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Reflections on Wingless Fairies

This post fully spoils my game Wingless Fairies. Spoilers aren't a big deal for a game like this, but I'll also overexplain the themes so you should probably play it first.

I'm really happy to release this game after not publishing anything for a few years. I've been busy since college with jobs and life, and I started working on this game a little more than a year ago so it's great to finish a big project like this. It was a joy to work on and I hope people enjoy it.

Before I started working on Wingless Fairies, I had a few different ideas I was playing around with. I knew I wanted to do something using a weird cobbled together version of VTuber motion capture. I had some ideas for a game where you're an actor in a stage play, or a game that took place in VRChat, both using character models from other games, as "actors" and avatars respectively. I decided to instead use the models without explanation, which creates a strange fantasy pastiche that keeps the feeling I was going for without coming across as meta or satirical, something I wanted to avoid with the down-to-earth story I was telling.

I like the pastiche / collage style in games. It's something that's rarely done on purpose but shows up all the time in things like mods or VRChat. There's some games that do this intentionally, Oikospiel Book I is a good example. The choices made in selecting assets can be playful and compelling and often feel more thoughtful than a generic character design or asset store models used out of utility. For character models it's a great way to create a striking design that holds immediate meaning for a lot of people, and it opens up metatextual readings without having to pull the player out of the narrative. A lot of games use these references satirically, or for a surrealist aesthetic, or to make a point about video games. I'm using it primarily as a literary device, like naming a character after someone from a classic novel. The references are there to set the stage for the themes I'm exploring with the characters.

The fairy models give the player a reference point for who they are and the sort of role they're playing. They're recognizable as side characters, who are treated as strange and sort of perverted in the Zelda games. I've always felt that the great fairies are based on drag queens (especially in Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild) and I think a lot of people have memories of having strong reactions to them as kids. They fall into the trope of the androgynous sage-like character, that is othered by the narrative but is nonetheless revered and spiritually important to the protagonist. It's a stereotype that has fallen out of favor as these extreme negative (or positive) depictions of trans people stop appearing in media, but there's a lot of truth to the idea of trans people as sort of angelic advisors, however ostracizing that is. There's also something about the characters calling each other an anachronistic gay term like "fairy" that's really funny and sweet, and feels like them aknowledging their own strange position in the world. In a way, reusing these character models follows the gay tradition of reappropriating popular culture and reclaiming negative depictions of ourselves for our own means.

Playing as a fairy reverses the trope of these characters as otherworldly sages as well. Now all the magical elements are commonplace–they're a job you're applying to or a place your friend brings her niece to babysit. It's something like magical realism, except the magical elements are still foreign to other people, just not you. I think most trans people have experienced something like this. I've had so many people come to me about some anxiety they have about gender roles that I clearly don't subscribe to, like they're trying to access some of the wisdom I must have, where to me it's my everyday life. People often say that trans people used to be sacred, but that feeling is still there in the right light.

This reversal of the mentor relationship is also a reversal of the typical coming out story. I don't see many stories about trans people that aren't focused on coming out. It makes sense people gravitate toward it as a narrative, it’s very cathartic and breaks down a lot of expectations that need to be broken down. But after you've torn yourself apart and put yourself together again, there's still the rest of your life. I wanted to write something about what happens after coming out. For me, years after coming out, a lot of my most cherished experiences as a trans person have been about helping other people. It becomes more about being a part of a community than your personal journey of violent self-discovery and change. In some ways the typical coming out story is sort of individualistic. It's a hero's journey, one that delegates other trans people to the mentor/sage role of that journey and often forgoes the final "return to the world with your newfound knowledge" stage in favor of a reconcilliation with parents or cisgender society. The responsibility you have to other trans people for the rest of your life is rarely depicted.

But I still think about coming out a lot. How could you not. If I want to psychoanalyze myself I could say I'm stuck on it developmentally, which is funny because it's an experience a lot of people never even have. With all the comparisons you could make between asserting yourself as a trans person to other coming of age experiences, it's really very different, like a whole branch of developing a personality other people don't think they have to go down until they do. Maybe that’s where the otherworldly view of us comes from. There's some wisdom to abjection by choice that people need to understand, but they can’t have it all at once, and so there's this artificial distance that presents as reverence. I say "they", but every trans person has someone who was that untouchable mentor to them, even if just for a moment until they become your friend again.

It's easy to feel bitterness about being seen this way. When younger trans people talk like they're terrified of being like you, but want your help with transitioning anyway. Or when ostensibly cisgender people need you for their come to jesus moment about accepting trans people or their own gender nonconformity. I think a lot of trans people isolate themselves because of how draining that responsibility is coupled with straightforward hatred. But you don't just become that person one day, it's a dynamic you're always on both sides of. Living that contradiction—between needing support and giving it, being looked down on while being looked up to—is one of the big narratives of post-coming-out trans life I'm trying to get at with Wingless Fairies.

That's all a very clinical way to talk about something really emotional, but I'm trying to explain the context that informs how we go into conversations like the one between Fawn and Rain. That context can be crushing, or moving, or it can feel transactional. That's kind of the joke with Fawn filling out a job application—that and the fact that the first time I ""crossdressed"" in front of other people, I was at a gay bar where an older trans woman was filling out a job application next to me.

Ultimately, the game is about all the disenchantment you have with these interactions falling apart after an unexpected moment of emotional intimacy. These sorts of disarming moments are so rare but so important to me as a trans person. It’s so easy to have a calculated cynical view of other people when you’re constantly analyzing all your interactions like trans people learn to do. Being pulled out of that disenchantment is incredibly meaningful. Fawn goes through that with Rain, where she thinks it will be a standard encounter and treats it that way, but something about Rain and her dream surprises her and she’s pushed into a much more vulnerable place of mind.

Part of that is Rain's uncomfortable honesty. She's clearly nervous and saying things she has never told anyone before. She comes into the conversation with the openness of someone who just witnessed something supernatural. She's tipsy and a little rude, but also being very brave for a closeted 17 year old in a really disarming way. It's a once in a lifetime moment for her, like Velvet explains to Fawn.

Velvet’s role is also really important to this dynamic. While Fawn and Rain are having this religious experience, Velvet is the one who has nurtured this environment and upheld the historical practice of the fountain and surfacing. It was important to me to show someone older than Fawn to show both sides of the mentoring relationship. Fawn had her surfacing with Velvet, and Velvet took her under her wing when she had nowhere else to go. Velvet has already gone through what Fawn is going through with less help. You pay this sort of support forward, but it can feel like there’s always more support to give than to get. Rain doesn't fully appreciate what's being given to her, she’s even a little rude to Fawn in the way a lot of closeted trans people are, but Fawn was once there too. That’s what Velvet tries to emphasize to Fawn earlier in the game, and later when she says Rain reminds her of Fawn as a teenager.

There’s also the centerpiece of the fountain, which stands apart from the rest of the straightforward trans narrative of the fairies. There’s no direct analog to the fountain in the real life trans community. Velvet explains that it’s a conduit of love for trans people, which is a difficult feeling to put into words. There are religious parallels, or metaphors, but the crucial thing about the fountain is that in this world, it is very literally real.

Velvet's description of the fountain is real. Rain's vision of the fountain really happens to her. As a literary device, the fountain is my sort of rejection of transness as a marginal perspective. Many people are comfortable understanding transness as one idea in a sea of ideas, as long as they can fly over that sea and feel above it all. I am saying, some things are real, and this is real. The truth is coming out of the earth and we're bathing in it. Not just the truth of our existence, but the truth of our beauty and our history and what we offer to the world. With the fountain and transness, the underlying magic is older and deeper and more real than anything that stands in its way.

The fountain is also aspirational. This transcendental trans love Velvet describes is real, but it's hard to keep hold of and come back to, and there's certainly no physical place you can access it so literally. But there are people like Velvet, working thanklessly, building up an impossible glimpse of the truth into something undeniable. Maybe you relate to her, maybe you know someone like her, maybe you feel like you are too hurt or too young or too critical and jaded to be like her. This is a game about growing up after all.

I wanted to try some different ideas for creating emotional intimacy here. I wanted the player to focus on their thoughts and the subtle ways they can interact with the characters. They can't choose any dialogue options or make any decisions that are often cited as "immersive" in triple A game design. I really disagree with this idea that more choices = more immersive. It's a marketing idea that never seems to actually make roleplaying feel more impactful. If anything, the abundance of choices in big budget games makes the awkwardness of the simulated systems more prominent.

This isn't to say I think the solution to immersion is less interaction, I just think it has nothing to do with the amount of choices you're given. I wanted to strip back all the game design tropes associated with roleplaying and think about how to actually create a feeling of embodying a character.

It's hard to think about what that could mean outside of video games. There isn't really an older artform to draw these ideas from. "Roleplaying" in video game design stems from tabletop game design and collaborative storytelling, and many single-player RPGs come from a design thread of simulating that collaborative experience. There's no history to something like a visual novel or what I've made here, which leads to a lot of game developers fumbling with what is essentially a work made without a central embodied character in mind. There's not really an artform that has that idea of embodiment like video games, we don't have the language or context to talk about it. I like the word embodiment as an alternative to roleplaying though, to emphasize taking on a created role rather than creating your own.

One parallel I did think of is ASMR videos. I could write about this forever, but mostly what I want to say is that the weird roleplaying ASMR audio stuff on youtube is maybe the closest thing to this artistic space that exists outside of games, and they create an almost unbearable amount of intimacy without any actual interaction from the listener or any budget at all. It's really amazing how much they do with so little, and I feel like there's so much to learn from this amateurish form that's applicable to games. They remind me a lot of Robert Yang’s work—very disarming and psychosexual, and easy for outsiders to make fun of for how intimate they are.

One way I tried to bring those principles to Wingless Fairies was by using motion capture the whole way through to create the immediacy of an amateur performance. Video games tend to lack this type of immediacy that you can easily find in other mediums. Singing in your car is a better direct translation of emotion to medium than most video games achieve, even those with professional acting. Something falls apart in that translation, and I don't think it's an issue with fidelity. I think people just don't know what they're doing. Game narratives are not written to access the emotional intimacy afforded by the player's embodiment of a character. They are written like film, loosely third-person, often even taking away your control and switching to a third-person camera perspective in cutscenes, completely taking away your embodiment. I knew from the start I wanted this game to be first-person, and I wanted the characters to look directly at you and be closer to you than games ever put their characters on the screen. I'm not an actor, but I tried to focus more on subtle movements and pauses. The moments when no one is speaking to you are drawn out as well to give you time to think about who you are.

There's some immediacy to the vocal sounds in the game as well, which I hand-recorded the timing of over a recording of myself directly into the timeline. There is a lack of quantization in the animation and vocals that I put a lot of effort into to seem natural. It’s all meant to create a sense of humanity that builds the feeling of being a character in a story.

It's fitting that the narrative is also about playing a role in someone else's story. So many games are about playing a hero, and I think in some ways the medium isn’t actually suited for that. Maybe it’s more suited toward stories about being assigned a role and the discomfort and responsibility that comes with that. I have a lot more thoughts about this that I’ll save for a later post.

As for Wingless Fairies, there’s a lot more sources of inspiration I took from. Besides moments from my own life that I would like to keep private, the poem Wishing Well by Gregory Pardlo was a big one for me. It's a great poem about being shocked out of disillusionment like I wrote about earlier. There’s an almost supernatural aspect to it that inspired a lot of Rain’s dreams and Fawn’s reaction to them. The poem The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar by Danez Smith was another inspiration. It's pretty self-explanatory, but despite its title it was really another inspiration for Fawn. Revisiting the poem did give me the idea of Velvet serving Rain a drink though.

That’s it for me. I have a lot more thoughts outside of Wingless Fairies I’ve been writing about that I’ll post on this blog eventually. There’s no comments on this page so feel free to comment on the game page on itch.io instead. Thanks for reading!