act 3 comes out in february. it is the last part of parfum nostalgique.

i don’t normally write dev logs, because i already have so much stuff to make for this series by myself. i’ve also grown tired of articulating my thoughts and feelings on my own work in a way that is packaged in business-appropriate language. but i’ve learned from the reception of my project that what people like about it is that it is anything but business-appropriate. in a country that is opposed to my way of art on an institutional level, i will leave it to AAA games to provide you with that experience, while I speak candidly, in a way that’s easy to get the words out.

when i was a teenager, my piano teacher sent me a ball-jointed doll from a friend who was getting rid of him. a dream of doll luke, who came with a green wig with a heavy swooping bang and a tailcoat suit. “i’m literally the luckiest person in the world,” i thought, even as my parents were getting divorced, and I was developing a panic disorder, and i was bullied so relentlessly for my neurodivergence that i had to move school districts. i didn’t know that I would hold that doll and scream and cry so much that i would grow up and feel no greater comfort than wrapping my arms around a cold, hard resin body. it’s like when you get a puppy, and it cries if it doesn’t hear its mother’s heartbeat when it sleeps, so you have to put a clock by their crate so they can hear the ticking.

I would picture dashiell standing in my room with his gorgeous tailcoat suit and his soft, beautiful face. beautiful in a way that didn’t feel like a man. and i liked it, because i was beautiful in the way that didn’t feel like a girl. fuck if i knew what that meant at the time.

i was sure that dashiell would be the main character of the great masterpiece game project i was planning at what, 14 years old? a game that would have all my dolls come to life. dashiell, lupine, lucian, and saturday, all lovingly rendered with the abi-station avatar maker and put in rpgmaker mv. fuck if i knew where it was going at the time.

my first year of college, i opened a doll in my living room some time in march. I had been waiting for the company to complete his casting for 3 months. i had already bought a wig for him, a short dirty blonde… something haircut! whatever it was was ugly and bad on him, but i had waited so long for it to come, so i tried to make it work. i later bought a wig simply because it was on discount for 11 dollars on aliexpress. it made. this man. look like. a poodle. the night i received it, i haphazardly sponged liquitex matte medium onto his face as an attempt at sealant without spray paint. it resulted in the blush i gave him looking splotchy, but good splotchy. like real skin. life clung wonderfully to his face. i used my brown watercolor pencil to give him “beauty marks,” kind of like the freckles i have all over my arms and legs. i took him outside to take pictures with the hydrangea bush. i meditated one day, and i saw him and his ridiculous hair. we sat on the edge of a fountain in a garden and i just stared at him while his hair kept growing and growing. it was like my mind was the garden his hair was creeping charlies growing up the sides of the walls of my skull.

it was very funny how cute val and dash looked together. i sat lupine and dash beside one another with val slightly further away, sometimes with some other dolls between them, to keep him from being a homewrecker!

I told this to a new friend at the time, one i’d made through some college friends who told me he could voice act for a game i wanted to make at the time. we’d never met in person, though. I said, “i got a new doll, and i’m trying not to let him come between dash and lupine. he looks like he could be a bit of a tease.” We threw the dumbest fucking ideas back and forth about how dash and val are secretly hooking up, but all in some elaborate plot to get him and lupine together. that dash and val hook up, dash cries about lu, and val plays the therapist, and somehow in there, he tries to push the two of them together. i was sitting on my bed, probably listening to malice mizer, talking to some guy who i’d only seen dressed as dante from devil may cry on facebook messenger, the worst messenger app of all time. but i braved the horrors for my dear sweet friend. i wonder if he knew that in 8 years, he’d be playing some sick son of a bitch with an eyepatch getting thwapped with a yard stick by a vampire bimbo dressed like a nun in a visual novel about existential dread.

that’s all i really feel like saying about the way these characters started. the whole story of how this all came to be is bigger than i have the energy to share and probably your energy to read. but while i wrap up this project, one i’ve actively worked on as parfum nostalgique for i think, 4 years now… i think of how lucky i was to be able to start my relationship with these characters through their arrival in my home, where i could see them, touch them, care for them, and create them with my own hands, all while i was only a child. my dearest imaginary friends.

if you read this to the end:

just like ruki from the gazette did to me when i was 15 years old when i had VIP passes to meet the band, i take your hands in mine, i look you a little too closely in the eyes, and i say, in very pronounced english, “thank you. you are cute.”