Aka: They/themperor Coat

It can be a "we" problem

Or why ART no longer lets Three out without a chaperone.

"GUESS."

I think murderbot would rage earlier in the emotion checks if it were clippy asking it

Like, you're born in Atlanta Georgia sometime in the 1880s. Your mother is a white English immigrant. Your father is an African American lawyer who has managed to become fairly wealthy off his practice.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claims that your parents were married, but they almost certainly weren't or, if they were, they probably had to go elsewhere to get married and their marriage wouldn't have been recognised in Georgia. Realistically, they were facing huge amounts of prejudice that are only increased when you are born.

(Your mother openly says, in front of you when you're older, that it is a “great misfortune” that you were born with darker skin than even your father.)

Then disaster strikes. Your father dies. Your mother can't stand to stay in America without him and returns to England.

She does not take you with her. She says this is because of your health. It's just way healthier for you to stay where you are, as a parentless mixed race child in the Jim Crow era American South. Rather than going with your only living relative to England (which, while obviously still very racist, at least doesn't have any actual laws against people like you existing).

Your mother meets a new man. A merchant. He's white. She signs over all your father's money and investments to him when they marry. She doesn't tell him about you. She's worried he wouldn't understand. She later explains that this was a major ordeal for her. That she struggled in vain to resist the urge to send for you for three years, until it got too much to bear.

So now you live in England. In a cottage on the estate that was partly paid for by your father's money.

You're not allowed to leave the cottage, because if anyone sees you outside in the daylight then they might find out that you're black. While you're in the cottage, even (apparently) at nighttime, you are made to wear long gloves and a fucking mask, so that nobody can accidentally look through the window and find out that you're black.

Your mother visits you occasionally. She tells you that you're her “own girlie and mother's pet” whether you're “dark or fair”. When her husband comes to see what's going on, you and your nurse get shoved out the back door so he won't see you and find out that you're black.

Unfortunately, your stepfather has noticed that his wife keeps randomly going off in the middle of the night to visit a mysterious cottage where the only inhabitant seem to be a weirdly secretive servant woman and a strange masked figure, and has decided that something Fucked Up is going on.

So he goes to consult the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes. Normally, the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes can work this kind of shit out in his sleep, but unfortunately your family is so dysfunctional that you override his borderline magical deduction abilities, and the best theory he can come up with is either “secret affair” or “weirdly convoluted blackmail scheme”.

Fortunately however, this does lead to your stepfather eventually meeting you and finding out who you are. Including the fact that you're black.

Turns out he's fine with it.

Like completely. Quite possibly more so than your own mother is. Turns out there was no need for the traumatic abandonment, the years of separation and then the even more traumatic being forced to live like The Man In The Iron Mask in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.

Nope. Turns out you could have been allowed to go outside in daylight this entire time. You all go back to the big house (that was paid for in part with your father's investments) together and we never find out what happens to you.

I mean… what. The. Fuck.

Like, I'm not expecting Sir Arthur CD to have written an entire child psychology textbook to go with what was meant to be a fun little short story about racial tolerance, but holy shit.

There’s a lot to dissect here.

There’s the fact that John doesn’t seem to mind it one bit? There is no ”what the….?” here. There’s laughing. And Paul W doesn’t even sarcastic-laugh it. It is a normal thing for them.

But what I am drawn to is the fact that there are no stage directions here. And this is telling me something about Joel. I mean, every deduction is a reach, but this is kinda showing us Joel is playing around with showing us moments that are not spelt out in text but are happening in front of our eyes (ears!) nonetheless. It’s a bit of a fuckery, The censors and naysayers are being circumvented because it is happening without really, in text, happening. But it is happening nonetheless. And you are left with a sense of “that didn’t actually happen, did it?” And this is important. Because it legitimises the notion that we are allowed to read a layer into what is happening, and we’d be more correct than the text itself.

Note that if you've been holding back on buying, this is the lowest the price has been AND there's Steam's new purchasing power pricing in place, which may have dropped the price even more in your region!