Nayru's Junk Heap

I apologise in advance, this won't be a positive post. This year was awful and beyond depressing. And the future feels bleak.

Me and my friends' struggle to afford living, while our professions are being stolen by soulless machines, developed and advocated for by equally soulless people. Our group suddenly lost a dear, longtime friend, and right after that, another had a brush-in with death due to a sudden medical emergency, and recovered only to be pulled back into thankless, unsustainable grind everyone is stuck in - because you've gotta survive, somehow. Don't even get me started on the violent events happening around the world.

Everyone seems just… so damn tired. Disillusioned. Resigned.

Frankly, I'm at a point where I regret not pushing through my burnout and health issues, to do more of my personal projects, stuff I consider a part of "actually living", when it was still feasible. Because allowing myself to heal, currently feels like a wasted time. Even though I know this is an irresponsible and unfair thing to say. Also very rich, considering even remembering to drink or eat felt too exhausting and mentally taxing during those days.

But I will keep crawling forward, not because I feel any hope anymore, or have strength left - but because what other option is there? I want to return to the fancomic I'm making, even though it's been in limbo for months. I want to keep contributing to my friends' gamedev projects. I still want to keep pursuing my passions, fulfil my goals. Even though, honestly, right now I don't know when and if it will be possible.

I may desperately feel like I want to turn into a stone statue, but the truth is, it's just the lethargy and apathy talking.

What I really want is to fucking live. I want me and my friends to thrive, to feel secure, and be able to do something that has meaning. Not struggle to barely vegetate in a world that never rewards, but only seeks to exploit our efforts to a point of them feeling futile.

That's it.

Gonta's birthday always takes me by surprise. New Year becomes the end of January in a blink of an eye... but this year I managed to draw something to celebrate, even if small!

Anyway, here's the sketch, too!

A deeply insecure, intelligent, earnest, considerate, hardworking, albeit socially clumsy in an endearingly pathetic way guy says he's used to being seen as scary, yet is visibly holding back sadness that his new friends DID get intimidated by him.

A former wild child obsessed with fitting into society as a distinguished gentleman. Who'd even bother with the abstract human rules of fancy-schmancy after 10 years worth of forming their adolescent synapses amongst wild animals? Is this inherent sensitivity to grace and decorum, or pure pragmatic bullshit and even deception? The guy's more concerned with what he "should do" over what he "wants to do", too - but still can't help but taint his "shoulds" with his "wants".

There were more observations, but ultimately "Oooooh, you're so gonna kill everyone!" was my honest-to-god blurted out, giddy conclusion, as my brain frantically processed this first encounter. ...Man. Anyway.

I played the whole game both loving Gonta more than I felt comfortable admitting and getting very pissed about it (there is a reason behind my blog's name lol), but also freaking out, and waiting for him to snap. Either due to getting fed up with mistreatment despite his efforts. Or leaning into his feral child side and butchering everyone, subtlety be damned - there's no rule limiting victims per blackened in this particular killing game anyway. Or ultimately turn out to be a twist-villain.

Know Wheatley? I thought Gonta would pull "I AM NOT! A MORON!", too, but instead… well.

(Should've been more selective with who you love, my dude...)

No 180. No subversion. Nothing cathartic like that. Something far more inconsolably heart-wrenching instead.

And far more real.

Paradoxically, Ch4 shows Gonta is far more genuinely good-hearted than I've ever allowed myself to admit. My hunches and paranoia got proven both correct and wrong at the same time, through Gonta commiting a horrible thing, with reasoning that went against my core values, yet miraculously without ruining his virtues in my eyes. Quite the feat, really. (ngl, still wanted to slap him tho, before the heart-break took over)

He didn't do it out of resentment. He didn't turn out to be a primitive, resentful brute. There was no pretense, no facade. Even at his very worst, what drove him was a genuine care for others, even if misguided and weaponized by someone else. His reasoning was fucked up, imposing, selfless and self-centered at the same time, but very... human and internally consistent. It all made sense. The goddamn fool was just as unhealthy as he seemed... and pathologically, deeply, irreparably kind.

That was my "twist".

And it meant so much.

People insist that Gonta's ultimate arc reveal is that he can knowingly do bad things. Nah. That's a simplistic takeaway. There's nothing special about it.

Gonta being a fundamentally good person, even if broken, and not immune to causing harm, makes him so much more complex, deeper and not so clear-cut of a character, than he'd be if he was evil, two-faced, or even a non-victimized partner in crime some insistently paint him as. At least that vulnerability of his is what had the most uncomfortably profound impact on me, and brushing it off or erasing it, or even romanticising it into something it's not, feels like a major disservice on par with dismissing him as dumb.

Ultimately, I felt both robbed and relieved by V3. I was glad Gonta was exactly who he presented himself to be. On another hand though, it made things all the more depressingly unfair and bleak, specifically considering the fact that Gonta's never truly initiated nor did things exclusively on his own terms, and how deliberately exploitative his circumstances were, despite pretense of free choice and technical possibility of Gonta backing out. Which, in terms of going out of one's way to do fucked up shit, is far, far less than what I both feared - and later on frankly hoped - he'd do.

But it does fit the pattern of vulnerable or abused people habitually compromising their own insight, ethics and truly independent decision-making in favour of overly valuing other people's deliberate bad faith and narratives they weave. A poor man's "autonomy", run by emotional, maladaptive or trauma-based autopilots, impulse, lack of clear-minded critical thinking, and stress or insecurity-driven overthinking, with no healthy distance from oneself.

And because of its short-sightedness, it saddles one with all the blame, whether unjustly or not, but never truly expresses/validates one's authentic self nor benefits others - except those who maliciously leech on and enable that sort of behaviour under one or another pretense, as means to their own ends.

And this hit all too close to home.

To get a bit too real, Gonta was the wake-up call that inspired the lasting change in me, as someone with same insecurities as his. Even if he did it through doing everything wrong and setting a very extreme example of what happens if you never stop to truly question your autopilot or assumptions about the world and yourself.

In a sense, he did save me - from justifying and giving harmful people a pass at the cost on my own well-being, just because I could handle it, knew I wasn't perfect, or also had things I was guilty of; from gaslighting myself that compromising my ethics is the right thing to do, or allowing others to do so to me; from thinking basic self-respect and boundaries is being rude and a burden, and being accountable for messing up means I have to keep defending or associating myself with toxic individuals; from thinking me compulsively falling into my maladaptive patterns over and over is remotely close to actually, *consciously*, utilizing my free will and potential; from parents who, ironically, called me "a savage child" for struggling with grasping subtleties of social norms due to isolation (though due to chronic childhood illnesses in my case) and chipped away my self-worth over the years, and from "friends" who, albeit very dear at the time, all too happily depended on that to instill their influence; from me taking everything others say to heart or at face value, while undermining my rational concerns or gut feelings. Really funny coincidence, btw, that parent thing. 4th FTE was a real "oh" moment.

Gonta did those exact things to himself and then some more, and got irreparably ruined before he had the chance to learn. But I didn't have to follow the same emotionally self-destructive trajectory.

Feeling comfortable with my anger at injustice without crushing guilt and excessive responsibility over other people's feelings, while still working on fixing my own issues, was part one of the healing process that set me free.

I'm forever thankful for what Gonta has taught me. And for the fact that in my jaded adulthood, I still stumbled upon a fictional character that had a lasting, formative effect on me. I thought it's impossible at this point. Really, dude helped more than therapy. And he's just pixels.

And I really, really wish he'd reach the same epiphanies as I did. He deserved that so much. That, or at the very least, get really, really furious.

So there it is, I suppose. A fanwork depicting something I thought I'd get in the game, and find positively cathartic as a reader. Because, indeed... it would've been "fun" (translation: hurt less), if he "went all crazy".