#ask james

Well, you see anon, when you actually possess genuine love and appreciation for something

especially something that usually gets left in the dirt, like, say, a heavily queer romance game with an all black cast, including the MC, and that allows you to be MANY flavors of queer - lesbian, bi/pansexual, ace, even polyamorous

and you are aware of just how much passion and love the devs have for their own creation, despite being well aware of how the deck is stacked against them in terms of racism, queerphobia, everything indie devs have to fight against before all that...

You try to help fight against that in whatever way you can!

However, I am by far not some big tumblr blog with hundreds of thousands of followers. I have generally been content to do my own little thing in my own little corner. Which is fine, generally, but is a problem when I want to really help rally a cause I'm passionate about.

So yeah! I have to do things the old fashioned way by going to people individually and telling them about this game! Because, clearly, me just posting about it, reblogging from the dev, is only going to get me so far.

Which is frustrating, let me tell you, because then I go to look at how the kickstarter is doing, and see it's not even halfway, and there's only a week left, and I'm well aware of how they're down $5,000 because of fuckery from some scammer on kickstarter...

...and then I get to look at tumblr, or twitter, and at any given time see a post going

"MLM media is ALWAYS more popular than WLW, it's misogyny, people are so male-centered, there's no WLW media"

with thousands of notes, retweets, etc

A fraction of attention which cannot be sent this game's way

Like, I've tried to stay bubbly and positive when rec'ing this game to all the people I've tried to talk to on various social medias, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't kinda pissed about all that. Women of Xal is SUCH a good series, with SO much dedication to it from the devs, that it deserves more than what it's getting.

Anyway. Check out Women of Xal, and the kickstarter for its sequel. You can get the first game for free right now while this kickstarter is running.

It is a political fantasy drama where you play as Xjena, a young woman with the ability to see into the future. You are gunning for the powerful political position known as "Matriarch", but have to compete with various other women for this spot. Other mysteries and drama are all happening at the same time. There are a plethora of romantic options, some of which you can pursue polyamory with, and all of which you can refuse if you decide to be asexual.

If you want even more detail on the story, this post does an excellent job on that.

You can get this first game for free on itchio with no trouble, and get it for free on Steam if you simply hit up the dev's discord

Thank you so much!!

"Yeah I can eat things, but I don't get that much enjoyment out of it. I can taste the food, but unfortunately you're correct in guessing that it just goes into my firebox and burns up. Depending on what food Gus occasionally insists I try, like, oh let's say, s'mores... the leftover burnt mess can clog up my boiler tubes, leading to me needing them cleaned." ~James

"James, I said I was sorry over and over again about the s'mores incident. I didn't think a few jumbo marshmallows would completely clog up your boiler tubes! I just thought it would burn into ashes.." ~Gus

"Honestly the workers at the steamworks who had the job of cleaning my tubes out were more pissed than I was." ~James

"Yeaaaaaah, Sir Topham Hatt wasn't happy about that either.." ~Gus

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I think that’s an understatement.” Alice might have still been a few months off from officially being a mom, but she still had the tone down flat. It was a tone she found herself using quite often between Sirius and James (mostly James). “And you’re welcome. Just because you are occasionally an idiot does not mean we’re going to throw you into the serpents’ den and leave you there. It does, however, mean you’re getting benched. For at least the next two missions. Sit down...let me see your lip...”

Motioning for the younger male to take a seat at her kitchen table, Alice moved to the cabinet where the healing potions were kept. She and Frank came home banged up enough that she had learned to keep them handy.

Also don't throw rocks through people's windows if you're upset over making other people upset

Just move block and move on or whatever, or just ignore hate messages

But seriously, stop spamming asks like this. Find better ways. Like that one blog mentioned, use tiktok or something. Spamming asks on Tumblr is a great way to get people to distrust you and avoid the game. If you've been here for long (which I doubt you have) you'd know that already

Be passionate, but think critically too. You can do both.

You're an anon, so I doubt you'll ever come back to this, but fuck it, let's go anyway

One of the earliest blog posts I have on here, at least in one of the tags that's likely most used, is from 2012. So I have been on here a while, and I am well aware there are issues to this approach. That's why I've been doing it in asks with my name attached, rather than on anon mode. That's why I've made sure to come back, and have conversations with people further on this, or other video games. I am doing my best to try and negate the issues with this approach.

Because other approaches aren't really doing anything so far. Or, alternatively, like with your tiktok suggestion, there are issues with that as well.

And that's not great when the deadline for this kickstarter is looming ever closer and it's not even halfway filled.

You say "Why not talk to a bigger blog?" Okay. What bigger blogs are you thinking of? Surely, if you're giving that suggestion, you have blogs in mind. What big yuri/femslash/wlw blogs are you thinking of? And how would you suggest I approach this, if this current kind of ask is not suitable? What would make that ask different from the ask I've sent out currently? Genuinely would love to know.

Additionally, I am deleting hate messages. You just aren't aware of them. Because they're deleted.