#new touch

#3199: New Touch Sauce Yakisoba - Japan

oh my goodness! thank you endlessly for this ask. I think about rosamund and the dialectic & neverafter a completely normal amount. it's so touching that the dialectic has had such an impact on folks, and I'm glad to have been a part of introducing Muñoz to you!

the dialectic was going to be a one-chapter fic about rosamund bc I am not normal about her, and then as the season continued, and as the Princesses themselves were relegated to obstacles/antagonists, it became a sort of literary ritual. By writing them, by using the semiotic form of Story that was used to trap & iterate them, I could at the end include their release, their freedom from that form, something not granted to them in canon.

if we live in a world where stories are aware of their story-ness, where stories have a life akin to our own lives, something like a written story is a horrible thing. returning to your life over and over, unable to make changes. time loop type shit!! trying not to sidetrack here into quantum storytelling principle (story in motion could end differently even though we all know it wont. but it COULD), but stories with happy endings repeating simply thrusts the characters through trials again and again and again. waking up always in the tower, in the fireplace.

for me, at least, it was necessary to let them go, to fully let them be. to drag your eyes back over the words is like dragging them back from incommunicable existence into our purview. but they've had some time to distance themselves from what they were, and it's possible that those I wrote about are no longer real. they are Something Else, and even if I were to unveil it, I could not undo their transformation.

it feels like a spell to me, though, so I'm loath to unveil it again. perhaps once more, but I don't know when.

when I concluded my perils & princesses campaign, nearly all of my players chose to be rid of their character sheets. we rendered them unplayable. they got out. there's something magic about it.

one day I'll actually collate all my thoughts & maybe write a book about New Touch, cause it's all interconnected for me. language is powerful. it's a tool used by a worldstory that disanimates & disempowers. but we can use it to move beyond it. to create selves we have never been, to redefine what human is so we can all live there. and maybe at the end, those who seek to drag us back to the world we escaped will find nothing but ink-stained pages.

Everybody’s got a little secret

Maybe I’ll tell you mine

Bring yourself just a little bit closer

A stranger in the night

Something good can be hard to swallow

The simple paradise

Slow down if you want to be my lover

New touch in the moonlight

How far, how far should we go?

Heaven Will Be Mine is a visual novel from Worst Girls Games that rather deftly explores the sacrificial dilemma of transformative markings through the metaphors of gravity, culture, and the vastness of space itself. HWBM very clearly defines the divide of “outside” and “inside” with freedom from the physical gravity of Earth and the cultural gravity of society. The pilot-protagonists all have crossed the border, escaped the atmosphere, escaped the realm of the dominating Culture. They have their own gravity at the beginning of the game, but not their own Culture. The three factions for which these pilots fly all have goals that revolve around the crossing of borders and the establishment of a sacrificial population. The Memorial Foundation seeks to ground everyone up in space so that there is not a threat of them becoming a separate society rather than an available sacrificeable population. Celestial Mechanics also seeks to engender a population that Earth would find suitably sacrificeable, but their method involves turning the pilots into un-human things, things alien enough for Earth to kill without repentance. Cradle’s Graces seeks to establish a new Culture in space, a place where they are not a sacrificeable population but just another group of humans. How to be human is at the core of HWBM; the characters and their leaders argue how much being in space, being apart from the gravity and Culture of Earth, marks them as not-human, how transformative leaving orbit is. They bear the sacrificial mark of having been past gravity’s reach, past Culture’s reach. There are three possible endings for the game, and in all of them the border remains crossed; there is no reconciliation with the dominant culture, because beyond the border, and with the help of their ship-selves, the pilots can create their own gravity and culture, can make a new society. All three of the protagonists are lesbians, and two out of the three are also transgender. This is another layer on their alienation from Earth; being in space is not the only reason why they are marked, and these markings have no natural process of removal. HWBM subtly intertwines being in space with the identities of the three ladies, muddying the waters between permanent and temporary sacrificial status in a wonderful, heartbreakingly beautiful way. In the Celestial Mechanics ending, the pilots undergo an “eversion” process where they fuse with their ship-selves, making the transformative nature of sacrificial marking direct and extremely visible. And yet, in becoming these entirely transformed beings, there is a lack of satisfaction in the sacrifice of them—they have become so alien that they cannot shoulder the burden of sacrifice. They have escaped the Earth’s Culture and gravity for good and cannot be a part of its sacrificial dominion. Those chosen for sacrifice must be at least tenuously related to those for whom they are sacrificed. In another of the endings, the Cradle’s Graces ending, a similar break from the sacrificeable occurs; the pilots declare war on the Earth, and both refuse to be human in the way that Earth Culture dictates and refuse to be un-human and therefore untouchable. They still become in a way untouchable, however; the war with humanity must be fought on their terms. Humanity must embrace a part of them in order to even have a ground on which to fight. There can be no interaction without identification; lacking that relation there is no language of violence by which ideas and feelings can be communicated. Another game from the same developers, We Know the Devil, explores more explicitly the transformative nature of sacrificial markings—again, there are three lesbian characters at the core of the visual novel, one of whom is trans. All three are at a religious summer camp where “bad kids” are sent. The game focuses on balancing the relationships between the three main characters; if one is excluded more than the others, she becomes the Devil. This is a physical transformation, with all three protagonists having different Devil-forms. When one

of them becomes the Devil, the other two fight against her, destroying the Devil and returning their friend to her “own” body. It is unclear whether this kills the unfortunate girl in all of these endings. This violent expulsion of the Devil becomes their re-entrance into society; the Devil-form is removed, and with it the sacrificial mark. In the true ending, if none of the characters are excluded, all three girls transform into their Devil-bodies, and they now have the beginnings of a society capable of fighting against the dominant culture that puts them into the position of having to kill the Devil in the first place. Nobody becomes the scapegoat to be sacrificed; they all cross over the border into the Devil’s world—the text of the game uses this type of language, even; the Devil says “There is room for three in my world, and only two in his.” (WKtD, Worst Girls Games). The true ending breaks the sacrificial taboo, revealing that the sacrifices are from within the population:

Mark 9:14-29 The Message There Are No Ifs

14-16 When they came back down the mountain to the other disciples, they saw a huge crowd around them, and the religion scholars cross-examining them. As soon as the people in the crowd saw Jesus, admiring excitement stirred them. They ran and greeted him. He asked, “What’s going on? What’s all the commotion?”

17-18 A man out of the crowd…