A Cozy Game Blog

Was hanging out stoned on an art call with @festering-queen when I raised the question of "If you could have any book right now, what would it be?" Take this as a warning that no idle book comment goes un-noted...

When she eventually tossed out 'The Art of War' I was filled with exceptional glee for I knew it to be a slim volume and in the public domain. Bound three little versions of it (two for her, one for me) and this here is the best one of the lot, shipped off to her months ago. Printed on 'bible paper', it's noticeably thinner than the 20lb versions and suffers the skew and minor munges all my bible paper prints have... but worth it for those feathery light pages!

Pages from Work Song, a fabric book about farming and falling in love 🌦🧵🌻 (1 / 2)

Instagram | Prints

Pokemon 1998 Stickers

i think the real contrast is that they’ve both got masks, and those masks are complimentary. they’re both kids who never got a childhood. they grew up tortured in the same place from very different angles with no one but each other to butt heads against. they both had to play-act grown up versions of themselves with few models for what a well-adjusted adult even looked like. so it’s cartoonish. gideon is the plucky hero of her own adventure story that will totally have a happy ending some day, far far away from her nemesis whom she’s totally not in love with. harrow meanwhile (to grossly oversimplify) has to imagine herself as someone cruel and cold enough to cope with being alive at the price of 200 other people. these two things fit very well together. gideon can play the hero to harrow’s villain, and harrow can enact cruelty toward gideon to make herself feel strong and mean (and generally just to vent anguish). the way they hate one another is a kind of mutual protection - it re-enforces the self-image that each of them needs to get through the day. but that’s the coping mechanism. harrow the ruthless bones overlord. gideon the hapless swords idiot, who thinks of nothing but tiddies & sweet sweet vengence (harrow’s corpse in various states of disgrace ) all day. and behind that they’re both tearing apart at the seems beneath caricatures of themselves that are deeply unsustainable and neither of them feels safe letting on the extent to which that’s the case. their hearts are a goddamned mess. neither of them is wearing that shit on their sleeve.   so yeah, there’s a lot more to gideon than being a swords himbo but that’s not the wild thing. the wild thing is she’s so convincing that she somehow manages to sell people on her no braincells act while being the pov character of entire first novel.