Lunar

so, your lord and best friend has just admitted to you that if you die, he will be so beside himself with grief that he might just die too.

the game then gives you THIS option in response.

and you, the player, know how video games work. you know this is the press x for romance button. you expect henry to admit his feelings—a culmination of all the hints he's dropped from the heart options we've chosen before—and kiss him as soon as the button's been pressed.

except henry doesn't kiss hans.

instead, henry places his hand on hans' hand. it's the first moment of physical contact between them in the whole scene...but it's not a kiss. it's gentle. it's intimate. it's tiptoeing the line between comforting a friend and something more...

...but henry leaves it at that. and he gets up and goes to leave.

and in that moment of panic. in that split second of 'this might be the last time i'll ever see you again, please don't go' — it's hans that kisses henry.

and it's henry who pushes hans away.

this is—for all intents and purposes—the opposite of what we, the player, chose.

and to add insult to injury, henry looks conflicted.

he looks SO conflicted that hans believes he's fucked up royally.

that he has completely tarnished their final moments together by acting on impulse—by giving into temptation and desperation and feelings he can't even put into his own words—and henry must be disgusted by him.

and hans believes this because he watches henry turn his back to him. refusing to look at him. and head for the door.

but henry stops before he opens it. and i keep thinking back to the heart option we chose.

the player is not making the choice for henry to kiss hans. we are not forcing his hand.

the player is reminding henry what he's been telling himself throughout the entire game.

don't run away, henry.

kiss him. kiss him back.

The Prey

I got in my head the idea of doing a tapestry-inspired painting based on this quest, so here it is! Among the flowers on the ground there are dandelions, st. john’s wort, and valerian, as they’re the ones you can find in the Talmberg Woods.

paintingpractice.png

Because I like to bring pain and suffering to our KCD chat, I kicked the figurative door open one day and proposed that, what if, Henry wore armor for the suicide mission, so Hans would be the one helping him into it - and how it would make it crucially clear that it would be the only thing keeping Henry alive if it came to it. And how Hans couldn't do anything else than pray that it would all be enough. And the idea just stayed with me, with the allmighty lord Capon, who never did anything like this to someone else, and how it would make their roles very much reversed. On top of all that angst, of course.