(repost from my main room)

One thing about misogyny that really gets to me is how often people can only understand women through victimhood. A woman gets hurt and suddenly that becomes the most important thing about her. She needs to be saved, protected, handled carefully. If she's angry or controlling or fucked up, people start looking for the "trauma" that explains it. If a story lets something terrible happen to her without turning the whole thing into a warning about what was done to her, then the story itself is a disservice to women.

Even people trying to defend women can fall into this. Womanhood is still being treated like something fragile and pure, something that has to be protected from ugliness of man or else it has been disrespected.

oneway.exe plays with that a lot. The women in it can suffer without their suffering becoming the point of their entire existence (Ophelia in some ways is meant to parody this trope, which is typical in horror and I do believe has a place in it despite its issues. But there's a lot about her that is also often overlooked.) They can be selfish, obsessive, cruel, loving, controlling, annoying, and really fucking gross. They can make awful decisions because they wanted to make them. They don't need to be pulled out of the uglier parts of the story so they can remain respectable women, and we don't need to stop every few minutes to reassure the audience that we know something bad is bad.

I'm not surprised when somebody comes into the game expecting a more familiar version of these stories. What has surprised me is how angry some people can get when they find out that isn't what we were trying to write.

There isn't one correct way for misogyny to show itself. My wife co-created oneway.exe with me, and she's told me plenty of times that she relates much more to the women we actually wrote than the kinds of female characters she was used to seeing growing up. Women who have agency, including the agency to be kind of awful. Women who have desires and power and flaws that aren't all there to decorate a trauma story.

That's personal for us because Bugs had a hard time identifying with female characters for most of her life. It was part of why she questioned her gender for years and wondered why male characters and male ships always seemed more interesting to her. When we started making our own cast, we didn't want to write women that we ourselves would immediately ignore in favor of the men.

The untouchable perfect girl you're not allowed to make jokes about, the sensible woman rolling her eyes while all the stupid men have fun, the group mom whose job is keeping everybody together, those characters get boring to us. No yucking your yum if that's what you like, but it just isn't what we wanted to make. There are enough stories out there that handle those roles a lot better than we ever could.

We have also started encouraging a higher age for oneway.exe than we did before, for a lot of these reasons. Some of the things the game talks about are nuanced enough that I think younger people could more easily struggle to read them the way we intended, and I'm not saying that because I think we handled everything perfectly. Pretty much the opposite. I would never pretend oneway.exe is some flawless, educational breakdown of gender, sexuality, love, relationships, or anything else.

I know we are not always delicate about these subjects, and we don't stop and explain exactly what the lesson is supposed to be. Characters do bad things without the game turning to the camera afterward and telling you that was bad. People want things that are unhealthy, power can feel good, and sexuality and relationships get messy. Love can make people do horrible things without that meaning the story is secretly saying love itself was the mistake. That's why I think the age warning matters more now, given we don't hold the player's hand through all of it, and some subjects are easier to approach once you've had enough experience to understand them with more maturity.

At the same time, I think a lot about what oneway.exe might have done to my brain if I had found it as a teenager. I spent a huge part of my younger life hating my own interest in femininity. I loved feminine clothed, I liked looking feminine, and I was drawn to womanhood in ways that I couldn't really explain, but I hated everything people seemed to attach to it. I hated the passivity, and the idea of being desirable in a way that made me available to somebody else. I hated feeling like femininity automatically put me in the position of being acted upon. I hated what grown adults decided to do with me because I dared to be public about my interest.

For a long time I thought the easiest answer was to reject all of it. It took me years to understand that femininity itself wasn't what bothered me. I had just tied it so tightly to everything I hated being assumed about me that I couldn't separate them anymore.

I wonder sometimes if that would have been different if I'd grown up seeing more women who were allowed to be complete fucking freaks. Women who were cruel, obsessive, vulgar, aggressive, controlling, or just difficult without the story eventually revealing the tragic reason they became that way and why it needed to be fixed. Maybe I still would have ended up identifying the way I do now. I have no idea. But I do wonder if I would have felt less desperate to throw away my attachment to womanhood if I had known there were more ways to exist inside it.

I do hope the people who need stories like oneway.exe somehow find their way to it. That matters to me much more than whether somebody wants to call our game good or representation. I don't really care about earning that badge, and I just wanted women in the game that we actually gave a shit about.

A lot of strange assumptions have been made about oneway.exe for a game that barely anybody knows exists. The part that bothers me isn't somebody getting something wrong on first impression, given everybody does that. But it's different to have somebody decide what we must believe, then start using whatever private information they might have of us as proof of something they already made up.

I was nervous for a long time to talk openly about our feelings for Red because I knew exactly what people would do with it. We never intended to hide him forever, but I also wasn't making it public, precisely because I knew what people would assume. The only reason I finally started talking about him openly was because, at a certain point, it became obvious that word about him was already spreading in a weird way. We had only spoken about him in what I thought was a space with friends, and somehow it had started making its way through this creepy little grapevine anyway. At that point, I'd rather people hear it from me than hear some distorted version of my relationship passed around behind my back.

Red is not obscene. He isn't inappropriate. He isn't some dirty little fetish because he likes cross-dressing, because he feels the most like himself when he's dressed up pretty, because he happens to be Asian, or because gender reversal is a big part of our relationship. And these aren't new ideas we suddenly shoved into oneway.exe because of him. We had always wanted to touch upon them, and people judge them in almost the exact same way.

A feminine man (that isn't a twink, let's be honest. Suddenly this issue is a lot less of an issue if it's a tiny little twink) exists and people start deciding there must be something wrong with the dynamic around him. A person willingly takes a role outside of what's expected of their gender and it must be assumed that person must have been pressured, manipulated, or abused into accepting it. A woman suffers and suddenly the entire story has to be about misogyny. Somebody loves in a way that looks too obsessive or too dependent for the viewer's comfort and now the story has to be a cautionary tale, because anything else would be glamorizing it.

I don't like the assumption from the other side, either. Men don't have to be ashamed of wanting to give somebody else control; a man can trust another person to take care of him, make decisions for him, know better than him in parts of their relationship, or take on responsibilities he doesn't want for himself. He can want to be protected instead of always being the protector. He can like being soft, pretty, spoiled, dependent, receptive, controlled, or even embarrassed if that's part of what he enjoys. None of those things automatically mean abuse is a part of the relationship.

Sometimes handing somebody else power is exactly what trust looks like to a person. Sometimes being cared for is what makes somebody feel safest, and a man can want a relationship where another person leads and he follows. The fact that I would hate being in that position myself doesn't make it abusive for somebody who actively wants it.

That's the part I care about. I hate the idea that femininity has to mean helplessness, but I don't fix that by deciding submission itself is unhealthy. The problem starts when people look at someone else's chosen dynamic and decide that because they don't understand it, then it's too "weird", and if it's too "weird", then it's nothing but a gross fetish.

At some point you have to admit that you're bringing your own feelings into the room. Everybody does that with fiction, and I definitely do it too. I have caught myself deciding what an author must have meant because of how something made me feel, then had to remind myself that I do not know them like that. Reading someone's work does not give me access to their brain. Maybe I just think something sucks ass, and so it sucks ass, and so I move on.

You can dislike something without changing the author's reason for making it. You can look at a relationship and think, "I would fucking hate that," and still understand that the people inside it might not.

I don't see the urge to call all of this disgusting or perverted as being that far removed from the way homosexuality itself used to be reduced to sex, obscenity, and deviance. Obviously they aren't the same thing, but I recognize the thought process. Somebody else's way of loving or expressing themselves makes you uncomfortable, so instead of leaving it there, you turn that discomfort into a moral judgment about them.

oneway.exe doesn't treat these things as shameful because we don't see them as shameful. I don't think my love is obscene. I don't think TRIO8's love is obscene. The story has always been about how far devotion and love can take somebody. Sometimes somewhere beautiful, sometimes somewhere terrible, or sometimes both simultaneously. Usually somewhere much messier. There are already plenty of stories that approach these subjects from other directions, but this is the one we wanted to make.

That's also why meeting Red feels so strange to me in retrospect. We didn't meet him and build a story around our relationship. We spent years writing about these things, and then somebody came into our lives who made so much of it feel real in a way I never expected. I call it a self-fulfilling prophecy more than anything.

Of course there is a lot of me in oneway.exe. I'm its creator and main writer. It would be weird if there wasn't. But there isn't a character I can point at and say, "that's meee :3" because pieces of me are everywhere.

One of those pieces comes from spending the past few years feeling trapped in sex work. I have been sexualized in pretty much every way I can imagine. Sometimes because I had to choose to be, but sometimes it's completely against my will. Sometimes in ways I would rather not explain publicly, online and in person. Sexuality stopped being a simple subject for me a long time ago.

I never wanted it to become as normal in my life as it has, but I know I can't just quit tomorrow, and I know nothing I do will remove the pictures that are forever on the Internet whether I want them to be or not. There isn't some obvious other job waiting for me that can pay what we need paid. There wasn't another job that could have covered Craita's chemo, my own medical bills, Naina's bills, and everything else we've had to deal with. So I learned to live with it and hold onto whatever control I could.

And shocker, yeah, I have been sexually assaulted before, but I don't consider myself a victim. I hate what happens to the way people look at you the second you admit something like that. Suddenly they have an explanation for everything. Your anger is trauma, your sexuality is trauma, wanting control is trauma, being aggressive is trauma, being strict about what you want is trauma. It's getting really annoying at this point to even hear the word trauma. Sometimes somebody knows exactly what they want and it does not need to be explained by the worst thing that ever happened to them.

And I can already imagine somebody reading this and thinking, "Oh, I didn't know this came from the mind of a rape victim," and suddenly finding the work easier to accept. No, maybe what I wrote still fucking sucks and you can hate it. Maybe I handled these subjects badly. Maybe you think the relationships are gross, the themes are irresponsible, or the whole thing fails at what it was trying to do. What happened to me does not make the art better, cleaner, or more justified. I don't need a traumatic backstory to earn permission to write about sexuality, power, control, gender reversal, or anything else. Art does not need to be morally justified by the person who made it.

I don't currently identify as a woman, but I'm also not going to pretend that I have no relationship to womanhood. My gender has changed a lot throughout my life, and for a while I did identify as a woman. I'm still feminine now, and I still like femininity now. That was the part I had wrong for years.

I didn't hate femininity nearly as much as I hated what people thought femininity gave them permission to assume about me. Especially as a teenager, I started hating my own interest in anything feminine because I thought liking it meant agreeing with a role that made me feel sick to my stomach to embody. I now know it's not a requirement, but back then I had nothing to teach me what that could look like.

The entire catfish situation and so many of the graphic threats made against me exist because I present femininely. People see what I look like and decide what they're allowed to imagine doing to me, they decide what role I should want, and what I must secretly be underneath all of this. It's easy to mock the idea that somebody small and feminine could want power instead of secretly begging to have it taken away.

Women can be fucking beasts. Feminine people can be fucking beasts. My wife certainly isn't somebody waiting around for a rescue either. But that doesn't mean the answer is deciding everybody should want power instead. Somebody I love can genuinely want to give it up. He can want to trust another person to lead, protect, decide, and take care of him, and I don't think that makes any of that is inherently perverse.

I'm tired of womanhood being treated like an invitation to imagine someone helpless, and I'm just as tired of chosen submission being treated as proof that something must be wrong behind closed doors. People are allowed to want different things. It took me a long time to get that part of myself back, and I do everything I can now not to hand control of it away again. I'm sick of being misrepresented, and I'm not here for you to write your fanfiction about.

That's why it pisses me off so much when the same thing gets projected onto oneway.exe. People decide they know what we think about women, sex, power, abuse, love, or relationships, then judge us based on the version of us they made up.

We made something about a kind of devotion that fascinated us long before our own lives started resembling it. Then we found ourselves living something that made us understand it even better. I'm not ashamed of that. As far as I'm concerned, we were meant to meet Red, and I'm thankful that some of what we feel for him now can make its way into a story that already had room for it.

oneway.exe is a product of love and a disgusting amount of work. It's insane how often people seem determined to invent some uglier reason for why something was created as soon as they decide they don't like it, like art needs a hidden evil motive before you're allowed to hate it. You can just hate it. You can disagree with what we wrote, you can hate the characters, the relationships, think our ideas are stupid, or decide the entire thing isn't for you. You don't need to turn us into worse people first.

People are free to decide what oneway.exe means to them once it's in their hands. That's part of making anything and putting it in front of strangers. What they don't get to decide is why we made it.

Finding myself, figuring out what I actually wanted from love, and loving Red gave me something outside of the life I had started to feel trapped in. It gave me sexuality that felt like mine again instead of something belonging to customers, strangers, threats, or whoever else had decided what they wanted me to be. It gave me femininity back too.

I can like being feminine without agreeing to be weak. I can keep the parts of womanhood I loved without accepting the person everybody else seemed determined to turn me into. At the same time, somebody I love can want softness, dependence, surrender, control handed over to somebody else, or even things I personally would find unbearable without any of that meaning he needs to be rescued from his own relationship. I don't need what he needs, he doesn't need what we both need. None of us has to move toward the middle to make the other person's role respectable. I will always be grateful for that.

Anyway. Hate the game all you want if you'd like, but keep my family out of your fucking bullshit.