Hi there! I don’t intend to be in your inbox too much, but people have claimed a whole ONE HUNDRED community copies and we’ve been at #5 on the itch.io physical games popularity chart, and that’s so incredibly flattering? I’m really excited to hear about what you all do with it, so if you play, definitely let me know how it goes!

I wanted to, as a bit of a celebration, post a segment from early on in the book that’s very important to me and discuss it a bit:

Toxic Yuri and Radical Compassion

Is it possible that in this game we are playing characters who are… bad?

The answer is yes and no. Toxic Sword Lesbians emphasizes the deep flaws of all the characters—even the ones that aren’t from checkered pasts. Can you be a hero when you can barely keep your shit together? Can you help build a better future for everyone when you’ve hurt others, emotionally or physically? Can you love and be loved and deserve it, even when you fall short of your ideals?

This hack takes the position that the answer is unequivocally yes. There is no goodness trophy, there’s no finish line for repentance, and there’s no waypoint in healing where your trauma un-happens. If our heroes can be complicated people still trying to do their best even when they slip, maybe we can choose to be, also.

I played a game called 1000xRESIST recently, which I saw Tumblr user iamalivenow summarize like this: 1000xresist boldly asks the question of what if a slightly awful teenage girl became the most important person the world and it answers that question in the most understanding, loving, fucked up way possible. I was thinking about that a lot while writing Toxic Sword Lesbians.

1000xRESIST could certainly be called queer game, although it doesn’t market itself that way—it’s first and foremost plenty of other things—and a lot of what it’s concerned with is the ties that bind people, even if they’ve done awful, unkind, unforgivable things to one another. I know I’ve had a lot of conversations with other queer Asian (and other variously diasporic) friends about how a lot of queer narratives land on the side of “if they’ve hurt you, or can’t fully accept who you are, then cut them out of your life,” but the additional complication of being part of a diaspora is that your family is your lifeline to your culture and history—and also the world outside isn’t going to always be kind to you, either.

In a way, it feels like the question it’s asking is not “Can you forgive someone who did this?” but rather, “Can you love someone who did this?” Which, as it turns out, is a different question for some people.

That’s the kind of space I wanted to make for play—the kind of space that, like celebrated lesbian poet Mary Oliver, says:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

I do want to do some more updates in the future—like, publish some extra settings, and maybe do a version of the playbooks from Advanced Lovers & Lesbians! So I guess keep an eye out. ;)