FIRST OF ALL: CONTENT WARNING! there are some difficult subjects mentioned but they are not explicitly gone into. topics around suicide, rape, sexual assault, kids getting hurt, those kinds of things are mentioned or alluded to. PLEASE be aware! the work ultimately goes in a positive direction but there are hard feelings in it too, before it gets there.

hey everyone! this is another MSpaint-like in some parts. i know it's been a while since one of those! but it felt important to do it this way for me.

i originally finished this work over the course of a week, getting it done on Sept 4, which is when the original Circlet of the Sun VN was posted. (which has since been fed to TALwire and is not available to read here as a result). however, ever since it was fed to TALwire, the intention was letting go of the heaviest and worst feelings, giving them to TALwire for healing, and seeing what could happen going forward.

i've had a series of dreams and things occur that led me in this direction. this work is about healing, and Papaya, Ellaroux, things circling those two. there are a few lines played by people i know, like lyn playing Gäap in a flashback and vee playing Lexy. i didn't want to put anything on the cover art though so i'm mentioning it here.

it has been a long journey! the original Circlet of the Sun was a deeply negative work, exploring all of the ways it was hard to remain focused on caring and healing in the face of feeling forced to care about someone who didn't care about anyone else but themself. it was an exploration of all of the difficulties of forced connection and how even with the best of intentions and desire to help, this can result in getting burnt out and basically going fucking Insane.

the current, NEW Circlet of the Sun is something i've arrived at through doing a lot of work to let go of as much as i can that causes me pain and hardship. it's an examination of some of the thought processes there. it's not as long as the original, but it CAN get intense. i didn't feel like it made sense to do much of this in anything other than MSpaint, which helps me with the most "raw" of the works i do. it takes too long to express myself in other forms when i am trying to get at difficult knots, and i found myself trying to work at Papaya's knots during this, which needed this kind of touch.

anyway... so... in the Eastar Discord I tried out a ritual experiment. i asked everyone to do some healing work and share their progress in the thread for discussing this work. overall people really put a lot of effort into thinking about their own situations and trying to improve them. i was really glad to experience this.

on an adjacent note, 2 months ago i asked people in Owel and Eastar to answer some questions about the servers. my friend was being harassed and it led me to want to understand how people in the servers felt, so i asked some questions to better gauge this.

here's the document with that! i told them all i'd be posting their answers unaltered, so this is it. it was gonna be in a blog post, but i figured, in the description of this update works about as well as a blog post!

here's the answers document!

please be aware, sometimes people do discuss how the NSFW site affected them, but they denote it when they do so you can avoid it. these were answers from Owel Discord, which allows NSFW subjects discussed, and they were originally in spoiler tags, but google documents doesn't have that and neither does this blog post so i can't really hide that kind of thing. so please just use your discretion when reading.

i recommend and advise not reading this document in those places if you're a minor. i've noted this in the document itself too near the beginning.

anyway! i feel good about all of this finally being done. i feel like it's been a long journey for Ellaroux and Papaya and it can finally go in a new way with new beginnings.

i have a lot of ideas in the works for the kinds of projects i want to try next. i want to do more game-like things in ren'py as opposed to these linear VNs, so we'll see how that goes. i really like games where you can walk around and talk to others... and i have a lot of material i can work with to put into something, so... i hope the next thing i post is a little game!!!

take care, everyone! i hope you have a great 3²/4²/5²/45²!