re: the concept of being an abusive game dev bc u made people feel smth
TW: child suicide, guns, police and military brutality
re: "ur an abusive game dev for making me Feel Thngs" emotional manipulation is a catch-all for the purpose of any literary device, but also you don't even need to move With the "purpose of manipulation" if you are emotionally sincere and intense in a way that is true. ex: the little prince
the little prince is openly a (semi-)autobiographical story about child suicide and all the reasons the little prince killed himself. you don't need any amount of "literary/narrative emotional manipulation" to speak about the extreme horror despair and wrongness that is simply True n There
there's an enormous amount of death and violence in the world that is happening always and all the time, you don't need to pretend it isn't? and you don't need to "re-imagine" violences for the purpose of "literary merit" when you could just draw on The Truth and humanize the ones here
at this point my consumption of fiction swings from two polar opposites: thinly veiled trauma allegories AND assfucking BL fables that are shoujo-manga fantasies about the concept of princes that do not contain an iota of actual irl masculinity Or homosexuality beyond Being Dick'd in the Ass
i direct you to Glitter and Violence and m.A.A.d. city for the kinds of thinly veiled trauma allegories that reassure me about the world. i have v little tolerance of most non-traumatic work natively written in english. exceptions include: watership down and plague dogs
when i say these reassure me i mean that i am so used to being surrounded by people who pretend violence ISN'T real, that violence is an imaginary, and that any severity of violence is "something that doesn't REALLY happen, it's JUST a movie / story / game / fiction"
obviously none of y'all have ever met someone that's been shot*
*and isn't part of the fucking Military / A Cop
"who else could get shot but a soldier or a cop" guess
also: think about who's getting shot BY soldiers n cops