remora game dev

05 Jan, 2025

TW: fictional discussions of suicide, shitty and irresponsible friends

a remora has a seemingly parasitic but truthfully symbiotic relationship to the host it latches onto.

a visual novel about imagining a love as sweet as a peach blossom kiss. (and as bitter as fairy foxglove, too.)

yue xianming (xm, long white hair kitty cat) is the remora!! in remora. qian zhouyu (zy, short black hair ouppy) is the shark

remora is xianmingvision abt how he is cute and harmless

(is this actually the case? No)

cradle chick if u remember that one is the closest to the truth

but remora is one of the games where you see xianming as he wants to be seen

revisionist history...

remora is basically about how xianming thinks of himself as fundamentally very small and also finds his genius caliber capabilities to be very uninteresting and will intentionally diminish them

remora is xm's appeal that he did nothing wrong and he and zhouyu could be silly happy together with only a littol war academy setting in the bg

the aesthetics are similar to once and future bc it's a callback to the framing of if you wanted the truth or smth beautiful

it's a romcom with an unreliable narrator who is Fucking Insane And Occasionally Violent but who is genuinely and sweetly in love also (the genre is horror romantic comedy)

it's a ymmv if the relationship is or isn't actually mutually beneficial and symbiotic, like shiragiku thinks zy is a leech parasite latching onto xm (shark), xm thinks of himself as a remora, shiragiku says that she thinks suzu would have intervened to ask zy his intentions towards xianming who despite everything has a glass heart, but while shiragiku can imagine him doing that she doesn't have the skill.

zy doesn't understand the metaphor, but he approaches xm like I can't stand him but can't live without him, he sees to the heart of me which is that I want to be with him but can't allow myself to have desire (esp for a man) and it upsets me that I want him and want to be with him. so him forcing his way into my life makes me happy but I can't say it and I can't make him leave even if it would be more comfortable (lifeless, predictable) to obey mindlessly the standard of normalcy I need to achieve to live a mediocre life where I am predicably unhappy. but at least it is predictable

when zy's friends gang up on xianming and try to separate xm from zy. xm does listen and keep his distance, but not bc of their advice, but because of shiragiku's strategem.

"watch. see how he is without you. who would he be if you disappeared?"

(zy nearly kills himself)

and his friends "are all busy with their own troubles" and don't even bother listening to his warning signs

xianming finds him, smiles, and says let's go home.

the friends thing is the way that normal friends will pretend to have your back and tell you what's best for you but when it comes to actually maintaining the damage control in the end after the thrill of the dramatic confrontation... they are suddenly busy and uninterested

they do have their own issues with depression, adhd, suicidal ideation

but they'd Never do anything that would actually genuinely make them a corpse by the next morning without a high chance of being stopped or saved

and they don't understand what zy looks like. when he's signaling

and oh does he Signal

xm just watches and waits...

and he even wants to see those people care about him. but they don't

they don't know how

but they did "do smth for his sake" to "help him improve his life" but not watch as he collapses

xm doesn't even bother to remember their names. he calls them paper dolls, and that's what they look like on screen

they don't realize that by going behind his back and "intervening" by threatening xianming to stay away from zy that they ARE doing smth awful and dangerous by separating them without zy's consent believing that he as a victim can't consent

then they pat themselves on the back for vanquishing the evil (xm) and don't pay attn to zy spiraling bc shouldn't he get better being away from her?

the friends think all the hard work is done that they separated zy "from this dangerous person" and don't watch as he cries for help at the top of his lungs but it's just a whimper from a dog that gets eaten up by everyone else's daily concerns

yeah... so in this version of events, for zy being With xm is better than being without him... he WANTS to be with xm and tries to kill himself when he thinks xm finally lost interest and abandoned him. (isn't this what he said he wanted?)

it's hard to say whether zy would be better or with or without xm... it's more like they would have had to never meet in the first place

xm is kind of fundamentally unchangeable

but zy could change

zy could accept himself, his desire, and the fact that he wants xm in his life. forever

remora leans towards him... choosing to let himself be happy. (but the paper dolls who did nothing to help him... really leave him no choice)

remora is really about like, normal people in the most derogatory way

but it's also about how zy is Too Not Normal to quite fit in

but he can pretend enough to get by

that's why all that happens

the normal friends who have had normal traumas, mental health issues, and normal lives are applying their understanding of such things and their normal expectations (with the Normal™ lack of care) to zy, who is fundamentally Not That

✨✨✨

i need to have zy and xm meet

I think I really want to criticize normal like "innocent" love game culture that is like truth or dare gay kiss edition that is like veiled permittance of homoeroticism framed as rejection

that also has a group hostility / peer pressure and coercion element

like xianming immediately becomes famous as an androgynous beauty who is probably a man or some kind of woman but no one is sure

whatever they know is that if he's a man he's gay / guesses are dominantly for him as a gay man

so zy gets provoked into like kissing xm Somehow

and then I think unluckily for zy, they end up being roomed together

the housing situation is like temple complexes varying from buddhist monastery type U shaped dorm with onsen facing the mountains and various private tiny temples, the dorm amenities are higher quality but you have to live in complexes with many ppl, but you don't have to cook for yourself and the chefs are quite good

but in the tiny temples they stock the fridges and hire maids (spies) to tidy (surveillance)

but they're basically tiny 2-bed houses

shiragiku engineered them rooming together as a joke. xm was supposed to live with her or alone.

but shiragiku said it was a joke but in reality it was too risky having two "ghosts/kings from hell" in the same area

(the reality came second. the joke came first)