I've just played through Better Half, and Nemlei's visual novels continue to be an incredible showcase of things I love in fiction. Dark humour! Sibling relationships! Codependency! Mutual isolation! Better Half, to my delight, adds selfcest to the mix.
Nemlei is great at creating morally terrible characters who are enjoyable to watch. I can struggle with 'everyone is awful' narratives; they can feel a bit too bleak and cynical for me. But there's a charm to the awful characters in Nemlei's games, and the undercurrent of humour keeps things from feeling overwhelmingly grim.
Delighted by Happier Thiu relentlessly hitting on himself after the split. When there are two versions of the same character in a story, I invariably want them to bang, and it's fun when they want the same thing. (Or one of them does, at least.)
I grinned so hard when I realised the two halves of Thiu only have one bed to share.
Canon doesn't really go into the experience of bedsharing for the Thius; I assume it's a bit awkward to start with, particularly after the sexual overtures and the attempted murder. Scope for fanfiction? Writing Thiu/Thiu fanfiction would probably be a technical nightmare, but it must be doable;![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dracothelizard managed to write fanfiction about five different characters called James travelling together, after all.
I smiled a lot when Happier Thiu bought Sadder Thiu a load of treats, Sadder Thiu got emotional over it, and then the two of them watched a film together. Cute!
'Is this the rest of my life, then? Is it? I mean, I'm fine if it is. So is it?' is also very cute.
'A character is split into two separate entities, each inheriting different aspects of the original personality' is a concept I've seen before, but there are a lot of interesting directions it can be taken in (and I'm not just talking about the two halves falling in love, although that's always a bonus). In particular, I like the way Better Half explores how the Thius change after the split. One half gets all the original self's positivity, one half gets all the negativity. But the positive Thiu quickly starts to accumulate new unhappiness, and the negative Thiu, no longer so lonely on account of having his own company, begins to have happier moments.
I'd never really contemplated regression to the mean in the context 'you're split in two, one half gets the positive and one half gets the negative', because, let's be honest, that's a pretty specific scenario. But it makes a lot of sense! If you draw a two from a deck of cards, the next card you draw is likely to be higher. Immediately after the split, Negative Thiu is at his lowest point; there's nowhere to go but up.
On one level, it's mildly unfortunate that everything Nemlei has created feels made specifically for me, because it means I've been falling in love with a bunch of visual novels that a) have no fandom and b) are unlikely, given that they've been taken down from the Internet, to accumulate a fandom any time soon. On another level, I'm having a great time. Thanks for tapping so deeply into my fictional tastes, Nemlei. I can't wait to see more of your work.
Nemlei is great at creating morally terrible characters who are enjoyable to watch. I can struggle with 'everyone is awful' narratives; they can feel a bit too bleak and cynical for me. But there's a charm to the awful characters in Nemlei's games, and the undercurrent of humour keeps things from feeling overwhelmingly grim.
Delighted by Happier Thiu relentlessly hitting on himself after the split. When there are two versions of the same character in a story, I invariably want them to bang, and it's fun when they want the same thing. (Or one of them does, at least.)
I grinned so hard when I realised the two halves of Thiu only have one bed to share.
Canon doesn't really go into the experience of bedsharing for the Thius; I assume it's a bit awkward to start with, particularly after the sexual overtures and the attempted murder. Scope for fanfiction? Writing Thiu/Thiu fanfiction would probably be a technical nightmare, but it must be doable;
dracothelizard managed to write fanfiction about five different characters called James travelling together, after all.I smiled a lot when Happier Thiu bought Sadder Thiu a load of treats, Sadder Thiu got emotional over it, and then the two of them watched a film together. Cute!
'Is this the rest of my life, then? Is it? I mean, I'm fine if it is. So is it?' is also very cute.
'A character is split into two separate entities, each inheriting different aspects of the original personality' is a concept I've seen before, but there are a lot of interesting directions it can be taken in (and I'm not just talking about the two halves falling in love, although that's always a bonus). In particular, I like the way Better Half explores how the Thius change after the split. One half gets all the original self's positivity, one half gets all the negativity. But the positive Thiu quickly starts to accumulate new unhappiness, and the negative Thiu, no longer so lonely on account of having his own company, begins to have happier moments.
I'd never really contemplated regression to the mean in the context 'you're split in two, one half gets the positive and one half gets the negative', because, let's be honest, that's a pretty specific scenario. But it makes a lot of sense! If you draw a two from a deck of cards, the next card you draw is likely to be higher. Immediately after the split, Negative Thiu is at his lowest point; there's nowhere to go but up.
On one level, it's mildly unfortunate that everything Nemlei has created feels made specifically for me, because it means I've been falling in love with a bunch of visual novels that a) have no fandom and b) are unlikely, given that they've been taken down from the Internet, to accumulate a fandom any time soon. On another level, I'm having a great time. Thanks for tapping so deeply into my fictional tastes, Nemlei. I can't wait to see more of your work.
