Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #3

Betty is probably the most understatedly important character I’ve ever written.

While there’s a really compelling argument that that Dorothy, too, is really important due to how many risks we took with her that are still paying off to this day, the legacy of Dorothy on the whole can be a little vaguer to pinpoint, whereas you can trace a very gay line that starts at Betty and ends at Jill.

You could say that Betty drunkenly walked so Jill could run into a wall.

I’ve written about her in the past in case any of you want a more in-depth analysis of her specifically (though beware stiffer writing than these newer blog entries), but this is all still a good introduction to a broader point during VA-11 Hall-A’s development.

It’s really hard to believe nowadays given that the VA-11 Hall-A fanbase is vocally populated by gays, queers, and/or sluts (and oh how we love you all); but the truth is that when writing the game I was… scared of misrepresenting people. You need to understand that coming from Venezuela, and from a really small town at that, it’s really hard to say that I had any experience with people in the LGBTQ+ crowd. 

Sure, there was the cheap lip service of “don’t discriminate against a man just because he likes other men” that nobody abided to in practice; and sure, I did meet some people that would turn out to be gay later in life after they were long gone from it; and of course there’s the argument that it was all me vocalizing a part of myself that I wasn’t able to put into words properly until 7 years after the original Prologue released.

But all of that is to illustrate that even though I was following a “sensible writer instinct” (AKA: “just write a girl like you would any other but she likes girls”) it wasn’t backed by any tangible knowledge of if, maybe, I was writing something that would hurt the same crowd I was writing a character about.

After all, I don’t mind ruffling feathers so long as that’s my intent, but if what I want is to make a cool character that just happens to be gay and then it turns out the gay part was botched and I did something that hurt gay people then that would suck, and I didn’t have enough world experience to be SURE that I wasn’t doing that.

But then Prologue released and a funny thing happened…

Everyone was praising Betty! They loved just how matter-of-fact her being gay was, how it was but one element in a big tapestry of other personality traits… and then I got… mad? 

So, a really sheltered dude from Bumfuck Nowhereton with no interpersonal experience with gay people whatsoever at that point managed to do something that apparently nobody coming from countries where gay people can be a little bit more open about their lifestyle was able to?

Literally what’s anyone else’s excuse? If I fucking could why couldn’t anyone else from The First World? 

But frustrations aside, I felt emboldened by the reactions to Betty. Even if at that point I still felt like I was walking a tightrope with no safety net, at least I had the reassurance that apparently what I considered “a slow walking pace” was actually me sprinting through said tightrope while screaming in terror, so hey.

Without Betty, there’d be no Anna, without either there’d be no Stella and Sei, and without them there would be no Jill.

And a world without Jill is a world that’s a little more boring, don’t you think?

The funniest thing about it all is how through the release of the game I was able to meet so many cool people over the years from all over the world that are the exact same kind of gay folks I had such a hard time meeting before. So in a self-fulfilling way I was able to fill that gap in experience by taking that risk.

Also, I guess nowadays I fall somewhere in that flag myself. A lot of my writing sure made a LOT of sense suddenly in that period of a day or so at the end of April of last year when I was able to explain a certain part of myself out of nowhere.

You can find more about this (Betty, I mean. Not my personal discovery thing) if you hit the + sign on the corner of the title screen of VA-11 Hall-A and play the Prologue’s second day.

Tomorrow is the last day of the Corgi invasion, but it’s also the time where Deal and Betty are finally in the same place.