It's still very surreal, in a good way.

I mean, the game was basically 100% formulated to be a thing I wish I could send back in time to myself in my late teens, both in terms of evoking fiction I was obsessed with back then and also discussing some gender stuff that I needed to hear. It's the game that would have cracked my egg and been my favorite thing in the world. So I guess it's not THAT surprising to hear it did that for other people.

But also I spent almost eight years worrying that it would come out and no one would give a shit, or that the people who had been waiting for it would be disappointed with the end product, or that people would call it problematic and toxic because Melody and Allison have one (1) fight and there's a villain redemption arc in it. (Bearing witness to the SU critical discourse did a number on me in my early 20s lmao.) And also, like, there are so few scenes where Melody and Claire being trans is actually directly addressed, so it's easy for me to feel like it's actually a relatively minor element of the story compared to everything else, something that could get lost in the shuffle if you aren't actively doing a trans reading of the narrative.

So it's a little wild to look around and see people naming themselves after my characters and saying it helped them crack their eggs or convinced them to go on HRT. It's strange to know that my little furry RPG Maker game I made on my laptop had that effect on people. But it's nice. I don't like to overstate my importance as some kind of transfem icon or whatever, but I'm glad my game found its audience and that it means something to those who played it.