Appendix ❤️🔥
These are the things which inspired my And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow campaign. As always, my players have their own, which they're encouraged to bring into the game, but these are mine.
Music
Weyes Blood - And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is the most obvious one. Few things inspire me as much as music, and this album is really emblematic of that. I think you could find everything I intend to transmit with Hearts Aglow in its sound and lyrics, be it the way the nature gently creeps into the track in God Turn Me Into Flower, or the lyrics for the title track:
Might be the moon or the cotton candy
Or it might be a man
Who actually understands me
'Cause it's been a death march
The whole world is crumbling
Oh, baby, let's dance in the sand
The track itself is an attempt to capture time, a snapshot of an amusement park date, holding onto your loved one and afraid of the dip in the ferris wheel. The entire album is a hopeful, joyous cry over death and despair. Weyes Blood's previous project, Titanic Rising, is also enjoyable though it didn't figure as much into this game.
Beach Bunny - Tunnel Vision (as well as her single, Good Girls (Don’t Get Used)) is poppy, pink, girly, and it hits my heart like Peleus' spear. Going just by the music, it sounds like the kind of thing you would expect to be about high school or something, yet there is a surprisingly mature undercurrent. This lyric in particular from Chasm is so beautiful:
I insisted that the faces of my parents couldn't change
But I love how I look like my mama when she was my age
Thought the world only got bigger, I'd be hanging in the park
Throwing balls at cement walls 'til the sky got dark, oh
And it's a sentiment most teenagers just don't feel, as they are still in the "my parents' faces will never change" phase.
Alvvays, in general really, though particularly Blue Rev and the self-titled album from 2014. I don't have a specific lyric in mind but the way they weave narratives, much like Beach Bunny, with vignettes of life and implications of bigger things, like pregnancy and people changing, are always near to my mind.
Laufey - Everything I Know About Love. My Laufey craze was earlier in the year, when I saw her live when she came to Brasil (and cried on the way home for reasons unrelated to her), but I still feel like this particular album was part of my white noise when making Hearts Aglow. Particularly Falling Behind which, despite being a regular and common sentiment - at least for me, anyway - is the kind of thing I hoped the characters would go through:
'Cause the sun's engaged to the sky
And my best friends found a new guy
I’m only getting older
I've never had a shoulder to cry on
Someone to call mine
Everybody's falling in love and I'm falling behind
Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future. I thought she was a lesbian when listening to this album, and that probably relates to why Hearts Aglow turned out so sapphic. I mean just check this out:
I see you there rejecting all your earthly power
Protecting and dissecting 'til you've emptied every hour
We jump into the pond and then we come under the shower
You lay upon my pillow and you open like a flower
I wanted to see you naked, I wanted to hear you scream
I wanted to kiss your skin and your everything
I wanted to be your woman and I wanted to be your man
I wanted to be the one that you could understand
That's some gay ass lyrics.
Céu - Tropix, specifically Varanda Suspensa. It's a genre-bending of Bossa Nova with synth-pop that speaks to the very soul of Hearts Aglow, which while nominally taking place in Fantasy Europe, not-so-very-secretly has its entire world subtly inspired by Brasil.
Wednesday - Bleeds has such a strong small town vibe, both the goods and the ills, that while I don't draw on it as much as the rest (in large part due to being far too American for the setting) it nevertheless deserves an honourable mention.
Note: I swear I listen to music made by people other than white women, it just so happens that both me and the game are a bit girly.
Games
Dating Sims and Growing Sims. I can't name a specific one because tbh I don't super like these games. I always want to like them more than I actually do, but the mechanics of "I want to go week by week and see what happens while building the character" come straight from my enjoyment of games like Volcano Princess and I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.
Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 Umi no Bouken Hen, as well as Millennium Kitchen's other game I played, Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale, to a lesser extent. Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is an extremely good meditation on nostalgia, you play as a 10 year old boy in the 70's in rural Japan and just go about life, catching bugs, learning about how the old doctor at the clinic is depressed with the passing of his wife, reconciling your older girl friend with the friend she "left behind" once she left for middle school and her dad died, etc. It mixes in just enough reality into the poetry, added to the beautiful environments and involving gameplay that it could not have inspired me any harder.
Goodbye Volcano High, one of 'em game with pronouns which was relentlessly mocked at release for how its characters look like furry OCs (they do, and probably are) and the quippy dialogue. However, behind both of those things there is a beating heart, a story of teenagers living through the end of the world as they know it and trying to come to grips with utter oblivion. It is, at its core, a story about grief for yourself and for the life you didn't get to live, about the injustices and vicissitudes of the world which shake you around and cut you short of what you might have been. In many ways, it is a game for burnouts, despite none of the characters truly being one.
There are other games which deal with things like that too; Disco Elysium and Umurangi Generation are games I like much more and go in even more daring places, but which ultimately haven't influenced me as hard as this one.
Wide Ocean Big Jacket is a 1 hour indie game about people camping, and that's it. It is very sober, very quiet, funny at times in a rare, non-Whedonesque way, and it reads to me like a perfect Hearts Aglow session.
Leathers by blark, readable here, which was actually what we used at the start of the game. They're both quite gay and about living up to difficult ideals (Chivalry versus your true authentic gay-manned leather self) and kissing your homies. Though I had to put my own spin on the formula (stress) to truly make it work, and though me and blark have never really talked directly (though I have played with him once! Great person), I still owe a lot to Leathers for the game I have.
Pendragon, duh doy. I'm using it.
Film
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is probably not the film most of my players associate with Hearts Aglow (and I know that for a fact because none of them has brought it up when we were talking about inspirations earlier), but a gay ass tragic love story between two (HWHITE!?) women? During the fweaking Renaissance?? Shot in one of the most beautiful, painterly styles known to man??? Sign me in, Jerry!
A couple Ghibli movies. The thing I dislike when people talk about things being "Ghibliesque" is that they mean "It's like Totoro!" and buddy, I don't even like Totoro that much. It's an alright movie, but the ones that really snatch my ass (and which are the biggest inspirations on Hearts Aglow) are Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (and I maintain Takahata is a better filmmaker than Miyazaki), and Yoshifumi Kondo's Whisper of the Heart. All meditate on lost time, childhood, and relate that to the natural world beautifully.
The other big one is Porco Rosso. Less so the movie as it is - which is good, get it twisted, though more of a dreamscape to me - and more so Hayao's Miyazaki guiding ethos for making it:
A town that people would like to visit. A sky through which people would like to fly. A secret hideaway we ourselves would want. And a worry-free, stirring, uplifting world. Once upon a time, earth was a beautiful place. Let us make a film like this.
Needless to say, I have taken a lot from other Ghibli movies too, but they're more set dressing. One dungeon is Spirited Away, the spirits evoke Princess Mononoke, etc, but I feel like they don't really get at the emotion of it all like the previous ones, though aesthetically they are my polestar, almost by necessity.
Early Disney is my secret sauce. Sleeping Beauty and Fantasia in particular, though in very undefinable ways. I grew up on disney movies and fantasy is permanently associated with music for me, as you might have been able to tell.
Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy, particularly the first movie. That is the ideal I strive for in a game mostly about young people talking.
Luca Guadagnino's stuff, particularly Challengers and Call Me by Your Name, for reasons I hope are obvious at this point.
Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast is basically a live-action version of the classic fantasy I bring up later. Visually I think it is nigh unmatched.
Cartoons & Manga
Revolutionary Girl Utena, which I watched earlier this year. I wasn't blown away by it - in fact, I would have preferred it if it were half as long and twice as gay - but I took a lot from it. In fact I wanted to take more, the early game had a lot of mentions of people duelling like it was a normal thing, but that went out the window fast.
Avatar the Last Airbender and the Legend of Korra. Some more bingo, cliché picks, but they undeniably have shaped Hearts Aglow deeply. How's this for a curve ball though: I think there's way more Korra than Aang in Hearts Aglow.
Books
XIXth Century Realism. I have talked before about how much of an impact Tolstoy has on me, as well as Jane Austen. I had read Anna Karenina around September and had the idea for Hearts Aglow in December, it was very much alive and well. A stiff, overbearing society that is a lot more medieval than it likes to admit, crazy people threatening to shoot at one another, high drama, it all is part and parcel with Hearts Aglow.
Classical Fantasy, in particular Lord Dunsany, Tolkien (specifically The Fellowship of the Ring and The Hobbit), Jack Vance's Suldrun's Garden, Alice in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis' The Sorcerers' Apprentice, and Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist. There is a certain attitude towards the fantastic and to magic that permeates these books that I always am trying to emulate. They feel very fairy-taleish but also very mysterious and wide.
Enchanters do things like steal shadows or enchant a rope to be perfectly tough, monsters are both beautiful and scary, and they were still T.S. Elliotly claiming the medieval tradition in a way that I also enjoy doing. Tolkien in particular, with his fondness for Arthuriana and his intentional shifting of The Lord of the Rings from fairy-story into Chivalric romance into epic is greatly admirable.
A little bit of Arthuriana, specifically The Once and Future King, the poem of Gawain and the Green Knight, Bédier's retelling of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, and The Wedding of Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. Truthfully, I don't tend to like genuine Arthuriana (like The Death of Arthur), but these are the most human Arthurian pieces I've ever read; The Once and Future King even deals with the sort of bildungsroman that Hearts Aglow tries so hard to be.
Unspecific & Personal
Greek mythology is where it always starts with me, though in a very undefinable way. There's nothing I can point out clearly in something like The Iliad which makes its way into Hearts Aglow, but I think it has unmistakably shaped my view of how heroism presents itself. People slap their knees and weep in sadness or anger, men are warped by their own rage into fiery monsters, the greatest are brought low by forces beyond their control and taken before their time.
Massive feelings of inadequacy. Not to get all heavy on you in this chill post, but I try to hide and overcome my very low self-esteem and self-worth, and if you can believe it, Jerry, things were NOT better when I was a teen. Hearts Aglow is tinted by that both in the sense of what is there (like the lack of full control over yourself) and what isn't, as in many ways Hearts Aglow characters can be free from those worries. They routinely defeat magical beings, meet enchanters, and fight in cool ass suits of armour, they very much are worthy and cool. But that's where it ties with Chivalry, I guess. I'm not skilled enough to make that comparison though, you'll have to make it yourself.
Nathan Fucking Bateman, specifically our Gold Horizon campaign, which unfortunately lasted scarcely half a dozen sessions. Nevertheless we talked so much about it, and how to present young people and their trials and tribulations in RPG format, etc. The entire group too was great and really set my mind at work for what different people associate with "childlike behaviour". More importantly though, the way Nathan facilitates a game shaves close to my own style, so I borrow mannerisms every so often. It's great to admire a peer!
Weird Writer. Obviously all of my players are inspiring to me in their own ways - Eterna gets into character like no one else, Cellar remains ever curious and upbeat, and Mann hatches some of the best schemes (and takes seriously even very silly things) - but WW probably influences me the most as a person, beyond the realm of a creative hobby. Is it surprising that a sapphic woman inspires what turns out to be a gay ass game? Be for real.
My old Pendragon game. One day I'll write more about it but it was a dope ass duet and a lot of "lore" in this game is either stolen from Perceforest for Mythras, or things that happened in that campaign.
There's probably more but these are the ones that come to mind. The thing is that things change
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