Friday Update #28: Crazy Moms (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

As you likely know, Mother's Day is this weekend. This year, I've been very busy over the past week working in my mom's garden and doing tiring landscaping as her Mother's Day gift, and we're going on a home garden tour with my sister on Saturday and have a homemade brunch on Sunday.

However, this Friday Update isn't about my mom, or at least, not right now. No, instead, I will first be discussing Zach's mom, an important character whose lack of sprites hasn't stopped her from having an imposing presence, and her various inspiration, a shocking number of which have been my own mom.

To refresh, here is the in-game World Information entry for Zach's mom:

Samantha Taylor, Zach's mom, is a stay-at-home housewife who holds down the fort while her husband travels for work and her son is off at college. She's an overprotective mother with an unspecified anxiety disorder that has only been exacerbated since she's been at home by herself.

For as much as Zach fears her, she was actually far more frightening before he was born, and married life with a single child has softened some of the razor-sharp edges of her character.

While she'd never incriminate herself, she was madly in love with his father in college; however, she wasn't alone in having romantic feelings for Zach's dad. What set her apart from the competition was that she was willing to take extreme measures in love to win his heart.

In other words, she's a yanderewho "disposed" of the trash around her beloved (or at least she gives that impression).

While Samantha Taylor's body isn't as well-endowed as her daughter's (largely due to Zach's edits in re:Dreamer'scharacter editor), the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. Zach inherited her distinctive red eyes and black hair, as well as a good portion of her natural attractiveness. She's 157cm/5'2" (contrast with the 160cm/5'3" height Zoey has) with a youthful appearance that has only recently started to fade.

Zach often worries that he shares more in common with her than her eyes or hair color, such as missing a few gears in his head that more "normal" people have. Now that he has a female body, certain things in his physiologically female brain have been rewired, a change that is only going to become more apparent as Zach adapts to his new female body chemistry. Zach's typical smart-ass personality and sarcastic jokes have started to become a scary-ass personality and chilling outbursts.

Visually, she's a half-German, half-Japanese 41-year-old housewife with black hair and red eyes, and she is a total yandere MILF.

Now I know many of us have been fucking feasting on nearly this exact character archetype recently with Spy x Family, but like I always say to someone trying to make gender bender content: the more of this niche there is, the better.

Source: Spy x Family Episode 2

re:Dreamer's Discord server has an art channel dedicated to "Zoeys" (an anime girl with black or very dark brown hair, red eyes, large boobs, and a stunning figure) (invite here), and it's been flooded with Yor Brair art since the second episode aired.

Source: VNSalesman on Twitter

One of the girls in the server even had a slight mental breakdown over the flood of art.

While I can't promise Zach's mom will meet that level of enrapturing allure, I do plan to borrow some inspiration from Yor Brair. I want her to have some of the presence of Homelander from Season 1 of The Boys in that she can walk into any room and instantly put everyone on edge, but I also want her to be attractive and cute and very mommy. You've probably heard of the "fight-or-flight" response, but I want her to give "flight-or-fuck" response to the players.

TiltSHIFT is probably going to be given her sprites, but depending on how slow he is with the batch of replacement CGs(which take priority), Myumi might do them after he finishes a few outfits for Zoey.

Her visual design is by no means finalized, but Zach's mom is largely styled in my head after a more mature version Taihou from Azur Lane, and her current World Information entry art, while a placeholder, reflects that.

Source: suiroh (shideoukami)

Like Taihou, she is more than a little batshit insane. Harsh parenting is self-perpetuating and cyclical, so it's hard to say how much of the blame lies with Zach's mom and how much lies with Zach's grandmother who raised her, but this is a woman who casually makes specific death threats to her son's girlfriend within minutes of talking to her for the first time in that role.

Fun attention to detail time that helps further my reputation as the Hideo Kojima of gender bender visual novels: Zach can't hear what his mom is saying to Britney over the phone on the Day 2 mall date, but those lines are still being said. They are rendered as fully transparent in the textbox which allows auto-read to have the correct timings of the "flow" of the conversation, but the History screen has those lines rendered properly in a readable way. This is a use of mimesis and diegesis; the dialogue of re:Dreamer is mimesis in that it shows, Zach's (occasionally unreliable) narration is a blend of mimesis and diegesis as it sometimes shows and sometimes tells, and the game interface itself is diegesis as it is concerned with telling information outside of confines of the story itself.

They say time mellows youthful passion, but Zach's mom is still a feisty cat with sharp claws, especially to her son. There are reasons for this that aren't just "Zach is actually just kind of a brat and would have been a tough child to raise for a mother who wasn't a tiger mother," but I'm keeping those close to my chest because that's a nastier can of worms to open than Zach very possibly having an unaware Oedipus complex (I mean, his idealized "dream girl" that he turned himself into looks very close to how his mom looked when she was his age? That's awfully suspicious…)

Now backing away from Zach's own trauma with his mom… let's dig into my own.

While I can't claim to have the worst mom of anyone I know (that award goes to a girl in the server who has posted some downright horrific stories of abuse at the hands of a self-centered mom that actually made my stomach churn), I can firmly claim the silver medal in this category in the Trauma Olympics.

Remember all that nice stuff I said I was doing for my mom at the start of this post? I'm not doing that because I love her (I do, but it's complicated and sometimes feels more like I just have to love her), but instead to placate her so she doesn't turn into a vindictive parent that makes my life a living hell because I "ruined her special day" or something.

My mom's abuse towards me is so legendary that a bunch of my speedrunner friends make jokes about it (which I encourage because while what happens to be is awful, I am aware enough to acknowledge that it's really funny, and it's also my shitty method of coping).

Link.

Link (pretty much what it say; also, a kinda fucked up thing to reveal to your son, even if it's true on my end?)

#humblebrag

Link (my mom told me to "leave the house" and locked the door and didn't let me have any water).

Link.

Link.

Seriously, the fringe lock arc was fucking deranged and is actual cartoon supervillain shit, but also, it was really funny.

Link (they drove me to the bank and forced me to sign it over literally the minute it got in the mailbox).

Link (my dad did this, but I later found out that it was because my mom told him to because she thought I was on my compute too much; notice the missing computer peripherals, most of which got broken when taken from my room).

Link (the context is that she didn't want me to lock my room anymore, so she took my door handle and I didn't have one for over 9 months).

As heinous as all of this shit is, it's only a small documented fraction of what my mom (in collaboration with my dad) have done. In "nearly-life-destroying shit" tier, my mom has also:

• Blown the vast majority of my college money from my grandma on sending me to an expensive wilderness therapy program and psychiatric boarding school that I didn't need. I had straight A's, but I had realized that my mom was kind of an awful person when I was 12, and she used that as justification to drop a 13-year-old kid into the woods for 70 days and then put him into a boarding school for 15 months, completely turning me into a social pariah in high school once I came home.
• Not believing me when I got diagnosed with OCD in college, because she blamed my 2.00-ish GPA on laziness instead of a mental health issue that made me think I was going insane with schizophrenia.
• Not believing me when I got diagnosed with Parkinson's in college on my 21st birthday, blaming my return semester on laziness and refusing to pay for any further education (also, my grandma was dead by this point, so she had control over the family funds).

Seriously, I have my discharge papers, and there's nothing besides ADHD, anxiety, depression, and not liking the authority figure of my mom.

At least my dad and I are cool for the most part, when he isn't getting coerced into doing crazy shit because he loves my mom and she told him to do it. He's just a government employee who wasn't home much when I was a kid, so we're a bit distant (and it's not just because he's a slightly aloof dad lost in his 3rd childhood hobbies like scale models and astrophotography).

Man, it's crazy how many boxes of the "I should have wound up trans" checklist I have filled in, yet it didn't happen.

As an obligatory bump, I'm still living at home while paying a modest rent; before re:Dreamer, I was working dead-end jobs like warehouse stocking and pizza delivery and suffering from some pretty severe depression. I'm grateful for being able to work on this game, but it's not enough to move out with the split I have with Espeon, so if you want to see me become self-sufficient from a psychopathic family, consider becoming a Patreon member to get me closer to that goal—

WAIT FUCK SPEAKING OF GOALS THERE'S THAT $3,000 PATREON STRETCH GOAL SO MAYBE I COUNTED MY EGG BEFORE IT HATCHED!!!

re:Dreamer 0.10.4 drops on Friday, May 13th, 2022. It won't be as expansive of an update as 0.10.3 was because I've essentially had to landscape and mulch a bit less than an acre of land all week and I've not had much time or energy for writing, but it'll cover more the the exercise that Keisuke forces Zach to partake in.

Until next time!