When I’m writing I’m looking for characters that are different from me, but also familiar. I can see their motivations. I understand why they are doing the things they do. I connect with Henrietta through many of the matriarchs I’ve loved in my life. These women have guided me as a human being. My two grandmothers remind me a lot of Henrietta, and so it was important for me to tell a story that treats her as she should be treated: complex and deeply sympathetic.

 I knew this story needed to be told for the majority in second person because of the format and the concept: It’s a video game. And, as mentioned above, I wanted to harken back to the old RPGs I loved with the “you are dungeon crawling . . .” type of vibe. I adore second person, and also it felt the most natural to show the progression of a game in an immersive POV. When playing games myself, I often find myself describing them as “I tried to change my outfit and then FELL OFF A CLIFF AND DIED OH MY GOD” or framing it in second person when discussing with other people.

We still tend to mark the presence of the feminine as unusual, while overlooking the overrepresentation of the masculine. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was once asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, and answered, “When there are nine.” When whole groups of women can fill non-gendered roles without it being noteworthy, we’ll have arrived. So for my Golden Age-style story, I followed the Golden Age tradition of casually using only one gendered pronoun. Only I picked feminine pronouns.

I’ve always found real life totally absurd, and sometimes absurdism is the only way to portray our world accurately. We all train ourselves not to see what’s right in front of us, all the time, because that’s the price of functioning in twenty-first century society, and meanwhile we’re so overloaded with information and opinions that we can easily start believing things that make no sense. A non-absurd approach to storytelling is merely contributing to the problem, in a lot of ways.

This is a trope I think about a lot. The life of those beings always seems to be one of isolation, as if exile is the cost of great power or knowledge. A genie is trapped in a lamp. A mad genius is trapped in their own head. Even if they don’t literally leave society, they can’t help viewing themselves as separate from it. There’s an essential schizophrenia to it. If you viewed yourself as totally apart from literally everyone you met, you’d have to at least seem a bit shady. And if the power has a high cost to begin with, isn’t it natural for the boon to have a cost?