humanizing monsters: yellow ramble

Hi, hello. It's been a while since yellow came out and I hate writing postmortems for games that I made ages ago. However, I read a couple of posts lately that made me think that I should explain a couple of things about this. It won't be a neat, structured thing, like postmortems for the Primary Lights trilogy. I just need to let something out of my system. This devlog will deal with issues present in the Primary Lights trilogy and in yellow. Additionally, it will discuss intrusive thoughts and religious trauma. Keep that in mind before going further.

yellow is, as it should be, a very disgusting story. It's not easy to read and it definitely wasn't easy to write. It made me sick - not figuratively, literally. After spending all of the Primary Lights trilogy in the head of someone that's been hurt - someone who's been treated like an object, someone who's been disrespected and misgendered, and let's be real, someone who's been raped - switching to the perspective of someone who caused all of this trauma and pain felt... wrong in many ways. I asked myself if I should write this at all. In the end, I came to a conclusion that it's a necessary thing for me to do.

There's this big trend to sanitize things, to keep yourself away from things that are uncomfortable to experience, to quickly shut down any thoughts that might make you feel uneasy. There's a weird push to keep your mind spotless and squeaky clean - sinless, if you are religious, I guess. From this point on, it's very easy to see all wrong things as other, alien, inhuman, coming from the devil or whatever other otherworldly force might tempt you. 

I used to be deeply Catholic and I was quick to reject every wrong thought I had - every thought that might've led to sin was quickly rejected, and since I was, and still am, really queer, it was a lot of thoughts to reject. Sooner or later, this led me into a pretty violent struggle with intrusive thoughts. All of them were the most gruesome, horrendous, unimaginable crimes against other people, playing exactly on the thoughts I was oh so bravely "fighting". The more I rejected them, the more violent and vivid they got, and I was fully convinced that even having those thoughts made me a monster. Good people, after all, don't think this stuff. Good people have good thoughts which are clear and pure, and they certainly don't experience what I was going through. There's a hard line between Clean Good People and Unforgivable Monsters.

The only thing that helped me was accepting that I could be a monster that's doing all of this. It was having this violent thought and answering to it with "I could do that, yeah. I could do much worse, actually, if I wanted to, but I don't."

Being a "good person", for me at least, isn't really about some inherent state of purity of thought. It's a dangerous thing to think. It's knowing that you are capable of incredible evil and not doing that. Realizing that you could be the "bad person" is an uncomfortable thought and this is why so many people avoid confronting it. Realizing that you could be the "bad person", after all, makes you realize that all of those horrible people you've seen on the news and learned about in history classes are like you. They're as human as you are. If you feel anger at those words, if you think "Naarel, you must be a Bad Person to think like that!" or "Naarel, but they aren't human if they're doing Bad Things!", or even "oh, so you're sympathizing with them?!", then that's a sign for you to stop reading here and reflect a little about why you reacted this way. Being a human is neutral. It's not a virtue in itself. By denying that someone horrible is human, we're trying to separate ourselves from the possibility that we could be doing all of this too because it's just easier to say "oh, this is a completely different kind of being than me".

Dehumanizing abusers is dangerous because it leads to caricatures being made. It leads people to believe that abuse can only come from some uncontrollable, animalistic impulse, that abuse can't be calculated - after all, only humans think. It leads to people believing that they are too good to hurt others. It leads to people seeing evil as the cartoonish villain twisting their moustache and cackling maniacally. It leads to literal slavery being legal, as long as it's done with prisoners. It leads to "he's a nice young man, surely he couldn't hurt you". If you refuse to acknowledge that evil isn't this alien, otherworldly thing - if you refuse to acknowledge that a human can hurt another human - you cultivate in yourself a mindset that makes it harder for you to recognize evil in others. You train yourself to not recognize red flags in people who are "nice". 

I decided to write yellow because I wanted to be in the head of someone who terrifies me. I wanted to get into their mindset. I wanted to think like they do for a moment.

I wanted to confront the guy I was in my most horrifying intrusive thoughts.

I wrote every line reminding myself that all of this, every single disgusting part, is something that someone out there might be thinking - and I made sure of that. I went to several spaces I'd rather not mention in order to see exactly how someone like Partner¹ might think. It was terrible. I felt ill. But there was something weirdly comforting in it. Something weirdly profound in diving right into the head of someone disgusting and acknowledging them as human, too. Something reassuring in the disgust I felt while reminding myself that all of this isn't some incomprehensible alien thing, it wasn't the devil that made them do it. They legitimately see themselves as a "good guy" here.

I never once felt sympathy for Partner and I never will. I went deep into their head, into their thoughts, into their reasoning; I went through their arguments, I gave them the same amount of thought that I gave to Narrator or Lover, and I acknowledged that they are all just as human as I am.

It's just that one of those humans is a piece of shit. Unforgivable, despicable, horrible piece of shit.

Writing something like this is never easy. Not only you have to confront all of those terrible thoughts but you also need to get to know the type of person you're writing about and it's terrifying because this makes them feel more like a person instead of a caricature we're all so used to seeing. It's no longer a mindless monster baring its teeth or a dark figure in an even darker alleyway. And the Lights series was always about showing the pain and the nuance of abuse - the sides you don't see often shown in media. It'd be easy for me to not try and understand Partner, to not read what I read, but it'd go against the entire philosophy. yellow is disgusting because it's all something that another human being possibly thought about at one point or another.

I choose to recognize humanity in those who commit unforgivable acts because dehumanizing them is how abuse goes unchecked. It creates narratives that aren't true. It makes recognizing that you've been hurt harder. It makes speaking up harder.

And you don't have to agree with me, that's fine. I'm not telling you how to feel, especially if you've been hurt in the past. All I ask of you is just to sit down and ask yourself about what being human means to you and at which point you cease to be human, and what lies behind that line. I want you to think about what you're achieving by refusing to acknowledge someone else's humanity. It's all genuine questions.

The answers are for you.

¹ In case you're not aware of the Lights series naming convention somehow, Partner is the abuser in the whole equation, with Narrator being the victim (survivor, if you prefer) and Lover being Narrator's current, more understanding partner.