I'm of the opinion that a properly good piece of media, at least one that doesn't rely on "twists", cannot be spoiled in a meaningful way. If you disagree, avoid this post until after you read HWBM. Which you will.
We love these places anyway. They're becoming more and more like home. All we need are more of us.
And they come, descending in waves, trying to take us back. We beat them back every time, and sometimes one or two look around, and decide "I'd rather stay here." And then there's more of us.
Sometimes they succeed, and take one of us back home. That's just as fine with us. We should go where we wish, live as we wish, and if our sisters get taken home, they bring a small part of us back to the Earth. That can't go unchanged.
My brain has been fundamentally rewired again. It happens on select occasions, when the right piece of media hits me at the right time, and I engage with it in the right mindset.
Heaven Will Be Mine is short and sweet. A full playthough is roughly five hours. Within that time, it packs a narrative of the trans struggle for identity and recognition, the search for meaning in a perpetually hostile world, the never-ending quest of humans' self-discovery and exploration, and of course cool mechs beating each other up.
Gameplay is delivered in the typical visual novel format, with choices along the way deciding your ultimate faction alignment, and what girls you get to make out with. Here's how to do that by the way.
You play across three main characters, each fulfilling various archetypes and personalities. Broadly, I enjoyed all three characters, but felt there was scope to expand and elaborate on their thoughts and feelings. Like the over-arching story itself, much is left up to the reader to decide.
Luna-Terra, the ace pilot, is the most "tired" of the three. Fighting through struggles without the self-respect to meaningfully change anything.
Pluto, a human that's gone beyond humanity. Absurdly powerful in her new form, but rejects the image of overwhelming strength that others assume of her.
And Saturn; unconventional, unpredictable, aggressively flirty. L33t h4xor extraordinaire.
I resonate strongly with Luna-Terra, and am looking respectfully at Saturn. Make of that what you will.
Through gravity, humans are ruled by each other. Anti-matter, anti-gravity, anti-culture; all exists as a resistive force to this gravity. The refusal of humanity to accept these parts of itself cause its own undoing. When we let our children develop in the lightness of space, they chose their bodies, genders, souls, hearts of their own volition. They became human in the ways they wished to become human.
The fight against Gravity is relentless. The pull of the Earth is not just measured in F = G(m1m2)/R2. It's measured in the mass of human history, the difficulty in breaking free of "normal", and the violence that follows resistance.
This was one of the most interesting metaphors in the game. In the context of gravity, one could choose stand on the surface of planet Earth, and cease resistance. Alternatively you could orbit the planet, still caught in its field, but with some measure of distance. To truly break free of it, how far would you need to go?
Creation of one's own gravity field, or connecting to a totally different one, can be seen as the liberation that these characters crave. I won't say more here, but the game does broach this in interesting ways.
In time, the shape conforms to the human inside. This in part confirms the specific theory: the human part isn't the ear, but the hole in the lobes for your earrings, lipstick is real, lips are not, and we see humanity defined in its gravitational output.
Ship-selves are another crucial aspect to this. They cannot survive on the surface of planet Earth. They are with form, but contort to replicate the user over time. Luna-Terra's is untouchable, Saturn's is bold and brave, Pluto's is warm and all-encompassing.
It is through Ship-selves that the pilots can fight against gravity, fight against each other, fight against the world. They are constructed in such an intricate way that they cannot kill another. There is a joy in it that cannot be found or replicated anywhere else, lonely as it may be.
No one should die in space. No one should die, period. No one has to die, because Ship-Self combat is shimmering missiles of light, cosmic explosions, electricity that sears through the soul. Blade sciences impossible for a human to produce! Dances of combat without end!The true capabilities of the Ship-selves are very ambiguous, more created as a tool of interpretation, as opposed to acting as the centrepiece of the VN.
A fight against ideas with toys. Humans would never show that sort of compassion to each other.
>I worry about what we would be like if that hadn't happened. For me or for you. [...] Would it have taken us even longer? I already feel like I became a person too old. Would we spend our lives without ever-There is pain and reassurance in seeing these thoughts said out loud. Just living can often be sufficient - both as an individual and in the cultures that we create.
>We'd have found another way. Somehow. In Earth or space, no one is ever born whole. We got there eventually, didn't we?
>Ha, I think so too. So I would like to believe that no matter what, we could live and be happy?
>Even in mortal bodies, on our boring, awful home.
>I mean, they can't undo what we have done.
>When they take us back, they will have to make us a part of them.
You can interpret a relentless sadness from any of the situations put forward in HWBM. To live free of Earth's gravity means losing and sacrificing aspects of us, not because they are necessarily incompatible with us, but because the rest of humanity refuses to allow it to exist.
Yet there is joy in fighting for ourselves and each other, and this persists beyond the endless struggle.
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Heaven Will Be Mine: Steam | Itch