Strange Gaming Diaries: C•ko•fn•ta•C, by Madocactus

if you were part of the first-wave undertale fandom shortly after the game's release, you might be familiar with a remix of gaster's theme named "Dark, Darker, Yet Darker", by a musician who went by The Great Anansi. it's the one with the dial-up noise at the start.

I made that.

the idea came to me shortly after playing the game, which was itself only a month or two after the game had released. I wasn't aware of any other gaster remixes at the time—I don't know if I was the very first or just the first to have gained any traction—so the idea felt excitingly fresh.

I made the whole thing in under a week, and posted it to...soundcloud. I had no idea how to make or work with video files, so a youtube upload was out of the question. but I did what I could to make myself presentable, picking out a pseudonym and even commissioning an artist through tumblr for a neat logo.

the choice of pseudonym makes me cringe to this day, but I try not to dwell on it. I was a barely-adult autistic white boy, these things happen.

it would, of course, receive more attention than I could have imagined. then it got reuploaded to youtube by somebody else, where it would go on to get over seven million views as of time of writing.

I then made my own youtube channel, uploaded the song myself, and make exactly two additional undertale remixes over the next few months. one of them, a remix of megalovania in the collage style of your best nightmare named "karma", as inspired by a tumblr webcomic (the author of whom I would enjoy a short friendship with), currently sits at over six million views.

the gaster remix was definitely still the thing to leave the biggest impact, though. there was fanart inspired by it. there were covers of my remix, a concept I hadn't even considered possible. my blanket permission to use the music for whatever purposes anyone wanted would result in it starring in a fanmade gaster fight, a realization of its original purpose.

if I wanted to, if I were to learn how, I probably could have taken that unexpected success and made it into something in the long-term. become a fandom musician like my contemporaries, start a patreon, and if I was very lucky, maybe even make a living from my art. that was the dream in 2016, wasn't it? it was a dream I'd even seen in motion when I was actually learning music production, back in the my little pony fandom, when the idea of a "fandom musician" really got started in the first place.

to this day, I occasionally still see pieces of that alternate timeline. friends years later would tell me that they'd listened to those old undertale remixes, been fans of them, felt creatively inspired by them. I got namedropped in the andrew cunningham video about gaster's theme. I listened to a song by the stupendium and heard my music in the intro.

but every time I considered that idea, and every time I looked at my uploads and saw those numbers all climb higher, the only thing I felt was fear. the attention I had and all the people who were all looking at me only ever sent me into a panic whenever I tried to consider them. I was afraid of what being an online creator could do to me.

C•ko•fn•ta•C is a game about that fear coming true and ruining your life.

this was one of the fellow toxic yuri vn jam 2 submissions I had the chance to beta read after finishing my own game (here's a quick link to that), and it stunned me in a way I really wasn't expecting. it's not very often you get a work written so sharply aimed towards the topic of toxicity in fandom, despite how widespread it is to the point that I feel compelled to describe it as generational trauma.

sunny's character is drenched in the exact kind of cloying cowardice that defines so many of the personalities that feed on the constant assertion of moral purity in online spaces, but what's especially fascinating about her is that she isn't just likened to a parasite because she's exploiting people—it's because she can't sustain herself without it.

it's an anchor to her entire life cycle, and the mounting sense of panic at the idea of not infecting anita with all those ideas shines through in small moments. it keeps her character, extreme as she is at times, grounded in believable psychology and made the many subsequent reveals of just how rotten she can be hit that much harder.

and sunny is only this way because of the people who infected her in the same way. her infantilized way of referring to the sexual content she just invaded someone's privacy to find as "spicy" is a reminder that this girl's beliefs and values and vocabulary are not her own, but were seared into her by other people that she herself no doubt fears the same retribution from. parasites, all the way up.

but sunny's abuse isn't even the only thing anita is afraid of, is the thing. through her inner dialogue, she also stresses about losing patreon memberships, about the pressure to constantly create products, about self-sacrifice for a profession so glamorized that it's easy not to notice the ways it can hurt you.

anita is a deeply vulnerable person going into this dynamic, despite what the optics might have an uncharitable observer believe. her income is unstable, her housing is unstable, her job requires her to walk the tightrope of acceptability and perceived honesty, and she's struggling to find stability in a system that hates her and wants her to work herself to death.

I've been in those positions before. you desperately cling to any source of stability you can find, but simultaneously never trust them to hold for long. you live your life fleeing from one makeshift shelter to the next, one spare room to the next, always extremely, horrifyingly aware of the power other people have over you and how you only live because of their whim.

I've been essentially homeless at a few points in my life, and taken in by a number of people who claimed that they would give me a safe place to heal. almost none of them did. I was afraid of what I knew they could do to me. what I'd let them do to me. this game turned out to be about that fear coming true, too.

to spend a bit of time speaking to the craftsmanship of the thing instead of the raw emotional impact, I found the sense of mystery very well-paced, and the steady stream of new information and lack of certainty as to where things would go besides "probably bad" made every horrible thing that happened hit with the impact it needed to. it's a story that dares you to keep descending down the staircase even when each step is creakier than the last.

it's a little bit embarrassing to admit, but I honestly thought that the game was building up to a twist of sunny actually, literally infecting anita with a parasite because of her bad hygeine and habitual lake-swimming and that she was going to die. that the game kept me worried about this for so long is, I think, a testament to the sense of uncertainty and dread it instills

the presentation of it also helps solidify that slow-boil tension, with how willing it is to focus on lengthy mundane pauses while a character relocates themselves or goes to handle something in the kitchen or some other activity that grounds them in the physical space of the game.

there's an almost cinematic quality to the storytelling that was fairly understated, but still felt like a unique draw that kept me honed in the entire time. I normally click through dialogues and speed-read through lengthy prose in visual novels—this was a rare case where I felt it prudent to slow down and let the game decide the pace of things.

and the most bitter part of all of this is the ending. the ending made me want to fucking howl and wail in sympathetic rage and sadness. the lifeline is severed, and anita lands headfirst into an environment full of hostility and numbing dead-end work, burdened with the responsibility of rebuilding an entire life for herself from scratch, with no one able or willing to help her.

there is, at the very least, a sense of relief from having cut out all the rot from her life, and the self-certainty with which she talks about herself and the situation. the final line of "im just here for the yaoi" is immensely cathartic, given everything.

but it's still a heartbreaking clipping of wings. it's a reminder that you can try your best to do everything right and still end up losing everything because someone else decided to manufacture your failure. that something you pour so much of yourself into can be taken from you and leave you without that opportunity for self-expression.

I grieve for all the artists I've known and watched be traumatized by the things the internet has done to them. the ones who were wiped out by the tumblr porn ban, the ones who struggle to navigate the heightened hostility of platforms like patreon, the ones who feel like they can't grow or experiment because they've become captives of an audience who only want them to be who they were ten years ago.

to those who still create, I hope the future is kinder to you and your art. it should be. you always deserved better than this.

to those who don't, I hope you can rest in peace.

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