The past two weeks since the release of Confusion v0.5 have been challenging.

Mega, a file-sharing service based in New Zealand, received a complaint (we asked why; they won’t say) that caused them to ban us from their service. That wouldn’t be so troubling in and of itself. Still, during the same period, we’d received some very prejudiced and pejorative messages challenging the rights of transgender individuals even to exist. We assume the author of one of these messages was the complainant. Why us, and not all other visual novels featuring LGBTQ+ characters?

Our consensus is that trans characters in VNs are usually included only for fetish purposes. Any discussion of trans rights goes directly against the current thinking of far-right factions. The ACLU is currently tracking 399 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the U.S. alone being contemplated for 2023.

Because Mega canceled our account, most of the slack went to another file-sharing service, Gofile. Unfortunately, because of the traffic, we had to pay five times our annual fee to cover the overage.

Many people have complained that Kevin, one of the characters in our story, is too one-dimensional and unrealistically combative. However, from just the past two week’s messages, we’ve realized that the world contains a lot of Kevins.

We didn’t intend for this to be a downer, just a reflection of what we’ve been enduring and why the support of the itch.io community is so incredibly appreciated.

We’ve been hard at work on Chapter 6, which will set the tone for the remainder of our story. Be forewarned: as we’ve told many fans recently, Confusion is not a love or redemption story. Instead, it will spiral downwards as Alex reaches her breaking point. How she deals with the after-effects will be up to the player.

We’ll be taking a two-week hiatus starting next week, so our next status report will be a month from now.

Presenting the standard duo of computer-generated depictions hailing from the most recent quatorzain. Enjoy!