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Phoebe is thirteen when she first sees two women kissing. It’s on television. It’s two main characters of her favourite television show. Tara and Willow were concrete evidence that whatever she feels when she looks at girls isn’t just something broken and twisted inside of her— that it exists in other people, that it’s okay in other people.
Which was very nice to have. Nice, but rare. Limited.
She would be rewatching Titanic at age 25 before she figures the story is all the more powerful if Jack Dawson is a butch lesbian who helps Rose overcome her comp-het and experience true tenderness for the first time in her life.
The same thing would happen the first time Dani gleefully pops her DVD of The Mummy in the player and Phoebe spends the whole movie wondering what subtle differences in the love story between Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser would make her heart beat faster if it were about a butch/femme couple of archaeologists kicking undead ass.
Maybe it’s understandable that she looks for representation anywhere. Looks for pieces of herself, pieces of what she wants or dares to dream she might have.
Little things that take a lot of bravery, like throwing a threesome between the main character of her video game, an angel, and the angel’s boyfriend in as a laugh. She actually had completely forgotten she’d done that when Dani gets to that point in the game, but she’s filled with the same urge of wanting to hug fourteen-year-old Phoebe that she’s had since they started playing.
Dani is delighted by The Mark of Oxin. She keeps saying so, as does her laugher— as does the crinkles by her eyes. She is delighted by every use of classic game moment music, every trope that Phoebe picked up solely from having played so many games herself.
She does criticise the main character, a little. Which Phoebe prickles over.
“He’s so mean to Emily!” Dani scolds after Alex says Emily can come along only if she doesn’t slow him down.
“I’m building tension,” Phoebe laughs. “When they learn to respect one another it will feel earned.”
“That’s very pulling-pigtails-in-grade-school of you…”
“Where do you think I learned it,” she shrugs.
*
Dani is so complimentary as she plays that part of Phoebe thinks she can’t possibly mean all of it. “Honestly, these concepts, Feebs…” she says. “Watch out Undertale, fuck off Final Fantasy like, this is how you worldbuild!”
Phoebe laughs. “How? Slapping together every trope I’d consumed up to this point?”
Dani nods, “Of course! Taking the best, sifting it, mining for what works.”
“Did not think that’s what I was doing…” Phoebe shrugs.
“You didn’t recognize your own genius.”
She’s finally gotten through the long path of glass to fall through heaven back to earth— these attempted mazes are the only element of the game Dani seems willing to criticise Phoebe for.
“I guess it’s pretty good for fourteen,” Phoebe smiles.
Phoebe already knows what Dani’s answer is going to be later when she asks, “If I released this game today, do you think there’d be more shippers for Alex and Emily, or Alex and Jake?”
Dani snorts. “Alex and Jake, obvi. We’re gonna pass up any chance for the gays?”
It has Phoebe thinking her almost go-to thought now, when confronted with a shoehorned het romance. “But what if Alex is butch?”
Dani keeps battling skeletons but doesn’t miss a beat. “Then Alex and Emily, duh. I mean, to be completely fair, you gave Emily and Jake almost identical personalities so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine either of them with Alex.”
“And by that, you mean that I made Alex be a jerk to both of them?”
They both laugh. “Yeah,” Dani says. “Maybe you’ve got some stuff to unpack.”
“Hey! I’m not mean to you,” Phoebe says, disproving her own point by shoving Dani’s shoulder.
*
The look of shock on Dani’s face when the game ends on such a dramatic cliffhanger is almost as satisfying as the look of shock she had when the threesome happened. Phoebe smiles smugly, saying, “And that’s it. End of summer holiday.”
“That can’t be it, Feebs!” Dani screams.
“It is,” she shrugs. “Went back to school, made my friends play it exactly once, and kinda forgot about the whole thing.”
“But… you just ended it like that? What was the sequel even gonna be about? How would it all have ended?”
Phoebe shrugs again. “I dunno. Can’t remember; I probably didn’t have any kind of plan.”
“You spent a whole summer on this,” Dani turns towards her. “How’d you just… stop?”
She isn’t all too sure now that she’s thinking about it. She thinks about how long it took to even convince her friends to play it in the first place. She remembers their lackluster response; nothing at all like Dani’s. In fact, the only thing they had in common at all with Dani’s response was the hatred of all attempted mazes and shock at the inclusion of a threesome.
By the next summer she had a PlayStation and her mother had encouraged her to start wearing makeup and the same friends didn’t hang around her so much… working on a sequel just didn’t seem worth it.
“I dunno,” Phoebe repeats herself.
“I’d love to play it,” Dani says, and she says it like she means it. She says it so earnestly, Phoebe just has to believe her. “I’d jump right in, waste no time after the first one, y’know?”
Phoebe smiles. There’s a lot that would be different about The Mark of Oxin if she made it today. There’d be less of a slapdash plot. Every city might not get its own king. There might be more subtle seeding about the titular mark on Alex’s neck. Alex would probably treat… well, everyone better. And hell, Alex might even be the lesbian rep Phoebe so desperately craved. But, for what it was, after playing through the game with Dani, she realises she’s quite proud of it.
“I’m sure we could buy another RPG maker somewhere,” she says. Dani’s face lights up.