Asexual Representation: In Stars and Time

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And today I know there are at least dozens of you out there that are thrilled to see the title of today’s episode, because you lovely listeners came to us in droves telling us that we needed to play the game In Stars and Time, and so we did just that. The time has come for us to talk about the asexual and aromantic representation in this video game. So how should we start? I feel like you are literally the one who has a degree in video games, so maybe you can help start us out. Tell the listeners what kind of game we’re talking about.

Royce: A degree in video games. That’s like sometimes hearing family members being like, “You do computers, right?”

Courtney: You do computers, you do video games.

Royce: So In Stars and Time is, I guess, at its surface level, what you’d think of as your sort of typical formula for a turn based RPG. It does have a lot of personality in the dialogue and the storytelling and it also features a time looping mechanic. So you’re mainly playing in a relatively small area, it’s in town and three floors in a castle before the boss. But you are repeating these multiple times as things are changing, dialogues changing, as you’re learning more about the world, as new things are coming up over what is a good 20-25 hour play time, assuming you’re not trying to 100% the game.

Royce: Mechanically the game is fairly combat heavy. You don’t really need to grind, but you find yourself in battle quite often. And this game does something that, if you’ve played enough RPGs, you’ll be familiar with. A lot of these style of games will use a lightly obfuscated rock-paper-scissors analogy for how combat works. One type of creature is weak to another type, but particularly strong against another. They don’t sugarcoat it in this game. The type of magic is called Craft, like people that use magic use some sort of craft, there’s literally the sort of combat magic is rock, paper, and scissors craft.

Courtney: So yeah. Which– When we were first introduced to that, I was nervous. [laughs] I was nervous. I should also state, overall, I thought the game had a beautiful story and I loved it, and I’m excited to talk about the rep in it. But I think this game finally sealed the deal for me. I am ripping off the bandaid and saying I don’t like RPGs. I really don’t. And I’ve kind of known this for a while. But a couple of my favorite games of all times are technically RPGs, so every time I’ve struggled to play one, I’ve always chalked it up to other things. But so, for example, like my very first RPG that I loved was Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and the first Paper Mario too was not bad either.

Courtney: But halfway through those games I get terribly bored of the combat and I avoid it as much as possible. But even within the combat there’s always some sort of timed mechanic where you have to hit the right button, do things at the right time, so that at least gives me a little something extra. And the other one is Undertale, which might be my favorite game of all time. But that one is very, very different combat wise. Because when you are in combat, it’s also like a bullet hell, where you’re trying to stay alive while an enemy is attacking you.

Royce: Or, well, when you’re playing through, assuming you aren’t just attacking, in which case the game takes a very different shape.

Courtney: And I love that you, like, have to play it through with three totally different strategies in order to get the full game and everything about that game and its impact just worked for me so so very well. But that one’s so inspired by, like, Earthbound and we tried going back to play that.

Royce: Yeah, with Undertale, instead of having all of your different abilities and attacks, you were actually dealing with communication prompts, and those communication prompts were different for each enemy that you faced.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: We tried playing Earthbound. I also tried playing Earthbound on my own quite some time ago, like before we knew each other, as a part of a year or two where I was trying to go back and play a lot of older games that I didn’t play as a kid either because I wasn’t aware of them at a time or didn’t have access to them or something. And I think I sort of burned out on that style of game by just playing too many back to back. But I’ve also learned that the older I get, the lower my tolerance is for a lot of genres and mechanics. And I think it’s that, even games that will do something interesting and different, a lot of the things that are done in the game are at least somewhat similar, if not exactly the same, to something that I’ve done before. And even things that are somewhat novel seem to wear off sooner than they did when I was a kid.

Courtney: Yeah, anything that’s too repetitive for too long, I think, both of us have gotten a reduced tolerance for. We even kind of talked about that when we were talking about Parvati Holcomb in Outer Worlds. Because that’s already a genre that neither one of us particularly loves in a video game, but by the time we got halfway through this game we’re like, oh my gosh, please just let us finish this game so we can get to the rest of the Parvati’s story.

Royce: Did we even finish that or did we–? I think we finished the side character storylines and then we got to like the last chapter and youtube’d it or something.

Courtney: I think we did have to go to YouTube to see, like, all of the final scenes.

Royce: The different endings, yeah.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: I have mentioned, just around the house while we’ve been playing games sometimes, that there are definitely some games now where, if I had a ‘skip to next cutscene’ button, I would press it.

Courtney: Yeah. So I really do think probably Undertale is the only game where that has not happened on me. Because every combat, no matter how you do it, is distinct in some way and they find ways to keep it fresh and different throughout.

Royce: But even then Undertale playing multiple different routes, we probably spent about 20 hours on it, maybe 25, which is about the same as we spent on In Stars and Time.

Courtney: And, you know, maybe we’ll have to put a pin in Undertale, because we’ve– we’ve absolutely had people ask us to cover Undertale before. Have you seen who the ace characters are allegedly in that?

Royce: No, I haven’t. I don’t remember people asking for that one either.

Courtney: Oh yeah, a couple people absolutely have. But yeah, I’d have to check it again. I don’t remember if it’s just Sans or if it’s Sans and Papyrus who are allegedly asexual.

Royce: Oh.

Courtney: We’ll have to dig into that sometime. Because, even though I might be a little salty about how overt that representation is, I do like talking about that game. So maybe another time. But the game at hand today, In Stars and Time, beautifully explicit representation. Very, very happy with the story. Even though I was nervous, early game, for the reason I just stated, with the fact that it’s literally rock-paper-scissors, I got nervous. I also thought it was interesting, but I was nervous about it. Normally, when you play a game like this and you’re acquiring allies who have different strengths or different abilities, normally you acquire them as you go.

Courtney: You normally start alone and then pick them up. But this game opens and you already have your team of people. You’ve already been traveling with them for a while, so you already know them all and they know you. And you’re basically playing the last day of your full journey. And I was very nervous at that point because I kind of like getting to know new companions. And I was like, are there going to be enough opportunities for character growth and development and for us as players to become attached to these companion characters now, since we are just thrown into it and already know them?

Royce: Yeah, we tried not to spoil too much going into this game. And when I– when we did start up the game and I saw that all of our characters were listed as being level 50, presumably out of 99, which is common enough, and that they had a lot of abilities and they already had some equipment and all of this, I was expecting the game to do this thing where you go into something reasonably powerful and then something happens and you lose all of your abilities or you go back in time or something like that, and that wasn’t the case. Most of the game is played without a lot of level progression for the most part, aside from your character, who is the only one of the party who is aware of this time loop going on.

Royce: You retain your abilities, you retain your memories, you retain your strength as you level up, everyone else resets. But I guess, to go through the cadence of the game, as you said, we’re basically in at the end of an adventure. Everyone has been together, traveling for a while. Different people joined at different points in time, but it’s been a couple years. I think it’s been a decent amount of time. There are five of you in total. You play as Siffrin, a short, behatted, stealthy, trap-seeking character, non-binary, touch-averse, kind of quiet. Which I think is one part about getting to know the characters over this repeating day is that, because your character is generally so reserved, there is a lot about their friends that they haven’t come to learn and there’s a lot that comes out over this repeating day.

Courtney: I was really happy to see that because that was one of the things I was nervous about. But I got proven wrong on that point. But yeah, Siffrin, I thought was very interesting because the party around them uses they and he interchangeably as pronouns. And even though we have gotten to a point in representation where we are starting to see characters who use they/them pronouns, very rarely do we have people that kind of have two sets of pronouns that both get used.

Royce: Yeah. Siffrin has fallen victim to the amnesia trope. They don’t remember a lot about their past, hometown, can’t talk about it. There are big missing blotches in their memory, which is one sort of ongoing thing in this game. There are a couple of mysteries that we get a good enough indication underneath, but it’s something that is not fully explained. The characters themselves don’t understand it and we as the players never get a full idea of, sort of, this world’s history and some of the magics behind it.

Royce: Mirabelle is the group healer. She’s a housemaiden from the town, the country that you come back to after all of this, and is sort of the crux for the whole adventure. Before this adventure had started, someone who’s simply known as The King – that’s a name, not a title – had invaded this country and used some sort of power that no one understands to freeze basically this entire castle in time. And this power is sort of spreading out and taking over the country. And she, for some reason at the beginning of the day does not understand was given some sort of power to resist this and seems to be the only one who– is being set up to be the only one who can actually stop The King, and so it was her going off on an adventure that initially started gathering the rest of the party.

Courtney: And she is actually our aroace character. And Siffrin, the character we play as the players, is asexual but does have romantic interest. We don’t learn about that part until later on, but it is always refreshing when you can have sort of two different characters, at least two, who are on different places of the A-spectrums. That’s always a really great way to demonstrate without telling that it is in fact a spectrum. And the conversations in which this gets revealed and made more explicit did something that I think is a step up from the conversation that you have with Parvati in Outer Worlds. Because she sort of explains that she is asexual and then you as the player have dialogue options. You can say, “I’m asexual too,” or you can choose that you’re not. There isn’t a choice with this one. In fact, there really aren’t a lot of dialogue choices that change the story.

Royce: Yeah, very few. There are actually a lot of times when you get a prompt to say something, it’s really just to control the pacing. There are a lot of cases where a prompt comes up and it’s just one option. It’s just waiting for you to hit the button to say the thing. Or a lot of times when you do have an option, it’s the do you want to have this conversation or do you not want to? And that’s about the only deviation there.

Courtney: Or there are things to just say on different routes. Like, since you are repeating the same day over and over again, sometimes a seemingly innocuous choice like, “Oh, what snack do you want? Here are three options,” and you can pick one, then on your next time looping through, you can pick another one. And usually that doesn’t affect anything. But sometimes there’s a silly gag like oh whoops, you’re allergic to pineapple, you die.

Royce: Yeah, those are usually sort of closed loop dialogue options where it may spawn off into a conversation but most of them ultimately don’t have like– There aren’t broad branching paths in the game that extend from those.

Courtney: Yeah, you don’t have– you don’t have sort of the dialogue freedom or choice freedom that you would have in like a visual novel dating sim sort of a thing, because a lot of those protagonists sort of start as a blank slate because it is meant to be you and you can make your own choices. Siffrin is not a blank slate. This character has their own insecurities, backstory, motivations, different relationships established with the other party members already. So there’s no option to not make Siffrin asexual. And I think, given the fact that you don’t have different branching dialogue options, the dedicated conversation between these two ace characters has a chance to go a lot deeper because it’s not going to cause as many deviations.

Royce: We should tack on as well that this is not a skippable section. Somewhere around mid-game you have a point where you have to go and try to find ways to help each of your friends that you’re traveling with.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: And this is how the conversation comes up with Mirabelle, and that is something that you have to do to progress the game. Whereas there are other things in the game, other events, that aren’t necessary to actually complete the game.

Courtney: Yeah, you do have to go through this entire conversation at least the first time, and then you technically do go through it multiple times. But after you’ve read it through in its entirety, you can then skip it the next time you have to have it. But yeah, did we actually pull up the script for that? So we can– Well, I suppose even before we have this conversation, which is probably, what would you say, mid game?

Royce: It is. It is in act three of six.

Courtney: Okay. So yeah, halfway through the game you’ll get this big conversation, but there will be just a couple of one off lines before it that can kind of hint toward at least Siffrin being ace, because it’s like, internal monologue happening.

Royce: I do remember a few situations where Mirabelle is like, “Relationships, ew.” Basically to one point– to one effect or another.

Courtney: Yeah, so there were a couple of hints for her before this as well.

Royce: There’s a point in one of the castle rooms where, if you go around and you try to inspect everything, you find a room with a bunch of posters and you roll one out and it just says something like– it’s a depiction of a bunch of naked people doing, I don’t know, fun things, or something like that. And oh, I found it here. It changes a couple times depending on how far you are in the game, but one of them is: “You look at them curiously.” Another one is, “You’re kind of grossed out by them.” And a third one is, “You don’t want to look at them.” But I guess we should kind of go through the rest of the cast, because we stopped after two people. But–

Courtney: But they’re the most important two people!

Royce: You do have a four-person party and there is a fifth person, who is sometimes just referred to as The Kid, Bonnie.

Courtney: Boniface!

Royce: Sometimes assists in combat by, like, healing you or attacking an enemy from afar.

Courtney: They make the snacks.

Royce: But a common theme is they really, really want to help out, they want to be able to fight, they want to be able to participate, but they’re also very young and everyone else in the party has to talk them down to be like, “No, we are trying to protect you, you are helping by making the snacks and by occasionally distracting the enemies, you don’t need to run out and potentially get hurt.” But in that scene with the posters, all of the adults in the room see them and understand what they are, and react to them in some way, and then they’re all like, “No, don’t let the kid see.” Real quick, before we go back to Mirabelle’s big scene, the other two characters are Isabeau and Odile. They represent the rock and the paper side of the equation, with Isabeau being the sort of buff, protector type, rock type. I don’t know if it’s explicitly confirmed, but it’s at least heavily hinted at that Isabeau is a trans man.

Courtney: I thought for sure he was after a conversation we had with him, and then also in close proximity to something that we thought was a trans joke, but apparently the creator said that wasn’t intended.

Royce: In reading through wikis after we finished the game, I did see one comment, not about this character, but about a particular item. There was an item that was called, like, a cracked egg and they were like, “This item, being a part of a larger trans awakening metaphor, was not intended.” It may have accidentally happened. It was not intended.

Courtney: [laughs] Well, I swear, in my memory of playing this, that happened in relatively close proximity to the conversation where we were like, “Wait, Isabeau’s trans! Oh my goodness.” And then we saw, like, oh, this cracked egg item. And we’re like, “Yup, confirmed.”

Royce: So one thing that this game does is, as you’re going through, you’re seeing people come across books or relics or something of interest in this castle and then talking about it, and it generates a lot of discussions about different cultural traditions between their respective countries. Because the country that they’re in right now, where this castle is in, seems to be what we would consider very progressive. The deity that they worship is the Change God, and it’s all about, you know, like changing. Not remaining stagnant is seen as a good thing. It’s seen as something that you should do. And Isabeau has gone through changes multiple times. To the point where there are some critical comments later in the game, at one point where Isabeau is criticized for potentially continually changing as a means of running away from self-reflection.

Courtney: Well, it also seemed to me, after a big conversation to learn more about his backstory – and I didn’t make notes of this so I can’t tell you the exact quotes – but the impression I got was, since he is the rock type and he’s big and he’s strong, he was talking about how he wasn’t born that way, he wasn’t that way and he had to become the strongest one and he had to be the big, strong, tough guy in order to feel like himself on the inside. But then he does have this softer side, like he also wants to design clothing and stuff and he was sort of having this conflict. He’s like, “But I’m supposed to be this big, tough guy.” So it almost seemed to me in this conversation I was getting very much vibes of like trans masculine and going maybe to an over performative level of masculinity that wasn’t true to his internal self before, you know, realizing more about what he actually wants as opposed to performing these gender norms for other people. So that– that’s why, after this big conversation, we were like, “Isabeau trans?”

Royce: Well, it is interesting because the text in the game, I think Isabeau brings up on more than one occasion transitioning from a nerd to a jock. But they very briefly mention being really young and being small, and I think, saying that they had braids. There’s something sort of feminine, like a feminine attribute in appearance.

Courtney: Feminine coded in this context.

Royce: And we also– We also know that Craft is the broad spectrum type of magic and we are introduced to the combat crafts. there are other crafts we see that people have. Crafted statues and flowers, and there are clay making and candle making, sort of stations in the castle. And so craft can be used to create a lot of things. One common enough aspect of craft is body craft, which is where you change your physical form to be what you want it to be. And a lot of people use this. Some people do smaller degrees and some people do larger degrees, and Isabeau did craft their body to be large. Large and powerful, intentionally.

Courtney: Yeah, and using that exact language, like, “The body I crafted.”

Royce: Before we loop back around, the fourth character, Odile is the paper type in the group. She is the oldest one of the four, I guess five of them, and the most learned and versatile. You could think of her as the wizard character in the group.

Courtney: Yeah, the stoic academic type.

Royce: Yeah. But back around to Mirabelle and the conversation, I mentioned that Siffrin has to help everyone in the group independently in order to move on. Everyone has something that is bothering them that they are trying to get past. On the morning of the day, when you’re going to run through the castle and fight the king, Mirabelle has been carrying this huge stack of papers that is basically, like, old-timey dating service type of thing. It’s a bunch of paper, physical profiles of sorting through to try to figure out who to date, and she’s overwhelmed. It feels to her like something that she has to do because, according to her culture, she believes she is supposed to change.

Courtney: Yes, which is really, really interesting because you described this culture as being progressive, because they welcome change, but there is still an element of enforced cultural norms and amatonormativity. Because, as she explains this to you, she says you know we’re supposed to change, because change is good and we should try to change, we should embrace change. But finding a partner, and essentially getting married, entering a partnership, is seen as one of the biggest ways to change.

Royce: And so this whole dating profile thing that she’s going through is kept very secret somehow. Our character even is surprised when she plops out this huge package of papers and is wondering how she was able to carry this around on their adventures and keep it secret the whole time. But through looping multiple times we eventually figure out what she’s been worried about and sort of force ourself into the situation to get her to open up and try to help. And so we start going through these papers and pull a few out. And it seems like she’s not all that interested in the profile of a man that we pull out. She’s not all that interested in the profile of a woman that we pull out.

Courtney: Hmm, I wonder why that would be.

Royce: We ask, “What kind of person are you into then?” And she says, “Oh, I don’t have a type. I like all kinds of people equally.” When prodding further, she doesn’t really give a clear answer. She would like someone nice, someone who likes her. And then she sort of pauses and turns the question on Siffrin. And Siffrin pauses and doesn’t know how to answer that either. The question of what kind of person do you like.

Royce: And then Mirabelle finally says, “I’m not interested in that dating stuff.” And part of what you were mentioning just a moment ago about the Change belief being very important to her, specifically as a housemaiden and to her culture in general, she feels very pressured into this.

Royce: And going through her own justifications here, she says, “One of the ways to change is to try new things. So I’m trying. I’m trying new things and some are fun and fulfilling and easy. But you can’t just go and only try new, easy things, can you? Sometimes I have to try scary new things, things that make me uncomfortable, things that I don’t want to do at all, which includes dating.” She says: “Romantic love is one of the biggest ways to change. It’s supposed to change you, to bring you new experiences, and I have to do it right. To be a good housemaiden, I have to do it. I have to date. I have to love someone in a romantic way. I have to do things with them, I have to bond with them, I have to sleep with them, I have to have children with them. I have to love them in a very specific way and I don’t want to.”

Courtney: Boom, mic drop. There it is. Beautifully done. You don’t even have to say I’m aromantic asexual. You just made it so abundantly clear.

Royce: This is a pretty in depth conversation. I’m not going to read the entire thing, but there are a few other lines here of: “Dating, the idea of being in a romantic relationship, of being with someone like that, I hate thinking about it. I hate the idea of it. The idea of it alone is just awful. I can’t love someone like that. It has never happened and I don’t think it ever will.” A little further in the conversation, Siffrin does say in response to Mirabelle saying the fact that she feels like she can’t change like everyone else around her makes her feel like a mistake, that she must be broken for not wanting to want these things because everyone else can. And at that point Siffrin says, “Well, I don’t know about the romantic part, but I don’t want to do things with people either. It’s weird, right?”

Courtney: Yeah, super weird Siffrin!

Royce: So the two of them commiserate a bit about that. The conversation goes on for a bit and eventually lands on being true to yourself and finding a way to incorporate that into the doctrine that you follow. And in that, accepting that this is not something for you, you are still changing in a way. You are still growing by accepting that you do not need to change in this way, which is a satisfying enough conclusion for Mirabelle, and her problem is solved for the time being.

Courtney: Hooray! Except she’s got much bigger problems and we’re most of them.

Royce: Yeah, our character really goes through it during the course of the game. There’s a lot of mental health issues presented here.

Courtney: Lots of issues… I mean, the game is not subtle about the fact that this is about mental illness. Because even the enemies you fight, going up to The King, from the very first run through, like they’re called Sadnesses and there are just like puddles of tears that kill you if you touch them and–

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: But our character starts mostly fine. Probably has a little bit of social anxiety.

Royce: A lot of social anxiety.

Courtney: Occasionally gets embarrassed, like we’ll hide under his hat if someone, like, calls too much attention to him. But it really starts to ramp up the more and more you go through the game and the more reps you get of this day.

Royce: We finished the game on loop number 81 or 82, I think.

Courtney: I want to say 82.

Royce: We go through it a lot. And the stress of that definitely bears down on the protagonist.

Courtney: Yes. But teased from the very first day, even before we have this conversation where Siffrin admits to being asexual, not necessarily knowing about romance, it’s really heavily implied right from the first day that Isabeau has a crush on Siffrin. He does this thing where he’s, like, very flirty, like, in the middle of the night, like, “Hey, Siffrin, I’ve got something to tell you.” And it’s like, “Oh, what is it, Beau?” And it’s like, “I’m not going to tell you yet, but I’ll tell you tomorrow after we kill The King.”

Royce: That’s an ongoing thing, because you do kill The King and you get to the point past it and you have a chance to talk to everyone before you end up looping back again. And you try to get this story out. And you get interrupted like four times in a row. And then finally–

Courtney: Every time!

Royce: Finally, on the fifth time you get something out of it. But a lot of the interactions between the two– One, we are waiting for a while to, one, have the confirmation of what was suspected there, but also to figure out along the way what Siffrin’s feelings were in the matter.

Courtney: Yeah, because at first it was like, “Oh, Isabeau has a crush on us.” But there was no any internal monologue about what we thought for a while. And then we have this sort of you know A-spec revelation in this conversation with Mirabelle, and then we still really don’t know. So then I’m like, “Oh-o, how’s that gonna go?” But then, after multiple attempts of killing The King but still not being able to finish the day, and going up to Isabeau and being like, “What did you want to tell us?” And then getting interrupted again and again, then we do start getting a little bit of internal monologue in the later game where Sifrin is saying, like, “We have to know if he feels this way. That’s the same yearning that we have.” Like yearning specifically stands out in my head because that was the word that was used at one point. And so it’s like, oh, there’s our answer. We yearn for him. The plot thickens. But he will never say it because we can’t get to the end of the game.

Courtney: But, yeah, Siffrin goes entirely off the rails and the very last– Well, so you do get these really interesting moments of growth where you’re referring to these people as your allies for a while and then after you get to know them all even better through multiple loops, then it starts referring to them as your friends. Even family–

Royce: Family.

Courtney: –at one point. But then your brain just completely breaks through all of these loops and all of this mental illness that has been steadily increasing, and then you just completely dissociate from reality. And one of the times you wake up at the beginning of the day again, it’s not even saying, like, “Oh, we’re at the beginning of the day.” It’s like, “Oh, act one of the play.” And the format is just different. It’s like you’re watching yourself in a play and the people around you aren’t real. And you even see a picture of your friends and instead of it saying either your allies or friends or family, it says, “Oh, it’s you and your actors.” And it’s like, oh, no!

Royce: Yeah, Siffrin growing throughout all of this and seeing all of these different situations where their allies react in slightly different ways based off of what’s happening, causes them to not see everyone around them as real people anymore. Because they’ve again been through this like 80 times.

Courtney: Which is interesting because, in the lead up to no longer seeing them as real, there’s this huge anxiety about like, oh, are you actually a terrible person? Are you just manipulating them? Do they actually like you this much, or are you just using this ability to loop to get closer to them?

Royce: Yeah, do you just know all the answers because of this ability?

Courtney: And they’d never actually like you this much if you weren’t being an awful person.

Royce: And what’s going to happen after it, after you break the loop and you have to tell them.

Courtney: Yeah, but then you break and turn into a complete and utter crab. We haven’t explained the crabs yet. [chuckles]They use crab for every insult, every swear word. It is so funny. People will just be like, “Oh, crab yeah!” Or, “Stop being such a crab.” Or, “What the crab was that?” And in an early line in the game, everyone was just like, “Crabs are inevitable, yes.” And so now I can’t help myself, every time crabs come up in conversations I just go, “Crabs are inevitable.” So that’s, if anything in this game is going to stick with me for all of eternity, it’s– it’s the crabs and their inevitability. But yeah, instead of– on that very last run through, instead of going through and you know being friendly, helping your friends out, saying the right things, you just become a beast and say the worst possible things to them and push them all away.

Royce: Siffrin is trying to game it. Siffrin thinks that they’ve figured it all out and that the reason why the loops aren’t stopping is because they’re clearly the one trapped in this magic. They need to be the hero, they need to stop it. And so they believe that they need to deal the final blow to The King, which isn’t what normally happens, Mirabelle does on every iteration. And in order to do that, in order to get everyone to where they need to be, everyone needs to be as strong as possible. So Siffrin starts to try to, like, basically speedrun the early town adventure, the ‘help everyone out’ thing, by taking shortcuts, and it’s clearly like acting really weird, acting suspicious, saying the wrong things, trying to– not being very articulate around what are, for some people, pretty personal, complicated topics and just trying to, you know, cut corners and get right to the big revelation that’s going to help them out. And it backfires. So they end up sneaking out in the middle of the night and running through the entire castle on their own.

Courtney: Which– I want to find what we say to Mirabelle on that last one, because it does involve the dating thing but with absolutely zero empathy and saying everything in exactly the wrong way. I think at one point we tell her she’s going to be alone forever, as if we think that’s a good thing, as if she thinks that’s a good thing.

Royce: Yeah, let me pull this up one moment.

Courtney: So, first of all, these bonding papers that Mirabelle has been carrying around, she is not forthcoming with, like we had to say the right things and get to know her better before she even really talked about them to us. So, with zero tact at all, we walk up and we’re like, “Oh hey, about those bonding papers, let me help.” And Mirabelle’s really caught off guard, like how do you even know what these are?

Royce: Yeah, when we weren’t being super callous, when we first just tried to very gently bring it up, she jumps into an attack pose and draws her rapier and is like, “Wait, who told you?” And the battle music starts playing in the background.

Courtney: Which was very funny actually. But, yeah, Mirabelle starts sort of rambling like, “Oh, I’m, you know, very stressed and anxious and awkward.” Just being like, “Yeah, this dating, I don’t know, I need to find someone,” etc. etc. And our internal monologue is like, “Too long, too long, this is taking too long.” And so you completely cut her off mid sentence and say, “You know you don’t have to be bonded to anyone?” And she’s like, “Oh, uh, huh? What do you mean?” “If you’re alone for your whole life, then that’s just how it is.” “What?!” “Isn’t it better to just come to terms with it now rather than later? You don’t need to be with anyone to be happy after all.” And then just silence. Just three dots from Mirabelle. “So…?” Siffrin says, “So, you should just accept it.” Mirabelle: “Accept what, Siffrin?” “Accept that you’ll always be alone.” And then she slaps you.

Royce: And that’s more or less what the conversation is like with all of your friends. Not necessarily with slapping, but that’s kind of the vibe we’re giving off.

Courtney: And so, unfortunately, alienating everyone and trying to go into the castle and fight The King alone is the last day. It’s like the last loop that you need to do to complete the entire game. So when you finally do meet back up with your friends, they end up following you. Everyone’s still a little ticked off at you.

Royce: Yeah, during this last sequence you’re boosted to max level and have a pretty easy time going through most of the castle. The mini bosses that are normally there you handle without even needing to fight. Like, you just see your character artwork draw their weapon. You still have to fight regular mobs and, like, collect keys and go through. And it’s a little complicated because the house starts– like the map starts changing underneath you. But you make it to The King. You hold your own against The King alone until kind of the very end of the battle, where you slowly get frozen in time. And right when you’re about to lose, your friends show up and, yes, are very adamantly like, “We are still mad at you. We’re going to talk about this later, but right now we need to– you need to not die.”

Courtney: And then, surprise, we were the boss the whole time. We became the final enemy. Which was very cool. We did catch it. We did see where it was going ahead of time. There are some signs that are subtle, but you can kind of figure it out if you have maintained a good memory through all of these different loops. Because apparently one of the crafts is wish-craft, not witchcraft. Wish-craft. Where they have like a wishing tree kind of a situation, and at the very beginning of this day everyone’s assuming, oh, the whole town probably wished for The King to be defeated. So when we go to place our wish, we’re like, “Oh, I’m sure everyone else already has that covered, so what should we wish for?” And that very first wish was like, “I just want to keep traveling with Mirabelle.”

Courtney: And throughout all these loops you start getting these little nuggets of information like, oh, The King comes from the same mysterious, forgotten country that you do. For some reason, the king also knows how to sort of detect this time looping magic on you and sort of knows that this is a thing you’re doing. And even though The King is known to be sort of trapping everyone in time, The King at one point, very, very late game, if not that very, very last battle says like, “Oh, I’m not the only thing trapping us here, there’s, there’s something else even more powerful keeping us here.” And there was a point where I was like– We also kind of learned that we know how to use wishcraft better. I think it’s probably from our country. Like we know how to use it better than everyone else does.

Royce: That’s sort of the implication. Learning what wish-craft is is a whole ordeal. It’s a big part of like the mid to late game. Because it’s– The country that you are in, I don’t think has ever heard of it. They don’t think it’s an actual type of craft. Time-craft, which is presumably what The King has been using, that’s what everyone thinks The King has been using, is known to exist but is thought to be an impossibility.

Royce: Wish-craft I don’t think is like– It’s hardly even on anyone’s radar. But there’s a point late game where there’s a conversation with the party about what everyone wished for and they go into details of how they made their wish and the rest of the party is all like, “Yeah, you just go in front of the tree, and you like clap your hands a couple time, and you say your wish and– or you think about your wish or whatever, and you walk away.” And Siffrin’s like, “What are you talking about? Very obviously, you look at the tree and you find a leaf that most represents you and you grab it and you whisper your wish into it and you fold it in half.” And goes through this like, very elaborate ritual, while–

Courtney: You did it wrong!

Royce: While everyone else is like, “What are you talking about?” Basically explaining the ritual component of this sort of magic that ties you to the– whatever force it is, a god, they mentioned the universe itself a number of times to, you know, draw forth from this source of magic. But it is not explicitly stated, but implied, that the reason why no one can remember where Siffrin and The King are both from is because of something that happened in the past, involving which– wish-craft.

Courtney: Gotta watch that.

Royce: There’s also, you will find books here and there about color theory. This game is played in black and white and the idea is that– again, not fully explained, but at some point in the past the world used to have colors and someone probably– There was probably some sort of issue where someone used wishcraft and got rid of the color in the world.

Courtney: They do kind of do a, like, concentration thing. Like if you use too much of this magic too close together, it can start to, like, tear at the fabric of reality. And so you do start to see some things unravel, like you’ll see echoes of yourself on different loops and sometimes the image will get a little messed up. So you sort of see this unraveling, so.

Royce: There are a few jarring splashes of red near the end of the game as things are coming apart.

Courtney: Oh yeah, red comes up as soon as it’s like, “Oh no, we’re the final boss.” And we’re fighting our friends. Our friends are literally in front of us. We, like, grow huge or levitate or something, and there’s just like a shock of red on the screen all of a sudden. But then we’re like remembering the rule, like, “Oh, but these are my friends and you can’t hurt friends.” So in this final boss battle where you’re facing your friends, you just hurt yourself repeatedly.

Royce: We had the option to do either. I just never tried attacking the party.

Courtney: Okay. So correction, we just hurt ourself repeatedly. But that is an option that you can do. But once all of that gets resolved, only then do you finally get Isabeau’s profession of love.

Royce: You also get an adamant confirmation from everyone that the end of this adventure doesn’t mean the end of your friendship. You can keep adventuring together after this. And that all of you should maybe communicate a little more.

Courtney: Yeah, because everyone’s like, “Siffrin, if you were afraid we were gonna stop adventuring together after this, why didn’t you just say that?” And then Sifrin’s like, “You didn’t say that either!” And everyone’s like, “True, but we all felt it. You’re right, we should all communicate better.” And yeah, communication is a big thing with Isabeau too, that he’s not particularly good at. Because, well, I mean A, obviously he did the whole, like, “I’ve got something to tell you, but it’s a secret.” But in the round where we just alienate everyone, we just outright call him a coward. And in this final conversation with him he’s like, “Yeah, ouch, that hurts so much because it’s true.” Like you, you really read me for filth there, but it was right. And their conversation goes well. You both come away from it happy. He does say that he loves you. And because of your internal monologue, how you do yearn for him and you want him to just say it, like this is a good, positive thing for you. And he does kind of ask like, “But do you love me the same way I love you?” And Siffrin’s response is just sort of, “I need time to figure that out.” And he was plenty happy with that.

Courtney: So to me this does seem like, without saying the words, very obvious asexual character. Hasn’t figured out romantic attraction. Might be demiromantic and these are brand new romantic feelings that are not common or haven’t ever happened before, so trying to figure that out. It might be a gray romantic kind of a situation. Or it could even just be asexual, does have a romantic orientation, but is sort of nervous or unsure of how to navigate what is presumably going to be a mixed orientation relationship. So lots of possibilities. But the rep we do get is very explicitly ace for Siffrin and very explicitly aroace for Mirabelle. In a way that I think is very clear, effective, not skippable, important to the story. I already mentioned that it’s great to see two A-spec characters in different places of the spectrum. That is always welcome. And then, just demographically, Mirabelle is a Black woman, has textured hair. Siffrin, as we said, uses both they and he pronouns so certainly non-binary of some flavor, perhaps transmasc of some flavor. And wears a fabulous hat. And I always welcome good behatted ace rep.

Courtney: So overall I did really like the story and I really liked the rep. One thing I also kind of like about the Siffrin and Isabeau ending being on a positive note but ambiguous is that, a lot of times in media, when we do have an example of a mixed orientation relationship, we have an asexual character and an allosexual partner or prospective partner for them. Oftentimes a big part of their plot and development is just that this is a mixed orientation. How do we do this? You’re ace and I’m not. How is this going to work? And that’s still very valuable because obviously there are mixed orientation relationships all over the place in this world and seeing good, healthy examples of that is welcome. Seeing disasterful examples of that could be interesting, if it’s done right. I just don’t trust allo people to do it right. So we need more ace writers to do things like that. So it’s– it’s nice to see the emotion and the building up to that, without making that a focus or like the central conflict. Because it really wasn’t the central conflict of not only their arc as prospective partners, but for each of them individually or the game as a whole, so.

Courtney: And then we have Mirabelle, who doesn’t want to be partnered to anyone like that, so it certainly doesn’t feel, like, the obligatory, “Oh, but aces can feel romance,” or aces do want to find love. Because we all know how isolating that can feel when so many of the ace character stories start to follow the same kind of arc over and over again. Although, truthfully, depending on what you’ve seen. Especially most aces and aros talk about television representation, because that’s where we’re starting to get more and more characters, but it’s also where tropes start to emerge and solidify a lot faster. There are few enough quality examples of ace rep that if there is sort of the aroace character, the loner, doesn’t want to be partnered, a lot of romantically oriented aces will be like, “But I want to see examples of aces who do want to fall in love.” But also vice versa. There are plenty of people who have only seen examples of aces trying to find a relationship and that being a big struggle in their plot line, and so naturally, a lot of aroaces will be like, “I want to see aroaces too!”

Courtney: So hey, problem solved! Put a variety of A-spec characters in your media. It’s allowed. Two A-spec people are in fact allowed to be in the same room as each other. It happens in real life too, I assure you.

Courtney: But yes, certainly, even though I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that RPGs are just not my thing, if the story is good enough, I will play more in the future. But of all the RPGs I have played, this is the first extremely explicit ace and aro rep that I’ve seen in a game of this genre. So that is very much worth celebrating. Also, I was gonna say I want a hat like Siffrin’s, but I think I already kind of have one.

Royce: Yeah, kinda.

Courtney: Don’t have an eyepatch like Siffrin’s. I did have a brief stint in an eyepatch when I was a kid, though, so. But yeah, looking at things after the game, after we played it through, because there were a couple of things that we did miss, so we did go look up some of the scenes we haven’t encountered, and there was certainly one that I thought was funny. Because I can relate to the A-spec obliviousness of like, either sex jokes going over your head or not understanding when someone’s flirting with you. And there was absolutely a moment where, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can hear Mirabelle and Odile talking, and Odile is like, “Oh, I wonder if Isabeau’s finally going to confess to Siffrin.” And Mirabelle’s like, “What do you mean? Confess what?”

Royce: Well, Odile just says confess. And it takes Mirabelle a little bit to be like, “Oh, oh! I– I get. How did I miss that?”

Courtney: Oh!

Royce: And Mirabelle specifically says– Because Mirabelle and Isabeau are– I think she calls them romance buddies, they discuss a long-running series– Is it horror romance? I think it’s those combination of things. It’s a series that a lot of people are aware of. Trying to find the last chapter is a whole big thing. And Mirabelle is like, “Why didn’t Isabeau tell me about this? Why did he confide in you and not me?” And Odile says, “Well, he told me that while you like reading romance fiction, you seem to be weirded out by talking about actual real life romance, and that’s why that didn’t happen.”

Courtney: Mm-mm. That’s a relatively common aro experience.

Royce: Yeah, there are a lot of things in the game that we found out after the fact. We did end up watching a scene or two that was big, that we missed, or that we just didn’t hit all the right checkpoints to hit, but other than that they’re just– There are a lot of situations that you would have to loop on a lot more than we did, at least in specific areas of the castle, to hear every iteration of what can go down there.

Courtney: Well, because we both got a little burnt out on the fighting and the moving through the castle and some of those mechanics. So there absolutely was a time where you were like, “I’m just gonna pull up a guide so that we can get this done in the most efficient way possible.”

Royce: About halfway, maybe a third of the way through, it was like, yeah, it’s walkthrough time.

Courtney: Yes, I really liked the story but unfortunately for me, who is already like– take this with a grain of salt, I’m an RPG hater, there was a little too much game in that game. But I understand the effect, I understand the decision that was made. Because some of the tedium of the repetition, like there are changes that do happen throughout it, so it’s not exactly the same every time and those changes are significant to see them happen. And ultimately part of the reason why your brain breaks is because you’ve done this too damn many times! So I think we as the players were just a little, uh, less resilient to the brain breaking from tedium than Siffrin as a character was.

Royce: Yeah, I didn’t mind the running around bit. It was all of the sadnesses that respawn every time you leave the room and run into you. And even if you can kill them in one shot or you just escape from battle, there’s still like a noticeable amount of time before you get your first turn and– Right.

Courtney: Yeah, that was absolutely– It’s like running through the castle, try to run away from the enemies, don’t let them touch you, try to just run past them. And then if one does touch you, like it turns the wrong way and you didn’t expect it to do that, then we– we just sigh.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: Not this again. Which, that was my experience playing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door halfway through the game. So that is just how I am for RPGs.

Courtney: Looking up some of the confirmations after– Because that– that was the only reason why we saw the quote about the cracked egg not being a trans reference somehow. Somehow that wasn’t intended, but it felt very much intended. We also saw mention of the head housemaiden, who you only see after you kill The King because she was frozen in time. It said somewhere that she’s a trans woman and that bothered me a little bit because I don’t remember any clues or indications about that in the game.

Royce: That was just a bullet point on a wiki. I did not dig into it further and I also didn’t try to run through the entire game script and see if there was a scene that referenced it. I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen something on a wiki that was… incorrect?

Courtney: Wrong.

Royce: Like I have no idea. I didn’t try to track that one down. The entire cast is pretty diverse and I mentioned that the country that they’re from is, even by the other characters who are not from there, is mentioned as being very progressive, very welcoming. There are a few interesting conversations where they talk about names, and the whole idea behind bodycraft being very common is interesting. They talk about different systems of beliefs and–

Courtney: There was also totally a side character, not even like a properly named one. Like, the people who aren’t in your party have like– Well, this even happens to us, if we run into a new person, they’ll call us like, “Oh you traveling one,” or there’s a guy fishing it’s– and he’s the fishing one. There is a woman with a cane at one point and she’s just called ‘beautiful one’. And that made my heart warm for a second. But I didn’t even think of this, but now that we’re having this conversation, in a world where bodycraft is a thing and you can actually modify your body with magic, the fact that there is someone who is still a cane user in this world is very fascinating to me. Because I have borne witness to far too many conversations, usually in TTRPG communities, like D&D bros, being like, “There wouldn’t be any disabled characters in a Dungeons & Dragons world.” Yeah, okay, all right.

Courtney: But that is a rant for another day. For today, it is time to give a huge shout out to today’s featured MarketplACE vendor: Serapheir. Where you can find fanart, prints, merch, charms, and other cool stuff by a New Zealand artist. And I picked this vendor today because I knew we were going to be talking about RPGs, and although they do not have any specific fan merch for In Stars and Time, they do have some Undertale fan merch and Deltarune fanart. Which we didn’t get to talk about here, but that’s sort of the successor to Undertale, same creator, literally an anagram of each other. And, as of the time this episode releases, if the next couple chapters of Deltarune haven’t released yet, it’s coming really soon. But in addition to Deltarune and Undertale merch, there are other fandoms such as Arcane, Fullmetal Alchemist, Vocaloid, Zelda, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, Monster High, Five Nights at Freddy’s. Tons of different fandoms. So if you have a favorite game or TV show, definitely check out this MarketplACE vendor see if they have anything for you, because there is so much here and this artwork is beautiful.

Courtney: Since I myself am rarely a collector of fanart, I rarely wade into fandoms in any tangible way because they scare me. But there are some just general Pride pieces of artwork here. Adorable, like, Pride color dinosaurs. I, of course, got the Asexual flag color dinosaur, I got the general Rainbow flag dinosaur and these are so cute. I even got an extra sticker for a friend of mine who uses a different flag and I think they will rather enjoy this one too. But check it out. If this wasn’t shipping from New Zealand and if shipping was a lot easier than it is, I personally would have also gotten this like Dungeons & Dragons themed washi tape. That’s really adorable. It has a d20 on it, a cracked skull, a loot, a sword, a spell book, bow and arrow potion. Really, really cute. Thought about it, but alas. The Pride dinosaurs will have to suffice for now. As always, links to find our featured MarketplACE vendor will be in the show notes on our website, as well as the description box on YouTube.

Courtney: So once again, thank you all for being here, and a special thank you to everyone who told us to play In Stars and Time. Little RPG gripes aside, it was a very enjoyable experience for us. So anyone out there who has any opinions on what game with A-spec rep we need to play next, please feel free to drop us a line, shoot us a comment. We are very busy people with a backlog of approximately 87,000 games to play, so I can’t guarantee we’ll get to it soon, but if enough of you comment on the same game, that’ll just keep bumping it up on the list further and further. Because that’s exactly what happened with In Stars and Time. So there is indeed power in numbers. So be sure to give us those recommendations and we will talk to you all next time.