the brightest moon // postmortem
stories of “runaway girls” have always tugged at my heart. when i was little, i often dreamed of leaving everything behind and somehow finding my own life in that faraway happy place, away from everything that could ever hurt me.
stories of “found family” are also my favorite. if someone is forced to realize that their blood-related family is only holding them back, there’s going to be a lot of grief they have to process.
but in that realization, that very same person can also realize that it’s very much possible to find and cherish an entirely new family, regardless of the fact that they aren’t related by blood at all.
combine these two types of stories, and you have something that really gets to me.
this one had a little bit of unexpected inspiration. in Detroit: Become Human, one of the protagonists is an android named Kara, who is bought by a single father taking care of his daughter, Alice. it’s eventually revealed that this android had once served this household before, but was beaten down and broken apart by that very father, who also hurts his own daughter.
the story then has the android, Kara, break her programming to save Alice from her father’s horrible fit of anger, whisking her away from the house into a bus, with no plan in mind, nothing but the sincere feeling that she wants this poor child to have a future far better than the one she was destined to have.
of course, i then went on to dislike the game as a whole for a variety of reasons i won’t get into now, and they would later butcher that same storyline as well...
but that initial introduction, where Kara and Alice breathe a sigh of relief as they sit in that bus, Alice slowly taking comfort in Kara’s presence as she begins to depend on that android as if she were her own flesh-and-blood mother... it always struck a chord with me, profoundly.
in turn, this story is a little bit of wish fulfillment, a “what-if” where a young girl gets to have a better future.