King of Longing

In life itself, in all that is complete and intact, the irrevocable evil was planted. This is the world that God created.

In Boeatia it's believed that children somehow born "incomplete" carry a great and heavy fate. This is the tale of two such boys; Myrmidon, destined to become a lord, and his bodyguard, Zanzibart. But best laid plans amount to little when the two fall in love and a natural disaster derails their so-called destinies.

King of Longing is a loving tribute to FromSoftware's post-Demon's Souls games and Kentaro Miura's Berserk, written in a fragmentary style reminiscent of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. That is to say, it's a story about a terrible world where life comes to an end quickly and without ceremony. God is indifferent at best, malevolent at worst. And the gaps in the tale, what is not said, are just as important as what is stated.

At the same time, I could describe King of Longing in a number of other ways. It is a bit of a shitpost of FromSoft games, for instance. But perhaps the most honest is to say it is a COVID story strongly inspired by my experiences during the pandemic, when I worked in the clinical trials for vaccines.

It was a time and place where a day was measured not in time, but in the expected number of fatalities that would come from delays to the research — and, consequently, to the logistics of manufacture, shipping and vaccination. Every day began with the intrusive but realistic thought that this could be the day in which you slip up and get sick, and it would end with me sitting down late at night to write Minotaur Hotel — a fundamentally hopeful narrative about humankind. King of Longing, meanwhile, was my way to cope with the reality I saw everyday.

It was not all bad. There is a long and very global host of unsung heroes, normal people who went above and beyond in their own ways to make it happen. It was a time in world history when small business owners put themselves at immense financial risk to supply research facilities, truck drivers broke their own limits to deliver fragile substances just in time, printing shops worked 24/7 to handle gargantuan amounts of medical documents, and fresh-out-of-college men and women did small miracles to restore the human world to a semblance of its previous state. And we did it all, we woke up everyday, aware of our frail mortality.

For once, world history was not determined by powerful politicians, terrifying weapons of mass destruction or ambitions monuments to vanity. Just this one time, the scientific advancement that defined our time was a medical technology that truly saved lived.

As difficult as the path to it may have been, and as rife as it was with every kind of injustice, politicking and hoarding of resources by the wealthy, we came out of it. Whether we realize or remember it, we still live in a world defined by a series of vaccines.

King of Longing takes from my life experiences in this subject, and from much more. For instance, it is also built on my profound discomfort with the hypocrisy in how workers and neurodivergent people are instrumentalized, exploited and discarded in our current economic system. Despite its unassuming length, it is a dense work. That said, ultimately I decided against publishing it because I could not bring together some of its disparate elements.

There were economic concerns — the costs associated with such a project and whether or not people would be satisfied paying for such a short story — but mainly it came down to reader reactions. King of Longing is as much a story told in its silences as it told in its words. The more I add to it, the more I remove from its core. And reader reaction was very consistently pointing towards a need for an expanded narrative — and those suggestions were not without very good justifications.

Another issue is that I wanted readers to be actively critical of the two protagonists — the story, in my view, hinged on that. But, well, people liked them too much.

In the end, it seemed as though King of Longing was, as a story, stuck between a rock and a hard place. I could either address the criticism I received and improve the story, but destroy its identity, or persist with the sparse details and ultimately deliver an experience that did not quite meet my own standards of quality.

It also was that a very some readers did not grasp what I was trying to convey — which I realize is an inescapable consequence of a story that expects the reader to "fill in the blanks" to this extent. That was, however, much less frequent than the previous case I described; my beta readers were fantastic, and it was not their fault that my writing had reached a cursed position.

Ultimately I decided to put it on my backburner and get back to it someday. I still think about that; I'd like to write two or three short sequels to it, which would perhaps be enough to package it as a satisfying product. Maybe one day I'll get to it.

As a final point: the most recent version of the prototype is outdated in comparison to the writing. I am providing a PDF with the most recent version of the script, with the coding elements for the most part removed. The prototype will provide you with the clearest idea of how the game would have functioned on-screen, but the script has the most accurate version of what the story would be like.

Writing by MinoAnon

Art by Aleph

Character designs by Danero

Music by h*ck