#8 - April 2025 - Spring Gothic
Spring Gothic is a visual novel from the collective known as Prof. Lily. Their works are currently available on itch.io over here. It's a short read that clocks in around 2-3 hours, and for my part, I found it captivating enough to easily read it all in one sitting minus a couple of interruptions I had to pause for.
It's a grounded, sober narrative about a long distance relationship between a trans retro game streamer, Nica, and a med school student who's very much done with med school, Chun. Two girls who met over the internet, fell in love or something that seemed close enough to love, and finally made the terrifying plunge of deciding to meet up in real life.
It examines a few things about long distance relationships--the masks we wear online, the transition from being just a username and maybe an avatar to a flesh and blood person, and so on--and what they can entail in levels of detail that are admittedly somewhat painful to read, as someone who is a little bit familiar with certain elements of what's being written about.
The relationship between Nica and Chun is one that starts online, and in both of their heads they have their own planned perspective on how everything will go perfectly once they meet in person. They'll hit it off perfectly, right? Why wouldn't they, after all the flirting and texting and bonding they've done online?
Of course it doesn't work that way. It's so easy in the heat of the moment, when your interactions are all via Discord, Twitch chat, texting, whatever, to assume that you've already got a complete read on a person after talking with them long enough. It's so easy to think that you either know enough to know the exact right things to say to make them happy, or taken to its worst excess, to treat any little conversation as secretly a game you've already won because you had what you assumed was a perfect script ahead of time.
Heck, go check the average indie VTuber's twitch chat and you can occasionally find people doing similar things to streamers who are either too nice or too self-conscious to shut them down--a fact not unnoticed by Spring Gothic as Nica pointedly makes note of stream viewers who are just there to ogle her, and in turn how much more meaningful it felt when Chun was able to see her as an actual human being. Though... well, given how certain things turned out with Chun, it's a bit of an interesting thought in hindsight.
Maybe even worst of all, there's assuming just how physically intimate you can get with someone because that's how you'd act with them online. Thankfully, I haven't fallen into these specific pitfalls--I've just been guilty of being awkward offline instead--but I get it.
On the flip side of all of that, there's the very human thought that it's okay to feel a little safer, to show a little vulnerability in the presence of someone you've known online for so long. After all, why wouldn't you trust someone you've confided so many things to over however long of a period of time? You can trust they'll understand you and your boundaries, right?
And so Spring Gothic shows us the sometimes unpleasant reality on the other end of all those questions and assumptions. When two people, both coming from admittedly somewhat painful and frustrating living situations albeit for differing reasons, realize that neither one of them quite had everything figured out.
Chun, for example, having her own perfect script internalized where everything goes to hell in her mind the instant something doesn't get the intended reaction. A conversation topic that doesn't land properly. An unwanted, overly aggressive kiss she carries out that we, as voyeurs getting to peek in and witness every little insecurity and perceived personal failing be brought to light one by one, are well aware didn't exactly involve the target of said kiss being in the forefront of her mind during it. It's complicated.
While Spring Gothic does very overtly date itself with some very obvious references to current, specific real life politics and memecoins and such, (un)fortunately, we're to some extent shaped by the times we grow up in. It's not a great time in a lot of places right now, for reasons I don't think I need to elaborate on, but it's the time we have to exist and find meaning in. Or create our own meaning in. I'll admit I got briefly jumpscared at first by those references, jokingly, but I think they're a totally valid way to write the story. If nothing else--and I say this slightly bitterly because I wish it didn't have to be this way--I think it's a little reassuring. These are current struggles that multiple people are dealing with. It's at least marginally better to know you're not the only person feeling adrift, after all.
Moreover, it does provide a good deal of context for some things. Nica's desire to find someone who accepts her for who she truly is even when she feels one of her own hobbies isn't feminine enough, to get away from a frankly miserable living situation where she has to spend a great deal of time and energy putting up a front to keep pretending that she's something she isn't, to get away from a country that... well, I'm making some vague hand gestures. Or even an interaction with a taxi driver trying to be accommodating regarding pronouns, in what I can only describe as a conversation that I fear might instantly age someone by a couple years if they were on the receiving end of it. There's just a lot going on now, and it's pretty easy to imagine why someone's perception on current affairs would be just a little bit negative and lead to so much uncertainty and anxiety in their life.
One last thing I'll touch on about the writing I particularly enjoyed was the divide between Nica and Chun interacting in the flesh as opposed to online. Even though Spring Gothic starts in the present during their actual physical meet-up, we obviously know that their relationship was born from interacting online, and I think it was a pretty inspired choice to, in the middle of a heated moment that could have just as easily led to them drifting away permanently, have them basically retreat to talk things out digitally via the relative safety of the way they've always chatted in the past. It's so much easier when you don't have to consider what kind of expressions to make, or where to look, or make sure you don't trip over your words, and so on and so forth.
The big realization being that both of them went into this relationship completely the wrong way--Chun's obsessively noting and looking up of everything about Nica to make sure she can appease her perfectly, taking inspiration from all of the most extremely wrong possible sources on how to do that, Nica realizing that on her end she may have inadvertently placed unreasonable expectations on Chun and never sufficiently understood her... it's great. I really enjoyed the final act and how things wrapped up. It's not a perfect start to their relationship, not by a long shot, but it's theirs to nurture.
I'm going to switch topics to go over a few other things I liked since, while I quite enjoyed Kastel's writing, it'd be remiss of me to not comment on some other things.
The character art (courtesy of lacunova) is lovely and does a lot over the course of a short read. I think their art style is just really charming (said in a way where I'm gripping at my chair's armrests with my internal voice actually yelling 'IT'S CUTE!! IT'S CUTE!!'), and Spring Gothic's particular method of storytelling, with only one character shown on screen at a time until a particular moment towards the end of the story, works really well in keeping your focus on either Nica or Chun's expressions from the current character's point of view. I have to assume this was a deliberate choice, and it's a really good one!
Besides that, a lot of the backgrounds used are clearly photos of real places with some editing done to them. I have no idea if they're the exact, literal places actually depicted in the story or not, but that's not really of any consequence--just idle curiosity on my end. While I'm just as fine if they'd all been CG backgrounds, I liked the aesthetic here a lot and it just strikes me as a good fit for something so contemporary.
The music, composed by Noelle Amelie Aman, is fantastic. While I haven't heard her work in the past, I did listen to Witching Stone's soundtrack recently and thought it was incredible, so there's that. Spring Gothic's music varies between a good blend of pleasant ambiance, some softer introspective music, and then one particular track (Yokaze) which does a very good job of setting off about a dozen red flags in my head as a sign of things beginning to go poorly. It's good stuff.
There's also a lot of generally good sound design. I'll admit I only read VNs infrequently (and would like to do better about that) so I'm very likely ignorant in this regard, but it seemed like there was some good use of sound effects for a lot of minor things to help keep things real feeling. A train pulling in, screeching, into a station. Idly flipping through a book. A light switch being gently flicked. A nice, gentle door opening. Plopping a stack of books down on a counter. Gently rustling bedsheets. You get the idea by now! I appreciated it quite a bit.
With all that said, I'd easily recommend Spring Gothic. As I mentioned earlier at the start it's got a pretty short run-time and manages to cover a lot of ground in that time which is, at least in my opinion, all the more impressive.
... Chun's so real for this, though.