I love that in Night in the Woods, you don't have a choice but to stick in your foot in your mouth. Yes, you have dialogue options, but it really boils down to "how do you want to fuck this up." We see it really clearly in Bea's storyline at the party when she's flirting with the guy and Mae's only dialogue options are blatant unintentional sabotage of Bea's attempts. It really emphasizes who Mae is as a character through the story, unable to control her thought-to-mouth impulses and chronically unable to read a room. You don't get to be a good friend, you have to experience her struggle and embarrassment and anxiety and regret. It makes the acceptance of her friends all the more touching, and it makes Bea's line about friends-by-proximity all the more heartbreaking.
I just fucking love Night in the Woods, man.
I know the story of Icarus is supposed to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of getting ahead of yourself...
But has anyone thought about whether Icarus intended to fall? What if when he flew high above, out of the awful labyrinth that had entrapped him and his father all this time, he finally felt free in the endless sky with the ocean under him? What if he looked beyond and saw a city on the horizon and while his father flying beside him shouts that it is safe haven, that they have found a place to land, all Icarus could see was another maze, with its walls and paths and crossroads. Only this one seemed to have more people caught in it. What if he looked at it all and refused to be one of them, refused to live the rest of his life in another labyrinth after just escaping one. What if the sun wasn't his doom but the bright burning possibility of freedom.
You must understand, I'm not saying he definitely wanted to fall. But maybe he never wanted to stop flying. Maybe he never wanted to be parted from the sky and sea. Maybe he just wanted to be free.
Silvery sands we walked over,
Footprints smitten but never forgotten,
Quite deftly destroying the perfect arches.
And how long shall we climb the ridges for?
When the light warms the time held in our fingers,
Running through steadily, yet fast,
Shuffling of only the crushed thorns,
Our bare feet sink into the
dissolved, ghostly essence of the past,
And we sit with the light, reminiscing the fall.