the title of this song is another protomen reference. it's a really depressing track about dr. light preparing to let himself be killed. it mirrors the story a lot, but light ends up getting a second wind in the end.
this story was... difficult to write and difficult to edit. i genuinely felt it was the most ethical to break the immersion to put a content warning on it.
i also don't think this anthology would be complete without it.
it comes from a personal place. my own suicide attempt. Really this story is barely about mega man, or robots, or sci fi. it's about the conflicting feelings i felt on the day i put a belt around my neck and the doorknob. it's about the desire for peace but the instinctive fear.
petal is a character I wanted to do for a while. he had different names at different times in my head, and sometimes entirely different genders. I wasn't certain his story would end in death, but I knew he had to be a sad person written from an emotionally honest perspective. he had to come from my own suffering.
someday i would like to do a version of him that gets to become consistently happy and okay.
someday i would like to become a version of myself that gets to become consistently happy and okay.
i envy the peace he found.
sorry if that's too real.
if you really need some mega man related commentary, i gave a canonical name to the resistance movement in the mold of elaborately named leftist revolutions, i conceptualized a resistance emblem and implied that they started out complex and became abstractions of the previous with each iteration. i even softly implied that the crashed plane mission in zero 1 is someone from resistance 4 using one of the planes gained from 3. i hope that's enough to chew on. i need to commentate on literally anything else. sorry