Heaven Will Be Mine is a flower growing defiantly in the hostile soil of cisheteropatriarchy. A stand against cishetero constructs like “physics” and “human” and “combat.” A rejection of the so-called natural sciences and their domination of metaphysical possibilities. The law of gravity is the law of gender binary and Heaven Will Be Mine rejects it, proposing instead a world where physics are subordinate. This is true science-fiction, science as a starting concept for what could be, because why couldn’t it? How could our fiction be shackled to their science? How could our bodies? A stand against Earth’s cultural authority expressed through its physical gravity, because culture and science have never been distinct concepts. A rejection of bioessentialism through an assault on objectivism. True subjectivism that rewrites ontology backward, to define being rather than allow being to define us. Earth’s inhuman, incontestable military power contested by girls in machines built to not kill. How could this be anything but pure hope?

I’m not familiar with NGE or 2001, I haven’t seen extensive Gundam, I’m a relatively new convert to the mecha genre and sci-fi in general, and I’m not a gender doomer. Maybe those associations are what lead to what I feel are unfair readings of this game. The conceit is obvious: Earth and “humanity” represent the cis world. The greater allegory may be a bit harder to fully accept, perhaps for those unable to identify with the metaphor or mesh with the flavour of sci-fi. “By becoming more human we become less human.” The core thesis of the game is provocative, but not ambiguous. What Saturn and Pluto and Luna-Terra do is right for humans because it’s right for them and they’re human, the most and least human of all. It’s designation they’re fighting, designation is violence, interpellation is violence. To accept their desire to stay separate from Earth is not to accept the incompatibility of the cisgender and transgender worlds, rather it is to accept the transgender world’s right to exist on its own terms, according to its own ontology; to allow humans to be free of the label human and trust it won’t lead to war. To reject this premise is to align with Iapetus, whose function is to “divide and categorize.” It is to condemn the girls to designation according to Earth’s ontological authority, to reject their wishes and thereby their being.

Heaven Will Be Mine is a surrealist piece that demands engagement on surrealist terms, but I’ll attempt to address it more concretely. Its prose is beautiful, poetic yet direct. It may be difficult to engage with for those unfamiliar with surrealist fiction, but don’t confuse this with confusing writing—it is intensely readable. Conflict and romance are written with chemistry and inertia, driving readers through scenes at a breakneck pace and punctuating kisses and combat with immense kinetic power. The game drops us into an established world but doesn’t expect us to immediately understand its jargon and lore, only to absorb the atmosphere; let the feeling of it envelop you, by the final playthrough it will all make sense. The characters are organic and realistic, queer down to their foundation but never superficially or ornamentally so. I’ve seen Heaven Will Be Mine compared to fanfiction, yet the prose is on par with that of professionally authored novels. Are we so afraid to legitimize works that tell our stories in our vernacular? Should our art not be grounded in our experience? This game shows that our right to exist is proven in our metrics of communication, our relationships, our community. It gives us recognizable characters with clear interiority and shows us how they clash and change each other, how they reshape through connection the same but different, a billionth at first then a hundredth, until it’s enough to live free of the Earth, to change the Earth’s gravity, to escape Earth’s designation.

Heaven Will Be Mine has no true ending. All of the endings are the true ending. None of them are. Who decides which ending is bad or good or true? “We don't need a true ending. We can make a true ending out of any ending. We can make it without the true end. We can make it out of the best ending, or the second best ending, or a bad ending. Beyond the part where there’s an ending. Until it’s something else.” Heaven Will Be Mine is pure hope. It announces a future where we can be whatever we are and not be held back by what already is. “When we let our children develop in the lightness of space, they chose their bodies, genders, souls, hearts of their own volition.” It is not a rejection of our compatibility with Earth and the cisgender world. It is a wish on a trinary constellation that Earth can become space, that its gravity can change, that the cisgender world can become ours too. You can hear this in the soundtrack, in Silly Game especially. It is art that could have only been born from our community with all of our hopes and dreams behind it. Heaven Will Be Mine is pure hope, hope for our future and our being and our humanity. “The human part isn’t the ear, but the hole in the lobes for your earrings, lipstick is real, lips are not, and we see humanity defined in its own gravitational output.” Heaven Will Be Mine is the pure hope that our gravitational output is enough to guarantee our existence no matter what obstacle may stand in our way. It’s right there in the title—we will achieve heaven, everything we want and deserve, to be free of 9.8 m/s^2 forever.

LUNA-TERRA RUN

i dunno maybe it's taken me over a month to write about this because i'm fucking insane about LT. did the CM ending, since i did the MF ending for saturn. really glad i watched a bunch of gundam before this one, LT isn't char but playing from her perspective is definitely more fun when you've seen the char aznable burger commercial. i think the first time around, i did not appreciate pluto as a character nearly enough. and i didn't even know who europa was....... imagine going your whole life and never seeing her......... what a horrible way to live

Gave me big "This Is How You Lose the Time War" energy. If I'd played this before reading that, I'd say it reversed.

I appreciated how my understanding of events grew over three playthroughs both through gaining more context and also just repetition. I was so lost as the start of my Saturn playthrough, but I got it by the end of Pluto's.

One point to note: I would have liked the main secondary characters of each route to be a little more involved in the endings. I was invested in Mercury, Mars, and Europa, you know.

Got every ending. So much of this game was like looking into a mirror and then also kinda seeing my brain's interpretation of my friends in that same reflection. I see Luna-Terra: "That's my buddy Maya", I see Saturn "That's my buddy Izzy", I see Pluto "That's my buddy myself". A beautiful little collage of ideas held together under some of the best VN presentation I've ever seen (sometimes with VNs, giving presentation to make the game look like it has more gameplay than it does is all you need to make it feel like a more deep and engaging experience! Really! I don't know why either!), and that isn't even to mention the beautifully hilarious dialogue. So much of this is gonna stick with me forever-

"Why couldn't you just be a bad person with bad ideas and wicked dreams!?" (Halimede complaining about their frustration towards fighting the protagonists)

"It's not really pain, but it's a feeling so overwhelming it shuts Saturn down like pain would. It's fascinating, full of information." (Description of Saturn kind of getting off on being shot)

"I'll forgive you if you left us for something stupid, but I'll never forgive you if you left us for something you don't believe in!" (Pluto complaining about Luna-Terra's motives)

Appalling and unendearingly juvenile: it's a display of trans women's tragic, enforced inability to conceptualize a future for themselves, bereft even of the understanding of this limitation.
The lack of structure, which in a more purposeful work might express a belief about narrative itself or the patterns of human life, is here an expression of its belief in the fundamental passivity of the demographic it represents. Its characters are incapable of meaningful action: everything they do is an expression of sexuality, while actual sex is functionally absent from their world -- it is reminiscent of Valerie Solanas.
The vacuity of the interpersonal relationships between these characters, which never extend beyond flirtation, seems lost on the game, which miraculous transmutes these into serious, committed intimacy in the final act. Love and belonging are nothing more than an abstract hope here: the labor, the negotiation, and the compromise that render either of the positions possible is regarded as an impossibility.
Indeed, the possibility of any contact between the transgender and non-transgender worlds (which are in reality one world: Earth) seems to be explicitly denied. This theme is especially prominent in one ending, in which the allegory of a doomed romantic relationship is used to express it: a motif I find particularly vexsome.
While my support for the developer is unwavering, I cannot abide the work itself. I truly hope we can one day count on transgender authors, at the very least, not to produce narratives of transgender impotence.