Hi everyone for what seems to be a monthly devlog from Waterlily on the Froth (the genderbent High School Lolita, if you guys were wondering why this is a HSL devlog).

So little updates about how much the game progressed:

– not that much, since I was quite busy with my OUAT project and Son of the Woods (another story about a teenage boy traumatised by an older woman who has feelings with him, but this time with an aroace take! Feel free to check it out if it can interest you!), and other things (had seasonal depression, fell sick, and of course, actual work responsibilities lol, hopefully chapters 2 and 3 should be finished for the next devlog);

– considering the lack of feedback (?), I guess I won’t release a demo with chapter 1 for now?? Like, this demo is going to exist anyway when the game is released so that players can test it before buying it, but I’ll focus on working on the full-project then!

Now, I wanted to spend the devlog comparing Matthieu and Gaëtana, in a similar way that I compared Chloé and Chris two months ago. So, if you haven’t played High School Lolita yet, you should, as this devlog will include spoilers. I guess it can also serve as some sort of mini-Matthieu essay?

Those characters as people

Well, before looking at Matthieu and Gaëtana as groomers, maybe we can try to characterise them as individuals.

Matthieu is at first a very balanced man: he has a job, a group of friends, is appreciated by his co-workers although labelled as “discreet”. So, he has a pinch of introversion but nothing too worrying, and it doesn’t prevent him from forming bonds. However, Matthieu is in a similar place to Chloé: he craves someone to have a meaningful connection with and for literature to be the support of this connection. After all, Matthieu is passionate, even more than Gaëtana, and is convinced that literature talks to our humanity.

However, Matthieu failed to connect with anyone so meaningfully in his life, and this caused him to start losing self-confidence in himself, as one does when being “out of the norm”. So, his natural reaction to this is a sense of narcissism: he needs to find a bright and sensitive mind that will answer to his. After all, if he manages to have a meaningful connection with someone whose qualities he admires, and if this meaningful connection shows that their souls are the same, then he can finally start to gain self-confidence and convince himself that, if he never managed to have a connection like the one he’s been hoping for before, it’s only because people weren’t sensitive, creative or clever enough to embody everything in once.

So, to quickly trace his psychology: Matthieu’s creative, sensitive and intellectual mind made it harder for him to connect with anyone, hurting his self-confidence. This left Matthieu with a narcissistic wound, as he thought either him or the other parties were to blame for this lack of connection. He chose to blame others for being too shallow.

(Side-note, if you guys played my actual romantic otome game When The Wind Blew You Away, this is the position the main character, Amanda Evans, is in: she’s failed to connect deeply with someone ever since her childhood friend, Peter Byrne, left without telling her. But unlike Matthieu, she decides to pin the problem onto her and tries to erase the winds flowing into her: she didn’t develop at all the narcissistic wound Matthieu did, despite facing the same issue, and the game shows her that, in the end, she just needs to be herself to find this connection).

Now, for Gaëtana, it’s quite different: she also enjoy literature a lot and is also very cultured (although I do think she isn’t as much as Matthieu), but she doesn’t aspire to something special at the core, for a meaningful connection with a creative, intelligent and sensitive mind (Chris isn’t that creative or sensitive a person anyway). She instead enjoys quite much the trivialities of daily life and daily discussions, and has way more fun talking about why she finds it stupid to prevent teachers from smoking on school grounds than talking about the Spleen and the Ideal in Baudelaire’s “The Vampire’s Metamorphoses.”

Yet, Gaëtana, deep down, craves love, for reasons I cannot fully disclose as they are spoilery and, by not finding it, she is afraid that she can’t be loved. So, it’s important to note that she has this vulnerable side to her. I wish I could develop more, but you guys know… spoilers.

However, what I can say is that she is determined, and certainly more than Matthieu: therefore, when Gaëtana wants something, she’s ready to try anything to get it, and is not the type to give up, and she is firm in her convictions (when Matthieu constantly questioned dating Chloé, despite still doing so) and her conviction is to keep a love she found, she’ll make sure Chris has no escape.

Those characters as teachers

The strongest opposition between these two characters appears in the way they function as teachers.

One of Matthieu’s main traits, which Chloé admires immediately about him, is how passionate he is about literature. This shows in his teaching: he is a charismatic individual, dragging students around him, and, in particular, students like Chloé, always available to answer their questions and recommend interesting books.

Matthieu takes his job very seriously: after all, he was the only teacher who cared enough about Chloé’s bullying to put a stop to it and get the bullies expelled. So, you can tell that his passion for his job is not only about literature, but also about creating a safe learning space for his students.

But overall, Matthieu is overall a passionate, dedicated but pretty standard teacher.

Gaëtana isn’t a standard teacher. Sure, she teaches the notions and methods expected by the curriculum. However, her approach is quite eccentric. I’ll let you discover in the actual game how she is, but she overall has a less orthodox approach to teaching literature. Yet, like Matthieu, she tries to use the personal thoughts of her students to reach her points: but when Matthieu focuses on intellectual, critical thoughts, Gaëtana cares more about impressions and impulsive thoughts.

With her students, she’s basically being a “cool teacher”, not enforcing authority, and instead being very chill about things teachers aren’t usually chill about – even more than that, she’s quite the troublemaker too, and appreciates more argumentative students, whom she sees as partners in crime. I guess her overall vibe as a teacher can be gotten from the excerpt I shared in the first devlog I wrote, announcing the project.

Those characters as groomers

Of course, an important part of these characters that can’t be ignored is that they are child groomers, engaging into a relationship with teenagers.

For Matthieu, let’s consider his narcissistic wound. By meeting Chloé, and realising she’s just like him (cf. “Whatever our souls are made of, yours and mine are the same” as he says in game, quoting Wuthering Heights), he gets a chance to actually love himself. After all, if Chloé and he share the same qualities, and if he admires Chloé, then he’s free to admire himself without feeling bad for it, and isn’t this a path for self-confidence? Well, of course not, and Matthieu is just feeding his own narcissism.

Yet, Matthieu isn’t completely immoral (I know, I know…), so he feels remorse dating a minor. And this remorse is unbearable not because of the harm he could cause Chloé: otherwise, he would see the harm he’s already causing. No, what makes it impossible to carry for him is that it lowers his self-confidence again.

So, he’s quite in a paradoxical situation: having bonded with Chloé confirms the excuse he found not to suffer from his initial narcissistic wound; and yet, the same bonding turns him into something he despises, a Humbert Humbert (the name of the narrator and groomer in the novel Lolita). Yet, because interacting with Chloé makes him feel so good, he’s not ready to let her go (and to set her free): he therefore puts her in a position where she is the one who has to emotionally regulate her.

That’s why, when he’s set on either letting her go (ending 1), or that Chloé doesn’t come back to him (ending 2), Matthieu is left with nothing but his self-hate: not only is the connection broken, he’s now a criminal, and a morally horrible person. Therefore, he chooses death, with a small nuance in ending 2: since Chloé refuses to accept him back, and breaks the cycle he’s trapped her in by refusing to regulate his emotions one more time, he partly blames things on her as he is hurt in a more shallow part of his narcissism (how can she reject me?). And he’s also so hurt in his narcissism that he needs, to soothe it a little, to catch everyone’s attention, as a last attempt to satisfy his narcissism before resorting to his extreme end.

The main difference between Gaëtana and Matthieu is that Gaëtana doesn’t feel remorseful, and therefore doesn’t feel bad for dating Chris. More than that actually, she feels entitled to his affection and love, which is still narcissism indeed, but built differently. Moreover, as I explained in the devlog comparing Chris to Chloé, Chris isn’t as enamoured with Gaëtana as Chloé is with Matthieu. Therefore, Gaëtana is more purposefully manipulative to keep Chris by her side. After all, he’s a more “rebellious” victim.

Basically, Gaëtana ends up seeing Chris as a property considering that, and I won’t detail the circumstances because of good old spoilers, dating one of her students gives us something she appreciates more than anything: attention, and losing Chris, is losing this attention. And all this conjugates with her need to feel loved, and her experiencing this with her student.

Okay, I guess that’s it for this devlog, which ended up being more about Matthieu than about Gaëtana in the end! Well, I really need to keep the events of this game secret as they might spoil the plot, and I guess this might be of interest to all the people who enjoyed High School Lolita in the first place. But I’m personally happy to see how changing the dynamic between the protagonist and the groomer, by changing their personalities, ended up giving two different stories, despite sharing the same premise of a highschooler groomed by their teacher. And although I crave to reveal more, there are things I’d better keep as a surprise!

See you next month for some more exciting news I hope!