Afterparty: What Do You Do When the Party’s Over?
Chris,
“I think you were my compass, and I was your crutch. And you can’t spend your whole life as a tool.” When Milo said this to Lola, I felt my heart drop, because, not to lean too far into meme culture, but I felt that.
I met my high school best friend, we’ll call him Adam, in 2009, our freshman year. We were both gangly kids clinging to a scene aesthetic that we were clearly growing out of, and I desperately wanted to be his friend. We were in the same group for our core classes, I think it was biology first, then government, then English. I followed him around, sitting next to him, hoping for an opportunity to get a word in and start building a relationship. I was a painfully awkward teenager, but I’ve always been one to pursue what I want. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but we ended up chatting about Kingdom Hearts. Soon we were inseparable, and a decade went by like it was nothing.
Looking back now, it’s hard to reconcile how that friendship managed to last as long as it did. We had similar “nerdy” interests, but beyond that, our personalities couldn’t be more different. Milo and Lola are a bit too close for comfort, being perfectly honest. Milo wants to stick around, do what’s familiar and safe, and feels that Lola is betraying him by seeking the opposite. Lola wants to run into the unknown and see what will happen. Adam has always hated change. He even teaches at the high school we once attended. My life has been nothing but change since I went off to college.
We lived 40 miles apart, and I had a new budding social life at my own school, one he did the bare minimum to hide his envy of. He was rude to my other queer friends, judged everyone I dated (which to be fair to him, most of my exes are terrible), and never let me forget that he was the “responsible” one for not drinking. While I changed my major, and went through existential crises, he did exactly what he set out to do, and got on the dean’s list a few times to boot. He went from being in my academic shadow to being the golden boy while I was just trying to graduate. But despite the growing strain, we managed to white knuckle through it and keep the relationship intact.
Once we graduated and entered the workforce, things got even harder. I started what would become Uppercut right as I was starting my first ever job, one where I was screamed at 50 hours a week. All my free time went into playing games and getting drunk, because they were the best ways to escape my work day reality. Even when I moved away from that job to better ones, my time was still limited. I had found something I was really passionate about, and it took up the majority of my hours away from work. But my other local friends seemed to be in a similar boat. They had partners and jobs and hobbies that kept them busy, so we only saw each other about once a month if we were lucky. All except Adam, who seemed to have nothing but free time despite going into teaching. He wanted to hang out on weeknights with little notice. Despite me telling him time and time that I didn’t like impromptu plans, he always texted me the day of, asking to hang out, and would be hurt when I said no.
This tension finally came to a head this year. After a bout of passive aggression on his part, and blinding anger on mine, I decided to try and talk things out, something I fucking hate doing, but have been striving towards being better about. That conversation did not go well, and I had a crystalizing moment, much like Milo had in Afterparty, where the thought that had been whispering in the back of my mind for years finally said the quiet part loud: “why are we even still friends?” Because I was his compass, and he was my crutch.
As I’m writing this, I can’t help but think about the fact that his birthday is coming up. It’ll be the first time in ten years that I won’t be sending him a text, or making plans for what he wants to do. Part of me is so, so sad about this. But a bigger part knows it’s just me mourning the loss of something familiar. I envy Milo and Lola so much it hurts, because Afterparty gives you the chance to force them to talk things out, and really listen to each other. Ultimately, I think their friendship as they knew it was doomed, but if you choose the receptive dialogue options, and use a little restraint, you can propel them towards a place where they can accept each other where they’re at, instead of for who they’ve conceived each other to be. You, the all powerful player, can give them a fresh start, even in the depths of hell. But here on Earth, we’re not always that lucky.
Growing up sometimes means growing away from people you cared about. Afterparty managed to convey that and forced me to face my own grief about losing an old friend. Despite Lola and Milo’s potential reconciliation, it made me sad, which isn’t what I expected from a game about trying to outdrink Satan to escape from hell, even with the twist about Satan’s whole deal. On our podcast about the game, you said the friendship stuff also really resonated with you, but I think differently than how it did me. So, Chris, how did Milo and Lola’s friendship hit for you?
