Thanks, Mom, but Specifically, Mom from Boyfriend Dungeon

Hey Mom,

It’s your favorite time of year again. I remember rushing around our different apartments while I was growing up, and putting up as many decorations as we could find the second we woke up on December 1st every year. It’s now the third holiday season where we’re not talking to each other, and I find myself thinking about these memories a lot more than I used to. I’m also finding out that the things that I thought were normal were actually pretty abnormal. I’m discovering this from all kinds of places– from my friends, social media, TV, movies, and my personal favorite, video games. Seeing other people’s relationships with their mothers, fictional or real, good or bad, has helped me contextualize all the different facets of our relationship with each other. Realizing that not everyone fought the way we did, and that some people are even friends with their moms, was more unbelievable to me than some of the things I had seen in any game. 

Boyfriend Dungeon is a game that, from the marketing, looked like a fun, easygoing dating sim with an interesting twist on the actual dating mechanic. The game uses dungeon crawling to further your bond with potential partners, as well as the more traditional route of meeting characters for dates with dialogue trees and gifting options. The story it ended up telling was a much more intense and nuanced one than I initially expected it to be, and I’m grateful for a lot of the things that it helped me learn about myself and the way I want to be seen by people I have relationships with, romantic or otherwise. But to me, one character stood out above the rest, even though we never even get to see her, and some people might not ever even interact with her.

Boyfriend Dungeon’s “Mom” character never physically appears, and is represented solely by text messages you can read using the in-game phone. Assumedly to keep people like me (and anyone else who might not want to be reminded of their mother for any reason) in mind, the developers, Kitfox Games, allowed players to turn off the texts from Mom entirely. It allowed players to not have to see potentially triggering content, or to allow us to have our in-game experience more closely match our real-life experiences.

Whatever the reason for the inclusion, I appreciate its existence. I sat staring at this screen for a long time, with the “No” option highlighted. All I have to do is press A, I thought, but something in me wasn’t allowing me to do that. I realized that my hang-up with choosing “No” was that Kitfox purposefully included the word “supportive” in this warning. That word is what made me choose to keep the text messages as part of my game, and I’m so, so glad that I did.

The first dungeon in the game is Verona Beach’s hot shopping spot, Verona Mall. After the romanceable épée, Isaac, was done explaining that the enemies in the dungeons are physical manifestations of your character’s worst fears– and then immediately theorizing that my fear of communication and intimacy is why my monsters show up as phones (rude, we just met), Mom texted me. My immediate first reaction was to assume that my character was in trouble with her mother, due to the sheer volume of messages that were coming, faster than I could keep up with what they said. Once I opened the phone, I saw what she had actually sent me. “I already miss you,” then sending several more messages about how dangerous the big city of Verona Beach is, as well as to listen to my cousin Jesse, to watch out for pickpockets, and finally, making sure that I found my new apartment safely. Two replies came up for me to choose from, and I chose to reply, “I’m fine, Mom,” which immediately prompted three more messages to come through. “Oh! Good! Stay on your guard, okay? I love you, sweetie.” Immediately, tears began to form in my eyes. 

I looked back at text messages from you, Mom. Nothing even came close to this level of warmth and support that I had received from this video game mom. I racked my brain for something, anything in my memories that came close to this. Nothing. I never thought that we had a bad relationship, just that we never really had a good one. But something in this game was breaking that notion of us ever having gotten along at all.

Throughout the rest of the game, “Mom” will send texts about any potential partners that Jesse may or may not have told her about. Little things, ranging from “Jesse tells me you have a very attractive friend,” to, “If they hurt you… tell me. Mama will take care of it,” followed by a message consisting solely of knife emojis. I thought to myself, “Am I friends with my mom in this game? That’s like, a thing?” These messages just kept eroding the dam I had built up around my feelings about my own mother, until, by the end of the game, that dam didn’t exist any more.

I learned so much from Boyfriend Dungeon. I learned about certain ways I feel about dating that I didn’t know about myself before, and about friendships too. The most valuable lesson that I learned, however, is that I had a toxic relationship with my mother for basically my whole life. Seeing that fictional characters had relationships like that, and participating in one, made me aware that having a healthy, friendly relationship with your mom might not be something that only exists in fantasy. It made me ask people in my life about their moms. It made me realize that not all of the other kids’ moms were putting on a show of loving their kids in public like mine was. By the end of the game, those realizations broke me. Why was I constantly making excuses for you? After all, you’re the one that cut me out after I came out. I know that I want to be a better mom than you ever were for me, and now I’m learning how to be just that for my future children. So thanks, Mom, for everything– you did teach me a lot throughout the years. But there’s lots of other moms I’d like to thank, too– specifically, thanks, Mom from Boyfriend Dungeon, for showing me that “Mom” doesn’t have to mean what I thought it meant.