Lost Girls character creation made me feel things
To be embrace the ugliest, darkest parts of girlhood in the safety of other (mostly? probably?) women is awesome, actually. In Weird Writer's Lost Girls, we can inhabit those places and turn them back on a hostile world for the chance to claw back some power for ourselves (or die, badly, I'm assuming. I will find out when I play it in two days.). I found something in her game's character creation that I haven't seen anywhere other than the deepest corners of my own memories. It's the truth of what being a girl is often like in the wake of trauma, removal of agency, interruptions to exploring oneself, or the conditions that force one to become something other than themselves just to keep going. The girls are scary, violent, mutilated, cold, bewitching, rotting, or sometimes eerily comical. They're not necessarily a roster of what you end up looking like when different kinds of trauma happen to you. They're just different types of girls you can be. They are their own kind of girl.
All of them are beautiful. The text doesn't say this--the girl types page only goes out of its way to describe the actual faces or bodies of girls who have been tangibly marked there. The pained grin of the smothered Smiling Girls. The melting faces of the poor Angelic Girls. My favorite are the flat-out Dead Girls, who still enjoy sexual appreciation and favors from beyond the grave. It's the attention given to crafting each of the girl types that tells us these are stunning creatures. Truthfully, there's nothing else a girl can be. Even ones who are rotting, or using their agency to, perhaps, prolong their own suffering, or the suffering of others.
It rules. I was touched by the experience. It showed me very quickly that someone else saw a darker side of the girl experience. You could be something disgusting or lethal or weird and still indisputably be--not only a beautiful girl--but a girl.