I don’t get along with Cheese.
I did once, but after years of conflict, communication just wasn’t working no matter how many new rules and structures we tried to put in place. We were both shitty to one another, and staying together was causing both of us a lot of harm. People can’t always work together. It happens sometimes. And that’s okay. Sometimes divorce is best for all parties.
But you don’t kill the kids in the divorce.
AIW is a project Cheese and I dreamed up together a couple years ago. Early jam sessions were fun as hell, and we laid out the bones (and a decent amount of meat, sinew, and flesh, too) for what would become a great series. Then we poured blood into it and brought it to life.
Since the start, I did all the coding, managed all the accounts—everything is in my name and has my personal details. I managed outside contacts, from beta readers, to artwork and comms. I even worked with another programmer to create a demo for a prospective AIW visual novel. I do the bulk of the writing (I’d estimate Cheese contributed about 35%), but critically I’ve written nearly every sex scene in the entire game, more than my share of the soft oral vore scene, and every non-vanilla vore scene such as AV, UB, Instant digestions, Party wipes, Ashlyn with a straw, etc.
This has been how it is since the first book we wrote together,
No Good Deed. I like to write smut, and I’d like to think I’ve gotten pretty proficient at it over the years.
And I didn’t care about bragging about taking on the larger load, publicly or privately. I was more than happy to have both our names on it and to act publicly like we contribute evenly. Cheese contributed some good stuff to the project, and I’m not gonna pretend otherwise.
Feeding an ego didn’t matter to me, because something great was emerging. It still is. Patreon has had 6 updates without Cheese putting down a single word or edit. There’s been zero patron feedback about a dip in quality during this time. Sure, I can’t do as many words each night solo, but there’s been less time wasted on needless arguments and endless relitigations. EricaRain and I have been working hard on the project all the same.
The act of creation is ironically destructive, requiring sacrifice and rewrites and fixes and revisions and death and decay. Improving as a writer is agonizing, and you don’t even notice it happening. Pain is expected.
My working with Cheese was as reciprocally bad as he’s described working with me for at least the last two years. Editing was hostile, contributions were unbalanced.
Cheese is a fine writer, but this project was a challenge for him. I used AIW as a means to learn and grow as a writer, but he never took those opportunities. We always had the exact same problems every month. And conflicts got worse over time. I did more and more of the problem solving.
This is part of Cheese’s statement I want to highlight. I copied it at the time I saw it, so I apologize if it’s been edited since.
"Prog cannot meaningfully distinguish between creative disagreement and personal attack. He can handle it well enough in editing work from EricaRain because he has a layer of detachment (and ultimate creative authority) over the party making the critiques. But I was a co-author, an equal contributor with every bit as much a say in the final product. He couldn’t simply ignore me or brush me aside if he wanted to. I had to be dealt with."
This is a projection from Cheese, yet says everything you need to know about the situation if you just flip the names. No idea of mine could be included in the story if we didn’t spend hours and hours making sure he felt like it was ‘his,’ that he’d conceived of it himself. If I suggested a solution to a problem, that wouldn’t ever be okay on its own, he wouldn’t ever trust or respect that I’m a capable writer. This was nearly every other day by the end of our working relationship.
He always had to be the smartest person in the room. Had to be right, had to pick a fight over every little detail. Cheese is a ‘Rules Lawyer,’ for anyone who plays tabletop games: the guy at the table always seeking to ‘win’ a discussion, the guy arguing in bad faith to always get his way. Someone who asks you to meet them in the middle, and then takes a step back before asking again. It’s insulting and exhausting to be on the receiving end of that.
The cycle was always this: Cheese would be difficult about a topic of discussion. He’d find shelter in his ability to play the victim ad nauseam (see his posts on the discord server). I’d get upset at having to spend hours over a single sentence or concept, and he’d call my reaction villainy. He can’t trust anyone, and it’s impossible to build anything on top of that, it turns out.
I’m sure that his friends have seen this in him, and I’m glad they’re able to tolerate it more than I am.
I was okay with it for a while, too, because I’m capable of compromise, and it was for a greater cause, for this fucking awesome project. But frankly, being mistrusted and disrespected by a colleague for years on end is bullshit.
I’d gotten to the point where opening the doc some nights would cause me a panic attack. It took months of therapy for me to be able to say something and attempt to leave the relationship with Cheese.
Collaborations shouldn’t be like that.
I said so in July. We had a call and I told Cheese that we couldn’t work together anymore, and that I was going to continue on with EricaRain. The next calls were about trying to find a way to have Cheese work as a contracted writer, to do assigned scenes going forward, but he ultimately decided that ‘If I [Cheese] can’t work on AIW, then AIW shouldn’t continue.’
That scared the hell out of me. It was a frightening thing to hear from someone who also claims things like: ‘I love this story and its characters’
I changed the projects’ account passwords to prevent Cheese from killing the project.
And every time we talked after that, it was clear nothing had changed on his end, and any thoughts of reintegrating him would have been bringing back the pain for both of us. A compromise would have been great. Expanding the project to allow for trusted writers to submit scenes to be vetted and edited and included would only have helped production. But there’s no middle ground between us.
I really wish it hadn’t come to this. I wish that we could have worked it out. But ultimately, this is my house, my worktable. I shared it with him for years, then asked him to leave when he repeatedly revealed himself to be bad company.
Cheese is the owner of the discord server. I wasn’t removed when Cheese’s posts there were written, but I was revoked posting privileges and thus made to witness it. Being called a monster and then only being allowed to watch the dogpile is crueler than anything I’ve actually said—Cheese’s ‘recollections’ of conversations are decisively one-sided in his favor.
This was the worst possible way to air our personal problems. I am sincerely apologetic for the public drama.
On a personal note, I was assigned male at birth, but about a year ago I came out as nonbinary. I prefer to be referred to as they/them among those who know me personally. It’s been a life-changing experience, and I’m happier for it. Cheese knows this about me as well. And while I don’t personally care that Cheese misgendered me (‘he’) in all his posts, I do want to put that fact up alongside an anecdote from our working time together.
Lloriel is trans. It’s not a secret, but a reader won’t be explicitly told that until a later episode. When I put forth the idea that she be trans, Cheese was deeply bothered and very uncomfortable. It took weeks to get over it.
Ashlyn is genderfluid, and will present as a guy for at least S2E8, maybe longer. There’s a nonbinary crocodile in S1E10 and a nonbinary demon in S2E2. Rabbeth’oa in S2E5 is asexual. Sherine is a
walking slithering allegory as a monster girl. Player pronouns were added way too damn late into the game, but they’re there in Season 2, and I was planning to spend Feb/March updating Season 1 to include them. One of the concessions at the start of the project was to make it Female Pred Only, but I’ve developed greatly as a writer since then, and I’d really love for an AIW visual novel to include the options for all genders to be predators.
This shit matters, even if it can lead to handling things clumsily or being criticized by shitheaded bigots. It’s worth trying. Always. It matters to me, and it matters to others. These characters and ideas are worth exploring and celebrating, and the pushback I received against these things fucking sucks.
Not working with Cheese has made the implementation of these things smoother. And I feel fucking awful for waving them around like this, but a pattern of rejection of queerness is unfortunately recognizable.
Cheese saying the project is on hiatus is false. The truth is that he’s got his finger on the trigger. He wants to see it dead.
If Cheese reveals all the spoilers and future surprises in store for AIW by posting the outline of the rest of the story as he’s said he’ll do, EricaRain and I are uncertain if we would keep producing the project. If you’d like more AIW, tell Cheese to not to publicly spoil the plot, because he won’t listen to me anymore.
Production is fine, by the way. Episode 7 is almost done for patrons, with Episode 6 hitting the public shortly after.
The AIW patreon has been suspended while this is sorted out. Should the project survive the next few days, a new AIW discord server will be set up.
Thanks for reading. I appreciate the chance to be heard.
Progressive
) but I do have 1 question and 1 bug-report
