Night in the Woods, Part One

One of the things I find interesting about Night in the Woods is the relationship Mae has with her parents after she drops out of college and moves back home. There are a few moments of tension, but they’re resolved in a satisfying way; and, on the whole, Mae’s parents are kind and supportive.

I’m not sure how much I want to write about this, but my own situation with my parents and family was so dysfunctional and abusive that I had a lot of trouble understanding the relationship between Mae and her parents as “normal.” I kept waiting for Mae’s parents to show their real faces, but that twist never happened; both of them were kind and supportive for the entire game. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but most of my adult years have been an ongoing process of re-evaluating what “normal” relationships look like. Partially for this reason, I think Night in the Woods is incredible in the way it portrays an extraordinary range of relationships between different people. Even though none of the characters is a perfect model of what a person “should” be, the game contains a number of useful examples for what healthy interactions between different people can look like.

To put this into perspective, here’s an excerpt from a wholesome Tumblr post about good parenting:

And then one day the abusive father was angry at the mom, and tried to take it out on my friend, my friend got a call filled with insults and threats. It was scary and my friend got upset, I tried to comfort them but I really didn’t have good words to say. They later called their mom, and this is what the mother said:

“You are a perfect person, if anyone is talking to you like this, you can walk away.”

I remember just feeling complete awe hearing this, told from a mom, to a child. It even cheered me up. Those are the words we should have been getting from our parents. This is the correct attitude.

Night in the Woods has a cast of characters who are flawed but try to have this sort of “correct attitude” regarding the trouble in their lives. The overall atmosphere of the game is quite dark, but each of the characters shines like a small light. It’s useful to be able to identify signs of abuse, of course, but it’s also important to have access to models for healthy relationships, no matter how old you are or where you are in your life.