Trust, confidence, and hope in a summer’s end – Hong Kong 1986 : a reparative reading

Abstract

Building on Sedgwick’s (1997) and Love’s (2010) reparative reading, this paper o!ers an analysis of the theme of trust and its variations (reluctance, con"dence, intimacy, etc.) in the visual novel A Summer’s End – Hong Kong 1986 (Oracle & Bone, 2020). More speci"cally, it examines how trust takes place (1) between the game characters, (2) between the player and the characters, and (3) between the queer player and the video game medium. A Summer’s End tells the unlikely love story between Michelle Fong Ha Cheung, a disciplined o#ce worker who lives with her mother, and Sam Ka Yan Wong, an independent and free-spirited woman who owns a video store. The story is set in Hong Kong, two years a$er the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed, and o!ers a re%ection on the challenges of being a queer woman in uncertain times. The game provides an interesting case for studying trust from a humanities perspective, a theme under explored in game studies and in English-language scholarship in general.