COFFEE TALK: We Need To Talk About Neil
This is a SPOILER WARNING for the entirety of Coffee Talk:
I’m the barista of a small coffee shop in Seattle in September of 2020. This is not the same 2020 with the coronavirus sweeping the world in a mass pandemic, or the 2020 where the Democratic primary has escalated into an all-out brawl between the establishment and the progressives. It’s not the 2020 we know, it is a fantasy 2020 with all sorts of fantasy creatures living alongside each other.
The same 2020 is also the 2020 where Pixar released a film with a similar concept called Onward, but nobody seems to be interested in it and the only gay character is a cop and has barely any screen time.
Coffee Talk is casually queer. The vast majority of its cast is queer, but it doesn’t draw a lot of attention to it. Gala and Hyde, a werewolf and a vampire who frequent my coffee shop, are clearly into each other and have spent decades knowing nobody else, but the relationship remains platonic. Myrtle and Aqua, an orc and some kind of selkie, meet at my coffee shop, bond over their mutual love of game design, and eventually enter a relationship after the former helps the latter with selling her first indie game.
I like them all quite a bit. Playing through the game once will take you a few hours, and as a visual novel, all you need to do is mix them the proper drinks every so often, which can be a little deceptively tough at times. I did more than a few Google searches to figure out exactly what combination Gala needed in order to curb his monthly rages into feral form (tea/milk/ginger). There are multiple playthroughs, which I have not fully explored at this time. You don’t always want to give them exactly what they ask for. When Freya, the game’s main human character, bursts into my shop, deeply sleep-deprived from working on a draft of her novel, I don’t give her the normal order of espresso (coffee/coffee/coffee). I give her a drink called Bedchamber (milk/cinnamon/honey) in order to let her take a nap at one of my shop’s many unoccupied booths so she can finish the novel in time.
I like them all quite a bit. Many reminded me of my own friends outside of this alternate 2020, their various issues weighing down on their lives. The only thing many of my friends need, and the thing I need, is just a friendly ear to talk to and listen to in turn. It so completely encapsulated the ways in which I have been lucky enough to have friends willing to listen to my problems and let me know that said problems actually matter and I’m allowed to have them. It’s a little thing, the coffee shop, and it felt strange that the version of myself in the game was such a better listener than the one in reality.
And then there’s Neil.
Neil is the game’s most unusual character in a lot of ways. First of all, they’re the only character in the game who isn’t, strictly speaking, from Earth. Secondly, they are initially not one single entity but the aspect of an alien hivemind, arriving on Earth for a specific mission. Unlike many alien invasion stories, Neil doesn’t actually mean Earth any kind of harm, nor do they intend to try and take control of the planet. For whatever reason, their hivemind has decided that Earth is in need of a protector and has decided that the hivemind must take as close to a carbon-based lifeform as possible and breed with someone living on Earth, producing a protector.
Essentially, Neil wants to create Superman.
The other patrons respond to this exactly how you’d expect, finding the whole situation completely ludicrous (though taking them at their word at them being an alien and seeking someone to breed with). They aren’t outright mocking, and upon discovering that Neil specifies that this kind of breeding must be a literal act of enthusiastically consented to love, begin to warm up to them a little bit. This escalates till my character, the shop’s owner, gives Neil a part-time job at the coffee shop to help them better communicate with others.
Neil has a lot of strange characteristics that immediately made me deeply identify with them and also audibly begin to laugh at times. The first is that Neil likes to drink coffee through their index finger, stating that the closest approximation to a mouth exists there. Neil treats this so nonchalantly, and seems so confused that other characters are confused by this, that it quickly becomes a defining character trait. Neil’s own general ignorance of societal norms, but expressing at any given moment that they’re not intentionally trying to break them at any point, that very much spoke to me.
Neil’s first appearance at the coffee shop culminates in them mistaking Myrtle, the game designer orc I mentioned earlier, for someone they’re meeting off of the fantasy equivalent of Tinder. The two resolve the confusion quickly with no ill will between them, but it still highlights Neil’s general inability to connect with others, and how much they struggle with this. Despite initially coming off as far too cold, aloof and analytical to let emotions conflict with their extraterrestrial mission, Neil quickly reveals that their desire for connection with others is genuine and not just for the sake of the mission, and that they’re not used to how patient the rest of Coffee Talk’s patrons are with them throughout the length of the game.
The other two ways the designers of the game show how thoroughly disconnected Neil is from the rest of life on Earth: in spite of their initial coldness, Neil constantly betrays how nervous and anxious they are by placing their index fingers together whenever going over a sensitive subject, a motion that seems to calm them to some extent. The other is the sound that accompanies their voice, which each character has in a similar manner to the way characters talk in the Animal Crossing series of games. While the rest have pretty similar sounds, Neil’s are intentionally high-pitched and sound closer to something synthetic than the rest, further highlighting their separation.
I need to note that every character has this level of detail put into them, from just a few simple animations to the way they sound when they speak. I’m sure there’s someone out there who really identifies with the Shakespearian love story between a succubus and an elf whose families despise each other, Lua and Baileys, anyone in what feels like a forbidden romance. I definitely identified in part with Freya, the frustrated freelance creative desperately trying to figure out a way to make a living doing what she loves. The character or characters you see yourself as will change depending on what kind of experiences you’ve ultimately had.
But for me, it was definitely Neil, and the amount of patience the other patrons showed them at every point even with how frequently they misread social interactions and body language.
Social interaction is something that is generally assumed to be some kind of base biological knowledge. I saw myself in Neil because they constantly mess up, and clearly express shame at constantly screwing up, not knowing what seems to come naturally to everyone else.
Here’s a really strange tangent: one of the things I took to heart when I was a little kid came from one of my mother’s favorite movies: a romantic comedy starring Will Smith called Hitch. And in this movie, at the very beginning, he says in voiceover something that stuck to the core of my being like glue and hasn’t left ever since:
Anyway, for convenience, this is the quote that Hitch says that stuck with me:
“60% of all human communication is non-verbal body language. 30% is your tone. So that means that 90% of what you’re saying ain’t coming out of your mouth.”
Now, how true is this actually? Who the hell knows. Many Google searches didn’t provide a clear answer to that question. But it’s something that stuck for a long time, and seeing a character in this game with a complete inability to be able to communicate with others, that did leave an impression. Neil doesn’t mean any harm, and they’re certainly not a wannabe pick-up artist the way that Hitch seems to do to make his living. But it still applies, and it’s not often in media that you see characters so visibly struggle with this kind of problem, and to show so distinctly how much suffering this can lead to, and the kind of uncertainty and self-doubt this can breed.
The quote stuck with me, and Neil has stuck with me, because it’s something that I struggle with all the time, and perhaps you do too. In any interaction, regardless of the intent, you may find that people might respond with confusion at best and antipathy at worst. It’s something I still struggle with as far as my closest friends are concerned. I don’t want to claim any particular reasoning for this. The typical response to this kind of admission is a query as to whether or not I’m on the autistic spectrum. That’s something I’ve suspected for a long time, but with no formal diagnosis (and no affordable way to do so), that’s something I’m not going to resolve. I also don’t want to frame the narrative around Neil being a metaphor for autism, because I think that’s incredibly reductive, especially considering the autistic spectrum has a wide range of experiences that I wouldn’t be reflecting accurately.
It’s far more of a generality than that: whatever the reason someone may have a fundamental inability to socially interact with others, it’s not something that can be explained as well as it can be demonstrated. I type these words completely unsure if you, the reader, will be able to interpret them the way that I intend them. The game frames their dialogue in such a way that you can see the clear divide between what Neil intends to say at any given moment and how all the other characters respond.
That the other patrons remain constantly patient with Neil, and work to meet them in the middle, and reassure them that they want them to be there, all of that felt therapeutic. I’m lucky enough to have friends now that treat me in a similar manner, even when the manner in which I speak can be confusing. That was not always the case, as it seems to be for Neil, who initially seems to be bracing for any kind of reprisal and sees the coffee shop as the only safe place with which they can interact with others. Eventually, they begin to travel elsewhere and give up their initial goal of creating the Coffee Talk equivalent of Superman to learn how to truly connect with others.
The game actually ends with Neil, having taken on a human form of their own and returning to the coffee shop some time later to speak to my character. They’ve done this to avoid immigration agents who had briefly interrogated me, trying to seek him out. A couple of things stand out from the final scene: that Neil has finally developed a sense of self outside of their alien collective, which seems to be have done peacefully. This isn’t the typical story of an alien hivemind violently ejecting anyone who dares have individuality of their own, and by all indications, the hivemind seems to have supported their choice.
The second big revelation is that my character also belonged to their kind as well, and made the same journey Neil did, thus explaining exactly why I was so accepting of Neil to begin with.
Which was strange for a couple of reasons. Firstly, that even though Neil initially refers to themselves as they/them because they are a literal plurality, and because those are the pronouns I now tend to use (if you haven’t already guessed from all the not-so-subtle hinting), but also because they use them once they have ceased to be a hivemind and have become an individual.
Second, that it also allows me, the player, to be able to graft my own identity onto that of the character named after me, as I am never given any set of pronouns and am referred to in the vaguest of ways. The game intentionally goes out of its way to make sure any player from any kind of background will be able to see themselves in the player. This sort of leap-frogs the issue the Pokemon games have dealt with: are you a boy or a girl? Any racial background, any gender identity, all are welcome, and the game explicitly frames its cast as racially diverse to begin with. Not just in a way that encourages tokenization, but showing a reality exactly as it is: inclusive, intersectional, all of whom deserve love and care and coffee.
Which, as a side-note, comes from a person who adores the Pokemon games.
I don’t want to speak further on that aspect as someone who is white, which I don’t feel is my place to be able to say more about other than that. But the player is given the option, through being similar to Neil, to be able to project themselves truly and fully onto the character with (presumably) your name.
This is not to say that Neil is the most important character in the game, as that distinction probably belongs to Freya, the most frequent customer and sort of the social lynchpin the rest of the characters rely on. Neil is merely a supporting character given a lot of detail through little, simple things that any aspiring game developer could implement. But this is my story about Neil, because I saw myself in Neil, and I saw my brand of queerness through Neil, and that’s often all media is supposed to do. You should be able to see yourself in a mirror of sorts through the media you consume. That’s not an opportunity I’ve had many chances for when it comes to that and other aspects of my identity. In other ways, I have had lots of opportunities for representation. It’s the complicated and tangled web we all weave with the media we take part in. It is a projection on my part, it’s me extrapolating and hyperbolizing, and yet, it’s what I see.
There’s a day in my coffee shop, I don’t remember which, where Freya asks you to make her whatever you want. This is right after she has a conversation with Neil, and they challenge you to make them a brew that will make them actually feel something for the first time. I cheated and did a Google search to find it, but I already wanted Neil’s drink to be perfect.
I made Freya what I made Neil, which got them to feel something for the first time, and what became a drink I want to try in reality:
I hope you experience something just as different and just as wonderful.
