A Tear of Vermillion
When I was 12, I went to my friend’s house. He had just gotten a new game, Legend of Heroes IV – A Tear of Vermillion. He opened the package in front of me and started playing. The visuals, sound, and story were a life-changing experience. For a year, I went over after school just to watch him play. Eventually, I got my own copy from a video game magazine, and playing it for the first time by myself, I realized how much freedom it offered—there was no guiding narrative, no arrows telling you where to go. I could wander as Avin and his best friend Mile, meeting strangers, helping people, and filling in the gaps with my own stories about who they might be in real life.
Of course, that freedom came with challenges. I often got lost and never made it to the end. I kept picking it up now and then, but it always became too difficult, and I gave up. It wasn’t until my 30s that I finally finished. The ending blew me away—the characters slayed all 7 gods who created the world, descended to the underworld, and brought back their lost friends. The game ended with a suggestion that now that all the gods are dead, it's up to us to build a new world. After years of playing, it felt profound to see a message so clear: you can step away from the world as it’s given to you and imagine another way of being.
This project grows from that impulse—to envision a shared future where generations of queers can come together and create new possibilities, drawing on the characters and imagery of the game. It also marked the first collaboration of CHIPS Collective (Jaewoo Kang, Erika Mitsuhashi, Alexa Mardon, Reed Jackson, Alysha Seriani, and Rhyan McCorkindale), an interdisciplinary group spanning dance, film, animation, sound, puppetry, clowning, facilitation, fashion, and textiles. In the summer of 2025, we traveled to Haenam, Korea, to work with Taewoong Im, jazz and traditional Korean musician and vocalist of Dulabam. In Haenam, we stayed in Eruhwahun, an artist and activist run space. The sound work that you will hear is a result of our improvisation sessions in the studio each morning.Alex Lee, Dukjong and Sharon Kim made our project so much more fun.
Photo credit - Khim Hipol