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Conversation With My Mother Pathos

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Gender transitions, cross dressing, and homosexual marriage are all unequivocally important social movements starting to gain recognition. Although gender transitions and homosexuality, along with other various LBGQT movement have been around for a while; social acceptance and safety for these various individuals is just beginning to occur. Merritt Kopas is able to confront and tackle this in her twine game, “Conversations with My Mother” by imparting a story about a mother’s letter to her child, using pathos to persuade the reader, and using strong visuals to tie the story together. Conversations with My Mother is not Kopas’ first game, in fact; Kopas has created other well known games such as LIM and the Consensual Torture Simulator. Specializing in the deep relationships between people, Kopas is able …show more content…

Pathos can be defined as an appeal to an emotion of the audience, and is ubiquitous within the game. From the second and third line of the story -if the hormones option is chosen- the mother asks, “how is that going for you” and “are you finding it hard to deal with the changes.” Those two simple lines invoke the reader's emotion, flashing them back to when they were young and their mother would ask them a plethora of questions every afternoon. Another potent use of pathos is available if the audience selects the therapist choice. In that option the mother simply states, “I started seeing a therapist. You’ve had lots of time to think about this, now I need to.” Those two simple sentences can tug on the heart of the audience by portraying the mother as sad and broken, but perhaps willing to try and understand her child’s decisions. By incorporating pathos into those two examples, and various others, Koppas is able to draw the audience into her story and persuade the reader to support her

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