I don’t understand what fucking eldritch chokehold this woman has cast on me. Is this a side effect of hemlock poisoning? Has her in-game sprite reached past the veil of my computer screen and enthralled me like a fucking vampire lord to some lowly peasant who just happened by? I don’t know.

I am insanely gripped by this goddamn character. EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of her visual design, narrative background, even the way her dialogue is written all speaks to me on some carnal level that makes me wish I could volunteer for the Termina Festival myself like it’s the goddamn Hunger Games just so I could get the chance to be in her presence. She’s incredibly intelligent, she’s self-empowering, and she’s kind-hearted in even the most distressing circumstances. She has deep-seated anxieties and insecurities, but she handles them realistically and stays brave even in the face of absolute horror. She’s a fucking cinnamon roll with a heart of gold and a willpower of iron – if a benevolent higher power exists in any capacity, it would do a disservice to itself to not emulate this girl.

I’ve torn into the files of the game itself for any ounce of her I could juice out of the core content she hails from like a ripe orange. I’ve decompiled and organized each sprite sheet that contains her, even cropping out undesirables she happens to be placed next to. I’ve dug through the .JSON files that contain all game events, even programming a rudimentary tool in Python that allows me to quickly skim the mass of text for any string sample that’s preceeded by the name “OLIVIA.”

I see a piece of fan work that contains Olivia and I fucking squeal. I squirm like a child in my fucking chair. It could be a dozen pixels in the tiny corner of some wall of sketches, it could be so heavily stylized that you can barely recognize her from the source material – fuck, I’ve seen some where she’s not even in her goddamn wheelchair. I’ve trudged through some of the worst fanfiction ever written simply because it contained the tag “Olivia Hass.” It doesn’t matter. If it’s Olivia, I will adore her.

This isn’t even a romantic thing. She’s not my “waifu,” and I don’t even necessarily wish I could be with her – I see her paired with Marcoh or Levi or Marina and I’m over the moon with joy. The concept of Olivia experiencing joyful love or intimacy in any circumstance fills me with a warm glee that supercedes any bad mood. Even if she were real, I don’t think I’d be jealous – more than anything, I want her to live a wonderful life of joy.

Thank you, Miro, for writing the best fucking character to ever exist in English media. We will never recover from this – nothing will ever fucking surpass her. We can give up now, Olivia’s done it for good.