Trigger Warnings:
Death (incl. child/teen death), grief, suicidal ideation/self-harm themes, graphic violence/gore, body horror, cosmic/eldritch horror and reality distortion, institutional violence and militarization of youth, abuse/coercive control, medical trauma (hospitals/needles), panic attacks/anxiety, religious trauma imagery, substance use references, profanity, occasional explicit sexual language.
Hello, and thank you for your interest in a/0. My name is Solange (or Zhiyuan) and I am an afro-asian nonbinary lesbian. You can find my twitter here, and a/0’s official twitter here.
I’m also a game developer, vtuber artist/rigger, and I draw sometimes! a/0’s been on a bit of a hiatus during the development of my visual novel ValiDate: Struggling Singles in your Area, and will be on hiatus still as I work on the development of other games/projects under NDAs. It’s also on hiatus because I’m in the middle of changing character designs and just fiddling with it and having fun. 🙂
Division by Zero is a passion project that I work on in my free time, at my own pace. There’s no strict upload schedule, but you can find me constantly talking about it–and drawing these characters–over on my twitter account.
a/0 is rife with philosophy (pantheism, panentheism, existenalism, cosmism and existential dread) and theology (Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) but also incorporates themes of feminism. a/0 is also a bildungsroman, as our budding 15-year-old protagonist grows throughout the wars she fights across the cosmos. There are some things to note though:
★ Chapter 2 is a flashback! It’s confusing, I know, but in that chapter Kohana is like 12-years-old. Her age isn’t a big deal but I just wanted to make it clear that it’s not a direct continuation of Chapter 1 because I am insane.
★ There are two versions of Kohana, the 15-year-old Kohana we meet in Chapter 1, and the 40-year-old Kohana who is featured in the 0.0.) chapters. In Chapter 4, their timelines merge and they interact together. These Kohanas are completely different people (meaning the smaller Kohana won’t grow up to be the older Kohana, and our Kohana is not the childhood version of the older Kohana). There will definitely more Kohanas. Collect them all.
★ Both versions of Kohana are definitely annoying but it’s because she is mentally ill and I am not joking. Any chapter she narrates will be extremely unreliable and her thought process and how she interacts with the world may be both infuriating and baffling. Kohana has Histrionic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder and is schizoaffective (she is bipolar and schizophrenic)–in general, she is a little shit. I mean this quite warmly, because I am schizoaffective and need my anti-psychotics and anti-depressants daily like a starving Victorian child (I also have two personality disorders but I don’t feel comfortable talking about them here but rest assured we’re in the same cluster).
★ Kohana isn’t the only severely mentally ill character here. In fact, the entire cast struggles with some sort of mental illness. They’re all LGBT+, as well as trans, unless stated otherwise.
★ Time gets REALLY fucked up after chapter 4. This is on purpose. The narration gets really trippy because Kohana gives up minutes of her life in the middle of her narration and is basically breaking the 4th wall and exchanging the actual story for time. Yeah…
★ I like writing absurdly-long chapters and being extremely poetic and long-winded. For a 9,000-word chapter (which is on the long side, but maybe will become the norm), it’s about a 40-50 minute read. Don’t think of this as a normal novel but basically something a little weird where the point is you’re supposed to get lost in the sauce. I understand that’s not everyone’s cup of tea though. :]
…And I think that’s it! If I think of anything else I’ll add it here, but have fun!