Trust, Confidence, and Hope in A Summer's End: Hong Kong 1986, A Reparative Reading

Samuel Poirier-Poulin's paper offers a reparative reading of A Summer's End: Hong Kong 1986, a visual novel centred on a queer romance between Michelle and Sam. Drawing on Sedgwick's and Love's theories of reparative reading alongside Marzano's and Ahmed's work on trust, hope, and the "promise of happiness," the analysis argues that the game builds trust among characters, between player and characters, and between the queer player and the medium itself. Trust is tied to time, hope, and the possibility of a queer future, and the author contends that this trust is cultivated through an affective environment of intimacy and nostalgia, despite the game's largely linear structure and limited player agency.

The paper's central claim is that ambience does much of this affective work. Neon colours, music, Mong Kok's urban night, and intimate apartment scenes transmit feeling to players, while the first-person narration and gradual unlocking of Michelle's inner life position the player as a supportive companion rather than a voyeur. Against the backdrop of Hong Kong's uncertain transition to Chinese sovereignty, Michelle's choice between a heteronormative future and a queer relationship becomes the pivot on which trust and confidence turn.

The analysis also examines the game's reception context. Citing data from LGBT+ game catalogues, the author notes that visual novels make up roughly 47.67 percent of LGBT+ titles on itch.io (N = 3,713) and 57.78 percent on Steam (N = 1,456), marking the genre as a privileged space for queer gaming communities. References to Hong Kong queer icons such as Anita Mui and to the film New Women generate an empowering queer nostalgia, which the author argues offers queer players a reparative experience of joy and a hopeful orientation toward the future.