#i choose to integrate player agency into his personality bc it makes him so fun

[riheinorn]

botw/totk link will forever be so special to me. the dichotomy of the feral little goblin kid that eats rocks and builds hyrule's first korok roller coaster, and the incredibly scary person who can best 5 lynels at the same time in less than 30 seconds combined is just. chefs kiss. yes he's both. he can be so silly people will straight up think he's joking when he says his name is link because no one expects the hero of hyrule to look Like That and catch lizards with his mouth. But then also in the same vein when he has to get serious, he WILL become an unstoppable force that can singlehandedly fight off an entire horde of monsters, and none who see him do that will ever doubt him ever again.

Link woke up with nothing after resting for a long time (TWICE EVEN), disoriented, immediately used some random sticks he found somewhere and in his hands, they turned into the deadliest sticks in the continent. He dives off cliffs and opens the paragilder 0.005 seconds away from landing head first on the ground. He (kinda) brushes off [the beginning of totk], multiple assassination attempts and Ganon's special troops meant to destroy him specifically. The Yiga clan are so bad at even getting a dent into him they look like comedic relief, while to the regular people in Hyrule they're deadly and terrifying, especially to the Sheikah. He won't die. He is Hylia's specialest little cockroach.

he's also absolutely shredding it on a shield like crazy. the people at the stables have an internal bet going on what type of definitely-not-horse Link will try to register next. last week it was a bear. next week it's the satori he "just found somewhere". someone once saw him fall out of a tree and he immediately tried to stuff 5 apples into his mouth. he jumps into every well he finds.

[ziracona]

I know you mentioned that Bill wasn't included in ILM because you didn't know much about his personality. Out of curiosity though, if you had included him in the fic, how would you have integrated his history of being in the middle of a zombie apocalypse that couldn't have happened for the other characters? Or like, what approach would you have gone with?

Oh this is kind of a tough one! I don’t know Bill well, because I haven’t played Left 4 Dead, but that actually wasn’t why he isn’t in the fic. I stopped including survivors after Jane Romero, because DbD updates so much that I hit a point it was either add more characters but know you won’t have time to develop them and give them the character arcs they deserve because you’re nearing the end, or stop adding people, and it’s always better to whole-ass less then half-ass more—especially with characters that are awesome and really deserve some due diligence. While Bill is actually one of the earliest survivors released for DbD (he was...siiixth or something? Like right after Ace? Or Nea?), that’s only for PC. On PS4 and Xbox, he wasn’t added until much later, and I play DbD on PS4. So, for me as a player, Bill wasn’t actually released until after Ash was. When I started writing, I was kind of vaguely aware he existed on PC? But I had 0 personal experience with him, and so I went with my own/console experience when it came to writing.

As for what I’d have done, that’s a dang good question, and I’m not entirely sure— I’d definitely have thought about it longer if I had included him, but I’ll give you what I think I would have done? Obviously, Bill’s not from the world the rest of the survivors are. While almost any of the stories can coexist with minimal changes (NOES 2010, Halloween, Stranger Things, even Ash are more or less fairly easily compatible), zombie apocalypse—couple things I know they’re bound to notice, ya know? Still, I stand by multiverse being both unnecessary and not the best decision for the story I want to tell, so what I think I’d have done is this: (under the cut bc it’s gonna be long af--get ready for some quantum theory lol)

Okay, so the Entity canonically can operate outside of natural time. Meaning it can take survivors from earlier or later, and isn’t on the same space-time fixed relationship the world is. Now, time travel is tricky. Or anything with a complex portrayal of time. But there are three basic setups for time travel potential that actually make sense. They are as follows:

Anything that will happen, has happened (or the Artemis Fowl timetheory). This one is pretty straightforward. Sure, you can travel through time, but the universe you live in right now where you are choosing to go back is the result of the past you caused. The change you’re causing is past-tense already, and the only real agency you have is in causing the circumstances leading up to where you already are. This still allows for some fancy manuvering (for example: want to save a friend’s life? No problem. You can’t remove the motivation to go back, so you in the past still have to believe they die, but so long as you didn’t like, hold their severed head—if it’s a situation like say, you saw them blow up, you can save that person—you just have to make sure your past self still sees them “die” in the explosion and thus chooses, as you did/are, to go back.) This is my personal least favorite theory of space-time, but it’s a solid one.

The second is the The Future is not Set (or the Back to the Future timetheory). This one says time is flexible. You can go back and kill your father before you’re born, and the future will change. How ripple effects happen are varried—for example in strict timeline variations of this theory such as those in Frequency or Back to the Future, if you cause yourself not to be born, time will catch up with you, and while the impact you left on the world remains, you, as you no longer are born, will vanish from existence as the time stream corrects itself. However, more lenient time streams such as the versions in Continuum or Futurama exist as well, where even if your effects on the world prevent you from being born, the version of you currently alive continues to exist as an anomaly. This is by far, in my opinion, the most enjoyable solid timetheory.

And last (unless you count Time Travel is Impossible as a solid theory which I guess technically you can??), theory three (or the Doctor Who timetheory). This theory portrays time as possible to change and allowing for alternatives to be taken, but not in all places and ways. It presents very hard limits on what can change, and offers a much more inflexible time continuum than theory 2, as well as much higher consequences for causing alterations. Rather than direct cause-effect consequences, like vanishing because you caused yourself not to be born, usually the result of tampering and causing a change of large size is that you will create time paradoxes, which the time stream itself desperately will try to destroy/fix, usually horribly and with massive and brutal force. Things like Life is Strange fall into this theory as well, with Dr. Who being on the lenient end of this spectrum and LIS the strict. It offers the technicality of a changeable future, but none of the true and almost wild freedom offered by variations of theory 2. Basically, any large scale or personal change you cause will rip holes in the universe, and either you will give in to fate and re-allow the loved one you saved to die, or you push on through and accept massive time-space damage and casualties for the choice. I’ve got mixed feelings on this one myself, as I’ve seen it handled super well and made a thing that can be fun, but it also is the theory that pisses me off the most when written poorly haha.

Anyway, massive time theory talk over, in Dead by Daylight, the Entity can traverse time canonically. In ILM, the survivors only talk briefly, after meeting Jane, about theories for how that works, but here is what I would say if ILM had included Bill. To preface, there are two timelines that each follow the same set of basic rules, but have a little freedom in how they effect each other (not so much in how they effect themselves): the Survivor’s world/reality timeline, and the Entity’s pocket dimension timeline. Neither timeline can contradict itself and create paradoxes within its own space. So. Bill is from the same universe as anyone else. At one point, the early 2000s followed the narrative of Left 4 Dead, and the Entity grabbed Bill where & when he “dies” in canon. Only, some time after grabbing Bill, the Entity took another person which (completely unintentionally on the Entity’s part) triggered a massive Buttery Effect on the world, and greatly altered reality, causing not only the Left 4 Dead apocalypse to no longer occur, but causing Bill himself to never be born. Bill however was already outside of the world and in the Entity’s pocket dimension at the time, and thus was not there to be “erased” and exists as an anomaly. While he is paradoxical in his own world, he does not at all contradict the Entity’s established timeline—he adheres to it. While the memory of survivors is effected and updated by changes made in reality by the Entity, because there is no version of “Bill” in the world anymore, he did not have his memories altered (there was no “Bill” for the timestream to update at all, as he is entirely an anomaly now, so it would have no reason to try). The world they exist in has a time continuum that operates off a variation somewhere between theory 3 and theory 2 (the future is not set, but also there are fix points—however, these almost exclusively exist in regard to one’s own past. The big rule is that personally making the act of altering your own past intentionally by nature also alters your motivations for acting in the first place, and thus negates the possibility of you doing so. While you can change other people’s pasts, or accidentally effect your own, you physically cannot change your own intentionally, because you’d create either a paradox or a time loop, and it would rip you apart).

Dwight is more or less correct when he hypothesizes that they might have all remembered a world with Jane Romero still in it until an hour ago. However, all of ILM itself is that version of time/reality (ie the “last” or “final” version, as it were/the version that came into being when Jane was taken). Her loss butterfly affect updated people, and so they remember her being missing. While the Entity could hypothetically someday accidentally do things that make it so survivors aren’t born in the external reality, it cannot do so intentionally or accidentally-on-purpose, because it is bound by the rules of its own personal history/timeline, and it can neither intentionally nor accidentally do a damn thing to prevent what has transpired inside itself from happening. Similarly, since the survivors are established as existing inside it, even if they were erased at birth, they would still exit it intact in November of 2019 with all their memories. The Entity thus has no real way to hurt them even in revenge, unless it is willing to risk taking them again from a later point in time. Most small decisions do not have buttery effects that are very large at all, and in general time attempts to smooth out with the least possible changes. What happened to Bill was a one in a billion fortunate/unfortunate chance thing, and was such an unlikely thing to happen in the first place, the chances of a thing like it happening again are astronomically small, and almost completely certainly would not to occur. In some ways it would be nice for him though, because he could escape back to a peaceful reality where many people he lost are still happy & living. While they don’t remember him, people would still have the echos of their past inside them (feelings of deja vu, memories in dreams, attachment and familiarity with people you never “met”) and he could reconnect with them if he wanted and live happily with old Left 4 Dead crew and his new survivor family. : )