#it's the metanarrates themself.

[carlyraejepsans]

Frisk being shipped with both chara & flowey is so funny to me. The frizzler indeed. i never liked friskriel but i do like your interpretation of flowisk and i desperately need to see them in dameoverse 🙏

charisk/flowisk is so good when you don't have a bitch in your ear telling you it's incest

[sunforgrace]

the thing with destiel well we go there will never be another them and the thing about destiel is. everyone goes oooooh soulmates ooooh destiny fated lovers and sure okay. but also get back to me when your chosen special guys failed to come together in every single universe except this one. when the authorgod themself tried to keep them apart and failed. metanarratively as well. quite literally in this one universe. every other version played out their fates followed their destiny stuck to the script. except here. in spite of it all the love was here.

[specterthief]

there is actually one thing i personally found ddlc did better than totono, which is monika's role as a character herself! miyuki is not only a love interest but the enforced first love interest, the Main Girl, but monika is hitting on a very specific character niche in bishoujo games and their fandoms (the cutely-designed female side character with no route who develops a cult fan following, inspires tons of doujin work, and maybe ultimately gets focus on a fandisc if fans are lucky) and an important mechanical role in genuine dating sims (the tutorial/info guy) and i think that actually serves the meta plot in a far cleverer way

she's a character evoking a trope all about the players, their desire for something out of reach and the creativity that can inspire, playing a gameplay role that in true dating sims is basically part of the user interface more than a character allowed to be part of the action - again, a role defined by interaction with the player themself. having that character be the one to fall in love with the player rather than the main character and rewrite the game to give herself the opportunity she doesn't have in a narrative she's not meant to be an active player in is really smart and something that really shines if you're familiar with the genre conventions she's playing with! totono might have done the game-altering fourth wall breaking metanarrative and tokimemo4 might have done the female info guy turning into a hidden yandere love interest, but the combination of the two is genuinely really good.

it's a shame plus seemed so determined to tear down so much of what the original built tbh

[fanonical]

i want to see a fanfic where the metanarrative is that this is a fic the character is writing about themself

[quackadero]

in general we think about WX a whole lot even if it's not always cohesive and generally along the lines of rotating them in our brain like a microwave or mentally drawing little hearts around them and kicking our legs like a teenager. They're such a fascinating character to us fr!!

YEAH ME TOO, I think about them all the time both en media res and metanarrative sense. They've been a character in development since late 2000s/early 2010s, and in some ways, it really shows. But you can also see where those in charge of their narrative are actively improving the nuances of their story while maintaining the morbid comedic tone of the game.

Having them be an intrinsically important character linked to the "main" character's storyline was not something I expected (because I expected whoever makes the ultimate decisions about what to include and not include, which I have no idea if that is the actual writer or their boss or someone else, to not make the character who everyone misgenders and posts 500000 times about how they are right to misgender them a somewhat pivotal player).

I also did not expect their backstory to be handled so well. It really felt like those who worked on the animation were careful to respect their nonbinary/agender-ness while also making a trans metaphor that had its emotional complications to those involved, which is a far more mature take than I even hoped. They also kept their asshole nature, which is hugely important to me. I don't want them to be the perfect little trans icon, I want them to be the messy ego-centric mechanical menace that they established themself to be.

Not to mention in the narrative itself how interesting thinking about whether they are a continuation of the person who put on the helmet, a brain copy (like in SOMA), or a new instance alltogether that merely used parts of a brain upload for programming/sentience. And then there is how THEY feel about themself and what their identity is. Do they consider themself a continuation of the human, an upgrade, a new entity, or maybe they are still internally grappling with self-identity. And also to mention how they practically plead to some of the npc machines and the celestial champion to ally with them while always throwing shade at anything organic. They want to pass (trans term) as a robot soooo bad. I loved when they crushed their empathy module in their hands, it felt so right for them.

I love thinking about them soooo much.

[eastgaysian]

curious if u have more thoughts on the 'durge as a metanarrative' thing

i have a vague sense that i saw someone mention this idea in a post or article, thought the idea was super interesting, and have been rolling it around my head ever since. however i don't remember who wrote that or if i just imagined it so if anyone else has seen this pls link me...

so broadly speaking, when it comes to giving players freedom of choice in an rpg, i think the most difficult player behavior for a developer to work with is npc killing. if you let the player kill every npc they run across, that's probably going to fuck up your design in some way, if not create a full softlock. those npcs provide information, serve mechanical purposes as merchants/healers/gatekeepers or openers, give out quests and then powerful or story-significant rewards for those quests, etc, etc. allowing players to kill everyone they meet while making sure that doesn't break the game requires a lot of work put into contingencies that most players won't see. but if you don't let players kill npcs/make certain important npcs unkillable, you limit player freedom and break immersion. todd howard what do you mean i can't kill the guy who introduced me to windhelm by being racist in the middle of the city. what greater narrative purpose does he serve

on the player's side, though, someone who's going around killing the story-essential npcs probably isn't playing the game 'as intended,' which is to say having fun by immersing themselves in the world of the game and making choices based on the character they're roleplaying. someone who's going around killing every npc possible is almost definitely playing against the game, just doing it to see what happens and find out if the game has a breaking point - and they're probably not even really having fun with it, because they're not only cutting themself off from the game's content, but going through the time and labor-intensive slog of killing hundreds of npcs spread across the entirety of the game world.

i think the dark urge as a concept offers some fun potential to play with both the developer and player side of npc killing. it's a fully intended, deliberately designed way of experiencing bg3 that hinges upon you as player and as character being encouraged to murder people, and it gets kicked off by an npc getting killed without your input - an npc that can have a presence throughout the entire game as well as offer you an extremely powerful quest reward. after that, though, every kill is up to the player. sceleritas fel urges you along and promises rewards, but there's one (1) dc 14 check between you and a murderless durge playthrough.

so the dark urge provides a story template where it becomes immersive and in-character for you to kill everyone possible, unlocking new story beats and rewards by killing npcs and losing out on their content, but it's also completely possible to interpret you, the player, as the irresistible dark urge making your in-game character kill as many people as possible for the hell of it. the moment in dak-wai's playthrough that got stuck in my brain forever was when i killed isobel, just to see what would happen (i saved before with the full intent of loading it back up and doing a Good Run), and realized that this hadn't broken their paladin oath. i'm still uncertain if this is an intended aspect of a dark urge playthrough or just a quirk of the flags surrounding isobel's death/kidnapping, but combined with the dialogue options that allow durge to insist that they kill as a result of compulsions against their will, the implications fascinate me.

in a durge playthrough, the game allows you to fully separate the decision you the player made from the decision the character you're playing would have made, and it makes sense in the story. that's cool as hell! i would've loved if larian leaned into this a little more. not necessarily in a way that fully breaks the fourth wall, but more 'evil run' content that is exclusive to a game where you've killed the good guys would add a lot of depth to this idea, as well as more exploration of the extent to which The Urge can be separated from your character, and just straight up more scenes where the player gets to fully choose whether to lean into or resist the urge. in-universe, it's bhaal's fault, but out of universe, that's all You babey. you, the player doing a kill all npcs run for your youtube channel, are the murder god who spawned a child designed to cause as many deaths as possible. don't you think that's neat? i think that's neat

[mister13eyond]

It's okay that you called me Anon, don't worry. Is one of your assholes also trying to reset every single alternative universe you've created? My yes or rather is trying to cancel a certain event, completely ignoring the butterfly effect it could have. For him, chaos theory is nonsense created by humans.

OH THAT SOUNDS DELIGHTFUL AND TERRIBLE i *love* a metanarrative aware/multiverse-destroying character [chef kiss] NOT TO COMPARE TO UNDERTALE AUS but i always loved the whole back and forth happening with certain undertale aus where some iterations wanted to DESTROY the concept of alternate universes/timeline offshoots and others wanted to INSPIRE artists and lead to the creation of MORE offshoots? it's super fun, that level of self-interaction between yourself as a creator and your character as a narrative element but also a RESPONSE to your creation is SO fun!

NONE OF MINE ARE ON THAT LEVEL but I think the closest would be Zinnia- rambling/oc lore under the cut bc it got long!

SO SOME FRAMEWORK IS NECESSARY in my comic universe, angels are beings connected to the mana that makes up the universe, which they can cast as "miracles", while demons are beings made of mana who cannot draw it from the universe around them and must draw it from individuals to sustain themselves instead

As a result of this, FALLEN angels (which Zinnia is) are angels who have not only been cast out of heaven but also CUT OFF from the flow of universal mana

However, because of this, fallen angels can be something like black holes that can wipe out entire city blocks by draining all the mana and life force from beings around them. They're incredibly dangerous. As a result, not only are fallen angels RARE, but heaven also takes precautions when exiling them by shackling them. These shackles act as sort of power limiters, making it so they can only draw mana on a very small scale (and not from humans- it has to be obtained from mana-based beings like demons.) These shackles cannot be removed by the fallen angel themself, and must be removed by someone else.

Since it's pretty dangerous to create a fallen angel, and even WITH the shackles can still be risky, it is NOT done often. It's much more common for cases like Asphodel to happen- where someone is not-so-subtly encouraged to leave and not come back, but no *official* exile is made. They're still connected to the universal mana flow, but are Heavily Discouraged from using it. Like a kid who hasn't been fully disowned by their parents, but HAS stopped getting financial support in any way.

As a result, an angel has to REALLY fuck up to be exiled. In Zinnia's case, he was doing some Extremely Shady business dealings in the renaissance era- he was caught selling indulgences and making promises to certain religious figures that they'd have a guaranteed spot in heaven if they'd just help him with this particular political move he wanted to see happen, you know.... (I'm not saying he dealt with the Borgias, but i'm not NOT saying he dealt with the Borgias, you know?)

It's been A Long Time since then and Zinnia has mostly been kept from any large-scale scheming by a combination of being shackled and also generally everyone in his circle wising up to his nonsense, but he IS still pretty desperate to get his shackles off, and isn't above lying or deceiving others to do so. He's also relentlessly petty and does things like "sic a demon hunter on a demon because he pissed you off one time."

He's probably the biggest ACTUAL threat in the cast, but because he's got a poor reputation and is shackled so he can't use his power for destructive means, he's kind of undergone This form of characterization:

If he ever manages to actually fool anyone into unshackling him, he could be an Actual Genuine Threat, but since he hasn't had any success, he's just like a mean cat that lives in Damian's house and causes small-scale problems.

[maestro-of-clockwork]

[[ MAGGIE’S META MANIA ]]

[[ a metanarrative study of hyperfixation and comfort characters ]]

It seemed they would always return to this place.

How many years had it been? Half a decade? Quite a long time, especially when you’re young. All of the pain and all of the suffering that had been caused inadvertently had not kept them from finding refuge in the void after all this time. After all, their best friend was there.

They knew it wasn’t real, they knew He wasn’t real. But that didn’t matter, because His impact was real, it was to them at least. He was the one thing that remained for them, the one part of this ordeal they had kept near and dear to their heart. And for Him, they were willing to return.

Maggie stood at the door to the study, preparing themself to return here once more. They had always been in out and out of this place quite a bit over the past few years, but it seemed time to return again. This… macabre fixation of theirs would not leave their mind easily, it seemed. Especially when that fixation could speak to you personally.

Despite everything about Him, they couldn’t help but find a bizarre sort of comfort in His presence, a comfort that lasted despite everything that had changed around you. He was still there, He would always be there. And they liked that, that’s why they always returned to this dark place. Always knocking politely at the door of His study, hoping He would answer.

“Uncle Antonio?”

He'd been so immersed in his writing, humming away for so long that the knock had almost made him jump.

Despite not having even seen who was at his study door yet, he already knew who it was. No matter how drastically a person changed, he always seemed to recognize their presence.

"Yes, my dear~...?"

[theamityelf]

Okay, Interview with the Vampire.

timeloop

Lestat relives his last day with Louis (the Mardi Gras ball, I mean) again and again, trying to make it go differently. To placate (or displace) Claudia, to position Antoinette differently, to dance longer. Episode ends with him waking up alone in New Orleans. Maybe it's storming outside and we can imply it's the same day Louis will later show up (or we're in 2005; I do wonder what Lestat might have been doing if he was indeed in New Orleans in the summer of 2005.)

whodunit

Theatre de Vampire hijinks. Someone committed a minor act of mischief, and they go way overboard trying to figure out who did it. Basically a trial. Everyone gets suspected at least once. Louis probably is suspected for the longest time, but it wasn't him.

musical

Theatre de Vampire hijinks. It's some sort of weird vampire holiday for them. They're all committed to expressing their feelings through song. Louis isn't part of the coven, so he refuses to sing. Everyone is annoyed. Maybe he grudgingly sings at the end and Armand is enchanted by his voice.

beach trip

Okay, this is the Zuko Alone of Armand episodes. He goes to the beach on a sunny day, when most other vampires can't reach him there, and has random interactions with a bunch of humans. It's very quaint and wholesome but also melancholy.

random genre change (especially if it's to a noir detective thing)

Oh boy, the best I got is a classic two-dates episode, like you know those episodes where a character has two very different social engagements on the same day and keeps switching between them and finds themself in the wrong wig at the wrong place or whatever and has to come clean? That, but it's Louis going between a family reunion with Grace's descendants (which has continued into the night; it's nighttime) and a very serious other thing. Vampire meeting, idk.

one where they get randomly meta and fourth wall breaky but then never acknowledge it again

The metanarrative is already a pretty integral part of the story, but this episode could be a characters-read-the-books thing. So, clip show. They argue a lot about how things happen, what was said and how it was said. A lot of replaying events in different ways, Lestat holding the book and doing dramatic readings and not letting anyone else hold the book.

one where something happened but we as the audience don't actually get to see how it happened and only see it through the unreliable narrated flashbacks as recollected by the characters

The show.

episodes that i think every tv show should have:

timeloop

whodunit

musical

beach trip

random genre change (especially if it's to a noir detective thing)

one where they get randomly meta and fourth wall breaky but then never acknowledge it again

one where something happened but we as the audience don't actually get to see how it happened and only see it through the unreliable narrated flashbacks as recollected by the characters

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

"Authenticity" and Live Performance

There was a piece of advice years and years ago on the topic of streaming, basically telling you "Be genuine, because the audience can spot fake enthusiasm from miles off."

Three things:

Can we? Recent events involving fakers being caught have drawn into focus how easily they continued to dupe the 'tubegoing public for years. A more directly apt example, in spite of appearing in a different medium: Your barista is not actually excited to hand you your drink. And while anyone who has themself done a service industry job knows it's basically coffee kayfabe (coffabe?) there are enough people who genuinely believe it that there are a bunch of dating advice columns whose first piece of advice is to tell lonely younger men that No. No, sweetie. No. I know you saw it in a Hallmark movie, that doesn't make it real. No.

Vaguely related to the idea of people being easily fooled on account of wanting to believe the thing: If you're watching a stream or a vid of a guy playing a video game and he's so angry about it, you're likely to apply suspension of disbelief not just to the video game but to the metanarrative of the guy. Because it's more fun. I mean, you could refuse to believe in the narrative constructed before you when watching someone scream in rage after the second time falling into the same pit. But if you're going to, why watch at all? Are you defending the Sanctity of Truth(tm)?

Finally, there's the fact that mugging is an acquired skill. Making a face for the camera that reflects how you really felt during an in-game event, as opposed to looking at the screen with a deadpan expression the whole time? That's a thing you can learn to do. Performing the emotions you're really having so that people watching can more clearly tell you're having them and your reactions mesh with the thing you're viewing to form a coherent narrative...is something you can and probably should learn to do, if you're going to have a live performance job. Which in turn means hamming up your responses to a video game could be more honest, more authentic, than giving a middling reaction and going, "Hey, that was kind of neat."

I didn't really have anywhere I was going with this, or someone to call out or even an idea to debunk exactly. I just feel like there's an idea of Authenticity in live media and I had a question of whether some of the larger-than-life responses were "real." Like, were the cast of Critical Role AS impressed/touched by the animated season intro as they appeared to be? What does it matter? 1. We have no way of knowing for sure, 2. We already go into an invented, fictional universe with them to watch them, and that constructed relationship is the actual appropriate level of relationship for us to have with them, and 3. It's entirely possible if they weren't trained actors doing acting that we would still have an inaccurate idea of their excitement level watching the video.

The real reason you shouldn't fake excitement to try and get clicks on YouTube is because it's such a self-directed job that if you're faking excitement you shouldn't be attempting it as a job. It'll just make you miserable and the odds of even halfway-decent pay are terrible.

[metanarrates]

A RAMBLY ASIDE ABOUT DECONSTRUCTION AND METANARRATIVE, FOLLOWING MY LAST POST ABOUT THE DICHOTOMY OF CONSUMER AND CONSUMED IN ORV:

part of the genius of orv's metanarrative is that from the beginning it has set itself up in a paradoxical state of reality. the world of twsa was fiction, filled with characters who were not real, and therefore, the morality of reading their stories as a form of emotional sustenance was not a problem. the world of kim dokja's reality was real, and he was a living person, and therefore, it was monstrously horrible for the world to treat his trauma as a form of entertainment. there is a clear line there between "types" of consumer, and a clear moral difference between how those types of consumption should be treated.

but then the world of twsa becomes kim dokja's world. and everything starts blurring. he's always been both consumer and consumed. it starts to get literal. there is a paradox here.

initially, orv deals with this aspect of metanarrative by clearly showing the constellations as immoral consumers (of both the Ungrateful Entitled Audience of Fiction sense and of the Person Who Is Fine Watching Real Life Trauma For Entertainment sense.) the incarnations become the victims of the constellations' voyeurism. orv asks the question "what would it mean to read stories if the characters in them became real?" and then answers it by saying "their audience would be torturing those characters." the blur of fiction and reality is easily sorted out, morally, by having the constellations be evil.

none of these conclusions are untrue. in fact, they're completely true. it is uniquely painful for the incarnations to live subject to the gaze of the constellations. but orv built its ideas on a blurred foundation because it wanted to deconstruct its own initial conclusions. so the narrative zooms out, and then zooms out again.

kim dokja IS a constellation. both literally, and in a meta sense. he is a reader. he is a consumer. in his life before this, the only thing keeping him from suicide was reading a story every day. emotionally, he needed that story to survive. and for the constellations, that becomes literally true. if a constellation does not sustain themself on stories, they die. they have no choice if they want to keep on living. and in other aspects of the story, orv's exploration of morality has evolved enough where it no longer considers needing to survive at the expense of others an unequivocal evil. it can be evil, but it is also a situation that people are forced into, and it's not unfair of them to struggle to survive under those circumstances. the morality cannot be easily sorted into black and white.

so we now have sympathy for the constellations. and then we zoom out again.

the constellations themselves are not immune to consumption. by each other, of course, but also as a result of the structure they live in. WE exist. not literally within the text, but AS A FACT OF ORV BEING A STORY, it has an audience. we are the audience. the text itself, and our gaze on it, constrains its characters. every one of them, including constellations and incarnations. they are all consumer and consumed, in this world where fiction and reality are not clearly delineable. they are all characters to us.

so how does orv deal with this? the conclusion of "people need stories to survive, so it is a complicated fact that people will consume stories" is a good one. and not necessarily untrue, once again. but its not the complete picture, so orv deconstructs itself again.

immoral consumers exist. there are ways to approach both fiction and reality that ARE harmful. both for others, and for oneself - I haven't even touched on all the ways that kim dokja's relationship to fiction can harm him too. but fiction is complex. it makes up people, and it makes up communication between people. it is the building block of understanding between a LOT of people and the world they live in. it's a good thing that it exists in the world.

what defines the relationship between people and fiction? a lot of the times, it's whether they love and seek to understand the stories they interact with.

understanding is often imperfect, mind. everyone approaches stories with their own viewpoint, one that is limited. im doing it right now. kim dokja does it with twsa. similarly, SOMETHING LIKE ORV, as broad in scope as it is, can't fully define the relationship between people and fiction. its metanarrative, as good at it is, is incomplete. definitionally, all texts are limited and have to constrain the subjects within. all viewpoints are limited and have to constrain the subjects of their perceptions. there will always be contradictions, paradoxes, and the simple inability to cross a gap in translation across the fourth wall. and the discussion of morality is ALWAYS there.

but orv loves fiction, and it loves the reader. kim dokja loves the story. WE love the story. none of this can exactly resolve every paradox involved with fiction, reality, and morality, but it can lend depth and meaning to all of it! it can make survival via fiction meaningful. that love is beautiful and worthy of being nurtured.

and that's the semifinal piece of deconstruction in orv. it started from a premise that is inherently difficult to rigidly structure, and ends by deconstructing every structure that could get rid of contradiction. it doesn't seek to obliterate contradiction, but to illuminate it, and show both the good and the bad. orv loves complexity, and it loves its reader. and it asks: what is love if not an attempt at understanding?

but of course, there's one last necessary piece of deconstruction. if we accept the idea that these characters can be considered real people, at least in our minds, then we know the text constrains them. it's not immoral that that is the case, but the text IS itself a structure, and this is a story very committed to deconstructing most of its own philosophical attempts at structuralism.

so they escape the text. it was the only way a metanarrative like this COULD end. the story itself can no longer contain them. an ending can't easily sum up everything there is about a story, especially because so much of storytelling is dependent on the viewpoint of a reader. and orv loves its reader.

how we view the ending is dependent on us. it's always been that way, hasn't it?

at any given moment I am ready to start going off about the metanarrative in orv. you never know. it could start happening right now

[makingshortstorieslong]

does,,,does anyone understand the radio show meta narrative in The New Albion Radio Hour: a Dieselpunk Opera? is it comprehensible or...? are there theories at least??

[nonbinarygamzee]

so if gamzee running out of slime didn't make him go crazy what did? (/gen, it's been a long time since i read the comic.)

so. im gonna start by being honest and say i dont really like or appreciate the descriptor used here. i think the hs fandom at large needs to take a step back and look at the implications going on with gamzee's character, both the unintentional and the on purpose. what are you (and hussie, obviously.) saying about addiction when you frame an addicts sobriety as the instigation for violence? to frame the substance as what keeps them 'in check'? addiction and sobriety both are morally neutral states to live in, and both are also a state of inherent vulnerability. even if homestuck itself placed gamzee's sobriety as the instigating Thing (which imo it actually doesnt, at least at the time myrderstuck takes place), i think it's the responsibility of the reader to take those things critically, and especially not compound upon them. especially so looking at gamzee, who is a highly racialized character, and coded to be mentally ill. notably the other characters to deal with substance abuse in canon are white coded, and get to be sympathetic in the eyes of the narrative.

for your actual question though, as i said before it's pretty likely gamzee was already sober before the events of murderstuck, for most of if not all of the time spent in the veil. they interact with others absolutely normally on the meteor, all the way up until the instigating trolling session with dave where he shows them the miracles video. Gamzee, feeling disrespected and unsure of their thus far lifelong withstanding (and likely highly escapist) faith, runs off to lick their wounds in solitude. they find lil cal, who as we know is a conduit for the will of lord english. theres been debate about how exacrly LE's manipulation works- is it flat out mind control, or is it more subtle?- theres basis for both ideas in the text, but i think people often forget about the other times this happens to characters and how strong of a hold it seems to get, whether the characters are technically coherent or not. See basically bro's whole... thing, the eyestab x2 combo, etc.

theres something more interesting going on with cal and gamzee than a lot of people give credit for, i think. obviously you have the more straightforward stuff going on where gamzee is questioning their faith, dealing with being essentially friendless after tavros' death, etc. and finds something that starts talking to them about it, and begins to believe that through Cal they will rediscover the truth to their religion.

looking into cal's eyes now gamzee not only has the burn of dave telling them their religion is basically fake bullshit, but they get a glimpse also at Lord English, which is to say they get a glimpse at themself, being a part of Lord English, and therefore a part of the figure that CREATED their religion in the first place.

more metatextually (but NOT less important or less canon because homestuck is a story about metanarrative and being a story. i can not stress this enough.) gamzee also gets a look at themself as a written character in a narrative and all that entails- the fact that they are a joke character, that they are a *character* at all, and that homestuck is a story where the lot of them are essentially stupid for being there in the first place. again i have to stress this is like, part of the point, homestuck is incredibly self referential.

and because im feeling evil and bold i guess i'll throw in some risque feelings on murderstuck as well; gamzee never actually outright attacks anybody. they threaten karkat, sure, but for a lot of reasons that could be its own post entirely i read that as largely gamzee asking for *help* from the guy who has thus far positioned himself as an authority figure- and is gamzee's only living friend. at the very least its a warning, which is more than we get from anyone else looking to kill their friends during this trip. when they kill equius, its because, at karkats behest, he comes after them (and well. its also a revenge narrative for equius using them nonconsensually for sexual gratification. sorry not sorry.). not to say there 100% explicitly isn't any intent there, because there is the argument of gamzee potentially killing equius specifically because of his own soul being needed for the creation of LE. but i just think its not as likely as equius died because he's the one who showed up. when they kill dear sweet nepeta, its because she, again, instigates when she witnesses equius' death. please note i am not making a moral judgement on nepeta here, just pointing it out. the tendency not to start the altercations they end up in is actually something that continues through their story during other pivitol fight scenes. and while this is a bit forward from murderstuck, i think its also relevent to point out that we actually see them interact with characters on the meteor pre-retcon with no intent to cause harm (rose), even feeling regretful and being openly self depreciating. it isn't like gamzee just continued trying to kill everyone.

im not sure how to close this one out for basically; i love them your honor. and so can you.

[4lph4kidz]

so i completely get what youre saying with the jakeposting but as a lit nerd i think you may be missing the sense of irony his character holds? as well as hussies involvement with the text of homestuck pretty much always being ironic? idk hs is full of irony and metanarratives and with tavros too its pretty regularly called attention to the absurdity of him being bullied by vriska for the disability she gave him. i just think its a little more aware than "let me bully this little queer here" especially if u view it thru the lens of hussie as someone whos relized their nonbinary as well and jakes relationship with gender. as well as their repeated statements that their characters represent a part of them and their relationship to themself.

oh, yeah. i'm well aware. my post was intended to be a flippant/hyperbolic reiteration of what i find interesting about the character, including the sheer absurdity of how he is framed on a meta level. like on some level part of why i like him is because of those metatextual elements, even if i do also sincerely like the character and am dissapointed with how he is written. i actually do respect & try to engage with the writing of homestuck for what it is, and for the record i think getting overly defensive over fictional characters is kind of silly, but like... i do still feel like there are some issues with how characters like jake and tavros are characterised despite that. i can understand what's going on and still find it lacking.

[vfig]

the knowledge of the player that the story isnt real and the knowledge of the characters within it that their world isnt real is two sides of the same coin (or perhaps, as the saying goes, the same side of two coins):

for the player, the piece calling attention to its own fictionality right from the beginning (as both p1 and p2 do in different ways)—the defamiliarization—is operating aesthetically, of course, but is much more importantly a moral challenge: "this is all just a story/play/game: your doctor role is not real; the people are not real; the disease is not real; their deaths are not real. i want you to care about them anyway, to strive to save them (and yourself) as if they were."

but this metanarrative is equitably minded: it lays the same challenge before its characters. they all have at least some hint that they and their world are not real and immediate; for a few, such as aglaya, this knowledge is explicit and a crucial motivator. but they are all challenged in the same way to take the existence of themselves and those around them as valuable and meaningful, even as this existence is inevitably curtailed by the boundaries of the narrative.

(as an aside, i will note that the unusual seriousness with which pathologic treats its characters—and especially its children—and the agency it gives them within the story relates to this: the player's mechanically favoured position in the game is narratively deemphasised, on purpose, and the other characters elevated. so that each of the other characters can honestly view themself as the "main character" in their world. this is a very rare approach in computer games, which mostly treat their characters mechanically, instrumentally, as tools or playthings for someone else, somewhat akin to the infantilization with which adults in our real world culture tend to treat children—and not just in our real world, as khan complains.)

it is perfectly possible, as a player, to play pathologic without rising to this challenge; to play it as "just a video game", chasing after merely mechanical rewards of achievements or "zero deaths", savescumming to attain an aesthetically or mechanically perfect outcome. that is the same moral infraction as a character who decides that what they do doesnt matter because "nothing is real" (hi p2 grief!). they are expected to act in character during the play as much as the player is.

(note that when i say "moral infraction" it is not to pass judgement on the moral character of the player, but to point out that they are then engaging the game using only their aesthetic sense, and not their moral sense.)

however, there is a fundamental difference for the characters within the game: whether they rise to the challenge or not is preordained by how the game is written and programmed: "The Law", as the characters call it. this lack of free will is only two-thirds applied to the bachelor/haruspex/changeling characters, of course, as they each get their own chance to be the actual agent (and yet still constrained, by both The Law and the puppeteering by the player who inhabits them). even when not inhabited by the player, they too recognise the challenge given to them: witness the conversation, after meeting The Powers That Be, with clara—the "you knew?!?!" moment in hbomberguys video—where she makes this case more or less explicitly. of course for clara there is an added challenge with the twin situation in not being sure if she herself is even real within the "real world" as it exists for her!

(another aside: the kaleidoscopic nature extends beyond just the moral aspects of the story and its framing, but pervades everything: you climb the staircases to heaven and hear sounds from the "outer realities" at the top. the taboo against digging the earth and cutting bodies is not only because they are sacred and valuable, but because it might reveal the floorboards of the stage or the stuffing within the dolls. you kill a man or cure him, and hear children crying or applauding as you do so. you die and the theatre director gives you a quick debrief before sending you out to act the role again.)

is this all a mess? yes. it couldnt be otherwise. its not laying out a thesis statement on any of these matters, but weaving a complicated tapestry where threads go back and forth from one edge to the other, and from the front to the back, and back to the front again. and when you look at it hanging on the wall, you can never be quite sure if you have it upside down or not, or if what you are looking at is the front or the back of it all.

A bit on postmodernism

I understand why Ice-Pick Lodge added the postmodernist performative layers to Pathologic, if only from the purely gamist perspective - for starters, to explain the save/load mechanics and multiple deaths.

I enjoy some of the meta plot elements such as the Haruspex meeting the next actor assigned for his role, or Murky's Haruspex doll, or Aglaya's doomed rebellion, or the pantomimes in the theater.

(The text in the image reads: non-pantomimity).

Yet still I feel that layer devalues the player characters' (and thus, the player's) achievements a lot. If a healer saves real lives in a real city, that's meaningful. If a healer plays a role in a community theater play, better or worse, a lot of that meaning disappears, much less if said play and said community theater are themselves a game played by children.

That is particularly apparent when thinking about the events after the games - for instance, writing post-ending fanfics. Essentially, either the setting is treated as "real", and then the postmodernist elements have to be danced around somehow, or the whole endeavour becomes meaningless from the start - or, at least, devolves entirely into further purely postmodernist play.

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Memory Alteration stories are hard to write and often hard to read as well - sometimes emotionally but sometimes just mechanically.

Also, no examples because...

Look one time I saw a video on Youtube that was like, "Top 6 Games Where the Protagonist was Dead All Along! Spoilers for the following games:"

...

Yeah.

A core problem they hit is the trouble of any metanarrative or unreliable narration: The existence of a story that is not true in the story we're hearing leaves us double-checking whether any of our information is reliable, and can accidentally draw our attention to the fact that the whole thing's fictitious on account of being...fiction.

But - and I think this is particularly true when there's some aspect of the plot that seems especially fucked? - there is something very satisfying about finding out that some horrible thing that has been going on was the result of some evil entity literally inserting themself into the life of the protagonist. We, the audience, were right: He would never have put up with that shit, even from a spouse! She wouldn't have acted that way at the prom! Those two never would have gotten together!

Naturally this runs the risk of having us considering our headcanon more canon than the book we're reading, which is a fine practice in general but can reduce our enjoyment of the individual work of literature in hand during the reading. But it's difficult to overstate how much satisfaction it brings a theorist when done right.

There's also something related to the Conspiracy Theory Support. That is, that when there's something horribly wrong with the world (in this case thankfully a fictitious one) there's something comforting in believing that it's horribly wrong because someone super evil is actively making things worse for people, rather than there being a lot of suffering because some people with hands on the handles of power are kind of dim and besides that the world's dreadfully complicated. Pure Evil is a lot easier to punch in the face than Everyone Stupid And Also The Complexity Of The World.

Also there's something ironically less painful about "your real dad was murdered by a changeling who made you forget him and believe your dad was the abusive shithead the changeling was toward you for strategic purposes" than the simple "your real dad was a shithead for no reason."