#tmagp s1e09

[theboombutton]

The interesting thing about tmagp episode 9 is that, from one perspective, it's about a pair of dice that kill you if you roll a crit fail. And in TMA that would be very End-coded. Games of chance were End-coded, and death is obviously The End. Open and shut case.

Except it's not, here. The statement giver had never seen anyone roll a 2 before he ran into Gary in that coffee shop, even after thousands of rolls. That's not an End artifact. Those dice are going out of their way not to kill anyone, save those who try to part with them.

The compulsion to roll feels like the Web, but is it? Certainly games of chance can become addicting, but I don't think that's the whole story. The Web is about the fear of the loss of control, yes, but it's also about something else controlling you instead. Here that something else is an embodiment of "random" chance - although again, it's not properly-random, not even pseudorandom. I have thoughts on that but they're best addressed further on.

Weirdly, of all the manifestations of Fear from TMA, this statement seems most akin to Jude Perry's - rolling the dice with other people's lives and fortunes, for the thrill of sometimes devastating them.

Which brings me back to the possibility of AU Fears.

In the Protocolverse, why shouldn't there be a Fear associated with chance and luck and fate and misfortune that happens for no good reason? A fear of lacking control and losing everything, without anyone else necessarily having that control.

This is where the way the dice are rigged becomes possibly meaningful. Their outcomes aren't random - they're what humans expect random to look like. They operate according to the gambler's fallacy, where the longer a chain of bad luck you have the more you're due for a good roll, and vice versa. Snake eyes aren't just a normal outcome of the 1-in-36 chance of rolling 2d6 - they're reserved for when someone is cursed with truly rotten luck. Notably that isn't true of boxcars: those just happen sometimes, without prerequisite.

Logically, a Fear of Misfortune wouldn't operate on the actual rules of probability, would it? It would be shaped by the superstitions of those that feared it.

(Also, I hope this statement puts the "they're not fears they're desires!" theory to bed. This guy didn't want the dice, and didn't especially want to roll them, but seemed compelled to anyway.)

[theboombutton]