#user: serenpedac

[onewomancitadel]

@serenpedac said:

Rogue leader theory

It seems that my one ever-enduring resonsibility in fandom is to shake things up. This, too, is very Solas of me.

I'm very surprised on this note. I initially dismissed the theory as I thought it was too obvious, and that's why I didn't make a post about it because I didn't want to seem stupid in falling for the bait. My chief argument for it lay in the mechanics of the CYOA, outside of the matter of characterisation, framing, subtle foreshadowing, etc.

There's pretty much no reason to build up the relationship as it does (with the choices about how to handle her absence, etc.) unless it's leading somewhere. So either Rebecca is going to sacrifice herself for the detective (and the sacrifice is contingent upon this background relationship check) or there's some sort of betrayal coming which impacts the character in different ways depending on that standing relationship. This would be bittersweet for those who chose to repair the relationship vs. may punish those who didn't build up the relationship (which might play into some of Felix/Farah's and Nate/Nat's suggestions to push you in that direction). I'm thinking about it from a mechanics perspective because special attention has been paid to it - in a romance story no less.

It's possible that she's some other shadowy figure (a Trapper?) but I think the fact that the Rogue leader is connected to Rook in the epilogue, near possessively in fact, the connection feels obvious to me. I'm saying this in not having read a counter fan theory, but I'm not really interested in analysing this for the sake of theorising or the sake of the text, but just based on my own speculation and gut feeling.

The Rogue leader is notably a 'she' which feels important too.

The reason I considered it bait is because the antagonistic feeling underscoring the relationship seems like maybe it might trick you into thinking she's a secret baddie, when she really just loves her kid... but given the fact that most of the characterisation is very straightforward, e.g. Sin really is good and it doesn't trick you, I began to diverge from that idea.

Having got through two thirds of my Morgan playthrough and discovered that the Agency has [redacted] to her, which I'm very upset about, I also think it's fully plausible that the Rogues aren't entirely evil either. So it might not be a clean betrayal story; Rebecca's probably not totally evil.

She doesn't want you to join the Agency because she's working against them and they're not good news. This may influence the tenor of her threats - she's 'trying' to be as dangerous as possible to scare you away. On the one hand, you have her asking if you're sure, over and over again, about what you're doing; on the other, she's doing what she can to try and scare you off. The face of the mother vs. the face of the professional.

This may also then muddy the waters about the decision to make the maa-alused join the Agency, in what was initially a 'good' choice now becomes more grey, and vice versa; a failure that a lot of people presumably make because they're romantics playing a romance-motivated CYOA, in choosing to save the love interest over Sanja, kind of retroactively becomes something else. Now that'd be a fun way to recontextualise the choices you've made and provide a thematic refresher at the relative halfway mark.

There are going to be seven fucking books? That sounds really difficult to carry the romantic tension.

Yes, there are sex scenes with Morgan (as I later discovered) but Jean doesn't just want to have meaningless sex, he wants to make love, so they haven't done anything yet 🥰

I also discovered the long hair was Ava, which is fun... I enjoy finding out new things... like the fact that Adam once had long hair... and now he doesn't... so fuck me actually... (I'm still laughing that I managed to pick the knight).

Yeah, no, my position on present tense is uncommon if not actively disliked in fandom, and it's just a matter of preference.

(Small footnote here in that I am also very sure that your writing is very good, and to my recollection English is not your mother tongue - in which case I am in awe of the ability to write creatively in another language. I still don't know how Nabokov did it. Take the following with a grain of salt, and also know that this is my roughly general position; I am also kind of obsessed with getting to the bottom of what makes writing sound good).

But I think people really struggle a lot with their writing 'sounding' like fanfiction and being unable to transcend the narrative form accepted in fandom, and that that narrative form can get incestuous really quickly and sound bad. The question to me is to tease out 'how to make present tense sound good' - like I said, there are instances where I think it's used deftly, in a way which does not mimic past tense narration - because outside of fanfiction, and even within fanfiction, most writers are working within the boundaries of past tense. It's not a codified tradition, it's a very folk one.

That in itself is a source of dispute outside of fandom in the literary sphere though; to what end the construction of prose, the 'niceness' of prose, matters, is in full contention. There's a desire to transcend prose, a desire to shit on prose because it's not cool, or to view it merely as a windowpane (literally - 'windowpane prose') into that storytelling world. It is completely fucking stupid. The only tools you have as an author are your prose and how you choose to disseminate information. It goes beyond a matter of creativity (how to make writing beautiful) and to a question of what the actual point of writing is and how you are empowered in telling a story.

That's what informs my reading as well. How has the author chosen to group information? How have they chosen to deliver these ideas - down to the skeleton of the story? Mason/Morgan introducing where the thralls are imprisoned and being grouped with them narratively is what informed my reading of their past - although I'm not sure how this theory will hold out, because the parallel between them and the thralls may be only be metaphorical but not absolute supernatural enslavement, I was still thematically correct (especially on the note of imprisonment). I do still think this is how I would've chosen to have written them, because the possibility that a thrall could become a vampire shakes up some of the mythos (and provides the spectre of redemption for the thralls in the story - why do they or don't they get to be full vampires?). This really goes for Rebecca too: this is how I would sensibly implement the mechanic for full narrative force, and, of course, to fully deliver on the 'is the Agency good or bad?' By the end of the series, you can evolve it through to a decision to either redeem the Agency or to close it down. And then what happens to the next shadowy supernatural organisation - or do you tell the world of it all?

And, of course, do Adam and Detective Majestic get over torturing each other and finally have sex. I don't think it will ever happen because she will just start crying looking at him because his pain makes her so sad, but she would totally let him suck her blood.

A scattering of TWC impressions, which I played because a mutual posted fanart featuring a guy with long hair and I wanted to see if he had long hair in the game. The character my protagonist romanced only had long hair in a flashback. I told you, they are trying to contain me

That being said, I'll try to be fair:

By Book Two I was calling that the mother is a traitor, and I presume the epilogue in Book Three confirms this. My favourite silly thing that authors do is something like:

"I'll never forgive anybody who ever does this."

[Character who is later never forgiven for something immediately speaks]

"I sure hope nobody betrays us."

[Traitor speaks]

or in the case of TWC, every time a Rogue leader was mentioned, Rebecca immediately began speaking. It's just a subtle way of linking information together that most people aren't going to pick up on, outside of actual hard clues (e.g. there's the bit where Rebecca gets the pure DMB, and somehow Murphy had pure DMB on hand, the repeated emphasis on doing anything for her child, caginess about leaving being a leader of the Chamber/the dad thing, etc.)

I cannot imagine how much work it was to twine together a CYOA game and try to structure the prose as part of that experience, so I tried to be really gentle on that aspect when I am at my most critical with such a thing.

Present tense works best with first person (there is one time that I've read third person present tense and it's transcended my issues with it, I think because there was a real deft employment of where it's good for - especially sex scenes) in my experience because it reflects that natural English conversational tone, though my preference would still be first person past tense, for the sake of CYOA I can see why it was chosen. That being said, I think it really did struggle at points trying to marry a past tense reflectional tone to the present, and there were times that the description of the environment was especially clunky. I wrote a post about dialogue tags that was implicitly about this series lol.

I did pay for all three books so I'm not knocking on something a fan put their heart into, hahaha. To its detriment I think the quality of the prose depreciated by Book Three - having gone back to do a second playthrough to do a male protagonist/Morgan playthrough, I don't think this is recency bias. In terms of actual structure, Book Three probably has the overall better dramatic moments but experiences a weakening of connective tissue - lots of 'and then'..., and fewer scenes where I can smash my dollies together.

This really brings me to my issue which is that I didn't go in knowing it was all about romance, and I really wish - ironically - it had leant more into being about romance.

The plot is there to carry the development (which I enjoy, unless you are able to write something truly literary) up until it fell more like it was beginning to overwhelm it by Book Three - then again I hated the fake dating in Book Two because it's a beloathed trope of mine, so maybe I'm just hard to please. I think this might be an issue of the will-they-won't-they Adam romance, which - whilst I love slow burn and most of all absolutely love slow burn which dicks around - really needed to torture Adam more and torture my protagonist more to get the message through, I think in part a consequence of the tone of this sort of story which is trying to feel grounded, but I would choose sensible character development in exchange for tonal compromise (especially as it would be constrained to one route). I'm willing to be seated for people who try to stay away from each other - yess please yummy yummy - but you need to feel comfortable in getting the emotional cattle prod out.

And I wouldn't be so upset about the realism of portraying a 900 year old vampire knight unless the setting leant hard into that 'supernatural-but-realism' modern style of cynical writing... like, you can't have characters laugh about believing in God (when God structured that period of Adam's early life and magic is real and a Gnostic-esque Echo World is also real...) and then get mad at me when I want you to portray a 900 year old vampire knight properly. He sounds like a traumatised soldier from 20-30 years ago; did he change with the times? Did he never fit in back then anyway? I guess I just wanted to go weirder! Also what's his attitude to sex. Lol

Also the fact that human bloodsucking didn't come up until the end of Book Three made me very disappointed. I wanted him to try sucking her like as early as Book One. I wanted to suggest it as a thing to help them fighttttt but it could also be so so sexy. 🥰 It felt a little like dramatic scenes kind of get postponed. No idea what Murphy is doing now

That being said, the most important thing to me were the nonviolent resolutions and being nice to the monsters. I think the real reason I kept playing is because it did keep offering outcomes that let me try to be peaceful and show compassion to the big sad mean monsters... whether that was in the romance itself, or towards the antagonists, that was actually great fun.

It's not even something you necessarily get to do in a Bioware game because combat is considered the lifeblood of video games (maybe in some older games you can talk down the antagonist, thinking of the original Fallout here - but notably its sequel eschewed this, almost like a joke) and the type of character I tend to construct for this setting is the gentlest I can think of, just because such gentle characters are so rare. So it's very very valuable to me to get to play that.

That actually brings me into what I liked about the romances, which is that I never had to consistently hit a 'flirt' option - something I hate about how RPG's construct romance now - because that's not even how people become attracted to each other! - and it asked me what route I was going to take. Notably on my second playthrough, it asked me why I had been avoiding Morgan - so it actually integrated how you met those hidden romance checks into the storytelling, even when I went through a romance with fewer checks seemingly hit. (I think this might've been because I let her wait outside? But why would I force my character on her? Lol).

And because Detective Majestic (okay I was thinking of Destroy All Humans because cops/supernatural/special agencies, I wanted something silly, and then they kept using her surname the whole goddamned playthrough...) is so gentle, she never pushed Adam not even once, and it let me keep playing that way without punishing that playstyle because it didn't ~meet the romance checks~, but it also had romantic scenarios where neither of them let themselves do anything hahaha, which was amazing. This is probably the rarest portrayal of romance I've ever seen in a CYOA/RPG, and pretty much redeemed my experience because it was so fun to actually play something unique which met me halfway. That in itself is very hard to do - the reason you'd structure something linearly with absolute checks is just because this method is very complex to write. Now you've got more than 'romance - no romance' to write a route for.

So the discovery element was really the strongest, and I enjoyed it for that reason above all else. It let me be nice, pacifistic, and play a romance with a unique approach - and though I am not always the kindest on some requisite romance tropes (part of the reason I liked playing a gentle character is that I like the subversion of pushy romance tropes lol) it was admittedly quite fun!

I'm glad I checked it out, so now I know who is the one with long hair and who isn't, and though I am rather curmudgeonly, I had a little bit of fun. I can definitely see how this would service a rich transformative fandom - especially because I don't know if you could reasonably write a sex scene in the main story proper. Blood sucking might have to supplement it... that's what the vampire can be a facsimile for, just with a much more negative portrayal, lol. Probably a separate thesis to be written on why the vampire has enjoyed a burgeoning positive reception in modern romance.

[onewomancitadel]

Yes, I really like your point about dark matter... it is just thrown out there in the end (another win for Cheng Xin doing literally nothing) which in contrast to the higher dimensions was actually foreshadowed very well (from my narrative-minded perspective).

My thinking, more specifically, on Cheng Xin is this:

the idea is that it is actually an insignificance which results in some meaningful significance... if such a tiny choice is damning, then it is the smallest choice of all which is powerful.

There's a separate point of analysis here which is this obsession with cosmic importance - some sort of external qualifier which would say humanity is special in abstract terms, the exact shit Ye Wenjie pulls with the Trisolarans - which refuses to recognise the fact that conscious, sentient beings with the ability to form moral judgement and cast those moral judgements are cosmically relevant and essentially cosmically powerful, no matter how many others like that there are in the universe. It's really peculiar how wilfully a series like this ignores such a point, not least since it motivates character arcs such as Luo Ji's and Zhang Beihai's.

And to me it is not just to really say that humanity is insignificant, in this theoretical reading - it is Cheng Xin actually saying - enough is enough. No one else deserves this, if this is what the universe is made of. There's nothing left of humanity to protect anymore, but what about the rest of them?

There's a persistent thread that only in masculinity can anything suffer enough to survive. It's kind of at odds with itself: if the dark forest thesis - if the narrowing of dimensions and breakage of physics itself - slowly kills the universe, how is it that the killing thing is the thing which breeds strength? It's literally self-defeating, and that which lives to the very end is Cheng Xin who can actually cast final judgement.

It's ironic that the death cult of patriarchy literally holds true in a work which tries to celebrate that death cult of patriarchy. Lol.

Major spoilers for Death's End, the final book of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy beneath the cut.

So about that terrarium...

My intial somewhat dismayed reading was that of an uncharacteristic, hackneyed sentimentality: even when the books took such an indulgence, there was always a cynical chaser. You don't get to experience the fantastical sense of romantic love without Luo Ji's understanding of women (or lack thereof) and the belief that people only love imaginations of each other and stay together so long as they don't conflict with reality. (This is probably key to the fact that the star-crossed lovers never meet in Death's End, neither of them being disabused of their fantasies. It's juvenile).

Suffice it to say, I really struggled with the ending. I struggled with Death's End in general; not necessarily the fundamental approach (I don't think undoing the victory was a totally bad idea, since I liked evolving that thesis past what it means to win) but the structure felt less whimsical and more directionless, a series of entries - quite literally - which felt disparate and never quite managed to hit that sense of dispassionate historical observation I think the text was trying to go for.

So the idea that there was this terrarium and message in a bottle left behind in a universe built specially for Cheng Xin was just kind of bizarre tonally. It felt silly.

I get it: the entries about Earth's past is right there in the trilogy title. But it felt very self-important; it didn't cohere with the overwhelming notion that humanity was 1. very irrelevant, 2. very bad at what it does, 2a. its women are very bad at what they do, and its men - if soft and weak - are similarly bad, 3. at every moment anything that isn't about pure survival is cut at the knees. Remembrance seems more like farce. Actually, the entire sequence on Pluto felt out of place, almost like we're meant to laugh at the little bugs trying to save their precious granules of sugar.

I was discussing the ending with my best friend and her family - actually I related all the events of the books to them, somewhat out of chronological order, because I know that they all collectively would fucking hate these books (I personally didn't, glimmers of brilliance make me all the more frustrated) - and she was said this amazing thing which was like, well, you say there's all this umming and ahhing over whether the universe might not be able to reboot if there's mass left behind - and it seems alright just to leave something - what if this is Cheng Xin's final fuck-up, finally chosen in an active way?

It's actually her seeming passivity which would allow this final stunt at all. Nobody would dare assume - not her last companions - that she would intentionally do this at all. So far she's damned humanity once, and then effectively twice (at least I think she is implicitly damned), and she is, really sincerely, a complete fuck-up wastrel who never does or thinks anything interesting. Luo Ji gets to be a fuck-up wastrel who thinks interesting things and does interesting things, and fails once, twice, three times, probably more, as a Wallfacer, and has a moment of stunning success because he's a fuck-up wastrel. This is a great idea, which unfortunately suffers in the face of the fact that Liu Cixin is obsessed with strong men.

The idea that Cheng Xin looks at the face of the overwhelming loneliness of her universe, the cruelty and inhumanity of the dark forest thesis, the wars upon wars which ravaged multiple dimensions until they were folded into flatness, and then decides to weaponise a sense of sentimentality to finally damn that universe - to prevent it from being reborn, to escape samsara - when she would never be expected to be capable of such a thing, to finally actively choose this maternality she's passively carried and passively condemned humanity with - is maybe the thing which could redeem that ending for me. It's bleak - and I still don't agree with the overall attitude the books hold - but it is actually a real thesis! It does actually deliver on this threat that's expounded upon and seems like, in any other story, would surely allow for some small space to remember humanity. But how much mass is enough? If enough pocket unvierses all leave behind a few hundred grams, surely it would start to add up.

The alternative interpretation is that Cheng Xin once again fucks everything up but not on purpose, merely through an innocent-intentioned sentimentality. But I think the fact that she acknowledges the threat allows a bit of wiggle room. The argument here would be that Luo Ji's final Wallfacer plan against the Trisolarans is concealed from us until its reveal; this move has been pulled once before. The key difference is that we never see whether the universe reboots. I think this is very meaningful for the argument that it doesn't, and that we wouldn't see the payoff of Cheng Xin's plan, because there is no universe anymore. This really makes it a true twist ending to me which - most meaningfully of all - doesn't go against what the books were trying to do, but actually strengthens it.

But she put the effort into recording humanity's history, and I might go so far as to argue that she did that to explain her motivation to end it all, instead of slipping into it, but actually thinking about it.

The real conflict here, actually with any ending, is the sense of anthropocentrism which it otherwise sought to subvert. But I think reading against that, if we take it seriously that human beings are moral creatures who make moral judgements irrespective of our place in the universe (however small that is), I think that actually pairs better thematically with the idea that a graveyard remembrance of humanity also serves as the final, very small thing - this small living thing - which says 'no more'. The sense of reincarnation and enlightenment here, too, feels fitting, though I'd argue that its overly cynical view of the universe does the argument better.

I wrote all this out and then I went back to reread the last few pages. (I'm using an ebook version, so I don't have page citations). I'm going to see if this interpretation actually holds:

Cheng Xin asks if she can leave five kilograms behind, and then:

As long as the tiny sun inside the sphere continued to give off light, this miniature ecological system would persist. As long as it remained here, Universe 647 would not be a lifeless, dark world. “Of course,” said Guan Yifan. “The great universe isn’t going to fail to collapse because it misses five kilograms.” He had another thought that he did not voice: Perhaps the great universe really would fail to collapse because it lacked a single atom’s mass. [...] Ultimately, the great universe was certain to lose at least a few hundred million tons of matter, or perhaps even a million billion billion tons. Hopefully, the great universe could ignore such a loss.

So the sequence of events is this:

they're going to heed the call of the Returners

Cheng Xin wants to leave behind something to remember humanity by

Guan Yifan says of course she can, so graciously giving her permission

they acknowledge the general fact that others may do the same thing, or maybe even a single atom might be enough to prevent the universe rebooting, so it's a gamble anyway

Holy fuck this is terrible. Anyway, if we go through this with the perspective of the books - that every civilisation is interested first and foremost in survival at any cost, and short of that, to be remembered (survival in memory) - it is near-inevitable that there will be other mass left behind. But the flipside of this is that each individual choice matters; maybe with enough choosing to forego that, the universe could reboot. It's not definite. The ending is left open, the 'science' here is left imprecise. But we are reading between the lines of motivation. I'm not sure that my reading holds as an intended reading - because I do think the thematic compromise of the ending really does feel quite clear - but this is how I would make it more concordant with the series.

I much prefer it for the fact that Cheng Xin uses her contemplation in this lonely, ugly pocket universe to come to a conclusion of leaving mass behind to damn the universe. It would give her something to do. It would improve it tonally - haha, just rereading it, my God, I can't believe this is the ending to these books - and I think I like it just because it subverts that patronising treatment Guan Yifan affords her, like a little child asking for a lolly, concealing the truth of the potential cruelty of nature... which she is actually very well aware of.

I don’t know how much those catastrophes and the final destruction of the Solar System had to do with me. Those are questions that could never be answered definitively. But I’m certain they had something to do with me, with my responsibilities. And now, I’ve climbed to the apex of responsibility: I am responsible for the fate of the universe.

I would like Cheng Xin to abuse the trust in her sweet passivity. This would parallel neatly with Luo Ji's defense against the Trisolarans, the deception within deception within deception, against the ultimate enemy, suffocating it in the cradle.