#welcome to wall of text. thank goodness for the readmore button eh

[erstwhilesparrow]

haven't made a list of thoughts in a while. thought exorcism time:

i feel like i've told this story a billion times but when i started university i told myself, "okay, that was a fun little summer jaunt writing fic and all, but you gotta chill now and focus on school stuff," and then i just could not do it at all. i'd have a google doc open on my laptop to add a couple sentences to it in the ten minute break between classes. i'd walk around campus thinking about editing this or that sentence. my friend turned to me while we were hanging out yesterday and told me something to the effect of, "i like writing, but i don't think i need to write in the way that you need to write." sometimes i think about what i would do if i had to stop writing for any reason and then i have to sit down for a few minutes. saying this in text i feel like-- a joke character? like how the fuck am i a real person that exists in the world and is like this. it is nevertheless true that i am like this!

so if i were to attempt narrativizing mcsos, there's two directions we could go here. one is to look at what's been produced so far and make a story about that, the other is to consider "if i were asked what sort of plot beats might be fun and interesting to do on this server starting from our current point in time, what would i say?" and the looking back direction i think is just. it's a game. lean into the themes, you know? everything you do is a love letter to the world, and in some ways, the game is the practice run for the love letter you are writing with your life beyond the game. and i also am thinking about that post that's like "minecraft's natural generation feels like an invitation to build on top of it," to smooth out the rough edges and make it look ~more like the thing you are expecting? i like the idea of the universe taking these players and going, "okay, here, for this brief span, inhabit these breakable little bodies and help me build a world with a history. help me make a place that people have been." and it works with the Not Doing Lore because none of the players are strictly Playing Characters, but they have ideas about the sorts of people who would be In This Place. owen's skeletons in the jungle are, yes, literally a place he is living for now, but they are also making someone else's story and putting it into the world, even if we never meet or know about that someone else. pix's massive excavation is a story about people who could pull chunks of the world up into the sky, and this is what pix's story is, but it's also not about him -- he is building a history that didn't happen, or at least didn't happen to him-as-excavator. i think there are ways to tell this story that make it ring true to what the videos give us and still Make It A Story.

another bullet point for the other direction: when the first mcsos videos were posted and people kept making "no lore! ;)" jokes and all the SOS promo material seemed like it was about people in modern day clothes stranded out in a weird magical wilderness, i mentioned to a friend that it would be really fun if what happened was a story about building a world so well it eats you. "we're not doing lore," they say. "it's just a game and we're just going to play it as a game." and it is a game, for a while, and they really aren't trying to tell any story, and then things beyond their control start happening and they become increasingly trapped in this world and they're not telling a story here but a story is demanding to be told anyway. this can also be about the horrors of being a creator, probably.

i do think that in conversation with an empty room and a microphone isn't even nearly as good as some of the stuff that was inspired by it, but i also don't care at all because i'm so fucking pleased that that fic did almost exactly the thing i wanted it to. i get why people are not always on the "all fic is meta" train but this is the train i am on and there is not much more satisfying than knowing that i played in a role in a really really interesting and ongoing Conversation Via Fic. it doesn't matter that i maybe didn't say everything i could have with that fic; other people can and have and will fill in those gaps!! it rules!! it's so cool!! i like this fact a lot. forgive me being sentimental.

[all of the other thoughts that would go here have to be redacted because i'm STILL not done outsiders and i am saving those thoughts for after i'm done to avoid people spoiling things]