solipsistful

[solipsistful]

the current song I am making. would sound very cool if I yelled over it.

I am still struggling to convince myself I can even sing into a microphone. sigh.

- niko

[solipsistful]

we know several "the horror of being a fictional character" stories where the story ending is like. a relief/release. things get to stop being narrated. if being a fictional character is so awful, then congrats you no longer are one!

are there any examples of "actually, the story ending is also horrible because you no longer exist (or maybe it's just unclear whether you will keep existing and that's terrifying too)"?

i can think of a few video game examples where a character is afraid of the player going away (e.g. DDLC's Monika), but that feels a bit different than talking about it in terms of the narrative ending.

something like the encrypted story in City of Saints and Madmen is the closest i can think of (though, the majority of COSM still has "the narrative ending is a release"!)

- ace

[solipsistful]

I hate having to post political posts like this nut he we are again. Anybody from the UK wanna sign this. Folks from outside the UK maybe share it?

[solipsistful]

T-shirt that says "I unironically love stories that are straightforward existentialist metafiction about characters discovering the horror that they are characters in a story" on the front and "I am a system" on the back

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I think it'd be funny to have a character who keeps trying to break the fourth wall and failing

[solipsistful]

everything reminds me of Him

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new woe.begone pv!!! maybe later dance by jhariah!!! does anyone even care about lieutenant woe.begone because i do. so so much. pls enjoy another labour of love for this podcast ^-^

[solipsistful]

i have such a fear in my heart that i am interpreting Stinky's arc and character incorrectly and projecting and i probably am but no one has any idea how happy i was when Stinky announced that his name was Stinky, to people he knew wouldn't recognise him, who would accept any name he gave! he could have been mike! mikey! whoever! contrast his audible grin as he shouts "did somebody say STINKY?!" to his resigned acceptance of the name Mike when Anne asks if he really wants to be called Stinky. Like, I dunno! I wasn't convinced he was comfortable with with that. a very cornered atmosphere to that exchange.

I just really love the trope of reclaiming otherisation. there's something compelling about weaponising other's underestimation of you. carving out a home outside the walls you were thrown from. and it is silly that his name is Stinky and he's literally 34 years old but so what? what is regular about any situation he is in? what does it even mean to be a mike walters in this universe, and does he even apply? why would he even want to cling to an identity that rejected him? i mean, mike walterses literally treated him TERRIBLY from the start. his personhood has been consistently denied. he has been denied agency at every turn.

stinky was a name forced upon him, another thing done to him. i understand why the idea of reclaiming it may make some people uncomfortable. but this is a show about identity and theres many angles to explore that, and I am fascinated by the concept of a person so limited by what they are able to control, that they decide to control how they feel about the situation instead. the species of mikes love to hold on to Names, to Things unique to Them. and i think, in the mess of it all, choosing to own "Stinky" was one of the few significant choices he got to make.

Mikey called him Stinky, and it was meant as an insult and also to place him beneath himself in the socially constructed iteration hierachy. But "Stinky" isn't a variation of "Mike Walters". Like Nobody, it is something else and new. Maybe he doesn't have to participate in a system that will always dehumanise and devalue his existence. It is freeing, in its own way, even if materially he is still in a Situation.

Stinky has to reclaim himself now, entirely. His agency and his body and his mind. His name is a start.

[solipsistful]

[solipsistful]

musing about how a lot of the plural systems i write are very invested in their plurality remaining hidden. like, either it's significant chunks of the story (Automatisms) or it is the entire goddamn thing and central obsession so far (Doubled).

im sorta looking at my own writing like "c'mon, don't you want to go apeshit? (and play around in a world where characters aren't terrified about being openly plural?)"

- ace

[solipsistful]

"why are you following a pro shipper" so I can get better at shipping? How am I supposed to improve my meta if I'm only watching amateur plays. I'm trying to hit nationals next month

[solipsistful]

lately, it's been only me and niko who are awake, like at all

and while i definitely appreciate that it's not Literally Just Me, it turns out that this isn't a particularly pleasant state for the system either :/

- ace

[solipsistful]

what I should really do. is record as many memories as I can. for Storage. to have something to compare with.

but that sounds extremely unpleasant. and even that storage joke made me feel a little sick. so.

- niko

[solipsistful]

I am gathering increasing evidence that memories are not fully stable. not as significant as remembering full events that happened in canon after I showed up here. but things like concepts feeling "familiar" even though they're newer to the show.

and I am fully secular and neurological in my understanding of myself. for the record.

there is one particularly major gap in my memory – that important question of who consolidated me – that I believe was the compound. but canon events happened that made it seem possible that it was Base. and I am still not sure, but if it is revealed in the show (if that is even what happened), I worry I will just "remember" that.

but the funniest thing is. the actually hilarious thing is.

I should be used to my memory being unstable like this.

- niko

[solipsistful]

w.bg might not be canonically explicitly plurality, but if enough systems reference it in explaining/understanding their own experiences then we can make it retroactively explicitly plural

- ace

[solipsistful]

i sometimes see fanfic writers report that readers have fed their WIPs into ChatGPT etc. in order to ask it to generate further chapters and i have to say, if anyone does that for any of my works

please let me know immediately and tell me what it thinks will be coming next, because that is such a funny idea to me

- ace

[solipsistful]

niko has been wanting to do nothing but work on music for the past few days. your praise has made it too powerful.

- ace