#cockatiel x chameleon spoilers

[xenostalgic]

As an Asian American, I actually hated the potrayal of Papimon and found her death horribly distasteful. I'm curious, what did you like about this fanfic?

fundamentally I think I enjoyed how for me it inspired and then rewarded a mindset focused on a sort of puzzley analysis, though admittedly on a fairly shallow level. 

there are lots of motifs to track, there are lots of hooks to allow the reader to assemble all sorts of patterns (is it significant that Harper and Van Der Gramme roleplay x.Nihilo, referencing the phrase "ex nihilo nihil fit", when Harper is so insistently referred to as "nothing"? clearly. is it also significant that it's the sequel to x.Machina, referencing "deus ex machina," when Harper is in some ways a successor to Mimmy, who has "always wanted to be a god"? more tenuous, but plausible, and fun to consider regardless).

but there was plenty that I didn't understand. I had a hard time understanding Papimon in particular, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there was something important to her character that I missed. I'm not sure what could be particularly distasteful about her death, though; it happens offscreen, we don't know anything about the circumstances, and there are so many possible causes set up (car crash, suicide, whatever illness keeps giving her nosebleeds, the recent expenditure of all her life energy on a single glorious work of art) that it seems pretty thoroughly and intentionally ambiguous.