#i think it's interesting to conceptualize the narrative structure like this

[punkitt-is-here]

Yknow i love fo4 and fo76 as games but hate them as Fallout games yknow?

Like theyre nice to play and i love some of the characters but man. They just. Are not Fallout. Its literally like if you took Fallout but made it for a general audience, theres no spice!! Theres no grime!! Why is everything so clean!!!

That's the thing; these games are built with inherently different base goals in mind. Bethesda in the modern day thrives off selling the idea of player empowerment, of being an explorer in a foreign land that you conquer through hard work. You shape the world to your liking by questing and exploring and conquering. And genuinely? I got no problem with that. I think games that gas the player up like crazy and set you loose on a world to make it your own are totally fine conceptually! Like, the fantasy of being able to shape the world the way you see fit is something I think a lot of people can get into, whether you're just looking for control in your life or you just want the experience of feeling like you can have some grand effect on the world at large.

But because of that, I think the core of what makes Fallout so interesting has to be put on the backburner. I don't play Fallout to feel powerful necessarily, and I certainly don't play it for the fuckin' gunplay. I play it because it has such a fun dedication to weird stories that feel like they have something to say, a staff of writers dedicating their time and effort to being a proto-DM at a table, trying to provide interesting and thought-provoking or at least real damn fun stories in front of you, because ultimately, the West Coast Fallout games are about people. They're about characters! And when you focus less on the idea of telling stories in a world and more on empowering the player as a fourth-wall observer, those priorities clash and in the East Coast Fallout's cases, it makes for a game with no spice or edge. Having something to say about, say, the US Military or American Expansionism and Exceptionalism or the nature of clinging to the past kind of fundamentally clashes with the player empowerment fantasy that Bethesda Fallout games want to sell you. You can't have these philosophy-based, morally-interesting factional conflicts that want the player to look inward when the very concept of your game is built around collecting loot and shooting guys instead of learning about that loot and learning about those guys you're shooting and why you're shooting at each other. Having radiant quest loot loop gameplay just doesn't mesh well with a world where choices are meant to have far-reaching impact, because if it did, it'd be impossible to program under a normal development timeframe, and it would likely make the player look inward and go "what the fuck am I doing with my time?" at the endless meaningless quests to go on.

I don't think the "Lone Wanderer Comes Across A Microcosm Of Adventure" format is bad, not at all, but you have to put a lot of work to make that feel cohesive with the larger character and faction-based narratives that 1, 2, and NV are built on, so instead those Bethesda-style games opt more for a toybox, playground approach to the post apocalypse. And when your primary goal is showing the player how cool of a sandcastle they can build, it'll never be structurally sound enough to sustain even a wave of nuance.

[reductionisms]

circle, line

A circle and a line look different, right?

What about now?

Time in gintama is a useless subject. Unfortunately, it is also a prerequisite to the gintama-human ontology. Thus, with a heavy heart, I look at lines, loops, and other unlikely time-mechanics in order to construct a gintama time for the gintama-human. 

Throughout this pseudoscientific inquiry, I locate gintama time– which I eventually call [time], for lack of better notation– in my thematic abuse of two mathematical concepts: irrationality and uncountable infinity. To give away the end, [time] is an uncountable infinity born in irrationality. Which, even to its own creator, makes little sense. 

Finally, this is my defense of the gintama time loop. Why? Well, I like loops and loop-like things, and, after all, we want good things to last, to repeat. So this turns out to be a love letter to algebraic topology. Sorry time loop fiction.

Onto more interesting things.

preliminary time notes

To think about time in gintama, I bracket [real world time] from [the narrative structure of gintama, which follows a time] and [time as characters in gintama experience it, i.e. personal time]. The latter two time-categories reflect [real world time] because gintama is written by an author, who, by virtue of existing, lives in [real world time]. That is, while narrative is fun because you can play with reality to make something new (e.g., time loop, time travel, non-chronological narratives in general), creation still requires building blocks, which are ultimately some sort of known assumption, that inevitably require some understanding of actual Time. 

All this to say I look at [narrative time] and [personal time] through philosophies about [real world time], which themselves are not especially real; in other words, my methodology is kind of shit. 

the situation– personal time

Otae announces the whole of gintama in chapter one.

This is gintama’s genetic code. 

To speak of time here is to note a few things:

1. amanto possess advanced technology;

2. humans are forced to throw away their physical swords;

3. the sword of the soul. 

The sword is a tool*; later chapters tell us that it “carries the soul”. So the sword represents, or, rather, is, something irreplaceable to humanity, that relates to the soul and personhood. This much is corroborated by the plot cycle. 

With contrast to the sword, time appears impersonal. We conceive of time, at least scientifically, as the movement between past to present, present to future, stretching infinitely before and after, where our existence does not matter to its flow. 

But would “time” exist without anyone to observe it?

Alternatively, how can “time” be experienced as time– as a movement– without anything to measure it? 

The human must “create” “time”, if only because it would not be “time” without a person to observe and call it as such. What this person perceives, they conceptualize as movement (measurement); and thus there must be a prior position to reference, or, in the least, a default– a memory. 

So “time” requires the present to be given by a prior; that is, for “time” to be experienced, the human who observes it needs already given into a past. The past itself (“knowledge” of the histories that make us who we are, “knowledge” of the tools that allow us to intend various things)– i.e., its inherent “given-ness” to us– depends upon it outliving those who live it. Thus various contexts, with their technologies, arts, and writing (though these are not really separable), function also to contain the essential past-as-memory for those who use and engage with them. 

Alright, great, but what does this have to do with the dick-and-balls manga? Nothing, really, except for everything. The amanto (with futuristic technology, in futuristic contexts**) force humans to give up their swords. It would be ridiculous to talk about what the “sword” means here. Suffice to say that it carries (an assumed) cultural-historical weight, an (idealized) memory. We would expect that its dispossession disrupts temporality. And it does– hence the “time loop”.

People love to talk about cyclical time in gintama. It is the same situations, over and over again; that no one ages, injuries heal by the next chapter, and, more than serial-typical regressions, that there is a sense that things won’t work, that important change won’t last, that life “just gets worse and worse”. Time as lasting change– or what we like to call “linear time”– doesn’t feel like it exists.

To return to chapter one. Here the central conflict is not actually between amanto and human; it is between Shinpachi and Otae. Their dying father tells them that even if they give up their physical swords (memory, past), they are not to lose the sword in their soul (?unknown). Sword-less Shinpachi resents him. Rather than “cling to the past”, he tries to adapt to the “linear time” of the amanto: he works in modern food service, gives up on the dojo, and, most importantly, opposes Otae.  

What does Otae do? We might expect her to inverse Shinpachi, that is, to “embrace” cyclicality, which would be to give up. She doesn’t. Otae tries to adjust, to make a living and survive, but, unlike her brother, she does so also to protect the “thing she can never take back”. This, as Shinpachi points out, is ridiculous, unrealistic, and makes no sense. And yet it is Otae who is thematically vindicated in the end.

From the first chapter, then, we can construct a sense of [personal time (to the characters)]. Again, for change to exist, there must be a prior form; that is, a certain sort of time is what makes change (technological, political, situational advancement) possible. Further, the self is involved in the process of time. Thus when the self is not whole (lacks the sword), time, and thereby change, becomes cyclical. So “time”, to the amanto, advances, because they can work with their external “selves” (technology, worlds, knowledge-memory) to “make change”. But time, to humanity, loops back on itself, is stopped, because humanity is bereft of its self and can only return to the starting point. 

We notice that humans still live in a world where time progresses– where time goes on without them. There is a split between the time of the self and the time of the world. Shinpachi decides to do away with memory and join the world-time, the “linear time”, that is, the time of futuristic technology and change; but his sister, who goes along with this and drags the past with her, does much better. 

For a more thorough application of this thought, please rewatch the monkey hunter arc. 

*It is also (obviously) a dick. **This reveals some connection between the concepts of “tool”, “context”, and time. Though I say so inverse-facetiously, since nothing about gintama can be taken as if it were serious.

time loop– narrative time 

So what about infinity?

Personal time is not infinity. In a first sense, it simply is not infinite– characters die. In a second sense, even considering that memory can be (haphazardly) preserved beyond a lifetime, especially in a story, humanity as a whole is finite– there comes a point, eventually, where no one is left to do the remembering. And in a third sense, personal time is still a string of pasts that were once presents, into futures that will be presents; though this finite string might divide into an infinite number of presents, its divisibility renders it still essentially patterned, which is to say that it is not really “infinity”– it is still mathematically countable.

I mentioned a dysfunction of personal time into cyclical (“un-change-able”) personal time. This is associated with sword-less-ness, equivalently memory-loss, equivalently not being a whole self. The fun of stories is that “character” can be projected into the structure of the story itself; it would make sense for cyclical personal time to have some correspondence to, or at least effect on, narrative time, that is, narrative structure. 

At this point I should be more general about the time loop. 

The time loop is thought to stand opposed to “linear time” in the stagnation-change, lack-presence, circle(hole)-line([censored]) dichotomy. Specifically, the time loop is opposed to “linear time” in the sense that nothing (usually) changes in a time loop. Or, more exactly, change is slow, nothing gets “better” in any real sense. Again, only where time flows “linearly" can we build off of what is prior, can we intend and achieve a future, can we change for the better (or so we assume). Thus the time loop carries a sort of moral condemnation in its very structure— a karmic debt, if you will.

Characters in plots get thrown into time loops because something has gone wrong. Whether or not they are the direct cause, the character must “figure something out”, “learn a lesson”, that is, address the problem that created the time loop, which will almost always be related to a step within the story of their self-development, in order to escape it. The point of the story is to escape it. This is just how stories go.

Then the gintama narrative “time loop” is barely a time loop. It repeats itself, sure, and no one ages, but that’s because no one should age in a wsj serial and sorachi tried to be funny about it. Still, some lingering sense of futility, or maybe just the sheer repetition of the same event for 16 years of serialization, weighs on anyone who reads it. This kind of feels like time loop fiction; there should be a point to the plot cycles. What are they trying to force Gintoki to do, to show us in his character? What are they aiming for, what is driving the “time loop” in the first place?

Takasugi is driving the time loop. 

(More specifically, Takasugi’s crushed eye-ball (soul), his eyelid; inaccessible past (memory), is driving the time loop.)

Another clarification. Personal time is time as experienced by the person; it is pure interiority. Thus, while the world moves on– personal time is time as movement– the person may not. 

For the person to move on, they must be able to make change, that is, from a prior form, give birth to the next form. This is because only the person can observe, know, and experience “time”, which itself is a movement (a change in position) from past to present, present to future, that is defined by the person. So change and time-as-movement, within personal time, look synonymous.

Further, movement in personal time requires the given past– the memory, from before me, passed down to me by people and places and things and contexts that I outlive– to be held by me, to be part of the “I”, and thus for my bodily self and my non-embodied self to generate personal time together. In gintama, I locate “memory” as the sword. But gintama’s sword is also part of the Self; so personal time in which the Self can move is only born out of a whole self. Equivalently, personal time is not the Self, but it is intimately related to a change that can only be wrought by the Self, which is to say, both my body and my given memory are necessary to the movement of personal time. 

In any case, “gin-tama” is about Gin-toki, and, quite literally, his soul, so we would suspect that narrative time is a projection of Gintoki’s personal time. But narrative time cycles weirdly, and Gintoki still has his sword. Alternatively: if Gintoki was not already a Self, that is, if he had to learn some lesson to become a Self through the time loop, how could he have saved any of the endless roster of villains that conveyor-belts around him? So maybe Gintoki holds his sword without remembering– except that he doesn’t, and the story makes this clear (“I haven’t lost a single thing”). He does, however, seem to possess a slightly different personal time. He and his sword remind antagonists of what they’ve forgotten, and these antagonists sometimes move forward with him into the next cycle. In other words, there is some sort of movement, a change, in the narrative, in the structure, associated with each loop. 

But cycles stay cycles, up to a very particular moment.

At which point I revert to the most obvious advantage of narrative time: it interacts with the readers. Gintoki “is” a Self (in the sense that an electron is both a wave and a particle), who carries his sword, who remembers, who hasn’t lost a single thing. Yet the time around him repeats the same events, over and over again. Why? Well, in part for the above: every gintama villain needs to learn the same lesson. But every gintama villain is also Gintoki, and even if he remembers, we don’t. To risk being redundant, we, as readers, have no idea what actually happened to him until chapter 519, when it is fished (unwillingly, I think) out of Takasugi’s eyelid. 

Then narrative time functions in several senses. It relates to Gintoki’s personal time, but indirectly; more generally it looks like a projection of the Losers’ personal times, where a Loser is one who has lost their sword. Still every Loser is also Gintoki, and every lost sword is lost memory, and even if Gintoki hasn’t forgotten anything– and even if Gintoki carries his past, his sword, with him– we, the readers, don’t. Surely enough, historical time in gintama only begins after chapter 519. The revelation must precede it. 

So the gintama time loop is driven forward by whatever it takes for this memory to be revealed. Each iteration brings us closer, but there is no lesson for Gintoki to learn that would speed this up; the heart of it is that he is waiting, he has to wait, for memory to return, for his past to come back to him, and this past is exactly Takasugi. 

Why? Takasugi is the past (his eye, his eyelid, is the past); his eye is therefore Gintoki’s sword, the sword of the soul we need for time to move on. But 10 years jump before Takasugi can make the approach, and even then only from behind. Worse, it takes hundreds more chapters for him to work up the resolve to face Gintoki head on. So if Gintoki somehow constrains the world to cyclical time, equally so does Takasugi. 

In short, narrative time cannot move until Takasugi’s eye becomes Gintoki’s sword. Thus half of the loop is about Gintoki always standing up again, always waiting for Takasugi to face him, and the other half of the loop, that is, its motivation, is about Takasugi working up the guts, or whatever he does throughout the series, to finally come at Gintoki* face to face. Yes, I’m equating circles and lines, which is silly. But I did this in the beginning anyways. Rewatch the final.

So why does this matter? Readers well-versed in gintama sword theo-ontology may recognize that the sword which is memory is identical to the sword of the human. This is partly because I’ve defined personal time to require the whole Self (the human) to move, which itself requires both the sword-as-memory and its human wielder. It is also because I’ve equated Takasugi to memory instead of treating him like a character (sorry Takasugi). Nevertheless, creation of the human sword (the memory-sword) is now essential to creating time, and creating time is now equivalent to completing the Self, that is, to becoming “human”. Put another way, Shouyou isn’t killed until Gintoki kills him in 519. 

More specifically, Gintoki killing Shouyou undoubtedly completes (undoes) his humanity**. It is also the only way for anyone in gintama to have a future, because it creates, gives birth, to time, the time of the series. Further, its revelation births time in the present just as its actuality births time in the past: the Gintoki who swings his human sword, who cries, in Takasugi’s eye, is the one who swings it at him now. Gintama doesn’t actually timeskip until Gintoki kills Utsuro in silver soul.  

Then the movement of time, both personal and narrative, requires three things:

1. a memory-sword (the human sword) (the sword of the soul);

2. a human to wield it;

3. and a decision on how to swing

I have discussed one and two to exhaustion. Now we turn to three.

*Gintoki is always Takasugi, in every case. The inverse holds as well. **It also completes Shouyou’s, but that is for later.

in defense of the time loop

Birthing time looks like an escape from the time loop. 

This is where the division between time, self, and change becomes essential. Why does the time loop, in many treatments, depress its readers? For the same reason that any tragedy is depressing: fate, un-change-ability, specifically, un-change-ability of things we want to change. 

The time loop is a “literalization” of tragedy. The person trapped in the time loop, at best, loses the ability to determine their future, accomplish their projects, do what they want and have it last, that is, to find lasting (exterior) meaning (this is all exterior). At worst, this person carries their incapacity into a loop that is the same tragedy, over and over again, which they are helpless to prevent or change in any way.

This setup is not exclusive to the time loop– other variations could be immortality, reincarnation, oracles, endless linear eternity, et cetera. In every instance, though, the tragedy is that people cannot change the things that matter. And while the time loop usually removes external change to provoke internal change in its protagonist, gintama characters also struggle with the impossibility of changing themselves.

More generally, though, real time isn’t actually cyclical or linear. We move through time, changing form, towards our death– and so the common thought of time is “linear time”, which is really about “linear change” and an inability to “go back”. But time is only known to us, only countable, because of its cyclicality. There are 60 seconds to a minute; 60 minutes to an hour; 24 hours to the day; and then this repeats the next minute, the next hour, the next day; and then the next month, and then the next season, and then the next year; and then it repeats all over again. Time is only measurable, knowable, existent to us because it repeats. If it wasn’t known beforehand, how could we measure the present, the future, against it? And for it to be knowable, it has to be familiar; and for it to be familiar, we must have encountered it before; and here is the inherent repetition– we can’t stop the cyclicality or flow of time anymore than we can avoid our deaths. Real time makes possible our “change” just as it is unchangeable, just as its existence is conditioned on unchangeability.

Gintama is a story, and story time works differently than real time, so maybe in the story we can separate “linear time” (change-ability) from “cyclical time”, from “time loop” (un-change-ability). Even still, what happens after you escape a time loop? Equivalently, what happens after you escape the tragedy? In the usual time loop– at least the usual time loop in our minds– the loop is escaped into linear time, or, more appropriately, it is escaped into the time where linear change is possible. But why is “linear time” the happy ending? Even granted that it exists (which is questionable), what makes linearity better than repetition, that is, why do people love “linear change”?

The Joui 4 lived “linear time” during the war. They fought enemies, and won. They progressed towards something, and believed in it, too; they were the main characters of a power-scaling, battle-shounen manga. And yet, their linear time ended, or more accurately, was never “linear”. Shouyou’s death, if anything, only proved the inherent impossibility of their shounen dreams. So narrative time twists into defeatist cycles, and Takasugi is doomed forever to repeat, and this is probably more accurate to the condition of the actual world they inhabit, because, most importantly, time was always like this, linear change as linear time never existed. 

But again, the tragedy was never about the time loop. From its inception, the tragedy has always been about intentionality versus ruination, “I” as capable actor versus “I” as acted upon, and the utter inability of anyone to change any of this. We want out of the time loop because we can’t do anything; we want out because we can’t act out of ourselves to make external change in any way that lasts. Ultimately, we want out of the time loop because we discover that our intentionality actually means jackshit. The world does what I don’t want it to, and traps me in this; I cannot act, and yet it acts on me. My despair at the exterior world which rivets me to itself quickly translates to despair in, at, my self. I can’t make change, so what does being [x person] matter, so this is my fault, so there’s no point in changing myself, so I can’t change myself in any way that matters, because even if I do everything right, there’s no meaningful effect on the world that holds me captive, et cetera. Thus everyone wants out of the tragedy, the time loop.

Including gintama villains, who usually try to get out of it by killing themselves. This never works. 

The time loop is tragic because it makes its inhabitants absolutely passive to it and acts on them eternally. The gintama cast is supposedly full of “losers”; its villain of the week, while beating Gintoki, calls him a masterless dog, a ghost, the one who lost, along with the rest of the samurai, et cetera; and the loser here is inherently passive against a winning actor. Nevermind that Gintoki never fought for the Romantic Japan that lost to the amanto– his loss is even more infinite for the narrowness of its scope. 

And yet, you’re not supposed to kill yourself.

Escaping the time loop– or, more generally, the tragedy– never guarantees linear time, because we always have to end the book on the happily ever after. So what really happens after you escape the time loop– is linear time actually a relief? Either things start going wrong, which isn’t the linear time ideal, or you achieve every dream, you make possible every impossibility, and come to the end of the infinite series by continuing on within it infinitely. Is that really “happy”? 

Alternatively: the cycles of narrative time drive towards the birth of a new time. But the tragedy of the cycles is intentionality/ruination, and the cycles can’t be escaped into their “opposite”. Gintoki, a human, with a human sword, kills Shouyou, and thereby brought forth a new time. And yet, this new time was still cyclical. 

Then what’s the solution– killing yourself? Takasugi, repetition Personified, asks this to Gintoki the entire series. Why won’t you stay down?, [Why are you crying?], [Why can’t I comfort you?], Why keep living in this world? Villainy aside, he does have a point– if you look carefully, living in the gintama world is incredibly, incredibly stupid. 

Gintoki says: no matter how many times I fall, no matter how many times I fight the same fight over and over again, no matter if it never ends, I will always stand up.

This is the height of stupidity. 

[time]

So narrative cycles aim at the revelation of Gintoki’s memory, which would identify sword with eye, tool with wielder, that is, complete the “human”, and thereby give birth to a new (non-linear) time. 

Here we get to mathematical infinity. 

Mathematical infinity is not a number, or even properly a concept. It’s more like a sign at the edge of a cliff that says, there’s a cliff here, here’s the end of the world– except that this sign also signifies whatever, and everything, that might lie beyond the cliff, which cannot really be called “essence”, or even be said to exist in the first place. In other words, infinity is a marker for a point of no return, that in of itself is nothing.

Some things are said to be “infinite”. Usually, these are patterns. A line is infinite, as is a parabola; but these infinities are predictable, that is, countable, because patterns are rules. Their comprehensibility allows us to treat them like fancy numbers. 

Conversely, some functions decompose into situations that are entirely ungraspable. This edge of knowledge, where it devolves into paradox and nonsense, looks like uncountable infinity. 

Uncountable infinity is the infinity whose name itself means nothing. It signifies to something that is, by axiom, impossible impossibility, ungraspable. When infinity “interacts” with the mathematical world– or, rather, when we push far enough to reach it– we come to paradox, chaos, and unintelligibility. Certainly, science could advance sufficiently to reconcile the mysteries of particle physics; but the fun of mathematical concepts is that you can define them in any way you like, even if they’re fake. And uncountable infinity is, by my definition, the “thing” that is always uncountable. 

So gintama narrative cycles aim at something, while those in cyclical personal times suffer for them. Cycles, better, change-less-ness, correspond to sword-less-ness, to lack of memory, and historical time only “restarts” when Takasugi brings us the past. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 

This doesn’t mean our new time won’t be cyclical.

In the end, “time” is associated with sense of Self. This is an unavoidable relation, because time is a human word, in a human language, that describes what is ultimately only known to us as human experience. But “Self” is (itself) a problematic concept. After all, what determines one’s Self? Relatedly, who, and/or what, and/or where, and/or why, gets to possess Selves at all?

Within concepts of Self is often embedded an instinct towards differentiation. The (western philosophical) impulse is to originate this difference in agency: that is, through my free determination of my Will, my Projects, my Actions, and et cetera, I differentiate “I” from “other” and thereby constitute Me. Needless to say, concepts of “agency” are inextricably linked to “change”. Thus, in this particular conception, “time” is bound to “Self”, is bound to “agency”, is bound to “change”, and to invoke any one is to invoke the other three. 

Here, “knowing” (as agency) finds itself imperiled. That is, though the “unknowable” would strip agents of acting-ability, “knowing” would also consign existence, life, the universe, et cetera, to determinism. In both cases, “(un)-knowledge” renders the agent passive. Thus someone might long for an unknowable magic in order to undo determinism, just as they might long for the knowledge to successfully determine their life; yet the one who longs for agency could find agency a disappointment, a not-agency. Equally, if the time loop embodies both desires before they collapse into paradox (I can continue into the unknown future if I escape; something is tying me down, my knowledge is insufficient to escape), “linear time” does so as well. 

But now we return to infinity, to irrationality, to uncountability, in short, to paradox. The bulk of the previous 5000 words has been to determine that the dichotomy is false. To be straight, knowing and not knowing, agent and non-agent, the linear and the cyclical, are not separable from each other. Their binary is an illusion, and the suggestion of one carries within it the absence of the other; they are synonymous at the exact and every moment they are not. Clearly, this is not not-knowing, and not knowing, and not not-either of them at the same time. I call this uncountable infinity, the mathematically irrational. 

The mathematically irrational is paradox. Consider: we can graph, and look at, certain functions, and yet never grasp their value (put x(sin(1/x)) into desmos). Similarly, we know exactly what “pi” is– the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter– and we can define it, use it, find it in every instance. And yet, pi is an irrational number, because its decimals trail off into uncountable infinity. Knowing and not-knowing, united in the same action: irrationality is knowing in not-knowing, not-knowing in knowing, and also neither. 

I will be ridiculous and find this paradox in gintama. I want to claim, in the first place, that the self never generated time at all; in the second, that this is never irreducible to agent/acted, knowing/unknown; and in the third, that time is generated by [time]. To do so, we must investigate the moment of its birth, in 519.

the cliff—519

Tools, given memory, etc., together with the persons who hold them, produce an actor-self, a time of possible change (a “linear” time). It is in 519 that Takasugi finally faces the camera.  

Now Gintoki grasps the sword (memory, Takasugi). This should give us “linear” time. 

But 519 is not so willing. Where we hope for capable agency, we find none. Instead linear/cyclical, active/passive, presence/distance, collapse into irrationality.

Take the archetypical moment. To Takasugi’s why, Gintoki says he’ll stand up. Specifically, he says, too bad– I (you) won’t fall. 

Standing up is what Gintoki (a person, with a sword) does. It is how he defeats each suicidal villain, kills Shouyou, and kills Shouyou and Takasugi all over again. This is what the “time loop” would require of him. 

Gintama antagonists, those paragons of rationality, tell us that it is irrational. 

Otae is also irrational. Her irrationality doesn’t fix anything (⇔escape cyclical time, make change), and she knows so herself– “If I’ll suffer either way, I’d rather suffer protecting it.” 518 chapters later, Gintoki says: “I won’t fall until you [Takasugi] fall, until you stop, no matter how many times it takes, I’ll stand up again… even if I have to walk over my teacher’s corpse, even if I have to walk over your corpse, I’ll protect his disciple, our companion, Shoka Sonjuku’s Takasugi Shinsuke, his soul.” 

So Gintoki stand(ing)s up until something– until Takasugi stops, until time is born– in order to protect Takasugi’s soul. This might look like an “end” to the cycle, but it doesn’t feel like one. “Even if I have to walk over your corpse”? 

Alternatively, “saving” Takasugi should be the change that the cycles want to make, that would break them in any normal work of time loop fiction. It is “agency” (capable action, material change) at its purest. But Gintoki says he will stand up and kill Takasugi and stand up again. No matter how many times the same thing repeats, no matter if time never moves on, no matter if he is forced to kill the very person he’s trying to protect, Gintoki will stand up. How could Gintoki possibly care about escaping any cycle, when he is the one “perpetuating it”?

So gintama is not actually about escaping the time loop, which is the rational thing to do. Gintama is about, do you have the strength to keep living in the time loop, even if it never ends?, or, do you have the strength to kill your teacher and your friend, and lose everything all over again?, or, do you have the strength to eternally suffer for the thing that can never be taken back? In short: forget the capable actor– gintama is about being foolish, and irrational, and embracing the time loop by standing up. 

If we look to chapter one, [standing up] is [protecting the thing that can’t be taken back]. Neither can be appropriately confined to cyclical or linear time. Otae says she’ll suffer either way, and Gintoki says he stands up to protect what Shouyou held precious, Takasugi’s soul. 

Otae protects a thing that cannot be taken back. This is the past. Gintoki acts for– and this is also a protecting– the past. Takasugi is, in a literal sense, pierced by this past every moment of his life. 

The past that we can recover, that we can fully integrate into ourselves, is the past that can be used to generate the future in “time”. Thus “accepting” the past “to move on” – accepting, making entirely part of oneself, making entirely interior – because only then can the past become knowable, comprehensible, and usable. The person must accept their past to change things, i.e., to make linear time. Time, change, and agency coincide.

Yet Otae’s past “cannot be taken back”. Certainly, even the accepted past cannot be “returned” to. But Otae’s past is the past that pierces Takasugi’s eye– that is, the past whose “revelation”, whose self-same existence, drives the completion/generation of gintama time itself.

So this is the past that “cannot be taken back”, in more than the literal sense. Takasugi is scandalized by its distance, even as he dies satisfied; Gintoki, ever-silent, still loses his composure at its provocation, is emptied by it, cries in 519 (in all of gintama), in 703. It is a past that refuses total use or incorporation; instead it acts on those who carry it, even after person is reconciled to sword (to its memory).  

Its paradox in position. Though “the past” is always present (“I haven’t lost anything”, “how long will you keep looking at that crushed eye of yours”), it is simultaneously kept from us by an irreparable distance. Distance, of course, suggests space, which itself suggests a space that is surpassable. But this distance is not spatial– it is temporal. Gintoki carries the past, yet never reveals it to anyone, much less to us; in the end it is Takasugi who has to do the revealing, and even then only after 500 chapters. Further, its revelation actually increases the distance. We grow used to our proximity to Gintoki’s “point of view”, to our role, through him, as protagonist of the story; and here his defining moment is told not through his eyes, but through the eyes of the distant antagonist, whose breaking point is the discovery of the distance between him and Gintoki. Gintoki is reflected– more, revealed to have always been– across a distance that is unsurpassable. 

This distance is equally time, because Takasugi and Gintoki were separated always, and only, by “the 10 years”. Takasugi comes to Edo– there is nothing stopping him, spatially, no physical restriction or meaningful law imposed, from making the approach– and yet he cannot make it. Or so we assume. We only know its universal separation axiom: 10 years, a distance between two points that could never be overcome or recuperated. 

So the past is across an unsurpassable distance. In this sense, it cannot be taken back. It is simultaneously carried in, pierces, Takasugi’s eye, who struggles because he cannot reconcile it to himself. Just as it is always with him– “every time I look, the beast…”– it is also the one thing he cannot bear to see (your crying face). Though its revelation is necessary to New time, it is also what sent time into irregularity in the first place. And though it is irreparably distant, it pierces every moment of the present, which is to say: it degrades time, it makes things weird.

Its paradox in times. The cliff is pre-originary to everything by narrative position. Gintama narrative cycles press towards its revelation as first dilemma. It is before even the corpse field, before anything else. It drives each time Gintoki swings his sword and reenacts it. The very first moment that Shouyou finds Gintoki, is predated, predicated upon, generated, made possible by, the fact that Gintoki kills him with his sword. 

From this past, Gintoki is (in the verb sense). It is ahead of him (in 519) and behind him (before 1). For its sake he “acts” towards a “change” (stands up) that he knows is impossible (“if I have to walk over even your corpse”*). In other words, for sake of this past, Gintoki lives as if he belongs to a “linear” time, even as he knows he doesn’t. The past brings forth itself again.

Finally, its paradox in agency. What is burned onto Takasugi’s eyelid is a single moment he cannot recover or recuperate. Instead, this moment acts on him, it pierces him, against his will. This sort of past is not an empty concept, that could be filled with any given circumstance. Takasugi is tortured because the content matters– because what happens on the cliff that day, matters.

The cliff is not what Takasugi, Gintoki, Shouyou, or anyone else, wanted. Worse, it is not what they fought for: Takasugi to save Shouyou, Gintoki to protect Shouyou’s disciples (in an act that he knows will destroy them), Shouyou to protect his children. Instead Takasugi is stripped of agency, and the eye that would acquire it; in the present he acts on everything because he is, in every moment, acted on. Equally, just as Shouyou tries to protect his students, he destroys them, and Gintoki, who is forced (acted on) to choose (acts on) between two wrongs, two denials of his self** (of linearity), that is, two losses, is the classic agent paradox most of all.  

So the past cannot be taken back, and this not only in the sense that no one can return to it. The past cannot be taken back as a memory, nor can it be incorporated as part of the self, nor can it function as the essential memory that projects forward normal time, even as it is known at every single moment. It cannot be domesticated. 

Gintoki killing Shouyou, and crying, is unacceptable. It is distance itself, just as it is proximity; it is simultaneously known (Takasugi sees it), unknown (no one can reconcile it), and neither (we still move on). It should not have happened. It is irrationality itself. 

And yet, by virtue of being “a past”, in its relation to the present, in its position as driving force of the time of the entire series, it still is time. The human, with the human sword, who cuts off someone’s head, is [time] itself.

Clearly, this is something outside of normal time. The question becomes, who needs to be killed, and where, and why?

The one who gives birth to a future.

*–and he does. 

**“No need. They’ll never hold a sword again.”

the future

That Gintoki kills Shouyou is essential. 

The start of gintama’s “historical timeline” is the corpse field. Here the time that Gintoki sits in carries a heavy sense of eternity. The moment where Shouyou finds him could be forever; historical time is out of place. 

What breaks this time is very particular. It is not that person and sword = human = time in the automatic sense, because Gintoki, who holds a successful sword (“before meeting you, I never lost to an adult”), remains inhuman. Rather, Shouyou, a human (to Gintoki), must give his sword to Gintoki for time to start. This is also what makes Gintoki human. Gintoki, the human, had to be given his humanity– and thereby time– by someone else. 

Equivalently, it is not enough for gintama’s [being human] that the right person holds the right sword. Only a human can progress time, that is, give birth to the future, but reconciling self to past, sword to eye, escaping the time loop, is insufficient. That Shouyou finds Gintoki is predicated by the cliff; sword can only become eye through the cliff’s revelation (and the cliff happens concurrently); self and past are reconciled only after Gintoki kills Takasugi; and the Shimura dojo is restored only once the Shimura siblings kill their mentor. It isn’t enough just to hold the sword– you have to actually swing it. 

This swing must be something irrational, because everything else is just the natural extension of a person with a sword (it is the person and the sword). Further, the person must make the swing themselves. For it to be a swing they make, they need to choose it. So the swing is a decision made in irrationality. 

Swinging a sword at– beheading someone— who is clearly the irrational choice. What goes against the logic of the world, of time, of all the meaning you sought after? Gintoki fought to protect Shouyou’s disciples; but Takasugi tells us that he wanted to save Shouyou more than anyone. Narrative logic says that Shouyou’s disciples should die to save him, and the logic of their linear time– their humanities and their swords– is to rescue Shouyou and progress into the future. Gintoki swings against everything. And cries.

Gintoki stands up, is irrational, for the past that can never be taken back. This past completes his humanity (person, sword, swing) in the moment that it ruins it (he cries). Gintoki kills the one before him(先生) to make them the one behind (into the past); which itself is a loop, is a cycle, but also a line. It is a [being human] that gives birth to an irrational time. 

Gintoki kills Shouyou even though it changes nothing. How does this birth time? “Time” comes out of a self, but Gintoki loses his self; “time” is what renders change possible, but Gintoki cannot “save” Shouyou or Takasugi. Certainly Gintoki knows this, and kills Shouyou in spite of it. But how does this bring forth a future at all?

Gintoki does kill Shouyou for something, for some reason, and this is concretely the survival (into the future) of Shouyou’s disciples. Abstractly, though the purpose is less clear– “even if I have to walk over your corpse” – it is still what drives (is the purpose of) every instance that Gintoki, or anyone, stands up. 

Gintoki’s purpose is Shouyou’s purpose, and Shouyou dies to give birth to the “future” (a future that is born in irrationality). So when Utsuro comes to kill him, Shouyou sees also Gintoki, and smiles. Sakamoto calls this “hope”.

We are told that Shouyou gives birth to hope– his students– almost as if to invoke the analogy. Shouyou’s disciples– his “children” – are him, because he gave birth to them, and they are not him, because they have a futurity beyond his imagination. Equally, this future is knowable, because the child is you, and time repeats, just as it is not, because the child is not you, and you will not be there to see it. This is the substance of “hope”.

With regards to the structure of his world, his time, and perhaps even his own humanity, Gintoki makes the irrational choice: he stands up. But to stand up is actually for, to give birth to, the uncountable future. Sakamoto tells us that Gintoki “gives birth” to this future in every shounen-bond he ever makes. And here is the paradox, something more generative than irrational dilemma– Gintoki’s “descendants” inherit his soul to be in ways unimaginable to him. 

This future pierces every moment, and in the same moment it escapes. Take that Shouyou knows, and cannot know, what his disciples will be. Their possibility is imaginable, in the sense that he can delineate it– “I hope you all find your own bushidous” – but it is also uncountably infinite, because your child is not you and not beholden to your patterns. Equivalently, Otae’s happy memories end when her father dies, but she still keeps the sword of her soul, this unspeakable thing, that past, and it is her purpose in standing up. 

Gintoki, with the sword he has been given by a human, kills Shouyou. This gives birth to an uncountable future– uncountable because it is born in irrationality, beyond the possibilities and expectations of pattern, either linear or cyclic– that is an uncountable infinity, and this is [time].  [time] drives, again, pierces, every second of all of time, and in the same moment it escapes. It is also irreparably beyond the one who births it. This is why gintama had to end. 

So the human is constituted in the moment of death (⇔the moment of irrational swing), which is to release the future— [time]. In the same moment, humanity, and [time], escapes. But the moment of constitution (⇔ [time]) is what births the next instance of being human, that is, the rest of time. 

In the moment before Gintoki’s irrational swing, each [time] was truly infinite. Here possibility is as unthinkable as Gintoki’s heart; there is no better way I can describe this than an uncountable infinity. Gintoki did what he should have (not) (not) have done. Neither he, nor Shouyou, nor Takasugi, Katsura, Oboro, or anyone, could have imagined any possibility for the future that was to come. In its sheer impossibility, this was infinity: the past that cannot be taken back. 

But the past that cannot be taken back is also the sword of the soul. By definition, this generates an impossible impossibility, that slips away as soon as it is born; and as the uncountable, that is, the mother of all irrationality, and also its child, [time] has little to say about lines or circles, aside from that they are essentially the same. So gintama never cared about time loops or not: all that matters is if you follow [time] by standing up. 

When Gintoki recovers his sword (Takasugi’s eye, Takasugi), he does so amidst a wreckage that looks like pine trees, as Takasugi (the one who finally stood before him, who now will stand behind) dies in his arms. Here, we find that the “cycle” repeats: Gintoki stands up, and the sun rises.

This is the dawn of a new, impossible day.

I don’t think that’s so bad. 

[ewingstan]

On 12.6 of Ward and reading Victoria give cute little nicknames to all of the patrolling guards. Giving numbered names in different languages to the ones outside, calling the one's inside "Red" or "the Lumberjack," etc. Works to make the narration a lot easier to parse for the audience while still fitting into how Victoria thinks, which is a neat trick.

Mostly just noting it because its a neat trick he also pulled in Twig. Sy giving people odd nicknames that just kinda stuck as their primary moniker was a big long-running joke there. Not the first time WB pulled from Twig's bag of tricks; I remember noting during the prison arc how Victoria conceptualized the different aspects of her almost the same way Sy did. I feel like Wildbow really settled into a narrative stride while writing Twig that he slips into pretty frequently during Ward.

That might be part of the reason I so frequently forget how compressed everything is in Ward; Worm and Pact both had long sections take place over ridiculously short periods of time, but for both of those the sense of bad things continuing to pile up were very purposeful choices. Twig was much more episodic in its structure, with long stretches of time between arcs where things develop off-page in interesting ways. Ward almost feels in a weird middle ground, where it has the all-gas-no-brakes timeline of the first two serials, but the pacing of the decompressed third. Of course, that could be due in part to how much more slowly I'm going through Ward compared to Worm.

[sophieinwonderland]

i was scrolling r/SC and its weird the mods are saying you arent responding to their modmail responses and claiming you are "threatening sub members". I have seen no evidence of this anywhere.

Ive seen the odd claims that somehow you are only citing older DSM sources because it "supports your narrative" but then they dont read the criteria for how vague it actually is. Nothing you have show has supported the sysmed claims and I have a degree! I've studied this for more then 6 years and I'm licensed! It's vague for a reason.

The mods there seem to think that our life should revolve around them just because I sent a message to them asking them to remove a post mentioning my name and age. I have asks in my box, and other posts I want to make. I got what I wanted from that conversation, which was proof that I reached out to them to ask them to remove comments naming me. I might respond further if I find the time and the interest. But I haven't yet decided.

As for threatening members of the subreddit... I really have no idea what they're talking about. If anyone there has received any actual threats, it wasn't from me.

I think either they're making things up, or are taking some sort of statement that I'll continue to post about their hate sub as a "threat."

I don't have any idea what they're talking about with citing older DSM entries either. I rarely discuss the DSM, and when I do, it's almost always the DSM-5.

I prefer the ICD-11 as my go-to source, as it explicitly acknowledges that you can have multiple "distinct personality states" without a disorder.

Furthermore, most of the published papers researching and acknowledging endogenic plurality that I cite have all come out within the past decade.

Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: 2016

The Plurality chapter of Transgender Mental Health: 2018

The ICD-11's Boundary With Normality for DID: 2019

Exploring the Utility and Personal Relevance of Co-Produced Multiplicity Resources with Young People: 2021

Conceptualizing multiplicity spectrum experiences: A systematic review and thematic synthesis: 2023

It's just a body: A community-based participatory exploration of the experiences and health care needs for transgender plural people: 2023

And many others.

Practically the only time I cite the DSM is when debunking people falsely claiming the DSM says you need trauma to be a system.

Otherwise, I generally don't consider it that relevant. It never claims you need trauma to be a system. It acknowledges possession states as real phenomena. And the existence of criterion C implies you can meet the other criteria without a disorder. But I feel there are better sources out there to use.

Like you say, it's vague. Despite leaning towards the existence of non-disordered and endogenic plurality, it doesn't go far enough to make it valuable for me.

I'm certainly not going to use older versions of the DSM as sources.

But yeah, there really is nothing to back up their claims. I've been asking anti-endos for years for even ONE single peer-reviewed paper stating that you can't be plural without trauma or a disorder. Just one.

Because I can name countless reputable psychologists and psychiatrists who have made it clear they believe in other forms of plurality in peer-reviewed papers from reputable publishers. I've seen others who are open to the possibility but seem neutral for no other reason than the fact their specialization is in trauma disorders, and they don't deal with people who aren't traumatized or don't have mental illnesses of some kind.

What I have never once seen is a single anti-endo provide a peer-reviewed source stating that you can't possibly be plural without trauma. And I mean this with any wording. It doesn't have to say "plural" or "system," as long as it communicates that this is the only possible way to have multiple self-conscious agents in your head.

See, for example, how the creators of the theory of structural dissociation have said in one paper that "self-conscious" "dissociated parts of the personality" may be involved in mediumship and hypnosis.

In the years I've been asking for this, not one person has been able to link to a peer reviewed source where a psychiatrist or psychologist has stated the opposite.

All they have on their side is The Big Lie. I've talked about this recently. Just repeat a claim over and over again until people believe it. Claim the experts support and agree with you, and you never need to source any of those non-existent experts. That's what r/systemscringe, and sysmeds in general, are depending on. That their members will be gullible enough to just accept whatever they say.

[scoobydoodean]

i’m trying to write a s15 fix it fic and i’m kinda stuck on what the ending for heaven should be. along with other smaller details i have figured out, i know jack’s not gonna be god, and neither will amara, but that means heaven can’t keep functioning as it has been, smth needs to change. i do have a few ideas, but i’m interested in what someone like you, who has a much more comprehensive knowledge of spn than i do, thinks. like how you wish the ending happened (other than dean living ofc), how you wish they handled the cosmic consequences of taking out chuck?

and ofc i won’t like steal your ideas! i’m just looking for inspiration and another perspective in order to flesh out my basic ideas

Well... to be honest, when I read fix it fics I often skip the world building aspects surrounding "new heaven structure". Honestly I'm more the kind of person to feel that part of the fun of fic is not having to do complicated world building and getting right into the character-oriented portions of the story. 😂

As far as my own wishes: I am a HUGE proponent of an open ending for Supernatural. Because Supernatural is about a battle between the concepts of Free Will and Destiny, and the final season, in particular, is about an evil author/god writing the characters lives, I feel the only narratively satisfying conclusion is one where even the irl author sets the characters free from their vision (after a certain point—obviously we want to have our fun and set the characters up for success). This is a HUGE issue with the actual series finale in my mind—that it attempts to write out the entirety of the characters lives even into eternity, entombing them in the author's vision with absolutely nothing left to the imagination when this show was MADE for a "ride off into the sunset" style ending because it's about free will. 15.20 simply was not that—it was far FAR too intrusive.

I mean to be totally honest because of its negative narrative significance, I kind of think heaven should simply implode. I think it would be very cathartic for everyone involved. The Winchester's provided (imo) an excellent landing pad for a fully canon-compliant fix-it fic where Dean once again tears apart the script. And yes—to me heaven is still someone else's script in 15.20, whether that was the authorial intent or not. Even if one isn't "Chuck won" truthing, one still has the line, "Cas helped" in 15.20—meaning that at the very least, Cas and Jack are trying to write paradise. They are trying to write The Future. (I discuss my criticisms of that here). This is also why the summary for my own WIP fix-it... looks like this:

Castiel abruptly drops the cassettes onto the kitchen table in a clatter, barely avoiding Mary’s morning coffee. “I need help understanding your son.”  Much to Castiel’s consternation, Dean… isn’t happy with the heaven Cas and Jack have designed and built for him. If that wasn’t clear enough from his preference for universe-hopping to alternate worlds over spending time in the heaven literally designed to be his personal peaceful paradise, or his in turns defiant and despondent attitude when grounded (read: when he hasn’t quite figured out how to chew through the plastic of his “cage” yet again)… it would be impossible for Cas to miss the fact that Dean will barely speak to him. Instead, he afflicts Castiel with one-track cassette tapes. 

On a symbolic level, to me, heaven in SPN represents false paradise. It represents Free Will losing to Destiny. It’s a hopeless, helpless, ultimate: “No matter what you do, you will always end up here”. Even if you succeed at defying The Man in life, you will ultimately be forced back into a heaven where someone else’s vision for your life plays out for the rest of eternity, sold as "paradise". You will always end up back in The Beautiful Room. The afterlife doesn't have to be conceptualized that way, but I think the "new" heaven in 15.20 still heavily misses the mark for me in this regard, especially given the surrounding context.

All of that said, in a more general sense, I think what you do with heaven in a fix-it fic really depends heavily on what relational/emotional themes you're exploring in the fic. For example, say I want to write a fic where Dean reflects on his life being full of responsibilities that were too big and how this deeply warped his sense of self-worth. Say though that I largely explore Dean's feelings and reflections on this through Jack, in the present, cracking under the pressure of being expected to be God. A narratively satisfying ending to that fix-it might intentionally leave the question of what exactly becomes of heaven an open question, because the catharsis in the end is that it isn't Jack's (or anyone else in TFW's) responsibility to figure that out. To have Jack say "I'm trying so hard to make everyone happy everyone wants me to make paradise and I don't know how and I'm drowning", and for Dean to say "You don't have to make paradise. You don't have to do any of this. It isn't your job." Could be a very emotionally poignant conclusion to a fic that focuses on that theme.

I wonder if taking even a further step back would also help? By which I mean: the concept of a heaven as a whole, or hell, or purgatory... they're all assumedly of Chuck's design, and while that doesn't make having four afterlife locations (including The Empty) inherently bad, it also doesn't make make for inherently good design either—practically or ethically. The angels were having trouble keeping the lights on upstairs as their numbers dwindled, Purgatory is an absolute mess (think about where Garth and Bess and their kids will end up...) The only place possibly doing okay in the end is Hell, under Rowena's rule. Death had lots of concerns about balance between the various afterlife areas and I actually think it would be hilarious to give Death... 4.0? a heart attack by just being like "Well... what if we just got rid of some of these places? What if we were trying to stay upright and balance on a seesaw instead of on a ball that can turn in any direction? Do we really need a separate afterlife for monsters? Can heaven and hell just both be in the same place and Rowena and a few other people run it?" Though the need for a new Death could also mean... a new one comes in with a new idea about how to structure the afterlife, but then you also have to ask yourself how intricately you want to detail any of this. If your primary goal is to build the most comprehensive possible fix-it fic that addresses any conceivable question a reader might have about the new reason of the world, then you might finely detail the new concept of the afterlife. On the other hand, if you're more interested in exploring an emotional theme, it might make sense to have whatever happens or doesn't happen with heaven symbolize or relate to an emotional/relational theme within in your story.

Idk that was very rambly sorry I hope it helps a little with brainstorming!

[squuote]

We know so very little about Mariella, but I think her existence as an entity similar enough to Stanley to be narrated in the same structure is very interesting. A lot of people take a lot of liberties with her when they include her in fanfics/other fanworks, often making her somewhat of a straightman, a force of sensibility and stability (and often emotional intelligence)-- which is great!! I love seeing people have fun with her, and it's often good to have foils to Utter Disaster characterizations of Stanley and Narrator-- but personally I see her as... well, as more of a parallel to Stanley, especially with both of them occupying a "protagonist"/"office worker" role when seen.

TSP/TSPUD is constantly operating on at least five levels of meta simultaneously, so it's hard to discern exactly how reliable any information is, or what level of meta it should be read on. Mariella's described presence is her witnessing the destruction of Stanley in "the real world" and simply being glad that it isn't her before moving on. I think this actually speaks to a distinct LACK of emotional intelligence, or at least self-awareness, perhaps to outright denial/willful ignorance-- within the narrative put forth by the Narrator, Mariella appears to be self-conscious, perhaps even defensive, her first instinct self-protective and self-assuring-- "that isn't me. I'm sane. How fortunate that I am sane. How fortunate that isn't me." The irony of Mariella is, of course, that she is ALSO simply a vessel narrated and controlled by the Narrator, not in the real world but within a story, exactly as Stanley is/was (in this narrative put forth by the Narrator) before he apparently 'realized the inconsistencies of his reality' and spontaneously died.

The interesting contrast to THAT is then that Mariella is outside the control of the player, so she ISNT identical to Stanley, and whether she is within the influence of the Mind Control Facility or not within the Narrative is not entirely clear. She is a character, she is framed like a protagonist by the Narrator, but she is outside the player's reach, and largely outside the visible narrative. Does she have her own player? Does she exist in her own form, or like Stanley (at least Stanley per the Real Person Ending) is she reliant on being puppeted to make choices, somewhere beyond the player's perception? How real is she?

Personally, I think Mariella is a very similar presence to Stanley, but without the influence of a Player/the repetition of the Parable, she has shut out the hints of her nature to survive. She is a foil to Stanley (Stanley-the-Narrator's-character, anyway) because Stanley recognizes his reality and is destroyed by it, and Mariella sees that conclusion and refuses to reckon with her reality honestly.

Conceptualizing her outside of the Parable-as-Game metanarrative, I think of her as someone who was Weird growing up, who was made to feel small and stupid and Incorrect for that weirdness, and learned to self-protect by strongly and determinedly identifying as Just Perfectly Normal, obedient to social norms and a careful expert at navigating her position and role. Someone who learned to be bland, to laugh at people failing to fit in in order to fit in herself, to turn her face from their suffering because she was Normal, she WAS. She is normal, and everyone knows that Weird people get made fun of, because they're Weird. She hasn't grown past that and she fights questioning things around her because she is petrified of being Weird and outcast again. I think as a character she deserves internal torment too (/affectionate) and the opportunity to grow from shitty coping mechanisms, instead of always being the Perfectly Balanced Background Supportive Lesbian. (She IS a lesbian tho. To be clear.) Yes this is a HIGHLY autistic reading of Mariella but that's because I am too autistic to perceive a character as neurotypical.

Ideal fanwork narrative, for me, is her reluctantly befriending Stanley (and/or Timekeeper/Employee 432) where they all work at the Office Where Nothing is Wrong I Promise-- reluctant because she knows they're Weird but befriending because they are genuinely nice to her and despite her best efforts she isn't actually friends with/fully accepted by/comfortable with people who ARENT a little Weird-- and starting out a little shitty and judgemental and then slowly growing out of that and coming to recognize that it's Okay To Be Weird and that she is, and she's been hurting others and herself trying to suppress it for approval she has never and will never truly get. Partially brought about because there is Definitely Something Wrong In This Office and she has to embrace seeming crazy, defiant, and bizarre in order to solve the mystery with Stanley/TK and break free of the office's trap.

*waves hand* obviously that narrative concept also involves a lot of other characters growing too, and is based on how I perceive them, but you were asking about Mariella.

ANON I NEED TO THANK YOU PERSONALLY FOR THIS ASK I have literally been rotating it in my mind since you sent it holy fuck. Everything about this has given me an entire new outlook on how I perceive Mariella and I mean that so genuinely. I love the concept of Mariella forcing away the possible reality of being another vessel for the Narrator to project stories onto. Her need for herself to be normal, for her to be in control in such a contrasting and different way than how Stanley wishes to be in control.

Stanley fully knowing that he has no control over himself vs Mariella who insists that she has control, that she knows what is and isn't real. IT'S SO FUCKING GOOD ANON. SO, SO GOOD. I literally am framing this on my wall, I fucking love this so goddamn much

[goldenpinof]

1) I'm a different nonnie but I loved your analysis on the dnpg comeback, but it leads into 2) what I don't understand about Dan is how YouTube stresses him out /so/ much, but how other projects don't as much? I've read his book, and I know it has to do with judgement and how hard he feels he has to pretend to make people like him (side note, I want him to write another book. I'd love Dan is Not Okay as a book even. I like his writing style), but you would think that that anxiety would translate to any public projects. 3) mildly unrelated, but when they react to pinof 4, I wonder if they're going to talk about 2012 in depth (Dan's breakdown on Tumblr, how the fans harassed Adrian, the friends they publicly fell out with between 2012-2013, just all of it) or if they're going to just react to the Pinof itself. Personally I feel like PINOF 4's energy is generally fine, but since they're focusing on controlling the narrative now, it could be interesting to use it as a possible retrospective and a way to clearly define their boundaries.

i'm gonna follow your structure :)

1) thank you <3;

2) i think it can have something to do with the amount of things being made. if it's youtube it "has to be" many good quality and interesting videos (3-5 is already many) and youtube demands consistency if you view it as a job. youtube is also a more public place than venues or bookstores. anyone, and i mean ANYONE, can see Dan's videos on the internet for free and form an opinion, and comment, and start a discussion (good or bad). and not that many things can be erased from the internet. books also cannot be erased the moment you make it digital but it's harder to go through a book and form an actual opinion than to watch a 10-min video and form an opinion also based on Dan's face. videos are personal, it's about him. bigger projects feel more like a job and are perceived as a separate entity. it's not Dan, it's what Dan makes. also books have editors and publishers that have some kind of responsibility alongside the author. independent youtube videos? not really. switching to tours. Dan likes irl feedback a lot. maybe that thing makes it easier for him to dive into an enormous amount of physical and emotional work every tour requires. also, the tour is not Dan, it's what Dan makes and plays a role in. there is more detachment from his personality even though we know he puts his own thoughts into his shows (tatinof and ii included). Dan may also like conceptual things (i'm assuming here, i don't remember if he ever said it, he could). to build a whole world based on an idea and live in this world for a bit. like, creating a tv series or a show requires more time, more revisions, help from others, but it's also more fun to create something so big, i guess. it requires more than his youtube videos but it also gives more in return. it's like making a baby that you're so proud of and then presenting it to the world, time and time again to different people. youtube videos could also be viewed as babies but as he said, a lot of it was made to please the algorithm and to survive on youtube (paraphrasing here). he overthinks his content and because of the amount (again) it's harder with videos than 1 or 2 bigger projects that he can spend months on making. (i bet the pitching of his projects and communication in general stress him out as well. but luckily, he has managers for that). you mentioned dan is not okay as a book, and i would die to see the script of a show as it is. and the fact that it already exists blows my mind a little bit. like, give it to me!!;

3) no, they won't talk about 2012 uneasy times. honestly, i'm gonna be shocked if they acknowledge it in any way. Adrian is a public figure now, mentioning him is a risk. i think they will just react to pinof 4, maybe they will give a few looks @ the camera indicating that they know we know, but other than that, i really really doubt we will get any serious commentary.

[breakandbuildfiction]

Shirou Emyia Is OP As HELL

I find it very interesting both narratively and conceptually that the subjectively main character of a great deal of the Fate Series is by the rules of his own universe practically a failure as a mage and an inconsequential existence among Servants-- the combat 'class' or species depending on your own interpretation-- and yet he is still not only one of the most successful mages and effective combatants in his own verse, but if his same magical skillset were to be imposed on a character in practically any other fantasy universe-- or if he just straight up got picked up and thrown into another universe using a canonical way to do that with the 2nd Magic-- he would instantly be considered one of the most impressive mages and warriors ever.

Seriously, Shirou is one of the mages to have come closest to mastering or at least utilizing the Third Magic, the magic that revolves around the manipulation and manifestation of the soul, by being capable of projecting his soul into the physical world as a Reality Marble. If memory serves this ability is said to be so rare that only a dozen humans in all of history are said to have been able to accomplish the same feat outside of when they come back as Heroic Spirits, in which case it is still considered exceedingly rare.

He is also probably the mage closest to learning how to use the Denial of Nothingness (which is THINK is the Fourth Magic, but I googled it and the Fourth Magic is not named or described, so it might be the First Magic which has something to do with the creation of Metaphysical Energy and/or Substances as opposed to the usage of such things like most if not all other forms of magecraft does... if I understand it right at least... the wiki says the magic is still unexplained in its entirety) thanks to his creation of and growing mastery of Tracing.

Speaking of Tracing, his ability to use that spell/combination of spells comes at least in part from his affinity for and mastery of Structural Grasping, which at his level allows him to instantly learn everything there is to know about a physical object's physical and magical properties along with its communitive history either by just LOOKING AT IT or in some cases by touching it. Though admittingly this is limited by him only being able to instantly memorize and reliably recall and understand that information be it physical or magical if the physical object is a Sword or an object closely related to the concept of Swords such as Spears, Knives, Shields, et cetra (With the seeming exception of Rao Ais which doesn’t seem to have a physical component and is instead a purely metaphysical existence that interacts with the physical world by invoking the very concept of the shield used in the Trojan War). He can then recreate those things at will with his magecraft and enhance or alter those properties with seemingly minimal effort! He's able to do this with ANY non-divine object and can even somewhat pull it off with some divine constructs as well! Though again, he is held back by his own status as a human, though in this case it has to do with his below-average to average levels of magical energy as much as it does the human brain's limitations on what it can perceive and how much information it can store at once.

That's TWO True Magics he's at the very least closer to than pretty much anyone else alive, on top of having so much skill with a spell that for some reason most mages consider nearly useless that he could steal the research of any mage that specializes in using Mystic Codes or otherwise uses them as a medium for their research or spellcasting and by doing so probably figure out some of the flaws that have been overlooked for generations thanks to getting the full rundown of the entire creation process and having COUNTLESS other Mystic Codes and Nobel Phantasms to compare it to practically simultaneously!

AND, let's not forget that the master of the Second Magic once gave the blueprints to his own Mystic Code that straight up uses a version of said Second Magic to the Tohsakas and even after several generations they couldn't recreate even a lesser version of it, and yet in one timeline Shirou was able to do just that in like, a day. This in turn, thanks to the fact that the Code was in the shape of a short sword, means at minimum that version of Shirou if not the others that eventually went to the Clocktower with Rin theoretically has access to at least a watered-down version of the Second Magic as well! And I'm pretty sure that when that happened it was revealed that Shirou's Reality Marble can produce rare or even non-existent materials within its confines that can then be used to make new swords/Mystic Codes that never existed before using Shirous's thoughts and desires in place of an actual forge and that Shirou can then Trace them into reality! The man can literally design magic weapons that should not be able to exist for one reason or another and then pull them out of his soul to use in a fight without having to figure out how to or spend the time required to actually make them. He just needs the final result to work. AND HE CAN THEN TREAT THEM AS DISPOSABLES NO MATTER HOW EXPENSIVE OR TIME-CONSUMING THEY WOULD BE TO CREATE FOR ANY OTHER MAGUS!

And all of this, ALL OF THIS, is primarily focused on how his magic stands in terms of Magical Research, not about how it would affect his status as a terrifying god-tier combatant. Though of course there is some considerable overlap. So WHY is he considered a failure of a mage? Because in the Nasuverse a mage's skill/what rate they are isn't measured or determined by how high their mastery of a spell is or their accomplishments outside of discovering a route to Akasha, but instead by how many different spells they know how to cast and how much power they can put into them. Shirou can only perform I think three or four spells (Structural Grasping, Projection, Reinforcement, and I think Alteration, though I remember some quotes saying he only has one spell, that being Unlimited Blade Works, and all his other spells are just lesser versions of it he is able to use) that are all considered trash tier and is nearly incapable of learning more. In almost any other setting being able to use three or four spells to accomplish what Shirou is able to pull off would be considered worthy of legends and everyone would be scrambling to work with him on the study and creation of Mystic Codes, but he got screwed over by being from a verse that only cares about quantity and rarity, not quality.

[winterandwords]

Happy STS, Winter!

Is there any book/author that has influenced your writing? Be it with style, ideas, or something else (like the decision to do it better?)

Thanks for the ask 💜

✨Weird and/or fucked-up books I adored that didn't follow conventional narrative structure or have conventional moral messaging✨

Shout out to Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland, JD Salinger, and Chuck Palahniuk as early influences, although I didn't recognise them as that at the time. When I shook off all the writing shoulds, I realised that most of my lifelong favourite books were structurally and conceptually weird in some way, or in lots of ways, and I was allowed to do that too.

When I started writing novella and novel-length things in my thirties, having written shorts and creative non-fiction for my whole life, I got sucked in hard to the idea that longer works had to follow conventional patterns and structures. When I did that, I ended up not liking what I wrote. What I loved about short fiction was that I felt free to get unconventional with it and for some reason (Writing Internet™ was the reason) I didn't realise I was 'allowed' to do that with longer stories too.

So yeah, the books I loved, the ones that stayed with me, the ones that still live rent-free in my head, are the ones with negative reviews about how morally wrong they are or how weird they are or how nothing really happens and it's just a guy getting high and thinking about stuff etc. Even though I have no interest in conventional publishing, seeing authors in that arena writing those kinds of books gave me a little boost in inspiration.

I hope no-one drowned in that stream of consciousness.

[yugiohz]

Just wondering but do you have any more lit theory recs? Or texts you think are like, basic readings? I had several literature modules in uni but they were ass and gave us No theorical base for analysis 😭 also it's fine if they are German/in German, I'm sure many of them will have translations into English

most intro books for literary theory are very easy to read as they're usually conceptualized for undergrad students, I think a classic one in english is terry eagleton's intro to literary theory? (I have a different one but i forgot which one i gave to it to a friend lol but in my experience, most are very accessible)

for narratology theories

Aristoteles' poetica if you wan to know how very early narrtology was theorized (a lot of fundamental concepts were conceptualized back then)

Barthes for authorship discourse (or others there's so many but Barthes is a good starting point)

Genette for narrative discourse

and then you have literary theory and criticism, but there is a LOT and not everything might interest you and worth a read, so I'd suggest just skimming some and only reading the ones you're interested in, I enjoy Bakhtin (Carnival, Laughter, dialogism), Kristeva (abjection), semiotics in general (saussure etc.), and post-structuralism is sth I'd also recommend

[pritishsblog]

BEST DIRECTORS IN CINEMA-5

Hi everyone! This blog is going to be the 5th part of my 8 part series of who I think is the Best Director Cinema has ever seen

And today I will be talking about

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

Christopher Nolan (born July 30, 1970, London, England) is a British film director and writer acclaimed for his noirish visual aesthetic and unconventional, often highly conceptual narratives. His notable films include Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), and several Batman movies. In 2024 Nolan won an Academy Award for best director for Oppenheimer (2023), which was also named best picture.

(Early Life)

Nolan was raised by an American mother and a British father, and his family spent time in both Chicago and London. As a child, he attended Haileybury, a boarding school just outside London. From a young age Nolan was interested in moviemaking and would use his father’s Super-8 camera to make shorts. He was influenced by George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy and by the immersive dystopian films of Ridley Scott.After attending University College London, where he studied English literature, Nolan began directing corporate and industrial training videos. At the same time he was working on his first full-length release, Following (1998). The film centers on a writer going to dangerous lengths to find inspiration; it took Nolan 14 months to complete. On the strength of its success on the festival circuit, he and his producer wife, Emma Thomas, moved to Hollywood.

(His Famous Works)

Nolan gained international recognition with his second film, Memento (2000), and transitioned into studio filmmaking with Insomnia (2002). He became a high-profile director with The Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012), and found further success with The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017). After the release of Tenet (2020), Nolan parted ways with longtime distributor Warner Bros. Pictures, and signed with Universal Pictures for the biographical thriller Oppenheimer (2023), which won him Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture.

(Filmmaking Style)

His Filmmaking Style

Nolan's films are largely centred in metaphysical themes, exploring the concepts of time, memory and personal identity. His work is characterised by mathematically inspired ideas and images, unconventional narrative structures, materialistic perspectives, and evocative use of music and sound.Joseph Bevan wrote, "His films allow arthouse regulars to enjoy superhero flicks and multiplex crowds to engage with labyrinthine plot conceits. Nolan views himself as "an indie filmmaker working inside the studio system"

(His Filmography)

Nolan made his directorial debut in 1998 with a movie named Following (1998). He made many other films such as Memento in 2000,Insomnia in 2002. He also made the Batman Trilogy which included Bataman Begins (2005),The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). In between the Batman Trilogy he directed movies like Prestige (2006) and Inception (2010). After this Nolan directed movies such as Interstellar (2014),Dunkirk (2017),Tenet (2020) and Oppenheimer (2023).

Nolan's hand and shoe prints in front of the Grauman's Chinese Theatre

(Awards & Honors)

Nolan has won 2 Academy Awards out of the 8 nominations, 2 BAFTA's out of the 8 nominations and he has 1 Golden Globe Award out of 6 nominations.

(Sources)

And that's it for this part folks, I'll meet you with another blog about some of the Greatest Directors Cinema has ever seen. Until then

CIAO

[i11endaus]

Tyrant's Utopia - Basic Info

"Tyrant's Utopia" (formerly titled Overall) is an AU concept that I created in 2020, but has never been released on any social media account. It is based on the occurrence of special events in the original Undertale that cause characters placement to switch, the idea is similar to the AU "Inverted Fate". It has a rough worldview setting and specific character image design, but it was ultimately interrupted and not completed in early 2021 due to my personal interests. Now, I decided to release all the previous content.

The concept of this AU began with the Neutral Route ending of Undertale. After Frisk defeated Photoshop Flowey, the six human souls were supposed to disperse, but Frisk immediately seized them. And absorbed it all, becoming a complete deity. But they did not choose to break the barrier to liberate the monster race, or destroy the world like Chara and reshape it. They ultimately chose to stay in the underground and use their divine power to reign there (Frisk's placement in the AU is Asgore). They returned to the ruins where their journey began and established their own royal family there. The power of the godlike dissipated due to Frisk's prolonged stay underground, injecting magic into the monsters along with the air, causing subtle changes in their physiological structures. Visually, it manifests as stripes (or cracks, armor edges, and other things that can be seen as stripes) emitting light that has similar colours as the human souls. At the same time, the distribution of monsters and work assignments in the entire underground underwent significant changes due to the birth of this tyrant.

Firstly, the map in the game, as Frisk has established a stronghold in the ruins, the entire map is opposite to original Undertale. The eighth human will enter the underground from the barrier on the mountaintop and explore the underground from the New Home to Ruins.

Then, the power of god awakened all dead monsters and human except for the humans whose souls were absorbed (but there won't be even a single monsters that may have existed conceptually that never officially mentioned appear in this story like Undertale:Yellow. Only the Main Cast that dead before NE ending.), Chara, Asriel, Asgore, Gaster, and others all existed in a fragile form of life that could not be fully resurrected (because Frisk did not revive them on purpose, but rather just a little miracle unintentionally created by the divine power floating underground). Their resurrection will strongly affect those characters who were closely related to them during their lifetime, which cause the placement of current main cast changed following such order.

Finally, the entire underground climate became more extreme due to the appearance of God, which further affected the mental state of the corresponding regional characters and changed their way of thinking and behavior. The entire underground was named "Ruins", "Hotland", "Autumn" (waterfall), "Winter" (snowtown), and "Inferno" (Core) by Frisk based on the climate.

All above is a rough worldview setting, and a more detailed introduction to the characters and scenes will be further explained in the corresponding character's image design. Let's conclude my narrative by listing the placement of character substitution. It might seems really confusing until you see my detailed explanation.

The Brave (8th hunan)----->Frisk

Monster Kid----->Flowey

Alphys----->Photoshop Flowey, Asriel

Frisk----->Asgore

Asriel&Flowey----->Toriel

Sans----->Napstablook

Papyrus----->Mettaton

Muffet----->Sans

Mad Mew Mew----->Papyrus

Napstablook----->Muffet

Mettaton----->Mad Dummy

Asgore----->Undyne

Toriel----->Alphys

Chara----->Monster Kid

Undyne----->Chara

Gaster&So sorry become specific enemies like other monsters

Reminder that several concept in this AU are also inspired the creation of Underswap: Over The World.

Undertale belongs to our tenderly Toby Fox.

[deusvervewrites]

You probably talked about this before, but I'm not sure if you have a tag for it and I've only seen you commenting this sort of stuff when you talk about the fics you're planning to do. I decided to ask anyway because, well, why not?

So, do you have a process for making your fics? Like, an outline, general rules you keep in mind, narretive structures, whatever and etc? Any preferred structures or (snrks) quirks of narrative and storytelling you enjoy making or seeing on other people stories?

I don't think I actually have talked about this, or at least in detail.

All of my fics started as a simple elevator pitch, like 'What If All Might told Midoriya he could be a Quirkless Hero?' or 'What if Midoriya got magical powers from a death god during the sludge villain attack?' or 'Cathleen/Inko raising Izuku.'

Then I move on to brainstorming, where I develop the idea further and work out how I want to handle it. Haigha changed the most conceptually, so I'll use it as my example. It started as 'I want to write Midoriya with All For One Quirk, but not related to All For One.' During my brainstorming process, I came up with the idea of him being experimented on by AFO as a test run for Nine and Shigaraki, only for something to go wrong and that's how he ends up confused in an alleyway with no idea that his Rabbit Quirk is just one he snagged from AFO on the way out. However, as I developed this particular idea, I realized him having All For One wasn't actually as interesting as the mystery of what happened to him and what Quirks he had, so I cut AFO out of it, and reworked the concept to fit.

I also usually have some ideas for future scenes or chapters in mind by this point.

Then I move on to my timeline of events. Since a lot of my stuff involves For Want of a Nail--a small change that goes on to result in far more significant changes--having a timeline helps me keep track of how the butterfly effect is going, and makes it easier for me to adjust as I consider the implications of a specific change more.

I usually use this timeline as my outline, but the timeline in When Freemen Shall Stand is rapidly diverging from canon at an alarming rate, so I might go on to have a second outline specifically for the contents of individual chapters, which will also make it easier to add in more slice-of-life content.

From there, the trick is to do what helps the narrative the most. Haigha for example originally was supposed to start with Midoriya waking up and realizing that his body had been changed, and learning that it's five months later than he thinks it is. However, I couldn't make this chapter work. I think I've still got two or three scrapped attempts at it somewhere. I ended up writing the actual first chapter so that I had something down, and it turned out to be a much better starting point. Referencing his recovery and the effects of his disappearance without showing them helped the mystery, and Nedzu quickly recapping the most important points while seeding future events made it an excellent introduction.

[vriskarlmarx]

for the Reverse Unpopular Opinion meme: homestuck. i've never directly interacted in it and all anyone seems to want to talk about is how unhinged the fandom is instead of anything about the thing itself >>

hehe oh boy

ok so anything i have to say about homestuck needs to be understood in the context that homestuck is probably the story ive engaged with that has most profoundly impacted me as a person, to a frankly hilarious degree. like from the way i tend to read stories to the narrative voices i will tend to use to my sense of humor to the Themes And Motifs that haunt me whatever etc. like i need to put up a disclaimer here and the disclaimer reads: ME AND SOMEONE I LOVE HAVE 5 SETS OF MATCHING HOMESTUCK TATTOOS ON OUR BODIES FOREVER.

that said here is a non-comprehensive list of things i love about homestuck:

- loads of interesting characters, the most interesting of which are all queer teenage girls. I could wax poetic all day about vriska (obviously), rose, roxy, calliope, kanaya, terezi, jade, jane and a few more but this would get super long super quick. they struggle with grief, addiction, social expectations (gendered and not gendered), narrative choices, fate, relationships with their parents and role models, messing around with their friend's bathroom, long-distance friendships, loneliness, clowns and harlequins, juggling different types of relationships, unrequited feelings, and pretty much everything else you can think about. and more generally, homestuck loves to confront different versions of characters with themselves, it's very interested in the ways that the self splinters, forms and re-forms.

- a huge huge diversity of storytelling forms. homestuck includes: images, dialogue portions written like chat logs, traditional narrative prose, narrative and conceptual flash animations, rpg-style games, musical compositions, fake documents (game faqs, book prologues, etc), format-breaking stuff on the website, etc. there are portions that retroactively went back and modified existing sections of the comic, which means that anybody who reads it now is 100% *not* experiencing the same thing that the people who read it a decade ago experienced. related: the fucky structure. homestuck has 7 acts, but act 5 has 2 sub-acts, and act 6 has 6 acts and 5 intermissions, but act 6 act 5 has 2 sub-sub acts (act 6 act 5 act 1 and act 6 act 5 act 2) and act 6 intermission 5 has 6 sub-intermissions and act 6 act 6 has 6 sub-sub-acts and 5 intermissions. like just the willingness to mess with itself in form and format, both for the joke and for narrative reasons, leads to a lot of really cool stuff.

- very fun metanarrative stuff. homestuck is about many things, and one of those things is itself and the phenomenon that it created. like i don't know how apparent this would be to someone reading it now but especially after act 5 act 2 homestuck was like pretty directly in conversation with the fandom and what was going on in andrew hussies tumblr ask box at the time before they became a cryptid. which has its pros and cons but that meant that a lot of the meta stuff about stories and narratives in general also became like a weird spiral inward and at some point homestuck became kind of about homestuck, and in a way it looped back to being interactive (which at the beginning it was interactive, readers would submit prompts which could be incorporated as commands into the story. this didn't happen again but hussie was responding directly to the fandom with a lot of things she was writing so it was being formed in conversation with its readers again).

- it's so funny. especially early homestuck like the first 3 acts and the first intermission. the humor can be so stupid and simple and so effective that there are some gags and lines i will truly never forget. some really nerdy gags about data structures early on too.

- vriska gets her own point. character of all time. known for being controversial, and she was, but that happened because of all the different things that were going on with her as a character who is really important for moving the plot forward at different points in the story with very complex relationships with other characters and with herself.

ok this meeting is almost done i gotta go but i could be here all day

[aleenya]

so i completed the first half of s;g 0. i am an emotional wreck.

listen. steins;gate 0 is a frankenstein of a game. i have issues with it, namely the narrative structure. while i do like the concept of the coinciding nature of the D-RINE paths it does have the unfortunate effect of 1) there being SO many plot threads set up and then dropped or forgotten about in favor of others and 2) the pacing and cohesion being all over the place. there were a lot of plot threads that i loved conceptually but have some critiques with the execution

but fuck. the core stuff with okabe/maho/amadeus is genuinely so good like i dont even care. when its good its fucking great. and i actually really like the different povs we get outside of okabe. its a very "linear" game in the sense that we already know the ending, but it also adds SO much, like SO much to this world. i was genuinely surprised at how much it adds and expands on kurisus character despite her being dead for all of it LMAO BUT IT DOES!!! i loved seeing her relationship with maho and learning more about her upbringing and it just has these beautifully raw themes about grieving and moving on and making peace with the time you had

i first fell in love with steins;gate when i watched it when i was 12. then zero (the anime) came out right when i lost my boyfriend to suicide when i was 18. it was honestly so difficult to watch at the time simply bc of how real it felt. and i just avoided it after that bc of how close to home it hit so i just engaged with the og stuff.

im so glad i could finally sit down and experience it. i think s;g is probably up there with a few of my other special interest medias for "longest running hyperfixation-turned-special-interest." it just struck an emotionally resonant chord with me both as a child and as an adult. also i love all the labmems so much. theyre all fucking autistic and id die for them DKHKH

i didnt think id like maho but i take it all back she is a genuinely fantastic character and i ADORE how seriously it treats her and the parallel of Mozart/Salieri and Kurisu/Maho.

...it also helps that im playing through this with my fiancee @cecelica and she gives maho a thick, deep russian accent whenever she voices her lines LMAO

[shoezuki]

Hey, Egg, I wanted to ask you a question related to fanfic writing if that's ok with you? I wanted to ask how do you plan your fanfics. Like, do you have a general structure you use? Or just go with the flow?

Asking bcz I saw your post on the background of the doc for ch 10 and got curious abt how you go abt planning, whether it be a oneshot or a chapter.

Sorry if its an odd question to ask 😅

Its np!!!! I love talkin bout anything fic related ngl. But to be honest i have next to No structure beksvssyd.

Im typically a oneshot type of writer where i do individual fics part of a bigger series such as the divinity au because for me i want some form of overarching topic/theme/AU without rigidly having a major story in place. Most often i have specific scenes/ideas in mind that are part of a bigger series or related to previous things. Tbh the doctor fic is an anomaly for me. I tend to abandon multi ch things out of losing interest.

I typically 'go with the flow' BUT have major scenes or plotpoints in mind. For the doctor fic i at first imagined it at 6 chapters in terms of major points in the story. Like ch 1: sampo leaving/finding gepard. Ch 2: them connecting/talking and getting closer, gepard's wound getting worse. Ch 3: the fragmentum amalgamation fight and sampo taking gep back to the city. Ch.4: gepards pov and finding sampo... etcetc. But i Obviously have a lot more chapters however the major plot points i imagined remain. There just happens to be more build up and plot in between major 'points'.

Time to get nerdy but in general this is how i think of my fics and anything i write: i block out the story in my head and what i want to convey in terms of key scenes. Kinda similar to the classic narrative structure/fraytag's pyramid but by conceptualizing the 'order' of major scenes between the First scene and the Final scene. W the doctor fic i have an idea of All major scenes ive written and will write, but also each chapter has this same format.

Usually this is All in my head tbh but for doctor fic im trying to actually do a shitty sort of outline w bullet points. Like for instance for ch 9 it went something like:

Gepard leaves to the underworld without telling anyone

He doesnt know what to do and goes to natasha's clinic first

Natasha doesn't trust him but realizes gepard actually cares/worries for sampo and shows him sampo in her office

Discussion of how he got there, nat's distrust of him/silvermanes

The badges.

Gepard falls asleep, wakes up and realizes lynx n serval were texting him

Gep goes home and serval chews him out. He tells serval about sampo

Lynx is passed out and gepard falls asleep beside her

Those are the 'big' portions i wanted to write, and then i add more points between and as im writing i go with whatever feels right to go from point A to point B. With other fics/chapters i have swapped around order of major scenes and ommitted some but i Always try to keep the beginning and the end fairly solid.

..... idk if any a this is helpful vslddgsjd. Like i really do keep most of everything in my head and rarely do i really like... outline or do a draft of these things. Altho the biggest thing i really Really am set on and would argue is most important is that. When writing a multi chapter thing or something with a bigger story to it, know your ending from the beginning. For one, having your ending essentially set in stone makes it much easier to build up to it and ensures the ending feels proper and satisfying. But also, at least for me, knowing how it ends makes it easier to stay interested/engaged with it.

W the doctor fic, how it ends is something ive known from the beginning. I technically have written beyond the ending even. Tbh if i had no end in sight i think id feel listless w it and probably drop it by now

Oh also. I like changing background colours of my pages and the fonts cuz it makes the documents look cool n i like tryna pick a bg colour that Feels like the chapter/fic :)