Notes from a discussion on Discord about fictives
--Makyo (talk) 19:01, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
Via Indi
Or, if characters are people, if everything we can write or imagine or could possibly happen did happen somewhere, then all the good stuff that could possibly happen happened to them as well.
Via Rensy
"Is it morally okay to have True Name of the Ode Clade as a fictive", the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate between people who haven't fucking read Mitzvot.
At the end of the day, this would not be the first time people have been dillweeds about whether the actions of a dubiously moral female character should be used as a metric to determine the morality of a person on the other side of the fourth wall.
Via Kimmy
I think that last part is a problem though. "Even though that wouldn't really fix anything". We live in an age of hyper individualization. The idea that you can "get rid of the Bad People And Everything Will Be Fine" is about as naive as "well, Technology will solve Capitalism". It is looking at a systemic problem and posing a magical silver bullet answer.
I also want to point out that at this point several of the people who have wrote the things have made clear their intentions about writing those things. Say what you will about death of the author, but could it be we are just seeing a condensed narrative? Could it be that True Name is doing opinion shaping in Toledot, and that is partially why she tells Ioan all of these horrific sounding things that would make absolutely no sense if she was truly an Evil Genius Pulling All Of the Strings?
I think it is more than possible to acknowledge that her and Jonas did some fucked up things that were wrong, while also keeping in mind that it is really hard to fucking start an entirely separate space and keep it going. That it is really hard to defend something that is counter to the world that you came from. That there are going to be a lot of attempts to destroy that and there are going to be mistakes made and there are also going to be consequences later, personal and political. There is room for nuance here.
tl;dr I Am Scared About Talking About Being A Fictive And the Feelings That Go Along With It So I Wrote This Essay Instead
Via Fireheart&
This is where we run into an intersection between "how we engage with media (which is not a person)" and "how we engage with media (which people identify with)"
Because there's always this like need to justify that a fictive is even a real person whose feelings are worth taking seriously
There was no way I was going to make a headmate out of her without Beholden coming along with me
But I was really feeling Pointillist
So I just kept pestering Skunks& until she was like "...fuuuuuuck you're right"
These characters were always variations on Skunks&. She was always plural, only not yet self-aware of that fact. And as plural or fictive authors joined the community, they started writing short stories that reflected their fictive identities and, by extension, altering what is true about these characters.
Sometimes that has rankled with book-canon, or Skunks&'s intentions with these characters, and that required some work to adjust this syncosm as not to inject dysphoria into this context.
And, also, virtually anything to do with these fictives has become co-owned and co-written. Kimmy's take on the seventh stanza in Cowboy is the primary source of canon for those characters. Motes Played was co-written by the fictives named in the story. Marsh contains ample fifth stanza content as well, and all of that is co-written by their respective headmates.
The fictives are authors in this space. They are not just reflections of one person or another performing an identity they like, they are writing canon material. That is why it is so personal! This is an open setting! Skunks& has seen fit to include us in her writing, and that makes this writing about us in a way we do not enjoy in most other fiction.
A Finger Pointing was a side-character with all of five sentences written about her before I took her on. Then Skunks& I decided she was in an enduring intraclade relationship with Beholden. Then we decided they had created some long-lived forks and then we thought it would be really hot to kill them and we wrote a pair of sister short stories called Columbines and Nasturtiums that became the B-plot for Marsh.
Warmth In Fire was not even attested until Marsh, and ey explicitly penned her first appearance in the novels.
No Longer Myself was a random Odist I picked out for roleplaying, and then Skunks& decided she wanted to do a really hot twist of the knife and write a whole fucking short story about her in her absence, explicitly playing with the ways in which her story differs between the System and our roleplaying.
Skunks& I have explored what we like about True Name — you know, the main character of the Cycle — and, given that, altered the published text to conform to our fictive identities.
We have put so much of ourselves into these stories because we are writing these stories about ourselves. They were always about us, because we are these characters. These characters on the page are a reflection of us, not the other way around.
Via Skunks&
There is absolutely a difference between character and person, though, and in canon, characters are more caricatures, in that their lives and personalities are slimmed down to accomplish a narrative goal. This long arc for True Name leads to a very negative opinion of her for the first two books that starts to crack in Nevi'im
Mmhm! And RP rides a line as well, where the caricature is dropped, but it is still not the complete self
We wrote portions of Motes Played together. We wrote portions of Marsh and the accompanying stories together. We have written several stories of, for, and with each other, and it has become a way of expanding the stories of ourselves which both informs our interactions and informs canon. I have never done a project like this before, and I am sure that such exist out in the world, but it feels like a very particular take on 'open setting'. This is why 'self inserts' are not just allowed, but wholeheartedly encouraged. The CERES clade in "Millworks" and "A Well Trained Eye", the Tarot clade in several stories I do not have in front of me, "Cowboy" and "Fox Hunt"...these are all fantastic examples.
This is why Fireheart and I are so keen on saying "it feels like love".