A Tale of Two Projects

There are two parts to this but I can’t be bothered to put it on two separate pages (for now, anyway). The 404 part is below; click here for the new project rambling.

404

Imagination is indefinite. Creativity is a limitless resource, making things is cool, and ideas that build and transform and intermingle and what have you—it’s all super heckin rad, and I love it. The Internet has made this easier than ever, from remixes of obscure band tunes that turn into animation trends to avant-garde short films from the 80s finding new life in Tik-Tok phenomenons. It’s crazy. I’m here for it. I encourage it.

Theoretically, this is the thesis of 404, the story-project-thing currently sitting at my hello-world repository. First conceived as a fanfic simply exploring the post-story ramifications on character development, because I was having trouble swallowing the popular fanon that the characters would simply get along with no further complications after everything that had happened, it turned into a sequence over a sequence over a sequence over a sequence—the core of which, really, remained the character interaction.

Here’s something I drew in October 2019, when I was probably in the middle of some sort of brainfog. It’s not related to 404, but it is more or less the tone I imagined it going out on. (The characters being blue- and red-themed is coincidental, “void” and all.)

It doesn’t really have a lot to do with that creative celebration thesis, does it?

Truth is, that didn’t kick in until January 2020, when I was introduced to Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!. The visuals enthralled me. The anime (I haven’t read the manga) is a love letter to animation itself, from expansive worlds to individualized characters to the inevitable but necessary aspects of business management. And I thought, y’know, it’d be kinda cool if 404 explored similar territory, but for the web.

Websites are inherently fluid. Put social media aside for a minute and consider the Old Web™, when people hacked HTML and CSS together from scratch on Geocities and other hosts (an era before my time, but definitely one I admire in spirit). Why should exploring a site be linear as an infinitely-scrolling feed when there are links? Sometimes those links are hidden! Sometimes even the URLs are interesting! Even on a mainstream level, the Wikipedia rabbit hole is enough of a phenomenon to, apparently, warrant its own Wikipedia page. It stands to reason that a web“comic” would be the perfect medium to explore an idea like this.

As it happened, I’d already planned on having hidden pages and file bonuses for 404; its fanfic-era source material, Doki Doki Literature Club!, hinged much of its “horror” on the player’s familiarity with computer mechanics, from surprise pictures to deleted folders as the game progressed (and, through in-game prompts, encouraged such file exploration). While I can’t exactly grab someone’s computer username from a website (or without prompting them to enter it first, which defeats the surprise), I can use similar ideas to inform my… storytelling?

But here’s the thing.

The core aspect of DDLC that interested me was the idea of meta-narrative awareness: one character is aware she’s trapped in a game, specifically one with a predictable ending which goes poorly for her. However, there are never any direct allusions to the game’s real-world creator(s); there’s abstract talk of scripts and code, but the actual author remains a non-person. Which is good, far as this self-contained gimmick is concerned; it keeps the audience’s attention away from thinking of giant AI conspiracy theories (while they’re playing, anyway), and directly on the shock and horror of what’s happening in what previously presented itself in a cute, innocent game.

The shock value was of little interest to me in 404; right from the start, after all, the core game was a backstory, the foundation of fan-fiction. Again, I was more interested in the ramifications on the characters. It made sense to continue drawing as little attention to the actual real-world author(s) as possible, even once all characters had attained “meta-awareness.” No one’s here for the Flyleaf behind the curtain, and even though the site would inevitably be hosted on my (GitHub-based) domain, I wanted to keep other traces of myself minimal. I even went far as making a separate email address, and uploading very little 404-related art to other platforms, to maintain some illusion of an authorless story.

This, along with what I had planned, necessitated the characters also not realizing they were in a website. There is one section in which the characters explicitly address a hypothetical reader, the “about” pages, because their in-story archive of the entire game had just been wiped and they wanted some trace of their existence… in existence. Something like that. Honestly, I just had to revisit my own page to double-check. It was that insignificant of a footnote, for something that essentially starts the story. (Hey, doesn’t “starts the story” sound kind of linear?)

There are two “thesis statements” at play in the long-term trajectory for 404 (which, frankly, is incomplete; I have a rough idea of three installments after “debug,” loose ideas for four more after, and then it’s all blended together to memory). The first is the championing of creativity—something of an afterthought, but one that’s not wholly incompatible with what the story was. Besides, fun as I find them, I don’t want the story to be quite as surreal and ungrounded as, say, the ENA series or (what used to be) the Goodbye Strangers project; there’s still a core cast, and they have their linear histories and hang-ups. (By the way, I should note that I didn’t find either of these until well after 404 had faded from my creative foreground, though I immediately thought they’d both be A+ inspirations for a hypothetical reboot/rewrite/revamp/whatever; more on this later.) In the end (and note, again, the linear implications of an end), the characters accept that, not only do they have to build their world, that this isn’t a burden but a blessing, and it is high time they had fun with it.

The second thesis is that life is kind of weird and pointless no matter what you do, which is about as dismal or inspiring as you make it; sue me, I like optimistic nihilism. At any rate it’s not only necessary but healthy for certain characters to accept that there are things they cannot control, including and especially their world (you can write a beautiful program, but can you guarantee it’ll work?) and the people around them (trying to manage people like assets is a one-way path to disaster).

These theses get along about as well as Rudy and Kade. When they’re actively working together, it’s less out of collaboration and more because one has ceded to the other’s will; “debug” would have concluded with Kade finally deciding to worldbuild with Rudy, and all is well. (And then they get stuck in the block dimension. But I digress.)

I dunno, man. They totally could work together, as could any two ideas. But frankly, webcomics is hard, and I can’t explain how long this has been dragged out in any way except that my creative focus has latched onto something else. I think, for my own piece of mind, it’s time to call this An Attempt, and stop letting it haunt me.

Well, kind of.

I’m still totally down to revisit the idea, incorporating what’s already there or tossing/retconning it entirely. Unlike The Firebird Effect, which I straight-up lost interest in when I tired of untangling all its eventual plot threads and tonal inconsistencies, I would definitely not say I’ve lost interest in 404. Those pixel people are still very near and dear to my (not-card-suit-shaped-)heart, and I hardly feel done playing with their world. What this means for “the story” remains unclear.

In any case, the author is still very much dead, so to speak. I’m not going to be having conversations with the characters* any time soon, even if it did start out as a big indulgent fanfic. (*You know, like people used to do in author’s notes. #OnlyRealFFDotNetNerdsUnderstand.) What I am thinking is that I just say to hell with the linear narrative, update whatever whenever, and see where it takes me.

Takes them? Whatever; forget only updating on 4/04s and 8/08s, at any rate. That was only sustainable if I actually had substantial updates to provide on those dates, which has evidently not exactly gone according to keikaku.

So what’s next? ~We’ll see~

now what

Anyway, about that shifting creative focus, and on webcomics in general.

You know, it totally doesn’t fit the story at all (there is no meta-narrative, no parade of creativity; it is allllll in on the personal drama, babey), but the idea I’ve been toying with for the past year has accidentally kind of embodied all those concepts of play and development. The idea first spawned in November 2020, as one of a couple little story-starters I entertained for like a day and then moved past—and then around January, in typing up those notes for personal archival, I thought, this idea kinda slaps tho ngl.

So the two characters at the crux got designs. New characters spawned to mirror them. And, while I am normally reluctant to publicize anything story-related because ~spoilers~ or whatever, I didn’t care about that this round because I wasn’t thinking it was going to become A Thing™. Figured I’d just play around with the idea some more, inevitably lose interest, fun was had call it a day.

Well, it’s December 2021, and I’ve told a non-small amount of people about the story, all with the assumption it would, in fact, become A Thing™. So, I guess now it’s going to become A Thing?? While there are still some significant details being sorted out, I actually know how it ends, which hasn’t happened with previous projects. It’s nice to actually be writing towards an end goal, even if said goal has shifted over time and isn’t 100% clear yet. And I am very much still posting “concept art” and other character sketches; certain especially-damning spoilers have been withdrawn, but besides that I am not being judicious for shit. You can see that I’ve been struggling with a certain character’s design for months now (only recently landed on something I think could stick), for reasons that I haven’t made clear but could be much more suspicious in context. Hell, you can even kinda tell that what’s now a fairly significant aspect, a certain recurring monster, wasn’t even a thing (visually, anyway) until I was designing a random character’s shirt, slapped a logo on it, and the resulting design kinda reminded me of an animal.

But I have reached an impasse.

Webcomics, again, Is Hard. By and large, one person does literally everything. (Sometimes they have help and/or collaborators, but that ain’t the norm.) It’s definitely not impossible to finish, but there’s a reason so many end in either “indefinite hiatus” hell (yes I am poking myself here with that) or straight-up cancellation. Time is inevitable; personally, I know I can’t be assed to keep up on stories that update at one (1) page a week (unless I’m actively keeping up with it via conversation with the author and/or other fans). Examining each update at a time certainly has merits, but I would much rather read in distinct chunks.

Which is more or less how I imagine the ideal audience-engagement schedule, for this story. I keep joking in my notes about it being an anime; a full episode a week, spanning just a season, would be a swell timeframe for release. Hopefully/ideally it has good “rewatch value,” but at the end of the day, it’s this hammy little narrative that got away from me. I want people to engage it as a sum of its parts, not at the agonizing drip of one page a $wheneverRateIsReasonablySustainable; that pace makes it impossible to engage an entire story. It’s like reading a novel, except you can only read one paragraph a month. Or watching a movie one minute a week.

To be clear, I totally get why it’s a thing. It’s a compromise between actually putting things out more than once in a blue moon vs the personal reality of making that many pages. Average internet artist is not a mangaka. (Who, by the by, are often overworked to hell anyway.) I simply, as a reader, do not vibe with it, and so it’s not something I’d want to use as a creator—especially not, for aforementioned reasons, for this story.

So What Do.

I still… do not quite know, for sure. I want a good chunk of it, or at the very least the pivotal moments, to be shown in full comic form; while it’s not as experimental with the medium as 404 is with the webpage, there are some aspects I’ve only considered conveying via comic layout. Certain visual motifs are extremely important, and I think they’d get lost in translation in prose. As it is, I’m trying to summarize everything for beta-reading’s sake, and I am having a hell of a time striking a balance between detail I think is necessary and, y’know, the compactness of a summary.

I think about meta and mediums a lot.

But in any case, I’m tying this into the 404 sendoff because… idek, I felt like it. I’m wondering if, instead of dedicating myself to a full-ass comic start to finish, I could use some (modified, expanded) version of the “summary,” interspersed gratuitously with doodles, concepts, and actual comic segments—and continually update as needed, both to add new scribbles and even make story changes as I deem necessary. Hell, I could even try sketching out an entire “episode” in one go, use that for a less-collaged version of the story, and update those pages if and as they’re finished?

Essentially, it’d be the kind of thing that, in retrospect, I could’ve done with 404 from the getgo. Does it fit or have anything to do with the story? Heck no! But is it getting the idea Out There, committing to Finished Not Perfect, all that jazz—so if my interest happens to wander before finishing A Whole-Ass Comic, I can still look back and say I have a body of work that tells a complete story, even if it’s not quite the story I initially envisioned it being?

Maybe.

—a-flyleaf; December 22, 2021. Oh yeah, signatures are necessary for blog posts. It just felt right, man.

P.S. My attitude towards spoilers, which is by and large “I don’t care, and in fact spoilers have often been the thing to get me into a piece of media I wouldn’t have otherwise looked twice at,” is probably an influence here.

P.P.S. If, having posted all this, I don’t have anything to show for this new idea by 2023 except out-of-context drawings and sketches, future!me will probably be disappointed. Fail faster, dangit!!

P.P.P.S. Oh god, I really need a new blog post layout. But, y’know, see above.