404/project-status

Originally posted December 22, 2021 after eight months of radio silence. Revised for standalone reading February 23, 2022.

Links open in new tabs.

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 sitting at this here hello-world repository. It was first conceived in late 2018 as a fanfic exploring ramifications on character development, because I was having trouble accepting the popular fanon that, once the curtain closed, the characters would simply get along with no further complications despite everything that had happened. Over time, the idea turned into a sequence over a sequence over a sequence over a sequence—the core of which 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 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 have a lot to do with that creative celebration thesis, does it?

Truth is, that idea didn’t kick in until January 2020, when I was introduced to the anime Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!. The visuals enthralled me. It’s a love letter to animation itself, from expansive worlds to individualized characters (and even the inevitable but, to some degree, 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. Ignoring social media for a minute, consider the Old Web™, when people hacked HTML and CSS together from scratch to display all their content just as they wanted (within the constraints of code, at least. This whole era was before my time, but definitely one I admire in spirit). Why should exploring a site be linear as a scrolling feed when there are links? Sometimes those links are hidden! Even the URLs can be interesting! On a less niche level, even Wikipedia can be a rabbit hole. Wouldn’t a web“comic” be the perfect medium to explore an idea like this?

As it happened, I’d already planned on using hidden pages and file bonuses in 404; its fanfic-era source material, Doki Doki Literature Club!, hinged much of its “horror” on the player’s familiarity with computer mechanics. As the game progresses, the player is occasionally prompted to see if anything’s changed in the game folder, with oddities such as surprise pictures and deleted folders enhancing the narrative. While I can’t exactly grab someone’s computer username from a browser (or if I can, it seems invasive enough I haven’t looked into it), 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, one with a predictable ending which goes poorly for her. However, there are never any 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 (or at least I didn’t), and directly on the shock and horror of what’s happening in what previously presented itself as 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 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 a-flyleaf dot github dot io, I wanted to keep other traces of myself minimal. I even made a separate email address just for the project, and uploaded very little 404-related art to other platforms, to maintain some illusion of an authorless story.

This, along with what I had planned for the narrative, 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. Honestly, I had to revisit the page to double-check. It was that insignificant 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 that 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, this isn’t a burden but a blessing, and it is high time they had fun with it.

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” concludes 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 ideas with the right finagling. 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 peace 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 my first project, which I straight-up lost interest in continuing when I tired of untangling all its eventual plot threads and tonal inconsistencies, I would definitely not say I’ve lost interest in 404. These 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 interacting with the characters in author notes any time soon, even if it did start out as a big indulgent fanfic. What I am thinking is that I just say to hell with linear narrative, update whatever whenever, and see where it takes me.

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

So what’s next? ~We’ll see~