Annotated 48-47
FB: About half of HR’s investors are fairly well-informed about the giant financial strength and impact of the modern gaming industry and its continued prospects for growth and robustness. The other half heard his name on the news and think he makes “Marios.”
So how much of this is real, and how much is just “How Carol remembers it?” There’s one small variable here that’s starting to diverge from the way things probably happened that day. But the rest of it feels true to the characters we glimpsed in Chapter 9 and the spirits of the in-game characters they will inhabit/create/become. I’d say that Syr’Nj’s player is the least like her “avatar” of the group, but she does resemble the Syr’Nj we saw in the earliest chapters (“Isn’t anyone going to say how INCREDIBLY AWESOME that adventure was?”) Naturally, as the most bookish person here, she’s the least comfortable with public nudity, which will give her a mini-arc on the next page. Best’s player, bottom right, didn’t even need to be told it was time to reveal his body’s perfection to the eyes of the others.
In the earlier draft, HR’s “Just my investors” was something about “the gods of long hours and elbow grease.” The new line is not only funnier, but it shows that even in the earliest days of the project, HR was quite comfortable lying about how much supervision he had.
This was such a great, unexpected way to bring us toward the ending, just fantastic storytelling structure.
Gravedust’s player wishes his beard was longer.
Was there ever any plans to delve deeper into what HR actually had to do to get it to work? You made it pretty clear that there was some malevolent magic stuff going on but it was always a little vague.
This was one aspect of the story where my tastes prevailed, in the end. Flo was excited about exploring the implications of HR’s “magick computer,” a device that executed small spells one after another like lines of code. I agreed that could be fun, but it was lower priority for me. Flo felt that worldbuilding meant you had to define very strictly what magick did and how it worked. I felt that some things needed to be defined–we couldn’t just give E-Merl ice powers at random–but when it came to the backdrop of the series concept, we had more room to say “Magick does what we want because we’re the writers.”
Circumstance decided the matter for us. Readers took a while to fully accept the “Sepia” side of our story. “I came here for wizards and elves and shit, why are we with this accountant-looking guy in his basement?” So whenever we did an HR scene, we tended to stay focused on the more personal dimension (HR rages against his uncontrollable creation, HR’s relationship with Carol takes another turn, HR murders Ferris) to keep selling readers on him. Every time we could’ve gotten further into the “how” of his creation…such as here…we ended up doing something more humanistic, and I think the story was better for it.
I think this was a good choice. Sure, it’s great to have magick follow rules; it helps it feel more limited and less, well, asspull. But how many of us even really understand physics? Regarding E-Merl’s power, is ice really out of the picture? Fire is related to thermal energy, ice could well be a reverse of the process. I’m not saying you should want to go that route, but that’s easily a leap you can make when trying to define magick and its process.
I was actually looking forward to a explanation on how/why HR needed a game to do magic on my first read and was disappointed that it was never given. If course this was before you shared all the pressures behind the scenes and the need to finish the story so I appreciate dropping in terms of pacing, just happy to finally have that answer now.
That sounds kind of like the Wiz series by Rick Cook. Main character is a computer programmer who gets summoned by mistake to a magical world, and ends up becoming a world-class wizard after he discovers that spells work like computer code, and figures out how to “hack” magic to do things no other wizard ever dreamt of. So was that a source of inspiration?
I doubt it! I’d never heard of it and Flo was very amused by the concept in a way that makes me think it was wholly new to her. Nothing new under the sun, etc.
I didn’t even realize that people besides HR, Frigg, and Best had color elements until someone mentioned it in the comments yesterday. I was always like “Okay, I guess Frigg makes sense, but Best’s player has some sort of magic/divinity thing going on and nobody else does?” Colorblindness truly is the stupidest disability.
Isn’t that the same person sending and receiving the message for the doggo joke?
No? The “Show meee” and hearts come from the left.