I’ve known “Sketches of Pain” was a placeholder level for about fifteen years now. It’s almost obligatory to begin scenarios with an exposition level these days, but I’m not sure I want to go that route anymore. I’m almost thinking of beginning in medias res. I already sort of do, in a way; “Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt” drops you into a complex political situation with a fracturing alliance between the defeated Pfhor, the S’pht, and humanity, and the root causes for this currently aren’t explored until “The Paradox of Tolerance” (though a careful reader of the
Rubicon epilogue could probably puzzle it out before then). But I want to go further than that. The Security Officer mentions being unstuck in time in “The Dream’s Dream”, so now I want to
really make
Chronicles unstuck in time. Maybe I’ll start off with a Tycho level without the slightest bit of context. Then there can be a dream level explaining about being unstuck in time (I may have to rewrite some of “The Dream’s Dream” to avoid redundancy, but that’s OK), and we’ll go from there back to “Take the Veil”. (I’ll also have to create a “Slaughterhouse-Zero”, maybe. Though then again, “Biblical Candy Machines” is really only currently marked as a dream level because I didn’t have a good dream level to put in its place – I can just reorder the existing dream levels, maybe.)
I definitely want to explore the psychological ramifications of being in combat for so long.
Slaughterhouse-Five used the time travel elements as a metaphor for PTSD, with it being impossible to tell whether Billy Pilgrim was
actually time-travelling or whether it was all in his head as a coping mechanism for the traumas he’d experienced. I tend to favour the latter interpretation, but I’m not going to insult people who hold the former view. In any case, I can’t use that interpretation
literally in a
Marathon scenario, because it’s already pretty clearly established that the SO is controlling time and moving through several alternate realities until they find the one that doesn’t end up in a galaxy-exploding kaboom. I’m not going to retcon 20+ years of established continuity between the original trilogy and several fan games, so metaphor it is.
That brings us back to the SO and Durandal. I’ve tentatively planned to “kill” Durandal since before Rubicon came out, but of course there’s a long, proud tradition of Durandal never really being dead, and I’m not going to break that either. The relationship between the SO and Durandal, however you wish to characterise it, is the source of the majority of character development in the trilogy, no matter that the SO only even speaks in dream levels and the prologues of some of the games. I can’t possibly throw that away. But having Durandal reincarnate as a somewhat different character, but with the same memories, certainly provides an opportunity for a unique spin.
Of course, the other issue is that the trilogy has always somewhat blurred the line between the character and Durandal anyway. Tycho explicitly says in
Infinity that the SO is carrying Durandal’s primal pattern during, I think, “By Committee”, and while Tycho isn’t always trustworthy, this certainly seems a reasonable interpretation of what the chip in “Hang Brain” is – otherwise it doesn’t have any purpose in the game. Of course, that then leads to the question of why we have to find another chip in “Strange Aeons” to merge Durandal with Thoth, but that’s probably just because there wasn’t a way to script in the player keeping a chip with them after a rebellion level back during Infinity. (Now you’d just use a Lua script like the one I wrote for
Rubicon and
Tempus.) But I’ve digressed. My point is that there’s a blurring between the player and Durandal’s identities, which I think was clearly intentional on Greg K.’s part.
So as a result if one of them dies, even if temporarily, that’s going to add to the SO’s trauma. And that hasn’t been explored that much either. I think it’s more or less established by now in
Eternal’s continuity – perhaps Pfhorrest can clarify if I’m missing the mark here – that “I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh” isn’t entirely metaphorical. So a reincarnation isn’t entirely out of the question here.
In any case, when you have this much time travel, cause following effect at some points is pretty much a given, as much of a headache as this creates to plot out. But that’s not a problem, necessarily. I love time travel stories, and I have a nonlinear mind. I’m apparently much better at spatial reasoning than I thought I was, judging from an intelligence assessment I took recently.
So I think it’s worth exploring the ramifications of this. The Pfhor started destroying any Jjaro technology they came across as a result of a Drinniol revolt, which in
Eternal was affected by Hathor and the SO’s actions – which are the consequence of events that happened millennia later. And so on. It’s a puzzle to unwrap. I think I’ll have to diagram it out to get the full story.
One question
Eternal doesn’t completely explore, at least to my recollection, is “how did Hathor get that way?” (And again, Pfhorrest can correct me if I’m wrong on this.) I recall there being some implications, but I don’t know if it’s ever definitively stated. It’s implied, though I don’t think ever definitively stated, that at least a portion of the reason is insanity, which could very plausibly be a result of all the experiences that she went through in combat. I think it might also have been implied that the W’rkncacnter worked to break her mind, too, but I haven’t read all the terminals in awhile. In any case, given how close she and the SO were, at least at one point, that will undoubtedly take a toll on the SO as well.
But I admire how
Eternal managed to make Hathor a galaxy-spanning threat that has to be stopped at all costs without actually making her unsympathetic. One of the better, more complex tragic villains I’ve seen, really.
IDK. I’m rambling. Anyway. The point is that the SO is going to have their own demons. And a central focus of the scenario is going to be their struggle to maintain control over them. I want to explore the different shades of insanity. It’s possible to be insane and not necessarily be perceiving reality inaccurately, for instance – the difference between insanity and psychosis. The former is simply processing reality incorrectly, and the latter is actually
perceiving it incorrectly. I’ve had periods where I questioned what was real, but it wasn’t for the most part because I was perceiving inaccurately; my perceptions just didn’t
feel accurate. In particular, my perception of time was distorted as a result of my symptoms and I had difficulty judging distance. But again, I wasn’t
seeing anything inaccurate; my mind just had difficulty absorbing what it saw.
I’m not going to use euphemisms here. I was literally insane during this period. But I wasn’t a danger to anyone at this point – not to anyone else, and not to myself either. I wouldn’t have thought to harm – well, OK, I might’ve harmed a fly, but I certainly wouldn’t have intentionally caused harm to anything larger. But there’s this sort of popular ignorance that believes the mentally ill are all prone to violent psychoses. In reality, the mentally ill are much likelier to be the victims of violent crime than they are to be its perpetrators. There are only a tiny fraction of mental illnesses that incline their sufferers to be likely threats to others, and I think this is a flaw in our language – there’s a kind of mental illness that affects a person’s perception and thoughts in a manner directly harmful to that person, and there’s another kind of mental illness that affects a person’s thoughts and perception in a manner that is much likelier to harm
others, but we group them under the same banner, and people think of “mental illness” and hear the latter even though that’s something like 1% of the population.
So I think I can use the SO to explore the other, much more common side of mental illness. And while I don’t know what the trauma of combat is like, I have experienced trauma. I have suffered from it. I’ve experienced a PTSD flashback (I’m incredibly fortunate that it was only one). I’ve experienced loss. I’ve lost years of productivity as a result of grief. I know the difficulty of communicating when my experiences and perceptions have made my manners of thought and expression highly prone to misinterpretation. And so on.
Which takes us back to the catalysts for the SO’s demons. The trauma of combat is obviously one. Loss is another. The backstory throughout these scenarios has already explored some of the player’s losses.
Rubicon’s has Kate – not just a loss but a betrayal there, I suppose.
Eternal has Hathor, which is far more complex since it’s explored over one of the longest
Marathon scenarios ever, not just in terms of gameplay length but also in terms of word count. (Seriously, it’s really wordy. I love it, but holy shit, is it wordy. Then again, I’m one to talk – just look at these posts. Or that opening terminal to “The Paradox of Tolerance”. At least I’ve kept the terminals in “The Dream’s Dream” to reasonable lengths so far, I guess.) But there’s definitely loss there and betrayal and who knows what else. And the SO has lost Durandal several times. And who knows how many others over the years.
The SO has managed to keep going through that, but it certainly required a lot of work.
Infinity arguably depicts the SO undergoing a break to their psyche and ultimately overcoming it. The dream terminals in both
Infinity and
Rubicon certainly depict some sort of working through issues too. And IDK how to characterise the player’s state in
Eternal but it certainly isn’t one of perfect sanity.
Everyone has multiple breaking points. There are points where it’s best, at least from an emotional and mental health standpoint, to take time off and pick up the pieces. Unfortunately, not everyone in our world has that luxury, which is one of several injustices in the world that infuriates me on a visceral level as well as a philosophical and moral one. But the SO can travel in time, or go back and keep trying again until things work out as well as possible.
As a result, I’m interested in exploring what occurs after a breaking point. How to piece oneself back together. Because we talk about breaking like it’s
final. Unfortunately, there are some people for whom it is, but I’d like to minimise that number. There are things that are just… taboos in our society in a manner that people don’t think about, and I’m not talking about things like sex, or about things like racism; I’m talking about things like insanity and failure. We don’t discuss them in a productive fashion. Failure isn’t always final (and where it is, it’s because society is structured unjustly; I consider that a truly just society needs to allow citizens at least some freedom to fail). Insanity isn’t always final (and again, where it is, I consider injustice to be an exacerbating factor here; we surely can’t save everyone but we should make more effort to save more of them). Recovery – rebuilding oneself, if you like – is a central idea I’m working towards.
I’m going to make a sharp break here and veer towards the issue of trust. One of the things I most loved about
Rubicon was how effectively the story made it impossible to know for certain whom to trust. It’s pretty clear even Durandal isn’t telling the truth about everything in the story. Tycho, ironically, seems more honest than Durandal in
Rubicon, but it’s difficult to know that for certain, either, because there’s no external verification for anything either of them says.
Since this is a sequel to
Rubicon, I’m going to keep most of Tycho’s characterisation in that scenario. Rather aloof, almost feigning a disinterest in humanity’s interest, clearly motivated by dislike for Durandal, but ultimately appearing to be surprisingly well-meaning and generally honest. I’d actually planned much of the same characterisation for Tycho long before
Rubicon X came out, so unfortunately it can’t be a surprise here as I’d initially hoped when I started writing. But I can still deepen the character.
I’m likely to keep most of Durandal’s characterisation, too. Still sarcastic, still
generally benevolent, but clearly with his own agenda.
When I started writing the scenario, I planned a branching timeline with a sort of murder mystery. Durandal was murdered at the halfway point, more or less. The rest of the scenario would branch depending upon a player choice – one timeline had the player siding with Tycho and his renegade Pfhor (later also including renegade humans), another with Leela and the Jjaro. I never developed this idea enough to qualify as a coherent story because it would probably have required seventy levels. And ultimately, I came to realise that Marathon does not provide a good medium for a murder mystery. I also was nowhere near subtle enough a writer yet to write one – I wasn’t able to provide remotely plausible characterisation on the Jjaro’s end.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing Vonnegut here. I’m going to drop in a passage from another of my favourite writers, Orwell.
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
I didn’t at all understand this quote when I first read it in eighth grade. It didn’t seem real. I hadn’t lived through anything to actualise that kind of horror to my mind. I’d read stories of Nazism and Stalinism in books and seen them in old newsreels, but they were movie villains to me. The idea of how an ideology like Nazism could grip an entire nation wasn’t capable of penetrating my mind.
I acquired a bachelor of arts in political science in 2008. I’d of course read Orwell several times by then, and I had a much better understanding of his political thought by that point, but I still don’t think I really understood O’Brien’s quote. Not on a visceral level. To understand something like that, you have to experience it in real time.
Nothing we’re seeing right now, to be clear, is on the same level of atrocity as 1941 Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. But 1933 Nazi Germany hadn’t risen to the level of atrocity as 1941 Nazi Germany. Authoritarianism doesn’t take hold overnight. It’s more like the proverbial turtle (is it a turtle?) in the pot of boiling water. The temperature rises gradually enough that people might not notice it.
But we’re seeing a lot of countries go from ostensible democracies to… not. I don’t know if you could ever say post-communist Russia was truly democratic, but it certainly isn’t now. Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, Poland, and the Philippines are among countries that probably were democratic at one point, but have slid into various levels of authoritarianism. And there’s a danger of that here. It’s not happened yet. But it could.
Germany may have committed one of the greatest atrocities in human history during WWII, but the de-Nazification after the war was surprisingly effective. I’ve used the Pfhor’s political situation in
Chronicles as a metaphor for post-WWI Germany: an overly punitive settlement led to genuine suffering that ultimately provided fuel for horrific demagoguery. One of the questions I intend to explore is how to de-Nazify a society. There was reason to believe after WWII that democracy might ultimately become the standard system of government throughout the world, but we’re now seeing evidence that a society that
becomes a democracy may not
stay a democracy.
And of course, the United States has not truly been a democracy for all that long. It started out with only white, male property owners able to vote, and those property owners could literally own humans as chattel. (I will allow readers to draw their own parallels to the Pfhor as desired.) It was eventually extended to all white males; racial minorities and women ostensibly gained the right to vote later, but it was de facto illegal for many African-Americans to vote until the Civil Rights era. We’re now seeing a return to that throughout the country, with factors such as increasing restrictions upon the franchise, racially biased gerrymandering, and felon disenfranchisement, which is intrinsically racially biased because convictions for felonies are racially biased.
But authoritarianism isn’t inevitable, either. I’ve been reading Richard Evans’
The Coming of the Third Reich off and on for awhile, and one of the central lessons of his book is that nothing about Nazi Germany was inevitable. Germany wasn’t, in fact, unusually antisemitic by European standards in the early 20th century; France and Russia, among others, were probably worse. Nor was there anything in the German national character that made dictatorship seem like a particularly likely outcome there. There were a number of points in the historical timeline where, if people had made different choices, it’s entirely possible Hitler would never have come to power, and even after he was appointed chancellor, there are a number of points where it’s feasible he might not have consolidated as much power to himself as he could have. The German Communists, for instance, refused to form a coalition with the centre-left in 1933, which
directly led to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor – otherwise, the left and centre-left would have been able to form a government. (There actually seems to have been a fairly extensive history of political violence between the left and the centre-left in Germany, so it wasn’t completely unreasonable for them to distrust one another, but their refusal to set aside their differences was certainly a catastrophic error.) Readers are invited to draw their own parallels about
Duverger’s law and third-party voters in first-past-the-post presidential systems if they so choose.
Chronicles will have two authoritarian societies to explore as case studies: one is the Pfhor and the second is on Antichthon. A central question of these segments of the story will be: “How did they get that way?” Humanity has, on the whole, regarded slavery as an evil for around 150 years (though not as universally as many of us like to believe – human trafficking is still a serious problem), but it wasn’t a settled question in the 1860s; we had a war about it. It wasn’t inevitable that a creative work produced by humans would’ve chosen to depict slavers as evil. It probably wasn’t inevitable that the Pfhor would establish an empire based on slavery. Perhaps
Chronicles can explore the reasons that occurred.
And of course, RADIX and I have already written above some of our thoughts about Antichthon and the fall of Jjaro democracy. I don’t intend to explore every factor behind this in exhaustive detail, because I prefer to leave many aspects of the Jjaro’s society mysterious, but I do want to go further detail behind, first, the creation of Lh’owon and the S’pht, and second, why they vanished and
Of course, I don’t want to contradict
Eternal too much (I’m willing to leave a few continuity discrepancies, which I can ascribe to separate timelines potentially created by the player’s actions, but I don’t want any central plot elements in the two scenarios to be completely irreconcilable), so I need to re-read all its terminals. I plan to go through and help condense some of them where possible this December, so I think I’ll probably crystalise a lot more of my thoughts about the Jjaro at this point as well.
That’s enough for now, I think. I should probably start compiling a document with this stuff so I can organise my writing better in the future.