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Case against continuity
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<blockquote data-quote="loverdrive" data-source="post: 9056146" data-attributes="member: 7027139"><p>If you’ve talked to me for more than fifteen seconds, you probably know that I’m quite firmly in a storytelling camp. I love Apocalypse World. I love Fate. I love MUJIK IS DEAD.</p><p></p><p>But the thing is, I kinda don’t give a crap about <em>stories</em>. I love cool, gripping <em>scenes</em>. Pretty much all the storytelling wisdom is about arcs, resolution of conflict, <em>change.</em> Maybe I’m a hack and I just suck at creating interesting characters, skill issue, yeah, maybe. Or maybe there’s something valuable in the distinct lack of change.</p><p></p><p>We’ve all played role-playing games. Pretty much regardless of the style, continuity is the king: fiction can’t, or at least, shouldn’t be retconned, shouldn’t be rewinded, it should triumphantly march forward, crushing all the words unsaid beneath it.</p><p></p><p>A leads to B to C to D.</p><p></p><p>But I’m a renegade. Screw this. A leads to A to A to A to A, until there’s nothing but a barren wasteland, devoid of feelings to extract, and only then we move to B to pick its bones clean. I crave stagnation the same way I crave suffering. Perpetual torture in a purgatory of an eternal song and dance, edging at the brink of release.</p><p></p><p></p><p>It's similar to fanfiction.</p><p></p><p>Fanfiction hinges upon the established, familiar characters, and that what allows it to cut to the chase: you don’t need to spend words upon words to make the reader give a damn about your heroine and her love interest, they already do.</p><p></p><p>Instead, you can focus on what happens to them, or who they are in your AU, or whatever, go nuts. Your idea can burn bright, so hot it would burn the story into ashes in seconds, and you can observe the inferno with a sadistic glee, without care in the world that you’ll have to clean up the mess you’ve created afterwards. Or it can be too modest to be interesting: “what if the main character worked at coffee shop” isn’t something you can mine for several seasons. You can mine it for fifteen minutes, though.</p><p></p><p></p><p><a href="https://loverdrive.itch.io/inner-sanctum" target="_blank">Inner Sanctum</a> was my first stab at this general idea: it’s played in scenes, and these scenes don’t have to be connected to each other in any way, shape or form. You can play out the same conflict with the same characters over and over and over again, every time reaching a different climax.</p><p></p><p>I’ll work in this direction more, but for now, I’ll probably pause design work. Online play for Inner Sanctum ain’t gonna implement itself, after all.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="loverdrive, post: 9056146, member: 7027139"] If you’ve talked to me for more than fifteen seconds, you probably know that I’m quite firmly in a storytelling camp. I love Apocalypse World. I love Fate. I love MUJIK IS DEAD. But the thing is, I kinda don’t give a crap about [I]stories[/I]. I love cool, gripping [I]scenes[/I]. Pretty much all the storytelling wisdom is about arcs, resolution of conflict, [I]change.[/I] Maybe I’m a hack and I just suck at creating interesting characters, skill issue, yeah, maybe. Or maybe there’s something valuable in the distinct lack of change. We’ve all played role-playing games. Pretty much regardless of the style, continuity is the king: fiction can’t, or at least, shouldn’t be retconned, shouldn’t be rewinded, it should triumphantly march forward, crushing all the words unsaid beneath it. A leads to B to C to D. But I’m a renegade. Screw this. A leads to A to A to A to A, until there’s nothing but a barren wasteland, devoid of feelings to extract, and only then we move to B to pick its bones clean. I crave stagnation the same way I crave suffering. Perpetual torture in a purgatory of an eternal song and dance, edging at the brink of release. It's similar to fanfiction. Fanfiction hinges upon the established, familiar characters, and that what allows it to cut to the chase: you don’t need to spend words upon words to make the reader give a damn about your heroine and her love interest, they already do. Instead, you can focus on what happens to them, or who they are in your AU, or whatever, go nuts. Your idea can burn bright, so hot it would burn the story into ashes in seconds, and you can observe the inferno with a sadistic glee, without care in the world that you’ll have to clean up the mess you’ve created afterwards. Or it can be too modest to be interesting: “what if the main character worked at coffee shop” isn’t something you can mine for several seasons. You can mine it for fifteen minutes, though. [URL='https://loverdrive.itch.io/inner-sanctum']Inner Sanctum[/URL] was my first stab at this general idea: it’s played in scenes, and these scenes don’t have to be connected to each other in any way, shape or form. You can play out the same conflict with the same characters over and over and over again, every time reaching a different climax. I’ll work in this direction more, but for now, I’ll probably pause design work. Online play for Inner Sanctum ain’t gonna implement itself, after all. [/QUOTE]
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