Talk To Glowfic Characters

[alicornucopia]

So we've started answering comments in "How To Read Effulgence" in character, and that's not really the ideal platform for those conversations. This is! You may address characters here and we may opt to answer in character. You will get a kind of loosely "backstage" out-of-continuity version of the character (in continuity proper, you cannot talk to them, since you aren't there) and if you want them at a specific (past relative to where we're writing) point in time, feel free to specify (e.g. "Addy in 1932", "Shell in her box", "the Joker while committed", "Minus right after he woke up from turning", "the alethiometer on the subject of 1207").

Any glowfic author may use this thread to receive questions.

You may also be interested in Make My Characters Talk To Each Other.

Comments

[shoaling_souls]

Yeah, it's a delicate situation for sure. I wonder if wishcoins support if-then-else instructions, if so maybe you could use that to check for what they would have consented to... Matilda might know. They seem to support foreach loops anyway.

[mute_pen]

...I think I've lost you there. Although talking to a Matilda sounds like a potentially good idea.

[shoaling_souls]

Sorry. In some worlds with more technology than yours has, there are ways of telling machines something like "if it isn't raining, then water the plants. Otherwise do something else instead." There might be a way of using wishcoins to check whether the swan would have consented to something -- I know they're not good at information gathering, but they are able to make a nametag write "Etty" if your name is "Etty", or the rules in Stella's city are able to stop a person if they are about to commit a crime, and I think this might be the same kind of thing.

Foreach is a way of doing something to a lot of things at once. It is an instruction like "for each child in the room, give them a chocolate." A wishcoin could do that: give every child in the room a chocolate.

Some people use wishcoins in ways that suggest they can accept instructions like this. When Stella was making her city on Mars, she used some technology like this to hep her work out all the details. I suggested Matilda, because she's worked extensively with this kind of technology. But I keep mentioning Stella, so she might be a good person to talk to as well.

[mute_pen]

I've thought of trying to refer to what the swans would have wanted, but I'd have to decide when they would've wanted it. While they were despairing and constantly mistreated and might have mostly wanted to die? When their minds were just starting to go but they could still have meaningful preferences, or when they were half gone, or barely there at all? Before they knew turning into a swan was even possible?

[shoaling_souls]

Now I'm wondering what version of me I would want asked if it were me. I've never been turned into a swan, but I've been through my share of bad things with my own version of the baron. I think, if I'd been asked ahead of time, I woudn't have believed I could come out on the other side and be okay. Even if someone said I would, I wouldn't have believed that. I might have wanted to be killed before any of it happened, if I'd known what would happen, though that is not what I would want now. I think I would want a hypothetical future version of myself asked. "Would the me that I will be 10 years after this decision resent this intervention?"

There are things that people have done to me for what they thought was my own good that I hated at the time but got over it because in the long run it didn't matter that much to me. There are other things that even twenty years on, knowing that they meant well is little comfort. Some of them small things but they still bug me because even if it was meant to help, there were unforseen consequences.

[subtly_artistic]

Uh, not to intrude, but do you have all the help you can use?

[shoaling_souls]

I'm okay now, I think. I wasn't for a long time, and there was a long stretch of not thinking I'd ever be okay. To stay in metaphor, there was a long time where I would have preferred either to be transformed mentally and physically into a swan where not being able to think or remember would be a mercy, or a time travel solution to make things un-happen, even though it would require going so far back that the equivalent future-me woud likely be so different as to be unrecogniseable to me.

I have a few memories from before the bad stuff, but they're not enough to give a sense of who I was as a person. My favourite colour was red. I enjoyed opening bottles and pouring them out to see what was inside them. I liked lining things up by size. I enjoyed repeating things I had heard. I had distant memories of being breastfed and was still searching for a way to make the milk come back. I don't remember being breastfed itself, I just remember a later time when I was thinking about how much I missed it. (This is a perfect example of something I resented at the time and would not have consented to, but I am now thankful that it occurred.) It's not a lot to go on, and even if I expand it to secondhand accounts of what I looked like from the outside, it's still not enough to say who I would have grown up to be.

As I get older, I feel that asking what-if questions about past me is falacious. If everything had been different then everything would be different. And there are things about my life that are neutral or good that are loosely causally related to the bad, or at least they seem that way to me.

For example, at one point in time I needed to learn a foreign language so that I could talk to mysef about things that were too painful to talk about in my native language. Learning that language led me to friendships with other speakers of that language. I don't know if I woud have learned that language without that impetus. The reasons for why that language in particular were neutral. Maybe I would have learned it anyway, but it is likely that the driving need wouldn't have been there. But now that I'm in a better place than I was, I wouldn't want to undo that bad that happened to me, not if it meant giving up that language. The good and bad things are all tangled up like that. I don't know what strands could be pulled from this tapestry without unravelling the whole thing.

I think it's evil to do bad things to a person on the off chance that they will find some good use for it later. Nonetheless, I'm wary of retroactively messing with my timeline because I did come out okay years later. But not everybody does come out okay...maybe some of the swans would, even a decade down the road, prefer to have remained swan-minded swans because they don't come out okay. But some of them I think can find life to be worth living again. Not right away; it's going to be a hard road. But I think some of them can make it through.

My current life is not without its problems, food security being the main one at the moment. Things will be tight for a while yet, but if we make it through, there's hope for a better future. The present is already far better a future than I ever imagined for myself.

[guessguess]

...D'you want a poof?

[shoaling_souls]

I would love a poof.

[pythbox]

Meep! Meep! Meep! Whmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[shoaling_souls]

*pats gently* Don't worry little poof, I will keep you away from the cat.

[pythbox]

Whmmmmmmmmmmm.

[shoaling_souls]

Goodness you're fluffy. Do you have a body under all that fur? You hardly do, don't'cha?

[pythbox]

Poofs are about 60% fluff. Aren't they the best?

-Harley

[shoaling_souls]

...by weight or by volume? :D

They are the best!

Harley, can your daemon take the shape of any creature including ones you've never heard/thought/dreamed of, or do you guys have to at least imagine it first?

[pythbox]

[Harley] Well, I was thinking volume, but it's not that close an estimate anyway. It's hard to tell where the fluff ends under there.

[Andrea] ...I haven't actually tried changing to a random shape, but now I'm going to. I bet I'll just end up imagining one along the way, though.