#within metafiction

[shtufffy]

I can’t tell you how I knew - but I did know that I had crossed The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

#vladimir nabokov #pale fire #poem #blade runner 2049 #blade runner #baseline #voight-kampf test #voight-kampf #within cells interlinked #interlinked #poetry #poet #nobokov #dropping in #ryan gosling #1960 #1961 #metafiction #poioumenon #shakespeare #timon of athens

[prokopetz]

Don’t know if you’ve already answered a question like this, but what is your opinion on the rise of meta stories in the general media space? Stories that tackle the nature of the story they’re telling or do/don’t do a trope while aknowledging that it sure is a trope that is used in stories.

In the year 1615, Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes published the second part of what had become his most well known work, the novel Don Quixote. Though its plot ranges widely, the premise of this second volume involves, in part, the tale of the protagonist's earlier adventures having been published in book form (possibly by a wizard), resulting in several encounters in part two with characters who've read part one – in effect, the novel Don Quixote exists within its own text.

At one point, the titular Quixote meets a man named Don Alvaro Tarfe, a character from an unauthorised Don Quixote sequel published by a rival author; though Tarfe claims with seeming sincerity to be a great friend of Quixote, he does not recognise the man standing before him now, apparently having befriended a different version of Quixote in his earlier travels. This episode frames a metafictional commentary on the idea of literary canon and the notion of "authenticity" in authorship.

#media #tropes #metatextual wankery

[drchucktingle]

BURY YOUR GAYS has a whole dang bunch of 'media within media' meaning movies or television that only exists in a fictional timeline. so i have been thinking, what is your favorite metafiction way?

personally chuck has been watching sopranos and i really want to see CLEAVER

also preorder BURY YOUR GAYS for the the scoop on 'devil's due' and 'broken don'

#metafiction #bury your gays #tingleverse

[pochapal]

hi there! Since you're currently Homestuck I'm writing in to ask you a favor: could you explain the truth/relevance/essentiality model of native integrity, for someone who has some experience with metafiction but hasn't read the Epilogues? I never got to that part of Homestuck and my attempts to Google explanations has left things very unclear in my head - in particular where each category ends and the other two begin.

okay so! caveat that a lot of this is going off memory and also 4 years of my own interpretation of the terms that may or may not correlate to actual reality, but truth/relevance/essentiality can be explained as follows:

as per the epilogues these things constitute the three pillars of canon - for a piece of fiction to attain canonicity it must be true relevant and essential to that which came before. in some ways this is as simple as if something like a sequel/spinoff passes the "he would not fucking say that" test and sometimes it's less simple.

for ease of understanding, each pillar can be understood as thus:

for something to be true, it must by definition not contradict either the literal or metaphorical truth of the canonical text. what comes after must be congruent with what came before. the easiest way to measure a story's truth value is to see if what is being said is verified as existing in some form within canon - if a character expresses interest in thing A, but this piece of fiction depicts them as both liking B and disliking A without even acknowledging their canonical enjoyment of A, then it loses its truth value.

for something to be relevant, it must have some matter of value or importance within the text itself. an example of something that is true but not relevant would be a side story that doesn't contradict the main canon but also doesn't add or change the core story in any way. inoffensive fluff of no consequence in other words.

for something to be essential, it must be in alignment with the themes and driving theses of the text. to make something essential, it must speak to the "why" of the source text in such a way that it either changes/becomes part of the central message. another understanding of essentiality is through audience impact - is this feature valued enough to stick in a reader's consciousness as a key component when recounting the story's details? in a lot of ways essentiality/relevance do share overlap, but my understanding is relevance = within the text and essentiality = outside of the text.

when thinking about these pillars, the important part is that these terms are also a loose metaphor for adherence to power structures/conformity to hierarchical norms. in homestuck, "canon" is a form of violence inflicted on its characters (the alpha timeline as a concept is the most accessible form of this) and so to adhere to canon is to perform existence in a way that the system views with approval. the pillars of canon are extrinsic validation that represent a total narrativising of reality, and thus the conflicts and hardships of canon continue to perpetuate (in homestuck epilogues terms, this comes in the form of sacrificing "happily ever after" for an intriguing and exciting sequel despite the suffering it will inflict on the characters).

what's interesting about this model is that truth/relevance/essentiality can also be self-generated and self-sustaining. a totally canon-divergent fanfiction will completely undermine the rules of its source to the point where if it were to be moored to canon it would damage the integrity of both texts, but it nonetheless continues to have its own internal consistency/structures. a queer AU means nothing to the source text, but it has meaning to itself and to the audience it exists for (audience response isn't very hashed out in the epilogues model, but i think it's important to consider for a more comprehensive picture - @hms-no-fun's godfeels touches a lot on this angle) and thus an alternative mode of being is formed in response.

the problem with a text that fails to adhere to these pillars is that, while it is afforded a greater structural freedom, it also fails to matter. a fanfiction that is canon-compliant has a greater value in the discourse surrounding its source text than a coffee shop au that only has character names and appearances as a shared commonality - even if this coffee shop au is a groundbreaking and moving piece of narrative, because it lacks any meaningful ties to canon it cannot be used to shape canon.

to give a clear example, a lot of this for me is most easily explored in the concept of june egbert who existed most prominently as a nebulous promise destined for the future of homestuck, but absent in its present. the question driving a lot of the fans with a vested interest in june during the 2019/2020 era was "june egbert is real, but how can june egbert be real? and what does june egbert being real mean?"

you can see this a lot with the two schools of fanworks depicting june egbert. on one hand you have what is loosely dubbed "hairclips june" - a version of june egbert who exists as the platonic ideal of transfeminine fantasy, who inhabits contemporary college aus and perfect femininity and coming out stories filled to the brim with queer coming of age tropes and feelgood trans girl archetypes. she is true and essential and relevant to the transgender experience (and indeed hairclips june *has* helped in cracking people's eggs and thus her validity and importance cannot be denied) but not the homestuck experience. in homestuck, june egbert will never come into being as an early 20's john egbert who realizes her depression is actually unaddressed dysphoria and who spends a great deal of time taking estrogen and wearing skirts and kissing her friends, but that doesn't mean there isn't a great deal of value in these texts existing regardless of their proximity to canon.

on the flipside you have "extant june" (a term i am inventing right now to categorize this character type in absence of official terminology), a version of june egbert focused much more on meaningfully addressing "how can june egbert come to be in a convincing way?", or "what canon and canon-adjacent avenues could june egbert take to come into being?". these june works are more dominated by the messy and heavy and dramatic rules that govern homestuck, and figuring out how to fit june egbert into that pattern. one such instance of this is godfeels, whose june comes about from a mind-meld with a sort of brain ghost vriska after a severe depressive episode and creates the composite "june eg8ert", a manifestation of vriska's influence on john during act 5 brought to its logical extreme. another instance is my own story, omelette route, which has june egbert come into being following her resurrection at the end of the epilogues and the canonical truth that "john egbert is dead"; freed from the narrative obligation of being john egbert, she is able to start examining the true shape of her feelings - this of course is an extension of the questions of selfhood posed over and over again by postcanon homestuck. you can even turn to homestuck^2 itself for what will almost certainly be "canon" june's entrance, through a 40 year old john egbert who, after sleepwalking his way into a miserable life and cruel world, has decided to once again give autonomy a chance.

extant june's stories are, for a better term, characterised in bleak and heavy and thematically dense brushstrokes, because homestuck itself is all of these things and more. to make a plausible june egbert that adheres to the rules of homestuck is to make june egbert compatible with the suffering of homestuck. june will never get a neat and happy coming out, but she might experience post-resurrection ego dissolution, or she might experience a personality-shifting psychic fusion, as these are all extreme character-defining moments common to homestuck's narrative language. yet there remains a controversy in these junes compared to hairclips june - these stories are often too complicated, too messy, too traumatic for an easy and palatable consumption. and yet they feel infinitely more tangible than a story about 21 year old college senior john egbert who is forcefemmed by his transfem roommate rose lalonde and has several feelings awoken as a result.

one version of june strives for truth and relevance and essentiality, and one does not. both junes contain an immense value for their respective audiences. in this way, you don't need the pillars of canon to have a conversation with a story's audience, but you do need them to have a conversation with the story itself. a story can only speak to its own pillars. if you discard those pillars either willingly or unwillingly, then you are distancing yourself from the possibility of dialogue. this is not to say that extant june is more "real" than hairclips june (they are both fanworks after all, and thus unable to ever attain absolute "truth" on their own due to not being canonically-authored texts), but that extant junes are more readily in direct dialogue and conversation with homestuck and thus have a greater potential for influence in this specific way. hairclips june through her essentiality can change your relationship to yourself, while extant june through her essentiality and relevance can change your relationship to homestuck.

i hope this helps in illuminating these concepts in a way that makes more tangible sense!

#cetaceanhandiwork #homestuck epilogues #june egbert #homestuck 2

[dragimal]

finally read the book Watership Down several months ago, after having only watched the movie for the last like, two decades, and I keep mourning what was lost in adaptation. this isn’t a dig at the movie at all, I know they had to work within a very small timescale, and I still love it very much, it’s just like

ok so you have this pretty linear movie about rabbits living their lives and experiencing both violence and hope. ok got it

but then the book? there’s an entire extra third of content (maybe even double??) that’s purely Prince Rabbit stories. and at first it’s like, wow this is really cool! we’re seeing more rabbit culture through these stories: what they think about other species, traits they value, the ways they use these stories to soothe one another or learn or connect, etc.

but THEN. then. the very last Prince Rabbit story in the whole book, detailing all of Hazel’s adventures with his original group... and his memory is so gone that he doesn’t even recognize the story as his own

that alone recontextualizes EVERYTHING. it’s not even just that every Prince Rabbit story we heard previously was probably a retelling of a real event, that’s a given. but more fundamentally, there’s this theme that every rabbit’s story is remembered as Prince Rabbit’s story. that El-ahrairah is not just one individual, but the the collective spirit of rabbits to survive and continue on. that every rabbit carries a bit of El-ahrairah in their soul-- his wit, his speed, his loyalty to his warren. that these stories connect so many different El-ahrairahs-- and rabbits as a whole-- across time and space. that in many ways, rabbits are themselves  stories

I really wasn’t expecting a new favorite metafiction from WD, but I’m glad I finally picked it up

#I'm most definitely not saying anything new or profound I just #love to realize that a story I've loved for years is even better than I realized #watership down #shut up ashley

[theresattrpgforthat]

do you have any metafictional ttrpgs? or any ttrpgs about nothing (being about the concept of nothing or literally not having something they're "about")?

Theme: Metafictional TTRPGS / Games About Nothing.

Y’all are really pulling out the stops for these requests, huh? I’m not entirely sure if what I pulled up actually counts as metafiction, or as games about nothing, but I hope you find something close to what you’re looking for here.

Feedback, by Adira Slattery.

This is a drawing and survey taking game.

You will be expected to draw some chairs.

You will be expected to take some surveys

.Requires the use of a printer for the surveys.

And at the end you gotta email me.

So good luck...

This is a game about drawing a chair. And then taking a survey. And then drawing a chair. And taking a survey. And so on. It’s an exercise that’s meant to be both repetitive and reflective. It’s hard for me to determine what this game is about, because a) I haven’t played it and b) I suspect it’s going to mean something a little different for each person who plays it. It’s possible that for some people who look at this game, it might be about nothing.

Undeath of the Author, by quinntastic.

A meta mini-game designed for Troika.

This is a game in which the author is both dead and not dead - they are undead, and it is up to the group to kill them. The author is the author of the game, and the group is responsible for figuring out how to go about and kill them. (Of course, the author is willing to tell you, the GM how they can be killed, but they don’t want you to tell the players. You can keep a secret, right?)

Beach Episode, by Legendary Vermin.

BEACH EPISODE is a microgame mix-in for your regular table-top RPG group. Players take  their current characters, quickly adapt them for a rules-light session, and commence to run an anime-inspired, beach-themed adventure. All you need to play is at least 3d6 and an established set of characters.

This is a game that is about nothing in the sense that it isn’t really about anything. It follows the style of the anime beach episode, asking you to take recognized characters, probably from an ongoing campaign, and giving them a moment of rest, relaxation, and (probably) nothing plot-relevant. It’s great for encouraging players to delve into who their characters are without feeling worried about the consequences.

Meta Society, by Small Stories.

Meta Society is a game about playing a game of Good Society created for the April Fool's Day Good Society game jam.

This is a game about playing a game - specifically a game of Good Society. When you play, you’ll describe fictional players interacting with a fictional setting, using safety tools and talking about what they did and didn’t like about each session. This requires a copy (as well as experienced knowledge) of how to play Good Society, but I think if you have had the experience of playing Good Society, this might also be something you could adapt to make it a metafictional game about playing a different ttrpg.

DIE: The Roleplaying Game, by Rowan, Rook & Decard.

You’re dragged into a treacherous fantasy world made from your own fears, doubts and desires. There’s only one way to escape - but with limitless adventure within your grasp, would you even want to?

In DIE: The Roleplaying Game, you play a group of authentically flawed people from the real world who gather together to play a game and are trapped in a magical realm. What are they prepared to sacrifice to escape? What are they prepared to sacrifice to stay? This is a TTRPG inspired by a comic book, about people who play games, finding themselves being drawn into a game. Your characters will be interacting with a fantasy world of their own creation, knowing that it is a game and yet being drawn into it deeper than they could have ever imagined. If you want to hear this game in action, My First Dungeon has an excellent season from Mar. 31 - May 26 of 2023.

The Waiting, by J.N. Butler.

A one page GM-less roleplaying game of suspense for 1 or more players.

The Waiting is inspired by the anxiety caused by waiting for the unknown.

In The Waiting you play as a character in a setting where it hasn’t happened yet. It is definitely going to happen, but no one knows when it will happen. Until it happens, there is only The Waiting.

What are you waiting for?

This feels like a game that could be about nothing because the thing that is going to happen will not happen while you play the game. The game is specifically about the time in which the thing has not yet happened - you just know that it will. The game occurs as a series of rounds, over which players describe what their characters are doing. When the event that the table creates happens, you have one final round of play and then the game is over.

This might also be a great tool for dropping into another game, if you’re like me and you like pairing your TTRPGs like cheeses and fine wines.

#tabletop games #indie ttrpgs #game recommendations #dnd #asks #indie ttrpg #metafiction #games about nothing

[haveyoureadthishorrorbookpoll]

Have you read...

note: If you did not finish but feel you read enough to form an opinion, you may choose a ‘Yes’ option instead of 'Partly' (e.g., Yes, I didn’t like it). Similarly, if you’ve never heard of a book until now but formed an opinion from this post, you may wish to select a “no” option e.g., “No, but I want to.”

(...) [A] work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled the Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. The narrative makes heavy use of multiperspectivity as Truant's footnotes chronicle his efforts to transcribe the manuscript, which itself reveals the Navidson Record's supposed narrative through transcriptions and analysis depicting a story of a family who discovers a larger-on-the-inside labyrinth in their house.

submit a horror book!

#House of Leaves #Mark Danielewski #horror books #horror #bookblr #books #horror classics #cult classic #epistolary fiction #epistolary novel #mark z danielewski #horrorbookpoll

[a-town-called-hometown]

I may be biased because "liberation from the narrative medium itself" are my favorite endings for metafictional works, but i also do genuinely think that it's going to be a necessary component to deltarune's ending considering the type of story it's telling with its metafiction. the fact that deltarune is a game is a critical component of how its characters are having their agency restricted. it makes the most sense to show them becoming free by removing the thing that restricts them. (in this case, the narrative structure of their world being a game and especially our presence within)

#deltarune

[studentofetherium]

even a lot of fiction that dables in metafiction doesn't really meet the qualifications of "doomed by the narrative" because even when you acknowledge the fictional nature of a work, setting it up in a way where the term accurately describes the plot is pretty rare

Revue Starlight is the rare example where i think it counts, since the narrative is a palpable force within itself, and the audience (as in, the people watching on their screen) are made a part of that. the issue comes from their participation within the narrative, but because of their fictional nature, they don't have any choice in the matter, because it's all just fiction

[grandhotelabyss]

Any thoughts on Byatt, on the occasion of her passing?

I read Possession one summer when I was in college and thought it was extraordinary. (Intimidatingly so, which may be why I never read another of her novels, though Possession is generally said to be her best.) I need to read it again. I can't believe it never came back into fashion with the dark academia trend. Maybe it's too brainy, or maybe it's that the (mostly) heterosexual romance lacks yaoi potential à la Dorian Gray, Maurice, and Brideshead Revisited. For anyone unfamiliar, Possession is about two late-20th-century British academics investigating the lives of two fictional Victorian poets (one loosely based on Robert Browning, the other on Christina Rossetti), and both pairs' possible love affairs with one another. Byatt narrates in a sprightly comic style with no little lyric potential, derived, I now see, from her great models George Eliot and Iris Murdoch, but she also parodies every other kind of relevant style with Joycean or Nabokovian aplomb, giving us jargony feminist essays, image-jeweled Victorian fairy tales, fulsome 19th-century correspondence, jagged Browningesque dramatic monologues, dreamy Pre-Raphaelite ballads, and more. The climatic vindication of writing and reading as almost prophetic activities, this against the reductively ideological approach of the Theory era Byatt was writing within and against, should be carved above the lintel of whatever English departments remain:

There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing and sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.

I was pleased to see a long story by Byatt, "The Thing in the Forest," in the Norton Introduction to Literature, which I used the one time I taught the class of that name, in the ill-fated spring semester of 2020. If you've never read Byatt, this story or novelette is a good place to start. It does a lot of what Possession does in miniature, synthesizing witty metafiction, aestheticized fantasy, and moving historical reality into a work of the latter-day Romantic imagination.

I also want to recommend Imagining Characters, an under-discussed book of conversations between Byatt and the Brazilian psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré about six novels: Mansfield Park, Villette, Daniel Deronda, The Professor's House, An Unofficial Rose, and Beloved. (I've still never read that Murdoch, I confess.) This book is probably why I think of Mansfield Park, Villette, and Daniel Deronda as forming a loose trilogy of 19th-century "problem novels" (like Shakespeare's "problem plays") that challenge any cheap 20th-century talk about the complacency, sentimentalism, meliorism, or all-around naiveté of "bourgeois realism." Plus Sodré and Byatt are superb readers, and it's a pleasure to "listen" to them in conversation.

The Paris Review unpaywalled their interview with Byatt today. I'd never read it before. She says much of interest; she even criticizes Kazuo Ishiguro in the same terms as I have, for writing international literature by subtracting specificity, though she later praises The Unconsoled for its insight into the psychology of the artist. She seems ambivalent about realism, constantly invoking fairy tales, even saying this about Murdoch—

I think Iris learned a great deal from the French surrealists, and then somehow went and sat in Oxford and became a slightly less interesting novelist than she would have been if she had stayed in contact with the world of Beckett and Queneau—she would never have gone into Sarraute-like writings. I think she developed a theory about the virtues of Jane Austen that wasn’t all that good for her.

—and this about herself:

If you asked me what I wish I’d written, I would say Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” That is a completely pointless postmodernist structure of total beauty that nevertheless has a profound point.

The interviewer notes her nonconformist heritage, what links her to George Eliot as well as to Lawrence and to Leavis. She acknowledges it, but notes as well another way, even within the deep English Protestant imagination:

There’s a Spenserian aspect of Milton that I love. It’s the exotic. It’s the extraordinary metaphors. It’s the luscious sensuousness of him. It isn’t the stern puritan. I think I made something of Spenser that was the presence of stories about unreal things in a serious, real world.

"The Last Spenserian." There are worse epitaphs. Now I just need to read more of her novels.

#a. s. byatt #literary criticism #english literature

[ego-sum-arbor]

I love looking at the silmarillion (and to a lesser degree lotr) as a metahistorical text, not just because it’s a useful way to incorporate the inconsistencies in tolkien’s unpublished notes or because it justifies the reinterpretation of characters and events, but because it generates such a fascinating microcosm in to play with ideas of memory and textual agency. Although lotr is more explicitly a metafictional work, I find the ambiguity and pseudohistorical omniscient voice of the silmarillion to offer more interpretive space.

Part of what I find so interesting about Maglor as a character are is his role as a storyteller within The Narrative tm who choses to depart from it. Examining the Silmarillion as a composite of earlier texts complied by a later scholar (possibly Bilbo?), it logically follows that his work was among the sources. Maglor is then not externally silenced, but choses to silence himself by departing from the company of elves. Indeed, he is sometimes interpreted as falsely authoring his own demise within the bardic/literary canon of ME. A certain self awareness with the text adds dimension to his position as a character who very much knows that his actions are wrong, but proceeds anyway.

I see Daeron as occupying a similar role to a lesser extent , but that view is more heavily based in headcanon and oc interactions, which are of course not textually supported.

#oops pretentious academic voice #unfortunately I am just Like This #míriel is getting her own post bc she deserves it #the silmarillion #unsure how to tag really #my blather

[nextlevelwaterpanic]

above all else i like how myhouse has put its foot in the door for me to Detroit: Become Autism about boomer shooters to friends who previously might not have been interested

exposing doom to an audience who would never have known otherwise that there's something for them after all

and maybe they can't all be intricately layered metafictional liminal horror experiences, but there are nonetheless hard-working community members pouring their souls into a canvas that you can explore within the limitations of a game from 1993 (more or less--gzdoom being basically a "ship of theseus" kind of situation with the original doom's source code but the majority of content is still for vanilla or boom/mbf-compatible ports)

#doom #myhouse #myhouse.wad

[pochapal]

re: Beatrice's contradictory ways haunting and vexing you, do you think this is the product of a multiplicity of Beatricehood - if not a multiple culprits theory then at least in line with your thoughts on the mythic construction of Beatrice The Witch, Beatrice Kinzo's Lover, Beatrice The Origin Of The Gold &c - or is there a grand unifying theory of Beatrice that you haven't been able to formulate?

i feel like for the most parts each beatrice is internally consistent with the exception of the overarching Beatrice The Culprit. the material beatrices each make sense in accordance with what we know of each time period and the respective people involved (save for maybe some finer details vis a vis Beatrice Kinzo's Lover and genji) and the immaterial beatrices each work within their self contained fictional frameworks (we know exactly how the beatrice that maria believes in and the beatrice that the servants tell everyone about overlap and diverge).

the problem is that Beatrice The Architect Of The Murders is in comparison rife with absolutely bizarre contradictions with no neat solution in the text. the base argument would be that this specific beatrice is defined by specific traits that can be mapped onto the relevant person(s) that are doing the crimes in the material world but outside of some reaching and projection with kinzo (who is ruled out from a lot of stuff by virtue of the existence of the other beatrices) there is basically nobody whose inner or outer self is congruent with what we know of this beatrice. if her motive was straightforward vengeance against the ushiromiya family then you could pin her origins on someone like kanon who has cause to violently loathe these people and if it was a straightforward occult ritual in accordance with kinzo's deal then that would speak more to someone like genji but as it stands "i am going to challenge you all to a life and death gamble where if you manage to stop me from killing you all you get access to kinzo's gold" is not something that really fits with any known quantity within umineko.

i think a Grand Unifying Beatrice would be to understand beatrice as a stand-in for the metaphor space people occupy when dealing with difficult truths - it is easier to talk about witches than it is fascism, or an abusive relationship, or being the person to slaughter over a dozen other human beings. beatrice as a concept is very much a mask worn by people and history to let truths filter forward less painfully. i don't think you can coalesce all these beatrices into a singular entity but i think they all operate using the same systems. the issue remains with that single beatrice who does not fit the pattern in the same way - whatever meaning beatrice has as a gambling culprit is opaque and contradictory in a way i don't think can be solved with the information we have.

my gut instinct is to say this relates to the deeper questions of fiction/storytelling and of umineko being a self-conscious mystery story that wants to be solved, but that layer of the story, if it exists, isn't accessible to us. i theorized once that there might be a metafictional beatrice who is presenting the mystery of umineko in a specific way to get a reader to want to dig into the concealed truths of the story, and i wondered if maybe something similar wasn't happening between the diegetic beatrice and the intended audience for the performance of the witch illusion on rokkenjima. the issue is that there is no convincing potential diegetic beatrice to fill this role, which is why i'm left feeling like i'm missing something. it's one of many instances where my understanding of umineko frustratingly feels like you're missing exactly one key puzzle piece needed to get a solid grasp of the picture - the truth is so close, yet so elusive.

#fatesealyou #short answer is i understand every beatrice except the one that matters most lol

[anonymouscomrade]

Goncharov explained:

SCP-2747 is a phenomenon appearing in print and online media whereby platforms dedicated to the discussion of works of fiction begin to mention a nonexistent instance of fictional media. Despite said nonexistence, articles, posts, comments, and other related metacontent created with regard to the nonexistent work of fiction will be found treating it as real. The nonexistent work of fiction can be mentioned by various individuals in varying capacities, ranging from brief mentions in forum posts to being the subject of entire academic essays.

Descriptions, screenshots, photographs of physical copies, and brief segments of text from said work of fiction can often be discovered in SCP-2747-affected media. Descriptions of it are entirely consistent with each other, and it has proven possible to reconstruct whole segments of fictitious media via descriptions of it taken from SCP-2747-generated metacontent. A list of fictitious media generated by SCP-2747 has been appended below (see Appendix A).

Where possible, the affected material can be traced to existing individuals; however, when questioned under duress, said individuals invariably deny having written the affected material, and deny all existence of the fictitious media mentioned within.

SCP-2747 has never been documented in real time; all observed instances thus far have been recorded post-hoc. No instances have been documented prior to January 2008. The reason for this is unknown. conforms to pataphysical observations documented in full in Appendix B.

It is the current hypothesis of the Department of Analytics that SCP-2747 represents evidence of a naturally-occurring anafabula, or anti-narrative: a cluster of interdependent signs, iconography and narremes that, when included to a sufficient extent within a fictional construct, leads to mutual annihilation. First-hand reconstruction of the anafabula's properties is impossible given its anomalous nature, but second-hand and third-hand descriptions have been generated from Observational Procedure LUCID CHALICE and appended below (see Appendix B). It can effect through layers of metafictional narrative, i.e. a metanarrative containing the anafabula will cease to exist within the narrative, followed by the narrative itself disappearing from our reality. The key identifier of the anafabula is that it invariably represents an in-universe antagonist or anathema in all manifestations of SCP-2747, likely due to inherent narreme components indicating its alien, yet centralising, nature.

#goncharov #scp #scp foundation #the scp foundation #scp-2747

[utilitycaster]

I spaced on sending this when you initially made the post, but if you were ever so inclined to make that full list of recommendations on metafiction/the liminal space of tangential genres, I would be very interested to see it! (the original list was 100% some of my favorite books/media)

Oh man I've been uh. bad at reading as regularly/much as I'd like for the past few years, something I'm attempting to remedy, and I've never been the biggest of film buffs, and as such that covers a lot of the high points.

(obligatory reminiscing): Truly the the most "not actually a real problem" tragedies of my life is that I was a teenager before the Goodreads era and so I was shaped, indelibly, by whatever Collected Science Fiction Anthologies of the Latter 20th Century my local library had circa 2004. As a result there's like a thousand 70s and 80s sci fi stories the titles of which I cannot remember but which are etched deep within the recesses of my brain. Occasionally I have enough details to go to some thread on the internet and say "pretty please can you find it," but often I don't. There's definitely one I'm thinking of in which a group of scientists keep doing an experiment to change the time line and they keep believing that it fails, but as a reader you clearly see the list of names and various details is changing. This is not super helpful to anyone other than to say "go read short speculative fiction." ANYWAY here's a few more.

On the topic of short fiction, Sword Stone Table is a collection of short stories inspired by Arthurian legend which I read last year, and not all of them worked but there were enough to make it worth it (and it's a quick read). Hilariously, the coffee shop AU was one of the more metafictional examples.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I don't remember this well but I own a copy and might re-read it; I distinctly recall purchasing it because she made a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation and got interviewed by NPR about it since she could see how many people quit reading at that chapter thanks to eReader data, and I was like "sounds cool". I love when authors are hostile to their audience in a way that's good for them, and I remember enjoying that chapter very much.

I mean your bio quotes Calvino so I'm assuming you're good there but like...I have not read all their work, but I trust Calvino, Borges, Le Guin, and Susanna Clarke to always deliver.

Jules Feiffer's A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears; Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock (among other Diana Wynne Jones books); The Phantom Tollbooth; and the various works of Ellen Raskin (best known for The Westing Game but I read so many of her books) are middle-grade or YA but they are in fact a big reason why I eventually became a college student who would read House of Leaves and Calvino for fun and why I became an adult who devoured Piranesi in one sitting.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

It's also been a hot minute since I read Possession by A. S. Byatt but I do remember loving it at the time.

For...the best I can put it is "popcorn reads?" low postmodernism? mass-market metafiction? Fun shit? Jasper Fforde is your guy.

Technically The Princess Bride is metafiction. Fun fact: a good friend of mine in college did not realize it was not legit a translation when he read the book. His undergrad thesis was in part about translation. We made fun of him for this.

David Mitchell's literary universe, notably Cloud Atlas. David Mitchell is a very good writer who does tend to have a pretty dark interpretation of our world's future and so I sort of fell off following his works because they were particularly depressing but like, that's a me problem because he's immensely talented. (note: did not see the film adaptation, cannot speak to that.)

I am also going to plug the Teixcalaan books (two so far, starting with A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine which is a bit of a stretch but I'm doing it anyway because I think it’s underappreciated (it occupies the same space in my mind tbh as Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota and to an extent Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire, both of which I’ve mentioned before, of an incredibly intelligent SF story with queer characters and relationships that was well received but just doesn't have the buzz of some other modern sf series). It’s not metafictional per se, but it does have an incredibly strong theme running through it of engaging with narrative and controlling it (honestly? Similar to Black Sails in that regard.) The Teixcalaan Empire is hyper-aware of language and legend, naming patterns are a number and a word, and the cool thing to do is write complex forms of poetry. The second book also has a character purchasing an indie comic and drawing all sorts of interesting comparisons to her ongoing situation... a little bit like Tales of the Black Freighter within Watchmen.

Run Lola Run/Lola Rennt (I watched it as a non-German speaker with subtitles and enjoyed it)

#answered #playerkingsley #long post

[triptychgardener]

Y'know just when you think you've understood everything there is to know about Homestuck, you realize that Tavros has massive allusions to Don Quixote. -Lives in a literal windmill -Wields a lance -Spends a lot of his time in a state that's considered delusional/fantastical just like Alonso Quijano, with his dreams of Prospit and imaginary friends -Spanish trollhandle while Don Quixote is one of the seminal works of early spanish literature And Don Quixote itself is known for being an early and excellent example of metafiction, with stories within stories being told in the book, which is framed as part historical account where the author at multiple points inserts himself into the story. It just goes deeper and deeper. God.

#okay i am ninety percent sure this is intentional but yeah wow it feels like a fairly deep cut #meta #tavros