[OOC][PLOT] The Fourth Thread of Planning for Arc 1 - Arrivals

[Labster]

The upside of most of the costumes I chose were that Disney Princess costumes can be bought off the rack, which is like 4 of the 6 undines.  Although Tomoyo did make the mermaid's seashell bra... in 10 minutes.  Bra + shell + hot glue gun.  Which I looked up on the internet, of course.  No wonder Google still thinks I'm a 25 year old woman.

Some random, half-considered thoughts while I sort out what I'm really thinking...

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Did Washuu Break the Internet? Did the walls between realities start to crumble on their own? Did a bunch of Random Near-Omnipotent Beings decide to toss settings into a blender and hit puree?

Yes. And No.

None of us are N-dimensional beings where N>4 (or 3, if you don't count Time). We cannot know the correct answer.

Some of our characters might get a little closer to the truth than others.  I think I can probably dash out something of an explanation of metafictionality by crossing over Fakir from Princess Tutu with The OA.  That is, if I hate you guys enough to include that much mind screw.

Fenspace is big enough that we can write a multitude of different kinds of stories. The stories there are about the entirety of F&SF fandom plus related groups.

There's Nothing Better has a smaller canvas, despite potentially having a larger cast. By design, the stories here are about the self-insert characters, whatever form they might be in. (Stories about the displacees are Lower Deck Episodes, even when the displacees are characters like Tenchi, Sakura, or Usagi). We've dropped from "millions of people" to "fewer than a dozen people", and that limits the stories that we can tell.

Honestly I was not exactly planning on the SI being a main character, but rather being a POV character.  I don't think we have this one on ATT, but the closest I see is Supporting Protagonist + Audience Surrogate.  But the idea is that there's some world that is already happening, and this character gets thrown in, in medias res, which is an awful lot like real life can be.  Noah Wylie's Dr. Carter in ER or Harry Kim in ST:V.  Maybe Kagome in Inuyasha qualifies as well.  They're not really privileged above any other character, but they give the audience someone to follow.

I seriously considered writing in Fenspace, but the problem is that I'm just not one of the fen.  I've never gone to an entertainment convention.  The perspective is very much not me.  Whenever I see a celebrity, my first instinct is to leave them alone so they can enjoy their day like a normal person.

Have we finished introducing the supporting characters that we want in the stories?

Are we ready to advance the plot?

Those are not necessarily mutually-exclusive. And, right now at least, each writer can have different answers to them - which might be adding to the frustration.

Ugh... no.  I mean, off the top of my head there's everyone from Ai yori Aoshi and Princess Tutu, and maybe a couple-a teachers, not to mention basically all the villains.  Look at UF, I don't think this set ever closes.

Advancing the plot is fine, though.