Recent Creative Projects NaNoRenO And Yesterweb Zine

April 22, 2022

So! I was going to make a post about the development of my NaNoRenO 2022 entry "MMOrial", but I also wrote an article for the fourth issue of the Yesterweb Zine and so I decided to talk about both of them on the same post once it came out. And it did, two days ago on the 20th in fact, but I was too busy being mad about Rune Factory 5 and also with classes, so I'm just now writing about it.

This won't be a very long post, as by now I've forgotten most things I had to say about either project, but I'll try to give some insight on how I went about writing both of them still!

NaNoRenO 2022 Entry: MMOrial

As the game's description reads, MMOrial is a story about losing your virtual home. The main inspiration for this was actually my favorite SCP article, SCP-5470 also titled "Why, 2k?". Without going into too much detail on the SCP universe, this is an article about a game that can pull people's consciousness into itself. It was run by a group of people affiliated with a cult/religion that believed their God would unite people through technological advancement, in particular the internet. Not much is said about the game's actual religious significancy, but it's made clear that it ended up becoming a space for vulnerable queer people. Because of the Y2K glitch, the game is shut down forever and all its inhabitants are forced out, even after one of the developers reached out to the SCP foundation.

The ending is technically a happy one, as all of the players with unstable home lives are then adopted by the largely queer group called... The Gamers Against Weed. No, they're not actually against weed, it's an ironic name. But the point is, there's still a sense of melancholy, that the environment you grew up in is lost forever and you're made to deal with the evils of the real world. That's the sort of feeling I wanted to capture for MMOrial.

At first I thought of doing something rooted in the supernatural like 5470, but of course I wasn't going to copy the whole thing. Plus, after reading some troubling allegations against the author, I decided to distance myself even more and thus make less fantasy and more sci-fi. And so, MMOrial is technically set in the future, where VR technology has advanced to the point that... it doesn't suck as much. Yeah, I really didn't elaborate on the real world setting, I just set it in the future so I didn't have to deal with our current hardware limitations and the implications they'd have.

I had to reach a bit to think of a reason why the game in MMOrial is shutting down, and I'm still not entirely satisfied with the answer I came up with to be honest. The developer was murdered, and since their family was highly prejudiced agaisnt them for being transgender, they're not going to keep paying for the servers and won't make the source code available either.

I wanted to have a reason for the closing that was more like a force of nature than an actual person who actively wants the game gone. To sorta mimic how things work with abandonware on the internet nowadays. Someone just grows out of their old projects, or stops being able to support it for whatever reason, and it quietly falls into oblivion.

Though in this case, it doesn't do so quietly, as I made all three main characters face the grief of losing their virtual home in a different way.

• Rain is the one dealing with the least of it, as it was just another game for him and he'll still be in contact with his friends outside of it anyways. I wanted him to be sort of out of touch with the queer experience at large, being a cisgender gay man and having an alright life. Though I made sure to not portray him as unlikeable, just unable to properly connect with his friends' grief.
• Nia took it way more personally, especially because she was one of the game's admins. I wanted her to fit the trope of "tech savvy transfemme", and also be the most open of the group. She's proud of her interests and isn't afraid to show them off, but still has a hard time dealing with the fallout of the game's closing.
• Astra takes it the worst. I didn't have much of a trope in mind for them, aside from being a "somewhat pretentious artsy type" and the one dealing with the worst home situation. For them, the game was literal escapism, not to the extent of something like 5470 but still making up most if not all of their positive social interactions.

For graphics, I was initially going to use jwildfire to try and generate some cool fractal backgrounds, but I decided to just edit some free to use pictures instead. I'm not confident in my editing abilities and I would gladly change it to something else if I had the skills or the money/time/connections to ask someone to make the graphics for me. Same thing for the music, though I kinda like the music I picked. You can find all credits on a text file that comes with the game, if you're interested.

Yesterweb Zine Entry

I settled on the theme of loneliness on the internet before I even applied to join the zine, but the way I wrote about it morphed quite a bit. I was originally going to write in a sorta more objective tone, starting with an analysis of which era of the internet was the loneliest. I don't have the initial draft anymore, but that section went something like:

"Web 1.0 was the least lonely because it was new, so if you saw a webpage you knew someone had to have made it not too long ago even if it didn't contain a timestamp. Web 2.0 (not the current era) wasn't very lonely either because chatrooms got more popular and people started making social interaction the main crux of a number of activities on the internet, like MMOs and chatboxes within websites that anyone could use. The current era, Web 2.5, is what I would call the loneliest, because there are no more large open communication channels and the various social media algorithms and automated bot services make you feel like you're the only person alive sometimes."

But then I realized that I wasn't around for Web 1.0, so I wouldn't really be able to provide an accurate summary of what it was like back then. And I also barely remember anything from Web 2.0 as I was busy pirating DS games and going through the worst years of my life. So the whole objectivity thing kinda fell apart.

The deadline was fast approaching when I realized my initial draft was falling apart, so in a panic I started writing about my experiences only. I know zine articles don't need to be objective and the like, but submitting something 100% personal to a crowd of people I honestly don't know very well would feel kind of... weird? In a way? So I tried to tweak it to have some more objective parts. I also did the page layout with Tumblr colors, and in hindsight I wish I had done something fancier but it fits well enough since I mention Tumblr as a formative experience.

I'm not entirely satisfied with it, I think I could have upped on the objective parts, but people seem to like it! I've gotten a couple people pinging me on the Yesterweb Discord saying that they were able to connect to it, and that's enough for me. No use in fixating how I would have done it differently, if people got any enjoyment out of it whatsoever then it was worth it.

Anything Else?

Uh, I've been writing Sonic fanfiction again. Doing a sort of character study on Shadow and his identity, and admittedly sorta projecting in a way but shh! (note from the future: I deleted the fic because people kept leaving weird comments)

I'm not very fond of post-06 Shadow portrayals and fanon Sonadow portrayals, so I wanted to give my own spin on it. The cool thing about Tumblr is that everywhere you look there's at least five people writing whole essays about Shadow the Hedgehog as a character and every aspect of him. I wish those were the people writing the fics, but it's nice to have it there still.

And hey, Sonadow gets clicks! I posted a little epilogue one-shot to my big Sonjet multichapter fic, and it got practically no attention, so I got petty and decided to finally put my Shadow plans in motion.

Just between us: there's not gonna be a lot of Sonadow moments – I joke with my friends that I only put the relationship in the tags to bait people – but I'll try my best to come up with a version of it that I actually like. I'll put the finishing touches on the new chapter as soon as this post goes up, so check it out if you're interested!

OK There's One More Thing

I got a post making MAD NUMBERS on Tumblr: here's the link and here's the image in question below: