Drunkard's Walk and Metafiction

[jonathanlennox]

Something I was pondering -- do any of the worlds that Doug's going to visit in the course of DW actually exist as fictional works in the Warrior's World continuity?
I know that one of the points of DW is to subvert the traditional patterns of the self-insertion fanfic, so I imagine that Doug isn't going to be familiar with the works. But that's not exactly the same question.
Now, given what you've described of Warrior's World Japan, it seems entirely plausible that the history of anime will be largely different. (I can't imagine Bubblegum Crisis being created in anything like the same form, for example.) But it seems like the U.S. is much more convergent.
The one case I'm thinking of in particular is the Valdemar books. They're heroic fantasy, not superheroes, so the existence of metapowers shouldn't directly affect them, I guess. And while Doug may not be a fantasy reader, it wouldn't surprise me if someone had sent him a copy of Mercedes Lackey's CD Heralds, Harpers, and Havoc at some point. Which might (or might not) have clued him in to something odd -- "hey, haven't I heard that song that bard's singing somewhere before..."
If the Valdemar books don't exist in Doug's world, it's going to have a significant ripple effect on the history of filk music, and so alter my entries for the Game Everyone Loves To Play. Which is mostly why I care. :-)

[Bob Schroeck]

That's a really good question. Certainly a wide variety of anime that we are familiar with won't be there in the DW version of Warriors' World, or will be altered to one degree or another. As to Lackey, well...
Okay, we've got a lot of the Lackey tapes from Firebird. And we've had them for a while. At one point I even approached the then-current GM (I forget who it was at the time) with the Shield-Spell Song with the intent of getting it into Doug's repertoire. So if I use the game as a precedent (which I will admit that I don't always do), then it seems that somehow Doug got his hands on at least that one song. Which means that Lackey and the Valdemar books exist in WW.
As to Doug recognizing any of the music -- good question. Valdemaran isn't English, and the lyrics would accordingly have different stress and scansion patterns. The melodies that fit those different patterns may well substantially resemble their counterparts in Warriors' World, but might not necessarily be very close. I'd have to know more about Valdemaran -- of which we know absolutely nothing except that we can draw the inference that like English it's probably a bastard tongue born of several other languages -- before I can even guess. That means either I or Misty has to actually build enough of the language to analyze. And while I am a linguistic hobbyist to a degree, it's not my place to do so.
Now, if you're going to suggest using the songs from the albums as the songs from Valdemar (as opposed to being supplementary works to a line of fiction from his own world), well, we can certainly cheat as needed.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.