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

[robkelk]

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.

"That's close enough, considering what humans are able to understand," Skuld replied. "The actuality is different, but the analogy is sound."

Rob nodded. "I expect everything that I sense you doing here is just an analogy that I can grasp."

Skuld turned to Urd. "See! He gets it! I knew he was the right person to call on for help!"

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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.

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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.

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Yeah, there's a difference between "a 40-year-old dating a 20-year-old" and "a 30-year-old dating a 10-year-old", even though the age difference is identical. Sure, Charlie Chaplin married an 18-year-old when he was 55, but she was old enough to have gone through puberty.