Entry tags:

author:saya, subject:writing

EGC Revisited: Part One of t3h l0lf3st
So, I was thinking that I would go through the EGC archives and try to piece together who wrote what when and why... it's public so that if an old writer friend like, say, Dot migrated to IJ from LJ, she could read this and go "OHHHH! THAT'S WHY X, Y, AND Z".

1st Arc: Spider Chronicles
Initially as a BBS joke, the Friendly, Intelligent, Talking Spiders (an injoke from Spiderweb Software shareware games) "invade" the assumed-urban-by-default setting of the Emiko's Genesis Chatroom. They mean well, but they're bouncy and a little airheaded, so they can harm people just by being too enthusiastic and unaware of their own relative strength. This is eventually revealed as an elaborate distraction by giant cockroach to enable him to kidnap Chatty (our "PC") and hold her hostage. Shinobi brilliantly turns the tide on this cockroach by recording a failed negotiation attempt and then replaying it for the Spiders—they're shocked by the revelation that the cockroach is actually "a great big meanie", and turn on him, allowing Chatty to escape. However, being cheerful pacifists at heart, they later let him go without a scratch.

For further irony, this "invasion" never actually ended. The Spiders simply moved Uptown and took up all the retail and service positions, making cameo appearances later as butlers, cab drivers, tennis instructors, zamboni operators, etc. They also seem to have caught on to concepts like "if you hug people too hard, they get squished" and "strangers don't like it when you give them mandible kisses".

I like "Spider Chronicles" because, well, it was cute! Setsu's always wanted to write something new that recycles the basic idea, because the actual logs doesn't read too well now, but then again, no RP logs are really that interesting to people who aren't in the RP...

Our parts in it were mostly written by Mack, Tatsuya, and Kurenai.

2nd Arc: Subspace Strings
Tatsuya started getting a little annoyed at having to "play" a female PC, so he engineered some weird reason for Chatty to start transforming into a man. This didn't really mesh with how the rest of us saw her character, so we ended up moving a lot of her characterization into a New Backstory Character, Miyu, who was very Blatantly Multiple. Later, even THAT didn't mesh, because we all hated Miyu and how stereotypical she had to be, so we ended up retroactively changing things so that the Chatty Who Became Male was really just a minion of the Real Chatty, who was still very female. She was also then written closer to what most of us really wanted. But, um, that's not in this arc!

Anyway, Subspace Strings was a lot of silliness with no real plot. "Subspace" was supposed to be "the space between universes", but in practice, it's treated as a pocket universe where no one lives but some people use to store stuff or as a way to "hop" from here to there. It goes on the fritz, somehow, and starts randomly teleporting people and things without rhyme, reason, or warning. Hilarity is meant to ensue.

Here's a great moment of Gibberish Technobabble:

"Subspace is just filling up the extra space between dimensions and if you were to cut it, you'd cause a vacuum that'd suck up all of Subspace into itself and cause a tear in the fabric of several other dimensions, which would either pull all matter into nothingness to compensate ... or, uh, create a direct path to a dimension that travel wasn't possible to before."

Believe it or not, that's said by a Cloud Strife. Why he would know about that, I have no idea, but then again, that Cloud later came out as transgender and married Ramza, so nobody was really writing him as "a normal Cloud" anyway.

Subspace Strings didn't really have an end, it just kind of stopped when roaches invaded. Eh heh...

3rd Arc: The First Roach Invasion
Giant cockroaches like the one who took Chatty hostage invade the EGC. Unlike the Spiders, they're about average intelligence, cynical, and armed for war. It also turns out the hostage-taking cockroach was their Leader. As punishment for rebelling against the Space Empire that enslaved their planet, it was reduced to being unable to support life, even cockroaches. In short, they're not only out for revenge, but also just someplace to live where they won't starve.

Most of the posts consist of comedic violence and cool fight scenes. Despite the fact that the roaches are armed with AK-47s, tanks, and heavy artillery, they seem to be pretty easily gotten rid of by squishing them. Chatty is, again, taken hostage, this time by Miyu, who is—gasp—actually his boss, and both caused the subspace fritzes and aided the roach invasion as a distraction from her Real Plan. This time, when he refuses to cooperate, Male-Chatty is killed by Miyu with a water pistol in an obvious Shoot The Dog manuever to show how evil Miyu is.

Outside the story, people start to get annoyed that Emiko's Genesis Chatroom has changed from being a BBS into an XBOX HUEG fandom RP. With Ian Kim's blessing, Mack moves it to a Lycos guestbook. The plot continues where it left off, but later this move from Emiko's Genesis to independent RP gets retroactively written in as a plotpoint. (YA RLY)

Most of it was written by Tatsuya and Mushihime, with worldbuilding from Hikaru, and comic relief (Gendou's tapeworm!) from Mack and Kurenai. It was originally supposed to be the Spiders going "HAY GUISE REMEMBER US?!" but Mushihime didn't want to write Spiders, and, BIG SURPRISE, she wanted to write more about the roach from before. Hikaru came up with the Destroyed Homeworld motivation, and things picked up from there.

In hindsight, it's pretty stupid that the roaches never realized that if Miyu was Chatty's boss, then MIYU would be responsible for the destruction of their world, and not an ally. But then again, she was poorly written—she was supposed to be a kind of "shadow behind the throne" kind of figure, with more than a few nods to Palpatine. I mean, HALO THAR, BIG PLANET-ENSLAVING SPACE EMPIRE

4th Arc: Demon Invasion
So it turns out that Miyu's Real Plan was to Destroy The World by way of a lot of stuff ripped off from Evangelion. The Roach Invasion wasn't distracting enough of the High-Powered PCs, so she also opens a gate to Hell from which demons invade the City.

The actual Destruction of the World is thwarted by Kii (Kurenai's PC—VS already had "a" Kaworu so he couldn't actually play himself), who nearly gets himself killed in a great big Easter Metaphor, but saves the world and also reveals that the EGC has an underground half, like our City. However, unlike our Underground, it's abandoned and has the really pretentious name of "De Civitate Dei", which Mack slapped on it as a kind of a joke for Flori. (HAY LOOK GUISE WE CAN HAS RANDOM ST. AUGUSTINE)

Miyu gets EVEN MOAR MULTIPUL and is/are killed off, except for two that somehow possess an Evangelion and have expository conversations with each other from time to time.

This was pretty much all Mack and Kurenai, with some Tatsuya.

5th Arc: I DON'T KNOW
I have no idea what was happening here, even after rereading, so, uh, have this lovely recap from Chatty—the male one, who should be dead:

"Okay, sheesh ... um ... lesse ... my mother is/was a mad lesbian biotechnologist with spiky green hair and an overly intense love for Evangelion mecha robots, I literally don't have a father, my entire childhood was spent in military facilities designed to build up arms and train soldiers for the supposed upcoming war with the Eva universe, my Magic Instructor was a clone that discovered her disposability, went mad, blew up the world, and later went on to force me to take over universes in her place because of her belief that she was God, and then I quit and got turned into a middle-aged guy, and then I fell in love with the most volatilely dangerous being in the universe, and roaches invaded twice, once with spiders, but I think that happened earlier back when I was a girl, and then my Magic Instructor brought herself to the front of everything and kidnapped me and killed me, and then I was dead, and then I was in Hell, and then I broke out with a full-blown army of the apocalyspe on mine trail, and then I possessed some boy in my Eva, and then I got split into male and female parts of the psyche, the female part is running around being holier-than-thou in a detached and deadly way, and I'm the male part and suddenly I'm not in the boy anymore, which is fine by me because I still have no idea how my mental garbage wound up in his head and now I'm a flying tabby cat!! Argh!!"

Oh, that's right, he broke out of hell. That... means Miyu killed him for nothing and screwed up her own plans. Oops? THAR BE PLOT HOLES

MORE FUN TECHNOBABBLE:

"I've said it twice already — it's a WARP BUBBLE. Time inside it is passing extremely slowly ... or time outside is passing absurdly fast. In any case, nothing that the authors haven't bothered to mention happening in it has had any time to happen. [...] Fine by me if you don't believe it. Ignore the fact that none of the people inside are moving, that the smoke from the café owner's cigarette is frozen in place, and that the contents of a very hot cup of tea still haven't made their way to the floor after being spilled, despite the fact that any ignoramus with a pair of eyes and the sense to look in the window could see that ..."
"Looks like a hyperrealist piece. (*flits about*) In any case, there's another explanation. I'm not frozen in time, I'm bruised! Why would a discongrinuity in relative timing make a physical barrier, eh?"
"The air molecules in the slowed area within the warp bubble would, from this relative point of view, be moving so slowly as to technically qualify as a solid without actually being one. Or to put it simply, you smashed into solid nitrogen at high velocity."
"Err ... but what about the flashy lights and stuff, eh? Eh?"
"Author showing off."
"Oh."

The Warp Bubble is, of course, Dr. Gerbil's fault, even though he never demonstrates the ability to create this kind of phenomena ever again. It also, uh, has nothing to do with the plot. Whatever it is. We also don't actually find out who Dr. Gerbil is until the next storyline, which is—

6th Arc: Anti-RL Rats
Here we discover Mushihime's skill at injecting new life into things when they get boring! "It looks like everybody likes writing fight scenes," she said, "but when the enemy is a vague army of some kind, it makes for a real boring scene. So, instead of an army, how about we come up with an assassin or something for each author that's matched to their 'genre'?" And lo, the Anti-RL Rats plot bunny was born.

The Roach Leader hasn't given up on his people invading EGC, but they've got a problem: those overpowered author stand-in PCs. Enter Dr. Gerbil, a 3-foot tall anthropomorphic albino gerbil. He theorizes that the reason why the Roach Invasion keeps failing is that, essentially, the people writing this stuff don't want them to win, so to even the playing field, you have to get rid of these meddling roleplayers by killing off their PCs. Then he reveals some cloned anthropomorphic rat assassins that are designed to "exploit" those PCs' weaknesses. Everybody loves this, and many epic scenes ensue.

Meanwhile, Subito Sikaryan gives one of the roaches (creatively named "Roach") a choice between defecting to the EGC side of the war or being "exterminated". Of course, once he's defected, he's very effective at killing his own kind. Why? Well...

"Roach defected; now, he is considered a traitor by all other roaches. What is done to a traitor when caught?"
"Uhm... unpleasant things?"
"Very unpleasant things."
"Ah... I see... so he—"
"Shoots each and every roach in sight. Yes, exactly."

It later turns out that Roach is the Roach Leader's son, which means that instead of fighting a rat, Sikaryan gets to fight the Roach Leader.

Most of the fights are pretty generic, but we still have a soft spot for Arisugawa Kazuki vs. Assassin Rat May. May literally had NO characterization beyond three lines of dialogue, and he took that and made a really nice Kenshin-esque swordfight out of it, and with some parts that actually depicted the canon-fodder roaches and their cause as sympathetic.

Credit for Dr. Gerbil goes to Mack—his name and species are pretty much a bad play on the name of Joseph Goebbels, and his characterization was initially a disguised rehash of William Kotzwinkle's Doctor Rat. As time went on, Dr. Gerbil became more of a sympathetic figure, probably because he was one of those rare, recurring non-humanoid characters. (The Roach Leader, of course, was ALWAYS Mushihime's woobie.)

7th Arc: Preconsternation
Fidel starts writing! So does Potega! And Tatsuya starts writing like crazy, because our posts don't have enough testosterone-filled HUEG SHONEN BATTELS in them.

Pretty much, this is us writing Menacing Foreshadowing while everyone else is still doing the same thing, having NO clue what we're up to. Little do they know that WE DON'T KNOW EITHER!

Potega PC, Dives (Fidel PC), and Ravenal (a PC very loosely modelled off of a friend of Mack's from Erde) all have "united" with the angel Azrael and therefore have Special Powers such as telekinesis, glowing red eyes, IN-SYSTEM COMMUNICATION AND COMMON MEMORY. (Oh. My. God. HOW MANY TIMES DID WE TRY TO WRITE IN MULTIPLE STUFF WITHOUT CALLING IT MULTIPLICITY?! *headdesk*)

...Wiegraf is also there, apparently because you can't play bridge too well with only three people. No, really, that's what he seems to be there for—guy to play cards with when you're on break from doing Mysterious Gathering Of Magical Objects.

Anyway, they, um, gather magical objects, Dives tries to betray Azrael and... well, he doesn't really *die* so much as he resumes being dead. I think. (Have Fidel explain it? Fidel = Dives = Not Quite Dead. It R Law)

...wow, I didn't get very far at all!