bobthetacocat

I think this is obvious, but the vast majority of things discussed in the Susie ARG do not relate to CCC 12 at all. Susie says as much herself.

This naturally brings up the follow-up question: why do this at all? If none of this matters to the canon, why put so much time and effort into it? And I guess that's a question you can realistically ask of all of SiIvaGunner. Rips take time to become as high quality as they are, right? Why do it at all?

The artistic process is kinda mean like that. It's a lot of hard work for something that feels so… ephemeral. Dust that falls through your hands when moved wrong.

Susie had a few things to say about the channel, the overarching canon, and its people. She said almost everything she desired to say… except she left one straggler she didn't wrap up in time. Kind of a shame really, I think it's one of the more important ones. It's hard to say what that piece would've looked like if it was finished, but after consulting with Susie, I'm sure it would've looked something like this:

"My father said to me that that things tend to repeat themselves, given enough time. Sentience creates understanding, and understanding creates symbols, repetition, abstraction into things we can understand. How fitting, I suppose, that there are plenty of quotes like this…

Have you ever thought about where that lighthouse shows up? It's different every time. To SiIvaGunner it's a landmark of his home, to the AI universe it's a connection to the AI mainframe, to all those other little universes it's one thing or another; and of course, to you it's iconography, a picture to be adapted. Endlessly exploitable, as the deftest symbols tend to be.

I can't help but notice these types of things everywhere… somebody says a random phrase here - "intriguing", "nice", "reverb", there's a million examples - and it manages to travel across the universe and back again. A character talks over here, and their idea shows up somewhere else. Mr. Rental exists in one world, and a place is named after him a universe and half a planet away. Ideas conglomerate, and reform, and repeat; and one domino can add onto what anything means if it's the right time. This isn't a unintended side effect of the system, that's just how these things are here, a world of repeating and combining ideas together.

Then again, in the real world - your world - SiIvaGunner himself is a repetition of symbol, no? His better half. And he, in turn, is a repetition of someone else, who probably was inspired by someone else… so I suppose this was inevitable, in a way."

Out of a morbid curiosity, I decided to go back and look at my first reaction to the release of Prologue and Episode 1 of the CCC in 2016, since I'm lucky enough to still be in that Discord server. It was the kind of reaction you would expect from a 13 year old: making jokes, making unrelated jokes, bad jokes, jokes, so on. But don't misunderstand me - I was excited, and I was glued to the screen.

Fast forward, now - it's 2024. I just turned 21. Episode 11 has finally released, and it's a stellar job, genuinely. I'm in the middle of conceptualizing the Susie ARG, a project dedicated to the nuances of this thing that's been a part of my life for so long... and here I am, making the worst joke ever about how Haltmann couldn't just get Susie with a piano from Super Star Symphony. And putting it onto my pitch document! What am I doing?! Am I stutipd??? I feel like the "what would you tell your past self" thought is pretty cliche, but I'm not sure how I would tell my past self that I'm just doing a higher caliber of the same stupid shitposting he was. I think he'd find it funny, though.

SiIvaGunner's lore has never been the most popular thing on the channel. It feels almost condescending to explain the main reason why in detail - SiIvaGunner's main export is high quality rips. People aren't really coming for the story. But I think there is a second reason worth addressing: SiIvaGunner lore is hard to follow. This is also obvious, but I think the reason it started getting hard to follow is more nebulous and interesting. My current reasoning is that the characters stopped having predetermined story arcs and started living lives, if that makes sense.

Wood Man is patient zero of this. His defection from his predetermined box was relatively simple - an offscreen penchant for movie making. This turned Wood Man, an otherwise dumb side character completely fabricated for the sake of his master's bidding, into, like, a guy. Wood Man & Robbie Rotten turned him into a more complex person, with something from him that we hadn't seen before and he hadn't told anybody. He discussed the time dilation, and everything that implies, and how the world's time moves along. Then he got teleported to The Lost Rip, and the whole predetermined box fell apart completely. He escaped being a dumb side character, and got to do his own thing. He started knowing people offscreen, he started filming more movies, having the chance to hang out and be somebody and mature. He started living. Until… well, you know.

Wood Man's whole deal is emblematic of the tricky thing with the wielding of the passage of time in correlation to real life - the longer time has gone on, the more opportunity our side characters in the SiIvaGunner world have had to live their lives outside of the script and break their boxes. Dr. Andonuts spent so much of his time working, being a character behind the scenes, until he was compelled to come into the light. Joke-Explainer probably spent years wandering Grandiose, doing her own thing, living her life, interacting with people; checking in once a couple of years until we caught up with her for channel host. Haltmann had way more time than he would've to become committed to finding his daughter, and Susie had pretty much her entire existence as a Figment to watch from behind the scenes, until… well, you know.

And it's like, how do you condense that? If your 6 year old nephew turned 15 when you weren't looking, how do you compartmentalize the hundreds of off-screen stories in your brain? You don't, right? These type of things reward being around from the beginning, in a story that has broken its predefined end, and with characters that have had the chance to live autonomously. And that's probably bad for some of the newer viewers, but maybe that's better for some of the characters.

By the tail end of the project, I realized I was a lot like Susie. Not in the literal sense, duh, but in the metaphorical, as a watcher of the story with a lot of opinions, who suddenly got to have those opinions known on the grand stage.

Susie started to sound more and more like me as time went on - or maybe I started to sound more and more like Susie? I'm not sure - as the character got situated in her place. I hope that hasn't been too obvious as you've been reading this document, but it probably has.

Susie and I don't agree on everything. We probably disagree on most things, realistically. But here we had one shared goal - to walk forward with this thing we've been watching for so many years.