where all things come to die

Premise:

Alliacea is a story about a pocket-realm paradise resort that slowly consumes its inhabitants based on how much their negative emotions affect their behavior. If you act under the influence of negativity, you will develop more and more inhuman features in an assimilation process. The end state of assimilation is losing your personhood/autonomy entirely, fully becoming a part of the environment like a statue, fruit tree, lamp, etc known as an installment.

The resort itself is a perfect eden, catering to every physical need and even anticipating desires while protecting inhabitants from physical harm. It's infinite in both time and space, and often non-physical in its layout. People enter the resort after undergoing some form of cataclysmic life event, such as the passing of a loved one, losing their job, etc, at which point they walk through a door and will be inexplicably transported to the Alliacea resort. Once on the resort, the island will present you with an infinite vacation. If you can keep your wits about you it's heaven, but if you start to slip or continue to be affected by adverse life events, you get eaten alive.

The metaphor is based on how we deal with mental health and our perspectives of therapy. We can accept that bad things happen, but we still struggle to accept how traumatic life experiences affect people. When people behave in complicated, messy ways as a result of stress, finding the middle ground between entirely excusing the behavior or condemning them for reacting at all is something our social norms struggle to process. Additionally the idea that therapy is a one size fits all, and if you walk into a therapist's office you can magically erase lifetimes of trauma and reflexive traits. Accepting that sometimes people will react to the bad things in uncomfortable ways, and they may always will. What happens when the blanket advise of: "be better today then you were yesterday" cant apply?

Also Alliacea is 100% me just DIYing more episodes of infinity train and the good place. I'm throwing infinity train, the good place, and margaritaville into a blender.

The story follows Mansoa, Pacific, and Bohai as they strive to understand and stop the resort from unraveling. After decades of a predictable status quo, one night Alliacea suddenly goes haywire, triggering typhoons, glitching buildings, accelerating assimilations, reanimating installments, and ultimately begins sinking into the sea. The three main characters have to first understand why the system broke, then fix it or escape before the entire pocket realm collapses into the sea. 

Mechanics:

Assimilation is the process in which the island consumes its inhabitants. When you first arrive to Alliacea, you would look completely normal, just like you did the second before you stepped through the door. For awhile things would be fine and you wouldnt notice anything strange, but if in paradise you still have a chip on your shoulder from that time someone laughed at you for wearing a miss-matched outfit so you end up poking fun at someone doing the same thing, you'd look down and suddenly you got fish scales on your hands. The more your adverse life events influence your behavior, the more features you pick up. Its not always continuous, sometimes they'll show up in one big burst or it takes awhile to build up enough mojo to activate, but the idea is the more stressed you act, the more it consumes you. Assimilation is non-reversible.

This process has a terminal stage, if you continue to be affected by negativity and just be an "overall bummer", you assimilate until theres nothing left of you and you lose your autonomy and personhood entirely. Eventually you become an inanimate object and blend into the environment. As you can imagine since assimilation is continuous, the resort has infinite time with no aging, becoming an installment is inevitable. Very few people survive on alliacea longer than about 10~ years. The resort is filled with ominously person-shaped statues, trees, furniture, etc.

Yes this is another nested metaphor how in cases of extreme trauma, one of the ways we protect our psyche is the more reactive the person becomes the less we empathise with them. its metaphors all the way down.

The resort itself is also quite bizarre. The entire purpose of Alliacea is to make people happy, safe and comfortable. If for whatever reason it doesnt know how to accomplish that, it doesnt understand how to form the environment around you. There are sections of the resort that have tilted buildings clipping into each other, nonsensical room layouts, non-uniform gravity, etc. Also because its infinitely large, there are many different regions of the resort. Some of them look like a classic hilton resort, others like a cozy BnB, some look like untouched nature, etc.

Theres also an unknowable number of people in the resort. Once you arrive you can't leave, so the population would be massive. But ☝️ because its also infinitely big, you'll never even know they were there, they could be light years away from you. Most of the people you'd interact with would be inhabitants of your local resort hotel block, usually about 20-50 people with similar demographics (think like the neighborhoods in the good place).

Alliacea also protects its inhabitants from physical harm and has automated upkeep. it DESPERATELY wants people to be happy and comfortable, so if you get hurt, it has two systems to protect you. 1) a general dampener on harm. if you tumble two stories out of a building you might just walk away with a scraped knee. 2) Even then, that scraped knee would magically disappear overnight. Their bodies reset from physical damage every night at midnight. You cannot "die" from harm, even if you suffered a fatal injury, you'd wake up the next morning.

None of this is meant to be nefarious. The island is trying so so hard to love and protect its inhabitants. Its whole mantra is: “you've gone through so much and are suffering tremendously. I will protect you and let you live forever in paradise.” and the assimilation mechanic is the island’s system going: “oh no! youre still sad! let me just smooth out the edges until youre happy!” but it keeps smoothing until theres nothing left. When you try to approximate heaven, you accidentally wind up with hell.

Characters:

There are 5 plot-centric characters. Mansoa, Pacific and Bohai move the story forward, Mrysin is a psudo-antagonist (?) and Lamerei is another plot-relevant-but-not-super-major character.

Mansoa is one of the most plot-relevant characters. She has been on Alliacea for a very long time, but hasnt assimilated at all.

She presents the island with its first contradiction. The island selects people who are woefully unhappy to become residents. Then it wants you to be completely carefree, and it smooths you out via assimilation until you are. Except...Mansoa is already happy? She already is gleeful and has no obvious negative emotions, almost to an uncanny degree. As a result, she doesnt have a single iota of assimilation, but then how did she end up in Alliacea if shes already happy? Obviously the spoiler is shes not, shes been suppressing every negative feeling her whole life to be accepted. But because acts EXACTLY as the system indends but is still unhappy, it breaks the island's mechanics.

As things get heavy, mansoa can no longer sufficiently suppress her negative emotions and it spills out in these huge burts where she has a large, writhing assimilation that bursts out of her. Unlike classic assimilation where its permanent, she flickers back and forth between being completely fine and her explosive assimilation depending on how well she can mask.

Pacific is another contradiction. The way assimilation is supposed to work is that something really bad happens to you, you get really upset about it and it influences your behavior, then you pick up new features/assimilate a bit more. But he has such a weird codependent thing going on with trauma that being in crisis is his comfortable normal, so he cant assimilate any further. He actually gets more upset when good things happen because he only knows how to function under dire circumstances.

He's modeled off of my experiences with treatment resistant bipolar so he also canonically has bipolar II. My blue princess with a disorder. He's very high strung and dramatic, and can have severe acute manic episodes. On the island he takes care of all the installments and monitors the "status" of the island since he's convinced they're in a torture chamber.

In his case, since stress doesnt affect him the same way, instead of assimilating more on his body the stress goes somewhere else. To a monster called the Balkhash.

The balkhash is an infinitely long manifestation of his trauma responses that hunts down Pacific relentlessly. Its capable of physically harming him, although he cannot harm it. If anyone tries to touch the Balkhash, they just phase right through its body. Pacific is supposed to represent the type of person that therapy would have a limited effect on and will unfortunately carry trauma responses for the rest of his life. He's not going to get better, so what do you do? do you just give up on them and cut them off or make peace with that?

Both Pacific and Mansoa are responsible for the resort glitching because they break the system in different ways. Someone who acts happy but is miserable, and someone who's happy state IS being miserable.

Bohai is another core character. He doesnt have anything crazy going on like Pacific and Mansoa, hes a standard faire islander.

Bohai struggles with self-worth issues and developed a white-knight complex to compensate for it. Everything works as intended with Bohai, so if his insecurities become more and more explicitly visible he will assimilate more. No weird monsters or explosions.

His character was deeply influenced by his mother, who had self worth issues and similarly pushed herself constantly in the service of others until she passed away. Bohai is following in her footsteps identically. Bohai acts like a supportive figure for most of the cast and constantly wants to help people and do acts of service even if its pushing him well past his limits.

Another important character is Mrysin. She's the manifestation of the island/assimilation in reverse since shes the environment as a person.

She was formed as IT support to figure out why the resort was failing and to fix it. On the resort she can do anything to anyone, but she struggles to understand the repercussions of her actions even as she tries to help people.

Her arc starts out as her being a hollow expression of the ideals of the resort mechanics, but as time goes on and she sees the flaws and inconsistencies with the fundamental logic of the system she becomes her own person with a developed personality and emotion.

Lamerei truly is a filler character to flesh out the dynamics and the world, like bohai shes a standard fare islander with nothing crazy going on. Shes the youngest and most recent addition to the island.

Relationships:

ok honestly all of that is just a very complicated backdrop to let these characters interact. i just like putting them in situations.

Bohai and Mansoa are close-knit best friends and have a rambunctious rappore. They spent a lot of time together and hang out constantly. Mansoa is often a "fun times" influence, trying to get bohai to stop working himself to death in LITERAL heaven and Bohai tries to keep Mansoa grounded. At its best they help cancel each other's self-destructive traits, but at its worst mansoa eggs on bohai's alcoholism/external coping mechanisms and treats him more like a tool than a friend, and bohai inadvertently feeds into mansoa's fears about rejection since he enables her behavior until he cant take it anymore and snaps without communicating how he feels.

Mansoa and Mrysin have some insane codependent deity-worshiper thing going on. Mrysin is originally drawn to mansoa because she sees her as someone who "gets it!" and mansoa does not immediately reject Mryin's one-size-fits-all model of mental health/loves the validation. When Bohai starts to withdraw from their friendship, mansoa leans into Mrysin HARD. Through their connection they begin to experience the flaws in their philosophies and work towards rectifying their perspectives. At first they have a "OMG this god likes like!! this is awesome!!/Wow what a cool follower who TOTALLY gets my message, i should reward them!" relationship, but eventually they begin to relate over feelings of isolation and rejection and form a more human connection.

Bohai and Pacific are probably my favorite relationship to write. Bohai's white knight complex coupled with pacific's fun and flirty "may be a lost cause" status ends up leading to many whacky scenarios. For years they've been very close and had crazy romantic tension, but held off on a relationship (imagine spending eternity with an ex if the relationship doesnt go well, and also breaking up might literally kill them). At their best, Bohai feels like the work he's putting in really means something and that he's valued/wanted/loved, and pacific doesnt feel completely hopeless and alone. At its worst, Bohai projects his "I'm a saving this poor helpless prince" fantasies onto Pacific which ignores the cases when Pacific is genuinely at fault and is really controlling/belittling. Pacific also isnt a uwu softboy who can be cured by the power of love, and he has severe bipolar episodes that can overwhelm even Bohai's savoir drive. No amount of love will ever be a time machine to undo what happened to him.

Mansoa, Pacific and Bohai have been friends for a long time and have established dynamics, when the resort starts falling apart and a wrench is thrown into their group for better and for worse. (for example, as a result of the chaos, Pacific and Bohai formally become an item, but then this makes Mansoa an awkward 3rd wheel which she takes personally and lashes out immaturely. This makes Bohai get frustrated with her and he withdraws harder from their friendship, which starts to crowd out pacific's comfort zone and makes her turn to the morally ambiguous embrace of mrysin. Pacific then has to play awkward peace keeper while also trying to stop the resort from collapsing since as mansoa gets more upset, the process accelerates. im playing 5D chess with my toys)