#cindersfall

1, In Cockatiel x Chameleon, there's no credits page, unlike with your other works. Do you have any list of chapter title credits somewhere? I'd be curious on that, I recognise a few of them.

2, In Chicago, you depict a group of magical girls plotting to overthrow the US government. As this was published in 2018-19, I assume you had access to depict Donald Trump as the sitting President, but you chose to set it during Obama's presidency instead. Any specifics reasons for that? Did you just want it to be in 2013-14 for other reasons and that was collateral?

3, I see you have read the Magical Girl Raising Project novels (and the anime, but I prefer the novels over the anime lmao). What are your thoughts on them? Which point have you gotten up to? Did you know that they're fully complete and released in official English now? I'm a big fan and they're pretty obscure overall when compared to other stuff, so I was surprised to see you cite them in one chapter title of yours.

4, Finally, do you have any solid plans for your next book after When I Win the World Ends?

Most of the chapter titles are original. Two, Me!Me!Me! and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, are references, but those references are glossed within CxC itself by Gramme's footnotes. For the other chapter titles that are references:

Moneymoneymoneymoneymoneymotherfuckers is from this Aesop Rock song.

The two titles that start with "Harper goes to Hell" are modeled on the 1993 film Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.

Entartete Kunst is a reference to the Nazis' degenerate art exhibit.

HELL OF SWALLOWED?! is the title of a series of snake vore hentai doujins. (I will not be linking to this.)

The title of Part I, Nothing to Nothing, is a reference to a quote from King Lear: "Nothing will come of nothing: speak again." Part III, End of History, is a reference to the 1991 essay by Francis Fukuyama.

While not exactly a reference, "Teatime witches who sneer at the uninitiated" is meant to evoke Umineko.

"Trees part; an idol emerges: She" evokes She by H. Rider Haggard, and more specifically the reference to She in Stephen King's Misery.

"Scrape of the cane" is modeled on the Homestuck song Swing of the Clock.

"Welcome to a land of magic" is a slightly altered quote from the first volume of Magical Girl Raising Project (more on that later this ask); the actual quote is "Welcome to a world of dreams and magic."

Other references, like those to Persephone or the Soviet Union, are probably well known enough to not require a gloss.

2. Two reasons. First, Fargo was set in 2013, the height of the Williston shale oil boom that is central to Fargo's first arc. (I also started writing Fargo in 2015, when 2013 was close enough that it basically seemed like the same time period.) Chicago is set immediately after Fargo, and even has some returning characters like Cicero. If I really wanted to, I probably could have stretched Chicago's setting to the Trump era, but the second reason I didn't was to give it some political distance from the Trump administration. Chicago is in many ways a product of the Trump years, but I didn't want the story to get bogged down in the swamplike minutiae of Donald Trump himself, and all the very charged political and aesthetic associations he carries. There's a reason there wasn't a single good Trump parody made during the time Trump was actually in office, and I did not consider myself up to the task of changing that trend. Beyond just that, there's something archetypally "presidential" about Barack Obama from a purely aesthetic standpoint that makes him a fitting stand-in for the United States political system as a whole. If the final chapter of Chicago involved Donald Trump giving a "return to normalcy" speech instead of Barack Obama, it would be a far different vibe, regardless of how you feel about either of those figures politically. (Also, throughout the entire time writing Chicago, I had that video of Obama wielding the Chaos Emeralds in my mind.)

3. I'm a major fan of Magical Girl Raising Project. I even wrote an essay that compared it to Madoka Magica. I am fully caught up on the series and own every book, as my updated magical girl shelf shows:

I got into the series through the anime, which adapts the first book in the series plus some side material from the fourth book, and I got into the rest of the series through my friend PlatFleece, who did a bunch of fan translations of the books before Yen Press made official releases. I actually really love the anime, though it's in some ways not fully indicative of the rest of the series. The anime is basically a magical girl battle royale, and it's one of the few battle royales that actually understands the core appeal of the genre. I'm totally annoyed by fake battle royales like Hunger Games or Mirai Nikki that are, in actuality, simply a series of challenges for the main character to overcome, with side characters virtually not mattering beyond their interactions with the lead. To me, a true battle royale should be an ensemble, and one that really surprises you with which characters die and in which order; any battle royale that follows a typical progression of killing off characters in order of irrelevance is a complete failure of the genre. The anime of Magical Girl Raising Project is excellent at not only surprisingly killing off major-seeming characters early on, but also having seeming cannon fodder characters make deep runs with unexpected impact on the whole affair. That's exactly what a battle royale should be like.

What's impressive about Magical Girl Raising Project as a series is how it continually reinvents itself with each arc. The first arc is a battle royale, the second arc is a murder mystery, the third arc is a season of 24 (this is the best arc, and the one I took the Cleveland Quixotic chapter title from), the fourth arc is a survival horror, and so on. And over the course of these arcs, the series gradually develops this fascinating world that is kafkaesque and bureaucratic in nature, with a labyrinthine magical girl government divided into endless departments and political factions. Magical Girl Raising Project is unique among dark magical girl series in that there is nothing innately bad about being a magical girl; you're not doomed to die like in Madoka or punished for using your powers like in Site or Yuuki Yuna. Being a magical girl gives you no-downsides superpowers and even increases your lifespan (there are some characters who have been alive since Victorian England), and the government's intended purpose for creating magical girls is simply to help people. The series is interesting in how it indicates spectacular consequences of fairly humdrum bureaucracies and political systems acquiring the power of magical girls; most conflicts, especially from the third arc on, are caused by government factions playing chess games for power, and most of the recurring antagonists originally sought to reform the government before themselves getting mired in and corrupted by its political games.

Of course, it's also a character meat grinder, fully willing to kill off characters both minor and major, even load bearing characters who drastically warp the status quo via their absence, and that's something else I really like. There's a hilarious tug of war between the series' author and illustrator, the former writing the story before the character designs have been created, and the latter consistently giving some of the best and most interesting designs to the characters who get axed first.

It's unfortunate the series isn't more popular and got really unfairly kicked into the "Madoka Magica ripoff" bucket by undiscerning critics (it's really nothing like Madoka beyond the basic idea of dark magical girls). Chicago is in many ways a stealth Magical Girl Raising Project fanfic, with its focus on government and bureaucracy, as well as its "harder" magic system. Even Clownmuffle's name is very MagiPro-esque.

yeah, from what i remember from my german studies, that's pretty much it. maybe like, 'ü' with the slightest hint of 'w' right at the end? i guess in english it's almost like pronouncing 'new' but replacing the 'n' with a 'r' and making the sound a little longer, like you said.

    Taiyang’s wide eyes were still focused on the dead body on the floor. Blood poured from the corpse and puddled on the floor. They were at the wrong place at the wrong time. No. She was wrong. He wasn’t a murderer. He wasn’t a... Whatever he was, he stared into Cinder’s eyes 

Furthermore, while I admit these might be a little more interprative I found it to be a valuable depiction of race within power dynamics (such as the inherent power white people hold over nonwhite people in various forms, and the differing responses between the white and nonwhite cast that reflects this; perfect) and the depiction of autism in its varying forms and the perception of autistic people (which also goes back into the identity theme ofc). dont correct me if you didnt do these bits on purpose pls though I enjoy having an interpretation that may or may not be there that I can read regardless of that

my favorite thing about it really was the characters though, you write characters in such an incredibly well-rounded way that I've been missing in basically everything else. they feel both relatable and real, which I think owes to having many traits which all relate to their core selves and motiviations but don't feel limited to just 'positive' or 'palatable' traits like I think too many things do, or tying them to a moral orientation or narrative alignment. this isn't exactly rare in lit or other art of course but to achieve this while also writing characters I can personally connect with and be attached to is, I think having both depth and meaning is a big achievement. thank you so much for that. I think Kiki especially is essentially everything I've ever wanted from a character lmao, but god Z. is fantastic and so is Cal and everyone else.

My only real major criticism is that there's a decent amount of grammatical errors that I have to assume are unintentional (as well as some obvious typos that I know are) and they kind of stick out badly esp when you're making intentional grammatical breaks. I think missing commas or other punctuation marks are the main thing here (which I know is intentional in Maxmillion's speech and Z.'s narration for example, but again I think some of them stick out as just being mistakes) but there's also some misspellings and such that I think could've been mitigated with another sweep of it. That's my only criticism that isn't minor nitpicks though, lmao.

i'll be mulling over various things about it for a while (esp re: the ending, Max and his role, Maximillion who I think is wonderfully complex in many ways) but for now I just have one question:

What would you say your biggest influences for this were? And what would you say your biggest influences in regards to character writing were in general, because again that's what astonished me the most with this and I'd love to read where you got it from.

I was going to have multiple questions but those don't really relate to Modern Cannibals so I'll put them in a second post lmao. Thanks so much for the brilliant writing.

Thank you for the deep and thoughtful review!

I'm actually surprised you found a lot of grammatical and spelling errors, as I did do several detailed editing passes over the story. While I would imagine some errors remain, I wouldn't imagine them to be especially frequent. Given the way Modern Cannibals is written, I would expect there to be some intentionality behind a lot of them. I do know that, in both Fargo and Modern Cannibals, I was making a consistent grammatical error regarding dialogue tags, where I was writing them like so:

"Lorum ipsum," she said, "Blah blah."

Which is wrong, the Blah should not be capitalized. This is an error I realized I was making between Modern Cannibals and Chicago, so all my stories from Chicago on don't have it. It's something I should go back and fix for Fargo and Modern Cannibals at some point.

(Also, if you ever see a typo or mistake in a story I wrote, please let me know, either through a message or comment - I always like to fix those.)

Regarding your questions:

What would you say your biggest influences for this were? The biggest influence was Homestuck, which might be obvious. I first read Homestuck in Fall 2012, and it was the most I've ever been impacted by a work of fiction. I remember getting caught up (this was somewhere in Act 6 Intermission 3) and falling back in a stupor on my bed, messing up my angle and banging my head on a board so hard it bled. For the next month, I was in a daze, barely able to function as a human as I meandered around my college campus, in awe of what I considered the greatest work of fiction written in at least a decade, something that seemed so innovative and important for the direction of literature in general. It was this stupor that formed the basis of the idea that would become Modern Cannibals, which I initially conceived of as more of a fantasy story, set in a waterworld, with the Hussie analog an actual wizard whose work had infohazardous properties. (The main character would travel by boat to reach Hussie, rather than take a road trip.) This idea transitioned into a more conventional, real-world one, though I still imagined the Homestuck expy to be actually infohazardous until very late in development; it was only at the very final draft that I decided to tilt the story so that any magical properties existed primarily in Z.'s mind.

(In 2014, I submitted an early draft of the first chapter of the story, which leaned into the infohazard elements, to a creative writing workshop, where the professor described it as derivative of Infinite Jest, which I had not read at the time.)

More minor or tangential influences would be The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, which is classic literature's road trip story. I also pulled from Road Trip Horror films such as Steven Spielberg's Duel for that sequence. The story-within-a-story element of Faerie Endless had its own miniature development cycle, with Z. originally obsessed with a much more generic JRPG called Gryffonquest. This changed when I saw this video about GATE, which (among other things) criticizes how the otaku main character is obsessed with the most generic Dragon Quest-y JRPG imaginable, and which reoriented my thinking toward fiction-within-fiction to make it much more distinctive.

I also think Ulysses by James Joyce had a major impact on the prose of Modern Cannibals. I read Ulysses for the first time while I was writing Arc 3 of Fargo, and I think the prose tilting more stream of conscious both there and in Modern Cannibals could clearly be drawn back to that.

And what would you say your biggest influences in regards to character writing were in general? I've always been drawn to larger-than-life personalities in characters. As a kid, I always hated the main character of anything. I thought they were boring, in their everyman relatability (I never related to fictional characters at all). I always preferred bizarre and eccentric side characters, who I felt never received as much screen time as they deserved. Many of my works are written from the perspective of taking minor characters and making them major. And from that perspective, you're going to get a lot of characters with weird gimmicks, who have some sort of multifaceted aspect to ensure they can sustain a major role in the narrative.

Modern Cannibals was my first work where I actually thought consciously about the second part, the multifaceted aspect. Before that I was perfectly willing to write gimmick characters as major characters who were just gimmick characters. Not having an idea of where to take the plot of Fargo in the first arc (which had become a series of action scenes stacked on top of one another) had necessitated I come up with more depth for characters like Delaney and Winnipeg, and I took that idea with me into Modern Cannibals, this time planning out the hangups and issues each character was dealing with under the surface of their personality. That actually became crucial to the structure of Modern Cannibals: I wanted readers to feel trapped in Z.'s perspective, suffocated, until the gauntlet of other perspectives near the end of the story that would reveal far more about the characters in her life, with whom she had previously interacted on a far more surface level.

Qrow Branwen would wear cat ears and leather pants 100%

Kiss pookie