#epigone

it started with killing davepeta. i knew june would kill davepeta and that it wouldn't be permanent, but that it *would* still be very costly for them in some way. my oldest plan for how to actually do that was reaaaaally nasty though. for a long time after the big fight in chapter 8, dana and crew would end up in the debris field around the moon at one ship that hadn't been torn apart... except it had no power. so june resurrected davepeta, inside of a battery that used them as an energy source. which would of course be torturous in some sense because like, come on, if you're gonna make a living battery it's gotta suck. like they don't make being a yellowblood in act 5 seem cool at all. shit's gotta be horrific if it's to have any meaning at all conceptually.

and that's just a bit too edgy for godfeels. this story's dark but i don't want it to be *mean.* davepeta hasn't earned that treatment and it's just kind of a waste of their character. it sucks and it feels bad and it doesn't really mean anything narratively. like oh you put a really likeable character in a torture box to torture them? what's jade gonna do, get more mad??? it's boring. it's a boring situation to put those characters in because all it really is is them going grrrrrrr and then waiting until i can contrive a way to reverse my goddamn mistake and get them back to square one.

so then i decided instead that rose would go grimdark, have her head cut off, her corpse would become a sort of oozing mass of oil and tentacles and lovecraftian corruption, so naturally june would use *her* for a battery instead. what is it about rose lalonde that makes this exact some conceit so much more palatable? like it's still fucked up but you know she would approve. and oh, mary, soaring through the stars on a ship powered by her dead wife's seething eldritch radioactivity! the romance is palpable. that's got some gas, you know?

but when i really got started on chapter 8 i realized i could cut out a whole chunk of pointless faffing about with june and dana trying to get some junk ship working, and escaping with it, and doing whatever until they eventually somehow rendezvous with lenore... by just using june's fucking super power to directly transport us to the plot palace boogie cruiser hotel. seriously i didn't plan to get into ANY of that stuff until 3.3, and honestly getting us to the comet *now* is just so much better in every way

but that means: no more need for a battery powered by main character death. which is great for the fandom, but now i've got these fucking plot points (bodies) just dangling around with nothing to do! davepeta's an easy fix because june could just fax them out to jade, the whole thing writes itself from there really, it's a softer landing, less cynical, and as with the comet it sets us up to get right to The Good Bits instead of fucking around spinning wheels. it puts the trauma directly into the hands of the people who will have to process it while under the gaze of the narrative. cut to the chase baby.

so what about rose? i knew that she as a character would die but that some wretched fact of her physical presence needed to become an animate antagonist force in some capacity. you'd think that epigone would be an obvious connection, and you're right! but i literally did not know epigone existed until it just fucking *showed up* at the end of dirk's chapter. i literally typed that fucking smiley after the cut to black and went

so anyway i then had to invent the metaphysics of ideaspace out of nothing and develop an entire narrative architecture to justify whatever the fuck that smiley was, a process which included making the above obvious connection vis a vis rose's corpse. from there it was easy to piggyback epigone off of dirk's newly-planned resurrection, and once i got a read on epigone's actual *character?* oh my god it was like angels singing, but in the worst most awful and bad way possible! the more i wrote of rotrose, the more possibilities emerged, and now it just so happens that this freak abomination slots perfectly into the spot of a villainous thing that i knew needed to be present in that section of the story but which had until then been entirely vague to me.

that's the godfeels writing process in a nutshell, basically. if i ever seem astonished that chapter 8 makes any sense at all, this is why. and it's quite literally the reason i committed to a lengthy planning phase before writing 3.2 in earnest, because as much of a thrill as that was it is something i absolutely never want to do again. i will probably end up having to do something like it again sooner or later because this story just can't help throwing me fucking curveballs at the last second, but hopefully it won't be quite so irresponsible next time.

i've had a vague notion that there would be an entity like epigone showing up for a while now, but it wasn't until i really started getting into the headspace stuff that i decided to bring it onto the scene now as opposed to later. which is the same kind of thing that's happened across the board, where 3.1 was originally intended to not have much silverbark-related stuff at all, and it's just kinda been seeping its way in.

anyway, i have a very specific set of cultural and political signifiers informing my conception of epigone. not sure how much i want to go into them yet since very little has been revealed of what epigone is so far? but i will say that it is deeply tied to the themes of memories and secrets that have hung over 3.1 from the start. there are other very potent symbolic and allegorical functions of epigone as well, but again i'll leave that stuff to the imagination for now.

my HOPE with some of this epigone stuff and like, just how awful it is, is to get people genuinely asking why silverbark would take the approach she takes. because this story is so rooted in june's perspective, we're primed to side with her unconditionally. but i when folks express frustration and annoyance at jade's refusal to clarify what's really going on, i assure you that is the intended reaction, and i daresay jade is just as frustrated as the rest of us.

but i digress.

the SPECIFIC inspirations for epigone i think are kind of obvious? it's got a bit of caliborn, a bit of audrey jr from little shop of horrors, a bit of BOB from twin peaks, all of them maybe pushed through the lens of a terminally online eboy who thinks traps are gay. i wanted its parts to be aesthically very ugly and unpleasant to read, and give off sort of an uncanny valley narrator vibe. green, monotonous, and vile in kind of a childish way? but also VERY aware of and intentional in what it's doing when it's the one in control.

epigone was tough to write because i kept wanting to make it more traditionally villainous, but i found it was so much more creepy as this sort of burnt up consciousness that only remembers fragments of language and concepts. it's sort of a natural outgrowth of ideaspace as a concept and meant to be the sort of horrific counter-example to the comparatively very positive presence of dare and risk.

a question i had while developing the metaphysics of ideaspace was, if your thoughts and ideas exist in a universal shared space with every other thought or idea to ever exist, what's stopping an external idea from getting into your mind? one of the cornerstone revelations i had about this was the idea that there might be metaphorical entities in ideaspace which mirror real life conditions. so with dare, risk, and X, you see this sort of metaphorical push and pull representing june's own internal conflicts about everything that is happening to her. they're still their own PEOPLE, but their arcs are also inextricably tied to june's in this kind of fascinating way.

by the same token, what if a person with dementia is having the stores of their ideatic complexes raided and cannibalized by a pernicious entity because some boundary of their complex is thinner than it ought to be? this is not to say that the entity causes dementia, or that dementia causes the entity, but rather that dementia and the entity exist in perfect acausal simultaneity. this is the thing about ideaspace: it is both utterly independent of meatspace, but also inextricably its symbolic mirror... although you could just as easily say that meatspace is a reflection of ideaspace! in truth, all of these are true, and none of them, depending on what the moment calls for.

i find the existential questions raised by this shit quite satisfying to think about.

i'm sure it looks kinda slapdash, but i actually spent a lot of time fine-tuning epigone's dialog. it's a fun challenge, finding ways to fuck up epigone's grammar and speech without relying on the "i kind of forgot how to speak" trope of just deleting adverbs and improper nouns and such. i want it to be understandable, but also feel like maybe it's speaking in a different language? there's a really subtle balancing act to strike here because it sees itself as so effortlessly above everyone and everything else. it doesn't really care about any of these people or their dumb drama, it just thinks these kind of mind games are funny. it is a creature of decoherence, so these sharpening points of divergence are like candy to its sweet tooth.

the last thing i'll comment on is rose. you didn't ask about rose, but i want to comment on rose. i've had her death and subsequent possession planned for a while now. i actually wrote the first draft of her "i'm back from the dead" reveal months and months ago, and that was the first real bit of epigone writing i ever did. at that point i was still thinking of this monstrous entity as being much more traditionally sinister, but i quickly discovered there was a lot of emotional mileage to get out of something in rose's body forcing her to speak in this really uncharacteristically sloppy way.

this should not come as a surprise, but i have plans for horror-rose. tumor-rose. epigone-rose. epirose? rosigone? e-pig lalonde? we'll have to workshop this one.