A Paradox Between Worlds
Hear me out here: a large swath of interactive fiction (edit: heck, all games. All media?) is just fanfiction, but for form instead of content. While fanfic authors play around with set characters and settings, IF authors instead play around with the genre conventions they fell in love with when they were younger. You want to emulate/improve/supplant those works of your yesteryear, whether it was 80s Infocom games or Emily Short or Porpentine or what have you. But in the end it’s just a different type of sandbox.
Hmm? No? Oh. Moving on…
A Paradox Between Worlds is built (mostly) in ChoiceScript, another entry that impresses me with its scope and heft. This one’s about fandom, fanficdom, and how we define ourselves, both to ourselves and to other people online. And about a lot of other things.
In A Paradox Between Worlds, there’s a very famous series of YA sci-fi novels called “Chronicles of the Shadow Nebula” that you’re a huge fan of (it seems like Harry Potter in a lot of ways). You’re such a fan that at the beginning that you’ve decided to start both a blog and a very ambitious fanfic that will involve travelling across multiple alternate universes.
There’s quite a bit of defining yourself at the start (which you can skip): what’s your handle? What’s your home life like? And maybe most important of all: what’s your ship? (Does everyone know this term? It means rooting for a romantic relation’ship’ between certain characters.) The character creation section is actually maybe my favorite part! It was fun seeing these glimpses of the “Nebulaverse” lore which seems extremely sketched out, and figuring out how I wanted to fit into all of it.
After that this switches around a lot, giving you small scenes and throughlines of a couple things: excerpts from the actual Chronicles books, bits from other fanfics, and also the most major sections: working on your fanfic, and looking through your blog feed which is tumblr down to its hashtags and subculture. I’m pretty sure the “real” book excerpts didn’t have choices (because how could they, they’re already written!), but you do direct where your own fanfic a bit, and then there’s the whole blogging interface. You’ve got a series of online friends you follow, and you scroll through each of their blogs and you can like or reblog their posts.
More words
This blogging section is relentlessly, tortuously true to life. You’ve probably experienced something similar if you use social media. One post is a silly joke, the next a plea for donations for a hospitalized aunt followed by someone shyly trying to share a deeply personal creative endeavour of theirs, followed by another silly meme that gets way more attention than that creative endeavour ever will, followed by something sad followed by something that’s really serious followed by–
There’s a follower count. It’s affected by what you reblog. People seem to pay attention to what you like. This is all A LOT. I skimmed posts, just like I do in real life. I weighed the effects of each button press. (I’ll like this silly post, but that isn’t something I’d want to reblog, because that isn’t the “me” I’m trying to cultivate.) (Hmm, have my reblogs been too one note today? Maybe I should reblog something a bit more upbeat for my followers.) (Ooh fanart, that’s something everyone likes.)
You don’t have to read through every single post; you can stop reading at a certain point, and skip to the next section. But I mean, I’d be missing Content! Game Content! Characterization! Maybe my friend’s relationship stat with me will go up if I find one more thing of theirs to reblog! Spookily effective, especially as this delves into more serious territory.
A major theme in all this is about identity, and gender and sexuality is certainly included in that. Your friend circle includes a bunch of LBGTQ+ people, and your fanfic also has choices surrounding how Galileo Nova (the main character of the books, and btw what a name!) thinks about themselves and their own gender. This is a topic that is explored throughout, in a manner I thought was really effective, especially in how it’s filtered through this world of fanfiction. Because of course you relate to certain fictional characters, and you do have/own(?) your own version of them within yourself, defining them through your own lens and your own life. And that’s why it hurts so much more when the later events start occurring, and you see your friends get attacked for who they are, and how they relate to the characters. The whole blogging arc is done very well.
Slight discussion of the ending in here... eventually
Now, at the beginning, I defined myself (“xing”) as a Capella/Galileo Nova shipper (Ellanova). There were some “Sorting Hat”-esque personality quizzes I took with an eye towards trying to answer as a certain type of person who’d want to write fanfic (thoughtful, insular, sensitive), and I ended up as an “Augur” of “Wind,” just like the character of Capella who happens to be very popular in the fandom. And Cappella/Gali was the most popular ship in fandom too. Great, I thought! As I play through this, I’ll imagine xing as someone who uses Capella as a self-insert, and who has a crush on Galileo and wants them to get together. All the pieces seemed to fit!
Except the fanfic I wrote was from Gali’s point of view, which okay, I just had to re-think Xing into someone who wanted to write as Gali and not Capella. But Capella never really made their presence felt all that much, in my fanfic or in any blogs. I kept looking for Capella/Gali stuff to reblog, but there wasn’t much of any. Some of that hope maybe isn’t realistic; with five or so defined book characters, I perhaps can’t expect this to prominently include every single pairing and character. But at some point @lunanova (I think) your close friend expresses disappointment in a chapter I wrote being Bruno/Gali ship focused, so I think I can be disappointed for a similar reason.
(There’s also a chance that since I chose to take a break from my fanfic at one point, I skipped a chapter or got some different ones too.)
Okay, so my Ellanova heart went unfulfilled. What’s there in my fic instead? Hmm. What you’re writing is a multi-universe fanfic. And a lot of the kernels of ideas that were there in the fanfic sections in the first half sort of got dwarfed by all the extremely important stuff happening in the blogosphere, so it’s all a bit fuzzy. And the blogging and fanfic parts never particularly seemed to intersect with each other; I didn’t really get the sense of feedback for the fanfic that I did from my blogging. Which ring true; of course your fanfic languishes in the public. Near the end, there’s a part where you can actually choose self-critiques of your own fanfic, and yes: the fanfic doesn’t quite feel like it gets going, and I do have to squint a bit to get something out of it. But after all, this is a first time writer with an overly ambitious set of ideas, and it’s genuinely difficult and overwhelming to write while your friends, your livelihood, your identity are under attack. And that’s the point. The fanfic felt more conceptual than real.
Still, the fanfic sections did more to establish ideas like “maybe multiple versions of you exist” and “wouldn’t it be nice to escape into another world” and what I didn’t get was a real sense of enthusiasm towards just playing around with the Nebulaverse and its characters. The broad intense fandom for the Nebulaverse is established elsewhere, and your own specific love of the series just seems to be assumed through your very presence in the community.
(What I think I’m really asking is: where’s my space Prom chapter??)
In the last chapter of my fanfic I got to define what my fanfic meant, and I ended up arguing that stories maybe don’t need neat endings to have meaning since real life doesn’t have endings. But over on my tumblrlike, multiple bloggers seem to sense that their own character arcs were nearing the end, as they seem to try to wordily sum up each of their own experiences and interpretations of what happened. Does that clash? Maybe not. A Paradox Between Worlds certainly tries to wind down better than xing’s fanfic did; maybe it doesn’t want to wrap everything in a neat bow, but it hits some strong closing notes.
Also in a pivotal emotional scene an achievement popped up, and I don’t know if it was intentional but wow was that bleak.
Also also there are quizzes that are hosted on a separate site which added a lot, and it makes me sad that in like five years those are going to become dead links and that part the experience is going to be gone.
Ambitious! Explores a lot of themes. A love/hate letter to online fan communities. I’m a bit curious how this comes off for someone who doesn’t know any of this world at all.
Results at the end
You have unlocked three out of eighteen possible achievements, earning you a score of 25 out of a possible 200 points.
Still Sane: Ending: Luna (10 points)
It feels so scary, getting old: Finish the game. (5 points)
Never think about death: Help a friend in a key moment. (10 points)
Personal
Online Name: xing @beautyinthemoonlight
Follower count: 162
Mage class: Augur of Wind
Blog alignment:
Gen: 18%
Shipping: 16%
Meta: 11%
Sympathy: 23%
Discourse: 24%
Shitposting: 19%
Top characters:
Gali: 6%
Bruno: 5%
Astra: 7%
Capella: 18%
Tycho: 5%
Top ships:
Astrapella: 5%
Brunova: 0%
Ellanova: 15%
Astranova: 0%
Brunastra: 0%
Tychonova: 0%
Brunotycho: 0%