Can I hijack this thread to talk a bit about why I wrote the Aeternalae, and where I feel it succeeded and where it fails horribly?
First of all, a major goal I had with the Aeternalae was actually to
remove some of the pointless mystique regarding women. If you never heard that stated before, just trust me, it was somewhere on my mind. I actually hoped by glorifying posthuman women, I could help male MSFers see normal women more... well... normally. To basically lampshade the fact that most TG victims essentially do become superhuman girls (I can count every story where an ugly guy becomes an ugly girl on the hand of a bad woodshop teacher). The two choices to get them to start seeing women better was to either be a buzzkill and remind them that girls in real life as just as disgusting and meat-based as men, or to take the delusion of girls as perfect and put it towards spiritual girls who are in fact physically perfect.
Unfortunately, that got kinda tangled up with my spiritual outlooks, which I often would talk about in the same breath. I also made the mistake of writing Aeternalae information in a way that sounded like it could be interpreted as real or prophecy. Though it's worth mentioning part of the "prophecy", a Sign of the Cutepocalypse if you will, was about an all girl world becoming an overwhelming and powerful meme on the internet. That
totally came true, and gave me pause on what to write next if I may be deliciously cryptic.
Originally, I actually intended the Aeternalae to be a bit of a horror story. I still really like that angle, too -- the fans of the setting really clamoring for them becoming a bit of a
Misaimed Fandom. It didn't help that basically whenever I wanted to share my ideas, there was definitely a backlash from certain hypersensitive people. The MSF from then was not as openminded as the MSF of today. The catalyst was that everyone involved was pretty damn immature to boot. The result? Wank from both sides, and I began finding myself irrationally identifying with my own creation, and generally becoming increasingly unhinged as I struggled to defend them. Eventually this resulted in me needing to "export" the horror aspect into a more properly swarming form of transforming super girl. Which, in the heat of zeal, I basically gave a Zerg-ripoff name. "Ovalisk". Good god, the originality there is frightening. And guess what? Round two, people identified with ovalisks.
I probably didn't help matters by eventually presenting the "ovalisk" perspective with the Kate Icing
blog. Let me defend that one though -- I'm actually pretty pleased with how I wrote Kate Icing's story, even though it was really in dire need of a proper arc and ending. I definitely should write like her again sometime.
Now that the history lesson is over, what exactly is my beef with the Aeternalae? It's bloated as hell and has a lot of half-formed ideas (such as "alphariginae") that are orphaned of any proper story, as well as characters I'd prefer to keep more to myself these days. Leena is a rather personal to me, for instance. The reading list of terms a new reader is saddled with is huge... which is ironic when the concept is not much more complicated than "anime girls methodically transform a world and its people". Know what's another science fiction writer with cheesy stories, a needlessly bloated glossary, and with an amazingly hardcore following? L. Ron Hubbard.
Does this mean I hate the Aeternalae or have an axe to grind? Not at all, if you'll believe it. My e-mail address is still
aeternalae@gmail.com because I'm actually rather proud of the fact I created something people love. And let me go on record as saying I still really like the idea -- cute girl borg invasion, and I actually like a lot of the technical aspects like how Influence works and so on. It's fun to write, and fun to read. Aeternalae lent themselves well to the kind of stories I wanted to write or read, and it got people to write the kind of content I wanted to see at the time. Dance, puppets, dance!
If your ideal self still runs with the Aeternalae as a concept, I'm not out to invalidate you. But please recognize you're spiritually identifying with a writer's rather amateur work, and you basically deserve a
lot better. To put your immortal soul into it is like being given a choice of various fine desserts (mmm tiramisu) and choosing to lick an empty sno-ball wrapper instead. I'm not suggesting the setting is ultimately unsalvageable, but that it'd be a lot of work to streamline it and I often got the sense I'm unwelcome to even try. If I am welcome to help make it a lot less of a mess, or more accessible, I'd be glad to. To be honest though, much of my effort right is going towards brainstorming a new setting that has a lot of similar ideas and attempt at appeal, but a lot easier to explain and to roleplay.
Posted: Sat May 22, 2010 4:46 pm
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