Ravelling Wrath, chapter 6: Discussion
If you haven't read Ravelling Wrath, chapter 6 yet, you might want to do that before reading further.
At over 12000 words, this chapter sure is a doozy!
Since this is the first chapter in the Otherworld, I had a lot of stuff I needed to set up. The rules of the Otherworld in general. The physics of the Waiting God's layer in particular. How manifesting works. The subtleties of Rinn's reactions to everything. And during all the exposition, I had to keep up the appropriate range of promises, like the one about the other Ravellers, and the ones from this chapter's major subplot about Rinn handling zir boredom and loneliness.
Amusingly, the exact rules of manifesting weren't established until very late in my design process. I knew from the beginning that I didn't want it to be able to create living things. But I also had multiple planned scenes where characters manifested food, so I had to come up with a justification for why food is allowed when actual living things aren't. Also, I wanted it to be able to create pretty much anything you could think of, but what if you thought of “a supercomputer that's better than any that's been invented yet”? That seemed like it could get out of control. So I eventually came up with a system that's somewhere in the middle, with lots of freedom but also interesting limitations.
Also, I definitely wanted manifested objects to be “less real” in some sense – e.g. the fact that it's possible to unmanifest them. (And the fact that they generally can't exist in the material world.) But I also didn't want them to disappear as soon as you weren't thinking about them, because it would suck if the characters manifested a bed and then it disappeared as soon as they were asleep. So… this is how it ended up.
Finally, (whispering) don't tell anyone, but this chapter has specific foreshadowing for a secret that is isn't going to be revealed until ten chapters later! We're really getting into the swing of things.
Approximate readability: 7.94 (1552 characters, 346 words, 21 sentences, 4.49 characters per word, 16.48 words per sentence)
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Comments
im curious about your decision to refer to the discs as “stars”. i know that they appear that way from far away, but it took me quite a while to realize that ““We're standing on top of a star?!”” referred to the platform itself and that there wasnt some sort of hot glowing sphere under it. in fact, i didnt catch that until Rinn went to the other side of it
another question, more of a character one i suppose: if Rinn took the time to manifest, say, a bunch of bricks and sand and laid them on the non-computer side of the platform in order to make a runnable surface, would that count as appropriate planning for the Waiting or would it be an exploit/workaround? to be clear i understand why Rinn doesnt do that kind of thing, just bc of zir character, but im curious what the Waiting would think about an alternate Rinn that did
brief sidenote off of that, in checking appropriate usage, i note that the Waiting God is referred to as “the Waiting God” or “the Waiting”, but the Stern God is sometimes referred to as simply “Stern” - is that intentional? is it a cultural trend or an aspect of the characters we have here?
anyway, this got longer than i expected, but thanks for your writing!
I should totally edit that initial bit to be more clear! Where it's currently:
I'm thinking I'll change it to:
For the bricks/sand thing, the Waiting God would definitely see that as a successful act of planning! I can see how you might think of it as “once Rinn sets it up, ze doesn't have to plan anymore” – but the full trajectory of a plan includes the time when you are successfully benefiting from achieving the goal.
I think the only time anyone calls the god just “Stern” rather than “the Stern” is in the phrase “Stern take it”, which is a shortening of “May the Stern God take it”, the way almost all common expressions get shortened over time. Most of the gods are either “the X God” or “the X”. The main exception is the Blood God, which is either “the Blood God” or just “Blood” (we haven't seen this yet, but it shows up later in the story) because it's the only one where the X is a noun rather than an adjective/gerundive. Oh, and you can use any of the Xs alone as an adjective to describe something as being like the X God (e.g. “That's such a Seeking way to think about things”).