Some Posts Are Fractal, or, It's Foreshadowing And Characterisation All the Way Down

[elisem]

So I just clicked over to Jeremy's goofing up the private message on an Order Only post, and reading through it reminded me how very many things get done at once in a lot of Alternity posts. (I know I'm talking about my own character, but it happens in every character's timeline.) In this one post, early in Jeremy's played time, there's:

* foreshadowing for the working relationship Bill and Jeremy have (which will eventually lead to Jeremy asking Bill to be best man when Jeremy and Maureen finally wed)
* an example of how the ISS group pools info to figure out what the grownups are not telling them
* Kingsley's guidance, and why he is so very much missed
* Sally-Anne, Pansy and Ron talking over interpersonal dynamics with an eye to future trouble and calculating the risk thereof
* Jeremy demonstrating his unexamined cluelessness about emotional impact by using the word squib as a self-putdown -- in front of Alice, while everyone is waiting to see if Frank has lost his magic for good. (This cluelessness about emotional impact will flower when he offers Hermione Teddy Nott's wand as a trophy and working tool.)
* showing how Remus/Sirius/Alice/Molly look after one another in times of stress and worry
* good early example of how Sally-Anne and Jeremy chat and banter (Sally-Anne telling him " I just lack the commitment to science and data-gathering that some Ravenclaws have, which is probably why the Hat put me in Slytherin.")

... and probably more. One of the things I love about Alternity is how interwoven all the pieces wound up being, and how not only the playing advanced the narrative, but how many directions it so often advanced the narrative at once.

Got any examples of fractal posts that you liked a lot? Pivotal ones? Or just things where the interplay and worldbuilding delighted you?

Comments

[jenett]

I'm trying to think of optimal examples, but while I'm thinking, I'll add that if anyone goes "Does anyone remember that thread?" and can't find it, tell me what you remember and I will rummage in the wiki for it.

[gwendolyngrace]

I think what you're describing is a process that is bound to happen with any set of characters where not all the variables are known at the first instance.

Naomi and I did not plan for Seamus and Padma to be besties, but it happened and it worked and we kept building on the groundwork that had been established to deepen and strengthen their relationship.

Deb mentioned that beautiful night when she and I stayed up til 3 (well, it was 3 for me; it was 1 for her) allowing Regulus and Sirius to finally talk to one another and hear each other, possibly for the first time in their lives. (At the time it was the latest night I had had playing Alternity. I look at this last weekend and think, "oh, how little you knew from late nights....")

But as I said, that conversation was a touchstone I used over and over in my understanding of Sirius's psychology, and Deb, in her play of Barty, particularly, used her understanding of Regulus to shade and inform what additional ammunition Barty could fire at Sirius. Because the same post featured a Reg-Pansy conversation, it also allowed me and Linny later to circle back to Pansy's relationships with both of them - Sirius's jealousy (and yes, he was!) that she started getting her advice from Reg instead of him, their bonding over how awful Walburga was and what it was like for her to be in Grimmauld Place, her love of music and how she used it to inform and broaden her horizons, etc.

Granted, I think the phenomenon you're discussing is much more obvious and varied when it's an open post like you're using to illustrate, and we had fewer and fewer of those as the plot and the necessities of character-cliques dictated smaller and smaller circles of trusted confidantes, but yeah, you're totally right.

It shows that we were careful and conscientious authors, yes, but also readers of each other's work, picking up cues that we left without even necessarily knowing we were laying the pipe.

[elisem]

I was looking at this post a while back, as an example of talking about how the wards affect trade (commerce is one of my Things), and it's got a fair amount of connection and foreshadowy goodness in it as well.

(And oh, the characters were all so much younger then....)

[jenett]

One of my favourite random worldbuilding bits was Siz asking Poppy about contraceptive advice for her sister.

(I um, do have the text of several of the Repopulation Office pamphlets saved: I will add that to the list of things to wiki. They are dreadfully horrible.)

But I love that for both some character stuff (Siz's large family was mentioned before I took her over, and figuring out how to make it clear they were there and she loved them was a constant complication) and also the relationship with Poppy, where they're just cheerfully chatting away.

And then for the worldbuilding, because of course if you have magic for this kind of thing, there's a few dozen different options, and people have really strong opinion about which you use, and which you don't. And the implications in there that the Ministry is quietly encouraging the ones that are more likely to fail (often because you need to remember to stop and do something when you're in the middle.)

The Adsimilis Silphion mentioned there is a charm that mimics the effect of the Silphium plant that was widely used as a contraceptive in the ancient world (so widely it went extinct, because it also had a very narrow growing range.) The plant was a thing you took monthly, and apparently had fairly few side effects, and of *course* someone would make a charm when you couldn't get it. Dropping those kinds of things into game always delighted me. (See also Argleton, which was Deb's doing.)

[synecdochic]

I mentioned it in another post, but I loved Siz and Tosha's conversations about ethics and forces of history so much. They reinforced so many thematic bits, and if you look at them in retrospect (I did the other night when I was looking for something) you can see that Tosha is absolutely correct when he says to Siz (after his return from the dead) that he warned her exactly what would happen, and sure enough it's all there. You just have to connect the dots.

(On a similar note: all the conversations Tosha and Lucius had about the problems of building a society rather than overthrowing a country. Because it's all stuff the Order will have to deal with as they do the same thing -- we saw a lot of it playing out, this summer -- and although it will work for the Order because they have entirely different and much better motives, and a leader who is not Sociopathic Evil, getting those questions onto the table up front was really a nice contrast, I think.)

I also agree that Reg and Sirius's last conversation was so very much an example of this. It didn't pay off until the end, but once it did, it really paid off.

[pegkerr]

This is one of my favorite examples: It's the conversation that Snape and Alice have right before the May 16 battle, and they touch upon Neville and his choice in December. Snape's tribute to Neville just moved me so deeply (brilliant writing, Denise):

I do not think Neville would begrudge me telling you this: he loves you immensely, but he believes in what we are doing more. His greatest joy was the day you told him what you were doing, and why you were doing it; his greatest pride was the day he was brought into the Order and could see for himself the cause for which you were fighting.

I have never known anyone so thoroughly possessed of the virtues of the Gryffindor, with so few of the vices. I spent years visiting his thoughts regularly, and I can tell you this, with no fear whatsoever that I am making up pretty lies to comfort you: he would not — will not — hold you to blame for what has happened. Not in the least. He would have sacrificed himself a hundred times over to preserve what we are doing, and counted the price a worthwhile one each time.

You have not forgot him. You will not forget him. You will find him, and we will rescue him when it is possible to do so, and we will take care of him for as long as is necessary, and the entire time you must — must — remember this: he loved you enough to give up his self to buy our safety, all of us, and I know him well enough to say that there is no part of him that did not pay the price willingly.

Do not take that choice away from him and count it a sin against your own reckoning. It was his choice, and you must honour it. I say this with the greatest of confidence: to him, not having done so would have been far worse.

You raised a son who was capable of making that hard choice — the right choice — at precisely the right time. Not many would have been able to.

Now consider:

*What a classic example of Alternity inverting canon. In canon, Snape reasoned that if Voldemort had picked Neville instead of Harry, Lily needn't have died. And so Snape hated Neville. And yet in Alternity, Neville is someone he genuinely admires.
*In the same way of canon inversion, instead of a hateful, wounding Snape we get a nurturing, consoling Snape.
*Snape is about to die. He's talking about Neville, but these words can also be considered counsel to Alice about how to think about HIS death.
*Neville is about to sacrifice himself AGAIN. And in this case, he won't even have the mind to make it his own choice--but it is POSSIBLE, he is in the right position, because of the choice he made in December.
*Alice is a leader who is about to lose a LOT of people she cares about. Snape is teaching her how to think about it so that she can do that and still hold onto her sanity.

[jenett]

So, I have another fractal (and I'm sorry for the fact it's Madam Pinkness, but she makes a good example here.)

Her post right after spring hols Y5, about new restrictions coming back to school

So, the first thing I should say was that figuring out how she was going to escalate when was really complicated: a lot of the plot about her blackmailing Raz was because we hit the question of "You have at least two highly competent people in the building who have no compunctions about killing other people, why do they not stop her?" and then we had to figure out what would stop them (a combo of a threat to Raz and then V's backing to let it play out, to make Harry do something being the solution we landed on, because we also realised we had to get Harry being more actively rebellious in some form sometime that year.)

But it also mattered to me that we had a reasonable progression from her end, that she got worse and worse, but in a way that made internal sense to her, and that built.

1) Kicking her demands for knowledge about private details up into higher and higher gear, and bringing out the theme of lack of privacy in a totalitarian regime.

2) Getting another mention in there of the role of the number 8 in the Protectorate (we went back and forth for a while on the total number of horcruxes, and decided on eight, and then had to seed 'eight is important, watch for that number' in there for a bit.)

3) The addition of further awful requirements (we never really picked this one up, I think because it's a kind of thing that's very tiring, but they were meant to be encounter-group style sessions, where one person sits in the middle and everyone else tells them what faults they need to correct. If I remember right, I'd had the idea for this earlier, and we didn't spring it until late in Umbridge's arc because we wanted to hint at it being horrible but not actually have to do much with it.)

4) Bringing out some more of the class dynamics, something Umbridge was pretty sensitive too, but that often were less commented on among the students for stretches of time.

5) Pushing the pureblood/halfblood separation much more clearly, so that Harry would be able to take a much more definitive stand.

6) Up the risks for the ISS kids, because they'd all spent their hols being tutored by traitors to the Protectorate.

And then there were some great comments (I adore Sally-Anne's "Dear Sirius Black, please do not give her additional ideas.")