Because you said we could ask anything I wanted to ask about the whole meta level to the whole "rpf but not rpf" thing? I feel dense for not picking up on whatever is being commented on but I haven't been able to pinpoint anything.

Then again I'm not an RPF person at ALL but I've been following your stuff and I blew through WFU like it was nothing so there must be something special going on.

Before I get into it, this is the first time I've tried to put any of these thoughts in writing other than in rambly DMs, mostly I've thought about this out loud or talked in voice chat or a few times in person, so it may be a bit incoherent!

I'm also tagging in @gaypiratebrainrot, who I'm sure will have a quite different but intersecting take - I took what they did and ran with it in my own way. (I feel exceptionally fortunate to have had them both as an editor and as a friend who encouraged my various ramblings on this topic.)

That said, below the cut are my thoughts about the "meta level", which I think fall into two categories: constructing characters and the role of fanfiction inside of the story.

First, the whole process of constructing characters. For me, it was a very deliberate thing; with Ed and Stede, it's figuring out how to balance the canon characters and (the public perception of) the people who perform them. This, with the bonus complication of the actors having talked about how they feel about the characters in relationship to themselves, for me at least makes for a very self-aware writing experience. (And an entirely new conception of parasociality, I think it permanently changed my mental landscape!)

In WFU this is also addressed directly in the text by the characters themselves talking about AUs:

“It’s sort of like, you take the essence of the characters and their dynamic, and see how they might behave in different worlds,” Wee John says. “It’s experimental. You’ve got your coffee shop alternate universes, your sci-fi alternate universes, your actor alternate universes—” “Yeah, but, like, isn’t this the actor alternate universe,” Frenchie says, gesturing around them. “Like, Stede and Ed are kinda like alternate timeline Rhys and Taika.” “No, no,” Wee John says. “It’s all about transporting enough elements of the character for it to read like the same person, just living a different life. You couldn’t just write a story about Ed and Stede and call them Rhys and Taika.” “It’s kinda like, reinforcing the idea of some inherent self, though,” Frenchie says. “Like, as if we have some kind of soul that would be consistent across circumstances, instead of all of us being dynamic living bodies that are massively shaped by the events of our lives. Whole thing sorta reeks of cartesian dualism.”

There was a great post that I saw recently that talked about AUs and understanding what are the core aspects of characters in the canon and how to translate them into a new setting, using the term "concretes", which I immediately added to my vocabulary. So these guys, WFU Ed and WFU Stede, have this strange mix of concretes (both canon and fanon), and in writing my piece, I'm also trying to match the concretes of WFU while expanding out the universe that they exist in. (This is true to a lesser extent of other characters who have a one-to-one match canon to IRL, which hasn't yet come up in my work but does a little bit later tho it is in my other fic of WFU, a secret third thing.)

Which leads me to the construction of Mary and the unnamed wife (her interior-to-my-head name is Carlita, fwiw; I actually have a "alignment chart" of variations of her name that maybe I'll throw onto this post) - because they don't match that pattern. Which made me conscious on a different level of how I was creating these amalgams: the vanishingly small amount of information I know about either Rosie Carnahan-Darby or Rita Ora or Carly Rae Jepsen, and deliberately so! I didn't want to write RPF; I wanted to match the not quite one thing or the other of WFU, and so these two women are amalgams in a different way, with different ingredients, and they're also constructed from archetypes: the Manager Wife and the Pop Star, and the whole cultural soup around those ideas.

(I have a whole separate thought about the character of Javid Denkins but that's kind of a spoiler at this point. tl;dr: It's a very goddamn funny joke that ends up having bonus meaning.)

I am forever grateful for a specific little bit of canon that was in WFU, because it let me do something different in my work: Ed takes his coffee with seven sugars (and a little bit of godawful creamer), and so when Mary and the wife meet and have coffee, suddenly that has meaning in comparison to Ed. A canon bit of goofery can become something about diet culture, and that gets to be a whole new thematic thread through the story.

And then there's fanfiction as a story element within the fanfiction. We handle it very differently, I think, between my work and WFU, because we're looking at different aspects and from different perspectives. Among other things, it fundamentally changed my approach to learn that both Rita and Carly Rae had RPF written about them over a decade ago, when both women were in their 20s.

But in both cases, fanfiction is woven through as both contrast and mirror to the story, which is of course itself fanfiction. In both stories, Ed's fic reading habits say something about him and Mary's attitudes (about RPF in particular!) say something about her. The wife's reactions to both of these things, as well as her prior experience, shape how she interacts with them. The existence of tropes or characters say something about us, the readers and writers, as well as about the world that these stories' characters live in.

For me, both the fanfiction element and the character construction end up being partially about how much is it ever possible to know anything about another person. The obvious limits, in the case of someone who is in the public eye - I love this bit from WFU: "built [...] from a handful of Youtube interviews, my Twitter feed, and a level of horniness that would fix the climate crisis if only we could harness it for renewables", and I started joking that the wife was "three youtube videos and an architectural digest article in a trenchcoat", even though it's quite a bit more complicated than that.

But not just famous people: Mary makes assumptions about Ed and his wife based on their public personas; Ed makes assumptions about Mary based on pieces of past history through the lens of his feelings for Stede, and the wife's exploration includes piecing together information from Mary's social media and Ed's fic reading habits. All we can ever know about another person is what we observe, whether that's a public persona or their words and behavior. (There's a secret third level of how much can one ever know about oneself, but that's probably a different post.) And that circles back around to the writer and the reader: how much do we know about the canon characters? the famous people? the characters in the story?

(MASSIVE shout out to the phenomenal beta team of @gaypiratebrainrot, @veeagainsttheday, and @emi--rose for pointing out where I needed to really boost this question of who knows how much of what and when. Their incredibly smart observations did so much to help me bring out that theme among others.)

I don't know if that even answers your question, but it's some of the extra material that's been in my head as I've been writing and editing. I also had never read any RPF (with the curious exception of a notable No Reservations - Narnia crossover) before WFU and it basically melted my brain, which I have continued to process through the experience of writing for the benefit of all the broken hearts. So yeah, something different going on here for sure.

How do you know you aren't actually a refrigerator given sentience and implanted with false memories of being human?

by looking down and not seeing a refrigerator and also knowing fridges cant look down next question

(looking at a list of paradoxes by greek philosophers) skill issue, skill issue, this guy's never heard of a pause button, skill issue, humans can obviously move infinitely fast

Do machines feel pain?

If pain is a signal your nerves send when there's something wrong with your body, then don't machines feel pain if they have a function that lets them know there's something wrong with their code/body? So do they feel pain?

no

I don't believe in gender and neither should you

me in the town square like Well.. some things ARE (benny) and some things are NOT (hot benny posts)

never attribute to malice what can be explained by commitment to the bit. or whatever that guy said

ssensed a certain pride in hus answer<333<3<3<3<3<3<3<<33<<33<3<3_3_3_3<3<3<3<3

there's only one kind of people. people who exist, and people who don't

The answer is it stopped being the ship of Theseus when he no longer owned it

Module 6 done. Subject is land of waves arc in naruto

Observation: 'ya boi' is used in the way 'yours truly' is in conversation to denote one is referring to oneself eg "This meal was specially prepared for you by your truly/by ya boi"

Assertion: 'ya boi' should also replace 'yours truly' in its other use to sign off informal letters and emails

Their virgin "wahh I should block every person the Cool Kids claimed a looser and align with my audience's demands to not lose my platform as a creator :'((((" vs my chad "I will deliberately say or reblog something controvercial once in a while as a preventive measure to ward off the people that only like me when I am pure"

What if I read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and became the most insufferable motherfucker for a bit would you hate me

is there any particular reason as to why your gen 2 iterators have more human-like anatomy? or do you just like how it looks? i kept looking at euros and finding quite odd how he has human feet even though humans (supposedly) don't actually exist in the rw universe

while i was designing them all i was thinking about was "wouldn't it be funny if ancients got Really close to inventing the human shape in a world where that shape has no root, but then were like 'mm.. nah! this shape Sucks let's try something Else' and pushed all that We are off the table in favor of the fucked up lookin Gen 3 designs? ...yeah. yeah it would. irl humans aren't aware enough that we are in the same bag as horses when it comes to shit evolution lol, lessa goooo"

BUT! i will admit to u right here and right now without any issue- when it comes to Gen 2 feet, the very very human like shape that i've been using lately wasn't originally in the plan! those peets were meant to look more like shoes. if u look at the big OC post u can still see that as well! (Fish even still has very shoe-like feet. he didn't change cuz he's an old fuck for a Gen 2)

the design came closer to the look of our bare feet while i was poking at Suns' design in their prime. since i wanted only to put down some ideas for their outfit + maybe look into the feelings their vibes and appearance should evoke, i went with a different style than i usually go with while drawing itties to reach for a more... ethereal and flowy, maybe? feel to it n that included the feet being drawn Like That

i'll give in, here's one of my more successful attempts at 'em in their prime (not the completely finalized design tho)

i REALLY liked it n because of my Happye i decided to draw other Gen 2s with that as well. so yes. it's cuz my eyeball thinks it's nice 👁

(but also like,, those toes r not separate, that shit is more like neat lil painted lines for the sake of the imagery JSNFJNKS)