How do you express the void, the hunger?
How do you express the thirst, the drive?
How do you express a life that never happened, wrapped inside the echoes of the empty paths that were?
Hello.
This is somewhere between a devlog and a postmortem on science. For its contemporaries, please see Dissolution in Blood and Time — Epitaxy, and bypassing boundaries, and The shape around the space — I’ve forgotten how to see the , Everywhere I go I see the , and spaces beyond labels.
Hmmm.
I’m genuinely curious how many other people have run into the peacocks down in Louisiana. If they’re still out there, wherever I ran into them.
Many parts of science are necessary fabrications, but not those birds, and the humor of that fact is not lost on me.
Ah, another thing that is not fabrication is the core conceits of Anselm, though you might have guessed it’s exaggerated just a bit.
There’s a post I’ve never forgotten. Not just because I’ve saved it, but because it understands.
the pursuit of omniscience is not noble it is not even achievable. but it has to be done. you’ll rend yourself apart if you die knowing one less thing than you could have.
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people keep acting shocked or impressed when i tell them that’s what drives me. does not the denial of information eat at you? does it not gnaw at your soul every moment that there are things you could know if you worked for them and you don’t?
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a side conversation at a market in a language you don’t understand is forever lost to you. that’s not just a part of the world you lost that’s a part of /your/ world that you will never get back. it’ll fade into the memory of those who said it and leave yours even faster. is that not an unbearable agony?
The name of science, this story, of course, comes from the word “omniscience”. That root of knowledge, truncated and incomplete, knowing it can’t be everything, wanting to be everything all the more.
The downside to the infinite yearning of the individual void is that it is both unfillable and also self-destructive, unless you have learned to rear it in. Anselm had not, because I had not. Some days I still don’t think I have. I can stay up hours past my usual time to sleep just because I’ve entered the space of some good writing. Fiction, nonfiction, genre doesn’t matter, just that there is more and I know what the endpoint is. It’s the largest gaps in the armor, it’s the siren’s song I join in with gladly.
So you can understand how easily this frames itself as sin, in the lens of someone who didn’t escape religion so early as I did.
Anselm is someone separated from me by the necessities of narrative and the anachronisms of a worldview distorted by repression of knowledge and living too long in the indigo. Someone who, even unto the end of this story, is trapped by the framing of religion and family culture that is opposed to learning, opposed to everything that is lived.
And yet on some level, the repression is necessary to retain sanity, isn’t it.
The custom noun set on itch is “fugue”. This is both because that is the experience of it, and because that was the experience of making it. This was made within the span of…just over a week, I think? before going on a trip, the stress and circling thoughts keeping me up and keeping me in that familiar state of body and mind.
I don’t recommend this, but I can’t deny it helped.
One of the things that came up early was the question “What is American Gothic, anyway, and how is it meaningfully different from Denpa fiction?” It’s a question that probably seems a bit silly to anyone else incredibly familiar with the genre of Denpa, but there was something to this, and it’s a space liminal to the liminal that I’d like to revisit someday. While science is decidedly more American Gothic, it is Digital American Gothic. I can reach into that space even now, I can see the ways in which the digital feedback through the collapsing personal understanding of reality, the ways in which, for Anselm at least, it is the digital world that disintegrates, that is the danger.
There’s a sort of running thing in all three of these visual novels, of falling out of love with food. I would hesitate to say that I find myself in that position much these days, but the ease with which that framing comes to me is worth notice, and this leads into the next aspect I want to focus on: the tennis ball.
I’m not really sure what it was that made “yellow, sort of fuzzy” a minor theme within science here. Lemonade and its flavor outside of everything else, its connection to Carmen, its thematic connection to The Devil, the sun as a sort of fuzzy yellow orb itself.
Tennis is one of my favorite sports. The local courts got replaced for this thing called pickleball (don’t ask), and also my health and fitness is a bit worse than it used to be, so I haven’t done it in a while, but while I’m not 100% sure of the connection since this is one of the things that wasn’t written down explicitly (and happened more serendipitously than consciously), I do think there’s a connection there still with the way that associating happiness and euphoria from the void of knowledge being filled with the experience of suffering for it, and with the stress and sleepwalking from living under things anyway. After all, you need information to escape the framing, and if the framing has resulted in you avoiding information…
On the topic of tennis. The Devil is one of my favorite things in this story.
I obviously still refuse to give details on how much of everything else was “real” or “imagined”, but I think it’s rather obvious that The Devil is decidedly Not Real, in the same ways that dreams are Not Real. The unreality of The Devil (this is the name of the character, btw, I’m capitalizing it like I capitalize Anselm and Carmen) is exactly the same as the unreality of the dream, the unreality and the blurred lines of Anselm’s life on this trip. Where do the edges lie? What happens if you stop being able to see the lines at all? There are so many boundaries and edges that it feels like I’ve never seen, that it feels like I’ve forgotten, but I can’t put myself back inside them.
There’s also the quality of horror that I find inherently entertaining, almost funny, that inspires the vast visual difference between The Devil as a hyperreal figment and the rest of Anselm’s experience as a blur. Because it is funny, with the right lens, and it is also horror, with the right lens. The loss of context and detail is a core concept in both humor and horror, and that line is one of my favorites to walk. It’s why I find ghost stories so interesting. There’s something about the supernatural that just feels normal to me, and yet it presents itself and is understood as this frightening thing.
Oh, right. Before I forget to mention it (again), there were honestly very few notes taken during the development of this. There were the initial vibe sketches for Anselm, and I think Carmen?—this is the only time across all three VNs that any sketches were ever made of any characters in them—and then the trial and error and crashloop of working with Krita for the visual style (the new Text tool it has is really nice but rather unoptimized when you start Doing Shit to it, which is more of a callout on my own process than on Krita. Been really enjoying using it for less egregious purposes since then, like in CoC). It was a very memorable process, though, either despite or because of riding the line of the subconscious directly while making this.
Cutting myself off here just because I think this is a good enough length for things. There’s more things that could be said, but I think that plenty have been, and I really should get working on some other stuff again.
If you have any specific questions, DMs and email inbox and itch experience comments are always open.
And if you don’t, then I hope the experiences were as worthwhile for you as they were for us.