Bread, and all variations of the aforementioned

An illustration of the Gallery of Neofrene. Jacques, Reception-1 and Reception-3 are standing near the centre. The three characters as well as Wires strewn all over the background are tinted pink. The rest of the illustration is tinted teal. The background is drawn with an abstract style and proportions. Various other characters of the comic are in the background.

Click to hear their voice claims!

Prose 3: Thoughtful Art Analysis, Exhibit A

➤ Content Warnings

Ableism
Reception

"It's a wooden block horse. A traditional toy from Quille." Three hands the artpiece to Jacques, a blocky thing whose simple figure contrasted with its ornate designs, saturated paint and colourful ribbons adorning it all around.

The visual arts were one of the Reception's few true passions, so the disappointment in discovering the one friend they managed to make in this bitch of a Universe couldn't even see was… well. They've long entertained the idea of sharing with somebody outside themselves—selves?—self, and while they were aware of the not-so-subtle prejudice that comes with resenting the situation, they simply couldn't deny that realising their wish would be left ungranted for who knows how long left a sour taste in their mouth.

Of course, you don't comment on the acrid aftertaste of the free food a kind coworker brings, you just chew through and smile and avoid mentioning it.

"The thing they do is, like, they carve the rough shape of a horse from one big block of wood—it's just shaped like a plain cube at first. You know what cubes are, right?"

"Yes. I am familiar with the basic shapes." Jacques studies the toy with his talons: it's made of wood, alright, surface sanded but still bumpy in the way wood is, proof the thing was unvarnished. He considers biting into it, the way Birds tend to analyse things, but decides against it knowing the argument the Curator would spring up upon his "interference of the exhibits" wouldn't be worth it.

"You know, there's an experiment like this where medical interventions gave previously blind people the ability to see, and when asked to identify a cube from a sphere through sight alone, they couldn't," Two says from their desk a few feet away, not looking up from the magazine they were perusing. "They did not have the mental association between the appearance of curves and angles and the way they feel. It seems a bit obvious, now that it's been tested, but it used to be an entire philosophical question in Universes before. There's an entire branch of study on it.

"Epistemology?" One sputters, trying to keep bites of their doughnut from spilling out of their… not-mouth. While they were aware of their own discriminatory inclinations, they've been stored so far away from One's body that it almost feels foreign to them. As far as they were concerned, they were pretty happy about having a friend who cared not for appearances, because it means he wouldn't pester them about how they can eat without a mouth. Some pressing questions, you leave up to the epistemologists, they would say.

"I suppose so," Two replies.

"That's interesting," Jacques answers, joggling the wooden doll about. It clangs a soft tinkle, and he finds two small bells are attached by strings near where the toy's head is. The sound is pleasant, a warm sunny day. "This is about horses?"

"Fuck no, epidemiology or whatever has shit-fuck to do with horses." Three picks up a box next to them, making a dismissive hand gesture towards Two while shuffling through the other miniscule knick-knacks they have lying around. "Didn't even lemme get to the part where I describe what the horse looks like, fuck's sake."

"Jacques cares more about epistemology than he does horses," Two hisses at their one-third. It never fails to astound them how stupid their own fractional selves could be. "Horses and birds do not have much in common, all things considered."

Three finds a brass bell, and considers hurling it at their strawberry-flavoured venom-laced compatriot (bet Jacques would find the sound funny, too), but freezes when they feel the familiar plop of One's thoughts within them. "I, um, don't think it's appropriate. To assume what Jacques would care about more."

Two rolls their eye but keeps their snide remarks to themselves, and even Three grudgingly concedes, dropping the piece of metal back into its container. One had their wits and being a hold of them, altogether, all three thirds, made it hard to argue with themself. How much do you need to argue with your own thoughts, anyway? They've lived their entire existence like this, going through the motions of being several people, even believing it themself sometimes, but in the end, Reception was just Reception, no matter how you sliced it, and their petty bickering, they knew, was little more than self-aggrandising fanfare. Compartmentalising their thoughts into their bodies was only comfortable because there was no real risk of alienation from each other. Different flavours, same carton of milk, neapolitan ice cream thrice refrozen.

They were still their self at the end of the day, and living in their own World made it hard to remember sometimes that Jacques was… not.

They suppose a part of friendship is accepting that a friend like you is still not you.

Four long strands of ribbons hang from the toy's pointed ears. Jacques interweaves their delicate fabric together, a loose haphazard braid. "I think horses and birds could be put into the same family of animals, through vibes alone."

God, fuck this. His thoughts are his own but sometimes Reception has just got to pipe up.

"Horses are mammals. Birds are birds," Two states matter-of-factly, adjusting their heart-shaped sunglass.

"Birds are reptiles," Three interjects, poking Jacques on the cheek with a porcelain figurine of an alligator (From Liscon, a common parting gift shared among loved ones, a memento of see-you-soon's).

One wipes a spot of powdered sugar off their face. "Birds are… birds." Short and sweet, correctional but non-confrontational.

"I said through vibes alone," Jacques tosses the horse back and forth between his hands, enjoying the way it jingles. "I am aware there is nothing scientific about it."

He stops juggling it around and holds it steady, tinkering with the rest of the body. A bunch of tassels seem to line the entire front of the animal, a few fraying at the ends, while a panel of what feels like velvet was plastered on the sides. From the point of its ears to what he assumes is the back (three braided ropes nailed across it, functioning as a saddle), a fluffy mane of cotton is glued on. He brings it closer to his face, the mane on his cheek, the way he positioned the object having its rougher straw tail brush against the underside of his beak. Maybe not just a sunny day, he ponders to himself, but specifically a sunset. Like sitting on the porch while the wind picks up.

Reception observes their friend, the dainty but sedulous manner in which they hold the artefact tugging at their feelings. Augh, sentimentality, the most vulnerable aspect of friendship. Even without the knowledge of what, to Reception, were the most interesting aspects of the doll (The saddle's a gorgeous shade of royal blue! The eyes are drawn on with a rare kind of mushroom ink! There is a silver sticker on its forehead! A sticker!), Jacques was appreciating it plenty, and all egocentricity aside, it intrigued them to think of what own little World the Bird might have in his own head.

Love is stored in the wooden block horse.

"Horses are mammals, so I suppose they could get rabies," Jacques pecks at the horse's forehead, a clement amount of force, resisting the urge to bite into it.

"… Yes? I suppose they could," Two looks up from their reading material this time. We're doing this. We're going down another irrelevant train of thought.

"Birds can't get rabies. Media really drove that point home once. I said if I had rabies, I'd start biting people on purpose."

Three retrieves the brass bell and bonks it on the bird's head. "Dude, you've got like, a mental problem."

Notes

From Wikipedia:

Chagu Chagu Umakko (チャグチャグ馬コ) is a horse festival in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. Held on the second Saturday in June, approximately one hundred horses with colourful fittings and bells parade between Sozen Shrine in Takizawa and Morioka Hachiman-gu. The term chagu-chagu is an onomatopoeic expression for the sound made by the horses' bells.

Here is an image of the dolls made to resemble these horses.

Anyway, they are the basis of the doll that Jacques tinkers with in this story.

These dolls are quite easy to find in Japan surplus stores [ which, as the name suggests, tends to sell discarded, secondhand or surplus Japanese products ].

rolypolyphonic owns about fifty of these dolls [ including similar horse dolls from Japan such as the Miharu-goma, Yahata-uma and Kinoshita-goma, which you may learn more about from the article the image above is sourced from ].

This is clarified to avoid the idea that the Region of Quielle is merely sci-fi Japan, although like all fictional places it does take some inspiration from cultures in our reality. One thing that I have found questionable in many mainstream YA fiction is that fantasy worlds just seem to be… taking a real place and putting magic in it. Which, alright, is a fine basis to start from, but it seems main settings are often Fantasy (Western) European Country and then everything else is… Fantasy Asia of Fantasy Asians Except the Asians are Just Japanese/Chinese and Fantasy Africa of Fantasy Black People.

Ergo, the analogue for the Western country is a specific country and then the analogues for everything else lumps whole continents together. What is the Fantasy Asia supposed to be? Japan and China are not all there is in Asia.

I remember reading this advice post for writers (an entire genre of posts that meet my ire, but that is a ramble for another day) that said you should write fantasy stories by mishmashing real world locations together, but to avoid doing so for certain countries like in Asia, because, to paraphrase the post's sentiments, 'historically many Asian countries have had conflicts and you never know if you might mash together enemy nations.'

Now [without going into every single issue I have with the whole post as that would take forever ], when people pointed out how strange this is especially when the same applies to countries in other continents, the original poster doubled down and said that wars in Europe were… I cannot fully recall the exact reasoning used, take my recollection with a [citation needed], but I believe claims that they were so long ago/these conflicts no longer exist in present day were made. And I am fairly certain as an example they used… Ireland and England. Ireland and England…

Well, this got off the rails, but regardless, while I do not think it is truly a bad method of writing, 'fantasy world that is basically real world but with magic everywhere' is something I have grown cynical of.

It is less the trope, of course, but the way present society has commodified art so now you have people making 'instructions' about the proper way to make art which all amounts to 'how to write things that are marketable and gets picked up easily by publishers' even if the final product is… bland.

Ah, or something. I do not have enough knowledge to claim the right to a more elaborate or defencible criticism.

Well, back to the story. I recall saying in previous notes I am not good with the practical aspects of worldbuilding like The Economy and anything that exists in the material world tangibly hashtag schizomoment. For that reason I focus more on sociocultural norms especially in how they pertain in the interactions of individuals: Reception and their not-so-subtle ableism is not merely a bias they present but reflective of both the culture of Maldevara and the Marginals themselves.

I think, whenever Jacques disability is discussed, it is important to remember two things about Maldevara: 1) There are barely any other disabled people, and none in the public view besides Jacques; 2) 'Love' is not only a symbolic but a legal concept that is also heavily integrated into their culture.

I will try to make this more obvious in the story itself later instead of just infodumping in the notes, but I am aware the way Jacques talks about his condition (physically and mentally) seems incredibly heavy-handed and even sermon-like. On one hand, when I read 1984 my favourite part was when the story 'read' the fictional book Goldstein wrote so this is largely a part of my own pretentious tastes.

On the other, there is little precedent for what Jacques believes.

'Knowledge' is a cumulative process. In discussing an entire framework of ideas, it is not enough to merely have separate ideas haphazardly strewn all over the place: these ideas build off of one another and interact with one another. Indeed, to view them as distinct things often leads to one believing contradictory things.

It is not that one is 'stupid' for being contradictory. Rather, some ideas that seem to make sense on their own actually make little sense at all when paired with another. A stable framework of navigating the world is less about the ideas themselves but the relationships between them, and often we can only understand certain new ideas when old ones paved the way.

Things like 'Making fun of eccentricity is biased towards schizospectrals' or 'It is ableist to mock blind people for not engaging with visual activities the way sighted people would' seem like 'common sense' ideas. I mean, they should be but I see a lot of people who still do not get those and if you are one of them I have no idea why are you reading my blatant Cringe Leftist Propaganda but alright. But still, these ideas do not pop out of nowhere: we can only understand they 'make sense' because we have preexisting ideas that lead to them, such as basic awareness of what 'disability' is or the fact that disabled people have thoughts and feelings.

Jacques lives in a country where there is little to no awareness of what being disabled is like, so it is hard-pressed for him to garner any basic sympathy even from people who genuinely love him, like Reception [ …and Media ].

And that is the basic stuff. His other more 'eccentric' ideas which pop up later, notably his lovelessness and obsession with identifying as a 'Dead' person, are ideas that are barely acceptable in our reality. What more in a world where nobody will corroborate your emotions?

This is the main question I think about when writing Jacques interacting with other characters. Questions like 'Goodness, why does this bird talk so much about his disabilities, does he not have any other personality?' or 'Why does Jacques tolerate these other characters when they tend to be ableist towards him?' are ones I wanted to highlight.

I think when you write a fantasy setting, it is a fascinating endeavour to lean into these sociocultural ideas that affect the characters deeply: it is difficult to articulate, but I like seeing characters intimately 'tied' to the world they live in as opposed to having their character traits be private, personal possessions that stem almost entirely from the obvious, direct interaction ('I was abused by my parents') instead of society's ideas of 'normal' ('Love is valued as the most powerful thing in the world but I don't feel it').

I suppose one of my issues with fantasy worlds that are just England With Orcs and Wizards is that the world is not an all-encompassing stage so much as it is a sequence of events, so to speak. The world does not exist outside of the times the world allowed the main character to exist: and perhaps the reason the world is not felt to need to exist is because we're just meant to think of England. The story becomes about the discovery of magic and not the world that does it.

A perspective I have based on the limits of my worldview and consumed media, you know. Obviously I am not denying the existence of good books with good worldbuilding. I just don't think those obnoxious advice posts get it right.

So, you know. Why does Jacques talk so much about the kind of life he has? Well, nobody else does. Nobody else can. By himself he is just irrelevant.

Beta design/concept

Reception is not going to be one of the more prominent characters, but they are interesting to me as one of the more unconventional Marginals.

In the future, I really ought to show more about the Marginals, their sociocultural norms and their physiology, but for now I will say Reception is an outlier primarily as a Marginal of their complexity that is not a member of the Council [ There are several Marginals who are technically not members, but these Marginals do not have the level of complex thinking as the ones revealed so far do and are more like animals, or sometimes robots ].

On top of that, they are the only Marginal who maintains multiple bodies as a default: this is not Illegal but it is something other Marginals prefer not to do outside the context of fulfilling specific tasks, for a variety of reasons that I will not get into.

In the original conception of the characters, before the Marginals had a well- developed lore, Reception was more of a tie-in to a different Marginal, the Curator [ who shows up soon ], serving as the permanent receptionist/guard of her Gallery. They had more-or-less the same personalities but with a more "Willy Wonka'-esque kind of eccentricity, which was later dropped and then got replaced with their current '4chan politician' flavour.

… I have never used 4chan so that is kind of a joke. No idea how they really talk there. Regardless, Reception is a character who seems to talk about a vague sense of Leftist Politics but for some reason has the edgy sense of humour that you would expect a misogynistic, ableist #SigmaMale to have. Now, as a disclaimer while some political references exist in the story [ it is a story that dwells on philosophical and moral themes so this was difficult to avoid ], this is not a 'political' comic in the sense that I cannot advocate for any actionable policies that translate into real life. The story takes place in their own fictional society that has different issues than ours, after all.

Regardless, Reception as a character that makes a lot of political references was done sort of to juxtapose the irony of how they are specifically the Marginal who is not part of their equivalent of a government yet they are the one seemingly most invested in the politics of it all.

Despite that, they do work for the Media [ which they consider distinct from working for the government, even though Media makes them work for the government, but IT IS DIFFERENT, OKAY! ]. No idea what that says about them other than that makes them similar to Jacques in a way that was not on purpose. lol. lmao.

That aside, writing their dialogue is confusing due to the way they refer to themself as singular but occassionally separately. Multiple body issues. I think their dialogue is one way to experiment with the culture Marginals have surrounding language as a whole.

No idea what else to say about them… haha funny stickman people lolol.