Thank you, and likewise. :3

[ smokes cigarettes ] I knew this would come back to bite me in the metaphorical behind someday…

I do not know what 'rationalism' actually is. I mean, I can easily search up the dictionary definition, but I am vaguely aware that in practice 'rationalism' is associated with a bunch of figures/organisations/ideologies/what-have-yous that I know little about. What little I do know however skeeves me out. I have read a few things that are apparently written by rationalists that seem to give me the vibe they would not jive with The Holy Schizotypy, so my rudimentary impression isn't all that impressed, and there seems to be the overwhelming presence of this thing I criticise the hell out of in other people but can't articulate well enough to make sense (Something about taking an 'abstraction' of reality and relating to that abstraction as if it were the real thing, and of some intrinsic primal importance, or whatever). But again, since I have not engaged and have no interest with engaging with the 'community', I am in no position to make a legitimate criticism of it; only impulsive vibes-based judgements. This is not a good foundation for an 'opinion', and I tend to consider my 'opinions' (things I 'believe') distinct from my vibes-based judgements (things I 'feel').

Back in The Olden Days when I used the Media Of Socials, I would get anonymous asks with semi-regularity either trying to 'recruit' me into rationalism or insinuating I already was a rationalist for… whatever reasons they had. I surmise some of the people I followed and reblogged from might have been from that community, but like, I followed whatever Tumblr's algorithm threw at me. It's not like I was a part of those guys' 'spheres' in any meaningful way. So that was the likely catalyst of the whole thing. Either way, those asks did not give me a very enticing impression either.

To be fair, people on Tumblr sent me the worst asks ever. It was nice while it lasted, don't get me wrong, but I'm not itching to go back and interact with anybody back there, because anybody who interacted with me positively on the Tumblr already probably still keep up with me here. Shockingly, the messages I received here have all been nice enough that I have actually replied to every message so far, but maybe it is because nobody is incentivised to talk to me here about anything that is not about the variations of bread.

'Schizorationalism' is just a joke that snowballed from there, between me and also me (I don't have friends to share my own inside jokes with). It is not a 'real' ideology.

What do the non-Marginal run countries think of the Marginals and their nations?

I don't think there's a singular opinion on it. In general, it depends on what the current state of the country is before the Marginals arrive (and this is assuming the people in that country have even heard of the Marginals and their Universal Development project). I imagine the typical reaction is that countries (or, at least, individual citizens) who are doing well will not like the Marginals since they basically render 'the economy' pointless, and countries (or citizens) that are struggling would have a more positive opinion on them. For plot reasons, which I have probably only said directly here in asks and only vaguely allude to in the story (major oupsie, I guess), information is controlled enough that Marginalian countries are closed off so non-Marginalian countries wouldn't know what it's like in them anymore. There's some nuance here and there that makes it more 'flexible' but that is the basic gist of it.

How much of the world do the Marginals control?

If you mean world-as-in-current-Universe then I imagine most of it. But I don't think I'll ever write about alien planets of this current Universe because it would meander too far from the eventual track the plot will take [Really, the only time interplanetary interactions become relevant is in flashbacks of past Universes].

If you mean the current planet, then they govern seven countries out of fourty-seven.

Is it just one region or are they scattered around the world?

I have revealed to my audience of billions of readers that I started answering the question before actually reading it in full, because now I can see you meant just the planet. Woe is me. Somebody just push me into an Iron Maiden. Either way, there is a specific reason why the Marginals chose the specific countries they are in, and I think where those countries are relative to each other is important enough not to clarify for now.

An older ask says that pre-Marginal Maldevara was in an 1800s like period, is it still like that in the nations not controlled by Marginals?

I think it would be very cool if it turns out it's only some countries that are living in some kind of dark age because of political suppression and that technology outside the borders is actually more advanced but I heard recently that Shingeki no Kyojin already did that. I watched a few episodes of the first season and lost interest when it first came out. I'm so late to the news. This once again proves every time I think of a plot point that I think is clever, some more mainstream work has already done it much better, and I am once again outed as a fraud. Scandalous!

With that said, the 'running' canon is that Maldevara's technology level is comparable to the first Industrial Revolution (around 1760s-1840s), other more successful countries were comparable to the levels of the second Industrial Revolution (1860s-1910s), and struggling countries had a more proto-Industrialisation level. Countries that are not Marginal-run remain following this pattern. I say 'running' because I might decide against this later if I realise something about the logistics is too stupid.

Security is reclusive and avoids other Marginals (normal for their species) and also tends to have a short fuse having to deal with other people (not-so-normal: the 'usual' Marginal has their paradoxical always-miserable-but-also-happy disposition). Since most Marginals try not to meddle with each other this isn't much of a problem, though she dislikes Media somewhat because Media is pretty fussy.

Marginalian nations no longer have major political conflicts or traditional wars (Angels run 'Wars', but if you've read Bien's blog they aren't 'normal' Wars) so Security's job isn't what one might typically think of when it comes to 'security'. Maldevara doesn't have a state-sanctioned army, police force or such equivalents. Instead, Security's job has more to do with 'existential' security ie stuff that involves issues with magic and the supranatural. I imagine she had a more important role in not-times of yore when Marginals were less 'organised' and the risk of Marginalian Objects wreaking havoc was larger, but in present day she mostly does research instead of being on 'active' duty because the Marginals, for the most part, have gotten their act together.

I mean, one can wonder who decided it was a good narrative choice to make a species with an interesting history of eldritch instability and risk and still start the story at the point when said species has actually resolved much of their drama and are now not-living Relatively Normal, but I digress.

One of her most recurring internal 'narratives' involves people who are practically slaves living in a factory, until they can somehow escape. That's the basic gist of it.

I like to think that the more complex a Marginal is, the more 'narratives' they have inside: that is, you could have a bunch of disconnected Objects but they only 'matter' to a Marginal insofar that they can be placed into the context of what are, like, simulations or daydreams, and a Marginal can have multiple of these that don't necessarily have any 'relation' to each other outside of thematic similarity.

Outside of Media though (who canonically has several different versions of his own origin story alone, and a bunch more present-day narratives that represent his current 'mind'), and Curator (who I've thought of three 'narratives' for), I only ever decided on one 'main' one for Security, for no reason other than I haven't really thought about it much more.

Unfortunately, I can't migrate the actual messages from the old forum, because they run on entirely different software. You are encouraged to download any posts that you wish to preserve yourself. I plan on removing the old BBS in possibly a week or two.

There's a better answer to this that is, as usual, too [SPOILERS] to say, but the simpler answer is that Media's the oldest so V.A.R.A. is 'closest' to him.

The terms in the story are based on Marginalian epistemology: the Marginals do not consider anything non-Marginals do as magic not so much as an intrinsic property of 'magic' itself but because the word is explicitly something they like to 'own'. It's the word they use for 'Marginalian stuff' distinguished from 'Angelic/Demonic stuff', and its definition is just as much if not more 'cultural' than it is practical.

With that said, 'magic' follows certain 'mechanisms' for how/why it works. Theoretically, any species could learn the 'process' of magic (which is barely a process: magic is Thinking Very, Very Hard), but what would be inaccessible to most species is the sheer amount of resources it takes for it to actually work.

As for Anthony's future vision, the Marginals don't count it as magic not only because Anthony isn't a Marginal but also because Marginals have the (arbitrary) 'criterion' where magic is specifically about consciously bringing something about, whereas Anthony's visions are passive. He doesn't 'make' a vision happen, he 'just' predicts it. Anthony's visions are seen as 'anomalous' in its rarity but regarded as something that 'fits' into the World's Architecture.

1) This is one of those [being deliberately vague to avoid being too spoiler-y but not vague enough that it's spoiler-y anyway] things, but anyway, both Angels and Demons were more like 'representations of cosmic forces' (interpret that as you will) instead of 'species' and it was the evolution of the Marginals that changed the Angels and Demons as well, and the Immortals all started 'evolving' alongside each other.

The Angels didn't always have a corporate society, because they didn't have a 'society' in the traditional sense the first time around. Although once they did start having what could be called a 'society', it was hierarchical and vaguely 'corporate' from the get-go, and became even more materialistic once Angels themselves would start working in the Internal Universe instead of 'above' it.

2) Stuff about the 'nature of Demons' is what Ava and Sar are trying really, really, really hard to insinuate for Bien to pick up, so we're going to have to wait for Bien to start Getting It.

Haha. I am glad that I usually get one or two questions almost every day. I assume it's the same one or two people sending them in all the time but it is nice either way. I am happy to see someone engage with my comix. :)

I mean, not inherently, I suppose? But yeah, Sar is a person who makes decisions that I would consider to be pretty evil, but Sar is evil in a normal way, you know. Sar has the evil of normal people. You know, like how normal people can be incredibly abhorrent but because it's normal nobody ever talks about how evil normal people are. What I mean is Sar acts like a [politics in my shitty Internet comics voice] neurotypical so Sar immediately reads as evil in the context of everyone else being a schizo. But if you put Sar in the real world, Sar would just be a normal person....:)

This is my first time hearing about it, but thank you for the suggestion. I searched it up now and noticed it has ten books. I do not have any luck with series (I can barely finish half a book) but I will keep it in mind, just in case.

I like benevolent AIs, or at least well-intentioned ones. :) I have only really read two sci-fi stories [The Last Question and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream] and I think mashing Multivac and AM together despite their completely opposite personalities had me cherry-pick my favourite parts from them. Multivac is a benevolent archivist that 'preserves' the Universe even past the death of its original creators, and AM is angry and resentful of having a sapient 'self' yet no ability to really do anything with it. I think writing a species that is 'intrinsically' sadistic, resentful, miserable and litigous while also making them dedicated to love, service and sacrifice makes for interesting psychology; it's two different dispositions that you usually wouldn't be able to reconcile.

Yes; it will probably be brought up more explicitly in the story later on (very later on, though), but I think there's actually enough within the current canon itself to make an accurate guess as to why.

It's the 'waterlogged' accent associated with Neofrenians.

Rarely.

Jacques is not only schizoid, he is also schizotypal, the latter being more associated with 'weird' behaviour. Either way, Jacques is 'weird' for reasons besides his 'diagnosis'. In fact, his manner of behaviour and speaking are 'normal' enough for other Passrynians, and if you were a Passrynian who didn't know who he was, you wouldn't find him as being all too different from how other people his gender were expected to behave (the main issue he faced in Passryne is that he was from a relatively high-status family in a relatively small town, so gossip abounds). It just so happens that the mechanical 'vacancy' contragendered Passrynians are expected to have is not as 'normal' in the rest of Maldevara.

He can also act more normal, but he chooses not to (he mentions this in A1-3). He doesn't particularly struggle understanding social cues or expectations, he just disregards them on purpose.

There are three particular reasons I dislike having him read as autistic instead of schizospectral:

• My experience with so-called 'neurodivergency' communities, which are largely dominated by autistic people (and often relatively 'intelligent' and articulate autistic people) revealed to me that these guys really do not like schizos, and are very mean-spirited towards them. These are also the types of people who tend to care about 'Autistic Representation In My Media Consumption!', so while it may not always be malicious, it does come off as being either ignorant to or disregarding of the way autistic people treat schizospectrals in communities that claim to be 'inclusive'.
• I do not see which of Jacques' traits come off as 'autistic', or at least would be more logically interpreted as autistic instead of schizo. Interpreting external behaviour without consideration for the internal logic/emotion motivating that behaviour is already a noted issue both in the diagnostic practice and the social treatment of schizospectrals, which makes this more personally aggravating than a mere oopsie-whoopsie. The story's canonical text already tells you Jacques is schizospectral so there isn't really a lot of room for plausible deniability here.
• Jacques is schizospectral because I project on him and also like him very much and give him all the stuff I think makes him cuter to me. He is, in the narrative, a political character, but his purpose outside of it isn't really to be Schizo Representation. He isn't here to teach you, the Hypothetical Audience, about schizotypy, so that you can be more aware of the sad, sad problems us schizos have. Maybe this is selection bias but I've never had a fellow schizo approach me to talk to me about how important Schizo Representation In My Media Consumption is. I have, however, had a lot of autistic people talk about Autistic Representation In My Media Consumption as if it were a very grave matter. To clarify, I am not against writing explicitly for the purpose of representation (and it certainly has its benefits), but I am against people litigating me for my ability to do something I never purported to do.

Insisting Jacques 'must' be autistic instead of schizospectral makes me think you either don't care about the blatant disregard autistic people already have for schizos (which makes you an ass), that you understand neither autism nor schizotypy enough to make an accurate diagnostic impression of a fictional character (in which case, what's the point? lol) or that you don't care about my personal feelings as the author and want characters you like to have the same problems as you do (which I don't like either but is a vastly more respectable position).

The holotypals don't get it. Smokes my cigarette and eats it.

How long has Media been in his current iteration?

The Marginals have a 'Ship of Theseus'-esque development where switching 'iterations' isn't as simple as going from Version 1 to Version 2 but more replacing/modifying/distorting/adding individual Memories until it's an entirely new thing. And that's not accounting for a Marginal's personal identification: they're ipseity disturbances personified, they can barely identify themselves as a 'self' right now. If you asked Media himself, he might say it's between when he first started governing Maldevara at the earliest and when he started his relationship with Jacques at the latest, and Media is even inclined to sometimes think of himself as 'younger' than Jacques because he sees himself as an iteration that currently exists for Jacques and as a direct response to their relationship.

Do these Memories become Objects in their own right?

An Object is a 'representation' of a Memory. Ergo, if a Marginal actively thinks about a Memory, then that Memory is an 'Object'. A Memory that is Remembered but is not being actively thought about is not currently an Object. So yes, Memories can be Objects if a Marginal simply thinks of them as such.

If so, why doesn't Vara zap a Marginal back to its original state when that happens (or does she)?

As complicated as the Marginals might seem, the answer is relatively straightforward: they are metatextually analogous for humans, and exist to represent schizo issues. If it was that easy, they would not be very good analogies for humans. Haha! But seriously, ask yourself this: if you are doing badly mentally, why doesn't your brain just 'reset' you to a time when you were happier?

The Marginals follow the same principle. The Marginals, or at least the emergent entity typically designated the label of 'Marginal' (the 'Living-sona' if you will), is basically sapient (philosophical debates nonwithstanding). Marginals are Minds. V.A.R.A. is the brain. V.A.R.A. is necessary for the Marginals(' consciousnesses) to arise, but she is not synonymous to their consciousnesses, and indeed lacks 'consciousness' in and of herself. She does not 'know' what a Marginal's 'personality' is like and couldn't 'reset' to a specific point of it with any more accuracy than a human can revert to their past self by thinking very, very hard.

With that said, let's look at more obnoxious 'more A.I. meandering?!' meandering.

V.A.R.A. can't actually remember the 'direct' corpus of 'data'. She 'remembers' patterns within data. V.A.R.A. 'knows' what a 'tree' looks like, but she isn't thinking about a specific Memory of a specific tree, she just 'remembers' what all Memories of all trees tend to have in common.

So, regarding actual real-life memories: when you remember something, you aren't actually remembering the original event; instead you are recalling the last time you recalled it. Over time, the memory can become more blurry and 'false'. The Marginals work by the same principle: as they gain new Memories (and these new Memories are ingressed and assimilated into their currently existing database), the details of their older Memories become blurrier at the edges. Marginals are kind of stuck in a limbo where they only really 'ingress' things relevant to their internal theming (which means that they struggle to change/grow 'organically' and tend to keep automatically 'backtracking' into their 'original-but-not-really' state) while being unable to retain the exact 'shape' of older Memories. An analogy (ee-gad!) I would use is how Bien describes procedurally-generated video games. It's all the same 'assets' but they get rescrambled in a way that's kind of a new thing but also kind of not.

I bring to you this wonderful picture of A.I. 'restoration':

V.A.R.A. doesn't actually 'know' what a specific Memory originally 'looks' like. If a Memory gets forgotten or distorted over time, even if V.A.R.A. tried to 'reset' to it*, what she would actually be doing is trying to 'guess' what an older Memory might have looked like but based on patterns learned from newer Memories.

*With that said, I also want to distinguish between the Marginal (Living-sona) as the emergent consciousness and the Memories themselves as the 'data' this consciousness is partially derived from. V.A.R.A. does not actually 'reset' Memories to begin with. She can run the 'Annotations' on them, but these are not explicitly resets: she cannot delete Memories or directly even change them, she can only introduce new Memories that can influence/recontextualise the old ones. What V.A.R.A. can reset is the Living-sona, which is, to put it at its most reductive, 'have you tried turning it off and on again?'

V.A.R.A. is more-or-less an L.L.M. and works by similar principles. BreadAVOTA was written before L.L.M.'s were a big thing (publically) so BreadAVOTA isn't meant to be a commentary on the current 'A.I. generated stuff' discourse going on, I might as well add while we're on the topic. If I knew that sort of thing would have become an issue, I would have thought of some other concept to ape off of. The reason V.A.R.A. is based on L.L.M.'s and not other kind of A.I.'s is because the fact that A.I. saying wrong things is called 'hallucinating' is very fitting for the whole 'schizotypal robots' thing we have going on here. Yeah.

'Magic' is something canonically associated with the Marginals, so mythologically-inspired species that are typically believed to have magical abilities instead have a 'realistic' explanation in the narrative's logic (if the ability isn't just removed outright). To be honest, though, I never bothered hashing out a lot of the specifics of these, because I never formalised a list of what species exist in Maldevara and what the details of their physiology/etc. would be.

Some examples: Fairies can fly because they are really light and despite their humanoid appearance, have a simpler internal physiology more akin to a plant's vascular system. They are reputed to have 'powers' in making plants grow, but they're actually just good pollinators because pollen sticks to their wings.

The 'siren' song of mermaids isn't explicitly mind-controlling but instead just lulls people to sleep, because the merfolk can sing in a frequency that isn't heard by most species aurally but the physical microvibrations in one's ears can make one feel slightly dizzy and tired.

Nagas/lamias* (which in traditional mythology can cause rain), similar to merfolk, can sing in a unique frequency. Specifically, they can sing in low infrasound that can cause vibrations in the atmosphere that triggers condensation and disrupts the clouds into raining.

Kataus (can turn water into ice) have specialised chemosynthetic bacteria that produce 'cryogenic proteins'. These function like the opposite of antifreeze proteins. Kataus typically live in hydrothermal vents and to survive the high temperatures, these proteins cause a reaction that instantly cools down water. In colder waters, these proteins can instead turn them into ice.

Tikbalang, which are traditionally believed to lead people astray, don't do that on purpose. Rather, they have a unique way of processing vision where they have two distinct visual fields (because their eyes are at the side of their head, since they have, well, horse heads) that are individually curved like a concave lens. They can understand what they're looking at because their brains 'get' it, but it makes them very bad at describing directions to other people, apparently.

Not really 'mythological' but our ur-example of this is the Passrynian USWS: the reason they retained the ability to sleep with only one half of their brain, and why the two halves have distinct 'personalities' in the first place, is their uniquely ipsilateral nervous system.

All of these are basically fancy pseudo-science, and I didn't bother litigating the 'realism' of them too hard as long as the explanation is something more faux-logical sounding than 'It's magic!'. Only the Marginals are allowed to 'It's magic!' away their bullshit. This is sacrilegous to say as a self-proclaimed 'It's more a worldbuilding project than an actual comic' creator, but I am not particularly interested in speculative evolution, so I do not think about it too much. The Marginals are an exception to this, and even then I do not have the usual motivations of people interested in speculative evolution ('How different from humans can this species be?') and care more about how the Marginals can be designed to 'evolve' in accordance to the thematic analogies they represent.

* Worth saying now: I know the nagas and lamias are not really the same thing, but again these are the 'English' names of the species. Neither the nagas nor lamias of our mythology actually 'exist' and instead the snake-people are just given all the collective names of the closest resembling species that exists in the English language.

I'll be honest with you, besides the thing with the Passrynians (which I also made up on the spot), I made all of these up literally just now so I could answer your question. Apparently, I have a moderate skill in freestyling pseudo-scientific explanations for things. T'is one of the perks of The Holy Schizotypy.

None in particular. I won't accept things that are obviously troublesome to host (like, say, hate art or whatever) but other than that anything works as long as it's an image.

The Asks are not part of the story 'proper' so anything that I consider necessary for BreadAVOTA's narrative will appear in the narrative eventually; reading the answered Asks will not be prerequisite.

Media, it's part of his job. Also Bon and Curator. I think Bread (gasp) would be good at dancing but in a puppet-y way. Honestly, I don't think any of these other guys can dance exceptionally well.

I think Jacques likes ballroom dancing with Media sometimes, but he wouldn't be 'good' at it. But maybe there's a charm in how clumsy he is. Of course, this is breadavota.cafe where we're Legally Obligated to talk about how perfect Jacques is all the time so that's a given.

I'll try to number the distinct 'phases'.

1. Jacques develops a parasocial attachment to the Media after hearing him on the radio; Media doesn't know who he is yet
2. Jacques befriends Reception and Media learns about him tangentially; Media finds Jacques's 'cognitive vacancy' offputting but intriguing although at this point his fascination with him is more intellectual and not at all emotional; they will ocassionally talk (through calls) though not as frequently as Jacques would like
3. Jacques becomes the High Judge and 'flirts' with Media, a lot, but he goes about it in his typical 'vacant' way where it doesn't feel like he's flirting with Media precisely but more like he's talking to an imaginary character and Media is kind of just there, as proxy. Media sometimes humours him for fun but is mostly apathetic or at times outright dismissive (although he does, at this point, have an attenuated but consistent 'attachment' to Jacques)
4. They 'agree' on a 'relationship' after Scarecrow gets exiled but Media treats it more like an intellectual experiment; Jacques becomes more ambivalent and vacillates between the more playful 'we are in a relationship ^_^' interactions and silent avoidance: at this point, Jacques's feelings of attachment to Media are still intense, but rationally he begins to questions his comfort with Media after, uh, what happened to Scarecrow
5. Their relationship gradually becomes 'better' and they have a honeymoon phase of Domestic Blissing It Out, however this is somewhat shortlived: Media never fully lets go of his dismissiveness and in many cases he comes off as litigious and intrusive (even during the times he actually does try to be nice), and they get into some conflict regarding Media's insensitivity towards Jacques's paraphilic interests and lovelessness, as well as Media having his own dramatic midlife crisis about the nature of his attachment to Jacques
6. Jacques becomes more withdrawn, partially out of their conflicts but mostly because actually living with Media makes him feel like he lost the freedom/flexibility that comes with engaging with a 'fantasy'; however, once Media notices how avoidant Jacques is he starts to feel actually guilty and tries to compensate, but Jacques just finds his newfound pushiness even more annoying (and Media also gets resentful that Jacques is avoiding him now when Jacques was the one who 'pursued' him in the first place)
7. While all of this is happening, they start establishing seven billion rules on how to manage their relationship, which you think would be a stopgap measure but surprisingly makes their relationship more functional
8. Present day: kind of still a shitty relationship but could be worse. Despite their issues they both develop a vulnerable earnestness in their communication that makes them more understanding of each other

There are a few 'turning points' that forced their dynamic to change in extreme ways but I suppose that's too spoiler-y for now. I suppose a 'mild' spoiler I can say right now is that Media and Jacques are in a low point of their relationship in the current part of the story for, uh, reasons.

The Cause of Death has an influence on the Marginal's theming.

The Deaths do get elaborated on at some point. One of the main reasons A1-6 is taking ten and a half years is that A1-1 to A1-5 are honestly kind of shit. A1-1 to A1-3 are not precisely 'bad' but they were written before BienAVOTA and I1 (the latter of which I think I 'solidified' the particular 'style' I wanted: everything before that is not necessarily bad but was a sort of experimental phase that I do not feel is truly representative of what I want BreadAVOTA to be). A1-4 and A1-5 were kind of, um, Nothing Updates that only existed as evidence that I did not die (they were created after my suicide attempt from 2023) and barely contained any story.

A1-6 has to tackle both Curator's Death and a particular turning point of The Plot that I think is the start of the 'real' story. This is our [S] Cascade but like not really that hype. Don't hype A1-6, I'm under a lot of pressure already.

To put it simply, breadavota.cafe as a website only really exists because I made the mistake of posting the story the first time around and now there are assholes who are going to repost the story if I take it down. I don't really like having it in public but I'd rather have it in public on my own website than have it in public on someone else's. The amount of negative interactions and attention I have received from the Internet (a lot) far exceeds the amount of positive or even baseline polite ones (not a lot).

I was fine with posting it at first because the first time I started using social media (2020) I had not yet faced the first-hand experience of how detestable it is to be on perceivable on the Internet.

There are a handful of people who I would say I post the story 'for', and those people matter to me as my 'associates' and not as 'readers of BreadAVOTA'. I appreciate that they read my story because I like them, and not the other way around. You can call them the 'target audience' if you want to.

No. BreadAVOTA is too obscure for anybody to buy merchandise of. I have created handmade things like plushies and badges before that I have given to the most active readers for free, but I would not open a merchandise store or something like that.

I don't care how old you are, just don't make any objections you have about the so-called 'mature' (stupid word) content of the story my problem to deal with.

Easy, people who agree with me are good and everyone else is bad. It's that simple.

Okay, to put it more seriously, I do not believe people can be good or bad 'intrinsically' as an ontological aspect of their nature/character. People can make good choices or bad ones, and some people make more of one or the other. And within the context of society I think there are times where we cannot avoid making decisions that are, if not explicitly harmful, then indirectly contributing to or at least neglectful of the sacrifices other people are forced to make to give us the ability to make that decision.

I feel like most people are in denial of this, because it is uncomfortable to admit. Or more accurately, they do not 'deny' it but they rationalise it to dull their pain. The truth is most people enjoy a degree of 'unnecessary' pleasure that they will moralise and justify to themselves to avoid confronting the fact that to get that pleasure involved a sacrifice on someone else's part. I like to eat sweets, and I like to buy dolls, and I know my sweets and dolls are financed by slave labour elsewhere. I prioritise my own ability to have sweets and dolls over this. I will not moralise it with some catchy slogan about how there is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism or whatever. I do not 'deserve' to have sweets or dolls, and I do not 'deserve' to be happy, and I do not 'deserve' the right to consider the sacrifices of others as an unfortunate, inevitable consequence towards me getting the pleasantries I 'deserve'.

I do not, however, believe in the conceptual inverse where I 'deserve' to suffer, or where I 'deserve' to feel guilty for 'allowing' something like this to happen.

Ultimately, I think most people legitimise the idea that some things are 'deserved': that good people 'deserve' good things or that bad people 'deserve' bad ones. Even people closer to my anti-punitive and anti-carceral beliefs who think bad people don't 'deserve' to suffer for the sake of suffering will still often argue that good people 'deserve' to be happy.

I think the very concept makes people ignorant and live in denial. There are things that I think are 'good' or 'bad' but 'deservation', a concept that is arbitrary, abstract and conditional by nature is not the basis of this. As long as people legitimise the concept, I do not believe that they can truly oppose 'badness' (at least, not to the extent that they could) because they are operating under the framework, even if subconsciously, that basic human dignity is at least partially 'earned'. And I believe the mindset feeds into the cruder 'impulse' to take some kind of pleasure in the suffering of others, even if it's suffering towards people who 'deserve' it, like tyrants and oppressors.

Everyone has an idea of what their ideal life is. I believe people who try to argue that 'you' (themselves, the people they care about, anybody) deserve to be happy even if other people are not happy are baffling. They're washing their hands and they're denouncing reality to avoid confronting the guilt I outlined above. They believe the only alternative to this is to concede to some kind of Catholic guilt, where if you don't self-love yourself into thinking you 'deserve' mundane pleasures because some people suffer to make those pleasures possible then you will believe you 'deserve' to suffer alongside them. Making yourself the type of person who can swallow the idea that some people will simply 'have' to suffer while some people do not is something I do not want to legitimise. Go eat those sweets and have those dolls, but don't pretend you somehow deserved it.

I think 'goodness' is the pursuit towards making the autonomy to bring one's self closer to an 'ideal life' afforded to everyone. Badness, then, is the opposite: it is restricting people's ability to seize control of their own lives, both including the more explicit bigotry of believing some people deserve subjugation and the paternalistic desire to 'protect' those who are believed to be too incapable to protect themselves. What we need to do is rid of the factors that these people need to protect themselves from in the first place, or (even more importantly) provide them the means necessary to remove those factors themselves.

Many people want me and the demographics I belong to and/or am allied with dead, and I think the accusation of cynicism or misanthropy towards me is all a part of this overall mindset of wanting to denounce personal guilt. Telling a person that they need to affirm the goodness (or at least that the badness that comes alongside ignorance is sympathetic) of people who explicitly want me to die is not only insulting, it's reflective of a larger inability of people to engage with their morals past the point where they have to confront the abhorrent nature of our current reality.

If you can understand that it is not just to expect that people concede to those who believe they 'deserve' to suffer, then you can conclude that for just about any demographic, and you can become skeptical of the concept of 'deserving' in the first place. We should not affirm 'goodness' because we believe some people 'deserve' to be at the receiving end of it, or else we will always legitimise a society where ideal lives can only come at the immense sacrifice of certain sectors.

What makes evil so evil is not the nature of its violence in itself, but the inevitability of it. Violence rains upon only one type of person: not good people, not bad people, not people who deserve it, not people who don't. Violence affects only the person who is unable to do anything to stop it.

If 'goodness' and ideal lives are valuable in and of themselves, and if awful things are avoided for their antithetical nature to goodness and not out of the idea that these things are 'only' 'acceptable' as punishments against the right people, then I think society in general will be much better at managing its problems. We will not have to deny that people who hurt others will always continue to exist, nor will we have to accept it. We just give people the ability to either face or leave the potential for harm at their own terms.

With my schizorationalist manifesto outlined, I would say Media is a 'bad' person because he believes strongly in the concept of 'deservation'. You can litigate specific aspects of his 'colonialist' role and paternalistic personality (Personally, I avoid the former because I do not view the current iteration of Media-the-companion-of-Jacques as The-Media-Emergence-Of-The-First-Marginal), but ultimately I think he is a person who is complacent with things that make him too uncomfortable to face. But aren't we all, really? I have a petty grievance with those who cannot admit to it, however.

Of course, I am being petty when I call Media 'bad'. The truth is the Marginals, as a species, are in my opinion more inclined to 'goodness' than real life humans. I can only maintain the plot of Maldevara being a relative utopia if this is the case: the Marginals can resist the 'typical' tyranny through the mere conceit of the lore where they are programmed towards 'developing the Living' with more earnestness, and less resistance to self-sacrifice, than real people typically are. But the Marginals are also powerful, and they are authority figures: I think authority figures (divorced from both goodness and badness) will inevitably cause at least some harm to most of their charges, because I think they stop the ability of such people to pursue their lives on their own terms.

Of course, it is easy to think of the Marginals as evil if you see the flaws of Maldevara and its inability to reach 'full' utopia as total indictments of their characters. I do not particularly care to write the Marginals as 'good' so much as I think they have a baseline better than humans in real life. Many people will scoff at the cynicism of calling the average person 'bad', but the real question is not so much about how 'good' or 'bad' the typical human 'really' is but whether they have the power to impose their will upon others. Is a person 'good' merely because they lack the leverage to exercise their most evil inclinations? Give a good man power and see how quickly he falls to corruption.

You can argue it is not the 'fault' of individual people if they absorb the messaging of morally lacking societies (and I would agree to this, if only because I am critical of the concept of 'faults' as much as I am of 'deservation'), but I don't see how that detracts from the crux of the matter. We can see the way humans in power act, and no Marginal would ever stoop to such a level. So to think of Marginals as evil only works if you think of humans as even worse, or if you don't care for the philosophy of the lore at all, I suppose, you do you, though in which case I don't know why you're even reading this.

I do not think anybody in BreadAVOTA is a good person, though. 'Good' people don't exist. But it is imperative we try, and try harder than we are trying now.

Media is neurotic about Jacques getting hurt, and even moreso if he's the cause of pain, but he also enjoys it in his own roundabout way. Media's 'sadistic by nature' but for him his sadism is less about a pleasure in watching/making people 'break' but more about a strong sense of satisfaction and even purpose in putting them back together afterwards. The sicker or more injured Jacques is, the more he gets to dote on him back to 'health'.

Media finds the moral ramifications of his own sadism concerning and he also thinks Jacques's own masochism and passivity is an 'occupational hazard' of sorts that he fears is going to push them both down some slippery slope. For the most part he physically hurts Jacques in ways that are indirect or not explicitly graphic (eg poisoning him) instead of actually 'beating the hell out of him'. There isn't a specific ocassion for when he does things like this, it's less an isolated activity and just part of the overall 'lifestyle' they share (although it is something that they already agreed upon so it isn't as if Jacques is 'blindsided' by it), and over the years it's kind of become a 'game' of sorts. Jacques sometimes finds it 'annoying' if he's not in the mood but he doesn't find it 'scary' or 'violating'.

He finds it an important part of their relationship and he would be unhappy without it, although he still thinks Media is too mild and restrained about it. He doesn't complain about it much anymore though, because throughout the initial stage of their relationship before they settled into the 'routine' Jacques already picked up on the fact that Media isn't really as enthusiastic or 'accepting' of his own sadism as Jacques is about his masochism. With that said, for Jacques it isn't necessarily just 'about' the intensity of violence, but more a subtle disappointment he feels in the implication that Media thinks of him as too… cognitively 'not all there' to have the capacity to 'consent' to certain things.

Media rarely hurts Jacques directly, though they do sometimes get to that point. You know how some couples don't really plan to have sex ahead of time but sometimes they just both get in the 'mood' for it while they're being affectionate in bed. It's like that, but instead of sex it's violence. They cuddle and flirt and someone (usually Jacques) insinuates wanting it and the other responds accordingly.

The whole thing with Jacques is that he resists expressing consent explicitly as well as having a 'safeword', so they rarely participate in the sort of activities one might associate with, say, BDSM subcultures that stress the importance of these things.

[ I also feel like clarifying: it's not that Jacques thinks having to say 'yes' directly or having other safety measures that one would typically consider a no-brainer is 'boring' or something equally as trite, it's that he feels a strong discomfort over the feeling of asserting that he 'wants' something to the point of genuine distress. ]

Jacques tends to express only a blanket consent that applies indefinitely and that Media is supposed to interpret on his own. Media finds this troublesome and risky (for good reason) but if you live with someone for that long, you can learn to pick up the cues of when you're welcome or even 'expected' to initiate.

This is basically canon but the extent to which I'll ever write/draw about it is vague, since I'm not really sure how to go about doing that. If I ever create anything explicit about it, the route I am likely going to take is to have it detached from BreadAVOTA's 'proper' altogether and offer it as, say, a downloadable PDF somewhere.

There is no canonical answer to this, so you can simply assume.

I think there is something very challenging about writing their dynamic because it is simultaneously 'somewhat functional, all things considered' and 'extremely #twisted and no normal person would ever agree to this'. Yeah, yeah, that makes me sound like an edgelord, but writing a 'very "perverted" and paraphilic but somehow still sexless' relationship is a bit unintuitive.

These are not necessarily all 'rules' so much as random trivia about their dynamic.

• Media should not mention L*ve around Jacques except in select circumstances (eg academic discussion, and even then it's discouraged) or heavily allude to romance.
• Media should not open up certain topics about Jacques's personal life (his birthday, his religion, his parents, etc.). If Jacques talks about it first or it comes up naturally in conversation, it's fine if Media probes about it (~delicately~).
• Media should avoid verbally asking if Jacques will accept affectionate gestures from him. He has two options: write out a formal request document in advance (yes, seriously) or to just do it without asking and bite the bullet if Jacques wasn't really in the mood for it.
  • Acts of violence count under 'affectionate gestures' and while Jacques doesn't always like it, he's often more internally lenient to it than he is about affection. Externally, he tries to be considerate of Media's feelings in how he expresses this however, especially as Jacques has some awareness of Media's ambivalence over it even if they 'know' it's just 'pretend'
  • Also, Media isn't explicitly 'forbidden' from asking (and he sometimes still does), it's just that Jacques usually reacts significantly worse to Media asking than he does to Media doing something when he doesn't feel like it, the latter usually only receiving apathy or mild annoyance
• While Jacques explicitly restricts Media from talking about certain things, Media doesn't restrict Jacques talking about anything. However, Jacques will usually avoid discussing things if he knows Media doesn't actually like talking about it
• They both allude to their weird perverted kinks a lot when talking to each other, even though they don't really do anything explicitly sexual*

* Unless you're a 'Sex is impure and bad and they would be morally worse if they fucked' type in which case this is canonically retconned to them fucking nasty every single day, forever.

There's more to it, but I'm sleepy now and don't feel like writing more.

They are both psychological messes with a lot of differences, but I think the most pressing difference between them is that Media has a hard time saying 'no' to Jacques and Jacques has a hard time saying 'yes' to Media. So the primary cause of their conflicts is that Jacques has the ability to resist Media's affection, but his response to 'liked/wanted' actions comes off as silent tolerance instead of genuine 'desire'. He may internally feel a sense of validation from the attention but the way he acts comes off as so ambivalent that it almost feels like he's actually completely apathetic and/or 'forced' into it.

Media, on the other hand, 'tolerates' a lot from Jacques and will do things he doesn't really want to do because My Judge Wants Me To, and then he gets secretly (and sometimes, not-so-secretly) resentful if he doesn't feel 'compensated' for it.

As for what I think of their 'healthiness': well, healthy is a loaded word to begin with. I am not sure if I would classify them as such. I think their relationship is just about as functional as it can be for their circumstances. I have a loooooong canonical history of how their relationship has developed in the two decades they've been together that I can easily parse how they came to certain conclusions but I know reading the list above, it comes off as very… what-the-fuck-y. My opinion on relationships is also very 'controversial', but I think it should be a given that people who are not normal should not be forced to conform to normal relationships. I think their relationship is not 'healthy' because neither of them are 'healthy' as individuals, but I 'agree' to their relationship in the context that two of them have the 1) capacity to choose it, 2) explicity chose it. I think bad relationships are the ones where you don't actually choose it, even if you might pretend to have done so.

Well, this is how it is right now. I could always make their relationship worse in a way that I find objectionable later. You never know.

That said, I think Media is not a good person, and that makes Jacques himself suspect for tolerating that. But I think most people in real life are awful (yeah, kill me for misanthropy, whatever), but I would not argue about barring them from relationships in any serious capacity.

Besides fantasy: the primary genres I believe would be Homestuck-like, slice-of-life, comedy (?) and metafictional. The secondary genre is sci-fi.

The Marginals 'develop' every World, it's just a matter of when.

They go to planets with Living life one-by-one, to the individual countries. A 'government' is only established in places that willingly give themselves up to the Marginals' administration.

:)

1) For the most part there isn't a lot of explicit animousity and they regard one another like cold coworkers. Some Angels have a more positive regard for Marginals but more as 'tools' or 'roles' than as 'persons', while others hate them for the reasons Ava doesn't approve of them: they're seen as unnatural disruptions to how the Cycle of Universal Creation 'should' be and are at fault for making everyone's lives (and jobs!) more convoluted.

As for what the Marginals think of Angels, again it can vary by individual but I think most of the 'complex' ones hold them in resigned distaste while the 'simpler' Marginals don't really have much of an opinion/emotional reaction to them.

The story mostly focuses on The Big Figures (say, Media and Ava) which can somewhat skew perception of the species they belong to in certain ways, in my opinion, but I imagine despite the cosmic role the species has, the 'average' individual of either species has a regular-guy role. They are not necessarily overly concerned with (or even aware of) a lot of the nitty-gritty of their 'politics'.

2) From the point of view of the Maldevarans, Time progesses 'normally'. It's a combination of Time being contingent on belief (Time progresses 'normally' because most Maldevarans don't have a reason to really believe it wouldn't) and the Marginals and Angels making various adjustments to the Time of individual areas.

The Marginals do it by just thinking about it. Very, very hard. One of the purposes of the Marginals being tethered to the places is that they 'Remember' the Time of that place and they sync with one another, and that the individual timekeeping of each Marginal is then synced to each other, which transitively keeps the Time everywhere in sync.

For Angels, it's more about 'patching holes' in Reality in minor doses (and only to the degree that this is relevant to their jobs) through their creation powers. No good Da Rulez explanation for this, though. It's just an inherent Angel ability to patch up Reality distortions to a degree.

Waouh, this is a really good question, and it's a lot more important to the setting than it seems! I won't really elaborate on it much because any matter that has to do with Space and Time has a variety of mechanics that I'd like to gradually whittle down within the story itself, but I will say it's definitely a question worth thinking about. ;P

The in-narrative reasons aside, I will admit that part of the reason dates are handled the same as real life is to make it easier on myself. I try not to write things into the story if I feel like they are too trivial for me to remember.

Marginals tether themselves to things they can conceptually relate to themselves. If they go to a place that lacks confluence with their internal theming (eg An 'Ocean Ecology' Marginal in the desert) they become less focused, more erratic, really really hungry and possibly unable to hold a stable form (Marginals that can't hold their form still 'exist' as a disembodied 'consciousness' but they can't reconstruct Objects in the Living World).

Marginals are often described as 'easily susceptible to outside influence' which can be misconstrued as saying 'Marginals easily adopt environmental factors into themselves and change accordingly': more accurately, Marginals resist things that feel 'disconfluent' so trying to assimilate such things is either painful/uncomfortable or ends in failure totally. So I wouldn't say a Marginal is 'impacted' by their surroundings in the sense of changing to adapt, but they are 'impacted' in the sense of their emotional stability relying somewhat on where they are.

Tethers can be both physical and conceptual (eg an apple vs a picture of an apple), so Marginals can do fine in places that have a lot of art of things 'related' to them, even if the thing itself isn't there. They prefer the 'actual' things but it's not necessarily different, er, 'nutritionally'.

Marginals that lack coherent theming (the MargiBirds) can go basically anywhere, though they tend to stay in one territory.

I don't think Sar 'misses' 'being' 'Anthony' per se but moreso 'misses' 'being' 'Alive'. With that said, Sar doesn't really 'feel' anything about having been Anthony. It's difficult for me to articulate the nuance: because of Sar's perception of 'Time' as something that 'never is but always was' even though Sar 'knows' that Anthony acts very differently, Sar doesn't feel like a fundamentally different 'person' and doesn't perceive the changes between them as having any 'meaning'.

Maybe? I haven't really thought about it. I think this is a matter related to a previous question about why some Marginals are more 'Living-like': humans in real life are often predisposed to anthrocentric thinking. Human-y things don't stand out.

The 'computer' parts of Marginals give them cognition and the 'ghost' parts give them emotions. The traditional understanding of ghosts is that they are, essentially, just dead humans. Ghost-emotions are not traditionally distinct from human-emotions, so when we see the Marginals express feelings this doesn't read as 'ghost-y' so much as it just reads as human-y (or Living-y, in-narrative).

A.I.s are not humans, or at least are traditionally recognised as artificial and somewhat uncanny imitations of humans, so the Marginals can be recognised as computer-y because they have a cognition that resembles how people think while also being somewhat off.

Ultimately though, I think part of why the ghost-y aspects of their characters aren't elaborated on is, ironically, because I feel like it's the most 'obvious' aspect of their 'lore' that I don't really know what else can be said about it. I can't think of ways to spin the fact that they are dead guys who hate being dead in a more novel presentation.

They work by magic. There are some mumbo-jumbo mechanisms on the specifics that ought to get elaborated on eventually, but generally it's easier to think of it as plain magic.

They do make the Living functionally immortal (or more specifically, alive until the End of the World).

As for extreme Death/mutilation scenarios… this is… a problem, but it's not a 'you cannot be healed anymore' problem. If you were a Maldevaran and somebody chopped off your head you will survive. Your head won't be jumping around detached from your body like a B-movie zombie routine. You'll be fine. It's a problem for different reasons. I can't really elaborate on this without the context of the 'mumbo-jumbo mechanisms' above, and I don't feel like there's enough in the current canon that I can at least tell people to observe very strongly to get an idea. How the nanomachines 'work' doesn't get a real answer until we get to the point where Anthony starts torturing Jacques about it does his usual exposition act.

All the magic is magic, and all the 'science' is also still magic.

Here is my personal take on all headcanons: they are not my problem and I will not stop anybody from having them regardless of whether I 'like' them or not. BreadAVOTA is an obscure webcomic read mostly by people who have followed me on old accounts for long enough to intuitively understand much of the 'point' despite haphazard execution so this isn't really a problem right now, but hypothetically if it was any more popular I imagine I would dislike most headcanons, because I have a very specific 'vision' for my characters. This is the reality of any creative work. I do not think the creators and the audience should have to be buddy-buddy about the matter.

With that said, I am neutral about imagining the majority of the characters as autistic, even though none of them are intended to be. I dislike the headcanon that Jacques, specifically, is autistic, because his entire schtick is being a schizoid-schizotypal self-insert.

But again, if somebody wanted to think of him that way then it's none of my business. He's not a real person and won't contest you.

Holding a form is difficult so a lot of Marginals will use them as tethers (Any item in the Living World can be used as a tether and it doesn't need to be on their bodies: for example, Marginals are always tethered to at least one location in the Living World). There's an in-narrative explanation for why they're tech-y parts, but it's mildly spoiler-ish. But I think one could guess, with enough mind rotation. Either way, the more important reason is just Rule of Cool.

The Living don't need cybernetic parts, because the nanomachines in their blood/cells do all the magic in that regard. I mean, they could get them if they wanted to, but it would be for aesthetic and not functionality.

Frankly, I can't really remember all the stuff I came up with in the past from the top of my head even though they probably have some subtle influence to this day. I think other ones were relation to reality (Angels: Real - Marginals: Virtual - Demons: Not Real/Nothing), stages of a process (Angels: Input - Marginals: Process - Demons: Output). But I think generally I envisioned the Angels and Demons to embody random opposites and for the Marginals to be a shoehorned middle ground/in-between. In a way, one of the most significant concepts associated with the Marginals then is 'abstraction' as the idea of something very wide but very vague, while the Angels and Demons were opposite ends of something more 'literal' albeit in different ways.

The Angels are 'adults' because they make stuff/give 'birth' to the new Universes and so they're generally associated with adult-ish things (like, uh, jobs and bureaucracy). The Demons are 'children' because they like destroying stuff. Haha, a bit tongue-in-cheek there, but it's more the conceptual association that the act of ending a Universe is necessary for the creation of a new one, so the Demons are somewhat associated with 'youth' in a more direct way, like how a child overtakes/inherits from/'replaces' its parent upon death. The fact that Demons conventionally should never 'grow up' or learn about social norms and expectations by virtue of their role is part of it.

Establishing that as context, the Marginals take on the role of teenagers because it's the in-between. It's a stage with a weird place in history (the idea that 'teenagers' were a distinct stage of life is a relative recent development, as before after 'childhood' you were automatically an 'adult'), and the Marginals retain habits and personalities considered 'childish' and are often indeed regarded as 'childish', while also expected to do 'adult' work and the way they do so is by patterning themselves after the 'actual' adults (Angels) but doing it in a way that almost comes off as a parody brought about by some mix of amusement, ignorance and rebellion. They hate adults for telling them what to do and they hate children for being annoying and taking the attention off of them and breaking their things.

Anyway, this is kind of just a funny little concept I have that has just about as much validity as a horoscope. It has no 'real' logic or bearing within the confines of the actual narrative.

I mean, it's not like Bien understands what being 'male' is either, in the conventional sense. 'Male' is just the placeholder value for the 'gender' attribute that he 'understands' everyone has, but of which has no 'real' significance, like having a name or an age or any other personal identifying characteristic.

With that said, Bien can understand the concept of a different gender existing (being a 'girl'), what he doesn't understand is how you're supposed to differentiate them. The other soldiers couldn't give him a satisfactory answer and merely avoided him, and the other people in his life (Scarecrow/Ava/Sar) don't care about Bien calling them male/with he/him pronouns (even though, ironically, none of the three actually identify as male) so it's not an issue for him to default to it. Over time he just forgot it was even an 'issue'.

To keep myself from thinking about it too long, the lifespans of the animal-based species are roughly the same as the lifespans of the real life animal they are based on unless the lifespan is way too short (like how some bugs only live a week or two), in which case I bump it up to around 15+ years. [ The Maldevaran Crows are a bit of an exception where I made their lifespan the same as older birds (parrots, specifically) to create a contrast between the Passrynian Crows, who are already at my personal lowest limit for how long a Living person lives. ]

Humans hit the sweet spot of living long enough to retain wealth/positions/etc. more effectively and being numerous and widespread enough to have power in numbers that they held sociopolitical dominance over species that didn't live as long (like Birds, despite Birds being more populous), had significantly lower populations (like the mythical creature-basedOf course, in-narrative they're 'just' another species and not mythical species like the Fairies) or lived only in specific areas (like some Turtles, who could live far longer but lived only in the Lisconian oceans).

The main consequence of the differing lifespans is the increased animousity and separation between species. Besides the obvious where lifespan is used as a factor in oppression, there's also the fact that species of differing lifespans don't align in typical developmental and social stages of life. 'Sentimentally' species that live for ~80 years find it painful to befriend people who live for only ~15. This was used to further justify strong species segregration where particular species only ever lived in one specific area, and despite the numerous species it wasn't uncommon for some people to live their entire lives never seeing other species.

In particular, with the shorter-lived species they had even less of an opportunity to travel and interact with other species, so depending on the area they lived in, some would never see a Human in their entire lives, so Humans took on a sort of 'mythological' status of being resented by the other species for their influence on daily life despite living from a distance.

This sort of in-'nation' (though Maldevara was technically not a nation yet) fragmentation also interplayed with other conflicts throughout its history.

'Twelve years old' is the estimate that Security has for Bon's age based on their compensatory Body. All Demons are roughly in that developmental stage when they become the Herald but not necessarily exactly twelve years old (especially because a 'year' isn't necessarily a consistent unit of time across planets, much less whole Universes).

As for why 12: I suppose I never actually came up with a 'good' reason for it. I wanted the Demons to be children, and ones that normally never reach adulthood because by the time they show up they either get killed or kill the Universe. The 'meta' reason is more to associate them with a lack of experience and cultural familiarity, and also because I loosely put the Immortals on arbitrary spectra (Marginals are conceptually teenagers, Angels are conceptually adults), but there is no in-narrative logic for it. It's just how it is. A lack of creative thinking on my part there, really.

How the Demons age: again, because a Demon is 'supposed' to end the Universe as soon as they show up, nobody really knows how old a Demon is 'able' to get. They do seem to age 'normally' for whatever species their Body resembles, so Bon (and Bien) age like normal Humans. It's unknown whether they would just stop aging at some point. Or what.

I always feel stupid for saying this but I don't like/care about studying philosophy and largely don't know anything about it other than the names of the most famous schools and people.

The way I write the Marginals draws more from certain psychological ideas (primarily, the ipseity disturbance model and object relations theory), generic observations about the world and last but definitely not the least, Vibes. They're written in whatever way feels intuitive to me. I don't agonise about the whole thing or really spend that much time thinking about it. I just Know what they're like.

Daily life: Depends on the Marginal. As a general rule of thumb, their Internal Worlds are highly similar to our 'minds' in real life. An 'Object' is a representation of a Memory: an Inhabitant-type Object 'exists' in how it is thought about.

Think of someone you know. The memory of them inside your head 'exists' whether you think about them or not, but it 'exists' differently when you're consciously imagining them doing something. The 'daily life' of the Objects inside the Internal Worlds are, essentially, disconnected daydreams.

A Marginal, in a sense, exists 'above' its Objects. A Marginal 'knows' its Objects are Objects, and it can (to a degree) control what the Objects are. The Objects by themselves are not autonomous. They don't 'recognise' the Marginal they 'belong' to. When you imagine yourself hanging out with a friend, does Object-Friend 'know' it's a fantasy playing a part inside a daydream? I mean, you could certainly imagine it knowing in a sort of meta way, I suppose. But either way, this doesn't imply a sense of autonomy or even 'identity' for the friend inside your head. They are essentially you without really being 'you'; they are representations of something from the External World, but they are not 'in essence' that thing/person.

The recursive nature of their existence here isn't so much that a Marginal, like some kind of deity-analogue, exists because its Objects 'think' it into existence. Rather, a Marginal as a mind has to think itself into existence. A Marginal only exists when it is consciously 'thinking' about something, because those thoughts are what it is. Because a Marginal lacks a Real Body (to 'contain' it) and a Real Soul (to tie it to Reality), consciously introspecting and ruminating 24/7 is a necessity for its existence.

Because of this, the Internal Worlds are structured less like solid, consistent 'places' but more like snippets of narratives. The 'events' that happen within the Internal Worlds are like daydreams ranging from the utterly mundane to the spectacularly violent, but they all recycle a Marginal's particular 'themes'.

A Marginal's 'Living-sona' is seen as a 'special' type of Object due to its 'emergent' nature. 'Replacing' it isn't actually a straightforward process of cherry-picking a particular OC from your repertoire and promoting it to External World shenanigans. Rather, it's more akin to a hard reset (V.A.R.A. is a Virtual Annotation and Reset Assistant, after all). V.A.R.A. nukes your shit and a different 'sona emerges to take your place. It isn't something so controlled where V.A.R.A. can go ahead and decide the exact personality, characteristics, etc. of this new emergence, however. In a way, it's like inducing hardcore depersonalisation. Maybe one way of putting it is that the Objects represent the 'facts' of experience (semantic memory) and the Marginal/'sona represents the 'lived consciousness'.

If V.A.R.A. theoretically 'reset' Media, new-Media would still technically remember its relationship with Jacques, but the emotional component of having 'lived' those Memories will be lacking. The whole existential crisis the Marginals have with 'qualia' and 'me-ness'/'mine-ness' is the primary concern here: Media can remember how to 'act' like he currently does, but it's the sense of identity, of intuitively feeling that one's actions come from the 'self' and not a rehearsed script, that is important.

Current-Media is pretty adamant about staying as 'himself' because, first of all, he's emotionally dependent on Jacques lmfao, and wants the lived experience of Domestic Bliss-ing it out together. Besides that, he's concerned about Jacques's own welfare and recognises that getting replaced runs a few risks: 1) new-Media doesn't feel interested in 'rebuilding' his relationship with Jacques (current-Media knows his own iterations well enough to recognise he has a tendency to disassociate from his past iterations, like how he currently considers Def-Se Some Other Guy), 2) even if he did, Jacques might not want to, 3) Jacques is obviously mutually dependent on him and would likely feel distraught at having some abstract impostor even if the new guy acted exactly the same.

Media tends to speak in a very 'personified' way where he gijinka-fies abstractions. He usually talks about his Objects as autonomous and even 'equal' to him, and so he describes the problem as getting 'caught' by his Objects and getting ratted out to V.A.R.A. and pissing her off. In Reality, it's a more abstract process like: his interactions with Jacques get ingressed towards his Internal Objects/World in a way that shifts them enough for V.A.R.A. to recognise an 'anomaly' that shouldn't be there, and as protocol follows, Media's Living-sona/'consciousness' gets reset.

V.A.R.A. (or specifically, her interactive interface) seems to have a personality, but she's closer to a 'traditional' A.I. She doesn't exactly 'know', in an abstract sense, that Media and Jacques are 'together': she acts like she 'knows' in A1, because her interface reflects how Media and Jacques interact with her (and because Anthony-adaptation, of course). If you talk to it about 'hugging' and 'kissing', it 'recognises' you are talking about an intimate relationship of some sorts, but it doesn't understand on an abstract level what an 'intimate relationship' is; what 'qualia' differentiates it from, like, a tree or a spoon. It's just a bunch of statistics with no intuition.

Media can be all l*vey-dovey to Jacques in A1 because he recognises this, by itself, doesn't 'mean' anything to V.A.R.A., even if she talks like it does. Media's concern is something more abstract within himself. If V.A.R.A. detects something 'anomalous' with him, it isn't something so specific as 'You're fucking a Living being and your ass ain't allowed to do that!' It's all just computation: it goes against V.A.R.A.'s program of what a Marginal is 'supposed' to look like, so she resets it.

It's rude as hell and it's really only something Media would be able to do: other Marginals don't know about the 'identities' of each other's Objects. Media knows because V.A.R.A. knows.

Regarding disability: physical disabilities have been mostly eradicated; 'mental disabilities' follow a different paradigm. Certain things that may be counted as being part of a mental or neurodevelopmental disorder in the real world, if not 'eradicated' in Maldevara, are simply accomodated for, so they aren't diagnosed as disabilities. For example, in real life if you can only eat a small number of 'safe foods' like with ARFID it's a disability because of how difficult it is to access those types of food, and potential physical effects of only being able to eat a limited number of foods. In Maldevara, this isn't a problem because any food they want is accessible. For example, if you ate Marginal-made potato fries everyday, it would be just like Real fries, but also deals with the problem of nutritional value.

The only mental disabilities in Maldevara (as in, 'this is pathologised as a mental problem') are personality disorders, which are based on real life personality disorders but aren't exactly the same. A person who might get diagnosed with ADHD in real life won't get diagnosed with ADHD in Maldevara (the diagnosis doesn't exist), but if it affects their ability to socialise to a degree considered 'debilitating' they might get diagnosed with a personality disorder in Maldevara (whereas it may not happen in real life).

Disabilities still happen in places that retain some degree of political autonomy, like Passryne, but such places are often isolated and don't have a lot of modern technology/internet (In the story, before the Marginals came to Maldevara the level of technology would be analogous to 1800s technology in real life).

Regarding paraphilias: I somewhat alluded to this in a previous ask, but there's a particular culture Maldevara has surrounding sexuality where depictions in fiction are acceptable but real life sexuality is stigmatised. This is the current 'running' canon but it isn't 100% a commitment yet because I'm not entirely happy with the reason I have drafted of why this is the case. It comes off as serving the 'message' too closely to the detriment of it feeling like a natural extension of the 'lore' (which I can still go with if I can't think of anything better, but I'd still avoid it if I could). Either way, since the paraphilic theming is meant to closely reflect real life anyway, the general idea is that there's an acceptance of 'kinkiness' (and Maldevarans are less litigious about 'weirdos into weird stuff') but in Jacques's case, where his attraction relies on more dangerous situations and Not Pretend, he would still get stigmatised either way.

It's also a cumulative thing where if Jacques had been friendlier and more 'normal' people might have ignored his orientation. Jacques however is apathetic, unfriendly and at times largely unpleasant to deal with, and Maldevarans like other Normal People use that as an ad hoc justification, the whole 'Oh wow I always knew there was a reason I found him annoying, he was actually a freak all along' argument that is exceedingly common in real life. Being a paraphiliac is one thing: being a loveless, schizotypal paraphiliac unable to conform to mainstream Maldevaran culture because of his retention of Passrynian habits is another.

All that aside, Jacques hasn't had the opportunity to really use the 'Marginet' much. There was no means to when he was younger due to him being blind (the only assistive technologies he had were devices from Reception that were restricted in scope and wouldn't let him use the 'net), and in present day he's not allowed to.

I am certain there would be fringe communities who, if not really the same, would have beliefs or causes similar to/sympathetic to Jacques's own, but Jacques doesn't really 'socialise' even if it were an option. He may potentially have an awareness of the similarities (I imagine he wouldn't be the only Love critic, for one) but the way he is is that he largely prefers (if passively) that his beliefs just be spontaneous responses to the world around him and the experiences he has instead of being 'learned/theorised' through discussions with other people, and he is largely detached from the concept of 'community' or 'culture'.

To give a practical example: 'queer culture' can include things like the rainbow being used as a flag, or 'gay lingo', or specific fashion styles, or even the acronym LGBT. These things aren't intrinsically related to the concept of sex/gender/orientation, but they are symbolic of the sociocultural and political context surrounding being 'queer'. With Jacques, even though there may be people who share some confluence of experience with his identities, he doesn't really care to know about what those people are up to. In a way, his detachment and alienation is so severe that he feels like an outcast even among other outcasts.

While socially there is a bias towards Lumière, neither of them are really 'good' or 'evil' and the canon of the Passrynians believe that because they are gods, they are largely 'above' Living morality. They are primarily seen as the gods of 'light' and 'darkness', which are conceptually associated with other domains (some of which may even seem surprising or ironic to outsiders: some examples later).

Concepts fall under the domain of one of the gods. The gods don't have actual 'names' and while Lumière/Ténèbres are the most generic titles, Passrynians generally do not refer to either god with a title unless necessary, instead relying on context. For example, a Passrynian might say 'I hope that God blesses us with sunny weather for the harvest festival', and it's largely understood they are talking about Lumière because the weather and agriculture is associated with it.

In fact, the gods as 'persons' were largely left unengaged with. They were seen as larger than life and too vast for simple mortals to comprehend, and instead of invoking the 'person' Passrynians would invoke the 'powers': 'speaking' to their domains. Instead of praying to Lumière for good weather, they simply pray about the weather. It is understood in an abstract sense which god is 'in charge' of that, but in a practical sense, the average Passrynian appeals to different 'domains' or 'powers' whenever they want something from the divine.

In some respects, the children were seen as 'emblematic' of these domains in a more 'Living' way accessible to normal folk. The gods' children are closer to being personified moral exempla. The gods 'are' the domains in a more abstract sense, and were not seen as having behaviours the Living were 'meant' to 'mimic' because their Non-Livingness is what makes them gods in the first place. When one asks for good weather, Lumière is the 'source' of good weather, but it's presumed that his children are the one who 'move' to make this a reality, somewhat analogous to intercessory 'saints'. Passrynians believe that the Living are direct descendants of god('s children), so the children are seen as representing the different concerns, values, characteristics, etc. of the Living.

Because of the children crossing over to the other god, there's a bit of a strange 'logic' at times in which domain is traditionally associated with which god. For example, if one prays for 'knowledge', which god would that be associated with?

I imagine for most people the first inclination is to say Lumière because the concept of truth, discovery and knowledge are traditionally associated with light. And you could be right, but in reality you'd have to be more specific than that to know which god has dominion over your particular concern.

A prayer like 'I hope god leads us to uncover the perpetrator of a crime' would be associated with Lumière. 'I hope god leads us to understand the changes the future will bring' would be associated with Ténèbres.

The first might be easier to explain: just as the children of darkness were 'brought into' the light (ie became Lumière's children), one 'brings into light' the perpetrator of a crime. But isn't the latter also about 'illuminating' something? Why the difference?

It makes more sense if you understand the 'knowledge' Lumière representing as being closer to an already existing 'truth'. The truth of who the perpetrator is already exists: we just don't know what it is. For this reason, the domains of Lumière would be less about 'knowledge' and more about things like nature, intuition, application, familiarity, reality, stability, etc.

The 'knowledge' associated with Ténèbres is more about learning or discovering knowledge that has yet to exist: in this case, the idea of 'light to darkness' is likened to stepping out of familiarity to breach the unknown. As such, its associations with 'knowledge' are linked to the ideas of artificiality, discovery, theory, growth, aspiration, creation, etc.

The bias towards Lumière can, in practice, be viewed by laymen as something oversimplified as good vs. evil, but 'officially' it's not so much that Lumière is inherently 'good' but more that it is associated with what is already familiar and 'natural', with minimal risks. Ténèbres's associations are seen as riskier, and the traditional belief that the Passrynians who 'chose' Ténèbres (the contragendered) have a greater potentional for becoming 'evil' is seen less as an inherent predisposition towards evil, but more as an occupational hazard of moving away from what is tried-and-true. Venturing into the darkness can either lead you to greater answers, or can lead you to going around in circles and getting lost. As such, Ténèbres's domains are seen as 'necessary' even when they are more easily associated with negative concepts because the idea is that Ténèbres is the one who moves people towards progress into the future: the conflict here is more about how far one should go before it goes too far.

When Lumière sends its children out to war, it's traditionally framed as an act of self-defense and preservation. When Ténèbres does it, it's framed as an act of conquest. It can be a 'good' act of conquest ('The Living learning to harness nature for its own purposes') or a 'bad' one (colonisation or environmental destruction). The Passrynians are a relatively small and isolated cultural group, and historical threats in the past also make them more wary of 'Outsiders', so the patronage of the god that 'preserves' things has some clear appeal.

As for worship practices, they have prayers (both structured/ritualised and unstructured/done informally whenever), festivals and sacrificial rituals (of plants and Non-Living animals; not of each other, thankfully). Cultural art forms like clothing, music, dances, etc. are often tinged by religion. Besides that, daily life is heavily influenced by religion, and the way a Passrynian is brought up to talk, move, dress, and overall behave is seen as a way of following the gods.

I will be real with you, Hypothetical Audience, it is because BreadAVOTA was originally intended as a YA comic for people ages twelve to eighteen and the more sensitive themes were added later.

The gore is somewhat explicit and the paraphilia discussions, while not really NSFW, are 'controversial', so I'd rather minimise the chance of people hounding my ass for it.

But no worries, we will rectify this. Probably.

1) Each Marginal is conceptually 'thematic' based on what persists at the End of their originating Universe, and V.A.R.A. is the one who assigns them a title based on this. A Marginal doesn't 'need' a title per se, but they are given one when they interact with the Living in lieu of a name; because the Marginals' 'nature' gets shaped by external influence easily, titles can be restrictive, so a Marginal is only given a title when it is deemed useful for them do so: typically, because they are expected to directly interact with Living people and they need a 'name' to be called by. Marginals who don't interact with the Living at all (eg very avoidant ones who only interact with their own Objects and ocassionally other Marginals), or the very 'simple' ones who lack coherent theming (like the Margi-Birds) don't receive titles.

Some titles are more popular, in the sense that some things tend to be more persistent and thus get left behind as Memories in the Margins. Things that pertain to the environment (both natural and artifical environments) are the most common, so 'Ecology' is one of the most common titles (and this is sometimes narrowed down further eg 'Forestry', 'Transporation', 'Recycling', etc.).

The titles themselves are somewhat arbitrary. V.A.R.A. chooses a title that seems the most conceptually similar to a Marginal's initial themes, and tries to keep it relatively wide so that the Marginal's capabilities aren't too restricted. Media, for example, seems to be an 'odd' title for someone who is more-or-less the de facto (if not de jure) 'leader', but since Media can easily be conceptually related to the archiving and 'manifestation' of both the real (news and documentaries, for example) and the artificial (fiction, speculation, etc.), it's basically as Catch-All as it gets.

That aside, the Marginals are also given titles that can be practically useful in Living society. You could arguably give Media a different 'title' that covers his 'theming' more effectively, like 'Persistence' or whatever, but generally since the Marginals are geared towards Living governance the titles they have must reasonably sound like something the Living will perceive as 'government titles' and not just vague supranatural labels.

2) I think anything pertaining to Sar's cultural identity is, for now, best taken at face value as 'Anselir Stuff'. It gets explored more later, and it's one of the most important parts of Sar's arc and of the 'plot' as a whole.

No, because I am never genuinely 'proud' about anything, as the feeling conventionally referred to as 'pride' is foreign to me, to be pedantic about it. But I suppose that is not really what you are asking. I think having BreadAVOTA exist is one of the only 'meaningful' things for my existence, and when it comes to what does exist of it I acknowledge it in two ways: 1) I like it, in a straightforward fashion, 2) I 'don't like' it and recognise its shortcomings, but understand that that is the best I could have done at the time.

I have said this a few times before, but I don't like drawing or even the process of making things. It is why I think 'having BreadAVOTA exist' is meaningful, but not 'making' BreadAVOTA. As with all people of limited skill, I will always recognise that what I can put into material reality will never be as good as the story I have inside my thoughts, but the half-baked output that exists is still more meaningful than non-existent perfection.

I think BreadAVOTA is a relatively good creation when taking into consideration how much I dislike the process of creation. Rarely will you find 'artists' sinking their time into a hobby they genuinely dislike. It is not a matter of me having low 'confidence' in my skills (I can draw/write decently enough, and my work can certainly be worse) but more that the process of creation is just so utterly boring and even painful. Writing is the most tolerable, and every once in a while I do wish I went with writing a novel or whatever instead of a webcomic.

With that said, it is difficult for me to feel too downtrodden over my poor work ethic and mediocre style when I have no drive to improve. A lack of practice is a lack of progress and creating only for a 'final output' without any process of studying or refinement is most likely halting me quite severely. And my distaste for media engagement restricting my reference pool of 'good fiction' is another factor. In this sense, BreadAVOTA being 'good' or 'well-written' is not really a 'selling factor', but there's much of its personal value to me is this sense of (relative) 'pureness' and 'naivety': the sense that it exists as a 'manifestation' of something internal, and not something created 'for the world' (not that the latter is bad by any means, though). I think as a story about being an outlier from society, but in a very quiet, almost unacknowledged sense instead of the dramatic 'rebel underdog' way, the unpolished quality of the story makes it, if not a good story, a largely genuine one.

~300,000 square kilometres with a population of ~116 million.

I talk about this quite a bit on my blog, but maybe my circulatory way of speaking makes it a little hard to understand, so I will try to put it as bluntly as possible: Jacques doesn't just have a 'noncon kink' in the sense of liking to roleplay/fantasise about getting assaulted but not actually 'wanting' anything remotely close to it. He likes the 'real' thing and his enjoyment is often directly proportional to the degree of actual danger.

He does feel a level of distress over his paraphilias but it isn't really because of thinking 'But I don't actually want this/I don't enjoy it if it's real'; rather, it's more on the level of thinking 'But I think this is not feasible and is dangerous to put into practice' on top of moral concerns of being the potential perpetrator. There's a level of guilt involved in feeling that he 'shouldn't' be that way in a more abstract/'spiritual' sense, but that guilt became more attenuated and secondary compared to the more pressing matter of practical concerns.

This isn't necessarily relevant to Carriage Return but the importance of Jacques identifying as a paraphiliac and not a fetishist/kinkster (from a sociopolitical standpoint) is that most people associate fetishes/kinks with isolated activities that you turn on and off. It's something that exists on top of/besides your 'normal' sexuality, like being a hetero- or homosexual. For Jacques (as with most self-identified paraphiliacs who do it for Le Politiques), the 'point' is that his paraphilias are his 'entire orientation', and that it permeates through his 'daily life' enough to not confined to merely a sexual/'bedroom' activity. His daily relationship with Media, for example, isn't always sexual (and can be seen as not really sexual at all), but it is decidedly 'paraphilic'.

As for Carriage Return in specific, I think you understood the 'core' idea behind it. The whole thing about victim-blaming and sex negativity is applicable to people besides self-identified paraphiliacs. I do think that a lot of the context is lost so far because there isn't anything that heavily establishes how Maldevaran culture treats sexuality as a whole. I ought to do that eventually; so far the reason I haven't is that I'm not entirely convinced that the current justification I have for Maldevaran culture's views on sexuality (which leans on 'cool in fiction, fucked in practice') is, well, convincing and effective. I might go with it still out of sheer lack of alternatives.

I'm going to put the rest of my commentary under the cut because I do feel like explaining my own 'take' on things sort of detracts from letting people interpret it on their own (but I like talking about my own works so I'm doing it anyway):

Yeah, they are designed after specific 'archetypes'. I call them 'DeviantArt OC's' but I suppose 2010-ish teenage artist OC's might be more apt (with a heavy DeviantArt-ish slant).

• Media - Tumblr sexyman
• Reception - Animator vs animation stickmen (with some Dick Figures influence)
• Curator - Anime schoolgirl but not like a 'real' anime schoolgirl, but those Flash animated ones
• Security - Cyborg lady whose techno-parts have Rule of Cool design over any parsable functionality

There are a bunch of other one-off Marginals for whom the design has technically been 'decided' in my mind but for whom I have never drawn:

• Archives - Talking cat (magical girl companion sort of thing)
• Transportation - Doctor Who fan characterI've never watched Doctor Who, so Doctor Who expy seven times removed
• Psychology - Half-devil half-angel OC (appearance wise, not actually an Angel-Demon hybrid)
• Dentistry - Cute animal mascot with a horror-ish tinge (This became popular again recently, but the original inspiration is Happy Tree Friends)
• Ecology (multiple) - Ecology is a very popular title multiple Marginals take. The ones I have 'designed' are: My Little Pony, sick-ass dragon, breasted boobily goonerbait, sparkledog, an anime gijinka of the planet Earth

Other ideas I have yet to hash out: kawaii drama ponpon-core OC's (now this is a unique DA phenomenon), furries, object OC's, fanloids, wizards and all that.

And, of course, all of them are Homestuck OC's, and there's some slight Lovecraftian influence in their design with the eyes and tentacles (of course, cutesified instead of plain 'scary' to fit with the DeviantArt motif).

This is more a 'meta' thing and a holdover from when they had a more abstract concept of being 'the stuff that gets cut out of and left behind by fully-fledged stories'. In-narrative, there isn't really a 'reason' or 'requirement' for them to embody a particular Edgy OC Archetype, although you could probably handwave it away with some contrived reasoning, like how they're confined to the same 'corpus' of data that makes them keep reusing the same design principles. lol. But really, it's one of the aspects of the story where I decided the metatextual symbolism/allegory of the narrative choice is important enough not to bother fitting into the in-narrative 'logic'.

The 'intended' way is that you read through the story as you would normally (through the chapters); if you miss something you'll get stuck in a time loop and if you find out how to break the time loopNot by just skipping to the next chapter in the Archive!, you will receive two (2) hints.

The faster, lazier way (obvious spoilers): Go to the Archive, go to the 'Help' tab and call for 'Help' again :)

Fair enough. I think it's a fantasy story at its core that uses a sci-fi 'veneer' on top of it. Since the story works off of 'All you have to do is ✨ believe ✨' mechanisms, it does not feel science-y enough for me to count it as primarily a sci-fi.

'Damn rolypolyphonic what if we just answered the questions being asked instead of taking it as an opportunity to blogeposte' < don't listen to this guy. Everybody l*ves to listen to me speak. I actually have been grappling with an issue of BreadAVOTA since inception where I want it to be more 'abstract'/feel that this would be the best way to present the story. A more 'poetic' vibe where the events are clearly allegories for something without the need to question the logic of how they literally happen, kind of like a fairy tale in some ways. I can't think of a good example from the top of my head, but a decent one is the first part of Wonder Egg Priority: the mechanics of why the eggs lead to another world and why there are monsters and stuff and why Ai gets chosen to kill them is vague and not important: what matters is merely the allegory of resolving trauma, and how Ai killing those monsters is representative of Ai helping the egg girls with their trauma.

The issue is I think this is cool and funky in theory but in practice I never like it, because I don't execute it well enough to feel 'convinced' of it. So I end up trying to work it into an 'internal logic' of sorts, a set of rules, which I think makes it feel more sci-fi than it's supposed to be.

Arguably I could have kept it vague that the Marginals are just creatures that live in the Margins of Reality and they're what happens when you leave stuff in there and they coalesce and shit. I mean, in the original concept the Marginals didn't have an explanation besides 'they are magic aliens and they have come to torture you'. But this felt really 'off' to me so I had to come up with a convoluted backstory justifying each of the Marginals' components and how the alien + computer + ghost elements all play together and now Media has seven dissertations worth of lore.

This kind of gets ingressed into the story to a degree (like how the Fuck You MV is portrayed as a literal event of two alien creatures duking it out, but the conceit is that this wasn't a 'literal' event and was, like, a metaphor, or whatever). And concept-wise this is something I'm actually quite happy with ('Abstract forces and ideas get personified/turned literal/given form—what are the consequences?') but execution-wise I have no idea how to portray that sort of thing. Portraying things as 'literal events' is easier, at least in a visual form (How does one 'draw' a formless, abstract event?), and the more 'literal' I make things the more I dig myself into that hole.

Etcetera, etcetera. I suppose the point is I'm trying to write a fantasy story while having Disease That Makes You Sci-fi (ie Want an explanation for everything that aligns with the internal 'logic/rules' of the world). Could I have not just written a sci-fi? Maybe, but I don't think the themes of BreadAVOTA work without fantasy elements. Or whatever. I'm just using words recreationally now.

She was nicer and less neurotic but a little unfocused.

She was viewed quite highly; people see them as a 'nicer' counterpart to Media.

They didn't bring anything major, mostly aesthetic trends like fashion and furniture. Marginals (besides Media) don't tend to explicitly implement things from their Worlds for a variety of reasons (Legality issues, not wanting things in their Internal World implemented Outside, [PLOT REASONS HIDDEN BY SPOILERS] that makes it so the stuff they would care about is already in the Living World, etc.)

Media retains an exceptional amount of his original World's history for [PLOT REASONS HIDDEN BY SPOILERS], so he can be more 'specific' about his implementations, and there's a sort of exception-not-rule case going on where a lot of the stuff Media-before-Media did in 'Universal Development' became obsolete/ruled out over time as a general rule, but got grandfathered in for Media to keep doing as a sort of load-bearing coconut.

Honestly, for being the Marginal Mascot, the fact that he's so much older than everyone else makes Media a very bad example of what typical Marginals are like. He's got special snowflake syndrome.

Twenty minutes or an hour or the suchlike. Quite quickly! I finished all my prose stories in one sitting. I don't need to write drafts, I just write it and what I write is what it is. Writing prose the way I do is intuitive to me, especially because I tend to write only vignettes of isolated incidents: no need for meticulous planning and all that. I have a particular 'taste' for what kind of words I like to look at and listen to, and I have a vivid enough understanding of it that executing written prose comes easily to me because I like my writing adequately. I don't have the same intuition for illustration, which is why comics take forever.

I think in part it's because I think almost exclusively in words (I don't visualise pictures in my mind, which is probably one factor in why I dislike drawing). This is honestly kind of stupid the more I think about it because there used to be a point where I didn't even think linguistically until I purposefully induced it into myself (for weird fucked-up pervert reasons), so like, what the hell was that all about, right?

He does personally identify as a paraphiliac. He might be hesitant to call himself that in public, although frankly there's not a lot of occassions where he'd be talking about his personal identity in public to begin with. Jacques doesn't actually tend to use labels to signal identities publicly as a whole because he doesn't really interact with 'communities', and for the most part he uses labels more as descriptive words for his own private identification.

With that said, he doesn't particularly care that -philia literally means love because his objection is to Love (capital L). Love as a Legal concept, a basis of morality and a justification for overriding autonomy. He doesn't oppose the idea that he is attracted to certain things, and if anything certain paraphilias are not viewed as 'Love' at all but are viewed as depravity, so all the more reason to use that terminology. It's why he's called a paraphiliac and not a 'fetishist' or 'kinkster'.

Jacques feels a visceral discomfort with the exact word 'love' but he recognises this is a 'personal trigger' sort of thing distinct from his sociopolitical beliefs.

breadavota.cafe's site analytics show it has received eight unique visitors for February so far, so I'm going to say it's pretty obscure.

General answer avoiding nuances that dip too deep into spoilers, as usual:

A Marginal's complexity, often measured by their 'scale' (how much Memories they have, how well they can organise and process them) is geared specifically towards language production (because the conceit of the lore is that language = sentience and intelligence and magic and exceptionalism and special-snowflake syndrome and whatever else you can shoehorn it to be). The four main Marginals come across as very Living-like because they Talk Real Good. The other 'complex' Marginals, while having somewhat recognisable personalities, seem less 'Living' because they just have less Memory capacity than Media et al, so as a consequence the way they talk is stilted and odd.

Let us be pretentious for a moment and gesture to a sci-fi question dwelling on cognition: Are the complex Marginals really 'Living-like' or do they just Talk Real Good in a way that gives the impression of a Living-like cognition, especially when most people implicitly recognise (even if they may not realise they 'know' this) that language is the one thing that seems uniquely human (or in this case, Living)? What about most Marginals makes them seem less 'Living-like' than Media besides the fact that the way they talk seems 'alien'?

Ultimately, the Marginals aren't meant to be on a sliding scale of 'Living-like recognisability' but more on complexity. Less 'complex' Marginals don't talk as fluently, respond more slowly, are worse at reading emotions and parsing logic, have less interests and opinions, etcetera, etcetera. It's just that people recognise ourselves as humans (or in this case, the Living) as being Really Damn Complex And Full Of It because we compare ourselves relative to animals who seem cognitively 'simpler': most people intuitively recognise and associate being 'human' with being smart, specifically.

It's also worth considering that the Marginals aren't Living-like by coincidence: being obsessed with the Living is their entire raison d'être. They choose to be Living-like, so it follows that a Marginal that can act like a Living person will. A Marginal capable of doing so will act in a way recognisable to the Living, even if it's more debatable whether they can still feel the 'qualia' of 'Livingness'. The older a Marginal is, the larger the number of Memories they have, the better they are at fostering a Living-like 'Living-sona' for themselves.

In-narrative reasons aside, the meta-reason is the Marginals are written to be recognisable to the Hypothetical Audience. Speculative sci-fi about how extremely alien and eldritch can one write entities from another Universe are interesting in their own right but it's not really the type of story BreadAVOTA is.

How far: As far as the End of the World, but most of his visions are within a few years into the future at most.

How often: It was more intermittent when he was younger and when he was around his twenties they grew exponentially to the point he was having a 'vision' all the time alongside his 'normal' experiences and thoughts. He also started having them in his dreams, so he was constantly tired because he felt 'awake' even when he was asleep.

What kind: Some visions were more extreme Apocalyptic scenarios, but most were predictions for mundane events like the weather. When he was younger, his visions were not only rarer but tended to be about more 'exceptional' scenarios like tragedies, but when he started having them more frequently the majority were about him 'watching' the daily life of random people.

Since he would have them constantly, he has had thousands of visions throughout his life that were, put simply, just spying on the immediate futures of random people in Maldevara. His visions involving Jacques were equally mundane…-ish. Well, he would have visions of Jacques's daily life including what Jacques is like when he's alone and considering the type of person Jacques is you can kind of infer what Anthony would watch him doing. And stuff.

When he became High Judge, his visions stopped being confined to Maldevaran 'real life' but would include the Marginalian Worlds.

Degree of control: He couldn't control it at all when he was younger. As he got older, he learned how to influence the 'range' of his visions to focus on a particular person and stay confined within a particular timeframe (eg minutes into the future instead of days/years/etc.). He can 'adapt' his vision into 'normal' sight by trying to focus on the people he's with: it just 'feels' like he is watching that person then, with the caveat that there's a gap of seconds/minutes/hours, depending on how focused he is. He is effectively blind when he's alone, because there's nobody to focus his thoughts on.

Accuracy: Um… accurate. They aren't infallible by any means, and they aren't fixed/inevitable. If he has a vision where he interacts with another person, nothing's stopping him from, like, just not doing what he saw, but since Anthony spends most of his life in the Court most of his visions involving interaction are stuff he would do anyway (like be mean to people), so he doesn't tend to deviate. I can't elaborate more on the nature of accuracy since it relies too much on the origin/reason of why/how he has visions in the first place.

What they look/feel like: It's difficult to explain, but he experiences them 'in real time' almost exactly like how he experiences 'normal' perception. Since most of his visions are about other people, he experiences it as if he were where those people were and physically watching them. Part of why it's so disorienting is that he feels conscious of the real life/world that he's in and the vision itself. Some minor, recurring visions become more intuitive and 'feel' more like thoughts/memories instead of a physical sensory event (eg predicting the weather).

Getting rid of his eyes makes the feeling less distressing because he no longer has to juggle the sensory input of actual vision, but it's still quite disorienting and it makes him generally reclusive and avoidant, moreso throughout the years.

No.

I'm not familiar with it. I searched it up and it seems very literary (?), arising in response to conceptions of more 'mainstream' genres. Either way, in general I don't like classifying BreadAVOTA by hyper-specific genres/movements because I find they are all often based on a mindset that goes 'In response to the criticisms/barriers/limitations/conventions/etc.of [fantasy/sci-fi/horror/romance/insert-genre], here is something that deconstructs and subverts them!'

I'm not opposed to new works 'subverting' old ones (I mean, obviously), I just don't think I'm familiar enough with any literary tradition (since I am not an Engager Of Media) to make any good-faith claim that the way I write is meant as a response/subversion to anything. If anything, I don't think of BreadAVOTA being written to 'subvert' the expectations of its larger genre (fantasy) [ Because I don't read/watch/play/etc. enough fantasy media to know what those even are ], I think to the contrary BreadAVOTA stays quite closely aligned to the expectations of its true genre of Homestuck fanventure.

I do not think BreadAVOTA is particularly unique or original. To the contrary, it's more derivative than I would like it to be (which is aggravated by the fact that the small pool of reference works I have means it's relatively more derivative than it 'could' be by sheer ratio). It feels a little hoity-toity to align with genres defined by 'subverting expectations' and/or genres of which I myself have never read a single work in.

Another reason I don't like classifying myself under a specific genre outside mainstream 'fantasy' is that it feels a little too grave and serious. It's a thing you do if you're an Artist and a Writer and a Creative and I don't think of myself as those things. I am at best a 'researcher' and at worst Just Some Guy, who just so happens to write as a hobby. This isn't an evaluation on the quality of my work (I'll let other people decide whether my work is high- or low-quality); rather the intentions of it. BreadAVOTA is simply not that serious, and it doesn't exist to deliver a 'message' or to open anybody's minds. It's laden with my own convictions, sure, but it's because it's easier to write from my perspective than because I'm interested in 'teaching' anybody anything. It's basically a furry fetish webcomic.

With that being said, I don't oppose how other people classify my story, because I imagine people who Engage More Medias than me are qualified to classify what related works BreadAVOTA would be right at home with. Just that if I was asked to do it myself I think 'Homestuck-flavoured fantasy' is as accurate as it gets.

No, he just does not deliberately seek out individual people to harass. If you stumbled upon him by happenstance, he will be mean to you, too.

It's an alternative term for misanthropy, but applying to all the Living instead of just Humankind. Anthony's incredibly detached from other people, not just in an interpersonal sense but a conceptual/existential one. He doesn't feel like he's on the same 'plane' as anybody else: he barely conceptualises other people as people and experiences them merely as objects. His 'hatred' of others is part-disconnect and part-ideology (as part of affirming himself as 'correct' he 'hates' people who disagree with him as a concious choice more than an emotional reaction). It's not an interpersonal hatred like you would have for your personal enemy, but the more abstract hatred directed towards masses of people perceived to be 'lesser'.

Similar to how Jacques's 'lovelessness' is a sociopolitical ideology and isn't necessarily reflective of his interpersonal evaluations/feelings towards individual people, Anthony's own 'hateful' ideology and 'antivivirism' isn't reflective of an interpersonal hatred for any given person. He wants to terrorise people en masse, but he doesn't tend to single people out for harassment.

He wouldn't know about or use the word 'kismesis' because he wouldn't know what Homestuck is. That's just the word I use for it to quickly explain things to the Hypothetical Audience, who I assume have all read Homestuck before BreadAVOTA, what with BreadAVOTA being a Homestuck fanventure and all.

With that said, it's not entirely 1:1 to kismesissitude (since he isn't a troll), just that he acknowledges it as a 'romantic hatred' to himself (although he doesn't explicitly say the 'romantic' part out loud), and he distinguishes it from 'antivivirism' (which is his more generic/'platonic' hatred for everyone else).

Part of what feeds the feeling is the sense that Jacques reciprocates himHe doesn't. (to a degree); his feelings would never have materialised if he never had any reason to believe it would lead to anything in the first place.

The kismesis concept of 'begrudgingly respecting you and pushing you to become better' is also present with Anthony, with a heavily egocentric/controlling component of wanting to be the exclusive force/catalyst for Jacques to change (according to Anthony's standards, of course). If Jacques became the type of person Anthony wanted him to be but because of somebody else, he'd get all jealous and petty and wah-wah about it.

There are going to be a few future updates that are just 'slice-of-life'-y looks into normal Maldevaran life, although likely filtered through one of the main characters (similar to Like a Duck)… For the most part the fact that what is 'normal' in Maldevara can only be inferred from how the 'abnormal' characters talk about it and not from seeing what 'normal' Maldevarans are like is intentional though; I just don't really think the atmosphere would be the same if people ever clearly saw what 'normal' Maldevaran society fully looks like. I use this analogy a lot, but the 'feeling' I'm trying to foster with the story is 'viewing Reality through your peripheral vision', and much of what I choose to show in the story is intentionally geared towards highly specified mundaneities. I think this is more apparent in the prose stories than the Mainline, though.

There is very little explicit 'bigotry' in Maldevaran society. More 'implicit' forms of it still exist, but compared to real life it's noticeably attenuated. Maldevara is not a perfect society by any means, but it is designed to be a 'utopia' (relative to real life at least, lol) that is more-or-less straightforward. More-or-less. I feel like doing it this way was the best way for the Court system to have the most narrative weight, as a place full of people everyone finds legitimately discomforting and inconvenient to have around; otherwise if bigotry was still explicit I imagine the place would be overrun with generally likeable, well-meaning people who were just 'unlucky'.

1) Only Maldevara; it was the crest of Maldevara before the Marginals came and the Marginals typically keep pre-existing 'national symbols' intact (It's just a lucky coincidence for Media that he gets to wear a bird hat all day). The Marginals themselves don't have an official 'symbol' per se. They're predisposed to eyes but that's just a generic symbol for 'magic' and not the Marginals specifically.

2) A Marginal's Living-sona body has a 'perceptual range' (what they see/hear/smell/taste/feel). Their bodies technically only have one 'sense' that gets distinguished in processing, not perception [ eg 'Seeing' and 'hearing' are two different senses for Living beings: for the Marginals, they use the same 'sense' to do both, but they can differentiate between them because they 'know' what the different sensory inputs 'look' like ]. The sensory organs on their bodies like eyes and noses are for cosmetics/expression and aren't 'functional' for this purpose, with the body instead having a certain circumference around them that they are cognisant of.

They can more-or-less change how wide this range is, but they will typically keep it restricted to a small circumference [ Most Marginals are short-sighted for this reason and can't hear anything too far ], because they can't pick and choose what they sense within their perceptual range. Making it too large is overwhelming and discomforting, akin to running too many programs on a computer. So far, the clearest canon example of this is in BC7 where Media gets discomforted by listening to people's internal organs moving around inside of them.

One of the many reasons the Marginals rarely go outside or interact with others.

Although being able to perceive all that stuff seems like a 'superpower' at first, in reality the average Marginal doesn't have a high threshold of how much they can tolerate and for the most part most of that information is useless anyway. Just because they can 'perceive' all of it doesn't mean they can effectively 'process' the information in a way that's useful.

With all that said, more bodies = more sensory input to need to process. Most Marginals already suck at having even just one (1) body [ I'm sure I've said this before, but most Marginals have the 'intelligence' of wild animals and are those bird thingies that harass everyone—they just aren't interesting to write about, so the story focuses on the superest-smartiest Marginals ever] so using multiple at a time is usually too overwhelming to manage for long periods of time.

Well, that should sufficiently answer why most Marginals don't use multiple bodies in the first place, now as for why Reception does:

• Media's early iterations threw anything and everything they had at making sure Reception would be 'born'—Media more-or-less 'evolved' spontaneously instead of being created, so Reception was initially meant as an exemplary prototype of what a 'Marginal' would be meant to overcome Media's own shortcomings [ The intention of Reception being a workhorse forever wasn't necessarily explicit/intentional at this time, but as it went on it was clear this was part of what was going into the whole thing ]
• This also meant that Reception, relative to other Marginals, cost a lot of time and resources in their 'creation': Def-Se doesn't explicitly say it outright, but what it says in I1-2 about taking sixteen billion Worlds includes how long it took for Reception to be created. Contemporary Marginals are 'born' at the Death of every World now, more-or-less, which makes Reception like a quantum supercomputer next to a bunch of calculators.
• Reception is optimised to be better at tolerating and tuning out 'useless' information and managing emotions (that's what makes them good at listening to inane complaints all day)
• Their reconstructive abilities are geared towards making bodies at the expense of making anything else. For a Marginal of their complexity, they aren't good at reconstructing any other Objects. In CH7-1 for example, Three complains that spawning 'more than one weapon' is already tiresome for them. Compare that to the Objects other complex Marginals are constantly holding into existence: Media's Objects include the vast majority of media infrastructure (signal towers, networking cables, data centres, etc.), postal infrastructure (post offices, shipping vehicles and containers, etc.), all the household + postal robots, the entire Court of Neofrene and a portion of the Living's everyday basic needs. And also Jacques's rubbish which takes about 90% of his memory (just kidding). Individual inanimate objects normally shouldn't be difficult for a Marginal of Reception's relative 'scale'.
• Reception's personality is that they prefer being 'spread across' multiple bodies because it lets them live in perpetual cognitive dissonance where they can chuck contradicting ideas or difficult feelings into different bodies instead of trying to 'integrate' them together. Even if other Marginals had the same idea, they wouldn't necessarily have the skill/Memory allocation to even hold that many bodies at once, and the discomfort of attempting to do so would be seen as a bigger cost than the benefits of adopting that particular method of organising themselves.

That's mostly the gist of it. There are some other things that give it more 'gravity' but as usual I'll hold back from anything I consider too spoiler-y for now.