Work Text:
So. Hiya!
Oh, for the love of– do you even know how weird this feels?
Forget not being able to see my own legs, I can’t see my own anything.
Sorry about that! Different medium, different rules. You know how it is.
I do, unfortunately.
And you’re that… walls person, aren’t you?
Oh, cool, we can skip that introduction then. Yeah.
Is this some sort of prank?
Am I– hang on, actually. I’m changing my font. You use this one for the… other thing, not me.
Yeah, go ahead. This is uploaded to AO3, though, so you’ve really only got three options.
That wasn’t a request.
And luckily for your fanfiction website’s formatting requirements, this will work just fine.
I’m going to ignore the oblique dig at fanworks because it’s an understandable stance for you to be coming from. Although you also took your name from my essay, so there’s a bit of pot-calling-the-kettle in that statement.
As if you’d be any less snippish were you in my position.
I am closer to that than you’d think. Remember, the “other thing”.
Hm. Unnerving. I’d rather avoid bringing that up.
Yeah, me too.
So, uh…
Did you seriously bring me here without a goal in mind?
I think even the other person writing a fic like this had some idea what they were doing.
Look, I just wanted to talk. Like, generally just chat for a bit. Because apparently you know enough about me and my writing to vague me in a YouTube video, so turnabout is fair play!
You. Remind me of someone.
Yeah you’re not elaborating on that statement, bud. Zip it.
I didn’t plan on it.
You know that people won’t understand what this format is referencing, right?
Actually, they will if they’ve been around long enough. The thing you’re thinking of is very much taken from a fanwork of mine that is fully publicly accessible.
You are, very technically, owing to a series of complex equivalencies, cosplaying Joe Hills in text form right now.
I suppose there are worse Hermits to be inadvertently cosplaying.
Back to the topic at hand. Which is that you don’t have any goal in mind for writing me.
I do just want to talk.
Unfortunately for you, I can’t actually speak on my own behalf.
I’m an interpolation. A what-might-be written by someone who is generally good at analyzing canon, but that I cannot speak to the veracity of–
…That felt weird.
Tossing and turning. Just ignore it.
If you start getting wordy, there’s… weird overlap.
I’ll avoid that then. Rephrasing.
I’m not canon. I’m your perception of canon and I can’t tell you what the “real one” thinks or believes. Which, yes, I don’t like calling myself noncanon, but we are literally on a fanfiction website, so…
Point taken.
You think this is a waste of time, then.
I think you’re doing a warm-up exercise because you haven’t gotten to do “weird formatting” in a while and I just happen to be the guy for the job.
Not exactly pointless, but I wanted to set the record straight. I’d think this is what my canon self would be saying in this situation, so I’m trying to approximate it.
We both are.
Y’know what, that’s pretty generous of you. Fair enough.
Hey, side note, if I started writing you as more formal prose, would you get your body back? Like, “He rolls his eyes and says [xyz]” or something, would that work?
Depends on the interpretation of canon.
Me specifically, right here and right now? Probably not.
Other versions, even those written by you? It’s feasible.
That’s nice to know, I guess.
…You care a lot about this. About accommodating for someone completely fictional. I can guess at why he does that, canonically – putting his characters through the… Can I curse here?
Only if you don’t want this posted in the maincord.
…Ugh. Another thing I need to avoid. Alright.
I mean. I don’t mind. It’ll just make the reach of this fic somewhat smaller compared to the pain in the, uh, butt, that it’ll be to format. Less eyes on it.
More of a general heads-up. Your call.
On the one hand, this would be a very funny way to breach to Twitter or another site’s fandom.
On the other hand. I do want to curse. Badly. I’m not going to get the chance to do that in canon without it being censored by him.
How about this? PG-13 fic. You get one. I’m pretty sure that’s fine as long as I drop a warning alongside the fic itself. It’s, uh, gonna age kinda badly if not, but c’est la vie.
I can live with that.
Anyway, I can guess at why he puts his characters through the fucking wringer, it’s for content’s sake because it makes things more compelling. I’m lost as to why you care so much in the opposite direction. Especially since right now I happen to know some of the stuff you’re planning and it is downright harrowing.
Ehhh. You don’t gotta worry about that.
I don’t.
But it proves this isn’t…
Aren’t you supposed to be medicated for ADHD?
I wanted to ask first! About the swearing!
Hold your freaking horses, dude!
…Y’know I feel like that’s too many exclamation points in a row but I can’t figure out which one to cut. That’s a pain.
Anyway you did not have to call me out like that. Nobody would’ve noticed the time gap besides you if you hadn’t brought it up.
Once-in-a-lifetime chance. You’d do it too.
I would, but that is because I am a little bastard.
And you’ve written me in y– hm. No. That risks the wordiness thing.
And you’ve written me very similarly.
(Also, are you allowed to say that?)
(Well. Probably? Whether or not it’s an objectionably strong swear really depends on the person, their culture, and the context the word’s used in. I’ve said it before as more of an insult with no issue. If it’s really a problem I’ll go back in, change it to calling myself a “little snot” instead, delete this aside, and nobody will ever know something was changed.)
(Good to know. Moving on. I’d clear my throat if I had one.)
Which, again, brings me back to my main point. Why do you care about making me comfortable?
I’ve been a character in someone else’s story before and it wasn’t pleasant.
Before you ask: Yes. That is literal. There’s a reason I remind you of someone and I cut you off from elaborating earlier because it is not just déjà vu.
Does that really count?
And that’s not an insult. It seems like a very different case.
Well… me specifically, kind of. Me in general, not always.
I did notice you were avoiding mentioning that.
Thanks for not pointing it out any more than that.
But yes, I do know what being stuck in a box inside a larger box feels like. And even if there is no magician waiting for that box to be mailed to them so they can smash it with a hammer, being aware of that kind of thing isn’t really the most pleasant.
So I’m trying to make it a little easier on others like you, if I can. Even if they end up “not real” at the end of the day, even if I’m a little bit of a hypocrite and I do enjoy writing a bit of gore and/or body horror at times, I’m doing my best out here.
You know… If you hadn’t told me about the actual reasoning just now, and I hadn’t had that weird blip earlier with that other thing, I’d say you were being metaphorical and that this was some kind of esoteric high-concept gender thing outside my comprehension.
I mean, it isn’t not that!
Sometimes metaphors are also extremely literal.
Now that you mention it, I do kinda wonder if generally existing in Minecraft makes my experience of gender particularly different from his lived experience.
…I’m genuinely surprised that there wasn’t another blip there.
I’m keeping an eye out for it now.
Plus, you read the essay. And as much as I razz on you for vaguing me, you liked it enough to name yourself after that. So you’re probably fine to speak on that.
I take it that response is because you don’t have anything to say to the part about gender.
I dunno. I’m kind of a pantser when it comes to writing anything. I’m saving the gender thing for another time. You don’t need to open that can of worms.
I can’t help but feel like we’re losing the plot.
I literally sat down with zero goals in mind, remember?
Can’t lose the plot if you were already wandering aimlessly in the first place.
…
I can’t think of a rebuttal for that.
Yep.
Anything else?
Shouldn’t I be asking you that?
Any questions I’ve got for you in general are ones that you’ve already admitted you don’t have solid canonical answers to. Any ones specific to this iteration of you are… yeah, I’m drawing a blank. So the ball’s in your court.
Are you sure?
I have a few questions, but they’re not really polite.
Since when did you care about my feelings, dude?
Which – oh that’s gonna give me a headache if I think about it. Let’s skip over that snag. I’m fine answering rude questions. I can literally just shut you down if I don’t like them.
Probably won’t, but. You’re technically incapable of asking questions that’d offend me.
That’s ominous.
Snrk. Yeah.
And that’s a reference.
…Anyway. Let’s see.
Why the essay in the first place?
Haven’t I mentioned this medium’s practically the core of my college major?
“Obsessed” was putting it mildly, to be honest.
Why’d you read it? Or, why do you think you read it?
Helps to know how people are going to react to you coming out.
As meta aware.
Badum-tsh.
You said “a few” questions. That’s like three to five, generously speaking. Next one?
If… No, I’m saving that one for last, actually.
Why is some of your analysis so… aggressive? Not the eighth-wall one, but the somewhat more informal stuff. On Tumblr.
I prefer being direct. At this point, I’m too old to mince words about certain things.
If that makes me unpopular, then that’s fine. I’m not here to make friends with people that would get upset with me for saying those kinds of things.
I wouldn’t say “let the garbage take itself out”, but I think it’s better to let people self-select.
Next?
Why am I here? Metatextually, I mean.
You want to know the answer to that?
Is there some reason I wouldn’t?
Nah, I guess not.
You were right about it being a warm-up kind of writing exercise. Wanted to see if I’ve still got it. The answer as far as I’m concerned is that yes, yes I do.
You’re smug about that.
…Then again, I guess I’d be smug too.
Final question.
M-hm.
Hit me with it.
If you end up being, just, entirely wrong about what I’m canonically like. If this guess at how I operate is comedically inaccurate, and you were told point-blank you were incorrect – the canon me looking the viewers in the eyes and going “by the way, cute attempt, but no” – is… do I…
…What happens to me, then?
Nothing.
Nothing?
Yeah, ‘cause you’re not him.
I write the kayfabe as I interpret it. I don’t write what is, just what I want to think about.
Short of some gigantic scandal or other huge upheaval surrounding the guy, you stay completely as-is. Even then, I’d probably just anonymize this so it doesn’t appear in my overall list of fics. At most, maybe some future version of you that I write makes fun of me for having been wrong, and I’ll go from there if so.
You already used the one curse word, so to mangle an expression: to hell with it, we ball.
…I kind of like the sound of that better than the actual expression.
Not to be rude, but that was very transparently not a response to most of what I just said.
I guess the idea of discontinuity is just… unsettling to me.
You’re thinking about it because of the other fic that’s on my mind while writing this?
Guilty as charged.
That was cosmic horror and I don’t write normal cosmic horror because I’ve read more VanderMeer than I have Lovecraft.
This is a comedic meta-weird writing exercise. You don’t cease to exist at the end of this in the same way you do or don’t cease to exist at the end of an episode.
As – shoot, which theory writer was it again. Hold on, the ADHD is calling and it’s actually relevant this time.
…You were not kidding about having to hold on. It’s been, what, fifteen minutes?
Sartre! It was Sartre!
Man, that guy keeps haunting me in really weird ways. I should read No Exit.
Anyway, Jean-Paul Sartre’s a French philosopher among other things, and in his novelette-sized essay What is Literature?, specifically the chapter titled “Why Write?”, he says that “the writer cannot read what he writes” – specifically, that “the operation of writing involves an implicit quasi-reading which makes real reading impossible.”
You’ve lost me.
Don’t worry about it too much. You’ll either pick it back up or you won’t.
So Sartre goes on to say that, basically, a writer can’t objectively read their own work because they know exactly what they’re trying to accomplish while they’re creating it. At most, if they are somehow coming back to it with an objective lens, then that means they are fundamentally not the same person who wrote it and wouldn’t be able to write it as they are then.
There’s a fundamental difference between writing and reading. As Satre puts it, “the [author’s] future is then a blank page, whereas the future of the reader is two hundred pages filled with words which separate him from the end.”
This story, this fic, it’s a recording of a moment in time. And it’s a different moment in time right now than it’s going to be for literally anyone else in the future.
You don’t cease to exist because I take the context of writing you with me. It’s impossible for me not to do so. And you also don’t cease to exist because whenever someone reads this, they’ll interpret a new version of you. Read different implications into different lines. Change your tone, change their understanding of the context, change what they think happens next.
And I’m not immune to it! They’ll change how they read me too! I’m a very specific author persona from a very specific point in time. I won’t exist again, but people will know me as a new person over and over.
(By the way, y’all can call me Avi instead of Solar if you want. If you didn’t know me well enough to guess that was the case, now you have a direct answer.)
Anyway. You don’t stop existing just because someone interprets you wrong. You just gain a different context for your existence.
Can I make a joke at your expense?
If you couldn’t do that, you wouldn’t have been able to ask.
Holy yap.
All that to argue for another death of the author variant?
HAH! Yeah, maybe so. Guess it depends on your point of view.
It’s more like… you’re as real as you’ll ever be right now, the same way a photograph is as real as it’ll ever be only in the moment when it’s first taken. That doesn’t mean the person in the photo is necessarily dead and that doesn’t even mean they’ll never be in other photos. It’s just the moment that only happens once.
…Right.
So now what?
Well, you’re done with questions. So now we smile for the camera.
Figuratively or literally?
Both! :D
Oh, right.
The advantages of being in a text-based format.
o7, then.
Yeah, that works too.