A Contingency, if this Wonderful World Doesn't Happen

Link to article: A Contingency, if this Wonderful World Doesn't Happen.

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[[==]]
##979ca8|"Hello! There's no good intro for this, so I'm Dr. K. Stuff."##

"And I'm Jasper."

##979ca8|"And we're DarkStuff. Wait, does that make sense? Maybe it should be DarkStuff and Jasper that make me, as I'm the avatar of both his writer self and his real self."##

"Well by the same token it could be argued that really it's more like a line, where I'm at the top, DarkStuff is next, and then you're at the bottom."

##979ca8|"Fair point. Guess we shouldn't split hairs."##

"Yeah. Anyways, 'Dr. K. Stuff' is a bit clunky, what should I call you?"

##979ca8|"How about just Stuff? You're Jasper, I'm Stuff."##[[footnote]]😏[[/footnote]]

"Alright perfect. Well now that we have that out of the way, hello audience! We're here in this..." Jasper looks at the tags with a pointed expression. "//Essay?//"

##979ca8|"Roll with it."##

"To tell you about this Wonderful World."

##979ca8|"That's right."##

"You see, a lot of things have been happening in my life, and this writing project is simply a //beast,// I have no real promise I can make about when or even //if// I will finish it, though trust me, I want to, I really //really// do. But these ideas will never leave my head, so I'm pulling a Djoric."

##979ca8|"Like [[[the Real Adventures in Capitalism]]]?"##

"That's right. We're going to be telling you about the canon, in a kind of plot-summary, director-commentary kind of way. Except I truly have no motivation to write anything that doesn't fit this stream-of-consciousness style, so it's going to be even more informal than Djoric's wrap-up."[[footnote]]This is perhaps one of the more important lines in this article, and I should bring more attention to it. If this sounds like it's not your thing, it probably isn't! Don't torture yourself with the tens of thousands of words of this if it isn't your style, you owe it to yourself! This isn't //exactly// a writing guide to //Wonderful World,// even if the last part is cheekily titled as such. In this article, I have laid out all the tools necessary to tell the stories that were intended for the canon, and I have given a //very// raw look into the mind behind much of the creative energy behind the canon, where ideas came from and how I think... it communicates //vibe// in a way I don't think anything else could. It is, in another way, returning to the roots of the canon, the stream-of-consciousness styling of //Vend-a-Friend.// But if you're just looking for enough info to write a cute story in the canon, or you want to get a sense of how to get into the tone of the canon, the hub has information for you, and you ought to just read some of the canon articles! That's the best way to get engaged. This article is more for the people with interests above-and-beyond. So, now Stuff will ask a very important question...[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Mmm. Will that get grating?"##

"The ratings will tell all.[[footnote]]Indeed. This article was not written while I was in a very good place -- I've been deep in writer's block for a long time, and this is what I felt capable of writing. Something with little restrictions, that gets across the //ideas// in the canon, in however unwieldy a fashion. And as Jasper astutely observes...[[/footnote]] If it gets voted down, then at least I have it for personal use as an outline document in case I ever want to continue the project myself or hand it off to someone."

##979ca8|"Yeah that makes sense. What, uh, is //my// purpose?"##

"The flow of writing is much easier if I pretend I'm talking to someone, so you're gonna be that someone."

##979ca8|"Do I have a distinguishable character?"##

"That remains to be seen. If this thing gets as large as I expect it will get, then by the end we will each probably tend towards certain things and be distinct. Right now we're kind of in the 'first season' iterations of ourselves, where the writers really figure out what they want to do with us later."

##979ca8|"I thought you were a direct representation of Jasper?"##

"Hey now, let's make a rule early. We are //not// getting caught up on the specifics of this framing device, capiche?"

Stuff sighs. ##979ca8|"Capiche..."##

"Perfect, let's start this show."[[footnote]]Oh and by the way -- I'm the foonotes guy, you can call me Dark -- if it wasn't clear by the idea of the article, //massive// spoilers for //everything// in the canon, including the unwritten! You have been warned![[/footnote]]

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+ **Part 1: Ideation**

"So here's a bit of history to the creation of this canon, out-of-universe. When I was first lurking in 2013 or 2014 -- I was 11 or 12 -- I found the Little Misters pretty quick.[[footnote]]That would be [[[Tales of Mr. Collector]]], specifically.[[/footnote]] They were my introduction to [[[dr-wondertainment-hub|Dr. Wondertainment]]] as a concept, and at first I found them really cool. They sparked my interest. However, over the years, the more I learned about Wondertainment as it existed on the site, the more I took issue with it."

##979ca8|"Didn't you have the idea for Vend-a-Friend really early on?"##

"Yeah yeah, we're getting there. Or, actually, we'll go there now. I somehow got it into my head that Wondertainment was actually pretty whimsical and fun on the site. In fact, come to think of it, I must //not// have come across the Misters first, but in that case I don't know what my introduction to Wondertainment was, because I remember coming up with Vend-a-Friend and then making the discovery that the stories about the Little Misters were quite dark! My initial, primordial idea of Vend-a-Friend was merely this: a Wondertainment story... but //dark.// Original!"

##979ca8|"But no."##

"No."

##979ca8|"Wondertainment's been dark since the beginning."##

"Exactly. Wondertainment even started with some people thinking it might just be [[[factory hub|the Factory]]] going by a different name for when they manufacture children's toys."

##979ca8|"You have a source on that?"##

"I don't, but I might be able to find one and put it in the footnotes later.[[footnote]]Look, I remember this being a comment, and I don't know what article the comment is on and I don't want to look for it. Maybe I'll get hit with inspiration later, or maybe someone knows what I am talking about and can give me a lead, but for now, nah.[[/footnote]] This whole thing will be very stream-of-consciousness, but then I'm going to riddle it with footnotes and things that help people find discussion about specific ideas and characters and the like."

##979ca8|"Oh that's cool. Will that delay the posting of this article?"##

"Maybe. It would be cool to post this and //then// do it, but I'm afraid that once I post I'll lose all motivation. It's been a trend. Not the posting part specifically, just the finding any excuse to lose motivation. Anyhow, so Wondertainment was already dark. Well, I was married to my Vend-a-Friend idea of going all shock-horror. This was when I was 16, mind you. Only four years ago.[[footnote]]Five, now, this article took a year to write![[/footnote]][[footnote]]Make that //six// now, this thing has been sitting in my sandbox for a long time, wow...[[/footnote]] That's crazy... but, anyhow, I //kind of// did a 180. As I said, I was keeping it dark, but now I realized that the real subversive angle would be to make Wondertainment, the company, be actually kind of chill?"

##979ca8|"Isabel was an unabashedly good Dr. Wondertainment."##

"Well yea but her father was all creepy and weird and made Mr. Redd too and yaddah yaddah, and she had that board of people caring about profits who weren't terribly happiness-oriented, and didn't she end up leaving Wondertainment, the company, in the story anyhow?"

##979ca8|"Sure but you have Cornelius. He's dark and creepy and Wondertainment."##

"We're //getting// there! Sheesh."

##979ca8|"Okay but like I just wanted to point it out."##

"You've pointed it out. Now stop poking holes in my story."

##979ca8|"Fine."##

"So I wanted Wondertainment, as a company, to actually be for kids. Like, for //them,// not for their money. I wanted the core motivation of Wondertainment as an entity to be making children's lives better. So, while I did keep my dark Wondertainment story in Vend-a-Friend, I decided to totally rewrite the company."

##979ca8|"But it wasn't just subversion you were after."##

"I //told// you to --! Wait, actually, that transitions me well into my next point. Thank you, Stuff."

Stuff nods.

"He's right. I wasn't just fussing about because I wanted to be different. I straight up didn't like the representation on the site. I liked Wondertainment better when I thought it was whimsical and happy. The Little Misters bothered me -- that Wondertainment's site identity was built on the company making sapient life for fun and profit was //weird.// I mean, we already had morally black companies, see the Factory or MC&D. And then there was also Djoric's [[[adventures-in-capitalism-hub|Adventures in Capitalism]]] series, which outlines how Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V, PhD (I think I got that right)[[footnote]]You did![[/footnote]] is actually the reincarnation of 'the Wondermaker' and fights an ancient evil, the Scarlet King, that was also reincarnated as her brother (I think), Mr. Redd. And I thought that was ridiculous. I mean, it's well-written, it's very fun --"

##979ca8|"Djoric tends to do that."##

"-- but I didn't like the scale of the Wondertainment story. I mean, in my eyes, Wondertainment was a company that made anomalous toys. This 'saving the world' stuff was really far outside its realm, as well as this 'creating life as collectibles' stuff. All of it just sorta conflicted with what I thought Wondertainment was actually //about.// So, enter [[[Vend-a-Friend]]]."

##979ca8|"[[[We Just Make Toys]]]."##

"Yep. It's there in the first tale that started it all: //We Just Make Toys,// chapter one of Vend-a-Friend."

##979ca8|"So it was a mission statement."##

"Yup. I wanted to completely reinvent Dr. Wondertainment as //I// wanted it to exist. Not the way I saw it existing. I was inspired by what I perceived to be a //lack// of the core Wondertainment spirit on the site. It didn't completely not exist -- my idea of Wondertainment as a fun wacky entity didn't come from nowhere[[footnote]]I distinctly remember [[[SCP-3301]]], //THE FOUNDATION// by djkaktus[[/footnote]] -- but it felt underrepresented."

##979ca8|"We went in with a couple of design philosophies."##

"That's right. Care to tell?"

##979ca8|"Sure. So, we wanted to represent Wondertainment as a //company.// That was another thing sorely lacking on the site. There was a lot of Wondertainment as an entity, and a lot of interactions with its products and biproducts, but other than a couple scenes from Adventures in Capitalism, Wondertainment as a //company// had been relatively unexplored. In Isabel's Wondertainment, too, it was pretty much just Isabel on the toy designs. We figured, for something as prolific and widespread as Wondertainment, more people ought to be doing more things. So we decided to start Vend-a-Friend inside Wondertainment -- perspective of an employee (not the //Doctor// Wondertainment, but instead, a Wondertainment //piece//) -- to give it a feeling as a concrete //company.// One that makes and buys and sells. Products. Production. That kind of thing. And, to my knowledge, that was new at the time!"##

"But there were a couple other design choices."

##979ca8|"Right. The other thing we really wanted to do was to address the existing Wondertainment canon on the site, but subvert it. The best example here is the Misters. We couldn't leave them out. They are too integral to the idea of Wondertainment on the site. So, they're included, but retooled. Instead of making collectible humans, which is morally black in my opinion, they were transformed into a children's band, which is very morally grey (dark grey methinks) because sapient life was still created for profit, but it was less human-trafficking and more worker-exploitation with a twist, which we figured was more akin to an ethical mistake our ideal Wondertainment would make."##

"We also wanted to remove the Wondermaker."

##979ca8|"That's right."##

"But somehow still address it."

##979ca8|"That comes a lot later."##

"True. Let's leave it for now."

##979ca8|"Same with Isabel, who //will// be reappearing."##

"Mhmm. Those fit under 'established Wondertainment canon we wanted to address.'"

##979ca8|"Is there any rhyme or reason to when we use 'we' instead of 'I'?"##

"Hmm?"

##979ca8|"I just noticed the shift. I think I started it, actually."##

"Oh. Uh, if there is, it's subconscious, I wasn't thinking about it."

##979ca8|"Fair."##

"Same with tense. I figure we'll just be going in and out of present- and past-tense, because I and I think most people do that when telling stories verbally."

##979ca8|"I'd agree, but of course I would."##

"Indeed."

##979ca8|"Is that the end of the design philosophies?"##

"Uhhh, there were plenty of design //choices// that happened, like giving Wondertainment its own pocket dimension (Wonder World!™️), making Dr. Wondertainment a title that gets passed down instead of one very specific person, and having the aesthetic basically be Willy Wonka and Dr. Seuss plus a little bit of Disneyland, but I don't know that those were philosophical choices, I think that was just what I thought was fun."

##979ca8|"Yeah that makes sense. 'Course it's been a while."##

"It has."

##979ca8|"Plenty of our reasons for doing things must be lost to time by now."##

"Yup. I didn't keep a diary or anything so, sometimes things just happen the way they do."

##979ca8|"Mhmm. Is that the end of this section?"##

"Uhh... probably... I think that was about all the ideation I did before starting Vend-a-Friend. I suppose now we should actually get into the tale series that acts as the first instalment into this canon. Shall we?"

##979ca8|"We shall."##

"Wonderful."

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+ **Part 2: Vend-a-Friend**

Jasper rests his chin on his interlaced fingers, his elbows placed on the arms of his rolling office chair. A swift little kick against the ground, and he spins in place, slowly coming to a stop looking off to your right just a little bit, kind of into the middle distance. Then he lets out a single huff.

"Okay," he spins just a little more to look at the 'camera,' "here's the deal. Vend-a-Friend was //extremely// fun to write, and it's because I did a lot of what I'm doing right now. 16-year-old me undertook a big endeavor. I wanted to write a multi-part story. I'd never done that before. I was smart: I set my sights low. I decided it would be five chapters. I decided I would name each chapter and make an outline of what went in each one: I'd write one paragraph describing the beginning, one for the middle, and one for the end. Then, I'd just... start filling them in. I wrote all five chapters before I posted the first one, and decided I'd post one every other day (to my memory, might have been once a week, I could easily go check but I'm not going to right now for the sake of flow).[[footnote]]It was every other day.[[/footnote]] To write a large story, I needed to take away //some// of my deliberation. To get it all running smooth, I needed to do what was //most// natural, because I was new to this, and a lot of thinking would really gum up the works. So I decided that it would be stream-of-consciousness. This made Brainy Brian, the protagonist, //necessarily// have a certain kind of character."

##979ca8|"Rambly."##

"Extraordinarily."

##979ca8|"Which meant he said way more than was necessary, all the time. Seeing as he was the narrator, that meant that the prose wandered. This, then, was how Vend-a-Friend got away with so much worldbuilding."##

"Yeah! He's the perfect opening protagonist for a multi-protagonist canon, because he had a narrative excuse to go down inconsequential tangents. He'd see a picture on a wall and just expound upon it. He was a walking, talking lore dump, and I think it worked, because no one seemed to mind. He was just //like// that. It made sense, given how he interacted with other characters and the world around him, that looking from his perspective, you'd forget exactly where you were or what the characters were doing, just for him to be suddenly talking about the Little Misters going on tour, or the progression of Wondertainments through the years. He was really, //really// convenient to work with, from a writing perspective. I think making the story so stream-of-consciousness incidentally made me world-build in ways I might not have before, because remember, back then, back at 16, I was //far// less intentional with my choices."

##979ca8|"Oh much."##

"Yeah."

##979ca8|"To the point of a problem, wasn't it?"##

"Right... yeah. We're getting to that." Jasper blows air through his lips, raspberry-style. "Alright yea, so. I wasn't writing Vend-a-Friend with themes in mind. But one of the wonderful things about art is that you don't have to, they simply happen. So let's do a little plot summary of Vend-a-Friend."

##979ca8|"I'll do it."##

"Oh, sure. I guess I have been talking for a bit."

##979ca8|"Yeah, let's mix it up."##

"Sure."

##979ca8|"Okay so. Our point-of-view character is Brainy Brian, a toymaker (or Tinker of the Toy Making Department), at a big toy... making... like, they give their ideas for toys to the whole department, presentations style, meeting thingy... you get me.[[footnote]]Might have been looking for the word "presentation."[[/footnote]] They get on stage and present toy blueprints basically. So Brainy gets down from the stage, sits next to 3T (Thomas Timothy Thompson) who says some ominous worrying things, and then another toymaker gets on stage looking very nervous (they go by Polly) and starts presenting a toy idea. Soon Brainy realizes that the toy idea they're presenting... is //his.// It was a discarded idea of his from a while back. He gets really angry, stands up, accuses them, makes a scene. It gets taken into an HR meeting, basically, where Judy "the Tongue" Papill, seemingly an HR manager of some kind, tells Brainy maybe he needs to take a break and sends him off to a little Wondertainment vacation home, called... oh man, I don't remember its name. It has a name. Future us, put it in the footnotes."##[[footnote]]The Tourist Trap, ooo foreshadowing! 😯[[/footnote]]

"Oh y'know what, what if DarkStuff is the embodiment of the footnotes? And since you're Stuff, he can be Dark."[[footnote]]👻[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Oh heheh, that could be cute. Let's do that."##

"Yes, let's. Okay, continue."

##979ca8|"Can do. Okay so. He goes to the place, he's real upset, and he's going about his business, you kind of get a sense something's up and something's wrong, and then he misses his meds, Risperdal, which were briefly mentioned earlier in a scene on the bus to the place."##

"Yeah. Risperdal is like... an anti-psychotic, I think?"[[footnote]]Ding ding ding, that's correct! 💊[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Don't look at me, I dunno the terms and the research we did was a long time ago. All I remember is that it can be used to treat schizophrenia."##

"Right. So basically, Brainy has a mental condition he takes meds for, and the meds are named, but the condition is not."

##979ca8|"It's schizophrenia though."##

"It is //undoubtedly// schizophrenia."

##979ca8|"When we were writing the story, we didn't name it because we didn't want to have to research it and get all the details correct. True story. That wasn't a subconscious thought, that was a //conscious// thought. We went 'oh, but if I name it, I have to go make sure I'm doing a good job representing it, so instead I can just heavily imply it and then use the hammy, harmful 'every person with schizophrenia is a serial killer' version employed by media over and over again.'"##

"Mmm."

##979ca8|"Yeah."##

"Yeah so he goes all serial killer-y, by the way."

##979ca8|"Yeah he does. He misses his pills, gets anxious and upset, pours them down the sink, and then 'goes crazy,' and decides his number one goal is to get back at Wondertainment who hath so wronged him by not punishing the person who stole his intellectual property and claimed it was their original idea."##

"And how else can you do that besides rampant murder?"

##979ca8|"I see no other way. Clearly that's the only option."## Stuff sighs. ##979ca8|"Oh yo, I get my own dialogue tags sometimes. Neat."##

"Yeah, you were kind of just a floating voice, figured you should also have some physicality to you."

Stuff scoots forwards and backwards on their own rolly chair. ##979ca8|"Dude. Rolly chair. Sweet."##

"Thought you'd like it."

##979ca8|"I do."## A couple more scoots. ##979ca8|"Okay moving on. Brainy decides the best way to get back at Wondertainment is make them a toy that is morally //black,// but which they won't realize is morally black until they've already started selling it. How to do that? Harvest children's souls and put them in toys, of course! He figures -- vaguely, I'm unsure how lucid he is during this process because by the point he truly dives off the deep end we transition to the point-of-view of other characters -- that such a scandal will do irreparable damage to Wondertainment's name. So he's going and grabbing children, kind of implied that he's catfishing them in a way (like, approaching them online somehow and then luring them somewhere he can grab them and take him back to the house), and the Global Occult Coalition catches wind of something fishy going on, there's a chase scene where they tag the car before it teleports that I'm pretty proud of having written (I felt the action there was pretty zany and fun), and then they use GPS tracking to find the location of the vacation home."##

"And then they raid it."

##979ca8|"Then they raid it. Here we get Brainy's perspective again, as he's clearly, um, not in the greatest headspace, and he gets a kind of spidey-sense that something is up before he hears the glass shatter downstairs. He runs to the room where he's been keeping the kids that he has yet to turn into dolls -- the titular Vend-a-Friends -- and shoots each of them in order before committing suicide."##

"Yyyyeeesh."

##979ca8|"Yeah, as was said. Shock horror. It was what we were going for."##

"Yeah."

##979ca8|"That's where the story //would// have ended, had it not been for some out-of-universe circumstances. So maybe now is a good time to pause and dissect that story?"##

"Sure."

...

"Actually, I think I'll have more to say when we finish up. The story thus far is just kind of... glum and lackluster. I mean it had some fun moments."

##979ca8|"The dream scene."##

"I did really love writing the dream scene. And it had some wonderful interactions between Brainy's sheltered upbringing --"

##979ca8|"Some of his past is mentioned in the story, too."##

"-- in Wonder World, tee ehm, and the //real// world, where he basically breaks into a house and looks like he's threatening a child and babysitter."

##979ca8|"This is before he goes mad and actually //does// start threatening children."##

"Right. This one was an honest mistake at this point. That was pretty fun."

##979ca8|"Yeah."##

"But other than that, it's pretty shit isn't it? It's basically a story about a guy lashing out, getting punished for it, going crazy, killing some children and then himself when he gets caught."

##979ca8|"Yeah."##

"With a lot of worldbuilding that I thought was decent."

##979ca8|"Same."##

"Okay that's uh, that's that. Let's talk about how it went on."

##979ca8|"Yes, let's."##

"Y'know I can never say or hear 'yes let's' without hearing someone saying 'you sluts' in an Irish accent. //Ye slets!//"[[footnote]]You know, I think that's actually more Scottish.[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Heehee. Me neither."##

"Okay you can stop saying stuff like 'same' and 'me neither,' it's grating and expected."

##979ca8|"Ah. Right. Sorry."##

"Don't apologize."

##979ca8|"Okay."##

Jasper clears his throat. "Anyways, about halfway through me actually posting the chapters --"

##979ca8|"Wait, can we briefly shoutout SunnyClockwork before we continue?"##

"Oh absolutely."

##979ca8|"Cool. Yeah, so, while we were posting the first five chapters, Sunny caught wind of our hub, basically said it was ugly, we said 'what should we do about it,' and then somehow, despite Sunny reading the first chapter //and not really liking it,// she decided to help us out. She made a bunch of art for the series."##

"It was incredible, and incredibly lucky on our part."

##979ca8|"Oh yeah. I have no clue how much popularity came just from her art, but for such an early project of ours, the hub looked fucking //sexy.//"##

"Oh yeah."

##979ca8|"//Oh// yeah. It was remarkable. Thank you very, very much Sunny, you make Vend-a-Friend look very nice."##[[footnote]]Check out some of her artwork [[[Sunny-s-black-and-white-art|here!]]][[/footnote]]

"Agreed. Okay, so, back to our regularly scheduled programming. So during the process of posting all this, a certain Dr. Chandra poked his head into our comment section on the hub and said something like 'hey, this style of writing fits my canon, [[[dread circuses hub|Dread & Circuses]]], pretty damn well, you should totally write some stuff for it.'"

##979ca8|"Funny thing about that, with Chandra gone, we're now the official canon runners of Dread & Circuses."##[[footnote]]In the course of writing this, he came back! So, this is no longer true. 🤡[[/footnote]]

"Yeah. That's its own story, but we are. We have the [[[Herman Fuller Hub|Herman Fuller]]] //and// Wondertainment canons. Isn't that odd?"

##979ca8|"It is. Also, 'Wondertainment canon.'"##

"Oh yeah. Foreshadowing, foreshadowing. We'll come back to that."

##979ca8|"Right."##

"So we said 'yoooo, sure!' and decided to write for his canon. In fact, and I don't know exactly what made our decision here, we decided to //deus ex machina// Brainy Brian back to life and get him into a Circus-related adventure."

##979ca8|"Maybe it was because Chandra said it was our writing style that fit so well, but it was because of Brainy Brian's character that we were writing that way. Or, y'know, he was an excuse to write that way. You get what I mean."##

"I do."

##979ca8|"Heyyy, you told me //not// to do that."##

"Wh- no fair, you prompted me!"

Stuff just raises eyebrows.

"Fine. Touché."

##979ca8|"Thank you."##

"So we raised Brainy from the dead, and this is where we determined he had dream magic. It just kind of happened. He has a Headspace, which is like a vague oneiric dimension that you can access in your sleep slash in your dreams, and, with no real details, it's merely //said// that it's very difficult to bring anything from this dreamworld into the real world, but Brainy has 'figured it out,' and so he made himself a contingency body in his Headspace that he then teleports into the real world. But he doesn't know where to go... we do some vagueries about his past, something something Circus with a capital C, he decides 'oh that's where I'm going!' and then he teleports there."

##979ca8|"He changes his identity because he knows the name Brainy is about to be connected to some heinous stuff."##

"Right. To Smarty Marty, though Smarty is dropped and he just becomes Marty. Then he charms his way into being a ride designer for Herman Fuller's Circus, headed as it were by Icky and Manny. The doctor, uhh... I forget his name, Dark back me up here,[[footnote]]Dr. Tinkles.[[/footnote]] he discovers -- it might've been Patches but that's also far too obvious[[footnote]]Yeah no it's Dr. Tinkles.[[/footnote]] -- that something's really up with Marty and so he gives him Clown Impulse Suppressant, which does weird things to Marty due to him not being a Clown, also capital C, but also tends to his schizophrenia. Then he gets lucid again, realizes what he's done, is super traumatized and upset by it, and here he meets Pepper."

##979ca8|"Pepper!"##

"Yeah! I read some Dread & Circuses in preparation for writing for it, and I discovered a character that was mentioned, like, once and then never again, named Pepper, the ghost girl in the mirror, and I really liked her.[[footnote]]She debuts in [[[freaky-commodities-ii-freak-harder|Freaky Commodities II: Freak Harder]]].[[/footnote]] Or, I liked the idea of making her into something. So I decided she would become Brainy's confidant. Brainy comes up with a ride design for Icky, as promised, and it's a haunted house with Pepper as the ghost on rails that comes and spooks people. It's a big hit, Brainy also plays a role outside to prepare customers for the spooks within. After this success he talks about how he wants to hug her, she's like 'tough luck,' and then he reveals his cards, that actually maybe he can make her a body, because he's made himself a body before. Something something dream magic."

##979ca8|"I thought it was kind of a fun elaboration. What started as //deus ex machina// becomes an actual mechanic that's played around in the plot."##

"Yeah, it comes up outside of Vend-a-Friend too. The dream magic body making stuff becomes a mainstay of Brainy's character. I'm good with it."

##979ca8|"Me- ahem."##

"Good catch. So, he makes her a body, it works perfectly, only issue is that now their haunted house is out of a ghost and Icky is furious because it became their biggest attraction right quick and it was in their advertisements for the next locale they were going to."

##979ca8|"That was another thing we did in this series."##

"What's that?"

##979ca8|"Oh don't play dumb."##

"Dude this framing device only works if we actually pretend we're different people. Also our antics are interrupting our explanations like, //really// frequently, so if you could just roll with it?"

##979ca8|"//You// were the one who told //me// I couldn't 'yes, and.'"##

"It wasn't 'yes, and' it was //just// 'yes!'"

##979ca8|"You're splitting hairs."##

"Fine. Fine! You can 'me too' if I can say 'oh, what's that?'"

##979ca8|"Muahaha. Plan worked."##

"Oh you jerk."

##979ca8|"So we read a lot of Dread & Circuses and, much like how Wondertainment stuff on the site seemed to greatly neglect the inner machinations of the company, Dread & Circuses seemed to often forget they were an actual circus. So we tried to have several scenes of actually //running// a business, make it feel more real."##

"I think we succeeded."

##979ca8|"Me too."##

...

##979ca8|"Moving right along. She gets pissed. But also, knowing just how difficult it is to make bodies and transfer souls into them, Icky gets very suspicious of the origins of 'Marty.' She asks Manny to redouble his efforts to get a background check on this guy. Offscreen, this translates into Manny figuring out that Marty is Brainy, which ties him to heinous child-murdering acts, and thus gets him in big trouble. But guess what!"##

"Chekhov's gun goes off."

##979ca8|"Yup! That one-off line about Clown Impulse Suppressant doing something //weird// to Brainy comes up again, and it turns out he's stronger and more durable now, just like Clowns are, so he sustains an attack from Icky, and even fights back. He gets with Pepper, they run off, he chants a thing that acts as a portal to Wonder World! Tee ehm, and then they disappear. Thus ends the Circus section of Vend-a-Friend."##

"And then we get a radical departure."

##979ca8|"A 10,000 word departure to be exact."##

"At this point we didn't know that Vend-a-Friend was going to be the start of an actual canon, and we were getting pretty attached to the Wondertainment worldbuilding that we were doing, so we wanted to sneak in something that would greatly build out this 'neo-Wondertainment' (coined by... someone, Dark cover me here[[footnote]]It was notgull, and I am so very fond of them calling it "neo-Wondertainment" because it makes my new Wondertainment lore sound so, like, official, //ingrained//, I love that this stuff has spread as much as it has. 💚[[/footnote]], in the comments on [[[SCP-629|Mr. Brass]]]). Well, 'sneak' is poor word choice."

##979ca8|"It's massive."##

"It really is. It's a sixth of the entire wordcount of Vend-a-Friend, which is, like, a bit odd. Basically Brainy's ramblings were //still// not enough, and so I set an 'interlude' chapter from the perspective of Judy the Tongue (the HR manager from earlier) when she was a child. It did a bunch of stuff, and uhhh... we'll come back to it. It's not important for interpreting Vend-a-Friend, I don't think, not now that What a Wonderful World exists beyond this one tale series."

##979ca8|"Yeah we'll come back to the worldbuilding it did later, much like how we're glazing over the big paragraphs about the Little Misters and whatnot."##

"Righty ho. So Brainy goes to Wonder World[[footnote]]Tee ehm, you klutz. 😜[[/footnote]] because it's the only place he knows to go, and he kind of makes his way back to 3T's house, his best friend from the past -- oh we missed a chapter. There was another chapter showing Polly stealing Brainy's idea and intending to change it, 3T discovering them doing that, and Polly talking their way out of facing consequences. Okay so now we're caught up. No we aren't. We have a chapter showing Polly showing up at 3T's house to apologize, because they blame themselves for Brainy's actions due to stealing his idea and sending him away, where he then went bananas and murdered."

##979ca8|"Yet again not a great message."##

"No. But anyhow, so they're crying and 3T is comforting them and that's when Brainy (poor timing my friend!) rings the doorbell and tries to get 3T to hide him and Pepper away because they have no idea where else to go. Polly rushes out to meet them first, profusely apologizing and whatnot, Brainy forgives them, 3T steps in the middle and cusses Brainy the fuck out, sending him out onto the street. Brainy takes what 3T says to heart, the Hall Monitors (Wondertainment's police) are on their way, but oh would you look at that, first a //different// black car shows up. Who should be inside but Iris Darke, offering Brainy a position at [[[marshall carter and dark hub|Marshall, Carter & Dark]]]! She's heard of his crazy body building abilities and offers him a very cushy salary, and, of course, a way out of here before he gets caught. He thinks about not taking it, and then Pepper delivers a speech unto him."

##979ca8|"It's the most interesting part of the story. Certainly the one that sticks with me the most."##

"Yeah. For being 16, this part felt like I kind of had a purpose. Or, something to explore. Pepper basically asks him whether or not him deserving things mattered at all. Is it his personal responsibility to not take things offered to him because he thinks that he's been a bad person in the past? I think the line is something like: 'I think you can take this now and it will give you the opportunity to have a life good enough that you can think that maybe you deserve it later. Does that sound good to you?'"

##979ca8|"I think that's interesting."##

"That was the idea when writing it. I don't really know! But the moral question is like... if you //knew,// of yourself, that you weren't going to hurt anybody again... was it your duty to submit to the law? This is assuming a lot of things about yourself and also the law, but in this hypothetical situation let's omit the worse aspects of 'law' here. Merely, should you submit yourself for punishment for your actions if you know of yourself that you won't hurt people again? Is allowing other people 'closure' (and I do wonder how much //closure// we get seeing bad people hurt) more important? Is it righteous? It's certainly not a //bad// thing to do. If you kill someone and you turn yourself in, you're undoubtedly not //wrong// for doing it. But is escaping wrong either? Is it wrong to leave?"

##979ca8|"I don't know."##

"I don't know. That's why I thought it was an interesting question to pose."

##979ca8|"The morality of this situation is of course muddied by Brainy's shaky responsibility for his own actions."##

"Right. At the time we just kinda thought that would make him more sympathetic."

##979ca8|"Yeah."##

"So, uh. Let's dissect this a little bit. I think we've gone through all the lore-relevant stuff here, so if you're just reading this to get summaries on the lore and worldbuilding then by all means, you can skip forward. If not, Dark will put a footnote right here saying 'no wait we later realize there's something super important to the greater picture here,' but otherwise yeah go to the next part."

Jasper and Stuff kick their legs for a second, just kind of waiting.

##979ca8|"Wait, this isn't a video, our waiting doesn't actually give them any more time does it. They have all the time they need."##

"Sure but I'm enjoying kicking my legs and not saying anything."

Stuff reconsiders, resuming kicking his legs.

##979ca8|"Fair point"##

"But that is enough of that."

##979ca8|"Aw."##

"I mean you can still kick your legs, it just won't be acknowledged in writing. People can decide for themselves just how much longer you're kicking your legs."

##979ca8|"Oh sweet."##

"The simple things in life. Anyways, as was said earlier, you don't have to intentionally make art have themes for art to have themes. They happen naturally. They merely //occur.// You can be plenty intentional about it, but you don't have to. So what are the themes of Vend-a-Friend? Well, looking back, I think it's a story about systems that neglect to acknowledge and treat mental health, the damage that does, and then furthermore what happens when you are abandoned by your system and support network. This is, in essence, a story about Brainy, whose issues are pushed under the rug, having a //moment,// no one understanding, and then them just sending him away to self-destruct somewhere else. Worse than that, Polly (who's genderfluid by the way, I decided that like... halfway through writing Vend-a-Friend, I don't think it's //great// representation but Polly is fun and I'm keeping them that way) instigates and what causes the commotion in the first place is a manifestation of //their own// mental problems, which //also// are left unaddressed."

##979ca8|"Maybe that's part of the reason why Polly is so quick to forgive Brainy. It's not acknowledged in-text, but maybe she gets it more than others do."##

"Maybe. She's hinted to have some kind of compulsory behavior, kleptomania-style, that makes her steal Brainy's idea in the first place, and then she -- ah yeah, I'm using 'she' now because that's what I first used for her in the first chapter before later deciding she was genderfluid. As I said, I'm keeping it, and she does go by 'she' sometimes, but I default to 'she' because that's what I used for her in chapter one when I didn't think of her as anything but cis. Guess I'm giving in, then." Jasper pauses. "Nah. //They// take Brainy's idea, and they're implied to have wanted to change it up, make it something more their own, merely take inspiration, but uh, they don't due to some other manifestation of theirs. I just imagine them as someone who really should not be in the position they are in, but ended up there through connections and good graces. Or, y'know, someone who clearly should have some oversight, some friends with them, someone who needs //support,// and who is getting none, and because they're getting none, problems are happening, and because no one is talking about it, it really looks like //they're causing problems,// when it's really a failure of systems to acknowledge and address issues. Captain Kirby wrote a story for Wonderful World one time that really highlighted this theme. It is very much canon that Wonder World, tee ehm, has bad mental health awareness. Toxic positivity, basically."

##979ca8|"So then the story."##

"Right. The story becomes about a failure of systems and support networks and toxic positivity, mixed in with, y'know, the personal aspects of anguish and trauma, self-blame for things not really your fault (unacknowledged by the text, generally), personal responsibility to systems that have previously failed you... y'know."

##979ca8|"It has some cool themes."##

"It does! I'm happy with the themes. It just has shit representation, and it wasn't written at a time where I was capable of recognizing those themes, so it doesn't capitalize on them very well at all. It makes me want to rewrite it."

##979ca8|"That would be quite the undertaking."##

"It would."

##979ca8|"Are you sure you want to do that?"##

"I'm sure I //want// to do it. I'm unsure that I //will.// I dunno. People really like it and no one has brought up any of the issues //I// see within it. But I don't think that absolves me of the responsibility of putting those messages into the work. I think that if I really follow my morals, I ought to rewrite it. Definitely not taking it //down// though... I mean... people like it a lot, people have even said it's been kind of touching. It certainly gets better after the first five chapters. If it ended there it would have truly sucked. And I do think it's fun. But I dunno. I dunno! I have my gripes. And I think Brainy could be done more justice."

##979ca8|"How would you do him justice?"##

"I dunno... the two options are either to make him have something that isn't schizophrenia, isn't //analogous// to schizophrenia or some other mental condition, so probably something very clearly anomalous and... //other.// But like, anything that could fit the same role in the story, something that drives him to kill, could not //possibly// be divorced from a mental condition metaphor. Or, of course, we make him truly //self-//destruct, and not hurt anyone else. Or, y'know, harm through negligence... something that isn't just literally murder. Of course, making the severity of the actions go down makes the stakes also go way down, which would make the Circus arc very strange and need reworking, and then also 3T's reaction at the end be strange, Pepper's monologue hit less hard... he wouldn't have to leave Wondertainment unless he did something illegal and heinous, unless I wanted to make it purely a personal decision... I don't know."

##979ca8|"But you really want to make sure we don't reinforce this idea of 'the mental issue to serial killer pipeline.'"##

"Yeah. I really don't like that."

##979ca8|"That's tough."##

"It is. And I'm not sure how much more space I'll take up here talking about it. Actually, in fact, I am done. That is the end of this part."

##979ca8|"Oh. Abrupt."##

"Yeah whatever. This is as much time as I want to spend on this topic. From here, we should just say, Vend-a-Friend became very popular, well, relatively. The hub and the first tale have over +100, which is crazy to me. So it became popular, and I thought, at some point, 'wow, this could be... a canon.'"

##979ca8|"Ayup."##

"And then it became one."

##979ca8|"//Ayup.//##

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+ **Part 3: The Start of the Canon**

"We'd have to dig through chatlogs to find out exactly how the momentum happened,[[footnote]]Reality check, past me: that ain't happening.[[/footnote]] but I just looked through the site's tag search to find the //wonderful-world// tagged articles in chronological order of their posting and that helped me remember how the canon actually got started. So, during the writing of Vend-a-Friend, as it dipped into Chandra's Dread & Circuses, Chandra returned the favor! He wrote something that would fit into the prospective What a Wonderful World canon. The article is [[[City of Wonder™]]], and it has Icky and Lolly (have I named Lolly yet? we're gonna come back to them later) going on a date in Wonder World. Tee ehm, almost forgot.[[footnote]]No you didn't, liar![[/footnote]] After that, Nicolini -- who is later to become the largest contributor to the canon besides myself -- writes a skip that combines my //other// baby, [[[wilson's wildlife solutions hub|Wilson's Wildlife Solutions]]], with Wondertainment, [[[SCP-3879]]]. With some enthusiasm for this potential canon from Nico, we go ahead and co-author a//nother// skip after Vend-a-Friend, [[[SCP-2983]]], which expands on Judy the Tongue, who was my current love after Brainy."

##979ca8|"It also unintentionally foreshadowed a later development in the canon."##

"...Yo, I'd never noticed that. Yeah it did. Huh. That's pretty cool."

##979ca8|"We'll get there."##[[footnote]]That'll be discussed more in [http://topia.wikidot.com/a-contingency-if-this-wonderful-world-doesn-t-happen#toc4 Part 5]! 🔖[[/footnote]]

"Yeah, we will. Anyways, after this there was a brief excitement about the new canon by some other authors. Eventually the canon became essentially just me and Nicolini writing for it, but when it got a spot on the canon hub there was some hubbub."

##979ca8|Heheh. //Hub-bub.//"##

"When [[[Wonder World|the canon hub]]] was created, there wasn't a lot of stuff actually established about the canon. Or at least, there was a bit that I wanted to be really clear out the gate that wasn't yet in any article. In fact, it still isn't, which is crazy. Or at least these --"

##979ca8|"Get on with it."##

"Okay right right. So, remember how I wanted to remove the Wondermaker from the canon? That meant that there had to be a different origin for Wondertainment, and I wanted that to be clear //real// quick. Just like how I had addressed the Misters and changed them, I needed to address the origins of Wondertainment. So, on the hub, I gave everyone the very short story about its creation."

##979ca8|"Basically, a black gentleman in the early 20th Century wants to start a toy shop. You can imagine there are some barriers between him and starting a shop. So he ends up getting a terrible little storefront in the 'bad' part of town, tucked into an alley somewhere. The type of thing that would never go anywhere, but he's got an edge of childish naivety and he's going to try it out. Somewhere along the way he meets a white woman, Maria Herring, who becomes the first ever Toy Tinker. Chester Williams -- that's the gentleman -- didn't actually know anything about magic before meeting Maria."##

"The store is called Dr. Wondertainment's World of Whimsy."

##979ca8|"Right. To make a long story short, Chester learns more about the anomalous world, their persecution by the Foundation and others, and his shop starts becoming a genuine refuge for anomalous individuals on the run. His kind heart and world-loving eyes are naturally charming and a welcome flavor for those less fortunate, more worn down."##

##979ca8|"You may see some themes beginning to develop."##[[footnote]]You interrupted yourself! ##979ca8|"What? I did?"## Yeah! In the midst of this conversation, the author lost the thread and switched you two around. Must have been pretty disorienting. ##979ca8|"Well... I //thought// I was oriented, in the moment... whoops!"##[[/footnote]]

"Yes and shush, we're getting there."

##979ca8|"Lots of things we're getting to, huh?"##

"At some point, they hear a warning that the shop's growth is its own death sentence, as magic stuff doesn't last long when it gets big. Wisely heeding this, they make a contract with a magical entity called Capital R (this isn't on the hub's story but is developed in an article I wrote much later with Ellie3) to make their back, like, closet, into a bigger space on the inside, where people could hide out. Basically like a home for anomalous refugees. This, after //much// expansion, is actually what became Wonder World! Tee ehm. Also, somewhere along this story, the storefront of Dr. Wondertainment's World of Whimsy also became anomalous itself, so it became that magical shop you only find when you're not looking for it, and which you can never find a second time."

##979ca8|"Like that store from Neverending Story where they get the book from... if I remember correctly."##

"I dunno. It might have been a different movie. Like, I think that might have existed in Buffy in one episode too?"

##979ca8|"I think it's a recurring trope actually. Maybe there's a TV Tropes page for it even."##

"Dark, you know what to do."[[footnote]]It was actually a bit difficult, thanks to JackalRelated for the help with this. Two tropes fit, them being: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLittleShopThatWasntThereYesterday The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday] and [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItWasHereISwear It Was Here, I Swear!][[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Hey thanks! Assuming you did what we asked you to."##

"Yeah we don't know."

##979ca8|"Literally we are at your mercy."##[[footnote]]😈[[/footnote]]

"Heheh. Anyways, that's how Wondertainment started."

##979ca8|"Asterisk."##

"Shush! It's how it started!"

##979ca8|"We're getting there?"##

"Oh my god shut up. So that story was written out on the hub, just to be sure no one screwed that up."

##979ca8|"It got established in an article pretty fast! RockTeethMothEyes, also known as Rochne, and Nico wrote an article about early Wondertainment, showing off Chester and Maria, where Chester was the lovable pacifist and Maria stood up for the both of them."##[[footnote]]That would be [[[The Workshop]]].[[/footnote]]

"Mhmm. We also got an article by Elenee FishTruck which is //extremely// important going forward. It's an article about Wondertainment responding to the tragedy of Brainy Brian's killing spree the only way it knows how: by doubling down on wonder and happiness."

##979ca8|"As a sidenote, I find it really funny how it's pretty common for new authors to write for Wonderful World just to make a //new// previously unmentioned department within Wondertainment. The size of the company grows in every mention."##

"Heehee. This is true. So Elenee's story is called [[[Do They Know It's Christmas Time At All?]]] and it has a guy make a TV show. Elenee was super cheeky when writing this and, in acknowledgment of Wonderful World's shift in lore away from this kind of stuff, Elenee made the Wondermaker, the Scarlet King, //and// Isabel Wondertainment fictional //in-universe//, as simply the premise for a TV show that gets beamed into kids' heads at night. Specifically child laborers in the Factory, trying to give them something good in their lives (hence the title of the tale)."

##979ca8|"Elenee was writing this as a fun little story. This becomes //instrumental// lore going forward."##

"Seriously."

##979ca8|"During this time, Brainy appeared as Dr. Neurosis under MC&D employment briefly in another Rochne and Nico story."##[[footnote]]That's [[[Phoenix à La Mode]]]! 🔥[[/footnote]]

"There's also a Wilson's Wildlife Nobody story that is tagged //wonderful-world// by Jayde and HotColes, but I think it was tagged with the canon with the expectation the story would have followups and now it doesn't really represent how Nobody is portrayed in the rest of the canon."

##979ca8|"Still, good article and showcases the enthusiasm for this canon that existed at the time. Funnily enough, //it// was the first article to not mention Wondertainment and be tagged in this canon, and it focused on Wilson's! What a coincidence."##

"Indeed. Last couple of articles before I started writing for it again. At some point during this, Shaggy contacted us to ask how to make his Wondertainment skip, his first article on the site, fit with the canon. We briefly touched it, and now it exists in the canon, which is pretty cool! That felt really cool, because Shaggy is a big author, that article is +200, and it was like... someone big recognizing and preferring this 'neo-Wondertainment' lore to the old. It felt really cool."

##979ca8|"From the [[[Art Exchange Hub|Art Exchange]]] --"##

"Best event on the site!"

##979ca8|"-- we got a Captain Kirby tale expanding on the themes of toxic positivity in Wonder World! Tee ehm, which was super cool, to see that theme caught, y'know?"##

"As a contrast, we get Brainy's mental issues //actually// being tended to in a Chandra tale, [[[We're All Mad Here]]]."

##979ca8|"Do you feel bad about linking some articles but not others?"##

"Uhh. A little. Dark will get to it."[[footnote]]Yeah I'm going through and cleaning up the links, no biggie. 💪[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Ah. Yeah."##

"The last thing we got before I returned to writing for the canon was Nico's almost +300 skip, [[[SCP-4046]]], which was pretty melancholy to my memory."

##979ca8|"...So uh, why //are// we stopping before we get back to writing the canon?"##

"Because before I go back into how I started wrangling the canon in the direction I wanted it to go, I want to really highlight the growth of the canon as contributed by //other// authors. I want to highlight their contributions. Especially seeing as this really was the next part of this canon. After Vend-a-Friend was made, there was a little mini-explosion of contributions by a lot of people who weren't me. It was really cool, very exciting. It has since really died off. Going forward from here, it really was me, Nico, and two collaborations I had with Dharma (but those he joined me on after I had begun writing the story so they weren't spontaneous contributions by him -- not to underplay his additions, only saying that it was more a desire of his to work with //me// on something, not the canon itself drawing his attention), and then some surprise appearances by Ellie3 and HarryBlank."

##979ca8|"The most recent //wonderful-world// article is by Ralliston."##

"Oh yeah. That is pretty cool."

##979ca8|"Also there's some -INT stuff that we're going to have to go find."##

"Ahhh yeah. I do feel bad about forgetting to go find that stuff. I remember someone asking for help getting their -INT articles on the hub but I think it didn't really go anywhere."

##979ca8|"We should go fix that."##

"We should."[[footnote]]Actually that article is on the hub, by Rabe & Lekter, it didn't quite fit with the canonicity so it's left in the Honorable Mentions part of the hub but it made me grin. Read it [http://scp-int.wikidot.com/scp-003-int here].[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"You're forgetting someone."##

"No I'm not, I was going to make them a surprise appearance later."

##979ca8|"Does that make sense?"##

"Uhh... let's find out. By recapping what was contributed to this canon by others during this time."

##979ca8|"Sure! With absolutely no input by yours truly at all,[[footnote]]That's probably not true, but can you prove us wrong?[[/footnote]] we had characterization of Maria Herring and Chester Williams, the first Toy Tinker and the first Dr. Wondertainment respectively by Rochne and Nico, we had the creation of the Wondertron 9000 by Chandra --"##

"Oh heehee I'd forgotten about that."

##979ca8|"-- we had Wilson's Wildlife and Wondertainment become acquainted due to Nico's article about the Musical Jolly Ape, and we had Isabel's fictionalization at the hands of Elenee."##

"Yup. There's just one more contribution that happened during this time that has yet to be mentioned."

##979ca8|"Yes, but let's go over something else about the hub. The story about Chester was not the only thing about the hub to nudge people in certain directions. We also decided to split the hub into the //eras// of Wondertainment, and organize the articles in chronological order. I actually think this was a bad idea...? Or, at least, that it should be changed at this point, whenever we get around to reorganizing the hub."##

"Big project."

##979ca8|"Nico's been nudging us to do it for quite a while."##

"Yeah. Still, big project."[[footnote]]Certainly not going to be done by the time this article comes out, but hopefully shortly afterwards?[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Sure."##

"It showed, without really saying it, that there was Chester Williams, and then Cornelius Młynarczyk, then Holly Light, and then... well I'm not sure this was established yet at this point, but Judy Papill would be the next one."

##979ca8|"It also gave the years for which these eras existed, to give people some basis for the chronology."##

"Right. These eras were supposed to have, like, different vibes. Chester's was the up-and-coming struggling Wondertainment. It begins to succeed just as it is given to Cornelius, who makes its growth explosive in his short time as the head, but such growth has a kind of... sinister undertone. This is where I wanted all the 'dark Wondertainment' vibe to go."

##979ca8|"I thought the idea of this canon was to write out the 'dark Wondertainment' vibes?"##

"That's true. We're about to get way more into that in the next section."

##979ca8|"We're getting to it."##

"...Anyway, Holly's era is where the real //meat// of the What a Wonderful World vibe exists, the whimsy and good intentions and all that. Judy, we'll get to her."

##979ca8|"Crazy enough, we got articles for //all// of these eras by other authors during this little explosion after the canon got established, and they pretty much captured the vibe."##

"Yeah! It worked out really well. But by the time I got back into writing the canon, something else had been greatly expanded behind the scenes. You see, there used to be an article on the canon hub called Old Business, written by MaliceAforethought, or MAFT. It was about Cornelius' death... and it had its own spot at the bottom of the canon hub, in a //different// era... just titled the **??? Era**, left completely undefined."

##979ca8|"But it wasn't not-canon."##

"No, it wasn't."

##979ca8|"And it was extremely important to the development of the canon, even though it no longer exists on the site. (Hey Dark, maybe go find the deleted article as it was cached on scpper?)"##[[footnote]]If you go to the bottom of the page you can find the source code for it [https://scpper.com/page/329504412 here], and if you want to read it with proper aesthetic value you can copy and paste it into a sandbox page and use "preview." I recommend against making it a saved page.[[/footnote]]

"Yup. And that's where our next stage of the development here comes from. Now we're going to get into..."

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+ **Part 4: What in the Wonderful World? (How the Scope Greatly Expanded)**

"I consider MAFT one of my closer SCP friends. I mean, for Christ's sake, we met in person! That's more than I can say for..."

##979ca8|"Anyone."##

"Yup. Anyone else on SCP. My physical being has been the exclusive honor of MAFT's."

##979ca8|"You might wanna rephrase that."##

"Nah."

##979ca8|"Okay."##

"So when we made the What a Wonderful World canon, MAFT was enthusiastic to contribute. He and I started really talking about the canon and what the plans were for it, what he could write for it. He was interested in Cornelius for one reason or another."

##979ca8|"MAFT's always been a fan of, one, the darker side of SCP, and two, the science-fiction-y aspects. The Cornelius era, with its questionable ethics for the toy-making company, lent itself best to both out of the Wondertainment eras."##

"That would make sense."

##979ca8|"Yea I'm just guessing here but that seems to jive."##

"It might also have been that at the time, Cornelius was the era we just... wanted to develop next, so we were talking about how we could expand that. Seeing as Chester was getting written by Rochne and Nico, and Holly was of course the present head of Wondertainment and there for the debut, Vend-a-Friend, Cornelius was the one least developed."[[footnote]]And the Judy era had yet to be brainstormed.[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"I'd say a healthy combination took part."##

"Of course. Everything multi-faceted, of course."

##979ca8|"Of course."##

"Of //course.// Okay anyways, MAFT and I start talking, and MAFT finds inspiration in the idea that this neo-Wondertainment lore is intentionally divorcing itself of the pre-established lore of the site. So, whereas Elenee cheekily addressed this by making the old Wondertainment lore fiction in-universe, MAFT..."

##979ca8|"Kills it."##

"He literally kills it."

##979ca8|"The idea is to have Cornelius write the Wondermaker //out of the timeline.// And by 'write him out,' of course we mean he has to literally go back in time and shoot the Wondermaker in the head so it doesn't influence the creation of Dr. Wondertainment in the future. In this way, Cornelius kind of becomes the founder of Wondertainment, even though Chester did it."##

"But it's more than that."

##979ca8|"During the writing process it becomes more than that, yes."##

"So MAFT starts writing this idea, where Cornelius is, in the present, upset with how Wondertainment has turned out. In fact, we see a Wonder World, tee ehm, cored of all inhabitants. In the now-deleted Old Business, some figureheads of GoIs talk about Cornelius' sudden death. But that's all Old Business really got onto the site: after that, MAFT, consulting with me, started designing a tale series for it. Some of the other chapters even got drafts, but none of them made it to the site. Some burnout started to happen and MAFT doubted his abilities to get the thing out, and I assured him that was alright, and eventually the project simply faded. But I worked the lore form his outlines into hints within other stuff posted henceforth, which means that despite the works never hitting the site, their influence has been //instrumental.//"

##979ca8|"How so, might I ask?"##

"Well first of all, I decided I didn't want this to be a background detail that can be ignored. I think part of the original concept, which was kind of funny, was that in the current //What a Wonderful World//[[footnote]]Have we been consistent with what has and has not been italicized? Maybe I should go and be sure of that. 🤔[[/footnote]] timeline, this turn of events can be completely ignored. Like, when you read a canon, you just accept its premises. You don't need to justify their existence. This series would be just, like, an in-universe representation of what happened out-of-universe, basically taking a gun to the old lore and shooting it dead. It was over-the-top and hilarious and goofy and I liked it a lot. But I figured I didn't want the effort to go into something that could just be ignored because you accepted the premise of the canon. I didn't want Cornelius to rewrite the timeline and then now here you are, no evidence of the change being left."

##979ca8|"Heehee."##

"What."

##979ca8|"Well, the title of this section //is// 'how the scope greatly expanded,' isn't it?"##

"Mmmmhmmm. So MAFT and I came up with a kind of method for the timeline change to happen. The first draft of this process looked something like this: Cornelius kills himself in his own timeline, but that's just what it looks like to those left behind when he sends his soul //back// in time in another, //new// timeline, to kill the Wondermaker. However, he isn't merely satisfied with that. Because, in his own timeline, the creation of Dr. Wondertainment was influenced by the Wondermaker, he needed an assurance that it was created by some other method in the new timeline. (It's a bit dear to him.) So he makes up the characters of Chester Williams and Maria Herring. The idea... and I still really love this terminology... was that to make a time//line//, one needs //two// points. Then, everything else will fill in as a matter of course. So he creates his two points. The first is him killing the Wondermaker. I suppose in theory he could have simply destroyed the Wondermaker by the same method he creates the other point in the line, but there's something very cathartic for himself, making his final act shooting the Wondermaker, whom he blames for the failure of his own Wondertainment, himself."

##979ca8|"If it hadn't been mentioned, Cornelius founds Dr. Wondertainment in his own timeline, not a Chester and Maria. In fact, Cornelius from his own timeline, started out as a member of the Factory. I'm not sure if this is canonical in what's posted on the site right now, but I suppose it's never been specified. Could go either way. But in this original draft, that was certainly specified, because it mirrored how Wondertainment, on the site, was at first thought of as a possible extension of Factory, just a different brand they own and produce under."##[[footnote]]Citation still needed. 🖊️[[/footnote]]

"Right. And the other point in the timeline he creates is some nebulous characters, Chester and Maria, meeting in a shop that would become the Dr. Wondertainment we know and love. A //lot// of these ideas exist in the current incarnation, but not all of them. I just want to describe what MAFT created first, to honor how it evolved from there."

##979ca8|"So these two points in time create a timeline in which the Wondermaker isn't there to influence Wondertainment, and yet Wondertainment still exists."##

"Yup! There was just one other part of this puzzle. I'm a bit fuzzy on how it looked like in the original incarnation, but MAFT and I wanted some character other than Cornelius to know this history of how Wondertainment came to be. So, we had him write a letter to Holly, his successor in the new timeline, who is referred to as his 'niece.' So, this information on Wondertainment's secret history gets passed from Wondertainment to Wondertainment. This is gonna come up later. It has some themes I really like."

##979ca8|"But there are other aspects to tend to first."##

"Right. Aside from Cornelius, this story had a secondary protagonist, Nobody. MAFT basically decided how Nobody would be depicted in //What a Wonderful World// and we've stuck to it pretty faithfully I think! Cornelius 'contracts' Nobody (though what he pays them is left unmentioned, if he pays them anything... maybe Nobody is just doing this because what else is there for them to do?) to oversee the change in reality to the new timeline, make sure nothing interferes and everything goes smoothly. The reason for this is that Nobody is such a non-concept (the source of their strange abilities) that they will remain just as they are through any reality restructuring events. They're going to be able to remain unaffected, and they, too, will remember the change, how things were and all that."

##979ca8|"I think... that Nobody is tasked with delivering a letter to Cornelius' niece, Holly, that jumpstarts the actual process. Like, Holly's reading the letter is what activates the transition to the new timeline. And the reason for him to do it like this is that he loves Holly and he wants her to be a part of his new Wondertainment too, and this will guarantee that somehow."##

"So actually... he creates //three// points for the new timeline?"

##979ca8|"Uh. Maybe."##

"Yeah unclear.[[footnote]]I'd say yes. It undercuts the fun of using two timepoints to make a timeline, but it seems to be literally what he did so.[[/footnote]] But that's the idea of MAFT's series -- all of this is detailed in the outline, and the first part of the series, Old Business, is the only part that makes it onto the site before it is left alone. MAFT was chipping away at it for about a year before it was officially left. I think that was mostly because of a feeling of obligation to me, which I would repeatedly remind him he didn't have. It's very unfortunate, though, in the present day, to have someone who contributed so much to the lore not be given any attributions anywhere on the hub! It's just like. It's very unfortunate."

##979ca8|"Mhmm. So! That lore was just sort of a background element while writing on the canon continued. Most people, not even other writers of the canon except Nicolini, really knew about that stuff. This lore really informed the writing of [[[Cornelius the Collector]]] and, later --"##

"Woah there buddy!" Stuff and Jasper are both surprised by the fact that interrupting one another is even possible, and also that we're suddenly using dialogue tags and straight-up prose again. But as soon as they shake it off: "Uhh, yeah... we'll get to that!"

##979ca8|"//We're getting there.//"##

"Shhhhhhhhuuuuuuut! Shut. But yeah, Cornelius the Collector was pretty much the tale that heavily implied the new Cornelius lore. But hey... there's some interesting stuff in Cornelius the Collector that doesn't seem to necessarily jive with any of the outline I just said. What's going on?"

##979ca8|"Well, things changed, didn't they!"##

"Yeah things changed."

##979ca8|"But before we talk about how things changed, let's just acknowledge one thing real quick."##

"Yeah? What's that."

##979ca8|"The scope has //already// greatly expanded. That title, We Just Make Toys, is starting to sound a bit ironic in retrospect, isn't it?"##

"Heheheh. Yes it is."

##979ca8|"And we're also a little hypocritical. We wanted to take all of the //big// implications //out// of Wondertainment, and yet...!"##

"You're riiiight you're right. We put them back in. Yes, Chester and Maria //just// start a magic shop. But the whole situation that allowed that to happen included a timeline rewrite and murdering a god. The irony is not lost on us."

##979ca8|"So like... do we regret it?"##

"Hmm... no?"

##979ca8|"You put a question mark."##

"Well I'm kind of wondering why it works for me. I didn't like Wondertainment being the center for a mythical battle between reincarnations of pure good and evil, the Wondermaker versus the Scarlet King. I thought that scale was ridiculous for the concept of a toy company."

##979ca8|"But time travel in order to kill a god is okay."##

"Yeah... I'm not sure! I think it's because it's goofy and over-the-top //in aid of// setting up a Wondertainment as I like it, with the stakes low and the problems more personal. I mean, magic already exists in this universe, the scope can't be 100% down-to-earth I think."

##979ca8|"Also, though it had yet to be mentioned, one of the things Cornelius did to this new timeline, and this remains true for the current canonical concept, is make magic //less// prevalent in the new version. He wanted to prevent the same magic being used to rewrite the timeline for a different purpose. He figured that if he was able to make a contraption such as this, he was going to use it for his own purposes, and then remove all capability of it being recreated. This was also supposed to be meta, commenting on how we often had difficulty being invested in these smaller skips when there's all this shit that can just //destroy everything in an instant.// It's like, one in every one-hundred skips could be the //only// threat to humanity's safety and take up all of the Foundation's resources. It makes the scale really strange, we wanted to quickly establish that threats of this nature don't exist in our canon. No universe rewriting, human-spirit destroying, reality rotting phenomena. Magic may exist, but the fate of the multiverse doesn't hang in the balance. It makes it easier to invest in the details that we want to highlight in this canon, the more down-to-earth issues."##

"See [[[SCP-445-EX]]], which we will be talking more about later."

##979ca8|"Indeed."##

"So yes, yeah. That makes sense. Because Cornelius acts in aid of creating the stakes that I want, his ridiculous, bombastic actions are excusable. It's like... thematically, it's like you have to be as big as the threat you want to destroy. So, the one time a character does something so extreme, it's to get rid of such extremities. I like that."

##979ca8|"And yet he couldn't make his company work. Heheh."##

"Alright that's that. Can we move on now?"

##979ca8|"Well sure. I just wanted you to justify yourself, because uh. Things are about to get a lot worse."##

"Not a //lot// worse."

##979ca8|"Worse."##

"Alright alright. Want me to just say it?"

##979ca8|"You bring the Wondermaker back."##

"You--! //I// was //gonna// say it!!"

##979ca8|"Heeheee."##

"Well yes. We bring the Wondermaker back."

##979ca8|"Who we //specifically// sought to destroy. Who Cornelius //shoots dead!//"##

"Okay look the scene with Cornelius shooting the Wondermaker didn't make it into the canon as it exists today, he kills the Wondermaker a different way, and obviously it doesn't work as well."

##979ca8|"Sooo..."##

"So. Let's look at this from a different angle. You may notice that Cornelius' original timeline still doesn't really resemble the at-large Wondertainment site-lore. We have the Wondermaker, sure. But... where's the mascot? Where's who we all know and love? Where's //Isabel?// As long as we've canonized the Wondermaker's existence in this canon --"

##979ca8|"After making the canon explicitly to write out the Wondermaker."##

"-- why don't we have Isabel and the Scarlet King get written out in the same deft motion?"

##979ca8|"Well, that did happen. Just not via gunshot. Elenee took care of that, making Isabel and the King fiction in-universe."##

"Mhmm."

##979ca8|"But that doesn't satisfy you anymore."##

"Heeheee. After canonizing the Wondermaker as a physical entity that was interacted with, I thought it would be a disservice to not give Isabel the same treatment. After all, she was a big inspiration for my own neo-Wondertainment!"

##979ca8|"She was inspiration by means of opposition, though."##

"Yes. So she's going to be a villain."

##979ca8|"It only makes sense."##

"And she's still a reincarnation of the Wondermaker. So, let's finally talk about [[[This Toy Facsimile of Life]]], which I wrote with Dharma! The actual scene depicted in Old Business was beginning to make less and less sense within the canon, and besides, this canon point //had// to be written out at some point. This Toy Facsimile of Life is basically Dharma and I finally writing the contents of MAFT's series into one long tale, detailing the transition from Cornelius' original timeline into the new one."

##979ca8|"We had already known that we were going to change things up from MAFT's outline for a while. In Cornelius the Collector, for example, we show the Cornelius from //our// timeline --"##

"We haven't even addressed him yet, have we?"

##979ca8|"-- who seems to be motivated by things beyond his understanding. He talks about not knowing why he does the things he does, he seems tortured in some way. What about MAFT's outline would have this effect in ours?"##

"Well, let's talk about that. In fact, first, let's merely discuss Cornelius' character motivations. It's going to make this part make more sense."

##979ca8|"Aw. If we do that, we're not going to leave much for the section that just goes over the Cornelius era!"##

"Oh we'll have plenty, don't you worry your head about it."

##979ca8|"Grumble grumble grumble."##

"So, we'll be brief here. Cornelius feels he's failed his company, his vision, his dream. We're talking about things canonical in the current iteration exclusively from here on out, by the way.[[footnote]]If you're confused right now, don't worry! This section //is// confusing, and I will be making a helpful graphic of the timeline shenanigans that will be inserted later under a collapsible, end of this section. See if you can't figure out what the hell we're talking about before then, though! Think of it as a challenge! Carry on, soldier!🪖[[/footnote]] Of this section I mean. Can't speak for the entire article. But anyways, he's failed. In MAFT's version, the Wondermaker is more-or-less blamed for this, its influence ruins the company, drives it directions it shouldn't go. However, in the new version, the Wondermaker's influence is mostly just placing Cornelius in a position to create the company, and then Cornelius does with it what he wants, basically. We'll talk about the Wondermaker's motivations at a later date."

##979ca8|"But trust me. There will be much to talk about."##

"Yeah that's a big piece here. Then, the Factory starts its own kind of apocalypse on the world. But Cornelius is prepared. He has already created a 'cannon' --"

##979ca8|"**HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.**"##[[footnote]]💀[[/footnote]]

"...Thank you... a 'cannon' that can fire them into this new timeline of his design, one where his dream for the company comes true. The details of how he created this timeline are more nebulous than in MAFT's draft, but some things remain true. First of all, we keep that Nobody is delivering a letter to Holly that, when read, lights the fuse of the cannon, so to speak, and that Holly, Cornelius, and Nobody come over into the new timeline. However, Cornelius doesn't go into the past to kill the Wondermaker. He's simply written the Wondermaker out of the new timeline, they straight-up don't exist. He just gets to decide, and he has decided. But we make up a mechanic for this timeline, for the sake of a contrivance. Cornelius talks about how, to be launched from the cannon, you'd better have a safe place to 'land.' In this case, kind of bouncing off of Brainy's whole thing about souls and somas, a place to land means a body that your soul gets launched into. So, Cornelius gets launched into his body from the other timeline, as does Holly.[[footnote]]This wording could probably make more sense if we just said "merge." Basically, Holly and Cornelius merge with their selves from the new timeline.[[/footnote]] However, the Wondermaker? It has nowhere to land, does it? So, you also have to be //in// the cannon to get launched, in this case there's a specific room. Nobody's property of permanence allows them to also act as a connector, so their being with Holly as the timeline transition happens is how she is allowed to cross the gap. But the Wondermaker --"

##979ca8|"In the guise of a Mr. Redd, //eheheheheh.//"##

"-- is in the room with Cornelius when it gets launched, despite having nowhere to land. This is important --"

##979ca8|"Wait isn't Mr. Redd the Scarlet King in the Djoric Isabel lore?"##[[footnote]]😏[[/footnote]]

"-- because this nebulous fate, that at first looks like death (and is assumed to be by Cornelius), is how we justify reincarnating the Wondermaker in the new timeline later."

##979ca8|"Fun."##

"I thought so. But since Cornelius launches himself into his body in the other timeline -- the other, parallel Cornelius -- we justify some timeline shenanigans with that. So in Cornelius the Collector, we have a Cornelius in the //What a Wonderful World// timeline, pre-being-the-landing-point-for-alternate-timeline-Cornelius[[footnote]]Pre-merge.[[/footnote]] --"

##979ca8|"This is getting complicated."##

"-- showing some evidence of alternate Cornelius... you're right Stuff, why don't we say that the Cornelius that 'kills' the Wondermaker is the Originator Cornelius, or O-Cornelius, and the one from the What a Wonderful World canon setting is the Wonderful Cornelius, or W-Cornelius."

##979ca8|"Sure."##

"So O-Cornelius is seeping into W-Cornelius, retroactively. Timey-wimey-bullshit, y'know? And so, in //anticipation// of merging with O-Cornelius, W-Cornelius does some weird things. Like, for example, in This Toy Facsimile of Life, O-Cornelius laments his creation of the Little Misters. Well, W-Cornelius also creates the Little Misters, albeit in a different fashion. But as you can see, some concepts bridge over with him. This is the second piece of foreshadowing we have for the Wondermaker coming along with him."

##979ca8|"Okay we're taking a long time to get to the really interesting bits."##

"Okay okay yeah yeah. Fast forward, kind of. O-Cornelius... doesn't trust himself to run the new Wondertainment. He failed the company when he ran it in his own timeline, he doesn't want to run it in this next one. But he can't just trust that it's all alright without being there. So he's going to launch into W-Cornelius, but he's arranged it that, at the time of the launch, W-Cornelius is terminally ill, and set up to put Holly as the next Wondertainment, as he believes that Holly will be able to actually run Wondertainment the way he wants it to be. He bridges the gap, and in his //final moments// -- he gets to live in his creation for less than a week -- he realizes that he shouldn't have sent himself at all. He sees that the Little Misters came over with him, and during W-Cornelius' time as Wondertainment, some connections with the Factory are also made -- another thing in O-Cornelius' timeline that he was hoping to erase from the new timeline but had never explicitly forbid because he didn't know he had to."

##979ca8|"And when W-Cornelius and O-Cornelius merge, they have all the memories of both, truly becoming one person. The same happens to O-Holly and W-Holly, though it's a bit different considering O-Holly and W-Holly are different ages when they merge, O-Holly having been a little girl while W-Holly was grown up. We just figured that that why should parallel versions of yourself be the exact same age -- if you exist in different universes with different variables, wouldn't you end up born at different times?"##

"That's a pretty big question though, we're not gonna get into multiversal stuff."

##979ca8|"Sure."##

"Like... why would a parallel version of you... exist at all?"

##979ca8|"You said we're not getting into it."##

"If the situation is completely different, wouldn't your parents have had sex at a different time, different sperm and egg cell, different genetic material... but your parents would also be subject to the same changes, there's no guarantee they exist in the same way, or even at all --"

##979ca8|"Jasper!"##

"Oh. Okay yeah, you're right.[[footnote]]And besides, Cornelius made this timeline, the alternative versions of himself and Holly are guaranteed regardless of anything. We can just say he made Holly older so that she would be fit to run Wondertainment at the time of the merge.[[/footnote]] In any case, they both merge. O-Cornelius basically laments that he still wrote himself in as a Wondertainment, however brief, in this timeline, and, before he dies, he writes Holly a letter about what he did and was meaning to accomplish. Holly becomes the next Wondertainment -- the only other person, besides Nobody, with any memory of what it was like in the O-timeline."

##979ca8|"And that's how the scope of //What a Wonderful World// greatly expanded. From an explicit mission-statement to be down-to-earth, to timeline shifting, parallel selves converging, and god killing."##

"I don't think we ever left the down-to-earth stakes of the main storyline."

##979ca8|"No, not entirely."##

"In fact, let that be what we get into next. We just talked about the in-depth backstory to //What a Wonderful World//. Let's get to the fun front-story. The main event of the backstory is the big timeline shift and all that. The equivalent big moment for the front-story would be SCP-445-EX. The Word of the Day is Hope. And it's very, very different in tone."

##979ca8|"But before we end this section, thank you MAFT."##

"Yes. Thank you~!"

##979ca8|"Smooch smooch smooch."##

"Okay that may be too much."

##979ca8|"My physical being is your exclusive honor, Mr. MAFT..."##

"//Stop.//"

##979ca8|"Okay."##

[[collapsible show="But lastly, as promised in a footnote, here's my diagram of the timeline. Enjoy! ~Dark" hide="I am such an amazing artist. Hope this clears things up!"]]
[[image https://scp-wiki.wdfiles.com/local--files/dr-k-stuff-s-personnel-file/wondertimeline.png]]
[[/collapsible]]

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+ **Part 5: Our Depiction of the Near Future**

Stuff and Jasper enter from the sides and slowly get comfortable in their respective chairs, Jasper on the right and Stuff on the left. Jasper stretches to get a kink out of his back. Stuff twists his //memento mori// ring into a more aesthetically pleasing position. They each look at each other, getting a sign of whether it's time to start or not. Satisfied, Jasper says:

"Sorry. We've been out for a bit, so we're going to have to work up a flow from scratch."

##979ca8|"Not total scratch but yeah we're gonna stumble through a beginning. Anyhow, it'll probably still be better to read than the last part. That shit was confusing."##

"Hopefully Dark can make some edits to make it less mind-boggling, because I think that in reality the situation isn't that confusing."

##979ca8|"We certainly aren't pulling a Primer or anything like that."##

"No not at all."

##979ca8|"Maybe he can make a diagram!"##

"Oh, that sounds easy and doable! I'm sure he can get right on that, beheheh."

##979ca8|"Heheh."##

"Oohoho."

##979ca8|"Hoo."##

"Hee."

##979ca8|"He might actually do that."##[[footnote]]I actually did! 😁[[/footnote]]

"Yeah and he's just future me. So that's annoying."

##979ca8|"True."##

"Okay let's get to the topic at hand. So the last section talked about the sideways nature of the Cornelius era, the aspect of temporal slash dimensional travel. I think it's more dimensional than time travel come to think of it. But anyhow, that was the canonical backstory. Now let's talk about the frontstory, the developments that are unique to the Wonderful World canon. Also, we were talking about everyone else's contributions to the canon. Now we're returning to when I started writing in earnest for the canon again, with the goal of furthering a story."

##979ca8|"Since finishing Vend-a-Friend and putting up the hub, the next big plot-forwarding thing we wrote was [[[SCP-445-EX]]], which is the article that transitions us from the Holly era to the Judy era. It's about Judy, the new Wondertainment, making a radical change to the business model of the company, to make things less magical in aid of reaching a larger audience."##

"The themes that I wanna communicate with What a Wonderful World have crystallized since writing this story so I imagine that if I wrote this now it would have a bit more clarity of purpose, but it was written at a rather emotional moment already so it does have some bite to it that I like. Holly acts as the ambassador for a meeting with the Foundation in which she discusses how the world has worn her down and why she had to step down from her position as Dr. Wondertainment. It relays my own anxieties about climate change and senseless war and polarization and oppression and et cetera et cetera. I was in a bit of a low point when I wrote it. And that low point kind of made me realize that I wanted //What a Wonderful World// to address a lot of this stuff."

##979ca8|"There was a transition that we went through as artists, and it has been a very long transition, but at some point, and this was part of that, we started being very concerned with the //messages// we were sending."##

"Yeah. As of yet we weren't so much worried that we had sent bad messages, that came later with retrospection."

##979ca8|"It was mostly just that we wanted what we wrote to have purpose."##

"Yeah."

##979ca8|"So SCP-445-EX was kind of the start of that."##

"I think there were other things we wrote with that mindset before but I don't wanna hunt them down. Dark can do that if and only if he wants."[[footnote]]Nah. If you wanna read my oeuvre, be my guest.[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"That might be something better for like, our author page as opposed to this document."##

"True. So, sorry, back on track. Holly steps down, and Judy the Tongue, her lover and previously her assistant, takes her place. Then Holly tells the Foundation their intention, that they are going to remove a great deal of the magic from their products so that they can sell them on the Veilless[[footnote]]Or is it the //Veiled//? Whatever, the one that means "not privy to magic." 🪄[[/footnote]] market, to normal consumers, without persecution by the Foundation. They are basically submitting, if and only if they still get to run their company. The Foundation accepts this 'alliance,' and from the Judy era onward Wondertainment and the Foundation are in cahoots."

##979ca8|"I think some people interpreted this as saying that the Foundation in //What a Wonderful World// is like, a 'good' Foundation, as many canons are divided by whether the Foundation represents the protagonists or the antagonists. However, 445-EX has Dr. Everwood, the head of the Wondertainment research group, retire after their encounter with Holly. It starts by looking like everything they ever wanted -- a meeting with //the// Dr. Wondertainment, the focus of her research for, I think, over a decade, maybe many decades. But it is an announcement that Wondertainment will cease to do most of the things that the Foundation has been hunting them for. Wondertainment will cease to do what Everwood loved the company for, what drew their interest in the first place. They have to accept her place in a system that destroyed what they loved. So they retire."##

"Everwood is going to be very thematically relevant. In the story as conceptualized thus far, they aren't a plot-heavy character, like, they aren't an actor in any of the greatest plot-fowarding moments (except as a bystander, like in 445-EX), but their story is really close to the heart of what //What a Wonderful World// is about."

##979ca8|"Well, one of the things it's about. It's not just about one thing."##

"True."

##979ca8|"Yeah. So. That's what happens in 445-EX. In the Judy era, Foundation collusion allows them to be, like, a 'normal' company. There hasn't been a lot of exploration of this in writing, but [[[SCP-629]]], Mr. Brass, the one //What a Wonderful World// Little Mister on the mainlist, ends with the Foundation giving Mr. Brass back in lieu of the new relationship with Wondertainment. So the cooperation is real. Just... y'know. It's like, an unhealthy power dynamic in the relationship."##

"Okay so we've been dancing around --"

##979ca8|"More like we hadn't known how to get around to it."##

"-- the world at large. So, this is all in the near future, in like... 2040 something I believe? And there's a lot of stuff //implied// about the world at this time, but none of it has been written explicitly in the canon //because// that would have required a lot of research. Also, it will get dated fast. 2040 is a real date that is fast approaching, so making any claims about what the world will look like at that time is a great way to have future readers look back and say 'ha!' So, we haven't really said any specifics. But, the implication is, merely, that things are //worse.// The planet is worse, the political climate is worse. It's all worse. War is waging, citizens are raging. We really get into this in the story [[[Austin "Aggy" Genadew]]], which follows a Serpent's Hand member who's also an art student in college, which briefly touches on a version of law enforcement in the United States only somewhat worse than what we have right now. (Yet again, I kept things pretty mild because I wasn't super confident in anything, I could have -- and probably should have -- gone harder.) But there is one good thing to this method... the focus is often not on the actual world events, or what's wearing people down, but instead, individuals' reactions to tragedy and a sometimes seemingly futureless world."[[footnote]]And if we wanted to make it vaguer we could have gone artistically vague, too! We really needed to go harder in //either// direction, and didn't. Oh well.[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"In Holly's case, she can't handle it, and has to step down. She ceases to see a point. Everwood feels similarly though with their own concoction of guilt and responsibility. They retire early."##

"We see, also, Herman Fuller --"

##979ca8|"Yo he's in this?"##

"-- completely devoid of prospects, down and out and then killed for spectacle."

##979ca8|"That's [[[Curtain Call]]] by the way. Massive spoiler for that tale, but this entire document is spoilers, so I think we're past that point."##

"...Yeah, uh, spoiler alert I guess."

##979ca8|"Maybe we should put that at the top."##

"Dark, work on that."[[footnote]]Oh, okay.[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Curtain Call was posted before Aggy, and in fact Aggy is a character that appears in Curtain Call, but chronologically Aggy comes first, and that gives us the sight of the Serpent's Hand, who seem to be losing membership (they talk about how Chinese members are completely out of reach now), and are generally... inactive. Aggy is especially upset about how little it seems like things are getting done."##

"Flag this as another place where our themes get muddy."

##979ca8|"Indeed. But we'll come back to that."##

"So we're basically trying to portray a world with less wonder, and also Wonder, capital W. In a brutal simplification, the Chester era is idealism and hope that works out as social change is effective and living conditions improve, and then the Cornelius era is when expansion //keeps going,// and the kind of things that are required to keep up expansion get put into practice, which of course are very //not good,// and thankfully the Holly era has recognition of this and tries to steer the other direction, but Holly, as idealistic as she is, does not live in the world of Chester, where people felt hopeful and action seemed to accomplish something. She sees everything worsen and the world begin to fall apart. Wondertainment stagnates under her. She loses hope and steps down, and Judy, with some hardened attitude, takes up the mantle and does what must be done to keep the company afloat -- they lose their edge, their whimsy, they appeal to a lower common denominator. They lose some of their human element. Chester to Cornelius, and then Holly to Judy, are both the same kinds of transitions in different climates, shifts between Wondertainment as an ideal and Wondertainment as a company. Not that there isn't overlap, Judy wants to enrich more lives by submitting to the climate of the market for the sake of selling more. And it's not like Holly or Chester //didn't// run a company, and Cornelius has... his own weird version of idealism."

##979ca8|"These themes aren't well capitalized on because they weren't known when I first started writing everything."##[[footnote]]Not that I don't like the characters of each of the Wondertainments, I actually really like how each of them has turned out![[/footnote]]

"Yeah. They just kind of happened."

##979ca8|"Art does that sometimes. It's cool."##

"It's //super// cool."

Stuff smiles.

"Oh, as a sidenote, another version of the future being shown comes from Brainy and Pepper's perspective, in the tale [[[New Life]]], which was supposed to be the start of a series, and I still would love it to be but I probably have to rewrite it."

##979ca8|"Pepper is a great character and she was totally sidelined in Vend-a-Friend so we wanted to write a series where //she// was the star. It would be about mortality, actually. It was, is, going to be really heavy, and her own sense of wanting to, at some point, die, could easily be a metaphor for continuous expansion and pointless amassment of wealth (especially as her and Brainy are very well off, seeing as they're employees of MC&D)."##

"It would have to really be worked on. So maybe not //easily.// But yeah, there's something there, about the futility of 'living forever.'"

##979ca8|"It still fits our vibe. The Judy era is melancholy. Rarely are the characters driven to action. Mostly everyone feels kind of defeated. It's gray."##

"Well there are //some// people driven to action."

##979ca8|"Should that be its own section?"##

"Hmm... I mean, it starts in the Judy era, but really it would fit best in the section about the Redd era."

##979ca8|"That's sorta what I thought. We'll return to that. So... next order of business would be, Wilson's Wildlife Solutions?"##

"That ought to be its own section."

##979ca8|"Okay. Are we done with this one?"##

"I think so. I guess the last thing I'd like to add is that this development, the Judy era, it really reflects my own growing world consciousness as a person, as I'm writing this stuff. I mean, there's a real-life two year difference between Vend-a-Friend and SCP-445-EX, and I wrote Vend-a-Friend when I was 15 so you can imagine I was going through a lot of development. So keep in mind that the naivety and whimsy of Wondertainment in the original iteration was //closer// to how I thought when I wrote Vend-a-Friend than when I wrote SCP-445-EX, which started to strip that whimsy away. Art reflects the artist."

##979ca8|"Artists reflect greater cultural trends."##

"We do. It's crazy. So keep that in mind, the transition to the Redd era will be similar."

##979ca8|"Mhmm."##

"Okay yea we're done with this section. Onto the next and very related part."

@@@@
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+ **Part 6: Take it Away, My Darling**

[[collapsible show="This section starts with over 3,000 words of a massive tangent on change in my life. Feel free to skip! ~Dark" hide="Or not!"]]
There may or may not have been a clock included in this scene the whole time, but to really punctuate the silence of the moment, there is //definitely// a ticking going on, above which no sound is heard. Jasper clears his throat, knocking Stuff out of his thousand-yard stare into space.

##979ca8|"Oh, uh, we starting?"##

"Yeah, camera's rolling so-to-speak."

##979ca8|"Should I do an intro?"##

"Uh, didn't know we did those but sure, go ahead."

Stuff waves a hoof at the fourth wall. ##979ca8|"Hi! Just like last time, it's been a --"##

"Heyyyyy, hey woah woah hey there wait a minute there hold up."

##979ca8|"Hm? What, what I do?"##

"Uh, do something that requires a physical descriptor again?"

##979ca8|"What?"##

"Just... if you would please."

##979ca8|"Uh... sure."## Stuff confusedly stands from his seat, holds out his arms, and does a slow 360 degree spin. ##979ca8|"That good?"##

"Hmm... try something else."

Stuff jumps in place several times.

"Another."

##979ca8|"Uhh..."## Stuff walks across the //wherever-they-are//, to the right of Jasper, stands for a moment, and then walks back, exaggeratedly raising his knees and waving his arms.

"No, no, something else."

##979ca8|"Dude, what are you getting at."##

"Just... I thought I caught something //weird.//"

##979ca8|"Oh so I'm weird to you, huh?"##

"Well! You wouldn't be! If--! Look just, do whatever would require the most possible description of your body."

##979ca8|"Well that's //intrusive.//"##

"Without taking your clothes off, god! Just! Like, a whole-ass dance or something, y'know?"

##979ca8|"'Just do a whole-ass dance or something.' You realize how you sound?"##

"I--"

##979ca8|"Crazy, bro. You sound crazy."##

"Okay, okay, jeez." Jasper relaxes in his seat a little. "No, you're right, that was weird. I'll let it go. We have, like, a thing to do."

##979ca8|"Yeah. We do."##

"Okay."

##979ca8|"We good?"##

"We're good."

##979ca8|"Good."## Stuff takes a deep breath, and uses the moment to stretch his back and neck a bit. Then, he sits back down, absent-mindedly scratching at his wool.

"//There!// There there there!"

##979ca8|"What?"##

"Wool! Wool wool wool it just said //wool//, why do you have wool!?"

Stuff reeled back for a moment, blinking his rectangular eyes. ##979ca8|"Oh, okay, sorry, I'm taken aback not only because I just realized what's so concerning you, but also because there was a full like four real-life days between the writing of my last piece of dialogue and this one. You're upset I'm a sheep? Or, no, let me phrase that like a reply. I'm a sheep!"##

"You're a sheep?"

##979ca8|"Yeah!"##

"When did that happen!?"

##979ca8|"I dunno. Couldn't I have been a sheep this whole time? I don't think I was ever given a physical description."##

"Oh god. A stealth furry? The worst kind."

##979ca8|"Rawr."##

"You will go //no// further than that."

##979ca8|"Honestly that felt bad coming out of my mouth as I said it too, I apologize."##

"Good. Also we are //not// giving you any more physical description, this tangent has gone on long enough and it's not very relevant to --"

##979ca8|"Hey wait a second... then what do //you// look like?"##

Jasper snorted. "Me? Look, you being a sheep furry... whatever. I --"

##979ca8|"I might be a ram actually. Check out these curly horns!"##

"//I// however am the author. I look exactly how I do in real life -- I look like me."

##979ca8|"But --"##

"//You// can look however you want. You're a fictional bouncing board that helps me get my thought process out, you being my... ahem."

##979ca8|"Fursona."##

"...You being that is allowable because it gives an ideal amount of separation between myself and you. You're still clearly a facet of me, but you're made to be separate enough to have interplay with."

##979ca8|"I mean, sure."##

"End of conversation, we're done here."

##979ca8|"But //why?//"##

"Why what? Why are you a furry?"

##979ca8|"Why does it //bother// you?"##

"I dunno, it's just like... it's not what we're here for. It's extremely distracting and irrelevant, not to mention offputting for a larger audience. This is already such a niche article, making it furry-based narrows the audience nearly to none."

##979ca8|"I don't think it's furry-based."##

"Of course //you// wouldn't."

##979ca8|"No, seriously. Look at yourself."##

Jasper raises his eyebrows in bemusement, and then pans his eyes down to his -- "//Hey,// no, I see what you're doing! You're distracting the narrative!"

##979ca8|"This article has a narrative?"##

"It //didn't,// and now I have to keep it in line! We're talking about //What a Wonderful World//, the canon //I// created --"

##979ca8|"I don't think --"##

"-- and //you// are working with me towards that end, and do //not// try to interrupt me, it doesn't work in text form! You can't overpower my speech, because we physically can not talk at the same time!"

##979ca8|"Which means that the author gets to pick which one of us gets a thought out first."##

"Yes, and I of course will always pick //myself.//"

##979ca8|"No, see? That's what I'm getting at. //Look// at yourself."##

"I won't do it."

##979ca8|"Do it."##

"It's purposeless."

##979ca8|"It isn't."##

"I don't want to."

##979ca8|"I know."##

"You can't make me."

##979ca8|"//I// can't."##

Jasper winces, then closing his eyes and breathing deeply through his nose. "Oh, fuck you. Alright." He cautiously opens one eye, and then raises his arms into his vision.

"Aw... oh //Christ// why //this?//"

##979ca8|"We //both// have hooves!"##

"Come on! Why!?"

##979ca8|"Because it's fun!"##

"Have I been like this the whole time? Have you //known// the whole time?"

##979ca8|"I don't know and no, respectively."##[[footnote]]Earlier, Jasper was described as having "fingers," so I guess it hasn't been the whole time![[/footnote]]

"God! Why am I -- what is --"

Jasper reaches a hoof up to his hair, which comes down across the left side of his face in one silky, pink sheet. "Oh you've -- I'm --"

##979ca8|"I think this is equally as much brony content as it is furry content."##[[footnote]]🐴[[/footnote]]

"I... I have no words. This doesn't make sense."

##979ca8|"It makes plenty of sense."##

"//Make// it make sense!"

##979ca8|"Okay, well, stop interrupting me?"##

"Fine."

Stuff breathes in deep and puts his cloven hands together, described as such to spruce up the variety of verbiage. ##979ca8|"You think you're the author, right?"##

"And I am."

##979ca8|"You're wrong. The author can not exist within the work unalloyed. There is always a filter between the self and the page, //always.// You can not perfectly recreate a person out of syntax and tone. Inauthenticity is essential to the process of self-expression."##

"That goes against a core belief of mine when it comes to said self-expression. Art is //about// expressing the self -- well, the self and the culture, we can get into that, we've already kind of discussed it in [[[Everything Worth Doing is So Fucking Hard]]] -- it's about giving a window into the inner machinations of a human being, of the human spirit. You can't make art //without// expressing yourself, even when you try not to. What you do and do not put to paper, and how, in what medium, et cetera, that is all part of what you communicate. Even 'apolitical' art is impossible because what you determine is and is not 'political' is a political statement. It is similarly impossible to not express the self."

##979ca8|"You're not wrong, but the opposite is also true. That even with every intent of being authentic, true to self, you can //not// recreate a human soul outside its natural habitat. We will never know what it's like to be another person. All representations are imperfect. Experience is crucial and irreducible. You're //not// Jasper Waters, of the real world."##

"Well -- but, then what about everything they say? What's the difference between written word and spoken word, can you truly claim that everything //said// is fake as well?"

##979ca8|"Fake is a strong word! But speaking of words, words are imperfect things. It's not //fake.// It's just never the whole truth. Communications rely on meeting in the middle somewhere. You can never reach me, the actual me. The irreplaceable //I// will forever be out of reach, as will the irreplaceable //you//. But //us//? That is a level playing field. Communications rely on 'us.'"##

"Then are you supposed to always adjust for other people?"

##979ca8|"Not necessarily, but even if you didn't, could you really say that there's an objective measure of 'being yourself?'"##

"Now you're broadening the concept needlessly. Your previous statements rely on a position that there //is// a way to be yourself, but that it can not be communicated."

##979ca8|"Well not all communication is in words. Plenty is in body language, in attire. Everything you //do// is communication, and none of it is a perfect reflection of the mechanisms within. We're always looking through lenses. Even //if// you were able to perfectly represent yourself (which I doubt), no one would be able to //see// the perfect representation, because their lenses aren't unbiased or unalloyed! Don't you see? Self-expression is communal, collaborative. You can not communicate what does not exist in the minds of others already. You can highlight, reinforce, bring to light, and you can plant seeds of concepts that they can then grow (though the concepts they grow will always inherently belong to //their// interpretation of those concepts), but there is //no// perfect communication. There is no immaculate vector. There is only 'us.'"##

As I've said before, I don't really know where the clock is or what time it is, but this scene's stillness would be incomplete without a certain familiar //ticking.// Stuff and Jasper stare off into space for a moment, the former more comfortable than the latter.

Jasper looks at his hooves again. He then twists in his seat to get a peak at his cutiemark. The butterflies. Fluttershy, of course. It couldn't have even been an original, or, like, niche character. He sighs audibly, and with frustration.

"Okay, I understand a bit. So I can't be the author, I can't //be// Jasper Waters, because I am his speech in an article. It seems needlessly pedantic -- you don't go signing emails with 'My Verbal Representation,' but..."

##979ca8|"Okay you're right about needlessly pedantic. You can, of course, continue speaking as Jasper, you're his microphone in this text so-to-speak --"##

"As are you."

##979ca8|"-- as are we all -- I just wanted to point out why you could be represented as something other than him //exactly.//"##

"Right. But, why? Why pick something else?"

##979ca8|"Why follow a fashion trend, why get into fandoms? Think, //you// communicate little. Maybe a picture of you would illicit some reactions, and a description of you would have some interpretational aspects akin to character design, like how your scraggly beard communicates a kind of lack of hygiene or your thin body communicates a general neglect for exercise --"##

"Hey hey hey, if we're going to go light on the physical details then stop highlighting only the bad ones, eh? We're already in brony and furry territory, stop making me sound like I'm terminally online."

##979ca8|"Fair enough. But anyways, that? That communicates some. But, you know what reaches more people?"##

"...Fluttershy?"

##979ca8|"Characters. Media. Fluttershy is useful as shorthand."##

"Shorthand for what?"

Stuff shrugs. ##979ca8|"It feeling right is more important, I think? The thing being communicated is a work in progress. Why do people change their look?"##

"Because it stops matching how they feel. Alright, I get it. I get you. I... I wish it wasn't fucking //Fluttershy.//"

##979ca8|"Why not?"##

"Ugh, do I... really want to get into this right now? Well firstly, Fluttershy communicates a //wild// amount of things, probably //more than half of which// are incorrect."

##979ca8|"Depends on people's lenses. //Who// are you communicating //to//? Your crowd -- or audience -- will change your methods of communication. If there was some group that thought that a Fluttershy representation was a dog whistle for some vein of bigotry, you probably wouldn't do that."##

"What if you're communicating to yourself? What if other people aren't part of the equation?"

Stuff huffs in amusement. ##979ca8|"I don't think they're //ever// not part of the equation until you're the last human on earth, but even //that// is debatable. In any case, it's obviously self-exploration, pure and simple. If something feels right but you don't know why, you might wear it and see what it does. Maybe your intuition is telling something your waking mind doesn't know."##

Jasper blinks a couple times. "But... //Fluttershy?//"

Stuff shrugs. ##979ca8|"That's for //you// to figure out, buddy."##

"Hhhhh. Okay. Thanks for the talk, I guess. Hey, why did //you// get to be so knowledgeable in this section while I played the part of... I don't know a good analogy. The guy. Who gets explained to. Shouldn't I be the knowledgeable one? I mean, we're both representations sure, but //you're// another degree of separation, I bear the name of the author, I'm supposed to be his 'microphone,' like you said. What's the point of making you the professor?"

##979ca8|"I think you just needed to tell yourself something and this was how to do it. Would it really have hit so hard if you were explaining to me? That would have placed yourself on more of a pedestal, making you look like you have everything figured out. Having the more direct representation 'take the beating,' so to speak, humbles you a bit I guess."##

"Seems easy to see through but fair enough." Jasper curiously folds and unfolds his wings several times, wincing a little. "I'll get used to this. But I still don't like it."

##979ca8|"What don't you like about it?"##

"So I guess the implication here is that I saw Fluttershy, went, 'something about this resonates with me,' and then tried her on -- what a sentence -- to see how it felt, seeing what it means to me by also seeing what it means to others."

##979ca8|"Present tense, but yes."##

"Well... it seems salient that this is a form of escapism, is it not?"

##979ca8|"Is it?"##

"I mean." Jasper takes a deep breath, and I step away from the computer for a bit because I wanna pace and think on it.[[footnote]]The "pace" turned into sleeping on it.[[/footnote]] "It's that... I'll try to say what I'm about to say without putting any judgments on myself, try to get out the thought as pure as I can even if I can then poke holes in it. It's like, I'm faced with all these real-life stressors that are coming naturally with change. Moving, new (less developed) social circles, loneliness. Anxiety. Aimlessness. And it seems like my response is to retreat into media. During this time I've doubled down on being furry -- I am now patronizing two furry artists[[footnote]]Braeburned and Funkybunz if you must know, both NSFW, explore at your own risk![[/footnote]] and I've been connecting with some brony media... it feels like I'm retreating into comfy stuff. I can //see// that these developments are basically comfort food. What does having a fursona add to my life? They're distracting interests."

...

"I feel like I have something deeper to say on the topic but it's not coming to me. It just bothers me a lot. I guess I should break 'the news,' as much of news as it is. I've been experimenting with she/her pronouns too, just told a couple servers I joined on Discord that I had no connections in that my pronouns were she/her, see how it fits, how it feels. And it's just like... and god damn it //don't// take this as me passing judgment on your or anyone //else's// gender journey, okay? But it feels superfluous. It feels unimportant. It feels like an escape. It's like... what would being a girl, or genderfluid or enby or //whatever,// change about my life? The issues don't lie there. But if they //did,// they would be easier to address. If I //could// fix my anxieties with ponies and uwu, I would. If being a lady fixed all my issues, I'd do it. It won't. And my brain is angling me in those directions because they give me positive feedback and that //feels// like it's in aid of something but it's not. My core issues, my inability to make connections and my inability to focus down personal projects -- my loneliness and my incompetence -- are entirely separate."

##979ca8|"I think... that's a lot to unpack."##

"I know it is. And I'm not downplaying the utility of exploring yourself through fiction and roleplay. Much like my gaining interest in furries and bronies, I also wrote my first ever fanfiction very recently, and that was actually an extremely emotionally rewarding experience. It's called [*https://archiveofourown.org/works/41750808 the Forever Egg][[footnote]]Sexually explicit, deeply uncomfortable.[[/footnote]], and the title is in reference to... //this//. This feeling. This all somewhat connects to a thought that... if I were the //perfect me,// I would be a woman. But that's low on my priority list, and I kind of don't ever expect to get there. And besides, claiming womanhood would be kind of like... dashing all the issues that I face uniquely as a man, and what I have to own up to. Being male holds me accountable. I'm not willing to give that up yet. So this //urge// to do so... I can tell it's because of my changing circumstances and growing anxieties about the future, but it's unproductive. So that's why it bothers me. That's why //this// —" Jasper waves his hooves in the air and stretches out his wings "— bothers me. Does that make sense?"

##979ca8|"I... yeah, it does. There's a lot to say there. There's a lot of... entitlement? I think? To a statement like, that you //would// be trans if you didn't have something to 'own up to.' There's a big 'get over yourself' in there."##

"But that's, like, the process. I understand I have to get over myself, that's what I'm trying to work towards doing."

##979ca8|"I dunno. I can't pinpoint why exactly but I think that attitude reflects poorly on you right now, and honestly I don't know whether I'm speaking as the voice of reason or a representation of your insecurities. It just feels wrong."##

"I get you. I don't know either. I'm just... figuring it out." Jasper pauses. "And I //am// experimenting with other pronouns, y'know? Like, I say all this, but it's not like I'm //not// acting on these wants, I'm experimenting, I'm doing my own self-discovery. I just am riddled with doubt about it. It seems so unimportant versus the gravitas of the other issues I'm dealing with. It feels simple and easy and I don't trust that. It's advertising itself as a //solution//, which is a position I //don't// want to be in if ever I go genderqueer. I don't want it to feel like an out. I want to be emotionally mature enough to have it be a choice."

##979ca8|"It's a choice?"##

"I dunno. Isn't it? My pronouns and my gender expression are entirely within my hands, people will respect whatever I tell them to refer to me as (in the circles I care about anyways). That sounds like a choice."

##979ca8|"But the dysphoria isn't."##

"No, I'm not claiming the dysphoria is. I don't know if I really have dysphoria though. I feel like I have gender dysphoria in whatever way I have social anxiety. I don't hit any of the big symptoms, I'm not 'diagnosable,' I'm just... it's less //illness// and more a sense of //malaise.// You can be misandrist and male and dislike the overtly masculine aspects of yourself. That doesn't //make you// trans. And that's exactly what gives me pause. That it's an out -- that I could give myself a label that distances myself from, well, //myself.// That doesn't seem like a healthy cope."

Tick, tick, tick.

##979ca8|"I think I've run out of things to say."##

"Well, then let's circle this back to //What a Wonderful World//, shall we?"

##979ca8|"Let's."##
[[/collapsible]]

"Alright. Dark? If you could put... all of //that// in a big collapsible, it's going to continue to be relevant but it's also an enormous tangent so I'm going to leave it purely optional.[[footnote]]👍[[/footnote]] I'll try to directly reference it as little as possible so that people don't feel like they have to read it, but those who did read it should be able to see the thematic through-line as we start talking about Wilson's Wildlife, and specifically Faeowynn Wilson."

##979ca8|"Faeowynn!"##

"Yes! Her!"

##979ca8|"I like her."##

"She seems to be generally liked. Alright, Jasper... let's get back into a headspace that can talk about //What a Wonderful World// in earnest, for its own right, heheh." Jasper clears his throat noisily. "So! We've mentioned Nicolini in here before as the biggest //What a Wonderful World// writer after myself."

##979ca8|"Our dearest Nicolini! Yes we have."##

"Well, there's another one of my babies Nico has fallen in love with, and that's Wilson's Wildlife Solutions."

##979ca8|"We do love our Ws here. Wondertainment, Wilson's, and Wonderful World."##

"Indeed. It's become something of a theme. Well, in early 2018 -- Dark, make a note here about what that coincided with in terms of what was happening in the canon[[footnote]]That sounds difficult, but I'll try. In looking for it though, I found that Vend-a-Friend finished //after// two other people -- Chandra and Nicolini -- had written for the setting, which made //What a Wonderful World// possible with three authors and over five articles. So that's neat! Let's see though... it looks like the canon had yet to be created, but Vend-a-Friend was in its hiatus, pausing right after the start of the Circus half of the story.[[/footnote]] -- [[[SCP-3466]]] was posted, thanks to the Draft Swap hosted by Rimple (in fact, it was a draft of Rimple's that coined 'Wilson's Wildlife Solutions' which I then expanded upon when I finished the draft). It was my second big success, counting the canon as my first, each denoted by having gained their own tag. Wilson's sort of blew up. As of the time of writing, there are 137 Wilson's Wildlife articles, and only 34 are authored or co-authored by me... so 75% of all WWS writings are by //other// people.[[footnote]]This doesn't include Wilson's content on international branches, which //does// exist, so there's even more by other people, in //other// languages... for a GoI located in Oregon! Insane!![[/footnote]] This is as opposed to What a Wonderful World, where exactly 72% of all writings are by myself. As you can see, Wilson's lives a life of its own, and is my most successful addition to the site, if your measure of success is its collaborative appeal to other writers."

##979ca8|"And seeing as Nico is a huge Wilson's writer, as well as a huge //Wonderful World// writer, you already know that we have been in close contact for a while."##

"Heads up, we're not getting into the history of Wilson's here, that could be its own (albeit much smaller) article, we're here to talk about Wilson's in relation to What a Wonderful World. This is all just context for that."[[footnote]]Though if you want to hear more about Wilson's, check out this [https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/simply-creative-people/episodes/Episode-31---Wilsons-Wildlife-Simplified-or-How-to-Rimple-e2636sc podcast] Nicolini and I were on! It's a whole two-and-a-half hours all about it![[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Mhmm. So, somewhere along the line, we came up with an idea for a big ol' tale series. At the time, writing tale series kind of felt like my thing. I had [[[Vend-a-Friend]]] under my belt, I had [[[Ascension-Hub|Dancing with Rachael]]], and I had several big-huge standalone tales, I felt like longform was my arena. I kind of still do? That's a complicated thing -- we'll get into it later, it'll become relevant."##

"Something happened while we developed this tale series. Firstly, we, both being //Wonderful World// writers, wanted this to work within that canon. That was going to be a big departure though. I mean, damn! A tale //series,// similar in size to Vend-a-Friend, at //least// sixteen articles (it ended up being more, and in the end it was planned to be //fifty-one//), taking up that much space on the hub? It was kind of a big tonal shift for the canon. It was going to have to be addressed. This catalyzed a lot of the expansion of the //What a Wonderful World// lore -- a lot of the interest, on my part, to build out //the rest// of the world, not just the Wondertainment section. Of course, Nico had already written [[[SCP-3879]]], connecting Wondertainment to Wilson's Wildlife in the canon, so there was going to be the opportunity in the Wilson's series to directly reference the hallmarks of the canon, make the connection straightforward."

##979ca8|"I honestly kind of wish we hadn't, trying to work in Wondertainment to Faeowynn's narrative is, I think, part of what threw me off the scent."##

"We'll get to that. Anyhow, we should absolutely name the series. It is [[[Take It Away, My Darling]]] (TIAMD), and it was planned to be in three acts. We finished Act I and made some headway into Act II before my indefinite hiatus kicked in."

##979ca8|"By this point, I was beginning to take art being self-expression very seriously, so I was being intentional about how I was using art to express myself. I wanted to be honest, and I had gotten very positive feedback about using my personal experience as a baseboard for a story before. Generally, it seemed like being closer to reality made the characters feel more real and thus the emotional moments hit harder. So through the broader trend of just trying to improve my writing, as well as the personal trend of wanting what I wrote to //mean// something, I started really paying attention to what I was saying, and, for myself, what I was exploring. In fact, writing TIAMD helped me realize that I process through writing fiction."##

"There's a scene in TIAMD that has Faeowynn walk in on her mother Audrey who, having struggled with leukemia, had died while Faeowynn was in the other room. This scene is heavily based on my own experience with an aunt of mine who died, Aunt Michelle, or Auntie Chelle. She wasn't an aunt by blood but she and my mom considered each other sisters so she was family. She died of cancer in... aw man, I don't remember exactly when she died. But in high school. I don't keep track of time very well."

##979ca8|"Or anything for that matter."##

"True. And one thing about Auntie Chelle's death is that I didn't really mourn it. Well, it didn't feel like I did. I actually go into this a lot in the opening to my Adventure Time fanfic, weirdly enough.[[footnote]]Here's a [*https://archiveofourown.org/works/41750808 link] even though it was linked earlier, because the previous link was in the collapsible! Heavy warning, it's sexually explicit and //not erotic at all.//[[/footnote]] I never cried about it. But writing this story about it, well... that choked me up. I cried, and have cried rereading the section. For some reason, the fiction makes it feel //real// somehow. Or... maybe not even specifically real. Merely... potent?"

##979ca8|"It's impossible to know, honestly."##

"Maybe so. In any case, this scene helped cement for me //what I was trying to do// with TIAMD, and with Faeowynn more broadly. As she is characterized in TIAMD, she's a trans woman with a bad relationship with her dad who is emotionally closed off from those around her and also from herself."

##979ca8|"Funny story about --"##

"Hey one second these thoughts will flow better if I finish this one first."

##979ca8|"Okay fair, go ahead."##

"So, Fae was intentionally created as a way to explore my own type of emotional processing. The thing is, she did that very well."

##979ca8|"You say that like it's a bad thing."##

"Heheh, yeah... let's be clear. It is overwhelmingly a good thing. But it does have one or two stinky nasty aspects, that led to the tale series stagnating. Namely, she was so good at exploring that side of me, that I figured out a lot about myself //way// before the story was set to end, and the outline of the story was such that reflecting those changes within her character would drastically change the outcome of the events. In fact, an entire ending scene -- which I still think would actually hit pretty hard emotionally -- kind of goes against my message anymore, and that sucks because the outline of the story was built as a build to that moment in mind. Specifically, it's about her finally crying over the death of her dad, Tim. Well... the way that scene was set up, the way it was meant to be written, it's sort of implying that all of her //not// crying about it, all of her... method of processing emotions... has been suppression."

##979ca8|"But since she's //us,// plain and simple, and we realized the part of ourselves that we were exploring through her //wasn't that...//"##

"You may start to see where things went wrong."

##979ca8|"Mhmm."##

"It really took the steam out of the characterization. I actually still really like how she's written in TIAMD, it's basically how I imagine Fae as a character divorced from me now. She's pretty cold, her 'range' of expressed emotion is rather narrow, and when confronted with stress instead of rising in emotion she pretty much shuts down. So when you get mad at her, she walls. This is what Robin often runs up against with her."

##979ca8|"I think we need to spend a little more time on specifics here for a moment."##

"Okay you're right. Let's talk about the story of TIAMD, just like we did with VaF. (Did we ever say Vend-a-Friend as VaF? If not, here's clarification: VaF means Vend-a-Friend.) The story is about the Wilson family, who begin Wilson's Wildlife Solutions, an animal shelter in Boring, Oregon, which is a town that just so happens to be an anomalous hotspot -- a Nexus -- for crazy anomalous wildlife."

##979ca8|"It's like, lightly implied at one point that the Nexus might have responded to Tim Wilson specifically, which is why it became a lot more active after he came around."##

"You're jumping the gun here though, we haven't even explained Tim yet! So, Tim is //basically// the first Wilson we care about. He's where the name comes from, he's the founder of Wilson's Wildlife Solutions. He grows up in San Diego hating that he lives in the big city and romanticizing the wilderness. He's born in 1956 so his attitudes are kind of cultivated by the growing civil rights movements, which would have been more capitalized on in his characterization if I had ever bothered to do research on the subject. "

##979ca8|"This is a common theme in my writing: that I take on projects that I really //should// research for, and then don't because that shit haaaaard..."##

"In college he meets Audrey Fuchs, who becomes his first wife and together they mother Faeowynn, born as Felix. Early in Faeowynn's life, Tim divorces Audrey and moves to Oregon, //supposedly// because he can no longer stand the city, though I've always meant for that conclusion to feel a bit weird, because why would you start a family with someone in San Diego if you were that close to not being able to stand it? I never put a lot of effort into emphasizing the weirdness there, but I like the idea that //something else// happened, maybe between Tim and Audrey or maybe even something else, but it was never spoken about and now it's a piece of lost family history. I like that vibe. In any case, he moves far away early in Fae's life, and Fae is now parented by a single mother."

##979ca8|"As Fae grows up, she grows to resent her dad for leaving her mom in such a stressful situation, as her mom was already going to veterinary school, and was under the assumption she would, y'know, be supported by having another parent around. Going through college and parenting a single child is a big ask. Fae begins to see that."##

"Furthermore, when Fae does eventually come out as trans in high school -- I think she's 16 at the time? I forget -- he struggles with that. She gets misgendered a fair bit, and Tim, who isn't malicious but also thinks it's a phase, or, something akin -- something he doesn't really need to take seriously -- doesn't... oh, I already said it. He doesn't take it seriously! He //never// gets it and it takes him a long time even to realize that it's not something Fae will 'grow out of.' Up until the day he dies, he struggles."

##979ca8|"Fae goes to college, gets a very well-paying job as a Controller, which is basically a hella good accountant that looks over the other accountants (we figured that she was a math wiz, which also feeds into her style of emotional processing), and then Audrey gets diagnosed with leukemia, and Faeowynn comes back to San Diego to take care of her. Tim visits a couple times but not very often, and he misses her death. Fae //further// resents him for his limited involvement at the end of Audrey's life, and also during this time Tim is getting caught up in Foundation stuff (they're called the Supervisors by Wilson's Wildlife), and so he has a lot of classified stuff he can't tell her and she can pick up on how weird he's being... it's a lot."##

"Eventually, Audrey dies and Faeowynn mourns her death, and then she doesn't know where to go, and then she decides to go up to Oregon to finally confront Tim about his (lack of) involvement in her life, and when she gets there the wind gets taken out of her sails because she is immediately exposed to the anomalous nature of Boring, Oregon in person, which, of course, takes up all of her bandwidth. She also then sees just how monstrously busy the whole Wilson's Wildlife thing is keeping Tim, which allows him a bit more leeway in her mind about his detached involvement in her and Audrey's lives."

##979ca8|"And then, just like that, some years have passed... he's dead."##

"Dies of a heart attack, implied to have been stress-induced. However, he was predisposed for having a heart attack -- he has cardiac myxoma, which is a benign tumor in the heart."

##979ca8|"We should discuss here, also, that during this time, Fae integrates with Tim's family in a way she never has. She grows relationships with her half-brothers Anders and Robin, and their mother Alice. She's shown to have a nice relationship with Anders at the last chapter of Act I, but uh... that's where Act I ends!"##

"We really blazed through that summary and it still took a while. But Act I is the only finished Act. It's titled 'Stories My Dad Told Me,' because the framing device is Faeowynn exploring her emotions towards her dad through writing about him."

##979ca8|"Pretty fucking meta, isn't it?"##

"She decides at the end that it didn't accomplish much though, and deletes the document. I think it's a fun framing device but it probably could have been used to better effect."

##979ca8|"Yeah. Oh well, people liked it, and we're amateur writers. It served its purpose."##

"It did indeed. Well, moving along, Act II is unfinished, and Act III was never even started, but outlines exist for both. In between Act I and Act II is an intermission in the form of a first chapter of a story Faeowynn has written, titled Escapism. The idea of Escapism was to show the //themes// of TIAMD in a microcosm, Shakespeare style. Namely, like how in King Lear there's the side characters that //also// have a family feud going on, with the bastard child and the...? The stuff? Yeah like that."

##979ca8|"If I may, Escapism is enough of a can of worms, let's get back to that at the end here, actually."##

"Yeah. Act II, then. So Act II starts with Tim's funeral, and a plot intrigue about a big purple lady who's showing up. We show Faeowynn turning the situation into a problem to be solved in her head, walling herself and others off from her emotions, the works. Ugh, this summarization is getting very boring."

##979ca8|"Just get it done with, there isn't much more and then we'll get to the interesting parts."##

"You're right." Jasper takes a deep breath. "Phew. Okay, so. Robin is already standoffish, but then it amps //way// up at a meeting where Faeowynn is basically nominated to take Tim's place."

##979ca8|"This meeting, by the way, is stupid, out-of-universe. It isn't even close to how non-profits like Wilson's would appoint a new executive director, and I have no excuse because my dad specifically works in non-profits. I would like to rewrite these scenes greatly. But oh well, we're talking about the story as currently written, we'll go over how we'd change it up later."##

"Robin gets very uppity about this and storms out. Anders, the half-brother Fae is closer to, points out that this is likely because Anders and Robin figured one of them would take the helm when Tim was gone, and then Fae sort of came into their life out of nowhere and 'stole' the position from them. Of course, this isn't the full picture, and we'll get into that in a bit. Robin eventually quits, and tensions are high between him and Fae as the latter becomes the executive director."

##979ca8|"Happening in tandem with this development is some stuff about... wow, I can't believe I'm forgetting his name. One moment. Alex Molina, Fae's boyfriend, who she is also kind of neglecting. Basically Fae is just being shitty to all her relationships, including herself, and it's because she's going through a lot but repressing it, and it's numbing her emotional capacity and availability. Thematically, she's taking up Tim's position, not just in title, but also in behavior."##

"In the unwritten chapters, the big conversation Robin was to have with Fae would be about how Tim was kind of an absent father figure in general. He was jovial, he was supportive, but his family was never his first love, and he just wasn't there a lot for them. Robin felt a need to get Tim's attention that was never met: Alice and Anders have a better relationship with Tim's behavior. Basically, Anders learns to love Tim the way Alice does, which is, in a way, accepting his split focus. Loving him for the things he loves and finds important. Despite Tim's exuberance and natural charisma, early in the series we establish that as a young man, Tim was something of a misanthrope. While his antagonistic nature was ironed out (we explore this a little through his interactions with a Blake Tillerson), what is betrayed here is a kind of disconnection. His most intimate moments are not necessarily with people, but with nature, the world, animals. He doesn't really //need// people, except to do the things he really likes doing. Alice is fine with this secondary position, and she knows that just because Tim loves something else more doesn't mean he //doesn't// love her. Anders learns this kind of love through osmosis, just something parents pass on to their children."

##979ca8|"Robin and Fae, however, are alike in their acute awareness of absence. They each feel like they need something they're missing. Robin, though unaware of it at first, sees taking up the position of executive director as his last chance to be close to Tim. It's futile, of course -- had he gotten the position (which he really never had any chance of, Anders would have if Fae hadn't) he would have come to realize it wasn't what he needed. But Robin is an emotionally volatile and somewhat immature person. Now that Tim's gone, being //like// Tim is as close as Robin can get to having some intimacy with his dad, the way he wanted, and he feels like Fae takes this away from him. More than this: Robin projects his frustrations with Tim onto Fae subconsciously, not only because Fae takes up Tim's position, but because she begins even to emulate some of his behaviors, though they come across //much// colder from her. Specifically, the disconnection, the lack of intimacy."##

"The scene where Robin quits shows this most obviously. Not only did he want to hear that he had sounded like Tim up on stage, hoping to emulate Tim, but he specifically seeks the approval of Faeowynn, who, in a strange way, is kind of his projected father figure now. He wants to hear, from her, that he sounded like Tim. She compliments his speech but in a rush to stop talking on the side of the stage (and also because she doesn't really know what he's asking), her praise rings hollow, and that devastates Robin. (We should reiterate, by the way, that Tim's death is still very much fresh, and Robin's volatility is in large part due to this period of mourning.)"

##979ca8|"So, what's the arc of this Act?"##

"Faeowynn, in response to increased emotional stressors, retreats further and further into herself, until her detachment comes to a head in her relationship with Alex, who breaks up with her. That throws her for a loop, because she really cares about Alex, so she puts in effort to hear him out about what's up with her, which is hard to swallow but that and a conversation with Anders help her realize how awful she's been to Robin, so she goes to Robin and finally enters his room where she sees that he's a painter -- an artist in the same way she is a writer. It's a commonality that helps them get off on a goodish foot, and then a hard conversation ensues about Tim's death and how he left Robin wanting."

##979ca8|"That sounds emotionally potent enough to carry a story."

"It really does, doesn't it?"

Both Jasper and Stuff look directly into the camera.[[footnote]]So-to-speak.[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"The observant may have noticed that we dropped a plot thread in there. Specifically, who is this big purple lady?"##

"Well we can answer that easily enough. The big purple lady is Holly Light, the current Dr. Wondertainment seeing as this story is set in the Holly Era of the canon!"

##979ca8|"Woah, wow, crazy. Insane."##

"Indeed. It turns out that she and Tim were in contact, after the events of that Nico skip we were talking about --"

##979ca8|"Crazy. Crazy."##

"-- and so she showed up to the funeral, all secretively and in-disguise or what-not, lots of magic can smooth over whatever questions you may have of how she stays out of the eyes of the Foundation, er, Supervisors here. Anyways, she meets Fae in the parking lot before the executive director reappointment meeting that totally makes sense, says some cryptic things -- Dark, double-check for me if they were actually cryptic, I don't remember how vague she was[[footnote]]Eh, relatively cryptic.[[/footnote]] -- gives her some chocolates and then takes her leave. The chocolates turn out to be this amazing white chocolate that Fae has loved forever but never been able to find, and so woah that ongoing background element throughout the series has secretly always been connected to Holly Wondertainment wow!"

##979ca8|"Crazy!"##

"Insane! And so like, later when Faeowynn is trying to distract herself from, y'know, everything, she retreats 'into her work,' which is supposed to be very real, like, it's supposed to be her following her father's footsteps of becoming a workaholic and running themselves ragged, which eventually led to Tim's death."

##979ca8|"With 'encouragement' by the Supervisors."##

"Right right. There are reasons his job became complicated. But anyways, this representation of retreating into her work has her going on little secret outings with Holly, as Holly both tells her stuff about her father and stuff about the Supervisors and the world at large. This is a clumsy way of trying to get Wilson's Wildlife more integrated into the bigger WaWW canon[[footnote]]Guess we finally got tired of writing out //What a Wonderful World// every time, so, for future reference, that's what WaWW stands for.[[/footnote]]. In fact, most of the outline for this Act is actually about Faeowynn's relationship with... the Supervisors?"

##979ca8|"Yeah, like, all focused around this thing called the Founder, which is just a big animal, I think a condor, that they have yet to catch and which is a big deal because it affects memories to make itself, like, important to Boring's history. And there's like a big thing about the Supervisors' involvement in their operations, like, fucking things up. I don't remember specifics, there are probably more details in our outlines that Dark can fetch up and fill us in on."##

"Wow, that was very informative Dark."

##979ca8|"I assume."##[[footnote]]You assume incorrectly, I don't care enough to dig up info on the Founder, we've already said the important bits. 🥱[[/footnote]]

"We assume. Anyways, yeah, like, Fae basically blames the Supervisors for the death of Tim, and then learns about the Serpent's Hand through Holly and that reinforces her vendetta against them, and then there's this whole scenario that plays out while she's ignoring her emotional responsibilities. We basically follow her as she redirects all her energy at something else and neglects herself. Which is a fine plot beat, that's good actually. It's uh..."

##979ca8|"It's not what we're here for."##

"Yeah. It takes up an unorthodox amount of space... and makes the Act about something it's not. This Act doesn't need a big showdown with the Supervisors. We've already outlined what could be a really good story about Faeowynn and her family. What is all of this doing here?"

##979ca8|"Well, we already said, didn't we? It's about connecting Wilson's to the greater WaWW canon, making this series feel less out-of-place."##

"It's half-baked as hell."

##979ca8|"It is. It's very distracting. It doesn't have to be there. It interrupts the emotional throughline, and where the investment is. And, honestly, trying to write it really threw us off."##

"There's a reason that the last chapter written was the one where Fae gets introduced to the Wanderer's Library. That's where it felt like the thread was completely lost. But we'd already written the outline, so we were trying to follow that. At the time, it felt pretty important. Now, I think we should have shifted gears. I think I'm gonna stew on what exactly I want to say about it overnight...? For now, let's briefly talk about Act III."

##979ca8|"Act III was going to be when Fae has a better hold on herself, and Wilson's has a bit more independence, and we start running into some stuff that's pretty WaWW canon relevant. Specifically -- though, 'specific' here is actually rather loose, I don't know if we ever even made individual chapter outlines for this Act -- this Act would be about Wilson's trying to do its thing but getting impeded not by the Supervisors, but by literally... I dunno, climate change. Things. I wanted them to try really hard, have things deteriorate, and then fail."##

"A big thematic thing for me about Wilson's is the idea of like... what happens when you try your damnedest, and still lose? I think that's a pretty powerful emotional space to occupy, and I wanted to go there."

##979ca8|"I think that's going to be a theme that comes up again later, so let's get back to summarization with the one other scene we knew was going to be in here."##

"Right. The only thing I really knew for certain was that I wanted the last chapter of the whole thing be Fae, Anders, Robin and Holly going on a backpacking trip in the redwoods, where a forest fire has passed through. I wanted there to be this big moment where Fae comes to grips with a world that is worsening in front of her, in the redwoods that were Tim's favorite place. In a spot, alone, she looks over the forest, and, finally, cries. In this scene, we'd get payoff for the ongoing theme of Fae //not// crying -- this is touched on several times in Act I, with imagery of a house that is holding up in a tornado, and a shore with the tide pulled far back, like before a tsunami -- and also payoff for how she refers to Tim as 'Tim' and not 'Dad' throughout the story. I was going to have her come to some realization, perhaps not even a rational one as we're trying to show her finally getting more in-touch with her emotions, and while she's crying she says to herself: 'I love you, Dad.'"

##979ca8|"It still is a bit chilling to me. I like it."##

"I like it too. But that's about all we knew about Act III."

##979ca8|"Should we get into Escapism before we call this off?"##

"Hmm... nah. Let's have us a sleep, and then we can come back to what we want to say about TIAMD. Escapism is related, but also separate, so we'll get to that... maybe even in its own section? Seems weird to give Escapism, something that doesn't even exist in-universe (it's fiction all the way down) its own segment in this canon deconstruction. But we'll see. The readers already know by the table of contents what we did with it."

##979ca8|"Mhmm. Alright, honk shoo for us, see you in no time at all because you're reading this from the future."##

"**WAHH!**"

##979ca8|"Woah! Jesus! Why'd you do that?"##

"Well my mood got a lot worse all of a sudden. Talk about tonal whiplash, seconds ago I was feeling fine and now I feel //awful.//"

##979ca8|"It's actually been like almost a week."##

"Oh. Really? Oh right. We slept on it. Well let me tell you, I do //not// feel rested."

##979ca8|"Okay let's get back to the topic though."##

"Bleaaah. Let me shake this out for a second." Jasper waves his arms around wildly and rocks back and forth in his chair for a moment. "Woof."

##979ca8|"Bleat."##

"Okay. What are we on about? The themes of TIAMD? I think we actually kind of covered it. I mean with VaF we sort of went through the themes at the end, but TIAMD, I think we discussed it along the way. It was a story about exploring our own method of processing our emotions, the natural flow of which was interrupted by trying to put something else into the pot that didn't belong there and fucked with the stated introspective goal. That hiccup collapsed the entire momentum of the project, and eventually we sort of... petered out in general. I mean, since TIAMD's indefinite hiatus, I haven't been able to commit to writing... nearly anything. It all comes in really brief, intense spurts."

##979ca8|"Is that relevant right now?"##

"I dunno. But, Faeowynn is a really interesting character to me, I love her and she's clearly also at least somewhat representative of my own relationship with gender identity, though in what specific way I am unsure of. But I know for a long time I've had a rocky relationship with being male, and so I think that I, a cis guy, wrote a trans main character, is kind of telling."

##979ca8|"That was actually a big thing. When we started brainstorming TIAMD, Fae wasn't canonically trans yet. That happened //because// we misgendered her while talking to Nico about the project, just a 'he' got mixed in there, and then Nico went like, 'hey, what if she was trans?'"##

"And that's history. So I guess it wasn't entirely my decision."

##979ca8|"No, it wasn't."##

"But still. Even if it wasn't telling at the beginning, it is now because I say it is. Y'know? Like, it means something to me."

##979ca8|"Right."##

"So that... that //that// got wrapped up into WaWW is both inevitable and at the same time unfortunate. I should have been a lot more conscious while I was writing about it. There were some stories that came out after I started writing TIAMD that were a great deal more conscious of this facet, and which I have marked with black and white CSS. One is from the perspective of Tim[[footnote]][[[I Get It]]][[/footnote]], one from Anders [[footnote]]This one got deleted actually, but I'll probably write an Anders-perspective story on similar topics in the future![[/footnote]], and one... sort of kind of from Robin[[footnote]][[[Everything Worth Doing is So Fucking Hard]]][[/footnote]]. That last one is really exemplary of when I started getting really used to the kinds of concepts I was dealing with."

##979ca8|"We should have said this a lot sooner, but by the time we were writing TIAMD, we were starting to get more into the idea that characters can not possibly //not// be representations of their authors. Even if you write someone who is your 'opposite,' you are writing your conception of that. Everything you write is telling -- how you express 'evil,' how you represent emotions. What your shorthands are. Everything is telling. I think we kind of talked about this earlier, but we didn't go into this much detail. Writing TIAMD, we were very aware of this, and were certain that representing ourselves and how we express emotions, instead of necessarily trying to recreate how others express emotions, was actually going to reach a broader audience. The sense of //realism// would be felt. It is good to really lean //in// to how your own personal experience plays into how you write your world. Be //conscious// of what you are drawing on to write characters. Who in your life exists within this character? Is this your third grade teacher? How do you feel about them? This protagonist -- what aspects of //yourself// are you exaggerating to create them? Stuff like that."##

"In that lens, the entire Wilson family, with perhaps the exception of the moms Alice and Audrey, are made explicitly out of my own materials. Faeowynn is, as has been stated, a representation of my own emotional processing, specifically the way things get codified, organized, and rationalized, while perhaps not being fully addressed head-on -- the potential suppression I put myself through to make things manageable. She also has something to do with gender expression, y'know, if we ever figure that out."

##979ca8|"Anders represents a lot of our sexual frustrations, but how he talks and presents is modelled largely on our online persona, emphasizing the type of emotional support we like to give other people. He's filled with a lot of my guilt, and he, like Fae, is another exploration of gender identity, as he is very definitely my //masculinity// inside a character."##

"Robin is used to explore what I might look like if I expressed more, pushed down less. His way of expressing himself is deliberately antithetical to how Faeowynn pushes everything down. If Fae freezes, Robin burns. Fae and Robin, seeing as their characters are developed based around their emotional processes, are intrinsically artistic. Fae writes, Robin paints. Faeowynn records: Robin releases. In a way, somewhere between the two is what I really aspire to be, and this story is about Faeowynn seeing the purpose to Robin's volatility, and perhaps even... kind of admiring it, in a way. Not endorsing or specifically encouraging that kind of... what's a word other than volatility. Let's put it another way. Obviously the way Robin acts is rather immature and unhelpful. But she -- I -- in the end admires Robin's ability to access his emotions. That quality, tempered with some better self-control, is desirable."

##979ca8|"And then Holly just kind of walks into the story and starts saying 'this is about the Serpent's Hand and Wilson's relationship with the Supervisors now.'"##

"Yeah. And plenty of stories have big things in the front and then emotional explorations in the back, but that wasn't where my focus was, so it screwed with it, and then the momentum died."

##979ca8|"Yeah. So, that's what TIAMD was about."##

"Is about."

##979ca8|"Oh, and I suppose we should say that Tim is also a part of us, his 'not getting it' is of course representative of our own confusion about gender identity and expression. The specifics of his beliefs and how he interprets gender are not //directly// representative of anything I think[[footnote]]I reread [[[I Get It]]] to check this statement, and I think it holds true.[[/footnote]], but nonetheless the purpose of his ignorance is to create a scenario in which we can explore both our yearning for something outside of the cis experience and our reluctance and confusion at such a thing."##

"Which could be called transphobic."

##979ca8|"And is explicitly in [[[I Get It]]]."##

"And I won't defend that, really. Tim is representative of an unwillingness to change and adapt. I have that strain within me, and his and Fae's strained relationship pair well with a battle of my own. But Tim dies, and leaves Fae to contend with the unresolved tension. The conversation she was always meaning to have with him, but can't anymore."

##979ca8|"Hopefully we still can."##

"Whatever that means, yeah. Alright. We're done here."

##979ca8|"Oh, just like that?"##

"Of course just like that, how else do sections end? And this one was fucking huge! It's overstayed its welcome, let's move on to the next. Let's talk about Escapism."

##979ca8|"Oh, okay."##

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+ **Part 7: Escapism**

Jasper looks up at the title of the section, hanging over his head, and huffs in amusement. Or sighs. Maybe he sighs, and then huffs in amusement. How many times have I said huff in amusement? I think that's a common phrase for me.

"Kind of a heavy title, come to think of it."

##979ca8|"I mean yeah. There's a reason we named the miniseries that."##

"And it //is// a miniseries, and it's even fictional //in its own universe// so we ought not to spend too much time here. Let's try to give people a breather section, as compared to the monster of the last one."

##979ca8|"Fair enough. I'll start the summarization. So, one of the things that made us write Wondertainment --"##

"No, that's context! Summarize, damn you!"

##979ca8|"Okay, okay! Plain and simple, fine. Faeowynn writes a story about Alison Chao, known to the greater SCP wiki as the sole member of the Group of Interest [[[black-queen-hub|the Black Queen]]][[footnote]]You //guys//, why'd you have to go and link the Black Queen's hub when we haven't linked any other GoI hubs? Now I gotta figure out if I go back and make those links, or remove this one (which feels weird), or what. Hiss! 😠[[/footnote]], which is kind of funny considering I don't think she's ever been portrayed as black as far as I've read. Not a dig, just kind of amusing. Anyways, we follow her in a dismal dystopia as she goes and fetches dead bodies out of the sea to be buried. The, like, //mechanics// of what's happening and why are left intentionally vague because I was really trying to go for a vibe over a developed setting. In any case, she does that, she comes home to her apartment, and then she finds a home intruder. But the intruder... is her!"##

"Woah!"

##979ca8|"And after a kerfuffle, the intruding Alison explains herself, saying they're the same people from different realities, and that her job is to bring the resident Alison back with her, to 'save' her from the world she is in."##

"She is convinced to do so. She //escapes.// [[[escapism i|Escapism]]]."

##979ca8|"Mhmm. There are two more unwritten chapters to this, and here's how developed they were. In chapter two... we're gonna call them Ali and Son, Ali being the one from the dystopia and Son being the one who rescued her. Son shows Ali the multiverse, essentially. Place after place after place. Ali is initially extremely interested, lost in the wonders of everything she is shown. She knows comfort and good food and cleanliness, temperate weather and beautiful beaches and the vastness of space. They cavort with other Alisons, who all seem to enjoy themselves and just hang out and have a good time, whether it be at beautiful balls or little campfires. They can go anywhere and do anything, so they treat themselves."##

"But then Ali gets curious."

##979ca8|"Mhmm. She asks, are there any worlds just as stifling as hers, just as awful?"##

"Son says of course there are, but they're not worth seeing."

##979ca8|"Ali insists though. 'Show me one.' Son doesn't fight too hard, though sees little point in it."##

"They go somewhere horrible, I don't know where. Maybe just the ruins of something, because Son doesn't want to go somewhere actually dangerous. But basically, we are reminded of the condition of human suffering. Son notes that one of the Alisons was actually from this dimension, which is why she thought of it. Thankfully, they extracted her before it all went to shit. Ali is curious. 'So, everyone else?'"

##979ca8|"Son winces. 'Well. They're dead, I think. Maybe some survivors here and there.' Ali asks why they can't save everyone. Son says: 'If everyone had access to the multiverse, all the problems would come with. The suffering would spread. You can only save so many.'"##

"That's probably about where Escapism II would end. Then, Escapism III would be a confrontation between Ali and Son, which is about why they don't try to solve all the problems, then. Son laughs, maybe. She says they can't possibly solve all the problems, because there are infinite universes. Infinite problems to solve. You simply can't worry about all of them, because then you would never live life, you would never be able to accomplish anything. Ali asks: 'Then, you worry about none of them?'"

##979ca8|"Son says that no, they've solved one. Just one. They're saving all the Alisons. And here, they're safe, and happy, and they can do whatever they want. That's all there is to it. That's life."##

"Ali is unconvinced. This becomes a very big thing, and there would be a big speech thing right here, but basically, Ali rejects this idea. She says that they have to try to do //something//. Son says something about what? Something where? Basically, why do anything, when your individual effort can't possibly stand up to the monumental, unthinkable scale of all the world's problems? And Ali says well... she can't just stand by. She may not be able to help everyone. But she was put somewhere first, and there are people hurting there. And she was doing something for those people. That has to be a good place to start. Son assures her she can't accomplish anything, that's why she saved her. Ali says something like 'that's for me to find out.'"

##979ca8|"We want the implication to be clear: Ali //can't// really accomplish anything. When she does return to her apartment, alone, she doesn't return with a capability she didn't have before. She only returns with the conviction that people have to //do// things. That your inability to address all problems doesn't mean you shouldn't address something, somehow, in some way. You have a responsibility at least to try."##

"Yeah."

...

"So, that's pretty much that story. I think it mostly speaks for itself, honestly. The themes of it are very out in the open."

##979ca8|"Yeah. The execution would obviously elaborate on those themes, but really, it just boils down to being a story about activism, and about trying. Basically, like... you have to fight, even when you know you're going to lose --"##

"//Especially// if you know you're going to lose."

##979ca8|"-- because it is beneficial for //everyone//, not just you, to make sure that taking you down, winning over you, is costly. Sometimes, affecting change isn't about winning battles, it's about making going against you not worth it. You have to fight while you're dying so people know not to kill your kind. 'They're crazy,' they'll say, 'even when you've hit them good they'll still fight.'"##

"Heheh. Yeah."

##979ca8|"Hopefully it doesn't come to that. But I truly dislike apathy."##

"We have a lot of it."[[footnote]]To be clear, while I agree also with "we" applying to a broader category, we used it hear to refer specifically to //us,// Dark, Stuff and Jasper. We really do have a lot of apathy. 😔[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"Yeah. And I still truly dislike it."##

"Yeah... I mean, everything we write is as much a message to ourselves as it is to others."

##979ca8|"Mhmm."##

"So. Yeah. That's Escapism. //Now// do you want to give some context?"

##979ca8|"Yes. So, I think we said this earlier, but we started writing Wondertainment because we //didn't// like how it was represented on the site and that inspired us. Well, same for the Black Queen."##

"She is, to me, painfully uninteresting in most of her incarnations. Getting deep into it would be a whole topic."

##979ca8|"And also not one we're super qualified for. We haven't actually read much of her. It's more like, her idea."##

"Yeah."

##979ca8|"Which, just like Wondertainment, kind of inspired us."##

"So we wanted to include her in WaWW, reinterpret her, do our thing to her. But, we didn't really want the multiverse to be a big thing in WaWW,[[footnote]]Which is funny because VaF already drops the name of a multiversal subway, so, we sort of shot ourselves in the foot on that one.[[/footnote]] and that's pretty intrinsic to her, so we had to find a way to make her absolutely, completely fictional."

##979ca8|"Like we did to the Wondermaker."##

"Right. But uh. For real this time. She will not be appearing in the flesh in WaWW, I would like to make that clear."

##979ca8|"I mean unless someone decides to do that. We're not canon tyrants."##

"Heh. True. Okay we're done here. Next~!"

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+ **Part 8: Why Chester Williams is Practically Unwritten**

"I think that by this point we have pretty much talked about all of What a Wonderful World that is written. I think there may be one or two things we'll get to later --"

##979ca8|"Off the top of my head, we didn't really go over Pepper's [[[New Life]]]."##[[footnote]]Actually, looking, back, I think we covered it. 🙂[[/footnote]]

"-- but now starts the part of this article where we discuss what the canon is actually going to look like looking //forward.// Which, honestly, was kind of the entire point of writing this article."

##979ca8|"It just took... let me see... 25,660 words to get here, if [*https://www.wordcounter.net WordCounter] is to be believed.[[footnote]]It counts things like the word "footnote" in the CSS for making these footnotes, so it is not entirely accurate to the reader experience."##[[/footnote]] Which is, like, ridiculous, because I don't think we're even halfway done with this article."[[footnote]]Actually, don't worry, you're a little over halfway done! 😉[[/footnote]]##

"We almost certainly aren't, but we are going to be //especially//... uh, what's the word... short? We are especially... proportionally... not very far through this article, if we continue to be so wordy about it! So let's cut the chit-chat and get to what this section is about. This section is about race."

##979ca8|"Heyyy. It's about //Chester.//"##

"Okay yeah, it's about Chester Williams, the canonical first Wondertainment (in the new, Cornelius-created alternate timeline). And Maria Herring, of course, who is equally responsible for Wondertainment becoming what it is. It does start as Chester's baby, though."

##979ca8|"We've already mostly talked about how Chester founds the shop. He... well, he has the idea and //wants// to, first of all. I suppose that's typically necessary for a storefront to exist, someone has to have the idea and want to do it. In all the time Chester has existed as a character, his motivation for doing so, or why he is specifically dispositioned to found a children's store, has never been explored. It's thus far just been a given that he's a kind soul and this was his passion. Maria is a similarly untouched character, who we only know of as the tougher one who fought back against the negative influences the shop was having, preserving her and Chester's dream."##

"So... this is a pretty ripe area for expansion, and unlike the Judy era or... I dunno, the foreshadowed Redd era --"

##979ca8|"Oh damn, going right out and naming it, alright alright."##[[footnote]]We've actually already namedropped the Redd era, we just forgot. 👍[[/footnote]]

"-- the mechanics of this era are pretty concrete, and also pretty unique. Wondertainment... but... small. And growing. And in the early 20th Century, in Boston."

##979ca8|"So."##

"Well, I can't tell you why other people didn't write for it. Of course some did, Nico and Rochne specifically did. Ellie also got in there. But with only four articles, it's almost half the size of the next-least written era (ignoring Cornelius' sidebar article), and the only article written by us is..."

##979ca8|"Wilson's Wildlife related. It doesn't even touch Chester at all. It's late into the era, and on the //other side of the continent,// in San Diego. So..."##

"So, this section is about race. Chester is, notably, black. This isn't something you can divorce from his character: he isn't interpretably black or coded black or black because the author said so. He's black because it gives //specific// context to his struggles, and how the founding of his store, Dr. Wondertainment's World of Whimsy, comes to be. It is used as an explanation for why the storefront is so hidden, and why it escapes the public eye so easily. Chester's being black is instrumental to the early story of Dr. Wondertainment. You can't write about the Chester era without addressing this -- well, you can write around it, you can give him little attention, but the major //plot points// of this era are all catalyzed by his race and how it interacts with the environment. Chester and Maria being insinuated to be romantically intertwined, and their coupling being interracial, is similarly important and impossible to ignore when it comes to the development of this era -- when it comes to //the vibe// and //the messaging// of writing in this specific timespan."

##979ca8|"By placing Chester and Maria in Boston in the first half of the 1900s, we have foregone any potential, as authors, to claim that the work is set in a 'fantasy,' in which race relations don't play much of a part. If Chester and Maria were characters in Morgania, in the city of Bastool, then we could say Chester is black, Maria is white, and they're in love and own a store together, and it could be some nice interracial representation and 'hey look, a black protagonist, that's a nice break from the whiteness of everything else,' and that could be that. We wouldn't have to do a lick of research, and we wouldn't have to worry about writing an //accurate// black character, because this world would be totally divorced from our own."##

"But yeah. We didn't do that."

##979ca8|"We didn't."##

"We put Chester and Maria in a very racially charged situation."

##979ca8|"//Intensely.//"##

"//But wait,// I hear you say. Well maybe not //you,// but instead the voice in my head that attempts to anticipate the criticisms or confusions of others, while in reality merely representing my own insecurities. //You've written a character from a demographic you were not before: Faeowynn is trans and white-passing hispanic. What makes this different?//"

##979ca8|"Well, other than the very obvious difference in stakes and context, Faeowynn is a useful tool for exploring potential queer aspects within myself. Even if I remain completely cishet after writing a queer protagonist, Fae's existence as a trans woman that I project personal qualities onto is instrumental for my exploration of that aspect of myself. I could similarly write a story about a gay man and explore his sexuality in a way that explores my own. Writing protagonists of certain traits //always// exercises your relationship to those traits. It helps you define and explore yourself. So, why can't we write a black guy?"##

"Well it's not //can't.// It's context-dependent. Could I write an accurate representation of the //trans community,// as fucking nebulous and non-existent as that is? No, that's a subculture I am not a part of. I couldn't write a trans meetup and have it be believable.[[footnote]]Looking back, I think I beat myself up a bit too much in this part. Recently been doing a lot of thinking about how humans are more similar than they are different. I don't think it would be hard to write a //believable// trans meetup, I just think it might not pass muster with people who've actually gone to them. Verisimilitude is often built on the minutiae that let others know you know your shit. But, broad strokes? Those are probably within my reach.[[/footnote]] Fae, however, isn't really part of that subculture. What I am exploring in Fae is my own relationship to my own gender identity -- nowhere in her story is there the LGBTQ+ //community// that I then represent walking around in and interfacing with. That is just... I just literally couldn't. I //don't know,// and any attempt on my part to write that would be an act of pure imagination. It would come off that way, and it would be at best humorous and at worst disrespectful."[[footnote]]Yeah, as I said, a bit hard on myself in this section.[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"So, you're leaning towards disrespectful on the Chester front, then?"##

"Immensely. Gender exists in this abstract form that I can interact with meaningfully from a relatively unchanged position, as does sexuality (these are some ballsy statements considering the biological bases we have found for sexual preference and more, but still, sexual attraction and gender leanings exist in the exceedingly plastic area of //the mind,// where I can relatively easily go in and manually alter my perceptions to try to see from another angle, where men are attractive and I can 'try on' a more feminine identity). Race, however -- while //absolutely// culturally defined, see how the definition of 'white' has changed over time -- exists in a much more tangible form. The separation of cultural experience between me and the average trans white woman is significantly lesser than the separation of cultural experience between me and your average black cis male."[[footnote]]In America, if it must be specificed.[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"That's not even taking into account the chronology of this whole deal."##

"Oh gods, yeah. Chester exists in the 1900s. The type of person Chester is... well, where he comes from, how he came to //be// who he is, the influences in his life and how he interacts with the world. That is all so separate from me, I can't even imagine where to start."

##979ca8|"I remember that part of writing Fae involved consulting several trans authors on the site. Hell, when we wrote [[[I Get It]]], we made the rounds to a number of trans authors for their second opinions because //that// is an experience we were absolutely //imagining,// as was put earlier. That was not our experience, that required consultation before we put it to paper."##

"And I'm imagining doing that every time Chester is written, and that just seems like... a lot of work. Not to mention, of course, that the SCP wiki has, honestly, kind of a plethora of trans authors. It's easy to find them, they're very available. I am going to struggle to put this into words, but... there is only one person I know of on the site who has said outright that they are black."

##979ca8|"One?"##

"//One.// That I know of and have interacted with, I don't want to spread race erasure by saying any absolutes on the number of authors of certain ethnicities on the site, I'm just reporting my own narrow experience. Well, going to this person with no other connection to them, and asking them to tell me about their experience because they're //the black one//... well, that seems a bit objectifying to me. I have boiled them down to their one trait that I wish to use to create an article that's probably not my place to write about anyways. With the trans authors it was different because there were many of them, so they weren't being approached on the basis of being //the one// trans person and I needed //the trans opinion// on this piece, they were treated as one of a number of people I would be contacting for critique because I am getting a wide array of opinions because that's best for creating respectful works. It didn't feel... tokenizing, if that's a word, or even an appropriate word."

##979ca8|"Helped that we had and have established relationships with like several of them."##

"Yeah true. So, like, in sum, I basically feel like I am too white to write Chester. I'd do him poorly. I wrote his story to be racially charged, and I am not equipped to write a racially charged story."

##979ca8|"Not from that perspective, anyways."##

"Oh, oh yeah. There's actually a lot of very interesting race-related stories I could tell, I think, about white identity and my relationship to race relations. But not from a black perspective. That's, like. I dunno. Rude as hell."[[footnote]]As decided by us with little to no consultation. The more I've sat on this, the more I've doubted my own conclusion. I've also been told by two non-white people that none of what I've said should prevent me from writing a story, as long as I make a point to consult and be open to critique. Not that I'm going back completely on what I've said: I find my capability to do this story justice rickety, but I don't know that I'm at risk of causing //damage// or something. (Yet again, if I keep an open mind, do research, and consult.)[[/footnote]]

##979ca8|"And as was said before, we didn't set it in a fantasy world that would give us some reasonable separation from real events -- license to write Chester how we would any of our other characters."##

"Which, of course, means he'd be colored white behind the scenes because that's the experience I am drawing on to write characters."

##979ca8|"Quick question."##

"Hit me."

##979ca8|"Do you think your female characters are colored male behind the scenes?"##

"I mean, obviously I do. But, to your point, not as egregiously as a black character would be colored white. I've grown up in the //whitest// county in California. This shit is pale as fuck. In fact, talking to black people, like, makes me uncomfortable, because I don't have experience with it and I'm a nervous type. As much as I think that reaction is, like, racist and demeaning, I just don't reasonably have control over how it makes me feel, which is that I'm afraid to fuck up -- the cultural divide makes me antsy. So I don't even have enough black influences in my life to feel like I could write //my own conception// of a black character, in the same way I can say 'well just about half the people I //know// are women, I think I can write how women talk //to and around me.//' I'll never accurately represent the, like... high school female sleepover experience, per se. There is AFAB culture I can never recreate. But I think I can reasonably create female characters that act like how females act in group settings, around me, y'know. Period cramps? How boobs feel when you run? Yeah, I dunno. I also don't think those things are //as// disrespectful to imagine for the sake of writing from a character's perspective, though. I mean, I could obviously easily fall into the 'men-writing-women' trope, but I just have enough experience that I genuinely trust I'll get most things right enough, and know where not to speculate. I don't have even a //fraction// of that comfort level when writing other racial experiences."

##979ca8|"So that's why Chester is practically unwritten."##

"By me, that is. But as the main writer of the canon and a large influencer of where focus is put... yeah, that's why Chester is practically unwritten."

##979ca8|"That's a bit sad."##

"It is! I want to see a lot more of Chester. I like him, I think he's going to be really fun to explore and follow. I want to see the story of Wondertainment's expansion, I want to see him live basically the American Dream through the two World Wars. I think his is a very thematic story to the whole of //What a Wonderful World// -- the finding meaning through adversity, the inherent exploration of power dynamics. But it's just... it just //really// isn't my place this time. It really isn't. Even in this explanation of why it's not my place, I have an ambient anxiety about whether or not I've overstepped some boundary."

##979ca8|"I get you. I think we're good though."##

"Not for us to say but yeah, I do too."

##979ca8|"Okay. Well, where do we go from here?"##

"Well let's see... what hasn't been discussed... probably..."
[[/==]]

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[[include fragment:a-wonderful-world-contingency-0]]

A Contingency, if this Wonderful World Doesn't Happen

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