An Interview With Billith On Narrativistics

Link to article: An Interview With Billith On Narrativistics.

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= **An Interview With Billith On Narrativistics**

= //from the Vietnamese SCP Wiki’s July-August 2023 Site News Edition//

= Questions were submitted by various community members, and were translated into English by the News Team of the Vietnamese SCP Wiki when necessary. All answers were provided by [[*user Billith]], unless otherwise stated. Interview moderated and answers compiled by the News Team of the Vietnamese SCP Wiki, represented by [[*user Irina Bougainvillea]].
]]

[[>]]
[[module Rate]]
[[/>]]

Greetings everyone! My name is [[*user Irina Bougainvillea]], an admin and News Team staff from [http://scp-vn.wikidot.com/ the Vietnamese branch of the SCP Wiki.] Recently we have invited [[*user Billith]] to be a guest on our Site News Monthly Interview, and there have been many interesting questions from our community concerning a prominent topic in many of Billith’s works, Narrativistics. We have been informed that this interview can be of value to the wider SCP community in general, so we will be reposting all parts of the interview that are related to Narrativistics to the SCP Wiki.

Many thanks to everyone who submitted questions and to Billith who takes his time to answer them – it was great to have you around. And to everyone else, we really hope that you will find this interview interesting too!

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**[http://scp-vn.wikidot.com/news-07-and-08#toc62 Check out the rest of the interview in English, with more questions and answers on Billith’s works, viewpoint on the SCP community, and Billith himself!]**

**[http://scp-int.wikidot.com/vn-hub Check out all translated Vietnamese SCP and tales on the International SCP Wiki!]** 

**Check out our other interviews with [http://scp-vn.wikidot.com/news-04-2022#toc53 ROUNDERHOUSE], [http://scp-vn.wikidot.com/news-06-2022#toc46 Placeholder McD], [http://scp-vn.wikidot.com/news-08-2022#toc24 Zyn], [http://scp-vn.wikidot.com/news-12-2022#toc20 The Exploring Series] and [http://scp-vn.wikidot.com/news-03-2023#toc42 EstrellaYoshte]!**
[[/=]]
[[/div]]

++ And without further ado, let us get to the main part...

**Question from Khoa Liệt (from the Vietnamese SCP Wiki’s Discord server):** Hey Billith, can you explain Narrativistics in the most simple way you know?
> Everett's Many Worlds interpretation x Simulation theory x Narratology. It's not 1:1 but it is the simplest way I can describe it.
>> **Khoa Liệt:** The funny part is you explained something that I don’t understand by more things that I also don't know what they are lol.
>>> **Billith:** Ah, fair enough. Let me try again without referencing other theories. Narrativistics is a multiverse theory that suggests our reality is one of infinite narratives which exist in parallel with all other stories/realities.
>> **Khoa Liệt:** Like… our reality is a story?
>>> **Billith:** Yes. And all characters are real in their narratives. Narrative and reality are interchangeable. They mean the same thing, in essence.
>>  **Khoa Liệt:** I see. Now that's a lot of knowledge.
>>> **Billith:** Technically we all can learn any knowledge given to us by our author(s) but they often do not make us aware of it; it's a lot of effort to create a character with every single piece of knowledge you have (try it!) and the more people learn stuff, the more creative energy the authors have put into making us that way.
>>> 
>>> Think of it like this: When you write a character, you have to explain their basic properties, right? Physical appearance, personality, emotional state, intelligence. All these things need to be established. Then think about writing a character that the reader understands that they //truly// know everything you know. Every single piece of information you learned, every plant, animal, insect, microscopic organism, extinct dinosaur, brand of soda, every shade of color, every equation you learned in school, every word you learned, every food you've tasted, every texture you've touched.
>>> 
>>> In order to establish that a character knows these things, you have to manually recall each of them and write it into the story. You could just say "X character knew every single piece of information I learned, every plant, animal, insect, microscopic organism, extinct dinosaur, brand of soda, every shade of color, every equation learned in school, every word learned, every food tasted, every texture touched" but what happens when your character needs to recall a specific detail? You need to establish that specific detail. It requires more and more creative energy, because it's just //more// creating.
>>> 
>>> The more the author wants the character to know, the more the character knows. But the more the author knows, the more they could provide to their characters. It doesn't mean they want to or if it would even make sense to do.

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** Apparently, I've seen an article mentioning Narrativistics as in Narrative Relativistic, is that correct?
> Narrativistics is the entire field of study, while Narrative Relativity is an aspect of Narrativistics, used to explain why narratives appear "more" or "less" real to one another despite being equally real in all cases.

**Question from reborn_again (from Vietnamese Discord):** Can you explain pataphysics?
> **The will of వ (from Vietnamese Discord):** He had [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1873973819 a stream] recently where he explained Narrativistics – one of many pataphysical models.
>> **Billith:** Narrativistics is not a pataphysical model. Pataphysics is a narrativistic model.
>> [[=image https://scp-wiki.wdfiles.com/local--files/sr-researcher-james-a-harkness-personnel-file/02.png style="width: 300px;"]]
>> If something includes every set, and a set is a dimension, and there are sets of slightly different kinds of sets, infinitely, to the most different. Then the thing that is describing that Superset is Narrativistics.

**Question from [[*user WPthai]]:** What is NBR value?
[[div class="blockquote"]]
**Billith:** N:B:R is a value of relative distance a narrative has with yours.

**Narrativity/Narrativism:** The complexity and expansiveness, the fleshed out nature of the system has compared to yours.

**Believability/Verisimilitude:** The effectiveness of a system's telling/The flow, the coherence between plot points / The ability to captivate and potentially convince you that you are experiencing this system (at the very least by feeling their emotions and "putting you in the characters' shoes").

**Realism:** The parity this system has with the one that built it ("directly above").

I like to use the "simulation" metaphor.

Imagine you had an extradimensional simulation room that could render an orthotope of space just as you intend and fill as per the instructions given by a programmer.

**N)** The first box has so much detail, you wonder who had the time to code everything like this. Books on the shelves with historical records from other worlds. You can leave and go an incalculable distance before you even scratch the surface. Unfortunately, the behavior of everyone seems off, maybe flat in personality or cartoonish, speaking unnaturally and sometimes in disparate conversation. It detracts from whatever immersion you had, and is frustrating. Not only that, but it doesn't look very nice, pixelated and the lighting is wrong.

**B)** The second box had you weeping when you left, and not in a bad way. It didn't matter that there was only one room and it didn't have any windows, nor books on the shelves (or any real lore to look for outside), nor did it matter that the graphics were repulsive. Even then, you couldn't help but think of the story and how, in that moment, you felt like you were in the character's skin. Living their life, vicariously, through them.

**R)** In box 3, you are taken by surprise when you enter a near-copy of your own world. Everything looks perfect here....if it weren't for the people who aren't acting right... Doing stuff that is completely odd for their characters, like producing items from nowhere. Or they're not doing anything at all, waiting for us to approach just to shout non sequiturs about the weather. You look outside and it's just a poster of the sun.
[[/div]]

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** Says, what's the difference between the N and R? The R is how closely the narrative resembles its creator's and the N is how complex and large the narrative is on its own?
> N = expansiveness / complexity of narrative (from the reader's end).
> 
> B = ability to get you into the experience and reach the "zone" where you forget about the world around you and are 100% immersed to the point where you can feel the characters feelings (from the reader's end).
> 
> R = how closely the narrative looks like to the one you're currently within (from the reader's end).
>> **Juan0x1:** If our baseline reality NBR is 1-1-1, can we create a 2-1-1 or even 3-3-3 narrative? If yes, then they would be hyperreal to us, the observers, right?
>>> **Billith:** More like if baseline is +1/+1/+1, we can do 0/0/0, -1/-1/-1 , -2/-2/-2.,etc. But +2/+2/+2 could have made us.
>> **Juan0x1:** So it's impossible for us to create a narrative more complex, believable and realistic than ours?
>>> **Billith:** In order to create a narrative more real (+2) than baseline (+1). your Super-author in (+3) would write an author in (+2)  to write you as a character "creating it" but it would be unlike +2 in many ways.
>>> 
>>>  ∅/∅/∅ NBR is Nonreal so isn't included in your perspective. Nonreal is what your baseline is if you don't exist.
>>> 
>>> We never truly create hyperreal phenomena compared to baseline but extra hyperreal phenomena can write hyperreal phenomena that we believe are written by us (because that's how the plot works).

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** In Narrativistics, it is stated that each narrative reality has its own frequency. If you somehow tune into the frequency of your author's reality, that would be the even higher author's intent right? That leads me to another question, would there be a case where unexpected things happen, like something that the entity author didn't write but somehow presented? Oh yeah, does the Paradox Exodus Engine work in Narrativistics?

To be more specific, the unexpected event could be: While I'm thinking/writing a story (has no relation to any forms of metafiction), the character in that story suddenly manifests into the real world. Is that possible?
> The frequencies are the NBR values, which are based on relative differences between planes. So to you, this narrative is baseline value, to every other narrative they are baseline to themselves. You can't access a narrative that's too far away in either direction without writing an author into a "lower" substrate or engaging in psychogenesis into a "higher" one, the latter of which creates a thoughtform or tulpa of the idea on the material plane. We do not know if that process is possible in our current reality for sure, which could mean our authors are too hyperreal to be reached.
> 
> This means the inverse is true as well, our authors would have to write proxy authors to affect our reality, and perhaps there are not enough human minds / cognitron density to create a tulpa in our reality as well.
> 
> Motivation always flows downward. The Paradox Exodus Engine is an SCP story element. Narrativistics includes //all// narratives.
>> **Juan0x1**: Flows downward?
>>> **Billith:** Yes. You cannot influence your author's intention. Your author creates yours.
>>  **Juan0x1**: Then, can the author of my author bring me to my author realm?
>>> **Billith:** Not unless their reality is capable of psychogenesis, which, as I said, is theoretical. It involves many, //many// authors collectively believing something is real to make it real. Basically something like that would involve our author(s) writing us all to believe it, which is disadvantageous because it can disrupt the stability of the narrative loop itself.
>> **Juan0x1**: Yeah, screw nihilism, we have Narrativistics.
>>> **Billith:** Narrativistics can induce enough existential dread on its own. Everyone is an author because every time you have a stray idea, daydream, run a scenario in your head, plan, think, you are creating a narrative. Every time you dream, you can create entire worlds with billions of people you might not even know exist, and they are Undone every time you wake.
>> **The will of వ (from Vietnamese Discord):** Could our reality just be one higher being's dream?
>> 
>> **Juan0x1**: Oh and, can the authors be like an alien species or any sapient species in general?
>>> **Billith:** Yes and yes, absolutely. It's possible they take a form impossible for us to comprehend, or they could be giant spiders, who knows.
>> **Juan0x1**: Nahhh, ain't no way a cockroach created me, I don't believe it.
>>> **Billith:** It would be a very smart cockroach.

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** So, like you've said in the article, most ontokinetic beings are either hyperreal or unreal, is this true for all reality benders? Why is ontokinetic basically manipulating the narrative? If I remember correctly, magic is also a type of reality bending and I don't think it has anything to do with narrative manipulation.
> Yes, //all// of them. Their ability is a sliding scale though, a powerful unreal reality bender and a weaker hyperreal reality bender might be able to go toe-to-toe. It basically comes down to behavior. Think about the -EN tale //[[[termination-order|Termination_Order]]]//, this is an unreal reality bender at its most platonic. Emotional, erratic, unstable, motivated by shallow goals, limited range of perception, immature, snarky, almost two-dimensional, distracting tunnel vision/blind spots. Now look at [[[SCP-3125]]]. Emotionless, incomprehensible in nature, zero personality, unclear goals, universal reach, near-omnipotence. The mere thought of it is enough to kill you and your entire lineage anywhere in the universe instantly.
> 
> [[[SCP-3812]]] has emotions, is erratic, unstable, motivated by shallow goals, has a limited range of perception (anywhere on Earth is still a limitation), immature, snarky, almost two-dimensional, distracting tunnel vision/blind spots. This is very clear in my opinion.

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** As for the SCP-3812 part (I'm kind of scared to ask about this one due to the power scaling stereotypes), you've said that he is an unreal entity, he transcends to a higher narrative layer so yeah, definitely unreal. But, what about the lower narratives? Is he still an unreal entity when he surpasses them?
> This is something people tend to misunderstand with Narrativistics. There is no "up" or "down", there are parallel fabulas and they appear different based on your relative distance from the substrate. SCP-3812 is //always// in the Foundation narrative, it never leaves because it does not have the ability to complete the transaction on our side. It is not //relatively// real enough to emerge from a book and punch its author. I haven't seen any character actually do that. Have you?
>> **Juan0x1**: Nevermind, he gets more and more unreal as he goes up, so evidently, when he comes back down, he would still be unreal, just a bit more real than himself in a higher narrative.

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** Can you explain the, uh, periodic table thingy?
[[=image https://scp-wiki.wdfiles.com/local--files/sr-researcher-james-a-harkness-personnel-file/01.png style="width: 70%;"]]
> Most of the "particles" can be Googled as they are repurposed from Narratology. They are fundamental narrative units: lexemes the most basic component of lexicon, phonemes the most basic component of a phonetic, etc.

**Question from chúa hề (from Vietnamese Discord):** How many hazards can I make with just the Narrativistics particle board alone?
> I don't insist I know all Narrativistic particles, as with the table of fundamental particles and the periodic table of elements, there are likely mediums I forgot or don't know about. You can assume, however, that there is at least one per particle / antiparticle.

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** So, at the end of the article, you've stated that even if 2 incompatible articles are somehow linked to each other, they will magically become compatible in your headcanon/own narrative bubble. Does that mean, the version of an already existing entity I mention in my article is not the original one but my own copy version of it?
> Correct. It creates a "narrative bubble" that works in those specific circumstances but not others, unless the author of the other work wrote it to be compatible with yours, too.

**Question from [[*user jackkiller]]:** I quite like literary works that provide interactions or connections among the work itself – the author – the reader, but these connections are too one-dimensional in most of the works I encountered. Reading Billith's works feels very "scientific", and how Billith explains each specific problem also feels like a scientific journal article as well. How are you able to apply your knowledge to your works, and how are you able to imagine a comprehensive picture about the way entities from a level above affect characters in a story, the interactions between readers and the work itself, and how the characters interact with us readers? And how did you find a way to explain it, or in another way of saying, introducing it to readers so that they understand that's how it is? I am impressed by how Billith builds his universe; it is complex, but the complexity also makes readers interested in all the knowledge.**
[[div class="blockquote"]]
Great question, something I had to think about because it's not an easy one to answer (I usually would just say “ask my author”, but there's more to it than that). Narrativistics was originally developed into a mysterious, relaxed field, with taoist principles regarding the nature of absurdity; the more we understand, the more we realize we know nothing. We are at the whim of something far bigger than ourselves, and we will never truly know its face, among others.

I got the idea maybe 7-8 years ago or farther. My ideas spontaneously appear or build over time. I developed Narrativistics to understand why the wiki has so many plot holes, missing/changed works, inconsistencies, as well as understand why my life was inconsistent and patterned in weird ways, why things changed or went missing and why I felt the way I did, which is that reality is less real sometimes, like a dream.

When I first posted Narrativistics, I was immediately hit by backlash from community members who felt targeted by it, which fueled their dislike toward myself. There was a fair bit of debate but ultimately I knew their claims were from high emotions and existential dread. I didn't want to have to keep dealing with it, cause I was getting pings telling me I had written the worst thing on the site, PMs, callouts etc. I needed to delve into the absurd and unknown parts of Narrativistics and really explore it, so I decided to granularize the hell out of it. If they want answers, I'll give them answers. The result: A completely unfalsifiable system given its one axiom ("all narratives are compatible with Narrativistics' ability to make all narratives compatible with Narrativistics") and secondary Rules ("This seminar is not narrativistics, this seminar is the lens by which I convey the properties to you.") -so you cannot override Narrativistics. You can proxy The Narrativistics Division, it changes nothing about Narrativistics.

This is how I built my framework for characters/authors. My ideas spawn from a mix of my backgrounds and interests; Computer science, mathematics, taoism, simulation theory, quantum theory, particle physics, Holographic principle, metanarrative fiction, existential dread, derealization, absurdity. I'd like to say these things shaped me but I've been primed to be receptive to them. Maybe I'm the only one that was insane enough to combine these things in the right way to create the exact terrifying cocktail necessary for Narrativistics.

Any characters I write, I write to be people and live vicariously through them. There is nothing more to it. It can't be any other way, and it's been popping up in media more and more over time, as if it's pushing to the surface. Because it is. Narrativistics is a virulent idea that spreads from author to creation. All that needs to happen is for the flow of Motivation to include Narrativistics, which it does and always has. I can recall early Narrativistic media, where characters realize they are in a story, but it has become more prevalent and complex as Motivation flows in a circular pattern and gives the idea to others over time. In a way, it's the system that exists to force us to collectively "wake up" from the dream.

[[=image https://scp-wiki.wdfiles.com/local--files/sr-researcher-james-a-harkness-personnel-file/04.png]]

The above included list of historically significant metafictional media (2nd image - 6 pieces of media in a 500-year period in the 20th century) and "Awakened" characters pales to the list I could produce just thinking about it:
* //The House of Leaves//
* //Asteroid City//
* //Waking Life//
* //The Congress//
* //Funny Games and Funny Games//
* //Black Bear//
* //The French Dispatch//
* //Across the Spider-Verse//
* //Stranger than Fiction//
* //Adaptation//
* //Black Mirror S6E01 - Joan is Awful//
* //The Fountain//
* //I'm Thinking of Ending Things//
* //Deadpool, Deadpool 2//
* //Ferris Bueller's Day Off//
* //Space Jam//
* //Annie Hall//
* //Wayne's World//
* //Deathproof//
* //Kiss Kiss Bang Bang//
* //Fight Club//
* //Blazing Saddles//
* //The Amazing World of Gumball//
* //Animaniacs//
* //Ed, Edd, and Eddy//
* //Arrested Development//
* //Community//
* //Velma// (unfortunately)
* //WandaVision//
* //The Twilight Zone//
* //Monty Python's Flying Circus//
* //Mystery Science Theater 3000//
* //Lady Dynamite//
* //Rick and Morty//
* All 17 //Muppets// Films

....You get my point. I haven't even gotten through half of them. And the outcome of this rapid increase? We don't know for sure. The image below shows how it should annihilate metanarrative and replace it with a new mode of story. That would include us.

[[=image https://scp-wiki.wdfiles.com/local--files/sr-researcher-james-a-harkness-personnel-file/05.png]]
[[/div]]

**Question from The will of వ (from Vietnamese Discord)** Can unreal reality benders turn into hyperreal reality benders if the higher author wills it and vice versa. Likewise can lower imaginators use unreal bottom up manipulations to turn hyperreals into unreals and vice versa?
> Good question. Ask my author, I guess! 
> 
> But actually, yes this is possible, as long as the NBR (Narrativity/Believability/Realism) values are significantly less than baseline. This is a stopgap that keeps things from incurring on our plane regularly; the author's intent is limited to their ability to realize said intent.
> 
> Just as [[*user djkaktus]] can write that SCP-3812 will do something and it still be unable to do that, or as [[*user LordStonefish]] writes Talloran into a reality with an LordStonefish-proxy recounting a nightmare as if it were truly material, that's the lie of storytelling. Whether or not you fell for it is up to the author's ability to convey a world near-parallel to this and your willingness to believe it..... until djkaktus' author intends otherwise, that is.
>> **The will of వ (from Vietnamese Discord):** Can a lower author also do something like this theoretically? Like how unreals pretend to actually be able to bend reality (or something like that). Could a lower author unreally have control of a higher narrative and unreally do something an even higher author could do?
>>> **Billith:** Only if a higher author wrote it so- remember, we don't really have free will, so it's always a downward flow, even if it looks upward from someone's perspective. Motivation always flows downward.

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** Well, I have had this question for quite some time now. If our reality is rather just a fictional work done by a higher author, does that mean whenever my interaction with someone ceases, that person will completely disappear as that person no longer exists in my story? And you've been talking about your higher author, does that imply each and every person has their own author who will be pouring fundamental H-energy down to keep the aforementioned person exist?
> Depends on the situation. If you and I share an author, then we're in the same story doing our own thing and neither of us cease to exist unless the author wants it. If we have separate authors, or our shared author originally wrote us into separate narratives, this interaction is a crossover junction between them and thus one or both of us may cease existing when not relevant to the narrative bubble created around us.

**Question from chúa hề (from Vietnamese Discord), with clarifications from [[*user Rigball]] and [[*user Edward_Knave]]:** What does Narrativistics say about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_physics cartoon physics]?
> Cartoon physics in our world or in a Foundation-like setting falls into unreal reality bending ability, but those constraints are set by the author as they create the narrative in question. Cartoon powers or physics wouldn't necessarily be considered out of place in a cartoon, being part of that narrative's limitations or lack thereof.

**Question from [[*user Kairento154]]:** I see that your narrativic writing is similar to The Kybalion. Have you ever read or made a reference to any of its writings in your own work?
> Never heard of it. Sounds cool!
>> **Kairento154:** "The all is mind, the universe is mental", Egyptian teachings of the outside world and the capability of the mental nature- yada yada.

**Question from chúa hề (from Vietnamese Discord):** Speaking of Narrativistics, how do you feel about having so many people misunderstanding its point?
> I feel a tad foolish for thinking a dense academic seminar would be more universally understood by readers when we have 12-13 year olds coming off the FNAF pipeline into SCP content. As I've said, it feels like a personal failing on my part for not being able to convey it better.
> 
> It is what it is though, I'm not concerned with it so much. I've written "easy" articles like [[[SCP-3315]]] and they were fun but ultimately I want to make people think more than I care about confusing kids or not. Not everything needs to be spoon fed, but I won't be going as dense as my proposal in the future, which requires you to research other articles that aren't linked and read Wikipedia pages about obscure space phenomena.
> 
> I wanted to make it like a puzzle and a mystery that rewards thinking about what things are redacted (all of which are intentional) and the connected articles. I also made a unique dialect with its own lexical rules, totally unnecessary.
> [[=image https://scp-wiki.wdfiles.com/local--files/sr-researcher-james-a-harkness-personnel-file/03.png]]

**Question from [[*user WPthai]]:** How do simulations, like computer simulations, or whatever like the Matrix stuff, fit in Narrativistics?
> A narrative containing a "real world" and "simulated world" will have at least two set/setting locations, "real world" and "simulated world". It's really that simple. If the "simulated world" is indistinguishable from the "real world" in every way, the NBR values of both are the same and thus the whole overarching narrative's NBR, as an average, will also be the same. If the "simulated world" is far more simplistic, for example, the NBR values of the two locales will be different, with "simulated" bits lower in value. Thus, the average NBR value of the overarching narrative is reduced. (NBR is typically given as an average of the entire narrative but in reality fluctuates frame by frame based on a number of factors, almost in the same way a person physically in the 3rd dimension may look in a temporal fourth dimension like a long, undulating snake, with their birth self at one end and death self at the other, and each frame representing all the states that exist between those two points.)
> 
> Also the framing of this "simulation" is important due to it sharing commonality with a metanarrative or supernarrative. A "simulation" could explain a metanarrative existing in-universe, but a metanarrative is not inherently a "simulation".

**Question from [[*user Juan0x1]]:** Does Narrativistics also affect SCPSimulation? Specifically, The Mind and Universe Prime, do they have free will?
> Neither of those are universally accepted aspects of narrative and thus Narrativistics applies to them as well. The Mind is just another character in a story.
>
> Remember that I could upload Narrativistics to the Backrooms wiki, to Stack Exchange, to toyhou.se, fimfiction, it doesn't matter. I could post it in 280 character chunks to Twitter and it still applies, because Narrativistics defines the fundamental, immutable properties of a conveyed story, regardless of medium or story elements. I only chose the SCPwiki as the means of portraying Narrativistics because that was easiest for me, The Narrativistics Division is the part that exists only in the Foundationverse (unless I chose otherwise).
>> **Juan0x1:** Then the chain is infinite? There's no starting point?
>>> **Billith:** Since one can theoretically nest infinitely in one direction, I have no reason to believe it doesn't work in the opposite way. If my author wasn't sure, I don't think they'd reveal that to me.
>>> 
>>> Oddly I've had Narrativistics in my head for some time, at least 7-8 years. I don't recall where the genesis of the idea emerged, for all I know I just woke up with this intention and motivation to write it into existence.
>>> 
>>> I mean, it's more likely I simply forgot, but I found mentions of Narrativistics concepts in comments of mine I do not recall making so did I forget or was reality retrocausally altered by my author? Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>>> 
>>> But that's how scientific models work. They are true until proven otherwise. Prove me wrong!

**Question from chúa hề (from Vietnamese Discord):** So when will we all die according to Narrativistics?
> To die is not to cease existing, these are two separate things. You can die if/when your author wants to kill you off, or logically follows the rules they established in-narrative, like finite lifespan. You might experience an afterlife, if they're into that sort of thing. Or, you might be done for the rest of the story. You will be recalled when the story is recalled, though you will have no memory of past iterations of the fabula.
> 
> When you cease existing because the narrative itself vanishes, it's like you were never there to begin with. Poof. No awareness of it, either. It just happens at some point and we'll never be privy to it.
> 
> Dream narratives end with the latter. You might find the dream notable and remember some parts in fractured narratives created by your recollection, though they have significantly lower NBR due to the human brain's tendency to convince itself dreams are real, while dreaming, and the diminishing memory of dream detail in general. You could preserve that dream by, for example, writing it into a complex story in a separate medium, but the two will likely not be 1:1. My first SCP article was based on a nightmare I had, but it is clearly something far different from the dream itself since it was in first person when I experienced it and it did not involve the Foundation.

**Question from The will of వ (from Vietnamese Discord):** If all things in Narrativistics are defined by higher imaginators then what is the point of hyperreal and unreal reality benders? Both can just become as strong or as weak as the narrative allows and because no free will exists, who wins or loses is wholly decided by authors, not by a bender's abilities.
> You are correct; the concept of unreal and hyperreal reality benders is something included only for its relevance to the SCP Foundation but, if you would like, you can use the distinction to apply to your own timeline for reference in case our narrative is ever affected by such things. The author's intention can still be narrowed down into one of the two categories, which can give you a relative idea of intended risk (though keep in mind if we look at the big picture anyone/anything can behave differently at any given time if an author so chooses. Most authors seem to follow some sort of narrative cohesion which prevents this sort of thing from arising, though not in all cases).
> 
> The question ends up being, did the author set up the world to have "rules" this entity is "violating" i.e. warping reality, or is the world capable of supporting this as per the "rules" from the very start?
> 
> Marvel movies don't have the same "rules" as a story without superpowers, but in the end it is all the author's intention for which way their own "rules" are broken. This is because, as I've said, authors can lie to their audiences and reveal greater "truths" or "rules", as the "rules" are actually far broader when not considered through the lens of a character within that world.
> 
> //"rules"// being the conveyed limitations of the narrative (eg. "Magic doesn't exist."). Different from rules are //"Rules"// which are the most accurate conveyed limitations of the story ("Magic was real the whole time but hidden from the modern world.") and the true limitations of Narrative/Reality as a whole ("The wizard will not escape into a narrative of sufficient relative hyperreality to its own."), respectively.

**Question from Demigure679 (from Vietnamese Discord):** I have a question, what does this mean? //”Naturally, semiotic hazards of the legalese variety are the easiest for us to deal with, most of the time; we don't really need to abide by rules or laws established by governments or lawyers, for that matter. Sure, abstraction is a pretty bad thing and, as a member of the smallest possible set of infinities, Unreality agents only have few things they can abstract into, and of course none of them are good.”// ([[[SCP-7079]]])
> Nonexistent entities are unaffected by most bureaucratohazards because they rely on you fitting the criteria of legally bindable when you can't be if you never existed. Abstraction is "the process of considering something independently of its associations, attributes, or concrete accompaniments; the quality of dealing with ideas instead of events." - ie becoming dissociated from the physical, concrete forms and definitions and instead becoming associated with the ideas those things represent. I recommend looking into [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfdEdE96En0 Cuil theory] for a great example of increasing abstraction.
>> **Demigure679:** Yeah but I don't really understand what does "as a member of the smallest possible set of infinities" mean in context?  Does it imply they have infinite Cuils (and therefore infinite levels of abstraction)? Or something else?
>>> **Billith:** No, set theory says there are different sizes of infinity, and multiverse theory says infinite possibilities exist, including impossible possibilities and more. So, there are still infinite possibilities for what could happen to nonexistent agents, but it's inherently the least possible amount of possibilities because only nonexistent possibilities would exist as outcomes for abstraction. Its flowery language to indicate their existence has a very narrow scope of modes that one could enter into.
>>>  
>>> You notice with Cuils that outcomes are more vague and wide-reaching as time goes on, because you go from being specific to nebulous, from literal to metaphorical, etc. The further out, the more concepts can be related to other concepts.
>>> 
>>> But it's still, ultimately, limited by the original set of concepts. 
>>> 
>>> You can see how starting with the concept of red is more limiting than the concept of an apple. The concept of a playing card is more limiting than the concept of blackjack. The concept of cold is more limiting than the concept of a blizzard. 
>>> 
>>> The concept of nothing is more limiting than the concept of //something//, let alone //everything//. Thus nonexistence is more limiting than existence.
>> **Demigure679:** Wait, why are they more limited?  Red can be more than apple can be but why more limited?
>>> **Billith:** Because the set of concepts that can describe an apple //contain// red, not the other way around. Red is a very simple concept as it is (Red, Color, Pigment, etc). An Apple is a complex concept (Apple, Fruit, Red (if the apple is red), concepts that describe it's flavor, texture, etc). Blackjack contains playing cards but playing cards do not contain blackjack.
>>> 
>>> Everything is the most inclusive set (100%) and nothing the least (0%) - even the spaces between particles have miniscule vacuum energy, but it is still very much something. Nothing will only ever not contain anything.
>> **Demigure679:** So does that mean that the more complex a concept ("less limiting"), the higher the Culis they have, Right? Since they involve more concepts? How many Cuils do Nonexistent and Apple have?
>>> **Billith:** Cuils are used to measure the amount of levels of abstraction away from the reality of a situation- they are made up by a redditor and not at all related to how complex a concept is. A complex concept will be able to reach more Cuils than a simple one. You can't give something a Cuil value without having a baseline.
>> **Demigure679:** Example: If the apple is the baseline, then the concept of an apple is the value of one Cuil to the apple? Similarly, if the concept of the apple is the baseline, then the "concept of concept of an apple" is the value of one Cuil with that baseline (concept of an apple)?
>>> **Billith:** Yes pretty much. The concept of an apple is a multiplex of different concepts like those above. It's not really just "concept of a concept of an apple".
>> **Demigure679:** So can an infinitely complex concept reach infinite Cuils? And if so, can those concepts (if they are "sentient", like [[[SCP-3125]]] and [[[SCP-6820]]]-A) be able to reach that level of Cuils on their own if they so desire?  Or are only special concepts (Semiohazard ones) like Logician (And [[[scp-5242|SCP-INTEGER]]]) can do that?
>>> **Billith:** Yes! Regarding SCP-3125 / SCP-6820, it depends on author intention.
>>> 
>>> To be clear I don't use the Cuil system because it's not really accurate. How does a person go from a hamburger to a raccoon in one Cuil? It's a redditor's thought experiment. Placeholder's SCP-INTEGER is based on it as well, you can hear him discuss it more in the discussion.
>> **Demigure679:** What about [[[SCP-2719]]]? Can the concept of "inside" be considered one of the most complex?
>>> **[[user Dr Ore]]**: I don't think so, you just have to define an "outside" and everything that isn't "outside" is by process of elimination "inside". There is even a joke about that.

**Question from [[*user Stockfish]]:** Just imagine the day when your authors allow you to publish a book with the title "Learning Basic Narrativistics For Babies". Might be a good idea for a Narrativistics tale, isn't it?
> Not a bad idea at all, but I try to avoid inducing existential dread in children (being a child is existentially terrifying enough as it is). A tale though…

**Question from [[*user Dept]]:** --Spoil ADMONITION season 2-- When will you drop another bomb like narraphysics?
> Soon. Narrativistics II will discuss Protagony / Characterization, Canon Events and personal growth/suffering in the role of maintaining the narrative loop. But there will be new things posted before that.

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> **Name:** Metafiction
> **Author:** Thirdreel, et al.
> **License:** CC BY-SA 4.0
> **Source Link:** [[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction| Wikipedia]]] (Screenshot)
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> **Author:** [[*user Billith]]
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> **Name:** Metanarrative 
> **Author:** 216.250.168.53, et al.
> **License:** CC BY-SA 4.0
> **Source Link:** [[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative | Wikipedia]]] (Screenshot)
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An Interview With Billith On Narrativistics

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