A Paradox Between Worlds

Comfort Castle
IFComp 2021 review: A Paradox Between Worlds (Autumn Chen)
Short spoiler-free review: this game is very good.
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Lava Ghost
If the 2021 IF Comp is any guide, “teens on computers” is a winning formula. In A Paradox Between Worlds, you are a teenager involved in the online fandom for a YA book series entitled Chronicles of the Shadow Nebula, written by one G.T MacMillan.
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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 7 Write a review

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My initial thoughts on APBW rambled a bit. It brought up a lot of ideas that swirled around. They took a while to settle. It's a very ambitious work, and I'm not surprised it co-won the Golden Banana. But I'm also not surprised it placed highly, as I think it was rewarding to go through even though I only went in for part of its experience. It's about an online fan-community for young adult fanfiction that blows apart when the author of the books insults someone who's a big fan of theirs. In this case, it's GT McMillan, author of the Nebula series. To me, the GT sort of lampshades JK Rowling's hot takes on Twitter and fans' disappointment.

But I think it's more than just frustration with a Rowling clone. They get relatively little text compared to you and your friends. Overall, APBW helped me realize how much stability some online communities have, because with competent, sane adults in charge and some simple rules, along with punishment for trollish "look how these rules aren't perfect," really terrible things don't happen. But then again, these communities have decentralized power. For instance, the SBNation group of blogs knows the college athletes they cheer for are, well, only twenty or so, and they make mistakes. Or they know the commissioners of their favorite league aren't there out of altruism. Or they can see the good and bad sides of their favorite or most hated coaches. And the rules are simple: no bigotry, no flaming, no illegal streaming links. They work. I'll be comparing things in this review, because I had a lot of moments saying "Well, life goes on, right?" Though it sort of doesn't.

When you are young, that all is a lot tougher, even without trolls around. Any chaotic event throws things into turmoil, especially when an adult precipitates it, because adults don't DO these things, right? Especially one that could write such cool books that really stick it to bad guys?

Well, GT McMillan DOES do something. Not right away, though. APBW is told through the lens of an aspiring fanfic writer who blogs a lot on tumblr. You're amazed at the people who write more and, apparently, better than you do. But you'd like to try. You have friends you reblog and like and so forth, but you quickly realize they're at cross-purposes with each other. Some friends have troubles that get reblogged, both trivial and serious. Some friends just post for attention. Your reactions to this can get you blocked. I wound up completely ignoring the @brunova-official fanfic account, as I figured any drama with romantic fanfiction between Bruno and Gali, the two most popular characters (I didn't want to worry about the details of the work-within-a-work,) and I still made enough connections. I was amused to find the author's comments in the source, explaining how following and rehashing that sort of thing got you lots of likes, just because.

So I did all right with the whole writing racket. Despite my character's reticence and worry everyone was better than they were, I kept racking up likes, as my character paged through the five physical senses for ideas ("What do you think/smell/see/hear/feel/taste?") and my character wrote stuff down. This was meant to be mechanical and formulated on the player-character's just plowing through and doing what they were told in English class, when really they want to do so much more. People assure the PC that it's all so good and so forth. Then the pivotal moment comes. McMillan doesn't just cut down any fan but one who really looked up to McMillan. Others who did so, too, are confused. Some of your friends proclaim McMillan "over," even as the actors and actresses of the movie based on the series disagree. There's a split among fans with big followings, too, that goes beyond "Who's the coolest character?" Claire/Shadow-Protectrix, a big fanfic writer who organizes NebulaCon, comes down on McMillan's side (ironic, given their screen name) when your friend Luna is attacked by GT McMillan, prompting more attention than Luna ever wanted. She winds up deleting her account and starting a new one and not even asking for reblogs in support of her.

NebulaCon's largely organized by adults, too, or at least Internet friends who seem grown-up for their age! Most of whom are nice, but some of whom let the kids know who's in charge. And with every pronouncement of Claire's that she has to scale back, I certainly feared NebulaCon would be canceled. Because NebulaCon is only once a year, as opposed to twelve fall weekends for football, where fans of opposing blogs on SBNation get together for more than just the obligatory "preview with the enemy." They take pictures. They even share loss and big life moments. It can happen every week, even between fans of archrivals. And stuff like this shows the best of Internet fandom, of people getting together and helping each other through disappointment, of empathizing and saying "what if it happened to me?"

It's pretty clear the downside of the McMillan community collapsing is much higher for its members than for adult sports fans. And it's not just pro- or anti-McMillan. There's "we should've known it all along" and "I still can't believe it" among the antis. At one point, the main character wrestles with a passage that discusses not being false to yourself and how it was interpreted as pro-trans, but after MacMillan's words, they realize they maybe saw what they wanted to. This parallels fans tired of a losing coach, in a sports community. Some think they can still right the ship, some see the signs in retrospect, and flame wars start. But the stakes are higher, because when you're younger and don't know certain mind game tricks jerks play, and you have to hold on to what's there and be glad there's only so much trolling. You don't even feel you can speak out against jerks who like what you like, because on balance, they've been a positive, right? And it may seem there is no plan B if your group of book-loving friends collapses. The author touches on this by having some characters say "Hey! I found this cool KPop group." Which is different from what you'd expect, logically, such as "hey, there's another great book series." But in that moment I realized both you-the-character and your friends wanted to say "I don't want to lose you as a friend" but you didn't want to seem that desperate.

And, of course, you will need to stay together. Good things will end. As you write your final fanfic, you-the-character are far too aware the fourth wall break you make is as mechanical as checking off the five senses and "think" for writing prompts, and it's done before, and it will be done again, splitting community or not, because it's part of growing and moving on. You actually do finish your fanfic and go out on a high. That, along with trying to support your friend McMillan called out, is all you can do, especially when McMillan doubles down. (Well, actually, you can side with Claire. I didn't have the heart.) The older fans who orphaned their fanfiction–well, you get it now, you didn't see how they could stop if they had this gift, surely they could've just glided into a pretty-good ending sheerly out of momentum. You figured people just kept having stuff to say, and they don't. I had a similar thing happen when writing game guides at GameFAQs. I realized I was going to run out of motivation or games, and I also realized YouTube might become a Very Big Thing. I eventually just had a list of games left that would up my total word-count. I moved on, slower than I should've, of course.

It's difficult when a community dissolves, big or small, but it's also so nice to cross paths again. Still, you just don't think you will, and while that's out of the scope of APBW, I'd like to think the narrator plants the seeds for that, despite NebulaCon being canceled. They'll find other interests. I suppose it's the same sort of thing as a first crush, except, well, it's about having lots and lots of friends that evaporate, or you know you won't be able to keep track of them all.

Playing through once was exhausting. I had trouble remembering which player in the canon was which, and I also had to brush up on which of your blogmates did what. But it was the first of this sort of writing I'd seen in this form, and I found it amazingly effective for getting me to sit down and thing. I had a lot to say, and on reflection, it might not seem relevant now, but it filled a place that other IFComp games didn't come close to filling. So I think it was overall very successful as a story and an interesting world, as well as a reminder of all the stories I wanted to write but never quite did.

The author had a lot to say in their postmortem. There was a lot to read, so for the first time through, I simply looked at the source code to see some of the options and such that I missed. The check_blocked.txt file provided me with great amusement and demystified some of ChoiceScript. There still feels like a lot to unpack. But I found I was able to keep up with APBW, even if I had to ignore chunks, as I learned some terminology that made total sense once I read it.

APBW originally inspired some much more random, rambling thoughts that I don't want to pull out of the authors' forum. They're not really about APBW. But they were important to write and bury. They reminded me of the slow breakup of other communities and some I'm still shocked are there. APBW even reminded me to check some I thought were dead, and it's great to see them live on, or even see a 31-year-old say "hey, some people were really nice to me when I was clueless and 13, and I miss them." I remembered how I wrote game guides because I didn't feel qualified to write actual cool games, just as the narrator writes fanfic. (I still haven't written a graphical one!) I saw parallels between fanfic and some humorous features at SBNation sites, such as the ubiquitous Power Poll which ranks teams in a conference and compares them to characters from The Office or skits from I Think You Should Leave or, from one very creative person, stages of evolution. And it all works. It somehow pulls everyone together and reminds them of what they want to look at while they wait for the next game. Simple yet funny rules are established: on offtackleempire, a site for Big Ten team fans, you must punch in on Saturday if your team lost this weekend. There are inside jokes, but of course people with decent Google skills can figure them out, and they deserve to. And there are fanfic legends, people who wrote great stuff and are maybe retired now, but they drop in unexpectedly with a few hilarious tweets or essays.

This all is the result of a fully mature community and may not be as exciting as McMillan fan communities, but it's at least as rewarding. APBW made me realize how much we have, more than any impressive "look how far we've come and what we take for granted" speech could. For that I'm grateful. I'm even grateful for people I like only because we like the same team (just as APBW's characters like the same series and maybe even share a favorite book or character, and it's wonderful until they find other incompatibilities,) or even people I liked and then it fell apart. I even wound up sort of wishing I could explain this to some of the more upset APBW characters. Perhaps it's worth doing in real life.

It seems reasonable to critique APBW for problems of focus, or of certain things being too generic, but it's wildly ambitious and hits the mark often enough that I, a layman to fanfic, enjoyed it much better than more polished traditional efforts which seemed to fit in a nice box. Once I got into it, it felt like something someone would have done eventually, and I'm glad it got done so well. And it reminded me of all the things that could've gone wrong but didn't. It hurt when longtime Purdue basketball head coach Gene Keady laughed as he endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, a man Keady would've kicked off the team after a week on general principles. I was disappointed with the accusations swirling around Kingdom of Loathing's co-creator and how this forced a much more serious view of the nightcap you drink to get drunk with your turns gone at day's end. And I'm glad I didn't know about Roald Dahl's dark side until he was an adult. Yet at the same time, any one of these is the sort of growing-up experience I'd have loved to have other people around for, even if things fell apart at the end. APBW captured that and more for me, and thus, I value it.

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This is a pretty hefty Choicescript game that consists of two parts: a young person browsing Tumblr that's part of a fandom for a fictional series of novels (a science fiction analogue of Harry Potter with its own house-type system), and a story-within-the-story consisting of your character's fan fiction.

Fanfiction gameplay includes things like customizing your character and reacting emotionally to things, as well as choosing ships (as in relationships).

Tumblr gameplay consists of choosing from 8 or so different blogs to look at. Choosing a blog to look at brings up a post you can like, reblog, sometimes comment on, or skip to go to the next one (or back). Each blog has about 4 posts in each section of gameplay.

There are several chapters, each one giving more fanfiction and more events in the blogosphere.

Midgame spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)The author of the series makes posts in the middle of the game calling out one of your friends and saying that transgender people are degenerates. Most of the people you follow are trans, and so it puts a big damper on things and chaos ensues.

The game has a main story thread, but it also has a 'score' aspect in terms of your followers. Reblogging gets you more followers.

I had a ton of emotions reading this. I like to put myself in the headspace of the people I play as but doing so made me really uncomfortable this time, and I made choices in-game that I thought the protagonist would do that are things I really wouldn't do in real life.

The discomfort I experience playing this game is because it encourages you to have empathy for people and then puts them in hard situations that there aren't easy answers for. It also reminds me of real life confusions and conversations I've had.

So I definitely had a stronger reaction emotionally to this game than to others.

Mechanically, a lot of content is dumped at once in each of the tumblr sections. That's the way real social media is, but I've been trying to clear my head of social media 'noise' recently (who isn't?) and playing this reminded me why.

With its world-within-the-world and focus on the nature of human experience, art, and their interactions, and with the Choicescript format, I was strongly reminded of Creatures Such as We, a game by Lynnea Glasser in my top 10 games of all time. That game leaves me thoughtful and hopeful, while this one left me thoughtful and distressed. Both are useful. Of the two, though, this game had an interaction mechanic that didn't work quite as well for me, with the nonlinear asynchronous tumblr text dumps. But that isn't to say it didn't work at all; I think it's one of the better games of the competition and a masterpiece of technical work, doing things I didn't know were capable in Choicescript. And the characterization is excellent, with a lot of the characters coming alive for me personalitywise (although I lost track of some of the handles).

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To this day, I am still baffled about how this game was able to recreate the vibes of Tumblr fandom from the 2010s (I shouldn't be surprised considering Autumn's references). From the old Tumblr Blue to the very virulent fandom conflicts, or the fan-organised conversions, or the always-left-behind character (sorry, Tycho), APBW perfectly encapsulate a prolific time of fandom culture.
It was kind of nostalgic to me, having lived through quite a bit of the Supernatular/Doctor Who/Sherlock shenanigans... Though I was not really into the fanfic side of it all.

But APBW is more than a snapshot of the very fascinating ecosystem of Tumblr fandom. It is also a commentary* on how the relationship between a piece of work and its fans change overtime, especially when a ripple in the fanbase, like a mundane headcanon post, creates a storm as the author of the work gets involved (and not for the better). Raising questions (but not answering) about what fans would do in this situation: do they keep on enjoying the work that is so deeply personal to them (maybe even have helped explore their identify) or do they disavow it completely; do they band together in support of the victim/targeted group or do they have a blasé attitude about the issue; do they try to keep the fandom community alive and stand as one or do they become fragmented**;...
*might not have been the author's intent, but this was my perception.
**the death of fandoms are... something. It was very bittersweet to kind of relieve it.

It gets even more shocking/impactful when the OP of the post identifies as trans and the author goes on a (inter-?)national broadcast spewing transphobic rhetoric, leading to the teenager being harassed and abused. The fandom (and online communities at large)'s reaction is very troubling, but neither new not surprising. From the hard-core fans who will support the author no matter what, the ones who will question any actions trying to show support for the targeted group (like a boycott), the ones who will not engage with the drama, or the ones who roll their eyes at it because they were calling out the author all along... this is a real thing that happens. And is portrayed in this game with all the visceral intensity you'd find on Tumblr/Twitter/other social media.

Even without the author (GTM) adding onto the fire (which was already sparking before their disgusting action), the games portrayed the parasocial relationships between the fandom users, how even adults can get caught up in what people would think as petty teenage drama, or how being online is not just an escape from IRL problems, feels very real. I have personally seen those call-out posts between fanfic authors about plagiarism, those fake-pologies to calm down the fandom in hopes everyone forgets, the "kid-friendly" spaces still filled with inappropriate/problematic contents, the Discourse, the fights between people not following the conventions of interaction...

Even if the online characters are based on tropes, they all have their stories to piece together: the self-proclaimed fandom mom, whose chronically online presence hides her avoidance to live her life truthfully*, the supportive adult who plays a double-role to take down bigger name accounts, the always critical-puts herself in the discourse-calls out the shitty stuff-overall is kind of a bummer (but a correct bummer), and the kids who just want some space for themselves. I have followed this people before (have I been those too?), I have had those weird-ass URL, I have been in those fandom fights... It was not just real, it felt being right back in those communities.
*I really didn't like Claire, but the more I've been thinking about their arc, the more I find her arc compelling. Her shitty actions still isn't fully balanced by the end, but there is some steps taken in the right direction.

And then there is you, the player, trying to navigate the dumpster fire that is the Nebula fandom as you want to reach your goal of writing a fanfiction* and gain a bit of notoriety (I did manage to double my followers count in this playthrough :P), balancing your relationship between the different users you follow, and your relationship with the Nebula universe. You can choose you name, your pronouns, your URL, your favourite character, your ship, the reason why you are creating fanfic, and what kind of post your blog is filled with. But your character is not the focus of this game (the above paragraphs are).
*I, of course, titled mine A Paradox Between Worlds.

This PC-is-not-the-MC is reflected in the fanfiction you are "writing", as each part reminds you/Gali this is not your story. Gali moves on from one universe to the other*, finding different versions of [their] friends entangled in trope-y AU (Alternate Universe) and feeling out of place/alone/like an outsider every single time (like You the player might feel this way in the Nebula community). Your actions defines the ship you have in your writing, as well as the quality of the writing. The focus on senses at the start of each new scene made me giggle a bit, from a parser "player" perspective.
*the multi-verse take was so meta, with APBW having the Canon/Fanfiction/Online universes in play. Autumn, your mind!!!

As the drama of the Nebula community unfolds, you find yourself struggling with writing/finishing the fan-fiction, reflecting on the feelings you have about the series itself considering the author's comments. In my playthrough, I pushed through, and found... myself, as the Destroyer (the Nebula baddie), meeting Gali, reminding [them] it is not [their] story, telling [them] the story is about to end, that maybe it should never have existed in the fist place... and that maybe you learned some lessons along the way... Writing the last part of the fanfiction hit me like a ton a brick, and made me question how I have consumed and created content in the past.

Finally*, there is the Canon. Each movement/chapter starts with a snippet of The Chronicles of the Shadow Nebula to contextualise the fandom, but also give some sort of preview of what is to come in the Online universe (very much a Cassandra vibe to them...). Though the author has mentioned the influence coming mainly from Homestuck**, I found more similarities with other YA universes (HP***, Divergent, or any YA-series-with-a-house/class-system-having-to-fight-a-big-baddie, and even a bit of the Hunger Games...). I dove into the codex in the stats page and devoured it, finding nuggets of gold and trying to link it to works I knew. One of my favourite bit: the Selene Dione character who is a Hannah Montana parody.
*lol, i've organised this in the reverse of how you experience each part in game...
**that's mainly because I never got into Homestuck that I didn't pick up on those references
***especially the main gang...

I don't know how to conclude this review. So I will leave with the final chat you can have with the gang: no one goes through character arcs like the books, IRL is messy and not everyone wants to share this part of themselves online, growing up is hard but so is growing apart from something that was important for you, moving on is also part of life...

So yea...

Go play this game.

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