More Speculation.

[Don Edwards 548]

13 hours ago, Matoyak said:

2) There's not a whole bunch to fic about. EGS is one place where nearly anything could happen, and between Patreon Pinups, Sketchbooks, NP, and the Mainline there's a lot of place for all kinds of stuff to go down. Really the only things that aren't ever going to show up are hardcore smut scenes or major universe crossovers.

I think a bigger issue is rather limited guidance on what's possible and likely for anyone other than the main canon characters.

Wapsi Square, like EGS, is a bizarre variant of our world. But it's bizarre in ways that are predictable once one becomes familiar with it. And extensions of it are easily doable - there are Titans, merfolk, and sphinxes (among other strange species) running around, along with this Greek guy originally known as Achilles, so a few more really-old (or really-odd) characters and a paranormal species or two are not a big deal to add, and making most of the fanfic stories largely about them and dependent on their special capabilities means it's easy for Paul Taylor to NOT copy from them. The fanon is HUGE. There are at least six active writers who share with each other before publication, drop tidbits into each other's stories, and otherwise cooperate; the fanon is self-consistent (mostly - there are a few goofs) and the characters stay in-character no matter who writes them. At least four stories are currently in progress.

So... based on what we know, what sort of powers does it make sense for, say, Luke's friends to have? And what powers would be of similar level but NOT make sense? How about if they were, say, 30 miles out of town? We can't tell - it's too random. Which doesn't make EGS bad, but does make it hard to write fanfics.

[Maplestrip 20]

Honestly, what I want to see more of is fan art. There's some out there, but compared to some other communities, El Goonish Shive is rather disappointing in this regard... I suppose EGS fans just generally have a less big creative output than other fandoms (though I always have a hard time estimating the size of this group of fans compared to other webcomics)

To commence the speculation, I wonder what Nanase is going to do. She seems very suspicious of Ashley here, so I'm pretty curious where that may lead. Ashley's behavior is pretty suspicious, after all (not wanting to ask about magic because of secrets), eventhough it all makes perfect sense to us and her.

So what may Nanase do? I mean, the most logical thing for her to do would be to ask Edward if he knows anything about her (especially if she's already talking to him anyway), but that sounds like a very boring way to advance the plot. Edward would do a background check and find nothing of interest. Maybe Nanase will spy on Ashley? She has plenty of spells to use for that purpose, after all.

[Don Edwards 548]

Quote

To commence the speculation, I wonder what Nanase is going to do.

The problem is that fanon story lines that star canon characters have a high probability of being invalidated by later events.

If Elliot were to go flying around the region and, from a low-altitude-overhead vantage point, happen upon and surprise a family of centaurs* in half-feral form (in full-feral they look like horses, in non-feral they look human), the story could actually be about the centaurs and Elliot be someone who happened to pass through. Just be a bit vague about precisely when this happened and where the centaurs are, and it's unlikely that the canon story will ever invalidate it. Then the centaurs' land could be a place where the Main 8 wouldn't have to hide their magic, so they might come visit occasionally, but it wouldn't be where THEY live, so it wouldn't become the site of THEIR story.

But do centaurs make sense in the EGSverse? So far, no, except maybe in the other half of the world (where the griffins come from). Sure, they could have been made using uryuom eggs, but why and by whom? Also, even if they did exist I doubt they'd be close enough to be inside the bubble of excess magical energy, which cuts out a significant amount of story options. They'd need to be wealthy to own/control enough land to go half-feral outdoors anywhere near Chicago, and none of the known chimerae are old enough to have gotten that wealthy by normal legal means.

 

* Centaurs used as the example because that's the main non-canon species added to the aforementioned Wapsi fanon.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

But do centaurs make sense in the EGSverse? So far, no, except maybe in the other half of the world (where the griffins come from). Sure, they could have been made using uryuom eggs, but why and by whom? Also, even if they did exist I doubt they'd be close enough to be inside the bubble of excess magical energy, which cuts out a significant amount of story options. They'd need to be wealthy to own/control enough land to go half-feral outdoors anywhere near Chicago, and none of the known chimerae are old enough to have gotten that wealthy by normal legal means.

Every state sends two centaurs to Washington where they live freely

[Tom Sewell 268]

On 4/28/2016 at 11:38 AM, Scotty said:

 

I too thought it must be Luke's mark because it fits his power and sort of fits his green hair. But it would also fit Grace's ability, wouldn't it? Grace starts out dreaming that she's wearing a green shirt before her clothes vanish, wakes up in a green shirt, wears another green shirt to school, and wears yet another green shirt to work that night, under that black shirt or pullover or whatever. Since The Shive cares a lot about color when He uses it and has said so kind of a lot, this could be yet another subtle clue.

Unless it isn't.

There are at least two other green shirt wearers depicted in Squirrel Prophet. In the two flashback panels where Grace remembers that Sam is really a girl, Sam is wearing a green shirt with pockets all over instead of a blue shirt with pockets all over. And in yet another flashback, Ashley is wearing a green shirt under her mostly black outfit, a colored version of the one she's wearing when she caught Elliot transforming. It's a stretch, but Ashley comes up with some pretty timely insights in the next arc.

[Don Edwards 548]

1 hour ago, Tom Sewell said:

I too thought it must be Luke's mark because it fits his power and sort of fits his green hair. But it would also fit Grace's ability, wouldn't it? Grace starts out dreaming that she's wearing a green shirt before her clothes vanish, wakes up in a green shirt, wears another green shirt to school, and wears yet another green shirt to work that night, under that black shirt or pullover or whatever. Since The Shive cares a lot about color when He uses it and has said so kind of a lot, this could be yet another subtle clue.

Unless it isn't.

There are at least two other green shirt wearers depicted in Squirrel Prophet. In the two flashback panels where Grace remembers that Sam is really a girl, Sam is wearing a green shirt with pockets all over instead of a blue shirt with pockets all over. And in yet another flashback, Ashley is wearing a green shirt under her mostly black outfit, a colored version of the one she's wearing when she caught Elliot transforming. It's a stretch, but Ashley comes up with some pretty timely insights in the next arc.

I'd add that if Grace likes green shirts and wears them often (one in bed, then another to school, and a third to work, all in the same day, kind of points that way), it would be rather normal and non-meaningful for her to wear a green shirt in her dream.

[Tom Sewell 268]

1 minute ago, Don Edwards said:

it would be rather normal and non-meaningful for her to wear a green shirt in her dream.

Yup, but the background to the magnifying glass is still green. We'll never really know unless and until The Shive makes it plain. And those pesky midichlorians or Alien Space Bats could change His mind.

[banneret 45]

I've always felt EGS fan fiction is limited because the work is dense, and everything is interconnected. The world itself exists in one era, with three or four periods, but the well defined characters are often together, undergoing development, and Dan generates this array of touch points all around. If you want to stick Susan and Sarah together at any time they weren't in the actual comics, and you're probably going against canon, and even if you aren't, you need to thread the needle with each of their schedules. They're not going to hook up, I guess they can play video games except - wait, they did that in NP. You can't go back, because the characters don't really exist in the early period, and you can't go forward because writing Susan and Elliot's eventual lovefest is not going to work out if Dan does this, or that, or the other thing. Ignoring Canon invalidates most of what made the characters interesting, it all emerged through layers of activity and development.
 

Contrast this with Harry Potter, where writers can work in three or four eras, maybe twelve periods, and you don't have any touch points to work with or around for most of the timeline. Want Lily Potter to have an eating disorder, and struggle with that through Year 5, you can. Want to detail a piece about Neville Longbottom's slow accumulation of power and wisdom over his school years, you can. Writing about Regulus Black waging a one wizard guerrilla war before anyone else knows what Voldemort is really going to do, sure, we know virtually nothing about him. Even the major characters have plenty of time for experiences, and a threesome with Gred and Forge may not even mess up Draco Malfoy's character from a canon perspective because his development is stuttering and superficial. Named Harry Potter characters, with a very few exceptions, are initial traits and simple relationships, which anyone can take and move elsewhere.
 

Do I think about writing about a long, blooming romance between Susan and Elliot? Of course I do, a lot more than I think about Regulus' guerrilla war. I'm not going to write either of them, but Regulus would be both far simpler and probably better in the execution.
 

[Don Edwards 548]

EGS suffers, as a fanfic base, from being tightly focused on a small and exceptional part of its universe (the town of Moperville, which is not officially any real town so we know nothing of it beyond what we are shown) and a restricted subset of THAT (the part that a small group of high-school students frequent). The fact that not merely one Immortal, but five, are heavily focused on those kids kind of implies that they are exceptional even relative to Moperville - so what they experience probably doesn't compare well to what anyone else in town experiences.

Where is there room for a fanfic that is clearly in the same universe?

For a contrast to that I'll toss up Wapsi Square.

WS is set primarily in the Minneapolis metropolitan area, and real-world bits of it periodically show up in the comic to establish that yes, it IS the Minneapolis of our (well, much-like-our) universe. With forays into central America, Egypt, a few unpopulated tropical islands, and an interdimensional space that houses The Library - which has a copy of every book ever written. The main characters include an antiquarian jaguar-shifter who works in a museum and owns an antique shop; a mechanic sphinx; a cop who can't be killed; a yoga instructor; a supermodel; a siren in high school; a werebear also in high school; the siren's little sister who is a plant; The Librarian; a demon barista; and a few other people both human and paranormal. Now add in that the schoolkids go to a school specifically for paranormals - so obviously there are a lot more of them, and we've seen occasional glimpses of several species.

It's a much larger setting, with provisions for extending the description beyond what's in the comic, and we see it from more different points of view.

There's a rather rich *collaborative* WS fan-fiction community - it's nothing unusual for a single story to have three to five authors, some chapters have two authors, and there's a separate private forum where the fanfic authors make sure they don't step on each other's toes/characters/plotlines. While the canon characters and settings do frequently appear, most of the stories involve a non-canon family of a species that has never appeared in the comic. But it still clearly fits in the same universe. And there's so much of it, all interconnected, that the authors have seen fit to build an index of it.

Of course, EGS fanfic could go the way of TwoKinds fanfic. Which is, very little of it makes any pretense of being set in the world of TwoKinds (or even a highly-similar world) or of picking up any major themes from TwoKinds. But then, why call it TwoKinds fanfic? Well, most of it is furry with some humans, and TwoKinds is a furry comic with humans... EGS doesn't have a similar tight niche.

[Scotty 1,061]

4 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

EGS suffers, as a fanfic base, from being tightly focused on a small and exceptional part of its universe (the town of Moperville, which is not officially any real town so we know nothing of it beyond what we are shown) and a restricted subset of THAT (the part that a small group of high-school students frequent). The fact that not merely one Immortal, but five, are heavily focused on those kids kind of implies that they are exceptional even relative to Moperville - so what they experience probably doesn't compare well to what anyone else in town experiences.

Where is there room for a fanfic that is clearly in the same universe?

For a contrast to that I'll toss up Wapsi Square.

WS is set primarily in the Minneapolis metropolitan area, and real-world bits of it periodically show up in the comic to establish that yes, it IS the Minneapolis of our (well, much-like-our) universe. With forays into central America, Egypt, a few unpopulated tropical islands, and an interdimensional space that houses The Library - which has a copy of every book ever written. The main characters include an antiquarian jaguar-shifter who works in a museum and owns an antique shop; a mechanic sphinx; a cop who can't be killed; a yoga instructor; a supermodel; a siren in high school; a werebear also in high school; the siren's little sister who is a plant; The Librarian; a demon barista; and a few other people both human and paranormal. Now add in that the schoolkids go to a school specifically for paranormals - so obviously there are a lot more of them, and we've seen occasional glimpses of several species.

It's a much larger setting, with provisions for extending the description beyond what's in the comic, and we see it from more different points of view.

There's a rather rich *collaborative* WS fan-fiction community - it's nothing unusual for a single story to have three to five authors, some chapters have two authors, and there's a separate private forum where the fanfic authors make sure they don't step on each other's toes/characters/plotlines. While the canon characters and settings do frequently appear, most of the stories involve a non-canon family of a species that has never appeared in the comic. But it still clearly fits in the same universe. And there's so much of it, all interconnected, that the authors have seen fit to build an index of it.

Of course, EGS fanfic could go the way of TwoKinds fanfic. Which is, very little of it makes any pretense of being set in the world of TwoKinds (or even a highly-similar world) or of picking up any major themes from TwoKinds. But then, why call it TwoKinds fanfic? Well, most of it is furry with some humans, and TwoKinds is a furry comic with humans... EGS doesn't have a similar tight niche.

One could, however, make a fanfic set in the EGS universe that doesn't necessarily have to do with the cast of the comic. There's the other half of the world that the griffins reside in that could be used as a backdrop, what Dan has given us about it suggests that the knowledge of magic is more prominent there, that Humans with royal blood tend to be strong magic users, and that there are intelligent beasts that are warriors and scholars. There's also the fact that alternate realities do exist so if you do want to use any of the cast in a fanfic, you could set it in an alternate reality like a "this is what might have happened if X did Z instead of Y".

[Scotty 1,061]

This is just a thought as to when the last system change occurred. The only warmongering horde that I can think of, would be the Mongols who's empire ruled much of Asia from 1206 to 1480, with a "Golden Horde" being established in 1251. What if, in the EGS universe, the Golden Horde was named such because they had access to magic that allowed them to expand their empire. A system change at the peak of their conquest could certain be attributed to the empire falling.

The only issue with this though, is that it seems too recent, I mean if 1480 was when the system change occurred, that's 12 years before Columbus sailed to North America, and I would think that Abraham would have created the diamond somewhere in that time period too.

So, the next possible time period would be a nearly a millennia earlier around the 6th century, the start of what would be called the Dark Ages. According to the wiki:

Quote

Dark Ages is an imprecise term of historical periodization which was once used to refer to the Middle Ages but is latterly most commonly used in relation to the early Mediaeval period: ie. the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It emphasizes the demographic, cultural and economic deterioration that supposedly occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.^[1][2] The label employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the "darkness" of the period with earlier and later periods of "light".^[3] The period is characterized by a relative scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it obscure to historians.

Quote

The term once characterized the majority of the Middle Ages, or roughly the 6th to 14th centuries, as a period of intellectual darkness between extinguishing the "light of Rome" after the end of Late Antiquity, and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century.

If magic had a sudden upswing in usage during the "Light of Rome" period, and system change would certainly throw everything into chaos for a great period, if enough people in power knew about magic and were attributing the existence of Magic as being a gift from God, the loss of their ability to use it could be seen as punishment from God and they would act accordingly, the lack of records, plus their general avoidance of science, heck even the superstitions of witches and witch hunts could have come from this and would have been attempts to prevent a repeat of history. The Knights Templar might have been the original organization formed when people started figuring out the new system stuff like the Crusades were attempts to suppress magic use in other cultures.

[Zorua 124]

*spinning 910cmx logo transition*

So when I read this page, I noticed that one little tidbit. Magus can amplify abilities as well as emotions.

Which reminded me of that time when Ellen blasted Vlad with her FV5 ray. While the result was the same as every other time Ellen's used that beam, that particular time had rather significant concussive blast to it, enough to knock Vlad into a wall with enough force to render him unconscious for a non-negligible amount of time. Never has Ellen's beam had that much damage to it.

I suspected Magus had a hand in that, amplifying the beam significantly.

 

Granted, there's evidence against. One, Elliot was there, and Helena and Demetrius were likely there too, so Magus likely wouldn't have been there. That said, they have slept in before, allowing Magus to get close enough to use his power on them, so depending on when they started their nap this opening could've still been there.

And two:

1 minute ago, Scotty said:

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure Magus had anything to do the Ellen's beam when she zapped Vlad, It's canon that she can amp up the beam herself, but as for the beam that hit Vlad, I'm more inclined to believe that she cares enough for Nanase that her emotions were naturally supercharging the beam. It was a clutch moment.

Granted, at this point in time, Ellen had no way of knowing she could amp up her beams, but these people barely read their spellbooks today. They use spells they don't know the ins and outs of all the time. Even Nanase fell behind on her reading, and she was practically obsessed with the thing. So yeah, it's plausible that Ellen's amped-up spell could've just been emotion.

That said, in the comic Scotty linked to, Grace doesn't appear to move back when hit in the last panel, suggesting that the beam doesn't have concussive force by itself. Maybe it's not there because this isn't a life-or-death situation, but that's still worth noting.

 

So there we have it. Evidence for and against Magus amplifying Ellen's beam against Vlad. What do you guys think?

[Arcanimus 31]

My suspicion grows that Tedd is the Magic Emissary. I suspect that the "whales" were magic itself granting the spell and an awareness of the buildup in a semi-believable manner. I suppose this belongs more in a "wild theory" thread, but my search-fu has failed me.

[HarJIT 97]

8 hours ago, Arcanimus said:

I suppose this belongs more in a "wild theory" thread, but my search-fu has failed me.

This is the wild theory thread.  Or rather its de facto post-Crash successor.

[Arcanimus 31]

2 hours ago, HarJIT said:

This is the wild theory thread.  Or rather its de facto post-Crash successor.

Oh. I guess my search-fu just needs a recalibration, then.

[Scotty 1,061]

So I was rereading "End of an Era" and the scene where they're talking about Susan's birthday and it requiring cake somehow made me think of "The cake is a lie."

Then it got me thinking:

Portals are possible with magic in EGS.

Tedd can read magic and learn how it works and possibly make wands with that knowledge.

Tedd knows the ins and outs of the TFG enough to build and program more, and can make watches and stuff programed with spells.

So...Tedd is basically short of seeing a portal being made from being able to make his own portal gun. I'm wondering if the creation of such a portal gun would lead to running into Lord Tedd, dealing with General Shade Tail, and Ellen getting to meet Kaoli in person finally.

[Tom Sewell 268]

On 7/25/2016 at 7:45 PM, Scotty said:

One could, however, make a fanfic set in the EGS universe that doesn't necessarily have to do with the cast of the comic.

One could, but who would read it? There's little point in writing fanfic without involving characters from the source. Write an original story instead.

Which is not to say you shouldn't build a story around OCs, but they should have involvement with the returning cast.

----------------

THe date on this post is wrong. I made it some time ago.

Edited August 15, 2016 by Tom Sewell
disclaimer

[Tom Sewell 268]

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

So...Tedd is basically short of seeing a portal being made from being able to make his own portal gun. I'm wondering if the creation of such a portal gun would lead to running into Lord Tedd, dealing with General Shade Tail, and Ellen getting to meet Kaoli in person finally.

Maybe, maybe not. The only portal we really know exists is to the other half of the Moperverse, Tara's and Andrea's half. Given Tedd's ridiculous intuition about magic, though, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

I'd really like to see Tedd to visit the Tess-verse.

[Scotty 1,061]

2 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Maybe, maybe not. The only portal we really know exists is to the other half of the Moperverse, Tara's and Andrea's half. Given Tedd's ridiculous intuition about magic, though, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

I'd really like to see Tedd to visit the Tess-verse.

I linked a page showing Nioi creating a portal back to her universe, granted, she appeared to be using a magic item to do so, but Tedd's insight should extend to enchanted items as well, like seeing a wand in action would tell him about the spell it cast.

[ijuin 572]

3 hours ago, Scotty said:

So...Tedd is basically short of seeing a portal being made from being able to make his own portal gun. I'm wondering if the creation of such a portal gun would lead to running into Lord Tedd, dealing with General Shade Tail, and Ellen getting to meet Kaoli in person finally.

For goodness' sake, do NOT allow the A.I. to have access to ANY neurotoxin!

[The Old Hack 2,448]

25 minutes ago, ijuin said:

For goodness' sake, do NOT allow the A.I. to have access to ANY neurotoxin!

Why not? It would be a triumph!

[ijuin 572]

I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.

[Matoyak 51]

6 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

One could, but who would read it? There's little point in writing fanfic without involving characters from the source. Write an original story instead.

Which is not to say you shouldn't build a story around OCs, but they should have involvement with the returning cast.

Hmm. I feel that's unnecessarily limiting the potential of fanfic writing in general, honestly. While I don't really read fanfiction, there's no reason it has to always include the main characters. One could use the universe created by someone else for it. (Heck, that's where a lot of the Cthulhu Mythos comes from, and the entire Star Wars expanded universe could be argued to be sanctioned fanfic writing).

[Don Edwards 548]

If the world is rich enough, it effectively becomes a character - or even several characters - that OCs can interact with.

And fanfic can also feed on fanfic.

[Arcanimus 31]

Welp. I'm on the bandwagon to believe that Pandora is the Will of Magic, or a part of it. Her previous incarnation has memories of the last system reset, and the fact that there have been no other resets since she's been in her current incarnation is just too large a coincidence to overlook for me. Granted, it's flawed, in that she supposedly was there during the "incident", but that could be a false memory planted by her previous self to cover her tracks in some kind of "I'm not allowed to know that I'm the will of magic"-type, Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya-esque plot.

Or I'm overanalyzing.