2:07 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: By the way, the overlying theme of Typical Tragedy is of light and darkness coexisting
2:07 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And being responsible for creation.
2:08 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Every other element is made from a combination between the two
2:08 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: here's a semi-chart-thing
2:08 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Light - Electricity - Fire - Wind - Earth - Gravity - Water - Ice - Darkness
2:09 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Earth is an even mixture of light and darkness
2:09 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: and, to be sure you understand the concept, what happens when you add just a little bit of darkness to Earth?
2:10 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: (add a bit of darkness and take away the same amount of light, I mean)
2:11 AM - Stooben: I'm assuming it has to be one of those elements listed, so I would have to say Gravity
2:11 AM - Stooben: but i'm not really sure
2:11 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: You're right.
2:11 AM - Stooben: go me
2:12 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Each element between light and darkness contains both
2:12 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: but with the advantage of one determining its form
2:13 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: What would be a light-based element with just a tiny bit of darkness?
2:13 AM - Stooben: Electricity.
2:14 AM - Stooben: I think I get it now
2:14 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: You're right.
2:14 AM - Stooben: For some reason I didn't notice before that you had Light and Darkness at opposite ends of the chart :x
2:15 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: But now you get how it works, right?
2:15 AM - Stooben: yes
2:15 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: In Typical Tragedy, users are born with elemental affinities
2:15 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Which is one of the ones on that chart
2:16 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: The elemental affinities of the main cast are:
2:16 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Tabuu: Darkness, Alex: Fire, Smiley: Electricity, Walkazo: Wind, MBV: Darkness, Pantaro: Light
2:17 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Some characters are Sages.
2:17 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Sages are people born without an elemental affinity- which means they can freely use all of them.
2:17 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Like, a jack-of-all-stats.
2:17 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Get it?
2:19 AM - Stooben: Yes, I understand.
2:19 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: (by the way, you're "Gravity")
2:20 AM - Stooben: Not bad. I expected to be darker than that since I'm half-demon.
2:20 AM - Stooben: Gravity always wins too. B)
2:20 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: You're gravity because of your association with time. : P
2:21 AM - Stooben: Makes sense.
2:21 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: The blue flames can't properly be placed on the elemental affinities
2:22 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: and there's actually quite a bit of technicolor fire going on in TT
2:22 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: From weakest to strongest,
2:22 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Normal Fire/Black Fire - Golden Fire - Blue Fire - White Fire
2:23 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Black fire is a combination of fire and darkness, not a traditional element.
2:23 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: It's something that people synthesize- Jimmy Wales, for instance, uses it.
2:24 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Anyways the reason I was explaining all of this to you is because
2:25 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: In Typical Tragedy, the universe began as the consciousness of one being, Epsilon- whose existence was a perfect balance of light and darkness in a massive body of water floating out in empty space.
2:26 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Epsilon himself was the gathered cultural memory and data from another universe entirely- ours.
2:26 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: (basically, Epsilon is the Internet.)
2:27 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Epsilon knew everything about our universe, but wasn't omniscent.
2:27 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: He grew lonely and split his soul into two perfect halves-
2:27 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Light/Darkness, Yin/Yang, you know the deal.
2:28 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: The Light Half continued to be known as Epsilon, and the Dark Half became known as Maladios Lockheart.
2:28 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Working together, Epsilon and Lockheart created the Wiki World.
2:28 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: They then created life born with bits of inherent knowledge from our universe- in other words, users.
2:29 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Users were at first powerless until Lockheart and Wales crafted a spell that would allow them ot access their own powers based on their elemental affinities.
2:29 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: *to access
2:29 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: they inherently had these powers to begin with, but were unable to use them
2:30 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Lockheart added a thing to the spell that would make it so that
2:30 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Whenever a user died, they would take the form of a troll
2:30 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: and whenever that troll was killed, that users' power and consciousness would become one with his own.
2:31 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: This plan was figured out pretty early on, and Wales, with the first generation of users, defeated Lockheart, stripped him of his body, and sealed him away within the Rift.
2:32 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Even after he was sealed away, the power still continued to run to him- which fucked up the balance of the universe in ways I myself can't describe.
2:32 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Because of the fact these users were basically beings created from data
2:32 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: The wikis they created, while taking the familiar form of countries and cities and the such
2:33 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Were still devoted around cataloging the knowledge that they were born with.
2:33 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: A world of superpowered data junkies, in other words.
2:33 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Or...the Internet.
2:33 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Thoughts?
2:34 AM - Stooben: Well, first of all, you should get Morgan Freeman to read all of that
2:35 AM - Stooben: (in all seriousness, you've put a considerable amount of effort into the backstory of the wiki world's creation. it's not just "there" like in every other fiction, which is a bit refreshing)
2:35 AM - Stooben: I like how you used the Yin and Yang theory to build everything up.
2:36 AM - Stooben: And it also kind of promotes reincarnation, just not in the traditional sense.
2:37 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Do you know what helped me when I was crafting the world of Typical Tragedy?
2:37 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: My own struggles with the concepts of religion and spirituality.
2:38 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: So I went with the most logical and most overused element I could- the balance/battle/coexistence of light and darkness, Yin and Yang.
2:39 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: But I didn't like how light is commonly viewed as the element of creation and darkness the element of destruction.
2:39 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: I decided that, together, they would be the foundation of all creation.
2:39 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And that destruction would be left to the creations themselves.
2:40 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: That's where the logical part comes in.
2:40 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: The religious aspects come in with Epsilon and Zanza.
2:40 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Zanza/Lockheart.
2:40 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Epsilon, pure light, Zanza, pure dark.
2:41 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: They were once equal halves of the same perfect being- which stresses the importance of inner balance, something that people of faith and people of sanity can agree on.
2:42 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: I explained Light as, to put it simply- control.
2:42 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Restraint over yourself, leadership.
2:42 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Or control over others, like a dictator.
2:42 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: I explained Darkness as chaos.
2:42 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Base emotions, base impulse.
2:43 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Unrestrained desire, the rebel yell.
2:43 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And at its worst, a destructive monster that only wishes to feed itself.
2:44 AM - Stooben: this was a lot more than just some wiki fiction for you, wasn't it
2:44 AM - Stooben: You almost seemed to have been aiming for a spiritual concept.
2:44 AM - Stooben: not bad
2:45 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: All of the problems in the world of Typical Tragedy- but all of the good, as well- lie at the point where light and darkness was divided.
2:46 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Epsilon would've been a dictator if he had a physical body to use.
2:46 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Instead, he was just selfish.
2:46 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: He created people gravitated towards light to protect his aquatic form.
2:47 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Lockheart was absolute darkness, and so, he was greedy.
2:47 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: He seeked out a way to break the balance- for the power that he and Epsilon once distributed evenly to all come back to him.
2:48 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Despite the difference between the two creators, what they created was arguably the good of their labor- but neither side truly appreciated the life they had made together.
2:49 AM - Stooben: Sounds like a lot of inner-turmoil coming to head between them.
2:50 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: It's the human condition, isn't it?
2:50 AM - Stooben: pretty much
2:50 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: What I created in the world of Typical Tragedy was a painting of the Internet
2:51 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: But the canvas that held that painting was what I considered a perfectly balanced, perfectly even, perfectly fair base.
2:52 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Every single user is born with a snippet of predetermined knowledge on a certain subject
2:52 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And they will spend their lives adding that knowledge to an archive for their fellow creations to see.
2:53 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: People existed with an admittedly small amount of elemental affinities for the types of personalities alloted within the world
2:53 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Which is why I introduced individualized user weapons and abilities
2:53 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: All of which would draw upon those affinities in different ways
2:54 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Emphasizing the individual at the core of society.
2:54 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: One in a million. Unique.
2:55 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: What I created was the best cariacature of the world and its people that I could imagine.
2:55 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: What do you think?
2:57 AM - Stooben: I think you did a really good job. And that you managed to wrap it all up and bring it to an end (well, looks like there might be room for a sequel, but you know what I mean) is impressive.
2:57 AM - Stooben: You put more effort into this than any of your previous works. That's for sure.
2:57 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: I put my soul into this.
2:57 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: In this massive world I created, there's a ton of tales that could be told
2:58 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: But in the end, Typical Tragedy is a narrative that parralels my own development
2:58 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Me trying to come to terms with my identity in something much bigger than I am.
2:58 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: At the end of Typical Tragedy
2:58 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Both gods will be dead.
2:59 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: All that will be left is the users and the animals and the Wiki World.
2:59 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And in that world without its creators, everything will continue.
3:00 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Life and death, but no rebirth.
3:00 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: With Zanza's passing, people won't become trolls when they die
3:00 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: They'll just die, like normal people do
3:01 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: But of course, their remains and all that excess energy will become one with nature, just like it does here
3:01 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And that chain of energy and life will continue on for ages afterwards.
3:02 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Every story I've written is the symbol of another step in my development as a person and as a writer.
3:02 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And, well, this is the biggest one I've ever made.
3:02 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And in the shortest amount of time, too.
3:02 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: I guess you could say that means my pace is increasing
3:02 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And, well, I'm starting to run
3:03 AM - Stooben: You're getting more fluent with your methods.
3:03 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And since I'm finally picking up my pace, I don't plan to stop.
3:03 AM - Stooben: I only noticed one significant pause in your work this time
3:03 AM - Stooben: good for you
3:03 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Yeah.
3:03 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Typical Tragedy never hit a standstill
3:03 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Until what happened with Smiley
3:03 AM - Stooben: yes
3:04 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: but the image of the ideal world I created
3:04 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And the assistance of the very real people who I made it based on
3:04 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Got me through.
3:04 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: You haven't read Typical Tragedy and probably don't plan to, but
3:04 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Thank you.
3:05 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: The original end I had planned for TT was Tabuu just laying down to relax at the end of the adventure
3:06 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: But after the developments with Smiley, I changed it to a scenario where Tabuu, while having grown wiser from his experiences
3:06 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Still wasn't quite done with the journey of trying to learn who he is.
3:06 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And at the very end, Tabuu's going to set out into the world
3:06 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: By himself, without friends or family
3:06 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: To find the answer himself.
3:06 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: The guy writing it obviously won't
3:07 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: But fiction's all about hyperbole anyways.
3:07 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Tabuu will find himself
3:07 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: And I'll find myself, too.
3:07 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: So, yeah.
3:07 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: To me, Typical Tragedy wasn't just another Userpedia fiction.
3:08 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Typical Tragedy was something I put my soul into, or, rather, the best picture of it I could paint for you guys.
3:09 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: What do you think?
3:11 AM - Stooben: I think TT was a good outlet for your frustration and many of the thoughts swimming around your head in recent times. Turned into a pretty good piece from what I know and have heard, too. I wouldn't be surprised if you at least get bronze in the Awards for it.
3:11 AM - Stooben: And no, I don't plan on reading TT, but it's not something against your brand of fiction. I...really just don't get into wiki fiction like I used to. At all.
3:12 AM - Stooben: The only thing I read is the very occasional sprite comic, but even that's a stretch these days.
3:12 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Yeah, I get ya.
3:12 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: But Typical Tragedy isn't just another Wiki fiction.
3:12 AM - {Travis Touchdown}: Typical Tragedy is anything but.