Author’s Afterword

“The secret to being original is copying so many people that your detractors give up pointing it out.” - Sir Nil, who encourages you to steal this quote without crediting him as he did with his own master.

Hey! Sir Nil here, I figured I should get into the habit of writing ye old Afterwords, since I got such a positive response from the Mycology Afterword back in the day. This is just some random unhinged stream of conscious thoughts that I figured I should type out to give context to the story I’ve been writing. Maybe I’ll give away what sorta story this is supposed to be, but I figured I don’t care if I give the game away.

I’m a pantser, this is an aspect of my writing that hasn’t changed from the day I started almost five years ago. I start with an idea, either a world, a character, or just a scene I think will be cool, I start fleshing out the idea in my head, build a setting and what not then I start writing.

Funny thing, the name Tautology actually originated from my beta reader Dissonant Serenity, who goes by ShinyRock on RR. I was going to call the story Chalk or something but she told me that this world was bizarre and hard to describe. You can only really describe it with itself, hence a Tautology. Which is so much better than calling it the story of ‘One Who Dyes’, get it, because he dies at the start and his power is- eh fuck it.

But man has Tautology gotten away from me, originally this story was started because I really got into Pacific Rim and Warhammer 40k’s lore, especially on Cadia and the Guard, the first real chapter/draft was an S-Class Files for the Guard of this world, detailing their actions during the Long Night, and how that Obsidian Moon I kept referencing was shattered. As for the rest? I got into Jujutsu Kaisen, Solo Levelling while also having a folder of superpowers for a Jojo fanfic. With a lot of background inspiration from Hunter x Hunter. I’ve read the classic webnovel super power stories like Worm, Brennus, some of Whateley Academy and Summus Proelium to an extent, however other than blatantly stealing their power classifications, I didn’t really like the western take on superpowers. Preferring the HxH and later JJK take. HxH in my mind embodies the Sanderson Laws of Magic pretty well, and I take more inspiration from that when I do power designs than I do of traditional western superhero fics.

That’s the sorta mindset I had when I began writing for Tautology. Taking the rule “Weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers,” to an probably unnecessary extent and an unhealthy appreciation of HxH’s Binding Vows and JJK Restrictions. If you can’t tell, Revealing your Hand and Conditions are ripped straight from those two.

Added onto that is a semi gripe I have with stories that make their main character just all around badasses. Generalist fighters who are useful in every combat context as either ranged DPS or melee fighter. For LitRPG enthusiasts, I mean the basic spellblade archetype. I understand why they do this, I even did it with Aiden. But one thing I set out when designing powers is for them to be useful, but not all encompassing, and for weaknesses in certain powers to exist not just in theory, as in, mentioned in passing but never actually used, but for them to be actually exploited, learned and realised by both the user and their enemies.

Going back to Aiden, the limit of his power is his creativity, knowledge, morals and resources, but while he can gain physical enhancements and personally fight better than a normal human, he is shit out of luck when facing people with powers that actually enhance their bodies. Hence why he could only run when facing Johnjohnjohnjohn and was essentially fucked when he was dragged into a pocket dimension with Rain and no material to animate. The Rain fight was essentially a normal human being put into a cage with a bear. The human might be able to take down the bear if they had a gun and prepared or something, but they didn’t, so the bear beared.

That’s because even if I find the basic bitch all around physical enhancement type powers bland, they can’t be useless, otherwise I invalidate their existence. I tried to contrast this strongly during Jun’s Daycore reveal, Aiden was knocked around and forced on the defensive just from glancing blows, while Jun was trading hits left and right with only a lost tooth to show for it. If I didn’t, suddenly every physique or brute type power needs another gimmick and then it becomes power creeped so that the ones like Aiden or Darius who only have gimmicks now need physique powers to stay relevant. My philosophy is that a power can appear useless, but can’t truly be useless. A power is only useless when the wielder is lacking in creativity, something I learnt from Jojo’s of all places lol.

The situational strength of a power also factors in because I want this system to be more of a rock paper scissors type rather than x is more powerful than y, and z is more powerful than x, thus z can beat y. Where matchups between powers actually matter, rather than generalists doing everything. Every character needs a clear shortcoming, something they just can’t do. You don’t expect Jun to pull out camouflage in the same way Aiden can do with his octopus tattoos, and you don’t expect Aiden to suddenly punch strong enough to shatter a building without wrecking his arm in the process. If there are generalists, they need the weakness of not being able to do one thing very well, or if they are capable of doing that thing well, they need time and resources, or are personally rather weak, as you may see with Aiden.

When I designed his power, I had a bunch of requirements, something with high potential to justify power increases in a long running web serial and consequences that will stay forever relevant. I had an array of inspirations, a previous power design called ‘Mushrooms,’ which is a song by the same artist as ‘Colorful’, which originally was just Feruchemy turned up to eleven. It allowed the conversion of certain attributes of the user, such as strength, speed or health, to be grown into mushrooms, which anyone can later consume to temporarily gain the stored attribute within. I went deep into this idea, but was, in the end, too determined on previous savings to fully meet my needs. I briefly experimented with the idea of making it so that storing memories or identity into these mushrooms would make them ‘animated’. Some finagling later and reading ‘Warbreaker’ got me to ‘Colorful’ as it is today. And if you’re wondering why I spell it as ‘Colorful’ instead of ‘Colourful’ despite not being American, it is because that’s how the song name is spelled.

While Aiden has the potential to solve all his shortcomings, they aren’t something that’ll happen quickly. He’s essentially the gadgeteer archetype with the DND wizard problem of constantly needing to recharge spell slots, but he’s also still at the stage where he’s lacking in resources and is rather inexperienced with his power. His own morals have made him focus on personally increasing his strength rather than creating and raising a pet tiger or at least having another dog.

Can you be a gadgeteer when everything you make has intelligence? Maybe not sapience, but enough sentience they can feel pain, love and emotion? Would it be right to create something for the purpose of nothing but conflict?

If your parents suddenly told you that they made you as a prototype, a test so they could learn to develop better living weapons, what would you feel? There are probably thousands of emo edgy stories just with the idea of a protagonist being created to serve as nothing more than a living weapon, and there is a reason those stories tend towards tragedy or rebellion. It’s fine if your parents forgot the condom, but making a living weapon is where Aiden thinks the line should be drawn.

And think about it from Aiden’s perspective for a moment, having a kid is wild. You suddenly have this meatball of flesh and other assorted materials that you don’t know what they’re thinking, that can act completely independently from you but you’re supposed to keep them alive and raise them right so they don’t get fucked in the head? I know I would probably fail in the endeavour, I can barely count on myself to keep myself alive lol.

He just doesn’t want the responsibility of raising kids, and that’s a perfectly fine choice. That’s why we get to the final point.

Everything I just said needs to be able to be exploited and subverted in a way that makes sense and doesn’t subvert pre-existing rules within the system, and characters need to know how to do so because they aren’t fucking idiots.

The microbiology book reveal was meant to be an ‘oh shit’ moment, because even if Aiden doesn’t want kids, he’s aware his own morals about the matter are rather loose. The deciding factor for him is personal attachment, and something too small to even see, not to mention interact with, is a great way to not develop personal attachment!

Problems need to exist, characters need a degree of inflexibility and flaws, but as intelligent characters, they should also have the capability of recognising and bypassing their own flaws to find ideas that they could not have reached without their specific circumstance and mindset.

Plus to overcome the limitedness of powers, I wanted to show the combinatorial strengths. That’s what I showcased with Trist’s use of the Wheel of Fortune spinner and her own Frame of Mind ability as an extremely basic example, and for a recent example, Säkkijärven polkka, which only became dangerous because the user also knew a cognitohazard. Without it, it would just be a rather simple to overcome Boogeyman. The reason for this is twofold, first, I wanted to justify party dynamics and multi-character relationship development for the future. Second, I view it as a perfectly reasonable development in any world that has become dependent on any sort of advancement system.

For example, think of antibiotics. A miracle of modern civilisation and science. No one person made it happen. Some guy discovered it by contaminating a petri dish, some guy manufactured it, some guy made laws to regulate it, and some guy transported it all across the world. A simple thing that requires countless different people of different skills, professions, lifestyles and more to get to your hands. Humanity does not survive the night alone, and I wanted to ensure that aspect is an important part of the story. Not in the least part because a major part of this story is just Aiden learning to make friends.

As for why powers have song names? It’s because I’m a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure fan. I fucking admit it. I don’t even try hiding the fact that half this story is just shit I liked from other media, and there’s nothing wrong with that, other than disappointing the peeps who thought I was trying to write something original lmao. There is a bonus of easy power generation due to the fact I can just search up a song and figure out a power from the lyrics, but let's be honest this part is pure fan indulgence on my part lol.

Anyways, Jun’s power was originally something from the Jojo fanfic I wrote that will never see the light of day. It was just Nightcore back then, a Stand that manifested as a pair of headphones. The aesthetic for her was because I really liked the K/DA Akali skin, the original one where she raps under blacklight in the train, and the general hip streetwear fashion aesthetic. I found that super cool so I decided to make a character around it.

As for Daycore, I added it later on, largely as a side thought, originally Jun’s brother, but I figured it would be much more interesting to put it on the same person, sort of like a ying-yang thing. Daycore’s design is kinda of an inverse of Nightcore, being much more traditional looking and with bright colours. His lack of appearance also is meant to be reflective of the proportion of Nightcore/Daycores songs that exist, with Nightcore being the more popular one. At the time I had also just finished writing another trans character in Mycology, so I figured I should keep that train steaming. Not because I thought it would be good representation, but because I found the idea of having different characters with life experiences far different from mine to just be interesting, and that it would be a good way to expand into different forms of writing and viewpoints.

I kinda only realised the ramifications like way later on, I didn’t realise people might actually see Jun’s gender fluidity and desire good LGBT representation from them. Suddenly there was this random pressure I started feeling that I didn’t when I was just making them up. So many times I wanted to pull out and just make her have a split personality instead, since it felt like a much safer option. It felt to me it didn’t matter how I wrote them because some people are gonna sneer because of who they are and others are going to hold them to some gold standard that I could not achieve.

But then I realised I didn’t need to give a shit about people’s opinions!

Like Maximilien Robespierre discovering the guillotine, cutting some people out of your life is just so much more refreshing. I suggest doing it with everyone you don’t like. But obviously I don’t advocate for cutting everyone out, a writer’s job when dealing with criticism and comments is to realise which ones are beneficial, and which ones are not. For Tautology I’ve tried to reply to every comment, even the ones I find stupid, to explain my thought process and decisions. Which, I’ll be honest, has only made me want to be able to ban some people from commenting.

Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, the story. As I wrote, the story gradually morphed into more of a character driven story than the epic I originally intended, which really ended up being my characteristic style. Readers of Mycology might already know what I’m talking about, it’s a persistent apathy to the world that is kinda hard to understand without knowing me. On the recommendations from a friend, I started going to a therapist in the last years of College (High School for the Imperial measurement users), and she told me I had major depression.

And I was like shit, people don’t have suicidal thoughts since the third grade?

That realisation was so weird. I reevaluated myself, and realised that I didn’t really enjoy doing anything. I played games and read stuff but those emotions were always fleeting. I barely concentrated or put effort into class and had no friends and no common topics to share, yet I thought of myself as no different from others. Just a bit more alone, and I didn’t care for the loneliness either. I spent my primary school years wanting to die, then middle and high school with an apathy to the world. I’ve lived almost an entire decade feeling nothing, not proud of anything I’ve done, not happy or sad of living, I was just simply there.

Existing, with no particular feeling towards the matter.

At some point I learned that people actually enjoy doing things, that they are motivated, that they know where they are going in life. I’ve been told the apathy and self hate that defined my life was kinda shitty, and that people felt happy in a way I didn’t.

I kinda wanted to feel that.

Not because I thought there was anything wrong with me, but more so because I figured it would be a novel feeling, something different. Having been this for so long, I had no correct frame of reference for what that feeling would be. It wouldn’t hurt to try, so why not try it?

I think now you can sorta understand why I’ve written Aiden like I did.

That and because I really liked the Nanami archetype.

And please don’t turn me into a martyr for depression or some shit. My life is comfortable, it is better than many in the world. Depression is something plenty of people have, and many hide it. I don’t because I don’t give a shit about my frankly rather boring life experience. Give a shit about people who are actually suffering, rather than some random internet penguin making shitty story metaphors online.

And this is a shitty story, one filled with mistakes that I can’t be bothered correcting. Remember Alexis? The tetris girl? I introduced her as a gag character then realised I didn’t actually give her anything else, the joke also got old after two uses so I fucking yeeted her and replaced the gag character with the entire Tuba family. I should’ve explained the setting through the school counsellor (whose name I forgot and have just been calling George and hoping no one would notice) regarding the criminality of meta powers. So many people thought he was just encouraging students to rob people when the truth was just doing normal jobs without a licence. Not to mention I really wanted to have had a Sister Savage showcase with the powers of Christianity during the zombie outbreak, but I felt the usage of Law by the Vice Principal already took up too much space so I ended up dropping it. Plus I didn’t actually have Trist’s character and her Frame of Mind power created when Aiden had that hand check up with Dr Oliver Oliver and Raj, so our lovable British parasite didn’t even mention her. The S-Class files were also supposed to be something akin to the SCP style, but just like SCP it ended up being way more narratively driven than intended. There’s probably more that aren’t even coming to mind right now, but you get the idea.

What is here is essentially the incoherent first draft of a pantser with no fucking idea of what he’s doing. If it’s shit, I’ll just fix it later. I’m fucking embracing that stereotype of the fan author who just copies shit he likes without adding anything meaningfully new. Nothing is original, you can’t write anything new, so plagiarise everything!

And I’ve seen a lot of people call Tautology dark, which really confused me for a moment because I’ve never written with the intention of making it dark. In fact, I’ve actively made decisions to make it less dark and edgy. For example, in Aiden’s fight against Johnjohnjohnjohn, I originally wanted to make it so that Aiden would end up trapped underground. The underground bunker’s gate being the only thing separating him from the hobgoblin, trapped with his body rapidly starving to death as his regeneration worked and only goblin corpses around to provide sustenance. In the end I cut that because I felt it was both too dark and not at all useful to what kind of story I was writing or Aiden’s character arc. While it would be a great set piece to show the utter resolve of a character to survive, in that situation, Aiden would’ve just sat there and died, he fundamentally doesn’t care about his own life enough to put in the minimum effort to live if a certain difficulty threshold is passed.

Without the mutual life or death struggle both he and Johnjohnjohnjohn engaged in, he wouldn’t have had the new perspective to keep trying to live. Someone else put in the effort and risk to kill him, so some kill stealing idiot didn’t deserve his life. His life suddenly had value in the fact someone risked their own to try and fail to kill him. Is that a good way to view things? Is that a good way to gain self-worth? Fuck no, but it is one that is entirely his. As the first real fight he engages in, that’s the sorta impact I want to induce.

Johnjohnjohnjohn was the one who almost killed him, so only Johnjohnjohnjohn, or someone who put in similar effort, is allowed to kill him.

The first part of the story is one where many take for granted. It is not about taking the first step on the great race course, but of gaining the ability to stand at the starting line. Aiden said it himself, he doesn’t believe he is a heroic figure, and he would honestly be worried about anyone who characterises him as such. He’s almost blatantly suicidal, it’s just that he wants to trade his perceived worthless life with one that he believes actually has value. A seemingly heroic act. Hence why he utterly does not care about any injury or mutilation he might suffer. The way he sees it is the same way we might when we buy something at a discount. Pay something at a low value, and receive something of great value. The only difference is the low value thing is his own life and he would give it out for fucking free if he could.

This first part of the story is for him to know what a ‘better’ version of him could be, one that he could set his sights on becoming, because randomly losing and regaining parts of yourself make for surprisingly good introspection material. Beyond all the technical mechanics of the power, Colorful is a power that incentivises him to live and introspect. To feel emotions with people, things, and events and eventually recreate them. Lose those emotions and change, and upon regaining them, realise how those things had affected him. This isn’t a story about paragons or perfect people, it’s a story about idiots stumbling through the dark until they happen onto the things that make them slightly better.

In the end this story is just something I wanted to write. Something based on my preferences, likes, dislikes and life experience. As a new writer, I still try to stick to writing things I know, and I know my life was not one upward trend to where I am now. There wasn’t a singular defining reason for my personality, there wasn’t a great quest or desire I embarked on, the world was not changed by my existence or nonexistence.

There is no dark lord to slay at the end of the journey. No linear narrative that goes in predictable lines all leading to a central conflict. No great tale or parable about morality or something. The universe doesn’t trend towards dark or light, it isn’t perfect nor is it grimdark.

It just sorta is.

A life is too small to know this insane world, and that idea permeates my writing. The world has been here before you came, the world will continue moving without your action, and the world will remain after you go. Everything can be explained, but why should the world bother explaining things to you? It’s been said plenty of times, but the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. If you hold the real world to the same worldbuilding standards as fiction, you realise that it doesn’t hold up at all. Like it’s not even close. The assumption that things need to make sense or follow some theme to me is a pretty fictional concept. I don’t ascribe meaning or reason to my life and the things that happen around me, so when I write I tend to try to create worlds where characters feel almost incidental. I don’t write chosen heroes or villains, at best they are coincidentally at the right place at the right time. They can have goals, lives, and dreams, but in the end that is just a random thing a meat computer ascribes to things. That counts as well for the weirdos who think grimdark is ‘realism’, my man, you are a fallible collection of meat tubes genetically coded with negativity bias, attempting to gain the intellectual and moral high ground through this perspective is a pretty stupid thing when those things only exist in the grey sponge between your ears.

Small goals like saving one’s sister is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it is still meaningful to those who undertake it. I don’t trend towards some kind of grimdark nor do I really want to. In what grimdark story does an old lady feel young again as she beats up an endless stream of zombies? In what grimdark story does a girl beat up a kaiju through sheer force of will? In what grimdark story does an old man sacrifice his life so everyone can be fed? In what grimdark story do ancient heroes rise to save their world one last time? In what grimdark story can you read about idiot teenagers enjoying a night out eating chilli? In what grimdark story does someone sacrifice themselves to give their descendants a world with green?

In what grimdark story does a man teach a young child how to ride a bike because he knew what it was like without a father?

If there’s one thing I know, the bleakness of the world and experiencing shitty situations does not mean you have to give up. Shit sometimes just happens, and nothing you do can change that. There’s going to be difficulty in life, and sometimes you fail, sometimes you only win because you got lucky, and that’s just sorta how things are. A neutral idea of a world that just is. The world doesn’t care if you are stuck in some malaise or if you offed yourself, things keep moving on with or without you. Just do whatever you like, it’s not like you will be remembered as anything more than a history footnote a thousand years later.

In the end, when I realised I felt happy, I asked myself: “Is this how normal people feel?” I sorta realised something then. This sounds silly but I almost failed high school because I kept putting in the minimum effort to do things, never trying to excel, never putting in more or less effort than I believed was needed to pass. I never felt the same stress my fellow classmates felt as they came upon their graduation tests that seemed life defining at the time. Sure, with the hindsight of time I realise even if you didn’t get marks good enough to enter your preferred university or course, you could’ve always tried again at a later date. But at the time I didn’t know that. I wasn’t trying purely because I didn’t care enough about my future life path to put in the effort.

When I was certain of outcomes I ceased trying. Even if the outcome was horrible, it was still acceptable. I might still put in effort but I didn’t put in any more or less effort that was needed. I know I will die, I know I will be forgotten, so my mindset was to ignore all the extra bits in between and just skip to the bit where I died. Sorta like skipping a cutscene in a video game.

I’ve changed a bit now, I know how this story will end, I know the exact scene I will end the story on, but I don’t fully know how I will get there, and I am dying to find out. For no matter what my plans are, they can change and they can improve, that is why I am fundamentally a pantser.

That’s what I’m sorta trying to do. Along with giving the middle finger to the phrase: “Reality is stranger than fiction,” which has been my life goal in literature since I started writing Mycology. If there is a meaning to this story, a point to why I write, these would probably be it. All authors make a point, whether they are aware of it or not, the fundamental problem of having personality and life experience is that it will inevitably flavour their writing. Like how my own philosophy tends towards stoicism and existentialism, big words that don’t mean all that much once you look into it.

And I am aware my own perspective is biassed and limited. For one I’ve realised I have a much higher tolerance of bad shit happening to characters, people cared a lot more about Aiden losing an arm than I thought. Much more than he did in fact, that part is a bit based on personal experience, since I didn’t much care back then that I was getting my ass whooped and bullied, and it was meant to be contrasted with him fussing over Jun losing only a tooth, a show don’t tell way of how he sees the worth of his own life compared to others.

People cared about suffering, I understood that but I don’t think I ever really internalised it lol.

Another thing that was absolutely hilarious was the min wage I set down. I googled the Australian min wage and halved it for what I thought was a proper dystopian sum, and then some guy said, “Minimum wage is up? And housing prices are down? Damn this world seems great to live in.”

Bless you that random person, for living in the real dystopia.

Which does bring up an interesting point. Who is this story for? After all, the cast of readers here is rather diverse, some people are here for the powers and action encounters, some people are here for the worldbuilding, and some are here for the characters, every reader has their own vision and expectations of what this story will end up as, some of which overlap but some of which are incompatible. There is ultimately a rather obvious answer.

The story is first and foremost for me. Writing is in the end a very serious hobby for me, I don’t do this for a job and saying I’m in it for the fame is pretty pathetic with less than 500 followers. Due to my style I find my work to be of little artistic or literary value so I’m not chasing some abstract idea of perfection either. While I used to write because I enjoyed people reading it, I’ve now realised that I write because I really do enjoy it. Ultimately an author cannot know how much an audience or reader enjoys their work, words are the closest thing humans have to telepathy and that has its own shortcomings. I am only sure of my own enjoyment of writing, so in this enterprise it is ultimately my perspective and vision that I hold to higher value.

I just like creating stuff, in fact I’ve been trying to learn how to be a digital artist on the side as well (it’s going shit, I can’t even finish the fucking Drawabox classes). This is a passion project, I am not aiming for greatness or fame or perfection or money, if (big if) I get those, it’ll be a pleasant bonus, but I don’t care about chasing it. I did care about the numbers a lot once, but I realised I wasn’t putting in the same type of effort as those who update everyday or spend hours just planning a narrative perfectly or even just following the popular tropes.

This story is, in the end, something I can say is mine, from the first to last word, I will know I was the one who wrote it. Sure I get burnt out occasionally and might not do everything perfectly or exactly how I wanted, and maybe I’ll cringe in utter embarrassment years from now when I think back on this, but that’s fine.

It’s fine if I make mistakes, it’s fine if I fail, it’s fine if I look back two decades from now and hate this work for all that it stood, because I’ve had nothing once, and found that rather dull. So I would rather make a bunch of mistakes than nothing at all, because at least I can learn from mistakes.

Sir Nil out.

Also, a friend called me a ‘tortured artist’ when I showed them this draft and that tag has been fucking with my head ever since. Sorta like a fishbone in your throat. This isn’t a Russian story where the quality of the book is determined by the suffering of the author, readers and characters right? I keep denying it but the more I think about it…