A Slice Of Life IN HELL

Plot Bunny; In a World where God is not a Reasonable Authority Figure (by modern, post-WWII standards) and sends non-believers and pagans to Hell, including otherwise perfectly decent people, as well as other transgressors for Values Dissonance rules (people who've had abortions, who don't ever pray or fast, who use profane language, who have same-sex relations, and so on). Hell not being a Fire and Brimstone environment, but a Crapsack World where causality itself is out to get you and Finnagles Law is turned Up to Eleven; it's basically Real Life on Super Hard Mode. And you can't die (though I've yet to decide whether it's a resuscitative immortality, where you die over and over, or a regenerative one, where you keep healing).

While having its fair share of horrible or even just mediocre people (following those rules won't save you if you aren't also a good person at heart), the more proactive among the good in that world seek to resist their fates as much as their will can bear, by being extremely cautious, taking a methodical, rational, thoughtful approach to everything they do, and taking great care of each other. Given that this is a Crapsack World out to get them, there's a lot of Yank the Dog's Chain and Bait the Dog involved, and the usual Cruel Twist Ending, but they do have eternity to acquire experience and wisdom, and get to really know each other. Thus we have a perpetual source of conflict, and Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is avoided by making the Hell-dwellers very, very sympathetic.

Probably better as an anthology than as a single story. Literally a post-apocalyptic scenario, so comparisons to works taking place in such, like The Road, or Fist of the North Star, might be in order. May qualify as Religious Horror. Comparisons to Crapsack World such as Berserk or Warhammer 40K might also be useful. Hell being infinite, the technology and economy levels could have a great degree of variation; see Punk Punk, and especially Cyber Punk.

Now that I think of it, Italian author Dino Buzzati made a speciality of such stories in terms of tone, but had pretty much exactly one such setting for a series of short stories: Viaggio agli inferni del secolo. Hell doesn't need to invent suffering, when it can copy that of modern life and turn it Up to Eleven.

Te original idea was to use Islam's characterization of Hell as blueprint. Satan is just Hell-dweller being punished, and most certainly has no authority over the people he tempted into his nightmare..So, none of that "better to reign in Hell" or "hierachy of Demons". Humans go to Hell for a bunch of reasons, mostly for disbelieving and getting in the way of the propagation of Islam. 

Various groups of people described as being in Jahannam include: disbelievers, [35] hypocrites, [36] polytheists, [37] the People of the Book who reject the truth, [38] arrogant rejectors of truth, [39] sinners and criminals, [40] tyrants, [41] the unjust, [42] transgressors, [43] concealers of God's revelations, [44] persecutors of believers, [45] people who commit suicide, and murderers.[46]

The punishments are crude, brutal, and very, VERY fiery; no mind games, just plain pain. No mind games, no Dantesque Ironic/Poetic/Karmic, tailor-made punishments.  It's all at God's discretion, though, in all his "wisdom and knowledge", which means you might not spend an eternity in there, or any time at all. This is no Constitutional Monarchy; God is not bound by his own rules, and whatever he decides, goes.

After some thought, I decided to soften canon up a little bit. The work intends to be satiric ("What are these decent folk suffering so much for?"), but if they go through seething, burning, gruesome Cold-Blooded Torture, then there's just no way of taking it in that direction; either you're pants-out terrified and immediately prostrate yourself before the LORD, or Willing Suspension Of Dibelief is completely broken and you find yourself either laughing at the grotesqueness of it all, or tossing the whole thing down the toilet in disgust and contempt. Plus, that kind of torture negates all opportunities for storytelling; even Torture Porn tales like And I Must Scream and The Passion and Cupcakes give the characters pauses to stop and reflect on the horror they're going through, or playing mind games, or, you know, storiable things besides screaming silently, vocal chords long torn apart. 

Additionally, God's absolute power to do as He sees fit is a bit of a narrative impasse; it renders the whole "these rules are unfair and these are decent people getting a disproportionate retribution" premise moot. Or perhaps not. Perhaps one could successfully invoke the feeling of beaten young children who are lashed and screaming in pain for disobeying rules that they don't quite understand, set by an all-powerful, all-knowing, inescapable authority figure who claims to love them, and who punishes or forgives or even cajoles in patterns that don't seem to make sense. 

... To be continued.

Man, this is a disturbing topic to examine.

One Thousand And One

This is the first tale that I will begin to put together on this site.

In this post, I'll be referencing a wealth of works from all sorts of media, as well as tropes, i.e. recurrent patterns in fiction that you've probably seen a million times. . They aren't necessary to understand what I'm talking about, I think, but they help me ground it into pre-existing tradition; there is nothing new under the Sun. I also hope that you'll find the TVTropes articles entertaining. Well then, let's get down to business.



My very first attempt at writing, waaay back in 2007, was a story about a guy who was thrust into a Narrativium-based world, which was kind of like an immense, live Let's Play for the entertainment a bunch of True Fae children (about three centuries old). Gran't Morrison's Action Comics come to mind.


He'd be thrust into different genres as different roles, and he'd have to start thinking vey meta, very fast, if he wanted to survive each story. He also wanted to get the damned show cancelled without giving a bad performance that would give the Showrunner a reason to fire him (literally), leading to many Springtime For Hitler moments, much to his frustration (sort of like the protagonist of Stephen King's Misery, Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear, Hideaki Anno and Evangelion, Sir Arthur Conan Dyle and Sherlock Holmes ... but he also starts to take pride in his work (think Walter White and his blue meth)...


At some point, he'd become aware that the way things made "storytelling sense" rather than "logical sense" also extended to the world outside the game. And then, instead of the usual "nested realities", "am I still in the simulation",Inception kinda thing,








we'd have an Animal Man meets Grant Morrison type of meeting where he gets to complain to ME, personally. That would be the climax. It's only slightly less cliché :P Also, he would notice the readers.








(I swear, back when I read that first time, I spilled my drink all over the desk. If only I could pull off the same kind of mind-blowiness and audience confuzzlement...)


Most of the references I'm making here are retroactive; I had the idea much before I came in contact with them, but they're handy for condensing. Another work I'd compare this to would be GAINAX's Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai; a story where a kid and his "not my girlfriend" fall into one fantasy world after another, each representing a genre of fiction, with them and their immediate neighbors falling into new roles as befits the story-off-the-day, until they figure out the metaphysics of what's going on at the same time as their personal issues. I suppose I could give the main character a recurring supporting cast. Fellow "gladiators"? Or game personnel? Or both? In fact, now that I think of it, it might be better to start the story as an Ontological Mystery, where our hero spends the first arc progressively figuring out where he is and why, instead of having his slavery revealed to him right away as I initially thought.

Anyway, my point here is to say that, almost as soon as I wrote the first chapter, I went on hiatus, because I was keenly aware that I was biting much, much more than I could chew. Even now, I don't think I have remotely what it takes to plan out and pull off such a project. Designing machines is such easy work in comparison; all you need is patience and method.


But, still, some patience and method might be useful here. So, how should one go about planning out a project like this? It's all fun and interesting to play with meta-fiction, but what overall point do I want to drive home? What would be the central theme, the overarching storyline, that informs the entire story from beginning to end, and upon which I can build sub-plots and genre stories? Those are answers I must find on my own, but any pointers would be quite welcome.