Apathesis Post Mortem/Design Thoughts!

Wanted to go over my thoughts with regard to the narrative of this piece, especially given this one seemed prone to some confusion (which is fair. It wasn't going for explicitly simple and overt.) This is basically a high level overview of the thoughts/what I think are the most opaque items, but feel free to ask further clarifying questions.

The Title

For the longest time, the only things that lingered in my mind were overt phrases for the title as to the extent of the message, which was being symbolically touched upon within the work.

That in this case, being that this temple functioned to facilitate apotheosis for the destined target (yes, fate too, in a way). The villagers knew something was up with the temple, but not quite what--whatever records they would have had wouldn't have been any more clear other than whoever went into the ruins never came back.

But being too overt would be removing the work needed for the game. So instead, I did the next best thing, which was tweaking a word into another word altogether, and in that, it still managed to carry some of the conceit along, albeit in a warped reflection. Apathesis-- apathetic + thesis. Reluctant to embrace the ideas that have been present all along, while also hiding in the shadow of the true purpose of the journey, the apotheosis of Didi.

Naming

Initially everyone was basically "Bunny, wolf, npc1/2/3". Just filler names so I could keep moving the narrative along. Nothing was latching on. I wasn't sure what species the other two visitors were meant to be at that point.

At this point, I was also thinking about the title, and for a moment, I was feeling the connection to another work of literature, in which people spend an indeterminate amount of time, visited by strangers, waiting for something. Waiting... for Godot.

That sparked the noggin, especially when I saw the naming conventions of the cast. I'd always figured it should be ambiguous whether the others were constructs of the temple or real people, but given the three names of Estragon (his given name, Gogo, his affectionate nickname and Adam, the name he gives to Pozzo) that verified that these wolves were meant to on a very surface level be mirrors of the wolf who flees into the temple. I didn't want to give any of them the full name, as I thought that would have been just one step too overt for the others to be the nicknames of the original instead of all sharing the same fount of name. A little plausible deniability, if you would.

Didi gets to be Didi because I liked the idea of her being a girl in contrast to all the M/M focused media that was inevitably gonna be in the jam, the trials felt like they would resonate more, and for the obvious reason that Didi sounded more feminine than Gogo.

Exile

The initial iteration just had Gogo leave, which isn't really too narratively satisfying. Took me getting to the flashback to determine why, and in that regard, I think I constructed something that's implicitly a nod to the Omelas, with a more overt representation in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Didi and her friends were content to not walk away as long as they weren't the child living in perpetual despair. It took six years for her to come to terms with what happened, six years to become one 'the ones who walk away'. Six years of a sort of survivor's guilt, where another instance of this "marking" occurred inbetween.

Random chance determines who gets chosen for a ritual for the village, to maintain its current status. Only those who are unhappy with it can even decide to go elsewhere, no matter where "elsewhere" may entail.

The Other Wolves

Initially, I wasn't sure who to use as the other sprites, but as noted, my mind brought it back to Waiting for Godot, which helped me refine that yes, these other wolves were reflection of Gogo, used to keep moving Didi along by the temple. They're flimsy insubstantial beings, mirrors to her own process and thoughts while projected onto a surface that is very much "Gogo if he was another way". One is willing to engage somewhat, the other not at all, but those don't come off too satisfactory. They don't have enough weight behind them, for they're just helping herd Didi along.

The notes were also mentioned by Adam, I believe, so who can say if they're also a construct of the temple or not? The fake noting the existence of the fake? Or maybe they were real? There's no definitive proof that Gogo was truly what led Didi into the temple--a village wolf isn't guaranteed to have the survival skills required to live in the wilderness until one got back to society. You get to choose if he made it there and the temple consumed him for not being Didi, or if he was there altogether~

Trials!

It wouldn't be godhood without a means to access that ascension. The right choices done throughout passing through the ever-expanding temple is a ritual that prepares the body for being able to accept it. Just like the marking was fate and fate alone, so is entering the temple. One can try to subvert fate, but fate takes its path in the end. Didi left because she couldn't stay, and if anything, the world was coaxing her to go to the temple in the first place.

Some of the choices for what was the viable outcome to apotheosis changed along the way (for better or worse, perhaps).

Initially, it was planned on Jumping into the 'ghost', drink the blood, drink the tree, jump in, but that was questionable, as per the intended purposes of all the "trials". If any trial should have been changed in the end, it would probably be removing the tree or swapping it for something else, but it's not like there's many overt paths to godhood left around for people to study :p only fictional ones, and those tend to be built into the constraints of whatever faith supplies them. Frankly, my mind couldn't spin up anything else, and I felt like there needed to be a sufficient amount of items for the choices and rituals--I suppose it could have just been three and three, but hindsight and all that jazz.

While there was a lot of text, I do think it's accounted for both in character (Didi mentions that she presumes she needs to do it in the right order to see Gogo again) and out of character (if the premise was to do all of the rooms at least once the right way, that would have already been fulfilled on the third loop, meaning that sequencing of some measure had to be the answer--the idea that it's repetition goes against the purpose of those four room staying the same whereas the rest are filled with countless other rooms that differ by the most minute of details) that it required a specific order to progress to the ascension. Respectfully, no one should have spent time wondering if they need to exhaust all options & see all text, especially as that goes against the symbolic conceit of the work. One would have to be overthinking things to get to that point.

The language was also adjusted on that more open looping section--Leave always carries a sort of denial to it. Didi doesn't want to accept that it's right, but she's denying completing the trial as though in fear of what to come. Some of the "not right outcomes" come along as such, as hinted through earlier in the text. The most ambiguous one perhaps is the ghost, but there's the diegetic support for drinking it being the right choice given it comes with the changing images. For the blood, the text notes earlier that the effects seem to be temporary, and that Didi is concerned when Est goes along with it. For the tree, sleeping comes off as another means to delay her own ascension, an attempt to give up altogether the more you choose it, and then for the abyss, no matter how much she tries, she can't consume the whole thing, violently rejecting her attempt.

The last four journals also hint at what is proper for those rooms, without being too overt. Given leaving always turns out as being a wrong answer, it's 2*2*2*2  of the "viable" choices, aka 16 of brute force at most, if one doesn't course correct on seeing the negations for the wrong choices asap. While I can understand that the correct choices weren't necessarily obvious at the start, if one discounts leaving as something that inherently fails to move the plot along and retained what happened in the pre-loop activity (which is echoed throughout the other attempts), I'd expect this to not take too long at all for the media literate reader.

As for the intended symbolic meaning of those trials...

The Ghost: Ostensibly intended as a test for confronting the unknown, by merging into the various memories of visitors (and otherwise?) of the temple.

But on the other hand, that feels like it aligns with the last trial, which was part of why it was the optimal one to swap with the second one.

Instead, drinking it was a means of preparing the vessel to be transformed, brief imprints of others lives as a sort of expansion of consciousness, a testing of the "mind" to be able to accommodate all of the information that divinity brings, whereas jumping in only experienced it with the normal sensory levels.

The Blood Basin: A baptism. Obviously that can't be drunk. One needs to submerge into the liquids for a baptism and re-emerge. The vessel had to be further transformed to be able to hold divinity.

Drinking it would be taking life into the self, but that's not a baptism. That's not meeting the spiritual criterion for change.

The Tree of Blessed Sleep: At least, that was the internal premise, but then I went "drink the sap instead.". Partially because I'm silly enough to not want the same action twice in a row, partially because I wanted an equal measure of actions (and baptism & the abyss both had to be jump in). The tree got assigned "drink" by default, and couldn't manage to brainstorm a satisfactory alternative (albeit felt that a trial in this place was needed, if only to help reinforce the expansion theme with the repetition of the choices).

So instead of the sleep passing to help the body accommodate the changes (aka what happens for children until they've stopped growing), instead the sap of the tree was drunk, the blood of something that wasn't human as though to take in the essence of the divine (for the divine is other).

The abyss: Rebirth. One jumps in, embracing death, and one comes out someone else. Godhood means leaving the former self behind, and becoming someone new. The shadows are just part of the journey. One must sever their ties to continue.

As long as one follows the rite properly, they ascend.

This part was perhaps a bit rushed, but trying to authentically portray something that shouldn't be quite understandable by regular measures was harder to think about how to execute. I didn't want it to be the Greek gods, who are all to human as a reflection of their creators. I wanted something more unspeakable, words that we couldn't express.

Best closest thing was in poetry, to try and bridge the gap to the divine with a human tongue, but of course, poetry doesn't necessarily have the clear "narrative" guidelines of how long it should be or what the material should cover. So both the transition from the rites to godhood, and the ascension itself were likely rushed in a way (especially approaching the end of the writing), but I think in a way, more knowledge isn't deserved or merited. This is part of the connections I made back in my mind to Waiting for Godot. We don't know how long the wait is. They say they'll leave, but they don't leave. They see the same people that they saw before, with an unknown amount of time that passes. Just as we don't get a clean resolution there, I'd argue it's fair we don't get a further resolution here, even if the lead up to it was a bit abrupt.

The Theme: I decide to layer the work with both overt instances and a more implicit usage. Overt in the diegetic sense of the choices-- the choices Didi could do grew with time. Another was the temple-- the rooms were the same but different, a vast space larger than the outside held, to be captured in the random filtering of the layers. Why find a 1000x different backgrounds, when a decent chunk randomly chosen would do. They were narratively the same, but technically different, and so were the chambers outside of those fixed four.

The final was the apotheosis, the ascension to godhood, the expansion from human to something more, which yeah, more implicit there, understandable to miss.

I feel like this covers my overall thoughts on the parts people had the most questions over, but as noted, feel free to ask anything else. I felt the rest was more overt in thoughts.