Cognitive Deviance

Thank You + Extras

This was a hell of a ride. And you made it. Thank you, dear reader, for reading my story. I hope you stick around to here a little more of what I have to say.

I started writing this story back in 2018. Five years later, a few minutes after midnight on January 10, 2023, three days after what would be Margo Sandoval's first birthday (yes, I'm disappointed I didn't finish it ON her actual birthday), I have successfully completed the first draft. That's right. The first draft. Writing Cognitive Deviance was, without a doubt, my most exhaustive project yet, and not just because of the dark subject matter. Looking back, I realized that this story matured with me. I started writing it in my sophomore year of high school, and I completed it only half a year away from graduating college. The story definitely changed here and there but nowhere near the amount of directions my life has gone in since I started writing it.

You definitely don't need to read on further considering it's all just fun facts from here on out, but I just wanted to thank you again for reading my story! Even though this is just the first draft, I am very proud of the way the story, the characters, and the twists came out. Which reminds me: if you do plan on rereading the story to catch all the foreshadowing and other cool things you missed on the first read, please DO NOT spoil the story in the comments. There are still lots of first-time readers. However, feel free to call out plot holes or inconsistencies because once again this is only the first draft.

If you're done for now, then have an amazing day! If you'd like to keep reading, then go right on ahead!

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I thought it'd be fun to acknowledge a few big changes made as the story went on. Here's the most noteworthy ones:

1. For starters, the novel was originally titled Psycho Slums, and the titular location was going to play a far larger role in the story, a far more different one at that. Rather than consisting of neighborhoods filled with crime and mistreated mentally ill citizens, the Psycho Slums were actually Psychwatch-operated insane asylums the size of city districts, filled with the most violent and unstable individuals imaginable! But the idea fell away after the title was switched to Cognitive Deviance to avoid confusion with the cyberpunk anime Psycho-Pass, which many readers have (oftentimes very rudely) compared this story to.

2. The story was going to be far lighter in tone, and on top of that, Margo and Jack were gonna have a relationship more akin to Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde in Zootopia, at each others' throats at first before blossoming into an unlikely friendship with hints at something more. However, as I continued developing Margo and Jack's individual character arcs over time, I realized that a romance or even close friendship between them was not only unnecessary, but nonsensical and even had slightly harmful implications. Wattpad (and fiction in general) already have enough stories that promote the false idea that romance can cure people of their inhumanity. Jack would tear Margo apart (and literally spent the last chapters threatening to do so), and he'd do the same to all of you. I only say that because I care about you guys. He does not. So stop crying about the Epilogue, please.

3. The Multi Man, Whitey, and Crimson were always meant to be the villains, but the Multi Man's ultimate plan was vastly different than how it came out. Originally, not only was he explicitly stated to have dissociative identity disorder, but Whitey would have it as well! They were still serial killers, but they received all those personalities by transferring the consciousness of their victims into their own heads via PACER before mutilating the bodies beyond recognition. This was heavily modified because 1) DID is already one of the most misrepresented and stigmatized mental illnesses in the media, which motivated me to focus on having the vastly more sympathetic and heroic Carl as the one with DID rather than the two bloodthirsty villains, and 2) even in this story's world, having so many characters with DID seemed hard to believe. Same goes for the casual mind transference technology; although, this aspect was still reworked into the concept of cognitive deviation and helped raise the stakes during the final confrontation between Margo and the Multi Man.