We're All Human

Afterword

That was We're All Human, that you just read. And this is its afterword. I have a lot of feelings regarding this story, which shouldn't surprise anyone, and I'm going to express them here, where people who care might actually look at them. If you don't care, skip to the end where there's an optional question to potentially enhance my future writing and to influence the course of any future fiction in the same universe.

Oh, you're still reading, marvelous. This is going to become slightly incoherent as I attempt to sum up all the thoughts I have about this book in the form of what basically amounts to a rambling blog post wherein I use slightly more elevated language out of a sense of self-consciousness regarding the fact that this is technically in a book. Bear with me.

We start with the book itself. We're All Human took form months before I wrote the outline, which itself sat in my computer disused for months until I suddenly decided to write from it. We're All Human, I think, is the crystallization of the things that really mattered to me then, and now I suppose. It's part Durarara!!! fanfiction (more), part Biblical narrative (more), it stars a young nervous girl whose internet friends are very important to her (more) on an online MUSH (more), fighting cults and a demon representing conformism (more) and the human capacity for monstrosity (more), and then stylistically it has a very Jewish golem (more), a faerie, and a robot (no more, but honestly just read my other book[s], you'll understand my feelings about robots pretty succinctly).

There's no better place to put this than here: A MUSH is a multi-user mostly-freeform roleplaying game accessed through the telnet communication protocol. It's all text and ASCII art, and it's a very, very old hobby-- I play on one that is older than I am, and it's not the oldest out there.

See I wasn't sure what to write in this afterword but now it's obvious that I start with some of the mores. To get the Durarara!!! thing out of the way-- Black Alley Stories is an alternate-universe version of popular Japanese light novel/comic/television series Durarara!!! which of course I heartily recommend even if I strayed pretty heavily from its roots. Some of Dante's analysis that... somehow, forms part of the book's technical climax is correct, although I think more of it is wrong. Most importantly there's no messiah in Durarara!!!, there's not even anyone /decent/ in Durarara!!!. But I think that Shizuo's struggle to be a decent person resonates pretty well with Dante's (more), and that's probably why she came off with such a wrong impression of the series. Oh well.

What the hell is this book actually about, then? A lot of things. I think one of the best themes to start with is its biblical elements. I'm not a Christian, I will likely never be a Christian. But Atai, in large part, represents Jesus. She's her own person, certainly, and she's a new messiah for a new age, a more powerful messiah because paradoxically she is very weak. She doubts herself so badly, and she always /almost/ succumbs, and until the end she's never ever sure. Yet, their stories end the same way-- willingly accepting their own death to save the world, even knowing that the world is rotten. In the end I'm not certain why I decided that Atai would be Jesus. Maybe it was Tall Mud's influence. Maybe it was the Holy Spirit whispering in my ear, which I've been told is known to happen.

New theme: the Internet. The Internet is very, very important to me. It's... hard, to put into words exactly how unbelievably indebted I am to it, which is why I wrote a twenty thousand word long novella explaining it better than I can now. It's about the power of complete strangers, about the power to reach out and do things even when you can't leave your own house, the power to forge communities out of widely different individuals. Of the MUSH staff and Ringo, we have two gay French girls, a former gangster of mostly ambiguous heritage, a massive pock-marked Jewish man, a scrawny, nerdy black kid, a fourteen year old girl who never leaves her apartment, and a robot. And yet, I hope I've demonstrated, these bonds are just as fierce as any in a book set in the real world, in homogenous groups. This is important to me.