Talk:Restless Souls/Technology: Difference between revisions

::::::*OK, if Hasegawa not only sees alienation as inevitable, but also envisions a "new order" for humanity (as opposed to a desperate attempt to elude extinction), then yes, he may position the Chrysalis as a "bridge over troubled water", where trouble (deadly threat) is no longer perceived as such once you're on the other side - and in that case, yeah, the troublemaker/trickster archetype may fit.<ref group=geyser>Needless to say, I still have my concerns. You're implying a ''huge'' paradigm shift for Hasegawa within a very short time frame: first losing Jamie to an uncharted poisonous world, then quickly discovering/researching the alien nature of the Wilderness; promptly establishing that there is an invasion going on and that it's absolutely unstoppable ("Oh no!"), yet devising (just as promptly) a ''guaranteed'' way for humans to adapt to the hostile biome instead of succumbing to it ("Oh hurray!"); finally, rationalizing the whole process as a welcome disruption of the political/environmental status quo - and only then coining the name Daodan, which doesn't so much suit the initial xenoforming threat as it suits Hasegawa's own (self-)alienating initiative.<br />So, from grieving husband to "prophet of trouble", all in a matter of years - or is it months? He'd still need to work out the whole Chrysalis thing - even if he is somehow assured of his eventual success as a "troublemaker" before core development even starts... Your story would need to account for this extremely fast character development and, seeing as xenoforming is never mentioned in Oni, you'd probably need to feed this big secret to the audience in large, potentially indigest chunks. To pull that off elegantly would be quite a feat, but you have to understand/forgive my skepticism.</ref> (What about Kerr, though?<ref group=geyser>Admittedly, Kerr's time with Konoko in Chapter 12 was short, but at no point does he - or anyone involved with the Daodan project - show any awareness or concern about an all-consuming Wilderness. The main perceived threat is hyperevolution itself - be it Muro's or Konoko's - and, to a much lesser degree, the ongoing BioCrisis. Then there's Muro's Sturmanderung, of course, which uses sabotaged ACCs for deliberate poisoning, and Konoko's counter-sabotage, which destroys the ACCs completely and possibly causes even more suffering - but that's another story. Those new threats (of apocalyptical magnitude indeed) are ''man-made aggravations'' of the BioCrisis and, for all we know, "mankind as we know it" was ''not'' headed for extinction, were it not for Konoko's and Muro's actions. On the face of it, both Kerr and Griffin's Daodan team seem to dismiss Hasegawa's "If something isn't done we are all doomed." as delusion/exaggeration. To have a sequel establish an exactly opposite truth - with an ineluctable alien invasion that's been eating at Earth this whole time... Well, that, again, would be quite a feat - ''if'' you can pull it off. (I think of my storytelling ambitions as much less radical and more straightforward than that, but I might be wrong.)</ref>)

::::::*OK, helping nature revert to a primeval/pristine state could be a legitimate goal for a "troublemaking" initiative, even if a bit naive.<ref group=geyser>Older isn't always better, especially if we're talking prehistoric environmental conditions. Suppose we revert to the primordial soup era, with heavy UV radiation, no oxygen, volcanoes everywhere... - how would that be a good thing? Anything before the Great Oxygenation Event would count as "dead air and foul water" to modern humans - or, for that matter, any biome that's old enough to host bacteria/parasites that our immune systems know nothing about. But would it really feel like progress for Hasegawa - working towards a "new world" that is, in fact, profoundly ancient, and uncompromisingly deadly at that?<br />The one thing that may help Hasegawa feel like he's ushering in a "brave new world" - and not playing along with some ancient folks who are stuck in the past - is the "haywire" part. New stuff flowing in from the Phase (or from beyond the Veil, whatever) - not just from a past Earth, but from alternate and/or future Earths, bringing about loads of new evolutionary miracles for Life and technological breakthroughs for Man... Now that's the kind of thing that definitely ''could'' feel like progress towards a new shape of things. Fundamentally uncontrollable progress - perhaps appealing only to a scientist that's already "progressing" towards "alternative sanity" himself - but progress nonetheless.</ref> (And yes, I do recall that your xenoforming is actually paleoforming, with the additional twist that there is no time travel involved - the ancient entities mean to reclaim the Earth simply by emerging from a stasis, and not by walking through some fast-forward time portal.)<ref group=geyser>I'm quite fond of the Diluvians, actually. How they're ancient and huge and dormant most of the time, but wake up once in a hundred million years (to avoid subduction), catalyzing Phase phenomena and causing catastrophic biological events (extinctions as well as explosions). I see them as massive catalysts of "Phase chaos" - rather than invaders who are deliberately paleoforming modern Earth -, and that redeems them in my eyes. That said, if they feel like the ocean's acidity is too high or too low for their comfort, they would probably try and do something about it - e.g., by wishing for plants that are better at photosynthesis -, but it wouldn't be anything like an engineered "plan", more like a planet-sized hivemind working through telekinesis, telepathy and other "Phase magic".</ref>