Thoughts on Melkrin, Heaven and The Meta (TLDR: Yuck)

I’m not one to rest on the seventh day, not really.  Or the eighth or the ninth or the tenth.  It’s mostly one weird, detached act of creation all the time.  What passes for a nap is tossing, turning, remembering.  

At some point, while perusing my last article, I thought of Lord Nim’s annexation of Greater Bosbia.  The name will mean nothing to anyone, but it was a typical case of “expansionist state swallows its tiny neighbor.”  

For the most part, I like scenarios like these: conflicts where an Evil Empire is involved always generate some cool one-liners.  A good battle scene gets everyone going, too.  I would challenge anyone to watch Peter Jackson’s rendition of the Battle of Pelennor Fields without getting back-of-the-neck tingles.  Yeah, yeah, I know, Peter Jackson.  But those oliphaunts!

The Bosbian conflict was not fun to watch.  It wasn’t compelling in really any way.  It was a bean-counter’s orgasm, a four-hour tabletop-RPG combat session—with the full grid, the minis, and dwindling supply of cheetos—where nobody would risk even a scratch to their PC.  

Recall how I once tasked “Albert” (Einstein, for the curious) with being the conductor of all things physical and real in a sizable region of the Earth.  Anyone who doubts the inherent artistry of scientific thought could have probably been swayed by watching the way he bent the breezes to make falling leaves jive like flappers, or made shapes in the clouds that a cute couple with different belief apparatuses might have argued over (“No honey, that’s literally my grandfather’s face!”, “No dear, that’s actually cumulonimbus-induced pareidolia!”).  

In this, and in all good cases of what I like to call “existence art,” the effect is subtle, and provokes conversations or experiences like the one mentioned above.  The couple got to have their moment, and such a moment—being a speck-on-a-speck of obscure meteorological data—didn’t really disrupt the almighty Observable Truth and cause members of certain fandoms to pull their hair out.  It’s actual and satisfactual.  

Contrast this with what happened at the Great Battle of the Three Casualties, a “battle” that occurred on Melkrin, long after Old Earth, long after Einstein was out of the picture.  Long after I was out of the picture, to be honest.

By the time of the battle, reality had been parceled out to many different creatives.  Something like ‘the whole Northern Hemisphere’ didn’t really apply anymore.  Not because Melkrin was radically different geographically—it was virtually identical to Earth (Yes, I’m lazy)—but because in my absence, things had happened that turned the fandoms against one another, and to a large degree, against me.  I’ll get to that stuff later.  

But on to the battle.  I’m not going to recount it all, because it’s too boring.  Ugh.  The main summary: a force, if you can call it that, of about 300 child soldiers armed with B-grade rifles destroyed the entirety of the Bosbian military, roughly 10,000 similarly-armed men.  

How?

Once upon a time, a man named Johan died and went to Heaven.  I didn’t personally nod to him when he passed through the Pearly Gates; by that point, that was someone else’s job.  Johan was, during his time on Old Earth, a thing called a “scientific racialist.”  He didn’t like black people, for whatever reason.  (I don’t like dogs.  To each their own, I guess?)  He had some other quirks, but he sifted content like everyone else, and served his time on the Committee.  IIRC, he was fourth or fifth chair on the Choir of Exobiology, drawing up concept art for new lifeforms that were to be part of a backburner world that I never got to.  If he was a member of any fandoms, I never heard about it.  

Johan’s Committee service period was up long after I had already departed, and well into the death spiral of Melkrin.  At this juncture, my Heavenly Host was continuing its work without any guidance from yours truly.  And I was beyond giving a shit.  Instead of being personally vetted by me, he was assigned by some automated process to a plot of reality in the arctic circle.  On Old Earth this was mostly barren, but by the Melkrin period, it contained a good little clutch of human beings.  The people there called it Bosbia.  

A majority of the Bosbian population was chocolatey brown.  They were also a culturally homogenous group, apparently the result of some isolated fandom’s efforts.  Bosbia’s culture had some interesting wrinkles—personification of colors, a blood sport that could only be played by tetrachromats, a kind of mystic view of coprolalia—so they were one piece of the setting that I still watched on those post-Melkrin days when I found myself depressed, slumped in creative fallow.  For a piece of Melkrin work, they were actually pretty cool, I suppose.  

Their neighbors, the fascists of Fuir-Nim, were kind of lame by comparison.  Seriously, whoever came up with the writing prompts that resulted in that motley crew has my contempt.  Essentially cartoon villains, the Nimites were a culture of gender-based slavery, atrocities, and fecal worship.  Their leader, Lord Nim, was a rather strange combination of unhinged-Disney-animal-sidekick (in this case, a coyote) and Adolf Hitler caricature.  Like I mentioned at the beginning of this article, they served their purpose as an Evil Empire.  I just wish they were a little less grimdark.  

The day of Fuir-Nim’s invasion of Bosbia started out much like any other for Johan.  Throughout his tenure, he had done his damnedest to make the experiences of the melanin-filled Bosbians as miserable as possible.  Little stuff: temporarily shifting gravity so as to trip up unwitting feet, magnifying sounds to cause avalanches in the distance in order to frighten folks, toppling towers of silence that wavered a little too much.  He got some chuckles out of it, but all this flew mostly under the Committee’s radar.  By this point, few people were ready to police every aspect of The Vision, particularly in such a small, forgotten part of the setting.  How tall can you stack a tower of silence, exactly?  Does anyone care?  (If a tree falls in the forest … ).  

But this day was to be different for him.  

I ended my last rambling article with a mention of Heaven becoming a “magical clearinghouse” for Melkrin’s dictators.  Here’s where I explain some of that (hold onto your seat, it’s a little weird).  

You see, Lord Nim knew about Johan.  Knew who he was, knew about his past (probably more than me), knew about his “racialist” predilections.  He also knew the exact dimensions of his reality parcel.

None of this is supposed to happen, like, ever.  

I don’t really like or appreciate meta anything.  It’s hard for me to “get.”  On Old Earth, there was some perpetually angry kid who wrote a lot of fiction from the point of view of an opinionated, fourth-wall breaking deity, whose name I don’t remember.  Was it “The Destroyer?”  I linked to one of the fictional snippets in the last article, but I’ll be honest, I’ve only made it halfway or so through it on my best day.  It was initially brought to me by one of the Garbage Men, outriders who trawled the basest parts of Earth looking for anything resembling siftable content.  These guys went to mental institutions, street corners, opium dens, obscure game jams, mothers’ basements—any bleeding-edge haven for “outsider”-class art—and retrieved what they could.  Most of it was totally unusable (surprise).  I might have cribbed a few ideas here and there, but fuck, I just can’t deal with that type of fiction.  It’s unreadable.

When I bailed on Melkrin and took off on my sabbatical, the meta had already gained an uncomfortable amount of cred among the various parts of the Committee.  There were people going down to interact directly with the setting for their own purposes, even though I had long ago made it clear in The Vision that this was forbidden.  I zapped a few of the more egregious offenders to make an example, but it didn’t really help.  So much “insider” knowledge had trickled down to the planet that you had cultures that worshiped Tolkien as a kind of psychic deity, and many had at least a cursory awareness of conworlding.  A few of the larger governments even begun burning books and shooting authors to prevent my teams from retrieving content.  When reality parceling eventually became automated, this all fucked with it pretty hard.

That’s how Lord Nim got an in on poor Johan.  And that in led to exploitation, in both the military and cult-film sense.  Who hooked him up is no concern of mine.  This kind of thing happened an innumerable number of times throughout Melkrin’s sordid history.  I’m not sure why this particular example sticks out in my mind, in fact.  I guess it’s because I vaguely remembered some trivial facts about the guy at its center, which is more than I can say for most Committee members?

On the day of the Great Battle of the Three Casualties, the Lord marched his 300-strong army of children across the Bosbian border.  The Bosbians, who had anticipated some shenanigans, initially laughed, because, why wouldn’t they?

But there was something odd about these invaders.  

Firstly, they were clean and wore quaint suits of shining armor.  For a country famous for its scatotheology, this was unthinkable and must have represented a concerted effort on the Lord’s part.  And armor?  Why?  This was a setting that had firearms.

Second, they did not fly the Fuir-Nim flag.  Nor did they wear their home country’s insignia.  Instead, the lot of them marched, in perfect lockstep, dressed to the nines in Nazi-themed regalia.  I say “Nazi-themed” because it’s very possible that many of Lord Nim’s manufacturers had never seen a Nazi before; I’m sure there was more than one swastika that was tilted the wrong way.

That afternoon, no one was high on cocaine, much to the chagrin of Fuir-Nim’s more conservative ranking brass.  The boomboxes carried by the “pep squad,” which usually blared tepid fascist propaganda, played “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Lastly, and most importantly, the army was 100% “white.”  Know this: most people in Fuir-Nim, though not totally homogenous, did not generally have the look of viking dudes from the Rohirrim.  This may have been due, somewhat, to a reaction on the part of certain fandoms to what was considered to be a “Eurocentric” focus in Old Earth fantasy stories.  (Taking one underrepresented group and turning them into an overrepresented cabal of hateable gun-thugs seems like it kinda goes against their own goals, but I can’t say it really bothers me beyond its aesthetic bluntness.  I’m a deity, not a politico)  But for Lord Nim to have found that many people with appropriately European features, Christ.  That must have been a government project of no small scope (though I doubt it was on the scale of the one initiated by the first dudes who tried something like that).

Seeing all this must have blown a fuse in poor Johan’s already-fragile mind.  His creative energy spiked, and all of a sudden it was like he was fucking Wagner in the midst of some grand opera.  When officers blew their whistles ordering a charge, Nim’s troops literally flew into battle.  While the Bosbians watched in horror, the white knights arrayed themselves, midair, into a firing line.  When they shot, their bullets became howitzer shells, loud percussions pounding out some jingoistic anthem (or maybe just a good EDM beat).  I’m not going to replay every detail here in this article—the scenario replaying in my mind nightly is enough—but let me just say that the battle’s name is not a reference to Bosbia’s losses, which were considerably higher than three.

Now, Melkrin was originally conceived as a “low-magic” setting.  To me, that means very little unsanctioned supernatural bullshit.  Certainly no Vancian fire-and-forget spells, or universities full of wizards, or angels throwing grenades, or whatever.  I initially drifted my expectations to allow the fandoms more freedom (particularly in the area of adding weird creatures), but magic has always been a touchy subject for me.  You can probably see, then, why a battle involving literal magic bullets kind of set me off.

Lord Nim may have had no clear idea of what to expect when he sent those kids into the fray.  I mean, Johan could have continued on, steady as she goes, done his 9-to-5 and kept his outlandish fantasies at bay for the sake of my more pedestrian fantasies.  But Johan wasn’t a “steady as she goes” type of person.  He was a mid-21st century schizophrenic with ideas about Nazism, European sovereignty and mass immigration that wouldn’t leave him alone.  Looking now at some of the things he did during his Choir employment (the Giger-imitative painting depicting an eight-armed alien creature devouring an interracial couple on the streets of Oslo comes to mind), it’s pretty clear that he had some things coloring his views, no pun intended.  Lord Nim took a gamble on Johan’s mental state.  It paid off.  

Sometimes, I wonder to myself about how I treated my Host, my cherubics, as I call them when I want to get kawaii.  Like, maybe if I had given more of a shit, just maybe, possibly, Johan (and the numerous other mentally questionable people parcel-sitting) might have been less likely to bend to the whims of Melkrin’s many bad actors.  I guess I probably should have talked with them more, treated them like something other than content generators.  Like I said, I’m not trying to be a tyrant.  

I won’t dwell on it.  

I promised that I would talk more about my exit from the whole Melkrin thing, and what caused me to jet on my precious Committee and Heaven.  That will have to wait until the next mind-dump, I’m afraid.  That whole Bosbia tirade is depressing, but also makes me want to create.  Yes, I have more bad ideas that I need to try out before my willpower burns away.

Next time: “Some farmers invade Heaven, or, Sharing is Not Very Fun”