Sadness, Madness & Gladness

I've thought a lot about my stories and the moods inside of them. The emotions that they contain and that I try to give to people.

I am infected by a show that I've never watched. A show I grew up adjacent to, but never actually touched.

I've thought a lot about sadness and madness.

Only two kinds of people can hear my songs: Those who see the world with pure, childlike wonder, and those with a deep sense of loss in their hearts.

To everyone else, I'm just a period in a sentence in the book of Ooo.

This is a quote from Aventure Time. It might be familiar to many, but it isn't to me. I encountered this quote as just that, a quote, in a screenshot of the scene where it happened. I didn't watch this show growing up, but I did watch its lore slowly start to develop, when people started theorizing it might be a post-apocalyptic setting of some kind, and then seeing that idea gain more traction as the show writers started thinking that's an interesting direction to go down and quietly put more of it there, then committing to it, slowly culminating in the show that it is today. I hanged out in some really strange spaces at that age, but some of those spaces really liked to talk about that show.

I don't really mind missing out.

Sadness

My stories are weird and emotional, and the worlds I make are always, primarily, an incredibly convoluted stage for strange emotions to happen. Heaven Reaches Out to Us had slow build-up to its middle and a sudden arrival to its conclusion from there, but it worked for its target audience because of the way the emotions flowed in the story.

I was making the moodboard for the second installment of that series, Twisted Summit, and as I usually do, I initially scope-creeped to hell, wanting to make it automatically place the images based on their dominant color and also on their moods, so that they'd transition seamlessly into each other. In the end I didn't do this. Lowkey, I might still do it.

The moods I decided on are sadness, madness and gladness. Two of those should be familiar to you if the quote from earlier was familiar to you.

That quote has haunted me since I first saw it. Really, the whole concept of magic people in Ooo being afflicted by magic, sadness and madness has been perpetually chasing me, and I think it has caught me. It's a beautiful, terrible concept.

We Know The Devil, one of the stories that directly inspired HRO, is a really strange, symbolic one, that will only make sense to a particular kind of person. A lot of people play it, don't understand exactly what's happening, and leave thinking "man, that was a cool and weird visual novel". Others understand the surface level events, but they don't really understand how these relate to real things that happen in the real world. How someone might find the entire concept relatable.

It makes sense. It takes a particular kind of life experiences to get something personal out of a story like that. There are many stories I feel uncaring about, but I'm sure they must be meaningful to somebody in the same way.

I try to fill my stories with the joy I feel for the world and the sadness and melancholy and anger that it took to get me here, that I often fall back into. What it's like to see these two extremes of life, to put them side by side, and live them through each other.

The result is my strangely emotional worldbuilding, something empty and confusingly hopeful, or so large in scope that you get lost trying to follow it. Overwhelming, terrifying and gentle.

I don't expect this sort of story to be as personal to many as they are to me. I don't expect it to make a lot of sense. It's a cool puzzle, and a cool world to unpack, for sure, but I don't expect to get as many tears from others as I've gotten out of myself.

And even so, I have caused a handful of tears.

So, that's kind of where I'm going to. That quote. Only two kinds of people can engage with my stories in that particular way, those who live and breathe the kind of wonder within them, and those who know that kind of loss and pain.

Madness

As I've become a more experienced artist in all the many bits of nonsense I get up to, I've learned a lot about the ways in which I stick to what others do (I'm sorry. Bloodless is MtGslop.), and also the ways in which I differ.

But, particularly, I am very intrigued by act structure analyses. I'm very interested because my work really resists being analyzed through the lens of The Hero's Journey. My "heros" don't ever return to the start having been changed. Something breaks and corrupts permanently, and oftentimes this is for the better. Things will never be the same.

And while I know there are others, stories like HRO seem to resist them as well. HRO clearly has three acts: The beginning, the part where three kids start doing some insane things, and the end. However, that middle is exactly one chapter. Probably two if you're willing to stretch it.

Okay, well, what about four acts? An introduction, then the characters hang out and get close, then the insane things happen, then the end. That actually works quite well, but we still have the same problem as before: The ending is two chapters.

Something irks me about giving a part of an act structure so little breathing room. But it works, right? It works. It works as a story, and the people who have read it have liked it, and the conclusion of the plot is two pages after an entire 123 pages of build-up.

So why????

When I was working on the image arranger thing from earlier, I noticed two things:

• Holy fuck six axes is too many but I really want image color to be part of the data.
• Sadness, madness and gladness are in all of my stories, and they all follow a linear path.

The Bloodless Prologue starts by introducing the world, dropping you into the shoes of someone to whom something is happening. By the middle it starts getting emotional, showing you more down-to-earth stories, or at least more melancholy ones, and for the last course, you get a final moment of triumph.

Madness, sadness, gladness.

Sadness for those deep, introspective moments. Madness for increased pacing, bouts of emotion, abrupt changes. Gladness for joy, satisfaction, fresh beginnings and happy endings.

Heaven Reaches Out to Us begins with two kids slowly dragging themselves through school life, to the point where a notice of a disappearance isn't really shaking them so much as they're going "oh wow that's so messed up." Then, things start getting intense, and by the end, they discover something true and beautiful.

Sadness, madness, gladness.

Homestuck begins with a kid doing a ton of antics just to check his mail. After that, things just keep getting more absurd through Sburb and its nonsense. There's a point where the characters are so used to navigating their world that they start exploring how they feel about it all, and it all ends with them tying up all the loose threads, and walking through that final door.

Isn't that madness, sadness and gladness, too?

It's not a perfect fit, and it's probably a coincidence. The Bloodless Prologue, for example, doesn't even adhere to it entirely, though to be fair I wasn't trying to. I don't think I want to begin trying to, either. The Hero's Journey isn't a prescription either.

Do you see what I mean? Isn't this an interesting lens? It doesn't fit every story. Particularly, something that fits The Hero's Journey best wouldn't fit this, because it would likely be closer to gladness, madness, gladness.

Gladness

So here's what I really want.

I want to spread that gladness. I want others to know it.

I want to provide comfort to those who know the sadness. I want them to know others know it, too.

And I want to provide some calm to the madness.

I began making art as an incredibly depressed teenager who didn't really understand what she was doing or why. I made tons of tiny sad drawings on every surface I had access to. I've had a ton of self discovery since then, and I'm not exactly perfectly glad, but I've done so many of the things I thought could never possibly happen. Many dreams I thought would remain unattainable. I want to find out what is next.

Sadness, madness... you get what I mean.

I think the ideas I've presented here are, in the worst case, kind of interesting. Sadness, madness and gladness create an intriguing family of act structures. It's a cool way to look at how the moods of stories changes over time, and it's a good framework to analyze stories that are harder to categorize into traditional structures. I also think making stories with these act structures in mind might result in something very interesting, so I'm tempted to do that deliberately at least once.

I'm curious if there are any stories that fit this framework cleanly. Perhaps even more cleanly than the ones I've mentioned. I'd love to know that.

I'm also curious if there are stories that follow orders that don't appear here. What about gladness in the middle? What would that mean?

And finally, I'd also really like to make that automatic image arranger, even if only to prove that I can.