[revision]
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# CrossDRawn Ways - summary
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"fly-walk" [cr. 2020-08-21T09:24:22Z]
today just before I went on my walk I was thinking about how I'd for a while had an image in my mind of [... monsterfarm monsters] in 'asekai style' [...] [*r]
what if they were bootlegs and i could change the ▓▓▓▓ out of them to alleviate my boredom
and i started immediately sitting down and creating "monster rancher the ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ version, i cannot take more than 5 minutes to decide on any idea except names" [...]
i think I will just write the majin story as lore for [... CdrW]
although i do want it to be a thorough bootleg that comments on and turns Every part of the monsterrancher lore in a wild direction into Something
there is going to be a bootleg for Every mf 'strain', [...] absolutely for the majin story and the fun of drawing them
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[cr. 1696368133]
CdrW began as something of a drawing challenge to "bootleg" every monsterfarm breed into something new, for nearly no particular reason [*r]
it was autumn, I was in the middle of having depression for several years, and I needed something to think about as I took my evening walk in the middle of the night but simultaneously in late evening.
thus I began spinning up strange concepts like Sundersorce, Vetramonia, and Rail, vowing to take "no more than 5 minutes to decide on any idea except names".
I did not get very far on the challenge originally, and picked it back up about 3 years later with entirely different "rules" — although in much the same spirit. I was determined to take every row of my strain table and turn it into something more strange and unexpected. I began building extensive "far and wide" tables listing out every possible monster concept I could start from. I restarted my "investigation" into the history of the monsterfarm universe. I became something like one of the in-game expedition characters, turning over every stone in the world to find its hidden history.
as CdrW was reborn in 2023, it merged with a separate project called KaijuTrack, for a Free Software algorithm to generate monsters from media — specifically /burned/ CDs, which had never been functional in monsterfarm games, and any old medium which could find new use on a modern computer, like floppy disks. eclipsing the drawing challenge, KaijuTrack became the new heart of the project, opening up possibilities for the mechanics and story.
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[cr. 1695890537]
one of the major influences for CDRW, which happened well before the "drawing challenge", was attempting to fix monsterfarm's Majin monster by writing a better story [*e]
there were a bunch of clues left inside the lore that _Monster Rancher_ was attempting to tell an intriguing story of multiple civilisations over many centuries and all the Adventures were somehow supposed to mean something, but after going through all of them Majin still remained a blank slate at best, and an embodiment of the writers' unseen racism or xenophobia at worst
Majin is something of an ominous human-like genie figure portrayed in the style of a weird Orientalist old movie — extremely buff, oddly dressed, and possibly meant to turn up in the kind of biomes a bit west of India.
The word "majin" literally refers to a supernatural being that functions like a person within a particular folklore context but has powers far beyond what a human can do [*j]
many things are put under the category including asuras, jinn, and vampires.
in more archaic times "majin" and "kaijin" overlapped, such that any "superbeing" or "monster being" in folklore could have traits a "majin" could then have - but the term had a negative connotation leaning toward evil beings on the "demon", "asura", "jinn are specifically the opposite of angels", or "vampire" side
despite this, in the first monsterfarm game they are mostly framed as shy or afraid, rather than something /Breeders/ should be afraid of. we get the impression any of the regular monsters like Rygar, Dino, and Naga are all bolder than Majin.
which leaves the question: if Majin is one of the most powerful secret monsters, what is it afraid of?
gameplay seems to accidentally offer an answer.
if Majin are successfully found, they will be in the awkward position of being a self-aware person trapped in the life of some kind of work animal or slave.
was this the actual reason they are normally hidden? that they are hiding themselves from the Breeders and their distant ancestors? that the sidequest to capture Majin is actually an evil quest tricking the player into accidentally becoming the villain of the story?
if the _Monster Rancher_ show had examined things on that level, it would have added a huge amount of depth to the series, including putting the first game into a new context and asking players to really explore it and think again about what they are looking at.
the effect would be vaguely similar to the first couple of episodes of _Petscop_ — do we really want this weird yellow baby-man to catch all the pets and assemble all the pieces, or is that actually bad?
the existence of Majin, and at different times either the talking action-cartoon-show versions of the monsters or the in-game monster descriptions implying monsters speak or do various human activities, really raise a lot of questions about the entire premise of the series. [*e]
why are monsters apparently property? why is it so unclear whether they are able to consent to being born into their place in life? can the "raising style" system which encourages you to ignore normal methods of bonding and communication possibly be a normal or correct understanding of monsters? do the Breeder assistants ever get things right or are they actually sometimes wrong about the workings of this world?
are the monsters literal thinking people or are they not? if they are, how did they get into this position? why were they created? what is their purpose? why do there always seem to be five different conflicting answers to all of these core questions?
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"xuanwu" [cr. 2020-09-04T12:29:41Z]
a majin [they/them] is main character of the alternate monsterrancher show and has a lodestone pointing to, xenon, why not [*x]
Majin MC doesn't know they have powers for most of the story [...]
possibly they have a keen sense for monster feelings and have been offered to be an assistant but declined, not knowing why but ultimately in order to set out on this journey
there needs to be appreciation of the locations and game NPC 'character classes' because those are good
i half feel like Majin MC is kind of a wannabe version of the Exploration or Training characters in some ways, a little more likely to drift around these wilderness areas than normal places
actually. it'd be super funny if MC just kinda ends up fighting one of the 'wild monsters' [...]
wait i shouldn't have been strong enough to do that let alone all of a sudden [...]
they refuse to believe that actually happened [...]
half of me wants to take this majin story seriously and half of me, this gremlin half, is like
"mc has a flashback and gali and monolith are just their parents saying stuff" "mc uses the Mirror as a transform item into Gali"
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"majin" [o. 1695702592]
my ideal monsterrancher game starts out as a seemingly normal mockumentary a lot like MR2,
dwells on the sort of 'nostalgic' 'tradition' of the series for a bit to drive in how Normal everything is,
then [...] by the end of the story it's practically like everyone's a shapeshifting powerranger & every tool is defined by its possibilities & any attempt to limit things to prescriptivist ideas is evil [*e]
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[Majin] get a proper Plot where they teach humans about previous civilisation(s) and where monsters Actually came from
and maybe working together they overhaul the whole civilisation to the next level with all these secrets never known c. MR2 era
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'oh yeah monsters and disc stones are because of us
we have the power to become monsters. all your monsters are actually people'
'why were you sealed in discs'
'so we can reinstall our bodies every few years. also because our rivals were afraid & trapped us there'
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"itsuka" [o. 2023-08-18T13:35:42Z]
maybe I should mark out a 'majin category' in the strain chart corresponding to which mf strains were associated with Majin but now meaning more which ones are associated with humanoid forms
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[cr. 1696392464]
god I know what I want to do with the Book of Colours
I make a lore book. it looks like a normal art book / handbook for a kaiju show - Pokémon, Digimon, Medabots, what the hell ever. but that's not truly what it is. it's an ergodic book. [*eh]
the book looks normal on the surface but it has not even just one but /multiple/ levels of things hidden in it.
the journey starts with just one tiny hint that things are not as they seem, maybe a note at the back recalling the hint in _Petscop_, and the closer you look the weirder things get
a number of steps would just be basically, a clue leads you to read the words on a page in a weird order to uncover a hidden message
but maybe some of the steps reveal just chains of letters spelling single words that you are thinking about madly wondering what that word could possibly mean, until you figure out how it probably fits with everything else and what the next step is
I definitely got this idea after watching a bunch of videos of people exploring _Welcome Home_ — a website many people colloquially call an "ARG" but may technically be better called an "ergodic story". [*eh]
unlike _Petscop_ this one does not easily interweave with the themes of CDRW, although arguably one can actually find a similar story of puppets versus an upper world buried in /monsterfarm/. [*L]
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[*eh] ergodic literature is defined by putting the components of a book into interaction in an unusual path. "ergodic" normally refers to physical systems where interacting pieces produce emergent effects. ergodic literature specifically takes some kind of form where the text consists of more than its words and content and some kind of additional effort to read the text is part of the text.
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[cr. 1696922109]
maybe I should tease the book of colours with a simple bop homepage that says nothing but
"this is a disk stack. you cannot yet unlock the bottom [📚]"
with, indeed, a disk stack like would appear in the game, but it's an absurdly high disk stack of ~99 disks
conceptually it represents the history of the CDRW world and its many changes and events
there may be a short post for each disk in the stack until reaching the bottom
this should maybe just be an svg file instead of an html file
that provides proper control over the graphics, including making it easy to display a whole bunch of disks according to the number of the page, but still in theory can be rendered using bop
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[cr. 1698291734]
these stacked disks might maybe be mosnter book entries with weird descriptions
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[cr. 1702249971]
if RD's mdem reader is complete when i'm seriously making CdrW i have such an urge to just, hide a secret marxist reader in my game files thinly disguised as another file
maybe it's an image and the image has an archive of text files shoved into it
i don't know if it would be better to make this an image actually loaded by the game so that it is harder to notice as weird, or an unused image that's extra mysterious
the one thing i know is that this reader should be disconnected from the ARG for the book of colours or any puzzles inside the game itself. it needs to be its own little puzzle that perhaps begins with looking inside the game files but is otherwise self-contained, such that you might or might not find it
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=> logs *L. tables/ "adventure logs" ; ..95883417
;
; << majin *e. old tids/ majin thread ; ..95702592
; << xuanwu *x. old tids/ majin story 6.25 "xuanwu" ; ..95706382
; << fly-walk *r. old tids/ cdrw 8.20 ; ..95710171
; << logs *L. tables/ "adventure logs" ; ..95883417
>> 1695787828 summary
