Vox Felicitas VI — Advice from Old Man Helmut

On last week’s episode of Vox Felicitas, I introduced everyone to Yelena Trotskaya, a cybernetically augmented killing machine addled by just a small amount of psychosis. I also went into a large amount of detail about how she started out as a minor villain, and then proceeded to accidentally her way to the peak of my totem pole of characters. She’s closely followed by Edward Frost and Mireen Mantriss, both of whom I will introduce to you in time. Next week, maybe.

Today though, I’m going to discuss the universe(s) from whence she hails, the Frencoverse, in more detail — and one of the major storylines that failed. Sit back and get some popcorn, because this is going to be a bumpy ride. I’ve a lot of context to explain.

On a side note: if anybody reading this gets to the bottom of this story and wonders “Hey, why’s the epilogue not asking us to applaud like the rest do?”. Welp, it turns out I’ve been doing a stupid this whole time without realising it. One cardinal rule of story distribution is do not ask for claps and/or likes! It’s bad for your health. And it’s also bad for everyone else’s health, because I want lots of people to read this and be happy. And if this doesn’t get distributed properly because of accidental cardinal rule violation, that doesn’t happen, I get angsty, and then Tiamat gets summoned. Which is really not conducive to increasing global happiness.

So in order to evade repeating my terrible mistake, I will simply pass on what Master Yoda (probably) once said — clap, or don’t clap. There is no try.

Let’s skip back to Ye Old 2015. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity … alright, that’s enough Charles Dickens for a second. Anyway, back in the day, the Frencoverse’s writings was split into two separate canons: the Main Canon and the Alternative Canon. One was designed for more serious storytelling — the other was a bit more off the wall and enabled the characters we forged for the main canon to interact with the wider multiverse.

For you see, the writings we made for the Frencoverse was based almost entirely within the realms of NationStates. I’m not talking about when the US and Russia argue with each other about who gets to blow what up in a proxy war (though the two do share some striking similarities) — I’m talking about the web game where you create a nation. Founded by Max Barry, author of such works as Jennifer Government (a real good dystopian satire, for the record), the basic idea beyond indulging your most tyrannous fantasies is you get together with other, like-minded tyrants and roleplay stories about your nations on the handily provided forums.

This is where and how I met the New Frenco Empire — Fren for short, the namesake of the Frencoverse that I co-founded alongside him. My nation was (and still is) called Blakullar, Blak for short — it’s Swedish for Blue Hills, and was created at first for a vastly different storyline, a monstrosity which we do not speak of. Anyway, about midway through the first big storyline we started, we joined together with some other, like-minded folk into an online subgroup dubbed The League of Mechanocracies. Remember how I mentioned Trotskaya got some accidental character development? THEY are the boys and girls responsible for that. Mostly.

Long story short, the Alternative Canon was devised alongside the Main Canon as a way for the characters we built for the latter to involve ourselves with the myriad shenanigans that the League got up to. Such shenanigans range from a duel between Trots and another cyborg supersoldier which was cut short by an argument between two machine gods, and a drinking contest involving nuclear material. It was around this time that the very same Johnny I mentioned in VF5 showed up, and the AC moved away from this level of insanity towards a more serious storyline. It didn’t help that the MC at that time had all but folded, since we lost interest in that storyline’s direction and decided “sod it, let’s see where this goes”.

Johnny and I (mostly I) ended up planning out a wide-ranging storyline for the ‘revamped’ AC, spanning the course of many years. It started out as a continuation of the story that was started during the madness era, starting out with the consequences of opening a faulty interdimensional gate before proceeding with a revenge story from one of the baddies as a result of chaos wrought during said faulty ID gate opening. Much later on in the story, there would be a whole story about depression and the consequences of hate and insanity, mingled in with undead machine gods wielding planet-crushing psionic powers to the woe of all life. Then Trots’ best friend turns on her in the name of conquering the entire multiverse, which would have ended in a war throughout time itself.

Now, either you’re thinking to yourself: “Wow! That sounds utterly amazing!”, or: “Good grief, what the hell were you people thinking?!”. Now, to the delight of those in the former camp, I’ve been wanting to revamp and restart that whole storyline since it folded. And to the delight of the latter camp, that’s exactly what we ended up thinking ourselves. We all ended up thinking that the plan was just plain stupid, I ended up agreeing, and all things accounted for, it proved to be pretty much impossible to salvage — without a full-scale reboot, which we had neither the time nor willingness to undertake.

At which point I will introduce you to Helmut von Moltke the Elder, the chief of the Prussian and later German Army in the late 19th century. Among the concepts he came up with while revamping the German military was the following notion: “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force”.

If nothing else, Old Man Helmut’s advice should be taken into account for all situations, not just military strategy. Now I get to elaborate on the fine line between advance planning and ‘pantsing’ — writing by the seat of your pants, without any but the most rudimentary of plans at all. The failed Alternative Canon represents the extreme end of advance planning: too rigid, unwilling to be bent to accommodate any radical change. Likewise, George R.R. Martin, acclaimed author of A Song of Ice and Fire (which most people will know better as Game of Thrones) represents the opposite extreme. Why is pantsing a bad thing? Well … we’ll let the 9+ year gap between the most recent ASoIaF novel and the upcoming one speak for itself. (No pressure, George.)

The reality is that the best storylines, and especially many-participant collaborative storylines like the Frencoverse, operate best with a mixture of planning and pantsing. Give yourself a rough direction to go along, but make room for that direction to be altered slightly or even changed entirely. Hopefully we’ve learned that all-important lesson for the Main Canon reboot we’ve committed ourselves to. We’ve since taken off from NationStates to bigger and better places, and with any luck we’ll become as big as I want us to.

Oh, by the way — if you’re taking a look at that chart and notice that ‘fapfics’ took up almost a fifth of the AC … I could go into all the lurid details, but if I did, you’d never think of gold the same way again. (Also, it would violate another cardinal rule of story distribution. Did I mention Tiamat tends to cause problems for everybody?)

Thank you for reading, and I will see you all again next week.

~ Harry