Posted by Nothinghere 6 years ago Report

you certainly could argue it seems like Rob wanted to be unbirthed.
but it does seem like Alice shouldn't just get away with how she treated him while doing it.
especially if she's not supposed to be as bad a person as she seems then she needs to be told what she did was wrong firmly possibly even angrily and if she is to grow and evolve as a sympathetic character she needs to regret it maybe even seeking forgiveness from Rob, perhaps even having to deal with him (possible her at that stage) not being able to give it yet.
that's assuming it's the direction you want to take her character because from experience tragic past isn't a free ticket to act however you want with no consequences and still have people like you.

currently she reminds me of a spoiled rich kid which is quite ironic considering her past. a slave to her own hedonistic desires, never reprimanded by an equal or authority figure, surrounded by yes-men reinforcing her bad behavior and never considering the feelings of others or assuming they feel the same way she does.
at least on the surface. on the inside she kind of seems like a neglected child destroying plates and pulling the cats tail in the hope that someone is going to stop her and tell her its wrong. or going by your response last time a slave to her own desire. she knows its wrong she wants to stop she wants someone to stop her but she can't and no one is going too so she indulges, not powerful enough to stop herself or brave enough to call for help. sure she probably tells herself her sharing with her sisters is a call for help. but she never does utter the words.

she also really needs to get that sadism under control somehow or lock it away when she shares with her sisters since the last thing you want spreading when creating a new world is sadism.

but according to your blog post if i understood it right the story is already finished and youre just spacing out the time between you posting each chapter?
because if that the case anytime iv'e commented and the next chapter just happened to be exactly what i commented about and it happens again this time we must be twins/soulmates/doppelgangers or something.

Posted by dreamweevil 6 years ago Report

Very astute observations! Yes, this story originally ran on the Unbirth forum before I had a gallery: I'm reformatting and reposting it here. It's been fun reading through it again. (Some minor cleanups are occurring along the way, since the original story was designed to be interactive: that's how Rob got caught up in it!)

Alicia's attempting to spare Rob's life (and a bit of her ethical integrity) in this chapter by transferring his egg to Rob's own girlfriend: if anybody's going to save him, after all, it should be Cerys. Alicia seems to have a thing for Cerys now, though, and if Cerys has any feelings for Alicia and allows any influence... Rob's not safe.

Yes, I do think we're thinking the same way!

dw

Posted by MasterGryph 6 years ago Report

Call me a skeptic, but I don't believe that it's possible for these "memes" to take hold unless the recipient is already open to the idea. Nor do I believe that it's possible that Cerys fell in love with Alicia. This leaves only one conclusion in my mind, and it's the same one that a future punisher came to.

It's unfortunate that Cerys turned out to be just plain evil.

Posted by dreamweevil 6 years ago Report

Casey and Alicia engineered that. In their view, Rob cheated on his girlfriend when he baited Alicia into unbirthing him.

By ganging up on Cerys it didn't take much to convince the distraught girlfriend that her cheating boyfriend earned this punishment.

In this world one's particularly vulnerable to those kinds of suggestions right after gaining neural induction. The experience of sharing someone's thoughts, when you're new at it, is simply overwhelming, and the voice of your new partner is a beacon in the darkness; you're very likely in your confusion to just accept the opinions and desires of the one sharing with you, along with all the facts.


P.S. Thanks for all the comments: this is fun.

Posted by MasterGryph 6 years ago Report

And as I've said, I don't believe Rob baited Alicia in any way. (The leaving the door unlocked? I didn't see that as a deliberate act.)

Posted by dreamweevil 6 years ago Report

...which makes this pretty realistic. Same event and two completely different perspectives, and no way to prove which was truly "right".

Now a jury would certainly side with Rob here. She came onto his property, never got consent, and swallowed him into herself despite his clear objections. But in Alicia's head he was play-acting: "No, Miss Alicia! Please don't show me your beautiful body and shrink me down and expose me to your most intimate space and keep me there forever!"

Some women in Alicia's world would see her side of it. "Okay, you should have gotten permission... but, yeah, he was clearly asking for it."

Posted by MasterGryph 6 years ago Report

Most things have multiple perspectives.

But a few things, even in reality, just don't. Only one, with a bit of nonsensical invention created to oppose it. Something that people can lie about believing as a facade over an evil desire to watch others in pain.

And that's what I see here. Alicia made up some quick excuses after the fact, but I don't believe even she could really believe them.

Posted by MasterGryph 6 years ago Report

Or perhaps, I'm just misusing Occam's Razor. :)

It takes giant leaps in logic for someone to, in good faith, argue that Rob's fearful reaction was evidence that he deliberately lured an assassin to kill him. Therefore, the likely explanation is that Alicia and those hypothetical women are arguing in bad faith, ie. lying.

Posted by dreamweevil 6 years ago Report

That's Alicia's flaw, and her downfall. She loves Cerys and Casey because both of them tell her what she wants to hear: "Rob was asking for it. Men like him deserve to be treated this way. He had it coming. You did the right thing, Alicia."

Tell yourself a lie long enough and eventually you believe it.

The one thing that was true about Alicia and Rob is that she did try, at least twice, to give him an escape route. She knew of her own flaw: that a panicked, helpless man would turn her on; and when Rob started to tickle that desire she pleaded with him not to go down that route. Unfortunately, the pleading was only with her thoughts, with her eyes: she never actually said the words or took any action to change things. Later on, she offers to make Rob her child, to set him free that way, and she's heard Daisy tell Rob You need to love her (forgive her). Daisy was correct there: if he'd been able to forgive Alicia, Alicia would have given birth to Rob in whatever form he wanted to have.

Posted by MasterGryph 6 years ago Report

But forgiveness can't be free. Trying to make it so devalues the genuine feelings and pain that happened. For Alicia to be reasonably forgiven, she would need to do a lot more to show she's aiming for it. And for that to happen, she needed to be pushed harder.

"You need to love her" was a nonsensical waste of breath. Not only does it not imply the presence of forgiveness, but it completely ignores the facts of the situation. Unconditional love is good, but cannot exist between bitter enemies.

Love doesn't imply forgiveness either. Even family members need to work for it.

If Rob had pretended to given Alicia forgiveness that she didn't earn, there's every reason to believe she would treat the whole affair as irrelevant and go right back to advocating (violent) gendercide.

Posted by dreamweevil 6 years ago Report

Interesting discussion and I agree with a lot of what you say here.

The love and forgiveness Daisy recommended here is the unconditional, spiritual kind; the kind that doesn't have to be earned at all.

I'll give you the backstory. In the work with bigmacrmuk the original plan for his character Rob was for Alicia to both humiliate and destroy him, so that was pretty much pre-ordained. But we didn't want it to be meaningless, wanted it to show the depth of his character and Alicia's.

We came so close in the collaboration to this going the other way at that point... it's why that back-and-forth goes on so long. If Rob had been able to unconditionally forgive Alicia despite what she'd done to him, it would have broken Alicia completely. She'd have collapsed to tears, and let her guard down. Rob would have finally been able to see the tortured girl inside this powerful woman: the damage done to her by her early encounter with Shay.

That's the kind of love and forgiveness Daisy was asking for, and that Alicia really needed.

Together they would have rehabilitated Alicia from the inside, she would have apologized to Rob and meant it, and the story would have taken a much different direction.

We decided that, story-wise, it was more interesting to have this fail, and not have the happy ending. Rob was too stubborn, didn't accept Daisy's advice, and so we got our death/destruction scene that was in the works from the beginning. Alicia goes on to be the conflicted and tortured woman that she becomes.

Posted by MasterGryph 6 years ago Report

The kind that doesn't need to be earned, and can only be revoked upon crossing a serious line, in other words. But a serious line that was long since crossed.

Alicia ends up as a well detailed character - one of the few in this arc. But the fact that other characters don't react appropriately drags them down. Jessica/Amy and Belle especially, but even Daisy isn't immune.

Posted by MasterGryph 6 years ago Report

For any sort of forgiveness to work, Alicia had to come back. It didn't need to be alone, but she needed to take another step first.