the ramble dump

It's been nearly two and a half years, excepting revisions, since we last saw Jesnails, strutting around the American West in 1875--back when we first decided to send her travelling through time to cause all the inadvertent chaos she's proved to be so good at. It occurred to us then as an appropriate next step for some Jesnailsian antics, following her life-fulfilling appearances as a scourge of zombies and, before that, her debut as a messianic figure intent on bringing some funk back to a dystopian, horrifyingly bean-motifed future world.

But Jesnails' trip to Little Pigaloo, USA, didn't work out quite as well as we'd hoped. We had planned it to be the first of a long series of episodic adventures as we followed Jesnails through time and space and watched as, space-time after space-time, the disco-fiend unthinkingly changed the course of history, precipitating in increasingly surreal situations as her story progressed.

We met with a problem, however. Jesnails, we found, does not work as a protagonist. She is a very dynamic character--so dynamic, in fact, that her mere presence is usually enough to have some huge effect. Her mysterious purpose, apparently self-prescribed, is essentially to spread the image of herself. She does this by creating an impression achieved through various modes of performance, often disco-related, and most of the time aided by some far-fetched contraption derived from her seemingly unlimited skills as an inventor. This leads to results that we can never clearly gauge the intention of, thanks to some catastrophic flaw or other that unfailingly manifests in her creations. So as far as the narrative goes, she's like a volatile chemical: once she's introduced, we sit back and watch the fireworks.

Explicitly giving Jesnails her own complete story puts us, as its writers, in the slightly tedious position of having to follow her around and describe the process by which she achieves her influence, rather than simply being able to have fun with each performance as it happens. So rather than just being able to play around with the hundreds of Jesnailsian moments we'd come up with, we had to fill each episode with a lot of uninteresting scenes to tie all these moments together and make a coherent story. Having her as the protagonist also constantly threatened to encroach on the idea of her as a rather vague, enigmatic entity because we ended up focusing on a character that by definition defies such focus. We continually had to check ourselves to make sure we weren't over-vocalising on her behalf, something that was often necessary just to move the story along in a sensical way--for example, getting Jesnails onto the Sheriff's whiskey-laden train required giving her a somewhat forced reputation as a fan of drink based on a single incident at the bar, and then we compelled her to walk into Bigbad's trap by having it stated that she was thirsty and wanted to avoid confrontation, thus leaving the train as her only option.

All of this also led to several moments where Jesnails' actions became hideously intentional in a way that didn't really fit her character. In a bit that I wrote, I had her deliberately shooting Bigbad, twice, when he was down. Here Jesnails had too much of a sense of what was going on, while one of the defining points of her character is supposed to be that she wanders the earth dealing much damage through sheer obliviousness. She'll react when she's cornered, like in the Santa battle in Jesnails Returns, but that's about as far as it goes.

Anyway, the endeavour was all so tedious that we never got past the first full episode. So, despite sporadic attempts to resuscitate, the project died. It was nearly a year ago that I had the idea of scrapping the convoluted story and presenting her time-travelling manifestations in the form of a more ambiguous montage. This way, Jesnails is cut free from the stifling necessities of a narrative while we are still able to showcase all those Jesnailsian moments we thought were worth presenting in the first place. And in some cases, Jesnails will never even appear in person. It makes the whole process a lot freer, a lot easier and a lot more fun, and hopefully the end product will also be much more effective.

Live In Rome, for your information, is the climax of the planned second episode severed from all the crap that was supposed to lead up to it, so you can enjoy just the tasty bits.

Partner in funk Ella Turnbull was informed of the plan and agreed to it all those months ago, but I haven't spoken to her in ages, sadly, so I don't know if she'll still be interested. I've only gone ahead with the project under the condition that Ella is free to add to it whenever she wants, but I figured I'd better just start the thing or it would never happen.

So basically, updates will appear when either of us feels like it.

Witness!

Experience Jesnails: Live In Rome.

Labels: boardfic, jesnails

# posted by Chris @ 8:25 PM