It’s a term used mostly in connection with live-action roleplaying (LARP) which means identifying in real life with your character in the roleplay, taking on their quirks, making choices more like they would. LARP-ers disagree on whether this sort of emotional experience should be avoided or just tamed. I admit I learned about it on the internet, I have never LARP-ed myself.
I thought it might apply to a game that some people log into daily for years on end and which is heavy on character description.
In LARP, you are literally, in real time, acting out and personifying your character in a way you’ve completely determined yourself, alongside physical activities like ‘hit someone with my sword’, so it can be harder for your brain to ‘switch tracks.’ You have muscle memory and practice making snap decisions in character. Fallen London is a text-only internet game where you don’t actually get to completely design your own actions, where someone else writes the FLPC’s inner thoughts and what they notice, and you pick from a predetermined selection of options at all times. The ‘heavy on character description’ part arguably makes it harder for there to be the kind of constant character analysis and ‘what would my character do’ thought processing that can be hard to switch off, because you don’t actually have to do that consideration in a split second.
Also I don’t really see whalerise/whalefall as a ‘where would you rather live/do you, fanbase, want to live in London or reality’ question, because one option is death and the other option is moving on to the High Wilderness to live more, in a place that is just as wild and fantastical and unreal as the Neath. There is a whole video game about it, even.
There’s something a lot of people seem not to realise about the Whalerise thing. She still dies if you tell her to ascend.
“ Where the sun meets the sea, she makes her last voyage. Golden rays pierce her thick skin like spears from Olympus. Blood and luminescence turn the water pink and gold and silver, as though her own backdrop had been painted to frame the scene.
And then she rises. Shedding skin, layer by oily layer, each cascading down from increasing heights like the veils of Melusine. And still she rises, the sun in the east laying out its rays like a path, guiding her on. Soon she is lost in radiance, only the drip-drop of ambergris from above marks her passage. And soon, even that, ceases”
She definitely doesn’t live a happy life in the High Wilderness like a lot of people seem to believe. Unless, of course, she can manage to live without any skin or blood or fat. It is a glorious death, the best kind of ending, but it is a death nonetheless.
It does have a “i want to die/i want to live on” dichotomy from the whale’s POV; that doesn’t really work if she dies either way. And the songs to convince her to leave are all about freedom, journeying, choices open to the whale no longer open to FLPC. It wouldn’t really make sense to set up that choice and go ‘actually it doesn’t make any difference/the only difference is the whale being suicidal or misinformed before dying.’ Besides, living without skin or bones or fat isn’t that weird in the FL universe, and who knows how Midnight Whales work biologically?
I fully read it as her being dying no matter what, just choosing whether to die in the Zee with the other whales (hello living world event) or to die alone where no other whale has ever gone before and never will after (presumably we’ll come across her later, higher).
yes, in all honesty, so did I. but the neath is indeed a very unique place, so who knows …
… and while I also agree that the more classical bleed relies probably on a lot of physical processes & interaction, I find the question itself fairly interesting: does the frequency and duration of my interaction with FL influence my other (real) life?
of course the effect might be way stronger after really having acted out rivalries or romances, but on the other hand that rarely happens for years without break. and of course I don’t go about my life suspecting spacebats to be the source of many problems, drawing symbols to try to alter reality, or trying to find hidden meaning in scone-recipes. but due to my job I tend to avoid sunlight & I sometimes talk to cats - and maybe that’s just the beginning.
for me the biggest bleed-alike effect is probably a field of knowledge and interest for information loosely connected to FL, be it historical facts or weird literature, that evolved by playing. above that I simply have the feeling that dedicating a small part of my anyway small brain constantly to this universe is bound to have some effect. but I’ll have to think a little bit more about what that may be … so thank you @anthony for the thoughts.
Everything you do in life impacts the rest of your life, at minimum in a ‘I am spending time doing this so I am not doing that’ way. And most hobbies will lead to you learning about other things branching off from them - a knitting hobby leads to learning to weave, or an interest in historic fibercraft, a video game hobby leads to modding and programming, and that sort of thing. That’s not really what people mean when they talk about bleedthrough or character bleed, that’s just existing as a person with a brain that can’t have one part of life experience be partitioned from the rest.
Yeah idk guys, I don’t think a game where you often can’t even make the choice you’d prefer if given full freedom can cause true bleed. Like definitionally, if you’re not making the choices wholly anabetted… I don’t think it counts.
Quick question about something that bothers me a bit: on the roof map, isn’t the Midnight Moon supposed to be where the stalactite impales the whale (here’s another sentence you don’t hear everyday…)?
It should, yes. The icon has possibly been put where it’s at to not actually cover the nice picture of the impaled whale when you’re travelling there?
Or it might just be a map mistake, one that I’d personally also prefer to be corrected in the future.
As for the Whalerise, considering the Firmament storyline so far, I also read it as a transfiguration, possibly even a change in the position of the Chain, instead of simple death.
Not that death at the Gant Pole is by any means simple. But anyways, considering where and how this scene is enacted, it Is in fact Not, even decreed Not to Be by the Judgements. So whether Whalerise represents transfiguration, passing into the High Wilderness or continuation in any physical sense or not, it is certainly a transgression, likely a crime against the Chain if you ask me.
At any rate, the way it’s written, Whalerise definitely symbolises continuation and Whalefall cessation. And in the Stacks, symbols are the only thing that’s in fact real. As might actually also be the case everywhere else, considering what we know about how the Judgments and their enforcers work.
While doing scientific voyages, I noticed that this item can be obtained by exchanging many research notes for it, which isn’t that impressive for a basic home comfort item that has very limited usage elsewhere.
It would be great if this item can be traded for more valuable items, or even upgraded into a better home comfort item. And the Voluminous Library can be used or lore-linked to the magical library we saw in Firmament Chapter 2.
So we need Anticandles for the next chapter. Am I reading the wiki right in that we need Discordant Studies 2 to get those? I hope that’s not the case.
