utilitymonstergirl

Foreach (also discussed here) has just concluded its second chapter, shaking up its whole narrative structure as we stand on the precipice of much weirder disruptions. I sat down with its chief creator, Lum, to discuss the story's genesis, planning, and future.

UMG: Congratulations on finishing Chapter 2! Has the story so far played out pretty much as planned, or were there major course-corrections along the way?

Lum: Oh this is an easy one. Exactly as planned. Almost down to the page-by-page -- my estimates for the lengths of each chapter were 24 pages for 1 and 26 pages for 2. Both ended up being 1 page shorter than what I predicted.

Foreach is planned meticulously, to a degree that might come off as neurotic, but the type of story that it is it kind of needs to be. Even just the basic premise took a deceptively large amount of work to have it function as a seamless loop, if that makes sense. It's a complicated story, with a lot of moving parts, a lot of characters, and a lot of thematic weight behind everything that's going on. I don't think it would be possible for me to write it in a way that was any less meticulous than I'm currently doing.

There's been some minor changes here and there. Some of them wouldn't even register as "changes" to another writer, just things like moving around the order of certain events in a sequence, changing what characters were present for what scenes, that sort of thing. I think the biggest change was there was going to be another anime girl. The joke was gonna be that she'd show up in backgrounds but would never be acknowledged directly. A fun gag, but I don't draw backgrounds with enough detail for it to be workable. So she was cut out entirely. Sorry, Josephin! You shall live on forever in the stylesheet as `lb-librarian-dialog`.

UMG: And even with that elaborate degree of planning, I appreciate how the story is still willing to run primarily on resonance and metaphor rather than get bogged down with logistical exposition. Do you anticipate that being a tougher balance to strike as we get metaphysically weirder?

Lum: Hmm, yes and no. A lot of stuff that I have planned is very big on internal logical consistency -- just for narrative cohesion, and tension, I'm going to need to have "rules" for how certain things work and what's possible in the universe. But a lot of those rules I have zero intention of actually telling the audience outright. I think done right, the readers can pick up on what's important and how things work just through pattern recognition alone, without having to bog things down into obvious exposition. So the world still operates in a way that doesn't leave the reader unmoored and confused, but it still preserves that essential, unknowable magic.

The sort of, magical realism, I-don't-gotta-explain-shit aspect of Foreach is something I intend to preserve right until the end. It's important to the thing that it is that I don't try and pull that magic out. The last thing I wanna do is pull an Inscryption and reveal it was all an eeeevil videogame designed by Hitler and Satan. The aforementioned meticulous planning goes a long way in helping me feel confident that I'm going to be able to pull that off.

To answer the question more directly... I do think some of the future stuff was really hard to strike that balance with, yeah. But fortunately, I've already planned out exactly how I'm gonna do it, so in some ways the work is already done! :3

UMG: Returning to the planning, does it take the form of dialogue and “stage directions,” with the panel choices and compositions less nailed-down?

Lum: Good question! My planning basically operates in two phases--

The first part is a relatively rough summary, which covers what happens in what order. I generally aim to have this part finished at least a year before I actually start writing each invididual page that gets covered-- it's important for me to have it finished well in advance so I know what I need to foreshadow, and so I can account for changes I might need to make if potential plot problems reveal themselves early.

Here's an excerpt of that summary, covering the Love Bomb sequence of chapter 2:

A new girl is introduced to the town by the Goddess of Love! It’s Yuno, the Apothecary. Yuno says that she’s proud to take her place on the island, and the Goddess has told her so much about how wonderful it is here, and she’s told her especially about how great and lovely and beautiful and perfect and kind Jiro is. Jiro is visibly uncomfortable with this. All the girls clap to welcome their new friend.

(There’s some incidental dialogue here where Casandra advertises a new range of crystal orbs that Jiro can use to boost his combat power. This is important for later).

Jiro is meant to go show the girl around the island, but he manages to give her the slip. While walking along the beach feeling sorry for himself, he encounters something odd – a ghost! She is wispy and faint, presenting as an orb of light with a tail, and she says she doesn’t remember her name. She’s scared and confused, and some of the other anime girls attacked her earlier, thinking she was a monster sent by Proteus. Jiro takes the time to talk to the ghost. He learns that in life, the ghost didn’t have many friends, and always felt alienated from her peers. Jiro relates to this, and they bond over their shared emotions.

Suddenly, Jiro is called away– there’s an attack on the island by the vile villain Proteus. He promises to return to the ghost and runs up the island. Proteus is a sinister magical man who HATES the carefree ways of the anime girl island. He wants them to stop having FUN all the time and start focusing on the REAL issues that REALLY matter. Jiro and company manage to repel him, but not before he promises to return and lay waste to the island.

Jiro returns, and finds the ghost hiding where he told her too. She expresses gratitude that he came back, he says of course. The ghost tells Jiro she’s glad she got to make a friend, even if it was after death. Jiro says he was glad to make a friend too, it’s been a long time since he felt like he could just talk to someone like this.

The ghost replies, “with that, my unfinished business is fulfilled” and vanishes into nothing. Jiro is left standing by himself with a stupid look on his face.

He goes home and plays video games.

Actually scripting each page usually happens much much closer to the actual draw date, usually a week or two in advance. Rather than scripting traditionally, I actually start by making the html that I'm going to use for the page directly, text boxes and all, with placeholder stage directions instead of the art.

I'll share this (and the above summary) with my collaborators, Peri and Rhys, who'll give me pointers and suggestions, before I refine that into the final page.

UMG: While the four settings have some obvious things they’re pastiching, what are some subtler influences on them that people might have missed?

Lum: When I was around 14 I watched a movie with my parents called Mud. Ostensibly it's a coming of age story, the main character a teenage boy in a small town who has a life-changing adventure after finding a weird dude in the wilderness. In practice, though, the teenager isn't even depicted on the fuckin' poster-- the poster is a full-size cowboy shot of the weird dude, played by Matthew McConaughey.

Mud isn't very well remembered today, but it was well recieved at the time, with a solid 98 on rotten tomatoes. Despite that, I was honestly kind of surprised by how little I connected with it at the time. I would have been in the same age bracket as the protagonist, I should have been going through the same problems as him, but none of it really landed with me at all. It didn't feel like it any of it was really true to what it's like to be that age. It was too... wistful. Mud didn't depict youth as it is to the young, it depicts an adult's idea of what youth was, filtered through glassy nostalgia and something an older person might call "wisdom".

That idea, of a coming-of-age story but distorted by an adult's authorial voice, really stuck with me when I was formulating what Home Bound could be like. Jasper's perspective has no real relevance to what Home Bound wants to be about, because his story isn't really for him. Rex, though, Rex knows exactly what this game is about.

There's probably a few others I can name. Hellfuck is inspired by vent art and those memes of stick figures drawn in ms paint engaging in incredible acts of violence. Last Gun doesn't just draw from the old boomer shooter style of FPS, but also the mid-2010's craze of Dadgames, about gruff soldier types finding new leases on life after they encounter a new child-figure in their lives. And Love Bomb takes as much from the reams of dogshit harem manga I read during a depressive period as it does from any videogame.

UMG: Also, I seem to recall a mention of YIIK.

Lum: Oh yeah, YIIK. I never actually played YIIK, on account of a policy of mine of not playing games that everyone says suck ass, but it always stuck out to me as one of the archetypical quirky earthbound-inspired RPGs, sort of like Undertale's evil twin. I watched a few videos on it, read about the endings, that sort of thing. I think its general vibes ended up forming a kind of nervous system for what would become Home Bound's aesthetic, what with the mix of fantastic absurdity and slice-of-life.

UMG: And given that lineage’s existing influence on webcomics, was it intentional that Home Bound's “suburban angst plus ghost battles” premise doesn't automatically ping as A Game like the other settings do?

Lum: Pretty much, yeah. Not necessarily just because of webcomic genre convention, Foreach wasn't even really going to be a webcomic at first; it was conceived of first as a videogame, then as a Petscop-style video series, before I scoped it down into its current form. But it was always intended to be the most "normal" of the four, as an entrance point to the story before the meta stuff started showing up.

That it ended up as the least obviously riffing on a videogame archetype was something of an accident of fate. Home Bound took the longest to figure out as a setting because it was the one that had to "close the loop", so to speak. Love Bomb, Hellfuck and Last Gun were all pretty easy to figure out, and I always knew Home Bound would be a quirky earthbound-inspired RPG, but figuring out exactly what sort of setting would... result from the Cliff Mason's familial ennui, and result in its protagonist seeking out the overly sugar-sweet Love Bomb... that took a lot of finagling.

There was a time when I was a little dissatisfied with what I came up with, because "Indie games about how you should listen to your dad" aren't as much of a thing as the other three, but eventually I embraced its status as the odd one out. It certainly helped disguise the twist of Chapter One a little better!

UMG: Speaking of these themes of autonomy and narrative focus, the question of “how much are the protagonists truly controlled by their players” is about to come to a head - was it hard to create rules for this that are both philosophically and narratively compelling?

Lum: Jesus fuck, yeah. I mentioned earlier that Foreach was first conceived of as a videogame, and a big reason I abandoned that idea was, like. Imagine if we threw in the real, actual player of the videogame as a third source of agency to screw things up. The shift from interactive to non-interactive media was motivated mainly by that little conundrum.

Once I'd pared it down to two sources of agency, it became easier to handle once I linked it into the themes of the story. Are any of us in control of our actions? Do we choose how we act, or are we locked into the path we're in by our circumstances? Aren't we all being piloted around by an alternate universe representation of our own dead dads? The videogame frame helps, because it ties into the question of why videogame characters act the way they do. When Harrier Du Bois decides to run headfirst through a plywood door, is that because he wanted to, or because I told him to do it in a fit of curiosity? Or maybe it's both?

But it was still pretty tricky, even with all that in mind, because I had to keep in mind the dual motivations every character had for what they were doing. Their behaviours would reflect not only on them, but their "parent" player. That's a lot to track!!! I came up with my own reasoning for everything that happens, and there are rules to it, although naturally I won't reveal what those rules are. You gotta leave a few things up to audience interpretation-- that's where the magic happens!

UMG: That's about all the time we have in this very definitely real-time and continuous interview, any closing remarks or recommendations as we take a break before chapter 3?

Lum: Before I started Foreach, I prepared myself for the possiblity that it wouldn't be as creatively satisfying as I'd hoped. Maybe I'd start making it, but that creative void in my heart would remain, and I'd just have to make peace with that. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. Making a webcomic has turned out to be the best decision I've made in my life yet. It's led me to ratchet up my creative output, I've derived so much glee posting pages and seeing everyone's reactions, and I've already made a bunch of friends. It's been good! I've learned a lot from the experience and I expect I'm going to continue to learn a whole lot more.

I'm really satisfied with how the story has gone so far. And yet I feel like I oughta add, these first two chapters? These were preamble. If you liked what you've seen so far, just you wait to see what I've got cooking -- we haven't even gotten to the good bit yet >:)