When the story of Harold and Scotty started, no one knew it, and no one understood what it would become. It started, of all places, on a kink meme on LiveJournal -- strangely, for being a kink meme, we were not all that interested in sex, but hey. Stranger things have happened. One of us was a veteran role-player of over a decade; the other was brand new to it. And when their story started, we had not encountered one another, and it didn't seem that two such vastly different characters written by two vastly different muns would ever be more than maybe a chance encounter.
Because it was a kink meme, there was no fourth wall. The veteran of the two did keep that boundary in place somewhat, but loosely; the play on the meme itself was something of a spur of the moment lark. It was designed to be tinkered with, and maybe dropped quickly, but that never manifested.
The newbie had no idea what she was doing, and the various proprieties and usual rules of roleplay were completely unknown to her. She learned on the fly, with all the pitfalls that come with something like that. Her character was taken up for a joke, and she really didn't know what happened when he suddenly started taking himself a bit seriously.
The nature of the game may have been already informal with the fourth wall, but when a chatroom started up for the muns, something spun off of that game that was, to nearly everyone there, even more so.
For the vetaran RPer, real-time play was an old-hat. She was new to LJRP, but she had been a Rhy'Din player for years and years, and without quite meaning to, she fell into old rules, and strictures and boundaries. They were still looser than she often kept originally, but much tighter, given the format -- Scotty, her character, was tweaked somewhat to be able to be playable in that chat, but his own personality by then had developed.
Every mun, or nearly every mun, comes across a character at some point who is so very alive that they might as well be. You know the kinds; the ones who stick with us, the ones who act almost before our fingers touch the keys. Some of us are lucky enough to have more than one such character in a lifetime; a few never do. But most RPers can tell you about that character, who is so much their own person, that you, the mun, has very little influence.
Turns out, Harold Lee, joke character, decided he was one of those, too. His mun failed to notice, at first. For a long time, she didn't understand that's what was happening.
The nature of this little offshoot RP was, though, for most players like an outlet for their characters in the 'real' game. When they came to that place, they would be aware of themselves in the other world, and for that matter, aware of themselves as fictional. As result, when these characters developed so differently from the 'originals' that it became clear that they were different people, the fact that they knew who their muns were and had interacted with and even loved them was woven through their souls.
In some cases, the characters played in chat -- the beach characters -- were always puppets to their muns. In other cases, though, they weren't. It wasn't always easy to see where the line was, but over time, it slowly became clear that in this world, unlike in their canon game, Harold and Scotty were very much whole.
And very much in love.
The beach, this place without a fourth wall, where everything was subject to the wave of a hand, lacked reality. Scotty felt it first, and he craved that reality -- where he could work, where he could live, where he could earn what he had. He was content for a long time on the beach, because over time, he and Harold went from friends, to dating, to engaged. But eventually, he wanted reality.
But reality meant a lot of things. And it meant that much of the space before, which lacked a fourth wall (and all implications good and bad), couldn't be acknowledged in any manner the same.
The muns thought they could just make it so. To steal a line. When the time came for Scotty and Harold to find Rhy'din (the moment chosen is one they probably both still blow raspberries at their muns for), the knowledge of a fourth wall was taken from them. They could remember their beach, their history, falling in love, but knowledge of things like why they used to go back to the ship between appearances and stopped, or why they knew things about the alternate reality that they shouldn't, started seeping in.
The problem was, these two were very much their own men, and the sudden gap their knowledge never quite sat right with them. For that matter, there were moments where they - especially Harold - were still played in a fourth wall-broken environment, something the muns fell to referring to as 'headspace'. When Harold set off a significant chain of events only in headspace, which was never meant to 'count', both characters latched on to the gaps and couldn't be stopped from trying to figure it all out.
From that was born the Maelstrom stories. (1, 2, 3)
We needed to heal the rifts between the reality they now knew as theirs, and the empty spaces they were missing, and the different things that happened in different areas of play. We still had to take out the fourth-wall stuff, as much as possible. They couldn't live in Rhy'Din with knowledge of our world. But we could let the nature of Scotty's creation -- a temporal rift -- fuel the ability for them to heal themselves.
For the most part, they did. They remembered events, enough to piece together the gaps and make sense of the universe. They were able to reconcile what happened in the ether, to what happened in their reality. It changed a lot; it gave them back parts of themselves, and let them establish themselves more firmly in their everyday reality -- their Rhy'Din reality -- where the fourth wall was in place.
But not all damage was healed. Sometimes, what happened in their reality brought back remembered traumas, from that time long before there was a fourth wall.
When something strikes from somewhere that is intrinsically linked to it, we bring them back into headspace. They're given back full understanding of their nature so that they have all the tools with which to work to heal the damage. In their headspace, they may handwave as they did on the beach, and they generally have access to most of their muns' memory. They know us. They talk to us, they talk about us, deal with issues in regard to us as well as each other and the world at large.
In 'Fighting Tock', among other things, Harold's mun is answering for something she did before she understood what blending was. The pink-haired bespectacled woman is his mun.
The place where Harold and Scotty cry together is the intersection of the muns' headspaces. When they go home, it varies how much they understand of where they've been, though the fourth wall comes back. Harold has a habit of referring to it as 'the other-place'.
It probably sounds crazy. But it's no new thing, for authors to speak to their characters -- it's a long tradition. It isn't blending; we are firmly not them, and they are not us. We cry for them, and laugh for them, but it's not because they're our proxies; it's the same empathy that makes people cry at sad movies, or laugh in joy when reading a book. We love them, like you love your favorite fictional heroes.
We keep their Rhy'Din reality free of us. They started in a place that made it very hard for them to achieve that reality, and there are times, when you read their story here, where what you read comes from a history or a now, beyond a fourth wall. Someday, hopefully, it won't be needed anymore; when all the hurts are healed, and whatever mental visits are made or conversation shared are done in simple pleasure; authors, chatting between scenes with their characters. But until then, please bear with us, and them. We've all come a long way, in this story we never, ever could have expected to tell, and some parts are hard, and some parts are metaphysical, but all parts are done with love and respect and a desire for something better.
--Steff and Erin, Scotty & Harold's muns
