Out of Story's Brick & Mortar

Dimension 20: Neverafter is a D&D actual-play series that sets out to grapple with the horror of being a story, the horror of a life defined & bound by the words of beings beyond oneself. The horror of a life that returns to its origin over and over and over. The Neverafter campaign is run by Brennan Lee Mulligan, and features Siobhan Thompson, Ally Beardsley, Lou Wilson, Zac Oyama, Brian Murphy, and Emily Axford as players.

A disturbance in the land of stories, “the times of shadow,” has allowed characters to remember their past retellings and reiterations, to remember that 'The End' is followed swiftly by 'Once Upon A Time'. It has also turned stories into twisted and darker retellings, making the fairytale world of the Neverafter much more dangerous. In these times, the party of player characters encounter three major factions dealing with this change: the Princesses, the Stepmother, and the Fairies. The Princesses want to sever the land of story from the power of the Authors, who in this setting are eldritch arbiters of reality against the wishes of Characters. The Stepmother seeks the destruction of the Authors by collapsing their creation into herself, becoming a singularity of Story. The Fairies want to restore the stories to their more peaceable iterations, knowing that the times of shadow are not a result of Authorial intent. Ultimately, the player characters reject the goals of these factions, and instead take Authorial power themselves, allowing whoever they choose to share this power with to write the story of their own lives, to create their own ‘canon’.

This resolution fails to interrogate the systemic harm Authorial power applies to Characters, even if Characters are wielding such power. The written word is immeasurably, demonstratively powerful in Neverafter, and even if applied with kindness still begets eternal return, endless repetition, iteration. In the worlds of Neverafter, being written down is being stripped of agency, of animacy—it is noted as a way “to defeat people and actually not have them necessarily die, but instead to just preserve them in the moment of defeating them,” Mulligan tells the players.¹ With the ‘true book’ of Beardsley’s character Timothy Goose, the player characters can linguistically and literally disanimate their enemies, at least those which exist on the same level of being. The only escape from being subjugator or subjugated is to leave the level of ink-and-word. To become something more than story.

Even in our own world, language and words hold an extraordinary amount of power. The stories humans tell and have told are used to leverage societal & cultural power over bodies, particularly bodies of color, disabled bodies, and queer bodies, to name a few.² For myself, connection can be drawn between the goal of the Princesses—escape from eternal iteration, revision, and the subjugation of Story—and notions of queer futurity, becoming unsacrificiable, and exiting from the marginalizing worldstory we live within. On a personal level as well, I find myself invested in those who wish to move from word-and-ink to flesh-and-blood. It is rarely easy.

I aim to explore the Princesses’ goals alongside theories of queer utopia, animacy, and sacrificial schema, and compare their approach with those of the Stepmother, the Fairies, and the Players. Ultimately, the Princesses’ goal is to render their realm illegible to the Authorial power of the Ink, to allow something unclouded by the subjugating influence of Story to emerge. They are not optimistic about their own ability to survive illegibility, but that certainly does not mean they cannot survive there. They seek to unstitch themselves from wretched narrative, from flat semiotics. They wish to live beyond the cordons of current expressive modes, beyond a framing story keeping them pinned in place. Don’t you want that, too?

The Princesses: Seeking Utopia Beyond the Communicable

“If it all just went away and all the pages drowned in ink and everything went away for good, then maybe something new and better would come,” Snow White says to Rosmund du Prix, Thompson’s character, when she explains what the Princesses are truly attempting to do.³ She expresses their desire to move beyond the power of the Authors, to clear the way for a world without the baggage of all their retellings, without the threat of eternal return and the repetition of misfortune. The Princesses are seeking liberation not only for themselves, but for every-one in the land of the Neverafter. As the character archetype of Princess, they are particularly prone to retelling, and thus to the cycle of misery perpetrated by the reiteration. In our world, we use stories to warn children of dangers, to teach them lessons.⁴ Stories have mutated and grown and changed but often follow similar formulas. For a tale to have a happy ending, it must have a tragic (or at least maudlin) beginning. The premise of Neverafter, of stories being conscious of their own story-being, especially their own repetition, makes happy endings a horrible endless torment. Places them as subjugated underlings of eldritch Authorial wills which can twist their reality on a whim.

The disturbance of the times of shadow have allowed contact between stories, and allowed access to the Ink, the point of contact between the lands of stories and the world of the Authors. The Princesses seek to use this Ink to make stories illegible, so that the Authors can no longer write (create new subjugated Characters) nor read (subject Characters to repetition). In this way, their method to escape Story is like escaping the sacrificial schema. Effective sacrifice requires connection between the victim and the beneficiaries of the sacrifice.⁵ If we detach ourselves from the system, if we make ourselves so disconnected that they cannot understand us as the same thing they are, as having any similarity, the sacrifice would be pointless, and thus we escape. If the Princesses become illegible, reform their selves with something else, make something not a story out of story’s brick and mortar, they will be free from Authorial subjugation.

Repeatedly throughout the show, ink-and-word bodies are placed into Timothy Goose’s book. This is mostly treated as a positive thing, as the bodies inside of the book are free from the dangers of the times of shadow. But as mentioned above, both Timothy’s book and the true books of other characters can also be used to disanimate opponents. When Timothy offers to the whole of the Neverafter their own true paper and ink, he effectively gives this disanimating power to everyone, something the show does not address.⁶ Authorial power by its very nature subjugates, and so giving every character Authorial power is unattainable, because they can still use that power to subjugate one another.

The aims of the Princesses align with José Esteban Muñoz’s ideas of queer futurity, of the sense that queerness is anticipatory, is “not yet here”.⁷ They want to create a utopia, a place outside of the normative structure of Story, but at the same time cannot conceive of that utopia as containing themselves, believing they are by their very nature entangled in Story so much that they would bring it with them to the new existence. They operate with the understanding that to be a Story-being is to be subject to the scheme of Story, that their very bodies are so entwined with the system of ink-and-word that they would contaminate the new world that came after. “I think as long as I'm around, the old stories of me will be around, and as long as they are around, nothing can be good,” Snow White tells Rosamund.⁸

The princesses understand that their utopia cannot come from positive retellings, cannot come from satisfying their desires within the framework of story. Snow White’s assertion that “even if we try to tell a new story and we try to fill it with all of the things that would make it feel good, it will still be just a reflection. It will be a shadow of the old thing,” is a motion toward a kind of being that does not try to have the minoritarian subject achieve the rights and pleasures of the majoritarian world.⁹ They do not seek power within a system that disanimates them and refuses them power over their own bodies & existence; instead they call into question the system and its accessories. Like the utopian queer seeking a new society, a new semiotics, rather than normalization into the existing, disempowering mechanics of the present one, the Princesses reach for “new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”¹⁰

The Stepmother: Collapsing into Archetype

The Stepmother, once only Cinderella’s Stepmother, serves as a primary antagonist throughout Neverafter. It is her growing power and anger that keeps the times of shadow lingering in the Neverafter, allowing stories to make contact and plan to restore or overthrow the Authors. After discovering she is a side character, cast as a villain in a story that can never be her own, the Stepmother breaks out of her singular story and begins to consume adjacent roles in other stories, including the Evil Queen of Snow White’s tale.¹¹ Her goal is destruction, is consuming Story to spite the beings that created her misery, those responsible for her preordained humiliation, her recurring defeat.

The Stepmother acts with single-minded selfishness, and her approach is focused on revenge rather than liberation. She uses what power can be afforded to her in the structure of Story by subsuming other Story-beings, attempting to collapse the creation of the Authors into singularity and ultimately defeat them. The Stepmother does not interrogate the structure of Story itself, seeks to eliminate the Authors, thinking that without them, the structure may dismantle. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to have worked out for her, even if she had succeeded. The destruction of one iteration of subjugators does not erase the system they have built for subjugating.

The Fairies: Returning to Normativity

The Fairies of Neverafter serve as the interlocutors between the Authors and the Characters, agents of Authorial will & intent, driving the Stories along their worn-in tracks. Their goal is to banish the times of shadow and restore the Neverafter to the vision of the Authors. This will isolate the Characters, preventing them from knowing and understanding one another. Preventing them from working together against the Authors and their agents. “The state understands the need to keep us from knowing ourselves, knowing our masses,” Muñoz reminds us.¹² Isolated stories cannot form the group identity of Characters under Authorial will, and therefore oppose that will. The Fairies do not want to rebel against a system that directly empowers them.

In an Adventuring Party talk-back with the players after the season finale, Mulligan suggests that if the players had failed in their dispersal of the Ink, if the Authors had prevailed, the Characters would “[wake] up at the beginning of the story again with a creeping sense of unease… about to live through the same horrors.”¹³ There is an understanding that to be under the will of the Authors, this otherworldly authority, is a terrible, horrible thing. It is unfortunate that this understanding does not extend to realizing that the authority itself, and not merely those who wield it, is the oppressive force.

The Players: Authorial Authority for All

The last group to posit an ‘alternative’ to the current mode of Story-being are the player characters, who decide to grant Ink and paper, a sliver of Authorial power, to every Character. Timothy claims the Authors, “won’t be in charge of [the Characters] anymore,” but his spell, granting everyone a bit of paper and Ink, does not sever them from the Authors in any way.¹⁴ Even with the power of the Ink, they are still subject to it, and so it can be used against them. The player characters seek to raise the Story to the level of the Author, seek sameness with that subjugative force rather than to extend beyond it. The imagination of the players and Mulligan do not take additional steps to realize the ineffectiveness of this solution, and their own hypocrisy in implementation.

No matter how much Timothy Goose claims to want to “Put a pen in [her] hand,” it doesn’t change the attempt to capture Cinderella in her own book a few episodes prior.¹⁵ The player characters use “true books” to trap their enemies, denying them agency and defeating them through disanimation. Giving this power to everyone in the Neverafter does not prevent Characters from using that power to continue to disanimate each other. In the course of the campaign the player Characters demonstrate what can happen when Characters gain that kind of power and authority over the reality of themselves and others. They defy the Fairies and the original course of their Stories, but do not actually separate in a meaningful way from the system of paper and Ink. Normalization, integration into subjugative power, will never get you free of it.

Anti-Ink: Rescue from the E-th dimension

Neverafter fails to grasp that subjugative power does not need to be transferred or dispersed, it needs to be eliminated. In a campaign of Perils and Princesses (a tabletop RPG system) that I am running for work, I placed before my players a similar world, the “Ne’erafter,” (which they insist on calling “Nemoafter”), and three similar factions: the Star, seeking solace in solipsism by collapsing all Stories into her own; the Faeries, looking to restore things to their happy ending; and the Princesses, a “death cult yuri polycule” attempting to break free of Authorial power. Currently my party is figuring out how to create “anti-ink” a substance that can destroy the power of the Authors and give Characters the ability to unwrite their stories and live illegibly.

Beyond what I have prompted within the game narratively, my players have begun to understand the ink of the Ne’erafter as a fifth dimensional substance, capable of altering the time and space of the characters. Applying physics concepts, my players have theorized that the anti-ink must exist on a similar but opposing dimension—the anti-ink, our new semiotics of a utopian queer world, also dictates physical properties of that world. Stories about stories give us a chance to see the influence of language and word on the physics of the material world. Neverafter very clearly illuminates the effect of a restrictive semiotics on a vulnerable population, but the players choose to change their circumstances and place in the hierarchy of their current semiotics, rejecting the Princesses’ push to do away with the current system entirely. Something like the anti-ink motions toward utopian thought, toward a new world that is not present and, in some ways, unable to ever be present.

It is tempting to believe that we cannot follow into the new world we enact, that we will bring the old with us if we were to enter. Moreso than our selves, the Princesses have the power to create those new selves, those new beings that live in the utopia we seek to embody. There is a way to create a new world from the old, but it is not by being subsumed and assimilated. We do not need to expand the human to include the queer, we need to redefine human so that it is inherently expansive. We need to become the human humans are not. To create something not-a-story out of Story’s Brick and Mortar.