SMG4:// Exodus

About Exodus, Deleted Stuff, Lore

The Yap SectionWinging it: About Exodus

During the very early stages of Apocrypha, Exodus took on a ton of different forms. This book was never structured or planned as rigidly as Apocrypha was. Apocrypha was easier to plan because I wasn't thinking as hard about all five books and how they fit together, just the one. Exodus on the other hand, was more improvised, and in my opinion, less cohesive. I had to think about lore shit, character arcs, and how everything lined up with the next few books in the series. The result was a lot of split-second decisions, potential plot-holes, and just having the final draft look wildly different than the initial idea. Butterfly effect is a bitch.

Very early on, there was only going to be just Apocrypha and a rewritten version of Revelations. At first, the narrative would split into two parallel stories, 'Terra' and 'Astra'. 'Terra' would become Exodus while 'Astra' would have followed the Meme Guardians across the universe. They would both converge again during the final battle, becoming Revelations again. A bunch of bloating later, I now have two more books to write until we get to Revelations. There's a ton of content that's been added and dropped since it's conception.

Forged from Pain: The Making of Tari

Originally, Exodus had a slightly different theme structure than the final draft did. The story was heavily influenced by a bad experience I had with school a while ago. Long story short, I pushed too hard to improve myself and ended up falling into anxiety and self-loathing. That was kind of the monomyth I wanted to represent with Tari in this book. In canon and here, Tari is a flawed character by design. She's not meant for the kinds of things she faces in this book and has to struggle with her own body and mind to overcome them. Eventually she's able to, but she makes a mistake and all of the expectations she has for herself crush her spirit.

In fact, the ending would have been wildly darker if I had followed this structure more closely. In the other ending, Lorie would have died to a Negative Meme because Tari faltered and Tari would have felt so ashamed about it that she just breaks. When you're at the bottom of a tall mountain, falling hurts less; but if you even slip at the top, gravity won't be as kind. You can still sort of see this in Tari's character arc in the final draft, but it didn't stick to the end.

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I feel like a lot of people don't like death-fakeouts that much, so I decided to expand on Tari's near-death-experience from Apocrypha for this book. Maybe Tari did dodge certain death, but that incident had lasting effects on her body and mind. That incident casts a huge shadow of her friends' collective guilt over Tari, which she tries desperately to escape from. I know that there are people out there who are dealing with similar things Tari is like chronic pain. I'm not an expert on or a survivor of pain or medical conditions, but I want to try my best to get this stuff right.

In all honesty, I just wanted to make Tari a badass. Honestly, the final battle was kinda just wish fulfillment fueled by Sonic Frontiers and Devil May Cry music. She deserves to be more than just "VIDYO GAEM GOOD UWU". I liked Tari's character arc in Western Spaghetti and I wanted to see more of her being brave and standing on her own rather than just languishing on the sidelines.

Starving: The making of Kaizo

I know I said that I hated making one-dimensional "evil and cazy" villains, but I might have made one of the biggest edgelords in Fanfiction this side of Coldsteel the Hedgeheg. This man was made as a Slipknot reference, for the love of Jeebus. They write a lot of songs like "Vermillion, Purity, Iowa, Killpop, etc..." that all talk about psychotic obsessed lovers. Even Kaizo's speech pattern was based on Corey Taylor's mumbled fry-voice in those songs, especially in Iowa. I realize that this will probably get me labeled as cringe, but it kinda fits. Kaizo and Saiko are both canonically based on the Yandere trope of animes past. I feel like he does unironically use "kitten".