Okay, I was trying to
not have this be something I did a big ol' post on but...
First of all, if you acknowledge conflict drive as canonical, it's already the case that literally every random shard is encoded with some ability to understand how to manipulate the host's brain for a targeted effect. It's extraordinarily difficult to believe that specifically incorporating the memory manipulation is somehow a tremendous burden to add locally to every shard, even if you want to argue something like 'new powers eat up a lot of shard space, such that this functionality can't be fit onto most shards'. (An argument, it should be noted, that runs contrary to everything we see in canon
and WoG about how much functionality shards have loaded on but don't make use of during a given cycle)
Second, saying Aisha's shard manages the topic just raises a whole bunch of other questions,
problematic questions that canon doesn't answer and I'm not aware of a WoG addressing, several of which seem fundamentally untenable for canon to answer. For example, I specifically noted that canon seems to intend that Cauldron capes -capes connected to Eden- are still affected by this blockage. Are we supposed to be assuming that Imp's shard is in constant contact with every one of Eden's shards, too, even though that doesn't really fit with Scion having no idea what happened with Eden? Are we supposed to assume Eden made her own Imp shard, even though the narrative gave no indication such a thing happened, Eden was explicitly distracted for much of the trip in, and there's no guarantee such a shard wouldn't have suffered catastrophic damage when she crashed, negating access to that functionality? Or do we just assume Imp's shard doesn't need to contact other shards at all, in which case
why doesn't it target non-capes? The Entities default to stupid brute force methods, wasteful expenditures of energy that are far beyond the bare minimum to get something done. It's difficult to imagine that in
this case Scion decided to have Imp's shard focus on capes in particular as a cost-savings measure, especially since Scion didn't indicate such a thing at all.
Third of all, the idea that Imp's shard is being pinged by other shards to manage the topic has the key problem that at that point you're positing that
every shard has routines for recognizing when memory manipulation is called for, and are just arbitrarily assuming that they very specifically are lacking the ability to solve the problem on their own. And, again, conflict drive is supposed to be a thing: if you run with canon-as-Wildbow-says anyway, you're now saying that shards have the ability to manipulate host brain's in a deliberate, targeted manner, in addition to needing to recognize when a host runs across info it's not supposed to have... but they have to phone up another shard to actually handle the nitty-gritty of hiding Entity existence from their host?
Why? You're saying they've already got 99% of what's necessary to do such a job themselves: they'll know the problem when they see it, and they can manipulate their host's brain to achieve goals. Why assert that it's more logical for them to be missing that last 1% of
very specifically lacking memory manipulation?
Fourth, this entire framework of 'Imp's shard handles it' further seems fundamentally predicated on the assumption that memory manipulation only needs to be done on a local, case-by-case basis, where Imp's shard gets phoned up to handle a problem, handles it, and then goes back to focusing on Imp until it needs to field another phone call. This has the problem that the way the memory manipulation is presented -consistent with Imp's power mechanics- is that there's a constant 'suppression' effect that, when canceled out, leads to the memories returning: it's not that a cape seeing a depiction of an Entity has the memory surgically removed forever, it's that shenanigans are done so the memory becomes inaccessible or invisible so long as the suppressor can maintain it. And Imp's shard was specifically made in response to the need to prevent
trigger events from leaking critical info. So at that point you're literally assuming Imp's shard is plugged into
every parahuman ever, at all times, to continuously suppress their memory... which is, I'll admit, in the right vicinity to be the kind of dumb an Entity would go for, but seriously, it just makes more sense for 'constant memory suppression effect requiring a continuous connection' to be managed by the shards that are
already continuously connected. Especially because if you're going to invoke the idea of efficiency to justify why shards don't load the memory suppression routine onto themselves, you're implicitly forcing the narrative into an explanation that demands
massive inefficiency. You could try to argue that Scion is fine with energy expenditures and operating on limited RAM, but that's completely unsupported by canon.
You put all that together and 'Imp's shard is the only shard that handles this topic' is just
insane of an explanation.
It makes far more sense to assume Scion made Imp's shard to get the major functionality tested, and then installed a more narrow version of it onto every shard. (And also assume something like 'and even though we didn't see it happen, Scion sent the data over to Eden and she installed the same functionality into her own shards off-screen', but the narrative has a lot of things like this relating to Eden, where we didn't see things we... really ought to have gotten at least a single sentence alluding to)
Regarding what other authors might have cut out: in other stories, the word count is filled up with description. The character doesn't just "go to the store", they go to a low-priced store with an unkempt facade, the sort of store whose prices were reflective of the convenience rather than the quality provided. Now, I do enjoy that; you have good description too, and I'll praise you and others for it. That being said, the fact of the matter is that if the paragraph's first sentence is "character goes to store", and the next paragraph's first sentence is "character arrives at store"... well, my lazy brain has already figured out plot losses due to skimming in such cases are minimal.
Ahhhhh. Put like
this, I'm finally putting my finger down on why I'm someone who writes incredibly wordy prose and yet one of my common frustrations with other people's writing (Particularly, for whatever reason, what could be called 'mainstream' writing) is often along the lines of 'too many words', a view that didn't change once I took up significant creative writing and discovered how word-heavy my own writing defaults to. (That is, I've adjusted my opinions on a number of topics as a result of writing, such as becoming more sympathetic to how fiction often avoids writing liar characters because it really is easy as an author to slip up and forget what exactly each character's knowledge state is, but this particular opinion hasn't changed)
Because you're not just talking about prose that incorporates a lot of description relative to the action, but also the part where such descriptions are often... not contextualizing the decision behind the action itself, but are instead feeding you either the character or the
author's views on certain kinds of topics.
That is, if I wrote a character deciding to go to a cheap, low-quality store, where this was acknowledged within the text at all, they would be relaying to the audience that they didn't have the cash to spare for a better store, or that they were in too much of a hurry to bother searching for a more quality store, or otherwise communicating how their interpretation of the store factored into their decision to go to that particular store.
Whereas a lot of fiction would just inform the audience that the store was a place that was cheap because it sold crappy goods. If the story is told in omniscient third-person, the description is probably telling you more about the author's opinions they're not explicitly sharing but still have ("This... sounds a lot like X Chain Of Store. I'm pretty sure the author hates X Chain Of Store, but isn't willing to explicitly call the chain a shitty store for shitty people.") than it does about anything story-relevant. If it's instead told in first-person, or over-the-shoulder third-person where descriptions are clearly intended to be the character's own descriptions in a first-person-type manner, it
might instead be intended to communicate some aspect of the character's personality ("This character is a snob. I am going to keep having them be a snob in their thoughts to make absolutely sure the audience gets that.") orrrr it might still be the author's own opinions leaking through. ("I'm a snob, so even though I'm writing a character who ostensibly values convenience and price over 'quality', I'm still going to describe this store as low-quality trash where it's very clear that's intended to be a negative.")
If such info is legitimately delivered as an in-character opinion, it's hopefully giving further context on character personality, which ties into understanding their decisions and motives and how people react to them and so on. But if it's not... it's just the author letting their own opinions show through, largely or entirely unrelated to the story.
So it's not just filler, it's filler pulling you out of the story: if I wanted Random Author's unvarnished opinions about how shitty X Chain Store is, I'd go find their blog or something. (I'm snarking a little, but also legitimately mean this) If I'm invested, I'm invested in the world and/or the characters within the world, and want further context on them.
This also finally helps me pin down why I've always been biased toward first-person storytelling: I struggle to write third-person omniscient at all, prefer to write first-person instead of over-the-shoulder third-person, and my reading preferences tend to run much the same, where third-person omniscient needs an extremely compelling or intriguing concept to get me past 'but I hate third-person omniscient' and I'm a lot more likely to get reasonably far into a first-person story than an equivalent over-the-shoulder third-person story. Because first-person is a lot harder to obviously fuck up in this way: if the author is expressing their unvarnished opinions through effectively a self-insert, but the character is consistent with theirself and their originating context and all, I can stay invested in the story even if I come to suspect it is just the author writing theirself and then passing it off as fiction. Whereas third-person is much quicker to provide obvious contradictions ("I, a character from The Poor Part Of Town, nonetheless hold opinions one generally only holds if reasonably well-off, like the person writing me") or nonsense statements ("I, the omniscient narrator, assert that X character doing Y thing is proof that they're a baby-munching evil person who hates goodness, never mind that from any kind of reasonable perspective this is obviously self-defense or otherwise
not a malicious act of despicable cruelty") or otherwise cause the bias to show through as the
author's bias, rather than eg a character's bias.
... which also explains why a lot of my ideas on the backburner have remained on the backburner. Worm is a first-person story: staying roughly true to Taylor's view of the world (In eg writing Monster) largely requires having read Worm and not promptly derped on how she thinks there. At the opposite extreme, writing a character we saw very little of in canon (eg Cherie, in Monster) or that I've invented whole cloth (eg Zelda, in A Single Shadow) is easy because there's little opportunity to make a fundamental error in depicting their headspace. (In the sense of forgetting something they thought in canon, or of having so completely misunderstood their context that my fundamental approach is completely wrong) Whereas characters we've seen enough for any consumer of the media to have some sense of their personality but it was a fundamentally outside perspective... staying recognizably true to that personality while writing their internal viewpoint -that we never saw- is really, really hard. Enough so I've got ideas on the backburner with a few dozen pages of plotting out written up, and absolutely no story written.
Which also explains why I've drifted more toward being willing to re-interpret, re-contextualize, etc, characters I'm writing, lifting much of that burden...
My hypothesis?
Taking into account You!Bakuda's admission to have zero interest in sex¹ ², and the fact that since you arrived you have either been in isolation (and thus limiting the chances of the topic coming up from outside source, aka others people) or you have been with ABB and thus in almost constant tinker fugue, it makes sense that You!bakuda wouldn't think about it, as doing otherway would imply that You!bakuda would be thinking about things with "sex" in mind.
Tl; Dr: Not thinking about sex is You!bakuda's default, and so You!bakuda wouldn't think about others' sexuality without something or someone else guiding her thinking process in that direction.
That's a good point.
From one point of view, the chapter may not have gone anywhere, but from another (the mine) this chapter not only showed great progress with the relationship between Bakuda and Taylor, but we finally have answers (and more questions) about the Taylor's mental state. And Cauldron(?) is answering us again, which together with the mural is several levels of worrying and exciting.
This chapter was a more successful slice-of-life than entire stories of the genre I've read, and this's just so fucking awesome.
It's always interesting getting a more concrete explanation of how my work is viewed, because I'm always surprised at how much stuff that never explicitly crossed my mind is, yes, absolutely in my writing.
And glad you enjoyed it so much.
It's a Ward spoiler, then in this case don't look on wiki page of the Blasphemies, as this detail is left very on open there.
Oh. That's good to know ahead of time. I've already run into a spoiler while trying to look up stuff for Wild Hunt writing because I figured there was no way that particular topic would be both touched on by Ward and then have people decide to shove any Ward spoilers right at the top of the page. So now I know not to look at that page until... I'm done with Ward, I guess.
... though really I should probably just not look at the wiki at all until I'm done with Ward...
And it was done so well, so seamlessly, it never occurred to me to be frustrated by the mislead. Partly because it took Bakuda by surprise too, but mostly by how much sense it made in hindsight.
