FQ Q&As

End of season 2 questions

>1. What was the ultimate trigger that made you decide it was finally time to bring Fuck Quest back? Those of us in the Ghost Thread saw the Anonymous post back in January teasing the anniversary (I assume that was you). Were you really planning that entire time?

As another anon said, I was not the ghostposter. The idea for Fuck Quest 2 came to me not long before I started tweeting again. Like the original, the concept came to me after waking from a nap.

This was when Cambridge Analytica/Facebook/etc. scandals were big in the news. I pictured a version of Fuck Quest more rooted in realism, a version of David Darkbloom who was a Big Data silicon valley type. So the conception was very topical.

Other ideas quickly sprouted from that. I knew to do this I would have to structure it as a reboot, and that gave me a lot of freedom to explore new things.

>2. Were you in Japan at all for the premiere of the Chuu2 ~Take on Me~ movie? There are a hilarious number of parallels between it and FQ2 (including that reference on THE CHART), despite the BDs only being released and translated a few weeks ago.

No. I take credit where it's due but I can't claim this was intentional. I only watched the Chuu2 movie after someone pointed it out. The parallels blew me away, the phone tracking app in particular -- I couldn't believe it. Yes, even Cerise's favorite song on the chart was a coincidence.

>3. A question on thematics - FQ2 is really fucking Greek. Not just because of the incest and gay shit (heh), but in the story structure itself - Darkbloom's hubris leading to his ultimate downfall, the idea of Sand Reckoner being a very literal Deus Ex Machina, the general feeling of the so-called "God" we've created with the Internet of Things - even down to the appeals to the muse (the audience) that early Greek plays were so noted for (something that generally always tickled me about quest threads in general). Is this a deliberate echo, or am I reading way too much into it?

Yes and no. There are definitely parallels I intended, with the naming of the tech, and parallels that exist because they're timeless tropes (David's hubris being his downfall) and parallels that aren't intended but I do feel are valid to draw (the point you made with appeals to the audience in Greek plays). I believe that readers should be in conversation with the text primarily, not the author; in other words, what I intend and what I tell you is the "meaning" of the story, is only as valid as anyone else's interpretation. Being the author does not make me the ultimate arbiter of the manifold meanings and pieces of symbolism you can find.

>How has audience participation altered the plot of season 2?

In a ton of ways. To give you a specific example, choosing to let Cerise and Rose in early on the plot with Camelia hit me completely by surprise and changed the entire path for the story that I had planned in my mind. More on audience choices later, there was at least one other question and more I wanted to say.

>Why did you choose a twink character and did you expect them to become so popular?

Traps are a particular fetish of mine and I wanted to cater to that. FQ is my magical realm, after all! I knew Alex would be popular because of the warm reception he got in the scrapped S2 synopsis.

Is railing a cute boy in a maid costume gay? Most definitely, Alabaster is hard gay for Alex, and that's hot.

>Question: Do you have any thoughts regarding a FQ VN project like the one mentioned earlier at some point? Presumably after S3 is over. I know a few artists who might be receptive to the idea.

I'm not opposed, but as you said we'll have to decide on that when Season 3 ends. I don't know what it would look like -- a retread of seasons 2/3, of season 1, of all combined (Fuck Quest/Fuck Quest Alternate)... something else? It could be exciting.

>1. Were there any choices we made that had drastic consequences, even though we wouldn't have realised it at the time? Were there any times we narrowly avoided a total disaster?

Yes. Again, letting Rose and Cerise in changed everything, as I said. There was also, off the top of my head...

1. Inviting Alex to the sleepover circa episode 7. Not inviting him would have ended up with Tyrus's men savagely beating him when they went to his apartment looking for Whitney. That would almost certainly have turned the audience non-negotiably and permanently against the idea of working with Tyrus... maybe Camelia, too.

2. Ultimately allying with Camelia. It would have been possible to align with Darkbloom, which would have HUGE consequences, although I did expect you to side with Camelia in the end. I'm honestly not sure what I would do if you chose the Darkbloom route.

3. Dissuading Vivian from going to congress. This was a choice that could have gone either way, I was excited for both. This was the point where you decided how the season would end, although no one realized it. Darkbloom would be alive if Vivian went to DC; episode 14 would have ended with Vivian finding where Camelia had Darkbloom held hostage, and either killing or incapacitating her.

There are others, but these are the ones that stick out to me. I usually don't go into alternate possibilities, but I wanted to be clear that we weren't on rails the way we were in the original. Your choices made a difference at many junctures.

Of course, there's also the fact that I take your sentiments to heart not only when branching off of choices... your feedback and the general mood of the thread also dictates things in other ways, beyond the choices you make.

>2. You seemed to have had this series planned out for a hell of a long time, but were there any major plot points that you only came up with after S2 had already started? (Renee being Whitney's mother, for instance)

The one you list as an example came after S2 started... episode 2 or 3, I hit on the concept of Whitney being David Darkbloom's bastard. Renee being in prison, was an idea from later in the run too... I wasn't sure whether to have her be in Palau, teaching high school, dead or possibly just not existing entirely. This route worked out the best. Galatea being a research subject along with Camelia and Alabaster was also decided well into the run.

>3. What were your favourite lewd and non-lewd scenes this season?

Hard to decide! I really, honestly can't make a choice. But, some thoughts...

Lewd: Anything involving Cerise really gets me going, especially when she got involved with us and Alex. There was also Vivian's deflowering, which was really hot to me. Camelia in the massage parlor was something I wanted to do since the beginning of the season and I shoehorned it in just because I found it so sexy. But pretty much any lewd scene you saw, exists because it's something that gets me off.

Non-lewd: episode 11 was as wild to run as it was to experience. Beyond that, there were some comedic moments that I loved doing -- Rose and Alabaster bickering, Whitney being a dumbass, etc -- one that sticks out to me, and I think stuck with some of you, is Camelia's "nahhhh" moment. I also loved all the moments of high tension, such as the car chase in the desert, and the last two episodes... ramping it up and watching the characters lose their shit as everything goes wrong, is really fun.

>1. You compared the scale of writing Fuck Quest to writing for NaNoWriMo. However, the result of people trying to write that quickly is, at best, a decent first draft -- not something nearly as gripping and cohesive as Fuck Quest. How do you reckon you've written such a quality story under those constraints?

I say this not to fish for compliments because I know anyone reading this has a positive opinion of FQ and will disagree with me. So I'm really not looking for you to chime in and say I'm wrong, but: I really, really don't like my own prose, especially in season 2. And while there's a lot I'm very happy with in terms of how the story panned out, there is SO MUCH I missed and was disappointed with too. So many missed opportunities and things left hanging, stuff I just couldn't juggle due to the sheer scale and the time pressure. I made a lot of mistakes... plot-wise, character-wise, and with the prose itself. If I rewrote it, a great deal would change, and it would probably double in length.

I haven't written regularly in a long time and I haven't been reading very much either, and I think it shows. I consider my actual prose much worse than it was in FQ1-- and I didn't like it back then either, so you can see how self-critical I am this time around.

Overall, my opinion is: the experience was a blast, but the product I created wasn't anywhere near good enough. I can only try to do better in season 3.

>Who were the 9 girls?
You'll have to wait and see~

>Could we have fucked them all this season if we had played our cards right?
It would be extremely difficult. This goes back to my own difficulty juggling all the various plot threads and characters.

At first, I was trying to keep us on track to hit 8/8 or 9/9 but as the episodes dragged on and we were moving so glacially, I started thinking about what the next season might hold, and I resigned myself to thinking that we wouldn't complete the counter in this season.

>Will Rose 2: Electric Boogaloo make a comeback?
Maybe! With the prom flashback, we know she exists in-universe.

>What was your favorite scene to write?
I touched on this already!

>Did we ever make an unexpected decision, or did you play us like a damn fiddle the entire time?

I've also touched on this already, but I'll add the vote that I took part in myself and got caught, was one I REALLY didn't want to see go the other way. The reason why is because it lead directly to fucking Vivian with Whitney's help, and I knew it was the only chance for that scenario to happen before the revelation that Whitney is her sister. I really wanted people to experience that, then the retroactive realization that it was incest.

>People have posted things in thread that were later referenced in quest, do you have a favorite?

Hard to say. I'll go back to Rose2 on this one. Her introduction in episode 11 was meant to be a one-off thing, to close the loop on the old story that we almost had someone else instead of Rose.

I expected people to hate her (especially in comparison to Rose -- the prospect that THIS is what could have been in her place all along)... I was very surprised to see she got a somewhat positive reception. That's why I decided to make her a "real" person within the universe of Fuck Quest. And if we see her again in some form... it will also be because of that.

>Did bringing those 2 guys with us into the break in even matter?

Yes and no. If Whitney had been with us, Marquis would not have become separated from us, and we would have seen Stasi in the finale too. It was never going to change the ultimate fate of Marquis though: I knew from episode 13 or so that Alex was going to end up beating him to death with his own bat. I really wanted to set that moment up.

>Is the number 421 itself important, and that's why we see it everywhere, or is there an event or idea related to 421, and that's what's important. For example, is 911 important because the number is important, or because of the attack on 9/11?

It's definitely important in the sense that it keeps popping up in crucial places, and I may or may not have some "ultimate" meaning to ascribe to it (stay tuned!) But the decision of it being 421 rather than some other number was arbitrary. It was just the Saturday I decided to premiere the show on. If 4/22 had fallen on Saturday this year instead, the big arc number of the season would be 422.

>Why did Cerise really kill Damon?

She was telling the truth. He tried to rape her.

>Is Kaa-san really gone for good?
Stay tuned!

>Was there a chance to go beyond the 9/9?and 1/1?

Alabaster definitely won't fuck Stackleford. I'll say that right now.

But the counter definitely isn't capped - as we already saw this season when we went from a max of 8 to 9.

>What the fuck is Noelle's deal? How much of her interactions with us bullshit? Why did she let us go?
These are great questions to be asking, and we'll learn more in season 3.

>Did Darkbloom kill our parents? He said he killed Amber's under torture, but I don't think he ever technically admitted to killing ours.
I'm not gonna answer this one either. I will say that I fully intended there to be doubt and debate about it. We may learn the answer definitively, or I may decide to let ambiguity remain.

>If the 4 implants have the same hardware, could they theoretically be upgraded to have the full SR package?
Good question for season 3.

>What made you decide Whitney would be David and Renee's bastard?
You know, I'm not sure. But it makes so much sense to me in retrospect. I think it was just one of those flashes I tend to get, where my brain draws connections between story elements without my conscious thought.

I decided she was David's daughter well before I settled definitively on making her Renee's as well. (I vacillated on that right up to the night of the big reveal). However, I really REALLY wanted to do Whitney as CEO, and that's one thing I'm super excited about heading into the new season. It's going to be fun as shit, you guys.

>What were some of the best decisions we made, and the worst ones?
Taking Alex along to Cerise's was a great choice, as I said. Bad decisions... definitely pressing Alex and Sable so much when they considered Alabaster a saboteur.

>Will Alabaster say "I love you" to all his haremites next season, or will he keep being a fag about it?
Depends~

>Is there anything you feel we've missed this season that we should have paid more attention to?

I don't think so. I'm sure there are little jokes and references you missed but most of the big things, I think you're all pretty astute about.

The finer details of the plot are still a little ambiguous, and there's one thing in particular I think you're all missing about the significance of Darkbloom's plan w/r/t Sand Reckoner, how Sand Reckoner differs from what came before, the debate between him and Sable etc. That's my fault though, because I intended him to have a longer speech in episode 11, and cut it off due to time + because I didn't want to bore. So that's something I consider to be an ongoing plot point which will clarify next season.

>You've made nods to the old plans for Season 2 this season, are they anything more than just a reference or two.
They're just references right now. Those characters do exist in-universe, and who knows, maybe they'll turn up in person somewhere. But no, I will not be introducing magic powers or biblical prophecy as plot points.

>What even the fuck happened in Episode 11 / Episode 1?
Sand Reckoner wasn't complete which is why Alabaster's experience was so fucked up. The complete Sand Reckoner can do much more. I want to say more than that, but as I said in the other answer, this is actually an ongoing plot point.

>What video did Darkbloom plan on showing the Senate?
Man, I had so much planned for the Senate testimony that I had to leave on the cutting room floor. The video wasn't anything like what you may have been expecting; it was just supposed to be deep fakes of the senators on the committee saying things like "I love to molest little kids!" and "Yes, I accept this bribe for $1 million" and so on. Something to shock and unsettle them, and prove it's possible to make a convincing fake video.

>What would have happened, broadly speaking, if we had let Stackleford die, beyond having once less waste of space in our life?

I fully intended him to die and in fact the only reason I offered it as a choice was because I needed to put a choice about SOMETHING up, since I had gone so long without a choice at that point. And because I did that, I had to make the choice actually MATTER, and since you decided to try to stop his death (surprising me), I had to make the attempt actually work.

Stackleford's death was supposed to be nothing more than an "oh shit" moment signalling that things have gotten really real. Stackleford was season 1's heel, representing all that was kind of wacky and madcap and comic about Fuck Quest. For him to die on his knees begging for mercy in the desert, represented to me the ultimate turn of the story from sex comedy to psychological thriller. (Not that both elements haven't always been present.) I planned that he would die from the first episode of the season -- early on, I intended it to be Camelia who killed him, but I didn't want to bring her so far into villainy that way. So it was delayed, and was ultimately supposed to be Stasi's big introduction as an enemy.

So the fact that he isn't dead now, frankly, is a fluke wrought by a spur of the moment whim to make his death an audience decision point; and now that he's alive, I need to slot him into something plot relevant for season 3.

>What was your favorite audience theory this season?
There was an anon trying to relate the story to Kabbala, and another describing how their Zodiacs/MBTIs line up so well, and that kind of fluffery always entertains me. I love crackpot theorizing like that because as I said, even where I don't intend something, the search for symbolism and meaning should never be constricted by what the author "intends." Seeing people dissect the story through the months has taught me about the story as well, and has informed my own decisions in so many ways.

Another theory I liked was that the universe of FQ2 was all a simulation (this was before episode 11 when people discussed it) -- this itself is an easy and cliche thing to theorize, but what I liked about it was the added idea that Mara's villainous nature was actually her attempt to rouse Darkbloom "awake." That one interested me too.

>What was the hardest scene for you to write, from just writer's block on getting the words out, to the subject matter being actually difficult to write?

I struggled between episodes 10 and 14 because I was trying to move things swiftly to an end point without sacrificing anything important. Much had to be cut to end things in a timely way. Episodes 7-12 all take place over the span of, like, a single weekend in-universe, and that was frankly unacceptable to me. That's why I really hit the accelerator at the end.

>Also, I hope we get more SoL hijinks.

Going out of order to reply directly to this: I agree. Season 3 will feature much more SoL hijinks. Of course there will be plot, and PLOT, but I intend to create more breathing room for silly fun too.

>If you could change some things about this season, from subplots, to delivery, to timing, what would they be?

Oh man. There's just too much to get into with that. I'm trying my hardest to press forward without looking back, but there was a lot I lost the opportunity to do that I really wanted to.

>What was your favorite supplemental material to make? For the one person who might care, mine was Whitney's test.

The test was a lot of fun! I also enjoyed the public release from Darkbloom Analytics with all the signatures on it. I spent about two hours signing dozens of printouts of that statement by hand, trying to perfect a signature in four different handwriting styles.

The /csg/ threads were also great. There's one I didn't get the time to edit and post in episode 14, unfortunately -- more Senate testimony stuff I left on the cutting room floor.

>What scene were you the most excited to write yourself, or to show the audience, if there was a difference?

For sure it was the final reveal of Whitney's true parentage. I was eagerly awaiting that for a long time. In terms of my excitement leading up to writing a scene I had planned, that stands out from all the rest.

>Is there anyone you wish you had spent more time on this season?

Gal, Vivian, and Kay. They all got the shaft (and not in the good way). Kay in particular -- and this goes back to my discussion about audience choices. Our decision not to talk to her early on when she first reaches out to us in the parking garage really surprised me. That decision relegated her to the back burner for a long time and I never found a good way to bring her fully to the fore. If not for that choice, this season would have featured much more Kay.

>1. I've seen occasional mentions from others about you doing other quests. Were there other quests between FQ1 and FQ2?

Battle Royale Quest, presaging the surge in interest in battle royale games, and really quite fun to write. I loved the desert setting. Unfortunately I dropped it after 3 threads due to my own laziness and struggling with the time demands of my new job out of college.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Battle%20Royale

>2. This is one you can flat out ignore because it kinda borders on "too personal" but I need to get this out there: Do you have anything else you've written?

I appreciate your understanding, but yes, I'll have to keep that a secret. After Fuck Quest is all said and done there are projects I want to do which I will not want associated with this -- sorry.

>3. What are some of your influences?
>3b. Do you have a reading list?

One HUGE influence for me is pic related, one of my favorite novels. I didn't realize until very late into the season, but Camelia's character has strong parallels with the character I-330.

If you read it, I must recommend the Ginsburg translation, which is by far the best available. You can actually find it online: https://libcom.org/library/we-yevgeny-zamyatin

Note that a formatting error in the link above renders the square root character as a V so when reference is made to "V-1" it's actually talking about the square root of negative 1. That's an important moment in the story, so I thought I'd clarify.

Also, to my own shame, when I quoted the book during Episode 14, I got it slightly wrong. Nelson puts it as "the known is finished" but the actual line from I-330 (the character I said had so many parallels to Camelia) is "everything known is finished."

>"And tomorrow ..." she breathed greedily through gleaming, clenched, sharp teeth. "No one knows what tomorrow will be. Do you understand— I do not know, no one knows—tomorrow is the unknown! Do you understand that everything known is finished? Now all things will be new, unprecedented, inconceivable."

Another big influence is postmodern literature in the encyclopedic style of Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Stories with multi-layered symbolism, ambiguous plots, huge casts of weird characters, etc. If you ever read a book like Infinite Jest, you'll see how much I've cribbed from this type of storytelling.

>4. I've listened to albums from Milli, DAOKO, Cibo Matto, and St. Vincent since FQ2 began. Do you mind hitting me with some more albums? Doesn't even have to be FQ related.

Start with Wednesday Campanella. The song "Little Match Girl" is going to be Galatea's season 3 theme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuuUfP4uJEk

However, that song is different from Wednesday Campanella's usual sound. Some other excellent songs by the same artist...
"Jeanne D'Arc" is a fucking banger of a track, and one of my favorite music videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syLz1rcTKD8
"Melos" is also an excellent video and song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qPSHOTzidw
"Momotaro" is her most famous video and you may have seen it before, also a banger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVPgxn3xohM

As for other artists... the characters will all have their own themes so you may see some more. I intend to fill some of the interim with character cards like before, plus theme songs.

(okay, don't add this to the playlist, but if Fuck Quest was a 90s romcom, "One Week" would definitely be the theme song for Ally and Rose. The lyrics are WAY too on point.)

>5. Did you have a general theme in mind you wanted to convey going into FQ2? Or to put it another way, did you have any goals in mind aside from major story plot points you wanted to achieve?
>5b. Did you accomplish those goals/convey those messages?

There were a couple things, but the overarching idea I wanted to tackle was the fractured perception of objective truth and what is "real" that seems to be gripping western society today.

That's a pretty pretentious way to put it, but that was really the main impetus behind revisiting Fuck Quest. I thought it was an interesting prism through which to explore my own feelings about it. We'll see the echoes of this throughout the next season, and this is another thing I wanted to harp on during the Senate testimony but couldn't; what Darkbloom has inadvertently done with Sand Reckoner is remove some very foundational things from the world's ability to "know" what is true. By claiming the video of the operation on Camelia was a fake, and then proving that it in fact could plausibly be a fake -- he did the exact OPPOSITE of what he wanted to acheive -- he completely destroyed faith in the idea of a knowable reality.

It's not as cynical as all that, though. Another aspect of this comes up with Alabaster and Rose. While I genuinely don't play favorites with the girls in the sense that I don't like one more than another and wouldn't choose one over another personally, Rose has been my favorite to write for (barely edging out Whitney, who was my favorite to write for in season 1). The reason is because I had this concept of Rose and Alabaster very obviously representing two sides of the cultural divide these days but nonetheless loving each other deeply. It was a lot of fun to play with and hint at.

Of course their relationship is completely twisted and they're both reprehensible people who you would never want to know in real life, but to me that relationship represents, in the grotesque and absurd way that all things in Fuck Quest are grotesque and absurd, the idea of reconciliation. In my heart of hearts I do think it is possible.

As far as how much of that I accomplished... it's part of my dissatisfaction overall. I didn't cover half the things I wanted to.

[...]

>8. Do you like ham? I like ham.

#IStandWithGalatea

>6. FQ2 was absolutely littered with easter eggs, references, and just tiny little details. How many of them did we pick up on?
>6b. What did we miss?

I would say you caught a majority of them -- I'm struggling to think of one off the top of my head that slipped past you all, although I know there were some. Or rather, there were some that went uncommented on, but I'm sure some of those at least a few of you understood even if you said nothing.

Maybe one that sticks out is that I changed Rose's mother's first name from Sara (which is what she was named in Season 1) to Charlotte. Charlotte is of course a deliberate reference to Madoka Magica.

>Did you come up with the characters first and fit their anime avatars to them or were the FQ characters somehow inspired by the anime characters?

I came up with characters first then found suitable avatars for them. For example, I conceived of Cerise as being a pseudo-slutty onee-sama, then went trawling through my random /a/ image folder trying to find a character who might be a good avatar for that; pic related is what I hit upon. (This was when I intended avatars to be inconsistent and not necessarily tied to a single existing character from anime.)

That being said, once I settled on avatars for a certain character in Fuck Quest, that avatar then informed more of their personality. From something as simple as Cerise's penchant for wearing chokers, to more important aspects like Rose's seemingly contradictory affinity for guns.

>What came first: The idea to have VR/AR-type technology as a major plot point this season or wanting a way to explain S1?

I don't think I've fully illuminated how season 2 connects to season 1 -- or at least not in a way that everyone understands. I do think if you reread Episode 11, what David says before and after the VR nightmare, you can get the main idea though.

Anyway, the concept of Darkbloom working on VR as the main application of Sand Reckoner came to me later in the season and yes, closing the loop on season 1 was a huge motivating factor for that. I wanted, and still want, everything tied off with a neat little bow by the time I'm done (betraying my own obscurantist authorial influences here). At first when I planned season 2, Darkbloom's motivation was a lot more provincial, Sand Reckoner was going to be a project never meant to go public, but rather be shilled to politicians and military-industrial complex types who could use at-a-glance comprehensive data on people to further their agendas. The idea being that, if the project ever leaked, it would cause an uproar among the general public who felt it an invasion of their privacy.

>Would you have been prepared to kill Stackleford?

I talked about this already, but yes. I was not only prepared to; I wanted to.

>I know you'll be wanting to concentrate on S3 now, but is a VN something you've considered writing? Doesn't even have to be FQ related, I wonder if that's a direction you could see your writing going.

There's a certain VN project that I want to do after I'm finished with FQ. It's something 100% different from everything Fuck Quest is. But it'll be a while before I can focus on it.

>7. Your dedication is incredible. How do work up the motivation to continue writing?

The main thing motivating me is that I simply want to keep the story going. That said, I've had nights where, if I were writing on my own, I would have turned in. But knowing there are people waiting live for me to continue forces me to bring every writing session to some sort of conclusion before stopping for the night. The pressure of needing to deliver has made me much more productive in that sense, because procrastination becomes impossible. I have to keep moving.

But I find it's rather a lot like cardio, which I picked up in the last few years. It takes a deliberate expenditure of energy and effort to get started, but once I'm running, I rather enjoy it.

>Do you have any particular interest in Silicon Valley/Big Data companies and their role in emergent technologies like VR/AR? Or was using that as a setting just an excuse to write a story about shadowy corporations? The parallels in the story to real life people and current events is quite explicit and you seem to have quite a tragic view of future technology and the people involved with it.

I have a highly negative view of people like Zuckerberg, Thiel, Bezos, Musk and so on, and have for many years now. Beyond that, the whole culture around Silicon Valley fascinates but repels me, and as I said the genesis of this season was extremely topical (recent scandals around breaches of privacy and the blithe response tech companies had to it).

There's not much interesting I can say that hasn't been said by smarter people, about the egotism and venality that is turning the future of technology into, ultimately, a perversion of human potential, as well as foundationally harming our ability to interact with each other in healthy ways.

I look at things like "deep fakes" which are real and becoming more convincing everyday, and I suppose I understand the drive to develop them from an information-war arms-race perspective, but I'm nonetheless reminded of Patton Oswalt's old standup bit where he mimics scientists doing horrible shit for no good reason: "hey guys, we made cancer airborne and contagious! You're welcome. We're science."

That's not even getting into how Silicon Valley has hugely propagated the "gig economy" and made 24/7 hustling a necessary way of life for huge sectors of the population, or how the really giant companies have betrayed the old ethos ("don't be evil" anyone?) to exploit workers and end-users, and willingly trample over individuals in other ways.

But I'm droning on. It is not ultimately so tragic I think because I am trying to drive home that people can still WAKE UP.

> Will busting Renee out of prison, either through skullduggery or throwing billions of dollars at someone, be an option for later?

Renee is going to feature heavily into Season 3. That's all I'll say now.

>-Why did Ally's parents die?
Definitely won't answer that right now, per my earlier response!

>-What events motivated Darkbloom to make Sand Reckoner?
I think he genuinely had a savior complex. He walked a path of moral turpitude with the idea that he HAD to do these terrible things to deliver the human race from suffering. I think his speeches in season 2 talking about that were genuine.

By the same token, he was gripped by the need for power and control, and in his ideal world, he alone held the keys to the kingdom. When he was reduced to begging for his life, when all was stripped away, his final appeal to Camelia was not that they could make the world a better place, not that they could do good things for people, but that she could be the "dauphine" of a new world order.

He was a megalomaniac who fancied the idea of becoming a benevolent dictator.

I mentioned this very briefly in supplemental material but Darkbloom is the son of a coal miner. He grew up in poverty and squalor in Appalachia. That kind of upbringing made him constantly strive and climb, to prove that he was better than that, but in his heart, he always sort of felt like a country bumpkin, I think. (I wanted to do a scene where he suddenly slips into a thick southern accent, catches himself, and goes back to his affected west coast dialect.)

As for the trajectory of his life, since that's not clearly spelled out either, I'll let you in on it:

Son of coal miner -> college scholarship -> doctorate in computer science -> professorship at Johns Hopkins -> friendship with Gustav, development of the initial concept of Sand Reckoner -> (at some point he meets Renee) -> weds Mara to get cash flow -> silicon valley startup based on credit card processing/e-pay -> pivot towards big data -> development of the Darkbloom Analytics we know in the present day.

>-Will Stackleford be a joke character forever?

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that fat piece of shit! I intended for him to be dead by this point, so his story could go anywhere.

>9. If it's at all possible, could you explain the reasoning behind why you chose the OPs, EDs, and Character Themes you did?
>9b. Are there any Character themes you wanted to show off but didn't get the chance to present?

world.execute(me); was a song I already loved. When I was planning Season 2, I wanted to find a good OP, and that popped into my head. I listened to it on Youtube to see how it fit, and I found fit extraordinarily well. The "recommended" bar on Youtube suggested "Camelia" next up, which was a new song by Mili that I had never heard. It struck me immediately as perfect too, so much so that I literally named Camelia after the song -- this was when I had the concept of her character but no name selected.

The first character I selected a theme for was Vivian, which was also a song I loved well before FQ2. I did that on a whim when I posted her character card.

Only once I had done that for Vivian, I decided to try to do it for the others. Ultimately I kept coming back to Mili because so many of their songs were eerily on point. I think if you look up the lyrics for any of the character themes I called out, you can see self evidently why I chose that song -- I always picked songs with relevant lyrics foremost.

There are character themes I never got around to yes but I will go into that in season 3!

>What happened at the end?

Cerise now has the complete Sand Reckoner package inside of her skull (the Penelope implant loaded with the Project Ulysses platform developed primarily by Sable). It was installed by Galatea at Cerise's behest because it was the only way to retrieve Camelia's PGP key and defuse the dead man's switch on the bombs underneath Darkbloom Analytics. Unfortunately, the installation had at least as disastrous an effect on Cerise as the operation on Camelia did as a child. Cerise "sees everything" and it's fucking up her brain.

That's the long and short of it. The flashback that capped the season was definitely not an arbitrary decision either.

>1. Obviously with a third season in the works it would have sucked to kill off too many major players but did any of the harem members have potentially deaths in the cards that we narrowly avoided? Alex and Sable were in some shit at the start of the finale and there were a couple of tense moments throughout the season like the desert chase scene, yet things turned out (relatively) daijoubu.

This is hard to say. I toyed with letting haremites die at a couple intervals but definitely by the time I settled on extending it into another season, I didn't want the body count to get too high.

>2. Speaking of the chase scene in the desert Rose killed a couple of men in the action. She has lots of experience with guns but even after killing she remained in (again relatively) stable mental health. Was this done to avoid overplayed tropes of PTSD? Or has Rose killed before so she's used to it? Where's Rose C?

It did fuck with Rose quite a lot at first if you remember, and she only snapped back to normal because things were moving so fast and she had to.

That being said, Rose is -- despite her gentle, caring facade -- ultimately a coldly pragmatic and extremely self-centered person (or perhaps self-centered in the sense that there are a handful people she cares about, and everyone else can go jump off a bridge). She isn't a sociopath, taking human life is extremely difficult for her and I'm sure she's still working internally through some of those psychological consequences. But it's much easier for her, than it is for many people, to soothe herself with the knowledge that it was truly self defense and she was killing to protect people she cared about.

>3. David was my favorite character this season. He wuz a good boy and dindu nuffin. As a whole the readers were pretty cautious of him so we tended to avoid him whenever we could, usually to go slam some puss, but was it ever a possibility to work more closely with him? That probably would have been a pain to write as it would throw a lot of character alliances completely out of wack but I think it would have been an interesting path

We definitely could have moved closer to Darkbloom and aligned with him in the end. I didn't expect you to and had no plan for what it would look like, but that was true of a lot of decisions you made and forced me to realign my plans for. I was prepared for the prospect that you might side with him; I wrote Darkbloom sympathetically, purposely to make it a possibility. It wasn't like some obviously evil psychopath asking you to murder puppies with him. He had an argument to make.

>4. In what ways are your characters designed in your head? For example did Rose always have huge boobs or was that decided when Mami was chosen as her avatar

Answered a similar question already, but as I said, even though characters were conceived first, aspects of their chosen avatars bled in. Mami's huge boobs definitely gave Rose her honkers.

>In the VR Fuck Quest sequence why does Camelia show up? Was is because of how she's connected to the servers? Was the glitching out just because we were freaking out and going against what had happened before? How long could we have stayed in the simulation?

Camelia's presence definitely is connected to her link with Darkbloom's servers, combined with her link to Alabaster that existed already.

It was also meant to give away the entire twist that Cerise would eventually become Sand Reckoner. At the end of the simulation, Camelia flickers in and out over the simulation of Cerise. And Cerise, in the simulation, directly says that she is Sand Reckoner.

https://archived.moe/qst/thread/2730761/#2731485

As for how long we could stay in the simulation, I intended to do at least the entire first episode but it was beginning to drag.

>Is Rose 2 existing and having the last name Catachresis plot relevant or just a red herring/reference?

Rose2 was initially meant to be 100% part of the simulation in Episode 11 (i.e. not a real person). She was some glitched perversion of Rose. But when I decided to make her real, why did I give her that last name? I guess that's a good question to keep in mind.

>Do you think you would ever add a trans character to FQ?

I'm not inherently opposed to the idea, I suppose it hinges on whether I have a good concept. I don't make a character gay or straight, trans- or cis-, or anything else because I specifically decide on those qualities beforehand, I just roll with whatever seems to fit the moment and the character called for by that moment.

There isn't a trans character right now (Alex is a boy! He likes being a boy! Why are you looking at him like that? Why are you holding that dress???) but I wouldn't ever bar the possibility.

>>I will respond to every single one.
>Even this one?

You're under arrest.

>Will Season 3 be FUCK Quest Babies where instead of having sex they're making their dreams come true

Yes. And they'll do the same for you.

>Will Alabaster manage to get all the way to the toybox during naptime or will Rose snitch on him to Darkbloom Daycarer Noelle?

This fuckin snitch is gonna ruin everything, bet. Look at that smug grin.

>It seems pretty clear that you wanted to humanize Darkbloom before he met his end, make him a more sympathetic character, was this so we would have a more conflicted feeling about seeing him go, or about making Vivian's anger at his killing feel more understandable?

Both. And more: I wanted the path of allying with him to be a plausible option. Beyond these plot-centered reasons, I also just wanted a villain who wasn't obviously a villain.

I'll step in personally here with my opinion, with the caveat that the author's opinion is worth no more than anyone else's, but I really don't like Darkbloom and I think he's a shitty person. Just what he did to Renee, which we've kind of glossed over, from impregnating her at the age of 16(!!) to forcing her child into adoption, and then letting her go to prison for life for crimes she didn't commit(!!!) -- that just absolutely tarnishes any claims he makes, in my mind, about being justified. He's not above his own baser self, his own desires, and those desires manifest in some very despicable ways throughout.

Having said that, it's not an accident that David's personality is... complicated... and therefore people are naturally conflicted about what they think of him. I set myself a huge task with FQ2, to take this character who was just cartoonishly evil and who everyone hated/feared in season 1, and by the end of it, make him so relatable that you think twice before deciding he's the bad guy. It seems like I accomplished that!

>Any books on writing you recommend OP? (both storycraft and prose)

The only book on writing I myself have ever read is Stephen King's "On Writing," which is one of the bog standard recommendations. It's good, it teaches you a lot of basics.

But I generally avoid the cottage industry of writing tutorials and books because I think the better way is to, as Nabokov once said, "read with a felonious mind." In other words, I read books, and take what I think works well from other authors.

This is incidentally why I also avoid communities of novice writers offering critique, because most of them are really big into those MFA, Writing 101 concepts that generally hammer home basic precepts like "show, don't tell" and "avoid adverbs" and so on. These tend to be taken as etched-in-stone commandments by novices who don't understand when it is appropriate to break them. So instead of getting deep crit, you get "you used an adverb in this paragraph, you're never supposed to do that!"

...

I just looked up the quote I attributed to Nabokov, and it turns out it comes from a book on how to write, NOT Nabokov. Whoops!

That book, which I can also recommend, is "Woe is I" -- and it won't teach you how to craft a story, but it does give you some nice nuts and bolts for how to navigate grammar. I've skimmed it, and it didn't teach me a whole lot I didn't know, but it's a good rec for anyone who ever felt baffled by the weird intricacies of English. That's useful for way more than writing fiction.

I guess that one quote stuck with me and my dumb brain decided it must have come from someone I admire more than Suzie Q. Grammanazi.

>how did you feel about David's character, were you trying to get us to like him? Or were his acts of kindness always as fake as they seemed?

I guess I answered this already, but as far as the second question -- I'll leave that for you to pick apart. There's no objectively right answer on how much of Darkbloom's actions and stated beliefs were genuinely expressed.

>Did Season 1 actually canonically happen within its own timeline, or was it all an elaborate Sand Reckoner simulation?

The key to answering this is what Darkbloom says in episode 11.

---

"You're familiar with Plato's allegory of the cave, right?" He says.

"Yeah. That was definitely some allegory of the cave bullshit right there."

"What if it wasn't?" Darkbloom says. "I don't know what exactly you saw, but..."

He returns to his spot at the window, basking in the sunlight. He thinks for a long moment.

"If you believe in free will," he says, "you must - you have to know that every choice creates a new reality. Every choice is a reckoning. Why is our reckoning any more real than any other possible reckoning? It's no more accurate to say our reality is the true one than it would be to say that 2+2=4 is truer than 3+2=5. And if we knew everything... if we knew it all... we could find the most optimal reckonings. That's all I want."

>Will there be more Fazil, Spancer and Ken in season 2? What is the likelihood of minor characters getting more of a major role?

Yes, yes, and yes.

I'm a sucker for ensemble casts where minor characters suddenly become extremely plot relevant. In other stories, I'm often more interested in characters on the periphery than in the main cast.

>How many times did you samefag? Be honest with me OP.

Fewer than you might suspect, and I never samefagged again after I got caught (I was too spooked to try -- I had been on cell data, so I don't know why it happened).

The couple times I took part in a vote never swayed the final outcome.

>4. Only because I can't help but wonder HOW FAR at every opportunity, I feel like I have to confirm: did you or did you not drive out into the middle of the Oregon Desert to bury a box on the off-chance that one of us would be crazy enough to check it? I and another concerned party may or may not have planned out the logistics for a road trip, and figure now would be the best time to ask if such an endeavor would be remotely worth it.

I didn't go that far, sorry to disappoint. I'm actually not even close to the west coast (although I have lived in California previously).

>5. Was there anything we did as an audience that well and truly surprised you as the writer? A vote gone awry, a connection we made, a theory that wildly stumbled too close to the truth or anything of the sort?

One thing that absolutely floored me was when someone made a word cloud of an episode thread and another anon pointed out "Fucking Whitney Darkbloom" was arrayed inside it, asking "is this canon now?" By that point I had already settled on making her his bastard.

Some of the coincidences surrounding Fuck Quest are glitch in the matrix level shit.

I've already talked a good deal about votes that surprised me.

>5. Was there anything we did as an audience that well and truly surprised you as the writer? A vote gone awry, a connection we made, a theory that wildly stumbled too close to the truth or anything of the sort?

>6. Comiket arc when? There's so much I want to see.

You better believe I haven't forgotten it! I wanted to get to it this season but there was never time. We will have an opportunity again next season.

>On that note, are there any songs you want on the season 2 playlist that you didn't get a chance to post?

Touched on this one already, but we'll get more music for season 3 as said.

>Redeemed Stackleford when?

Soon. He is retreating to train now so he can become the 8th Hokage.

>How bad would you have let things get? If we kept making shitty decisions, how much rope would you have let us had to hang ourselves with?

I've touched on this here and there, we did avoid some terrible outcomes, and in other instances made things worse. As I've said before, the only option that I have a hard time seeing as possible is Alabaster himself dying. But you never know.

>Do you put as much effort into Vasily, Tyrus, Mara and Armstrong as you did for David Darkbloom? Are they intended to be as deep or are they mostly written to get the appropiate emotional response for the audience?

I would like them to be a little more humanized (well, not Vasily, RIP). Tyrus in particular, I think has interesting backstory, he's another person who grew in meager circumstances and constantly strives because of it, like Darkbloom. It's also clear that he loved his husband, and the ramifications of that death will echo in season 3.

Mara is more difficult to talk about in detail because as you may guess, she will be a HUGE factor in season 3.

>Overall, how did we come out relationship wise from this season? Were you expecting worse or better relationships with the various characters? How would a Darkbloom ending be as game breaking as the Carmelia ending[...]?

As I've said, I really don't know how I would approach a Darkbloom route -- it would be exciting, but radically different from what I envisioned. As far as how relationships panned out, I did not expect things to deteriorate as badly as they did with Alex and Sable (and you kept making it worse!) but in retrospect it makes sense. Things really split along factional lines at the end, and I knew it would be impossible to appease everyone. Eventually you had to make a decision, you had to stop playing both sides; and that inevitably harmed relationships.

>Have we encountered all of the main antagonists yet or are there still others to deal with?

Hmm. I'm not sure if I should answer this.

>Will you be adding in more harem members between seasons or will the cast be mostly the same from season 2 to 3?

Stay tuned.

>In your opinion, what was the worst choice that could have happened this season? What was the best choice?

Worst -- possibly allying with Darkbloom, at least from a story perspective, because I would have ended up trying to asspull a season finale from nothing, and it may have been unsatisfying. (So not worst possible choice in terms of actual story ramifications, but story quality.)

Worst in terms of consequence, some of the early choices could have led to much darker outcomes, like brushing off Kay again when she wanted to warn us about Renee/the desert plot etc... or actually, trying to hide Camelia's blackmail plot from Cerise and Rose (I planned whole episodes of hiding the blackmail from them, then the subsequent sting of betrayal they feel when it comes out).

Best... all of the choices that led to sex, naturally. (You sure made a lot of Best choices!)

>>what Darkbloom has inadvertently done with Sand Reckoner is remove some very foundational things from the world's ability to "know" what is true. By claiming the video of the operation on Camelia was a fake, and then proving that it in fact could plausibly be a fake -- he did the exact OPPOSITE of what he wanted to acheive -- he completely destroyed faith in the idea of a knowable reality.
>Did Darkbloom realize that this is what he had done, before he died? Or did he, in his Hubris, believe that this was just another minor setback and that he could unfuck the situation he created for himself?

I don't know. I don't think he saw it, though. In his mind, this was just another necessary detour on the march to achieving his goals. He still believed he would be vindicated; that eventually the public would see the value of what he was trying to do, and hail him as a visionary, a hero, a savior.

Darkbloom had a peculiar view of reality that in a certain sense denies the objectively knowable material world (or at least postulates that other constructions of the universe are equally real) so while he strived for "perfect knowledge" he may not have seen his deep-fake excuse as inherently contradictory or harmful to his cause.

> What all endings did Renee get in Choice of Robots?

Renee cannot play Choice of Robots because she is in prison.

>Is it that instead of making robot waifus for everyone so they can live their lives fucking them, he's making virtual worlds so that people can live in their own ideal realities?

Yes, although I think ultimately he wanted more than just a run of the mill VR simulation.

>So just how big IS your Nagato folder?

It's not too big.

>Why do you avatar with Nagato? Is she your waifu?
>If so, second part: Why is your waifu so cute, and what does Yuki TL to?

Yes, she is.

TL note: Yuki means "best girl"

>Did you want to have Noelle have a greater presence in S2 than she ultimately wound up having, or did you intend for her to be very background so that her being a fed would really come out of left field?

I wanted her to have more of a presence, but like so much, I had to cut content.

>What exactly do you mean when you refer to the supplementary material? Are they going to be more articles like Cerise has been posting, or are they going to be full-on bonus scenes like the interlewds of old?

It's a surprise, anon!

> So OP, what's your opinion of each of the character's avatars? How do you feel about them within each of their original series'?

I think they all fit quite well! As far as the harem goes, the characters I chose were all my favorites in their parent series.

(With a slight caveat: Kyoko is my favorite Meguca, Mami is a close second; and Sumikaze I only chose because she's a reporter, I've never even seen Occultic;Nine)

>If Mrs Soliloquy had survived up to the events of FQ2, would she had been as big of an incestuous degenerate as she was in FQ1? Or was that just Alabaster's magic Jizz encouraging her thirst for her son's dick?

If Kaa-san had been alive, she probably would have been part of the counter, so in that sense she would have to be such a degenerate. But at that point we're talking about a radically different reality to the one that FQ2 takes place in.

To me, in this universe, it makes sense for Cerise and Alabaster to be so incestuous because they were so traumatized by their parents' deaths -- they came to depend on each other in what would be considered, in real life, quite unhealthy ways. For Alabaster and Rose, who are cousins (once removed!) it makes sense because they met later in life and sexual attraction to estranged family members is a well documented phenomenon; ditto for Whitney and Vivian.

For Kaa-san, in this universe which is a little more "realistic" than FQ1, I would have a hard time explaining why an otherwise well-adjusted woman would jump into bed with her son. But I guess I could handwave it away with the excuse that Soliloquys are just horny degenerates by nature.

>Is Allabaster gay?

He's as straight as the path from New York to San Francisco!

>>Tyrus is also from meager circumstances.

>Do you like villains like that the most OP? Those who come from little and, through skill and will, ascend to power's pinnacle? Will there be more antagonist variety next season? Will there ever be an antagonist lewd or lewds outside of the harem?

I enjoy villains like that but I think it's just happenstance that Darkbloom and Tyrus share the same sort of character arc. They differ in a lot of ways too. Tyrus isn't a megalomaniac and he has no aspirations about changing the course of history. He's a more garden-variety criminal boss.

For antagonist variety, I think it's clear where the general conflicts are gonna be next season, but I have some surprises to spring too.

Antagonist lewds? Who knows. Maybe Mara can show us the joy of erotic asphyxiation. (Nothing dangerous.)

>Is there anyone in season 1 who does not fall into the faction box besides Whitney/Cerise/Rose or are there always 3 Darkbloom, 3 Rebellion, 3 Solioquey?

I wouldn't say that. Kay for example was sort of a "free agent" -- she helped us at points, but that was to get closer to the story. Other characters might have changed allegiances depending on how events unfolded, although I don't necessarily see what might precipitate it, off the top of my head. However I don't think it would have ever been possible to move Vivian against her father, or Camelia to his side. I also don't believe that Whitney, Cerise, or Rose would ever have chosen a different side from Alabaster. Maybe if we REALLY fucked up somehow, but... that would be pretty monumental.

>Would you take away an of the existing harem members for any particular reason, like moving or such?

I don't see myself writing out a haremite for such a mundane reason. If one leaves the cast it will be for something very plot relevant -- a death, or being forced into witness protection, or something like that.

>Would Kay have died if we did that? Is that why you weighted that choice much harder than you did the first time?

I'm not sure of that. What I meant is that we'd never have found out about the buried implant, the fact that Noelle is a fed, the involvement of the Russian mob, etc... so many things would begin blindsiding us... while at the same time, Camelia's revenge plot would begin to wear increasingly thin for want of a motive to continue working with her... and all of that, while I can't foresee precisely what it would lead to, would have created a really difficult situation.

>10. Which characters from FQ1 changed the MOST as you ported them over to FQ2 and how?
>10b. Which characters from FQ1 changed the LEAST and do you regret it at all?

Most: perhaps Rose or Vivian.

Rose is definitely a lot more fleshed out (she's a very fleshy girl!) and I think a lot more interesting in this go-around. She definitely benefited the most from the transition. I found her so interesting to explore and write for that she took an even bigger role than I anticipated, and I anticipated that she would be a major character.

Actually, you can thank Rose for FQ2 existing. When I was discussing rebooting the quest with Hexer, he floated exploring this plot in an entirely new setting -- no association to FQ and its characters. I was warm to this and we started going through each of the FQ characters (including the new ones), deciding whether they should have any parallel characters in the new series. "The sister," "the childhood friend," "the reporter," "the radical," "the hacker," "the megacorp CEO's daughter" etc...

Then we got to Rose. Hexer was of the opinion that Rose or a Rose expy would really serve no purpose in the plot I laid out to him about hacking, political scandal, silicon valley hubris and tech gone mad. In other words, he said, cut her.

When I thought about the prospect of not including her or a similarly constructed character at all, I really didn't like it. I saw a clear role for someone like Rose in the story, even if I didn't use FQ characters. And since I was thinking along those lines, I finally said: why would I do this as a separate setting, if I would just end up porting versions of these characters over with slight alterations?

That was a huge tangent.

Vivian: her gloomy personality and penchant for $20 vocab words is the the same, but I think it's pretty obvious that she isn't the traumatized little girl she was in FQ1. Or at least she wasn't. She had a quite close relationship with her father, which humanized the both of them, and that was interesting to touch on (for the brief time I had to -- I would have loved to explore more of Vivian and Darkbloom's comparatively normal, heartwarming father-daughter bond. Their characters are both kinda weird, brainy, over-articulating, aloof, etc... so they don't interact the way most fathers and daughters do... but they expressed much more emotion with each other than they were ever comfortable doing with others. They meant the world to each other.)

Alabaster and Cerise obviously changed a lot, too. They are much less harsh towards each other, and even towards others, and that stems directly from losing their parents. As much as I loved their no-holds-barred sparring in the original, it just didn't make any sense given what they've been through (especially now that we know they covered up a murder together).

As for characters who didn't change as much? That's easy: Whitney. Do I regret it? Why would I regret not changing perfection?

>11. Reading through the ending of S2 again, I can't help but admire how much fun the interactions between Mara and Whitney are. I really love it when your characters interact with each other and not just us.
>Did you plan for such a match up to happen between the two?
>11b. Did you have any other "match ups" that you really wanted to show us but couldn't?

That matchup was definitely plan. I wrote the final interaction between Whitney and Mara back around episode 13 or so.

Other matchups... I wanted a scene after the events of the finale where Tyrus browbeats Alex about what exactly happened in the server room. I pictured that over the course of this ad-hoc interrogation, we'd see Alex transition from flighty and scared to something maybe a little more mercenary, cold. I'm not sure if I'm getting it across properly -- but you'd see in real time that Alex is changed by his experience of killing.

I would have liked to do something between Gal and Darkbloom, too -- but it's hard ot get Gal out of her apartment! Tyrus and Mara, or Tyrus and Stasi is another one, but we'll definitely get another crack at that.

For intra-harem interactions, we saw much less of Rose-Cerise, Rose-Whitney, and Whitney-Cerise than I would have liked. All three combos have interesting dynamics. Camelia also didn't interact as much with the harem as I wanted her to.

Overall, I agree that I love seeing characters interact with each other and not Alabaster. I want to do more of them in the new season. And I wish I had the chance to engineer more of these scenarios in season 2 because they're a joy to write. (That's part of the reason I played so much with the usual structure of the writing, providing flashbacks and story sequences where Alabaster isn't even present... part of the difficulty in creating these scenarios is how closely we're tethered to Alabaster's POV.)

>Does Whitney know who her mother is? Does Mara? I assume this is going to be important come S3, so I understand if there's something you can't answer.

This is a question that I can't answer. Not "I don't want to" but I can't answer it right now: I'm still considering the path forward on this subplot. In other words, stay tuned!

>Someone needs to work alongside Sable's replacement, right?

Very true.

>Totsuka or sensei?

This is an easy one. Sensei is best girl and Saika is best boy.

>Now this may be too personal a question, so I don't mind if you skip it: It's no secret that you've used FQ to introduce your relatively niche fetishes to your readers. But there are there any fetishes you have that you really *don't* want to include in the story, either for plot related reasons or because you think there'd be a lot of backlash?

This is disgustingly normie these days (which is itself sort of weird to me, but I swear I liked it before it was cool): I really like the whole "daddy" kink. I wouldn't include it in FQ -- not so much because there'd be backlash, although I think there would be -- but rather, if I picture one of the girls calling Alabaster "daddy" during sex, I can only laugh, and I don't think it's sexy.

The other fetish of mine that I hold back on because I know a majority find it distasteful is watersports.

>7. Do you actually hate Subway as much as we think you do?

I actually don't mind Subway personally, although on the rare occasion I eat there it's always "fuck it, I guess Subway's close." I just like shitting on Subway to carry on the legacy of Renee, whose obsession with sub sandwiches precluded her from liking such a pleb establishment.

>8. Does Rose have a favorite model of gun?

I would have to do some research on guns to properly answer this question, because I picture Rose as being well-versed in gun culture, and I am not. (If any /k/ommandos are here and have any ideas, I'm open to suggestions.)

That being said, Rose takes after her avatar and appreciates the boom of a shotgun over pistols (although she's a good markswoman with small arms). I think her preference would be some type of shotgun first, then a good semi-auto pistol, and rifles only if nothing else is available.

I imagine she spent many weekends of her youth like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f8VmJRuBFY

>9. Does Whitney have a favorite model of car?

Whitney definitely buys American. She's probably into muscle cars like Mustangs and Camaros, or for a classic look, T-birds, GTOs, Baracudas...

>Since we'll never get any interactions with Vasily now, did you have angle for Mara and Vasily as a dark reflection of Cerise and Alabaster's relationship?

I did consider this. Actually, right up until I wrote the final episode I wanted to keep Vasily alive into season 3 as another antagonist, and we would have definitely seen more of him, including fleshing out his relationship with his sister. But I needed some semi-major deaths for the finale; Vasily was there, and he was easy to kill off.

We may still learn more about him, as Mara will definitely want to avenge his death. I don't know what their relationship was like though: incestuous? Regular brother and sister? Coldly professional? It's something I'll ponder myself in the interim. No matter what, Mara is NOT happy that he's gone.

>/k/ommando reporting, if the Mallorys are old money blue-blood hunting types then she might lean heavily towards well-regarded classic designs like the Winchester Model 12 or Ithaca 37 while she would look upon newer, more affordable Remingtons and Mossbergs with disdain. If she was more strictly into trap/skeet/sporting clays (muh animal rights) she'd have a five-figure bespoke over/under double barrel made to her exact measurements by any one of a dozen Italian boutique manufacturers, though this would have some disadvantages when it comes to engaging bipeds instead of clays.

I don't think the Mallorys are into hunting (certainly not Rose).

The idea behind Saul and Rose both being proficient with guns is that Saul is a big civil libertarian who goes hard on constitutional law (he has done lots of work with the ACLU, for examples). They keep guns nominally for home- and self-defense, but I think it's more of a status symbol or a statement for Saul, to own several firearms, just because the constitution says he can.

So to whatever extent he and his daughter have actually used their guns in the past, it would limited to firing ranges.

>Why did David Darkbloom feel it was necessary to kill Mr and Mrs Soliloquy? Was it just to cover up their association with him and his experiment on Alabaster?

Can't answer that anon, sorry.

>Having a potty mouthed white trash put in charge of a monolithic big data company is too good. Whitney best (and smartest) girl.

She's definitely the best girl for the job. By the nature of the plot I've set up, we'll see more Whitney in the next season, but there should be lots of room for the other girls to express their own roles too. Whitney is bringing everyone along for the ride!

I'm glad the story I told was resonant with you. We'll see more Silicon Valley culture stuff in season 3 as well, I think. This season we were entirely focused on one company, but in season 3, Whitney's gonna have to work to salvage the company's reputation and that will involve others.

>What actually happened to Cerise? In the epilogue they allude to her as if she’s ill or in the hospital but never say what her status is.

I'll remain mum on this as well. But I think it's obvious that Cerise is not in a good way right now. I can make one promise, which is that isn't dead and will not die as a result of what happened in the finale. Beyond that, I can't say.

>How big is Alabaster’s dick really? Everyone keeps mentioning its huge.
>How big is Alex’s?

I made this weeks ago, the last time this came up, and forgot to post it. tl;dr Alabaster's packing a Coke can.

>1. Not a question. Fuck you for making me fall in love with this shitty fucking anarchist.
Thank you anon, very cool!

>2. What crazyhouse do I have to go to for a girl like her?
Just go back in time and find an old-school anarchist of the Emma Goldman "propaganda of the deed" variety.

I've always been fascinated with Presidential history, and the stories of the two forgotten assassinations - Garfield and McKinley - are especially gripping. Garfield was killed by a pants-on-head crazy idiot named Charles Guiteau, who gets a homage in Sable's character. McKinley was killed by a slightly less pants-on-head crazy NEET-slash-proto-/r9k/-poster named Leon Czolgosz, who was influenced by early 20th century anarchists (although even they had rejected him from their social circles).

In reading about the history of that I also picked up on a lot of the history of anarchism through osmosis and although I consider Camelia ultimately apolitical (in the sense that she doesn't care about the left-right divide or have a vision for what society should look like beyond destroying the primacy of Big Data and technological privacy-snooping), she definitely looks a lot like those early 20th century radical bomb throwers who put the world into a lot of turmoil back then.

>Assuming all of the implants were linked to Darkbloom in the same or similar way, was he using Camelia as a way to watch over Whitney through us? Is that why he thought of us and our family members as trustworthy enough to cary on his legacy should anything happen to Whitney? Even further, was Whitney attending the same school as and meeting Alabaster orchestrated by David because he knew we’d keep her safe?

Alabaster and Galatea were not linked to Darkbloom the way Camelia was. What goes unstated at the end of the season is Darkbloom had an implant too, and it had the same package that Camelia's implant has. The fact that both implants were communicating with Darkbloom's central servers in the same way (pulling data from them to make inferences about the world) made the implants inadvertently become a bridge to one another. This is why they saw each other through them.

Since Alabaster and Galatea's implants weren't receiving information from Darkbloom's servers like Camelia's was, but only sending information, they weren't able to see through David's eyes, and vice versa.

All that being said, Darkbloom knew that Alabaster and Whitney were in the same town, attending the same school, and it could be said that he purposely engineered it in some fashion. He ultimately saw some spark of himself in Alabaster, I think -- especially as Alabaster grew older -- and was happy to see Alabaster having such a good relationship with Whitney. Darkbloom was an absent father but he must have kept an eye on Whitney. I think he saw it as poetically fitting and proper that one of "his" children from the implant experiments would wed one of his biological children. He envisioned passing off a huge level of power and wealth to all of them, when the time was right -- even Camelia.

>Are Camelia, Galatea, Catachresis, Darkbloom's implant, and Penelope the only implants in circulation?

Yes.

>Darkbloom's implant
>Did it have a name OP?

Of course. Diegesis.

>You know how your head subconsciously assigns a voice to a character when you read their dialogue?
>Whose voice do you assign to each of your characters, OP? Whether they be ripped wholesale from somebody, or just a general idea.

I have a hard time answering this one. I don't think I read my own characters' dialogue in a way that sounds like anyone in particular -- or at least not consciously -- although they do definitely have a certain voice which I imagine.

I'd say Rose sounds the clearest to me in my mind, a kind of lilting/airy smugness drips off a lot of her dialogue.

Whitney's voice has just the slightest hint of valley girl to it, and is a little deeper than a normal woman's. She may have a little bit of vocal fry going on.

Vivian is surprisingly deep given her size (but not as deep as Whitney's) and low in volume, gloomy, with excellent elocution.

Gal's voice is extremely quiet and higher pitched, she elides over a lot of hard consonant sounds and tries to speak as quickly as she can, very mumblecore.

Alabaster and Cerise are both relatively accentless and "normal" sounding in pitch, volume, pronunciation. There's nothing remarkable about how either of them speak in my mind, when I read their dialogue. Cerise might raise the pitch of her voice slightly in a professional setting, and drop it lower when drunk or schlubbing around in her underwear at home.

Kay has a voice as sly as her personality, I imagine she'd be an excellent singer; lower, kind of silky and smoky at the same time.

Sable's voice is all over the place like the rest of her. When she's yelling I imagine she's so loud that her voice begins to break and crack. When she's in a depressive mood, she's like Galatea on downers -- slow almost to the point of droning.

Alex is obviously extremely girlish given the fact that he's a boy, to the point that his voice is probably at a higher register even than Whitney's. Very airy and he often speaks haltingly because he's so uncertain of himself.

Camelia has an affectedly brash voice, she tries to make herself sound boyish, but if you catch her off guard she has a very high, pixie-ish voice and speaks very quickly. Something like a teenage Jenny Lewis maybe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDLcleGtWN0

Darkbloom sounds like he's booming even when he's speaking at a normal volume. He has the sort of voice that commands the attention of the room. Not because he's some deep, baritone speaker -- he's more of a tenor -- but because he speaks so crystalline clearly, with such obvious thoughtfulness and, of course, confidence.

>Whatever happened to Dale Earnhardt was a real American hero guy?

Some say he's still puttering around that Walmart to this very day. All we know is, he's called The Scoot.

>I know you didn't decide on Renee being her mom until later OP, but I couldn't help but laugh when I dug this up.

End of season 3 questions

>1. What was your original plan for Season 2 that you thought you could finish the entire run in only 13 episodes? What was your original plan for Season 3 that you, once again, thought we would be finished in only 13 episodes?

So this is a lengthy answer to a simple question.

I was 99% certain from the very outset of Season 2 that there would be at least a Season 3. Even before I announced officially that Fuck Quest was coming back, there was a scene in my mind, which I eventually got to do in a similar way, where Alabaster approaches Cerise, and sees that her eyes are blue, and says "Sand Reckoner..." then you get hit with "END OF SEASON 2."

A lot of other things I imagined for that climactic scene, which I won't reveal, never came even close to fruition, but that cliffhanger still happened, and you can't end a series like that.

I did think I could get from the opening scene of season 2 to this cliffhanger -- or whatever other cliffhanger we capped season 2 with -- within the span of 13 episodes. But that turned out not to be the case. This was purely a problem of pacing, and I think with faster writing, and better pacing in the middle of the season where a few episodes takes place over the span of like 2 days, I could have done that. In reality we made it in 15, which wasn't too bad after the pacing issues earlier in the season.

During the interim between season 2 and 3 I initially was entirely, 100% committed to priority 1:

-End every single outstanding plot arc in the span of 13 episodes.

However, this directly conflicted with two other priorities I was also entirely, 100% committed to:

-Stop pre-writing and pre-planning almost completely.
-Give a stronger focus to SoL and sexual shenanigans, and let the cast mostly enjoy a life of wealth for a period of time, without too much worry.

My initial thoughts were that these three things were possible all at the same time, that there actually wasn't very much left with the Sand Reckoner super-plot, and that it could be tied up in the space of 3 or 4 end-of-season episodes. You see a vestige of this broad-picture plan in how the season actually turned out.

But even as I finished the run of Season 3 Episode 1 and lay in bed afterwards, I said to myself: "I'm gonna need to do a season 4, huh?" I knew right away that it wasn't going to be done by the end of episode 13. Especially because of priority #4, which I was also committed to entirely, 100%:

-Finish the season in 13 episodes, not a single episode fewer or a single episode more, no matter what, even if it kills me.

So something had to give, and the thing that gave was finishing the main plot of the reboot in season 3.

Therefore, I right away was able to relax, and focus even more on SoL stuff in the middle stretches of the season. This frustrated some readers, but I made sure to keep setups going that would pay off later, of which, more to say later.

( Errata: priority 1 was more like: "end every single outstanding plot arc during season 3" and priority 4 was to keep season 3 to precisely 13 episodes. Slightly, but critically separate goals. )

>What is it that attracts you to the timeline shifty / alternate reality shenanigans-style plots? Is it a part of the Quest Thread format where every choice we make is what ultimate branches out into those other possibilities, or is that just an avenue for you to explore a predisposition of yours?

I would say it's a mix of both.

But what I'm attracted to most, as a writer, and as a reader, is meta-fictional tomfoolery. Self-reference, fourth wall breaking, violating traditional storytelling structures, nonlinear plots, unreliable narration, and so forth. Basically, doing something with how the text itself as an object is presented, that isn't just a standard text, but becomes itself a part of the story it conveys.

Since the quest thread format naturally introduces branching plotlines as an element of the text, the meta-fictional way to play with this is by introducing the concept of alternate worldlines or reality shifts.

I really like these concepts even in traditional sci-fi type stories where it's not always so meta, but it's not something I as an author would tend to focus on, without being in this format.

>3. Boop 4:21

Boop.

>Had we stayed in the living room to hear Charlotte and Scarlette go through their memories, would we have heard an alternate version of Christmas?

I assume you mean Christmas 2001 when Alabaster lost his shit at Mom for buying the wrong game console. This wasn't on my mind during that choice. In honesty I don't know, and had no plan, for what would have happened if Alabaster hung out in the living room with them -- nearly all of the interactions that happened for added flavor/context to relationships and history etc. were composed on the fly.

>boop

Boop.

>4. Were you more disappointed or relieved that nobody caught the Vermont Coma Genetics anagram?

Neither -- I completely expected that to fly under the radar and would have been totally shocked if someone did figure it out. There were a few other shell companies listed alongside it, and tons of anagrams to make out of "Vermont Coma Genetics" -- plus you'd need to make the leap of logic to shorten Vermont to VT -- so I expected that anyone finding this setup in advance of the payoff was impossible. It wasn't meant to be found. If it had been, I would have been impressed, and not upset.

>5. The Basilisk and it's relationship to Sand Reckoner. I'm scared to ask specific questions regarding it for obvious reasons, but is (was) Sable REALLY willing to go through with bringing THAT about? Does she just see it as her responsibility?

I'm not sure what was going on in Sable's mind, truthfully. The line about "forgive them, basilisk" was a last-second addition. I think she did see Sand Reckoner as a next step in human development that would make the human race greater. If it imbues men with souls, in her reckoning (no pun intended) then the system itself must surely be God, yes? That's where I was going with that.

But I'm not sure she actually thinks, herself, there's a Roko's Basilisk situation inherent to that, or that she had any "duty" to help bring Sand Reckoner about. I think she saw it as something purer, and unequivocally good and benevolent. I think I would remove the basilisk reference if I wrote it again.

>Diegesis has been in Viv’s head for a year and it hasn’t bridged with anything else, she’s probably not even aware it’s in her head. That was the whole thing with Catachresis and Diegesis, and the servers are still up, so there’s no reason why they wouldn’t try to reconnect. It also means that Stasi’s implant is a clone, and not Catachresis.

As we've seen, yes, Stasi had a Russian version of the implant, which is inferior in some way. And I don't think it should be giving away the goat too much, to confirm that yes, Amber is holding the Catachresis implant as well as the Penelope implant now.

Vivian is very much aware she has David's implant, though. And I think we have seen it cause some strange reactions from her already -- she recognizes Amber as Camelia -- and somehow finds herself INTENSELY attracted to her (as we saw at the bachelorette party). You could say there's a connection between Vivian and Amber because of the fact that Vivian has an implant in her skull that spent so long connected to Camelia.

>Another thing is how certain people remember Red Camelia, and others remember Blue Camelia. We have no confirmation from Gal, remember? She probably doesn't remember since Galatea just handles handles implicit memory, while Camelia and above can handle long-term memory. That’s how Amber was able to tell us our favorite cereal and who we fucked last. That shit was uploaded to the servers and she retrieved it, so because we remember Red Camelia, that was saved to the servers and we’re remembering correctly, likewise with David. Cerisebloom is the manifestation of all of David’s memories, so of course he remembers red Camelia. Vivian probably remembers her because she’s using David’s implant, David definitely remembers her because of his implant.

>Feel free to call me a retarded namefag if this sounds stupid.

You're a retarded namefag but you're our retarded namefag, and as far as what you've said in this paragraph, you're thinking correctly. Slight correction, though: Gal has been directly asked, and she remembers blue Camelia, as you theorized she might.

>How long had Scarlett Catachresis existed in this reality before Alabaster discovered her existence?

I don't want to answer too much about this right now, but I wanted it to be clear, at least, that as far as the people of the world are concerned, Scarlett Catachresis is an individual with her own personal history separate from Scarlett Soliloquy. In other words, as far as all the records, and memories of people who knew "Scarlett Catachresis" go, she's been alive in the world for 40-some years.

There are TONS of ancillary questions that might spring from this, but I won't say much more at this time.

>If Sandreckoner can conjure duplicates and insert them fairly seamlessly, why was Scarlett the only one to be conjured in this fashion and not anyone else?

I don't know if I can answer this one either. I will say before it's over, we'll receive an explanation of how and why Scarlett was "brought back" with a different family.

>Did David Darkbloom have Scarlett, and the rest of the parents, killed? If so, why? I know that he swore up and down that he had nothing to do with her death when interrogated by Alabaster, but that certainly wasn't his response when Vivian asked him the same question.

I don't know whether we'll ever get any firmer answer on the question of whether he did it and what his ultimate motivations were if he did. I know what I would think of the situation as a reader, but that's colored by my perception as author, since I know the "true" answer, or the answer that I would put if David was given a magical truth serum.

>How much of the backstory from FuckQuest season one is applicable to this season? I believe you've said Alabaster's This is Your Life Flashbacks from when he was killed are canon here, but is there anything else?

Unless otherwise stated or logically impossible, I'd say you can take all of S1's backstory as still canon. So for example, the death flashbacks in season 1 conflict with nothing in the reboot, save for the one where we see Vivian after the car wreck. So all of that, except for the one with Vivian, still apply. On the other hand, the detail of Charlotte's name and familial relationship to Alabaster got retconned, so that doesn't apply.

>Is the whole 'Alabaster is his own father' thing still true here in these recent seasons? If Doctor Carte examined the DNA sequences of Alabaster and Scarlett, would she get a headache trying to make sense of the results?

This was only ever a part of the scrapped season 2 concept, so as far as I'm concerned, although we meme about it, it's not "canon" to season 1 either. I'm not gonna go there in the reboot at all, either.

>If Alabaster fathering himself is still true, is some of the fuckery from Sandreckoner coming from the system trying to quantify Alabaster, whose existence is paradoxical, and the system reacting unpredictably to the impossible data it's receiving?

>Both Stasi and Kay were in Afghanistan?

Yes. At different times, though. Stasi during the soviet-afghan conflict in the late 80s, Kay during gulf war 2 in the 00s.

>Mara Darkbloom is 100x scarier than David ever was and we made a terrible mistake letting him die before eliminating her. Y/N?

There's a question mark here, and although you probably intended it for the thread, I'll sorta answer.

In true shonen logic fashion, you have to make each subsequent threat somehow graver than the last. So David Darkbloom was pretty bad, or at least you have to admit he was pretty scary if you're in the #DarkbloomDidNothingWrong camp. Which means the next thing has to be even scarier.

But this isn't just shonen logic, it's a natural progression of many serial dramas, to ratchet the extremity of the threat and up the stakes again and again. This is why more realistic, grounded dramatic series that do this -- that aren't shonen anime -- have to eventually end.

Breaking Bad is a great example for this, a western drama I get many cues from. You start with Walter White up against a couple low-level street slingers. Then a mid-level distributor who's a psycho. Then he meets a legit, high-level distributor, but of course there's conflict there too. And you find out this distributor is himself in war with a Mexican cartel! And when Walt overcomes THEM, he becomes a worldwide meth kingpin -- and THEN what? I don't know, he fights... Nazis? Well after Walter White stages a recreation of the Raiders of the Lost Ark with an automated turret gun, there's really no crazier you can go, unless you introduce a Meth Illuminati or a Galactic Meth Empire. So the series had to end.

There are other modes to do a serial drama, and certainly other modes to do a dark comedy/sex romp like Fuck Quest, that don't need to introduce constantly elevating stakes, but that's at least where I've gone so far with the reboot.

>2. What would happen if we didn't choose Kay during the tennis arc? Would we get stomped in the first round?

I'm not sure! I expected you all to go with Kay for the opportunity to win, you buncha meta-gaming bastards who read THE CHART, but I was prepared to roll with whoever. I'm glad you chose Kay, it was a super fun episode, but I don't know what I would have done otherwise. Any other choice - and the choice you did make, to go with her - would be written on the fly. It was mostly a filler episode, a fun one, but I didn't have a plan for where it would go.

>3. Are there any lewd scenes that we cockblocked you out of writing?

So, so many. You'd probably just get sad if I told you how many.

Sometimes lewds I really want to do get shoehorned in (Camelia in the massage parlor) and if I can't shoehorn them, they get repurposed. Off the top of my head, the Renee solo lewd this ep was supposed to be with Rose, actually. I wanted to do a scene where Alabaster ambushes her in the ladies room and rapes her -- err, "rapes" her. (The line "they should really make a law against that, huh?" was originally meant for Alabaster, to Rose, when she's shocked to find him there.)

Let's see... off the top of my head, things I never got to do in any form, at least not yet. A bodywriting scene (I envisioned Whitney doing it to Alex, but it could work equally well with many characters), Vivian's fumbling lolidom, a true femdom scene where Alabaster doesn't take the reins back (I've always vacillated on this for fear of backlash), a version of the Charlotte lewd last night where Charlotte is instructing Alabaster and Rose together, a scene between Alex and Sable which I was going to do but stopped because the thread was already exploding with simultaneous debates over Alex's role, and also whether his involvement in ANY lewd is NTR/cucking -- didn't want to stoke the fire.

Lots more. I think about lewds a lot.

>4. What where your plans with Makoto at the start of the season? Was it mostly fetish fuel or did you want her to play a large part in the story?

I'm going to be perfectly honest, Makoto was created on a whim. I was jogging one night and had the concept for being cheeky/meta with a character named after Whitney's avatar, "played by" a different Im@s character, whose character is in turn playing Whitney in a film. I loved it so much that I posted the character card literally an hour after hitting upon it.

As a concept it's wonderfully meta, but I wasn't sure how to make her relevant, and she never gained a lot of traction in my own mind, as far as where the character could go. I knew from the start that she would eventually be revealed as a double agent, but I never had a good picture of her in my mind, of "Makoto Kikuchi" as a person.

I only later thought to have her try to out-lesbian Whitney -- which was a great juke, and I could have done a lot more with it. But I needed to clear the deck of some subplots. So I killed her off.

>Are there any jokes/references/callbacks/allusions we didn't get and if so what?

Tons, I'm sure, although whenever this question gets asked I all of a sudden come up blank. I can think of two off the top of my head, one I alluded to in this episode. Rose's African Grey parrot is named Myrna, which is my nod to the novel A Confederacy of Dunces. The description of Myrna on the wikipedia page for that novel should be illustrative.

Another one, also in this episode, is that the dialogue at the end of the final lewd between Alabaster and Rose is a direct callback to a dialogue from season 2.

If I think of any others, I'll add them, since like I said, I know there's lots more, but I can never recall them all when asked.

>Did you make up that joke about Vishnu? I couldn't find it when googling. I was hoping it would be on a list of dad jokes

Yes, I made it up. The phrase "dangerous and extremely armed" just came to me at work one day (I like spoonerism) and then I kind of back-engineered a joke from that.

>Be honest now. Is Rose your favorite girl?

I emphatically and absolutely want to give all girls their due. So it would not do for me to tell you that Rose is personally my favorite when considering her from the perspective of a reader. But it should be clear by now that Rose has a special place in my authorial mind as the most important person in the story, to the character of Alabaster. The only two girls who could possibly challenge Rose as the most important harem member are Cerise and Whitney. I think in the end Rose has eclipsed them, if only slightly.

But just because there's a character who's specially important to Alabaster, doesn't mean that Alabaster (and by extension the readers) can't love the other girls. I think for example that Alabaster and Vivian have a very special relationship that, while of a different character from the one he has with Rose, is still emotionally affecting, and worth exploring, and dedicating time to, and enjoying in its own right. (Vivian would certainly agree).

This is why I spent some time exploring in this episode how the other girls reacted to news that Alabaster was marrying Rose, and tried to make it clear through my writing that everyone could accept a life where every relationship is equal, even if the relationship Ally has with Rose is more equal. If you get what I mean.

From a supertextual perspective, there are relationships in this story that maybe come off as more poignant than others to you, as a reader. I think I've said this before but the ones that strike you this way, usually do because I incorporate elements of my own past relationships and people from my own life into those interactions.

So having said that, there's a woman in my life who I've had a very Rose-like relationship with. No we don't have rape fights. We've had a tumultuous, sometimes romantic and always adversarial dynamic. So I've worked that into a lot of what you see here.

>Who wins most of the arguments, be honest

I win every argument we have, naturally. She has yet to win a single one, despite trying her best to come out on top. It's kind of sad.

>Hmmmm?

Well it's a winning record, anyway. For sure at least a 66/33 split, maybe better... definitely.

The bickering is a definite source of inspiration, but we don't have anything nearly as intense as what my characters do. None of my real relationships that have inspired aspects of FQ are as outlandish or as interesting as what Ally's got, sexually or otherwise, sorry to say. I'm not that extraordinary.

>What would happen if we didn't give Renee the implant this episode?

I don't know. Much of my endgame plan hinged on that choice, so I'm at least glad it went the way it did in the sense I'd have to replan how it all went down if you'd gone the other way.

It would not have affected whether or not Renee and Alex ended up in Mara's clutches. But it would have been quite impossible to give Amber the implant in this episode had Renee not been holding it.

I'm sure in this alternate timeline, you readers are probably thinking that giving Renee the implant would have prevented the kidnapping somehow, but that was already set in motion before this point.

>What was your personal favorite lewd and non-lewd moment of S3?

Oh my goodness. I'm going to have to think on this one.

There may be recency bias at play here, but lewd-wise, many of the lewds this episode were some of my favorite to write. The bachelorette party in particular REALLY turned me on, like in a "I need to take five minutes in the middle of writing it" kinda way. I actually hadn't planned to show it at all, or if I did, only as bonus content. My first plan was to come back on Sunday night with the Smatters lewd and the Charlotte lewd back-to-back.

But after closing the thread on Saturday, I realized I couldn't hype up a bachelorette party for Rose and then NOT depict all that perversion. And lying in bed going to sleep that night, I kept coming up with obscene imagery for it, then again when I woke up on Sunday morning. I think by the time I was envisioning Vivian on her knees in front of Amber sniffing her panties while Amber sits there spread-eagle, legs entwined with her older sister -- I just had to show that. Even just thinking back on it makes me wanna go take five minutes again.

Other highlights, for me, this season were Charlotte's laundry day bonus, Renee's double feature in episode 5, and fucking Vivian in the grocery store. The Kay bonus was also great (I so rarely get to explore exhibitionism)

For non-lewd, the slice of life stuff was just so fun to get back to, and such a refreshing change of pace for me, even if some people wanted to get back to the main plot. The tennis episode, the cookoff with mom, even just watching anime with Noelle. I really liked character interactions that didn't have a fucking Sword of Damocles hanging over it.

Not that I don't also love to pull the rug out and make everything go wrong, too -- as this episode shows.

I think in the end, though, my favorite non-lewd stuff from season 3, the thing I'll think back to, will always be Whitney as CEO. The board meetings, giving away cars on TV, and just being her lovable old self despite the newfound power.

I have to go for now, so I'll answer the other questions at another time.

>How do you feel about the course of S3 overall and how do you compare it to S1/2? Do you favor one season or another?

To me, S2 = S3 > S1.

S2 and S3 are different in how they're structured and I can see why a person would prefer one or the other. But both are more similar to one another than either are to S1, which is really a different kind of narrative entirely.

I am proud of what I've been able to do with the reboot seasons, especially because there were lots of moments of self-doubt in both, and times when I genuinely did not know where I was going or what I was doing, and yet I always found a way to tie things together, keep it moving forward, and keep all the plates spinning. In both seasons there have been Saturdays where, an hour before the episode is supposed to air, I still don't really know what I want to do with it, and I'm terrified that I'm gonna be like Eminem choking at a rap battle in 8 Mile. But it hasn't happened yet. The worst I've ever had to do was call off an episode this season right before airing, take a break, and come back refreshed.

Not that there aren't weak points and failures, I've had to drop plots, and entire characters, I've sometimes been too ambitious, and I've had major problems with pacing.

Overall, I think I've done very well for a piece of fiction now cresting 450k words, written almost entirely by improv.

To me, criticisms of season 3 being too slow are entirely warranted. Like I said, I can understand favoring the balance of season 2's plot-to-tanoshii ratio. But I'm very pleased with the fact that, whether the diversion in a mostly SoL middle phase was a good decision or not, I was still able to keep setups building that had payoffs at the end. Setting up the anagram juke, the culmination of the StuCo arc being mixed into the Sofia Sant-Elizabeth stuff for the moment where Amber and her friends get directly inserted into the main plot arc, and so on.

It was certainly a slow-burn of a season compared to season 2's constant roller coaster. I used Breaking Bad as a reference point before, so if you've seen that show, you'll understand -- let's say something like... FQ3 was like Breaking Bad season 1/2, whereas FQ2 was like Breaking Bad season 3/4. I'm in the small minority who enjoyed BrBa's earlier seasons better, but most people preferred the less ruminative, faster, higher-stakes plotting of later seasons.

I think FQ season 4 will have a structure much closer to FQ2's than FQ3's, though. In the analogy I've set up, it would be Breaking Bad season 5.

FQ1 is such a different animal that I can hardly compare it to the reboot seasons. It has its charm, but looking back, I find it quaint. Like a prototypical version or an incomplete draft. Well, it IS incomplete after all.

>Was there ever a single choice we made that determined whether or not we married Rose?

Of course, I never offered a choice that was [ ] Marry her / [ ] Don't marry her. So no, there was not a single choice.

There was a choice recently that would have, in turn, led to this direct, singular choice, but you couldn't have possibly known at the time. This was the decision whether or not to talk to Cerise about the prospect of marrying Rose, in the previous episode.

It was bad timing, since Makoto had just died and Whitney needed comforting, and I understand not taking that decision. I stuck it there because I was rushing to make sure I knew what we were going to do for the finale -- since if the decision to marry Rose was taken, the marriage was going to be the focus of the finale (which it was). And like I said, you couldn't have possibly known the outcome of that choice in advance.

But if Alabaster did have this conversation with Cerise at the time, she would have directly asked him if he actually wanted to marry Rose, and it would have become an audience decision.

By not talking to Cerise about it, I wrote as if Alabaster had already decided in his heart what to do, via the path the story had already taken, and the culmination of choices and audience feedback throughout 2 seasons.

I would not have done this if I didn't think that a direct yes/no vote would have been anything other than a foregone conclusion and a mere formality done for the sake of avoiding calls of bias/railroading.

I might be wrong, and you can definitely call this an instance, perhaps the biggest in the series, of railroading, but that was my logic. The truth is that based on the mood of the thread and the consistently Rose-favoring decisions made throughout the run of both reboot seasons, you decided to marry her a long time ago.

>What is your personal opinion on the debate over Alex's betrayals and how we should deal with/feel about it?

I'm not sure I should even broach this topic. Man you're asking some hard questions.

I can tell you my opinion, but it's not authoritative. It's an act of subjective interpretation, same as any reader's, and doesn't hold any special weight since I'm the author.

I think that what Alex did this season is not fundamentally worse than how Alabaster betrayed Alex in season 2. In some ways, Alabaster's actions were actually worse back then.

Alex was almost continuously in grave danger of losing his life throughout all of season 2, between the business with Camelia, and Tyrus's gang, and the bombs underneath Darkbloom Analytics, and the Russian threat... Alabaster never warned him about any of this and continued to sabotage the project that Alex was working on, without consulting him or trying to explain his side of the story. When he told Alex, finally, he did it in the worst way possible, blindsiding him, and forcing him to decide on a moment's notice whether to stay with Sable or side with him. It was awful.

Alabaster in season 2 acted with very little regard for Alex's wishes or wellbeing, for the majority of the season. Only at the very end did he make an attempt to save him -- from consequences that Alabaster himself had a huge hand in bringing about to begin with. It is because Alabaster moved forward with trying to destroy Darkbloom Analytics that the Russians targeted Alex in the first place.

The things Alex did this season were also awful. He did not clue Alabaster in and went behind his back. His decisions got people killed. He betrayed the trust that Alabaster was finally learning to place in him.

Their relationship is incredibly broken right now. Both need to redeem themselves, in my opinion.

>- Where there any clues/foreshadowing we missed on her identity as a spy? Or was the amount of interaction just insufficient to clue ourselves in?

I would say there wasn't enough interaction with Makoto in general. I wanted to insert some scenes where she showed unusual interest in the specifics of Darkbloom Analytics tech, which might have only been evident in retrospect, but I never did that. So unfortunately, no, it was not foreshadowed properly at all. I had intended to keep her around a bit longer, but I had to drop some things from the story, and she was it.

>- Considering your inclination for historical figures as inspiration for some characters, were you attempting to go for a Mata Hari-like role for her, if more screen-time was permitted?

While I wasn't thinking specifically of Mata Hari, yes, she was a femme fatale type who used sex as a way to get closer to the main movers at Darkbloom Analytics. Having said that, I don't think she set out with this goal in mind -- that she would accomplish her secret mission through sex -- but rather, fell into perversion, and then realized that it would be a useful tool as well.

She could have been a very interesting character, but I didn't do her justice.

>- Would Alabaster be bastard enough to "comfort" Makoto's grieving mother, if she's present in retrieving her daughter's remains?

Absolutely. He'd wipe those tears away with his dick and feel very little remorse!

>- What's the contents of the obituary section for David (as far as the whole world knows), Stasi, Makoto, and Sable? Dad in newspaper heaven needs to know!

I planned to post an article for Sable's death during the interim, so I might also do Makoto for added bonus. David got essentially an obituary in the TIME article I posted during the last midseason break -- the world's opinion of his legacy was dim.

>- Not related to the ones above, but what were the wedding couple's vows?

I don't think they were at all capable of swallowing their pride enough to compose custom vows. That would mean admitting in some way that they're happy to get married and they're NOT happy to get married, they DON'T want to get married, don't be ridiculous. That's absurd, that's an absurd notion you're suggesting, completely ridiculous. Shut up!

>Speaking of the post-season Time article: I think I caught your clues about you hinting at it as far back as September.

Gonna jump the question queue since I'm off to bed soon and curious here -- you'll have to refresh my memory -- I don't recall what you're talking about.

>How long had you been planning to put that out?

I was working on it already before the season ended. But after the season ended, I had only really written that opening section where Kay draws a fairy tale analogy. Most of the rest was written in a week or two before I posted it in December. I'm very pleased with how it turned out!

>D-do you mean Kay hinting at Time articles in the season finale wasn't a clue as to what was to come? I kinda pieced it in my head knowing your penchant for fake articles, the mention of David having been Time's Person of the Year 2015 in the very first episode, and feeling like the inheritance was such a world-shattering event as to warrant such an article. I'm not saying I TOLD anybody except IaTM about my guess, but I was super happy to see it all the same.

No, you're right, I just forgot this:

>Kay pokes you in the chest. "I want to be embedded. 24/7, unrestricted access to the inner workings of Darkbloom Analytics 2.0. For a year. No, two years. I'll start with a series of Time articles, then parlay that into a book deal--"

By this point I was already working on the Time article and knew I'd be posting it in the inter-season break, so this was definitely a direct allusion. I sometimes don't recall all the various foreshadowings, winks and nods, narrative traps, and so on, that I've set up! And conversely there are definitely things in the text of all three seasons, that served to set things up, but which never came to fruition.

>Following on from the same question I asked last season - were there any major choices we made this time around that we didn't know were major at the time of making them?

I elaborated on one -- the one with Cerise -- but let me think back to a few others. I believe this season's major choices were all pretty self-evidently major, like whether or not to give Renee the implant for example, or whether to try to kill Stasi. Letting Darkbloom see his daughters was in this category, but you might not have realized that it would lead to a subplot where Vivian momentarily allies with him. Teaming with Kay in the tennis episode led directly to her giving us the details about Gustav's whereabouts, which enabled the plot with getting Darkbloom out of Cerise's head, but I think that was inevitable.

>What's the deal with Armstrong and Nelson's relationship? Are they just friends (much as they'd hate to admit it), or is there something more going on there?

I don't see them as gay, just frenemies. They're quite close though, definitely a bromance there.

>Are there any particular questions you WANT people to ask, that haven't been asked yet?

Maybe before the thread is done, I'll share some closing thoughts and observations on this season.

>What book did you get these pretentious names out of by the way?

Which names, characters or the implants?

The implant naming schema was just very Grecian, of course.

Penelope/Ulysses was how it began, since Penelope waited patiently in the desert, while Project Ulysses traveled all over the world, gathering data, to complete the code base, and their union made Sand Reckoner. Of course that's a ham-handed allusion to the Odyssey.

Having settled on that concept I then made the other names Greek-inspired too. Diogenes is known as the cynic, so if Diogenes is an "antidote" or a leavening agent, if you will, for Sand Reckoner; it represents a sort of cynical skepticism of things, an acceptance that Sand Reckoner's control over your perception cannot remain unfettered. I'm rambling, but that's the idea there.

Galatea (the character) was so named because I saw her as a very Galatea-like figure (not to be tautological). Or specifically a Galatea 2.2 like figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatea_2.2 -- at the time of the character's creation I did not intend for her to have a Sand Reckoner predecessor, but it worked out perfectly. I made the implant share her alias because it just fit so well with everything going already. And of course making Galatea (the implant) focus on implicit memory, while serving lots of plot needs, was also a nice touch, since "Galatea" in the original myth is a statue carved so perfectly that its sculptor falls in love with it (immense skill with the hands and muscle memory to do that trick!)

Camelia, was name for the Mili song, so kind of breaks the Greek name pattern.

Catachresis though, is a Greek literary term, and I chose it specifically also because Alabaster's last name is also a literary term. In other words, his foil in season 3 now is named quite similarly to him: Alabaster Soliloquy, Amber Catachresis. You may see why this fits especially well with Scarlett added back to the fold.

Diegesis is another Greek term, and perfect for Darkbloom's implant, since that was his entire motivating force in the original FQ -- it's a callback.

As far as character names go, I've elaborated at length on that before, but of course at least one comes directly from a novel, Vivian Darkbloom.

>>If David was given a magical truth serum.

>How about some magical truth semen?

I was wishy washy on us ever fucking Cerisebloom, but somehow it didn't feel right. I don't think Cerise would be okay with that, and that's what held me back.

>In all seriousness though, is the answer to that question something you'd be willing to reveal once it's all over?

I don't know whether I will or not. Ask me again at the end.

>Is Alabaster a self insert, a character you identify completely separate from, or sort of a balance between the two?

It's a balance. Alabaster represents some of my worst personality impulses, I model some beats of his relationships on my own life, and of course his kinks line up with mine. In terms of worldview and outlook, we don't truly align all that much. Disposition-wise, I'm much better at dealing with people, too, even when emotions run high, something Alabaster dearly struggles with.

>Follow up, do you not use Yuki as a character base in FQ because you don't have a character in mind for her, or because she's just for you and not the audience in your mind?

Yuki was just something I started using in S1 to make my posts stand out when speaking as author, since Yuki is mai waifu and I had a trove of images to use. It's not a necessary thing to do to make my posts visible, since clearly you can just jump from post to post of mine via ctrl-F or, now, highlighting my ID. But it's become kind of a traditional thing at this point so I continue.

>>Another one, also in this episode, is that the dialogue at the end of the final lewd between Alabaster and Rose is a direct callback to a dialogue from season 2.
>Are you talking about the "Today was fun" thing? I'm pretty sure everybody got that, it was pretty obvious

There were also a few other callbacks I didn't mention in this episode, because I forgot:

-When Alabaster goes to see Rose in the first post of the episode, and she can't meet his eyes, they say simply "Hello Rose."/"Hello Alabaster." -- which was their first-ever dialogue to each other in the reboot, when they met under similarly tense circumstances and similarly refused to look at each other.

-When Auburn searches Amber's room, he says that looking under the picture of Bush was almost insultingly obvious, and that no stalker worth their salt would fail to check there. Of course, Rose searched the bedroom earlier in the season, and never thought to check there.

-During the wedding, Cerise ties Alabaster's tie for him (when he refused to let anyone else do so). Cerise's first interaction with Alabaster in the opening of the reboot was to tie his tie before his interview at Darkbloom Analytics.

I'm not sure how obvious or not these are -- it's hard for me to gauge how well readers remember things -- but no one commented at the time anyway.

I'll go back and answer the questions I skipped tomorrow, just wanted to add these before I forgot again.

>what did Mara hope to gain by putting diegesis in Vivian? surveillance data? or something more long term?

Two things. I didn't do a great job explaining it (as in, didn't really explain it at all) and so I wanted to lay it out here, although you'll probably see this reiterated at some point in the actual text of season 4.

Mara planned to have Camelia's implant recovered and placed in her head. This was her chief goal, to get a working implant for herself.

For the operation, she was planning to use a Russian doctor (Konstantin Federov, mentioned a couple times in the season), introduced to her via Stasi, who worked on Russia's analogue to the Sand Reckoner project.

To verify Konstantin was capable of doing the operation successfully with Darkbloom Analytics developed implants, Mara had him perform it first on Vivian, with the implant they did have access to, the one recovered from David's corpse.

In other words, Mara used Vivian as a guinea pig.

The secondary benefit this accomplished was giving Vivian access to some of the things Diegesis could do. As with the implant in Camelia (Catachresis), one of Diegesis chief uses was to give the user a huge amount of data about people and the world at large, at-a-glance, which is obviously useful in making business decisions, among many other things. Unfortunately for Mara, Diegesis is notably less effective when it isn't paired with another person who's using the working Catachresis implant. Of which we will see more in season 4.

Mara's longer term plan to get Catachresis in her head, assisted by Konstantin to do it, was foiled in a couple ways. She never recovered Catachresis; Konstantin was arrested by the FBI (see the Valentine's Day bonus scene with Noelle), and now, finally, her chief contact on the Russian side, Stasi, is dead.

So she's going with plan B.

>what was stacklefords task for Camelia?

I assume you mean this moment in season 2:

>You sigh. Sometimes it's like pulling teeth with this guy. "Did she ask any specific favors of you, in return for sucking liquor out of her belly button?"

>"Um... I'm not supposed to tell, is the thing," Stackleford says.

If that's the case, then the answer is immediately revealed. Camelia borrowed his car and his credit lines. The bags you see her toting from Saks Fifth in this scene are actually gifts for Tyrus, a notably outlandish dresser. (She leaves to go visit him at Palo Alto Waste and Water Management after the scene). During this phase of the story she was still ironing out her "strategic partnership" with him.

This is kinda-sorta a retcon because I also was picturing Stackleford being more deeply involved in the main plot when I wrote this scene, and so I also planned that Camelia asked him to do other things in addition. I didn't have in mind exactly what else that entailed, but it would have been part of her plan to sabotage Darkbloom Analytics. Eventually this subplot was supposed to culminate in Camelia murdering Stackleford right in front of Alabaster, but I pulled back from this plan, since I didn't want to make her so nakedly villainous.

>could we have potentially sided with Mara by voting differently as far back as the first board meeting?

I have a hard time picturing that but we may have seen an uneasy truce for a period of time. I could easily see Mara deciding that we'd be useful, and trying to leverage us against David's plans. If this plotline developed then it's difficult to say how Mara as a character would develop with it, and so maybe she would have been humanized enough to consider an ally down the road. But I'm skeptical.

>Camelia had a huge swath of season 2 during which she had access to the servers, any surprises still left there?

I think the story is about to get a lot bigger than Darkbloom Analytics as a company, but there may be some surprises left in store about our dearly departed Camelia and the two implants in that safe in the wall.

>If the main servers had exploded would Ally and Gal have revived along side Mom and Amber?

I don't see this as having been a legitimate possibility -- I never intended to let Ally's plan to destroy the company succeed, in following the classic narrative rule that a detailed plan can never go off without a hitch. But if it did happen... well, I'm not sure I should answer. I'll say the result wouldn't be great. Ally and Gal would not revive, I'll put it like that.

>What prompted Sable to die instead of Alex from a meta perspective? was it the level of vitriol being directed at her?

I'm fine with vitriol directed at a character, I won't kill them off just because they make people mad (we need generators of conflict after all.) But I rather see Sable's death as a major redemptive turn for her. She sacrificed herself for Alex's sake without question. It shows a side to her that many suspect did not exist.

I thought it also fit her character completely. To die the way she did, in the absolute most bonkers way possible, was very Sable.

Finally, she was marked for death for a long time and knew it. I think Sable was, towards the end, getting the inkling -- although she resisted it -- that what she had done in bringing Sand Reckoner into the world was a terrible mistake. That SHE was the one who doomed the world, and that in some way, the world was done with her. Alex, who still fears death, and still has a lot to lose, and still has hope, too -- the world is not done with him yet.

>along similar lines, it seems unlikely that Mara would find the end goal of Diogenes acceptable, why not frame and kill Dr. Carte and make Diogenes impossible or improbable to achieve? especially considering Maras probable feelings toward the woman.

I'm really giving away a lot of my Season 4 cards here, but per my reply to an earlier question in this post, Mara needs someone who can put an implant in her, when the time comes. For sure there is no love lost, though, and things are going to suck for Dr. Carte in the immediate future.

>We never got to see Camelia go all out, and I suspect the implants have significant applications in personal combat. Any chance you'll be using some more extreme asuka avatars next season?

Yes.

>Will Anna and Cerise get a chance at a wedding?

Absolutely.

>OP-sama, OP-sama! How far do you usually run in a day? Do you run daily or like three times a week?

My typical run is 4-6 miles. The days I run in a week vary because I'm terrible at keeping a rigorous schedule. But I keep myself on track with a goal: 1,000 miles total per year. I track progress in an Excel spreadsheet that tallies how many days off I have based on my current daily average.

>What were your thoughts watching first watching Kaguya-sama while it was airing? It's pretty flagrantly obvious how many of us drew connections between Ally and Rose's relationship while watching it - it certainly made the show as a whole significantly more enjoyable to me - but I'd love to hear your opinions.

I have not found the time to watch Kaguya beyond the first couple episodes. I read some of the manga at work, though. Overall it's one of the few shows where I actually think the main girl is also the best girl. It should be clear that I also see plenty of parallels to draw between our favorite StuCo Tsuns and the main characters of Kaguya-sama.

>Being a writer myself, I would love to hear your process when it comes to creating such deliciously fucked up characters. Every single character in this story is batshit insane and on paper is completely unlikeable, but somehow they all manage to work. Did you ever worry that people would just be horrified instead of entertained?

I've said this in the past, but I originally wanted the characters to be unlikable. Back in season 1, the starting concept was a weeb-infused and sex-crazed version of sitcoms like Always Sunny -- it was supposed to be a story about terrible people doing terrible things to each other, getting fucked over by it, and never learning their lesson.

So it's hard for me to give advice when I ended up moving in a direction opposite to what I intended, and making the characters actually MORE human than they were supposed to be.

Having said that, I just let the characters be themselves.

This is going to sound weird, but when I write dialogue, I don't feel like I am myself. When it's Alabaster's turn to speak, I feel like Alabaster; I think and see the world like he would. Then when, say, it's Whitney's turn to talk, I think and see the world like she would. In that moment, I feel so totally as if I am inside the mind of Whitney Darkbloom (for example) that I could sit down and carry on a real life conversation with you, in-character, and never miss a beat.

When I write dialogue, I bounce back and forth like this, mentally assuming the role of each character I write for, to such a degree that writing their dialogue is as natural for me as speaking in my own voice.

It's kind of like becoming fluent in a different language.

To know a character this well, to feel them so intuitively in writing that I don't just write for them but write as them, allows me to do two things. It allows me to characterize them consistently, and it allows me to characterize them deeply.

If I ask you to tell me why you like your favorite character, let's say maybe your favorite is Whitney to roll with the example. It's not just because she's the tomboy childhood friend, but she has a depth to her character that goes beyond the setup, that feels organically discovered, and true to her, and which is consistently there. So while her character is legitimately a sex-crazed LUNATIC when you think about it, she somehow also feels human. And that endears you to her.

>It speaks to the depth of the characters that you can assume such a distinct voice when updating in real time. Kudos, and thank you for the thorough answer!

Just remember that I discovered their voices myself over time. Whitney didn't start fully-formed. But in letting her dialogue go where it may without restraining myself, even if what I realized what she would say/do in a situation isn't what I envisioned prior to writing the scene - that's how I learned who Whitney is as a person. And Cerise, and Rose, and Vivian, and Amber... etc.

This is what I mean by letting them be themselves, and how characters in season 1 got from being caricatures defined by the archetypes I mixed into them, to being the people in season 3 we know now. They did it by surprising me a lot.

I couldn't have possibly known when Rose Mallory walked down the hallway in Season 1 Episode 3 to tut at Alabaster for being a misogynist, that I would connect so powerfully to her as a fully fleshed-out human (but then, neither did Alabaster). Nor could I have known that the scary cougar of a sensei in season 1 episode 1 that made everyone shit themselves, would end up being Dr. Renee Motherfucking Carte, Eskimo kisser extraordinaire, super-cake, later super-milf, and loveliest eligible drunkard in town. I had no idea that our asshole NEET of an older sister bitching at us in the opening scene of the series, was actually a damaged, emotionally vulnerable, but incisive and intelligent person, who longed for something more in her life, has the tools to achieve it but needs the support. Etc., etc.

It was only by letting the characters speak through me that I myself learned Rose is more than just an SJW, Renee is more than just a sexually frustrated teacher, Cerise is more than just a slutty drunk onee, Whitney is more than just a tomboy childhood friend. They are those things, but they're not constrained to that.

>Did you ever see someone perfectly predict a plot point? Did you keep it or change it just to spite them?

Yes, several. I don't change things if they get predicted, and rather see it as a pleasant surprise, and a reward to the readers for anticipating me. Small things and big things get predicted in advance all the time.

One thing that was recently predicted in advance was VIOLENTLY TSUNDERE WEDDING VOWS, and someone else also posted an image of Mami Tomoe in the (actual) episode 12 thread which I intended to, and did, use for the OP image. But of course these are easy calls and not really huge plot points either.

Among major things that people called right and which surprised me, were that Whitney was David Darkbloom's bastard daughter, and that Stasi had a Russian version of the implant.

>Could we have prevented Sable's death or was she fated to die in the story?

I think after season 2 and especially with the trajectory her character took in this season, a reconciliation would be extremely difficult. But wasn't absolutely fated to die, I think the main things that might have prevented it happened quite early in the season. I don't want to talk too much about it because it involves a subplot that I envisioned as actually being the final culmination of everything -- that hasn't come about yet, but which may yet still. Ask me again at the end of season 4.

>How many of her campaign promises has Amber manged to deliver on since being elected Student Council president?

She's been president for only about a week or so -- and North High is still in ashes -- so, none.

>Is Auburn Brantly as bad as Amber and Alabaster make him out to be? While he is obviously meant to be a male counterpart to Rose, with the hypocrisy and ruthlessness that entails, it's not like Amber and Alabaster don't have their own blindspots and prejudices in their own thinking.

We will get to know Auburn and Will a bit better in season 4. You'll have the chance to judge them for yourself.

>Does Auburn have anything approaching Alabaster's skill in fucking and debauchery? Was the girl who burnt down the school sexually involved with him or was Auburn unaware that one of his followers was willing to go as far as she did?

Difficult for me to say -- I myself need to sit back and think about how Auburn will function as a semi-major secondary character going into season 4 rather than as a one-off. I could see it, but I could also see other ways to develop him.

I do want to say that I initially had the dynamic between Amber and Auburn, in the StuCo episode, being more explicitly Rose/Ally like -- with Amber going on and on about him to the point where Alabaster has to tell her to shut the fuck up already -- but of course that's getting into dangerous territory, right? So I pulled back a little. I'll have to think about what I want his character to be, in comparison and in contrast to his "ancestors"

>How did the reunion between Charlotte and Scarlett go down?

I want to say we may see this as a flashback. This was one of the more important moments elided over because it was the revelation to Saul and Charlotte that they live in a world that's so crazy it may as well be magical -- it opened their eyes to how wild things truly were. Plus I love the relationship between Charlotte and Scarlett, they're fem-bros, when they don't bicker, and their reunion would have been emotional.

Here's a picture I wish I had when Charlotte was trying on outfits for Ally, apropos of nothing.

>What are your favorite children's books/stories. Something you'd want your own kid to read?

Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss are go-to classics in my eyes. The original Winnie the Pooh novels are absolutely magical, ditto Paddington Bear. The Phantom Tollbooth has to be part of any children's canon, too. You can't go wrong with Goosebumps. And finally of course, Marx's Capital.

>What are your favorite myths, heroes, old gods etc.

Prometheus or Sisyphus are my favorite characters of mythology to think about, for similar reasons.

>Were the characters in the Alaska prologue at the start of the season already decided at that point?
>I always felt like it could've been Alex and Sable

This was a very astute observation you and several others made.

I wrote the flash-forward at the beginning of the season not knowing what it actually meant, or how to get there.

I mentioned taking cues from Breaking Bad, and hey, there's another one. Season 5 of that show, the writers did the exact same thing with a flash forward that they had no plan on how to actually get to at the time of writing it.

By nature of this, I wrote the scene to give me the most possible options. I thought Alabaster and Rose were the likeliest people to be in the scene, but I kept it open-ended enough that it could have plausibly been Alabaster and any other haremite -- or, failing a decision on marriage, Alex and Sable as a fallback.

Having the "wife" get cut off referring to the husband as "Al--" was my clever nudge to you that this is the case. "Al--" can be finished as Alabaster, Ally, or Alex.

As the season developed and it became clear in my mind that we were really headed towards a marriage plot with Rose, the candidates winnowed for me down to three. I saw developing us towards an explicit choice to marry Rose, which, if it failed, then an explicit choice to marry Whitney; and only if both of these failed would the couple in Alaska be Alex and Sable.

This never came about, but these three couples were my own most plausible picks barring unforeseen developments/new ideas during the season's run.

>What made Mara Darkbloom the monster she is now? Or was she always a monster?

Mara is simply a sociopath, a power-mad, corrupt, and sadistic bitch. I don't know that there's a lot of hidden depth to her. She is what she is and doesn't try to be anything else. While the motivations of real people are usually multi-faceted and complex, such nakedly venal people also exist in the upper echelons of power, and Mara is one.

What made her this way? We can debate nature vs nurture; she grew up in a wealthy family with connections to mafia, and criminality was a natural part of her life growing up. But she enjoys what she does, and that takes a special kind of mind that's rotten from the start. I'm thinking here of the cruel pleasure she took watching Vivian get her eyeball scooped out.

>If we had gone full corporate evil - siding with Mara/Darkbloom/both in some of our early S2 choices and no one else - how would that have affected the story? Would we have still gotten 2.5 season's worth out of it, or would we just be locked into Bad End?

The story would have developed in such a radically different direction that I honestly cannot say where we would be right now. Siding with Darkbloom was a possibility I knew could happen, I deliberately set it up to be a plausible choice, but I still didn't expect you to take it. If you had, I would have rolled with it, but I had NO plan for what it would look like. Would it lead to a bad end? Maybe. But it totally changes all the predicates that the current timeline builds itself upon.

>Are you on Duracell's payroll?

Please look forward to the upcoming line of vibrating FUCK QUEST™ onaholes powered by Duracell®, complete with built-in warming functionality, modeled after all your favorite girls. Collect them all for the "true harem ending"!

>Do these include a function that syncs their vibrations in time with all of my favorite pastebin links? Does Alex's come with a flappy benis?

Yes; yes.

>Alabaster always seems to be a one shot wonder in the reboot.

I guess it's more realistic, but I haven't even really considered that personally. I should do more scenes where Alabaster does some multi-pussy drifting.

>>realistic
>referring to the man with like a foot long dick as thick as a coke can

Whoa, hey now, Alabaster's dick is a little under 8 inches! That's just within the realm of realistic! And being literally as thick as a coke can is his own hyperbolic bragging. He's packing heat, but he's not a horse.

This has been another edition of Dick Facts with OP.

>All I want is a lewd with Whitney and Renee taking turns riding alabaster to completion

And I can definitely support this concept.

>I'm curious about those dropped characters, though. Is there anyone in particular you're disappointed you couldn't work into the story?

When I mention dropped characters, I'm talking about characters that were introduced but either directly written out (Makoto) or ones I haven't been able to find much plot-relevant use for (Ken, for instance).

I'm a big fan of ensemble casts where minor characters suddenly have importance. For example, in this episode when Auburn Brantly of all people breaks into Amber's room and finds the implants stored there -- there's something really interesting to me about this random character being one of the only people in the cast to come "eye to eye" so to speak, with David Darkbloom's disembodied consciousness. Moments like those, are really cool to me, and I try to work the secondary/tertiary characters in wherever possible for that reason.

So having said that, I'm a bit down about not being able to think of many ways to use Fazil and Ken specifically, Nelson and Armstrong too, and finally among the harem, lots of the girls got shorted on screentime, which is certainly my fault all around.

>As for questions, I don't remember if you answered this already but at what point did you decide that Rose2 would be Amber's sister?

I love this question! I was hoping someone might bring it up because it gives me a chance to talk candidly about a couple other concepts I had for season 3.

When I decided to use Rose2 as a character, by this point I knew 99% that I also wanted to bring Mom back, and Amber too, so the question I wanted to answer was how it all fit together. Why is all this happening?

While considering options, I hit upon the idea of Rose2/Mom/Amber all being their own family who Alabaster finds. I really loved this, which is what you eventually saw. It gave me the chance to do some great moments, like closing the premiere in such a cool way; Alabaster waiting around outside work with Rose2, when she's like "oh hey, my sister's here!" and Alabaster turns around and there's Camelia driving up. Then you get to explore the dynamics of this insufferable weeaboo and her political radical kid sister, and you find out that Mom is there too. It's neat, leaves a lot of new doors open, and keeps you intrigued.

But the other concept I considered, which I didn't use, was introducing either Amber or Rose2 (I leaned towards it being Amber) as Alabaster's little sister.

As in, Amber would just be there, without explanation, as Alabaster's imouto, and everyone would accept that, and act as if it had always been this way. That was a different way to close out the season premiere; Alabaster in the hospital with Cerise, say, when another person comes around to visit -- "hey, sis" -- and it's Amber, and they're carrying on like this is a perfectly normal conversation.

I know some people taking part in discussions the other week will recognize this as a subplot lifted wholesale from a different show, which is a big part of why I didn't do it ultimately

Because I wanted to bring Mom back, I decided to go with the original concept, and give her a different family from Alabaster and Cerise. This ended up squaring nicely with some of the elements of the Sand Reckoner super-plot that haven't been revealed in full yet. All of this was decided in the interim between seasons -- bringing Mom and Amber back, introducing Rose2, making them a family.

>On the subject of callbacks, when is Whitney going to buy Alabaster an international milkshake chain? I'm sure she can afford more than half now.

I like this idea! I wonder whether Alabaster would understand its significance or not. He can be a self-centered bastard. Season 1 callbacks are fun, though, so let's see what happens.

>When are you going to use the Whitney twitter?

I was going to use it throughout season 3 but I ended up not for reasons unknown. It could have been a lot of fun. It's clear where the inspirations for it come from, so it would have been fun to have her talking about the FBI witch hunt, how Darkbloom Analitics (sic) is the strongest company, ever; how she's a much better CEO than David Darkbloom, a bad (or sick!) guy. Etc. Oh, and of course:

>I have never used the word nigger! Never have, never will!

It would have been fun to go balls-out crazy, but I dunno. I just never picked it up. The same with Kay's Twitter. Some wasted opportunities. Maybe I'll use them in s4.

>I was thinking that sometimes our choices do not alter the behavior of Alabaster, but alter the situation in which it is; so we affect the past rather than the future. Like our choice in the tennis match, where our vote on Kay did not make Ally choose her, but put him in a situation where she was the only option because the others where taken; or when we voted for our best man, where Ally tried to choose Whitney, but couldn't. Well, maybe the situation would have developed in the same way and Ally would have forced his way, I can't deny the posibility; I just didn't think it would be likely. Also, I know this kind of choices aren't exclusive to Fuck Quest and can be quite common in VN, that's why I said that I don't know if this qualifies as a FQ Question (or even a question at all). The thing is, with all the reality manipulation fuckery going on, I can't help thinking that in those votes we aren't choosing what Ally is going to do, but a World Line shift (like in Steins;Gate). I can't keep finding amusing how a desicion in the present can change the past.
>So, to make it a question, what do you think about this, OP? I certainly don't expect this to be a FQ plot point (if it were I would be very impresed), so I'm asking this as a writing thing in general.

This is an extremely astute observation. I think about this a lot, actually.

I don't do it deliberately -- or in other words, it's not that I plan to pepper in choices that retroactively affect events prior to the choice. When I do this, it's for a practical reason. For example, when you chose to have someone other than Whitney be the best man; to me, it wouldn't make any sense at all for Alabaster to settle on someone other than her as his first pick after she directly asked him for that honor. So, with that in mind, I had to invent a reason why he couldn't pick her after all, which of course by nature hinges on a fact coming to light from prior to the scene which he wasn't aware of. But had you chosen Whitney, this fact would not have been an issue. So the choice changed the past as well as the future.

Whenever an audience decision point changes the past, this is why.

But I try to avoid writing like that, because I personally don't like it -- it strikes me as very odd, when you consider it, which you have -- not to mention a sign of poor planning. But, given the timeline fuckery, I've accepted that it can make a logical sort of sense, and I assumed most people wouldn't really ruminate on it too deeply when it happens.

>I know we were very preoccupied at the time what with fucking Cerise and then being taken to the night club right after, but I thought it was a shame that we never got to see /csg/'s reaction to the livestream. Obvious as it may be, how did they take it? What's the board been like ever since that day?

It's bad. /csg/ is in a state of continuous strife and civil war. It's not a very friendly place right now. The slutfags and incest shippers reign, and the purityfags are seething. Footfags continue to hold the fort, but morale is critically low, and sofafag is MIA. The thread's biggest tripfag, TCG, spent a couple weeks in complete denial, swearing up and down that the circuit bender could not possibly be Cerise -- then, in a sudden change of heart, in a fit of rage, he posted a series of images of all his handcrafted Cerise merch destroyed by his own two hands. He's been missing for a few days and assumed dead of suicide. Whitneyfags and Vivianfags shitpost with impunity.

With news that Alabaster Soliloquy suddenly married his own cousin, some no-name SJW intern, everyone is in a state of confusion and fingerpointing. How could Cerise suck her own brother's dick on camera and then get so spectacularly cuckqueaned a few weeks later?

Another critical shock to the system will come when they find out Cerise is marrying a woman. That new may rip *chan asunder entirely.

>Is there any, any hopes at all, that Noelle can be saved and brought back into the harem fold. I may be alone in this sentiment, but I feel that there is genuinely chemistry between her and Alabaster that still deserves to be explored.

I want to have Noelle see more screentime in S4, she was one of the most shorted characters in the cast, and freeing her from the FBI is my way of freeing her up for different stories that could have her closer to Alabaster without having to depict him SO on-guard all the time, which dampened any chemistry they developed.

>Bonus question: Can we add foodplay to the list of "Heretical Taboos That Should Absolutely Be Explored But Never Were" for season 4, or is that something that doesn't really do it for you on a personal level?

I'm not against it, in a light way. Eating whipped cream off Whitney's tits, having Rose2 rub a lollipop against Amber's pussy and then lick it, that kind of thing. Fucking on a pile of fried chicken with mustard for lube, nah.

Although we did have a bit of foodplay just this season already. Vivian learned the joy of country-grown vegetables!

>That's fair for these two. I just can't help but imagine Rose agonizing over a notebook full of hastily erased vows muttering possible comebacks Alabaster would say to her, if these were ever said.

I can certainly see Rose having done this multiple times over the years. Actually, I'll go ahead and say she's definitely done this many times as far back as high school.

It's clear she's been imagining the wedding for a long time. I like to think of her in the shower -- sitting underneath the showerhead, you know, where the rush of water drowns out all other noise and it's just her with her thoughts, mentally going over the ceremony in her imagination, making it just a little more perfect each time. But of course in her mind's eye, she's brave enough, and Alabaster too, to be honest with their feelings. In reality, we saw the wedding we saw.

>>I'm thinking here of the cruel pleasure she took watching Vivian get her eyeball scooped out.
>Yikes
>Are we fucking her?

In some sense of the word, I think we'll definitely take it as a priority goal. In all senses of the word? Well, this is Fuck Quest. So anything is possible.

>Was Alabaster's name at all chosen so that someone could call him Alabamster

r00d, but no, Alabaster's name was just a ridiculous name I came up with.

>Aside from season 4, do you intend to run more quest threads, either FQ related, smut related, or just in general?

I have projects I'd like to do after FQ, which wouldn't be in a quest thread format.

>OP, in the middle of Season 2, you mentioned considering changing Kay's portrait character to someone else due to a lack of good art of her being around (still true, she was an otherwise minor character in a mediocre anime that was a total flop, after all).
>And then within the next two episodes, you used that same character for Noelle Keki in her introduction, the most obvious trap (besides Alex) in the series (whether we gleefully walked into her or not). When did the idea for Noelle come to you, and how did that tie into the way she was introduced? Did you ever consider writing out Kay due to the lack of interest shown in her at that point in the season?

I didn't consider writing Kay out, no, but I was struggling to integrate her into the main plot after readers turned away from key choices regarding her. I was pleased that she ended up being relevant, but she got shorted on screen time. And Kay certain has a purpose to serve in the endgame.

The idea for Noelle did come to me as a result of the discussion around Kay's avatar, though. I knew I wanted the FBI to become embroiled in the plotline, but I wasn't sure how, and introducing that subplot by having Alabaster get honeypotted by a qt weeb gf was too perfect.

>>So having said that, there's a woman in my life who I've had a very Rose-like relationship with
>I really would like to know more about OP Studios' daily life.

It's not as interesting as all that. My life at the moment is boring, I'm in a holding pattern for the time being. The person I alluded to in the other post is a coworker, we hardly ever agree about work matters and tend to have heated arguments about them, and outside of work we've had to mutually agree not to talk politics because it leaves us both too angry. But if we can avoid these two topics, we get along fine. So it's not the constant, always-at-each-other's-throats thing you see in FQ.

>Considering the demands for an idol to be fit and physically coordinated for their routines, why is Makoto so hopeless with sports? I'm basing this assumption on the tennis match and the blank section for favorite sports in Makoto's chart.
(another poster responds):

>Idol's usually aren't psychically active beyond singing and dancing and lack a lot of skills even normal people would have. They abandon everything to spend most of their lives training to be an idol and just that so once they reach their mid 20's and fired for being "too old" they can't do anything else. It's like the worst job ever

I think this post hit it perfectly, and is exactly why I depicted Makoto as helpless with tennis.

>What was Stackleford's reaction to Stasi's death? Was he preparing himself to get revenge on her only to have the satisfaction taken from him?

I'm not sure he even knows yet that she's dead, but he would be happy, and certainly relieved. I wouldn't say he was on a vengeance quest, he's too much of a dope for that.

>Why did the FBI quickly decide to fire Noelle right away, instead of transferring her or give her a long vacation time first?

The government is coming to realize that they need to let Darkbloom Analytics work in peace if they're going to get in on the Sand Reckoner action, and with other nations starting to elbow in, they don't want to lose the coming information war because an FBI agent got uppity. So to palliate the public, the investigation continues, but Uncle Sam is realizing that they have no leverage, and need to be obsequious to DA. As a demonstration of that, they completely booted the person rocking the boat.

Noelle might have some opinions about this.

>>I'm a big fan of ensemble casts where minor characters suddenly have importance. For example, in this episode when Auburn Brantly of all people breaks into Amber's room and finds the implants stored there -- there's something really interesting to me about this random character being one of the only people in the cast to come "eye to eye" so to speak, with David Darkbloom's disembodied consciousness. Moments like those, are really cool to me, and I try to work the secondary/tertiary characters in wherever possible for that reason.
It's too bad you're doing this before all of your actual characters get there due. Seriously Aubrun and Will are probably gonna get more screen time than Makoto for no reason other than "crazy twist"

It's not about "oh man crazy twist" it's about seizing the opportunity to bring characters to the fore in novel ways. I failed to develop Makoto well, but one thing FQ lacks for is important cast members who Alabaster isn't also fucking. Will and Auburn will be around in S4, not more prominent than the harem, but more prominent than, say, Stackleford. Or at least, this is likely.

They're just additional secondary characters to call on.

At the rate my ideas are going, S4 may end up being a full-fledged season as suggested elsewhere, so there will be a little bit of leg room to include a handful of people who aren't in the harem.

>So did Amber use the implants to come back at the end of season 2 using the Soliloquy's as a template (Amber as Alabaster, Rose2 as Cerise, Mom as Mom, Amber having burnt down the school) or am I just over thinking it?
>Will season 4 be Amber and her reverse harem saving the day? (Will as Whitney, Auburn as a Rose analog)

These are good questions to keep in mind, but I don't quite want to answer them directly. I will say, that it should be clear by now, that Amber is leading a life with a lot of parallels to Alabaster -- you've noticed that.

>If you had to pick some girls in the harem to give more time to, who would your top picks be?

Noelle, Kay, and the Catachresis family. Probably in that order. Gal needs some more love, too.

>Is it possible for someone to have two sand reckoner implants?

Great question!

>Will season 4 be the bigger, badder, lewder season?

It's hard to continually top myself. It may have a lower lewd to episode ratio but I hope we get a lot of lewds that are very bold, and VERY lewd. I mean, Rose2 only just realized that she likes molesting her little sister, and Vivian is awakening to her attraction to Amber, too; and Kaasan caught a whiff of our debauchery. So much to explore.

>>but I was struggling to integrate her into the main plot after readers turned away from key choices regarding her
>What choices? I can only think of one?

The major one was not talking to her in the parking garage. The other one, which didn't totally sideline her, but sidelined a lot of the plot she was part of, was declining her suggestion to go to her apartment, and demanding to meet with her in public, when we eventually did speak with her. I wanted her to reveal that board of connections so much earlier than she did, which would have rocketed us right into a huge part of the plot like four or five episodes before we got there in reality. Not only would Kay have been more prominent in this scenario, but Renee too. 

>Is... is this entire quest some sort of psychoanalysis of the fact that you’re going to end up married to your sjw coworker?

FQ is a self administered psychoanalysis in many ways, but although several characters in the story contain kernels of myself and my life, each in their own way, they're also more than that. So I draw inspiration, but it's not a 1-to-1 mapping.

That said I won't blog too much more about myself as a person or my outlook, relationships, politics, love life, etc. I prefer to remain a cipher.

> Man, words can't express how happy I am that we didn't end up having that original season 2 plot, it was so stupid. Although a more battle focused FQ does sound like it could be fun

Me too. Taking 5 years off was painful, but for the best.

>Hey OP, was Charlotte a Soliloquy before she was a Mallory in this timeline?

I'm not sure. In S1 it was stated that Scarlett was a Soliloquy before being a Soliloquy, but this was narrative deck-shuffling for the scrapped S2 subplot about a feud between the Soliloquy and Mallory family. Since that never happened, it's not necessary to set Scarlett up as a longstanding Soliloquy standard-bearer, and by extension, her niece Charlotte. But since I haven't touched on it in official material during the reboot, I suppose you can imagine whatever you prefer.

>Any final thoughts before the thread inevitably falls off the boards while none of us are looking?

Season 3 has been a lot of fun for me. There were moments of doubt and plenty of missteps but I enjoyed it as a whole.

I look forward to delivering on at least the three bonus lewds promised in this thread, sometime soon. Also some additional teasers and bonus content via twitter.

I'll close with some thoughts about individual characters.

---

Whitney
She has always been one of my favorite characters to write dialogue for, which is why she's always had such a large role. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all. Toying with the various ways she sets fires and tries to put them out again as CEO was a lot of fun, and we'll continue to see some of this in season 4, but I think Whitney as a character is taking the lesson of Makoto's death to heart. We're going to see her step into her role as CEO more fully, and so I see her as vitally important to what lies ahead.

Cerise
She's had a hard life. I'm happy to have been able to give her such a nice relationship in the form of Gal, and develop that, because they both deserve it. Her dynamic with Alabaster in the reboot is a lot softer than it was in S1, because I found it hard to give them that no-holds-barred stance after everything they'd already been through -- death of parents, covering up a murder... and since their sparring was such a big part of S1, it could sort of feel like Cerise's role was a bit diminished. But she's the same Cerise in my eyes, and her essential character, the self-doubting, under-achieving, but wickedly smart cynic, is there. Without the specter of Cerisebloom hovering over all her scenes, we'll get more of a chance to enjoy Cerise in her own right, in S4.

Rose
I've said a lot about her already. The development of Rose into the "main" girl of the harem was unexpected to me when I began the reboot. As so many have observed, she's so much more than she was in S1. I love what I've done with her character and the chemistry she has with Alabaster, and she's also one of my favorites to write dialogue for. Rose Soliloquy is going to be a force to be reckoned with in S4.

Rose2
There are lots of question marks still hovering around her character which will get answered before all is said and done. Rose2 is sweet in more ways than one, and I'm glad she made it out of S3 (relatively) unscathed. In S4 I think we're going to see her mature, if only a little, as she seeks to prove to Alabaster that she can be more than the useless hindrance she was during the nightclub shootout. She'll also grow in a sexual sense -- a lot.

Mom
As with Rose2, the questions still outstanding will be answered. Bringing Mom back was a choice I initially struggled with, I wanted her absence to carry weight, but in the end, I didn't feel like Fuck Quest could properly end without her having a presence again. The mama bear we saw in S1 will be out in force at some point as things get heavy.

>Any final thoughts before the thread inevitably falls off the boards while none of us are looking?

Season 3 has been a lot of fun for me. There were moments of doubt and plenty of missteps but I enjoyed it as a whole.

I look forward to delivering on at least the three bonus lewds promised in this thread, sometime soon. Also some additional teasers and bonus content via twitter.

I'll close with some thoughts about individual characters.

---

Whitney
She has always been one of my favorite characters to write dialogue for, which is why she's always had such a large role. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all. Toying with the various ways she sets fires and tries to put them out again as CEO was a lot of fun, and we'll continue to see some of this in season 4, but I think Whitney as a character is taking the lesson of Makoto's death to heart. We're going to see her step into her role as CEO more fully, and so I see her as vitally important to what lies ahead.

Cerise
She's had a hard life. I'm happy to have been able to give her such a nice relationship in the form of Gal, and develop that, because they both deserve it. Her dynamic with Alabaster in the reboot is a lot softer than it was in S1, because I found it hard to give them that no-holds-barred stance after everything they'd already been through -- death of parents, covering up a murder... and since their sparring was such a big part of S1, it could sort of feel like Cerise's role was a bit diminished. But she's the same Cerise in my eyes, and her essential character, the self-doubting, under-achieving, but wickedly smart cynic, is there. Without the specter of Cerisebloom hovering over all her scenes, we'll get more of a chance to enjoy Cerise in her own right, in S4.

Rose
I've said a lot about her already. The development of Rose into the "main" girl of the harem was unexpected to me when I began the reboot. As so many have observed, she's so much more than she was in S1. I love what I've done with her character and the chemistry she has with Alabaster, and she's also one of my favorites to write dialogue for. Rose Soliloquy is going to be a force to be reckoned with in S4.

Rose2
There are lots of question marks still hovering around her character which will get answered before all is said and done. Rose2 is sweet in more ways than one, and I'm glad she made it out of S3 (relatively) unscathed. In S4 I think we're going to see her mature, if only a little, as she seeks to prove to Alabaster that she can be more than the useless hindrance she was during the nightclub shootout. She'll also grow in a sexual sense -- a lot.

Mom
As with Rose2, the questions still outstanding will be answered. Bringing Mom back was a choice I initially struggled with, I wanted her absence to carry weight, but in the end, I didn't feel like Fuck Quest could properly end without her having a presence again. The mama bear we saw in S1 will be out in force at some point as things get heavy.

Vivian
I feel like Vivian is the sleeper pick for character who changed the most between the original and the reboot. Rose gets all the plaudits but Vivian grew just as much if not moreso. She is no longer the victim and living plot-point, but her own person, with her own agenda and goals. David Darkbloom's death and Vivian's journey with internalizing the truth of what her father was, is something I only touched on a little, but it has radically changed her, ultimately for the better. I've loved to let her go gloves-off in dealing with people. Vivian can verbally tear someone to shreds like few people can. And her weirdly nonchalant, dignified approach to the debauchery she takes part in is cute. She's a loli in spirit, but our Viv-tan is all grown up.

Noelle
If ever there was a character who needs more time, it's Noelle. She's tons of fun to write for, echoes of S1 Cerise in there but with her own flavor. Unfortunately, it was hard to make her prominent when the nature of the plot I set up placed her as essentially an enemy, or at least a person we couldn't reasonably trust. With Noelle out of the FBI completely, it should be much simpler to accept her as an ally. She has a role to play in the events to come.

Kay
She has always been my pick for most underrated character, but that's ultimately my fault for not finding more to do with her. By now, hopefully people see her as a person who's reliable and can be counted on to have our back, even if her motives are sometimes self-serving or utilitarian. She was never going to be the "main" girl in the harem, but she has a definite chemistry with Alabaster, and I'd like to mix her in a bit with the other girls too, bounce her off of them, and let her do important things in S4.

Charlotte
MILFs are sexy as hell, and from the moment I reintroduced Charlotte in the 1st episode of reboot, it was always in the back of my mind that she'd be a welcome addition to the harem. With her fully there now, I've enjoyed exploring her perversions. As a mother, she's much warmer than Scarlett and this naturally translates to a less inhibited sexual attitude. An out-and-out cougar like Charlotte is a new flavor and it's been fun to see her take advantage of Alabaster like that -- while encouraging Scarlett down a path she didn't expect.

Galatea
She is the hardest character to write for. From being half-mute, to being a total shut-in, it can be hard to use her. There are extremely important things for Gal to do in S4, though, and I think the marriage with Cerise will go a long way in healing some of her deep, deep emotional scars. I want to see Gal overcome herself in a sense before things end.

Makoto
I didn't do this character justice and, in the end, it may have been a mistake to introduce her. The time we had with her was fun but I never found a good place to really let her stretch her legs and develop. It's a shame, because a lesbian rapist to rival Whitney was a monumentally cool idea to work with.

Sable
Though not the first haremite to die, Sable's death really signaled a turning point in the narrative, and in its wake, the proceedings are bound to get much heavier. I didn't expect to kill Sable when I began in S3, and even up to the night of the finale I didn't think I would, but I went with it because it felt like the right time. Sable sacrificed herself for Alex, a fact I think we should all remember when we assess her. She could be frustrating, or outright maddening throughout the past two seasons, but she wasn't a monster. I think she's one of the most tragic characters in the story, ultimately.

Renee
How times have changed from the demure Dr. Carte of S1 who blanched at doing anal! Dommy Mommy Renee was an interesting track to take with her, but it made sense, with her slightly older, more hardened, and more-related-to-Whitney character in S3. But outside the bedroom, she's still that acerbic doctor we know and love, and I was elated to have her fully back. In S2, her absence was totally unexplained and so was a huge mystery for much of the season, then when we finally did see her, she was only there for a few exposition-y minutes. Having her as a fully-fledged participant in S3 was a highlight for me, and you can tell how much I missed her by the sheer density of her scenes, lewd and otherwise. S4 portends dark times ahead for Renee; let's see how our favorite Christmas Cake turned MILF deals with Mara one-on-one.

Alex
By far the most complicated character in my own eyes, I don't know what to make of him, or what he ended up becoming S3. I hope when it's all over, we can say that Alex's character arc made sense and was satisfying. In S4, we're going to see more of him and Renee together, since circumstance has put them in the same sad boat, and I hope that dynamic can do good things for both of them when times are hard. Alex is probably the worst off of the entire cast right now -- it's fair to say that the level of despair he's going to begin S4 in borders close to insanity.

Amber
Amber is busy pamphleteering for her new Nazbol club at North High, but she wants you to know that she's not going to let Alabaster Soliloquy get away with taking her normal life from her! She of course has a huge role to play in S4, and her unique set of skills is going to be a boon to the harem. I think we'll also see more of her in a sexual way, too. Only 3 lewds in 28 episodes is unforgivable! As with the other Catachresis family members, there are questions left to answer, which will be.

David Darkbloom
I really, really struggled with bringing him back because I didn't want to make Fuck Quest a story where death is meaningless, and he's the third character resurrected in S3. But unlike Mom and Amber, he does not even have a corporeal form anymore, and there's a good debate to be had over whether the David Darkbloom of S3 is "really" him or not -- which I encourage everyone to consider. It's a philosophical question, ultimately, though. For all intents and purposes he does still exist within the story.
David is in a truly awful purgatory at the moment, but we haven't seen the last of him. Whether he can ever be "redeemed" in your eyes, or in Alabaster's, is an open question. Whether he even wants that, what his goal is at this point, and what purpose he might serve, are other questions to consider. It was interesting to have him in the story without him being the ultimate threat, and what's more, to have him continuously in a state of fear, confusion, and improvisational panic -- it's a side to David we have never seen. But without Cerise's body, he's totally at the whim of whoever holds his implant, which will be yet another slide into powerlessness for the formerly power hungry mogul. I wanted to do a little more in S3 with him advising Alabaster et al on running his company, but never found the time for it, unfortunately. Maybe it will happen in S4? As a side note, I came really close to doing lewds with him learning to enjoy the pleasures of a woman's body, but as I said, it felt wrong to do this to Cerise. Maybe in a non-canonical OVA.

Fazil
Best boy now and forever. He'll be around, although I'm not sure to what level of importance.

Ken Smith
A joke character, and not quite on the level of Fazil for being based. I don't see him having much of a role for important plot matters, but who knows?

Stackleford
Worst boy now and forever. I thought of doing plot-relevant things with him in S3, but I think he is forever relegated to buttmonkey status by this point. But as with Ken, who knows, maybe he'll have a (brief) moment in the sun again.

Tyrus
His absence from the finale was deafening. We will see what he's been up to, early in S4, and we will get closure on the plot threads he's involved with. Friend or enemy, Tyrus isn't gone yet.

Armstrong & Nelson
It was a TON of fun to get to know these two members of the Darkbloom Analytics boardroom, and they'll be around in S4. There's going to be organizational shakeup at Darkbloom Analytics right away in S4, and some crises that they'll be equipped to help with, so look forward to our odd couple helping us navigate stormy seas.

Saul
I might not have made this clear enough, but despite his protestations, Saul loves Alabaster like a son. He's a hardass sometimes, and personality-wise similar to Alabaster, so you don't see it shine through the way it does with Charlotte. But that begrudging affection is really sweet to me -- and I like Saul's character a lot. Don't worry about Charlotte fucking us; as we saw in the finale as well as the episode prior to it, Saul is getting his share of extramarital strange, too.

Dalton
You might hardly recognize this name; I only even mentioned him a couple times in the text of both reboot seasons. He's been at the periphery, but he's a board member along with Armstrong and Nelson, occasionally mentioned as one of Mara's best allies on the board along with the late Vasily Kerimov. He's going to have a bigger role as an antagonist moving forward.

Stasi
She could have been a major antagonist, but you chose to neutralize her. That's a fine decision, but it doesn't clear the deck of threats -- just gives other threats a chance to rear their head! Stasi was really underdeveloped. We would have seen much more of her if you hadn't chosen to kill her, but the cards fell where they did and she got got.

Will & Auburn
Yes, we will see some more of them, but no, they won't be a major focus. They have a role to play but of course this is Fuck Quest, and secondary characters will always take a backseat to our harem. For reference, if I go through the text of S3 for "prominence by mention," none of the characters outside Alabaster and the harem match the prominence of even the least-mentioned haremite. Having said this, I needed a couple characters to add for some utilitarian purposes, which we'll get to, but the added flavor of being Amber's high school buddies makes them a bit more interesting than creating new people from whole cloth. It also let me tie a bow on the StuCo arc.

Mara
By now it's clear that Mara is one of the major threats we face, if not THE major threat. She knows it, too, and is taking measures accordingly. I wanted her to be around more in S3, but what little we did see of her was scary enough. One semi-scraped plotline I wanted to do was a battle between Mara and Whitney for influence over Vivian, but ultimately, I think Vivian is far too smart to ever realistically consider Mara trustworthy. Mara took advantage of Vivian's grief in the wake of Darkbloom's death, but over time, Vivian was more than capable of cottoning to what Mara really is, and deciding for herself that Whitney is a more reliable person to align with. So with that thought in mind, it didn't feel right to have a subplot where you question whether Vivian is falling for Mara's manipulations.

Mystery girl on the poster
I won't say anything more about her other than that she's a major player, and will be one of the most important characters in S4. No, she isn't Auburn's psycho stalker who burned down the school; she's much more important than that. Are we going to fuck her? Well, she's a cute girl, and this is Fuck Quest. So let's see.

Alabaster
Marrying Alabaster off was a choice I wasn't sure about, but having done it, I'm extremely happy. Someone mentioned that Alabaster is a man now, and how surprising that is, and it's true. The reboot seasons have chronicled Alabaster's maturation into a real adult. Yeah he's still a sarcastic ass and hornier than the rabbit he just fucked, but he's not the kid we knew in S1, and that's really arresting when I reflect on it. Alabaster will have a lot to manage in S4, so please help him.

>Oh right, that reminds me! What exactly happened on the helicopter flight with Whitney and Vivian that made Whitney so upset? I forget if we ever got an explanation for that.

I didn't have something clearly in mind at the time, but I always pictured it as involving the two sisters' biggest point of divergence, which is how they feel about their father. Whitney HATES Darkbloom, while Vivian is ambivalent at the very worst (especially at the time).

Of course, Whitney's disinterest in the minutiae of being CEO is also something that grates on Vivian's nerves.

So the thing in the helicopter was some combination of Vivian being snitty about Whitney's unfitness as CEO, and some harsh remarks back and forth about David Darkbloom.

A sisterly spat.

>Please, just write out Noelle. Playing the "we ruined her life" card to generate sympathy for an author's pet character is a cheap trick.

I don't usually put out authorial interpretation as the absolute final word on how people read a scene, but you're talking in terms of my intent, so I'll say I think you misread my intent.

Booting Noelle out of the FBI naturally leaves as the first questions, how upset is she about that, and to what degree does she hold Alabaster accountable?

Quite on the contrary of trying to make the reader feel guilty, I wanted to get these questions out of the way immediately, and show that although Noelle is unhappy to be fired, she recognizes that it's not really all our fault, and that of course, we'd have legitimate reason to be upset at her as well. I wanted to face that head on with a couple sarcastic quips, which by doing this, basically show that they come to a sort of tentative reconciliation right away. We are not truly meant to feel like we "ruined her life." This exchange sets the table for feeling all right about interacting with her in the future.

>1. What was your reaction to us hugging Alex?

Surprise. It didn't seem in-character for Alabaster, so I had to have Alex comment on that, but it was a nice moment. I like those little moments where write-ins gain traction and something unexpected happens as a result.

>2. What would've happened if we never said "You're great" to Mom again? Did you always expect us to?

I would have to roll with a version of the story where Mom continues on in ignorance of her dual identity, at least for a little while, or possibly just gone with that version of the plot for the entire season. But of course I knew you would all do the obvious thing. In this case, it's the only write-in that I expected in advance. I would have been disappointed in you all if you didn't do it!

>3. The flashback of Alabaster shitting on Rose's dream is canon right?

100%

>Does she even remember that it was Alabaster?

They don't remember, and they certainly don't remember it being one another. Rose was 6, and for Alabaster it was a pretty unremarkable moment. He probably wasn't paying attention when Rose's name was introduced, and conversely his name was never given to her. He left the program just one or two class sessions after that so they never got to know each other.

>How different would Rose be if we never said that to her?

I know the implication of the flashback is Alabaster's mockery was a formative experience in Rose's life, and perhaps it was one, but it would have been one of many. In other words I don't think that this single instance, as awful as it was for the poor girl, made her a person whose politics and outlook you (likely) disagree with or turned her into a BDSM switch or made her obsessed with winning. I don't truck with the idea that singular moments totally change what otherwise would have been a person's life path -- at least not unless that moment is a LOT more monumentally traumatic than being bullied once.

Rose had many influences growing up that made her see the world as she does. And while she's hypocritical in a lot of ways, while e.g. her social-justice beliefs are often depicted as a mask she wears, I don't think that means what she claims to believe aren't "actually" things she believes. So for her to find these beliefs, wasn't a switch that got flipped in 2nd grade to set her down that path, but the longer culmination of those many influences.

It's an essential aspect of Rose's character that she sees the world so differently from Alabaster because it shows how two so similar personalities can arrive at two so dissimilar worldviews; and then, despite that, find reconciliation between themselves. Politics and cultural values and deeply reasoned moral principles are very important, but they're window dressing over our even deeper core personality. If those are simpatico, you can overcome any other difference. Her core personality was already there, and the window dressing would have looked similar whether or not Alabaster mocked her.

>Does Rose know, or suspect, her parents are swingers? It's possible Alabaster claiming that her Mom gave him a Titjob would get her asking questions, but would she be surprised how deep this rabbit hole goes?

This is a really interesting question, and one I hadn't considered.

It only recently came as news to Alabaster, so you might think Rose would be similarly surprised -- we tend to have blind spots where our parents are concerned, especially around their sex life. But Rose grew up in their home from birth, and also has a bit more awareness than Alabaster ("I make it my business to know things") so maybe she's seen some things she repressed. I'll go with, she knows about it, but doesn't dig into it.

>If she didn't know about it before she definitely knows now, we straight up told her about the titty fuck

That doesn't mean she knows her parents are swingers, just that her mom fooled around with Alabaster. Would Rose have any inkling that Saul and Charlotte have enjoyed bringing home big tiddy paralegals and railing them together? That's the substance of the question at hand!

>How would you have ended episode 1 if we didn't choose to give Rose2 a ride?

That's a tough one. I didn't have an alternate path in mind and I really wanted to close with the reveal of Amber. Without offering to drive Rose2 home, I don't think I would have been able to do that, so I would have had to come up with an alternate scene. I think what I had in mind at the time was something ominous with Mara, or maybe a tense scene between Whitney and Vivian after they returned from their little grand canyon excursion. But it wouldn't have landed with the same wallop of seeing Camelia roll up to the club, for sure.

>Do you still have your whiteboard lying around OP? Or did you wind up returning it to work with all those sticky note stains?

I do have it! No one ever noticed it was missing, so it's all good. In keeping with my commitment to plan less, I haven't been using it, and the unused sticky notes from last season remain -- although I've technically cleared several of them in s3.

Hey, why not reveal them. Here they all are, verbatim, as they sat at the end of last season. These are word for word except for notes in [ ].

>Cerise
Lewd: family movie night
Dialogue: "Don't cum on any my stuff, Alabaster. I swear to God."

>Whitney
Dialogue: "Pew pew!" (while holding a real loaded gun)
Dialogue: "I... don't know what that means." (in response to a joke at her expense)
Lewd: Alabaster sets Whitney loose on Rose: "I raped her -- came in her -- she stole my cum from you. What are you gonna do about that?"
Plot: Joined a chapter of campus communists at Berkley by accident ("I really liked all the red they wore")

>Rose
Character detail: Unironically retweeted the "guys literally only want one thing and it's disgusting" tweet
Dialogue: "I'm being hate crimed. These people are hate criming me!"
Lewd: Raped in "her" own car (the Volt Ally bought from Charlotte)

>Camelia
Dialogue: "I'll burn you. [...] No, that isn't a metaphor. I will burn you with hot pokers."[*]
Character detail: Camelia reading "On the Juche Idea" -- "The Kims have some good ideas!"
Character detail: Camelia, dumpster diving: "Hey, there's good shit in here!" [this somehow didn't get cleared despite hitting it in S2]
Dialogue: "The best op-sec is no op at all. I'm all analogue."

[*The full dialogue would have involved Camelia threatening to "burn" us, Rose freaking out, Alabaster clarifying that she only means in the metaphorical sense of releasing the trove of info she has on them, and Camelia counter-clarifying that she's being literal.]

>Vivian
Dialogue: "My human fragility got the better of me for a brief moment."
Character detail: Vivian has to sit on a booster seat at the Senate hearing
Lewd: Make her wear cum-stained panties all day long at work

>Galatea
Plot: Gets money from fleecing /phishing old folks (takes their money when they die)
Character detail: Camelia gets her drunk once to loosen her up
Lewd: (In a very small voice): "Choke me..."
Character detail: hacking details, browsing with Tor, using Kalilinux, uses a cracked WPA network in her apartment (brute force), got into DA with a Slack exploit, etc.
Lewd: Wants to be drugged and raped while unconscious

>Kay
Lewd: Obsessed with anal [this was given to Sable]
Plot: Accidentally hits Rose with her car
Lewd: Sex swing?
Lewd: Porthole sweater... but no cleavage to show off
Plot: Leaking details to her favorable to Cerise

>Sable
Character detail: Prework pushups as a daily ritual
Lewd: Timid -> wildcat during sex / missionary -> cowgirl

>Alex
Lewd: Whitney writes lewd things on his body [another one I was just talking about!]
Lewd: Under the desk BJ

>Ally
Plot: Phone tracking convo (trailer hitches) -- Ally and Cerise[*]
Dialogue [actually narration]: You've just started on your second helping of soft-serv when Rose sits down across from you.
Dialogue: (Popping up on Rose in the women's bathroom): "Someone should really make a law against that, huh?" [another one I was just talking about!]

[*The concept I had in mind here was Alabaster would take Camelia's advice from episode 3(?) and have a conversation about something he doesn't ever talk about, while his phone is out, then see what sort of targeted ads he gets. In this example, he's discussing trailer hitches with Cerise -- and of course starts to see ads for trailer hitches.]

>Misc
Plot: Gustav is in Palau ("Never come to Palau, children. It is an island hell you won't escape.")

>You should definitely plan much more than you did in this season.

I know. I'm planning to use the inter-season break to think a lot more about what vectors I want to take the quest in. Originally I was going to come back in July, but I want to take that additional month for more recharging, and more time to mull it all over.

I thought I could end it all in a more freestyle jazz way this season -- but that didn't pan out, obviously. So to make sure I really do complete the story in season 4, it'll be back to my traditional modes of trying to map out episodes with flowcharts prior to running, and trying to keep several steps ahead of the current moment, while keeping the plethora of possible endpoints in mind. I can't tie things up without much deeper planning because now there's just so much going on.

(Oh, and this is why I cleared the sticky notes just now and posted them -- the white board's coming back in style, boys.)

>I'm hyped as fuck. How do you plan on fitting THE ENTIRE CAST?

Smaller sticky notes, and denser packing. There won't be a need for a "Flashback" section either, which clears up space as well. I'll see what it looks like as I dive into it, though. I might just take another whiteboard if I decide I need to.

>I dearly enjoyed FQ Season 1 years ago and thought it went to the great quest graveyard in the sky as so many such works do. I was very surprised then to see Season 3 Episode 12 in a both rare and spur of the moment visit to /qst/ in search of a new, meaty quest to read. I finished catching up later the same day as the last story post, having spent my free time buried in it. I really will be looking forward to Season 4 when it arrives.
>I'm a lurker but just wanted to say something about how much I enjoyed reading the quest in all its seasons. Godspeed.

It's great to have you. Please tell the "gently hold her hand" guy from S1 that I miss him too! Looking forward to your presence in August.

>>Kay
>>Plot: Accidentally hits Rose with her car
>HOW THE FUCK DID I MISS THIS

Just to be clear, I envisioned it being more of a love tap, not like a send-her-to-the-ER kinda thing. Of course now it's going to be the ending of season 4, and it'll kill Rose, sending her sideways into another realm for Season 5, AKA Fuck Quest: Rosekai.

>>Lewd: Alabaster sets Whitney loose on Rose: "I raped her -- came in her -- she stole my cum from you. What are you gonna do about that?"
>This is more funny than hot to me

It was meant to be kind of a funny line, in keeping with redoing the whole "Whitney's ten commandments" thing -- a season 1 callback to when the comedy was even more absurd.

>>Lewd: Make her wear cum-stained panties all day long at work
>Wait have we not done this already? That's a crime
We kiiinda got it in episode 8 but it's not how I wanted to do it. I need to keep this sticky note around, it sounds like.

>>Lewd: Raped in "her" own car (the Volt Ally bought from Charlotte)
>We'll have to do it in season 4 than, won't we?
I don't know if Alabaster still has that Chevy Volt anymore now that he's rich, but regardless, he'll have a chance to sexually assault his wife in places she doesn't expect.

>>Character detail: Prework pushups as a daily ritual
>She can do pushups?
She could, yes. It was meant to be a really surprising thing, of course.

>>Lewd: Under the desk BJ
>Giving or receiving?
I'm sure he wouldn't say no if you're offering, but I pictured receiving, of course. It would be a sort of exhibitionist scene where other coworkers are present but unaware.

>>I don't know if Alabaster still has that Chevy Volt anymore now that he's rich
>You know he still has it just to spite Rose.

On reflection, you're 100% correct. And he routinely offers to sell it back to her for increasingly absurd amounts of money. $500 million... $1 billion... $1.5 billion? "Just ask Whitney for a loan, I'm sure she'd be happy to help."

>Did you ever plan on revealing how Whitney managed to negotiate Renee's freedom with our nation's president, OP?

This was a S2/3 concept I never really got the chance to do properly, which is that in the universe of Fuck Quest, it was meant to be ambiguous who is actually President right now. I pictured a dialogue between Rose and Alabaster where they argue about it but it never becomes clear who actually won in their universe -- and how they truly feel about the outcome.

>I'm so sad you didn't do this. I can imagine people panicking so hard

Maybe it could still happen. It is certainly the case that Whitney has the favor of the current US President in FQ, and geopolitics is maybe a bit more important to S4 with international attention on Silicon Valley/Sand Reckoner now.

>You had definitely poked and prodded at it a bit, which I find hilarious, so I'm okay with this answer.

While admittedly, the idea of seeing a conversation between Whitney and Trump is funny in concept, and when I did the line in the TIME article about the pardon, I thought of what that might have looked like (Whitney and Hillary would be funny in its own way, too, but maybe not as much) -- I try to steer clear of directly referencing specific figures when I do political satire in FQ. It doesn't seem like the right thing to me, I'd prefer to lampoon the climate, rather than the real people populating it. We've all seen the jokes about the people themselves.

Certain Silicon Valley guys have been mentioned by name, and have even shown up in person, but even there I tend not to directly say who they are -- and I sometimes think maybe I should just use expy figures for them instead.

Putin and George W. Bush were exceptions, but that was a reference to something which occurred as far back as 2001 (their meeting at Brdo Castle) so it seemed more "historical" than "political" if that makes sense.

Mid Season 4 questions

>>Qiangxiang
>>Gangam style
>Dropped

I'll kick off reader Q&A with this not-really-a-question!

I spend way too long on the chart whenever I update it, trying to pick the most perfect thing for every possible category for every character while keeping the responses mostly unique too. I've spent many hours on it, really.

So for Chloe's favorite one hit wonder, I couldn't find a lot of resources for Chinese one hit wonders. I was pretty stumped since she's not the type to consume a lot of pop from the west. But then I thought of some backstory here.

Chloe was raised by her uncle as we know, who is a staid conservative when it comes to matters of culture, a true Chinese nationalist. So of course, pop-cultural items from other countries were strictly forbidden in his household, from fast food (as we've seen) to Hollywood films etc... but if he hates American culture, then certainly he hates other east Asian cultures even more...

Now Chloe would have been around 8-10 when Gangnam Style exploded in popularity. I'm sure all her school friends were listening to it. So I imagine her also listening to it, but not for enjoyment, rather as an act of defiance. Bumping it loudly in her bedroom to piss her uncle off. Defiance which she ultimately paid for... but it ended being a catchy song that grew on her despite herself.

>What a lovely story of horrible child abuse
>Speaking of the chart, what's the significance behind Smatter's favourite font? Since you made it an image, I can't even google the name of it

Wingdings. It's not available on Google sheets.

She likes it because the symbols are funny.

>What are you going to do after Fuck Quest ends, OP? Will we ever hear from you again? Will we ever explore this world/these characters you've created again or will this be the definitive end? ;_;

After the finale, I'll make some announcements. I don't want to talk too much until then about what the future holds.

>Why a Q&A at this point in the season?

Because I'm crazy and unpredictable. But also because I want to give y'all something for Saturday even if I'm not putting a new episode up.

>Who would you main in a /fq/ inspired Smash Bros clone?

Dad. It's so weird that they made him an Alabaster echo, though.

>I apologize, but this has been rattling around in my head for weeks.
>How does Rose2 feel about people who eat pull-n-peel twizzlers without either pulling or peeling?

She's fine with it, because this is how she herself eats them.

>Whose perspective had you enjoyed writing the most now that you have written from Cerise perspective.
>Whitneyquest was definitely one of my favorite moments from the pseudo conclusion of original season 1

There was a scene with Fazil's POV in season 3 if you'll recall that was a lot of fun to write.

But overall, it's been an absolute blast to write from Amber's perspective -- I'm so glad I made that decision.

For the lewd scenes especially it's been a ton of fun. I've written SO much smut from the perspective of Alabaster, which is always cool of course, but being able to flip the script and show it from the perspective of the girl getting fucked, to describe in graphic detail from their own viewpoint how much they love his dick, how much they love to get cummed inside etc, is so hot. The first scene with Alabaster from Amber's perspective was one I definitely needed some me-time for. But she's a ton of fun to write even outside the lewds, too.

>Here's one for you, OP: Did you have a plan for Darkbloom if we hadn't gone off the rails with body-snatching Dalton? Is it still too soon to reveal it if so?

I did have a plan, and of course that's totally off the rails now as you say. My preexisting plan for Darkbloom this season totally blinded me to the possibility of putting him in Darkbloom during the premiere -- so I'm glad you all wrote it in. This is much better. It's made season 4 so much interesting. My plan would have had him still hidden in Amber's safe, out-of-play, for most of the season.

He wouldn't have stayed there forever, of course; it was a Chekov's Implant situation. One of the first things I wrote for season 4 during the midseason break was a scene involving Darkbloom that I had intended for the finale, or an episode very close to it. That scene almost certainly won't happen, or at least in the form I thought -- it would have to be radically altered if it did.

(Totally blinded me to putting him in Dalton, rather -- he's been bodyjacking Dalton that the two are basically synonymous at this point!)

>What HP House is Alex, really?
I can see an argument for all 4, which is why the little joke there. But my gut feeling when I initially got to him was Slytherin. You might not expect it, but it somehow fits, right?

>Why Is Smatters so fond of Jimmy Carter?

This came to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident

Also, he may or may not have ordered a secret FBI black operation to free the subjects of cruel human experimentation from their tormentors and reintegrate them back into society under assumed names, in the witness protection program

>Are you making the joke I think you are with her favorite element?

Maybe.

>Why did you add Sable and Makoto back?

It was mean to take them out just because they departed from the story. They belong there.

>Any significance to changing Vivian’s tarot arcana and giving hers to Chloe?

I was struggling with Chloe's, but in the end, The Magician seemed to be the best fit for her. It also wasn't as ominous as the other cards that I thought might fit for her. And since I want responses to be as unique as possible, I tried to find a different card that fit with Vivian, too. It's funny, but the same tarot arcana fit quite well for both characters.

You know, people think "death" is a very ominous card, but it's not, really.

>the Death card symbolises the end of a major phase or aspect of your life that you realise is no longer serving you, opening up the possibility of something far more valuable and essential. You must close one door to open another. You need to put the past behind you and part ways, ready to embrace new opportunities and possibilities. It may be difficult to let go of the past, but you will soon see its importance and the promise of renewal and transformation. If you resist these necessary endings, you may experience pain, both emotionally and physically, but if you exercise your imagination and visualise a new possibility, you allow more constructive patterns to emerge.

Very apt for Vivian!

>Any significance to Sable’s stand being *that song?*

It just fit particularly well for her character.

>Can we mating press Chloe’s esophagus?

Lewd.

>Was there anyone you wish could have come along [to Vail] that didn't make the cut?

I came to it without a strong opinion on who should go or stay. Although I did have a particular scene in mind had Vivian gone -- but this wasn't a scenario I was heart-set on realizing, just something I could have done if she was present. Ditto for an idea I had if Chloe had gone.

The team you assembled was fine, and got the job done. It was always going to be a messy extraction, but it was fun to use the team we got.

>Piggybacking off that, were there alternatives to the final showdown with Mara, at least in your head?

Oh several. Of course if you had let Mara slip away, that would have changed the endgame entirely. But once David was on the Vail team, I really wanted him to notch the kill, and I don't think her death could have been any more satisfying.

> Who's your favourite non-haremite, /fq/?

It's hard for me to name a favorite in terms of a character I'm fondest of - there are characters I like to write for more or less, because of how fun they are, but it's hard for me to cast it in terms of "oh, I like X better than Y as a character.

But if I had to pick a favorite secondary, then probably Saul. He was a good man and a good father. You got him colored through Alabaster's POV (and the mutual animosity they shared) 90% of the time so it wasn't always apparent how strongly he loved his family, even Alabaster himself. His anger at Alabaster, when it arose, was always driven by disappointment and concern.

>So David is from eastern Tennessee? I can't remember right off if it's been mentioned or if he's just an escapee from greater Appalachia

Yes. Here's how I put it in a Q&A thread from season 3:

He was the son of a coal miner, but in eastern Tennessee -- very far east, near the border with WV.

Specifically he grew up in the Mountain City area. Go ahead and pull that up on Google Maps!

>Did he ever enjoy any of it?

No, and he's got a lot of daddy issues. A huge part of Darkbloom's psyche is striving to be something more than his upbringing. Here's how I put it in the Q&A at the end of season 2:

>I mentioned this very briefly in supplemental material but Darkbloom is the son of a coal miner. He grew up in poverty and squalor in Appalachia. That kind of upbringing made him constantly strive and climb, to prove that he was better than that, but in his heart, he always sort of felt like a country bumpkin, I think. (I wanted to do a scene where he suddenly slips into a thick southern accent, catches himself, and goes back to his affected west coast dialect.)

>My friend and I were discussing a potential /fq/ fighting game, and I came up with the concept of all fights being rape battles. You'd have to sexually dominate your foe into submission in order to win.
>(Alex is the joke character since he has no offensive capabilities whatsoever.)

>Rushdown:
Whitney
Amber
Makoto
Chloe

>Grappler:
Kaa-san
Charlotte
Smatters

>Zoner:
Rose
Noelle
Sable

>Glass Cannon:
Vivian
Gal
Camelia

>Shoto/All-Rounder:
Rose2
Kay
Renee

>Trapper
Cerise (can summon Furby familiars and has a super to summon the mysterious succubus minion, Besuto)
Alabasterina

>It almost upsets me how easy it is to envision some of their sprites as if this were done as a 2D fighter. I can see Renee's labcoat billowing in the 'wind' while she tosses a lit cigarette to the side while entering the arena way too easily.

The alt costumes alone! Whitney in her business suit or spats and tanktop; Rose, Cerise, and Gal with wedding dress versions; Rose2 with a catgirl outfit; Vivian with businesswear or full GothLoli regalia; Smatters with nothing at all! Plus special unlockable costumes, too!

And the jiggle physics!

> And didn’t he do it to avoid going to prom with his cousin? (once removed)

He went to prom with Rose2 as part of an extremely elaborate, horribly petty attempt (which was totally successful) to get under Rose's skin. He chose Rose2 entirely because she has the same name as Rose, and so he could make Rose think he was about to ask her out before pulling the rug from under her. Rose then counter-attacked by taking Stackleford to prom.

No one came out of this looking dignified.

>Also OP, are you watching Mrs. Fletcher on HBO?

No, but it doesn't look like my cup of tea. Now, if she was banging her son then we could talk.

>What was Whitney even doing on prom night, anyway?

Maybe we'll find out someday.

>I always get a little down when I think about Whitney's relationship with Alabaster.

It is bittersweet. But Whitney is happy with what she has. If you think of her role, she's really kind of the queen of the harem, even if Alabaster is legally wed to Rose. And I've tried to make it clear that there's a true love between the two of them (him and Whitney) that's understood and mutually reciprocated.

>Nelson Berenstoin
>Berenstoin
>i never noticed that Mandela reference before

People caught "Berenstoin" right off but I'm not sure if anyone noticed "Nelson" being also a reference before.

>How do you say Ally? Like the word alley or like the word ally? I’ve always read it alley.

It's meant to be read "alley."

>How might Charlotte and Scarlett differentiate themselves as Grapplers?

Charlotte is a half-grappler. She has long-ranger options and projectiles similar to Rose, but they're much weaker, and not ideal. She wants to be close, but she can manage at long distance.

Scarlett is a true grappler. She has no projectiles to speak of, and several moves that can eat projectiles. She always wants to be right up in your face. Her ladle can do some work at mid-range but she's best close-up. Lots of command grabs where she can stun you with her baking, etc.

>Another question for you, OP. What was Catachresis!Mom's job back before we hired her to work as DBA's pastry chef? It seems pretty clear that their family didn't have a father, so I'm just curious as to how they got by.

I never stated this in the text, but I pictured Scarlett working at Whole Foods as a supervisor to make ends meet. You may recall that Whitney worked at a Whole Foods too during season 2 (not the same one, of course).

End of Season 4 questions

>1. Alex. Everything. He truly did wind up as the deepest individual cast member. What were your thoughts on his development as a whole? Did you ever expect to tell the story you did with him when you introduced him?

Alex was really hard. Every time I lifted him up, I ended up kicking him back down. I didn't intend for it to be that way, but that's how it turned out. Some of his suffering was on his own shoulders, but I don't think all of it, or even a majority of it, was.

But as I piled on bad thing after another upon his shoulders, I really didn't want him to be just "the sweet kid who bad things happen to" -- I hate character development like that. So his evolving personality was actually my way of making him more compelling. It's much more interesting to see a person who takes their life into their own hands, even in times of tragedy, than one who's just the world's punching bag forever. Alex ended up having a darker edge to him -- the deceitfulness he could muster, the anger in his heart that sometimes reared its head. I love him a lot, and I never ever expected him to become what he did.

>2. In the end, who was your absolute favorite character to write for? Who had the best lines and who had the most satisfying arc in your opinion?

Whitney was never not fun, in all seasons. Whether she was a simple tomboy gf or a high-powered CEO, she was always fun to feed lines. She had some of my best.

Rose was fun in the context of her feuding with Alabaster. Ditto Cerise, but I found Rose's style of tsun more entertaining to write, personally.

Charlotte's pervertedness was a joy... you can argue over best mom, but I kinda feel like she's the hottest Mom. Her attitude towards fucking Alabaster is really sexy.

Vivian's overly eloquent speech was super fun, I loved making her such a weirdo. And while I'm talking perverts, her hedonism was also super hot...

A lot of my favorite moments happened with characters playing against type. Gal being assertive, Mom being deredere, Vivian being emotive. And so on. It's always fun to take a character out of their element.

>3. Conversely, were there any characters you had absolute disdain for? Even Qiangxiang was portrayed in a tragic light, and with good reason, so I feel you didn't hate her as much as we did.
>Who are the FQ characters you actively hate? You mentioned in the DMs that there was a handful of them, and I know Chloe isn't one of them

Every named Kerimov we met, particularly Alyosha, but they're all rotten. Chloe was quite right in her assessment, they are representative of how Russian society has degenerated in the last decades.

Li Xi. Dalton Cantor. Hugh Thurston. Konstanin Federov.

And perhaps most notably: David Darkbloom. I despise David Darkbloom. He got far better than he deserved.

Characters I notably don't hate: Chloe, Stackleford, Tyrus and Marquis.

I may be forgetting some.

>4. Madlibs when?

Someday.

>5. I guess most importantly, are you happy with how things turned out?

I'm so happy I could cry. This might be the best thing I will ever write... pathetically enough. If not in quality of prose than in how the story elements finally converge.

I consider this ending the best gift I could have given you all, in the time I had... I tried to make it that. It wasn't perfect, far from it, but I love it for what it is, and how it all came together... I hope you got the joy from it that I myself did.

>>Who whas Blue Camelia?
>I always asumed she was sort of a reemplazement for Amber to fill the Camelia role, but I don't know if there's something more.

This is essentially true.

In case it doesn't click for you or I didn't make it obvious, the story of the FQ reboot spans across two iterations of the same universe. At the end of season 2, Alabaster dies under Darkbloom Analytics with Rose. What we the audience see, him passing out -- is followed shortly thereafter by the detonations... and when we see him wake up by himself down there, we're actually seeing him in the next iteration of the same universe. Blue Camelia was the Camelia of that iteration; red Camelia the Camelia of the prior iteration. But Amber of the final iteration, is also Camelia... the duplication of Camelia is part of the glitch that forced the Optimizing Parameter to cut scenario 421 short.

>Why is Pinochet the favorite dictator of best girl Renee?

I'm not sure. Renee kind of likes bad guys who live in South America, I guess. She likes McAfee, too!

>Other ending possibilities?
>I assume our method of entry when attacking DB analytics changed the endgame on who the final antagonist was being either alyosha or misunderstood best girl.

This is correct. Going by sewer would result in Chloe's death, with Alyosha as final boss. Going by the front gates would have resulted in an utter clusterfuck with both of them surviving to the finale.

We got the version where Alyosha died, and Chloe was final boss -- I prefer it this way. Chloe, I think, was the most compelling villain of all four seasons.

It didn't change the contours of the final arc, except in who our antagonist was.

>Any recent choices you were surprised by the viewers making. I thought I was going to be crucified for cooperating with Chloe in the beginning of this episode but it ended up the popular vote.

This 100%. I expected you to kill Chloe -- I even wrote her death in advance. I think what I was forced to whip up instead is actually more satisfying. She lives on after the fall from grace, like Satan evicted from Paradise. You know, I actually kinda mourn for Chloe. Alabaster was her God -- and because of what she did, he achieved an ultimate victory he never could have, otherwise -- but also because of what she did, she can never again have that bliss herself.

Lucifer was once God's most cherished angel, and he in turn loved God the most of all... look what it gets him.

Another choice I was surprised by was keeping Alex out of Darkbloom Analytics when he volunteered to go.

>Any possibilities to have everyone alive heading into the endgame?

It's hard to envision counterfactuals. When you let Chloe into the Nail House, Alaska was inevitable in some fashion... you set yourself on a path to ruin. I expected that to be the case and didn't have an alternate plan. Like so many other times, you could have surprised me -- but in this case, you didn't. You got, more or less, the ending I envisioned since the start of the season.

>Why didn't Mom disappear along with Rose2?

One of my favorite authorly anecdotes is about Raymond Chandler, the best known figure in classic hardboiled detective fiction. His crime stories were vast, complex, sprawling things with tons of interconnected parts that you'd have to read through multiple times to pick up.

Therefore it can be hard to key in on the meaning of individual events and how they link to the bigger picture. Such was the case with his best novel The Big Sleep, which was later adapted into a feature film. When the director, confused by one plot point in particular, sent him a telegram reading: "WHO KILLED THE CHAUFFEUR?" -- Raymond cabled back: "NO IDEA."

In all seriousness... Rose2 was a glitch of some sort, created by Cerise and Amber's desperation for a normal life -- she disappears because, as many people have pointed out, Rose2 isn't people. But this opens a host of other questions... why we glimpse Rose2 in the first iteration of the universe we see (could be backwards-reasoned as perhaps flashbacks only actually relevant towards the next iteration, but that's kinda hokey)... and what the actual mechanism of her existence/disappearance is... I can't really answer any of it. She's a glitch, after all. And the Optimizing Parameter explains that the glitch corrupted her ability to discern the direction of entropy's arrow... that's the catch-all reasoning behind some dangling plot threads.

>I would say that Chloe's sin wasn't that she loved Alabaster.
>Her sin was that she couldn't love Whitney.

Astutely made observation. She even recognizes her jealousy as the major flaw, in the end... too late. A classic yandere.

Gonna take another break, more answers later.

>Our resident yandere didn't even make it into Yandere Survival Quest. Evicted from paradise indeed.

This was a huge missed opportunity. I actually planned for her to show up in it as the one and only non-insane character -- helping Alabaster get away from all the other crazy bitches. Didn't have the time to put it in though.

---

Whoa, I passed out and woke up to a very interesting discussion. I take all criticism in the spirit offered and always use it to make myself better, so I don't think these points are unfair or unkind. I do disagree with some of it, though. All I can do is explain my own reasoning, and hope that sparks some more good back-and-forth!

>On the inevitability of Alaska:
I truly was committed to having a way to avoid the flash-forwards from really happening.

I don't know what the end phase of the story would look like if we sidestepped the "ruined world" Alaska visions, but I did have a thumbnail concept of how the flash forward <span class="mu-i">itself[/spoiler] would actually be explained: Alabaster would be given a glimpse of it via Sand Reckoner fuckery, and get the chance to avert it.

I do understand the sensation that it was all set in stone because of the way it was presented to you -- flash forwards have a way of doing that -- but I do think your choices mattered.

>On [Y] not mattering
I don't see the [Y] vote as actually having been a choice. Why would you ever choose anything else? By that point you'd already committed to "resetting" the world in a prior vote and had every reason to hit the button once you'd heard the exposition in the lighthouse. If that "vote" had gone the other way, I would have been shocked beyond belief. I have no idea what I'd have done.

So it wasn't meant to be a vote at all, even if presented that way. I gave you all the chance to say "[Y]! [Y]! [Y]!" but I wasn't trying to amp up the stakes with the "you won't remember" warning and make readers doubt hitting the button by then. Actually, I was originally intending to do the whole thing as a single post -- maybe I should have -- and you'll note how quickly I posted both updates.

The choice with real import happened before the lighthouse, when Rose reveals her pregnancy and Alabaster wonders whether it will happen again in the next world. That was a bigger leap of faith for us all to take before we knew the contours of what we were signing up for.

>On immediately contradicting the "you won't remember" warning
Lots of characters get contradicted fairly quickly after making major assertions -- the Optimizing Parameter isn't god. She either found a way to do what they both wanted in the end even though she originally thought it wouldn't work, or Alabaster and Rose themselves contravened what fate had in store for them, or maybe something else... I don't know. It's better to leave a little magic to wonder over.

I didn't mean for it to be such a headfake. I set it up so you'd all be okay with Alabaster being the only one to remember, and wanted to make Rose's memory a bonus -- not the principal "stake" of resetting the world.

But in the end, someone else had to remember. Take a look at Alabaster's little mini nervous breakdown in the epilogue right before he goes downstairs. Being the only one to remember would have made him question his own sanity, and it would have left him ironically kind of lost -- always questioning how to interact with the people he loves. Rose has always been his primary confidant... so it made sense for he to be the person who crosses between worldlines with him. She remembers in order to help him navigate his new reality -- and vice versa.

>On Ep14
I'll talk more about it as I go back and do more Q&A, but yes, it was hamfisted deck-clearing. The loss of Whitney was so much harder for me to do than anything else before or after... it tore me up, even though I knew what was lying in wait at the lighthouse -- I was utterly depressed for days after. I can only imagine what it did for everyone else, who didn't know for sure I would be merciful in the final phase.

After that moment, there was no possible way to avoid a "reset" attempt, so the deaths of other main characters just didn't carry the same horrifying gutpunch. So Ep14 as a climax, I completely admit, doesn't work as well as I could have made it. It wasn't really a climax... the lighthouse was. Ep14 was just a long and violent transition period to the choices of real meaning after the story's worst moment of despair.

>On the cliches of the ending
Rose remembering is cliche, but so would Alabaster being the only one cursed/blessed/blursed with memory. This is all nothing innovative as a narrative, really. The beauty of FQ lies, I think, if there's any beauty at all... not in the mechanics of the plot but in the characters.

But Fuck Quest is, of course, the monomyth. It's as straight a retelling of the monomyth as you could conjure up. I didn't set out with that goal of course, but as I wrote the final passages, I realized to myself: I just recapitulated every single step of the hero's journey. But of course I did -- there's a reason it's called the "mono"myth. Nearly every epic story is a version of it. Mine just wears that fact on its sleeve. So yes, it's more than cliche... it's the ultimate cliche.

>On Rose's plot armor
Once Alaska really was inevitable -- and to a lot of readers I understand that it looked that way from jump -- she did have plot armor by definition. I can't deny that, but I'm okay with how I structured it. The stakes of the narrative lay elsewhere than Rose's physical safety in season 4. We were dealing with a collapsing reality and had no idea what was really happening with the Sand Reckoner superplot until the very final moments in the lighthouse. Those were the real stakes.

Now that it's all over, I can say that although I truly love all girls, even Makoto (I wanted to give even the most ignored and pushed-aside girl a beautiful and meaningful ending), I can admit that Rose came to occupy a special place in my heart.

That's obvious enough anyway -- but I really hope she doesn't come off as a mary sue. She's way too deeply flawed and I still have way too much fun treating her as the designated buttmonkey for her to be Little Miss Perfect -- that's part of what I really love about her, the same as how the flaws of every girl are what actually make them shine so bright to me. But it being the case that I saw a special role for Rose in the story, and to Alabaster, I can't ultimately deny that the way it all shook out may have looked like authorial bias. Because maybe it was. I just hope that I could have made it satisfying for anyone, even a hypothetical Makotofag or, I dunno, a Gustavfag or someone. I wanted everyone to get their best ending.

>Yeah but why did Chloe love Alabaster? In fact, I have no idea why
>Kay
>Chloe
>Noelle
>Actually liked us

Chloe is drawn to shitty guys like so many abuse victims are, and Alabaster is a pretty shitty guy (on the surface... and maybe below the surface, too.)

She also gives her worldview in the beach episode:

>I am not an enemy. I only want things to be interesting. This is my theory of the world: that money and power stay only with those who are interesting. Look at us. You and I, we are the interesting people of the world.

Alabaster is interesting to her. His world is interesting to her.

Broad Dynamics wanted Darkbloom tech from the start, so Chloe would have been doing a lot of research on Alabaster prior to meeting him... this is when she fell for him. She really is the nega-Vivian in a ton of ways. Her love runs deep, but it springs from, let's say, juvenile motives and obsessions.

>Kay
I don't know that Alabaster occupies a paramount place in her heart, even if she does like climbing on top of that dick. She loves him but it isn't like how Cerise, or Rose, or Whitney, or Vivian, etc. love him. As for why she cares at all... he's fun to be around... and Kay is a thrill seeker. Alabaster creates thrilling situations.

>Noelle
She's weeaboo trash and so is Alabaster. Their common interest gave them a springboard to get to know and care about each other. Their natural chemistry made them grow close.

>Did any other harem members not love Ally like Renee, Charlotte or Sable?

I think Sable is the only one who didn't really "love" Alabaster to any great extent. There was only sparks there, never fire. Charlotte quite clearly loved him and so did Renee.

>Why does Stackleford love Alabaster more than anyone else?

Alabaster gave him his calzone one day in middle school. To Stackleford, it was the most important day of his entire life... to Alabaster, it was Tuesday.

>Taking things away from the Stackleford side of things, I have to ask:
>If, and I do mean by the aeon-spanning near-infinite nonzero possibility of 'if', some utterly ridiculously wealthy /FQ-anon/ opened the vaults and gave you complete and total free reign, would you consider adapting Fuck Quest from traditional quest to full-fledged, mind bending Visual Novel complete with voice acting and animated smut scenes? Or, as sole progenitor and steward of the magic of this entire 6 year long adventure, do you feel such an adaptation would be.... lesser, in impact and in ability to reach its reader on a deeper level, due to lack of complete open-ended nature of a quest?

I definitely would. I'm not skilled with visual novel writing, but with the promise of resources I would give it my best shot. It wouldn't be as magical as the original, you're right... the choices you made were as much on the fluidity of your constant feedback, as on the choices I directly presented... a VN lacks that critical component of the author being in constant conversation with the audience while writing.

>hard confirmation that op thinks one girl is more best than all the others
>Tried to make my peace with this happening for three seasons and now that it's out in the open it still leaves me feelin bitter

I'm sorry. If it makes you feel any better, Rose's special role in the story for Alabaster means she comes out of it with the hardest burden to bear. Even though they will be able to support each other in bearing it, the weight of the awful horror everyone had to go through to reach the 422nd scenario is nothing short of traumatic.

Because they remember, they can help make this go-around successful. But those memories mean they're going to have it rough. And since they shoulder the almost unbearable weight of the semi-eternal recurrence, all the other girls get to enjoy the lightness of being. They got their best endings at a huge cost to both Alabaster and Rose.

>I guess my only question is will this be the end of your career as a QM or do you think you might return with something totally new one day?

I may or may not. I've got lots of story concepts. For now, I'm going to take a little break. Writing 350,000+ words in about 5 months sapped me.

>last Chloe lewd: did our choice matter? would choosing tenderness equal to saving Whitney?

It both did and didn't matter.

It did in the sense that choosing to reject Chloe would have led to Alabaster leaving and having a very hot, totally degenerate sex scene with Rose and Amber. Whitney would have lived, probably through episode 14 at least, and although we would have ended up in Alaska, maybe there would have been more people surviving besides Ally/Rose than just Kay and Smatters. Maybe we would have even had other people join us in the lighthouse.

But I don't actually know how I would have played it because I fully expected you to vote to bone Chloe. When it looked like it was going to go the other way, I was excited -- in the way I usually am when I have to completely redo my plans because of an unexpected vote -- and I was also kind of desperate not to "have" to kill Whitney. I called it when it looked like a tie, and was going to spare Whitney in that scenario... but I don't know what I would have done for the finale in the version of events where Whitney escapes death.

The vote didn't matter in the sense that even though I would have spared Whitney, awful suffering was bound to come anyway. Things had already gone so far off the rails, and you had already let Chloe too far in, that pain was going to befall us one way or another.

>What about Kay? What came of our scorched Earth.421?

Kay and Smatters, in that world, suffer maybe the worst fate of all. Limbo. They continue to live without definite confirmation that Alabaster was successful. So they probably end up thinking he failed, because nothing changes for them. They get to have each other, though.

>What are your plans going forward?

See my last reply.

>1. Was Rose2 a real person (whatever that means) before Camelia corrupted Sand Reckoner, or was she purely born of SR?

Rose2 wasn't people before the 422nd scenario. She was born of Camelia and Cerise creating a glitch in the system.

>In either case, does SR actually have the power to rewrite reality? Yuki was talking like she didn't, but I'm not sure how to reconcile that with Rose2's whole deal.

Yes and no. The full extent of what the Optimizing Parameter can do is unknowable. Maybe even she doesn't know (she was wrong about Rose remembering, for instance).

In essence, she "seeds" the next universe with certain conditions. On a meta-textual level, since obviously she represents me -- those are the starting premises of the quest's story. The "consequent conditions" are choices, which are divergence points.

So the control she wields over the reality of Fuck Quest is the same kind of control I do. She can strongly guide the events, in some places more strongly than in others, but she can never erase that stubborn niggle of free will. So she never knows what's really going to happen at the end.

(Now, unlike me, she doesn't rewrite reality on the fly -- all she can do is set forth the beginning conditions of the cosmos that are going to lead to all the others. Then as she observes the outcome, she prepares changes for the next iteration. The glitch that Camelia and Cerise created, of which Rose2 is a part, was the setting of initial conditions she didn't define.)

>2. Did you have plans to do more with Spy Ken? ChartAnon and I were discussing this last night as one of the handful of decisions we made that were unambiguously "wrong," but really it only went wrong for Ken, and it's debatable how much better it wouldve been otherwise

There was a whole lot that I couldn't get to. Spy Ken was a subplot with lots of potential that really just kind of fizzled out, and that was because there wasn't time. It's not that I had big plans for it that I didn't get to -- I had the <span class="mu-i">possibility[/spoiler] of big plans I never developed. That's my own failure, but at least I gave it some form of resolution. Him getting ghosted was a heavy moment and played into the mounting doom of the story's final act.

You could also say his subterfuge did things in the background that let Chloe stay essential through the end -- since the Chinese government got bad info, they couldn't develop their own SR tech, which gave Chloe tons of leverage. But you'd have to infer that, and it's not something discussed in much detail beyond some passing dialogue.

>I'm left with the uncomfortable question of 'now what'.

Now live your best life.

>Did you have any threads were Amber might not have come about as a central cast member and Camelia would have stuck around? Or was Cerise utilizing Penelope a forgone conclusion?

I didn't plan to bring Camelia/Amber back into the story until planning for the third season after the finale. At least that's how I remember things developing. So I could have easily developed a version of the story where Camelia was gone after her death in S2E14.

As for Cerise using Penelope, that was an image I had in my mind since before the reboot began. The idea of Alabaster, Whitney, and Rose walking in on Cerise, seeing her eyes are blue, and realizing -- "Sand Reckoner..." -- was a cliffhanger I really wanted to build towards. But what that really meant, I didn't know until much, much closer to the end of the second season.

>Who was the hardest cast member to kill? I know that's probably like 'pick your favorite child', but I'm curious.

For certain, Whitney. She really does embody everything lovely about the world of FQ... and her death was the story's rock bottom moment. The other deaths came attached with the promise that they were leading to salvation. Whitney's death was just nasty, horrifying, and violent. Made all the worse by the fact that it was Alabaster physically doing it... by the fact that maybe she died thinking he had betrayed her. By the fact that his last words to her were "Go to bed already. Leave me alone." For these reasons and so much more, writing Whitney's death made me almost vomit -- literally. It's the worst experience I've ever had writing anything in my life.

>Which aeon did you enjoy teasing the most?

Ye Olde Fucke Queste. It was a blast, and has some of the best Whitney banter in all four seasons.

>If you could clean up or clarify one thing about the four season run, what would it be?

I'm need to think about this one. Watch this space.

>We've dipped in and out of philosophy a lot over the course of the years. Are there any arguments that you yourself have enjoyed or appreciated watching?

The discussion in this thread about recurrence was fascinating. The ethical/moral disputes people had in season 3 over Alex's actions were intractable, sometimes vicious, but always interesting to see. Seeing people agonize over the road to perdition we walked in season 4 was also "satisfying" -- in that it's exactly what I intended people to think about -- wondering whether the way we tortured Dalton and got Ken ghosted by the feds and started a chain of events leading to the murder of innocent children, etc. etc., meant we had passed beyond redemption.

Finally, watching people try to pick apart the reality of FQ is a joy. The implications of SR tech on what "reality" even is, etc. And particularly the discussions around whether Sable's and/or Darkbloom's grand visions for the tech were ethically desirable, or even factually accurate.

>Did you always have it planned that Chloe would betray us?

Yes. I mean, she told Alabaster exactly what she intended to do. I was wondering whether I could actually make you guys fall into her honeypot after how negatively you reacted to her first few appearances, but yes, that was the intent.

You know, I myself ended up liking her so much that I wanted to renege on this original plan, let her just be a normal haremite... Chloe fooled even me. When I realized that she fooled me, I recommitted to making her betray us.

>How could Vail have gone differently? There are the obvious diversions, like following Alex and chasing after Mara, but I was wondering if you had plans for other choices to make things end up differently for us, like with Amber and Noelle staying hidden inside the car.

Depending on who went or stayed, I don't know what other major events could have happened. You nailed some of the big ticket items. Alex could have died, Mara could have lived.

One HUGE thing I went back on at the last moment in planning for Vail, was this: Vivian was supposed to die.

The basic concept, which I never developed, was that as things in Vail got desperate, the group would need to reinstall Amber's implant (this actually happened). But, the implant wouldn't work quite right... they'd have to radio back to Whitney and ask her to turn on Sand Reckoner's full power (knowing the risks this would entail since Mara wanted that too.)

The group would be successful and get away with minimal casualties like what we saw... but when they got back home, they'd find Whitney weeping over Vivian's corpse -- her mind having been unable to withstand the power of the Diegesis implant and its link to Amber's.

I'm very glad I didn't go down this path. Vivian's ultimate ending was much more satisfying, and we got to see so much more of her in so many great moments.

But if you go back and read some of the lead-up to Vail, and also the episode itself, even the title card, you can see that I was laying down the groundwork for her to die in that episode. It's another one of those recurrence things... Vivian died in Vail in FQ1, and she nearly died in Vail in the reboot timeline, and ultimately she would have died because of the events in Vail in season 4... in other words, that fate of Vail being Vivian's doom would have been inescapable.

It fit so well, for her to die in that episode, that for a while, I was wondering whether I had made the right call. But with hindsight, like I said, I can say I did.

>Was the significance of 421 planned from the very start?

No. In the interim between season 3 and season 4, I happened to hear about Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, purely by chance... and realized that that was the "solution" to Fuck Quest that I had been trying to figure out, myself, for so long. Until then, I had not the slightest idea how I was going to really explain all this shit, including 421.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology

>What are your favourite non-Alabaster pairings?

In no particular order: Whitney and Vivian, Whitney and Renee, Amber and Vivian, Gal and Cerise, Alex and Cerise, Alex and Sable, Kay and Noelle, Charlotte and Saul

>Since the recurring universe has been confirmed, are we to believe that the Magic College AU from the original season 2 is canon after all?

Yes. I actually intended to do that as one of the realities Alabaster would see in the lighthouse... maybe plop him in the middle of the scrapped S2 finale, with him going against Ebony. For the sake of time, I scrapped that... again.

>What number revision did the original run take place in?

All we know is that it was before scenario 421. It was its own scenario -- not part of the 421-verse. I imagine it was probably an early version.

>Any notable references/foreshadowing we missed?

All the time I know this question is coming, and there are tons of examples, but I end up coming up blank when it gets asked.

One thing people did miss at the time, was the first Kundera mention in S3. Someone did eventually point it out earlier inS4, but no one talked about it at the time. The Amber/Vivian pairing is so interesting to me because of their radically different outlooks... this is part of it. Vivian feels weighed down by eternal recurrence, Amber feels the exhilarating lightness of being and wants to break free of cycles.

>Did our actions in season 1 effect why the Camelia glitch occurred or is it a completely separate event?

Can you clarify? Season 1 as in FQ1 from /a/, or season 1 as in the first season of the reboot? If the former, then no. If the latter, then yes, absolutely. Remember that Alabaster actually dies at the end of season 2 -- Cerise doesn't get her implant until it's too late to save him -- so her grief, while she had the power of Sand Reckoner, was part of what led to the glitch.

>What's the single most important choice we made in the series?

Letting Cerise and Rose know that Camelia was blackmailing us.

Other honorable mentions go to Daltbloom, and obviously, resetting the universe. I'm sure I'm forgetting others.

>Since Alabaster already made it to the Lighthouse a couple of times why didn't one of those encounters lead to the "ideal" world we got in the epilogue? Seems to me there is even less reason for him to refuse if he came alone.

The Optimizing Parameter explains it herself -- she never tried letting Alabaster remember. It's even possible that the prior times he made it there, she never even backed up his consciousness. Just because he arrives at the lighthouse doesn't mean that he gets to have his consciousness carry over... in all the hundreds of trillions of iterations, there are any number of situations that could have put him there without such an opportunity being possible.

And almost certainly, prior arrivals of Alabaster to the lighthouse occurred between iterations -- recall there are hundreds of billions or maybe trillions of iterations on each major scenario -- so if Alabaster arrives to the lighthouse only a few times, it means he's almost certainly not there at the moment when the Optimizing Parameter is ready to move things to the next scenario.

So I look at what we saw in this finale as a uniquely special set of circumstances leading to a one-of-a-kind information transfer from one scenario to the next.

>Any other fun ideas related to the alternative worlds you didn't use?

Many. I talked about not being able to do a glimpse at the scrapped s2. I also scrapped doing Watersports Quest (lampshading my most controversial fetish), a genderbent FQ1 where Alabaster is a girl and the harem are all guys, and Wholesome Christian Quest where Alabaster is in seminary to become a priest, with his harem also at the school.

>>Letting Cerise and Rose know that Camelia was blackmailing us.
>Damn, I had nearly forgotten about that one. I can't imagine the relationship with either character developing in nearly the same way without that.

I planned for the first half of season 2 to involve Alabaster sneaking around a ton behind their backs, trying to keep them from having to be involved... yeah, it completely rewrote the entire script of Season 2. That was the moment Rose went from being just the tsundere to being Alabaster's closest confidant... and the moment when Cerise went from being just the tsundere sister to being Alabaster's rock in a world without their parents. It changed MY conception of those characters... and thus made them so much more. Thank you all for trusting them more than I did!

>>Wholesome Christian Quest
>Okay I need to see at least a couple of posts of what THAT would have been.

It was going to open from the cliffhanger of the ostensible prior episode where Alabaster saw his sister, Sister Soliloquy, and another nun, Sister Healy, committing a "sin of the flesh" (by kissing).

Your first choice would have been to confront them directly, to speak with your fellow seminary student Alex about it, or to ask Mother Superior Keki for her advice.

>Are you still into anime?
Not nearly as much as I used to be. I have very little time to watch, and most series... just don't appeal to me the way they used to. I'm both too genre savvy and maybe a little bit too old to appreciate a lot of what's out there.

>What's your Japanese powerlevel?
Rose2 level.

>In all the reality iterations, how often do Alabaster and Scarlett end up committing incest? Is it even common across the iterations? Does Sand Reckoner consider a propensity for incest on their part a detriment in its task or just another variable that can be accounted for?

It's definitely just another variable in the grand scheme of things. As for how common it is... I dunno. More common than most mothers and sons would fuck each other, clearly.

>What would have occurred if either Mara or Aloysha had managed to reach the Lighthouse? Could they have meaningfully forced Sand Reckoner to create an iteration where all their viciousness and cruelty is given free reign?

The lighthouse would never have revealed itself to them. This goes unstated, but you can infer that the lighthouse only allowed itself to be seen once Chloe decided not to go too and Alabaster/Rose decided to "reset" the world.

>Is Mara, across all the iterations, an irredeemable monster? Or just all the iterations where it is probable she marries David Darkbloom and gives birth to Vivian?

In 422, we see a version of the world where Chloe has a chance... maybe there are ones where Mara does too. In all the uncountable multitudes of configurations of the universe, anything could be possible. Then again, maybe not -- every person seems to have certain essentials that never can be erased -- and perhaps evilness is part of Mara inseparably. It depends on where you stand with the nature/nurture debate I guess. I couldn't say.

>You mentioned a distant possibility that Mara and Alabaster might have fucked, if the stars were right. Has this occurred in any of the reality iterations?

I'm certain it has. Maybe Mara wasn't consenting in all of them... maybe Alabaster wasn't in others.

>Who was Chloe’s favorite among the girls. Obviously not rose.

Samantha.

It's funny because I started having them interact because I saw that as the most unlikely combination of two characters to share any interaction at all. But yes, Chloe found Samantha extremely fun and interesting.

I think she also really liked Amber.

>What did Dalton do wrong?

Dalton killed Sable in front of Alex and took part in kidnapping him and Renee, knowing Mara would kill them as well.

And maybe more egregiously he put his family at risk by working in league with the Russian mafia.

>It's all over so you might as well spill who your favorite grill is. My money is on Rose

It's hard for me to flat-out say Rose is my "favorite." Maybe you could call her first among peers. I guess you could say I regard her much the same as Alabaster does.

>That said, after all's said and done, do you think you'll come back for the occasional one shot with the establishes cast members? Iirc, you were planning on having a Christmas special back in 2014 that didn't end up panning out due to personal reasons. I would love to see something like that happen whenever you get the urge to write these characters again.

I don't think I'll be able to resist revisiting this universe. After the OVA, let's talk some more.

You're right that I wouldn't want to do a full fledged season 5. Once you know the truth of the FQ-verse, how do you create any real stakes again?

>Was there any way to avoid everyone dying in universe 421?

I've talked a little on this, but yes. We could have averted Alaska entirely... but I have no idea what that ending would look like in the details.

Or otherwise, we could have had other characters survive to the finale... again, not sure what this would lead to.

>So is Rose's reason for keeping the memories is because she was in the Lighthouse as well?

Rose being able to keep her memories is a miracle. I could come up with a way to explain it, but I think that detracts from it. "Some miracles, you just have to let be."

I mean, just imagine the implications of the simple fact that Rose now knows even from sophomore year of high school, that Ally and Whitney are super into bunnygirls!

>>You're right that I wouldn't want to do a full fledged season 5. Once you know the truth of the FQ-verse, how do you create any real stakes again?

>Honestly? By removing the reset button. Just make us care about the plot and your characters; make us know that we can fuck up one universe.

That's true -- I would have to remove the possibility of Alabaster knowing or getting to the lighthouse/reset button. But persistently there would still be a throughline of thought that runs, "even if we completely fuck it up, it's fine, because this is just a failed iteration of the universe and they'll have another chance."

>What would Whitney had been like if she received Vivian's level of education growing up?

She's already the smartest girl in the universe, so that kind of opportunity would give her MENTOK, THE MIND TAKER levels of intellectual horsepower.

In all seriousness, a Whitney raised by David would be really interesting. But tragic, too. She would always show so much promise and bursts of impressive capability, but she would be plagued by a feeling that she's a disappointment, and in a way, to him... she would be. She'd be able to do okay academically... but not excel to the heights of Vivian, or to the level David would expect of his child.

>I take it's to early to ask about ideas of what next?

Too early right now, but you'll hear from me.

>6. Did you always plan on actually making Amber our daughter from the future? Does that mean Auburn and Will will be born around the same time as her? Is Daddy gonna have to kick Auburn's ass?

You know, it's only implied! I never said for sure that Amber will be Alabaster's daughter.

Of course, if such a thing happens, it's not something I conceived from the start, no. The potential came to me between seasons 3 and 4. And yes, it was a huge reason I went the Daddy route with her in sex scenes.

And yes, it's also why we don't see epilogues for Auburn and Will. They are Amber's contemporaries, so they don't exist yet in 422 either.

Amber will kick Auburn's ass more than enough without Daddy needing to intervene.

>7. You mentioned that you had an original plan regarding Darkbloom and Penelope that was sidestepped early on by our Daltbloom plan. Did this culminate in the Johann installation? Or was it something else that never came up?

My season 4 vision for Darkbloom had his implant inside Amber's safe at home, turned off, for almost the entire season. If Alaska happened, I was going to have Kay break into the ruins of the Catachresis home and retrieve it and take it back to Alabaster. So we got basically that plot, but with something much, much better in between.

The Johann thing I didn't think of until planning for the episode it happened in, actually. It was a really inspired idea, in my not-so-humble opinion. Resolves the Chekhov's gun of suggesting Furby Darkbloom in season 3, but in a much more impactful way.

>8. Did you have a fleshed out plan for discovering The Lighthouse via Cerise's congressional bid, or did you lay most of your bets on Chloe's successful seduction?

No. I was pretty confident that you'd fall for Chloe by the time Cerise's congressional bid really developed, so I was keeping that option in my back pocket. I'm sad I didn't get to show Cerise actually in congress, and that the subplot really didn't go anywhere... I tried to give it <span class="mu-i">some[/spoiler] sort of resolution with her appearance on "a certain notable podcast" being such a catalyst. And it was nice character development for Cerise if nothing else.

>9. Did tie votes usually wind up having bonus stuff appended to it? Did any actively work to our detriment?

It depends on the specific vote -- some were situations where you just got both options if they weren't somehow exclusive, and in others I had to create a compromise solution on the fly which you might call a bonus. I can't remember any ties off the top of my head that were detrimental overall.

>10. Any chance we can get a glimpse at any unused pre-written materials left on the cutting room floor? Whether in this thread or after / during the OVA?

I have very little pre-written stuff that I didn't incorporate because I mostly avoided pre-writing until I was sure it was going to happen. But per the other poster's request, I'll post the remnants from the whiteboard soon.

>What did Mara Darkbloom offer Dalton Cantor to become her triggerman/gofer? Did she just have to threaten his family or did she offer him big wads of cash as well?

I say I hate Dalton because I imagine him being motivated by his own venality, and not under threat. He's just a corrupt corporate figure in league with organized crime, working for the profit motive... that's my view of him, anyway. Since nothing in the canon text is spelled out, you can craft your own viewpoint.

If that truly is how Dalton operated, I think it's important to note that he probably was still a "good" father. He was devoted to his wife and children. That's the thing with so many evil/corrupt people... they can compartmentalize the horrible things they do. They in a sense lead double lives. Darkbloom himself was much the same.

>OP, I actually have some questions about interactive narrative design that I want to shoot you soon-ish -- Twitter DMs a good place?

I'm the wrong person to ask. I've been guilty of railroading in the past, and I've made tons of missteps. But I would be happy to talk. You can DM me.

>That reminds me, what was the big plan behind making Cerise run for congress?

Per the other poster's thoughts, it was potentially an alternate path to finding out the secrets of the lighthouse, but I never really developed a plan for how that would work in the details. Other than that, I just thought it was something fun for Cerise to do in season 4.

>On that note, what were the various generals like in those final weeks/months? How would they have reacted to everything that happened at the facility, and their beloved girls being declared dead?

The world is a complete nightmare very soon after the destruction of Darkbloom Analytics and probably *Chan goes down for good mere hours afterwards, or maybe even sooner.

The users in the general threads probably have more pressing concerns than their online waifu obsession when WW3 dawns, but the most devoted among them, like That Cerise Guy, probably wind up committing sudoku.

For what little time remains to the site before it goes down, those general threads are absolute shitshows of rage, recrimination, wild speculation and rumors, disbelief, shock, panic, grief... you name it. Thousands of posts of utter mass confusion and hysteria. Not fun.

>So, OP, how's your relationship going with the coworker who reminds you of Rose, and has that affected The End of Fuck Quest?

There's been a spark between us before, but I don't foresee a relationship developing. Definitely not the ending Alabaster and Rose get! Our dynamic isn't nearly as fun as what you see in FQ anyway, we're capable of being civil, it's just we just often don't see eye-to-eye at work or on certain topics.

Did it impact the end... I'd say not hugely. All the girls are more than just the individual parts and pieces from my life that inspired them.

>IIRC, Cerise never got to use her pre-season teaser quote (something about starting a Soliloquy dynasty), so were there any other characters that didn't get a chance to use theirs? What sort of scenes would these entail?

I think Cerise is the only one. That was supposed to be from a conversation about her congressional bid... I would have included it after a choice that you voted against early in the season -- where Alabaster can either go talk with her about her bid, or do some other thing (I forget what, but that other thing is what you voted for.)

I actually had a bit of a scrapped subplot with Cerise where you'd begin to get the sense that she's acting disturbingly like David... with the implication that the time they spent in the same body affected her.

>What in the world could of happened if we had people remove their implants. I can’t imagine where the story ended up if everyone got them removed or alabaster did.

I don't know. I fully expected you to keep them... going the other way might have led to avoiding Alaska completely as well.

You may be starting to pick up on the fact that I'm bad at planning. If a vote doesn't go the way I expect it to, I have to go back to the drawing board. Often that's the case. But just as often it isn't... and in the times that it isn't... I never think again about what contingency I would have developed.

>How many of the girls were pregnant before the waifu holocaust?

Wouldn't it just hurt to talk about those things?

>Do you feel you messed up with any of the harem members?

Makoto for sure. I didn't develop her, wrote her out in an abrupt way, and really didn't do her justice at all.

She got the longest epilogue because of that... and while "Makoto Quest" is really intended as a kind of joke, like, "haha, there's an entire universe where Makoto of all people is the most important!"... in it's own way, it's kind of poignant too.

Sable... I don't know. I go back and forth on Sable. I actually kind of like what I did with her as a character, and how she had so much impact all the way to the very end even though she was MIA for most of season 3 and dead in season 4. But as a harem member she fell flat.

I like to think I did well with all the other characters.

>Any that ended up less interesting than you were hoping for?

Again, Makoto and Sable. I think softening the dynamic between Cerise and Alabaster also made her a bit less fun, even if that was a deliberate choice. We get to see some of that fun come back in 422. I was happy about that.

>Any you regret taking in the directions you did?

No, except for Makoto's death.

>Why do you hate Darkbloom so much? You said Chloe was your favourite villain to write but do you think any of the others turned out well?

Darkbloom:
-impregnated Renee at 16 while he was, what, 35ish? Then forced her to give the child up for adoption (even if for good reasons, but those reasons are also his fault)
-experimented on children
-murdered people to cover it up
-almost killed his own daughter with his assassination plot
-let that girl he impregnated and supposedly loved go to prison for life for his crimes
-got in bed with the Russian mafia to chase after a delusional fantasy of power
-thought he was uniquely fit to wield power over the world, had a God complex
-loved his children but was nonetheless a really bad father
-was generally conniving, hypocritical, petty, vindictive, power-hungry and egoistic
-never learned his fucking lesson, <span class="mu-i">was still murdering people in season 4[/spoiler]

It occurred to me the other week that David Darkbloom -- fittingly enough -- is basically Humbert Humbert. He ruins a child's life -- or in this case, a few of them (Amber, Gal, Alabaster, Vivian, Whitney...) -- because of his own selfish desires. He characterizes that selfishness as love, but it's a monstrous love. And only at the very end, when it's too late, does he truly feel the weight of what he's done and show remorse. He does what he can, then, to fix it... but it cannot undo what's been done. There's a Lolita reference in this episode, in a scene with David, because of that.

As for other villains I liked to write... as much as I don't like David for the person he is, he was fascinating to explore and write! Mara was a bit one-dimensional to me, but had her moments. Lev was so uniquely repulsive that it was interesting like watching a trainwreck. Alyosha was so shockingly awful that he creeped me out.

>>Now she's a homebody, 100%. But in the scene where she comes to visit the Nail House and watch anime, Alabaster notices she seems like the kind of girl who would have fond memories of camping. But she actively seems to hate when the great outdoors gets brought up in S2.
>Does Noelle have a soft spot for the untamed wilderness that she doesn't let on? Is this another one of the minor adjustments between worlds?
>Or is Yuru Camp really that good? Asking for a friend.

I never actually watched Yuru Camp, but you're right -- she has nostalgia.

I picture that Noelle's father was himself a cop or a military man... he set for her an example she wanted to live up to. And he was an outdoorsman too. So she tagged along with him, on camping and hunting trips, as a kid.

She couldn't make herself enjoy it... in fact she hated everything about it except for being close her dad. So although she's a homebody as an adult, she can look back on those times with fondness, if only for that reason.

>How long will it take before Alabaster slowly ends up regaining his harem, which may or may not involve his own daughter, or are you keeping that secret for the OVA?

I dunno. 422 is wide-open for possibilities. To directly answer it all would take away some of the magic... and the blessing of letting every reader decide for themselves what might happen next.

>I have a lot to pick apart later. But I just realized that OP took one last time to spit in David's eye by suggesting Leibniz was more correct than not. Hilarious.

I would actually say Darkbloom is precisely right. We don't live in the best of all possible worlds. It takes the tireless work of the Optimizing Parameter to seek it out, and she may never actually find it.

>11. We certainly made assumptions, but we never got a total confirmation. What was the "special ingredient" in Rose's Buddy Cookies?

Period blood. Threw a couple clots in the mixing bowl too and all.

>>I would not have guessed that she is the one you would come here with."
>Please elaborate, Yuki-chan~

She's speaking for me there. I would not have guessed that Rose would wind up with the role in the story she did, when I first began to write. It's because of free will that Alabaster and Rose were both able to defy the Optimizing Parameter's expectations and reach her.

>So, you might return, and only for something new?
>Does "The End of Fuck Quest" end the entire franchise?

I may return in some fashion, but I don't see another reboot or season in the offing.

>That's my very minor gripe with the story; I was initially imagining that the implants were merely thin clients for the data crunching programs on DBA's servers. Assuming they figured out a brain-machine interface, it is totally believable that modern photolithography could fabricate a grain-sized microcontroller that can fit enough program logic for both the brain interface and a persistent wireless connection to the servers. A full-on neural network and the entirety of human knowledge less so. So when it became clear the SR implants can continue preforming their feats of prediction even without the servers that sorta fell though. I had various other minor technological gripes with how the implants were handled, but oh well. I enjoyed the story immensely regardless.

There was definitely some power creep with the implants and SR tech. The story slowly went from very light sci-fi/thriller to a kind of magical realism masked in the language of sci-fi.

I don't regret it but it did mean that the internal consistency and framework of the SR tech did sort of get away from me.

In the initial stages, I did envision it exactly as you did -- hardware that's phoning back to home and not much else. It grew a lot more complex over time. But yeah, in the beginning, it was much more realistic. When I was speaking with Hexer about my ideas of a new FQ, I told him that I'd be surprised if someone wasn't already working on Sand Reckoner style technology. At that time, my vision of the tech was a sort of portable panopticon letting you see deep information at a glance about the people and places you encounter, plus maybe some minor mental augmentation.

>1. So... now in 422 when we've re-established our harem and Amber's born and grows up a bit, does Alabaster... y'know? Or does he give Will a gentle nudge so he seduces her as Whitney did Ally, thus returning balance to the Force? Or both? How much of Amber's personality stays the same, anyway? And what about the others for that matter?

Would you really do that? Go and fuck your own blood-related daughter? When she's old enough, of course.

Or would you rather see Amber go and live her own Fuck Quest? Fuck Quest: The Next Generation?

I guess in the end, you can picture what works best for you. I could say what I picture, but that goes back to the quandary of not wanting to set 422 in stone.

As for how much of her personality would stay the same in a hypothetical world where she's born to Alabaster and Rose... quite a lot. Basically all of it. Her being their daughter is a perfect explanation for why her politics are so... unique. Look at what Rose and Ally did to a parrot -- just imagine what they'd do to a person!

>Why the name Amber?

It's just in keeping with my penchant for color names.

As for the canonicity of who Rose and Alabaster's child will be, if any, in 422, at the moment it's for you to decide. There are only hints and implications, like so much of 422's future. So if you like to imagine the being that appeared to them in the lighthouse, I could see it. Sand Reckoner would choose a form that most appeals to them, right?

>2. Could you expand a bit on Dalton Cantor's backstory? I found it interesting that a family man was loyal to the russian mafia. Was he a gainful associate, or a begrudging victim of circumstance? Both?

Answered already, but yes, I see him as entering into his criminal enterprises willingly. He wasn't a made man himself, just a corrupt businessman. But he dealt freely and willingly with mafia elements, and ended up conspiring with Mara to kidnap Alex/Renee.

>3. How well have you been preserving your notes? You've shared a photo of a board of stickynotes before. Is there more on the cutting room floor for you to dump? This has already been asked, but what would you have done if we had removed our implants? Combinations of remove/keep? What about if we had sided with Darkbloom in S2?

I think removing all the implants would have set us down a path towards a sort of detente with Sand Reckoner. It may have averted Alaska, as I said upthread. I didn't have a concrete plan for it, but it would have been interesting to explore. Maybe we could have gotten an End of FQ where Alabaster and his harem just kinda get away with it and live in peace? Hard to say. I prefer the ending we got, honestly.

If we had only removed a few, say from Gal and Viv, I don't think it would have changed too much about the contours of the overarching plot... then again, I can't know where I'd have gone.

Siding with Darkbloom in season 2... man, I don't know. That I certainly didn't plan for. I think I would have run with it to its logical conclusion and let Alabaster slowly develop as Darkbloom's protege, for all the good and bad it would entail. We'd still get Whitney Darkbloom in that version of events -- that was something I really wanted to do, even if I vacillated on making Renee the mother. So we'd probably have seen a much more harmonious Darkbloom family, but a much more morally grey Alabaster for sure. Interesting to consider. Darkbloom could have really loved Alabaster like a son if Alabaster had come under his wing. They are a lot alike.

We'd also still eventually learn that Darkbloom potentially killed our parents (with him still denying it, obviously). That would create a rift, so who knows where it goes from there.

>4. Suppose Fuck Quest weren't named Fuck Quest. Say if it were a Mr. Robot or Black Mirror type show and the sex scenes were mostly toned down and/or only implied and a full-on harem wasn't so clearly acknowledged. Have you thought about what its title would be?

Yes.

>6. Are Tyrus and his men still gangsters in 422? Does Armstrong still have his senatorial background?

So much of 422 is for you to decide.

>7. You mentioned a few episodes ago you had an announcement to make at the end. Were you referring to the QA+quiz or something more?

There will probably be more around the time of the OVA!

>8. Suppose I hadn't posted the damning "tenderness". Could you still deliver the alt scene with Amber and Rose sometime? Pretty please?

I really want to. It's one that's kept me company in bed on some late nights!

>9. You mentioned earlier that you despise David. This was really unexpected. Throughout S2-4 I had the distinct impression he was being painted as somewhat relatable and only a slightly worse person than Alabaster himself. What do you hate about David precisely?

Answered a bit upthread, but just because I personally hate him doesn't mean I didn't strive to pain him as a multifaceted and complex man. I did. And if you feel like you're ambivalent about him, or even that you like him, that's valid.

One of my goals in the reboot was to take Darkbloom, who was a cartoonishly evil fuck in the original, and make you think... "maaaaybe he's not so bad?" -- which I definitely accomplished, to see people talk!

>10. Why did he get involved with the Russian Mafia in the first place? Surely he could have pursued any number of preferable sources of starting funds with which to jumpstart his dream?

Darkbloom came from meager beginnings (no connections, no seed money of his own) and didn't have any legit investors willing to jump in bed with him. He got into online services at the beginning of the WWW -- because he could see its potential -- but the money-men who make the world go around weren't quite there yet, this being before the dot-com boom -- and definitely not for some upstart hick whose only bona fide was a tenure-track professorship at a university.

The mafia was willing to jump in because Darkbloom's first foray into the WWW was E-pay services, and that could be made a convenient avenue of money laundering -- in a world where not many people understood the internet, it was easier to conduct some shady business. And yeah, it was the Faustian deal that set into motion... well, if you think about it, the literal end of the world.

>11. Could you summarize Alex's backstory again? What was it that started his arson spree and led to him getting disowned?

It wasn't a spree, but he did burn down his grandparents' home.

I'll tell you all I myself know: he grew up with an overbearing father and an alcoholic/pillhead mother. He acted out a lot as a child, and did poorly in school. This culminated in his mother pawning him off on his maternal grandparents at age 13-ish. His grandparents were awful too, and he didn't fare any better with them. I don't think he burned the house down on purpose, but I don't know what the circumstances were that led to it. He was an incredibly, incredibly troubled young boy.

>12. How much did our boy Ken suffer in Guantanamo Bay ;_;?

A lot. And then he died.

>13. What happened to those backup server facilities Sable was trying to blow up in S3? Isn't some of the data we were trying to protect still available there? For that matter, who nuked who? How do you imagine the details of WW3 at the end?

The satellite facilities stored data, but all the infrastructure of the Sand Reckoner platform existed underneath the main campus.

Kay made mention of "suitcase nukes" and I think the implication there is it may have even been non-state actors. In any case, not definitively known. Who nuked who is really immaterial by that point. The world is a shambles regardless. As for the details of WW3, it's a three-way between America, China, and Russia as the primary aggressors, each blaming the other two for what happened at Darkbloom Analytics, and none of them knowing that it was actually a super sexy twink with a penchant for crossdressing named Alex Best.

>14. Have you considered coming back (after you've rested for about a few months) and doing little slice of life episodes set in various parts of the story? Interlewds?

As I've said before, I will likely revisit this universe in some fashion. Dunno how yet.

>With Whitney, it was obvious, especially in S4, that Alabaster's continued lack of trust in her deeply hurt her. Was that always something you had in mind for the character, or was that element built over many compounding decisions?

It's not something I always had in mind for her, but it seemed to be a natural extension of a couple basic components of hers and Alabaster's character. Alabaster misunderestimates Whitney. And Whitney wants nothing more than for Alabaster to appreciate her.

It's really sad how Whitney continually thought of herself as the perpetual second banana, even though I think in her own way, she was the most important one of all in Alabaster's heart. I know I've said that same thing of Rose and Cerise too. They each have a piece of his deepest heart.

And even more than Rose and Cerise, Whitney was the one who trusted Alabaster the most... Alabaster, as he matured, saw that as a responsibility, and tried to protect Whitney. But that ended up becoming a sort of paternal attitude, which meant the trust didn't run both ways, and that hurt her.

She wanted him to treat her as a confidant the way he did with Rose, but he never extended that to her. I think, in 422, Alabaster is ready to understand that he can open up with Whitney more wholly. Cerise too. And all the others. I'm rambling, but that's the lines I'm thinking along.

None of this was part of the initial plan for Whitney, or even "initial" in terms of planning for the reboot, but grew organically of the logic of their relationship, like I said.

>12. Do you feel that the format thrust upon us by /qst/'s board rules (namely relegating lewds to pastebins) worked in favor of or in detriment to FQ as a whole? Or do you feel the experience was mostly unchanged by the necessitated format?

At first I really hated it, because in the original FQ, I often intertwined very lewd moments into the events of the story without them being "lewds" per se, and so the rules of /qst/ were on their surface pretty restrictive to that. I also had extremely plot-important lewds in the original, too -- which I felt couldn't be done within the pastebin format since I knew people might skip a lewd that didn't potentially tick their boxes. If something extremely important happened in a lewd, people could miss it! So it basically segregated the story into the R-rated bits and the X-rated bits, and never the twain shall meet.

As time went on I got bolder and bolder about mixing risque stuff into the normal events of the story. In the premiere of season 4, for instance, Whitney asks Alabaster to kiss her cunt for good luck before they get off the plane in China. That was right in the middle of the thread. So there was a little envelope pushing.

And ultimately, in the end, I found a way to work with the lewds being mostly separate from the story, and I think maybe it made the whole thing better. It just took getting used to.

Good question!

>So, Whitney 422 has the same thirst for Alabaster's virginity that both prior Whitneys have exhibited. She was a bit manic about it, even. HOWEVER, Alabaster 422 is now for all intents and purposes Alabaster 421, who already lost his virginity...to Whitney.
>Did Whitney accidentally and irreversibly cuck herself?

Whitney would be elated to know that she got to Alabaster's cherry literally trillions of years before Rose McHitler and all those other bitches even had a chance. Then she'd pounce on him and demand to take it again!

>With the Kerimov dynasty in shambles in 422, does Dalton stick with Darkbloom at all? Or does he stick with the Mafiya?

Hard to say. I would like to think Dalton isn't in too deep with criminal elements in 422. It gives his children a better chance in life.

>Does 422 Rose at least wait until high school graduation to start a family with her first cousin (once removed) or race toward teen pregnancy as soon as is possible?

Does wildly irresponsible teen pregnancy turn you on?

Alabaster and Rose are going to be having lots and lots of very unsafe sex, but a baby will happen when it happens. There's only one sperm and one egg to result in the combination set forth by the universe's starting configuration. The Optimizing Parameter's seed is powerful!

Whether that sperm and that egg meet when Rose is 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20... etc... you can envision for yourself.

She will have a baby with Alabaster in 422, though. She won't be the only one!

>What was the final line drawn in the sand for the Nail House residents with regards to Ancient Aliens?

>Not saying it was aliens, but not NOT saying it was aliens
Gal
Whitney
Amber
Mom

>Probably not aliens, but no reason to be close-minded
Kay
Alex
Chloe
Smatters
(Sable would go here too)

>It wasn't aliens, you stupid FUCKS
Alabaster
Cerise
Vivian
Renee
Rose
Charlotte
(Makoto would go here too)

>Maybe the Egyptians were the aliens!
Rose2

>That information is classified.
Noelle

>Would Gal be vindicated in knowing that she was technically correct in her belief, if she knew the extent of Sand Reckoner's existence?

Oh for sure. It's something she'd gloat over to Sir. She' would talk mad shit... and then get hit.

>Yeah about this, Rose2 had a bit of a yandere streak but it never got to see light of day.
>What would it have been like?

I always intended for the yandere thing to be just a tease. I don't think it actually suits her character. She just plays at it because she sees it in her japanime. Okay maybe she's a little yandere but I was never gonna go full on batshit with her.

>I'm sure it's no secret that each of the haremites tick a particular fetish (or fetishes) for you, but do any of them do a better job of enticing you than others?

I've always been open that scenes involving the MILFs get me really hot in particular.

Alex really gets me going too. I was just reviewing the scene where he shares an onahole with Ally, earlier today.

Whitney has always enticed me sexually, since fit tomboys are patrician tier. I especially love when she's enthusiastically helping us dominate another girl. But that attitude ended up spreading, and the hierarchy of who dominates who became a kind of round-robin of degeneracy. Lots of fun!

Any scenario where I can really drive home the incest gets me going, and especially with Cerise -- and particularly especially the earlier scenes where they're just dipping their toes into incest, and going slowly further and further, towards that point of no return. unf.

>Do any pastebins this season stand out as being your personal favourite?

Vivian's bathroom break (with)
Alex has two mommies
Alabaster has two mommies
Amber in wonderland
Amber's first scene in the nail house (gagging with Rose2 on a double dildo, then sneaking into Ally's bed)
Alex's onahole scene, and speaking of,
"Sharing Holes" from s4e7

no particular order. There are lots of others that got me going too but these stuck out as I scrolled by.

>The Kay and Noelle pairing was totally unexpected, and I'm sure we're all surprised at how much we all ended up fucking loving it. What inspired it in the first place?

That arose as a direct consequence of how I was keeping track of who had shared at least one line of dialogue with who. Kay and Noelle had never spoken, so in episode 2, I had them giggling over the origin of Alabaster's safeword with Rose. I sensed chemistry there, so I put that combination in my back pocket and threw it onto my whiteboard with a note to explore it.

It blossomed from there, like lilies in spring...

>And purely as a hypothetical: if everyone, and I mean EVERYONE (apart from yourself) wanted a pastebin featuring Stackleford, would you fulfill it?

The Optimizing Parameter would decide that it's time to end humanity's eternal recurrence, and destroy itself before seeding the next universe.

>Was David aware or did he know we fucked Renee in the toilet on top of him?

He saw it.

>Also, here is a requested reminder to talk in the post Q&A about how the episode 11 riot cliffhanger event came to be and what was originally expected for it.

I mentioned in an earlier that the vote against sending Alex back to Darkbloom Analytics in episode 11 surprised me.

Kay's dialogue in that scene prior to the vote sets up the groundwork for my initial plan:

>"Alex is the next best thing to Sable Guiteau," Darkbloom says. "If Nelson recommends that only Alex can finish the project -- which is the truth, as far as I am concerned -- he might be allowed to return to Darkbloom Analytics as the chief project engineer."

>"No," Kay says.

>"Excuse me?" Darkbloom says -- conveying indignation as best as possible with the use of an affectless modulator simulating human speech.

>"That has subterfuge written all over it. The idea of inviting Alex back to the company has to seem like it came from their own heads. If Nelson comes to them with it, they'll smell a rat."

So... remember that at this time, there are already huge protests outside the campus.

The idea then would be to incite some small-scale altercations between protestors and police, to make it look like the situation was becoming out of control. This would scare the government into trying to fast-track completion of the project (so they could get out of there before the protest breaks into out-and-out rioting), and hopefully this would mean bringing back aboard the only person who could finish it in a reasonable timeframe: Alex.

Amber sees that Auburn is at the scene of the protests, so she leans on him to help stir some shit up. They're pretty good at it! But it turns out that the police have a disproportionate response to the small-scale looting/vandalism/rock-tossing they incite, and it leads to a horrible spiral of violence that ultimately becomes a massacre. But the government does end up coming knocking at the Nail House asking Alex to come back, so yay?

>1. What would have happened if we told Rose “we have to stay?”

Although I had one planned, I may never tell what the alternate ending of the story would be.

But this would have been the final credits song... I can reveal that much, I guess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQt9h36-2vM

You already know what would would happen anyway. Read the ending again, review THE CHART closely, say twenty hail marys, and the answer will reveal itself. I'm only joking about the hail marys

>2. I love some of the social satirizing you do and it shows how well you do it that you never seem to be endorsing any kind of viewpoint. Now that it’s over, would you be willing to share some of your personal social/political/moral/religious/philosophical opinions? Are you now or have you ever been a commienazi?

Do you really care to know what the Fuck Quest OP thinks of Donald Trump or Jesus Christ or abortion or whatever? I keep my personal opinions on the topics of our time a little close-held because I'd rather not alienate anyone, and it's not important to the story. I have strong opinions, but what do they matter?

When I get pretentious enough to strike out from my little box of banter and nasty sex, to tackle "big ideas", I'm trying to be a little less topical and have a broader view of things, to grapple with the issues that have always been with us. So sharing political or social opinions is kind of pointless.

I'm sure if you read closely, and with an objective eye, you can pick up on some of my own personal biases in those arenas... but not because I tried to pepper them in, and use the quest as a soapbox. I'm just only human after all, and can't escape my personal self entering what I create.

Now as for moral/philosophical opinions... well, if you want a moral to impart, it's in the title card of this episode. That's all Fuck Quest is really about.

>what would be the easiest way to share FQ to someone and do you think it reads best as a thread or as written out document or similar?

It depends on who you're recommending it to. If it's someone who you know is cool with raunchy shit, just tell them it's some hilarious raunchy shit that'll grow on you, and send them the season index links in the OP of this thread.

I'd start people out on season 2 -- but that's my personal view. Season 1 is a fine jumping off point too. Maybe try to gauge where on the porn-plot spectrum your friend leans... if more towards the porn side, start with season 1. If more towards the plot side, start them on season 2.

On the other hand, if you're not sure how they'd feel about hentai-inspired smut... well, I feel like FQ could be a hard sell.

I think FQ is very good, for what it is. But people who don't read it often write it off, based on the name and basic premise alone. I've seen many people disregard it as nothing but a dumb porno, when all they really know about it is that it's a harem comedy called Fuck Quest. Which, I mean, it IS a dumb porno... but I'd like to think I've created something with real heart.

If your friend isn't open-minded about stuff with porn in it, they might never give it a chance. You just kinda have to accept that.

As for the best reading experience, I prefer the threaded format, since you get them purty pictures, and also can see people reacting in real time if you want to.

>13. What was your absolute favorite lewd scene throughout the series? If it's a particularly long one, what was your favorite section from it? OR would you rather hold off on answer this until after the OVA?

I couldn't possibly answer that. Just trying to pick a favorite from season 4 ended up giving me a list of like 10 I still wanted to add to... I have fond memories of so much. I'm a rotten pervert, please forgive me!

>Is Gal still a gifted mimic now in iteration 422? I'm guessing that 421's implant ramped up ability to an absurd degree, but she had a natural talent for the implant to build off on.

I would say yeah, she has a talent for impressions, just not the absurdly perfect ones she could do in 421.

>Also, why did 422 Gal flunk her Julliard admission? Did she throw up on the adjudicator?

She flunked it so she could stay in Gilroy and attend North High and fall in love with the drunk NEET who runs anime club.

Of course, she doesn't know that yet. So as for what specifically caused her to fail... she just didn't make it. Julliard is extremely selective.

>Season 1 question what was the plan for transhumanisim club, saw the banter from Renee and remembered that plot line that didn’t get explored

Cute bunny hijinks, sweet augs, a mousy Christian girl who wasn't gonna be part of the harem but who you'd all want to fuck. I can't remember much more than that.

>14. Did you have any other ideas for haremites that you wanted to introduce, OP? You told me and Chart about one, but I've gotta know about others.

Yeah, Vaporwave chick is the only one I can remember.

In the reboot, as you can see, I pretty much just threw in everyone I could think of.

I might have added a futanari, but I decided against that. Sable could have been a futa -- I thought very briefly of it -- but didn't do it. Futa is a fetish of mine I didn't really get to do anything with... although Vivian's ejaculating dildo is a good substitute.

>Oh yeah OP, are there any of the unexplored pairings that you think had potential to be fun/hot/cute?

Rose2/Mom. Super degenerate sex scene I wanted to do with them and didn't get to.

Rose2/Cerise for that matter. Embracing her onee-sama role with her.

Noelle/Chloe. Actually walking in on her staging a clam invasion of China would be hot.

Vivian/Mom. I believe this is the only season 1 combo that hasn't had direct sexual contact. Vivian could use a better mother figure in her life.

I'm sure there's others.

---

While I'm up to date on questions, here's a random fact.

I was originally planning to end on episode 16.

14 would have been pretty much the same.

15 would have been a much longer journey through Alaska, maybe with some sidebar KayQuest, and ending with Rose and Alabaster coming upon the lighthouse.

16 would have been 100% lighthouse, the alternate scenarios, and then epilogue.

I like the way I did it, but this is why so many of my planned alternate scenarios didn't see the light of day.

And episode 15 was going to be called Darkbloom Into You

>How the hell did a dying Alyosha get into the body of a 4 Star general?

I don't know. It was a desperation ploy, obviously, and it ended up paying off. The mechanics of how they pulled it off are going to have to stay a mystery... suffice to say he's one of the most powerful mobsters in the world and had friends in high places in the US government.

>Were you always planning on having us fuck Charlotte, or was it only in response to the thread really wanting to do so?

Ever since introducing her as a secondary character in the premiere of the reboot, it was in the back of my mind that it would be fun to rail her. I didn't seriously consider it until planning for season 3, though -- since her role got expanded by the events of the season 2 finale. It was definitely helped along by support from people reading, but I kind of expected you all to want to fuck her regardless. And even if it hadn't really come up, I think I would have done it.

>Did you decide Noelle was pregnant before Vail or in the aftermath just to break everyone's heart?

I decided well before Vail. She got pregnant the first time we fucked her in season 3. When she "jokes" about it with Alabaster in the gym scene, she already knows and is trying to gauge his reaction.

>Did you ever play around with the idea of Dadabaster knowing about a potential kid in the mix before episode 15?

No, it had to be at the very end for the final choice to develop.

>Where all the brown girls at?

Chloe was brown! Not adding a delicious brownie is a big regret of mine.

>Top five sadpanda tags?

scat, vomit, all-the-way-through, eye penetration, hand holding.

>but who would be the most excited to become a mother? And in that same vein, who would be the most apprehensive about it?

Most excited to most apprehensive, all on assumption they know the pregnancy will be supported by Alabaster:

Rose2
Smatters
Mom
Whitney
Rose
Charlotte
Renee
Noelle
Vivian
Kay
Sable
Chloe
Amber
Cerise
Gal
Makoto
Alex

>Cerise that low
>Kay and Sable that high
>huh, wouldn't have expected that

Cerise doesn't have a ton of self-confidence so she probably doubts her mothering skills, and her apprehension is compounded by the incest angle. She's not as into having a incest baby as, apparently, Rose The Younger. It makes a ton of sense to me that she'd be extremely torn if she came up pregnant with Alabaster's baby.

Kay and Sable aren't exactly champing at the bit to get pregnant, but they would deal with it.

>Also on the topic if pregnancies, there was a pretty obvious disreprancy between the reaction to the Whitney pregnancy scare in season 1 and the huge push for impregnating everyone in the reboot. What do you think was the biggest reason for the change in mindset?

Age for sure. Most of the readers of FQ1 were in the late high school/early college demo. Most of the same people were the ones reading the reboot 5 years later, so the average age of the readerbase probably went from like 18 to 24. People are more open to children when they're older.

Alabaster himself also aged. A lot of the pregnancy scare in season 1 came from people rightly pointing out that he and Whitney were too young/immature to have kids. Well, Alabaster was about 21-23 during the events of the reboot and was holding a stable job. He was ready for children if he wanted them.

>In the original season 2 concept, there was a list of wishes that we would have been able to choose to grant for the haremites as a reward for beating the final boss, and iirc the wish for Alex's sake was to turn him fully into a girl. Do you think that would still apply in this universe? Would Alex be happier as a girl?

No. Alex is happy as a boy, and I don't see him as trans. It turns out that Alex, in addition to being perhaps one of the most complicated characters, has one of the most complicated sexualities too.

He'd probably jump on a magical device that lets him change from one to the other at will for sexual purposes, but in the end, he identifies as a male and would want to stay that way.

>Are there any predetermined events that would always happen no matter the worldline we are in? Like Alabaster meeting specific characters etc.

I don't know how the rules between major scenarios exactly work. It seems that Alabaster is fated to be involved with certain people like Whitney, Cerise, and so on. But others, like Kay and Gal... well, we didn't see them in FQ1, right? But that doesn't mean they never would have come along at some point, either. I have mentioned that I like to picture Kay showing up at the end of FQ1, for example. So who could say?

>Are there any choices where you deliberately left out a good option in the hope we would collectively choose it even without the prompt?

In season 3, of course, there was the prompt where I expected you all to write in "You're great" which jogged Mom's memories. Other than that, I can't think of one.

>What would happen if we collectively made an "impossible" choice. Like bringing along a death character to Vail? Or what would happen if nobody votes on a choice? (with the assumption that people are still reading and didn't just outright drop the quest)

I like to think I'm a houdini when it comes to reconciling impossible choices in the context of tie votes. But in such a case where everyone chooses to bring along a dead character for example, I would probably intervene and go with whoever came in #2.

The offering of choices comes with a certain understanding between author and reader that you will give somewhat logically enactable edicts and I in turn will follow them. When readers begin to purposely make strange/impossible choices, the quest is falling apart. It means the readers no longer really care about the fabric of the story and are just toying with it.

That's also true of the case where no one votes. That signals to me a lack of interest, so I'd probably call the run off for the time being.

>15. Rose Imouto was one of our top candidates for the Tiresias installation. What the fuck would have happened had we decided on that?

I only had a thumbnail sketch of what it would be like, but I envisioned a plotline where potentially she gets extremely ill - and, like the guy in a zombie movie who gets bit and tries to hide it, doesn't tell anyone that she's "not real" for a little while, because of how terrified and confused she is. Those were some basic starting premises, but I may have developed in a different way at the moment of truth, such as ditching the illness side of it, and/or having her just immediately suffer a nervous breakdown and blurt it out.

The implant would show her that she isn't real, but it wouldn't delete her or anything, just as it didn't delete her when Alex used it.

>I'd have thought Alex would love having Ally's baby. Honestly surprised Whitney isn't first.

Alex would be freaked out by the physical impossibility of it, which is why I rank him so low.

Whitney would be over the moon to have Ally put a baby in her, but there are some seriously baby crazy bitches in our harem! (Practice safe sex, everyone!)

>Do you think either Nelson or Armstrong has ever had anything resembling feelings for the other beyond your standard bromance?

Nelson and Armstrong felt a powerful love for each other like only true platonic friends can feel. I see them both as straight guys who had a strong, unbreakable friendship. They had wives, and we can infer at least Nelson had a child (I also picture Armstrong having a couple grown children of his own). They had a lot of fun with the bunnygirls Whitney rented for the bachelor party.

We know quite well that none of that means they couldn't possibly be down for dick either, but I just don't think they were.

>Are there any anime characters you would have wanted to use as an avatar for a haremite because you find them hot, but couldn't come up with an interesting character for them?

I don't think so, no.

>Did Stackleford make it through his tenure without getting convicted as a child molester?

He died in a nuclear holocaust a little bit after starting as a teacher, so most likely yes.

>What would have happened if we had brought Will in under the Nail House's roof?

I didn't ever seriously consider it. He'd make a good pool boy. Would probably freak Alabaster off by coming on to him. I wouldn't have been able to let him fuck any of our girls except maybe Samantha. Even letting him and Alex fuck would be pretty iffy. So he wouldn't have had any fun, and being so close to Amber without being able to have her would be pretty cruel.

>What's your personal opinion on gothic lolita vs sweet lolita?

I enjoy the look of both, but please don't tell Vivian I said so.

It would be funny to have Amber dress up in the style to give her grief.

>Are there any fetishes besides futa that you would have liked to explore, but held back on for one reason or another?

The "Daddy" thing was one I had forever and it was nice to get that out there.

Raceplay would have been fun but I never found a place to work it in.

Drugged sex in hentai is hot, but maybe it would have been too extreme for you to see our Nail House residents to pound a couple rails of coke before fucking. I would have shown a scene or two like that but I think the reaction would be negative.

Would have done a lot more watersports if people didn't get buttmad about it.

Gangbangs, public use, bukkake, etc. just aren't workable in the context of a romance where you care about the girls. The fake-out with Rose was as best I could (or wanted) to do, and even there I had to make it clear to her in advance what was happening, because she could never accept it otherwise.

Pregnant sex is fun.

>If everyone else is going to ask about pregnancy, Which girls were on the pill / got off the pill / never on any form of birth control.

Never on:
Rose2
Noelle
Chloe
Amber

Off:
Mom
Rose
Charlotte

On:
Samantha
Whitney
Renee
Vivian
Kay
Cerise
Gal

Don't read this if you don't want to be sad. Samantha can't bear children. When she was freed by the government as a child, her uterus was removed to prevent any further breeding -- that's her "birth control." I was going to mention this at some time but never found a place to drop it into the story.

>Don't leave us OP! Fuck Quest might be over, but there's more fun for us to be had, right?

There's always more fun to be had.

>Now that the dust is settled, where do you all rate:
>The seasons

In hindsight, I think:

2 = 4 > 3 > 1

>The girls

I couldn't possibly.

>The season finale episodes

4 > 3 > 2

>The lewds

See my prior responses.

>How does it feel to be part of a small pantheon of popular/long-running quests that had a proper conclusion? I’d guess probably less than 0.1% of all quests on this board ever have an actual ending.

Feels great. It's probably not as low as 0.1% but I know the odds weren't on my side.

I bet you never thought I'd really finish when I first came back!

There were many nights when I felt demotivated or uninspired, and thought seriously that I would never see the end. It's only because of you... because of knowing I had an audience taking time out of their week to wait for me to make something, that I finished. There were nights when I had to physically force myself to sit down and just fucking write something despite every brain cell feeling sluggish and uncreative and incapable -- because I knew I'd be disappoint my audience if I called it off.

I'm so incredibly glad I saw it through. I couldn't have, without your support.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I love you!

>Did Qiangxiang personally go to North High at least once to lend some legitimacy to her fake cover as a student to prevent getting deported?

No, not in the version of events we got. I was going to do a whole subplot where Chloe enrolls there and becomes Amber's classmate, but I nixed it. Her cover story as being a student there, in this version of events, was only ever on paper. She didn't visit the school.

>Were there any backup plans to manipulate Auburn's yellow fever in case Qianxiang's seduction didn't work out with Ally? Would it have entailed her attending North High down the line, or was the cover story introduced way too late in the story for it to matter?

This would have been part of the Chloe at North High subplot, where Auburn and her would have developed an argumentative flirtiness. I don't know where it would have developed from there, though.

>Whatever happened to that girl obsessed with Auburn (forget her name or what Amber called her) that burned North High down after the events of the assault in Darkbloom Analytics? I assume she's in juvie or jail, but did she get news of Auburn's death and how did she take it?

She didn't get news of his death because she died in a nuclear holocaust.

>I expected Mom to be lower and Rose and Chloe to be higher

Remember that Mom's top tag is impregnation and that she's utterly degenerate as far as trying to get Ally to knock up as many girls as he can. She of course would want to join the fun!

Chloe is on that dividing line of "if it happens, it happens." She's not out to get pregnant, but she'd let Ally cum raw inside her without protection and accept whatever happens because of it. Her only ambivalence would stem from the pain of childbirth itself, the child possibly diluting any love he might develop for her, and her own social standing.

Rose really wants a baby with him. The girls at the top of the list are all varying shades of "put a baby inside me already, GOD" -- it just happens that the ones above her are a twinge more in need of some baby batter!

>15. Did the original Camelia understand the nature of the universe? Did she know Amber would take up her mantle as a result of the glitch?

I would like to leave that question for you to puzzle over. I have my own understanding of how far Camelia's insane Xanatos gambit did or did not extend, but you can have yours too.

>Guy above asked this already sorta, but was there ever going to be anything to Auburn and Chloe aside from that one Kaguya nod after the highway chase?

As said, I would have liked to do a subplot with her at North High and Auburn would have been a part of that. But it got axed.

>who was the POTUS, you cheeky fuck?

Being that the Current Year of FQ is 2014, I suppose that makes Obama the POTUS!

>How am I supposed to enjoy this oyakodon bowl with extra egg now that Dad is no longer the Bast from the Past?

It's not too bad. Dad is out of town a lot anyway, since he's a pilot! Lots of time with the house free to yourself, with two sisters and a Mommy to cum inside!

>Post post script. How does Renee feel about Whitney and how does Darkbloom feel about Whitney?

Renee obviously loves Whitney beyond words. She also loves getting screwed by Whitney.

Darkbloom loves Whitney too. He was an awful man, but he did love his daughters both quite deeply.

>Did Mara ever love Darkbloom or Whitney?

She hated Whitney with particular viciousness.

As for her attitude towards Darkbloom... it's complicated. Initially in the story, I pictured them as having a tumultuous/tormented love that was tarnished by Darkbloom's infidelity. But deeper into the series it seemed like it developed in the direction of "she never really loved him and vice versa." Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.

>Also, do you feel you made the Russians in the story too one dimensional?

Yes. They really only existed to be obstacles. I would have liked to develop them, particularly Mara and Stasi, more than I did.

>15. What did Chloe and her men think when Alabaster and Rose didn't return from the lighthouse? The lighthouse would not have revealed itself to others, but did it have a means of denying them entry when they were already there? Would Chloe have tried to check up on them or did she just give up and leave. How do you imagine her spending the remainder of her time in the ruined world?

When Alabaster cut her belly, told her to leave his sight and demanded her not to call him Ally... I think only then, did Chloe truly understand that he would never be able to love her again. Until then, she was deluding herself into thinking that she could bring him around.

Once that moment came, her delusions completely shattered, and so did all of her hopes. When she left in the cargo ship, she was willingly exiling herself from the "paradise" promised by the lighthouse.

Following this, she would have left with her men and then dismissed them when they returned to China. I'm sure there were others who would be only too happy to take control of implant-using mercenaries.

As for her thoughts when, from her viewpoint, nothing changes... she would expect this, because she thinks Ally is leaving her behind in hell, to go and live in paradise.

She would want to commit suicide, but would force herself to live on in the ruined world as a sort of penance.

I don't know where her life goes after returning to China. She was rogue from the moment the military took over Darkbloom Analytics. At that time she had already burned all her bridges by killing her uncle, and without being able to work at DBA, she had no use to Broad Dynamics anymore -- all of this that she explained to us was true, and her move into the Nail House was her own plan being put into action.

Since she returns to China with no real friends and many enemies, she probably isn't long for the world after that.

In the end, the Optimizing Parameter is making a universe based on what Alabaster desires. Does Alabaster grant Chloe a better chance at life strictly to help himself... or also because he is taking mercy on her?

>16. I hope this isn't too personal, but how old are you, approximately? I would assume you're somewhere between Cerise and Noelle's age. Reading season 2, I imagined you were inspired for the setting by your own experiences having entered the workforce not many years ago. How accurate is that?

I am a Christmas Cake.

>17. Do you regret the avatar you chose for the Optimizing Parameter, given how many anons now want to fuck your waifu/yourself?

I knew what I was doing.

>Oh yeah, how the fuck did Chloe mind control Renee? I assumed she was able to control Alabaster because of his implant, but Renee didn't have one.

She didn't. Chloe merely coerced Renee by threatening Vivian's life. Renee acted freely, in the sense that she controlled her own body.

>What year are Alex and Gal?

422 ages:

>Cerise: graduated
>Alabaster, Whitney: senior year
>Alex: junior year
>Rose: sophomore year
>Gal, Rose2: freshman year
>Vivian: 8th grade

>tldr: FQ remaster when, if at all? 1/5/10 years?

Maybe some day, but I can't commit to anything right now! I have already thought for quite a while that I would like to rejigger a ton about what I've written, and polish this up into the form of novels... I might do that. But I need to think about it.

>Is Whitney older than Alabaster?

Whitney is older than Alabaster by about 7 months!

>18. Some comments you made in the previous Q&A seemed to hint that you had further plans for Stasi had we not killed her off when we did. Care to elaborate on that?

Stasi didn't make my "hated characters" list because I see her as just a mercenary for whom a job's a job. She wasn't particularly sadistic or evil, she just didn't have a moral compass. That's informed by her time in the Soviet army and being a medical test subject (she had an experimental implant).

I never developed this much, if at all, but I think of her as having been working towards a double-cross of Mara and others of the Kerimov clan. In any case, she certainly had no special loyalty to them. I think she found Alyosha completely repulsive, ditto Mara herself.

She was a formidable opponent with... if not a deep backstory, then certainly one that I could have had fun delving into. We get just a glimpse with Tyrus putting in her implant. She's been a soldier in Afghanistan, she's done nuclear dealings with North Korea, etc.

>I FUCKING KNEW IT! I knew you liked raceplay. Your Unit 731 bantz and racial teasing like 'C'mon Ally, don't you want to breed this Japanese cunt?" were too on the ball. Personally I'd have god damned loved if either of those kinks came up more. The little hints of race stuff was always hot as fuck.

Was it that clear? I did slip just a liiiittle of it in:

>Makoto's heaving, impatient little whines and Whitney's chiding in your ear -- "don't you want to try that ricey pussy?" -- get you to switch.

As for drugged sex, the hentai super-aphrodisiac stuff is fun but I think it's even hotter if they're willingly getting high before fucking you!

>have you found any of the ideas good enough that you'd like to use

I'll be combing through the thread in more detail this weekend and thinking about the format for the OVA. Lots of material to use.

>What parts of the story would you have trimmed and what parts would you have expanded on, now that you've gotten a chance?

Hard to say. If I had to do it all again, I may have completely disincluded Makoto. I would have expanded Sable's role and her interactions with other characters. I would have done more of the corporate day-to-day at DBA and glimpses at how Whitney and the others manage people. There's a scene I left on the cutting room floor of Whitney interacting with a janitor that I'll clean up and post here shortly, as a for instance.

I would have set clearer rules around the Sand Reckoner technology from the outset and hew to them better. I would have expanded the conflict between DBA and Broad Dynamics. I would have expanded the role of the Russians. I would probably cut back some of the subplots that weren't as fruitful like Rose2's yandere hints. I would have done more with the Cerise for congress plot.

>Would you have ever have let us fuck Darkbloom in Cerise's body and mindbroken him with cock if people had been insistent enough?

I don't think so. While it's sexy in theory, I just couldn't do that to Cerise. It would be a violation of her, I think... not in the fun way.

>Were there any ideas or things from the audience that went too far/were too much for you to indulge so you carefully steered away from?

Wellll...

>Did Lady want to fuck Rose or was he just being friendly?

Lady was meant to stoke some fear that I'd go there with either Kay and/or Rose. And while no one ever noticed, or at least mentioned, the source of Lady's avatar -- it ain't wholesome.

But I wasn't ever really going to go there. Although some people did advocate for it.

>What happened to Gustauv and will we see him again?

We saw him in the epilogue! As for the world of 421, he was well away from WW3 and I think he survived.

>You've say before that Kay didn't really love Alabaster and just saw him as a convenient fuckbuddy. Is that because we ended up not really spending much time with her? Did some characters that you intially planned to not like Alabaster as much end up actually falling in love with him because of the focus/extra time spent with them? Did you already have an idea of how each harem member would interact with the rest or how far their relationship would develop with Alabaster before you added them in and did that ever change?

I think Kay did love him, just not on a level as powerful as, say, Whitney.

The characters I was surprised by in terms of their chemistry with Alabaster... Gal, Amber, and Chloe all come to mind. They all ended up loving him much more than I envisioned.

For interactions among the harem, tons of it surprised me as things organically developed. I never suspected Noelle/Kay until I tried them out, or Vivian/Amber, or Chloe/Samantha, or Amber/Rose... the list goes on.

>if you were to make it into novels, would you simply convert the story into novels, or would they be CYOA novels?

They would be normal novels with a Light Novel sheen.

>19. Did the Russians ever name their implant line? Besides Dahlia, of course.

Rusalka. I had intended to include this somewhere but never did.

>20. Did you ever have a clear idea of what Dahlia was actually capable of? Was it truly a second Penelope?

Dahlia was loaded with a slapdash version of Diogenes. It gave Mara immense powers such as the superhuman ability to dodge bullets, and the ability to wield some level of control over Sand Reckoner based technologies, evinced by her control of the SMATTERS units. She could see that Amber was Camelia, and would have known Rose2 was "not real", which is almost certainly why we end up later seeing Russian forces trying to apprehend Rose2.

Dahlia could also have supported Sand Reckoner, but we never turned it on. With those together, Diogenes and Sand Reckoner, Mara may have been able to see the location of the lighthouse... and going there find nothing but seawater, since the lighthouse would never show itself to her.

Oh, this discussion also reminds me... Stasi also knew the original Camelia was a redhead. No one caught this:

>September 2, 2018

>"Thank you, Stasi, for everything." Mara shakes her hand. "I trust you to deal with the rest?"

>"Of course. We will cremate the body and dispose of it. And we will yet find the red-headed bitch who killed him, too."

(To be fair, Mara didn't catch it either.)

This was part of the groundwork I was laying to have Stasi potentially go rogue and pursue her own ends. I think she was intending to recover Camelia's corpse and take the implant for herself without letting Mara know.

>Also, why did you make Darkbloom's character sheet so fucked up that it included scaphism and his need for godhood and a hint of other insane, megalomanical degenerate mad man traits if it didn't actually pay off much?

"Favorite execution method" is a bit of a misnomer. It's more the method of execution most morbidly fascinating to them. Darkbloom, who is phobic of maggots, finds scaphism especially horrible to contemplate, but for that reason, it's also transfixing. I imagine he imagines that it's the best proof of man's barbarity.

His ideal job being "God" is kind of a joke. I should have put something real... then again, he is a bit of a megalomaniac.

I'd argue his arc did pay off. He was a megalomaniacal, degenerate madman who got brought to heel after his sins caught up to him, and died pitifully. This happens in real life. Many such cases!

>what if his mind was in a woman who we have no emotional attachment to? Mara, for instance?

That's all sorts of deliciously fucked up, but I dunno. I'm still of two minds about it. I have no love for Darkbloom, obviously, but I'm not sure what to think of mindbroken cumslut Bitchbloom.

> It's not like I was a die hard Rosefag before all this (I actually kind of hated her), you made me convert after how she was handled in the reboot. She went from being a bitchy, violent control freak to, well, still all those things but in a way that worked much better with her dynamic with Ally that resulted in her being much more fleshed out as well. I would've never imagined back in season 1 that she would ever have such a special relationship with Alabaster but that just goes to show how far they've both come as people over this series and I'm so glad that that wasn't destroyed in the end by the universe reset. She's been extremely important, in both meta and in story to FQ as a whole

Thanks for the kind words!

I feel very good about how I ended Alabaster's arc with most of the girls, including Rose.

I think I made most of my storytelling decisions for the betterment of the narrative and without personal biases interfering with my judgment. When some girls were getting the shaft in the bad way, I tried to give them more prominence... but it was inevitable that some of the girls would be closer or not with Alabaster himself.

Having at least one girl there with Alabaster at "the end of the world" (in more ways than one -- they were at the literal end of the world) I agree was a pretty strikingly beautiful and sort of haunting setpiece. It's something that will stick with me. It didn't have to be Rose -- your choices led to that just as much as my plotting -- but it fits, and overall, it's kinda sweet that as jealous as she always was, she's going to end up becoming a kind of shepherd for the harem in 422 like Alabaster will also be.

> Does Sam know [she can't get pregnant]? Or is she just being hot in dialog.

She knows. I was going to have her mention it, offhandedly -- not showing any sadness outwardly, but Ally sensing that it upsets her. And of course trying to cheer her.

>1. I take it we are to assume Alabaster smothered Cerise with that pillow. What did Chloe do with the body after leaving in the ship?

Chloe would have buried Cerise at sea.

>2. Can you elaborate on the fates of any other characters in the 421 universe who we never saw confirmation about?

I don't think there are any other major characters whose fates have gone unrevealed.

Oh, I guess Fazil: he would have been as all right as possible in a post-WW3 world.

>3. Any jokes, callbacks or references you’re mad we missed?

Every time this question comes up, I forget the stuff you guys have let slip! There's a ton. Let me think back through recent posts...

There's a bunch of Mili references peppered into the past couple episodes and I've only really seen one pointed out, the most obvious one, which is Alex's line of code.

Kay saying "did your implant make you loopy" is deliberate wordplay.

Samantha working in a bike shop is an obvious joke about her being the community bicycle herself.

Kay's scene mentioning that she once envisioned reporters saying "what a scoop!" is a callback to her insulting Charlotte for supposedly envisioning the same thing.

When Rose and Alabaster admit to cheating in the StuCo election, their stated methods of cheating are vice-versa from how their analogues are frequently accused of cheating. Alabaster forged votes/voted multiple times. Rose changed votes and suppressed votes.

Kay keeping Guy in her purse is a callback to her insistence that she's not a neurotic Dog Mommy who goes around with her yippy little toy breed in her purse.

I could keep going. Pretty much every episode is interwoven with dozens of little self references, jokes, and callbacks. I assume a lot of these actually are getting noticed, but people just don't talk about them since there's nothing really in them to talk about. So when stuff goes unmentioned, it doesn't make me mad!

>4. Would you ever consider a scene where Alabaster bottoms to Alex?

I dunno. I primarily write smut scenes that interest me personally. And the idea of Alex topping Alabaster just isn't really alluring to me. Not because I'm intrinsically somehow against it on principle, it just doesn't turn me on. I think maybe the most I'd want to go with them is a 69.

It's true to character, too. Alex likes getting fucked like a girl in the end. And Alabaster likes fucking him like one.

>5. Does the universe exist only for Alabaster’s sake or is Sand Reckoner trying to optimize it for everyone? If the former, what makes Alabaster so special?

This is a really hard question to pin down. I had some exposition from the Optimizing Parameter regarding her origin and relationship to Alabaster, but I left it on the cutting room floor because I didn't want to make it canon. That would have explained this definitively in favor of "the universe exists for Alabaster's sake." But in the end, that's a pretty solipsistic universe.

I see a couple distinct possibilities.

1. The Optimizing Parameter is trying to produce the most optimal universe for the highest number of people at the same time, and Alabaster just has a unique opportunity for optimizations.

2. The Optimizing Parameter is trying to create the best possible universe for one individual or group of individuals, then, once finding it, she moves to another, until she has found the best universe for every possible human to ever exist.

The truth could be either of those things... or another version of your own imagining. I'm leaving a lot of Fuck Quest's metaphysics unanswered because it's more fun that way, in my opinion.

>5. How does Sand Reckoner operate in a world like Ye Olde Fuck Quest where there is no such thing as computers? Magic?

The Optimizing Parameter does not exist from the beginning of the new universe. She seeds each next universe with initial conditions that will also bring her back into existence. So in Ye Olde Fucke Queste, she may not exist yet, despite having set conditions for Alabaster's life in that timeframe.

Magic is another possible explanation -- maybe the Optimizing Parameter doesn't always need to be a technological entity. Or maybe the "magic" of YOFQ is just advanced technology that the medieval people of that world mistake for magic!

>6. Will you ever update the chart? And would you ever consider doing a “character interview” like https://thewritingkylie.com/blog/get-to-know-your-characters-with-character-interviews-115-questions (many templates exist?) I know it’s a lot to ask but it would be so intriguing!

What kind of stuff would you guys like to see on THE CHART?

As for the character interview, I've seen these types of things before! It would be fun to do one. I just might!

>7. If you novelized the story, would you sell it? Try to publish it? Patreon? What?

I have no idea! I've only deeply considered doing something more with it as I approached the end. I'm uncomfortable doing stuff like Patreon, and no reputable publisher would let this kind of stuff on their platform, so I have no clue how I'd put it out in the world.

>8. Can you reveal any other story ideas you’re playing with aside from FQ?

Let's talk after the OVA.

>9. Who are your writing heroes? What famous authors do you dislike?

David Foster Wallace's love for and interest in people of all walks of life has always been a joy, and his maximalist prose style influences me a lot. You don't see it in my writing for FQ because I'm constantly under a time pressure and working by improv, but my "real" writing, that is, the stuff I have time to myself to sit down and edit for hours per paragraph, strives for a somewhat similar style.

Other writing heroes include Melville, Nabokov, Murakami, Kafka, Eco, Vonnegut, Camus, Pynchon, PK Dick, and Cormac McCarthy. Just to name a few.

Writers I detest include Johnathan Franzen, Shirley Jackson, O Henry, Palhniuk.

>10. Did Alex’s foster parent he mentioned molest him and can you please answer no even if it’s yes so I’m not sad?

I honestly would say no. The guy who took Alex in was a nebbishy middle manager type. I think the worst he probably did was creep on Alex hardcore, but never did anything to cross the line into actual sexual assault. That's how I read the situation, anyway.

>>my "real" writing, that is, the stuff I have time to myself to sit down and edit for hours per paragraph, strives for a somewhat similar style.
>If you don't mind me asking, what kind of stuff do you consider your real writing? Are you writing a novel? (No need to go into specifics, obviously)

I don't mean FQ is "not real" in the sense that I'd disown it or that it isn't something I care about. I only mean that in the sense that I edit and polish it very, very little before putting it up, and pump it out at a much faster pace than the stuff I'm not posting publicly.

I can't post anything from serious projects that I'd like to do things with, for obvious reasons, but here's a character description I found in a random file, to give you a flavor of my normal prose stylism.

---

Ann-Marie has a layer of subcutaneous fat in her forehead. It covers the entire breadth of the forehead from eye to eye and hairline to brow, distending the skin and making the dermis horrendously greasy. It looks like a buboe ready to burst, or maybe the aftermath of her skull shattering and her brain oozing into the void. This layer of fat has no obvious proximate cause, as in e.g. morbid obesity, unfortunate birth defect, encephalitis, or botched cosmetic surgery, so that all the specialists she has consulted remain capital-B Baffled. This layer of fat weighs more than a pound and sort of hangs over her brow, sagging under its own mass. Imagine a forehead with a beer gut; you'll get the idea. The overall effect of this sagging is to give her a cavewomanish mien, which isn't exactly helping matters. The layer of fat appeared when Ann-Marie was 13, which any woman who has gone through the tribulations of puberty will tell you is spectacularly bad timing, with all the pressures and incipient neuroses and anxieties about body image, popularity, and attractiveness that attend, + none of the above palliated in any way by the almost primeval viciousness of your teenaged coevals. Not to say there is a good time to suddenly develop a subcutaneous layer of fat in your forehead. But there are worse times, and adolescence has got to top the list. For Ann-Marie, the mental anguish -- and please forgive that phrase, usually so insipid, because in this instance there is honestly no better way of putting it -- the mental anguish of her peers’ cruelty proved too much. She dropped out of school in the 10th grade and became a shut-in.

Ann-Marie's day consists of the following routine, with only occasional deviation. 1. Wake up; 2. lie awake in bed for one to two hours; 3. stagger out of bed; 4. eat a "breakfast pizza," with sausage, artificial egg, bacon, and roasted pepper, a product of the fine folks at Pepperidge Farm; 5. masturbate to truly appalling images on her computer; 6. watch anime on her computer; 7. see item 5.; 8. ibid.; 9. post about anime on anonymous message boards; 10. naptime; 11. eat an entire family-sized bag of Lay's potato chips, sour cream & onion flavor + a 2 liter bottle of wild cherry Pepsi; 11. see item 5.; 12. more time on anonymous message boards; 13. sleep for twelve to thirteen hours. 14. go to 1.

Ann-Marie’s growth does not entitle her to Social Security disability benefits, since (per the Social Security Act), it does not prevent her from performing the substantial gainful activity required to make a living, nor does it impact her field of vision or her mental acuity, nor has any analysis indicated any sort of malignance or degenerative bent to the thing. It’s just this lump of fat that won’t go away. Surgery is out of the question for financial reasons, since Badger Care, her state-funded HMO, considers the procedure cosmetic and therefore will not pay a dime. A paroxysm of desperation once led Ann-Marie, aged 16, to attempt siphoning the adipose herself using a razorblade and turkey baster, with predictably disastrous results. After losing over a pint of blood and spending the next five days in the hospital under suicide watch (this being the height of the zero tolerance era and a culture of just generally distrusting our youth to learn lessons from mistakes except by putting them through a bureaucratic sausage grinder so massive and inhuman it would have made Kafka shudder), all she had to show for her trouble was a trapezoidal scar on the lower-left side of her growth. The suicide watch turned out to have been probably a good thing in retrospect because Ann-Marie also became convinced that her meddling had somehow caused the thing to grow, despite assurances from her primary care physician that it appeared to be “roughly the same size” (a spectacularly poor choice of wording, granted); and this conviction, like those of teenage girls who think shaving their legs leads to a Hydra-like multiplying and thickening of the pubey hair there, persisted in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

---

I write by free association, so here's a sort of similar character from the same file who you might feel less sympathy for.

---

Tom Stanton has eyes deep-set in their sockets, as if they've been half swallowed by the fat of his face. His features are soft. Weak. As if carved from Play-Doh. Beady little half-sunk eyes and a dumpy misshapen fivehead and a chin that becomes a neck the way a heap becomes a pile, you can't tell exactly when. He licks his lips every twelve seconds or so. It's disgusting.

What he does is, he hides your money. And he's good at it indeed. He can shuffle around checking accounts and Roth 401(k)s and dividends on investment farms &c, so that come April 15th you don't owe anything at all, or maybe Uncle Sam even has an outstanding debt or two with /you/, maybe you even qualify for food stamps and housing assistance, like so many hard-up billionaires these days. And this shell game he plays with your money, it isn't /illegal/, technically, but it isn't technically legal either, rather greyly extra-legal or /supra/-legal, as he likes to say -- well in any case no jury in the country would convict, and that's what counts.

He leaves his Manhattan condominium now, like all days, at precisely 8:00 AM. See him turn out his lights, once twice three times, like he thinks the first two times won't take. See him lock his door and try the handle, once twice three times, just to make extra sure. See him wait for the elevator, pressing the call button once twice-- you get the picture.

He insists that he's just "very particular."

Of course being "very particular" is why he's so good at what he does. It helps him keep track of his dozens of clients' hundreds of offshore accounts in Vanuatu, Nauru, Fiji. It helps him wade through brick after brick of legislation -- gives him the almost perverse ability to /enjoy/ it -- and the acuity to zero in on every loophole. He's a genius, it can't be disputed. A bona fide savant. He could be out finding solutions to unsolved problems in algebraic topology or non-Abelian group theory or whatever. But this is what he does. He shuttles between his nice little condo in SoHo and his nice little office on the upper east side and he helps the rich evade the law, day in and day out, without breaks for federal holidays or vacations, and every day at 3:15 PM precisely he eats lo mein from Chang's, with one two three packets of soy sauce. This is is his life and if it changed in even the smallest detail he would go fucking bonkers.

---

Anyway that's enough of my non FQ writing.

>Any tips for wannabe writers? I procrastinate far too much and I never got far into writing any fiction.
>Except my quest maybe, but I don't like the quality of the finished product really.

I can't pretend to be knowledgeable or a good source of tips. This smut quest is the only longterm project I've ever seen through to its end.

My best advice for writing, though, if I had to summarize what I do...

1. Steal shamelessly (but don't plagiarize)
2. Let your characters talk, don't put words in their mouth or hew too closely to your plan for the conversation.
3. Trust your audience, don't state the obvious. If someone goes to the window, you don't need to add that they look out. That's what you do at a window.
4. Try to be invisible. Your writing isn't impressive because you, the author, are smart.
5. Don't be too constrained by Strunk and White. Play with language. You're not writing for a newspaper.
6. Love people. And put your characters first above plot and worldbuilding. Those things don't matter if you've got no one interesting to populate the world with.

>I recall you saying the song Camelia was particularly fitting for Amber's character arc, but remind me - did the song inspire any aspects of her character directly, or was it just coincidential?

No, I had planned most basic aspects of Camelia's character and backstory before stumbling on the song. I looked up world.execute(me); on youtube in preparation for the reboot, thinking it would be a good OP song, and Camelia was in the related videos (the music video had just released days prior iirc). Very fortuitous! Of course, she was named for the song, but that's about it.

This is neither here nor there, but I think Bathtub Mermaid rivals Camelia in terms of fitting character songs. The lyrics, music, and general vibe of the song are absolutely perfect for Chloe. Again, I had planned most aspects of Chloe before I revisited it and thought of it being good for her!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n-iqXTztVQ

>What's your favorite Mili song, OP?

Camelia, I'd say.

Followed by Ga1ahad and Scientific Witchery, world.execute(me);, Rubber Human, Bathtub Mermaid, and With a Billion Worldful of <3

---

Ok, here's what didn't get cleared from my whiteboard.

CERISE:
>Lewd
Jerking Ally off with an onahole

Scissoring and sharing a double dildo with Whitney

>Plot/Character Detail
Gal teachers her hacking

>Dialogue
"Maybe David Darkbloom rubbed off on me. Living that long with another consciousness in your head is bound to leave a mark, right?"

WHITNEY:
>Lewd
Titjob but... there's not much there (team up with Kay?)

>Plot/Character Detail
Inadvertently joins the #FreeJared movement "They told me he was innocent! Why wouldn't I tweet in support of freeing an innocent man!"

ROSE:
>Lewd
True femdom scene, Ally doesn't win (no pegging though)

>Plot/Character Detail
Chinese characters keep calling her "the tradwife"

>Dialogue
Apperance on TV "fake news. That's absolutely fake news--"

"It's unforgivable to play on easy mode."
"I -- tch. Don't quote Touhou memes to me, Rose. You know it creeps me out."

Rose2, using either forefinger to press the sides of Rose's cheek into a smile: "Let's turn that frown upside down!"
Rose (voice muffled, still being forced to smile): "I'm going to murder you."

AMBER:
>Lewd
Amber and Kay - interesting combo to explore

Experimenting with anal masturbation/rimming with Vivian

>Plot/Character Detail
Fist fight with Auburn

Starts a Nazbol club at North High

>Dialogue
Regarding Auburn: "Very low SMV. The lowest."

"Oh, sure. You destroyed her with facts and logic."

(Regarding Gal/Ally): "Gross. You're skeletons. You two fucking would sound like a Gamecube controller at a Smash Bros tournament."

"I'm not surprised Rose married you. Liberals jump into bed with the right at the <span class="mu-i">first[/spoiler] excuse. It's what makes them such useful idiots."
"I don't know how to interpret that."
"Sure you don't."

VIVIAN:
>Lewd
Standing sex - holding her by the thighs

Wearing cummy panties all day at work

Fumbling femdom MUST DO

>Plot/Character Detail
Booster seat at a congressional hearing

Tells Alabaster that David really did kill his parents

Flashback to witnessing David's death

>Dialogue
"The world turns on the decisions we make. So let us pray we make the right ones."

"I have allowed my heart to be consumed by hated... it feels quite good. I inherited that from my mother -- and that little genetic gift, will kill her..."

GAL
>Lewd
Spitting on her face / girls taking turns to help

>Plot/Character Detail
Wins an argument against Armstrong

Toking up with Nelson... Armstrong mocks them

Playing ITAOTS in her office... Nelson praises her taste

RENEE:
>Lewd
Alex eating/rimming her to sleep

>Plot/Character Detail
Playing word games with Alex

Eskimo kissing with Alex

>Dialogue
"Stop being so goddamn... persnickety about everything!"

ALEX:
>Lewd
Solo scene with Ally - tearful makeup sex

>Plot/Character Detail
Smoke cigarettes with Renee in their cell

Alex's parents visit while he's in captivity

>Dialogue
To Renee: "Maybe you should have been my role model. Maybe I wouldn't be here today."
"I'm no one's role model."

[As you can tell, most of what didn't get cleared for Renee and Alex was material dating to their time in Vail.]

KAY:
>Lewd
Wears a vibrating egg to a TV interview

Gets a sex swing installed in her office

>Plot/Character Detail
Accidentally hits Rose with her car

ROSE2:
>Lewd
Ice play

Tail buttplug/petplay

>Plot/Character Detail
Amber tells Charlotte that Rose2 once answered "dinosaur" for "what do you want to be when you grow up."
Charlotte: "That's not so bad. Lots of young children have fantastical daydreams--"
Amber: "She was in seventh grade."

Trains in firearms and "ka-ra-te"

>Dialogue
"Ally-kun, denwa!"

"Always the megablocks, never the Legos..."
Nelson: "Uh, actually, the plural is just Lego. ... Sorry."

CHARLOTTE:
>Lewd
Gentle momdom? Some light bondage and soothing words

"Instructing" Rose and Ally

>Plot/Character Detail
Saul and/or Charlotte show up to work one day with unexplained and poorly concealed black eyes

Walking in on her rapping along to Tupac, "hard R and all"

Flashback to reunion with Mom

>Dialogue
"He strikes me as... how should I put this -- a low-T individual."

(About Rose): "Every plan she's ever hatched, eventually succeeds... if she's plotting against you, look out."

MOM:
>Lewd
Walks in on Amber/Vivian

Revenge on Charlotte -- making Rose "prove" she can satisfy her son

>Plot/Character Detail
Has a meme calendar

Kills an intruder trying to get into Amber's room

Bakes for a major press junket @ DBA, with predictable results

>Dialogue
"I didn't intend to raise a Bolshevik..."

(On that note, here's a dialogue post-it I just realized I dropped on the ground, for Amber): "There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. Lenin said that."

NOELLE:
>Lewd
"Can we try the mating press?"

Dribbles baby oil on Alabaster's dick with her mouth -- then sucks him off

>Plot/Character Detail
Poisoning Hugh
[note: the honeypot to get Sable's notes was originally supposed to involve her poisoning him to death]

Ally discovers her top tag is vanilla

>Dialogue
"Sorry. I forgot your whore wife was going to be here."

ALLY
>Dialogue
(On Rose2): "She's Whitney's Whitney."

"One night in Boise and the world's your oyster..."

OTHERS
>Plot/Character Detail
Hank from quiz bowl shows up - wheelchair bound following his accident in Boise, but still "just Hank." Lives in Boise now, "I learned to like it there."

Saul is super into Animal Crossing

Auburn's "I'm with Her" bumper sticker

>Dialogue
Nelson: "Rumor is that he's got an improbably large penis... 3 standard deviations or more."

Stackleford: "I've been into bimbofication recently -- where are you going?"

Armstrong: "Oh, that's great. I have to carry water for an accidental Maoist. Just what I wanted."

Saul, on Armstrong: "Yeah, we used to be adversaries. Tag-teaming a slutty bunny tends to make people see past their differences."

Amber calls either Auburn or Rose, "feminist cringe compilation #421"
[not sure why this is under the "others" section]
.
.
.
And that's it! I had a good clear rate this season.

Pulling the post-it notes with the girls' names on them off the now otherwise-blank whiteboard was a really ennui inducing moment just now

>What's the source for Lady's avatar? Looked all over reverse image searches and couldn't find it.

Dmitrys.

>C'mon OP, you're telling us you don't find it hot to keep turning David on and off so he and Mara each take turns getting stuffed over and over again, drooling and trying to resist but completely unable to because every time they can try to form a coherent thought they switch so it's just unending mind bending pleasure mixed with black nothingness? I don't believe it.

Anon pls.

>Rose2 and Chloe never interacted with each other

>An actual crime

I agree. I wanted to bounce them off each other.

>>Accidentally hits Rose with her car?
>Still there, huh?
It's just a really funny image to me! Surprised you remember it was also on the S2 board.

>>[Mom] kills and intruder trying to get into Amber's room
>Gonna assume a russian?
Wasn't sure who it might be. I just envisioned a scene like that where she has to kill to protect Amber.

>>Fumbling femdom MUST DO
>You've been sitting on it for years OP, just go for it

There's still time.

>>True femdom scene, Ally doesn't win (no pegging though)
>Not a big fan of femdom personally but I'm genuinely surprised we never got this.

It likely would have looked quite a bit like the femdom scene we got with Renee. Maybe just a tad rougher for Ally, and with some more of Rose's peculiar tastes in the mix.

>>"Instructing" Rose and Ally
>>Revenge on Charlotte -- making Rose "prove" she can satisfy her son
>Wish we got these

Me too.

Ditto the ice play with Rose2. Just imagine putting an ice cube in each of her lower holes and watching her squirm!

>What happened to Whitney’s body?
>I thought it was so touching that Kay went back to get the pets (Smatters included) but that means she dealt with Whitney’s body too, right?

Kay buried her, probably in the backyard, and with Samantha's help.

There's some missing time here with regards to Kay's whereabouts. The nuclear attacks alluded to in the finale did not happen immediately after Alabaster and Rose fled to Alaska. But I'm not sure what the full timeline, post-ep14, looks like. I think Kay probably stayed in the Nail House for a period of days or weeks, at first grieving, and then deciding on a course of action.

She would have fled to somewhere safe herself, prior to the nuclear attacks (maybe she had somehow received advance notice?) and then returned after the fallout to dig up the implant.

It's in fact plausible that she tracked Rose and Alabaster all the way to Alaska, realized they needed Penelope, then returned to Palo Alto to retrieve it before going back to Alaska a second time... and possibly the nuclear armageddon happened during her first road trip. It seems that she knows to go to Alaska when she finds Penelope in the finale's cold open, so this version of events makes sense too.

>[debate over whether Amber/Camelia were truly extremist in their ways]

Camelia was certainly more of an extremist than Amber, and Auburn was more of an extremist than we are initially given to believe.

I said this after season 3, but I'll reiterate that although Camelia and Amber are the same person, thus sharing some essential traits, their life paths have molded them differently. Since Camelia's life path was more extreme, she became a more extreme version of herself.