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ratgirlcopia · 2 months

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Nah, i think what you said in your lore opinion makes a lot of sense, actually, and as your token mutual who is (unfortunately, here) very fond of terzo and meliora, i think, from a 'what is ghost to someone just getting into it' perspective its probably the most coherent way to approach it!

(My migraine addled brain last night suggested it's like. Vampires before and after Dracula. Prequelle and Impera are putting a definite and more specific thing together. The earlier albums and papas play with a premise, and it's not that there's *not* stories there, but. If you're writing a dracula story you don't really have to integrate other earlier, potentially contradictory, vampire concepts unless you want to, because we've got a single, specific iteration we're working with now. The previous papas and how they interact with copia's lore are functionally, as you say, more like fun AUs than equal canon)

yeah i think this is a really good way of looking at it! the previous papas are essential to how the concept evolved, but they're just not part of it anymore, they were a separate thing, and that time is pretty much over. sorry in advance for how long this is, this ask just made me start thinking about it again and i think it's an extremely interesting topic.

it's sort of wild, because i guess they figured that in order to keep people invested, copia had to be part of the "same" universe, and there had to be background characters carrying over across eras to bridge the gap, but the longer it goes on, the more it becomes obvious that the story probably would've benefited a lot from doing something like, "hey, the three previous guys were all from, say, the swedish location of the ghost ministry, but now we're going to talk about all-new characters from the los angeles location and it's a separate thing." but the decision to keep imperator and nihil as characters who have always been orchestrating things across eras (thus retconning a lot of stuff in the process) means we have these very ambiguous connections that weigh down the narrative.

even nihil's whole existence is contradictory. they present him as if he's been "papa" forever, we also have the "there can only be one papa" rule copia throws out during the ascension show, so then we're left with...what, nihil was papa before, then his kids were papa, then he went back to being papa? if the title is that easy to toss back and forth, it doesn't really mean anything. but if we view nihil-imperator-copia as their own universe, with nihil holding onto that title forever because there just isn't anybody else who's good enough for it, his whole deal makes a lot more sense.

the previous three are killed off SO unceremoniously, and because they are literally never brought up again, it just feels like (again, understandably) the writing at the beginning of the prequelle era was pretending there's a connection to the past eras that wasn't really there, to convince people to stay invested in what was essentially a brand-new thing. but now that it's worked and people are invested in copia, there aren't any more call-backs to previous eras, because they don't need them. but that weird "is it the same thing or isn't it" connection is still there because they relied on it in the beginning of the prequelle era.

it's the kind of thing that would drive me absolutely crazy if i was responsible for figuring out how to tell a coherent story, but thankfully that's not on me so i can just watch.

i think ghost is probably a very, very difficult thing to write for because of all this, which is part of why i'm so interested to see what the ghovie ends up doing. i think it could be a really cool opportunity to retcon the parts that don't make sense and try to edit all the weird, ambiguous loose ends together into a good, internally consistent story. they'd have to be willing to risk going "hey, these things aren't connected at all, sorry," more openly than they have before (even though that's basically the reality, with the current era not acknowledging the previous guys at all), but i think it would be worth the risk in terms of turning out a story that can stand on its own as a logically sound thing.

#ask #singinrevelry #i mean. it was already a pretty big risk to kill off the previous three. so i don't think tf is particularly Risk-Averse in that sense.#it's an absolute mess of a thing as-is and that's certainly fun.#but i do genuinely believe it has the potential to become coherent. and that's what makes me insane.

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