"Shhhhh. You are going to write a Fearblog."
Sometime in the Fear Mythos, while I was still working on Genera and on Rapture, I think even when DCA Season 8 was happening, I started another new story. This one was a blog titled Fearblog of Fear, Dreams and Sleep and Fear, and there was some frustration behind it, but it was a... surprising frustration.The idea was to make the worst Fearblog I could think of, sort of a tribute to the still-think-it's-legendary Marble Bumblebees as well as a host of crappypasta that I found delightful in their absurdity, probably also a tribute to Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff though I hadn't been reading Homestuck for that long by then. It was also a (perhaps risque) pastiche of some Slenderblogs and Fearblogs I had read. I definitely started out wanting to make fun of bad writing. But you want the truth? The truth is, this was the most fun story to write. It bore the most creative fruit out of all my projects, and it forced a change (or crystallization) of the most fundamental philosophies I had, the philosophies of creation and community.
So. There's a (fictional) kid on the (fictional) internet calling himself Billy Everyblogger. He is destined, nay, prophesied, ordained by the horror gods themselves, to write a Fearblog (The Wooden Girl appears on his bed one night, holds a finger to her lips, and says "Shhhh. You are going to write a Fearblog." I think of that often). And boy, does he write. He begins a 96-post epic, soon joined by the mysterious masked proxy "Masky." He meets Fears old and new, he saves his girlfriend over and over again, he.. does some stuff with school, he learns of the ancient Obama dynasty, and eventually he becomes a proxy and begins These Violent Delights, an edgy thoughtful sequel blog, where he writes treatises on the Proper way to do horror, and he struggles with internal conflict over whether to really serve the horror monsters or if that makes him bad.
I went out of my way to make this as absurd as I could. There's nonsensical chapter divisions, there's musical interludes, there's constant "allusions" to popular serial works (including my own). Masky leaves comments on most posts, with hidden links in them (that, for a long time, led inexplicably to.. seedier parts of the internet. "why???" because those were Masky's home, dammit. the art of a web log needs to run on the rules of web art, not writing). Billy gets into arguments with his commenters about what good writing even is. One of those arguments is why he even ends his first blog. It's this whole meta arc. Billy gets a hater, and it makes him quit blogging. It's tragic.
And then came Magreat & Archangard.
"This is who we are."
Jordan Dooling IS Christoph Magreat IN I Am Everyblogger
Friend Bones and I made fake pseudonyms ("fake" as in, we never exactly hid that it was really us), alter-egos, who had studied modern art and were quite interested in bringing those sentiments to the blogosphere. I'm Christoph Magreat, Bones is Jesus Archangard. We named ourselves by crossing Fear names with famous artists (EAT + Rene Magritte, The Archangel + Fernando Pessoa alias A. Francisco de Paula Angard). The fact that together they're Jesus and Christ is, I swear to god, a ridiculous coincidence we didn't even notice until quite a bit after making some stuff. We did this for the same reason I made up the character Billy Everyblogger: to add context to some blogs.
First there was The Blog Without a Face, which Bones and I co-wrote the first few posts for, then we left it for like two years, and then I suddenly went and wrote the entire rest of the thing in a couple days. It is, canonically, Fearblog of Fear fanfiction. Like, that wasn't a retcon; that was the plan from the outset, that was the very idea. My own fanfiction for my own story. And in practice, I believe it's a compelling narrative in its own right: The slender man discovers he is not real and has an existential crisis, only to find meaning in that he's actually pretty good at bullshitting. Because "bullshitting" is something far more profound in the real world. It is the source of social interaction, it is the fuel of Play, it is the heart of philosophy, and it is the soul of Life. We fake it until we make it, within the parameters we discover for ourselves.
Do you get it? The point of Archangard & Magreat is to make clearer the point of Billy Everyblogger: "This is who we are. We all have this within us. It is harmful to make fun of writing that works differently than we like. It is not 'bad,' it is no worse than your efforts. Ignore it at worst. Participate in it at best. That is how you will grow."
And from then on, and ever since, I have resolved to celebrate the "bad" art.
something about Magreat
...oh, right, back to the story. SO MAGREAT AND ARCHANGARD, these two painfully serious artists, CAME INTO THE BLOGOSPHERE and wrote fiction in tribute to Billy Everyblogger. And Billy was revived, Billy came to believe in himself again. And that is why he writes his sequel blog, These Violent Delights. Because now he knows someone believes in him.In the meantime, in 2015, Archangard writes a ton of blogs, Magreat collaborates with him for the abstract Fear series, and then Magreat crafts the esoteric epic (esotepic?) Viceking's Graab, a twisting maze 67 blogs deep (a blogyrinth!), which I do not see getting converted to Website anytime soon. One of the (again, sixty-seven) blogs in this maze is written by Billy Everyblogger; Magreat allows Billy to serve an amusing and important function in his greatest work!
And then Magreat goes missing.
what comes next
this symphony isn't done, so you know what that means: there's MORE BLOGS TO DO. These Violent Delights must be finished. there may be a third and final work in Billy's saga. Magreat will come back and release more blogs. (is... is Where's Magreat? canon here???)there's more for me to say, but dammit this will do for now.