How I Do It (feat. The Great Lady)

I mentioned at the end of She Sings At the End that I had a half-written essay about how I did it. This is the refurbished version of that essay, merged with a different essay I'd been working on as a follow-up to TLN asking me "How do you do it?" after I posted What Do People Know About the Mythos? Contrary to my usual status quo, I actually have a thought process stable and coherent enough to describe, so describe it I shall. 

This essay is also a sequel and slight update to “The Grand Art”, and as before the steps I list here do not neatly march in order in practice; this is ultimately a post hoc systemization that is meant as an analysis of my own thoughts, rather than a prescription of method.

As a refresher:

• Text - the work as a whole, situated within the context of its creation and engagement. Star Wars is a Text.
• Component - (Formerly Idea) Discrete elements of a Text, such as characters, events, places, themes, and other content. Luke Skywalker is a Component.
• Trait - (Formerly Component) Details that make up a Component, operating as a second layer of  “Disaffected farm boy” is a Trait. 

Or: Traits are individual lego bricks, components are a lego construct that can be easily moved between sets, and a text is the entire lego set as a whole.

Adaptation entails moving components between texts through alteration of those components and their associated traits; change is inevitable and should be leaned into - the point is making your version. 

Since my breakdown of the Great Lady is quite long, I’m going to stick that in the back half for pacing purposes and just use lightweight examples for Part 1.

 

Part 1: Adaptation via the Grand Art

0. What am I trying to do and why, anyway? 
No need to overthink it. It’s helpful to have an idea of what you want to do with the component you’re translating, but “I want to make my own version of this” is perfectly serviceable to start.

Example: “What’s Luke Skywalker like in a hard-science Star Wars?”

1a. Identify the component’s name,  place, & time 
These traits come first because they provide the historical and social context that supports and shapes everything else in the translation. Not all components will have all three (lack of a name or a specific time being pretty common), and in those cases you’ll have to fill in the blanks with whatever you think is most appropriate. Places and Times are components in their own right, but they don’t need special treatment or a dedicated step.

Example:

• Name - Luke Skywalker
• Place - Tatooine
• Time - Galactic Civil War

1b. Identify other relevant traits.
This list should contain everything else that you think is interesting, relevant, or distinctive about the component. You’re not aiming for completion here, so focus on the immediately available / recognizable traits and don’t get caught up in the weeds. you can always add more or expand what you have later. 

An important note here is that you should include traits you don’t like in this step along with the ones you do: figuring out what to do with those comes later in the process.

Example:

• Trait: Disaffected youth
• Trait: Longing for adventure
• Occupation: Moisture farmer (struggling)
• Connection: Biggs (friend)
• Connection: Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru
• Connection: Anakin Skywalker (father, presumed deceased)
• Connection: Leia Organa (secret twin sister)

Don’t worry if the component you’re translating doesn’t have much in the way of distinctive features; boring components can still be useful thanks to Points of Interaction.

Sidebar: Points of Interaction
I don’t have a pithy definition for Points of Interaction, but it’s somewhere in the territory of “the conceptual space where traits of a component would naturally / logically interact with other components of the text, regardless of whether or not the interaction is present in the source text.”

There’s a quote from Grant Morrison that illustrates the principle in reverse:

“Kids understand that real crabs don't sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really fucking dumb questions like ‘how does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile's tires?' it's a fucking made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!" 

Now, I understand where Morrison’s coming from here: I’d probably be just as irritated if I had to field questions from comics nerds all the time. But someone is going to eventually need to pump those tires; the error (as we see constantly in big franchises) is in thinking that the pumping the tires by itself is the important part.

The Batmobile is a souped-up hot rod (trait), so naturally it’s going to require pretty extensive maintenance to keep it in fighting shape (POI). But it’s also part of Batman’s secret arsenal (trait) so it can’t be maintained by just anyone (POI); Alfred could do it, but since Bruce built it I could give him a new “Car Guy” trait and that gives him a potential point of interaction with all manner of car guy-related things. What are his other cars like? Who does he buy parts from? Does he have a group of friends he only meets at car shows? Did he ever call in to Car Talk?

Points of Interaction are primarily there to provide texture and flavor, but they will often help influence plot and character dynamics: it’s easy to imagine Bruce and Clark spending a Saturday fixing up Clark’s car, or Batman struggling with the villain of the week because the Batmobile is in the shop for transmission repair.

Anyway, it’s always good to keep potential POIs in the back of your head, just in case they come in handy later.


2.Make the initial adjustments
Alter the name/place/time pyramid from 1a in order to fit the component into the destination text.

I tend to have a lot of fun with this step; since my preferred level of verisimilitude is generally higher than a lot of the material that I like adapting, the process often turns into a puzzle I need to entangle. If I’m translating Conan from the Hyborean Age to real-world history, do I stick him in the Iron Age Pontic Steppe with the real-world Cimmerians, or do I put him in medieval Ireland based on his name? Either one works, but they will result in radically different outcomes later on.

Example: Tatooine is swapped out for Mars (or a Mars analogue), the Galactic Civil War is compressed to just a single solar system. “Skywalker” is used as a bastard’s name and is a calque of an old word for astronaut.

3.  Assess and adapt remaining traits
This is usually going to be the longest stage in the process, but also the one where your vision really comes together. Toss out the stuff you don’t want, focus on what interests you, keep your eyes peeled for fruitful points of interaction.

Example: Luke grew up on Mars but wasn’t born there, so he’s missing a few common gene mods (skin pigmentation for UV protection, enhanced kidneys for water filtration, lungs and heart adapted to low-oxygen environments) and has to make do with workarounds.

4. Add new traits as desired
No real guidance here except “go where the muse takes you”.

Example: 

• Luke’s reigning celebrity crush is Dejah Thoris.
• Luke knows a bit of the Sand People trade language.
• Luke has two somewhat-successful side-gigs: repair work (pays mostly in barter and favors), and selling weed he grows in an old hydroponics unit Uncle Owen trashed a couple years ago (less successful - his cultivar is absolute dogshit)

5. Additional Tips
Strategies and trains of thought I find useful, but which aren’t really suited to getting their own step in the schematic.

• Start with a big ticket item; make one change at a time; build each change on top of the last.

• When stumped, think about what would be the most likely case if all else hews to reality.
• This is useful for filling in blanks, deciding what traits to cut, or generating Points of Interaction.

• Alternatively, come up with an elaborate logical justification for how the trouble spot could work in the logic of the rest of the world.

• Make them earn their adjectives
• Very important when adapting old fiction; give that purple prose a fine-toothed comb and see what’s actually useful as a description. If the description contradicts the actual content, go with the content as your base.

• If the description is vague, add some specific details with preference to those that provide Points of Interaction.

• Treat all narrators, including omniscient ones, as unreliable
• This is one of the most useful cheats out there and absolutely vital for doing any work in Lovecraftiana: act with the assumption that all narrators inherit their author’s biases and adjust components and traits accordingly.
• You can use this as an excuse to get away with damn near everything.
• But by that same token, you are not immune to it.

• Bigotry in the text works like bigotry outside of the text.
• This is where a lot of Lovecraftiana stumbles, because the authors take the bias inherent in the premise as an accurate description of the world those characters inhabit.
• It doesn’t matter how many “HPL was a huge racist” notes you put in the beginning of the book if you just repeat the bullshit as-written.

• In-universe bullshit can still be interesting
• In-universe bullshit brings with it the complicating factors of “how / why did the bullshit get believed?”,  “what makes it bullshit?”, and “who profits from maintaining the bullshit?” 

Doubtlessly I could cook up more, but for a fast-and-loose guide this is a good place to get started. 

Part 2: How I Made the Great Lady

All right, finally ready to get to the meat of the essay.

0. What am I trying to do and why, anyway? 

“Can I write a better / more nuanced version of the Bloated Woman (ie. “a Mythos scenario with narrative justification for a hedonist cult devoted to an obese goddess in 1920s Shanghai”) while maintaining its core traits?”

1. Identify relevant names / places / times in the source text.

Using Masks of Nyarlathotep as the baseline:

• Name - The Bloated Woman
• Place - Shanghai
• Time - 1925 

1b. Identify other relevant traits.

• Visual Trait: Obesity
• Thematic Association: Hunger, Consumption, Predation
• Thematic Association: Sexuality, Seduction, Paraphilia
• Trait: Disguised danger
• Mythos Connection: Hedonist cult
• Mythos Connection: Deep Ones
• Mythos Connection: Avatar of Nyarlathotep

2. Make the initial adjustments

Name: The Bloated Woman
“The Bloated Woman” definitely doesn’t sound like something a cult would call their patroness, so I used “the Great Lady” instead and took advantage of the common semantic overlap between “great” and “big”. As a bonus, this also differentiates my interpretation from Masks.

In an older draft of her post I rendered her name as 參宿 的 大 貴 后, which if I did it right would come out as "Great Noble Queen of the Three Stars”. I was able to get a Mandarin pronunciation for it but not a Shanghainese one, and I'd need both to do it properly. (If I borked this, please let me know down in the comments.)

Place: Shanghai
Stick a pin in this.

Time: 1925
Stick a pin in this one too.

3. Assess and adapt remaining traits

Visual Trait: Obesity
To fulfill the challenge I gave myself, this part had to stay.  

I purposefully kept it variable whether or not a given manifestation of the Lady is obese: sometimes the description is explicit, but most of the time I don’t mention it directly and let the audience’s imagination pick up the slack.

I describe her as “enormous” in Tape #5, but I left it at that because the focus of the horror should be the fact that she’s eating people. Then I layered on top of that the discrepancies of her winking directly at the viewer (thus aware she’s being observed), and then running out of the room in a dead sprint complete with cartwheel (with the implication that she's coming after you).

(Importantly, she’s also depicted as eating people in untitled.mp4 and Tape #??, but isn’t explicitly obese in either of those to reinforce the focus on her eating people. Though since those tapes don’t end and she never stops eating, there’s an open space there.)

In Tape #9 I left this aspect as only a brief implication (the heavy footsteps from off-screen), and hung things mostly on the hook of the dichotomy between the corpse pile and the PLEASE STAND BY placard.

Besides those instances, most invocation of her size comes from outside depictions and evocations: the venus figurine, the priestess in the flashback, the figure in the mandala. 


Thematic Association: Hunger, Consumption, Predation
This trait is underplayed in Masks, only really emerging in conjunction with the disguise the Bloated Woman uses to lure in victims. You’d think high pulp would lean into it, but I digress.

Hunger poses an interesting conceptual contradiction: It encompasses greed and gluttony (always hungering for more despite already having more than enough), but also starvation and want (not having enough and never getting it). And you can often have the latter because of the former, which is a source of a lot of “obesity = monstrosity” motifs, so that’s something to keep in mind.

(I originally forgot to add (but have since added) a reference in the original post to a Japanese manifestation of the Lady that’s explicitly emaciated, to play into this further.)

I decided to go for portraying hunger as more of a social ill that the Lady embodies, via all those glimpses of the industrial death machine. I think the closest she gets to dropping “feed me, Seymour” is her interactions with Hill (which themselves remain mostly implied), and in that case she’s either deliberately playing with his attraction to her, or his attraction to her is generating that specific feedback (abyss = mirror, he sees in her things he hates himself for wanting.)

Thematic Association: Sexuality, Seduction, Paraphilia
Per the source:

"Assisted by the Black Fan, the Bloated Woman may seduce men, giving victims unearthly and degenerate pleasure before smothering them in flabby bulk."

Sorry to break it to you, brother; she doesn’t need the fan.

Standard Chaosium laziness on this one: it’s a cheap shot and it’s not doing anything beyond “non-normative sex is gross”. There’s a potential route to emphasize the mind control / “overwhelming divine influence overriding human behavior” route, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms and I’m already waist-deep in the bait bucket as it is.

(I’m actually a pretty big fan of the thing DG does sometimes where the unnatural is less cults worshipping gods and more “too close to radioactive materials”, but that’s a very different type of scenario and removes the character from the equation.) 

I already touched on this with Hill’s interactions with her (it’s more overt when I’ve run the scenario he’s from, where checking his hard drive would reveal a pornography stash begun prior to his purchase of the tape), and his narrative position as the self-loathing fetishist ties all the way back to the opening tape.  

That + Tape #12 covers how this trait collides with modernity (I added Hill’s violent misogyny and the environmental cost of AI there (and contrasted it with the generally-positive presentation of the fanart that made a terf quit twitter) so as to not just copy the original’s “ew gross a kink”), but the modern fetish ecosystem didn’t exist in 1925 and Lovecraftiana leans ancient.

Venus figurines are the natural historical link to draw on, but Venus figurines weren’t really a thing in stone-age China - you’re not really likely to find them further south than Anatolia or further east than the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. But gods are famously mobile, so all I needed to do is invent or imply some manner of migration across the continent (more on that in the next section.)

(Part of why I get so much creative mileage out of the Venus of Willendorf et al. is from how time has erased all but the barest hints of artistic intent from the work and left it an ideal projection surface / interpretive space; it could be a religious token, it could be pornography, it could be a self-portrait, it could be a combination of any of those or something else entirely and we’ll never be able to say for certain. If it was based on a real person, would she be skeeved out by having a nude depiction of herself known to people around the world, or would she go “Ha! Still got it!” If it was a depiction of a goddess, what was that goddess like? What were her stories? Were her myths an integral part of the community, or the private fantasies of the sculptor? On and on.)

Trait: Disguised danger
“Surprise! The hot lady was a monster!” is such a tired trope that I’d only really invoke it in the context of something like an evolutionary arms race between the mimic and the societies around it. While the idea of a monster that takes advantage of compulsory heteronormativity as part of its hunting strategy is funny to consider, that’s deep in the weeds and not really relevant for this experiment. Into the bin it goes.

Mythos Connection: Hedonist cult
Stick a pin in this one.

Mythos Connection: Deep Ones
For what possible reason? There’s no thematic correlation besides sex, and even then they’re a terrible pick: the K’n-yani are immortal polyamorous hedonists who can manipulate matter with their minds! They’re 110% capable of some Deviantart-tier chicanery wrt human physiology. If you’re going to insist on “non-normative sex is gross” at the very least pick the right minions for the job!

What are we even doing, Chaosium?

(I didn’t come up with the potential K’n-yan connection until writing this revised essay, mostly because I thought that giving the Lady more servants would dilute the narrative impact of the cult. Which is true, but if I want to do a follow-up they’re certainly on the table. Frankly there's overlap there with my long-running ideas re: the drow / lilu. Let it never be said that don't let thoughts ruminate.) 

Mythos Connection: Avatar of Nyarlathotep
I’m a big fan of aspects, avatars, manifestations and "what you're seeing is only a passing glimpse of a greater power", but in a horror story it's risky business to just come out and say "X is an aspect of Y". Especially in the expanded Mythos, which has by and large run most of its baddies into the ground. So I think it's much better to use shared symbols and traits to draw associations between forms and say nothing more of the matter. Let the audience pick up on connections, freeing yourself from sullying the unknowable with a name.

So I used a light hand here: a three-lobed pupil, a glimpse of Azathoth (not named but identifiable), a sardonic jab at how convenient it is to have the Black Pharaoh showing up to cause problems (despite that being mostly what’s happening), and let the rest remain unsaid.

4. Add new traits as desired

Addition - Prehistoric Origin
As something of a reversal of the “Disguised danger” trait, Tapes #20 and #26 lay out the shape of the Great Lady’s past; she was a human priestess from a people who lived somewhere in the north-eastern-ish Caucasus and became what she is now through contact with the unnatural. To heighten the pathos, I added glimpses of that humanity in some of the tapes (most prominently in #10 #12, #?? and #NaN)

Addition - Cross-Continent Migration
I needed a way to move the Lady from the Caucasus to China, and the easiest way to do that was to imply it via the interstitials. The only real criteria I had in choosing the places and times was that they had to be more recent the further east they were, and there had to be a religious tradition I could slip the Lady into to indicate how the people of that time and place interpreted her (this is fairly easy: every major religion either already has or has the space for a demonized sex-haver lady.)

Putting them in reverse chronological order was an easy way to emphasize that the actual destination isn’t Shanghai, but the cave where it all began (and the revelation of the Lady’s tenuous humanity).

(Surprising no one, the PIE in the 3581 BCE interstitial does actually mean stuff. 

• Kuonikos son of Kuon Ghe => “Little Dog, son of Big Dog”. 
• Hsulaʕwes => “Good Reward”. Bit of a spoiled son, that guy.
• “Posti bhebhudhi!” => “Behind (you), be alert!”

"PH'NGLUIXR" is my attempt at Aklo, very simply just means "die" as an imperative.

Bonus gag: The cuneiform book review, if written out phonemically, is rendered “MA-AM DI-IS IS A WE-EN-DI-IS”.)

Addition - Mythos Connection: Tsan-Chan
Shadow Out of Time gives us a year, one scholar’s name, and a vague gesture at the Yellow Peril. That’s a geographic link I can pull on, but also a can of worms. But with 0 actual canon content, I can let 3000 years of sound change do its work, explain “Tsan” as a descendant of “Texan”, and go on ahead with my predominantly American cruel empire. *Waves hand at outside world*

There’s an entire Tsan-Chan post I have cooking, but the short version is that the US tried an invasion of China shortly before Cthulhu woke up and Tsan-Chan is a post-Tulu polity claiming legitimacy from both polities but not actually a direct descendant.

 

Part 3: The Pin 

I didn't just keep saying "hold onto that thought" for shits and giggles - this is the crux of the exercise that makes it all click. Buckle up.

(As I said in the commentary on the main post, a lot of what follows here started in theories I had about Tom Haan from The Magnus Archives, prior to him getting written out of the story.)

My starting place and time is Shanghai in 1925, and anyone with a cursory knowledge of Chinese history can tell you 1925 wasn’t a great time to be in China: the country was in the tail end of the Century of Humiliation, with the Republic struggling with warlord cliques that have kept things in a state of simmering violence since the death of Yuan Shikai and the end of his yearlong empire in 1916. The Nationalists and Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition are three years out. The Qing Dynasty ended with the Xinhai Rebellion and the forced abdication of Puyi in 1912. Multiple treaties have carved up and handed out territory to Russia and Japan. The Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 saw eight Western powers invade and then demand exorbitant reparations from a government they weren't officially at war with. All excellent sources of historical context, but I don’t think there’s a strong enough conceptual link to the Lady’s traits: for that, I’m going back a few more decades to the Taiping Rebellion

The Taiping Rebellion took place from 1850-1864, and is the kind of catastrophic mass death that is more or less incomprehensible for human beings to wrap their head around. 20,000,000 casualties over 14 years of violence, famine, and disease is the low estimate. Apocalyptic religious violence ushering in the age of warfare-as-industry fits very nicely with both the endless hunger theme and the fascist future I wanted to hint at with Tsan-Chan, but the actual reason I settled on the Rebellion was because of just how common accounts of cannibalism were during the conflict (common enough that there's a Qing general commenting in his journals about how the price of human flesh has gone up since the last time he saw it). There’s our ticket in.

At the center of the Rebellion was Hong Huoxiu, a man who suffered a major mental break after failing the imperial examinations for the third time, complete with visions of the heavens and accompanying divine revelations. He took the name Hong Xiuquan and declared that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, who you might be familiar with that name as the central figure of a major world religion that practices communion with the divine through symbolic cannibalism, and also has some rather strong opinions on sin and some sizable hangups about sex.

(Now, in full fairness to history, the Christian elements of the God Worshiping Society came from Protestant missionaries, not Catholic ones, so I’ll invoke artistic license for thematic purposes and conveniently not specifying what the exact Christian influences were on the leader of the Great Lady Society.)

Xiuquan starts up a band of followers and it spirals out into the formation of the Tianping Heavenly Kingdom and the beginning of a war that kills tens of millions of people. The capital of the Heavenly Kingdom was in Nianjing (Tianjing at the time)...which is about 300 km upriver from Shanghai. Practically next door.

1925 then puts us ~60-75 years after the war, which means that the door is open to a cult leader who lived through the Rebellion. They'd be in their 80s or 90s and potentially pushing 100 if they're still alive, and all together the details that Masks provides for time and place fit perfectly into a historical context that emphasizes the themes I want to focus on.

Let's consider a survivor of the Taiping Rebellion: the inhabitant of one of countless rural villages stricken with famine and caught in the middle of a war zone. This survivor managed to survive extremely dire circumstances through cannibalism. And let's say that they know a little of Christianity through contact with missionaries - they converted and were baptized, but practiced a pretty heterodox vision of it.

This survivor, wracked with trauma and guilt, tries to make sense of the horrors through the means he has available. We can start freely syncretizing and remixing elements: the image of Guanyin, bodhisattva of compassion & goddess of mercy (a figure occasionally syncretized with Miryam of Nazareth); the substitutionary atonement of Christ taking on the sins of mankind; echoes of Celtic sin-eaters; propitiation of the gods through sacrifice of food; cannibalism as conduit to the divine; the insatiable appetite of industrial society; the Christian obsession with sin and guilt. And all of this is filtered through the nihilism that comes from experiencing a total failure of religious belief. It’d be perfectly reasonable for someone who’s survived what he’s survived to come to the conclusion that the world and its people are so irredeemably fucked that achieving enlightenment or acting in alignment with the Dao or being saved by the grace of God has become impossible. There’s no escape anymore. Nirvana is out of reach. No amount of good karma can get you out of this. Jesus isn't coming to save you. Confucian ethics won't do a damn. You are trapped here and then you die, forever. 

But he’s had a spiritual experience that's convinced him that he made some contact with the divine. He brushed against a greater power, he knows that there's something out there behind the world. And with every avenue of escape blocked off and every veil torn away, it's an easy thing to respond to the devouring Power (oh hey there Red Law) with subservience in the hopes that you can benefit from its leftovers and avoid destruction through servitude and sacrifice. And since you’re already fucked, you may as well throw yourself into Slaaneshi excess and eat, drink and be merry into oblivion. Not just for your own pleasures, but because the Great Lady takes on the sins of her followers as sustenance. They're all an offering made in exchange for her favor.

The survivor makes his way down the river to Shanghai in the years following the war, and there you have it - a sufficient-for-game-purposes historical / social justification for why there's a sex cult active in 1920s Shanghai whose central figure is an obese woman. Everything else is gravy.