Ok I answered some more questions.
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Mindfang’s journal entries were always intended as narrative departures in which I would deliberately drag the story into what I call “The Bad Fanfiction Zone.” Without necessarily laying it on TOO thick (because holy shit, fanfiction can be REALLY bad), I specifically emulated some common impulses of fanfiction writers to open this backstory portal, to fill in some world building details and contextualize the arcs of the troll kids. It’s kind of bombastic, character-aggrandizing, uncomfortably erotic, and florid. I wanted to leverage the Bad Fanfiction Zone for useful story purposes, primarily because this was a funny idea to me. It’s one of those gags which I don’t expect the majority of readers to pick up on. Some people LOVE the Mindfang stuff because, among other reasons, they’re often the sort of people who genuinely like to read fanfiction! Whereas some others HATED the journals, probably without even fully understanding why. The reason is because I bombed my own story with bad fanfiction, and tricked them into reading it. This is absolutely the most hilarious consequence of this gag.
But don’t get me wrong. Just because I call it the Bad Fanfiction Zone doesn’t mean I actually think the Mindfang stuff is bad. All the lore is good and I like the indirect filling in of events and details of alien culture as you’d reveal through study of historical documents and journals. But the execution is humorously heavy handed, somewhere between lavish old world prose and an enthusiastic fandom hackjob, and this was a conscious layer of the gag. And there are some people who do pick up on this.
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…and reblogging this part because i totally remember HATING the journal entries until something clicked in my head and i got the joke
