Katalepsing Katalepsis

I think I've done a decent job at breaking down Katalepsis' themes and philosophy as I've read it. Not something I can take too much pride in, as it's a work that wears its heart on its sleeve. I'll talk a little bit more about that stuff as it pertains to the last couple of arcs, but more than that I want to do some structural analysis. Both because it's interesting, and because I think there's a lot to learn here for aspiring writers like myself. Especially since, as a fantasy web serial, Katalepsis falls into a format and genre that I (and a lot of my own readers, I suspect) are likely to create within.

In a previous post, I said that Katalepsis pulls a balancing act of elements that should tip over into a trainwreck, but somehow doesn't. That feeling has only intensified in this latest arc, with the abrupt genre switch into pulp fantasy dungeoncrawling and then back again without so much as an embarrassed blush. It then hits the ground running, and the reader, somehow, keeps on running along with it. Not many stories could finagle that, but Katalepsis does.

There are flaws. Places where the strain really shows itself, even though it avoids breaking. I think looking at those weak points would also be constructive.

The first dichotomy I'll address is one that's been on my mind a lot, due to various conversations I've witnessed or participated in within creative spaces.


Wish Fulfilment

The terms "wish fulfilment" and "power fantasy" get thrown a lot in pop fiction discourse. Usually derisively, though there's been a countercurrent trying to dignify them in recent times. The sneerers say that it's just porn without the sex (or with the sex, sometimes). The defenders say "what's wrong with porn, huh? Are you some kinda Puritan or something?"

My own stance is that wish fulfilment stories are the literary equivalent of getting ice cream, while more challenging stories are like mountain climbing. There's nothing wrong with either of them. They're both fun. One of them is just more fun in the moment, and the other is more rewarding after the fact. The joy of being doted over, and the joy of overcoming adversity. But I digress.

Katalepsis definitely has its wish/power-porny aspects. The whole harem element is obviously that (Heather doesn't have all of the hot lesbians fawning over her or anything, but the fact that her domestic/social group is accumulating those to the exclusion of any and every other type of person still puts it in that approximate genre cluster). Likewise, a person suffering from lifelong mental illness being suddenly told that they aren't mentally ill but actually more in-tune with reality than the average (and being given a very easy, cost-free way of neutralizing the negative effects of that). Heather does get challenged and forced to grow alongside this, and part of the mystique of Katalepsis is understanding the degree to which Heather is an unreliable narrator who needs to get her shit together. The story presents challenge and self-reflection along with the free goodies.

But this is just a prelude to the "power fantasy" question, because this is where Katalepsis is doing something really interesting that I don't think I've seen before.

In "The Other Side of Nowhere," we abruptly learned that Heather Morell is the most powerful human character in the story. She abruptly learned that this is the case. There were hints at this beforehand, from the end of "Providence or Atoms" onward, but the extent of it was only spelled out when she pulverized Alexander. In terms of its introduction to the story, Heather's powers are basically a power-up that finds its way to the protagonist out of nowhere. A sword in a stone. A ring in a cave.

But that's not actually what it is. Heather has actually undergone a long, strenuous training regime, in which she worked herself half to death for every last bit of power she now has. And, in yet another Fullmetal Alchemist parallel, she only gained access to that training because of the loss of her sibling, and she'd trade it back for her in a heartbeat.

But she didn't know that she was undergoing a long, strenuous training regime, at the time she was undergoing it. She thought she was being tormented by a night-time hallucination for years on end.

It's sort of like a training arc version of the Buddhist "you are already enlightened, you just need to realize it" concept. Heather spent half her life working hard to become a powerful magician. She didn't know she was doing that. The reader didn't know she was doing that. She had an offscreen training arc without herself ever realizing it.

I guess there's another kind of wish-fulfilment in that concept. The idea that her suffering must have done something for her. That it couldn't just be suffering to no end. Retroactively, the years that she spent in that state are being "redeemed" in a certain sense, even if she'd much rather have her sister than her powers. There's a hint of...you could almost call it an entitlement fantasy there, though that phrasing feels unfair. But, no matter how you interpret the execution here, a surprise retroactive power-up, gated behind the protagonist's failure to understand that they were in fact working at getting that power...well, I've only seen something resembling it once before that I can think of:

Only in this case it's outright reality-warping magic, and she spent all of her teenaged years painting Mr. Miyagi's house before the reveal.

Mr. Mieyegi. Heh.

Anyway, like I said, the kinds of rewards and empowerments a protagonist receives, and how much work they need to put into them, is a topic I've seen being discussed a lot. Katalepsis' strange, staggered approach to revealing the superheroic nature of its main character - on both sides of the fourth wall - definitely had me thinking for a while. Is this a particularly good way of writing a superhuman? Is it better or worse than other methods? I don't know. But it's so different from the normal approaches that it merits thinking about.


Forms of Empowerment

Like a lot of works with power fantasy elements - and a lot of the ones that I've been reviewing in particular - Katalepsis has some strongly Nietzschean sensibilities. I know I've talked about the Will to Power in a million analysis pieces by this point, but I mean...the climax of this entire story arc was Heather deciding to use the power over others that she'd been either ignorantly sitting on or timidly fleeing from for years. It's about as textbook a Will to Power arc as you're ever likely to find.

Hell, the Prince Kassardis fable from K6BD wasn't as textbook as this, and that one was purpose-written to be an existentialist tract.

The fact that Heather has Raine as her main role model at present both supports and undermines the existentialist ethos. On one hand, on a superficial level, Raine is basically the first photo that pops up when you type "Übermensch" into Google Image Search. On the other hand, Raine's weirdly servile nature - the way she seems to find fulfilment by devoting herself to others to the point where she seems to have few life goals that are genuinely her own - makes her seem like the most disempowered person ever.

Is this actually healthy, for Raine? Is this her rationally deciding that protecting and caring for people like Heather and Evelyn is the thing she wants most in the world, and prioritizing her own potential life goals below that, and being legitimately happy with that? Or is she just sinking into a trap of false contentment that will ultimately bring her to resent her self-appointed charges?

Applying that question across the board, it could turn out that Katalepsis is ultimately interrogating the will to power rather than celebrating it. If Heather starts using her self-catalyzing hypermath powers more freely, and develops a resistance to the backlash it causes her, is that going to give the Eye a stronger hold over her? Is she just sentencing herself to a more gradual version of the same thing that's happening to Maisie, ie the person she's trying to save from exactly this?

On the other hand, we have a counterpoint to the counterpoint in the form of Praem. Bound to serve. Objectified in almost every sense of the word, being bound to a set of wooden mannequins and used as both a tool and (probably) a sex toy by Evelyn. But, like. She wants her strawberries. She gets strawberries for doing this. None of these human concepts about objectification and dignity necessarily apply to her (we don't know that they don't apply to her, sure. But we also don't know that we do). If Raine is an aberration from the human norm, does that necessarily mean that there's something wrong with her?

...

Remember, there's not actually any such thing as "normal" in nature. The evolution of new species occurs when a mutation ends up conferring a fitness advantage under current conditions. Every living thing on Earth is the descendent of a deviant freak that prospered because it was a deviant freak. The only difference between a birth defect and an evolutionary leap is the surrounding environment.

Looking at the way this story vindicates Heather's apparent schizophrenia, and thinking about articles I've read about how what we term "the mental ill" were regarded in various premodern societies...hmm. Not that at least most mental illnesses have ever (or probably will ever) be beneficial traits to have, but the stigma attached to them - the sense of "something wrong" that the mentally ill are treated with - is based on the interplay of such few factors in such a narrow possibility space.

In the grand scheme of things, in the great eye of the universe, there's nothing wrong with anyone.

...

What a person is willing to do both for and with their power is a recurring theme. And it's one that takes advantage of the story's aforementioned power fantasy aspect. Interrogating power while indulging in it allows the story to pander to and challenge the reader simultaneously. Best of both worlds.

Moving on to what I think the biggest takeaway from (early) Katalepsis is for other writers, now...


Urban Fantasy, Portal Fantasy, and What a "Genre" Even Is

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that urban fantasy (at least, of the dominant "masquerade" subgenre as it's usually written) is basically portal fantasy without the portal. Either way, you've got a fish-out-of-water protagonist from "our" world who has to figure out how to navigate a realm of magic and monsters. Barrier between dimensions, or barrier between ignorance and knowledge; the only difference in how they play out is whether or not the protagonist can still call home.

Katalepsis seemed like a pretty straightforward urban fantasy masquerade story for the first three arcs. "Other Side of Nowhere" starts to blur the lines.

...I guess the lines were already being blurred a little bit, with the introduction of characters like Praem to the roster. Demon-powered blue-skinned fetish maid robot is something you'd sooner expect to run into in a gonzo science fantasy setting than in an eerie masquerade-fantasy world. She existed in the previous arc, sure, but she was a minor element. A bit of incongruity that called attention to itself in a weird way, but didn't take center-stage. Anyway, if the lines were blurred before, they suddenly vanished altogether when we went on a swords-and-sorcery dungeoncrawl in another dimension.

And the characters fit the new genre and aesthetics seamlessly. Even though it seems like none of the pieces except Praem and maybe Twil should belong here, after our introduction to them as natives of "our" world.

...

Well, mostly. Praem's fetishy garishness still feels more like something someone modded into an MMORPG than it does like a native element of the world of brooding castles and dark sorcery. But then...if magic in this world allows people to do dumbass decorative shit like that at little cost, it's also hard to argue that they wouldn't do that. I mean, look at some of the ridiculous decorations that medieval knights used to put on their armor and helmets.

Praem looking like that is dumb in exactly the way that real people, in the real world, are dumb when they can get away with it.

...

You know, maybe the point that I've been circling around without quite putting my finger on in this section is that "genre" as a concept needs interrogation.

The throughline of Katalepsis that make these shifts work is undoubtedly the characters. They behave consistently enough from world to world to serve as the story's anchor, and the way they adapt to the changing circumstances around them is realistic. Humans are flexible. They deal with whatever comes their way. Healthily or unhealthily, productively or destructively, one way or another they deal with it.

In real life, things don't happen or not happen because they "fit the vibe" or "match the aesthetic." Genre doesn't exist outside of fiction.

Maybe once you've gotten good enough at writing to no longer need genre conventions as a crutch, it would be best to discard it entirely and never look back?

Maybe it was never a good crutch in the first place, and it leaves you with avoidable bad habits?

Maybe genre, in its entirety, as a concept, is actually just...bad?

Obviously, fiction doesn't have the freedom that real life does in terms of what can or can't happen. People don't tend to like stories that lack focus, or character arcs, or don't have a clear beginning middle and end. Emulating real life is not the purpose of fiction, no matter how much we talk about the importance of verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is a tool, and it's an important tool, but it's not an end unto itself. And, really, I think verisimilitude is most important when it comes to characters above anything else about a secondary world. "Can you see this person actually saying/doing this thing?" If the answer to that question is reliably "yes," then really, I don't know how much the rest of it matters. Consistent worldbuilding and convincing plotting is always a plus, but if you've got the characters down then it's really a secondary - if not tertiary - concern. Unless the worldbuilding is so bad that you're unable to parse the characters' decisions as they interact with it, of course. Write well enough, and genre stops mattering. It stops being important, even if you've decided ahead of time to commit to it.

In light of these thoughts, I'll return to the part of Katalepsis that I've always had the least patience for. That being, the occasional winks at the audience and borderline fourth wall breaks. By defying genre and hewing to characters over backdrop, Katalepsis makes its own kind of believable reality in the face of unbelievable elements. When the characters suddenly go out of their way to remind you that genre is a thing that exists, and that the story you're reading is in fact a story, Katalepsis is basically rejecting its own greatest strength, and trying to apologize for the thing that it least needs to apologize for.

I can understand why the author felt the need to throw those snarky bits in. But I think she would have been better off resisting the temptation.

...

I'm looking back at my old "Ghost Song" review right now, and the conclusion I came to about that game being in the same genre as "real life," despite being full of androids and space demons and stuff. And I'm thinking.

Maybe, despite being gung-ho science fantasy on the surface, the reason I liked Ghost Song's story so much is because it managed to transcend its aesthetics and not actually be in any genre at all.

...

Katalepsis doesn't quite manage to shuck the baggage of genre entirely. There are a few aspects that seem to exist in the story despite rather than because of the characters and their motivations (for instance: Raine and Heather both ostensibly going to classes at this point, despite having every reason not to bother and seemingly very little time to anyway, feels like an unfitting remnant of the go-to YA fantasy tropes). But I think the visible seams actually help make Katalepsis a better instructional example, because you can see what it's doing and what it doesn't need to be doing.


This whole post ended up being ramblier and less organized than I hoped. I'm not sure if there's a coherent takeaway or not. But, I had thoughts that I wanted to share, and now I've shared them, useful or not.

I guess if there's a thesis in here, it's that characters really do trump everything. Humanize your characters, treat them with respect, and put enough of your own animating force into them that they can have their own interests, and any flaws in the rest of your story will become that much easier for audiences to ignore.