The Long RP

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"The Long RP" was one of the Acteriendian BHH roleplays and later the basis for Ultrix stories. "The Long RP" told a story where the Fourth Army fractured, allowing Mala Dzumach Kavanah to take over the universe and establish a single polity, replacing species-nations with a regimented faction system. At the end of the RP, Mala was assassinated and the Fourth Army met up again to investigate her death. Its name refers to the fact that the original RP—which probably took place in the spring of 2016, but could also have been in late 2015 or summer 2016—continued for several weeks in a Skype chatroom without being interrupted by another plotline.

The idea of Mala taking over the universe and establishing a single regimented polity, often even one organised via the faction system, became the basis for Ultrix stories, one of the three main strands of the Crossover Cycle. There was once an attempt to continue The Long RP, an infamous December 2017 RP that became known as the "Nanobots RP" (UL 15.12.17) after it collapsed when Tom refused to "go with" Robert introducing a violent and confusing plot twist, which he said he had introduced to explain the dissonance between the Acteriendian canon and the presence of Tom's character Ajax; this RP prompted important conversations about how BHH worked.

Plot[edit | edit source]

Following a tactical and ethical dispute, Ciarraí Teagwyn Kavanah forcibly expelled Ro Elluna (and a fleeting key being played by Tae, whose character may have been the focus of the argument) from the Second Fourth Army by pushing them out of the spaceship. When Raven Olympia refused to get with the programme and asked Ciarraí to chill out and find Ro, he too was pushed out of the spaceship, though he managed to throw a tracking crystal into the spaceship as he fell. Ro and Raven reunited and followed the tracking crystal to find that Ciarraí had set up a new base on a crystalline planet, with a so-called "Third Fourth Army" of around eight people sitting around a table. In the end, five of these people were holograms; the only real ones were Ciarraí, an Olympan called Adshek O'Hare, and another Evon called Irais, whom Ro particularly disliked. Kerry was supposed to play all three but he ended up neglecting Adshek and only Ciarraí and Irais were relevant going forwards.

Ciarraí and Irais were apologetic and agreed to unite with Raven and Ro, reviving the original Second Fourth Army. They swapped notes and agreed that Mala Dzumach Kavanah was on manoeuvres and that they had to work out what was going on. Ro tried to forcibly expel Irais, triggering another fight, broken up by Raven using crystals. Mala then broadcast an announcement that she had been declared President of Olympa; Ciarraí pointed out that she probably did have enough blackmail on senior Olympan politicians that this might be possible. In the next few hours, she also declared herself leader of Helltuna, the Astranci, the Dylon, the Unlon, and various other species, until eighty percent of the universe was under her control.

The Fourth Army went to Evonia to work with Sabriel Lunadelle Redena, the only significant leader who had not officially ceded power to Mala. They emphasised that there were rebellions going on across the universe and tried to persuade her to lead them into war. She refused, and said that the Evon would be voluntarily surrendering to Mala to avoid being attacked. The Fourth Army then went to confront Mala, eventually finding her hiding in a hall of mirrors.

She explained that she had taken over the universe with the intention of carving it back up into entities broadly equivalent to species-nations, factions, which would be based on what abilities gave someone value to society. Trapped in the hall of mirrors and with no other choice, the Fourth Army accepted Mala's offer to collaborate. Ro became faction leader of Ultrix, Ciarraí of Callidus and Irais of Ferox. Raven refused to lead a faction and returned to the Ravensgate to intervene in the situation from above.

The plot briefly resumed after Mala died, when Ro confronted Ciarraí at her funeral, and after some machinations, the Fourth Army ended up reuniting.

Analysis[edit | edit source]

The Third Fourth Army[edit | edit source]

Something to do with the figures at the table being hyperreal and the event taking place in a liminal space at a transitional point in the plot, and this reflecting kerry's later belief in a link between liminality and hyperreality, idk

The faction system[edit | edit source]

It is interesting that Mala chose to replace species-nations with the relatively similar faction system, rather than establishing a centralised totalitarian state. Her emphasis was on making the world stable and predictable: her factions were intended to compartmentalize people and encourage specialisation, turning the world into a stable system where every unit of society from the individual to the faction was like a cog in a machine. However, this machine had no leader or overall direction. Mala created a system to maximise order, predictability and conformity, and did not design it so that herself (or anyone else) was in power — indeed, the whole notion of power was rendered redundant.

The faction system thus reflects a fear that a faceless oppressive bureaucracy might not have intentionality, such as a human dictator, at its centre. To metaphorise this concept via the RP itself, the faction system is like the "hall of mirrors" in which the Fourth Army finds Mala, constantly reflecting and perpetuating itself with no purpose, beginning or end.

It is particularly interesting that Mala was the one to supply this vacuum of teleology. Sometimes portrayed as the low-key Maya Evon manipulator with a master plan and sometimes as the high-and-mighty Director of Reality with all the trappings of autocratic personal rule, it is ultimately Mala that human instinct seeks to find enthroned at the heart of the bureaucratic web, sitting at the observation station on the panopticon — the divergent portrayals of her character span both the archetypes associated with this function. Yet her true end goal appears to be the destruction of the concept of an end goal.

This means the faction system can be read as a representation of anorexia nervosa. The Fourth Army's failure to prevent Mala from achieving her every demand left her no space to desire, so she resorted to the destruction of demand. Lacan says that desire is carved out in the space where it is perceived that the Other lacks (where the Other means something like 'the outside world' and for the child is embodied by its parents); that is, beyond the Other’s ability to give one something. It is important that this gap be held open for the subject, so that they are allowed the space to desire. Anorexia results from satisfying the child's every demand, hence failing to create the necessary lack in the Other. The anorexic's refusal of food is as an attempt to carve out a space for her own desire in place where the Other lacks; to generate alterity with the Other by demonstrating that she is hungry in a way that can't be fed.

Kerry later went on in Kingfisher to compare the British political elite's focus on discipline and self-control in pursuit of a rational ascetic image to the reading of anorexia as being control-focused. Is Kingfisher, which equates a rational free-market driven society to Hilde Bruch's "golden cage", a reworking of "The Long RP" and its hall of mirrors? Or do they represent two separate fears: a British anorexic society, proceeding from classical psychoanalysis and neoplatonism, and a "Glastieven" one, informed by oppressive systems with no obvious villains or intentions at their centre, like the bureaucracy in Brazil (1985), or perhaps even like West Exe and the faceless exam boards.

If "The Long RP" is distinguished from Kingfisher by its lack of a driving force, as Brazil is distinguished from Orwell by its lack of a Big Brother, then Mala's death towards the end can be viewed as a correction by the system, rather than an attempt from outside to attack it. Having created the system, she had become unnecessary, and her megalomaniac personality and pseudo-privileged status as its creator — as seen, for instance, in high-ranking political figures attending her funeral — make her an anomaly. As with anything else that was not flush with the uniform surface of the cogs, she was crushed in the gears.

In contrast, her position as the embodiment of the system might have served a social purpose. Just as Wilson comes to believe that there was no Big Brother, Mala hides the system's purposelessness. This interpretation finds weight in the Fourth Army re-assembling immediately after she died, particularly given that Raven comes down from the Ravensgate to once again intervene in the world. It also does not require that Mala planned it herself: in The Silver Crown (1965), which is known to have influenced BHH, the so-called King sincerely believes that everything is "his" plan, whereas in truth he is merely is a figurehead used by the Hieronymous Machine to give its authority a human face.

Other observations[edit | edit source]

Real-world events in 2020 draw the reader's attention to the otherwise rather uninteresting scene where Kerry's character expels Cat's character from the group after an argument over ethics, possibly even over the ethics of a third character played by one of Cat's friends from the anime and manga subculture.

"Nanobots RP"[edit | edit source]

The "Nanobots RP" (given the code UL 15.12.17 in Tom's RP Index)

Two issues were at stake in the discussions following the failure of the Nanobots RP. The less important discussion, albeit the one that was remembered as the Nanobots RP's most enduring legacy, was over whether Tom should have tried to "go with" the nanobots. Robert argued that it was an important pillar of the decentralised text-based roleplaying system used in Glastieven mythology that players respected each others' rights to introduce crazy twists and tried to make them work rather than picking them apart — as he put it in the OOC chat: "Fuck me. Stop questioning it and RP." Tom argued that it was the more important pillar that all players respected the basic rules of the world and did not do anything game-breaking.

The other discussion related to Robert's stated motive for introducing the twist. Kerry said at the start that they should "continue" The Long RP.

He said that "//Well, we decided to continue an RP, but then Tom pasted his character over the top //I had no answers to what had happened //Because it'd changed Tom //It hadn't Robert //It had.

//Nopr //The past had changed Tom //How? Robert //The characters relationships had changed //The locations had changed