Word of God

Over the years, Matt has provided us with interesting insight into the BiM universe. This is a catalogue of comments regarding the comic and its creation.

* Remember, tradesmen rituals are only safer because the tradesmen, themselves, aren't cosmic assholes looking to take advantage of anything. like, they want to work with you, they don't have ulterior motives outside of getting dat business. Anything not involving them, or involving other entities, is never going to be as safe as dealing with them directly. They can act as a mediator or buffer between the evoker and evoked, but they can only do so much

* (After being asked about the sealed box) they normally cut you off before you can ask the question, thus bypassing the issue. Secretly, the cost of finding out whether or not you should open the box is, itself, not opening the box. they were pretty confident if they gave that response, you would pay the price (of not opening the box). It was kind of cheating, but they were kind of concerned about it.

* it's part of why they ask for a lot of weird, not all that useful stuff, because someone out in the universe might trade up a pile of Lesser Pancakes for one Good Earth Pancake

* (Re creating true life) I mean, her being both human and a fragment with the powers of both like she's mufucken Blade is kind of a rule breaker in itself, but yeah, it's a thing humans can normally do (but humans, specifically)

* It's also been pointed out that clones are never perfect, regardless. I mean, that was pretty early in the series, but lab meat only works because they're cooked off of a blue print from the start--they're not clones of an existing person, they're grown from the first cell off of a template, built from scratch. Cloning technology in the BiM universe just causes... odd deviations, that Thale skirts around with blood powers. Otherwise, each of his clone generations would be progressively less and less him.

* Mine's mom, while she did become very human and was certainly nicer than Fragments usually, still never humanized the giant mouth in the basement. It's made more progress in becoming "a person" with the current crew than it did the entire time with Mine's mom. Mine's mom was nice enough to her external red, she just didn't see it as nor treat it as a person. She lacked the capacity. Like, she lacked the understanding of the need to do so, or the inclination. It didn't come natural to her to see it as anything but what it was. Humans, on the other hand, instinctively name their cars and get frustrated at their internet when it slows down.

* That's actually something that's been stated about Fragments, proper: they can't create "true life," or souls. Anything a Fragment makes is just a golem. Whenever Fragments all combine into a First Womb or what have you, THAT can make true life, and humans can make true life (either by humanizing the soulless or, uh, fucking), but it's out of the reach of Fragments. It being out of Nil's reach for similar reasons (mentality and a lack of humanizing capacity, in addition to a hard limit of the reach of magic) isn't all that crazy. Regular Fragments, while they can be nice, lack the perspective and positioning mentally / socially to make the non-human feel human enough to come into their own identity.

* The great paradox is that, to become stronger and gain more options, Mine has to consider her abilities... but also the more she thinks about her powers / situation, the higher the risk of dehumanization / detachment. Memories are just neural signals; how does she remember stuff outside her body? Maybe she doesn't. Whoops. Happiness is a combination of chemicals. Can she experience that as The Blood, or does she just think she can? Maybe it's habitual. Maybe it's unnecessary. If I fill an open rowboat with blood, is it "inside" or still "outside"

* The fact that I'm pulling this story out of my ass as I go along is both fun and wacky and the greatest threat because I don't have an ending in mind, for anything. I'm almost always surprised how things shake out. In addition, a lot of stuff that would have been real bad was in motion before it got stopped / prevented. The Thing At Hope's Church was going to happen, bringing Fuse to the error room just gave me an excuse to soften that fight a bit. I had already thought about where to take things if Thale succeeded at Meating The Tunnels. I had plans for if Hope died, provoking Reigns to bring in that PMC group and go full hard ass on the city, and Carpenter's current plan can still absolutely go off.

* It was joked about, but if someone had picked an unmarked door I'm like 80% sure Edison would have rolled with it, albeit been very passive aggressive about it. It would have made the deal a sure thing, but people were afraid of testing Edison's patience. The real trick is, I didn't originally present it as a Monte Hall style game per se, just numbered doors and Edison likes game shows. People in the comments iirc suggested "hey you want to make it like a goofy gameshow, you should do that thing where they open all the doors after a selection is made"

* The vote count got extremely close to blooding Prophet from the vent, which would have lead directly to Mine getting acid bathed and hella dead. Possibly Fuse, too, depending on how shit went down after that. The Monte Hall game with Edison was legit, I had the door number written on a piece of paper on my desk. If people had not turned it into a Monte Hall situation, and/or had picked the wrong door, Mine would have been shanked in the brain while in the brain. Carpenter's robot was set to explode if he was fighting a losing battle, full stop.

* also if Hope had been killed during the church raid, that was nearly bad

* the nurse herself was supposed to be incidental, just the body that happened to contain some of the heart's blood. Then everybody's behavior sort of... kept giving her personality, and I was like, "yeah fuck that this nurse is the main character" somewhere between "stop and read the cat magazine" and "I am a vent hermit"

* (On Mine calling Caius from Mars) this is loosely based on a true story, as a bunch of suggestions were like "caius brain phone, call pierce" and then I had to scramble to remember what the hell the phone situation was on Mars, and then I suddenly remembered wait, blood, yes, incredible

* the fragment headed toward earth, and that zone 50 guy in particular, because of a zone 50 station set up to try and get the attention of aliens. basically, yeah, her curiosity was set off because ... what the hell would you do that for

* for reasons that take a while to explain, I know the entire veggie tales theme I sang the entire theme while streaming mario odyssey

* it's like running a game, but instead of four people playing four characters, 100 people are playing one character. I have a very extensive history of DMing, and have written a couple of tabletop games

* The entire fucking nightclub wasn't planned. I was trying to steer folks toward the church. Someone asked Grizwald where he got the info, I pulled "he heard it in a nightclub" out of my ass, and people went dashing after that nightclub. So, I had to make all that up as I went. A bouncer got blooded, a bartender got blooded, I randomly decided to have the bartender get offed and the bouncer kept for questioning so the readers could learn from him. ...But of course, the audience decided to save that bouncer, and thus Caius happened

* alright, so: originally, in chapter 1 when Vasquez revealed he was actually a bad guy, and Michelle turned on him? My original idea was for Michelle not to do that. She was going to begrudgingly betray Mine, and the two of them would proceed to chase Mine around the hospital for a while. The flamethrower parts--like, the water gun, the lighter, all that, they were originally put there to give Mine a defense against Vasquez and Michelle. Michelle would, eventually, be able to be convinced to work against Vasquez. ...Except, the readers were so damn nice to her, and so dedicated to making sure she was okay and patching her up, I couldn't justify her turning on Mine. So, Michelle became a party member right then.

* I think I've mentioned it before, but I briefly humored the idea of Full Blown AU Shenanigans for a chapter that didn't happen

* I did start doing a write up for a BiM Mafia game, though that was before a lot of plot stuff happened

* I had to dig a bit for the description, but the Red seen in Mine's mind during Incident F was "our mental avatar of our red on the human end;" basically, Mine's feelings about Red, who is herself Mine's feelings about... the red. One's own acceptance of a part of themselves, similar to but technically separate from those feelings. Honk honk. When everything's together that Acceptance-Red is just part of the connection between Mine and Red proper It beefed up her electrical signals en masse. That, combined with Red having to use Mine's physical brain to form her "own" thoughts while she was stuck in Mine's body, and you have... Red thoughts. Lingering firings of synapses, thoughts that weren't made by Mine, but by the mental avatar she'd imposed on a part of herself. Tulpamancy's not far from it. She powered up her signals after getting her imaginary friend to make some.

* the name thing is, hilariously, one of the oldest ideas I had, if not actually from the start then really close to it. Like, I chose Mine's skin color to be specifically more Asian so I could get away with the name

* also in the realm of things that changed, I was planning for (and had numerous ways hashed out for) Prophet to escape after that, but people were so absolutely livid about the fake out and were so enthusiastic about ending the shit out of Prophet that I just kind of went "yeah he deserves this, he gonna die"

* in general, I've joked that the more I plan for something the further off the rails it's going to go, almost nothing I anticipated worked out like I thought and I've just been kind of flying by the seat of my pants it is really fun to pull back the curtain a bit and reveal that no, almost nothing was planned ahead of time, and yes, everyone can totally die plot armor is not one of Mine's powers. Yeah, Bartender Bob was just a random name tossed in at the idea of me flipping the coin different and the guard being killed instead of the blooded bartender. the entire nightclub break in was never going to happen, and Macland Row as a character was fairly spur of the moment. I was dropping hints about investigating the church and the cult, but people asked "where did Griz get this info" and I was "uhhh he overheard it at a club" and boom, the chase was on

* Yeah, Finch went through a lot of humbling / having his world broken / toughening up after chapter 1 the stuttering's faded a bit, too, as he used to go into it when he was breaking some new ground and couldn't get his thoughts in order. A lot less totally shocks him these days lmao. Fuse was the only one I really had planned on, and even Fuse changed a bunch by the time I actually put him in the comic. Caius was pulled out of thin air, and I tried really hard to dissuade folks from Liz but the readers insisted

* like, as you get near the ground it becomes straight up sub-human abominations. yeah, psychic mutations are less understood than normal brain mutations, which are less understood than non-brain mutations science could explain The Many being a giant mass of brains before they could explain how one of the brains is psychic. I was about to add ^ there's a hundred types of psychic and they break down even further, with no two telepaths or pyrokinetics being the same even

* the library and the tradesmen have said similar things, but everything has rules; you just have to figure out how to skirt those rules. Mine can't control the blood without a container... but turning the blood that was inside the needle (and thus controllable) into a partial husk to contain the rest of the blood, making the blood its own container was the start of some straight up madness

* doubling down on the toxin mid-infiltration was also a good call, as I was like "Thale can probably combat shellfish poisoning" ... "nope here comes s'more"

* yeah, in Liz's case Thale slightly worked the system by 1.) believing Liz was "his" was enough to compensate in combination with 2.) specifically taking over enough of her brain to have absolute control over one arm, making that arm "his," then growing a brain in there to double down on it before he could doubt himself

* I will confirm that Thale cannot reach the inside of Mine's red

* aside from the martyr issue, recall that Hope officially works for Reigns, and does stuff for Reigns' channel. Hope getting shitmurdered would have prompted him to blow off public opinion and dial up those PMCs like, Reigns would have gone full "the public doesn't know what's best for them, it's time for GUNS" Southern Pass going full fasc on the city also would have spiraled into Thale starting to blood PMCs. sadly, the price will not suddenly drop when Hodges does yeah, he's not holding the gun market up on his chubby shoulders, he's just a massive fearmonger / major owner of the city's gun market / ruthless douche. Stratemeyers might start to get cheaper like... a few years after he dies, as he stops appealing to the public's fears to drive up demand and no longer has a strangle hold on the business, give or take a few other factors. if I had started BiM way later, Mortimer Hodges would probably have a bigger role he's just a dude that owns a lot of local gun companies yeah, he's not really significant to the plot, I just wanted one of Hope's deacons to be a Dude That Makes Gun Money

* true story, I almost did an alternate timeline chapter with Fuse as the protagonist, but it felt like it would have been too much of a distraction/diversion/pointless hurdle

* also yeah, Mac's haircut is based on that of an overweight cash-for-gold dude that used to play ultimate texas hold'em a lot. He was a massive POS that I have amazing stories about; not pictured, cash-for-gold dude also used to wear like eighty pounds of gold jewelry like Mr. T. meanwhile Macland Row's just based on a bunch of people I knew when I was a blackjack dealer. much like how Hope is based pretty heavily on Joel Osteen, Thale is basically Peter Thiel in fictional sprite form

* jokes have been made, but space colonization is probably the next step for the wealthy as the pollution fuckery gets too bad for even the higher tiers to live with

* the not-UK cities instead took to building out over the ocean, and building non residential stuff underground but they have severe Big Brother issues and (somehow worse) racism instead of pollution, so nobody really wins
* the lowest tiers of the cities in not-america are super fucked because of the sheer density of the radiation, but rural environments and pretty much anything else at ground level is really damn close. Stuff lives, technically, but civilization goes in quotation marks and people like Nimrod or the Many are the rule and not the exception

and even a lot of the "human" populace still clinging to their mutated existence gets picked off by fucked up mutant animals

* Willard's been having his own covert adventures, sometimes featuring a cat. bonus DLC will reveal how Willard has secretly been infiltrating every place in BiM around the same time as / slightly before the main party, like pretty much everyone the giant tofu in Resident Evil 2
* also for frame of reference, a ruthless PMC has been kept out of the city by a podcast
* Yeah, by its nature every error!person is dead. The error room just lets them talk. This Fuse is just... more dead than usual.
* [The Hospital] is the concept, of hospitals. they are protecting you. The Library is good friends with The Hospital
* Jane's sexuality is whatever the hell the readers say it is
* the crack is less "your brain is broke" and more "your brain is broke and you're fine; you don't need a brain fuuuck being human"
* the blue cactus has no special properties, aside from being a cactus (from spaaace) the cactus did nothing of note, I vaguely remember the slime was going to do something but it was really unimpressive and silly
* the slime girl will be DLC, in the Blood is Mine dating sim
* on a totally unrelated note, I find the story of Lovers: Being So Good At a Fairly Lame Mutation That People Think You're Psychic to be a little inspirational
* ...and that his Alien Wife Farm is purely for psychological reasons. Human intercourse is no longer a thing he does. It's purely a way to make a human form of a fragment of the red suffer and be slave for his amusement, a weird blend of his worst humanity and the hatred he inherits from his bioprinted blood. That the woman in question is Jane's mom is actually secondary, he was working on this before Jane became an issue. I don't imagine it will come up in the comic, so I'll confirm: Thale doesn't have sex anymore
* Most of the villains are held back by each other. Shirai's had a few low key plans that had to be rushed or were totally derailed because of Carpenter. Thale can't play his full hand because he's trying to play twelve games at once. Carpenter comes off as the most dangerous because he has no attachments--he's not trying that hard to win anyone's favor and no one's in range to sabotage him.

That being said, as Team Thale gets trimmed down the shackles will start coming off. If Mac dies then Shirai has nothing left to lose, for example. If Carpenter dies Shirai stops having to watch her back. If Shirai dies Thale doesn't have to convince her of anything anymore. Carpenter's probably the most dangerous on his own, but also one of the biggest limiters on everyone else. Shirai was originally trying to work conservatively--Carpenter was the one that got some of her goons to raid Finch's house with a flesh eating virus.

* I didn't plan for that much more with Edison, either, outside of her original appearance in the school. People showed some interest in her, and I joked to my roommate about Tesla, but then people showed mooore interest and I was like "fiiine."
* like, I just expected someone to remember the song later, but when people were like "HUM THE TUNE THE DOOR MIGHT OPEN" I was like... well
* older kids might not believe in santa claus, but they're still strongly discouraged from messing with other kids' ideas about santa claus. Except santa claus is linear causality
* "when Jane's blood is inside an object she can control it, but it has to be inside, not outside." "when a circle is drawn perfectly in blue ink, with candles arranged in a very particular fashion, Hrothgar the Answerer can show up and answer one question but you gotta get it perfect" meanwhile cosmic outsiders are like "humans have to have oxygen? and it has to be able to reach their face? how oddly specific"
* you could potentially turn all of your blood into some other material. They'd still have Weird Calcium or whatever, but you would no longer have control by virtue of not having blood in them, so it would technically unblood the person
* everyone will have discovered their spirit animals by the end of the comic. Fuse has been a bug, Finch will have been a rat, Caius will have been another Caius
* I guess in descending order, Worse Outcome was Carpenter exploded Jane, and you guys would have had to straight up do the cult ritual to get her a new body. Infinitely Worse outcome was Jane killing the Many while Michelle was still holding off Carpenter.
* also Yahaha, You Found Me: the gun doesn't just utilize EM fields, it specifically disrupts the electrical signatures of imprints. That is, EM fields imitating brain signals. That is, it doesn't just spread through a body, it also fucks up your ability to think while getting shot with it
* (re Geoangular Control) oh, that was the one thing I inevitably forgot to mention in my summary: sometimes individual pages of the book make it online, but they get taken down almost immediately. I think that's everything
* [Fuse] later discovered he HADN'T seen it in Lydia's notes, he'd found out about it independently before all this even started. ...Which he's highly suspicious of. Even on cleantex, his memory of how he learned of the book is shady, at best.
* I know at minimum Totally Not Russia had its own version of Z50 that was slightly more public but a lot less successful. the tardis bunker might actually have been maybe sorta not condoned by the world's Europe version It might change because I write by the seat of my pants, but my soft canon right now is Z50's influence wasn't totally global
* for reference, previous OCs that have been snuck into the comic are: the dude that was listening to the podcast at the good hospital, and the dude in the suit at the church
* >matt if we grew a space ship and left the planet what would you do Super Jane Galaxy. the "we gave up, but we're space pirates now so whatever" ending. It's a bad end, but not the worst
* Yeah, Lasker was frozen partway into the stretching thin part, he will absolutely commence drinking deep if given the chance. Lasker put out a large amount of Quantity but not a lot of Quality. He just rapidly swole up into a whole bunch of meatstuff. The Red is, to put it succintly, an Infinite Meat Dimension
* Thale doesn't let Carpenter do stuff above the lower tiers much for that reason, Carpenter is a proverbial time bomb when he's not literally an explosive
* Zone Fifty was working on a prototype Stratemeyer that is the most powerful gun on earth, but to survive its use you need the correct mix of sass, gay, and Latina
* also, the explanation for how [Mine's dad] stayed alive so long is so specific that I don't know how I'm actually going to work it into the comic, or if I can
* Mom's internal red would feel differently, having gone on a different sort of journey than the external red (who was externalized before having to meet the new husband), but would probably still be very amicable. Her internal red's inaccessable by any feasible, conventional, satisfying means at present. Nothing's impossible, it would just take some really sideways backroads mind warping shenanigans to get any mileage out of it. The Mars Beast was hella dead and its red was essentially inaccessable until science and Lasker happened--that which is dead does not eternal lie and all that jazz.
* (On how the other characters would scale to keep up with Mine) Fuse would get robot leg upgrades, Michelle would get a Mk. V Stratemeyer that destroys planets, Caius would learn secret martial arts pressure points He will explode Thale like in Fist of the North Star Dr. Finch will save the day in a Turn A Gundam, somehow
* It's going to turn peoples' brains inside out when the final boss turns out to be The Smell of Fresh Linens. "From our underwater lair, we created the ultimate version of a communist revolutionary--one that could rule from land or sea. Behold, the Similucra of Fish Lenin!"
* You've got it right that not all psychics are telepaths. Fuse is technically psychic, as was the guy that was making Prophet "invisible." True telepaths are extremely uncommon--there's more that are borderline, like siblings that can only read each others' minds, or people who can read thoughts on touch, or people who can just show up in dreams.
* [Bugs Bunny sawing off Florida] happened about 80 years ago in Blood is Mine canon. I actually had to edit out a reference to Florida at one point, because it would have admitted the existence of a Florida
* Unfortunately, in the capitalist dystopian pseudo-future there are only Man Eating MegaEmus
* (On Fuse x Red) Fuse x Jane's hypothetical externalized manifestation of her alien instincts
* It would be hard for me to go back to doing regular comics now, lol. I enjoy the participation / spontanaity factor way too much.
* Caius is (probably, subconsciously) named after a band I like and to bring that into a weird full circle of self-eating references, the guitarist for Kyuss was Josh Homme, who would later be the lead singer of Queens of the Stone Age. Josh Homme (especially in the video for Little Sister) was who I based the main character of Mushroom Go off of, visually.

* I think a dude played Eridan in an RP forum I ran once, that's all I got It was a real "coming to God" moment, because it was a big cross-fiction any media RP forum, and a dude signing up as a Homestuck made me re-evaluate that decision Like, serious sit down conversation with my roommate, like "what am I going to do if somebody signs up as a pony, Chad? What will I do
* Fuse is working under the assumption that it's not a "real coma," but a psychic monster eating Macland's thoughtcastle. And yeah, Dr. Finch just wants to treat the coma as a coma coma coma chameleooon
* The sequel to BiM is just going to be a bunch of weird bunker adventures discovering societies of mole people or dinosaurs in zone fifty bunkers
* Jane is like if the Doctor ate the TARDIS Except she has two ear drums instead of two hearts
* Late-stage capitalism has kind of always been the enemy, like the Darkside of the Force
* (re malformed dream cats) Even if it got really close, you'd just end up with uncanny valley cats. "It's just like a cat, except it's... not... quite... like a cat". all with what is definitely a human voice periodically saying "Meow?"