Metafiction in Versus Debating: The Absolute

In the later 600s, early 500s BC, the Greek Philosopher Thales proposed that the universe was made of water.

More specifically, he said that water is the "arche" of existence. "Arche" is a word that does not seem to translate very well into English, but it refers to something's fundamental substance, something primordial that is not formed but instead forms everything as component. 

Let us imagine for a second a hypothetical Thalesian Cosmos. The Cosmos is formed of water. All things in it are simply water in different forms. 

If we were to take a being that could magically manipulate and move water with gestures and place them in this universe, what would change for them? They would find that their capacities had suddenly grown to encompass the whole of the cosmos. With enough scale and precision they should theoretically be able to turn stones into people simply by shifting the water that comprises them. They could cause a planet to not be a sphere and instead be a cube should they have enough control. If one gives them an arbitrary level of control of water, and all things in the cosmos are made of water, they should theoretically be able to do anything they wish.

Let us move our attention from water to something else...ink perhaps. Let us imagine a hypothetical universe that is comprised of images made of ink overlayed onto sheets of paper that are in layed down in a spatial sequence or moved between them with such speed that to an outside observer it appears they form a continuum of motion. If in these ink universes, there were entities that were....again I stress HYPOTHETICALLY alive, and one was able to say change the position of the ink that comprises their cosmos, they could, again given an arbitrary level of scale and precision in their control, be able to form any picture depicting anything they wish and it would thus be so.

More abstractly, let us imagine that there was a sequence of data, a set of 1s and 0s used in binary to indicate the machine controlling it to display a set if images in proper time. We can hypothetically imagine the existence of a species of data entities, who recognize themselves as sets of repeating code that the machine interprets as displaying a recurring image an outside observer would see as their "body" in the images. Should one of these entities spontaneously develop the ability to manipulate code, it would be within their power if given arbitrary control to manipulate the code to cause any set of images they want to appear. 

Metafiction. Infamously, at least to me, difficult to discuss in a versus context given how inherently specific to the series in question it is. Metafiction from an artistic standpoint is an artistic movement that does not attempt to create a self-coherent hypothetical reality, but instead makes evident it's own constructed arbitrary nature for a point. Metafiction is against a traditional idea of narrative, the idea of suspension of disbelief, where the audience is expected to pretend in a hypothetical reality being expressed for the sake of gaining some information from the hypothetical reality. Metafiction specifically makes the viewer aware that it's fiction for the sake generally of expressing some point about fiction or some subset of it.

Metafictional Abilities, or Metafiction in the versus sense, refers to entities being able to manipulate their medium in order to gain an advantage in fight. Metafictional Abilities are notoriously difficult to extrapolate. Given that metafictional is currently "en vogue" as it were in the video game scene, characters with these abilities and which people want to debate are brought up fairly often and so need some level of understanding to achieve. 

A rule that versus debating has, that I consider very important, and yet is also frustratingly ambiguous is verse equalization. What verse equalization means it that it is assumed abilities from one universe would work on characters from another universe even if their physics are different. In other words, soul manipulation would still work on the crew of the Enterprise, even though they have never been shown to have souls, because it is assumed the power works as normal. Verse equalization I imagine is important to understanding how to use metafictional manipulation in versus.

Let me take a step back and talk about the fundamentals of versus debating for a second. When we say "X vs Y", we are really packaging a more complex question in there that usually amounts to the same thing, namely "If this hypothetical entity x from hypothetical universe a was real and had the capacities presented to them, and hypothetical entity y from hypothetical universe b was real and had the capacities presented to them and the two were to fight, what would be the outcome?"

The problem with introducing metafiction is that metafictional abilities obviously assume the character is in a fictional work. We do not assume real life has a "plot", yet some characters can manipulate the plot of their work. One might innocently ask "what's the problem with asking who would win between the two under the assumption that they are both still fictional?"

The problem with that is that two fictional entities cannot fight. This is because two fictional entities do not exist and therefore cannot perform actions or possess agency and will. That might sound hugely pedantic, however in this particular discussion it is very important. Why is this important? Well if we to assume as a hypothetical that these two fictional entities, that are fiction and thus do not actually exist, actually do possess wills and capacities to act (purely in a hypothetical sense), then you will quickly find that neither have the capacity to affect each other, as both do not exist being fiction. To have any form of interaction, one must presume that both characters have some level of reality. 

So this leads to the question of how to equalize? However on some level I think one can maintain the continuity of abilities from the hypothetical universe the characters "exists" in to the hypothetical reality of the fight. If for instance a character in an animation has the ability to move water with their mind, what they are moving is not actually water but ink that resembles water, but we don't say the character is actually an "ink that resembles water manipulator". We recognize that as a hypothetical representation of water, and thus in a hypothetical fight situation they would be able to manipulate hypothetical water just as they do in the hypothetical universe that is their original universe.

But that begs the question, what are metafictional manipulators manipulating in a hypothetical real universe? As far as we know, our cosmos does not have any distinguishable arche, though it is easy enough to simply say one, since anything we define as being the arche of the universe will be the definition of the arche of the universe (though it's properties we will still have no knowledge of). I generally refer to this as "the absolute" referencing the idea of the "planes" of reality. An alternative and more vague term one could use is simply "being". Being, or simply "existence" is "that which is" and is shaped into recognizable patterns and forms by abstract concepts, patterns...

In this vein, existence erasure might be seen as a very specific form of manipulation of the cosmos's arche, similar to a character in animation erasing another character, or a character in a game deleting another character. A character that has metafictional manipulation thus in a neutral battlefield would have, going by verse equalization, "being" or "absolute" manipulation and thus their powers would work as normal.

From there, one can intuit the properties of specific forms of metafiction based on their consequences to characters in their respective verse. However to me there are two more specific cases that need to be addressed.

The first is what happens when a character can supposedly affect the real world. Now obviously no fictional character can actually affect the real world. The idea of them can just as obviously, knowing about the idea of a character can influence real people to act in certain ways, but it must be differentiated that the idea of a character is not the same as pretending that the fictional construct of a character actually exists and can influence the real world.

But this leads us to ask what it means if a fictional character is presented as going into the real world. What is actually happening is we are being asked to create a hypothetical reality where this already hypothetical character can enter the real world. In other words it's a different layer of hypothetical. 

It is pretty easy to imagine dual layers of hypothetical. I'm sure anyone reading this can think of a fictional universe that has a popular fictional show or book or game within it that has no real-world counterpart. Discussing a fight between a character from the first fictional universe, and the fictional universe within that would require us to hypothetically imagine both being real anyway so it's for the most part unimportant. It it important to differentiate this from two characters being equally real but one existing in the context of the story "inside" of a work that otherwise seems to be a fictional work. A "real" entity existing inside a video game does not need to be taken out of the game to be put into a fight against a normal "real" entity. This is specifically about when one entity is fictional from the perspective of the other.

The other important question that is raised to me, is the question of interactivity. I'm gonna be honest, I don't really understand how to incorporate interactivity yet under any standarized rules. Interactivity from the real person's perspective, essentially fragments the hypothetical into a set of hypothetical realities of varying degrees of probability. By this, interactivity is not a metafictional phenomena in itself, since it is merely part of the interface for which the recipient of the hypothetical reality can experience it. Obviously though metafiction can be mixed with interactivity, if a fictional character arbitrarily limits the "player's" options.

Now again obviously a fictional character can not actually limit a player's options are. What is happening is in the game code there are specifications made to present the sequences of images representing the game as a character stating that they are altering the player's interface and then having the data shift accordingly. We are being asked therefore again to imagine a hypothetical reality where a fictional character can interact with the "real" world, in this case the game they are programmed within. Again this is two layers of hypothetical reality. In this case it would seem to be that is merely another expression of metafictional manipulation, manipulating game data within the "lower" hypothetical reality we have imagined.

And so that's it. That is my best interpretation, going back to fundamentals, on how metafiction manipulation would work in versus.