UnEnding (Multimedia Project, English, 2016)
“UnEnding” is a multimedia project I created in collaboration with artist Kate Hughes back in 2016. The premise was that a group of Japanese teenagers and young adults, given supernatural powers by fictional characters they related to, have to stop the worlds of fictional stories from overtaking and consuming their reality. The project was inspired by 90s Anime and the novel “The Neverending Story” by Michael Ende, and was designed to play with the 4th wall and directly involve the reader as yet another layer of “reality” that existed in the story. However, due to inexperience with webdesign, marketing and projects of this scale, I shelved the project in 2017 and, unfortunately, also lost contact with Kate Hughes, who was responsible for the majority of the art and more than half of the character designs. Should I ever decide to revive this project, I would first need to establish contact with Kate again, as I don’t plan on using her character designs without her permission.
You can read the first chapter here.
Excerpt:
If you asked me why people play videogames or watch Anime, I would tell you that that’s a really stupid question. After all, there is a lot of reasons to do either of these things, right? People are as different as there are many of them. Of course, we often don’t see that behind the others’ closed doors. Who knows, the nice cashier at the Convenience Store that you buy your chewing gum from every day might really be a die-hard Mecha fan, right? And the lady stamping off your letters when you go to the post-office? Chances are she still has the Sailor Moon Keychain she bought fifteen years ago with her friends. And maybe she bought another one just yesterday.
[…]
Of course, you can take everything too far. There will always be the crazies, who’ve lost all semblance of understanding of the difference between reality and fiction. People who throw an over-dramatic hissy fit online if you say anything bad about their favorite character. People who buy body pillows and then go and insist that they are married to them. People who talk to these characters as if they were real and believe that they love them like you love a real human. But I am not that kind of person. I have a firm grasp on reality and on my life. No matter how much a character means to me, I will definitely always know where to draw the line. …That’s what I thought about myself.
But then I got home. I dropped my bag on my bed and heard that familiar voice behind me again. Except, this time, it didn’t call my name. Instead it groaned with a loud “Ugh!”. So I turned around, and that was when everything I thought and believed about myself and reality went right out of the window.
Yes, on that 8th of April after my 18th birthday, I turned around in my room to find somebody who shouldn’t exist, sitting on my bed. That “somebody” being none other than the one video-game character I believed to know more inside out than my own self. He’d rub his forehead, seemingly recovering from the impact of my bag on his head. Then, he’d look up at me and blink. I’d look back at him and stare.
“…Umm…’Sup?” he’d ask.
I’d step backward and crash into my own chair and desk, falling over.
That’s how Keiji and I first met.
