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Loose ends and other questions and Minna’s answers

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Jitter:
Hello all,

Minna has promised to try and answer questions about SSSS world and at least some of the loose ends in the streams. There isn’t going to be one specific Q&A stream, but she’ll be happy to answer a few each week.

This thread is meant for sharing those answers, so if you go on the stream and ask something, or get someone else’s question and answer, please share here.

You can also post your most burning questions here if you can’t or don’t want to go to the stream, I ma be able to ask some of them.

I can’t promise I will be attending each and every stream, but I try to catch the majority of them for the time being. They are relaxed and I like watching her draw, even though it’s been bunnies and pokemons lately. I’ll let you know if it get e.g. religious in which case I will stop.

It is however not a task I promise to take care of! Plus anyone else is more than welcome to post here too.

Anyways here are a couple from this week.

Q: what is the cure to the Rash?
A: nothing, there was never going to be a cure found. The only cure is a bullet to the head.

Q: will Onni ever have a girlfriend?
A: you can write whatever you want for any of the characters, I’m not pro or against any fan interpretation for the future

Q: in the illustration for book 3 Reynir seems to be casting a stave. Can he do that, or learn to do that?
A: maybe in the dreamworld he can? In the real world they need to be drawn or carved on something  (Apparently this was not something Minna had a firm plan about, she gave it a bit of thought)

Q: can the Finnish mages ask for nature spirits to help?
A: that’s pretty much all they do

thorny:
Thanks, Jitter! and yes, of course, just go to whichever streams you were going to anyway.

Sherval:

--- Quote --- Q: what is the cure to the Rash?
A: nothing, there was never going to be a cure found. The only cure is a bullet to the head.
--- End quote ---

That's quite... depressing. But it does make sense, because the moment a cure would be found, the world could start healing itself and the story would end there. Of course, that process alone would take years (even decades) to accomplish and could (or rather would) be worthy of its own story in SSSS canon...

But yeah, I can also understand the idea of not providing an instant fix to everything. For one, like I said before, it would end the story as it has been thus far (or rather, force it into certain direction compared to not having the cure, which is far less restricting). And two, it would've been quite cliche.

I DID hope that there wouldn't be an insta cure available at the end of adventure 2, because that would've been some Disney movie level of happy ending. Rushed, sloppy and indeed very cliche. But the idea that there was NEVER going to be one at all is another thing entirely.

Of course, there's always room for speculation; *clears her throat, digs up her roll of tinfoil, folds it neatly into a boat shaped hat and then puts it on*: it's always possible, that there USED to be some kind of an idea for the eventual cure, before Minna scrapped that idea entirely at some point. The same way any further SSSS stories got scrapped here.

IIRC, didn't the experimental vaccine in ADV 1 technically stop people from mutating into trolls? I have this memory in my head about Mikkel saying something about "different bone structure" on the bodies that had used the vaccine. The vaccine couldn't save their lives, got their souls stuck in a limbo but, IIRC, it DID stop the mutation, right?

Of course, that vaccine itself could've always been meant as a mere plot devise to explain the murder ghosts, nothing more. But the idea that that vaccine was never even CONSIDERED to be something that would've been refined in later stories (or alternatively, some other vaccine from elsewhere)... Well, perhaps that was indeed the case. Or perhaps it was considered as an option at some point, before getting ultimately scrapped, in order to keep the SSSS world's status quo as is for all eternity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Jitter:
One thing Minna mentioned quite recently, maybe some mont or two ago is also that she has forgotten many of the ideas she may have had before. Not just now, when she had decided to end here, but also before. It is a part of her process apparently.

And she has scrapped ideas that may have been major. An example she mentioned is the omen both Reynir and Lalli saw in Adventure 1. When she made that page, she had ideas how omens would be a major element, maybes it was something about different omen-creatures. But it was something she dropped long ago.

So some of the things we think about as foreshadowing may have been like that, initially intended but later scrapped, some maybe sorta intentional but forgotten, and some are probably just in the eye of the beholder.

There are also at least some things Minna has used but never completely designed. I kind of think the nature of the Rash is one of those things. Since she wasn’t going to introduce a cure, she didn’t need an exact explanation of what causes it. Maybe she has more information than is revealed in the comic, but it looks likely she doesn’t have it down to details.

thorny:
Yeah, I think the Rash may have all along been a Black Box Plot Device. Minna may never either have known or have tried to work out what caused it, how it works aside from the effects she wanted for the story, or how or if it would end. She may well have just been interested in telling stories in a world affected by the Rash in certain ways; and of course a world that's found a cure wouldn't be that world, so might have been/be useless to her.

Some of her fans would feel unhappy to be themselves devising a world in which such an important plot element has no explanation whatsoever, even in the artist's mind. If I'm working something out for a story, even something I never expect to get out of my own head, some part of my head thinks it's necessary to try to work out at least a handwavium explanation for such things. But not everyone's mind works that way, and I don't think Minna's does.

-- it occurs to me that a world that did find a cure would still be massively shaped for quite some time by the experience of having gone through the Rash times; and also that, even if the cure worked on people who had been trollified for over 90 years, there would be large portions of the planet with effectively no functioning human society. Most people in the Silent World would of course have died; and unless the cure also brought amnesia, any cured trollified surviving people would be massively traumatized by the time they'd spent as trolls. The post-cure societies that resulted would probably not be much at all like the pre-year-0 societies. A lot of interesting possible stories there.

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