Loose ends and other questions and Minna’s answers

[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]

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.

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.

[yung_chrysanthemum]

First, thank you Jitter for doing this! Even if you aren't able to, um, religiously attend every stream, it's cool that you're willing to toss questions in on our behalf.

I'm mildly amused to hear that Minna is drawing Pokemon since based on the announcement of CoH's cancellation, I had figured she was done with video games for good.


I find it a little bit hard to believe that Minna had no purpose in mind for the incomplete cure that the crew found in Adventure 1. But maybe Sherval is right and its only point was to explain the murderghosts.

Regardless, my headcanon will probably always be that the cure failed because of some magic-related reason that they couldn't have known about in Y0 but are capable of solving in Y90. Eventually they learn how to use it to cure people before they trollify. I don't think they would be able to use this to cure existing grosslings. But the fact that they can stop new ones from being created would be a huge deal.

(for the record, even if Minna had eventually brought up the "cure" again, I don't think it would have been until the end of the last adventure, as either an "epilogue" item or fodder for a final arc)

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?

Yes. IIRC the "different bone structure" thing was Mikkel's observation that while the people who had received the "cure" had been infected with the Rash, they hadn't died from it. (i.e. they probably died of thirst)

[JoB]

IIRC, didn't the experimental vaccine in ADV 1 technically stop people from mutating into trolls?

Cure, not a vaccine. It stopped the bodily modifications, and thus at least the patients acting out any mental corruption, but they would then suffer brain death.

I have this memory in my head about Mikkel saying something about "different bone structure" on the bodies that had used the vaccine.

While it is true that the cure had been used on those bodies, he pronounced the changes to the bones as an effect of The Illness.

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.

Reminds me of the interim title she had for SSSS that she never told anyone because it was way too spoilery, and had entirely forgotten about later on ...

[Maple]

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.

I think that works for this canon though. The Rash isn't some obstacle to be overcome, it's a part of everyday life. A force of nature to be mindful of. It informs the setting, and it helps establish why characters act the way they do, but it doesn't overtake the story entirely. And I think that's what sets SSSS apart from a lot of 'zombie canons' and gives it its own distinctive flair: the zombies aren't the enemy, they're just a part of the setting. You can avoid them entirely if you're mindful about them.

[thorny]

Maple, that's a very good point. And I think it's some of why I liked SSSS so much, when I'm not interested in most zombie stuff: it's not primarily about fighting zombies. It's just about living in that world.

[Jitter]

In addition to the zombies not being the enemy, there is no enemy at all. There isn’t a slightest indication of any human on human violence, after Y0 and the Icelandic coast guard. It’s possible such is not unheard of, but it’s certainly not a feature of the story. Many zombie and other apocalypse stories are at least as much about the infighting among the survivors as coping with the disaster.

This reminds me of a question. Why is the Finnish army in Keuruu, while most of the population is at Saimaa? In a war situation it may be beneficial to separate the two, in the hopes that the enemy will attack the troops and the people may stay safe. But here they are not dealing with an enemy that would make coordinated attacks or have any sort of strategy. Wouldn’t it make sense to have troops where they could defend the villages? Or at least have A village at the fortress? (There are no civilian families, or military families either, as Tuuri hadn’t seen children for years).

[thorny]

Maybe that's just how it happened to work out sometime in years 1 - 10 or so, and they've never re-thought it?

Maybe they don't want the military controlling day-to-day civilian lives, and think mixing them in might cause that to happen?

(Maybe I don't know?)

[lwise]

Maybe they're working on setting up a settlement there, since transportation is easier from there.

[tehta]

Maybe they're working on setting up a settlement there, since transportation is easier from there.

I agree, they might well be carrying out some sort of cleansing/reclamation effort. Or maybe that area is so dangerous that it requires constant military presence, and it is important/useful for some reason? (Transportation, maybe, as you say. The map shows nothing special, otherwise.)

[Jitter]

The central island in Keuruu is the only place in Finland marked safe on the map. Why doesn’t anyone live there, as in properly settled? Do they have something there? A secret??

Also it seems that being a warrior is a lifetime calling (however long or short the lifetime), so it would make sense or there to be some military families at least. Unless the Secret is very dangerous so the families are sent elsewhere.

Hmm hmmmmmm

[JoB]

(There are no civilian families, or military families either, as Tuuri hadn’t seen children for years).

Tuuri was a non-immune in a place with a 92% immunity rate, and a central area designated "civilian quarters", even though civilians made up less than a fifth of the population. There is some cleansing going on, but no explanation is ever offered why they'd be doing that in a place so hard to reach from the other Finnish population centers. There is considerable export of timber from Pori, but I'm not convinced that that alone makes a stronghold that far off inland worthwhile.

Keuruu was already in existence when the kade wiped out a significant part of the Saimaa settlements, otherwise I'd theorize that that incident made the post-Rash Finns want not to put all their eggs in a single basket.

One possible hint is that the Keuruu-Pori waterway is explicitly said to be "safer than the Saimaa canal", so it might be a long-term project to move the population center to a place with better connections to the Known World, or trailblaze a direct Keuruu-Saimaa connection later on.

Keuruu is a tad more Northern than Saimaa Central, but still South of Joensuu and (the secondary population center of) Eno, so I doubt that it's an attempt at establishing a refuge fort in a colder (= grossling-unfriendlier) place.

Not an overwhelming lot of pre-Rash history to make it worth keeping hold of, I'm afraid, but of course there is the possibility that the initial post-Rash settlement of Keuruu was an early wherever-we-can-stop-running-from-the-horrors one, like Saimaa-the-new-capital-of-Finland apparently was, and that the Y90 military position just grew out of that.