#fargo dx

[weaselandfriends]

About Fargo DX

About a year ago I mentioned I was working on an edit of Fargo, titled Fargo DX, that would significantly improve its prose and pacing while maintaining its plot, characters, and overall structure. I shelved the project to work on 1 Over X, but I returned to it a few months ago and since completed it.

April 16 is the 10th anniversary of when Fargo ended (I already wrote a post about the making of Fargo for the anniversary of when it started). On that date, I'll start posting Fargo DX on RoyalRoad, Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, and AO3. My plan is to post a chapter a day until all 42 chapters are posted.

Will Fargo DX replace Fargo? No! Throughout this process I have striven to avoid "George Lucasing," so all original versions of Fargo will remain exactly where they are, unchanged. (Actually, I fixed some typos I discovered during the edit, but that's all.) Fargo DX will be posted as a separate version and I'll let the fans decide which they prefer. I personally believe Fargo DX is a much smoother read that emphasizes Fargo's strengths without compromising its plot and characters, but I don't intend to dogmatically enforce that point of view on anyone.

Why do this? Though I'm releasing Fargo DX as a 10th anniversary gift of sorts, I primarily did this edit for my own satisfaction. Fargo was my first serial work and my first work longer than 200,000 words. Though I found the act of writing it easy, there was a self-imposed time crunch (I released a chapter almost every week over the course of a year) that prevented me from giving it the rigorous editing that I normally apply to my stories. Meanwhile, the act of writing Fargo led to major improvements in my prose style (improvements that would be on display in my next book, Modern Cannibals), but the obverse side of improvement is that everything you wrote before the improvement suddenly seems lacking. In short, I've often felt like Fargo could be made stronger with an edit, so I finally went ahead and did it.

What changed? In most regards, the changes were geared around improving the quality of the prose. This meant cutting extraneous or redundant words or sentences, rewriting sentences to read less awkwardly, and improving word choice. I also took the opportunity to resolve a few small plot holes here and there, such as inconsistencies in the date (early on the date is given as late November, while at the end of the story it clearly takes place around Christmas). I paid particular attention to Fargo's fight scenes, which were often long and sometimes repetitive, with a lot of aimless hitting and being hit. I made changes with the goal of giving these fight scenes more punch, in line with the often stark and brutal tone Fargo conveys. Altogether, the total word count changed from 325,000 (original) to 276,000 (DX), a nearly 50,000 word reduction.

What didn't change? I made no changes to the plot or characters. All chapters remain in their same positions, covering their same storylines. I also elected not to add any scenes in a DDLC+ type of way, as I didn't feel like Fargo is really missing anything and that any additions would be just for the sake of adding something. Though the lack of new content might make this edit of less interest to longtime fans, my goal was to create something I legitimately felt was the "ultimate edition" of Fargo. Adding superfluous new scenes would not help that goal.

I'll mention that I strongly considered publishing Fargo DX on RoyalRoad under the title "Magical Girl Machine Gun" (the title would have remained unchanged everywhere else, and I would still refer to it as Fargo personally). I thought this might gain it some attention on RoyalRoad, where the story has never been published before. Ultimately, for reasons of bibliographical consistency, I elected not to do this. I'll mention that the proposed daily update schedule is designed for RoyalRoad attention metrics, though.

If it's been a long time since you read Fargo and you've been thinking about a reread, or if you're a fan of my other work and never got into the Go Duology, this is the perfect opportunity for you to experience the story in a way (I hope) is better than ever. If there are any other questions, I'll be happy to answer them.

[theothin]

I don't understand, said Kyubey. What does this anecdote have to do with your current actions? This makes no sense! How can all three of you act against the logic that has guided you so far? How are humans so inconsistent? Darien levied a boot and kicked him off the edge of the cliff. His body pinwheeled into oblivion.

extremely puntable cabbit

[phetaritette]

Not much to explain here it’s literally just Erika.

[weaselandfriends]

Fargo DX: Chapter 1

Fargo DX has been posted! (For more info on what Fargo DX is, see About Fargo DX.) Chapter 1 is up on the following sites:

AO3

RoyalRoad [as Magical Girl Machine Gun]

Spacebattles

Sufficient Velocity

I'll be posting Chapter 2 and 3 later today. After that, I intend to post a chapter daily. The number of chapters is the same as the original Fargo (42).

Several people told me I should, in fact, post the story as "Magical Girl Machine Gun" on RoyalRoad, so I'll be doing that. Maybe it'll see a boost in activity.

Cover art by Phetaritette.

[weaselandfriends]

Fargo DX: FINAL CHAPTER

AO3

RR

SB

SV

Word Count: 8,299 -> 7,932

Commentary:

When I first wrote this chapter, I was so exhausted after the previous one that I was convinced the chapter was awful, that I had written it terribly, that I was being sloppy and lazy right at the finish line. On reread, I understood that the chapter needed essentially no changes at all.

Fan art of the ending under the cut.

[weaselandfriends]

Fargo DX: Chapter 39

AO3

RR

SB

SV

Word Count: 10,726 -> 9,327

Commentary:

This is probably the best chapter in Fargo. Ibsen, especially the edited version, might compete, but this is truly a chapter that sticks with people. It stuck with me; there's a reason I keep naming chapters in later stories after quotes from the same source.

(As an aside, I've actually been to the LACMA, which does in fact look eerily similar -- at least on the outside -- to its scale model recreation in Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. I've even got a picture of myself next to Severini's Armored Train in Action, one of the paintings that features in Cockatiel x Chameleon.)

As for this chapter. The idea of showing magical girl heaven was put into my head by Puella Magi Homura Magica, an early PMMM fanfic that heavily influenced Fargo. Late in that story, there's an interlude in the Law of Cycles, which is depicted as a heaven-like environment, generically idyllic where girls in togas or white robes lounge vaguely sapphicly together. Sort of a westerner's default vision of heaven turned lesbian.

I found this depiction rather uncreative. It seemed, in some way, to aesthetically fit Madoka's goddess form, which evokes a western angel, but I always felt like Sayaka and Nagisa's depiction in Rebellion was much more professional, more there to get some business done, the workhorses of the overarching scheme. Of course even the concept of the Law of the Cycles as a literal heavenly location is out of sorts with the name Law of the Cycles, which suggests a specifically Buddhist samsara, but then again, Sayaka and Nagisa's appearance as angels sort of contradicts that too. The whole canonical understanding of the Law of the Cycles is littered with artifacts of ideas rather than any coherent singular one; the end of the show proper points heavily at a Buddhist interpretation, but the fanservicy need to bring Sayaka back in Rebellion tilts it much more Christian (which in turn corresponds to Homura's Rebellion transformation into a heavily Christian Lucifer figure). All of this, of course, is itself a natural byproduct of Japan's rather secular feelings toward religion, which Fargo itself emphasizes with its Christmas chapter.

I could go on about this, actually. Recently I was reading about Robert E. Howard, the author of Conan the Barbarian, generally credited for creating the Sword and Sorcery genre, the pulp fantasy counterpoint to Tolkien's high fantasy Lord of the Rings. Howard and Sword and Sorcery would in turn influence Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons; Dungeons and Dragons would lead to Ultima and Wizardry, early video game attempts to adapt the system; Ultima and Wizardry would influence Dragon Quest, which in turn created the entire Japanese conception of Western fantasy. Robert E. Howard, the root of this lineage, was intensely interested in his "Irish cultural roots" and imbued his Conan stories with motifs from Celtic history and myth. By the time this series of influences reaches Japan, though, it's been bled dry of that very specific Western cultural intensity, becoming neither really Western nor even Japanese, an almost entirely generic form of fantasy. It's almost incredible to see.

Anyway, in designing my magical girl heaven, I wanted to lean into the idea of Sayaka and Nagisa as workers doing Madoka's bidding. Then, of course, there's all the conversations Madoka has with her office worker mother. It seemed to me like it made perfect sense for heaven to be a huge office building where everyone does a cubicle job.

I, of course, worked in an office building at this time, and the existential misery of doing that was a huge part of the initial impulse to write Fargo at all. By this point writing the story, I had gotten over it, so this vision of heaven is a reflection of that acceptance -- or resignation. I like that this heaven is, despite being functional and everyone being fine with it due to being lobotomized, sort of existentially despair-inducing. It should be. Since writing Fargo, I've discovered that inventing some perfect heaven is a favorite thought experiment in webfic spaces. I find the fixation on this concept somewhat unsettling, especially since I sort of get the impression that there is an underlying belief that these fantasy heavens are not pure fantasy but something the authors see as potentially possible. Maybe that's just my read and not actually the case. But then I see people talk about the "singularity" as an article of faith and I'm not sure.

In Worth the Candle, a story I quite like, there's one of these utopian heavens, and it's my least favorite part of the story. (I don't think author Alexander Wales believes in it as an achievable goal like I was talking about just now; he just likes worldbuilding for worldbuilding's sake.) The description of the heaven goes through great hoops to explain how good it is and how accommodating and how it does everything in its power to ensure everyone is perfectly happy, then as a sort of last resort -- in case anyone somehow slipped through the cracks -- it suggests that people can basically lobotomize themselves to be happy if everything else fails. But if you can do that, why bother with everything else? Just lobotomize everyone so they're happy from the onset. Then the world can be anything, it can be a giant office building, it's still heaven.

I dunno. I'm not really a dreamer.

[weaselandfriends]

Fargo DX: Chapter 28

AO3

RR

SB

SV

Word Count:

Commentary: 9,293 -> 8,554

Compared to the last few chapters, this one needed relatively few changes. Most of Anoka's long story at the end is unchanged, and the cuts I make to the first part of the chapter are designed around making it more trenchant, more brutal, more raw.

The chapter title, "A Stage Dense with Corpses," is from The Crying of Lot 49, describing a fake Jacobean revenge tragedy that ends with a Tarantino-esque level of bloodshed, leaving only a perfectly generic minister alive to deliver the closing lines. This concept lives in my mind, and I'm pretty sure I allude to it in several other stories.

This chapter is notable for introducing Chicago. Chicago, of course, would go on to be the center of a later story of mine. Like most things in Fargo, it was not well planned in advance, though I did have some vague sketches of an idea building over the course of writing the story. There are a few allusions to Chicago beforehand, such as Woodbury mentioning it in Chapter 14:

"In Chicago they don't do it like this," Woodbury continued, as if she had not heard. "In Chicago they have it all ordered and tiered and there's this hierarchy and you gotta report to your superior officer and they take a percent as tribute or whatever.

(Someone commenting on Fargo DX asked if this and a couple other references were added in the DX, but no, this is from the original.)

The seed for the idea that became the Holy Empire of Chicago originated from a review I got very early on when publishing Fargo on ff.net. On Chapter 4, in fact. Someone calling themselves THE GREAT ANONYMOUS REVIEWER (and signing all their reviews with: "I don't flame, I bitterly critique." - The GAR) gave me an effusive multi-paragraph bit of praise that spiraled into its own worldbuilding, the very first instance of someone seeing Fargo and thinking "But what if there were magical girls where I lived, too?" They said this:

With a population density of over 27,000 per square mile, New York City has the largest concentration of Magical Girls in America: there are close to 1,000 at any one time in Manhattan alone. Outsiders consider the area an overpopulated, constantly-at-war bloodbath because of this, but the reverse is actually true, at least to the city's residents. Through a complicated system of honor duels, social hierarchies, and rigidly defined territory boundaries, the Big Apple has the highest Puella deaths per year, but the lowest death RATE overall. It is one of the few places on Earth that a Nomadic Puella need not fear instant hostility…provided they follow the rules, of course.

This post kind of took hold in my mind. To be honest -- and no shade to The GAR, though even by 2015 they seemed kind of a relic of a bygone era -- I was annoyed. I felt annoyed that someone would come in and plop all this on top of the story I was currently writing. It's bizarre for me to remember this now, because today I love any and all fanfic of my work. Maybe it was just because The GAR themselves was kind of cringe, but I remember just not liking this "headcanon" (as they called it) at all.

It's because of this post that I almost never mentioned New York City in either Fargo or Chicago. It just seemed slightly radioactive. But that left America's other big population centers, which I would develop in the fringes of my mind. Los Angeles, The Place Where Magical Girls Go to Die, a particularly hellish wasteland combining big city sprawl, smog, and Hollywood's thwarted dreams. The Terminatrixes would name themselves after its roads the way a thug might name themselves Skull or Killer to exude danger. And Chicago...

In many ways, my vision of Chicago starts from The GAR's vision of New York, defined by honor and hierarchy. The earlier allusions to the city from Woodbury certainly build on that idea. But Chicago didn't really become Chicago until this chapter, Chapter 28. The real solidifying reason why Chicago is Like That is because I wanted to hit Sloan with the stupidest, dumbest thing ever. After everything, after Ibsen, after Yaldabaoth, after Delaney, I wanted her to come down off the tower and see only a tragic, ridiculous joke. Hennepin of all people the only survivor, getting off scot free despite her obvious shiftiness. And the Chicago Empire, the grand LARPers, taking magical girldom so seriously they twisted it back into the realm of parody. All of the self-important bullshit Cicero spews this chapter was designed to emphasize Sloan's apathy. How could she possibly care about this pseudo-Roman nonsense? How could anyone?

I've come to consider Chicago a creative turning point, the foundation of most of the works I would write afterward: Cockatiel x Chameleon, Cleveland Quixotic, and When I Win especially. The performative attempt to construct meaning out of a fundamentally meaningless existence, and the struggle for an outsider to care, to even accept it as real. In some way, you might be able to thank this one random ff.net reviewer from 2015 for that.

"I don't flame, I bitterly critique." - The GAR

[weaselandfriends]

Can we see the appearances of all the Fargo DX Magical Girl OCs? I was wondering what they all looked like.

I have a lot of fan art for Fargo, but it's almost all of the same few characters. Here's Sloan:

Delaney:

Winnipeg:

Omaha:

Plus fan art of Ramsey:

And Clair (on the left):

I recently received some brand new fan art of Delaney, Winnipeg, and Omaha, which I'll post once Fargo DX wraps up in a few days.