Considering the last asks about Merch Mimics, I want to ask how common Hex's situation is, that being remembering being part of a show/series/another world and suddenly appearing one day as a toy into a world where your previous home is fictional?
What I'm really wondering about is if before the Merch Mimic becomes that identity in cases like her's (and Jack and Stack's, I'm assuming), if the Mimic in the larval stages imprints on the Idea of that character and that's why they have these memories, or if it's a soul transmigration situation in that this character did exist in another world and then suddenly they exist in another but translated into another form of being.
I'm assuming that Merch Mimics are more malleable in origin than this, as in a multiple ways for them to come into being, but these two particular possibilities of origin sounds very interesting to me!
Great question! The answer is meant to be very ambiguous, but there's something about the fictional worlds these characters seem to come from that seem more "real" than the kind of stuff a human would just come up with off the top of their head. In this setting, alternate realities are known as "paradigms". Paradigms only exist in the abstract as far as anyone is aware, but if a mimic gains knowledge of a paradigm, it can just mimic whatever it sees in that reality and essentially "port" it over to real life. The implication is that mimics like Hex or Jack perceived realities similar to this in their larval stages, and manifested in the real world as characters from those paradigms, using human dreams and ideas as guidance for finding those realities.
This relates to how stories seem to have lives of their own; writers moreso "find" stories rather than truly create them, you could say. Stories likewise seem to "possess" people, with whole swaths of people in consensus that a story has to follow a certain logic. Paradigms are often not physical at all, so there isn't normally any way to just yoink infinite matter from other worlds. Ideas though? Those transcend any such limitations.
There's meant to be some ambiguity as to how accurately someone like Hex is actually the "real" Hex, but her fictional anime backstory is having been a memetic virus that infected a robot and became a threat that way, so waking up in the real world by using the same method is literally like a tuesday afternoon for her. All according to keikaku-- Or perhaps that's just her rationalization of her own constructed memories. They aren't really mutually exclusive, it's the same thing as far as she's concerned. Also. do not kin her. that's what she wants. you don't know what you're unleashing on this world if you actually succeed
