so, last night i couldn't sleep and i started thinking about pinnochio and then about svsss, the 'becoming real' that is achieved by love and sacrifice. i haven't read the original work of carlo collodi, and i read svsss almost two years ago... so ngl i'm definitely bending the stories to support this half-assed interpretation lmao, but i’d love to share it and see other’s opinions. sorry if it's not very well-written, english is not my first language...
there's this perfect meta about how sqq never really feels that any of his experiences after the transmigration are false, even though it'd make everything easier for him. and i think that's true. he never doubts about this new reality and its high-stakes, i mean, he accepts the tranmigration-trope as something real that's happening to him and not an hallutination or a dream, he might think that this universe is plot-oriented even as he's trying to live in there while trying to scape the plot, and the people, he might often think of them as characters, but he never treats them only as prompts for whom he should have no consideration, but as realities that exceed him. that maybe is at the beginning just a comment on the psychological attachment of fans to the works they love, it's very usual for readers -especially young readers- not to approach and criticize fiction for what it is but as a record of real events, but i don't think that's the case, knowing cucumber bro, i think -and sorry if i'm bieng philosophical here- that it's because real things present themselves before us with that 'extra', that 'i don't exhaust myself in your perceptions', and our conscience sees it clearly and distinctly. so even if sqq rationally has strong reasons to think everything is kinda virtual, kinda false, he can't really behave as if it is, because he feels the reality of it.
BUT. he knows this universe doesn’t work with the same laws as his original universe. the laws of this universe are the laws of fiction (the protagonist halo, the inevitability of the abyss, the necessity of melodrama and an antagonist, the ooc prohibition, the fanfic-baiting scenarios, the side-plots and plot holes that he has to amend -he has a mission after all!-, the easy mode, the scenario pushers) and these rules are endorsed by the SYSTEM. the SYSTEM functions here as the guarantor of the permanence of the fiction. the SYSTEM provides the transmigration and establishes the cool-points system to secure different narrative milestones to maintain the fictionality in a universe that otherwise would run free. it limits but also empowers sqq. fiction limits and empowers him, that is clearly seen in the fact that all sqq's expectations are based in the original book, that gives him the gift of some clairvoyance but also blinds him to the new developments, it stagnates him as much as it gives him an advantage. he really understates his own impact in the world around him and there's always an emotional distance between him and the poeple around him: fiction is his coping-mechanism, fiction, the very area in which he is presumably an expert -given the arrogance with which he felt entitled to criticize airplane's work-, is his way to navigate his new reality, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. and like xin mo for luo binghe, sqq's coping-mechanism is not well-adjusted.
the sheer existence of the SYSTEM and the presence of sy is a descentralizing power, it removes the centrality of lbh, and in the space between those two centres the world finds respite. it might be that the reality of sy streams into everything that surrounds him, but this new reality is so thirsty of that, it wants to burst the stricts constraints of the SYSTEM so bad. we joke a lot about it, sqq's harem, but it makes sense that the characters seem to be attracted by the genuine existence of sqq, the 'already-finished' person. the world wants to be its own thing, and it spills over and the SYSTEM redirects it into discarded and forgotten elements to complete itself, to maintain it within the limits of fiction. the universe contains within itself the potential of its original outline, of higher quality than what pidw ended up being, having been carried away by the preferences of the mass of readers, but this world is real here, it can't really be corseted: the resentment of chunshan, zhuzhi-lang's devotion and the death of gongyi xiao, the weight of shen jiu, haunting the present like a ghost, the inteligence of the different seconday characters (especially girls) that can't stay that low, the relationships and roles that can't stay as they are needed to fit the genre expectations and clichés. the world's dynamics and inertia seem to flow to other places and the SYSTEM won't let them or it will phagocytise them. there's this dialectic between the SYSTEM, sqq and the universe, influencing each other and sometimes it's impossible to know which is the motor..., but i'd say the final change in the genre of the story sqq is 'co-writing' with the SYSTEM is evidence of this overflow from the universe. the necessity of a meta perspective -our perspective, where sy and the SYSTEM are characters as well- to comprehend the story they're writing without plotholes is evidence too of this overflow. in the end it's the SYSTEM that has to adapt for the enterprise not to fail miserably, it has to revert to the original purpose of this universe's creator to make sense (we don't know to what extent that was something inescapable -engraved in the bones of airplane's creation- or something that occurs by accident, by the fact that cucumber bro is really and unknowingly airplane's zhiji, or really it's just the SYSTEM rationalizing something ungovernable). svsss is the story sqq is writing. it starts with the SYSTEM's entry and it ends with the SYSTEM's exit as it has concluded its fix-it mission. 'our story has just begun' is just a saying, what does begin is real life.
like pinocchio, it's all about a test. sy, in his own world, lives in and for fiction -a pseudo life-, and the SYSTEM, like the Blue Fairy, gives him the opportunity of trascend it, to transition through this liminal space between reality and fiction that is the svsss universe. here the test is not of morality but of narrative skills -but more important, to confront something that surpass them (the reality of binghe as different from his pidw counterpart, and the reality of himself beyond his heteronormative self-image), and the reward is real life. finally, sy can live in reality. at last, he's real too.
pinocchio's trial is to differenciate good from evil, because, once he has the knowledge of good and evil -the original sin- he can't be anything but a person, a person with a soul that can be condemned or saved by god.. but he's made real because of his love for his father (faith?). sqq is there to fix a story, but he's made real because of his kindness, because he can't but engage with the reality of binghe, he's made real when he doesn't desert binghe and his own feelings, really sees binghe as he is and sacrifices himself out of love.
