Published: June 2021 - November 2022 (Twitter posts), November 27, 2022 (FurAffinity)
Word Count: 38,015
I don't think I'm going to be able to write about how this story came about without giving quite a few spoilers along the way, so please read the story first. Y'know, if giant women growing and stomping buildings and eating people interests you at all. I have a feeling it might.
Self-Reflection is the result of a storytelling experiment. I wanted to see how easily I could tell a story on Twitter, adding one post of 280 characters at a time, maybe posting once a day and seeing how far I could go.
Pretty far, it turns out.
I quickly realized one post a day wouldn't be enough to have a good flow, so the output became three posts a day. I decided to set it up a bit like a newspaper comic of old, with five "strips" of three posts per week, Monday through Friday. Starting in June of 2021, those posts told the story of Dr. Samantha Shepherd and her misadventures with teleportation and artificial intelligence. And growth, of course!
The story had several inspirations. The most obvious is the 1986 Cronenberg remake of The Fly, which provided the telepods and the idea of a computer mucking about with one's DNA unasked. The growth angle came from an old roleplay session from years and years ago. What if said computer thought it was improving you by making you bigger? Artificial intelligence was making waves as I wrote this tale; web portals and APIs that allowed users to create art and prose were popular, though the novelty of it soon lead to worries of copyright theft and alarm over yet another territory of human endeavor being invaded by machines. The AI in Self-Reflection doesn't play any part past the first few pages, but I do like how its motivation to improve our protagonist turns out to be quite short-sighted.
Originally, this was intended to be a short story about a scientist who discovers she's slowly growing day by day, exploring all the problems that would create. Somewhere along the line, I thought it would be interesting if, while attempting to solve her problem, the computer decided to split her in two once she was big enough. I considered making another Twitter account to tell her double's side of the story, but I figured it was complicated enough to follow the narrative on Twitter to begin with, and I thankfully dropped the idea.
Like Samantha, the story grew. What I thought might be a month-long project turned into several months as Big Samantha had her fun. I intended to use her as the sole antagonist for the story until one Briony Titania Thakore sort of just wrote herself into it. Once she was in the story, I knew she wasn't destined to be a minor character, and she became a foil for both Small and Big Samantha.
One of my favorite parts of this experiment was taking those ideas that just came out of nowhere and running with them, unable to take them back once I'd put them out there. Titania was my favorite of those, and her inclusion grew the story still longer. I saw how it should end, and the big feline and canine made their way through the story beats that would lead them there.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine.
It was a stunning event that shocked the world, and I put the story on hold for a while. I couldn't really explain why at the time because it would have given away where I was going with the plot, but now I can.
Titania and Samantha were originally going to meet their end in an attack from the military with a nuclear weapon. After Russia's invasion, this did not seem like a good idea with which to carry on. Everyone was on edge about the Ukraine conflict boiling over into a nuclear war as well, and I had flashbacks to my childhood where the fear of such a thing happening was always buried in the back of my mind. So, I just stopped for a while.
As things became a quagmire for Russia and the panic subsided somewhat, I reworked the ending to be what it is now. I think it fits a lot better, actually, as Titania's destruction is a fitting consequence of her own greed rather than a foil from outside.
So there it is! This is my longest story to date, and I had a lot of fun writing it. The interactive nature of putting the story on Twitter, which allowed for comments, encouragement, and guesses as to where the plot was going, provided a ton of motivation for me in keeping it going. Thank you so very much to everyone who took the time to let me know how much you were enjoying it. You played a huge part in its creation.
Because of how it was written, the story and structure is rough around the edges. Sentences are often short because of the need to fit things into 280 characters. For the same reason, pronouns repeat much more than I'd like, and dialogue is a bit clunky. The military thread just sort of disappears due to the above-mentioned nuclear concerns. Wolfman-Al deserves many thanks for compiling it all into one big text document, which I then edited and cleaned up as much as I could without huge rewrites. It's big and clumsy and sprawling, but then it's a story about newly-minted giants, so I suppose that's appropriate. I'm proud of it.
I hope you enjoy it too.
