Dev Log 7: Ellie, The Mysterious Waif

(Spoilers Abound)

For a girl who appears on the cover of the game, Ellie is a character who you really don’t interact with much. See that’s a spoiler already, you were warned.

She’s the cover girl, but what do I even say about her, where do I start? How do I talk about her without spoiling future ideas? For once it’s not rhetorical.

Ah screw it.

She was written in a very interesting way compared to all the other characters. I have mentioned this a few times but the documents where I brainstormed the other characters didn’t have a section for Ellie. You were never supposed to interact with Ellie like the other characters. From the start, she was different, and isolated.

She’d be happy to hear that, huh.

In the original DnD campaign, I wrote myself in as this crazy powerful magic character who could destroy the world or something edgy, and that character goes missing and sends the players a letter to find him, where they discover an unknown world of dreams and begin to explore. Ellie was the character I made to replace myself, in this story. 

In some ways, Ellie is more than just a character. She is an idea. In the document, she is more or less what the characters are reacting to. She represents trauma, or the fog, or COVID, or disaster, or loneliness, or being bullied. Isn’t that so uplifting?

The game starts with her jumping off a building as the trigger, and you go to the school, where each of the characters react to the incident, and give their opinions on it. These opinions are expanding in each of the character dialogues where it opens up to their views on life.

The design of Ellie was simple. I thought to myself, what definitely would trigger the protective instincts of players? Who would they definitely want to save? And so I made Ellie a shy Asian girl. As you may figure, many of those qualities, admittedly, are also features that drew me in as well. I designed Ellie more or less based on an idealized image of a girl, like the Anima (something of a hint), or as a waif(u).

One person (Bet you they didn’t play the game), who I once asked about their favorite characters, told me Ellie and Chloe. He told me that Ellie was the waifu type and Chloe was the tomboy gf as to why he liked them. I think it’s because they are the first 2 characters that show up on the site, but that those characteristics were identifiable and were good. Ellie clearly demonstrates those qualities.

These main aspects of Ellie mirror Zakuro from Subahibi, where she is the frail black haired, mysterious girl who triggers a protective instinct from the MC and the player. In fact, Eliza, the white dress version of Ellie (is the least spoiler-y way I can say that) shares the same color scheme as Zakuro. Both characters are at the heart of a mystery in the game.

One place where they differ however, (spoilers for both) is that Ellie is right. I thought it was a major disappointment for Zakuro’s oddities to be more or less fake, in a game that is already so weird, unless I need to give it another 10 reads. Instead, Ellie is absolutely correct, and sees something plainly that others cannot seem to accept, despite bending their lives and minds around it.

In response to this reality that others do not face, Ellie (seems to) commit/s suicide (which also represents pressure and suicide rates in Asia.) I remember reading this particularly uplifting paragraph from Satre I believe, about how suicide is the brave option, and that those who live in spite of it are cowardly. I’m surprised I hadn’t remembered its existence until now. 

I could have explored this through the lens of suicide more, and how others react to it, but because I knew the plot, it didn’t really register to me. At least, that part wasn’t what interested me.

Where I think Ellie shines, even if she isn’t a character in the same way, is that she gets the Dream Floor scenes, some of my favorite scenes in the game. These are the places where I allowed myself to be experimental. I had designed the floors (and in some cases failed) to explore Ellie’s mind from different perspectives. Floor 1 examines her life as a student, and Floor 2 examines her past. Floor 3 is where I try to put the dream in dream world, and create something that both introduces lots of lore, as well as breaks boundaries of the style of writing that one may expect in a VN. I employed different techniques, styles, and conventions in each scene. My most prized is the stream of consciousness like sections as she falls asleep. This section fulfills a long time dream of mine to have written something like that, and reading it over, I am confident I can do something even better.

Something that a long time friend of mine had mentioned when reading it, and something that touched me to hear, is that this scene really feels like me, in that the style and the references are things that I have explored for a long time. Achlys, but this scene in particular, uses so many references, ideas, and moments that come from my own experiences. These pieces are part of a Speisu Mythology almost, a weaving of many strands of experience. Like how a person may name a character Icarus to draw allusions and foreshadow a fall, or reference the western canon and name a character Ophelia (honestly for similar reasons but more feminine), many of these moments in Achlys draw those same allusions. While it wouldn’t be immediately obvious what is what, I hope that someone can at least see the idea, and learn from reverse engineering.

For instance, the use of HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME is a reference to The Wasteland, but it’s also a reference to a previous poem that I had written titled The Last Question, where it was also used as a reference to the Wasteland. Based on The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock, it was a poem in short where a narrator approaches the steps in front of the door to a girl to confess to, or ask a question to. But instead of it being romantic, it is depressing, wildly unintelligible, philosophical nonsense. Yes, I was always like this. Another part of the poem I remember was the reference of Calliope as his muse. I can’t seem to find the poem however. I guess it’s lost to cyberdust, but a part of me fears I’d just get embarrassed reading it.

Anyways, Floor 3, especially Floor 3 part 2 is both the heart of the Ellie story, and one of my favorite parts of the game. The short of Floor 3 part 2 is that it was meant to be my take on Ulysses, a long modernist stream of consciousness story by James Joyce taking place in one day, where every section is in a different style. Joyce was another pioneer in this personal mythology style. Starting from Ellie waking up, she goes through her day, and then goes back to sleep. Ulysses was an examination of the human mind, written more or less with a modernist thesis that “Man is the measure of all things” (Long history behind that quote, turns out) where the story of one average man is overlaid in the famous myth, the Odyssey. The life of one average man containing all of human experience, in such a way that it touches the divine.

Beautiful.

In fact, the final section of Ellie as she falls asleep, where it becomes a giant wall of punctuation-less text, is meant to be a direct mirror of the Penelope section of Ulysses. I can’t recall if Penelope did this, but I know Finnegan’s Wake did, where the ending of the story loops into the beginning. I loved this idea too, so the end of the Floor 3 section loops back into the beginning of the section where the word becomes a wall. It was a little more obvious with how I structured it. (Did anyone notice this without me saying?)

Floor 4 was affectionately named as the section Where the Words Stop, by my friend, and this section is actually a departure from the story of Ellie and it returns to the MC. I was supposed to write a section where it becomes more clear exactly what this scene is, but alas.

The ending of Floor 4 was a mirror of EVA, but I had thought a very long time about what words I wanted to say before the credits. What I ended up choosing I think fits the theme of the game.

Ellie was a character who didn’t even really have many interactions with the cast or the player, but her presence is always felt. I think this is even stronger than The Comedian in Watchmen. In all honesty, I never felt that Achlys Book 1 was supposed to be the end of Ellie's story, but rather the beginning, heck the prologue really.