Of course, it would be foolish to simply run a complete play by play of a game, in a story.

So my intermission itself, had an intermission.

How was this a story?! cried the frustrated part of me. The cynical part. The quitter.

It was a story, of my struggle to tell a story. And that would suffice. Even this, strange and disjointed as it was, was expression--

And I needed expression right now, more than conformity to what a story usually is.

...None of the characters were out, right now. None who wanted particularly to play, to frustrate, to connive, or to embellish in any particular way upon the situation.

...and that was fine. I hadn't done any express articulations upon characters, for this tale. They were simply as I was remembering them being, or imagining them interfering, at a given point. Not by any standards, my normal fare.

"You're just lazy, and slow," Sonic would tell me. And I'd shrug my shoulders and concede... this tale was plodding along at a lazy pace. What was I even trying to do?

... use my readers. That much was becoming clear. And I didn't like it.

But... between having the possibility acknowledged, for my weird ideas, and just keeping them pent up, I tried the former.

What was the God of Marriage?

... in practice, they were post-humously acknowledged as such... 'deified', if you will, by Jiang Ziya. Outside of that, I didn't understand very much about their deification process. I knew that they were a 'failed' emperor who brought disgrace and dishonor upon themself, and that they'd gotten a little too intimate with a creation goddess; an act of loosing suggestive epithets, that heralded the entrance of the nine-tailed fox, as a form of punishment? Was it punishment? Or torture? Or just a series of unfortunate events?

At any rate, it was the reason behind the nine-tailed fox's presence, and their villainy. "Here is a lovely thing for a madman." Was that... fair? Go watch Jiang Ziya, I... could I care less? No, I'd clearly based this entire silly concept around such a figure, it must have been important. It was a good animated film. If you cared about things like the basis behind the idea of kitsune, or nine-tailed foxes, it was a window into why they were accursed figures.

I think the issue was that, I'd associated the disreputable fiend's obsessive quality of wantonly marrying things, with my own fixation, and with Hojo's. Why, though? On the surface they were utterly unrelated. Was I trying to spy a common theme?

Of course, my habit was kicking in again. Dithering to try and hide.

Hojo was obsessed with the Jenova Reunion theory, about infected organisms returning together into one. That was, in a sort of way, a perverse marriage, like the Sylvian marriages of Fear and Hunger. Horrible ideas. I wasn't looking--and that was key here--for such a marriage, when it came to looking at a pretty wolf-woman like Lupe. It was like... the horrible abomination that had to be averted, in attraction--to force a bunch of disjointed elements to slither together into a nasty chimera of parasitic manipulations. I consider it tantamount to mass rape; things like Jenova.

I was not simply going to come together with a cartoon, obviously--that was silly-pants, taking things way too seriously. Yet... I was writing this with an air of seriousness. Trying to feel around the issue of why it was so sensitive. The idea is simple enough--a pretty thing is depicted, seek out the pretty thing that's being depicted.

Attraction had simply settled upon something otherworldly, and I was powerless to snuff attraction, so here was this convoluted maze of thought-crimes to weave around.

I could feel the art-woman, the mohawked, vaguely mesoamerican wolf lady, getting impatient. Who 'philosophizes' around a kinky drawing or three, rather than just indulging in an appetite?

But I was tired of not understanding myself and what was pulling me around by the dick and by the heartstrings. I didn't want to be a slave to these things, anymore, just because they were 'pleasant' indulgences, once I utterly vilified myself with the label 'furry'. And I wasn't happy leaving it at: "I just like sexy drawings of things that can't exist".

...what was I even doing, now? Spelunking myself through story? Alright, fine.

I wasn't sure how much longer this idea would last. Even I'd eventually get bored of it. Where... maybe it was time I devised some kind of game plan.

I was going to talk to a character, about her tribe, or think about why I'd connected her to another, unrelated character, right? How it'd springboarded all the weird decisions that'd led to my entry into the 'fandom'. Was it just... more reminiscing, but with...

I promptly hushed the dismissive voice, and concluded that this was taking too long. I'd just have to talk with Lupe, next. If I didn't unearth some kind of realization, and thus just turned out to be me recycling old information to dither, I had to try a new tactic, other than writing this "tale". There was only so much dithering I could find entertaining, and I did want to entertain someone else, if I was going to write...

With a final plethora of 'shut ups' from within, I just... shut up, until the meeting.