This post is a list of various things that lit up in my brain as I thought of the aesthetics, themes, setting and scenarios of Emptiness Effigied. It’s stuff I’ve wanted to play with and make my own for a long time. Also it’s not listed in order of importance or anything.
History: Reading real world history is one of my biggest and most enduring fixations and I think this is maybe the most consistent thing in my work. It all starts here. Other aesthetics and elements can change, but I always want to write worlds that have history and give off the feeling, the weight, of living within history. I never directly follow our own history though– and lovers of “alternate history” might be frustrated by the fantastical elements.
Politics: All media is political. Trying to express a non-politics is still a politics. I have always been candid that the things I write are very much influenced by my politics. My artistic expression is a form of talking about and exploring my beliefs. It is not *only* that but those elements play an indelible part. Because of my beliefs about art, I will not *explain* the politics of the work here in detail, however, and simply leave you to encounter them yourself.
Food: Reading about cooking and food is something I do whenever I’m writing a setting. Food says something about modern national identity and national myth-making, about the movement of peoples, the convergent points between cultural histories– this is especially prevalent in the inspirations for Novograd. It also says something about class, about means, about climate and economy, and yet it is also personal and aesthetic too. I cook some of the food that’s in my work just to try it! So I think I can say I am inspired by food in my work.
“Girls Love”: Baihe/Yuri/Baekhap– whatever word is most familiar to you. It’s tough to like, break this down into specifics because it’s just something I’m steeped in. You can read what I write and if you’re familiar with this stuff you know it’s influential to me and you know I’ve experienced this before. I started writing as a kid because I wanted to write yuri fanfiction. So this is part of my expression, it’s not about specific works. I guess if I’m giving you a random recommendation “Fugue Across Worlds” kinda fits the vibe a bit. Read that one.
Adventure stories/”Pulp” magazines: Originally I envisioned Emptiness Effigied as having something of a pulp framework– shorter, punchier stories following a recurring character, in kind of a loose reinterpretation of story magazines. However, aside from a few things like Conan and Lovecraft I wasn’t super familiar with story magazines. So I read a TON of lad’s story magazines from the 1910s, 20s and 30s. Despite this I ultimately decided to just lightly adapt my existing writing framework from TSW and UD rather than trying to make vast changes to how I pace and plot stuff. I felt like I just couldn’t express myself well otherwise.
“Detectives”: Because the biases of “detective fiction” fans will affect how some stories might be read I won’t go into a lot of specifics here. I’ve always been interested in detectives– action detectives, noir detectives, disco detectives (RIP), etc, the entire broad genre of “detective”-ing, and I have some ideas about the whole endeavor that I want to try to explore and play with and communicate in Emptiness Effigied. Particularly, I am not only looking at the history of detective stories within themselves– but also how “private detectives” started in our history, and their typical work and actual clients, and alongside that real history, I wanted to also highlight the mystique of the “private detective”.
H.P. Lovecraft: One thing that the pulp-reading adventure made me realize is that the mean for racism in pulps was dialed even higher than Lovecraft’s writing, in a way that surprised even me. Anyway– my favorite dead racist guy. Very in the zeitgeist generally, from Call of Cthulhu OC fanart from Japanese artists to trashy AI Cthulhu videos on Tiktok. Therefore I feel like you can generally understand how his work inspired me. I actually ended up learning about his work after encountering the tabletop RPG. His stuff was unlike anything I’d ever read as a young adult and became very influential to me. You can write literally whatever.
Russian Literature: Because it is set in a place inspired by Imperial Russia, I feel like you will get something extra out of this if you’ve read some Russian literature in your time and if you haven’t, you ought to! It’s fun as hell and really enriching to just view another time and another place with the detail and care of a contemporary. Literature is really cool. I recommend beginning at the beginning with Alexander Pushkin because he has a lot of short prose works that are incredibly fun. One of my favorites is “The Queen of Spades.”
Internet Horror Aesthetics: I really like the Backrooms, but it is hard to say you like the Backrooms without qualifying, because there are so many things under that umbrella now that are very different! But I also don’t *just* like the Backrooms. I also like the vibe of “liminal spaces” generally. I also like “Dreamcore” and I like “Analog Horror” both of which are also so broad as to make mentioning each of them meaningless– what about them DID inspire me? I label it under the enigmatic category of “Internet Horror Aesthetics.” You’ll just have to read with an open mind to find out. (Watch “Midwest Angelica” by the way it rules.)
Empty Spaces: I had a dead dove account on twitter and on tumblr and I followed like over a dozen prolific microfiction authors writing about inhumanity, trauma and sexuality, commonly using dolls and witches as archetypes for the used and the user, for the possessed and possessor, and things like that. The themes and writing styles really captured my imagination. I had all these ideas for stories but I never participated because I felt like my style would be out of place– and I feel that applies to Emptiness Effigied. But I wanted to be authentic to my inspirations in this post even if I don’t think my work fits into it neatly.
“Spot the difference” horror: A form of indie horror game about “finding anomalies” to survive/advance the game, often very quickly iterated for profit. People might have strong opinions about these as games or as products, but I found the core conceits fascinating– the thought of a world in which it is known that strange events can be “corrected” by making note of them, but that, if overlooked, misidentified or misreported, they will become immensely deadly, immediately deadly. This led me to think about how I’d write this.
Physical information/Information-Matter-Energy: Emptiness Effigied draws some inspiration from the idea that information is a calculable physical phenomenon that stands alongside matter and energy. How this manifests in the setting itself is something I will not further describe so readers can discover it, but I do want to say ahead of time– I do not believe in “Simulation Theory” and Emptiness Effigied is not a “Simulation.” In this story nobody will wake up in a computer or have stats or access the console or anything like that. This idea just informs part of the setting and aesthetic and how certain things “work.”
Conspiracy Theories/Hoaxes/Weird Religious Stuff/etc: All of the same esoteric nonsense theories that are real in Unjust Depths are also more or less real in Emptiness Effigied. It’s like all the worlds I write. Listen, I LOVE lost continents. I LOVE the Anunnaki. I love ancient silica trees. I’m a HUGE fan of this stuff. And it offers a lot of meat for the sensational and lurid elements that support the “pulpy” aspects of the story. Obviously I should disclaim here that I don’t believe in any of it. Please do not become addicted to delusions or gambling.
Alternate selves/”what if”?: I’ve always wanted to play with themes of alternate selves, alternate realities, bad ends, what-if scenarios– but I feared that it was difficult to maintain a focus on characters, politics and history in the setting, if the world has these extreme powers– the reader will start caring more about the mechanics and physics of time travel or multiversality than about the rest. Then I thought about the concept of gacha “alter” characters as a way I could soft-engage with the concept without (hopefully) introducing too much plot legalese into the minds of the reader. We’ll see if I end up being successful.
ACG/Social/”Gacha” Games: Some people watch a lot of vintage movies and think all the characters in my work look like old movie stars. I myself play a ton of chinese mobile games and follow a bunch of fanartists on social media, so that’s what the characters look like to me. I’m always imagining scenes like glossy events from a high-production ACG work. So here we go– it’s the gacha section. You knew it was coming. You know Madiha loves gacha games.
Path To Nowhere is, I feel, an almost perfect synthesis of the above inspirations aside from the period– adventure stories, detective stories, eldritch horror, and a woman detective fucking hot women. It’s got incredible style, with glitzy, edgy, high-detail, hypermodern aesthetics drawn from contemporary Chinese fashion, with characters that are sharply stylized and drip eroticism. I really like the moody, immensely sexual tone of this game.
For the same reasons (fashion and aesthetic that’s really sharp, except more “period”) Reverse 1999 is another one with art that’s been going in my “Aesthetic” folder. Reverse 1999 has a quieter, softer, more contemplative and “literary” style compared to the erotic hypermodernity of Path to Nowhere. Neither is perfect in my head but both are inspirations and I would be happy if either of these aesthetics popped into your head while reading. I think my own imagined aesthetic lies somewhere in the middle of these two examples.
But I mean also– let’s be real here my head is just full of Mihoyo characters. Have you seen Cerydra? She’s teal Furina! And have you seen Furina? If you’ve seen Furina– you know and you understand that I don’t just *stop* thinking about Furina. Also, can’t forget to mention that Wuthering Waves is also really good nowadays. Have you *seen* those Rinascita characters? If you’ve seen Carlotta and Phrolova you *know* I don’t just stop thinking about Carlotta and Phrolova. I haven’t stopped thinking about them for months actually.
And look I don’t want dismissive “what gacha game is Madiha playing this week” stuff from you all. You can’t have me at my political fiction without loving me at my Girls Frontline.
One last thing: check out this artist, their stuff is CRAZY aesthetic, it’s so good.
One last last thing: check out this artist, her stuff is CRAZY aesthetic, it’s so good.
One last last last thing: check out this artist, their stuff is CRAZY aesthetic, it’s so good.
(Also it goes without saying but don’t be weird to them! Just like their posts and move on.)
Music: Here’s some music that I think fits the vibe of Emptiness Effigied and I personally like to listen to. I will link to or mention places where you can buy the music but everything here is also on your streaming service of choice (or at least it’s on Spotify) if you search.
In-universe in Emptiness Effigied, “Palmwine” is the popular music of the time period that the characters listen to or hear played in certain scenes. This is directly inspired by real life West African music traditions of Palm-wine music and Highlife music which I’ve been listening to recently. In particular a modern band I like is Santrofi (specifically a Highlife band)– listen to the title track of “Alewa” to get a sense of the vibe in a modern style.
I’d also recommend the Shanghai Restoration Project for like a different mix of jazz flavored/jazz fusion stuff. Their album “The Classics” is (as I understand it) a collection of remade 30s and 40s Shanghai jazz staples. I also recommend the self-titled “The Shanghai Restoration Project“, along with “Story of a City” both albums with a really great vibe and some themes of hustle, romance and city living that are emotionally close to the themes of Emptiness Effigied. I could only find them on iTunes.
I’ve also been listening to a lot of Lo-Fi while I write. I’ve had a pre-existing interest in lo-fi beats stuff for a long time. In particular, when writing the tense scenes, I’ve been listening to a lot of horror-inspired lo-fi tracks from this guy Dated that I found on bandcamp. I really like Night Prowler and Halfway to Halloween from him. I also have a lot of lo-fi stuff from Jazz-Hop Cafe that I spin up in randomized Auto-Playlists on Musicbee as a personal “radio.” They literally put out a Backrooms lo-fi album, and “The Speakeasy” is another one I really like.
I’m also an inveterate Electro Swing enjoyer. I feel like I’m all over the place on what I enjoy but if I had to give some recommendations here, Swing Republic’s Long Legs is really fun. Alice Francis is another Electro Swing act that I really like. I could only find her music on iTunes (and there’s a lot of her work I can *only* find on streaming services…)
I think if I had to “score” Emptiness Effigied I would probably dip into the above.
Anyway, that’s everything I can think of right now. Obviously inspiration is a continuous process so I will interact with new things and keep changing as a person and want to converse with new ideas in the future that might not be here. But the basis where everything started that will continue to be expressed throughout in Emptiness Effigied is laid out here. I know it’s a lot, and I am not going to recommend trying to follow the entire journey yourself, but I think knowing the broad strokes might make it more fun for some people in the future.