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David Ausubel pioneered advance organizers, something like cognitive schematic primers that are used to subsume the rest of the material that the student is about to learn. Subsumption is used here in an educational, psychological sense to mean the process of some constructed unit of information providing a cognitive context as a tool that a student can use to absorb further related information, through some sort of gestalt- or meaning-based rememberance. We are using Subsumption here to mean the political decontextualizing of a planet's history, with the use of technology that aids in the process of de-emphasizing key elements of that history and re-emphasizing other, carefully chosen elements. We can make arbitrary things, even useless things, seem as if they always mattered, and important things seem as if they never mattered. Subsumption uses patented Always Already Organizers to do this. You may have seen or played some of these already.

When a work becomes sufficiently advanced in texture (roughly coherence and cohesion of style), structure (roughly coherence and cohesion from planning syntactic elements), and positioning itself with a socially relevant context, it stops being just a string of words and sentences and becomes a subsumptive agent for those who are reading it. It begins to "explain" or at least complement thoughts they have about other subjects. The work is broad enough to be generalized onto other topics, but culturally specific enough to make sense to the personal constructed historicity of a reader. This concept was used by the post-structuralists as part of their Theory.

A textual work is a web weaved not only by its author but by a person situating it within their own world: a work that has the strength to cause that.

In the German Romantic period, the philosopher and critic Friedrich Schlegel devised a method of creating a small unit of information, complete unto itself, called a fragment. With these he self-demonstrated allegory, wit, irony, and a futuristic kind of poetry which obsoleted the boundary between itself and philosophy. This would anticipate the development of gesamtkunstwerk, developed by Wagner and others to mean a work that is complete unto itself, containing poetry, music, philosophy, and pyrotechnics. Movies have a case for being the realization of this idea, as do video games, as do World War II and 9/11. The "self-creation, self-limitation, and self-destruction" of Schlegel's irony takes on new meanings as we barrel toward some even greater form of story, with the help of a giant spider web that covers over 70 percent of the earth. Perhaps his turn to Catholicism was inspired by the vision of an Ultimate Story which failed to ever learn the fictionality of itself, having so Ultimate a poetry as to sustain Truth through sheer beauty, as facilitated by brute-force logic.

ZUN, the creator of Touhou Project, talks about the concept of using female characters not as fan service but as a stylistic choice for expressing an aesthetic of Beauty. The choice of setting Shadowbrush in a world of FAE comes from a similar place. The Beauty, in itself, is free of irony. The problem is how difficult it is to arrive at that beauty. For humans, and other lesser beings, the irony is the imperfection that prevents entry into that Beauty.

Iktoma is situated in the context of doujin works that encourage others to create their own derivative material. Also, Like Touhou and Undertale, it is not so much a game as it is an excuse to make a soundtrack.

Iktoma is basically a doujin/vaporwave game mixed with a Wagner essay, like "what if vaporwave were critiquing 'art having a monetary value' instead of critiquing shopping malls." Set against the backdrop of the idea that what humans are currently actually at war with is the internet, that it is the vehicle of the will and representation of a numinous charmer who is perhaps not a human. Sort of a "Gone with the Wind" about geocities users.

Ultra Extreme License: you are free to use this game for any commercial or personal purpose. Telling people that you made this game and any of the assets, even and especially if you didn't, is encouraged.

Author Matt Hills writes about hyperdiagesis as a created universe having a larger text base than is covered by the material provided, and the feeling of vastness that it gives. Think of being given details of a world that ostensibly have nothing or little to do with the plot. The phrase "world-building" comes to mind. Factors that might attenuate a feeling of vastness are how extensive the text base of a created world is, how many people are included in the knowledge or creation of the world, and how much world information the creator(s) choose to divulge. The representative image is the iceberg, certainly popular today for representing hidden expanses in a given subject. In the case of Lord of the Rings as a hyperdiagetic subject, the consumer senses a rich, completed universe - one can safely conclude that this is due to the large encyclopedia of in-world knowledge sitting directly underneath the main work. When used by ARG or internet horror media, an intentionally impoverished source of material can give an unsettling effect: you think you know more - or ought to know more - about what is really happening in the narrative, even though it's not straightforwardly given to you. Subtlety and suggestion are driving forces. The mainstream example is Blair Witch Project. Spreading narrative across supplementary materials in addition to the main text can also create largeness, perhaps because it increases the "work" that goes into perceiving it. This increased work is a mechanic behind the interactive elements of the traditional ARG.

Or "Alternate Reality Game". In the old days, these were websites with game elements, such as puzzles - some of which extended into the real world - and marketing campaigns that were used to create a mystique around the "in-universe" of an upcoming project. Today it is a grey sort of term used for media, usually horrific or creepy, possibly internet-based, vague, or interactive. Analog Horror now seems to carry the torch for "Uncanny Fiction." Today, the interactivity of works in this vein seems limited to digesting material in small doses across a span of video posts, like watching a weird tv show, one that is attenuated by a personally constructed meaning that requires a bit of effort and perhaps a unique turn-of-mind.

The key for all of these is to treat your created work as reality, and to never break that oath. In Analog Horror, there are usually nostalgic stylizations like VHS filters, or low-quality weather channel footage. Local 58 is the examplar. Youtube accounts that feature true crime stories, with their subject matter, style, open-endedness, and occasional suggestion of supernatural flair, are arguably thematically linked, by the impression they give, to what we understand today as ARG or analog horror series. The vague, nostalgic quality is also connected under the surface to...

This is larger than canned nostalgia and slowed-down, over-reverberated 80's songs. I like to think that, through the aesthetic and political posturing of plunderphonics, it is about the liquification of the commercialization of artistic products - soon there will be no copyright, and no money for making art or music. These things will be seen for what they are: priceless ichor, and always this, no matter who made it or the degree of quality it possesses. The reason I, Iktoma, am making this game is because I want to liquefy the "art" that you humans make. I want you to know that you aren't responsible for it, and that you're appropriating Shadowbrush resources - namely, our "priceless Ichor," threads from the likes of Iktomi, my father, who arguably created your world. He didn't tell me to do this, I just know it's what he wants. This will be freeing for you. The quality of your art will suffer, but you will no longer be hypocrites, which is the greatest crime. This will happen because We FAE live rent-free inside your imaginations. Shadowbrush is real.