User:BobTheTacocat/The Spirit of The Age
I've been very secretive with [THE ZEITGEIST] since I entered The Wiki Camp 2. I thought about what should happen when I made it, I conceived an endgame, general concepts, presentation, and what that all meant; and I promised myself that I would keep it under lock and key until I got eliminated or won. The mystique of what was going on was a huge part of that presentation, you see.
It's been about 2 and a half years since I made that decision. Over that time, I've realized that not only is it a secret I don't want to keep anymore, it's a different secret than what it was before.
I've been thinking about it a lot after 10 challenges with an 11th impending, and I just want to get it all off of my chest. I want to talk candidly about what [THE ZEITGEIST] is, and more importantly what it used to be.
[THE ZEITGEIST]
I created [THE ZEITGEIST] as a proxy device to "let myself off of the hook," so to speak. To me, how a character composed themselves, especially how they are represented in writing, would greatly inform their future works. This makes sense to me even now - a comedic leaning character will tend towards comedic entries, a serious leaning character will tend towards serious entries, et cetera. But I didn't just want to have one tone. I wanted everything, and I wanted it to make sense in the context of my character. So that hatched a plan, and with some asset work and watching "The Undebunkable" by Captain Disillusion (a very great video that I'm confident violates the Blacklist, so I will not link it here) that plan became what people know as [THE ZEITGEIST]. I still think [THE ZEITGEIST] is my best challenge entry, even now.
Similarly, I had the idea to generally base the personalities of each of the ZEITGEIST constructs off of myself and things I would be interested in writing:
- Thaumiel is very obviously based off of the SCP Foundation. I had enjoyed the context of the SCP Foundation for quite a while at that point, so it was the first idea I thought of and finished. Bonus points for the joke of the Locked Box Test.
- Football is a carryover from The Wiki Camp 1, a joke page I made while extremely tired to the point of laughing fits. This selection was two-fold: first, it was a fulfillment of jokes saying that I should play Football as a character back during TWC1, and second this would serve as my excuse to make "joke pages". Football's characterization, deriving from this, is basically just whatever I thought would be funny to make Football say with hammed up typos to replicate the authentic ones.
- Puzzle Piece Hair Clip came from a genuine appreciation of Wikipedia and the work that it does as a collective on top of a fondness for Wikipe-tan. Ironically, while I think that the way she talked in things like Error logs was pretty far from myself at the time, intentionally so, I think she might be the closest to how I write characters now of the bunch.
- File was extremely undercooked, but I do think that the approximation of the File namespace formatting is still pretty good. Their later characterization was a process of figuring out what I'll call a "gremlin character", somebody that politely messes with people for their own entertainment, to contrast with their hidden aspect. In retrospect, I think it's not incredibly great, but has stood well enough and I think it would be wrong of me to change it.
- Kevin was a sendup of a very specific type of character that I guessed other people would do at the time, the character that is more or less a virtual avatar for the writer. This was never a jab at this brand of character, merely an observation that they exist. This is why Kevin is the way that he is, why all of his depictions are scribbly, and why he has always been subtly "more important" than the others with a bit more "meta-awareness". He has been described as "the surrogate" more than once and is used as [THE ZEITGEIST]'s ambassador, this is why as well. Kevin not leaving his room was a fun-house mirror reflection of how I felt during the COVID pandemic, never really leaving my space.
[THE ZEITGEIST] itself is, of course, the wiki editor, the puppeteer of the puppets - a stand in for myself. Its abilities are decided by what it can change, and by saying the special words aloud, those concepts become real to the inhabitants of The Wiki Camp 2. This line of thinking has been there since the beginning (the intent of THE ZEITGEIST's page is that by reading the page, that is the form that currently exists) but started having a form during Challenge 2, where it fabricates the Houston Omniversal Science and Technology by stating it to be a true construct, and is able to mimic a Wikipedia editor to do the Host merge by talking like one.
This is also why [THE ZEITGEIST], despite being almost unfathomably powerful in the world of The Wiki Camp 2, is unable to decide its scoring placement or that it has 1 million Blessed Tokens. The Divine Goddess is a higher power than [THE ZEITGEIST], and it is obligated to play by its rules while on Her turf.
Tendency to change or lack thereof
Characters in The Wiki Camp are, no matter how much we have broken it, restricted to the medium.
Similar to the camp concept of bonus entries, pages outside of challenges related to characters requires a reader to actually have read them, and with the amount of content on the wiki it requires navigation to that content, so it's a harder ask than usual. Couple that with having to diegetically explain that content (if you even do it at all - some of the highest ranking entries in Wiki Camp history are completely unrelated to the character at all e.g. Lil Hal), in addition to the long breaks in between getting to write these characters... I don't want to say that it disincentivizes dynamic characters, but in comparison static characters get the longer end of the stick.
The characters in [THE ZEITGEIST] are static characters on purpose. There was no way I would be able to make arcs for all of them or something like that, and even if I did, would that make that much sense? [THE ZEITGEIST] was the full show, and they were the pieces of the whole.
I realized as I started writing my Challenge 10, S1E1 (The Cast of ZEITGEIST), that all of this was so far removed from myself. It had taken several years, but a critical flaw had emerged with writing characters like facets of myself: I was no longer myself anymore. I wasn't that person in 2022 anymore, I was somebody in 2024, now I'm somebody in 2025; and all of that is just going to keep going.
Over my camp career, and generally in my writing career, I realized that I greatly prefer letting characters live outside of their story. Letting characters live outside of their story allows them to be dynamic somewhere else, and come back for a week to check in. But the forms can't do that. They are necessarily encased in amber so [THE ZEITGEIST] can use them. I was able to leave my room and see people, but Kevin wasn't. What is there to do about that, when it's an integral part of him because of a decision from years ago?
It's almost a little cruel, isn't it? Creating characters with explicit puppeteers, in a situation that necessitates keeping them static unless told otherwise, and then giving them no directional force.
The End of [THE ZEITGEIST]
Kevin was always going to pull the plug.
The concept
"The End of [THE ZEITGEIST]"[conjectural title] was something I had conceptualized for a while, as far back as Challenge 2. I was pretty set on it, until I realized I wasn't.
The idea was that Kevin would tell people in the Host group chat that he needs to go. He would walk outside of a 2-dimensional view of his room and see a staircase going upwards, and walk up into the darkness.
Concept art from 2022, depicting the forms as created beings.
I'm not sure what the propeller cap one in the back left is (I think I just made it up), but the back right one is Eden's Blessing, a scrapped form representing The Binding of Isaac and its wiki.
From there, Kevin would enter a room with Julia Grace (the OC that I use for branding) in it, writing what was happening to Kevin. From here the story changed depending on the time frame (at first it was a "you did good" speech, then talking about being written, then the passage of time), but the ending would be Julia allowing Kevin to pull the plug on the computer, with a more nebulous ending. The page "ZEITGEIST" would then be edited to be about Julia Grace, with archives of the form pages.
Concept art from 2022, depicting Julia and Kevin.
Kevin has always been drawn with an Adobe Animate circle brush, while I usually draw Julia in my more common flat brush, so I wanted to define them with different brushes to illustrate their conceptual distance.
Side note: in 2022, I told myself that to foreshadow this, I would keep my profile picture as Julia Grace until I got eliminated, so people in The Wiki Camp associated this character with myself. And I kept that up for a long time! I still primarily use Julia as my profile picture even today, but that's just so I don't have to think about personal branding, and it stopped being about The Wiki Camp a while ago.
Why I am not doing that
It's a mix of not thinking I could commit to making that a story worth reading, and some of the disconnect with [THE ZEITGEIST] that I mentioned earlier.
Keen-eyed viewers that know my history more intimately may realize that this is similar to The End of Microfilm and Megaphone, with the characters meeting a higher being. Yes, The End of Microfilm and Megaphone was done knowingly, and part of why I don't want to do it for the forms is that I think it's done better there than I could do for Kevin. At that moment in time, my connection to Microfilm and Megaphone was far more personal than [THE ZEITGEIST] and its forms.
It's not that it would be an unsatisfying ending for [THE ZEITGEIST], it's more that it would be unsatisfying for me, the writer.
The Spirit of The Age
What does the future of [THE ZEITGEIST] look like, then?
S1E1 (The Cast of ZEITGEIST) was very important for me because it made me admit a lot of things. I don't really plan on winning The Wiki Camp 2, and not winning is fine. I let the forms go slightly outside of The Wiki Camp, a free-roam animal with a small perimeter. Kevin admitted a lot of things on my behalf, as the surrogate is allowed to. For all intents and purposes, Challenge 10 was designed to be my last "lore heavy" challenge entry, taking the opportunity to cash out just a little.
Host was built explicitly with [THE ZEITGEIST] in mind. As the original co-conspirator of what became Host along with User:NARI, I feel obligated to keep the lights on, which is why I did not make the exodus to Wanted contestants, and will continue to keep the lights on until I cannot. If I get eliminated, I don't expect myself to be chomping at the bit to rejoin the competition.
After I either get eliminated or win, I do have an updated and heavily revised version of the contingency plan. Of course, that's information I'm not going to tell you.
[THE ZEITGEIST] over time has become something of an interesting experiment as a creative. [THE ZEITGEIST] was the first time I made a character FOR something, and seeing the reaction to that over the years has been interesting. I still think about a conversation I had with a friend who interpreted [THE ZEITGEIST] under the lens of plurality, with the shifting divided forms fronting as one of them at any given time. Like, oh! I never even thought of that! I haven't really had a character on public display for this long before, enough to where my entire creative philosophy about that character has evolved and changed completely. Even now I'm kinda talking like I'm calcified, but I know I'm not, and I'm sure in a few years all of this will be deconstructed and reconstructed too.
I have a lot to thank [THE ZEITGEIST] for, though. It was me experimenting and trying to find my taste as a writer, and I eventually got to take that to other things, and will continue to take that to other things; and while I think my writing for [THE ZEITGEIST] as a project isn't the best I will still be reverent of it for that reason, even if I tweak the design.
I await their future.