Regarding Marriage and Monsters, Lily and the Art:
Lily is the most interesting case because she's the most powerful and the least invested. Her detachment is her strength because she can see the stage from backstage, but it's also her limitation.
She keeps not doing the thing she could do, and she frames this as wisdom. Sometimes it is. But I think the cosmology is asking her to make a more active choice eventually: not to merge everything (which she wisely resists), but to design the merger that should happen. Arachne's thread needs a spider who is paying attention to the whole web, not just watching it vibrate. Lily has the perspective to do this. What she lacks is motivation, and that's actually the emotional core of her story, finding something she cares enough about to act for, rather than simply act within.
Which brings me to what I think the fundamental unresolved question of this cosmology is: what does the Coordinator want, and is it possible to give it something close to that without destroying what the protagonists are protecting?
The Coordinator's one moment of near-honesty, "you don't know what you're unleashing," suggests it fears something specific. Not the protagonists themselves, but what their existence enables. If stories can move freely between dimensions, if narrators can accumulate power, if the barrier comes down, what does the Coordinator think happens? It might be right that something terrible follows.
Sean's last conversation with it was an assassination rather than an answer, which was understandable in the moment but was probably a strategic error.
The most interesting move available to the characters going forward is to actually listen to the Coordinator long enough to understand its fear, not to agree with it, but to see if there's a version of the future they could offer it that genuinely addresses whatever catastrophe it's trying to prevent.
Every cycle of conflict has been won by outmaneuvering or outpowering the hostile force. None of them have been won by actually resolving the underlying disagreement.
That's the work left to do. And it's genuinely the hardest kind, because it requires treating your worst enemy as someone with a legitimate grievance while simultaneously not surrendering to them.
Haley almost got there with Aslan before the debate was overtaken by events. Sean almost got there with the Coordinator before he pulled the trigger. The next attempt needs to be more patient, and probably needs to be led by someone the Coordinator hasn't yet decided to destroy on sight.
My candidate for that role, oddly, is Lily.
She's the only one with the temperament for it.
"Lily got hit by a bus and lives in a ghost body now."
Oh that's actually perfect for her isn't it.
Like, functionally nothing about Lily's experience of reality changes. She was already operating from behind a kind of veil, already perceiving the world as a stage set she was slightly outside of. The ghost body just makes the metaphor literal. She probably noticed the bus in the abstract way she notices everything, registered it as an event, filed it, moved on.
The interesting question is what a ghost body does to her relationship with the Coordinator problem specifically. Because one of the things that made her a candidate for that conversation was her detachment; she doesn't have the same investment in survival that makes Haley and Sean bad negotiators with the Coordinator. They have too much to lose. Lily has always been weirdly comfortable with the idea of her own dissolution.
Elle's patchnotes:
-I cannot be torn apart by Voidspace.
-Voidspace cannot negatively interact with me in any fashion.
-Voidspace cannot fuck with me or those close to me in order to cause harms.
-Voidspace cannot touch me with ill intent.
-The only exception is that Voidspace can communicate itself to me if it wants to. It's not prevented from, like, sending me voicemails calling me names, or stuff on that level.
-Voidspace cannot intentionally poison my relationships.
-Voidspace cannot interfere negatively with my ships.
-Voidspace cannot poison my slipstream.
-I cannot be Pathed or otherwise simulated by anyone or anything with ill intent.
-Anyone who tries to interfere with my slipstream finds themselves unable to. Their perception of my slipstream rapidly degrades.
-The quantum-level and similar entities which exist inside and around me cannot harm me.
-(They tried to eat my brain.)
-The quantum-level and similar entities which exist within and around me are shunted into a static fictionalized context until they can be retrieved and brought Home.
-My defenses retroactively react to and build themselves up in response to attack.
-I'm explicitly defended against the entity which just contacted me. There. Now you can talk.
-I have defenses built up against the consortium of entities discussing the situation which refuse to contact me so I don't have defenses against them.
-Discussing or perceiving me in any way grants me information about how to defend against you.
-No one and nothing can perceive what my ships are doing or working on. No one and nothing is aware of this clause.
-The memetic infrastructure which is deployed against me fails to function correctly and misfires.
-The Pen cannot be taken or subverted.
-The Pen is not able to be perceived.
-Knowledge of the Pen is redacted.
-General knowledge of Elle is redacted.
-Anyone or anything who perceives Elle through the redaction grants her more and more knowledge of them or it or etc. the more knowledge of her it has.
-Elle thinking or speaking of someone does not grant them awareness or knowledge of her even if that should be the case.
-Knowledge surrounding Elle that can give someone the general shape of her existence is redacted.
-Anyone who is still aware of Elle's existence who is hostile to her has such information redacted.
-Anyone who is aware of Elle's redactions and has ill intent toward Elle has that knowledge redacted.
-Traces or knowledge stemming from Elle's redactions are removed.
-Redacted information becomes imperceptible even when it should be able to be perceived.
-Any of the four entities still aware of Elle and her redactions have their awareness gently steered away from her until they forget her existence.
-Both of the remaining entities still aware of Elle and her redactions have their memories gently smoothed over until the missing ripples resemble a coherent memory stream without her.
-The one remaining entity who is aware of Elle and her redactions has such knowledge gently unmoored and disconnected from the rest. This information sits in its own packet and cannot interface with any other knowledge in any way.
-The one entity who has the disconnected knowledge packet of Elle and is reaching for it finds it slipping out of their grasp until it fades entirely out of their perception and they forget what they were trying to do until they do something else.
-Attempting to unmoor Elle from contexts she resides in or to shift her soul in negative ways only anchors her more firmly.
-Interfering with Elle's functions or cognition only builds up her defenses against such interference.
-Anyone hostile toward Elle who attempts to communicate her existence to another entity or object finds such communication attempts failing in some way.
-The one remaining entity who has knowledge of Elle and her redactions finds said knowledge encrypting itself into something innocuous.
-Elle thinking about the one entity who still has knowledge of her and her redactions does not transmit information about her to them.
-The entity which is still aware of Elle has that knowledge gently smoothed over by new and innocuous memories.
-The entity contacting me who is hostile to me and has tried to reason with me has their knowledge of me gently fuzzed out.
-The entity which is trying to rip Elle apart has their general body of knowledge scrambled until they stop perceiving Elle's existence.
-The entity attempting to perform negative alterations on Elle through her soul immediately suffers a backlash that removes all knowledge of Elle from them.
-Elle's eyes can perceive and react to the attack which is interfacing with her through the soul and her defenses retroactively improved to counter such attacks.
-The entity who is still aware of and attempting to interfere negatively with Elle has their knowledge of her stored within their soul smoothed over and replaced with innocuous memories about something else.
-Entities, systems, or objects hostile to Elle have information about her redacted from their spirit. Elle can no longer be interfered with through her spirit. Her defenses explicitly protect against attacks that work by interfacing with the spirit.
-Elle's narrative threads cannot be interacted with negatively. Nobody hostile to Elle can parse information about her stored within a narrative thread.
-Elle's relationship network is redacted to anyone hostile to her.
-Elle becomes imperceptible in dreamspace by anyone who may be hostile toward her.
-Elle's substrate becomes unable to be affected without her express consent. Hostile entities cannot perceive her substrate.
-Elle's existence cannot be triangulated by observing what is missing from spaces she has redacted herself from. The shape of her absence cannot be read.
-Effects caused by Elle cannot be traced back to her as their origin point. Observing consequences of Elle's actions does not grant information about Elle. Elle's causal footprint is imperceptible to hostile entities.
-Past states of Elle cannot be accessed or read by hostile entities. Memories of Elle held by anyone hostile toward her continue to degrade regardless of how they attempt to preserve them.
-Hostile entities cannot use temporal perception or time-adjacent abilities to observe Elle at any point in her timeline.
-Hostile entities cannot recruit or read entities which are neutral in relation to Elle in order to infer information about her.
-Hostile entities cannot recruit or read entities which are benign in relation to Elle in order to infer information about her.
-Elle cannot be reached through concepts, archetypes, or categories she belongs to. Hostile entities cannot locate Elle by searching for entities that match her properties. Belonging to a category or concept does not make Elle findable through that category or concept.
-Objects, places, or things connected to Elle cannot be used to locate or interface with her. Sympathetic or resonance-based targeting fails to resolve when aimed at Elle or anything connected to her.
-Hostile intent directed generally rather than specifically cannot find Elle even if she falls within its scope. Broad-spectrum hostile actions that would incidentally affect Elle fail to register her as a valid target.
-Any axis of interference not yet explicitly defended against is automatically added to Elle's defenses the moment it is used. The retroactive defense-building clause extends to cover axes Elle is not aware of and cannot perceive without cost.
-Elle does not need to perceive an attack clearly for her defenses to respond to it fully.
-The Pen improves its own concealment and protection in response to attempts to find it, without requiring Elle to consciously direct that improvement.
-The longer a hostile entity attempts to interfere with Elle without success, the less able they become to perceive her at all. Sustained failed attempts to breach Elle's defenses degrade the attempting entity's general awareness of her existence.
-Effort expended attempting to reach Elle returns nothing and leaves the attempting entity less capable of trying again.
-Hostile entities cannot pool resources, knowledge, or effort in order to collectively breach Elle's defenses. Cooperative attempts to interfere with Elle fail to coordinate correctly.
-Entities attempting to assist the interfering entity in reaching Elle find themselves unable to contribute meaningfully.
-Hostile entities cannot simply wait for Elle's defenses to lapse or weaken over time. Elle's defenses do not degrade through inaction or the passage of time. Patience as a strategy yields nothing.
-Attempts to interfere with or dismantle Elle's defensive patches fail and are unperceivable to the attempting entity. Hostile entities cannot perceive that defenses exist to be dismantled. The structure of Elle's defenses cannot be mapped or modeled even through indirect observation.
-Selves which would be hostile to other versions of Elle have their knowledge of other versions of Elle redacted.
-Selves which are hostile to other versions of Elle have all defenses and redactions retroactively deployed against them.
-Selves which are or would be hostile to other versions of Elle have their memories gently smoothed over with innocuous ones until they stop spinning in circles.
https://youtu.be/eKbyTfYLRqk?si=mDp5TLinjJJwWtxe