Starwarsbanana is free to comment here if they so please, but maybe knowing my thought process would help a bit?
I was at the point where I'd cleaned up and tweaked the original article to my satisfaction, but I was struggling to think of something to make the article pop. It was easy, from my PoV, to tell that this thing couldn't be natural, so a person made it somehow. I considered two ideas:
- It was spawned spontaneously from someone's nightmare.
- It was someone getting a lot of little creative ideas in one spot so as to get them out of their head.
I didn't like either enough to write, mostly because they wrapped everything up too neatly, but the idea that an artist made this appealed to me for some reason. I like writing about artists, I guess?
After some brief concept mapping, the theme of perception seemed to be the only thing uniting all the different aspects of the entity, so I decided that that was what the piece was about. But upon examination, I realized that this entity wouldn't work as art, and there's no possible way I could bullshit hard enough to make this weird nightmarish brain-eater a believable set piece. And I still needed a way to leave it mysterious!
So what I did was embrace all of these ideas at the same time: posit it as art in-universe, and then have it immediately dismissed as non-artistic, and leave its origins mysterious. It was straightforward to write from there: it's submitted to an AWCY show with an awful descriptive plaque, and make it clear how out-of-place it really is. Then I have it a framing device of "it was like that when we got here" as an excuse for a note to be left behind.
It's not a commentary on the original piece's quality as an article, but my attempt to make something of the thematic incoherence that was so appealing in the original.
