Triptych of the Architect, by Logic
The Viceking is dead. Long live the King.
Viceking's Graab
is a blog maze by DJay32. In it, you explore a pyramid/tomb/catacomb/labyrinth of blogs, reading the writing on the walls that might be the actual walls themselves, in search of the centre where the "Viceking" is buried. Who was the Viceking? Who killed him? Why? What led to the construction of the tomb? These are all, as described by the writing on the walls, your goals to find out. Be warned, however. The Graab contains well over 60 blogs, and every path has ample misdirection. And to make things even more confusing, this is a part of a metanarrative of blogs by the abstract character "Christoph Magreat."
Written for The Fear Mythos and The Slender Man Mythos, DJay spent several months working on it having grown very disillusioned with blogging as a whole.
The Graab contains examples of these tropes:
- Affectionate Parody
- All There in the Manual: DJay released a companion blog, Viceking's Blaag, which offers leading questions and some analyses for the more particularly obscure Finnegans Wake references. Plus a list of art pieces, which could act as a sort of checklist— if any of the art is new to you, you haven't seen all of the maze.
- Anachronic Order: Beyond just being nonlinear, if you try to make sense of the history of the Viceking or even just the building of the tomb, no set path through the maze will be chronological. There are implications that the further in you go, the further back in time things are, but even that doesn't quite add up with the stories told by the writing on the walls.
- Arc Words:
- "Buckley shot the Russian General."
- "Deep." It's not obviously recurring, but once you've been made aware of it, it becomes obvious how hammered-in it is.
- Author Avatar: Shem, the one who wrote on all the walls, is yet another manifestation of Jordan Dooling in the blogosphere. Though given that the Graab is supposed to be written by Magreat, this might be more muddled than it seems.
- Call-Back: Not just in the sense of a labyrinthine layout with the text referencing itself in convoluted ways, but just about every aspect of the maze is a reference to something in Fear Mythos past.
- Creator Provincialism: In an abstract example of the trope, the fact that everything about this maze is a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Fear Mythos is surely because it was written by DJay.
- Deconstruction: Of blogging, of communities, of reading, of writing, of fear, of thought.
- Dedication: To alliterator, who wrote 90 blogs for the mythos, many of which are among DJay's favourites. With the completion of this maze, DJay's own blog count technically passed a hundred.
- Easter Egg: Almost every element of every blog in this maze was meticulously placed, meaning there are secrets in the Graab that will go unnoticed for a long time.
- Everyone Knew Already: On one level, the Viceking is the Slender Man. This is practically advertised and doesn't take much to figure it out in the maze itself. (However, perhaps it's advertised because it feels like an empty answer, a premise rather than a mystery.)
- Language Equals Thought: Implied and debated the further into the maze you get.
- Meaningful Name: Every name is meaningful. "Viceking," "Shem," "Buckley" (and the Russian General).
- Mind Screw
- Ostentatious Secret: "What will you find in the middle of this tomb? What was the deal with the Viceking, how did he die, why, what did he actually do in life?" Such questions are brought up in almost every single blog.
- No Ending: None of the paths conclude. Everything takes you back to the beginning if you try hard enough. Unless you're unlucky enough to hit a genuine dead-end.
- The Place: It's literally the grave of the Viceking.
- Self-Deprecation: In the B-Movie Monsters pastiche, all the posts are rather frank and cynical summaries of some of DJay's previous blogs.
- Shout-Out: The interbloguality runs so rampant that it's practically the thesis of this maze, but shout-outs pertain to non-blogs as well.
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Spiritual Sequel: To alliterator's the garden of forking paths. - Stylistic Suck: Billy Everyblogger, of Fearblog of Fear, gets a blog somewhere in the maze. It's predictably terrible. He attempts to hide many dead-end paths, but they can easily be accessed via his blog archive.
- The Treachery of Images: From time to time, the reader is reminded that they are not literally in a tomb, that even plot-wise they are alone reading words on a screen.
- Unreliable Narrator: Shem, who wrote on all the walls, does not lie that often, but he's evidently very unstable. Probably even dead. So the fact that he's the only voice to go on in your exploration probably doesn't bode well for comprehension.
