《The Lore of Victor and Gloriana Graves》


 Entry One

    I have maladaptive daydreams. In this work, I¡¯ll be exploring one of the many worlds I created. I won¡¯t be writing them as traditional stories, but more just as a retelling of facts. This isn¡¯t the Story of Victor and Gloriana Graves, just the Lore.


    And who are Victor and Gloriana Graves? I guess you could say they¡¯re my children. Yes, I remember back when I first created them. I set out to create a fantasy version of myself to daydream about. I¡¯m not the first person to do this, by any means, but I didn¡¯t follow the traditional path. Most people who do this might envision themselves as an actor or a rockstar, some kind of celebrity. This was too small for me, though. I told myself I wanted to be a 21<sup>st</sup>century Genghis Khan, or Alexander the Great, or Caesar.


    So that¡¯s how I came up with Victor Graves or, at least, his predecessor. He¡¯s had a number of name throughout the years I was doing this. Those lives he lived early on are prehistory, primordial. I wasn¡¯t setting out to create fiction when I started, I was just entertaining myself in the same way I had been doing so since I was a kid. I¡¯ve forgotten much, but there¡¯s still enough to write about.


    So what do I mean by a modern day Genghis Khan? Someone who conquers the world? Not exactly. The world is starkly different now than it was during Khan¡¯s time, so a modern day Genghis would be starkly different from the original.


    Victor Graves was many things in his life, but he was never really a military man, unless you count the days when he was the commander in chief. He wasn¡¯t a general, though. His conquests weren¡¯t military affairs. So, what did he do? He started his life out by making a video game. Later, he got into the movie and music industry. Yes, he was a man of our own time. This is all happened during the 2010s. The world of Victor Graves is a ripoff of the real world. He did a lot of things during his life, even becoming president. This doesn¡¯t sound very interesting, though, does it? We have billionaires and politicians in the real world already, so what makes Victor so special? Well, he was an Alexander the Great. It wasn¡¯t just that he accomplished things, but he accomplished things in ways the world had never seen before.


    He conquered Hollywood, the music industry; he created his own philosophy and political ideology and dogma. He became the de facto leader of the United States for much of the remainder of his life after stepping down as president. He turned the U.S. into a mosaic of different city states and expanded its borders. He even created a new culture, a new people. He distributed his own sperm and became the biggest reproducer in human history. He was also well liked (generally) by the people he was responsible for. He championed modern day virtues, as opposed to medieval ones. If that sounds like he¡¯s a Mary Sue, that¡¯s because I haven¡¯t gone into the details of his life yet.


    He had his controversies, his foibles, his dark side. I think if Victor were somehow real, he would be a figure that was a mixed bag. Did he create a utopia or a dystopia? He created something, to be sure; he left his mark on the world. He was a great man but great doesn¡¯t necessarily mean good. Me? I like him. He¡¯s got a lot of me in him, after all. I tried to create a human being, though, not a superhero. I wanted people to look at him and see a human being. If for nothing else then simply to keep up the suspension of disbelief. I like my fantasies realistic (for the most part. Truth is stranger than fiction, after all. And this is a strange story). He¡¯s a very complicated man with a complicated history.Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    He is a man, but he¡¯s also a fantasy. Ideas are glorious things to have. They¡¯re truly ideal forms. It¡¯s the bringing ideas into reality where things get sloppy. The path to Hell is paved with good intentions, after all. I tried to keep that in mind while I was creating him. But just remember, that, at the end of the day, this is the lore of a male power fantasy, first and foremost. You might find yourself rolling your eyes at a few things.


    There are two versions of Victor Graves currently in my mind: a millennial and a gen-z. One born in 1990, one born in the year 2000. The one born in 2000 is what I¡¯m currently working on so we¡¯ll talk about him here.


    He starts his life on January 1<sup>st</sup>, 2000, because why not? He displays a remarkable intelligence for his age early on. Maybe he learned to talk and read a year or two earlier than normal. He¡¯s young when he discovers a book about Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Caesar and, after reading it, is forever permanently marked by it, being injected with a fire that burns in him to be like this great (great =/= good) man.


    He develops a deep interest in history as a result. And it¡¯s not that he doesn¡¯t have other interests. He, like all children, has interests in play and art and everything else. Movies, video games, comics, et cetera. He was fascinated with the output of human culture, regardless of the form it took. History really captured him though.


    His parents are best friends with another set of parents, the parents of one Gloriana, maiden name pending. She¡¯s a black girl of Victor¡¯s own age whom he grows up with and one day marries. They are completely inseparable from the time of their infancy to the time they are euthanized, always known as the pair: Victor and Gloriana Graves.


    Victor and Gloriana grow up together and come to share the same interests. They are as similar to one another as one can realistically expect such a pair of children to be. Their marriage, when it happens, is a happy one, one without drama or strife. Remember, this is a male fantasy, after all. It¡¯s only as realistic as it needs to be to suspend disbelief. Victor considered Gloriana to be his equal in every way. And even when Victor was held hostage by terrorists and unsure whether or not he¡¯d live, he slept well knowing the Gloriana was still safe and would be able to take over for him. She was, in fact, the first female president of the United States, serving the two terms after Victor himself, although people would still say he was the de facto leader, even though he technically gave up his office after the two terms.


    Victor and Gloriana spend their whole childhood plotting to become great (great =/= good). They develop a unique artistic movement, philosophy, political ideology, and even a dogma to allow people to escape the nihilism of the 21<sup>st</sup>century. They also love one another more than anything else in the world, she being just as smart and as capable as he is. Growing up together made either of them stronger than they would¡¯ve been alone.


    That¡¯s the basis for one of my maladaptive daydreams, Victor and Gloriana Graves. I¡¯ve written around a thousand words, so I think I¡¯ll cut this entry there. More to come.

 Entry Two

    So, our modern day Caesars, our Victor and Gloriana, are currently children. They plot and scheme together all the time, thinking about how they¡¯ll become great (great =/= good) one day, thinking about how they¡¯ll come to conquer the world. What should they be doing to prepare? They needed to make money. A lot of it and in a short time frame. They needed to become, at minimum, billionaires. How do they go about this? What¡¯s their strategy?


    The Gravesverse was first formulated in the early 2010s. The news at that time was full of talk about killer apps and indie video games. The smartphone was still a relatively new phenomenon. YouTube and Twitter were approaching their zenith. But let¡¯s take a step back and recall that there are two versions of Victor: a millennial and a gen-z, born in 1990 and 2000, respectively. Millenial Victor Graves is far more realistic, and that¡¯s the one I originally envisioned when I first came up with the Gravesverse, me being a millennial myself. But, with that said, I have a certain affinity for the gen-z one right now. He has more potential than the millennial version, who would, in our time, currently be president. Yes, I think we¡¯ll stick with the gen-z Victor Graves for now, although we will probably flip and flop between the two based on the needs of our lore.


    It was in childhood when gen-z V&G decided that, in order to become billionaires, they¡¯d need to understand technology. They¡¯d need to become programmers. Victor understood how important a historical force technology is. Like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and everything else. They didn¡¯t want to just be another tech corporation, though, they wanted to make a real name for themselves with people. That and they needed to be able to work fast, so they needed something that was more creative than scientific. They needed to be billionaires as well as celebrities as well as artists. What is the intersection of technology and entertainment and art? Video games.


    Here we need to have a chat about originality. Back when I was creating these fantasies, they were only for my own private consumption. They were still artistic endeavors, but with an audience size of one. I needed inspiration to fuel them, as all artists do. So, in V&Gs later childhood and early adulthood, they¡¯d be doing things that I had seen happen in reality. I¡¯d be stealing ideas from the real world and using them as fodder to fuel my fantasies. That would make things more relatable and realistic, and realism is something I craved for their story. Remember, I made up a daydream about a human being, not a superhero.


    So, Victor and Gloriana¡¯s first video game was Minecraft.


    And Minecraft was a perfect choice for them to create from a story perspective. If you aren¡¯t familiar with how Minecraft came about, it was started by one guy who made a very simple and straightforward game and added to it gradually. That guy¡¯s name was Notch. It later became a humongous success, allowing Notch to sell the game to Microsoft in 2014 for two and a half billion dollars. He had started it in 2009, I think? That¡¯s what, five years? That and it was a creative endeavor, one that shook up the video game industry, one that was truly unique. Minecraft is the perfect inspiration to rip off for my fantasy world. And so, Notch doesn¡¯t exist in the Gravesverse. The game was made by Victor and Gloriana themselves.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    The game itself dovetails nicely with V&G¡¯s story, too. Minecraft is a game about starting with nothing and shaping the world around you however you see fit. This is what Victor and Gloriana aimed to do in their reality. Have I mentioned yet that Victor became an orphan? He started with the deck stacked against him. What¡¯s important to keep in mind though, is that there were differences between the real-world Minecraft and the one that V&G made in the Gravesverse.


    The game V&G made was Gravesian. What do I mean by Gravesian? Victor and Gloriana had created their own aesthetic, their own artistic philosophy, their own way of viewing the world. The actions they took in life were applications of that underlying philosophy. You can notice it even with the names I¡¯ve chosen for them: Victor, Gloriana, Graves. Those names were chosen for a reason. They¡¯re making a statement. No matter what glory you achieve in life, no matter how many victories you win, no matter what riches you gather up, you are, in the end, dead. Dead as dead can be. Our destiny is oblivion.


    The Graves¡¯ emblem, their symbol, is a skull with a crown on it. Memento mori. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! A dead god-king. A golden sarcophagus. The crowned skull will be amended and added to as V&G journey through life, adding new philosophical axioms.


    Victory and Death. Victor Graves.


    Death and horror is at the heart of Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ aesthetic, their Geist (used in the sense of Zeitgeist). Maybe Geist isn¡¯t the right word, but it will do for now. My own personal philosophy is that meanings and words should be loosey goosey. Everything should have synonyms, even proper nouns.


    So, a Minecraft focused around the real world concept of death. A Minecraft that focuses on showing the world in all its splendor, with all of its tastes and aromas and things to touch and be captivated by and enamored with, but a world that will ultimately end one day.


    I think this dovetails nicely with the early days of Minecraft, where updates to it meant losing your save, losing the world you spent so much time creating. It¡¯s like how Buddhists create those mandalas in colored sand and then, at the end, they tip the canvas and let it all fall away. (Note: Victor and Gloriana Graves are most certainly not Buddhists, but they draw inspiration from everything in the world for their personal Geist.)


    Gold is at the heart of that Minecraft. Gold and diamonds. Riches, extravagance. I don¡¯t know how much I should go into talking about ¡®the way I¡¯d¡¯ve done Minecraft,¡¯ as that can be pretty boring, but I¡¯ll talk about it a little bit.


    The art, for one, was different but still simplistic and pixely. There was a more horrific quality to it. And it was darker, with more contrasting colors. That and there was an emphasis upon building up your own empire, with family dynamics and people you could recruit for you. The nougat of the game is still the same, though. Blocks. Mining and crafting. Minecraft.


    Even the name Minecraft dovetails well with Victor¡¯s past. Victor and Gloriana¡¯s parents (recall, they were best friends) were avid fans of Blizzard games. Starcraft and Diablo and particularly World of Warcraft, when it first came out.


    Victor and Gloriana fell in love with their parents¡¯ virtual world, playing it in the limited capacity a four or five year old could, enchanted by all the lore and the art and everything else. World of Warcraft was big about its community driven spirit, and that¡¯s something that always stuck with V and G, ¡®til the end of their days. They even thought to themselves that if conquering the world didn¡¯t work, making their own fantasy world would do as a fine substitute, which is another reason they gravitated toward the video game industry.


    That¡¯s about another thousand words or so, so we¡¯ll end this here. More to come.

 Entry Three

    So our little conquerors have made Minecraft, a unique and totally original video game that had never been done before (at least not in the Gravesverse lol. Notch, as a reminder, does not exist there). This let them sell out and become the youngest self-made billionaires the world had ever seen. Now, let¡¯s talk about YouTube. The video hosting site was in its zenith when V&G were making their little game. This was how they marketed themselves.


    You can¡¯t be a great (great=/=good) man of history, an Alexander or a Genghis or a Caesar, without a marketing arm. You¡¯ve got to be able to sell yourself to your troops, your people, to those that you conquer. All leadership is marketing. It¡¯s propaganda. That used to be a neutral term. It¡¯s only in recent history where it¡¯s gotten the negative connotation.


    Victor and Gloriana started a YouTube channel, first to simply market their video game. It started out basic, with them sitting at a desk facing the camera and talking back and forth, charismatically and affably, almost as if they were of one mind. This will be the way they present themselves when they have a message they want to send to people from now until they are euthanized: sitting down and talking from behind a table. This will be important to keep in mind when we get to Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ first movie. Also, they add decorations and props later, both on the table and in the background. They are starting an artistic movement, remember. They¡¯re big on decorations.


    As I said, affable and charismatic. All smiles. Funny, too. That and the level of comfort and chemistry they had with one another was something to behold. The two teenagers enamored people who came across them on YouTube while they talked about their ugly little video game. The game became an overnight sensation. Nothing like it had ever been made before, after all. (In the real world, there¡¯s something about Minecraft being inspired by a game called Infiniminer and one called Dwarf Fortress. We¡¯ll eliminate the existence of these in the Gravesverse, making their version of Minecraft all the more impressive.)


    They come out with the game publicly around the mid-2010s. That¡¯s about as early as we can start it for our gen-z V&G without compromising the suspension of disbelief. Having them be millennials makes a bit more sense here, as having them born in 1990 lets them be 19 in 2009, when Minecraft is released in our world, and 24 in 2014, when it was sold to Microsoft. I will stick with them being gen-z for now though, we¡¯ll just call them gifted children. They started working on the game privately when they were, what? 10? 11 or 12? 13? They started experimenting with coding at a young age. The details don¡¯t matter so much here, just choose whatever age makes you roll your eyes the least.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    There¡¯s a difference between Hollywood Giftedness and Actual Giftedness. Let¡¯s think of the two types as opposite ends of the spectrum. Generally speaking, I like to stick to the more realistic end, but not all the time. It depends on my mood and the needs of the story. Besides, truth is stranger than fiction, eh?


    Regardless of age, they started work on Minecraft and they became a legitimate YouTube sensation. They spoke a lot about being inspired by their future children, wanting a game to have them all play together one day. A game where you can build anything and be anything. A game that was good wholesome fun. Even at this early part of their career, they always had a mind for political optics.


    It¡¯s not too long before they¡¯re brought on talk shows and radio broadcasts as something of a bit of a novelty. A ¡®look at these fuggen¡¯ kids over here! Ain¡¯t they sweet? Ain¡¯t they smaht?¡¯ kind of thing.


    The game becomes quickly popular. Extremely popular.


    How are they hosting this game? Don¡¯t they need money? They do. They get a little start up cash from Victor¡¯s dear old dead parents. They left him maybe around 50,000 dollars, or something along those lines. The pair¡¯s parents were either working class or lower middle class. I want the rags to riches trope to be there, but not in an over-the-top way. In another version of the story, I simply have them rob banks. Realistically, of course, the method where you go in and hand a teller a note demanding cash from their drawer and then you get out of there. But we¡¯re not in that version of the Gravesverse right now.


    That story of being an orphan only added to the novelty. They did the talk show circuit once a year. This was to bring people to the game. Once those people were brought in, their primary method of engaging with them was on YouTube.


    While on the talk show circuit, they¡¯d speak about their goals in life, but not too much. Victor wasn¡¯t at a point where he was proclaiming himself Alexander or Genghis reborn yet. Although, if you asked him who his favorite historical figures were, he¡¯d be honest with you, although he¡¯d likely try to steer the conversation elsewhere.


    They made regular videos on YouTube, talking about the updates to the game and what they were doing. It was here they started to experiment, too. They practiced cinematography and fancy camera work. They practiced writing little skits. There¡¯s a small scene I have in mind right now, where V&G are speaking on camera about this or that update or whatever and Gloriana picks up a wand from the desk before her and starts waving it around. It¡¯s got a strobing light on it, which picks up in intensity and brightness, but still they¡¯re talking like nothing is amiss. At its brightest strobe, it appears to teleport the pair to a different location, still in the same seats they were in, still behind the same desk. And they keep talking about the point they were making. The wand was just a misdirection to attract the eyes of the audience for a moment.


    That¡¯s our 1000 words. See you next time.

 Entry Four

    We¡¯ve spoken a bit about Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ early years, but I¡¯m not sure if I want to stick to a strictly chronological timeframe. As my mood shifts and changes, I go backward and forward in time in their fantasy world. Recently, I¡¯ve been focused on their kids.


    Thousands.


    Thousands of kids.


    Victor Graves is a sperm donor (and Gloriana and Victors¡¯ other wives are fertilized egg donors, but that¡¯s a bit out of our scope for right now), but not one in the traditional sense. He has his own sperm repository that he gives samples from. Who does he give them to? Gravers. I haven¡¯t spoken about them yet. Those are his fans. In addition to being fans of him, he goes a step further. He creates an institution for them to be a part of. He¡¯s weaponized his fanbase.


    There¡¯s a chapter in every city, and not just the major cities. He has fans in every county in the country, or at least that was his original goal. To utilize the county system as a means of propping up his fledgling institution. We¡¯re getting a bit off topic here, though, back to the sperm.


    He gives the sperm to either high ranking Gravers or ones whom can afford the price (wealthier Gravers are of interest to Victor Graves, but not so much to overturn the axiom that ¡®All Gravers Are Equal¡¯). The sperm is not a mandatory thing, by the way. Everything is done by consent. By the time he starts giving out his sperm, he¡¯s displayed himself to be a very capable man. This isn¡¯t done so much out of genetic superiority, though. It¡¯s not eugenics, not yet. In the same way he created an institution for the Gravers, he wants to create an institution for the Graves Blood Dynasty, for his family. It is to have a patriarch/matriarch that¡¯s been chosen to rule it, to help administrate Victor and Gloriana¡¯s vast wealth once they¡¯ve been euthanized. A ruler that can be chosen from a large population, so as to allow competition to foster. Victor wants to build schools and cathedrals and cities.


    He wants to build a culture. A people.


    And he did.


    Or at least he did in my fantasy world.


    Victor Graves will die, as all men do. His aesthetic and philosophy and everything else, his Geist, is so profoundly focused upon that as a fact.Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    Anyway, back to what we were originally focused on: the kids. The Gravespawn. The Graves Blood Dynasty. The Graves Family. Everything has multiple names to reiterate the fact that a name is not the thing, but just a sign that points to it.


    The Graveskinder. They live in the city of Victoriana in the state of Gravesland, a very small state, a city-state, that was created from ranchland that Victor bought up for cheap early on in his life (not too long after selling his Minecraft to Microsoft) located in Wyoming, which is a beautiful area, home to Yellowstone National Park.


    There is property in Gravesland, and all of it belongs to the Graves Family. The city itself is located on private property.


    Victor Graves gobbles up a whole lot of property during his life. I need to remember to go into the specifics of how he did that. Minecraft was sold for a few billion dollars, but you need a lot more than that for the level of property that Victor has by the end of his life. He is a trillionaire before he dies, the first one and I think the only one, too, as the notion of property changes by the time he is euthanized. And I know Trillionaire sounds a bit ridiculous as I write this in the year 2025, but it¡¯s true (true in the fantasy world). I tried to make him getting to that status as realistic as possible, so as not to mess with the suspension of disbelief. He really works hard for it. But those are tales for another time.


    Anyway, back to the kids.


    (I pause writing here to consider what direction I want to take, it takes me some time to consider.)


    The kids have their own culture. It¡¯s intimately tied closely to the culture of the Gravers, of course, who are now their own institution that exists independently of the now dead Victor Graves. And most of the kids end up deciding that they, too, want to become Gravers and join that institution when its their turn to decide whether to join.


    The culture is all about family first, but not in a sinister way. Remember: utopia. It¡¯s the same ¡®family first¡¯ you might have about your own family. It doesn¡¯t mean you¡¯d rob someone in broad daylight just so you can buy your children a pony, although that goes the other way, too, as many of us would transgress norms to help a family member in dire need. But they aren¡¯t in need, these Gravelings. Victor Graves brought home the bacon before he went away for good. They¡¯re set up nice. And what do they want?


    They want to bring Victor back.


    They want to create an afterlife and bring people back from the dead. Victor and Gloriana. All the Graves family. All the Gravers. Everyone else in the world, everyone else that has ever existed.


    Dr. Frankenstein did this in the early 1800s, so it shouldn¡¯t be that hard, right? Wrong! It¡¯s very hard to bring the dead back to life, or at least it is in the real world, as I¡¯m sure you already know. While the Gravesverse is a fantasy world, where I could make anything happen at any time, I want it to be heavily influenced by our own world, so as not to mess up the suspension of disbelief.


    Maybe I¡¯ll go into their strategies for doing that at some point, but for now, we¡¯re about at our thousand words again, so I¡¯m signing out for now.

 Entry Five

    Utopia.


    Dystopia.


    A single syllable is the only difference between the two, such a small difference. I¡¯ve created a man, in my opinion. Not a hero, not a villain, just a man. He was inspired by characters in history, with all their shades of gray, and so he, too, had himself shades of gray. His good and evil. If I ever do decide to write the story, it could go either way for him. Maybe my goal is to make him so realistic that different people will have different views of the man. I want to be unbiased, but I can¡¯t be, considering he¡¯s my own creation.


    As I write through these entries into this blog, my mind bubbles and conjures images of all the headspace I have been in throughout the years. All the little plot paths I tested out and ultimately decided for or against. There¡¯s a great many versions of Victor Graves. I¡¯m trying to paint the broad strokes at this point, though.


    Trillionaire.


    In today¡¯s economy? Yes. He becomes a trillionaire. The world¡¯s first. He becomes it over his lifetime, of course. It started out with the influx of cash from his dead parents. Or the bank robbery. I¡¯m thinking 50k for that right now. Just enough for him to build his little video game that he and his girlfriend are making. Minecraft. He needs a website to host it on, of course, and a means of distribution. And some camera equipment for his little YouTube channel. A powerful computer. He doesn¡¯t need space, though. They start out in Gloriana¡¯s parent¡¯s basement.


    Have I mentioned that Gloriana¡¯s parents took him in when he was orphaned? Her parents were his parents¡¯ best friends, after all. Sometimes Gloriana has a single mother, other times not. And even sometimes more they¡¯re both orphans and meet in the foster care system. But for today, at this moment in time, he lives with Gloriana and her parents. And they are, lets say, working class or lower middle class. Enough for a house with a small basement. Enough to enrich the lives of their children in what little meager ways they can. Books, a computer, a place to develop hobbies and interests, a subscription or two to World of Warcraft.


    It¡¯s a happy family. Remember, this is a fantasy, after all. Happy families can exist in fantasies. Not everything has to be so dramatic all the time. Victor talks it up big about Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and Julius and Augustus Caesar. How he¡¯s going to change the world. How he¡¯ll become president.


    ¡°Yes, yes, Vicky. We¡¯ve heard it before. When though?¡±If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    ¡°I¡¯ve already begun,¡± he says with a smirk.


    He talks, too, about marrying Gloriana. The parents couldn¡¯t be happier. It¡¯s an already decided fact while they were still toddlers, after all. Victor proposed to her with a ring pop, which she still has up to the day she and him are euthanized.


    But, back to Minecraft. Back to becoming a trillionaire. He does things much like Notch did them, all the way up to selling to Microsoft to the tune of two and half billion dollars. Maybe a little more in Victor¡¯s case, as his Minecraft was far more fantastical. Victor himself didn¡¯t realize it when he was creating it, but the author of his thoughts (me) had the benefit of hindsight when he made his little video game.


    Unlike Notch, this becoming a billionaire can¡¯t happen in 2014. Being just 14 years old is far too young for the suspension of disbelief. Minecraft started development when they were considerably young and progressed through his teen years. Maybe he was fifteen or sixteen when he sold it? Old enough to drop out of high school, which he and Gloriana both did, much to the concern of their parents.


    Is that too unrealistic? Maybe we should go back to a millennial Victor Graves. He graduates high school in 2008 and has the same time table as Notch, becoming a billionaire at 24 in 2014. Victor was originally a millennial, after all. That¡¯s what I am and he was originally a fantastical version of myself. As I¡¯ve gotten older, though, I¡¯ve fallen into the same trap that older authors make: they want young protagonists. Ones full of life and possibilities.


    Regardless, though, he becomes a billionaire. He was a millionaire first with just the raw sales of the game during his time when he was doing the talk show circuit. When he became a millionaire, he had a gold tooth installed in his mouth. When he became a billionaire, he had a diamond embedded in that tooth. He¡¯s a casual fan of body modification. He¡¯s got a Minecraft tattoo, too, so he can always remember what he made.


    So now he¡¯s a billionaire, he marked that off of his Alexander the Great checklist. A solid first step. Not too shabby. So, what should he do with the money? What¡¯s the next step? How does he acquire more money? Or is money really the goal? It seems to be that way in today¡¯s world, after all. Billionaires control everything. They are this age¡¯s kings and princes, aren¡¯t they?


    Being a billionaire is nice, Victor thinks, but only as a means to an end. Money isn¡¯t the whole story. There¡¯s only one real power in the world someone can harvest, and it¡¯s not money, it¡¯s People Power. Money is just a means of accessing People Power. Pay some people to do something and they do it for you. People Power. Move mountains, conquer nations. It¡¯s all People Power. How do you get it?  Money¡¯s not the only way you can get someone to do something for you.


    You could always just ask them to do stuff for you. For free.


    Work for free? That¡¯s a tough sell. Luckily Victor is quite charismatic and charming. That, and he knows one thing, people love to work for free. They do it all the time. It¡¯s called having a hobby. The main thing with a hobby is that it¡¯s just got to be fun. And Victor knows how to have some fun.


    That¡¯s another 1000 words. I¡¯ll see you later.

 Entry Six

    In addition to being interested in programming and video games, Victor and Gloriana were also interested in filming and movies. They knew that this, too, could be a path towards their goal of becoming a 21<sup>st</sup> century Genghis Khan, given the power of celebrity, given the power of culture. And, luckily, they came of age at a time when YouTube was in its zenith, allowing them to learn the basics of moviemaking.


    They started incorporating what they learned into the YouTube videos they were making for their Minecraft game development channel. They¡¯d start off with little skits and things for comedy¡¯s sake. They¡¯d make a name for themselves on YouTube not just for being game developers, but for being just normal everyday entertaining as well.


    They started to branch out and begin a new YouTube channel. It was there where they made their first music video, being heavily inspired by all the music videos they¡¯d seen on YouTube during their childhood.


    And here¡¯s where we¡¯re going to steal some more ideas. I use the real world as food to feed my fantasies. Gotye¡¯s ¡®Somebody That I Used to Know¡¯ video. Have you seen it? The one where the singers are painted over the course of the video? It was an enormously successful song and video from the early days of YouTube. I¡¯ll use it for Victor and Gloriana¡¯s come up.


    I go back and forth on the music, though. Should they also, in addition to the games and the videos, have had an interest in making music themselves? That¡¯s an awful lot for the suspension of disbelief. For now, let¡¯s just say they hire people to make music for them. The infrastructure for making popstars is all there, the institutions. You just need to have the right connections or be talented enough to attract the eye of one of those movers and shakers. Victor and Gloriana decided they were just going to pay for the privilege of becoming minor online popstars. Sometimes I like this route, other times it¡¯s too much. Again, maybe it¡¯d be a bit more realistic with a millennial Graves.


    Let¡¯s just keep it simple for now, narratively speaking, and say that they paid for the music but personally made the music video themselves. This isn¡¯t a perfect situation for the Gravesverse, given that the subject of the song is about a breakup, whereas they¡¯re completely in love.


    They release it as an internet hit primarily. They¡¯re not out playing live in cities or anything, they got video games to make, although to celebrate its success they do go on a radio tour to play it live in some of the studios. That and they¡¯re invited back to some of the talk shows to play it live on tv. ¡°Ohh, aren¡¯t they cute and talented? These kids that made the video game are making music now!¡±This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    Sometimes I have them focus on the video game first and foremost before selling it and only then getting into the music industry, and other times they¡¯re mixed together. But the point is that, while they may not be talented music makers, they most certainly are talented video makers, with an eye for things that become viral. They came up with the music video for Gotye on their own, after all. Did they know it was going to be as big of a success as it had become? They probably thought it was going to do well, given their narcissism, but not that well. They were pleasantly surprised by it, I think. That and the nude nature of the music video added just a hint of scandal to it, them being rather young. Nothing too much, though, of course. They were family friendly.


    ¡°Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over.¡±


    The music video in question is a perfect thing for them to have created, too, considering how low budget it was. They spent money on the music but they were apt businesspeople, too. They knew how to stretch a dollar. And this is the form of the music videos they made in the early early days. Later, they¡¯d use their budding popularity to reach out to legitimately talented musical artists to get permission to make music videos for their favorite songs. It¡¯s at this time that they¡¯re rather enamored with Kanye West, as it was during this time that he was popular as well. That and he is rather talented, in my opinion.


    You have to understand why they made music videos. It was because I was making music videos in my maladaptive daydreams. This was during the lead up to my first psychosis, so they were incredibly vivid ones. I¡¯d listen to music over and over again and create music videos in my head. It¡¯d be like dreaming while I was awake. And Kanye West was one of the musicians I was listening to quite a bit back then, in the time when I was building my fantasy worlds.


    The music video for Power by Kanye West was one I was particularly enchanted by. The one where it starts out with a closeup image of Kanye West¡¯s face and slowly zooms out to reveal a Sistine Chapel like scene around him of women. Watch that video if you¡¯re at all interested in the topic of this blog. It¡¯s a sequence of images that we¡¯ll keep coming back to. It didn¡¯t have enough context for me, though, in its original, real-world form. Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ version of things was loaded with allusions to their work. Maybe instead of or in addition to the women, there¡¯d be zombies and skeletons. Horror elements. Their Minecraft had a more horrific feel to it than Notch¡¯s. It was Halloween themed.


    I did make custom, unique music videos as well for them, too, that grew in complexity over time during the lead up to my first mental break. I might go into those more at some point, but for now we¡¯re at our 1k words.

 Entry Seven

    As I write this, the presidential inauguration of 2025 had just occurred the day before, so I have that on my mind with the Gravesverse. Victor Graves becomes president in it, and I have an instinct to tell you how that happens, but we¡¯d be missing a whole lot of context, so I¡¯m not sure if I should go into that yet or not.


    This entry will be a little wild, I think. We retcon history a bit here, and talk about real people that exist/have existed in our world. I¡¯m not sure how I feel about posting that. I know there¡¯s some rules when writing about real figures, but there are still ways to do it. South Park comes to mind, them using real people all the time.


    This is a work fiction, first and foremost. Its purpose is to entertain. And these aren¡¯t the actual people I¡¯m talking about here, I¡¯m talking about my version of them. I¡¯m sticking with the same names, though, because that¡¯s how this happened when I originally was conceiving the Gravesverse. I used reality at the basis for my fantasy world, remember.


    That and I think it would lessen the impact of the work if I made up a name and simply described their position in the world. It should feel real. With that said, this bit of the story may or may not cause you issues with the suspension of your disbelief. Or it may even be offensive. It¡¯s kind of out there.


    We¡¯ll get back to the chronology, soon, though, and we¡¯ll build back up to this moment in Victor¡¯s history. Hopefully by then things will make it a bit more sense. Until then, though, buckle up, because it¡¯s about to get weird.


    By the time Victor is of presidential age (not that he hadn¡¯t requested the age requirement to be lowered prior to then) he¡¯d amassed quite a popularity. He had brought home Osama Bin Laden, who in this timeline was still at large and still intimately connected with terrorist organizations over in the middle east. I have to admit here that my knowledge of the inner politics of the Middle Eastern world is a bit out of my repertoire, but I know there¡¯s different organizations with different goals in mind. I assume the leadership is all cordial with one another, no? A little bit? No? There¡¯s certainly an alignment of interests there. So, let¡¯s assume that¡¯s how that works.


    A world famous pop star, a singer, the most famous one, think of Taylor Swift, had been kidnapped by a terrorist organization. The details of that are a bit hazy right now. I had an idea that she received an offer to play somewhere in the Middle East that was too lucrative to refuse. Or that she go to some budding city over there that was looking to make a name for themselves as a tourist destination. Maybe Dubai? Is that too offensive?


    I have a notion that this is about to get very offensive indeed. My apologies for that if that¡¯s the case, I was just trying to get good fodder for an interesting storyline, I don¡¯t mean to offend anyone.


    Anyway, this pop star of the Gravesverse is captured and it comes to light that she¡¯s being raped. Victor and Gloriana Graves have history with her, they know her, are friends with her. Know her fairly well, actually. Victor, in his good graces, suggests on social media that a trade be organized between the United States and the terrorist organization. Trade the pop star for himself, who by that time is a superstar in his own right.


    ¡°Worst trade ever,¡± one commenter says on X/Twitter.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Is it completely selfless? Not quite. Victor Graves is a bit conceited, and he knows that going down like this would be a good way to die, for legacy¡¯s sake. But he doesn¡¯t think he¡¯s going to die. He¡¯s convinced he has a destiny. And it¡¯s true, he does. I am the God of the Gravesverse, and I shine my light down upon him. And in addition to destiny, he knows a few facts. He¡¯s popular the world over. And he knows from the CIA (FBI?) that some of the children of high ranking terrorists, Osama Bin Laden being one of them, are big, big fans of his work. They want to be Gravers, in fact, and maybe one of them is, if they¡¯re over in America studying (Gravership being open only to Americans and Canadians at the time).


    This is a reference to Osama Bin Laden being found in the real world with anime on his computer, I think for his kids. So Victor knows he¡¯s liked by some of them as a fact, and he knows he wouldn¡¯t be raped like Popstar is, he knows he¡¯d probably be treated with some modicum of respect if he went over there.


    It does have a selfless angle, too, though. He genuinely likes Pop Star, even so much as having asked her in the past to be one of his concubines, which she had declined. He makes the trade.


    He¡¯s over there for some time while Gloriana runs the family business for him. It¡¯s at this time that they announce Victor Graves has been collecting his own sperm for distribution. Never let a tragedy go to waste, after all.


    Anyway, he¡¯s over there for some time before he gets out, which in and of itself is a very big to-do. There¡¯s an explosion in the secret facility he¡¯s being kept at. Local reporters and concerned local citizenry rush over to investigate and discover Victor Graves with an old nude man with a bag over his head and taped wrists. Victor is bedecked in golden jewelry that would put Mr. T to shame, and he has a gold AK-47 on his back and a golden pistol that he¡¯s pointing at the head of his captive. He¡¯s also wearing the late Gaddafi¡¯s white dictator hat.


    The people begin to film him and it quickly circulates on social media, a live showing of him in a random city in the Middle East with a captive with a bag over his head and taped wrists. Victor speaks some of the local language at this point, he talks with one of the local citizens who got there first, making sure he¡¯s broadcasting online. The man asks him if he¡¯s ever going to finish filming Fatebook, a series from them that had been on hiatus now for some years. Victor can only sigh.


    He announces to the world that he needs an extraction and goes down and sits against a wall with his hostage and waits. At some point, he takes off the bag.


    ¡°That¡­ that¡¯s Osama bin Laden!¡± a news reporter exclaims aghast as the television feed displays in the newsroom.


    The local police are there now, but they¡¯ve been ordered to simply contain the area, knowing that this is a big deal on the world stage and not wanting to muck it up. The citizenry and local reporters have been ushered out, but one still broadcasts the scene from a high rise apartment building balcony, it just far away now, Victor can¡¯t be heard.


    Not too long after he¡¯s extracted by the U.S. military, who had a base located¡­ oh¡­ a medium distance away. 100 miles. 50 maybe. They go to fly Victor home and Victor, being Victor, commandeers the airplane and locks himself in the cockpit. He¡¯ll fly himself home, as a matter of fact. Over the radio, speaking with a member of the press, he announces his love for Gloriana and tells her to execute order 66.


    And what¡¯s order 66? Nobody in the Gravesverse knows except Victor and Gloriana themselves. But, spoiler alert, it involves them taking over the city of New York, bringing every Graver in the country, and there are quite a few at this point, to the city. Something big is about to go down. Something huge. A happening.


    Anyway, he uses that as well as his popularity and auctoritas as fuel to become president. But that¡¯s all the time we have for now, we¡¯ve passed our thousand words.


    One last thing before I go, a P.S., remember that I said this was a story about a Mary Sue. If you found yourself rolling your eyes while reading this entry, just know that Victor has his faults, too, they just hadn¡¯t been on as big of a display for this particular entry.

 Entry Eight

    So how does Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ family, the Gravespawn, how do they mean to resurrect the dead? The idea was implanted by Victor himself and explained at different times throughout his life. He wanted a vision of death to be something that didn¡¯t bring fear but brought hope.


    It¡¯s not an easy task, and not one that¡¯s going to be done anytime soon, even if it is possible, which it may not be. No one can be sure. It involves something called Dyson Spheres (or swarms). You can Google the term for additional information. Essentially, imagine a large, large, LARGE sphere constructed by humanity around our sun. Its interior is covered in solar panels, harvesting as much energy from the sun as possible.


    Do you have any idea how much energy that actually is? It¡¯s astronomical, pun intended. The sun bathes the planet in more energy in a couple of minutes than humanity uses all year. And that¡¯s just the energy of a single dot of the sun¡¯s total surface area. Imagine if we had a sphere around the sun that captured the energy and converted it for us to use. What would we even do with that amount of energy?


    We could power computers. And by the time we get around to having built a Dyson sphere/swarm, the computers of that time will be very efficient and very capable. Artificial intelligence will be very capable as well, as I¡¯m sure you can only imagine. A brain powered by a sun. People have already spoken about what that future civilization might do: build simulations.


    Simulations. I don¡¯t want to rehash tired old tales here, so Google it for information. In a nutshell: simulations can run that create new universes. That¡¯s not what I¡¯m interested in, though. What I¡¯m interested in will take a leap in our scientific understanding of the universe.


    I propose that these simulations will be able to recreate the past in totality. They¡¯ll be able to view it as it actually played out for us in history. Sure, we¡¯ve never had any time travelers come by to visit, barring John Titor, so maybe time travel is out, but playing the past like a documentary series isn¡¯t.


    The people of the future will be able to see everything about us. They¡¯ll have every atom accounted for, every quark. They¡¯ll be able to see into our brains and see the way our neurons fire. They¡¯ll be able to recreate and read our thoughts as they happen to us. They will have long since uncovered the mysteries of the human mind, understanding completely the way thoughts are formed, how pictures are formed in our head, et cetera.


    The future will finally be able to determine what consciousness is. Is it just an after effect of neurons firing? Some ghost in the machine? Is it gone for good once it¡¯s shut down?


    I propose that consciousness is something that can be targeted and extracted from the past and brought forth to our future¡¯s present. This is a step beyond a simple clone with all of our thoughts in them. That is not a suitable path towards truly resurrecting the dead, but simply a copying method. Star Trek fan theories talk about this a bit, saying each time a crewmate uses the transporter, their ¡®consciousness¡¯ ends and an exact replica of a person is created wherever they¡¯re beamed to, without any knowledge that their predecessor had died. This state of affairs is no doubt going to be figured out before we figure out how to truly resurrect the dead, of course, so by the time the true Victor Graves is truly brought back, he¡¯ll have a very old clone with his own memories there to greet him.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Why do I and Victor believe this? We don¡¯t, not entirely. We can¡¯t ever be for sure that it¡¯ll work that way. But we are hopeful for the future. We are hopeful because of what we see in the technology around us. Victor Graves is, after all, a bit of a tech bro.


    Look at technology around us, everything we¡¯ve created in the modern world, and wonder why it¡¯s even possible. What purpose does the fact of it being possible serve in an uncaring universe? The dinosaurs never needed it in the millions upon millions of years they roamed the earth, yet the possibility was there all the same. All the mathematics and science and applied engineering concepts and everything else has always been possible deep down in the code of the universe. It¡¯s as if it¡¯s made for us to figure out. It¡¯s like the world¡¯s hardest most time-consuming puzzle.


    Does that mean there¡¯s God? Who knows? Victor certainly doesn¡¯t. You can imagine, though, with him one day being president, he needs to be able to appeal to our Christian countrymen. And the truth of the matter is that he simply doesn¡¯t know what¡¯s going on behind the wall of stars that shine above us. And that¡¯s the story he sticks with. He is very hopeful, though, and very optimistic, based on the evidence he¡¯s seen, that one day, somehow, the resurrection of the dead will be possible, even if it doesn¡¯t make any sense to our current understanding of the universe.


    So what happens if that method of resurrection isn¡¯t actually possible? Is Victor just dead? No, Victor is always a pragmatist. As he comes up to the end of his life, he slowly starts fading out from the public view, at first from the general public, and then from the Graver public, and then from Graves Blood Dynasty and then even from his own personal family. Like a heart slowly dying, its beating getting more and more shallow and coming less often. And after the last appearance, he¡¯s just no longer seen again, not ever. Where did he go? No one knows. Well, I know. Me and the current patriarch/matriarch of the Graves Dynasty know.


    Antarctica.


    He froze his body.


    In fact, he sets it up that all of his bloodline will be shipped to Antarctica upon death, stacked in shipping containers on great cargo vessels. We can¡¯t know for certain the future will figure out the way to resurrect the dead like we¡¯ve outlined above, but we can do it an old fashioned way: freezing ourselves and at some point hoping medical science allows us to be unfrozen. Gravesrest, Antarctica. Where for miles and miles and miles, thousands of corpses are lined up, some young and nubile, some mangled, most old and intact. They lie there waiting, hoping that their offspring will someday have the ability to wake them up from their deep slumber.

 Entry Nine

    As we¡¯ve spoken about, Victor was a pretty busy guy, as you would expect from a 21<sup>st</sup> century Genghis Khan. How exactly does he do it, with just him and Gloriana? They don¡¯t do it on their own, of course. They have a team. Every great leader needs their lieutenants, their cabinet, their advisors. Victor is no different. Except in one way: Victor has a harem. All his closest confidants are women, his wives and concubines. Not legal wives, of course, as polygamy is illegal. He only has one true wife, and you already know her. Gloriana.


    Speaking of her, for as great as she is in her own right, what made her agree to allow Victor to have a harem? Why not monogamy? Doesn¡¯t this make her look bad, particularly if Gloriana doesn¡¯t have her own harem of guys? Isn¡¯t it a bit unrealistic? Doesn¡¯t it get in the way of the suspension of disbelief? Isn¡¯t this just mindless male fantasy?


    Getting permission to have a harem is no easy task, by any means. It was one of the most daunting challenges Victor has ever faced, but he accomplished it, much like he accomplishes everything he sets out to do.


    Victor wanted to have a harem ever since he was a young child. Maybe he watched Tenchi Muyo! when he was young or any other number of harem anime. He knew any great leader needed capable people around them to help and carry out their vision, so why not have those people be girls? He loved girls, after all. Yes, a harem seemed to be the way to go for young Victor, the only problem, of course, was convincing his future wife Gloriana of that.


    The argumentation goes as you can imagine it: a conqueror is always going to be popular with the ladies, it¡¯ll make him the envy of other men, he needed advisors so why not women, he loves girls. And a million more arguments. All of these were had with Gloriana when they were young. Some of them worked, some of them didn¡¯t, some of them she relented on eventually, some of them she had already agreed with.


    I think Gloriana had a female best friend when they were young and growing up, maybe a local, someone in the neighborhood they grew up in. Maybe that was Victor¡¯s first concubine. So they were actually a trio when they were plotting as kids to become 21<sup>st</sup> century conquerors. Having the first concubine be the first wife¡¯s best friend is a helpful position to be in, I think. Some versions of the Gravesverse has Victor having a sister, sometimes a twin, sometimes not. I was inspired to add that fact back when Game of Thrones was in its hay day, so maybe we won¡¯t have her exist for right now.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    Also, let¡¯s make Gloriana bisexual, just for the Hell of it. Remember, I¡¯m the God of this world, everything happens as I make it happen. And it is a fantasy, a male fantasy, at the end of the day. That¡¯s what the Gravesverse was in its original state: a power fantasy. It is just a bit of mental masturbation, so why not a harem?


    Even, then, though, I think we need something more. Another argument. I think the best argument Victor came up with was the argument for family. He wanted to have children, a lot of children. As we¡¯ve spoken about before, he ends up having thousands of children, but providing sperm isn¡¯t quite the same thing as personally having and raising children. What of his most immediate of families, the family he spends his own time with, the family he starts early on in his life? It takes a village to raise a child, after all.


    Why not have a large personal family full of plenty of half brothers and sisters? They can be homeschooled together, and socialize with one another (as I¡¯ve heard socialization is an important part of homeschooling). They¡¯ll be able to grow up together and have strong bonds. That, and they can be of the same generation. Have Victor get each of them pregnant at once so the babies pop out at roughly the same time.


    ¡°And I¡¯ll let you choose them!¡± Victor argued.


    Gloriana gets to choose the women that are brought into the fold. She gets to make her own little village of mothers and midwives and teachers and lovers.


    Gloriana finally agrees, and their best friend is added to the group as the first concubine. They keep this fact away from Gloriana and the best friend¡¯s parents for now. They keep this fact away from everybody for now. The best friend, of course, helps them create Minecraft, as do a few others they interview and find along the way. But nobody knows Victor¡¯s a near-polygamist at this point, and people just assume monogamy between the pair of them.


    Luckily, the best friend was capable in her own right. And growing up with V and G brought out her best qualities, too. So that¡¯s what his cabinet is, wives and concubines. They become concubines first, and wives later, some of them did anyway. But none of the wives were equal to Gloriana. They were expected to be great, as Alexander the Great was great: intellectual, beautiful, talented, capable, et cetera, et cetera. Most importantly, though, loyal. Loyal to a fault. Let Victor and Gloriana not have to worry about their home life at all, it should be a harmonious thing. Let them focus 100% on conquest. Loyalty was the best attribute to have, according to Victor and Gloriana Graves.


    It''s easy to see how this can be used in a dystopian way, of course. And it can certainly be viewed that way, but it doesn¡¯t necessarily have to be. What would make you be loyal to someone? What would make you assume a person¡¯s best intentions? What would make you give someone another chance? Loyalty is not a bad word, not a bad trait, if done with wisdom.

 Entry Ten

    So let¡¯s talk about the Gravers. The word fan and fanatic are related to one another. And there are all sorts of fans out there. Fair weather fans, hardcore fans, and everything in between. There are fanbases and fan conventions. Fans organize on their own, of course. It is as natural as moss growing on a tree.


    Victor and Gloriana have seen the power of fans. They¡¯ve seen fan conventions, fan forums, fan Twitter, and everything else. They also knew how powerful people could be when organized and put together. They already had fans. Fans of their video game, fans of their YouTube videos, and later fans of their music and music videos. They decided early on that they were going to need to weaponize their fanbase.


    They needed to turn them into a machine.


    We spoke a bit before about People Power. This is that. How do you get People Power? You¡¯ve got to get people to work for you. Money is the easiest way to do that, but not the only way. If someone likes you, they can usually be convinced to help you out in some ways. Of course, if you lean into that too much they¡¯re going to get tired of it eventually, depending on how much they actually do like you. But if you make it an ¡°I¡¯ll help you and you¡¯ll help me¡± kind of situation, then you can reliably work that back and forth for eternity with most people. Tit for tat.


    ¡°And, so, today we announce we want to take our YouTube videos to the next level! And we need your help to do that!¡±


    Victor and Gloriana Graves wanted people to be able to watch their YouTube videos in movie theaters.


    And they had gotten quite popular at this time, them having already sold Minecraft and having started using the billions of dollars they got from it to make even greater YouTube videos. They had started making a name for themselves in online music and also music videos. They used their considerable wealth to work up enough songs to make a full music album. What songs were on there? Gotye¡¯s Somebody I Used to Know, of course, as in this universe it was theirs and Gotye didn¡¯t exist. There were other poppy hits, too.


    Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if they were talented enough to be their own songwriters, making legitimately loved pop songs that was dripping with Victor and Gloriana¡¯s Geist. That¡¯s a bit too much, though. They¡¯re Mary Sues enough as it is, aren¡¯t they? We¡¯ll have them just keep paying to make songs, now giving general directions to the song writers they hired about what the song should be about. And it wouldn¡¯t be the Gravesverse if we didn¡¯t steal ideas from the real world. So maybe they had songs that were like Rihanna¡¯s Umbrella, Katy Perry¡¯s Dark Horse, Lana Del Rey¡¯s Young and Beautiful. We¡¯ll just say those songs never got made by the original artist in the Gravesverse, they were made by V&G


    They were pop hits, but not some technical masterpieces. Just radio friendly hits to help their celebrity.


    They also made music videos, and this was the big key for them. The videos they made for their own music were somewhat simplistic compared to what I¡¯m about to describe, not much different than music videos for pop songs today, except maybe with a little bit of V and G¡¯s personal style added in there.


    The music videos they made of talented artists, though, were getting to be really something to behold. They really threw their money and time and energy into those. Utilizing everything they knew about movie making and cinematography and camera tricks and everything else.


    And, my God, were they actually original ideas?


    In the Gravesverse?The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    They were.


    I remember making the music videos myself, prior to my first psychosis. They were stunning and beautiful and unlike anything you¡¯d ever seen. They were truly different.


    And here I¡¯ll need to talk a bit about myself. I was having incredibly vivid daydreams at the time, as I was (unbeknownst to me then) descending into legitimate mental illness. They were like dreaming while awake, except I was able to control them in ways you can¡¯t control your dreams. I was controlling the finest details about them.


    I¡¯d listen to a piece of music over and over and over again and just have imagery play out in my brain. I always tried to keep it tied to realism, of course. It was all within possibility, all filmable, even if the odds of capturing what I was envisioning on camera was incredibly low. I wish I could show you what I made, I really, sincerely do. Because it¡¯d make me fucking rich.


    I could take the time to describe it for you, but the music videos were very, very elaborate. They were very ¡®sensory overload¡¯. I could take a thousand words to describe half of a scene over the course of half a second, and you wouldn¡¯t be able to hold it all in your brain anyway. Not that you¡¯re dumb, of course, but just it¡¯s too much to write. That and you¡¯re not galloping towards the cliff at the edge of sanity.


    Instead, I¡¯ll give you the broadstrokes. And I¡¯ll give you an example. Come back to that video we mentioned before, Power by Kanye West. It¡¯s all done in one shot and its very busy. It¡¯s made using mainly computers instead of trick photography. But, the music video never really got all that popular.


    Imagine, instead, a similar camera movement, of slowly panning out from a subject except its done in real time. And listen to Famous by Kanye West for this one. It¡¯s Victor and Gloriana Graves sitting at their desk again, and the camera slowly pans out from them. Very slowly. Very, very slowly. Victor and Gloriana had both been talking during a rather humdrum video. They were outside. But now they were quiet and just staring at the camera. And they continued to stare at it as it slowly pans back. There¡¯s a record player on the table before them with a crowned skull on it spinning around at the speed a record player normally does. There¡¯s also an old fashioned clock there, too. Or maybe a grandfather clock is behind them. As the camera continues to pan back, Kanye West¡¯s Famous begins to play, and then something curious happens. Suddenly, when Kanye West¡¯s Famous¡¯s beat breaks, after the part with Rihanna singing, the record player and clock speed up, but Victor and Gloriana are still stuck like statues staring at the camera.


    The video speed picks up, you see, its playing in fast forward, faster and faster, but still Victor and Gloriana Graves are just sitting there not moving and just looking at the camera. The sun begins to set behind them. And the camera still pans out, a little, little bit faster this time. As it pans out more, you discover that there are lights on the ground around it, like lamps, and they¡¯re spinning around slowly as well. And still Victor and Gloriana Graves sit and stare at the camera. The sun is really setting now and its getting dark, the light from the spinning lamps takes over the outside scene. The light plays on the pair¡¯s faces, and still they don¡¯t move. And then, after the second ¡®I made that bitch famous,¡¯ where the beat breaks again, they suddenly stand up.


    They start walking towards the camera, except the video is still being played back at a super sonic speed, but they look like they¡¯re walking normally, meaning in reality, they¡¯re walking incredibly, incredibly slowly. And they¡¯re walking towards the camera. And they¡¯re coming up on it, and still the camera pans back, and you notice the camera is on a track and being moved by automation.


    Does that paint a picture for you? I¡¯m reading back through this and I¡¯m not sure if I¡¯m conveying my ideas clearly or not, it may just all be nonsense you¡¯re reading right now. The music video lasts the entire length of the song, and it gets more and more busy and more and more strange as time goes on, increasing in stakes. We¡¯ve gone well past our thousand words, so I¡¯m going to have to wrap this up for now. If you want, though, I can (try) to further explain what happens in the video on a later post if you can imagine what I¡¯m trying to convey and are interested in seeing its rising action, climax, and final scene. It really was beautiful when I made it, I assure you of that. And if it doesn¡¯t seem that way when you¡¯re reading it, just know it¡¯s that way for the people of the fantasy world I¡¯ve made. It makes them famous. Really famous. Psy¡¯s Gangnam Style doesn¡¯t hold a candle to it in term of virality. That¡¯s 1400 words. We¡¯ll talk a bit more about the Gravers next time, too, as we kind of got sidetracked. Time to go.

 Entry Eleven

    So, Gravers. That¡¯s where we¡¯re at. In the beginning, they were fans of Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ Minecraft, then of their YouTube channel, and then fans of the music, and fans of their music videos. Currently, just average fans. The same kind of fans that anyone popular has. A few hardcore ones, plenty of normal ones, and a lot of fair-weather fans who just like Victor And Gloriana¡¯s vibe and check in every now and then. Once the Kanye West Famous video is released, though, that changes things. That¡¯s a premium music video. That one is considered a triumph of art. It went viral, to say the least. And, again, if I didn¡¯t paint a good enough picture of it in my last entry, just know that the people of this fantasy world really like what they saw in it. They wanted more. And they¡¯re going to get it, too.


    Victor and Gloriana Graves put out the call for help. They release a video essay detailing their plans with the movie industry. They want to show music videos of the kind the world had just seen, but in movie theaters, for people to be able to watch them on the big screen. They also didn¡¯t want to be taken advantage of by Hollywood film distributors, whom they accused of being corrupt and slimy. Instead, the distribution of the films will be handled by Victor and Gloriana Graves personally, but there¡¯s a problem.


    They don¡¯t have a distribution network. They will have to build one and build it quickly.


    As an aside, what you¡¯re about to read is how I originally envisioned it, back in the 2010s. I don¡¯t know if, since then, film distribution has gotten simpler. Maybe movie theaters are able to simply connect to the internet and download a film to play at their location. At the time I was originally doing it, with millennial V and G, I had it that distribution was still something that had to be done physically, as in, bringing the films to a movie theater directly. We¡¯ll keep it that way for the time being, as it¡¯s more interesting in my opinion.


    We might be getting a bit ahead of ourselves at this point. Let me step back and say that they had a film ready, ¡°Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ Music Video Extravaganza.¡± Around an hour of straight music videos, about a half hour of unique content with each video played twice since the videos were so busy and jampacked with visuals, along with some brief video essays and a short pilot for a show they made added on as a double feature as a bonus. But in some versions of the Gravesverse, it¡¯s just the music videos for this first one.This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    This had all been filmed by now and had been manufactured and ready to send out to the movie theaters. There are over 2000 movie theaters in the United States, and they each needed to get copies of the film to play. Could they have sent them by UPS? I suppose, but that¡¯d be costly and it¡¯d take a lot of time to package and print out a label and send out, and Victor and Gloriana Graves were always trying to save money, being savvy businesspeople. And in truth, at this time, they didn¡¯t have much liquid cash reserves, having spent most of it on the music videos and the pilot for the tv show. That and they were purposefully setting themselves up to weaponize their fan base, as you¡¯ll see.


    They put out a call to their fans. V and G wanted the fans to meet up with each other in person at their most local movie theater on a certain day at a certain time and to bring their phones. It should also be noted that by this time they had gotten an email list together of the fans.


    On the chosen hour of the chosen day, across the country, V&G¡¯s fans met up at every single movie theater. They were told to meet in the parking lot and to try not to get kicked out, as some movie theaters would have had more Gravers at them than others. Once they were there, everyone received an email directing them to a link to twitch, the live streaming service. There was a static image of a skull with a crown being broadcast on the live feed along with a message to turn their volume up and wait.


    The fans were a bit bemused by this, being in a group with each other in person and having their phones all in sync and broadcasting the same audio, which at the time was a prerecorded message to please stand by, done up in a dramatic and over-the-top way. After a few minutes to allow everyone to get connected, Victor came over and started broadcasting his voice. The screen was still the static image of their emblem, with Victor not wanting people to be looking at their phones, but rather each other, and just listening.


    ¡°Welcome, welcome! And thank you again for coming,¡± Victor said, his voice being transmitted to thousands of people across the country, the fans were once more bemused when they heard the effect of Victor¡¯s voice being piped out of each of their phones. ¡°This is officially the first broadcast to you fans like this, and we have a lot to talk¡­-¡°


    Victor talked. And he talked. And he talked. But he did so with his characteristic charm and in an overly bombastic way, his speech having been written and rewritten and carefully edited over the preceding weeks, trying to keep it as entertaining as possible so people wouldn¡¯t get bored.


    He spoke about his goals in life, then. What he wanted to do. And he needed help to meet those goals. But he wasn¡¯t expecting to get help and offer nothing in return.


    That¡¯s about a thousand here, so we¡¯ll continue it in the next entry.

 Entry Twelve

    Victor Graves didn¡¯t believe he was a user of people; he believed in tit for tat. You help me, I¡¯ll help you. He believed this was one of the cornerstones of human civilization, so keep that in mind as we progress into the lore further. He explained this much while he was talking to the Gravers on the day he first rallied them.


    What did he want from the Gravers? For now, he just wanted them to work as his distribution network for Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ Music Video Extravaganza. What was he promising in exchange? A few things. He offered both concrete things as well as pie in the sky. He told them that he believed the music videos he had made would be unlike anything they had ever seen before, which was true.


    He understood this was a big ask for his Gravers, wanting them to drive to the area where he had the physical copies of the movies and drive them back to their local movie theater. That¡¯s a lot of time and gas. He sold it as a journey to take, a modern day quest to complete. It was like in World of Warcraft: an NPC requires you to go fetch something for them and they give you a reward. In this case it was more experience rather than gold.


    He said that he¡¯d have a little convention set up for them when they arrived at the location of the physical movies, where they¡¯d get to meet the two of them. He also prepared something a little interesting, a collector¡¯s item. What was it, exactly? A piece of paper. It would be an IOU. For those Gravers that found the time to come collect the physical copies of the Extravaganza, they¡¯d receive a piece of paper. They would be able to buy the paper piece for whatever price they¡¯d like, even 0 money and it¡¯d be marked down in a database. This would then be used to send them a mystery collector¡¯s edition item.


    Victor rather liked this idea, the idea of not having to overproduce something while trying to divine what the market would bear. Instead, he was just able to produce the exact amount he needed (with a few spare just in case). He would use this strategy quite a bit over his life, as he was big on the idea of producing less waste. He also liked the idea of being able to buy a collector¡¯s item based on the amount of money you currently had to spend on it.


    The Gravers listened to him talk and were amused by the idea, for the most part. A decent sized chunk of them agreed to come, although there was a significant portion that couldn¡¯t due to obligations or finances. Victor advised them to carpool and make a genuine adventure out of it, and, if the movie was a success, and if the Gravers enjoyed the time they spent doing it, he¡¯d do it again in the future. He told them that he didn¡¯t intend for his star to set until he was an old man, and that he¡¯d be around for decades to come. Then he sent them a link to his website that allowed them to purchase an official Graver¡¯s Membership Card, again for any price, including zero.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    This would formalize the fan base, making them an organization, an institution. A club, united by an interest in art and V&G¡¯s own charisma. This was the beginning of the Gravers, and when that name was first used officially.


    Their first goal as Gravers, however, was getting the movie theaters on board with his idea. Most were already open to the idea, having read the news and having seen their video for Kanye West¡¯s Power themselves, but there were holdouts. There was a method to doing things in the movie business, and V&G were going above and beyond it.


    V&G advised his Gravers to socialize with one another a bit and then elect a temporary speaker amongst their group, it didn¡¯t really matter who, just a single person to speak with V&G¡¯s voice. There was a pause in the speech for a few minutes as they did this. When Victor came back  on, he gave them the instructions. He advised them to find the mover or shaker that was in charge of their local theater, or as high of a person as they could, and to have them play a YouTube video that had just been uploaded. That video outlined his plan, which he¡¯d go over during the live broadcast with the Gravers.


    There were several points he brought up, but the most important points was that the movie theaters were allowed to show the Extravaganza at no cost. They didn¡¯t owe Victor a cut of the money, but they were strongly encouraged to do so if turned out to be profitable for them, and that they could do so through V&G¡¯s Patreon or PayPal account, which had been set up in the early days of their Minecraft. This was a gamble, but one Victor wanted to take. First, he¡¯d see if it actually worked, and second, he didn¡¯t really have the infrastructure to negotiate with the over 2000 movie theaters across the country. That and he really wanted every theater to play it. It was also good press.


    He also said to the movie theaters that if he was as successful as he currently hoped he was going to be, that he had plans to continue this sort of thing for the rest of his life, making movies, and so it was good to establish a mutually beneficial arrangement now. Victor said that those theaters who sent their fair share of the profits to V&G, which he didn¡¯t specify specifically what it would be, would be remembered, would be given favor.


    When was all this going to happen? There was always a sense of urgency with Victor Graves, he was dying, you see. Not because he had cancer or any disease, but simply because all human beings die eventually. Everyone was in the process of dying from the moment they were born. Victor felt this far more than most others in the world, he was determined to do something with his life, and to, with any level of luck, return from the dead one day. That sense of urgency compelled him to always push himself, and others, as much as possible in as little time as possible. The Gravers were to come pick up the physical copy that very day, once they confirmed with the theater owner that they¡¯d allow the movie to be shown.

 Entry Thirteen

    And so our young conquerors had rallied their Gravers, had simultaneously negotiated with each of the thousands of movie theater owners in the country, and had started the Gravers¡¯ first quest: to bring back physical copies of the movie to their local theater.


    I don¡¯t think I mentioned it before but Victor and Gloriana were LA natives. There is a version of the Gravesverse where they were originally from Texas, but I think LA is better for the direction I¡¯m going with this particular lore. The pair had had the movies manufactured, either through a traditional Hollywood factory or maybe somewhere in China, and had shipped them to the center of the country, to Kansas.


    And so, the pair had a shipping container or two located in a rented out field in Kansas. They had a skeleton crew, too. Victor had picked up several concubines during the time prior to and the time during their creation of Minecraft and had even made a few of them into wives. Not wives equal to his Gloriana, of course, but a step up from concubine. I¡¯ll have to go into how he convinced these 21<sup>st</sup> century women to come along with him as his concubines at some point, but in a nutshell he spoke to them about his true ambitions in life, what he planned to do. These concubines weren¡¯t just idle trophies, either. They were his executives. They helped him with everything, from acting as a personal assistant to being a programmer or artist or community manager or even an accountant or lawyer, depending on their education. These were smart and capable women.


    They had also gotten to Kansas a bit earlier and had done a meet and greet or signing (V&G had published a book by this point in some versions) with local Kansan fans and had rallied them to their cause prior to putting out the beck and call to the Graver Nation. This allowed them to set up the ¡®convention¡¯ that they had promised and would allow them to distribute the physical copies of the movies once the Gravers started to arrive.


    The convention was¡­ well¡­ not great. I was inspired by the real-life event of DashCon, which if you¡¯re not familiar was considered to be one of the worst conventions of all time. So the field where they hosted things had a ball pit in a kiddie pool and a bounce house and that was about it. The reasons for this wasn¡¯t because V&G were incompetent, though. They hadn¡¯t had the most time to prepare, being so busy with the making of the movie itself in the lead up to the release, so they decided they were going to try to make it as bad as they possibly could.


    Their strategy was a success. The Gravers were, for the most part, amused by the poor quality and it started to trend well on Twitter. Aside from the ¡®festivities,¡¯ though, there were several long tables set up and roped off walkways for people to funnel into and out of. Gravers, over the course of two or so days, arrived at the location, organized into the groups they arrived with, and came through and purchased their collector¡¯s edition IOU paper for whatever amount they wished to pay and would have their names entered into a database, as detailed in the previous chapter.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    They got the physical copy of the movies and enough for their local theater and a few extra just in case there were manufacturing errors. Then they went down the line to meet Victor and Gloriana Graves, who had a concubine acting as a photographer with a custom built camera. The photographer would take a picture and a code would print out on a receipt. The code on the receipt would direct them to a website where that picture would be later posted, allowing them to save it. This piece of technology sounded more interesting back when I originally came up with it, back when the internet was a much newer place. Victor and Gloriana were always coming up with these little inventions to streamline things.


    The meeting with Victor and Gloriana was a brief affair, as the two had explained to the Gravers in an email. They had to manage their time well. They¡¯d come as a group and V&G would each have a custom built stamping machine that they¡¯d use. This would allow either of the pair to put a photograph of themselves in the machine and stamp it with their signature along with a code which would indicate when the autograph was created and also to verify its authenticity. First Gloriana would use her machine to stamp the photograph and then hand it to Victor to do the same with his machine. This was mostly considered to be an amusing way to receive an autograph at the time.


    The machine they use to autograph would get more streamlined and technological throughout the course of their lives. Again, it seemed more impressive to me when I first came up with the idea, but it might be a bit dry to read about in today¡¯s age. After the autograph, they¡¯d get a quick picture. Not a selfie that the Graver took themselves, but one from the photographer as outlined above. As an added bonus, they also received a silicone bracelet with ¡®Graver¡¯ on it and a ring pop (V&G had shared the story of their engagement ring while on a press tour some years before). These bracelets were each marked with a unique code and would one day be worth quite a bit of money.


    And then the Gravers were allowed a few moments to partake in the festivities, of which there was very little to do (this being a nice side benefit from V&G¡¯s perspective. Get them in and out fast) and then they were off again. Back from whence they came. They came in round the clock, 24 hours over the course of those few days. V&G didn¡¯t show any level of tiredness, they had prepared for this.


    And so this was the first Quest for the Gravers, of many, many more to come. There were, of course, a lot of hiccups and stumbling blocks and problems that arose, but V&G were prepared for that fact and responded to each one as best they could. But having hiccups was considered to be a feature in the Graver Institution, a selling point. It meant they were doing new things. It meant they doing things at full speed. Victor and Gloriana spent much time talking about the nature of small problems and how one should expect them to arise in life. It was a feature of the universe, of the laws of physics. That law would be on full display for the entire life of Victor Graves, as he continued doing new things at breakneck speeds.

 Entry Fourteen

    Gravers, yes. I¡¯ve spoken a bit about the Graves Family Dynasty, the ruling institution, but I haven¡¯t spoken much about the Gravers themselves. What were they? They were an institution V&G created, their soldiers. I mentioned before that Victor was a Genghis Khan, but he was not a military man. Conquest in the 21<sup>st</sup> century isn¡¯t just about violence (not that there isn¡¯t widespread violence in our time), it¡¯s about affecting change. It¡¯s still about obtaining power, but what is power, truly?


    It¡¯s simply a means of expressing one¡¯s will, namely by getting other people to do your will for you. This can be done through violence or laws or with money, as we¡¯ve mentioned, but it can also be done through voluntary exchange. A president is powerful, a CEO is powerful, but a community leader is also powerful. A wise man is also powerful. If you have good ones, your parents and family and friends might have a powerful influence on you. And all power is simply influence. It doesn¡¯t have to be bad (although we will still be going back and forth between the utopic and the dystopic, have no fear. The first thing something must be is interesting).


    In the beginning, the Gravers were simply a weaponized fan base, used as a blunt tool to set up a quick and dirty distribution network, but they grew into more than that over the course of Victor and Gloriana¡¯s lives. The pair had planned all of this out in their childhood. They had seen the power of community spirit in action. They had read their histories.


    If I describe here what the Graver institution was at the time of V&G¡¯s death, contrasting it with the humble beginnings I have just described in the previous chapter, you might lose your suspension of disbelief. There were great changes, but it was all very gradual. All a trickling effect.


    One of the things that¡¯s said about the world of today is that it lacks a sense of community. As church membership dwindles, as the town square is largely forgotten, as people live more insular lives, as they work from home, socialization is something that isn¡¯t happening very well. It happens, to be sure, but not like it was. Back during the middle ages, one might be born into a community and know, growing up, that they¡¯d be dealing with the same people for the rest of their lives. These people would also be their only real source of entertainment, of commiseration, of pride. This is missing from today, and Victor and Gloriana Graves knew that.


    The Gravers were set up to be a social club, the likes of which the world had never seen, one that was only possible with today¡¯s technology. History abhors a vacuum, after all, and this lack of community and purpose is prime real estate for a charismatic figure, regardless of whether they¡¯re great and good or great and terrible, or some combination of the two. But let me reiterate that it was the technology. Do you know about the printing press? How it shaped the world around it? Google that if you don¡¯t. It took some time from the time the printing press was invented to when it actually changed things, though. These things take time. The internet has become like the printing press. It has changed things. It will continue to change things.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    Victor and Gloriana Graves, being agents of change, knew that the internet was their primary tool, more so than anything else. Khan¡¯s army had horse archery that allowed it to conquer the world; the Graves¡¯ army would have the internet. And, like the gladius was so iconic a tool in the Roman world of Caesar, so too would the smartphone become the ubiquitous tool of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. If the symbol of the fantasy genre is a sword, then the symbol of the Gravesverse genre is a phone.


    It was time to develop the app. Sometimes in my imaginings, this comes before the first rallying cry to the Gravers, sometimes after. It doesn¡¯t really matter here which came first, just that it was created around the time Victor and Gloriana Graves began their work in earnest. It connected them to each other and organized them into units, based around their local movie theater.  It also assigned them to one of three teams or factions or whatever the best word for it is.


    There were Orange Gravers, Purple Gravers, and Green Gravers. Pumpkins, Vampires, and Goblins (to lessen the impact of the whole death-obsession thing, there is a strong Halloween theme associated with the Graver aesthetic. I might have failed to mention that when I first brought up Minecraft).


    In some cases, the teams split up the movie theater unit, in other cases, the entire movie theater unit belonged to one team. This type of thing is a recurring motif in Graves philosophy, the idea of experimentation. Which of these two methods would lead to the greatest outcome? Victor and Gloriana didn¡¯t know, so they¡¯d try both methods and see which one was better. Better at what, though? Being a Graver itself meant fostering a sense of national community, whereas being a part of a movie theater unit meant to foster a sense of local community. The teams were a midpoint between the two. They were meant to be something like sports teams, except not geographically determined. Institutions within institutions. ¡°Plans within plans.¡± V&G planned to foster a friendly competitive spirit between the teams themselves.


    And so now they needed uniforms, a sense of identity. Yes, Graver Nation is set up to be an identity group. Victor and Gloriana Graves were not immune from being affected by the political happenings of the mid to late 2010s and early 2020s. I haven¡¯t spoken much about this yet, but V&G existed in a copy of the world we ourselves live in, with all its people and problems (although I have changed a few things around).


    There¡¯s another thousand.

 Entry Fifteen

    Shall we continue talking about the Gravers or shall we get back to the chronology and talk about the movie? There¡¯s so many directions we could go in, so many paths to take. That¡¯s what I love about writing, but it¡¯s frustrating. I want to just get it all out there, and I do mean ¡®all.¡¯


    I think before I talk more about the Gravers we should talk a bit more about what Victor and Gloriana Graves did to win their hearts. And they did not win all of their hearts, by any means. Remember, this is supposed to be a bit hyper realistic. He won some hearts, with others it was a business deal, and with others it was just a cool thing to do, and with others they were just going with it for fashion¡¯s sake.


    There are many levels to being a Graver, some are more hardcore than others, as fans in the real world tend to be. Victor and Gloriana both knew this about people. They wanted a space that appealed to as broad a range of them as possible, while making the hardcore fans feel rewarded for their loyalty without making the more casual fans feel like they were being overlooked.


    It starts with two axioms: 1. All Gravers are Equal 2. Some Gravers are more equal than others. This is, of course, in reference to Animal Farm by George Orwell. Irony is a big theme in the Graves Spirit. It also works well for us in constructing a complicated man, one who stands somewhere between the poles of evil and beneficent.


    He explains this to them, of course, what he means specifically. He doesn¡¯t go too philosophical at this time, as he¡¯s speaking to all of them and he doesn¡¯t want to bore them. He just makes it known that he¡¯s going to try to make an institution in which there¡¯s a genuine effort to achieve the Proper Balance amongst its members.


    Pay attention to those words: Proper and Balance. Sometimes they are together, other times they are on their own or with other words. These are important concepts in the Gravesian philosophy. A scale is added to their personal flag at some point, for ¡®Balance¡¯; and for ¡®Proper,¡¯ it¡¯s either going to be a checkmark or a neat bowtie. I haven¡¯t decided. But we¡¯re getting too into the nitty gritty.


    He also asks for patience and understanding as he works out the kinks, the hiccups, with the institution. As he tries to make things better. He mentions how Minecraft began as a pile of shit and it was only with time and significant effort that he alchemically transmorphed it into the delectable chocolate it became. He needs time to work things out.


    And so the Gravers were told all of this after they retrieved the physical copies of the movies. They returned to their local movie theaters and delivered them unto the owners, the managers.


    Recall, they were given these movies for free and were not expected to pay V&G any cut, just urged to do so if it turned out to be profitable for them. Some of the movie theaters played the movies, others waited to show midnight screenings at first so as not to interfere with the movies that were already in theaters. Victor and Gloriana had purposefully chosen a date where there wouldn¡¯t be much competition, where they wouldn¡¯t have stepped on the toes of any Hollywood institutions, them needing to stay as hidden and unthreatening as possible (so that they can later dominate/conquer/chop Hollywood).The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    There were two three four components of Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ Music Video Extravaganza (at least there is in my current recollections): 1. Music Videos, two of each in the Extravaganza, as everyone likes a rewatch of something beautiful. 2. Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ Fatebook, Pilot Episode, a relatively short episode of a series they wanted to work on, the first fictional work of their career (in this version of the universe), 3. Gravesian Philosophy videos, 4. Commercials, custom made commercials from Victor and Gloriana Graves themselves. They were for specific products but they hadn¡¯t actually negotiated any business deals with the corporations who owned those products. They were hoping the companies would just give them some money once they saw how successful the Extravaganza was, or at least that would give them some ammunition to come negotiate with the next Extravaganza.


    Should I say something about the music videos in the Extravaganza? These were largely visual affairs, as you can imagine. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all, but the music videos were shot at 24 frames per second. I may at some point describe them, but as of yet, as I write this, I haven¡¯t got a single reader, so the question I asked in one of the previous chapters, about whether my description of Kanye West¡¯s Famous music video was at all interesting, hasn¡¯t been answered yet. But I will give you some broad (very broad) strokes.


    They were visual masterpieces. The lighting, the busy-ness, the attention to detail. Dare I say it reminded me of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? That, too, was detailed, beautiful, and full of context for the medieval people it was painted for. They¡¯d look up and see the stories that they spent their whole lives listening to, the stories that meant more to them than anything, come to life.


    It was heavy on the symbolism. Heavy-handed, as a matter of fact. Recall the symbol of Victor and Gloriana Graves is a skull with a crown on it. Subtlety was not their strong suit. But there was so many symbols flying by so fast that it didn¡¯t matter.


    And what music did they choose? They were fond of Kanye West, true, but this wasn¡¯t the Kanye West Music Video Extravaganza, it was theirs. There was a time I could have answered that question, in detail.


    There was a time where I could have explained every image in every single music video. A time when my maladaptive daydreams were at their strongest, captivating me like a serpent is captivated by a snake charmer. Since the psychoses, though, and I had three of them that sent me to the psych ward, I¡¯ve been medicated and haven¡¯t had them anywhere nearly as strong. My imagination, at this point, is a bit below average. It feels like sobriety, and it is. It¡¯s not really ¡®fun,¡¯ but it is, at least, ¡®healthy.¡¯ But that¡¯s enough about me.


    Kanye West¡¯s All of the Lights


    Led Zeppelin¡¯s Stairway to Heaven (a long one)


    Kendrick Lamar¡¯s m.A.A.d. city


    Les Miserables¡¯ Look Down (Beggars) from the movie


    AC/DC¡¯s Thunderstruck


    One of the Hamilton songs (we will have to talk at length about Hamilton at some point)


    There were others, but those are what comes to mind now, those are some that I can remember bits and pieces of.


    More to come.

 Entry Sixteen

    Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ Music Video Extravaganza was a resounding success. It went viral. It went gangbusters. It smashed box office records. It was the talk of the media for some time. Or at least that¡¯s how it worked in my fantasy world.


    It was a perfect storm for a media sensation: 1. It was a hit movie, 2. It was a unique movie, 3. It was a legitimately artistic work, 4. It was created by incredibly young entrepreneurs, self-made billionaires, an orphan, 5. It had already generated news after V&G had rallied the Gravers, 6. It had been given away for free to the movie theaters, which were empty shells of what they could have been, being sucked dry by Hollywood, 7. There were more angles, but that¡¯s enough to talk about.


    The Victor and Gloriana Graves Flex on Hollywood was next, an after party hosted some few weeks past the movie¡¯s premiere. A block party to be hosted at midnight central time at the movie theaters parking lot, the place where it had all started.


    This time, they¡¯d play the Twitch stream not just on the phones, but through their car speakers via Bluetooth. Music played for them, intercut with V&G talking up what they had all accomplished. Music from the Extravaganza, and other music, too. In some versions of the universe, great effort is given towards getting permission to use the music in the few weeks leading up to the block party.


    The Gravers are mobilized online, asked to lobby their favorite artists for permission to possibly use their music for V&G¡¯s Twitch and more Extravaganzas. Every musical artist. The Gravers spammed them like no tomorrow. An excel document was created on a Google Doc that listed every musical artist in existence. Once proof of permission had been found, they¡¯d be crossed off on the spreadsheet. They didn¡¯t get everyone of course, and it started irritating the musicians who didn¡¯t want to participate, getting spammed and hated on by a mob of unruly Gravers. The Graves told everyone to stand down a few days prior to the block party, so as not to irritate everyone online.


    ¡°¡­And who do we have to thank for all this success? You guys. I really mean that. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I¡¯m not trying to downplay my and Gloriana¡¯s own accomplishments. I think we did good, real good. But this success wouldn¡¯t have been possible without you Gravers. Do you see what we can do when we organize? Do you see what we can do when we¡­-¡°


    Organization. A powerful, powerful force. The ability to (quite literally) move mountains. The ability to (literally) reach for the stars. Victor talked this up a bit during the Block Party, what they could accomplish together. He quoted Spiderman in saying that great power comes with great responsibility. He said that if they ever felt like Victor had gone off the deep end, they could always step back and away from him. He said that he wanted it so that they could communicate to him, in mass, about the direction he¡¯s taking with his career as a 21<sup>st</sup> century conqueror and he would answer them. He said he wanted them to become a Gundam, with him as the pilot. A great machine. An enhancer of one¡¯s abilities.


    Victor told them they needed a place to meet, first and foremost, and to try and get permission from their local movie theater to either be able to meet in the parking lot or even inside the building every so often. Most of the theater owners agreed, seeing a good business opportunity with this.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    Victor said, though, that he wanted to go further than that. That he wanted this to be a bona fide social club, something they could belong to for the rest of their lives. Something where they could make friends, organize events, whatever else. He talked to them about establishing Chapterhouses. Guild Halls. Gravers Dens. He had a proposal in mind, and it was just a proposal. If they didn¡¯t want to go for it, they didn¡¯t have to. And if a portion wanted to go for it and a portion of them didn¡¯t, then that portion that wanted to stay out didn¡¯t have to either.


    He wanted to buy property. A small property in the area of each movie theater in the country. A place for them to call their own, to meet up and chill, but also to organize and plan. Victor said he wanted to purchase all of these pieces of property himself and allow the Gravers to use them. The only problem was he didn¡¯t have enough money to do that. V&G had spent considerable money on the Extravaganza, and didn¡¯t charge the movie theaters to play the movie, although money was rolling in now, but they wanted to use that money for the next Extravaganza, for Fatebook.


    His proposal was this: he wanted them to, collectively, purchase the properties on their own, each paying a little bit, whatever they could. And they didn¡¯t have to pay anything if they didn¡¯t want. The only catch was, he wanted them all to do it in his name. He¡¯d own the property outright, even though they¡¯re the ones that are paying for it.


    The Gravers were feeling a bit critical about this. Billionaires weren¡¯t popular in the world at the time of this. They were seen as money grubbing Lord of the Rings¡¯ style dragons, sitting on vast hordes of wealth and roasting anyone who so much as eyeballed it. Some derided this idea immediately, particularly on Twitter.


    ¡°Don¡¯t let them fool you,¡± one commenter posted, ¡°they¡¯re rich fucks now, they¡¯ll take your money and won¡¯t give it back.¡±


    Victor told them about a system he wanted to experiment with, and bigged up the idea of experimentation, harkening back to the founding of the nation, when states themselves were supposed to be like petri dishes, that it was important to try new things in the world, to see if improvements could be made. He wanted to a create a system that would allow him to govern. He said if the property was bought in the Gravers¡¯ names themselves, then he would eventually be bogged down always having to bargain collectively with thousands of people at once each time he needed to use the property to do something.


    He needed the ability, like Julius Caesar, to make decisions about things, sometimes without consulting the Gravers, at least in the matter of property.


    Many were still skeptical, but there was enough of them that buying a small property for the mass to use would be actually really cheap for the individual Graver. It was the sheer scale of the operation that allowed them to do this. They were really, really popular at this time. The talk of the town. Of every town. And they capitalized on that fact. What¡¯s a mortgage when it¡¯s been divided a hundred times? Two hundred? I haven¡¯t worked out how many Gravers there were, but there were a lot. It was a bona fide youth movement (although anyone of any age could join, it was mainly the young that had participated, them being plugged in to popular culture and having more free time to spend).


    They were still skeptical, but it was so cheap, wasn¡¯t it? And they could quit paying whenever they wanted to. The houses were in V&G¡¯s name, not theirs. The onus was on Victor to convince them to keep paying. For the most part, the housing initiative was a success. A few holdouts, to be sure, and a not insignificant amount of Gravers that decided they were going to purchase the house in their own name, regardless of what Victor had said.


    So they had the organization, and now they had property to conduct it in. All was going well for Victor and Gloriana Graves.

 Entry Seventeen

    Let¡¯s talk about Fatebook. Have you guessed what we¡¯re ripping off this time?


    Think of the name: Fatebook.


    Think of a series.


    It¡¯s an anime series.


    It would have originally been popular either at the time or not long prior to when I was having my maladaptive daydreams, in the 2010s.


    Have you figured it out? I¡¯ll tell you now. It¡¯s Death Note. And what the fuck is Death Note? You should Google it if you¡¯re not already familiar with it. It is, in essence, an anime series about a notebook that, once you write someone¡¯s name in it, they die. Simple as that. The series is a bit of a mental game of cat and mouse about the owner of the Death Note not getting caught by the police.


    You can watch the series if you want, I really enjoy it and am in fact watching it for the second time during the time I¡¯m writing these entries. It¡¯s a bit aged, I¡¯ll admit. It¡¯s not as captivating to me as it was when I was younger, but the soul is still there. You don¡¯t have to, though, not for the purpose of this blog. I¡¯ll explain what¡¯s necessary.


    How much are we ripping off Death Note? When I originally conceived of Fatebook, it was actually quite a bit different from the anime series. It still had the main character, who owned the notebook and was killing people; the otherworldly Shinigami, in the case of Fatebook simply called a Death God; the primary antagonist, who would stop at nothing to keep the main character from practicing his godlike powers. The two characters end up working closely together, the main character under pretense that he¡¯s trying to catch the killer, too (his identity as the killer a secret).


    Victor played Main Character, Gloriana played Antagonist. One of the concubine/wives played the Death God, maybe the best friend we spoke about earlier. The Death God, I think, looked a bit like a really dark jester, with a jester¡¯s mask.


    Fatebook was shot in a very cinematographically intense way. Like an A24 film, except one that had mainstream appeal. It was also very dark and dreary, very goth. It stuck with the Halloween theme V&G had going on.


    Death Note is a perfect thing to rip off for Victor Graves. A hyper intelligent young man with grand ambitions receives a tool with which to project his will upon the world. That and the main character was the true villain. Remember, irony is a big thing with the Graves Spirit, the Geist. The pilot and subsequent episodes were short and episodic, always ending on some cliff hanger, much to the chagrin of the audience, who felt this practice was done a bit too heavy handedly. It was overall something that people genuinely wanted to watch, though. It was a sensation in its own right. Would it have been as big of a sensation had it been released on its own, without the name of V&G attached to it? Probably not, but it would still be, in my opinion, pretty popular in its own right.This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    Fatebook allowed them to assault the movie theaters with a steady beat. Coming out with short, hour long movies at a quick rate, once per month, enough to start causing Hollywood insiders to become a bit irritated by them. V&G were soaking up all the headline space.


    And now, there¡¯s a few different directions we can take on what happened next. Sometimes I have Victor and Gloriana Graves come out on the offensive, castigating Hollywood as a corrupt den of adders. It was, after all, a time around the Me Too movement, or at least it was with the Millenial Victor Graves. I¡¯ll have to check my time table and see if we have room for the gen-z Graves to make a name for themselves at that same time. I don¡¯t think we do, so what will have to be done is we eliminate the Me Too movement from the Gravesverse for now, but we haven¡¯t forgotten about it entirely. We¡¯re inspired by it for our fictional universe.


    And now here we are having mentioned something political again. Victor and Gloriana were well aware of the growing political tensions in the society they were a part of, make no mistake about it. It was at this time, though, that they didn¡¯t want to pick a side. When pressed on this fact by the media, they always tended to air on the side of caution, waffling a bit. They¡¯d say something like:


    ¡®It¡¯s a very tricky issue, dealing with politics. I feel like I¡¯m too young to get into it in earnest. I need more time to consider things. Ask me again in a few years. For right now, though, the Gravers belong to both sides of the political spectrum, and I like that about them. And I have them not talk politics during official functions. Both sides setting aside their differences and coming and being together. I think that¡¯s the idea we should strive for in the country. I want us to be more united, generally, but, again, ask me in a few years.¡±


    Anyway, sometimes V&G come out on the attack against Hollywood and sometimes they¡¯re more passive. Sometimes Hollywood likes them, sometimes it hates them. I think, for this blog, I want to get to a scene I created of them at the Oscars, though. They were still, generally speaking, the big hot ticket item. People liked them. Actors and directors and other industry artists praised their work and what they were doing for the industry itself, giving it a real breath of fresh air. And so Victor and Gloriana Graves kept quiet their opinion about Hollywood, and didn¡¯t quite yet start the conquest. They would, soon, though.

 Entry Eighteen

    Let¡¯s get back to the Gravers with this entry. Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ troops. They, for the most part, felt like they were a part of something, something cool. They had really gone and done something in the world, them becoming V&G¡¯s distribution network for their movies. They also, generally, were establishing a good relationship with a local business, the movie theater they were assigned to. It was also neat how now there were even more people who wanted to become Gravers. They had a bit of a status, being a Graver.


    Again, they were mostly young people who had spare time and an interest in popular culture. They didn¡¯t have much money to speak of, but, due to the raw scale of the movement, they were able to throw together enough cash to mortgage a Chapterhouse, a Graver¡¯s Den, a Guildhall. It was just a house at first, a rather cheap one, but they could say it was theirs.


    Well, technically, it was Victor Graves¡¯ house, seeing as how the majority of them accepted his deal and put the house in his name. Which, let me reiterate, meant that the Gravers paid for it but Victor owned it outright. They were still by and large skeptical about this arrangement but, again, the scale of the movement made it cheap for the individual Gravers. They¡¯d try out the deal. And, if they didn¡¯t like it, they could always stop paying.


    This got V&G some skepticism in the press as well, and the pair had to take to the news in several instances to try and explain what they were doing. ¡°It¡¯s completely voluntary! They can stop paying at any time! Think of it just as a membership due, is all. It¡¯s cheap enough for the individual Gravers, the average payment is only $x.xx per month!¡±


    So now there was a clubhouse in the vicinity of every movie theater in the country. Some of the Gravers, particularly the ones from more well-to-do areas, wanted bigger or more houses, but Victor convinced most of them to just get the one house per movie theater, a small house. They would expand as time went on.


    Their first goal was to socialize and get to know one another, and so they were expected to gather at the house when they could and talk with each other, exchange numbers, all that sort of thing. An online forum was set up for Gravers, an old school style one that had a spot for each greater geographical region to allow somewhat local Gravers to communicate with one another on a geographic basis. Also a subreddit and a 4chan style website to get together. In some Gravesverses, V&G goes to 4chan directly and asks for a specific board for Gravers to have and use that¡¯s only open to members. V&G didn¡¯t know which social site style would be the best, so they¡¯d try a couple different versions, you see.This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    There was also the Graver app, that linked them together, that allowed V&G to send out announcements, that had good Graver news on it, links to budding Graver YouTubers. The app is very important to remember, so keep it in mind as we go forward.


    The next thing they needed was a leader to represent each movie theater team, someone to be the Graves¡¯ local mouthpiece. In keeping with the spirit of experimentation that we mentioned earlier, there were a number of methods to obtain a leader. In some cases, it was a simple vote by the Gravers themselves. In other cases, the leader was chosen directly by Victor and Gloriana Graves, which, given the fact that they didn¡¯t really know any of them yet, was done randomly. That randomly chosen leader could then either appoint a replacement or try out the spot themselves. In some instances of the Gravesverse, this latter style of choosing was the main method for everybody.


    Victor and Gloriana pleaded with the Gravers to give them time to grow as an institution. They knew that there would be a lot of drama associated with selecting a leader and there¡¯d be a lot of hiccups along the way, there may be bickering at some of the Dens. There may be some questions arising about why the leader was part of the orange/purple/green team but not the other two teams. There may have been some resentment that the leader was chosen directly by Victor and Gloriana Graves themselves.


    V&G talked to them about the nature of the Gundam he was building with them, of the machine, of the ability enhancer. How it needed to be streamlined and responsive. At this time in their lives, they had been making philosophical videos, related to the nature of what they wanted to accomplish and how they wanted to do it. I remember feverishly engaging in these arguments in my head back when I was experiencing the maladaptive daydreams in full, but, again, since my medication, the dreams are not as powerful. I don¡¯t know how captivating I can make these philosophical conversations as of right now. I don¡¯t want this work to get bogged down in theorizing about things, I want it to keep being engaging.


    I¡¯ll mention what I think is necessary or interesting but understand that Victor and Gloriana Graves spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the Gravesian Philosophy. They knew not all of the Gravers would be interested in hearing about it, but they still needed to get them to listen to the broad strokes, at any rate.


    And so V&G published videos. They rated the videos on a one to seven star system, in order of importance. The idea being that every Graver would be compelled to watch a seven star video or listen to a seven star decree, but seven was only really for emergencies. It was all one through five at the beginning. Victor and Gloriana Graves understood that Gravers liked them, generally, but weren¡¯t going to be willing to invest 100% of their time to becoming Gravers. They had lives after all.


    We¡¯ll talk a bit more in the next entry. It¡¯s been a thousand words now.

 Entry Nineteen

    Victor Graves, King of the Gravers. Yes, king. That¡¯s how he referred to himself once the Gravers had established the dens, the halls, the crypts. There was a crowning ceremony, of course. At first, he either used a burger king crown or that popular plastic crown, the same one that Biggie Smalls was photographed wearing. A very basic one.


    So, a king, eh? In a democracy? Yes. They were trying to be conquerors, after all, but specifically 21<sup>st</sup> century conquerors. Not military people, not dictators. They weren¡¯t opposed to the idea of democracy by any means, even though they had just denied it to large swaths of the Gravers by enacting a rule that allowed the pair of them to choose the Gravers¡¯ leaders.


    Democracy was a fine thing to have for a country, they said, for local governments. They weren¡¯t a government, though. They were an institution, to be sure, but they existed like a corporation. They needed to be able to compete with other corporations. They needed to not get bogged down with red tape and bureaucracy and the petty political squabbling that democracies are known to develop. It is for this reason that the Graver Institution was owned wholesale by V&G, its organization was entirely at the whims of the pair.


    ¡°Now, this isn¡¯t to say that we mean to say ¡®kneel,¡¯ and you kneel, of course. This is a Balancing act that we¡¯re engaging in. We want you all to feel like we¡¯re doing things in the Proper Way. We want you to have a voice on how we run things, to make sure we¡¯re being as efficient and effective as possible in making this the best social club that¡¯s ever been. But give us a little room to try things out, that¡¯s all we¡¯re asking here.¡±


    Again, the Graver Nation was new and interesting, so its members went along with things for the most part. Besides, it wasn¡¯t all that radical. Business owners could run their business as they see fit, after all. If the employees didn¡¯t like it, they could leave. Good businesses, though, knew to listen to their employees. Not that they were employees, of course, Graver Nation was a different king of thing. But there were similarities.


    That and it was enchanting to have a king. It was like out of some fantasy book. Lord of the Rings. Aragorn. Sure, Victor could call himself a king, that would be fine. King of the Gravers. Gloriana Graves, queen of the Gravers. Long may they reign. And who were the Gravers in this fantasy world? They were the knights. And their knights needed their armor.


    Soldiers needed a uniform. We¡¯ve already discussed how there were three teams within the Graver organization: the orange Pumpkins/Wolfmen, the purple Vampires/People Eaters, the green Goblins/Witches (remember, things have multiple names in Gravesianism, as the name is not the thing, just the sign that points to it). Victor and Gloriana Graves contracted with a middle of the road clothing company to make shirts for the Gravers to wear. Black shirts with green, orange, or purple accents, bedecked with a skull and crown on it. Only Gravers were allowed to purchase the shirts from the online store, it requiring a special login code from the Graver App to purchase.A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    And the Gravers had to purchase it themselves, which is why they chose a middle of the line clothing company to host the transaction. But it wasn¡¯t a mandatory purchase, not at first. V&G knew what it was like to be without access to cash. They encouraged another method of getting a uniform, too. Getting a black shirt from a thrift store and then decorating it with a skull and crown by bleaching it, turning the bleached area into a nice orange-ish color. You can Google this style of shirt bleaching online, it had become a popular thing when I was originally conceiving of the Gravesverse.


    Another thing we should talk about is the masks. These aren¡¯t features of every version of the Gravesverse, though. This gets a bit hazy, here, as masks are closely related to the Jackverse, but masks originally began as part of the Gravesverse, if I remember right. And what¡¯s the Jackverse? Just another maladaptive daydream world I had created. It started out as an outgrowth of the Gravesverse but turned into its own thing. That¡¯s where I get my penname, but we¡¯re getting a bit out of scope here.


    Masquerade masks. To add onto the Halloween theme. In some versions of the Gravesverse, every Graver was expected to wear one during official functions, where it was allowed by law. Remember, Graver Nation was an identity movement. It was identity politics. However, it was an identity one could put on or take off at one¡¯s leisure. Being a Graver was something completely voluntary, you see. They¡¯d choose their own names as part of their new identities, too. Good Gravesian names, in the same style as ¡®Victor¡¯ or ¡®Gloriana.¡¯ Gothy names. Halloween names. Death dealer (from Harry Potter) names. V&G published a list of examples. This wasn¡¯t to be their ¡®new¡¯ name, by any means, simply their ¡®Graver¡¯ name. And, to reiterate, a Graver was an identity that was voluntary, and one that didn¡¯t require you to sacrifice any parts of your other identities to be.


    There were rules that came with being a Graver. Rules based in the Gravesian philosophy. No politics, for one. Gravers weren¡¯t expected to completely disregard politics in their real lives, of course, it was just asked that at official functions, when you donned the mask, when you put on the Graver face, that you¡¯d keep your political views inside and focus only on Graver business. There were other rules, as well. But we¡¯re at our one thousand words for right now, so we¡¯ll talk about them later.

 Entry Twenty

    I mentioned a bit that during Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ Music Video Extravaganza, there were philosophy segments. Philosophy was a big part of V&G¡¯s work. They wanted to create a new method of doing things, something never seen before. They wanted to create brand new political systems, new ideologies, they wanted to usher in a new age. They thought the one they lived through, the one we¡¯re currently living through, was detestable.


    You can think of Gravesian Art as Applied Gravesian Philosophy. The same with Gravesian Politics. I mentioned that there was a no politics rule for the Gravers in the last entry, but that was only true in the general sense of the word. No outside politics. Inside politics was fine. That and Victor and Gloriana became more political as time went on, it¡¯s just they tended to go their own way. They didn¡¯t belong to one or another political party, wanting to court both sides of the political spectrum. Was that beneficent or more self-serving? I¡¯ll let you be the judge of that. Remember, Victor was just a man, with all that entails.


    Appealing to both sides was a tough task, though, particularly in the 2010s and 2020s, as I¡¯m sure you know. We¡¯re incredibly divided right now. Victor still sought to do it, much to the ire of some of the internet. He was called a fence sitter, an enlightened centrist, a political coward. This didn¡¯t really bother Victor, as online spaces were a beehive of negativity. It can be expected by anyone who gets popular that they¡¯re going to have their haters. Victor was no different in that regard, but he still had a very high reputation when it came right down to it.


    He knew the rules of obtaining power, both the good ones and the bad ones. He knew what great men (great =/= good) had done in the past to achieve power. He needed an enemy, he knew that. Someone to point at and say this is the source of your problems. Who would this enemy be, particularly for someone who¡¯s not trying to rock the boat politically? He targeted Hollywood itself.


    Maybe not the celebrities, not at first, as they were, for the most part, liked by people. He targeted the industries. V&G accused them of being like a den of adders. He accused them of taking the dreams of desperate young people and using them to twist them and manipulate them and to make them go against their own principles in the pursuit of fame and money.


    This is where we¡¯re going to get to back to real people again, with all the awkwardness that entails. We¡¯re going to talk about Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. And perhaps this works better for the millennial version of Victor Graves rather than the gen-z version, but for the latter, we¡¯ll just say that the Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein thing and the Me Too movement didn¡¯t happen in the Gravesverse world as it happened in our own world.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    The flashpoint of the Cosby thing started in the real world when comedian Hannibal Burress laid into him during a comedy set that was posted online. We¡¯ll say that didn¡¯t happen, but that the rumors circulating about Bill Cosby were a bit of an open secret. The same for Harvey Weinstein.


    Before I get much further, I should say all of this happened after Victor and Gloriana Graves won Oscars for their Extravaganza. That Oscars ceremony in particular was a big turning point in V&G¡¯s life, so we¡¯ll come back to it in particular at a later date, so we¡¯re jumping forward in time a bit for this entry.


    Victor and Gloriana put out a general call for people to come forward to them in secret and detail the abuses they¡¯ve faced at the hands of Hollywood. Victor and Gloriana were big news at this time, they were considered capable people. The pair told people to come forward to them with their accusations and they would make these people who abused them regret committing the abuse, if they could. And he would keep their identity a secret unless they were specifically given permission to reveal it.


    This is what kicked off the Gravesverse MeToo movement, which was a more private affair. This gave Victor and Gloriana Graves power over some of the Hollywood movers and shakers, and it also put them on the industry¡¯s shitlist. It was also a way for them to continue creating headlines. To remind you of the time table, this is after the Extravaganza and after the numerous episodes of Fatebook being played on a monthly basis in the movie theaters and after the Oscars ceremony where they won awards for their Extravaganza.


    Throughout their life, they remained in the headlines, and naturally, too. Always off doing some great (great=/=good) thing, always making a bigger name for themselves. This fact made some people queasy when Victor Graves became president and was given the power of nuclear war, but that¡¯s a story for later.


    But anyway, the Gravesverse MeToo movement was started by Victor and Gloriana, and it was done strategically to cause those powerful abusive people to hurt. They didn¡¯t instantly go to the police/court system. It started off with blackmail and obtaining influence in the movie industry. They threw Bill Cosby under the bus, as he was too old to do anything for them and his crimes were particularly heinous. Those accusations would proceed naturally with the news cycle once they had boosted the signal of the accusers. Weinstein, though, was a player in Hollywood. If V&G had him under their thumb, they¡¯d be able to make some moves in the industry. And that is exactly what they did.

 Entry Twenty-One

    Harvey Weinstein wasn¡¯t the only one that Victor and Gloriana had under their thumbs. As news circulated, more people began to trickle into them, giving them, at first, a small list of high level Hollywood corporate-types that they could squeeze.


    It wasn¡¯t all as simple as I¡¯m making it out to be, of course. This was a multi-year endeavor, something that they continued with throughout the rest of their lives. That and the high level executives sometimes didn¡¯t want to go along with Victor and Gloriana Graves¡¯ urging. For those, they¡¯d make examples of them. They¡¯d fund legal teams and work to collect evidence against them and have them tried in court.


    The pair were building a network of people that were willing to work for them. And it wasn¡¯t just Hollywood, but the music industry as well. They¡¯d get volunteers to come forth and tell their story, and then they¡¯d talk to those same volunteers about getting back at the leeches, about making it even. They¡¯d convince them to go undercover, to collect evidence against other suspected predators.


    They¡¯d take an exploited person, person A, who had been exploited by person B, and go to person D (who had exploited person C) and go undercover and try to document and prove malicious intent. Here we have the dichotomy of Victor Graves again. This was a controversial way of doing things. Was it right, wrong? Was he using these exploited people for his own personal gain? Yes. But he was up front about what he wanted to do. He wanted to change Hollywood, and the exploiters didn¡¯t have to help him do it if they didn¡¯t want to. It was all consensual. There were enough volunteers that the strategy worked. Tit for tat.


    This was all part of the Conquest of Hollywood, which Victor began in earnest after the Oscars ceremony where he had made his speech. Before that, though, he had been discussing/propagandizing (propaganda used to be a neutral word) the Gravers. Telling them what they could accomplish together, convincing them to work with him to change the world for the better.


    This all dovetailed together. He had some of Hollywood under his thumb so that when he commenced with the Conquest, he was able to keep making movies. He had enough influence that the Hollywood machine wasn¡¯t able to hamper his plans to make them.


    As I write through these things its apparent to me how it¡¯d make more sense to have Victor Graves be that millennial that I originally envisioned him as. The time table works much better. Him selling in 2014 and coming out with the movie at that time and then doing the Subjugation of Hollywood. That and the lead up to the 2016 election made more sense, too, with a growing sense of populism happening in the country. Should I mention what the candidates of that election said about Victor Graves? I could, certainly, but I don¡¯t know if I should, given that you might be burnt out on politics by this point. No, I think I¡¯ll leave that alone for now. But back to my point, maybe you should imagine Victor Graves as a millennial for a little bit. We¡¯ll go back and forth between millennial and gen-z. Just know that some stuff from the real world has to be put on hold during the same time in the Gravesverse, to allow V&G to enact those things themselves.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    He made music videos and philosophical videos against Hollywood, too. This was a controversial thing for him to do, but not overly so. Hollywood has long been seen as a bit corrupt, hasn¡¯t it? Victor went to great lengths explaining himself to the press and to the common people in addition to his Gravers. It helped that Hollywood fought back viciously. They tried to leverage their power over the movie theaters against him.


    The movie theaters didn¡¯t want to get caught in the crossfire. They said as much to the Graver Chapters that were assigned to them. Victor Graves acknowledged their concerns but tried rallying them to his cause.


    ¡°For too long Hollywood has held too much sway over the movie theaters. They¡¯re bleeding you dry. Movie theaters are in a sorry enough state as it is. You have to charge more to recuperate the fact that you¡¯re not making as much money from the movies themselves, and as a result, people aren¡¯t going to movies as often, going only a few times a year on average. All while the a-list actors make sums of money to the tune of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, while the studios themselves rake in billions, while streaming services continue to eat away at your profits.


    ¡°Not that they aren¡¯t in their right to do that, of course, I¡¯m not complaining about capitalism here, but I¡¯m suggesting we use their own playbook against them. They have power and influence over you, but with me, I¡¯ll give you a way to tip the scales back in your favor, to give you back bargaining power. I¡¯ll use the same principles I used when I made my distribution network, when I made Graver Nation, I¡¯ll use People Power. We¡¯ll go to them as a single unified front and demand that they change. I envision a future where movie theaters are once again a cultural hotspot in our country, where people go regularly and often. Where we may even watch historic events unfold in the news.¡±


    The movie theaters were skeptical of this at first, as I¡¯m sure you would be if you were in their position. They were between a rock and hard place, though. They wanted to stay on both Hollywood and the Graves¡¯ good sides. Victor Graves was really shaking things up in the industry. His steady drip of content that they didn¡¯t even have to pay the Graves back for was really revitalizing the theaters themselves. That and with the nature of the videos, them being music videos and with as relatively short a runtime as the whole movie was, there was a strong urge for people to rewatch them. That and they liked the Gravers, for the most part. They liked hosting them. Yes, they had seen the power of Victor and Gloriana Graves firsthand, and they, for the most part, agreed that they¡¯d at least hear him out, that they¡¯d at least give it a shot.

 Entry Twenty-Two

    Victor and Gloriana Graves knew they needed to be able to produce music videos quickly, they also needed to keep the Gravers doing something, as well as get some more ammunition for the war on the entertainment industry. What they did was start a music movement.


    They had already made some inroads with the music industry itself, but not quite enough to do what they wanted to do. They also had a legion of young people awaiting their next word. They had told the Gravers that they wanted to create a culture, and what do cultures need? They need cultural products. In this case, they needed music.


    By this time, there had been more than a slew of philosophical videos that had already been published, first on YouTube during those early days and then a few higher quality ones to come out with the movies. There were already Gravers that had music making as a side hobby. They had come in with it. What they needed to do was sift through this mass of musicians and find the talent.


    The popular music industry of today doesn¡¯t necessarily have the best musicians in the world practicing in it. There is a lot of nepotism and there is a lot of marketing going on. That and I¡¯m sure you¡¯ve seen yourself musicians who seem to be incredibly talented but never quite make it, they just don¡¯t have access to that powerful infrastructure the music industry has, the star producing power. Victor and Gloriana Graves knew this, and knew there was talent within Graver Nation that, once found, would be able to compete on a national or even world stage. That was the problem, though, how do you find them? And, once you do, how do you empower them to become stars?


    Victor and Gloriana had a plan for this. They were going to create a machine with which to produce musical stars. They told this much to the Gravers. They had already created a distribution network, they had already obtained bases of operation all across the country, and now they were going to make their own music infrastructure. What kind of music, specifically? All of it. All of the genres. Rap, Rock, County, Pop, Metal, Classical, and everything else. They also wanted to use their budding musicians to create a new genre of music, but that¡¯s a bit further than we need to go for right now.


    People Power. That¡¯s what it was. That and the Power of Technology. Combine the two and you can do anything possible. You can move mountains, fly to the moon, conquer the world. They told musicians to start work immediately. Remember, there was always a sense of urgency when it came to Victor Graves, time just didn¡¯t move quick enough for him. (Not that he had nervous energy, though. He had a very calm demeanor about him, as if he expected everything to happen as it happened, but he was always pushing people to go that extra mile, as long as they were ok with the pushing).This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    The musicians were told to start playing and recording their music and uploading it online. I¡¯m personally not too familiar with indie music platforms, but I know they¡¯re out there. Soundcloud? Is that one? Victor and Gloriana had no problem utilizing existing infrastructure out there. They also used their own websites and app, the 4chan site, the Reddit subreddit.


    There was one thing that Victor asked them to do, though. Like the bit with the housing, Victor wanted to own all of their output. Not actually all of it, of course, just the stuff they were producing as Gravers. They could always take off their mask and produce stuff on their own. But, as Gravers, he requested that every piece of music, every beat made, every song sung, every instrumental, be transferred to him so that he may personally own the intellectual property.


    Some more skepticism came about, but what Victor had said wasn¡¯t surprising, based on what he had done with the housing. That and it had been a few months since the Graver Dens had been purchased en masse, and the Gravers kind of liked the idea, for the most part. So they said yes to Victor again, over all. Not everyone did, of course, but enough of them did to do what Victor needed to be done.


    They started uploading their work to the websites with a special statement that transferred their intellectual ownership of the tunes to Victor Graves in its entirety.


    After that, Victor got to work making some more videos outlining his ideas. He wanted the Gravers to have access to use all of the music that they themselves had been creating, without worrying about ownership or anything like that. If someone who raps finds a nice beat they like, they could use it. Or if a music producer hears a piece from an instrumental, they could use that to make a beat. If someone produced a beat and a rap and someone else liked it, they could make a copy of the music and play along with it. And then that could, in turn, be used by a producer or another musician or whatever else. And they could do covers, or whatever else. You get the idea. The teams were used here, too. Greens used green products, Orange used orange products, and Purple used purple products. They would compete with one another.


    The goal here was to make good music as efficiently and as quickly as possible. The non-musician Gravers were tasked with listening to the output and trying to elevate the best sounding stuff. They utilized all available existing infrastructure on the internet to do it. They created Facebook groups, subreddits, 4chan pages, twitter groups. Virtually using all social media, trying to find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Trying to find a way to elevate those interesting sounds and to let them spread.


    The mood was frenzy, but Victor and Gloriana knew they had a problem on their hands. They needed people to keep producing music, but they couldn¡¯t expect them to do that if the individual musicians weren¡¯t getting anything from it themselves. They needed to respect the rule of Tit for Tat. They needed to figure out how to give credit where it was due and how to deal with the money situation.

 Entry Twenty-Three

    With all this borrowing and using of other people¡¯s material, it was important to keep things straight. A finished song may have a lot of people that were ultimately responsible for it coming to life. There may have been a number of iterations on it. And, furthermore, there was the star factor to consider. Who ultimately was the singer for the song? What if a cover of a song that was created by the Gravers was getting more attention than the original song? What if it was a cover of a cover?


    In addition to the music, Victor and Gloriana also had their Gravers try making music videos, for those that had an interest in learning about making film. And the singer of that version of the song may not have been located in an area where the aspiring videographers were, so they had local talent just lip sync the song for the purpose of the video.


    And who got the most credit? The performer? The composer? A beat maker? The videographer? All of these things could make or break a piece of music. Also, who would be getting the money for those music and videos that turned out to be truly successful? Making sure people got the right amount of credit for the work they put in was of paramount importance.


    It was true that all the music and videos the Gravers made for the project were owned wholesale by Victor himself, but he knew he couldn¡¯t just expect Gravers to work for free and in silence forever. That wouldn¡¯t do. He wanted talent to be rewarded, and he wanted it to be fair. He had the Gravers participating in this musical project keep track of everything they did, hoping that one day he¡¯d be able to design or have something designed that would be able to organize the data and figure out who gets what credit.


    ¡°I want all of you to feel like you received justice for the work you put into the Graver Music Project. And not just because I¡¯m a nice guy, it just makes good business sense for talented people to be rewarded for their contributions to a project. I¡¯m not trying to deny you your credit. But understand that things will be missed in this project. Egos may be bruised, injustice may happen. Think of it in terms of the Conquest. Some have to be on the front lines, some get killed early on in the battle. It¡¯s all up to fortune. Just know that your sacrifice in this won¡¯t be in vain, though. Imagine what we can accomplish if we work together. Imagine we can create. We¡¯ll have a bona fide artistic movement on our hands, a moment in history together.¡±


    Star power was also something that was of paramount importance. Victor and Gloriana wanted to create a new generation of pop stars to control the music industry with, and, importantly, they wanted them to be under their thumb.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    Was this right? A star needs quite a bit of infrastructure to be born, that¡¯s the truth. They need a legion of people all working in the background in order to shine. Those were the Gravers themselves. Yes, the Graver pop stars would be under V&G¡¯s thumb. Everything they produced would be owned by V&G wholesale. This all wasn¡¯t done for 100% greed, though, or at least that¡¯s what Victor put effort into trying to explain. He wanted to create a whole new system for doing things. He wanted to create an institution with its own bylaws and rules and practices. He didn¡¯t want to have to rely on existing laws to settle disputes. He wanted to make his own methods, based on his own philosophies and ideologies.


    One such philosophy was the idea of Post-Trust. Trust was on the way out in society. The internet had seen to that. Never before had there been such an eroding of trust and public good will. Conspiracies theories abounded, the political divisions in the country were wide and severe. People lacked trust in scientific institutions, financial institutions, governmental institutions, entertainment institutions, scientists, CEOs, politicians, and celebrities. They even started to, for some, distrust basic truths of reality, turning towards strange sounding conspiracy theories. The internet had exposed the truth that we were all human, all fallible, all imperfect.


    And so Victor and Gloriana decided to do away with trust in its entirety. What was trust, anyway? It was an assumption of a person about behavior they¡¯ll engage in in the future. You trust someone to always do the right thing and then get mad when they fail to live up to the expectation you have of them. You have an idealized version of them in your head that they can fail to meet. Victor and Gloriana came up with the idea of post-trust. Don¡¯t assume the person you¡¯re working with is going to do the right thing, focus only on the present, what they are currently doing. Think like a business. A business doesn¡¯t trust someone, they make predictions about behavior, to be sure, but they don¡¯t get mad if those predictions turn out to be inaccurate, they simply have to update their models, the onus is on themselves. That and they protect themselves from the pitfalls of trusting someone. They lock their doors at night, not because they think they¡¯re going to be robbed that particular night, but simply because it¡¯s a best practice to engage in. It¡¯s the Proper Way of Things.


    We saw this in action with the movie theaters. Victor and Gloriana assumes they aren¡¯t going to make any money from the movie theaters themselves, giving away their product for free, but in the instances where they do, they mark those theaters down as having a good track record, of paying dues. They do this with the Gravers, back when they came and picked up the physical copies of the movies, they had them pay for their collector¡¯s edition item in advance, rather than trusting they¡¯d be able to sell physical collector¡¯s edition items in advance.

 Entry Twenty-Four

    I¡¯ve spoken a bit about the Oscar ceremony where our young Genghis Khans declared war on Hollywood. What¡¯s your opinion of Hollywood? I mean the industry itself. Do you believe it to be benevolent? I always thought the reputation was that it was kind of a meat grinder. It takes people and exploits their dreams. This is how it was in the Gravesverse, anyway. I think during the early to mid-2010s Hollywood was a slight bit more irritating than it was today, what with celebrities just having got on social media and trying to first figure it out.


    It was true that Victor and Gloriana Graves had gone outside of the traditional system of Hollywood to produce their first movie. They had used a production company, to be sure. They had paid out the nose to use one. But they had ultimately marketed and distributed the movie on their own. In some instances of the Gravesverse, this is enough to draw the ire of Hollywood itself, meaning that Hollywood effectively fires the first shot, so to speak. As of right now, though, my view of Victor and Gloriana Graves is a bit hungrier than it normally is. I want them to be more like conquerors than just innocent little babies that conquered the world defensively. So, I had them take the first shot.


    Recall, the Oscar ceremony is prior to the Gravesverse Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein incident. We went a little out of order in these past posts, but that¡¯s ok. The only aggression Victor and Gloriana had shown against Hollywood so far in the chronology had been accusing them in an off-hand way of being scummy, back when they first announced they were building their own distribution network. Most people would¡¯ve agreed with that, though, so it wasn¡¯t like a big deal or anything. They also had a movie ready every month of the year, which definitely did irritate the industry, but they let it slide. The industry insides thought that V&G could only keep up that pace for so long before they¡¯d have to stop to replenish their backlog. Generally speaking, people liked Victor and Gloriana and were willing to give them some space to operate. They were endearing.


    Would you roll your eyes if I told you they swept virtually every Oscar category? At the time of the awards ceremony, a thing called Graves Fever had gripped the nation, including gripping the people who vote for the Oscars. They were just doing so much all at once and so well and so affably that the country was absolutely enchanted by them. Not that they didn¡¯t have haters, of course. There were plenty of people who were tired of hearing about them lol, and they¡¯d only be able to pull their hair out as time marched forward and V&G¡¯s stars rose ever higher. That and there was a contingent of people who didn¡¯t like their reliance on horror elements in Minecraft and in Fatebook. They thought it was inappropriate, but not overly so. But for right now, for the majority of people, they were enjoying watching these newcomers on the scene come in and shake things up.This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    With Graves Fever in full swing, they went to the Oscars and start winning awards. Oscar after Oscar after Oscar. They were quite pleased by this and very appreciative, although a bit reserved, a bit overly polite. It was noted during them coming into the Oscars that Victor Graves had arrived with a lot of women. Emphasis on ¡®a lot.¡¯ They were all the women who had helped him make the movie, they supposed. Up until this time, most of the media that V&G produced had been on themselves rather than their immediate organization. There was, I think, a community manager for Minecraft that was a girl, who had an interesting name, probably that was one that was made up, one to match Gloriana. But other than that, there hadn¡¯t been much media of their employees.


    They had a camera person everywhere they went. They were female, too. In instances of the Gravesverse where Victor has a sister, that¡¯s who the camera person was, at least in the beginning. Victor Graves knew from a young age that he was an historical person, and so he wanted to record everything about himself. This would get him in trouble later, but for now it was just one of eccentricities. He had even brought out the camera person a few times back when they were on their talk show circuit, recording himself as he did the interview. So she was at the Oscars ceremony, too, at first with a video camera on the red carpet, but she had to put that away. The women Graves arrived with were all wearing hidden cameras in their dresses, though. This was an historic night, you see.


    What Victor did was a gamble. He had his speech ready and wanted to speak it during the acceptance of the last award, the one for best picture. There was a time back when I was in the process of creating all of this that I knew specifically which year the Oscar¡¯s ceremony happened on, but I don¡¯t remember now. I can¡¯t tell you what his competition was, but he was fairly certain he¡¯d complete his sweep. He couldn¡¯t know for certain, though. And if he decided to make a video of himself reading the speech after the award show after he had lost the final Oscar, he¡¯d look bitter. It would¡¯ve been a PR disaster, so he was a little nervous when they finally got to the final Oscar.


    He won, though.


    Cheers and congratulations all around. He had swept the Oscar ceremony, joining film history. He had already smashed box office records, once he finally worked out an international distribution plan (he went a more traditional route for that, he only had Gravers in the USA and sometimes Canada, depending on the version of the Gravesverse we¡¯re in).


    So he won, unfortunately, we don¡¯t have time for his speech right now, the one where he announces war on Hollywood, as we¡¯re at our one thousand word limit.

 Entry Twenty-Five

    ¡°The sins of this town, Hollywood, are beyond count and comprehension, today marks¡­¡±


    Victor Graves began his speech railing against Hollywood. The audience members at the Oscars ceremony thought it was a joke at first, and laughed, but it soon became apparent that it was no laughing matter at all. In some versions of the Gravesverse, he starts getting booed, in others, there¡¯s stunned silence, in others yet, awkward chuckling as people aren¡¯t sure what to do.


    They start playing music and eventually cut off his mic. He kept speaking, though, and when his mic was cut, he just started talking louder. Security personnel tried to get him off the stage but his concubines, which were all up there with him to accept the award for best picture, fought with them to allow Victor to continue speaking. As an aside, nobody was aware at this point that Victor had concubines, and nobody was aware that he considered himself to be a modern-day Genghis Khan. They knew afterwards, though.


    The whole thing had been recorded by the secret cameras hidden in the group¡¯s clothing. The whole thing was uploaded to YouTube shortly afterwards, so people could see for themselves what Victor had said. As it got pretty rowdy at the end of the speech, Victor and Gloriana both came onto the YouTube video to explain what they intended to do. They meant to shake up the whole Hollywood system.


    They couched it all in language that largely spoke of bringing power back to the common people, to the communities. They wanted the local theaters to have more leverage, they wanted the corrupt executives who abused newcomers to be brought under their thumb, and they wanted to tip the scales of power in favor of the American people, the theaters. They said that Hollywood was overpaid, and that the celebrities and executives who were given all this money by the American people were using it irresponsibly, absconding with it to overseas destinations and never giving back to the country which allowed them to earn it in the first place.


    Victor and Gloriana declared war on the town, announced to the world that they were Genghis Khan reborn, and declared that they would one day be president. They said that they were willing to work with the malcontents who¡¯d work with them. That the sooner the people who had been targeted came over to V&G¡¯s side, the better of a deal they¡¯d receive. The video in which Victor announced all this was quite aesthetic indeed, showing him with all his concubines dressed up in their fanciest clothing.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    People weren¡¯t quite sure what to think of the whole affair. It was certainly entertaining, and people were mostly amused by it, I believe. The news media was a bit at a loss for words once they ran the original report on the video that Victor had made. He made them understand what he intended to do, though. He and his wife went on a media blitz across the country, decrying the sins of Hollywood to anyone that would listen. He modified his arguments based on the program he was on. Fox news would get a different angle than CNN, et cetera. He tried couching his arguments in language that would make it appeal to the American people as a whole.


    This was a test for our would-be conquerors. They needed to be as charismatic as they possibly could to win over the hearts of the country. They took a serious tone with what they were doing, framing their arguments as if they were a topic of significance for the people of the country, which Victor and Gloriana believed that they were.


    When it became apparent that Victor and Gloriana Graves were earnest about declaring a War on Hollywood, people were all the more amused. This was in the 2020s, when feeling of resentment were at an all time high from both sides of the political aisle. Victor and Gloriana made sure to deftly maneuver in between the two political parties themselves, not wanting to get labelled as a member of either one, wanting to appeal to both groups. Their strategy was, overall, a successful one.


    Their first task was rallying the movie theater owners over to their side, which we have talked about a bit already in previous entries. Hollywood could just as easily and collectively have said to the owners that any of them that played Victor and Gloriana¡¯s works wouldn¡¯t receive any movies from the rest of Hollywood. Fortunately, Victor and Gloriana had already begun work dividing and conquering the industry.


    Their first stop was Disney. The Mouse was a titanic competitor to them, and not one they wanted to upset. They went to its CEO shortly after the awards speech and explained, in brief, what they intended to do, presenting some of the evidence they had of exploitation within the industry. They asked Disney if they would sit out of the fight, at least for now. They tried to be as reasonable and acquiescent as they could, understanding that the Mouse doesn¡¯t like to be threatened.


    By some strange stroke of luck, the CEO of Disney agreed, as he was personally interested in seeing what was going to happen in the coming in the months. That was one problem resolved. Now the next thing they needed to do was start dividing and conquering. They went through and did the Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein thing I¡¯ve described in a previous entry, getting just a smidgen of Hollywood under their thumb. After that, they had to rally the Gravers themselves, preparing them for a fight.