The Manor Wiki



Welcome to the Manor
The Manor is a world-building writing project. It originally took form as an aspirational daydream about where we'd like to live - a large, Borgesian Manor of sorts with infinite rooms and odd inhabitants. Given the limitations of reality & our personal funds, we decided to turn this into a writing project that would involve hyperdetailed world-building: stories, myths, character portraits, room descriptions, illustrations, diagrams, blueprints, etc. This wiki compiles and organizes some of these elements and projects them on an epistemic axis. What you're reading are artifacts of anthropological interest rather than literary endeavors. A Manor story encountered on the wiki, no matter how much it bears the marks of a fictional excerpt, has the resonance of a thing excavated -- and you can use this "archeological" discovery to further your understanding of the Manor.

The principle character of the Manor is the Manor itself.

Explore

 * Norms
 * Places
 * People
 * Artifacts
 * Myths
 * Stories

Ethos
The essence of the Manor is disclosed first and foremost through stories. These stories are not self-contained narratives, and even when they appear to be, the climax occurs when the narrative passes into the broader significance of the Manor itself. The climax may unknot the many small disasters within a story's scope, but as far as the Manor is concerned, the knot is only further tightened. The words to keep in mind here are renouement and synecdoche. The Manor is dominated by a feeling of simultaneity, for all stories run concurrently, and together they form a tapestry that is greater than the sum of its parts -- but no greater than the Manor itself. In this sense the Manor forms a sort of Plane of Immanence, where transcendent moments become trapped inside the Manor's semiotic field. The in-world fact that characters find themselves unable to leave the Manor reflects perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the Manor: there is no Real to be found beyond it.

Logos
The so-called "rules of the game" are difficult to enumerate because they are usually determined by an erotic sensibility for what belongs and an acute sensitivity to what doesn't. Hence Logos yields to Eros, but there are a few meta-textual heuristics that are worth pointing out. No direct internal contradictions are allowed, of course, but smaller inconsistencies causing just the right amount of dreamlike doubt are welcome. Non-linearity is encouraged. The spatial limitations of the Manor are to be respected, meaning there shouldn't be too much content taking place outside of the Manor and its grounds. There is no magic. The time period is vaguely Victorian/Belle Epoque, but anything from the whole of the 19th century can be brought in as seen fit. The resulting dissonance should be amplified rather than glossed over. We aim to achieve a sort of timelessness.

Pathos
There is little human warmth to be found in the Manor. Moments of tenderness, love, empathy, and kindness do exist, but the Manor's inhabitants are primarily driven by their perversities and desires. Manor personalities tend to be secretive and ingrown, perhaps disturbed, often seeking extreme states of consciousness. Whether through intensification, inversion, perversion, a slow whittling or a radical reshaping, the Manor fundamentally alters personality.

Original Pitch
A sort of timeless Manor in the Black Forest of Germany, near the border of France, with an unnumbered but seemingly endless menagerie of occupants doing strange things in strange and beautiful rooms that are constantly in flux. Complex staffing (pretentious butlers, sexy maids), complex but antiquated internal communication systems (occupants largely socialize with each other by sending letters through pneumatic tubes). It’s a bit Victorian and Gothic and like the inside of the Dreamers home force-multiplied across an endless set of functionally differentiated chambers and rooms. It's unclear how any of the occupants came to live there or why anyone comes, but once you join, you can never leave, or rather, it never occurs to you to leave, even if you only planned to stay there for a little bit. People who live too long in the Manor grow eclectic and obsessive, ever more immersed in strange fantasy worlds and roles. It’s a sizable place, of course, but as you wander it you become increasingly convinced it's infinite (in a sort of Borgesian way) -- there are just way too many rooms and chambers and little secret recesses and things. And there is a sense that the Manor is somehow host to overlapping realities -- the characters get so engrossed in their personal dramas that they actually disconnect from the central thread of reality running through the place. This should never be explicitly mentioned (and should maybe only remain a metaphor), but might manifest as two characters realizing they were in the same place at the same time yet never saw each other. There's a big beautiful labyrinthine library, a Viking dining hall called the Valhallarium, catacombs, ossuaries, crypts, secret passageways, art studios, writing nooks, a brothel, a mapparium, a psychoanalysis chamber, cat playrooms, a euthanasia chamber, a theater, laboratories, blah blah blah basically everything you'd ever want. It's sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure but there's no you, just a bunch of different characters, proliferating unchecked from various departure points. Like Sleep No More but in book form, or Hogwarts for adults, but the Hogwarts metaphor undersells its ideal form. If there is a point to the project, it's to serve as a House of Creativity where any story can unfold within the parameters of Manorspace.

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