The date was December 1st, 2015. My 18th birthday.
      I can’t remember the circumstances anymore, but I decided to watch the 3rd .hack//Liminality OVA. In this episode it’s explained that Emma Wieland, the author of The Epitaph of Twilight, originally published the poem on her personal website. I, freshly 18, who had never done anything truly of any worth in his life, thought to myself: I could make that.
      I slapped together a gif and some text, and one of the first pages of wielant.net was born.
      In 2015 I did not yet know Ryuuji Sogabe. I knew Flugel, the “antagonist” of an unfinished manga I didn’t like very much. He was always a symbol of that part of .hack, that game, those titles that were never translated. In 2015 all I was doing was throwing PNGs and GIFs and MP3s and 4s and so on and so forth at webpages until they made a semblance of sense. I graduated from my Gaia Online education of HTML and CSS to a 1999 understanding of web design. With each page I felt I was doing something important, that whatever they were they transcended each and every thing I had written or produced up until that point in my life. It felt like exactly what I should’ve been doing for a long time.
      Then in 2016 I met Tokio Kuryuu, who introduced me to Ryuuji Sogabe.
      Thanks to the efforts of fantranslators I was able to play .hack//Link. I was also able to see that I was mistaken about its plot and its circumstances and that for me, a lifelong .hack fan, it was not the insult I had long thought it to be (the opposite, actually). Scouring old forum posts, reading summaries of plots unknown to me, I made out an image of where .hack was heading back in 2012, and what had happened while I had looked away.
      I started to see the shape of a finale.
      And it seemed so obvious, too! How was no one else discussing this?! How could .hack become so interesting, so rewarding, so fun, and yet it seemed like I was the only one on earth to care? That was when the pages I made for wielant.net stopped being about The Epitaph of Twilight and more about what I thought was happening and where things were going.
      In 2016 I read what had been posted of the original Bullet novel until then. I was shocked with its depth of storytelling, how much it relentlessly pulled from the mountain of information that makes up .hack, and how little it cared to explain it all to you. Yuri Seto, a hacker who was only ever named in what’s essentially flavour text in the original PS2 series, is the main antagonist. Ryuuji Sogabe, the antagonist of a PSP game, is the protagonist of this novel. Veronica Bain, the mastermind, is both an executive of Mama and perhaps even Helba (but more on this another time). Jyotaro Amagi is a character first mentioned on a disk that came bundled with a collector’s edition of G.U. Taichiro Sugai, too, is a minor character only ever mentioned in Online Jack, someone you could miss entirely if you never bothered to open the news in that game.
      Characters like this waltz through this novel like it’s the stage of act 47 of the world’s longest play. To the average onlooker, this novel is absolutely meaningless. It’s an unfocused amount of text written over 5 years that only the true freaks will get remotely anything out of. At the same time I felt like it was the .hack story I always wanted to see. It was the fruits of my long years of investment, and it was Ryuuji who guided me through it.
      Because of this I always felt him to be the “lead” of .hack’s background story, the behind-the-scenes narrative unfolding ever so slightly behind every single game, manga, novel, anime, film, and radio show. He was the guy who dived head first into it all and dared to narrativize it. It’s also why he’s the first .hack character to ever speak the words “Have you heard of an organization called Mama?”
      Naturally I wanted him to continue to guide me through this “background” of .hack, the exact topic I was exploring with wielant.net. With each successive page I uploaded, each hidden message in the source code, each minute amount of dialogue that would occur, a narrative began to form in my mind. At first it was simple: I wanted to explain how certain things in .hack came to be. The most mysterious objects of information in .hack’s database are entirely related to Ryuuji’s narrative, so I began to see him as I often felt: decrepit, unshaven, in a trench coat, fighting for his life against the vast nightmare of information that was .hack, far too large an amount for any human to feasibly keep in their brain. It was this basic image that formed the basis of Recoil Arc.
      In 2019 Mode Gone was “created.” I won’t get into this story either, since it’s far too long for an afterword to a novel we wrote.
      Yes, the novel--what a weird word to write!
      It is fanfiction. But it is almost 90000 words of fanfiction, and if it were printed onto paper it would be a full-length novel. I feel the way I imagine anyone does after writing a novel: different. Things happened to me during its conception and writing. I changed, my life changed, the novel changed. And it was all throughout this time that Ryuuji Sogabe was alongside me all along the way.
      Once Mode Gone formed and we had begun planning the future of wielant.net more concretely, we decided on three projects:
      1. A scene in which Ryuuji Sogabe is shot and killed.
      2. A database of information built from intensive speculation.
      3. A sequel to .hack//bullet that dramatized the discovery of certain information.
      The first two were “easy.” I had already made most of the database before our meeting, and the cutscene, while laborious, was something we could easily see the beginning, middle, and end of. The sequel to .hack//bullet seemed the most deceptively simple because I felt I knew where I wanted it to “go.” Obviously it took the most time of them all.
      Here’s the number one thing I learned from this: writing a novel is never easy.
      You can tell from the first few chapters of Recoil Arc: they suck. They are mechanical productions of what I thought .hack is as an outsider to it. I wrote from the perspective of trying to recreate the process of making .hack as others had. The thing that was not apparent to me at the outset was that .hack is an entirely collaborative and inherited experience. Each individual employee at CC2 who worked on it gave it their own touch, each work was undeniably their own. I made the mistake of approaching it the same way I had the database: speculative fiction.
      You’ll notice as things progress they take detours, characters make strange decisions, and most importantly: they fail. It is perhaps most tragic in David’s case, who believes himself to be incapable of failure.
      David Steinberg was a character first introduced in .hack//Sekai no Mukou ni. He has since appeared in its manga adaptation, Bullet, and Thanatos Report. We agreed that one of the things most necessary in a sequel to Bullet was a clear explication of his character. The only other information there is on Steinberg (in the film’s Archive) is that everything we have seen is not his true personality.
      He is, most of all, a man that wears a mask.
      So it was decided that we would at least cursorily explore the foundations of that mask, which led to the creation of Eriko Fujioka. Originally it was meant to be that Eriko would be to David what Kaya is to Ryuuji: a woman he can’t cry about, because that would be admitting defeat. It was obvious to me that David would have spent time in Japan, specifically in Kansai, because of his accent. I shoved him at an unspecified age to a university I had seen there.
      Here’s where the story changes: the more I put in my own year of living as a student in Japan into David, the more my own life started to come through the pages of RA. And the more time I spent with him, the more every chapter of this story began to change.
      I changed, too. Things I had planned at the outset changed. The true nature of the story revealed itself once I also opened myself to it. It’s a mysterious thing how this works, and I really won’t bother writing too much about it either. The point is: trust yourself. You know where this is going, even if you don’t--that’s something I learned from Eriko Fujioka.
      Eriko is the one truly original character we introduced in RA. Not only was it necessary to explore David’s “true” personality, but she was also necessary to act as an anchor into the pre-Pluto’s Kiss world of .hack, which is an area of the timeline that has never been explored before. While much of Pluto’s Kiss and its consequences are explained as an overture to the rest of this series, their implications are not considered very thoroughly. The internet disappeared. When you think about that in relation to the world we currently live in, it seems almost impossible. Not to mention the very different internet of the world before 2005, both in .hack and in real life, stands in stark contrast with the centralized hellscape we call the “free network” now.
      For these purposes Eriko Fujioka was born.
      The idea that she could have saved the world was also concomitant with this. We didn’t want to end up making another dead girl for a man to feel some kind of way about, so I won’t say much more than this: Eriko Fujioka is not dead. She was never intended to die, and is not dead in the year 2025 or beyond either.
      But, like I said: this story is about failure. That’s why Eriko, who was closest to the truth, who was the strongest of any character in this story, failed to fulfill her duty. I don’t mean to illustrate how crushing the establishment that manages information can be, nor did I want to write some kind of masochistic Gainax ending. It’s simply that the same way the original Bullet often feels like act 47 of the world’s longest play, RA is act 48.
      Why an interquel? Why not write what happens immediately after Thanatos Report? Or even the year between Dominique de Mirabeau’s death and David’s final showdown with Eleanor?
      Because there’s too much housekeeping left to do.
      Before we can feasibly write a story about the 13th Bansyoya File, David’s cyborg body, the two factions of Mama, and so on, I had to set up the circumstances necessary for those stories to even take place. Much of those plot points were dependent on other stories being told, one of those being the original Bullet--but we can see that story also deviated from its original purpose, and its promises were never truly fulfilled. In fact, during the serialization of RA, Bullet received an additional chapter that “explained” where Ryuuji received the 13th Bansyoya File, so we continued to write the story as if that had happened (bit of a relief, actually!). To this end RA was created to create context. If you’ve read the story to its completion I’m sure you understand how important a phrase that is.
      There is still one more story that must be told before we can even think about moving beyond Thanatos Report. I’m sure you can figure out for yourself what that is.
      I also realize now that writing an interquel to a series as dense as .hack is about the dumbest thing you can ever do in your entire life. The amount of late nights between the three of us where we would discuss what the story was going to be even before we began writing it was like trying very carefully not to spill a bowl of water filled to its brim while sitting in the backseat of a car doing donuts in an empty lot at three in the morning.
      Not easy!
      Even while writing I would often forget exactly where I was taking the story. I would make different stops along the way, and the nature of certain events would change. Here is what was to be covered before we began writing:
      1. Ryuuji was to have a funky road trip on his way to Aomori, where he would discover the quantum computer and decode the remainder of the message from Genius. In the finale, he would also discover an organ trading black market supplied by CC Corp for quantum research.
      2. David was to discover collusion at the highest levels and kill Tabitha Knox.
      3. Eriko was to discover the true nature of the ALTIMIT project through her internet friend, then disappear from David’s life. Then this information would somehow be discovered by David in the present day, becoming his breaking point.
      Yeah, all that shit just barely happened.
      In fact, by the time it does happen it almost feels like it was besides the point. They lost--great. But like David says, they had lost from the very beginning. In that regard, as a narrative, the things that happened before they realize this take more importance than the actual finale itself. The shocking conclusion of the finale is that this .hack story had an outcome that was decided by forces outside its protagonists’ control (and oftentimes this is the conclusion of most .hack stories), and that the only thing they can really take for certain is their lived experience. That’s why it becomes extra important to examine the things that happened in this story versus the ones that were said to have happened.
      So: what’s the point of it all?
      To be more aware of the “true” shape of .hack, which is that none of it is true at all. In a series as dense and as collaborative as this, you naturally want to order it in a way that makes logical sense. But much like the fleeting nature of internet memes, in-jokes, and what could be called cultural “lore,” you’ll often find yourself hitting walls of meaning trying to archive all this stuff instead of being in active conversation with it.
      Okay, I feel like I’ve written all my thoughts and also nothing at all. I hope at the very least you’ve understood that this novel exists for reasons that transcend itself, much like all works of art. Don’t groan when you read “art” in relation to fanfiction, either--celebrate it. Take action, assert yourself, and write the world you want to see. Most importantly, I want this to be clear: .hack is a story designed to be retold. Each entry undergoes an obsessive process of destruction and rebirth both in narrative circumstances (the jump from one version of The World to another) and its real life production (the hiring and promotions of new teams to make it). There are countless alternative retellings of “canon” media licensed and distributed by Bandai Namco to challenge what that word really means. RA’s plot itself is an expression of this, as the characters themselves are fighting back against this undefined, non-canon world. Ryuuji, David, and Eriko are constantly chased by phantoms of people that have disappeared or never existed in the first place. The villains are working to put into motion a plan to justify every story. RA, at its highest levels, is about the hope inherent to fanworks: that you can save these characters.
      I encourage everyone who read this story to its completion to write their continuation without my consent or acknowledgement. I ask you to write the .hack story that has always been in your heart, even if it contradicts everything. It doesn’t even have to be .hack: make the Evangelion, Nier, Gundam, and so on you see in yourself. Fuck canon.

      When I started all of this I did it to prove something to myself. I obsessively made every single page by myself in a desperate attempt to prove I could. I want it to be extremely clear: these most important parts of wielant.net would not exist without the help of others. Of course, the two active members of Mode Gone are one thing, but many artists, programmers, and in-betweeners all had a hand to play in the most important undertaking in my life. All I can hope for is that where we go from here is even more impressive, more entertaining, and more our own.

      Thank you to:
      Custat
      Saber
      Sayakon
      Fonzeworth
      Sakuromi
      Syunkan
      Zyunoe
      …and all the travelers.
      This story is not yet over. As long as I’m alive, .hack will never die.

      E. WIELAND, MAY 12 2022
      modegone.net