An Update from the For Normal People Puppet Mastery Division Writing Room

S2025 E165 *contains spoilers*

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Hi there,

We’re really hoping everyone is enjoying this timeline. With infinite universes running concurrently, we’re glad to have you following along with ours.

It was at the tail end of the Dark Ages when we at For Normal People’s Puppet Mastery Division (FNPPMD) introduced plot-driven narrative.

Audience data consistently shows that Planet Earth performs best when we prioritise plot over character development or world-building. Both Earthlings and Viewers respond more viscerally to chaos than to order — and yes, we’ve heard your notes about The Ice Age.

By now, Earthlings have developed little regard for their past or for the infinitely forking paths of their futures. See season 1440, episode 24 Spreading the Word for one of several piecemeal attempts made by the FNPPMD Writers’ Room to encourage the spreading (and the safeguarding) of acquired information among Earthlings separated by space and time.

The Gratification Directive

Unlike ants or bees, Earthlings are driven by the compulsion to satisfy immediate, individual needs — be they material or emotional. One example of a material need is the need to consume high-calorie foods for energy. An example of an emotional need might be the need to consume high-calorie food for pleasure or pain avoidance.

Among Earthlings, the instinct or drive to accommodate needs produces a drug-like experience known as gratification — a reward produced chemically in the brain.

How this works is simple: experiences resultant from the drive to need-fix are relayed via an elaborate sensory apparatus, through a network, and into a CPU.

Imagine powerlines running beneath an Earthling’s skin, connecting their fingertips, tongue, or frenulum to a computer behind their eyes. Each signal that reaches an Earthling’s brain carries a recipe — or a set of instructions — for which chemical ingredients to combine to produce a particular emotional response.

Gratification is therefore a uniquely individualised exploit. It asks nothing of the collective. It requires no understanding of how or why it works. And as you all noticed long ago, it drives every aspect of human behaviour.

In effect, Earthlings exist in a state of mutual emotional ransom. Each Earthling’s needs — and the pursuit of their own gratification — exert tangible effects on uncountable other lives. We have written superstructures like law, government, and ethics into the Earthling experience in an attempt to best balance their illusions of free will against their capacity to destroy each.

Despite many Earthlings’ increasing resentment towards these future-securing superstructures, they remain well observed the moment that imagined or cosplayed struggles become real.

The Taming of the Crude

The issue, from a programming perspective, is that while these structures support long-term narrative continuity, they obstruct our audience’s appetite for chaos, barbarism, teen pregnancy, war, and ‘natural’ disasters.

Enter the workaround: Our Earthlings prioritise emotional gratification over collective responsibility — a responsibility that cannot be realised without at least a passing familiarity with their own history, ethics, and law.

It is our duty, here in the writing room, to push for a renewed familiarity with this aforementioned scaffolding among Earthlings without re-wiring their need to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. This middle ground allows for maximum internal disorder among Earthlings — in keeping with the desires of our audience — without triggering external collapse on Earth.

As things stand, the mind-virus among Western Earthlings born among undergraduate liberal arts students and spread by Lizzo remains easy to spot. Earthlings affected wear symbols of collective identity without practising its obligations, gravitating largely towards similar patterned scarves, rhyming couplets, and the romanticisation of violence far away.

Those afflicted have developed new vocabularies, new ways to complain, and new mechanisms for outsourcing blame. While providing a feeling of communal enterprise, these affects unfortunately appear to only re-enforce a thirst for further personal gratification.

Plot, Longevity, and Self-interest.

As we not g-ds, but writers, we’ve decided to work with, and not against this aberration. All we had to do was reframe personal distress as moral truth. And so it came to be: Earthlings now pursue emotional salves as inherently valid, regardless of how those choices affected the materially vulnerable.

To feel affirmed, avenged, or seen offers instant feedback. To preserve history or engage with inherited wisdom demands discomfort, patience, and change — none of which produce a chemical reward on cue. The gratification loop wins again.

This skewed relationship with time renders ancestral knowledge mostly useless to survival. Earthlings can still digest food, power down at night, and reproduce — but the species stagnates.

Instead of engaging with a shared narrative, many now preoccupy themselves with hijacking others’ stories as a balm for their own confusion or pain.

We have run into problems. Chief among them: continuity.

We embedded ‘democracy’ into the Earthling moral structure, expecting it might support collective flourishing. Instead, it gave rise to populations voting not for material stability but for symbolic struggle.

It is proving as impossible to remove Earthlings’ reverence for democracy as it is to count on them using it for the common good.

A fight to the death. Forever!

That’s why we invented the IRGC. By repackaging antisemitism as Pan-Arab nationalism, we tapped into post-colonial shame complexes — particularly among the West’s most privileged and least informed. (See seasons 1970–1990: The Siloing of Education.)

Personal resentment became externalised as admiration for ‘the other’ — not as a geopolitical actor, but as a symbolic foil to local authority. This fetishisation created a trauma-bond between middle- and upper-class Westerners and any foreign body that appeared to reject their own institutions.

We first trialled this technique on teenagers. It was a roaring success. Did your resentment for your loving but imperfect parents lead you to date Bad Boys, steal makeup, smoke menthols, discover radical politics, or get a scattered constellation of regrettable tattoos?

Glad you understand.

And while many are now complaining about the beginning of World War Three, we’d strongly encourage a rewatch of some of our earlier work.

Seasons 1933–1945 were popular, if tragically misread. Season 1967 had fantastic pacing. Season 2001 was a commercial success, though feedback suggests the pilot remains confusing. For something more subtle, revisit Partition: The Subcontinent Saga — a sleeper hit full of borders, identity crises, and mutual amnesia.

We urge patience. Earthlings are still evolving. Many mistake catharsis for clarity, resistance for reason, and aesthetics for ethics. They are drawn, overwhelmingly, to whatever story best flatters their pain. There is little we can do, balancing our audiences’ need for drama and chaos with our own need to ensure that this show be green-lit for yet another season.

We remain hopeful that in some future season a critical mass of Earthlings will be forced to recognise that history is not a trauma to be inherited, nor a weapon to be wielded, but a map. One which, if read properly, may yet guide pivot what has become horror porn into a coming of age saga.

Until then,
Yours in plotting,
The For Normal People Puppet Mastery Division Writers’ Room