Bad Omens Retrospective

0.5: Bad Omens

"You thought it wise a Devil’s bargain, which cleaved a new world's margin."

Initially penned in February and March 2020, it's the oldest content in the Archives and was written well before the Archives were even an idea. Bad Omens was originally a reboot of the Cafe and Diner ARG from 2018 set in a new universe with most of the original cast back and working together. It was very short-lived due to the pandemic, my grandmother's death, and my having to move across my state to return to school. Still, unlike the original ARG, all of the reboot receipts were archived, so they literally formed the backbone of the Archives in 2021. That being said… I have a lot of problems with Bad Omens.

The Good Omens

As much as I want to just shit on Bad Omens for being old and bad, I think there are a lot of good things this Update brought with it too. The most notable good that came from Good Omens was the premise of the current iteration of the CaDive Universe, also known as the 16th Sphere. The 15th Sphere (a.k.a. the original 2018 ARG) ended in a fiery confusing mess. It was so bad that I had to reboot the universe somehow to continue the story. And still, to this day, I love the premise of Mammon and Belphegor teaming up with Jean-Marc to use God's Pocketwatch to rewind the universe.

Part of Jean's stipulations for using the Pocketwatch to reset the universe was that he would get to have all of the Cafe and Diner employees return and be at his side. Now, of course, you might be thinking--well, if that's the case where's Miranda, Brent, Tyler, Ashlyn, Aelan, or Salenna? I think that the deal between Mammon on Jean-Marc was only set up to have all of the Cafe and Diner employees have the possibility of returning. And those who aren't present for the Fourth Cafe either join after Otherworldly or are doing their own thing… or are dead.

The other great thing Good Omens brought was the Otherworld itself. It's a fresh and novel concept for the Cafe and Diner to deal with and dramatically expands the available customers. Good Omens opens up with CWWA/Cowon in Washington (originally OSO/Other Side of the Otherside, though that was later amended to be an earlier case.) And in CWWA, Jackie is hot on the trail of a canine customer paralleling the opening of the original 2018 ARG, where Jackie was tracking down a Chupacabra. It's such a fun opening that calls back to the original ARG in such a nice way. It's also the return of Jackie as a character, as she originally went AWOL at the end of A Halloween Gambit in the original ARG.

The Bad Omens

But boy, oh boy, is there a lot of Jackie in Bad Omens. Almost entirely too much Jackie. Of the 49 Receipts in Bad Omens, Jackie has 6, and Felix has 7. And the other few employees who dominate the conversation are Jean-Marc, Jennifer, Jericho, and Joy. So… Managers plus Felix. This was a weird habit of mine in the earlier writing to only give focus to the Managers. My character balancing does improve later on, though, and it improves dramatically after Update 11 or so when I started ensuring that everyone got at least one receipt. Still, these earlier updates are very mono-employee, and Update 1 isn't going to be much better.

Another major flaw of Bad Omens is that the pacing is horrendous. It's easily my biggest regret with how Bad Omens is written. The pacing of CaD was never that great, however. For comparison, the Twice Third Temple and Welcome the Dark storylines in the original ARG were only three months long, whereas now they are both around 18 months long. The most notable flaw of Bad Omen's pacing is that Nightmarch is introduced halfway through February. Initially, the entirety of the Otherworldly Adventures was only going to take around 5 months. So, the Cafe would have gone to Nightmarch to get Princess Takiyasha's Antekey in April 2020. For comparison, now the Nightmarch story arc takes place in June 2020 and stretches until mid-August 2020.

The Ugly Omens

…And then there are the weird continuity errors and downright retcons that come with Bad Omens. Three major oddities stick out to me in Bad Omens. 1) Sequence II (obviously), 2) The Friday Reports, and 3) Julia-Wandsun/Babe of Lucifer.

So first off, Sequence II. The big old retcon in the room. Originally it was not written to be a retcon. I didn't go into writing it thinking I would end up redoing all of it anyway. In fact, I debated with not even including it in the Archives at all because it is no longer canon. What happened was I wrote myself into a bad corner in 2020 and when I came back to continue the story in 2021… I hated it. Partly because the pacing was terrible, partly because I had jumped the shark by opening the Black Tide, and partly because I just don't like my older writing all that much. So I made the decision to have Dolos reset time by a month so I could write it properly. Of course, the "real" March 2020 still has its problems, but I'll talk about that when I get to the Update 3 & 4 Retrospective.

Next, the Friday Reports. So very weird and out of place. The Friday Reports were released as part of the 2020 Reboot ARG and were sort of like a fun treat to show what happened in the past of this new universe and how it lined up with events of the prior universe using a reoccurring boogieman, Friday. The problem is, I wasn't planning on writing the Archives, so I was able to write whatever, and I didn't have to worry so much about shaping future content around them at the time. Now I have seven receipts that are just scattered throughout the Third Cafe that I need to write around, and over time I've had to update the Friday Receipts via Housekeeping to make them fit better with what's going on. On the bright side, at least, I wrote the Friday Receipts with much more forgiving pacing at the time… though it's almost a little too broad in some places. But I think that's a general limitation of Friday's terms that he could only come to Flipside on Friday the 13th.

Then there's Julia. Julia is a returning character from the very ill-fated J's Cafe reboot. Technically, the J's Cafe reboot was the first reboot of the Cafe and Diner in the 16th Sphere, but it didn't take place in the Cafe Prime Cycle. My issue with Bad Omens is that the reveal that Julia is the daughter of Lucifer was going to happen a lot sooner than it does in the Archives now. It was supposed to happen around June 2020… instead of December 2021. So the poem "Babe of Lucifer with locks of gold, Half-Prince unleashing horrors fourfold" was a bit too straightforward. It also makes it sort of weird that Jean-Marc doesn't press the implication of Lucifer having a child, and I still haven't really addressed that yet in the Archives, but I'm hoping to at some point.

In general, there are also some other oddities about Bad Omens and the Otherworldly Adventures. New customer classifications like Ms. and Mx. are never used outside of Bad Omens. Shaka has his name needlessly obscured. The Receipt Total system makes a lot more sense in the Twitter ARG context but is now just cumbersome in the Archives. The Pearl Antekey was originally the only Olympian Antekey. And the horribly awkward timing of Bad Omens taking place a month after Otherworldly started leaving a weird January 2020 gap to fill in later.

Final Thoughts

I don't like Bad Omens. I wasn't in a good place when I was writing it, and it received next to no attention when it was running. I love the premise and the setup, but the actual writing was too fast-paced and poorly balanced character-wise. I've done some Housekeeping work on Bad Omens to attempt to get it closer to the quality of future updates, but there are some rough spots that no amount of polish can really take out.

Neat Stats

Bad Omens has:

• 49 Receipts
• 16 Authors
• ~10,000 Words
• 21 Diner Receipts
• 7 Cafe Receipts
• 2 Cafe Diner Receipts
• 1 Diner Diner Receipt
• 18 Different Cafe Receipts
• 11 Orders

Bad Omens takes place in Long Beach, New Orleans, Auburn, Hollywood, Mompong Island, the remains of the Sogi Power Station, and Richland.

Bad Omens is also the first appearance of the Zombie Kathrine Wade, the Badb, Princess Takiyasha, and Despoina.