Toy Essay: Why I Gave My Novel a Fictional Academic Afterword

When I was around ten, I played with LEGO so intensely that my dad once boiled the bricks in a pot of water when I would not come down for lunch. I'm his eldest and I could only imagine how my state of flow must have looked like disrespect, prompting him into that noob daddy drama. A few years later, my friends and I were cannibalizing mechanical toys to build styrofoam boats with homemade propellers, learning that machines weren't sacred objects but puzzles waiting to be reimagined. This tinkering instinct is probably why I approach LLMs the way

Venkatesh Rao

suggests: as toy-making equipment, the usage of which is also playful.

This week, I need to write an academic essay on a chapter of Malinowski's seminal Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) in connection to his posthoumously published diary. This is for the masters program in Anthropology I’m currently in the middle of. I'm familiar with Argonauts, so to make it interesting I thought of comparing the relationship of the two texts with my novel Rajah Versus Conquistador and its fictional afterword written by the story’s fictional author, Maria Carmen Kintanar-Lozano, PhD.

Instead of wrestling alone with the blank page, I treated the task like those childhood LEGO and boat-building sessions. I asked ChatGPT to plan my workflow, tweaked its suggestions, uploaded my course documents, refined my Readwise Chat prompt questions until they sparked the right connections, then watched as highlighted passages streamed in, each quote finding unexpected resonance with the others. I then loaded those quotes to ChatGPT and had it create a prompt for Claude (which still has the better literary voice after multiple new models from both LLMs). As I grappled with these two toy-making machines across the day (I’ve occasionally trained in [or played!] Brazilian Jiu-jitsu), I felt that old familiar pleasure: throw it in and see what comes out, delight when it veers somewhere you didn't expect, tinker until you find a something you like, and get lost in the world of your creation.

LEGO as a metaphor captures two levels of play visible to a kid:

• The enjoyment of making of toys (ie, the making of LEGO objects)

• The enjoyment of playing with the toys you made

But there’s a third level. Venkat writes:

Most people who enjoy playing with Legos do not appreciate the very different pleasures of nerding out over injection molding, the thermal properties of ABS, and industrial dye chemistry.

Tamiya Mini 4WD cars might be a better metaphor since it allows a kid to experience the three layers of enjoyment. These small plastic racing models came as kits requiring assembly with grownup tools like screwdrivers, designed to race autonomously around large plastic track circuits. But the real magic happened beyond the instruction manual. My friends and I would hunt down plastic sign shops to fabricate custom bumpers, take motors to electric repair shops for rewinding, and whisper secret formulas for fluids to eyedrop into dynamos. The cars became platforms for endless modification—gear ratios tweaked, suspension tuned, bodies painted and detailed. Tamiya demanded we understand mechanical principles: how gear reduction affects speed, why bearing quality matters, what makes one chassis setup faster than another. The hobby's third level wasn't hidden behind corporate walls but lived in every garage workshop and hobby shop counter, where the craft of making the cars and a first taste of the joys of handling tools often proved more addictive than the racing itself.

Let’s map the three levels onto LLM:

• The enjoyment of using tools to make toys: learning how to work with LLMs

• The enjoyment of making toys: the actual process of creating an essay

• The enjoyment of playing with the toys: reading the resulting essay

The essay below is the toy that emerged from a nine-pomodoro playtime across an entire day. Some lessons from this session:

• I assumed that ChatGPT 5 is better than Claude Opus 4.1 / Sonnet 4 in general tasks. At the same time, I’ve been comparing literary voices for over a year at this point, and ChatGPT still makes me cringe and Claude generally produces good output to my ears. In my next play session, I’ll just do everything in Claude.

• A new prompt tactic: if the output is not exactly what I want (in terms of ideas, not voice), but I can’t articulate it (it’s a gut feel), I tell the LLM that there’s something wrong with it and to come up with questions so that I could guide it in fixing the output. This has worked well!

• If I have a clear vision of the essay, it is better for me to write it manually and use LLMs for fact-checking, summarizations, and filling gaps. There’s also joy in producing writing way beyond the average of the training data. Here’s an example which was also prompted by my masters: it’s kinda clunky and weird in a way that is hard to prompt. If I’m still exploring, it is better to play with the LLMs until I sense a “full body yes” with a certain angle (eg, the one below came from multiple iterations).

Anyhow, here’s the resulting essay. It could still use some refinement but I have to submit it today. And I’m satisfied with it. It speaks of a truth that resonates with me. Definitely full body yes. We call this “lapus sa bukog”—it pierces through the bones (my bones, at least).

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Private Demons, Public Masks: From Malinowski's Diary to Fictional Afterwords

The Kula is a ceremonial exchange system in the Trobriand Islands where shells circulate to build prestige and social bonds. Reflexivity is the practice of examining one's own position and biases in research and writing. Yet what reflexivity rarely addresses is the ethnographer's internal war—not with observed biases but with the voices that would constrain the work before it begins. My empathy for Malinowski has grown after writing a novel. While he used his Diary to exorcise private demons that threatened his scholarly project, I use a fictional afterword in Rajah Versus Conquistador to absorb academic ghosts that would compromise aesthetic integrity. Dr. Maria Carmen Kintanar-Lozano becomes my designed mask—a performative solution to the storyteller's struggle against scholarly voices that demand constant qualification.

Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific presents the ordered, scientific face of ethnography—the public performance of disciplinary authority. His private Diary, published decades after his death, reveals a starkly different reality. "On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to 'Exterminate the brutes'" (Malinowski, Diary) exposes colonial attitudes that his published work carefully concealed. Other entries—"This interview bored me, and did not go well" (Malinowski, Diary) and "The [natives] were getting on my nerves, and I could not concentrate" (Malinowski, Diary)—reveal the emotional turbulence beneath the scientific surface. Firth attempts damage control, framing the diary as "a private record, a confession to himself, a kind of purgation and guide to personal correction, almost certainly for his own eyes alone" (Firth, Introduction to Diary). Yet Firth also acknowledges the document's value, calling it "a revelation of a fascinating and complex personality who had a formative influence on social science" (Firth, Introduction to Diary). The mainstream reading treats the Diary as both scandal and breakthrough—it unsettles the "view-from-nowhere" pretense of early ethnography while paradoxically grounding Malinowski's authority through the very disclosure of his moods and biases. The confession humanizes the ethnographer but at the cost of exposing the colonial violence underlying the discipline's founding texts.

My approach in RVC inverts this sequence and transforms confession into performance. The afterword's fictional scholar states: "I feel compelled to disclose my own positionality... to address potential concerns about the representation of violence, gender dynamics, and social stratification" (Kintanar-Lozano, RVC Afterword). This declaration comes after the narrative, not before—a crucial timing that allows the novel to proceed without defensive hedging. The afterword retrospectively frames the unflinching depictions: "To do otherwise would have been to impose my contemporary sensibilities upon a past that does not fit them" (Kintanar-Lozano, RVC Afterword). The fictional scholar anticipates objections: "Readers familiar with debates on toxic masculinity, class oppression, and the ethics of depicting ritual violence will find points of contention" (Kintanar-Lozano, RVC Afterword). By naming these concerns through a performative mask, I create an aesthetic shield—the afterword absorbs potential critiques by pre-acknowledging them through a fictional intermediary. Unlike Malinowski's unintended exposure, this is deliberate theater. The mask declares: "This novel exists in the liminal space between history and imagination; its truth-claims are narrative ones" (Kintanar-Lozano, RVC Afterword). The calculated disclosure performs a designed stance that "must be seen to be done" even if after the fact.

The designed mask enables aesthetic autonomy through calculated disclosure. The afterword's self-awareness about "toxic masculinity, class oppression, and the ethics of depicting ritual violence" (Kintanar-Lozano, RVC Afterword) addresses the academic chorus that lives in every scholarly writer's head. Where Malinowski's Diary reveals actual struggles between scientific pretense and human prejudice, the mask anticipates struggles that may be more imagined by the author than inevitable IRL. One cannot simply tell ones mind to stop imagining. So the fiction writer used the only tool he had: fictionalizing.

Malinowski wrestled with real prejudices in private pages never meant for circulation. The designed mask wrestles with disciplinary ghosts in public, performing a kind of academic shadowboxing. Yet this shadowboxing serves an aesthetic purpose: by exhausting the anticipated critiques—whether they would materialize or not—the afterword creates space where the narrative can exist without qualification. The story breathes because the mask has already held its breath against objections that may live more vividly in academic training than in actual readerly response.

Perhaps Malinowski and I fought similar battles against different demons. His diary entries—"Truly I lack real character" (Malinowski, Diary)—suggest a man exorcising colonial thoughts that threatened his scholarly work through private confession. The storyteller in me recognized a parallel struggle: academic voices in my head that threatened the aesthetic integrity of the narrative. Where he turned to secret pages to contain what couldn't enter his ethnography, I turned the scholarly demand for reflexivity into fiction itself. The afterword became my exorcism—not private but performative, transforming the very voices that would constrain the story into characters within its world. Both strategies honor the same truth: some thoughts must be given form to be conquered. Malinowski did his work; he fought his demons. That his private battle became public scandal says more about our hunger for fallen idols than about his method of managing the contradictions every ethnographer carries.