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 Muses: From Malinowski’s Diary to Fictional Afterwords

Malinowski built his reputation on the Kula — a ceremonial exchange of shells that circulates prestige and bonds across the Trobriand Islands. He built it, too, on the pretense that the ethnographer's inner life was irrelevant to the work. His Diary demolished that pretense. Yet what the subsequent discourse on reflexivity rarely addresses is the ethnographer's internal war — not with observed biases but with the voices that inhabit the work before it is written. My empathy for Malinowski has grown after writing a novel. While he used his Diary to suppress private demons that threatened his scholarly persona, I found that writing Rajah Versus Conquistador required something closer to the opposite: not suppression but invitation, not control but negotiated surrender. Dr. Maria Carmen Kintanar-Lozano arrived the way Paraluman did — with the felt rightness of a missing piece finding its place, a recognition rather than a decision.

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. He fought his possessing spirits — and lost, posthumously, when the private pages went public.

My process in RVC moved in a different direction. Doc Camy arrived with the completeness of a move that satisfies every dimension of the game at once — and there were at least four dimensions.

The first is neo-animist. Doc Camy arrived the way Paraluman did — not as a solution I reasoned toward but as a recognition, the sensation of something that had always been there revealing itself. The diwata of the novel gave me Paraluman’s name before I understood its significance; they gave me Doc Camy the same way. I did not choose her so much as identify her — the way one identifies a face in a crowd that one has been, without knowing it, looking for. That she happened to be a Cebuano woman scholar with a feminist sensibility and a devotion to binukot lore: this too felt given rather than invented, consistent with a story that seemed to know more about itself than its author did.

The second dimension is aesthetic — or more precisely, architectural. The novel’s real ambition was not beautiful sentences but the weaving of worldviews: Humabon’s ancient sacrificial epistemology of power, the conquistador faith of Magellan, the binukot historiography that frames both. Most historical fiction on 1521 is trapped inside the epistemologies of nationalism or Christianity, using the past to deliver moral lessons for the present. RVC tried the opposite — using the present to translate the past, while remaining maniacally faithful to the historical and anthropological record. A novel with this kind of structural ambition needed a framing voice that could hold the weave together without collapsing it into a single perspective. A male Cebuano author, writing from inside the Humabon worldview, could not provide that. Doc Camy’s afterword — written from within the binukot tradition, attentive to what colonial records erased, aware of the story’s moral complexity without flattening it — is not a disclaimer appended to the novel. She is the outer wall of its architecture, the voice that makes the weave visible as weave.

The third is defensive. Every novel has enemies — not hostile readers but the ethical frameworks that would conscript the story into their service. RVC faced two such threats. The first was nationalist historiography, which wants 1521 to be a morality play: Lapulapu the hero, Humabon the traitor, the Spanish the villains. The second was the ethics of my academic community, which would have found the novel's depiction of ritual violence, its binukot on a pedestal, its masculinity unqualified by ironic distance, deeply troubling. Both frameworks, if internalized, would have turned the novel into propaganda — just propaganda for different causes. Doc Camy's afterword was a cordon around the story, a way of acknowledging these readers so that the narrative itself would not have to answer to them. When she declares that "to do otherwise would have been to impose my contemporary sensibilities upon a past that does not fit them" (Kintanar-Lozano, RVC Afterword), she is not hedging. She is drawing a boundary: the novel's moral framework—to her—is binukot Catholicism, not postcolonial theory, not nationalist pieties, not academic feminist critique. When she anticipates that "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), she is naming the chorus — and then, having named it, releasing the story from its demands.

The fourth dimension was also aesthetic, but from a different angle. The story did not feel complete without being brought into the present — without showing what happened to the world the novel created, how its forces rippled through Philippine history into the present day. But if I, Kahlil Corazo, the masters student in anthropology, attempted that epilogue, scholarly discipline would have strangled it. I could not claim that Cory Aquino carries Paraluman’s mitochondrial DNA, or that the baylan’s fingerprints are on the anti-Sangley pogroms, or that the Sinulog’s wild Sunday belongs to one sisterhood and its solemn Saturday to another. These are not claims a scholar can make. They are claims a fictional tradition can make — one with its own archives, its own oral histories, its own centuries of hidden knowledge. Doc Camy’s world, with its binukot and baylan moving through Philippine history like the Bene Gesserit through the Imperium, was the only container capacious enough to hold the story’s full arc.

This is what separates my situation from Malinowski’s most sharply. His demons were his own — colonial contempt, boredom, self-disgust — and he fought them in private pages never meant for circulation. His diary entries, “Truly I lack real character” (Malinowski, Diary), suggest a man at war with thoughts that threatened to contaminate his ethnography, containing them through confession so they would not enter the published work. The voices I wrestled with were not my own prejudices but something closer to disciplinary weather: the ambient epistemology of the postcolonial academy, the post-Holocaust morality that makes Humabon’s violence nearly inaccessible to most contemporary writers. I did not suppress these voices. I gave one of them a body and a name, and let her write the afterword herself.

The difference is not between control and exposure but between fighting a possessing spirit and incorporating it. Malinowski wrestled with voices he could not acknowledge and eventually lost to them when his diary went public. I invited a voice in — the feminist scholarly consciousness that is part of any trained anthropologist’s inheritance — and let it speak through Doc Camy, who is possessed by feminism knowingly, and not entirely. She shares my Girardian training, my Cebuano roots, my anthropological vocabulary. She is the feminine voice the novel summoned and the masculine author partially inhabits. Not a pure channel. Something closer to what a baylan does: incorporate the spirit without dissolving into it, speak through it while remaining oneself.

Perhaps Malinowski and I fought similar battles through opposite strategies. He turned to secret pages to contain what could not enter his ethnography. I turned the scholarly demand for reflexivity into fiction — not to neutralize it but to let it live in the world the novel created. The afterword became not an exorcism but an incorporation. Both strategies honor the same truth: some voices must be given form. Malinowski gave his form in hiding, and the hiding became the scandal. I gave mine a fictional name, a PhD, and a feminist perspective she developed on her own terms. That she also happens to address the critiques I half-imagined says less about my foresight than about the novel’s — about what a story knows when you have inhabited it long enough to let the diwata finish their work.