The POV, in its specialized state.
The POV’s definition was this: “everywhere and everywhen the avatar can go with its everyday awareness, and that which can go everywhere and everywhen.”
However, the POV of an avatar tends to be more specialized than “everywhere and everywhen,” depending on what inspirations it accepted. In other words, we keep seeing what we keep seeing.
We can think of this as the difference between everything that could be written in a novel versus everything that is written in a novel.
The former is the POV in its original, unlimited state.
The latter is the POV that is filtered through the accepted inspirations of an avatar.
There is no problem with a specialized POV. It’s actually quite practical. If our POV were to truly go everywhere everywhen, we, as avatars, might go mad. It would be like a novel written from the POV of everything that is possible:
The knight wielded his sword to cut off the wings of the monster dragon. The newly-upgraded artificial intelligence predicted the doom of humanity. She kissed her boyfriend on the lips, passionately, and said, “Let’s live happily ever after.”
This is what happens when we mix Epic Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Romance. Plus, there is no protagonist. Plus, the setting is so diverse that it feels undetermined. Plus, basically, it’s no fun. Most of us don’t want this in our lives.
The possibility of writing everything and anything is great, but if we were to write everything and anything, we wouldn’t be able to experience the story—our individual stories.
Thus, at some point in our lives, we ceased leaving the options wide open. Instead, we chose what it means, for each of us, to be “I”—especially in the avatar form. We accepted inspirations about how we look, how we smell, how we talk, how much money we make, who our spouse is, etc.
Accepting such inspirations is perfectly fine.
However, it is also useful to know that a POV doesn’t have to stay specialized in the particular way in which it happens to be specialized. The POV can always return closer to its original state: limitless.
The worldview tag is best read in this order. The later posts build on the earlier posts.