Half-response meaning Kaktus may want to add on to this, or even disagree with me on some stuff, but here's my take. So there's one similarity in the replies across the board I wanna respond to, that being the similarities to 835.
Not gonna lie, 835 was very intentionally on our minds while we wrote this; we were, in our mutual phrasing, trying to aim for worse than 835. (Whether or not we accomplished 'worse' is of course subjective and dependent on readers' individual interpretations of the gore, the compulsion stuff, the Fifthist stuff, the sexual stuff, etc.) However, here's where I see this as different from 835 in all manners other than surface-level squick (both articles are about a gory biological thing under the sea/land, but to me that's where the similarities end):
We don't know what 835 is there for, but this is here because the divine starfish needs to collect souls. 835 is an open area with a lot of gore and gunk but a lot to explore; 2678-2 is a long fleshtube, that's it. One straight path and one function. Notably, 835 is often considered nasty because it has flat-out rape themes in it; this is a big point, in that Kaktus and I mutually decided in aiming for 'worse than 835' that this would be far nastier if people were consenting to what's happening to them. They may be compelled to pull to the side of the road, but after that we're really not certain what sort of decision-making is going on when they jump in; maybe it's just a biochemical response, maybe it's still part of the compulsion response, we don't really know. But this mouth in the ground is there for a reason, and people are being led to it for a reason.
I do definitely see the reasoning in saying the ending specifically is too similar to 835 because of the faces thing, and maybe I'll talk to Kak tonight about rewording that (I wrote the ending paragraph, so maybe there're some things I could rephrase). My mental vision of 2678-2's river of gunk is super different from my mental vision of 835's wall of faces-and-gore, with a totally different color palette even, but I may need to rephrase it to focus less on the faces and more on the surroundings. I think that might cut down the similarity.
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