[codex] Launch the Living Arc transmedia story system

[frankxai]

Summary

Launches The Living Arc as an original Arcanea transmedia story system, including the narrative foundation, a cinematic responsive web experience, Webtoon Episode 00, downloadable wallpapers, and a ready-to-publish social campaign.

What ships

• original six-book story bible, Book I opening chapter, canon-staging proposal, and transmedia release strategy
• interactive /story/the-living-arc experience with a remembered opening choice, Living Elements Concord tabs, expandable codex, format paths, and real wallpaper downloads
• vertical /story/the-living-arc/webtoon/episode-0 prologue with reading progress and three original art panels
• 4K desktop and phone wallpapers
• eight-slide Instagram carousel + ordered ZIP
• 18.13-second 1080×1920 Reel master, four source cards, and cover
• Instagram, Reels, Stories, LinkedIn, X/Threads, and Discord launch copy with alt text
• editable social-render script, asset-rights ledger, direction decision, and visual QA evidence
• sitemap, metadata, Open Graph, structured data, and lore discoverability

Verification

• tsc --noEmit
• targeted ESLint with zero warnings
• Next.js 16 production build: 133/133 static pages generated
• browser proof at 375×844, 768×1024, and 1440×1000 on both routes
• zero automated WCAG 2 A/AA and 2.1 A/AA violations in the final proof run
• no horizontal overflow, broken visible images, or unlabeled images
• opening-choice persistence, Water Concord selection, and Scroll → Episode 00 interaction checks passed
• social renderer syntax, 8-file carousel ZIP, and 1080×1920 / 30 fps Reel master verified

Editorial and rights boundary

All new lore remains STAGING pending canon review. The system translates broad genre-level influences into Arcanea-original terminology, metaphysics, characters, symbols, and visuals. New generated masters are retained with provenance in the asset ledger; pre-existing draft art is flagged for provenance confirmation before external licensing.

[gemini-code-assist]

Caution

The consumer version of Gemini Code Assist on GitHub has been sunset. All code review activity has officially ceased.

[coderabbitai]

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[frankxai]

Automated CI triage

Relevant release gates are green:

• ✅ Quality Gate — TypeScript/package tests, lint-debt report, and production build passed
• ✅ Web excellence
• ✅ CodeRabbit status
• ✅ TypeScript and Security Audit jobs in the broader test suite
• ✅ Local scoped ESLint, production build, responsive browser proof, interactions, and WCAG audit (details in the PR body and design-qa.md)

Three repository-wide workflows remain red for issues outside this PR’s changed paths:

• Deploy Arcanea Applications fails in actions/setup-node before dependencies because it requests a pnpm cache before pnpm is installed.
• Arcanea MVP CI/CD runs the full existing web lint backlog and reports 222 errors in unchanged files; the Living Arc paths pass the targeted zero-warning lint command.
• Arcanea Test Suite reports existing CLI/package matrix failures; this PR changes no CLI or package test code.

I did not expand this story release into unrelated CI-infrastructure or legacy-lint remediation.

[claude]

Review: The Living Arc transmedia launch

Reviewed the code changes (76 files, ~4.9k additions) against the repo's TypeScript/Next.js/CSS-Modules conventions. Overall this is a well-structured, self-contained feature: consistent CSS Modules split (foundation/narrative/codex/release), SSR-safe useSyncExternalStore usage, prefers-reduced-motion handling in every new stylesheet, and solid semantic markup/ARIA labeling on the webtoon page. A few things worth a look before merge:

Potential bugs

• apps/web/components/story/living-arc/living-arc-experience.tsx — unguarded localStorage.setItem: readStoredChoice() wraps localStorage access in try/catch, but choose() calls window.localStorage.setItem(...) directly with no guard. In Safari private browsing (or any environment with storage disabled/full), setItem throws, which would break the "Keep the wound / Give him the memory" buttons with no fallback. Worth wrapping the write the same way the read is wrapped, so the UI degrades to "no persistence" instead of erroring.
• Timing coupled across files by a magic number: choose() uses window.setTimeout(..., 420) to wait before scrolling to #first-memory, matching the 420ms choiceReveal CSS animation in living-arc-foundation.module.css. These two 420s are not derived from a shared constant, so a future edit to one duration will silently desync the scroll timing from the animation.

Code quality / maintainability

• living-arc-styles.ts merges 4 CSS Modules via object spread ({...foundationStyles, ...narrativeStyles, ...codexStyles, ...releaseStyles}). CSS Modules class names are only unique within their own file — if two of these four files ever define the same class name, the spread silently lets the last one win with no compiler/lint error. Not a problem today (names look deliberately namespaced), but it's a landmine for the next contributor who adds a class without checking all four files.
• --null as a CSS custom property name (in living-arc-foundation.module.css, reused across codex/narrative/release modules) is a confusing name for what's actually a near-black ink color (#05070d). Reads oddly at every color: var(--null) call site — a name like --ink-deep would be clearer.

Scope / risk

• Site-wide domain default change bundled into a feature PR: apps/web/app/layout.tsx and apps/web/app/sitemap.ts both change the fallback base URL from https://arcanea.com to https://www.arcanea.ai when NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_URL isn't set. That's a global change to canonical URLs, Open Graph metadata, and the entire sitemap — not scoped to the new story routes. If this is an intentional rebrand it's fine, but it's easy to miss buried in a 76-file feature PR; worth calling out explicitly in the PR description and confirming the env var is actually set in production so this fallback doesn't silently change SEO metadata site-wide.

Test coverage

• No unit/component tests were added for the new interactive logic — LivingArcExperience's choice persistence (readStoredChoice/choose) and WebtoonProgress's scroll-based completion tracking are both pure-ish, easily testable behaviors (localStorage round-trip, event dispatch, progress math) that currently have zero automated coverage. Given this repo's TDD-first guidance, at least a couple of unit tests around the choice-storage logic would be valuable.

Accessibility (minor)

• The elementTabs / formatTabs widgets use role="tablist"/role="tab" on <button> elements but don't implement the WAI-ARIA APG roving-tabindex + arrow-key navigation pattern — every tab remains a normal Tab stop instead of a single tab-stop with Left/Right arrow switching. Functionally fine (click and Tab both work), but not a full ARIA tabs implementation.

Instrumentation (verify, don't necessarily change)

• living-arc-experience.tsx and webtoon-progress.tsx dispatch several window.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent('living_arc_...')) calls (living_arc_choice, living_arc_element, living_arc_format_interest, living_arc_chapter_start/complete). No in-repo listener for these events was found — if they're meant to be picked up by GTM or another external tag manager, that's fine, but worth double-checking the tag is actually configured, otherwise this is currently inert instrumentation.

Security

• No issues found. The two dangerouslySetInnerHTML usages for JSON-LD (page.tsx, episode-0/page.tsx) only serialize static, hardcoded objects — no user input flows into them.

Nice touches worth calling out: the try/catch + version-tagged shape around localStorage reads, the SSR-safe useSyncExternalStore with an explicit getServerSnapshot, and consistent prefers-reduced-motion overrides in every new stylesheet.

[claude]

Review: [codex] Launch the Living Arc transmedia story system

Reviewed the diff for apps/web/app/story/the-living-arc/**, apps/web/components/story/living-arc/**, scripts/render-living-arc-social.sh, and the small infra edits. Overall this is a well-executed, self-audited feature drop — the included design-qa.md and release-evidence/living-arc/visual-proof/report.json already document a real browser QA pass (WCAG checks, 375/768/1440 breakpoints, overflow fixes), which is exactly the standard this repos web-release-gate expects. Nice work closing that loop before opening the PR.

Code quality / correctness

• Dead analytics instrumentation. living-arc-experience.tsx and webtoon-progress.tsx dispatch several CustomEvents (living_arc_choice, living_arc_element, living_arc_format_interest, living_arc_chapter_start, living_arc_chapter_complete), but no listener anywhere in apps/web consumes them (no dataLayer/gtag/analytics wiring picks these up). As written this is dead code — worth either wiring it to the actual analytics pipeline in this PR, or dropping it until that pipeline exists, so a future reader does not assume it is live telemetry.
• Implicit cross-file CSS variable coupling. living-arc-styles.ts merges four separate CSS Modules (foundation, narrative, codex, release) into one flat object via spread. Tokens like --null, --gold, --moonbone, --teal-ink are only defined in .shell inside living-arc-foundation.module.css, but consumed in living-arc-codex.module.css and living-arc-narrative.module.css. This works today only because every consumer happens to render inside the .shell wrapper — there is no compiler check enforcing that, and CSS custom properties fail silently (not a build error) if that assumption ever breaks. Consider centralizing the token declarations in one clearly-canonical file instead of relying on one components local class to leak variables into sibling modules.
• --null as a variable name is easy to misread as the CSS null/invalid-value case. webtoon.module.css uses --ink for a near-identical near-black (#03060a vs #05070d) — a consistent, clearer name across both would reduce confusion and duplication of near-identical dark tokens.
• Style organization: related selectors are split across files somewhat arbitrarily — e.g. .villainImage lives in living-arc-foundation.module.css while .villainSection/.villainCopy (same section) live in living-arc-narrative.module.css. Not a bug, but makes it non-obvious where to edit a given sections styles.

Scope

• .github/workflows/deploy-apps.yml (Node 18 to 22, pnpm install method) is bundled into this content-feature PR. The change looks correct — it matches packageManager: pnpm@8.15.0 and engines.node >= 20.9.0 in the root package.json — but is unrelated to "Launch the Living Arc" and would be easier to review/bisect as its own PR.
• apps/web/app/layout.tsx and sitemap.ts switch the canonical/default domain from arcanea.com to www.arcanea.ai. That is a site-wide change (affects metadataBase for every pages OG/canonical URLs, not just this feature) riding along in a feature PR — worth confirming it is intentional and that arcanea.com still redirects, since this silently changes canonical URLs everywhere.

Security

Nothing concerning. scripts/render-living-arc-social.sh uses set -euo pipefail, quotes all variable expansions, and only operates on repo-local, hardcoded paths (no user input, not wired into CI) — safe as a local asset-rendering utility. No secrets, no dynamic eval/injection surface in the new TS/TSX either.

Performance

• Good use of next/image with explicit sizes throughout, and loading=lazy on below-the-fold webtoon panels vs. priority on the first hero/panel images.
• webtoon-progress.tsx scroll handler is rAF-throttled and passive — reasonable.
• The bundled Instagram carousel zip and mp4 reel now ship under apps/web/public/..., which is correct for direct downloads, but worth double-checking these large binaries do not get pulled into any JS bundle analysis/build step unnecessarily — they should not, since they are static public assets, but flagging given the unusually large added-file count (77 files) in this PR.

Test coverage

• No unit/component tests were added for the new interactive logic: readStoredChoice/subscribeToChoice (localStorage parsing with a version guard) in living-arc-experience.tsx, or the scroll-progress math in webtoon-progress.tsx. Both are small and cheap to unit test (malformed localStorage JSON, version !== 1, the scrollable <= 0 edge case). Given this repos TDD-first guidance, this is the main coverage gap — not blocking, since the PR body documents manual interaction QA, but automated coverage would catch regressions the visual-proof screenshots cannot.

Nit

• page.tsxs seriesData.url and the webtoon pages episodeData.url/isPartOf.url hardcode https://www.arcanea.ai/... rather than deriving from NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_URL the way sitemap.ts/layout.tsx do. Minor inconsistency, fine in practice, but worth noting since the rest of the codebase treats the base URL as configurable.

Nothing here blocks merging; the flagged items are mostly maintainability/coupling concerns plus the dead-event-listener question, which is worth a quick confirm before shipping.

[frankxai]

PR hospital triage 2026-08-07 — PARK (draft · creative gate)

Disposition: leave draft. Living Arc transmedia system — creative gate.

• Label suggestion: park · creative-gate