For the last couple years, outside of bad tweets, dumb jokes, and testing things for corporations
(always looking for new work by the way, tweet me if something needs testing :p)
I've been getting through something akin to writer's block I guess? and now I need to vent.
For those unaware, a lot of the media you absorb every day, every year, usually starts life as something else. For the grand majority of incoming anime and occasionally videogames its light novels and their favorite long lost cousin twice removed... webnovels
The webnovels and light novels have been around for a while but the digital variation of these is pretty damn recent and as such have gone through a lot of changes as a medium. One of the biggest most frustrating changes is the lack of self control when writing a story... specifically
The story can drastically change weekly depending on viewer count.
Analytics can be a fun tool, at any time they can tell me how many in the "audience" responded to a tweet, how many of my users come from other countries, how many people view my profile on a monthly basis (I'm still blown away how more people see this account then there are users in the companies I've worked for) and that right there is the struggle I think writers have been hit with.
They think if they react Now and adjust NOW then they are guaranteed to do better next month ( and sometimes weekly). Its a literary form of hedging bets with short term gains and chances for long term losses.
And as a result,we have writers like the ones that handled card apprentice. They had a good idea but they never truly capitalized on it.
The story takes place in a card based, magical, scifi warring era type world, and as such there's a lot of themes. Politics, Economics, WMD's, War Tactics, it had a wildly expanding depth of topics / interests as it went through the stories world building. It's by and large one of the funnest world's I've seen in a long time
Where they fucked up at every possible intersection is the main character, "Chen Mu".
It's the story anyone has seen a million times. The boy, an orphan, born into an extremely shitty dog eats other dogs world needs to find a way to survive and through the power of a magical maguffin he has discovered a way to survive that will surely lead him towards a life on easy street.
Sadly, the writer doesn't seem to read the latest trend on slow life light novels and has decided that each and every time the character has been given a chance to live on easy street, he shall instead decide not to live on it with barely any discerning reason as to why.
It makes the character look like a fucking moron and the internet has agreed on that statement
Each time some character has a chance to provide the MC with everything he has ever wanted, he will choose not to act on it. Every time a heroine character has professed their love / want to give him a place he has always desired, he will never fucking act on it. There was even a moment where he could have become a king under unique circumstances that guaranteed him a life with no regrets that easily fixed any problem he currently had in his life, yet he never fucking acted on it.
Naturally, it looks alot like the writer over the years was just trying to fan the flames, using trope salad after trope salad and intentionally triggering the audience as he searched for the next bit of the story he could tell . As disgusting as that is... that formula probably worked, this is considered one of the more popular entries that had a lot of people paying to read across the world.
It was constantly competing on the associated charts and the fact this story kept popping up whenever i was looking for something else clearly means the writer had done something right ... even if that was through gas lighting and likely flame wars on the forums.
yet now, as hes reached the end and this whirlwind world of great ideas and shitty resolution his fan base after years of devotion has come to an ugly realization.
After reading for years, should I bother reading anything he writes anymore?
He spent all this time, all these years writing weekly on this very very long all encompassing story yet he ended up going nowhere.
Every character including the main character never sees a better day, every heroine is left facing dread alone when they needed the MC by their side for survival, every mentor dies or faces a disastrous life and all that worked to paint a unique / technologically fascinating world has lost all meaning since there was never a conclusion.
If anything, the analytics, heated comments, and constant obsession with tropes has only led the writer down one route and that route would be the bad end of any videogame world. The scenario where everyone has died and there's nothing left.
You should never have a reader end a story like that. The hero should be defined, the people surrounding him should gain their closure, and the world itself usually needs a feeling of "moving on" and that's a big part of the reason why I hate ROI / analytical approaches to anything.
Most of the time your not looking for a way to move on, your looking for a way to get bigger
and it breaks everything else along the way.
No one wants to go anywhere if there's nothing left
They'll just move on without you..
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