Monthly Archives: November 2016

Not-City-of-Heroes Fanfic writing

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Screenshot from City of Heroes character generator

This picture may be created by the City of Heroes character generator, but the heroine Nordic Spring is from the totally imaginary MMORPG Paragons which never existed in our world, only in the world of the novel I am currently writing (my second NaNoWriMo novel this year, after I won the 50 000 words challenge with my first story, Artworld.) In contrast to Artworld, I am having a blast writing Paragons of Virtue, where Virtue refers to “Virtue City”, the city formally known as “Virtual City” before it became real, and totally not the Virtue server in City of Heroes, which is an intellectual property held by NCSoft Inc, whose lawyers are probably on the Internet like most people these days.

Nordic Spring is one of the characters in my story set in the defunct MMORPG Paragons that has mysteriously become real. She is a Nature / Ice Guardian, which is totally not a Nature Affinity / Ice Blast Defender from City of Heroes, seeing how CoH doesn’t exist and never has in that world. Before coming to the alternate reality of Virtue City, she was a slightly physically challenged, long-haired woman named Tove something or other, which is totally not a poorly disguised rewrite of Tuva, not that it matters since they are both imaginary and all.

The main main character of the story is Lightwielder Trainee, a Light/Light tank. The tank class is a mainstay of MMORPGs since long before CoH was made, and it is not spelled “tanker” like the corresponding archetype in CoH. Also, CoH doesn’t have Light powersets, although it has Darkness powersets, which work differently. (The MMORPG Champions does have a Light powerset, but it works slightly differently from in my imaginary world, beyond the obvious implications of the name.) Before coming to Virtue City, Lightwielder Trainee was an underpaid office worker named Markus. In the story he is mostly referred to as Markus when doing internal monologue or talking with friends, and Lightwielder Trainee when doing heroic things or being mentioned by others. Only Tove knows his former identity, and the other way around, as they used to team up together almost every day for several years, to the point where people thought they were a couple.

Of course, now that they are physically in the game world, who knows what will happen. But I am pretty sure it will be rated T for Teens, like the game itself. Or “Young Adult” as they say about books.

***

I am having a blast writing this story, it is one that practically writes itself. Which is great because I get to read a new chapter or two each day. The downside with stories that write themselves is that I have less control over them than if I crafted them from scratch. For instance, I had planned to introduce Tove early in the book and use her as an alternate viewpoint character to avoid this becoming just a translation from 1st person perspective.

One thing that bothered me about Artworld was that the heroine got way too little exposure and development because the MMC (male main character) was the narrator. An interesting character was largely kept unexplored and the romance was badly understated because the MMC did not really understand her emotions. (What guy can understand a woman’s emotions anyway?) So I decided that my next book would be 1) not a romance, although there might be pairings and triangles in it, and 2) not a first person perspective. In practice, however, I am now on the 6th chapter of what I call “translated first person”, by which I mean it reads as if it was written in first person narrative and then someone went through the text and replaced all instances of “I” with “he” (or occasionally the name), “me” with “him”, “our” with “their” and so on. Only one person has internal monologue, only one person’s feelings are clear to the reader, and the reader does not know things the main character doesn’t know.

Translated first-person perspective is very common in LitRPG novels, even in good ones like Aleron Kong’s Chaos Seed. But having recently rewatched parts of the anime Log Horizon, based on the LitRPG books by the same name, I see how useful it can be to expand the scope a bit, even if you maintain a main character. If you compare Log Horizon to Sword Art Online, another popular Japanese LitRPG which was made into an anime, you will notice that the main character of SAO has a pretty strong Mary Sue (or Marty Stu) flavor. In other words, he is too perfect and overpowered.

One of the most appealing aspects of LitRPG is that the characters are constrained by the game mechanics. You have to do your grinding and your artifact quests in order to become powerful, you cannot muddle through until toward the end of the book, when everything comes to a climax, the main character suddenly has godlike powers because of his heroism or his love or his heritage or an ancient prophecy or because Mystra said so. That is one of my major turn-offs about conventional fantasies, and conversely one of the things I love about LitRPG is that the character has to do the grinding to power up, use his creativity to find the best strategies and tactics based on understanding the rules, and gain the cooperation of other heroes or even villains to help save the day.

So what I wanted to write was a kind of “Log Horizon meets City of Heroes” (except not really). But the writing style, as much as I love writing and reading it myself, may get in the way of making this what I wanted.

Of course, it is still early. I mean, as of Chapter 6 (16000 words) we are still in the character’s first day in Virtue City, and he is still level 4. The tentative female main character has just arrived and is level 2, having done only a street quest so far. (Notice that the quests are usually called quests or quest missions, never just “missions” because this is totally not City of Heroes. I am sure not even lawyers could misunderstand that.)

But now it is time to get back to City Park, which is totally not Atlas Park, the starting zone in City of Heroes. Just like Factory Row is not Kings Row, Steel Towers is not Steel Canyon, and so on.

I can’t write Log Horizon

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Screenshot Log Horizon

A minor character – in more than one sense of the word – from Log Horizon. Even these are surprisingly well developed (in this case only in one sense of the word, thankfully).

I have belatedly finished watching the second season of the anime Log Horizon. (Legally, in this case on Crunchyroll which is a site that lets you stream anime and read manga for a quite reasonable fee, and in some cases for free but with a time delay. They don’t have light novels yet, though, as far as I can see, but recently they have a lot more manga. I watched the anime, but it is based on light novels that I have not yet read.)

The novels fall squarely in the LitRPG category, which I have mentioned before. This genre is stories that take place inside roleplaying games, or worlds nearly indistinguishable from roleplaying games. In all cases I know of, this refers to MMORPGs, massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. While I am sure there is a lot of fanfiction on the Internet based on existing games, the games in the LitRPG books are original creations which may be more or less vaguely similar to existing games, but generally more advanced. As such the stories are usually set in the future, where games have become even more immersive. And then, in several of these stories, the characters find themselves literally transported into the game world, a parallel world that is now their new reality.

This is also the premise for Log Horizon. One day after a new expansion to a popular game has been rolled out, suddenly the players find themselves trapped in the game, their in-game avatars now their bodies, and the game world fully real to all senses. This causes various problems at first, for instance at first you cannot make food without the in-game cooking skill even if you know how to do so in real life. Some of the strongest guilds try to become rulers of the cities and enslave others. The tentative main character of the story is Shiroe, a young man who plays a fairly pure support class (Enchanter-Scribe) but is fiercely independent and introverted by nature. He is valued for his obsessive knowledge of the game and as a master strategist, and manages to organize a “round table” of different types of guilds to serve as a loose kind of government, preventing the player-killer guilds from taking over the capital city. (Players that are “killed” in the game revive at the cathedral, but it is said that each death causes you to lose some of your memories from Real Life. As such, most players avoid it as much as possible, but some seek it out.)

While Shiroe is an interesting personality, the story really shines because of its many supporting characters, which are given a great deal of personality each, and interact in sometimes dramatic and sometimes comical ways. In this regard, Log Horizon differs from many LitRPG stories, including some that have been made into anime. In a way, it could be said that these are really single-player experiences. The most extreme example I can think of is Overlord, in which only one player is transported into the alternate world, as far as we know, although certain events imply that one or more others may also be there. The rest of the cast in Overlord have personalities, but are clearly marked as non-player characters and therefore inherently less real. The perhaps most famous LitRPG anime is Sword Art Online, in which there are thousands of players, but the main character Kirito is written as superior both in skill and personality, causing the other players to seem largely irrelevant except for his love interests.

A concept often used about amateur writers (and especially prevalent in Fanfiction) is “Mary Sue”, often called “Marty Stue” for male characters. A Mary Sue is a character that is supposed to be relatively ordinary, but is written as superior in every way, unbeatable and ridiculously overpowered in every way that counts. The Mary Sue is often given character flaws that are not flaws, often an excessive humility that serves only to highlight their superiority. The story treats the Mary Sue differently from everyone else.

In Log Horizon, Shiroe is possibly the smartest person in the game, but he is limited by his supporting class character. He only shines when he can make others shine. You will not see Shiroe stand up alone against an army of enemies and defeat them singlehandedly. But because of his reliable support, he is loved by his friends and they go out of their way to help him even if they don’t always understand his plan. Several of the other characters are given opportunities to shine in their own right, including a large story arc featuring some of the underage players going on a quest.

Log Horizon is not the only LitRPG anime with multiple well-developed personalities. There is also Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, which I actually encountered as a novel before I saw the anime. The main characters are few but well developed, including one who dies partway through the story. This story differs from most in that although the world is similar to a game world, the characters do not arrive there by playing a game.

***

I wish I could write stories like that, with multiple believable characters. But that is still beyond me. I am now past 40 000 words on my designated NaNoWriMo novel of the year, but it is a rough patch. I had hoped that the colorful personalities in the Royal Art Academy of Greater Akikei would interact with each other and the narrator character to fill this part of the story, but so far they have remained flat and hiding in the shadows. One of them is actually kind of active, but she is too much of a cardboard caricature, not a believable person like the two main characters. She certainly does not add much in the way of romantic tension, although I will give her a few points for trying. The rest are little more than nicknames and I find myself unable to wake them up.

Oh well, it is good that I am not a professional writer after all. I guess I shall continue in my office job until I die or am disabled.

NaNoWriMo again!

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Screenshot anime Magic-Kyun Renaissance, featuring Monet

Return of the colors, from episode 6 of Magic-Kyun Renaissance. Tsukushi is known as the “Monochrome Prince” but upon getting to know this one special girl, he starts to see the world in colors again.

I have been taking part in the National Novel Writing Month pretty much ever since it became international approximately ten years ago. For most of that time I have taken November off as my paid vacation for the year. (Norway has 5 weeks of mandatory vacation. I like my job, but my boss could get in trouble if I don’t take my 5 weeks every single year. So may as well have something else constructive to do.)

To be honest, I feel that my writing has gone downhill lately, and it was never more than around the level of the $0.99 and $1.99 books in the Kindle Store. But at least I could write some pretty funny dialog.

That said, the craft is still in my fingers, it seems. This year, I did not pick a topic or even a genre until around an hour before midnight on the last of October.  At that point, I randomly decided I wanted to set a story in  a world somewhat similar to the anime Magic-Kyun Renaissance, which I had just watched some episodes of. (Legally, on Crunchyroll. Try it for free.) It is actually an anime for girls, based on a genre of games called “dating sims” (not related to The Sims from Maxis/EA). Most of these sims are for boys roleplaying a male character befriending and dating girls, but the reverse can also happen, and these games seem to be increasingly popular, and along with them anime of the same type. They tend to be more romantic and less erotic, which I don’t mind, and it is always interesting to see things from the female point of view (which is sorely lacking in my writing, seeing how I have never been female.)

***

Now, my NaNovel is not about a girl with a harem of boys adoring her. The viewpoint character and narrator is a young man, but arguably the girl is as much a main character as he is, at least at the outset she is the most active, the most competent, the one that moves the story forward. The male narrator is mostly preoccupied with himself (and his impending death, seeing how he has cancer and the hospital has given up on him). But in the corner of his eye there is always this girl, coming and going, doing what needs to be done, moving things forward, until the point (at the start of chapter 4, as of the draft) where it becomes obvious at least to the reader that she is the real hero of the story so far.

The part that is inspired by the anime, and then only partially, is the magic of the world, which is based on art. In the anime, exceptional performers in different arts have the ability to cause “sparkles”, patterns of light that flow from their art and awe the audience. That’s it, they are basically idols. Otherwise the world is as we know it. I wanted to go further. The Light of Arte, changed simply to Artlight in my novel, is more of a metaphysical or perhaps even divine element that is able to perform miracles or at least magic.

But only the most extreme combination of Talent and effort give rise to spectacular, obvious magic. Most works of art and craft simply has what the book calls Quality (a feature I also used in my failed and mostly boring attempt at a NaNoWriMo novel some years ago, called The Eternal Road or words to that effect. No wonder it was boring.) A work of high Quality does what you would expect it to do, but better than should be possible. If you sleep in a bed of high Quality, you sleep better than you would in a normal bed. But if a bed is made by a Master, it may be able to cure illnesses of body and mind simply by sleeping in it regularly. Only the Great Artists themselves can see the Artlight, and once they have done so, they lose interest in most things of the world.

The simple premise of the novel is that there exists a world parallel to ours, with the same flora and fauna and races of human (almost, at least) but where a single rule is different. In our world it is called Clarke’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But in Artworld (not actually called that by its natives of course) it is “Any sufficiently advanced art or craft is indistinguishable from magic.” As a result, our near-magic technology based on electricity doesn’t work there; crude steam engines is as far as you get. But instead they have art that can, in extreme cases, heal cancer, or open a portal to another world.

The narrator is 21 years old when he comes home from college to spend his last months with his parents. Then the girl next door shows up, revealing that her grandmother came from a parallel world and their family still has a way to access it. However, anyone who would have died in one of the worlds can never return there even if he or she survives in the other. Even if he can be cured – which is far from certain – he will never be able to return. He will have to spend his life in a world where modern technology is only a rumor and where democracy is not only a crime but a heresy. So that should certainly spice things up a little. ^_^

I don’t think there will be any cease and desist from the lawyers of Sunrise, Pony Canyon, or Broccoli. (I apologize for the Japanese company names, they are actually real.) As usual with my derivative works, I have condensed the original down to a very short paragraph before expanding it again into its own story. You would probably not recognize the original if I had not told you. Well, that could be because you don’t watch anime. Or if you do, you don’t read my half-baked novels. I can’t exactly blame you, but I try to write the kind of book I would like to read myself. It’s not like many other people do that.