IWSG - On Originality

 

    I usually don't use the suggested discussion questions, but this month's is actually tangentially connected to what I already wanted to write about, so I figured may as well do both!  Here's the August 3rd question:

When you set out to write a story, do you try to be more original or do you try to give readers what they want?

    Obviously, this question is intended for people who are already connecting with an audience, so it kind of doesn't apply to me, as the few things I've posted to AO3 and itch.io have minimal presence and very little in the way of an audience.  (What little audience they do have, I'm not sure what they want, other than LBGTQ+ content (primarily in the form of stories featuring m/m romantic relationships), which is pretty much the only common thread running through almost all of my work.)  And yet, in a way it also does apply, in that my most popular game on itch.io (having more than twice as many downloads as the rest of my catalog combined, and almost as many pageviews as the rest of my catalog combined) is so much more popular that it gives an idea of what people on itch.io really want out of me.  Or perhaps simply "what they want, period."

    Unfortunately, that's something I'm not prepared to give them, because that game (which I wrote and coded in about two and a half weeks for Yandere Jam (if you're not familiar with the term "yandere" you might be happier that way)) is marked as NSFW.  Which it kind of is and kind of isn't.  There's no nudity (well, none beyond a very tame monster sprite with partially exposed, non-nippled breasts) and what little sexual content it has is text-only, very brief and lacks any descriptive details.  On the other hand, it contains a character who derives a sexual thrill from watching a handsome man die horribly over and over again, so it's not so much Not Safe For Work as absolutely inappropriate for people under 18 years of age.  (Or, really, under any age.  Honestly, I was terrified to release it, because it's so unlike me and so twisted, even though it's actually quite tame for what it is.)  Based on the number of followers I've gotten since its release (many of them starting to follow me on days when no other game got any pageviews), it's obvious that there are people on itch.io who would like to see me write more games like it.  But that's just not going to happen.  I don't want to become a NSFW game developer (I'd need someone else to write the NSFW parts, among many other reasons!), and I'm certainly not releasing anything else so demented.  I actually rather wish itch.io would let us "orphan" games the way AO3 lets us "orphan" works we've published there, so they can still be out there for people to interact with, but without the works generating unrealistic expectations regarding future works.

    Hmm, rereading the question, I feel like I kind of misinterpreted it.

    *cough*

    Right, so the actual question was more along the lines of "do you follow the trends or do your own thing?" wasn't it?

    Yes, I knew that all along!  Of course I did!

    I was just testing you.

    Really.

    *ahem*

    I tend to just do my own thing, and if that happens to line up with something that readers actually want, that's great, but I don't go chasing after trends.  Or even keep up with what's currently popular, for that matter.  *cough*  I have a somewhat isolationist lifestyle, I guess you could say.

    I would like to think that I manage to be somewhat original from time to time, though.

    I hope.

    That being said, it's my lack of originality in certain regards that I wanted to post about in the first place.  There's a novel I wrote a few years back that's currently on its second major draft.  It still needs a lot of work before it's ready for anyone else to see it, but one of the things I'm wondering about is if I need to start over on a lot of its world-building.  (Because I do want to release it eventually, in some form or another!)

    As it stands, each nation in the novel's world is based directly on a real world culture from past eras, all of them then technologically advanced to a roughly mid-19th century level.  My original plan was to establish in one of the later books in the series (not sure how many there are going to be, probably between 5 and 7) that the elf-like species that had originally been the dominant one on the planet had abducted humans from all those different actual cultures to act as slave labor.  Due to various factors (mostly having to do with how the elf-like species ran the planet before the humans successfully revolted against them) the different groups maintained a large part of their national culture, language, etc., though many things also changed, of course, including the names they applied to their cultures, and by the time of the novels, none of them have any idea that they used to live on another planet.  I'm now thinking that's way too much convoluted backstory to have to insert in a late section of the series, and I should probably just ditch that part, but since I have so many other question marks about the later parts of the series, that's not my big concern at the moment.

    What I'm really worried about is how for some reason I thought it was a good idea to have some of the cultures also have some partial parallel history to their Earth counterpart.  So, for example, the country inspired by Ancient Rome had its own Hadrian and Antinoos tragedy, the country based on France had its own revolution complete with a lot of heads being chopped off, the country based on Ancient Egypt had its own Akhenaten religious upheaval, and originally I was going to have the country based on Japan have its own Meiji Restoration, but that one I already scrapped and turned into more of a reverse Meiji Restoration.

    I'm not too concerned about the Hadrian and Antinoos one, since the basic idea--powerful ruler falls to pieces when his boyfriend suddenly dies--is not all that complex or unique, and I had a lot of differences both pre- and post- the boyfriend's death.  (Naturally, they don't have those names, of course.  But the Antinoos-analog is from the Ancient Greece-inspired country.)  The tragedy (which is very recent to the events of the book, as one of the leads was in fact a former schoolmate of the Antinoos-analog) plays a pretty heavy part in the cultural landscape of the book, so it's good that I'm okay with that one, 'cause I absolutely cannot remove it without reworking a lot of stuff I really like.

    The Akhenaten one is a bit more questionable, but I'd prefer being able to keep it, because mine had the twist that it was successful, unlike the real Akhenaten's restructuring of his country's religion.  Thus, in my novel, the Egypt-analog is the only monotheistic nation in the world.  (With one exception, the elf-like race had purposefully avoided abducting people who were from monotheistic cultures, in part because they couldn't make their slaves accept them as new gods if the slaves only had one god.  Although the main off-the-page reason was that one of the things I didn't want to have in this fictional world was any religion that seeks converts, because...well, for a lot of reasons.)  Still, maybe it's inappropriate?

    In any case, it's the revolution in the France-like country that I'm really worried about, to be honest.  I mean, it does have a lot of differences, first and foremost being that in the novel the queen and her children survive, because a secret society replaced them with body doubles before they could be executed by the revolutionaries.  (They tried to save the king as well, but he had been kept in a different prison under tighter security, so they failed.)  Said secret society, of course, being the real reason for the revolution, as both it and every villain in the entire world are after the pieces of an ancient magical device (which they see as a super-weapon though its purposes are not military), and one of the people after the pieces knew that the royal family had one, and so they fomented the revolution in the hopes of getting their hands on the piece in the ensuing chaos, but the secret society managed to rescue the queen (one of the society's leaders) and her children, along with their piece of the thingy.  (The revolution was likewise very recent in the book's timeline, and a major part of the plot of book two is going to be the heroes having to ferry the queen and her children to safety with her brother, the king of the Germany/Scandinavia-inspired country.)

    Ultimately, maybe the problem isn't the revolution, but the fact that I put it in a France-like country?  I had all the countries basically positioned to roughly line up with the locations of their real life counterparts, but if I shifted them around, maybe that would fix (or at least vastly improve) things?

    Like, if I deleted the France-like country altogether (Europe is unfortunately over-represented as it stands, so not much loss there) and moved the China-like country over where the France-like country was, then the revolution in question could have been in the China-like country, which would have made it all the more shocking to its contemporaries.  And then I could make use of all that I've learned about Chinese culture lately.  (Plus I could introduce a new character for book two who's inspired by Wei Wuxian! 💗 Not that I could do him justice, but...a girl can dream!)

    Hmm.

    Y'know, I'm feeling pretty good about that idea.

    Although I might need to keep the "abducted Earthlings" part if I'm going to have an England-analog (or rather an island with a Celtic-inspired culture) off the coast of a China-analog, since in a real world neighboring polities tend to have a lot in common, both linguistically and culturally.  But since I've already set up the elf-like race and the fact that they used to tyrannize the humans, that's not too much...hopefully...

    LOL, sorry for turning this into basically "me talking to myself in public" about a planned re-write for a novel that who knows when the heck I'll get to it (I'm still in the middle of rewriting and releasing an entire series of novels, and absolutely should not deal with this single novel (that is intended to be the first in a series) until I've finished dealing with the series which is already partially released and has a complete set of first drafts already written, plus I'm committed to writing a visual novel for a friend before working on my own projects anyway) but I think this has proven very useful to me.  :)