IWSG: Conflicted

 

    Amusingly (or not), this month's question is actually pretty much exactly what I would be talking about anyway.  (Funny how the universe often seems to work that way.  Like how everyone else is always arriving at the grocery store at the same time, and/or leaving it at the same time.)

August 2 question: Have you ever written something that afterwards you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it?

    So... so much to say.

    Technically, I can think of...well, actually, there are a lot of cases, really, but only two that lead anywhere.

    In the first one, which I think I ended up talking about last month as well, I had written a game for a game jam that was...more than a little questionable.  It involved a demon lord who got off on watching  as the handsome hero who had come to slay him died time and again on his way through the monster-infested castle of the demon lord...but the demon lord kept reviving him because he wants him to get to the top eventually, as the demon lord wants to have his way with the hero.  It's not graphic in any way--the deaths are text-only, don't go into any particular detail, and most of them have very little innate sexual component to them (the ones that do, though! 😰 I am honestly horrified that my brain was able to come up with some of that stuff, tame though it was)--but it was still just so innately wrong that I was hesitant to post the game.  Despite that it was for a game jam--with a fast-approaching deadline for submission!--I delayed posting it for three days because I was just so scared of what people would do when they saw it.

    So, yeah, I was very conflicted about that one.  But so far nothing's gone wrong from it being out there (except that it gets way more views and downloads than the rest of my games put together) and it's been out almost a year and a half.

    That isn't what I would have been talking about today, though.

    What I would have been talking about today regardless of the question of the month is the fanfic I started posting on AO3 about a month ago.  Going into posting it, I did have a few misgivings:

• Because the story starts out with the love interest locking up the main character to protect him from his enemies, it could look like Stockholm Syndrome when the hero realizes he's always been in love with the love interest, and yet we're supposed to be on board with this relationship.  (Technically, pretty much anyone who might read it should already be on board with the relationship, since they're the primary romantic pair from the novel it's fan fiction of.)
• It has three distinct arcs with very different tones and themes, so trying to find a way to tag the work on AO3 was somewhere between awkward and impossible.
• I remain a bit fuzzy on some finer details of how the magic system of the original novel works, so some of what I had happening was probably borderline impossible or otherwise contrary to canon.

    However, on the whole I was feeling pretty good about it.  And, honestly, I still think there's a lot to it that's good.  Or at least good for me.  I'm very aware of my limitations, and know better than to expect that I can just magically surpass them.  That being said, I even thought I managed to make it look at least somewhat like an actual romantic relationship, which is something I normally cannot do, having no real understanding of what those feelings are like, as I'm quite strongly aromantic.

    Anyway, I got up to the fourth chapter posted, and things seemed to be going acceptably; the comments were mostly positive, at least.  Then came a new comment in a single, enormous paragraph.

    This comment was, as far as I can tell, intended to be positive.

    The person was gushing about what they thought I was writing about.  About how happy they were to see the love interest's young self finally portrayed as selfish and controlling.  About how much they enjoyed watching the drama version of the hero suffer.  On and on.

    I couldn't believe it.  Someone had read what I had written and mistaken it that far?

    Sure, there was some truth to some of what they were saying.  There was, for example, a certain element of controlling to the love interest's character in the fic, just as there is in canon, but it wasn't intended to be his primary character trait!  But most of the rest of it was so far off that I didn't even know what to think.  The idea of the story wasn't to make the hero suffer (and in fact even in what I had already posted he wasn't doing much that could be called suffering!), it was just to take him out of the situation that was about to explode and lead to the death of his adopted sister and her husband, which would lead in turn to numerous other death, including his own--and I wasn't working with the version of the story from the live-action adaptation, but the original novel!  (Heck, I even opened the fic with a direct quote from the novel, which I properly attributed to the official translation, providing a page number and everything!)

    After spending maybe half a day deliberating, I replied to the comment, apologizing that my writing was so bad that the opening--which does admittedly have some unreliable narration from the POV of the hero who feels he's been betrayed by his best friend--had so mislead the reader into thinking the story was going one place when it was actually going somewhere radically different.

    But it was still bothering me.

    That I'd written something that could be so badly misunderstood as to invite character-bashing in the comments, expecting that I agreed with the bashing.

    I ended up deleting the fic off of AO3 entirely.

    And I felt really good about that when I did it.  I even managed to get past some of the writer's block I'm having in the current piece I'm working on.  (Most of which is due to the fact that to tell the story I'm trying to tell, I have to get the characters through a war.  Which it's like...I don't know what would happen in this war, specifically, plus I hate war and don't want to write about one?  It's making it slow as molasses to write, but it's going okay for a first draft.)

    In retrospect, I don't know if that was the right thing to do.  (Certainly, the people I spoke to in between replying to the comment and deleting the fic all told me "don't do it at all" when I asked for advice regarding whether I should finish posting it all really quickly, like two or three chapters a day, and then delete it, or if I should just delete it immediately.  I had thought, in response to what they said, that maybe I could leave it up if I just turned off the comments, but...by the next day I was convinced again that deleting it was the only path forwards.)

    It does feel like that by deleting something I had noted in the summary was already fully written and edited (which is true!) that people will assume I deleted it because it wasn't finished and I didn't know what to do next, and that they will thus never again believe me if I post something with a note on it saying it's already been written.  Which probably doesn't actually matter, of course.

    On the other hand, I do feel like if anyone actually cared about the story, they probably would have clicked on one of my other fics and left a comment asking what happened to the one I just deleted.  And so far they haven't.  (I also noted in the summary that I would be posting every weekend, so they know that a chapter is post-due.)  Although I'm not 100% sure how much of that is "no one gives a fetid dingo's kidney" and how much of that is "AO3 keeps crashing."  Though it's probably the former, not the latter.  (Though the fact that AO3 keeps returning a timeout error is alarming, to say the least!)

    It's an awkward situation where it feels like no matter what I did, it would have been the wrong decision.  Leaving it up would have been wrong, but maybe taking it down was, too.

    All this is probably not what I should be saying in response to this month's question.

    I should be trying to come up with some time that I was feeling like I'd gone in a wrong direction and so I rewrote and ended up with something better.  There have probably been times like that.  There have certainly been rewrites that were radically different than the first draft, and a vast improvement over it, but I don't recall off-hand if I felt conflicted about any of the first draft stuff that ended up being changed.  (And, like I said, I'd have been talking about this anyway, even if the month's question had been something like "have you ever sent your characters to the beach?")