WTF, Etsy? Again!?

     Hey, a sequel post! :P

    So, I posted before about Etsy's algorithm doing weird stuff, putting in recommendations for things that are totally unlike anything I've been looking at/buying.

    Well, it's still at it.

    Here's my recent activity feed on the main page:

    As before, it's all MDZS merch, most of it cuddly romantic images of the two leads, and most of it in cute chibi versions at that.  (For those who happen upon this post unaware, MDZS is short for Mo Dao Zu Shi, typically translated as The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, a danmei novel (the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese genre called Boy's Love), and the basis of the very popular (and excellent) live-action drama The Untamed.)

    Now, my most recent purchase, admittedly, was not MDZS.  It was a bit of Persona 5 fan art:

    You will note that again, it's cute, chibi, and depicts the true love between two male characters.  (And yes, I feel justified in calling it true love, even though the game as it is does not allow you to romance Fox, because there's way too much evidence that he was originally supposed to be not merely a romanceable character, but the romanceable character.  I am intractable on this point.  Joker/Fox (or Fox/Joker, whichever floats your boat) simply is love.)

    So...the recommended items on the top of the page were a mix of MDZS and MegaTen items, which is reasonable enough, especially since I've bought MegaTen fan merch on Etsy before, and will certainly do so again.  (MegaTen is short for Megami Tensei, the super-series that the Persona series is part of, though in the US it's all released as Shin Megami Tensei, which is technically incorrect, because that is itself a different sub-series.)

    But lower on the page, it picks out a few "categories" that it thinks you're interested in, and points out some examples within those categories that it thinks you'll like.  And here's where it gets very messed up.  Because these are the ones it showed me:

    Again, I can only say "WTF, Etsy?!?"

    I do not buy things that sexualize women.  (I mean, not unless you count Barbie dolls.  And that is a very different level of sexualization than we're talking about here.)  And I haven't bought anything that could even remotely count as an action figure from Etsy since 2019!  I've bought some acrylic standees recently...but they were romantic ones depicting two men.  (Mostly Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, the leads of MDZS, of course, but I also bought a fantastic one a while back depicting the versions of Patroclus and Achilles from the game Hades.)  I may have looked at a few figures/figurines since then, but those were more MDZS merch.

    Furthermore, while much of what I've bought has been romantic, none of it has been erotic, so why is it showing me things that are so NSFW that the site feels the need to censor them?  (A few of the shops I've followed do sell some NSFW items, but only ones depicting men.)

    I mean, I guess I get it, to a certain extent.

    Persona has become a very popular series since it was restructured with the release of Persona 3, and Persona 5 is especially popular.  And there is a broad misunderstanding within our culture of gaming as the near-exclusive domain of the heterosexual male, especially the subset of heterosexual males who cannot obtain the love of real women, and thus pour out their desires onto absurdly sexualized representations of women.  That subset certainly does intersect with the subset of the population of gamers in the Venn diagram of the general populace at large, but it is merely a small intersection, not a complete overlap.  The grotesque assumption that "gamer = horny straight male loser" is disgusting and repellent.

    You would think that their algorithm would at least get the difference between art depicting women for the male gaze and art depicting men for the female gaze (or for non-gender-specific gaze, like in the case of the Hades fan art I've bought).  Or if that's too much for it, it could at least note the difference between male-presenting characters and female-presenting characters.  I don't think that's too much to ask for!

    Sorry.

    I realize there's no actual point to this post aside from me complaining, but...sometimes you just have to say these things, somewhere, to someone, even if it's just shouting into the void like this.

    Besides, really, how does one chibi keychain of two male characters hugging lead to having the algorithm suggest that I'd be interested in an erotic statuette of a furry woman with her chests hanging out?  It makes no sense!!  (The oversize figure of a robot soldier from the Star Wars prequels also makes no sense, but at least it's not erotic.  Though actually I might prefer an attempt to eroticize those silly-looking things to some of what the site has been pushing at me.)

IWSG - On Genre

 

    So, I totally have nothing to talk about this month, because I still feel like I'm being put through a very slow wringer by this VN I agreed to write. 😭  Therefore, I'm just going to tackle the month's suggested question instead of trying to dredge up my own topic.

October 5 question - What do you consider the best characteristics of your favorite genre?

    Alarmingly, a few moments' intense concentration on this question has led me to a question of my own:  "What even is my favorite genre?"

    Pre-contemplation, my instinct would be to say that my favorite genre is fantasy, but I don't actually write all that much fantasy, and even when I do, it tends to be a very splintered section of fantasy that some might not even consider fantasy anymore.  (My Greek mythology-based novels, for example.  Or the series that I initially intended to be steampunk but which morphed into a Victorian-tech-level, animal-powered airship tale with a few magical creatures and magic-like alchemy, but otherwise not particularly fantasy at all.)

    This realization is actually rather alarming.

    In any case, if we assume that the answer really is fantasy, the best characteristic is definitely the flexibility:

• Don't like the laws of physics?  Toss 'em and write new ones!
• Think humans are dumb?  Don't need 'em!
• Ever wanted to be able to fly?  There's a potion for that--or a spell--or maybe all your characters have wings!
• Want a society that's more egalitarian?  Write one!
• Etc.

    It's great being able to invent the entire universe of a story from scratch, not needing to worry about whether you're accurately portraying a time or a place.  (Which isn't to say that you shouldn't research any societies that might be similar to what you're going for.  You absolutely should still do that.)  And it's great to be able to make a world where everyone's nice to each other, or where women have always ruled, or where homophobia/transphobia/racism/bigotry-in-general just plain doesn't exist.  Or where bigotry does exist, but then your protagonist is "the special" and able to defy the whole world to prove their worth despite that the whole world hates them for being whatever it is that the world judges against.  (That trope should, of course, be used sparingly in works you plan to share with others, but it's very satisfying to write.)

    Ironically, I saw a similar question about favorite genres in a VN-dev space not long ago, and my first thought was to ask if LGBTQ+ counted as a genre. 😆  The same flexibility applies there, too, but even more so, since every other genre can be included within it.  So I guess that means I really appreciate a genre where I'm not constrained by anyone else's rules.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    In a related/unrelated thing, someone posted a link to one of those personality quiz things in discord.  This one is about figuring out the emotion that drives an artist/writer to create their art:  https://uquiz.com/quiz/p0u5c3/what-emotion-do-you-create-from

    My result was "Discontent":

You create from discontent.  Most of your life has been spent being uncomfortable in your own skin.  This body is just another house that's never felt like home.  You don't know how to be at ease in this world or this life.  Art is a way of running away, of forgetting yourself and escaping to a more comfortable place.  To cope with an unhospitable reality, you create more welcoming worlds to consume your work and your waking hours.  But the foundation of your art has always been your discontent with the real world and your life within it.  Lurking behind the inviting scenery you desire to be anywhere but here.  It is a world constructed as a respite from this one.  Such vivid fantasies are the dream of one who considers reality a prison.

    As one of the others in the discord commented, I feel like I'm being called out by these results.

    It's eerie, especially considering how many of the questions left me going "none of these answers apply to me!"

    And it also feeds disconcertingly well into everything I said about why I enjoy working with the fantasy genre...

    (The big lesson here, I think, is probably to stop pre-writing these posts.  I wrote the first half on Monday, then discovered this quiz right before bed on Monday night, and am now adding this second half of the post on Tuesday morning.  Obviously, I should just make it a habit of getting up early on the first Wednesday of the month and writing the post that day, instead of scheduling it from a day or two before.)

WTF, Etsy?

     Etsy really needs to improve its algorithm for recommendations.

    When you navigate to the main page, it shows you a handful of recommended items and searches based on your recent activity, right?

    So, here's my recent activity:

    And yeah, that's representative of what I've been looking at lately, on account of being mildly obsessed. 😅  I mean, there's also been some miniatures--partly to go in the miniature rooms I'm trying to get finished up, and partly to be accessories to go with the Nendoroid dolls of these two characters--and some doll clothes (also for the Nendoroid dolls), but mostly it's just been MDZS merch.  Because, you know, obsession.

    Here's what it showed me today on the front page as the recommended items at the top:

    As I said in the title of the post:  "WTF, Etsy?"

    Seriously, I have never in my life purchased a print of a disgustingly over-breasted woman, not from Etsy or anywhere else.  Nor have I ever purchased anything on Etsy that was sexualizing women at all!  On top of which, almost everything I've been browsing lately has been female-gaze merchandise of a female-gaze-oriented gay romance.

    So what POSSIBLE excuse can their algorithm give for putting that nasty cow-bikini print on there?  I mean, okay, it would admittedly be funny to see how Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji would react to such a sight (the latter would definitely be horrified, and might attack her on the assumption that she was a demon), but...ugh.

    So gross.  Why do some people want to see drawings of women where each breast is as large as (or larger than) her head, anyway?

    I will never understand it.

    (I could also ask that Etsy provide a "don't show me this item again" slider to go with that print that's showing on the thumbnail to search for "the untamed," as I don't think it's right to sexualize a character being horribly beaten, but at least that's actually related to what I've been looking at.  And, actually, there might be such an option on there somewhere and I've just never figured out how to use it, now that I think about it.)

    (Speaking of the recommended search thumbnails, I find it mildly hilarious that the thumbnail for the "Mo Dao Zu Shi pin" search shows a pair of figurines, and that the "mdzs" search's thumbnail shows a mug which appears to have an illustration for Heaven Official's Blessing on it rather than one for Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation.  But as they're both by the same author (and goodness knows I'm definitely looking forward to the new volume of Heaven Official's Blessing that's due out on Tuesday with its steamy cover) that at least makes some degree of sense, unlike the bikini print.)

You know you need to stop writing for the day when...

     ...you find yourself writing "“I have rarely attempted to make any attempts to alert you to my feelings.”"

    Ugh.

    Yup.

    It's been a day.

    (In my own defense, I did make two runs to the storage place I've been accumulating crap over the last five(ish) years, as I'm trying to get it all jammed into my house and/or garage before the end of the month so I can stop paying out on such a stupid expense.  (Hopefully, I'll also get rid of some of that crap, too, but...one step at a time.)  I also write upwards of 1,300 words in a Google document on my phone, because I had ideas but didn't want to turn on the computer until I was done with everything else I needed to do today...)

    In something slightly less absurd (but only slightly), today I also wrote a sex scene that contained almost no mention of, you know, sex.

    It's like, maybe I shouldn't have tried to write a sex scene from the POV of the most repressed man in the world.  (Or, more accurately, that I shouldn't have tried to write a sex scene at all.)

IWSG - Connecting Tissue

 

        So, the other day, I was watching a fan-edit of the recent Disney+ mini-series Obi-Wan Kenobi adapting it down to movie-length, since it had originally been intended to be a movie rather than a six episode show.  (Yes, I know, I know, questionable at best.  But I do have a Disney+ subscription, and had already seen the mini-series, so...)  Seeing only one half of various planting-and-payoff scenes really left me thinking about something that I'd already been thinking about lately, vis-à-vis the title of this post, "connecting tissue."  (And yes, this will eventually circle around to my own writing insecurities.)

    I've noticed that a lot of times different versions of the same material (whether a fan-version like that edit or an official adaptation of an already completed novel or other work, or a simultaneous treatment of the same story in two different media), although the same story beats are covered, the connecting tissue is radically different.  Sometimes this is because the setting has changed (compare, for example, the different material in West Side Story compared to its original, Romeo and Juliet), sometimes it's just because of the difference in media (for example, a narrative style that spends a lot of time simply explaining things behind the action requires creativity in adaptation) and sometimes it's because the adaptor has their own purposes in the adaptation that are not representative of the original in one respect or another.  (I feel sure that the movie of Starship Troopers would be an ideal example there, since the book was pro-military and the movie was not, but to be able to actually say so definitively I would have to actually read the book, and I will pass, thank you very much.)

    The adaptation that has been most on my mind lately is the series streaming on Netflix right now under the title The Untamed (which I suspect is not an accurate translation of its actual title, which is different from the original novel's title) and its original novel Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation.  (I've mentioned this on the blog before already, and will definitely mention it again, 'cause I'm ever-so-slightly obsessed right now. 😅 )  Now, I'm not done reading the novel yet, because the final volume of its official translation won't be published until next April.  (It remains to be seen if I can even wait until December for the next volume, or if I'll hunt up a fan translation to read the parts I'm so desperate for.)  But one thing that strikes me about it is how different much of the connecting tissue is.

    The story takes place in two time periods:  the five-ish years leading up to the hero's death, and the events taking place after his resurrection thirteen years later.  (Not a spoiler; his death is the opening of the novel, followed immediately by his waking up alive again after thirteen years.)  In both the live-action drama and the novel, there are a few significant story events in the present and then we dive into the past for some backstory on the characters and their history.  (In addition to the two versions I've experienced, there's also an animated adaptation and a graphic novel adaptation, but I have not watched/read them, so I don't know if they followed that formula, though I'd expect they do.  I might see if they've been translated into English once I've finished reading the novel, though.  I'm very curious about the other ways adapting the material was approached.)  The live-action show takes the approach of doing the entire past sequence in one exceedingly long go, whereas the novel sprinkles bits and pieces of the past into the present, as appropriate to the present context.  (Some of these bits and pieces take up about half a volume of the novel, so they're not insignificant spans.)  In addition to drastically changing the way the audience perceives the characters (the secret enemy mastermind whose identity you only learn in the final episodes of the show was exposed about halfway through the second volume of the novel, for example) this has radically changed the tissue connecting the characters.  Surprisingly, while the show did not feel padded in the least (despite its 50 45-minute episode runtime), there's actually a great deal of padding there, and most of it is fleshing out the relationships between the characters in the past, giving greater characterization of the supporting cast than the novel has time for.  (Also, in some cases, giving more full coverage of events the novel couldn't show, since it never leaves the hero's side, aside from summations of events he didn't witness.)  Various other changes were also made (primarily replacing the romance between the two leading men with longing glances and homoerotic subtext, an unfortunately necessary change due to the stance of the mainland Chinese government towards LGBTQ+ content), especially in enlarging the roles of the female cast, but it's the the expanded content with the entire supporting cast that really sticks with me, the extra connecting tissue.  For example, so far in the book, in looking at the relationship between the hero and his adoptive brother, it kind of feels like his adoptive brother always found him something of a nuisance, whereas in the show, it's clear that they were as close and affectionate as real brothers:  sure, they quarreled and got on each others' nerves (well, mostly it was the hero getting on his brother's nerves, really), but at the end of the day they would also have given up almost anything to help each other out.  I think that's the relationship we're supposed to see between them in the book as well, but because it doesn't spend as long dwelling on it (after all, that's not the relationship we're supposed to be focusing on!) and showing them getting along happily, it doesn't come through as clearly.  (This could also have to do with the translation; while all translation risks the loss of nuance, the little I know of the subject suggests that Chinese is especially going to lose a lot of nuance in translation to other languages.  Anything live-action doesn't lose as much in translation because the actors' performances are in their faces, bodies and voices, not just in the words they're speaking, so there's more there that survives the translation process.)

    Thinking about all that extra material surrounding the various characters in The Untamed/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation puts me in mind of a similar-yet-different case, that of Sailor Moon.  That seminal '90s magical girl IP is an unusual (but not unique) case:  it was being simultaneously developed as both an anime and a manga.  (Manga being the name for Japanese graphic novels, for those who aren't nerds like myself.)  As with many in the West (most, probably), I saw the anime before reading the manga.  (Though I didn't see it when it was first brought over, thinking it looked stupid.  And, honestly, it kind of is stupid, but a glorious, wonderful kind that's very lovable.)  After loving the show, I decided to read the manga, and was astonished by how short it was.  (It doesn't sound short, I suppose, being about twelve volumes long, but...Cardcaptor Sakura's twelve volumes covered three seasons of very uneven length--about two and a half seasons, really, with only two story arcs.  Sailor Moon's twelve volumes covered five full seasons, each with its own story arc.)  I was also very disappointed by it at pretty much every turn, because it spent so little time with the characters.  Everything was just rushing willy-nilly towards the next fight, and no time was set up on the connecting tissue letting us get to know and care about the characters; only the heroine got much time devoted to her, and even she wasn't as fully characterized as in the show.  A recurring villain on the show who spent a long time throwing monsters-of-the-week at the heroines before finally being dispatched in a truly epic fashion was killed at the end of his first appearance in the manga; in fact, all the henchmen who had been significant opponents in the show became the monsters-of-the-week instead...and yet in the case of the henchmen of the first arc, the manga expected us to feel considerably more sorry for them than the anime did, despite doing literally nothing to give them any personality!  If it had spent more time on them as characters, giving them more tissue to connect them to each other and to the heroine's boyfriend (who they had served in his previous life), maybe we would actually have felt sorry for them, rather than just being told we ought to feel sorry for them.

    On the other hand, sometimes adding extra connecting tissue may be a bad thing?  When The Untamed increased the amount of time the audience spent with two of the female cast, that only made their eventual deaths that much more painful.  (Though at least restructuring the story meant that their deaths were at about the 2/3 mark rather than closer to the end, as I have a sinking feeling that both their deaths will end up in volume 5 rather than volume 4.  Getting almost all the tragedy out of the way by putting all the past events together was helpful in that regard.)  Though whether that's a good or a bad thing is perhaps subjective:  I mean, I know some authors actually want to make their readers cry, and certainly moving the audience can't be bad as such, but...I dunno, maybe it's just that I'm a weakling who doesn't like feeling bad.

    I've been mulling over a lot of this lately because of my current writing project, in which that connecting tissue--the material that's so necessary both to flesh out characters and bind them together--is a big question mark on the current outline for the story.  For pretty much all the characters who have a side-story (the ones the hero can romance), all I have for that side-story is "dunno what it's gonna be about" or "something to do with them commiserating over this thing they have in common" and no clue about how to go about writing that connecting tissue, or how to draw the characters closer to each other as the side-story progresses.

    This is, of course, because I've really bitten off way more than I can chew, agreeing to co-write a visual novel with dating sim aspects when I don't even particularly play dating sims, let alone know how to write one, and the unfamiliar setting isn't helping, though I do at least feel a lot more comfortable in the setting than I did when I started, thanks to all the research (and all the examples I've consumed).

    I'm about 13k words into the script at this point (counting notes and speaker notations), and really feel like I'm doing a miserable job of it.  My collaborator (who is the other co-writer, the project lead, and more) said they thought it was acceptable, but...I don't feel like it is, and I'm terrified of when I get past the bare-bones structure we have planned already and reach the connecting tissue that I just have no idea how to fill in.

    And I feel like this has actually led rather well into this month's suggested question:

September 7 question - What genre would be the worst one for you to tackle and why?

    There's actually a lot of "worst" genres for me, but this one I'm trying to work in right now--a subcategory of the romance genre--might be the actual worst.  As an aroace person who never had a romantic relationship to have the "no, this is not for me" epiphany from experience, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I don't know how to deal with writing romance, or even people in relationships.  I basically only know what I get from media I've consumed, so I basically see romance in two very disparate stages:  hornyhornyhorny and so-established-as-to-be-boring.  I know that real people don't actually see romance in only two shades--lust and taken-for-granted--but that's all I ever get of it from popular culture.

    I feel like I need to exclusively write stories featuring no romance whatsoever even in the background...and yet I really kind of want to write about beautiful people who fall in love with each other and happily manage to connect and maintain their connection.  I don't know why, but... 

    (Before I started thinking about all this, I'd have said that the worst genre for me to tackle would be horror because I'm so easily frightened, but at least I know what fear is, and what scares me.  I could probably write quasi-decent children's horror if I had to.  Realistic modern war as a genre would also be abysmal for me, but historical war and sci-far war are genres I've dealt with from time to time.)

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.  :)

IWSG - On Love

 

    As I continue to wallow in the throes of research on an overwhelmingly large topic in order to write most of someone else's visual novel, I keep finding myself focusing on one of the two parts of the game I absolutely will not be writing:  the love story parts.

    Not focusing on them in the sense of "it's those parts I find myself imagining writing" but in the sense of "how do I even write the lead-ins and lead-outs of romantic scenes?"  Knowing your limits is, of course, an important part of being a writer, and I have long since come to understand that I 100% cannot write characters falling in love.  Being someone who does not feel romantic or sexual love, this is hardly a surprising fact.  (Though it is surprising how long it took me to figure out that I couldn't write it; I kept trying to write love stories stories with love in them long after I realized I was asexual and aromantic.)  For the most part, in my own works, even if I can't remove romance entirely, I can at least work to avoid the "falling in love" stage of a story and it generally works out at least enough for me.

    But this time it's not my story, so I don't have that control.  And, as is common (but not universal, no matter what some people think) in visual novels, there is a dating sim aspect to the game.  Well, "dating sim" isn't really accurate, but I'm not sure what a better term would be.  I can't really explain the story since it's not my story to share, but I think I can at least admit that the player character has entered a mostly-closed location in search of a particular individual who he knows is there but whose face he does not know, so he has to get to know all the people there who match the missing person's general description (age, mostly) in order to figure out which one is the person he's looking for.  In the process, he can fall in love with one of them, leading to a different branch of the story that leads to the romantic ending with that character.  (Not that all the suspects are potential love interests, and at least one of them won't return the player character's affection even if you pick them...)  Consequently, when we leave the research and planning stage (another hindrance in writing this game is that we're having trouble finding times we're both free to discuss the game) I'm going to have to write each character's subplot such that it could lead into romance, but doesn't have to.

    I am unsurprisingly feeling very daunted by this idea.

    I did at least come up with the approach of having the subplots advance in a manner similar to the S-Link scenes in the newer Persona games (the ones back on the original Playstation having been entirely different) which should make writing it a lot easier on me, but...

    ...the prospect of finding a way to make seamless lead-ins for the other writer's love-related scenes in still scaring me a lot.

    Also scary is the prospect of trying to write something set in ancient China, given my lack of firm knowledge of the setting.  Obviously, that's why I'm doing research (I've been reading a lot of online information, and have just received one of the two books I ordered last week (on top of two books I bought in person)) and have been watching some Chinese dramas on Netflix, plus reading the translation of the original novel one of them was based on, but...at the end of the day, it still feels a bit like I'm attempting to do something I'm not qualified to do.  Like, does it still count as cultural appropriation for me, a white person, to write something set in China when I'm doing so in partnership with (and under direction from) someone who is of Chinese ancestry?  I mean, I hope that makes it okay, but I still feel a little iffy.

    The irony about my extreme inability to write love is that when I read (or sometimes watch) something with a great romance in it I often find myself reacting like a giggling teenager.  *sigh*  Even to me, I don't make sense.

    (BTW, for anyone who's interested, let me recommend that drama and its original novel (though unfortunately the official translation is so far only up to volume 2 of 5 on the novel), because they're super-good.  On Netflix, the drama was given the translated title of The Untamed, which is a bizarrely flavorless title, and I don't think it accurately translates the show's title, though I'm pretty sure the drama does have a different title than the novel.  The novel's title is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, which I admittedly can see making any network (or streaming service) wince, despite that it's a really good title.  I decided to read the original 'cause looking around online I began to realize that the drama had been heavily self-censored to be allowed on Chinese television, and it sounded like the novel let the two leads actually admit to being in love with each other.  I'm actually still only most of the way through the first volume, but it's already much more direct about...well, it's not really "their feelings for each other" at this point, just "his feelings for him" since it's not reciprocal yet...but it still had me acting ridiculously giddy because he's adorable in his inability to express his feelings.  (But that's exactly the sort of thing I know I'll never be able to write, but hopefully my co-writer will be able to add that sort of thing into scenes I've already written...)  The drama version seems a bit simplified all around (which is astonishing, considering it's 50 hour-length episodes long!) but the cast was really excellent (and the hero is quite possibly the most beautiful man I've ever seen a picture of) and the scenery and sets incredibly gorgeous.)