Narrative Ramblings

Today is Friday in California

[ontologicalweevil]

Rule 7: How to get Better at Story-Telling

In the author-reader community I take part in we call it Rule 7. It’s simple: Talk about what you like in a piece of media. Why? Because you aren’t going to get better if you critique and berate everything you hate in a book, movie, or serial. You want to focus on why you liked something rather than why you hated it. You aren't going to learn if all you stare at is the garbage and piss you stepped in. Look at the city in front of you.

We call it Rule 7 because as soon as someone starts insulting a piece of media, that's a Rule 7 violation in our discord and we gently chide them. It's unhealthy to hate and we learn nothing.

I enjoy writing fiction. Rather simple thing to say. Anyone’s tried to write would recognize that writing is hard. It’s a confluence of skills that need to be sharpened in order for a project to come together. 

There are all sorts of resources to learn how to write better. An endless slew of techniques and methods you can read about. But there’s another way, another way to learn how to get better at the Craft. 

Let me show you Rule 7, but first this: 

I hate Dune, it’s boring, it’s dry and we have a chosen one plot. There are ginger haired freaks (in the books) and they’re blatantly capital E evil. It’s all about ecology and the religious stuff isn’t interesting. The universal jihad seems fun but we want to experience it, who cares if it’s a vision from the spice. Like really? Space drugs that make the empire of humanity function? Seems like a bit of an issue to blow up all the mining facilities. 

Wow. Such deep insight, thank you. We aren’t really learning much about it are we?  It’s easy to dislike the first Dune book. It’s a dry read. We don’t want to be like Cinema Sins or a chud youtuber. Let’s use Rule 7. 

In Kuang’s The Poppy War I enjoyed how the author builds reader empathy for the main character. The MC is highly motivated, her agency drives her to study as hard possible to get into the nation’s prestigious military academy. The conflicts she face help ratchet the tension and make the MC more likeable. She is a war-orphan fostered by poppy traders and she works for their store at no pay. She owns nothing, has nothing, but her brain. We learn what’s at stake, she’s about to be sold off as a bride to a regional trader, he’s wealthy, but old, and her abusive foster mother wants the market advantage. Our MC dreads it, she imagines what it would be like to be forced to bed and push babies out for an old man who had gone through multiple divorces. We’d all love a bit of sugar, but it is at the cost of her agency—adopting the traditional female role in her society would transform her into a non-person. Her mother even gives advice to drug him with poppy until he is a human skeleton so that our MC may take over his wealth and power. The reader is presented with an alternative to the MC’s dream of getting into the academy by studying for a brutally difficult nationwide exam requiring knowledge of twenty-seven books challenging its takers with mathematics, logic, the classics, etc. We see her cleverly leverage her tutor and poppy trading foster mother into giving her the chance to study and make it into the academy. As an author, we learn that a motivated, clever, and intelligent character with their dreams on the line and multiple conflicts makes for a compelling read. This all takes place in the first (and maybe the second?) chapter. 

When we engage with media we have three modes of engaging with the content. We have our consumer brain. Am I enjoying this? We have our art brain: What does it mean? And we have the creator's brain: Why do I enjoy this? 

We want to learn why and how a movie or a book works. Why was Harry Potter popular? He has an abusive family, he’s trapped in the suburbs, he has no prospective future, he’s lonely, he’s a loser. He’s brought to the world of magic and all of it is flipped. Like one of those stories where a laboring girl learns she is a princess and her life turns around but instead of class war, now she’s gotta deal with a peeved uncle wanting the family fortune.

 The MC doesn’t need to be a particularly deep character; The conflict sometimes helps define the character. J.K Rowling hasn’t written anything particularly good since Harry Potter because she has nothing intelligent to say. But we can understand why it worked. Hermione and Ron are foils to one another, Ron born into the world of magic and doesn’t care much for it, while Hermione comes from the mundane world and loves magic and wants to learn all about it—just like us. She becomes an audience favorite because she is relatable. 

Rule 7 takes a little while to get used to. I still come into conflicct with it. Sometimes we watch a movie, we feel as if we wasted two hours of our life—*cough* 2001: A Space Odyssey *cough*— and all we want to do is rant about it. Give it the half-star review of Lettrboxd but find what makes it work. Crafted in the 1970s with scenes of spectacle that are decades ahead of its time. It’s certainly one of the films of all time. I have very little to say or learn from Kubrick’s magnum opus. Because—

Study what you want to write. 

You’d better crack down and do your homework. You want a gritty superhero story? Worm, Watchmen, The Boys. You want to write a war story? From whose PoV? Regular folk? The Pianist, Schindlers list. Soldiers? Saving Private Ryan, Generation Kill, Band of Brothers. Do you want it to be a comedy? Top Secret. 

But that’s one part of it. Because if you want to get better you need to be familiar with stories featuring other genres, themes and storytelling. 

A book doesn’t have to be good for you to learn from it. Using Dune and 2001 were bad examples which I immediately pivoted from. 

I’m currently reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I find it an uncompelling read. Yet there’re elements to learn. It’s originally a Polish book, other languages have different ways of thinking about the world and the people around us. Here’s a paragraph to show what I mean. The author and her character interrogate the concept of ‘useless’ and ‘useful.’ We learn more about how the main character thinks about the world. 

“But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.” 

It’s cool. We learn new ways to explore how a character thinks and reacts to the world in their head.

You should adjust your relationship with the media you consume from not just being a consumer, but understanding why you are enjoying it.

[ontologicalweevil]

Isekai: The Story-Teller's Pitfall

Foreward

Several years ago I attempted to write a story where dude #1997 is dragged from our world into a realm where nomadic skeletons rode ships on sand, and the goddess whom had pulled him in tasked him with murdering her fellow goddesses champions because they had locked her in a prison. It was after seventeen chapters, thirty-five-some thousand words that I stopped and thought to myself: Why is this an isekai? What do I get from it being an isekai? And I realized one of the side characters, a small-time thief who got on the bad side of one of the villains, would serve better as a main character. Not average Joe from bumfuck America, because the point of the story wasn’t about being transported, it was about the power dynamics and relationships of the goddess with the leash on their involuntarily chosen champion. Granted, this plot has evolved into its own thing which I’ve been writing and hope to post sometime soon—though it’s changed significantly and my writing chops are still developing.

This is something I’ve noticed a lot across the web with people publishing their stories. New authors are taking short-cuts without realizing it. Crippling reader empathy by making blank slate characters and expecting readers to like them because they are from our world. I wanted to prod my own brain and try and understand story telling a bit more.

I hope we can all learn something new.

Thesis and Whatever

When someone says they’re writing an isekai story, your first question should be: “Why?”

Why are you writing an isekai? What themes and tropes do you plan to use for your narrative? Why does your story need to be an isekai?

These questions need to be answered before you begin outlining your story.

Anyways, here’s my thesis:

The isekai genre of storytelling is a narrative crutch if it isn’t a main theme of the story.

What do I mean by that?

There’s a webserial called Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales. In this story, a young man is transported to a world with elements from his homebrew TTRPG sessions he ran for his friends. He learns within the first arc that his best friend was transported to the very same place, except it had been hundreds of years ago and now his best friend has disappeared off the face of the world. The story explores themes of friendship, loss, moving on, suicide, and how his ideas had come to life in this world both the good and the bad. Worth the Candle has to be an isekai in order to explore the core themes of the narrative. It’s also a LitRPG which allow the MC the tools to combat strong entities. The TTRPG elements of the main character’s past life and new life allow us to suspend disbelief; just as his meeting with the game master of this world does to cement why he has the abilities he does.

The isekai genre often holds hands with the LitRPG genre. Stories like Sword Hero Online or Overlord, are fundamentally different stories and yet are both isekai LitRPGs. Both utilize their genres to some efficacy. Overlord’s main character (MC) is a salaryman with nothing to live for back home and stays logged in just as the game he’s poured his life into shuts down. It doesn’t shut down and continues as a whole new and real world—he bumbles incompetently through the politicking of the new world as a powerful lich. His minions throughout the series continue to believe he is a genius; because they are the most high level beings in the world the MC’s incompetence is negated. It’s an action, comedy, and wouldn’t work without the isekai or LitRPG elements. The former explains why the MC is incompetent and not a murderous undead, and the latter serves to suspend audience disbelief as to why they are powerful. Sword Hero Online is a story where players get trapped (help step-bro I’m stuck) in a VRMMO virtual reality massive multiplayer online game. Because the world is a video game, they have LitRPG elements, the suspense of disbelief is built in.

How does this compare to a generic isekai story pervasive in anime genre fiction? A character saves a cat (they do something which serves to show off their heroic character trait, or lack thereof) and then they are teleported to a new world. They make friends, discover a big bad, and defeat him. I’m reducing it, but that’s the shape of most of these stories.

Let me adjust: why are these stories common on Royal Road, in webcomics, anime, light novels, and wherever else you may encounter it?

Welcome to the meat of my clumsy essay.

The Isekai Genre as an Evolution of zero-point

The zero-point is rock bottom. It is where one retreats and regroups with what they have left and tries again. Trying again, failing again, and failing better than the last attempt. Lenin uses climbing a mountain as his metaphor. Story arcs follow the same trajectory.

The zero-point in stories is where the main character leaves their old world behind. Our most famous stories in the west exemplify this. Luke Skywalker leaves his moisture farm after his adoptive family gets ganked. Harry Potter owns nothing in his adoptive family’s home. Frodo leaves his home behind to prevent his loved ones’ slaughter and powers on through the power of friendship.

Each of these characters are plain ordinary individuals. They serve as bland characters for the audience to fill them in. By making them ordinary it makes them easier to resonate with. But the conflict they face is what makes them exceptional.

Okay so, why does that connect to the isekai genre?

These characters have attachments within the world they live in. They lose those attachments and are forced to find a new mode of existence. The isekai is the easiest and emotionally kindest way to employ zero-point for both the author and readers.

Transporting a character from their world to the new involves zero cruelty in the process. Snap your fingers and that’s that.

Now the author has a few problems they have to solve.

You have a character with zero ties to this new world.

You have a character who your audience doesn’t care about yet.

You need a conflict with stakes that have more than two results, example: end of the world—unless you plan on ending the world and the story continuing in the ruins of it.

How do you resolve these problems?

Cruelty’s Necessity

Being kind as an author is one of the worst traits an author can have. You must be the cruel god of your character’s universe because through adversity does your audience become attached to the characters. It is necessary to inflict zero-point onto the protagonist to begin the hero’s journey.

Darren Shan’s Demonata series solves some problems. Quick, deploy ultraviolence onto his loved ones with ultraviolence and send the MC down the path of the plot. Easy, the character has faced the worst day of their life, the readers are promised grit and gore, and now they have a mission of revenge that morphs into something else entirely.

In the anime Shield Hero our protagonist is treated like trash by the residents of the new world because of their shield. He comes in with three other strangers who are granted the spear, the sword, and the bow and they are popular with the humans. The man character receives one ally to work alongside with, the princess of the kingdom, and she tricks him by spouting rape allegations, it becomes a revenge plot—when that plot line resolves by the the midpoint of the show, the story has nothing left interesting to tell. Shield Hero sucks.

The Devil is a Part-timer tells the story of a devil king who loses his kingdom to the heroes and flees to Japan and becomes content with working at a McDonald’s analogue. It becomes a slice of life even as the main hero follows through and she tries to find and fight him. It works because conflict remains and resolves into an odd friendship. Once that plot resolves, you either end the story or find something new—fighting old enemies with new friends.

An author’s cruelty sets the stage for love. In Berserk the titular character Guts, loses his friends and found family, and finds a new family in a world that is changing and challenging them. Without the gut-twisting betrayal of his closest friends, Guts remains a mercenary stuck in the same loop of his life until he dies, retires, or becomes another story entirely. Zero-point lets our character redefine and reflect before beginning a journey with an intention to become or do one thing but will metamorphosize into something else entirely.

Blanker Slates

The isekai presents you with a blank slate character whom the audience and the author can project themselves onto it. But that isn’t enough, because people want to feel likeable, and if the main character isn’t likeable, they themselves won’t want to project themselves onto the character. Weird isn’t it?

Recently, I finished reading Alexander Wales’ Thresholder, it’s about a guy who enters a portal and goes world to world fighting other thresholders. We see snapshots of the worlds they explore, pieces of the cultures, from the eyes of a man who isn’t as interested in the world as much as the readers are. His self becomes obliterated throughout the worlds as he tries to gain new powers to fight other thresholders. It supersedes his personality, though it wasn’t like there was much to begin with as we the readers are thrown into the story after he has seen two worlds. He’s gone through the shock of his new circumstances and became used to the violence he needs to inflict in order to survive. It pushes away traditional story telling conventions and instead uses the draw of progressive fantasy elements, new world-building, new allies and thresholders, and new conflicts to keep readers interested.

Ordinarily an isekai’d character needs a guide to the world. Some authors may exclude a guide to set up conflict and comedy. You can save or expand on exposition but that risks audience interest.

Harry Potter, Frodo, Luke Skywalker, they’re blank slates, but they inhabit the world and have a place in it. They have established relationships with the people and the universe.

An isekai’d character thrust into a brand new world is a blanker slate. We’re expected to fill them in ourselves with ourselves. You should like them because they’re from our world!

That’s not a great start, and that’s a start a worrying number of stories employ. Many of them are written by amateur first time authors. We all have to learn somewhere, but it’s a crutch and more often they sound unappealing. Would you read a story about a person thrown into the middle of a forest and they have to survive and grow stronger through fighting? Stories like that are popular, but they live and die by execution, and numbers going up.

Numbers Go Up

The LitRPG genre is another crutch of story telling when it is leaned on.

That’s it, that’s all I have to say about it.

I lied.

Let’s look at two examples:

In the webserial Die Trying by the author of 12 Miles Below, the MC is granted a system alongside everyone else involved in a game of the gods trying to escape or fix their home universe Azdrial. It’s an extraction LitRPG isekai. The main character goes between Earth and Azdrial trying to complete quests, leveling up, heal his family back home, and get rich or die trying [Title shot]. It’s a fun story and the LitRPG system is granted to Wade, our ex-video game nerd now forced to work as a store clerk, now having an opportunity to break out and break the system as much as possible. The system is there but the story successfully draws the readers into caring about the side characters and our desire to see how Earth will change with objects from Azdrial being brought over. Humans like building things, growing numbers, digging holes, it appeals to our silly little brains,

In Worth the Candle anytime someone found a way to break an element in the universe, such as cloning themselves too many times, an area around them is turned to an exclusion zone and they cannot escape it. It serves as a means of preventing the world from ending in certain cases. Such as an exclusion zone where someone is getting groundhog’s day’d for eternity or an Ultra Evil Guy escaping containment: torturing and raping everyone to death for eternity. Cute. This system prevents power creep and keeps the wider world from becoming too much of a mess. It’s a limit on what the MC can do, and they create an exclusion zone by abusing the magic they have at their employ. The story isn’t about the RPG elements provided, but it allows the author to throw in newer more dangerous and interesting foes for our protagonist to dispatch. It allows for greater stakes, opportunities for the character to grow their renown, and redefines their relationships with the rest of the cast. Action defines our characters. Whether it’s a slice of life or Bridgerton. Our character could simply walk away from the problem, eating a hot dog and that would show a different dimension of the character.

The issue lies when it’s used as a crutch. How so? When the system becomes an extension of the character’s personality or simply is their personality. What do you want to do? Become stronger! Why? I want to go home! Why? I have family there! When the numbers matter more than the characters, that's a problem. The numbers are a tool and if the main character was ever presented with the quandary of giving up their number system so they can grow as a person, then it should be let go. Power is a tool and how it’s employed in a story defines the relationships, which tropes will be vital to execute to maintain reader satisfaction, the conflicts and stakes and the proportion to their power.

Escapism

The isekai serves to make escaping our world seem possible. The yearning for a world that isn’t ordinary, trapping us in monotony, where we’re expected to follow expectations contains the human desire for novelty. Pun unintended but I’ll take it.

End

If we reframe the portal fantasy into a narrative lens. It’s pushing the main character through the door directly into a hero’s journey.

You need to dice and fry your onions before you do anything else, yo.

Thanks for reading my poorly structured rambling

A few Definitions

Isekai: Portal fantasy: dark tower, alice in wonderland, narnia… ↩︎

TTRPGs: the most famous example being Dungeons and Dragons, etc, an extension of oral story telling with an interactive narrative participants must engage with. ↩︎

LitRPG: Literature role playing game in which the character(s) has stats and levels up throughout the story. ↩︎