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Survivors (Patreon)

Published:
2020-04-04 18:11:19
Imported:
2023-02

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OK, I *promise* the next thing I write will be short and sweet.

So I wrote another frickin' novella. For those of you wondering, "why isn't Ice Bear posting anything when he's stuck in quarantine," the answer is because he decided he'd start four different projects simultaneously and then fixate on the longest one of them until completion. In case the title didn't make it clear, Survivors is the sequel to Losers, the novella I wrote back in February or so about Chanda and her friends being lottoed off to their classmates. It's of similar length, so brace yourself. Whew. I'll probably put it up for sale as well, but you guys are so great for sticking with me that I'll toss it your way no further questions asked.

Thanks so much to all of you who've had kind words or feedback on The Gamemaster's Screen! I've almost recovered my expenditures on cover art, so... yay? If you feel motivated to do me a solid, feel free to post a review on Amazon or Smashwords, that'd be tits, yo. (Or if you hated it, feel free to do me a solid by not reviewing it! :D)

Coming up, we got some commissioned pieces from our drawing winners, all of which I'm excited about but at least one of which I am super duper excited about. I'm going to make it my mission this month to make being stuck at home a little less tedious for everybody, and give folks something to focus on other than that one thing. I hope you folks are all healthy and hanging in there. Very best wishes, and more to come.

Comments

Anonymous

Well that answers the question of "where is ice Bear" :) Hope you are safe wherever you are!

Ferrum1

Gotta say, I was very happy to see this come out. Rather disappointed in the short length of it, but what's a fella to do? Had Chandra been changed? No? Who can tell? The twist makes for fun reading and I'm already looking forward to the next dozen chapters. Hopefully they'll be a lot longer than this one. ;)

Anonymous

I *knew* I was forgetting something! There's been so much content being pumped out by all the authors I pledge to that that "Gamemaster's Screen" completely slipped my mind! No worries though I picked it up from Smashwords now. (Thank you Ice for making that option available) I'll post on here again with comments after I've read everything. But before that... are there actually people on here who *prefer* shorter stories? Just... why?

Anonymous

So I am back, having read through this. Would it be a reach for me to say "Called it"? I feel like I predicted this plot direction (at least partially) in the comments to the last one. Anyway, I gotta say I enjoyed this chapter way more than the previous. I'd already mentioned all the little things that bothered me about the concept in the previous chapter and there weren't any new problems with world-building on this one so I could just relax and enjoy the story for what it was. The best part of this was the sheer variety in characterization, not just in the losers but also the winners. In the previous chapter it kinda felt like all the winners were interchangeable, and the losers were just personifications of various fetishes. This time around we see that while some losers are completely air-headed bimbos others retain varying levels of ability to think. We see that while most winners are gropy assholes some of them are just... guys. My favorite scene was probably the one with Jake at the ice cream shop. This one made so much more sense to me than the cinema scene in the last chapter. This is a world where guys take girls for granted, so it makes sense that they just act like... dudes. It evokes a world where men just don't care about how women might react to what they say or do. They don't go crazy over hotties dressed in next to nothing because why would they? This is all shit they've seen before. It's basically a world where locker-room banter is the norm, because men and boys have no reason to act any differently with women around. In the last chapter I also mentioned my disappointment that the boys were seemingly going about the whole lottery business quite inefficiently. Why was no one trying to apply game theory or statistics to this? Nowadays I've come around by realizing (or rationalizing to myself maybe) that we simply wouldn't run into those guys in this story. They wouldn't give a shit about Tiffany or Chanda. They would have known that blowing tix on hotties was a bad move. They're probably still working on all the uggos they won, putting those poor girls through the world's most most intense workout regimen / beauty makeover. That is, perhaps, a story I would like to read as well but it's *not this story* and that's fine. So yeah, great work on this one Ice. I'm officially looking forward to reading what comes next.

icebear
>>34753743

Yeah, I obviously couldn't say anything at the time about you being on to me, but good call. :) Which isn't to confirm she definitely did get won; I think there's a case to be made for her being free but paranoid (or there's meant to be room for a reader who wants to make one to do so). But I definitely meant to take it in this direction. As for Jake, I weirdly find myself not disliking him as a person despite him being not super-cool to Chanda (which is in large part on account of her own lies, in fairness). While it's outside the scope of Chanda's tale, I figure in time, the major dynamics we're seeing in the story would shift substantially. Sure, a bunch of 18-year-old boys who've been salivating over this opportunity their whole lives are apt to go power mad, but you figure after a while, most of them will probably chill the fuck out to some degree, especially the ones that are getting off on being assholes to their losers. You can only be spiteful at a person so long for something that was essentially another life, another person. Hell, poor Dorothy may be miserable as fuck now, but in time, that's going to either engender sympathy/regret or (if her owner's a true sociopath) just be annoying to be around, so eventually he'd be bound to give her a reprieve. I didn't get into whether or not there's some sort of future period where losers can be readjusted, though I'd think so? The concept only stands up to so much scrutiny in the first place, but one would think that if the idea is that these losers will mother the next generation, you don't want their entire personality set in stone by a horny teenager. And yeah, there's indubitably plenty of guys poaching the low-hanging fruit. :) But as you say, they weren't reaching for the stars. Really, the more I thought about it, there's probably going to wind up being more guys who don't win than girls who don't lose. I just couldn't come up with a satisfactory term for them (already don't love "survivors" alongside winners and losers), but it was easy to write around its absence. Anyway, glad it pleased. :D

Anonymous
>>34753743

The ambiguous nature of Chanda’s situation was actually the best way to resolve it, IMO. It creates infinite levels of mystery. “Did Aaron win Chanda? Is she free? If Aaron did win her, why is he letting her believe that she’s free? Is that his thing? Does he get off on… pretending to rail against the system while secretly participating in it? But if so, wouldn’t he prevent her from having these doubts… unless that’s exactly what he wants? Maybe she should confront Aaron about it… but what good would that do really? It’s not like knowing the truth would change it, and confronting Aaron might screw her out of a relationship with the last remaining decent guy in the country. Maybe she’d be happier just keeping her doubts to herself… But is THAT Aaron’s thing? Did he arrange everything to turn her into an unwitting accomplice in THE SYSTEM? It would have been simple to super-charge her libido and manipulate her thoughts so that she would grow into a twisted parody of her former self, ostensibly free but desperate for his approval and attention. She’d spend her days trying to seduce him into orgies with the Barrios sisters or whatever, not realizing that he’d seeded that idea into her psyche somehow. But is that so bad? Sure, Aaron gets to live out his weird, sick little fantasies but Chanda gets to live out her own fantasies as well. It wouldn’t be real happiness but it she would *feel* happy. Well, the feelings would be real but they would be based on lies…” You could go on forever in this line of inquiry. It’s turtles all the way down.

Ferrum1
>>34753743

Aaron's situation is rather believable. He comes from a family that wants kids and grandkids, so him being interested in such things would be normal. Feeling the pressure to breed is the same for guys and girls, after all. I see his situation as pretty realistic. He hates the concept of the lottery because it's tantamount to rape in the very worst way. But it's also his only chance to actually have a family of his own. So what's he do but put his money on the one target that's so far out that his chances are almost nil. Winning Chandra was an accident. He put up a ticket for her to sooth his conscience. At least he can say that he tried, right? And when he did actually win, he came up with a way to keep Chandra as "herself" as possible. This, in his mind, minimizes the "rapey" aspect of it. A balm to his conscience, sure, but still something necessary for him. Of course, that doesn't mean Chandra isn't going to demand that he be more bossy with her. She's going to want to fit in with the crowd like women always do, so to some extent she'll want him to be publicly "in charge" when possible. If nothing else, Aaron is trying his best to live up to his moral code, but it's a tough world and nobody's perfect.

icebear
>>34753743

Well said. I think what has drawn me to this scenario once it popped into my head is that it's one of those works where I have my characters and get to just let them Do. So rather than being driven to an end plot point, it's just putting Chanda and Aaron in a tank and seeing what they do. I can buy a world in which Aaron, without hostile intent, bid on and won Chanda, leaving her as unscathed as possible. I can buy one where he sees himself as a romantic and wants to use his winnings to sweep her off her feet, play the hero. I can buy one where he didn't win her at all, he really does have the integrity not to participate, and the sort of hostility to women that the Lottery invites simply bred an environment that courted his heroism. While I didn't have it crystallized from the get-go as I sometimes do, I think the end note of the story sums it up fairly well, that it's a world with so much taken out of it that it's difficult to survey what's left. Relationships between women and men, in conventional terms as we know them, are defunct, but in a lot of ways, so are relationships between same gendered individuals (possibly excepting gay men). The Lottery's power imbalance throws huge inequality into male relationships, and of course renders female relationships fleeting, hollow. Anyway, before I get all Nicholas Sparks self-aggrandizing on this, thanks for the thoughts. There will eventually be more to come, I suspect.

icebear
>>34720963

Doing good. One of the nice things about working from home is that the coronavirus shenanigans have meant minimal disruption of my routine. But I know many friends, family members, and fans are not so fortunate. But for my sake, doing well, thanks.

Anonymous
>>34753743

I'd like to chime in on Ukyo's post regarding the ambiguous nature of Chan's Situation, and IMO, I agree that it creates so many layers and levels. While one can predict the train of thought that Chandra had by the end of the piece, the fact is that there's really no way to tell, or even narrow down the possibilities, if she's right or wrong, and that creates excitement to see what comes next, and I applaud that.

Anonymous
>>34753743

I'm pretty convinced that Aaron seeded Chanda. It just wouldn't make sense for no one to even try. Here is how I think it all went down... Aaron didn't abstain from seeding girls. He, in fact, seeded as many girls as he could with one ticket each. He did this because he realized that his abstinence wasn't going to save anyone. The girls he would have won would just go instead to random dudes who would abuse them. His plan was to try and win as many girls as possible, then just keep them as-is. Set them free, or at least as free as they can be within the system. Well, most of them anyway. Aaron was probably planning on keeping one of the girls. His parents were hoping he would be able to start a family, and he didn't want to disappoint them. So the plan was that he would spread his tickets around, hopefully win several girls, keep one and "release" the rest. What Aaron didn't count on was that he actually only won one girl - Chanda. That puts him into a bind because he can't both meet his parents' expectations and keep any girls out of the system... or can he? This is the tale of how one teen tried to have his cake and eat it too.

icebear
>>34753743

To be fair, he hasn't yet tried to eat her. :) (and if we extend this cake metaphor, does that make Chanda a cannibal...?)

Ferrum1
>>34753743

That's a good train of thought, and I can see Aaron trying something like that. I wonder if the Lottery Commission has a baseline that has to be met, or if the winner can elect to have nothing done to their prize. Did Aaron give her just a nudge, maybe succumbing to peer pressure or teenage hormones? What will Chandra demand from him if she's feeling the urge to fit in? There's a dozen ways to go, and I've been mostly wrong all the way through so.... I guess I'll just have to wait for the next few chapters. Hope they get here soon!

Anonymous
>>34753743

Aaron probably *did* make it so Chanda gets hornier the longer you make her wait. It's hard to come up with a convincing lie on the spot so he might have just blurted out the truth. It also makes sense because we actually do see Chanda get hornier as time passes in the story.

Anonymous
>>34753743

Aaron also reminds me of Connor from TIOS, however, the fact that this is mostly from Chanda's perspective gives the reader enough doubt and mystery regarding Aaron's actions and whole person. Will he be a Connor type character? Worse? Smack down in the middle?

Anonymous

Man I was so excited to find a sequel to Losers, I had no idea that you had published it. If it had appeared on Amazon I would bought it in a second. This edition is one of my favorite pieces of your writing due to the protagonist Chanda. Watching these events from the perspective of a woman dealing with the indignities of society rather than from a man benefiting from them gives an extra zing to the story, which I think sometimes lacks due to your preference for fairly passive male protagonists (like Aaron!). Chanda is a great character and I'm loving her development. Great work.

icebear
>>51248117

Yeah, I meant to put it up there, and then I forgot about it, and then every time I think about it I'm like "well, it's been so long, I should do it closer to part 3..." and that's been all the excuse I've need because I am terrible at my job. :) But I am glad you enjoyed!