Season 3 Arc 10 – Author’s Note (Patreon)

Whew… it’s been 600k words again…

Alright, so, a few things to address before I get to the chronological breakdown.

First things first: harem bloat situation. Obviously I said last time around that I wanted to pause the harem additions for a bit and… I have succeeded, for the most part.

“Fun, can’t you count? You added 2!”

Yeah, I added 2 over 621’000 words. I think that’s fairly acceptable as far as pacing goes. As for those two, admittedly I hadn’t fully planned either of them. Hard to say which one was more spontaneous.

Ehtra has been in storage for a while, of course. I did not plan to add her to the harem, but I had good ideas, so I acted on them and I did that with the appropriate amount of restraint, given the situation. Between Ehtra awakening and Ehtra joining the harem, there’s about a full book’s worth of content.

Lu Zhi has been planned forever and I mean FOREVER – you can find first hints about the new monarch of the Mandate of Heaven as early as Season 1 Arc 4. What she was supposed to be has been shifting a bit during that time, but I always wanted her in sometime down the line. That she joined the harem so quickly, however, was unexpected. Another instance of a character running away with it because of their own motivations.

I also did some additional set-up work for potential future haremettes. Lucifrena showed up again, even if we are STILL not quite at her conclusion, Kage was introduced, Fianna was introduced, Layla got more screentime. Are any of these four guaranteed to be haremettes? Yes, no, maybe – for some I don’t know myself, for others I am keeping you on your toes. Don’t want things to be too predictable.

The harem bloat situation is interesting on many levels. I won’t go back into the whole mathematical side of things again, that was extensive enough in the last author’s note. What I discovered since then is audience reactions to the harem bloat and how it is being handled.

Fascinatingly, even people that are outspoken about the harem getting too large for their tastes still approved of the additions of Lu Zhi and Ehtra – admittedly a lot more for Lu Zhi than Ehtra. This leads me back to the adage of ‘If the reader knew what they wanted, they’d write it themselves’, which is obviously not entirely true (writing is a skill, as my early chapters make me painfully aware of) but there is a core there.

What I am saying is that ‘the harem is getting way too large’ is a general thing to keep in mind, not to make it an ironclad law that no one else can be added. By all feedback that I received, it is clear to me that more haremettes are still appreciated, if it is handled well.

That being said, we are inching closer to that line where the ironclad rule should be applied.

Everything is a gradient.

John had the talking to after Ehtra was added, so that’s the in-story acknowledgement that John is transitioning out of finding a harem and into having a harem. I can’t tell you if we’ll reach the hard limit of 30 (or 34, depending on how much I get propagandized by the pro-harem crowd), but I can tell you that I am still very aware of things.

As for another topic of mixed reception: Layla. With her appearance at the wedding, we have finally reached the spot where she self-actualizes for purposes other than getting closer to John. If you still don’t like her at this point, that’s completely fine/understandable. I just wanted to say that this is more of what we are working with. Layla is more than just a highly obsessed stalker and she’ll show that as she gets better at grasping her situation introspectively.

Another thing to address is the lack of side story this arc. Plainly, I wasn’t motivated to write one and I am considering whether the POV switches aren’t the better way to go about these things anyhow. I could also do both. I’ll get your pulse on that in the Feedback Form.

Now, for the chronological breakdown.

This arc was a lot more focused than the last one. I basically had two things I wanted to achieve this arc and both of them happened with some stuff in-between.

We start the arc with 27 Days of Preparation. A few things of import happened here. First off, the Astria Raid was cleared. By feedback given in chat, it was popular enough courtesy of the satisfying final fight. Many called it a worse version of Ohmior, which is fine by my standards. It provided a bunch of new items, primarily for Lydia, and the upgrade for Inkaryl to make it the first Mythical weapon.

I had Mythical weapons planned for a while now. Initially I wanted to make the Fusional weapons in general Mythical quality, but that felt kind of cheap because they were just being handed to John by Marathyu for the longest time. Maybe now that the Crafting Crew is on it, I’ll have that be changed, but I can’t tell you quite yet. It will definitely stay VERY rare.

Perhaps most important about this is that this marks the last time John went grinding with the aid of Magoi. The High Fateweaver has been gradually phazing out of active affairs by his own wishes. While I still plan to give him more scenes, there is an element to my stories about saying goodbye. I am not here to write a power fantasy, even if the nature of John’s powers make many fantasies come true. The inevitable march of time does bring changes.

After that we had the Palace getting upgraded to a truly ludicrous building. This is one of those fantasies coming true. As John gets more and more powerful, there are certainly some restrictions of reality that no longer apply and his house now being a gargantuan complex filled with impossibly large sub-complexes is certainly one of them.

After that, we have the sailing over to the Divided Gates meeting. What is important here is, primarily, the creation of the Rose of Artifice and Hailey’s conversion to the Golden Rose. The latter was something I had planned either way, because it fits with the country gal’s character. The former was also going to happen at one point or another. We shall see where it leads.

Then, the Divided Gates Meeting began and… well, a bunch of stuff happened, expectedly. I’ll do this in no particular order, since all of this stuff was happening simultaneously.

First off: Lu Zhi. I mentioned it above already, but to reiterate, the Heavenly Jade Empress immediately became popular with everyone in and out of story. People really like confident, dangerous, and cute tomboys, who would have thought?

Everyone. Everyone thinks that.

Of course, Rave was even more the enabler here than Lulu herself was. Rave sees, Rave wants, Rave gets, simple as. Certainly helped to get everyone onboard that Lulu herself had her schemes about the situation.

Another thing during the Divided Gates meeting was the revelation of Remus’ involvement in the creation of Prometheus. This is just another one of these things that shows Remus’ long shadow through history. Not much to be said about it from my side.

Then there is the meeting with the Korean leadership, the Great Sultanate, the remaining Metracanas, and the fight with Krieg. Interesting but ultimately fairly minor events, more worldbuilding and covering the bases so future events have more grounding.

Oh, and Mengele.

I like to categorize my villains according to the seven deadly sins. Not in the sense that I want them to embody one sin in particular, more in the sense of which of these seven are the primary motivator for their evil actions. I do something similar for the good guys and asking myself which sins they have to struggle against. There is also the opposite side of that with asking myself which virtues villains still possess and in which a good person is a paragon.

Arkeidos’ primary sins were Wrath and Greed, for example (this was made abundantly clear because of Apotheosis).

Mengele I thought of more like a combination of Pride and Gluttony. The difference there being that Arkeidos wanted to own everything while Mengele wanted to be everything. Mengele also was an arrogant prick while Arkeidos was more of a tempered person who got aggressive in taking what he wanted.

Anyway, the point I am getting to is that it was nice to write someone who is an absolute bastard. Whatever good Mengele may have once aimed for, he had long since surrendered it in pursuit of personal ambition. There was nothing redeemable about him and he behaved that way from start to finish.

And that’s where the Azure Tribe comes in.

The Azure Tribe is another one of those things I’ve planned for a while and it’s easily one of the most Shounen anime things I have done in a long time. A rival faction that comes out of nowhere that has a few members directly or indirectly tied to some of our protagonists. They are strong enough to be a threat and thus must be overcome in a series of single combat fights in order for the party to get what they want.

Standard, yes, but standard for a reason. It’s pretty hype when done right.

I think I did it right.

The fight scenes of this tournament where among my favourites I have written and there were quite a few important payoffs over their course.

First and foremost, we have Nathalia changing her form and her outlook. I’ve been chipping away at Nathalia since she first left, because she needed a reality check. Nathalia was not a good person, she arguably still isn’t, and that needed to be acknowledged for the relationship to remain what it was.

Second to that we have Nia reaching the zenith of her personal potential. Not as great a fight scene, for reasons of the scales and powers involved skirting the line of comprehensiveness, but a good payoff in power development. The AI pictures used in this bit were generally received well, although I’ll probably just use links in the future rather than bind-ins because some people really don’t like them.

Third was the fight between Metra and Liakan and that was important because Metra fights are always great.

I won’t go into detail for the rest of the fights, nor will I go into detail for the individual characters. You’ll see more of the Azure Tribe. Unlike Shounen animes/mangas, I won’t introduce characters this powerful and then make them immediately irrelevant after they were defeated and forget they exist. They have their parts to play going forwards.

Especially since, ya know, their sponsor is dead.

Mengele’s death here I went back and forth on a bit. Obviously, he was a contender for final boss of the story, or at least one of the major end of story encounters. There were three factors that went into whether or not he would die here.

1.     Would the characters be able to make it happen? Motivation was plenty, the question was whether they had the set of tools to overcome all the security that Mengele reasonably should have and, at level 600, yes, they could make it happen (with a little help from other people that do not like Mengele).

2.     Would that make for a satisfying conclusion to the plot line? I believe so, although I have had some people say they thought it was too sudden, which I can see. Mostly, there was positive reception though.

3.     Would the fallout from that decision further the story in an interesting way? And the answer to that is: absolutely yes. The fallout from Mengele’s death has only just begun.

So, I did it. There was also the consideration that it would be an interesting curveball, that such a major figure died so ‘cleanly’, but I don’t throw curveballs for curveballs sake alone.

After that, we have John getting that seat at the Divided Gates table, we have the proposal to Lydia, and then we are moving on to the slice of life section of this arc.

Ehtra was awakened, which was an interesting set of chapters. Ehtra has a knot of contradictions to resolve and that will probably take her the rest of eternity. She wants a past that no longer exists and can never exist like that again so she is looking at the future to try and reclaim what she can, knowing she can’t have it all. She hates and loves the memories. She loathes her own humanity but she also wouldn’t want to be anything else. She’s conflicted and that makes her intriguing enough that I added her.

Fianna was also introduced here. She only had 2 chapters of actual screentime so far, so it’s not like she had a lot of attention. She’s very much a spur of the moment introduction that I might take somewhere or might not. Time will tell.

John’s twentieth birthday had a lot less razzle-dazzle than the last one. Less time to plan made it a private affair. I have taken to grabbing the list of haremettes and then doing some controlled randomizing for group dates. It’s an interesting writing challenge and it lets me show some less common pairings.

I’ll probably take a step away from that for whatever slice of life section I have next. I feel like I’ve done a bit too much of the random interactions this (and last) arc and too little of the cliques that the haremettes spend most of their free time in.

Then there was the giant orgy.

Which, I suppose, is a good moment to address something else. You may or may not have noticed, but there was a deliberate and pretty intense decrease of overall erotica in this arc. This is, for one, because I was just writing other porn stuff elsewhere and I only want to write about the birds and the bees for so much of my week. For two, a lot of people keep telling me they read this primarily for the story anyhow.

Do let me know about your feelings on this in the Feedback Form. I will adjust accordingly.

Next was the little stretch about knighthood. Nothing overly interesting. It was primarily about interacting with Ehtra some more, having John do some more philosophizing, and show how far above even the elite he is these days.

Following was the second grinding session of this arc, this time with Lulu. New Raid dropped, the Ravaged Coast, which I think is a pretty good one so far. It’s got a soft narrative going on and the AI pictures do help with formulating cohesive visuals. The maps, admittedly, are pretty ugly, but I have to cut corners there. It is just not worth spending a lot of time on something that only exists for top-down visualization purposes.

The side plot here of fighting Lulu was also quite interesting. They weren’t particularly great fight scenes, courtesy of having the emotional depth that spars necessarily have, but it was still nice to show just how absurd the current number 2 of the Abyss is. To be clear, in full control of herself, Eliana would be stronger (although that wouldn’t be enough of a lead to make her the clear victor in all 1vs1 scenarios).

Guild Hall Tier 5.5 Upgrade, going to Prague, meeting Kage, Bachelor’s Night and then the wedding. I’ll just breeze over all of that because it’s been recent and you remember and it was pretty brief all things considered.

And that’s basically that. Go to the Feedback Form, if you would be so nice, and tell me what you thought: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfIcoLgkFeUMntukDlcQQCwk8KpRZA1xTlzbLJ-hBaJhPdMRQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

And now an update on some other stuff.

Since many of you only follow me by reading, you probably last heard from me directly when I published the New Years update. I have since been doing pretty fine, all things considered. Income is stable enough and has risen a little bit, so that’s nice. If you want to support me, you can find me on SubsStar/Patreon.

https://subscribestar.adult/funatic

https://www.patreon.com/Funatic

As for what else I have been doing, it’s mostly the Rewrite. As of me writing this, I am close to done and I can probably use the 2 week break from this arc to finally wrap that up and get back to writing Welldark/Drip-Fed.

I hate editing. I hate editing. I hate editing.

Sorry, the mind goblins got in control for a moment there.

There is… nothing else to really say. That Rewrite seriously has been eating my time.

I’ll be back in two weeks and present you with the next arc. This one comes from a spontaneous idea, but I think you’ll rather like it anyhow. After all, who doesn’t like Aztec aesthetics? Like the Another Kingdom arc, this one will be focused on one conflict. Unlike the Another Kingdom arc, this one will be complicated.

Prepare yourself, therefore, for a clash in the jungles of Middle America. What did Mengele seek? Who is blocking the visions? What did the Abyssal Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans do, what differentiated them, what did they have in common? Who else might be sniffing around the area? Did Momo jinx it by saying they won’t find another woman there?

Get ready for a frilling (ba-dum-ts) arc full of conflict!

This branch returns in 2 weeks with Season 3 Arc 11 – Crimson Spokes

Until then!