Author’s Note – S2 Arc 2 ‘You will remember me’ (Patreon)

At ~310000 words this Arc is stupidly long. I think you all noticed that as well. Then again, I also announced this as the longest arc in the season… well, it actually should be the longest arc in this branch overall.

Before I continue let me give a thanks to all of you who support me here. It's become quite big already, netting me almost 200$ per month. While nowhere near a level that I can live off it, it does seem to be quite the promising path. I will continue treading it as long as I can and at the very least until I can bring this story to a (hopefully satisfying) conclusion.

ALSO! In important news, I got two new proofreaders. Say thanks when you see them on the Discord, they make this stuff actually readable.

Back to this arc: Due to the sheer length of it, I will not be touching upon everything, but here are the important bits.

In the last author’s note, I promised the following things:

-          The mother-daughter rivalry of Nariko and Rave

This one I regard as largely successful, although the second post-fight talk still needs to happen.

I couldn’t just make Rave win against her mother, would have made her look way stronger than

she is supposed to be (at this point). I am, however, happy to get Rave some character

development as she is one of those that are harder to develop on the basis of being pretty alright

already. Not much in the way of flaws to work with.

-          Momo getting a fighting style

Yeah, this one was pretty much scratched, sorry. It’s going to happen eventually, can’t have her be just a sitting duck all the time, but what I had in mind felt hard to justify to just give to her without the proper challenges.

-          Nia Fae

She is here, and she acts exactly how she is supposed to. Although I guess I am underdelivering on the ‘creepy’ factor considering how many people find her cute. More on that in the character insight.

-          A Christmas Party

Well, it certainly happened.

-          Thana’s true power

Many people actually got this one right from the start. I remember comments about her being a goddess as early as Season 1. That actually makes me rather happy; I don’t need or want to have every twist be unpredictable. However, I doubt anyone could have imagined that I was going to pull a goddess of genocide on you all.

Yes, I do like to go overly dark sometimes.

-          Siena being a murderous bitch

Nice bait and switch there, Fun. Siena mellowed out considerably over the course of this arc to the point where she actually gets along with everyone now. No, I haven’t forgotten about the violin thing, it will be back when I feel the story allows me to focus on Siena for a bit. No, her being mellowed out considerably does not mean she is fine yet.

-          What the Metracana really is

Ah, yes, Metra. I kind of kept this promise, but the teased “beautiful berserker woman” was postponed to a later arc due to this one already having a giant crowd of new characters. If there is one thing I don’t like about having John as the definitive MC, it is that I can’t just POV hop. Makes a large cast difficult to handle.

She will be here, eventually. Next Arc. I promise. She is going to be blonde.

Now let’s address all the other things of importance that happened (in chronological order):

The Arc started off with a BANG in the form of the 11k words orgy chapter. I knew it was a mistake while writing it, because fuck me that thing was long, but I just told myself to ‘fuck it and go through with it anyway’. To this day I haven’t gotten rid of the typos in it. Sadness.

The next giant orgy will be split into several parts, otherwise my proof-readers will kill me. For good reason.

Ironically, the orgy has less likes than the shortly following chapter ending on the ‘someone is pregnant’-cliffhanger. Your guys’ priorities are weird. Ah well.

TANGENT: While on the topic of likes, I need to whine about how you people are fickle as fuck. Especially regarding porn chapters. I was told this was due to a phenomenon named “Fap and Forget”, which would explain why some porn chapters have immensely increased view but sub-average likes. I need you to hit the like on sex scenes or comment and tell me which one you like the most. GIVE ME FEEDBACK! Tangent over.

Then Nathalia came back, not much to say here. I know Nathalia is a pretty popular character, but aside from ‘being around’, she didn’t have much to contribute to this arc. Momo getting her wings fixed was pretty nice though, gave me an excuse to write about the one girl that is decidedly not in love with John. Well, one of two.

We will talk about Salamander never exceeding 99 RP whenever we get to it. Yes, I have plans. You should have figured by now that I have plans for most stuff. For example, you should check out chapter 175, look what Lydia has to say about godhood and then check the title of chapter 154. There is some more (a lot more) titbits like that.

It took 30 chapters to even start this damn tournament. I won’t go over all the matchups, it would be boring anyway. Nia rolled around, stuff happened, much of it inconsequential. I don’t know if you can tell, but I am a great fan of Slice of Life and banter.

Then the whole Undine situation finally came to a close. I had plans to fire this in Season 1 Arc 4, the miniscule corruption chance she had when evolving, if you remember. I scratched it back then because it felt too forced, which is good because I really like how it turned out this time. Giving Undine more time to dwell on her stuff and giving her an actual reason to corrupt herself felt just better all around.

The Thana side story happened, but I am not sure what else to say about that. It was the start of her mental walls crumbling and of my badly executed doomsday clock metaphor.

Then the finale fired. Honestly could have made the fights even longer, especially the bit of Nathalia and Richard intervening, but I always feel that fights shouldn’t take too long in the grand scheme of things. They are simply not all that exciting in the written word. If I was making this a comic, the fights would have more twists and turns, cause describing a flurry of attacks is pretty boring in words but not in pictures where you can hype shit up like crazy. But I am not, so I won’t.

For the goddess of genocide: I actually had two versions of her in mind and was unsure which one to go with until the very end. One would have been incredibly philosophical and talking the whole time, the other was the one I went with, the being that was pretty much just a beast.

The former felt more fun, but she wasn’t meant to be fun. If you have the literal walking extinction event, having her debate about the true nature of humanity in the middle of a fight just didn’t feel right. Instead I went with the pretty brutal thing that made it to the page. It was less interesting to write, but the savagery felt way more accurate.

On the brutality levels I can assure you that this is the ceiling. I actually think that there have been a few too many ripped off limbs this finale, but not tearing them off felt wrong as well. Ah well, it’s out now.

Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk about in the story…

Let’s talk John for a moment then. I feel like I am saying this every arc: John continued his rise in power and is now stupidly strong. Pretty much all parts of his toolkit have been revamped in some way, and he finally got a bit more in the melee area, hurray.

(I am going to address Combination in a separate chapter after this one, don’t you worry.)

I also patched out one of my personal pains which was the group levelling. It always felt a bit iffy to write. Don’t know how you readers feel about it, but me just wizarding up the levels without a proper system in place just didn’t feel right. That is even with me being more conservative with that power.

Not that there is a real proper system now, but I put a cap on my wizardry. Giving myself guidelines/caps on John’s powers feels way more fair.

Nerfed John again, should be the last time his abilities get hit in this bluntly a manner.

…

So… Yeah, there is just so much in this arc that could be addressed that I will do the only sensible thing and call it quits here. You can leave me questions in the comments or ask me directly on the Discord server.

Next Arc will be pretty straight-forward. I won’t be making promises like last time, that was kinda stupid of me. The goals have been established, the enemy is clear, and I am pretty sure you know which side is going to win at the end, so let’s not beat around the bush and call this war for what it is: one-sided.

And so I will declare to you that the next arc of this story and the final arc of Season 2 is called ‘The Five Day War’. I will now take my usual week off, see you all then~

Extended Character Insight - Nia Fae

Let’s prelude this thing with her character theme: Crystal Strings – Fading Away

So here were the basic characteristics that I went ahead to build Nia with:

-          Blonde

-          French

-          Anti-Mage

-          Emotionless Exterior

-          Badass

-          Weird

I think I delivered on all of those. Blonde I made her because there is a severe lack of blondes in my branch… not blue eyes though, I have a lot of blue-eyed girls for some reason.

French I made her for… no reason, actually. I just felt like making her French. Dunno. It gave me a nice excuse to tangle her up with the Horned Rat, but that was more an ‘after the fact’ thing.

The anti-mage part is because I think that every story of this nature will have at least one of the cancel type powers. Don’t know why, but there are certain powers that just appear whenever you have a story with basically unlimited different magics. Another one that pops-up almost every time is the power thief (in this story that’s Romulus) and the copy-cat (I don’t have that one yet).

And I just think that the emotionless exterior is a nice character gimmick. I hope I am pulling it off well. I think it was starting to get tiring, so I gave Nia the notecards so that I can actually describe her emotions while also keeping the attribute intact.

Now, the badass part needs some elaboration, I think. I call her that because of how her fighting is laid out. I usually try to give every character a basic fighting style that I then write around or subvert on the basis of how I want to twist the fight.

Examples: Lydia fights are planned to create a situation where her victory is guaranteed. John creates plans with individual steps to bring about his personal optimal outcome. Rave keeps her enemies on the ropes until she wins or they slip-up. That’s the basic idea.

For Nia the idea was that she wins all fights in as quickly a manner as possible while using her attacks as quickly as possible. This means that she will often put the big guns up front, because there is no need to conserve any strength if the enemy is beaten. The difference to Rave’s careless approach here is that Nia will take the time to analyse what the quickest way to triumph actually is.

This makes her victories seem relatively easy, even if they are often the end-product of ceaseless self-training, hence the descriptor ‘badass’. I think the two fights she was in show this relatively well. As her potential level has shown, Nia will actually be one of the strongest members in John’s group eventually.

Lastly, the weird thing is the whole ‘seeming wrong to other people’ thing. I feel like I underdeliver on this a lot, so I am going to crank it up in the future.

Her obsession with animals was a thing that I also just slipped into. Somebody mentioned it on the Discord server, and it just fit so well. I originally planned for the Void to be a more hostile place, but then I decided to have the Outsiders (also void) in.

Then I retconned the Outsiders to be Lorylim (not necessarily void) due to difference in what they were supposed to be and what I needed/wanted for my story. Well, I guess that’s fine in the end. The friendly emptiness is a nice change of pace. Don’t need everything you can’t understand to be filled with Eldritch horrors. Even if the creatures inside may not look all that friendly.

Introducing her with her own POV chapter was an experiment I ran to make it clear that Nia wasn’t actually emotionless without having her break character. Seems to be a success in that regard.

Welp, this is what I had to say about Nia Fae.

This was the second arc of the second season “You will remember me”. I hope I will see you all next arc “Five Days War”, have a nice break from my story, catch up with the other branches and all that niceness.

PS: If you have the time, please give me feedback using this form: https://goo.gl/forms/oi8Qhn0a3XsmrD1z1

Would be much appreciated.