Season 3 Arc 7 Author’s Note (Patreon)

Back in Black.

The idea of the return to Springfield obviously bounced around in my head for a while. Only the vagueness of its location associated with the shared setting across branches made me sort of question whether I would bother, but I think with the vastness of the Order’s territory I have “veiled” that “secret” well enough.

Anyway, HELLO! Let’s take things slowly. First off, as is appropriate, my gratitude goes out to my Patrons. You guys keep this job possible, which is quite important because my deadline is coming closer. By the time I turn 27, which I will in August 2022, I want to know whether this is something I can do for the rest of my life or at least have this job do enough that I can start planning for the future. As of the moment of writing this, I make 1,175 USD per month on Patreon, with about 50$ more on SubscribeStar. While I can live off this income due to my frugal lifestyle, it’s not exactly an amount that I would call ‘comfortable’ in terms of future planning.

I would implore any of you that enjoy my work to consider throwing something my way. Just the minimum amount (2$, because there is like 50 cents left of 1$ after transaction fees and VAT) would help.

Now I will not be all dramatic about it and declare that I will be gone come August unless X amount is met. What happens is that my rent-free time on my parents property is running out and that will therefore incur additional fees I need to pay. Fees I could cover with what I currently invest in artwork and a side job.

It is, however, necessary that I orient my life towards what works and ~1200 USD per month is just not something that allows me to build anything (with local cost of living, it should be said).

At about 1700$ I would at least be fairly comfortable. After 2000$, hyper-inflation notwithstanding, I would sit pretty. If I don’t see myself hitting those targets in the next few years, I’ll just have to gradually turn this back into a hobby.

The good news is that I do see myself hitting that target. If you want to prove me right, head on over to one of these two sites:

https://www.patreon.com/Funatic

https://subscribestar.adult/funatic

I’d also like to remind you that I have a couple of other active projects that may find your liking:

https://www.scribblehub.com/series/329594/welldark/

https://www.scribblehub.com/series/121869/dripfed/

And with all of that baggage out of the way, let’s return to this story.

The last two arcs were quite bloated, in the sense that they included a bunch of stuff I hadn’t originally planned for but had to be included anyway for one reason or another. This one mostly stuck to the outline, which is why it ended up “only” being about 300’000 words long. That’s about half of the last two ones.

This Arc wrapped up a bunch of minor and major things. Of course, we started things off with Nathalia coming back. The dragoness has long been a fan favourite. Despite her prolonged absence she regularly won polls in regards to artwork and other popularity contests. I suppose her theme makes her more distinct than the other women, who usually behave around John’s age. Maybe it’s the entire “taming a powerful woman” fantasy. Either way, people were glad to have her back.

This was then followed up by the end, or the initiation of the end, of the Lake Alliance subplot, with John travelling over to discuss the terms of them joining Fusion. Not much to say about that, just another political manoeuvre paying off as the circumstances demanded. Obviously, while the Lake Alliance is pretty much ‘solved’ at this point, their influence will remain a factor through Emrik. More on his role in Fusion’s future in the, well, future.

After that and a date with Nia later, things rolled right into Christmas. This marked another story thread getting largely resolved with the return of Momo.

I had many ideas about what to do with Momo over the years. The original one was to push her more towards her lesbian inclinations and have her just be around. I discarded that one fairly quickly, it just didn’t feel like it belonged in this story. The sassy support is too dear to me to be delegated to a side character and I do feel like her and John had the necessary chemistry, so they went back together. A different idea for their meeting would have been to have Momo return to the USA on her own, independent and unaware of John’s actions. From there she would have either met him in the middle of his conquests or she would have gotten captured by the Order and broken down to her core. Her retrieval would have sparked the conflict between the Order and Fusion.

These two chains of events were flawed on a few levels. To keep it short: It makes no sense that Momo wouldn’t have at least heard of John, since modern communication devices exist. Her leading any kind of organization, specifically forming one, felt odd. I decided that the Order wasn’t to be an antagonistic force of the truly evil variety.

So, we instead have Momo returning, of her own accord, to John when she felt ready. This works best for her character anyway, I feel.

Also, during Christmas, it should not be skipped over, was the reveal of the Lorylim’s true nature. Now, of course, it is difficult to say if I’m entirely truthful about the claim that the Lorylim are the old god of genocide, neither John nor the Horned Rat have any proof to that end, but let’s just assume that’s the whole story for now. Well, the whole base story, before the Tiamat and Izha chapters were added.

Next we hit this Arc’s big grind session. I seem to have at least one of those per arc. It’s a bit formulaic, but with John’s powers such structured approaches just make sense. This specific grind saw a focus on Assaults and the newly added substance of Court Dust. I had to give this one a big number of drawbacks, as easy abuse of it would obviously lead to John taking a week off and grinding out level 1000 ASAP. I even considered making the effects of the Court Dust so severe that John screwed up and lost the entire EXP. I might still do that in the future, if he ever does it again. It should feel like a bit of a gamble.

New Years came and went. Lake Alliance got formally integrated and the Guild Hall reached Tier 5.

This is another thing that came to a conclusion in this Arc. I originally planned for the Guild Hall to be finished by the end of the Season, but it made more sense this way, I think. From now on upgrades to the base of operations will come as smaller Building upgrades or changes to specific areas. The last map I made, I assume most of you noticed, is quite detailed. It took me over three days to make and if I ever do another upgrade, I dread to think how long that would take. Better to keep it near what we have now.

And then the next thing to come to a conclusion, albeit this one was also started properly in this arc, was Metra’s replacement of her Tiamat materials.

I do want to take a moment here to address the trend of the harem becoming monster girls. You can expect it to continue, but for a selection of the haremettes to remain human. Specifically Scarlett, Lee, Nia, and Gnome will remain completely human in their appearance. Lydia might change, I have not decided on that yet. The rest will transform in small or large ways. Partly this is because I think such additions are hot, minorly it is because a story this long just lends itself to occasional physical changes.

Short date with Max later and we enter the Back in Black segment.

I had the outline of what would happen with the Golden Rose written out since about 2 years ago, first point being their meeting in Florida. The final fight played in my head in various ways every time I listened to the song that I linked at the start of the Rave chapter. Of course, what is in my head and what ended up on the page differed wildly. Visual imagination and describing a chain of events is hardly compatible.

Like always, I fell short of my own expectations when it came to the action of the scene. As for the conflict with the Golden Rose at large, I am quite content. As I am content with the way John closed the various small strings that still attached him to Springfield. The entire segment was about tying up a few loose ends and it had been a long time coming.

Rave finally defeating Moira was a good scene to end the arc on.

So yeah, this arc was largely what I wanted it to be. I've got no major regrets, which is nice. If you didn’t like anything, you can tell me in this poll below.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScV5NmRG91bFvMhX3_h2Es-1T9deINN_c7EPJYfWW9eB0ib4Q/viewform?usp=sf_link

What’s next? Well, this arc was no 600k words, but 300k words is still enough for me to justify two weeks off, to be honest. In the interim, I decided to do a mid-season QnA. My Patrons get to ask questions for that so, if you see this and aren’t subscribed yet, it’s sadly too late to participate. I will release the answers a week from whenever this hits the public.

The next arc will be focused on one thing, in a way you might even call it filler. We’ll take a step back from John’s conquests, as he fulfils a promise he gave not too long ago. For a time, we will leave the familiarity of our world. Perhaps that commitment will demand more than just John’s attention. We will see.

The Funatic branch of the Gamer, CHYOA edition will return in Season 3 Arc 8 – Another Kingdom.

Until then.