Handling Terrible Things (Patreon)

My next story, Broken System starts out pretty dark, though perhaps not quite as dark as Tenebroum, where someone is stabbed to death in the opening sentence. As a result, I've been giving the concept of what makes a story too dark a lot of thought. Lots of relatively light movies have terrible things happen in them, but the audience doesn't bat an eye. 

Shield Hero certainly falls into this category. [Spoilers] In the second episode the MC is falsely accused of rape and ostracized by every other character that matters to the point where he has to buy a slave to start building his own party. It sounds terrible, and yet somehow it works. 

It's just as true in Hollywood though. In Pirates of the Caribbean the MC is arrested to be hanged for piracy, and the female lead is captured by a ship of rapey undead pirates at the end of the first act. That's pretty nightmarish, but it doesn't stop the movie from being an action comedy. 

There's a lot of things that make that possible. Tone. Consequences. Reaction. As I mentioned last week, I've learned some lessons here from Dath After Death. So, we will see, but I think in a perfect world, Shield Hero is the right example when it comes to a game-lit isekai. Bad thing happens, the MC makes lots of progress, then another bad thing happens, and he loses some of the progress. So, five or six steps forward, two or three steps back. 

I'd like to say I will get the first ten chapters of it up next week for people to read and give feedback on, but as I've mentioned a couple times before, August is a complete mess for me, so that might slip to the first week of September. We will see. Currently I have 5 chapters done. So, so far, so good.