A Question of the Future: (Patreon)

This was the other post I told you about in the question answer post I put up a moment ago LOL, and which contains the only question that I will be formally asking you all to vote on a response. It will not be weighted. This is simply a numbers poll, and will last until the seventh. 

Anyway, looking forward, it seems obvious to me that the next two months are going to be, if I have my druthers, Harry Potter dominated. I have been saying that I would be putting my votes down on Harry Potter stories - Magic of the Force, and Bhaalson Remodel. Remodel in point of fact is going to be updated in September and because of this, there won’t be a patron-only poll. 

Of course with all that being said even if I put my own put down votes, Magic of the Force might lose to Horse for the Force. It has happened before LOL. I hope it doesn’t because it’s time for that story to be updated.  It will be five months since it last saw an update, so it’s past time. But I have to acknowledge the possibility.

Yet this might mean that the only Ranma story getting updated in September will be a small story. This is a problem that could continue in October, since I will be putting A Third Path into the large story rotation at that point and bringing back FILFy in the small story poll. 

So I was thinking about other ways to reward my patrons, when I stumbled upon the new Anime Adventure site,  http://addventure.cf  as I was exercising one day.   Well, I call it a new site, but none of the stories are being updated any longer and its really just a repository for the stories there. That being said, some of them are quite good.

For those of you who don’t know or who came late into the fanfic scene and never heard of it, Anime Adventure was a site where people could basically create choose-your-own-adventure type stories. Each series began with a restart point and then the author of that initial point would write out four choices that could be taken over by other authors or which they would continue. One choice would always be ‘Something Else’ which would allow for literally anything any other author could write out. Again, none of these stories have been followed up on in more than four years. The majority of them, at least I believe so anyway, were about Ranma.

Some of these stories have been found on fanfiction since Anime Adventure went down. No Tendo, a Ranma/Stargate/Sailor Moon crossover with hints of quite a few other things in there (including a Bolo and a Bonaparte lookalike from new Dominion Tank police), a Ranma/Evangelion crossover based off the Lamp of Mihoshi restart point, which is also quite good if quite random. Mihoshi from Tenchi becomes an all-powerful genie and sends Ranma to the Evangelion world to take Shinji’s place… cue chaos. Both are great.

Indeed, most of them are random, folks.  Let’s face it, with that many cooks in the pot how could it be otherwise?  Anyway, the point of these stories were that each chapter would be small. Around 1000 words, maybe as much as 2 to 3000 at most.

I thought of these stories, and feel a lot of them were good enough to be revived. I also think that keeping to such small entries would be good for many reasons: Working on these small chapters could happen anywhere, not taking up the large chunks of time my full-sized stories demand. And given the utter randomness of the choices – which you all would choose, it could be new, fun, and, above all not take up time to plan how the story would look going forward. I couldn’t world build as is my wont LOL, not very easily anyway. And finally, I could put the series of small posts on hiatus when we get back to months where Ranma will have a more equal chance to win the various polls.

So for my idea for what to do in a Harry Potter dominated month, I would use the poll system here on Patreon to do one of two things.  That system is actually quite good, if you’re just running a pure numbers poll. 

First, I would choose a restart point from the multitude of such already available from the Anime Adventure site.  From there, I would put down the four choices from that restart point. The only difference would be the ‘Something Else’ choice would be replaced by something I would choose from that point in the story. Each poll would go for four days.

These choices would include the ones that have already been written by someone else.  This doesn’t mean that you all can’t choose that way forward of course. It just means that what I post would be based on what someone else has written, but revamped, Vimesenthusiast style LOL. And each version would be 2000 words, perhaps as many as 3000 rather than the shorter variety, covering more detail or events.

The first so-called restart point I would use would be the one called Setsuna’s Fault, the premise of which I used to jumpstart the crossover portion of Sword, Bow and Horse. Beyond the aforementioned Lamp of Mihoshi restart point this one in my opinion allows for the most diversity. In particular, it would lead to one of my all-time Anime Adventure favorites, Wonder About Zero. I would frankly love to follow up on that story. Or perhaps you all would prefer to see a Ranma with Wonder Man’s powers in some other universe? Or just play around with him getting different curses?  Making it his life’s work to screw Pluto over? Sent to China’s ancient multi-kingdom periods?

The other Idea would be to create my own Choose-your-own-adventure story from scratch. I don’t like that idea just because it would probably end up simply be creating another story from scratch. Using Anime Adventure and one of those starting points would serve to limit the amount of time I would take on each post.

And speaking of posts, because they are so small, I would post three of them in any given month, nine days apart. Which would give you all more to read during the month too, another plus.

So the question is, does this idea interest you all enough to follow up on?