Chapter 104: Author’s Retrospective – Arc 3

After six months, we finally finished Arc 3! Let’s all congratulate ourselves, me for finishing it and following a two chapter per week release schedule, and you guys for being here through the Arc, which I know had a lot of ups and downs. A huge thank you to all of you readers who stuck around with the story.

It’s now time for the Author’s Retrospective. A heads up that this is going to be very long, but I know some people enjoy reading this kind of stuff. This is not only to share information about the story, the background workings and all that, to you, the readers. This is also for me to be able to consolidate my thoughts and learnings so we can improve REND going forward.

I wonder how many people clicked this thinking it was a quitting announcement or something. It’s funny that the last Retrospective we did had way more views than other chapters just because non-readers were curious about it, probably assuming it was about an author quitting.

Anyway, this arc has really been a challenge to write, but the important thing is that we’re finished with the “introduction” part of REND.

 

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Arcs 1-3 (Just Intro) – Perhaps many of you have heard of types of plot outlines, especially those who are also writing their own stories. Essentially, they’re templates for making the skeleton of a story. Even if you haven’t heard of them, I’m sure you’ve encountered sort of similar ways how stories with powers start.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: we begin with the main character living their normal life; something strange happens that upends their normal life (essentially the world bothering the MC); the MC meets with someone/something who can teach him/her, as well as the readers, about the new world (joining an organization, a mentor, a system, magical item, a book, a prophesy, etc.); we learn and practice the powers and stuff like that; and then we begin the adventures/missions. This usually happens over the first few chapters/episodes of a story to establish everything early on.

REND sort of follows that too. However, instead of just being a small part at the start, the introduction was stretched over three arcs and more than one year’s worth of writing. (This story started May 20, 2020). Imagine super condensing Arcs 1-3, and it can essentially be the intro part of a book. We’re just 16 days into the story!

This is so that we (especially me as the writer) can have a solid foundation for Erind’s character from which we can build her.

 

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Building from the ground up – Most psychopaths we see in stories are already “built” when they are presented. That’s because they’re usually the antagonists and not the main characters so they have to be end-game boss levels when they do show up. Besides some rare flashbacks and tidbits of info, we’re usually not going to see these characters from before their journey to be the antagonist.

On the protagonist/MC side, we do have “psychopaths” who start from scratch in a sense, but most of them are not real psychopaths. I’m referring to stories with homicidal/psychotic killers seeking revenge because they were betrayed/humiliated/oppressed/bullied – you know those kinds of stories, revenge plots are very popular right now. Stories with real psychopaths as protagonists are very rare. It’s rarer to find stories which explore the character development of psychopath protagonists, blending into society at the start, living a “normal” life, and then gradually transforming. Why is that?

These are reasons I came up with: 1) It’s hard to write the character arc of a psychopath; 2) It will make them look less threatening/intimidating if readers see them from when they were being “normal”; 3) Most readers won’t be able to relate or understand, or even appreciate, their character arc anyway.

We could've started REND far into the future when Erind is already a mastermind of an organization or something—not sure of what her future would be. It would’ve been way cooler that way. However, I didn’t do that. For one, I’m not confident in writing Erind to be as great a character as I want her to be in the future. The key to that is joining her in her journey. I believe, and I hope it’s true, that if I built Erind from the ground up, we'll get an infinitely way better character. Even if it takes years of writing, I know it will be worth it in the future. That’s also tied to what I said in the previous Retrospective about starting small.

Speaking of the future of this story, let's discuss the new revelations we had about the Corebrings.

 

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Revelations about the Corebrings – Towards the end of this arc, we had two new pieces of information about the Corebrings.

First is that they’re not the usual hero organization we see in stories—like Justice League or the Avengers—but they actually control parts of the world through discreet means. I’m not going in-depth discussing this now. Suffice to say this setup is not only meant as a reimagining of the usual concept of a hero organization but also a thought exercise on how a world would be if superheroes who actually cared about saving it are the ones running it from the shadows. Some (probably most) Corebrings don’t think normally, but they do truly want to save the world. I’m excited to explore this concept as we go along.

The second revelation is that there are tons of worlds/dimensions out there. Corebrings help these other worlds fight off Adumbrae. And if it’s not winnable, they will get the Mother Core of that world and abandon it. I'll focus on this second one.

I had many ideas for REND before settling on Erind. One of the earlier concepts for REND was set in a different world with the Corebrings from this world coming there to harvest the Mother Core.

My main inspiration for this is Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe you’re familiar with its second book: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. The story of the second book is a bunch of kids got summoned to another world by a god and then they adventure and fight to save it. Hey, it might be one of the earliest isekai stories that has the same “formula” as the modern ones we got now.

But it was the first book, the Magician’s Nephew, that interested me the most. It has a place which has many, many portals leading to others worlds, including our own. These worlds are also very different from each other, you can even see new worlds being born or worlds about to end – the main characters visited a dying world and Narnia, which is a new world. See the neat ideas in this old book? Considering this was published way back in 1955, you can actually say that the rise of isekai we got now is just a resurgence rather than a new thing. People back then got their isekai too!

Besides Narnia, I was also inspired by Dune (although I’m not going to tell in what way because it will spoil some things). From recent works, my inspiration is World Trigger. I’m sure many of you who have read/watched World Trigger can spot some concepts here. But really, most of it is from the Chronicles of Narnia plus elements of Sci-Fi and ideas from the SCP foundation.

What does this setup of different worlds mean for the future of REND?

 

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Longevity of REND – I’m sure you guys read tons of other webnovels/manga, and I’m also sure many of them are long running, perhaps some ongoing for several years already. Webnovels, especially ones by amateur authors like me, usually don’t have that much planning for the future. More often than not, they will reach its natural end—let’s say they defeat the demon lord or reach the peak of cultivation—but because of demand from readers, the author will continue it, like making a new peak cultivation level for example, or like in the case of Naruto, they’re fighting alien gods now (I don’t follow it anymore).

Anyway, I think it’s clear what I’m getting at here. With this setup of multiple worlds, we’re not going to face that issue. We won’t have any problems with scaling and asspulls because we have the setup for a very long story. We could technically start a “brand-new” story with Erind in another world, and that could be a whole series in and of itself. I also plan to write other stories—for example, a mainstream fantasy adventure story—and it’s easy to put it on the other worlds that’s just thinly connected to this one.

With that, we have a rough view of the future of the story, and we’re done with the introduction as well. Let’s move on to the challenges writing this Arc before discussing why I wrote Arc 3. It would have been fine with Arc 1 and 2 as introduction. Plus, this arc is way different from the other two.

 

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Challenges in writing Arc 3 – This can also be labelled as the challenges in writing a webnovel with different plotlines and multi-POV chapters of side characters. Webnovels are not a good media for that because of the scheduled release. With two chapters (or one) a week , it takes some time to progress a specific plotline because each of them has to be given time.

That’s why single thread linear stories like power progression (levelling up, cultivation, those kind of things) are the prevalent webnovel genre. It’s easy to maintain them and keep the readers hooked all throughout even with staggered releases. Moreover, readers most likely can’t appreciate or even remember something that happened several chapters ago—probably published a month or two ago—in this or that plotline.

Another problem is the reception of the side characters and their accompanying story threads. People will like some of them and dislike others. I know a lot of you didn’t like the setup of Arc 3. I’m with you on that, I personally don’t like complicated stories with staggered release. But I will read them after they are already done (more on this later).

Given these problems, why did I still go through with it? Essentially, I did it to experiment with many things, one of which is how readers connect with psychopath characters in webnovels. To get a better understanding of that, I think we should revisit a certain topic.

 

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Problems writing a psychopath main character in a webnovel – By problems, I don’t mean the challenges in writing per se, but more on the reaction of readers to psychopath MCs. I’ve discussed some of this in the previous Retrospective and also with readers in the comments section of a few chapters, so some of you probably already know about this. I’ll be going a bit more in-depth this time.

Webnovel readers have an expectation of what a psychopath main character should be. Revenge plot stories with tons of gore/killing are what a majority of webnovel readers think when talking about psychopath main characters. However, most of those MCs are not psychopaths. For one, they were decent/normal people before getting betrayed (or whatever is the setup for revenge), then they transform into homicidal maniacs afterwards. Real psychopaths don’t/can’t change like that.

Given this prevalent expectation of what “psychopaths” should be in webnovels, REND encountered a lot of negative reaction—and still continues to do so, but fortunately it has become much less, to the point of becoming tolerable. At the start, I didn’t use the term psychopath at all because I don’t want to be constrained by a “textbook” definition of a psychopath and would rather like to let Erind’s character grow on her own instead of ticking off a checklist. And in the story, Erind herself doesn’t refer to psychopaths when she says her “kind”.

The problem is many people didn’t understand REND has a psychopath MC and reacted negatively. I believe you can still see some of the comments in the early chapters and maybe some of the harsh reviews that weren’t deleted by mods (I make it a rule not to report even the most stupid reviews; I did rant about one but I deleted the author’s notes after like a week). Some of the fault was with me early on because I was still getting a feel of how to write Erind. I was still learning early on how to handle it, so it involved awkward self-reflective spiels that psychopaths wouldn’t do.

So, I edited parts of Arc 1 and explicitly put psychopath in the summary (even though I really didn’t want to) to avoid confusion. And that was when readers specifically looking for psychopath webnovels came. Which then brought about a whole new wave of negative reaction because they were actually looking for revenge plot stories with psychotic killers and not a real psychopath main character.

I pushed through all of that, as older readers would know, and just kept on writing. Eventually, some of those readers appreciated my depiction of a psychopath, changed their views, and stayed with REND, and I’m thankful for that.

You are reading story REND at novel35.com

Another challenge is when Erind actually does psychopathic things. Let’s first discuss how the usual “psychopath” MC webnovels handle morality. Whenever the MC do bad things (be it killing/injuring/using others), they will do it to either bad guys or random faceless people (this is mostly collateral damage), and the latter one is very rare.

Why is it that these supposedly psychopath MCs only target bad people? That has something to do with self inserts. A vast majority of webnovel readers consume this media for enjoyment and escapism, which means self inserts; this is also the reason why most webnovels are power fantasies.

That’s not a bad thing; I enjoy most webnovels this way, and I’m sure so do most of you. Unfortunately, it’s not very advisable to self-insert into Erind. And here comes the problem. Revenge webnovels (which are usually labelled as psychopath MCs) are structured as self-insert stories. That’s one of their main appeals. I think most readers are fine with self-inserting to MCs that do more vile things than Erind because they are doing it to the bad guys. There is something cathartic perhaps for a reader to get the “revenge” while reading a webnovel which they can’t get in real life against their problems.

And so, many readers instinctively self-inserted into Erind when they tried REND, and became bothered when she does morally questionable things without regard to the line of good guys/bad guys.

The most recent example of this which had a lot of impact on my readership is the chapter in Arc 3 where Erind kills Paolo’s dad. A lot of readers got uncomfortable with that because Paolo’s dad is an innocent bystander who was trying his best to survive, and Paolo and Julie pleaded with Erind to save him. Erind said yes, but actually killed him (he was already dying though).

After that chapter, several followers dropped out (way more than usual fluctuation) and then a slew of negative ratings came in. There are also instances of this in Arc 1 and 2. Veteran readers know about this. With that, let’s proceed to why I wrote Arc 3.

 

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Why write Arc 3?

In connection with the discussion above, I wrote this arc to have normal people with bigger roles so there will be a divide between Erind’s psychopathy and the emotions of normal people, hoping it will remedy some of the negative reaction to what she does. It is exhausting emotionally following Erind all the way, so I thought to test having this “rest” by bringing in many side characters this arc.

And given there is not much normal relatability with Erind, I hoped the side characters could help with that. Take for example Ramon, he was supposed to be a “normal” MC type of character. If you analyze his path, he can really have a story on his own which is more in line with the usual story of getting superpowers in a dark themed story.

A side goal is to practice my skills writing side characters, giving them life even though they appear in just some chapters, making sure they have an impact with the reader even though they’ll most likely die this arc. That’s another reason why there are tons of new characters this arc.

I also wanted to explore the mind of a psychopath. Arc 3 is a survival horror genre. We have the side characters and Erind, and I’m trying to see their differences. That’s why it feels like there’s like two or three different stories in one because Erind’s POV is just way different.

Let’s take the exploration of fear for example. Recent studies show that, contrary to popular belief, psychopaths can feel fear. Their part of the brain that can activate fear is functional. However, it’s their processing the appropriate response for dangerous situations that’s impaired. So, Arc 3 has more explorations of life and death situations for Erind, comparing it with how side characters go through similar scenarios. We can contrast their character arcs and emotional development with Erind’s.

I consider Arc 3 an investment for the future. To explain this point, let’s take Overlord, specifically Volume 4, the Lizardmen. I didn’t like that volume when it started getting translated. The previous Volume 3 was about Shalltear’s fight, so I was eager to learn more about Ainz’s story. I really hated those Lizardmen and their story threads. Moreover, only parts of the chapter got slowly translated by unofficial sources (ehem), so it was more annoying. I just wanted to get over with it.

I’m sure many of you felt the same way with this arc. However, after several volumes of Overlord, and after rereading it a few times, I’ve grown to like the Lizardmen volume. I rank it the second volume I like the most (top 1 is volume 9, war with the kingdom). The true experience of the lizardmen arc only came to me after reading it in one whole go.

My theory is that many readers won’t like this arc as it is getting written (turns out I was right). If I was a reader, I wouldn’t like this either. But I’m sure if this is completed, and there are arcs after this, people will like this a lot just how I came to like the Lizardmen arc of Overlord after rereading it.

Based from the comments of new readers, those who came when the arc is about to get done, they do like this arc, so I guess I’m on to something here. I just can’t fully explain what. I guess, if we’re comparing arcs to stocks, Arc 3 looks good on the portfolio, especially in the long run.

 

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Inspiration for Arc 3 – At first, I wanted to do an Alice in Borderland thing, with puzzles and all that. But that’s way above my skill level to write, and I have no idea how to make good puzzles. So, I switched over to this monster building experience, mostly influenced by Sweet Home and the tons of zombie infection movies. This is really a perfect setup for having lots of side characters.

As for Erind’s Pino face, it’s obviously based on Pinocchio with an end timer of turning into a real boy (girl in this case). I tried to bring in elements of Snow White (having a prince in Ramon and saving the sleeping real body) and Pied Piper (mind controlling people and pulling them along) but I eventually dropped those and focused on Pinocchio theming. I think I didn't need to have complicated it too much; it was fine to maintain the themes from Pinocchio and twist them like I did with Little Red Riding Hood. Although it really isn't twisted here but more in line with the original version.

Most are familiar with the Disney Pinocchio, not the original one. In the original, Pinocchio is really a brat, and the ending was him getting his comeuppance, with him left for dead. However, because of its popularity, Pinocchio was continued and eventually given a happy ending of turning him into a real boy. The thing is, everyone else he encountered along the way still retained the cruel fates they met and he didn’t really pay for all the asshole things he did.

In a way, that applies to Erind too, especially the ending where she came out unscathed, while others paid the price for her survival.

 

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Lessons learned – Let’s now discuss some of the things I learned writing Arc 3.

Small audience - I have a niche webnovel and I shouldn’t expect mainstream acceptance. A true psychopath MC is not for everyone, and I’ve come to accept that. It’s really a waste of time to worry about those who dislike this story because REND caters to a specific taste most people don’t have.

Of course, as a writer, I do want to have widespread audience. It’s only normal. And since it’s not possible with REND, my plan is to write another story (alongside this one) for more mainstream consumption. It will be set on one of the other worlds of REND and will be thinly related to the main story. I don’t have much plans for it yet, but at least I can take comfort in the idea that I could make a story for general audience, and one for a niche audience.

This is Erind’s story - I’ve also come to understand that my niche audience, you guys, do like Erind a lot and would like to have the story focused more on her. There’s a mixed reception for the side characters, but I could say that everyone wanted more of Erind. Going forward, we’ll focus more on her with the occasional side stories that will have much more impact.

Erind affects the readers – I’m not sure how to phrase this, but I believe that Erind’s psychopathy affects the readers. The best analogy for this is watching nature documentaries. For example, if it’s a documentary about the lion, we will cheer the lion hunting a gazelle. But if it was a documentary about the gazelle, we will be sad if the gazelle gets eaten by the lion.

Let’s go back to the scene of the death of Paolo’s dad. The nature documentary analogy isn’t going to apply that well here; readers are not going to cheer Erind killing Paolo’s dad compared to if she’s fighting a bad guy for example. However, many readers are more “accepting” of what happened.

There’s a certain disconnect with emotions in that scene. It was supposed to be an emotional scene for Paolo and Julie, but Erind was thinking about other stuff and it influenced the readers. I think many readers did have a jarring time reading that, and I found that interesting. We should have more scenes like those.

Plotting – Arc 3 really had a shaky start especially when we started introducing various story threads with the side characters. Personally, I was concerned with pulling it all together. In the end, I think I did a pretty good job wrapping up this arc.

There are several setups here that I’m proud of (like that metal box, Erind being able to control her puppets, Finlay's shenanigans). Most webnovel writers aren't planners/outliners, especially hobby ones like me writing in our free time; we barely scrape by the next chapter. Still, I’m happy with how I plotted Arc 3 given the constraints.

Writing myself into a corner - This is related to above with plotting exciting story threads and scenes; perhaps this is more with action scenes. I got this idea from Wildbow (writer of Worm and other famous webnovels). He writes himself into a corner and then plans how to get out of it with what’s available to the character. Compare this with planning everything first so you already know how the characters solves the situation before you write it. I liked this idea because it gives a different feel to the scene; like there is desperation and survival in it. Or, it makes the scene have more impact. It’s kind of hard to explain.

A good example of this is in Erind and Doms vs the gorilla monster. I liked that fight a lot and I think many of you also liked it. I only thought of things like jamming her own hand into the gorilla’s throat, etc. (the kind of things one can do with detachable body parts) after I had written Erind getting beat up by the gorilla.

Another example is when Erind first encountered Finlay. I, as the author, knew about Finlay and his puppets, but Erind doesn’t. I had to figure out a way for Erind to discover it and win the situation.

I think the best example for this is the ending of Arc 3. Erind said she had many fake stories to sell to Myra, but at the last minute, she realized that the best path in that situation is telling her the truth. That is exactly what happened to me. I had a different ending for the Arc, Erind is telling Myra a fake story, but I feel like it doesn’t really solve the situation. And that was when it hit me, Erind should just tell the truth. Scenes written through this method really have a different feel to it.

 

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And that wraps up this Author’s Retrospective.

Thank you so much for being with me through this journey. I don't think I would've continued REND after getting tons of negative reaction if you guys are not here. Many webnovel readers seem to forget that I'm just a guy writing in my spare time, putting a lot of effort into making a different kind of webnovel without any payment. A lot of thanks to those who rate and especially those who take their time and review the story.

That said, for those who haven't done it yet, I'd appreciate it if you do leave a rating/review if you like REND. Thanks in advance. Besides rating and reviewing, it would really help out a lot if you recommended this story to people who you think will like REND. It would be a huge help in making our niche reader community grow.

Onwards to Arc 4!

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