u/Sherlockyz

Hey guys, so I noticed this trend, which isn't news to anyone, but I wanted to talk about this as an aspiring IF writer, so I can understand how others feel about this.

To address the elephant in the room, Fallen Hero. Almost every one of us loves the books, and for good reason, they have an excellent premise and the story/world is really well done. But I fear we as a community are suffering from the tolkienization effect that lord of the rings has in modern fantasy as a whole.

Sure, there were other superhero books before, but none with that big of an impact as FH in IFs.

I'm not making any comment on the quality of post FH superhero books, but it's a fact that without FH, we wouldn't have as much superhero IFs being written. And superhero IFs fill the reader need for more FH stories, so new superhero IFs by default get more attention than unexplored subgenres.

I ask this, because reading FH made me see that superhero fiction isn't reserved to movies and comics, even literature can have this when done correctly, and I do intend to continue to write in this subgenre regardless of how many works are going to be published about superheros.

This isn't a post asking if it's okay to write about superheroes or asking for any kind of validation.

I made this post becauss can't avoid to feel the need to make sure that my own work is unique and not some search to emulate the feeling of FH, even if I'm not consciously doing it.

So in that topic, what are things in superhero IFs that you feel are still unexplored or often explored too often?

And for authors who wrote in genres/subgenres where previous books made their mark so much that every new story will inevitably be compared to it, E.g. Harry Potter, Neuromancer, Lovecraft Mythos, GOT, etc...

How did you approach this? I hate the anti-tolkien style where writers felt the need to subvert fantasy to make the opposite. Still, their need came from a real desire to not be derivative and make the own work unique.

Other thoughts on this topic are welcome, there are many beginner writers, like myself, that I think would benefit on a constructive debate on this.

Thanks in advance!

This was going to be a comment on a recent post made here, but I believe that this topic should be addressed in a more clear way. If it's against the rules of this sub I will delete this, but I think it is relevant to hosted games and the IF writers as a whole in the community.

This was not the first time I saw a writer struggling with the stress of constant feedback and the many problems that being an creator, specially of IFs creates.

And while I heavily sympathize with this specific author struggles and I understand and agree that there are toxic people in any community, specially in the internet. I believe that this is a mindset problem that any IF author needs to understand how to deal with, otherwise it would only cause problems for their mental health and should not be worth the trouble.

Toxic and demanding fans will always exist, deciding to become a public author without accepting this reality is the author's fault, I'm not shaming anyone, we all do unprepared decisions in life for whatever reason. Interactive fiction biggest benefit is also the downfall of unprepared authors, the biggest benefit of IFs is that the IF culture heavily accepts and incentives WIP consuming / feedbacks.

This honestly is the biggest thing for IF and I don't think that people fully appreciate that.

A regular book writer would spend years working on a single manuscript, often struggling to get any feedback at all or their work, blind to see if people would even enjoy the story.

Sure, you can have your friends and family read it, but this is pretty limited, and no matter how much somone likes you irl, nobody is going to read hundreds of thousands of words every month to help you. You can also seek other authors and people online to help, still the sample of readers is often small, you will struggle for constant feedback, and the type of feedback is biased. You don't test a beta for a app by giving it only to other developers, you try to get as much samples of different people as possible to find blindsposts.

Most irl authors don't fail because they weren't capable or hard working, they failed because they spent years (Or their entire lives) isolated in a bubble where they were never acknowledged that their writing was actually good. I can spend hours talking about the life of some of this authors that suffered from this, Kafka is a big one, at the end of his life he asked a close friend to burn his books after he died, he already had burned most of his work by that point too.

I speak for my own, short and microscopical, experience publishing a small prologue of a story that I wanted to create. In a day or two I already had multiple comments and hundreds of clicks on my post. This might seem insignificant, but for someone who was not even sure that other people might actually enjoy a story of mine, this was huge. And it's one of the big reasons I even feel motivated to share stories.

I admit that I never got enough exposure to know the pressure the authors who have thousands of comments, criticism, and requests have. So my own perception on some aspects of this problem are not so rigorous, but I do believe, considering my own experience on irl work dealing with clients and seeing how famous author deal with this can give an understanding on this that might help some people.

For the authors who received any feedback. You need to understand that most of the time people are sharing their opinions and experiences in regards to their own lives and preferences. You don't need to take any of what people say at face value, but it doesn't mean that it's all worthless or ego inflation / deflation.

Some people love hard scifi and hate soft scifi, others is the contrary, and others don't have deep preferences on this yet. Understand that not every criticism or recommendation carries the same weight. A criticism on how to make your hard scifi tech better has more relative worth than of someone who hates hard scifi.

Feedback on UX is one thing to take into mind too, because you might disregard someone complaining that your magic system is too simplistic and soft as just a hard magic purist opinion, that may be true. But if many people feel that the magic in the story is just all over the place and used as is simple used as a plot device or ex machina (Maybe not with this words, hence why don't take feedbacks with face value) that might be something that is actually worsening your story and the readers experience, unless this kind of magic plot device is the goal.

Requests is another beast, because some might be cool concepts that you never thought of having in the story and might add a lot to it, others might be things that are missing that are essential but your focused on others so you forgot how important they are, while others might just be self indulgent requests that might not fit the story or your vision at all.

In truth, you don't owe anything to a reader, some might hate that you gender locked the MC or that you made X person not be a RO. In the end is your story, you don't have to take anything out or add anything in if it would make your job harder or does not fit into your vision.

Having said that, remember that just like regular writers may need to change things because of editors and publishers rules, IFs in this specific community need to fit into the general norms of the Choice of Games company, which I don't find unreasonable, they actually help as a quality filter in my opinion. But if it would go against your vision, there are other IF platforms where nobody can tell you what needs to be in or out of the final draft, just like self publishing exists irl. But remember that there are downsides to alternative approaches.

The constant flow of feedbacks in WIPs can help a lot in different ways, but authors need to understand that they own the story and that they are not discussing a story that they like with their friends, they are discussing their own work with random people from different and singular backgrounds, this are not the same type of relationships and should be treated as such.

You will notice that I'm not commenting anything on how people should express their opinions or give feedbacks on what they read. Because as long as is not just random toxic and insulting comments, we can't really categorize every feedback on a WIP as if it has worth or not, the author is the only one who can decide that.

I do feel a bit weird teeling what people should or should not do, so feel free to disagree with me if you are a published author or if you had to deal with the constant exposure of feedbacks from other people in your WIPs. If you could say why you disagree or complement the post with your own thoughts and experiences it would be awesome, because this post is just me trying to help some new authors that might feel (Or already are) overwhelmed with the struggle of having creative content online.

Thanks if you read this so far, if this post helps at least one author, even in some minuscule way, than it already accomplished its goal. (It already helped me make my own thoughts on this matter more clear, so hopefully it will help others too).