Feb 09, 2025
Author's Commentary #345:
Time to talk about Chapter 345: Serbia's ruddy rose.
It's time to showcase Nikolina's chess prowess, and she certainly doesn't disappoint. She's so good, she's giving opponents bishop odds in tournaments, and winning. Maila was no slouch either, being rated 2410, but Nikolina is unstoppable when she's angry. Nikolina is quickly shaping up to be one of the more difficult characters to write, mainly due to her backstory. I'm still trying to figure out all her traits, but I do imagine she'll be regarded as one of the more controversial characters in the series, assuming I decide to give her the storyline I primarily have in mind for her.
One thing I will confirm is that the Serbian folk song, "Oj Ružice rumena", was the big inspiration for shaping Nikolina and to some extent the Serbian team as a whole. If this series ever gets an anime and/or video game adaptation, you can bet a remix of said song would likely be Serbia's theme. In an adaptation, music is one of the things I think needs to be perfect as it's my believe that engaging music truly enhances the medium and makes things more memorable.
Speaking of things in the series I want to be perfect, the game itself was really fun to write. I guess we can call the opening the Serbian gambit for now, but it really did put Nikolina at a huge disadvantage. But then she sacrificed the roooooooook, and suddenly things were even as Maila took the bait and captured it. That moment is easily the most fascinating to me. Most humans would certainly capture that rook as would some bots too, yet doing so shockingly evens the game, and gives White a slight edge. Then Maila blundered and Nikolina was merciless. I've got my work cut out for me for my next favorite games in the series list with all these amazing games being featured in the story. In fact, I might still have trouble narrowing things down, even if I extend it to a top 30 favorite games in the series list.
One interesting fact about the game is that it was actually one of the last games for the round to be written. Originally, I was going to have the story jump over to another team for a few chapters before coming back to these two teams, but ultimately decided it was best not to break anything up, and thus shuffled things around to make them flow better. Now the Estonia vs Serbia match will conclude first before the story shifts over to the other team match of the round.
Though getting back to the story, it's all down to one final match, with whoever winning having a fair chance of being Japan's next opponent in round 7. Of course, that isn't a guarantee that whichever team wins this will in fact be Japan's opponent. Many teams in the women's section currently have perfect scores of 12 points, but that just means all those teams will be paired against each other, further reducing the amount of teams with perfect scores. And naturally, the next game will not be the final game of the round either, so there's still plenty of action left in round 6 of the tournament.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
