Jan 02, 2025
To:Hype
Thank you so much for reading to the end and leaving feedback! I'm really very glad you had fun reading it.
In general, I actually agree with you about wishing more stories didn't go high stakes. I've complained about this to my friends before. "Why do we always have to save the world and kill gods in JRPGs? Why can't we, I don't know, embark on a long journey to return home from enemy territory?"
But in this case, I chose the nuke for two reasons:
First, I needed a reason for Sprout to go from 0 to 60 when it came to killing for the cause. For all her faults, Sprout is very intelligent. She immediately imagines the worst-case scenarios and realizes she has to subjugate herself to the cause. But that also creates a blind spot where she sees herself as doing everything she can, so she doesn't notice when she slacks. It also emphasizes that for all her faults, Sprout and the others aren't to blame for the situation, giving some weight to Ares's arguments. I wanted to show that contrast between her and Ares. They're both genetically-engineered killers who are the best at what they do, but what separated them was intelligence. Ares couldn't understand just how bad nuclear war would be. If the stakes were lower, Ares would have had a point about sitting back and letting the humans kill each other.
Second, I'm an old anime fan, and there's a lot of nuclear angst in old anime. It's less prevalent here, but in a lot of my writing I like to commentate on anime tropes and their consequences when real-life otaku take them too seriously. I held myself back a lot in this story, but I couldn't help myself with that high school karaoke chapter.
And, I guess, it also enabled the alliterative book title.
As for being repetitive, thank you. I'm glad it didn't come across to the reader. When writing, I still feel repetitive. A lot of nodding, shrugging, smiling, turning to look at, etc. Breaking up dialogue is quite the challenge for me, because to me, the dialogue is the interesting part. When I get near the end of a book, every time I write a "She nodded" or similar, I feel like I've written it hundreds of times.
Anyway, thank you again so much for reading!
