Jan 19, 2025
"Never been stellar." Har, har. I see what you did there.
How do I even comment on something like this after a single read-through? It got me thinking about a lot of things, many of them not about the story itself but of the current state of pop culture and the place within it for stories like this.
If nothing else, this was an ambitious entry, and you somehow found the time and effort appropriate to the ambition. In a different context, that might all pay off. At the very least, you've got an interesting portfolio piece if you wanted to pursue a career writing for a large corporation.
If I can talk about the ARG first, I'm not sure how much more there is to it. The site and the username were easy enough to find in the book. I got the password and was able to guess a few of the 5-letter access codes, though they all seemed to do the same thing. There was a lot of, uh, stuff I won't spoil for others that I noticed but didn't decode or dig into. I just don't have the time these days. I got interrupted multiple times today while trying to read by stuff I needed to take care of.
But my point is, the site was extremely well put together by a single person on such a short timeline. The effort you put into it is obvious and, I would say, professional level. That doesn't mean it's on the level of professional ARGs, but those are made by entire teams, not a single person.
And it's the kind of thing that the right community of fans would really get into, but that's where my musings about the current state of pop culture start. Every year, we get more and more new entertainment options. It's extremely difficult to cultivate a dedicated enough audience for an ARG.
I fall onto the side of the argument that this was always the case. Writers always struggled to get noticed. The idea of a pop culture monoculture is overblown. ARGs always did best when there was an already popular organization backing them. But just because it was never easy doesn’t mean it didn’t used to be _easier_. I think it’s easy to see from the explosion of the number of fan wikis, and the fact that each wiki has a lot less content than they used to. It’s just harder to cultivate a dedicated enough fanbase for this stuff.
Not that it’s impossible, just that the HF contest isn’t really going to put you on the board—unless Wit adapts this and it becomes popular. Not everything that gets animated necessarily attracts an audience.
So you’ve got two ingredients that really fuel dedicated internet fan community: the ARG and the extremely complicated, detailed narrative. If you could get a large enough, dedicated enough audience for this, it’s exactly the kind of thing people fill out large fan wikis for. Especially complicated narratives involving parallel universes and/or time travel. I mean, there’s a reason demand for _Hyrule Historia_ was so high. And even before it was a thing, a reason why people endlessly debated the _Zelda_ timeline.
That narrative gets very confusing, especially in the last quarter of the book, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but personally, I had to give up taking notes about which details belonged to which parallel and just commit myself to accepting that I wasn’t going to understand all the details, and that’s OK. Ultimately, the story doesn’t _need_ the reader to understand everything, as long as they get the big pictures, but the details are there for the dedicated fanbase to dig into.
Especially since there are more levels fans could go beyond what’s stated in the novel. You’ve obviously got a _ton_ of details you created about the characters and the world that didn’t make it into the writing, and leaves a lot of space for readers to speculate and come up with their own theories. (At once brief point, I was convinced that Arufa and Marisa were some kind of crossed wire where their “real” personalities ended up in each other’s brains.)
But, well, you nearly hit the word count for the contest, and it doesn’t feel like it was nearly enough. As we already talked about in the comments, quite a bit was rushed, and the emotional bond between Arufa and Marisa wasn’t really established before it was needed in the story.
Then, in the second half, you have to rely a lot on Ghiles and White being willing to do the supervillain thing where they monologue the entire explanation to the other characters. Ghiles I could kind of see, and after learning about Arufa’s connection to White, it explains _some_ of White’s behavior, but not all of it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that while there’s a good in-universe reason for the test subjects’ personalities to change after getting yanked out of X2, the doctors seem like completely different characters in the second half, and it’s a bit jarring. Ghiles’s character arc is very compressed. He goes from 0-60 in the span of a few paragraphs. For White, it seems like this was who she should have been all along in the story.
Given the ambition you had for the story, I don’t think 75k words was nearly enough to meet that ambition. You probably needed at least another 50k, possibly more. Maybe less if you go through fewer iterations in the first half of the novel, but that might lessen the impact. In fact, it seems like not enough time is spent in X2. Honestly, you could probably do an entire book that’s just the first half, ending when they get pulled out of X2, a cliffhanger ending setting up the second book.
Now that I think about it though, that might get some people upset about the world they just spent an entire book getting to know being fake. Not all of my advice is good, but I hope it gives you helpful things to think about.
But getting back to the media landscape, convincing people to drop the time to read a long novel or two from an unknown author plus an ARG is kind of a big ask, especially when sci-fi doesn’t have the greatest market in Japan or the West right now.
You’d also need to consider that complex timelines are very polarizing when it comes to readers/viewers. For every person that professed a love of _Lost_ while it was airing, there were at least 3 who didn’t have the patience for it. So on top of having a long book in a less popular genre, you’re targeting a dedicated, minority audience.
Anyway, I’m amazed at how much you were able to put into this in such a short time. I know it got down to the wire with the deadline, but congrats on getting it done. I can’t think of a single other entry that required so much work, not just for the ARG, but in keeping track of the complex narrative to make sure things make sense. I don’t know if that will matter when it comes to judging, but it’s still an achievement. Again, congrats and best of luck with the judging.
