1-8 Thoughts
This is a blog post talking about 1-8, if you haven’t read it yet, do so here. If you want to give criticisms for this section of the story, you will be able to post in the comments here!
Hoo boy! This chapter, as most 3 part chapters are, took a long time for me to create. I was still suffering from writer’s block while going into creating this chapter. I knew I wanted this ability to interact heavily with Mind’s Body and Body’s Mind, since we haven’t had a fight really going over those two abilities yet. Hopefully these fights help really establish how Psynesis works in the reader’s head, since giving them all in one big exposition dump isn’t really efficient?
You may ask “Why did you even give us that big exposition dump in the first place then?” Well, because the alternative was to explain the Psynesis systems during the fights, which is problematic for a couple of reasons.
Reason 1: It ruins the pacing of the fight. Psynesis is still complicated to explain, even when I split it up into pieces. I’d basically have to put the entirety of 1-3-3 in the middle of this fight!
Reason 2: It cheapens the value of the power system. By continuously revealing core parts of the power system during the fights, in future fights, readers might get the impression that I could just add an update the battle system in the middle of the fight to “cheat” around a victory. After all, if I only explained Mind’s Body and Body’s Mind during this fight, the concept of my characters suddenly gaining a 6th sense to negate the main ability of the enemy seems really cheap.
Ok, so I knew I was going to use an ability that was going to mess with the perception of Isaac, but how would I do that? I initially asked a few of my friends what are some creative alternative abilities to invisibility. One idea I was given was the ability to remove someone’s presence from someone else’s mind. At first, I really liked this idea, because it had basically the same effect as invisibility, but it was unique in it’s own way. But I ultimately decided against it for another two reasons.
Reason 1: It’s like… really hard to write temporary short term memory loss during a fight. At least, it’s hard to do so in a coherent way. I’m sure a more skilled writer can do it, but I do not have the skills for that.
Reason 2: Conflict with Isaac’s memory loss. It’s hard to distinguish between the ability that’s causing Isaac’s actual memory loss, and the enemy’s ability.
So I decided on using a more generic “just but him in a dark area” technique. I knew from the start of the battle that I really wanted to dig into the fact that the enemy for this encounter was an asshole, so I came up with the “Not actually blind” plot point first. Which is nice, because that idea really shaped the ability. The entire idea behind the ability is that it’s supposed to seem like it’s supposed to make anyone trapped in it feel from the blind guy’s perspective, making it an almost empathetic ability, with the victim starting to feel for the “blind” guy. But then the plan was to force the enemy to do an impossible feat with the limited perception that they have, and then Isaac would get suspicious. So when Isaac eventually breaks through, he’s already mad at the enemy for trying to make him feel empathetic for someone who was lying about a major disability. Everything else dialogue wise was just designed to make you hate him even more. Admittedly, this fight could’ve had a bit more build-up, (I might actually do some edits to previous chapters to naturally build up this fight a little more) but I think it’s fine for now.
You also probably noticed that I used a bunch of things that Isaac learned from previous fights to help defeat him in the final act here. It was a pretty un-subtle reference, so I hope you did notice it. I wanted to add that because it shows how Isaac has grown over the past few days, and what he’s really capable of when he puts his mind to it.
Fun fact, I actually had this entire scene played out in my head, but I forgot my friend drew the enemy with a gun. So that was an extra element that I had to compensate for, in case you’re wondering why it was dispatched of so quickly.
As usual, I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and feel free to post any comments about it below!
