Psynesis VS Wasteland

Psynesis's Wasteland, in it's current form, will not be continuing. I feel like that realization took a lot longer than it should've. But, I spent >400 hours on this, so what gives? After all, this was supposed to be "the story." You know, the one big story every writer holds to their highest standard, their future "magnum opus."

I first became aware of an overall problem in the series once I was about to start properly editing the series because I'm not burnt out anymore, also because I finally got some actually good feedback for once. I would apologize to the commenters who criticized my work, but I'm 100% sure they aren't reading this.

It's worth noting that the "overall problem" isn't because I just got bored of the story, or I got all depressed because I couldn't portray my "perfect story" properly because I'm "such a bad writer."

I'm just going to spoil the hell out of the story now since I'm not going to use these parts. So here's the character arc for The Liberators of Society. The Liberators of Society (which I'm just going to call the LoS now) destroyed society as a whole because they grew up in an awful society that subjected them to intense oppression. From their limited perspective, they believed that oppression was a natural biproduct of society, and that the only way to remove it, was to remove society. Hopefully my speech that I wrote in 1-11-2 was good enough to convince you that idea had merit in their eyes.

Of course, by destroying society, the LoS just put the world into a survival of the fittest state. They justify this to themselves by saying that it's the natural way the world works, and that it's not their fault that it's this way. Also, because they're incredibly powerful Psynesis users, they can't really comprehend the idea of dying to a random bear attack or other natural occurrences. But eventually, they do realize that every single person who died of starvation, disease, or otherwise died in usually incredibly improbable ways in the previous society is a death they only have themselves to blame for.

These two paragraphs are probably the best part of my entire story. I'm incredibly proud of what I have here. But, looking back at the rest of the story, I realize how little I actually cared about the rest of the story. I realized this when I created a character completely unrelated to Psynesis's Wasteland, and how much fucking fun I had creating her. Basically, I spent so much time working on this story in a way that I felt was nessisary in the moment, rather than actually asking if this was something that I really liked.

There are other themes I wanted to tell with Psynesis's Wasteland, but since those are salvageable for my next story, I'm going to keep those a secret in case I expand on them later.

The title of this post actually sums up the other problem quite nicely. "Psynesis V.S. Wasteland." Basically, there's a conflict between the shonen inspired action series I want to write "Psynesis" and the theme heavy story I feel a little obligated to write about a lawless wasteland, and building back up to society.

So, the basic theme of the "Wasteland" story is that a completely "equal world" doesn't exist. Or, put simply, "Life is unfair." Even societies that try and force equality is governed by a force. But all that means is that force, or the people running it, is the most powerful thing in that society.

So, if you want to create a story about recreating society, then it would make sense if the story's actual plot progression would be about creating a town from nothing, and then eventually building more and more power and people until eventually you have a real society. Problem is, you'd be spending a lot of time on... actually building the town, and later society. There's not really a whole lot of room for 1V1 battles, much less time to explain the power system. Which is a problem when that's the story you really want to write.

I could fit in fights by using them as an excuse to recruit warriors, or by using it as a way to drive conflict between neighboring factions, but those will only work so long. By doing those, I'm going to either quickly inflate the character roster or faction size. Which doesn't seem like a problem until you realize that once the main faction size gets too big, you can't use either of those excuses anymore. Conflicts between factions will quickly turn from group battles to straight up wars. After a certain point, stopping the plot to focus on ONE new recruit doesn't make sense anymore. Even if it was worth it or otherwise made sense, I'd quickly inflate the main cast with too many characters, which I really don't want.

Maybe there's a way to get around this theming problem, but even if there was, I have really lost passion for the many of individual assets as a whole that I'd probably just rewrite the whole thing.

So, what happens now?

Well, there are aspects that I do like. Most notably is the power system. It takes a heavy inspiration from Hunter X Hunter, but I'm still completely in love with it. I can promise you that my next original work WILL feature Psynesis, and the story will be properly built around it.

But I'm not going to go onto my next original work immediately. Probably going to write some fanfiction or something. You know, something to get me back into the habit of writing and improving.