The Hero From Another World

12. Genre

What does this remind you of…

Bonus…hiding on the edges…

Prompt: A key to generous creation is helping the consumer of your work understand what it is, what it’s supposed to be and what the alternatives are.

We call this taxonomic work: Genre. Romance novels, action movies, social enterprise design are only three of the bazillion genres available. What’s yours? What are the other options in your genre? What does your work rhyme with?

I will circle back onto this topic until the day I die (lofty assumption, but I’m 8 years strong now!), but the genre I want to hit already exists, and it is craving new work.

In my hobby of watching anime, there is a genre named Isekai which generally follows the archetype of a run-of-the-mill character (usually a guy) being forced to suddenly live in another world (usually fantasy, extremely contrasting to our usual Earth-dwelling shenanigans). The reason this genre exploded in popularity was obvious: viewers felt like they were going nowhere in life, and found inspiration in a self-insert character suddenly changing in value from a non-descript nobody that was easily forgotten to the front and center hero of a new world. The biggest problem in this genre is the very promise that launched it to prominence: the key to becoming a hero was dependent on a fantasy world that does not exist.

Suddenly, Sword Art Online appeared and changed the tune of the scene entirely. What if the run-of-the-mill characters were instead trapped in a virtual reality world instead of a fantasy world? If virtual reality becomes good enough in real-life, could I become a hero too?

8 years later and Sword Art Online (The Anime) is still going strong. Despite all this time since its initial airdate, there is no Sword Art Online-like virtual reality game to fill the hole that its viewers desperately crave. As I’m still a huge fan and simultaneously want a medium to tell a story of my very own, I’m studying how to do Virtual Reality development in the time I’m not spending time creating in this workshop :wink: I can feel myself welling with excitement that my past experiences reflected in my writing and that my current career path in software development are about to collide to create what could be my ticket into escaping the 9-5 job and cementing my future.

Before this workshop, I used to be afraid that whatever I produced would not be good enough for anyone to lay their eyes on. Four weeks strong, and my tune has changed a bit to of a bigger ego, and now I think that my work is too good for anyone to read :joy: I need to work on myself and expand my mind to listen feedback and alternative viewpoints, and to find the happy medium in https://pro2.akimbo.com/t/10-developing-good-taste/25529 so that the story no longer just becomes about me, but rather us, and the heroes we can all become.