Warning! There is no humor beyond this point. Proceed only if you wish to entirely lose your mental image of the author.
Japanese light novels always end with afterwords, and I always liked hearing an author's thoughts, so I figured I will continue the tradition myself. I suppose I will frame this as Q/A and put the question in italicized bold for easy reading.
What the fuck?
That's not a real question.
Would you please ramble aimlessly about the nature of the story and such before moving into more structured segments?
This is the first fiction I have ever written in my life. I have no prior experience with web fiction, fan fiction, or any other creative writing. My friend started writing a web novel of his own, and I had just finished finished Worth the Candle, which led to me browsing around Royal Road. I mentioned some of the stuff I was reading to him, and since he was writing a web novel himself, he pushed me to start my own. The idea was fairly unthinkable to me, since as mentioned I have never written any fiction before, but I ended up with the idea of a time loop starting in the middle of a battle field. I just kept visualizing an orc swinging down at someone at the very start of the loop. And so, I wrote the first chapter completely off the top of my head. I wrote it on Royal Road because I had read Everybody Loves Large Chests and appreciated the blue boxes. If I was going to write a litrpg, it seemed logical to write on a site with blue boxes to use. (Actually, the stat box I used is just something I copy/pasted directly from ELLC, with only a few words changed.)
The inspiration behind the nature of the story is a friend of mine, who is very antagonistic towards the hypocrisy of deconstructions/etc insulting other works while being shallow themselves. According to him, true individualism/identity comes not from trying to rage against what's popular, but through presenting your own honest interpretations of things. Nobody has the same conception of things, so in the process of writing something honestly, your individuality will show without you needing to explicitly contradict anything else. I kind of wanted to explore this myself and see what would happen (as per the description) if I tried playing all the things I liked straight. How would my own identity be reflected in my attempt to write an honest harem, an honest litrpg, etc etc? The answer is AIROT.
Plot-wise, I went in with basically no plan, but by the time I finished the chapter, I already had a bunch of ideas forming. Why was he in the middle of the field? Well, the goddess put him there. Why did she do that? etc etc. It ballooned out form there, and by the time I finished Border Skirmish, I had roughly sketched out the entire plot of AIROT. There were many changes by the end, but the core ideas were all there. I was more excited than I thought; writing shit out was surprisingly fun, and while my friend quickly lost interest in reading it (no hard feelings bro), I couldn't stop thinking about the plot I had come up with. It was simple, but fun; just a romp across the world accumulating babes, then ending with him fucking the omega goddess babe. That was all I ever wanted to do. To write a simple harem story.
Be honest. It was definitely satire, right?
The constant accusations of AIROT being parody-ridden satire kind of came off as funny to me. The description of the work is quite short, and says in clear letters:
>Please be warned of lewd descriptions and depraved sexualization. If nothing else, this will be a sincere work.
It's right there! It's been there the whole time! 100% confirmed sincere. It's canon.
I really did not approach this work trying to be a satire or anything. I just wanted to play harems straight and write some nice smut here and there. A nice, heart warming loop adventure. It's just that my detached style of humor comes off as derisive and ironic at times.
That said, I'm of course aware of the horror overtones and all that. That was intentional, since like I said, things get a lot more brainwashy when the pacing speeds up. But I didn't do it to be subversive or a parody. It was just the natural end-result of LOVE at max power. You can read into it and envision the brainwashy-stuff as a commentary on female characters losing agency in harem works, but the idea I was kind of going for was that it could be either/or based on your perspective, for this work and many others.
Did you rush to the end of the story after the Dwarf Arc?
The previous sections establish important for the following: I was NOT prepared for people (especially rationalists) to actually start reading AIROT. I went in with pretty casual feelings, a budding enthusiasm to casually write something I would like to read (as is so often the case), and was not at all anticipating the intense scrutiny that would come.
Someone posted it to the [REDACTED] and it was pretty much all over from there. The funny thing is, I tried signaling in the very start of the story that I didn't want to write rational fiction; Malcador repeatedly makes mentions to not wanting to play mind games, for instance. So imagine my horror when WtC fans are suddenly praising it. I don't really know how writers of popular web fiction can actually stand to keep their series going forever. From the moment people started started praising AIROT, I started wanting to end it. The pressure to remain "good" after people call your thing good is extremely intense, and I knew it wouldn't end well for me. I wasn't trying to write something that really stood up to scrutiny, I was just writing something for fun. The 3 days pause after the Dwarf Arc was more or less me debating whether to continue with my initial outline or just cut to the ending so I could end ASAP to minimize the damage when people inevitably got disappointed. I chose the latter.
In my initial outline, the Beastkin Arc is there in its full glory. It's an extremely long loop, wherein he must deal with the issues of all 7 countries and wed the 7 beastkin princesses etc etc. I initial envisioned AIROT as two books: Book 1, up to the end of the dwarf arc, where he resists Chadness. Then Book 2, the beastkin + invasion arc, wherein he embraces Chadness. They would be equal in length, which would put the Beastkin arc at probably around 100,000 words.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the extreme content and nature of this work kind of comes off as a joke if you don't like it for what it is. The nature of girls being drawn to Malcador, the extreme sluttiness, the over-the-top harem antics, etc, all feel like a joke that you're meant to laugh at for being extreme. But I wasn't really trying to make them jokes. They were just what came out of my mind when I was trying to write a harem work, and this discrepancy causes problems when it starts looking like I'm repeating the same joke over and over. From my perspective, I write an extreme sex scene, and to me, it's just normal stuff, business as usual. But to someone who is perceiving the extreme sex scenes as jokes meant to shock the reader with their extremeness, well, then every sex scene I write will seem like me repeating the same joke, and eventually the feeling will just be "eugh, another extreme sex scene? It's not funny anymore." To me, I like the scenes as they are (and in other works as well), so they don't 'get old' despite the repetition, but if someone views them as a joke, it looks like repeating the same joke over and over, which isn't funny.
In short, by the end of the Dwarf arc, people were already feeling as if I was repeating the same joke over and over. I didn't really want to disappoint them and see them drop off like flies as I continued "repeating the same jokes" as it were. The best thing to do, it seemed to me, was to end it swiftly and try to satisfy both those who viewed the whole work as a joke and those who were enjoying it sincerely.
So, as mentioned, the problem was that the beastkin arc was going to be more or less pure smut. Haha, the bunnies need a lot of dicking to be cured, bunnies are horny, etc. It would be something I enjoyed writing. But it wouldn't have the substance that a lot of people were enjoying. It would just be repeating the same "joke", over and over, for 1/3rd of the work's entire wordcount. I had a crisis of faith. And I knew I wouldn't really be able to write the Beastkin arc while watching everyone slowly realize that everything they enjoyed was just shadow on the walls on the way to Malcador's Fuck Quest Through the Beastkin Empire.
So I instead decide to cut it down immensely and skip to the invasion arc. From the very start, the Invasion was a button I could press to GTFO whenever necessary. There was a bit of a snag though.
First of all, I've read a lot of (not pure-smut) harem works, and it always bothered me when the protagonist didn't have sex with girls so clearly willing to fuck him. Even the works that did have fucking started putting it in the background until all the focus was on the plot, with all the sex scenes just being one-liners to the side. I decided, back then in my ignorant youth, to be the change I wanted to see in the world. AIROT would be a harem work with all the fucking, without devolving into pure smut.
That's fine, but it opened the doors to fetishism, and mega-sluts addicted to sex is a fetish I am fond of. It managed to slip in via the love point system, and then that was it. The floodgates were open. I write characters by trying to empathize with them and see what they would say/do, and unfortunately, in a world of mega-sluts, everyone wants to have sex all the time. Largely, this was fine with me. I wouldn't have really minded writing a sprawling epic of constant sex. But it got a bit extreme, and all in all, it became hard for me to write any scene without it revolving around sex conversations. The extreme sluttiness pretty much corrupted the story and risked turning it into pure smut, rather than a normal harem work with a dash of smut. Now I understand why so many traditional harem works ban fucking, or start having all the sex be off screen: it's simply too dominant if you let it be.
All in all, I really screwed myself. If I ever write something smutty again, I will make sure to contain the schizophrenic insanity rotting my brain and not write potentially amusing narration that will attract people not interested in smut. If I write something rational-adjacent, I will shoot myself in the head for daring to write for the most intelligent and insightful audience of readers in the entire world. They simply cannot be beaten in a game of wits. They are the best there is. (I will also not make all the heroines mega-slutty).
What's all this about a rewritten ending?
I rushed the ending even harder initially and wrote a fairly short, horror-focused interpretation of the story wherein love points basically were brainwashing outright. I don't really think it's worse than the current ending, and if you were reading the story ironically you may even like it more, but it's definitely shorter and less substantial. It can be downloaded and red in EPUB form here. (Most changes are in All The Stops (4) and beyond).
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
https://mega.nz/file/y0g2iaYL#A18POt5qk8UEQF1GO3nlPosd0vR-OHaxRGP1VmUSuJA
Okay, and now for audience questions.
Br*efvoice: "Did you speed up to finish this before Worth the Candle's possibly final chapters were posted?"
Yeah, I was even more scared of people judging the ending and being negative if they had WtC's no doubt amazing ending to compare with.
X*ro: "Will Malcador fuck the deer?"
No. That would be humiliating, and he would never let it down. Spoiler: In the original outline, he learns Doppelganger from Hilda and has his doppelganger fuck the deer princess instead. The doppelganger assures him deer pussy is fucking incredible, but Mal refuses to believe him. He thinks it's a ruse. It is his loss. (This is not a meme).
M*kin: "Please just tell me who you are. I have made so many theories."
I feel like my opsec has been fairly poor throughout this, and maybe this afterword will give you the final clues you need to crack the case. I've only kept myself anonymous since I didn't want people to judge IRL me for all my gratuitous (and 100% sincere, non-ironic) depictions of intense fucking. All I can tell you is one thing: I am not Remy. I apologize to Remy for making people think you are me. You are presumably much more talented than me, and would never deign to use an anime avatar for this long. (the greatest humiliation).
M*terion: "What is the source of your avatar?"
You correctly identified that it is not on any of the Boorus. It's only on pixiv and twitter. https://twitter.com/twumi425/status/1077530447591104512
*rph: "What is the moral of the story?"
I kind of explicitly tried to avoid giving any moral point to the story. Every time Mal was forced into a sexual situation, I basically had to wave the flags of "THIS IS NOT MAKING A STATEMENT ON MALE RAPE". I'm with Hemingway in that I think that it's better to write a story without symbols, and let the symbolism arise naturally, than it is to try to force symbols in to begin with. I.e., if you derive a moral, well it's good to be enriched by works, but I certainly didn't put any in there. I just wanted to accompany Malcador on his fuck journey.
That said, I do think themes/symbols arose naturally, and that theme was "What is the nature of love?" plus "Is love real?" etc. I think it's hard to write a harem story without these questions floating to the surface, especially if you're intentionally writing it so girls fall in love swiftly and extremely hard, as is often the case with harems. In the case of AIROT, I hoped to convey that the love in harem works can still be true and valuable even if it looks shallow or like brainwashing, if only you really believe it with your heart. (Now you understand why the horror ending made me so disappointed in myself that I did a lengthy rewrite).
Okay, and now anonymous questions which are actually just me talking to myself.
Anonymous: So what was the symbol on his shirt?
C'mon. Pop culture reference? Heir? Embarrassed to talk about it? There could only be one thing.
[https://i.imgur.com/2CXaikH.jpg]
If you know, you know. (I know it's Hero of Breath symbol, rather than Heir of Breath symbol in particular, but you know.)
I didn't mention it in-story to explore the """iceberg theory""" of writing. Wherein you leave things intentionally unsaid and that adds more depth, like an iceberg. Also, I chose it because I was wearing a shirt with this symbol while writing the first chapter. Malcador is NOT a self-insert, as much as I would like to have 1/1000th of his chadness, but he did take fashion advice from me.
Anonymous: So Rose is an Amaryllis clone, right?
Well yes and no. I was clearly inspired by her character, but the reference goes deeper. I was actually inspired by Wheel of Time having an Arthur Pendragon expy of its own, Artur Paendrag Tanreall. I saw this thing that both WtC and WoT did, and decided to do it on my own. Add to the myth. Unfortunately, Rose Penndrack was so much like Amaryllis Penndraig that this was completely lost to the shadows, and the Wheel of Time part of the reference was obscured completely.
Anonymous: So was the story planned or not?
My style was to plot out every loop of an arc before writing the first chapter. So, for example, by the time I wrote Dungeons and Dwarves Chapter 1, I already knew the hole was fake, Daiya would be kidnapped, Duran was brainwashed, etc. I think planning ahead this way, even with just a rough plot outline, is VERY important for properly setting up foreshadowing/payoff. It also makes things a lot easier to write when you can just sit down like "Alright, I'm writing X loop now." and just get right to work. All in all, it worked out brilliantly in every possible way. I highly recommend writing plot outlines early and sticking roughly to them, deviating when it becomes obviously beneficial to do so.
Anonymous: Why is the cover so based and intellectual?
My friend drew it for me after Chapter 1 while having absolutely no idea about what a horny experience the rest of the story would become. It stands as a testament to what AIROT is at heart, if not what it is in plot and characterization and everything else.
Anonymous: Can you talk about "deep characters" please?
Okay, I didn't really know where else to fit this in the afterword, but I really wanted to include it so here I go.
A friend of mine once challenged me to actually concretely describe what it means for a character to be "deep." All my life I had had a conception of "deep characters" vs "shallow characters," but when actually challenged on this, I found myself unable to meaningfully describe deep characters. The best I could come up with, without relying on the mystic meaning of 'deep', was that 'deeper characters' had more 'relations'. So, a character who is 100 years old has more relations in the sense that he's gone through 100 years of history, 100 years of events you can relate other events to. There's more stuff. But that's quantity, not quality, and I still couldn't define quality in relation to depth.
In the end, I had to throw up my hands and admit that 'deep' characters didn't exist as I conceived them. I was being a slave to language without realizing there was no substance to my words. I started thinking about my favorite characters, and realized a lot of them were anything but 'deep'. I liked a lot of them purely for surface level attributes. Heck, I actually loved some of them, for completely superficial reasons like being incredibly hot. The idea began stirring in my head that making likeable characters was not an impossible and mysterious challenge after all. Perhaps one just had to faithfully depict some beloved archetypes/attributes as per their own taste, and the world would give a thumbs up.
For this reason, in AIROT, I tried faithfully reflecting character archetypes/attributes that I liked. Instead of, say, seeing the tsundere archetype and trying to do a subversion of tsunderes, I tried doing my 1:1 interpretation of a tsundere to reflect what I like about tsunderes. Sophia is what came out of that. Hilda came from, and yes I am confirming this as WORD OF GOD, me trying to recreate the Hex Maniac and see if I could make a 'good character' purely by trying to 1:1 recreate my mental image of the Hex Maniac. Rose wasn't explicitly based on Amaryllis from Worth the Candle, but I did try to reflect "intelligent ice queen," and let me tell you, me trying to create an "intelligent ice queen" sure resulted in a character extremely similar to Amaryllis. Etc. All in all, the characters in AIROT are me looking at archetypes/attributes I like, and trying to perfectly recreate them with no subversion/twists/etc. It's a bit ironic that trying to reflect things honestly and sincerely ended up looking like satirizing them.
Anonymous: So what was all that about the dude who fucked elves 1000 years ago?
Truth be told, while sketching out the LORE for Koh'rin, the elvish capital, I had an idea. What would it be like if a human was suddenly teleported into the middle of an elvish city like Koh'rin, and wanted to fuck his way to the top? I immediately started sketching out a plot. All in all, if I were to ever recover emotionally from finishing AIROT, my next work would possibly be a 1,000,000 word (planned) epic of one dude fucking his way through Koh'rin until eventually reaching the Elf Goddess (spoilers). It would be a sequence of 10 books (each 100,000~ words long) wherein he conquers 1 elf per book. I'm in the process of writing a 100 page worldbuilding doc to ensure this epic would be the most complex and elaborate depiction of a dude conquering an elf city through dick possible. I will only start once I have the politics, economy, geography, climate, etc, of the city down pat, along with 200~ named elves with personalities, daily schedules, etc. It needs to be realistic and detailed. However, this is but a pipe dream, and it will probably exist only in fragment references in AIROT. Canonically, though, this story is why elvish culture was twisted to be especially slutty.
Anonymous + Commentators: Why didn't the story show him fucking the goddess?
Honestly, I just thought pacing-wise it would be a little poor. Same for the entire 6-woman orgy at the end. I've been toying with the idea of sex-only epilogue chapters, since I know people want to read sex more than anything, but they would probably look pretty clumsy just stuck on the end after the epilogue.
Anonymous + Commentators: What the fuck is up with The Midday Moon? Do you know nothing about swordplay? God!
This surprised me the most out of anything. I wrote the Middway Moon passage pretty casually, and never at all expected so many swordplay "experts" would come out of the woodworks. Honestly, I don't mean to fight over this subject, but I basically ripped the technique 1:1 from an actual Japanese swordmaster who came up with the idea in the process of trying to invent an unbeatable move. It's actually founded very solidly in real swordplay theory, and while it is flawed for certain reasons (mainly difficulty in execution), it is NOT so simple that it is beaten by "just stab at the person running at you", I promise.
I highly recommend anyone interested in swordplay to read the visual novel Hanachirasu ( https://vndb.org/v430 ). The technique described features prominently in it, and Hanachirasu actually doubles as an introductory text to Japanese swordplay (written by the master of a kendo dojo, ironically enough) so you will learn quite a lot reading it. It's a pretty good + interesting VN on top of that. Once you have finished, then you can come describe why the technique is bad... if you still can.
Okay that's all that's coming to me
Yeah same. If you have any further questions, drop them in the comments and I will try to answer ones that I feel are valuable to express. One last note, though:
It feels a bit lame to directly ask, but I would really appreciate any and all fanart. If you have finished the story and have even an inkling of a desire to draw any kind of fanart, even stick art, I strongly encourage you to do so. I would really appreciate it, and I can already guarantee I would remember any of it forever, even the stick art. I just really like fanart, and it would be touching to have some of my own. But, of course, this is a tall order. No hard feelings. I just thought it would be better to ask than to not ask. You miss every shot you don't take!!!
Okay that's that. Thanks for reading, and I hope this glimpse into my stream of consciousness did not disturb or frighten you.
Edit: I have decided to attach all fanart I receive to this afterword. Below are the first two beautiful specimens. Thank you, I will never forget these gifts.
[https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/437697099383963668/862033255631814686/unknown.png]
[https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/437697099383963668/862033335995465748/unknown.png]