Mob Sorcery - Book 1 Detailed Commentary

Intro

The end of the first book (well, sort of) of my new urban fantasy book is fast approaching, so now is the perfect time for a “planning post.” Ha.

This will be a bit different to past commentary and planning posts, because it comes after I’ve written the first book but before it’s released. I’m going to assume that you’ve already read the first 30 chapters. I don’t know if I’ll have a separate post-release commentary.

A significant issue I’ve faced writing this commentary has just been my general mood toward the genre.

So this commentary has been more difficult to write. I don’t know how it will come out. Hopefully no worse than usual, but I’ll leave this here as a warning.

A Guilty Pleasure

Urban fantasy settings have been popular for ages, hence the rise of all the shifter stuff. My personal interest goes back further, as I was a big fan of World of Darkness (old and new) and Dresden Files. I even played in a multi-year New World of Darkness campaign over IRC.

I’ll be honest and say that shifter stuff hasn’t exactly been my jam. There’s a reason I never touched it, even beyond the fact it was a trend (and still gets the rare book despite the current superhero push).

Regardless of what big trope these settings run on, there are some fundamentals underlying them all, and many go back to World of Darkness (and influential works like Anne Rice’s books before that). The masquerade is a big one, but even a lot of the racial tropes are there.

However, when you look at East Asian settings, urban fantasy is radically different. While you can often still find masquerades, the mechanisms vary.

What is extremely common are masquerade-free settings. Many of these are some form of system apocalypse-type setting (oh no, I’m going to be sued for calling the subgenre that) but Japan has a ton of “what if the elves, orcs, vampires etc just integrate with humanity.” These are common in lewd settings. One I can actually mention is Monster Musume.

But even beyond the monstergirl stuff, there are lots of interesting magical settings that blend this stuff together, particularly in visual novels. I draw a lot of my inspiration for magic and fighting from these, including stuff like the TYPE MOON verse.

In any case, I’ve always loved the idea of an open urban fantasy setting mixed with technology. Over the years, I’ve fiddled with my own setting, but have never seriously written anything in it or considered it a possibility for a series.

The main problems have been fleshing out the world and coming up with a proper story in it. For some writers, problems such as history or “what do they eat” are annoyances that they simply refuse to consider and laugh off those who think about them. To me, they help a world and story avoid being a simple bag of tropes and provide depth that helps it remain memorable.

One of the big issues of urban fantasy stories is how deeply derivative they are. While I sometimes get really oddball comments claiming my other series are clearly ripoffs of some other random story, urban fantasy stories are often extremely derivative. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be boring to work with.

Finally, I never really had the push to try to make the story work. Until recently.

Alternative History

Alternate history settings are a lot of fun to write and experience, because of the twists they can play on the world. Some can be fairly banal, such as how I basically replaced Uber with Wings. Others can be more fundamental, like the effects easy access to magic might have on the use of violence as a corporate tool. Modern militaries hold their power because of the scale and expense that makes it hard for smaller entities and paramilitaries to match them, but when some random asshole might know a city-destroying spell and works for the highest bidder, dynamics change.

The use of a proper alternate history was the turning point for me to start seriously working on the setting. I’d been seriously playing around with an idea for this story since late last year, after Spellblade 5’s release, but couldn’t make the setting and plot interesting enough for myself.

I genuinely don’t know when or how the idea came to me, but the idea of the masquerade breaking during WW1, and the US being a sort of “outcast” country toward magic hit me. It fit in with the “nation of immigrants” role that the US held, particularly with the reasons people went west in the first place. Aulfair became a place full of New World entities and factions, splintering off from the Old World ones. By contrast, Old World countries such as Europe, Japan, China etc would implicitly have immense magical influence.

This entire idea puts magic deep in the roots of the setting and its politics. It means that there’ll always be interesting things happening, other than “Vince is doing a job.” The motivations will be something tied to the world, instead of just a random mission. To me, this is important. A story and setting feels better if tied together. If I could remove the magical elements and everything remained identical, it’s not a very good fantasy story. I apply a similar principle to sci-fi, where the science/technological elements need to be intrinsic to the story (this is part of what separated cyberpunk from dystopia back when they were both major literary genres).

There are, however, some side-effects of doing this that I’ll come back to in a later topic.

A Patreon Serial

This whole section is about the authorial and financial side behind how I ended up working on this idea. Skip it if you’re just interested in the story itself.

When I posted the first chapters, I also gave a small explanation for why I was writing this story in the first place.

I take a while to write my current series, and they’re taking longer as they get longer. Plus, I constantly want to improve the quality of my stories. So that means more research, more time focused on plotting and often rewriting sections, and getting annoyed at my prose. The latter has been an aspect I haven’t spoken much of and was something I tried to markedly improve during Neural Wraith, although I’m careful not to deviate too much from my intentionally simplified sentence structures.

Longer publishing times hurt. The gaps between Demon’s Throne and Heretic Spellblade are long. At the same time, I’ve tried shorter publishing times with Neural Wraith and that was also a travesty. This takes place at a time when a lot of authors are pushing really hard to publish as fast as possible, even when they’re not writing the books anymore (hence the emergence of all the “co-writers”). The genre is flooded with books.

So I need something to fill in the gaps, but also to deal with Amazon and the harem audience being unreliable (e.g. telling me that Neural Wraith is my best series when Amazon tells me it’s terrible).

Right now, my idea is to focus on Patreon. I’ve had misgivings over it in the past (and still kind of do), but reliable monthly income is nice. My patreon links and posts don’t mysteriously vanish because an algorithm has decided it hates me. There are deeper thoughts to this, but I’m wary of talking more about them right now.

I needed something other than just “support” to offer, though. I more or less plateaued in terms of Patreon support around the start of the year from everyone who was here through thick and thin, and you’ve been enormously helpful. But readers treat author patreons as a service more so than a tip jar, unlike with Youtuber patreons. Reworking the entire thing seemed too risky given the environment.

I’ve tried short stories in the past, but I suck at writing them. Art has been massively cheapened by AI art, to the point where I look at people going “amazing art” to really obvious AI covers (and the cult-like behavior of attacking anyone for saying otherwise) and question why anyone feels AI writing will get a different response. Those used to be two of the big draws on Patreons: bonus content, in other words.

But I can write a serial, and keep it exclusive to Patreon for a longer period of time. I expect this will accompany longer periods of time where you can read book chapters on Patreon as well before I release them.

For whatever reason, Patreons are weirdly controversial among harem authors. There’s definitely a strong level of pushback against them among a certain author clique, to the point where a few don’t have them. I won’t voice my reason why I think that, but I’ll simply say that I think having a Patreon is an important part of surviving as an actual author in a time when content mills such as ghostwriter farms and AI writing spam are going to get a lot worse.

I’ll also probably need to finally make a discord to follow through on this, but that’s a topic for another day.

I actually started on the idea of a “lower effort” story last year. I hoped Neural Wraith might be that idea, but it failed. Other ideas often focused more on building stuff, but I struggled to either create an interesting enough setting/hook or realized that it would be a ton of effort. A couple of those ideas have transformed into progression fantasy ideas, because I never throw out a good idea if it sticks with me longer than a week or two.

How well this story will succeed at the task will only be seen over time. There have certainly been a few speedbumps and problems. More so than I expected at the start. But I still have hopes for it.

A Grounded Action-Adventure with SoL Elements

Slice of life is such an overused term right now that I think I could slap it on Neural Wraith. “A Cyberpunk Neo-Noir Detective Slice of Life Harem Fantasy” sounds like some good buzzword soup.

And to think, I once got flak for comparing harem authors to management consultants. The similarities run deep.

I usually do a plot summary at this point, but there’s not a huge amount of plot to go through.

Vince is an enforcer with money trouble, some level of ambition, and more talent for magic than he should in his position. Aulfair is a city in a post-Masquerade world, where ordinary politics has collided with the ancient magical world to create an enormous level of friction.

So the plot is simple: Vince needs work and the mafia provides it. They’re down on their luck and want their old territory back, because they used to rule the roost. Vince blows shit up, goes through some trouble, and pulls off his job. Then the Fire Nation—sorry, the Golden Path attack and he’ll get pulled into a bigger story, where he can meander around a lot more.

The idea was to give a loose plot that he could weave in and out of while still working toward goals. In practice, I found that I needed to resolve the first job for the Lionettis to progress things. That caused me to rush things, and I had to go back and fix up some rough patches in the story. Kaziern ended up too weak. Vince may as well have shown up, blown up their defenders, and taken over their shit before the cops showed up.

Integrated with this were the slice of life elements. This isn’t a slice of life story, because things actually happen. Maybe I should just write a 60k word story where next to nothing happens and make a lot of money, but I get bored easily.

Instead, the slice of life stuff shows up in the extensive character-focused sections between each major event. Lots of time spent with Nina, Nicki, Fia etc talking about various topics, and not just story-related. Some relationship drama, or stuff that is brewing into relationships.

I wanted this to be an action-adventure story, with progression elements. It’s not proper progression fantasy, because I don’t have Vince go off and do some extended training montage and eat some magical cultivator grass to ascend to another realm or some shit, but the idea is that he’ll need to increase in power. But I also wanted to make the fights less about DBZ-style power levels and more about specific techniques and their weaknesses.

So all the spells and magic are strongly codified. You know what people are capable of, in much the same way you are in Spellblade. Over time, I’ll be able to complicate the magic available to them. I do want to avoid the nonsensical levels of skill spam bullshit that some litrpgs have, though.

Slow Burn with Fallible Characters

Slow burn is one of those definitions that is utterly meaningless in the genre. I put it in the same camp as slice of life: people wanted it, so authors basically said they had it without changing anything. If you say something enough times, it becomes true, at least in a small community.

In a past life, I wrote genuinely slow burn. As in, no sex until like 120k+ words into the story. None of this “my story is slow burn because the MC doesn’t sleep with somebody until the 60% mark in a 250 page book” nonsense. I still write fairly slow stuff. Ironically, I also get a lot of shit from the “stop making characters fall in love instantly” crowd, because I don’t have love interests hate the MC at the start.

Hence why I say slow burn is a nonsensical definition. It has no meaning, other than to complain that you want a book that is slower with the sex/romance than the book you’re comparing it to. Oh, and it’s another marketing buzzword for the soup.

However, I do want this story to be slow with the relationships. Vince is meeting a bunch of new characters and I want there to be time to breathe before he does anything with them. He has a pre-established relationship with Nina, needs to have some interest in forming a harem, and help Pola grow as a person before doing anything there. Plus characters like Fia and Nicki have their own walls.

This is, ironically, how actual romance usually works. There are usually barriers between the MC and his love interest(s) that need to be worked through. In Heretic, I usually reversed the order (which is why people bitched about the speed of the relationships), with the relationship being formed due to the Champion-Bastion situation, and the barriers being worked through later. This is known as a character arc, a truly rare phenomenon at times.

Which brings me onto the truly risky decision in the story: fallible characters.

Pretty much every female character has some element that will annoy a certain type of reader. This rounds them out, instead of making them a bag of tropes that is instantly familiar and comfortable but lacks depth.

Alessia is cold, miserly, and caught up in the etiquette and pride of being the family head, and only leaves hints that she likes Vince. She’s not mean or condescending toward him, so I don’t think people will actively dislike her, but the harem audience tends to ignore women who aren’t openly affectionate and a certain subset actively dislike those above the MC in status (and this subset are some of the most obnoxious people in the entire community).

Nina is possessive but isn’t making a move on Vince. One of my alpha readers actually got really annoyed by her, to the point where I actually worried about reception of her. I suspect there’ll be more of him in the general harem audience.

Pola is chaotic and emotional, but also physically aggressive and emotionally immature. She put a lot of people off with her earlier antics and attacks on Vince, and I do wonder how those readers feel even as she softened up. Fia, by contrast, comes across as more worldly and grounded, but is up to her neck in vices, is very strong on loyalty, family, and finding her place in life, and has rough elements she prefers to keep hidden. Ally is similarly shady, despite being very cute.

But Nicki probably bears the brunt of it. She’s blunt, greedy (or at least, greedy enough for her position), and bitter. Her job also might remind people of some frustrating elements of modern life (Uber and tipping). Finally, she’s deeply uncomfortable in her own skin, and there are strong racial elements that surround her (harpies are an ostracized race). Of all the characters, backlash against her is the one I’m expecting the most.

At the same time, developing all these characters with their faults, histories, and personalities should be fun. It’s why I let them develop that way from the start.

Pola vs Nina

So I did a poll for who should have sex with Vince first. I figured that the polls might be a fun way to get people involved with the story, but I’m honestly not sure if anyone actually wants them, given both I’ve done have been surprisingly one-sided and nobody’s really said anything (and comments have been surprisingly high for chapters otherwise).

What I can talk about is my original plan for the two of them.

Pola and Nina both got some interesting reception when I first wrote the story. Both are vaguely derivative of Arknights characters, with Pola being a “derpy Lappland” (i.e. the fanon interpretation of her) and Nina reminding me a little of Siege but probably nothing else (I don’t know where Nina came from, tbh).

My original plan was for Pola to be the main love interest, starting off aggressive and territorial, only to claim Vince once she’s convinced of his strength. Nina would then trigger because of this and make a move, starting the harem. There’d then be some fun between the two of them, due to their history.

But both girls got some pushback in early reading. Nina irritated one of my alpha readers and I softened one of her earlier scenes before I posted on Patreon. Pola definitely rubs some folks the wrong way with her behavior, more so than I expected. I put her in “overly aggressive and kind of dumb anime girl” territory, but not everyone sees her that way. She’s trying to be somebody she isn’t and is bad at it (hence smashing the champagne).

Based on this, I figured to leave it up to people whether I shifted things around. I actually decided ahead of time to commit to the Nina scene, as I was convinced it was the most fitting. If people had actually voted for Fia, I have no clue what I would have done.

Or Ally. Errr…

Anyway, these two have a fun history. There’s definitely more to come between them.

Fia and Seraph

Fia is the character that got added in primarily to round out the Lionettis. While researching the mafia, I found their structure with the boss, underboss, adviser. However, I liked the idea that Alessia wouldn’t have an adviser, as that isolated her, especially with Pola being so headstrong and lost in her own world.

That meant there needed to be some sort of trusted lieutenant that Alessia is leaning on, and that would be one that comes from a privileged background as well. So I whipped up Fia as a rich girl that fell into drugs and gambling as a teenager, but became comfortable as an enforcer. This later became her close friendship with Pola (with some nagging), due to them both going to school together, if a year apart.

Much of this is based on the stereotype of what happens in private schools in Australia, where drugs and vices are a horrendous scourge. Hell, a lot of how I’ve approached the seedy side is influenced by my own background. I grew up in a regional area, where almost everyone in my school did drugs or drank. The area grew the crops that they sold in Sydney, the largest city in Australia (at the time, as I think it just got overtaken) and had a massive drug raid in my senior years. Ice destroyed the lives of several people in my rather small cohort and a lot of people I worked with part-time gambled all their money away. Hell, the 2IC of the grocery section at the supermarket I worked in was a former biker gang member (basically the only organized crime in the area).

Fia is very much a vice-riddled girl who has made a lot of bad decisions, but has a safety net and is somewhat comfortable with things. But there are hints that things have gone wrong. She also has some problems with Vanna that tie into their mutual backgrounds.

Which makes the comparisons to Seraph interesting. I view Seraph as someone who lost her future due to circumstances beyond her control, and made difficult decisions because she had to. She’s worldly and does what is necessary, because she views this as both duty and how the world works after seeing everything go wrong. Nathan gave her a purpose beyond simply existing.

By contrast, Fia is actively making her life worse than it needs to be. Her worldliness comes from screwing things up and recovering, rather than being horribly burned by the world itself. She also has some very strong views on what is the right and wrong things to do, which is why she’s supporting Vince more than she arguably should and is so adamant about the idea he’s going to become part of the pack. Her goal is give herself purpose, in an almost clingy way.

But there’s obviously something similar between them, because a lot of people have compared them. Hell, the idea got brought up out of the blue by one of the only people IRL who reads my stuff, and he doesn’t read the Patreon comments (my brother reads my stories, don’t ask).

In any case, Fia has rapidly become one of my favorites in the story, and apparently a bit of a dark horse. Although Nina remains a popular girl, it seems. Then again, clingy, sexy lion girl works well.

I am curious what people think of Fia’s vices, though.

The Seedy Underbelly

Harem books have an almost “Christian Rock” vibe to them. There’s explicit sex in them, they’re often overly voyeuristic (to the point of uncomfortableness), and they usually have tons of actions and violence in them.

But harder stuff is often missing or, if present, heavily attacked. Sometimes this is because of Amazon policies. Amazon has a ton of rules against certain content, which largely matches those of other platforms that allow adult content (specifically around stuff like consent). There’s some weird conspiracy theory stuff about this among some authors, but I feel it can be summed up easily like this: the closer a book’s sexual content veers toward erotica or pure titillation, the more likely Amazon treats it like erotica. And the rules on erotica are harsh, with basically flat bans on drugs and alcohol in sex scenes.

Even outside the Amazon treatment, I still see a strong bias toward “wholesomeness,” however. There aren’t many vices on display outside really basic ones. The seedy underbelly of the real world, including drugs and prostitution, are glossed over if not entirely absent. The latter did show up a bit, but got attacked so much due to the sharing rule stuff and the desire for some people to have literally every female character ever be a love interest.

This is, ironically, mirrored in the broader fiction community, except that harem likes sex. I’ve been approached in the past about Neural Wraith for some cyberpunk stuff, but they hadn’t read it and wouldn’t touch it because it had sex in it – which is hilarious given cyberpunk has always been associated with sex.

I feel there is a moral angle at play here. Harem MCs have a tendency to be almost obnoxiously “nice guy”-like if they’re not douchebag chads (and sometimes they’re both, but flipflop depending on whether they’re interacting with a woman or man). All the genuine criminal stuff, such as racketeering, gambling, drugs etc is avoided because it poses moral quandaries. If the MC is doing questionable stuff, it’s often explained away because the government or whoever are actually evil and it’s fine (I use this to some extent in Demon’s Throne, although Rys is genuinely not a good guy and that riles some folks up).

The few times the MC is less than nice, there is often a lot of pushback against that series. This also applies to stuff like litrpg, where the outright sociopathy some MCs display is somehow painted as a good thing at times (occasionally they’re just crazy, but it’s not uncommon for the MC’s penchant for murder to be a “good thing”).

In Aulfair, the governments are just governments. They’re corrupt, sure, but they’re not villainous. And while the corporations can talk a good game, they’re still doing some not-so-great stuff. This is very much a rather normal society, despite the weird stuff by our standards, and certain things don’t fly. That also means that criminal stuff is still, well, criminal, although more in a prohibition-era way at times.

So when the Lionettis are taking back the shopping mall full of illegal stores, they’re taking back a lot of profit. They run a protection racket (with actual protection), take a cut of the gambling parlors, work with the prostitutes, cut and distribute drugs etc. They’re organized crime, and much of what they do is facilitating illegal activity, and those lower on the totem pole effectively pay taxes to the bigger criminal entities. This is backed up by violence, because nothing else can justify it (there are some great books about this).

I gloss over parts of this, because it could easily bog things down. Vince doesn’t think too hard about the consequences of his work or who he’s working for. Not because he’s an asshole, but because he has problems of his own. There’ll likely come a time when this comes up in-story, and the answer will be rather simple.

When you’re at the bottom, you don’t dictate the rules. You can choose not to do certain things, but you’re basically screwing yourself over for no benefit. At a certain point, things change, and the companies and people who are doing it probably need to think about those actions. “If I don’t do it, somebody else will” is an excuse that applies if you’re a cog in a machine, not the guy making the entire machine. Even more so if you’re rich enough to not have to give a shit.

This isn’t entirely reflective of my view of things, though. But generally, if you can choose not to do something questionable, but still do it, that’s on you. People just like coming up with excuses for their greed. It’s why I’m including some of the seedy stuff, but glossing over the darker elements. Also, it makes good fodder for Immanuel and the other criminal entities to have “ethical” disagreements over how to run the city.

Corporate Dystopia

A few people said the setting has a corporate dystopia feel, and it kind of does due to the power the conglomerates hold in Aulfair, but much of this is just Vince’s position in the city and overplaying the feel of what life can be like. Much of the exploitative elements and commodification of magic is just capitalism. Transformative magic becomes part of the beautification and fashion industries, including the artificial birdgirl stuff. Instead of humans selling sperm and eggs (the latter of which is deeply controversial), birdgirls sell the much larger eggs they lay. There’s even an element of common magical tools being shitty, because customers refuse to pay for quality and tend to pay with their life instead.

So, yeah, a lot of this is just “the world already sucks if you break it down or shift a commonplace problem into something new.” It likely doesn’t help that I’m glossing over a lot of the stuff that hasn’t changed, because it’s uninteresting. Worldbuilding in a modern environment has a “the media only covers negative stuff” issue, where I only describe the stuff that is new, but that can give a warped perspective.

What is new and pretty dystopian are the enforcers and the way companies incorporate violence. More than dystopian, it reflects a breakdown in how society normally operates.

As powerful as some of today’s companies are, the idea that they’re genuine megacorps is nonsense. The US federal government alone spends more each year on its military than the market cap of every company save Apple and Microsoft. Companies influence government, but they ultimately bow to it, despite all the bluster about leaving entire continents every time they’re annoyed by a law (you could make a drinking game out of empty threats to leave the EU from tech companies).

So the idea that a bunch of magical conglomerates will happily resort to violent takeovers and assassinations, backed by the fact that stopping them would require literal military intervention, is a massive shift. Magic is an equalizer, and if there are individuals with spells capable of matching nuclear weapons or natural disasters, then they’d be incredibly influential.

In a darker setting, those magical individuals would have broken the Masquerade and carved up the world. To some extent, they did do that in Europe in the post-war chaos. I’m leaving the global state of affairs intentionally nebulous, though.

But the fact that magical beings worked alongside governments, monarchs, and presidents in secret for millennia meant that didn’t happen everywhere. Also, not everyone chose to become a magical feudal lord. The elementals are law and order types for the most part (even the governor is one, although she’s more of a “natural order” type). It’s also implied that the US military has weaponry and personnel available to crush even powerful enemies such as dragons.

Leaving those threats aside, I do get to have some fun with the magical conglomerates. Adding in fun tidbits like Immanuel being effectively an evil bank and private equity firm, but also burning down Wall Street. Or turning a mafia family into a legitimate enterprise.

Brands

In Neural Wraith, I studiously avoided using any actual brand or company names in the book. Some authors are willing to throw McDonalds and Apple around, and I sincerely doubt they’ll threaten to sue anyone over using them, but there are a bunch of reasons I wanted to avoid using them.

Primarily for Neural Wraith, the use of actual companies could induce certain reactions. I’ve said that Aesir is somewhat Apple-like, but they’re not literally Apple. If I called them that, there’d be certain audience expectations. For one thing, fans of the company (and there are a lot these days, as people replace the cult of celebrity for the cult of massive companies that see them as walking wallets) might not appreciate it if I make Apple the villain. The fact the US and the CIA showed up as a villain in Neural Wraith 3 is the sort of thing that could easily annoy some folks, given some books basically worship the US in isekais.

There’s also a question of dating the story. This has become more pertinent than ever with the ongoing implosion of Twitter. While the term “Google something” has survived the test of time, even it’s facing some headwinds due to AI search becoming a new battleground (and the fact search in general has become a wasteland of awfulness). Technology, company, and brands are ephemeral. IBM was a monolithic powerhouse until it wasn’t.

However, I’ve loosened up a little in this story because it’s sometimes easier and more fitting. I’m still uncertain with some things. The fast food chain is some weird amalgam of several, and I probably won’t ever name it. I’m not a huge fan of paper thin parody names (like MgRonalds or Nutube).

Knowledge is Power

This series is thin on themes compared to my usual stuff, but one does run through the magic system.

Knowledge is power, in many respects.

The strongest influence is easily TYPE-MOON. In Fate/stay Night, the Servants are mythical warriors and legends given life and use Noble Phantasms, which are magical abilities and weapons based on their myth. Once you know their identity, you know their abilities (sort of, given I don’t recall the legend of King Arthur involving energy beams being fired from swords). If you’re in the dark, you can’t plan how to defeat your foe or how to counter some of their nastier abilities.

This idea flowed into the use of magic for enforcers. With how limited spells are for powerful magic-users, it’s possible to easily counter an enemy by sending or hiring someone specific. So conglomerates prefer to hold back their elites from petty conflicts, because using them will make it easier for them to be defeated in real battles. Vince worries about whether he’ll be targeted more often on jobs now his true strength is known, too.

This information warfare continues with the immortals and their true natures. Demons actively stop the public spread of demonology using extensive legal measures. I like to imagine they make the record labels seem weak. The Pirate Bay and Napster never needed to worry about a hit squad of demons rocking up and just offing everyone and blowing up their servers. Vampires use troll farms to mislead. Sorcerers are extremely secretive and elitist, keeping their knowledge locked away – although this leads to more of it leaking than for others.

I’m also using this as a way to explain the murkiness of history. Individual groups and people might know their own history or how myth really played out, but collective magical history is unknown. The various factions have painted themselves in certain lights or hidden themselves, and sometimes deceived other magical powers. This means not everything is known to everyone, and there is another level of Masquerade still potentially present.

I consider it similar to National Security secrets. Yes, we have a general idea of how the military works and what’s going on in the world, but there’s so much going on we have no clue about. Often we’re openly lied to, and some stuff that sounds insane is actually true (and then people pretend they totally knew it was happening because it discomforts them too much to acknowledge reality).

Cast Size

I usually don’t talk about cast size, because it’s a rather obnoxious discussion where everyone “agrees” that smaller is better, but almost every successful book is bigger. There’s been a rash of smaller harems lately, but they’re all short series, which I think is very telling. Short series can make it easy to hide flat characters, because you don’t need to maintain presence five or six books in.

However, in this case, I’m talking more about the cast itself.

Usually, the large cast in my books is a result of the nature of the story or setting. Spellblade and Demon’s Throne have kingdom building or epic fantasy elements, and demand larger casts to fill out a bunch of roles. Nobles, officials, various villains, knights, merchants, rivals etc. Every time some new nation or faction shows up, there’s a small roster that needs to make an appearance, and because I like to show rather than tell, I also add in characters to fill in certain roles if they’ll make a difference.

The latter is what happened in Neural Wraith. Its cast grew because it’s an investigative series with slice of life elements. So there need to be a bunch of suspects, plus the police characters, and then the folks who fill out the void around Nick. Relative to a lot of scifi and fantasy, the casts aren’t particularly massive. Spellblade is at epic fantasy level, for sure.

This time, I don’t need to expand the cast so much. There aren’t too many roles to fill out. In fact, I probably have too few characters. There are a few bit parts where I’ve left folks unnamed and I might go back and name them, as they’ve reappeared a couple of times (like a bartender at the Prefect’s Lounge or the enforcer who hits on Vince when he heads up to Alessia’s office).

At the moment, the cast is almost entirely utilitarian. There’s the prospective harem (Alessia, Pola, Nina, Ally, Nicki, and Fia), plus Vanna and Liz in the Lionettis, Gawlik and Luscarne in Kaziern, Quintus in Immanuel, Ronin, Juliet, plus the mayor and governor. The largest unnamed character is the elemental that Vince bumped into on main street before the story started, plus some bit roles elsewhere.

I actually cut a pair of characters from the story who were supposed to occupy the spare bedroom, because the opening chapters had a lot going on. At this point, I might be replacing them with different characters entirely. They were a pair of shut-in hacker catgirls.

So I dunno. This is definitely something I’d appreciate thoughts on, if you have any.

Historical Elements and the “F” Word

A lot of the fun in creating an alternate universe setting is blending it into the world as it is. This can involve dealing with a lot of really dicey historical events, though. How authors handle this depends a lot on the time, their personality, and their culture. Japan has a real knack for weird depictions of Hiter, for instance. To be fair, they do the same to their own historical figures (the Sengoku Era has many fascinating depictions), although there’s a strong nationalist streak to many depictions.

As you can imagine, touching on some topics directly is often in poor taste, incredibly stupid, or reveals some really weird political shit that could have stayed out of the book. I don’t think anybody needed Harry Potter to handle the real WW2, for instance.

However, the present is the product of the past, often in ways that are difficult to fully comprehend. This is something that I find a lot of authors completely miss when they worldbuild (likely because they never tried). While I’ve often seen the question “what do they eat?” posed, the question I often focus on is “how did this happen?”

In some cases, the answer can be left ambiguous without issue or dealt with later. Demons infiltrating humanity and sowing chaos is pretty believable, and there’s a story behind Immanuel coming out to Aulfair. Much of the presence of the demihumans is easily handwaved, too.

Other topics could be invented wholesale or left alone. Houou and another major faction are tied into East Asian political stuff that will be interesting to unravel. To give a hint: recall that Vince calls WW1 “the Great War” which is what it was often called prior to the second one. Rather important things happened involving Japan in WW2 that may not have occurred this time.

There’s some comparisons between the founding of Aulfair and the mages “going west” to the way certain persecuted religious elements also moved further and further west. Although building it a stone’s throw from Seattle is also a case of thumbing their nose at the US in a time of high tensions.

But the big one is the Lionettis.

An ancient lineage of Italian wolffolk, with ties to Roman myth and who founded a mafia family in Aulfair. It’s stated they were here even before the mages, although that might be an exaggeration. At the very least, they staked their claim from the start.

The fun part are the mafia ties. See, the mafia (primarily the Sicilian Mafia at the time, I believe) were enormously powerful in Italy and influenced the government. A certain prime minister by the name of Benito Mussolini took power, turned himself into a dictator, and fought a war against the mafia (both for populist reasons and because they limited his influence as a rival power in the country). While the mafia had been present in the US before this, its influence grew as they fled from Italy to the US (and then worked with the US when they invaded Italy).

Realistically, I could have tossed this. Just had the mafia be ordinary thugs etc. But I chose to keep it in because it adds a bunch of historical elements I don’t need to invent or work around. The Lionettis are much more prideful and generous than actual mafioso, who really are just criminals. This adds a deep and personal element to losing their homeland, especially as they didn’t get it back. This adds an additional element to the Italian side of the mafia, rather than just being wolves.

Also, they get to call the police “blackshirts” with good reasoning. That term refers specifically to Mussolini’s secret police and is comparable to calling the cops Stasi or Gestapo. It’s a charged term. Alessia even has some personal distaste for everything relating to the issue, when she criticizes her old.

I stop short of doing more than generally gesturing at what happened, however. Even in the commentary of the chapters. I can guarantee there’d be a bunch of angry reviews from people who would say the book was “too political” for using a historical term, because of their current politics. It’s just not worth the trouble, and I know a lot of people will already understood what the topic is or they can google the term “blackshirt”.

This topic also relates to certain elements of Spellblade, but I’ll talk about those in an eventual retrospective I plan to write.

The “Pride” and Competitiveness

I guess I’ll finish this off with an open topic.

It’s fairly normal to basically avoid any sort of infighting between harem members and have everyone get along, as well as have the MC accept things. The latter I can understand, as it gets extremely grating to find a way to have an otherwise normal MC play along. It’s deeply amusing when I see claims that the genre is “better” than Japanese light novels, when I see some really popular books with MCs that are basically just a light novel MC that has sex.

In this case, Vince isn’t really prepared or thinking too much about a permanent relationship. I dislike the intense levels of horniness or pervertedness that pervades much of the genre, and I’ve completely stripped it out of my books these days. That leaves a more natural way to bring him around to being in multiple relationships.

With Nina claiming Vince first, that makes it easy to use her as the excuse to push him toward multiple partners. He’s also hot-headed and prone to bad decisions. Such as kissing Pola back and flirting with Fia. I’ve previously avoided the “you need to handle the harem realistically” stuff, because I find it tiresome, but I’ll do at least a modicum of that before I push it aside.

However, there is going to be a degree of competitiveness between the girls. Nina and Pola go without saying. But there can only be one at the top, due to actual laws in the story. A few are going to be interested in claiming that spot. When Alessia enters the picture, she’ll be keen to cement her position as well, and won’t necessarily play fair. She has a family fortune, after all (and, arguably, is already thinking about how she might use it before even making a move).

I am curious about thoughts toward the girls poking at each other over Vince over the course of the story between the plot, though.

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Anyway, that’s the commentary. I didn’t talk too much about the story this time, because I felt it was fairly simple by comparison to my usual stuff. Also, the chapters are still up with individual commentaries, so you can check those out still.

Hopefully you enjoyed this and keep enjoying the story.