Weekly Update - 102

Comic this week? Yes, if I work my ass off and consume constant coffee.

Drawing: Page 133

Playing: Nothing interesting until Thursday, but maybe Satisfactory.

Drinking: Coffee and more coffee and extra coffee and ultra coffee because coffee give me more coffee there's never enough coffee I need coffee.

Ramble:

I’ve lost interest in a fair few webcomics and television shows that begin with a small cast of characters and grow to a large cast.  The problem with it, at least for me, is that when I begin reading a webcomic, it’s usually because I learn about and subsequently grow attached to one or two among the core cast of characters. It's not always the main protagonist but often someone in their close orbit, either an important supporting character, a secondary main character, or even the main antagonist. When the story then balloons out to welcome more characters and explore each of THEIR respective tales, sometimes my favorite characters get pushed ever more towards the sidelines of the story, and I grow tired of rarely, if ever, seeing them in action. I struggle to grow invested in all the new characters, and it causes me to lose interest in all these side stories. Ultimately, I stop reading the comic, not because the story is bad or because any of the new characters are uninteresting, but because I’ve lost my anchor, the thing that kept me invested in the first place.

It seems inevitable for long-running comics to introduce new faces. Having a diverse cast of characters is a part of world-building, it’s a part of the setting, and it’s a way to introduce new conflicts as old conflicts get resolved.  It seems especially common in long-running animes, after the first two or three conflict arcs get resolved, and the writers have to move on to find other ways they could raise the stakes and create conflict after their main cast has become so powerful that anything short of universe-ending threats are trivial wastes of time.  But it’s a trap, I think, for an author to start shifting their focus away from the main cast. As this comic, God Slayers, approaches 4 years (five for me, if you’ll recall I worked on it a year before posting page 1) I think I’m beginning to understand, from a creator perspective, why this trend is so common. It has happened more than once that a character I originally imagined as a side character worked their way into my heart and ultimately managed to join the main cast, (Read: Max and Riley). It’s a dangerous thing for this to occur too often. These characters are SUPER INTERESTING to me, their creator, and it becomes a difficult task making sure they are also SUPER INTERESTING to you, the reader. But, that's also kind of a trap, because when every character is SUPER INTERESTING, we end up the No Man’s Sky syndrome, where if every planet is unique among billions and billions of planets, the game somehow feels samey and boring from a broad perspective, since visiting every new and unique planet is ultimately a similar experience. (As an aside, I love No Man’s Sky, I’m pleased with the game in its current state and happy for its developers, I’m merely calling out the biggest issue that I personally had with the game near when it launched, which I think back to often because I think it is an interesting psychological datapoint.) Another comparison, the death of a main character at the beginning of Game of Thrones is impactful and shocking, but by about the fourth or fifth time the author kills off one of his main characters, we're expecting it, and we very quickly get bored with it. I digress. This is all to support the idea that diminishing returns in writing is absolutely a thing, as it is with introducing new characters.

So, I think there might be a good reason that the core cast of characters shouldn’t often exceed five. It gets too hard to follow all of these different storylines and characters and all of their crisscrossing plots.  Now, I’ve expressed my deep, vicious (albeit none-too-serious) hatred of tropes in countless ways. However, there is value, I think, in taking the case of the Five-Man Band. I am a discovery author, and I let my characters guide my hand and tell me their story, but that doesn't mean I can ignore proper story structure and form.  We've been telling stories for thousands and thousands of years. It is mankind's oldest form of entertainment, and we know quite well what the formula for a successful story is. Still, rather than dictate my characters obey The Plot, I instead imagine there are slots, in my story, for the characters to put themselves in. That’s why, for me, if I’m going to decide to shift a character into a Main Focus slot of the story, there needs to be room for them, there needs to be a good reason for me to do so, and once they’ve made it there, it is a permanent commitment.  I don’t want to play musical chairs with my five-man band.

My plan involves keeping the focus of my story on Kiva, Kiera, Max and Riley, with an open slot for a fifth character you haven’t officially met yet. I could tell you stories about Twitch and Reese and Donno and Snake and Betty and characters that will no doubt be added later, but those characters, while they might all have their own unique interesting stories, aren’t the focus of Kiva's story. They have their own stories, stories that will only be hinted at on occasion if and when they mesh with Kiva’s story.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that while I probably have more characters to introduce, I fully intend to keep the focus on the core cast, making sure to thoroughly explore the stories of the characters that you and I love most. There will always be time to tell other stories in follow-up comics.