More (unfinished) content · 4:33am Oct 11th, 2023

It's been a while. I could talk about things being busy, but things are always busy. I'm not going anywhere, barring very unfortunate circumstances, and I appreciate everyone who's still been following along with this account.

As things currently stand, I have a story with roughly 35,000 words sitting in a google doc. I meticulously planned it out, figuring out how to incorporate it as part of an alternate universe to an alternate universe, established a core theme, set up the most relevant characters and ran out of gas way, way, way before the finish line.

This blog post is not about that story.

I've been going through a bit of a breakup with a game mod I've enjoyed a lot. Not that it isn't fun - currently, it is still very, very fun - but in the span of a couple of years the person in charge of the mod changed, then changed again, then reformed into a committee, then decentralized again into being the combined efforts of independent modders overseen by a small collective of individuals responsible for organizing, slightly editing and codifying the content into a cohesive whole.

It is a mod for a political game. The original chief administrator was an avowed socialist whose primary goal was to deglamourize Nazi Germany by highlighting the core flaws, inefficiencies and rampant and utter dysfunction inherent in the model by recontextualizing things in a theoretical cold-war scenario in which they become a superpower (it's a long story.) The current admin collective has gone out of their way to competencewash Nazi Germany specifically and totalitarian dictatorships in general, portray democracies as weak and flawed and attempt to establish America as morally grey by having them do cartoonishly evil and nonsensical actions in the setting (re: bombing all of Britain with defoliants a la Vietnam to deny any other country benefits from puppeting them and tossing foreign civilians overboard during an evacuation to deny international culpability) to attempt to construct false moral equivalence. Allegedly, this has been for constructing a stronger narrative. In practice, that kind of narrative couldn't work its way out of a horse's ass if you gave it a map and the horse a stack of laxatives the size of its head, but I digress.

Yet, while I (mostly) don't regret doing away with interactive fiction that has become a perversion of its original ideals, I can't ignore the fact that said mod got me interested in, then invested in, political dramas in general. And since I am easily molded by things that i enjoy, and shamelessly rip them off to create my own content in some shape or another, this has caused me to mentally tease the idea of creating a mildly interactive political drama writing project here.

It's been on my mind for a while; over the course of said while, I've largely disregarded it under the belief that i wouldn't finish it, which isn't on unfounded grounds. That said, a little while ago, it struck me that keeping something under wraps won't convince me to finish it all and release it, either - it just means that it won't see the light of day. The benefit of the latter, I suppose, is not disappointing other people by failing to procure more of what they might be looking for; but if that's the case, then the alternative i seem to have provided them is simply not giving them anything to be disappointed about, which isn't ideal, either.

So I'm two beers into the culmination of my musings, and have ultimately decided screw it, I might as well gauge interest.

In theory, as I've said, my interest is in writing a political drama. To be more specific, it would be a chronicle of the time one particular character - canonical or a descent of a canonical one - spent as Acting Princess of Equestria, an elected position similar to that of a President or a Prime Minister, as they try to mold a modernizing and democratizing Equestria in their own image while managing their personal lives, emerging crises, international diplomacy in an era of paradigm shifts, and all the various turbulence that comes with trying to pass legislation as somecreature elected into a position of great power (and great responsibility, natch.)

I have a rough timeline of events plotted out, immutable events that crop up through the course of the story's timeline. But if I haven't been entirely specific about all the details, it's because - as I've mentioned - I wanted to incorporate some audience interactivity as well. Throughout the story - not at every given moment, but during several significant moments that could fundamentally change the story's course - I want to open things up to the audience for suggestions as to how to proceed, i.e. what the character should do during said pivotal moments. And since I'm interested in hearing people elaborate on their thoughts, I'm choosing to go about this quasi-voting process in a totally partisan merit by paying less attention to the total number of responses given towards one course of action or another and more attention towards people who elaborate and give interesting or compelling responses to the choices presented to them.

And if I haven't been specific on who the main characters actually are, well - I've got a number of different ideas for that, too.

But before I start giving more fanciful responses to these sorts of questions, I wanted to know - could this sort of storywriting approach work? More importantly, would YOU be interested in reading and contributing? Or should I go for something less ambitious or more concrete?

Hit me back with your replies. If enough people seem like they want me to go ahead with this idea, I'll elaborate in a future post, but I might as well do a preliminary interest check before i vomit more letters out of my keyboard.

-Petri