)About inspiration · 9:56pm Apr 30th, 2015
I will use this space to talk and give the appropiate tribute to what I think were the most important inspirations for some of the ideas in the Superiority fimfic.
(needlessly to say, there will be spoilers ahead, not only for the story, but for a couple of old videogames).
Castlevania Aria of Sorrow was a videogame released for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. In my humble opinnion, it is the best game in the entire Castlevania franchise.
Castlevania for the N64, was a 1999 videogame released for...you guessed right, the Nintendo 64 (
), while frankly it is quite average, if not flat out bad, I enjoyed it back when it was first released. For anyone not knowing what the Castlevania franchise is all about, most of the games are all about exploring Count Dracula castle, and most of them end with a climatic battle against the evil vampire named Dracula.
In Castlevania for the N64, your character meets fairly early in the plot an old yet regal looking vampire that is identified as Dracula. He talks like Dracula, fights like Dracula, and is even accompanied by the classic musical theme that the series uses for the fights against Dracula. 
But surprise, surprise, he was not Dracula. Actually, he was a willing servant of the true Dracula, which for the duration of the game, took the guise of a weird, but otherwise nice young man, and becomes the final boss of the game..
Castlevania Aria of Sorrow is a game that takes place in the future, many years after the supposed death and destruction of Dracula. But early in the game you face against a guy called Graham Jones, who acts like Dracula, looks like Dracula, blatantly tells you that he is the reincarnation of Dracula and fights against you like Dracula.
You see, according to the lore of the game, Graham was born exactly at the moment the original Dracula was destroyed. As he grew older and noticed he possessed magical powers, that led him to believe that he was the reincarnation of Dracula. Therefore, when Dracula's castle showed when he was an adult, he entered it intending to take over as the Dark Lord he believed himself to be, which gave him delusions of grandeur. He is destroyed by the character that is actually the true reincarnation of Dracula, finally recognizing at his last moments that he was a fool. Thankfully for everyone involved, the true Dracula refused the call, fought against his dark side and decided to take the side of good.
As you can clearly see, I took elements of both games twists, and mixed with a dash of Rosemary's Baby and some elements from my own imagination for the whole concept of the two Sombras.
9 hours 9 persons 9 doors and Virtue's Last Reward, are two games in the same franchise, retroactively called the Zero Escape series. They were released for DS and 3DS/Vita in 2009 and 2012 respectively.
I wouldn't be able to do the story of this two games justice while trying to explain it here in mere words (not to mention, they are so good, and recent enough, that shouldn't be spoiled to anyone). All I will say is that both games take a fantastic and original approach to the concepts of fate, destiny, alternate dimensions/timelines, truth, corruption, trust, betrayal and love. The whole Termite speech that was weirdly included in the fimfic? That was all an extended homage to a similar scene in Virtue's Last Reward. Two of my favorite games/visual novels ever, and should be played by anyone who likes an interesting, original story. 
And sure... I could mention here the whole inspiration that was the Netorare genre (don't know what Netorare is? you might don't want to google it if you are in the work or school), but considering the restrictions on the blog posts, I rather not
. At any rate, thanks for reading this.
I didn't make the Aria of Sorrow connection, even though for a while I was a Castlevania junkie.
Maybe it's just been too long since I played it... it's a little old now, isn't it?
I always sorta wondered, once I looked past my knee-jerk outrage at the subject, what exactly someone feels when they enjoy NTR. Like, some cheating fic is very obvious (most FimFic is this way): we're supposed to feel like we're the guy who the girl is cheating with (because the great majority that is fetishized or glamorized is girls cheating on guys on Fimfic at least. More rarely it's a guy stringing a girl along and she never knows) and laugh or treat with contempt her pathetic boyfriend/husband, or occasionally her villainous husband.
But NTR (which is, as far as I know, entirely about a girl cheating on a guy. I have yet to see a gender flipped version) has such a focus on hurting the man and how much of a 'nice guy' they are and either how much pain they are or how much of a fool they are for not noticing... Is it... a masochistic pleasure, where they identify with the cheated upon? Or is it the same pleasure as the other sorts of cheating fic, where they identify with the cheater? Or is it some kind of comedic effect, intending to come off as ridiculous and absurd, like Kafka intended when he wrote his stories?
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Those questions take particular importance in sites like this, because I think NTR is an entirely different beast in text and in more graphic media.
Let be honest here, if NTR has become a mainstay word across the less than decent circles in the internet is not because of the fanfictions or other kinds of writings. The popularity of the genre as a whole is primarily because of the ridiculous amount of adult manga/animation/movies/games/etc. that use it as a centerpiece, and is getting more and more popular with each passing year. But in the end, in most cases one can't help but feel that the whole NTR coat of paint is superficial and the creators are just using the NTR pretext in order to use a different idea just like they might otherwise use drugs, blackmail, mind control, or a long etc. After all, the content itself visually, is hardly that different than what you find in "vanilla" adult media, is just pron, and the guys (and gals) that get off with one of them can use another with little difference. In this case they enjoy NTR because it arouses them, as simple as that.
But is when someone tries to translate the whole NTR thing to text is where the real test for the genre is, since in many cases arousal of the viewer/reader is not the primary objective (in the Superiority Fimfic for one, the longest singleintercourse was in the vanilla happy moment of the last chapter and not in any of the NTR moments). In this case I don't think is blatant masochistic pleasure of identifying with the victim, nor sadist pleasure of identifying with the cheater. I think the hook comes from the worry and the empathy with the characters. Readers don't see themselves as any of the characters, but see the characters as individuals they care about, and even though they might feel disgusted with the perverse situation they are in, they are so worried for this fictional characters that they need to know what happens next, or how everything ends. And said empathy and worry is not just directed at the victim, but sometimes to the cheater too, since even at the worst moments, they can't help but feel pity and disappointment for them, and hope that there was some kind of explanation for everything. The resolution might be horrible, most of the time quite sad, rarely it might be happy, but in the end, the reader NEEDS to know how it all ends.
As some people enjoy being scared by a terror work, or they enjoy to cry at a sad tragedy, I suppose there are persons that enjoy (to use a word) the thrill of being artificially worried by a NTR work.