Regarding my Aversion to Adventure Stories · 8:00pm Mar 9th, 2016
Truth is, most of the time I find adventure stories very dull. As if, while I read, there is something much more interesting happening later that I am anxious to get to. The beginning is interesting, the end is certainly something, but the middle? Characters and places that I will not be penalized for forgetting.
Though I am not some kind of intense literary scholar. My vocabulary may be exquisite, but by no means am I actually expert at this kind of thing.
The point that I'm trying to make is that, in an adventure, there are often a lot of details. Details about setting and context that I, as a person with my own tastes, cannot often aspire to care about. Especially when I know that a lot of these details exist only to turn and prod the protagonists a certain way to illicit a certain reaction. Granted, this reaction is the most fun to read about. But I would rather not fuss with the goop in-between.
A nice kind of adventure story makes these details compelling. The setting is just as an intriguing character as any. But this is not easy, because it often involves making the setting simple, which runs the risk of being boring, or exceedingly accessible enough to in itself be unoriginal. Unfortunate.
In "The Last Illusion", I take the simple route. Despite its tags, the story is not about the adventure. I take care to remove Trixie and Ditzy Doo far away from the setting because it is not that important. This comes to the effect of making the story a little pedestrian at times, but, like I said earlier, the details of the setting are not important, so I neglect to write about them. Moreover, the story is about the characters' ideals.
I like to think it makes my story interesting. A pair of characters, prompted to interact together in a compelling way. It is a series of adventures stacked on top of each other, each having the characters learn something new about how they live their lives. I hope that I can demonstrate this, pretentious generalizations aside.