I Started Writing An Isekai
Well, I started it a few months ago, I'm halfway done with it.
It follows a girl who gets transported into a videogame. A vanilla concept. You know what to expect here. But you can't run an Isekai on vibes. You have to come up with some new thing to make it unique. So what makes this one different?
Well for starters she is in her late 20's/ early 30's and works in an office. No Jr High or High School children are or will ever be involved. Quite a few other isekai start off with an adult who gets transported to a new world as a kid or totally different creature or whatever, so I don't think this will be an issue.
This story is set in the early 1990's. The game she starts playing/gets trapped in is an offline single player DOS fantasy RPG. So I have her arrive in the game (I won't spoil much, I might not finish it. Who knows.) knowing what to do and what to expect from the game itself. The story starts off very meta, with our main character playing along because she doesn't quite realize she is stuck in the game yet.
But here is where it gets fun. She does the usual stuff. She gets her first quest, gains party members, and completes the first dungeon all according to the readers expectations. Her character is now established and the next few chapters should be a fun romp through a vintage RPG until she escapes the game and goes back to the real world with a newfound outlook on her life IRL blah blah blah.
Lol, no.
My pet peeve with these protagonists with "main character energy" is that they always know what to do, are always right, are the smartest person in the room, always win the battle, belittle anyone else who questions them, get the first girl they see to fall in love with them, beat the final boss, save the princess cat on their hero's journey in 3 acts before dinner time and under 100k words.
Not in this story.
I am going to break her, and possibly the reader.
It won't be as silly as the Goon Squad's power point slides but the goal with the second act of this story is to write something that reads like The End of Evangelion feels. The game's code doesn't know how to account for a human psyche trapped within it's processes.
It will be fun to try and write just what the character goes through, how the game tries to deal with her, how she tries to deal with it. If you have ever emulated an older game on a modern ultimate beefmaster gaming PC you'll know that images can glitch, clock speeds cause animation to speed up. The game was written for a computer with a 60mb hard drive and is now being sucked through a ghz warp tunnel - the characters own brain processes.
I'm currently outlining the third part of the story so there can be some semblance of closure once the reader makes it through the middle. I think it will turn out alright. Let's see if I can finish it.