Tyrantviewer said:
...for example in your sorcerer snip, rather than his state being some random reincarnation or unique power (like so many reincarnation stories have with little justification) it happened because he did it- with magic he studied and learned- he isn't amazing because he did what would be impossible for anyone else, it is because he did something that he came up with himself- the magic looks like to be something he worked out within the logic of the setting- figuring out how to do it is the amazing thing...
So I realize this wasn't clear, but I first started thinking about a "reincarnation" story as the result of reading the manga Witch Craft Works, in which case the Main Character is a Muggle Who Doesn't Know Anything but is the vessel for some kind of magical super-power, and the Main Girl is the Witch who protects him.
I was thinking about a setting like that: where some rando normal boy has a stupidly vast mana capacity, and the Magic Association put a seal on him to contain his power, and the Designated Love Interest is a local magician girl that's helping look after him, so that Bad Guys can't kidnap him and stick him in a juicer to squeeze him for power.
Except the reason he has a stupidly vast mana capacity isn't because he's a statistical outlier, it's because he's a Sorcerer from a parallel reality (sliding is unsual-but-not-impossible magic) who explicitly manipulated his parameters in his last life, so in this life he can use his vast mana capacity to do, like, high-energy physics experiments and turn himself into a Magical Tokamak.
So from
his perspective, the Designated Love Interest is the
Villain, related to those obnoxious bastards who stuck a seal on him and are getting in the way of his hermetic research.
So when he really does get kidnapped by Bad Guys, he's like "whatever" because even with the seal, he can still scramble their brains whenever he wants, and anyway he's subtly trying to cut a deal with them and use the Bad Guys as a shield against the Wizard Association.
zerohour said:
Follow up question: Don't Light Novels have art in them? How are your drawing skills?
I'm not worried about this, honestly. From my view, I'm using "Light Novel" as the template for what I'm doing, and in either case even if I did want to get art, I'd rather do it with the story essentially complete.
As for my art skills, I'm mediocre at everything except mechanical layouts and isometrics, 'cuz that's all I ever draw.
balthanon said:
For setting, I'm not sure how popular it would be, but playing off of all the dystopian novels that we get in the US with hard-bitten teenage girl protagonists, I've really been wanting to see a novel set in a utopian society. I think a light novel might be a good place to set that, since you don't need world shaking plots to drive them really. You could probably get away with hard sci-fi in that setting if you wanted to go that route-- we have a lot of cool technologies that are on the rise that with some development could lead to a much better world and it would be fun to see someone actually play that out rather than focusing on the "oops, someone forgot to insert a comma here, the robots have taken over the world".
Well, first off, I'm going to point out that Utopian societies are super-hard to set novels in. Because they fundamentally lack conflict, there's nothing to drive a story.
Utopian Science Ficition, as a rule, comes in two flavors: 1) Political Polemac that is extolling the virtues of some set of social / technological / whatever reforms that are the
cause of the utopia, and 2) False Utopia or "Twist Utopia" settings where Things Are Not As They Seem!
Well, that being said, there was an anime called Fractale that was as close to a genuine utopia as anything I've ever goddam seen. The anime presented the people who sustained themselves on high-efficiency tube food while living cheaply in small trailers and doing everything in VR as living wrong, compared to the people who returned to the old ways of farming and living in solid towns and forsaking VR. But from my perspective as a viewer, we had two populations: one that has
solved economic scarcity by filling everyone's bodily needs with the smallest ecological footprint possible while shifting the remainder of economic demand into the fundamentally unlimited space of Virtual Reality; and the second population were a bunch of reactionary jihadis.
I kind of wanted the "Return to the Old Ways" group to get in trouble with Sky Guard / Space Guard / Planetary Defense Organization, who kept all the really terrible weapons mothballed on the moon in case they needed to deflect any killer asteroids... or collapse any potential supernovas in the local group with a temporary blackhole. Possibly by making the rando kid they shanghaied a junior member of the Guard.
seitora said:
How's about the gazillionth-and-one novel about a Virtual Reality?
Well that's kind of what my big fanfic right now is about, so I'd want to do something a little different.
I think I'd rather do one where the Summoned Hero assumes by default that he's trapped in a Virtual Reality, since that's the explanation that he views as theoretically possible, instead of
magic being real. That or "magic" is something like a software hack and he's getting firsthand proof that the Simulation Paradox is true.