Girl Lich

AGARES [2] is hard to describe, fitting for a spiritual successor to the meta craziness of Worth the Candle. Let me instead kick this off by being a hack and telling you what happens in chapter one.

We’re dropped into the mind of a disembodied entity floating in the void, a “System.” The System (Sy) has access to enough facts about Earth that he can guess he used to be a real person, but he’s lost all his episodic memories in the transition to this reality. Before he can even come to terms with that, he gets a popup.

[Warning: Player Incoming, Scene Uninitialized, World Uninitialized, 120]

Sy clearly needs to set up a world, a story. He’s got a god-like control over the environment, but he only has 120 seconds to prepare it for whatever is coming. He rushes through the process, setting up small details for the player to pick up on, like a tower in the distance, a nearby town, a basic fantastical quest…

He’s not remotely ready for the player he’s going to get. Mulligan Mercer [3] spawns in.

He came out of his stance slowly and looked around, taking in everything I’d made in the last two minutes. He patted himself, making sure that he was whole. A smile slowly spread across his face. “Isekai!” he shouted. “Isekai! Isekai!” It was like he was a Pokémon. […] [E]ventually he stopped dead in his tracks. “System?” he asked. “Help? Menu?”

Mulligan is the worst kind of metagamer. He’s a popular anime reviewer who loves pointing out tropes and CinemaSins-tier mistakes, an adversarial nightmare who will stop at nothing to uncover issues in Sy’s world, as if his task wasn’t already hard enough.

Sy scrambles to deal with him, but everything happens in real time—Mulligan’s introduction to his LitRPG interface ends up having to be handled by the “Autopilot,” a system that, much like ChatGPT, goes for whatever is simplest, the most braindead solution to the problem, averaged from all the world’s media. The Autopilot gives Mulligan the six Dungeons & Dragons stats on a screen, offers him three generic classes, and calls it a day.

Once the Player has seen it, there’s no going back. The restrictions Sy is working with preclude retcons; consistency is king. Time cannot be stopped, though at least he doesn’t need to sleep, unlike his “adversary.”

Even if Mulligan’s stuck with generic stats, even though he made sure to already open and read every single window in the interface, maybe there are hidden stats and unlockable classes. Maybe Sy can make him uncover new interfaces after he levels up. And at least there was enough time to make clear plot hooks for him to follow—

Mulligan turns around and goes into the forest because “I bet they didn’t think I would do that.”

Sy eventually discovers he works for a bigger organization.

*The Auditor rolled her eyes. “Your job is to know this guy inside and out. Your job is to give good isekai.” I looked at her. “Is … is that how they phrase it?” “Not in the manuals,” she said. “The rulebook is three hundred pages and dry as a bone. But yes, that gets the point across. Figure out who your guy is, what he wants, and give it to him. Character arcs are nice but not a must. Progression is great, but not mandatory. You included some derivative D&D game stuff, that’s whatever, but probably the numbers should go up.” “That was Autopilot!” I said. “Who is a worthless piece of junk, by the way.”

He gets warnings from his own interface when he fudges details in a way “the audience” could tell, when the story gets too meta, when the established genre is shifting too much, when a PG-13 rating isn’t being kept.

He has an Auditor assigned to him, and she tells him racking up enough warnings will get him erased. [4] Worse, there are metrics for not only Mulligan’s enjoyment of his adventure but the audience’s, and they can’t get too low either.

The Auditor doesn’t know the details herself, and she seems to be as much of a slave to the organization as Sy is. At least she knows what was in the Orientation that every other System seems to have gotten.

He could stop working himself to the bone, let the Autopilot handle most things, but not only would that be too sloppy even for the nebulous audience, our little System actually cares about the artistic process.

(Turns out even Mulligan does. The ultimate hater has a backstory and layers, like an ogre.) [5]

You’re probably, slowly, realizing what all this is actually about: the author of AGARES himself.

If you don’t know who the author is, it’s impossible to continue without introducing you to an elaborate web of serial economics.

Alexander Wales, like many other writers, became popular because of the rational-fiction scene that emerged after Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality started slowing down. [6] Fanfiction or original fiction, it was all gratis, and I don’t think he ever expected to gain any non-local fame because of it. The reader reactions he got were only a small bonus.

This worked for a while, but then he started writing long-term web serials, somewhat standard fantasy fare like Shadows of the Limelight and Glimwarden. An attempt to support stable long-term writing led to opening a Patreon, but it wasn’t very successful.

Worth the Candle was his next work, Glimwarden left in the dust. He didn’t even write it under his own name originally—anonymity gave him freedom to make the weird LitRPG-themed pseudo-autobiography he wanted without harming his reputation as a “serious writer” or caring about the readers too much. It was a surprising, massive success, resonating with people beyond his usual audience. Wales revealed he was behind it, and eventually the work made it to the website Royal Road, which even back then was a rising gateway to The Mainstream.

This is a graph of his Patreon. I’ll let you guess when the reveal happened.

A gateway it was. Wales got popular off his Weird Work and immediately began getting publishing deals. While working on those, he made This Used to Be About Dungeons as a palette cleanser, which was certainly less Complicated and Artsy but still pretty good.

He was suddenly earning enough money to live off his writing. He could get even more money by selling out. This didn’t exactly [7] happen, but I think the invisible hand of the Mainstream heavily affected him regardless. His next work, Thresholder, needed to live up to new standards—it needed a marketable title, it needed a cover from day one, it needed an action-heavy, trope-filled plot that would be appealing to… Royal Road? [8] And somehow balance it with his own interests so his muse doesn’t completely die?

Thresholder was mildly successful, if a bit more aggressively monetized, with paid and free updates months apart. [9] What would be next? An even more strongly-RR-targeted serial, Doomsday Pivot. Its first book went to a capital-E Editor before release, who gave it enough feedback flags that it still isn’t out two years after conception. I don’t think WTC would have done well with a mainstream editor, either.

Finally, a month ago, this new novel started being posted.

I don’t know exactly what’s going through Alexander’s head. A lot of this is guesswork. But I can’t help but conclude that, as Worth the Candle was self-therapy for his life before 2017, AGARES is that for everything since. He’s certainly admitted he’s finally, once again, writing only for himself.

I suspect the life of an Internet Writer is not easy:

If you want to make it to physical stores, the quality of the book doesn’t even matter that much, you need to network. [10] Even after you sign a deal, you may still need to moonlight as a TikTok whore and do all your own advertising, [11] which really feels like what publishers should be for to begin with. And then they’ll rename your Pith to Queen of Faces anyway.

You could stay Internet-only, but still want some degree of publisher help that deals with Amazon for you. There are pretty much only two “online publishers” that don’t completely suck. One is run by an egomaniac amateur who is really bad at marketing, the other is perennially backlogged releasing bargain-bin schlock, all your series competing with each other for time. [12]

And what about your Patreon and SubscribeStar subscribers? Decisions your publishers made for you—or the ones you make to chase the mainstream—can easily lead to an audience resonance cascade and screw you out of your stable income. And you might feel guilty about ignoring your loyal supporters and pandering to a completely different group of people, who mostly just write “First!” and “TFTC” in the RR comment box…

Worst of all, sometimes your readers will write borderline-parasocial book reviews that psychoanalyze all your decisions just to try to understand the work better. They might even realize this halfway through and end up publishing the review anyway, the bastards.

It’s easy to imagine these authors constantly dealing with severe anxiety. They have so many conflicting priorities, and even if they do everything right, luck still plays a factor. It all could go up in flames at any point.

AGARES is about this.

Sy wants to make Art that people appreciate. Instead, he is answering to a faceless audience that’s nothing like him, with only vague metrics to gauge whether he’s on the right path. [13] An equally faceless organization gives him strong guidelines on what he can and can’t write, some of which directly contradict what makes the metrics go up. Even the friendly faces are slaves to the same system that binds him. The readers he thinks he understands are mercurial and sometimes seemingly impossible to please. And if he doesn’t do everything right, it all falls apart.

“It’s still art,” I said. “Just … not the kind that I would make, if left to my own devices, if I was doing this for myself.”

These are only the monetary anxieties. The story allegorizes the shit out of the Craft in general, with many conflicts concerning the pros and cons of complex worldbuilding, thinking details in advance, locking yourself onto a path, going for accepted tropes vs subversion… and most of all, trying to “redeem” bad genres. Including the “I woke up as a Dungeon Core” one, of course.

It’s a lot like Worth the Candle, since the Dungeon Master preoccupations aren’t that different from a fiction writer’s. Hell, there are plenty of tabletop dynamics here too. But you don’t get a shitty zombie arc. The tug of war of antagonistic-reader-versus-author-versus-autopilot is interesting from the get-go, the freshest you’re likely to read any time soon. The Autopilot is only going to get more relevant as AI grows its creative-writing skills, yet another source of stress.

I’ve been gushing over AGARES (and randomly digressing about economics) for many words now. Does it do anything wrong?

Yes, nothing is perfect, and I’ll never shut up about flaws even when I’m effectively trying to get you to buy something.

The characterization of Mulligan’s first Companion is very off early on, too sarcastic and annoying, though it recovers quickly.

The relationship between Sy and his boss will get stale if things don’t change soon. (I suspect that the Auditor might herself be in a similar position to Sy’s, with layered systems… I could be thinking too hard here.) [14]

You have to pay money to read it.

And… that’s about it.

Let’s bring it home. This is two great stories in one. Mulligan’s ground-level campaign is basically Worth the Candle 2, a complex LitRPG that forces originality onto every set piece and basically requires lateral thinking to win.

“Well known, where I’m from,” said Mulligan. “And I’m willing to trade away everything known to me and not known to Parlance, but ten words is my offer for the knowledge I’m seeking at the moment.” “We must confer,” nodded the man. They spoke in whispers, heads next to each other, cheeks touching, inaudible, and Mulligan thought it was quite curious that they would need to, if both of them were fingers of their god. But perhaps this was just a god’s way of talking to himself? “We accept the conditions,” said the man. “Speak these words which only you know, but we reserve the right to reject them, if they are known to Parlance.” “Very well,” said Mulligan. “Tsundere,” he began.

And that’s not counting Sy’s own meta-deal, a story about the creative process.

“Mulligan believes that a dead god creates rampant eternity,” said Autopilot. As if to emphasize his point, the red and blue dots glowed on the screen where they overlapped. When I looked at what was pinned down by observation and what was staged, I saw that Mulligan had exposure to almost exclusively the points in overlap, with very few exceptions. “Well, he’s wrong,” I said. Audrey cleared her throat. “Oh come on,” I said. “I need to change the entire shape of the world to make him correct?” “I don’t think I’m saying that you need to,” she said. “But yes, it would be nice for the narrative if Mulligan’s observation about the way these two things overlap with each other was, in fact, correct. He hasn’t talked with Sabine about it, but he’s made his declaration, and she’s going to ask him how he knows it. I can see that in her mind.” “That isn’t — that’s tying too many things together,” I said. “It’s not the vision.”

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that we have something truly special here.

AGARES is currently releasing a large batch of chapters every week or so, exclusively on Alexander Wales’ Patreon for the foreseeable future. [15] Read it, now, and let me know what you think.

Footnotes

[1] Also, I might need to get my priorities in order.

[2] Thematically, the title is not exactly bad-on-purpose (even if it’s meant to always be abbreviated), but unappealing-to-publishers-on-purpose. Writing it out in full once was enough.

Rotogravure is a printing process, but I think someone like Mulligan would think of something very different.

[3] Very appropriate that, right after I watch Dimension 20, I read a main character named after two famous Dungeon Masters that both appear in this video.

[4] A popular theory is that this already happened, and it’s why Sy has no memories and got no orientation. He got brainwashed after he failed the first time; he’s not actually new at this.

[5] Readers of Cleveland Quixotic will realize there are a lot of similarities here, but I hated that and loved AGARES. The main character is a big part of it.

[6] Ironically, like our main man MM, “ratfic” often falls prey to munchkinry and meta-commentary on the Cinema Sins of whatever work it’s ficking.

[7] Signing with Kindle Unlimited meant all his newer serials are getting stubbed due to exclusivity clauses. This is a light form of selling out, IMO, especially because money is going to Amazon of all companies. At least AGARES profits go only to him and Patreon.

[8] If you’re here and somehow don’t know what RR is, my feeling is that the median reader is a 16–21-year-old male who loves shonen anime, numbers going up, and power fantasies (but I repeat myself).

[9] Thresholder is still ongoing, but I haven’t read it in a while. Beyond basic problems with the protagonist, it just felt like I was no longer the target audience—maybe I never was.

[10] A related interesting article by Woman of Letters is here.

[11] A particularly pathetic example of this is Jason Pargin, author of John Dies at the End. The man is fifty years old and his entire life is pandering to tweens with clickbait. I guess he used to be a Cracked writer, so the transition wasn’t so bad, but still.

[12] It’s completely possible they’re both totally fine and I’m getting the wrong impression from writers who were particularly unlucky, but I think this is all at least emotionally true.

[13] The audience rating goes from 0 to 5, but Sy is told that the real scale is 4.1 to 4.9 in practice, with the decimal point representing the true score. This mirrors so many websites in reality, like Royal Road itself and especially WEBTOON, where some of Wales’ works have been adapted to comic form.

[14] That sounds very appealing to meta web-serial writers.

[15] I think the plan might be to never release it for free unless it’s finished, so I have no choice but to become a negatively-paid shill here if I want to discuss it with more people. Take those five dollars off Super Supportive and redirect them to something better, I beg you.