Season 3 Author’s Note
And so ends the final arc of the third season of the Gamer.
Let me start with questions that I expect are on people’s minds. First, no, this is not the end of the story. I still have five seasons total planned. You can say I am stretching out the story, I am not doing so deliberately and my track record shows that 5 seasons was always the plan. Just want to get that out first.
Second, the Advanced Class, Overclock and Modification of Elementalist will be shown at the start of the next arc.
With those two points hit, let me just go through the contents of this arc really quickly.
We can broadly separate it into three parts, being the attack, the counter-attack and the conclusion.
The initial attack began when they crashed and ended with the defending of the Guild Hall. Of note here is the death of the parents, both John’s and Lee’s. I have been planning for these deaths since the start of the season (many of you correctly identified the mushroom-based supplement back in Arc 3 as a set-up), although small parts of the execution changed over time.
Most importantly, the island part of it all was supposed to take noticeably longer. However, the original planning of this part of the story had John closer to the level 500 point at most, so the whole balancing was thrown off on that ground.
What was supposed to have given him the power to fight the Lorylim at that lower level was a Quest from Gaia that effectively made him the tool used to punish the Lorylim for the killing of his parents. In the original scheme, Izha was not a telepath in this way. I must say that I like what I ended up with a whole lot more on every level.
The second part was the counterattacks, ending with the return of Remus. Some pacing issues here as well, primarily around the Rodaclam fight, I feel. Abzu also could have been a bigger deal, but I am really not big on drawn out action sequences, neither writing nor reading them.
The third part was then everything after the counteroffensive up to the end. Originally I intended the romance with Lyndell to wrap up before the final confrontation, but that was left on the cutting room floor due to pacing. I don’t think there was a correct choice here either way.
So that’s the arc pretty quickly summarized. It was action heavy but plot-wise it wasn’t actually that dense. A whole lot happened in a very short amount of time, but the actual changes of the game state, so to say, were concentrated to the beginning and the end.
Now, let me take a moment to talk about the season as a whole. Thematically, that is, I am not listing all of the arcs and telling you what was in them.
Season 1 was about getting John started and accustomed to the Abyss.
Season 2 was about John finding his foothold in the Abyss and getting him on the path to ambition.
Season 3 was about John realizing his ambition and becoming a power player in his own right.
I have, I would say, overachieved that goal. As I said above, I was anticipating to end this season on level 500 AT THE MOST. Around 300 was more of my humble expectation. Instead, we are at almost 800, which puts us pretty close to the level ceiling. In fact, it is safe to assume that he will reach it next season.
Part of this discrepancy between my expectations and the reality was that I made the absolutely stupid assumption that I would liberally use time skips this season. The original name for this season was Years of Freedom, if anyone remembers that, because I genuinely wanted this to take years. I was technically right, it took about 2 years in-story time to get us from the start of Season 3 to the end, but that wasn’t really what I had in mind.
Of course, stupid as I was, I failed to take into account that long time skips DO NOT WORK when I have the Class System in place. I am not going to have him pick up Perks off-screen, that’s dissatisfying, nor am I going to habitually have them stack up until conveniently the reader peers in, that is immersion breaking.
So, it was a more day to day affair, which also plays in me loving my slice of life. The primary reason why this season bloated so much is that I focused on character interaction over plot progression, which you can have your preference for one way or the other. It's clear which one I have.
Another disadvantage of having this arc be this huge and wide-reaching was that John matured a whole lot more before the end than my original plans would have anticipated. The death of the parents was still a harsh, one time punishment, I do not mean to diminish that at all. It’s just that overall things became a bit difficult.
This is why I cut some more of the lead-up to the Lorylim fighting. In the original chain of events, John would have gone into a self-induced coma and used Siena’s dream manipulation (which is criminally under-utilized, I am aware) to live out the chain of events to save his parents over and over again while the harem tried to keep Fusion afloat.
The harem side of things would have been pretty interesting, so I lament having lost that, especially since it would have been an opportunity to pull out some of the darker sides of many of the women. John, however, has long since stopped being the kind of guy who would do that to himself – if he ever even was. That part of that plot probably was never that great.
Originally, the Lorylim infesting John also wasn’t supposed to be a waifu but one of those ‘rage modes that consumes the MC’ sort of deals. He becomes a lot stronger but the primordial Lorylim whose only goal is killing its own kind takes bigger and bigger chunks out of him. This did not work because John was plenty powerful and had enough allies to rely on. Forcing this would have felt silly. It was either doing away with that plot entirely or doing something else with it. I chose Lyndell, because I have self-control (that is a joke).
John’s massively increased power by the end of this arc also demanded that I come up with a way to either make the world way more dangerous in the next two seasons or accept that John will continue to dominate 90% of any fights he gets into, 99% when the harem is involved. I chose the latter because I am not big on the MC having the ability to just force every issue with physical confrontation.
Thus, I came up with the scheme of the Re-Alignment of the Abyss. It was partly inspired by Berserk’s Great Wave of the Astral World, although the changes to the overall world state are not as drastic.
This did require a change in Izha’s previously loose powerset to hyper-telepath. Like a lot of ideas I have spontaneously, this was better than the original plan. Just a manifestation of continuously churning through the same plans mentally.
In the original, Izha was still able to hear the Lorylim throughout the dimensional divide, but he was driven mad way slower by it. There was a whole subplot about finding diary pages throughout the arcs that I dropped because John is too smart for it. I partially revived it in Arc 12, but only as much as I thought I could get away with.
So, the Great Re-Alignment of the Abyss was set in stone and with it came the final difficulty for the finale. I think I may have laid it a bit thick for John’s struggle between choosing whether he just wants to murder both Izha and Tiamat and get his proper revenge (letting Izha win in spirit, because Izha is a nihilist who lives to just get a rise out of people) or helping Izha destroy Tiamat (letting Izha win ultimately because he gets to destabilize the entire world and kill the being he hates the most of all).
Thick it may have been, but it was the best I think I could do.
On that note, I gave a nod to COVID-19 there, because it just so happened to fit with the calendar. I was originally going to fully ignore the pandemic, but when reality and plans line up, I make a connection. I have no intention of further mentioning it if I don’t have to… which I don’t know how much that will be. As little as I can get away with while retaining the realism. I don’t want discussions to start in the comments.
As for Izha and Tiamat as villains… I am pretty happy with myself here. Let’s start with Izha.
Izha is the man that has nothing left to lose. He doesn’t map neatly on my usual stick of “what Deadly Sin does this villain embody” – Izha maybe can be identified with jealousy, but I do not think that is correct. Izha is simply a man that went mad and held onto that madness because it was the only thing that felt right. He is a pitiful phantom, broken by powers he never asked for, found by the worst entity that could have found him. There is depth to him, you could even argue that he wanted to do good but was too broken to do it properly. Ultimately, however, he is absolutely evil.
Tiamat is borderline comically evil. This is, for the most part, intentional. I wanted there to be absolutely nothing redeemable about Tiamat. What there was that was good about her she killed millennia ago. Tiamat is the dragon archetype. She is in this story to be defeated. There are some layers to her as well, although John and the reader only ever get hints of that from dialogues she has with other characters. Ultimately, she is the devouring mother and she wants to become the world, so that none of her children ever suffer. Even that is done in the service of herself because she cannot stand watching what stupid, suffering children do. Tiamat is raw Chaotic Evil. If I was asked to assign any of 7 Deadly Sins to her, the answer would be “Yes”.
The Lorylim as a whole were a body horror eldritch faction. I made them mushroom themed based on the Last of Us, back when only the first one was out, and gave them a nice helping of the Warcraft Old Gods aesthetics, because that is one of my favourite outer gods looks.
I will be honest: I am quite happy to be done with them now. I have written so much body horror by this point it sort of lost its impact on me and I will happily enter a recuperation period before I pull the eldritch horrors back out of the wardrobe.
I might not even do it for this story at all again.
Plenty of human enemies roam the streets now. Make no mistake, the Abyss is more dangerous than ever. Izha has brought the Generation of Monsters fully online and introduced tens of millions of people to the Abyss in an instant. The powers that stand currently will be altered by this. After all, why would suddenly powerful mundanes simply fold into the power structures of the Abyss? How many of them even will be sane, considering they shared their awakening with Izha’s last moments?
And while the world is in turmoil, John will profit.
Indeed, Fusion is the power that stands the most to gain from this Re-Alignment. Because of Fusion’s youth and because it was built by a mundane born man, it will integrate the newcomers with relative ease. Other power structures in the world, so old that they have not really interacted with the mundane in hundreds or thousands of years, will feel the strain a lot more.
And in Japan, where the Abyss is effectively wiped out… things are about to get very, very dicey.
John and his harem will remain very powerful. The rules of the game have not changed, only the number of players in it. He is still a Latebloomer, his harem is still absurdly strong. There are just more people capable of mounting a meaningful defence now, potentially enough to band together to stand even against the entirety of his women deploying at once… potentially.
Alrighty, that’s all of my yapping… you can go here if you wish to support me. Please do, as I do need more money. I am still not in a place I would call financially fantastic, only stable.
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Everything has been said. John has established Fusion as his realm. A marriage is the first focus, then perhaps some leisure is allowed, before Vinh and the new arrivals to the Abyss set Asia alight. The theatre of China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam shall be the centrepiece of the next season. Lyndell will enter the harem, nothing can stop Layla, Fianna takes aim, and perhaps Moira and Lucifrena can get peer pressured?
We are so close to the breeding…
I will see you all again for the 1st Arc of Season 4 of Collide Gamer. I shall dub the Season ‘Trees of Life’ and the first arc ‘The Overdue Rite’.
Until then!