I need to start balancing out my reading habits.

If I were to be categorized into a broad fan archetype, I'd most certainly be in the "fanfiction writer" class, albeit dabbling into "blogger" (quite obviously). I've been thinking about it for over a decade now, about as long as I've been an anime fan (actually rather longer, since I started writing non-anime fanfics), and I still can't figure out if my writing of fanfics can be considered to be by choice. Blogging is most certainly a choice: I have lots of things to say about various stuff related to anime, but actually taking the time to type it all out is something that is a conscious decision. In fact, my actual posting schedule (the two-posts-per-week turning up both on Saturday at the last possible moment) might indicate that it's become a sort of self-imposed obligation, a challenge to see how long I can keep this charade up.

Writing stories is another matter: I am forever struck by the impression that if I don't write out the plot ideas that swirl around in my skull, my head will explode. It will be messy.

Currently I'm hammering out yet another story that involves Magical Girls. I've started and abandoned this genre so many times that it's more like I'm waiting for an extended period of maybe a year or so where I can really get to work on just writing, without all the bothersome Real Life stuff getting in the way. Maybe after I've written my mandatory million words of crap in this genre, I can start turning out something of actual substance and value.

The problem I'm facing now is not the old one of cultural bias. I figure that I may as well write everything with Westernized names, and call it "localization". Any complaints that I should have used Japanese names and cultural situations I shall weave together into a banner of I Told You So.

Rather, I am having difficulties in thinking in prose.

Manga, or at least the manga that I read, has an interesting visual flow: the situation is presented to us by means of the panel layouts and their contents, with the text reserved for dialogue and offhand explanations when absolutely necessary. The bigger text boxes and balloons seem to be largely for infodumps, which complement the action on the page. Compare this to many modern Western superhero comics (I have to qualify all of that because invariably someone will probably come up with something beyond my experience), where the panels contain the characters in some dramatic pose or other, while the page is filled with text. The characters just kind of stand there, letting the exposition flow around them. The same amount of dialogue in a single comic book panel will likely be spread out through several much smaller panels in manga; I suspect that the black-and-white nature of most manga has something to do with this.

In any case, I find myself thinking of this story in terms of manga. Here, we have a beat panel, to set up a gag about how the viewpoint character is tailed by his rather odd girlfriend. (Yes, it may be considered a wish-fulfilment story. So it goes.) There, we have a jumpy sort rant about soemthing or other, while another deadpan character does something nonchalant and decidedly bizarre in the background. It's not easy to translate imagery like this into prose, where just about anything that is pointed out in the text should have a reason for being there. Hanging a great big neon sign saying "HERE IS THE JOKE, LAUGH AT THIS" kind of kills the humour.

But since I've run out of shelf space to buy more books, and I've read most of the local library's selection already (not that they have that large a selection), my fiction reading material these days is limited to scanlations and such, which take up little physical space. (I do buy the manga if I like them; I'm waiting for the next Negima Del Rey release, for example.) This may be the source of the problem.

To attempt to correct this, I've been digging out all my old books from dusty boxes to figure out why they're in dusty boxes instead of on my shelves. A cursory reading often reminds me why, as with E. E. "Doc" Smith's Triplanetary:

While not essentially bloodthirsty — that is, not loving bloodshed for its own sweet sake — they were no more averse to blood-letting than they were in favour of it. Any amount of killing which would or which might advance an Eddorian towards his goal was commendable; useless slaughter was frowned upon, not because it was slaughter, but because it was useless — and this inefficient.

And, instead of the multiplicity of goals sought by the various entities of any race of Civilization, each and every Eddorian had only one. The same one: power. Power! P-O-W-E-R!!

I realize that styles have changed over the decades and the Lensman saga is a classic, but it's kind of hard to read something as overblown as that and maintain dramatic tension. Then again, another Dramatic option I seem to have unearthed is Tolkien's Silmarillion, which would probably finish off what's left of my writing style.

Strangely, my current habit of thinking in manga panels does not help me with GamerS: for a gag to be pulled off, the scenes need to be set exactly, with little deviation. Since I am working with pre-existing images, I find that my ad-libbing abilities have been getting the workout more than anything planned. All the GamerS jokes, funny or otherwise, are almost always conceived of about ten to fifteen minutes after I browse through the screenshot collection. So much for planning.

While waiting for my Internet to get repaired (again), I've been marathoning Persona 4, which features, as one of its much-vaunted improvements over Persona 3, branching Social Link options. The overall difference is fairly minor, largely in the conversation options and incidental dialogue; the Social Link results are the same regardless.

Now, if you've never played either Persona 3 or 4 before, the idea behind Social Links is that you meet someone, and then you get to know them better through further repeated meetings, until you form "an unbreakable bond" of Really Close Friendship (and for female characters, possibly something more). Along the way, you help solve some problem or other they are facing in their lives. All of this gives you nice bonuses that help you in battle, or at least the preparations before battle, but that's beside the point.

The branching routes in P4 mean that I get to Socially Link with either one of two choices for each of the school clubs. Back in P3, this didn't matter that much, because the game refused to be clear on which club the Social Link character belonged to until you actually chose yourself (insert Schroedinger's Cat experiment reference here); whatever your decision, you'll be dealing with the same person. In P4, however, you deal with different people. So if you pick the Basketball Team instead of the Soccer Team, you'd be interacting with Kou Ichijo, rather than Daisuke Nagase. The same goes for the Drama Club's Yumi Ozawa and the Symphonic Band's Ayane Matsunaga.

But what about the other, unpicked route?

As I've mentioned before, I have problems with this sort of thing, which I call Visual Novel Route Regret. Basically, all these characters have their problems and worries, some of them really serious, and the game often implies that they will never be free from their woes without your assistance. In P3, it was actually possible, if very difficult, to max out every Social Link in one play-through, and thus solve everyone's problems neatly. But in P4, with the branching, this is impossible, even if the actual game mechanic Social Link maxing is much easier.

And so I have to weigh the Seriousness of the characters' problems against each other. Is Kou's insecurity about being adopted more or less debilitating to his future prospects than Daisuke's inability to get over his old rejected crush? Both have let it affect their performance to the point of depression, so it's not a given that they'll be able to get over it themselves. The Cultural Clubs are a little easier to pick: Yumi's angst about her estranged but hospitalized father, leading to her nearly severing links with her mother, is probably more serious than Ayane's basic lack of confidence in herself. Sorry, Ayane, but Yumi's case is more likely to make her suicidal.

At least the Social Link problems in Persona 4 are not as drastic as in Persona 3, which is a bit of a relief. If you haven't been following a Max Social Link guide but know what is in store for the characters, it's hard to decide between helping Yukari get over her father's death-by-corporate-murder, or comforting Mitsuru after her father's death-by-actual-murder and her arranged marriage to an odious man she hates. Compared to that, Chie's search for a good reason to protect people is a little less world-shattering.

This is a bit of why I'm not very keen on playing the more Dramatic sorts of visual novels: the girls tend to have incredibly depressing (and often supernatural) backstories, which may very well lead to their deaths or spiritual discorporation or whatever. The viewpoint character may or may not know the reason why, in a given route epilogue scene, certain members of the old gang appear to be missing, but the experienced player knows. And that makes it all the more depressing.

On a vague tangent, I have this incredible urge to go write some lyrics for the Junes jingle.