“Huh, wait a second, Season 4 Author’s Note?”

Yeah, this is going to take a moment.

Hello, Funatic here.

As you may or may not be accustomed to by now, I typically split my Seasons up into Arcs, my Arcs into Chapters, all of that. Having a Season that consists of only 1 Arc is a first, but let’s go through what happened here.

Putting it simply: I wrote myself into an interesting spot. Not a corner, I would say, for the reason that there were no plot contrivances necessary to keep things moving, just an interesting spot where I presented myself with a moral quandary.

Obviously, this entire Arc has been about the group’s struggle of whether they should or should not directly intervene in a situation that they do not have a larger stake in. The problem with this question is that it is profoundly difficult and, in planning, I did not give that the proper deference.

You can see the traditional tale: adventurers arrive in a world, find it in a bad spot, intervene and leave it in a better place. A story told a hundred thousand times that will (and should) be told a million times more. That was the idea. I, however, made two critical mistakes.

One, the situation was not as terrible as one might require for a morally unquestionable intervention. You can say much about the castes and the slavery and all of it justified, but Herbaemayim was not in a state of universal destitution. Matter of fact, most people were doing quite well. I wanted each side to have its arguments, even if that argument boiled down to “everyone gets to eat, don’t touch anything”. Which, for the record, I think is a pretty good argument.

Two, the characters of this story. Perhaps I am just a bit too used to the Gamer with its absurdly overpowered protagonist. I wouldn’t say that problems there are solved without inspecting the nuances, but John has luxuries that Apexus simply does not, when it comes to projecting his will onto the world. This is doubly true because one has the will to exert himself, while the other is busy pondering what wisdom is. The scales of these two stories are fundamentally different and our leading quartet reflects this in their attitudes.

I tried, several times, to find an angle that would make the party make a move. I could have forced the issue. It would have been perfectly reasonable. A draconic punishment by an unwise slave owner. A chasing party by a slighted young master. A run in with cruel pirates. All of this could have happened.

But as I wrote the arc, I realized that none of this would have felt true to their characters. The problem isn’t that it wouldn’t be an entertaining story, it's that Apexus is not the character, at least not at this time, to make the drastic move of toppling the flawed systems of an entire leaf. He would not assume that authority to himself.

So, I was dragging my heels for a bit, wondering where to take this next and then I realized that the only logical place to take this is off this Leaf. The party would realize that they cannot achieve what they want and so wouldn’t stay. They would extend what little help they can. That is, therefore, what happened.

And I am really happy with that.

I won’t pretend any of it was planned. Neither will I deny having considered de-canonizing this arc. I believe that admitting to faults in writing and starting over fresh is a drastic but viable measure. But, I won’t employ it here.

It’s messy. I believe my writing style makes it apparent that I like messy. A strength of self-publishing on the internet is that not every chapter needs to have a point to the overarching narrative. There’s no paper to be saved. Meandering is an option and meandering is something I enjoy, because life isn’t that simple and straightforward and that’s just how I like to write things. Sometimes, things are messy, stuff doesn’t work out, time is wasted on tasks that lead nowhere.

So, the Season ends, as they always do in this story, when they leave the Leaf. After just one Arc, this time. It has the added benefit of keeping the story a bit unpredictable. I am not one to overtly resist tropes, but I am not one to follow them blindly either. They’re tools and I will treat them as such.

That being said, I will outline the next arc a bit more carefully. Unpredictable is good, repeatedly dissatisfying is not. Can’t abort every plotline in its inception. I don’t know how long that will take, I just hope I’ll do it properly this time.

So, yeah, don’t have much more to say, honestly. Hope you can derive as much value from this clusterfuck as I have.

Let’s turn a new Leaf everybody,

Funatic.