Mary Sue, Marty Stu, and the Overpowered Misunderstanding

Or how dumb is power scaling anyway?

A discussion came up at work recently. My boss asked us to think about our anthem. Our theme song. She left it as homework for the week, which was generous of her. A full week to figure out what to say. Not what's my theme song. My anthem. And if you know me at all, you know this is a loaded question. Because I don't work in silence. I don't exist in silence. Right now I'm listening to dark neoclassical strings fused with techno. Last week it was country. Before that, J-Pop. Before that, classical. Before that, electro swing. Before that, heavy metal. Before that, I heard a banger clip in a YouTube video and listened to it on repeat for three days straight. I go through phases the way most people go through socks. So where do you even start when everything is your genre? I knew immediately what not to do. I wasn't going to roll up with "Wild Thing" by Tone Loc or "Let's Talk About Sex" by Salt-N-Pepa. Tempting? Sure. But this was supposed to mean something. I also didn't feel like citing some hyper-specific group that produced exactly one real album and then faded into the ether. I didn't even quote Deep Purple's "Lazy," and trust me, that one was on the short list for a long time. I went through everything. "Firebird Suite." "Pruit Igoe" from Watchmen. "Shut Me Up" by Mindless Self Indulgence. "Bruises" by Unloco. "Anarchy" by KMFDM. "Computer World" by Kraftwerk. Any one of those could have been the answer on a different day, in a different mood, at a different point in my life. Because here's the thing about me and music. I legitimately love it. All of it. I listen to both types of music: country and western. And also techno, trance, urban, jungle electronic. I listen to DJ Tiesto pretty much nightly on my sleep trance playlist, which also has Moby, Lemon Jelly, and Ghost in the Machine, to name a few. I make soundtracks for every writing project. Every single one. I have soundtracks for books I read. I read The Dirty Pair: Sim Hell by Adam Warren with the original Mortal Kombat soundtrack so many times that I legitimately start thinking about nano swarms when I hear "Juke Joint Jezebel" metro mix. That's not a joke. That is a real Pavlovian response I have developed over decades of being a deeply weird person. So I labored mightily over this. Should I troll? The easy contender was "Never Gonna Give You Up." I could have Rick Rolled my entire department and retired on that high. I could have gone for the epic troll of Deep Purple's "Lazy" and just not explained why it's such a monumentally awesome song. Let them sit with it. Wonder about it. Eventually look it up and realize they'd been educated against their will. Or should I be serious? Actually try to figure it out? Was it "Across the Nation" by The Union Underground? A song I would throw horns to while driving my Wrangler with the top down. Was it the sublime perfection of "Carol of the Bells"? What about "The Power of Positive Drinking"? I spent a week on this. A full week. And I still didn't have a solid answer the morning of. Then the day of the meeting arrived and everyone went before me. Twelve people. Eleven of them gave predictable, safe answers. Bob Marley. That one popular song from Slumdog Millionaire. Some Hindi music. A Christian rapper. And the big reason behind all of them was the same: they just grew up with it. That was it. That was the depth of the connection. "I grew up with it." Fine. Valid. Not everyone needs to have an existential crisis over homework from their boss. But me? I went classic. Maybe I was channeling Darren from Kobold. Maybe it's because Queen makes legitimately excellent music. Maybe it's because there's only one answer that has ever really fit, and I was just too busy sorting through the noise to see it sitting right there the whole time. My anthem? "The Show Must Go On." And if you don't know why, then I don't know if you know me. Or the greatest Queen to ever live. Freddie Mercury was dying. He knew it. Everyone around him knew it. And he still came in to do his job. He still walked into that studio, sick beyond what most of us will ever experience, and he sang. Not because he had to. Not because someone was paying him. Because the show must go on. Because that's what you do. You show up. You do the work. You pour whatever you have left into the thing that matters, and you don't stop until the lights go out. That's the anthem. Not because the song is flashy or because it makes me look cool at a meeting. Because it's true. I've been knocked down more times than I can count. I've had health scares, career setbacks, creative droughts, personal losses, and moments where the smart money would have said to quit. And every single time, I got back up and kept going. Not gracefully. Not always quickly. But I kept going. The show must go on. It's not a motto. It's not a bumper sticker. It's a way of being. You don't stop because it hurts. You don't stop because it's hard. You don't stop because nobody's watching. You stop when you're dead, and based on Freddie's example, maybe not even then. So yeah. Eleven safe answers and then me, standing there like a lunatic, telling my coworkers about a dying rock legend and why his refusal to quit is the only anthem that has ever made sense for my life. Turns out my boss was going to make a playlist out of everyone’s picks. Which means I missed my chance to troll her. I could have pranked her every time she hit shuffle with Salt-N-Pepa’s “Start Me Up” kicking in at full volume. Oh well... it would have been weird as the last song. Maybe Dennis Leary’s “Life’s Gonna Suck” would have been the better play. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So I’ve been playing the Cosmere RPG lately, and it’s done something I wasn’t prepared for. It’s made me miss the old days. Not in that vague, sepia-toned way people get nostalgic about things they barely remember. I mean the real thing. The visceral, bone-deep ache of knowing you used to have something good and it’s just... gone. I’m talking about Saturdays. Getting up, sometimes after working third shift, grabbing a shower, and hauling yourself to a friend’s place to sit around a table with a bunch of other nerds and play RPGs until two or three in the morning. Then you’d drag yourself home, sleep for a few hours, and wake up to do homework or chores or whatever mundane thing the real world demanded. And you did it gladly, because you’d just spent twelve-plus hours in another world and it was worth every minute of lost sleep. I spent years with my gaming group. Years. That’s not something you replace easily. And then I moved ten hours away, because life doesn’t care about your hobbies, and that was pretty much the end of it. You tell yourself you’ll find a new group, you’ll make it work online, you’ll do play-by-post or virtual tabletops or something. And maybe you try. But it’s not the same. It’s never the same. There’s something about sitting across from people, rolling actual dice, watching someone’s face when their character gets obliterated by a critical hit, that a screen just cannot replicate. And here’s the kicker. Even if I found a group tomorrow, when would I play? I’ve got a full-time job in medical IT. I write books. That’s not a side hustle or a casual hobby I pick up when I’m bored, that’s a second full-time job that doesn’t pay like one. I’ve got an alpha reader waiting on pages. Somewhere in there I’m supposed to sleep and eat and pretend to be a functioning human being. The math doesn’t work. I want to game more. I want to play. The desire is there, screaming at me like a bard who just rolled a natural 20 on their performance check. But the hours in the day don’t give a damn about what I want. I’ve looked at play-by-post. It should work, right? You write when you can, other people write when they can, and eventually a story comes together. Except it doesn’t hit right. It’s like the difference between a live concert and listening to the same album on your phone with one earbud in while you’re doing dishes. Technically it’s the same music. Functionally it’s a completely different experience. Play-by-post is RPGs with the energy sucked out. You lose the spontaneity, the table talk, the moments where someone says something so absurd that the entire group derails for twenty minutes laughing. That’s the stuff I miss. That’s the stuff you can’t schedule into a forum thread. And now, because the universe has a sense of humor, one of the players wants to run Daggerheart. Look. I’m going to be honest here, because that’s what the Tenets demand. I don’t get the appeal. I’ve looked at Daggerheart. I’ve read through it. And I cannot figure out why I’m supposed to be excited about a system where the rules are so light they’re practically transparent, and the abilities you do get cost action points for what amounts to a plus two. A plus two. That’s it. That’s what you’re spending your limited resources on. Not some spectacular, table-shaking power that makes everyone sit up and pay attention. A plus two. I could sneeze and get a plus two. And here’s the thing people don’t seem to consider when they pitch rules-light systems at someone like me: I write books. I have an alpha reader. I am already doing collaborative narration for a living. I don’t need the RPG to provide me with a framework for telling stories, I have that covered. What I need from a tabletop game is the game part. The mechanics. The crunch. The system that pushes back and makes you earn your victories. If I wanted to sit around and make up stories with other people, I’d start a writing circle, not roll dice. About a year ago, I answered a Reddit post looking for players in a RIFTS game. And I spent a month on character creation. A month. Building out backstories, stat blocks, figuring out how all the ridiculous RIFTS mechanics interacted with each other, making characters that felt like they had weight and history and mechanical identity. That’s what RIFTS does to you. It’s a beautiful, glorious mess of rules layered on rules, and you need a degree in accounting to build a character, but when you’re done, that character is yours. You earned every stat, every skill, every absurd combination of abilities that makes your GM want to throw the book at you (sometimes literally). Daggerheart got announced in our group and I said fuck it, I’m writing up Ryoga Hibiki as a minotaur chick with a club like Kaido from One Piece. Took me two minutes. Two minutes, because there just isn’t enough system there to engage with. When your character creation process takes less time than ordering coffee, something is missing. I didn’t feel like I’d built a character. I felt like I’d filled out a name tag. A month versus two minutes. That’s the gap. That’s what rules-light costs you. Sure, you get to play faster. But what are you playing? RIFTS gave me characters I could write novels about (and have). Daggerheart gave me a sticky note. I grew up on systems with crunch. AD&D had tables for everything. RIFTS was the aforementioned beautiful mess. There was weight to the mechanics. The rules weren’t just there to facilitate storytelling, they were part of the story. When you rolled and the dice betrayed you, it mattered because the system had teeth. When you succeeded against long odds, it felt earned because you understood exactly how unlikely it was. Rules-light systems feel like someone took a full meal and replaced it with a protein bar. Sure, it’s technically food. It’ll keep you alive. But nobody’s sitting down at a table excited about a protein bar. Nobody’s losing sleep over a protein bar. And I don’t want to spend my precious, limited gaming time, the two hours I can barely scrape together, eating a protein bar when I know what a full meal tastes like. I know the argument. Rules-light systems lower the barrier to entry. They let you focus on the narrative. They’re more accessible. And sure, fine, all of that is true. But accessibility without depth is just... shallow. It’s the gaming equivalent of those stories where the protagonist gets handed ultimate power on page three and never has to struggle for anything. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the tension? If the system can’t threaten me, if the mechanics are so forgiving that failure is basically a narrative suggestion rather than an actual consequence, then what am I even doing? I’m not playing a game at that point. I’m doing collaborative improv with extra steps. And I already have a creative outlet for narrative collaboration, thanks. It’s called being an author. And maybe that’s fine for some people. I’m not telling anyone they’re wrong for liking Daggerheart or FATE or whatever other system treats rules like suggestions. But it’s not for me. I need the crunch. I need the weight of a system that pushes back. I need to feel like my decisions matter mechanically, not just narratively. Because when everything is narrative, nothing is. The Cosmere RPG, at least, has some meat on its bones. It’s got the Sanderson magic systems baked in, and those are inherently logical, which appeals to the part of my brain that needs to know why things work the way they do. Sanderson’s magic has rules, hard rules, and the RPG respects that. There’s a system you can engage with, not just narrate around. That’s why it’s hitting the nostalgia buttons. Not just because it’s a tabletop RPG, but because it reminds me of what tabletop RPGs are supposed to feel like. Structured. Challenging. Worth the investment of time. But even so, two hours of it just feels like a tease. Like getting one bite of that full meal and then being told the kitchen’s closed. I remember what it felt like to play for ten, twelve hours straight. To be so deep in a campaign that you forgot what day it was. To have a character with so much history and so many scars (mechanical and narrative) that losing them would genuinely hurt. You don’t build that in two-hour sessions spaced weeks apart. You build that in marathon sessions fueled by bad pizza and worse soda, surrounded by people who care about the game as much as you do. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that back. That’s the honest truth, and it stings to type it. The people, the time, the energy... all of those things are harder to come by now than they were twenty years ago. And I’m not going to pretend that playing Daggerheart for two hours on a weeknight is going to scratch that itch, because it won’t. It’s a band-aid on a wound that needs stitches. Oh, and they’re laying it over a Pathfinder module. So we’re taking a system built for a rules-heavy game and running it with a system that barely has rules. That’s like putting a lawnmower engine in a Ferrari and wondering why it doesn’t handle curves. But I’ll try it. Because at the end of the day, even a pale shadow of the thing you love is better than nothing. Even a plus two is technically a bonus. And who knows. Maybe I’ll be wrong about Daggerheart. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong about something. It would just be the most recent. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

I Am Not A Kobold! was supposed to be a light novel. 100,000 words. Quick, fun, get it out the door, move on to the next thing. That was the plan. And if you’ve been following me for any length of time, you already know how well my plans tend to work out. Book 1 is 182,654 words. Book 2 is 182,207 words. I’m rereading both of them right now before starting book 3. The series might be six books now. And there’s a potential spin-off trilogy. So much for light and quick. Let me tell you how we got here. The Build Kobold started in 2024. I got eleven chapters done and then life did what life does, which is get in the way. The remaining chapters, twelve through twenty, plus two side stories, got finished over the course of 2025. Coming in literally on the wire on December 31st, 2025. Because apparently I have a thing for deadlines, even self-imposed ones that no one but me cares about. Book 1 took the better part of a year, and to be fair, I was jumping between multiple projects at the time. That’s not unusual for me. I’ve always got a dozen irons in the fire. But the real reason book 1 took as long as it did wasn’t the distractions. It was the foundation. The skills system, the classes, the world lore, all the bits that make a litRPG universe function had to be built from scratch. You can’t just throw stats on a page and call it a day. The mechanics have to feel like they belong in the world, not bolted onto it. That takes time. That takes iteration. That takes staring at a spreadsheet at two in the morning wondering why you didn’t just write a regular fantasy novel. Book 2 was a different beast entirely. The foundation was there. The world existed. The characters had voices. I knew how the systems worked because I’d already built them. So book 2 came together in a span of a few months, even though it ended up the exact same length as book 1. Nearly the same word count, fraction of the time. And here’s the funny part, I actually wrote the back half of book 2 twice. The first version had one ending that set up book 3 a certain way. I gave it to my alpha reader, who didn’t like how book 2 was going, we talked it over for at least a couple of dinners and some breakfasts. One must never discuss literary fiction on an empty stomach. Tolkien would be very cross, and we mustn’t make the Professor in Bookhalla cross. But I waffled on it, decided I agreed and that the ending wasn’t that good, and rewrote the entire back half. Still finished by the end of April. That’s what having a foundation does for you. When you’re not building the house and the furniture at the same time, you can afford to tear out a wall and rebuild it without losing the whole structure. The Polish Now here’s the thing people don’t talk about enough: the writing is the easy part. It’s the editing that takes forever. Book 1 of Kobold is pretty well polished at this point, going back and forth between me and my alpha reader over and over again until we’re both satisfied. It’s gone to an editor, it’s up on royal road That process, the read, the notes, the revisions, the “this scene doesn’t land the way you think it does,” that’s where the real time investment lives. Anyone can vomit 182,000 words onto a page. Making those words worth reading is the actual job. I’m in that phase right now with the reread. Going through book 1 and book 2 back to back before I start book 3, making sure the continuity holds, making sure the character voices are consistent, making sure I haven’t contradicted my own lore somewhere. Because when you’re potentially looking at a six-book series, every thread you leave dangling in book 1 is a thread you have to either pick up or acknowledge later. And I’d rather catch those now than five books from now. The Villain Who Refused I need to talk about Bart. Bart was supposed to be the villain. That was the plan. Through a good chunk of the first half of book 2, he was geared to be our antagonist. More than that he was always going to be the measuring stick everyone compared against. But… he was just too charming. The character outgrew the outline. He started making choices that didn’t fit the role I’d written for him, and instead of fighting it, I followed him. This has happened to me before. Tessa in My Monstrous Life was supposed to be a bitch. I started writing her as one. No secret, I don’t like felines. So Tessa is as a cait sith, a cat girl monster, with an attitude problem and a chip on her shoulder. But god if she’s not one of my favorite characters in that series now. Some characters just refuse to be what you planned. They tell you who they actually are, and you either listen or you write a worse book. Bart told me who he was. And who he was, was Superman. Not literally, but in function. He became the most powerful, most capable, most morally complex character in the story. The guy who was supposed to be the obstacle became the pillar. And that created its own set of problems, because once you’ve got a Superman in your story, you have to answer the most important question in fiction: How do you take out Superman? I’m not going to answer that here. But it’s the question that turned a two-book project into a potential six-book series, and it’s the question that might give Bart his own trilogy. The Books of Bart. A villain who became a hero who became something else entirely. His story has a life of its own now, and I’m just the idiot holding the pen. The Author Who Can’t Do Sequels Here’s the thing I need to admit. I’ve said, more than once, that I’m bad at sequels. That I prefer building new fictional universes over expanding existing ones. And that’s been true for most of my career. I start something, finish it, or abandon it, and move on to the next shiny idea. The project folder is proof of that. Dozens of outlines, half-finished concepts, worlds that got built and never revisited. Kobold broke the pattern. I don’t know exactly when it happened. Somewhere between building the skills system and watching Bart refuse to be a villain, this stopped being a project I was trying to finish and started being a world I wanted to stay in. That’s never happened to me before. Not like this. The Sundered Realms is massive, but it’s a universe I built to house other stories. Kobold is a universe I built that started housing its own. Five to six books. Maybe more. A spin-off trilogy. Side stories. I went from “100,000 words, get it out the door” to “I might be living in this world for years.” And the weirdest part? I’m not scared of that. I’m excited. I was actually wondering if maybe a series of vinettes, romantic ones for Angel and Bel, maybe show Verth go on a date. Or Gex? What’s our big cleric boy Titan doing? Does he have wholesome clerical woman he visits? Does he like the fellas? I don’t know… the pen does. So yeah. The kobold in the room is that the author who said she couldn’t do sequels is now planning half a dozen of them. Turns out I wasn’t bad at sequels. I just hadn’t found the right story yet. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

I have a problem. I’ve written a 130,000-word novel about a Were-Hyena who thinks she can outsex a succubus, and I don’t know what to call it. Not the title. I’ve got the title. Devilish Deal. That part was easy. The problem is everything else. What genre is it? What category does it go in? Where does it sit on the shelf? Because the publishing industry has a classification system, and my book looked at it, laughed, and walked away. Let me explain. The Brackets When you’re publishing a book, the first thing you’re supposed to figure out is your audience. And the industry has helpfully provided you with age brackets to make that easy. Board Books for ages zero to three. Picture Books for three to eight. Early Readers for five to eight. Chapter Books for six to ten. Middle Grade for eight to twelve. Young Adult for twelve to eighteen. And Adult for eighteen and up. Simple, right? Except these aren’t descriptions of content. They’re marketing buckets. They tell a bookstore where to shelve something and a parent what section to browse. They don’t tell you a damn thing about what’s actually in the book. An “Adult” book could be a literary character study about grief, a 900-page epic fantasy with no romance, or wall-to-wall erotica. All three go in the same age bracket. A “Young Adult” book could deal with war, trauma, death, and political revolution, but because the protagonist is sixteen, it’s YA. The brackets are the starting line, not the finish. And that’s where it gets messy. The Genres So you’ve picked your bracket. Now you need a genre. The publishing industry gives you the broad strokes: 1) Romance: centered on romantic relationships with an emotionally satisfying ending. 2) Mystery/Crime: follows a protagonist investigating a crime or puzzle. 3) Fantasy: features magical elements, imaginary worlds, or supernatural creatures. 4) Science Fiction: explores speculative technology, space travel, or future societies. 5) Historical Fiction: set in the past, blending fictional characters with real historical events. 6) Horror: designed to frighten, shock, or create dread. 7) Literary Fiction: focused on character study, style, and thematic depth rather than plot-driven action. 8) Action/Adventure: high-stakes quests and fast-paced action. Eight categories. Clean. Manageable. And about as useful as a screen door on a submarine for anyone writing anything that doesn’t fit neatly into one box. Where does Devilish Deal go? It has romantic elements, but the romance isn’t the center and there’s no emotionally satisfying ending in the traditional romance sense. It has fantasy elements, succubus, were-hyena, elven noble, but it’s not an epic quest. It’s not horror, it’s not mystery, it’s not literary fiction in the “quiet character study” sense, even though character work is the backbone. It has explicit scenes but it’s not built around them. If I had to pick one of those eight, I’d say Fantasy. And that would tell you almost nothing useful about what you’re actually getting into. The Sub-Genre Explosion This is where things go completely off the rails. Because the industry looked at those eight broad categories and said “that’s not specific enough” and then the internet got involved and said “hold my beer.” This isn’t a new problem. Robert E. Howard wrote Conan. It was Fantasy. Then somewhere along the way it became “Sword and Sandal,” then “Low Fantasy,” and now you’ve got three names for the same thing depending on who’s talking and when they started reading. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern got labeled “Science Fantasy” because it had dragons but they were genetically engineered, and back in the day Sci-Fi and Fantasy were published and shelved together anyway. Pern is probably our first real example of genre classification breaking, because the book itself didn’t change. The shelving system did. But that was a slow drip. What’s happened in the last decade or so is a flood. Here’s a sampling of what the sub-genre landscape looks like now, with what they actually are in plain English: 1) LitRPG: Fantasy with video game mechanics visible on the page. 2) Progression Fantasy: Fantasy where the power system has visible stats and leveling. 3) Romantasy: Fantasy plus Romance. That’s it. Two genres in a trench coat. 4) Grimdark: Fantasy but brutal and morally grey. 5) Cozy Fantasy: Fantasy but gentle and low-stakes. The anti-grimdark. 6) Noblebright: Also the anti-grimdark, but with more heroism and less tea. 7) Dark Romance: Romance but edgy. 8) Reverse Harem: Romance with multiple love interests. 9) Monster Romance: Romance but the love interest isn’t human. 10) Portal Fantasy: Fantasy where you travel to another world. 11) Isekai: Portal Fantasy, but Japanese. 12) Cultivation: Progression Fantasy, but Chinese 13) Xianxia: Cultivation plus martial arts plus immortality. 14) Wuxia: Martial arts fantasy from Chinese tradition. Been around for centuries, got a new English label. 15) Dungeon Core: LitRPG but you’re the dungeon. 16) Slice of Life: Literary Fiction but low-stakes and usually cozy. 17) New Adult: Was supposed to be “Adult but younger characters.” Became “Romance with explicit content and twentysomethings.” 18) Urban Fantasy: Fantasy set in a modern city. 19) Paranormal Romance: Romance plus Urban Fantasy. 20) Gaslamp Fantasy: Fantasy set in the Victorian era. 21) Steampunk: Sci-Fi plus Victorian aesthetic. 22) Cyberpunk: Sci-Fi plus dystopian tech noir. 23) Dieselpunk: Sci-Fi plus WWII-era aesthetic. 24) Solarpunk: Sci-Fi plus optimistic environmentalism. 25) Biopunk: Sci-Fi plus genetic manipulation. 26) Flintlock Fantasy: Fantasy set in the gunpowder era. I could keep going. I won’t, because we’d be here all day and I have books to write. And that’s not counting the subcategories that are in a specific category. Romance for instance has historical romance and contemporary that didn’t get touched on. And Dystopian and straight up erotica. Look at that list. Really look at it. How many of those are genuinely new concepts, and how many are just existing genres with a modifier bolted on? Romantasy is Fantasy plus Romance. Grimdark is Fantasy but dark. Cozy Fantasy is Fantasy but not dark. The punk genres are all Sci-Fi plus an aesthetic. Isekai is Portal Fantasy with a different word. Half of these sub-genres exist because someone needed a new tag for Amazon’s algorithm or a new hashtag for BookTok, not because the English language lacked the words to describe what they were writing. This is the exact same problem music went through. Rock was a genre. Then rock became classic rock, hard rock, soft rock, punk, post-punk, new wave, synth-pop, grunge, post-grunge, nu-metal, industrial, industrial metal, electronic body music, gothic rock, gothic metal, symphonic metal, power metal, thrash metal, death metal, black metal, progressive metal, djent… At some point you’re not describing genres anymore. You’re describing vibes. You’re taking a single characteristic of a piece of art and elevating it to a category, and the result is that everything is technically classifiable but nothing is actually classified in a way that helps anyone find what they’re looking for. It’s the paradox of specificity. The more specific you get, the less useful the categories become, because no two books (or albums, or games) occupy the same exact space. And the reader standing in a bookstore, or more likely scrolling through Amazon, is drowning in tags that tell them everything and nothing at the same time. Pop Lit and the Blurring of Lines And then there’s the rise of what I’d call pop lit. The books that exist in the overlap of multiple genres and don’t apologize for it. Romantasy is the obvious example, it’s fantasy plus romance, and it’s gotten big enough that it’s functionally its own category now. But is The Priory of the Orange Tree romantasy? Is it epic fantasy with romantic elements? Is it literary fantasy? The answer depends on which BookTok creator is reviewing it and what shelf Barnes & Noble put it on that week. The same thing happened with “New Adult” as a category. It was supposed to bridge the gap between YA and Adult, covering that 18-to-25 age range where characters are navigating the mess of early adulthood. In practice, it became a marketing tag for “romance with characters in their twenties and explicit content.” That’s not what the category was supposed to be. But that’s what it became because the market and the algorithm shaped it, not the writers or the readers. My Problem So let’s come back to Devilish Deal. 130,000 words. A Were-Hyena named Tara who speaks in a Cockney accent. A succubus. An elven noble. A dragon girl with a pretty obvious curse. A minotaur who runs the brothel the three of them work at. The minotaur and the dragon girl become Tara’s love interests, because apparently my protagonist looked at the menu of available romantic partners and said “give me the bovine and the dragon mommy.” Three on-page sex scenes and one implied. BDSM as a thematic framework, not a kink checklist, exploring power dynamics, loss of control, and assumed identity. Character work that makes up the vast majority of the word count. Coworker relationships that are as central to the story as any romantic or sexual element. Is it erotica? No. Three scenes in 130,000 words doesn’t make something erotica any more than three fight scenes make something an action novel. Is it romance? There are romantic elements, but Devilish Deal doesn’t follow the romance genre’s structural rules. Is it romantasy? That’s closer, but romantasy has become so associated with a specific aesthetic and reader expectation that calling Devilish Deal romantasy feels like false advertising. Is it dark fantasy? Urban fantasy? Paranormal romance? Adult fantasy with mature themes? I genuinely don’t know. And I think that’s actually fine. The Fifty Shades Problem And if you think my classification crisis is bad, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Fifty Shades of Grey. Fifty Shades got labeled as “BDSM erotica” by the publishing industry, the media, and pretty much everyone who’s ever mentioned it in conversation. It sold over 150 million copies under that label. It spawned a film franchise. It introduced the concept of BDSM to millions of people who had never encountered it before, weirdly I guess they didn’t go surfing the internet in the 90s. And almost everyone who actually practices BDSM looked at it and said, “The hell you say?” Because Fifty Shades isn’t BDSM. Not really. It’s a story about a controlling, emotionally manipulative billionaire who uses the aesthetics of BDSM to justify behavior that the actual community would flag as abuse. Safe, sane, and consensual? The foundational principle of BDSM? Fifty Shades treats it as a suggestion, not a rule. The negotiation, the trust, the mutual respect that defines real power exchange? Replaced with a nondisclosure agreement and a rich guy who doesn’t take no for an answer. But the label stuck. Because the market didn’t care whether the label was accurate. The market cared that the label sold books. “BDSM erotica” was scandalous enough to generate buzz and familiar enough to shelve. It didn’t matter that the BDSM community was screaming “that’s not us.” The classification served the algorithm, the marketing department, and the cash register. It didn’t serve the content, and it certainly didn’t serve the community it claimed to represent. This is the same problem from the other direction. Devilish Deal can’t find a genre label that fits. Fifty Shades got a genre label that doesn’t fit. Both problems exist because the classification system doesn’t describe books. It describes market positions. And when the market decides what your book is, the actual content becomes irrelevant. Devilish Deal has genuine BDSM themes. Power dynamics, negotiation, trust, the vulnerability of surrendering control. It’s baked into the character relationships, not sprinkled on as set dressing. But do I call it BDSM fiction? After what Fifty Shades did to that label? After millions of readers now associate “BDSM” with Christian Grey instead of the actual community and its principles? The label is poisoned. Not because of what it means, but because of what the market decided it means. So add that to the pile. My book can’t be classified because the genres are too narrow. It can’t use the labels that might fit because other books have corrupted what those labels mean to readers. And it can’t go on the biggest marketplace because of a keyword filter. The classification system isn’t just inadequate. It’s actively working against the books it’s supposed to serve. The Classification Problem The real issue isn’t that my book is hard to classify. The real issue is that the classification system was never designed for books. It was designed for shelves. Physical, retail shelves. You need to know where to put the book so a customer walking through a store can find it. That’s the entire purpose of genre classification at its root: logistics. But we don’t primarily sell books on physical shelves anymore. We sell them through algorithms. And algorithms don’t need genre categories the way a bookstore does. They need tags, keywords, “also bought” data, and reading behavior patterns. The sub-genre explosion isn’t authors or readers trying to describe books more accurately. It’s the market trying to feed an algorithm that was never designed to understand art in the first place. And here’s where it gets truly stupid. Devilish Deal can’t go on Amazon. Not as written. Because “were-hyena” triggers Amazon’s bestiality content filter. Now, before I start screaming into the void, I’ll be fair. The filter exists for a reason. People were abusing the “shifter” label to publish actual bestiality content and hide behind the excuse of lycan/furry/therianthrope, I’m not here to judge you on the term you use. Enough people ruined it that Amazon’s response was basically: if they’re a shifter or were-creature, any intimate content has to happen in their fully human “base mode” or it’s banned. Werewolves got grandfathered in because werewolf romance was already a massive, established genre generating real money. Everything else got the axe. So Tara, my Were-Hyena whose entire identity is rooted in what she is, has to either shift back to full human for every intimate scene (which defeats the point of the character) or she can’t exist on the largest book marketplace on the planet. A few bad actors wrote garbage, Amazon swung a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel, and now legitimate authors are collateral damage. “Just publish somewhere else,” you might say. Sure. There’s Draft2Digital. There’s Itch.io. There are options. But here’s the catch-22: publishers and agents look at Amazon for data. Your sales numbers, your reviews, your ranking, that’s your resume in the publishing world. If your book doesn’t exist on Amazon, it functionally doesn’t exist to the people who could take your career to the next level. So you can publish on a smaller platform and maintain your creative integrity, or you can gut your character to fit Amazon’s keyword filter and have access to the market that matters. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. This is the classification problem taken to its logical extreme. It started with age brackets that don’t describe content. It escalated into genre tags that describe vibes instead of books. It got corrupted when the market decided what labels mean regardless of accuracy. And it ends with a content filter that can’t tell the difference between a shapeshifter romance and actual harmful content because it was never designed to understand what’s in the book. It was designed to sort words. And if your words don’t match the approved list, you don’t get to play. So when I sit down and try to figure out what Devilish Deal is, I’m not really asking a creative question. I’m asking a logistics question dressed up as an identity crisis. The book knows what it is. It’s a story about a Were-Hyena who bit off more than she could chew, a minotaur and a dragon girl who complicate everything, and the fallout from all of it. The fact that I can’t fit that into a neat genre tag is the system’s failure, not mine. The fact that I might not be able to sell it on the largest bookstore on the planet because a handful of people abused a label a decade ago? That’s the system working exactly as designed. And that’s the problem. I’ll figure it out. I always do. But the book is what the book is, and no classification system, no algorithm, and no content filter that thinks hyenas are more dangerous than wolves is going to change that. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

Sit back… let me regale you of a time when I was… younger. Ten years younger. Fifteen. Twenty. It doesn’t really matter. The point is I was a lonely nerd seeking communication and interaction with other like-minded deviants. And tabletop gaming was the answer. I’ve been gaming, tabletop gaming, since high school… or middle school. I don’t recall exactly when someone brought in a copy of AD&D and I created my over-the-top powerhouse of a human character who went by the name Warlord. Look, don’t judge me, I was a young stupid kid. But good ol’ Garion was the only surviving member of his village. Everyone but him had died. Garion had max stats, 18/00 for strength and all that. His sword was a plowshare he’d beaten into a shape vaguely blade-like. He was using Dragonslayer before Guts. And his insanity only went higher and higher. Warlord challenged the gods, would have become a God. Only he challenged the God of Sloth to a contest to be lazy. Midway through the contest Warlord rolled over to see how Sloth was doing. Boom. Contest lost. Warlord had to give back all of his godly titles but one. So Warlord maintained his God of Chess and Tactics title. Because of course he did. I tell you this ridiculous story because it illustrates something I’ve come to realize over the years: every major creative project I’ve ever worked on started at a table. Or a forum. Or a buddy’s living room after a concert. And the pattern is always the same. Someone throws out a “what if,” my brain latches onto it like a dog with a bone, and ten years later I’ve got a 130,000-word manuscript and no idea how I got there. The Sundered Realms: Born from a Half-Dragon So there I was, coming back from a KMFDM concert in Chicago with a couple of my buddies. We stopped by a friend’s house and he was spitballing ideas for a gaming session. He wanted to play a half-elf wizard type. And I had just been watching Dragon Half, you know, with Mink. And I’d loved dragons for… well, pretty much since The Flight of Dragons. If you haven’t seen that movie, fix that. I’ll wait. So naturally, I wanted to play a half-dragon. That’s the kind of bulletproof logic you get from a bunch of nerds hopped up on industrial music at two in the morning. And from that one character, that one throwaway “I want to play a half-dragon,” came The Chronicles of Loth. Which became The Sundered Realms. Which became 68 gods across multiple pantheons, an 8,000-year timeline, and a fictional universe so sprawling that I need an alpha reader just to keep the worldbuilding straight. All because I watched Dragon Half and went to a concert. That’s how it works for me. The games feed the fiction. The fiction feeds the world. And the world just keeps getting bigger because I never learned when to stop asking “what if.” Esper Fade: Born from Shadowrun Same gaming group. Different system. We picked up Shadowrun, and I rolled up a lot of characters. Kei from the Dirty Pair, an elven sniper named Longshot, a rigger named Fixer , a decker named Casa Nova… a drunken army ranger by the name of Ole Joe. Because apparently I have a thing for characters who have no business surviving the situations I throw them into. Somewhere in that campaign Ole Joe and another character, Amilya Morgan, developed enough life that they outgrew the table. They wanted their own worlds to play in. Oh… and did I mention Sharpshot? Yazuka hit man? Yeah pretty much all of my shadowrun characters came to play. So I gave them one. And that became Esper Fade, which has since spawned Old Man’s War, a work in progress, and Digital Ghosts and Other Anomalies, a 107,000-word sci-fi anthology of 19 stories, oh and the good doctor will get her own book. A Doctor’s Dilemma the ending of the Esper Fade world, right now. All because a drunk ranger and a doctor in a shadowrun group got too big for a single campaign. Kiadan Slywyth: Born from Being the Weakest Play-by-post this time from Explorer’s Unlimited. Phase World, Rifts. And I was outgunned from the jump. The other players had a cyborg with something like ten attacks, a space marine dwarf, an immortal, and other stuff I can’t even recall because it was all so absurdly overpowered. I just wanted a rogue scientist hacker type who had super powers and looked like Lockheed from Excalibur. Because of course she did. I’ve been obsessed with that little purple dragon since I first picked up an Excalibur comic. Kiadan had a pouch of holding many things, a millennium tree acorn that… did stuff, and her ability to turn into living space was basically my way of clawing up to parity with characters who were broken as hell. She wasn’t the strongest. She wasn’t the toughest. She was the one who had to out-think everyone else at the table just to stay relevant. And that made her interesting. That made her the kind of character who sticks with you long after the game dies. So now there’s a whole series of Kiadan Slywyth Mischief stories sitting in my project folder. Because a tiny dragon-looking hacker who had no business surviving her own campaign refused to stay on the page she was written on. Devilish Deal: Born from a Brothel RP At some point I had discovered Eliquy, the adult RPG forum. And I made some good friends through there. That’s what gave birth to my present fursona Rose Dandy-Ba. It’s what led to the forming of Pacific Shores. It was a community of creative weirdos, which, as you can probably tell by now, is my preferred habitat. Somewhere on that board I found a pair of nutters who wanted to put up with me, and we started an adult RPG that took place in a brothel. The cast was a demon succubus, an elven lesser noble slumming it, and me. The adventure lasted maybe a week or two before real life kicked all our butts and we stopped posting. That was March of 2016. But that idea… that idea sat in the back of my mind for years. I’d write a chapter here, a word there. Developed and tinkered with the characters, changed names, changed worlds. It was originally going to be in the Sundered Realms, my Loth-verse, but I divorced it from that. And as Kobold got more and more completed I thought about putting it there. But it never felt right. Some stories need their own space to breathe, and Devilish Deal was one of them. So what came next was an on-again, off-again passion project about a Were-Hyena who drank her own Kool-Aid and thought she could outsex a sex demon. Yep, it’s one of those stories… only… it isn’t. Not really. Of the 130,000 words, the sex scenes are significant but they’re not the point. There’s a scene with Tara and the Succubus that still needs tweaking, about 10,000 words right now. But the scenes with Tara and Connor, and Tara and Mira, her coworkers? Those are 17,000 words. A piece. And most of that is character work, power dynamics, people figuring out who they are in relation to each other. Tara speaks in a Cockney accent, which has been a problem. Connor speaks in a Zulu type accent, which was actually pretty fun to work with. Mira is English, our succubus is English, our elven noble is English… I’m starting to think I have a type. Or at least a thing for accents… Isabella Diaz in A Goddess’s Gifts was from Columbia and had a spanish accent. Five projects. Five gaming tables. I’m absolutely seeing a pattern here. The Pattern If you were to look at my project folder you’d see dozens of works that have just loose, tentative notes. Godslayer: The Miracle Blade. Di Demon Di! The Curse of Jade. Servant of the Gods. Toys of the Gods. Earth from an Alien View Point. Ballad of the Blade Queen. Not to mention the massive backlog of stuff in the Sundered Realms universe. Not all of them started the same way, but the big projects certainly had a creative flare from a game. A conversation. A “what if” at two in the morning with people who were just as weird as I am. And some of them will never be more than notes. That’s fine. Some ideas are bones you chew on, and some are bones you bury and forget about. But every once in a while, one of them digs itself back up. Warlord became the seed of understanding that I loved building characters who punch above their weight. A KMFDM road trip became an entire fictional universe. A two-week forum game became a 130,000-word novel about a Were-Hyena with more ambition than sense. A drunken Shadowrun ranger became a sci-fi anthology. A tiny underpowered hacker who looked like Lockheed got her own series. And it’s not just tabletops. The Expanse started as someone else’s tabletop RPG campaign before it became novels and a TV series, and watching Amos Burton do his thing on screen gave me Brooke Amira, the gutter assassin with no morals, a massive body count, and a wife who saw good in her. When that wife gets the orc chief killed, Ballad of the Blade Queen becomes a death march across the Sundered Realms hunting down the parties responsible. My nod to what happens when a tabletop game gets big enough to inspire people who were never at the table. And then there’s Sogian Kaiser, who came from playing Monster Hunter World and asking “what if the monster hunter was also a thing that goes bump in the night?” A were-bear hunting monsters. Because apparently I can’t interact with any form of gaming without a character crawling out of it and demanding a novel. To paraphrase Schmendrick the Magician from The Last Unicorn: “Magic, do as you will.” And magic did. Sometimes it’s nice to just have an idea to work on. Like a dog with a bone. You have a general idea of what you’re doing, you draft out the plot and go. And if you’re lucky, if you’re stubborn enough, if you keep asking “what if” long enough… something comes of it.  I’ve been asking “what if” since Warlord challenged the God of Sloth. I don’t plan on stopping. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So I just finished Mistborn. The ideas are fresh and if I wait until I sleep on it, half of this will be gone by morning. I'm learning that lesson the hard way lately... strike while the iron is hot, as I told myself and then failed to do on the last post. Here we are. Again. Quick disclaimer for the Sanderson faithful before we go any further: yes, I'm the sister of the brother who reads everything this man publishes and then tells me about it in great detail on his lunch breaks. Yes, I've been skeptical. Yes, I wrote a whole post wondering what happens to his outlines when he kicks the bucket. And yes, I was the one who picked up Way of the Kings and felt like I was preflighting an airliner when I just wanted to go for a Sunday drive. That one was a legit struggle. It took me months. A couple of chapters a day, casually, jumping between the physical book and the audiobook on walks, and eventually Way of the Kings became strictly audiobook because I just did not want to read another single word of it. I finished it out of spite and stubbornness, which are two perfectly good motivators but not the ones a novel should be relying on. So coming into Mistborn, I had baggage. Big, industrial Samsonite baggage... I should also mention I'm currently playing the Cosmere RPG, which is doing more for my Sanderson tolerance than the books did. It's not half bad. A bit rules-light for my taste, and anyone who has watched me GM knows I like crunch, I like options, I like a character sheet I can drown in, and I do not love how few skills my character has. Coming off decades of AD&D and its descendants where your sheet is a novella of proficiencies, the Cosmere system feels like somebody handed me a business card and told me that's my whole guy. But it plays fast, the world is fun, and it warmed me up to actually sitting down with Mistborn. So credit where it's due. Even if my idea to be a chull-riding spren wrangler wasn't feasible... and my next was a scholar with a shardbow... again not feasible. I'm making my way through with my scholarly ways of DESTRUCTION! Yeah... I went the Shigaraki route, and my god is breaking things apart at the molecular level powerful, destructive, and satisfying. 3D6. Boom, 18 points of damage to your soul! *clears throat* ahem... anyway. Let's start with the gut punches, because that's where my brain is living right now. Marsh. Sweet, grim, brother-in-arms Marsh. They telegraphed that rug pull so hard I thought I saw it coming, and then the book yanked it anyway. You think he's gone, you grieve him, and then nope, surprise, he's still kicking. I don't know if I should feel cheated or annoyed. Probably both. Kelsier though? The K-Man himself? Gone. And I was actually not really expecting that one, so hat tip to Sanderson for that. You build a novel around a charismatic con-man mentor figure and then you put him down in the dirt, that's a bold call. Gandalf in Moria bold. Ned Stark bold. As I said, I tip my hat. And can we talk for a moment about The Lord Ruler? The Lord Ruler with that backhand. I'm sorry, where was this dude in Way of the Kings? Because that is the kind of moment that makes a fantasy novel sing. One casual, contemptuous swat that reframes every encounter you've had with a character up to that point. It wasn't even him trying. That's the terrifying part. That's how you write a big bad. Not a thousand pages of logistics and glyph scholarship, just... swat. Fifty paces. Gone. Take notes, Stormlight. Speaking of the Lord Ruler, and the setting in general, the whole thing reads like Ravenloft with better branding. The ash-choked sky, the perpetual dread, the skaa grinding out existence under a god-king who has personally outlived entire bloodlines, the Mists as an actual supernatural presence with rules you learn the hard way... that is a Domain of Dread with a Sanderson coat of paint. And the Lord Ruler himself lands as a Domain Lord. More Soth than Strahd, though, and I mean that as a compliment. Strahd is romance-tragedy in a cape, an immortal sulking about a woman for eternity while everyone politely pretends he's terrifying. Soth is regret ossified into cruelty. A man who failed the big moment, knew he failed it, and is spending eternity making everyone else pay for it. The Lord Ruler has that same calcified-failure energy under the god-king swagger. He got handed the world and he made it ash. I'll take a Soth over a Strahd every day of the week, and I especially appreciate a villain whose backstory hits like a tragedy instead of a perfume ad. On the figuring-things-out front: I clocked Elend of House Venture as the love interest basically the moment he showed up loitering in the wings reading instead of noble-ing. Sanderson doesn't exactly play these cards close to the chest. I also called the Lord Ruler being both a Feruchemist and an Allomancer... a storage bucket tank and a burner in the same body. I couldn't tell you exactly which clue locked it in, that's the aphasia tax at work, my brain processes in words not pictures so I can't replay the scene that tipped me off, but somewhere in the back half I just knew. I recalled a conversation where my brother mentioned everyone plays the Lord Ruler as this big super powerful badass, and I knew Sanderson is pretty meticulous about his magic so it had to be something we weren't necessarily seeing. And when we learn our tasty valet can store up things, the natural question is, can you taste what he's cooking? And the truth of the matter was... yes. Yes you could taste what he's cooking, but you weren't able to access it. But if someone could cook and taste? Look... this Rock metaphor only goes so far. Either way, the whole system demands a keystone villain who embodies both halves, and Sanderson loves a clean system. Either way, the reveal hit like a confirmation, not a surprise. Which is its own kind of satisfying. The magic system, by the way. I've talked before about how I can't stand magic that doesn't make sense, how I spent a decade on Altered Realities untangling cause-and-effect because I refuse to hand-wave at my own readers. So imagine my relief reading a book where the rules are rules, the metals do what the metals do, and when someone pulls a new trick it's because they found a new application of the existing laws, not because the author got bored. Sanderson and I would probably argue about a lot of things, but we agree on this. Magic has to have a bill, and somebody has to pay it. Vin pays hers constantly. Respect. My curiosity as to what element the 11th metal is might not be answered for a bit. But I knew as soon as Vin burned it what it did. If gold showed her past selves, and atium showed the lines of attack, well a mixture of gold and atium could show a possibility of others' futures, at least that's the logic I'm sticking with. Sailing the internet seas looking for stuff on Sanderson is high spoiler territory. Look, just because my bro reads everything and talks to me about it doesn't mean I recall everything. I don't have a band that I can pour my memories into like some sorta Feruchemist. I have to make do on a pretty decent long-term store of information. I used to recall for years what I had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I no longer do that, I devote that to other equally useless stuff. Like 90s comic book lore. Now for the grading on a curve portion. I said Way of the Kings felt like a preflight check, and I stand by that. Mistborn is lighter on its feet. Less geology, more heist. Less interlude-as-homework, more plot-as-plot. The cast is tighter, the stakes scale cleanly, and when the big setpieces hit, you've actually been given the tools to care. On a scale of one to Way of the Kings, this is the stronger entry. By a lot. I'd say something like 9 out of 10 Blackthorns I'm buying the second book... but the truth of the matter is, I already did. I bought it even though as of writing this I'm halfway through the Isles of Emberdark, think I have about 7 hours left on that. I won't be reading it for a bit, I have a story about a merchant crab I got to read. Don't judge me, I see crab and I buy it. I know evolutionarily speaking, crabs are peak life. I will say that having read most of Emberdark, I recognized from Way of Kings the dark pool is the Shademeyer that Jasnah and Shallan ended up in, Shallan being the whiney teen girl with the soulcaster and the shardblade she did some terrible things to get her hands on, what those were? I may never know because book 2 Words of Radiance is her story. I wanted to say Honorblade instead of shardblade, but that's the Cosmere RPG talking. Don't worry Taln, we'll get your sword back, or die trying. Anyway. Good book. Surprised myself. If you told past-me that I'd be recommending a Sanderson novel in a blog post, past-me would have asked if you were feeling okay. Clarity of Thought Before Rashness of Action, as Shockwave said. Turns out when you give a book actual clarity of thought, you reward the reader's patience. Who knew. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So we finished My Hero Academia. Good show, had its ups and downs, definitely dragged in some places, but at least I knew who was on screen at any given moment. Then we dove into the backlog, and that meant Solo Leveling. We watched the first season, finished it, and moved on to better things like Delicious in Dungeon, Frieren, and Invincible. You know, shows with actual characters in them. It’s not a secret that I consume media and internalize it and criticize it. That’s kind of my whole deal. And I’m telling you right now, Solo Leveling is pretty meh. At best. We still have to watch the Ant King fight, probably tonight, and I’m already bracing myself because I genuinely do not recognize half these characters in their street clothes. Their names are too similar. Their designs are too similar. It’s like someone hit copy-paste on the character creator and just tweaked the hair color slider. So it’s hard to know who is who, and more importantly, it’s hard to care who is who. And then you have Sung Jin-Woo. Blank Slate MC Boring Dude Bad Ass Power Fantasy himself. And it’s like… yawn. Who the heck cares? He levels up. He gets stronger. He levels up more. He broods attractively. Rinse, repeat, insert cool shadow army here. Now compare him to Saitama from One Punch Man. And maybe this is the key difference. Maybe it’s because One Punch Man isn’t taking itself seriously. Saitama is the guy who is supposed to be sort of jokey. He’s going to win. You know he’s going to win. He knows he’s going to win. The show knows he’s going to win. And yet somehow, impossibly, it still works. I rewatch the Genos vs. Saitama sparring match pretty often. The Deep Sea King fight. Boros. They’re all memorable. Not because of the outcome, which is always the same, One Punch, but because the characters around the punch are worth watching. That’s the One Punch Problem, and Solo Leveling has it bad. See, when you make your protagonist an unstoppable force, you have exactly two options. Option one: make everyone around them interesting enough that the audience is watching for the ensemble, not the main character. One Punch Man does this. Mob Psycho 100 does this. I’ll be blunt, I wasn’t watching Mob for Mob. I was watching for Reigen, Mob’s so-called “Master,” the greatest con man in anime history who accidentally stumbles into being a decent human being. Option two: make the journey to that power so compelling that the audience doesn’t mind the destination. Neither of these is what Solo Leveling chose. Solo Leveling chose option three: make everything look really, really cool and hope nobody notices the protagonist has the personality of a loading screen. Season 2 of One Punch Man was alright, not as memorable as the first, I’ll grant you that. But you know what fights I watch over and over again? The Ranma 1/2 Breaking Point arc. The dodgeball fight in Hunter x Hunter. The Hisoka vs. Gon fight. The Knuckle and Shoot vs. Gon sequences. A few of the old DBZ fights, the ones where you actually worried, even a little, that Goku might not pull it off this time. And yeah, Goku always pulls it off. He’s Goku. But here’s the thing, he’s not just some blank template that makes it hard to care about him. Goku is a lovable idiot who wants to fight strong people and eat a lot. That’s a personality. It’s not a complicated one, but it exists. I tried to watch Mashle. And while the dude is funny, he’s just… so meh. It’s the same problem wearing a slightly different hat. The overpowered protagonist as comedy works exactly once, and One Punch Man already did it better. And it’s not like anime doesn’t know how to do fight scenes with stakes. Have you watched the Shibuya Incident arc in Jujutsu Kaisen? That spirit fight where Todo and Itadori are popping back and forth with Boogie Woogie? That fight rocks because you care about both fighters, because the technique is clever, because there’s genuine tension even when things are going well. Or the Mugen Train arc in Demon Slayer, where we see Rengoku going hand to hand with Upper Moon Three. Technical skill, emotional weight, consequences. That fight matters because the character matters. Has Solo Leveling given me a single fight I want to rewatch? The animation is gorgeous, I’ll give it that. The production values are through the roof. But does gorgeous animation without emotional stakes rock as hard as Todo screaming about his best friend while swapping positions mid-combo? No. No it does not. My friends and I talk anime frequently, and my gaming buddies are all about how great Neon Genesis Evangelion is. And look, I get it. I understand why people love NGE. But I was sitting there going… eh. But did you see Getter Robo G? Did you see Gaiking: Legend of Daiku-Maryu? Did you sing along with the Star Blazers theme song? Did you root for Utena to become the prince and save Anthy? Those characters had personalities. Utena had a drive and a purpose and a tragedy baked into her DNA that made every episode compelling. Shinji… Shinji had a lot of people telling him to get in the robot. And maybe that’s the generational divide talking. Maybe I’m just old enough to remember when the overpowered protagonist wasn’t the default setting. When you had to earn your power-ups through training arcs that actually meant something. When characters had flaws that weren’t just “sometimes he’s too cool and brooding.” Ranma was arrogant AND had a legitimate weakness that was played for both comedy and drama. Gon was determined AND dangerously reckless in ways that had real consequences. Even Goku, sweet, simple Goku, had the flaw of prioritizing fighting over literally everything else, including his own family. What does Sung Jin-Woo have? A level-up notification? Now, I can already hear some of you. “But what about Levi?” And yeah. You got me. I need to address this because I’m nothing if not honest about the holes in my own arguments. Levi Ackerman from Attack on Titan is, on paper, exactly what I’m complaining about. He’s an overpowered badass with the emotional range of a wet napkin. The man has virtually no personality. He’s short, he cleans things, and he kills titans like he’s getting paid per head. That’s… kind of it. I hate the ending of Attack on Titan. I think the show disappeared up its own existential rear end and forgot to come back out. But Levi? Levi works. And it bugs me that he works because he shouldn’t. I think the difference is context. Levi exists in a world where everyone around him is dying horribly and constantly. His blankness isn’t a power fantasy, it’s a trauma response, and the show earns that reading even if it never spells it out. When Levi carves through titans, it doesn’t feel like a victory lap. It feels like a man who has watched everyone he cares about get eaten alive and has decided that efficiency is the only emotion he can afford. That scene where he gives Erwin the choice… that’s not a blank slate moment. That’s a character moment buried under all that stoicism. The blankness IS the characterization. He’s not empty, he’s full of things he refuses to express, and Attack on Titan gives you just enough glimpses to know the difference. Sung Jin-Woo isn’t hiding depth under a cool exterior. There’s just… nothing under there. Levi is a locked safe. Jin-Woo is an empty one. And then there’s Alucard from Hellsing Ultimate, and oh boy. Talk about a badass blank slate who has absolutely no business being as compelling as he is. Alucard is, for most of that series, basically an invincible murder machine in a cool hat. He walks into fights you know he’s going to win. He toys with his opponents. He monologues. He grins that stupid, wonderful, terrifying grin. And it works. It works SO well. Partly because Hellsing Ultimate knows it’s a spectacle and leans into the theatrical madness of it all. Partly because the supporting cast, Integra, Seras, the Major with his absolutely unhinged war speech, are doing the heavy emotional lifting. But mostly? Mostly it’s because when Alucard finally drops the act and unleashes the full Dracula bit at the end, when he becomes this emotionless void of pure power… you feel the loss. You’ve spent the whole series watching this monster who was at least entertaining, who had swagger, who had that voice. And Crispin Freeman, god bless that man, could read a phone book as Alucard and make it sound like the most menacing thing you’ve ever heard. So when the character becomes truly blank, truly emotionless, truly just power without personality, it hits different because you remember what he was before. That’s earned blankness. That’s a narrative choice. Solo Leveling starts blank and stays blank. There’s nowhere to fall from because the character never climbed anywhere to begin with. So yeah. Levi and Alucard prove that you can make a seemingly blank badass work. But they also prove my point, because the reason they work is precisely the thing Solo Leveling is missing. Levi has trauma under the surface. Alucard has centuries of monstrous history and a voice performance that drips with personality even when the character shouldn’t have any. They’re not actually blank. They just look blank until you pay attention. Jin-Woo looks blank because he IS blank. And that’s the difference. Here’s the thing about power fantasies. I love them. I’m not above them. When I play Elden Ring, I start off as a weak, scrawny bastard. The plucky Tarnished with 1 HP and a dream. And I grind away. I die to the tutorial boss. I die to the Tree Sentinel because I’m too stubborn to go around. I die to Margit. I die to Godrick. I die to every single thing in Caelid because Caelid hates me and I hate it back. And I beat them. One by one, I beat the bosses. And then something shifts. Somewhere around the midgame, I stop being the underdog. I stop being the plucky hero. I become the boss. And suddenly I’m not struggling through dungeons anymore. I’m walking into boss arenas to check if these so-called demigods are WORTHY of sharing a kingdom with me. And that power creep? That gets me. Every single time. But it gets me because I earned it. I remember being weak. I remember every death screen. The power feels incredible BECAUSE of the suffering that preceded it. Solo Leveling wants to give you the Elden Ring endgame without making you play through Limgrave first. Jin-Woo’s early weakness is a speedbump, not a journey. He goes from E-Rank to god-tier so fast that the weakness never has time to mean anything. Compare that to the moment in Hunter x Hunter when Gon sits across from Pitou and you realize, with dawning horror, that Gon isn’t the hero of this scene. He’s the monster. THAT is how you do an overpowered protagonist. You make the power itself the source of tension. You make the audience afraid of what the character is becoming, not impressed by how many shadow soldiers he can summon. And you know what else works? Getting back up. In One Piece, Garp is shown to be a badass. He just… comes out of nowhere and drops a damn meteor on an island, and you’re sitting there screaming “My man! Get ’em!” at your TV. That moment works because Garp has been this legendary figure lurking in the background for hundreds of episodes, and when he finally cuts loose, it’s cathartic. It’s earned through patience, not a level-up notification. Or Guts. God, Guts. He fights. He struggles. He loses. He gets the absolute hell beaten out of him by things that should kill him ten times over. And the man gets up. The mofo gets up. Every single time. And it’s not willpower. It’s not some shonen “I believe in my friends” power boost. It’s inevitability. Getting back up is just what Guts does because the alternative is lying down, and Guts doesn’t know how to lie down. That’s a character trait that tells you everything you need to know about the man without a single line of exposition. Even Stark. Lovable Stark from Frieren, who is legitimately afraid to fight a dragon. He doesn’t want to be there. He’s terrified. And he keeps getting up anyway, not because he’s brave but because someone has to, and he’s the one who’s there. There’s a reason the best moment in any fight story isn’t the final blow. It’s the moment the hero stands back up when they shouldn’t be able to. There’s an old Thing vs. Champion fight, and Champion says something that’s stuck with me: “I could crush you a hundred times, but I cannot break your spirit.” That’s it. That’s the whole argument. That’s what makes a fight matter. Not the power level. Not the animation budget. The spirit. Solo Leveling has no spirit. The One Punch Problem isn’t about power levels. It never was. It’s about whether the story gives you a reason to care beyond the spectacle. One Punch Man gives you Saitama’s existential crisis, his boredom, the comedy of a world that can’t recognize its strongest hero. Mob Psycho gives you Reigen and the Body Improvement Club and Mob’s desperate desire to be normal. Hunter x Hunter gives you consequences so brutal they redefine the protagonist entirely. Elden Ring gives you the memory of every death that made your victory possible. Berserk gives you a man too stubborn to die. One Piece gives you a grandfather who drops meteors because family matters more than rank. Solo Leveling gives you a cool jacket and some shadow summons. We’ll watch the Ant King fight tonight. Maybe it’ll change my mind. But I doubt it. Because the problem was never the fights. The fights are fine. The problem is that I couldn’t pick Sung Jin-Woo out of a lineup of his own supporting cast, and when he gets knocked down, I don’t feel anything when he gets back up. And that’s a failure that no amount of animation budget can fix. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint