Have you ever felt like reading a harem story with femboys, or with pegging, and then you look around and can’t find one? And when you do find one, it’s completely degenerate and weird, and it doesn’t have exactly what you wanted.
I feel the same. I feel you, my friend.
You go on Reddit to complain about it, and people tell you that of course there aren’t stories like that. If you post X, you won’t be able to promote on subreddit Y. If you do this, people won’t read you, or they’ll hate you, or they’ll try to burn you at the stake. And then they go on to tell you that you should write what you want, that you should be the change you want to see in the world.
But dreams don’t pay the bills now, do they?
I went into Bound to the Fallen 1 with this very same idea. I didn’t want to be what the market wanted. I just wanted to write what I wanted. It was also my first harem story, so it was an experiment from beginning to end. Then the worldbuilding kind of took over, and I went into book 2 with a grand mess of a living world that had a life of its own, and characters that had lives of their own too. And mind you, back then I was still mostly pantsing, so my characters were making their own decisions. I feel like that’s the right way.
And by then, the story had no space for any of those novel ideas. It’s full of weird stuff, just not that weird stuff. Now I’m feeling like a slave to the market, wondering what would happen if I added it in book 3. Perhaps I shouldn’t, and perhaps I won’t. In fact, it feels like adding it to this series would be a betrayal of the readers who expect a certain dynamic in the story. Which, of course, means that if you want it, you have to build a story with that dynamic in mind from the very beginning.
When I paused for a moment and started writing Supers Reforged, I tried not to pants at all. Instead, I wanted to plot everything out and stay perfectly aligned with my design for the book. Again, I landed on the more popular dynamic: a dom main character, and love interests who are subs in all sorts of different flavours. At a certain point, though, plotting everything started to feel like wearing a ball and chain around my ankle. Anyone who reads it on Royal Road will probably notice the point where my mind broke and I decided to free my characters again. For the Amazon version, I hope to hide that transition completely and let my characters be free from the very beginning, because that’s how things should be.
But it still feels like I’m bending too much to the market.
Now, if you’ve read Bound 1 and 2, you’ve probably seen lots of degenerate stuff. But believe me when I say my mind is capable of much more degenerate things.
So here’s the thing: how degenerate are you as a reader?