Once the gates of 'perfume' opened all hell broke loose. Suddenly I had to make all sorts of edits everywhere. I resumed world war 'even,' 'just' and 'comma,' deleting scads of unnecessary samples of all three. (Chapter 44 was particularly bad but now it's much improved). I corrected various grammatical errors. I deleted unnecessary sentences. Most of all, I switched out 13 children's names for new and better ones.
Mayu was made the daughter of Urara because they're both timid Precure. Etolinde and Rosalinde were made the daughters of Deedlit due to their shared elven heritage. Uriko became Kuon's daughter due to their shared beastkin heritage. Scarlett, Melisandre, Alain, Miyabi, Mist, Micaiah, Marco, Nina and Stark all found similarly natural fits for mothers.
Most of the deleted names nixed to give room for the newcomers were not personally to blame -- they're still great fictional characters -- but they had the fatal flaw of names that overlapped with other characters in the book, whereas all the newcomers had unique names. By dropping a bunch of 'repeat' characters I made it easier for readers to know who was whom and sped up the natural flow of the book. Ren, Rio, Izumi, Misaki, Hikari, Hotaru and Yuuki were all repeats who had to go. Haruki comes from an underwhelming story, 'Sakura, Saku' which isn't even fully translated, so it was an easy delete. Schala and Gemma are minor side characters who don't really merit a precious pantheon spot. (The number of children is too limited for the likes of them.) Izuna can be cut without much damage to No Game No Life's representation, so she had to make way for Uriko. Meiling is a filler character so had to go. Miku is from the less important Cinderella Girls spinoff so didn't really fit in with the other three represented Idolm@ster characters, (Miki, Iori and Haruka) all from the original series, so she was an easy cut.
I made use of all the effort I put into improving my 'Wonderful Fictional Characters' permapost and transposed all the sensible options from there into my book, which is still my magnum opus and should be given every possible opportunity for improvement. Especially since I had to edit the book anyway, so there's no sense holding back. And especially since Unicorn Overlord is too good to leave out of a book meant to be divine writ.
Not only characters were replaced, but franchises were as well, again on a 1:1 basis. Three franchises were nixed, all obscure Io Sakisaka manga. Replacing them were three much better franchises -- Girls Band Cry, Unicorn Overlord and Bloody Roar. Franchises I spent much more time with and twist my emotions every which way. The franchise changes are almost more important than the character changes, it was so vital to get these names into the mix.
As mentioned in the previous post, I filled in a plot hole where Sagiri seemingly was both stuck in her room and constantly conversing in public in paradoxical fashion, by explaining she was communicating remotely -- something she did in the original source work too and thus is a completely authentic explanation. I always thought of it that way, but for readers who hadn't watched Eromanga Sensei I can see why they would have been confused by it. I also reversed the order of some sentences in Kirino's speech to make it flow better.
If there were more changes I've already forgotten them, but these are changes enough. 13 name changes is humongous. It's a larger edit to the book than many previous edits of yore all on its own. There were no added story segments like has happened in the past, because the story itself is complete. But improving a story's flow matters too.
With this I'm pretty sure the book is perfect and won't need any further changes. But obviously I'll have to read it a 43rd time to make sure, somewhere down the road. New readers can rest easy knowing the book is finished, has a simplified/improved name gallery and follows the proper rules of grammar. There is no reason for them to delay any longer:
The whole book was great, I love all 101 waifus, but Chapters 55 and 58 really stand out for their quality. Chapters 48 and 49 are short but really sweet. And Chapter 43 is probably the high point of my literary ability. Not because the chapter is particularly good, but because it tackled the absolutely hardest material and did so in a passable manner. I had to characterize the least approachable 15 waifus in one fell swoop and give people at least some sense that their charm matched the other waifus who were given oodles of good scenes. Making that section mediocre is harder than making any other scene great. I'm supremely proud of that chapter.
I love the waifus all chatting with Cute around a snack bowl. I can feel the atmosphere of that scene so well, like somehow the words can really expand into a hologram and outright show you how fun and lovely these girls are.
I love Christopher's group dates at the harvest festival and barbeque. It displays so clearly how fun it is to have so many different attractive people in one place. There's no better argument for polygamy than this book.
I love how honestly the book tackles the hardest questions and answers them head-on. The wives confront him with every tough question any reader might be considering and force Christopher to answer to their satisfaction. Nothing gets a free pass, eventually he's forced to give an answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It's the all-book, it presents a coherent worldview covering every aspect of good and evil, mostly because the waifus won't give him any breaks until he coughs the answers up!
This was my 42nd re-read. The 42nd. Perhaps due to being in paperback, or perhaps because all the earlier edits have improved it so much, but I enjoyed it this time as much as ever. That shouldn't be humanly possible but there you go. This really is the best book ever written, and now it's a little bit better. If I read the 43rd edition in paperbook, with all these fixes in place, I imagine it will be the best experience ever. For once I could just read the book without having to stop and edit anything! Ah, what bliss that would be. . .
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