Revisiting Old Work: Sadlands
After stumbling upon a writer’s block while working on Athletes Ready!, I decided to revisit another one of my old scripts from many years ago.
This time I went for a novel that I started writing in December of 2020. I completed the first draft of the novel, but never came back to it after the fact. I think there were many reasons for this, but most likely the central reason was that I’d ended up with a story that felt entirely different from the one I wanted to write.
Like many of my works, this novel was born out of a frustration with the overuse of shitty tropes and overall lazy writing found in the content I was consuming at the time. Combined with the audacity to believe I could do much better, I decided to show everyone how it’s done.
At this time, I held a pretty scathing opinion on the particular genre of anime that featured a transportation or reincarnation into another world, commonly known as ‘Isekai.’ Such stories often relied on bland self-insert protagonists, power fantasies, and fanservice to keep their audience’s attention.
Was it pretentious of me to hate on this low-brow genre for pandering to the lowest common denominator of pubescent males? Absolutely. But I stand by my pompous holier-than-thou attitude, because I genuinely believe most of the stories in this genre to be total garbage, with only a few notable exceptions.
The challenge I gave myself was to create my own story in this genre with a legitimately compelling narrative. I ended up with a story called Sadlands, which was basically a dark sci-fi fantasy inversion of the typical ‘Isekai’ plot. The protagonist accidentally finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world that is overrun by geist-like beings that feed on negative human emotions, causing their victims to die of happiness.
As if I wasn’t stretching myself enough, I gave myself the additional difficulty of a protagonist who not only suffers from depression, but attempts suicide in the very first chapter (the attempt is what transports him to a new world). This feels like a necessary choice for the narrative and the world I’ve created, but I fear that I haven’t done the underlying work of representing this debilitating mental illness in an authentic and unproblematic fashion.
When I reread my first draft, I found it refreshing that it wasn’t as incomplete and aimless as I’d felt when I first concluded it. That being said, I’m still not sure if it's a story that I’ll be trying to perfect and publish any time soon. For now, it may well just be another story added to the foundation of my craft - integral to what I’m building, but almost entirely hidden beneath the surface.
