The Beginning

Where to even begin? Probably… with a bit of backstory of sorts. Or an explanation behind the series. So, for those who might not be aware, this is the rewrite of another series of mine: Ero Dungeon Evolution (EDE). EDE was originally an isekai litrpg of sorts that I first published to Royal Road. It was one of the fastest growing stories on RR and made it to top popular and trending… and then it got nuked because it was too lewd, and thus began the “smutpocalypse” of Royal Road where they began cracking down on a ton of other lewd fictions. It was going to happen with or without me, but I accelerated the process and made it happen sooner rather than later. Oops.

Anyways, it was a story inspired by a particular doujin that I liked, Trip Dungeon. You can find that on the le funny numbers site if you’re curious. So, I saw this doujin and wanted to write something inspired by it, but made it an isekai instead of a VRMMORPG originally, and I also made it a LitRPG rather than simply a gamelit.

It was my first attempt at writing a LitRPG and I used a system that a friend of mine made for me rather than one I came up with myself, and it was… very strict and constricting. It did more harm than good and massively slowed down the story. That combined with me digging myself into a bunch of holes that I didn’t know how to dig myself out of, and losing general motivation for the story, resulted in me wanting to rewrite the story to make it better.

But I was already doomed at that point.

My Beliefs

I’m a very selfish author. You’ll learn why this is important soon. I’ve been writing since I was 6. I’ve been writing almost daily since I was 9. So, that’s writing almost daily just for fun for 20 years now. During that time, I’ve always only written whatever I want to write. I’ve never written what anybody else wanted me to write. I just always pandered to myself and nobody else.

That’s still true now… for the most part. With my other series, namely The True Endgame and Lazy Dragon Queen, those are stories that have always been written 100% for myself and nobody else. I’m just incredibly lucky in that the stuff that I love to write for myself is also what just so happens to be popular with the broader market to some degree. I’m not writing ecchi harems because they’re popular, I’m writing them because I genuinely love them. It might look like I’m pandering with my stories, and countless people have accused me of purposely pandering and writing what’s popular, and that’s somewhat true, just not in a way that they meant. I’ve always pandered to myself. I’ve never intentionally pandered to anybody else with my writing.

That was supposed to be the case, anyways.

A Flawed Foundation

I wanted to rewrite EDE to make it better than before, but I fucked up at the very beginning by caring about retaining readers. Yes, to me, given my beliefs, caring about retaining readers is a mistake. Because as soon as I care about retaining any of you, I’m putting your own interests above mine, and I’m not that kind of writer. I fail under those conditions.

But I knew a lot of people loved the original EDE and I wanted to make them happy. By not being selfish, I fucked up and set the story up for failure (from my perspective). I wanted to try and bring back all the same characters. I wanted to give fanservice by referencing characters and events in the original EDE that I didn’t actually care about. I thought people would be disappointed and not like the story if I didn’t try to bring back every possible character who originally showed up in EDE. So, instead of just writing what I wanted to write, I tried forcing myself to bring back all these different characters. Instead of focusing on just writing a good story that can stand on its own and be something that I was proud of, I ended up focusing on caring more about how I could keep original EDE readers as happy as possible while still overhauling the story in a way that I would like.

And it was this foundational approach that fucked me and the story up over the length of its run.

This resulted in me bringing back characters like Cani, Wally, and Sophie (and various dungeon monsters) who were only in EDE for a short amount of time but had their fans. I figured people would be disappointed if I didn’t bring them back, so I made sure to even though I didn’t really personally want to. This also explains Meadow. In EDE, Meadow was just a spider. That was all. Just a spider who had voyeuristic tendencies. She was never a girl, never talked, nothing. But she was regarded as being Thera’s little sister and, despite just being a spider, had quite a few fans who I knew were really looking forward to her comeback. But because her just being a literal spider wouldn’t really work and wasn’t something I was interested in doing, I tried to make her into an AI and tried tying her into plot events that occurred in my other series, TTE, and just… yeah. It felt very forced and half-assed.

So, that’s part of the issue, but not all of it. I can’t blame all of the reasons for why I feel EDO is bad on the fact that I tried to pander to EDE readers, because quite a few things are entirely my own fault.

Things to Improve

Actually, I can blame all of this on me trying to pander to you. Poor me. I’m totally not at fault here. This is all because I tried to make you happy. I’m the victim.

Just kidding.

There were a lot of things that I dropped the ball on and never properly used. Ignoring all the dungeon stuff since I like the idea of dungeon management more than actually writing dungeon management which means I basically ignored all of that until I felt so guilty about neglecting it that I forced myself to write some more of it, there were also things like Syl and Akorya. That was never properly resolved. Now, I like how I handled it. It might not be satisfying since most of Syl’s growth happened off screen because she got in trouble with work, and that’s realistic to me, and I do like some realism despite it being fiction and realism not always being what’s most interesting in fiction, but what I fucked up is not showing you the change afterward. There should have been some scenes of Akorya and Syl interacting after Syl’s change to prove that she actually did change.

Then there was stuff like the party of girls who Damian recruited and wanted to sort of mentor but basically never brought up again except for a couple of times.

If I were to edit the story, then I would:

1. Properly conclude the Akorya/Syl drama.
2. Remove the Akorya/Streamer drama.
3. Remove the whole “become Lust’s Champion” thing
4. Remove Cani and give Sophie the role of opening up a restaurant in the dungeon instead, and make her no longer a champion of gluttony
5. Remove Meadow, or at least change her so that she’s no longer an AI. Either that, or I divorce EDO from being in the same universe as TTE and make intelligent AIs their own thing in this setting.
6. Have Damian and Thera hook up sooner, and have more chapters where she’s being romantic with Damian and just being a part of the relationship in general.
7. Remove the party of girls Damian recruited.
8. Remove the stuff about Damian’s sister and her boyfriend. Oh, I didn’t mention this yet, but I originally intended for the boyfriend to end up being abusive, the sister was going to call Damian for help, and then Damian was going to go and beat the absolute shit out of him and potentially go to jail over it, because I wanted to add some drama and make a parallel between him and his father. But then it felt like that would be way too heavy for the story and way too random feeling to everything else, so I never actually went through with it.
9. And just probably cut out like… 30% of a bunch of pointless filler chapters that I only wrote because I had no idea what to write or was procrastinating writing what I needed to move the plot toward.
10. I’ve mentioned this on my server more than on SH, I think, but Damian’s mom and his relationship with her were heavily based on my own mom and my relationship with her. Over the past year, things have… well, I’m not going to go into a bunch of personal details, but let’s just say that our relationship has definitely been damaged and isn’t quite what it used to be. So, I would try to change Damian’s mom and his relationship with her in a way to still have the same feeling, but to be even better than it already is, and to remove the similarities between his mom and my own.
11. Give Lily an additional arc somewhere in there, and just have her and Akorya be more present and showing off their personalities in general.

What I Learned

Most of what I’ve learned isn’t just thanks to EDO, but thanks to all the stories I’ve started and dropped in general.

The most important one, and this might seem silly, is to not think about trying to start a new story. I have a 100% drop rate so far for stories that I had to think about starting. What I mean is like… I’ll see something and get inspired, and then I spend days, weeks, or potentially even months, trying to think about how I can write something inspired by that. I’ll see something and go, “I really like this idea, I want to write something like that,” and then try to think of something that works with it.

This happened with EDE by forcing myself to try and write something inspired by that doujin.

This happened with SG by forcing myself to try and write something inspired by Muv-Luv Alternative.

This happened with TQH/TDH by forcing myself to try and write something inspired by S-Ranked Behemoth.

This happened with TTT by forcing myself to try and write something involving tentacles just because I for some reason had a reputation as “the tentacle author” and wanted to prove my worth for being somebody known as that.

This happened with DE by wanting to write a 4X-inspired LitRPG for months and months and then finally forcing myself to just do it after building a system for it.

Every single story I’ve started and dropped has been the result of me forcing myself to come up with an idea.

However, with both TTE and LDQ, those were both stories where I was basically just chilling, minding my own business, doing something else, head empty… and then boom, somehow, my brain suddenly has a new idea and I spend the next 8 hours writing it. No thoughts, head empty, just writing out of nowhere. The thinking and planning comes afterward.

And now the same has happened with the new series I just posted to Amazon, TAG. I commissioned art and I wanted to try and think of a story for a character in the art, but I couldn’t think of anything. For weeks, I tried thinking of a story that could go with it, and nothing came to mind. However, then while I was just in bed trying to sleep, not thinking about writing or stories at all, I suddenly got the idea for it, immediately went to my computer, and spent the next 10 hours writing the first like 15k words for it. I then was so inspired that I managed to write the entire first book within two weeks. Had I tried to write one of the ideas that I got while thinking about it, I probably would have dropped it. But instead, I wrote the idea that I had no idea I was going to write until 5 seconds before I had it and felt the need to write it. That's a good way of putting it. Those other series, I wanted to write them. For TTE, LDQ, and TAG, I needed to write them. The same is true for EDO. I never felt the need to write it. I simply wanted to write it.

TTE, LDQ, and now TAG are the only stories I’ve written that basically started completely randomly without me trying to force an idea into reality, and the first two are my longest running and oldest stories. TTE and LDQ are years old now. TTE has over 1.1 million words and almost 4,000 pages written, and LDQ is about half that and climbing. TAG, I wrote more for within two weeks than I wrote for all the above dropped stories over months.

So, what I’ve learned is that if I try to force myself to come up with a story idea, I’m going to drop it 100% of the time going by my history thus far. If I want to write something, I'll probably enjoy it for a few months and then either get bored or think it could have been done better and lose interest. But when I need to write something, I keep with it no matter how many times there may be moments where I don't want to write it.

On top of that, I’ve also learned that while I love the concept of LitRPGs, writing them is an entirely different beast. You see, I might just be “haha funny weeb smut author who drops stories,” but I actually care a lot about the craft of writing and worldbuilding. I hate doing things half-assed. This is why I refuse to ever implement any sort of “Charisma” or “Luck” stat in any LitRPG I write because, in my opinion, to implement those properly in a way that meets my standards would require completely overhauling how society works in a world where Charisma and Luck are stats. For example, Charisma alone basically works like an invisible aura of brainwashing most of the time, and that would mean consent no longer exists by modern standards. The world’s entire concept of consent would need to be explored just so that it doesn’t feel bad (to me), and that’s just on the topic of consent, and that’s just for one stat.

Instead, I prefer much more minimal LitRPGs. Either absurd non-serious LitRPGs like LDQ where everything is self-aware and all the numbers are made up, or like TAG, where the only stats are purely combat-based like armor, damage, speed, health, and critical chance. Half the things I wrote and dropped were LitRPGs that featured systems that did not properly explore all the implications of them, and thus are bad.

So basically, part of the issue with past stories is that I jumped into them wanting to write LitRPGs without properly caring about the systems and all of the worldbuilding implications of them, resulting in stories where I dug myself into holes and then felt disappointed by their lack of quality. And when I didn't do that, I jumped into them because I wanted to rather than because I needed to.

In Closing

I’m not sure if there’s anything else for me to say, because that last bit was already moving away from EDO, and this is supposed to be an analysis regarding EDO.

If I had to rate the story… I would give it a 7/10 despite how flawed it is. Now, mind you, I’m selfish. I still mostly wrote this story to appeal to me and my preferences (just not 100%). TTE, LDQ, and TAG are all undeniably 10/10s to me. I’m borderline narcissistic when it comes to my own stories. I love rereading them, I like my own stories more than anybody else’s stories, I laugh when I reread them all the time, I never cringe or want to change anything because I already wrote them to be perfectly tailored to my tastes in the first place, I post screenshots/quotes from my own stories to my server sometimes to share them just because I’m rereading them and they stood out as extra great/funny to me, etc. Are my stories objectively 10/10s? Of course not. To plenty of people, they’re not even worth being 1/10s. If I were to try and be objective and evaluate the stories based on a normal person’s expectations in the West, then… EDO might be a 3/10 while TTE/LDQ/TAG are 6 or 7/10s at best.

But I’m not writing to other people’s preferences, I’m writing to my own preferences, and so EDO is a 7/10 while the others are 10/10s. EDO being a 7/10 is why I still respected it enough to finish it. It’s not up to my standards, but it was good enough (and close enough to the ending) that I respected it enough to give it an ending instead of just dropping it. The stories I dropped, I wouldn’t even put them above 5/10 as far as my personal preferences go. Some of them I would even give higher “objective” ratings than they get in personal preference ratings, but my personal preference rating is what matters to me.

So, basically, what I’ve learned is to be even more selfish and to literally never care about what my readers might want, to only write stories that I get randomly inspired for out of absolutely nowhere instead of anything I have to think about, to only write stories that start from a need to write rather than a want to write, to keep LitRPG systems simple unless the point is to basically be a worldbuilding wiki rather than a story, and… that’s about it as far as EDE/EDO goes.

Thank you to all of you who have stuck with EDE/EDO up until now. You probably like the story more than me if you’re still here, and I appreciate it. Someday, probably, hopefully, I’ll edit it and publish it to Amazon after giving it some serious editing that will involve cutting out a bunch of stuff and adding some new things. I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours writing this series, so it would be a shame to not publish it eventually. But for now, I want nothing to do with it so that I can focus on the series I’m actually passionate about instead.

I’ll mark the series as complete once I’ve posted this and then that’ll be it until I publish the series sometime in the future. Thanks for sticking around this long!

If you’re interested in checking out my other series and haven’t yet, then you can check them out at the following links:

The True Endgame

Lazy Dragon Queen

The Ascension Game