Hey, folks!
Letâs talk about where Sunspot comes from. This isnât so much a peek behind the curtain of the week-by-week writing process as it is a discussion of the biggest inspirations for the story and why it is how it is. There areâ¦letâs say four key works that Sunspot owes most of its DNA to.
The setting has been in my head forâ¦a decade and change, by now. Like all stories not put to paper, itâs mutated quite a lot over the years as I encountered other stories to crib ideas from, and few major elements have survived all that time. The Spire, the Vaetna (a word whose origin I think comes from a random one-off spell in Eragon, but Iâm unsure), Ezzenâs name, the Frozen Flame (no, Iâve never played Chrono Trigger), the motif of spears, andâ¦thatâs really it. But I never actually wrote any of the story downâbarely even talked about it to anybody; it was my dumb little pet story idea that I wasnât confident enough to ever do anything with. I didnât write or do anything else creative as a hobby until the pandemic, when I decided to learn to draw, but I never reached a point with it where I felt like I could bring the Vaetna to life in a webcomic or similar. So the ideas just kept fermenting.
Enter The Wandering Inn, the first of those four stories (not chronologically, but bear with me). For the unfamiliar, TWI is an isekai LitRPGâa pair of words I normally have a fairly high degree of distaste forâwhich transcends the connotations of both of those labels. Itâs also the longest contiguous work of fiction in the English language, sitting at about thirteen million words and growing by about a million and a half more each year.
I wonât bore you with every reason I adore TWI. Iâve gone over most of those points in an open letter I wrote to pirateaba in March, which you can read here. Paba actually responded to this less than an hour later with an equally long reply, which left me sobbing uncontrollably for half an hour because I had never felt so seen before. Itâs kind of silly, but that was the moment where I started to incorporate âbeing a storytellerâ into my identity.
And TWI did indeed get me writing. I could not stop writing fanfic for The Wandering Inn, from short snippets to longer oneshots to novella-length stories. A lot of it is pornâbut porn with plot, porn which still tries to live up to the thematic beats essential to the story and to do justice to the characters. I waffled a bit on how much smut I wanted to include in Sunspot, but I think what bits weâve done so far have been harmonious with and strengthen the rest of the story.
According to my AO3, Iâve written just shy of 100k words of TWI ficâmeaning Sunspotâs already longer than all of it. But it was how I cut my teeth with writing and learned that I was actually pretty dang good at it, at least with TWIâs unrivaled quantity of canon that meant I could skip things like establishing character dynamics or magic systems. But those things scared me, so I still didnât attempt to write anything original.
This brings me to the second of those four stories: Katalepsis. Itâsâ¦hard to describe. Iâd call it cosmic horror yuri, as in yuri where the participating members are cosmic horrors. Itâs probably one of the best works of fiction Iâve ever read, period. From the line-by-line prose to the character work to the texture of the setting, itâs all gorgeous. Sunspot owes much of its style to Kata: the first-person narration, the emphasis on food, the trans(both gender & human) theming, the belief that connection with other people is a force more powerful than any dark god. Actually, it shares that last one with TWI, too.
I havenât written much fanfic for Katalepsis; in fact, at time of writing Iâm not even caught up (arc 14, I believe). But Iâve easily passed ten thousand words rambling about it in its Discord server, and talking about fiction more broadly with all the wonderful artists and writers there helped crystallize a lot of the ideas that would eventually become Sunspot. Basically all of Sunspotâs charactersâthe Radiances and Ezâcan be fairly accurately described as a hodgepodge of different Katalepsis characters. Have fun guessing whoâs made of who! Also, a lot of the smuttier elements and the general impact of attraction on Ezâs psyche are heavily inspired by Katalepsis.
That being said, I still didnât actually start putting Sunspot to paper in any serious dimension until six months ago, when I was diagnosed with cancer. Fear not; we nuked it from orbit, and Iâm totally healthy these daysâbut the five days I spent in the hospital gave me a lot of time to think about the future, and the potential lack thereof. This was only a few weeks after that letter to pirateaba, in which I had discussed their own memento mori and the death of Akira Toriyama. So in that hospital bed, I started to work on Sunspot in earnest.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Cancer killed science fiction author Iain M. Banks, who wrote the Culture novels, the third work on this list. Itâs more of an anthology of different stories about a hyper-advanced mega-civilizationâthe titular Cultureâinterfering in the affairs of other species, often to adverse effect. I read those books about two years prior to my own diagnosis, listening to the audiobooks while I worked at a knife sharpening plant in hundred degree heat. Much of the Spireâs foreign policy, and therefore the texture of Sunspotâs whole setting, is inspired by the Culture. When the goodness of people, that thing Kata and TWI believe in so strongly, fails to make a difference and the world becomes dark and bleak, there is a higher power there to bring down the hammer.
Nowâs a good time to mention that Iâm Jewish. We have a concept called tikkun olamâârepairing the worldâ. Tikkun olam is a moral imperative to make the world a better place, for the simple fact that it must be done, not for fear of chthonic punishment or personal gain. Iâm not sure paba or Hungry or Banks were aware of the idea when writing their stories, but it is the beating heart of all three. Iâm tired of grimdark cynicism, and all three of these works helped me believe I could write a story about goodness, and about the obligation to enact it. Obviously, âgoodâ is subjective, and therefore moral quagmires are endemic to any story that wants to be about tikkun olam. Soâ
Letâs talk about Worm, the fourth story on this list.
Itâs probably impossible to write a superhero webserial in the year 2024 without acknowledging Wormâs influence; I doubt it needs much introduction. Of these four works, itâs the first I read, and at the time it didnât actually leave much impact on me; I binged it in about ten days in high school and then didnât really think about it until I started reading TWI and other webserials. With the benefit of hindsight: I donât like Worm. Itâs not a bad story, all things considered; itâs a perfectly serviceable story about villains. 7/10, 8/10 in parts.
Sunspot is very much Worm spitefic. Theyâre similar in the basic setup: stochastic distribution of superpowers which may-or-may-not themselves be alive. Sunspot intentionally draws very different conclusions from this on both personal and geopolitical scales than Worm does; I dislike its insistence on a superhero-supervillain dichotomy based on this setup. There are other points which Sunspot is explicitly trying to do better than Worm: for instance, Worm is painfully, glaringly, almost offensively cishet throughout its entire runtime. Also, it dangles âNazis badâ, that most freebie of free squares on the literary morality bingo, and then obstinately refuses to actually embrace it. It doesnât even really have commentary on the matter. And thatâs to say nothing of the theme of tikkun olam, in which Worm is entirely disinterested outside of the requisite superhero fiction âsave the city/worldâ once the scale got big enoughâwhich is so obligatory it basically doesnât count.
Iâm not derailing this entire A/N to rant about Worm for no reason. It is, in its own way, as big of an influence on Sunspot as the first three works on this list. It provides a roadmap of elements for me to avoid and do better than it did, and thatâs just as important as the things to aim toward. Worm fans, donât murder me.
Whew. Anyway.
Note the lack of a magical girl entry on this list. Iâm actually rather under-read on the genre, and desperately need to brush up on some of the classics, which Iâm nervous to admit to my audience when so much of the story has to do with the Radiancesâ performativity in imitating what they think is mahou shoujo. According to readers, I seem to be doing an alright job of hitting the mark, so fingers crossed I can keep that torch burning. Please bear with me.
There are a lot of other more minor influences on Sunspot. Some of the tone and dialogue comes from some rather trashy but close-to-my-heart Warhammer 30k smut fanfic which I will not disclose. Some of its thoughts on violence come from Kill Six Billion Demons. Iâm not that well-read on actual story structure, but a lot of the knowledge I do have comes from OSP Redâs Trope Talk videos. And of course there are countless more, various stories I read as a kid that contribute little bits and bobs Iâm not consciously aware of. More recently, Iâve been watching a lot of Dr. Who, which is probably coloring how I do dialogue. Câest la vie.
Outside of media, thereâs one more thing which is really quite important to Sunspotâokay, no, two more.
Firstly, I live in Japan! You may have seen this one coming. The depictions of different landmarks and the locale and just the general experience of Being In Tokyo all come from personal experience, and Iâm hoping my love of this city and country come through in the writing, even though Ez is kind of out of the loop on all that stuff. I know some authors are pretty private about this sort of thing, but it informs the story too much for me to try to hide it. Ezâs feeling of displacement comes from my own, though I can neither confirm nor deny whether I am living with a group of hot magical girls who are weirdly interested in transing my gender.
Secondly, a lot of Ezâs experiences prior to the beginning of the story are based on the pandemic. Unlike the real world, COVID-19 didnât happen in Sunspot, but his life being suddenly cut off by a random global calamity and him responding by retreating into seclusion and online social spaces obviously does draw from my own personal experiences, and those of quite a lot of my readership, I imagine.
I think that just about covers what I wanted to talk about in this. Hopefully youâ¦got something out of it? I donât know, Iâm just sort of yapping. So letâs just end it here. Thanks for reading!
See you all on the 11th!
- yootie