In the Japanese art of calligraphy every stroke is final. There's no sketching outlines and revisions, just one try to get it right. It reflects a cultural appreciation for the decisive moment, something that's visible in their sports, gambling, and in the iconic post-WWII samurai movies, whose final confrontations would go on to inspire the gunslinger duels of spaghetti westerns.

  I would do well to respect the Japanese culture whose light novels I'm so mockingly parodying. Because a weekly updated story is very similar to calligraphy. Once a chapter is published, that's it. We can do some fixing on the spelling but it's too late to change major plot points, shuffle story beats around, or fix the pacing. Every upload is final.

  When I started this story I did not expect to still be writing it years later, and I did not expect that it would grow to be more than half a million words long. (More than War and Peace). I was part of an internet forum were we read and discussed various *isekai* light novels that were posted online by translator (basically pirate) websites. Isekai means "new world", these were stories about normal everyday people being transported to a fantastical fantasy world and having exciting adventures. (At the time I had no idea this concept was in any way popular outside the Japanese otaku culture, I had certainly never heard of the term "portal fantasy".)

  Since many of these stories borrow from each other, making one or two twists to well-trodden premises, many of us got the idea that we could do just as well at the art, throwing around random ideas for minor twists of our own. These were then ofcourse met with the challenge to "just write your own."

  Eventually, a few of us did. Some others from the same circle that you can find on RoyalRoad are 'Lucid', 'Dark Lands: a Villainess' Guide to Settling her New Home', and 'It's the Healer's Life for Me.' (The last one originally being called the "Healslut's life," after a short-lived meme of the time.) And we found out for ourselves that it's not so easy.

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  They say there's two ways to write a story. Either you carefully plot out all the storybits and then write the in-between bits, or you just start writing and find out where the characters take you. I was mostly taking the second approach, though I had some scenes in mind that had inspired me to start the story. Combined with the medium of a sequentially updated story, that's a volatile cocktail.

  For example, one of the earliest story beats I had in mind was for the goblins to take in human outlaws and develop a semi-consensual broodmother system. To that end, I introduced outlaws that were brought down and left helpless due to an orc raid. But I mistimed my plotting and the goblins had developed nowhere enough to become providers or patrons to the outlaws. So I had to replot and have the outlaws return and then later get decimated again by the adventurers' guild. This kind of lack of foresight is what stretched the story to four times the length of what I had originally intended it to be.

  --

  Fodder was inspired by the churn of Japanese *isekai* stories, and was originally meant to be a themepark ride through the one world they all seem to be set in, featuring recognizable character tropes such as the guy with tons of love interests (Laurus), the "I just want to be normal" guy (you probably don't remember Rudy), the villainess that changed her fate (Beatrice), and the extremely edgy guy out for revenge (Abyss).

  Even Scratch himself finds himself in the exact same situation as the protagonist of RE:Monster. At the time I thought reincarnating as a low level monster was an interesting premise that that story had wasted and that deserved somebody having another go at it. I didn't find out until later that in fact there have been many gos at it, and that this premise is extremely well represented.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  I wanted Scratch to be a villain so that he could get into conflict with all these *isekai-jin*, but I wanted for him to have a self-consistent moral philosophy. Something to reflect on and get into arguments about. I decided that Scratch is opposed to the forces of justice because Scratch hates the concept of justice. As he would call it, 'bean counter morality'. Somewhere in the early chapters he balks at the idea that there could be such a thing as a "good" person, "a tool is good or bad, based on how well it serves its purpose," to Scratch, being good means to be used as a tool by someone else. Principally unpricipled, he can be put into conflict or team up with anybody and it will be believable.

  The witch Lacrima was introduced to showcase Scratch's consistency with this principle. She was meant to be a tyrant that imposes her will on the weaker goblins, which are powerless to resist her. Yet, in the end, she is defeated by giving her everything she wants, not via retribution. A solution focused on the future, rather than payback focused on the past. Due to the aforementioned plotting problem, and how easy it was to have someone that could dispense magic plot devices in the story, the conclusion to her story occurs about 50 chapters later than it was going to.

  But all of this was taking us somewhere. As it goes with stories where the author is just along for the ride and seeing where it takes them, a theme began to emerge. The nature of evil became a recurring thread in the story. Embodied most by the demons, who consist of multiple families that disagree on the best way to be the most despicable. When writing a regular story, you would then go back and rewrite earlier chapters to properly set this up and create some sort of arc. But this is calligraphy, every stroke is final.

  --

  There are a few more ideas for story concepts I had that I wasn't able to work into the story. To get them off my chest, here they are:

  - The mist isles: a land where many *isekai-jin* lived. Each new one would introduce some marvelous modern concept like bathing or mayonaisse to wow the natives, until eventually the country just became modern day Japan with day jobs and no fantasy adventures to be had.

  - Whisk players having a heart of the cards philosophy where they believe battling someone in a magic card game will teach you all about who they are deep down. Possibly getting sappy with a hobgoblin (whose deck would showcase how much death the goblins had experienced) and declaring enduring brotherhood, to the chagrin of their respective war leaders.

  - Ritter's magical school being inundated with protagonist types. Scratch puts a class of super advanced mages pretending to be normal teenagers with a fraud teacher that doesn't know much magic so at least they'll only waste each other's time.

  - The human kingdoms get their hands on the money printer and promptly cause hyperinflation

  - The anti-imperialist literati class that Youthere cultivated in Grienice are huge virtual signallers and extremely inviting to goblins to the point where it gets kinda weird

  The last chapter could also have been a short story onto itself. I had this idea that hell skeletons wouldn't be able to talk from their own power and Scratch used what magical knowledge he had retained to record some voice lines on his body in magical runes, but he only had three lines that he would have had to creatively use in different contexts all while pretending to be human.

  Someone said they felt like the story had skipped a few dozen chapters near the end. I can understand their perspective. I was going for an etcetera feel. You've seen our heroes fight and scheme and manouver their way into power, and they've been at it the same way for over twenty years. It was all winning, constantly, the only thing that could upset the status quo was them losing, and eventually, they had to.

  The story has been slowly increasing the pace ever since the beginning. When Scratch first arrives every moment is described, everything is new to him. The more secure the goblins become, the more time can simply be summarized. We start to skip days, weeks, months, and then years. Finally, we skip a few decades, to the next time something notable happens.

  Benesant being pressured into taking on dragon form and a hero party being trained up using the sunken palace to defeat her were part of the idea from the beginning. But I had trouble tying it together. Plotting things out. It's hard.

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  I will be writing other stories. I already have a few ideas, ones that are less derivative. I'll try proper outlining for once, see if it suits me.

  Also, fucking PARAGRAPHS. How do they WORK!? I've been reading all my life I've never internalized any of it. I should take a course.