This work came about slowly over the course of several months; basically, I'd think about a character, ponder what the character's life must have been like before the Catastrophe, what sort of life would make the characters that would become the main characters of the series, and then write a slice of life. I'd seen a lot of Log Horizon SI, some good Log Horizon romance, far too few "The Characters Made It Back" stories – but hadn't seen anything about the time before the Catastrophe. I do confess to having been significantly influenced by a Haibane Renmei fic, Shadsie's "Before We Had Wings" in this particular case, and probably owe a nod of recognition in that direction; having written these works for nearly two decades now, it is truly a rare thing for me to be emotionally affected by a work, and "Before We Had Wings" certainly qualifies. The link to that story can be found in my Favorites.

I did get a very interesting comment from a pre-reader who hadn't seen the series and was concerned that I was presenting that people who play characters of the opposite sex in an MMO must have some deep-seated reason for it, as both the characters presented for whom that qualifies (Tetra and Akatsuki) both showed such in this story. First, it should be noted that people playing opposite-sex characters in Elder Tale is uncommon for the simple reason it is becoming less common in today's MMOs: voice chat, a feature becoming more common in MMOs, makes disguising one's true gender more problematic. As for the two cases presented… Akatsuki pre-Catastrophe is almost pure canon, at least as far as I could tell; she was a college student, but so short and young-looking that, at one point, a middle-school boy asked her out. She clearly resented the difficulties her appeared age presented, and that yearning to be treated seriously as an adult by her peers bled into her post-Catastrophe character. The case regarding Tetra is more complex, and far less is known about her pre-Catastrophe, except that she was male; I portrayed Tetra as having fairly severe gender issues pre-Catastrophe because at no point in the canon does she show any regret for the Catastrophe, and more importantly seems to revel in her new life. Even with the effect that the world had on its characters, that level of acceptance probably doesn't happen unless the person Tetra was pre-Catastrophe truly and desperately wanted to become her. Contrast that with Akatsuki, who doesn't want the new body "he" finds "himself" in, to the point of seeking out the one person "he" knows to hold an appearance-change potion in order to physically change back to a form much closer to her pre-Catastrophe body.

Finally, I suspect the question is asked… why these characters? Why not Krusty or Isaac or Roderick, for instance? The simple answer is that I couldn't conceive of a scene with them. These were the characters for which I could discern who the person was before, and so wrote the scenes as best I could.

Nightelf

January 29, 2016