How to Write: Paranoid Mage
First installment in a series of analysis on how the narrative structure of the most popular web serials and how to replicate it.
Biased Self-Assessment
With analyzing other serials, like Jackal Among Snakes or Millennial Mage, I feel my current understanding is lacking. In the case of my evaluation of Paranoid Mage or Primal Hunter, I’m fairly confident in my judgment. That’s my premise.
How to Write, Standard and Replicated Disclaimer
Breaking down the individual elements that make up a story can be useful in understanding how these elements work together to create an immersive experience. In this series, I will be examining the individual narratives of the most successful web novels in order to better understand how they work.
Do understand that to the extent that a web novel is successful, it is because it is able to create an immersive experience that draws the reader in. This is accomplished in part by the author’s mastery of their chosen medium and in part by their understanding of what makes a story work. In layman's terms, taste and market play a great role in the actual success - nonetheless, this is a great opportunity to learn from the best.
This series is not intended to suck anyone’s dick nor to put anyone on a pyre: it is not a review. I started this on my own to explore the most successful mechanics in the most successful serials. I won’t go deep into the bad parts because this series is about what makes something successful. I have the exact opposite as well, which is closer to a retrospective analysis - sometimes nastily known as post-mortem - of failed/stunted-growth novels [, including my novels], but that’s still private, and given the very inflammatory nature of it and the inconsiderate hate I’d get from it, I’ll most likely keep it like that.
If you take issues with what I write in terms of its veracity, you are welcome to express your own opinion. I take particular interest in 1-on-1 conversations with other authors - but I’m generally a bit shy when it comes to asking for a voice chat. If you are an author and you want to ask for a voice chat with me, just shoot an email at jacopofowl@gmail.com
If you take issues with the series because you are a fan/hater of the analyzed novel and/or because of politics, don’t waste my time.
Introduction
Paranoid Mage has had one of the most meteoritic rising in webnovelistic history. It came out on January 1st, 2022, and reached 2711 Patrons on January 24th. In 23 days, pegging the total earnings of each Patron at ~$10, this series potentially grossed $27.110 during its first month. Now, considering that Patreon takes a cut, that Inadvisably Compelled, the author, already had the Patreon up for his last series, Blue Core, with a lower earning-per-Patron average, a plausible figure would be around ~$20.000 for net Patreon earnings.
Few Novels have reached those numbers. Fewer still, if any actually did, reached them so fast. It’s interesting how, apparently, the authors’ guild says that ‘the median income of people who described themselves as full-time authors was just $20,300 when including all book-related activities.’
Is that figure above believable? I don’t even remotely think so. I think it’s a clickbait figure made with little rigor: it’s already hard for people with a good understanding of statistics to pull off credible numbers without making blunders because of biases, much less to the ‘authors guild’ random surveys. Nonetheless, it is cool to say that Paranoid Mage made in 23 short days what your average writer allegedly makes in a year. All the more power to web novelists, anyway. But do not be discouraged by random numbers made by people with little mathematical [and logical] knowledge.
There's no questioning the quality of writing here, especially for the first five chapters. And I started my How to Write series with this novel because it's probably one of the few examples where the ingredients for success are much easier to spot than usual. My very first personal essay is actually on Primal Hunter—but that one was too lengthy and would have scared away most readers. It’s going to be the next one, though, so don’t worry.
Chapter 1, Punching Our Guts
The very first chapter starts like this:
For some reason, there was one of them at the funeral.
Ever since Callum Wells was young he’d seen things. People. Things that were people, or people that were things. The not-quite-human. […]
We’ll see how this structure is somewhat of a constant from chapters 1 to 5, with InadvisablyCompelled creating the premise in the very first lines of the chapter to then using the build-up to punch the reader’s guts. There’s a sense of foreshadowing in what the author puts on top, which makes the reader subconsciously expect something. Not knowing what that something is, constitutes a good chunk of the appeal.
We are told that Callum Wells can see the supernatural, and in the first sentence we are drawn to the world with a statement precise enough to get our attention, but with plenty of ambiguity to build on our curiosity in the very next statement.
Look very closely at this statement because everything that comes right after is sort of an interlude. After a little bout of anger for the paranormal being’s disrespect toward his parents’ funeral, we are drawn back into the world of mortals. We are given interaction with a kind Human, and then a bit more of the backstory. So far, the novel is decently written and interesting, but nothing of note happens in the first half.
When we get to this, we are roughly a thousand words from the beginning, somehow we have already forgotten about the supernatural because Callum is doing something entirely mundane.
Despite his preoccupation, he made the time in the following weeks to go to the gym or go biking or shooting on a regular basis. Not that he much felt like it, but in addition to the general caution he’d inherited from Callum, Sr., Selene’s death had made Callum paranoid about his health.
Or is he?
“Hey!” The owner of the gym waved as Callum headed toward the equipment. Though he’d introduced himself as Shahey, Callum was pretty sure that wasn’t his name. Shahey was maybe five feet tall, but completely covered in red-orange scales and had a reptilian head rather than a humanoid one.
There’s no pause in the narration, no lull that would foreshadow what’s going to happen right after in a matter of a few paragraphs. Someone enters the gym and starts shooting.
Their pistols cracked as they aimed at Shahey, but the bullets just seemed to bounce off his scales. The lizard-man rounded to face them and opened his jaws, and an instant migraine slammed Callum backward, stars dancing in front of his eyes as there was a sudden thunder.
Damn, that was fast, wasn’t it?
Heat scorched his face and when he blinked his vision clear, Shahey was gone. So were the gunmen. There was only a curtain of fire on that side of the gym, hot enough that the glass slumped and ran in little puddles. Callum stared for a moment, then coughed as acrid smoke rolled in. The sprinklers went off, to no effect, and he realized that everyone had to get out. He had to get everyone out. A quick glance around found that everyone was unconscious save for him, and for no apparent reason. The fire was hot, but not that hot.
I have Bolded and then put in Italics the part that I’d like you to pay attention to. I’ll save you the scene where Callum tries to bring the people out of the gym because I’d recommend you read it for yourself. What is interesting, is that as soon as manages to get out of that inferno…
The rough concrete dug into his hands as he tried to lever himself upright, wheezing as he dug for his phone. Part of him found it strange there were no sirens already, but it wasn’t a movie set. In the real world emergency services took time to arrive. He was dialing when a voice startled him.
“What are you doing?”
I’ve spoken about this very part in my previous article, The Three Things you Need to Write a Successful Web Novel. What we have here is a prime example of Superimposition of Animus, in other words, a visceral grappling move that puts the reader in a chokehold and shoves empathy - doesn’t matter if negative or positive - down his throat.
We are struck with a hammer here, caught unprepared for that sentence. Paranoid Mage has a subtle approach that did not foreshadow enough for a gym-ending fire, but that did prepare us for such an outcome. It’s not totally out of the field, but it wasn’t expected. That’s a great strength. So many authors foreshadow the living hell out of their novels, basically telling the reader what’s going to happen next.
Even great authors sometimes go overboard with the foreshadowing, as if readers were a bunch of three years old kids. And while it’s true that going too subtle can be damaging, InadvisablyCompelled struck the perfect balance: we could have expected something bad to happen, but we weren’t told to.
Let’s deconstruct:
If Paranoid Mage has suggested that ‘there have been many robberies/gunfights lately around the block,’ then this development would have been kind of meh. Still decent, but meh.
Instead, the focal point rests not upon the mess, but on the fact that Callum made it the most important thing when, clearly, the most important thing had been revealed at the start:
Ever since Callum Wells was young he’d seen things. People. Things that were people, or people that were things. The not-quite-human. […]
Callum wasn’t supposed to interact with the paranormal. He saw people on the floor but felt that:
The fire was hot, but not that hot.
It’s the air, the materials falling, not the fire, the real danger. Now, I don’t know if the people could have died or not because it’s not specified. But, on a level, Callum should have acted as if nothing was wrong. He had done that his entire life, that was the obvious right choice. But the truth is that it wasn’t that obvious.
As an author and a self-described webnovel researcher, I’ve made this mistake, and I’ve seen it done a thousand times. Over-foreshadowing is a thing, folks. And it kills many potential best sellers.
I know that it might sound exaggerated, but I firmly believe this was a massive propeller before the actual make-it-or-break-it part of Paranoid Mage. This is one of two massive Superimposition of Animus moments. This gives the initial rocambolesque acceleration to the novel.
Let’s reroll the tape for a second, though.
How do you write such a thing in your own novel?
Because this is the question I’m interested in.
I’ve stated this before, and I’ll reiterate it: I firmly believe that you learn much more from books than from authors. Authors are never as sharp and good as their own writing. Often, they are not even aware of what seems to make or break their novel - which might or might not be the case with any novel we are going to analyze. I’ve seen the practice of interviewing authors or hogging their attention in hope that their knowledge will trickle down, but those who do actual research and are very self-aware seem to be few. That’s why I’ve started these essays. I have a bunch of them in barely logically stringed sentences in my own RoamResearch graph - I used them to improve and to write new novels. This is not pure elucubrations, but a practical overview of what made what. Also, as a side note, I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad in associating with bigger writers or asking them for opinions, but I also believe that self-made research goes a long way when it comes down to actual narrative.
So, why don’t we draw a picture of what happened?
We have a much larger situation to consider, the A part: Callum can see paranormal creatures. But then, B comes before A: Callum is involved in a fire of magical nature. The B is bright and short; if it had been any longer, leaving us the time to think, the readers would have figured out the following, ‘Callum is going to out himself.’ But there was clearly not enough space for that.
Why is this unusual?
Look at the image below.
This one is what you see in terms of foreshadowing for pretty much any other author. You have a small hint that gradually turns into a revelation. It might be anything, from the striking description of a beautiful girl to the sad/angry/frowny look on someone’s face, telling us that something bad is coming.
Some writers use this exact method for the proverbial Checkov guns - which are naively similar to what the above image is showing us, just with an extra step.
They let time pass so that the reader has somewhat forgotten that the author has that precise gun, and then they pull out the gun from their hat.
Personally, I have been reticent to try and re-enact what Paranoid Mage has done so masterfully in chapter one. The main reason is that you need a perfect set-up. Even if at first glance it might look like something that fits pretty much any scenario, it’s actually really hard to pull off. And if you mess up the timing, your main character now looks like an idiot. Having a history of hated main characters on RoyalRoad, I’ve kept from it for now.
So, how do we actually do it?
This kind of thing is best suited for something short. You can keep up the optical illusion only for so long before the reader figures it out and gets angry at your main character’s stupidity. So, as a rule of thumb, anything above 1500-2000 words might be too long.
You need a broad hint, something that is not specific. If you say, ‘Marla had a black bruise on her eye and kept looking around the bar with stark fear in her eyes,’ and then you write, ‘oh, but the drinks were at $3 dollars each,’ you will most likely not reach your goal. What’s going to happen it’s too obvious. Just because you artificially try to take away the readers’ attention from it doesn’t mean it will work. You might just make them angrier.
If you are writing a LitRPG, it really depends on how you want to pull it off. Are you going to do it with a reveal of the System? I mean, the readers probably saw the LitRPG tag on your novel; what are you going to surprise them with?
What you could do is try and make up one aspect of the System that is already embroidered in LitRPG’s society. So, you’d need a post-apocalyptic society in this case - which is already starting to resemble Paranoid Mage’s conditions.
Paranoid Mage’s specific recipe is:
Main Character has one specific trait that he’s supposed to keep secret, but that the author doesn’t spend too much focus on to avoid hinting too much
The trait is revealed at the start of the narration with as few words as possible and as detached as possible from it
Main Character is abruptly forced to reveal it and gets caught
If, for example, you spent too long ranting about this one special thing the MC has, putting too much importance on it… you just outed yourself. They are now expecting it. And that’s very common in media. You have a superhero who accidentally reveals their power. Easy. But that’s because the focus of the narration was said superhero’s power.
Callum, instead, is not even particularly afraid of revealing it. He just doesn’t want to be fed psychiatric drugs, that’s all.
With some real effort and talent, you could probably deconstruct this further. But that’s up to you. Use it if you need it and if it fits your plans. Otherwise, do not force it into your novel just because.
Chapter 2, Yeah Ok
Callum knew a hustle when he heard one. It didn’t matter that the hustle was extremely well organized and claimed to wield authority equal to a national government, it was still a hustle. Mandatory training and mandatory draft? That just meant that everyone did things the GAR way or they got killed. A supernatural dictatorship. Fantastic. It was a tyranny he’d never even known existed reaching out to claim control over him, but there was absolutely no way he was going to let it.
‘The man is watching,’ as they say. This plays a lot into our collective fear that the government might be controlling all of us, on a level. When I say collective, it might be better to point at US residents. Other countries usually give less of a damn about the government. Especially Europeans. I don’t know enough Asian people to judge what’s like over there.
The opening salvo stirs some interesting feelings that can be summed up as the prototypical ‘Hero good, Politicians bad.’ Nothing new there. I am frankly not sure that this is, in a reader’s eye, anything more than candy. It’s good, sure. And if you consider the Chinese Matrix of the Unsung Hero analysis that we have seen in a previous article, Callum is no more than your average xiake with the typical Christian traits in literature.
This trait is pretty much the only real heavy-hitter here, narration-wise. And then, we see some good-old projections.
From my previous article: A projection is an element that includes foreshadowing of the future and, at the same time, lets the reader wildly fantasize about what is possible inside one’s novel.
“Space mage,” Lee told him. “It’s quite rare, but we can’t tell how powerful you are because of what happened with the test. Besides, at your age, it’s impossible to know how much capacity you can get by exercising your magic.” She fluttered a hand. “I’ll get you the exercises for beginner mages, and the space magic primer. It’s more meant for children, but…”
Plus, a few paragraphs above, we have a hint of the main character’s special powers after he got tested by the bad agency guys.
“Was whatever happened normal?”
“Not really,” Lee admitted. “I’d have to dig into the histories, but I suspect it’s just a consequence of performing the test on someone as old as you. According to Nurse Taison your casting ability will be impaired for a while, considering the vis overload, but while you were out we went ahead and put on your mage’s mark.”
There are interesting concepts that you could label ‘speculative fiction,’ like the USB where they keep the beginner’s instructions on how to do magic. That’s pretty cool. But that’s not, strictly speaking, what makes or breaks the novel. It helps, and you can find many of these elements peppered through the narration, but I’ll not go over every single one of them because, at the end of the day, we are focused on the heavy-hitter stuff.
If I had to say, I’d probably still point at Chapter 1 as the first ‘money-maker.’ This is good candy, but too many novels have some similar elements and didn’t succeed.
Would Paranoid Mage still be famous without these particular traits here? Or is it because of Chapter 1 that Paranoid Mage is so popular? Is there a synergy between the two or could we argue that there’s one that overshadows the other?
Hard to say. But let’s go back to the text for a second. After obviously finding out that the test presents some abnormalities, we see a mix of positive projection and superimposition of animus.
“Yes,” Lee agreed. “I’m sure it’s connected to how he managed to get to be thirty years old without noticing magic at all. He’s some kind of medical curiosity.” Lee’s eyes glinted with avarice. “I bet I could make my reputation if I got to properly study him.”
The bad guys want to vivisect Callum? Better get angry about the government wanting to mess up with your body, pal. Jokes aside, it’s a good jab - pun intended. And it’s not unbelievable. Below, you find more of this ‘they vs him’ rhetoric that creates even more superimposition of animus.
Callum pressed his lips together. He’d got along well enough with Selene to get married, so that obviously wasn’t true. It was just that Sen didn’t care about so-called mundanes. For that matter, it seemed pretty clear that the supernatural world in general wasn’t all that impressed by the mundane one, for all that they clearly were happy to copy all the nonmagical advancements.
So far, he hadn’t been impressed by what the supernatural world had to offer.
One last thing about chapter 2 I want to talk about because it came up in a private discussion I had with a reader: the ‘absence’ of a power-creep.
Some might argue that I did not talk about the good balance in power that has been shown so far. Callum is no power-creep, and we get just a whiff of his powers. That is enough for some readers to consider this a ‘great’ novel. And they can. But they would be simply ignorant, that’s all. You don’t judge a novel by what it doesn’t do wrong. You judge it by its exceptional traits. The fact that Paranoid Mage is mostly decently written is not what made it stand out in the crowd. Otherwise, every other novel would hit 20 grand. So, let’s move forward and check out the next chapters.
Chapter 3, Back to the Pattern
Chapter 3 opens with the very same structure we have seen in Chapter 1:
It turned out Sen did know what a bank was, but didn’t care what Callum was doing there. It was obvious that he mostly put Callum in the mundane category, and the fact that Callum hadn’t been practicing magic didn’t help. Without the aura of vis about him, or the ability to pick up on the entire spectrum that Sen cared about, Callum might well have been another species.
While Chapter 2 was more about projection and superimposition, which usually follow non-linear patterns and are a one-off salvo to get the reader’s attention, what InadvisablyCompelled goes to is what could have been the core of the novel:
Two important chapters started with the bare minimum information to build some great foreshadowing. Well, this info is not proper, traditional foreshadowing, but it makes sense to look at it to better understand what's going to happen later. While proper foreshadowing would have been Callum already fooling Sen in some way at this point, here we just get to know that Sen doesn't know what a bank is. And that means that mages do not know shit about the mundane world. That sets up Callum for a plethora of shenanigans in the future.
He waited until just after two in the morning, going over it again and again in his head, so stressed that he could taste the adrenaline in his own saliva. It was one thing to contemplate what he was about to do, but it was another to actually commit to it. He frankly doubted he’d have been willing to make the leap without the casualty figures he’d seen.
What happens here is that Callum escapes and the magical paper-pushers simply acknowledge that, with all the incompetence you’d expect from your local post office.
“How did he get out without tripping your wards?” Therin frowned at Sen. The man was a scion of a powerful House, so there wasn’t much in the way of punishment Therin could levy. In fact, Sen’s assignment to Callum was sort of punishment in and of itself, after he’d burned down half a block the last time he’d been let out into the mundane world.
“I don’t know.” Sen shrugged. “My guess is that he wasn’t as naïve as you thought. We were only going to be there two days so I just spelled the doors. That’s policy for mundanes, which Callum was.” Sen said challengingly, and Therin scowled. All signs had pointed at Callum just being a strange sort of cripple, but apparently not. Nobody fled for no reason.
I think there are several interesting projection instances in this chapter and more things to build the anti-hero narrative to have Callum fight the government. But, I honestly don’t believe that anything in chapter 3 is particularly make-it-or-break-it.
I’ll discuss this aspect more at the end of our analysis.
As a general overview of my thoughts, I see chapters 2, 3, and 4 as an Interlude between chapter 1 and chapter 5.
But let’s discuss what happened at the start, the little foreshadowing before the proper run. There are not many paragraphs between the first and Callum packing to escape. There was space here to replicate a similar - if not exact - pattern that we saw very clearly in Chapter 1.
I believe that if InadvisablyCompelled had arranged it better, this chapter’s narrative structure would have had the same strength as the very first chapter. Instead, he fuzzied up the pattern, making it vaguer and, possibly, hasty.
Chapter 4, Build-Up to Chapter 5
“Hello there!” The girl at the counter chirped as he walked into the café, the small bell above the door jangling. Her nametag proclaimed she was Clara. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before!” If he had to guess, he would have said Clara wasn’t more than fifteen or sixteen, which raised the question of why she wasn’t in school, but it really wasn’t his business.
I consider the above paragraph at the bottom of Chapter 4 as the functional start of Chapter 5. That’s all I have to say about this chapter.
Chapter 5, Shit Comes to Town
In Chapter 5, you can see the very same hinting pattern that was established before. However, I want to note something.
Functionally speaking, I don’t think that the division of chapters will have much impact on the very first 30-50k words of a web novel. Paranoid Mage’s narrative is not as clear if you only look at where one chapter ends and where one chapter begins.
The POV Change
The start of Chapter 5, in fact, is a POV change. Considering the things that are going down now, that’s not the best choice. A POV before a moment of tension might risk taking away the strength of your novel. However, said POV is barely 10 paragraphs long, which makes its presence not a burden on the overall result.
Plus, a note on this POV.
“He was supposed to be my apprentice,” Duvall growled.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to use your own resources,” Jahn said apologetically. “GAR has put the case in abeyance.”
Chapters 1 to 5 paint strong anti-government rhetoric that is used to foster adversarial sentiments in the readers’ minds. This POV could have maybe pushed just a tad more on it, but, nonetheless, is part of fostering the right kind of superimposition of animus.
Functional Structure Leading to the Ultimate Superimposition of Animus - The Hero Complex
When I look at Paranoid Mage’s structure, I think that the paragraph I quoted from Chapter 4 is the functional start of Chapter 5. Why? Because it’s the same pattern. Look, there’s a cute, innocent, hard-working cheerful girl working at her parents’ diner. Isn’t that… a hint? [Or maybe I’m just much more Paranoid than Callum, who knows.]
When I talked with other authors as Paranoid Mage just started publishing, everyone was very excited about chapter 5. Everyone was riled up, and I found more than one person jumping on InadvisablyCompelled’s Patreon.
What really, forgive me yet another pun, compelled the readers to jump on the wagon is the following.
“Think of something, Mister Hall?” Arthur asked, noticing something even though Callum could have sworn he hadn’t changed his expression.
“Well, something woke me up last night, like a large animal or something. I wasn’t sure what it was, and I just went back to sleep afterward. I can’t tell you anything else, though. It was gone just as soon as I was out of bed.”
[…]
“You will not kill in my town,” Arthur snarled at the bulky man sitting across from him. “This is Winut pack territory, not yours.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mister Langley,” the vampire said in a bored tone. “If one of your pet mundanes had a tragic accident, that’s your issue.”
“He was killed by a vampire,” Arthur ground out. “They tried to make it look like something else, but I went myself and there’s no mistaking the scent.”
[…]
When dawn arrived, he was actually on the verge of dozing off when a car came barreling down the road and swerved into his driveway, sliding to a halt in a spray of gravel. That woke Callum up instantly, and he hastily threw on some pants and a shirt while Jessica got out of the car and ran to the door. He almost tripped going down the stairs as Jessica hammered on the door with more than normal strength, and had to teleport his cane into his hand at the last instant before he jerked it open.
“They’ve taken Clara,” she blurted before he could even begin to ask. “You have to help.”
Long story short, assholes vampires get into town, and they are basically parasites in Paranoid Mage’s world. They love nothing more than apparently abducting innocent people and feeding on them. Plus, they are bullies.
Now, it would take me copy-pasting the entire five chapters to show you why you get riled up. I suggest you go and read them for yourself. What you need to note down is that Paranoid Mage has layered several strata of Superimposition of Animus.
We started with Chapter 1, where we find ourselves in Callum’s shoes without even realizing it. Then, in chapter 4, we see the peaceful town and the cute girl. In chapter 5, the threat becomes apparent, everyone is on edge, but we are brought to believe - guess what - that Callum might be the one who’s going to get attacked. This time, the pattern is the same. Stretched, sure, but the same as chapter 1.
A simple list of some of the things that have fostered negative Superimposition of Animus:
Callum would need to either be drafted in the military or get himself apprenticed to a mage = despotical, unfair laws
Callum is looked after like an interesting guinea pig after they run tests on him = malicious agents trying to ‘harm’ the MC
Mages are very haughty toward their non-magical counterparts = an unfair societal structure
Vampires bad, and they abduct Clara = an absolutely despicable act that immediately triggers every single hero complex in our minds
Now, I’m trivializing these bullet points to make them simpler to understand and to avoid redundancies. I have an infinite amount of respect for the work done here so far.
There’s also the mostly neutral superimposition that happens in Chapter 1 which works as an instant shock to the reader, now pulled on the passenger seat, shoulder-to-shoulder with Callum.
The Great Convergence of the Animus
Disclaimer before you keep reading this part
‘We live in a society, duh,’ where it’s easy to point a finger and think we have figured something out. Sadly, too many people jump to easy conclusions and only think in terms of low-hanging fruits. The topic of masculinity itself is something I’d rather not discuss on the Internet because of the sensibilities of certain parties.
But in our case, LitRPGs, [web serial] Progression Fantasies, and Xianxias are fundamentally tied to the xiake of Chinese origins. Even Callum, so American in his behavior, would actually fit without a problem in the landscape of feudal China, where knight-errands had to be judges, juries, and executioners in order to enforce justice.
And thinking that this type of violent justice is not something that belongs almost exclusively to men would be historically and, most likely, factually incorrect. If you reject this premise, you will not find the following analysis useful.
Hard to Pin Down Animus’s Qualities in an Analytic Manner
Let me just pull up an excerpt from my previous article:
In his work on the collective unconscious, Jung describes Animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman and Anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man. As I mentioned before, young men all across the first-world countries are repressing their masculine side, making masculine idols more and more popular, whether they are toxic or not. Also, men have been repressing their feminine side for centuries, or maybe millennia, across all societies. That’s the Anima, the feminine qualities that a man should reconcile with for a better life. However, now we have the repression of the core qualities of each sex, effectively giving ectopic birth to Animus in men and Anima in women. It is only natural that men prefer literature with a strong masculine figure.
Men are therefore naturally brought to admire masculine traits, no matter how toxic they might be - that is an undeniable fact.
And it’s hard to decide what qualities are good and what are bad for a man. Plus, dogmas are always too monolithic to accommodate the intricacies of real [or fictional] life.
For example, a crying man has been the object of controversy since Plato.
Then we should be right in doing away with the lamentations of men of note and in attributing them to women and not to the most worthy of them either, and to inferior men, in that those whom we say we are breeding for the guardianship of the land may disdain to act like these. - Plato Republic III 387e–388a
However, for the Western world, whether you like it or not, the Iliad and the Odyssey have had the greatest literary, and to an extent, cultural, influence. And guess what.
The heroes of the Iliad, in particular, are very often presented in tears, suffering grief and pain. The tears of Achilles, just as his military exploits, are present throughout the poem, from his first appearance to his last. When he is not fighting, he is crying. All signs suggest that for an epic hero crying was not simply the expression of momentary distress, but rather a form of conduct that was a constituent part of his nature.
What, then, are the hero’s duties if we don’t even know whether they can cry or not?
It’s easy summing up a few things as duties but hard to actually put them into practice without going overboard. Remember, this is a ‘How to Write’ series, and therefore we must put extra attention to what we can emulate from Paranoid Mage.
Up to the end of Chapter 5, Callum was trying to distance himself from the madness of magical society. He just wanted to live a tranquil life. But when he finds out that Clara has disappeared, it becomes an instant moral imperative to rescue her.
Every man has the ‘saving the Princess’ instinct. Why? Lots of speculations could be done here, but if you have ever heard the [now unusual] saying ‘a face that launched a thousand ships,’ that refers to Helen of Troy. Beautiful [and innocent] women are the prime reason for men to have conflicts.
In the case of Clara, we have not much in terms of beauty as much as in terms of innocence, though. But that does the trick all the same. A hero faces injustice, corruption, and morally ambiguous people. Unlike the Christian tradition of heroes, a hero also has to be ruthless and extremely prone to violence.
In Paranoid Mage, we sum up rather minor or clichéd actors together to slowly and relentlessly build the anger among readers. That’s what ‘The Great Convergence of the Animus’ stands for.
How to replicate it
This is a difficult thing to do because of the varying sensibilities of men across the globe and the technical and emotional skills needed to accomplish such a result. And I say men because men are the great majority of readers of web serials.
Let’s draw a comparison between three novels, including Paranoid Mage, obviously.
Primal Hunter is even more famous than Paranoid Mage, and something I’ve thoroughly studied.
I Wear It Black is a novel I wrote after studying Primal Hunter, Paranoid Mage, Defiance of the Fall, and He Who Fights with Monsters.
By definition, a convergence of superimposition of animus is the defining moment where all the negative emotions associated with the masculine animus come together and supercharge the reader so much that his emotions are almost impossible to distinguish from the main character.
In Paranoid Mage, the first superimposition is neutral, so much so that using the ‘animus’ noun is almost wrong. But then, it steers on the side of things that clash with a man’s animus, falling in line with the usual narrative of web serials.
Ideally, what you want to do is to have small bits and pieces that clash with a reader’s animus. Paranoid Mage calls for the violation of privacy, freedom, body, and overall injustice in society. Primal Hunter, instead, calls for something much more controversial: competence. The first ten chapters of Primal Hunter have the underlying idea that the modern man is incompetent and that a ‘return to monke’ would, instead, be auspicable and beneficial in such a situation; it basically implies that the era of feminine traits that come really handy in a corporate context has ended, that it is high time for violence.
In Primal Hunter there’s what some Western sub-cultures call ‘incel rhetoric.’ I personally do not agree with that definition, but this is not a gender studies class. So, if you don’t like that kind of rhetoric, it’s completely understandable. But I’d not ascribe it to being an ‘incel’ or being ‘fascist,’ just more to personal taste and sensibility.
In I Wear It Black, the first ten chapters present one of the worst possible corporation politics that could exist. There’s outright abuse and injustice, not just incompetence. The CEO has hired mostly incompetent beauties because he’s a sociopath, and that creates a living hell for the main character who, stupidly, tries to prove to himself that he can still make it even in the worst situation possible.
While both Primal Hunter and Paranoid Mage have been criticized for certain aspects, I Wear It Black has received the most amount of hate [and least money, sadly] out of the three. The most interesting thing, though, is that those two were case studies I have genuinely poured over for hours on end and, at the time of writing this very paragraph, albeit there has been a torrential outpour of hate, the revenue-per-follower is good. But we’ll discuss this more in-depth in a future article on the retrospective analysis of I Wear It Black.
The reason I put the three novels side-by-side is the fact that the superimposition of animus can be a two-edged sword. Creating too much injustice makes for a ‘weak’ main character, whereas creating too much incompetence makes for ‘incel’ output.
So, adding those two elements had a multiplicative - or, perhaps, even exponential - effect on the narrative. So, be extremely careful with it. I might have done what young teenagers do when they mix a bunch of alcoholic beverages together believing they are going to get the most potent concoction Humankind has ever seen—just to end with a disgusting mix of spirits.
And what’s the sweet spot? I believe the sweet spot is slightly outside one’s comfort zone. To create the best emotional value, it might be best to create situations that we personally dislike, and don’t feel comfortable with. Unless you are mostly desensitized to these things, in which case it’s harder to draw a line.
What you want to do is to pepper such elements lightly and subtly to avoid the outrage of the crowds, but keep it consistent and, for maximum effect, create a cliffhanger exactly at the moment the convergence of superimposition of animus happens.
Technicalities
Paranoid Mage took a one-week break after Chapter 5 that brought troves of subscribers to InadvisablyCompelled’s Patreon because it was the perfect moment to capitalize on the convergence of animus. You can plan the novel and release the chapters in the same way.
Paranoid Mage already had a big sister, Blue Core, another novel by InadvisablyCompelled. An established author will always have an easier time shooting up the ranks compared to a newbie. Your own network of other authors and your fanbase can do wonders in the initial stages of web publishing.
Paranoid Mage is an Urban Fantasy with close-to-none elements of progression fantasy. This is highly unusual for a novel on RoyalRoad. LitRPGs are usually king, queen, prince, and the entire court. Paranoid Mage is the exception, not the rule. You’ll have higher chances of success with a fresh LitRPG with original details compared to an Urban Fantasy.
Conclusions
In its first six chapters, Paranoid Mage is nearly perfect.
Breaking Bad’s character Mike is a good model for Callum's character. Astute, perceptive, and resourceful. Callum, however, lacks the charisma of other heroes. I attribute the delay to a lack of time. I think the author would need extra time to do justice to this book. Or a fantastic editor, and I don't mean "wow, this guy edited a mainstream fantasy novel." Without a doubt, nope. I'm referring to an editor who has saber-sized testicles.
In terms of quality of writing, this is easily in the top 10 of all the web novels I've ever read—maybe even the top five, but I'm too lazy to make a more detailed list.
What I can say is that you can definitely learn how to better manage the superimposition of animus in your novel by reading and analyzing for yourself the first five chapters of Paranoid Mage. The sixth is complementary in my opinion - no more than an accessory to its success; that’s the reason I didn’t analyze it.
Also, always remember that knowing how something is made and actually doing it are two different things. Having a recipe to follow can make your life easier, but you’ll still need a bunch of experience if you plan to make it as a chef.
Anticipating FAQs
Why did you only analyze five chapters?
In my opinion, those five are the best and the most important. InadvisablyCompelled broke the winning pattern after the sixth, and I think that made the novel inadvisable. Also, this essay is north of 7k words. I didn’t want to write a book about a book.