The KidVegeta Anthology/Chasing Oblivion

Chasing Oblivion was a story I had considered writing since early 2015. At the start of that year, as I mentioned on the anthology page for Bonetown Blues, I was debating whether to write this story are start Things Were Better Then. I ultimately decided to write that one-shot collection first, after talking it over with Destructivedisk. The main reason for that was that my ideas for this story were not very clear at that point, while the effort required to plot out ten short one-shots would be far less. Knowing that this story would probably be pretty long, as it is the next in the series of human origin stories following Spindlerun: The Tale of Yajirobe, was a factor in that. I structured this story almost entirely after Spindlerun in terms of the chapter length and the point-of-view structure, so I knew getting into the one would be a major commitment.

Ultimately, I didn't start writing Chasing Oblivion until August 2016. By then, I had also completed the one-shot collection following TWBT (The Heels of the Unknown), much of Baby You're a Rich Man, and the Kanto Arc of my Pokemon story, A Just Edge. All of that is to say that by the time I started this story it was about the only active story I had at the time, not counting The History of the Decline and Fall of the Planet Trade Organization. It was also the only story remaining that did not tie into Dragon Ball: Heart of the Dragon in some way or another. That fact alone made it a priority for me to complete at that time, as I was ready to get into the an almost exclusive HOTD focus (barring some non-canon comedies and the occasional canon character characterization one-shot).

In order to prepare for this story, I began mapping out the chapters in outlines in the same way that I had done with Spindlerun. A lot of time was spent on characterization for this story - much more than I spent on the characterization of the Spindlerun secondary characters. I spent a lot of time on characters like Junichi and Lychrel, trying to make them unique and interesting. I knew early on that this story would be focused primarily in Diablo Desert, where we end up meeting Yamcha for the first time in Dragon Ball, and that he would not start out with a group of bandits, but would eventually get caught up with some before breaking away with Puar, thus ending up how he is found in Dragon Ball. Additionally, I wanted to involve South City, as I wanted there to be a metropolitan setting to contrast the anarchistic, sandy, dirty, desolate, barely-peopled desert.

The group of bandits that Yamcha gets caught up with are the bandits who appear in Bonetown Blues. While I chose to write Things Were Better Then rather than this story in early 2015, I still had a scratch to itch regarding Yamcha and his backstory that I used as the basis for that one-shot. It's essentially an epilogue for Chasing Oblivion. Rather weird, I must admit, to write the epilogue for a story like a year and a half before I even begin that story, but it was fun. And it gave me certain structures to the story that I'd have to adhere to - namely, that Wolfe survives, that he's the one who teaches Yamcha the Wolf Fang Fist, and that at some point they have a falling out that doesn't end up killing either of them. Had I not written this story, Wolfe would have certainly died in Chasing Oblivion, as nearly everyone else does. But thematically it is probably more interesting that he survived. They had a cool moment of reconnection in Bonetown Blues.

One of the bigger problems in the planning of this story was coming up with the secondary canon characters who would appear in it. In Spindlerun, those characters were General Blue and Mr. Satan. I thought having those characters serve secondary roles was a nifty idea, so I tried to do the same here. The only problem was that it was difficult to come up someone to use. Colonel Violet eventually was chosen, and Hasky was chosen at a later date, as those two both seem like they could be useful for a story like this. Violet in particular is a renegade, so being involved in the bandit drug trade was believable in my opinion.

There was also the matter of having one first person point-of-view character. In truth, I have no idea how I came up with the mayor and his plotline. I must've been high or something. Indeed, I got high to write this story, so there's a lot of details I don't exactly remember, though the broad strokes of the story have remained with me. I distinctly remember I would take edibles for the first few chapters, but I gradually started doing vape cartridges. This means that for the first three or four chapters, I had to wait like an hour for it to kick in, often meaning I was thinking about the chapters for that hour beforehand, then writing as soon as it kicked in. Since vape weed gets you high immediately, that was not the case for the later chapters.

I began this chapter before starting my first semester at a new school. It was a stressful time for me, so Chasing Oblivion was one of the things I could cling onto to not feel stressful. I am rather fond of this story for that reason. But also, despite that, it is a lot like Spindlerun in that it made me very weary to write it. The chapters become absurdly long at the end. I think the final chapter is like 13,000 words. Probably the longest chapter I'll ever write for a story. I already broke up the final two chapters when they were originally going to be one, so breaking that up a third time was just not going to happen. Structurally it didn't make sense. But it's just so long, and it took so many hours to write this story. The editing phase was long too. It was just a grind.

I spent a fuckton of time on Chasing Oblivion, and it took a lot of patience and hard work to get it done. I had originally tried to finish it by the end of 2016. However, that proved to be impossible for a few reasons. Firstly, like the silly boy I am, I began another one-shot collection, A Short-Lived Dream, after writing the first three chapters. So I spent a good deal of time from October to December 2016 focusing on that story. I was also writing other one-shots at the time, such as the first Ikigai story, A Space Christmas Story, the rather useless contest story called This is a contest story, and was still in school.

So I had a lot on my plate. And with how long Chasing Oblivion chapters were becoming, each one was like a week's commitment at least. Luckily, I was able to complete chapters 4, 5, and 6 in 2016, but that was where I hit a roadblock. I had originally planned on making this a 7 chapter story. But as I mentioned before, I had too much left to write. I couldn't make a 23,000 word chapter. That's just way too much. So knowing I had to split it, a decision I only made on the wiki on January 3, 2017, but one I had decided on at least two weeks before that point, I lost momentum and was unable to finish. Two chapters would not be doable in like a week's time, as I only posted the sixth chapter on December 22nd. However, I was still able finish it relatively quickly into 2017, thankfully, even though those last two chapters were long as fuck.

The first three chapters took me a month to finish. Then the pressure of school set in, I began ASLD, and the writing slowed immensely. I probably still could have finished this story in 2016 had I tried harder, but it would have been a lot of work. Considering all the extra work I added for myself, as well as having to add another chapter (that ended up being 13,000 words) unexpectedly, taking two extra weeks isn't that bad. I did make a pretty good push at the end, finishing two chapters in December and another one on January 5th. So I didn't take too much time off this story. It was the most important story to me from August 2016 to January 2017.

Despite having those one-shots to worry about, Chasing Oblivion took me way longer to write and due to the complexities of the plot, weaving Yamcha's story with Violet's, Hasky's, the mayor's, Wolfe's, and Yunwu's, not to mention the dozens of other characters, was no small feat. I had to think about this story a lot. I was constantly revising what I wanted to do with the plot, although certain things were surprisingly decided upon early too. For example, how Yunwu dies was planned from the outset. As a result, I was able to foreshadow it for eight chapters, and that was fun. One of the harder plot points for me to resolve was how Yamcha meets Puar. I didn't want him to be a bandit from the start, as Puar doesn't strike me as that sort of person. Yamcha being the one to "turn him bad" is more thematically interesting to me, so I had him meet Yamcha pretty late in the story for that reason.

Thematically, this story is a lot more nihilistic than Spindlerun. I was going through depression at the time, so that was where my mind was at. There's beauty in desolation, but there was also comfort for me at the time. I'm pretty much okay right now, so that comfort is not still there. When I re-read this story, I will have a certain level of detachment from it for that reason. But it's pretty brutal. Spindlerun had moments like that too with shocking deaths, betrayals, and the like, but I think Chasing Oblivion makes this a more prominent and consistent theme. I also had a lot of fun with the mayor's plotline, as the people he deals with are a lot like the people I see at my school. Authoritarian ideologues are the worst. Being able to do what I did to them in this story was really cool, because it's such an insane ending to that plotline. It's basically the most absurd and violent ending to that plotline possible. I remember distinctly thinking to myself "alright, let's just do it". Going the insane route is sometimes necessary, or the plotlines are all too predictable and banal. Not that I think that of the other plotlines, but certainly, the rest of the story is more grounded in believability. The insane twist also serves as a metaphor for the mayor's insanity, it must be said.

So I'll leave the rest of the specifics to the endnotes below. This is going to be a long one. As of writing this commentary, Chasing Oblivion is my third-longest story, being surpassed only by Dragon Ball Z: The Forgotten and His Majesty's Pet. Also, it must be said that my PTO story, while unfinished as of this commentary, is currently about 200,000 words longer than Chasing Oblivion too. So while it's a long one, certainly it's not the longest story I've ever written. But it's compact. It's only 8 chapters. HMP is also compact, being 11 chapters, but both PTO and TF are more than 70 chapters. So yeah. This is going to be a long one. Let's get on with it then.