Ugly Persona Fans Must Die

by nominikui

A young man visits the Velvet Room, with a destined path of justified hatred; a hatred for ugly-looking people, that will spiral into an act of bloodshed on a particular date in October; Ann should hate ugly-looking people; this fact won't ever change. [Note: all chapters after the first are author ramblings]

28. Upcoming story note

Now that I'm thinking about that scene I posted, that acts as a hook for my upcoming story, I'm realising how much of a moron I probably seem to have not made "Last Surprise" the song that plays in that scene. At the time when I was writing it, I went with the OG-Persona 5 song I thought would be most bombastic to perform, to really play up them standing on stage in a dazed confusion. Plus, the lyrics of Rivers in the Desert fits in with the plot of the story in a really strong way, which will be obvious when I finally get around to writing and posting the damn thing.

The issue I'm having with planning out this story so far is that I'm beginning to realise how hard it actually is to write meta story stuff that doesn't come across as ungodly tacky. Like, I want this to be a deep dive into the psyche of the Persona fandom, that really exposes a lot, but at the same time, I want to do that in a way that seems natural, and is wrapped around an actual story. Because otherwise I might as well just be posting rants at people, instead.

I'm going to be angling the story mostly from Panther's POV, and I've decided that to keep it focused, and to avoid it seeming needlessly tacky, that I'll avoid using too many specific references, and keep the meta aspects generalised and vague. So basically, don't expect Erika Harlacher to appear, or any mentions of ChurchOfAnn, or anything of the sort. No real people and things (other than Persona Super Live, and the usage of specific Persona elements, like songs, and imagery. Those are just vague "Persona things" by themselves to not feel tacky. You'll notice when I did that Super Live scenario, that the depiction of the Super Live performance was pretty vague beyond "a woman singing and a band playing music", and I did that on purpose). It'd be tacky, and needlessly provocative, to boot. And it'd make the entire fanfic feel like a dumb meme/crack fic, and that's not what I'm going for.

I'm trying to invoke something of a genuine fourth wall shattering story, but done in a way that the series would actually do it, if it decided to do something like that. I want to keep it relatively grounded, and I really want to put effort into making it my best story I've written so far.