An Ordinary Heroine for My Raygun Romance

For one, I’ve decided not to share short fiction on the blog.

But regarding the Raygun Romance, I made a particular choice regarding the heroine, one that I think is underappreciated sometimes: The heroine is an ordinary woman.

This does not mean that she is a plain jane or a hapless loser; indeed, she has great beauty and excellent mechanical engineering skills. However, it does mean that she isn’t some superbeing who can take down any foe, or some ultimate genius who can outsmart absolutely anyone. She has no superpowers or magic, and she isn’t linked by blood to any notable figure, whether real or in-universe.

One thing I noticed when reading older work is that many of the protagonists weren’t powered, yet they were put up against supernatural foes; Conan the Barbarian stands out here, since he regularly goes toe-to-toe with demons and wizards. The ordinariness of such protagonists is meant to heighten the sense of danger and make it that much more amazing that they defeated their enemies. It also creates a strong boundary between the mundane and the fantastic, making it clear that the villain is not merely causing damage, but twisting reality in a strange way, as if the hostile entity just shouldn’t exist in an ordered universe. Perhaps this is because in those days mega-IPs didn’t exist, so the only models of heroism to go to were real people who did amazing feats, not fictional characters put up on a TV screen.

This also flies in the face of modern Japanese light novels, which have the precise opposite situation: a person with nearly unlimited power going to another world and dominating it. Such novels run completely contrary to the spirit of the classic pulps despite often being compared to them.

As for my own work, the protagonist must be ordinary for the story to work, because one big part of her story is her brushes with the supernatural; if she is supernatural herself, it matters far less. Any “special stuff” she has is merely technology of the far future, and I’m careful not to treat them as superpowers by another name. While a person will never fly around like Goku no matter how hard they train, my MC’s accomplishments are achievable by real human beings.

As usual, I hope to share this with you when Kindle Vella opens up in the near future.