A Missive to the Hero

A standard isekai hero summoning written in second person past tense.

An experiment I started and then abandoned in short order. I did however learn some stuff from it that might be interesting to share here, for anyone else who wants to try to get second person to work.

So my premise for the story was to try to get around the normal difficulty of achieving willing suspension of disbelief inherent in second person narratives (the whole 'you do x', 'no I don't', problem) by having the narrative be an accusation of wrongdoing by someone who hates you. The idea being that when you are accused of something and when you encounter personally directed hatred that your ability to think rationally is diminished. That if someone says, 'you did this, you monster, I hate you,' there's a part of you that listens to them and might even doubt yourself. Especially if they are trying to hurt you by saying it. I did also cheat a bit by involving magic amnesia, but I don't think it's necessary.

The problem with this is that my attempt was just too long. Trying to tell a whole isekai hero against the demon lord is just too much for this style. On that point, I did have plans of it being this sporadically updated thing in which it would be obvious that certain parts of the story was missing. As if the transmissions from the other world was being cut off. I think that would have been effective both for immersion and reducing length. But even then it was just too much.

The problem with trying to do a novel length story with this approach though, is that it is dependent on the aforementioned tone of accusation and hatred. However, this is a very narrow emotional range. First off, it was just exhausting to keep my head in that emotional space. Second off, it's somewhat limiting if there's no emotional variance.

There's also the issue that in addition to being second person, it is also an epistolary story written some time after the events occurred. So for immersion I decided to limited the information to what the 'writer' could feasibly have remembered. So no whole conversations recorded verbatim. Because even in real life, if someone wrote you a letter telling you a story about something years later in the same detail as a typical novel, you would assume they're making most of it up to fill in gaps, even if nothing fantastical happened. So that means that the details become even sparser than my normal stories. Which means that the story becomes simultaneously too long and too short.

Combining the last paragraph with the one before it creates yet another difficulty. Because without details to give a sort of breathing room, that emotional invariance becomes a lot more set in stone. In which case there quickly becomes no place to take the story.

Anyways, I hope this analysis of my failure was interesting. To be honest, I probably could have gotten at least twenty chapters before the inherent problems became insurmountable. I mostly just stopped because of how exhausting it was to maintain that headspace of simmering hate, but I'm sure a more disciplined writer could have done it easily. If you're writing your own second person narrative and you found this helpful or the limited amount of story I did write interesting, please leave a comment mentioning your story so I can check it out.