I’m taking a pause in my reading of The Wandering Inn for a while and catching up on other stuff. Worth the Candle is another work of online fiction that is now fully complete by a writer who goes by the name Alexander Wales. I read Wales’ fanfiction years ago and he is considered one of the writers who arose in the community around Eliezer Yudkowsky’s HPMOR but I haven’t been following up with what he has been doing recently. Well, this was what he was working on and at around 1.6 million words, it’s a pretty hefty epic. It seems to be moderately successful and the image I use here is taken from an approved translation of the work into the Korean language called This World I Made. As for what it’s about, on the face of it, it’s yet another entry into the crowded isekai genre but actually it is a very meta-fictional exploration of fantasy worlds and I think semi-autobiographical on the part of the writer.

Juniper Smith is a teenager from a small town in Kansas who wakes to find himself strapped in an aircraft and then air-dropped into an area filled with roaming zombies. When he closes his eyes, he sees a user interface overlay that informs him that he is in some kind of game yet he cannot quit and is forced to fight to survive. Soon he meets a girl, Amaryllis Penndraig, who he perceives as the most beautiful girl he can conceive of. She gives him some background information on the world he finds himself in, Aerb, and they team up. Yet on Earth, Juniper was a big fan of tabletop role-playing games and serving as the Dungeon Master, particularly loved to create fantasy worlds. He recognizes many elements on Aerb from his own campaigns. Nine months prior, his best friend Arthur was killed in a car accident and he has been depressed and suicidal ever since. So he is shocked when Amaryllis explains that the current world lives in the shadow of a great king who disappeared 500 years ago and she is his most direct ancestor. That king’s name is Uther Penndraig, one of Arthur’s characters from a long campaign.

Obviously with such a huge word count, I’m not going to be able summarize much, but a few highlights are important to allow for some discussion. Like other isekai protagonists dropped into game worlds, Juniper starts out weak but can level up and learn skills and magic fast. The main plot involves him forming an adventuring party to search for Uther while becoming ever more powerful. But the nonstop escalation of the stakes and the power of the opposition they face mean that no matter how strong they get or how cleverly they exploit the rules of the game and synergies in skills and magic, conflicts only ever become more difficult as they desperately rush from one place to another to solve their problems. At the same time there are plenty of flashbacks to Juniper’s life on Earth, in particular the tabletop gaming sessions with his friends. With so many of his creations and ideas being brought to life on Aerb, every memory and scrap of information from those sessions could be hugely significant. Furthermore they realize many of the encounters they have recall particular experiences from Juniper’s previous and could be interpreted as lessons meant for him.

So this series is partly an action-packed travelogue as the party fights across the breadth of Aerb, even as the party knows that the adventures are devised by an all-powerful Dungeon Master who is seemingly hostile towards them. The DM actively intervenes to shut down overpowered exploits to maintain balance and the in-game achievements appear to push Juniper to behave in some ways he would rather not. Another part is a highly meta examination of the logic and biases of game worlds and how characters within a narrative crafted by a higher power should react when they know that they exist within a narrative. There is also plenty of psychological introspection in here as well as Juniper grapples with his depression following the death of Arthur and how he lashed out at everyone else around him in its aftermath, and echoes of this trauma are reflected in the personal problems of the members he picks up as companions. You can enjoy the series for the adventure but the meta and psychological issues are omnipresent and weigh down heavily on Juniper and by extension the reader.

In fact this got heavy enough at times that I was tempted several times to just drop the series or skip to the end to see what happens. There are a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which Juniper is a very unlikeable and annoying character, especially at the beginning. I later understood that this is by design and amounts to a sort of mea culpa by the author and the character is at least partially based on himself and as such exemplifies some of the bad habits of the rational community, including a condescending attitude towards anyone who doesn’t share the same mode of thinking. Then there’s how the Dungeon Master seems intent on punishing the party every time they get a win of some kind. While on paper Juniper’s team seems powerful, it practice they are forced by the plot to run from one crisis to another, facing overwhelmingly powerful opposition with pretty much no downtime at all for a long while. They face insidious threats like mind control undermining trust between party members, Juniper being addicted to the level-up process, enemies that blatantly cheat to be as strong and as fast they need to be and so on. It’s tough going and I really don’t understand why they don’t just give up when they know that this is all because of the all powerful Dungeon Master.

It does get better later and the crazy ideas and worldbuilding in this series makes it worthwhile to stick around to the end. Like everything else this is extremely meta as Juniper came up with his ideas for all kinds of dumb reasons so playing with his hands as a kid in the bathtub turned into giant spires sticking out of the sea. There are dozens of magic types, though they work more like superpowers than traditional magic in fantasy, hundreds of races, a similarly ridiculous number of magic items, and much more. Even the people who live on Aerb remark that the world makes no sense, being too complicated and made up of too many disparate elements. At the same time these worldbuilding elements are used to discuss issues like sexism in fantasy, the problematic nature of slave species, what happens when inhabitants of fantasy worlds ate rational and optimize according to their strengths and so on. A lot of the worldbuilding is awful but again deliberately so as they are meant to be dreamt up by a teenager when he should have been paying attention in school instead.

Due to my mixed feelings about this and having underestimated its length I sped my way through many parts of the story though I still read everything of course. It certainly possesses an addictive quality that makes you want to know what happens next once you feel more invested in the characters. Still this is an acquired taste so much so that even the moderate success that it has met with is surprising to me. I think that those who like traditional litRPGs and want an action adventure story will be disappointed. Even the rationalist community may not like this still any clever rules exploits are instantly shut down by the Dungeon Master who is intent on keeping the narrative on the rails. In my opinion, this series is best enjoyed for its meta-fictional elements and as a very introspective look into the imagination of a teenager.