Hello. I am Charles Branaghan, but everyone calls me Charlie. I am a webnovel writer of little renown, preferring the genre of high fantasy adventure with a sprinkle of romance. My interests are reading an unhealthy amount of literature, walking my golden Sparkie, and drinking rum on a rainy evening alone in my room. I have been at this game for the last six years, and all I have to show for it is a list of stories that never broke through the thousand-view mark, and a handful of comments, all from bots trying to swindle me into a Discord-based art scam. My family keeps telling me to get a real job, rather than the variety of odd shit I do to stay alive and pay my rent in this four-person house share. My housemates are objectively nice people, but we don’t talk. I wanted to follow my passion for writing, so once I graduated high school, I moved to California, wide-eyed and stupid in retrospect.

Apart from the webnovels, I have been writing my magnum opus that has been in the making since I was fourteen. It is a world-spanning fantasy epic in the vein of George R.R. Martin and Brandon Sanderson, or so I would love to hear from the agent that eventually picks it up. It’s been over a year of querying, but I refuse to give up! I know publishing is hard and the market is oversaturated, but it has always been my dream. I have nothing else to live for, otherwise.

The webnovels are practice. I thought that writing chapter by chapter, getting reader input, and observing the statistics would improve my writing and earn a bit of money on the side. Boy, was I wrong. Not only was it impossible to write anything original and unique that would outcompete the trope-fest that was the ranking board, but the absurd volume of AI-generated slop populating every corner of the internet made writing a successful serial as easy as climbing to the top of a waterfall, as it was pummeling you into the abyss.

I apologise for the dramatics, but when your livelihood is on the line, the mental breakdown is included in the bundle.

One day, scrolling through my YouTube Shorts reel, I stumbled upon a gorgeous fantasy backdrop with dragons, elves, amazing music, the whole shebang. I frantically jumped into the comments to see what TV show I had woefully missed out on, only to find out it was one of those AI short dramas.

My blood ran cold. It had over three million views. In comparison, the human-acted short dramas in the same category barely reached a hundred thousand. What was the world coming to!? What was so attractive about the generic uncanny valley slop that not only overwhelmed the written webnovel spaces, but now spilt out into TV series?!

Out of morbid curiosity, I downloaded one of those free short drama apps and navigated to the AI section. There was everything from CEO drama to mafia romance to werewolves to BL. Having a soft spot for masterpiece works of  Freya Marske, K. J. Charles and Johanna Chambers, I had to see what this abomination was going to look like.

Five minutes later, I launched my phone onto my bed (I wasn’t going to break it; I was dirt poor) and went to the bathroom in search of bleach for my eyes. It was… frankly horrifying. The pacing, the weird expressions, the voice changes, the clothes making no sense, the plot, the inane dialogue. I remember when I was young, I saw my mother watching a Brazilian soap opera. At the time, I thought: How braindead do you have to be to watch this and think it unironically entertaining? I now see how, in comparison, that was a masterpiece of television. I should call my mom and apologise for being a snob.

Later that evening, as I was watching Sparkie go mental over a tennis ball in the dog park, heedless of the rain, the morbid curiosity struck again. Maybe I just stumbled on a particularly bad one? Maybe there was something salvageable out of all that slop? Millions of people seemed to like it, so what was it about these dramas that called out to them?

I opened the app again and scrolled through some filters. I wanted to find that scenery, with the majestic dragon and beautiful castle on the hill I saw previously. But in all the hundreds of comments, not a single person was kind enough to drop the title. So I trudged along, scrolling down the sea of generically overdone covers, looking for something that wouldn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out, Oedipus-style.

I missed it! I quickly scrolled back up, past the half-naked couples in various embraces, to that glimpse of green and blue that flashed before my eyes for a split second. In retrospect, it was stupid of me to do this, sitting under a tree to hide from the light rain during a thunderstorm. Just as I was about to tap on “The Lands of Avaria”, a lightning bolt shot out of the sky and landed straight on my phone screen, ignoring the huge tree behind me. Everything went dark, and my eternal torture began.