This morning I woke up to a surprise: someone from the US had hit about fifteen chapters of Re:Zero fanfiction I wrote back in 2019-2021, that virtually never receives hits. I assume this stranger read some of it as well. That got me to reread a few chapters again, and I remembered that I had an absolute blast writing this story. Some of the funniest scenes I have ever giggled through appear there (most others in my ongoing novel).

Why on Earth was I writing Re:Zero fanfiction anyway? Back in 2018 I had released two books of novellas in Spanish, my native language, but nobody cared. Although I sent them to a few contests, I got no reaction. That was disheartening, even more so because I had come to a turning point of sorts in my creative life: for years I had only read, watched, and played stuff in English, and I didn’t connect with the material either produced in or translated to my native language. I resented plenty of translators, because they injected lots of local colloquialisms into other people’s works, and in general I simply didn’t enjoy the vast majority of the stuff that Spanish-speaking people created. To this day, the only album in Spanish that I listen to semi-regularly is Los Rodríguez’s Palabras más, palabras menos (that I think is fantastic).

I no longer consumed material nor thought, for the most part, in the only language in which I could become proficient enough. That surely killed any hopes of writing original works in English, as well as trying to write seriously in my native language.

Around that time, GPT-3 was impressing the few people in the know. Most civilians only interacted with it through middleware like a website that used GPT as a director of “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type narratives, and it worked quite well for it even then, mainly because it wasn’t censored yet, or at least not remotely to the current extent. I won’t mention the website, because it ended up betraying its users.

I recall an instance in which I, as the protagonist, was attempting to have a normal conversation with a supporting character, only for that character (a female, no less) to blurt out something about scratching her balls, or something to that effect. You never quite knew what sort of material you would be presented with, which made “playing through stories” using GPT-3 very entertaining.

Cue Re:Zero. It was a series of Japanese light novel series that I came to know through the popular anime adaptation released in 2016. I’ve been a life-long lover of Japanese fiction, particularly manga and anime, and they excel at creating fantastic, colorful worlds with competing factions, weird races involving their own peculiarities, and above all, a sense of adventure and camaraderie that has been lost in the West, where our storytellers have been exchanged for political activists. In Re:Zero, a teenager named Natsuki Subaru gets isekai-d to a fantasy world featuring multiple races/species with weird powers, warring medieval factions, bizarre mythical monsters, etc. As the kicker that worked for me, Subaru was a bright, cheerful kid who tried his best to help the people he cared about, only to end up killed over and over: he has the power to reset time whenever he dies, which he does often, in horrible ways. The concept of solving problems through dying agonizingly, having to repeat the same sequences when nobody around you knows you have already lived through them, remains fascinating to me, and I wish I had come up with it.

I figured, why not have a good time playing through that narrative relying on GPT-3 to move things along? For the first eight or so chapters, it didn’t work very well: I relied on GPT-3 too much, which made the narrative quite incoherent, and different from the original (to the extent that I failed to reproduce introductory sequences whose absence ended up biting me in the ass later). By chapter 9 or so, I started taking the narrative seriously, using GPT-3 to spice up the dialogues or come up with intriguing details I could explore.

In my hands, the protagonist, Natsuki Subaru, turned into a wild, semi-deranged pervert, a masochist who openly welcomed at times getting killed even to get off, and who entangled the hapless fantasy characters in some of the most ridiculous and funny dialogues I’ve ever written; when I reread some of them earlier today, they made me laugh. The result was a joyous romp, as far as I’m concerned.

In the end, I abandoned the series when I was about to finish chapter 66, because by then, I had already read the ending of that arc as the original author had written it; I disliked it quite a bit, and it had diverged so much from what I had set up in my own fanfiction, that by then it I might have as well written my own stuff in English, now that I was confident enough. And so I did: lots of free-verse poetry, short stories, a novel that I self-published (My Own Desert Places), and a three and a half books-long novel I’m still writing. So I’d say that writing Re:Zero fanfiction was a great idea.

If you’re curious, and you can tolerate incorrect punctuation, some verb tenses used incorrectly, and in most chapters, paragraphs not separated correctly (for whatever reason, I thought it looked better), then check them out at the end of this page: my novels.

For some specific chapters that I remember fondly:

• When Subaru and his demon companion try to ascertain the nature of a flying whale with the help of a bunch of idiotic travelers (chapter 11)
• When Subaru, dismayed about his inability to stop an apocalypse, decides to mooch off an opposing household while trapping himself in a loop of debauchery and suicide (chapter 16)
• When Subaru drags a cat-girl amputee through a warzone (chapter 24)
• When Subaru disappoints everybody in his fantasy life to exercise his suicide powers (chapter 33)
• When Subaru meets a dead witch and ends up drinking her spit (chapter 42)
• When Subaru confronts his troubled past in a witch’s simulation (chapter 46)
• When Subaru goes through a sultry encounter with a contract killer who gets off on disemboweling people (chapter 50)
• When Subaru deludes himself into believing that his sexual act with a half-elf princess was a witch’s simulation (chapter 52)
• When Subaru annoys their senior servant to an extent that causes him serious physical issues (chapter 53)
• When Subaru and their demonic senior servant travel back to the mansion to confront a German lioness (chapter 55)

There’s lots of other chapters I would have mentioned, but editing them to space their paragraphs is quite annoying.