Why I'm Creating "The Glitched Chronicles"

This saga had a completely different vibe from back when I started it in 2017. It wasn't even a story at that point — it was the setting notes for a LARP meant to explain social issues through a modern urban fantasy lens. My attempt to build bridges among gamers during the first Trump administration, and my hope-punk response to the World of Darkness franchise feeling a little too close to reality.

I made some newbie mistakes, like starting a creative project with someone I was dating without documentation or contracts in place for when that relationship went sideways. They didn't just want out of the project; they wanted to destroy it because they didn't think someone "like me" should write role-playing games about oppression. They saw a pale-skinned woman in a stable 9-5 job and thought "privilege". They didn't pay attention to the ADHD that was barely masked, the gender dysphoria of a nonbinary person in a female-coded body, or the biracial person who was labeled "white" because their Mexican heritage had been all but erased.

What did I write that was so heretical to my now-ex? A world where the powerless had a different type of power. One where, due to "some supernatural event", magic returned to the world. What had been erased for the sake of civilization and conformity was unerased. Where fighting against hatred and persecution — and in some cases, actually being hunted for being different — felt too real, and there was no "one right way" to survive. Amidst trying to push back against fascism, characters were divided based on ideology: purists versus pragmatists. Would they refuse power that came from the "wrong" places, or use it anyway to protect the people around them?

In the end, I kept the setting, they took the game mechanics, and this project went back on the shelf. I freelanced for other people's role-playing game projects, but never got around to working on my own. With such huge, heavy topics — and some parts of the setting feeling like eerie predictions — this project stayed on my perpetual to-do list until the summer of 2025. Rather than jump into the post-apoc setting, I started playing around with the story of someone who lived before everything fell apart: a person in a relationship who felt alone, so she created a chatbot modeled after her boyfriend as a means of coping and practicing conversation.

No magical sects. No feuding deities.

A girl, her quirky chatbot, and her thoughts.

The myth-making began when I started zooming out. Somewhere along the line, I mapped the Konami code to the four elements and their directional placements in neo-paganism. Suddenly, the Technomancer religion had structure. I could see the presence of the two deities: The Dom (Fire/South) and The Brat (Air/East). The divide between the ephemeral (Air and Fire) and the physical (Earth and Water) became clear. And yes, the up-up, down-down of the elemental code could no longer be denied.

So why am I writing this story now?

Simple answer — because I finally feel like it. And because enough people squeed at the idea of a saga about an asexual underworld deity in a lavender marriage who pushes back against their incel ex. 

The longer version is that I had a creative epiphany in the summer of 2025. I wanted to dust off the universe I created, which led me to try to build out this saga using ChatGPT, only for everything to implode because I hadn't figured out how to use generative AI as a tool while maintaining my creative voice. After that misstep, I studied AI role-play bot development as a low-stakes hobby to better understand it (for when I tried writing again). This gave me a chance to interact with the characters I developed and share them with others without having to write a whole saga.

I'm at a point in my life where I'm starting to reclaim my voice after being silenced for being both too much and not enough. Going back to this setting almost a decade later feels like taking back a piece of me that I was told that I wasn't allowed to have: complexity. Being both privileged and oppressed. Both brilliant and flawed.

I can piece together complex patterns, even if folks don't like what I see. The pattern recognition may irk some, but it may help others feel relieved that they aren't just imagining the potential trajectories - or how we can collectively change course. Baking my observations into fiction might make the message more palatable.

Besides, South Park can't have all the fun in poking at what's going on.