To get the confession over with, I've gone and written twenty or so pages of an ongoing, directionless, slightly episodic survival story about two refugees in City 17.
I understand that Half-Life isn't like the big RPG titles, whose customization, open-ended gameplay and D&D lineage lend themselves well to fiction using their universes. All Half-Life has is (the horror, the horror, the horror!) the 800 or so stories on fanfiction.net.
But I'm sort of a good writer. The other times I overcame my shame and wrote fan fiction, the community and two of the very talented (okay, one very talented and one average) original writers were quite impressed. So with that tenuous reassurance that it won't make your eyes bleed, would anyone be interested in reading some Half-Life fan fiction?
It's not entirely derivative, as I avoid the game's characters and events to expand on the universe a little, exploring how people would live their lives in such a changed world, how they would deal with the past and their old identities, and what it is like to try to survive in the ghost of a city where all the comforts and technologies of the past are available, but hard to reach. Half-Life's is an interesting sort of apocalypse, less depressing and destructive than a nuclear war, so I try to make the results matter more on a human level. A big part of this is making the social environment of City 17 more complex. How would people under the Combine regime communicate and relate to each other? Many of them don't even speak the same language, but what does nationality mean at this point anyways?
An interesting tidbit, HL writer Mark Laidlaw confirmed my image of a diverse, multinational City 17 with people from all over the continent grouped together. You can read about it in the Laidlaw Vault on the Steam forums.
TL;DR: I have fan-fic. Here is an excerpt:
"Miljan paused, kicked a headcrab into a pile of hubcaps, then kept on talking..."
I understand that Half-Life isn't like the big RPG titles, whose customization, open-ended gameplay and D&D lineage lend themselves well to fiction using their universes. All Half-Life has is (the horror, the horror, the horror!) the 800 or so stories on fanfiction.net.
But I'm sort of a good writer. The other times I overcame my shame and wrote fan fiction, the community and two of the very talented (okay, one very talented and one average) original writers were quite impressed. So with that tenuous reassurance that it won't make your eyes bleed, would anyone be interested in reading some Half-Life fan fiction?
It's not entirely derivative, as I avoid the game's characters and events to expand on the universe a little, exploring how people would live their lives in such a changed world, how they would deal with the past and their old identities, and what it is like to try to survive in the ghost of a city where all the comforts and technologies of the past are available, but hard to reach. Half-Life's is an interesting sort of apocalypse, less depressing and destructive than a nuclear war, so I try to make the results matter more on a human level. A big part of this is making the social environment of City 17 more complex. How would people under the Combine regime communicate and relate to each other? Many of them don't even speak the same language, but what does nationality mean at this point anyways?
An interesting tidbit, HL writer Mark Laidlaw confirmed my image of a diverse, multinational City 17 with people from all over the continent grouped together. You can read about it in the Laidlaw Vault on the Steam forums.
TL;DR: I have fan-fic. Here is an excerpt:
"Miljan paused, kicked a headcrab into a pile of hubcaps, then kept on talking..."