Consider the Dust is highly influenced by my many years of inhaling shounen anime. That means a lot of my favorite tropes are fundamental to this story, so you can expect:
- Magic weapons! Because they’re awesome, and I’m a big believer of putting whatever is awesome into a story.
- Tournaments! A shounen classic. The stakes rise, and our characters level up to meet them.
- One True Rival pairing is actually BFFs—and one of them is Naturally Cool and the other is… super not.
- True power comes from the bonds of friendship, not forsaking people.
- Making friends by defeating them—and in so doing converting them to your philosophy of life—via epic battles. I like to call this trope “communicating with our fists.”
- Never, ever giving up, no matter the ludicrous odds stacked against you.
Those are a few of the obvious ones, though there are subtler thematic and aesthetic tropes (more on cherry blossoms to come) threaded throughout!
One of my goals with this story from the get-go was also to center women. I love shounen anime, but even when they have lead female characters with awesome powers, those women rarely get to be the focus of the story or save the day in the overarching plot.
(I’m looking at you Naruto, and My Hero Academia, and… well. Lots of my favorites.)
I can enjoy stories without any women centered! But this is an aspect I wish were handled differently in many cases, so I wrote my own veering hard that direction. (There is a token dude. You know, for realism. ?)
Basically, this story has most of my favorite things: epic battles and badass women and magical power. I hope you have as much fun with it as I do!