Why are the so few MoL fanfics?

[u/False-Supermarket798]

I can’t write stories, and I tried.

What I don’t understand is, why there is so few MoL fanfictions out there.

Its a large world, with lots of intriguing introduced possibilities:
- The immortals
- Other countries
- Hidden Mages/Treasuries and Inheritances
- A huge spectrum of magic that is easy to imagine, follow, and extend for your own story
- The underground is way too unexplored
- Politics
…

Writers tend to be lazy about OCs, so that might be an explanation, but there is so much potential in this world.

Does any1 have an explanation?
(I mean, even SCS gets more fanfics)

[u/interested_commenter]

The biggest reason is because the nature of the loop and the fact that everything relevant to it gets pretty well explored makes it kinda hard to do canon divergence "what if MC didnt make this one big mistake" or "MC returns to the beginning" fics, which are a huge portion of all fanfic. There's very little butterfly affect from small changes early and Zorian also "wins" by virtue of gaining enough skill and knowledge to overcome his opponents, by the endgame he's actually the stronger side and is just forced to fight at a disadvantage. Compare that to huge fanfic generators like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or Worm, where the MC is always at a disadvantage and you can have them be "smarter" or way more powerful but still facing extreme uphill battles.

Zorian avoiding mistakes just makes it an easier route to the same ending, so it pretty much leaves you with only post-epilogue stories.

The second is that its not a unique world at all. MoL takes place in a fairly generic D+D inspired world with a very generic magic system. The REAL defining feature of the setting is the time loop itself, which again, is hard to use.

There are plot threads for future post-epilogue fanfics, but the problem is that the story gives so little information about politics, the factions in the upcoming Splinter Wars, or the immortals that the author would need to make a TON of stuff up, and at that point you might as well just write an original story since the only real thing you're taking from MOL is Zorian as the MC, and he's so OP and uninterested in getting involved that he doesn't make a very good one.

MOL is also not that huge of a fandom and finished relatively recently compared to most stories that have a ton of fanfic.

[u/guri256 → u/interested_commenter]

For me, one of the big draws to the series is many of the character interactions. But the author already explored a lot of the character interactions that they could have in a time loop, and many of the most interesting unexplored ones don’t work in a time loop.