1,732NOT A NEW CHAPTER: BUT THERE IS (MAYBE) LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
Let me start by sincerely thanking everyone who has stuck with this story since the OG days. Your feedback meant the world to twelve year-old me, and big shoutout to all the people who took me seriously and gave me sincere and critical criticism, because that's the sort of thing that keeps a kid writing and writing until eventually they stop writing absolute garbage and learn a thing or two about sentence structure. And humor. And grammar, that too. Anyway, my point is this story has been around for a really long time and it awes me whenever someone reaches out and says they've been reading it since the beginning and still like it.
You don't need to be an OG reader to look at the story data and see the staggering gap between the initial release date and the last posted chapter. As an adult (lol big mood™ 2020) it doesn't seem like a lot but reading through teenage writing really opens your eyes to how much growing you can do in that period of time. And there's only so large a band-aid I can slap on this thing via edits and grammatical corrections when it remains a product of pre-adolescence.
So a great deal of why I am no longer writing this story is just a matter of poor timing. I still hold a great deal of fondness for the overall plot, but the execution is difficult to cope with.
Beyond that, can I just say how floored I am with how toxic this fandom has gotten? Maybe it's not this fandom, maybe it's just the internet at large, but the fact that twelve year-old me could get away with posting hot garbage and was met with an audience of guiding, kind souls and nineteen year-old me could post legitimate content and end up with illegible nonsense trolling in response is just boggling to me. There are still a great deal of wonderful people who read this story and have dropped reviews over the ensuing years, don't get me wrong, but the growing amount of just plain nonsense is irritating, to put it mildly.
I am not contractually or monetarily obligated to create content. I do it because I like it, and because I like knowing that somewhere there is another twelve year-old who might be reading this and might try their hand at writing one day too.
Honestly, I'm not even mad about people who tell me 'this plot makes zero sense' or 'this story is super gay'. The former is definitely true shit, but the second is just? Idk it makes me laugh. I've won awards for gay fanfiction, if I wanted it to be gay, I could make it very, very gay. Saying you want to 'hack my address, put a tennis ball in my mouth and then make sweet short love to my significant other' is just slightly over the top here for a fanfiction website though.
TL:DR; I'm not continuing this story. However, there is a new version of Synchronicity up already on my profile. But I was so annoyed over all these 'your characters are so gay' comments that I just said fuck it and made them gay asf lol. If I'm going to get those comments anyway, I may as well enjoy myself and make it slash.
The story is called 'kaen 火炎' and should be obvious to pick out from the description. It has a new title since I'm going to leave Synch up for archiving. I wanted to write this AN for the people who have stuck with me since day 1 and deserve to know. If slash isn't your cup of tea, that's totally fair and I'm sorry.
**ok replying on ffnet is probably top 10 most poorly designed UIs of the internet so I'm not going to try, but here are some 24h later add-ons. Making it slash was somewhat of a counter-troll but also if you look at my profile you'll see as the years have gone on I almost exclusively write slash these days. That being said Kaen is definitely on the 'slash if you squint' side of things, but better safe than sorry. I know I said gay asf but if it doesnt fit in the story it just doesnt fit you know? Anyway Synch went 18 chapters with no romance to speak of and Kaen is going to be very similar. It's action/adventure at its core but character relationships and development are what I really like to write. It might even be gen too tbh, but I don't want to guarantee that.
And to move on from that aspect, I would like to reiterate this decision wasn't fueled entirely by people threatening me on the internet for something as inconsequential and useless as fanfiction - there were so many 'man, I wish I had approached this situation differently', or 'man I wish I added this scene in' moments that I eventually decided to redo it entirely. There are also a lot of plot inconsistencies that need to be addressed. And I will also shamelessly confess to being inspired by the insane amounts of Kimetsu no Yaiba and Solo-Leveling manga I've been reading lately, so there was new inspiration involved as well.
Also I totally get it if you don't want to read slash. That's perfectly acceptable - just like I can write what I want to write, people are at perfect liberty to read what they want to read.
***also almost forgot to mention the 'maybe' part of the light at the end of the title. Whenever Kaen gets to chapter 19, if it's plot is still similar to synch's, I will update this with the new content and make sure it's edited to be totally gen/no romance.
Godspeed friends and may the force be with you,
-slex
