It was late 2020. I had just finished my master's thesis and became a newly graduated jobless during the pandemic. While sending out countless application letters and being two months away from becoming a true starving artist, I wrote my thesis into a short science-fiction story.

Although a friend of mine once said, "History buries more creative minds than it recognizes.", there are still some silver linings from time to time. A couple of months later, three writer friends heard my short story and generously invited me—a non-native English speaker, who had never written a series before—to expand the short story into an animated series with them.

Over the next four months, I had the opportunity to be part of a "writers' room," a collaborative environment where every writer shared the same vision of a story, bounced ideas off each other, and created equally together. Although the writers' room didn’t help me financially, it gave me some creative time every weekday night and 3-4 hours of online role-playing every weekend (we were discussing fictional characters and worlds as if they were real). I might have given up on creating without the support of my peers. It was also the first time I experienced a creative environment where everyone constantly inspired each other.

By mid-2021, we finished our "series bible" (the design document for a series) and began pitching it to studios. That’s when our creative utopia ended, and the harsh reality hit us in the face.

In the film industry, people say that only 5% of the scripts are made into films. As an emerging writers' work without big names attached, it was no surprise that none of the more than 100 studios we reached out to picked our series. We definitely didn’t want our story to end this way, but by late 2021, we had spent nearly as much time reaching out to studios as we had spent writing, and it was wearing us out.

A Web3 friend recommended that I turn the story into a Web3 project, suggesting that we might attract studio attention by first building a community. I applied the Chinese philosophy of “treating a dead horse as if it’s alive (and maybe a miracle will happen)" and designed a collaborative fiction campaign with two visual artist friends, inviting people to expand the short story with their stories.

Fortunately, the campaign took off in late 2022, quickly attracting more than 15,000 online participants. This helped us prove the value of our story and eventually drew the attention of a reputable studio in early 2023. If you think our series was finally going to be made—just as I thought back then—sadly, the reality is that the studio still needs to pitch it to streaming platforms, and it won’t be made until they get a green light from them. One and a half years later, it still hasn’t happened, and it's already out of our hands.

How can this be right? I can’t help but wonder how many other creative minds and projects are buried by these artificial hierarchies. Furthermore, many who participated in our collaborative fiction wrote great stories, yet they don’t consider themselves "creative." Since when has creativity—a basic human trait—become a privilege? If the existing system is making things so difficult, why don't we create a better one?

As my writer friends moved on, I kept working on this problem and eventually teamed up with some great people who shared the same thoughts. We've been working on a solution for the past year and a half, which now includes the product this article is published on and the concept that this article aims to deliver.

But before we get to the solution, let’s explore the root of the problem first.

*Tip: Follow the "Featured" branch if you'd like to follow the narrative(s) of my choice.