Inspiration Behind Mil-Sim Story

This is a bit of behind the scenes in terms of my thought process to writing my original story: Mil-Sim Story. Though this story is original, it’s an accumulation of many ideas form both personal and external sources. Most works tend to build upon ideas and concepts developed before hand with a bit of mixing and matching. Kind of like baking, except I don’t know how to bake. I know how to operate an oven and microwave, but I couldn’t give any advice on mixing tea spoons for this or that or adding spices to certain foods. I’ve been told cooking is a lot like Chemistry and to be honest, that was one of my weakest subjects in high school. I just thought it would be a nice analogy for writing for some people because they are familiar with that idea. Yeah, I’m not exactly being professional with this commentary.

A bit of background: I’ve been writing as far back as my school days, although not consistently. In the past, I generally wrote about the supernatural and some romance with said elements. A lot of these writings were done mostly for a thing we had back in the day called TASKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge & Skills). I wrote about stuff like lost civilizations, aliens, and supernatural beings since that was my interests at the time (ironic considering I used to be a stanch atheist at the time opposed to all religions). Part of it was due to the fact that most people were writing about personal stories and hardships in my school days, probably as a way to win over the hearts of whoever was grading the essays. My idea was never to pull on heart strings but to give something interesting and different to the person reading them wether that was the teacher or whoever was grading my essays. I also wrote a bit in college before I dropped out though these were more analytical than creative (I was majoring electrical engineering after all and didn’t have the opportunities to do creative writing). When I did drop out, I had been on an emotional and depressive downward spiral dealing with such a major defeat from flunking out of Uni; having worked so hard in high school, sacrificing my free time for clubs, classes, and marching band, all for it to mean nothing in the end with an additional school loan I’ve yet to pay back as of today. It took me a very long time to get back on my feet and even now I still have a lot I have to fix with my life, but to cut to the point, one of the things that I had a fondness for during this time was consuming anime and manga.

I was never a big anime guy growing up. Even for someone like me who was a loner, I didn’t really see anime as worthy media. I do recall seeing some stuff late night on Adult swim (usually around 8-9 pm when it would air) like Cowboy Bebop, Detective Conan, and Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex to name a few. I’ve seen a bit of the Pokemon anime even though I wasn’t particularly interested in Pokemon, it was popular back with gen 1 and 2 when I was in school so that’s usually how I came into knowing it. It wouldn’t be until college when I would grow a fascination with the media. Before that, I was a weird kid into war films, foreign indie films, and documentaries. I’ve seen all of the major war films like Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, as well as older ones like Kelly’s Heroes, Platoon, etc. I also watched a fair bit of Spaghetti westerns too. Video games were probably my biggest gateway into history and eventually stuff like weaponry like firearms. So when I find an anime that aligns with my interests, I’m instantly hooked.

One such anime that intrigued me was a series known as Girls und Panzer. The plot was rather simple, an underdog school of girls had to go up against some some top tier schools in a sport involving Tank Combat. The characters weren’t deep, but they had their charm. One particular aspect I liked about Girls und Panzer was the representation of different nations in WW2 with each school. It wasn’t just silly stereotypes either. Each school had it’s own philosophy based off the tactics, the history, and even the economic situation of the country during WW2. Anzio’s Girls High School for example (based off Italy in WW2) was a strongly motivated school despite have a pretty poor budget compared to most schools and despite all that, the girls were always lively and enthusiastic with a very strong leadership. They were one of my favorites hence why years ago I started writing a fan fiction called “Summer with Chovy” which was supposed to take place at the end of Das Finale (which part 5 has yet to be released at the time of writing this). It was going to be a Slice of Life fanfiction with a bit of Sensha-do tankery action around the end of the story with Anchovy (Anzio’s Sensha-do commander for the school) graduating and passing on the chain of command to another student while also falling in love with an unassuming Japanese boy named Tomio who doesn’t have academic aspirations and works part time at a local pizzeria where Anchovy also works under a shy persona named Chiyomi. The story is up on Waifu Library but has never been completed. I ran into a writers block and couldn’t figure out how to proceed with the story. So I took a break for a long while.

One thing that was going on in my mind was the fact that I was writing a fan-fiction. Girls und Panzer fan fictions are a dime a dozen. Some of them are actually really well written like “Dein Weg ist Mein Weg” which takes the plot of Girl’s Und Panzer and swaps the events and characters around to tell a darker more depressing story that makes the battles more intense and more challenging. I couldn’t bring myself to write a Girl’s und Panzer fanfiction when I’ve been doing my best to stay as lore accurate as I could. It was very limiting to write when you have to stay within the constraints of the anime, the manga, and the films which haven’t been finalized. Not to mention, Girls und Panzer has quite a bit of retcons between the mangas, spinoffs, and anime which doesn’t help at all.

My first attempt at an original story was a simple love story called “The Loner’s Chorus” which I based off a piece of music that I had composed a while back. The story would be loosely based on my own life experiences but with the twist of coming across a crush (who is unrelated to a real life crush I had) several years later as the two reflect on their past where the main character was too shy even communicate and the present where the two go out and form a circle of friends from all walks of life and find meaning in a desperately tiresome world. As I was writing the first two chapters, I found myself finding this whole idea kind of boring and I dropped it right away. I might as well just tell my own personal stories which I already do on my blog site.

Another idea that came to my mind was to write a historically inspired fiction with some light fantasy elements (The Passion of Lyra). This story would take place in a fictional country during the beginning of the Bronze Age Collapse and feature a young group of adventurers. A young man working in his father’s farm in an Egyptian inspired society would be patrolling the beach and stumble across a princesses from the channel islands (inspired by the Minoans civilization). There would be an interesting dichotomy between the two as the princesses (Lyra) was raised as royalty and it’s expected for peasants in her region to treat her as a God. But her country was ravaged by a mysterious group of sea raiders that plunder her kingdom and took her and her people to be sold into slavery until a bad storm shipwrecked them. Meanwhile, the male character would be a rural country type who would dis-regard formalities and often squabble with the princess despite offering her shelter and joining her on her quest to figure out where the sea raiders came from as they explore the known kingdoms each with their own culture and customs to look for answers. I honestly liked this story idea because bronze age fiction is not something that is common apart from stories of great warriors or stories about major battles. I wanted to have a story that was kind of Miyazki-esque with some adventure elements mixed with slice of life moments but set in a particularly ancient settings reminiscence of the old world bronze age civilizations. The one barrier that prevented me from writing such a story was the fact it was far too ambitious to write. I have to work part time and often, I found myself having no time to write such a long story with all of these detailed elements in my mind so I had to scrap the idea right after writing the first chapter. Perhaps I was not ready to write such a story. I had to think of something more down to earth and more into my expertise. Don’t get me wrong. I know quite a bit about the history of the Bronze Age, but the moment you start digging into each civilization, looking into details like their religions, the way their society viewed aspects of life, extreme details like the layout of Egyptian family homes and apartments and it starts to overwhelm you. You spend more time researching than you do writing and that’s the problem I ran into. Even if I was writing about fictional kingdoms, these were heavily inspired by their real life counterparts and I didn’t want to discount that.

So now I’m back to square one. What if I do another Girl’s und Panzer Fanfiction using Anzio’s Girls’ High School but with a whole new set of characters. It would be in the same spirit as a typical Girls und Panzer Plot but this time in a new timeline after the events of the main plot which would in theory give me more freedom to work around lore. On top of that, I could do more with these new characters by allowing them to have more depth to them than your typical mainline Girl’s Und Panzer character although most of them would make a return for this fanfiction. As for the main characters, if you are familiar with Mil-Sim Story, they should look awfully familiar:

That’s because this is were I developed the concepts for Chiara, Emi, Mai, and Hikari. In terms of their personalities, their base line characteristics were set in stone. Chiara was going to be the shy music student, Emi was going to be the strong athletic leader, Hikari was going to be the rich pompous girl who somehow got enrolled in a poor school like Anzio Girls’ High, and Mai was going to be the sleepy head girl who grew up from poverty. The story would take place in Japan like the original Girl’s Und Panzer and the plot would be the girls restarting the school’s Sensha-do team and going up against various schools; some new and some familiar ones. I wrote one chapter for that idea but then gave up on it to no ones surprise. This time, it wasn’t due to the lack of ideas. Rather, I wanted to do something completely original but the whole tournament style of Girls und Panzer kind of stuck with me as a good plot device for whatever I had in mind. It did take me a while to figure out until soon enough, the idea came to me from an unexpected source. Guntuber E-drama.

I know it sounds too funny to be true but it really kicked off a lot of ideas in my head when this was going on back in 2024. The whole idea of some guntubers being shills was not a new revelation as this sort of stuff goes back for almost a decade. YouTube generally does not like firearm content so most gun channels have to source sponsors or paetron style backing to keep the show running. It’s a lot harder to run a channel with a non-profit mindset as ammo and guns are expensive so a lot of them ended up taking adverts from various gun-focused and non-gun-focused businesses (ie think of Nord VPN, Raid Shadow Legends, etc). Some of these like BigDaddyUnlimited had a failing buisness model and went under water the moment the finances went to shit which wasn’t a good look for those that shilled them. Another notable example was Sonoran Desert Institute which was supposed to be a community college where you can learn gun smithing (in a trade where a gun smithing degree or standard isn’t even taken into consideration) but the real kick in the nuts is how they try to appeal to veterans with their GI bills to spend their money earned from their service for their scam college only for them to watch YouTube tutorials as a lecture and read out of date articles on gun smithing. But shilling was just one of the issues as that year, more dirt has been dug up on certain YouTubers, some had autistic meltdowns, and there was this back and forth between what it means to be a gun owner. Are you supposed to be a high speed low drag operator training every single day for “le upcoming civil war” meme that’s never going to happen, let alone a civil war where door kicking tactics are going to be used? Maybe you’re just someone that likes plinking on the weekends. Perhaps you’re some kind of prepper. Some owners like modern sporting rifles. Others like historical firearms. These different ideas along with the drama of certain gun tubers sparked this idea in me to write something that sort of encompasses the general idea of firearms, tactics, and the philosophy of being competitive. What if I took the Girls und Panzer concept, and make it about firearms? What if I make it a character driven story with different conflicts of interests, clashes of personalities, romance, action, and humor mixed into one simple story of a bunch of girls making a name for themselves to the world.

Thus, the idea of Mil-Sim Story was born. Initially, it was going to be an airsoft story but I figured that would be very dumb. Airsoft and Mil-Sim can go hand in hand, but story-wise, being hit by a BB and calling your hits just seems so anti-climactic. Airsoft guns also don’t operate the same way as firearms. You don’t have different calibers other than different grams of 6mm BB types and AEGs are pretty much going to work the same no matter what the firearm looks like. You can have a M1A1 Thompson shooting just as far as someone’s riced out M4A1. So that was thrown out the window right away. But how would the girls compete with firearms without them getting hurt in real life? In Girls und Panzer, the girls drive around in real tanks and fire live rounds at each other but supposedly there’s regulations and stuff to ensure the safety of the tank crews. It’s kind of a half-assed explanation as to why nobody really dies in the tournament even though on some rare occasions the girls do get hurt and even have their lives at risk. But nobody wants to see those girls getting hurt in what is supposed to be a wholesome and uplifting story and I wanted to achieve the same thing for my original story. So the next best thing is video games. Specifically VR. It would have to be a more advance version of VR. Think of something along the lines of Neurolink but without implants. The headset would go over your head and you would just lay down in a sort of sleep as the heads up display shows you the in game world, the sensors on the headset detect your brain activity to translate control of your movements in a natural way in the VR world and your avatar is essentially the same way because the headset scans your face and determines your biometrics to replicate it in-game. You cannot feel pain in VR but taking damage would alter your ability to control your movements and/or slow them down to simulate the feeling of having pain. By doing everything in VR, the characters can engage in combat but don’t have to worry about permanent consequences. The tournament in question will have many different “stereotypes” but instead of being country focused like in Girl’s Und Panzer, the teams would be loosely based on certain militaries, mercenaries, historical users of guns, and even wacky teams. The whole idea of Mil-Sim Story is that it’s an online MMO style competitive Military Simulation where you can fight in small scale skirmishes (The Tournament in question is 8v8 but generally smaller matches are 4v4) or large scale battles with hundreds of players and NPCs. There’s also an in-game economy and a squad/team/group based mechanic where the players can manage their own base of operation and run mercenary and combat tasks to their squads and team to generate revenue to develop their base and their capabilities by buying new equipment, weapons, and vehicles. While all this sounds great, there has to be more to this story than just combat simulation. The characters need a backdrop and reality check with the real world outside of Mil-Sim Story. So the characters would be from a college or post-college background. A lot of their own personal goals and struggles would be a foundation to how they preform or how they interact with certain characters in Mil-Sim Story. Since I like the dynamic I had planned from my previously canned fanfiction, I decided to use them specifically for this story and flesh them out a little.

The plot of this story no longer takes place in Japan but in a fictionalized University somewhere in Central Texas (Think UT Austin but smaller in scale) and located closer to San Antonio than Austin. The reason for this is because I have a lot of familiarity with Texas since I lived here for all my life and I could reference certain locations that the girls can go to. Some of the places like Giovanni’s Pizzeria are entirely made up but it is inspired by some local Pizza joints in the area. The girls can travel to one of the various cities, perhaps make a trip to the beach, or even do some shopping at some outlets or even an unassuming carpenter’s store. There’s a lot of freedom and opportunities in terms of locations I could use outside of the University Campus setting. On top of that, the characters will have a more American personality with the exception of Hikari who keeps her Japanese nationality for the story. Mai in particular is more of a trailer park girl with an eccentric personality and intelligence and would certainly be the most Texan out of all the girls in her groups. Chiara would still be the shy girl as before and Emi would be a dedicated athlete in college in track and field. The girls would have their own majors to study for, each taking a toll on the girls in their own specific way and they would all live in proximity with each other on campus. Of course, they won’t be alone. I brought back another character from “Summer with Chovy” as a sort of call back reference to that story. Tomio is a childhood friend of Emi (and in this case has no real connection with Tomio from “Summer with Chovy” other than name) who has also got hooked into Mil-Sim story alongside his friends who all sort of represent the non-college side of adulthood. Fio is the youngest being as old as Tomio and Emi but her family is wealthy like Hikari. She’s a NEET and is afraid to work. Kimberly and Ramirez represent life under wage slavery as the two both work mundane jobs but also have creative aspirations with their small indie band which they host performances at Tomio’s family restaurant. As for Tomio, well there’s not much I can say about him yet as I am still writing out my story but he’s a bit on the lucky side despite not going into college after high school. He has chosen a path to continue his family’s Italian restaurant and will instead focus on his relationship with Emi, both of whom had previously left off on a bad note in their middle school years. The two would develop their close friendship again and perhaps something more will develop between Emi and Tomio.

And that pretty much describes the thinking process to how I got to writing Mil-Sim Story. In a future post, I’ll go into detail about specific characters and how I approached them in terms of describing their personalities as well as the weapons they use in Mil-Sim Story.”