Happy you enjoyed them! Outing exactly how chronically online I am is absolutely worth it now.
Slammed was so enjoyable for me even as someone who doesn’t know the first thing about pro wrestling. Hope to capture even a fraction of that magic through this project, haha.
I’m not familiar with Megas XLR unfortunately, but I might have to pull up these episodes. There’s a surprising dearth of similar work to study and learn from in this specific genre (commercialized fantasy battles, as you very aptly put it), and I could always use more!
I’m glad you asked! The short answer is that yes, stagefighting is reserved only for lower-level awakeners, and that MC is too weak to brave dungeons right now. The more detailed answer requires explaining quite a bit of the world’s lore (or maybe not, but I do want to yap about this part of the worldbuilding lol)
This isn’t anywhere in the game yet as it’s more loredump than the current build can handle, but there’s actually a formal division in-world between hunters and non-hunter awakeners.
Some awakeners awaken as full-fledged hunters, on account of having gained extraordinary powers right at the very moment of their awakening. The bulk of awakeners fall below this threshold, but may eventually become a hunter, provided they can become sufficiently powerful.
This threshold is formally defined and rigorously maintained by the World Hunters’ Association (WHA). This same organization works with various national governments, ensuring there are bureaucratic systems in place to not only identify awakeners, but also detect any among them who has crossed the threshold to become a hunter.
Hunters typically enlist into guilds of their own volition, as it’s an extremely lucrative job, with a highly adaptable slider on danger-to-rewards ratio (i.e. lower-ranked hunters may choose to join guilds specialized in hunting ‘farm dungeons’–mostly-neutralized dungeons which now serve as a site for guilds to mine resources from). However, for those who do not immediately awaken to hunter-level powers, the road to become a hunter is often fraught with various difficulties and dangers (later parts of the game will touch on this quite a bit).
Importantly, while non-hunter awakeners are allowed to sign on to guilds and enter dungeons (provided they’re willing to shoulder the consequences), the reverse does not hold true. Hunters are forbidden from stagefighting. This is done to both make room for non-hunter awakeners (who would be hopelessly outmatched otherwise), as well as to incentivize hunters to, you know, actually hunt (which is still a function that the world needs served). The hunters themselves often also see themselves as above stagefighting–which can sometimes be seen as a frivolous use of powers that should be world-saving–and some go so far as to view stagefighters with ridicule.
Because non-hunter awakeners can become full-fledged hunters given certain processes, there’s plenty of in-world discourse about whether the existence of stagefighting actively detracts from the world’s hunter resource. Top stagefighters like Breaker are essentially guaranteed to reach at least a respectable level as a hunter, but they’d have to go through a difficult, life-risking process before that can come about. The stagefighting industry’s existence, then, is often seen as discouraging awakened talent from becoming full-fledged hunters, because they can still earn a very good living without risking their safety in the process.
As the demo has hopefully made clear so far, MC is nowhere close to being able to even attempt becoming a hunter. This is not to say they’ll be definitively locked out of that segment of the world forever - but it does mean that they have much more pressing concerns to tend to at the moment…like becoming a decent stagefighter, for one.
I do have an idea, set in this same universe, that would cover much more ground on the hunter side of things. I’ll definitely consider picking it up in the future, provided Stage Fight does well enough!
