I think what inspired me was just reading way too much and starting to nitpick at tropes. I've been reading a lot of isekai and transmigration stories lately, and, well, I'm a contrary person. Isekais always revolve around people who had no choice but to leave their world and enter a new one, and then, slowly, over time, are offered a chance to return home, only to realize they do genuinely love the home they've made. They were often happy or at least content people before they traveled to another world. Nothing too great or too bad, just average. I just thought the genre was playing the same story over and over. There are so many people who would take the chance to go to another world, people that had nowhere to go back to. And we do see a lot of characters like that, too! But they never made the active choice from the very start to "leave". I knew what I was writing was essentially a passive suicide, but I didn't want to punish my protag for it. It was a bit of wish fulfillment in a lot of ways, thinking about someone that chose to "leave" and wasn't punished or faced abject misery, but managed to find fulfillment and happiness. In a lot of ways, it was inspired by my hope that people I lost managed to wind up somewhere where things were better this time. I just wanted to get that kind of story on paper. Or, well, in a google doc.
Anyways, here it is. That was a bit of a ramble.
