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I... write-ish for... entertainment purposes, mostly. I find most authors don't put enough effort into their trash, and it shows. I, on the other hand, slave away at it and come up with hopelessly tangled characters and plots, which are in no way redeeming.

As far as meaning goes, Winter's Requiem is about... jack s**t, really. Oh, people contemplate stuff, and Kita goes on about the nature of history and literature, when she's being pretentious and narrating, and there's a bit of deconstruction going on, but there's certainly no message. Some of the individual scenarios might be considered to have meaning, such as the relationship between the personal and the political in Kingdom #1, or the bit with the fountain, but really, you'd only get that if you were taking the whole analysis thing a little far.

History's Conquest could be about the power of inherent order in the universe, and the main trio happen to dwell quite a bit on the ideas of love or something like it, (and I do not mean smarmy romance. Their "love" is only barely romantic) as well as the creation of "lovely monsters" like Kita and Feragel, but again, if you get that, you're officially trying too hard.

The Sum of All Desires reveals... exactly that, or at least what Allemande thinks it is. Oh, and the end of the world, and the fact that... even those who would think of themselves as essentially good people might not try to stop it, especially if they knew how. Or something like that, anyways.

At this point I guess I'm really aiming for quality in my writing. Quality of style, quality of plot, and quality of characters. I want to make something beautiful, like the inside of a clock.

As for actual meanings, I can't conjecture about my stories' "deeper meanings" without sounding like a cornball. So I won't.

I kind of think stories will take care of their own meanings.

I agree. I've found that powerful characters in particular will lead me to the message.

If you have to force the meaning into your story, especially by making your narrator proselytize about it, you run the risk of alienating people. But if you write an amazing story with characters that feel real and elicit real emotion, it'll take on its own meaning in the mind of the person who reads it. The truth must dazzle gradually and all that.

That's the kind of story I'd like to write.

The hilarious thing is, as part of the deconstruction of saccharine video games, Kita does go on and on about some meaning or another. The problem is, she's an unreliable narrator if I ever saw one, and you probably couldn't get whatever she gets out of it if you got half your brain cells lined up properly, but that's Kita for you.

I wouldn't say you should try not to alienate people (Ayn Rand comes to mind) if you do go for meaning, which isn't a bad thing. It's just not what I'm doing. Not that I'm not alienating people, in my own ways, as I'm sure I'm just as biased as everyone else, but that just happens, message or no.

Why not?

Besides, everyone is racist, and the more someone claims to not be racist, the more racist they probably are. Like my university, which gives special scholarships to people of Native American descent or African heritage, in order to "build diversity." Also known as RACISM.

I would like to argue that there is such a thing as a static character. Granted, static characters have a tendency to die at the end of the story... But then there's always Howl, from HMC. He starts the story as a selfish, vain, dishonest, womanizing b*****d. He finishes the story as a selfish, vain, dishonest b*****d, and the only thing that's changed about him is that he can now "properly" fall in love and is no longer a womanizer. But that's something that happens to him, not an active change he makes in himself. There is no Moral of the Story as far as Howl's development is concerned (except maybe "don't catch a falling star"). At the end of the book, he's still a pretty terrible person, all things considered, and almost impossible to live with. And that's okay.

I could also argue that racist characters can stay racist...it's just that in our culture that's not strictly considered "socially acceptable," which tosses you into the realm of presenting your character in such a way that your audience would want to keep reading about them. If you can write a racist character who stays racist and yet keeps the reader engaged, well, I guess you're "allowed" to do that.