Showing the backstory, and probability

Whew, been a while since I have last posted on here, hasn’t it?

I’ve been pretty much busy with writing down Fairy Chess for NaNoWriMo. It was quite hard doing the challenge, mainly because it’s quite hard to come up with ideas on what’s going to happen in a scene, even if you know the general outline. But I managed to persevere, and in the end, I managed to write 50219 words, and about one third of the novel. Which is a great achievement for me, since every time I even managed to start a novel in these past few years, it would always stop somewhere before the third chapter...

Anyway, alongside the main story, I have written a couple of short stories that explain a few things about the two main character’s background. If anyone wants to have a look at them, and comment on them, then feel free to have a look. But beware. I copypasted the story directly from my unedited NaNoWriMo novel, so the text is still full of plot of holes, and with enough grammar errors to feed a Grammar Nazi. Tread carefully. XD

Attack at the school: http://thy-robocop.deviantart.com/art/FC-Attack-at-the-school-189150523?q=in:scraps+sort:time+gallery:thy-robocop&qo=4

Sophie’s first time: http://thy-robocop.deviantart.com/art/FC-Sophie-s-first-time-189267207?q=in:scraps+sort:time+gallery:thy-robocop&qo=3

The Gun Kata Training: http://thy-robocop.deviantart.com/art/FC-The-Gun-Kata-Training-189273704?q=in:scraps+sort:time+gallery:thy-robocop&qo=2

Pest Control: http://thy-robocop.deviantart.com/art/FC-Pest-Control-189380994?q=in:scraps+sort:time+gallery:thy-robocop&qo=1

The Confrontation: http://thy-robocop.deviantart.com/art/FC-The-confrontation-189387844?q=in:scraps+sort:time+gallery:thy-robocop&qo=0

So, the other thing I want to talk about is Alyssa. Again. Really, this girl is giving me so many problems...

During the course of Fairy Chess, in her backstory, and in the future stories I have in mind for her, as well as in her OCBZ version, Alyssa engages in various dangerous activities, such as escaping from magical girls, spying on them, organizing an attack on them, escaping from their prison once she is captured, convince the other prisoners to aid her, organize a raid on the girls and kill a large quantity of them through bombs and zerg rush, remain hidden from the wrathful girls, engage a magical girl into a one of one gun kata battle, finish off her previous job of eradicating the magical girls... All interesting things that I would like Alyssa to do in the course of the story, and many other for future stories. But there’s a problem with that.

The problem with the above is that, in order for her to pull off these kinds of situations, she would have to be a) a Mary Sue, b) the goddamn Batman, or c) incredibly lucky. Option a) is the one I would quite like to avoid, thank you very much. Option b) is also out of the question, because that kind of defeats the point I wanted to get with Alyssa. She wants to be in control of her life, but life continuously puts it out of control, and being the goddamn Batman, while it may be something she aspires to, is a much more stable situation than the one I want her to be in. Also, the backstory I have in mind for her does not really allow for it. And the problem with option c) is that the stuff Alyssa needs to do requires her to be extremely lucky, and people may start calling out on such extremes of luck that comes without any particular reason. Unless...

I had a chat with one of my friends a while ago, where I basically illustrated all the points above. And he said: “Well, why don’t you give her some low end luck manipulating powers?”. This simple yet elegant solution has provided me not only an answer to my problem, but also inspiration for ideas in future stories (such as, what would happen if Alyssa, who wants to be in control, gains enough power to basically have Fate itself do her bidding?).

I shall be working to develop this idea further in my stories. And right now, I have got a couple of questions to answer, to start integrating it in Alyssa’s character:

1)What is the nature of this power over Fate? What can it do, and what are it’s drawbacks? How does Alyssa control it?

2)How do I keep Alyssa and others from noticing it until later on in the story? How do I keep the power low key?

3) How can I alter some main events to fit this idea, but not make it too obvious? Can I include any negativity from this power?

4)Will Alyssa become in the future that which she greatly despises, being a magical girl?

5)Could I use this power to further Alyssa’s tendency to weaponize memes and tropes?

Well, that’s some more work to be done, and it will be something I shall be working on once I finish off my semester exams.

See ya around!

Thy-Robocop.

Justifying Alyssa: the solution

First thing’s first: My Birthday is tomorrow! Soon I will no longer be a teenager anymore!

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get back to business.

In these last few days of my teenage life, I have journeyed deep into the recesses of the TV tropes, in search for something that would help me work out the problem with Alyssa. And after a few days research, I have stumbled upon one golden suggestion, that has made everything click into place.

That golden suggestion was ‘memory wiping’.

By building on this suggestion, I have remodelled my original idea of the magical girl sister blowing up her village, and worked out some of the elements that followed. Here’s how the updated version of Alyssa’s backstory goes:

Alyssa is spending some time chatting to her friends in the school canteen, talking about this and that and other things. Suddenly, one of her friends starts turning into a monster. Panic ensures as the monster goes on a rampage, killing a couple of Alyssa’s other friends and everyone else in the vicinity. Alyssa manages to save herself and a couple others, and witnesses the magical girls duelling this creature. However, this creature proves too much for the girls to handle, and they have to resort to more extreme methods. Long story short, they end up blowing up a good section of the school.

Now, of course, Alyssa is shocked by all of this, and tries to get to her friends to talk about it, only she witnesses the magical girls doing something to all the people present at the incident, effectively mind wiping them. She then sets to try and convince everyone about the truth, even finding some evidence from people videotaping it. Her magical girl sister Alice, who was present at the incident, catches wind of her sister’s strange behaviour, realizes what she’s up to, and decided to wipe her sister’s mind.

She goes to Alyssa’s room at night, to do it without her sister noticing. However, Alyssa, being a bit paranoid after the attack, manages to catch Alice by surprise, in full magical girl gear (as she can’t do the spell without it). They have a verbal confrontation, with Alice trying to convince Alyssa that oblivion is the best solution for the both of them, and Alyssa telling instead that she does not want to forget. Seeing that they will not be budged, Alyssa tricks Alice into getting close to her, and then stabs her with a knife.

Later on, after Alyssa escapes and builds herself a new life somehow, she stumbles upon the girl who caused the transformation of her friend, a dark magical girl on the Infernal’s side (...or is she?) who uses insects to infect people and turn them into monsters. Alyssa manages to trap her, and interrogate her, to find out why she did it. Through her, she learns about the magical girl civil war, and realizes that what happened at the school could happen again, unless she stops them. So, after disposing of the insect girl (pouring fuel or something flammable on her, and maybe using a lens to set it aflame), she starts her crusade against magical girls.

So, what do you think about this new history? There are still some more details to flesh out, such as how she manages to avoid detection until she joins the magical girl hunter group, her life within the group, and how she obtains the bouncy ball as her weapon, but for now, I think I have progressed quite a lot, don’t you think?

I have enabled comments from anyone on this blog, so feel free to contribute!

Justifying Alyssa

One of the main problems I have when coming up with ideas for my stories (a weakness that a guy called Drakhael in the OCBZ chat loves to exploits, nuking my character and sending me back to the drawing board) is that I often can’t justify the existence of my characters in a certain setting. Either that, or the reasons I use to justify them end up causing more problems and plot holes than before. And the character I can’t seem to justify at all is, ironically, my main character, the ones people might know me for, if they know me at all: Alyssa Gillespine

Alyssa originated in a story called Encounter at The Art Gallery, which you can still find in my scraps on my DA page.  http://thy-robocop.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d1xty9n In this story, she was a former cultists of a so-called ‘god’, who decided to use the powers of Yog-Sothoth (a more powerful, and relatively more reasonable Lovecraftian outer god) against her former colleagues, and against the magical girls, who were so focused on dealing with outer threats that they did not realize they were actually helping the false gods themselves.

Over the course of the past couple of years, she has had many changes, but a few core traits have remained:

1) Alyssa always wants to be in control of her life, but situations arise that takes it out of her control, and into a territory she is unfamiliar with, or into the hands of people too powerful for her to overcome. She constantly struggles to get it back into her control, even if that means doing questionable acts such as mass murder and the like.

2) She loves talking, almost to Miss Exposition levels; she never lies outright, preferring instead to be misleading; she loves taking memes, tropes and quotes  and use them when she speaks; and finally, she is hard to anger.

3) She has a thing for surprise attacks and disproportionate retribution, so much that every time she attacks, she leaves people wondering “WTF just happened here?”. Ways to achieve that have included explosives, Great Old Ones magic, bringing guns to a magical fight, environmental kills, and changing the rules and the stakes of the game.

4) She has a strong dislike for magical girls, which has lead her to become what I term as “the Joker ( especially Hearth Ledger’s one) to the magical girls’ Batman”.

Based on these traits, I am trying to build up a new version of Alyssa for my NaNoWriMo story, and so far, I have come up with a couple of plausible ways to explain the above traits that she has. There are still others that I need to tackle, some of which I shall be posting here. But the main problem I would really want to solve, as almost everything else about her is connected to that event, is this:

Why is she killing magical girls?

The only idea I have come up so far involves her having a magical girl sister, who at some point in her past blew up half her village, and thus wrecked her entire life, in order to destroy some dangerously genre savvy monsters of the week. Alyssa witnesses all this, and, enraged, she strangles her own sister to death, and then start murdering magical girls to ‘eliminate these variables from my life’, as she would put it.

Now, the thing I have found wrong about this idea is that it’s too much, too sudden for Alyssa. And I really don’t see her murdering her sister like that, hot blooded. Especially after seeing that her sister could level an entire village if she so wants to. So the way I have to work around it is that, after her initial anger, Alyssa would calm down, try and find out more about her opponent and the reasons she did it, then realize something negative about the magical girls that makes it clear that the only good magical girl is a dead magical girl, and that it’s her duty to mankind to take them all down.

So, do you think this line of reasoning is sound and reasonable? And if so, what could Alyssa find out about magical girls to justify her killings? In my setting, most, if not all of the magical girls are engaged in a civil war between Celestials (those who get their powers from the planets of the solar system, and their associates), the Terrans (those whose powers derive from Gaia herself, and who consider both Celestials and Infernals and invaders), and the Infernals (a catch all term to indicate those enemies with powers from different sources other than the ones cited above), but how do I present it in such a was that Alyssa believes all ‘magical girls’ are to be killed, rather than make her realize that “Oh, they are actually some that are really good, and without them, we are all screwed, and maybe I can help them out instead of murdering them indiscriminantly”? And if you think that my idea was taking it a bit too far, then what else can I use to push Alyssa over the edge, without resorting to drastic measures, and without making her realize the above?

Enjoy cracking your head around this puzzle. See ya later!

Hello, and welcome to my blog.

I have set up this blog mainly to post my raw ideas for my stories, in the hopes that maybe you could help me flesh those ideas out, and make them believable in the story. If not, then perhaps venting my ideas, and looking through them, might help me out anyways. XD For now, the ideas I will be posting will mostly be about my upcoming NaNoWriMo story, which will explore the backstory of my signature OC, Alyssa http://thy-robocop.deviantart.com/art/Alyssa-OCBZ-Profile-169928454?q=&qo= . Once that’s finished, I will continue using this blog to post ideas for the other stories set in that setting, and maybe of my other stories as well.

Apart from that, I may be posting excerpts from my stories, quick funny scenes involving my characters, mainly Alyssa, and maybe some personal thoughts or considerations about the way I view the world. I am aiming to write something at least every week, to keep my creative juices flowing, and to avoid the blog falling into inactivity, as some of my other accounts have.

And what’s my NaNoWriMo story, you may ask? Well, I will be telling more about it in future entries, but the basis of it is that it’s a urban fantasy novel involving magical girl, based on the idea: “What would realistically happen if Magical Girls were made to face enemies such as the Joker and Lovercraft’s eldricht abominations (Cthulhu and company)?”

I hope you enjoy your time on here!

Robert