7/31: Bits and pieces and idea-ifying.
Dragging out an old concept from earlier on to play with some more. My 'magical girl based' original project. I'm dubbing it 'Knight Lights', perhaps. Though part of me wants to give it some ridiculous fauxanime style title.
What sort of project this is going to be, I don't know. I don't know if it'll ever get into story form, or whether I'll just put together a 'world bible' style pile of information on the setting and everything. I'd like it to be a finished thing. It'd make a nice thing. But we've all seen how not good I am at that by now, I think? Heh.
Anyway. Let's start with the heroine. Lucia. Saviour of the dreaming world. But how does she get into that situation? It's not going to be a case of critter turns up on her doorstep and goes 'here's your powers', as we've often seen: in the early stages of the story, the dream and waking worlds are very strictly split apart. It might be plausible that she comes from a long line of dream-guardians or something?
While I originally visualised her as having a magical girl outfit that had some kind of pyjama flavour to it, like Touhou's Patchouli, I'm abandoning that one. There are so many ways it could go wrong... She gets armour, but cute armour, if I can design such a thing. At least armour's a thing that I'm pretty satisfied I can draw.
Setting. The dream world's obviously the dream world, and dreams are weird. There's a few layers to it (bwooong~) - the 'outermost' is the place where human dreams are grown. If they 'go off', or anything bad happens to them, they turn into nightmares. They're harvested before that stage, but obviously not while there's a dreamer in them: once they're dreamed by someone, does something happen to them? Does the act of being dreamed in cause them to grow? Oneiroculture is apparently a tricky art. XD
The waking world setting, though? While magical girls would automatically suggest sending it over to Japan, I'm considering keeping things closer to home. It worked for Sailor V, didn't it? :p Though perhaps we're not the most magical girl friendly culture around over here. At least I know that she's not going to end up all tea and crumpets if I write her, huh? It seems a little weird using the baku but making her a Brit, but it's entirely plausible that she's got Japanese ancestry somewhere - I just don't want to fall into some kind of stereotype pitfall if I do that much, re: the 'oh so cool mary sue sakura chan' type characters we've all seen, who end up half-Japanese because it's 'sooo kewl'. Or maybe it doesn't matter, the dream world is pretty damn global after all...
The enemies. Nightmare creators. My brain is making obvious Nightmare Moon jokes off the bat here. What do they want with the nightmares? One aspect of it, at least, is using the people whose dreams they steal and wreck to take over the waking world. I don't fancy having villains who are evil for the sake of evil, though, so they've got to have a reason behind that much...
This thing being centred around dreams, we're going to be playing with a lot of the symbolism here. As Lucia fights her way through different dreamers' experiences, it's going to have some effect on them, I'd imagine. She's likely going to have to try and deal with them in the waking world, too.
There's a few different schools of thought when it comes to dream theorising. There's Freud, with the 'ego, id, superego' business; Jung, with the 'Persona, Shadow (oh hey that sounds familiar), anima/animus...' and a half dozen other aspects of the personality, and probably more I haven't looked into yet. I'll probably need a consistent kind of theory to use for all this, at least. And no, 'too much cheese' doesn't count.
The rest of the cast, I have no ideas about. Baku mascots, sure. Human cast members, there's her family, friends: what will they know about her deal? When will it become relevant? At least when things start impacting the waking world... but before that, she's rather isolated. Maybe someone whose dream she saves could be a decent ally in all this, as they might understand the shenanigans that are going on. What do the dreamers tend to realise when they've woken up, anyway? I've had quite a share of lucid dreams over time, but would I realise if I'd been dreamhacked at...?
Well. Just thinking for now, anyway.
What sort of project this is going to be, I don't know. I don't know if it'll ever get into story form, or whether I'll just put together a 'world bible' style pile of information on the setting and everything. I'd like it to be a finished thing. It'd make a nice thing. But we've all seen how not good I am at that by now, I think? Heh.
Anyway. Let's start with the heroine. Lucia. Saviour of the dreaming world. But how does she get into that situation? It's not going to be a case of critter turns up on her doorstep and goes 'here's your powers', as we've often seen: in the early stages of the story, the dream and waking worlds are very strictly split apart. It might be plausible that she comes from a long line of dream-guardians or something?
While I originally visualised her as having a magical girl outfit that had some kind of pyjama flavour to it, like Touhou's Patchouli, I'm abandoning that one. There are so many ways it could go wrong... She gets armour, but cute armour, if I can design such a thing. At least armour's a thing that I'm pretty satisfied I can draw.
Setting. The dream world's obviously the dream world, and dreams are weird. There's a few layers to it (bwooong~) - the 'outermost' is the place where human dreams are grown. If they 'go off', or anything bad happens to them, they turn into nightmares. They're harvested before that stage, but obviously not while there's a dreamer in them: once they're dreamed by someone, does something happen to them? Does the act of being dreamed in cause them to grow? Oneiroculture is apparently a tricky art. XD
The waking world setting, though? While magical girls would automatically suggest sending it over to Japan, I'm considering keeping things closer to home. It worked for Sailor V, didn't it? :p Though perhaps we're not the most magical girl friendly culture around over here. At least I know that she's not going to end up all tea and crumpets if I write her, huh? It seems a little weird using the baku but making her a Brit, but it's entirely plausible that she's got Japanese ancestry somewhere - I just don't want to fall into some kind of stereotype pitfall if I do that much, re: the 'oh so cool mary sue sakura chan' type characters we've all seen, who end up half-Japanese because it's 'sooo kewl'. Or maybe it doesn't matter, the dream world is pretty damn global after all...
The enemies. Nightmare creators. My brain is making obvious Nightmare Moon jokes off the bat here. What do they want with the nightmares? One aspect of it, at least, is using the people whose dreams they steal and wreck to take over the waking world. I don't fancy having villains who are evil for the sake of evil, though, so they've got to have a reason behind that much...
This thing being centred around dreams, we're going to be playing with a lot of the symbolism here. As Lucia fights her way through different dreamers' experiences, it's going to have some effect on them, I'd imagine. She's likely going to have to try and deal with them in the waking world, too.
There's a few different schools of thought when it comes to dream theorising. There's Freud, with the 'ego, id, superego' business; Jung, with the 'Persona, Shadow (oh hey that sounds familiar), anima/animus...' and a half dozen other aspects of the personality, and probably more I haven't looked into yet. I'll probably need a consistent kind of theory to use for all this, at least. And no, 'too much cheese' doesn't count.
The rest of the cast, I have no ideas about. Baku mascots, sure. Human cast members, there's her family, friends: what will they know about her deal? When will it become relevant? At least when things start impacting the waking world... but before that, she's rather isolated. Maybe someone whose dream she saves could be a decent ally in all this, as they might understand the shenanigans that are going on. What do the dreamers tend to realise when they've woken up, anyway? I've had quite a share of lucid dreams over time, but would I realise if I'd been dreamhacked at...?
Well. Just thinking for now, anyway.