Writing/RP meme: 1
Jul. 30th, 2010 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meejDesnik said to do this, so I'm gonna.
Z said I should do this about Graycloaks, so ... I'm gonna? And also for the various RP ('role-play', if you will) games I write for.
QUESTION THE FIRST:
1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with and why.
Well, gracious. My favorite writing project that I have made up myself, from whole cloth? Or my favorite writing project where I collaborate with others? I think there's enough of a difference that I'm going to talk about both.
My favorite collaborative writing project is probably Perfect World, a forum game loosely based on the canon of Yuu Watase's Fushigi Yuugi universe. The premise is that there was once one world, populated by humans and spirits alike, and that the four beast-gods split the worlds: spirit, and human. Now the worlds are coming together again, and in the confluence, spirits are coming loose again in modern Tokyo. (And other places, but Tokyo is the nexus.)
I love the flexibility that this premise gives me, I love the opportunity to research Japanese folklore and culture, I love other people delving into it - this pleases me immensely, that every single writer on the PW board tries to get it right and not be an appropriative twatwaffle. We have a Filipino spirit-walker, a Japanese-Hawai'ian weather witch (kind of) (with other issues), an Edokko consulting psychiatrist, a Russian general's daughter who works with a nerdy librarian, and two very hot Brasilian demon-hunters STUCK ON A GOD DAMN PLANE. (you heard me)
We also still need a Chichiri, and I am very good in not leaping upon that, because Fang was awesome.
I enjoy the four characters I have there. Shiyo Sakagawa the ramen-shop owner is my token ordinary mortal. She wants the worlds to be separate, because she does not quite hold with all of this chaotic nonsense about magicians or kappa; kitchen gods are about all she wants to deal with. However, as long as everyone's here, she'll feed them (gaki are less likely to attack you if they are slurping noodles!). Tsurian Yoshinaga is an extraordinary mortal who works two jobs - the first as an executive assistant to a calligrapher, the second as a government astrologer. She is a punk and I like writing her, although she is exhausting, because she constantly skirts the line of what the Japanese are willing to put up with from their own. Her life is probably the hardest of anyone's in the game, so far.
Then I have Teijo Dan, a psychiatrist who genuinely wants to help people, and to study them, to find out what makes people themselves ... and how to hold onto that, because he is terrified by the idea of death, and the cessation of self. He is bothered by this, and how lame it is to fear death so much. (There is a death poem by a famous monk, who when his disciples asked him to give them a verse said, "I don't want to die!" I have to find a way to work this in somewhere.) He is a bit handicapped because he hosts the soul of Miboshi, who was previously an evil magician specializing in ripping other people out of their bodies so he could take them over and live forever. Evil magicians suck. Teijo doesn't yet know what his former self did. It will be ever so much fun when he meets Binshou, the reincarnation of the LAST person he body-thiefed. :D
Then there is Kenrou Amakusa. I vastly enjoy Kenrou, because I have been noted to have a Type when I RP or write: the pale unpleasant upper-class swordsmen poets. Kenrou is not pale, and he isn't really unpleasant; he's just disconcerting. He is afraid of nothing, and very little bothers him. He used to be Kunzite, in another game; now he is Hotohori. It is an excellent challenge, transitioning him from unforgiving Winter to unforgiving Excellence. Also, sometimes he is just plain a dick, but those are often the most fun times. He is a jerk in an entirely different way than - say - Greyspell is a jerk, and also different than Diamond, which relieves me: if I'm going to have a Type, at least I can play out all the permutations of Type and not be (entirely) a One Trick Meejit.
As for my favorite writing project that is all mine:
GRAYCLOAKS.
It began with a Sailor Moon fanfic. No, really. It was a shared project between a Big Name Fanfic author, Celeste Goodchild, and me, and it centered on the villains of the second season of Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon: the Black Moon Family. She was fond of the Smart One, Sapphire; I was fond of the Pale Unpleasant One, Diamond. I brought in some elements of a writing community I'd been a part of previously, which was a 'mafia' clan on their version of Nemesis (the tenth planet of the solar system, to which the Black Moon Family had been exiled waybackwhen). This clan was called the Graycloaks, which I'd taken from the epithet of Elu/Elwë, the king of the Teleri. (TOLKIEN NERDERY)
Celeste and I eventually decided that the exciting huge saga of the Black Moon Family was enough of our time and energy that it should be an original work. It practically was at that point any way, so we brainstormed a new world, one that still had contact with Earth. There were many things wrong with this idea of porting over the old, but the main one was that we had not yet realized that we had a major divergence in the story we were trying to tell. I wanted plot-driven; she wanted character-driven, with a major emphasis on romance. Which: fine, everyone should do what they want, but not in a shared project. Things fell out, and I extracted the Graycloaks and Kairos and said peach out late. I felt uncomfortable writing about her characters, so I excised them, and built something else. (This is probably a large part of where my trust issues with other people writing my characters comes in; I have to know you pretty well to let you write some of the characters I'm most invested in, and then I'm glad when I do, like when Ali writes Greyspell better than I do, or like when Cal knows what Kenrou would do in certain situations. One day I'll get over this and just let people have fun, but until that day, I'm going to get headdesky when people want to put Siddharsvara in a high school AU.)
SPEAKING of Siddharsvara (that's 'Sihd-dhar-svah-rah', it's pronounced just like it's spelled!). He is one of the things I am most amazed about. He was brought on as the Designated Heavy for when I was writing a story about proto-Yamadharma's childhood, and then I wondered why he was so goddamned mean, and ... Heh. Now the story is mostly about him, and his issues, and his inadequacies. As per my Type, he is pale. All Graycloaks are, and not pretty milk-pale, but DEAD FISHBELLY-WHITE, because they rarely if ever see the sun. Siddharsvara is not that unpleasant, he is simply harassed and under a great deal of pressure.
He IS part of one of my other types, which is Creepy Twin Dyad. (Also seen with Mirain and Mardainet, and with Teal and Roman. Lais obviously doesn't count.) His twin is a sad lady called Savitri. One of the reasons I enjoy Graycloaks is that I get to explore a totalitarian state patterned on the family-as-world, which ... is even more fun than it sounds like. They call themselves Dhaumradana, and their laws deal with the self and the soul.
I once had to sum up the Graycloaks for the Katydid. I said, "Um. Well, basically, they are kinslaying incestuous baby-eating psychotics."
There is not much left to say, after that, except that I took the names of two minor Graycloaks, and turned them into Greyspells for Warcraft purposes, and while Laikhaila Graycloak is much the same as Laikhaila Greyspell, because Cal is awesome, Omasvara Graycloak is ... not so very much like Omasvara Greyspell, at all. Because I am awesome in a different way.
Z said I should do this about Graycloaks, so ... I'm gonna? And also for the various RP ('role-play', if you will) games I write for.
QUESTION THE FIRST:
1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with and why.
Well, gracious. My favorite writing project that I have made up myself, from whole cloth? Or my favorite writing project where I collaborate with others? I think there's enough of a difference that I'm going to talk about both.
My favorite collaborative writing project is probably Perfect World, a forum game loosely based on the canon of Yuu Watase's Fushigi Yuugi universe. The premise is that there was once one world, populated by humans and spirits alike, and that the four beast-gods split the worlds: spirit, and human. Now the worlds are coming together again, and in the confluence, spirits are coming loose again in modern Tokyo. (And other places, but Tokyo is the nexus.)
I love the flexibility that this premise gives me, I love the opportunity to research Japanese folklore and culture, I love other people delving into it - this pleases me immensely, that every single writer on the PW board tries to get it right and not be an appropriative twatwaffle. We have a Filipino spirit-walker, a Japanese-Hawai'ian weather witch (kind of) (with other issues), an Edokko consulting psychiatrist, a Russian general's daughter who works with a nerdy librarian, and two very hot Brasilian demon-hunters STUCK ON A GOD DAMN PLANE. (you heard me)
We also still need a Chichiri, and I am very good in not leaping upon that, because Fang was awesome.
I enjoy the four characters I have there. Shiyo Sakagawa the ramen-shop owner is my token ordinary mortal. She wants the worlds to be separate, because she does not quite hold with all of this chaotic nonsense about magicians or kappa; kitchen gods are about all she wants to deal with. However, as long as everyone's here, she'll feed them (gaki are less likely to attack you if they are slurping noodles!). Tsurian Yoshinaga is an extraordinary mortal who works two jobs - the first as an executive assistant to a calligrapher, the second as a government astrologer. She is a punk and I like writing her, although she is exhausting, because she constantly skirts the line of what the Japanese are willing to put up with from their own. Her life is probably the hardest of anyone's in the game, so far.
Then I have Teijo Dan, a psychiatrist who genuinely wants to help people, and to study them, to find out what makes people themselves ... and how to hold onto that, because he is terrified by the idea of death, and the cessation of self. He is bothered by this, and how lame it is to fear death so much. (There is a death poem by a famous monk, who when his disciples asked him to give them a verse said, "I don't want to die!" I have to find a way to work this in somewhere.) He is a bit handicapped because he hosts the soul of Miboshi, who was previously an evil magician specializing in ripping other people out of their bodies so he could take them over and live forever. Evil magicians suck. Teijo doesn't yet know what his former self did. It will be ever so much fun when he meets Binshou, the reincarnation of the LAST person he body-thiefed. :D
Then there is Kenrou Amakusa. I vastly enjoy Kenrou, because I have been noted to have a Type when I RP or write: the pale unpleasant upper-class swordsmen poets. Kenrou is not pale, and he isn't really unpleasant; he's just disconcerting. He is afraid of nothing, and very little bothers him. He used to be Kunzite, in another game; now he is Hotohori. It is an excellent challenge, transitioning him from unforgiving Winter to unforgiving Excellence. Also, sometimes he is just plain a dick, but those are often the most fun times. He is a jerk in an entirely different way than - say - Greyspell is a jerk, and also different than Diamond, which relieves me: if I'm going to have a Type, at least I can play out all the permutations of Type and not be (entirely) a One Trick Meejit.
As for my favorite writing project that is all mine:
GRAYCLOAKS.
It began with a Sailor Moon fanfic. No, really. It was a shared project between a Big Name Fanfic author, Celeste Goodchild, and me, and it centered on the villains of the second season of Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon: the Black Moon Family. She was fond of the Smart One, Sapphire; I was fond of the Pale Unpleasant One, Diamond. I brought in some elements of a writing community I'd been a part of previously, which was a 'mafia' clan on their version of Nemesis (the tenth planet of the solar system, to which the Black Moon Family had been exiled waybackwhen). This clan was called the Graycloaks, which I'd taken from the epithet of Elu/Elwë, the king of the Teleri. (TOLKIEN NERDERY)
Celeste and I eventually decided that the exciting huge saga of the Black Moon Family was enough of our time and energy that it should be an original work. It practically was at that point any way, so we brainstormed a new world, one that still had contact with Earth. There were many things wrong with this idea of porting over the old, but the main one was that we had not yet realized that we had a major divergence in the story we were trying to tell. I wanted plot-driven; she wanted character-driven, with a major emphasis on romance. Which: fine, everyone should do what they want, but not in a shared project. Things fell out, and I extracted the Graycloaks and Kairos and said peach out late. I felt uncomfortable writing about her characters, so I excised them, and built something else. (This is probably a large part of where my trust issues with other people writing my characters comes in; I have to know you pretty well to let you write some of the characters I'm most invested in, and then I'm glad when I do, like when Ali writes Greyspell better than I do, or like when Cal knows what Kenrou would do in certain situations. One day I'll get over this and just let people have fun, but until that day, I'm going to get headdesky when people want to put Siddharsvara in a high school AU.)
SPEAKING of Siddharsvara (that's 'Sihd-dhar-svah-rah', it's pronounced just like it's spelled!). He is one of the things I am most amazed about. He was brought on as the Designated Heavy for when I was writing a story about proto-Yamadharma's childhood, and then I wondered why he was so goddamned mean, and ... Heh. Now the story is mostly about him, and his issues, and his inadequacies. As per my Type, he is pale. All Graycloaks are, and not pretty milk-pale, but DEAD FISHBELLY-WHITE, because they rarely if ever see the sun. Siddharsvara is not that unpleasant, he is simply harassed and under a great deal of pressure.
He IS part of one of my other types, which is Creepy Twin Dyad. (Also seen with Mirain and Mardainet, and with Teal and Roman. Lais obviously doesn't count.) His twin is a sad lady called Savitri. One of the reasons I enjoy Graycloaks is that I get to explore a totalitarian state patterned on the family-as-world, which ... is even more fun than it sounds like. They call themselves Dhaumradana, and their laws deal with the self and the soul.
I once had to sum up the Graycloaks for the Katydid. I said, "Um. Well, basically, they are kinslaying incestuous baby-eating psychotics."
There is not much left to say, after that, except that I took the names of two minor Graycloaks, and turned them into Greyspells for Warcraft purposes, and while Laikhaila Graycloak is much the same as Laikhaila Greyspell, because Cal is awesome, Omasvara Graycloak is ... not so very much like Omasvara Greyspell, at all. Because I am awesome in a different way.
