Monday, February 21, 2005

Story Ideas

Well, I've been forming ideas for another original story, and have two. Probably won't write either of them.

One's one I came up with a while ago. It would end up being called War of the Ghosts, unless I renamed it because of the old folk tale named that. Basically, the plot would revolve around the ideas of how ghosts are in the real world, but a war explodes between them and human-kind. We are throughly stompted. (Think I might have mentioned this idea in a blog before). Until all that's left is a surviving pocket of humans. How did they survive? They mastered their own emotions. It turns out the ghosts feed off human emotions to appear and physically harm them. Obviously fear, but they've learn to use any. Making the main character the leader of these survivors, a completely apathic and emotoinless man. Having learnt to repress their emotions, these humans now follow a dismal existance, just living for the sake of it. The ghosts on the other hand, are using new tactics. They rely on instincts. Shock tactics. Something that makes you jump and kicks in your biological fight of flight mechanism. This activates fear, and they are using these surges of emotion to wipe out the survivors. However, our hero is so broken by the loss of everything, he is completely unaffected by this. And only he can teach it further to save hte others.

Unfortunatly, there a is turn for the worse. When one of their own is wounded but not killed due to the shock tactics, they raid a hospital to get supplies to help him/her. However, while there they find a recovering coma patient. Your typical attractive heroine (and also the plot device that leads the reader to understand the world). The problem is our emotionless hero starts to fall in love with her. And love is a powerful emotion. One strong enough to let the ghosts get to him and end human-kind's last hope....

Of course, I need an ending. And enough to make a whole plot. But I think it's a good story. Needs some work to stop the ghosts killing our hero straight away and things, but it could be quite good. And one of the first storys to actually feature ghosts as they should be judging by what people believe them to be like.

The second story is less good. A return to my stereotypical fantasy writing. Came about during playing FFXI, and Boote's comments against mages. I decided there must be a way to turn this into a story, like I often do, and came up with an idea. In some kind of typical fantasy world, you have your magic users, and your warriors. People are pretty much born into a caste, and trained from scatch to be that role. This means that the kingdom of whatevers warriors are the greatest in the land, trained in the hardest and toughest way so they can take anything. The problem is, they're outnumbered and losing a war with goblins/orcs/marshmellows/whatever. A young healer (a mage who casts healing magic) sees that the only way for them to win is to send the mages into battle with the warriors, so that they can heal them on the battlefield and double their effectivness. So she decides to go out and fight with them. The problem is to do that, she has to pass the test designed for people who have trained all their lives to be warriors to fight on the battlefield, when she's just a mage.

This splits the story into two halfs. The first being her training and attempting to get into the army, and the second being after she succeeds/fails and disobeys the rules anyway. The second half would focus on the war, and battles with her in it. The first being the one that shows her effectivness being there that changes the rules (thus ending the discrimination so the story has a nice happy bit). So then we follow the adventures through an almost Band of Brothers style story in a fantasy setting.

The problem is, for this, I'd have to invent an entire fantasy land just for the story, when it's really not important for the story. The second problem is I'd have to revert back out of first person, because I can't write from a female perspective convincingly. Then I came up with a solution. To make it be told in a unique way, it's actually a Just Another Story story. This means Christopher Walker, from that story, narrates, and tells the story. So he reads a story about the past of Ryur, the world from Just Another Story, and then passes it on, creating a Chris-writing-about-what-he-read style of thing, which could be quite interesting. It could also help to explain why there is no bias despite Ryur being a very medievil world where you'd expect it to exist in Just Another Story, because it was all eliminated in this war hundreds of years before.

I'm leaning towards War of the Ghosts if I write either of them. Or I might come up with a better idea. Or just do more Diary of a Superhero.

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