I had too strong a caffeine too late in the day and now it's approaching 4 in the morning and I'm like, I want to write prose but I don't want to return to my fanfic, what if I wrote a book

And then I look at the ideas in my head and it's like, the magical girl story, I've got that plot pretty set, but I'm pretty married to it being a comic, magical girls are so strongly visual. And everything else, it's like, oh, I need a plot to make a book.

It is not enough to just have interesting characters, they must actually, like, have things to do that, like, accomplish things.

I mean I have ideas for things that can happen but not, like, coherent arcs, y'know?

just shake the characters around in a jar until motivations come out

...I could file the serial numbers off of Evil Uther and tweak it some. The core plot of that is actually very solidified and the main reason I never actually wrote it was that I kept getting caught up on details like "what the fuck do I do with Raven," and making it something original means I can fix

that by just not having a Raven.

If I did that I could never tell anyone the real inspiration, because "started as a fanfic" is one thing, "I was so pissed off at a shitty mod slotting my faves into villain roles even though it made no sense that I went NO, HERE'S HOW YOU MAKE THEM CONVINCING ANTAGONISTS" is quite another

Nobody cares about DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS: OSTIAN PRINCESS more than me but in entirely the wrong way

that's fantastic though

I MEAN THERES A KEY WORLDBUILDING ELEMENT IN MY VISUAL NOVEL THAT IS SOURCED FROM MIGHTY NO 9

SO

LIKE

[gestures]

sometimes spite is a powerful source of inspiration

curious about how Mighty No. 9 (of which all I know is "knock-off Mega Man") inspired any of your vn (of which all I know is "kissing skeletons")

theres a completely bonkers plot point that's never really touched on in MN9

where like

all nations agreed to a mutual ceasefire and No War Ever

and instead they settle things that they would have gone to war over in robot thunderdome, basically

so in the necromancer setting, kingdoms and such basically went "ok we need to stop getting into wars, it's a huge waste of life and resources and mages are so prevalent that they can do all sorts of fucked up freaky shit and tear through hundreds of ordinary soldiers with the right powerset and it's just not worth it"

so they settle disputes that escalate above a certain size of "a few quick skirmishes with the enemy country" with mage duels

where they have battlemage representatives fight each other and the winner's kingdom gets their verdict and the loser has to accept it

osteon is one of these mage representatives for the kingdom they live in and they've been doing it for 8 years

this means they are both very good at their job and also incredibly grumpy about everything

like they're naturally sort of a grumpy person anyway but they'd be a lot less of an entrenched grouch if "settling disputes in various kinds of combat" wasn't their assigned role

Neat!