So, this is my first attempt at making an article for Chaos, and I wasn't really sure what I could talk about...I do not have the vast experience writing in this section that would make it easy...some of you use this section to tell in character stories, however short. I've never done that, and am not certain I would enjoy it, at least, not until I got the hang of it, anyway. Much of what others produce when they do so is admittedly quite excellent. Perhaps I might experiment with an IC journal entry some day, or somesuch.
I figured, as an experiment, I might go into more depth about my approach to writing on this site, and how it evolved over time. This doesn't seem like the sort of thing to clutter up the feedback and critique section anyway.
Where better to start then with the very first character I made?
When I made Maple, I didn't have anything in place, nor did I have any idea of what my stories would become writing her. My initial characterization had not really been too set. She was initially imagined as a cross between Tom Hardy's version of Mad Max, with her biker gear and black vehicle (she still retains some of his terse characterization in how she speaks, and much of the way her delusions were presented in her early posts were attempts at mimicking the severe hallucinations Hardy's Max suffered from.) And Johansson's version of Black Widow and Saldana's Gammora in how she was trained in a sinister special program for producing top line assassins with a mentor that doubled as a parental figure, with her shooting style resembling John Wick's. Other stuff floated in later as I started writing with
Matsu Ike
, who is an absolute blast to work with. It wasn't until I started rping with Matsu that I really truly started to get a feel for this setting that Chaos presents, as she started getting influenced by Brosnan Bond and the Cassandra Cain Version of Batgirl, while taking some of the personality of Roger Moore's version of Bond. This is why some of my earlier fights are not as...energetic as the later ones were. My very very first Dominion, Lungs to Dust, is an example: that one just has Maple fighting for her life against one huge soldier with muscle in the first part. I used that fight to experiment with creating tension and establishing Maple's weaknesses. When I saw how frenzied and hectic the fights could get in dominions, and the crazy cool descriptive posts people used to describe their characters fighting, I began to add more flare in Maple's posts, on the premise that her fight in her first Dominion was that of an extremely rusty assassin who hadn't faced a true threat in a while due to her constant pursuit of easy, low risk bounties, and as her story progressed, I started revealing more and more of just how horribly deadly she actually was and why she was so messed up mentally. It was through this that I started to explore the Meta-Premise that has expanded to all my characters since then: take away their beauty and they would be regarded the same way you'd probably regard a Velociraptor about to pounce on you.
As time went on, I started to use Dominion threads to experiment with "Power Levels" and Matrix Fights came to mind:
Ordinary NPC Non Force User Warriors/ Non Combatants = Zion Rebels
NPC Force Adepts = Agents
Player Characters (Mine/Other Members Player Characters) = Rogue Programs
Administrators = The Architect/Sentinels
Alternatively:
Ordinary Non Force User Warriors/ Non Combatants = Kyle Reese / Sarah Connor
NPC Force Adepts = T-800's
Player Characters (Mine/Other Members player characters) = T-1000's
Administration = Skynet/John Connor
Its admittedly a rough formula. Except for how high Administration ranks in both versions
Keep in mind: It wasn't my initial plan. But plans evolve over time.
Gothic horror elements started to creep in right when I made Nine, just as the skeleton of my Lore was taking shape, and subsequently influenced Maple's storyline. I originally had not planned to interconnect those two, but writing with Matsu's alt Sawa made it all but inevitable. Why Gothic? Because I think a lot of Star Wars tropes could easily be bent to this angle, especially given the stories that inspired Star Wars. Knights Slaying Monsters and Wizards, Tragic Romances and Sinister Pursuits across lonely, isolated corners of society. I wanted to explore all the really horrible aspects of living in such a setting, with the constant and rampant war crimes, xenophobia, illegal science, Perverse Sorcery whether Light or Dark and endless religious warfare, how even if you have the power and strength to survive all but the possibly the absolute worst The Galaxy can throw at you, you are still no better off, the relative bits of calm are just prelude to the next storm. Its why so many of my characters cannot function in a normal, civilian setting...they simply wouldn't know what to do with themselves, and in the end, it wouldn't be safe for them or the innocent people they'd live next to pretending they were ordinary...they cannot stop moving around due to the blood they have spilt and continue to spill to achieve their ends, even as it is slowly destroying them, having such a high level of skill in itself. For my three mains, their lives had to be literally destroyed to turn them into such deadly threats, and much of that destruction is entirely their own fault.
This Gothic lens I had in turn partly influenced how I wote about the Force, with the rest coming from how it was presented in Kotor 2: Mysterious, empowering, but ultimately impersonal and manipulative. Darth Sion is the inspiration for the type of dillema I am putting most of my characters through: In the end the only way to end his misery was to willingly give up the thing that had taken him to such rarified heights almost no one could match him...yet the tradeoff was no real true reward other than survival, and no end to his suffering. His skill and power made his existence an empty, tragic and hollow one like it does for my characters.
My approach to Force Powers
Bioshock is a major inspiration in how I wrote Force Use, which is why I make constant references to that sound that plays in the game when you acquire or improve a plasmid. I didn't want everyone to do the same kind of Force Push...Force Training is said to affect every Force Sensitive differently...some may be stronger in using one technique really well while another who may know the same technique cannot, so I tried going about it like one character could use the Force to enhance their body really well and another could not, but they had other abilities to help them survive. I have mentioned this to others but this is the reason that my characters who are very heavily mutated by the Force cannot use telekinesis well, or get stunned by nuetral powers. But they learn and master Force Powers faster in general while my characters who are focused on weapons learn new powers slower and truly esoteric abilities are closed to them in many ways.
As for how they learn them, at first I had a dilemma: I can do only so many posts a day lol but I wanted to be detailed and somewhat conceivable. On the other hand, training threads are a slog without lots of good drama set up between characters. I settled for not learning Force Powers without setting up situations in which the knowledge that was required would be conceivably at said location my characters were in. In other cases, they learned certain powers instinctively, brought on by great stress, and I always tried to make sure the powers acquired through stress were built upon other skills they already knew. Others were sorta like the dragon walls in Skyrim: the knowledge was imprinted on a monument, and downloaded itself into the character's brain, or found in books or scrolls like Maple.
I also took pains to make the Force creepy. With Laertia, its implied that the experiences where she acquired her most powerful abilities were nightmarish visions/possible visitations of entities from the Netherworld of The Force. Also, learning a Force Power is not a pleasant experience for my characters most of the time, unless in a formal setting. I have even tried to make telekinesis have a very sinister, unnatural quality to it now and then. Force Healing itself is made to be creepy even at low levels in my writing and I use how it manifests in a character as an indicator of inhuman physiology (Plus, Logan References are too good to pass up.), whether they are an actual player character or npc.
Camp elements didn't really start to come into play until I had The Amalgam up and running, and she was the one where I really started to combine and experiment with elements of horror and gallows humor. (I'm not sure but I think she was also the very first one I really tested out the Theme Song Gag on.) As the Gothic elements started with Nine and spread to Maple, the Camp and Comedic elements started mostly with the Main villain and retroactively spread to Maple and Nine, each "Main" I have introduced (Maple, Nine, Amalgam, Syd, and Laertia) introduced lore and elements that spread backward.
Anyway, that's all I can think of to write at the moment, but I would like to stress that all of this is the result of collaboration with great and wonderful Roleplayers, like
Karlie Lynn Destat
, Kay ,
Starlin Rand
,
Beltran Rarr
, and more recent ones, like
Ryv
. I owe a great deal of thanks to many others and wish you all a happy new year.
I figured, as an experiment, I might go into more depth about my approach to writing on this site, and how it evolved over time. This doesn't seem like the sort of thing to clutter up the feedback and critique section anyway.
Where better to start then with the very first character I made?
When I made Maple, I didn't have anything in place, nor did I have any idea of what my stories would become writing her. My initial characterization had not really been too set. She was initially imagined as a cross between Tom Hardy's version of Mad Max, with her biker gear and black vehicle (she still retains some of his terse characterization in how she speaks, and much of the way her delusions were presented in her early posts were attempts at mimicking the severe hallucinations Hardy's Max suffered from.) And Johansson's version of Black Widow and Saldana's Gammora in how she was trained in a sinister special program for producing top line assassins with a mentor that doubled as a parental figure, with her shooting style resembling John Wick's. Other stuff floated in later as I started writing with
Matsu Ike
, who is an absolute blast to work with. It wasn't until I started rping with Matsu that I really truly started to get a feel for this setting that Chaos presents, as she started getting influenced by Brosnan Bond and the Cassandra Cain Version of Batgirl, while taking some of the personality of Roger Moore's version of Bond. This is why some of my earlier fights are not as...energetic as the later ones were. My very very first Dominion, Lungs to Dust, is an example: that one just has Maple fighting for her life against one huge soldier with muscle in the first part. I used that fight to experiment with creating tension and establishing Maple's weaknesses. When I saw how frenzied and hectic the fights could get in dominions, and the crazy cool descriptive posts people used to describe their characters fighting, I began to add more flare in Maple's posts, on the premise that her fight in her first Dominion was that of an extremely rusty assassin who hadn't faced a true threat in a while due to her constant pursuit of easy, low risk bounties, and as her story progressed, I started revealing more and more of just how horribly deadly she actually was and why she was so messed up mentally. It was through this that I started to explore the Meta-Premise that has expanded to all my characters since then: take away their beauty and they would be regarded the same way you'd probably regard a Velociraptor about to pounce on you.As time went on, I started to use Dominion threads to experiment with "Power Levels" and Matrix Fights came to mind:
Ordinary NPC Non Force User Warriors/ Non Combatants = Zion Rebels
NPC Force Adepts = Agents
Player Characters (Mine/Other Members Player Characters) = Rogue Programs
Administrators = The Architect/Sentinels
Alternatively:
Ordinary Non Force User Warriors/ Non Combatants = Kyle Reese / Sarah Connor
NPC Force Adepts = T-800's
Player Characters (Mine/Other Members player characters) = T-1000's
Administration = Skynet/John Connor
Its admittedly a rough formula. Except for how high Administration ranks in both versions
Keep in mind: It wasn't my initial plan. But plans evolve over time.
Gothic horror elements started to creep in right when I made Nine, just as the skeleton of my Lore was taking shape, and subsequently influenced Maple's storyline. I originally had not planned to interconnect those two, but writing with Matsu's alt Sawa made it all but inevitable. Why Gothic? Because I think a lot of Star Wars tropes could easily be bent to this angle, especially given the stories that inspired Star Wars. Knights Slaying Monsters and Wizards, Tragic Romances and Sinister Pursuits across lonely, isolated corners of society. I wanted to explore all the really horrible aspects of living in such a setting, with the constant and rampant war crimes, xenophobia, illegal science, Perverse Sorcery whether Light or Dark and endless religious warfare, how even if you have the power and strength to survive all but the possibly the absolute worst The Galaxy can throw at you, you are still no better off, the relative bits of calm are just prelude to the next storm. Its why so many of my characters cannot function in a normal, civilian setting...they simply wouldn't know what to do with themselves, and in the end, it wouldn't be safe for them or the innocent people they'd live next to pretending they were ordinary...they cannot stop moving around due to the blood they have spilt and continue to spill to achieve their ends, even as it is slowly destroying them, having such a high level of skill in itself. For my three mains, their lives had to be literally destroyed to turn them into such deadly threats, and much of that destruction is entirely their own fault.
This Gothic lens I had in turn partly influenced how I wote about the Force, with the rest coming from how it was presented in Kotor 2: Mysterious, empowering, but ultimately impersonal and manipulative. Darth Sion is the inspiration for the type of dillema I am putting most of my characters through: In the end the only way to end his misery was to willingly give up the thing that had taken him to such rarified heights almost no one could match him...yet the tradeoff was no real true reward other than survival, and no end to his suffering. His skill and power made his existence an empty, tragic and hollow one like it does for my characters.
My approach to Force Powers
Bioshock is a major inspiration in how I wrote Force Use, which is why I make constant references to that sound that plays in the game when you acquire or improve a plasmid. I didn't want everyone to do the same kind of Force Push...Force Training is said to affect every Force Sensitive differently...some may be stronger in using one technique really well while another who may know the same technique cannot, so I tried going about it like one character could use the Force to enhance their body really well and another could not, but they had other abilities to help them survive. I have mentioned this to others but this is the reason that my characters who are very heavily mutated by the Force cannot use telekinesis well, or get stunned by nuetral powers. But they learn and master Force Powers faster in general while my characters who are focused on weapons learn new powers slower and truly esoteric abilities are closed to them in many ways.
As for how they learn them, at first I had a dilemma: I can do only so many posts a day lol but I wanted to be detailed and somewhat conceivable. On the other hand, training threads are a slog without lots of good drama set up between characters. I settled for not learning Force Powers without setting up situations in which the knowledge that was required would be conceivably at said location my characters were in. In other cases, they learned certain powers instinctively, brought on by great stress, and I always tried to make sure the powers acquired through stress were built upon other skills they already knew. Others were sorta like the dragon walls in Skyrim: the knowledge was imprinted on a monument, and downloaded itself into the character's brain, or found in books or scrolls like Maple.
I also took pains to make the Force creepy. With Laertia, its implied that the experiences where she acquired her most powerful abilities were nightmarish visions/possible visitations of entities from the Netherworld of The Force. Also, learning a Force Power is not a pleasant experience for my characters most of the time, unless in a formal setting. I have even tried to make telekinesis have a very sinister, unnatural quality to it now and then. Force Healing itself is made to be creepy even at low levels in my writing and I use how it manifests in a character as an indicator of inhuman physiology (Plus, Logan References are too good to pass up.), whether they are an actual player character or npc.
Camp elements didn't really start to come into play until I had The Amalgam up and running, and she was the one where I really started to combine and experiment with elements of horror and gallows humor. (I'm not sure but I think she was also the very first one I really tested out the Theme Song Gag on.) As the Gothic elements started with Nine and spread to Maple, the Camp and Comedic elements started mostly with the Main villain and retroactively spread to Maple and Nine, each "Main" I have introduced (Maple, Nine, Amalgam, Syd, and Laertia) introduced lore and elements that spread backward.
Anyway, that's all I can think of to write at the moment, but I would like to stress that all of this is the result of collaboration with great and wonderful Roleplayers, like
Karlie Lynn Destat
, Kay ,
Starlin Rand
,
Beltran Rarr
, and more recent ones, like
Ryv
. I owe a great deal of thanks to many others and wish you all a happy new year.
