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Post by Pen Against Sword on Jun 19, 2008 15:56:50 GMT
YOU SHOULD ALSO ADD IN A HEALTHY DOSAGE OF SEYMOUR x RIKKU. You, you did this to me! *shakes fist* Seriously, after reading 'God's Wheel' the only thing I could think when you said "healthy dosage of SeymourxRikku" was Oh, yes please. *headdesk* Aurikku, Sylla, think of the Aurikku!Anyhow - much as I like the idea of Rikku's mom being a total flake (well, she had to get her bouncy personality from somewhere, didn't she?) I rather think that, given how close-knit a society the Al Bhed are, warm-and-loving-reunion might be better. (What, us hijacking your fic? Never!) Oh, and if you want lots of awesome (platonic) Jecht-and-Rikku interaction, check out 'Memento Vivere' by Enkida. It is absolutely amazing. ;D Sylla, she's ruined us! She's ruuuuuiiined us! Can you believe that after I read God's Wheel, I thought about how I was planning on writing this story and thought about how I definitely want lots of snappy dialogue between Seymour and Rikku, and then I thought, "I'll have to work really hard to keep it Aurikku and not stray off into SeymourRikku land." WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME, LA? Actually, I sort of wanted Rikku's mom to be kickass with a great sense of humor and adventure. Not really the perfect mom, but the kind of person that Daddy Cid would've fallen head over heels for back in the day. Also, I am eagerly awaiting the next installment to Memento Vivere. I love that story. And as for you, fear, I think I have a couple of suggestions/questions. Okay, so you're worried about being predictable/transparent? No offense intended but the idea you are using is not a new one. This and variants of it are used a lot of time to bring two characters together despite the odds. That is NOT to say that's a bad thing--not at all. A new, refreshing spin on an old trick can draw in a whole lot of readers (me included--I LOVE innovation). As for the new refreshing spin and what it is, however, I'm afraid I'm rather lame because I can't think of anything, and I don't know the fandom so it makes it hard for me to know the physics and the magics and what rules are what of these people's world. Also, my question is this: why do those two gets sick if one or the other of them is getting intimate with someone else? I realize it's apparently a result of their linkage, but why is it intimacy that causes this physical discomfort? If you don't have some sort of explanation it'll seem as though you just pulled that out of thin air, and your plot device will be really, really obvious. (You are trying to get them together, right?)
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Post by fearandloathing on Jun 19, 2008 16:24:06 GMT
Thanks, Pen, I'm aware I'm not being original as I did yoink the idea (with writers consent) from another story and fitted it into the new fandom Part of how I did that is the basics of the world are some people in it have unusual powers called Alices, they can be almost everything (flying/invention/animal pheromones/etc), and Mikan has been revealed as having a steal Alice, so the whole link forms when Natsume (fire alice) is attempting to burn down a whole building (people inside are an anti-alice faction who've abducted and killed a young student and he's not happy) and because she can't stop him with the first of her alices (nullification) she just steals the whole thing before he can do any more harm. As for the sick question, I'll admit it's not something I thought about clinically, but luckily you asking will make me think about it and come up with something believable saaaaaved. The principle is that they are 'meant to be together' (which I'm sorta aiming for eventually but hopefully not phrased like that) so when one of them is interferred with it causes the other discomfort, currently it makes them sick because they are both recovering from being in hospital as the stealing/linking made them both pretty sick, as her gaining this massive power (which is also kinda destructive, as it ruins Natsume's health and he's on a lot of medication just to live normally) is like a system overlode and for him it's like the same but in reverse. An idea that just came to me now could be eventually calling it the formation of a new alice that /is/ what the link is, which could work, and...hm, your last point is a very good call :S *panics* And woo, Rikku's mum sounds cool! Adventurous sounds perfect for her. EDIT: Random manga-reading-induced (damn me I feel like I don't have a single original idea anymore D:) plot-add-on, as the most recent chapter paints the picture of Natsume not being completely over Mikan/confused by things, I could have a whole process of him deciding he wants her and her saying 'no.' bweeeeeeh my brain isn't working today
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Post by Sylla on Jun 19, 2008 17:44:54 GMT
Sylla, she's ruined us! She's ruuuuuiiined us! Can you believe that after I read God's Wheel, I thought about how I was planning on writing this story and thought about how I definitely want lots of snappy dialogue between Seymour and Rikku, and then I thought, "I'll have to work really hard to keep it Aurikku and not stray off into SeymourRikku land." WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME, LA? There, there. *pats Pen on the back* You're absolutely right about us being corrupted and ruined for life, though, because when I thought about the fic straying off into SeymourRikku land, a happy little voice in my head immediately replied, Oh well. ... You could make it Aurikku with SeymourRikku undertones, perhaps. Just keep the witty dialog, and I'm happy. =P
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Post by T. Costa on Jun 19, 2008 18:20:28 GMT
I'm having a lot of problems. Can someone please tell me - what makes a resurrection fic trite and cliche? Because I'm kinda sorta doing one and I want to stay far, far away from trite and cliche. I want the resurrection to seem, not natural, because resurrection is NOT NATURAL, but you know, not forced.
*rips hair out* This may never see the light of day. Or at least, I may not wind up putting it anywhere. D:
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Post by Sylla on Jun 19, 2008 20:23:50 GMT
Hm... it'd be easier to point out what is cliche if you outlined the basic points of what's supposed to happen, Costa. I think, with ressurection fics, the best way is to find an explanation that is neither too scientific ("Oh, look guys, we've uncovered a machina that explains the nature of spacetime and how to bring back the dead!") or too mystic ("Oh, um, I guess the Fayth decreed it must be so"). In fact, I'd make sure you have a major other storyline, with the resurrection somewhat peripheral to it (though how peripheral is your choice). That way it doesn't look like you're just writing resurrection for the heck of writing resurrection, and for character X and character Y to get together. Above all, be original - but of course I don't need to tell you that, do I?
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Post by Pen Against Sword on Jun 20, 2008 2:24:36 GMT
I agree with Sylla, Costa. It'd be a lot easier if you gave us a bit more details on it.
In general, resurrection fics get trite and cliche when they have a very stupid, obvious plot device as the reason the character (whomever they may be) is not dead anymore.
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Post by La Editor on Jun 20, 2008 4:46:04 GMT
Sylla, she's ruined us! She's ruuuuuiiined us! Can you believe that after I read God's Wheel, I thought about how I was planning on writing this story and thought about how I definitely want lots of snappy dialogue between Seymour and Rikku, and then I thought, "I'll have to work really hard to keep it Aurikku and not stray off into SeymourRikku land." WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME, LA? There, there. *pats Pen on the back* You're absolutely right about us being corrupted and ruined for life, though, because when I thought about the fic straying off into SeymourRikku land, a happy little voice in my head immediately replied, Oh well. ... You could make it Aurikku with SeymourRikku undertones, perhaps. Just keep the witty dialog, and I'm happy. =P (inside mind: YES! YES! BWAHAHAHAHA!) I mean - I'm sorry! D: I honestly didn't think it would spark... anything, because it really didn't have -that- much of a pairing. But I guess most of my stories never do P: I'd be fine with witty humor too! ...But you could totally write a different story. Maybe a oneshot. With Seymour x Rikku. I would write you things and draw you things. And send you expensive virtual birthday cards. Lots of them. XD Sorry, sorry. Heyhey, Sylla, I never got a chance to review reply-thingamabob. Your review was so nice for God's Wheel, I squealed on the inside. I hoard long reviews like good chocolate. It made my week. :3 Tasha, I already sent you some of my ideas for that, but for some reason I really don't like the idea of it being Gippal. I just don't like him. I have no idea why D: So, for Oceans Fall Into Skies - I posted the main idea a page or so back - I have it sort of figured out. So, now I'm sort of stuck - how do you get out of a time loop? Basically, Vincent goes back into the past, but I need him to sort of not be forgotten. I'm thinking that instead of hitting the past, he goes into an alternate dimension because he needs to beat these fiend things, but augh I'm just so confused and ready to pull my hair out D:
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Post by Sai on Jun 20, 2008 9:39:18 GMT
I've been thinking about doing a parody on Yaoi, including all of the contrite cliches of the catagory, FFVII style. I want to point out everything that writers are doing (even myself....) and try to fix them up and make them passable as 'original' or at least 'mediocre'. While I'm certainly not the best writer, considering I have to make sure I don't OOCify my characters every chapter, I have a drive to write it.
I'm thinking three chapterss, max, loaded with all of the little things about yaoi that readers can't stand. Anybody want to give some of their ideas about what happens in yaoi that you don't like/are cliched?
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Post by Sylla on Jun 20, 2008 9:56:54 GMT
XD Sorry, sorry. Heyhey, Sylla, I never got a chance to review reply-thingamabob. Your review was so nice for God's Wheel, I squealed on the inside. I hoard long reviews like good chocolate. It made my week. :3 You're welcome! ;D I know from experience long reviews are nice to receive, so I try to make all my reviews longish. =P Anyhow - as to Oceans Fall Into Skies... I think the best thing to go for here might be to sort of vaguely play around with the nature of time and all that. Since it's something no-one really understands, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a suitably mystic-sounding solution. (Something like, oh, he didn't actually go back in time - time rewound itself, but everything actually did happen so everyone remembers it.) Just a thought. =P Addendum for Fear and anyone else who wants to have a shot at this: So the basic idea I had (which is probably not the most original, but Oh Well) is that everyone's settled down into their respective lives after FFX-2 (yeah, it's an FFX fic), when suddenly weird things start to happen - strange locations no-one remembers start to appear, the characters have occasional bouts of comelete OOCness... and, one morning, a strange, innocuous-looking girl is washed up onto the beach at Besaid. What Tidus and co. don't realise at first is that the arrival of the girl exacerbates these problems. When they start to realise, she attemts to turn her charm on them (cue a really cheesy, 'Oh look at me I'm just a poor innocent girl' scene) - and just when it seems all is lost, another person appears and chases the little girl away. Meet the Good Authoress, dedicated to upholding all that is canon. She's come because her little sister has blatantly ignored the fourth wall and snuck herself into Spira - and if sis can cheat then she damn well can, too. Authoress tells the gang about what's happening - that is, the little innocuous girl (whose name, ironically enough, is Sue) is twisting Spira and everything in it to suit her childish whims. So suddenly the whole FFX/X-2 cast, complete with a mysteriously revived Auron, is on another uest - this time to find the one thing that can cancel out Sue's powers: the (previously unheard-of) legendary Square Sphere. (Btw, yes that is a pun, because a sphere is obviously spherical and not square, but it's a play on Squaresoft's name... yes, I am totally lame, why?) So once they get the Square Sphere, they can use the power of Squaresoft - which, after all, stands for everything that is canon - and bring an end to Sue's messing with Spira. (Of course, that's just the bare bones of the story - feel free to mess about with it and add stuff.) =P ... Any takers?
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Post by T. Costa on Jun 20, 2008 10:29:18 GMT
Uhhh I don't wanna give too much away about the story because it still may never see the light of day if it's not good, haha. But um, the resurrection sort of is a plot device, but more than anything it's about how two characters, one resurrected, grow to love each other - they don't at first, not even one bit, but as they mature and stick around with each other they figure it out. I expect it'll be rather long and the resurrection would take place right at the beginning. There's a semi-scientific (in that world) explanation which I am trying to kind of iron out details for. I guess I could just flat-out make it an AU fic where that character didn't die, but....I dunno. Grrr. I'll get together with Hannah (my unofficial muse) later and we can bang out a couple of ideas. She's usually pretty good at telling me when I'm full of it. XD
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Post by fearandloathing on Jun 20, 2008 15:40:50 GMT
Haha, I like it Sylla! At first I was taking it seriously, but then as it revealed itself as parody a big grin crossed my face Have you heard of the hitchhiker's guide to Spira? That is a X parody with its own good moments. Question, what will they all be doing post X-2? (Just because I'm interested), and idea, what would you think of a suggestion that Sue worsens the problems post-arrival by 'Tidus/Auron/hot-male-lead X OC'-ing it up? I.e. bouts of OOCness also include guys randomly 'falling in love' with Sue... perhaps only to wake up with some kind of sugar-crash hangover or something? I love the idea, though I think I'd really like to undertake it in some kind of collab format, writing on my own burns out my brain and the power of two brains can make it funnier. (Any takers for helping out with something like that?) As for Tasha, what about having the resurection being made at some kind of a price/cost to the characters, so for shooting out random ideas (from the sims 2 no less) they are brought back, but they aren't exactly the same as they were before, or the people around her(?) have had to make some kind of personal, or even monetary/materialistic sacrifice for her life.
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Post by Sylla on Jun 20, 2008 17:38:04 GMT
Heheh, I'd prolly be able to hammer out a couple scenes (this is how I write - disjointed scenes, then I string them together).
Anyhow, feel free to completely b*stardize the characters for the lulz of it - the whole point of having Sue there is that she tries to make every male character in sight fall for her... or each other. Cue the guys trying their best to resist. =P And the sugar-crash hangover thing sounds good, if pulled off properly. We wouldn't want to descend into complete wanton silliness, now would we? XD
Also, bonus points if ressurected-and-possibly-reformed Seymour can be snuck into there. (I can just imagine some of his lines now: "I wanted to destroy Spira, but what this Sue is doing is too macabre even for my tastes.") Lawl. (Total closet Seymour fangirl. Shut up, brain.
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Post by T. Costa on Jun 21, 2008 5:44:23 GMT
As for Tasha, what about having the resurrection being made at some kind of a price/cost to the characters, so for shooting out random ideas (from the sims 2 no less) they are brought back, but they aren't exactly the same as they were before, or the people around her(?) have had to make some kind of personal, or even monetary/materialistic sacrifice for her life. La Editor had suggested that, too (she's one of THREE people I will discuss this story idea with XD) and I like the concept, I'm just sort of trying to figure out what the sacrifice will be. A physical sacrifice, like in Fullmetal Alchemist, just doesn't seem to do it justice, really. Now, a lot of this story will revolve around the concept of motherhood - and that a pregnant woman, who is of course at her most protective, has amazing regenerative ability (in this world, anyway). I don't want her to loose the baby, but I'm thinking perhaps the spirit of the baby could become corrupted somehow and she needs to un-corrupt it before it's born? I have no idea, honestly. I'm really drawing a blank on what I need to do with this. It's really frustrating because I know I could to it alright if I could just make it ....work, somehow. Grrr. Haha. Also, Sylla, that is THE BEST STORY IDEA, EVER. Seriously. I would write it but I'm afraid I'm not good enough to make it not suck. Parody has never been my thing.
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Post by fearandloathing on Jun 21, 2008 9:04:16 GMT
I think I could do this kind of parody if I had somone to discuss it with in depth and work out what was gonna be what/where/when/how/bla/bla/bla and so on, it'd be fun to be part of the creative process without the stress of sitting there on your own in front of the keyboard with all the work on you Hm, pregnant you say, the sacfirice of a child is certainly one of the most emmotive and heart-breaking things, Tasha, so that could be a really big plot issue, as a question who will the character be pregnant by and why/how? An idea could be the intended sacfirice is just to lose the baby, and so a lot of time is spent trying to fight this and you can have lots of miscarriage scares anddesperation just to keep the child alive, because it'll be 'not meant to be born' and such. Another angle that only works if the character isn't necessarily pregnant in the first place is being unfertile, so unable to bear children. So there's my two cents incidentally is this FF/game fiction or original fiction?
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Post by T. Costa on Jun 21, 2008 13:58:04 GMT
FFX. I toyed with doing a Rikku-Seymore because of God's Wheel, but I can't seem to overcome my immense dislike of Seymore. D:
Well, I think I blew it kinda with that line alone. lol. I'll give up on being secretive for now; we're all writers here, huh?
Okay, basic premise - Rikku has gone and gotten herself knocked up. She doesn't realize it at first but when the guy in question (Gippal) seems to have blown her off (he's really gotten called away on duty and by the time he has a chance to write to her she isn't where she was so of course he gets the letters back....), she gets depressed and starts traveling. She finds out she's pregnant at Guadosalam, and desperate for a kind face, even if it's just a memory recreated by pyreflies, runs to the Farplane. What she doesn't know, being Al Bhed, is that pregnant women generally aren't allowed into the Farplane because of their regenerative and protective abilities - they've been known to yank people back from the dead, sometimes horrible people, sometimes people who are misformed, and sometimes whole people who just never should have been brought back - and, of course, sometimes at great expense to themselves (what expense is partially what I'm trying to figure out). While she wasn't in love with Auron before this story, he pops up in the Farplane because he's one of the people she thinks of (there's a story behind why but I don't want to get into it), and that of course draws his memory out and ....
Well, now, that's where I have to figure out exactly where the kinks lie. I'm wondering if there's anyone else I should bring back, too, since I don't want the story to revolve entirely on the hows' and why's of Auron's return. I have no idea. I toyed with the idea of her losing the baby but I really want her to keep it for a whole host of reasons. I really want her to grow up and mature a bit, and I think that having to think of someone else for a change - her baby - could really do that.
I also want her to deal with the stigma of being an unwed or otherwise unattached mother, and Auron to deal with the stigma of being a man in an unwed mother's company. There are endless possibilities there, of how people could react and how the characters themselves could grow. I also very strongly want to work Shelinda in there because she was so compassionate during the game. I could see her as a safe haven of sorts, someone Rikku feels wouldn't judge her. While Yuna would normally fit the bill for this role, Rikku would feel horrible spending a lot of time with Yuna, because Yuna is just settling down to some version of normalcy - she has a husband and is trying to start a family at this point - and she doesn't want Yuna to have to deal with her problems too, although she doubtless would no matter what.
Another thing I want to explore is what I feel would be Auron's somewhat justified anger at being resurrected. He has, of course, experienced enough, been through enough, and spent ten years masquerading at life, which was bound to be exhausting. He's gotten barely a rest when suddenly he's yanked back, fully alive. And while Auron is definitely not stupid, he has been known to see things in black and white.
I dunno. I really want to write this out but I want everything figured out ahead of time so that I don't have to stop writing when I hit a roadblock and figure out wtf is going on. I *hate* doing that. Even if it sucks I feel a burning desire to write it; I'd like, of course, for it to NOT suck, which is why I'm discussing it with ya'll. XD
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