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Weekly Update - Narrative Character Connections

2 years ago1,448 words

I did more story-related planning this week! Here are some thoughts about the potential drama of connections between characters in stories!

(Gasp, this is my 500th blog post here apparently?? That's hard to wrap my head around!)

I had another of the MRI brain scans I've been having every 6 months this week - I won't find out whether MY LIFE IS OVER!!! until next Friday though - so that got in the way of work a bit.

I did do some stuff though! I've been working more at the plot, and I think I'm at the point now where I'm happy with my plans for the story and should probably stop fiddling around with things and get to work preparing for the next alpha. Shouldn't take too long to alter what I have to fit with these new ideas.

In my naive youth, I assumed stories were written one chapter at a time, with the second being approached when the first was fully finished. My planning now is more like brainstorming a bunch of potential connections between a few Important Points which have been fixed since the beginning of my planning, seeing the whole thing from a top-down, long-distance view; the biggest challenge is keeping the entire web in mind at once so I know how any changes would interfere with everything else!

Something that's common in stories (at least pop-culture stories like those in Hollywood films and games; I'm not sure about fancy highbrow ~literature~) is having (often familial) connections between characters, which are often - but not always - revealed as a big twist. We like it when things are interconnected, when there's some intimate, personal bond between the players in the unravelling drama. Finding out Vader was Luke's father was a very big deal to people at the time!

It's not always done well, of course. Sometimes it's done to excess, where everyone is everyone else's sibling or uncle or whatever, to the point of straining suspension of disbelief (I think the TVTropes name for it is something like Everyone's Related). I saw this on Reddit the other day (in the form of a screenshot of a tweet containing a screenshot of a Reddit comment... which I had to screenshot and trim because of file format incompatibilities and... SIGH):



That wasn't exactly the original plan when the first Star Wars films were made, of course - the connections between Vader, Luke, and Leia famously weren't decided when A New Hope was released - but as the volume of content set in that universe grew, so did these connections, because connections like this are appealing. I know I like them!

I finished playing the remaster of Chrono Cross the other day, which I suppose is silly to compare to since the game's like two decades old, but I'd say its story isn't too dissimilar to typical RPG stories in that it's convoluted to the point of being incomprehensible (with a lot of ~profound~ teenager-style-philosophising like "why are we here?" or "is there any need for violence??" out of nowhere that are completely at odds with the events or gameplay), plus it also makes use of these surprise character associations to add depth to events... kind of.




Literally right before the final battle, there's this huge, barely coherent lore dump - delivered in sequences of dry block paragraphs by three NPCs who you don't even have to talk to - explaining how one important character is actually another's father who's also become the... biological interface of a future computer and was, uh, mutated by the bite of some animal-demon... yes... and that another one's the daughter-clone of a minor NPC from Chrono Trigger - who's not previously been so much as mentioned - despite zero physical similarity and a personality that's the complete opposite (of what the wiki tells me, since from what I recall that character barely spoke enough in Chrono Trigger for much personality to come across at all). WHAT A DRAMATIC AND EXCITING REVEAL THAT EXPLAINS SO MUCH!!!

It's like if MARDEK 3 ended with you suddenly discovering that Elwyen is actually an extradimensional traveller and a clone of Clarence's wife and you have to save her from a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere called "REVELATIONS" or the universe will end (though now I'm regretting not doing that!).

Made me wonder whether they ran out of time and/or funding and weren't able to do as much as they wanted with the game, or something.

I'm writing the story of Atonal Dreams to include a lot of these connections, so all of the playable protagonists have prior bonds with at least a couple of others. Forming emotional/psychological 'concords' - bonds - between characters is a big part of the narrative (it used to be a gameplay feature, but now it's more woven into how events play out). But hopefully what I've got is less abrupt and more meaningful than stuff like that!



I posted and wrote about this concept art on ∞ my Patreon ∞ recently. I'm posting it here too largely because I just wanted something to show, but also because it provides an example of the sort of connections I'm going for, and especially which I'm adding in with my recent plot revisions.

Previously, Ossoum - on the left there - was intended to be Savitr's old friend, but I wasn't sure how they'd met in the past, and he had no prior connection to Pierce. Seemed a bit odd though, since they're both weird bald men of the same age. I've now revised that so that they both grew up as Beyond Ponderers - Ossoum's younger form shown here (he'd still be the sunglasses-wearing version in-game) - but an Incident led to both of them leaving the monastery, with Ossoum going to live with a new partner in Gemsand and meeting Savitr that way, and Pierce being banished.

Once I decided on that, big parts of the story revealed themselves to me. Explorations of this past event, and their feelings about and attitudes towards one another before and once they reunite. Much more fulfilling, I'd say, than if they were strangers. Allows for the exploration of a whole lot more stuff.

The other two pictured here are Oneira, a sindrel, and Lunaia, a hundreds-of-years-old Meek, who now both join the party as full-fledged playable characters. I talked about them more in the Patreon post, though I'll likely talk about them more in future posts here too. They're not really relevant to the first bits that'd make up the private alpha and subsequent public demo I'm planning to do though.



Another thing I've been thinking about is how some story decisions I'm making are inspired by the medium: what works well for a game wouldn't necessarily work for a novel or film, and vice versa.

Going back to Chrono Cross again, that uses six elements (a big inspiration for how I handled elements in MARDEK and beyond, I think), and at a later point in the game you have to seek out and defeat six dragons, one of each element... for no good reason other than to open a door which is sealed until you defeat the dragons (there might have been a bigger reason in the convoluted lore, but it wasn't clear to me as a player not overly concerned with deciphering it).

Atonal Dreams is not-dissimilarly structured around the elements, though I'd like to think it's all made more personal. Most of the chapters involve going into a character's psychepelago via a flowerbed of a particular element, at the end of which you face a boss of that element, in order to acquire a thing of that element to open some gate that's sealed by all the elements.

Probably most of my brainstorming time this week was spent deciding on why the gate is there at all and why each character would be motivated to want to pass through it. Also what exactly the bosses are; they're not just random monsters!



Because it's all story-based stuff though, I won't go into any more detail than that for fear of just spoiling everything, even if I am desperate to just blurt it all out because I'm proud of my decisions! Maybe not blurting it all out is one of the hardest parts of making anything story-related!