#kas-artz | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

takerfoxx · 8 years ago

Text

“Monsterland” Thoughts

Monsterland was one of the first episodes I had plotted out and initially had two purposes: to reveal what the dockengauts actually looked like and get them over as a serious threat for whenever I needed them next, and to get Kyoko her pet valk (more on that little chicken nugget later). Plus, you know, all the violence, violence, violence, violence. I'm starting to think I have a problem. This is what happens when you're a 90's kid and read Animorphs instead of Goosebumps during your formative years. It does things to you.

Anyhoo, I was originally going to save it for later on in the story (y'know, like I should have done with Help), but when it came time to choose the last episode before the break, I was really worn out from The Heist, was tired of all the plots involving politics and betrayal, and didn't feel like writing anything with too much plot. And since Monsterland was pretty much nonstop action, it was selected as the note to end things on.

In regards to the fight in the Velocity Terminal (the name of which I absolutely love. Naming places is often a pain in the ass, but I got a real kick out of this one), it was actually thought up as a standalone scene, one that wasn't actually connected to any specific plotline. It was just a fun all-out brawl on a wacky landscape that was admittedly heavily inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog games. Plus, as much as a love how good the fight in Breaking Through the Clouds came out, I was disappointed that I never got to fit in a scene where everyone from the Freehaven Four got to square off with their opposite number in the Void Quartet (Kyoko with Annabelle Lee, Mami with Nie, Charlotte with Artz, and Oktavia with Ticky Nikki), so this was my way of making up for it. And like all my big fight scenes, it was planned out bulletpoint-style, with a handful of high spots (notably Kyoko's trick with the spear and the freefall drop, Mami's shootout with Nie, and Oktavia racing along like as screaming lunatic) with a lot of improvision in between. For me, the highlights that were made up on the spot was Charlotte's MMA-esque battle with Artz and Charlotte and Mami's finger-wrenching rescue of Oktavia (ouch). Though in hindsight, I should have made more use of the teleporting towers thing. It's too cool of a concept to just use once.

Though I will admit, I did struggle to come up with a reason for why the Void Quartet would still be chasing the gang. I guess, "Because we hate you and have nothing better to do" works okay.

Anyway, the dockengaut home planet was originally going to be dull, grey, and lifeless (save for the monsters), much like the elephant graveyard in the Lion King (yes, the boneyard was a direct reference). But that just struck me as boring. Yeah, I appreciate a lot of gothic aesthetics, but I still have a perchance for colorful worlds, and there was nothing to say this one couldn't have a lot of color and still be sinister. So we got things like the black jungle and purple fields and whatnot. I guess more of my Animorph fanboyish came to play, since most of KA Applegate's alien worlds operated under similar principles. Come to think of it, this whole episode was one big love letter to Animorphs.

Insofar as the monsters were concerned, I only had a couple in mind going in, other than the dockengauts and valks of course. The bahemont scene was preplanned, as were those cone monsters that almost got Mami (they were originally going to be sandworms, but screw it, sandworms are overused). The design for the miscus were actually stolen from a monster idea I was going to use for Subconscious, but they ended up working just fine here. As for the others, those I deliberately avoided designing in advance so I could have fun making them up on the spot. The Worm was pretty much brainstormed on the fly, and it ended up being really cool if I do say so myself. It borrowed the whole hanging from the ceiling from Bongo Bongo in Ocarina of Time, while the rest of its body was designed around a cactus. And it really helped to have something so huge and terrifying be scared shitless by the dockengauts, as it helped drive home just how unstoppable they are.

Anyway, the bulletpoint approach really does help with action scenes. I think I've mentioned this before, but sometimes the coolest "found moments" come from trying to work your way around logical problems that show up unexpectedly. For example, during the freefall into the boneyard, Kyoko was initially going to just snatch Oktavia out of the sky and then sort of wall jump her way into the ground. Then I thought, "Shit, what about the wheelchair?" So I stopped writing and brainstormed for a few minutes before coming up with the spiral ramp of shields and having Kyoko literally ride the damned thing all the way to the ground, with Mami making the save at the end. Come on. I know it's far from the most memorable scene, but it was still pretty damn cool.

In contrast, more often than not scenes that get planned far in advance fail to live up to what I see in my head. Take the introduction of the first dockengaut. It came out fine when I first wrote it, or so I thought. But after going back and reading it over when the chapter had been up for a while, I feel I had ended up rushing the whole thing. It should have been drawn out more, delaying the reveal, making the formation of the dockengaut's body take longer while leading the dread build. Instead, it just went too fast. It's was fine for what it was, but it could have been so much better.

Same for the fight on the next chapter. Beat by beat it's fine. But I really should have played up the horror aspects more, especially when it comes to the lighting. In hindsight, it would have been a good idea to damage the equipment after all and screw up the lights, so that they would be flickering in and out, giving the dockengaut a more demonic appearance. When it comes to things like building dread and inspiring horror, aesthetics, pacing, and atmosphere are everything. As such, the dockengauts worked best when they were in the shadows.

Speaking of improvising versus planning, all of Kyoko's dreams about wandering around in the dark were made up on the spot, mostly as a way to slow the pacing down whenever she passed out. It's easy to slow things down when you need to if you have several characters to bounce the POV back and forth between, but when it's just one for the whole chapter, you have to rely on whatever tricks you can when the time comes for a breather. Dreams are great for that sort of thing. So are flashbacks. And in this case, I ended up liking the idea so much that it became a recurring motif, one that eventually led to the big rescue at the end. Plus, with Oktavia being absent, it helped build up the idea that Kyoko was developing feelings for her and made their reunion a little more special.

The same applies to the compass. I needed to give Kyoko some kind of advantage, and since I had already introduced the fact that she still has it as a Chekov's Gun in case I needed it later, now was a great opportunity to fire it off. As for it copping some kind of attitude, that was one of those on the fly things that made me laugh so I just rolled with it.

But with all the improvising and extra stuff, a few planned things did end up getting cut, one in which Kyoko's hiding from a dockengaut only for some kind of fist-sized monster crab thing to sneak up on her, shriek at her, and have her throat it right at the dockengaut and flee while its getting torn apart. The other was for her to make her final escape out of the caverns by rushing through a black tunnel filled with alien slugs, squishing them along the way and eventually have her jump out of a hole in the side of a cliff (that part sort of made it in). This actually were taken out not because they wouldn't work, but because I'd like to do another dockengaut themed chapter sometime in the future and didn't want to blow through all my ideas in one go.

Now, in regards to the meat slave Kyoko runs into, I had an idea for her to find a hole, peek inside, and realize that below was a huge cavern, with hundreds of meat slaves being devoured by thousands of dockengauts. While a great image, that was another thing that I felt would be better off used when the gang made their eventual return to dockengaut land, so a single meat slave was used instead. Which was good, as some things you want to start off small and slowly escalate.

That being said, I admit that I ended up feeling really bad for the poor kid. I have a personal policy to avoid redshirting as much as possible, and I hate it when innocents suffer and die horribly to get the monster of the week over while the mains get out unscathed, even if the death was temporary. But I had to make an exception in this case, as there was no way in hell Kyoko, or anyone else, could have saved her. To be fair, at least she wasn't completely forgotten. I had Kyoko rage at God at the end for never sending anyone to help her as a way to make up for things, which is more than they usually get in some of the shows I've seen. Still, sorry about that, kid.

Okay, let's talk about valks. Now, it's no secret that I fucking love Jurassic Park (first one only, accept no shitty sequels!), and the velociraptors were my favorite part of it, oversized and scientifically inaccurate as they might be. In fact, I like them better that way! Screw the feathers! Boo!

Anyway, yeah, I love raptors. And so when I decided that I wanted the gang to adopt a team pet, I first thought of giving them a dog. Except no, there's no way a dog would ever survive, so they needed something tougher. Then I realized that this was my damn story and I could do what I wanted. So if I wanted to give them an alien velociraptor as a pet, I could do just that. I just needed to find a way to make it work.

That was part of the reason for their surprise appearance way back in First Time (damn, that was like two years ago! Time really does fly). I wanted to take the concept for a test drive to see how people would respond and introduce the idea of valks imprinting on the first thing they see upon birth. And seeing how the valks got more fanart than most of the main characters, I'd say things went off smashingly well.

So it was time to reintroduce them, and since their first appearance had them getting killed off pretty quickly, I needed to get them over as a threat as well. Now obviously, I couldn't make them too OP. After all, super predators or not, they're still just animals, while Kyoko and Charlotte were "hot immortal chicks with superpowers" (Buffy FTW), but I still wanted them to have a good showing.

I just wasn't prepared for how big that showing would actually be.

See, for the valk fight, I only had a couple of bulletpoints in mind: the part where they run into the nest and the baby hatches, and the one where the valk gets thrown into the balboa trees. Everything else was to be made up on the fly. Unfortunately, when it came time to do it, I got hit with a vicious case of writer's block. The wheels weren't turning, the words weren't flowing, and I was about to smash my head against the computer in frustration.

Oh, I got over it of course. Sometimes you just have to force the wheel to get things rolling, to grit your teeth and power through whatever's got you hung up. But when I finally did break out of that block, I found myself confronted with the opposite problem: I was having too many ideas.

The fight just kept going on and on and on and on. Every time I ran into a logical issue (how do I get them from point A to point B? How do I get this valk over here to get killed by so-and-so?), the solution would end up inflating into five pages. And that happened a lot. That whole bit with the gorizzly was literally spawned from me just needing to figure out how to get the valks into the gorge. The miscus was me figuring out that the valks would have wised up and not attacked the girls directly, so I needed some other way to get Kyoko and Charlotte into the gorge first. The pillar was to get the girls into the labyrinth. And the…well, you get the idea.

Still, while frustrating, per usual the improvisions ended up making some of the best bits, and it was a good feeling when it was finally completed. Because wow, that was an ordeal!

Side-note: I did cut out a bit where Charlotte would impale a valk with her wires, forget herself, and then accidentally retract them with its blood still on them, necessitating Kyoko to cut off her arm before the poison paralyzed her, mainly because I couldn't have Charlotte taken out of commission that completely. I made up for it with Kyoko get blinded and having to cut out her own eyes, because CLEARLY I HAVE ISSUES!

That the dockengauts would "save the day" by taking out the two remaining valks was always going to be the ending though, as was the gunship rescue. I know it's a bit Deux ex Machina-y, but sometimes that's the way things have to be. I did got back and insert those transmissions between the gunships to sort of soften the blow, though I wouldn't blame anyone for rolling their eyes. Also, I again feel like I rushed that last dockengaut scene, but oh well.

The reunion scene sort of speaks for itself, so I won't comment too much on it. However, I will say that the way it ended got changed several times. See, Kyoko had a baby valk in her backpack, and it needed to be smuggled out safely. Well, if I had the border guards take the girls to their HQ as planned, it would have surely been found, and I couldn't have that. I toyed around with the idea of having the guards simply drop them off and let them go on account of being suspicious of the order to have them arrested or something and fearing that something was up, but that was too kitschy. So, having them just bail it was. And as such, no hot meals or good night's sleep in a warm bed for them. Sorry guys.

For the epilogue, it sort of served as an epilogue for the whole story thus far, with Charlotte aptly summing up just how lost they were. And let's face it, she's right; even Kyoko admitted it. And I have to admit as well, maybe I did go to a couple wells too many times, what with the girls (Kyoko especially) getting the snot beaten out of them and being pushed past the point of exhaustion. Also, having this episode end on a tearful reunion when the previous one had done so as well does kind of dilute the effect, which means going forward I'm definitely going to have to dial back the violence and find some more variety in the plots. Which isn't to say that there won't be other search and rescues or heavy fights that push the girls to the edge, just that I need to lighten up a little and stop putting them all in a row.

Still, damage done. Only thing to do now is keep moving forward. Hey, I did say these stories were intended to be a learning experience.

And boy howdy, have they ever been. While I'll freely admit that I've made numerous mistakes in Imperfect Metamorphosis, looking back it does seem that I've made even more in Resonance Days. I'm starting to regret the whole Alliance thing, as it takes away the edge the story had in its first few chapters. And the episodic format should have been in place from the beginning. And Help was used way too early, and sending Kyoko and Oktavia off halfway through was a mistake. And The Heist, while an interesting experiment in unconventional writing, was a total mess.

Which isn't to say I necessarily regret all the decisions I made or think this story is bad. Far from it, I love Resonance Days and the freedom it gives me. And most of it came out very well, I feel. However, let's just say when it comes from learning from your own mistakes, I have learned a lot, and continue to learn more with every installment. And I expect that I will also learn even more from the first Subconscious book, and will learn more when the fanfics start up again, and…well, you get the idea. No matter how much experience you have or how meticulously you plan something out, there will always be more mistakes right around the corner. And if I had to choose the most important lesson I've learned from writing fanfiction, it's that even if you do screw up in a major way, sometimes you just have to adapt on the fly and keep going, instead of throwing the whole thing out and starting over like I kept doing before Imperfect Metamorphosis.

Now, looking back on Monsterland, how did it stack up? Well, it has its problems. Again, I felt that I should have slowed down most, if not all, of the dockengaut scenes, change the atmosphere a bit, and built up more horror and dread. Also, in reading it back, I admit that the big valk fight is a sudden change of gears. The fight itself is pretty damned good, but after hyping up the dockengauts, having the finale be against a different set of monsters entirely does cause a bit of a hiccup.

However, while I do like Help a bit more despite it having more problems with its placement and execution, Monsterland came out the smoothest of the three episodes so far, in that I went in with a specific vision for what I wanted it to be and the final result being more or less how I envisioned it, plus a few extras. Even the parts I cut out were mainly due to wanting to use them later than discarding them entirely. So yeah, pretty happy with the final result.

Okay, okay, okay, let's talk about the baby valk. Well, to be honest, there's not much to say since the little dude was only just introduced, but even so, I've been looking forward to bringing him (and yes, it's a him) into the story for a long time. I know, it's kinda cheap to introduce him right before the break, but one thing at a time I guess. Anyways though, in addition to realizing that the team pet needed to be something big and mean enough to survive their various misadventures and to pander to my raptor obsession, I think another reason for going with a baby space raptor was sort of subconscious (see what I did there?), in when I read the Jurassic Park book for the first time, I sort of fell in love with the baby raptor that shows up for all of two scenes and was devastated when it got eaten. So I included a baby raptor of my own that wouldn't get eaten. While…killing off an entire family of raptors, juveniles and other babies alike. If younger me ever read this he would want to strangle older me. Well, tough luck, kid. I'm bigger than you.

Still, he does promise to add an interesting dynamic to the team. Especially given how Charlotte's likely to react. Oh, this is gonna be good…

Or will be. Huh, it's kind of strange. After this goes up, I'll officially be done with Resonance Days and Imperfect Metamorphosis for a long time. It is sort of eerie, in an end of an era sort of way. Still, sooner or later you have to take things to the next level, and as much fun as I've had with these stories, the sad fact is that there's no money in them, and if I just keep going with them exclusively forever I'll never get around to Subconscious. So this is it. In a few hours I'll be starting the project for which I've been preparing for…roughly about twenty four years. Twenty four years of dreaming, daydreaming, plotting, planning, writing, rewriting, scrapping, and obsessing. This is really it.

Well guys. It was an awesome near eight years. Stay tuned for what's next!

2 notes · View notes