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Stupid brain
Jun. 29th, 2006 01:40 pmI keep getting interesting ideas for stories, but the problem is they're more themes, so I'd basically have to write a whole (very long) story with the concept/idea/theme echoing through it, just to get to the admittedly cool ending scenes.
I was just looking at some fanfic where the rival came in after the main character picked her pokemon, and I thought 'Hey, wouldn't it be interesting if the rival picked the one with a type disadvantage? Kind of like how Gary always shows up Ash, it'd be extra infuriating to have someone be better than you and hand you your ass with a type disadvantage.'
Then I thought, 'HEY! Wouldn't it be really cool if someone wrote a whole OT story with the standard main character/rival setup, only the main character who we're all rooting for is actually the _rival_ character, but it's subtle so the only clues are how s/he is matching the rival's movement in RBY or whatever, and then at the end THEY lose to their rival at the Elite Four and it'd be all subversive and cool!'
Then I though, 'Goddammit!'
Because no one's going to write that, and in order to write it you'd have to write a WHOLE TRAINER STORY, and those things are monsters. The obvious shortcut is to just write the rival bits, but then it wouldn't be a cool subversive mindfuck, because the readers would realize something was up, and even if they didn't, you wouldn't get them all invested in the apparent hero only to pull the ground out from under them at the last second.
There are a lot of other ideas like that. I had a similar free-association process go on where, while doing research for my history paper on environmentalism, I came across an old book called Ecotopia, which is kind of like my Unoriginalities, actually - it's a thinly disguised blueprint for designing an environmentally friendly society wrapped in the guise of a story. That combined with my other thought, which was that if the climate does go nuts and methane floods the atmosphere and the oxygen vanishes, the only way humans would survive is in domes, made me think of writing a sort of counterpart.
It'd be titled Ecotopia and be about people living in a beautiful lush world that's perfect and environmentally regulated. Inside huge glass domes. It very slowly starts to get into the basics of the world, but indirectly, because the main character doesn't know much and doesn't care about what he does. Ultimately the reader finds out that they're the descendants of the richest people in the world, who commissioned these huge places built back before the general disaster. It's also slowly found out that the domes are operating at a very low capacity, supporting far fewer people than they could have, because their biosphere functions are hampered by the fact the huge sections are purely aesthetic. The character's friend is bored so they wander around and find out these sort of things, and at the end...they just head back to their normal activities, having gotten bored with investigating. Outside, the world is dead. Inside, the last people alive couldn't care less.
And then there's the story based on the 'god of the gaps' idea, which is a phrase to refer to the annoying tendency of fundamentalists to say God's in charge of whatever hasn't been fully investigated (He used to be in charge of weather back when I was younger, but now that we understand it better, he's just managing evolution, hurricane aim and why all the large nuts in a mix wind up at the top after it's shipped). It's pretty stupid. The idea would be that it actually was true, but in a more ominous form. Once a mechanistic explanation arrives for something, it 'governs' that particular area, so that anything outside that (say, a miracle) no longer occurs. This would be why miracles seem to happen less and less as time progresses - not because records are more accurate, but because God becomes more limited. In the story, people are working on a unified theory to finally stitch everything together. But writing this would involve writing a whole other story as a sort of red herring, with this as the backdrop that only becomes clear near the end.
I was just looking at some fanfic where the rival came in after the main character picked her pokemon, and I thought 'Hey, wouldn't it be interesting if the rival picked the one with a type disadvantage? Kind of like how Gary always shows up Ash, it'd be extra infuriating to have someone be better than you and hand you your ass with a type disadvantage.'
Then I thought, 'HEY! Wouldn't it be really cool if someone wrote a whole OT story with the standard main character/rival setup, only the main character who we're all rooting for is actually the _rival_ character, but it's subtle so the only clues are how s/he is matching the rival's movement in RBY or whatever, and then at the end THEY lose to their rival at the Elite Four and it'd be all subversive and cool!'
Then I though, 'Goddammit!'
Because no one's going to write that, and in order to write it you'd have to write a WHOLE TRAINER STORY, and those things are monsters. The obvious shortcut is to just write the rival bits, but then it wouldn't be a cool subversive mindfuck, because the readers would realize something was up, and even if they didn't, you wouldn't get them all invested in the apparent hero only to pull the ground out from under them at the last second.
There are a lot of other ideas like that. I had a similar free-association process go on where, while doing research for my history paper on environmentalism, I came across an old book called Ecotopia, which is kind of like my Unoriginalities, actually - it's a thinly disguised blueprint for designing an environmentally friendly society wrapped in the guise of a story. That combined with my other thought, which was that if the climate does go nuts and methane floods the atmosphere and the oxygen vanishes, the only way humans would survive is in domes, made me think of writing a sort of counterpart.
It'd be titled Ecotopia and be about people living in a beautiful lush world that's perfect and environmentally regulated. Inside huge glass domes. It very slowly starts to get into the basics of the world, but indirectly, because the main character doesn't know much and doesn't care about what he does. Ultimately the reader finds out that they're the descendants of the richest people in the world, who commissioned these huge places built back before the general disaster. It's also slowly found out that the domes are operating at a very low capacity, supporting far fewer people than they could have, because their biosphere functions are hampered by the fact the huge sections are purely aesthetic. The character's friend is bored so they wander around and find out these sort of things, and at the end...they just head back to their normal activities, having gotten bored with investigating. Outside, the world is dead. Inside, the last people alive couldn't care less.
And then there's the story based on the 'god of the gaps' idea, which is a phrase to refer to the annoying tendency of fundamentalists to say God's in charge of whatever hasn't been fully investigated (He used to be in charge of weather back when I was younger, but now that we understand it better, he's just managing evolution, hurricane aim and why all the large nuts in a mix wind up at the top after it's shipped). It's pretty stupid. The idea would be that it actually was true, but in a more ominous form. Once a mechanistic explanation arrives for something, it 'governs' that particular area, so that anything outside that (say, a miracle) no longer occurs. This would be why miracles seem to happen less and less as time progresses - not because records are more accurate, but because God becomes more limited. In the story, people are working on a unified theory to finally stitch everything together. But writing this would involve writing a whole other story as a sort of red herring, with this as the backdrop that only becomes clear near the end.
