Drunkard's Walk Forums

So high schooler Jeffrey Jacobs thought heading to school in his older sister's choice of Halloween costume was bad enough. Then in first period he looks out the window and spots some sort of meerkat/rabbit crossbreed of unnatural coloration trying to talk to him. His day just goes crazier from there...

Quote:Hall pass in hand I slipped from the
room and walked to the end of the building and looked around as I
stepped outside. Perched on the water fountain, tapping a hind leg
impatiently the meerbit was waiting for me.

"Finally! We don't have much time
miss, I need you to--"

"My name's Jeffrey."






"That's nice, my name is Claret,
we don't have time for my usual introduction. Like I ever do anymore. You
have potential for great power miss Jeffrey," one blue tipped
paw reached around his back and brought out something silver tossing
it to me. "Put that on and give the top a twist."

Quote:




Claret spun around and in two bounds
was on the edge of the roof. Finally taking the opportunity to look
around I recognized the place. "Oh! Agua Fría grade school. I
went here."

The kid came up next to me,
"Viento Fresco's got a better basketball team."

"Only because Agua Fría doesn't
have a basketball team."

"Like I said..."

Claret jumped up and down on the edge,
"Girls! We don't have time for that. Look, over there, it's a
whole army!"

I took a look where the critter was
pointing, "Um... that's not an army."

Red took a look and actually
face-palmed.

Despite Claret's trouble identifying Jeffrey's gender, the poor guy does manage to avoid having his transformation result in a dress (loose hakama style pants, yes; dress, no). He meets three as yet unnamed magical girls (who he is thinking of as Red, Blondie, and The Kid for now), gets to complain about confused mascot critters, makes what could almost (with generosity and some squinting) be thought of as a date, and gets locked in with a giant spider (without having learned any abilities roof leaping). And that's only in the first 4400 words...
So, I've seen Nanoha through Nanoha StrikerS, the first few episodes of Sailor Moon, the first six episodes of Madoka, and read through the translated Cardcaptor manga. So I'm not completely unfamiliar with the genre, but by no means would I claim to be an expert. I'm not aiming for a profound deconstruction of the genre, just something with a bit of humor and a bit of drama. I'm also thinking more in terms of a collection of episodes than an actual novel.
As for why I'm posting this, I'm open to ideas for things I might throw at the characters. At the moment I pretty much have one truly defined character and a world that has only recently discovered magical girls exist outside anime and/or Japan. I pretty much decided to try for NaNoWriMo's 50K words Thursday afternoon, and did no planning before that. So this is definite flying by the seat of the pants.
-----

Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.

You could always have them trash the Ministry of Magic.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

Hmm, that is a good question. Just how are the little critters ending up in our world handing out power rings transformation objects (Claret is handing out watches. They even function as actual watches showing the time and date). I've got a few vague notions but nothing on page yet. If this was Potterverse I don't think they'd have much nice to say about the Ministry of Magic. "You let people who can't even operate a toaster decide government policy? You folks are nuts!"
Red, Blondie, and The Kid at least have first names now.
And they've got a burger place to hang out at ("Close enough to the police station to make our parents happy and far enough from home to feel free").
-----

Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.

For nanowrimo, I'd suggest not sweating things.

The point of nanowrimo is teaching yourself to write, and write regularly. Don't sweat getting the story perfectly squared away, you can sort many things out in revision, later. You'll learn a lot from writing the thing, which will probably be much more valuable than endless revision of a small chunk. (Reading can also help writing, but I would not suggest a reading binge for nanowrimo unless one was a very fast reader, and even then it might distract.)

Don't sweat research. It is real easy to get distracted by that when you can be writing. The details you know off the top of your head should be enough to fool yourself, which is most important at this stage.

Don't sweat following advice. There seems to be huge variations in how writers work, and what works for one can be wildly unproductive for another. If something someone tells you is holding you up in this, I'd say forget it and move on.

These are mostly caveats I felt the need to add, because I was concerned I might not edit out all the useless, wasteful, or harmful things to say that may have come to mind. Forex, many of the questions that naturally come to my mind, that I would ask while developing that scenario for my use would possibly be a wasteful distraction for you. I also got the idea somewhere that you were focusing pretty strictly on a straight treatment of the genre, so I organized my thoughts in that direction before coming here.

I do not have a deep or comprehensive knowledge of the magical girl genre.

Nanoha, Sailor Moon, and Madoka essentially fall into one sub-genre of Magical Girl, and I get the impression you are working there. I dunno how much of a CLAMP factor there is between the Card Captor Sakura anime and manga, but that should give a useful data point for other parts of the genre.

The Japanese often avoid good guy teams of four because they consider the number unlucky, as it sounds like death.

I'd guess that a core strength of a magical girl, played straight, is social and emotional. She has a good eye for people. She rarely, if ever, meets a person, decides that they are fundamentally good, and ends up being tragically wrong. When she has concluded someone is a good person, and they turn out to be an enemy, they may either end up on her side, or as an honorable enemy. A good person turning out to be an enemy is generally the work of plot, rather than the (An honorable enemy who ends up needing to die has a good chance of being resurrected, reincarnated, or remembered. This is not unusual for significant dead people, excepting mentors, in general.) When someone asks for help, and she commits to giving it, she has often read the danger of the situation somehow, and is prepared emotionally for what it takes. At the very least, her foundation is sound enough to find the strength for what she needs to do. This doesn't have to be a battle, it can be a lot of different things. (I haven't seen much of this, but some episodes of magical do re mi might give an idea of other alternatives.)

A magical girl, played straight, is rarely, if ever, emotionally broken by the realities of their situation. (Backstories for villains, or girls who have lost themselves emotionally, and need to be brought back, sure.)

Anyway, I'm kind of weak at this sort of thing, so I'm not sure how to better explain things. When it comes to social and emotional, I tend to be able to pick up on blatant things through study.

Part of what Madoka seems to have deconstructed is skipping or breaking this stuff.

Stories are simplifications of reality. They stimulate the pattern finding that we use to process, measure, and understand reality. Often, they simplify around one or more truths at the expense of others. A core truth often kept for magical girls is that conviction and emotional commitment are often needed to do things, especially when facing an opposing will. Magical girls fight significantly better when emotionally centered. Fighting worse is often due to plot related lack of center, and resolved in part by regaining the center.

Anyway, emotions and relationships may be very important, but don't sweat it if you haven't worked that part out yet.

I'm somewhat inclined to ask a bunch of questions related to how and why real humans fight, but that strikes me as a distraction from where you are going.

There are reasons, beyond child safe, for certain genre tendencies or conventions for death and villains. It takes certain amount of effort emotionally, depending, to oppose or fight another human being. Killing another human being generally has a psychological cost. If you are keeping track of emotions, like for magical girls, that makes it a really good idea to establish a motivation that is strong enough for that. Monsters, or monster soldiers with 'human' officers, where said officers die to outside factors or are purified after defeat do not require near as much work to establish a level of motivation up to the task. The more effort it takes to establish something, like a level of motivation, the more central it probably is to the story. It may be easier to start out writing stories about one core thing, and magical girls might count.

So, if fighting humans, the magical girls will probably build ties or a relationship with them, before purifying them, redeeming them, recruiting them or helping them find themselves and leave the bad guys. If monsters with human officers, then death due to outside factors becomes more of an option, and as the officers become less human, killing them becomes easier to justify psychologically. Sometimes defeated officers are no threat, and can be left on the sidelines. Officers is here used to refer to elite monsters or humans managing or generating other monsters, rather than a reference to actual human officers in actual organizations. It is me being sloppy with words.

Accidental death, or surviving left for dead can be played humorously. '"He bled out from a papercut?" "Five minutes. I don't understand myself."' '"You were dead. We put you in a barrel of gasoline, dropped that in a tanker car of red fuming nitric acid, put that into Io's Magma ocean, and dumped Io into Alpha Centauri A when we had everyone." "Well, I'm afraid you missed my vitals. An inch to the right, and I'd be done for."'

If random bad guys are workable suggestions, Emperor Gore, of the Dinosaur Empire inside the earth, from Getter Robo. (Rather than Getter energy, perhaps he is just ticked over his relatives graves being 'desecrated'.) Anything else concrete strikes me as too much my own baggage and too influenced by my being in a bad place emotionally.

I'd kind of say decide where you are going, and pick your villains from there. Invading aliens who want to harvest human energy, or study humans, who are armed with pocket monsters, are pretty easy and maybe near default. Their polity would have had a prior relationship with the polity that the magical girl recruiters came from, explaining why they would want to fight.

Besides fighting, other common sources of conflict in the genre and in that sub-genre of magical girl include relationships, persons of the week and their problems, internal emotional problems, collecting widgets, and competitions (contests, singing etc...). Building, maintaining, and repairing relationships with comrades, friends, parents, enemies, romantic partners and or random people can be a big part of the genre. For internal emotional stuff, maybe someone else generates a monster magically due to emotional imbalance that needs resolving, or the magical girl is growing and changing because the transformation allows her the opportunity.

Anyway, I'm losing the thread of this essay or wall of text. I enjoyed hearing your ideas and trying to respond. It has given me some additional ideas for my own efforts. If you see a magical girl thing from me involving cross dressers and the South Korean army, it is partly your fault. Anyway, good luck and I hope I've helped some.

Danny Boy, Danny Boy, the polls, the polls are calling...

I was tempted for a bit to go into a long spiel about how to design worlds and ensure consistency and etc etc etc, but... well, the bit RomanFanboy just said about not sweating things is simply better for your purposes than anything I would have come up with.

note - the genre you are emulating started out a story arc at a time, and only built backstory when it had to.  Throw in a few Chekov's guns that feel appropriate to your half-built cosmology (I see that you already have pretty blatant elemental themes for your schools, for example, so maybe tie things into elements and/or colors a bit) and go.  Make your characters interesting and fun to write, warp the world to throw them into interesting situations, and don't be afraid to let yourself come up with explanations after the fact (if, indeed, explanations are to be had at all).

In terms of stuff to throw at them, not so much firm guidance as a few ideas...
- Monsters with powers that you want to see them in fights with, and power sources (possibly only vaguely associated) that you think would either be interesting or humorous.
- Theme exploration with completely unjustifiable parallels.  If today's theme is snakes, then maybe have one of the hero squad have a fear of snakes and another one has just bought a pet snake that she's quite fond of from the recently opened snake supply center down the road - inspired by a recent visit to the zoo where they all saw the snakes and the phobic friend displayed their phobia.  Then have them fight a snake-based monster of some sort, in a battle where the one character's fondness for her pet snake and the other character's phobia of snakes both play significant roles.  Stuff like that (though you don't have to go into that much detail).  Basically though, once you have a theme for the episode, feel free to work it.
- Lots of stuff about team social dynamics, both in and out of battle, and at least a bit about how being a magical girl/boy affects their home life.