A lot of thoughts have been swirling around my head the last few days about writing and stories I am working on and I don't really have anyone to talk about in person with them right now and attempts to engage on the internet rarely ever work out for me so I am going to talk about it on blogger because I need to vent all of this in some way.
It started with Giant Robo. For those not aware, Giant Robo was a manga and live action tv show in the 1960's about a boy and his giant robot in Japan fighting evil. In the 1990's there was an anime OVA revival that many consider to be one of the best anime of all time. I finally had a chance to watch the Giant Robo OVA and most of it was pretty great, we will get back to that later.
I have also been making those character collages and just kind of looking at a lot about various story ideas and what some of them are missing. That brings us to The God Factor.
The God Factor is a story I have been working on for a very long time. It is about a group of people who each gained super powers from a substance known as the Divine Element, working for an organization called The Parliament of Light and fighting against evil across the multiverse. Each of them comes from a different version of Earth. Most of them come from some version of Earth very similar to our own. They each have varying levels of extranormal/pretenatural activity that is usually kept secret from most of the world. Some worlds have so much extranormal activity that its impossible to keep any of it secret and there are government agencies that monitor or regulate it. And some worlds have been through apocalyptic events but humanity endures.
Most of the character chose to leave life on their home Earth behind to join the Parliament of Light. Some left for simple reasons like an excuse to get away from the overbearing parents. Two of them had brief superhero careers before deciding they could do more good working for the Parliament. Others lost loved ones to war or tragedy and decided there was nothing tying them to their old life anymore so they may as well help in the fight against evil. At least one of them comes from an Earth where civilization was destroyed by a zombie apocalypse so he has no home to go back to.
Over the years I have figured out a backstory for each God Factor character except one. Her name is Rosa. I know what her family was like and why she hardly ever talks to them. But I could never decide what kind of Earth she comes from and why she chose to leave it. Then I saw Giant Robo.
The Giant Robo OVA is a 7 episode direct to video anime that started in 1992 and finally finished in 1998. It is about a near future where an international police force, called the Experts of Justice, fight against Big Fire, a terrorist organization trying to take over the world. And the greatest weapon in this battle is the Giant Robo that answers to a heroic 12 year old boy. While watching Giant Robo, it hit me. This is the kind of world Rosa came from. A world where giant robots just happen to get manufactured in secret sometimes and there is super science super weapons and some people just kind of randomly have superpowers for reasons and also there are various types of magic sometimes.
Anyway I decided that Rosa could have once worked for a group just like the Experts of Justice and her power to manipulate gravity would have let her fit right in and be a powerful asset. The world she comes from is pretty cool, so why did she choose to leave it behind? Well Giant Robo gave me the perfect answer for that too.
By the time you get to the final episode of Giant Robo it is clear that many of the characters are headed for a tragic end. And there is a lot of tragedy going on in that finale. I mean they really go out of their way to rub the tragic salt in that tragedy. But the thing that bothers me about it is that all the tragedy hinges on a few characters being complete morons and keeping secrets for very stupid reasons. Now I could get into a whole debate about what makes a well written tragedy but this one just irked me for so many reasons. But it did give me the solution to my problem with Rosa.
What if the reason Rosa left the organization she worked for was because of a massively tragic event? And it was a tragedy that could have been prevented if a few people in positions of power had just told the truth instead of keeping secrets in the name of peace or order or whatever. Rosa is not the sort of person who would accept excuses like that in the face of mass death. Rosa would say to hell with you and all of this and jump at the chance to leave them behind to join the Parliament of Light instead.
But now I have to write that story out don't I? Indeed I do, among many others things. So on top of everything else I am also now building a modern earth adjacent retro futurist world and trying to figure out what kind of secret the organization of good guys would have kept that led to retaliation by a mad scientist with a doomsday weapon. But maybe I can storywall that out with some people later. I am glad I got some of this written out of my system for the moment.
