Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

You probably haven't noticed, but I moved some old Project Homuncupunk background write-ups to the wiki. (I haven't moved the part about the Templars' armaments, as I need to update that information more heavily to fit my current idea.) This was just while I was at it writing a bit of new stuff for Project Artificer.

Although there's only that much to show you, most of the ideas there lately are comprised of a lot of new ideas for characters (mostly to increase the yuri factor—maybe enough to get me to actually fix that instead of messing around with Homuncupunk and AnthraXX so much). Sadly, there's not much to show for them without telling you what happens.* I can say that the story is suffering from the fact that it's all about the supporting characters and has little to do with the chief protagonists. Of course, since I'm going to have to rework the entire thing, I might just change who's in the middle. In any case, I did at least keep the head count down (far too little, far too late?) by using one I already had (who happens to be famous) to become "Slash" (since it didn't make any sense for her to have a Latin name in a world where the language never existed). Her personality and appearance have changed quite a bit in the process, but since all is widely known is rumor, the information given isn't specific enough that you'd see any of that evolution (other than the name). Incidentally, I never knew the origin of the term until I looked it up; I guess that means in Japanese it'd be "kakeru." (I'm somewhat bothered by the slang definitions, but I doubt they would be among the first three that come to mind for the target audience.)

Another new character ends up replacing the other point in the love triangle around the Lady Deléa (also famous). A problem there is that under the current society, that would mean both he and Áeleran would have to be of the same house (since they were both considered possible suitors for the lady). That's not so bad, as the new idea is that they be House Blue[Hock]brush, and there's space for a lot of variety in unarmed combat, but like Hōshin Engi, Artificer's gimmick is magic items, and thus I'd want to focus on weapon styles. A more widespread problem is the fact that, judging by D&D, a pre-industrial small city boasts a population numbering only in the thousands, which means if you have more than a half-dozen noble houses, each one would have a very small gene-pool. Of course, the Bridgefolk are the quintessential frail aristocrats of the Pale Sea, so maybe that fits. I think the main reason I said they didn't mix was the hereditary birthmarks on their foreheads, but since those were added by the high elves millennia ago using necromancy, I could just as well say they still maintain their integrity when interbred (which would make an interesting phenomenon where a mixed couple's children would be separated depending on which House's mark each manifests). Speaking of which, the debased markings of the River Rats are probably the only feature of humans in the Pale Sea that doesn't commonly appear in real-world humans as far as I know, which is something they normally don't do for some reason even in fantasy (with the notable exception here)—but since humans are supposed to be the most adaptable and varied race, I think that fits, too.

*It has been mentioned that the information I post about my projects is pretty incomprehensible outside the context of the stories (which will not be ready anytime in the foreseeable future because I don't know how to draw). My social worker suggested that I might post scripts as I did with prose drafts, but considering that any I've written are for my use alone, the stage directions may not be sufficient for comprehension. It might be nifty if someone read my scripts and offered to draw them for me, but I'm still not too keen on the idea of trying to collaborate with a stranger. In any case, all I've got is a pathetic fancomic about MYTHBUSTERS (since blitzcon offered to do some image edits for me, then never replied to either of the emails) and most of one of my shorts (which would have to be kept members-only, since I'm supposedly entering it in a contest and handing over the rights, so I don't want to take the very small risk of someone stealing it).

Edit (2008.08.18): Added links

We were hiding out in some Japanese school.

I remember almost nothing from this one, but it was a combination of Raki☆Sta (particularly the bit starting here) and another school series. (It's been so long, I've forgotten what the latter was.) I've never even read or watched the former, but it's one of the ones blitzcon told me he was going to show me long, long ago (but not early enough that I could actually get the videos), so I've been breaking my usual rule in its case. Consequently, most of my knowledge of it is from Ms.?† Maitake's illustrations and comics (although I haven't actually been reading the posts since I haven't even started the series yet), which is undoubtedly skewing my preconceptions of its content.

†You may remember that I fouled up a while back and that I later decided not to worry about it. I neglected to mention that Ms.? Maitake replied the very next day and pointed out that it was clearly stated on the site that duplicating things without permission was prohibited, which rather scuppered a post I'd made.

Meanwhile, when I contacted her/him to ask whether I could post direct links to individual posts, I decided to ask about her/his gender so I could address her/him less awkwardly, but she/he declined to say. (Japanese writers/illustrators sometimes take PNs that would suggest genders different from their own, but I've never seen anything proving that any have made false claims about this. Then again, nor do I have any proof that any Japanese comic writer/illustrator has ever been captured on camera (with the exception of Akamatsu, whose mug I do not fondly remember seeing, particularly considering that he's actually married to a lady who's more than 13 years his junior now), so that's hard to say with certainty, either. You can take this into account for my generalizations in the next paragraph.) I would tend to assume that she/he's a man like me due to the demographics (?) of what she/he seems to find interesting, but that's a bit of a disservice to Ms. Hayashiya, Ms. oneirotsai, and many others. Of course, in English, there aren't any honorifics‡ except title prefixes, so it doesn't make much difference; in Japanese, I've just been using speech patterns somewhere in-between.

I do find it interesting that I see ladies who draw stuff aimed at male audiences all the time (with Ms. Takahashi being the classic example), but never confirmed examples of men drawing stuff for ladies. (The fact that ladies draw lots of yuri, yet I never hear about men drawing much yaoi, is less surprising.) The closest I've seen is Fujieda, who has been suppressing his style (judging by Iono Sama Fanatics, his only independent work I've read) in various YuriHime Comics mooks (and of course the compilations), but although they always use feminine second-person pronouns, the content of even the main series is more moe than shōjo, so he's still a bit short of Jack Nicholson.

‡In my research for Projects Abdiel and Homuncupunk, I was surprised to find that in modern English, the one language I've encountered that has almost no ways of showing respect, we have retained the plural/formal singular objective from the early modern variety as our sole (before conjugation) second-person pronoun.

I've decided to start my experiment with characters for Project AnthraXX, since I removed them earlier. (I took down a page from Homuncupunk as well, but as it stands at the moment, AnthraXX has actually become slightly more publishable, since it has something vaguely resembling a story and themes to go with the sex and weirdness.) This may be a bit of a waste of time if I manage to later get other people to do it for me, but it's pretty easy to edit, so this is a reasonably good way to keep notes for my own use as well. It would be even peachier if I could figure out how to make a template for a little info box like they use on other wikis.

Unusually enough for me, Project Cow Level has no sex in it, as I didn't have any interest in having such content in a story about tauren and dwarves. While I'm at it, I'm considering keeping the violence to (MPAA) PG as well. That may be difficult for one of my adventure-based (type B) projects, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, as I've mentioned before, Projects Umbra and Homuncupunk are coming to have more and more sex, while Project AnthraXX is coming to have more and more story, thus blurring the gap between A and B. Consequently, AnthraXX is probably the most ready of my original projects, owing primarily to the fact that its setting is heavily based on the real world, thus preventing me from needing to create mecha designs from scratch. Of course, it's still quite controversial, but at least there's plot to thin out the sex and I don't portray YHWH in quite such a bad light. I also think that the witches' and demons' subplot doesn't overpower the main story about the protagonist and heroine, but it's still tangential enough that I haven't completely thrown out the idea of making it a separate project.

In other previews, I've thought about vague subtitles for the three story arcs of Project Homuncupunk:

Part One: The Bounty Hunter
Part Two: The Prodigal Son
Part Three: The Emissary

I chopped the first two down to one word each for better parallelism. The subtitles reflect Jūzaburō's role in the story. ("So, what's with the second one if he turns coat at the beginning?" you might ask. Now that would be telling, wouldn't it?) Riku's backstory relates mostly to the first story arc, but the second half of it has a spoiler for something in the middle of "The Hunter," so where I include that will depend on how long each volume runs. I'm also not quite sure about the wording for the third part (and can't explain without spoiling it), but there's plenty of time to think about that.

I'm thinking of also making Project AnthraXX in three parts, corresponding with the three trimesters of Ms. Brown's freshman year. These would likely be short enough that one volume of the hard copies could be devoted to each, with one extra story as an extra for each. I don't have subtitles for the trimesters, as I don't know quite where the breaks will be, but the first two extras are currently known as "Time-Gilded Paradise Lost" and "The Dark of Gomorrah"; I'm not so sure about the third, as it doesn't really seem to add anything to the series.

As you may remember, I've always tried to posit that my intention with my projects is not to make anything realistic, but to create total fiction. I've tried to express this in recent drafts of the disclaimers. (I had them on the main page, but they quickly outgrew the 2-kB limit. I should probably put them somewhere else so you could access them without joining, but then I'd have to reword the second-to-last sentence. . . .) Of course, I have no knowledge of legal issues, so I just cobbled the document together arbitrarily. If you have any ideas on improving it, I'd be interested in hearing them.

I've also removed a couple of documents from the Project AnthraXX and Homuncupunk sections because they contained the most glaring misogyny on the site. Sadly, those pages were the main sources of information for those two. Hopefully, I'll get around to updating and re-uploading them sometime in the near future.

My readership appears to be at an all-time high (apparently at least two regulars!), but I've accumulated quite a lot of stuff during its absence, to say nothing of my sloth and the fact that I've built up a lot of new things due to year's-end-and-beginning splurging. So, I'd like to see if you have any requests or suggestions. What I've got in the works is as follows:

( Ridiculously long notes )

Humans were already well established as a race covering the world's islands at the beginning of the historical era several millennia ago. It is thought that there was long ago an ice age that caused land bridges to rise from the sea, allowing primitive man to migrate to all of the major land masses of the Northern Hemisphere. By the time of the daimons' coming, each isolated group had evolved to have slightly different cultural and physical characteristics, the latter most notable in the higher levels of melanin appearing as one approached the equatorial regions. Most islands and archipelagos were rife with internecine warfare caused by overpopulation, humans forced to fight for the meager resources and land available.

The arch-daimons' arrival changed all this. Although the Dread Queen remained aloof, and Old One-Eye reveled in such battles, the Anointed attempted to promote peaceful coexistence. More importantly, the Lord of the Great Land became the champion of human sovereignty over the world and taught mankind the ways of shaping, allowing them to survive without outside resources and build the mighty skyscrapers whose roots lie at the bottom of the seas. As humans stopped fighting and met their long-lost brethren from across the waters, ethnic groups became less based on race and geography and more on religion. Although the arch-daimons were willing to cooperate in many situations, and they all recognize their peers' divinity, they are not a true pantheon, and each (other than the Dread Queen) inspired His own followers.

Today, the City of Mannheim contains human groups who mostly identify themselves by their religion, even if they are not practicing devotees. Each of the three groups takes names based on the holy language of its patron, and each runs the gamut of human (and daimon-blooded) physical appearance. Intermarriage is not uncommon; as weddings are conducted by priests of the respective faiths, one of the partners must generally convert to the faith and surname of the other. A similar change is made when an orphan is adopted by a parent of a different faith. When a child is born out of wedlock, he generally takes the surname and affiliation of the parent who raises him.

Hmm, it seems rather odd to use a capitalized pronoun with "each." It represents the fact that each one is more or less a monotheistic religion. It's also unusual enough to be entertaining (although not so much as accents, particularly considering that most text will be in all-caps anyway).

Ever since Mikazuki Yoriko's introduction of homunculi nourished by humans' ambient animic energy during the Panpolic War, the drain on the souls of the citizens of Mannheim has only increased, causing people to become more and more sluggish and apathetic. This phenomenon is known as the Shikimoto Effect, named for the Mikazuki Co. researcher who first examined it in detail. Shikimoto's demographic studies also corroborated suspicions that female humans are significantly stronger of anima then males on average.

Shikimoto further developed a hypothesis of why women would be superior in this way. Her basis was the source of human psychic ability: crossbreeding with daimons. Apparently, female children's animae are more closely related to those of their mothers, grandmothers, and so on. As most daimons capable of interbreeding with humans prefer to take female form, they are more likely to pass on greater animic strength to female descendants.

The reason that foxes and hags usually assume female guises is a matter of efficiency. Both are harvester daimons, whose MOs rely on using disguise to infiltrate human society. It has been judged through certain studies that, of all combinations, male humans are most easily duped by females, due to their hormones overriding their brainwaves; consequently, a female form is the most likely to produce good results.

However, as an effect of that effect, the cause has been changing. Women are now typically more animically powerful than men, making them more valuable targets. However, the fact that women have greater strength of personality means that they are becoming, in general, more attractive to other women as well as men. Consequently, a harvester taking female form can often have her pick of the prey of both sexes.

It seems somewhat counterintuitive that beings that do not normally reproduce sexually would be able to crossbreed. Shapechangers such as foxes and hags are apparently able to imitate human form to the point of fully functioning reproductive systems, while virtues retain these characteristics from when they were human. In contrast, valkyries have human-appearing natural forms, but do not appear to be able to reproduce in this way.

From my research, I found out that I was mixing up Übermensch with the Master Race. The real version is a good correlation to my own philosophy (and that of my "perfect" character from another project).

Meanwhile, I've posted information on daimons on the page. I don't know why it wasn't out there before. Admittedly, it isn't coded to HTML standards, but that didn't stop me in the case of the psychics doc. You'll notice that all daimons are taken from various mythologies with my own spin on them. I also translated the names of the Asian ones to make them seem more integrated—but that doesn't make as much sense, now that Japanese is one of the five main languages of the setting. It would be most logical to translate each race's name to the holy language of its patron, but that would be a pain in the ass. As you can see, I assigned their allegiances by function and theme rather than origin.

It also occurred to me that the Board consisted of only five people (♂♀♀♀♂), yet still boasted a total of two mustaches and two monocles (three of them because the character designs are homages to characters from other media). I suppose it paints a pretty good picture of a group of upper-crust experienced sorts, but I'm still considering altering those demographics a bit.

I had two shifts this morning, so between the down-time and the grunt-work, I had plenty of time to think about the character backgrounds for Project Homuncupunk. As before, I thought of a lot of full write-ups for various scenes therein. It also occurred to me that there are huge numbers of flashbacks for the first story arc. (Jū himself doesn't get much in that area due to his age, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem, as I made sure to throw in appropriate scenes to illustrate him in the first arc, and he really comes into his own as a multiclassed mover/shaker in the second.) I'm sure I could trim some more of them to extras, but I'll need a good chunk to use to illustrate the numerous characters and their relationships and current status. (As always, I prefer visuals to text, so this way is a lot better than just having blocks of expository stuff.) In particular, I need to establish the ones who are going to be developed further from those points by the end of the story arc, and especially the ones who will be dying in that time period. I usually hate to let go of any of my belovèd characters (which isn't necessarily all of them, but the majority of the significant ones), but this project has such masses of planned material that I know they all get proper treatment.

After I got home, I happened to read an existing comic, and was amused by the fact that the villain appears to the heroes and immediately tells them his (un)life story. I know Knaak is a popular author, but I haven't read any of his stuff since I was a kid (relatively speaking), so for all I know, he could be a hack writer. In this case, it may just be that he was restricted in how many chances he had to do this stuff. (Who the hell makes an epic graphic novel trilogy?) Meanwhile, while I like WARCRAFT, I'm not so sure about throwing away my pride to patronize the company that's "LEADING THE MANGA REVOLUTION" with its Americanized Japanese and Korean comics and its Japanized American comics. I also noticed a coincidental similarity in title to the other first volume of some comic by a Korean dude from that company that I have.

Meanwhile, upon further thought on the Templars' armaments, I realized that a sword really isn't much use, even at close quarters, if you have a reliably semiautomatic shotgun with ammunition that respawns at negligible animistic cost (at least to high-end homunculi like them). I wanted anachronistic double-edged swords with crossguards just for the iconic image, but I suppose the shields might be good enough for that.

As I've noted before, each of Projects AnthraXX, Artificer, and Homuncupunk has at least one long background story of at least one secondary character that is unnecessary and too vast to fit into the storyline without breaking it up. (I can't for the life of me remember what I said I thought up about background in Maddie's Maids, which proves the inefficiency of my system.) If I ever actually publish graphic novels of the series, they would make good extras for those who are willing to pay for what will theoretically be available on the Web for free. The ones for AnthraXX and Homuncupunk would contain spoilers, so they'd have to be held back to certain points in the series, and all are long enough to be divided between the backs of several volumes.

For bonus material in other volumes, I have ideas such as (no bullets because they format badly in various styles):
※Author/illustrator interviews
※Author/illustrator's commentary
※Character profiles
※Lists of allusions for readers to try to identify (perhaps with rewards)
※Popularity contests (characters, items, abilities, etc.)
※Setting background (including the now-sprawling chart of departments and leadership of the Mikazuki Corporation)

Actual illustrations, including design sketches and extra pics, should be saved for daily_yuri exclusives, as thanks to my most belovèd community, since that's what you're required to post there. Maps would be an exception, as they're reasonably essential to understand the stories. In any case, I really need to get drawing.

As mentioned before:

The Mikazuki Corporation is split into a number of departments that deal with the business, including Accounting, Custodial, HR, Mangetsu, Marketing, R&D, Retail, Security, Shipping, Stocking, and Troubleshooting. There are also numerous lesser companies that it controls, most significantly the Waterworks.

THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Apparently I stilled missed a few things on my second try, so I guess I'll just have to keep nesting prefixes until I'm satisfied.

First of all, I've been worried for a while that having Isabel as Riku's maid comes a bit too close to the African slaves thing that was so big in the U.S. (and in Britain, too, judging by the movie CMs I saw over the summer). (I did like the fact that flower＊flower in YuriHime S gives a counterpoint.) Adding Ms. Itoya, whose skin is even darker, might only aggravate the problem. However, there are two mitigating factors. First, Ms. Itoya has more of the demeanor of an executive than a servant, as she has to manage the rest of the Templars. Also, the fact that I've added the rest of the Brides means that the two dusky ones are now middle management. Unfortunately, as named characters, they're a lot more visible than their subordinates, so the thematic prejudice appears to remain. We'll see whether I have to do anything else about that.

Also, it might appear odd that the senior member of the Templars is in charge of such mundane things as uniforms and armaments. However, the fact is that this was a tradition long before Riku added civilian members for cooking and cleaning. No one questions Ms. Itoya's physical or animistic capabilities, either.

The Templars' signature armaments are the bastard sword and heater shield. Besides the iconic image provided by this archaic gear, it also fits well with their duty of protecting the Mangetsu Spire itself. In a typical corridor in Mikazuki HQ, a three-wide shield-wall of élite Templars provides a much higher concentration of might than most any intruders could bring to bear. The standard-issue shield is just large enough to cover the wielder's body in a crouch while still allowing a bearer with enhanced physical strength to utilize reasonable maneuverability in tight spaces. An opening in one side is designed for thrusting with the sword or firing a shotgun (another weapon useful in close quarters) carried as a sidearm.

Despite the standard-issue equipment and formal training, Templars are highly skilled individuals, and they are encouraged to take advantage of their own propensities. A prime example is their Deaconess, Itoya Angel. She is of a bloodline in which Yoriko has long been perfecting the shaping skill. Angel herself specializes in crafting of textiles, and shows it in a fight, where she relies on monowire and adaptive armor.

Incidentally, you may note that I mentioned the Mikazuki Board of Directors in the original post. This is a new idea I've been developing, so I'll expand on it later.

I think in terms of comic books, so I come up with a lot of dialogue when I'm planning my projects. I'm thinking that I should start typing actual scripts so I can have a record of the lines before I forget. The current plot synopses are kept on the computer in the bedroom, but I should probably move them to Mother's, which I actually use. With a job like this, I'm not going to be getting my own Internet connection anytime soon.