Sharing and workshopping for an upcoming story

[HexadecimaPlaceholder]

I'm writing this for a story I am writing (Hopefuly I can post the first chapter in a week or two. Hopefully) I am writing this both to drum up interest, and to maybe bounce some ideas around. If you have any questions or comments, it would help me a lot in fleshing this out. This post will be a broad overview, and I will go into characters, setting, mechanics, ect in more detail in followup posts, if there is interest.

TLDR: It's TWEWY, but instead of teenagers from japan, the cast are jaded burnout 20somethings from Minnesota.

The story is urban fantasy set in a version of modern day, centered around the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Layered beneath the normal world is a parallel dimension called the Fade. A very small number of people (a hundred or so in a city this size), called Divers*, can travel to the Fade, and gain other powers stemming from this. Beings called Judges make the Divers play 'games', which can range from fighting monsters to fighting each other to doing seemingly arbitrary tasks in the mundane world. Most Divers also have their own agendas separate from, but intersecting with, the Fade and the Games. Little bit of The World Ends With You, little bit of Bleach

The Judges have their own agendas as well, and not all is as it seems.

The core cast of heroes are a bunch of deeply dysfunctional people, forced to work togeather by the rules of the game:

Kyle, 23 years old. Depressed, directionless, working a dead end job. Pulled into the Game against his will, but later throws himself into it out of simple desperation to have anything meaningful in his life.

Xochitl Torres, 20 years old. Cynical and antisocial, she lives alone and earns her living online as an adult content creator under the name Lady Flowerfox.

Lana. Surname and age unknown. A woman of dubious sanity who does not like talking about her past. She seems to have been aware of the Fade even before awakening as a Diver, having had visions of it and other things since she was a child. Has developed a quasi-religious obsession with the Fade and all things related to it.

Mark Silver. 40s, making him one of the oldest Divers in the current Game. Former soldier. Has no patience for other these children and their bullshit.

Sam Storm. 20(?). Seemingly a normal, healthy person, yet also strangely unphased by all of the supernatural insanity going on. Definitely has more going on that he's not letting on abbout.

*I'm looking for a better name. The Fade is sometimes compared to an ocean of spirit, so 'diver' and 'dredger' both kind of work along the theme, but neither quite sound right. Thoughts?

 

[TheEldritchGod]

You can put any amount of crazy into the first chapter of your story and most people will swallow it.
AFTER THAT, you have to be be logical and avoid the far end of the bell curve.

Think beyond the characters.

What sort of world has to exist and what insane sort of changes had to happen to create the situation?

Here...

Start there, read to chapter 28.

This is Normal Guy winds up in superhero world and gets a weak set of powers, becomes delusional, winds up getting a split personalty, then goes on a normal typical date.

In Reversel Sexual Morality world with superheroes.

All the crazy stuff is set up in chapter 1, then everything is logical progression from that. Chapters 25 to 28 have a lot of discussion about the world itself and what happened to MAKE the world they crazy ass way it is. The fall out. The costs. The sacrificies. The reasons for the sacrifices.

Is the government fascist and totalitarian? YES.
Does it need to be? YES.
Are Women dominate in this world? YES.
Is there a reason? YES.
Does it suck for men? Yes.
For women? Yes.
For everyone? YES.

It's complex and well thought out. I have reasons for EVERYTHING and what I don't explain, you trust me. Why? because the reader can tell, I thought about it, I didn't just do shit at random. You can trust me. This world is DEEP.


You have a story about "Some other setting" with a little bit of "Some other setting" meets a little bit of "Some other setting".

Yes. Everything has already been written. There is nothing new under the sun.
Try to take it back a bit more to formula than: Franchise X meets Y and Z.

1) I have no idea what those three IPs are. Never read any of them, so I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about.
2) Taking something from one culture and transporting it to another culture rarely works. Are you suree this Twenty fits in America?
3) Why don't you break down the tropes of the IPs FIRST, then you can see about combining them? Just a thought.

Because I would never describe any of my stories by pointing to someone else, with the exception of FTS. That is FanFiction based on a Manga, so of COURSE I would say, "It's based on X." Even then, I broke down the original and then rebuilt it.

You sound like you are trying to reskin something. Don't reskin. Break the IP down to the componate tropes FIRST, then build your story.

 

[HexadecimaPlaceholder]

More detail about the world. NOTE: Exposition within the story itself is always from the perspective of the character saying it, who may be wrong or lying. Some of this is not revealed until later

The Fade Is the supernatural world beneath the 'real' world, which is sometimes called the Shore. It's true nature ties into some secrets about the true nature of the world, but in short it is a parallel dimension shaped in part by the thoughts of the people living in the real world. While the Fade exists everywhere, it is most stable and easiest to access in major cities, because the sheer volume of people gives the Fade more to work with. The Fade is sometimes likened to an ocean, which one 'dives' into, while others describe it as a 'tower' that one ascends. It is divided into layers with different properties, growing more distorted and extreme as one grows further from the Shore. A city's mirror in the Fade reflects the combined perceptions, memories, opinions, and desires of it's inhabitants.

Actions taken in the Fade affect the real world, and vice versa, though the cause and effect are not always one to one. Destroying a building in the Fade will not immediately destroy it's equivalent in the Shore, but there will definitely some kind of effect, either on the structure itself or on peoples perceptions of it.

The Fade contains creatures called Errata, which both shape and are shaped by events and conditions in the real world. Errata are not 'living creatures' per se, most being instinct-automata doing things for inscrutable purposes. Many different species of Errata exist, each with different appearance, behavior, spawn conditions, ect. Even seemingly intelligent species of Errata, that plan ahead, react in complex ways, and sometimes even seem to 'speak', cannot truly be communicated with or understood in any real way. Errata do not 'reproduce', but are spontaneously generated when conditions are right. To quote a Judge explaining to new Divers:

These creatures are not truly 'alive', like an animal. They are more like a chemical reaction, a flame simply appearing when heat at fuel are present. The flame burns not because it wants to, but because that is what flame does. An Errata just is and just does. A feiloid might look like a stuffed cat, might meow like a cat, chase you like a mouse and bat you around like a toy, but it does that because that is what humans conceptualize cats as being. A complex pantomime with nothing going on inside. It has more in common with the word cat than it does with an actual flesh-and-blood cat.

The so-called 'shallows' of the Fade are basically identical to the real world as it currently exists, but emptied of people and scattered with Errata. Buildings and large objects are mirrored, but smaller objects (books on shelves) or objects that move frequently (cars) are either absent or distorted. It is always night in the shallows, but the night sky is wrong, with too many stars that are far to bright. Many Games take place using it as an arena, and many Divers use it to their own purposes.

Scattered through the shallows are 'thin spots' where a Diver can go 'deeper' into the Fade. In the next level down, the city is distorted by peoples perceptions of the city and memories of the city both as it used to be. All locations are slightly exaggerated caricatures of themselves- a mall is perpetually soaked in neon light as though the 80s never ended, filled with chattering echoing voices despite being devoid of people. The site of an infamous tragedy will have blood seeping up out of the ground. Memories of the past are important as well, provided enough people remember and care. If a library that lots of people went to and remember gets torn down, and a mall built on the same spot, then in the second-level Fade both will exist simultaneously on the same spot in a headache-inducing manner, superimposed such that you can 'flicker' from one to the other without 'really' moving. Locations with complex or contradictory natures may be similarly bifurcated- for example, a hospital is both a place of healing and a place of death, so in the second level of the Fade it may be decomposed into superimposed aspects reflecting these perceptions.

Each level deeper makes these effects more severe and apparent, until it simply dissolves into architecture soup. Highways, alleyways, hallways, walls, ceilings, floors, pipes, all just churned together into an inscribetable, illegible mass that no human can navigate to go deeper. Rumors and speculation abound surrounding what lays beyond the lowermost exposed reaches.

Each region of the Fade has a distinct ecosystem of Errata, and different uses for Divers seeking to use it to their own gain.

 

[Indicterra]

You could use better names or could expand the pre existing names like 'Sam storm' --> 'Samuel storm'

I use this trick to show the progression of relationship between characters. Like for example when he is introduced he will naturally introduce himself as 'Samuel' but as story progress the other characters get closer they opt to call him by his nick name 'sam'

Very few notice it, but I quite like it.

 

[HexadecimaPlaceholder]

Thanks for the feedback. Think that the Fade (#3) is an interesting sub-setting?