I know ppl go wild for king/knight and king/jester relationship dynamics on this website but I do want to pitch: knight/jester. Loyal warrior who’s not been known to suffer fools and the fool who wants nothing more than to be suffered by them, working under the same leige. Think about it and get back to me
Oops my hand slipped
Was thinking about this again and have some thoughts
-All the kings knights wear very similar armor and yet the jester can always recognize HIS knight no matter what. Even with his helmet on
-The knight never takes the jesters flirtation seriously. He just thinks that he’s a flirt with everyone (which he is but it’s different with the knight)
-The knight also berates him for being silly and never taking anything serious. Ever. He’s just a fool with no real responsibilities who makes jokes even in the most dire and inappropriate of moments.
-Until one day he finds the jester crying. It’s shocking to find the courts funny man in tears. Wrong in a way he can’t explain. He’s always jovial no matter what. And now suddenly the knight is on his way to kill whoever upset him.
As many of my followers probably know, I run a pixelart webcomic by the name “Hero oh Hero” (read here).
Just to throw my thoughts into the ether, I’d like to share a few of the writing choices I’ve made throughout the production of my comic & why I decided to make those. Not sure if they’re useful and/or interesting to anyone, but it’s fun for me to reflect.
As of the writing of this post I’m at 2757 published pages & 3453 pages total if we include buffer, quite some content!
The first thing I’d like to talk about is the general structure of the comic, I run three separate stories that feel relatively disconnected, despite taking place in the same world.
Burk, a heroic character who goes around trying to defeat villains who do evil deeds. As he travels from city to city he meets various friends who join him.
Noah, a bookish introvert who’s favorite hobby is being left alone & avoiding social situations at all costs. He’s also a magic child-soldier being forced to perform missions for a totalitarian government.
Tobi, an adventurous inventor-girl who comes from a world that operates by video-game logic, she gets flung into another world at some point & is trying to find her way back home.
Comic Structure
So the big question here is: why tell three stories rather than just putting all focus on a single one? I think the biggest underlying reason for me is that a lot of games I played & series I watched had what I’d describe as a “protagonist-centric world”.
It’s obvious that the story itself will focus on the protagonist, they have that role for a reason, but it goes much further than a character being important/central to the narrative. In a lot of series I felt that the worldbuilding itself, the magic system, the legends and myths, all of it was often designed to accentuate the protagonists’ importance, or somehow add something to “why” the protagonist in particular was worth following. Very often this’d result in stuff like worlds where, if there were 4-types of magic power a person could have, the protagonist would be the one special person with access to 2, 3 or even 4 of those abilities.
I don’t necessarily think this is bad writing in itself, but I did sometimes find, especially in series with interesting side characters/extended casts, that the way the universe seemed to revolve around the hero and their abilities often made the world itself seem less interesting or less real to me. What got me interested in multiple perspectives & multiple protagonists back in the day were games like Seiken Densetsu 3/Secret of Mana 2 where you had 6 main characters of equal importance & you could basically decide for yourself which of the 6 was your playthrough’s “protagonist” & which 2 out of the remaining chars would join you on the team. Similarly games like Treasure of the Rudras played around with multiple different heroes rather than a “true” chosen one hero of more significance than everyone else.
I noticed that a lot of these games that either split up the roles, or provided multiple canonical characters who technically could’ve done the job, aleviated a lot of the annoyances I had with singular-protagonist series, but also added the fascinating element of how different narratives/perspectives could intersect and affect each other.
Designing the Heroes.
So from the early onset I’ve decided that I really wanted to tell a story where rather than just a single central protagonist, I wanted several protagonists of “equal importance”. The next question that follows is: If I’m going to have multiple heroes, what characters am I going to choose? Burk came relatively easy as he’s a character I made up for an old English class story back in highschool, though I did tweak him quite a bit from his original design. What I did want to try and do is contrast the other two characters from him, but not *just* in terms of “This one’s strong, this one’s smart, this one’s … hot” or something, but also more on their role within the story. This is where I got the idea to try and really try to put a notable difference between the main characters & why they’re even in “their story”. Burk’s a highly active protagonist who goes out of his way to look for adventure, Noah in contrast is absolutely reactive and is thrown into a plot entirely against his will. Tobi is hard to discuss without major spoilers, but I’m thinking that observant readers who are up to date probably know where she falls in this regard.
Once I figured out the biggest area of contrast between the three, it was pretty straightforward what setting would best accentuate that aspect of them. Burk & his narrative very closely follow a D&D-type of “let’s find an adventure for the sake of it!” plot, whereas I intentionally threw Noah in a dystopian Empire that has little interest in things such as “personal agency” and “Freedom”.
My latest project is a custom set of keyboard caps
I really love the way this post never blew up big but it never goes away. I’ve got other posts that get like 100k in a couple days, and never leave my notifications… But this one just shows up once or twice every day.
I fully expect the teeth keyboard will still be slowly circulating five years from now. Still creeping people out.
I couldn’t be prouder. Someday I’ll introduce ya’ll to the hair keyboard and you’ll know the true meaning of fear.
that’s because curses don’t just go away on their own
my favorite location in hit classic Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga is the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell that fawful and cackletta cause a ruckus in
This looks like a fucking parody post, or an edgy edit, but it’s 100% official real Flintstones.
Clarification: I don’t hate this book, I love it, it’s amazing. It’s just that taking a step back and looking it out of context is still really funny. Especially the line “We participated in a genocide, Barney.”
ok but imagine them in their cartoon forms saying this dialogue i’m
can we have some context to this, perhaps?
Bedrock is having a mayoral election. One of the candidates is a violent war mongering asshole that riles people up against the lizard people. This reminds Fred and Barney of their time in the army.
Back then the father of said violent candidate was riling people up against the “tree people”. Fred, Barney, and other soldiers fought what they believed to be a defensive measure against the tree people. Turns out, it was actually an invasion, in order to kill off the tree people and take over their forest to build Bedrock.
That’s what Fred means when he says he and Barney participated in a genocide. They literally did.
(Extra fun fact, Barney adopted a tree person baby after the war, and his son Bamm-Bamm is the last tree person.)
THINGS I AM UNREASONABLY ANNOYED ABOUT BY GAME SYSTEM
D&D: Please put a disclaimer that you are not a universal system. Every time I see someone try to do a political mystery game in D&D, I take 3d10 psychic damage and have to make a death saving throw.
Pathfinder: Look. If i wanted to play a game about fighting Cthulhu there is an extremely famous game specifically designed around doing that. Literally no-one is ever going to say “Wow, I want to play a Cthulhu themed game! Time to stat up a musical halfling from a magical fantasy land!”.
Chronicles Of Darkness: Just admit no-one uses any of your rules. You have Social Door Rules and Integrity Conditions and Corruption Levels and I bet at most 50% of COD players could tell me which of those I made up. Just admit people aren’t dressing up as Alucard The Bringer Of Shadows because they want to sit down and do calculus.
World Of Darkness: You know that old guy who’s still doing his job even though he is way too old to do it any more, but he’s now an institution so you can’t get rid of him? Like that. The 90s called and they want literally everything about this back.
Call Of Cthulhu: I appreciate the commitment to authenticity, but maybe stop hiring actual disgraced mental asylum directors from the 1920s to design your sanity system?
GURPS: Look. Look. Listen. We both know that you just want to write history textbooks. These are history textbooks with a few stat blocks begrudgingly put in. If you just give me a book on early Chinese history I will read it and go “ah, very interesting!”. You don’t need to put in a list of character choices. We’re all nerds. We’ll read them. Live your best life.
Powered By The Apocalypse: I actually can’t think of anything wrong with PBTA. That’s not a bit, this is literally the perfect system. Take notes everyone else.
Mutants and Masterminds/Heroes System: Your systems have probably the most customizable character creation in the world and you both just make reskins of the Justice League over and over again. Maybe we only need one “thinly veiled copyrighted characters” setting? You can fight over it once you decipher your combat mechanics.
FATE: Ok I won’t lie, I have no idea how the fuck FATE works. I have read the rules repeatedly and played three games and I still have no idea what invoking an aspect means. I don’t know why. I grasped the rules of fucking Nobilis but this one just psychologically eludes me. This is more a problem with me I guess, but I’m still annoyed.
Warhammer 40k: Have you considered spending less on avocado toast? Then you might be able to afford to charge less for things?
Exalted: Apart from the lore, the setting, the mechanics, the metaplot, the character creation and the dodgy narrative implications, I can’t think of anything to improve here.
