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negrekI participated in the second annual Zoroark Games this year, and I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about how I approached my imitation entry this year. I meant to do this for my imitation last year as well, but didn't manage to pull it together (or even a properly completed version of the fic, lol)--perhaps someday. For now, anyway, I'm going to post the various drafts of this story and talk a bit about why I made the choices I did--what I was trying to do in order to make my story feel like a kyeugh fic.
For context, the Zoroark Games are a fanfic exchange and writing exercise where the goal is to fool the other players by writing a story in another person's style! This involves writing two one-shots, one "real" one that's simply your own writing in your own style, and one "illusion," a story written in the style of another (randomly-assigned) author in the group. The goal is to fool as many people as possible into thinking your illusion story was written by the author you're imitating, while also correctly identifying who wrote as many of the other stories as possible. I had a great time, if an abysmal showing, last year, so I was super excited to participate and hopefully not embarrass myself quite so badly this time around!
As I mentioned earlier, this year my assigned writer was kyeugh! With the author assignments made and this year's list of prompts posted, my first task was to figure out generally what kind of story I would be writing!
My first step, of course, is to review kyeugh's work, with an eye towards picking out common themes, writing tics, and overall feel. kyeugh's been posting stuff online for quite a while, so it was fun to go back through some stuff I'd never read before or only vaguely recalled. (Do you remember "Attack of the Shadow Fox," kyeugh? Pepperidge Farm remembers.) In the end, this was the list I came up with:
- The Man is a literal man, and he's named something like Cuthbert Abernathy III
- in general, people in positions of power are the bad guys
- humans tend to be kinda low-key shitty towards pokémon, even when trying not to be
- orders or societies, often secret
- themes of power and oppression
- high fantasy feel - especially in names (typically new nouns made by smashing two words together)
- fair amount of focus on religion/spirituality
- humor! less so recently...
- kyeugh often gets titles from music that she likes, oh no
- tendency towards introspection
- strong worldbuilding details
- some tendency towards a kind of dry and... Britishy?... narration. "it was really quite whatever" and so on
- vivid color words
- just every now and again, a little exotic vocabulary
- occasional fragments with descriptors expanding on/clarifying previous sentence, e.g. "Its seven amber eyes blinked asynchronously. Anxiously."
I began by trying to narrow down a general setting and subject. kyeugh does write in modern settings, and that's where my preference tends to lie, personally. However, she hasn't published anything non-historical in a while, and I didn't know how many of the people participating in the games were aware of Mongrels of Castelia, much less anything earlier, so I figured writing in a historical setting would be wisest. kyeugh's favorite regions to write in appeared to be Unova and Kalos, and with her primary fic being in Kalos, I figured going there would be too on the nose. Unovan history it was, then!
I've occasionally batted around the idea of doing something with the lore behind volcarona/the Relic Castle. "When volcanic ash darkened the atmosphere, it is said that Volcarona's fire provided a replacement for the sun?" That sure raises some questions. The pokédex repeatedly refers to volcarona as a being of legend, worshipped as a deity, etc., so it would be easy to take a religious sort of angle on it, and that opened up plenty of potential for an antagonist in a position of power, people being shitty towards pokémon, and some kind of secret or exclusive society. All in all, it felt like I was playing around in a thematically-appropriate space.
kyeugh often relates pokémon regions to their real-world counterparts, e.g. Kalos is explicitly pretty France-flavored, Kanto/Johto feel Japanese, etc. I needed to figure out where I wanted to draw from for the Relic Castle's setting. Two possibilities immediately sprang to mind: the southwest US, home of many Pueblo cultures, or the Nazca of Peru. In pretty much all respects the Pueblo would have made more sense: the Relic Castle is right outside Nimbasa, which is ostensibly Atlantic City but has always felt more Vegas to me (the desert is RIGHT THERE!), and Unova being "the NYC/US region" means that a North American location would generally be where you'd expect an ancient Unovan culture to be based.
However, the sigilyph that live in that area are very blatantly inspired by the Nazca lines, and the Relic Castle itself reminds me of Cahuachi. In the same way that an eevee isn't a fox, a rabbit, or any other one mammal but instead its own weird mashup of them all, GameFreak was clearly smashing a bunch of inspirations together for their "ancient Unovan ruins" concept. So I figured it would work fine to lean on what wasn't perhaps the primary source of inspiration, but which had been part of the mix. Also, I was hoping to do a story with heavy involvement of sigilyph, and had thought they might travel their own lines similar to the ones found near Nazca, so, really... I just liked that angle better. :P
While brainstorming, I took some notes about where I thought the story ought to go:
- A young priestess who wants to connect with larvesta/volcarona
- A figure of authority who's a dick
- A cool worldbuilding detail to draw it all together
- At least one thing with a cool fantasy name, like "wispfather." Sigilyph could be good for this (also want sigilyph)
After some fussing, I came up with an initial plan that would focus on a girl who was born outside the usual priest caste of her city, but who earned some special privileges as a result of the affinity she had for the the sigilyph, the city's protectors. Although not part of the Sun priesthood, she'd be allowed kind of around the periphery, close enough to get curious about the volcarona and ultimately break some taboos in order to get closer to it. And then, oh no, it would turn out that people were being dicks to pokémon, again.
I was having a little trouble with the end of this concept in particular, what *exactly* should be messed up about the city's relationship with the volcarona that would be unjust/unfair but where the volcarona would also be compelled to stick around and do more or less what the humans wanted. I was particularly enamored of the High Priest basically holding his position of luxury and authority on the basis that he had to fight the volcarona each night in order to keep it complacent and therefore the city would be fucked without him. Naturally it would be a show of some kind rather than a real fight, and the volcarona's cooperation was being assured through some other method, but what exactly that was and how it all would slot into the rest of the story remained difficult to pin down.
While working all this out I remembered, oh no, there were prompts for this challenge that we were supposed to use! My story didn't feel like it was really trending towards any of them, although I fiddled a bit with the idea of the protagonist learning the "true colors" of the high priest, or of her society, kind of. That felt a little abstract, though, and since I was having some difficulty with the resolution anyhow, I decided to step back and try a different angle on things. I'd keep the basic ideas of the setting but make it a more interpersonal story. We'd follow someone who was actually part of the Sun priesthood this time but still an outsider on some level, competing to rise to a higher station. They'd be betrayed by someone they'd considered a friend who was competing for the same spot as them, and in a particularly personal way--by taking advantage of that trait that made them an outsider. Thus the story would be about the protagonist seeing her friend's "true colors." In addition, there would be a thread running through that this was already a fucked-up sort of situation to be putting people in, as well as lightly exploring the rationalizations people made for it/how they behaved under it.
I wasn't super happy with this idea; it felt really simplistic, which in turn felt like a bit of a disservice to kyeugh. But last year I'd been really overambitious with my imitation and crashed and burned as a result, so for this year I'd resolved to do something very basic that I could actually complete in a reasonable amount of time, and would therefore have the time to do some actual imitating with, which is the fun part and not something I got to do much at all last year. I was not going to let myself throw up my hands and switch story concepts at the last minute again. With that in mind, I pretty much locked myself in on this story concept unless it turned out to be entirely unworkable somehow... and given how simple the concept was, I thought that pretty unlikely.
Unfortunately the sigilyph angle would have to go here; I didn't think I'd have enough time to get into it given that I was now going to have to spend time developing additional characters. Space constraints were a very pressing concern for me with this one, heh. I was shooting for 3k-4k words total, which would put me in the ballpark of the longest of kyeugh's published one-shots (and the one I believed she'd put the most work into and which was therefore the most representative). Obviously I couldn't go over the word limit again this year or I'd just be straight fucked. I sadly stuck a sigilyph in at the end to console myself.
In the first draft I'm not really looking to do any imitating; I just want to try and get all the actual events down on the page so I can start working with them. Nevertheless, there were a couple of things I tried to keep in mind as I was going along. First, I tend to prefer using a number of short scenes broken off by cuts, whereas kyeugh seems to prefer longer "tracking shots" that move from one scene to another without an explicit break. Witness the first chapter of Wandersword, for example, which is 7500 words and all one scene. I wasn't going to be able to do any jump-cut flashbacks or weird interleaving structures here! kyeugh's writing also tends to be substantially more introspective than mine, so I tried to write in that direction to begin with so I'd have more thinky bits to work with from the start rather than needing to inject them all during editing.
All that said, here's how the first draft looked!
For context, the Zoroark Games are a fanfic exchange and writing exercise where the goal is to fool the other players by writing a story in another person's style! This involves writing two one-shots, one "real" one that's simply your own writing in your own style, and one "illusion," a story written in the style of another (randomly-assigned) author in the group. The goal is to fool as many people as possible into thinking your illusion story was written by the author you're imitating, while also correctly identifying who wrote as many of the other stories as possible. I had a great time, if an abysmal showing, last year, so I was super excited to participate and hopefully not embarrass myself quite so badly this time around!
As I mentioned earlier, this year my assigned writer was kyeugh! With the author assignments made and this year's list of prompts posted, my first task was to figure out generally what kind of story I would be writing!
My first step, of course, is to review kyeugh's work, with an eye towards picking out common themes, writing tics, and overall feel. kyeugh's been posting stuff online for quite a while, so it was fun to go back through some stuff I'd never read before or only vaguely recalled. (Do you remember "Attack of the Shadow Fox," kyeugh? Pepperidge Farm remembers.) In the end, this was the list I came up with:
- The Man is a literal man, and he's named something like Cuthbert Abernathy III
- in general, people in positions of power are the bad guys
- humans tend to be kinda low-key shitty towards pokémon, even when trying not to be
- orders or societies, often secret
- themes of power and oppression
- high fantasy feel - especially in names (typically new nouns made by smashing two words together)
- fair amount of focus on religion/spirituality
- humor! less so recently...
- kyeugh often gets titles from music that she likes, oh no
- tendency towards introspection
- strong worldbuilding details
- some tendency towards a kind of dry and... Britishy?... narration. "it was really quite whatever" and so on
- vivid color words
- just every now and again, a little exotic vocabulary
- occasional fragments with descriptors expanding on/clarifying previous sentence, e.g. "Its seven amber eyes blinked asynchronously. Anxiously."
I began by trying to narrow down a general setting and subject. kyeugh does write in modern settings, and that's where my preference tends to lie, personally. However, she hasn't published anything non-historical in a while, and I didn't know how many of the people participating in the games were aware of Mongrels of Castelia, much less anything earlier, so I figured writing in a historical setting would be wisest. kyeugh's favorite regions to write in appeared to be Unova and Kalos, and with her primary fic being in Kalos, I figured going there would be too on the nose. Unovan history it was, then!
I've occasionally batted around the idea of doing something with the lore behind volcarona/the Relic Castle. "When volcanic ash darkened the atmosphere, it is said that Volcarona's fire provided a replacement for the sun?" That sure raises some questions. The pokédex repeatedly refers to volcarona as a being of legend, worshipped as a deity, etc., so it would be easy to take a religious sort of angle on it, and that opened up plenty of potential for an antagonist in a position of power, people being shitty towards pokémon, and some kind of secret or exclusive society. All in all, it felt like I was playing around in a thematically-appropriate space.
kyeugh often relates pokémon regions to their real-world counterparts, e.g. Kalos is explicitly pretty France-flavored, Kanto/Johto feel Japanese, etc. I needed to figure out where I wanted to draw from for the Relic Castle's setting. Two possibilities immediately sprang to mind: the southwest US, home of many Pueblo cultures, or the Nazca of Peru. In pretty much all respects the Pueblo would have made more sense: the Relic Castle is right outside Nimbasa, which is ostensibly Atlantic City but has always felt more Vegas to me (the desert is RIGHT THERE!), and Unova being "the NYC/US region" means that a North American location would generally be where you'd expect an ancient Unovan culture to be based.
However, the sigilyph that live in that area are very blatantly inspired by the Nazca lines, and the Relic Castle itself reminds me of Cahuachi. In the same way that an eevee isn't a fox, a rabbit, or any other one mammal but instead its own weird mashup of them all, GameFreak was clearly smashing a bunch of inspirations together for their "ancient Unovan ruins" concept. So I figured it would work fine to lean on what wasn't perhaps the primary source of inspiration, but which had been part of the mix. Also, I was hoping to do a story with heavy involvement of sigilyph, and had thought they might travel their own lines similar to the ones found near Nazca, so, really... I just liked that angle better. :P
While brainstorming, I took some notes about where I thought the story ought to go:
- A young priestess who wants to connect with larvesta/volcarona
- A figure of authority who's a dick
- A cool worldbuilding detail to draw it all together
- At least one thing with a cool fantasy name, like "wispfather." Sigilyph could be good for this (also want sigilyph)
After some fussing, I came up with an initial plan that would focus on a girl who was born outside the usual priest caste of her city, but who earned some special privileges as a result of the affinity she had for the the sigilyph, the city's protectors. Although not part of the Sun priesthood, she'd be allowed kind of around the periphery, close enough to get curious about the volcarona and ultimately break some taboos in order to get closer to it. And then, oh no, it would turn out that people were being dicks to pokémon, again.
I was having a little trouble with the end of this concept in particular, what *exactly* should be messed up about the city's relationship with the volcarona that would be unjust/unfair but where the volcarona would also be compelled to stick around and do more or less what the humans wanted. I was particularly enamored of the High Priest basically holding his position of luxury and authority on the basis that he had to fight the volcarona each night in order to keep it complacent and therefore the city would be fucked without him. Naturally it would be a show of some kind rather than a real fight, and the volcarona's cooperation was being assured through some other method, but what exactly that was and how it all would slot into the rest of the story remained difficult to pin down.
While working all this out I remembered, oh no, there were prompts for this challenge that we were supposed to use! My story didn't feel like it was really trending towards any of them, although I fiddled a bit with the idea of the protagonist learning the "true colors" of the high priest, or of her society, kind of. That felt a little abstract, though, and since I was having some difficulty with the resolution anyhow, I decided to step back and try a different angle on things. I'd keep the basic ideas of the setting but make it a more interpersonal story. We'd follow someone who was actually part of the Sun priesthood this time but still an outsider on some level, competing to rise to a higher station. They'd be betrayed by someone they'd considered a friend who was competing for the same spot as them, and in a particularly personal way--by taking advantage of that trait that made them an outsider. Thus the story would be about the protagonist seeing her friend's "true colors." In addition, there would be a thread running through that this was already a fucked-up sort of situation to be putting people in, as well as lightly exploring the rationalizations people made for it/how they behaved under it.
I wasn't super happy with this idea; it felt really simplistic, which in turn felt like a bit of a disservice to kyeugh. But last year I'd been really overambitious with my imitation and crashed and burned as a result, so for this year I'd resolved to do something very basic that I could actually complete in a reasonable amount of time, and would therefore have the time to do some actual imitating with, which is the fun part and not something I got to do much at all last year. I was not going to let myself throw up my hands and switch story concepts at the last minute again. With that in mind, I pretty much locked myself in on this story concept unless it turned out to be entirely unworkable somehow... and given how simple the concept was, I thought that pretty unlikely.
Unfortunately the sigilyph angle would have to go here; I didn't think I'd have enough time to get into it given that I was now going to have to spend time developing additional characters. Space constraints were a very pressing concern for me with this one, heh. I was shooting for 3k-4k words total, which would put me in the ballpark of the longest of kyeugh's published one-shots (and the one I believed she'd put the most work into and which was therefore the most representative). Obviously I couldn't go over the word limit again this year or I'd just be straight fucked. I sadly stuck a sigilyph in at the end to console myself.
In the first draft I'm not really looking to do any imitating; I just want to try and get all the actual events down on the page so I can start working with them. Nevertheless, there were a couple of things I tried to keep in mind as I was going along. First, I tend to prefer using a number of short scenes broken off by cuts, whereas kyeugh seems to prefer longer "tracking shots" that move from one scene to another without an explicit break. Witness the first chapter of Wandersword, for example, which is 7500 words and all one scene. I wasn't going to be able to do any jump-cut flashbacks or weird interleaving structures here! kyeugh's writing also tends to be substantially more introspective than mine, so I tried to write in that direction to begin with so I'd have more thinky bits to work with from the start rather than needing to inject them all during editing.
All that said, here's how the first draft looked!
