What is the Book of the Shadows?

How are you readers doing out there.

This is my second post, so I thought I’d get a little into that title of my blog a little.

The Book of the Shadows originates from an idea that is relatively generic. I mentioned in the introductory post what a fan-fiction is. I also mentioned the terms “doujin” and “doujinshi”. Again, I won’t go into the details about the difference between those two terms specifically, but in general they are microcosms of the larger umbrella term of fan-fiction. The difference for between regular fan-fiction and doujin is that, aside from referring in general to Japanese media, doujins are more like fan comics. In the same way a manga is a story overlaid on images that represent that story, a doujin is the same thing, just written by a an amateur as unofficial extension of another story.

So let me use this example. The Star Wars series was created by George Lucas. However, there were a number of supplemental comics and novels created by fans that expand on the Star Wars universe. Some are considered canon (official part of the story, or consistent with the story) while some are not. Another example is the Scary Movie franchise, a franchise that merges the stories of various horror movies, mixing in pop culture references, and handling it all with at least an attempt at comedy.

My Book of the Shadows is closer to the latter example, just without the comedic focus.

Several years ago me and a few friends were talking at lunch. We got into a discussion about movies and TV shows, specifically about things we liked and didn’t like about them. Sometimes it was specific characters, sometimes it was the story, sometimes it was just a matter of the direction of the story in terms of when certain things happened in the story.

Through that discussion we began to spout ideas about things we’d do differently, what we’d change, etc. After that, I began to experiment with my storytelling

One day, after finishing a final exam, I sat down and started writing a story. I started with a couple characters from a couple different shows. From there I expanded the surrounding story with characters from those surrounding stories. I then added new characters from additional stories and expanded the story that way.

The Book of the Shadows began to grow from the general mythos behind two anime series; Yu-Gi-Oh and Silent Mobius. The first is surely more popular than the second, but I had been watching both at about the time that this hobby started. As you may likely know, Yu-Gi-Oh is a series based around a card battling game. Silent Mobius takes place in a future where there are these dimension hopping aliens trying to take over the world, or something along that line. Using a host of characters from across several different additional anime, I used the Silent Mobius story as the foundation for the story I have written.

So, where does the name “Book of the Shadows” come from? Originally I was planning to use the Book of the Dead as a basic

foundational

piece. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a document used by religious authorities in ancient Egypt to record instructions for the rituals after a person died. If you get into some aspects of supernatural stories, the Egyptian Book of the Dead was actually a spell book. I was going to utilize that aspect of the mythos, and so it was going to be the Book of the Dead, not Book of the Shadows. I changed the name because I knew I wouldn’t get into ancient Egyptian mythology enough to support such a name. But I did want to keep a hold on the idea of a book that wasn’t quite what it seemed to be (was also watching the anime Read or Die at the time) so I needed to come up with a new name. Shadows just seemed the most appropriate given the general themes developing in my story.

Straddling the line between Light and Darkness,

Living In The Shadows.

That is the tagline I use with the Book of the Shadows, particularly the first book. It is the idea that one cannot live purely in one place or another, but must straddle the line between the two ideas. In a real-world context it would be similar to choosing a political ideology for oneself. I not that affiliation and ideology are two different things, for now I am referring to ideology. In every case, selecting the pure form of one ideology or another results in an improbable paradigm. Absolute Democracy doesn’t work because of the issue of tyranny of the majority, and, well, tyranny doesn’t work because it’s tyranny. The idea behind the word “Shadow” is that it fills the gap between the two extremes of pure light and pure darkness.

For the characters in my story, they fill that gap between Light and Dark, or rather the imagery assigned to Light and Dark - Good and Evil.

Well, sorry about the lengthy post. Till next time.