Update on Book of the Shadows - Choosing Characters and Stories

It's been a few weeks since I launched this blog, and I was intending to have website up and ready to go already. But alas there have been a few setbacks so I'll have to hold off on that for now. I can't at this point make any promises about when I'll actually get things going, but at the moment it doesn't seem I'll be able to do it for at least a couple more weeks.

Oh well, that's the way things go sometimes.

So for now I'll tease a little more about the actual story that this is all working around.

I should have mentioned in one of my early posts that there are several themes that are at the heart of the series of stories I have molded. The starting point, however, is the concepts invoked by the characters within the story.

I approach characters for my story in a very direct manner. I utilize the concepts of String Theory for my story in many aspects. In other words, I hold that all possible outcomes exist as a component of an alternate reality or universe. If you come to a fork in the road you take the left fork in one reality/universe while in another you take the right fork. The results may or may not be different aside from that one alternate decision or different set of circumstances.

I start with the concept for my story that all anime, all manga, all video games, exist within this framework based on String Theory. But String Theory has its limits. Aside from being only a scientific theory at the moment, not a law of the universe, it may or may not be accurate. Furthermore its tenets hold that possibility is constrained by physics. In other words, unless physics proves that you can fly like Superman, that fork in the road I spoke of earlier doesn't hold an option for you to fly away.

So I add a necessary caveat; magic exists. This plays a background role into the whole Umineko story. This differs from the more common idea of time travel that is more prevalent in the same Umineko, wherein you would take the left fork and take a time machine back in time and either independently act or alternatively tell yourself to go down the right fork.

This is all to say that within the bounds of my story it isn't that, for example, Lacus Clyne of Gundam Seed and Euphemia li Britannia of Code Geass just happen to look remarkably similar while living in completely separate realities. It's that they're related across generations, one's life taking place decades, maybe centuries apart (I do this in my story by the way).

image courtesy of zerochan.net
Euphemia: Left side and top right
Lacus: Center and bottom right

Or similarly, sticking with the Gundam and Code Geass universes, it's not that Gundams and Knightmare Frames exist as separate technology paths in differing universes, but in the same universe fulfilling differing roles.

That's the basic thought process that goes into who and what appears in the fan-fiction I've been writing; do these characters and their stories fit together, and if so how? How well this works is dependent on my skill in writing the surrounding story to fill gaps. It is very much like trying to tie together two separate universes with a piece of string.