State of the Realm 2011, Part Three

And here we go with the final piece of the 2011 report on the SoTR. See these final thoughts on the BotS at the close of 2011, and look forward to my thoughts next week on 2012 and 2013. So, picking up where we left off...

Meanwhile, I have bounced around a number of other stories. I spent much of the time with the First Sun Saga. It is a story that is every bit as complex as the First Moon despite being one of the newest sagas I’ve started in the past couple years. Several of the Two-Six are set to appear in this story. That alone makes it unique. There’s also going to be a lot of back-story involving the Two-Six as a part of this story, so it’ll be interesting. Originally the main character was set to be Rahzenshia Rose in her life as Destiny Rosencraft in this separate universe. But as the ideas developed and I manifested other Two-Six into this universe, I shifted focus slightly, thus there are essentially two main characters; Rahzenshia and Hime. This saga will be a little faster pace than First Moon, but also very, very exciting.

Over the summer I spent a lot of time on the Second Star Saga. This one was born of a basic thought of whether to delve into other legends here on earth. I was watching a show on History Channel about the Tunguska Event in the early 1900s. And so, I decided to revisit the Romanov story and the whole thing about Anastasia surviving/escaping the assassination of the Romanovs. I developed an interesting plot in which Anastasia and her brother escape and go on to live quiet lives outside of Russia, their descendants then ushered back into Russia on a renewed throne is 2015 after the nation has experienced decades of strife and suffering in what is thought to be a curse for having killed the last Romanov tsar.

This saga will have at least two mini-sagas. The first will cover the rise of the new tsar, and the second will cover undetermined events far into the future. The Rosencraft don’t appear, per say. Drusilla and her daughter Serina appear as main characters, but that’s it. There is an allusion to the fact that Serina’s father was either Yami or Yugi in some alternate reality fashion, but given that I amount Drusilla’s relationship to Serina’s father as a semi-tragic encounter of a weeklong tryst while she was on vacation, with him dying after she returns home and discovers she’s pregnant but before she can tell him, he doesn’t gain all that much attention.

As summer came to an end, I found myself working on yet a new idea. At first I wasn’t planning on having it a part of the Book of the Shadows at all. It was such a uniquely framed idea that literally came to me in a dream. I woke up and rushed to jot down what I could remember. As I spent the next couple weeks going over it, it became a nice idea for a story, though I still didn’t want to roll it into the Book of the Shadows. Ultimately, I have, however, thus creating the Third Star Saga. It involves a teenage boy who one day finds a girl rummaging through his room. She ends up living with him and his family. He discovers that she is a demon, a candidate to become the next ruler of Hell, the Devil. He also discovers that the girl he’s been fawning over the last couple years is an angel, a candidate to be the next ruler of Heaven, God. The whole story is now going to be a take on the manga series Princess Lucia and a couple other similar titles, looking at a story of false prophets, false demons, and false gods. The main character will be Kyouske, an original character. His full name is Kyouske Rosencraft. The big secret you’ll find out probably halfway or so into the first book is that he’s the last pureblood human male on the planet, all others being in one way or another having alien blood in them. I’m flirting with how to handle this idea, leaning towards the idea of his being forced by the angels to find and consummate a relationship with the last pureblood female of the planet. I’d take that to a more serious level than the typical harem anime plot, but I haven’t even settled on that path yet.

In this story though the Rosencraft name appears I don’t immediately have any known Rosencraft characters appearing. For his part Kyouske is adopted. As for his family, which is eccentric, neither of his parents, or his sisters or younger brother bares the names of any of the Rosencraft. I don’t know yet if this will mean anything special though. Also there is not yet any of the Two-Six in this story. I still very well may spin this back off into its own story after all.

Over the last six or so weeks my focus has been on a sort of side story. A couple years ago I began writing a scenario involving the Rosenckruez that the Rosencraft encountered during their search for the Animus Blade. The Rosenckruez are to attempt an invasion of the Rosencraft Universe and there will as you might expect be a fight. This plan is currently set to be a sort of standalone story in between the ending of the original Book of the Shadows and the beginning of Advancing Shadows. At any rate, at that time I placed it under the working heading “Looking Glass”. The idea was that, like Alice in Wonderland, the Rosenckruez universe is to the Rosencraft another world that seems similar yet bizarre and strange.

What I decided several weeks ago was to slightly expand the idea of the Looking Glass series. As of now it is a place where standalone stories will be placed, regardless of the saga they are attached to. These are intended to be one or two book stories set in a variation of one of the existing universes. Thus, while similar to the idea of all of my books, they are not intended to be part of a significantly larger continuity, nor play a role in the larger meta-story. This story in particular takes place in a universe I’m calling Cromwell. So as to not ruin the surprise I will only say that the character who initiates any mention of this universe appears a little into book VIII, but does not have a role in this Cromwell Universe story I’m writing.

This story follows Drusilla, a semi-original character introduced in the Arenzai/Abh Arc. In this Cromwell Universe story, she is leading Neo Nemesis on a “Crest of the Stars”-like mission to claim dominion over all of space. At the beginning of the story, the Rosencraft have just been decimated by Sephiroth. Yami, Eve, Anzu, Tea, and Lynette have all been killed. Drusilla is about to claim Earth as her next prize in preparation for her conquest of Earth. Before that, however, she must meet with Yugi as a personal favor to friend and confidant, Yugi’s grandmother, Jennifer. Drusilla falls in love with him and they eventually get married. From there the story becomes one about the various planets and personalities they encounter as Drusilla continues her power grab across the farthest reaches of the universe.

More or less this, and other stories that end up in Looking Glass, are excuses for me to write stories and characters into a semblance of the Book of the Shadows story even though I don’t necessarily have a means to do so in a canonical way. There’s too much else happening in other stories for me to address the possibility of Yugi being in a relationship with Drusilla, or to squeeze in another story about vampires. As it is I’ve already done a little pushing in order to squeeze in both a two-chapter stories that, aside from Yugi and Drusilla, manage to include characters from BlazBlue, Vampire Knight, Shingetsutan Tsukihime, Daughters of Mnemosyne, Rosario+Vampire, Touhou, and Blood+/C. In another chapter I recreate nearly the entire war history of the Strangereal universe in the Ace Combat series from Ace Combat 2 through 6, skipping over 3 due to its timing relative to the others. This story is and will be fun and interesting to write at least, it just won’t matter much to the rest of the stories I’ve been telling thus far.

There is a possible change on the horizon to a couple characters. The deal is, I had back-to-back hard drive failures this fall. I lost a lot of stuff, not much directly dealing with the Book of the Shadows thankfully, but among those were rare single images I had of Drusilla, Destiny, and Death. I was always acutely aware of the rarity of the images of those three, particularly because they are not from any anime, game, or manga, so simply obtaining that original media would not be an option for obtaining their image. I was recently trying to find higher quality versions of those very images with little success. As it stands now, with those images lost, I may be forced to reconsider their use for my characters.

For Drusilla that will mean focusing more on Soul Eater’s Arachne for her character image instead of the unnamed character in the image I was using before. For Destiny this means likely abandoning the established Lucifer Hawk form that inspired the creation of her character in the first place. Instead I would likely end up with the same setup I have for the rest of the Rosencraft regarding their Lucifer Hawk forms, which is that they are identical to their human forms, but with requisite tail, wings, and slight changes to features, such as change in iris shape and color. Death’s case is slightly different from the others. Death is very ephemeral in my story. She doesn’t appear often, and is not particularly likely to appear in alternate universes, thus there isn’t much of an imperative to even assign an image to her.

With everything that’s happened this year, the Book of the Shadows is coming along nicely. There’s still a few rough patches that need tending to, but overall it has been a very stellar year for the Book of the Shadows. So, I am proud to declare that this year was a successful one. Look forward to more developments in the year to come. May 2012 be an even better year than 2011.

- DaCosta Rosencraft