Warning: This post is long and contains a lot of stuff which most people probably don't care about, that stuff being me ranting on and on and on about my fics. Yes I do that a lot in here, but for some reason this seems worse than usual...
If your fic is focused in an original setting, how intensively do you develop the setting of your fic? If it is focused in a canon setting, do you tend to change much of it?
Both TFC and TRINITY are set in fairly original settings. TFC, however, remains pretty close to the normal, original Pokemon settings. What I have changed is stuff like the (otherwise pretty much nonexistent) school system, which in turn resulted in a slight modification to the starting age (up to 12, to allow for six years of primary school without needing kids to start too early). On the whole, my intent was just to make it more "real," rather than the overly cartoony depiction that the anime tends to show.
Battles can actually be really dangerous now, and encounters with wild Pokemon (which are no where near as common as in the games, and not even close to the anime either) can even sometimes end fatally. I mean, they're wild animals. For the most part, they'll run away from a human walking through the woods, not just hang out and chill when they have no idea what the strange human's intentions are. If a Pokemon doesn't run away it'll fight, but not just for the hell of it. Wild Pokemon encounters are typically because the Pokemon is defending its territory, and they'll go after any Pokemon the trainer has out first because they pose the bigger threat. If the trainer doesn't have any Pokemon with them, a wild Pokemon WILL attack the trainer. In the end, that's just a long way of explaining why Prof. Oak so desperately wants to keep you out of the tall grass. Only in TFC it's not tall grass but more so forests. I write in forests too much, and don't get me started on my overuse of clearings in forests.
Um, yeah. In TRINITY the whole damn settings is completely new. And yes, I've been developing it rather intensively. In fact, ever since I started writing it, I've been thinking about the TRINITY setting so much that it's probably developing faster than TFC did, although I suppose that's not a surprise since I had literally nothing to base TRINITY on. Well, other than the series I blatantly ripped it off from (Ghost in the Shell for the land-based parts, Battlestar Galactica for space). Actually adapting those existing elements to my own purposes, in a setting populated not just with humans but also by Pokemon, proved to be quite interesting though, and the more I develop more detailed ideas and concepts, the more I begin to realize that directly ripping something doesn't work too well.
The Battlestar Galactica is great in a BSG setting, but while I can take some of its concepts and use them in TRINITY on the USS Andromeda, some parts of its designs just won't fit with TRINITY. Either because of technology problems (TRINITY doesn't have FTL drives as BSG does), or because of stylistic reasons (Galactica's too rounded. Pegasus is better, but still too rounded and generally oddly proportioned to fit with the style I'm going for). While Ghost in the Shell provides some excellent cyberpunk concepts and aesthetics to work off of, it tends to be perhaps
too advanced with some of the concepts. I'd love to give the members of Icarus thermoptic camo, but that would be just way too convenient and all, so I had to change how cloaking fields work. Virtual computer interfaces would be awesome in TRINITY, but it's just rather absurd really and the only way GitS gets away with it is because they do it so flashy. Still, I carry on a part of it with the Cybernet, which is less GitS and more obligatory Sci-Fi cyberspace anyway.
Despite what the anime has shown us, not everyone thinks about Pokemon 24/7. What are some of your character's side interests and/or hobbies?
Shrike is pretty much like me with his interests, due to how early in his development he was pretty much a self insert. While he's largely changed from that, (although some might say he's just an idealized version of myself now <_<) he still retains my own side interests. He plays video games (Pokemon games to be specific, with other RPGs on the side. Yes, Pokemon games within the Pokemon world. Think of them like the Sims is to us, a reality simulator. Kind of), he likes computers, he listens to music, he'll read books once in a while, he even writes! Speaking of which I so missed an opportunity to start each story part with an excerpt from his story within a story. Oh well, I can still start books with them if I really want to. Or I can make like TRINITY and just stick the excerpts in at the beginning of random chapters (except it's not so random in TRINITY, currently it's every other chapter).
Rayne primarily reads and draws. She doesn't use computers much. Her biggest interest is simply caring for and training her Absol Matariel, outside of that she doesn't do much other than read and draw.
Aira is somewhat of a cross between Shrike and Rayne I guess. She reads some, about on the level of Shrike (aka, only once in a while), she'll doodle when bored but isn't too good at it, she's not too fond of video games but doesn't hate them, she does spend most of her time online though, chatting it up in chat rooms and forums. It is how she and Shrike met after all.
All the characters in TRINITY are a bit of an exception to this question since in TRINITY, no one spends much time thinking about Pokemon in the whole training and caring for sense as Pokemon are (generally) regarded on the same level as humans. In fact, training is dead since it's actually impossible to contain Pokemon within Pokeballs anymore. In terms of interests nonetheless however, Tashima is of course very, very heavily into computers. They're pretty much his entire life. He has them inside him with his cybernetics, he worked as a programmer for CYPHER, is a hacker on the side, and before all the events of TRINITY happened he spent a lot of time within the virtual world of the Cybernet, primarily playing virtual video games and fights. Other than computers, all he really does is watch TV and that's about it. Havoc is pretty mellow, and can in fact spend a lot of time simply thinking. He also likes to watch TV, but then he also likes to just go out and walk around. Truthfully, I haven't really developed his post-TRINITY character that much so I can't say too much about him. <_<
I think I'm done typing. I haven't been writing much lately due to school so my urge to write has been building up resulting in rants on my fics like this. Anyone who read all of it and actually cares, please reply so I can award you all with cookies. Dear god you deserve them.
Valentine said:
To avoid going through my usual tl;dr list
I am obviously not afraid of tl;dr. -_- Although lists aren't really my things.
