If the implications are that the mystery lady from the prologue is Yokoka's and Moa's mother, then that means Valyn forcefully stole the Yin summoning pin from her O__O
AND, that's a double f**ked up implication going off what Valyn said to Yokoka and Mao in chapter 14, that means he has all his memories in tact and that ALSO means he knows about Yokoka and Mao's true past and could of taken them out of the forest and back to their mom, BUT DIDN'T...
Hey Chris, if I remember correctly, Mao said in a chapter, that after he gets Kalliv home, that he was going to Get revenge on the person that ruined his life
If you don't mind the question, do you have any advice for people who want to start writing stories and improving at writing? But don't really know where to start?
Sure, of course! Here’s some stuff from the top of my head in no particular order, anyone is welcome to share and add to this so check out the notes too;
- first off don’t try to write “good” stories, write stories that you personally have fun writing and try not to worry about the quality. The first version of my webcomic I wrote when I was 14 and it was novel style, absolutely terrible, not even good grammar or anything but it keeps you hooked and having a fun time because it’s insane and I need to see what comes next, what will the characters do now
- if you’re the kind of person to worry about details or needing everything to be perfect you should try to make it a challenge to not be allowed to edit any of this. Write it physically on paper if that helps (so it’s a bigger effort to change anything of it) and commit to what you’ve put down and keep going. This is how I managed a finished first draft.
- don’t like a past piece of lore in that version that has you feeling blocked? Change it. Who cares. The story evolves as it goes, it finds itself. Again, you should be having fun most of all as I promise THAT is what the readers will really get attached to.
- you’re allowed, and even recommended to take breaks. Take a break long enough that you no longer think about the story or the writing and forget what happened. Then reread all of it again from the start and take notes of certain early ideas you started but haven’t completed.
- while writing I like to do what I call “opening doors” which is basically “starting” some plot points and leaving them open. For example, the main protagonist receives an item and then does nothing with it. On a later reread you’ll think “right, something should happen with that” and get an idea and write that down. The time between event A and its resolution taking so long makes it feel connected. If you do this enough you’ll get a really complex map of connections inside your work, and you can do this to varying degrees of complexity which also adds depth. The protagonist receives medication in chapter 3, but in chapter 8 she fought in a storm so it became wet and unusable. In chapter 2 a character gets angry at someone he sees below him and in chapter 15 you realize he’s usually at the receiving end of this dynamic.
- it’s totally okay if your story starts with like, characters basically copied from those you like from other medias. I’m personally more of an original works kinda person but the first story I wrote there were characters who were “pokemon but not really.” As you write they become their own unique thing.
- don’t worry about it, just keep going. If it feels difficult, take a break and do something else. If you have ideas while you aren’t working, write them down in notes or sticky memo pads and stuff
- even if you end up with a story you don’t like or don’t finish, you’ll always find things out about yourself and your writing style. Don’t throw it away but you are allowed to file it away and not look at it. The you 10-20 stories from now will want to look back at how far they’ve come so save it for them.
- while watching/reading/playing other pieces of media if anything you see makes you go “wow that was really cool,” I really recommend checking out tv tropes and seeing what they have to say about that character or scene. They break down how it was achieved narratively so you can learn how the writing was done and get a better grasp of it and reader expectations in regards to that technique and why this instance worked so well to try it out yourself
- now that you’re on tv tropes, check out the tropes doing things you like and go through the list of examples to see how this particular thing was done in other media you’re familiar with
- now we’ve lost you to tv tropes for the next few months
- don’t worry about it this is research
- reread your story again and now you should have even more ideas!
- end up with chapters getting longer and longer as you want to do things with each character in each chapter… your document of things you want to add in the story when it feels right keeps getting longer. I apologize to you.
- oh something I do BEFORE I start writing anything down, especially on a later rewrite where I know what the story wants to be, is what I call a “mood map.” So I’ll usually know the start of the story pretty well, an idea of the ending and a couple scenes I think would be impactful. Before I write any of them, I’ll decide what emotion I want the person reading it to go through the story. I want them to be feeling happy and comfortable, then we hit the first conflict and bam, that mood drops. We aren’t feeling good, maybe even a bit on edge. Then we get a bit of a breather to recover from that to keep its impact. I find it helps hold the entire thing together as knowing what the mood of a scene will be you can adjust the writing (and colour palette/pacing/composition, if it’s a comic) to hold it all together nicely and with intent. It doesn’t have to be detailed either, I just do a graph with negative and positive mood on one axis and time of the story on the other so I can plan the emotional pacing of the whole story.
I hope this helps! But I really cannot insist enough to just have fun by yourself; no matter what emotion you write from people will be able to tell. So if you write out of resentment because you want to be popular and feel entitled to the attention, it’s probably not going to be fun to read. But if the author has fun with the story and loves the characters, it’ll rub off.
Find yourself one story that drives you crazy (positive, well written) and one that drives you crazy (negative, so close to being good but isn’t) and let them drive you insane in different ways and write your own, that’s what I do HAHA
Can I just say how much I LOVE how this comic subverts your expectations a lot??
Like at the start of the comic you think Oh Mao's this big emo jerk but then as the comic keeps going you suddenly go, Oh w o w I don't blame the poor guy, he's been through shit and I understand why he lost it on Yokoka in chapter 2, that's a lot of bottled and justifiable resentment
And when you first see Copycat and Fahrin, your like- Oh no!! are these two secret bad guys!? but then the comic moves along and its- Oh, these two are just dramatic anti heroes
And lastly for Yokoka...
At the start it seems like she's just this idiot hero, but then your like-
Oh... When all of this comes back to her... its going to be devastating...
Ahh I’m so happy to hear this!! My favourite type of writing style “we’ll set some expectations for you, you’re used to this thing happening, you might even be a bit annoying expecting it to go a certain way… just kidding, we’re doing something else, something better” and when it’s done well I find it leaves me in kind of shock but then I become extra obsessed with the thing so it’s become the way I write haha!
Even in terms of simpler things and structure, it’s like this all the way. I really love playing with tropes. For example;
- the trope of the idiot protagonist here who’s strong and nothing really stands in their way is usually male, but in this story she’s female.
- the trope where a character we meet is past their breaking point and just kind of broken now and trying to manage and deal with it is usually female, but here it’s Mao
- the antagonist Hurricane was just minding her own business
- the sparkling hero everyone loves and looks up to is actually an asshole. Okay this one isn’t so uncommon anymore but it’s still always good, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of people who expected some sort of twist because they fell for his facade and thought he was possessed or cursed instead of having a mask off moment.
Hey do you remember who first told us Valyn is cool? The narrator! The same narrator who IMMEDIATELY has two lies in her introduction— she hasn’t lived in Betel’s forest all her life, something we know from the prologue we just saw, and her name isn’t Yokoka. You think she’s right about Valyn? Oops.
I really like to set things up that you’ll dismiss or not fully understand on the first pass but then the more you reread the more you spot and understand now. Another example: if you decided to reread the story now you might notice that Mao’s words to Yokoka in chapter 2 seem kind of familiar but also a bit odd/out of character for him… hey wait a second, isn’t this what Valyn’s words to him in chapter 15 were?
Now you can connect the dots that Mao said this in anger because Valyn says this to him all the time and to a certain level, it’s sunk in. It only took about 8-9 years for this to drop.
Don’t you love webcomics time…
(It’s also worth noting a lot of the force behind my writing was specifically two frustrations with all media I was trying to enjoy at the time: the mascot character never got to be a full character though I think this one has improved since, but more importantly… no one ever wrote a story about amnesia that didn’t annoy me! You’re all doing it wrong, I became a writer because of this!)
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