Let's make a Space Opera

This was copied from an identical thread that I placed in the wrong section, but here it goes.

NOTE: When you see one of my posts replaced with: AUTO-THUMP: BAD IDEA IS BAD, that meant I was throwing out an idea of Canon Welding user-submitted stories.

I've had more than a few crazy dreams, and when I combine more memorable characters from them, I find I could almost make something coherent out of it. One of them involved a guy who looked like a cyborg Rorschach becoming a father figure for a girl in her early tweens with unstable pyrokinesis, another one involved a Barbarian Hero who was at odds with a Cat Girl that looked like a snow leopard. Other ideas that came to me while I was awake was another cyborg, only one who looked more like an augmented Lich, plus a shinier, sleeker cyborg that was also a serial killer. (They're quite common in my twisted little vision of the future.) But enough about my ideas, what ideas have you ever had for a Space Opera?

edited 21st Jul '11 11:56:56 PM by TweedlyDee

Mine's a bit more different, inspired by Power Rangers RPM, Star Fox, Terminator, and such.

A sentient A.I. goes mad and takes over the main system, using nanotechnology to turn organics into robots. The remaining people hid themselves in a floating colony called Sanctuary. A five-man group of pilots decided to perform an ambush attack by planting a bomb inside the AI's fortress, but they failed and lost one of their members. They were almost dying when they come across a ghost-class starship, allowing them to traverse the converted planet carefully. And thus the plot pretty much is about them finding weaknesses to the AI, fighting battles, seeing their fifth member, until the penultimate war.

One of my ideas (that I laid aside when I began work on my main project) was in some ways a subversion: there was this great big section of the galaxy, many planets, each of them independent and practically its own sovereign nation, with minor roaming mercenary bands and navy vessels constantly engaged in skirmishes: in short, adventure.

However, the protagonist of the piece was a garbageman on a gigantic space station, one that had nation status, one who desperately desires to go beyond the confines of his home. His life is made considerably more exciting when the ship of one of these bands comes drops out of space near them and proceeds to take over the unarmed place with contemptuous ease. It's a complete shock since no 'disarrayed' group has ever gotten the resources to obtain a ship posing a threat of that sort; it turns out later to be a renegade military cruiser, but that's irrelevant.

The captain announces that he's merging the civilian and military populations of his ship. While the protagonist is excited initially, thinking that he gets to train with the 'cool guys', it really means that the soldiers help clean the garbage alongside him. This includes a new war hero (for whom the protagonist develops feelings), who was placed there by random choice in the interest of fairness, and the high commander of the ship infantry, whom everyone regards as functionally a living god, who a) wanted to watch and mentor his protege, the aforementioned hero, and b) actually gets a kick from doing mundane jobs. By the end, it's wholesale confusion as the people declare revolution and the protagonist and his new companions aren't sure which life they really want.

Then everyone dies.

Sounds kinda cool, though singularities taking over are a little overplayed. But I shouldn't judge, given how I'm pretty much ripping off Outlaw Star.

Am I detecting a little Slice of Life in there?

edited 21st Jul '11 11:10:11 PM by TweedlyDee

Oh yeah. There's a Slice of Life, then a sustained bombardment form railcannon and ship lasers, and then a Slice of Life where your server at the restaurant is liable to have half his face missing and replaced with grafted bionics. So it's two lives combined by repeated sledgehammer blows, one might say.

Also, realization. Slice of Life=SOL. SOL=Shit Out of Luck. I see a pattern. Hurr.

AUTO-THUMP: BAD IDEA IS BAD

edited 21st Jul '11 11:54:55 PM by TweedlyDee

I will post my own experiences with the genre when I'm less tired, but I just wanted to say now that this has a pretty misleading title - unlike the "Let's make a shonen" and "Let's make a Magical Girl" threads, this is not about making a Space Opera, it's for people to talk about ones they have made. Just wanted to make a note of that.

AUTO-THUMP: BAD IDEA IS BAD

edited 21st Jul '11 11:55:11 PM by TweedlyDee

I'm not sure everyone would appreciate that, especially since it was not mentioned in the original post. I certainly wouldn't.

AUTO-THUMP: BAD IDEA IS BAD

edited 21st Jul '11 11:55:21 PM by TweedlyDee

I'm not suggesting anything. My first post was merely commenting that the title is a little confusing. My second post was noting that commenting six or seven posts down that you intend to use this thread to combine other people's ideas into your work - after several people posted theirs without knowing this - might not be met with their approval. I know that if I had posted about settings I've made, assuming that this was simply another "talk about your works" thread, and then was told "hey guys I'm going to cannibalize your ideas", I'd feel fairly offended and somewhat plagiarized.

Well then I'm sorry if I misled you guys. If that was a bad idea, it'll go.

EDIT: Now it has.

DOUBLE EDIT: The Canon Welding idea came about because I thought this would go like the "Let's make a Magical Girl" thread and was shocked when it didn't. Lesson learned.

edited 21st Jul '11 11:58:13 PM by TweedlyDee

Just to be clear: the difference I saw between this and the "Let's make a magical girl" thread is that that one was up-front from the first post about what it was doing, whereas here, except for the title, you didn't say anything about this Canon Welding idea until several people had posted. Again, I'm not accusing you of doing this so you could plagiarize other people's works - but I am saying that it was a bad idea not to state your intentions from the start.

edited 22nd Jul '11 12:04:31 AM by nrjxll

Well, that was just a way of improvising. But having a place to exchange pet ideas is still good.

Singularities taking over is an archetype and yeah it is overplayed, but I want to see it more as a plague rather than an invader in a Space Opera setting.

Oh and why Star Fox you say? They call their team Star Specter - the main characters are a fox, a hawk, a rabbit, and a kitten. Oh and the fifth member is a wolf who was "killed" but ended up as a robot enemy later turned good.

Well, I have a setting which involves a group of nations that follow hard sci-fi and a group of nations that follow rule of cool, schizo tech.

But focusing it down on a very narrow part of the story for where I just felt like running with Rule of Cool was a group of solar systems over run by a trillion tech-barbarians, over top of 100 million advanced people in a sparsely populated part of the galaxy. The result is constant warfare and space battles.

My work is one part Space Opera and one part Military Science Fiction. Space Opera wise my trilogy has the intricacy that the reason for the latest (and last) flareup of the long running conflict in the 'verse is actually a conspiracy by a third faction led by a Terran named Mikhail Voronov and a Preyaran named Mistress Bellah seeking to overthrow the two existing and replace them outright. Along the way it becomes a fantastic adventure of conflict, secrets, insurrection, sudden changes in fortune, sudden changes in alliances and plenty of Beyond the Impossible and Rule of Cool.

edited 22nd Jul '11 4:39:01 PM by MajorTom

OH BOI! I can't believe you already have a trilogy. Damn, I seriously need to get started putting my ideas to paper.

^ Yep, I have a trilogy built out in the basic sense. None of the three books are complete much less written but I have a basic plot flow for the entire thing plus most of the Worldbuilding surrounding it in place.

Then I have side series and stories to go with the 'verse. (And possibly a sequel saga after that but let's not get ahead of myself.)

edited 22nd Jul '11 5:22:26 PM by MajorTom

What about these "side stories"? I really wanna hear one now.

^ Mostly gaiden fluff, Slice of Life and other stories told by other viewpoints in the verse, mostly civilian.

One of them I have planned called Children's Crusade brutally deconstructs and plays reality upon Improbable Age, Competence Zone and Child Soldiers.

I have an idea for a Space Opera, but currently the entire thing imploded when I realized that I had newer, better ideas, and it was built upon a shoddy, old (the story is half a decade in the works) foundation, and that it simply wasn't all that great because of it. The basic idea was "stick superheroes in the Standard Sci Fi Setting, and let them wreak havoc." The problem was the worldbuilding had drifted so far (in the beginning, the heroes were meant to be entirely sympathetic; now, they really weren't, or at least the morality had changed) that it was unworkable. I started out with straight Silver Age-style supers, and now I had Modern Age deconstructions.

What would those "Newer, better ideas" be?

Kid heros meet a terrible fate, I'm assuming?

edited 22nd Jul '11 7:35:45 PM by TweedlyDee

Well, more realistic wordbuilding, nations that acted like nations instead of like strawmen, battles that made some kind of sense, averting Misapplied Phlebotinum, and most of all, the social implications of the supers themselves. However, the storylines themselves and the plots rapidly became unworkable, because it was all geared towards Black-and-White Morality, while the new worldbuilding was more Gray-and-Gray Morality, or Gray-and-Black Morality.

Basically, in the original, everything was a Mary Sue at face value, period. Now, everything seems almost kind of nice on the surface, but slowly reveals itself to be seriously, irredeemably fucked up the further down you go.

edited 22nd Jul '11 7:38:54 PM by USAF713

^^ Quite.