Developing a sci-fi space opera

For a couple of months now, I've been meaning to write an original story. Problem is, it's very heavily inspired by Gundam and I want to avoid pitfalls that would chase the reader away by making them think "seen this before, nothing new here".

The similarities to Gundam are evident. Ordinary High-School Student ends up Falling into the Cockpit of a Bigger Stick Humongous Mecha he ends up piloting as part of the crew of a Cool Starship, their main opponent being a Char Clone fighting for colonial independence. However, that's not all the story is about.

So then, the story would be made up of four parts. Part 1 would concern the protagonist Falling into the Cockpit by way of I Know Mortal Kombat. More specifically, he's an introverted, almost Shrinking Violet teenager (kinda like Arita Haruyuki) living completely on his own, having no parents and his grandfather having vanished a few years back. The town he's living in is an underground colony on Mars, circa 23rd century (haven't decided on the exact year yet). The biggest difference between him and the standard Gundam protagonist is that he sharply averts Refusal of the Call. He hesitates, he's terrified and he openly admits both - but once the chips are down, he doesn't even try to bail out and run away, even when others bring up the possibility. With that said, Jumped at the Call isn't in effect either; he's a nerd and an Ascended Fanboy, yes, but not once does he treat it as the awesomest thing ever. Skills-wise, he never sat behind the controls of a Voidstrider before but as the technology isn't new, there are plenty of simulators about it (in the same way there are simulators about military aircraft in real life) and he's a very high-level player in those. His gaming skill doesn't translate into piloting skill but he is familiar with the general control scheme of a Voidstrider and is good at improvising, so he learns to keep up with the Mooks fairly quickly.

Anyway, when the genre-requisite enemy-attack-on-hero's-hometown comes, he ends up saving the life of a girl who turns out to be the Cool Starship's Bridge Bunny (and later becomes his Love Interest). And here is my other great concern: she's also the younger sister of the local Char Clone, with their parents having been assassinated.

Unlike Gundam however, the bad guys aren't The Empire but La Résistance who radicalized into Well Intentioned Extremists after a major political figure sympathetic to their cause was assassinated. The Char Clone also isn't a low-ranking officer but the head of the whole organization, disapproving of their methods but powerless to reform it due to opposition from extremists. His relationship with his sister is primarily influenced by their parents' deaths: a few days beforehand, the Char Clone's membership of La Résistance was leaked to the public, forcing his father to hold a press release denying his official support to the group. The assassination happened during that press release by way of a bomb, killing the father and his wife, as well as brutally maiming their daughter so badly that both of her legs had to be replaced with cybernetic ones (optionally, with the shock of limb loss and seeing her parents dead giving her psychosomatic asthma). Due to the topic of the press release, the Char Clone blamed himself for the bombing and sent his sister away to keep her safe, even though she never blamed him. She subsequently ended up in the military to pay for her legs' maintenance - and those suckers aren't cheap.

Part 1 of the plot would consist of the Cool Starship trying to deliver the Bigger Stick to a military staging area - but by the time they get there, the whole place has already been razed by La Résistance. Part 2 consists of the crew fleeing pursuit while looking for a way to strike back, culminating in the protagonist dueling and defeating the Char Clone, followed by a Tear Jerker scene of the Char Clone giving his sister some parting words before suffering death by uncontrolled atmospheric reentry and leaving the protagonist feeling like crap while watching the hysterically crying girl. Normally, this would be where the story ends, right?

Not in this story, it doesn't. Turns out the defense contractor MegaCorp that manufactures the military's weapons, from guns to ships to Voidstriders, was also funding La Résistance, Playing Both Sides for their own ends. Their objective is simple: with a few well-placed assassinations, they caused the colonial independence movement to radicalize and start a guerrilla war, prompting the government to enact defensive measures and tighten their control over the colonies. As both sides wreck each other, the MegaCorp rakes in tons of money selling weapons, money they use to buy themselves into the government to become an N.G.O. Superpower and eventually One Nation Under Copyright. The protagonist's disappeared grandfather was hired by the MegaCorp to design the Bigger Stick but he found out about the MegaCorp's plan and was... detained to keep him quiet, hence why he never returned to the protagonist like he promised. And now that the heroes know about this as well, the MegaCorp had them declared traitors and hired multiple PMCs to silence them.

Part 3 consists of the heroes being on the run from the MegaCorp, trying to rally some of La Résistance's members who were personally loyal to the Char Clone. Even so, the situation is so desperate that Time Travel is what ends up giving the heroes a chance for Part 4 - by saving the Char Clone and showing him the evidence to recruit La Résistance to their cause, then moving against the MegaCorp in secrecy while the MegaCorp is busy chasing their past selves.

Regarding Voidstriders. Like stated above, they're not a new and revolutionary technology but have been around for some decades now, so no one considers them anything unusual. They first appeared during Corporate Warfare and the military, after seeing their effectiveness, immediately jumped in on the bandwagon themselves. I'm still not sure about the exact control scheme but it is not a Motion-Capture Mecha (the protagonist is not very athletic, plus a human body would be incapable of replicating the kind of maneuvers Voidstriders can pull without spraining muscles and dislocating joints in the process), nor does it require an Unusual User Interface (which the protagonist, not being a trained pilot, obviously wouldn't have). Appearance and mobility-wise, they are between an AC and an Orbital Frame.

Voidstriders are primarily designed to operate in zero gravity, not on the surface; accordingly, they don't have a permanent foot but instead fold out the tip of their leg into a high-heel shape when they need to walk on a solid surface. Their anatomy is mostly humanoid but they rely exclusively on integrated weapons instead of hand-carried ones frequently seen in fiction. The great majority of them don't even have articulate hands; the forearms end either in an Arm Cannon with a Blade Below the Shoulder strapped onto it, or the other way around. In fact, a Voidstrider with hands is usually considered an Awesome, but Impractical Joke Character by professional pilots. The protagonist's Bigger Stick has articulate hands but no hand-carried weapons, allowing the protagonist to use ImprovisedWeapons in his first battle as the Establishing Character Moment of his quick thinking (and later to defeat the Char Clone's Voidstrider by ripping out critical components).

So then, could this work or I shouldn't bother?

What does your protagonist want?

Why do they want it?

What stops them from achieving what they want?

Answer these questions in as few words as possible, and without name-dropping any tropes, please.

He primarily wants to just survive the whole thing and go back to his previous life.

The why should be obvious from that. I mean, doesn't being alive beats being dead?

Aside from all the bad guys trying to kill him, he also has to risk his life because his conscience won't allow him to let someone else die instead of him.

edited 20th Feb '15 4:34:47 PM by amitakartok

Tungsten is asking you to examine your protag's deeper motivations, which will provide the foundation for any character development you have him go through. It will also provide you with the basis of the story's ultimate conflict. So you should invest some time in thinking about that in a detailed and extensive way.

Yeah, what Marquis said. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

The core reason why he doesn't bail out on his comrades despite not being soldier material is because he considers their lives more important than his own. With no parents, his guardian seemingly having walked out on him, being unattractive and not good at interacting with people, his self-esteem is in the ground. He's not a Death Seeker but "better me than someone else who doesn't deserve it" is still his core motivation for risking his hide.

With that said, he's also selling himself short with self-deprecation. His gamer past, his escapism from reality, also happens to be the one thing enabling him to save lives: while the simulators he played weren't exactly realistic, that fact is also what results in him regularly pulling balls-out crazy-ass maneuvers professional Voidstrider pilots wouldn't have the nerve to attempt but he does all the time in games, resulting in his enemies thinking he must be some kind of insane supersoldier with a lifetime's worth of training. And he never could've gotten into gaming if he had been popular and extroverted. So a key point in his character development would be him realizing that being the kind of person he is (and dislikes) is precisely what allows him to make a difference.

"My life sucks and I suck, but here's one thing I'm said to be very good at and can do to make a difference, saving lives in the process. So why not do it?" That's why he pilots.

edited 22nd Feb '15 9:50:26 AM by amitakartok

Hmm.

So far, your main character sounds completely passive. He doesn't choose to become a mecha pilot - the role is thrust upon him. He doesn't choose to oppose the antagonists - they attack him first. About the only thing that seems like an active choice is his decision to stay on as a mecha pilot, but even that seems more like a submission to external pressures than a choice made of his own free will.

Where's his agency? Where's his drive? When does he start making decisions on his own? When does he start taking action on his own terms? Ideally he should start right at the beginning of the story, when the Inciting Incident rolls around. When something comes along and disrupts his status quo, he should be taking action to adapt.

Yes, staying alive is one thing, but is there really nothing else driving him? Does he not want to know what's going on, or why people are trying to kill him? Does he not want to strike back at the people who messed up his quiet life? Does he really just spend the whole story doing what everyone else tells him to do?

He didn't become a pilot because he was told to. He climbed into that thing himself to stop the marauding mooks, nobody told him to do it - though he did need the Bridge Bunny's voice identification to unlock the anti-theft system lock and subsequently carried her around in the cockpit throughout the battle to both ensure she's safe and to ensure he's not going to be mistaken for a hijacker. That actually prompts crewmates to wonder whether The Dulcinea Effect was in play in his decision to get involved and stay involved; he denies it but he's not being entirely truthful there, at least not later on.

He's told about it early on.

Not for his own but once the defense contractor's meddling becomes clear, he indeed wants to strike back at the people who messed up everyone's life (his own included).

edited 23rd Feb '15 5:20:39 AM by amitakartok