One word to say for this, awesome. I found this to be a well thought out work and you should definitely work on this.
When I read this story twice, there's a case of Harsher in Hindsight when you notice that the previous Royal Swordsman is the one who impaled Moon's friend with his sword. Actually, the whole story is a case of Harsher in Hindsight when you find out that everything that you've believed in is a lie.
That's what I like most about this work, it shows people that when they learn how to think out of the box, they can change the world that caged them. People aren't imprisoned behind bars, they are imprisoned by their own lies. That's because they are Believing their own lies. The story may have be disillusioning, but it ended in a good note when Moon improved the Kingdom because of her actions.
If I were you, I'd name this... The Paragon or just Paragon. That's because the good guys are just Well-Intentioned Extremists and Child Soldiers that are forced to fight the La Résistance that are portrayed as Evil Overlords but are actually just people who were opposing the regime.
edited 21st May '16 4:08:16 AM by Victor_Skye
"In the grim darkness of the future, there is only war."The first draft of the script's done. The working title's "Day and Night.". Edit: The final one is "Story of Good and Evil."
It's done in screenplay format, and would be an hour and a half it were a movie - maybe shorter, because most of the text is panel descriptions.
I like it a lot, but of course I do - I wrote it - so I'd really like anyone else's opinion.
Also, if you want to go into it without knowing what I intended for it to mean, sure, because it honestly might be better that way., and it's supposed to check out as an adventure comedy even without all this stuff. But if not...
I changed the ending to be ambiguous. And none of this is explicitly mentioned, just heavily implied:
First, the Helios tells his side of the story as if it's true - both directly and through the constant propaganda throughout that half of the story, then there's the Halfway Plot Switch where Moon takes over the kingdom, and then she tells her own side of the story as if it's true.
Then, at the end, it turns out neither's completely telling the truth, they both might be completely lying, and neither one's entirely good or evil. Hence the name. And, if someone read it again, they'd find out even though they're mostly in fun or cartoony ways, every single conflict or disagreement in the story is Gray-and-Grey Morality. Even the two characters who argue about the Beast Fable backstory are just repeating what they learned as kids, and even though one of them sounds like he's completely right, it's never confirmed or denied. Even the Eldritch Abomination a soldier summons is like his pet dog, and neither of them wants to hurt anyone, just scare them off.
...Although Moon still really does improve the kingdom when she takes over and give everyone free speech, so it's implied that her being a Consummate Liar was worth it.
Or at least, that's how it's supposed to go, so anyone who'd be interested in giving feedback should probably let me know if it worked or not.
Also, sorry I didn't answer everyone's posts earlier. I didn't have time.
Finally, I've done a few sketches, and I'll post them soon.
edited 27th May '16 4:13:52 AM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.5 days. TBH, I got laid off from my job with zero notice last week - they just said "today's your last day, not your fault at all, in fact, you've been doing really good, but sorry." (It was part time, so they can do that).
I guess I was so just done with it all that I went home and wrote for 18 hours a day, barely eating and sleeping. (Thank fucking God I already paid next month's rent.)
I also found a process that helps me write faster. It's based on the "So or But" rule, which I just wrote about last night in Writers Block Daily. I might do something explaining it later.
EDIT: Also, it really, REALLY helped that I'd written a comprehensive plot outline beforehand - the one in the OP. Seriously, I recommend everyone do that, even if you don't post it on TVT.
edited 26th May '16 10:16:41 AM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.Also, I'm looking for a final name. "The Progenitor" isn't bad, but two things...
1. It's definitely not a cutely-drawn-magic-adventure-comedy title. It's more of a thriller novel. Or a dead-serious dark fantasy.
2. it's a massive spoiler, because in the script, we don't know Moon takes over the world . But I probably shouldn't use Day And Night because it's already a popular webcomic - even if it's a Fan Work and we're nothing alike - and I don't want to step on anyone's toes or read any more dumb "the fuck is this bruh" comments.
Speaking of that... Can I vent a little?
Edit: No I can't. I ended up rewriting that better on another site, anyway.
edited 28th May '16 4:18:44 AM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.Also, now that that's over with - sorry - I found a final title. "Story of Good and Evil." Why not "A Story?" Or "The Story?"
"Story" flows better, sounds less pretentious, is not taken, people would call it that anyway in conversation, and some, if they were trying to talk about it to someone who's never read it, might say "CS Jones's Story of Good and Evil," which is perfect. Plus, hopefully people will think it's a straightforward parody of Black-and-White Morality fantasy stories, only to find out that, actually, the first half = "good" and the second half = "evil."
edited 27th May '16 4:21:32 AM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.Hmm, that's a lot of posts there...
I honestly think I'll read the script later, since I'm too damn lazy. I might not be able to help you much, but I'll still be staying here anyway because I believe that you're really onto something.
I think "A Story" is better because it gives the reader a false sign that it's going to be a traditional good guy vs bad guy story that people find in children's stories. It also sounds better than "The Story".
Since there are animals in there that can talk, maybe changing the title into "A Fable" or "The Fable" would be more appropriate in context. It's just a suggestion. It also sounds more enchanting in my opinion.
"In the grim darkness of the future, there is only war."
It's neither "A Story" nor "The Story." Just "Story of Good and Evil." It's odd, but it still makes sense instead of being a Word Salad Title no one gets, so hopefully people will be curious about it.
Thanks for staying here. I've started trying to figure out what makes a "Page Turner" and see if I can write one so the reader's "laziness" doesn't come into it. I think I have a few, and I've posted some of them in Writer's Block Daily. ...Along with a bunch of other ones.
Edit: At the basis, I think it's a story where no one knows for sure what's going to happen (or why something weird happens if it's a Foregone Conclusion) but it still makes enough sense not to be a Random Events Plot, so they say "OK, I want to see where this is going."
Edit 2: And then you design everything in the story to heighten that feeling. E.G. Color symbolism, music, etc. But not in a way that's so in-your-face they just say "UGH, TYPICAL."
Edit 3: And don't explain it in-story, because that's just bragging and no one wants to read it.
But the first part is the most important.
edited 27th May '16 4:26:31 PM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.You underestimate the extent of my laziness, Wheezy. As one should not underestimate the power of fools, one should not underestimate the work one puts in doing absolutely nothing.
Well, I don't have any ideas about that... but why not name your story after certain events in the story such as "The Sun Year" or "Royal Children's Games"?
Those people aren't the audience I want.
No offense, it's just that the story contains all kinds of bizarre cultural references - even if they also make sense In-Universe - and a Jigsaw Puzzle Plot, so although I also think it works as a straightforward fantasy story, it doesn't work anywhere near as well if you don't get those. So if they nope out based on the title alone, they would probably have hated it anyway.
edited 28th May '16 12:48:02 AM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.I actually feel a bit motivated to read a bit today, so I've started reading your 110 page work. It was easier than I thought so I'll be progressing fast.
As for the title, I have really run out of ideas, sorry. Nothing hasn't come to my mind.
Holy shit, I loved that Mage tournament. I feel a little sorry for the boy, he won her game but lost the match. At least they got over it and are in good terms with each other.
Note: I installed a new game and I'm addicted to it. I'll probably finish reading your work in a week or so.
Spell check: You know, just to help out in a little way. (Work in Progress)
P.9 - The Leopard says that the boy is better at "tanking" hits.
p.15 - Royal Heroes - It consists of three children under the age of thirteen who are sent around the kingdom to "rek" forces of evil,
edited 29th May '16 1:40:51 AM by Victor_Skye
"In the grim darkness of the future, there is only war."
All intentional, two them modern gamer terms "rekt," "tanking hits" used intentionally for the contrast with the fantasy setting. Even though some people will think they're just misspellings. Although I might change "rek" if everyone thinks that.
Thank you, BTW.
Edit: Also, you might like the "Hostage Game," too. You'll see.
edited 28th May '16 3:03:03 AM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.I agree that those are not misspellings. I have seen both before.
I am not a fan of 'Tale of Good and Evil'. If I were browsing the list of Fantasy Webcomics, I think I would skip over it.
To clarify, "Tale" is a cliche. "Story" - and not "A Story" or "The Story" - is not. It also sounds odd and slightly modern, which this comic would be in spades. If 13-year-olds can fall in love with unbelievably verbose Homestuck, I don't think people will be thrown too much by a slightly odd title.
Also, a few random notes, to myself:
- The final version of the in-universe manual's title will probably be "The Encyclopaedia of All True Things." (No, I didn't misspell it, I'm simulating the ae character)
- It would be interesting to keep this thread open as a "diary" for everything related to it, so I'll have it in one place and we can kind of watch the story "evolve" into its finished form. Hope you don't mind.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness is my least favorite trope title to write. It always takes about 4-5 tries to spell it right.
edited 9th Jun '16 5:34:32 PM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.If I knew a more eye-catching version of that phrase, I would use it, but until then, this is the one I have. (Also, sorry if I sound kind of dickish in my past few posts, I'm just in a bad mood due to something IRL.)
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.Read it whenever you want. (Sorry about my own delay in responding. More Real Life stuff happened. Long story.)
edited 19th Jun '16 10:09:26 PM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.

Here’s a story I came up with yesterday. I really want to adapt it into a webcomic, although I won’t get to for a while because I’m busy trying to make more Yume Hime.
But, have you ever had one of those story ideas you just had to stop everything to write down? That happened here. And I MIGHT (huge emphasis on “might”) be able to start working on it at the same time, because I want to do it in a much simpler art style - think Cucumber Quest - which will hopefully take far fewer forevers than Y-H to draw.
Can’t think of a name for it yet. Shame "I Am a Hero" is already taken: that would’ve been perfect.
—
The legend goes like this:
Long ago, back before anyone can remember, the animals decided they were tired of the wild.
Life was short and brutal, there was never enough to eat, and they lived in fear—both of each other, and of the humans, whose towns grew bigger by the day. Soon, they feared, there might not be any “wild” left. But they couldn’t cooperate because they spoke so many different languages.
But one day, the rabbit king had an idea: “Friends,” he announced to his herd, “we will join the humans!”
There was a long silence.
“But Wise King Booplesnoot…” came a lone voice from the back, “Surely, they’ll boil us for their stew!”
“Yes, if we try now,” he responded, having well prepared for this. “So first, we must learn their language.” The herd agreed this could work, and the idea spread through the forest. So for years, they spied on the humans, and learned what they called everything. The birds listened from the housetops. The foxes convinced the dogs to report to them. Soon, united by a common language, they could organize.
One day, countless scores of them walked into the humans’ largest city. Everyone was too dumbfounded to attack them. They stopped in the town square, and there was a long silence before the largest bear spoke just three words…
“We will work.”
Sun Year 799
Every year, towards the end of the year, the Royal Children's Games are held. 15-and-under tournaments in swordfighting (with wooden ones, of course), magic, and tabletop strategy games are held all over the Sun Kingdom, the winners coming to the capital for the finals on Christmas eve. It’s bigger than the Superbowl fucking the Olympics, and the three winners are named the Royal Heroes, working directly for the king—Currently Helios XXIV—to defeat villains who want to take over the kingdom and seize the four orbs that destroy the world if someone manhandles them evilly.
A farmboy wins the first and becomes the Royal Swordsman, A Spoiled Sweet girl from an elite sorcery school wins the second and becomes the Royal Mage, and a bear cub dark horse contestant wins the third and becomes the Royal Strategist.
The king tasks them with defeating the evil General Moon, whose armies use black magic, and who’s amassed more power than any enemy thus far. However, being one of the few shadowy overlords who’s good at the “shadowy” part, the king doesn’t know where his hideout is or what he looks like. On their way out, they pass the head guard, a previous Royal Swordsman, who tells them he knows it sounds intimidating taking down an overlord, but they shouldn’t be afraid. “When they sent me to defeat one, we thought it was hopeless, but his forces were barely trained, with zero morale. Guess that’s what happens when you know you’re fighting for the wrong side. And his lair was a sorry sight. And get this: when I cornered him, he cried like a baby and begged for mercy! Just proves the ones who talk the biggest are always the smallest in the end.”
Word spreads around the kingdom that the Royal Heroes are coming for Moon, and the next day, he hijacks all the TV channels (this is one of those fantasy worlds that has a few modern technologies but only the plot-convenient ones) and, wearing a mask and scrambling his voice, tells them his hideout is in an abandoned castle in the Foreboding Death Mountains, and that if they don’t stop him by midnight on New Year’s, he’ll fire a device at the king’s palace that will “make this the last Sun Year.” …But that they’d better come alone, or it’ll happen sooner.
So, the Heroes book it to the hideout. And of course the king’s army comes with them, instructed to stay nearby and rush in if the Strategist gives them a signal. So our heroes break down the doors to find… A skeleton crew of henchmen (mostly animals, some humans) armed with non-lethal weapons and ordered to cast only stun spells. They reach the top with no lives lost on either side… But no sign of a doomsday device, either.
Waiting for them is the man from the video, who they quickly take down and unmask to find… Another henchman. They capture him and interrogate him, but he doesn’t know much—he just tells them he’s sad to know they haven’t figured out what they are.
They ask what that means, and he explains that the legend is true, but it doesn’t include what happened next:
The humans fed and clothed the animals in exchange for the work each type was good at, but adjustment was… Very hard. To put it mildly.
At first, they were given only the worst jobs and paid starvation wages. As the cities expanded, more of them were taken from the wild and forced into society, often against their wills. First, the wolves tried to resist, and were shot and poisoned by the thousands. The bears were dragged from the forest, beaten into submission, and forced to work for free. A hundred thousand cats were put in prison camps on suspicion of being spies. Humans put out of work rioted. Masked raiders kidnapped animals in the night to cook and eat. And the Helios dynasty grew rich exploiting both sides of the conflict.
Eventually, things got better, the animals gained rights, assimilated, and now—as they knew—lived in peace and on mostly-equal footing with the humans. But there’s still one big problem…
The army enters and drags him off before he can finish, but as they do, he screams, “Don’t you get it?! You’re assassins!”
Meanwhile, back at the capital, thousands of people—mostly animals, some humans—pour out of their houses and into the streets. The guards to the city gates are picked off with long range spells, and they’re opened to allow armies more to swarm in from the forests.
The real Moon stands at the entrance to the palace, takes off his mask to reveal he’s neither a human nor a “he,” gives a brief speech about freedom, and blows the palace gates off their hinges. A raging battle ensues between his forces and the remnants of the army who stayed behind, but it’s nowhere near enough to stop them. With the royal family and all the staff having been evacuated with the TV broadcast, they easily take the palace and break into the vault containing the orbs.
Moon Year 3
The royal family’s been deposed, the army’s been disbanded, Helios XXIV’s about to start trial, and Moon’s reign has been…
Pretty good! The budget’s been balanced, social services are better than ever, and the justice system’s even gotten fairer. The Royal Heroes have even gone back to their previous lives, unpunished… But one day, they’re all arrested and taken to the palace. They’re placed in holding cells, next to the former king, and left without a word.
The former Strategist simply asks him, “All the things in the news… Are they true?” He simply says, “Yes.”
After an hour or so, the former heroes are told Moon herself wants to see them, and escorted to her office, the former throne room. They find it a mess of papers and documents, with her sitting behind a desk buried under piles of the same.
She gets up and introduces herself. She’s a bookish, but genial, black cat. She apologizes for the wait, explaining that restructuring a kingdom from the ground up is much harder than you’d expect it to be—but that’s why they she’s suited for it. She hated having to wage war. “In fact, I never called myself a ‘general.’”
She asks if they know what the king did. Only the Strategist says yes.
So she leads them to an underground vault filled with mountains of gold. This, she explains, was stolen over centuries: Embezzled tax money, protection money from humans against animals and animals against humans, weapons sales to both, money earned from slave labor… In another room, locked in a massive vault, sit the orbs. They’re only here until she can find a way to destroy them: he’d been using the threat of global annihilation to keep other countries in line. …And worst of all, they’d learned generations ago that they couldn’t just kill their opposition in plain sight without angering the people, so they’d come up with a better way to do it…
When she was little and training for the Strategy Competition, her (human) tutor disappeared: rumor had it that he was a traitor. When she won anyway, a few years later, she was told she’d have to save the kingdom from the evil Malestro, a mastermind trying to destroy the kingdom from inside. But when they tracked down the “mastermind” in a modest building, the walls were covered in posters for a man campaigning against the king’s appointed governor. He had only a few tens of followers and guards left. And she knew him. And, as she knew, his name was “Maleno,” not “Malestro.” And when they cornered him in his top-floor office, he cried and begged for mercy, but the Swordsman unceremoniously impaled him.
She kept quiet about the whole thing, and was replaced by another Royal Strategist when she turned 15. …But it didn’t take her long to figure out what was going on: The “villains” were the Royal Family’s political enemies. They weren’t “taking over the kingdom,” they were trying to resist: some peacefully, some not, but none of them wanted to destroy the world. The king sent children as hitmen because they’d blindly obey and no one wanted to hurt them. They’d been doing this for generations. To ensure they got the most skilled ones, and to avoid that nasty term “child soldiers,” they created the Games, and made them so prestigious it was an honor to send your kid. …It was all exactly the kind of story that appealed to children. And after one year, or if they started asking questions, the kids would simply be replaced.
So she left the city and fixed up a beautiful old castle in the mountains, started wearing masks, and intentionally took on the alias “Moon” and the persona of a Classical Villain out of pure spite, and started reaching out to the people (mostly animals, some humans) who knew it as all a lie. She amassed an army of guerillas and spies and told them to storm the palace when they got the signal.
The signal would contain a date, a time, and the phrase, “make this the last Sun Year.”
As they leave, the Mage asks her why, if she isn’t evil, her armies used black magic. She tells them there’s no such thing: That’s just what the humans called the folk religions of the forest after they outlawed them.
edited 20th May '16 5:22:44 AM by Wheezy
Novel progress: The Adroan, 110k; Yume no Hime, 98k; The Pigeon Witch, on pause at 40k.