Some of you may remember my posts in the past.
I'm not just doing all that for nothing. I said long ago that I was making something good.
I was inspired by the inherent crappiness of this fic:
http://lolanime.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/hftow-ch-1-the-land-behind-the-boundary/It's got a plot, a good premise, and understood the importance of music in any story.
But I read it, and I couldn't go on. First, it gave the impression that a little kid wrote it, with so many deus ex machinae and plot loops. Second, the main character contacted every last person in Gensokyo, and I couldn't lose the feeling that it was way too out of character. Last, it failed to maintain suspension of disbelief.
Rather than sit at my desk and flame the author about how much it sucks (I did that in my troll years) I decided that I could make a better one.
Since I was doing many hobbies in my spare time, like research in strange scripts, programming, and thinking up stories in my mind, I decided to coordinate all that in a giant project.
The base of all this is suspension of disbelief. Reading crappy fanfics hardened my will to make sense of everything, so that it becomes believable. That probably caused problems.
I chose Gensokyo as a filler because it was literally just an almost empty world, which probably contributed to it's success. (The fans do the thinking for you, making it the ultimate crowdsourced story.) To use a metaphor I heard somewhere, a good fictional world is like a impenetrable opaque box (which has all the secrets), letting out only a little bit of light (the few facts we get about the world).
Everything else is a variable. People make fanfics to give their ideas about what happens inside the box. (like, where things are, how the people interact, what happens, how they look) but have only touched upon very little about anything in it.
Now those are fanfics. What I'm doing is a fanfic on steroids.
I want to provide an underlying framework upon which the entire story operates. Then, I make a story relying on that framework. To put it in words, I am recreating Gensokyo from my perspective, from my logic. I'm trying to be as close to canon as possible, but I'm taking a few liberties.
Some people were offended that I'm imposing my ideas on that world.
But that was the point. I'm filling in the blanks of the unknown box, just like any writer would do.
But, I never explained my wills and reasons properly, causing huge amounts of misunderstanding, and miscommunication.
A huge majority of this adaptation is original work. The synopsis of the story I'm making is about a group of heavy infantry, sent to a stop a coup somewhere near Asia, accidentally wandering into an illusionary world. The major focus is not on wars and battles, which in fact, I'm not sure I should show at all, but it is on the hardships that the soldiers faced before joining this unit.
The nation these soldiers come from is almost an anarchy. Huge government rollbacks, trying to raise money to cut taxes and national debt, cause a huge amount of hardship. While their budget deficit is zero, it was made at the cost of the defense of national interests (the end of Economic regulation, Food regulation, etc) and infrastructure maintenance. The roads are potholed and useless, and anything useful is controlled by corporations that make public use impossible.
Quality of life is really bad for the majority of the people, which I call the proles, (proletariat) and opportunities are restricted to a few people, the hicks. (english loanword for Hikikomori) The hicks live a privileged and opportunistic life, but never leave their tall buildings, for fear of attack from the proles. That makes them antisocial and unsuited to human contact. The proles are very social, and seem to have more fun than the hicks. However, they live a dangerous, hard, and short life.
There is not only class divisions. This nation has fallen apart into a disjoined group of states. Two sides quickly manifested, the Nationalists and the Libertarians. The Nationalists consist of states that maintained government after the feds pulled support for it. Quality of life is bad, but have been successful in pulling themselves out. The Libertarians have no written boundaries to freedom, but in practice are ruled by militias that rule like dictators. The people are brainwashed by their own will, believing whatever they say on extremely biased news channels. The militias kill political enemies in a strange way, by claiming that they were ordinary citizens murdered by evil agents of the Nationalists who "want you to be next". It causes mass panic, and is effective in creating perpetual war against a nonexistent "socialist" enemy.
That is the background of that nation. The soldiers have their own sad histories.
One guy, Mustafa Abdul Al-Rahim, lost his wife in 9/11. He joins the army getting sent to Iraq, where he saves many soldiers as a combat medic, and later as a unit commander. As time goes on, each new team assigned to him hates having a Muslim commander, and mutiny. Fearful of bad press, the Army dishonorably discharges Mustafa, not the rebelling soldiers. He comes back home to find his house burned by a lynch mob, and he is narrowly saved by police, who send him to Washington to be deported to Iraq. He made huge amounts of enemies as a U.S. soldier there, so he fears for his life again, cursing "Hard work pays off." A general passes by, notices his former commander, and decides to save Mustafa by recruiting him into an extralegal unit.
Another guy, Nicholas Sciezkak, losing his job, his family, and all his possessions, decided to jump off a bridge. He decides against it when a lost boy asks him for directions. He leads the boy back to his house, where his family give him a nice reception, a job, and hope. But, the man loses everything again when the boy and his family dies of food poisoning. He goes back to the bridge, but jumps back, remembering the boy's last words, "Never forget that you still have a future". He lands on a recruitment officer, who gives him a new opportunity by giving him a rare job as a soldier.
These are just two stripped-down examples out of the group, and each soldier's background and character is revealed.
Of course, what i'm writing is not all sad. Arriving in the illusionary world, and surviving to the village, they find a world which lives carefree and idyllic lives, in stark contrast to the soldier's bleakness. They warm up, and participate in a strange happenstance, involving other outsiders.
However, the soldiers decide that they cannot stay, and as they have a duty to go back and fix their hopeless world.
That is the story I had in mind for the entire time. That was just an emotionless generalization, so expect the real story to be much better.
I hope you understand better about what I had in mind. I should have made all this clear from the start.
