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I'm a Sentimental Old Sap


Pahrak Model ZX

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I have this problem in regards to fanfiction where I think about the ridiculous ideas I came up with in my younger days with such undue fondness that I start trying to rework it and see if I can salvage the concept and redo it. So, story time!

 

(Oh gosh I really have to explain this I’ve been dreading this day)

 

For several of my BZP years, I was working on a long and convoluted series of stories known as Bioni-Lords. It started out as a story where Bionicle characters were Pokémon, but then I changed things so that, rather than sending out the Bionicles to fight, the humans would fuse with the Bionicles to gain their weapons/powers/etc. And then go and fight Gym Leaders while being hunted by a criminal organization. So, it still wasn’t all that different, really. As this coincided with the beginning of my weeaboo phase (gosh I hope it was just a phase), the scope quickly expanded and I began including “Bioni-Spirits” for characters to fuse with that were based on characters from just about anything—anime, video games, movies, books, and so on. (I also let other people submit Spirits, so at the time of the series’ cancellation the count was…1683? Dang. On the other hand, take that Pokémon! We got more!) The plot only got more confusing from there, with the sequel tossing in an exponentially larger amount of weirdness, and then I started on a prequel that…well, by then I’d like to think my writing had improved and it was decent enough, but then I got super discouraged thinking about the things I would need to do to keep that story in line with the overall canon I had decided on when I was 12 and concluded it would just be best to drop the story and dump all the ideas I was going to use into a few blog posts in case people wanted to read about them. So, that’s it, time to move on, right?

 

(Man there are some serious run-on sentences in this post)

 

…Well, okay, even when I was cancelling the series I still wanted to do something else with the concept. I tried simplifying everything as much as possible and seeing where that would go, and ended up with The Blade of Valor, which I then began to expand into The Kaita Legacy. Though, now I’m feeling like those might be erring too far on the “dark and gritty” side, so…I’d still like to finish Kaita Legacy, but maybe I should explore other options as well.

 

Honestly, a big part of the fun I had with Bioni-Lords was that whenever I got a new hobby or a new idea, I could incorporate it in some form and things would keep going. I thought of it as a “Fanfiction of Everything”, and while part of me feels like that’s innately off-putting, I still just…really, really want to do that again. (Especially with Bionicle being rebooted. It’s given me very targeted motivation.) Of course, even if I were to do that, I know I should probably drop that massive Spirit list and take a new, much more streamlined approach to things (limiting the list only to Spirits that actually show up in the story, at the very least). I could probably also drop the more Pokémon aspects—some of these I abandoned even in the story, things like fixed HP and attacks, they just really limit what you can do in a fight more than I usually liked to. Instead, it’d be better to just state what abilities and equipment a Spirit gives, along with maybe a few specific named technique, and see what the characters do with those. Or, maybe have a basic transformation for characters that can then be customized by adding the abilities and equipment of characters from various things? (Plus some original stuff, probably.)

 

(I mean…I don’t really want that giant list to go to waste, so I’ll probably preserve it separately from the new list I’ll have to make, even if I hide that old list forever out of shame)

 

And I mean, the plot will probably still be more like a long-running manga (both of the original Bioni-Lords books that I completed ended up having over a hundred chapters), so I’d probably just embrace that and try to come out with a (probably pretty short) chapter each week or something. That of course presents difficulties that will never go away (both from a time and writing standpoint), but eh, if I’m embracing the manga style, then that comes with it and I’d probably be okay with that. Besides, if I did end up doing something like this, it’d really be for myself, so, who would be there to complain? :P Course, then there’s the question of “why do all this writing if you don’t expect anyone to read it?” but, I mean, it’s still practice, I’m still writing, that in and of itself should be good. And I’m pretty sure it would be a better idea than that one Final Fantasy story I was also considering redoing.

 

(Come to think of it, since this time I know already that I won’t be sticking to Bionicle Spirits I should probably just put it in OTC. I mean, you know, if I were to do this. Hypothetically.)

 

I guess what I mean by all this is that the nostalgia blinders-induced motivation is evolving, I already have a bunch of brainstorming stuffed in a document, it seems it may only be a matter of time until I start a new ridiculous and convoluted Bioni-Lords successor, SAVE YOURSELVES.

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The idea of rebooting something old is pretty alluring. I'm guilty of never letting a project die as well, I'm constantly reworking stuff I dropped years ago because I thought the idea was stupid!

 

Bioni-Lords actually sounds...familiar? Did you ever post it on here?

 

If you think it's worth pursuing even just for yourself go for it :U

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Yeah, BZPower was the only place I posted it.  Due to the forum crashing the only parts left are a topic containing the last 30ish chapters of the second book and what I did of the third, plus then a virus hit my computer and deleted all my documents.  A lot of it survives only in my impossible to decipher handwritten notebooks, but that's probably for the best.

 

And after posting this I realized that I started the first book exactly ten years ago so now I feel compelled to go ahead with this as an anniversary thing, dang it I think it's really happening.

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