Story idea, help appreciated.
Jan 20, 2012 21:22:34 GMT -8
Post by JW% on Jan 20, 2012 21:22:34 GMT -8
Okay, honestly I'm not sure if this project is going to go anywhere. I am a member in good standing of the City of Heroes MMORPG, and I write fanfiction about my characters exploits every so often, frequently using it as a soapbox for my opinions on other social commentary. Some mutant characters for example, talking about how everyone assumes their struggle is similar to being homosexual and how it's a painfully false dichotomy when you start to consider it.
For those who are unfamiliar with City of Heroes, it's basically a comic book superhero setting. Like Marvel Comics or DC, complete with a living legend "Superman" like character, and several others(the grim vigilante who lost his parents so now uses his millionaire inheritance to fight crime, etc). The exact setting isn't needed to assist me here, all you really need to know is it's a world where super humans, both heroes and villains, are very common. So even being a super hero doesn't make you special or above anyone else.
Anyway, I have a character I'd like to write about this time around... His hero name is Sky Fall(actually, it's a string of characters that means Sky Fall in another language, because obviously Sky Fall would have been taken). His outfit is two tone blue with a plummeting bird logo, he wears flight goggles and large high tech gauntlets. He was born a mutant with some minor electrical powers, primarily able to sense electromagnetic fields. The gauntlets freeze things to create superconductivity, letting him use his electrical powers more freely. So "Electrical Ice Blaster". He can fly by electromagnetism, repelling himself from any ferrous materials around him, but he's not very good at it, and at a young age he fell and hurt himself badly, and now is afraid of flying high(he hovers, but is afraid he'll fall again so he doesn't go very high).
Anyway, the story is meant as a slice of life with my usual political commentary. In this particular case it's about a recent news article I read. The idea that America is suffering an "epidemic" of disenfranchised young men. They live with their parents, they never even try to get a job(after the first three to five years failing they give up), they just sit in their room using recreational drugs(mostly pot), and playing World of Warcraft or other online fantasies. I found myself rather insulted by most of the article, primarily because I too play online games and spend a very large amount of my free time online(I don't use drugs and I have a job, even though it really sucks and is nothing like what my degree prepared me for, so I don't quite fit the mold being shown, but it was still insulting).
My idea was, what if somebody we'd normally look up to, namely a superhero, was in a similar situation? It seemed a reasonable idea for a story.
So, we have our hero, he has reasonably impressive powers, and I'd need to include some decent action sequences as he's doing his superheroing. Not sure what. Disarming bombs to stop arson attempts, rescuing victims from satanic cults, stopping self replicating robots or lavamonsters from beneath the earth... City of Heroes has plenty of "mundane" missions like that to choose from.
Then we have him come home. Show that he's introverted and associal. He spends most of his time quietly at home, a run down apartment building covered by his government stipend he gets for doing his superheroing. He lives on a college student budget, despite having several degrees, he occasionally fills out an application for an electrical engineering job(which he's overqualified for) but is turned down for various reasons. He plays online games, follows facebook(where his parents have given up nagging at him) and occasionally watches porn(I'm unsure of how to treat this one, his highly physically active lifestyle would probably give him a good hormonal boost, but given that his powers only work through super cooling his suit, it'd be like taking a cold shower for as long as he is being a superhero... not sure what kind of libido that would generate).
Additionally, another factor I wanted to include, though I'm not sure if it fits in this story or deserves one of it's own, is an experience I had when I was first job hunting. I had a job(janitorial services... this was back when I had to build my resume, so I was young and stupid) and I managed to get fired from it. Because I was "not a team player". There was another house keeper on the staff who, during lunch break one day, mentioned to one of the other girls how she was looking forward to making some money at the job... by using her lawyer boyfriend to sue somebody. "Sexual harassment is easy enough, my word against some other guys, who'd believe them?" At which point I(and the rest of the male staff) refused to go into one of the cabins alone with her for any extended period of time. Considering it normally took four people to do the housekeeping on any one cabin, I didn't think it would be a major problem. "No, I'm not going in there with you until our supervisor shows up. I don't care if it'll give us an 'early start'." It, apparently, was and I was fired.
Now the article I was working off of for Skyfall, the one with the disenfranchised young men, stated that they preferred porn to real women because porn was less effort... but I thought that mixing in the decidedly negative feelings I got from not only my first work experience, but a majority of my college experience as well. If one were to have such experiences without the equally positive ones I had, their disenfranchisement would be all the more reasonable and understandable. Which is kinda what I'm going for here, that the "failure to launch" crowd isn't their fault, it's the natural result of the society we have built. They're not losers, they're what they've been forced to become. This is the future, and it's not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
Too much? Too political? What's everyones thoughts? I'm a bit stumped on how to write some of the scenes and would appreciate some feedback on the over all idea.
For those who are unfamiliar with City of Heroes, it's basically a comic book superhero setting. Like Marvel Comics or DC, complete with a living legend "Superman" like character, and several others(the grim vigilante who lost his parents so now uses his millionaire inheritance to fight crime, etc). The exact setting isn't needed to assist me here, all you really need to know is it's a world where super humans, both heroes and villains, are very common. So even being a super hero doesn't make you special or above anyone else.
Anyway, I have a character I'd like to write about this time around... His hero name is Sky Fall(actually, it's a string of characters that means Sky Fall in another language, because obviously Sky Fall would have been taken). His outfit is two tone blue with a plummeting bird logo, he wears flight goggles and large high tech gauntlets. He was born a mutant with some minor electrical powers, primarily able to sense electromagnetic fields. The gauntlets freeze things to create superconductivity, letting him use his electrical powers more freely. So "Electrical Ice Blaster". He can fly by electromagnetism, repelling himself from any ferrous materials around him, but he's not very good at it, and at a young age he fell and hurt himself badly, and now is afraid of flying high(he hovers, but is afraid he'll fall again so he doesn't go very high).
Anyway, the story is meant as a slice of life with my usual political commentary. In this particular case it's about a recent news article I read. The idea that America is suffering an "epidemic" of disenfranchised young men. They live with their parents, they never even try to get a job(after the first three to five years failing they give up), they just sit in their room using recreational drugs(mostly pot), and playing World of Warcraft or other online fantasies. I found myself rather insulted by most of the article, primarily because I too play online games and spend a very large amount of my free time online(I don't use drugs and I have a job, even though it really sucks and is nothing like what my degree prepared me for, so I don't quite fit the mold being shown, but it was still insulting).
My idea was, what if somebody we'd normally look up to, namely a superhero, was in a similar situation? It seemed a reasonable idea for a story.
So, we have our hero, he has reasonably impressive powers, and I'd need to include some decent action sequences as he's doing his superheroing. Not sure what. Disarming bombs to stop arson attempts, rescuing victims from satanic cults, stopping self replicating robots or lavamonsters from beneath the earth... City of Heroes has plenty of "mundane" missions like that to choose from.
Then we have him come home. Show that he's introverted and associal. He spends most of his time quietly at home, a run down apartment building covered by his government stipend he gets for doing his superheroing. He lives on a college student budget, despite having several degrees, he occasionally fills out an application for an electrical engineering job(which he's overqualified for) but is turned down for various reasons. He plays online games, follows facebook(where his parents have given up nagging at him) and occasionally watches porn(I'm unsure of how to treat this one, his highly physically active lifestyle would probably give him a good hormonal boost, but given that his powers only work through super cooling his suit, it'd be like taking a cold shower for as long as he is being a superhero... not sure what kind of libido that would generate).
Additionally, another factor I wanted to include, though I'm not sure if it fits in this story or deserves one of it's own, is an experience I had when I was first job hunting. I had a job(janitorial services... this was back when I had to build my resume, so I was young and stupid) and I managed to get fired from it. Because I was "not a team player". There was another house keeper on the staff who, during lunch break one day, mentioned to one of the other girls how she was looking forward to making some money at the job... by using her lawyer boyfriend to sue somebody. "Sexual harassment is easy enough, my word against some other guys, who'd believe them?" At which point I(and the rest of the male staff) refused to go into one of the cabins alone with her for any extended period of time. Considering it normally took four people to do the housekeeping on any one cabin, I didn't think it would be a major problem. "No, I'm not going in there with you until our supervisor shows up. I don't care if it'll give us an 'early start'." It, apparently, was and I was fired.
Now the article I was working off of for Skyfall, the one with the disenfranchised young men, stated that they preferred porn to real women because porn was less effort... but I thought that mixing in the decidedly negative feelings I got from not only my first work experience, but a majority of my college experience as well. If one were to have such experiences without the equally positive ones I had, their disenfranchisement would be all the more reasonable and understandable. Which is kinda what I'm going for here, that the "failure to launch" crowd isn't their fault, it's the natural result of the society we have built. They're not losers, they're what they've been forced to become. This is the future, and it's not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
Too much? Too political? What's everyones thoughts? I'm a bit stumped on how to write some of the scenes and would appreciate some feedback on the over all idea.