What Could Have Been II

[MethodicalSlacker]

Copy-pasted shamelessly from the previous thread, in the tapa-talk wastelands:

Lets face it, we've ALL had ideas for what our characters could do on the island which we never got around to actually doing. Whether it was because the character in question died too early, or someone else's character died too early, or you decide that the idea in question is actually a lot dumber in hindsight then it seemed at the time. Everyone I think has at least one idea they wanted to try out at some point with their characters, but for whatever reason the idea never came to fruition.

Which is why i've decided to set up THIS thread. Basically, its just for sharing any ideas you had for your characters to do which you never got around to/decided against/completely forgot about/etc... This can include:

Character Development that never came to fruition.

A humourous moment which was later deemed too stupid to actually try out.

A certain interaction with a certain character (Maybe you were given someone's deathrights, only for your character to end up dying first?)

A specific death scene which had to be compromised for time.

An intended Face Heel Turn/Heel Face Turn that never actually happened in the end.

Etc......

As a note, though, it'd probably be best to only mention ideas for characters who're already dead. After all, you wouldn't want to unintentionally spoil anything about your survivng character(s), would you?

It's a new version and we have substantial numbers of dead characters so go at it! And while you're at it feel free to copy paste from the old thread as well, linked right here.

[MethodicalSlacker]

[+] Ye Old V6 Regerts

CrossBowPig - 07/25/2017
Right now I'm concerned with something a little more immediate:
Post 300

Cicada - 07/25/2017
u coming in for the kill
damn
milestonez

CrossBowPig - 07/25/2017
I'm gonna do a long-ass "What Could Have Been" post
Post mortem

Cicada - 07/25/2017
oh huh this'll be cool

CrossBowPig - 07/25/2017
Yeeeeeeee

Cresting Broken Plains: The V6 Handler-Formerly-Known-As-CBP Self-Indulgent Postmortem-y Thing

Introduction:
I've been feeling kind of navel-gazey recently. A good wallow in your own feelings can't really hurt you, as long as it isn't what you spend most of your time doing, but lately a lot of this introspection has been directed towards several of my missed opportunities during my first version on SOTF Main. A lot of these won't exactly be plans that fell through entirely, but missed opportunities, or points where my experience could have really, truly, changed, for better or for worse. Some of these will be reaches, and others will be what I hope are interesting insights into my process writing Arthur Bernstein and Lili Williams. I'll start with the most speculative and work my way up to an actual error I made that I'm pretty sure not many people (if any) have spotted on their own. Let's begin, shall we?

Arthur Could Have Gone With Henry Spencer And/Or Jasper Bustamante:
Writing the dynamic between Arthur and Coleen Reagan with Kilmarnock was one of my favorite parts of V6. Without that dynamic, I don't know if I would have been able to shape Arthur's narrative into the focused, pointed work that it turned out to be otherwise. However, the impact of this decision on the rest of both his and Henry and/or Jasper's stories would have butterfly-affected so many that I feel that, despite the reach-y nature of this hypothetical, it's worth including here. Speaking of Arthur, something else I lose sleep over is his death.

Lili Could Have Died Earlier If I Didn't Swap In Arthur:
Arthur's death was, admittedly, pretty damn well timed. Building the trust between Coleen and Arthur, from stressful situation to stressful situation, went on long enough for the absence of Arthur from Coleen's life to be emphasized in her behavior, and yet didn't drag so long that Arthur's dying first became a foregone conclusion. At the same time, Lili was in-between story threads at this point in time, having just decided she was completely done with Darius Van Dyke's escape plan. I don't know exactly how I would have killed her off at this point (I had vague visions at some point of a harrowing encounter between Lili and the Isabel Ramirez/Lily Caldwell duo). At the very least, it would have prevented one of her more egregious errors from spreading too badly later on, but we'll get to that later on. On Arthur's side, this could have squeezed a few more drops of real tension out of him and Coleen's strange friendship. I'm happy that things turned out the way they did, though.

Lili Could Have Not Left Benjamin Lichter and Maxim Kehlenbrink:
This one ultimately came out of my own impatience. This early on in my SOTF career, I still had not learned how to wait patiently for others to post. So, when I thought that Ben and Maxim were taking too long to wake up, I had Lili go and throw her shoes into the ocean. I probably intended for her to go back to Ben and Maxim, but eventually decided that if they did wind up meeting again Lili would have wanted to leave for real and that would just wind up being redundant. We're getting close to the big, big redundancy now, but I think there's just one thing I want to touch on before I get to that career-ruining revelation.

Lili's Death Could Have Been Planned Better:
I won't say much here, because a lot of this isn't mine to say. I primarily want to apologize for how much of a dick I was when it finally came time to kill of Lili and I still hadn't learned how to be patient yet. Her actual suicide was fine, but the thread prior had a lot of stress going on behind the scenes, and I'll leave it at that.

Which, finally, brings me to-

The Sports Strap:

Here we go.

Let's set the scene a little before I jump into the big fuck-up. In the thread My Human Gets Me Blues, Lili takes off her glasses and puts them in her pocket. She does this because, over the past few days, they've become so scratched up and smudgy that she's been unable to clean them in any meaningful capacity. Darius enters the room, and asks Lili if she's willing to help him carry the body of Jasmine King, which was lying in the middle of the room, for his escape plan attempt. She agrees, and the two carry the body out onto the bridge. While on the bridge in God In Three Persons, the subsequent thread, the glasses fall out of her pocket and are never seen again. Lili's sight problems get a little worse over the next few days, and factor into quite a few of her more hasty decisions, including, in some part, her catastrophic inability to sympathize with Asuka Takahara in Ship's A Goin' Down, the blurriness of Asuka's face matching the blurry line in Lili's mind between friend and foe.

There's one problem with all of this, though.

Lili should have never lost the glasses.

Take a look at these few sentences from Lili's profile.

On the day of the kidnapping, Lili was wearing a blue sweater and black jeans. Underneath her sweater she wears a red Frank Zappa T-Shirt. For footwear, she wears blue Chuck Taylor sneakers that she bought the previous summer. Her glasses are attached to her head with a sports strap, a precaution she has taken since her early schooling.

Did you catch that? Let's zoom in a little closer. Good, good, now, enhance!

Her glasses are attached to her head with a sports strap, a precaution she has taken since her early schooling.

If you don't know what a sports-strap is, it looks like this:



I'm unsure if you can tell exactly from the photo, but having worn one of these myself, they're affixed pretty tightly to your head when you wear them. So tightly, in fact, that you'd want to let your glasses droop around your neck instead of take them off if you were being annoyed by just how smudgy they had started to get. If you had been wearing them since grade school, like Lili, you probably would have been used to doing this instead of leaving them in your pocket, and if you had been wearing the strap to avoid losing the glasses specifically because you're a massive ditz, then you'd definitely not just put your glasses in your pocket.

So, what happens when Lili doesn't lose her glasses? A whole lot of stuff, really. She probably wouldn't have spent so much time running in circles and getting drenched in the rain - in fact, she might have even fought Leslie Price if, I dunno, she could have seen her - she wouldn't have relied so heavily on others during the second half of her run, and she most definitely would have had a harder time shooting Asuka. Some of these changes would have played out for worse, and others for better, but the one thing tying them all together is the disappearance of Lili's Sports Strap - a glaring omission, by any measure.

It took me a good five months after she died for me to realize that I had even given her a Sports Strap. Why did I do it? Was it specifically so that I could avoid the overplayed Scooby-Doo "Oh no, my glasses!" trope? Was it so that I could give Lili something visually remarkable, something that would make her generally safe and reasonable appearance a little more notable? Or was it specifically so I forget, like a paper town on the map I had charted out in my own head, forgotten in the mess of my own amateur cartography, a repressed reminder of my own vapid meandering so well hidden that even I, its creator, would eventually pack a bunch of food and clothes into the back of a green 1982 Ford Escort and set my GPS to the city of Sports Strap, Arizona, hoping to find a place to start a new life?

More importantly, why didn't anyone else point it out to me? Was it really so forgettable of a character detail that it escaped the minds of two different artists, a good 15+ thread partners, and anyone else who happened to read her along the way?

Guh.

Conclusion:
I loved my time writing in V6. I have no idea how most of these changes, if they were what took place, would affect how Lili Williams and Arthur Bernstein's stories played out. The one thing I know for sure, though, is that the choices I did make - consciously or by mistake - led to some of the most fun I've had as a writer, both in the SOTF universe and as a writer in general. I highlight these not out of regret - well, mostly - but because they were good food for thought.

I hope you had as much fun reading my kids as I did writing them.

- Methodical Slacker

tl;dr No you can't have Lili for SC3 I have unfinished business on this bitch of an Earth.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Okay well no takers so far so I guess it's up to me then.

Here's something I wrote and abandoned because it was kind of fucking nuts. The goal was for it to come out and sort of thematically kick-start the stories of all my kids thematically and I don't know if it would have been a good thing to finish but it felt kind of self-indulgent and semi incestuous so I canned it. I've had the thought to rework it as a memory but I'm posting it to prevent myself from doing that.

Yeah. I'm talking about the QUADPOST

I'm not going to format the entire thing with columns here. I'm just going to give you a link. It's expressly non-canon. I was going to give it a very terrible title. {S} Convene.

Yeah, a Homestuck reference. If you thought I had any integrity left, don't.

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

The one thing I wanted to share at this moment was that Camilla, in the earliest stages, was meant to explicitly have paranoid personality disorder- and the effects of that would have changed her trajectory, especially on island quite a lot. I didn't think I could write that well, so that was called off but I kind-of sort-of intended to drop hints towards it still being a thing but not as explicit and well long story short I ended up completely dropping that idea. I'm kind of pretty glad I didn't go that way, honestly.

[ItzToxie]

Em Em would’ve been a thing most likely. At some point I planned on Emil poking fun at Emmett, saying that he reminded him of Haida from Aggretsuko, before trying and failing in the most absolutely dorky way to ask him out.

[Ryuki]

Ned Jackson was originally my self insert, however, the more I developed his character, he became only a fraction of myself and my interests.

Originally, I wanted Ned to die sacrificing himself to save a friend. However, because of a few errors on my part, I decided to get his death over with, that way everyone involved could move on. In the end, while Ned tried to talk things out to someone who attacked a companion of his, he was shot from a distance by another killer.

[Grand Moff Hissa]

I might port all my old stuff someday, but for now fresh things only.

Phillip Olivares:

• All In The Telling is Phillip's only Pregame thread: Basically, I thought it might be fun to explore a character entirely through overhead monologue, and figured if I was slick enough I could establish most important traits in that format. I knew from the start that I was going to bring Phillip into the game (he started out as a concept entirely created to make Yugi sprite someone in full clown attire, and I felt it would be impolite to not commit and use him after that), but figured I could do one big high-effort thread and call it a day. But then I got this really interesting offer about Morton's List...
• Phillip and friends actually play Morton's List: Basically, the Morton's List thread was intended to lead into the game and associated craziness, but there were in retrospect a few planning hurdles. We spent so long on setup/walking through the wwwwhhhhooolllleeeee process that it took up a massive chunks of Pregame for all characters involved and folks had other stuff to do, so we let the die hit 13 and called it a day.
• Phillip and friends actually play Morton's List 2: Electric Boogaloo: After the first Morton's List thread kinda ran out of steam, I proposed (maybe just to MS; I forget) that we reconvene near the end of Pregame and smash-cut into scene as the die hits the table establishing the quest, and try a mulligan just blazing through a game. Didn't ever really get this off the ground or organize it, though.
• Phillip's death is an outrageously long setup with a terrible punchline: This is the big one! I originally planned to end Phillip's story with this crazy sequence where, as he's about to get shot or stabbed in the face, time dilates and his internal monologue goes off on an incredibly huge tangent that turns into another joke a la All In The Telling, bookending his story and closing right as the bullet or blade or whatever hit. I had this vaguely up my sleeve for most of the game, but getting it where I wanted would've taken a lot of work and prewriting. What really killed this, though, was that as the lighthouse scene came together, I realized every option I had come up with for making it go down would've been really, really disruptive to the flow of the scene in progress and basically yank the spotlight away from everyone else, which would've sucked. I think the idea was strong in a vacuum, and it would've been very funny (albeit only to me), but also just did not play with everything else I ultimately wanted to do with him, so it had to go.

[Melusine]

I’m the reason why we didn’t Morton list oops

[Grand Moff Hissa]

I’m the reason why we didn’t Morton list oops

Nah, I think everyone had sorta fallen off pace besides, too. I know I let the thread sit for weeks more than once. ><

[Cactus]

Ariana Moretti:

Basically the only reason that Ariana came to be was because I had been wanting to tell the story that I did with her and Ross, but with someone else playing the in-game gf role. I had a ton of trouble finding anyone who was interested in the concept, so I just did it myself. While I didn't want to run both sides of the relationship for obvious reasons, I do think that it did allow me a level of control over how I told the story from each side. When I made Ariana up, she really didn't change much. She was always going to enter the game, and at that point I think that staff had announced that we were having a four character cap, so it made it easy to decide. Very close to the application process, I had a small thought about swapping the two and leaving Ariana behind, but Ross was a weaker character who I'd tried very hard to keep even-keeled in pregame, so I thought it would have been a waste of setup and so I kept with the original plan. Ariana was always planned to either be my longest-lasting character or my first character gone depending on how the chips fell, and when they did as they did, she fell first.

[Frozen Smoke]

So, I had some light plans for the first few days of my characters that ended up not coming to fruition for a variety of reasons, and whilst I have many more "Could have been"'s since, the core ideas of those might end up being reusable somewhere down the road in V7 so I'd rather not tip my hand.

Parker Green

So, my initial plan for Parker was fairly specific, but I felt like the prerequisite circumstances for it would be fairly likely to occur. I wanted him to either join a group that was trying to escape, or found one if necessary, and playing people off one another to detract from suspicion from himself whilst trying to make out like he had some plan. I somewhat called on my thoughts on how Parker might do this as a reason for him being in Dystopia, finding relatively easy to get information that provided a sense of progression and understanding to others without really probing too much at the mechanics of escape, due to the danger presented to his life.

Wasn't entirely sure how it would end. People realising what he was up to and turning on him, him robbing them in the night as he did with Aoi/Garren, trying to cut off a loyal core - Kind of all depended on what group I could subtly slip Parker into the dynamic of in Day 1. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get Parker into any group, and most of them seemed to already have some form of internal storyline I didn't want to disrupt by the time Day 2 rolled around, so instead I did a scaled back version with Aoi and Garren (thank you very much Zetsu and Pippin for letting me bully your children) that hit most of the same character beats I wanted to a lot quicker so I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

Faith Marshal-Mackenzie

Now, Faith's plan on Day 1 went off without a hitch, my hope was to give her the worst day of her life on the first day of the island and I think I got that. But the plan was for her to pull herself together for her friends, as she was originally supposed to be woken up after falling asleep somewhere by........

Demetri. RIP.

Unfortunately character availability issues prevented the two from ever meeting, and whilst I toyed with the idea of finding someone to replace him, I'm actually pretty happy with the storyline that came about as a result of throwing Faith into an open thread literally screaming. Sometimes things just work themselves out!

[Jilly]

Abel Zelenovic LIVES (for more than 45 seconds)!?!?

I'm not sure how common knowledge it is now, but I always planned for Abel to be a day 1 death. However the initial plan wasn't to do it right out the gate with a one post wonder, but near the conclusion of a wakeup thread.

However, about halfway through pregame I started thinking about the idea of how relevancy of deaths can be broken down into two parts: the actual scene as it goes on, and the repercussions of the actions of those involved. So, why not eliminate that initial context both IC and OOC and instead focus entirely on the after and its ripple effects?

Needless to say I'm very satisfied with how it went and the reception afterwards, and a lot of it I really do attribute to Espi since a majority of the twoshot was dependent on them and I really appreciate their willingness to go along with my ideas. But there was a moment or 2 where I did consider backing out and scrapping the death entirely and instead keep Abel around as an actual on island presence, meeting up with Max and the other baseball boys or who knows what else in that AU where Paloma doesn't beat him senseless.

However, I also think sometimes characters just need to die when they need to, and I feel Abel did just that.



Desiree Beck turns PLAYER!?!?

Another kind of big one but needing less explanation going into the game was that Desiree initially was my ride or die long game kid, being transparent for a second. Along with that, she was going to be my villain kid.

Her first thread happened out of pure luck, but what I wanted for her to do was lose her bags in some way right out the gate and from there start a downward spiral into robbing and killing out of necessity for survival. Obviously the losing bags worked out without planning so I was like great let's do this!

...Except, of course, she stumbled her way into grouping with Thomas and the OG Clout(less) Gang. So that arc was kinda put on hold just to see where things would go from there.

And then she ended up getting rolled early and instead got clout as Erika's first kill. There's the breaks sometimes, but I also think she died in a good place along with setting in motion the arcs for other characters so I'm satisfied. Just slightly disappointed about the RNG, but I think it worked out all things considered.



Ramsey Cortez plays a PIANO!?!?

Okay so imma be real and admit this was a huge stretch because Ramsey was my "just see what happens" kid, but a thread I thought about doing/integrate actions in was to have a grand piano somewhere inside the manor house and spend the better part of a day/doing a chill thread fixing and tuning it and playing it or something. IDK.

Obviously this never happened because of the whole Mercy murdering thing (THANKS, Kelly) and I couldn't think of a real way to propose integrating it with Madison and Nathan already occupying the place, so that was quietly dropped out of my cabinet of scene ideas.

[Tonyksin]

please delete

[Tonyksin]

Amelia the killer????
-
One of my original plans for sweet little baby Amelia was for her to eventually become my Player character. I planned on having her delude herself over time and some scary island experiences until she started to believe that she'd been abducted by aliens who were testing her by taking the form of all her classmates, leading to her going on a killing spree across the island hunting down all the alien pretenders. After discussing this idea with some other handlers and really thinking about the logistics of it all i decided to go another route and not take this path for her. But hey, it would have been pretty wild.

Lorenzo the Anti-hero?
-
Originally, Lorenzo was never planned to be my villain character. In fact, I planned for him to be somewhat of a reluctant hero on the island, running into situation after situation where he had to help people who, back in Chattanooga, he disliked or had animosity towards. In fact, I planned on him making a heroic sacrifice at some point to rescue whatever group he found himself in against a villain trying to take them out. But once I agreed to the Prom plot-line with Artem, and the ensuing rape scene, i realized that Lorenzo had taken a step past the point of no return, and the only path for him to take at that point was that of a player.

Regina toughens up?
-
Had Regina lasted longer on the Island, eventually i planned on her pacifism and non-violent policies to come crashing down around her as she watched people die again and again in front of her. This was meant to lead to a scene where she would discard her weak self and resolve to protect herself and others, with a important hair cutting scene where she chopped off her braid to show her resolve to change and become stronger. obviously her death nipped this in the bud, but it would have been fun to explore this aspect of her character. Maybe in a SC3 run?

[ItzToxie]

Widdly2diddly let’s crime it up!

So since this is my last month in v7 for the forseeable future, I may as well get some memes off my chest. Ima start with some Emil ideas I had.

Haha! I was just pretending to be retarded!

...Not really, but had Emil lasted longer, I’d have slowly revealed that he’s not the dumdum everyone thinks he is. I got to hint at it a bit with his elaborate plan to duel Lorenzo, but that being his death thread I had to pull some strings and put in some glaring holes that I, and if things were going the way I had hoped without rolls, Emil would have thought around. One scene I had set up in my head was something like Emil and Emmett wandering down a path. Emmett would be aware of them being tailed by someone, and would warn a seemingly unaware Emil that they were being followed. Emil would flash his tracker, and reply with something along the lines of “I know, and now they know I know.” Cue the chase scene. If he ever had the chance to use his tracker to outsmart an opponent I feel like his story could have had a big impact in the later game had he made it that far.

Emil wouldn’t have been a player hunter.

As the title says. Emil wouldn’t have used his tracker as a tool to fight back against the players, or even the terrorists. He had a very simple goal. Reunite as many people as possible. Yeah he stated it, and yeah the narrative heavily hinted that he was going to do it, but he kinda died so that didn’t happen. One thing I notice especially with rolls and storylines is that they tend to fucking die right before or right when people get to meeting and starting shit. With Emil and his tracker I was hoping to negate a lot of it and coordinate meetings with other kids so more people could spend time writing the storylines they want with the kids they want without the whole journey to find my friend shit happening beforehand only for them to die once they get close to doing it. Didn’t happen but that was my goal. But yeah on that, even if shit had gone tits up for Emil he wouldn’t have gone murder hobo hunting. People were killing eachother and he knew he couldn’t stop it, so he wasn’t gonna waste his time or the people he was with to attempt it. Dude was determined to die making the island as better of a place as he could, he didn’t care about icing fools. Though he would still fuck you up if you try to kill him, or at least your dignity if you ask Lorenzo, Emil would not hesitate to R.Kelly a motha if he had to.

Now to some Marco stuff now that the murder twink is not long for this world.

You get what you fuckin deserve!

Marco was meant originally to be a Joker-esque villain. He was going to be very black comedy oriented, with a focus on unusual improvised ways to murder. The original version I had in mind for him was something like a human Chucky doll or the leprechaun movies in that he fucked people over in some of the weirdest and funniest ways to kill people. The cult island of hippies with no plumbing or technology kind of made it hard to do though. Like, they don’t even have outhouses (do they have outhouses? I wanted to sleepaway camp 2 some disgusting fool that’d deserve it) anyways, like not only that, but his story took a different turn too, being less of a sadist for the sake of it and more of a Greater Daemon of Khorne or an Ork Warboss only in it for the fight. Probably never gonna happen with him now or in SC3, but that type of player is still on the drawing board.

Marco the... Hero?

No you read that right. Marco wasn’t going to be a hero persay but underneath all that sadomasochism and psychotic bloodlust I wanted to give him some heroic traits. Had he lived longer, some scenes I wanted to give him, were coming across someone who’s be scared of him due to his reputation, only for him to try and calm them down, and tell them he’s only looking for the ones that’d be fun to fight. I wanted a moment to make it explicit that he didn’t kill the helpless or the weak, and god help another player that did who compared him to them. (Arjen notwithstanding, though he was a special very justifiable case to be fair.) At a time, Marco would’ve gone player hunting not for any justice, but for the sake of finding worthy opponents.

Arjen Mans The Fuck Up.

So there was plans between me and Sh4de involving Marco and Arjen. Namely Arjen wasn’t supposed to die during the cliffs. The original idea was for Marco and Arjen to sort of form this Vaas and Brody farcry relationship where the two would constantly fight to undermine eachother at different intervals in their story, both developing in their own ways, with Marco going from passive aggressive little weenie into post apocalyptic war lord, and Arjen going from a passive aggressive weenie into an actual heroic dude. We could’ve had some mad max vs lord humongous shit go down, but shizzles happened.

Adonis dying would have made Marco snap.

Aka. Why I did the hero in the end. If Adonis were to die first, then Marco would have flipped his shit at the only person he’s ever cared for dying in front of him. Then instead of the fun one eyed bootleg warboy getting into fights with his chainsaw because fights are fun and getting hurt felt good, you’d get a sad one eyed crybaby getting into fights because he wanted to die. Does it sound familiar? Yeah because I already fucking did it. Jon Gully aka Emo Michael Myers the first. At that point there’d have been no fun in writing Marco because I already did it and his story would have fizzled out and I wouldn’t be having fun doing it. Why couldn’t I just have Marco not give a fuck about Adonis? Because it doesn’t fit his personality. He just found the one person he cares about only for them to die? Ayyy fugettaboutit. Yeah it doesn’t really vibe well. If I have to grieve, you best bet ima make a kid grieve. Anyways yeah, that’s why I heroed. Y’all can blame the rolls. I know they rigged! That’s why everyone always gets rolled right once they’re getting their story started! Tell me they don’t! I know you set it up that way, just like you putting chemicals in the water to turn the Kermits gay, and that Epstein didn’t kill himsel-*muffled plastic baggie suffocating noises followed by 3 shots to the back of the head.clintonfoundationintensifies.jpeg

We regret to inform you that Toxie has committed suicide today. It’s truly tragic that he ran himself over with a steamroller after ingesting antifreeze inside of a Gatorade tm Glacial Freeze bottle. He will be missed. Probably.

Anyways yeah, tinfoil batting aside fuck v7 rolls particularly. They were never this bad in v6. I’ll see y’all in tv3, v8, and sc3 when I inevitably bring back my v7 crew coz I failed yall (not really because the rolls did it, it’s not my fault this time I swear)

Dabs into the dumpster until next time.