Musing on past writings, part 1.

I had this thought late last night about looking into some of my old writings. As I've probably said before on one incarnation of my site or another, I've saved my writing from 4th grade (9-10 years old, I think?) onward. Most of it before I started using the web is written on journals rather than typed out or put online.

I look back at them now and then, I guess partly to remind myself how far I've come as a writer, and a person. Holding those old journals in my hand is like looking at a relic. I mean that was 19 years ago, when I wrote the first one. Nearly an entire decade has passed.

This time, though, I was looking for something in particular. I was thinking about...

...how much I actually wrote rape and abuse into my stories. I was YOUNG back then, and when I think about it now, it's a little bit disturbing that I even had those sorts of thoughts in elementary/middle school. I'm sure I'm NOT the only one, but the part that saddens me is that kids shouldn't be thinking or feeling the kinds of things I did -- it's unhealthy for a child's psyche, to say the least.

My writing has gone through several phases:

9-11 years old - The Crystal of Dragonia. Which I believe I was trying to rename at one point. Zaryn Chronicles or something like that, when I was realizing that "Dragonia" sounded stupid. Dragonia had a twin planet, Dragistah, and I'd had them renamed Zaryn and Zarynth.

Anyway, this was my "fantasy opus", or as good as one can get when you're 10. :P I rewrote it at least once. It was inspired originally by Secret of the Unicorn Queen which was a short-lived girls' fantasy series in which an ordinary girl from Earth gets transported into this fantasy land, where warrior women ride unicorns and kick the arse of this evil magician guy. XD So yeah. The main character is totally this winged unicorn rider, because I thought putting wings on it would make it DIFFERENT! And all her friends are conveniently orphans who escaped from the cruel orphanage with her to become unicorn riding amazons.

Later on it gets even weirder, because I got all into watching my sister play Altered Beast and got completely *enamored* with the idea of weredragons. Which I called "weredragons" even though in my world, they never switched back into human form. They were more like dragonmen. :P Eventually the main character (Alistia, named that way for Alis from Phantasy Star 1) ends up actually being TURNED into a weredragon. WTF?

There were also plenty of dragons. I was into reading D&D books and liked all the different dragon types, so I made... something like 10-12 of my own? All of them based on gemstones, of course. Yeah, 'cause that totally makes sense. I eventually came up with a cosmology, even, a tripartite one: Stelwyn the "good" dragon, Zyzelonth the "evil" one, and Telvir, the Dragon of Balance (who, you might like to know, later ends up blending in with my concept of Breath of Fire's Ladon, later.) The gemstone dragons are all the children of Stelwyn, but the oldest among them, Diamiroth -- naturally the diamond dragon, duh -- goes eeeevil, and becomes one of the story's villains.

I should also mention that the first draft of my story has an evil, pink-furred cat witch in it. I do not shit! I was a weird little kid. But I did have to put cats into my story somehow (my first stories were all about intelligent / anthropomorphic cats) and so the catronas were born. Nothing much to say about catronas beyond that except that they're humanoid cat people with shapeshifting magic. :P

12-13 years old - I believe around here is when I started getting heavily into Wing Commander, and put aside my whole "fantasy opus" idea for a sci-fi / space opera one. :P It went through various incarnations, starting as a bonafide Wing Commander fanfic with myself and my sister as starfighter pilots (I was Scythe, my sis was Dragon) and developing afterward into an original fic because I had some sort of weird idea that I could PUBLISH that stuff.

It wasn't really all that good. Also, there was already the Man-Kzin books, on TOP of the fact I was already kinda ripping off Wing Commander -- though I will admit I made a very careful effort to try and separate things. I actually took a bit more inspiration from Star Trek Klingons than the Kilrathi, in creating what I called the "Khalenti Dominion" (the Khalenti being my version of war-like space cat people :P) and I even ended up bringing in the catronas from my fantasy series.

I conceived of actually connecting the two stories, so that the Khalenti ended up invading Dragonia and Dragistah in the future, and renamed them Zaryn and Zarynth. Or something like that (I don't know if by then I'd decided Zaryn was the real name or not). The catronas, who lived on Zarynth, ended up deciding to cooperate with the Khalenti so that they would not be forcibly invaded, and so joined with them. The dragonborn races of Dragonia, I believe, did not cooperate, and thus were... more or less ruined, but for those (like Ftolzan, of the Flizdak Pirates, an escaped dragonborn) who managed to get off-planet.

The biggest twist, then, was actually changing my story from the perspective of the Terrans (though humans were definitely still strongly involved in the plot, as they and their allies were the "United Terran Alliance" and the main enemies of the Khalenti Dominion). Instead the main characters were the heir to the Khalenti Dominion, Khijhiris Avishtzar-Vakhrana, and a catrona double-agent, Akhalla Thyzanalith, who worked for both the UTA and the Dominion. Khijhiris was the captain of the ship Serpentis, and Akhalla one of the Khalenti's ace pilots, nicknamed "Akhalla the Cutthroat".

I even went so far as to call my story The Cats. I think it sounds stupid, now. :D But that was what I called it then, since the story was mainly about cats in space. The story also had plenty of room for angst: Khijhiris is forbidden to fall in love, particularly with a catrona, who are considered the "weaker" feline race. Akhalla was raped as a teenager (sigh), a victim of attempted rape at LEAST once after that, and often resisted Khijhiris's love because she mistook him for a "typical" Khalenti male. I think I even wrote her attempting or committing suicide once or twice (sigh, again.)

And THEN there was all the stuff with Tigrina (a catrona, of course, and defector to the UTA) and her father, the "death-cat" who was experimented on cruelly and turned into a cruel and loveless man himself. Father issues, anyone?

14 years old - I stopped writing such longwinded stories around this point. The reason being that I discovered the Internet, of course, and so all my time went to MUDding, chatting on IRC and ending up in online relationships that in some cases ended badly (usually at least partially my own fault. *sigh* Well, I was young.)

Anyway, around my freshman year of high school, my big obsession was Shining Force. I absolutely fell in LOVE with this game. I'd rent it ALL the time until I got a copy of my own, and then played the hell out of that thing over and over and over. :D

My first crush of the game was actually the main character, Max. I used to imagine him ending up with Princess Anri of Guardiana (who I thought was TOTALLY AWESOME) all the time. I wrote some bad poetry about it, even! Yes, gotta love the teenage years and all their bad poetry.

Later on, though, I crushed *hard* for General Elliott of former Protectora, now Runefaust. Ohh yeah. To this day I still fangirl Elliott. He's a dragonman, too, so I guess I've never really lost my love for the half-dragon types. :P Anyway, Elliott is the consummate loyal soldier of high honor and high ideals. He dies against the Shining Force defending his King, even though he knows King Ramladu has become irrational and warlike when he was once an honorable man himself.

I was so deeply struck by Elliott's sacrifice as my 14 year old self that I committed the sin of creating a character to be his lover! And so Ryshassa the first was born -- not an empath or healer in the slightest, actually, but something more like a warrior mage, part elementalist and part fighter. She also has the shared history of having been raped when she was young, as future Ryshassa was, and Akhalla before her. I guess around this point was when I started getting terribly obsessed with putting my main characters through rape and angst and shame and other such negative emotions.

Anyway, Ryshassa ultimately loses Elliott to the Shining Force, and instead of grieving but understanding his reasons for sacrificing herself, she's filled with vengeance for the Force. She allies herself with Darksol and learns devil magic, more or less. Similar to what Mishaela is, I suppose, except she also loses much of her sanity, and waits to take her revenge AFTER the whole Dark Dragon stuff is over with. I never really wrote the confrontation between her and Max, but I figure there's only two ways about it: she would either have died (which would have matched my morbidness of the time) or been converted back to good. Who knows?

15 years old - This is when I got into Breath of Fire 2, I believe. Again, I never wrote any lengthy stories, but I DID write.

I was a Ryu/Nina advocate even back then. I still am -- I prefer Ryu and Nina with each other in EVERY BoF game. So the first writings I did were bits between Ryu and Nina, with angst mixed in here and there. Like I said, I was very morbid in those days, so I preferred to write about the "bad" ending in which Township is never reactivated and Ryu has to guard the Gate to Infinity.

From that spawned my one original story that came out of this era: Tatsumaki Dragon-Wind. He's the sickly, socially anxious son of Ryu and Nina (Nina probably kills herself, knowing my penchant for drama in those days :P) who grew up with the lofty expectation of being a hero and finishing off Death Evans once and for all. Of course, being frail and unconfident -- he was my first bishie character, I swear! -- he couldn't possibly have lived up to this expectation, and went through a great deal of the story being jeered at, abused and self-harming.

There were a couple women in his life that tried to influence him positively, though. First was Sarkhana, who was a unicorn girl, more or less... well, she had a small horn on her forehead, kinda like the beastmen in Lunar (as in Lunar: the Silver Star and Eternal Blue). I conceived of her as one of the Earth-element based races like the Plainsrunners.

Anyway, Sarkhana was Tatsu's first love, and probably his only friend, too. Unfortunately, her race was dying off and she was one of the only, if not the last of her kind. She ended up being carted off as a breeder to continue the race's purity, leaving Tatsu alone and grieving for her.

Later on... I don't remember exactly why, but Tatsumaki ended up leaving Township for whatever reason. Unfortunately, someone put a price on his head, and the assassin that ended up taking that job was a Dark Dragon by the name of Mysa Sedrajanah. Tatsu was an easy target, of course, and she could easily have killed him, but ended up taking pity instead. She helped him escape and thereafter they lived on the run for a while, while whatever illness Tatsumaki had continued to eat at him from the inside.

He was dying -- and knowing that, he made his final decision. Those of you who've played Breath of Fire 2 would know that the Gate to Infinity needs the life of a Dragon to be sacrificed in order to be opened. Well, Tatsumaki thought himself both useless and at death's door ANYWAY, and so got it in his head to be the sacrifice so Ryu, the TRUE hero, would reawaken and return to Infinity to destroy Death Evans for good.

I never actually wrote that part. But I planned for older!Ryu and a grieving but resolute Mysa to go together, and do the job. They may even have been able to call on some of the other old party members to help out.

I do know I never meant for Tatsumaki to live, though. I guess it felt a little bit like killing myself... indirectly.

To be continued.