GB Plots 2018 Retrospective

Alright, let's get this show on the road. Time to look back at all my plot events this year and let loose any behind-the-scenes or cutting room floor stuff!

SONIC MANIA PLOT

All three of my plots this year were plots I'd been planning to do for a long time, and this one solidified pretty quickly last year after "Eggette" took off in popularity. As my pre-Brawl plot, it was mostly meant to be a fun romp, though there were a few serious moments towards the end.

Fun fact - I intentionally structured the plot to make it resemble an actual Sonic game in format. Miniboss > Boss fight with Scramble > Miniboss > Boss fight with Scramble > Miniboss > Final level, last battle with Scramble > True Final Boss that steals Scramble's thunder. It's a mishmash of how classic Sonic and modern Sonic games tend to go, with the added bonus that all of Scramble's fights were weaksauce - first her opponents beat her while drunk, then her second "fight" was a Chao Race, and while she meant business the third time it was over in one round and Metal Widow Maker reduced her to tears afterward.

5/8: GTR Attack (Takkeder Trio)
This was an event I'd wanted to do in Season 7 but didn't get around to it, so I altered the background details to make it work with Sonic Mania Plot and grafted it on. Something about Contra Hard Corps just works really well for me as a near-bottomless mine to keep pulling material out of. It's just one of those games, like Streets of Rage 2, that I've gone back to for further RP ingredients over and over again.

As is my usual formula for bringing video game boss fights into RP, I tossed in a twist that would throw off anyone familiar with the source material. In this case, the Takkeders still transform into various opponents over the course of the second half of the fight, just like in Hard Corps, but I used Spriter's Resource and MSPaint to create brand-new transformations.

Takkeder had an unused form, Takkeder Seahorse. The event was running long, so I dropped this round for time.

5/16: Kobbering Under The Influence (Heavy Magician and Scramble)
Here's another event I'd wanted to do for a long time, though the initial idea was much more vague. Since literally the Manhattan days we have talked about the concept of a bunch of drunk Kobbers struggling to fight a weak villain, and it's finally happened!

This event had a hidden agenda. Chao sent Kaede even though this was a combat event (which normally meant No Marshmallow Allowed) but we'd worked out beforehand that Kaede's character arc would benefit from her being thrown into a fight and being utterly unable to accomplish anything in it. We went with this being the event to do that in because it was a lighthearted affair with weak opponents, which accomplished two things: 1) it kept Kaede from being hurt TOO badly and 2) it emphasized to Kaede that even heavily intoxicated Kobbers could fight better than her. And so her development began...

Also: Punch Drunk. GET IT? DO YA GET IT??? I MADE A FUNNY.

5/23: Motor Psycho (Heavy King, Heavy Rider)
I like doing high-speed chase fights, and this, GTR Attack, and the finale were me indulging in that love. It's always fun to have an exciting setpiece for a standard style "defeat the bad guy" plot to make the fighting feel more unique and memorable, and having a moving battle is an easy way to do that.

The GUN Truck was originally going to be a Fite Club opponent. I had considered using it as such in Season 7 but never got around to it. I decided to add it here, since it's a Sonic character and therefore fit in perfectly!

5/30: A Day At The Chao Races (Scramble and Omochao)
As part of the earlier 'humiliate Kaede' plan that Kobbering Under The Influence was partly about, I had promised Chao that there would be a non-combat event in this plot later so that Kaede could get revenge. The original plan was a Mean Bean Machine-themed event, but I wasn't able to figure out how to get a full event's worth of material out of that. Then I hit upon the idea of Chao racing, and I was saved! I got a ton of use out of the Chao side game in Sonic Adventure 2. I played it a decent amount in Sonic Adventure DX as well, but 2 had the better and more fleshed-out Chao raising experience. I started by including some of the challenges you'd find in the real Chao races, then started mixing it up with various references. I really enjoyed working in a reference to that awful Catch The Ball game JRM reviewed on The Game Hoard. We don't often see him get genuinely upset at video games, but MAN did he rip into that shitty thing. I could FEEL his hatred. So, of course, I had to stick it in a plot for mocking. I also put in a round of the Chao playing Puyo Puyo as a reference to the original plan for this event.

Ultimately this was a bit of an example of what happens when you're counting on the tractor to produce a good result and it lets you down - Kaede didn't do very well in the race. But her Chao still made it over the finish line, and in the grand scheme of things it didn't matter that Kaede didn't win.

6/7: Kuwahawi Vice (Metal Widow Maker)
From the beginning, Heavy Gunner was going to be a friendly character all along (for a given definition of "friendly"...). After years and years of me using and abusing the "established character is revealed to be evil" twist over and over again, it was high time to try and do a whole season without once going back to that well, so that is what I forced myself to do. As a result, I came up with Heavy Gunner's angle in this plot - he was introduced as such a blatantly obvious mole that ANYONE would see what I was planning, only for me to intentionally subvert that and reveal he was never going to betray the ZFPD at all.

The original angle for this plot involved Heavy Gunner dying. Heavy Shinobi was on the chopping block as well. People seemed to resist the idea of Metal Widow Maker slaughtering them all, though, but I still let her have Heavy Magician for heel heat and to show that Metal Widow Maker was serious after the events up to this point had mostly been goofy fun.

6/12: The Big Badnik Brawl (Scramble's Fortress)
Pulling on Sonic Spinball was satisfying. The first two stages of that game are very memorable for me from my numerous childhood rentals of Spinball (I hardly ever made it to level 3, and never reached level 4). Like my 2015 Streets of Rage plot, sometimes I just wanna take you guys on a video-game-style adventure fighting a bunch of mooks and obstacles before taking on a boss. It's one of my favorite kinds of plots to do, but it requires a lot of preparation and effort to do well.

This was where the truth about Scramble came to light. I had portrayed her throughout the plot as being an annoying little twerp, but tried never to lay it on TOO thick and she had a couple moments where I played her for sympathy so that people wouldn't hate her too much. She was always going to turn out not-so-bad in the end - similar to Rachel, she was a recurring antagonist who would eventually face turn. Speaking of Scramble, she was a considered BBB8 entrant, and I even made an icon for her the same way I made headshot icons for all the Brawlers, but I ultimately swapped her out for Battra. The icon's art was repurposed as part of the image for Punch Drunk, so it all worked out.

6/13: Open Your Heart (Metal Eloher)
Alright, first off, Stag Beetle's transformation into Super Stag Beetle was literally added the day of the plot. I remember because I wrote The Swarm's Brawl entry in advance of signups and didn't include Super Stag Beetle (I had to either add it before posting or edit it in after posting, forget which) because it hadn't been thought of. Open Your Heart, though, that was the final battle music for a lonnnng time until I checked out what Egg Reverie Zone's music sounded like (never got all the emeralds in Mania so I never heard that track in-game) and I was blown away by how perfect a tune it was for the fight, so I immediately put it in as the fight song and switched to Open Your Heart for the final round.

Miscellaneous Leftovers
The most notable planned-but-scrapped elements of this plot were two characters. The first was E-101 Beta, who was a possible boss fight and later was considered for Fite Club as an opponent for Eggerman pre-Brawl. The other was this trenchcoated camera-headed fellow, who would have appeared as a spy for Scramble, watching the Kobbers from afar and keeping tabs on them.

HALLOWEEN PLOT

Halloween Plot was in the works for a full year and a half. In October of 2017 I came up with the idea of facing an evil Halloween spirit who preferred Halloween's darker side and was an unlikable bully that the Kobbers would have to deal with. However, I also had the concept for Turkie in my head and wanted to do that plot first. It worked out - 2014's Samhain plot was about fighting Christmas, and 2017's was about fighting Thanksgiving, so it was the right time to complete the holiday season trio and do a plot about Halloween cannibalizing itself.

But the thing is... this was originally a dayplot.

My first concept for Halloween Plot was having Pumpking pop into the bar instead of Samhain on October 1 and promptly begin being an asshole. After a few scenes of his shenanigans, the Kobbers would have enough and confront him, triggering a boss fight which would include the return of Samhain. A short, simple plot, just like the short and simple plots Samhain had in 2014 and 2017. Seemed fine.

But then Lord Ostarion The Skeleton King won the Brawl, and I saw a chance for something much more. Ideas filled my head with ways to introduce too-early spookitude, and the plot completely shifted gears. The original bits about Pumpking being a bad replacement for Samhain that pushes Halloween's frights first were still intact, but now they were shunted up to much earlier in the season and many more events were added. This event went from just being Yet Another Samhain Dayplot to a proper in-depth look at how exactly the holiday spirits function. Turns out the answer was "not very well", and showed that past troubles like 2017's Turkie and 2014's Christmas Creep (who I retconned into a Christmas spirit) were symptoms of a larger problem. Of course, that part was always somewhat there, as shown by the Halloweenplot teaser I did at the end of 2017 that revealed Shroud was involved.

Poor Shroud. For many years he's been a GB Ensemble whipping boy due to the fact that I never settled on a direction I wanted to go with him, so although he appeared fairly often in Season 3, he didn't really do much except help out on other people's events. In recent years I've attempted to redeem him - he has a role in First Fantasy, my RPG Maker game that released last year, and now I've used this plot to finally pick a direction for him and explain him better. It took a little retconning (this was of course not an idea I had for Shroud back when he was a regular character, though I didn't have to change much to make it work), but making him a holiday council member seemed a good fit. Now he and Samhain are off helping make the holidays great again.

7/18: The Train of Terror (Wendy Witchcart)
So, it wasn't totally planned, but I ended up making every installment of this plot themed around a different aspect of Halloween or horror. The theme for this first event was spooky rides! Dark rides, hayrides, those kind of creepy attractions that tend to pop up in amusement parks, carnivals, and as accessories to October attractions like corn mazes and haunted house walkthroughs. The plot itself was a straightforward fight. Wendy Witchcart was chosen due to JRM's repeated mocking of the character concept back when he was playing lots of Sonic games for Sonic Mania's impending release. Doing one last Sonic-themed event was a fun callback to the long-finished Sonic Mania Plot, too.

8/13: The Crappypasta Cook-Off (Y2K Bug)
The title for this one comes from "The Creepypasta Cook-Off", a yearly writing jam hosted by Bogleech where people send him their home-grown horror and he posts up the submissions at the end of each year. I thought the idea of inviting participation this way would be a lot of fun, and you guys all had some great stories!

Y2K Bug's appearance was intentionally an odd one where he made references to things that weren't clear and didn't get explained. As revealed at the end of the season, he's actually a member of The Curse, and it is next season that will finally explain what his deal is.

8/26: Monster Party (Blobby, Universal Monsters)
Last summer, I saw the entire Hotel Transylvania series one after another over the course of a couple weeks. Pretty good movies! I had a good time watching them and briefly considered RPing as Mavis. The HT character to make it to RP was Blobby, though. He didn't do much - his early appearance during a Cheng'de Plot installment was him acting as a scout to see what the Kobbers were up to, and while he boasts some powerful combat abilities he's a nice guy and didn't want to fight the Kobbers... so he didn't!

Anyway, this plot was inspired by Hotel Transylvania 3, which places a significant chunk of the film's playtime on a giant cruise ship and also involves a climactic musical battle towards the end of the film. I took the boat and was inspired by the music fight to do a Battle of the Bands here. It's not too similar to what happened in the movie because I generally try to avoid spoilers for recently released media. A movie that was still in theaters at the time of the plot? Definitely too soon to rip from it too hard. I mean, I know it's not like the entire community was pumped about seeing this silly family film or would be upset to know plot details about it, but that's just how I can be sometimes. I've accidentally spoiled people on stuff in the past and it feels AWFUL.

Anyway, this plot was a sort of dumping ground for various spooky cameos I wanted to get in but might not have room for otherwise, like Audrey II and the Universal Monsters. The two Bravely Second monsters that made appearances (the mummy and witch) are very cool designs I'd wanted to use in RP somehow but didn't have the space to make them significant characters. I'd considered it, though - the mummy girl was a possible Season 7 newcomer, and I considered bringing back the girl who had been possessed by the witch hat later in the season to give her a nice ending. Ultimately though I never followed up on either character.

The theme for this plot was both "spooky music" and "family-friendly Halloweeny stuff". Family/kids entertainment is a huge part of Halloween, after all, and it's nice to enjoy "spoopy" things without actually getting frightened. I also very much wanted to do a plot where Kaede could be Kaede after she'd struggled to find herself due to the V3 plot.

9/6: The Haunted Arcade (Meme indie horror)
"You got your Format Wars in my Halloween Plot!" "You got your Halloween Plot in my Format Wars!"

Getting the arcade in on the action is always fun. I didn't expect to get this much mileage out of Odyssey, but he's ended up having just as much staying power as Dolby and is a lot of fun to mess around with, in big part because of his arcades and his hobby of collecting arcade machines. We'll see more of that next season. This plot was a chance to reference the 2010s trend of having spooky PC games come out, go viral, and end up with big fanbases and tons of copycats. We saw Hello Neighbor, Baldi's Basics, Five Nights at Freddy's, and Doki Doki Literature Club, and we also would have seen Bendy and the Ink Machine but I cut it for time. I had better ideas for the other games anyway, with FNAF in particular being a must-do since our community has had so much fun with that game's legacy thanks to Del and The Fazfucks.

This was another case where possible spoilers from recent media came into play. I had assumed that enough time had passed to use Doki Doki Literature Club pretty freely here, but had to use spoiler tags when Ivel said (thankfully ahead of time) that he hadn't played DDLC yet and was mostly unspoiled but had wanted to get around to it, so the last leg of the plot was marked with warnings.

9/30: Pumpking's House of Horrors (Pumpking)
We had had a lot of fun in Halloween Plot, but I couldn't let a big plot about spooky stuff end without a genuine attempt at frightening people, so I pulled on one of the most frightening things I could think of - your own mind. Dreams and nightmares are inexplicable brain-shows made by your consciousness while you sleep. They can entertain, and they can scare you out of your shorts. And in dreams, your power level varies, but you're usually helpless. You try to run, but you can barely move. You try to shout, but no sound comes out. I could think of no better way to turn this plot into actual horror than by having Kobbers confront their worst nightmares.

...Of course, before that, we had silly B-movie monsters and a Powerpuff Girls villain to deal with! I couldn't let it be ALL bad, after all! This first part of the event was going to get a day to itself, but it was one of the events I cut when I decided to scale back my plots, so we dealt with Boogie Man and Maggot pretty quickly.

As for the finale, it was a fun final battle with Pumpking taking on a super form and something I'd wanted to do all plot long - Samhain bringing the cavalry! Originally he was only going to show up with Christmas spirits to show Christmas and Halloween working together for the common good, but I decided it'd be even more fun if EVERY holiday got in on the action, which also fit the narrative I'd made of the various holiday councils devolving into bickering shut-ins who didn't connect with their own holidays or with humanity any more.

POKEMON PLOT

Man, this thing. This thing went through even more changes than Halloween Plot did! I mean, Halloween Plot's original version was monstrously different from the final product, yeah, but that was just one huge shift from dayplot to major plot. This one, though... well, first of all, the original plan was for this plot to be SCP-themed.

The SCP Foundation (SCP stands for Secure, Contain, Protect) is a creepypasta website devoted to coming up with bizarre and often frightening anomalies in reality in the form of objects, people, animals, and so on that the SCP Foundation captures and studies. It seemed like a vast field of opportunity for plotting... but the more I investigated the site, the more I knew it was a no-go. The main sticking point is that some of the things written about on that site are absurdly overpowered, beyond even shonen anime or superhero comic levels. Numerous monsters and such there are basically unstoppable, with one infamous reptile-like creature in particular being literally invincible (it can take damage, but always survives and regenerates). I considered the point of the plot being to take some of these OP disasters and cut them down to size by letting the Kobbers defeat them, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the hassle and cut all ties to the site's content being in RP.

So what does this have to do with Pokemon? Well, my original idea involved Celesteela being an escaped SCP, since Ultra Beasts aren't too far off from the sort of craziness they deal with. A cast of SCP researchers with themed names (they would all be named after former US Presidents. Historical ones, not modern ones, like Van Buren and Roosevelt. Not sure why I went with that, but it just felt right to me) would have been an opposing force, with most of them just doing their jobs, one or two being sympathetic to the Kobbers, and of course one rogue evil scientist who has dangerous plans. The plot would have focused on Ultra Beasts and their weirdness, but also brought in those aforementioned other SCPs as additional opponents.

This plot was also going to be Nerd Club's swan song. Last offseason I was strongly considering the possibility of retiring all of them except Dolby and either disbanding Nerd Club or starting fresh with Dolby founding an almost all-new roster of nerds in Season 9. However, too many good ideas for Sumireko in Olympia (Violet Detector, the new Touhou game starring Sumi, was also a factor in making me want to keep her), plus a reluctance to retire Rachel meant that only Rifa retired and Nerd Club remained intact.

If you were wondering why Russi Clover never did anything, the drastic changes I made to this plot when I scrapped all of the SCP stuff and almost all of the Nerd Club stuff is the reason you've been looking for. Her main role was going to be here, because she was never going to appear in person. I built up Russi as hiding behind proxies and such at her computer because she was very paranoid about the conspiracies she was uncovering, and Russi was going to hit paydirt when she uncovered the SCP Foundation. No SCP meant nothing for Russi, and so she was, much to my regret, scrapped AFTER being teased to appear.

With all the excess cut away, I was able to make Pokemon Plot - gasp - actually about Pokemon, and one of the biggest and best ways I did that was by working with Draco to make this plot double as Hazel Plot.

Hazel Plot is also one of the reasons why I split my attention between Pokemon Plot and Halloween Plot instead of doing them one at a time. Pokemon Plot's contribution to that was that, since Draco wasn't often available to do plots, I planned to fill time with Halloween Plot events so he'd have room to do his own plot stuff in addition to mine. Plus I figured that if he had to cancel an appearance I could just swap in a Halloween event without losing a step.

7/25: Big Trouble In Little Fite Club
This plot served two purposes. The first was a simple warmup battle to introduce Neo Team Plasma and my idea to pull from Pokestar Studios for unconventional opponents. The second, sneakier purpose was to throw people off the trail. At this point I had already decided on Pokemon Plot ending with revelations about Beheeyem's past. But I held his event first, to make it feel like we were already done with him. It could give the impression that he was just a bit player in the grander scheme of the plot, and someone like Regigigas would carry the finale instead, but no!

There's not much else to say here aside from acknowledging that as soon as I saw the Pokemon GS beta leak, I knew it had to be included in Pokemon Plot. What an incredible moment that was, seeing real actual scrapped Pokemon with sprites and everything. And you just KNOW there are dozens - maybe HUNDREDS - more Pokemon we'll never see hiding in Game Freak's archives. Gah!

8/4: The Trouble with Totems (Celesteela, Totem Araquanid, Totem Wishiwashi)
A strange event, but a good one that basically went exactly as planned, which was sometimes hard to do! This was one of three events that made up Hazel Plot within Pokemon Plot, the others being Deep Freeze and the finale. This plot was fantastic for other people's characters working with the fight I presented them. Not only did we have Hazel doing her best to win this battle without causing significant harm to any of the Pokemon involved, but we had Kaede (in her V3 outfit) going off the deep end and trying to overpower the Pokemon with violence. The resulting interactions helped further Hazel's arc and pushed Kaede off the slippery slope leading to the Kaedeplot battle not long afterward.

Celesteela was originally considered as a Brawl entrant, entering with Soliera as her trainer. As always, though, space for the Brawl was at a premium and I couldn't afford to spend a slot on a character that might not be too important. Celesteela made plenty of appearances later in the season as a Kobber ally, but Soliera did a lot less than I'd planned due to various events and parts of events getting cut or changed. We didn't even fight her!

9/22: Deep Freeze (Team Plasma)
One thing the Pokemon GS beta leak did was drastically change what Neo Team Plasma did in their appearances in this plot. In Big Trouble At Little Fite Club it wasn't TOO much of a difference, just swap out their original Pokemon (I don't even remember what I would have given them, maybe just typical evil Pokemon team small fry?) for the beta ones, but THIS event changed a lot more. We probably would have had a stronger focus on fighting the Plasma Frigate, perhaps facing it and Mecha Kingdra together. Speaking of which, Mecha Kingdra went through some changes. Original plans called for a more horrific opponent, some kind of awful mutant Kingdra, but I went the glorified badnik route instead when I opted to go less dark.

Having Colress fight on his own without his Pokemon was an odd idea, I know, but I loved the concept of two Pokemon trainers forgoing the Pokemon and fighting with their fists, and Hazel's burly stature and history of doing the fighting for her Pokemon instead of the other way around meant I totally had to do it. I threw in the mythology gag of the Magnezone Chao had appear a few times as being Colress' Magnezone just for kicks, and as I expected Chao loved that little connection.

10/8: Return to the Distortion World
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugggggghhhh.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggghhhhhhhh.

This one did not go as planned. At all. I suppose me not even really having a plan was part of the problem. This event was originally going to be much more meaningful and feature boss battles against Giratina and possibly Arceus, but there were so many things I was trying to cram into this one event that it kind of went all over the place and I feel like it really suffered for it. It wasn't a disaster or anything, people participated and I was happy to give Memebird an event where he'd have some semblance of what the hell was happening (Evil Pokemon! Punch 'em!), but I wasn't happy with this one. It was solely "a thing that happened", and was done because it was necessary but didn't feel very important despite the developments.

Monster was basically only there to ensure it got into RP after being teased on the preview image I made for the plot. It was originally going to get an entire event all to itself, but that was scrapped when I downsized my plots in September after being concerned about how many events I still had left to do. Mecha Tyranitar was in a similar boat, having migrated from the finale to here when I cut the finale down from two days to one. The original plan for MT was to use both it and the grey recolor, MT2. The MTs would have been significantly larger (a hundred or more feet tall instead of fifty feet) and Celestia or someone else would have hacked into MT to get it on our side and fight MT2.

Essentially, this plot was my dumping ground for everything from the scrapped plot days I didn't want to ditch entirely, and as a result it had little focus and meandered from one miniboss to another until it ended.

10/13: Have The Power To Let Go (Ellie)
My worries about my plot carried over to the finale, where I was concerned that my plot would end with a whimper. But, to my delight, it absolutely didn't and this was one of my favorite events I ran all season. The tension, the drama, the twists, the music! I had so much fun with this and I felt invigorated when you guys seemed to be having fun too. Draco knocked it out of the park with some really intense moments, with Gardetto's Mega Evolution and Pawny's normal evolution being fantastic moments not just for this event or plot but for the season as a whole.

This plot underwent a pretty significant change, that being the true form of Ellie. She was always going to be the alien from Pokestar Studios, but in the original draft, that was actually her real appearance and not a hologram. She was, however, still intangible due to tapping into an unknown power that made her impossible to attack. So how would the Kobbers have stopped an insane, irredeemable villain who was also completely intangible? She would have made a fatal error in the climax when she would go into a super mode and transform into a gigantic, monstrous beast several miles tall. This monstrosity would have destroyed a couple of small, nameless islands to show off her new power (Does this sound familiar yet? Chao and I laughed at the similarities when I told him). But in order to reach this size, Ellie would have had her spaceship transform into a life-support system and attach to her back, and while she was intangible... the ship was not. The Kobbers would destroy the ship and Ellie, unable to breathe or support her own size, would collapse into the sea and drown.

Another major change made was that Ellie did not have a personal connection to Beheeyem early on. Early on, she didn't even have a name. This version of Ellie still would have gone after Beheeyem, but not to get revenge - instead, she would try to get him to join her, and her motive would have been to show the world that Elgyem and Beheeyem are NOT laughing stocks of the Pokemon world, and she would prove it by becoming the strongest Pokemon in the universe, ushering in a new age where all beings were subservient to her and her kind.



And that about does it! Apologies for the long wait and the sometimes-brief sections - these have gotten harder for me to do in recent years. Still, I hope this look into my thought process was interesting, and I hope to see you next summer when we take on The Curse!

Hit me up if you have any questions - I'm sure I missed some stuff - but be careful about posting those comments here - the comment section was screwy for some people last year.