Thursday, March 1, 2012

City of Diabetes Ideas

I tried to make a "City of Diabetes" story (the other way of parodying the City of Beasts series) but it wasn't clicking for me. Instead, I'll just dump some ideas I was considering for such a setting:

* Generic Disney-movie signs of cheerfulness, like bouncy music, birds chirping, butterflies, etc.
* Hella Jeff is not evil, Sparda is not corrupted, and Sarah and Alex's first date goes without a hitch. ROB still wins the Brawl though, because he is the ROB.
* Zephyrus is planning to take himself, his seven brothers, and Needle Man (all of whom are, yes, alive) to Hawaii for a well-earned vacation.
* Zephyrus has enough money for taking nine people to Hawaii because his cooking show is an international sensation and he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a week selling VHS tapes, cookbooks, and little robot master action figures.
* The plan for Sarah, Antoinette, and Stella to use Speechcraft and cuteness to stop Servitor worked, and the Servitor is now a vaguely unnerving but completely harmless and amiable bar patron. Designate_5 revives after Widow Maker jams his soul into him.
* The classic "Erebus' characters making small talk as they approach the bar" gag has an extra voice added to it, because Ksar survived the Valor attack.
* Sine has discovered a way to put a stop to her endless cycle of reincarnation so she can plot her life on her own terms - and she's also found a method of giving Zephyrus the coordinates for her soul so she can be located if she DOES decide to reincarnate.
* Sarah and Alex are basically unchanged except they got their chocolate fountain earlier and Sarah has found a method of living as long as Alex does. Tridenland is somehow even more wildly successful.
* The Lord of the Night, Valor, Veshen, and any of the other extremely dark villains are retooled into Saturday morning cartoon parodies of themselves. Crescendo does in fact go into battle with his head welded to his ass at one point, like he should have.
* Draco wins his fight with Sarah by getting her to surrender. The VR Fite ends with no injuries except a pounding headache for Sine and a slight throbbing for Amanda. Rafflesia is discovered by one of David's computers picking up strange energies from the arena, and all it manages to do is make Designate a husk before being driven away. Meat Boy is allowed to leave immediately. Draco wins Fite Week, and Fergy is revived as his prize.
* Nobody loses their memory.
* Nobody attempts suicide.
* Sarah doesn't slaughter the Tribbles in blind rage, and their victory over the pets is via ring-out by multiplying so much that the pets get shoved out the arena's door. A containment and mass neutering program solves the breeding problem.
* The Sheep does not make a deal with Despair. It is simply a comedic character that dies and revives like Meat Boy, except its revivals are in increasingly overwrought and dramatic ways while its deaths keep getting more and more banal and stupid.
* Sister Alice is toned down severely into a cranky old lady that is actually just very lonely and will eventually show her warmer side if someone gets close enough to her.
* Doomrider doesn't fucking hurt kids, and he doesn't fucking hurt adults, either. He just has stupid amounts of cocaine and sex.
* Jaxx remains a hero, out fighting the good fight for humanity as a Sentinel. Despite his long life and the horrors he's seen, he remains optimistic about the people he saves.
* Walter and Antoinette are friends.

And my favorite idea...

* Like in City of Beasts, the patrons' actions forced the Major to take drastic measures. In City of Beasts, he had a portion of the city walled off. In City of Diabetes, voting for Friendship is outlawed because 6 fights in a row were flooded with Friendship votes.

Conclusion: Just as actually doing a full roleplay in the City of Beasts would be too dark and depressing and invokes the Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people"), City of Diabetes would be boring and contrived, and could very well evoke the same eight words thanks to a lack of thrills or excitement. Hooray for balance!

4 comments:

  1. I'm not sure why you even had to make this unless it's your bizzare irrational hatred for grimdark kicking in again, but hooray I guess.

    "Just as actually doing a full roleplay in the City of Beasts would be too dark and depressing and invokes the Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people")"

    Who's to say plot developments wouldn't happen if we did roleplay it out? You seem to think the world would remain pretty much static, like in Warhammer 40,000 or a monster-of-the-week anime during it's first season. Look at how weird shit happened in the bar all the time. If we spent even so much as a week roleplaying CoB, I garuntee that somnething interesting would happen. I'd bet real money on it. And if the players can't make people care about their character, that's a writing problem, not a problem with the setting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "In City of Diabetes, voting for Friendship is outlawed because 6 fights in a row were flooded with Friendship votes."

    I agree with this policy.

    Also, I like the City of Beasts as alternate reality stories more than full on RP. It's a dark mirror to our main RP, and while there are interesting stories to tell there, I don't think full-time RP like the bar would be good... for our minds.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Also, where are Celestia and Skeiron in this? Not that it'd be hard to come up with stuff for them, but it's the principle of the thing!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My dislike of grimdark settings actually stems from the fact that a happy ending is kind of a requirement for me. It's just personal preference. There were plenty of darker moments in the bar that I actually quite enjoyed, particularly the Servitor plot, and there have been things I've read that I'd consider grimdark that I liked. It's just a case of me getting so attached to characters that finding out that they're doomed is like "nooooo". Just me being odd.

      These parody things aren't me being "COB sucks, stoppit" so much as it is "damn, look at all these COBs, I should lighten the mood so nobody goes off and hangs themselves before ZF7".

      Celestia and Skeiron? I didn't even mention Widow Maker! I couldn't think of anything noteworthy off the top of my head, but I suppose Widow Maker has a perfect betting record and Celestia's opened that bakery Amanda predicted, and it's wildly successful.

      Skeiron makes the bread.

      Delete