Season 15 is now well behind us, and at last here is a long-overdue behind the scenes look at my events and characters from that year and how it all came together, as well as what got left out or changed from initial plans.
Getting Jiggy With It was born from a bit of a malaise I developed late in Season 14, where I was losing interest in traditional "go fight the bad guy" plots and wanted to do something different. My original plan was to do a plot with no serious antagonists. This wasn't the first time I'd considered such an idea (you may recall The Cabinet Of Curiosities had an initial similar goal), and I went into it expecting not to succeed. One thing I often find myself doing when it comes to RP is setting a goal knowing I will fail, but the idea was not an absolute adherence so much as it was restraint. For instance, some years I'll try hard not to add new characters to RP on a whim, so that when some inevitably get through my defenses, they're characters I really care about or that have a clear role to play in a story. This was the same way - I wasn't surprised when a couple of genuine antagonists popped up in the plot, but I kept the scope small and restricted, and we ended up defeating the closest thing the plot had to a Big Bad about halfway through, with most of the plot's other battles being against petty villains that weren't very threatening (Venom Brigade), a large animal of neutral alignment (Monsterverse Tiamat), and an honorable duel against a hero (Foetodon).
The idea of making a plot about Jiggies came from replaying the Banjo-Kazooie N64 duology on Switch Online's N64 app. I played BK near the start of 2024 and BT much later in the year after it came out on the app. Both games hold up well today, in my opinion, though admittedly the addition of savestates smooths off a lot of potential frustration and BT running without lag on the Switch helps it a lot. Both games deliver some wonderfully memorable worlds and characters, and as I've done in the past with franchises I hold in high regard like Streets Of Rage, Octopath Traveler, Sonic, and Pokemon, I wanted to do a plot that evokes the feeling of playing the game that inspired it, without just being a retread. I got the idea for a series of events where I essentially make a miniature BK level and let the Kobbers loose to go scoop up all the collectibles. I think it was a good idea, but it took some work to get the format right.
If looked at after the fact, the first two events of the plot are fine, but I didn't feel fine in the moment (particularly the first one). By offering so many little challenges at once and needing to reply to each one in turn, I'd overwhelmed myself. I finished the first event feeling poorly about not just my plot, but RP in general, and in fact was feeling so down on myself that terrible thoughts had begun pushing into my head of wanting to abandon plots entirely, or even outright quit RP. It wasn't because of anything anyone did. I was just bored of the same old same old, and yet struggling to find anything to replace it with. It wasn't a good feeling. Fortunately, by the time we got into June, my mood regarding RP began to improve, and Brawl Season helped me get back in gear. By the time we got to the Horus plot-within-a-plot arc, I was fully back to being excited to show you guys what I could do.
Let's go over the plot's cast first and see where that discussion takes us.
