Ramblings Of A Ponywriter: The World Continues To Inspire · 2:57am Jun 29th, 2023
Sometimes I have a vague idea for an adventure story.
Take Twilight Sparkle. Probably an early-ish point on the timeline, when she's already ascended to an alicorn but hasn't been one long. Season four finale at the most, I think. And something happens. Maybe it's an accident, maybe she goes deliberately searching for the answer to a mystery and it leads her to doing it knowingly, but she ends up pulled someplace else. A land of ponies and other familiar creatures, but things are a bit odd. The technology level's a bit lower, magical abilities run on slightly different rules, and the ruler...
They worship an alicorn, whose domain seems to be storms, with a side of war. But while their devotion is genuine, along with their appreciation for her protection from the monsters that plague their land, they are also terrified of her. Anyone who disobeys her laws, anyone who threatens the order she has strived so much to maintain in the face of the dangers of the world, will be struck down with no hesitation and no mercy.
Twilight tries to meet this alicorn. Maybe she's the one who would have the full answer to the mystery, maybe she's the only one who would have the knowledge of how to send Twilight back, but either way, she wants an audience.
But Twilight is another alicorn, in a land that's only ever had one. She isn't part of the established order.
She's an anomaly, and anomalies must be destroyed, for the good of all.
It would be the kind of order-versus-harmony story that the likes of which the MLP comics have touched on once or twice, exploring ancient creatures becoming so detached from the mortals around them that they can become too rigid and too alien to be what their people need as times change. Twilight would be cut off from her friends and needing to make new ones, fast, in order to know how to function in this new land and to be able to use her full power as the Alicorn of Friendship. Maybe there's even something similar to the Tree of Harmony, waiting for her to find it...
It would also be marked as a crossover, because what I've just described to you is essentially a ponified version of a tiny slice of the story of Genshin Impact.
For a lot of people, say the words "gatcha game" and they're out the door before they hear a word more, and I would never blame them for that.
It's a system we've all seen in cheap mobile spinoff games. Characters and equipment are each given a star rarity, and you earn chances to pull from the prize pool. Exactly what's in there varies, and you've got to keep your eye on announcements for when the really big prizes are up for grabs. Keep trying for that five-star character you love so much, and if everything you've earned in-game isn't enough to snag them, you could always buy a few more chances...
As monetization models go, it's a none too kind one. And the people for whom it's an automatic hard pass? By all means, keep away. Whether it's someone with an addictive personality who knows it would end up the start of a bad road, or someone who doesn't want to support a company that decided that a digital slot machine was a great way to do business, both are fair. I'm not a fan of the business model either, and would feel better if the they used nearly any other.
But miHoYo (yes it's officially spelt like that), the company behind Genshin Impact, does stand out from the crowd, a bit. They don't do cheap spinoff cash-ins. Because they don't grab onto existing IPs. They create their own, and they've realized a fundamental truth that seems to have escaped a lot of game developers looking to make a quick buck:
If you want people to hand you money to chase your characters, if that kind of thing is going to be sustainable, they have to like the characters. They have to like the world you've taken them to. They have to like the game.
miHoYo decided that the best psychological trick they had in their arsenal to make people pay hand over fist to play gatcha for their characters was with good character designs, good writing, and a fun game. And they're confident enough in that strategy that they told Tencent to take a long walk off a short cliff when they offered to buy them. You can tell that the gatcha money is being reinvested in the product, in everything from the design of the locations to the gorgeous soundtrack.
And for better or worse, that product is a source of a lot of inspiration.
Allow me to introduce you to one of my favourite Genshin Impact characters, Fischl von Luftschloss Narfidort, the Prinzessin der Verurteilung.
(Yes, she makes gestures like that with her arms in game, too, all the time. Dramatic camera angles are also sometimes involved.)
When you start playing Genshin Impact, the first land you travel through is Mondstadt, a nation that is essentially what happens when a Chinese company decides to design a location meant to be vaguely Dutch. The lower early budget shows compared to locations from more recent patches, but there's a lot of charm to be found in the quirky characters.
The patron deity of the land has been so hands-off for centuries that when he does show up in the cathedral and announces who he is, the sisters throw him out assuming he's a random person who's either crazy or spouting outlandish things to be funny. The owner of the best brewery is secretly running around foiling the schemes of the local monsters in an obvious Batman reference. There's a boy who was literally raised by wolves and helps you meet a local powerful wolf spirit. There's a little elven girl who likes explosives. There's a black sheep of a noble family who joined the local order of knights and who is so socially-awkward that she swears revenge against everyone and everything at the drop of a hat, and her closest friend (and possibly girlfriend) is the one person so aggressively friendly that she cut through the defense mechanism and befriended her anyway.
And Fischl...
She's part of the local Adventurers Guild, but she claims it's only a temporary situation. She's a traveler from another realm, you see, a realm of darkness called the Immernachtreich, where she's the ruler, and she'll eventually return, with her loyal night raven, Oz, at her side (and if that sounds familiar, yes, Brandywine's feathered friend was an intentional reference). She speaks in an extremely flowery fashion at all times, to the point where jokes circulate among the guild of there being a "Fischl Dictionary" to allow you to understand her, and Oz is frequently the one cutting through it to translate her words for people who aren't used to how she talks. Trying to mimic her way of speaking tends to both fluster and delight her, and she may just grant you a title on the spot for it.
Only... there hasn't been a dimensional traveler in the world of Teyvat in centuries. And you know that because the player character was the last. After all this time, only the most ancient and knowledgeable beings in the world even know anymore that such a thing is possible. Then you dig a little deeper...
One of the kinds of collectables in the game are in-universe literature. Light novels are all the rage in this world, and you can collect one-off books and series alike, which tend to have an excerpt to read. Even if you're not paying too much attention to grabbing every last shiny thing, some series have books downright everywhere, and minor characters will often talk about their favourite books, or you'll even meet the writers of them. Stories are a pervasive theme throughout the game.
One of those series is Flowers for Princess Fischl.
The Fischl we know is a girl named Amy, who immersed herself in the persona of her favourite book character as a coping mechanism for a past we have scant information on. When her elemental powers manifested at fourteen, which are supposed to be a reflection of the person's deepest desires and ambitions, they emerged in the form of book-Fischl's most loyal servant, Ozvaldo Hrafnavins, the very core of herself reflected by giving herself an eternally loyal friend who would always understand her.
It's implied that she met Oz at a very emotionally low point in her life.
Meeting him may have saved her life.
When I had the opportunity to play as, or interact with, Fischl during the game, I would usually end up laughing at her over-the-top demeanor and her banter with Oz.
But every once and a while, you see the scared, lonely girl behind the bluster, who doesn't really know anymore where she starts and the mask ends, and that laughter turns into tears.
It's not a perfect game. In fact, I drifted away from it a while ago and rarely care to log in even for daily rewards. It's an easier game of its breed than most to enjoy with a free-to-play approach, or to limit your spending on, so long as you're willing to be patient (and I can be very patient), but the sheer scale of the project is starting to get away from them.
There are places where the pacing of the story is rushed. There's some writing choices that make the fanfic writer in me twitch with a desire to forge an alternate path. And unfortunately, they're starting to reach a point of character saturation where it's clear that, while they're very good at crafting said characters, there isn't enough time and words to give them all the focus they need to shine.
There's another character I love, absolutely adore, and a chunk of the fanbase doesn't even know she's still alive. Because the last moment in the main storyline that focuses on her has her laying broken on the ground while a villain gloats over her, and after that villain is killed in a spectacular fashion, the narrative just... forgets she exists. She has no dedicated character quest (many do, and for a few, that's the first time you ever meet them) and the times she's seen after the fact, alive and well and helping her nation recover after the recent civil war, are all in limited-time events that are yoinked when their time is up, only to be seen again in Youtube videos from those who were there and recorded it.
It's a problem. There's a lot of little problems. Some of them, especially for QoL polish, are noticeably better in their most recent game, Honaki Star Rail, which has its own charming cast, fascinating world, and the turn-based gameplay has been given so many wonderful visual flourishes that I can watch streamers play it for ages. And have been. A good chunk of the VAs for the English version stream and it can be really fun to see them playing the game they acted in.
But it's not about perfection, really, it's about how every little thing a writer interacts with becomes material.
One of Genshin Impact's problems is that everything is too big. The cracks of a wide scope are already starting to show and the game has only released four of seven (possibly eight) nations so far. But cut out a little slice, pull forward the characters with the most potential, focus in...
That's what fanworks are all about, right? We do it with bit-part and background characters all the time with Friendship Is Magic. It's about finding the characters we know can be more, pulling them out of the toolbox, and telling them, "the stage is yours."
And sometimes you get a rambling blog post from someone who needs to get the thoughts out in some way and it's going to be a while before they start another longterm project. It can make a good breather in between writing my current ones.
Until next time all, and may you ever be inspired.
Ain't that the truth? More of my stories incorporate Magic the Gathering lore than many realize, to say nothing of the idea pile where I toss the halfway realized concepts that come to mind for later review and refinement.
I'm in the "addictive personality who dares not cross the threshold" camp with Genshin Impact, same as WoW before it. (I know, very different beast, but the principle's the same.) Still, glad to hear it's providing such rich material for your work, to say nothing of the cautionary tales of scope creep.