JW: Update and Cut Content · 5:53pm Jun 27th, 2016
I am excited to say, reworks on the next section have been completed and we are moving on to the edits, which should be relatively quick, given that it is a much shorter section than last time. I am trying to get faster with these. I've even put some time into writing chapter five. Also hey look at that! 250 Views! Makin' milestones!
I finally got around to fixing the formatting issues on chapter 1. I remembered hearing about them for a while, but my adhd and anxiety made me want to shy away from that duty of fixing the mistakes. I finally took a good look at it, and just... hot damn! For every one of you that has stuck around despite that first chapter's lack of spacing, indentations, and the back and forth dialogue within the same paragraph, I am thankful that you stayed around. I really should have fixed that ages ago. I'll have to go through chapter 2 and see how that is too.
Looking back at chapter 1 was a bit of memory lane for me. The direction and style of Joker's Wild has certainly evolved over time. I really didn't know where the story was going when I had finished chapter 1. I was playing with ideas, but I didn't have anything set in stone. Here I am now, one year later, with the whole model planned and it is interesting to see where things changed.
I wanted to take some time to go through some content that had been cut from the story for various reasons.
Way back when, Tumbleweed and Calypto were just going to be a wandering storm of recklessness. Not really doing jobs but being sort of like raiders who preyed on raiders, and considered themselves better for it. Tumbleweed was going to have many many more opportunities to show his deceptive side, being a three faced triple crosser to quote Victor Borge. Some of that still remains, but the nature has been given a lot more direction with the caravan idea, and I like the culture it adds to things.
In the old versions, I was going to have Tumbleweed acquire a bunch of raided swag, treasure, and his little arsenal, only to come back one day to find that a dragon has decided that it is very comfortable to sit on, and that it was his. Tumbleweed would then have many scenes of having to argue with the dragon at the risk of becoming grilled pony, just to get little bits of supplies. While it was a fun idea, it got cut because Tumbleweed doesn't really use a lot of supplies, and they don't have time to be returning to a base all the time.
In the early versions of the Ponyville arch, I didn't remember that in FOE that the alicorns had only been seen 10 years prior to FOE. I just thought they spent 200 years derping around, pretending to look for the black book or whatever other garbage they were interested in. Tumbleweed was going to walk in on a bunch of alicorns chilling in Twilight's Library (because they obviously still have elements of Twilight in them) reading books, particularly saucy stallion X stallion books that it would vehemently insist was purely for research, and a couple alicorns doing background gags like playing chess against each other, and when one of them won they would high five each other as if they were on the same team. I always felt that there would be a lot of reason for the unity to have a couple of ponies to seek out entertainment for the rest of the unity so that they could all be mentally satisfied while doing whatever it is that alicorns do. That idea got scrapped because I found out exactly what I wanted to do with alicorns, and the idea of having alicorns when the original says they only appeared 10 years prior is the sort of dramatic irony that has wonderful implications. If you haven't figured it out, I like writing castles built to crumble.
In the first drafts of chapter 2, Tumbleweed was going to have a gag where he caught up with one of the sniping raiders at the beginning, and it would cut to Tumbleweed holding up a radigator steak in the air and the raider completely roughed up with a black eye. He would go through all of the dog commands (Sit, down, roll over, where did the flamboyant zebra go?) and then give them the steak. The first versions of that draft were really rough because Tumbleweed doesn't flow as well when he doesn't have others to bounce off of.
There are a number of areas and characters that were planned that are inevitably going to get cut. There were going to be a lot of dog characters that were going to die repeatedly, but then I realized that as great a dark humor is, people really do not like when dogs die. I think that is more so than children. We were going to scrap that idea for having a telepathic dog that would be a direct reference to "A Boy and his Dog," which was the inspiration for dogmeat in the original fallout game. It was going to try to bring Tumbleweed lots of ladies, as that was what Blood the telepathic dog did. Back in those versions Tumbleweed may or may not have been gelded. There were other dog gags that were going to be interspersed in the narrative. Dogs would bring ministry mare statuettes only for Tumbleweed to go "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?!"
There was going to be a paranoid stable dweller that joined the group on their journey that ultimately got cut. He didn't really have story archs, and his role of being juxtaposition to the crazy wasteland personalities that Tumbleweed and Calypto have was fulfilled by other characters. His other use was to die, because naive green horned stable ponies should not be competent in the wasteland. They were going to get a bad one too, head exploding and all that. It was going to demonstrate just how numb some of these wasteland characters are to death.
There was going to be an enclave gal in the original script, and while I am still on the fence, chances are she is still going to be dropped. TW and Calypto are going to have more than enough reason to dislike the enclave, and at one point they were going to ambush a wing of them with not much other than a crowbar. Tumbleweed was going to steal one of their helmets and spend their time running around while the one enclave gal furiously chased him, being unable to fire her weapons. She was going to be ostracized by the enclave for staying down in the contaminated wasteland surface, and Tumbleweed and company was going to capture her. She was going to think that TW and Calypto were going to torture her, despite Calypto telling her repeatedly that she wasn't going to be tortured. It didn't help that TW was going to be making a terrifying racket over in the kitchen. When she was forced to eat delicious wasteland lasagna, she would assume that it was a cruel form of psychological torture to gain her trust before they did the real torture. She would be captured by the enclave, but Tumbleweed and Calypto would be able to chase them off before they managed to brand her. Tumbleweed would give a speech about how they abandoned her and that they would surely chase her again, over and over, and asked why she would want to return to such a two faced society in the first place. He would say something along the lines of "You can continue to keep praying for a forgiveness they won't give you, or you can embrace a new life and a world that will accept you." And then he would hand her the brand. I liked the idea of having a dashite with a brand on only one side. It would be like giving the middle finger to the enclave, saying "I still got my cutie mark, bitches!" She was going to be one in growing list of love interests for the ironically prudish Tumbleweed (Because you never see a wastelander who is insecure about those things). At some point, my editor and I realized that if Joker's Wild was a game, it would be a post apocalyptic dark humor dating sim. It was getting a little bit too haremy, and the dashite would be planned to be part of a Big Horner arch that is probably going to end up being cut in the interest of saving time for everything else.
There were a number of towns that are going to end up cut. One of the first towns Tumbleweed and Calypto were going to run into was going to have a raider problem and Tumbleweed was going to run into a merchant that dressed in the uniform of a caravan he was familiar with. Caravans would have code phrases to demonstrate that they hadn't been killed and had their stuff stolen, and Tumbleweed would find the blood on the gear and the failure to give the code conversation to be all he needed to know. He would give Calypto the signal, and he would wipe out the small raider group. They would find out that the raiders had a hide out somewhere, and tumbleweed would radio up the caravan of that deceased merchant and he would tell them "hey, these raiders want to dress up as merchants, how about we dress up like raiders and show them how it is really done?" And they would sneak in while the raiders were out, bar up the doors, and in catching them off guard, they would absolutely slaughter them.
Another town that was going to get cut was going to be a small collective of spineless cowards that entirely believed that the best tactic of survival was to beg, plead, and give up everything they had to absolutely everyone who came across. Tumbleweed would get furious with them, and he would insist on helping them, but only through forcing them to learn how to fight on their own.
There was a town with a scientist that made intelligent radscorpions which was the idea for the radscorpion Tumbleweed is riding on the cover. A lot of these ideas were quirky wacky adventures with really ramshackle solutions.
There was going to be a chapter where Tumbleweed ran into a group of ponies who were hyper athletic trickers (It's like stree acrobatics with a lot of background in martial arts). It was going to be something were they would use parkour and high powered attacks to deal with threats they normally couldn't deal with. While there were going to be some dashites, there were going to be many earth ponies, including their leader. The idea would be that they didn't need wings to fly. This was going to be something where Tumbleweed trained and grew, and got more acrobatic things, and it would be part of two sessions of training, where there would be an element of gaining metaphorical wings, and later getting metaphorical magic, and thus becoming the actualized alicorn without being an alicorn. I scrapped this out of time, but also because I realized I really didn't want Tumbleweed to have any relations with alicorns. He is an earth pony, and his strength comes from that of the earth pony. I want to focus on the mythic earth pony rather than play into an overused trope. Also, parkour and acrobatics can be weird to write in a story. There will probably be some, but it will not be all the time.
There was going to be a time where Tumbleweed broke his leg, and they just waited a month (because you could do that in the old games). They would have random shenanigans going around town, and it would be really quirky.
This is not an exhaustive list, but I think that is good enough for now. If I had the time, I would love to write endless wasteland shenanigans forever with slice of life low-fantasy wasteland and the cast of Joker's Wild.
This all sounds really interesting! I really do love hearing about scrap ideas like this it's kind of like behind the scenes.