User talk:Soap

I am currently typing up interpretations of histories that I wrote when I was a teenager, and these stories are very violent and dramatic even by my standards. e.g. try searching for words like

• enslaved
• masochistic
• plantations
• abusing

This is not what I come here to do, and I will be paring the stories down considerably. I am dealing with constant severe pain due to several independent medical issues, and that makes me angry, and in all honesty that's probably the only reason I'm writing about massacre after massacre. Please be kind and sympathetic.

Please let me know if I'm writing too much. I think Im mostly done anyway, as even though my conworld history spans 26000 BC to 12000 AD (with "present" being 8773 AD and the years after that prophecies) I am mostly interested in the period from about 1770 AD to 4268 AD as seen from the perspective of Paba, and most of that has been written down in great detail.

Sources

As above, most of what I'm writing here is taken from stories I wrote when I was a teenager. The very oldest ideas were from when I was 3 years old, and the most recent ones were from when I was in my early 20s. I've still been writing "new" things since then, but they are almost all "fine details" stories involving small numbers of people and thus wouldn't fit in very well with the history-book type of writing I had done when I was younger. (Although I did attempt a novel and a few short stories even then; those also do not appear here.)

Some exceptions to the rule of not writing ideas that I've come up with more recently include dreams I've had about my conworld, particularly when I have trouble sleeping due to pain and start fantasizing to try to make myself feel better. Some of these are more likely daydreams (at night!) than true dreams.

I know from operating a website in the past that pages like these do get substantial readership, so long as they at least appear in Google, though it's likely that the vast majority of the readers were looking for something else and may not read the whole page, or any of it at all beyond the few words it takes to realize it's not the page they wanted. So my writing it abit sloppy, and since I pull from different sources that I've written at different times, sometimes things don't quite match up.

Spelling

For example, I have a hard time sticking to a single spelling for a foreign name, particularly a name that lasts a long time and undergoes sound changes. Is it Tebbala or Teppala? I've never decided, because both are valid names for the planet from two different stages of the same language. I've also spelled it Tīpala, Tipala, Tippala, and Theppala. Those are all names from just one language, Thaoa. The same word is reflected in all of the other languages in many other forms, although despite the fact that Thaoa is not a particularly widespread language on its planet, I have decided to stick with the Thaoa name for my planet.

In some cases, the sources I'm copying from are computerized, and most articles mix different sources, so the spelling can change from one paragraph to the next. For example, Xema is called "Xama" for a few paragraphs in the Swamp Kids article, and then changes to Xema for the rest of the page. I will probably stabilize these eventually, but only if I'm rewriting the paragraphs for other reasons. It's more important for me to change inconstistencies where a whole name is substituted for another, for example calling Anzan "Vaamū" or vice versa (both are names for the same Empire, but from two different eras).

Universal canonicity

One rule I've always held to is to never reject any of my ideas at all. Everything I've written since I was three years old is now and will forever be canonical. When one idea contradicts another, they are either both true at separate times or one of the names is changed. Since creating a nation called "Camia" when I was 11 years old, I've had several more Camias, thus explaining how "Camia" can be utterly destroyed by one of its enemies and then a few hundred years later be on the verge of conquering the world. People, too, can appear multiple times, under different names. The two powerful female leaders Ende and Joja were originally the same person in my writings, even though they lived 300 years apart. Both of these were originally "Nancy" who was the leader of a club for children in Camia who wanted to Save The World. A similar person, Afunyū, lived in the 1900s, but I now realize when I wrote that she was Nancy I was using a metaphor.

I did not hold to this rule early on. I just now found a note to myself "Remember, the plots of the book are completely detached from the comics, which gave way to the book in Nov '93." Neither the book I was writing then nor the comics that precede it are mentioned here however, as they dealt with fine details happening to just a few people whereas my history books deal with large events. However, a few things do appear in both, such as the firebirds' attack on Sala.

Particularly when I was younger, but even now that I'm in my thirties, I came up with ideas that seemed impossible to reconcile with other ideas later on. For example, when I was 13 years old, I wrote a story in which two 13-year-old boys in Camia learned that Camia's enemy, Wamia, was going to try to defeat Camia by crashing them into the sun. Even though Camia and Wamia were on the same planet, Wamia didnt worry about problems because they were fighting a "weather" war, and any increase in temperature, even to absurd levels, would not hurt Wamia. But when the two 13-year-old boys in STW discovered that Wamia was contemplating whether to "shoot the sun at them" they ended the war by destroying the sun. Then they fled to planet Nama to ponder whether they had done the right thing.

Since this event is still canonical, I have to find a way to work it into the story. My conworld no longer has computers or spaceships or interplanetary ballistic missiles, and I like it that way since there is no longer any possible way for one nation to "destroy the universe". Even with my insistence to keeping absolutely everything, I am willing to move events from one time period to another and thus greatly change the details of what happened so long as the event itself is preserved. Planets become countries. Aliens become animals. Guns become arrows and missile attacks become ground force invasions. Destroying the sun, however, has so far resisted my attempts at working it into the story. In a truly unintended irony, the names of the two young boys who fired the missiles that destroyed the sun were named the Golden Sun and the Red Sun, on account of their respective hair color, which was noticeable because they were immigrants into a city where the vast majority of the population was dark-skinned. I didnt realize the irony because I wrote the story about destroying the sun four years before I got the idea to start giving everyone bynames instead of developing hundreds of conlangs for each time period and using names from those conlangs. In a second irony, the Red Sun was patterned entirely on a person I had known growing up who thought blonde hair looked weird in any context and often made fun of blonde people. The Golden Sun, meanwhile, was patterned entirely after myself, which is why the Golden Sun is the leader of the group and the Red Sun merely second in command. However, he (I) was "so generous" towards his friend that even though he was originally simply named the Sun, because of course the sun is yellow, he changed his name to the Golden Sun to show that he was considering himself merely the equal of his otherwise less-admired friend.

One thing I do know is that destroying the sun was the explanation for why the Raspara people, hideous parasites whose entire existence depended on abusing the people they lived amongst, suddenly had no power and could not prevent the ascendancy of a government run by the people they had abused for the last sixty years.

Influences and ideas

A few ideas taken from video games exist in my conworld, but most are in the "short stories" I wrote when I was younger and will not be publishing here or likely anywhere.

Comically overpowered child superheros

Since I started writing when I was three years old, and did the bulk of my failed attempt at writing a novel when I was 12, and since I've held to the promise to keep everything I've ever written inviolably canonical, a lot of the characters in my stories even today are children between the ages of 5 and 12 years old. Five because that's when I started writing stories, and twelve because that's when I stopped. I find my early writings amusing in that I wrote mostly about war but never even considered the possibility that one of the 12 year old boys that was cruising around the universe fighting battle after battle in six simultaneous wars might actually someday get hurt. They were always inexplicably invincible not just to death but even to being injured, and I never came up with an explanation for this except impossibly good luck.

In one scene on planet Namma, a 12 year old member of the TCT superhero league, "Teddy", is cornered in his own spaceship by four aggressive enemy soldiers. Three of the men pinned the boy to the floor of the ship while the fourth started kicking him and stomping on him. The boy's reaction to this was to pull his radio out of his pocket and call for his copilot to come into the ship to rescue him. Realizing that this was impossible because the ship was now in motion, he jumped up to free himself from the four men and attacked the fifth man who had come inside to pilot the ship. Then he subdued the other four attackers and brought his spaceship back down to the planet.

A few weeks later, his spaceship was again invaded by enemy soldiers. This time, Teddy was outside the ship when it happened. He responded by rushing through the crowd of soldiers and into the ship, and then slapping away the soldiers until they were finally all on the ground. Then, hearing that his hometown had been invaded by the army of planet Xema, Teddy flew home with three other kids and the four of them defeated the Xeman army in close range combat. Later, their teacher told them they needed to invade Seattle because the capital of the United States was located in Washington, so they left for Earth in a brand-new spaceship.

Contacts with Nanuko

The people of Namma understood that the TCT kids were trouble. On (I believe) their very first visit, two TCT boys named Teddy and Zach landed in a village and were greeted by a soldier, Nanuko, who immediately ordered them to leave the village. Then he assigned (of course) a young boy to the task of going to all of the other nearby villages to tell them to keep out Teddy and Zach. Teddy and Zach decided to follow the boy to each of the villages so the villagers could meet the people they were supposed to be keeping out. Of the many villages they had been banned from, the boys chose to settle in Torushi Village. They spent their first night on Namma sleeping in a small inn, taking the money needed to pay for their beds from one of the villagers.

A few months after that, while visiting planet Namma, Teddy ran into trouble once again. This time, one of the citizens of Torushi, a boy named Treba, cornered Teddy with a sword, demanding to be given access to Teddy's "dream machine". The ever-heroic Teddy grabbed the sword and rushed to find Nanuko, who was now friendly towards Teddy and the other children. He then forced Nanuko to turn the government over to Teddy and Nauri (a girl whom Teddy had met recently and become quite fond of). The fact that Treba had been pressing a sword against Teddy's abdomen just minutes ago didn't matter at all; he considered Treba so insignificant that he didn't even want revenge. However, Treba was a kunma (see below), and thus even weaker than most of Teddy's other attackers.

Battles in Wamia

Some of the children occasionally were captured by enemy soldiers, since although they were quite strong their powers were primarily defensive rather than offensive ones. One boy, the same "Teddy" from above in fact, "got caught" by his enemies while spying in a foreign country and was thrown in jail near the city of Buga in his nation's enemy, Wamia. He decided to break out of the jail by drilling through the floor with his "cocoon" superpower. Then he climbed into an invisible spaceship and flew for some reason to Fort Calamity, a fortress of about 20 square miles in the arctic wasteland, for protection even though he was already free and safe as soon as he got into the ship. Dr. Zāme figured this was as good a time as any to invade the kids, but after he got inside the fort he fell into a booby trap and disappeared. Then, a girl named Jen destroyed the "radar computer" (I'm not sure what I meant by that) that Dr. Zāme had used to track them down.

Later developments

The boys fought against two types of enemies: the first type was conventional armies, sometimes enormous ones representing an entire nation but also often beating off small invading forces that had been sent out by a foreign nation not wanting to risk losing its entire army in one battle.

The other type of enemy was the "supervillains" one might expect to see more of in a comic book or a novel originally based on a comic book. For example, Dr. Zāme threatened the kids day after day with all types of enemies, being particularly fond of enormous building-crushing mutants. Often, the boys would be sitting in sixth grade happily doing their schoolwork when the teacher would call them up to the front desk to tell them that Dr. Zame had just threatened their city with another pack of mutants and it was up to the boys to save the city by fighting off the mutants with no weapons or armor to protect them.

First snake battle

One day, Dr. Zāme himself called up the boys on their telephones before school to let them know they had a big surprise waiting for them in the local battlefield. The boys' parents wished them well as they converged on the park in the center of town. Long before they arrived, though, they caught sight of their big surprise: a snake so gigantic that even its tongue was longer than the boys were tall. A sportscaster named Bob showed up to watch the children try to fight off the snake, but refused to participate in the battle himself. The snake kept crushing them and trying to poison them but the boys kept slithering away. On the other hand, none of the weapons the boys had been throwing at the snake were able to get through its skin.

Eventually one of the boys decided to freeze the snake with cold weather spells, knowing that snakes shut down in cold weather. Five cold waves soon showered the snake, and then at the climax one of the boys switched to a hot spell in order to shock the snake into a state of distress. This killed the snake. When they returned from the battle, their teacher was so happy that she gave them the day off from school to celebrate.

Missile attacks

At other times, Dr. Zāme preferred more conventional methods of attack, such as shooting anti-aircraft missiles at their spaceships or larger missiles at the buildings in their hometown (although this type of attack required coordination with other people; Dr. Zame couldn't do this by himself.) Once, when three of the boys were on planet Theta for a political conference, in which they were deciding whether or not to launch an invasion of Earth, Dr. Zāme decided to hit the boys with an interplanetary ballistic missile and destroy the building they were staying in. The attack succeeded in destroying the building but the boys survived, as did the aliens they had been negotiating with. On the way back home, the boys were attacked by a flock of gigantic man-eating birds which had been imported from the planet Xema. When they hid from the birds, they were ambushed by Dr. Roc, who had been cooperating with Dr. Zāme.

Adults are useless

The national government seemed uninterested in reining in Dr. Zāme, or even tracking him down; they simply resigned themselves to the fact that every few weeks there would be a major disaster in their capital city and it was up to a group of ten young boys to bail them out. Even the boys' parents were unhelpful, soberly telling their kids that they could not go out and play until all of the 20-ton slugs occupying the shopping mall at the other end of town had been eliminated.

All of the enemies the boys fought were adult males. Not once did one of the boys break ranks with the rest, even when I realized I had intended all along for the boys' superhero league, TCT, to be just one of many, thus opening the possiblity for competition or even open warfare between the leagues. Very rarely did the kids have any help from adults in their missions. I believe Nanuko is the only example of an adult character actually helping the kids out in their missions directly instead of just ordering them around from battle to battle. And he was pretty nearly useless. TVTropes "AdultsAreUseless" applies here. There was a second adult that was helpful, actually, one of the 2 characters named Bob. He had a habit of telling lies and pushing his way through crowds of people in order to start fights against unsuspecting victims, but he never wavered from his position of supporting TCT. However, whereas Nanuko joined the kids' adventures and flew in their spaceships just as if he was one of them, Bob worked on his own and made no alliances with anyone except TCT.

"The Power"

Many years later, I came up with an explanation for why the kids would always emerge squeaky clean from each battle that also explained some of the other oddities in my early writings. All of the supervillains the boys fought seemed to have the same uncanny ability to survive every battle unscathed, even battles they "lost", as did the kids. One exception to this is that in the very first "mutants vs. humans" story I wrote, Mr. Zāme (sic) threatened the boys with man-eating birds and gigantic slime molds, and then, when those were gone, tempted the boys into entering his heavily guarded fortress. In the fortress, they tricked Mr. Zāme into letting them all pile on him at once, and they KILLED him with a bomb.

Two months later, "Mr. Zāme" threatened the kids with mutants again, this time right after they had finished defending themselves from an attack by a man-eating firebird. As I wrote the comic, I realized Mr. Zāme had been killed off, and corrected it by adding "His brother, actually." (I drew in pen at the time, so every mistake stood. It kind of helped the realism a bit.) I soon renamed this brother character Dr. Zāme. However, it seems that my original intent was to have them be the same person, so I am sticking with that explanation, and using the "Dr." form of the name for the combined character.

Attempts at explanations

In my later writing I contemplated the idea that the supervillains were in fact merely grown-up superheros who betrayed the team, and that the children were being misled by their leaders into believing all of the missions they were being sent on, even missions that killed thousands of people, were entirely morally good, and that the many adult male "supervillains" who kept on disrupting them were entirely morally evil. The fact that not even one adult male still sided with TCT gave the adults a strong argument that they were right to attack TCT.

The invincibility was explained as being a natural innate power of the superhero children, which stays with them when they grow into adults and thus turn on their former teammates. I remember also an idea that the invincibility power that the children and the supervillains shared also prevented them from killing each other, because "the Power" could not attack itself. They could only restrain each other and send indirect attacks such as mutants and missiles at each other. When Dr. Roc attacked the boys in a cave on Hurricane Island, he didn't kill the boys, he merely put them to sleep.

I don't remember the full details of this expansion of my idea however, because I no longer include magic or space or superheros as part of my writing. I do believe that at this time, I had decided that the TCT members and the supervillains in fact could die by conventional means, they simply could not kill each other because their Power would not permit them to destroy one of their own kind. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I had always intended the kids to be normal mortal beings, not invincible, but that they simply really did extremely lucky and did foolishly brave things that could easily have killed them many times over.

It should be noted, though, that this explanation doesn't entirely fit with my original ideas, because Dr. Zame and the other supervillains did not have magic powers in the early comics.

Reflection on Teppala

The remnant of this scenario in my current writing is that Save The World (STW) sees itself as a very child-focused organization, despite being almost entirely devoted to war and enslavement of its enemies, and is led primarily by females with motherly instincts because adult males are frequently kicked out of STW. With very few adult male members, STW must fight its wars in very subtle ways. In my early writing I had no problem pitting a 12 year old boy against an army of 12000 heavily armed soldiers, because I knew that the boy would always win. In my current writing I have to come up with more sensible explanations.

I *just now* realized, after 24 years, that the name Swamp Kids is a symptom of this as well. I dont know why I had to dream in order to remember this, but it worked. Although it's true that the Swamp Kids, due to their high birthrate, did in fact consist largely of children, and although it's also true that they were well below the average body size for the empire they lived in, and were painfully aware of it in every one of their very many wars, the Swamp Kids had abolished child labor on their first day in power and thus relied strictly on a traditional adult-led (in fact, male-only) hierarchy for both their military and their government. The name "Swamp Kids" was merely a symbolistic cultural way of thinking that stressed the virtue of obedience to authority: the ruling class was still allowed to call its people "men", the rest of the people were merely "boys" or "kids".

Superheros without superpowers

The Kunma Kids

Treba

Even those children who did not have magic powers were often expected to behave as though they had. There were actually two types of magic in my early conworld, TCT's type and another weaker type called "Tanta spells". One poor misfit boy, "Treba", lived on a planet (Namma) where all the people around him had many Tanta spells and he had none. Yet for some reason he was expected to defend the entire village he lived in, while all of the stronger magical people around him reclined in their hammocks resting comfortably in the knowledge that their one-boy army was out in the fields fighting off the men in tanks with his miniature battle-ax.

This boy happened to be a slave, so in the middle of a battle he was often forced to take time out from fighting the enemy soldiers to serve his masters a luxurious meal or take their laundry down from their clotheslines. One day, after helping repulse an invasion of men in tanks (and getting bumped around and repeatedly run over in the process) he returned home to find out he had been banished from the village for cooperating with the other people who had beat off the invaders. However, he was soon back in Torushi anyway because Teddy and Zach forced their way in and brought Treba with them.

TCT took pity on this boy, but nevertheless, shortly after they rescued him they sent him to take on the supervillains on planet Xema, including Dr. Zāme and Dr. Roc, again with no weapons or armor to protect himself, and no knowledge of how to pilot a spaceship.

Later, a girl pays Teddy 2 days' wages to beat up Treba, then a different girl, Nauri, sentences both of them to slavery for violating the prohibition against fighting. Soon, though, Teddy is released from slavery and Treba is transferred from Nauri's property to Teddy's so Teddy can beat up on Treba legally.

I've made a word for this type of character: kunma (also wumma, kunama, etc). A kunma is a character who resembles me, but whose existence is so painful that he is inarguably worse off than me. Sometimes, a character representing myself attacks or torments the kunma, and other times protects him. I think I've only created two such characters in my life, Treba and another boy named "Gary" who I suppose I could mention below.

Gary

Long before I created Treba, I created a boy named Gary to beat up on. I believe I was 7 or 8 years old when I drew my first-ever comic strip, and all I remember of it is a bunch of children at the lunch table in 2nd grade laughing at Gary for saying something embarrassing. I had assumed those comics were long gone, but stumbled across them one day many years later. But, due to a flood in our house in 2007, after which we simply threw things away without looking inside at all the soaked papers, they've probably been gone for real for 8 years. Ironically I think I drew on laminated paper with crayons at the time and it would have survived a flood whereas all of my later comics would have been ruined.

When I was 11 or so I drew some comics on construction paper with a pen. (I dont think I ever used a pencil.) In one story, Gary and Teddy found out they were the only two students to have failed the last test. Gary was happy that at least he was not alone in his suffering. But Teddy responded by beating up the teacher, and the teacher agreed to change Teddy's grade to 100. Then the teacher dismissed the class and Gary walked home depressed.

Then, on the way home, an older boy picked Gary up and started hitting him, demanding Gary give him all his money. Then, Teddy stepped into the fight and threw away the boy that had beat up Gary. Five days later, Gary got beat up again and this time Teddy wasn't there to protect him. The day after that, Gary got beat up again. The day after that, Gary got beat up again. People began to tell Gary that he was getting attacked because he was a Wamian immigrant whose family had been invited to move into Camia, but that most Camians weren't cool with it and therefore for the rest of his life he would just have to simply face the facts that he would be getting beat up over and over and nobody would care.

However, Teddy still considered Gary useful enough to bring him along on missions. One day, when Dr. Zāme had threatened Teddy and a few other boys with a herd of gigantic building-crushing mutants, Teddy decided to bring Gary along to use as bait for the animals. Gary ran around on the ground letting the animals chase him from place to place while the other boys knocked the animals out of place just before they were about to eat Gary. They killed all of the animals except one, which they decided was too harmless to bother with since it was just a gigantic slime mold. So, the slime mold survived and started lurching around the city as a symbol of how helpless the military of Camia would be if they didnt have the TCT boys to pick up the slack for them.

In another battle, Teddy told Gary to participate directly by trying to kill an animal that had rolled over onto its back and couldn't get up. But he was unable to harm the animal, so Teddy killed it with a bomb. In yet another battle, while the other boys were casting magic spells and splashing the predatory firebirds with fire and ice, Gary decided to run in and punch one of the birds directly, but he hurt his hand on the bird's beak and later on the bird bit him, incapacitating him for the rest of the battle. Then, one of the other boys accidentally hit Gary with a water spell, causing him to nearly drown. Then he healed Gary with a magic potion.

Soon, Gary switched schools to a "Wamian school" to isolate himself from the bullies around him. On a hot day in late May, Teddy and another Camian boy invaded Gary's new school and took one of the teachers hostage. They said that they were doing it in the name of their homeland, Camia, and that the Wamian school was unwelcome and was trying to brainwash Gary. The teacher pled with the boys to let him go, and promised to prove that they were not brainwashing their students. When Teddy looked at the textbook the teacher had been reading from, he agreed that it was not anti-Camian propaganda and apologized for invading the school. But still they took Gary out of the school and went home.

Two weeks later, Teddy and Gary were walking in the woods. A woman was walking close behind the two boys as they approached a very polluted river. Teddy told the woman to leave them alone, but she refused. Then, when she was facing the other direction, Teddy launched himself on the woman and started kicking and punching her. Then he just walked away, figuring she'd learned her lesson. But the boys stopped at the riverbank, and the woman soon reappeared behind them. She pushed Gary into the polluted river and then stepped back and smiled at what she'd done. Teddy ignored Gary and started fighting the woman again. He gave her quite a thrashing, and decided that it was a good time to search the polluted river for what remained of his friend Gary.

Gary survived, however, and soon recovered. Later that summer he challenged a Camian boy to a race and won. The prize was $100. The other boy, however, attacked Gary and took most of the money away. Gary went home sad but at least happy that the other boy had let him keep a part of his winnings.

The Cleanup Corps

There was also the "Cleanup Corps", a group of elementary school aged children who went around the Earth cleaning up environmental problems while being attacked by snipers and bombers as if they were the greatest threat yet to the civilization around them. I blame Captain Planet. These children did not even have magic powers or advanced technology; they simply went around the world cleaning up toxic waste spills while dodging bullets and torpedos. (Because they lived on Earth, they were not in the "gun-free" paradise world that most of my writing takes place in.) The Cleanup Corps is quite possibly the most absurd idea I've ever had. But at the time, it seemed perfectly normal to me.

From my "red notebook" I see that I had originally intended the Cleanup Corps to have literally singlehandedly saved the entire Earth from destruction because another group of eight children, a subgroup of TCT, had been ordered by their teacher to singlehandedly destroy the Earth. Those eight kids did in fact destroy much of the Earth, but when they met up with the Cleanup Corps they suddenly switched sides and the two groups of kids befriended each other. After the Earthlings learned that the Cleanup Corps had saved their planet, they started shooting at them, so TCT decided to rescue them and move them to planet Teppala. Thus, the cleanup missions stopped and the Earth became messier again.

Apparently, once TCT had rescued the Cleanup Corps and moved them to Teppala, they became mostly independent from their teacher Nancy, and Nancy reacted to this by adopting the Cleanup Corps as "the new TCT" even though they didnt have superpowers. Also, apparently, a boy named Soap was an STW member in one later incarnation of my story (written in 2008).

Reflection on Teppala

I might rationalize this idea by saying that the children were merely a wing of a larger organization that mostly employed adults. Also, the Cleanup Corps was not a kunma because none of the characters resembled me.

Direct borrowings

In fact, I just now remembered that even Calvin made an appearance in my comics, though only as Spaceman Spiff. He had no magic powers, but did have his "mertilizer" gun which put him on a level with the other superheros. Stupendous Man never appeared, nor did the obscure Capt Napalm or just the "regular" Calvin. My early comics were quite Calvinesque, the kind that the "real" Calvin would have read, except that mine always had much worse artwork: I didnt even realize birds had beaks at first, I just drew mouths. I also was fond of depicting conversations as taking place mostly or entirely outside the panels, so that it was literally just speech bubbles within each panel, colored according to which person was speaking.

Further back in my childhood, I used Archie Comics characters as well. I remember one story that had Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Dilton, Reggie, and myself. My character was very much like Jughead. I believe I was writing myself into the story as being about 18 years old, to match the other Archie characters. I didn't seem to get the idea to self-insert my character as the age I actually was until shortly afterwards.

I borrowed some ideas from TMNT, which was owned by Archie at the time, but no actual characters. Ace Duck was the only character to even be mentioned, and he never actually appeared.

Video games

Some indirect borrowings from video games still exist. The Raspara people stereotypically wear bathrobes because they are patterned after the Wizzrobe "people" in the original Legend of Zelda video game. When I was young (maybe 8 years old) I pretended I was Link and that I had made friends with a Yellow Wizzrobe when we met each other in a doorway. This is why the "Yellow Raspara" befriended the Swamp Kids and the "Blue Raspara" doubled down on their abusive practices.

Early on I had some direct borrowings, such as from Mystic Quest. This game features an unusual art style with tiny humans fighting animals literally thousands of times larger than the humans, such that even an enemy named "Basilisk" (an insect) is able to "scrunch" (presumably meaning to crush) the players, and most attacks by the humans seem to be aimed at the enemies' feet. (Note: I might be misremembering: it was either a Basilisk or a leech that crushed me. Or both.) Likewise, a slime mold attacks humans with a pseudopod because the humans are so tiny that even an amoeba can crush them.

This led my early comics to feature humans (mostly boys around my age at the time) fighting off gigantic mutants created by the Zāme clan. True to my inspiration, most of these animals fought the kids by crushing them instead of using sharp teeth or claws against them, even if doing that would have been far more effective. For that matter, essentially all of the animals the kids fought could simply have swallowed them whole, but never attempted it. Even the snake whose tongue was bigger than the whole bodies of the kids who were fighting to take it down merely tried to poison the boys with his tongue (!) but never succeeded because as above all of the children seemed to be invincible.

Female characters

A few girls did appear, but I just now realized that most of my female characters were also based on video games I was playing at the time. However, video games in the early 1990s didnt have much room for personality development in their characters, so really I was being original after all because I was giving personalities to the otherwise very flat characters in the games. I did have some female characters that were entirely original, but most of them appeared in backup roles or in typical female roles such as teachers and people's mothers. (Only very late in my comic career did I begin to introduce "girlfriends".)

As above, although the national government of Camia was helpless to track down Dr. Zāme or any of the other men who kept making life hard for the TCT kids, they were seemingly okay with going after women. For example, in the year 4190, Camia declared war on an middle school teacher living in Baeba Swamp. Most of her students were already imprisoned, but two girls were still at large because for the most part, girls were left out of the most dangerous missions. Thus, the two girls flew to Wamia to free the other kids. When they arrived they broke open the prison and let out the six kids being held prisoner, and then the eight of them flew to Earth to rescue the rest of the kids. Then, they all flew to planet Namma to get away from the war that their own nation had started with them.

End of comics and novel attempts

In 1994, I drew my last comic, "JEPARODY", a parody of all of the comics I had drawn up until that point. It started as a Jeopardy game, but when one contestant (probably Teddy) got a question wrong he responded by crushing Alex Trebek and then turning on all of the other contestants as well. Every character was badly drawn, and most of the panels consisted of people fighting or people talking in speech bubbles while remaining outside the panel.

I had outgrown my hobby.

By this time, I had also stopped writing my novel, although I did not intend at the time for that state of affairs to be permanent. I just never was able to pick it back up again. I've tried three times since then to finish the novel, and even have quite a long plotline mapped out, but I jsut don't seem to be able to do it. Thus, since resuming writing in late 1998 I've essentially only written in "history book" format, writing about whole nations' thousand year histories instead of the affairs of individual people over a span of a few weeks.

Technology

My world now takes place in an environment roughly comparable to medieval Earth but with a lot fewer humans than the Earth had had even in that era. This is partly because sapient animals are also present, and have kept humans from growing too strong. Thus, human technology progresses so slowly that it remains nearly static for the first 20000 years after the first settlements on Rilola. Some ideas are discovered and then abandoned because the only civilization making use of them collapsed. I even want to have guns on Teppala, but to have them be so very weak that arrows remain forever the preferred weapon among the elite armies of the world.

Because of universal canonicity, I have a hard time integrating my ideas from the science fiction world I worked on for the first 20 years or so of my writing career (roughly age 3 to age 23 ... i was always into space, from the very very beginning. Maybe that planets-and-stars themed potty training toilet had something to do with it).

The invention of the incubator

In earlier writings, around the year 2001, I wrote sentences like The population of Camia rose back from less than 3000 after the Tinkers' killings in 3827 to over a million in 3833. I dont remember it, but Im pretty sure that I was assuming that the Tinks had invented and perfected an incubator to give them babies, freeing up their women from the difficult and painful role of womb-service so they could focus on actually raising and nursing the babies. Such a birth rate would be impossible with womb birth alone. This may also be why not only the Tinks, but most of the societies that attacked the Tinks during their time in power were seemingly all males, never having to worry about protecting their women at home when they sent their entire male population off on a new military conquest.

Birth control

I seem to have repurposed the phrase "birth control" around the year 2001 to mean birth by an incubator. I only just now realized this, having probably forgotten it about ten years ago.

Conlangs

To a much lesser extent, i try to follow universal canonicity with my conlangs as well. For example, 22 years ago h was the Moonshine word for "human" (I dont remember the etymology), so I needed to make sure that Khulls hʷ "soldier" could evolve into that same h in the new Moonshine, which is now a daughter languages of Khulls whereas in 1994 it just floated on air.

Notes to self

• "he only doesnt let me down the stairs" ... complaining someome isnt THAT abusive because he at least still allows access to the hallway
• The (Soap) Bubbles were identified as identical with the Andanese in a scrap story immedaitrely after the TDA story

• However, it was certainly not just an ethnic group; e.g. Pinuha and the Red Sun, the two most powerful people in the government of the Little Country, joined the Bubbles, fired all Swamp Kids from the government, and banished all Swamp Kids from the Little Country.

• One story that uses the word "bubble(s)" fifty times seems to identify them as Mampum, indicating they include Crystals. This would explain why the Crystals of the 4149-4268 era seem to have nothing in common with the Crystals of the 1500AD-3915 AD era. This same story also uses "crystal(s)" 169 times.

• Can "Larnac and Lucy" be here?
• "leaving just Ezra" <--- when did this happen?
• The Swamp Kids may be a fork of the Crystals. The "Vaamūans" that invaded Tarwas and later got invaded by Atlam were identified as Crystals in one source.
• there was a strong localistic sentiment in amade, and the region refused to force its children to learn standard camian, preferring instead the smooth, measured dialect that had come to them from clubia. <--- possibly explains "STW was imported from Clubia"

Not qualified h not ă pappo

:)