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#MAKING LORE AND DEEP STORIES ABOUT HARMLESS INNOCENT CHILDREN CHARACTERS.
cha0s-1 · 2 years
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I litteraly found my new favorite trope/ship trope by brainstorming... and the problem is, i don't know how to find any type of media(specifically stories) of that dynamic. I tried googling it, and i found nothing.
The ship dynamic is : narcissistic obnoxious Hero x depressed ass villain who's will to live is hanging by a thread (bonus points if there is a love triangle, and angst with no happy ending). Ofcourse, i want them.. well the hero to have a character arc.. and a bunch of angst
So if you manage to find a story like this, or even make a story like this let me know!
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infinite-xerath · 3 years
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Runeterra Retcons 9: Shaco
The time has come to discuss League’s resident killer clown… Or killer jester, I suppose. There is a difference, not that it really matters because even the lore doesn’t ACTUALLY know what Shaco is. To be frank, Shaco is a weird character because he’s NEVER had a proper place in the story, even from his conception.
Shaco’s original lore paints him as a complete and utter mystery. Nobody knows who or what he is, where he came from, or what he really wants. All anyone has ever known is that Shaco loves killing people because he thinks it’s funny. He could be a demon, a rogue weapon, or just a homicidal madman who’s really good at what he loves. That’s where his character begins and ends, so there’s really not much to actually analyze here. Shaco’s second lore attempts to give us a little more detail but all it really does is say the exact same thing with more words added in.
Of course, Shaco’s first two lores were written at a time with the Institute of War and Summoners were still canon, so after the retcon back in 2015 Riot opted to give him a new backstory to make him fit in with the new world of Runeterra. That backstory, as we can see, is ultimately little more than a placeholder. I mean, his extended bio doesn’t even match the blurb on his Champion page!
In summation: Shaco is a haunted doll who belonged to an unknown prince of an unknown kingdom and was transformed by unknown magics for unknown reasons. This backstory now feels especially redundant with the introduction of Gwen into the game, a living doll with a similar backstory albeit far less evil. To be frank: there’d be room to have some interest thematic parallels between Gwen and Shaco if Riot had written these two in such a way that they were creations of the same person or belonged to the same kid but wound up becoming wholly opposite of one-another.
For example: perhaps in an alternate version of the lore, Gwen comes to embody the childlike innocence and hope of her maker/owner and seeks to spread joy and cheer while Shaco is a corrupt and perverted manifestation of those desires who seeks only to amuse himself in the suffering of others. This, I think, would have been a fantastic way to go about it, but given that Gwen is already so heavily tied to the Shadow Isles plotline and Viego is set up to be her primary enemy, I feel like it would be kind of difficult to work Shaco into that dynamic at this point.
Besides, it’s clear that Riot DOES have plans for Shaco: namely, that they aim to retcon him into being a demon. This is somewhat evident by his champion title, the Demon Jester, as well as his relationships are listed as being Nocturne and Fiddlesticks, the demons of nightmares and fear, respectively. There’s also that branch on the demon family tree labeled “Delirium” which would fit a murderous jokester pretty well.
To be honest, I was initially hesitant to even bother doing an episode for Shaco given that Riot clearly has at least some vague idea of what to do with him, but since reworks are coming out a lot slower now and Shaco’s not even on Riot’s priority list as far as we’re aware, it’ll probably be a WHILE before we actually see them do anything with this particular concept.
So, given what we know about Riot’s current plans, the general direction of this rewrite is simple: make Shaco a demon. Admittedly, though, that’s a little easier said than done. Demons in League are creatures who feed on mortal pain and suffering, but each of them has a different way of going about it. Fiddlesticks mainly uses paranoia and trauma to drive his victims mad while Nocturne takes a more Freddy Krueger approach of just invading dreams and turning them into nightmares. Tahm Kench likes to make Faustian Bargains by giving you everything you want and then tearing it all away from you, while Evelynn lures you in with seduction and then proceeds to tear you apart piece by piece.
Every demon takes a different form and has different ways of going about things, but all of them share a core concept: they feed on suffering and misery, be it physical or emotional. That said, there’s a bit more to demons in Runeterra than just that. See, back when Fiddlesticks was released, Riot went and released what the community has dubbed the “Demon Family Tree,” which appears to be a chart displaying the hierarchy of demons and different emotions that different kinds of demons can prey on.
Now, admittedly, there’s a LOT about this chart that we don’t currently understand, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if Riot doesn’t either. There’s a key that resembles the one around Zoe’s neck in the top-left, a bunch of circles in the top right we don’t know the meaning of, and a whole bunch of text written in what I think is supposed to be Old Noxian that we can’t currently decipher. There have been theories and discussions about this already, so I’m not going to get too deep into it, but the main takeaway, I think, would be the words on the chart that we CAN read: Fear, Delirium, Nightmares, Secrets, Bliss, Frenzy, and Obsession. There’s also the term “Azakana” at the bottom, though we know thanks to Yone that this basically just refers to a demon that hasn’t fully matured yet.
Tying the chart back to the demonic Champions in the game, it’s easy to piece together the connections that they each have: Fiddlesticks is fear, Nocturne is Nightmares, Raum (the demon bound to Swain) is Secrets, Evelynn is commonly believed to be Bliss, and Tahm Kench is most likely Obsession. That leaves Delirium and Frenzy untouched, which leaves us with two spots to fit Shaco into.
Now comes the hard part: the decision. Delirium refers to a state of mind in which one’s awareness of their actions or environment is significantly reduced, whereas frenzy is a sudden burst of frantic, uncontrolled emotion, typically rage or aggression. Either one of these could work well for a killer jester, but I personally think that delirium would suit Shaco better in terms of how his personality is portrayed in game. So, with that said, let’s dive deep into the realm of demonic and see what can be done to turn this cursed puppet into a proper Demon of Delirium.
It is often said that misery and comedy are but two sides of the same coin. Laughter often comes at the expense of others, and one person’s despair may be another’s delight. Most entertainers would tell you that walking the line between humor and malice is key, but to Shaco, such distinctions are a joke for which he himself is the final punchline.
The demon known as Shaco has stalked Runeterra for ages, spreading his twisted influence far and wide. There’s nothing Shaco loves more than to bring joy to those who need it most, often appearing to mortals who have experienced great loss or tragedy. Those coping with grief or misfortune may find themselves unexpectedly visited by a grinning jester, who assures that his only desire is to take away their pain with the power of laughter.
At first, Shaco’s antics are innocent enough. Some cheesy jokes to lighten the mood, some harmless pranks to lift the spirits of the downtrodden, all with an unyielding smile that one cannot help but start to imitate. Soon, those enthralled with Shaco’s antics are invited to play games with the jester to help distract from their worldly worries. Those who accept are whisked away to partake in a day of fun and merriment, playing all manner of pranks on friends, family, and even innocent bystanders.
When the games end, Shaco leaves his playmates cackling insanely in the aftermath, often surrounded by bodies and covered in blood. None laugh louder than Shaco, however, who delights in watching his playmates slowly regain their sanity and come to realize all the atrocities committed at his side. Some cry out in despair, while others break down laughing or crying harder than before. Some go mad, others are executed for their crimes, and some even opt to take their own lives. All outcomes are equally hilarious to Shaco, who soon sets out in pursuit of his next playmate.
Stories of the Mad Trickster exist all across Runeterra, often told as children’s tales to teach valuable lessons: don’t trust strangers, never give in to sadness or despair, and always be mindful to never take a joke too far. Few truly believe in Shaco’s existence, but those who fail to heed such warnings may find themselves to be his next playmate, as well as the butt of his joke…
So, this one was a bit shorter than normal, but I think it serves to get the point across. As the embodiment of delirium, I wanted to give Shaco a set-up sort of similar to Tahm Kench: he appears to offer help to those in need, only to end up ruining their lives in the long run. The difference, of course, is that Shaco lures people in to help them forget their troubles with fun and games, only to escalate to full-blown murder and mayhem.
In essence, Shaco drives others to delirium, making them believe the carnage is all just fun and games until his spell is broken and reality sets in. I’d like to think he particularly likes preying on the downtrodden because those who are suffering mental anguish already are easier for him to cast his spell on.
This is just my take on Shaco, though. Who can really say what Riot will do with him in the future? Who knows, his rework might end up even better than what I have here, but of course, anything is bound to be better than his current, non-existent lore.
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Here Comes the Bride, Part Four: Constance, Hat Boxes, and the Meaning of The Attic
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(Photo by Jeff Fillmore)
Warning label.  We're going to get pretty heavy here before we get light, but you'll get no apologies from me.  I happen to believe that people always and everywhere keep talking about the same old things, whether they're writing big, thick theology books or scripts for situation comedies.  Stupid jokes or philosophical systems—it doesn't matter.  We are all natural born theologians and moralists, and darn it, we just can't help ourselves; everything we discuss with each other echoes into and out from something vast and serious.  No matter how trivial and superficial we think we are being, Deep calls to Deep (Ps 42:7).  Connie will show up some paragraphs down, but if what goes first is not your cup of tea...well, no doubt there's a blog out there dedicated to hidden Mickeys in the Haunted Mansions.  Google, and go in peace.  Rest assured that there will be another installment of "Here Comes the Bride" to deal with some of the interesting inspirations for Constance and even some intimations of her future. It's all good. The current incarnation of the attic bride is a unique and ambitious attempt to swell the Mansion's cast of characters and expand and solidify its backstory.  No longer is the HM simply a retirement home for ghosts from all over the world, brought here by invitation but getting stuck in the fabric of the house itself until Madame Leota fixes the snag so that they can materialize and start schmoozin' and boozin'.  Until now, this basic plot has been the only backstory to the HM that could claim official sanction, and indeed it accords with what the Ghost Host tells you and accounts for most of what you see.  But it has never completely covered the phenomena presented.  For example, the Ghost Host has a further tie to the house.  (The other end is tied to his neck.)  What's with that?  Was he an owner at one point?  That would explain why the hosting duties fell to him, and perhaps the retirement home idea was his, but it suggests that the house had its own haunted history before that. The other thing that suggests a previous history is the attic.  Attics are places of concealment, of hidden horrible secrets.  Moreover, the attic has always functioned as the asterisk on the big Marc Davis joke.  The first thing to do is make it clear what that joke is, because that joke accounts for 90% of the HM.  That joke is the broad, firm base from which other, smaller things may deviate. As we saw in an earlier post, at first you think the ghosts are malevolent and out to get you, but it turns out that "they pretend to terrorize" and really don't care about you at all; they just want to get to a state of comfortable materialization so that they can enjoy themselves.  Ha ha, the joke's on you:  you thought they were hostile, and you were wrong. The point of the joke, the moral of the story, the message of the Mansion, is that fear of death is overblown. That's it in a nutshell.  I mean, you really don't know if it's a chamber of horrors on the other side of the veil, do you?  No one really knows, right?  Perhaps the scary hauntings you hear about are just naughty pranks, perhaps all is forgiven and all is well and everyone's having a jolly good time over there.  So long as you don't know which is the case, you might as well take the optimistic view.  That's the vision presented to you by Mr. Davis.  In his portrait of the afterlife, the executioner and the knight he dispatched are now best buds.  There is no revenge, no bitterness, not even any residual hierarchy of power on the other side of the grave—kings and queens are playing like children!  Yeah, there are those two duelists still going at it, but it's more a matter of both of them being humorously stuck in a cycle of irresolvable earthly business than a tragic vision of implacable hatred.  You almost suspect that they're doing it as a game now.  After all, what happens when a ghost shoots a ghost?  Is he going to die or something?  See?  Joke!  Ever'body laugh. Without going even deeper than we need to, we might briefly note that there is a certain resonance between this joke and traditional Christian theology, wherein Death is defeated and rendered harmless ("where is thy sting?"), and ultimately the story of the universe is told as a comedy and not a tragedy.  In this sense, the Haunted Mansion is simply expressing an optimistic hope firmly rooted in Western culture.  "All shall be well." Okay, now the asterisk, now the "yes, but."  Equally part of the Western and Christian worldview is the notion that the afterlife is also the place where justice is finally served (it sure as hell ain't on this side of the veil, in case you hadn't noticed).  Justice implies judgment, and judgment is bad news for the bad.  That happy optimistic vision hopes that enough mitigating circumstances will ultimately be found so that everybody, or almost everybody, gets off, but if the wisdom of the ages is given any weight, there remains a residual pool of those who choose evil without any possible excuse for it and put themselves beyond the reach of even the most generous of post-mortem visions. Disney traffics heavily in traditional fairy tales, correct?  You'll note that the villains in fairy tales are often very villainous indeed.  It might sometimes be possible to understand them, but you cannot excuse them.  They have made their alliance with Death.  You cannot redeem them; what you do is, you kill them.  In truth, the world of traditional fairy tales is pretty stark and grim, and Disney has always faithfully represented this fact.  Fairy tales are also a good place to check out the aforementioned wisdom of the ages.  It's not surprising that Davis's warm bath of good feeling has a sober asterisk attached. The HM is just complex enough to give a nodding acknowledgment to this darker truth while celebrating the rosier vision.  This could have been accomplished in a number of ways, but the route the Imagineers chose (by intuition—don't ever think I'm claiming that they sat around and thought about all of this consciously), is the detective mystery.  What is it that motivates the sleuth in all of those whodunnits?  Bringing the criminal to justice.  Making sure the guilty party doesn't get away with it.  You don't associate Sherlock Holmes with forgiveness, do you?  Now ordinarily, writers of detective fiction banish the supernatural from their pages.  That's because the readers are supposed to be able to figure out who did it based on clues dropped along the way.  If you throw angels and demons and ghosts in there, it spoils the whole thing.  No one can reasonably be expected to anticipate a deux ex machina resolution to a mystery.  But the reverse is not true:  crime and detection are not absent from ghost lore.  Too many ghosts busy themselves with revealing where the body is hidden, or where the knife was buried, or by terrorizing the guilty into confessing their crime.  These ghosts, at any rate, are not in a forgiving mood.  They want justice. In our discussion of the Hat Box Ghost, we showed that the whole attic scene originally was held together by the head-in-a-hatbox symbol, which hails from the world of crime mystery.  You're in the attic, which is one of the two places in an old house where horrible secrets and crimes are hidden (the other is the cellar, of course).  You see that hatbox, and you have a dreadful suspicion that there's a severed head in it, and when your suspicion is confirmed, you realize you're looking at a murder, and you wonder what happened and who did it.  Like a good murder mystery, the attic gives you just enough clues to conclude that the bride is the guilty party, as we saw.  What's the Hat Box Ghost up to, anyway?  He'sshowing you what happened.  Got his noggin whacked off and hidden in a hatbox.  The murderer evidently got away with it, but now the victim's ghost has come back to reveal the awful truth to the world.  The crime is illustrated before your eyes and it is linked to the bride via the synchronized heartbeat.  Very efficient storytelling—this all takes about a second and a half.  These guys are GOOD. Note that the question of justice enters in here—you wonder who committed the crime—whereas when you see the knight in the graveyard, who is just as beheaded as the HBG is, you don't ask any such questions.  The perp is right there, after all, and neither of them care any more, and you don't even know which was in the right and which was in the wrong.  And you don't care either.  You regard the two beheading victims in completely different ways.  Creepy atmosphere + a hatbox in the attic = bingo,  you're in murder mystery land. Oh, all right, I hear those fingers drumming on the tabletop.  You've been good, so here.  Here's a few more Connie shots by Jeff Fillmore (aka ~Life by the Drop~ at flickr).  She's miserably hard to photograph, and I don't know how he does it, but IMO Mr. F. has got the best Connie shots on the Web.
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From beginning to end, the attic scene has never been free of the grisly-hatbox symbol.  It is just as fundamental as the bride herself.  We noted how the two blast-up ghosts were skullish heads popping from hatboxes.  They were there from 1969 until 2006.  You can go back earlier.  Here again is a shot of the scale model, which we've seen before:
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Let's pan to the right and see what got cropped out.  Well looky there.  I see two hatboxes, and one of them is suspiciously isolated.  You look inside, I just had dinner.
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Next up, some Claude Coats concept art for the attic:
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Well, I'm not so sure that it isn't an innocent hatbox in this case.  But this is an attic.  No doubt something horrid is hidden there.  Any guesses where the body is?  Possibly the trunk, but if you didn't think, "Maybe walled up in the brickwork of that chimney," you really need to read more books and see more movies.  See how it works?  They know that you just know these things. When they were kicking around ideas for a New Bride in the mid-2000's, there was a range of ideas put out there for consideration.  One widely-reproduced sketch that passes as "concept art for Constance" actually stayed very close to the then-current bride.  Still has the candle, still has the beating heart, still has the bouquet, and still has the blank white eyes.  Just a coked-up version of the "middle bride," really.
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Oh, and if you come across a less-severely cropped version...well whaddya know:
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Here's the Frank tableau in the finished make-over at Disneyland:
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Nice.  And here's a piece of concept art for it.  (Nudge nudge:  lower left, atbox-hay on the oor-flay).
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Just in case you think I'm imagining things, some concept art for Constance throws subtlety to the wind and takes us directly back to Hat Box Ghost territory.  Oh, and notice how close this Connie is to the finished character:
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Ewww.  That'll put you off your Eggs Benedict.
Reportedly, there were plans to put a stack of five hatboxes across from Constance in the HBG's old spot, with the names of her five husbands on them.  Hatbox city.  One report even suggested that they would light up and glow from within.  That didn't happen, but they did put a hat-rack there, with hats on it matching Connie's hubbies in the portraits.  Heh heh.  When they put Constance into the WDW attic in 2007, they too got a hat-rack, but they also got the stack of hatboxes.  No name tags or lights though.
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Wouldn't want to be in there on a warm day.  Notice the swords laying around.  You don't suppose that means anything, do you?
With the grisly-hatbox symbol, you've got CRIME looking for PUNISHMENT.  You've uncovered something deliberately hidden.  There's a murderer out there somewhere, a score to settle, a vengeance yet denied.  Question:  How has the attic bride always been different from most of the other ghosts you see?  Answer:  She's not happy.  No socializing for her.  Even Constance is only experiencing the lunatic glee of the criminally insane.  If you insist on calling it "happy," then it's kind of a Charles Manson happy, you know?  I wouldn't say she's happy.  She's not forgiven or forgiving, not within the embrace of any resolution.  But is justice being served?  Well, if she wasn't so utterly wacked-out, she'd realize that she's exposing herself and being exposed.  Hattie with his damning heart-beat box is gone, but now we've got five haunted wedding portraits with the husbands' heads disappearing.  Those portraits are five ghostly fingers from beyond the grave laying accusation.  And yet, those guys aren't happy either, and they don't even get the relief of being too crazy to care.  You don't see forgiveness, but you don't see just deserts either.  The ghostly revelations inspire no remorse in Connie, and she's suffering no reprisal.  Her madness has taken her to a place without punishment, but also without love.
This is a very sour note in the HM, and it may well be a thematic blunder.  The Connie addition is seriously flawed.  Unlike the knight and executioner, there has not been any post-mortem reconciliation in this case.  They're grim ghosts without the grinning part.  If there were a way to show the husbands yukking it up with Connie, all of them laughing at the silly fuss their earthly crime drama stirred up, then they'd be part of the Marc Davis all-is-now-well joke.  Or, alternately, if the hubbies were allowed to show some sense of satisfaction that at last the murderer has been caught out, putting their spirits to rest, avenging them, giving them something to grin about like the old Hat Box Ghost, then they would fit into the traditional role of the attic as the "justice must be satisfied" asterisk added to the otherwise merry universalism of the Haunted Mansion.  As things stand, the message of the attic is, "the Devil wins," however lightly and humorously expressed.  Yes, you will survive death and live forever; but no, there is no guarantee that you will find either justice or forgiveness on the other side.  That's a common enough stance in modern horror, of course, but it is utterly foreign to the Mansions.  Or it was, until May 2006.
Originally Posted: Wednesday, June 2, 2010 Original Link: [x]
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