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lucksea · 5 months ago

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actually no u know what. out of mercy i will post my kind-of story bible for ultraman showtime........ as an apology for my inability to write things . heres my loose ideas for my beautiful world

Ultraman Showtime is a story following four young Ultras as they try to navigate through the turbulence of life and discover who they want to be.

Allegro is a clone created by Belial to be his successor. His experiment was deemed a failure and he was abandoned on a planet of monsters several thousand years ago. He was recently discovered by the inhabitants of M78, and is eager to meet new people after spending his whole life alone. He is gentle and sensitive, but his emotional outbursts tend to be literally explosive. His inability to use his energy powers properly is considered something like a disability.

Marize is an energetic Ultra who finds more fulfillment in combat than in science or healthcare, to the chagrin of her parents. She has the ability to expertly manipulate the energies of both the space and people around her, making her incredibly powerful. She has a very straightforward view of the world and often has trouble understanding people. Her passionate nature means she can be very short-tempered.

Lyle is a young scientist who is fascinated by monsters. He has a keen interest in biology and left the Land of Light to study the creatures who often come to Earth. He can come off as distant or uninterested, but he is far more attentive than he seems. That being said, he typically finds his work more interesting than other people, so he has no interest in proving himself to others.

Zero-Two is a machine from another universe, fashioned after the legendary Ultraman Zero. After a fierce battle across the multiverse, Zero-Two is the last of its kind, thought to have been destroyed. Allegro and friends discovered it drifting through space and repaired it, giving it a new life separate from its old code. This has left it with no purpose and no sense of self. It is trying to figure out what it means to be alive.

The story would probably follow an “event of the week” format, similar to most Ultraman media, with some storylines carrying through multiple arcs. I plan to make references to other media, as well as expand on some concepts in the original source that I enjoyed but felt weren’t elaborated on enough or could have been done differently. I’d like to explore the more domestic aspect of science fiction, beyond fighting space monsters, such as the implications of growing up in an alien environment, or having unrealistic expectations placed on you from birth.

Ultraman is a world about humans and the ways they interact with the universe, taking the form of fantastical battles and their impacts on society. While I have great respect for that story, I’d like to take a look at the other side of things and explore what it must be like for the aliens. The Ultras are gigantic, incredible creatures, akin to angels or sometimes even gods- but they’re not either of those things. They’re people. What is it like for them, to be raised with this idea that they must protect the entire universe, and sometimes more than one? What must it be like for them to pretend to be something else?

My favorite parts of Ultraman are the ones exploring the ways people can help and harm each other in both innocuous and world-changing ways. I think there are ways that I can explore this idea further while using the idea of aliens as a lens to study it. I understand that many people who are like me, in that they are somehow “different from the norm”, dislike the idea of being compared to inhuman creatures, but I’ve always found it comforting. It’s kind of cool to me, since I’ve always liked aliens and monsters and robots. I wouldn’t mind being one of them. And Ultraman is a compassionate hero who fights for peace and love. I hope the comparison here isn’t too insulting for people. I think it would be incredible to be able to help people like Ultraman does, even though it’s pretty unrealistic.

“Showtime” doesn’t have any real significance as a name. I’m, um… bad with names. I drew the three Ultras saying “It’s showtime!” as they transformed, and that seemed good enough as a title, so I stuck with it. Their own names also don’t follow any kind of consistency. Allegro was originally going to have music-themed powers, and that didn’t end up happening, but I already liked his name for him, so I never changed it. Marize’s name came to me in my classic gambit of “make a sound out loud and then make a name out of it”; my only real idea for her was that her name could sound like two different names in English, because I thought it would be funny. One of my friends named Lyle because I couldn’t come up with anything for him. Zero-Two is the only one whose name I actually took time to think of- more specifically, her second name, Zenith. Because she’s a trans character, and names are often very important to us, I wanted her name to have actual relevance to her character and story. She originally names herself after Zero, who she was created in the image of, and eventually comes up with her own name which references her origins while also making a statement about her new self- that she has risen above her former purpose.

Allegro and his friends are roughly the same age as Zero, maybe slightly younger. I wanted them to be around 20 years old, similar to my age at the time of writing this. There are a lot of teenage coming of age stories, but I’d like to write one about what it’s like to be an adult without fully understanding what that means. Because of this, Marize and Lyle probably remember Zero’s battles with Belial, given that one of them led to the whole Land of Light freezing over. I haven’t decided if I want them to have already left by then, or if I want them to leave afterwards. It kind of depends on when Showtime takes place in the timeline, which I also haven’t determined. It definitely takes place sometime after Geed, but I don’t know enough about the Heisei/Reiwa shows to decide where exactly Showtime happens yet. The easiest answer would be “present day”, but that would mean the time is always changing, so it would be better for me to pick a specific time and then work backwards from there to figure out where everyone would be. Maybe I’ll put them in America during Arc?

But I don’t know if I want Showtime to take place in America, which I obviously have more experience with than Japan, because while I feel like I would be much more confident exploring society in that way, it might not be very faithful. I don’t know if Ultraman ever really existed anywhere other than Japan in-universe (there are a few american adaptations, but they’re very rarely acknowledged, even as far as Ultraman goes), so I’m a bit worried as to how people might take it… but I also don’t want to look like an idiot trying to write a story in Japan, especially if I try to do research and end up getting it wrong anyways. It’s important to me that I do the story justice.

I have a lot of images in my mind of the trio on Monster Planet, studying them, but I don’t know if that works consistently with what I want out of the story. I like the idea of it, but then the rest of it doesn’t really make much sense. Why would they go to Earth if they have something to do there? Then again, I’m not sure I have much reason for them to go to Earth in the first place. I got an idea in the shower, of the Group for Extraterrestrial Relations (GETR), being a sort of global group funded by the UN in nations that have had contact with aliens. I imagine it started in Japan, and then branched outward as monsters and aliens began to appear elsewhere. Perhaps the Land of Light has some kind of contact in GETR that allowed them to send Allegro, Marize and Lyle to Earth in order to learn more about humans, and defend their given station from threats in the process. I like the idea of them having jobs or school, learning about humans through hands-on experience. It was a fun part of the Ultraman series whenever the writers acknowledged that the Ultras playing as humans may not understand everything about human culture. Maybe the Ultras of the Land of Light, knowing how involved humans have become with their efforts for peace, want to learn more about them, so they plan to send a young warrior and a young researcher to Earth to study and learn more about them, as well as help protect them.

While this plan is in motion, Zero discovers Allegro drifting around Monster Planet, and brings him back home. While the council deliberates on what to do with him, he, Marize and Lyle hit it off, and the council decides to send Allegro with them to Earth. He’s very new to the world, but many of the Ultra warriors learned important lessons while striving to protect humanity, and they seem to value learning via combat– as seen with Zero’s exile– so I think it makes sense that they would send him off with his new friends to learn about life on Earth. They may or may not know about his tendency to explode. I haven’t decided how I want to introduce that yet. And I don’t think it’s actually that frequent of an occurrence, either, despite my jokes about it. He only does it when in very high-stress situations, and he has trouble getting it to happen on command unless in that sort of situation. He can’t really delay it that well, but he can trigger it sooner if he’s in the right headspace. It is possible for Allegro to avoid exploding, but it’s very difficult for him once his timer starts, similar to how most Ultras are bound to run out of energy soon after their timer starts flashing. Learning how to calm himself down when he’s having panic attacks, and learning to avoid them in the first place, is part of how his character will develop. Also, I feel like trying to calm down when there’s a flashing beeping light on your chest reminding you that you’re panicking and need to stop panicking would make it way harder to actually stop.

Maybe Parse could be part of GETR, one of the alien consultants for making sure humans get along with the non-violent aliens who come to Earth. Perhaps a member of GETR is assigned to each of the ultras as a sort of chaperone-slash-buddy to make sure they’re getting on alright? I think the gang should find Zero-Two while they’re on Earth, so she wouldn’t get one, at least not right away. They’d find her pieces just sort of drifting by and go collect them, then realize she’s a robot and bring her to Parse to be repaired. (Or maybe Jean-Nine finds the pieces and brings them to Parse after Hikari sends him there? I haven’t decided yet.) Once she’s complete, or nearly, they realize what she is and debate whether to call someone back on the Land of Light. Marize thinks they should report it in, Allegro is worried they’ll destroy her again and thinks they should keep her a secret. Lyle states that they’re obligated to inform the other Ultras of a possible threat, but because Zero-Two seems more confused than dangerous, they could take responsibility for her and urge the other Ultras not to destroy her. I think Allegro would be very protective of Zero-Two because of his perception of her as a fellow clone, even though that’s not exactly what she is. This makes him a similar figure for her as to what Zero was to him, as the first person to show friendship and compassion to them [although Zero and Allegro’s relationship is much more distant, as they’ve only met once or twice and Allegro kind of idolizes him, whereas Zero-Two is adopted into the group properly.] [I should note that Allegro does not consider Zero-Two to be Zero. As far as he’s concerned, she is her own individual person from the very start, and she just happens to look similar to Zero, like how he vaguely resembles Belial.] [Very vaguely. He was originally supposed to look more like Belial did pre-corruption, but then I liked how his crest and fins kind of looked like a star, so I made them bigger. I also made his eyes more square-shaped rather than diamonds or circles, so really he doesn’t look much like Belial at all. I guess that’s part of why his experiment was a failure.]

After thinking about it for a minute, I think it actually doesn’t make much sense for Lyle to have a yellow timer, even though it looks better, so I’ll have to figure out why he has one, or else people might kill me for redesigning him again. Then again, I’m redesigning Marize after making her a reference because her design doesn’t look that good, so maybe I’ll just change Lyle’s anyway. Allegro having a yellow timer makes sense, because his timer has a different function, but I think Marize and Lyle should have the classic blue-to-red timers. Maybe I can make Lyle’s eyes blue to match? But most Ultras don’t actually have matching eyes and timers, so maybe I’ll leave them as-is. I’m so used to matching colors that the idea of having their eyes and timers be different colors is hard for me to stick with, even though that’s how it’s always worked. But I do like how Geed and Rising look, with the glowing blue eyes matching their timer, it looks much more streamlined to me…

There are so many things I want to capture with my stories. The circumstances of your creation are irrelevant but your actions will impact your future and they are informed by your past. You owe honesty to nobody but yourself. You must remember that you exist in other people’s lives. You can come and go but you will always leave echoes in your wake. People will remember you. Your memory is who you are. Kindness and compassion are more powerful than violence. Violence leaves wounds that can never be fully healed, on both the victim and the perpetrator. People will always hate you and people will always love you. You have to love people. You have to love yourself, too. Basically, you have to love. Everything, everywhere, all the time, you have to be in love. With the world. The way the air tastes. The sound of the trees, and the creek, and your cat, and your neighbor’s kid who likes to play with their dog in the yard across the street, and the people at the grocery store who remember you when you come by every week. Even when it’s too hot, or too cold, or too wet, even when you feel used or ignored or disrespected, even when it’s just fuckin’ hard, you have to remember how it feels to love. That’s the most important thing. Because it’s too easy to hate. It’s easy to get angry and lash out. We can’t always let ourselves do the things that are easy.

That’s something I like about Ultraman above everything else. It’s about love. Ultraman loves humans. And usually, he loves the monsters, too. He kills them when he has to, and when he doesn’t, he finds ways to help them, or he honors their deaths. Ultraman is a compassionate hero. I feel like that’s something that’s very important to remember, an important thing to have.

Ember’s Key is also about love, of course, although in a different way. I feel like my ideas for the spinoff are even looser than the main story. Ember is connected through Zenith, when they become friends by chance, and later Marize, who seems to be a magnet in my mind for people with differing opinions. I always find myself imagining her butting heads with people. Ember herself has changed a lot since my initial idea for her, and she’s still changing, so I haven’t tried to pin down any ideas yet. Originally, she was a drag queen, but I’m not sure if that’s still true. She was going to have something of an outward, self-acceptance vibe, which would help Zenith figure her stuff out and also impact Tregear, who got added to the story later. Tregear and Marize and Zenith have some kind of nebulous ties. And then Mad Astra got added even later, which made me start thinking about a sort of game Astra and Tregear are playing. Like narrators, kind of, or maybe just observers, watching the events of Showtime unfold and messing with the four main characters however they like. I think Astra would find Zenith fascinating (partially because I think it would be fun, since one of my planned beats for Zenith is her becoming something like Normal Astra’s protege for a while before achieving her final form, and partially just because the way I write Astra, he seems like the type of person to be interested). And of course I think Tregear would be happy to mess with Marize. She’s similar to him in just enough ways, and different from him in so many more, that I think he would feel some kind of need to make her fall into darkness. He doesn’t like the idea of watching someone like him succeed where he failed.

I feel pretty bad because Ember, despite being a key character, doesn’t really have anything going on for herself yet. I’ve made a woman who is a plot device… I’m sorry Ember… I’m still looking for something for you I promise… I have a few loose ideas, like her being banished from her homeworld for some hardcore thing like treason and murder. But I haven’t decided exactly what happened yet. Just that she got banished

there's a bit more information to be found on my milanote board, which i've strung together to keep track of things (although i've almost run out of space, and i don't want to pay the premium fee, so i guess eventually i'll have to find something else to use as well). it has some relationship charts, and other boards are nestled in, so you can double click on things to see more. MOST of the characters with boards have descriptions, but not all of them.... all of this is a work in progress

#null havoc damage #nebula m78 #ultraman showtime

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