Considering how much random stuff I threw against a wall and got to stick, it feels very appropriate to start this blogpost off with the wonderful Clownpiece art that Cornwind got for me last year without even knowing what had been planned and what was going to be planned later on. This crazy mixed-up fairy and her crazier somewhat-coherent story have spanned five settings and - as of this blog - a whopping EIGHT YEARS of being in RP from a semi-regular in Season 6 to contributing to plot in Season 7 to being a consistent participant in the Salvagers plot and a big role during my finale in Season 10 to getting to be a partial protagonist of my Season 12 plot when evil Dorats took the stage to finally getting to be the star of her own plot this year, Season 13. She's not done with RP by a long shot though, in case you're worried. Not when there's more Chaos to be dealt with and a love interest to bumble about with.
Cut Content
A good place to start discussing this year's plot is last year though and how I accidentally screwed up a lot of planning. It's October 2022 and it's my plot finale with Marx, Jevil and Dimentio leading an army of brainwashed rabbits and baby Dorats towards Moriya Shrine to wreck it and get a tunnel to the strange, fantastical realm of Hollow Earth. Huge stakes battle with big monsters and lots of mooks so everyone who attends has something to do. Pretty standard for me, right? Well, my ORIGINAL plan for the ending was for Dimentio as Monster X and Clownpiece as Ghidorah to grapple through a portal to Hollow Earth to set up for "Journey to the Hollow of the Earth".
What happened though? Why, on the day of the plot finale, did I suddenly shift gears and have Dimentio get blown away? Well, I escalated things a bit TOO much and had the Trio of Insanity conscript baby dragons in their army and letting him get away - even to be defeated a year later - would probably have been unsatisfying. This led to HUGE changes to "Journey to the Hollow of the Earth", going very far off the rails I had originally planned.
The biggest change ended up being one of the best, in my opinion. Originally, most of the plot was going to take place in Hollow Earth with maybe one or two events occurring in Whalestrand and...get this...
The MALPverse wasn't going to be involved at all.
The original plot would have gone roughly like this:
1. Clownpiece is still working with Chris and Yohane to find a way to Hollow Earth; she knows there's a way SOMEWHERE near Whalestrand but can't pinpoint it. Sightings of a golden dragon attacking small towns and villages attract the Kobbers and there's a fight with the dragon, who turns out to be Seregios.
2. After Clownpiece 'tames' Seregios, the younger Dorat offers to lead the Kobbers to Hollow Earth, explaining that she herself was driven out by an even bigger Chaos. Before anyone can go into the cave and find Hollow Earth though, Adelle and Paimon reveal themselves to be guardians of Hollow Earth and want to know why Clownpiece wants to go there. "Looking for Chaos" is a bad answer and leads to a fight.
3. Beaten, Adelle and Paimon agree to help, but it takes awhile because Chaos makes it so the path from the surface to Hollow Earth is constantly changing. Chris sends her EMMI to map a route. There'd be a lore dump at some point about how Adelle's people are descended from Mothra worshippers and Paimon is an enigma - she wasn't planned to be a Sivana moth creature at the time.
4. Clownpiece and Friends descend into Hollow Earth to start tracking the main Clownpiece, the Dorats, and Dimentio. Clownpiece leads the gang to Clownpiece, who is in the middle of defending her Dorat Den from a local kaiju, King Kong. A brawl against Kong ends with Paimon convincing the great ape to stop trying to mulch the Dorats and that they're the good Chaos.
5. Dimentio appears and reveals he lured Kong to the Dorat Den so he wouldn't have to do his own fighting. He escapes and leads the Kobbers to the desert where the Great Master Ghidorah's body and the Chaos Heart were located. Ancient guardians are awakened to prevent anyone from reaching the body though. That particular detail made it to the final plot, but the original version had Ruby, Emerald, and Diamond Weapons from Final Fantasy as three guardians who would be tracked down and destroyed in separate battles instead of a Boss Rush like what happened in RP. Momoyo in her centipede form (under her Alpha Weapon codename) would have been the last defender.
6. Dimentio would chortle a lot and reveal he couldn't beat the Weapons himself and manipulated the Kobbers into doing it for him. He would then rush into the desert to find the Chaos Heart for himself, FINALLY turning into Keizer Ghidorah for a final showdown against the Kobbers. (Goops remarked in chat that he'd even told his mom the 2022 finale would have Keizer Ghidorah; THIS was why that didn't happen in 2022.) Clownpiece would then Inherit the Chaos Heart and become a giant space dragon who would take the baby Dorats to space to raise them right. Or at least stay in Hollow Earth fixing the giant desert.
I toyed with using the original Final Fantasy 7 versions versus the updated Final Fantasy 14 depictions; I didn't want to accidentally spoil potential FF14 stuff for people in chat who have or are playing it currently. Kong would have probably continued helping with plot after making a truce with Clownpiece. Iku wasn't involved in the original plot draft at all and outside of my plot the characters would have largely done the same stuff back in Whalestrand.
There were more changes to the plot that were made prior to the 2022 finale that happened for one reason: Clairepiece being made official.
1a. Clownpiece was originally slated to just go to Hollow Earth and not leave a Clown Piece behind, but I couldn't just leave Claire hanging like that.
2a. 'Taming' Seregios would have been done by Chris and Adelle to get help going to Hollow Earth.
Otherwise, "Journey to the Hollow of the Earth" would have more or less happened as outlined above. Outside of the original timeline, I don't recall cutting much content from the plot we ended up doing. There were some details that would have been different.
Macka, one of the servants of Delilah Alexandria, was originally going to use a Touhou Lost Word alternate of Rin Kaenbyou for her uncovered faceclaim. Macka is even Croation for Cat (Garvan, for the record, means Raven, like Utsuho.) I decided to go with a different face claim, Micha Jawkān of Symphogear, after deciding on more of her backstory and details.
While I talked about Kong during the outline above, I think he's significant enough to merit a bit more talk. I don't think he would have done much in other folks' plots, but I probably would have done a few solo posts about him and Adelle to flesh out the Hollow Earth culture a bit more. Depending on how quickly he was actually introduced into RP, he might have gotten a Big Bar Brawl slot instead of Garvan.
I wanted to flesh out a bit more of Margit's history and maybe show her trying to catch more Pokemon. Fortunately she's going to be around next year for that. She would've been shown trying to catch Pokemon besides her starting pals, maybe even going to Hollow Earth and discovering more Paradox Pokemon. Will we ever get an in-character reason why she started with four squid Pokemon? Maybe, maybe not.
In a just world, I would have gotten around to writing another robot fight or two with Big O so Yohane could be even cooler.
The Plot We Got
While I had the foundations for the new plot started shortly after last year's finale, a lot of the plot's final form began to coalesce throughout November, going from chasing an evil Dorat to combatting the ultimate anti-Clownpiece: an Order-obsessed space dragon who had been active for a long, LONG time. The concepts and specifics were still evolving even after the season began, but early November saw the release of something that'd end up being a HUGE influence on the plot: Sonic Frontiers. And not just because it has a BANGER of a soundtrack.
I've never played the game, but the Internet was raving about it and I slowly absorbed knowledge of the game through Let's Plays and listening to that banger of a soundtrack while I worked to the point where Youtube would recommend five different uploads of the same song often. It's thanks to Sonic Frontiers that we ended up bringing back an old concept into RP, the MALPverse. How did Sonic Frontiers make the MALPverse and return for its eventual redemption though? Sage, the cute white-haired AI girl from Sonic Frontiers, needed a role in a plot about space dragons rumbling with each other. I don't want to ramble in a disorganized fashion though, so let's ramble in an ORGANIZED fashion.
Sage Robotnik
I'm not gonna like, I really like Sage. She's an artificial lifeform girl with white hair and red eyes like a certain Shadow-hunting android from the Vegas years. As mentioned earlier, I'd watched a lot of Sonic Frontiers cutscenes and stuff and gotten a good feel of the Sonic games Sage. She needed a role in the plot and being a protagonist-turned-antagonist for personal reasons seemed like a good fit for her, being more of a "Evil is my dayjob" villain in Sonic Frontiers.
MALP Robotnik's death was going to be Sage's motivation from the moment she was considered for the plot as a way to push her to do evil things. How exactly it'd get her from meeting the Kobbers to fighting them took time to decide on though, eventually settling on her being convinced by Jack of Blades to do things that would be frowned upon by most Kobbers, eventually leading to the idea that Sage needed to kidnap Grima for Jack's plans to work, even if she didn't know what exactly the plans were.
Even as a bad guy though, she didn't want to be BAD. She spent a few months trying to Kobber despite being afraid that Kobbers would beat her up for being a former "bad guy" without knowing her circumstances, getting exposed to all the neat miracles they did to cheat death, wanting to actually do good things even as she was doing bad things for good reasons. Even with a giant space dragon in tow, she wanted to avoid fighting Kobbers.
Chao's suggestion to have Sage meet with the Prime Eggman was a great opportunity to have Sage get the next best thing to her own father's advice: his alternate self's cousin with similar goals. She got a much-needed pep talk in how to win, not necessarily how to be evil, and how to win while being prepared to lose, which set the stage for Sage to have the idea to establish sub-minds, which allowed her to still attend Goops' finale even while the main Sage was radio silent in space.
Eventually, Sage had to make a choice, to either do a good thing and keep trying to save her dad or to do the RIGHT thing and to keep Jack from manipulating and abusing her trust. In the original draft of the finale, she would have confronted Jack in the City of Beasts with a ruined Supreme mech only for it to be vaporized and a reborn Sage to have contacted Attami privately for a reunion, but especially after Attami turned the rescue tables on her, it didn't feel right to make Sage go into hiding and not start down the road to forgiveness.
And since they aren't major enough to really need a section of their own, Orbot, Cubot, and Metal Sonic had been planned to be Sage's support team since the idea of hijacking Grima had been finalized so she wouldn't be totally alone in space. I'd planned to write a scene of them playing board games at some point just to really rub in how evil (not evil) the Robotniks were being.
As for MALP Robotnik, we didn't get to see much of him outside of one blogpost, but if he had made an appearance of some sort, I imagine he would have been a cross between the games version and the Sonic Boom CARTOON version, a guy who was capable of villainy but more for the sake of proving that he could do a better job of ruling the universe than the current administrations than being evil for evil's sake, one who had ideals that required crushing blue hedgehogs I guess.
Attami becoming Sage's 'Big Sis' was a great turn of events, Goops' lovable android serving as a character that Sage could relate to more easily and a friendly face that could help the AI girl integrate into Kobber society after being isolated in a ruined fortress for over a decade. The two bonded over being artificial lifeforms in an organic society, eventually coming to each other's rescue in our respective finales. Sage ended the season hanging out with the Salvagers, but she'll be back next season.
Seregios
As mentioned earlier in this post, Seregios had been planned since close to the beginning of the plot's conception, to act as a different kind of Dorat than Clownpiece had been, a younger sibling for Clownpiece to teach in the ways of the Chaotic Space Dragon and force her to mature a bit. During the original draft, Seregios was needed to provide the Kobbers with a way to get to Hollow Earth, navigating the ever-changing tunnel system downwards for them and at one point I had even considered her to have been sent to the surface by Clownpiece herself. The explanation for her having a humanoid form like Clownpiece for that version of the plot was that she had somehow come upon a smartphone that had lots of slice of life anime downloaded to it (this would have been Adelle's phone that she lost) that inspired the
schoolgirl look.
With the Clown Piece still in the picture though, a new character to guide Kobbers wasn't needed as much when there was a Clownpiece who could do it and then Chris Yukine also had a refurbished EMMI that could be sent to do the job as well. I still wanted to use Seregios though, so when the Sonic inspiration came along, I decided to throw her in the MALPverse to serve as a Flicki (the animals Robotnik stuffs in robots) for a new Mecha Ghidorah, one that would serve to give Sage a lingering resentment of Ghidorahs that I for better or worse didn't do more with besides having Sage and Seregios fight a bit in part 1 of the finale.
There is a Mecha Ghidorah in the Godzilla movies, but I couldn't use that one for two good reasons: Harpy had used it during the Revue of Rejects plot and it wasn't purely mechanical. It took Clownpiece five seasons before she got to be a Ghidorah; I wasn't giving Seregios that kind of power right off the bat, so I hunted for Oops All Mechanical body for her to use as a Flicki. I found two: the concept art for a rejected Showa movie designed by the original Gundam designer and one based on the Legendary Monsterverse.
It's amazing and it was hard not to share it when I first saw it (SK knew of it anyway and shared it on Discord) even after I'd settled on the goofier, more Sonic-esque one because I thought I might have Sage use it in the finale.
Spoilers: Sage did not use it in the finale because I decided she wouldn't build a robot in her father's killer's image.
I do regret not giving Seregios more things to do outside of my own plot, though she did get to go to at least one of Chao's Live A Live events (though I actively decided against sending her on Cornwind's fighter plane event because Clownpiece is silly not dumb and knows what Dawn's missions entail) but she's already started down a path towards being the Order Ghidorah so there's plenty of time to do stuff next year, on her own or with Clownpiece or Paimon.
Paimon and Adelle
While Paimon and Adelle may not have been joined at the hip during the season, the intent for them to be a team since their role was first conceived makes it appropriate in my mind that they get a joint section for the blog.
I've said several times in chat that I never beat Bravely Default 2 because the overuse of enemy counterattacks really ground on me (and if I haven't, remind me and I'll complain about it) but one of my favorite parts was Adelle, who I felt was one of the game's best characters, spunky like Edea from BD1 but fun in different ways. (They should have given her a catchy utterance like Mrgrgr though.) Meanwhile, Paimon's one of the two main characters from Genshin Impact with a lot of mystery surrounding her (at least, that's the impression I get from Wiki diving since I don't play Genshin). I figured the two of them would work well as a duo with Adelle as the serious one and Paimon being an ancient, lazy sidekick who COULD know stuff but might not.
They had their role as denizens of Hollow Earth who lived on the surface as a way to keep an eye out for people who would want to go down there searching for treasure or worse and then deter them with force if need be. They largely kept to this role, but instead of being a boss fight, they had a solo post where they had an encounter with Clownpiece to clear the air between them. I didn't have much planned for them beyond that, so they tagged along on a few plots that were relevant.
Would you believed Paimon being a giant moth creature wasn't planned initially? It was a spur-of-the-moment idea I had while barposting with Harpy that just felt RIGHT. Paimon's a mysterious creature, obviously not human, so why is she hanging out with Adelle and safeguarding Hollow Earth? Because she's continuing the Draco trend of cute girls actually being giant monsters in disguise and she ended up playing a bigger role than I'd expected.
Since as far as I know, Bravely Default 1 and 2 aren't in the same setting and only have crystals and Asterisks/Jobs in common, and considering that Chao introduced some of the Bravely Default 2 Asterisks as made on Earth (he can correct me on this if need be) I decided Adelle wasn't going to be affiliated with Luxendarc in any way, so in terms of her source material, she's got all the abilities of the Dragoon and Thief Asterisks, but she doesn't use Asterisks. Paimon, meanwhile, has no powers at all in Genshin Impact, so I felt like just giving her access to all of that game's elements in the form of generic magic. And being a moth, but that's not in Genshin Impact either (or is Paimon from EORZEA?). Kind of odd to me that they haven't done a playable Paimon summon at all, but I suppose it'd be odd to see Paimon running around with herself.
I also had a lot of fun doing the silly Paimon Brawl votes. It was a lot more work than I'd initially expected and required some unconventional use of software, but hey, where else are you going to get Paimon dancing? Eh? EH?!
So they're monster hunters now without having to keep people out of Hollow Earth. They'll be around in Season 14 for sure, so look forward to more...Paimon food reviews or something. I don't know yet.
Maybe...PAIMON EATS???
No.
Momoyo
Momoyo deserves a section. Why? Because she's part of a bigger organization affected by giant space dragons.
She got introduced in Agama as basically a joke about centipedes so naturally she eventually got to do more in the plot, having a battle with the original Ghidorah presented to Suwako in Season 11 and brainwashed to help the evil clowns in Season 12, building up to the reveal that she was actual an Anti-Spiral bioweapon. She keeps getting relegated to the sidelines a lot, unfortunately, but I'm glad to have had her for my plot. RP doesn't have enough centipedes, dangit! Momoyo suffers from a case of me having trouble introducing things for their own sake and keeping them minor, not wanting to waste any part of the RP buffalo!
Momoyo ended up being the first rung on what ended up being the Anti-Spiral ladder making up part of the Ghidorah backstory, essentially making a war between Order and Chaos the Spiral Nemesis that caused the Anti-Spirals to eventually create the Zonders that were my Season 10 enemy. In Gurren-Lagann, the Spiral Nemesis was implied to be a giant black hole that would be created by too many lifeforms existing and their combined Spiral power; I like my more tangible disaster, personally, one that's been averted thanks to the Kobbers killing Jack of Blades.
Momoyo may have started in RP as a joke about centipedes in the year her game was introduced (although unlike Chimata she didn't get in THE VERY MOMENT she was announced) but she ended up being a large part of the extremely weird backstory of Ghidorahs in ZFRP. She and the other Anti-Spiral adjacent characters like Nia and the Moon Rabbits may not show up too often in RP from here on out, but I enjoyed having them while I could.
The MALPverse
Strange to think the MALPverse wasn't even going to be part of the plot at first, isn't it? Originally a joke about a grimdark version of the RP timeline that every franchise seems to have at one point or another, formed when the Mammals Are Lazy Patrol decided they were going to solve ALL the problems, including each other eventually. As I recall, the original super-evil-grimdark version and the modern MALPverse (now dubbed Altera, which is a great name) split about the time I had MALP Draco as a villain in Season 6 so it was less cartoonishly evil. As mentioned in the above section, I don't like wasting already-existing RP concepts, so when I needed to rewrite Journey to the Hollow of the Earth, including the MALPverse seemed like a great way to give new characters history without getting interference from the Prime RP Kobbers while also giving the plot some meat to it without resorting to having Grima send monster-of-the-week enemies. It also let me do a couple of great event ideas that allowed me to step away from the typical "Giant Monster/Robot Fight" Dracoplots that I'll admit may be getting stale.
Not to mention having a plot occur in the MALPverse lets us finally wrap up that lingering thread that you'd think would be more relevant. An entire 'evil' universe is kind of a big deal, right?
While coming up with the MALPverse's involvement in Journey to the Hollow of the Earth, I had to explore why the two timelines split, the big factor being that there was no more Zoofights Corporation to keep the good times rolling at a time when most Zoofights fans were extremely violent and the benevolent Kobbers hadn't fully solidified as a group yet. In the real world, we know Major Failure had real life things happen that prevented another Zoofights. In the prime RP timeline, their focus shifted to providing a different kind of entertainment, sponsoring a fleet of starships to go to the planet Ardea for the newly-implemented Star Festival. So MALP got the short end of the stick and just had Zoofights just...go dark, the leadership disappeared and all its money to keep violent folks entertained gone, leading to a lot of unhappy, bored people who wanted blood and money, eventually leading to the formation of the less-nomadic Cobbers (pronounced like Sob because it's the CITY of Beasts, not the King of Beasts) that undertook lesser acts of evil in the name of a pay day.
So I settled on Jack of Blades initially being drawn to Zoofights for the blood sports (in his source material, Fable, he practically runs an arena of his own) and staying for the chance to commit murders to bring Chaos to New York City only for it to grow wildly out of hand in ways he hadn't expected. It was like his birthday and he got to make it even worse by reaching out to someone who had lost family to the growing violence, Darkwing Duck aka Darkwarrior Duck, who might exist in Prime RP but only appeared onscreen as an animated picture. If you don't know who Darkwing Duck is, he's a Disney cartoon from the 90s who's a spoof of Batman and James Bond and one episode involves his daughter Gosalyn time traveling to the future, which creates a dark timeline where Darkwing becomes Darkwarrior Duck, who was a cartoonishly evil dictator. That out of the way, Jack sponsored Darkwarrior to form the Cobbers to bring an evil order to the City of Beasts while the MALP members were off in space fighting each other.
With the evil established, I realized later in the season that if I sent Jack of Blades into deep space with Sage, I really didn't have a way for the Cobbers and the Kobbers to come into conflict with each other, needing some way for one side or the other to go blustering into the other dimension for a ruckus. It didn't seem right for Clownpiece to just go to town since there are Planeswardens in MALPverse and Darkwarrior Duck has no reason to go to the Prime universe like MALP Draco did. Hence the introduction of the glorious rebel organization, Aquors, named for the idol club You Watanabe and beloved-hero-in-every-universe Yoshiko Tsushima aka Yohane joined in their source anime, Love Live Sunshine. Aquors was a good way to bring the universes together by having them go "Hey, shit's being stirred up in this other universe, let's go tell them.", introduce EVEN MORE Symphogear characters in the form of the Mechvaranus girls and Fluffy Chris (an alt of Chris Yukine from the mobile game), and show that just because the universe was screwed up didn't mean your good guys HAD to be evil in MALP in the form of Blue Lantern Sanae Kochiya. I also got to throw in a heroic Decepticon from Transformers' Shattered Glass timeline so Deceptiplot forever.
So having yet another Yohane led to one of my favorite RP events of at least the year: Junk MALP versus Clownpiece. I don't like to have my characters show off how super tough they are because normally that means I feel like I'm trying to steal someone else's plot for my own guys, and I appreciate everyone who sent a junk villain to fight her (especially Brine, who gave us a miniplot out of it) so she could show off how tough she'd become. It was a nice twist on our usual formula where one villain usually gets dogpiled by heroes, letting a protagonist be the 'villain' of the plot for a change, and also a nice take on the "junk badguy" thing we've started doing. I also feel like it gives us a good reason why one hero doesn't just go out and fight the huge badguy organizations on their own: someone who doesn't have a lot of power-ups available to them is going to get stomped on eventually without the backup.
The other MALP-centric event of the year was also really fun for me to plan, the big bar brawl between the Cobbers and the Kobbers, a chance to show off that the only reason these evil guys haven't spread out to cause more trouble isn't because they aren't powerful enough to do so, but rather because there's no incentive to go to Ardea or Vegas or Kuwahawi when there's money to be made in the City of Beasts, especially when there isn't a huge corporation subsidizing their travel and other expenses. We got a huge battle with people like Perfect Cell taking on a dozen guys at once and Darkwarrior Duck showing he's actually tough despite fleeing from the previous event. I really enjoyed everyone's participation there. Sure, the Cobbers might not have taken over a universe like Dark Matter did, but they were still a bunch of evil assholes that we removed from power over innocent folks, and that's what's important, right?
I included a scene with Aquors taking over the King of Beasts to show that Altera was going to be okay even if we don't actively RP there anymore, with Planeswardens and a new group of Kobbers taking care of the place.
Grima
Before Jack was included in my Season 13 plans, Grima was originally conceived of as Clownpiece's ultimate enemy, the Lawful Evil to our fairy pal's Chaotic Good, the ultimate embodiment of Order in the galaxy that would test how far our Goodorah has come since her first appearance back in Season 6 to make it so the entire Lunar Invader Trio got into RP. I apologize for reusing the name since I'd already included Grima's human form as Tara Skew the year before, but I really like the sound of "the Fell Dragon Grima" so I adopted the excuse that Grima is an ancestor of dragonkind throughout the universe so dragons sometimes name their kids Grima like how IRL people are named Jesus or like how Chao named his Gabriella after the angel, Gabriel. I also really liked the dragon Grima design from Fire Emblem and it felt better to keep the name and design together.
I had a similar challenge with Grima that I did with the Cobbers: how to actually make the Kobbers aware of them. Sure, I could have just had Grima show up one day and go "Fight me" but that would've been a very short and a lot less satisfying. Chao was kind enough to trade me Iku Nagae, who'd been a Kobber back in the Vegas years, for Okina Matara, who'd shown up a bit last year so I could make use of her title of "Dragon Messenger" to go into space and make contact with Grima, giving the Order dragon her own messenger and giving us our first Dracoplot of the year, sending a brainwashed Iku to attack Clownpiece in a way that the Internet asks of fantasy empires: why doesn't the evil lord send their best troops right away to crush the hero? Well, it takes a lot of energy to mobilize the entire giant space dragon, so if a mind-controlled proxy can do it, why not try that first?
Something about Grima I wish I'd explained better is her power to remove the powers of others - ie do a magic and delete superpowers - as an effect of powerful Order, to bring a being's baseline abilities to a specific level. It got mentioned in the first event and not mentioned often again.
Eventually, after a plot-convenient amount of time, Grima arrived over Earth to do battle with the heroes without more than a solopost of Big O fighting a Sivana that had gone to Earth to hunt Clownpiece. I enjoyed having an infodump plot for people to talk about how to fight a giant space dragon, kind of like Bulette Tank last year, because I like to get y'all more involved with how to save the world. Yeah, I'm running the plot but it's just a bunch of soloposts without y'all to participate, so I want you to feel more invested. The twist of Grima going "Wait, what'd you say?" and doing what I'd call a face-swerve instead of a full turn was fun to do because I liked showing that Grima was fully prepared to keep trying to murder Clownpiece but was also inclined to resolve things less-violently if given a compelling reason to, only for Jack to screw things up at the last moment (and make sure plot didn't end in August).
Grima came into being to challenge the oft-seen notion in fantasy that Chaos is automatically bad and Order is inherently good, set up to fight Clownpiece and show off how good the fairy has become just so someone who is even worse could step up and take over as the big bad of the plot, someone whose lore involves establish Chaos as evil: Jack of Blades.
A small little Easter egg: in an epilogue post, I had Grima call itself 'Avo' and call the original Ghidorah 'Aeons'. This was a little nod to Fable and two of its most powerful weapons, the Sword of Aeons, a plot device that Jack of Blades sought for ultimate power and the base game's best weapon, and Avo's Tear, a slightly-weaker good-aligned weapon you got in the Lost Chapters expansion if you did the good thing and destroyed the Sword of Aeons.
Jack of Blades
Yeah, I doubt anyone actually believed that Jack was going to be a good guy when he showed up and aside from saying he was an OC for awhile I didn't try to hide it. Everything about his appearance screams EVIL and I'm okay with that. Jack's inclusion was conceived of as a way to flesh out the story beyond a big fight with Grima that would give Sage more significance, an evil-looking newcomer to the King of Beasts who could befriend the evil-associated AI and foster her desire to do 'good'.
Of all the characters I've introduced to antagonize Clownpiece, I would say Jack of Blades is the one I would say most embodies the concept of "Evil Clownpiece" to the point where I tried to get an AI art thing to make Clownpiece in Jack's clothing. I couldn't get one that satisfied me though, so I included Clownpiece going "I thought you'd look like me under your mask" as a joke. A concept I don't think I've mentioned in actual RP is that all of the Ghidorahs and Sivanas are what Transformers calls a
Multiversal Singularity, where only one of that person exists in the entire (RP) multiverse so there is no MALP Clownpiece or Dark Star Clownpiece, just Clownpiece. Jack of Blades thus is what Clownpiece might have been if she'd never met Hecatia, wandering on her own doing random acts of Chaos to amuse herself instead of being taught a set of morals.
He's wicked and smooth, doing what pleases him however he wants. He killed the MALPverse's Major Failure and EnforcerWolf to stir up trouble and made allies in the form of Darkwarrior Duck and the Goblin Illuminati (who will probably show up again because I felt I underused them) to bring pain and suffering for his amusement. Upon finding out that there was another universe when Clownpiece lead the mission to Sage's base, he followed our heroes back to the Prime universe to find out what THEY were doing and how to cause even more mischief, eventually culminating in a plan to embody both Chaos and Order to perpetuate his own brand of Evil. More than any other villain I've done in RP, he's the baddest of the bad guys, not having a deep reason for doing his misdeeds beyond "I feel like it" and "It's fun" and that was something I enjoyed about adding him to my plot, to really show how bad someone like Clownpiece could be if they didn't care for anyone or anything else.
Jack was different from a lot of my other villains though because he wasn't directly being villainous. He went to the bar to hang out with Sage. He went on some plots and didn't do anything bad to sabotage the plans until the moon. Jack was visible to the Kobbers and not doing bad things in front of them, so (in-universe) he had a really good alibi, with the one Kobber to have seen him doing evil was Labrys, who had ties to the Fable universe thanks to her friend, Hal, my take on the protagonist of Fable. Labrys wasn't an active Kobber though, so naturally it wasn't likely for her to identify Jack. Jack kept his villainy hidden as long as he could, manipulating Sage into bucking the Kobbers and using their plans to fulfill her own plans, using the truth to deceive the lonely little AI into hijacking Grima for noble purposes (except for his lie about Neo, which helped expose him). Jack's revival method comes from Fable 2's Knothole Island DLC, in which you can lead a villager to a small shack with a lever next to it. Get the villager in the shed, pull the lever, and they die so your dog can come back to life without your alignment getting penalized at all.
He was always going to be the Keizer Ghidorah once he was included, because the Godzilla fans needed to know that big baddy was going to be beaten after Monster X didn't escape justice, showing up in Ghidorah form a couple of times to really show off that there was another dragon waiting in the wings, blasting Clownpiece and Paimon on the moon to facilitate the kidnapping of Grima. Because while I'm doing better about making smaller-scale plots so nobody has to pull a Megazord out of Edgar's butt, I can't resist having a big, giant, epic battle against a giant manifestation of evil threatening the universe.
But like I promised after the Boston thing, I didn't completely destroy the City of Beasts, just a solid chunk of it.
Captain Clownpiece Lapislazuli
Clownpiece had to grow up a bit eventually, eh? When I introduced her to RP back in Season 6, I didn't think she'd get a pairing, let alone an entire huge plot all about her and her backstory. Then Season 7 and Kuwahawi happened and she slowly started getting more and more reveals, hanging around to do Planeswarden things and slowly getting lore and history until a weird magician went NIARK NIARK NIARK and made Clownpiece angry enough to awaken her heritage as a chaotic space dragon so she could slam dunk him into a volcano. My little Chaos fairy's come a long way since she barged into the bar with Hecatia, including two Big Bar Brawls and becoming a King of Beasts Day staple (whether you like it or not). I even gave this section her full formal name and title to show she's not just a little clown anymore. (Or should it be Lapislazuli-Voyant? ;3 ;3 ;3 ;3)
I'd love to be able to say I had this all mapped out from our first year in Kuwahawi, but that'd be a silly lie. All I had planned was to slowly build up lore for her one season at a time with no definitive goal in sight beyond "Gonna turn this fairy into a space hydra yup yup yup" but it turned out well in the end, I'd say. The most serious planning I had was having Jevil 'cameo' in Olympia to eventually lead up to more Dorats showing up in Agama to eventually have a big Ghidorah throwdown this year. Yeah, plans took a sharp left turn to Albuquerque but we eventually got to the destination in the end.
My big goal for Clownpiece this year was to show off how she'd grown over the years, going from a silly fairy sidekick who loves her mamas to a responsible member of the Planeswardens and proper girlfriend for Claire, struggling with staying true to herself as a being of Chaos without letting it dominate the life she'd built around herself.
She took a lot of hard knocks this year, starting with Grima's introduction and announcement that the space dragon was coming to Earth specifically to kill Clownpiece and potentially everyone she knew, a shock for a fairy who'd never had an arch enemy before. Even Moonface or the Salvagers hadn't targeted her specifically, just going after her 'prisoner' while Barubary didn't kidnap her because she was Clownpiece but because she was a convenient battery for the development of the mutant Gyaos, Iris. Grima was the first being who saw her and went "Yep, I really want you dead."
With a fearsome nemesis giving Clownpiece a feeling of bone-chilling dread, her next step was to go and find a way to tip the scales in her favor until a way to Hollow Earth could be found, leading her and the Kobbers to the MALPverse to find their Chaos Emeralds - Prime's being locked in a Kuwahawi museum and Heart Star's disappearing after the final battle with Sectonia - and use their power for herself. The Chaos Emeralds getting involved had been a no-brainer and I'd been trying to plan a Super Clownpiece form for months until Cornwind shared the art at the top of this post and it was better than anything I'd had in mind by that point. The Chaos Emeralds gave her a new problem though: she was invincible and more powerful, but she was also suddenly filling herself with more Chaos than she was used to, making her feral and wild and not necessarily caring to distinguish friend or foe, eventually leading herself into conflict with...herself.
The 'Piece full of Emerald power vs. the Clown that wasn't, an external struggle made internal once the two fused back together, forcing Clownpiece to confront the idea that she'd only made things worse by trying to get stronger, especially when she could tell it wasn't just herself afraid of the Emeralds. Fortunately, someone had foreseen something like this happening years ago and showed up to kick Clownpiece's Super Butt. I am not putting that in the ticker. Nobody ever leaves RP forever and Suwako is no exception, returning to continue dispensing Giant Monster Wisdom to the fairy in order to help her come to terms with an uncomfortable truth: the Emeralds really aren't the problem, it's Clownpiece who needs to shape up.
So Clownpiece does something she's never done before: talk out her problems with Claire. Maturity might not have made her more powerful, but between that and fighting the Cobbers by herself, she gained something even better: the realization that she didn't need to be strong enough to solve everything herself because she had people who cared enough to help her. Her decision to give Claire the Chaos Heart to hold on to was both a way to make sure Jack didn't get it AND a symbol of their growing bond, culminating in the very excellent (in my humble opinion) Clairepiece Ghidorah fusion during the finale to help land the killing blow. I wish I'd planned that better though so they could have had more of a Claire flair.
One thing I tried to do in events was to show Claire as just as much a contributor in fights as Clownpiece was. Yeah, Clownpiece has a lot of raw power and flashy attacks, but Claire shows up to events and does a great job contributing with her psychic powers and her ever-growing Gridworks talents. She's a level-headed gal who does a great job of keeping Clownpiece grounded. Clownpiece might not be the focus of Dracoplot again after this, but I look forward to seeing how she contributes in the future, especially with Kogasa having her issues next year and SK bringing forth the Merfolk god to contend with.
In the end, Clownpiece gave up her Emeralds and put the Chaos Heart away because she has everything she needs at her side.
Other Stuff
With all of the stuff directly-related to plot discussed, now I can talk about other things that happened in RP that aren't part of that plot.
Garvan
Outside of my own plot, Garvan is probably my most significant contribution to RP this previous season, having been present for quite a bit of Brine's Hagplot and other appearances besides. Delilah was always slated to have a pair of assistants, but I hadn't decided on what either would actually look like until I was talking with Chao one evening and he'd mentioned that we don't really play around with height much in RP. Sure, we have strong characters and wide characters, but we don't often do tall characters, me especially with 4'1" Zeldoten, tiny fairy Clownpiece, and second-shortest Symphogear girl Chris as some of my main characters. So I decided the first of Delilah's helpers would be the tallest non-kaiju on my roster at 12 feet tall and then took more inspiration from Chao, going to the Touhou Lost Word pool of neat alts for characters to grab a version of Utsuho that was...a maid.
I had an appearance and a role for Garvan and, unfortunately, I decided that was enough to throw her into RP, forgetting that she also needed a personality and - given the nature of RP - a power set.
What I am about to say next is not intended as criticism towards anyone but myself. I gotta preface this or I'll spend every other sentence apologizing.
Garvan needed more time to cook before I threw her into the Brawl. She only had weeks between introduction and sign-ups to develop and I didn't give her enough time to do that. I slapped together a Brawl entry with things that'd make for an interesting Brawler without consideration for her as a character. If I'd written her Brawl profile now, there'd have been less talk of modes at the very least. As JRM said in his post-Brawl blog she had a really passive personality at the time and a Garvan from a month or two later would've been a really different entrant.
She's got her role to play next year though. I loved having her blossom over the course of Idolplot and I look forward to what happens in Season 14!
Delilah
If there were any kind of logic to this blogpost, I'd be talking about Margit next. TOO BAD. Planning ahead for Season 14, I brought in Delilah and the Library of Alexandria to start setting up for my next plot. I've started to realize I really like outlandish character concepts and stealing ideas from things I like, so I brought in a sentient library. I don't want to talk about her too much here because all the juicy details get to be revealed next year in plot. Suffice it to say that she was eager to get rid of the brain parasites and other reality-altering beings for personal reasons. It was a huge unexpected surprise when Brinehammer revealed Iliesh to be a Sphinx; needless to say, him also revealing a character to be from old Egypt and in possession of a magical library was almost as surprising as the year M_Sheep and I both picked the Miser Bros for our Secret Fiter AND they got picked to be in the Brawl. Awkward.
Delilah has her reasons for trying to be standoffish and not get too involved with events, but then things happen like hags needing help mastering magic and Violence writing her a book that make it difficult not to do things, like transform the library into a Megazord to punch evil hags. Just when she thinks she can settle down, a strange candle monster tries to burn her down and contrary to what Cornwind might say, the Candlemaker could have killed her with the arson attempt.
As I'm sure I've said four or five times this blog already, I'm looking forward to writing more Delilah stuff next year.
Macka
Just to round out the Library of Alexandria group, I don't have as much to say about Macka as I do Garvan or Delilah yet, but I gotta write something about her. She didn't do a lot this year even if she did TECHNICALLY debut about the same time as Garvan, mostly hanging out in the background doing secret agent things for Delilah as needed. As of the time of the writing of this section (I started late 2023 and continued writing on-and-off) I've mentioned in response to the Brawl Wishlist that Macka might not get into the Brawl because I don't have a well-defined power set for her yet and I want to avoid feeling like I'm prematurely entering someone in the Brawl. She has used a couple of faceclaims in RP so far - Arknights' Doctor player insert and Symphogear's Micha Jawkin, teammate to Hooded Pitohui's Garie - but I have plans to get a picture of what she looks like without giant coats and wigs.
The coat serves to protect her from heat and light because, as I briefly alluded to in a barpost, she absorbs energy like Garvan but if she absorbs too much she lights on fire. This will hopefully get brought up in Season 14, assuming I remember. Because of this, she prefers using magical items and mundane weapons like guns or a pair of clawed gloves/hands.
Skullmageddon
YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE FINALLY DEBUTED IN RP PROPERLY. After not being selected as a Secret Fiter, providing effort commentary on Fuzzface, and not winning the Secret Fiter Scuffle, we finally had a great setting for Skullmageddon to exist in and I couldn't NOT bring him in as both a Whalestrand resident and a proper Big Bar Brawler. He's been fun to throw into the bar to do random posts and to toss onto the occasional plot requiring a burly skeleton-esque person. His pawn shop is more or less directly lifted from the River City Girls game, which is shockingly in the same timeline as Double Dragon Neon. A very early idea for Jack of Blades would have had his mask appearing in Skullmageddon's shop for an Inquisitor - not Morag or Brighid - to purchase because it was so obviously evil, but I didn't want to overcomplicate the plot more than it already was.
Being Delilah's friend was just a fun detail to make the setting feel a bit more connected.
Morag and Brighid
I almost regret making Brighid into Morag's Stand with how much Stand lore is being brought into play next year! ;p
Just kidding, of course. NO REGRETS, BABY.
There's nothing too deep about my plans for Morag and Brighid. I saw their designs at some point in 2022 and decided I liked what I saw. Morag's a cool lady in uniform and a badass with a cool supernatural-y partner, Brighid, so I decided I'd throw her into RP and find a good reason for it. I deliberately went with Brighid being Morag's Stand to give them a relationship similar to their source material without having to create the concept of Blades in RP, because introducing a race of magical girls into RP seemed a bit much when I'd likely not do another Blade while we've had Stands in and out of RP for years. Fortunately, I'd figured on this early enough to include her in Chao's Whalestrand preview plot event involving Cardholder King Milaarc, spinning off her Xenoblade role of an Inquisitor into making her a supernatural cop in RP. She and Brighid suffer from a common theme with some of my newcomers though: they're somewhat incomplete as character because, in Morag and Brighid's case, I never figured out 100% what kind of neat powers they have beyond being vaguely fire-related.
I've never played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 so I don't know what they do in-game and all I know is I don't just want it to be generic fire magic. Wildfire did that back in Olympia.
Fortunately, being good with swords and having a toolkit full of supernatural countermeasures served them pretty well during the season even without a lot of other cool superpowers and I'm seriously considering the duo for Brawl 14.
Thanks to plots like Seychelles' early Roman revival plot and SK's Aqualand adventure, I feel like the two of them had some good chances to show up and contribute to plots, though I also feel like they've been more successful than my previous attempts at RP cops because there's not a huge ZFPD presence like we had in Olympia, so there's more of a niche for them to fill.
I was tempted to try getting the game and playing it for myself, but Gooper Blooper has reported in chat that it's kind of boring, so I'm fine with my version of the two.
Iron Princess Iris
Cute design, robot girl. I didn't have a ton of huge plans for her besides occasionally doing streamer stuff. She was fun to include in Idolplot, though she's less likely to stick with it in Season 14 if only because she retired from show business once already. Before I'd seen the Iris design, I'd actually considered Alear - who ended up being a major antagonist in Chao's Live-a-Live plot - for the "retired magical girl actress" character but he got dibs, so I went with a robot girl to further the "Whalestrand is robot-friendly" narrative.
Spathi
Another cute robot, I didn't have a ton of plans for her either beyond throwing her into government with a background relating to Bree's previous Robot Rights ideas from Sonia and Novaselic. She could hang out in the wings to help with government stuff in case the Kobbers needed a friendly presence in the government who would be able to hop out on plots if need be. The name Spathi was my idea; unlike Labrys and Aigis, the Persona series didn't give her an actual name, just referring to her as Unit 024. Spathi is a Greek word for sword, in the vein of Labrys being a word for axe.
2B and Potemkin
Funny enough, 2B and Potemkin were originally slated for a full debut in Season 14! I don't want to say why quite yet, but the two were going to make a few background appearances during solo posts or after events. Then Chao announced the Blood Bowl event for people to send in 'trash Neo Neos' for a night and figured that the two might sign up for it to make some extra cash in addition to their day jobs. I don't think anyone expected that the Neokama would become a thing after that part of his plot but he said all former Neo Neos were invited to join the now-benevolent group so in they went and got a few more significant appearances (and Zords) out of the deal. Looking back, I'm glad I sent them to Blood Bowl.
Mabel Black, formerly Miss Black General
While Mabel Black isn't a 2023 debut by any means, first appearing in Season 10 with a supporting role in Season 12, she underwent a significant character development after - of all things - a Big Bar Brawl bet that wouldn't have happened as it did without me bringing back the indomitable Tara Skew: Piyori's month of bodyguarding against Miss Black General offering to be her sidekick once she got out of jail. It was a unique wager and that close to the Brawl I wasn't sure if it'd get taken, so I had a surprisingly-appropriate counter-offer.
In her source material, Miss Black General isn't really that evil a person. The RX Group is really goofy and low-key evil (in one issue, the General and her minions try robbing a bank; they end up being held hostage by more-intense robbers) and one of the General's reasons for joining the group was...to try getting a date with her idol, Braveman. She's got the heart of a sentai character and felt like a good fit for the equally-energetic and comically-zealous Piyori; it's really a blessing that Piyori won because otherwise Mabel would never have worked for her and probably would have just stayed in Agama jail.
By the by, I know I've mentioned this to Chao, but the name Mabel Black was invented by me for RP. Even in the issue where the RX Group meets Miss Black General's parents, her real name isn't brought up at all. It's like how Chao gave Lanterby the name 'Emilia'.
Fighting the Dark Matter invasion in Season 10 doesn't count as heroic, so here in Season 12 Mabel got her first taste of fighting for JUSTICE as Prism General, working with the Neokama long after her bet's time limit ended and she found herself enjoying the other side of Good vs Evil.
After helping Alex pilot her Gundam for a few plot events, Chao insisted that we do a scene in the bar where she formally joined the Neokama, confessing her crimes to Edgar and Alex. (Piyori already knew; Tara told her as much when the wager was placed.) Mabel had quite the shock when Edgar and Alex admitted they'd done bad things too and had been given a second chance; I'd blame Piyori because she's always shouting about JUSTICE to the point you'd never know the Neokama used to be the Neo Neo Kobbers.
We might have met Mabel Black back in Valhalla as a waitress trying to pay rent and spy on the Kobbers, but she unexpectedly got her own little redemption story that came about in a very appropriately-chaotic way considering my plot this year. Apologies to Chao and JRM for going back and grabbing this snippet of chat, but I'm glad you enjoyed it too and it inspired a good summary of her time in RP.
In Season 10, she HAD to be Mabel Black.
In Season 12, she GOT to be Mabel Black.
Margit Rosenqvist
Maybe a weird thing to say after having played Pokemon since Gen 1, but I've never had an RP character from the Pokemon universe. Sure, I've named various trainers after my RP characters and I've done what plenty of people have done and thought about what kind of gym I'd run if I were in Pokemon. I've had characters who associate with Pokemon but they always started as something else before getting Pokemon, so when Goops started showing me pictures of a cute Splatoon OC that was also on some fancomic merch or something, I started getting INSPIRATION.
I'd toyed with giving her a team based on Splatoon in general with the four cephalopods she started RP with as well as other Pokemon based on the game, such as a Basculin to represent the Salmonids and a Clauncher because I think there's shrimp in Splatoon? My ignorance of Splatoon is why I chose to stick to the squids and octopi as well as letting her have a Cyclizar because everyone in Paldea seems to have one just for riding. Of course, Margit eventually broke the theme by capturing a Slither Wing in Goops' plot and an Articuno (Galar) in Jumpropeman's plot. Will she ever get more Pokemon? Probably; clams and snails are related to cephalopods so Shellder is a possibility (especially the kind found on Slowbro) or even a Hisuian Sliggoo because RP always needs more GOOMY. I also figured it'd be cool to bring in Miraidon since Goops made Paradox Pokemon part of his plot and Koraidon and Miraidon almost don't feel like Legendary Pokemon.
Back to Margit though. While I don't mind using a faceclaim from time to time, I also didn't want to potentially just take someone else's OC (even if the creator was putting them on merch; I'm still not sure) especially if this was my first Pokemon OC so I called up Goops and his magic to help make her more than just a human Inkling. The orange hair is about all that's left of the original character because if Margit was going to debut in Whalestrand, she'd be either a Glasetera native or from a neighboring country, dressed appropriately and interested in more local things, like winter sports and drinking hot chocolate.
The University of Moltres is a play on the University of Phoenix, the online university that nobody takes seriously, and if Professor Vyglass is typical of their faculty Margit's better off not going there. But she does go there and works hard for her education, so she had to have a history where she'd had Pokemon but lost them to explain why she likes them but isn't a Champion like every game's protag is within a week of getting their starter. Vyglass sucks and is mean, as made evident by his brief appearance at the end of the season to set up plot next year, so you might wonder why Margit studied under him for a long time. Cue "Magma Hands Margit", the very successful amateur boxing career Margit used to pay for her schooling under she got a scholarship offer, which also served as a way to make her able to participate on adventures when throwing out a Pokemon wasn't always an option and made her a bit more interesting.
It's at this point that I'm remembering that Hazel, the Team Plasma grunt from Kuwahawi exists. So she was my Pokemon OC before Margit and the two are pretty similar. They're protective of their Pokemon pals, they have orange hair, and they're good at punching people. They're totally different though; Margit's never been a criminal and she's okay with Pokemon battles while Hazel went to trade school instead of college and had parents who were cool with Pokemon.
Hazel vs. Margit in a fist fight with their Pokemon aces as trainers? Maybe.
While Margit wasn't the focus of plot this year, I tried to throw in some good backstory scenes to explain how she got to modern day Whalestrand with four unevolved Pokemon and a three-legged Cyclizar, though what exactly happened to Margit and Harley on Krakenspine Mountain is a story for next year. She's got doubts about her ability to be a trainer - especially after seeing Iono conquer the Sevii League, famous streamer Raihan and his amazing Brawl-fighting dragons, ex-champion Viola, and other great Pokemon trainers - but that's not stopping her from trying to help Pokemon, animals, or disgusting freaks named Jeb!
Closing Thoughts
It's not every year I get to close the books on a long built-up story like Clownpiece's and I'm glad I got the chance to do it thanks to you guys. I look forward to making even more great stories happen and I'm grateful for the chance to both join and host such excitement. If I think of anything I forgot, I'll update this post and put the additions in a different color or something, and if there's anything I didn't address here that you want to know or just have a question in general, let me know and I'm happy to respond.
See you in Season 14!
