Dracoplot 2018

First things first, I think the best thing I did this year from focus on having one big plot as opposed to trying to do multiples in previous years. I had the Labrys side plot that got to pop up now and again, but it worked better for my schedule just doing teasers and ending with the big finale, but more about that later.

Katteloxplot

I'm typing out my thoughts on the plot as I think, so there's not a ton of cohesion here.

As I mentioned last year, I wanted to do a lot more with The Deadly Six last year, so the plot that would've been about them last year was done this year. They got a few appearances last year that set up their antics on Kattelox Island, but scheduling and what have you got in the way of me doing more plot events, the biggest of which was joining a Pathfinder game that took over my Sundays, leaving me only Saturdays as my only dependable plot day of the week.

I enjoyed getting a chance to bring back Labrys to be the "star" of the plot. She did a fine job as the quest giver character, especially since she got to have some extra plot development in the form of her side story involving her dreams and her sisters. Giving her the title of Silver Shroud was tied in more to the angle I originally wanted to do with this plot, which was Fallout 4's Far Harbor meets Mega Man Legends. The mystery aspect of the plot fell largely to the wayside in favor of thwarting the Deadly Six's evil plans and fighting big monsters.

Speaking of big monsters, I originally had more plans to use the Gear Gigant X and its upgraded form from the Yu-Gi-Oh card game along with more involvement from the Geargianos. Trying to squeeze in more appearances from it was hard to do with the limited numbers of events I had, so I didn't use the bigger form.

The real star of the plot ended up being totally unplanned at the beginning: the Globglogabgalab, whose name I had to learn how to spell to avoid needed to look him up every time I did an event. The memeslug kind of appeared out of nowhere, cropping up with his annoying, ridiculous song that really rustled my jimmies when I first saw it. I swore to myself that I would work him into the plot somehow and he stole the show, becoming the REAL villain of the plot.

I knew I wanted to do another callback, bringing back Gentleman Draco's enemy/brother from Season 1, Big T, but originally he was going to be just a ghost who possessed people, originally coming from Final Fantasy X's Farplane to bounce from body to body until he could learn to play the piano. It wasn't until probably after the first battle against the Glob that I hit upon the idea of Big T reincarnated as the Globglogabgalab. Until then he would have used mind control/possession to make Felix help him do thing, get the Glob (originally an innocent victim) to do evil things, and eventually take control of FFX-2's final boss, Vegnagun.

Having Big T be extremely bitter about being a Memeslug was the perfect motivation for him to want to destroy Kuwahawi in the process of hunting down his brother. He got a fine amount of #Comeuppance in the end. I'm especially fond of the "finally squandered his life" line I wrote. :)

Brachiosaurus Dopant was born from an actual Kamen Rider W monster from a manga that was really unique to me in that it was a GIANT MONSTER and not the conveniently-human size that the TV monsters are. It also let me use Gaia Memories as something besides a plot device that almost never got mentioned except as a potential (and intentionally fruitless) way to give Kaede powers.

SPEAKING OF KAEDE...there was originally going to be a different ending to the plot that got...well, derailed might be the best way to put it. Through no fault of his own, Cornwind changed the ending of Dracoplot by having Kaede use a piano to defeat The Centre's human evolution. The original ending was going to be that the Kobbers would fight Suzie, the Deadly Six, and then Big Fau. I ended up combining Suzie and 4/6 of the Deadly Six into one boss fight and then had Big Fau and Big T the next day, with all villains being defeated there and then. Originally, Big T would've escaped to be confronted later as...

...KING GHIDORAH. I teased during the infiltration event that they had Mecha King Ghidorah in their base. The Glob would somehow take control of it and be a powerful boss fight that, for the first round of combat, couldn't be hurt because it had a powerful force field. In order to take down the force field, Kaede would have used a piano.

A piano named Vegnagun. If you've played FFX-2 you'd be familiar with the giant bug robot that's controlled by an organ (the instrument) on its head. It would've been a fun way to let Kaede save the day with the skills she already had. Cornwind got to the idea first though, so I scrapped actually using it in plot. No fault of his though.

Why The Deadly Six? If I remember correctly, I'd watched all the cutscenes from Sonic and The Lost World and liked their designs.

Big Fau got in because Chao and I geeked out about Big O one day and I said I'd have a giant robot/monster fight for Miu to use her Brawl prize against. I'd used the trio of robots used to build Big Fau in a previous season, so I figured why not.

I actually hired someone in May/June to draw the MegaMan Suzie picture, because I liked the combination of Kirby's Suzie and MegaMan Juno enough to want it depicted in plot. She could've potentially been fought during the Infiltration Event, but ultimately no combat was necessary.

Speaking of which, I really liked the Infiltration mission. I was inspired by a Pathfinder Module I'd played years ago called Library of the Lion, where your job is not to kill things, but to infiltrate a secret library and recover information without being caught. If you did that adventure without combat, you achieved perfect success. So I wanted to do an event like that for a chance instead of the usual Dracoplot "go fight a boss" events.

Labrysplot

This gets its own section because it wasn't part of my old Season 7 plans. Once I'd decided to make the Kattelox plot happen the next year, I decided to bring Labrys back as the quest giver, but I didn't want her to do nothing but Kattelox stuff, so I decided I wanted to explore more about her. It didn't really tie in to Kattelox, so I didn't have it crop up during those events.

So I decided to have the "spirits" of her sister units waking up for reasons which, ultimately, I decided were her involvement with the Phantom Thieves and going into Palaces somehow waking them up. The battle with the Meme went through a lot of different versions in my mind.

Originally, the Palace was a laboratory full of the kind of faceless humans Persona 4 Arena had in its backgrounds. Unfortunately, my incredible unfamiliarity with Persona 5's Palaces meant the end result wasn't that great to me. It was cool and tied in to her RP debut though, so I'm not wholly unsatisfied with it. That's a minor complaint though.

The battle was always going to involve the "Shadow" androids, though in one version it wasn't a battle. There would have been the option to try convincing them that their hatred and anger were misplaced with possibly some actual investigation being performed.

Cornwind asked me one night though if Labrys could fall victim to Mr. Down's robots brain virus and I agreed, deciding it was a pretty perfect way to bring about needing to go into Labrys' head. Originally, she was just going to go "Hey, I'm haunted. Go into this TV and beat up my ghosts." (or something to that effect) and Shadow Labrys would just show people around. Having the Meme really screw up her brain providing the perfect reason to need to go in: she can't start up as long as the Meme keeps driving her and the 40-ish souls inside her insane. Destroying the Meme in a battle within Labrys' mind also meant it could be destroyed and she could be cured without anyone going "Hey! This is how we resolve that plot too!" because it'd be impossible to fight that many Memes and keep the memetic virus from coming back to that person.

The Meme itself went through several iterations, even on the day of the plot at first. I liked bringing back the Songbird whistle due to the negative effects it had on her mind, but originally the Songbird would've been brought back as the Meme! At pretty much the last second though, I decided bringing that guy back was a boring idea. Fighting Songbird in Columbia again? Been there, done that! So I started looking for a new badguy, something mechanical and creepy, almost landing on Metroid's Nightmare but Chao used that guy YEARS ago.

I ultimately ended up picking a Decepticon because they were traumatic to Labrys too and I picked one who, in his home series, is associated with Unicron. One black recolor later and Soundwave became a great avatar for a sound-based virus.

Labrys' speech also went through a few versions in my head, but it never strayed too far from what you got.

DeMonde

Minor character ends up playing a large role in Downplot. I appreciate Cornwind indulging me so much on having her investigate and combat Mr. Down. She's kind of unique in that the Kobbers do most of their healing with magic and aren't equipped to fight diseases and stuff, so she got to have a lot of moments with a badguy who seemed tailored to fit her. She won, she lost, and ultimate will grow as a person, I'm sure. It was a lot of fun writing body horror stuff, because that's absolutely the kind of weird science she's into. X)

I planned a lot of her "anti-Down" measures ahead of time and PM'd the entire list to Cornwind about a week in advance so he could build Mr. Down's pre-finale showdown with DeMonde to fit both our ideas.

The plot in general was a lot of fun for me, because the doktor got her moment to shine.

Also, I allowed the possibility of her perma-dying at the hands of Mr. Down to be there if nobody went looking for her. She would've been found later, having left behind some notes and a partially-reconstructed tape recorder. Magic wouldn't have worked because she's really old and it would've failed due to the gods not wanting to waste their energy.

But someone looked for her and found her and saved her. Yay!

Hazel

I don't remember exactly how I came up with Hazel beyond "give generic Plasma Grunt a background." This was in between Sun/Moon and the Ultra sequels, so I ended up tying her background into the Alola region. Goops helped me flesh out her character during the off-season and eventually offered to give her a minor starring role in the plot, even scheduling events on Saturdays just so Hazel could be there.

There's a lot of Hazel stuff I wanted to do but didn't get to for reasons. Like, part of her background is that she used to have a YouTube show called Hardware Hazel where she, Sandy, and Pawny built stuff. A lot of her background didn't come out until towards the end of the season, like why she gave up Pokemon training to become an anti-training activist: she fell through an Ultra Wormhole and found a Guzzlord on the other side that killed her starter Pokemon. I even checked with Goops to see which Ultra Beasts he was using just to see if I wanted it to be something she'd have to deal with in plot, deciding that her being scared of Celesteela and overcoming that fear was good enough.

That death would give her some PTSD and cause her to give up Pokemon training, giving her Gardevoir to a friend and releasing the others to move to Unova, where she ended up being Team Plasma's handywoman, building their bases and stuff with her new Pokemon, with whom she never battled except once, which was more than enough. Then Pokemon Black/White happens and she goes on the lam as a broke migrant worker who gets paid in cash at the end of the day, barely scraping by until she met Celestia, another event Goops and I worked out after he got tired of seeing her ordering Quarter Water and Bir.

Another thing I wished I'd covered more of was what Hazel did after the Colress event. She flew to Ontario with Mix the Kyurem and then....just returned later. I'm going to actually write about that during the off-season though, so I won't talk too much about it except to say that I wish I'd thought of it sooner in the year, because then I would've also given her a Zygarde cell (one of my favorite things about Moon was getting a Zygarde) as part of a bet between Legendary Pokemon to see if a human could actually care about a Pokemon.

Every Pokemon Hazel grabbed after Pawny and Sandy was one she actually uses in my Ultra Moon run (which I still need to finish). I used Pawniard and Sandile in my White run, so they're all Pokemon I've used at one point.

Deb

Deb was a character I'd made for another RP and decided to bring into ZFRP as a support character, an average, ordinary lady with no powers or special skills besides being an engineer. She got to do some stuff though and had her own small arc after the Brawl. Since the Kattelox finale got altered, she also ended up driving the giant robot to fight Big Fau instead of Labrys, who was too busy fighting Big T. She's currently slated to have a bigger role next year.

RPing Stuff

Not directly related to in-universe content, but I did two things differently that I think I'll keep doing in the future. The first was to use my own characters to give bonuses to others. Instead of trying to give Labrys her own attack, I make her assist another character with theirs, turning a miss into a hit.

The second was using my paid time off to attend plots. I did this for Chao's Yorigamis event, part 1 of the Kattelox Invasion, and the Mr. Down finale. Having events scheduled in advance and pretty much always starting at the same time makes it easy to submit a time off request a week or two in advance and take the afternoon off to RP. :)

Cut Content

The Zygarde Cell was also considered as something DeMonde would've found and eventually used to fight a "Clone Zygarde". That particular plot aspect did not get developed much. Just would've been something neat.

DeMonde was also considered as a potential plot VILLAIN at one point, having been driven insane by something like Season 7's plot and prompted by an outside force (Big T) into making Pacific Rim monsters to open a portal to what she though would be her own world, but would actually be the Farplane. Zeldoten would either make a monster of her own or join forces with Irys to fight DeMonde. While monster fights would've been cool, the plot overall didn't seem great and was cut. The Rampage monsters would've either been DeMonde monsters for Irys to fight or Zeldoten's own beasts, taken from DeMonde's home back in their homeworld. When the talk of our next setting, Olympia, began, I considered carrying this plot over to Season 9, but Kuwahawi's islands setting is a lot more conducive to hiding big monsters than a flying city, so I decided to just bring the Rampage monsters in as experiment/pets of DeMonde's.

I've mentioned Ghidorah. Ever since the brief scene last year with Clownpiece looking at Ghidorah's body, I decided I wanted to find a way to actually bring him into a boss fight. I think the way Kattelox ended was better than my original plan though, so I'm not too torn up about not having this boss fight.

I was seriously bringing in Dark Eclair from the Disgaea games to mostly be a talking head, but I'd asked Harpy if she had plans for Dark Eclair. She didn't specify if she did, so I ultimately brought in Magnolia to take her place as a "do stuff, hang out" character not tied to any particular plot.

I feel like I should talk about the Big Zam too. This guy was actually on my Brawl entry for awhile before I swapped him out for "Alternate Dame." I really liked his concept too: the Big Zam would be a mindless vehicle driven by the three Zako Zako commentators who have appeared in the past. They would have been its "assist" so they'd have an excuse to run away like cowards if it got destroyed. I'm sure they would've been KO'd anyway, but I really liked the idea of someone entering a vehicle as a Brawler. I even checked with JRM ahead of time if it'd be okay; it would've been permissible because the operators were actually in the Brawl and not watching from the stands.

One idea I had for a Zeldoten plot this year was someone finally trying to arrest her: two law enforcement officers from her home world tracking her to Kuwahawi to finally put her behind bars! They would have arrived in May and tried, only to be told that they were out of their jurisdiction and needed to fill out proper extradition paperwork, so they'd pop up every so often filling out forms and waiting to hear back. At the end of the season, all of their paperwork would finally have gotten approved and they'd confront Zeldoten and her friends, if she had any willing to say "I know they're cops, but screw them." or something to that effect. Ultimately got cut after bouncing the idea off of Goops and deciding that not very many people would enjoy having to fight obviously good characters for the sake of a not-quite-evil one.