What a crazy year for plot! When I finished with my plot last year, I promised myself that I would tone down the stakes so it wasn't just year after year of potentially world-ending threats. I don't think I succeeded on that front in the end, with giant clown monsters who wanted to go eat enough energy to destroy the universe. Of course, when I initially conceived of my plot for this year, it was originally SUPPOSED to be two shorter, unrelated plots. One plot about Silvania and one about Sanae and Suwako being harassed by big business and more fucking dragons that turn into cute girls.
Someday I'll do a plot that lacks robots, kaiju, and dragon maids. Probably. Not.
And starting off with the biggest twist of them all: there were originally NO CLOWNS AT ALL.
I did the teaser of them laughing at near-dead Momoyo and people started getting interested in what they'd do, so...uh...I worked them into the plot and I think that at least worked out for the best. They did naughty things that helped push the plot and made for a more interesting finale that what I'd initially planned. Not that I had a ton of planning for the Moriya/Griff plot before the season started. Let's talk about Silvania first!
Silvania Véulunar, This is Your Life
My turn to finally create the bartender and the bar itself. I talked about Silvania and The Accidental Hero in my blogpost about my 2021 RP so I don't need to cover again what I'd written back in April. (Hopefully I don't write blogs for two years' of RP in the same year again like this.) This plot was meant to explore the origins of The Silver Tribute and how Silvania came to be the captain, the result of an adventure gone terribly wrong when she and her companions were vastly unprepared for what they found beneath the Magicite mine and dealing with the consequences of it while there was a group who had the ability to do so.
The Scorchbeast from RP is the Scorchbeast Queen from Fallout 76. I'm wringing every last drop out of that game bit by bit; who knows, we may see things from its newest update next year! Maybe. I altered its origins a little, instead of being awoken by nuclear missiles it was awoken by exposure to magic after lying dormant for however long it's been since The Deck visited Earth and ate the magic. A later addition to its origins that I forgot to/didn't have a good time to bring up is that the Scorchbeast was a Dorat spawned by Ghidorah's tooth back in Ye Olde Days. I really liked it as a villain, being a menace that really absolutely needed Kobber intervention to destroy since magic is so prevalent in Agama's technology that it's called Magitech.
This plot was always intended to be three events long. The first event, Silvania introducing the Kobbers to the Scorchbeast, and the third event, a huge battle against the Scorchbeast, went more or less as I'd intended and were a lot of fun, I think. Our story-loving bartender finally had to tell a story about herself and we got to find out she hated telling hers because the last one was a traumatic experience for her and then we got to have a cool battle to save Agama and free Silvania from the burdens of her past.
The second event was originally going to be much, MUCH different. At some point between "This is Your Life" and "Bulette Tank", Goops had correctly guessed in private what the original second event was going to be: a fight between the Kobbers and Silvania and Goldlewis, with a new "Company of Heroes" (a name I shamelessly took from Final Fantasy 14) consisting of Ningguang (Silvania's niece, daughter to a couple of her old comrades), Steve, Ochako, and Panserugelbjorn. The reasoning for the fight being that if the Kobbers couldn't beat them, they wouldn't stand a chance against the Scorchbeast. Silvania would have used her magical connection to The Silver Tribute to make a huge platform in the sky the battle could take place on and would have consisted of Silvania playing a support role for the first couple of rounds, buffing and healing the others, before joining the fight herself.
What ended up happening though was me selling the threat a bit too well to a crowd of less-impetuous people! MY plan for a cool fight was swept aside as cooler heads said the government needed to get involved, leading to a huge lump of cut content that I'd originally commissioned the Silvania In Armor picture for! She was going to Brawl anyway though, so no loss. Ironically, cooler heads leading to getting the government involved also led to Silvania, Goldlewis, Ningguang, Constable Mole, and every unnamed conspirator either getting arrested or going into exile, because whatever the reason no government likes being embarrassed like this and tends to sweep these things under the rug. So we got a couple months of Bartender Steve.
Bulette Tank (a play on Bulettes also being called Land Sharks in DnD and the TV show Shark Tank) had the benefit of introducing Griff and his associates to the Kobbers though, Griff Enterprises being called in to serve as an alternative to solving the Scorchbeast crisis. Yes, I would have let Griff win that if your ideas hadn't been convincing and the third event would have been something else entirely, like Kobbers having to fight Scorched Miners trying to break out to help the Scorchbeast. We also got three Agaman characters out of it who otherwise wouldn't have existed: Mage General Michaela, Senator Ratbat (who, spoilers, was Griff's government contact), and Rangers the Ranger. Michaela and Rangers I came up with over the weeks between events (Michaela being a face claim from Helltaker and Rangers being from Arknights) while Ratbat I thought of including the day of Bulette Tank. Decepticons had already been established as living in Agama and I needed a slimy finance guy, so he worked out perfectly.
Michaela being the daughter of Silvania's fiancé was something I came up with after the face to explain why Silvania especially would get hounded for jail time. Coyote going to jail ended up being a good way to get Silvania out of jail. No offense intended, but nobody seemed too eager to get her out besides JRM even after I said "I don't have plans to get Silvania out of jail." and I liked the idea when I got it. More on that later though.
I'd intended to do more posts about Silvania's exile, but didn't get around to much more than doing a few good scenes between her and Reines. Those were enjoyable scenes to do though and I thank Brine for letting me turn his posts into sudden collabs.
Aside from Silvania's exile, going the...uh...Responsible Route also had the unintended side effect of putting Goldlewis and Ningguang on a bus trip they couldn't return from, so I sadly didn't get to do anything else with them. There'd been a bit of interest in chat of seeing Goldlewis Brawl, but there was just no way he'd be let back into Agama to do anything without getting arrested on the spot. He and Ningguang weren't Kobbers, so there wouldn't be the "Help ZFPD" option. So they're maybe helping in Egypt with the Oasis.
Moriya Shrine vs Kiketsu Family
I really don't have a better name for this plot, so let's just go with that since it's what the plot essentially boiled down to: Yachie trying to use Griff to get back at Suwako for something that happened back in Season 5 while Kanako was forcing Youkai Mountain to be in Nevada for cult reasons. I'm going to start with some cut content though.
An event I had considered for VERY early in the season, potentially Day 2 even, was a prototype for what would become the fight with Tara Skew. I'd decided to make Tara's card performance-themed prior to the season starting at least and she would have exposed herself as a Cardholder by 'challenging' the Kobbers to a duel in the hotel's parking lot, where a stage was being set up by her subordinates, including otters handing out Nerf weapons to those who accepted as they left the bar. The Card's power would have been used to create special effects, like turning a giant dragon puppet into the Grima dragon from the Fire Emblem games, making the Nerf weapons feel real, and foam lightning bolts hurled by otters seem like actual magic. Nobody would actually have been hurt, but it would have LOOKED real, all so Tara could make a point like "Don't let appearances deceive you; we're just a business" as part of her strategy to fight the Kobbers by...not fighting them.
The second cut event was my original plan for the finale, which would have involved no jesters at all and barely any giant monsters. Probably just a one-day thing too. Instead of the Spell Card Duel being a team event, it would have been strictly Sanae vs Aqua over Shrine ownership while the Kobbers and the Kiketsu Family protected Moriya Shrine and Youkai Mountain from Griff Enterprises mercenaries, robots, and the Cybersaur, which would have been piloted by Coyote with Griff himself supervising from inside. If it HAD been a two-day thing, Day 1 would have been fighting the army (beefed up with some mechs) and Day 2 would have been stopping the Cybersaur from using a giant cannon to blow up the mountain and get to Hollow Earth. This got axed because, simply, Coyote got arrested and I wasn't about to tell anyone that no they couldn't arrest Coyote and I definitely wasn't going to just break her out of jail; I only even did the Coyote/Silvania swap after asking permission with the assurance that Coyote wasn't going to do anything else in plot. Without Coyote to lead his 'security' troops though, there was never going to be a chance of Griff joining in a battle.
There were a few other small things that got cut because I never got around to writing them or couldn't find a good way to actually do them. One idea I had was a potential event against Yachie where she'd be tricked into fighting Chao's Saki somehow and there would have been a flooded dome so Yachie could fight as a dragon turtle. I ended up going with the Suwako assassination as part of the plot instead. Another idea cut because I couldn't think of a great way to do it was having the RX Group distract Sanae from going after Aqua by occasionally showing up in Agama with their own giant robot, the Beck Victory Deluxe, older brother to the RX-3 Chao introduced during the Olympia years.
Cut content aside, let's talk characters, starting with the star of the show.
Tara Skew, for better or worse, stole the show by being the most developed antagonist outside of the jesters. While I feel like I developed Yachie's backstory about as well, Tara had an advantage over the other antagonists in that she had more and better moments to interact with the Kobbers. Aqua couldn't go to the bar because in-universe Tara and Yachie feared for her safety (with people like Julia, a very reasonable concern) and out-of-universe I didn't want to strain the "villains in the bar are untouchable" rule too much. So Tara got to sometimes hang out with the Kobbers even before her fight event. I really liked her as a bad guy because she tried a strategy rare amongst the Kobber rogues' gallery: she kept Griff away from the Kobbers and steered any trouble Griff Enterprises caused towards being handled by Agama. This was a very smart strategy...and ended up making it difficult for me to really do the plot because Kobbers just going after Griff makes them look bad because they're either going after innocent (in the 'not breaking laws' sense) or they're making a problem out of something the Agaman government has handled. So the trouble had to happen while she wasn't looking.
Tara was always going to be a theater geek though. The teaser of her in 2021 had her writing a speech and as mentioned earlier she almost had a whole event that would have been her staging a fight (literally) with the Kobbers. She got a few solo posts throughout the year alluding to this, including a jokey reference to the Phoenix Wright games (Los Japangeles is a joke I've heard associated with the series) and her battle event ended up being one big stage show. Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil, she dislikes violence because it's all her abusive family wanted her to do, but she is not a pacifist; she just chooses when she wants to be violent, like her event or attacking Pirouette or Ebisuwaru. It took me awhile to decide on her Card being stage-based instead of something more combative; the Card couldn't be lawyer-themed because her pride in her intelligence wouldn't allow her to use a crutch like that.
Tara's quest for wanting dragon-sized furniture and stuff is me making a Trans allegory, wanting to live as herself and not what she needs to be to fit in with society. She's forced to be a human most of the time because that's what society is built around. If I recall some comments came up during her event about her just living as a human and at the time I wanted to comment "Would you tell a Trans Guy he needs to just live as a woman?" but that'd kind of heavy-handed and blunt of me.
Next up, Griff. Initially conceived of as a rival to my first original character in RP, Gentleman Draco, he actually appeared in a short blogpost I did back in 2015. Even I had to look it up to make sure I'd actually put him in something instead of just thinking of ideas. Comparatively down on his luck until his partnership with Yachie and Tara, eager to get ahead and one-up his old rival or - in Draco's absence - his allies the Kobbers, never able to get the satisfaction he wanted though while his 'conscience' Tara was watching. I don't regret not having him be more active in the plot since he fancied himself a schemer and an unseen power kind of boss. He got to be plenty loathsome though, didn't he? Ordering hits, getting his subordinates to off himself, etc, all the while actually being a spiteful coward who would never get his own talons dirty. I consider him to be one of the highlights of the plot. Maybe this isn't an entirely accurate observation, but it felt like there were far more people interested in making sure he got punished than there were people interested in trying to get Silvania out of prison.The unsung heroes of the plot are the Moon Rabbits: Seiran, Ringo, and Reisen. Why? Because the Lunar Capital in Touhou lore is obsessed with 'impurities' (I'm not entirely certain what those are beyond 'Not Moon Things') so it was easy to just have them go to Earth, not care about Agama law, and go be terrorists. Funny trivia: they were always planned to appear this year doing an event where they attacked Clownpiece, but the assault on Clownpiece in the park was going to happen...in OCTOBER. Originally, I had planned to wrap up the event at Moriya Shrine early in the month and then do THE SINISTER MOON COUNTER-LANDING!!! in mid-October as a set-up for Season 13, but they were perfect for provoking conflict between Griff and the Kobbers. I even asked Chao ahead of time if he was cool with me using them. The named ones got to go on some plots even afterwards before joining forces with Yachie to get all those Touhous out of Agama. I might've used them a bit more but there seemed to be hostility towards them, no offense, so they stuck to getting some barposts, appearances in SK and Sheep's plots, and then Seiran being tapped to join the bad guys in Part 1 of the finale.
Yes, I do like Seiran more than Ringo, Chao. I admit it.
Rolling on over to Darkness, she did everything she needed to be. She guarded Aqua. Good job. I didn't go into her origins too much aside from saying she gave up a sports career to be a bodyguard and showing that she has a Stand, [One Tin Soldier], which got some explanation in Part 1 of the Spamtonplot finale. The extended take of Darkness' backstory is she played a lot of sports for awhile and got her Stand while playing American Football. It manifests by appearing as a bigger, stronger version of herself, but it only works while she's protecting someone else and not herself. Attacks against whoever she's protecting barely scratch her, but attacks against her are regularly effective, so she wears some high-tech Griff Enterprises armor so she can take a lot of damage. She was great and deserves rewards.
On to Aqua, who was cut content last year! She was originally slated to be a goddess-descended student of the Magitech Academy who was snotty, arrogant, and mostly useless. Her role in 2021 was taken by Sucy, who was just arrogant. Always intended from the conception of this plot to be another descendent of Suwako, Aqua is supposed to be Evil Sanae: a goddess able to access her powers already, not very helpful, and pretty useless outside of her water power niche, not having a great family life growing up like Sanae had with Suwako and Kanako. As Goops once put it though, she's not really THAT evil, more like Team Evil's cute mascot...who could actually be dangerous if she wanted to be. I wish I'd come up with a few more excuses for her to go on plots or do some other things, but after the attempt on Suwako's life, it just felt like it wouldn't be safe for her to be around Kobbers and, as mentioned earlier, throwing her in the bar even after that would have felt like violating the "no villains in the bar" rule. Also, she didn't actually pilot the El Dora Five herself; she had the RX Group do it while she was on the radio talking.
I thought Yachie Kicchou, actual Touhou, was going to play a much larger role in the plot early on and she did have a decent role in it. Babysitting Griff meant she didn't have as much freedom to act as Tara did, but she still got to go on a Cardholders plot with her cousin, Sapphire. Looking back, the scene I wrote of them meeting in the marketplace was a lot more antagonistic than their relationship actually ended up being. If I had any regrets about Yachie, one is not writing out the Suwako-vs-Yachie flashback post sooner in the year to help explain their rivalry and two is that I never got around to having her interact with Saki until the finale; I'd tossed a few ideas to Chao about Yachie trying to screw with Saki by giving Futo ideas for pranks. It was hard finding a good dragon turtle image to use for her though; most of the pictures were either from Pathfinder/DnD or were of statues that had legs instead of flippers. I did enjoy writing the occasional scene of her and Tara meeting in random diners across Agama for secrecy purposes.
Not much to say about Coyote Williams, but she deserves to be spoken about regardless. She was a character I made for Del's one-shot Lancer game and I liked her enough to bring her into ZFRP in largely the same role, though without the mech. In an early draft of her ZFRP incarnation, she could use her power to make guns out of anything to make a mech, which would have been used to try and duel with Sanae in her GaoGaiGo. A mech fight would have been cool, but I think the battle with her that happened made more sense storywise.
The general structure of the plot was decided upon pretty early in development. I was initially trying to do a plot where the stakes weren't something world-shattering like the Zonders and Bergman had been. At worst, the stakes were originally just supposed to be "Suwako and Sanae get kicked out of Moriya Shrine and Griff makes tons of money". Side note: Griff would have gotten away pretty well if it hadn't been for the post-Tara push to #Comeuppance Griff Enterprises. The mining facility was originally going to be Griff trying to dig his way through the path of least resistance to Hollow Earth in Agama while the Moriya Shrine takeover was intended to give Griff Enterprises a known way to get to Hollow Earth. Yachie getting to Hollow Earth during the events of Harpy's 2015 event "Have Faith in Me" in which Kanako Yosaka moved Youkai Mountain from Gensokyo was an early element of the plot as part of its backstory; as mentioned earlier, I wish I'd either made this a blogpost during the off-season or something posted much sooner than I did, though it was until Dimentio that I had an explanation for how Yachie knew about Hollow Earth. The list of characters was pretty much the same from early plans to execution, though the RX Group was probably the last group of characters added to the plot.
I wanted this to be a story more about Sanae than Suwako. She'd gotten a taste of being a hero and doing good deeds back in Olympia, but this was a year about her personal growth, her doubts at being a good Shrine Maiden and growing into the responsibilities of being a fully-fledged god. The Mirror of Rebirth scene underwent a few changes from the original version, which would have still featured Sanae fighting a fake Sanae, but instead of a Gensokyo where Moriya Shrine ruled the island would have appeared as a Gensokyo covered in sludge, a crazed Sanae having contained a Dark Matter-ed Hedorah there under the assumption that only she as a Moriya god could have done it. This fake Sanae and her Hedorah would have attacked Sanae before Yoshiko teamed up with her to do a team Sekiha Tenkyoken. That would have been cool, but I do like the "I'm everything you fear about being a god" angle better. Piecing together the clues that Aqua actually was a descendant of Suwako's and forgiving her for trying to take the Shrine was a good ending to her journey this year. The original one-on-one duel would have largely gone as it did in Finale Part 1 (including Sanae raging at Gensokyo itself), but would have featured this FF14 song (warning: spoilers for Endwalker) because the lyrics are really good for Sanae. Note: the Mirror of Rebirth is based on items of the same name from the Lost Word mobile game; collect 1000 for a character and you could reset their level to 1 but their stats would be higher by the time they were back at 100.
Overall, I am maybe 70-75% satisfied with how the Moriya Shrine vs Kiketsu Family plot came out. I whipped it into a fairly coherent plot, but I should've done a lot more planning ahead of time instead of really bringing it together in early July.
Since I brought it up in chat recently (as of when I write this statement) I had some issues with what I did with Momoyo this year. I meant to explain a few things, like how she got to be 'working' for Griff to begin with. The short version is the Jesters did it. The long version is she was an artificially-created superweapon who was sent to fight the original Ghidorah five minutes after being born, two multi-miles long titans duking it out so long ago there was one continent and no life on land, who then eventually hibernated until modern-ish Agama and someone gave her intelligence in exchange for not crushing Agama and Pepsi, only for the Jesters to take that intelligence away so she could be used as a brainless animal to dig up Ghidorah teeth with. I wish I'd thrown her in the bar more so the characters would have reason to notice she was gone.
The Trio of Insanity
The other saving grace of the plot, the Trio of Insanity wasn't even supposed to be part of this plot originally! The name's based on a remix that combines their themes and Clownpiece's called The Quartet of Insanity. Jevil cameo'd back in Olympia, placing a Brawl bet and then talking to Clownpiece during Moonface's finale, then the other two showed up at the end of Season 11 for a teaser. People seemed really excited about them though, so I felt like I had to bring them in and I think it improved the plot for the better. They provided me with an excuse for how Yachie knew about Hollow Earth (clowns told her) and for how Griff got hold of Momoyo to dig up stuff (clowns stole her brain) and made for some of the plot's best moments (arranging for Clownpiece to be chaos honey to draw in more of them to Earth). Randomly having them appear in other plots was fun too, fitting in their search for Chaos.
Claire, I think, described them the best. They were master-less Dorats, essentially children who lost their parents before they had the emotional maturity to be on their own, like Lord of the Flies except murderous clown dragons, trying to make their way in the universe the only way they knew how. Clownpiece avoided this fate by getting adopted by a different kind of chaotic, three-headed Master before she could do more than attack the Lunar Capital once out of boredom, hence why Moon Rabbits hate her. Their goal would ultimately have led them to having a battle to the death to see whose dream would come true in the end. They each had a different dream they might have used a Card for, but when they showed up to fight over the Card it was really just to get to fight someone. Each Jester had their own dream for Chaos too.
Marx was a brute who would have just gone around the universe being a stereotypically-violent Ghidorah, devouring all life in his path, mindlessly smashing things.
Dimentio was going to destroy the universe and make a new one that was like him: amoral and dangerous, where everything was out for itself.
Jevil had the most interesting wish, in my opinion. He was going to remove Chaos from the universe to see what would happen without it. No decay but no growth, people unable to die and unable to heal. And he'd go around observing the aftermath for awhile before giving back Chaos.
They were all undeniably evil, willing to put others in danger for their own goals, but ironically they were only able to obtain giant monster forms thanks to Clownpiece, because she showed them that they didn't need to get power from their Masters, the biggest thing keeping them from going to Hollow Earth themselves. As explained in one post and shown in another, they went around Agama feasting on various forms of chaos, like breathing it in at the Brawl or going to ruins to devour Children of Leng. For Marx and Jevil, I'd initially gone looking at Ultraman kaiju for their monster forms, but I didn't find anything that satisfied me; shockingly few three-headed dragons in Ultraman, so I picked the coolest not-Ghidorah dragon I could find and grabbed a giant bat I knew of for Marx.
Ironically, I felt they ended up making Part 2 of my finale a big TOO chaotic. The horde of DALL*E Ghidorahs was a rather last-minute addition that perhaps wasn't well appreciated when it was revealed that it was...not a "Gotcha" but a negative reveal. I'd made those back in June to use at some point this year or next. And then Jevil/Orochi's first round attack...I wanted to try doing something CHAOTIC for an attack and not just a monster attack, so his attacks were initially going to be him manipulating reality to disorient and confuse characters, but it seemed to be too obtuse so I gladly let Hope stop the Jester from doing that again. I guess I would say I'm both satisfied and dissatisfied with how things went.
Gooper made a comment that day that bears that bears a bit of explanation: "I was actually expecting Keizer Ghidorah tonight and even told Goopsmom that's who we were fighting :V There wasn't really room for Dimentio to get a second form with all the other stuff going on, though."
Dimentio was originally slated to be coming back in Season 13 as the big bad villain, but the morning of the Part 2 I realized that tricking baby monsters into being his army was such a big enough sin that it would be incredibly dissatisfying for him to escape, even if he would get eventual #COMEUPPANCE. Dimentio would find a way to become Keizer Ghidorah at some point next year to be overcome somehow. Instead, he got his #COMEUPPANCE by being betrayed by one of the two guys he badmouthed for not being super-sinister schemers like him. Good thing I have a few months to plan, eh?
