Okay, everybody.I've finally decided on exactly what I'm going to do for Lotus's story. It's going to be a reworking of the Magical Girl Genre.
Essentially what I plan to do is remove most of what makes the MG genre lame, cliched, or just outright stupid and replace it with a bunch of new stuff that really I don't think has been tried as much (if at all) and certainly not in the MG genre.
I don't want to give away any details yet because it's still in the groundworking phase, but that's my plan.

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NOW ONTO THE MAIN POINT OF THE JOURNAL!

Due to an extended conversation with ~Wondrous-Sableye and his friend ~Crimson001, It's basically been revealed to me that there are a number of problems with MC regarding his character. 50% of people in my poll agreed that "my characters" were Mary Sues, but it would seem that a lot of them were talking specifically about MC.

To technically call MC a Mary Sue is hard for me, since Mary Sue generally denotates people don't like the character, and given the number of positive comments about him in relation to the number of negative comments... Namely, the fact that there never HAS been a negative comment about him... It seems that he isn't unlikable, just unbelievable.
Still, I'd like him to be more believable so I've decided to make a few changes.

So after speaking with WS and his friend Sara, essentially a number of changes were decided upon considering MC and his background.

First of all, he can't be over 1200 years old anymore. It's not exactly concievable that after so many years of torment that he wouldn't have ended up insane or have taken his own life. So we eventually decided that the right year for him to be born would be about 1550 making him around 462 years old. The thing about this is that it makes one important plot point in his life impossible. This is how he was intended to be worshipped as a Norse god for a good amount of time, making it all the more crushing when he was reduced from god to trash essentially overnight.
The idea that we came up with that would most closely resemble the Norse thing in terms of outcome would be to have him worshipped by the Hindu people as one of their snake gods, but this poses a few problems.
For one thing, the Hindu are still around. The advantage of the Norse was that that religion is essentially gone. There would be nobody that would be offended if I screwed up the religion, and also it made a lot more sense how he became reviled.
Second, it was hard to think of why he would be abandoned so readily. Honestly, the best thing we could think of was that he would eat a cow. It'd work, but it's kinda anticlimactic.
Third. It puts a real constraint on time. If I want to keep most of the story the same, then he needs to be moving on to China/Japan really fast after he's born to have the thing with Lin Su and join the Shaolin Monks after her death, where he learns his Shaolin Kung Fu.

Hmmm... Now that I think about it. It may be optimal to push his birth back another 100 years to 1450. That gives him a bit more time to do the stuff with the Hindu, and move on to Asia.

If anyone has any other sugestions about people that can worship him, though, I'd appreciate it. Note that I'm trying my best to AVOID African Religions and Small Sects/Cults.

Another thing that's changed is I'm ditching his mastery of multiple types of Martial Arts for just one: Shaolin Kung Fu. I pick this for several reasons: the main one being that it fits the best with his background, but also because the weapons involved with the style are FRICKIN AWESOME (Hook Swords, Bladed chain, etc).

So that's his background change. There were also a number of changes in terms of weaknesses, and there was a bit of discussion on personality and his name, although those really didn't change.

So, anyways, I'll be revealing everything in a new reference sheet around the time SSBB is over, so I don't screw up Atomic-Chinchilla's entry, and so I have a bit of time to work out his past.

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So that's the new plan. Most of the main stories won't change that much, so you don't have to worry aout him becoming an entirely different character, but the changed background elements should make him a lot more believable... If a nearly invulnerable serpentine half demon ever could be described as believable.

On that note, never take a "Mary Sue Litmus Test." Ever. Seriously, it'll just get you a bad idea about your characters when there most likely isn't anything wrong. Unless you deal with a strictly normal universe with strictly normal people, that have absolutely NOTHING special about them in any way to the point where they're the equivalent in boring of a high school English course novel. Not Kidding. That's the only way you can get a good score. I tried, like 10 of my characters and the only character who didnt end up with an "Uber Sue" or "Irredeemable Sue" score was Chekhov. He's by far the most normal of all of my characters, and he still made a "Borderline Sue score."
So really, If you have a fantasy or otherwise "fictional universe" story, don't bother taking the tests. They're so focused on making everything real to the point that anything nonreal = bad.
You wanna know some great characters from successful movies and TV that made terrible scores when I got curious about the test's credibility in the fantasy department and tested them?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Angel
Harry Potter
Luke Skywalker
Neo
Captain Kirk
and even Batman

FREAKING BATMAN is a Mary Sue according to these tests!

So seriously. Don't bother with those tests if you're writing original fantasy fiction at the very least. Fanfiction maybe, but don't bother if your thing is all your own, because if the character is not entirely based in reality, it'll be a Mary Sue. If you want to find out, host a poll like I did or something.

So a while ago I introduced you to a new character of mine named Lotus Hasu: [link]

Well it's been three weeks and I still can't figure out what the heck I want to do with her. I've considered a number of angles for the story to take, but none of them really seem like they'll work all that well to me.

Let me break down some of the ideas I've had and why I'm tentative to use any of them.

My first idea was to go with a sort of superhero angle, hearkening back to my middle school days. The setting would make it easy to paint a personality and background for Lotus, and the secondary characters and other such elements wouldn't be much harder. The problem with that is, that while I've never disliked the idea of making a superhero comic book series, I've basically discovered I don't have the patience or initiative to keep up such a thing. So that's out.

One idea was to actually put the setting in feudal Japan, and perhaps change the name and outfit around a bit. It could've had an air of historical fiction that I truly enjoy, but honestly I don't know much about Feudal Japan, and I really don't want to spend a lot of time researching it when I really just want to have fun with this.

Another idea was to take a Magical Girl Angle. But while that has its advantages in character creation and setting, I had to chastise myself for even thinking about it. Seriously. MG's are so overused and so cliched that even thinking about them makes me feel stupid. Go ask someone what they think of Magical Girl Anime. If they're older than 12, they'll laugh it into the ground.

While I honestly don't want to open myself to ridicule, I had a thought. What if I could pull the genre out of the gutter? Get rid of all the cliched stuff and start with a clean slate and make the Magical Girl, dare I say it, epic.

Perhaps if you take away those sissy Japanese school uniforms and oh so overused teen crybaby situations, replace those dumb staves and frilly outfits with katanas, shurikens, and kenpo-gi's, maybe stop calling out dumb magic spells that don't do shit replacing them with some slice and dice action, and stop with the painfully long and boring sequences, there's actually a genre worth something here.

The problems with that are if I fail to fix the genre, I'll get laughed at for the rest of eternity, and it still more calls for a comic book layout rather than Graphic novel. (Though I could probably find a way to make it a novel, it would be a stretch.)

Oh, and stop with that sissy, cutesy magical animal bullcrap. Give her, like, a badass-looking, hardcore falcon or something if anything at all. Sure the bird could be psychic or powerful or something, but it doesn't have to look like it belongs in a care bears cartoon.

(If you can't tell, I've given a lot of thought into how to fix the Magical Girl Genre. Don't ask why.)

Anyway, I guess what I'm asking is for suggestions. I'm seriously stumped here. I mean, The best idea I've come up with is the Magical Girl thing and honestly, unless I can be assured people won't hate me for that, I really don't want to take that risk.

So, I dunno. What do you guys think I should do with this character? Preferrably something that could be a graphic novel. I simply can't do a series.

So I was thinking I'd dress up as Psycho Mantis for Halloween this year. Get a bald cap, A gas Mask, and dress up in some tight, modified black clothing. Get my friend in the theatre department to grab me some stage makeup (cause that wouldn't make me gay) and use that to bleach my skin and give myself some scars. Would certainly be scary enough for the day, and god knows It'd probably be a lot of fun...

But then I remembered...

I HATE Halloween

Seriously. If there were an Ebeneezer Scrooge for Halloween, That'd be me.
Will, ladies and gentlemen! Halloween Humbug! (I actually like to announce myself as that)

So now you're probably thinking: "But Will?! Halloween is a great day! You get to dress up and get candy and have fun at parties and, heck, you could even have the joy of teepeeing Prof. Loomis' house! How can you hate possibly hate it?!"

Now don't be confused. I used to love Halloween. I eagerly awaited the day every year, and starting in JULY, I would begin to plan what I would be that year.
I built up an impressive array of costumes too.
A Ghost (Age 5)
A Demon (Age 6)
A Cowboy (Age 8)
A Poliwrath (Age 9, yeah, you read that right)
Cloud Strife (Age 10)
Luigi (Age 11)

Wanna know what I was when I was 7?
A Volcano

I seriously got my mom to get a bunch of wire, burlap, and paint, and make me a realistic volcano costume! I'm not joking! I think I'm like the only guy that's done that, and looking back on it, I'm so proud of myself for showing off so well my creativity and insanity at such a young age!

Anyway, those were the glory days. The days when Halloween wasn't a plague upon this country. So what happened, then? Well for some reason, back in 2001 (The year I tried to be Luigi) everything fell apart.

See, up to that point, Halloween was, what I like to call, innocent. In the years 1990 to 2000, everybody that went out on Halloween that I EVER saw (this means Teenagers too) went out as something that wouldn't have made me toss my cookies. There were your classic 50's horror monsters, such as Dracula, Frankenstin, Werewolves, Mummies, Ghosts. There were a few classic Icons, such as Godzilla, The Aliens from practically every Scifi movie imaginable, Darth Vader, and hell, I even saw Robocop once! Aside from that, most people were going around as kung fu masters, clowns, and pirates. Nothing in this array that could possibly scare me or make me puke, or cause me to end up scarred in any way.

Then for some reason, once 2001 rolled around, it seems the holiday decided, "I want to stop being at all wholesome and start being just plain nasty. I'll be nasty in three ways. For one, I'll make everybody into a jerk on Halloween and force everybody to try and scare people or, at the very least, make them toss their cookies. I'll also take away all of the normal, kid friendly costumes, and leave the world with costumes that aren't fun, but instead are actually scary for little kids and make older people with weak stomachs (i.e. ME) throw up. Third, when I do this, all parents of the world and WILL will be sure to cry on this day and wonder what happened to the good days."

Essentially that describes what happened. It all started when I was 11 in sixth grade. On Halloween, I was in school, and the first thing that happened was i noticed all of the costumes on that day (we were allowed to wear our costumes to school, see) were oddly gross. They had started to incorporate blood and gore into their repetoire.
Also, that year was the year of the "Demon Houses." Two houses that particularly picked at me. One went so overboard with decorations that I was actually worried I was being stalked by a monster or serial killer on the way up the driveway. The other just put strobelights all over the place and nearly gave me a seizure. Seriously. that house would've given someone with epilepsy a seizure, no doubt about it.
I didn't think much of it. until the next year.

Seventh Grade:
Here's when things got bad. It wasn't quite halloween yet, and one of the local bullies walks in wearing his mask. A gory, bloody Skelatonized Demon Mask. I don't see it until I get tapped on my shoulder and turn around and I get screamed in the face by Cory Ebert, one of the local bullies.

This was the only time I literally fainted.

Said event was followed by that years Halloween party a few days later in which ALL the refreshments were fake: A) Body parts that are seen on a living person (Fingers, feet, eyes, tongues). B) Body parts that had to be removed from a dead person (Hearts, Brains, Livers, Stomachs, Kidneys). Or C) Blood.
There was also some vomit salsa. Seriously. You dipped your finger shaped chips into them.
See what I'm getting at here?
And all of the costumes were just as disgusting as Cory's mask. Exposed guts, blood, and all of them tried to take a crack at scaring me after my performance with Cory.

Essentially every year after that has been more of the same. Either someone is actually trying to scare me, or indvertently grossing me out. Literally every year after 7th has had at least one person try to freak me out with a mask, and ALL of them have succeeded in startling me at the very least. Even this year, the infamous Ian Drakeford put on an "It the Clown" mask and knocked on my door, freaking me out when I opened it.

What might be the worst part about it, though, is how desensitized the children are to this. THey're going along with it! One year I decided to pass out candy, and I saw kids dressing up as: Fredddy Kreuger, Jason Whatshisname, Michael Meyers, Zombies with all the gore you could ask for, and The guy from Scream.
Why are these parents letting their 7 year old kids watch slasher films?!

Moral standings of parents aside it's sickening to watch these kids go around as such disgusting things. I mean, they're not actively trying to antagonize me, just having fun. But really it makes me sad that they are having fun dressed up as such things.

The only good experience I had on Halloween in the past 8 years was last year, and that was when I was the photographer for my friends going off to a Halloween party which I did not join them on. Oddly, none of them were wearing anything gross. The scariest thing their was was either how Memphis was dressed up as a convict, or how Matt was dressed up as a pirate. Nothing was gross. I was starting to think "Hey! maybe now that I'm in college and people are mature, they'll stop being gross and I can actually happily partake!" 'Course, that theory was shot down seconds later when Ian and his posse walked by dressed as bloody, eviscerated corpses. That's what I get for getting my hopes up.

What really pulls at my heartstrings is that nobody seems to care or notice. They all just tell me, "you have a weak stomach." While this is true, I can't help but think that everybody but me has lost all sense of morality. Why else would people purposefully dress up as a serial killer or a victim of a serial killer and find it fun? And why else would a person not doing so not bat an eyelash at people who do? It makes me think that nobody cares about human life at all now.

So that's where we stand. Everybody on Halloween turns into Jerky McDickhead and it doesn't matter if you're 5 or 20. Halloween isn't fun, It's gross. And I can only sit here and mourn the days that I've lost.

End of Discussion.

Wow. It seems like nobody's been online all freaking day. The entire past 24 hours I've literally had ONE person reply to me. Kinda upsetting given how much I seem to thrive on attention. Maybe I need to do something more offensive to get people to notice me. 'Course, that could easily backfire and get me banned, and that's the last thing I want right now.

Anyway, getting to the point of this journal, I have just had, like, the weirdest-ass day in probably my past ten years of existance. Note that if you actually want to read a journal that has any relevance to anything then you're in the wrong place. I just want to tell people about all the weird crap that's happened.

So the whole day started with an all nighter that resulted from my not doing my homework until the last minute (again). I ended up having to read a huge damn book for my US History class that I regret having taken with every fiber of my being. This book spanned ONE THOUSAND, EIGHT HUNDRED, AND SEVENTY SEVEN FREAKING PAGES. Naturally I had to cut a few corners, but being the diligent student I am (), I went into the task intending to cut as few as possible. My original panic about the situation eventually evolved into frustration, eventually leading to anger, then rage, and finally a full undying hatred for my history professor (Which in all honesty, wasn't a big leap from how I felt about him before).

After spending seven F@#&ing hours staring at my computer screen, because I wasn't bright enough to buy the book when it was still in the school bookstore, but was damn lucky enough to find the whole thing online, My head was ready to explode. Half with fury and half with the inherent pain that comes with staring at a computer monitor for seven hours. By this point, of course, I had said "screw this" and had started cutting as many corners as possible, while still trying to maintain some grasp as to what the book was trying to say. This didn't work out so well, but by that point I was far beyond the point of caring. Anyway, It was about this time I had to go to my 9am class, Mathematical Concepts. Possibly the most boring class in my repetoire, but certainly the one to dish out the least amount of unpleasant surprises. The class went by pretty smoothly, all things considered.

Now at this point, a specific question has probably come to you all. "Why was it so important that you read that huge book in so little time, Will?" The answer is quite simple. My history prof has this f@#&ed up idea that history is best taught by forcing us to read huge books in a small amount of time, and then making us tell each other what we thought of the book in more of an old ladies' book club thing than actually teaching us any damn history. (Seriously. This guy has no idea what the hell he's doing.) The funny thing is. If you don't say anything in the "discussion" then you get an 'F' for the day, and for some odd reason, todays discussion was oddly pivotal. Somehow it seems that everything we're going to do for the rest of the semester rides on what we talked about today. So essentially, I had to speak up at some point.

And thus truly begins why the day turned out so freakish. (yeah, I've bored you for so long and I still haven't gotten to the damn point)

See, I decided that it would be a bad thing to end up falling asleep in my soon-to-rear-its-ugly-head history class, so I did something I never do.

I went out... and got coffee.

I HATE coffee.

Hate. Hate. HATE!

It tastes like you're sucking on an old gym sock and it ends up leaving me with the jitters.

Despite the fact that I obviously dislike this particular beverage, I felt that my usual Dr. Pepper wouldn't do the job. I was THAT exhausted. So I went out and got myself an iced Mocha.

The resulting wackiness that was the rest of the day is what most people on campus believe stems from the fact that this was the first ever coffe I asked for that had a shot of espresso in it. I simply find that hard to believe. My dad used to drink espresso and he never ended up as f@#&ed up as I did for the rest of the day. No. I think someone at my local starbucks is an incompetent junkie that accidentally dropped some of his stimulants into my drink. 'Course, this is a dangerous accusation to make, so I'm going to stop that particular topic right there.

Anyway, the rest of the day ended up a huge wacked out chain of events that can only be described as feeling like my friend ~Joshing3the7Kokiri if he suddenly ended up inhabiting the body of a hummingbird with ADHD. It. Was. NUTS!

When I finally got to my pivotal history class I was so wigged out that my additions to the conversation were barely comprehensible, I was litterally bouncing around in my seat, and I was twitching so much I was actually asked by the guy sitting next to me if I suffered from Parkinsons.

Anyway, the rest of the day continued on like this for HOURS. I felt like it was never going to end, and yet I kept praying that it would. It's SO goddamn uncomfortable, this feeling. And if it's anything like getting high, I can't understand why people would want to get high in the first place. If you're feeling depressed you watch a funny movie, you don't turn yourself into the reincarnation of Woody Woodpecker!

These wacked out feelings only JUST wore off, like ten minutes ago. I can tell you right now, I'm NEVER having an espresso again for the rest of my life. It's just not worth it!

... And now in retrospect it seems that there wasn't much random crap that happened today so much as it was I felt odd all day. Hmm... Seems I just wasted not only my time, but also yours if you bothered to read this. Oops.

Anyway, that's my long and arduous tale of my day. If you read the whole thing that's freaking amazing. If you skipped this over or got bored halfway through I don't blame you. I'll probably take this journal down tomorrow anyway.