Art by our ever-talented @merenge_doll
I feel like the most important thing any creator has to establish is a “mission” to take upon themselves.
It can be as simple as wanting to fill the world with more pictures of women with armpit hair, it can be as high reaching as wanting more stories depicting the complex relationship between a single mother and their pregnant teenage daughter.
For me, it’s been to strive for naturalism.
I remember in 6th grade we were asked to make short small plays for the rest of the class. After one such play the teacher asked if anyone had any feedback to say and I raised my hand and said something to the effect of “at the start of their play they’re getting up from bed to school, but nobody wakes up that fast.”.
It got me weird looks and one baffled teacher, obviously. But that moment stuck with me. There was a weird combination of the usual shame that happens in remembering those moments but there was also this underlying feeling of “I was right, though…”.
And then years later that event would definitely feel like the earliest sign of my journey as a creator.
All my life, no matter how much I enjoyed a story I had this nagging feeling of “but people don’t talk like that”. Then while reading art books during the period of my life that I was really into illustrations I noticed a section explaining that you need to learn to “draw what you see, not what you’ve been taught to see”.
And that gave me something I had just… rumbling in my head for years and years: “make what you see, not what you’ve been taught to see”.
Draw the actual grass you see, not the zig zag lines a teacher once told you represented grass.
Write the people you actually know, not the archetypes that the media has taught you to know.
This mission, however, has always been in an eternal conflict with another side of myself. The side that grew up with Looney Tunes, with Tom and Jerry, with Tex Avery cartoons, with Animaniacs. The side that really enjoys the clash of huge personalities making sparks fly.
This latter side is the one that took over when I was writing Streaming-chan.
During the writing period of VA-11 Hall-A, client sections (of which there were at 4 of per day not counting one crossing into the other) usually needed a couple of days to be fully formed. Sometimes I’d move onto other sections and go back to earlier ones once I had figured something out. On average, I’d say each client section took about a day and a half of work.
Streaming-chan was done in a single afternoon. In about 3 to 5 hours or so.
Not only that, but the first encounter with Streaming-chan as you see it is how she was in the first draft. Aside from spellchecking nothing was edited, nothing was adjusted, it was fully formed in one go.
The romantic call it “Inspiration”; the doctors call it “Hyperfocus”.
And really, while other examples weren’t as swift, I remember having the most fun writing the more out there characters like Dorothy and Dana.
Thankfully I still had my mission always present even while doing that, because a character like Streaming-chan can’t stand on quirkiness alone.
We can all relate to not putting extra effort into things unless it’s a special occasion, and if so we’ve all considered means to push that “special occasion” onto us to be that better part of ourselves more often.
That’s what truly lies at the core of Streaming-chan. A caricature of this concept, maybe; but she’s not streaming herself 24/7 “just because”.
And that’s a saving throw of the writing, because in this day and age the concept of her character has lost some of its novelty, and there will come a time where the collective consensus of what an “annoying hyperactive content creator” looks like will change. But even when technology moves on and when the hellscape we live in makes the idea of “monetizing sleeping hours” look quaint, the tale of a girl that felt like streaming made the better part of her shine and so decided her life would be streamed in its entirety will remain.
For real, though. Writing sci-fi is becoming a daunting task when the real world is all too happy to parody itself before you have even a whiff of a chance to say a word.
If you’re playing along, today was day 4 of the full game.
Tomorrow: The city is restless but there’s still a shift to fill.
Thank u for u’r story =]