The Long Trip to Kuwahawi's Wondrous Islands

The Natural Wonders of Kuwahawi is a plot with so many previous iterations and changes that it's gonna take more than just going behind the scenes of specific events to encapsulate where this plot came from and how much it changed along the way. In fact, it is basically unrecognizable form its initial shape, but the important thing to consider here is that the evolution was built off the corpses of earlier ideas because no matter what I ended up doing of these ideas, it would have been this year's plot, and some elements are carried through to the end product, or were almost carried through, or... well, too much time spent explaining the explanations is not time spent explaining the actual substance! So, before we go behind the scenes on the actual plot we got, let's go back to the first real idea I had for a Kuwahawi plot, on that was meant to be done here rather than just any old place like Those Left Behind was.

DRAFT 1: CADUCEUS TOWER AND THE VIRUS

A while back I shared an old idea of mine about a tower of people negatively effected by medical treatments and such, with their stated goal being to prevent any further medical problems in the world and solve things before malpractice could hurt others like it had them. Their treatments had only made them worse, and Kuwahawi was going to have something crop up that called their attention.

Since 2011 I have had a plan for a virus plot, but for many reasons I haven't gone through with it. Here I almost did it, but I didn't, as you can tell pretty easily by the fact it didn't happen. Back in 2011, I found an image on Drawception of a strange old blue man with goggles who looked sort of sickly, and I wanted to make the idea of the virus being that it had twisted the guy into that appearance, although I couldn't find the image after deleting it a long time ago. Didn't do it for a multitude of reasons, one being it's hard to make it an effective threat in a setting as free as ZFRP and it's not very fun or easy to fight against. Still, didn't stop me from trying to resurrect the idea! I still wanted to use something similar to the blue-skinned man as the inspiration for the virus's effects, so the form the virus took was one that compelled people to drown themselves. It would essentially make any afflicted person start to make dry noises like they're parched, but no matter how much liquid they ingested, they still felt like they didn't have enough. Being on an island, their mind would eventually turn solely to the quest to drink and thus make them move into the ocean and drown, although we might find victims in pools and bathhubs first as they go for the on-hand source of tons of water. I imagined one scene where the virus had attached to thousands of people and the Kobbers would have to keep these people from marching into the sea to kill themselves, which could be neat in a horror movie or something.

The virus wasn't natural though. It was created by... a character I don't think I ever named. He had orange spiky hair though! And was a bit young, not kid young but sort of anime young. Very anime for some reason in my mind, and he probably wouldn't be as much if we got him in RP.  This fellow's reason for making the virus was basically population control. It wasn't about natural selection or "only the fit shall survive" or whatever, he just had a mindset where the greater number of people there are, the less opportunity there is for everyone. It comes from the sort of bleak concept that a disaster does, by causing damage and casualties, open up previously occupied jobs, free up stagnant money, make it more likely someone can obtain certain possessions due to less competition... He basically wanted humanity to be thinned down into a more meaningful species, where there were less pointless members or members who held back others through their holdings. The virus would just take hold in whoever, and while this idea came before we got the Infinity War movie, I'm sure his approach would inevitably be compared to Thanos's ethos these days. The irony here would be that soon this villain could contract the virus himself since he specifically did not develop any cure or anything to avoid his plan being foiled, but this would evolve soon into something more.. He did know there was a cure in a later iteration of the plot, but it was an odd one.

This plot would introduce an old couple to the King of Beasts as connected characters, one of them based on a design I found in a graphic novel and the other just an old lady. Old Man and Old Lady had no powers or anything, but they were actually the parents of this villain and came to Kuwahawi to try and make sure he wasn't doing bad things, although they wouldn't reveal this at first of course. The strange thing about this couple though was they had another "son". The old man was a mycologist, and in his studies he came across a fungus that had pretty much the intelligence level of a toddler. It molded itself into a somewhat lumpy humanoid shape, and it was basically a black truffle child with no obvious facial features or anything. Their excuse for being here was to introduce the little truffle to the Kobbers and hope their weirdness might bring some understanding to its existence. The real son would be incredibly angry with this surrogate son and, when designing the virus, he would make the only cure... be the truffle. That specific truffle that the kid is the only instance of. Here we have the battle of the parents possibly having to give up their good son's life to cure the bad one's problem, but they wouldn't be able to do it... and then the old woman would get the virus. Then we'd have a heartwrenching scene where the father is prepared to kill the truffle boy to save his wife and everyone and... then Kobbers? They save the day somehow?

That was one problem with the plot. I didn't think of many ways for Kobbers to interact with it. One scene I had in my mind set was one where the villain would want to talk with the Kobbers, sitting in a chair well after the Kobbers knew he was basically Kill on Sight... but he'd have a contraption his hands were hooked up to. Various shotguns are tied to each finger by string, all of them pointing down at an unconscious little girl (later changed the truffle boy when he came around in the plot concept) so that, if the Kobbers tried to hurt him or do anything to move him, the strings would pull and the kid would be obliterated. It was basically just so he could talk to the Kobbers and tell him why he did anything, but not only did I have no good thing for Kobbers to do on the plot, I had no good exit for him either. It was just another image I liked but had no use for.

To make this plot potentially less of a parade of the bleak, the villain almost got two bumbling sidekicks, those being Mr. Fish in his earliest form and Mr. Walrus, whose name we'll be seeing again later. They were comic relief through and through and would probably have a lame fight with the Kobbers, but they were the arms of this guy who didn't go out in public and were fish and walrus people for... some reason. Again, planning never got there. Caduceus Tower would also have a few characters show up, with then four characters planned to join the bar cast. This incredible cast commitment to one plot that I had no clear direction for is the biggest reason it got cancelled before evolving further, that and... well, pretty much everything about it didn't seem very good for interactive RP!

Mr. Fish would go on to get his role in Those Left Behind where he was almost a villain, but Mr. Walrus was almost the supervillain of that plot. As the ultimate callback to RP, these two were meant to tie to my pre-ZFRP days on the Star Fox Assault boards, where I posted Mr. Fish the Businessman shows in topics for no good reason and was the user Mr. Walrus because my brother got my original Gamefaqs account banned for posting with it about tank cannons looking like erections. Mr. Walrus has a history recounted in an old blog post, but he was basically a big villain on that board because he got the mods to crack down and ban off-topic posting, aka all the bar RPing over there. So, in ZFRP, he would have been behind Those Left Behind, orchestrating events with a past of eliminating communities across the universe, starting with one that sounded pretty similar to a Star Fox bar (thus explaining his animal appearance, he was from the Lylat System!).  Mr. Walrus realized he enjoyed the power of being able to dissolve friendships and bonds, and his quest to break apart groups lead him to the strangest one and his biggest potential victory: the Kobbers. His plan was to bring back old bargoers and pit them against the new, hopefully making things crumble as the name became meaningless and trust dissolved... or they just killed each other. There were long speeches planned, but he would have not been fought proper. In the Kobber Museum event, he'd appear on monitors talking to the Kobbers, laying out his history and why he was doing this to them, and when they beat the Gremlins, he'd reveal that Dylan had just finished summoning The Consumer and that Mr. Walrus was already taking off, believing he had failed. You COULD try to catch Mr. Walrus before he left Earth, but you'd leave a huge problem behind to do so. After the big finale, I knew people didn't want Mr. Walrus getting away, so if it was going poorly that he got away without a battle, Motoko Kusanagi was going to have successfully tracked him down a bit later, finding him in like, an airport or something. They'd talk all dramatically and then Motoko would kill him to wrap things up. Trimmed all this to make Those Left Behind more about nostalgic fun, but there was another idea floating around the same time as Those Left Behind for a potential 2018 plot, where Mr. Fish would have a role still and Mr. Walrus could have as well...

DRAFT 2: THE UNDERSEA ARMY

Boy, let me tell ya, I had this planned since before 2017 started and seeing Sea Witch and hearing about ideas about an undersea dwarf civilization were making me anxious I wouldn't do it... and then I didn't do it! But I really liked this idea and got deep in the planning phases.

The Undersea Army was not the name for the plot, but it encapsulates what it was as it kept changing. The original idea was fairly simple: humanoid undersea animals would wage war on Kuwahawi, the Kobbers fighting them along the way. They were essentially raiders, with their goal for attacking people on land tying back to what made them capable fighters. You see, these animals were all decked out in armor built from shipwrecks and used weapons salvaged from them, and I don't mean old timey shipwrecks. These came from World War II and later shipwrecks, meaning they'd have armored plating and cannons and such. I had so many fun ideas for armor designs for sea creatures, and each important naval position in the army was filled by someone named after a real shipwreck, since they saw that name on the armor they salvaged from the ship's sidings. I had a notecard with all the characters and roles and species, but I remember mostly Fleet Admiral Yamato as he took the most famous wreck and was a giant squid. Other characters I do remember was a religious leader who was by the admiral's side, since the undersea creatures were all worshippers of Cthulhu in my attempt to worm Point Nemo into RP, the place furthest from any dry land on Earth. There was also to be a warrant officer who was originally an otter but never got her species changed despite me deciding to change it. Original idea was just sea animals in general, with things like seahorses and pufferfish and all but mammals were included too until I decided they were a marginalized group. This undersea fish person race lived underwater for ages, but the mammals were all mutated by the Bikini Atoll to achieve similar sapience, with dolphins and seals and such horrific creatures who were more like maniacs on leashes than true soldiers.

EDIT! I found the sticky note full of ship wrecks! We have: Fleet Admiral Yamato. Admirals Barrow (with a question mark for some reason), Gilliam, and Carlisle (with the note it's radioactive). Vice Admiral Kaitawa. Rear Admiral Canberra. Captain Dona Paz who, it's noted, is a Big Deal. Commander Lexington. Lieutenant Commander Kongo. Lieutenant Callaghan. Ensign Yamakaze. Chief Warrant Officer Graf Spee, and Michel, or maybe they were the same character? Warrant Officer Goolgwai comes with the note (pufferfish) to actually give a species to it too, and then we have Warrnambool last. Tried to find ones with reasonable character names and I'm sure some had assigned roles and species, but the note doesn't say them and it's been too long to remember them.

It would operate like a military on the whole, although they were basically pretending at it instead of being an actual navy. Fights would involve things like attempting to blockade the docks or firing shots at different parts of the island to split Kobber forces. They would at first try diplomacy, a tactic that had worked on many islands, and they'd essentially want Kuwahawi to agree to constant technological tribute to better the undersea force's power. We'd meet Yamato, the priest, and warrant officer in a round table discussion before they depart and wage war on us. It was basically a megaplot considering how many characters and battles I had drawn up... and then the Snowmads happened. A wonderful plot, SK's best, but I didn't think using sea creatures was so fresh anymore and didn't want to lessen his plot by seeming to copy it. They were invaders too so... back to the drawing board!

I tried to salvage it with an idea I was even more excited about. Rather than sea creatures wearing the wrecks of battleships as armor, it became humanoid coral, and the warrant officer became ribbon coral girl so she could have twirly twintails. As you might have guessed, the warrant officer was meant to be sort of redeemable, although no matter how much you liked her, she would fight til the end for her species and cause, although she could convert after the planned finale. I looked up many coral species but this idea was starting to lose its legs, especially since it seemed like a heavy art load and being beaten to the punch lessened my interest. The Cthulhu angle is a favorite though.

You see, when we whittled down the forces of this undersea army, they were going to be forced to resort to their most desperate of options. Launching what seems like a final hurrah with many of their forces, the admiral and warrant officer would actually be heading to Point Nemo, aiming to awaken their god and have him attack the Kobbers. When we got there, we'd have the final dramatic confrontation with the two but we'd seem like we failed, Yamato heading in to the sunken city of R'lyeh to call on his god. (Callie and Marie worshipping Cthulhu also made me wonder if this was okay :V) Thing is, once he got in to the sunken city... he didn't find what he expected.

Rather than finding the slumbering elder god, he found... Chuck Thulhu. Chuch Thulhu is a human sized squid person that looks just like Cthulhu but he's got a white beard and glasses. He's basically a grandpa version of Cthulhu. Chuck would tell Yamato and everyone else that there is no Cthulhu, but it was a carefully cultivated brand invented by him to sell merchandise and licensing rights. People just saw Chuck a long time ago and misinterpreted him, and Chuck's been making bank on that mistake ever since! Yamato would be crushed and turn himself over to Kobber justice, and after everyone left Point Nemo and R'lyeh... Chuck Thulhu would go deep into its depths, where Cthulhu was slumbering peacefully, Chuck's deception to let his brother continue his sleep having worked perfectly. We'd never follow up on this probably, but it was a cute way to keep the joke and the threat if other people wanted the old god to be real.

Mr. Fish's tie to all this? He and Punfisher were originally members of this undersea humanoid aquatic race, and Mr. Fish was originally going to be a sort of scout for them, and then I think Mr. Walrus was almost the scout, and then... nothing! The plot idea shifted! The undersea army was an attempt to make the plot more relevant, but the next plot idea would be the one we finally got, the Natural Wonder of Kuwahawi!

FINAL PRODUCT: NATURAL WONDERS OF KUWAHAWI

Ultimately, the idea I settled on was as simple as "what if... a bunch of islands... but they weird?" Quite barefacedly, I used the Spectrum plot structure as a way of designing it, as that was a plot I was very happy with since it did so much for my characters, but I don't think I'll be using it again since it didn't feel as well done this time around. Giving a character a plot moment is an easy way to cinch up an arc but I'll probably be aiming for less preplanned conclusions in the coming year. The islands we got were basically designed around the cast's importance to them though, and I believe it was my plan to RP Stan, Heff, and Wooster that kicked things off with the first idea, since the Land of Milk and Honey was a Winnie the Pooh location I also remembered and wanted to integrate.

But! Let's not try to skip around too much. Instead, let's go right into the first plot relevant island and one that was almost a long plot on its own! Essentially a third plot draft that was also tossed out in the end!

KNACKPLOT: a.k.a. The Patch

There was once almost a standalone Knackplot. After bringing him in as a meme for 2017, I decided I basically had to do a Knackplot the next year, at least as a joke. The Patch was always to be the staging ground for it, the name being a joke on the fact that a patch was what Knack 2 needed to be good but it never got one, and Knack's life was in jeopardy because his game's weren't good. There's another meaning to it, but we'll get there eventually.

First, the original form of the plot was not about making Knack 3 at all! Gregg was still the grim reaper who came for Knack's career just because it would be funny to write him and I could squeak in the Project Spark reference later when the Patch became more about creation, but I basically wanted a video game grim reaper to come for video game souls! Only other one I briefly considered was the one from Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Originally though, instead of offering Knack a chance to make a good game, he would have been able to earn his life through a series of challenges to prove he's a good gaming mascot, and there comes the original idea for the plot.

Knack plot would have had Knack competing in a platforming challenge, a collectathon challenge, and a quiz! Well, that was one of the ideas, I can't remember all of them, but these were the almosts. The idea was Knack would compete with other faded video game mascots in these challenges, but Knack would be able to convince Gregg to let the Kobbers help him out "since Sonic has a bunch of friend to help him and he's still huge!" Characters we might of seen on this plot included the likes of old mascots like Boogerman, Buck Bumble, Glover, Blinx, Wild Woody, and a lot of other old guys I didn't expect anyone to ever use. These were just names, likely to maybe appear in the quiz game but nothing else solid came out of them. Some guys did get potential ideas around them though, like Aero the Acro-Bat was almost the platforming challenge competitor where the Kobbers would have to overcome a circus, and then Croc was made the platforming challenge guy instead but I didn't know enough about his games. Platforming might have been hard to write interestingly too. The collectathon part would be easier since I could just lay out various challenges to complete instead, but there was also going to be an appeal part of it and the guy we were competing with? Gex! Gex would be spouting movie and hollywood references the whole time and Gregg would give him the win, meaning Knack would have to enter the final round to try and earn his freedom or else he'd be kaput.

Partly I just wanted to play this music in the plot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4YvqotUfk0 but also I thought the quiz game could be cute, Kobbers answering questions about video games past- oh wait google exists shit what can I do. Never found out how to make a quiz game interesting and fun without prior knowledge or a way to bar cheating. The Kobbers were meant to win this round, and after that... Knack is saved! Which is... a good thing? I don't know. I couldn't really gauge if people actually cared about Knack, especially since the joke was he sucks. He did poorly in the Brawl voting which only helped sell the idea people didn't, and I wasn't sure if people would even care about the final form the plot took. But... this wasn't the end of Knackplot yet. We'd soon discover that Gregg wasn't really employed by some greater force called The Powers that Be (which is still a joke in the final plot) but instead, we'd see him in a bar, the one from Wreck-it Ralph with Tapper and all, and we'd find that the guy who got Gregg to try and reap Knack was... BUBSY!

Bubsy wanted to eliminate the competition and since he recently got his revival game, he had basically overcome Gregg's challenges too and was now sending him out to anyone else with no hope of a franchise. Bubsy would capture Knack and take him to a Bubsy 3D world where we'd fight him... but he was still not the top dog in this chain. Bubsy would be acting for a different character, one that Gregg and Bubsy would discuss at the bar but wouldn't appear until the second part of the finale event. You see, Knack wasn't just a random mascot target for the Bubster... he was someone a former Sony mascot wanted bumped off. The Patch's history was similar to what it is now, Kevin Butler and all, but the villain of the entire Knack based plot was... Sackboy! Sony's fading mascot would have had the AP in him just like he does in current canon, but it was removed to make Knack and now Sackboy's star was fading. He wanted to take the AP back to be the big star again! AP, ofcourse, being the All Star Power from Playstation All-Star Battle Royal that all the characters were fighting over, and since the final boss of that game was Sony's original mascot Polygon Man... he was to be the real REAL final villain!

Okay, let's step back a touch. Sackboy couldn't talk, but he'd explain his reasons for wanting to be a big mascot again using his Popit Menu and stickers, basically a similar exposition to the one we got in the actual plot event but with Sackboy still in the picture. Sackboy would then use the menu to pull Polygon Man out of Knack, leaving him dead basically, and then Polygon Man would be the big battle, Sackboy using his ability to create to help Polygon Man fight back the Kobbers so that Sackboy could reabsorb him after and become the big name again. Kevin Butler would come in after the fight and basically go "we don't actually give a shit about mascots what the hell are you guys doing" but we'd probably let Sackboy live and all and he'd hand the Patch over to Bottom Dollar after the plot ended.


Making the plot instead about creating Knack 3 was just an idea that flit across my mind as my faith in this form of the plot was fading. It felt a bit too much like Segaplot at times and I hadn't played games like Croc to do the research and wasn't likely too in time. Asking a bunch of nerds who like to play video games to make a video game seemed like a fun plot idea though even if I was nervous if it could work, and while I was likely to tip somewhat in the RPers favor, if we did make a shitty game on purpose or otherwise, the Game Hoard rating joke would have been accurate to that effort. People seemed to put in the effort though so I don't feel bad about being nice! I carried over as many of the old ideas as I could into the final version of the plot, if not too gracefully, although Gregg's death touch didn't come until other things developed, originally he was just a grim reaper who could shake your hand! That death touch is partly a reference to Grabbed by the Ghoulies's incarnation of the reaper where his death touch is his defining characteristic. One thing I forgot to mention: The Patch was originally envisioned as a place that materialized game characters unguided, like a piece of fiction had plopped down onto our planet. It could explain certain video game characters existing in reality if people liked, and it can still sort of if they fit with the new version of the island, but the idea basically took the Red Spectrum idea and made it bigger so I changed it to avoid being too blatant about my source of inspiration.

For some broader plot details we'll cover them near the end, but let's keep on the train of island plots and focus next on Shimmer's story!

WAYGATE ROCK

Shimmer left behind a family with a big problem hanging around their neck: sickly little Margaret. A part of explaining the absence of Shimmer's mother, Margaret was half-elf while the rest of her family was human, and that half-elfyness was making her super sick. Leaving the fate of Shimmer's mother ambiguous was fun for a while, but for a character around as long as her, you have to start addressing those mysteries eventually, even if the answer isn't very nice.

Treating Margaret was originally just an evolution of the trip to Elfland, where we could potentially learn how to help her, but Draco swoops in with the awesomeness of DeMonde and makes it a much more interesting thing then "we went a place and maybe learned how to help her idk". It might have even turned out we didn't learn how to treat her if people acted a certain way on arrival! But, Draco cinched her up really good and now she's a happy girl, and the focus instead turned to Waygate Rock, which the island's only real change from inception was making a horizontal pool portal into a standing vertical portal.

The elf city itself, well I used some elf language translator to get these names:
City of Meler

Cystaerdaelaes
Aendryror
Vodaerer
Medaesolor
Aistaesor

All of the names are basically jokes about typical snooty elves, and I definitely intended to play into that with my interpretation of High Elves.

Vodaerer means Prideful

Meler means Stuck Up

Aendryror is Egotist

Cystaerdaelaes is Homewrecker,  a name picked as he was the father of Margaret and thus the one who ruined the Carpenter family.

Originally, arrival in the elf city would be quite different and have so much more talking. We'd talk first with a council who would take the joke of saying Eww at everyone they see even further. Originally, the concubines and such of elves were almost shameful in the society, and treated like the indulgences of lesser members of it. Cystaedaelaes would get shit from other council members for his need to find a human mate and he wouldn't even be very proud of it. I didn't want this to be a combat plot since the idea is that Shimmer's mom is basically like her, unhappy with her life but choosing to be much more selfish in her choices in the end. Shimmer saw the way of good and tries to help people, Shimmom just wants to help herself. It was bound to be a sad plot and one that sort of poked at "not everything is clear cut good or bad". Like, this isn't really good, but it's also what she wants you know? If we did try to break her free against her wishes though, we'd fight a bunch of high elves! They had magic mostly, a few spears, it wasn't really a fight meant to be too great but we could have killed the elfdad and then made our way out if people really didn't like the place. Some places are just a bit shitty, and Meler is meant to be sort of like that despite its attempts to look like the bestest place ever. Shimmom was also almost a lot less empathetic, perhaps even a bit apathetic to Shimmer in general. I didn't want the taste left in people's mouths too bitter though. I have no real plans for the future of this place at the moment, but I wouldn't be surprised if it resurfaces somehow just to clean up old business. Could have definitely been done better and was perhaps the first part of "too different for the sake of being different" this plot faced.

These two were meant to be the lead-ins to the plot, so they're position was sort of planned from the start. Otherwise, the following islands save the final ones were a bit more fluid and based more on where a character was personally than any structure, so we'll kind of just follow up on these as they are in my notes. A small treat first though: MOST of my cast was integrated into islandplot, but I was considering giving Keahi a spot as well! I considered him being called to an island to hearken back to his volcano roots from Season 1 FYM arena fites, where he'd have to talk to a lava god or something. For a while, before that idea came to be, I even considered having Kap drop by after every fite to talk to Keahi, Kap trying to get the surfer to get in touch with his culture more. It was even possible that Keahi would meet Kap's daughter and they'd be dating by the end of the year! But I didn't do that and tried to keep him simple after it was clear that he wasn't simple so he didn't fill the bartender role too well! Almost gave Keahi lava god powers to tie to his past too, and by almost I thought "should I? ...naaaaaaaaah" ANYWAY...

THE ISLE OF EMPTY HEARTS

Tomiko's island! Tomi was a nice surprise last year and I really enjoyed writing her this year and last. She was a bit more interesting in speech last year I feel because she didn't have to carry the conversational weight as much since she was a side character, but I still liked her attitude. Her history, with the tons of brothers, a dad who just gave up on the family one day, and a mother who gave birth to Tomi in prison came well before this year started, partly because I liked the idea of her being born in a prison :V I almost did a Christmas blog looking at her past, particularly a moment where her oldest brother would give her a lecture about how you have to take from life or it will take from you, but it seemed sadness around a holiday that I didn't want to bum people out during!

We almost did see that scene still, and I did consider leaving Tomi's backstory secret longer instead of it coming up in a talk with Rachel, as the proto-Isle of Empty Hearts would have revealed it! Before all the islands were tied to the Logic Spirit, they were just kinda weird places, and the Isle wasn't really much of an island at all. It was a space travelling location that took on many forms, and the isle's secret was that it contained an odd alien fisherman who was able to remove parts of your mind and cast them into an infinitely deep pond filled with memories. It was called "Empty Hearts" because it emptied your heart of woes and such, and Tomi would have gone there after her situation with Vykarius and life hit a hard point. She'd want to rip it out of her head so she wouldn't hurt anymore, and then she'd show up back at the bar acting out of character. Maybe too happy, maybe no emotion, maybe not even really doing anything! That would lead to us heading out to the island and trying to get her memories back, diving into the pond Hercules at the end of the Disney movie style. 

How the idea was expressed changed from here. There was the idea that people would go through different memories of Tomiko's and fight through them by supporting her. There was an idea that people would literally fight traumatic memories that are represented by mutated fish (like say, someone who witnessed a traumatic murder might have the fish take on aspects of the killer), there was the idea that people would have to suppress their own harsh memories as they swam in the water. Here we'd see Tomi's past somehow though no matter how the action happened, and the fisherman? Totally impartial. He doesn't try to convince people one way or another about whether to cast their memories into the pool, he just facilitates it. He doesn't even know he's on Earth since the island changes so much beneath him, he just keeps up his role.

This idea was scrapped mostly because I couldn't come up with a best way to do this and the idea didn't make much sense with the new Logic Spirit explanation attached to it. The flowers came eventually, and it went through some expected iterations, like "it's all an illusion!" or whatever, but I thought some nature not being malicious and just having those powers was a nice change of pace. Instead, the island would be menaced by something else to make it dangerous, and I had a pretty good idea of the sea monster I wanted to feature! I found one that matched it pretty well thankfully, although the flower design was based not on any real flora but those weird mechanical arms in the Death Stranding trailers that open and shut rapidly. The pond version of this event had no answers for the Vykarius situation, leaving it sort of up to Kobbers to talk Tomi one way or another, but the flowers achieved their final nature as a way of capping things off happily. It was possible Tomi might end up with someone new during the year if people were fine with her moving on, and some interests were hinted at, but I also had a good but not cheap ending in store here with the flower if the original relationship stayed true, and for a pairing that was really satisfying to RP last year, I gotta admit I'm glad they're still together too.

Tomi's gloves were lost on this plot as well, and since it was near the end of the year it didn't hurt much. I got to do a few different things like the gun and prototype gloves to make her a bit fresh near the end, but she was a real scrappy gal this year and I just wish that didn't mean she had to sit out of so many huge battles because she didn't have much going to face them. Briefly considered bringing a brother or two into the picture for a scene of her talking through her emotions but didn't have a place. I'll miss ya you scrappy kappa.

THE TITAN'S HAND

I just couldn't keep Cirno out of RP until 2019.

And I don't regret it! Cirno was so fun to RP this year that I had to restrain myself from doing it too often. Her brash and brainless attitude could very well annoy instead of amuse through oversaturation and I'm still not convinced I achieved the right balance. Cirno is very much a character like Shimmer whose thought process can change depending on how she gets to the thought. Cornwind asked me at one point for Embla and Cirno to have a rivalry and I literally couldn't tell him if that would be what came to pass because presentation would determine how the character reacts. Instead, they're like sister types instead. Cirno won't be the braggart and liar she was this year anymore, but she will still want to be the best, just not with such single-mindedness after she saw the results! Her finally getting Scraps nee Trash to open up and be proud of who she was was a huge highlight of the year for me, and while I like the ending scene they had, I almost tried to find a way where Cirno could still live with the trio in Kuwahawi but go to Olympia!

Cirno is my favorite touhou and that's been a joke for a while, and I think the simplest way to describe why is just that I find energy and determination to be likeable traits. These are often attached to dumb characters so we get some airheads with these traits,  and while I did have her say Baka a few times, I didn't want to overload on it since gratuitous use of other languages hardly ever feels natural in fiction. I like optimism and perseverance, the character who can get down in the dumps but it won't keep them down for long. This sounds like sorta generic protagonist stuff and there are some who fit it, but I don't want them to be impenetrable walls of determination and I like to see them falter because that's when their mindset is tested. Cirno is almost an exaggeration of this in RP, wanting to be the very best of the best of the best, but I didn't want her to be a complete intolerable gloryhound, and that's partly where the angle came from that best doesn't make everyone else worse. She wants approval because she gets put down so much, but rather than moping about it, she tries to better herself, she just doesn't understand how and can blind herself to her behavior during it.

Daiyousei's relationship with Cirno in fanworks doesn't do much for me, partly because Daiyousei is kind of your typical shrinking violet. I could have very well not had Daiyousei in RP if not for the fact I could get away with making her a small fairy, something that let her be a better constant companion to Cirno and a sort of guiding character like Navi. Daiyousei was seemingly made her shrinking violet personality, but the lady beneath it was always intended to be a bit of a rude woman. She's been pushed trying to keep Cirno in line, and I liked the relationship between them being a non-mutual crush more than the typical idea since it lead to both humorous and dramatic opportunities. Daiyousei being around people other than Cirno is helping her work through some of her feelings, but a crush is not easily quashed. She'll be a little less desperate in the future at least!

Titan's Hand is a bit of an obvious attempt to push the character growth along, Cirno hitting the peak of her quest for being the best and paying the price. The trials on the island went through many ideas. At one point I considered each fingers having a trial associated with that finger's meaning in culture. For example, the thumb would involve the thumbs up gesture, and I considered it having a gladiator style situation where you need to determine who lives or dies based on info fed about hypothetical characters. Some still have their associations somewhat present, like the pointer finger having the figures in it point at the challengers, but I thought I'd rather have interesting challenges than a theme, although the theme was "make others do the work for you" as an admonishment of Cirno's approach. The Titan was made a mega-bitch, and earlier versions did have the Kobbers face off with it not by fighting, but taking Sheep's approach of making Cirno sound unappealing and not worth keeping. Having people put her down was meant to give Cirno a reality check and also contextualize that sometimes people say mean things about people without meaning them. I almost drew the Titan's design, but it wouldn't look too nice in my style I think and the gold mannequins that looked like what I wanted were never in a good pose for it. The concept of a being with no head, hands, or feet because it flung them across the stars was one I was really committed to, and had I not been than maybe this would have fit into the plot better. Right now, only the materials benefited Bottom Dollar and Kuahiwi, but older ideas had them move the whole island onto Kuahiwi and it would have some other benefit.

And older design for Titan's Hand had no trials. Instead, climbing it was the challenge, and Cirno would get to the end of it first and get teleported over and captured. It was hard to explain why no one cheated to the top though. It was almost a hiking plot too! We would have just walked around marveling at the strange sights, and originally the island would have had everything on it missing pieces, like you used a photoshop erase tool to just remove parts of their body but it would still function normally. Imagine a palm tree with just parts of its trunk entirely missing, you able to put your hand through it. Maybe we could have fought some afflicted wild life, but nothing came together here. I guess it didn't come across too well in the end, but the other parts of the Titan were cast onto other planets like the hand was on ours, and they could teleport over at will if needed. The points where limbs terminate or start had the portals that connected them across space... maybe I should have drawn it. Would maybe be clearer then!

ADORATIA

Jaws's last turn on the catwalk was this year, after people telling me quite a bit he was perfect for an island setting because he was a water animal! I mentioned before I almost had Jaws's arc this year be training up Johnny Tsunami as a protege, but that fell through, so instead he became the washed up actor with nowhere left to go. The Kobber Movie he was making wasn't meant to fail when I made it his ending in 2014, but at the same time, its success wasn't guaranteed. I decided it would fail well before Jaws rejoined RP though, because Kobber Movies would be incoherent messes if accurate, and Jaws really isn't cut for directorial work! 

The huge shark wasn't going to get back into Hollywood after that though. He's really old and his career hard to recover from, and while I did expect some people to maybe toss him some bones actingwise, I wanted the point of his arc to be about accepting your limits since Jaws has spent years upon years not doing so. His acceptance is not him giving up though, but recontextualizing skills towards another one of his passions, that being to help people who don't get a shot at the big time the chance they need. I was happy to see Gefilte make more of an impression this time around, the little sea pig a decent companion for Jaws's eccentricity. Wish I had made Jaws more eccentric though and Gefilte a bit grouchier. Much like Jaws, he acts how he think he should act, taking on the Hollywood agent persona and shifting into it because of how long he's spent in it.

Adoratia itself got its coral that reads your mind to make your wishes come true came from the old coral idea, as in I wanted to do something with coral before we left the islands. Still wish I could have made coral characters... BUT! In more experimentation, I decided to make this a plot about acting. There were almost longer, more involved scenes, as in we'd go through each one together instead of a group appearing in audition phase before the Phantom of the Opera scene put it all out there meaning wise. I also wanted this place to be less about Jaws realizing something through the experience and more working through ideas he already had, and Adoratia wasn't going to attack people when its user departs. It's on Kuahiwi now and can continue to indulge people so it's not too beat up about it. A lot of specifics changed, like how the audience would be, but originally there was a very strange take on the Adoratia concept.

Jaws would be incredibly fat, engorged on juices the coral injected in him, and he'd be delusional as he struts about the stage, acting and asking the Kobbers to act with him. They'd need to get him in the right position to yank the coral off his head to free him from its control, but they'd have to be convincing actors to get there first. How this would teach him to be a teacher instead of an actor... who knows. I think there were more iterations, but I mostly remember the Jaws is fat version and not much else. Jaws had some Tomiko problems this year in his attack style made him unfit for many fights, but at least he has a clear path off into a happy life now instead of an ambiguous end that I doubt I would have let be happy. That sounds negative, but it was sort of a bad concept from the get go deliberately.

(NOTE: I took a long break from writing this blogpost and am now just coming back to it. Apologies if from here if info is repeated or not remembered as clearly, but here we go to the next islands!)

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

So, basically the entire reason I decided to RP Stan, Heff, and Wooster was just spontaneously remembering their existence one day and looking them up on the Winnie the Pooh wiki, only to find its one of those wikis where the editors are weird in their details. I shared in chatzy the day I was doing this the obnoxiously long lists of character traits Heff and Stan had, and by that point the two were already brewing as characters to integrate into RP. Stan: "His personality is calm, devious, snarky, treacherous, arrogant, negative, wicked, obsequious, offensive, zany, loathsome, earnest, sneaky, thoughtless, abrasive, narcissistic, wrathful, observant, obnoxious, zesty, lion-hearted, eager, sadistic, temperamental, austere, nefarious, menacing, ambitious, tough, testy, shrewd, thankless, attentive, noisy, mean, accountable, thoughtful, trustworthy and somewhat intelligent." Heff: "His personality is loud, easily scared, helpful, emotional, funny, fearful, thoughtless, hard-working, efficient, happy-go-lucky, eager, fussy, feisty, attentive, laid-back, ungenerous, malicious, persistent, hyperactive, envious, finnicky, fun-loving, hot-headed, exuberant, frolicsome, faint-hearted, annoying, loquacious, uncompromising, mean-spirited, prissy and foolish." Naturally, I trimmed these personalities down to suit my needs and not be ridiculously specific :P However, despite my nostalgia mostly angled at these two motivating this choice, Wooster was the perfect guy to bring the group together as more than two jokes who couldn't hold their own in a fight. Wooster is huge but nice, making him good for fights he could drag the other two along on but also he wouldn't totally dominate the event because he wouldn't go for the kill or anything like that. They were intended to be joke characters to be sure, but I think lately I've just been drifting away from dedicated joke characters like these three. I'm not unhappy with how they did this year, but they weren't much. 

I believe The Land of Milk and Honey was one of the first solidified destinations for this plot since it fed into the island setting pretty well. Just some place the Kobbers could go to that was strange, but the form of the Land of Milk and Honey changed a lot. Originally from an episode of Winnie the Pooh as well, the episode involved a group of pygmies, or rather, Pigmies, since they were all smaller versions of Piglett who worshipped him like a god. For a long time, this version of the land was going to follow that episode pretty closely. In the episode, the quest to the Land of M and H is a big focus, with all these kooky jungle creatures freaking out when the place is mentioned, and I almost included the weird monkey band the gang encounters during the adventure as an antagonist, but the earliest idea for the Land was the Kobbers would show up and get an extremely warm welcome from the Pigmies, fed milk and honey freely... only for it to be revealed the gifts were poisoned, the pigmies trying to protect their precious source. The Kobbers would fight with debuffs against a bunch of these tiny dudes but ultimtely the volcano full of the gold and white would erupt, forcing them to flee to avoid dying. Stan would want to stay or something but then go with everyone else. Then the idea changed to no eruption, but Stan would steal whatever made the Land of Milk and Honey work and run off with it, but he'd have to leave his brothers behind because the pigmies caught them or something. He'd ultimately realize he needs to go back and save them and character moment and yadda yadda yadda I'm sure you can imagine the events on that premise. However, what the Kobbers would be doing was always sort of minimalized, so I shifted the focus, trying to make this island about the discovery since others were about the island itself.

The Land of Milk and Honey lost its pigmies and became the Woozle/Heffalump homeland, and the reason I made the woozles/heffalumps a nearly extinct species was basically to make them a bit more sympathetic. Always trying to steal honey or scam people could have made Stan hard to tolerate, hence why their species has a sort of dependence on honey as well. It's more like a grifter trying to get an easy meal rather than just pulling one over for profit. Perhaps my trepidation of making the trio unlikeable is why they didn't get much play? Anyway, the focus soon became the trip to the island, with me needing to explain why no one has been to the Land of Milk and Honey before. So, it becomes closed off to all but natives and I put in some protectors. Backson was an immediate pick, the creature from the Winnie the Pooh movie a perfect fit for something that could fight but also something that is reasonable and friendly when need be. From there, picking other Pooh villains to shore up the rest of the crew was a bit more difficult. Pooh didn't have many antagonists! And some of the big memorable ones include things like: three stuffed animals who kind of look like thug versions of Pooh, Tigger, and Piglet; a gang of wild west horse people... and the guys I used! I was tempted to rope in these villains as well, but the batch I went with worked better. Took the Skull that was the focus of the older Pooh movie to serve as the gateway to L of M & H because OF COURSE I had to, brought in Crud and Smudge because a giant goop monster works as a good enemy, and to head it all, I took in Long John Cottontail, a character Rabbit said existed and was a ruthless pirate only for the ghost of that pirate to show up as an actual character. I gave them personalities and attacks more fitting for their roles, but this three-fight structure definitely felt cramped to try and conclude in time. People need to stay up longer for real yo.

Anyway, I had my battles, the premise of the event, just needed something to kick it off, so I decided to rope in Lumpy the Heffalump from the show. The first sign the race isn't going extinct and a cute enough character to rope in the Kobbers, I don't really know much about Lumpy since I haven't watched too much new Pooh, but he was a decent enough addition to the trio to give them a nice sendoff instead of a life of grifting. Stan is no doubt still prone to it, but he's got other things to focus on now with less of a constant worry of starvation hanging overhead. Heffalumps and woozles did give me a bit of a constant need to consider if a fictional species name is meant to be capitalized or not, as I've seen it done both ways, but I tried to keep it lower case and probably failed. Only other things here is the stretchiness of the heffalump/woozle race was done to A: relate to the trippy visuals from their song and B: so Stan could be a bit rough with his brothers and Wooster a bit clumsy without any actual pain being worried about.

THE REVERSE WHIRLPOOL

And here we are. The thing that really brought the plot together into one shape rather than these being disparate or even nonexistent events before hand. The Reverse Whirlpool exists as it is because it's a pretty simple idea for a landmark that is illogically weird but still sort of makes sense. It's like an upside down waterspout after all, fat at the base and tapering upwards until it ends inexplicably. Conceived as a match for Ezra's unusual nature, its purpose was messed with a few times until it became a portal to the broken world of the Logic Spirit, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Ezra himself combines like, three ideas I had into one character. First, we had me stumbling upon the unusual naming conventions of Puritans, where they'd append long Christian-related names to their children. A few of these I also shared in chat when I discovered this strange naming convention,
If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned, Has-descendants, Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes, and Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith being the kind of example I was working with. No character was coming to me to match the name save that Ezra is a very typical sounding Puritan name to match whatever the last name would be, but then two more ideas came to me. One is a character who says Sakes Alive! and similar phrases because those need more loving. The actually IMPORTANT one though was an image of a man holding a bow split in half and drawing the loose string to effectively fire an arrow. The image alone just felt so interesting to me I had to conceive of a character to match it, their path towards entering the Brawl and using broken weapons of fallen fiters all but assured... all BUT assured because it never happened due to Ezra's actual form and pseudo-invincibility :V The idea was a character who could use broken objects as if they were fully formed, his drawbacks being he was very broken himself and couldn't handle fixed things well. I put him in a Puritan upbringing just to rope in the silly name, although he soon became a devout Christian as part of it and became a religious character even though being religious put me off RPing characters like Angie from Danganronpa in the past! I realized also pretty quickly a literally broken man has a lot of room for angst and stuff... so I swerved. People who overcome adversities like disabilities and stuff don't have to be mopey, and sometimes they get through it through positivity and optimism. Ezra said it himself that his good attitude helps him overcome the trials of his weird situation, and it also makes sense a character like him would be deeply religious to try and justify his near impossible existence.

I considered for a while how such a character could exist logically. I like to have some reason characters work the way they do, but Ezra's power was pretty far-reaching and defied universal logic... so it became deliberately illogical. An abomination of reason. He works because he's not supposed to work. We'd need some way to reveal this though, so the Reverse Whirlpool became his goal and reason for being in Kuwahawi, but we'd still need someone to reveal the truth. Enter: The Logic Spirit.

I've considered working in more Spirits from JRM's group of universe patrolling specters, so this seemed like as good a reason as any to use one. Logic might not usually be the purview of a spirit, but like how Death has actually lumped in other traits like Life into his role, Logic is an amalgamation of old Spirit roles like Gravity and other universal rules that don't need such specialization. However, with the Zoofights universe in general playing willy nilly with logic, I figured such a spirit was going to have a really hard time. Sure, some of us try to make things make sense, and others just kind of do whatever, and while I didn't want to guilt anyone specifically with this concept, I thought it was cute to acknowledge this and the ramifications it could have on a being whose job it is to make sense of it all. It's implied it once looked like the other spirits and got twisted trying to internalize all the issues in logic into itself and its pocket domain, but its own flaws lead to those errors in reality leaking out. The design of the twisted Logic Spirit went through a lot of imagination, but for an original creation, I don't think I ever would have settled on a design of my own. So many weird ideas floated around that I can't even accurately describe without things like "arm like appendages emerge from the middle of the chest shape that serves as a sort of center of its disconnected body" and so on. It's talking I wanted to be really gimmicky though. Sentences presented in a random order, some in other languages, colors and other traits always changing. I didn't completely abandon this idea, but I really wanted something that didn't feel normal, even if that made it hard to understand. Unfortunately it got saddled with a lot of exposition which shouldn't have been done, but you have to be a little inexplicable at times to get across a character is inexplicable!

As with many things on this plot though, the substance of the event was hard to figure out. I considered the crew just going into the broken logicverse and barely able to function. I can't tell you how many times I imagined the opening scene where your senses are described with incompatible descriptors. From there, ideas like trying to navigate the broken world came up, escape the broken world, encounter broken characters for a fight, so on, but I decided to do puzzles! Logic puzzles! Where you need an answer on the spot for things designed to deliberately be illogical! Not the best concept, and certainly a case where my own mind was being used as the base rather than considering the other minds coming into things. I've got the kind of head that likes to find things that don't make sense and try to explain them, and even as I sat on this idea for trying to make the illogical Wonders into something that can exist for a long time, I kept coming up with new ways to make it work, some I had to feed to you all when things weren't going well. Again, too much experimentation on this plot, but I don't regret it. I wish I had done it better as always, but I think I needed my ambition reined in, and I could have certainly done worse to get that wake up call!

Things like the ultimate fate of Ezra were hard to consider. I didn't want him "fixed" and I didn't want him instantly dead after his event. I almost revealed that he was the son of the guy from the old JRM plot whose body was constantly moving forward and back in time to die and be born again and again, but the compatibility with the logic leaking explanation was suspect. OH YEAH! The Logic Spirit's final design came from an image from something called Compliens, which are like kooky out there designs for a Pokemon-like. Or, well, the ones I found interesting are the really strange ideas, it's got some normal stuff too. The similarity to Monster Collector, my own Poke-ripoff and the source of spirits, cinched that I wanted to use some of its designs for RP. Some still sit in the future folder, while the Logic Spirit is a lightly altered image of another one. Falaa is it's name there and I removed some features to make it less humanoid. Still not the totality of what I would want from a broken spirit, but it's simplicity is probably for the best.

Now then, let's move on to the end of all this...

KUAHIWI

But mainly... Bottom Dollar.

Bottom Dollar was originally King Dice. From Cuphead. It's why I claimed him and his minibosses shortly after the game came out, but I ultimately didn't use them. However, this whole plot has been about moving away from the original King Dice concept more and more until we got the guy we know as Bottom Dollar. King Dice was going to start off as pretty much the instigator of every island event, but with clear antagonistic aims. He would approach JRM chars at the low points in their personal arcs, and while some of the characters would be savvy and realize he shouldn't be trusted, he'd offer them just what they wanted. Tomi, for example, would be tricked into going to Vegas to supposedly land a deal, only for Dice to reveal he just wanted to talk to her and get her to her island for plot. King Dice might have even sent his minibosses to be the battles on these islands if they needed them. Why would he want them on the islands though? Well, for similar reasons to Bottom Dollar: the potential! King Dice wanted to make Kuahiwi into the perfect tourist destination, with all these amazing impossible places to visit. However, unlike Bottom Dollar, King Dice was interested in bigger profits than money. He wants people's souls, so what he'd do is make this amazing island and only charge a person's soul for admission. He'd gather up a bunch of contracts with people's souls and hold them hostage, threatening to destroy the contracts that would also destroy the souls due to a clause in them. This idea really began to take shape though when I moved away from King Dice and onto Bottom Dollar.

Bottom Dollar was conceived first as a Kobber villain they couldn't beat. Winning all the time, every foe being a guaranteed win... well, it does get a bit samey. I wanted to see a villain who won against the Kobbers but wasn't really all that harmful or had to be dealt with after winning. Bottom Dollar's old incarnation was antagonistic and his helping of Kobbers all towards that aim of getting More. He'd say the souls are More because they're worth more than money, or at least people are worth more, a couple million each to his estimates, and while many of the people who'd sign their souls to get on the island before the Kobbers realized the problem were going to be no-names, I would have had some characters like Cirno do it too, mainly because the idea was Bottom Dollar would be holding the contracts when we confronted him. He'd put them in his chest box where if you attacked him you'd likely kill all the people whose souls he owned and he could shred them in an instant if he felt threatened. The idea was all the Kobbers had to do was put aside their pride and say he beat them, after which he'd give up all claim on the souls and move on. He'd have a victory against them and the Kobbers would have a loss, and that's what he wanted. So much so, that the whole soul business... was one big bluff. A bluff he'd reveal immediately after by destroying the contracts right in front of them. Because not only did he want to beat the Kobbers, he wanted to show how he did it as just a normal individual. No superweapons, no powers, not even a fight. Without so much as touching the Kobbers he defeated them, and his leverage wasn't even legitimate. The soul contracts had no actual sway, he didn't have the power to enforce them like a demon, devil, or a King Dice could. They were paper and that's that. I imagine some people would want to kill him after that reveal V:

This idea would be retooled into what we got, where he is a good guy and he just wanted the claim of beating them and offered up incredible benefits for allowing him to say as much. I understand people's reasons for not liking the arrangement and saying no, but if that was me... hell yeah I'd take that offer. If I could help so many people with just words, you could get me to say a lot, especially when it's pretty much harmless to say "yes he beat us". So long as I'm not like, implicating people in a way that would get them hurt or worsen their lives, I'd always take the route that leads to tons of charity. BUT, that's me in real life, and I was more interested in the reactions of characters anyway. Unfortunately it got immediately tainted by real life reactions so it wasn't really the way for characters to weigh the value of pride or the importance of group identity or any of the interesting character angles I was hoping for, and it only further soured the taste in people's mouth for an already rickety plot. Holding the party after was meant to be an apology, but real life drama was weighing things down and reactions and... well, at least Cirno had fun with a new friend.

Bottom Dollar, as a character, was considerably softened from earlier drafts of course. Rather than pure More motivation, he became a bit better rounded. A lot of business characters go on the whole "drain it dry because I won't live to see the consequences" route real business baddies go for, but Bottom Dollar was meant to be the more logical businessman, the one who knows its better to lay out a huge longterm plan rather than jump around sucking money from as many sources like a capitalist vampire until the luck runs out. Opinion of him definitely went down at the end for his offer, and his unusual nature and me trying to let Kobbers do the work instead of him on adventures didn't help either, but I still wanted a more ally like character connecting the islands instead of one who'd be evil in the end. I also didn't want him to be a Kobber because that's the easy connection, and it seems like more characters should really go "hey, we know what Kobbers can do, let's be cautious but cooperative" Bottom Dollar trying to keep from getting close to them was part of avoiding any potential Kobbering that could come his way if they didn't like him. His design was more fun though, although I struggled with it. I wanted him to have no obvious head, so the jewel cam into play, and I wanted extra arms so he was always working on making money even when otherwise occupied. Making him a heavily altered being rather than something born this way was also meant to emphasize how far he's gone in his pursuit of More, a concept that seems more interesting than just "I like money, me want lots of it". Things like the elf shoes felt right, but the cape and other details... it's hard to weigh my desire to go hard on a character embodying their idea while trying to acknowledge character designs shouldn't go overboard on details and extra fluff. There's a piece of advice going around that you need to thin a character's visual design down as much as possible, this being why things in art like characters with pointless wings, devil horns, weird eyes, etc. feel like the mark of an amateur artist, because they're being added as an attempt to be interesting without substance to the design part.

ANYWAY, Bottom Dollar is not the island though! Things did go away from the idea Kuahiwi scooping up all the old islands and placing them on its back as it would do when it came to life in the original draft, but they still had their important parts transferred as Kuahiwi's new dream of being the perfect island. In a bit of silliness, I decided to look back at the origin of Kuwahawi's name and it came back to the Kuahiwi plant that we corrupted to make the name sound reasonable but original. Kuahiwi is also a word for mountain though in Hawaiian, so that's on reason the island got a big mountain on it, besides that being a good feature for an island in general, but it gave it an in-universe naming reasoning more importantly. Kuahiwi having the "real" name and Kuwahawi not was always going to be a joke, but the sister island concept lead to its inferiority complex and a decent enough reason for its explanation. It wanted to be the big shot island people loved, but it was passed over for the bigger and more suitable Kuwahawi. I didn't want Kuahiwi to be born from the same concepts of Dakota though, it almost being a dark reflection since both came to life to get more recognition. Kuahiwi was bad about it though, but it also didn't have the internalized thoughts of people guiding it. We see Kuahiwi's core when we fought it, and get ready for this explanation, because it's a doozy. The idea is that the core is the only truly living part of the entity known as Kuahiwi, a the rest is a normal island. However, the core is a special being, perhaps alien, that can extend its influence out to integrate matter as sort of an exoskeleton it has free movement control over. It didn't really live much before its entering of the island and association with it as its sort of host, but this "island parasite" can only really use its mental influence to control the things around it, not really move itself.

One reason the core was so shielded during the battle was because if a being had such a huge weak spot that could kill it easily and the means to defend it, certainly it would. Bottom Dollar playing the villain to trick the island is why the entry was left open instead of shored up when Kuahiwi made its plan to try and use the Logic Spirit to make itself perfect, but it still had to have a lot of defenses! Gregg was there to help, but we could have gone either route if need be, I just didn't want to break any further logic on an already illogical plot! The island fight, from the moment Kuahiwi was decided to exist, was always going to happen, the exact features changing as ideas came and went. Fighting the land isn't really something we do in RP because... I mean, why would you? Even when we're in hostile territory, things will send out enemies we can kill. I wanted the final boss of the plot to be an island that fought you AS AN ISLAND, not a chunk of land that spits out conveniently fightable babies. And so, we get things like the land, forests, and mountains making the attacks, but the capabilities of the core aren't so great it can just immediately get matter to squash everyone on it.

CONCLUSION

Apologies for this behind the scenes taking so long. It was a long time coming, and it's not even for one of my better plots! Writing for The Game Hoard has me really wrapped up and all, and I'm sure the time it's taken me to get around to finishing this made the quality suffer some.  The inevitable "how could I have forgot to put this" will occur soon enough no doubt. A lot of ideas fed into this plot's creation. I wanted to do a proper island plot before we left the island setting, but the form it would take was so in flux that I'm surprised it came together at all. I tried to continue to push what RP could be with new ideas for plot events, but a lot of it went over poorly. I tried to recreate the magic of Spectrum plot by trying to use plot events to further my characters, but it felt more rigid this time and less earned, and our plot connecting character wasn't as fun as Aviaticus to be sure. There was a lot I could have done better, and some of these could have been stronger on their own or if I wasn't chasing a gimmick. 

Still, I did enjoy them when they were working, and characters like Tomi are some of my favorite characters I've ever used. Her and Vykarius's relationship is one of my favorite things I've worked on in RP, Shimmer is one of my favorite characters as well, and Cirno's really fun to write. Things like Ezra and the heffalumps and woozles not making a big splash didn't feel like failures even though they made small splashes, but that might just be a new way of looking at my RP in general influencing that. I think I won't hang characters arcs on plots the same way anymore. Characters will still definitely get impacted by my plots and those of others, but they won't need to wait to have a big revelation or change because it needs to be done in a specific way. Unless like, the character's big revelation is like, fighting a specific bad guy because you know, that's got to be done that way by design. BUT, things like Cirno learning to be less boisterous won't need to wait their turn in line, they'll instead just latch onto reasonable moments. A bit more freeform stuff next year with characters and less focus on doing these "my whole cast is involved" type plots. Less focus on making sure every event has some crazy gimmick just because it worked well with Those Left Behind. Probably less plots where we go to be sad somewhere :V No guarantees on that one! I like to write all kinds of moods, but I did try to be more open about my upcoming plots without giving away the game.

I do appreciate feedback on the plot. I really don't mind getting some meaningful critique, and I'd like to not have a plot's ideas fail so much on the execution if possible in the future. It's meant to be enjoyable for you guys as participants, so if that's not happening, then it is failing. As I've said on other plots, if you're only writing a story for yourself and to have things go as you plan, then you can write it outside of RP. Interactive stories are made better for including the impact of others, and that includes just giving HAWT TIPS N TRIX to each other outside of the event's parameters.

Anyway, maybe I'm beating myself up here too much, so I'm gonna wrap things up and finally get this thing published! I would like to thank you all for participating and putting up with some of my weird ideas. I do keep wanting to bring interesting new things to RP and I might have an idea for a way to do that in 2020, but I don't want to go so far I fall off the map.

Time to start shifting focus away from the islands and to scifi city! ...You know, when this blogpost started, the title didn't mean the trip to this blogpost was long, it was referring to the long history that built up to this plot :P Perhaps it was appropriate it took this long to come out, and surely, my biography will say it definitely was.