Try it again... What anime would YOU write?

[AEtherryan]

Thank you for your thoughts of my post Rorschach , I for one would like to say goo job to both of you on going back and forth exploring that one story.

Think on this also, What make a good story?

For me it is Growth in any way you may see it , rather it be of charicters thru conflict or the exploration of a concept, and if you happen to teach something in the process than awesome. Thought provoking and heart string tugging plus humor not ot mention angering the recipient of a story are grand ways of engraing a story into someones heart forever.

if a story can do that than it is worth all the sacrfice needed to make it coem to exhistance!

[OmniStrata]

http://www.geocities.com/lord10chi/equi ... cover.html

Well, genre: Action, Romance, Martial Arts, Vampire, Fantasy, Epic.

I'd post some description here but though this prologue is God knows how old, I'm very stupidly lazy but the story is still there inside mah head.

[OmniStrata]

HOLY SHIT, I didn't realize that not only is my prologue there, the character profiles along with some REALLY UGLY old art of mine is there as well!!!

daymn...

[Rorschach]

Think on this also, What make a good story?

For me it is Growth in any way you may see it , rather it be of characters thru conflict or the exploration of a concept, and if you happen to teach something in the process than awesome. Thought provoking and heart string tugging plus humor not to mention angering the recipient of a story are grand ways of engraving a story into someones heart forever.

if a story can do that than it is worth all the sacrifice needed to make it come into existence!

Well, I usually work by Orson Scott Card's MICE analysis: Millieu, Idea, Character, Event. A lot of stories have several elements of each, but one element usually dominates the others.

A millieu story is a story which generally shows us around a place, a sort of travel guide. Learning something about the characters is nice, but not essential to the story. In Gulliver's Travels, for example, we don't need to know all that much about Gulliver himself. The point is to have a look at all of the strange places he goes, and compare them to modern society. Pure millieu stories aren't all that common, but a lot of stories do spend time exploring the strange worlds the author has built.

An idea story is usually one in which an idea is explored and promoted. Quite often fables and stories with some moral point are idea stories: stories that "anger the recipient" as you put it tend to fall into this category. For example, when the prophet Nathan told King David a story about a rich man robbing a poor man of his pet lamb in the Bible, that was an idea story. The idea was to show David that if he could condemn the man in the story and swear bloody vengeance on him, he would have to be condemned too for stealing another man's wife, and God had every reason to take bloody vengeance on him. Other idea stories deal with scientific discoveries and suprise endings. A lot of good jokes are essentially idea stories, too.

Character stories are the ones that involve the most focus on the characters themselves. Though these stories may have elements of the other kinds of stories in them, the characters are the driving force, striving to grow or to change themselves in some way. Onegai Teacher is one such story, as Kei and Mizuho struggle to make their marriage work and Kei struggles to get over his "teitai" condition that quite literally keeps him from changing and growing. By the end, the characters are not the same as they were.

Character stories do not always have to be filled with fantastic devices and impossible events to be great stories. Hana Yori Dango is another character story involving nothing more fantastic than High School romances. (How astoundingly rich the four boys in the "Flowery Four" really are--having their own private thousand-passenger yachts, for example--may be somewhat fantastic too, although it occurs to me that if any of the worlds' richest people do have children, those children probably do flock together somewhere.) By the end, none of the characters in it are quite the same as they were at the beginning.

Event stories are stories in which something is out of place in the world, and needs to be fixed. In event stories, the characters can be as complex and emotional as anyone likes, but they are not what's driving the story. What's driving the story is the question of whether the world is going to restore itself to the order that once existed, establish a new orderly situation of some kind, or degenerate into chaos.

A lot of the Cowboy Bebop stories are event stories. To be sure, learning something about the characters' backgrounds is nice, but it's not essential to the story. Faye Valentine's heart-wrenching past is gripping material, but we don't have to see that to know what kind of woman she is, for this is established within moments of her introduction: she's a hard-bitten woman who uses any and every advantage she has to achieve her goals.

At the end of most Cowboy Bebop stories, the characters are exactly the same as they were, but some semblance of order has been restored in the world around them where it had gotten bent out of shape. This is how the Cowboy Bebop movie was able to fit right in with the episodes even though the series had already ended: up to the last two episodes, none of the characters had really changed at all.

Omnistrata, from reading what I could of your story and the character profiles, your story sounds like it might be very interesting, but I think you're trying to do too much all at once. You start in the middle of a war and thrust a dozen names at me, and I'm sitting here wondering what's going on and why I should care about any of what's happening. If you want to do an epic story, learn from the old masters: the Illiad doesn't start in the middle of the Trojan War, but with the private (soon to be made very public) wrath of Achilles. Your best bet is to start from one or two characters this way and open out into the wide world of their society, the way all good epics do.

Even if this is an event story and the first really significant thing that happens to your characters is the war, it's still best to tell the story from just one point of view at the start. I recall a story that begins in the trenches in World War I this way, working from one soldier who's been having weird dreams, and his personal miseries and dealings with fellow soldiers in his squad. That story went on to be a character story, but even if your story is about the heroic actions of a whole team that helps change the entire course of a war, it's best to introduce that team one character at a time. Those profiles are good notes for yourself, but the story should do the actual introducing.

Don't begin with any historical prologue, either: the time to read Tolkien's collection of histories of Middle Earth in the Silmarillion is always after you've read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, not before. Once you've established why we should care about what happens to the characters, we'll gladly read fictional histories of them that would bore new readers to tears, but not before then. If the story is about events, begin with the events that establish the unchanging personalities of your characters. If it is about the characters, begin with their private struggles, their hopes and fears, and how they hope to change their own lives through participating in this war.

In other words, you're beginning in the middle of the story; back up!

[AEtherryan]

thanx Rorschach for showing me Mr. Card's M.I.C.E. method i never knew of it . that will help me anylize everthing better (something i highly enjoy). You know it would be nice to see some of Orsons work put into anime form. I personaly would like to see A Planet Called Treason ( a messiah type story ) . oh and al thought this is slightly off topic. i bieng the same religion as Mr. Card see where other wouldn't, unless you know our doctrine very well, lots of thing from it in all of his stories in fact A Planet Called Treason gave me an insight to the experience that Chist 's life must have been like . so in anime the stories i often enjoy are ones like in Chobits where i see that Hideki and i are pretty much the exact same personaity type and seeing him in diferent situation that ive not quite been in gives me insight to my self . to sum my post up i would like to write an anime based on people i know in very different circumstances.

[Rorschach]

Well, he's in not in anime yet, but I notice on http://www.hatrack.com that Orson Scott Card has just written the script for a Marvel comic book. Who knows what he might try next? I can't say as how I agree with his Mormonism, but there's no question that he's a top-flight writer. I got into reading his works through the Ender's Game series. (You'll notice that the site indicates he's bringing out another book in his related Ender's Shadow series this March.)