Welcome to Chaos!

the music was awesome (obv) but one of the things you notice watching it live is the character choices. Oliver (the male main character and a retired "HelperBot") is robotic and very cartoony at the beginning. this is super obvious in his first song, "World Within My Room". The actor is stiff, has exaggeratted facial expressions, etc. Throughout the play, he becomes less stiff and, in the end, it's pretty clear even before (SPOILER!!!!!) Claire shows up again that Oliver has not erased his memory. The final scene is a beat-for-beat near perfect replica of one of the first scenes, except Oliver is clearly different than he was in the beginning of the musical, as is seen through his more "human" movements and his changed reaction to Claire's knocking.

the hotel scene is HILARIOUS, which you don't get just listening to the soundtrack, as the entire scene with Claire and Oliver talking to the receptionist, arriving in their room, and watching a movie is left out of the music. side note: not sure if this is universal for every showing, but Oliver being a nerd about Terminator 2 was so precious and funny, especially while Claire was singing "How to Be Not Alone". There's a part where she's singing and Oliver is watching the movie and he makes grabby hands in her direction until she hands him Hwaboon. It's so cute! (Also the "Hotel Sexx" bit was so mortifying cause my MOM was there and I had NO idea that was a thing!! agbjkasbjdbjkdasbjbjsdsbjsk)

Claire and Oliver are way more tragic and at the same time more wholesome in the musical, which is something i never would have gotten by just listening to the soundtrack

i cried the first time i heard "Maybe Happy Ending", but it's so much more bittersweet in the musical, emphasis on sweet. it's not tragic, which is what i got from some of the music. its beautiful and happy and devastatingly heart-breaking and wonderfully romantic all at the same time

Claire is dying, but she was able to go out one last time and have a wonderful time with someone she was able to find love with. Oliver was able to find closure around James and help heal the hurt Junseo, James' son, felt. Oliver was also able to find love and spend time with someone he adored. They are both dying, but Oliver has more time than Claire does and even so, he chooses to keep his memories of her, even though it will hurt him more to have her come back, possibly with no memories of him or their relationship, and fall in love with her all over again and spend the rest of her life with her, knowing he will have to say goodbye to her and spend the next two or three years alone without her

they choose to fall in love and have a wonderful time and then let go of one another to spare each other the pain of loss or falling out of love, but i also think that they both chose to keep their memories of one another? even though they both said "let's erase our memories of one another", i know Oliver kept his (it's kind of obvious; he's a shitty liar) and i think Claire kept hers, even though it is within her character to erase her memories. she might've, but i don't think she did. I think she waited for a while and decided to recreate their first meeting on purpose, hoping that, against all the odds, Oliver would have a similar reaction as he did in the beginning of the play. hoping he would open that door again, let her borrow his charger, and fall in love all over again so they could spend the rest of Claire's life in happiness

its tragic and heartbreaking but its so so sweet

first up: Goblins! what are goblins? if you asked a handful of random people, what traits would they consider the most typical of a goblin?

small, usually green, big ears, lanky limbs? frequently a large nose, sharp teeth, and yellow eyes? those are all common traits for goblins in media across the genre. here are a few sketches of easily recognizable goblins: (including one of my favorites, the goblin design of @pocketss)

(image description: three sketches of goblins. The only one directly labeled is the pocketss goblin, which is very small, has a round head and thin pointy nose, and large leaf shaped ears. it is wearing a little coat. the other two goblins are more typical of fantasy roleplay and video games, having large noses, crooked ears, and short bodies with long arms. one of them is wearing a mechanic outfit with overalls and goggles. the other is wearing a hooded rogue outfit. end description.)

these are all different from each other, but they're similar enough that you could glance at any of them and say "oh that looks like a goblin!" You've probably even seen similar goblin art from other tumblr artists, or your favorite fantasy media.

so now let's look at how I draw goblins:

(image description: a frog-like goblin standing in a cheeky pose, leaning on an invisible surface of some kind. They're nude, but have no external sexual traits. Their belly is a pale yellow while the rest of their body is light green with darker green stripes. They have a round face, yellow frog-like eyes, a small nose, long whiskers, and big bat-like ears. next to them on either side are lists of traits that are common for goblins in fantasy media, contrasted against the more unique traits of this goblin design. end description)

this is one of my fantasy people that I consider the most recognizable. They've got a lot of standard goblin traits! green skin, yellow eyes, sharp teeth, big ears, lanky limbs, and they're rather small. On the other hand, they also have several traits that make them stand out from the common depictions of goblins.

They're amphibious, they have whiskers and a frog-like vocal sac in their throat. their skin comes in different colored patterns like real life frogs. and they're also hermaphrodites in the scientific sense. my goblins don't have set biological sexes from birth. they change between laying eggs and producing sperm based on various environmental factors.

But I think it would be hard for anyone to take a glance at this design and not recognize it as a type of goblin. it strikes a pretty good ideal between the typical and the unique, in my personal and somewhat biased opinion.

Moving on from this, let's look at my depiction of gnomes. They're kind of on thin ice with that title, I don't think they're as easily recognizable. But at the same time, I'm not sure I can come up with an alternate and more fitting title. Gnomes are weird. I see them depicted in only a limited handful of ways in mainstream fantasy, and far more varied ways from independent artists. Gnomes come from a mythology where their name could have referred to several small fae things, or been easily exchanged with other small fae things and similar creatures. The most common depiction of them is probably the garden gnome, which has little in common with how gnomes are depicted as a playable race in roleplay games. but here are three ways I usually see them depicted:

(image description: three sketches of gnomes. the first gnome is labeled "dwarf lite" and resembles a short humanoid with a sturdy body, pointy ears, and a short thick beard. they are wearing a pointed cap and a durable work outfit with gloves and boots. the second gnome is labeled "mousey" and resembles a small humanoid with a hairy face, larger semi round ears, and a long skinny tail. they also appear to have small claws on their fingers and toes. they're wearing a collared shirt, vest, and simple pants. the third gnome is labeled "elf hobbit" and resembles a short humanoid with pointy ears and long hair, wearing a cloaked adventure outfit. end description.)

common gnomish traits include a larger nose, pointy ears, some form of facial hair, and a short torso with somewhat longer arms. The most common versions in mainstream media are the "dwarf lite" and "elf hobbit" versions, like no one can quite decide if gnomes should primarily be tinkerers or spell casters, and which role they're depicted with determines whether their design is more dwarf-like or elf-like. But the mousey with a tail gnomes are more common from independent artists. It reminds me of some illustrations of the Borrowers, and I do wonder if the artists had them in mind.

here's my gnome design:

(image description: a gnomish woman sitting casually and looking upwards with a smile. she has a pig-like snout and ears, as well as four-digit hooved hands and feet, and a stiff short tail. she is wearing a wrapped head scarf over her hair, an off-the-shoulder shirt, and long pants with a climbing belt. on either side of her, there are trait lists comparing the expected gnomish traits with my own different gnomish traits. end description.)

My gnomes do match the concept of being small, agile, magic using folks with a prominent nose. But mine are also not as small as typical depictions of gnomes, and I've gone the porcine route to connect them with my orcs rather than leaning into the typical dwarf lite or elf hobbit depictions. I would not expect every new viewer to see this design and say "oh, obviously that's a gnome." because the pig-like traits are very atypical for depictions of gnomes. But at the same time, they have enough in common, and gnomes are varied enough in other media, that it doesn't take too long to adjust the audience view so they accept this as a gnome. at least I hope it doesn't lol.

and finally let's look at a fantasy people design where I got too into my unique ideas and had to rename them because they just lost the most recognizable traits of the original thing.

I will admit that in middle school I was a Twilight fan and I thought the vampires in that series had a lot in common with elves, so I decided I also wanted elf vampires. Cringe, I know. But the elf-vampires kinda got away from that origin as I built up my world and characters, and I just couldn't keep calling them vampires! I had to think of a new title. But I also didn't want to work too hard at that new title, so I just took some letters out of "strigoi" and I'm going to say it shares in-story linguistic origins with the word "drow", so both of these groups were named after an old elvish term for "those who live below/ in the dirt/ at the roots". Stroi and Drow almost sound kinda similar. Close enough to claim linguistic drift, at least! So they are vampires no more, and I am quite happy with how they fit into my worldbuilding.

for comparison, here are a few typical vampire designs:

(image description: three bust portrait sketches of different vampires. First is an undead human, looking like a common human man wearing a coat, but his eyes are red and he looks very tired. second is a nosferatu, who is bald with crooked pointy ears, a sunken face, and big sharp teeth and clawed fingers. he's wearing a dark robe. third is the fantasy dracula, looking more similar to an elf with sharp teeth and red eyes, but his features are more angular and he has more facial hair than the typical elf design. he is wearing a fancy cloak. end description.)

and here's the elf-cousin stroi that just stopped being a vampire a very long time ago:

(image description: an elf-like man with curly red hair and a long tail. He is standing on his toes. His outfit consists of a simple pair of pants, a shirt with a broad neckline, and a slouchy square cardigan. on either side of him, there is a list of common vampire traits and a list of stroi traits. end description.)

vampires are typically some form of supernatural immortal being, usually undead, often having fangs and venom and special weaknesses. They usually have magical powers like shapeshifting and entrancement. They pretty much always survive on a diet of blood and nothing else and they're generally nocturnal.

when I created the stroi as vampires at the start, I designed them as blood drinking elves who came from a cursed bloodline, all descended from some revived dead warriors. In concept, this is a pretty cool idea! but as I got more and more into speculative evolution and fleshed out my world and characters and all my story ideas, I ended up changing a lot of details for these folks and eventually they just no longer resembled vampires! I don't think a single person would look at this design and think "that's a vampire". no, they're more likely thinking "that's a funny looking elf", and they're right.

my stroi are living creatures in a perfectly normal way, though they have long lifespans. Unlike the elves, they live on the ground and are primarily carnivorous, so they do have sharper teeth and they do consume blood as a result of consuming raw or less cooked meat. They are not strictly nocturnal or diurnal, taking their own shifts to be awake at different times of day, taking oddly timed naps as all carnivores do. They can use magic, like anyone in my setting, but they have no powers unique to them, and certainly no special weaknesses. They don't even have venom, unless you count normal mouth bacteria. So you see, they just don't share enough traits with vampires to justify the title. People see the word "vampire", and it gives them some very particular expectations that my stroi simply cannot fulfill. Their lore has changed too much.

and sometimes this is necessary for the creative process. coming up with a new title for your fantasy people when you realize they no longer fit their origin can be very difficult! but it's so much worse to keep clinging to that origin and trying desperately to maintain the traits that people expect to see even though it doesn't work for your project anymore. I couldn't even stick with my idea that the stroi could still be vampiric if they were brood parasites for the elves. it's another cool idea, but it doesn't fit what I'm writing at all.

Learning to let go of your old ideas and move forward with the new ones is an important skill. Maybe you really really wanted to have elves in your story, but you leaned so hard into some new traits, got invested in all of that, and months or years down the road you look back and realize your elves aren't so elf like anymore! you wanted them to be wolf-like, but you got so excited for your wolf-elves that you ended up with something else entirely. it happens! and it's okay to let go of the elves and move forward with your awesome wolf people. maybe you just have to go do some research on wolf people in mythology now and figure out if there are any other non-werewolf creatures you can take the name of and use as further inspiration to flesh out your wolf people. or maybe you'll have to come up with a whole new title from scratch.

Earliest story plan:

Self insert oc, she had winged unicorn parts and her dragon-themed sister was based on my cousin. They had a family curse of some sort, so they were orphans, and there was an antagonist winged unicorn out for generational revenge. For some reason. I think the thing was like, the winged unicorn had a sister, and that sister sacrificed herself to fuse with the first woman of this family line, because a unicorn-elf-lady was somehow necessary to the world. Something about connecting to nature and magic. It was like a fantasy superhero story. I don't remember much else about the early plot ideas, but this was the first story I seriously wanted to write in full. I didn't get very far.

The dragon sister got dropped along the way and I further developed an actual world around the unicorn girl. It was not earth, but a new planet created by magic where all the fantasy people had moved through a mass portal migration to get away from humans. There was now a whole biological caste system for the elves, because I was like 12 and I just liked color coding and categorization and I absolutely did not think about any of the deeper implications. Since i have brown hair and blue eyes, obviously I made that combination the special royal elves. Red hair with green eyes was the warrior caste. Black hair with brown eyes was like. The common folk. Or maybe the common folk were the blond ones with grey eyes. And then white hair with purple eyes were the healers. It was very stupid. There were also generic reptilian monster villains. Standard evil race stuff. I started to branch out and make other fantasy people too, but it was mostly just elves at this point.

I got a vague obligatory childhood crush on some dude I knew from church so I made an elf prince based on him and did a whole soulmates plot about it. Cringe. The real person did not have a twin but for some reason I really wanted to do an evil twin thing. So I made two elf princes and had one of them get possessed by a vague evil entity from the forest. Also around this time, I stole the elemental bending idea from Avatar and gave my elves elemental magic powers. So of course the nice prince had plant magic and the possessed evil prince had fire magic. Nice prince abandoned his crown to go study healing in the hopes of saving his brother. Somehow he also just. Randomly met the self insert unicorn girl and the moment they made contact with each other it was like a Spark and they instantly knew they were soulmates. No other relationship development. Can you tell I was going through puberty? Lol. I turned out to be aroace eventually, but those puberty hormones sure did a number on me.

These characters were my primary focus for a long time. They went on adventures. They got werewolf'd at some point. For some reason. Werewolves were never relevant again ever in any of my story ideas, just to be clear. They only existed so I could give my ocs wolf forms. I think I was reading Twilight at this point because I also developed my own elf vampire lore and made some new characters around that.

There was also a plot line where the evil elf prince was finally freed from his possession and then married his childhood friend. Sometime after this, there was a war with the reptilian people.

Other side stories I recall from this time:

- elf vampire woman having trouble with her love life and eventually finding her true love, a blond elf man who was tragically orphaned by a plague.

- origin of elf and dwarf alliance, when some elf fell down a hole in the mines and the dwarves were nice to him.

- I created merfolk and had some elf lady fall in love with one. This was also the first of my "and then they had sex but like she was asleep the whole time because ew sex who would actually want to be awake for that. I just want them to have a baby and I know babies come from having sex".

- some other elf dude was riding a horse in the rain and had a bad accident in which his leg got squished by a tree a few days before his wedding. For some reason I decided this made him infertile. Because of an infection I guess. This dude and his wife actually ended up being long term characters and I am rewriting their story as we speak XD it's a lot more exciting now than it was back then.

- another elf dude. I had a lot of these. His village was always being invaded by tiny dragons who ended up burning half his face off. He chased them down out of revenge but ended up taming them instead.

And then I went and put my unicorn girl and her elf prince back on the normal human earth. They got portal'd because ancient portals just randomly get opened sometimes. Because of their immortal eternal youth thing, being fantasy elf people, and because I was a teen at the time, I sent them to high school. No i don't have any other explanation. They were a married couple and they just got magically whooshed over to earth and for some reason they were going to high school now. They had to disguise themselves with magic. They made friends with some human teenagers. Elf prince got on the football team. And then a jealous quarterback shot him. But he was fine.

This plot obviously fizzled out and went nowhere. But I tried it again later when I gave the unicorn girl and her elf prince a son and sent him to earth too. I do not remember what he was doing there. He had a falcon as a pet.

Branching out again in my later teens:

I started to abandon the unicorn girl and elf prince at this point and turned my ideas elsewhere. I had no characters of color and I decided this was a problem. I was also digging in more on fantasy stereotypes and decided I wanted to do more than just elf characters. So this is where I came up with my first version of orcs.

Various fantasy people i had at least designed at this point:

- elves

- vampire elves

- humanoid pixies

- anthro bird people (not the same as my current bird people)

- cat people

- dwarves

- merfolk

- new lizard people who are not evil

- centaurs

- orcs

- concept of a plan for halflings and gnomes

Some stories I came up with while setting aside the unicorn girl and elf prince:

- slutty elf man who ends up with a centaur woman

- elf lady falls in love with songbird man. This is not a precursor to my current protagonist couple of a gnome and bird dude. This was also round 2 of "i want them to have babies, so they have accidental sex/sex while asleep, because I still think sex is gross and weird and this is definitely not an indication of me being queer in any way".

- orc woman and elf dude have a kismesis relationship dynamic because I was reading homestuck and I was very compelled by the concept of a hate-romance.

- superhero au where all my ocs have a superhero identity in a scifi-ish city. It actually got quite dark. For some reason their superhero secret social space was also a strip club. There was a racist elf doing serial rape and murder. This was definitely my edgy phase. I do think I had some interesting ideas with this one, but it wasn't really going anywhere lol.

My first actually on purpose characters of color:

I had done some character redesigns by this point to bring some color into my worldbuilding, and the elf caste system had been abandoned by this point. I also ditched the portal migration for a "all the fantasy people just time traveled to live in a time post-humanity" concept instead.

My first characters of color were about two dozen elves in post-humans Africa. For some reason I wanted them to be on lacrosse teams. I had never watched a lacrosse game in my life. Do not ask me why I made them all lacrosse players. I was very weirdly attached to this idea. I also gave them all small animal companions, I think I was influenced by stuff like The Golden Compass and other stories with familiars. I doubled down on elves having elemental magic too.

Somehow this also turned into my first query characters. It was very cringe, because I was like "oh being gay is like suuuuper rare and this gay elf boy is sooo scared of being gay that it gives him anxiety attacks and severe depression and he tries to kill himself". Very very bad. Terrible. So cringe. Can you tell yet that I was raised in a sheltered conservative religious home.

But one nice thing did show up in this story. All this boy's sport friends helped him recover and they set up a calendar rotation to go on platonic dates with him in public so he wouldn't feel so alone. His best friend who was a girl started dressing more masculine and they ended up together. My logic was that people should fall in love with their best friends more, because to me friendship was a very good and important thing, and I did not understand how attraction could outweigh it.

Clearly this was the logic of a girl who didn't know she was aroace and always expected her friendships with boys to turn romantic because what else is supposed to happen when you're good friends with someone of the opposite gender? But hey, the friendships were the strongest part of that story and it did open me up to making more queer characters! So yay for that! I eventually turned that girl friend character into my first trans character, so even though these characters have lost all significance to my stories, I still sometimes draw them because they were the first queer couple I made and that's kinda special.

Generational characters:

So i had this problem where I would make characters and then want them to have kids and then I would explore the kids and want to see them as adults, and then I wanted to see them fall in love and have kids....... etc.

This resulted in the prosthetic leg elf dude and his wife adopting two kids. And then the queer couple having a baby. And then the queer couple adopted a second kid after a natural disaster, and this kid was in a wheelchair.

And then those kid characters grew up and I decided that the dude in the wheelchair and the daughter of the one-legged guy would be a cute couple. And then they adopted kids too.

So now we are approaching the current day stories!! Yes, that's right. My current protagonist Morianon is one of the children adopted by that couple I just mentioned who I originally wrote as children themselves, who in turn were raised by characters I already had stories for.

Morianon was originally an elf. I ended up seriously overhauling my worldbuilding and magic system, and actually I only ditched the innate magic things like elemental bending in more recent years. I even clung to the time travel migration for a while. My gnomes and orcs have only become more porcine since I started @fantasy-anatomy-analyst

I would say the majority of my current worldbuilding ideas only happened in the last 5 years.

Morianon was a child character and then I aged him up and gave him a girlfriend and he was supposed to be a chosen hero. And then I didn't like that. And now I'm doing a totally different story with him than I originally planned for.

One of the characters from the inexplicable lacrosse teams has actually been aged down so he can be in a relationship with one of Morianon's siblings. My pixies are insects now. I had to drop the lizard people and some other ideas like kangaroo people, and a third species related to orcs and gnomes, because I just had too many people species to work with. I still kinda do, if we're being honest.

My elf vampires no longer exist and have instead been replaced with a third species called stroi, between elves and drow.

The elf who lost his leg and his wife, Morianon's adoptive grandparents, have a new story. They're now a stroi and a drow, and the drow woman was supposed to be a Matriarch but she turned out infertile and left her home to find new purpose. Which is a lot more interesting than just having some elf dude lose his leg in a storm. He loses it in a hunting accident now.

I think I'm the most proud of all the development I've done with my orcs and goblins. I didn't even have goblins for a long time! But now they're some of my favorites.

That was all a very very long ramble lol. Point is, don't give up on yourself if you feel like you've been working on the same stories for years! All these changes I've listed happened so much more gradually than I can really explain. Looking back on it makes it way more obvious just how far away I've gotten from those initial ideas.

It is so important to refine and change your ideas as you grow. Don't be afraid to say "this idea isn't working anymore". And also! Don't just abandon your old ideas! You can bring them back in a new way! You might find some gold in that childhood sandbox, you know?

And above all, if you do intend to publish a book, please actually listen to critique and take the advice and editor gives you. It’s important not to let other people cut your good ideas to pieces, but also having an outside perspective can help you find the problem spots that need to be refined. You might be too close to your ideas and forget that the readers you want to reach don't actually know anything about your story! They won't understand it by instinct. You gotta actually explain stuff and try not to use an overwhelming amount of detail at once.

I have that problem myself lol there are just a lot of characters to introduce and i find myself hurrying through them and shortening important plot details so I can finish my drafts faster. But I need to slow down and maybe just cut the story into smaller pieces so I can write it more effectively.