Stablehand, in brief, is a story about destiny, identity, and choice, as well as puns, randomosity, and generally trying to break out of the rut I've gotten myself into as an artist by only trying to do "serious" things.
It'll be told as a kind of combination gamebook/webcomic, a little like both the famous Homestuck and the videogames Myst and Riven in format (probably more similar to those latter two though). Basically, the world will just be kind of open for you to explore and make decisions in as each of the many characters, and the story will just kind of unfold as you do. Each character's story will intertwine with all the others', sometimes in strange and unexpected ways, and you'll have to be careful and try to see the big picture in order to get a good ending.
But the good news is this: there won't necessarily be just one "right" way to solve any given problem, or one "right" ending! Part of the theme of this story is that everything has a lot of different facets, good and bad. Endings. Countries. People. Decisions.
And at times, all of them can surprise you.
The World
My goal with Stablehand is to create a world that is very relatable but at the same time very strange. I loved Myst and Riven and the way their worlds felt so complete and yet so deeply mysterious at the same time, and I want to do a similar thing, but in a less... unpopulated setting, with more life to it.
Part of the way I'm doing that is to create a world that, basically, no average Joe or Joan living in it really understands. It's a world with dragons and griffins and unicorns, but where almost everything is explainable by science. Except, of course, these weird freak occurrences that keep cropping up that completely evade any rational explanation; as a result, nobody can say for certain whether magical or paranormal things exist or not. Pretty much every current or historical event has at least three different stories of what happened associated with it, and politics, too, are incredibly mysterious and confusing for most people. But I guess that last part's pretty much just like real life, isn't it?
The Characters
I'm leery of comparing Stablehand to Homestuck, because they really aren't the same kind of thing at all, but there was one thing about it that I can confess is influencing Stablehand: the way it constructed its characters. Each character had a distinct colour, symbol, group of interests, and overall style that created a distinct "theme" all their own, topped off by two characteristics called a "Class" (like RPG character classes) and an "Aspect" (like RPG elements/types of magic). This interacted with the game they were playing and their overall situation to give them a kind of "mythology" to grow within, and to further define themselves as Heroes.
I'm doing a similar thing with Stablehand, except it's more flexible. Like what I just described, each character has a colour, symbol, and backstory, but additionally, each character can have any balance of eighteen Destiny Attributes that defines who they are, which unlike the "Classpects" above can change! Though a given character might be given hints as to what people think they are or want them to be, in the end they must decide for themselves who they really are. If anything, I guess that's the message I want this story to send.
The Cleverbad
One more thing I'm trying to do with this story is test out a sort of "new story-building method", which I like to call "the Cleverbad". Basically, what I do is use Bad Translator to produce really weird quotes, like these (usually I put in random lines from Cleverbot or WikiAnswers questions to start with, hence the name), and then if they fit my story I make interpretations and use them to expand my worldbuilding. You can probably see how this would help me create a really weird world immediately, but there's also another reason why I'm using it: it was actually what inspired me to start this whole project.
Yes, really. Every time Bad Translator churned out a weird quote, I always felt like there was some kind of bizarre story encapsulated in it that I was just a hair away from understanding, and I really wanted to see that idea turn into an actual, comprehensible story of some kind. So... you can kind of think of Stablehand as the story of Bad Translator if you want to. It's turned into a lot more than that already, but that was my inspiration.
A truly free series
Yup! Stablehand itself will be presented to you free of charge, like many internet creations these days.
But it's also "free" to you in another extremely important way you don't see nearly as often: you can re-use stuff out of it for practically anything. Because my Stablehand stuff is under the CC-BY-SA, you have full permission to use it for whatever if you meet two conditions: I get attribution and if you make it into something new, you licence that under the same licence. And if you can't do that, you can still use it under fair use.
Pretty much no other fictional work out there right now is like this! If you decide to make a fanwork for pretty much anything else, quite simply, you risk censorship. Comment on a movie? Takedown. Edit a small piece of a TV episode? Takedown. Put up a review or "let's play" for the wrong game? Takedown. Try to write the next Sherlock Holmes (a series mostly in the public domain)? The estate is flailing at the idea. The sad truth is, even though sharing clips and edits and fanworks is increasingly becoming a greater part of our culture, none of our existing works are really designed for it! Some like the MLP:FiM team have taken a step in the right direction by letting fanworks live, but I don't think that's enough. In order to really stop all this madness—censorship, hostility, "stealing", underground doujinshi—I think we have to embrace a new kind of media.
Media to liberate. Media to inspire. Media designed to be "stolen" from.
I know just putting this licence on my work isn't going to cure the larger problem by itself, and I don't even have any idea if you'll ever want to use my work in this way. But, my hope is that if I do this, maybe one day other creators will start to realise how this could improve the world and choose similar licences. Maybe one day, we can have a creative world where the motto is no longer "don't steal it's mine!" but instead "here I made you a thing, see what you can do with it".