I will assume nothing in this. I'm literally gonna start from zero, apart from especially clear tumblr posts I've made. And I'm gonna go up to everything I have figured out but actual current story plot of the actual main character stories (partly because they're all in a bunch of little vague pieces in my mind anyway).
Obviously if you're the kind of person who doesn't want any spoilers or doesn't like to see worldbuilding explained all the way through before it's relevant, this is not for you. My about tag(s) might be a better place for you to learn about the story. But if you wanna know what's up with Stablehand and its world and/or help me on it, and don't mind background spoilers, I recommend you read it.
With that said, let's get started. ~10500 words follow.
I finally thought about it and realised today why exactly that old "PIRACY. IT'S A CRIME" ad was so grating and stupid in the eyes of not just me but alotofotherpeople. (Trigger warning for Holocaust on the last one, but it's my favourite.)
And here's the reason it's stupid: it makes an improper logical leap.
It equates copyright infringement with theft metaphorically, then equates theft with crimes literally, and ignores that distinction to make the otherwise possibly reasonable assumption that if A → B and B → C, then A → C. That is:
Piracy is (metaphorically) theft.
Theft is (literally) a crime.
Piracy is (???) a crime.
And actually, to really make the argument it's making—that because there is a law you shouldn't break it—the ad also pretty much has to add an implied fourth term that because there is a law against something it must be inherently harmful/evil, so it's more like:
Piracy is (metaphorically) theft.
Theft is (literally) a crime.
Crimes are harmful and should not be done.
Therefore piracy is harmful and should not be done.
Now let's try that same idea with different things.
The government is a (metaphorical) octopus, extending its arms into everything
Therefore the government probably operates underwater
Government. It's a deep-sea operation.
Your brain is (metaphorically) your central computer
Computers are (literally) electronic computing devices
Electronic computing devices are usually made with plastic, metal, and silicon
Therefore your brain is probably made with plastic, metal, and silicon
Brains. They're a technological wonder.
Your body, according to the bible, is (metaphorically) a temple
Temples are a type of religious building.
Religious buildings in Christianity (or at least the statelier ones) often contain stained-glass windows, spires, and/or gargoyles.
Therefore you should be asking why your body doesn't have awesome gargoyles.
Bodies without gargoyles. It's a missed opportunity.
There could well be some little nuance I'm missing here since these sound a good deal more obviously absurd than the original, but I think this is the gist of it.
Recently I've been thinking about the fact that no matter how hard I try to call Yanha "it" and "they", I keep accidentally thinking of them as "he" for some reason. On one hand, it felt wrong because nothing about them is really all that "male", but on the other hand, I just couldn't stop myself, and I thought that was really weird. I wondered if it was just the fact that as a human, I was just too used to everything being forced into the categories of "male" and "female" or what.
Then recently, when I was kind of messing around trying to think of new MB ideas, I realised that in my task of trying to create an MB that looked like each of the attribute logos, one I hadn't gotten to was Esteem, so I tried to think of what would look like the Esteem logo. A hexart, duh. But it has to be surrounded by flame, I thought, so maybe it's a phoenix. Actually maybe it's a firebreathing phoenix-dragon-unicorn that's 'maaaaaaaagical'. A Flaredrakeicorn. Haha, that's such a ridiculous idea, why don't I go ahead and do it. (The thing is, I'd already had the idea that in-universe, people would still imagine fire-breathing dragons, flaming and/or reborn phoenixes, and magic unicorns even though none of those specific things exist, and I realised it would actually be pretty funny if there was a thing that had all those qualities but it was just one really incredible creature.)
Then, unexpectedly, after deciding Arkturuse would probably ride one of these things around since it would probably be a fairly flamboyant and majestic creature, and realising that by accidentally calling that creature "Sir Flaredrakeicorn" I'd kinda made an accidental Adventure Time parody, I made the odd realisation that once again, I was thinking of an MB as male even though nothing about it was male (other than the bright colours technically I guess :p) so I really had no reason to.
Eventually I started to think about MBs and gender a bit more, and realised that oddly, some of them I thought of as being gendered and some of them I didn't, and some of them were in an odd middle ground where I thought of them as being sorta-gendered, but only in the most abstract way, like "Sir Flaredrakeicorn".
So, eventually I came up with this gender system for MBs:
Male
Female
Other
None
"Cis"
---
---
---
None
Zeta
Xai
Zed
Neutral Zeta
---
"Trans"
Male
Female
---
---
Basically, every MB starts out as "None". That is, no gender at all. But from there, depending, they may end up identifying as something else.
"Trans" genders, that is, male or female, are extremely rare because most MBs would have an extremely hard time wrapping their minds around what "male" or "female" even meant even if somebody tried really hard to explain it to them; it's just not a concept they have in their conceptual vocabulary. However, a very, very select few (like, five of them or so period :p) have managed to sort of more or less get it. (Vergozsya in particular actually identifying as female is actually pretty important for the story.)
For most MBs, the more likely option is Zeta genders. Zeta genders are more abstract; they don't really have specific definitions the same way male and female do, though there are still distinctions between them.
Zed, a lot like my own gender, means "sorta female but not really". (Zeta genders take their name from Zed, obviously, as it was the first one I came up with.) Zed creatures tend to be formidable and threatening, not to be messed with, but also reflective and curious, and above all, mysterious. For a long time I'd thought of Observers as often being basically this gender. I don't know if this will make any sense but they could be said to be "dark", kinda like a yin/yang thing.
Xai (pronounced "kai" like the Greek letter, though leaning a teeny bit toward "ksai") is the opposite of Zed, meaning "sorta male but not really". For a long time I'd felt like there had to be a "male" opposite to my own gender, so... this is my name for it now. Ssiassi is Gender Xai, as is Xera Flaredrakeicorn (Xera is the Xai version of Sir :p). Xai is sort of... open and candid. Xai creatures can be strong but they don't really radiate strength and threat the same way Zed ones do. Instead what they radiate is more like... maturity, or dignity. Calmness? Restraint? Purity? Something like that; they're like, deferentially cultured, a very teeny bit like Esteem but not really prideful or confident in the same way. They're oddly suited to being exemplars though they also tend to be like but why do I deserve this, I'm not all that special. Alternatively, they could be more like Ssiassi and be oddly friendly in a kind of "bro"-like way, sort of treating everybody as worthy equals and messing around like there are no rules. Anyway, if Zed is "dark", Xai is "light".
(I feel like both of those definitions were pretty incomplete and perhaps a bit skewed as far as describing the genders Zed and Xai as a whole, because given that this is kinda new stuff I was basically just describing specific examples of each: The Ingenious for Zed, and Xera Flaredrakeicorn plus this big cat thing I'm tentatively calling "Commander" for Xai. But, that's the best I can do right now.)
Neutral Zeta is a more nebulous Zeta. Basically, something that's Neutral Zeta is not genderless, but can't be pinned down as male, female, Zed, or Xai. It has personality in a way that suggests it has a gender, but... it just doesn't fit anything. I'm tentatively thinking Xzhyrxiel (the angel thing of Faith) will be Neutral Zeta. In a way I guess it's pretty close to nonbinary in meaning though I feel like it's much more narrow, as "nonbinary" could include things like Zed and Xai but Neutral Zeta doesn't. Also, Ssivyin is nonbinary but not Neutral Zeta, and kinda leans toward Xai but isn't necessarily quite Xai either. (I'm not really sure what Ssivyin is honestly... gender-mixandmatch with Xai as the base piece and other gender-lego-pieces fittable to it as needed? That's as close as I can come to describing it. :p)
I might end up adding other Zeta genders to the canon later, given that with more abstract standards to them there could potentially be any number of them. A power of two would be good given that almost everything about Stablehand is about powers of two, but as this isn't something that's super necessary I won't really be rushing to come up with new Zeta genders the way I did with more central things like attributes, attitudes, and attunements.
Well, this is the Shikunbao. Like I said, my brain literally just kind of synaesthetically pulled it out of this song—as my handwritten note on the page just a little bit sloppily describes, "the song conjured up this exact body plan in my mind".
Shortly after "designing" it, I decided—again kind of subconsciously—that it would make the most sense as a mountain animal in an area either in or around Hinotoria because of its snow leopard-like spots. So, I thought about it a bit and decided that since a lot of Chinese names for animals are kind of just randomish but descriptive phrases, this thing would be called the "rock fist leopard", or Shiqianbao. In Hinotorian syllables that translated to Shjkjwnbaw, or Shikunbao. So... that's where its name comes from.
I also later got this idea that the Shikunbao would be somewhat self-aware and since the Hinotorians are associated with Unity, they would have somehow made some kind of agreement with them such that the Shikunbao are really willing to help them out, especially when they need to get through their rough, rocky habitat (but are still just about as cold and hostile as they were before to everybody else). I figured, Unity is a weird attribute and it needs some kind of wacky perks that go with it. Like having freaky yetimonsters at your command. :p
Of course, it's not really the same thing at all by now. Here's a brief overview of how it's changed over time.
Tenkai started life as something called "Aeromon". In the very, very, very beginning, it was a very thinly-veiled Pokémon imitator, that I believe was essentially born out of me creating what were basically "fakémon" but wanting to assign attributes to them that I knew Pokémon never had canonically.
In particular there was a creature called the "Crysterius" (crystal + mysterious :p) which was essentially a Starmie clone, but with waaaaay more arms to the point of being more of a spiky ball than a starfish and made out of translucent crystal. It had the ability to absorb things into it that then just kind of... floated around in stasis inside I think? But somehow it actually gained power from that, even though it wasn't digesting them. It was like... the more matter was inside it the more powerful it was, and it was kind of a portal to its own little pocket of space where all the things it sucked up lived.
Crysterius as a "fakémon", in a glorious RBY-style dex entry too. (Also, click it for a handful more fakémon/weird fakémonish things I made at that time.)An attempt to revamp Crysterius as a more "original" creature named Giosway. This was supposed to be from a Japanese word but I can't find the actual etymology again for the life of me. I think it may have come from a misreading of 玉瑛 (gyokuei) as gyosuei.
Crysterius was probably my most interesting fakémon, and I kind of started to form its own plot around it, where Crysterii were floating all around the world absorbing things into their cores with tractor beams, up to and including trees. I'm not sure, but I think this in particular was the thing that inspired me to split my creature creation from Pokémon into Aeromon in the first place, just because this scenario would create a totally different kind of world from the Pokémon world. So, I had that plot thing. I figured out that if Crysterius cores were good for storing stuff, maybe they'd be a good alternative to a Poké Ball (I might say Monster Ball, but that was before I actually watched Japanese Pokémon, so, yeah), possibly even better because the full cores at least could store so much more. I even made up this neat little intro gif for if Aeromon were actually some sort of gameboy game or... something like that, which you can see below.
The intro to Aeromon, "Ice Version". I was able to find the frames again but had to recreate the last part with the fade out and the title appearing, which is why it looks so... actually decent. XD
So what happened after that?
I just kind of forgot about the Crysterii and their little plot as I was expanding my creature roster. Don't ask me what happened there! In retrospect I think I didn't realise back then how awesome and weird an idea they actually were.
But anyway, I tried to develop the story. Not unlike I've seen some of my own friends of ages close to what I was then do today, I quickly decided I'd never be awesome enough to build anything as complicated as a game, or even as skill-requiring as a visual-type story for this (or at least not gather either of those skills quickly enough to be able to do either of those things before I scrapped the project), so I broke out the good old word processor and tried to novelise it. I think that was something of a bad decision, honestly; everything about the story was really rather visual, and a purely text format kind of took away what was cool about it, leaving only excessive thesaurus use and cringeworthy weeaboo-isms behind. I think I'm just generally really, really bad with text stories as a medium, to tell the truth, as it's oddly tiring for me to read them even though I can get through chapters upon chapters of dry biology and physics textbooks with great enthusiasm, and I've practically never gotten anywhere writing them either. Visual stories may take effort to progress, but in some ways that's kind of a quality filter for me, as it doesn't allow me to just let endless streams of substance-less words flow out of my fingers without a reality check as to whether I'll end up deleting them all later when I realise they're crap and don't convey the story I wanted to tell at all, and be back at square one. Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that text stories are not easier than visual stories, despite what you might be led to think, and thinking that will just make writing harder for you.
Anyway. By the time "Aeromon" had gotten to its novel phase, I'd realised the name Aeromon was already a Digimon name, and even though I didn't know anything about copyright at all at that age, I already knew more than enough to not want to deal with IP collision bullshit, so I changed the name to Adventures of Kurei (which amusingly enough abbreviated to AoK, and I joked that, well, now its name was AoK :p). It's interesting to note that ironically, in trying to pick a more "original" name, I literally just picked the name of some random Japanese-tutorial guy I was reading a page by (Clay/'Kurei') as the name for my protagonist, while Aeromon had been something I actually came up with off the top of my head. (Wait... no, actually, the protagonist wasn't actually named that. I just picked that for the title because it sounded a little bit like his actual name, but 'in Japanese'; I'm not sure I ever had any plans for anybody to call him that, to be honest. It's sometimes hard to explain the choices I made in trying to put together stories 7-9 years after the fact.)
A title image for AoK, showing "Protagon", the head of the "good faction", or something like that. There was also an Antagon but I never drew him, and I'm not sure I even figured out how to work either of the two into the story itself either. My plotting was a mess.
In a short while, AoK began to evolve into a sort of monster notebook project. Now, I mean that very literally—there was literally a physical notebook that I think even had a table of contents, which I was literally creating entries for various creatures in. It was overall a little bit like what I'm doing with Stablehand/Tenkai, though a lot less intentionally planned that way: instead of the monsters really being specifically designed to fit into both stories or either of the stories being designed around the monsters I was honestly just kind of creating them and sending them off into limbo not really knowing or thinking about where they were supposed to go. :p
Now, compared with what I'm creating now, the creatures in this notebook were really a little plain. Many of them were just "take a creature out of mythology/regular animal and add a weird add-on, particularly an element or single new body part, that then becomes the theme". In this category were "Wulfangs", which was literally just a wolf pup with visible protruding fangs that then became one of two unicorn wolves and then some random oddly-Halloweenish designs (these guys were kind of the "let's see how many weird but yet obvious puns I can get away with" line to be honest: Wulfangs, Wulfantom, Wulfury, Wulfantasy... Wulfuego-hielo because I was obsessed with foreign dictionaries :p); a thing named for the Acropolis that was literally just one face of a Greek building with two pillars as legs because I had to have an example of a "Cement-type" creature (this came from me dreaming that my randomly-anthro Pidgeotto's status incorrectly claimed he was Cement-type); and Javuu, basically a hippogriff but with improved Ditto powers because I needed a name for it and Javuu from déjà vu was the first thing that came to mind. A small handful of others, maybe 2 or 3, were essentially Pokémon ripoffs that were supposed to be alternate evolutions but of course since the actual Pokémon were not going to be in it they had to be distinct to make sense; one was named Far-Flung and was able to wield "Psy powers", whatever that meant (one thing I do know is that "by the way, Psy is not the same as Psychic", as my somewhat underline-happy teenage self so helpfully pointed out for a friend :p). Others, like Blizzarisk and its other elemental forms, were halfway between these two categories, and yet others like Pythoria had almost no visible difference from real animals save possibly no real species of that particular type of animal having that specific colouration.
Blizzarisk is a pretty good place to pause for a moment, actually, because it shows one of the major things I was trying to develop for AoK. I think at that stage my favourite Pokémon ever was Eevee. I LOVED Eevee and the fact it had so many different evolutions, and just like everyone else, I made and tried to draw my own Eevees to fill in the gaps and everything. I was so obsessed with Eevee and its different type specialisations that I wanted to literally turn everything into Eevee. EVERYTHING.
My old evolution chart for the Basilisk, screwed-up RTF text layout and all. I believe Hebikurai and "REGALISK" were supposed to go with King Cobra.Another good illustration of my love of Eevee.
There were exceptions, of course: some creatures like Wulfangs obviously were not subject to the Eevee treatment. Wulfangs I think either came from just being unsatisfied with Pokémon having only three stages, or wanting to emulate the evolution system in Telefang, where a small handful of Denjuu had like seven different stages split across different branches of a tree. There were a handful of things where I was trying really hard to give them different branches and "mod evos" the Telefang way even before I really knew how Telefang worked beyond what I'd read on Racieb's pages.
I was also trying really hard to make the rock-paper-scissors part of my elemental system be complicated and nuanced but I don't think I even had any idea what I was doing there because I didn't get very far on that.
Now, this kept sliding along chaotically until, guess what, I actually started learning to program and sprite! And then, for some reason, I had to start from scratch, because my AoK stuff just wasn't good enough or something. I think it may have been that I was planning to integrate a bunch of the AoK monsters back in later, but I just wanted to get my game working and establish its style and rules first.
In this stage of things, I had an almost completely different approach from what I'd been doing before. For one thing, it was now more based on Monster Farm than Pokémon and random fantasy stuff. For another, I had by that point entered one of the most gigantic weeaboo phases imaginable. A weeaboo phase so big, it was the size of Gojira, and not Godzilla. Everything had to be named in Japanese. Everything. And everything had to be inspired at least loosely by Japanese myth/tradition, if only actually related by name.
Accordingly, I called this new version of the project Tenkai. (This name was a combination of the kanji for heaven/sky (天) and monster (怪), that I then discovered sounded just like tenkai (天界), a word for heaven/paradise, so it was actually kind of a neat pun. I've stuck with that name because I still like it.)
Sprites for Tenkai, the Gojira-sized weaboo edition.
In general, in Tenkai, the monsters were somewhat more pet-like than in AoK in that hunger, health, lifespan, and damage as distinct from fatigue were all things, and you could train them to do things like perform better at different statistics and learn new techniques by combining techniques they already had. A major part of the game as I remember was going to be just trying to figure out all the different things you could do with each one and make it learn and make it become. (In a couple ways, my current version of Tenkai is probably going to very much derive from the way Gojiraboo Tenkai was going to be structured, given that really, that central idea of potential and different ways to unlock it is kind of like the premise of Stablehand, and an idea I really like in general.)
It's also interesting to note that this version of Tenkai, much like AoK before it, also had variants, but instead of elemental variants they were regional, much like in Monster Farm 3. Each one was like a breed the region was known for, and I was planning a system where you could breed monsters to get other variants that were sometimes combinations of existing breeds but other times "secret" creatures. I think I could have made that much cooler if it'd occurred to me to actually learn something about genetics and patterns of inheritance and separated this out into specific traits, rather than just mashing up appearances. :p
So, after that, about three years ago and one year after I let that version of Tenkai slide into the never-going-to-be-finished pile (six years, I think, since Aeromon began), I came back and rebooted Tenkai yet again, seeking to have more unusual and less overtly Japanesey stuff, and that's where Stähe (Stähe was actually revamped from the Aeromon stage), Kuryne (sort of a revamp of the dogs from the weaboo stage), Ajan, and similar guys came in. This time I was going to take yet another a new approach to variants, by focusing on habitat types and theming mons and their abilities around their habitat type, with the variants being themed around other habitat types. A major focus of this stage was making mons "realistic"—by this I didn't really mean "exactly like real animals" or even "immediately plausible in the real world" as much as just, you should be able to draw/model them in a completely photorealistic way, consistent with other animals, and no part of them should be so cartoon-stylised you can't figure out how it would "really" look. Accordingly, Stähe for instance lost its featherhands and got bulky pawhands instead.
Habitat type symbols, or as I called them, "attribute globes".Stähe, before and after.
Now, nine years after Aeromon began, I'm rebooting Tenkai one more time, this time as a libre monsterpet game. As I've already described, it will likely be a spinoff of Stablehand, featuring things like hexarts, leijonœrns, and the elusive "Heavenscratch" (a cœlailurus basically, except real), along with some new creatures designed specifically to be unusual and slightly unearthly, such as the Sonata snake. The variant thing is still alive, but I'm thinking of doing it mainly as different Stablehand attributes rather than elements or habitats, and having the monsters actually able to freely shift between the different attribute-forms; habitat types miiiiight maybe come into play too though, I don't know.
Anyway, stay tuned for more updates on "Heavenscratch Beastquest Tenkai", literally nine years in the making.
So, I tried out Epic Pets recently, and I was pleasantly surprised with it. I loved the designs for the lightning cat and the later forms of the earth (?) jackaldog, as well as the textures and interface.
Then I suddenly got an idea. What if when I revisit Tenkai—my old, kind of vague monstergame idea—I make it a libre monsterpet game? I'm not sure what licence I'd use, but definitely NOT anything more restrictive than the CC-BY-SA or the GPL.
Do you know what that would mean?
It would mean something that's like Pokémon or Monster Farm, or indeed, Epic Pets, but which you could freely use the mons from in ANYTHING (anything), even commercially, as long as you were comfortable releasing it under the same licence as Tenkai. And you wouldn't even have to label your fanmons "fan art" when posting on deviantART or something, unless you wanted to, of course. We're talking open source culture here.
No more risk of takedowns. No more "well it's technically illegal" or "well they haven't come after us yet so we don't know" or "well it's a grey area..." bullshit. Everything. You. Made. Would. Be. Lawful. Period.
Currently I'm toying with various concepts for how to make the game interesting and different, because even though it's kind of supposed to be a "libre alternative to existing things", I still don't want it to just be more of the same. One thing I'm experimenting with is the idea of giving each creature a completely different kind of control system. For instance, among the creatures I have concepted up so far, the "Sonata Snake" would be controlled by playing notes with the keyboard, and maybe, like, depending on what the other monster was doing in battle it would give you a note and you have to play a particular chord to evade, or another one to block, or another one to grab it and constrict it. And if you played particular sequences of notes/chords or something, you might be able to do awesome combos. Another, the "Cutlark" (I'm not sure whether I like that name or not) might rely on using quick reflexes and careful timing to slash and evade with the cursor. I've always kind of liked monsterpet games, but at the same time often felt like they're too much about luck and monotonously spamming the same attack. And at the same time, recently I've really gotten into games like Robot Unicorn Attack and the Flappy Bird imitators (I guess you might call those arcade games?) and I kind of like their fluid, continuous pacing, and how simple and intuitive the controls feel. I feel like if I could combine those two experiences (cool monsters in an interesting world and a fluid and intuitive, relaxing yet challenging control interface) it would be a really interesting game.
Rough concepts for Cutlark, Sonata snake, and the logo.
Initially I wanted to make the new Tenkai a Stablehand spinoff and give each of the monsterpets the ability to "archetype" to any attribute at any time, with their abilities and strategy changing a little, but... I don't know about the status of that now. I think it would go a long way toward making the game more interesting, giving each individual monsterpet more individual character (I may not have mentioned this before, but in Stablehand, I see each character as being more able to use each attribute as they get "better" at it, with each person's ability to get "better" at each attribute different, and that would come into play in Tenkai too), and making especially multiplayer type things potentially more unpredictable and interesting. On the other hand, though, I'm not sure how well Stablehand attributes and the kind of creatures I'm actually creating for the new Tenkai would play together. The stuff I created for the "old" Tenkai definitely seems like it would fit though, and there's a good chance I'll recycle it back in, so... I'm not sure this isn't going to happen either.
(Another thing I thought about for a brief moment, if Tenkai does turn out to be some kind of Stablehand spinoff, is mystery beings as monster companions. It would be kind of weird because they're sentient and can even talk, albeit in their own language, but then again... I guess that didn't really stop Digimon.)
So... yeah. Those are my plans for Tenkai right now. It will probably take a lot of time for them to really materialise into anything, but I thought I should share them with you.
