My Writing History, Part 2

It was around late 2000/early 2001 when I started thinking up potential stories to occur in Aloutia. This was around the time I was watching Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, and Digimon, some of the first shows I watched with actual and evil villains whose storylines spanned multiple episodes. The first villain I created was a blatant rip-off of the Digimon Emperor from Digimon season 2. They even looked the same *sigh*. I actually remember the night I created him quite well, because he appeared to me in a dream that I woke up from and spent the rest of the night developing. It resulted in me getting NO sleep that night, but thankfully my grandma let me stay home from school the next morning.

In my dream, the villain was the Aloutian Emperor, a boy with no name. He was a petty, vicious brat who held absolute control of his realm and was an unbearable tyrant. He had three servants: Kielle, Kailsey, and Grulley. I created those three as well, that same night. Curiously, their names had been part of the dream, though I had to figure out how to spell them. Kielle had once just been Kyle, then Kiel, though I settled on Kielle once I realized Kiel was an actual name and it wasn’t pronounced the way I was pronouncing it. Kailsey became Cailsey after I worldbuilt a *thing* where only certain people (Dragons and Centaurs) could have K-names (Kielle is a Dragon, btw). Grulley changed entirely because I hated that name. He was originally a winged man, but I turned him into a shapeshifter named Mira. The name ‘Mira’ was meant to be a hefty pun, though some of it is a stretch now. First, it was supposed to sound like the word ‘mirror,’ at least based on how my family and I pronounced ‘mirror.’ She could transform into an exact copy of a person, so she was essentially their mirror. Secondly, her ‘true name’ was Kaimira, which was how kid-me pronounced Chimera. I was really into mythology at the time, and Digimon had just had an episode with a Kimeramon, so… again, I was influenced by what I was watching at the time, lol. Thirdly, I was also really into astronomy, at least at a kid-level. I liked learning the stories about constellations, learning the names of stars, and learning more about planets. In one of my astronomy books, it mentioned the star Mira was a ‘variable star’ which meant it changed its appearance. A perfect name for a shapeshifter.

My infatuation with astronomy influenced much more. I decided it would be fun if each of my species was based on one of the 88 constellations. I had already created about 60, and some of them had NOTHING to do with any constellation, lol. Some were obvious. Wynnles went with Leo, obviously.

(Pic of Amiere and Tawny, drawn by Akanetto. Amiere and Tawny are both Wynnles.)

I had to shoehorn a few in, or get creative with my interpretation. I made a species for each order of insect (based on a list at the time of the most common orders, of which there were 24 listed). In case you are wondering, there is exactly 1 constellation that have anything to do with insects (Musca, the fly). So Dipterans got associated with Musca, and the rest got… whatever I put them with. Even though some were shoehorned at first, I later changed those species to be more apt. For instance, I associated the Neuropterans (antlions) with Apus, the bird of paradise. I changed the Neuropterans so they would have gorgeous, vibrantly colored wings in their adult stage.

With each species based on a constellation, I then had some context with which to make stories. I was particularly interested in the story of how Ophiuchus had been rejected from the zodiac, even though it took up a lot more space on the zodiac belt than, say, Scorpio. I combined that with myths about snakes being evil and boom, now I have a whole villainous society! At the time, the snake-people *species* was called ‘Ophidians.’

I only changed their name to Orochijin later, after I learned Japanese. It had been a long time coming at that point, because I was using the word Ophidian to refer to both a species and a culture/country which included people who weren’t snake-people.

(Pic of Kamiko, an Orochijin (species) and Ophidian (culture/nationality), drawn by Nercassa)

I will say, the initial Ophidians weren’t the man-haters in my current story. At the time, they were just… a sort of generic evil society? There wasn’t much to them, to be honest. Again, I was a kid. Please don’t judge kid-Erika for not having the most nuanced villains and societies in all of fiction. As a side note, when astrologers started talking about adding Ophiuchus to the zodiac, I felt oddly validated, despite having no interest in real-world astrology.

The last element of my ‘obsessed with astronomy’ phase involved me blatantly ripping off Sailor Moon. I loved the idea of the heroes being associated with planets and the moon. At the time, I only had the ten elements (Death, Wind, Plant, Life, Fire, Lightning, Stone, Mind, Water, Ice). I put them in that order specifically because they were tied to the 9 planets in the solar system and Earth’s moon. Some of them were obvious connections. Earth got Plant because it’s the planet with plants. Mars got Fire because it’s red and *always* associated with fire. Lightning for Jupiter/Zeus. Water for Neptune/Poseidon. Mercury getting Death and Uranus getting Mind were more shoehorned in, but hey, they couldn’t all be perfect fits.

In the stories I wrote with this set-up, ten human children would leave Earth and travel to Aloutia. They each had a ‘partner Aloutian’ (hello, Digimon), and they traveled across Aloutia in search of the Elemental Stones (hello, Digimon’s crests and Pokemon’s badges) (fyi ‘stones’ eventually changed to ‘cores’ because I didn’t want them being conflated with the Stone element). After the humans got them, they could transform into a cool, badass with awesome clothes. Oh, and they each wore a circlet with a jewel over their forehead which was 100% taken from Sailor Moon, lol. It wasn’t even subtle. Their partner Aloutian would also transform into a bigger form. Yes, I once had “Aloutian evolution” very similar to what Pokemon and Digimon do. I still have the Dragons and Krakens go from small forms to large forms, but I would later discard the ‘evolution’ idea and standardize the appearance of all my species so they could have one form.