horrible pitches for a minis anime
(ping @brazenautomaton @rocketverliden @balioc also I am sorry)
I
We follow a group of first-year high school girls through their daily lives. They decide to form an after-school Warhammer 40K club and to enter the national tournament. Tabletop strategy is actually a traditional feminine Japanese hobby on par with flower arrangement and calligraphy. Our plucky heroine finds her own place in the world and this character development inspires confidence in her classmates.
II
Our protagonist starts out as a teenage boy tapped by military high command to become a future space marine commander. At the military school, he has to study the Kriegsspiel. Yeah, you heard right: Although this is set in space, people are wearing 19th century Prussian uniforms. Soon after he gets his first command, he has to decide between following his orders and helping his friends. He decides for the middle ground, and lets his former classmate -now a dangerous rebel - get away while reforming the Galactic Republic from within. Throughout all of this, the two antagonists still continue their last round of Kriegsspiel by correspondence, sometimes with only one round per year. The state of the tabletop game is obviously a metaphor for the war and their personalities, but also they continue the game to get intel about how the other guy thinks.
III
Tabletop wargaming is actually the most important thing in the world. Everything is about tabletop wargaming, everybody paints, buys and sells figurines. Everybody knows the rules. Whole cities are themed around tabletop strategy… But weirdly enough most people don’t actually play the game, except for our then-year old hero who randomly decides to become the very best at it, like no one ever was.
IV
A young boy finds his grandfather’s minis in the attic, but doesn’t know how to play with them. He asks his grandpa, and he explains the rules and gives them to him, plus one he never got around to painting. By painting it with his own bright and distinctive style, he awakens an ancient spirit who tells him that he must defeat demons. Demons are slumbering in certain conveniently-colour-coded red/black painted minis, which will magically turn stark white when they lose, but have special reality-warping and rules-bending powers otherwise. In the climactic final battle, it turns out that the big bad wants to conquer the world with tabletop strategy, and the whole country is a battlefield with figurines at a 1:2 scale.
V
The world is straight-up magical, and the minis are basically golems and voodoo dolls in one. Playing the game on tabletop causes the game pieces to manifest physically. When our mid-20s aimless freewheeling easy-going otaku protagonist is sucked into this world through a mysterious mirror, he knows his training was not for nothing. He instantly becomes a master strategist and conquers city after city, but as he adjusts to his new life as a medieval warlord, he must finally learn to take responsibility for those under his rule. Also his dakimakura is a real woman (not a golem) in this world.
Your three options to get this greenlit are:
- Publish a manga first
- Convince Bandai/Games Workshop/Squeenix that they will make their money back on model or videogame sales
- Ask Netflix, they greenlight everything
none of those were really what I was thinking, but the first is closest I guess
the main themes of the story are “self-expression is valid even if you use a thing something else made to do it” / “you don’t have to shackle yourself to the way other people see the world”
the main character is a kid / young adult whose brother moved off to the UK to work; he gets a cool bomber jacket in the mail with the symbol of the [Not Cryx] faction on it that his brother won in a tournament, which inspires him to try the game. the jacket is too big for him so he wears it tied around his waist in an example of Symbolism. he starts up the [Not Cryx] army because he thinks he’s supposed to, and he likes how they play, but he doesn’t like all the evil so he paints and customizes them to be not evil. he is a Spike and finds himself playing to prove himself, to prove the validity of his intelligence and his expression and his worldview, against a world that thinks he is useless and wrong
he learns to paint from a girl at the minis store who doesn’t play and just paints the models for other people. she’s his love interest. she’s also a ko-gal, a subculture in japan who express themselves through fashion another culture created, because there’s a theme. she works at a maid cafe, but hates it, because the kind of “respect” she shows customers seems horribly horribly insincere. the hero gets her into the game itself to spend more time with her, and she makes an army of ko-gal magical girls. she is a Timmy and playing the game is an experience, a journey her and her army go on that is valuable even if it is a game
the best friend he makes at the game store is a nerdy spiral glasses guy who still is a human being to be treated with respect. he’s a Johnny, and his army is a bunch of Orc punk-rockers with electric guitar axes who have a bunch of buff songs they can play for each other. he’s constantly trying to stack them and chain abilities to create some amazing unbeatable combo, even though that’s not how the army is supposed to go, because that’s what he wants to do with it, and it’s awesome when it happens. he probably has a dakimakura with a buff orc version of Cherie Currie on it; why should that diminish someone who is a loyal friend?
the first rival is an uptight lore nazi with a completely lore-accurate army of heroic paladin goodguy heromen, who thinks out heroes are doing it wrong. he’s a dick and he wants to have control and mastery of something, and if other people see it differently it undermines his ability to know what’s going on. his ongoing rival relationship with the hero will help teach him to respect other people’s expression but he’s never going to be a full-on best friend
the models being “alive” is treated like Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes, where it’s at an ambiguous place between magic and imaginary. people will give their models pep talks, but interact with each other like the models aren’t alive. the models will do things that affect the world but have plausible other explanations.
the game isn’t the most important thing in the world but it’s important to them, so, it matters
and once we have a solid emotional core for our characters and grounded scope, if we need to make a third season or more, THEN it’s revealed the game is a reflection of an ancient and powerful game that changes the fate of worlds
the main themes of the story are “self-expression is valid even if you use a thing something else made to do it” / “you don’t have to shackle yourself to the way other people see the world”
———————–
the first rival is an uptight lore nazi with a completely lore-accurate army of heroic paladin goodguy heromen, who thinks out heroes are doing it wrong. he’s a dick and he wants to have control and mastery of something, and if other people see it differently it undermines his ability to know what’s going on.
Huh.
I am…surprised…to hear you, in particular, creating art (or even proto-art) that speaks in this way about this concept.
Ain’t nothing wrong with it, to be clear, either as a thing with which to tool around in cute stories or as a thing to care about for real. But it’s a social/moral priority set that seems at odds with your previously-discussed experiences of art and lore.
Speaking only for myself, now – I have a lot of sympathy for lore nazis. I certainly understand the sentiment that is “this is a beautiful world and a beautiful story, I’d love to share it with you, but please have some respect and take it on its own terms.” And I certainly have had bad experiences with the kind of culture invaders who say “eh, your thing is kinda lame [or maybe “kinda problematic”], but it has some bits and pieces we like, so we’re going to make it our thing and then make it completely different and wreck your community/infrastructure in the process.”
Long story short, it’s easy for me to sympathize with the guy who’s like “look, this game has an actual story that is good and that people put a lot of effort into, and your giggly waifu necromancers and punk-rocker orcs are not part of it.”
…not that people who hold that position can’t be tremendous dicks, or that they’re always right. Fanwork is often awesome, whatever the quality of the original text, and “self-expression is valid” is…valid. But, as I said, given your past writing I’m surprised that your instincts aren’t closer to mine.