Part of this might become just airing out grievances with certain characters, fair warning.
The short of it is that we started in August of 2022, following a 6-hour Minecraft session where I started planning and building a city by myself using an unfinished dock world as a base, showed Jade (Kara's creator), and she had the idea to do a post-SBURB story using our kidsonas as the basis for our characters. We ended up pitching the idea to some of our friends and they were interested, and that's when the project was born.
There were six of us: myself, Jade, Uni, Mc, Onyx, and Sugar. We'd build on the server on occasion, but spent a lot of time chatting over Discord about our ideas and where we wanted to go. That lasted about a few months, it's like the golden era of the whole project. The honeymoon phase, if you will.
It was great at the start when all the characters were fresh, but problems began to present themselves slowly over time. Fights over what should and shouldn't be included, creative differences drawing hard lines in the sand in what and wasn't compatible (or better put, whose writing styles were and weren't compatible), a solid several months where Uni ended up in control of the whole thing that led to three people dropping out at once because of tonal alienation or every suggestion being shot down no matter how good it was, Cromwell being scrapped entirely and rewritten into Prescott, a completely different (and to be frank, extremely dry) character, it was a mess. Eventually the entire project just kind of fizzled out and died, save for Mc and I talking about our characters or one of us just dropping ideas into the channel.
There are three distinct eras of this project and one psuedo-era in the three years since its conception that I would like to list out, as a sort of breakdown for how things went while the project was still alive and everyone was united working on one thing.
ERA ONE: THE GOLDEN AGE (AUG 2022-MAR 2023-ISH)
The early days of the project when everything was still fresh and fun. Character concepts were still being developed, there is a general air of silliness to the whole thing. Base personalities are nailed down and there is a rough idea for the world they created and now live in.
ERA TWO: THE FIGHTS (MAR/APR 2023-LATE 2023)
Around where the schism started, I think. The Incident of that year happens, resulting in Prim being scrapped. Characters have become a lot more solid, however the world and rough plot we had is still very flimsy and packed full of contrasting ideas that don't really fit together. This is where creative differences start to come into play. Jade is the first to step back (she had her own shit going on so i do NOT blame her, honestly all the fighting probably just made it worse), and arguments over what to include or what to drop start to become VERY common, creating a tense atmosphere around the whole project. Lasts for a REALLY long time and ends up inadvertently killing the lighter fun of the golden age.
ERA THREE: THE DEATH OF THE PROJECT (EARLY 2024-JUN 2024)
Cromwell is scrapped. Uni is left in control of the project, resulting in a light YA-esque tone that ends up alienating Kara, Cain, and Damien by leaving no room for their stories to fit in with the world. Jade, Onyx, and I drop out at once, listing the new softness of the concept we had no part in or were pushed out of as the reason. Chats about compromising and finding a middle ground are had, but no work into implementing those ideas is done. Project loses significant amount of momentum and dies a quiet death, with it only being brought up three months later. Sparks and ideas are still brought up on occasion in the original channel, but nothing substantial comes of it. It's mostly just me screaming into the void.
ERA FOUR: INDEPENDENT REVIVAL (JAN 2025-PRESENT)
Where I'm at now. Fucking around with dead characters and a dead project because I love them too much to let them stay dead, and occasionally talking to other people who worked on the project to come up with things, or ranting about my traumatized son to friends who just like hearing about others' ocs. By now any sort of work is either solo, done one-on-one in DMs, or shared with the few who still want to do something with their characters in one place, but the council approach and the original channel are dead. Though, a small splitoff group has formed that Jade set up, then kinda appointed me as the spearhead because she liked the direction I've been taking it in.
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I do have some things I want to bring up about the project and where I've gone with it on my own since its death.
1) I still want to give proper credit to the others who took part in the project.
I didn't do all the legwork and what they created is so good, I don't want to take that credit from them.
I love the characters we made and the ideas we came up with so much that even though I was one of the three to drop out initially, I ended up branching out instead and exploring Damien on my own time in a way that works for him. I've ended up rambling about him later to other friends and talking to Mc about splitoff concepts like reviving Damewell for a sort of enemies-to-lovers healing thing set in the 1980s, or the idea to rework the project into a chronological anthology to avoid having to deal with the council approach we were taking before that led to so much fighting. I've made sure to add links for those of us that have creative work up somewhere like on social media or on a personal site, but not everyone has an online presence with their work, so some links are missing.
2) Part of my own rework will sometimes involve reviving or reworking old characters, sometimes ones I did not write.
In this case this involves bringing back Prim Ashprit, an edgy Mary Sue created by someone who joined the project briefly but ended up being kicked out of the entire group for something I'm not going to discuss here. Prim has shreds of a good character, tiny little scraps that can be built upon using old suggestions from Uni and I, as we were both helping the person who originally created her at the same time. I think she could be a pretty good side character if she was developed a bit more, since part of those scraps included extreme aggression (could be reworked into emotional immaturity?) and what may have been an accidental inferiority complex.
Additionally, this is one reason why I choose to include Cromwell instead of Prescott, however the other reason mostly consists of recognizing the mountain of work lost when he was scrapped and seeing what about him needed to be dropped to make him better. Cromwell, at least in my opinion, has a lot more substance to him and is a far more nuanced portrayal of an abuse victim, in that he's not perfect by any means. He's got walls so hard to get past you'd assume they were just who he was and has perpetuated the cycle of violence he was put in (which does not invalidate his victim status, keep in mind. there's no such thing as a perfect victim), but him being a rich piece of shit with signs of undiagnosed ASPD does not detract from his humanity at all. He's harder to redeem, sure, but just because it's a lot more work doesn't mean it's impossible, which is far more realistic and makes the payoff that much more rewarding. All he needed was to get rid of the branching plots that added nothing and he was good. Prescott lacks the weight Cromwell held and at this point only really exists to be one half of a romance that's so difficult to root for because both halves of that relationship are so lacking in anything that it gives no reason to be invested.
This sentiment also includes Clemmie. My take on her is that she needs to have the morally gray aspects of her character expanded upon. She has the potential to fit RIGHT in with the rest of her team tonally, but those ideas like getting manipulative when she feels like she's losing control of a situation, or a tendency towards obsession, or how she can't cope with her immortality are so underdeveloped that thinking about the lost potential she has genuinely makes me sad. I want to see where I can go with actually exploring those ideas and making sure that potential doesn't go to waste, because I love Clem and it hurts that all I can think about when I try to recall her personality is that she's in a will-they-won't-they with Prescott, which isn't even a character trait, that's just a situation. I really do want to see where she can go because she had such cool ideas put into her that seemed to just be forgotten about almost immediately, and she needs more going for her to give more of a reason to be invested in her and her relationships.
3) This will also include tweaking relationships if needed.
In my opinion, the components of a relationship (EVERY kind of relationship. it just gets fumbled the most in romantic ships) matter just as much as the actual dynamic of the relationship because while the relationship as one entity can be entertaining, it's often the way the characters compliment each other that really gives it its substance. I've found myself preferring Damewell over Clemscott simply because Damien and Cromwell have a lot of personality that makes them and their interactions entertaining, and their issues end up mirroring each other and complimenting the other in a lot of ways that makes it way easier to be invested in the ship. Clemscott lacks that because one feels as milquetoast as that one boring love interest for Lucy in Dracula, and the other has the seeds to carry the whole ship on her back that aren't being given the time or care to grow, and it just makes their relationship feel dry. The most they have going on is thematic parallels, but about half of that is carryovers from Cromwell.
Some other minor tweaks will also include widening the rift between Clemmie and Damien (mostly because the difference in tone makes it hard for one to compliment or contrast the other in more ways than simply how they deal with their issues, so keeping the friendly demeanor but making them more distant makes sense to me) or the unfortunate sidelining of the DameJace ship (due to underdevelopment on jace's end and a similarly fluffy tone feeling slightly too off. i do really love the concept though, and jace has some stuff going for him, so i will keep an open mind for damejace).
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Despite my gripes with how the project was managed and admittedly, still feeling hurt because it felt like I was being pushed out of something I helped found and create, I really can't state how happy I am that this whole thing came into existence at all. There were quite a few mistakes made at the start, we were all teenagers deciding to take on something I don't think any of us were equipped to manage so the fact that it imploded in the end does not surprise me (teenagers famously do not have the Greatest judgment, and i was 17 when it started so i was definitely not immune to that. i think at some point we started to take it WAY too seriously and that might've been the start of it), but we were still able to create a pretty powerful set of characters if I'm thinking about them THIS hard and still reaching out to share my ideas about my favorite group of traumatized nerds after the project completely died last year.
Maybe if I ever end up making it into a MSPFA, I'll link to it here (i think it'll be good like that, leaving room for both serious moments and some REALLY good jokes. it's a really malleable format).
I guess that's all I really have to say about this. It was a mess at best and a complete shitstorm at worst, but by god, it's still being dragged around. And maybe it'll become something again.
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Hopefully that wasn't too much to go through! I do have a lot of thoughts about this whole thing, but I want to save the majority of them for the character pages.
MOST OF THE LINKS SHOULD BE ONSITE NOW. the search button is still broken (i haven't quite figured out what to do with it yet) and so are all the save buttons, but i'll figure something out eventually
other than that, here are some other changes i've made:
offsite advertisements have been replaced! they all lead to shit like my webring and whatnot now. i may replace them again later down the line, but for what they are right now i really like them
pages that previously had the default neocities layout now have a semblance of an appearance! it's mostly placeholders where it stands, but yknow. progress.
all character pages now have a rough format for information. right now only damien's is complete, i'm gonna have to ask around for the rest, but they have a format
even more missing parts have been replaced! right now i think my favorite is probably the little gear icons, i love how they look
UPDATES
Posted on 18 March 2025 by
some misc updates for yall:
working on filling out all the pages. so far i've gotten the project lore, character list, and credits pages set up.
fixing broken images or making new ones to fill in the old slots, setting up links and stuff for the old advertisements
collecting old images. some have deeper goldmines than others
WORLD MAP |
LORE LORE |
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