prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: taking the basic tropes of transhuman literature and mashing them up with some other genre so that the technological breakthrough that erases the boundary between people and their tools is something totally off the wall.

Like, usually it’s immortality nanobots or cheap cybertech or people uploading their brains into computers or whatever, but instead let’s make it…

… oh, say, magical girl transformations.

No, seriously: the breakthrough is that somebody figured out how to open-source transformation wands. You can download the plans off the Internet, and knock one together in your garage using readily available materials. Now everybody can transform into sparkly love-powered versions of themselves, and the transformations are getting steadily stranger as millions upon millions of people experiment and push the boundaries of what’s possible.

Where does that take us?

(I was initially going to go with “anime-style martial arts”, but halfway through writing the post I realised that Shaolin Soccer already did that one, so obviously the only solution was to go full shoujo.)

Fielding a few questions from the notes:

1. No going grimdark. No global apocalypses that kill off 90% of the human population, no Akira style body horror, no everybody inevitably transforming into rampaging monsters, none of that. Framing a moral that it’s wrong to aspire to be other than what you are is counter to the core themes of both transhuman literature and magical girl anime.

(Yes, I’m looking at you, Puella Magi Madoka Magica!)

2. That doesn’t mean you can never have people monsterising themselves, mind. Exploring the inevitable growing pains of transformative technologies is very much in keeping with our core themes; the technology in question simply happens to take the “transformative” part considerably more literally than is ordinarily the case.

(Maybe stay away from monster-of-the-week plots, though, unless your premise is, like, a team of magical girl social workers who track down people who’ve made unwise modifications to their wands and get them counseling. These are love-powered transformations, after all; you don’t turn into a face-eating monster out of love unless you’ve got some gnarly issues to work through!)

3. Talking animal companions are admittedly a sticking point. There’s not a huge amount of room for them in the setting as described. Maybe they’re a built-in feature of transformation wands, like magical personal assistant software, and everybody gets their own. Maybe they’ve been thrown for a loop by the open source revolution as much as anyone, and figuring out their place in the new social order is your main plot. Maybe they just aren’t a feature of this particular milieu.

Or you could go with raina-of-winter’s suggestion and run a cyberpunk prequel where talking animal companions are basically pulling a reverse Kyuubey, masterminding a conspiracy to keep transformation wand technology out of the hands of the masses. That also works!

4. No, you don’t have to wear a dress in particular, but were it up to me, a flamboyant, sparkly outfit of some sort would be mandatory. It seems to be an inextricable feature of transformation wands. If you tried to go for a nice, subdued tuxedo, you’d probably end up with a purple brocade tailcoat and matching spats, or something to that effect. Fancy a uniform? It starts at “marching band leader” and just gets showier from there – we’re talking shiny brass buttons for miles.

5. If I were the one writing it, I’d be inclined to say that yes, boys can play too. A transhuman setting where the core transformative technology only works for 50% of the population can easily go to some very weird places, and since I’m coming at this from the perspective of a tabletop game designer, I’m inclined to favour a setup that accommodates a wider range of character concepts.

(That said, there’s always room for a spot of gender fuckery. Perhaps it’s not unheard of for one’s transformed state to involve some degree of gender bending. For some, this an expected and desired outcome; for others, well, they get to learn something about themselves!)

6. I was about to say “no, of course you can’t transform into a car”, but then I reconsidered: if it’s good enough for Revolutionary Girl Utena, who am I to argue? Sure, you can transform into a car. You can have a whole underground racing circuit where people turn into pretty pretty racecars.

(People will probably think you’re a weirdo, though.)