Conscious, Conscientious

Conscious, Conscientious exists thanks mostly to Super Smash Brothers: Brawl.

Thanks for reading! Next time—

Alright, alright. I’ll give some more context.

It was back in my college days, roughly eight years prior to writing this (wait—it’s been THAT LONG ALREADY?!?!). I was home for the weekend, as usual, but since it was early in the fall semester I didn’t have much homework to do. So instead, I found ways to be a productive member of society!

…Not really. I just played too much Wii. Specifically, Super Smash Brothers: Brawl.

I had played the game so much with a friend in high school that I fell into a routine approach: I’d always do two-on-two team battles. As I dodged and spammed the A-attack for hours, my creative gears began turning. Ever since I was a kid, my brain has interpreted everything as some sort of story or narrative, and apparently playing a mindless game was no exception.

I began competing as the same team combinations over and over again, on all kinds of different stages. Before I knew it, I was forming fake little storylines for these teams in my head.

(Apparently, at nineteen years old I wasn’t old enough to stop playing pretend. But anyways…)

All this overly-specific gameplay got me thinking: this could literally BE a story. Fighters with special powers that always fought in teams of two…travelling to extremely diverse types of locations, to the point where they cross genres when they cross borders…

This could be fun to write.

As a Toonami kid back in the day who had recently returned to the anime world like some sort of Prodigal Weeb, I had seen my share of powered-up fighting anime. But I hadn’t seen many concepts where the characters always fought as duos.

(I had yet to watch Pacific Rim, which had just released months earlier…but that’s Pacific Rim. It just…doesn’t count.)

On top of that, I thought it would be fun to implement a Pokémon-type culture. Hence, the Consciousness League: a fighting league where teams of two would travel around and challenge each other for money and potential stardom.

As for where they would all be adventuring, the idea of attributing genres to actual locations intrigued me. These power-enhanced duos would travel a vast world filled with virtually every possibility, much like the randomness of all the Super Smash Bros stages. It wouldn’t be constrained to science fiction, fantasy, or realism alone.

While initially I had no idea what that would look like, it has since evolved into the story’s setting and system: the Multiverse, containing Fiction Country, Realistic Fiction Country, Fantasy Country, Science Fiction Country, Normal Country, and Horror Country—all connected by No Man’s Land.

(I understand I haven’t explored this very much in the first Volume, but it’s addressed much more in Volume 2, which starts next week!)

Similar to the limitless settings in the Multiverse, the characters would be just as diverse. In Smash Bros, I had been playing as two teams consistently: Link and Shiek, and Zelda and Lucas. These four characters were my initial inspirations for the main cast: Deon, Skrili, Zayza, and Lammy.

And when you spend too much time fighting as Link, you start to question things.

Namely: how does he carry so much stuff around at once?? It always looks like he’s pulling it out of his butt. Is his butt an infinite pocket of items??? Like, where is this all coming from?!

That gave me the whole “Imaginer” idea: a power where consciousnesses can create objects with their mind alone (Momo Yaoyorozu from My Hero Academia didn’t exist to the public yet so don’t come at me). Originally, all consciousnesses were going to be Imaginers. Instead, I landed on over a hundred consciousness types, like the original 101 Pokémon in Gen 1.

To be fair, I can’t really say Super Smash Bros: Brawl and OG Pokémon were my entire inspiration. As I mentioned, I was the Prodigal Weeb: returning to anime as a bright-eyed manchild and absorbing every second of shows like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Bleach (the latter of which hasn’t aged nearly as well as the former). As a reborn anime fan, those long-running shonen epics excited me. I wanted to try and make my own story like them, paying homage to my favorite anime.

And I kid you not: I genuinely, naïvely thought I was doing something unique by starting an anime-inspired ongoing novel. I had no idea the communities on Royal Road or other sites existed. Honestly, I wasn’t even planning on showing anyone my work—I was going to use Conscious, Conscientious merely as writing practice.

So by this point, I had paused my game. I turned on my Toshiba laptop (Old Faithful…you will be remembered forever) and opened a Microsoft Word Document.

I’d been writing fiction for nobody since I was very young, but hadn’t worked on anything in quite a while. This gave me the push to get back into it.

As I typed the first few words, it all began magically coming together into a pure masterpiece.

Just kidding, it sucked.

Throughout my college years, I went on to write around 26 chapters (which I called “episodes”) of my original story. My ingenious approach was to write on the fly each time, with no idea of an overarching plot. I was winging it, just to keep my writing muscles exercised.

That caused A LOT of stupid plot issues. I DON’T recommend writing this way.

Eventually, I began emailing the chapters to close family and friends. One is a fellow aspiring writer, and you may see their work on this site one day…I’ll let you know ;-) Over the years, after I realized I had a legitimate idea on my hands, this friend helped me flesh out the overarching story and characters.

This led to about a year ago, when I finally decided to try sharing my stories with the world for the first time. I had a clear beginning, middle, and end in mind, with all of the plot and character arcs conceptualized.

The only problem was: my original 20-something chapters were in rough shape. So I spent quite a while reworking and rewriting chapters, while planning what the overall release of the project would look like.

Aside from writing fiction for nobody to read, my other passion has always been making music. As a longtime Sonic the Hedgehog fan (the casual kind, not the questionable-fan-art-kind), I always loved how the 3D games would feature actual theme songs for each character. Plus, I discovered the immersive art of concept music from rock bands like Falling Up, who released an album called Hours with a corresponding audionovel of the same name. This was something I’d always wanted to try.

And so, as I prepared Arc 1 of Conscious, Conscientious, I also began writing and recording theme music for it.

(Shameless plug: check out the first theme EP Conscious, Conscientious 1 wherever you stream music! I’ll include the Bandcamp link below.)

And now, after several months of writing, recording, posting, and mostly just learning from dumb mistakes, we have the first 20 chapters of Conscious, Conscientious. I’m pleased to say: starting next week, we dive right into Volume 2 with Chapter 21.

In the next arc, you can expect a lot more exploration of the Multiverse and how it works, a lot more powers and types, and most importantly: you’ll see the main characters forced to grow and change with new challenges, both physical and emotional. I’m excited to raise the stakes, as well as bring you some more theme songs. I hope you’ll come along for the journey!