Marty here for a very special Process Thursdays.
Why is it very special? Because it’s by me, of course. Also it’s cross posted, which is the new hotness.
Over on my blog—which I’ve only just remembered that I had—friend of the show: Tarvis North, suggested I talk about inspiration. That’s a rich, meaty vein of veiny, rich meat of a topic. So I applied the question to Shadowstories, remembering its earliest days back when it was a poorly kept slambook writ by a handful of giggling idiots.
It inspired (see what I did there?) me to pull back the curtain on the adolescent and transparent origins behind the characters you see before you every week here at the Storyverse. From back in the day: when Chuck, myself, and a handful of our Creative Writing class first added our characters to the story. They were never intended to be self-inserts, I don’t think we ever considered Grebok to be me, or Chuckles Chuck, etc. If anything, they were avatars (pardon the pun) into the book.
Over the years the little scamps evolved and migrated to the folks we see to the right here. At one point (which was still, like, fifteen years ago. The first time I think we had any illusion of doing something “serious” with it), Chuck and I wrote up a series of origin stories, which finally gave us anything resembling canon. Even then the ideas have continued to mutate into the material that ultimately ended up in the Bios.
That’s who they are now, but let’s take a look at who they were then. Back when they were the barest spermazoa ejaculated out of our deranged, pop-culture drenched brains into the wadded tissue of our high school notebooks.
•••
Lord Chuckles: Avatar of Good
Lord Chuckles origins may not be surprising to those of you with detail-oriented eyes and a love of late 80’s/early 90’s PC gaming.
This was Chuck’s chosen name in the then-popular Ultima series as the, well, the Avatar of Virtue (no relation to the jester from the series, actually. That just happened). It was more or less a play on “Chuck” with the added benefit of being a ridiculous name for a Chosen One type hero person (this isn’t high comedy folks).
Earliest incarnations of Shadowstories played this pretty straight (since we had no hope of publishing, IP issues were somebody else’s problem). In fact, in one of the books—VI, I think—the team spent a good deal of the story in Britannia. It was just that much funnier that the so-called Avatar of Virtue was a prickish fop.
Once we manifested illusions that this was a saleable property, we needed to change Chuckles’ origin. By then the story barely relied on the game (which, by that time, had already boomed and busted online), so it was a fairly easy fix. One that gave us a new bounce of narrative freedom, and Moritania was born (originally Morittannia). Chuckles’ time spent on a garbage scow and ignoble return home were added as send-ups of the Chosen One legacy.
That he’s not technically an Avatar, or that in his apparent embodiment of all things “good” (including fruit-filled pastry and anonymous rest stop handjobs) he’s abandoned those assholes to their fate, only adds to his hilarious mystique.
•••
Grebok, son of Drogmar,
Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventoozlar
While a more obscure reference, Grebok is arguably the more direct lift.
The name is taken from a line delivered in the MST3K episode: Cave Dwellers. During the long-winded and convoluted exposition (a part we like to call, she had to ask), we are introducted to the incidental character: “Grebok”. Crow supplies the rest of this ridiculous moniker in a master stroke against flimsy fantasy nomenclature (I found an annotation that says it was actually “son of Flockmar, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Pentuzlar.” I am just learning this now). I fell in love. This was literally the funniest thing I’d heard so far. I started using it on the BBS’s and anywhere else it would fit.
Grebok, the character, was originally more Cro-Magnon (or Conan-ish), in keeping with the barest hint of his “source material”.
After we had gotten underway with the first couple of Shadowstories, Chuck and I used to pass a property on the bus with a sign in front announcing it as: Mirador. It was just a suburban plot of land in a rural part of our County. I guess they really identified with lighthouses. I think it was a single story home, even. How that got conflated with the Spanish word for Watchtower is anyone’s guess. I just thought it was a badass fantasy name, and that was the beginning of the end for Grebok’s more Conan-y tropes.
Slowly but surely Mirador grew in my mind, as did Grebok’s role in it. I just heaped layers of my favorite things onto this fantasy planet. It was at turns Final Fantasy/Phantasy Star, Star Wars, Star Trek, D&D, Magic: the Gathering, you name it. Eventually it grew too cumbersome, even for my “but it’s rad” teenage justifications. I refined the idea down but it still held all these really weird artifacts from previous bad ideas. Eventually the only way to parse it all was for Grebok to become the man of two worlds he is now. At times savage and dopey, and other times cultured and well-trained. Somewhere between Conan and Han Solo is the Son of Drogmar.
Ooo! Here it is (Cue it up to 2:55).
•••
Lord of the Lemmings
From the game, Lemmings, not-so oddly enough.
Our friend Lupy (who just got married last weekend btw, big w00t) introduced us to the always enigmatic Lord of the Lemmings. It started just BSing and getting into the head of whoever must be laying down all these mono-functional little rodents from this game which delighted us so. When Shadowstories came around, he put himself down as ShadowLord (his current BBS handle), the Lord of the Lemmings.
In his earliest days he supplied the gang with boosts from his signature, situation-appropriate critters. All with self-explanatory names like: Flashlight Lemming, Explosive Lemming, Glasscutter Lemming, Mood Music Lemming, etc. It wasn’t long (possibly as many as five pages) before the “Shadowlord” part got dropped. However, the dire, cloaked look of the character remained well after.
Lupy’s penchant for hijacking Shadowstories with bizarre anecdotes and long winded (if well written) asides, slowly coalesced into the LotL (pronounced Lottle) that we all know and are highly suspicious of these days.
His impending godhood, and ability to move in and out of the story (moreso than his fellow protagonists) are all latter day additions more Chuck and myself than Lupy. However the reverence of a Great Big Lemming, his knack for speaking in sing-song rhyme, and ability to confound all who speak to him are all from the original blueprint.
•••
Gunther P. Washington
Not so much based on any particular person or source of pop culture.
Although his hapless humor was very much in the style of Get A Life, the (too) short-lived sitcom starring Chris Elliot. A favorite of our own pasty, tow-headed friend, Jim. A wunderkind of impeccable comic sensibilities (he was unto Jim Carrey before anyone knew who that was).
It was Jim who first gave us Gunther P. Washington and his lovable loser mystique. His obsession with his “mommy”, love of all things tacky, indomitable sunny attitude, and common foil for Sparky were all the character had in those halcyon days of youth.
Over time, however, the character became more and more the doughy, magnet for big violence and office clerkery, man-child he is today. Not so much a departure from his original purpose considering he didn’t have one, but no less an evolution in concept.
•••
Sparky and R.T. are more or less our own creation. They might be lampoons of Wookie sidekicks and the concept of pilots loving their spaceships a little too much, but not nearly as specific as the above. The Bastard Sun, Skarpo the Wily Bear Magician, Jason Priestley Death, and assorted other characters are more or less our own.
It was primarily the main characters all had their uncreative origins in other media. Whatever was our favorite thing the minute and a half before Chuck handed us an otherwise unexceptional, single-subject notebook is now permanently embedded in the fabric of the Storyverse for all time.
And that, dear readers, is how the sausage got made.
