Fight With All You've Got! Jenkinrocket Writes A Live-Action Shonen For Hollywood?

in #writing7 years ago

Sometimes I have daydreams that are fragments and pieces of story, script, and video game ideas. In my time I've seen (played) a lot of anime, television, movies, and video games. Add this to the fact that I've been writing seriously, keeping journals, and writing stories since I could write and what you have is a backlog of all sorts of ideas.

Here are one of the ideas I've had over the years and recently. Some of these are stories that have been 'with' me a while, and others have come only in the past few years .

I watch a lot of shonen anime, and I really love it for the most part. It's an example of a pretty damn formulaic genre that, when just a little bit of polish is added, can be incredibly awesome. You really just don't need to change the recipe very much to make something awesome.

For those of you not familiar with shonen anime, I'm referring to stuff like Reborn!, Naruto, Hunter X Hunter, Yu Yu Hashuko, My Hero Academia, RWBY, and Soul Eater. They usually feature a relatively young protagonist who starts as a weakling and must grow to meet increasing challengers until they finally face 'the strongest person' or 'the master of the world' or the equivalent.

Well wouldn't it be cool to finally have a live-action shonen-like show in America?

It's something that hasn't really occurred to anyone else. We've got/had plenty of powers shows (i.e. Heroes, Alphas, etc.), but we haven't had anything like this.

The differences are subtle but important. The plot would revolve around a school (this is pretty fucking common). The school would train people to be strong both through classes and through sparring battles. Every year there'd be a yearly tournament in which the current class would square off against other schools and each other in order to prove who is strongest.

So far, pretty formulaic (honestly I've consumed so much media that I can formulaically write a number of genres and actually make a good movie/show while barely blinking an eye - that might a interesting post, but it's a different one). Oh, there's two things missing: one is the secret at the heart of the world. I can't provide examples of it in other shows because it would obviously spoil the story for those who hadn't seen that particular series. However, the secret at the heart of my world would be Stasis Crystal, buried underneath the school (it's always underneath the fucking school for some reason). I won't go into all the details of why it's there and where it does because that would take eight pages and a thousand words to explain.

The 'power' would simply be named 'soul', and would have several distinct varieties a la Hunter X Hunter. And, of course, you've gotta have a main villain. I mean, of course there'll be plenty of minor villains leading up to the main one. This guy will just be someone who wants to destroy the Stasis Crystal, and thus the world.

You see, this world is in part a figment in the mind of the mad god (name TBD). He used a relatively barren planet and it's downtrodden, struggling people as his canvas. However, to get things going he had to create some people to advance the society as he saw fit, not letting these people know what they were but planting certain ideas in their heads. These people are figments, and exist among the people. However, almost no one remembers this secret. So the mad god is the main, main villain above the main villain (I kid you not, this is fucking common in shonen).

And that's the summary of what I have so far.

Not bad, huh? I mean, I'd watch it. Damn I'm good at being humble.

Alright, I've gotta go train my soul to fight the mad god. Hmm... Although if it turns out that I'm a figment....

Source: 1

Sort:  

Funny seeing this, since I just wrote a review of InuYasha yesterday, where I talked about how it both implements and departs from the Shounen anime formula.