Note [#0001]

 

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2/8/25

I’m thinking it’ll be about maybe four POVs

I want it to have this SolarPunk theme to it, but with a lot of weird and wacko shenanigans and undertones somehow incorporated

The ‘main’ character is this little boy who likes to crochet funny little characters, him and his friends have lived in a small community surrounded by a large bubble. It almost has a terrarium kind of look to it.

They can come out of it, but it encapsulates their heads in their own little bubble.

I say ‘main’ because it’s not like he’s the main focus or anything, there are lots of others who are just as focused on, but he’d definitely be the face of the story, if any of this makes sense

I guess you could say he’s special.

Characters:

POV 1:

Little boy

Little boy’s friend

Troublemaker

POV 2:

Mark Harvey 

Mark’s friend

POV 3:

Teen girl 

Other teen girl

Possible third character 

OTHERS:

The Mayor 

I fully expect this to go through some wild changes for a while, considering it’s so new

2/9/25

One of the main themes I wanted it to focus on, if not *the* main theme, is the difference between who you are as a person, who you wish you were, how you see yourself, and how others see you.

When I was initially going through possible things I wanted in a new story, the first things that were coming to mind were things such as dimensional travel, characters with alter egos, or just a singular character that can be envisioned in several different ways.

The dimensional travel was quickly trashed because I decided it would be too big on a world building scale. 

I still liked the thought of having characters in almost AU kind of settings, but decided not to go for that either.

One of the first obscure images that popped up into my head was a few kids with packs and traveling gear walking through a vegetated area with bubbles over their heads.

The second one was two girls dancing on top of a shabby roof in overgrown greenery with an old looking mechanism reminiscent of a Walkman. One of the girls had a mechanical leg.

The third image was of two adult men walking over a weirdly glass platform talking to each other, one of them had a pole and sunglasses; he’s blind (that’s Mark Harvey. The only dude with a name currently)

If it wasn’t obvious at this point, this is a fantasy world.

2/10/25

Due to two of the three ideas being immediately scrapped because the vibes were not vibing; I decided to move back to the only other one; the alter ego idea.

Look, I keep seeing marvel rivals and therefore superhero stuff, the Superman movie’s coming out at some point (I’ve seen it circulating) and I’ve gotten kind of excited for the Fantastic 4 movie, sue me

The thing is, I don’t want a superhero story, and I don’t want my characters to be hiding some kind of alter ego.

The more I tried to think of something in terms of plot for these characters, in this fuzzy idea of a world they live in; the more it just doesn’t seem right. I much more like the idea of these characters just going through their lives, and you get little glimpses into that; just normal stuff (for their world anyway).

Thinking then, how do characters have other versions of themselves without, well, having other versions of themselves lol

Right now it circles back to the initial theme.

Who you are, who you wish you were, and how you see yourself.

There you have it; and the world you see where ppl going through their lives are their real selves.

Then I’m thinking there will be some other place, some kind of pocket dimension maybe; very similar geography to the Land of Odd in the way that it’s not quite an actual planet.

And in this place will be these creatures, these little guys lol, who are almost other facets of different ppl, these enigmatic and eccentric personalities that mirror ways of visualizing ppl mentally.

Now I know how it sounds, and it’s not going to be as literal as that, it honestly can’t; otherwise I will feel entirely restricted to making these characters as realistically sound as possible, and that’s not what they’re supposed to be like. So it’s probably going to be more so you can pull out a general theme that a character seems to have without it making them up entirely; it’s almost like they are centered around something specific, but have grown into their own thing. Does any of this make sense? I hope for my future brain that it does.

One of the only things that made me iffy on this concept was the fact that I’ve already created a story in which there’s this weird split between one dimension and other where there are creatures in one that each person in the other is connected to; and that’s ECHO, but I’m not sure I can go back on this concept anymore, so hopefully it’s different enough. I guess I just like that kind of concept 😅

A main difference between the two however; is the fact that in ECHO, the Split Dimension is literally half of their planet, and the ppl in that world have a pretty nice chance of getting into the Split Dimension.

Frog in a Fishbowl is not like that; the other dimension is completely cut off from that world, no one even goes to it, or knows about it. Well, almost no one… I’ll get to that. Essentially 

Hold that thought; I’ll come back to it I promise but I think I just solved an earlier problem I was having with this story. You see due to spending basically no time yesterday writing notes I had found myself having an entire backlog of things I thought about that I’ve been just now writing down in here. Honestly that’s one reason it probably seems more systematic. But I digress; this may not make sense right now but stay with me. Groups, what if the characters are matched up in groups based on the planets they come from? See an issue I was having was that the more I thought up things for this story, what with the two dimensions and stuff, the more it felt like I was created two completely separate stories. Why was I creating an entire Solarpunk themed world with its own fantasy setting when I was going to create an alternate area very different from it and try to sandwich them together? Like at that point I felt like it would’ve been better if the setting was just placed in a modern world and then the alternate dimension would be the main focus? But I was already getting attached to my barely visualized unnamed characters that would be the main focus; and they were metaphorically and literally born in this SolarPunk world, and wouldn’t work in a modern setting (I don’t even like modern settings, the closest I have to that is Echo’s setting and I do not need another similarity); gosh, it wouldn’t even be able to be called Frog in a Fishbowl anymore (as silly as that name is). There was one connection already, which was the little boy, who happened to be able to see these creatures (right now their placeholder name is just The Others), and liked to make little goofy crocheted versions of them; but that just didn’t seem like enough to me. See I already knew that the Dimension was completely separate from that planet, so it just made it weird to me that the Dimension was exclusive to that world. Because,  why? You know. It’s barely connected by story.

So now I’m thinking, maybe it’s not just that world connected to it; which I did wonder about, but didn’t want to go with it because that would mean connecting more worlds to it, and I don’t want another universe thing, this is a pocket dimension, not a galaxy. But that’s the thing, it doesn’t have to focus on any other planet or dimension, just the Others that exist from it. Maybe there isn’t an ‘Other’ for each person from each world, just a select few. And maybe those select few are grouped together due to it. This means that the main group can just be the ‘Others’ that come from that SolarPunk planet, and any other group there is would be from any other world or dimension, but you don’t have to know in what way, you’d just know the ‘Others,’ not where they come from.

The only thing about this is it does seem to be leaning towards a similar concept of the Oddities, what with their Patches and groups and stuff, but I don’t really know what else to do.

Sighhhhhhh

Alright, I’ll put it on the back burner for now…

_______________________

“Why do you look at some people like that?”

“?? Like what?”

“You look like you’re staring into them, it’s kinda creepy sometimes.”

_______ shrugs, “Just gathering inspiration I guess.”

“Uh huh, okay then…”

Notable places (with placeholder/possible names):

The Fishbowl:

A moderately sized city filled with vegetation and surrounded by a large bubble protecting it from the outside world. It is very Solarpunk themed. It is ruled by the Mayor. POV 1 is found here.

The Bench:

A rusty hand-built bunker of sorts, filled with all sorts of trinkets and mechanisms made by an inventor. POV 3 is found here.

The Glass Sky:

A large winding pathway hovering above the ground, it looks like glass. It leads to many a place including the Fishbowl. POV 2 is found here.

[END]