So I finally decided to go forth with my fantasy bronze age adventure story and began my process of brainstorming, writing, and researching ideas for this particular story. The later of which is going to be the major driving force to creating this story as I am focusing on a period of time that was considered to be the start of the Bronze Age Collapse in our own world. However, I’m not trying to write a historical fiction based off the real civilizations of that time period. Rather, I want to give myself a bit of leeway and freedom by having some fictional world that has these civilizations that are loosely based off their real life counterparts. I had mentioned this in my previous blog already but to elaborate, basically I’m doing something along the lines of Not Egypt, Not Mycenaeans, Not Minoans, Not Babylon, Not Hittites, and so on and so forth. I settled with calling some of these fictional empires with names loosely based on something akin to their real life counterpart or used something completely made up. What I do want to accomplish with this fictional setting however is to try to be as authentic to the lifestyle of the bronze age as much as possible as well provide a reasonable and believable culture to some of the characters and nations in this story.
In the case of the characters, as mentioned before, I didn’t want them to be some kind of power fantasy as is the case with most bronze age stories. But I thought it would be an interesting to have two contrasting characters of different backgrounds to play off one another. Our main character, Bes, is a shepard along with his father in the Kingdom of Theebeni (Basically a Not Egypt civilization that thrives off a major river). He’s not exactly wealthy but he gets by comfortably. Though he does strive to become very rich though he can be impuslive at times. He can sometimes act like an idiot too but he mostly wants everyone to be happy and is more than willing to help those in need of assistance. Not exactly the most heroic character but perhaps that’s something that could change as the story progresses. I had yet to come up with a “set in stone design” for him as Koikatsu kind of sucks for designing male characters. I’ll eventually figure out a design for him. Our other main character, Lyra, is a lot more thought out. I made her the former princess of the Kingdom of Thalassia (The Minoan equivalent in this story) which was ransacked by an unknown hoard of sea-faring barbarians and was enslaved until a terrible storm had wrecked the ship she was on, killing everyone but Lyra through sheer luck. Unlike Bes, Lyra is a noblewoman of high status who frequently deals with diplomacy with other nations and thus knows most of the multiple languages of the various kingdoms (a skill that will come in handy throughout this story). She can be kind of arrogant, especially to commoners or “mortals” as she calls them, but she might have a change of heart. Might. She also doesn't like violence of any sort and prefers talking her way out of conflict more than anything. She's kind of has this Cleopatra look to her which I really like even though Cleo isn't associated with the Bronze Age historically. On top of that, Lyra is supposed to be ethnically more or less Minoan-like while Bes is to be more Egyptian like. Considering the fact that this is all fiction and not exactly based off the real bronze age, I can probably let it slide for now. I’ve included her character designs here in color to demonstrate more or less what I want her character to be like.
Some of the various outfits she’s wearing in these concept models are going to be what I think the outfits of the various civilizations these characters are going to run across and she’ll wear something along the lines of these outfits to blend in with the populace or perhaps even stand out when that is needed. Koikatsu is kind of limited when it comes to the “Bronze Age Aesthetic” I’m trying to go for but I think these came out pretty alright. Unlike my fanfiction however, I’m not going to accompany the story with images as that would kind of wasteful in my opinion but doing stuff like this on Koikatsu does help me visualize these characters more when I write about them for the story.
What about the title of this story? The Passion of Lyra. I think it’s a decent title. Since this is a adventure with some romance/slice of life elements, I can’t imagine coming up with something better or worse. I’m alright with it. Unless something better comes to mind, I’ll probably stick with it. On another note, I even went as far as to compose some tracks specifically for this story to help me immerse myself in this historically inspired setting though I can’t say the instruments I used are 100% accurate to the era. It’s close enough considering the VSTs I had to work with to make it sound like it’s for a bronze age setting. A mix of Ancient Egyptian, Middle Eastern, Hellenistic, and my own kind of musical motifs all mashed together into something. I can’t really say for certain as I want to expand on this a little more. It’s a nice departure from what I usually compose to say the least.