(Yesterday, 01:05 PM)robkelk Wrote: These folks?



Don't worry about whether they'd fit in; we have an entire planet to tell stories in. And they wouldn't be the first slice-of-life cast in Refuge -- there's the folks from Azumanga Daioh in Los Angeles and the core four from Lucky Star in Montreal.

You'd be setting yourself up for some challenging stories, though. The Haibane are used to what amounts to a small town, and Manhattan is definitely not a small town. But culture clash makes for good stories.

(Yesterday, 02:08 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: They'll have to enter the setting in mid-to-late 2017, though.  We've put a moratorium on adding new casts any earlier than that, because we kept having to go back and re-retcon things to account for them, and we got sick of that.  <grin>  Summer 2017 or later is far enough out to avoid disturbing stuff we have in place already, while allowing us to make any necessary adjustments to the really long-term plans.

As for living in Manhattan, well, there are some great possibilities there...  and by the end of 2017 they'll be far from the only displacee group in the city. 

Now, I don't know anything about Haibane Renmei, so I don't know if this is something already addressed in the series, but given what you've said, it seems to me that you'll have to figure out what connection if any they have to the Celestials and work from there.

To help you get started, here's our Style Guide, which is actually more like a general guide to writing for the project.  Give it a look, along with the rest of the publicly-accessible part of the wiki -- that should give you enough grounding to get you started on an introduction story for them and your SI.  In fact, please read as much of the wiki as you can stand before you start writing -- you're not the first reader who wanted to join the project, but the last one we had was... well, he didn't pay any attention to some very obvious details from the stories and got a lot of established background wildly wrong in his first try at a story.  We tried to help him, but he disappeared after telling us his writing style was based on ignoring research, throwing whatever he could at the wall to see if it stuck, and waiting for readers to tell him what was wrong.

Besides, reading the wiki is crazy fun.  <grin>  And if you decide you want to see the writers-only parts, just ask here and we'll get you set up.

(Yesterday, 04:45 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: Well, regarding that last, great -- you're already miles ahead of that one guy.

As for the Haibane...  The question you should really decide for purposes of the setting is if the Haibane are some manner of Celestial being, or just look like it.  This is important because the Celestials will certainly know if the Haibane are or not, and that will inevitably affect their interactions.  Now, you don't need to ever explicitly say what you've decided in a story, but you -- and eventually the rest of the writing team -- will need to know.  Just because you know, though, that doesn't mean the Haibane themselves will know, if you don't want them to.

And if they're Celestial, just because they look like Abrahamic angels doesn't mean they are.  No doubt you've already noticed that we don't align with any particular pantheon, either -- they all exist together.  And the Abrahamic religions aren't the only ones that used winged humanoids in their iconography.  Also, "little golden rings floating overhead" haloes are a degenerate representation of more general "divine glows" originating from the head or entire bodies of holy figures; they're not specifically Abrahamic, either.  Although we have one character, an Abrahamic Celestial, who has a visible halo at all times (check out Josh, if you haven't come across him yet), that doesn't mean anything as far as the Haibane are concerned.

They just look like angels.  No Celestial powers, special abilities, none of that.

I'm trying to remember where, exactly, but Yoshitoshi ABe said that he needed a way to make the Haibane visually distinct from the humans, and he went with itty-bitty wings and halos solely because they look cute.

Sure, they're born from cocoons, fully-grown, knowing how to walk, talk, basic life skills, etc., and they have about 8 or so years from hatching to Day of Flight but beyond all of that, they're humans with cute appendages.  They even get the flu.

The way I'd write them:

They've already taken their respective Flights, and emerge from cocoons in our world, days apart (despite their Flights not necessarily taking place at the same time in the show -- we only see 2, with one more implied to be in the "very near future").  The twist being that, unlike the amnesia when they hatch in the anime, here they'd remember their time in Glie (the name of the walled city in the anime).  The cocoons would be in 5 different rooms in a boarding house under renovation (in keeping with the Haibane hatching in places the humans aren't in).

(Yesterday, 06:57 PM)Labster Wrote: I definitely had considered adding some Haibane, but got caught up in other stories.  It's nice to see someone thinking of writing them. It will be interesting to see them come into a new place where they can actually remember their prior lives.

I'm honestly not sure how you get that the show is absolutely not Judeo-Christian.  In the former, there's almost nothing known about Sheol, so the Jewish idea of afterlife is close to a tabula rasa.  In the Christian conception, don't the Catholics have Purgatory?  I mean, if I had to describe the show in an elevator ride, I'd say it's teenage slice-of-life set in Purgatory.  Ya know, high concept.  It doesn't match the Protestant depictions that well, I'll grant that.  But to me some of the Shinto-ish elements are window dressing, just like how the Christian elements are simply window dressing in Evangelion.  There are hints of reincarnation, so perhaps some Dharmic influences as well.

But as to our setting, it's essentially a mixture of different religions, which goes with my own philosophy that no religion has a monopoly on wisdom – but atheists are absitively, posolutely wrong.  Some aspects of celestial existence can be understood by humans, but some things are literally beyond human understanding, so it's okay to be very vague when writing about the celestial (dis)order.

Someone would be the tutelary of their residence, who is the being who would manage their spiritual progress.  Their residence manager is traditionally in our setting a self-insert character.  But you could also consider some sort of priest, or at least someone spiritual, who guides progress both spiritual and temporal for whatever haibane become. We have other characters who can take on that role, too, so self-inserts are of course still welcome.

Very, very speculatively, all of the displaced characters in our setting are actually secretly haibane.  Not what we're writing, but fun idea.

Also, they have wings and haloes because Haibane Renmei started as a weird doujinshi, and something about sexy halo girls.