Walking the fine line of clique' Options

[vvalkingman]

I'm currently working on a seperate project atm, but my mind wanders from time to time and I can't help but write down something I think might be a good story to be used another day. Now, it walks the fine line of clique' but I feel if done correctly it might be a decent concept. Thoughts? Feel free to beat it down, it was just something that came to my head five minutes ago

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I see two young boys in an orphanage being overseen by a ruthless keeper. A young girl, a wanderer searching for something, happens upon the orphanage.. She sees the two in action(perhaps they were protecting a younger smaller child from the ruthless keeper) and decides that she needs them on her journey. One of the boys has a strong sense of justice and stands up for people, typically taking the lead on things but has a tendency to be too hard on himself and has a bit of a superman complex. The other is older and though he doesn't like to show it, he also has a strong sense of justice. He acts as though he is only looking out for himself, but when he really cares for others he goes all out for them at heavy cost to himself. His attitude though alienates him from others. I see both of them becoming great leaders at the opposite ends of two armies/powers. One goes the route of a paladin warrior of light and the other goes down the path of a deathbringer(which is a name given to them by the paladins. They call themselves Senshi, warriors of the blue light.) The girl in the middle.....I'm thinking she's a shaman or something. Someone who communes with spirits and is actually trying to bring balance to the world again.....and perhaps bridge the gap that divides the Senshi and the Paladins because currently they are at war.

Here is a small cutscene where an elder of the Senshi approaches the older boy, now a young man trained as a paladin, and attempts to recruit him as a Senshi:
"How honorable of you.....staying behind to face us alone so that your comrades could escape. A man such as you would make a fine senshi. Why not cast out the accursed yellow light from your body and embrace the light of the true god?"
"Nice sales pitch, gramps. I might be a horrible paladin, but I still have my pride."
"A man like you doesn't belong with them. You feel it. You know it. You are different from them and I can see that. You were born for this. Born to be a senshi."
"SHUT UP OLD MAN! You people are evil! You murder innocents, burn down villages, and desecrate our sacred temples! I'll never join you and even if I die this day, the paladin's will have their justice."
"Justice....We do what we must to survive and win this war. You call what we do evil, but to us what you do is evil. You follow your Light(yellow), your 'god', but we follow our Light(blue), our 'god'. You say you are on the side of justice, but in our eyes WE are just. If only one side was just, one would call this a suppression.But this is war. And war happens because both sides are just."

Something like that....thoughts?

[X-M-O]

The whole situation where the "Senshi" is trying to recruit the young boy is not reason enough to develop a story around it.

I think it'd make a lot more sense if that young boy felt betrayed by his younger brother and/or the young girl you've mentioned. Then he has more reason to actually switch sides (the "join the dark side" bit isn't very convincing).
If he were to feel betrayed, and perhaps also has feelings for the girl (with his brother also having feelings, but his brother would have been open about this whilst the older brother kept it a secret to himself), then he'd have two realistic, personal reasons to switch sides.

You could even take it a step further.
The boys were orphaned by a particular side of the conflict, and the Senshi explain to the older brother that the Paladins are the reason he was orphaned (whilst in reality his father was a Senshi and his mother was a Paladin and they both died trying to bring about peace).
With that, the Senshi would have some special trinket that would match the trinket worn around the older brother's neck that was given to him by his father (the Senshi would be attempting to prove that his father was killed by the other side, since the Senshi wore that specific emblem/necklace); also the Senshi would explain that the necklace that the younger brother always wore was actually the emblem of the Paladin (though of course that was given to him by his mother). You would make a note of the fact that no one else in the game had seen the emblem being worn by the young boys (that way the Paladins would never have seen the boys' necklaces and wouldn't know about them); the boys would not recognise the emblems actually represented anything until this point in the game story.
The Senshi would convince the older boy that his mother killed his father and then the Senshi killed his mother because she killed his father. This would cause the older boy to understand the difference in justice between the two factions (and he would be convinced that any faction's justice that would allow a wife to kill her husband was truly unjust).

Now you have a legitimate argument for the idea of justice.


After that, we need something more compelling to convince the older brother to leave his younger brother (and the young girl) for the Senshi (preventing him from trying to convince them to come along; and causing him to despise them both).
The Senshi would explain how the young girl (the main young girl in the story) was actually responsible for assisting the boys' mother in killing their father. She would play the damsel in distress and bring the father's guard down as the wife would make her move.
Then the young girl would betray the mother to the Senshi out of a sense of "justice": two boys should never be raised by a mother that had killed their father. So the girl would now be "playing both sides", according to the Senshi.
(Of course, some of this would be true, but all of it is meant as a way for the Senshi to convince the boy to hate the young girl. So some of it would be false; in this case, the mother was trying to rescue the father from a surprise attack that had mortally wounded him. In the end, the father had died from his wounds and the wife died trying to protect him; the young girl was never involved in the incident - but of course she knew about the incident because the father and mother were well known on both sides due to their attempts at making peace and making speeches virtually everywhere. So even the Senshi soldiers of the lowest rank were aware of the green necklace and its story - though none of them knew there were children until that point; same for the Paladins.)
The young boys wouldn't know about their parents' involvement in the war until the Senshi talk to the older brother (chiefly because no one knew they belonged to the mother and father, however the special necklaces they wear were unique to the parents because they were not blue/Senshi or yellow/Paladin; they were both green, which is a mixture of the two and represents peace between them). The Senshi all wear their emblem, but it is blue; the Paladins all wear their emblem, but it is yellow.
The older boy would end up joining the Senshi, and the younger boy wouldn't know about that - he would only know that his older brother was missing after an attack.

The younger brother would then ask the Paladins to help him find his older brother and show them his necklace; then the Paladins would explain to him the truth behind his parents' deaths (versus the Senshi telling the older brother a different story).

This is where the game really would begin, because he would now be searching for his older brother (with the hope that he didn't die in the fight, since his body wasn't found) with the young girl's assistance. He would use his necklace to show people asking if they had seen the matching green necklace (because his brother would be wearing it; or whoever killed him would be wearing it as a souvenir - or so he had thought).
His older brother would still be wearing the emblem, but would be wearing a yellow one with it (hiding the green one because of what the Senshi had told him). This would make finding the older brother difficult (because only a few Senshi would even know about the boy, and even fewer would be willing to tell if asked by a Paladin).


Anyway, now you would have a lot more motive and reason behind the story.
So I'd recommend something like this; also, I'd go even further into the reasons behind the existing war and the parents having some sort of nobility (which is why the Senshi were so eager to recruit the older boy - and why they practically keep it a secret from everyone except for specific officers/leaders -- this would also be why the Paladins would supply assistance and resources to the younger brother at the beginning of the game, and throughout the game wherever Paladins exist). Both sides would have a reason for helping or protecting the young boys (the Paladins would be protecting them because they are royalty and the Senshi would be helping them along for their own purposes; the father was a Senshi prince and the mother was a Paladin princess). At some point, the Senshi king would die and the older brother would be in line for the throne (making his royal cousin jealous); neither would be able to take the throne until a certain age, and after proving themselves in battle, etc. However, the steward and his wife would want the crown and would do their best to prevent either boy from taking the throne, but they wouldn't say that at all - obviously. The steward and his wife would plan ways to get the boys in dangerous situations (convincing them that it is necessary to prove themselves in a specific way, and also trying to get the two to increasingly hate each other over time). The two boys end up being rivals, messing each others' missions up, etc.


=D