[OJfic Resources] The Survivalverse AU

I’ve written a lot of stories for 100% Orange Juice and its associated properties, and I’d like to encourage other people to do the same. In this article, I’m going to be talking about my own AU, the Survivalverse, why I made it, and what design factors went into it, in the hopes that it sheds some light on some of the difficulties of writing OJ fanfiction and how to get around them.

Why make an AU?

I made an AU because, simply put, the characters and canon of the Suguriverse are designed in such a way that writing stories about them in that universe is difficult, but that eases the process of making games with them.

What do I mean by this? Well, to begin with: the Suguriverse is composed of four games (plus Mixed Juice, but leave that aside for now): SUGURI, AoS, SORA, and AoS2. All four are an odd flavour of shmup/fighting game hybrid, trending more towards the shmup side of the genre, and mostly following shmup genre conventions.

This means that Suguri and co. are, for the most part, typical shmup characters, influenced by the necessities of that type of game. Shmups are usually action packed, with a fairly rapid pacing that leaves little space or time for their personalities to be explored; as a result, the characters tend to be very flat, with one or two defining features/motivations and few lines, particularly for characters who are unimportant to the overall plot and just there to get in the way of the protagonist.

So far, so good; personally, I don’t mind dealing with flat characters, since one of the things I do as a writer is try and sketch them out in bigger detail and grow them into a more complete vision. Is this OOC? Maybe. But staying entirely in character is a waste of time, because fundamentally, the creators are limited in how deeply they can characterise their cast by time, money and the requirement of pacing a discrete piece of work. I am not limited by any of these things; the advantage I have is having the time and resources to explore these characters more fully, which is exactly what I try to do.

However, the more crucial aspect of shmup genre conventions, which is reinforced by having fighting games that include the whole cast, is that once a game is done, the previous bosses are discarded and a whole new set is created for the next game. You can see this at work in series like Touhou, where, apart from a few exceptions, most characters either do not return or wait a long time before returning. Touhou also goes out of its way to make many characters self-interested or reclusive, to take away their motivations for meddling in plots that don’t concern them (and therefore fixing plot holes where a character who really should be interested in the current plot doesn’t appear).

The effect this has on the setting is actually very large, and is first seen with the Sora cast but then later with all the characters barring Suguri. Basically, it makes sense for the creators to be able to put their characters ‘back in the box’ when they’re done with them, so to speak; they need to make room for the next set (and, in the case of the fighting games, having too large a cast will require exponentially more effort with balancing and moveset design, which a small studio won’t have the resources to do that well). Unfortunately, the Suguri cast is harder to put back in the box than the Touhou cast; all of them are powerful enough to have a significant impact on any given incident, they have a fairly tight-knit camaraderie which will pull other cast members in if even one is concerned, and, mostly, any threat large enough for them to actually bother dealing with would be dangerous enough to drag even the most self-interested characters into the fray.

Which means the easiest option is to kill them.

You can see this happening throughout the series by charting the Sora characters, who, with the exception of Sora herself, just cannot stay alive. Apart from Sham, they all die in the events of Sora, and Sham dies afterwards. This means they are understandably absent during SUGURI and AoS, which were made chronologically before Sora. (You could say that Sora being a prequel so far in the past is an effort to avoid having the SUGURI cast around for the bulk of the action). In AoS2, they appear again – but are either destroyed, or have an extremely limited lifespan as replicas. By Mixed Juice, which is the furthest point in the Suguriverse timeline that we have access to, the Sora cast appears but by the end we’re told everybody is dead – with the exceptions of Suguri, Sumika, and (possibly, it’s ambiguous) Hime.

This repeated death and resurrection process is, to me, just the creators taking the characters out of the box when they want them and putting them back when they’re done. It’s a part of the genre, and it serves the purpose of making sure there aren’t too many characters hanging around that they then have to deal with. But it does make writing for those characters difficult, especially the Sora cast since – in canon, anyway – most of them die right after meeting Sora in battle. There just isn’t time, or space, for them to do anything that isn’t their role; they don’t exist for long enough.

But, as a fanfiction writer, I’m not trying to make a fast-paced action game with a whole new cast every time. I’m trying to make stories where cute girls do cute things, and I need a setting that’s suitable for that. Enter the Survivalverse.

Designing the AU

The premise of the Survivalverse, as I originally envisioned it, was very simple:

Everybody, barring perhaps Shifu and Star Breaker, lives.

There are other differences between the main canon and mine, usually to facilitate some element of characterisation, but that’s the main one. The purpose is to give us a large cast of characters to work with, without having to resort to OCs if we don’t want to. However, as I started to write it more and more, I realised that there are other considerations that I had to take into account to keep the setting workable. What I’ll do now is go through the various changes I made to various characters, and to give a reason behind them.

The Shifu Brands as a whole:

The main difference between the Shifu Brands in canon and in the Survivalverse is that, in canon, they are all mentioned to live with Suguri, or at least share some close living arrangement. In my AU, they have all spread out to do their own thing on Planet Earth.

This, basically, is me dealing with the writer’s version of ‘putting characters back into the box’: typically, the more characters are in a scene, the harder it is to handle. Spreading out the Shifu Brands means I don’t have to have six or seven characters in every scene, or justify why they’re not in a scene, which allows me to focus more on the characters I want. It also means they can all be ‘introduced’ into the AU individually, which gives me some amount of time to work out what their characterisation should be, since most are fairly basic in canon and I haven’t decided how to explore them yet.

Suguri:

Suguri, in canon, is a difficult character to deal with because her personality is very understated. Like Kyoko, she’s fairly professional, calm and capable; her main distinction is that she’s kinder. But she’s also an almost entirely static character, because she’s been around for 10k years by the time we meet her and there’s just not that much growing that conceivably needs to be done. She’s the hero, she’s the most emotionally stable of her peers, her main motivation of regenerating Earth is basically complete, and there’s nothing really left to challenge her; even plotline fights, like Shifu and Sumika, are resolved overwhelmingly in her favour, with her holding back her laser on Shifu until the last moment (implying she could have killed him at any time, but was simply trying to end things without bloodshed), and Sumika acknowledges that she could try as much as she liked and never beat Suguri.

The way I dealt with this was to essentially ‘fast-forward’ Suguri’s character development, by taking her social awkwardness from Mixed Juice and sprinkling it into the AoS-AoS2 time period. This humanises her a little, gives her problems she cannot solve immediately, and introduces room for growth; it also means she can be sucked into zany plots by other characters. The introduction of this slightly ‘bumbling’ element to her personality more or less made her into the World’s Dadliest Superwoman; she loves and deeply cares for everybody around her, and offers both discipline and unconditional emotional support, but she doesn’t get everything right all the time and it’s usually funnier when she doesn’t.

Hime:

Praise Hime! \o/

Hime is a character I haven’t made too many extreme changes to, honestly – all I did is play up what her personality is in the first place. In canon, she’s a lesson in contrast: this refined, ethereal creature with an absolutely savage tongue, and who often gets carried away and ends up doing outrageous things or misbehaving (enough so that she’s eerily familiar with Sora’s disciplinary methods). She has a lick of competitiveness, since she’s always willing to ‘dance’ or ‘play’, especially when Sora and Suguri are in the picture.

In the Survivalverse, I’ve tried to keep her refined aura, but dialled up her other personality traits – because the longer we spend with her, and that she spends with her family, the more likely it is that her more childish side will show through and that she’ll be comfortable showing it. The Hime of Survivalverse, while not malevolent, is certainly mischievous: she knows damn well when she’s being outrageous, and she’s enjoying herself every step of the way, trying to have as much fun as possible with her adopted family. In terms of story dynamics, she fulfils the important role of taking Suguri (who is very static) and Sora (who is very sleepy), and dragging them kicking and screaming out of their comfort zones and into their next adventure. Sora and Suguri alone would get nothing done; Hime is the engine that drives the family, and she’s probably well aware of it. As a result, a lot of plots either start or are helped along by Hime’s intervention and teasing.

Sora:

Sora of the Survivalverse is my baby, and quietly wormed her way into being the closest thing to a protagonist these stories have. In spite of that, she’s probably the character changed most from her canon incarnation, and a lot of the major changes to the Survivalverse come about as a result of the need to work around her, because there are certain things that just cannot happen while she’s around.

Sora, in canon, is very nearly a carbon copy of Suguri’s personality – most of the elements that differentiate her come from outside sources, like 100% Orange Juice or Mixed Juice scenes. She’s a little quieter, and less convinced that she’s doing the right thing; she spends most of the war uncertain and unhappy. Later, when she wakes up, she is still a very serious, straight-laced character, even more so than Suguri sometimes; she begins to show elements of competitiveness and boisterousness, but that’s about it. She’s Suguri 2.0, or 0.1 – whichever takes your fancy.

The first change I made in the Survivalverse, other than that everybody lives, was that Sora does not become a Guardian alongside Suguri and Hime like she does in canon. To begin with, there was never actually a point to her becoming one; there never exists another threat in the known timeline that Suguri and Hime cannot deal with by themselves. But other than that, having Sora continue as a Guardian essentially means she keeps her role as a soldier, in a world that no longer needs them. Sora, who dreamed of living in a peaceful world, finally finds one – but can never truly lay her weapons down, because she may be called to defend it. She can never truly avoid war or combat, and so her ‘happy ending’ is incomplete. It keeps her available for future games, if she’s needed, but it means she can never really transcend being a tragic figure, at least in my opinion.

So, while the ‘retired’ Sora of Survivalverse might fight on occasion, she never feels she has to, and can live her life in a new world without the pressures of being ready for combat. In light of that, other elements of her personality can begin to show through. Some of these, I took from Suguri and Hime, her adoptive family – she has elements of Suguri’s calmness and social blundering, and elements of Hime’s mischievousness and knack for going overboard. Other things I took from official AU versions of Sora: her sleepiness is a joke referencing her downed sprite in OJ (as well as her 10k years spent napping), and the quirkiness that has come to define my Sora originally reared its head in Mixed Juice, where she pretends to be a dog for some reason that I forget. Other places where she has a somewhat spacey personality – like in the 100% OJ event where she’s almost late for school because she was enjoying the sunshine – came later but reinforced these traits.

Other traits I added as a case of small reality doses: Sora struggles to communicate, because unlike Hime (who may well be able to access Earth’s data like Sumika and ‘download’ a language pack), Sora has woken up 10,000 years in the future with nothing to help her. Together with her spaciness, this has resulted in a Sora that readers have sometimes told me reminds them of somebody on the autisic spectrum, and if that’s how people prefer to read or imagine her, I don’t have too much problem with it; her unique trains of logic are some of my favourite parts of writing Survival!Sora.

One trait that Survival!Sora has also grown into is a tendency to go overboard in a fight. Once she starts and gets that hit of adrenaline, her training kicks in and she finds it hard to stop; because of this, certain characters and events are difficult to have happen, because the more free-floating and irresponsible Survival!Sora would almost immediately bring them to a head – mostly, things relating to Sumika and Star Breaker, which I’ll go over in their bios.

Nath:

Nath, in canon, is somewhat grumpy, being compelled to fight by orders she seems to disagree with but cannot fight, and reasonable enough that she seems to accept the olive branch Sora holds out to her after her fight, and in fact doesn’t really seem to wish Sora ill at any point – unlike Alte, who outright called Sora a monster, and rejected Sora’s offer of surrender. She’s also extremely dead.

Obviously, that doesn’t give us much to go on for a Survivalverse rendition of her, which is a common theme with the Sora cast, and a major reason why more of them haven’t appeared: a large amount of work needs to be done to flesh her out, and for most of it, there’s not really a lot to go on.

In the end, however, she grew into a reflection of Suguri: a reasonable, mature person with a 10,000 year backstory and countless unrecorded adventures. But unlike Suguri and Hime, she hasn’t had the benefit of a purpose to drive her, and comes into the story still unknowingly carrying the baggage of the war that consumed her body and her life. She’s unable to improve her life, or even really to enjoy it; she just whiles away the time, alone, until Sora enters the picture.

Although I had to ‘invent’ a lot of new things about Nath, I did try to keep her feeling the same as her old self – as much as I could, with a 10k gap between the two. She kept a certain element of grumpiness, and the tendency to characterise what she’s doing as a losing battle (in-keeping with her defeatism in the war, where she seems to have given up on a peaceful resolution before she’s beaten). The way she felt she couldn’t fight her orders, meanwhile, has lightened into a habit of going with the flow when she’s being dragged into a zany scheme.

Although I’ll admit that the Sora/Nath relationship was originally influenced by Coffgirl’s art, it really got into me after only one or two stories, and the reason I do so many stories where Sora and Nath just interact is because I think their relationship is one of the most genuinely uplifting things about the series. Together, they show that recovery is possible, even after the most tragic circumstances; little by little, they lead each other to a brighter, happier future, spreading the burden of their past between them. It is a way of quietly saying that no matter how long you’ve been sad, or lonely, happiness is still possible with a little help – even after 10,000 years of aimless searching.
(I try not to go overboard with that in the stories, though. People read my work to see cute girls doing cute things, not for overblown thematics.)

Nath being alive is another reason why certain events can’t happen, as detailed under Sumika’s entry.

Sham:

Still kinda getting to know her, so there’s not too much to say here other than that I picture her as quietly unhappy under a smile, and that the same strength and support that Sora and Nath offer each other in their relationship is beginning to be offered to her.

Sumika:

Sumika herself is not that different in the Survivalverse compared to AoS2, although she will perhaps be a little happier since Hime remembered her by herself this time. The main thing about her, insofar as handling her for stories goes, is that due to several characters being different, AoS2 cannot happen.
As I mentioned earlier, survival!Sora is less disciplined and more likely to go overboard in a fight than her canon interpretation, and has just as much reason to be apocalyptically furious for Sumika essentially bringing back spectres of her past just to kill them again. Further to the point, both Sham and Nath are active in the setting, and are probably just as angry. AoS2 happening in the Survival setting would not end happily for anybody, but especially not for Sumika.

Furthermore, the Survivalverse is built on the assumption that everybody else from the war (except Starby, maybe) have survived – and seeing doppelgangers of themselves would probably bring Tsih, Mira and Alte out of hiding immediately to see what the hell’s going on. Alliances would be reshuffled, conflicts might be reignited, and the cute girls would stop doing the cute things and instead maybe set about killing each other properly this time. Highly undesirable.

Star Breaker:

I’ve said this before on Twitter, but, fittingly for her name, Star Breaker would break the setting if she was introduced. This is a world that Starby tried to destroy and only barely failed to; Suguri knows who she was and what she tried to do, and Sora definitely knows first hand how dangerous she is. Nath was destroyed by her; for the sake of Starby’s destruction, Sham had to watch Sora sleep for ten thousand years, never knowing if she would wake. Even if Starby wasn’t malevolent, they would never be able to sleep peacefully without keeping an eye on her; the entire storyline would become about her. She is Godzilla, the colony drop, the nuclear bomb. While she exists, peace cannot ever be sure, or easy, and Sora nor Suguri can ever lay down their arms.

This holds true even for a ‘reincarnated’/memory-wiped Reika: even a Starby who presents no threat at all must be treated with extreme caution. While the nature of the setting presupposes – must presuppose – that redemption is possible and that even Starby, who was broken beyond all repair, is able to be fixed, it would take a full storyline all of its own to get her there, during which all the other characters would be on edge and much harder to explore in their own right.

We might, of course, suppose that there exists a memory-wiped Starby roaming around the Survivalverse, completely unknown to the rest of the characters, and that that might be the happiest ending she can aspire to. Or that, in destroying herself and finally dying properly against Sora, she achieved the ‘happy ending’ she was looking for.

For my money, though? I would look elsewhere, to the realm of the QPverse, where Sweet Gods jealously protect their domain, where schoolgirls pack as much firepower as the strongest weapons of the Suguriverse, where there is no war, and where the combined might of QP and pudding can soften the heart of any evil – there, you might find Hoshino Reika, enjoying after-school snacks with friends she could never have had in her original world.

Hypothetically, of course.

Setting

The setting is one of the hardest things about the Suguriverse to get a handle on, and unfortunately, my work is not the best place to do it. I’m not sure it’s come across by now, but I’m a very character-focused writer; I’ve created a few little settings like Suguri’s house and Nath’s apartment to provide a backdrop, but mostly what interests me is how the characters grow, behave, speak, and interact. What I will say is that, much like the characters are designed for a shmup/fighting game, so seems to be the setting – far fewer civilians for collateral damage, most places are just geographical locations or arenas rather than places that could actually be used to live, etcetera; as a result, the setting doesn’t feel as concrete or interesting, geographically, as the QPverse setting, the Flying Red Barrel setting, or even parts of the Mixed Juice setting.

So, sorry. Can’t really help you there – writing in the Suguriverse setting at all means you’re probably going to have to make up places to set stories in, and even the Survivalverse doesn’t have too many knocking around.

Conclusion

That, more or less, is pretty much all I wanted to say about the setting, what things I changed, and the reasons for changing them. The aim is make a cohesive setting that is upbeat in nature, includes ample opportunities for the characters to interact and grow, and which remains mostly true to the events of canon where applicable. Hopefully, seeing how I went about trying to create that will help people to create their own spin on the canon setting, or even their own alternate universe settings.

There are still a lot of holes that need filling. There are a lot of characters I didn’t talk about here, because I simply haven’t taken the time to slowly explore and build upon their personalities like I have with the others; I just haven’t gotten to know them yet. But the AU is designed to allow me to do that, little by little, in my own time. Even this article is far from complete, and is just what floats to the top of my mind when I think about the setting.

But now that I’ve described the AU as it is, there’s one thing left to do: open it.

If you’re thinking about making a Suguriverse story and you’re feeling iffy about the setting or the characters, feel free to reference these ones. If you think Starby should be introduced and you’re willing to chart her path to redemption or otherwise, jump right in. If your favourite character’s not been introduced yet and you want to do them justice, go for it. It’s all there, and it’s not like it’ll be any more or less ‘canon’ than my stories. If you have any questions, feel free to comment on the blog or ask me on twitter – I don’t bite, and I’d really love to see more OJ stories of any form.

For anybody who got this far, I hope you enjoyed it, or at least found some of my thought processes a little interesting. I’d like to make more articles to help as springboards for OJ fanfic in the future, so if you have any suggestions, send them my way and I’ll see what I can do. I'm not exactly the best person to be doing this kind of thing, so be patient with me, and I'll help as much as I'm able.