Discarded Manga Ideas/Plots

[Sutari]

I don't know if anyone remembers, but on the old forum, we had a thread in Manga Works that was specifically for plots and storyline ideas that people came up with, but didn't use. I thought it was very interesting, and was hoping to start it up again?

It's basically a brainstorm thread.

PS. It doesn't matter how cliche or overused they sound. Post 'em anyway! You never know, someone might take different elements from multiple stories and make a totally unique one!

((And if there is already a thread like this, please say so and I will delete asap))

HELP YOUR FELLOW WRITERS/MANGAKA

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Here are mine.


1. "Choiceless" (or flash box, idk)
- One shot
- SciFi
- Adult
- Psychological
- Horror (gorey)
- In an unknown city, a new breed of criminal is on the rise. Using booths called "Flash Boxes", one is able to simulate 11 days (264 hours) without sleep, forcing the adrenal glands into a lethally hyperactive state. The effects of a Flash Box last 16 hours followed by fatal cardiac arrest, but during that time the user's senses and nervous system exceed superhuman levels.
These criminals call themselves "The Choiceless" (bad name, i know Dx ) wearing blood-stained porcelain masks to hide their faces, deformed by sleep deprivation.
Whether its for vengeance or ideology, the physically unstoppable "Choiceless" vow to destroy as many people as humanly possible within their final hours, so that they may enter the afterlife with peace of mind.

PLOT: 19 year old (Insert name here) is framed by her three stepbrothers for the murder of her own parents, and given the death sentence. On the day of her execution, a man wearing a porcelain mask saves her, killing everyone in the room in the process. He tells her she can bring justice to her situation by using a Flash Box, etc etc

(Thats about as far as I got... She uses it, becomes a choiceless and kills her brothers thinking she avenged her parents, only to find out that it wasn't them who were at fault, it was actually another choiceless who killed them, and spared her brothers' lives if they agreed to create and sell more flash boxes to different districts of the city. They supposedly got filthy rich from doing it, and wanted to keep her out of the loop by sending her to prison. Money is yet again the antagonist *eyeroll*
Alot of other stuff happens, she falls in love with the guy who saved her (lol secks scene), but they both only have about 2 hours left before they die, so he builds a new type of flash box that can transfer adrenal hormones, and thus extend time limits. He dies while using it, but manages to give her his time.
The final climax is that she has to use her last hours to defeat the choiceless that killed her parents, and he ends up being the very first choiceless, surviving for almost a year by killing other choiceless and stealing their adrenaline with a similar machine to the one her lover created.)

Yeah, after a while the plot stops making sense, and I got too frustrated to continue. *rage*

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2. (I forgot what the title was.. something about thunder and cellos)
- One Shot
- Supernatural
- Action

PLOT: In a smoldering village cursed by an endless lightning storm, a musician from a distant land tames the energy into the strings of his violin. For decades he warded off the storms that threatened the lives of the citizens, and was known as the "Son of Sounds".
Several years have passed since the Son of Sounds passed away, locking his violin in a safe deep underground so that the people could live without fear of the storms within its strings.

(Thats as much as I have... Its supposed to be something like "The daughter of the Son of Sounds is raised in the village, which is now being threatened by the "storm god" who created the first one that her father tamed. And now she has to use the storms in the old violin to try and defeat the storms of the Storm God to save the world, blah blah blah. ITS GETS TOO CLICHE. Plus it sounds like a song called "The Devil went down to Georgia" I've heard before.)

[Matt]

@Sutari - That first one is actually pretty cool. Predictable, sure, but cool. I'd have read it.

I have plenty of discarded plots, all discarded for the same reason: predictability. Most of them are just Word documents, though I made Blank and Golden Summer comics.

1. DAKONIA
-Action
-Adventure
-Fantasy
-Steampunk
Age @ time of writing: 12 (yes, I've been writing steampunk for 5 years, only learned what it was a few months ago)
Plot:

SPOILER! :

Miol, Quenlin, and Darren (all 12) are growing up in a normal fantasy village when a demon emerges from the ground and ravages the entire place, throwing the kids out of the wreckage. Miol ends up in a river, where he drifts away to another point in the story. Quenlin and Darren are rescued by an elven girl named Alana who is the daughter of the king of the western elven village, Treviri. She takes them to Treviri, a tech-y city with computers and electronics based on energy crystals. Meanwhile, Miol washes up in another western village called Tivoli. He's rescued and cared for by a girl named Kylie. Shortly thereafter, Tivoli is raided by goblins and its inhabitants flee to Treviri. Reunited, the original trio, plus Alana and Kylie, head north for some unexplained reason and find a legendary sword that they use to eventually kill the demon who originally destroyed Dakonia. I remember there being some business with Quenlin and Alana being killed by a shade and a falling pillar, respectively, but what do I care anymore? I realized it sucked a month later. Besides, they were resurrected later because I was a pussy and didn't wanna kill off my Mary Sues.

Elements I kept: Technologically-advanced elves, names of places (Treviri, Dakonia), base character template (Quenlin).

2. SOUL
-Sci-fi
-Drama
Age: 12
Plot:

SPOILER! :

Luis Soul is dude with pointy ears who everyone thinks is an elf, living in a contemporary setting. He's shunned by all his peers, but ends up being a hero.

Elements I kept: None.

3. TIME CODE
-Sci-fi
-Action
-Drama
Age: 13
Plot:

SPOILER! :

Alan wakes up in rubble. His hometown (New York City) is destroyed and there are no people as far as he can see. He finds a little girl named (I forgot, so let's call her Sue for now) Sue, who is apparently completely useless compared to the other kids he meets after getting a phone call from a well-known teen agent called Will, who is British. Will and his girlfriend, Alexis, are responsible for Alan and Sue's survival. Another kid named Trev contributed, and he joins him because he's Irish. All of these Mary Sues and Gary Stus figure out that there are two bad guys who caused the world to pretty much blow up, and they go to beat them up. Not kill them, for whatever reason. They fight robots along the way. Will uses a sword and the others use plasma rifles. Eventually, they all barge into the baddies' base, avoiding a really, really obvious deathtrap. Alexis dies and Will beats up both bad guys for revenge. Then it turns out Alexis is alive. They decide that they need to figure out the "Time Code" in order to reset the world, as if it had backed itself up the previous day. I wonder why I didn't just keep Alexis dead if that was the case. Apparently-useless Sue turns out to be a genius who can figure out the code, and she sets everything right.

Elements kept: Zero-to-hero character "arc."

4. BLANK (Original)
-Sci-fi
-Action
-Drama
Age: 14
Plot:

SPOILER! :

Isaac is a gangster who leaves his gang at the beginning of the comic. He sees a guy trying to shoot a cute girl, so he saves her. Her name is Miri, and she's eternally grateful. Really, though, she just latches onto him like a 15-year-old girl to Orlando Bloom. Coincidentally, Miri is 15 and Isaac did look a bit like Orlando Bloom, hence the comparison. People keep chasing Miri and Isaac, and when they're finally caught, they're led into an underground base where they're given a hotel-like room and Miri gets her eyes gouged out. Now, at this point, I could have still salvaged the plot, but what I did instead was horrendous: I introduced a new character: a man in a cloak with long, curly hair, dark eyes, and inhuman combat skills. He tells Isaac about a machine that could hook up to Miri and give her new, working eyes. Isaac, suddenly deeply attached to the girl he just met, helps her find the machine and has a rather video game-ish battle in which he protects Miri in the machine while gunning down enemies.

Elements kept: Miri and the concept of her blindness, Isaac as a gangster.

5. GOLDEN SUMMER (Original)
-Action
-Romance
-Drama
-Supernatural
Age: 15
Plot:

SPOILER! :

Kayden is a normal kid who has a crush on an albino girl named Sierra, who is assaulted on her way home from shopping one day. Being trained in martial arts, she manages to knock him out. Then her hot older sister, Atemi, enters and nonchalantly starts a sparring match. Sierra lands a good kick, and Atemi coughs up blood and falls over. The mugger/assaulter shoots Sierra. She turns into a demon after death, which happens to be just when Kayden and master martial artist Benji arrive. Demon Sierra says that normal Sierra likes Kayden, then tries to kill everyone. Benji has an "intense" fight with her (DBZ-style) and she goes back to normal with her fatal wound somehow healed, and the mugger whose throat she slit as a demon is just forgotten. Oh, and in that comic, I drew Atemi with the biggest tits I've ever drawn on a character. Just sayin'.

Elements kept: Sierra as a cute albino character, Atemi as the sexy older sister. Appearances only. Their personalities were promptly discarded.

6. GUARDIANS (Blank revision)
-Sci-fi
-Action
-Drama
Age: 16
Plot:

SPOILER! :

The story opened up with a rainy scene outside a hotel. Josh Monty, a handsome college student, is protecting two beautiful girls, Lauren and Miri, from a guy in a cloak who says he wants to kill them. There's a fight. Josh loses. The assassin beats up the girls, but can't bring himself to kill them. He leaves, and the story continues. Miri goes to school a few days later and fails to confess to the guy she likes, Isaac. Josh is revealed to be babysitting the two girls at the hotel (not suspicious at all), who are then revealed to be bioweapons. There's one faction of people who want them dead so that they can't do harm, and one that wants them alive to do experiments and use them as . . . well, bioweapons. Josh wants them to live normal lives, and so do their parents. The parents show up during a basketball game in which Miri makes a half-court shot and scores at the last second. Assassins camp out around the hotel, and the parents leave to draw them away (really because I got bored with them). Isaac is revealed as the assassin, Josh and a random dude with no relation to the story play Halo, and then they all go play tennis. On their way back to the hotel, they get shot up. Miri is shot and dies in a gutter while everyone else gets away. This was the first story I EVER finished the first draft of.

Elements kept: Josh Monty now has his own story, a horror/thriller that I plan to make into a game. Miri and Lauren were kept and put in a religious inspirational novella and a snowboarding drama, respectively. All bioweapon elements eliminated.

7. ALBINO v.1 (very, very recent Golden Summer re-make)
-Drama
-Family
-Religious/inspirational
Age: 17
Plot:

SPOILER! :

Sierra Summer is an albino girl who was abused in her home country of Africa. Her aunt cut off her hand for money. Sierra goes to America to live with her cousins, who adopt her. Coincidentally, she now has a sexy older sister named Atemi. Sierra's abusive aunt comes to America four years later and starts teaching Sierra's foreign cultures class, claiming that there were other hunters her and that she was here to protect her beloved niece. In the end, Sierra's aunt tries to kill her again, but ends up shooting Atemi. Sierra is saved, Atemi is admitted to the hospital, and Sierra's aunt runs and hides. Predictable, stupid. I'm ashamed to admit I only ruled out that storyline in the past month.

Elements kept: The basic plot and characters.
Elements discarded: The ending, Sierra's aunt's original character arc, Sierra's aunt's main personality.
Still working on Albino as my main project. Most of the stuff I write now is horror, psychological, or religious/inspirational, so I never even touch those old plots.

[Slurpee]

I had one where there was a selfish guy who accidently reopened pandora's box.
It never really went any farther than that, but you can twist a bunch of things.
like the box could be a giant door, or something like a simple cardboard box.

[ram]

I had a story about hand of midas where the protagonist got the hand of midas but managed to control it. though it's a shounen type and his usually using ordinary wooden sword and turn it into gold weapon, while there are others like him who's a villain where they can turn stuffs into other elements as well(there are liquids and gas as well) it's difficult to explain it but you guys can have that story if you want cause i don't need it anymore.
if your really intrested just pm me.

[tagYURIT]

the first one is really cool. .after i'm done with my thesis. .em really gonna post something here. . .also. .i think that we share a common taste on story genre. .^^

[BozeSG]

Oh, i had a thread about my discarded plots but now that this is here, i'm going to abandon it...

ok, copy pasting three stories:

1- Sky Mermaid

SPOILER! :

The story is about a boy who's scared of anything he sees. one day, his parents decide to go on a trip so they leave him with his uncle who's house is in the seaside for a few weeks.
the boy tries to cope with his fears so that his uncle and his wife won't know about his cowardliness, but one time, in the middle of the night he freaks out when he sees his own shadow on the wall while going to the toilet, so he runs out of the house and hides in the beach nearby, but again he freaks out at everything he sees (mostly, about the fact that the line between the sea and the sky is not distinguishable) there so he runs back into the house.
the next day, when he wakes up, he finds a baby mermaid (as big as his thumb) in his uncle's aquarium on the verge of being eaten by the other fish, turns out that at night, whenever the sea line cannot be seen, the sky and the sea connect and this baby mermaid had fallen from the sky to the sea and got into the boy's cloth when he was hiding in the beach.
the story revolves around the boy trying to raise the mermaid in three weeks ( the mermaid's got a frightening growth speed ) so she can go back to her home in he sky.

3-(haven't named it :P):

SPOILER! :

The story is set in a flat earth... or should i say... two flat earths...
Rast and Chap are two broad and flat plate-like continents parallel to each other in a way that if someone from Rast would look up at the sky with a very powerful telescope, he would see someone who's living in Chap and vice versa. In the middle these two plates is a another plate made out of unbreakable hard glass, which is essentially there to cancel out the reverse gravities of the two worlds.
The people who lived in these two continents were proud of themselves and in the hope of gaining domination, they started to attack the other world, but the glass plate made them all ineffective creating a situation of discomfort for the residents in the two worlds.
And so, the younger class started a new way to challenge each other: Graffiti Wars.
By wearing protective clothing for the atmosphere pressure ( it looks like an old diving suit ) and a new technology for creating long ropes, they hang from the glass sky with a hook and they try to do graffiti on it, there are no rules, it's just that whoever does it better earns more respect for his/her continent.
Now the story, is about a graffiti artist who has made a home for himself in the sky and his job is to monitor the other artists who do graffiti on the sky and keep a record for their works, but one day, he sees small cracks on the glass sky....

I'm currently working on 7 stories, of which i'm probably going to discard 3 that are not developing as well as the others, so i'll probably post more here later.


EDIT: i've decided to try the second one again...

[Slurpee]

I had an idea about a boy from 1000 years in the future who accidently goes back in time.
Think of the opposite of Futurama.

[Bacon_Barbarian]

Plot: [spoiler]Sierra Summer is an albino girl who was abused in her home country of Africa.

... Matt.

[CypressDahlia]

Before you say anything, Bacon. South Africa is full of white people with white names.

[Matt]

Oh, I see what you did there, Bacon.

Yeah, Cyp's right. I did my research for once.