The origins of the Stormbreaker Universe and some earlier versions of the story
So, let me tell you a little about how these stories got from my head to these forums, also what the earlier version of this universe looked like:
As I’ve said a few times before, my little sister and I made up the majority of my characters and the base storyline for the SU roughly between 15 to 17 years ago. Back when I was young, I spent so much time daydreaming in class or drawing maps of Trecta (my fantasy world that eventually became Partoga) that a few officials at my school were worried that I might be suffering from a learning disability. Before I was ten years old, I remember being screened for ADHD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and some kind of personality disorder by the school’s councilor. Once the term “Maladaptive Daydreaming” was coined, people started throwing that one at me too. But I was never diagnosed with anything. I just had a hyperactive imagination and was generally an out-of-control child.
When I was in First Grade, I was the first student in the class to learn how to read fluently. All of the other kids struggled with pronunciations and syllables and context clues, unable to get through picture books without help. Meanwhile, I was in the back of the room blazing my way through
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, having the time of my life. I loved reading so much that my parents built me a small library in our house.
There were two books in particular that are directly responsible for the creation of the Stormbreaker Universe. I read them dozens (and possibly hundreds) of times and still have the badly battered copies on my shelf today:
The Kid Who Ran For President and its sequel,
The Kid Who Became President, both by Dan Gutman. I absolutely loved those books and constantly daydreamed about being in those stories. Over a couple of years, the fantasy changed. I imagined my dad being elected President, and I pictured myself going to the White House and having similar adventures to the eponymous kid in Gutman’s books. Those fantasies were the earliest iteration of
My Father’s War.
Back in 2006, only about twenty of the core characters existed: Blake Robinson, Princess Asami (who later became Chihiro Tachibana) and their core families existed in the “World of World War Three”. Only a select few of the incidental characters existed. These characters predate just about the entire Stormbreaker Universe. For the most part, the earliest version of
My Father’s War was populated with characters from
The Kid Who Became President.
It was around the same time that I started creating the fantasy world that would eventually become Partoga. Back then, my sister and I were both intensely loyal fans of BIONICLE, a story-driven toyline produced by the LEGO Company. Over the ten years the series ran, Bionicle developed such a massive and complex story that its lore could be considered a mythology nowadays. A key aspect of Bionicle is that the story took place on an island, and the story was filled with references to the culture of the Maori people. Many of the characters in the Bionicle story were named after words in the Maori language, as were locations and certain titles.
Starting in 2005, the LEGO Company started encouraging fans and amateur builders like myself to start creating our own Bionicle legends. My sister and I set to work right away. We built over fifty of our own custom Bionicle characters and drew up maps of our own islands. One such island I created was called “Trecta”. About three years later, I redesigned Trecta Island and made it into the world of Partoga. (Or more specifically, the Western Continent of Partoga) Here is the very first map of Trecta I ever made, all the way back in 2005:
I’ve been holding onto this map and its companions for 16 years now. Quite happy I finally get to share them. Trecta was the world I loved and enjoyed creating. I created Levakia around roughly the same time, but that island never really held my interest, and I abandoned its map without ever finishing it.
Eventually, though, I did marry the two maps and create the greater world of Partoga in the spring of 2010. If you’ve read
Faith in Chaos, then you’ve already seen this map:
For years, I would just keep adding to the world of Trecta/Partoga, creating characters and places, but not writing any stories in the sense you and I would think of. I created a history of the world, to explain why certain places were where they were, or how certain characters came to live in which town or whatever. Out of fealty to the Bionicle mythology, I preserved the tradition of basing the culture of my island people off that of the Maori. Sometime around 2015 is when I stopped modeling the Partogans after the Maori and decided that they just were Maori after all.
It wasn’t until 2008 when I started creating “Partoga stories” in earnest. About a year after I started creating the islands of Levakia and Trecta/Partoga
, I joined my school’s concert band as a trombonist. We participated in a sight-reading competition in the spring of 2008 and we were given “Straight 1’s” by the judges. (the highest possible score)
For those of you who don’t know, a Sight-Reading contest is when musicians are challenged to perform a piece of music they have never seen, read, nor heard before. During this competition, the song we played was a concert piece called “
Regenesis: Song of the Planet” by John Higgins.
I absolutely fell in love with the song, not just because of the melody and tone, but because of the movie that is supposed to accompany the music. As we performed the song, a video played for the audience, showing a slideshow of images of Mount St. Helens National Park. The pictures were taken before, during, and after the volcanic eruption of 1980. The music started out happy and cheerful before growing ominous and dark. Then the "cataclysm" occurred. The song ended on a theme of hope and rebirth.
I was especially enamored with the final two sections of the song, "Void" and "Renewal," which depict the devastation and eventual restoration of Mt. St. Helens National Park. I remember that I wanted to see some kind of story that took place during this kind of event. I wasn't interested in seeing the actual disaster. I wanted a story set during the aftermath. That's how I got the general idea for
The Legend of Whetu Kealoha, the first of many stories set in the world of Partoga. But the story wouldn’t come together in a way that I can recognize for another three years or so.
And in a nutshell, that’s really how the seeds Stormbreaker Universe were sown. I just kept adding things on top of what was already there. I got into videogames at the age of six, and I was playing
Homeworld by age 8, so I don’t remember exactly when the Partogans and Levakians became spacefaring Homeworld factions, but it was definitely before I turned twelve.
XCOM and Stellaris came much later. Around 2017.
I also want to shed some light what I consider to be the central three elements of the Stormbreaker Universe.
All three elements kinda happened at once, but I can’t tell you when they were added because they were
kinda always there. In fact, one of the centermost elements of the Stormbreaker Universe predates the SU itself:
The three elements are:
- Time Travel
- Jericho
- The Paradox
When I was young, I grew up with a lot of science fiction, and Time Travel was a constant feature in the media I was consuming. I watched every episode of
Star Trek: Enterprise as the show aired, and I loved the concept of a Temporal Cold War, with sci-fi warriors using history itself as a battlefield and the future up for grabs. In my own stories, I imagined a very lopsided Temporal Cold War, where only the evil side had access to a time machine and the heroes had to play a really long game against them. That’s kind of where the Paradox came from. She started out as a nebulous enemy with no face or voice, acting from the shadows to change history until one of my heroes noticed she was active and took action.
In each and every story I made up, there was always a moment of interference, where the Paradox would somehow show up and cause the plot to take a turn. The first thing she ever did in one of my stories was interfere with a love triangle. She intercepted and
got rid of a boy who was rivalling Blake Robinson for Asuna/Chihiro’s affections. Sometimes the Paradox would be present for only a short while, making her changes and then disappearing. On other occasions, she would be present from beginning to end.
The Paradox got her face and personality before she was ever named, and for that, you can blame my dad. When I was in elementary school, he bought me an educational computer game called “
Jump Start Adventures Third Grade”. All you need to know about this point-and-click adventure for children is that it contains the character who
directly inspired the Paradox and her modus operandi:
This is Polly Spark. She was the game’s main antagonist. Of course, this was an educational game for kids, so she’s nowhere near as bad as Akira. However, she does use a stolen time machine to re-write the past so she could get a passing grade on a history quiz, which is pretty awesome and instantly qualifies her for the role of “supervillain” in my mind. And who doesn’t love an eight-year-old supervillain!?
Selfish, kinda petty, prone to snide insults, and harboring a complete disregard for everyone except herself, this was the innermost core of Akira Robinson’s character. Everything else about her was built on this template. When I first created the Paradox, she was a middle-aged woman, but I eventually reduced her age to make her more similar to Polly, taking the Paradox all the way down to her teenage years.
Akira got her name from the 1988 anime movie of the same name. In fact, a very large number of Japanese characters who appear in my stories are named after anime characters. I’m just a fan of the art form.
As for Jericho herself?
She was added to the story around the same time as the Paradox, and I always intended for her to be the messianic savior of mankind; kinda like a futuristic female Christ-like figure. To that end, I wanted to give her a very meaningful name, so I looked up a list of the oldest cities on Earth. Eventually, Jericho was named after a town in the West Bank of Palestine that is allegedly 11,000 years old.
The earliest version of Jericho was radically different from where she is now, but there is one detail that is more important than all others:
Jericho and Akira were supposed to be sisters.
Yup. Let that sink in.
Jericho was going to be Blake and Chihiro’s daughter.
The dual characters of Asuna/Himawari were created explicitly to replace Jericho after I removed her from the Robinson family. That’s also why the Ray and Robinson families have an identical makeup. (African-American man marries a Japanese woman, has a daughter who goes on to do incredible things) I built Jericho’s new parents to match her own ethnicity; which in hindsight may have been a bad idea, because two of the central families in the story are now indistinguishable.
Jericho and Akira were originally going to be twins, and Jericho’s name was going to be
Asuna. I originally planned for them to be the “Great Nemesis” pair, with their battles against one another being a main part of my own Temporal War. Ever noticed that on the rare occasion I describe Akira’s outfit, she always seems to be wearing white? The twins were supposed to be color-coded:
Akira, thinking herself to be a hero, always wore white and acted as though she was the most morally upright person in the room.
Asuna (Proto-Jericho) would dress in black and behaved like an anti-hero. Some small vestiges of this early version of the character can be seen in
The Stormbreakers if you know where to look. (Doesn’t the final version of Jericho seem slightly anti-social to you?)
The characters of Jericho and Asuna were separated from each other when I decided to change Jericho’s lifespan. Originally, Jericho and Akira were supposed to be born during the final minutes of the War in Heaven, and then meet their destiny during the
Rescue at Cape Canaveral 50 years later. (This is the only major battle of the SU that has not been shown in one of my stories yet)
After I decided Jericho and Akira weren’t going to be twins anymore, Jericho’s youth and messianic adventure were moved to the Second Hyperspace War (2015 to 2036) instead of the War of the Paradox. (2084 to 2086) And don’t worry dear readers, you’ll get to see the War of the Paradox and its epic final battle, the Rescue at Cape Canaveral, during the tenth and final installment of the Stormbreaker Universe: “
The Last Heroes”
Oh, and I know that there’s a very high chance
@HistoryDude might ask this question, so I’m going to head him off at the pass:
How was this early version of the Stormbreaker conflict supposed to end?
I was planning for the tale to end with an epic
Star Wars style showdown in which Akira and Asuna/Jericho fought in a massive Psionic battle that destroys everything around them. Finally, with the fate of the Galaxy in the balance, both women would simultaneously strike and kill each other to end the war.
I think it goes without saying, but the less I say about the movie
Batman v Superman, the better.
Thank you for joining my discussion of the origins of the Stormbreaker Universe, and I hope you enjoyed this look at what could have been.
See you tomorrow for the original ending of
After Everything!