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Raven's Children - History - Merging the Raven Tribe with Fivemoon
In the previous two posts, I talked a little about the Raven Tribe and Fivemoon. Now things get interesting. (Well, for certain values of interesting.)
Up to 1999 or 2000, these were completely separate stories in separate worlds. Fivemoon, as noted before, was the setting for several unfinished fantasy novels. The Raven Tribe's story was slated to be a comic, and I had an adventure/exploration/quest story mapped out in rough strokes.
When I started seriously looking at getting my Raven Tribe story underway, I decided to combine them. At this point, more than a decade later, I don't remember why, although my guess would be that I didn't want all the world-building that I'd done on Fivemoon to go to waste. At that point, the Raven Tribe had been developed in a lot of detail (one might say absurd detail, looking at all my ridiculously detailed family trees and lists of tribe members from 30 years before the story takes place and so forth). However, the rest of the world wasn't really developed at all. I had a couple of characters from other cultures and a vague idea that there some sort of medieval-ish empire, and that was about it. In Fivemoon, I had tons of different cultures to choose from, all of them well fleshed out, so I decided to transplant the Raven Tribe there.
Up to this point, as I said in the Raven Tribe post, the Raven Tribe had been located on a steppe or, sometimes, in a desert on their world. When I put them on Fivemoon, I uprooted them and moved them to the Arctic for no other reason (at least no reason that I can remember now) than because I had just moved, or was in the process of moving, from Alaska to Illinois and was desperately, miserably homesick. I'm pretty sure I wasn't consciously aware of this at the time, but it's really obvious to me looking back on it. I wanted to draw home: snow and spruce trees and mountains. I put the Raven Tribe in the Arctic because it would enable me to wallow in nostalgia about the place I wanted to be, but wasn't. And they fit pretty well there, because I already had a vague idea that there were some nomadic tribes living in Fivemoon's Arctic and there was no reason why the Raven Tribe couldn't be one of those tribes.
However, everything about the Raven Tribe -- how they looked, how they dressed, their culture -- was geared towards having them be a group of horse-riding nomadic warriors who lived in the steppe/desert. I began reinventing them for the Arctic, but kept most of it the same -- the art motifs that they used, the general look of the characters. Actually, right up until I started drawing the first pages of the comic, I waffled all over the place as to what sort of template I wanted to use for them. "Cave painters" was the dominant idea for a while; I envisioned them as something vaguely like Paleolithic Cro-Magnons. The idea of having them be sled-dog-using, vaguely Inuit-like people took over right before I started drawing the comic -- well, maybe a month or two before. But it didn't have a lot of time to settle in.
The other thing that happened during the year or so that I worldbuilt for the comic was that I "updated" both Fivemoon and the Raven Tribe to reflect everything that I had learned (and was still learning, from the Internet) over the decade since I'd initially created them. In some ways, this was a good thing, because I really had learned a lot between the ages of 13 and 23! Unfortunately, if Raven's Children ended up feeling like a mishmash of cultural influences that never quite meshed, this is EXACTLY why. I took something that I had created and built into a finished state in my teens, then began adding things I'd found on the Internet that seemed cool, fascinating, or fun to draw. It's probably a miracle that it's as coherent as it is.
Not to mention I'd discovered ~REALISM~ and was dead-set on making the story as dark and gritty as possible. There would be cursing! Sex! Nudity! Blood! I was a grownup, by golly, and I wasn't going to pull any punches.
This was not going to end well.
Up to 1999 or 2000, these were completely separate stories in separate worlds. Fivemoon, as noted before, was the setting for several unfinished fantasy novels. The Raven Tribe's story was slated to be a comic, and I had an adventure/exploration/quest story mapped out in rough strokes.
When I started seriously looking at getting my Raven Tribe story underway, I decided to combine them. At this point, more than a decade later, I don't remember why, although my guess would be that I didn't want all the world-building that I'd done on Fivemoon to go to waste. At that point, the Raven Tribe had been developed in a lot of detail (one might say absurd detail, looking at all my ridiculously detailed family trees and lists of tribe members from 30 years before the story takes place and so forth). However, the rest of the world wasn't really developed at all. I had a couple of characters from other cultures and a vague idea that there some sort of medieval-ish empire, and that was about it. In Fivemoon, I had tons of different cultures to choose from, all of them well fleshed out, so I decided to transplant the Raven Tribe there.
Up to this point, as I said in the Raven Tribe post, the Raven Tribe had been located on a steppe or, sometimes, in a desert on their world. When I put them on Fivemoon, I uprooted them and moved them to the Arctic for no other reason (at least no reason that I can remember now) than because I had just moved, or was in the process of moving, from Alaska to Illinois and was desperately, miserably homesick. I'm pretty sure I wasn't consciously aware of this at the time, but it's really obvious to me looking back on it. I wanted to draw home: snow and spruce trees and mountains. I put the Raven Tribe in the Arctic because it would enable me to wallow in nostalgia about the place I wanted to be, but wasn't. And they fit pretty well there, because I already had a vague idea that there were some nomadic tribes living in Fivemoon's Arctic and there was no reason why the Raven Tribe couldn't be one of those tribes.
However, everything about the Raven Tribe -- how they looked, how they dressed, their culture -- was geared towards having them be a group of horse-riding nomadic warriors who lived in the steppe/desert. I began reinventing them for the Arctic, but kept most of it the same -- the art motifs that they used, the general look of the characters. Actually, right up until I started drawing the first pages of the comic, I waffled all over the place as to what sort of template I wanted to use for them. "Cave painters" was the dominant idea for a while; I envisioned them as something vaguely like Paleolithic Cro-Magnons. The idea of having them be sled-dog-using, vaguely Inuit-like people took over right before I started drawing the comic -- well, maybe a month or two before. But it didn't have a lot of time to settle in.
The other thing that happened during the year or so that I worldbuilt for the comic was that I "updated" both Fivemoon and the Raven Tribe to reflect everything that I had learned (and was still learning, from the Internet) over the decade since I'd initially created them. In some ways, this was a good thing, because I really had learned a lot between the ages of 13 and 23! Unfortunately, if Raven's Children ended up feeling like a mishmash of cultural influences that never quite meshed, this is EXACTLY why. I took something that I had created and built into a finished state in my teens, then began adding things I'd found on the Internet that seemed cool, fascinating, or fun to draw. It's probably a miracle that it's as coherent as it is.
Not to mention I'd discovered ~REALISM~ and was dead-set on making the story as dark and gritty as possible. There would be cursing! Sex! Nudity! Blood! I was a grownup, by golly, and I wasn't going to pull any punches.
This was not going to end well.