The Drowned Underside

Summary:

A jar of water and an underwater reality with a siren.

The Drowned Underside

(account deleted) 17 Jul 2021 05:12

I currently have a flawed draft here: http://rpcauthority.wikidot.com/forum/t-14140920/the-drowned-underside

Two crits both stated that it needed more.

I have an idea I want to play around with, but I'd like some second thoughts. I'm having enough trouble that I feel like making a page here about it.

Anomaly + Story:

• Jar of water.
• Water is infinite.
• Occasionally, bloated tiny humanoids come out. They're buoyant, 98% water and dead.
• There's an underwater reality where a siren lures people to their death.
• The siren is actually a human reincarnated into an underwater Guardian angel hell-bent on punishing people who wronged her lover before she died.
• The underwater Guardian angel lures people to her domain where they bloat into these little water balloon things.
• The underwater Guardian angel isn't a pretty humanoid with wings. She's a mass of eyes and fins and maybe a couple of mouths here and there. She's meant to be an underwater deep sea creature interpretation of a biblically accurate angel. Yep. This creepy slimy eyeball thing is some dude's dead liver reincarnated as a creepy guardian siren abomination thing.
• The Authority contains this bitch and sends a CSD down there for study.
• Turns out she ain't too happy that the Authority is getting between her and her lover.

That's all I got so far. It's definitely a far stretch from what I originally had, but I feel like this is unique enough. Thoughts?

Re: The Drowned Underside

Almarduk 17 Jul 2021 21:45

1. I'd give some more thought as to why the water is in the jar. Maybe the siren dimension can only be accessed by a special kind of water that was destroyed or lost, whether intentionally or otherwise, which led it to be contained within the jar.
2. Such a change implies a previous period in which the siren was not in the jar (good title by the by, "Siren in a Jar"). This allows you to do some very neat things with imagery: build up the siren to be an angelical, horrible and mighty being, starved by being in the jar (all of this going off of what you had in the prior version of this draft).
3. Divinity is often seen as bright, beautiful, and untouchable. Corrupted/tattered/rotted divinity is a great aesthetic that benefits from taking what you expect from a spiritual entity and bringing it down to the exact opposite end of the beauty spectrum.
4. This kind of requires you to build up your thing as something divine, whether by directly describing it as so (or implying it to be) or relying on semantically associated language to make the reader come the exact kind of imagery you're going to tear down.
5. The background narrative is nice I think, but lacks a thematic link to the whole siren/angel thing. An example of what I mean: the Lover managed to capture the Siren's love (unusual, since Sirens are usually more concerned with eating), then left. This forces the Siren to change somehow, whether in character or physically, which leads it to a path that ends in its current entrapment. (You don't need to use this, it's just an example I threw together because I couldn't find the words to show what I'm talking about)
6. The play between Siren and Angel gives a lot of interesting angles. Is it an Angel that is using its inherent divine beauty as a Siren, or is it a Siren that appears an Angel to fulfill a goal? Which of the sides is more important? Is there some sort of ambiguity in the line between "divine beauty" or pretension thereof?