[Webcomic] Marie & The Adventurer's League

Goodbye to Marie And The Adventurer's League
Goodbye to Marie and the Adventurer's League


I apologize in advance, I use the words "sucking and fucking" like 100x in this document.


Long story short, I'm killing off this comic; not because I want to stop making comics, or I don't like it, but because it's a beginner project, my first comic, and while I'll revisit some ideas, there's a lot it needs. If you want to know how the story ends, or what the plan was, CTRL+F "So how does it end?!" I may not publish this fucking… Essay, but I'll review my points in the morning to see if I still feel this way.


  1. There's a weird issue with what's canon., It went from the CYOA to the "reboot / not reboot" to the canon / not canon story. This was called out back in October when I thought "Ah, I'll just sum up the plot to this point in a middle schooler's essay." I did a reboot then retconned the reboot, making everything before it canon, then doubled back, then doubled back again, so everything before November is a jumbled mess

  2. The comic has a ton of emotional baggage. I'm a lot better than I was a year ago, and it's kind of a drain

  3. I don't want to write forever stories. Seriously, I don't. The plan for Marie is so long, and has so much stupid intertwining bullshit it'll never be finished.

  4. Marie and Spinnelope are cute, but every other character just stands around while they do stuff. I could fix that, but I kind of hate the other characters, and I don't know what to do with them. Jaina replaced Taylor as "Person who knows nothing but asks questions," Taylor is just a sad pawn with no agency, Uncle is a martyr I keep chickening out of killing, and I should have just given Marie a girlfriend from the very beginning, I thought I wanted to write romance, but it turns out I actually didn't. Instead I wanted my MC to have a girlfriend who went on kick ass adventures with her. The main cast needs like 3 or 4 people.

  5. I can produce 300 comics in the time it took me to produce my first 150 with less stress, higher quality, and better pacing.

  6. There's a tone issue. It's real fucking weird to go from laughing super heroes saving their friends to a frog drinking whisky thinking hard about killing himself. In retrospect, frogs should probably not be contemplating suicide. Someday I will post this and everyone will laugh.

  7. You're gonna laugh, but part of what made me want to quit was reading the comic where Mookie had Snout slap a halfling with a flaccid cock, and his fans fucking loved it. You can make anything and someone, somewhere, will enjoy it. It's insane that no-one calls him out and it made me re-think why I do comics. I can put anything in a comic and find fans. Seriously, look at all the comics in the PYF Thread, and the BYOB Thread, and each one is someone's favorite. Maybe not someone on SA necessarily buuuuuttt….

  8. Thorsby's comics are amazing and they look like… That. I learned more about comic making, plot execution, character personalities and design from Thorsby then I did from Zoophobia, or Helluva Boss, or Gunnerkrigg Court or like a million other webcomics. You can create something really engaging with Thorsby art if you execute it well.
  9. I don't ever want to slap my readers in the face with a flaccid cock. If I'm going to write a story about fucking, I'm going to be up front that this is the sucking and fucking comic. I'll draw it with one hand, and everyone will know what's up. Marie was becoming a sucking and fucking comic pretty goddamn fast. The next comic will probably be "heavier" in sucking and fucking but "lighter" in the mood. This is not a threat.
  10. Most importantly, I don't want to do it anymore. I wrote out the next pages, and thought "nay, I'm out." It'd take me a year almost to get to the cool Adventurer's League College Arc, and then we'd sit around in college for a year, and if I want to write a story about college, I'll write a story about college. I won't write a story about college, because I know nothing about college other than studying, eating ramen, and crying.

  11. The artist that got me into creating content also gave up on their first comic after making a mess, and they became an insane success. (Hello Vivziepop.)

  12. The setting is too much at once. The plot is too much at once.

  13. The expanded Boba universe is dumb. I'm not Terry Pratchet, and Discworld wasn't his first story.

===========================

"So how does it end?!"

===========================


First of all, here's the script for the next month, the way I write, is I have an overarching plot map, a timeline, and then I write the scripts 5 - 10 in advance, that way I know if I need to slip something in to make things a bit smoother for the reader. There were 3 intended endings, I was going to pick one when I got further in the story and felt it out a bit more, and a couple I ended up thinking of as the comic went on, though you'll notice they get closer and closer to where we are now in the story, because I kept wanting to end it more and more.


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Currently intended Ending

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From where we are right now in the story, Ginn would save Uncle and turn over the assassin's location that Jaina had hired to kill Caesar. While Ginn was saving Uncle, Frankie, who was revealed to be working for Ginn and not the fox gloves, would inform the two cops Marie killed at the beginning of the reboot that she was at the old factory. She would end up getting pinned inside with explosives she had placed to bring the whole building down, and would barely manage to escape while she fought them. Sarin would reveal she was also a sorcerer. This was intended to give Taylor a form of magical tutorage outside of the Adventurer's League and the current information about magic. Which I had wanted to use to justify Taylor just flat out being better than everyone else at Magic, but also suffering from impostor syndrome because of it. "Am I a great sorcerer, or am I just cheating because I'm being given shortcuts?"


Chase reveals that Claire had never intended to pay Marie, as she had killed that bald gnome from the beginning of the story. Marie would have to hand over Taylor if she wanted to be an adventurer. Marie would fight Claire, and end up proving to be more trouble than she's worth when she decimates (literally) Claire's fighting force with the help of Jaina, Spinnelope, Uncle, Ginn, Frankie, and Sarin. Claire would finally cut a deal. She'd give Marie her money if she went and killed Caesar. Since Marie was already intending to do this, she would go ahead. We would learn about the singular deity in this world "God," not a judeo-christian God, but an omnipresent (but not omniscient) person that ruled the entirety of fate and shaped their world in their image.


This would just seem as an oddity until later. Marie and the group go and kill Caesar and almost completely wipe out the foxgloves. This ends up also wiping out most of the protectorate in the city, and with most of them gone respawning, Claire takes over, and upends most of the infrastructure. Sabaton becomes self-governed away from the Communistic society, and is heavily coded as a very bad thing. The group doesn't care though, because they finally have a party, and would be becoming adventurers. They then finally go to the Adventurer's League, but UH OH! There's an exam, and they must pass to become adventurers. They do not pass, but the Queen herself steps in and makes a special exception for them. We end up finding out that Marie's dad fucked the queen a lot, but didn't really want to, and that he had done something to Marie. It loops back to what Spinnelope had said to Marie: "You're not chosen because you're special, you're chosen because you're not." Marie is basically a genetic super soldier with super magic human juice, and has been getting even more juiced (unintentionally) by Spinnelope feeding her life force. A normal person, it'd just leave. Marie, every person she kills, makes her a little stronger.


The Queen works with Marie, and we have a few light-hearted adventures. School stuff, where Marie has relationship issues as she wants a polycule because she is surrounded by people who want to fuck her, but Spinnelope is insanely jealous. The Queen takes interest in their studies, after that bit there's a dungeon "arc" where Marie finds a gundam and fights a Kaiju, but the gundam blows up. Marie and Spinnelope would end up getting in a war with the Dealmaker and their dragon. The Dragon would end up being an agent for a single omniscient deity that runs the fae and all the ley lines of fate. For some reason, they're super threatened by Marie.


Then there's an arc where Marie has to study for exams, but Spinnelope is bored and wants to fuck / make out all the time and it ends up fucking with her grades. The Dealmaker tries to break them up by making it look like Marie is cheating on Spinnelope, but instead of being a huge arc, it's a funny one where they just communicate, agree that magic is real and they're fighting a magic trickster fairy, so neither is probably cheating. The Dealmaker lets slip about the whole god thing, and they eventually ask the Queen about it, because Spinnelope only knows of their existence but not their importance.


It would be loosely implied that God is an author, or even a stand-in for the audience, and if Marie wanted peace in her world, they would have to kill God. Sarin talks about how humanity wanted to kill God, because he had decided that Capitalism was a divine right. The Queen reveals that The Dealmaker would be the oldest Fae dating back to the birth of the world, and that she had made a deal with God to allow peaceful Communism to reign for 1,000 years. With Sarin's and Spinnelope's help, Marie, Taylor, The Queen of the World, and Jaina would team up to kill God. By killing God, they would destroy the concept of Fate and give the world free will, essentially killing the only way capitalism could exist in the world. There would be no system in which the world would be bound to any code of its own, and all of them would live happily ever after. In the last dungeon, they need a portal to go into God's domain. There'd be a fight against God's soldiers, and they'd be implied to be people who Spinnelope and her Fae folk had gotten into deals who failed, and were forced to fight as it was their fate.


They get the portal, the Queen, Sarin, and Taylor sacrifice themselves to kill God, and Taylor is reborn as a child with horns, and heterochromia, who Spinnelope, Jaina, and Marie agree to raise together. They live happily ever after. This is the canon ending if you care about that sort of thing. This is the closest the story will ever get to finishing.


I'm sorry.

===========================

The Original Ending (When it was a CYOA)

===========================


The original ending was written when this was "The Queen Dies At The End," I was still thinking of the Boba extended universe. At this point, the story was a thriller about revolution.


Marie and Taylor meet a Demon Touched and a Cobbold (Demon Touched are basically tieflings, Cobbold are… These fucked up creatures I never got around to introducing.) Who wants to kill the Queen because she's a fucking Lib, and is slowly letting her communistic empire be taken over by capitalism. That was the whole point of the money as food and magic thing. The idea was that the consolidation of power was happening, but the Queen was too comfortable to do anything about it, and cities on the fringe of the empire were falling to capitalism. Jaina and Uncle and Spinnelope weren't a part of the story yet.


Instead, the Deal Maker and Marie were going to be fucking and sucking and Taylor was going to be like 14. It was going to be a wolf and her cub, where Marie raises Taylor the same way Ben raised her. Votes were going to decide what flavor of mental illness Taylor would have (with there being no option of being mentally well,) Ben was originally intended to be a very good Father, and it was going to be that he didn't have cancer like Marie thought, but instead was poisoned by the Queen. Human sickness was always cancer and those weird dimensional buildings like the factory. Claire was going to be a pivotal part of the story, taking the role of Uncle. She was going to be Marie's sponsor for the League. The Dealmaker would have shadowy talks with Claire about how they're setting Marie up to become the greatest in the world. There'd be hints of what it would cost Marie, but we'd never find out what. Before Taylor was Taylor, she was just "The Martyr." That was what Taylor's job in the story was, to become a fucked up ball of neurosis and get herself killed by killing the queen. There'd be a vote on the job, which would be an arc that ends with Marie kills a bunch of cops and fox gloves, and basically ruins this gang.


Marie was also a much darker character. Her heavy drug use was supposed to severely fuck up her ability to teach Taylor, and Taylor was supposed to become increasingly depressed and lonely because of it. The voting mechanic would get pushier and pushier with Marie basically trying her best to get Taylor to become a fucked up addict, until either Marie decided to get clean, or depending on votes, gets so fucked up she guilts Taylor into heavy drug use. After the first job, Chase dips on Marie and Claire fronts the money in Chase's stead, but asks Marie to find Chase. Marie finds out Chase is this sleeping thing that ran away from the war that ended the world, because he had outside information that this place was a communist paradise, but someone was going to fuck all that up. He said he had to keep Marie out of the league. He turns into this huge fucked up monster, and Marie kills him, because the Deal Maker keeps telling Marie she's going to save the world.


In the Adventurer's League, Marie meets the next party members, there's three votes where Marie goes to these different ruins, with a total of 9 ruins planned, but each in a pack of three where'd we only go to one so A1 A2 A3, B1 B2 B3, C1 C2 C3. The A group finds out about human sickness, and that while it sucks, it's not super lethal. You just start spewing monsters and shit, so something else is killing off people with human sickness. We also find out that the Queen isn't immune to this disease like we thought. (She has it.) Marie becomes the top 50.


In the B series, Marie gets a super cool weapon of some sort. There'd be a vote, so it'd be like power armor, or a rail gun, or a lightsaber, and she'd become scary strong. The Adventurer's league would recognize her, and her party of four for their stunning service, and the Dealmaker would start dropping hints that the Queen might have had something to do with her dad's death. Marie becomes top 20.


In the C series, we find out that the Queen had gone to one of these bunkers on her own and basically found the equivalent of a 2020 military base in the year 1920 and basically conquered the world with technology 100 years more advanced than anything around her. They also find a curse bomb, and there'd be a vote whether Marie would use this thing that causes human sickness in a town, or sacrifice one or two of her party members. Marie becomes a top 5.


The Deal Maker offers Marie a shortcut to the number one spot, and Marie takes it with a fake vote, where all 3 options are grayed out, because Marie had already decided. This ends with Marie finally finding out the Queen had killed her Father because her Father had found out that the Queen's Neoliberalism was killing the world, and that she was planning to hand her empire off to capitalists so that she could retire.


Marie swears a blood oath, and the deal maker gets them all geared out to go and kill the Queen. There's a dungeon sequence again, this time the queen's castle. Every single ally Marie has made in the story dies. Anyone who survived to this point of the story also dies, until it's Marie, the Dealmaker, and Taylor fighting the Queen. The Queen reveals she's immortal, and can not die, that she is a dracolich, a dragon far beyond anything they have ever seen. We learn that she is the dragon from the co-running series Escape From Lab 619, and had killed off humanity for destroying the world. Marie and her party kill the queen multiple times. Before she has an idea, she hugs Taylor, tells her she loves her and asks Taylor to use Marie's energy to transmogrify the Queen instead of killing her.


Taylor turns the Queen into a Cat. It takes all the Energy Marie has. There's a fake out where Marie is dead. There's The End? And I make the thread wait a month for the actual Epilogue. The Deal Maker stepped in and used her energy to save Marie. Taylor had died, but was imprinted with some of the Dracolich's magic, and is instead reborn as a phoenix person, allowing me to use Taylor in a future story, without it actually being Taylor, and possibly re-use the Deal Maker. We learn that the fat cat and the pig from earlier were capitalists, and had orchestrated much of the evidence that was used to show the Queen was a centrist, and a representative republic is formed that ultimately turns the world over to capitalism. Marie gets her Pyrrhic victory. She lives an extremely blessed life, famous, beloved by everyone, but her glory was stolen and eaten. The very last line implies this is intentional, calling back to the 2nd comic ever where the Dealmaker had said "I will eat your glory," implying that she had set this entire thing up to put capitalists in charge of the world.


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Reboot Ending

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When I did the reboot, I decided to just fucking wing it. I had turned the Dragon the Queen was going to be into a dragon that was working with the Deal Maker, Uncle would take Claire's position being the sponsor, and after the thread voted on Jaina, Jaina would be the reason marine destroyed the Fox Glove's doing it to avenge Jaina's family the way she would want someone to avenge hers. Ginn became the group's Vegeta and… I was going to let the CYOA thread guide me.


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The ending I was going to go with just to let the story fucking end

===================================


While Marie is waiting at the factory to kill Ginn, Ginn kills Uncle and Taylor. Sarin agrees to take over Taylor's body, and they go to avenge their comrades and kill Caesar, and all the Fox Gloves, the Fox Gloves managed to kill Claire, and the police are protecting them, there's this whole war against the police and Ginn is this cackling villain the entire time but getting away. Finally, after murdering Caesar, and wanting to murder Ginn, Gerald gets Marie into the Adventurer's League, invoking her dad to do so. Marie agrees, but finds out that in order to do so, she has to let Ginn be her sponsor, and that in doing so, Ginn would be the only person it would be impossible for Marie to kill dating back to the whole adventurer's accord thing. Marie refuses, and they all get in a fight with Ginn. Sarin Dies, Spinnelope Dies, Jaina Dies, Marie kills Ginn, and then is allowed into the league anyway. Finding out this whole thing was just a set up to try to stop Marie from killing Ginn. Realizing the entire system is corrupt, we later see her wearing clothes similar to her Dad. She ends up in the Queen's Chambers and kills her. The epilogue is that with the Death of the Queen, the world was thrown into Peril and barons picked apart at the bones of this society.
 
I realized that I was in the wrong about the stupid child drinking liquor avatar, and that being perpetually outraged will also make you perpetually lonely. I'm trans-planting my project "Boots" which is a reboot of this thread into it's own thread, and coming back, if only so I'm not hanging out by myself anymore.

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

[Animated / Webcomic] Boots - Happy Queers Frolicking at the book fair. Original - Mature - Drawing

Below is Adventuring Boots is a story about Marie Petrovska, a saphic transfemme who works for the mob with her sister Jaina, to try and pay off her Uncle's massive bounty from his life of crime. Marie dreams of becoming an adventurer, a person who has become so strong and skilled in magic that...
 
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