Legend of LuikIt's time for a retrospective. When I started that Cartoon in '05, I thought it would be a simple animating out of Mookie's My Angel with limited use of artistic license. By the end of it's production it was entirely different cartoon and one with a story that I was pretty proud of. Even still I had some issues with Legend of Luik's plot upon its completion, and it has only been recently that I realize why.
The Main scene I had problems with was the one during the Bridge (2:55 to 3:25) Here the girl Katharina is supposed to make Luik realize what a monster he has become on his journey, but nothing she could do felt natural to the story. He practically realized it on his own while the rest of the time was padded with shots of the people he killed (just in case you forgot- dur hur hur).
The issue from the story is actually rooted to a scene (which also takes place during the bridge) in My Angel's story, but the blame is still mine, as this was the very first scene I gutted during my first rewrite. To show the moral high-ground that the hero possessed, Mookie had one of the villains Seduce the hero as a last resort and he resists her because he's fighting for more than lust. As Necessary as this scene was it seemed like a highly out of place move for the villainess to make (easily misinterpreted as a sign of the artist's deprived needs). In an attempt to fix this problem, I changed the Seducing woman to an innocent daughter of the villain. I took it too the opposite extreme by making her much more sympathetic as I developed the plot. The Girl and Luik end up switching roles as villain and hero over the course of the movie. Both of our movies ended up making the same mistake.
In both of these cartoons the character who should have been focused on to fix this issue was the Captured girl. In My Angel the girl is unconscious for the entire show, and in Legend of Luik she does nothing but forgive and enable the murderous side of the hero. I did flesh out a lot of this girls character in her story preceding the events of legend of Luik, but if I had developed a Passive heroine from her character and not made her accept the destruction of her village and death of her loved one, then I could have had some much better motivation in these characters and the plot would have been a little more solid..
In the end, I learned that Mario really messed up my view of the Hero rescues princess story structure, what with the entire focus on mario and making toadstool just wait there as a goal and not a character. I also learned that just building onto your characters more and more is a blind way to develop a story, and I should always continue researching on things I can apply to my writing.
