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Meet Red Savina
🕑 Added 2019-05-12 19:07:15 +0000 UTCSo if I’m going to write a screenplay, what’s it going to be about?
I mean, it’s going to be about a giantess, because hi, hello, have we met? Okay, beyond that. As I put it on my web site, giants range the gamut from gentle to apocalyptic. But I’ve just finished one of my longest-ever pieces about mostly gentle giants and wanted to switch up, and monster movies are pretty classic. Beyond that, I already had a monster giantess character bouncing around in my head: Red Savina. To explain her, I’ll have to back up a little.
I’ve had a coyote woman character named Chipotle for years, but she only existed in online roleplay. As you might expect, this meant she stayed a little nebulous: different sizes, retcons, contradictory back stories, you know the drill. Her settled constants became that she’s a successful chef and she’s married to another woman—to Kitana, a dragon/kitsune hybrid who pretty much qualifies as a kaiju. Chipotle is, well, not a kaiju.
But what if she somehow acquired a kaiju alter ego, kind of like Jekyll & Hyde but if Hyde was a giant sexy dragon/coyote woman? This is an idea that Kitana and I developed in roleplaying, with the notion that “Red Savina” emerged from Chipotle’s own secret desires and Kitana’s magic. When I started kicking around the idea of a screenplay again (I’ve kicked it before without getting anywhere), Red Savina was an obvious choice for the kaiju.
Okay, but Saida & Autumn throws a wrench in here. Chipotle exists in the world of the Giants’ Club, so she exists in the world of Mensura. Finally giving her a set-in-text canonical version in Mensura, though, meant setting limits the same way creating the canonical versions of Saida and, for that matter, the rest of the world set limits. On F-Chat, Discord, IRC, et. al., we can have giants routinely go on city-smashing dates with their friends, but a consistent long-term setting featuring that would…let’s just say it would be decidedly different from Mensura’s milieu.
So I thought: if there’s a canonical story Chipotle and a separate roleplay version of her that I play fast and loose with, why not do the same for Red? Set the screenplay somewhere entirely new, with entirely new characters, and a new coyote woman who finds that she’s perhaps inconveniently changing into a monster giantess.
The more I thought about that, the more my story mind went to town on essential questions. If I kept that original Jekyll and Hyde notion, just who is the new Jekyll? Creating Mr. Hyde was Jekyll’s intent, but he got out of hand—is the same true for Red Savina? Who’s the story’s viewpoint character? (In the original The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the viewpoint character is one of Henry Jekyll’s friends.) Is Red Savina herself the antagonist? (The monster isn’t always the true villain in many of these stories, after all.) Just who is it who’s trying to stop Savina? How difficult would stopping her likely be?
Well, let’s go to camera one, Bob:
I’m going to guess the answer to that last question is “pretty difficult.”
Next up: just how do you start writing a screenplay, anyway? (Foreshadowing: I have not technically started writing the screenplay yet. But it’s shocking how many notes I have. All of them. I have all the notes. Except for the ones I’m still writing.)
Art by Ken Cougr, who you‘re all already supporting anyway, right?
