Dumb ideas for your comic/novel that you are glad you scrapped

[aqua03]

So, I just remembered that when I was writing DRGN/DRAGOONS, one idea I had o make the world seem "unique and alien" was to create a new language, and then write the comic entirely in said new language and provide a translation guide for the readers....

I'm kinda glad that didn't go anywhere...

But that got me thinking: Did you guys have any ideas that you thought were good ideas at the time, only to realize that you were glad you scrapped them in the end?

Have fun sharing!

[roddelrosario23]

The comic I made is a world where superpowers and people who have them are called Aces and there is this one character named Carl Reeves aka Coral who was scrapped he had the ability to secrete calcium carbonate (what corals are made from) from his pores to form a hard coating he's like colossus from xmen but coral, I thought it was stupid so I ended his concept.

[vothnthorvaldson]

Same with the constructed language! Although I did not scrap it entirely, I kept it for a few written notes and will present it as extras.

What I'm really happy to have scrapped are a few lengthy discussions between a goddess and a few humans, retrospectively that was super tacky and a bit out of character.

[spadesart]

I scrapped gruphex because i didnt know what to do with him, even though he was introduced like a main cast character. he had a small arc in planning but it no longer fit the story as i developed it.

cut a sexual comment from williams neighbor irt william biting them because it wasnt established that they dated and are comfortable with that level of exchange.

scrapped characters in chapter 5 belonging to a spinoff idea because im not making the spinoff and theyd just waste screen time, and i cut a chapter involving sirens taking over the eclipse for the same reason.

I also decided to change victors demeanor because he was falling into the "big scary poc" trope. Im also reworking his backstory to something more tasteful than originally planned because it was pretty meh.

[Rhonder]

The middle phase of my comic was initially muuuuuch longer than the final, edited down version ended up being... I kind of alluded to it in this forum topic I made last year during the writing phase:

Hey there! I'm in the process of writing the plot/script for a short one-shot comic and ran into the title question while examining my story/characters. First I'll define what I'm referring to as an extraneous character: -A character that makes sense to exist in the setting you're writing, but that has little-to-no real plot relevance. Essentially a character that's kind of there for fluff, more or less. The set up for my cast (currently) is an adventurer group of 4 people, then a rival grou…

Basically I initially had a whole "Main group vs rival group" competition thing going on to try and get the treasure back (i.e. the rival group was trying to swoop in and nab it first so they could get the reward). In the middle there was an intermittent fight scene between the two groups that resolved with the rival group winning and kind of drugging/putting the main cast to sleep, but then they got trapped by the thief and when the main group catches up, they banded together for the greater good of getting the treasure back...

Like, I could have polished it into a good segment, but the thing is: my page count goal for the project was ~50... and even after removing 4 of the characters and completely redoing the segment in question, I'm still on track to end closer to 65 xD so for this particular project it was very much a dumb idea.

[Iris-Grimoire]

Splitting Image specifically:

• Mortimer was a pretty boy, straight up. When I went back to read up on the old draft it had a baffling amount of inconsistencies solely because he was around 25, not to mention his character not adding up to being a repentant tired person when he's still young and stupid. Middle aged and mostly stupid is better.
• Instead of black magic, he had a contract with an elder god called The Jinxer. There's being misled into doing bad things for the greater good, and there's looking at Cthullu and saying 'yeah you're trustworthy let's hear your terms'.
• I'll get to this in a few months in Chapter 1, but in the original version of the library scene, Mortimer still tries to be buddy buddy with the queen and the draft implies he's still in love with her. Big yikes from 16 year old me, to make the supposed sympathetic character trying to get the moves on a widow who's not looking for a relationship anymore.
• At some point Mortimer and Veriesin were supposed to have a petty argument, until I noticed this was the forced conflict scene that I hate in every movie it's in and just decided to find another way to get them from point A to point B. This is also OOC, because while Mortimer can get offended and argue with her, he's very calm and wouldn't start digging up dirt over nothing.

On the same universe as SI, but not on a story I intend to make as webnovel, I had a couple in a story where one person was 18 and the other was older than Earth. Yeah... no. I had to rewrite and trash a lot of scenes that made younger me happy and hyped but it was for the best to get rid of something so creepy in hindsight.

[NRScott]

A car accident. It had actually been planned from the beginning of plotting. My character was supposed to lose a leg in the accident to set up for book two. I had all the little bits of foreshadowing planted (making everyone buckle seatbelts before he would drive, a close call at a stop sign, etc)... In the end, my characters came to a good HFN and I wanted to put them to rest as a standalone novel. (Note: This is in my KDP published story, not on Tapas)

[NRScott]

I am a MASSIVE fan of May/December relationships so I probably would have really enjoyed the younger character with the older than Earth character. When age differences are done correctly it just gives me the warm fuzzies. (Though I've read a lot that I had to stop part way through because it read more like the older person taking advantage of someone young and naive, rather than a mutual partnership built on trust and affection).

[Iris-Grimoire]

It does work, especially if you go into the intricacies of a character that'll be a blink of an eye in the other's life, but the power dynamics there were out of control and the 18 year old definately isn't mature enough to make that kind of choice for life. In the end it worked way more with the group's relationship as a whole where everyone has a say in the journey, rather than an unnerving and overdone "oh no I can't let you get in danger, I lost too many people before".

It also makes for a very fun scene later on where the older character has to distract the younger one from certain death with his powers, and he 100% feels like he just sexually harassed her because he should have something in his incredible wisdom that could've had a better result. If they were actually in love, it'd feel really creepy, but with the new dynamic it becomes exclusively about "hey my magic gives me WAY too much power over my friends and I don't know if I'm losing control or I just couldn't make a better plan, this sucks".

[azzy-m]

Setting aside the fact I originally had it planned that one of the characters jack off in the comic (please don't ask for context, it's an idea I briefly entertained)

1. In the VERY FIRST rendition of the story, Marcus (then the love interest, currently the protagonist) was kind of an asshole. I wouldn't say he's impossible to root for, it's more like "how is anyone supposed to genuinely fall in love with this guy". Back then he's that kind of possessive love interest that, when he sees that someone is even remotely interested in the girl he's pursuing, he gets pissed. Okay so yes, maybe a little hard to root for.... Now he's a nice character, don't worry.

2. So one of my characters, Terry, has a love interest named Robin (who isn't introduced in the current comic yet and won't be until, give or take, late into 2019, but it's ok I think). Back when I was working things around for the 2018 version of the comic, they started out hating each other because Terry had exposed a really dear secret of Robin's that only she was trusted with, to the rest of the student body, and she saw nothing wrong with it. I think I don't have to explain why it's scrapped, but just in case, it provides a "yikes" dynamic to when they eventually fall in love and makes Terry really unlikeable. If anything, I was trying to go for a kind of Bubbline dynamic since they're sort of inspired by both of them, but I didn't want to entirely copy them.

[DiegoPalacios]

For my current comic, i go with the motto of "if it looks stupid but it works, it's not stupid".

I mostly scrap plot and character ideas that don`t work well with the tone of my story.

[morganicfoods]

For my comic (Anecdote of Error), I originally had one of my characters do a really overdramtic soliloquy about how the other characters had changed them into a better person. This character was watching from afar as the other characters played basketball. When I made this scene I had no idea I was gonna make that story into a comic, and so I didn't revisit this scene again until like April... I took it out immediately lol. No part of this scene makes sense with the way the story is now... it's been through a lot.
Also, at the very, very beginning one of the characters, Yensha, was supposed to be the main character, Atshi's older sister. It did not make any sense even at the time.
Looking back at my old notes for this story is so hilarious because it's changed so much.

[sarrowsmith10]

For Goblins of Razard, my two main protagonists (Hawk and Reign) were originally supposed have a romantic relationship. It got scrapped because it didn't make sense for the story, and it turns out they just don't have that sort of chemistry. It was a nice thought I guess, and sometimes I still do art with them together like that, but its not canon.

[NickRowler]

The series The Robot Zombie Space Pirate was originally a collab with someone that I had a few falling out with. The series was rewritten when I was in a dark place and I need to just express emotions. But there was a lot of stuff that changed.

• There was a MC named Benny who was a hyper-feminine hetrosexual boy. It was partly removed due to me worrying that the "jokes" written for him came off a little too mean. I did want to add him back into the rewritten comic but never found a place for him.

• Kev was part of a cult called the Holy Sandwich and there was a competing cult called Mother. This was removed due to is being way too weird and dialog was changed to be Christian instead. However a reference to Mother is still seen on one panel

• Space Cadet was originally an angel ninja vampire from Oz. He was suppose to be the opposite of a robot zombie space pirate but was changed to just being the opposite of a space pirate.

...
The series Crow's Worth is sort of based off a story I wrote in high school. I ended up rewriting a lot of it due to the original had a lot of non-sense.

• Crow stole a magical pencil from a narcissistic cartoonist, said pencil had the power to bring drawings to life. With the pencil, he drew a crude drawing of man who died 14 years ago. The crude drawing then reunite with his grieving wife and they both live together as a happy couple. Um, do I have to explain why I removed this...

• As a young teen, I guess I was not 100% aware of problematic relationships. That being said...Miss (a 36 year old woman) and Nono (1000 year old demon who looks like a child) had somewhat of romantic feelings for each other. The both used to be a couple as a younger kids but broke up after Nono killed her brother. I removed the whole romance thing and changed it to them being friends as kids. Nono was also shown to being close to her brother when they were kids

• Miss grew up in a cult called the Nightcrawlers which worshiped her father like a god. She pissed them off by marrying an outsider. They put a hit out on her and she had to hide. The assassin carried around little gongs and hit them before they killed you. I removed it because it was so god damn stupid. Nightcrawlers were sort of reworked into the Guardians. The Guardians don't want to hurt Miss, they want to stop Miss from hurting herself.

[rajillustration]

Mine had talking dogs.

[AceRagz]

Me and Typh had a third contributor to our comic at one time and about 80% of his work has been purged from the comic which was a lot...and I mean a lot of his two main characters having weird cosplay sex, squirrel characters named: Peanut, Waffle, Pancakes....frikkin...Pancakes.....groans, characters committing suicide with little to no reason than he was feeling down that day and decided okay let's self hang some characters! One he later regretted he wrote in this whole convoluted story line where he was actually killed by another character due to some secret spy shenanigans in a war that was part of the later chapters. I rescued the character though since he came up with Link's name but I drew his design I felt obligated to bring him back as an actual character for the reboot with a more down to earth and humble story.

[Lucca_Vendramel]

I'm not sure there were any major bad ideas I scrapped for Everdream... I think mostly everything I did was reasonably good

[indagold]

I wanted to first do a 10 page short story introducing the minor characters of my longer story: All Broken Gods until I realized no one would know who these characters were until 100 pages in of the final story, I reveal a massive plot point that would only be revealed towards the end of broken gods and I would introduce a character that never will appear in the story at all, not to mention it would be too edgy and over the top for a literal 10 pages comic that was suppose to ease you into a longer plot that contained more serious stuff. why the hell did I think that was a good idea?

[Tanako]

dont want to say because it could potentially be a spoiler however, it was too late to scrape so i molded it into something else so i can finish the series faster. lol

[NRScott]

@rajillustration You say this like it's a bad thing (For real though, any form of talking animal in a book makes me so happy)