What are your scrapped stories?

[Kayke]

Oh gosh, my most recent dropped story was basically a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction. It was about a girl who's family was cursed to have to hunt demons/vampires/monsters but the curse also makes the eldest of the most recent generation super strong when they turn 16 (so they'll stand a chance against the demons)??? The demon hunting was not the focus at all though. It was a romance where she falls in love with this vampire who got turned in the 1920s and follows his own weird moral code and actually saved her once when she was a kid. Basically he falls for her and has to work his way into her good graces but she doesn't trust him because he's a vampire. Very Spike/Buffy. And she even has a little sibling who ends up trusting the vampire before she does.

I did some sketches for it and then decided to write it as a book instead of a comic... buuut my partner read it and was like "this is really derivative" so I dropped it to work on other stuff.

All that remains are some old character sketches:

I have other projects that are "in development" or "on hold" but not many that have been dropped completely.

[MinNCompany]

Ooh yeah, plenty. I think the most developed story ive shelved is a sci-fi slice of life about a mishmash family of people with superpowers, including 'twins' that experience severe pain when physically separated too far, a boy that can read minds only through lip contact, a mom and her two daughters, one of whom has telekinesis (which is an 'illegal' superpower in this world).

[Wolven_Sister]

Oh well! That's gonna be a lot of cover.

My very first comic I ever made was way back when i was 12. I was heavily obsessed with manga (still love manga, though my addiction is now healthy I guess haha!). I can't remember what it was called, but it was about this woman who had cat ears and a tail. She was raised in a monestary and skilled in shaolin. Oh my gawd this sounds just terrible typing this. She was supposed to go to the west to save her younger sister. If you've ever seen the anime Saiyuki, this comic was heavily inspired by it.

The 2nd comic I made shortly after was called Nothing More. It was about an orphaned young woman who lived with her dog. She meets a vampire named Alistarr who became her fatherly figure of sorts. She was also supposed to fall in love with a demon named Clay. It was heavy in religious themes, angels, demons--the whole shebang. Soooo cringey....

The 3rd and 4th comics I made were when I was 14 and they were supposed to be webcomics. They were both BL themed. One was called Hazardous and it was about a police officer who is teamed up with a cyborg to stop some insane female villain (who--plot twist!--was the police officer's sister). Romance between the officer and cyborg ensued. The other webcomic I can't really remember, but it had basically no plot at all. These two webcomics never premiered online.

Then I made another manga-like comic called Connor: Most Wanted. About a werewolf and a military guy trying to catch him. Think of Moby Dick and Captain Ahab, but with werewolves and set in WWII.

Around that same time, my friends and I were working on a comedy webcomic called 3 Rednecks And Some White Trash (3RSWT). This one we actually hosted online and it was basically our circle of friends and our fictional ventures including a mysterious beeping sound, gender swapping, and more. It was hilarious and it had decent reception back in the day. However, all of us went our separate ways so the comic went on an infinite hiatus (we didn't fight or anything, we just all drifted apart). I think I actually still have all the pages we made...

This doesn't even count all of the literary stories I created then dropped. if I did that, this post would be INCREDIBLY long!!

[joannekwan]

WELL (busts out my Word docs)
Here I'm only showing stuff from when I was 16 to present day. Anything in black is dead, green is completed, blue is still in development.

All of these have at least one paragraph written about them and are meant as comics, since that's what I do (except maybe like one or two that I actually wrote out as a short story). But I've been wanting to rethink a few as novels. They'll always be here if I ever want to revisit the stories or characters and rework them.

[J.Lovelace]

Omg I organized my ideas in the same way as you.

[AmysGames]

I have a bad habit of hanging onto story ideas indefinitely, so I don't know that I really have "scrapped stories" as "stories I tell myself I'll get to eventually but realistically I probably never will." Though I have several old fanfiction comics I've long since given up on, if that counts.

[Weevmo]

Oh! I love questions like this!
The first scrapped idea I've had was one I pitched to a network that got rejected. It was a pretty poor idea in hindsight, but I learned a lot! It was basically about a strange rooster called Shygo who was trying to be as human as possible; even adopting a human child and raising her!

I may come back to it and rework it someday.

THEN there was Eb and Flow, the tale of two siblings caught on either side of a war between humans and monsters. It was a neat idea, but the concept just didn't get together and I ended up merging it with another idea about a blue cat called Dirk who is trying to become the greatest hero of his line. I do this a lot: combining two different stories for the greater good.

Yet again, I want to make this a comic someday with some reworking! I have a lot of ideas.

...AND A TON more but there's a couple for here. Thank you!

[joannekwan]

Your ideas are so cute! Funnily enough I had a story about a rooster who tries to be human and he's been adopted into a human family. xD

[Weevmo]

Thank you, Joannekwan! That's interesting that you've had a similar idea; I guess rooster's are just a prime bird for storytelling, eh? XD

[MinNCompany]

These are all so cool! I really enjoy stories with family themes

[shazzbaa]

Ooooo interesting topic!!
Most of my ideas from middle/highschool can be found in the scribbles in the NostalgiaQuest tag on my blog; they fall into the "probably scrapped by now even though I never formally killed them" category. Most of these were intended to be written stories because comics hadn't occurred to me yet!

I have one story that's kind of in the "On Hold Indefinitely" category called Made Forest, about a wizard who built a forest out of a city, twisting buildings and technology into trees and plants and animals. I wrote a big chunk of script for it, and a pitch -- I still love the idea, but the point at which I was most passionate about it, I used it as a project for my advanced scripting class, where it was torn apart.
My mistake was that I didn't realise this was a deeply personal story. I definitely believe that watching that story be destroyed by my peers taught me a LOT about storytelling, and the story absolutely needed brutal critique, but it also taught me that nothing kills the soul of an idea like crowdsourced critique -- the advice of twenty different voices who haven't yet learned to help you find your own idea's soul rather than remake it in their own shifting image. In the end, I couldn't find my voice in it anymore, and I set it aside.

Only one story idea was consciously scrapped -- a smaller story idea I created for class with the working title of Break Out, which was about a kid with DID/MPD trying to escape his treatment centre and discovering a lurking evil in its basement, while the two members of his system learned to finally work together. I did a little bit of script and a lot of concept stuff for class.

I've been really interested in functional multiplicity for a long time, and I still would really like to write a story with a multiple character who isn't a mess, but ultimately I felt like this particular concept hit an uncomfortable place of not being kind to anyone -- it had a lot of resentment left over from my younger self's mistrust of mental health institutions, while also operating from the assumption that this character would be presented as "crazy" and not being particularly kind to him, either. I still don't disagree with the thing I wanted to say -- that focusing on making someone "normal" is misguided priorities -- but the other messages that accidentally slipped into it became more and more uncomfortable the more I learned, so I dropped the story.

All the rest of my story concepts are in the weird space of "maybe I'll make this someday and maybe it's just for fun and I won't really know until one of them accidentally becomes a comic." Runewriters was never supposed to be a finished comic -- I thought I was just making it for fun!

[Weevmo]

Thanks, Min! Yes, me too! Part of the reason I want to make stories is that I don't see a lot about familial relationships out there (Mostly Romantic) and I want to change that! Dysfunctional or not haha!

[indagold]

I did do a story when I was 13 that took place in the same universe as one of my current comics. It was about a king that sent a plague upon the land and it was up to a group of people to save it. Now ten years older I do want to rewrite the entire thing and give it a better plot but it would be wayyy too long to make.

[SteamTK]

I know the feeling. I have a lot that logically I'll never actually do anything with, but I'll still think about.

[insomniascrawl]

I dropped my old comic called Rooftop Bookshop and wow. My friends were piiiissed lol, but I needed to focus on (Semi) Super, I just needed to take a change in direction creatively.

Aside from that I posted 2 short lived attempts at what is now (Semi) Super
and dozens of others that never made production whose names are forgotten now >_>

[MinNCompany]

You shouldve just put it on indefinite hiatus ;w; i cried a lil inside when i realized it disappeared from my reading list

Haha, I'm just glad you know what you like and what you want to work on don't worry

[ahhvecadoes]

I don't really scrap stuff, it all just floats around until it gets swallowed into a bigger story. Heart Hex is like... three different stories I've been writing over the past 15 years that never really came to fruition until I mashed them together.

I have two other stories in development, one a horror comic about centipedes, and the other about 20-somethings living in the Southwest during the late 70s.

I think the only thing that might be potentially scrapped is the fan comic I started of Tanz der Vampire. I wanna finish it but... not sure if a fan comic is worth that effort anymore. We'll see.

[tuesdayisms]

All of my "scrapped" ideas that I can think of at the moment were pretty embarrassing things that I came up with when I was younger. The one scrapped idea I can think of is a world where children are now in charge now that adults had disappeared I didn't really feel a connection to it.It's been done many times before anyways.

I do have ideas that I don't know what to do with/holding off until I get my first series established or completed-

One is a more comedic (yet potentially heartbreaking) tale of two rat 'sisters' each a year apart. (Mind you, that's a big difference in rat years). There's the perky, sociable Delilah and the cynical, but sensitive Delores.

Then there's this fantasy idea about this warrior who is exiled from her home because her race is nonviolent and she had tried to defend her village while the well-known hero was away. Eventually, she and the hero (who used to be her idol before her absence got her in trouble) team up to defeat monsters together, our protagonist using mostly magic and the other hero using mostly force. There might also be some romance involved with them. Not sure if I'm going back to this.

An older idea I had was about a recently outdated robot assistant teaming up with an autistic mechanic and other outdated robots to stop the latest model of robot assistant from using the chip inside people's heads that let them control the robots to take over their minds. It's a shame that I probably won't do this anytime soon, but I have other stories I'd like to tell first.

A more recent idea is a more gag a week style comic with some story elements about a jack rabbit who thinks he's a jackalope. I'm still working on developing it, but it's not a priority right now.

[insomniascrawl]

Lol, I'm in the process of trying to put together a website, I think I'm gonna put Rooftop Bookshop in an archive, maybe even add a bit to it in the future; I can let you know if you're interested I'm thinking about putting an alternate universe slightly more mature but very much of a mess version of them in my other comic because I really did love their characters tbh.

[NanettesClouds]

Oh boy, so I have this 6-page minicomic from like, 2 years ago I think? I stopped working on it after page 3, which is a shame because I'm pretty proud of these pages, and this is probably the only opportunity I'll have to share them. at this point though I don't think I could smoothly continue the project, style evolution and all that. Also, I lost my thumbnails for the other 3 pages. Anyways here it is:

I think the general story was that they while they were on their way back home she was going to see the remnants of all the terrible things the knight had to do to get to her, and then the King would arrange their marriage despite her thinking the Knight was a horrible monster.

Shrug emoji

I'm glad Dust was my first minicomic that I shared instead of this I guess. It's more fun and more in-line with the type of work that I wanna be known for, whereas this was too depressing and sad.