Barrens' End
1648 AN
Scope
The motivation behind building Barrens' End
So much space opera today feels like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. It is a faded shell of its former glory. While I am not saying that there isn’t any good space opera being written, but I have not been able to find the queer, fantastical space opera I want to see.
I want an expansive world filled with wonder, mystery, and magic that stretches endlessly into the past and the future. The sheer joy I once had in the genre has faded and gone away. I want it back.
What do I miss?
Hope, optimism, adventure. There is so much nihilism and unwarranted "realism" in the genre. We cannot travel faster than light. We have never met an alien species. These are the simplest and most fantastical elements of the genre. They exist to make it fun and instill wonder in the audience. It isn't that every story has to be happy or even optimistic, but at least for me, it needs to be fun. I am sick and tired of the grim, nihilistic, pessimistic, or some combination of the above stories that have been making the rounds recently.Let's Create Some Hopepunk
The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk.With more detail:
Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.That's it! That is the motivation right there. I miss characters that genuinely and sincerely care. That is what I want and why I want to do this. I love a good, queer, hopepunk space opera and they have been harder to find over the years, so I want to have one of my own so I can always have a place to go to that will allow me to run away into another world and find the story that I want.
The goal of the project
Barrens End is a Queer, Hopepunk Space Opera that will reject the heteronormativity and heterotemporality of the more mainstream worlds in the genre.
This is a large galaxy, inspired by our own Milky Way but not bound to it. It would be too much to incorporate all discoveries made by science in an ongoing sci-fi series, especially as that might require rewriting star systems to ensure they match exoplanet data. While I will not reject this information and may use it for inspiration, it will not be followed slavishly.
This world’s main goal is to inspire wonder and adventure in myself and others. As a result, these stories will lean heavily on creative imagery and interesting details to bring them to life, not to mention the lore. All that sweet, sweet lore.
This galaxy is not a place for a simplistic black and white morality or storytelling. While the morality will not default to gray, it must have the complexity to it.
In the end, this world will spawn a table top roleplaying game, flash fiction, story stories, novellas, and novels.
In my dreams it will have a streaming series, movies, video games, and anime/animated series. I have little control over the production of these forms of media they will remain in the realm of dreams.
Barrens' End's Unique Selling point
Purpose
Barrens End is Hopepunk, Queer Space Opera galaxy designed to bring wonder, adventure, excitement, and fun through non-heteronormative fiction and worlds that brings magic and awe to every element of the stories and lore.Positioning
Barrens End’s stories will flow out through lore, short stories, novellas, and novels as well as through the adventures players have through the RPG. As a fan of golden and silver age space opera, as well as Barsoom, the Lensmen, Star Wars, Star Trek, Farscape, Aliens, Spelljammer, Babylon 5, Darkover, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who, the Green Lantern Corp, the Cthulhu Mythos, and so many others, I want fans of these worlds to find a home in Barrens End. My goal is to take the lifetime of inspiration I have garnered from these world to craft a cosmos built on a foundation of interstellar wuxia where our heroes are focused on cultivating their talents and skills to such a degree of mastery that they are the best person they can be.Personality
Barrens End’s personality is sincerity and excitement. Sincerity is honest, wholesome, down-to-earth, and positive. Excitement is lively, exciting, imaginative, and daring.Unique Selling Point
Barrens End offers Queer, Hopepunk Space Opera Table Top RPG, books, short stories, and podcasts for anyone who wants to get lost in interstellar adventure and lore to inspire a sense of awe, wonder, and excitement in our players, listeners, and readers. Unlike most popular space opera, Barrens End focuses on character driven stories and not grand spectacle, so drama arises from interpersonal relationships and how they affect the groups they are a part of and how those groups affect them.Theme
Genre
Barrens End is a queer, hopepunk space opera, science fantasy, or technofantasy. What makes it unique is that in drawing on my inspirations from Lensmen and Barsoom to Dune and Star Wars, I knew that I wanted there to be deeper almost magical mysteries in the setting, so I am adding elements from Wuxia to give it a unique flavor.
Queer Fiction
Queer forms in writing express not only the urge to but the necessity of fracturing the traditional narrative structure or genre in order for queer authors or queer characters to express their world and make space for their stories — and in both the ordinary and extraordinary we find these queernesses of form.LGBTQIA+ characters and stories have been suppressed for so long that Queer writers and stories lack the forms, metaphors, and patterns that exist for the cisgender heterosexual writers and stories have benefited from and too many stories with queer characters and themes heteronormalize and cisnormalize their characters and stories to fit them into existing tropes. While this is not always wrong, it is unnecessary and problematic if we are going to creation a fictional language of our own. I am not claiming that I am the only one doing this, but I feel like it has to be built into the fabric of this setting so its characters and stories are not straight-washed to conform to a broken market that is hungry for new stories.
Hopepunk
Works in the hopepunk subgenre are about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges.
Space Opera
Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes science fictional space warfare, with use of melodramatic, risk-taking space adventures and chivalric romance. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it features technological and social advancements (or lack thereof) in faster-than-light travel, futuristic weapons, and sophisticated technology, on a backdrop of galactic empires and interstellar wars with fictional aliens, often in fictional galaxies.
Reader Experience
Barrens End is an ancient, lived in cosmos with a mystical and optimistic air that doesn’t ignore the existential and cosmic horror of life, but believes that their is a path through the darkness back to the light.
Another way to say this is:
The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacles to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.The real question is how will the mind adapt and convert these obstacles. Will it overcome it, obliterate it, force their way around or through it, choose a different path, or accept it and stop their progress. While that might not be the only ways character can react, they will have to confront, submit to, evade, or ignore the obstacle as their first reaction. So the readers will eventually encounter the obstacles and the choices that made the characters who they are and the new ones they encounter through the stories. Before the Mandalorian happened, I had the characters make the statement, “The obstacle is the way.” As a shorthand and a warning to each other. I might keep this aphorism in the stories, but I am not sure because it sounds so much like “This is the way.” While I want Star Wars fans to feel at home in Barrens End, I don’t want to make any similarities to Star Wars too easy to weaponize against it. The number of sects who each approach the Great Mystery from their own direction and with their own metaphors will also have their own obstacles that define the way they practice their arts. AI, Robots, and fantastical creatures are commonly encounters and should inspire wonder, awe, and fear.
Reader Tone
Noble Light Gray or maybe Noble Silver would be a better way to put it. People have to work for what they have, and life isn’t always easy, but there is always hope because people really can make a difference even at the scale of the galaxy.
Recurring Themes
1. Diversity is the cornerstone of our strength. I want the story to show this not only through a diverse cast, but by pointing out the diversity of opinion and talent we possess within.
2. No one is an island. Everything is interconnected from the largest scale to the smallest.
3. Hopelessness is a lack of Imagination. Sometimes the powers that be work to limit the options we can imagine so we cannot dream of a world without them.
Character Agency
Stories should vary from the intimate and small to the grand and epic. The is a world of heroes, if that is what the characters want to be.
Focus
Drama
The Pharos seized control of most of the hyperspace jump gates in the wake of the fall of the An-sarra and have become a despotic stateless master of the galaxy.
The Firinn have fallen and the galactic underworld is roiling with strife as other houses seek to take control.
The Suran have set out to build themselves an empire with no care for the suffering they cause in others.
The Aerisians launch the first ships they contributed to the Pathfinder Legion. They seek to prove themselves.
Rumors circulate that the Thalassans survived the chaos after the Dark Nova and have secretly rebuilt their fleets to take back the empire they lost.
