Superheroes Assorted
Scope
The motivation behind building Superheroes Assorted
It all sprung from a teenage supervillain who was forced by her guardians to enroll in high school because she was drawing too much heat. From there, it sprung into a whole superhero universe.
My motivation is to tell Ruby Gray's story, and the stories of her friends and family. To play around with all the fun superhero tropes that I enjoy.
It's since grown into a broader superhero world that includes a pretty full cast of characters and some made up countries.
The goal of the project
This is for a series of books that consist of a long character arc for one character. Ideally, I have sufficient background information in this world to write that series.
After that, we'll see about some standalones and picking up some of the other characters. Possibly even a historical prequel series since I date my superpowers back to the 1800s.
So I'm hoping to get through Ruby's series and by then have enough interest that I can keep going with a few other characters who stand out to me at that point.
Superheroes Assorted's Unique Selling point
The core of it is Ruby as (hopefully) a fun, interesting character who people enjoy reading about. Smart, arrogant, honest, driven, she's at the core of the story.
For this guide specifically, I do plan on writing it as if these are her notes about people and places, with addendums from her foster sister/minion for those details that Ruby would leave out.
At this point the selling point is that it's not grimdark but has a positive core to it. People chosing to be heroes; minimizing the "realistic" collateral damage because they'll just have developed the tech to avoid it; that sort of stuff.
Theme
Genre
Sci-fi action superhero YA. Set roughly modern day.
Reader Experience
It should feel colorful and action-packed. Not too violent, and I'm not focusing too much on the darker possibilities of superheroes being real. No grimdark here. And it's a YA focus so not too high of a content rating, but also people get hurt and die and all that so, you know, classic comicbook feel.
Reader Tone
Bright to middle. I don't want something downright silly, but I want the overall feeling to be positive. Like things will eventually turn out good even in the darkest situations. That there's risk of disaster but also, ultimately, people trying their best to be good people will win.
Recurring Themes
The value of being not the right person, but just a person in the right place at the right time, and doing the right thing. That you're not some special chosen one, but that you choose yourself to do the right thing, and continue to do so.
The primary theme is probably that choosing to do good, and keeping at it, is how we make the world a better place.
We're better together; both in the romantic sense and the friendship sense.
Character Agency
This is Ruby's story, so she gets all the agency. Except for the parts where I spring disaster on her because that's my job.
By the end I want Ruby to have changed the world; that her actions and the people she's brought together will defeat a major threat and set her up to continue helping against other major threats.
Drama
The Chaos Coalition is on the rise. They're a lot milder than most supervillains, but they absolutely have an agenda and are okay with killing those in their way.
SIVIC is corrupt from the inside, with key agents still being evil and acting to control and steal superpowers. This is an ongoing issue that they thought was handled but they only buried it.
Epogeos is rising in the background; trying to give themselves superpowers at will and to high power specifications. They're willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want.
Katastrophis is coming. Came once a decade ago but people are going to discover soon that it was all a stopgap and it's coming back soon.
Ruby's personal nemesis is Gina.