Magical Ghost Girl Arisa Bannings (Nanoha/Battle Fantasia)

[Comartemis]

I don't know how many of you have been following the Battle Fantasia thread, but if you've been following the main thread over on SpaceBattles.com you might have noticed a few mentions of a spin-off idea I've had and which I'd like to develop. The idea in question concerns the cast of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, specifically Nanoha's friend Arisa, and her transformation into a magical girl.

The idea originally came up during a discussion of whether Yu Yu Hakushou would be admitted to the list of series included in the main project, and it was rejected because it wasn't a magical girl show. The suggestion of magical girls based on YYH got me thinking about Bleach, however, which has a stronger connection to the genre at least in the Karakura Town arc (Seriously, Ichigo transforms into a ghost to fight hollows, Rukia is a human substitute for the magical girl/boy's familiar, he fights a lot of monsters of the week... think it over a bit). Rather than create new characters for the role, however, I decided on using Arisa, since she has a past history of being a ghost during her debut appearance in Triangle Heart and I rather like her personality.

The tough part has proven to be developing the concept in a sufficiently original way. It would be easy to stick to an organization like Soul Society but I'd rather not make such an obvious Bleach rip-off, especially since I'm not overly fond of the series past the first arc or so. I'm similarly wary of making any sort of absolute god-like power for Arisa to answer to because I've never liked all-knowing Yahweh-like God figures with absolute authority over the salvation or damnation of souls or what have you. I also have to work this around the various cosmologies involved in Battle Fantasia, several of which like Sailor Moon confirm the existence of souls but not necessarily of an afterlife. I've given some thought to the idea of the god figure being something like the source of life energy on the material plane, but I think this may conflict with one or more of the involved series.

There are several things I know I do want, however:

• Arisa's outfit and powers are loosely based on the Burning Arisa doujins, so Arisa has a katana and some manner of fire magic for her chief weapons. Some similarities to Konpaku Youmu may make their way into her fighting style as well, but because I know jack-all about Touhou it probably won't be anything tremendously obvious.
• The fire which Arisa is using isn't due to a magical alignment, but due to a symbolical alignment between fire/heat/warmth and life energy (contrast cold/death as the absence of heat/life). Since she's a Nanoha character, she's a very strong fighter by necessity, none of this "running-away-from-the-monster-waiting-for-the-obligatory-male-to-show-up-and-save-her" deal that anime-version Sailor Moon and similar girls have.
• Arisa becomes a magical girl by transforming into a phantasm, shifting her body and life energy into an ethereal state between life and death. In this form she is invisible to people with no spiritual awareness (including a surprisingly large number of magical girls), but is capable of interacting normally both with solid matter and with other spirits, though she can also choose to phase through walls and such like a proper ghost. Weapons charged with spiritual energy can hurt her in this state, as can other spirits.
• Arisa's chief enemies are necromancers, evil spirits, various forms of demons from other franchises that feed on life energy (youma from Sailor Moon for instance). Her ultimate adversary is probably something/someone like the Lich King from Warcraft, given the parallels I mentioned between heat/cold and life/death.

Thoughts/opinions/flames?

[Muramasa]

Not much to say. I do like the idea, but I think there would need to be someone dedicated to giving her a good amount of character development (a.k.a screen time). If Arisa is only going to be around for a snippit or two than I don't think it's worth it.

[Wyrd]

Have you ever watched the show Dead Like Me? While it is not what you are going for stylistically, I think how it handles the afterlife and how reapers know who and when to reap and a 'higher power' might work for you with only a little editing.

In that show, occasionally when a person dies they become a reaper instead of moving on to the afterlife, usually replacing the person who reaped them. Their job from then on is to 'pop' the soul from a person's body just before they die so that they don't have to experience the pain of actual death and then guide them to their 'light,' which takes them to their afterlife. None of the reapers know what is on the other side of that light, and they aren't allowed to go on to their own life until they have reaped a specific number of souls(the number of which they do not know).

In the series, once they become reapers they gain new bodies that don't look like their old ones so that those who knew them in life won't recognize them and can move on from the person's death. Since you seem to want to keep her connected to Nanoha, this is something you would likely want to change. They get abilities that allow them to do their jobs and cannot be killed by normal means(otherwise they wouldn't always be able to be where they needed to be).

It handles the knowledge of each reaper knowing who and when to reap by there being a handler for each group who is given that information to distribute to his/her group. The information just shows up for the handler every morning. Nobody knows where it comes from, what/who the higher power is, or anything like that, they just know that there is something/someone who knows who is going to die and who tells them.

Arisa could have her primary job be guiding lost souls to the next life, but never getting to go there herself and know what she is guiding them to. Her secondary job is to protect the dead from necromancers, ghosts gone rabid(like hollows), and so on. The story could focus on either element, though it sounds like you want to focus on the latter part, with the other element providing some background and occasional plot elements.

[Comartemis]

Not much to say. I do like the idea, but I think there would need to be someone dedicated to giving her a good amount of character development (a.k.a screen time).

That's the idea. This is a spin-off project that happens -- so far as I've determined -- during the A's - StrikerS timeskip, when Nanoha is recovering from her injuries and the majority of the Nanoha cast is busy working off debts to the bureau. The reasoning here is to ensure the other characters can't swoop in and solve all of Arisa's problems, which is compounded by the problem that few of the magical girls in the Alliance have the kind of spiritual awareness needed to help Arisa fight her enemies.

Arisa could have her primary job be guiding lost souls to the next life, but never getting to go there herself and know what she is guiding them to. Her secondary job is to protect the dead from necromancers, ghosts gone rabid(like hollows), and so on. The story could focus on either element, though it sounds like you want to focus on the latter part, with the other element providing some background and occasional plot elements.

This sounds workable to an extent, but I'd rather keep her role as a magical warrior, so her primary role is protecting both the living and the dead from the undead and their masters and she doesn't work too much with Grim Reaper duties (that may actually be the job of a separate character, maybe Botan makes a cameo appearance here or something). The idea behind the "god is the source of life energy" idea was for a continual cycle of reincarnation, that life never really ends -- it just moves from one form to another every now and then.

[Pale Wolf]

Well, I haven't been following the Spacebattles Fantasia thread, mostly because... 150+ pages. I have much less intimidating things to read

Probably would've been appropriate to put this in the Battle Fantasia idea thread (since it's basically there explicitly for any spinoffs and takes authors may want to do off the idea), but I can see why you might not feel like it.

Afterlife-wise, you could always riff off Sailor Moon, with the star seeds cycling through the galaxy/universe/whatever to get back to the Cauldron, with that as the afterlife and the prelife - this would work for the reincarnation/cycle flavour you wanted, and it was my interpretation of Sailor Moon's cosmology.

In general I'd suggest staying away from active god figures at all costs. The idea that 'meh, the universe is being regulated and it's fine, your struggles don't really matter in the end' is not quite an implication that strikes me as being to your taste, and if gods show up, that implication comes out. Even if they're completely unable to handle the current situation, that just means the current situation matters on the major scale, all the other ones don't.

Wyrd has some good ideas, but I sort of agree with you. And a self-regulating system shouldn't really need carriers and shepherds, especially if star seeds can travel on their own (for one thing, where would the first souls have gone, especially if the owner wasn't intelligent enough to comprehend the task?). I sort of see Arisa's role here as more of an antivirus - so you could have her empowering as called on by an 'infection' causing problems in the system, with her in particular chosen for, well, whatever reasons you felt like cooking up.

Of course, another question is what other characters you plan to include. Since you're intending to keep most of the magical girls out of it, the Nanoha cast is mostly offworld... you're gonna need at least one or two major roles for Arisa to riff off of.

[Comartemis]

In general I'd suggest staying away from active god figures at all costs. The idea that 'meh, the universe is being regulated and it's fine, your struggles don't really matter in the end' is not quite an implication that strikes me as being to your taste, and if gods show up, that implication comes out. Even if they're completely unable to handle the current situation, that just means the current situation matters on the major scale, all the other ones don't.

Which is why the god-figure I was thinking of was an inactive god figure, though "god" may be less appropriate a title than... I don't know, source or something. I've been watching HeartCatch Pretty Cure for the Battle Fantasia project, and the Heart Tree seems kind of like what I'm going for here; it's an important but mostly inactive being that maintains the state of things by its very existence, but its ability to act on things outside itself is rather limited, so it selects agents to protect it and act on its behalf. In my head, this thing was born at the dawn of the universe and it's the source of all life energy, but people can learn to tap into that force and either use it honorably (as Arisa does) or corrupt it into unnatural forms, and Chaos may have something to do with the absence of life becoming a force of its own.

I sort of see Arisa's role here as more of an antivirus - so you could have her empowering as called on by an 'infection' causing problems in the system, with her in particular chosen for, well, whatever reasons you felt like cooking up.

Sounds about right.

Of course, another question is what other characters you plan to include. Since you're intending to keep most of the magical girls out of it, the Nanoha cast is mostly offworld... you're gonna need at least one or two major roles for Arisa to riff off of.

Well, Suzuka is a natural choice to start with, her vampire heritage has some potential as a plot point. If we go with Vampire!Suzuka for the same reason we're going with Ghost Girl!Arisa, Suzuka is more properly a dhampir or otherwise has one in her ancestry since she lacks the traditional vampire weaknesses to sunlight and such. Someone plotting to "reawaken her true heritage" as a Queen of the Undead might make for an interesting plot point. As for other allies, Yohko Mano's devil hunter-trainee daughter seems like a natural choice for this kind of story, though I'd have to run her existence by the rest of the thread, given that someone's written a snippet about her still being a virgin due to her bad luck with all her boyfriends dying on her.

[Wyrd]

First, I believe that that comment about Yohko is actually canon: Every time she thinks she's about to finally get some nookie, to the point that she is saying 'screw it' to the idea that she would lose her powers in the process, the boy she is interested in either dies or turns out to be a demon. What she isn't told until very late in the series was that she only had to be a virgin when she first received her powers. She didn't have to remain a virgin to keep them. Her grandmother figured that not revealing that little tidbit was the only way to keep Yohko from following in her mother's footsteps and getting pregnant as a teenager, with things being even worse for her because her powers would continue to attract demons so she needed to be skilled enough to defend herself even while hampered by pregnancy*.

*that last bit is an interpretation of events, not explicitly said. It could be that she could be perfectly safe staying at home while she was pregnant but grandma wanted to get as much training in while she was capable of teaching as possible. Also, it has been long enough since I've read/seen any of this series that I may be confusing fanon and canon.

For the concept of how did the first beings make it to the afterlife without a guide, you have a couple of options. One is that it takes intelligence to get confused when you die. Animals, always in the present, do not fear death, are not confused by it, and move on without difficulty. Another is that early spirits did occasionally get lost until they found their way to the next life or developed enough complexity and intelligence to guide souls to the next life, or just eat them. A common theme in Eastern interpretations of the demon realm is that evolution occurs on a very personal scale. All beings are born unthinking animals, and if they survive for long enough even the trees gain sentience and greater and greater power. This could happen with spirits and be the origin of demons and a demon plane in the first place.

Another possibility is that there is something that either created all life/the universe, is the source of life, or was the first intelligent being and it chooses reapers and such to help keep the system running. In Babylon 5, the first intelligent being born in the galaxy was immortal. Still is, really, since he is still around. Every subsequent being and race had shorter and shorter life expectancies until things leveled out at around 50-150 years, the current life expectancy for all of the 'younger' races. This first being need not be powerful. With time and age would come knowledge, and with knowledge power, but that does not mean that it could do everything it thought necessary everywhere they thought it was necessary. Developing the reapers could have been an act of compassion after seeing some people he had known for millenia be unable to move on, or he could have created a system of warriors to fight diseases in the tree of life, or however you want to word it.

Yet another possibility, related to the first, is that some of the first beings to die did get lost. White Wolf puts out an RPG series called the World of Darkness. In the prior version of the game, all Western vampires are descended from Cain, the first murderer. However, the rules for the vampires of the East, which each struggle back to life on their own, suggest that Cain was the first victim. He just didn't know how to die so he came back and in his anger at being attacked slew the man who had murdered him. Perhaps the first demons and vampires of your setting started off as spirits that got lost on their way to the afterlife and wondered either into the wrong realm or back to their own bodies.

Another thing to consider is that in Eastern myths, not all vampires are vulnerable to sunlight. One explanation I have seen is that vampires which are heavily attuned to Yang energies much more closely resemble the living, are not harmed by sunlight except through long exposure, can sometimes actually contract the diseases of the living, or carry them and infect those they feed off of, and are the ones capable of siring dhampir children. The Yin aligned vampires have stronger magics, seem younger and more otherworldly, are immune to disease, and have great strength at night at the cost of being weakened or even burned by the sun. Remember that while Yin is traditionally female and Yang is traditionally male, that does not mean that there are not yang oriented females. A yang oriented female would be more aggressive, hyper-active, have trouble sitting still, have a dominant personality, etc. Haruka from Sailor Moon would be an extremely Yang oriented woman, though a Yang oriented woman would not necessarily be homosexual. Michiru is a very Yin oriented woman and is still homosexual. The two forces are not linked to sexuality except in the sense that Yin tends to be drawn to Yang and vice-versa.