Brought up by knight504 in the random ideas topic here: <a href='http://z14.invisionfree.com/The_Fanfiction_Forum/index.php?showtopic=3409&view=findpost&p=22036638' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>http://z14.invisionfree.com/The_Fanfiction...post&p=22036638</a>
After which we discussed options for a few posts. Since then I've been rolling the idea around in my head a bit, trying to see any optimal ways to take it and if the idea has merit in an attempt to flesh it out.
Probably going to have this be a main conflict of a fic for the purposes of the narrative just to keep everything focused. Granted, it could also work as a side plot to come to the fore later on as other lesser plots resolve, but given fics tend to die rather quickly save in rather rare cases it's probably best to keep things simpler and smaller for now. The goal is to try to get a majority of the relevant characters after Aizen's defeat (preferably changed to death so that bullshit is nicely tucked away for all intents and purposes) as involved as possible. The main driving force behind this fic will be, akin to Shunsui's statements after defeating Starrk, no side is just in this war.
Make no mistake, Soul Society has a bunch of dickheads running it. Oh they may have some good people like Ukitake and Komamura, but then we have Soifon and her justifiable homicide/torture shenanigans with taking justice too far, Mayuri in general, Old Man Genocide himself, and even Kenpachi has proven that while entertaining he's a rather callous murderer when his foes don't interest him (Regardless of whether or not they deserve it).
So yeah, it's all too easy to blame any given confrontation solely on them, but for the purposes of this concept, we're going to try to make it such that both sides will share some part of the blame and have their bad points based on circumstances (some more forgivable than others obviously). This will be difficult and very subjective, but let's at least try to keep this goal in mind. Mistakes will have to be made all around to escalate this confrontation to the point of no return, not just because one side is clearly in the wrong or mind control shenanigans were involved or what have you.
The point of this is to make it as ambiguous as possible to make it hard for outside players, like Ichigo's group, to have a hard time deciding who to side with. And indeed give the author a lot of leeway to build that up as well.
So basic parameters, from the getgo we're dealing with an AU to do with the events immediately following Aizen's defeat. The ideal place to get the ball rolling will be to start with Gin's survival. As covered before in the random ideas topic, this will be the first plot point to drive the rift in between the Shinigami and Vizards.
As per what happened in the manga, Gin was the guy who cut Hiyori in half and, had Unohana not shown up would have killed her. Granted, she lived in the manga, but she could just as easily died given how touch and go it was there. However, though that's an equally valid place to take this, the narrative purposes of this fic will be better served if instead she was crippled in the events*.
(*Also obviously for plot reasons we're ignoring Orihime's hax healing. Yes, Yes, I'm aware that's pure shenanigans, but then I remind you Yamamoto's still missing an arm and Orihime couldn't do Jack Shit to get Ichigo to return his powers so we're rolling with similar shenanigans to the manga anyway)
Due to his long running gambit to kill Aizen and despite his failure to kill him a clear sign of his intentions to stop the man even when there appeared to be no hope of him being stopped at all, Gin is given a relatively light punishment and given time may even get his previous position back if he proves still loyal. Naturally the vizards, who have a bit of beef with the guy, don't find this light punishment for someone who crippled one of their own ideal, regardless of extenuating circumstances.
Naturally this starts off relations between the two immediately on the wrong foot, causing several to reject offers to return to their previous stations.
In comes Mayuri. Having a history with Hiyori, the shady scientist offers to attempt to find a way to cure her current condition in exchange for a few 'tests'. Hiyori, knowing the guy to be creepy sure but desperately wanting to get her position back again (potentially due to Hakifune motivations or what have you) accepts against her better judgements.
This is what starts the conflict rolling. Shinji, discovering this deal, immediately tracks Mayuri down in the middle of a particularly nasty hollowification test and tells him point blank to stop it lest he start a fight in his precious lab. Despite Mayuri's warnings, he reluctantly agrees for the sake of his equipment and prematurely aborts the experiment.
Sadly this causes the entire thing to go awry, and, because there's basically no other way to stop her from her rampage, Hiyori has to be put down. Whether it was Shinji personally who had to do it or the callous way Mayuri ended up finishing her off when their was no other choice, or perhaps Gin was the one to do it, to complete his dirty work is up to the writer. However basically this fiasco and both Gin and Mayuri reminding him that it was he who forced the experiment to abort despite warnings cause Shinji to sort of go off the deep end.
Not helping matters is Yamamoto's refusal to punish Mayuri for this breech of human rights because he has extensive proof Hiyori herself agreed to it. Now absolutely livid, one wrong comment causes a fight to break out between him and a captain, probably Gin, either leading to him murdering a captain or refusing to accept punishment for attacking one, which basically is the last straw and starts the 'war' between the two factions in question.
Now the vizards are allied with Shinji against the entire force of Soul Society. Numbers wise, keeping in mind that the one ones who really matter on either side are captains, that's 4 vs. 10 or 11 depending how events go down. Not good odds for them, but Shinji's smart and they have the skills to resort to Guerrilla warfare if need be, especially given Sakenade's power.
However they also know that having more allies can only help, which causes Shinji, now completely off his rocker and determined to take Yamamoto down, to look for allies on the Hollow side of things. Grimmjaw, Nel, Halibel, Mosqueda (Privaron Chad fought), hell, depending how the thing in Mayuri's lab went down we could have a privaron reunion up in here. Or Starrk, that'd be awesome too.
Basically though by this point he's trying to beef up their numbers, which causes Soul Society to take a VERY large interest in the activities rouge powers still at large, which includes Urahara's bunch and Ichigo's group. Now maybe Ichigo still doesn't have his powers back letting that help play a role in which side he chooses, maybe not, but basically right now Soul Society cannot afford messing around. And at the same time the Vizards need numbers to help secure a decent victory, so there's going to be a significant amount of focus placed on which side he and his friends ultimately take.
This could lead to a number of developments, maybe either side tries to help the side buddies like Tatsuki develop their powers to help sweeten the deal and endear Ichigo to their side, maybe Urahara's trying to play the fence to see how this develops, hard to say. But it's certainly a decent amount of potential to really build something off of.
A few very minor B-Plots I'd tried to flesh out:
Lisa's potential role in this could be very interesting, having actual buddies still in Soul Society and with tensions as high as they are with kill on sight orders out on them thanks to Shinji, Urahara's bunch vanishing thanks to the proceedings, and Shinji trying to gain allies with Hollows of all things, she needs an in to at least get contact with Shunsui and inform him just how bad Shinji's gone starkers to hopefully fix this mess before it gets REALLY bad.
Which leads her to the only potential way she has to contact the man given the circumstances, Chad who also has a previous history with Shunsui, who still owes him a drink. She contacts him, gets him to contact Shunsui to let him meet with him in SS for that long owed drink, which thanks to a peculiar type of kido likely related to the mind projection one, manages to get her a secured secret meeting with the man.
Unfortunately SS is a tad smarter than expected and plans to take advantage of this situation and uses the secret corps to take out Chad and make it look like the vizards did it (Under the story of exactly what happened, only Chad instead refused and that riled them up), pushing Ichigo's group in their favor. So basically conspiracies everywhere on both sides is a potential means to exploit this scenario even further.
Fortunately the plot fails, mostly thanks to Shunsui being damned smart too and giving him a heads up, which botches the assassination attempt, leads to a small scuffle involving Chad, Lisa, and Soifon's bankai, and now Chad and Lisa are gone (In HM thanks to Bro Mosqueda to the rescue likely), and until they recover from that fiasco no one can clear up the story properly meaning the stakes are raised on all sides and Ichigo's group needs to come to a decision fast.
Urahara, also having a history with both Hiyori and Mayuri is also likely going to play a good role in this part. Vanishing to try to get the stories straight before he solidifies a side, he's likely in Mayuri's (As in HIS) labs trying to figure out what he was doing to Hiyori and whether or not he should do the man in personally. Fortunately for Mayuri what he was doing was on the up and up as a potential means to exploit hollow regeneration to cure her condition (That time anyway) and it only ended in fiasco because of Shinji's meddling.
Mind you he'll still deck Mayuri, just not for that reason. This also puts which side Urahara's going to ally himself with rather up for grabs.
Ishida himself is practically obligated to side with the vizards frankly, which probably puts a damper on things for Ichigo's group. If anything, the chance to murder Mayuri alone is worth the asking price. He might be on the sidelines for a while about this, but ultimately if there's any one side he'll side with, it's probably going to be the Vizards.
There also could be a subplot involving certain members of the Vizards (Possibly Lisa if you build off the above bit) trying to recruit the more agreeable members of the Shinigami side to their cause, though ultimately how that goes down is up for grabs. Hard to nail down who actually would defect without going really deep into the reasoning and potential plot buildup. You could however make a semi-decent argument for Kensei to take Hisagi with him during the initial conflict's beginning, depending how attached Hisagi is to the guy.
Further if the Ichigo doesn't have his powers back yet plot is still in motion, the Xcution plot could end up a bigger mess depending how these things developed. And considering how close that was to brilliance, using this plot to help tighten that up could be quite fruitful. Since it'd likely result in the shinigami being too busy to do shit, and thus the home team gets to handle it themselves like what needed to happen. :angry:
Anyway that's a basic framework to get started with, any further ideas are potential developments could only help from here. Feel free to post some thoughts on this or something to help flesh it out more. :sisi:
After which we discussed options for a few posts. Since then I've been rolling the idea around in my head a bit, trying to see any optimal ways to take it and if the idea has merit in an attempt to flesh it out.
Probably going to have this be a main conflict of a fic for the purposes of the narrative just to keep everything focused. Granted, it could also work as a side plot to come to the fore later on as other lesser plots resolve, but given fics tend to die rather quickly save in rather rare cases it's probably best to keep things simpler and smaller for now. The goal is to try to get a majority of the relevant characters after Aizen's defeat (preferably changed to death so that bullshit is nicely tucked away for all intents and purposes) as involved as possible. The main driving force behind this fic will be, akin to Shunsui's statements after defeating Starrk, no side is just in this war.
Make no mistake, Soul Society has a bunch of dickheads running it. Oh they may have some good people like Ukitake and Komamura, but then we have Soifon and her justifiable homicide/torture shenanigans with taking justice too far, Mayuri in general, Old Man Genocide himself, and even Kenpachi has proven that while entertaining he's a rather callous murderer when his foes don't interest him (Regardless of whether or not they deserve it).
So yeah, it's all too easy to blame any given confrontation solely on them, but for the purposes of this concept, we're going to try to make it such that both sides will share some part of the blame and have their bad points based on circumstances (some more forgivable than others obviously). This will be difficult and very subjective, but let's at least try to keep this goal in mind. Mistakes will have to be made all around to escalate this confrontation to the point of no return, not just because one side is clearly in the wrong or mind control shenanigans were involved or what have you.
The point of this is to make it as ambiguous as possible to make it hard for outside players, like Ichigo's group, to have a hard time deciding who to side with. And indeed give the author a lot of leeway to build that up as well.
So basic parameters, from the getgo we're dealing with an AU to do with the events immediately following Aizen's defeat. The ideal place to get the ball rolling will be to start with Gin's survival. As covered before in the random ideas topic, this will be the first plot point to drive the rift in between the Shinigami and Vizards.
As per what happened in the manga, Gin was the guy who cut Hiyori in half and, had Unohana not shown up would have killed her. Granted, she lived in the manga, but she could just as easily died given how touch and go it was there. However, though that's an equally valid place to take this, the narrative purposes of this fic will be better served if instead she was crippled in the events*.
(*Also obviously for plot reasons we're ignoring Orihime's hax healing. Yes, Yes, I'm aware that's pure shenanigans, but then I remind you Yamamoto's still missing an arm and Orihime couldn't do Jack Shit to get Ichigo to return his powers so we're rolling with similar shenanigans to the manga anyway)
Due to his long running gambit to kill Aizen and despite his failure to kill him a clear sign of his intentions to stop the man even when there appeared to be no hope of him being stopped at all, Gin is given a relatively light punishment and given time may even get his previous position back if he proves still loyal. Naturally the vizards, who have a bit of beef with the guy, don't find this light punishment for someone who crippled one of their own ideal, regardless of extenuating circumstances.
Naturally this starts off relations between the two immediately on the wrong foot, causing several to reject offers to return to their previous stations.
In comes Mayuri. Having a history with Hiyori, the shady scientist offers to attempt to find a way to cure her current condition in exchange for a few 'tests'. Hiyori, knowing the guy to be creepy sure but desperately wanting to get her position back again (potentially due to Hakifune motivations or what have you) accepts against her better judgements.
This is what starts the conflict rolling. Shinji, discovering this deal, immediately tracks Mayuri down in the middle of a particularly nasty hollowification test and tells him point blank to stop it lest he start a fight in his precious lab. Despite Mayuri's warnings, he reluctantly agrees for the sake of his equipment and prematurely aborts the experiment.
Sadly this causes the entire thing to go awry, and, because there's basically no other way to stop her from her rampage, Hiyori has to be put down. Whether it was Shinji personally who had to do it or the callous way Mayuri ended up finishing her off when their was no other choice, or perhaps Gin was the one to do it, to complete his dirty work is up to the writer. However basically this fiasco and both Gin and Mayuri reminding him that it was he who forced the experiment to abort despite warnings cause Shinji to sort of go off the deep end.
Not helping matters is Yamamoto's refusal to punish Mayuri for this breech of human rights because he has extensive proof Hiyori herself agreed to it. Now absolutely livid, one wrong comment causes a fight to break out between him and a captain, probably Gin, either leading to him murdering a captain or refusing to accept punishment for attacking one, which basically is the last straw and starts the 'war' between the two factions in question.
Now the vizards are allied with Shinji against the entire force of Soul Society. Numbers wise, keeping in mind that the one ones who really matter on either side are captains, that's 4 vs. 10 or 11 depending how events go down. Not good odds for them, but Shinji's smart and they have the skills to resort to Guerrilla warfare if need be, especially given Sakenade's power.
However they also know that having more allies can only help, which causes Shinji, now completely off his rocker and determined to take Yamamoto down, to look for allies on the Hollow side of things. Grimmjaw, Nel, Halibel, Mosqueda (Privaron Chad fought), hell, depending how the thing in Mayuri's lab went down we could have a privaron reunion up in here. Or Starrk, that'd be awesome too.
Basically though by this point he's trying to beef up their numbers, which causes Soul Society to take a VERY large interest in the activities rouge powers still at large, which includes Urahara's bunch and Ichigo's group. Now maybe Ichigo still doesn't have his powers back letting that help play a role in which side he chooses, maybe not, but basically right now Soul Society cannot afford messing around. And at the same time the Vizards need numbers to help secure a decent victory, so there's going to be a significant amount of focus placed on which side he and his friends ultimately take.
This could lead to a number of developments, maybe either side tries to help the side buddies like Tatsuki develop their powers to help sweeten the deal and endear Ichigo to their side, maybe Urahara's trying to play the fence to see how this develops, hard to say. But it's certainly a decent amount of potential to really build something off of.
A few very minor B-Plots I'd tried to flesh out:
Lisa's potential role in this could be very interesting, having actual buddies still in Soul Society and with tensions as high as they are with kill on sight orders out on them thanks to Shinji, Urahara's bunch vanishing thanks to the proceedings, and Shinji trying to gain allies with Hollows of all things, she needs an in to at least get contact with Shunsui and inform him just how bad Shinji's gone starkers to hopefully fix this mess before it gets REALLY bad.
Which leads her to the only potential way she has to contact the man given the circumstances, Chad who also has a previous history with Shunsui, who still owes him a drink. She contacts him, gets him to contact Shunsui to let him meet with him in SS for that long owed drink, which thanks to a peculiar type of kido likely related to the mind projection one, manages to get her a secured secret meeting with the man.
Unfortunately SS is a tad smarter than expected and plans to take advantage of this situation and uses the secret corps to take out Chad and make it look like the vizards did it (Under the story of exactly what happened, only Chad instead refused and that riled them up), pushing Ichigo's group in their favor. So basically conspiracies everywhere on both sides is a potential means to exploit this scenario even further.
Fortunately the plot fails, mostly thanks to Shunsui being damned smart too and giving him a heads up, which botches the assassination attempt, leads to a small scuffle involving Chad, Lisa, and Soifon's bankai, and now Chad and Lisa are gone (In HM thanks to Bro Mosqueda to the rescue likely), and until they recover from that fiasco no one can clear up the story properly meaning the stakes are raised on all sides and Ichigo's group needs to come to a decision fast.
Urahara, also having a history with both Hiyori and Mayuri is also likely going to play a good role in this part. Vanishing to try to get the stories straight before he solidifies a side, he's likely in Mayuri's (As in HIS) labs trying to figure out what he was doing to Hiyori and whether or not he should do the man in personally. Fortunately for Mayuri what he was doing was on the up and up as a potential means to exploit hollow regeneration to cure her condition (That time anyway) and it only ended in fiasco because of Shinji's meddling.
Mind you he'll still deck Mayuri, just not for that reason. This also puts which side Urahara's going to ally himself with rather up for grabs.
Ishida himself is practically obligated to side with the vizards frankly, which probably puts a damper on things for Ichigo's group. If anything, the chance to murder Mayuri alone is worth the asking price. He might be on the sidelines for a while about this, but ultimately if there's any one side he'll side with, it's probably going to be the Vizards.
There also could be a subplot involving certain members of the Vizards (Possibly Lisa if you build off the above bit) trying to recruit the more agreeable members of the Shinigami side to their cause, though ultimately how that goes down is up for grabs. Hard to nail down who actually would defect without going really deep into the reasoning and potential plot buildup. You could however make a semi-decent argument for Kensei to take Hisagi with him during the initial conflict's beginning, depending how attached Hisagi is to the guy.
Further if the Ichigo doesn't have his powers back yet plot is still in motion, the Xcution plot could end up a bigger mess depending how these things developed. And considering how close that was to brilliance, using this plot to help tighten that up could be quite fruitful. Since it'd likely result in the shinigami being too busy to do shit, and thus the home team gets to handle it themselves like what needed to happen. :angry:
Anyway that's a basic framework to get started with, any further ideas are potential developments could only help from here. Feel free to post some thoughts on this or something to help flesh it out more. :sisi:
