Evolution of the story
This story started off as an idea for a manga during a random online rp friendship. I’ve changed it a lot since then so that it’s accessible to more people than just us animoos, but sometimes I find myself using the old names for things.
The main thing I’ve been fighting with is the title/name of the alternate world. It was originally Rakuen - the japanese word for heaven, which was fitting because at the time the world didn’t have the negative connotations it has now. These days I call it The Realm, and I’m leaning towards Rakuin as the name of the world itself. It might not make much of a difference, but to me Rakuin seems more like it could be some made-up name and people may not necessarily think it’s japanese, but it actually is. I like that this way it means “marked” instead of “heaven”, because that can have a few different meanings since Reizka and the world itself are ‘marked’ by their deal with Hebe, the other characters are marked with sadness, pain, their pasts, etc.
Nathan originally had two names. In the real world he was Nadakunaru Kesshin, and in Rakuen he called himself Nashiki Nishimashi. I anglicized the name to Nathan Keane, and will have him call himself Nada in Rakuin for posterity. Naomi, Reizka, Kunizka, and Momo have kept their names throughout the process. I added a second t to Mateo to make it more italian and changed Kira (his little sister) to Gia. Corinn has had the biggest changes character and name-wise. For the original manga story her name was Shuri, and she was a fire student who was related to Reizka. I think she’s had five different name changes and lord knows how many bio revisions. I like that the more I revised her though she became a stronger woman protagonist than I had originally planned.
