The Pitch: Prepare The Spare

A while back I bummed around on YouTube and watched this clip from Mobile Suit Gundam.

And then I watched this clip from Episode 2 of The Vision of Escaflowne. (Poor Balgus.)

And then I read Ben Cheah's post on isekai, which you can find at PulpRev https://www.pulprev.com/2019/04/isekai-is-not-japanese-europe-in-video.htmlhere. I got out my notebook because I remembered that I had an idea on how to do this that hadn't been done, or done well, in some time. I wrote this down after watching those two clips and another from Final Fantasy XV.

This is the pitch.

A magical kingdom is under attack by an evil empire. The king dies. The princes are all dead save for one, the youngest, who suffered an apparent death but actually survived and is secretly hospitalized. He's stuck into a sensory deprivation tank and hooked into a VR simulation to speed up his recovery. One of the king's chief retainers has to retrieve the prince from the facility before it's found and destroyed.

The prince comes out when he's shown that the man who betrayed him, the man who was both his friend and his rival, is behind not only the attacks but personally slaughtered his family and threatens to subjugate his people to the empire's yoke. But he can't fight the man right away; he has to rally the remnants together, resolve threats to his position and authority, and then he can renew the war against the empire in order to get his revenge.

The VR sim is the key, as it's actually something of an MMORPG; the medical establishment uses it to facilitate communications across borders and language barriers. The prince and others have to use it to avoid Imperial entanglements, and the sim world is more like our everyday life than the fantastic world they actually live in. That's a realm full of intrigue to be had.

So we have Garma coming back from near-death to get Char, having to play guerilla war online and in meatspace to do it like Van had to do, and he has to be like Neo here and there. Add giant robots, laser swords, and some romance to suit and we've got something to work with.