/lit/ - Literature

>>9178291
I understand having an unhappy ending, especially when it is abrupt can leave someone thinking about it for a very long time afterwards. I don't really want to commit to anything now however, as I have other outlines I've worked on for a while, and actually have another piece that utilizes this protag's presence for some weird simulacrum business, so we'll see how that goes.

I think that should work fine for now for the aging thing unless I can come up with something better. What I'm thinking is that during the battle, the protag gets carried off literally on top of a space ship and somehow survives to get inside, but the entire ship collides with a station, which is a sort of off-world prison, and both the station and the cruiser crashland on some freezing inhospitable moon, where they stay in the wreckage for the most part and underground and that's where they have to survive, something where they have a very low change of surviving and with some truly shocking imagery (like holding onto a giant space ship literally while it ascends into space)

I think instead what will happen is that each of the prisoners has some kind of tag or powered device on them that can be used to power some kind of suspended animation capsule, but it only lasts a certain amount of time, and because of the low power it can't run all of the systems so sometimes the protagonist will wake up and actually feel freezing but be unable to move, and has to literally sit that way for years at a time, falling in and out of icy sleep, unable to do anything until the capsule opens, demanding more power, and they have to wander off to kill someone to get another battery, in a horrible freezing disoriented state

The culture one presents difficulty for me because people are defined by the cultures they come from. If the protag comes from a culture that was in a dark age, it will be reflected in their own attitudes towards people and places. The vision I always saw for this character was again, a "Renaissance man" type of person. They come from a place that values art, enlightenment, and fashion. Its pretty integral to the themes of the plot in many areas, especially considering the "dark age" still exists in many of the places the protagonist will visit, and the difference in culture will create a "clash of worlds"

So I'll need a way to advance the "Renaissance" by 50 years, and in my original draft it was the end of the war that actually created that Renaissance, so there will have to be some other trigger.

Perhaps being a colony away from the human homeworld they just developed a different culture, and began that "Renaissance" period much earlier, but by ending the war the way they did (their homeworld with the Renaissance culture vs. the human homeworld in the Dark Age) they were able to be taken by an enemy who would not interfere with their culture or liberties, which not only allowed them to continue their Renaissance, but expand on it