Overview

This is an idea that I am not using anymore but keeping for historical purposes.

It was originally conceived while brainstorming the Forest arc.

External problem

What if the problem is external, and not directly tied to the forest at all? I feel like the client should be a local, but I don’t feel as tied to the need for the problem to be local.

In some respects, a foreign problem actually makes more sense in explaining the premise. A local inhabitant hires a foreign agent to solve a foreign problem.

I envision the forest as being timeless—any problems it has have been there for centuries. While such problems have not been fully solved, they have been partially solved—the inhabitants have learned how to coexist with the horrors.

But if some new, alien problem arrives in the forest, the inhabitants are at a loss how to address it—none of their traditions apply to it. They are baffled, and they need help.

And that can help tie the threads together. James is more familiar with the problem than the forest folk are. He is related to the world the problem comes from.

Absurd flood of dangers

While I am regularly reigning in my knee-jerk tendency to overdo single ideas at the cost of every other idea, I like the idea of having an almost overwhelming and comical variety of dangers and impediments. I’ll probably need to back-peddle on this, but I find myself wanting the audience saying, slightly exasperated, “Now what?”

I want to see if I can get away with exhausting the audience with how many magical forest trials James needs to dodge around. I want it to be absurd.

There may be ways I can lampshade and foreshadow the absurdity so that it is easier to swallow.

Normally if I was piling on troubles, I would use that as an opportunity to tie many distant aspects of a story together, but if I go with this absurd route, the dangers need to be home grown. If James is plagued by dangers, each danger needs to be due to one of these reasons:

  1. James is a foreigner and certain dangers only apply to foreigners
  2. James is unfamiliar with their traditions and makes mistakes
  3. James does not have the time or resources to invest in the practices that avoid certain dangers (The natives have built their lives around making these practices practical.)
  4. Even with all of their precautions, natives occasionally get hurt, and so does James.
  5. The problem James is sent to fix has disrupted the traditional ecosystem of problems and solutions and now everyone is more affected by the problems.

That last point is especially notable. That adds a little more of a clue as to the nature of the problem, and why the forest people want to fix it. More than anything else, it disrupts the status quo. The denizens survive through stability, and that stability has been upended.