Creating the Holo protagonist for the future! - Mixing ideas
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Hello Holotrainers!
I hope you had a peaceful and gift-filled Christmas. Here's what I promised you a few days ago. I've been writing some things on my phone on the way home, and I think I've managed to add something interesting to this story I have about the future timeline of Holozing, which is where most of the game they're making takes place.
I had been thinking about the protagonist for a while. As always, I didn't want to create something conventional that was easy to recognize or had the archetype of others that have already been seen. I wanted something like what I did with the antagonist, something where you didn't know who was right because both had valid points.
The protagonist of the future timeline is not the typical heroine destined to save the world. She doesn't have a prophecy hanging over her head or spectacular powers that everyone admires. She is, basically, a human who doesn't quite believe the story she's been told.
She grew up in a world where the creatures no longer exist. For her, since she was little, the "normal" thing has always been the Holos: virtual, clean, and perfectly controlled versions of what was once wild and real. People go to see them like they go to a theme park or a modern museum. They get excited, draw nice conclusions, and go home peacefully thinking that humanity did the right thing.
She doesn't.
For some time now, she's felt that something is wrong, although at first she couldn't explain it. The Holos move well, react well, they even seem to have personality... but everything is too perfect. Too repetitive. Too safe. There's no real risk, no surprise, no error. And when you compare that to what the original creatures were supposed to be, the difference becomes unsettling.
One of the character's most curious traits is that, at certain moments, the world loses its color for her and turns black and white. It's not a flashy superpower or something she can activate whenever she wants. It just happens. And when it happens, it's as if the world's makeup falls away. Everything beautiful disappears and only the skeleton remains: the structures, the limits of the system, the simulation showing its seams.
That's when she sees what others prefer to ignore.
The Institution, the company behind this whole technological circus, presents itself as the savior of the creatures' legacy. And mind you, not everything they do is bad. Thanks to them, the world didn't completely forget what it lost. The problem is that their interest isn't just in preserving, but in exploiting. Each Holo exists to collect data, to test human reactions, to understand how to use what was once natural for purposes that are no longer so innocent.
The protagonist realizes this little by little, not with a grand, epic revelation, but with small details like decisions that don't add up, hidden files, strange behaviors in certain Holos that seem to go off-script for a few seconds. Moments when something seems to… remember.
And that's where her conflict becomes interesting, because she doesn't have all the answers either. She sees the world in black and white, yes, but she lives in a place that is pure gray. What do you do when destroying the system means erasing the last remnants of the creatures? What do you do when the artificial is the only thing that keeps the memory of the real alive?
She's not a perfect heroine. She doubts, she makes mistakes, sometimes she judges too quickly. But that's precisely why she works so well as a protagonist. Because she doesn't want to save the future or return to the past. She just wants to understand what was truly lost… and if it's still worth fighting for.
Some ecological undertones here and there; this isn't a story where I want to pit the two sides against each other directly, but in a less conventional way. Perhaps I'll make a post about it before the end of the year.
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