#omniverse tales
random bitter aspiring authors on “writing advice” blogs: Don’t make your main characters super special mary sues. don’t make them better than other people or more interesting. your main characters should be boring average guys with the personalities of wood pulp
the Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh was objectively the best man ever. He was the hottest, sexiest, most gorgeous hunk of pure manly awesomeness that ever lived and he used a sword that weighed 120 pounds.
The lesson here is that your main characters can be as special, overpowered, and unrealistically skilled at everything as you want, as long as this has the purpose of driving the plot via all the problems they cause (because they’re an egotistical nightmare and a gigantic raging asshole).
TBH I use an approach simultaneously simpler and more complicated as far as the idea goes. The characters I design as protagonists in my Bizjarran Empire stories have no real in-universe threats (doesn’t mean out of universe ones aren’t entirely probable to be drawn in by seeing something that actually registers to them where nothing else does). This is correspondingly met by putting them against the tasks of bureaucracy and having to actually run a multi-galactic civilization full of fully rounded flawed individuals where they can’t just use telepathy to snuff out a galaxy to do a thing.
Likewise while there are entities capable of operating on a multi-galactic scale that win a multi-galactic civil war, the actual victory is won because the task of statebuilding AND fighting a civil war on a multi-galactic scale is hard and infeasible, meaning that the characters’ grand power accelerated a process that would have happened regardless and admittedly saved a few quintillion lives from dying in bloody battles in the process.
Equally since these characters are intended to represent a very narrowly specialized set of functions, there’s the open question of what happens when such an entity has a ‘glitch’ and then you have the equivalent of Superman and Paul Atreides in a berserker frenzy incapable of telling friends, allies, and families from foes and able to snuff out galaxies with a thought.
One of the Omniverse Tales laying out some of the most important backstory. Specifically how Syian III the Regicide gained the name.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/31117466
Hammer of the Stars: - TheLightdancer - Original Work [Archive of Our Own]
One true pleasure of writing this:
Is that Odylin III the Foolish and Syian III the Regicide are two of my most delightfully unpleasant characters not named the Azar of Azarath. One is a smug fellow deliberately modeled on the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in a few ways, the other is intended to be Space Mikhail Gorbachev and Nicholas the Bloody.
All the self-contained destroying the thing to save it of the former and the bloodthirsty ‘kill them all and let God sort them out’ attitude of the latter.
He’s his own version of the most triumphant example of why the Space Emperor archetype is doomed to fail. Instead of being the scarily efficient Palpatine type, he’s a complete failure at everything he tries who holds the 'die on the throne but hold power’ attitude until he marches himself to his own ruin.
While the Underlans are based on different Russian Tsars and mixtures of Russian Tsars and Soviet leaders, Odylin III is both Paul I and Peter III. Utterly unsympathetic, willfully blind to the true nature of the Autocracy, and then it turns out he so very badly misjudged everything about everything.
Finally getting back into the swing with my original multiverse:
I intend to revive and finish *Blood Among the Stars* as well as starting a new narrative, sort of. This one, Hammer of the Stars, details one of the most critical events of the backstory of the stories proper and it is one of those ‘Underlans are Space Romanovs dialed up to 121’ tales.
Anyone who’s read the history of the reign of Tsar Paul should have a good idea of the loose sketch of what happens and why.
There are a few key differences, however.
