What is Shadowlight?
Shadowlight is my ongoing story and maladaptive daydream that has been spiraling out of control for the past 25 years. I always dreamed of drawing it as a comic, and I’ve tried multiple times, but it was way too long, complicated, and exhausting. Attempting to write a novel out of it was also exhausting, there was too much information to organize. I want to do something with at least some of my ideas, but I’m not sure what. After many years of doing nothing with this story but daydreaming and doodling, I’ve decided to release the entire chaotic mess online. Maybe others can take inspiration from some of these ideas and make something cool out of it. I’m letting my story ideas loose into the public domain. Not my characters or designs though (they’re copyrighted)- just the ideas. Many different stories can be created from the same concepts (see TV Tropes)!
Who am I?
It doesn’t really matter. I’m kind of a hermit and choose to remain mostly anonymous, although a name can be seen on some of my drawings. I haven’t used any social media since 2019, but I recently uploaded some of my Shadowlight-related art in two online communities. I go by “glowprism” there:
https://cara.app/glowprism
https://www.artfol.co/glowprism
Please read this page before delving into any of the scripts and notes, otherwise it won’t make ANY sense, as it’s complete disorganized chaos.
It’s important for me to explain 1. Brief summaries of each version of Shadowlight from over the years, and 2. Who the characters are. I’m going to list all the main characters and supporting characters, all their various names, and the years in which I created them, in approximate order. I’m omitting background characters who only appeared very briefly.
Story Version Summaries
1. Maiden of the Darkness (1999-2000)
This was a completely separate story from Shadowlight, but it’s important to mention because it was Celeste’s first story, back when her name was Janelle. I only had this story from December 1999 – January 2000 before switching over to the earliest versions of Shadowlight. This story was about a quiet, mysterious, ghost-like girl with psychic/ supernatural powers, Janelle, who hid away in an abandoned house that was alleged to be haunted, and some random teens found her when they broke into the house to investigate. I think they thought she was weird at first but slowly befriended her. Two of Janelle’s new friends were Mayumi and Jou (Jou was her love interest, who later became Alex in the next version of the story). There was also some kind of cute round mascot alien or fantasy type of creature called Mari, but I don’t remember where it came from, lol (I think it was inspired by Mokona from Magic Knight Rayearth). I can’t remember if I ever developed the story much beyond that, but I think Janelle had to hide from a shady organization that wanted to use her powers for no good. I still think that premise is pretty interesting. This story, and this version of Celeste, was first inspired by the obscure 90s anime Key the Metal Idol, the first “adult” anime I ever watched, which aired dubbed on late night TV in the US. I was also greatly inspired by the 80s manga Mai the Psychic Girl, published in English by Viz, which I found at the local library. (If you think Maiden of the Darkness sounds a bit like Stranger Things, check out Mai the Psychic Girl!) I was only 14 years old at the time, and the stories and art of Key and Mai had a profound impact on my creative pursuits.
2. The Psychic Girls / Galactic Heroines / Silver Shadow / Shadow Soul / Shadowsoul (2000-2006)
This story was mainly inspired by anime I watched at the time, such as Sailor Moon, DragonBallZ, Tenchi Muyo, and Evangelion, as well as various manga I picked up, and sci-fi in general. My art style at this time was inspired heavily by the art of my best friend from Japan, as well as Evangelion and Fushigi Yuugi. Celeste’s name was Ayano during the majority of this story, and she was Japanese-American. I’m going to call this version of the story “Shadowsoul” because that’s the name I settled on for it for years. Shadowsoul was a sci-fi story about a group of high school girls (and later, a mix of girls and guys) who came into contact with microscopic (later, interdimensional) sentient alien beings and merged with them, gaining their psychic and supernatural powers. Two groups of aliens, whom were natural “enemies” (predator and prey), were living on a meteorite that crashed on Earth. These aliens had many names over the years (some ridiculous like Protagonist Organisms and Antagonist Organisms, and also Joskan and Sorlan which I used for something entirely different later), but I eventually settled on Jom for the “good” aliens and Zom for the “bad” aliens. Most of the Jom died on impact, but many of the Zom survived and began possessing humans and Earth animals (I later changed this to possessed humans only) to strengthen their powers and consume the Jom, as well as drain the energy of humans and other life forms on Earth. The small group of Jom survivors allied with the group of high schoolers (who were the first humans they came in contact with) to defeat the Zom, saving both themselves and the rest of life on Earth who were now threatened. The main characters had many name changes, but I mainly settled on these: Ayano, Alex, Maya, Evan, Simeron, Sterling, Joel, and Crysta. Ayano was the main character, Alex was her love interest, Maya and Simeron and Sterling were Ayano’s friends, Evan was Alex’s friend, Crysta was a punk/goth girl who didn’t really get along with the others at first, and Joel was a quiet mysterious loner guy (Crysta and Joel became love interests). They all went to the same high school, and they were all secretly allied with Jom aliens except for Sterling. They constantly had to leave class and other situations to partake in battles against the Zom, which was very stressful. This also resulted in Sterling thinking that her friends were avoiding her. Eventually, the government caught wind of the aliens and their connection to these now super-powered high schoolers. An organization was created to assisting the main cast against the Zom threat, and they were given special durable suits (which were probably inspired by the pilot suits in Evangelion). I think at one point I made a version where the Jom were not as “good” as they said they were, nor was the government organization. I also briefly had an idea for the final battle that involved all the main characters temporarily fusing together into a giant human-alien being (which I decided was too ridiculous, only for a similar concept to be used pretty well in Steven Universe years later, lol). I can’t remember exactly how the ending played out, other than it was a happy ending where the Zom were defeated, romances between the characters developed, and conflicts with friends and parents and others were resolved. The height of my obsession with this story, and most of its development, took place in 2000-2003. Then I graduated high school, was busy with college, and struggled with a deep depression. The depression briefly created a darker version of the story in 2005-2006, with multiple character deaths, which I won’t bother mentioning because I don’t like it at all. I also developed some other comic ideas in 2003-2005 that I shifted my focus to.* Ultimately, I abandoned this version of the story because it was very “high school.” I grew older, had more life experiences, and couldn’t relate to it anymore. However, if I remove aspects of my own life at the time that influenced the story, I think it’s still a pretty interesting premise.
* If you’re curious about the other stories I came up with at that time, I’ll mention them here briefly:
One was Silent Eyes (2003), a BL (boys love/ shounen ai) romance between two high school seniors, which I no longer have interest in because it was cliché and is now too dated. The main character was Dylan, a shy nerdy artist guy who was bullied sometimes, and Shane, a closeted jock with homophobic “friends.” Other main characters included Lynaia, who was Dylan’s best friend, and Cinnamon, Shane’s sister. Shane had a crush on Dylan, and they eventually got together. Shane and Dylan tried to keep their relationship secret from the homophobic jerks at school and Shane’s religious parents, but they came out by the end of senior year when they graduated. The story did have a happy ending. I was actually kind of obsessed with this story in 2003-2005 but only ever drew around 7 pages, although I did finish an outline of the full story.
The other two comics I actually drew a full 20-ish pages of each, as they were my weird and crappy entries to Tokyopop’s Rising Stars of Manga contest, which did not win. The first one, Mental Casey (2003) was about a weird shy awkward loner girl who encountered and befriended a weird psychotic misanthropist loner guy who lived underneath the high school building in some secret abandoned basement room. But at the end it was revealed that he had killed another student the year before. It was edgy emo cringe and badly written and I will not share it here, lol. Even if it sounds kind of interesting from the description, it was very poorly executed (I actually loathe it because it reminds me too much of my own mental problems). Maybe someone else can use that idea and make something better out of it.
The second story was Dream Within a Dream (2004). It was about 4 fairy-like humanoid beings who lived in a hollow fruit hanging from a tree. They were afraid of the day the fruit would fall from the tree into the “sea of blood” below. Across from them in another tree, a fairy guy left his fruit home to explore the world outside. However, his wings were still underdeveloped, so he fell into the sea of blood below. One of the main characters, a fairy girl who also narrated the story, had been watching the fairy guy from the other tree. She tried to catch him as he fell, but only caught a feather from his wing. Shortly afterwards, the main characters’ fruit fell from the tree. But they were still alive and unharmed, and it turns out that the “sea of blood” was actually a field of red flowers. The fairy guy who left his fruit home too early, however, had died. (I think if I reworked this story I’d have him survive.) I think it had an interesting concept to work with and some decent character designs, but again it was badly written so I’d rather not post it. Back around 2017-2018 I had a desire to re-write and re-draw this short story, but I never did.
3. Shadowlight (Version 1) (2007-2016)
The next incarnation of Shadowlight was manifested out of my newfound fascination with alien conspiracy theories and esoteric new age philosophies and other high strangeness that I found online. It actually started with an episode of Coast to Coast AM that I heard on the radio in the middle of the night in late 2006. I tuned in to Zachariah Sitchin talking about the Annunaki and Planet X and I was fascinated. Then I looked it up online and fell down a massive UFOlogy/ new age / conspiracy theory rabbit hole for years, and my mind was never the same since (I didn’t necessarily believe in all of it, but I still found it fascinating, and it fuelled my creative inspiration). The new incarnation of Shadowlight officially started development in January 2007, which was around the time I changed the name of the series. There were many different sub-variations of Shadowlight created between 2007 and 2016, so I’ll describe the version I settled on as “final.” It’s long and complicated, but I’ll try to make it make sense. In this story, Celeste is not from Earth. She is a genetically engineered human-alien hybrid who was born on another planet, Lasmir, but grew up on Earth. Celeste and others like her are called Shadowlights (or Sevaran in Lasmiran) and were created to become super-soldiers by an underground organization of rebel scientists seeking to take down an oppressive global Monarchy run by a human-alien bloodline. It was at this time that I gave Celeste her signature violet eyes (and originally she glowed in the dark but I changed this). She has powerful psychic abilities, although her abilities had been almost completely repressed with a microchip in her brain for her whole life until the story begins. She also has no clue about her latent powers, or that she’s part alien, or that her biological family gave her up to protect her. Celeste was adopted by an ordinary human family and thinks she’s an ordinary human from Earth. I realized later that I made Shadowlights way too overpowered in this story; they were telekinetic, telepathic (including remote viewing), they could fly, they could teleport, they could make themselves invisible, and they could heal injuries of themselves and others instantly. (They were genetically engineered to be super-soldiers, so it was the whole point to make them super powerful, but I still think it was a bit too much.)
The story begins when Celeste is 18 years old and just beginning college (in some versions she’s still a senior in high school). For the past 6 months she’s been in a relationship with a mystery guy her age named Ralan. They met at a deserted local beach when Celeste witnessed Ralan emerge on a small flying disk from thin air, which astonished her. Ralan has golden eyes that he hides with color contacts, he travels around on his flying disk with Celeste, and he won’t tell Celeste much about his life, other than he has a very strict father who wouldn’t approve of their relationship. Ralan is actually a prince, a descendent from the Zakovan royal family that rules over Lasmir, who are enemies of Shadowlights and seek to eliminate them. Ralan knows who he is, but he doesn’t know Celeste is a Shadowlight! Celeste also doesn’t know she’s a Shadowlight, but Ralan recently revealed to her that he’s a prince from an alien planet, and that he and his father have rogue psychic super-soldiers seeking to kill them. Celeste and Ralan met by chance, unaware of their mutual connection to the planet Lasmir. One day, Celeste is returning to her apartment from class, walking from the bus stop, when her head starts to hurt. Suddenly a strange fiery dragon-like flying creature appears and starts chasing her. She runs the rest of the way home. Ralan is there waiting for her, as they currently live together, and she tells him what just happened. But then, the creature emerges right through the wall and tries to attack Celeste again. Ralan and Celeste hop onto Ralan’s flying disk and they teleport into a forest hundreds of miles away to escape, calm down, and try to make sense of what just happened. Ralan is sure that creature is some sort of creation by “the enemy,” and that it’s actually targeting him, not Celeste. What neither Celeste nor Ralan know at this point is that this “dragon” is an illusion created by 4th dimensional amoeba-like entities called Ezhva, which feed on negative emotional energy such as fear, anger, guilt, and sadness (based partially on the Zom aliens I created in the early 2000s). Members of the Zakovan royal family recently arrived on Earth from Lasmir with some of these entities, whom they have allied with.
[This summary is to be continued…]