Personal Page for The State of Quandary

On these personal pages, I wanna talk about what the story is and give more details about the plot (obviously without spoiling it).

Summary

Just being a kid is an uncommon thing in this city. Children are forced to grow up with the crime that pervades their every day life and the oppressive control subjected to them. Living through this for years created an environment where no one fights back and everyone loses. Fang, knowing he could make a change, sets out to change the world from it’s normal. His only hope, however, is with the very people presiding in the heinous world around him.

Excerpt

From Chapter 2

The night was long, it seemed that daybreak took longer than usual; but it arrived and just like every other day before this, Fang made his way to school. However, something was different.

Cassie had texted him saying to meet her at her class, which was on the first floor. He found his way there and saw Cassie sitting on the floor outside the door staring at her phone. The same composition notebook she had the day before was also with her. He walked up to her and got her attention. She looked up and her eyes went wide.

“Is something wrong?” He asked.

“Y-yeah, I told you to trim your hair. You must have shaved off at least five inches!”

“Something like that.” Fang said, glancing back a bit at his now shoulder length ponytail.

“Geeze.” Cassie huffed, “I actually liked your hair super long.”

“It’ll grow back.”

“If you say so.” She got back on track, “Anyways, you got class this morning?”

“No, I have a free period right now.”

“Yes! That means you can just come here every morning and we’ll chat or do whatever we’re planning.”

“Your… teacher is okay with that?”

“Yeah, usually I just skip class after attendance since I don’t really have to be here.” Cassie walked inside, “Our class got one of the highest ranks last year so this year we can take it easy. Essentially, we don’t have to learn anything until Christmas since we’re too far ahead right now.” Cassie walked to a desk that was pushed up against the wall. She climbed over it and sat down in the chair that was sandwiched between the corner and the desk.

Fang looked at the rest of the class and found most everyone was similar to Cassie. They were huddled in groups playing games, talking, watching movies or eating. He found a spare chair and brought it over to Cassie’s desk. He sat down and Cassie opened her composition notebook.

“Okay, so here’s the best plan I could come up with.” On the page was a picture of a pyramid, “The bottom is all of us, like Altraz and the other smaller groups. They’re only together ‘cause this is the result of being oppressed. Forming these gangs was much better than just letting the twins walk all over us. Now, they are our best bet at taking them down. If we recruit the help of every major group, then I believe that’ll do exactly what we want.”

“But again, what’s to stop everyone from just betraying you?”

“I thought about it last night, and the best way to stop that is to recruit everyone in a certain order.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we gotta get everyone something that’ll entice them. I thought this out and our best order is like this. I’ve left out anyone that’s not a top group and just focused on the major influencers.”

Fang looked at the paper and saw names he easily recognized; in each of the pyramid blocks were the names of the groups known to the school.

“So this order is gonna get us what we need?”

“I believe so. The two at the bottom, we don’t have to worry about. Altraz is definitely going to work with me if I ask them. Bakesama is really close to me, but I’ll still have to talk to them later today. They’re the only ones who I can guarantee will work with us, everyone else.” She let out a sigh, “That’s a matter of what I worked out. With two groups with us, Celestial Haven will have more reason to join us, and that’ll be what we do for everyone else, just with more numbers.”

“I see, and that’s how we’ll silently break their foundation.”

Her teacher spoke up, “Alright class, I’ll check attendance now.” Everyone just nodded.

“Oh, Millie said she’s not gonna be here today.” Someone said.

“Okay, I'll just excuse her then.”

Cassie continued. “Exactly, it’ll be real quiet and the twins will never suspect anything ‘cause no one will be doing anything different than usual.”

“This plan is pretty sound by the look of it.”

“While I’m sure anyone could have thought of this, thanks.” She closed the notebook, “So for now first thing’s first.” Cassie got up, “Let’s see if Bus- uh, Bakesama has room for us.” Cassie began to climb back over the desk and dropped down to the otherside. “Come on, attendance is done.”

Fang looked back and saw that her teacher had already turned her focus on a book. So he got up and joined Cassie as they left with three other students who also left out.

Personal feelings about the story

This story was created after a friend and me were talking about animes we felt kind of lost their way, in specific, I brought up One Punch Man and how originally it was much more comedic and less "shonen", but when I stopped reading (which was around Garou) it just felt like it lost its original feeling. Personally, I wasn't too interested in the show after that and stopped reading/watching it. So, my friend encouraged me a bit to write my own version of it. So I did :)
This is the result of that conversation. I wanted to write a story that properly showcased how people my age (aka Gen Z) feel about life in general. Of course, I'm not saying I know how everyone feels, this is just from sentiments I've seen online as well as my own feelings towards life. The main point of the story revolves around the students feeling as if their life was stuck a certain way and they had to just live in the society they were born into. Without very much choice, most if not all students ended up complying with the broken society which heavily involves them in criminal acts of all kinds.

So, trigger warning: this story involves talks about abuse (all forms of it), sexual extortion, sexual assault, minor insinuations of rape, gang activity and gang violence, blue and white collar crime, and hate crimes.

Lore

So it's not exactly "lore", but I'll detail how the story is and everything involved in it.
To begin, I need to explain the city... which doesn't have a name because I'm terrible at that. However, I do have a name for the main setting which is Holma High. This school is the most well known school in the entire city. There's a system in place of "leaders" who essentially control the school and—if they're influential enough—part of the city. These leaders are also given a nickname in order to indicate who is a highly influential leaders. How they got that title lies in the next part.

Fang is one of the main characters and he begins the start of this revolution. He has his own reasons for wanting things to crumble, but that will be revealed within the story. The main point is he initiates the story. He believes that nothing will start until he asks the one person who seems to be heavily involved with everyone at the school. That person is Cassie—a neutral individual who isn't a leader, but has power like one.

Cassie, before the events of the story, forms close ties to most of the leaders at the school, so Fang believes having her is invaluable to starting anything. Cassie's sign for who's trustworthy and who isn't, is giving the leaders a nickname. So throughout the story, characters who are trustworthy are reffered to by a nickname.

Each leader represents real world crime or syndicates:

Leaders
Altraz (Street Gangs) - Leader: Amirani - NN: Ami
Bakesama (The Yakuza) - Leader: Bushimaru - NN: Levi
The Costa Family (The Italian Mob) - Leader: Cecilia - NN: Cece
Celestial Heaven (Entrapment) - Leader: Danai - NN: Dani
Chemical Compound (Bio chemical weapons dealing) - Leader: Emeryk - NN: Emey
The Rellers (White and Blue Collar Crime) - (By the twins respectively) Gavin and Jayvee. These two made the school's system of give and you’ll get

Each of these leaders has some relationship with both Cassie and one section of the city and the school. Explained above. Fang believes forming ties with all of them an ensuring their assistance will help them take their control of their lives and get apart of it back. What or who are they taking it back from? Well, I'm glad you asked.

The main antagonist in this story are a set of twins named Gavin and Jayvee. Apart of a family known as the Rellers, they have control over pretty much everything. Whenever they want something, they get it and it doesn't matter what anyone else wants, they will find a way to get what they want. This includes using the students to work for them. Wanting their influence to be removed, Fang and Cassie work to take them down.

Extras about the story

Special Mentions

This will probaly be the only personal page with this section because THIS story has something extra that made it a bit more "special" than the others. So along the other reason why I created this story was because of the music video The Real by ATEEZ. A lot of things from the video and just from ATEEZ in general is in this story (please don't sue me, I luv y'all). Anyways, I actually didn't like the video very much when I first saw it, but over time it grew to be one of my favorites (only being beat by Halazia). So, if I ever get to sharing this story, here's some of the things that are taken from ATEEZ and used in my story.

Extra extras

So I actually drew every main character because I was obsessed with this story when I was first writing it. So here they are, but again, I'm not an artist so don't expect a lot.

Cassie and Fang

Ami and Dani

Bushimaru and Mei

Cece and Emey

Gavin and Jayvee

These are some of the things I've made for Cassie and Bushi. I even made a set of couple outfits for them and then tried to draw it :D but it's shoddy so I won't share it