Novel developement (entry 2)

Long time no see I guess, I've been working on my other project a lot as well as just living life, but I wanted to write some of this down, because it has definitely been on my mind, as I've recently been talking to one of my friends who read the original books and it's been prett helpful. THis oneis worded super informally because I really just wanted to get it out of my head as fast as possible.

Sooo, around the time that main prince guy is like, 14-15 or so, the royal palace is attacked and destroyed. In the original version, this happened a little bit earlier, and the siege was lead by tha auntie-type character, who is, plot twist, evil (well, not really, she's complicated.)

now, in the original, the reason this happened is because auntie character was secretly some thousand year old monstrosity, and a part of this weird royal military council (basically a group of the highest ranking knights in the kingdom). She was mostly chill like this and wasn't very active in her role anyways, until she had a secret kid and went "welp. this one's gotta be king so I might as well take over" and she used her magic powers or whatever to try and destroy the old capital (important context here: she was also responsible for the destruction of the original structure a few hundred years ago). She then ran off/was driven out by the remainder of the knights and joined forces with the prince's older sister, as well as a few other characters that supported her, and was gonna go back to the palace to take over for good.

As for her secret son, he was sent away into the neighbouring kingdom and grew up unaware of his heritage until he was found by the main prince guy's cousins (I swear I'll talk more about them later because there's a lot going on.) and joined them in trying to gather the knights again to try and defend the kingdom or something like that, however the fact that the auntie type character was his mother was supposed to be the big plot twist at the end.

This siege of the capital also resulted in the main prince guy being driven off after witnessing the destruction of his home. He ended up in another kingdom's royal palace as a sort of guard.

Now, the way I want to transform this part of the story is a bit more tame and a LOT more logical. Basically, auntie would still have her secret son (not sure what to do about the ancient eldritch horror thing yet.), and she'd be blackmailed by this rebel group with it (like, "help us raid the palace or we'll expose the fact that you have a son and probably kill him too), so she had no choice but to send him away and aid the siege. Like she'd unintentionally end up in the middle of it all. After the raid, she'd have to run off, finding refuge with the prince's sister who's got enough problems with her family for this to be a sort of breaking point and make her hellbent on taking over the throne herself. The palace wouldn't be destroyed completely and would end up being taken back by the king & the knights, however the prince guy would become unable to live there due to everything that's happened, so his father would reluctantly agree to send him away to a foreign nation on a sort of diplomatic mission until he had a reason to come back (the reason being a potential wedding.). This sendoff would be where the story really gets going, but more on that later.

As for the son character, I'm still working out a lot of details, but he was fairly important in the original, so I want to keep him involved closely, I'm re-reading a bunch of material I have right now so we'll see what elements of the story I could keep and what I should change or alter.

Anyways, hopefully in the next entry I can say more about the supporting & side characters from these first two parts of the story, such as the cousins, the royal family, the rest of the knights or a very specific side character who was HEAVILY important in the original but he's very messy so I haven't brought him up yet.

I also want to work on the politics, firstly I really want to decide exactly what kind of conflict is there in this kingdom that warrants all these coups and raids (because there's a lot more in the original, both past and future), and I want to work out the actual system because "all-powerful king and a couple of guys with swords" is a bit underwhelming to me. Also, I feel like the other kingdoms need work too. In the original, the story actually started much later in the timeline with a completely different main character in a whole other kingdom, so there's definitely material to work with, but a lot of it is very, for the lack of a better word, bad. There's also a few uninteresting and/or illogical main characters I have to cherry pick the most salvagable ones out of because I feel like "guy locked in a magic amulet for literally no reason" just doesn't cut it anymore