anxious_songbird: a bust up drawing of a smug looking young man in fancy clothing and messy shoulder length hair (smug Mr. Hyde)
So I've been thinking about Jekyll & Hyde, mostly cause 5-ish years ago I found Alive animatic by S.K. Michels and have had brain worms ever since. I've already talked about the actual twist of the book, but I've wanted to create a story with the motifs of the story but like, gaslamp fantasy.

[Note: this is me brainstorming & notating for future use, this won't be used for a while]

  • First of all; yes Jekyll & Hyde are the same person. Jekyll just pretends to be another person with a shapeshifting potion basically.

  • I'd genderbend Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde into Henrietta & Edwina. Mainly cause I've stolen the name Henry and I'm not sure how to feel about writing a character named Henry who is public domain. Also fem names pretty.

  • The setting would be semi-Victorian fantasy. But IDK yet how terrible I want the place to be? Like what xenophobia would be things that a) make sense & b) I can wright it okay? I do want there to be classism + wealth issues cause reasons.

  • I imagine the emotional arc of Henrietta to be: is a emotionally abused & repressed lady that recently became a doctor, and is still empty on the inside. She tries to transform herself into a new person via magic potion, but basically just makes a stable transformation potion. But she thinks "wait, I can fuck around and find out". And then starts being awful & reckless as Edwina cause she has no clue how to seperate the Polite Rules of her society from actual morality. But then she actually starts talking to people other then snobby rich folk and goes "hey, maybe being good & following the rules are seperate things!".

  • So Edwina becomes a caprisious Robin Hood esc figuer; pretending to rob herself and straight up robbing her richer coworkers to give to the people she likes & knows as Edwina

anxious_songbird: a bust up drawing of a smug looking young man in fancy clothing and messy shoulder length hair (smug Mr. Hyde)
This might be rich coming from an semi-ironic Jekyll & Hyde musical fan & unironic ¨The Glass Scientists¨ fan, but I'll die on this hill.

So for those who haven't watched the OSP video on Jekyll & Hyde (+ didn't read or understand the original book): the two were the same person, NOT a split personality. The OSP video's comment section kept comparing Hyde to Jekyll's shitposting account and/or an addiction allegory and I think that's accurate.

Now, maybe it's just me, but ¨dude who uses a magical disguise to free himself in a bad way only for it to bite him in the ass badly¨ is more interesting than ¨good dude VS evil 2nd personality¨. + It wouldn't unnecessarily feed into the idea that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder have an evil personality that will do bad things. Not that it can't happen, but to my knowledge it's an overplayed & harmful trope.

I'd think if the split-personality idea that stuck to the Jekyll&Hyde concept wasn't a thing; it'd be a very popular villain idea. I mean a man who uses strange science to transform into a new look to do bad things? That's villain shit!

Even if you wanna make Jekyll/Hyde a good guy or just morally grey, it's possible to twist it into something angsty. Like ¨this man felt so trapped in his life that he felt that he needed to be somebody else¨ and/or simply just make the bad things he wants to do not actually awful. You could focus on the self-destructive part of the story & the tragedy of it.

There's even 3 options for something modernized already there:
- evil/morally-grey magical girl/guardian AU
- straight up the alt-account thing
- & sketchy Vtuber

I just kind of find it sad that the actual twist of the book was lost in translation. But that's just what kinda happens to old stories.

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anxious_songbird: drawing i made of Terezi Pyrope from the neck up who is in shadow (Default)
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