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Origins

I've posted a new episode treatment in the summer project: "S01E03 "O Spider, Here Is Thy Sting"" . This one, like yesterday's, starts with the idea of an IRL episode but does a lot of different stuff with it. Like The Lizard, The Scorpion is another character with a potentially interesting past that the animated series just kind of tosses away, and I wanted to see more done with him. I gave him a different origin story than in the comics—more tragic and accidental; the BTAS influence, I suppose—but also tried lightening his initial appearance a little so that he wouldn't come across purely as a guy with a free-floating grudge.

I'm also trying to better motivate the sheer number of mad scientists that show up, in both the comics and the animated series. Maybe it's not much more realistic to have them all come pouring out of Oscorp instead of arising independently, but at least it focuses the ridiculousness in one place—Norman Osborn's company—instead of positing a lot of coincidences. Making them all serpents slithering out of a pit of vipers, carrying their grudges with them in their coils, I hope also amps the interpersonal conflicts a little more, making the fights personal and not merely maniacal.

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It's really hard coming up with multiple plots to weave across multiple episodes. But that's probably not a surprising observation. Maybe it would be more interesting to say that it's very hard to concentrate in a sustained way upon the problem. I don't think I went more than ten minutes at a time yesterday thinking about the second half of the first season.

It gives you a headache, trying to work out a complex plot in your head, and you're always worried about following it down some twisting rabbit hole that won't be able to intersect with the other plot lines that you'll have to come back to. That's another reason I kept skittering around in ten-minute chunks—I had to spend ten minutes on one plot area, then ten minutes in another, and ten minutes in a third, with twenty or thirty or sixty minutes in between to clear my head of what I'd just been working on.

Also, I was doing more, um, research. By which I mean, I was reading comics for ideas about what to do. There's nothing wrong with that, particularly in the context of an animated series that was already freely adapting such Spider-Man storylines as "Spider Island." So "The Return of the Sinister Six" will figure in what I'm writing, alongside stuff I'm taking from the animated series itself.

I got quite a few ideas down: I've now a pretty good idea of the shape of the next twelve stories, and the motivations that will carry the characters through them. Today's goal will be to put some preliminary detail onto them.