Two Brothers Story Outline
This is the story that I had originially pictured as a fantasy comicbook, but I think I'm going to try my hand at fiction again. It'll be an historical fiction story, set not in an imaginary world based off of the Holy Roman Empire, but the Holy Roman Empire itself. I want it to be a time of convictions, as well as a time of extreme strife and confusion – there isn't a better time in European history than the 30 years war.
The main two characters are two brothers, the only sons of a free knight. As you know free knights technically owe allegiance to the Emperor alone and not to the more local Princes. However, it is an institution that is dying out by this time, I believe. I should probably check up on that. Anyway, this is about 100 years after Luther and Germany is in chaos with conflict between Catholic and Protestant. I really want to show the conflict at it's worse. Religious conflicts between fundamentalists (and the ignorant people that follow them) very quickly become neighbor against neighbor conflicts, with extreme violence at the local level.
So the younger of these kids is kind of like Dimitri and Alyosha combined. He's athletic, attractive, likes the ladies, fun loving, and yet at the same time he's fundamentally good. He's not afraid of a fight, but he's the first to counsel peace and the first to offer mercy. Mercy is probably his primary characteristic. He believes that people are generally good, and therefore when they do him wrong, he believes it to be a temporary error on their part. He can't imagine that people wouldn't like him because he likes everybody. He idolizes his older brother.
Damn it I can't figure out the exact dynamic that I want between the two brothers. I want one to be pure in the beginning and the other to be obviously less so – more of an ends justify the means kind of guy. Then I want something to happen so that the guy who was pure flips his shit completely and becomes full of hate and revenge. I guess I wanted to explore the close relationship between extreme love and extreme hate – how the extremes of emotion are actually very close to one another. Then again, I don't want to make the passionless guy the hero of the story.
Anyway, so the two brothers go off to war together, joining the protestant cause because I would find it difficult to write from the catholic perspective. At some point they meet a woman of the opposite persuasion with whom they both fall in love, though the older brother tries to deny his feelings because he knows it would not serve his designs. They have a falling out when the younger brother decides to quit the field and marry the woman. Then shit happens to both of them while they are apart. First, the woman is killed by a roving band of thugs claiming to be catholic but really just looting and killing people while the younger brother is away. He therefore flips his shit and decides to go on a rampage. He brings some minor characters, cousins and such perhaps, to his side and begins to lead a small scale war. He doesn't go so far as to murder innocents, but his previously merciful nature is gone and now he offers no quarter to the enemy. Meanwhile the older brother is forced at some point to put his mercenary nature to the test – facing some kind of decision that goes against his upbringing or religion but would advance him politically. He finds that he can't do it. Perhaps he truly finds God at this point and finds that he is not a God of hate and violence but these people have both corrupted him for their ends. Then he sets his sights on his brother's retribution. Maybe I should make the story more about faith. The older brother doesn't become a monster because he finds his faith, the younger brother becomes one because his faith was in goodness not in God.
Ultimately, I've got to figure out a way for it to end well. I think tomorrow I'll just start scening it out and we'll see how far I get. I should do some reading on the time period and pick some names as well.
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