Welcome to the website for Giant Armors, a world of giant clockwork robots and the kids who pilot them.
| Stories | The tales of the Giant Armors and their pilots |
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This is a scene I added late in the writing of Armor.
I once listened to legendary animation directory Brad Bird (creator and director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles) talk about pacing in a story. He explained that there’s a tendency–especially in animation–to try to make every single moment special. To go for the big laugh or the big thrill in every scene.
He explained that you can’t do that. While any story will have big moments, it needs small moments so the audience can breathe and react to the big moments.
This bit of Armor is a small scene. It involves Tom and Adam walking around the city, being normal. Well, as normal as they can be. It’s a time for them to see what it is they’re protecting.
It also hints a bit at the society of the city. We see that entire families work in their shops, including children. Nobody’s surprised by this; it’s just how things work here.
This is something Tom must face: what is it that he’s really fighting for? Who is he defending? Is it worth defending? How far would he go to defend it?
All questions he’ll have to answer soon enough.
It’s always a bit dangerous for an author to describe something as his or her “favorite.” Readers can then dive into that bit and wonder why it’s so important to the author, dissecting it and otherwise obsessing over it.
In many cases, this favoritism has less to do with the content itself, and more with the author’s feelings. For a piece of the author’s own writing, the author may just have had a particularly easy time writing that section. Or the author may be proud of a particular word or phrase that’s important to the author, but not to the story.
That said, chapter 4 of Armor is probably my favorite chapter. This is where everything starts to come together. Much of the groundwork for the ending is laid here.
Moreover, this chapter includes several important conversations, my “Gundam conversations.”
Gundam was one of my major influences in creating Giant Armors, and one staple of Gundam series involves conversations between characters about why they fight. Most Gundam protagonists don’t really want to fight in whatever war they’re in, but they’re often surrounded by people who do. So they end up in a lot of conversations about why they’re fighting.
So I wanted to include that in Armor. In this chapter, Tom talks to several folks about why he chose to stay and fight, which I think is an important thing to establish.
This also establishes a running theme of the entire Giant Armors series: the differences between kids from Earth and the inhabitants of the Giant Armors world. The people in that world have a completely different pre-history, history, culture, etc. than anyone on Earth. Not only do they have different cultures, they see the world differently. They organize themselves differently, socialize differently, talk differently, build differently. They are, effectively, aliens.
So, a lot happens in this chapter. Perhaps that’s why it’s my favorite.
Just posted part 3 of Armor, in which Tom meets Adam, they both face their first major battle against the Trych, and Tom thinks up a surprise for the bugs.
Welcome to the official Giant Armors website! I’m very glad you’re here.
I’m Brent P. Newhall, the author of the Giant Armors series. This will eventually be a series of novels about the Giant Armors, the fantasy world they inhabit, and the kids who pilot them.
I’ve just put this site together, and posted the first two parts of book 0 of the series, Armor. Armor is a prequel of sorts to the full storyline.
I’ll post more parts of Armor in the coming weeks and months.