Geo and Ego are boy soldiers on opposing sides of a war in a distant land called Err.  They have been trained to hate each other, but when they find themselves lost with no one to count on but each other, they learn to set aside their differences.  Geo’s side is fighting because they believe that the land’s name is pronounced Err like “Air.” Ego’s side is fighting because they believe the land’s name is pronounced Err like “Urr.” These two sides have been fighting for 500 years.  Many have suffered and died because of it.

Geo is a new soldier and resents being made into one.  He misses his family and his sister.  He fights because he is afraid that if he doesn’t his family will be hurt and possibly even killed.  He hates fighting, he hates killing, he just wants peace.

Ego has been a soldier for as long as he can remember.  He doesn’t have a family.  The army is his family.  He fights with pride and hopes to gain recognition and rewards.  He doesn’t care about the people killed and the lives lost.  He just wants to be the best soldier ever.

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These characters are meant to illustrate the ridiculousness of war.  By creating a heinous situation for the soldiers to fight in it only exemplifies how completely insane war tends to be. At the same time they are meant to illustrate that both sides of a war or fundamentally the same.  This will be made clearly by the boy’s appearances.  They will look exactly the same only with inverse colours.  The contrast in their personality illustrates the variations of boy soldiers and how extreme these soldiers can become over time.

Gaia is a refugee living in Downtown Tha.  Her homeland is unknown to the residents of Tha but many assumptions are made based on her ambiguous ethnic appearance.  She was sent by her parents to make a living in Tha in hopes that she will have a better life than they did.  She was meant to flee with her twin brother Geo, but unfortunately the warring forces in her homeland took her brother as a boy soldier.  She remains mysterious, disinterested in Tha’s consumerist culture and the people that blindly follow it.  She strives to be a successful healer and perhaps even learn the arts of politics so that when she returns home she can bring peace to her land.  She is skilled in many mystical ways that the people of Tha don’t understand, but at the same time she is still human.  She gets irritated when orientalists approach her with ignorant overexaggerated believes about her and her mother culture.

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Issues addressed:

- Refugee children

- Child soldiers (slight)

- War

- Orientalism

- Consumerism vs. Traditional society

Gaia is supposed to be representative of people all around the world.

Appearance

I want Gaia to be very exotic  in appearance.  Brilliant coloured eyes, darker skin, coloured hair…something that cannot be depicted.  Although since my characters tend to be weird colours anyway, I suppose that won’t be hard.