In the distant future of the year 2009...
Freeracers
Mt. Metro, the city that runs like clockwork.
Robotic Rigs are a common sight, tailored to reflect the personality of the owner...
Or optimized and mass-produced to work long hours expanding the city down from the peak, where those with the "real" power spend their days in luxury.
Ordinators patrol the streets and guard factories, keeping busy managing the day-to-day drudgery behind the gleaming facade.
But there are those who would long for nothing more than to throw a wrench in those gears...
Freeracing is an underground competition of skill and cunning, a performance of self-expression and defiance of the stifling norm. Making mischief for the authorities, helping out anyone in need, showing the world how to care. How to Live!!!
If the Glass Eyrie watches everything, why not give them a show?
If the Ordinators want to stop us, they'll have to catch us first!
At the heart of that rebellion, at the core of it all, Freeracing is about freedom to be yourself.
Not a role to be filled, not a replaceable machine, not just a number among the crowd.
And here we go! I've been planning to make a proper introduction post like this for ages now. I've done some musing in the past about what i want the setting to be, the sort of themes i'm interested in exploring for this series. The way i described it then is like a Kids' Cartoon Dystopia, lighthearted but with an edge of real issues behind it.
Now of course, I'm not pitching this to Lego themselves or anything and i can go as wild as i want with it, so this is more of an exercise in Nostalgia to me.
I want to channel the specific feelings i get from late 90's and early 2000's era lego, things like Xalax, Drome Racers, Slizers and Roboriders. Memories of illustrations in little fold-out instruction sheets, hints of a story that i never understood, extrapolated out in my young mind. This is a throughline also shared by my other two build series, though not quite the same in either case.
Besides that initial seed, there's also the somewhat wish-fulfillment aspect of making lego furry figures. Nobody does nice hand-sized anthro action figures! This must be corrected.
I'd also say that Bionicle as an inspiration fits neatly into both these categories, hitting the nostalgia and the yearning for little guys that just aren't regular degular boring humans, even though Bionicle as it was definitely did fit that human body plan with a couple of exceptions.
I think this level of story detail is all i'll be committing to, kind of a "background sketch" that's slowly fleshed out piecemeal in the descriptions of more characters and builds over time. A little stack of nanofiction to accompany my building and character design.
There's a lot of gaps that i'm likely to leave purposefully unfilled (such as the exact nature of the characters' existence, whether as uploaded minds or fully artificial or something inbetween) to instead focus on the feel of the world, the kind of childlike creativity that's all about just playing around with it and having fun.
Til next time!
