CPC Behind the Scenes: Rejected Scenes / Ideas (clean version) (Patreon)

Sorry for the long-awaited delay! I forgot I had been waiting on this until after the season was over, just bc I reference like a panel or two from the finale (not that it would have been a big deal though…). 

So here are a few types of deleted jokes / scenes / concepts (that I am able to currently talk about) that never made it to the CPC. Thank you again to Bayrenda for the idea! These concepts I show are really quite awful though, so I hope this doesn't taint ppl's memories of what the actual story while we're on hiatus!!! >_< (pls come back for season 3....)

This post is kinda long, so I'll be continuing the other installment a few days later. From the poll, it seems like many ppl don't mind posts with less-than-clean language, but there were enough ppl that seemed to not want to see that. So it's been tamed down a lot, but please still skip if you'd prefer (I'm sorry!!! ._.;;)

Here we go!:

A Rejected Joke Brainstorm

Most weeks, I spend what little spare time I have sitting and brainstorming silly titles or lines in the comic. 

One small example is this: For the commemorative photo of the Pastel family with Laverne in the season finale, it says "Live. Laugh. Laverne." But here were some rejected ones:

I bet you can think of other funny things Laverne’s name could be superimposed into too! 🤣The possibilities are endless.

Other things I sat for too long with are the names of the amusement park buildings in ep. 26, as well as what Lorena's math textbook said in ep. 31:

(On my brainstorm list I guess I had written down: "Fi-fi-fo-fractions," "Old MacDonald Had a Fundamental Theorem of Calculus," "Hyperbola Ever After". So dumb hahahaha >_<)

A Rejected Scene 

Sometimes I just can't fit everything into a week's comic, and certain (inconsequential) things have to get cut.

One example is that at Lance’s big birthday party in the Plaid Kingdom, Gwen was carrying around a purse. It held the fairytale book that she ended up returning to Frederick in the library. But I originally also meant for Gwen to have packed her little Princess Panda keychain in it.

At the party when she was feeling lonely standing against the pillar, she was going to find it in her purse. She would think fondly of the CPC and and help take her mind off of her darkness momentarily. She would wonder what they were up to (and the answer was that they were chasing butterflies or something very silly).

But then I wrote in all the Jamie gags, and I had no room left for this!

A Rejected Cursed Princess

I've got a list of rejected Cursed Princess member ideas that eventually morphed into what they are now. I think I had a princess with eyes of a fly, a teeny tiny sized princess, etc. One not-good rejected idea was having a princess based off the fairytale "The Princess and the Pea".

She was a princess that was being tested for her "true royalty" by a prince before they got married. Like the fairytale goes, he placed a pea under her mattress (in her palace), and like a true princess, she had a terrible night's sleep. But unlike the fairytale, this prince had to go to battle the next morning and tragically died before he could remove the pea. She unknowingly kept sleeping poorly for a decade, even through many stacked mattresses. After years of terrible sleep, she finds the pea, but feels the ordeal has tarnished her beauty with everlasting eye bags and dark circles, and dejectedly joins the CPC.

Yeahh. I liked the twist on that (very odd) fairytale, but not much else about it made much sense. I think maybe Abbi ended up taking her place. And her story (which is just a really dumb, shortened reference to the Japanese fairytale Urashima Tarou) seems funnier to me lol.

A rejected / reformulated plot idea

In ep. 45, Gwen receives a terrible makeover from the maids of the Plaid Kingdom. But in my very first draft, one absolutely awful idea I had was that it was the CPC that originally and accidentally did it to her out of sheer incompetence. 

It would have been taken place after Prez's  boring lectures on beauty for Gwen. Syrah suggests a makeover instead, and everyone takes Gwen away excitedly, except for a despondent Prez and Saffron (who ended up enjoying her lectures).

In the club's makeover, they still accidentally give her frizzy hair and terrible thick makeup, and Saffron walks in right when Gwen is revealed and screams in fear at seeing Vampire Clown.

But jeez, what an AWFUL idea!! lol. The CPC has its fair share of flaws and bad ideas, but that crosses the line for how bad they could be. So the idea quickly got rejected and ultimately reformulated into what it is now.

Writing is truly just about getting down every bad idea in front of you, I think. I feel like your brain then takes those bad ideas, and over the next few months, magically transforms them into better ideas down the road. But it would have never happened if you didn't sit with the terrible ideas first.

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That's all for now! As stated above, the next part with unclean language will come a few days later. I decided it would be a post centered around the types of things I do to keep CPC more all-ages friendly haha...