Livvy’s Guide to Making Batshit Crazy Araki-esque Fan Stands
Are you in need of a few stands? Want to do something to pay a little homage to the original material, or figure out a way to spice up your fan stands after exhausting a long, long lineup of cool original designs and powers?
Well, you’re in luck, because I believe I’ve cracked the code on how to come up with stands that have powers that’ll make it fun (and maybe even a little challenging!) to write! So for me, this is what I do
The trick is this: Treat every stand like a conspiracy theory.
When you come up with powers, find the weirdest leaps of logic you can possibly take and then just fucking go with it, no holds barred.
I’ll go ahead and break it down into steps while using my fan stand Moneytalks (a vending machine that starts a life or death stock market game) as an example:
1. Find a reasonable start point.
If you’re doing something based on a tarot card, looking at the meaning of the card helps, or if you’re basing it off of an existing power, looking at the mechanics of that might help as well. For Moneytalks, I used the Four of Pentacles card, a card in the minor deck of the arcana most associated with Earth, material possessions, and wealth, as my starting point.
2. Figure out what you want the stand to reflect (doesn’t necessarily have to be positive)
Have your start point, and figure out what aspect of it you’re going to keep intact to carry throughout the process of creating the stand. It can be a narrative purpose that you need that particular stand for, it can be that you want it to reflect character growth in its stand user, it can be that you want it to do the antithesis of what the start point represents or any number of things.
For Moneytalks, I wanted the stand to represent the idea of struggling with and learning how to manage wealth when you’re in a secure position, as the Four of Pentacles card represents a time when you are financially stable. The card represents the struggle to decide whether to spend all your wealth or to hoard it, and the idea of finding a happy medium. This in turn reflects a bit on the stand user, but we’ll come back to that later
3. Start brainstorming connections.
Even the absolute loosest ones you can think of. Even if it’s only tangentially related. Figure out two words or phrases that become the central theme of your stand, and start spitballing the exact first things that come to mind, even if they’re only very very very very vaguely related. For Moneytalks, the thought process went something like this:
how to gain and lose wealth -> money -> corporations -> betting -> betting ON corporations -> sneaky corporations want in on the betting -> stocks -> stock market
wealth in relation to others -> products -> selling products -> products i want right now -> oh fuck the shell is closed rn -> soda -> mountain dew -> oh wait there’s a vending machine downstairs -> V E N D I N G M A C H I N E
4. Start connecting the dots
Your stand’s powers are a giant conspiracy and you’re about to unearth it. Start connecting those two dots- figure out how the two points you arrive at connect together to get the inner workings and design of your stand. Having a general idea of what the stand user oc is like will also help, but it’s not entirely necessary if you want the stand to be completely independent from the user
For Moneytalks, since the stand user is a teenage girl, I started thinking- okay, she’s not old enough to be really involved in the market, and likely has more experience through simulations and games. Games. Games need pieces, which means it needs people. For the stand Moneytalks to activate, there must be at least twenty people present (sans stand user). Why are there so many people? What do they get as chips in this game? Probably goods of some kind. Likely goods that come from a vending machine, equally distributed out.
The goods represent Stocks, which means the players of Moneytalks’ game have to buy and trade each other’s stocks, with powerups becoming available for the price of stocks from the stand user, who sells back the stocks she amasses. Once someone has a monopoly on every stock, the stand user can confiscate it and toss it off of, say, a plane, forcing the winner to go after it and die.
Tl;dr of step 4: The Vending Machine Is The Stock Market and It Becomes A Life Or Death Game Where the One With the Monopoly Must Go Overboard with the Company (the deed to the Vending Machine aka the deed to the Stock Market)
5. Behold Your Horrific, Strange Creature and/or Item And Rejoice
The Stand. You Are The Creator. It Is You. Congratulations!!
For some more reference in case you need some more slightly wild ideas, I’ll go ahead and link my masterpost of my own Pentacles Deck fanstands here
Just as a parting note: this entire process isn’t at all set in stone, and you may find your own sort of style to making crazier sorts of fan stands yourself! In the end, it’s whatever works best for you, and whatever will be more fun!
Still, the best of luck to you all!
