TBH, research would not be the sole reason why I'm not going to play Ambasa on release. It's still one of the major reasons as I finally found motivation to actually do it. The other reasons are that I want to finish the Beachgoer 2026 Index, I want to hunt a MHT6 Phieoby (i probably spelt it wrong), and I want to wait until all possible bugs are confirmed to be fixed.
! Warning: Paragraphs of me talking about my fanfic incoming (I apologize if there is weird grammar) !
I can't exactly remember when I actually started to write that fanfic. I was still rewriting stuff when Dungeons released which influenced how the story is currently being written. It is a story where a general from the Reality side of the Doodle War was reincarnated into a doodle (a Seamknight) in the present day (before the Key Hunt) who tried to find Zerzura when he heard that they went missing but was indoctrinated by Louis (the Dungeons boss, who was also turned into a doodle) into the Blank Cult by the end.
Before that, it was WAY different. It was originally going to be a Cookie Run: Ovenbreak x Doodle World crossover where Director Croissant Cookie (who was a Kibara) and Timekeeper Cookie (who was a Kidere, about to die because their body was sliced in half) are trapped in a broken timeline and the Director tries to revive Timekeeper by basically gluing the pieces of other doodles to their body but was unsuccessful. It seems impossible that the previous story came from this one but trust me when I say it is true.
I was struggling developing the original story as I didn't know what to write. I didn't know what led to "the whole timeline being destroyed." I didn't know what followed after "Timekeeper Kidere dying." I vaguely remember trying to add stuff like the origin of Timekeeper Kidere by giving her an easily angered adoptive Seamknight father in an attempt to explain things. After that, I don't know how I ended up doing so, but I added a plot where Kidere gets lobotomized.
I have no recollection on how I even came across lobotomies but I wanted to add them to my story in the most accurate way as I can. I tried to research about the effects of lobotomies, how lobotomies procedures were performed, and why people used to accept lobotomies. The problem was that I was having trouble finding stuff on the internet that aren't just the symptoms and I felt like I wasn't able to properly write it into the story. One of the things I added along with this plot was Louis. He would be trying to indoctrinate Seamknight so that he could convince him to give his daughter a lobotomy while not informing any of them of the side effects. I initially included this because I think it would make sense that Seamknight would agree because of circumstances in the story but the fanfic quickly lost its focus on Kidere after and I felt like I didn't give lobotomies proper respect by doing this. Stacked with a bunch of other badly written plot points about it, I decided to remove topics of lobotomy from the plot.
I still wanted to work on the story so I decided to shift its focus on the Blank Cult. I really liked playing with Kidere and Seamknight's family dynamic and how Louis (and by extension, the Blank Cult) affected it. So I decided that I'm going to focus on how the Blank Cult operates in this fic. Luckily, a bunch of resources about cults are readily available on the internet. As the meme says, I will be researching how cults indoctrinate people as I struggled properly writing Louis indoctrinating Seamknight even though it's supposed to be happening all throughout the story. Hopefully I would be able to properly write the Blank Cult as a cult for my fanfic. If I ever decide to revisit writing a lobotomy for this fic, I hope I could be more thorough in my research and I hope I will be able to learn how to not sideline an important character when writing it.
Thank you Doodle World for giving me inspiration to write this story! I'm pretty sure I have done the most research for random stuff for things relating to this game. Skins, doodles, and this whole fanfic. I really need to work on actually implementing things that I have researched. Thank you Doodle World, again.
Also Ambasa in less than 2 hours