During the Shutdown War between the alien species known as the Arweli, and the Robot collective known as Groupthink, massive planetwide bombardments occurred.
Arweli industrial planets were targeted particularly as a means of slowing their war effort. Several times, Groupthink suicide ships equipped with a preciously irreplaceable drive crystals would jump deep behind the battle lines and into Arweli territory to unleash a planet wide barrage of atomic weaponry faster than the defenses of the planets could react. The resulting devastation of industrial facilities on the surface of these planets released unimaginable amounts of toxic byproducts into the environments.
After the war, many species including humans would make expeditions to these dead worlds in pursuit of resources, but would find mutated and degraded offshots of the Arweli species clinging to existence in the ruins.
(Sorry this is a repost, Beehaw defederated and apparently the original post I made disappeared)
Good villains gonna vile^^.
The post-it method is quite interesting, I used to do something quite similar during my university years. I would draw a small square on my class memo or notebook and only draw within the box (in a futile attempt to keep it contained). Though I mainly did environments that way. I wouldn't enjoy drawing big environments anyway. Chars would usually span the margin.
Do you still have those postits kept somewhere? Have you tried organising or structuring them?
About blank slate v jaded. It really depends on the tone you are trying to strike with the whole story and setting, but usually it proves quite difficult to have a main cast that is solely jaded or has lived through everything already. The blank slate 16 yo are a trope for good reasons I think. They are just mature enough so that their reasoning is still relatable for an adult reader, but they also, like the reader, don't know much about what life is really like in the setting. They offer the opportunity to explain, or easy and natural exposition.
That's no surprise that there is Edward in the crew of Cowboy Bebop, you do need those curious types. But on the other hand, having only chars that have lived through nothing and don't know what they are doing is closer to a ttrpg party than narrative storytelling, so...
It's really not the original opinion of the year I guess, but balancing helps.
Well, I suppose it's not just that the characters had things taken away, but that they are actively working to get their lives back. It isn't just mopey depression. That is just the start. Like screenwriting says: Characters should start stories in a place where they need to change. I've always had a trio in mind. The woman who was a pilot for an independent colony militia during the war. Her dream was to be a pilot. In the war she was shot down and lost her arm and leg. She ended up with subpar prosthetics which didn't have good fine motor control, and her colony was destroyed so she ended up like many colonists becoming a refugee to a corporate run area. She became a low skill worker among a crowd of people scraping by.
Second would be an arweli former commando. He was a full patriot and his entire government crumbled and at the same time he watched a lot of cowadice and hypocrisy among the political class as it happened. He ended up being hired muscle for a semi-legal trading outpost run by a Lando Calrissian type. Starts the post war era not believing in causes any more, or at least trying very hard not to.
The last would be a former human corporate soldier who ended up contracting a fatal disease from where he was deployed in the war, and underwent an illicit experimental surgery to transfer his conciousness into the robot shell, which would of course leave him questioning if he was really even himself anymore and all that.
These would be the three that end up together and as the group that is the window into the world. While it isn't an exact parallel I think about The Wizard Of Oz, of all things a lot when I think of them, even though they don't have 1-for-1 motivation lineups with those characters.
Here's a link of post-it note and random paper sketches and drawings. Consider these like non-canon concept art. Quality will be all over the place as a lot of these were just made for me and done in one pass. A window to what I'm thinking, but subject to changes.
I love to see that kind of out of context sketches. You put quite the effort on the style and the expressivity of the characters and their situations, so it leaves an impression regardless of the level of finition, simplicity or technical quality. And in my book that's what such sketches really are about, even more so if you did them to get a grasp on what you were imagining.
Regarding your trio, they are all as you said damaged goods. Physically for the cyborg guy and the pilot, morally for the arweli. I imagine that it makes them complementary in a way, though I expected at one off them to be mentally damaged (wounded body, jaded soul, broken mind). Oh well, they probably all are to some extent.
From the trio, I think that the cyborg is likely the most appealing as a leading character (from an outside perspective, not knowing nearly enough about the story as a whole, of course).
While the two others are characterized either by having renounced (because of the injury) or given up (losing faith in the cause), the cyborg is characterized by an active drive, his need for identity... He is in that unstable situation that you mention by definition, while the two others are in a stable (bad, but stable) state that will require effort to drive them out of.
I'm also curious as to what could bind that ragtag crew together given that they are not connected via any conventional link (from ly understanding). They are not from the same place, they are not from the same faction or even species, they have no common history, their ideology -or absence thereof- do not match, and there is likely no outside force other than fate to push them to join hands. Maybe they agree that the villain needs to get what they deserve?