What is Breakpoints?

Breakpoints is my Splatoon fan fiction. Currently in planning and outlining, I had enough fun with the Proof of Concept story that I decided to make it a whole big thing.

Why Splatoon?

Splatoon wormed its way into my brain when it first came out in 2015. I was young and found the game quite fun. I have a historically bad record with any kind of shooter game, so being somewhat decent at one was a novel experience.
At the time it wasn't much deeper than that, and beyond some worldbuilding, neither was the series.
Come Splatoon 2, and a slightly older me, something changed. I can't say what it is, but something about the hero mode ending, Tidal Rush and just that whole sequence just lodged itself in my brain. I added the song to my phone of course. Every time it would come on shuffle I would have an indescribable, I don't know longing, consume my brain for the next couple hours. Once I got the means to start actually writing, I decided I wanted to explore that longing, and as such chose to start writing about it.

How much do you break cannon?

I believe that cannon exists at various levels for different properties.
Something like Arcane has very defined characterr traits, dynamics, settings, arcs, etc.
Splatoon on the other hand, it's very... loose with a lot of its key elements. The main protagonist of each game is a veritable blank slate. The stories themselves also very threadbare, not much more than "Hey kid! Here's a gun! GO!"

However, the WORLD and concepts that Splatoon presents have so much more potential:

• Exploring Inkopolis and Splatsville
• How the NSS works
• Octarian Society
• The Underground Metro and Kamabo co.
• Alterna
• The Salmonids
• Even smaller concepts have a lot of depth to them if you want:
  • How does the Rainmaker work?
  • The hymposhades
  • Fry's eel summoning
  • How do specials work?
  • What about ability chunks?

All these ideas and more are just BEGGING for a deeper dive into them

Splatoon Cannon in Breakpoints

To keep it simple: The shape of the overall Splatoon story will be there:
- Octavio still kidnaps the Zapfish, only to be defeated by Agent 3, Callie and Marie.
- Octavio tries again, kidnapping Callie, only to be stopped by Marie and Agent 4.
- Craig & 3 still fall into the Metro with 8, and Off the Hook & 8 still battle the Nills Statue.
Etc etc.
The overall workings of the world will be the same:
- Turf wars still happen.
- Grizzco is still operating.

Breakpoints just expands on all of this, de-gamifying it. Some examples:
How turf matches work logistically
What ability chunks even are and how they function
Making the blank-slate agents into full characters
Adding depth and neuance to the established characters
Turning the linear levels of the story campaign into an actual exploration of the domes

Admittedly, I am making some pretty major changes to the cannon in a few minor places.
Check the headcannons page for details on that, but rest assured none of these changes derail thea overall shape of the story as outlined above. And the most exciting part?
I have a fair bit of original content planned too1 Set both before and after the existing campaigns, I plan to look into the character's origins, what happens "off camera" between campaigns, and what happens after. I've got some original characters to throw into the mix too, just to keep things different.

Some general info about the story

The story is told in (mostly) chronological order. The exception being character introductions, backstory is explained when we meet the character for the sake of clarity.
Currently, the outline has the entire story broken into 10 main parts, each one set to be its own major arc, some longer than others. The current outline looks like this (do note, the arc names are currently very vague both for spoiler reasons and incomplete outline reasons):

1. Callie & Marie Origin Story
2. Splatoon 1 Rewrite
3. Splatoon 2 Rewrite*
4. Octo Expansion Rewrite*
5. New Agents' Origin Story
6. New Agents Arc 1
7. Octarian Last Stand
8. Return to the Metro
9. Alterna
10. Side Order

*These two, while being published as seperate stories, will occur simultainously in cannon, and will have a chronological reading order.

Honestly, writing this is probably going to take a while. Making the 10 chapters in the legacy story took me 4 months for ~65k words, and I have a lot more content that that had outlined. In addition to the headache that comes from surviving upper level college, an internship hunt, and all that IRL stuff.
Good news though: The story's been an absolute blast to write, so I don't see myself stopping anytime soon. The hyperfixation gremlin has been latched onto splatoon since 2015, so I don't think my interest is fading. In addition to that, really, this is one of those projects where I'm writing it for myself. A lot of the stuff in here is (going to be) scenes, ideas, or concepts that I want to see, but haven't. So I decided to make them myself.

The Legacy Chapters

When I started this whole writing idea in the summer of 2023, I had no plans beyond "Yeah I'll make some OCs and throw them into the NSS. Might tweak some of the characters too, that'll be fun."
And then while I was writing it, a bunch of small mistakes, inconsistencies, and missed opportunities cropped up. I started planning for some future stories, and some backstories, and by the time I had a good outline figured out, I realized that the chapters I had written so far were just, not really compatible with what I had outlined.
The solution is simple, there's a bunch of things I'm not happy about with the existing chapters, and they don't fit into my greater plans anyway, so they're being decannonized.
I don't regret making them, if amything I'm still a bit proud of them. I intend to keep them up, under the legacy banner. They're a proof-of-concept. I like the ideas and everything I have set up, but I want to do the legwork to backup the other characters this time around.
If you want to read the legacy chapters check the chapters tab, they'll have their own section at the bottom.

Breakpoints is a blast to write, I hope you enjoy it as much as I am!