The PAFL That Never Was: Part 2. Story

Behind the Scenes 09.2023

Well then, it’s time to talk about how the original story for PAFL was meant to play out.

It was meant to be a comic or a novel, which allowed for a much different style of storytelling. Though, I’m namely talking about the one trick I used at the beginning of the narrative – you’ll know what I mean soon enough.

Keep in mind that the summary will be quite vague (especially in later parts), as it was never adapted to any serious extent outside of little comic snippets, illustrations, and written segments. I’ll also be using the characters’ current names for ease of reading.

Excuse the rough sketches in place of illustrations, hope those will suffice to give you the general idea of the scenes.

Anywho, let’s get into it!

Punch It, Punk!

This is the part of the story that’s most similar to the narrative we know.

It all begins with one of two scenes: Olya finding Dmitry already beat up at the dumpster or Sergei watching a news report about an escaped mutant (yes, they actually alerted the public to those in the old version). The exact order doesn’t matter.

We then see Dmitry waking up at Olya’s place, where he acquaints himself with both her and Anya. You know the drill: Anya almost immediately invites Dima to be her boyfriend, while Olya allows him to crash at her apartment until he recovers, since he doesn't want to go to the hospital. Interestingly, she’s not nearly as iffy about the idea as she is in PAFL.

We gradually watch the relationship between the characters develop. The shenanigans are about what you’d expect. Though, there are numerous things that make them a lot less wholesome than the Punch It, Punk you’re familiar with.

For starters, Anya is a lot more hesitant to talk about her family. She mentions having a brother and a mother, but it takes her a while to reveal to Dima that Lilya is a prostitute. They also never cross paths with Yura and Anya avoids discussing him entirely.

As time goes on, the girl shows her nastier side. She seems to care little about what Dmitry is or isn’t comfortable with and can even hurt him physically. But the boy grows weirdly attached to her regardless. Despite her often acting cruel towards him, he can’t help but feel bad for her. In the end, she is very weak.

Olya’s character is a more pathetic one. She is extremely lonely: her relationship with Sergei amounts to little outside of sleeping together, she has no real friends, and having Anya around is the only thing that feels somewhat rejuvenating.

Having Dmitry stay at her place is just an attempt to bring some company into her life. This leads to somewhat inappropriate interactions, though never anything explicit. Olga is several years younger than her PAFL self, but an adult nonetheless.

Over time, Dmitry is looking more and more suspicious. The escaped mutant message at the beginning becomes hard to ignore.

Parties Are For Losers

In parallel to the PiP gang’s shenanigans, we’re shown the events of PAFL: Yura and Sanya rescue Katya from the local thugs and befriend her. Unlike PAFL, Sanya doesn’t have a solid gang - her old group fell apart some time ago, and she mostly hangs out with Yura and some of his pals (Tsar and Yana were the only defined background characters at that point).

A pretty significant difference here is that neither Yura nor Sanya assume that Katya ran away from home. Perhaps, a child from a neglectful household similar to Yura’s, perhaps a kid from the orphanage – they don’t know, but they don’t pry about it either. She simply hangs out with them and then disappears off to whatever hiding place she’d managed to secure.

In a sense, this character trio is a lot more distant from each other.

To start with, Yura is more mature – at least, superficially. He still teases Sanya and whatnot, but doesn’t really make a fool of himself; he does not self-deprecate and never lets his actual frustration slip out. He’s a lot more difficult to read.

As a result, he also never has that moment of breakdown with Katya. Instead, the two share some scenes where he opens up to her in a more restrained way. I remember those being difficult for me to write – I think I’d do much better with those today.

The personal gap between Yura and Sanya is also greater, in part due to a bigger age difference. Sanya herself has a rougher personality, which doesn’t leave much room for tender moments. She is also a more seasoned street thug, so there is less general naivety on her end.

She still holds a certain reverence for Yura, but I think interpreting it as a crush is a lot more difficult in this case. The girl also dislikes him being friendly with Sergei, but can’t do much about it. Her relationship with Olya or Sergei’s coworkers is basically nonexistent.

Sanya has a very slight connection with Katya. She finds her fun, but that’s about it – if anything, Sanya’s a bit jealous that Yura spends more time with some kid. Still, the whole group forms a semblance of friendship over a fairly short time.

The story draws to the same conclusion: Sergei sees Sanya hanging with Katya and calls containment services. Kid goes boom, gets taken away, curtains fall. The mutant has been captured.

False Disposition

Sanya’s already strained relationship with Sergei takes a serious hit. Meanwhile Yura is filled with determination to rescue Katya. He talks with Sergei about it, and the latter agrees to give him the equipment necessary to travel the Zone – mostly out of guilt. Plus, Yura’s technically an adult: his choices are none of Sergei’s business.

Yura leaves alone without saying goodbye to Sanya; though, in some versions she does catch up with him False Disposition-style. He leaves a note to his family.

And he does not come back.

Wait, what?

Yeah, Yura just fucking dies there. Well, at least in some iterations he did. The key point is that he went to rescue Katya and didn’t return. Not surprising, to be fair.

But also, if the reported mutant was captured – that is, Katya – what’s up with Dmitry? What was up with that foreshadowing?

Not long after – or before – Katya’s capture comes a scene where the boy reveals to Anya he ran away from routine beatings at home. Having learnt that, she makes an effort to be softer with him (though, with meddling success). Here, he’s just an average kid.

And now that we mention it, Olya never suspects Dmitry as a potential mutant and neither does Anya, despite his strange behaviour and the apparent prevalence of the story in the news. The suspicion is only on the part of readers. Why is that? You might’ve already guessed.

Parties Are For Losers and Punch It Punk do not happen simultaneously.

The two stories happen a year apart from each other. They are intentionally framed through alternating scenes to create more of a red herring around Dima, while at the same time dropping subtle hints through incongruencies in character clothing and throwaway lines of dialogue.

There was no grand meaning or symbolism to it, by the way, I just thought it would be cool and crazy lol

But with that big fat reveal out of the way, here's how things progressed.

Running Away Arc

The story after that was very disjointed in my head, but if I had to scramble the scenes I had planned into a more or less coherent narrative, they’d go something like this.

Anya tells Dmitry about her family situation and the brother that had disappeared off to the Zone. She doesn’t believe he’s dead, but who knows, really. She wants to run away from the city with Dmitry and venture into the Zone herself.

Anya loosely understands that the Zone is dangerous, so she wants to get equipment for traversing it. She remembers her brother got it from that one girl’s brother, so that’s who she’s gotta search for.

Here’s the issue: that one girl, a.k.a. Sanya, got a lot meaner over the course of the past year. More jaded and violent than ever, she has gathered a whole new gang around herself and is now anything but approachable.

In this part of the story, Sanya acts as a sort of antagonist. She refuses to give Anya any information (absolutely justified), and Anya keeps testing her with increasingly aggressive attempts of getting supplies for the Zone.

Their conflict escalates beyond mere equipment, with Anya partially blaming the girl for her brother leaving. The tensions culminate in Anya pointing a gun at Sanya (which she got god knows where) in the middle of a dancefloor. Sanya just laughs her off.

I had no particular conclusion planned for this mini-arc, but what I knew for certain was that in the end, Anya goes “fuck it we ball” and decides to run to the Zone with nothing but snacks and Dmitry at her side.

In this version, the Zone’s perimeter isn’t as strictly guarded, and anyone willing to jump out of a moving train and then walk a couple of kilometres through a wasteland can get in. This Zone is also slowly, but continuously expanding, meaning the guard posts have to be moved every couple of years. But that last part doesn’t really matter.

When Anya and Dmitry get to the very border of the Zone, a car pulls up. Out comes Olya, gives Anya a slap on the face, and drives them back home. I think the implication was that Sanya conceded and said she’d contact a stalker that would guide them through the Zone; then specifically asked Olya to get the kids, knowing she wouldn’t go through with the mission.

But maybe I’m giving my younger self too much credit and Olya just magically knew they were going there, I don’t remember.

Either way, that very anticlimactically concluded the “running away from home” arc.

Finale

And at last, the vaguest and dumbest part of them all. The EPIC ending.

Yura returns from the Zone, changed. His body is thinner, his hair is longer and has gone grey from, presumably, stress. And he’s strong as hell!!!

Basically, Yura did reach the containment facility deep in the Zone. On his way there, he got either contaminated in some way or his latent abilities came out – I didn’t decide on that. The end result was that he got registered as a mutant, was imprisoned, and spent over a year at the research centre.

There he underwent a lot of inhumane experiments and learned that KT was, in fact, terminated. As a result, he lost faith in humanity, decided that all people are rotten at the core and all that’s good in the world is doomed to wither anyways.

He eventually gets powerful enough to run away, making his way back to the city. His powers are pretty much the same as Dima’s, but stronger. What he wants to do is for humans to ensure equal treatment for mutants or whatever, who cares – I wanted an excuse to have a big fat battle against a strong mutant in the city.

I didn’t even have a concrete outcome in mind. At the end of it all, Anya would just talk to her brother in the city ruins. Maybe they’d say something profound, but I didn’t come up with what exactly.

And that was it.

Some comments

I like how the summary makes it very apparent which parts of the story had more thought put into them and which had me totally lost.

Stupidity aside, it’s interesting to look back on it and realise how much the overall atmosphere has changed. I’ve heard a lot of people say the current PAFL has a melancholic vibe. But the old version seems a lot more angry, doesn’t it? It was for sure grittier in a way only an edgy teenager could conjure.

I don’t feel complete disdain or embarrassment for the old doomerish PAFL – I think some ideas in it could be interesting if handled in a more meaningful way. A less likeable Anya and a more antagonistic Sanya are especially fun to me.

But in the end, I’m very happy with how the series’ direction changed. The old story got a total overhaul by the time I worked on the Punch It, Punk video – and currently, I’m still following the plan laid out around that time (though, the ending arc has changed substantially).

I wonder if – and how – PAFL will change by the time I get to the final video. Probably not a lot, but hey, who knows what kind of epiphany I’ll get on the road there. Storytelling sure is fascinating!

***

I’m sorry this BTS took so long. I’ve been completely caught up in work this month and a lot of things have been slipping my mind. Because of that, this month’s character interview and fan content roundup will come out on the first and second of October. Again, I apologise.

Next month is looking to be even more busy, but I’ll do my best to follow a more consistent schedule and make all the content updates on time. I’m really thankful for your patience!