Today’s post is about Ocean! And will probably be the shortest of the posts covering the differences between the genies’ original introductions and the rewritten ones I ended up publishing. 

Sapphire

As mentioned in Rajan’s post, Ocean was originally introduced at the museum along with the fire genie. Since that scenario didn’t really make sense, I reconfigured things to take Ocean out of that part of the story entirely, meaning I had to create a new story for him, including giving him a master. 

There are basically no similarities between the original version and what I ended up publishing, other than that Ocean was always a stuffy character. Given that, and now that he had an actual master rather than his gem just randomly hanging around a museum, it felt perfect to make him a genie who was a stickler for following his master. Unlike the rest of the genies up to this point, Ocean doesn’t have a rebellious bone in his body, and believes in following wishes to the letter. 

His slight personality redesign also meant that he would be the first genie who didn’t want to go with Ali. This presented an interesting challenge, since Ali would never force herself on anyone, even an enslaved genie. It took me a little while to figure out how to convince Ocean to join her!

Ultimately, I was quite pleased with how Ocean’s story played out. It gave me the opportunity to show how unwilling Ali is to impose her will on anyone else and to show off Tavor’s dark side with him killing people behind Ali’s back (for the first time). And, of course, this version of the story provided way more opportunities to showcase Ocean’s character compared to the original version where he interacted with Ali in a museum for five minutes.