HighInCoco
A/N: I just felt like writing a story like this.
A young woman named Marceline, a third-year college student studying animation and illustration, dies after being fatally shot in the back of the head by a stray bullet while walking out of a café.
When she opens her eyes, she finds herself face-to-face with an orb-like being that calls itself the System. The System tells her that she will be reincarnated into a new life, but without any of her memories.
Marceline is devastated. Her dream of moving to Japan, becoming a mangaka, and working at an anime studio is now over. Desperate to hold on to at least a part of the life she lost, she begs the System to let her keep the memories of the things she loved most: anime, manga, comics, video games, and animated movies and shows.
The System eventually relents, but with one condition: Marceline will not retain those memories normally. Instead, she will experience them as dreams throughout her new life.
With that, Marceline's soul is reborn into a world vastly different from her own.
She awakens in a world where animation and illustrated pop culture have never reached the same level of popularity or cultural significance. Cartoons, animated movies, comics, and video games exist, but they are mostly considered children's entertainment and have never become iconic mainstream forms of media. Superhero comics do not exist at all, and neither anime nor manga have ever been created.
Technology is also decades behind what Marceline was accustomed to. The world is roughly comparable to the 1990s, with computers, video games, and other technology still developing. Three-dimensional computer graphics are only beginning to be experimented with, and the entertainment industry has yet to discover the potential of modern animation, comics, and gaming.
With her memories appearing to her only through dreams, Marceline slowly begins to realize something:
She can use her dreams to create things this world has never seen before.