#bubblegum crisis fanfiction

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Anti-Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: Andy Skuse's Bubblegum Cross

Oooofah. Here we go. Here's one I sort of forgot existed. I mean, I don't wish I had never remembered it in the first place, but I don't feel like I came out the better for wear having re-read part of it.

Jeez... how did I remember this thing? Right-right-right. Someone on the Edgerunners fanfic Discord was talking about AD Police Files, I remembered its weird-ass manga that is supposed to have all these deep lore connections that explain Largo and suchlike, and then I remembered the fanfic that tried the hardest to get mileage out of said connection. Having reread Dead End City and not liked it that much (Takezaki's art style in this case is just too much like schlocky Katsuhiro Otomo), I decided to return to this fic. I knew from the first chapter that it wasn't that good, and I was proven right by chapter 23, but I persevered.

Why? Because Bubblegum Cross is a more interesting kind of bad than my other anti-rec-in-progress Just Won't Die, and a less boring kind of bad that is Illusions. So, without further ado, here we go!

So! I read all 23 chapters of this fic fairly quickly. They're easy to skim, and they're easy to dissect in such a manner that I can catalogue, and summarize the failures of this fic in, like, a listicle. I was daunted by this fic at first, just knowing Skuse's reputation, but that sentiment has passed. Cross isn't even, like, actively bad, it's just a bunch of mediocre cliches. It reaches neither above nor below, but slumps onward towards Gehenna like a half-dead hunchbacked ox. Or something like that.

It's difficult to summarize the story briefly, too, mostly because of its dedication to that Deep Lore that was brought up in Dead End City, but let's try. Spoilers ahead, not that you should care:

In 2036, following the destruction of GENOM by the government for human trafficking and experiments, some shady dudes sneak into Quincy's office and steal the OMS. In 2038, Priss is depresso as the Sabers have wound down and her singing career is dead, but then she meets Blackie, who is also a rock n' roll dude and is best described as the Cool New Male Original Character. He saves Priss from some street thugs (don't they always), they hang out at his apartment which has a weirdly fancy samurai tapestry, the two use 'ya know' and other uses of 'ya' instead of you for me not to be annoyed. Meanwhile, a mad scientist being bankrolled by Quincy (actually Largo's predecessor v728 in a Boomer shell) builds weird superboomers (actually animal-human genetic hybrids in cybershells, for reasons beyond me) which attack a military base, and said super-twitchy Boomer-things proceed to wreck the Sabers' shit almost instantly because they can just dodge any given attack the Sabers throw at them. Also, for some reason, the Sabers' hardsuits have power problems? And I'm pretty sure this didn't get mostly written until before 2040, when if you brought up the Sabers having power supplies measured in minutes you'd be laughed out of the room. Anyway, Blackie shows up with his own hardsuit and a laser katana, and delays the Sabers long enough for them to escape, but insists he has to see Sylia (not that he knows she's Saber White until she reveals it, thank goodness that's not a factor). So they meet, and Sylia gets a data unit off of Blackie, which turns out to be the rest of her father's notes, on stuff like mind uploading and telepathy (which I guess, given the end of OVA 5, isn't unprecedented). Blackie is revealed to be a Largo-like cyborg, a prototype created by Dr. Stingray and raised by Dr. Raven. And then, uh... nothing happens.

Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. Let me qualify that statement: Nothing which serves the mainline plot happens, and what happens in that back half or so of the fic is honestly kind of... it's not dull per se, it's just more it feels really forced, as the author attempts to wind every piece of deep lore he knows around Blackie. As an example: Blackie and Priss are hooking up (oh boy another author's Cool Male OC gets a Saber to fall in love with him and pierce through their cool exterior what a surpriiiiise (see this is why I like A Killer's Heart, because Ryan Xavier went out of his way to do something a little different)), and they're back at the seaside vending machines where Priss hung out with Sylvie. It turns out that Priss's boyfriend (Jesse? Christ, can't we at least try to use some more Japanese, or just slightly more foreign-in-general names? It's not that Megatokyo isn't a melting-pot city at this point, it's just that this smacks of not trying very hard) looked a lot like Blackie, Blackie tried to go to the police for something or another, and in so doing tipped Mason off to his presence to a degree... which caused Mason to hit Jesse thinking he was Blackie.

Skuse. Skuse. Why do that? I get Blackie's supposed to be an important guy, but this is pushing it to an absurd degree. Forced doesn't begin to cover it.

Like I said, little of significance to the main plot occurs, until the bio-borgs track down Priss and Blackie, but nothing happens at that point, literally 'run!' is the end of the story as it was written, and Skuse said he only had 9 chapters left, and these are short-ish chapters, so the question of 'how the fuck did you intend to wrap this story up satisfactorily in the time you had left' rears its head, especially since Skuse said he wanted to get Jeena Malso in there (if you wanted to, put her in at THE START OF THE STORY).

So I think I can nail down a few big, leering problems with its story besides its incredibly dull single fight scene (there's this bit where the bio-borgs simultaneously lunge to choke out the Sabers and the girls are just helpless against it, it feels really, again, forced) and awkward prose. One is the idea that meat biology has somehow exceeded the performance of Boomers, which doesn't make sense to me given what we've seen Boomers do; the next is that terrible-ass pacing; the third is Skuse's desperate attempts to make all the deep lore mean something to the story; and, well fucking Blackie.

Oh, Blackie. Blackie Blackie Blackie. I remember reading somewhere, maybe it was an old Usenet post, that Skuse said he was trying very hard to not have an overpowered Cool OC Dude, which is baffling because Blackie is the umpteenth incarnation of that sort of character, with his black hardsuit, his hooking up with Priss, his superhuman strength and reflexes, his fucking laser katana, his Kawasaki Ninja-based bike, and the fact that he's the most important character narratively (his name is key to Sylia unlocking his datatape with her Dad's message on it through a borderline Death Note-level password puzzle, for another example). It's not helped by the fact that Blackie doesn't have much of a character beyond a childlike enthusiasm for things that can transition easily into him being mature and cool, so it's hard to figure out what Skuse was trying to do with him in those moments.

But who am I kidding. Bubblegum Cross is the platonic ideal of the mediocre Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction, really. I don't need to spend more words on it than I already have.

It speaks for itself well enough.

[tangent101]

No! Not another fanfic idea!!!

Me: No. No, I’ve got plenty on my plate! I don’t need to think of this...

Dark Side: Ah, but consider this: Bubblegum Crisis. But instead of Linna, it’s Max... and Priss is replaced with Chloe.

Me: Go on...

[drgeoduck]

Daley and Leon enjoy flirting in the office. Because it's funny.

[greenjacketwhitehatdocmui]

Old Fanfiction Plug

It was the dawn of the Third Wave of anime fandom.  It was the age of rental anime at Blockbuster Video.  It was the time of USEnet discussion groups, particularly rec.arts.anime.

These were the days before dial-up internet, before streaming, before Blu-Ray and DVDs.  Those few licenses that made it to the US shores did so in the form of subbed or dubbed VHS tapes, perhaps the occasional Laserdisc.  There were those who also provided fan-subtitled anime for those series that hadn’t made it to the US.

Anime fanfiction was mostly Ranma 1/2.  There were others, mostly of the older titles such as Kimagure Orange Road, Bubblegum Crisis and some lost to memory.

After my first, godawful Ranma 1/2 story (which had the trifecta of modern sins--a blatant self-insert, terrible writing and being written in script format), I got better.  It’s easier to get better when you’ve started from the very bottom.

The idea of anime characters and regular people interacting wasn’t a new one.  There was a series where the characters were in a hospital and they hated “animes” as they called them.  Then there was “Who Framed Vampire Princess Miyu,” which took a different tactic of having anime characters be just actors.

The latter was my inspiration for Anime Detective.  The premise:  Our intrepid hero, the somewhat grumpy, not so hard-boiled detective is a policeman who has to maintain good relations between Animates (anime characters) and regular people.  Fortunately, he’s well-connected, if not always well-liked.  He also has access to a one-ton hammer in a dimensional pocket.

After the first story, he gains a partner:  The very capable, very lecherous Ryo Saeba, the City Hunter.  He also gets help from a cute redheaded hacker, Nene Romanova, from Bubblegum Crisis.

As you can imagine, these are not deep mystery stories.  They do contain some commentary and humor--most likely a shot at whatever was bugging me at the time.

I’ve written eight stories for Detective Andrew Mays.  Just don’t call him “Andy Mays.”  He hates that.

Anyway, the stories can be found here:

http://www.eyrie.net/ETC/AD/

Please ignore the e-mail address on the page.  It’s old and it never got changed.

I actually have three more rough drafts.  The final chapter was written for Nanowrimo this year.

So, if anyone is willing to engage in a little fanfiction archaeology and can wade through ‘90′s anime references, feel free to take a look.

--Doc

P.S., I have put some cameos of colleagues in my stories.  I’d be very surprised if you could pick them out, though.

[skzfaker]

i just finished your fic! :) it's nowhere near ready tho. i still have editing to do, and only then will it be perfect, but yay! prepare >:) also - i'd pass away if u made a book cover for it, omg. that would be so good blinking is optional and yeah, i still have a long time :) it'd be super cool to incorporate the stuff i learn into fics, but i also just finished my pre-reqs so im still really not in my major just yet. but im excited for my upcoming classes! i have done evil wizards, evil joseon dynasty era warriors, evil pirates, evil vampires... ahahahahaha. can u see a theme AND YEAH, JONGHO <33333 he's the greatest. he's so cool. i have put him through so much and he absolutely does not deserve it. i show my love in really strange ways. he's the main vocalist of ateez, right? i may have stolen his vocal cords in one of the fics as a punishment for his sins it's a very long story. I have a handful of fluff fics but it's really just majorly horror or fantasy and it's all darker fantasy lol. clearly... i enjoy the more sinister side of life. hahah i might skip but probably not. i hate skipping class ajdsjklfskl and i'd just be worried about it during the concert which wouldn't be good. idk, who knows, i'd stop a moving truck w my bare hands if i knew that by doing so i'd be able to see ateez oh, where do u live if u dont mind me asking? i figured we lived in different places because your time zone seems different than mine and thank u!!! i've just been chilling, but i also like being a busy bee, so i've been writing when i can, i'm also a lifeguard, and im trying to get a paid internship at a lab for my resume :') and yeah, i like to do a lot of things not on the computer! i play viola tho not as much anymore bc im burnt out but i still say it, write, knit, and read! ngl the first thought i have was felix's extensions in thunderous. clothes never really bother me too much, it's always hair it seems. i just like it a certain way and im not a big fan of longer hair, so i saw his extensions and sighed a bit. ofc it's just hair and i still love him but AAAAAA. what about u? - ���

wow you work really fast! THE HYPE FOR THIS STORY IS REAL (╯✧∇✧)╯and it'd be a honor to make the banner/cover for it! do you usually have covers for your stories or have someone make those btw? i remember back when i frequented fanfiction sites, everyone seemed to have their own banner-makers. sending you energy for the editing portion tho!

also i spent a majority of yesterday taking naps so i think my eyes are back to normal

okay that's a pretty impressive repertoire of horror-themed stories! very intrigued by the evil pirates one evil-anything needs to be more of a thing - this is why i love it when groups do dark/evil concepts (also i keep typing 'evil' as 'evel'). all the fluff and bubblegum is cute and all, but i live for the edgy and dark themes too.

HAHA OMG jongho is ariel - i love how you stole his voice HAHAHA. you really hit him where it hurts; i can already feel his crisis from over here. yeah we're definitely the same in that regard. i love my cheesy romance, but horror is still my #1 genre. i do hope you gave jongho a happy ending tho (≧▽≦)

aww man i was the same when i was a student too. i wasn't happy skipping classes and i was constantly anxious about being late. fast forward a few years and i'll take a random day off of work for the heck of it HAHAHA. hopefully having to stop a truck with your bare hands won't be the requirement for you to meet ateez tho! have you already met them before, btw? or is the concert next year potentially the first time you'll see them?

ah i'm currently staying in the philippines! what about you? i kinda just assumed you're in america - please let me know if i'm off-base there, and we can figure out just how much time difference we have tho tbh i'm a vampire so i'm up until 3 or 4 AM here

(also you just reminded me to ask which timezone to follow when it's time to give gifts/reveal ourselves on the 25th. i might give my gift too early...)

btw, have you made it home??

yay! glad you’re getting some rest! wow a lifeguard tho! i'm guessing you enjoy swimming then HAHAHA. and that you live close to the beach? ooh i love that knitting is also part of your hobby list. i used to crochet but got too lazy about it. what kind of things do you like to make?

...okay i swear i'm not copying you on purpose here, but felix's thunderous extensions is also on my list of ??? skz looks. the blonde ones that match his actual hair looked okay, but the weird greyish ones...yeah i'm not feeling it. i thought it was part of his hat at first. hmm, can't say i'm a huge fan of chan's cheeto hair much either, especially when it was so short (soz chan). what about your favorite looks?

[kariedo]

1-68 and 99

Why are you like this?

1: when you have cereal, do you have more milk than cereal or more cereal than milk?I tend to put more milk in even though I don’t drink it lmao

2: do you like the feeling of cold air on your cheeks on a wintery day?No I hate the cold with a passion

3: what random objects do you use to bookmark your books?Nothing really cause I haven’t picked up a book in god knows how long lmao

4: how do you take your coffee/tea?I don’t like either unless it has a shit tone of sugar in it

5: are you self-conscious of your smile?Yes

6: do you keep plants?No. Me and plants have some bad blood lmao

7: do you name your plants?No cause I don’t keep plants

8: what artistic medium do you use to express your feelings?Generally my tablet or paper

9: do you like singing/humming to yourself?Yes

10: do you sleep on your back, side, or stomach?usually on my side, but if I’m dead tired my stomach or if I’m drunk my back even though you’re not suppose to lmao

11: what's an inner joke you have with your friends?The most recent one is “Pete would shit is pants” and “Stupid” lmao

12: what's your favorite planet?Venus lmao

13: what's something that made you smile today?My cat lmao

14: if you were to live with your best friend in an old flat in a big city, what would it look like?It would be covered in weeb shit let’s be honest lmao That or we would have our fav disney stuff everywhere along with our favorite colors clashing because I’m sure none of us believe in transition colors

15: go google a weird space fact and tell us what it is!Please do not. I can’t handle space. I’ll have a crisis lmao

16: what's your favorite pasta dish?All pasta dishes lmao

17: what color do you really want to dye your hair?LAVENDER

18: tell us about something dumb/funny you did that has since gone down in history between you and your friends and is always brought up.The fucking comment about lean muscle which still haunts me to this day. I opened my stupid mouth when we were talking about body types and I said I preferred lean muscle and literally the next fucking day Joseph Joestar happened and they will never let it go.

19: do you keep a journal? what do you write/draw/ in it?No lmao

20: what's your favorite eye color?I think green eyes are really pretty lmao

21: talk about your favorite bag, the one that's been to hell and back with you and that you love to pieces.I don’t really carry around bags. There’s my purse that I’ve had for god knows how long only cause I’m too lazy to clean it out and go look for a new oneplus I’m broke af for a new one

22: are you a morning person?Oh honey no lmao

23: what's your favorite thing to do on lazy days where you have 0 obligations?Just lay in my bed and do nothing lmao

24: is there someone out there you would trust with every single one of your secrets?Yes and sometimes I think I’ve made a mistake cause she’ll always tease me about some stuff lmao

25: what's the weirdest place you've ever broken into?A middle school because my friend had to use the bathroom lmao

26: what are the shoes you've had for forever and wear with every single outfit?My black knock off vans lmao

27: what's your favorite bubblegum flavor?Just the original bubblegum

28: sunrise or sunset?Sunset

29: what's something really cute that one of your friends does and is totally endearing?They will make doodles or write stuff and I’m such a sucker for that stuff and I cry :’)

30: think of it: have you ever been truly scared?I live in a constant state of fear lmao

31: what is your opinion of socks? do you like wearing weird socks? do you sleep with socks? do you confine yourself to white sock hell? really, just talk about socks.I love socks. I have them on constantly except in the summer and it’s only really so I can tan my white ass feet. My fav kind of socks are the really soft and fuzzy ones uwu

32: tell us a story of something that happened to you after 3AM when you were with friends.One time we were drinking and my now current roommate lived by a park and so we went and we were playing on the jungle gym and there was this turning wheel thing that you’d spin on. So we all went on it and I spun on it a little to fast so when I let go I kinda semi ate it but I was fine but my roommate didn’t see this green pole and he slammed right into and was on the ground laughing and crying lmao

33: what's your fave pastry?Doughnuts lmao

34: tell us about the stuffed animal you kept as a kid. what is it called? what does it look like? do you still keep it?I used to have this stuffed polar bear and I would refuse to sleep without it, but I think I gave it away or it’s in a box in my stuff somewhere

35: do you like stationary and pretty pens and so on? do you use them often?I like pretty pens, but I don’t use them often because my handwriting is shit lmao

36: which band's sound would fit your mood right now?Tbh just play me emo band for my whole entire life lmao

37: do you like keeping your room messy or clean?Messy af

38: tell us about your pet peeves!I really hate having to do everything when people just don’t want to do their shit, so I have to pick up the slack.I also hate ignorant people who just refuse to listen to you.

39: what color do you wear the most?I wear a lot of black surprisingly

40: think of a piece of jewelry you own: what's it's story? does it have any meaning to you?I have a pendent of the arrow head from part 4 and it’s basically cause I’m Jojo trash lmao

41: what's the last book you remember really, really loving?I don’t think I have ever read a book that’s had a lasting impact on me. Fanfiction on the other hand BOI

42: do you have a favorite coffee shop? describe it!Not really cause I don’t drink coffee

43: who was the last person you gazed at the stars with?nnipps and she found Maui’s hook lmao

44: when was the last time you remember feeling completely serene and at peace with everything?Never :)

45: do you trust your instincts a lot?I guess????

46: tell us the worst pun you can think of.There was this quiz that I accidentally missed back in CHEM 110 and it was such an easy quiz and one of the fucking questions was a god damn pun and it was: What do you do with a dead chemist? You barium

It haunts me to this day

47: what food do you think should be banned from the universe?I don’t think I have a food that I hate that much

48: what was your biggest fear as a kid? is it the same today?Failure and it’s still holds strong to this day as I am dying in college :)))))

49: do you like buying CDs and records? what was the last one you bought?I do lmao the last one that I bought myself was Death of Bachelor, but nnipps had to go and buy A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out WHEN I COULD HAV GOTTEN IT MYSELF

50: what's an odd thing you collect?I don’t think it’s odd but I have some pop vinyls and figures. Stuff like that. Then there’s blankets, but that’s mainly cause nnipps always gives me blankets for christmas lmao

51: think of a person. what song do you associate with them?Does it have to be an actual person lmaoI’ll just use my friend and I just associate “How Far I’ll Go” cause Moana is her fav movie and she loves that song lmao

52: what are your favorite memes of the year so far?Idk if it’s really a meme, but I’m in love with those bird videos with Becky and Ron lmao I could watch those for hours and quote them

53: have you ever watched the rocky horror picture show? heathers? beetlejuice? pulp fiction? what do you think of them?Nope never seen any of them

54: who's the last person you saw with a true look of sadness on their face?Oh jesus um I guess my friend

55: what's the most dramatic thing you've ever done to prove a point?I don’t think I have done anything dramatic to prove a point

56: what are some things you find endearing in people?I really love when people just do nice stuff that other person loves for each other lmao

57: go listen to bohemian rhapsody. how did it make you feel? did you dramatically reenact the lyrics?Ok I was literally singing this yesterday with my roommates and we always get into it like the drama queens we are lmao

58: who's the wine mom and who's the vodka aunt in your group of friends? why?joetaroh-koohoe is definitely the vodka aunt lmao as for wine mom I’m pretty sure the rest of us fall into that category

59: what's your favorite myth?I don’t really have one

60: do you like poetry? what are some of your faves?I do, but I don’t think I have a fav

61: what's the stupidest gift you've ever given? the stupidest one you've ever received?I go all out with presents so I don’t think I’ve given a stupid one or at least I hope I haven’t and then I love all gifts so I never classify any gift as stupid lmao

62: do you drink juice in the morning? which kind?I use to, but ain’t nobody got time for that or breakfast

63: are you fussy about your books and music? do you keep them meticulously organized or kinda leave them be?Not really. They are just there chilling lmao

64: what color is the sky where you are right now?Grey

65: is there anyone you haven't seen in a long time who you'd love to hang out with?I just recently saw my friends for spring break and my other friend is up here so I’m good for now lmao

66: what would your ideal flower crown look like?Just a shit ton of carnations lmao

67: how do gloomy days where the sky is dark and the world is misty make you feel?Lazy af

68: what's winter like where you live?FUCKING FREEZING AND IT NEVER STOPS RAINING AND I HATE IT

99: list some songs that resonate to your soul whenever you hear them.Ok if anyone knows me they know that This is Gospel by Panic! at the Disco fucking cripples me. That song just destroys me and I can never listen to it without either crying or just dying.

Death of Bachelor also hits me like a fucking truck along with House of Memories (although that one is because I’m OTP garbage) then there is She Had the World. Lying is the Most Fun a Girl can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off is also a song that gets to me mainly cause that was my first Panic! song lmao Then there is Build God, Then We'll Talk like I just fucking die with that song ESPECIALLY THAT VIOLIN BIT LIKE G O DThen we have Girls/Girls/Boys that sends me into a spiral of emotions.But moving away from Panic! there’s this acoustic version of Touch it by Ariana Grande that had my soul transcend to a whole other dimension. Who was I before that song. The piano and the vocals saved me man. Then there is Knew Better Part II that gets to me like idk what it is but it speaks to me. Then we have Best Mistake that fucking wrecks me too like it speaks to my angsty soul. Then there’s Why Try, One Last Time, and My Everything that also speak to my angsty soul.

Pretty much Panic! at the Disco and Ariana Grande just tend to kill me lmao

[recentanimenews]

Ranma 1/2, Vols. 37-38

By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz. Translated by Kaori Inoue, Adapted by Gerard Jones.

And so at last we come to the end of the great Ranma 1/2 reissue. Inu Yasha may have had a broader reach, Urusei Yatsura may have had a bigger impact on Japan itself, and Maison Ikkoku may have had more maturity and resolution, but Ranma will still be THE anime gateway for many fans, along with Sailor Moon and Bubblegum Crisis. Having read the series again, I am able to see why it was so wildly popular, as well as why revisiting it can be frustrating. Ranma does not have depth – in fact, it actively leaps out of the way of depth – which makes it perfect for creative fans who want to give it that depth. It’s no coincidence that more than AMVs or fanart, it was fanfiction that was the biggest part of the mid-90s Ranma boom. Still, this does not mean that Takahashi’s manga is not good. It’s very good indeed.

Please do not be fooled by the cover – yes, there is a wedding at the end of the book, but we don’t even get to the ceremony before everything is completely destroyed and we return to the status quo. Well, status quo except that it seems that if there had not been chaos, Ranma and Akane might have gone through with the wedding. But there is always chaos in Ranma, it’s practically the main cast member. This manga ends much the same way that many of the classic UY anime episodes ended – with more and more of the cast showing up, each trying to beat up somebody else, until everything finally turns into a giant pile of destruction. Ranma 1/2 is not a romantic comedy, or a harem manga, or even a martial arts comedy. It’s pure slapstick.

The martial arts gets a good workout in the main part of this volume, though, as we return to China to battle another major villain. You get the sense that Takahashi is trying to figure out a way to top Herb, and she doesn’t manage it, really, but A for effort. The whole main cast is there (poor Ukyou, guess you were supporting after all), and there’s lots of cool fights and dramatic kicks and Akane and Shampoo in distress a lot of the time. That said, even when captured or dehydrated down to the size of a doll, Akane is still thinking hard and trying to get herself out of her predicament. Shampoo, alas, is merely mind-controlled most of the time. (I will note that Akane not noticing Ryouga transforming several times in this beggars belief, but hey.)

And so Ranma ends with our main couple waving goodbye to the readers as they head off to school again. It’s never quite confirmed that they do have mutual feelings for each other, mostly as I think Takahashi hoped people could read between the lines and see that she’d had them show their love without saying their love several times. (UY did this too – Ataru in particular was the poster child for “show, don’t tell”.) It didn’t quite work, and fans who disliked Akane were always quick to point out the open-endedness of the ending meant that they didn’t end up together. Takahashi later did one of those “character relationship charts”, filled with one-sided arrows, except for two – Ranma and Akane, and Ryouga and Akari. So she knew they loved each other.

But we don’t read Ranma for resolution of romantic tension. We read it for genderswapping and bizarre martial arts contests and so many fights and “Ranma no baka!” and in order to flesh out our 800,000 word epic fanfic with smatterings of actual canon. And we read it because we love the characters, flat as they are. Of course, we may not always love the SAME characters, but any Ranma fan is obsessed with at least one of them (except Happosai). Ranma 1/2 was a roadmap to modern anime fandom, and the road may be less traveled these days but it’s worth walking back over.

By: Sean Gaffney

[mechanicalinertia]

Bubblegum Black mega-ish chapter notes: Chapters 9-12

Yes, that's right! If you only follow me through tumblr, you probably thought I was dead! But no, I just chose to hold off on my usual notes-post until I'd finished the ridiculously long and complicated battle between Hotel Moscow versus D-Company. So the notes will be for four fucking chapters now.

Also, for the record, I'm probably going to stop just posting these on tumblr, and start mirroring them to SpaceBattles or Sufficient Velocity. I mean, how many people have a tumblr account that will let them read all the way through? Not many, I imagine. Well, let's get into it.

CHAPTER 9

The OCs: So! New characters, hm? I don't think they'll be playing a major role in the fic for the most part, but once I figured that Balalaika would have experience operating a powersuit - not because of any particular reason beyond the assumption that they existed during the Kazakh conflict, and then that she needed a way to stand alongside the Sabers in mecha-fighting - then I thought it would be fun to have other suit operators that were Balalaika's comrades-in-arms and thus people the Sabers could fight alongside too. It helped me, in turn, figure out how to humanize Hotel Moscow just a bit, having these specific people with specific talents.

KB-43 Oktyabr: The predecessor to the ADP's K-suits, the Model 43 'Walking Armor' was drafted as a mechanized system in between World War 3 - when light power armor was used for individual infantry protection and lugging heavy equipment - and the Kazakh conflict. UralVagonZavod, the developers, were flush with Chinese money and talent, the alliance between China and Russia supposedly ironclad - the only problem was that Russians hated UVZ for their top-attack vulnerable tanks, the ones that were not so impressive in the Ukraine war and were even less impressive during the botched attacks on Finland and Poland. Building the first powersuits, then, was a last-ditch attempt to not have Russia's legendary tank-building house liquidated and folded into other parts of the Rostec state defense conglomerate. It worked. KB-suits might require more maintenance than other powersuits, might lack the versatility or strength of more modern K-suits, but they're a bit like AK rifles in that regard. They're just fucking everywhere. Also, they're literally just the Russian Arms Boris ACPA from Cyberpunk 2020:

KB-65 Nasyschat: 'Saturate' in Russian, appropriate for its light artillery capabilities. This is the Russian Arms Bombardier ACPA from Cyberpunk 2020. Note that in both armor's cases I've severely reduced the amount of weapons they carry. This can either be read as a concession to Hotel Moscow not having the logistical might of the old Russian army, or just acknowledging that the amount of weapons an ACPA can carry is fucking goofy. Most ACPA could squish even 2077 Adam Smasher with ease. It's wild.

GSh-30-V: The 30mm cannon the Boris uses in CP2020, but built by the KBP boys as a rifle (hence the V) patterned off old Gryazev-Shipunov autocannons. I'm sure that this realistically does not make sense. Eh.

KPV: 14.5mm machine gun. Note my joy in turning old Russian guns into powersuit weapons. Ha ha ha. hoo hoo hoo. hee hee hee.

Semi-auto incendiary-flechette shotgun: This, in retrospect, makes no sense. The ammo doesn't make sense and neither does the use of shotguns to take down armor. Well, what the hell. Once again, I blame Cyberpunk 2020's humongazoid 'borg / ACPA weapons, specifically the United Arms CLAW, a 4-gauge mag-fed autoshotgun. If anything I've toned that fucking monstrosity down a bit by making it semi-auto. Kinda like the KS-23, another Russian goofy-gun, now that I think about it.

Instrument Vzloma: Breaching instrument. Which is hardly an appropriate term for a man-sized axe wielded by a giant powersuit, but what the hell.

Balalaika's speech, getting inside Balalaika's head in general: I actually don't want to say much here; the speech, and her internal monologue, should speak for themselves.

Tou Chi The Blaster: Real Black Lagoon character, for those of you who don't know the manga / anime. Kinda one of a million loser gunmen with big attitudes and bigger addiction problems in Roanapur.

More Regrets: Considering how big the missiles are in IRL anti-ship missile boats, I think my image of almost a missile turret for the 2069 Black Lagoon is a smidge off. Obviously the boat's much bigger than an Elco, but its ordnance is much bigger too, right? Yeah. Well, what the hell. Sci-fi tech.

Rock's guns: The shotgun in question is an SASM-18, a futuristic retread of the mag-fed semi-auto SPAS-15, using a motorized cocking system to replace the pump-action switch for specialty rounds so one need only pull the trigger. Oh, and eight shells instead of six. As for the Type-37... I have plans for a detailed look at what's basically Rock's 'hero gun' going forward, even if said gun is somewhat impractical. But I kind of want to put them in an actual chapter instead of dumping them to the side here. So let's put a pin in that for now.

Lena meditating: I know I've said this before someplace, but I'll say it again: It's strange that 2032 Linna's prowess as a melee expert supposedly comes from her aerobics and dance training, and not just plain ol' martial arts. (and then 2040 Linna has no talents either way, but that's beside the point). I still think it'd be nifty if Lena had martial arts training, was still a vain materialistic yuppie but also good at keeping her body in tip-top shape through various techniques. Fuck, now I'm remembering a bit I read of Shawn Hagen's BGC Shadowrun crossover where she just got muscle grafts. How tasteless. And, again, yes, the Sabers are superheroes, of course they're going to rescue people soldiers would write off as dead.

Duhmin, and Roanapur's history: I like this bit of writing. But it explains itself, really. I rewrote the opening of this scene like three times, by the way.

CHAPTER 10

Marya Zaleska: One of Hotel Moscow's big cargo ships (presumably able to carry some weapons at some point) in canon.

Swimmer Rounds: Are apparently a real thing! I think if you look for the most recent Nammo ammunition catalogue you can find them somewhere in there. Wild shit.

Icewolf: So, here's some lore about how hacking works in this cyberpunk-y universe! The old internet was bricked by cyberweapons, not by Bartmoss, and now crude memetic organisms, evolving from those old pieces of software like microbes, are bred, learned from, weaponized for various purposes. In an age where computers are explicitly brain-structured (ie neuromorphic), it makes sense to go for biological metaphors, I think. Like... like Hacker Pokemon? Is that too trite?

Tardigrade: No, there is no prior fic where this type of Boomer showed up, but I really enjoy the idea of the Sabers having had enough adventures that a lot of things that show up in this fic don't necessarily surprise them all that much. Anyway, incoming miniboss encounter!

The Boomer / Powersuit: The thing Balalaika fights here is heavily inspired by the D.D. Mass Production Type, a scribble found in the B-Club and then in the BGC RPG EX book:

Weirdly enough, according to both the B-Club and the RPG, this was a never-seen design for a Battlemover, but I swear I've seen it in an establishing shot of GENOM Tower's entrance in OVA 6. I don't understand what's going on - is it the same thing? I want to believe it is.

47C Kappa Boomers: Not much to say about these. They're there.

CHAPTER 11

Oh boy oh boy oh boy: Rock finally killed someone himself! What fun! What excitement! I suppose it has to happen in every longer Black Lagoon fic. And I suppose Rock never gets to feel very good about it. And I suppose... what else? I think Revy's reaction was about right here. I really ought to chill on Depression!Rock for a bit, but that'll wait until the next arc.

KA-77: Basically the Russian version of the Bell V-280, the tiltrotor replacement for military helicopters, kitted out with gunship weapons. Fun fact: Tiltrotors don't actually have a worse safety record than helicopters. For a near-future sci-fi setting, they're a much more sensible new VTOL than vectored-thrust vehicles like the Harrier jumpjet or the AVs from Cyberpunk the franchise. Then again, BGC has those really cool-looking enclosed-fan 'aerodynes' the ADP use all the time, so that's an entirely different form of VTOL I didn't use...

Junayd Lakhani: The man himself! He's kind of a preening weenie! That's kind of the point! Also, yes, I resorted to an MGSV-style Fulton recovery system almost as a joke that became a real thing. I do not regret this.

CHAPTER 12

Honestly, I think I've got enough here. Things work out, they explain themselves, and I don't feel like writing extremely long notes for these chapters anymore. Let's just vibe, for now.

[mechanicalinertia]

Anatomy Of A Lovedoll, a Sylvie-centric Bubblegum Crisis AU, is now complete!

See that? That's the Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction I've spent the past seven months working on.

See this girl? Sylvie? Friend of one of the Knight Sabers, pleasure-model Boomer, lesbian vampire? That's who it's about.

That's right, everybody, Anatomy of a Lovedoll is a Bubblegum Crisis AU fanfiction around novella length, where the doomed Sylvie is rescued from her tragic fate, hooks up with Priss, joins the Knight Sabers formally... and then, with the discovery of advanced cybernetic hardware in her brain, everything gets really uncomfortable as Knight Saber leader Celia Stingray attempts to get the other girls rigged with the same hardware, and Priss is having none of it. The ethics of wiring shit into your body and the true meaning of freedom are discussed; lesbian romance abounds; and then to cap it all off there's a nice big fight scene totaling something around 15K+ words between two chapters. And now it's done! And it's good! I encourage, nay, implore you to give it a shot, and see what you think of it.

[mechanicalinertia]

Bubblegum Black Chapter 4 is now live!

So this is a far shorter chapter than Chapter 3, and honestly that might be a good thing. As is the fic is 31K words and the plot's barely started. Well, next chapter is another big STMPD-branded fight scene - that's why I waited a month to release this chapter, so I had time to finish the next one in a satisfactory manner.

But that's not to discount that what's going on in this chapter isn't important. Far from it. If anything, this is the chapter where a very crucial decision is made that is the contours along which much of the plot goes. Let's dig into it.

Recovery Zone 23: As tempting as it is to be coy and refuse to explain the joke... look, it's a Megazone 23 reference, Megazone being the anime that made AIC and Artmic the kings of the 80's OVA boom before Bubblegum Crisis and Gall Force. I did watch the last part of Megazone 23 Part III recently, and it was profoundly okay-ish. Megazone never manages to be as concise and snappy as BGC, and often feels like it's trying too much and never enough at once. Apparently, though, Megazone and not BGC is the franchise AIC wanted to remake and slap a part 4 on during their period of trying to Kickstart anime back in the 2010's. So maybe it's more popular in Japan, even 40 years out? Who knows.

The Vampire Serial Killer Thing: Yeah, for those of you who don't know Crisis, Sylvie's original role was a lesbian sexbot vampire serial killer, gathering blood to save the life of a sister Sexaroid, who befriended Priss and then died miserably at the end of OVA 5. It's a genuinely sad moment, especially because Sylvie's circumstances are so interesting, and the question of 'should we have empathy for this Boomer-girl-thing' is a question that has been discussed in the fandom ever since the episode's release on Christmas Day, 1988. So part of the reason I switched over to a 2060's AU for my work is so I could just keep her alive, force Sylvie to come to grips with who she is and could become. Pure, uncut copium, as Edgerunners fans might say. But I think I'm onto something when I say that Priss wouldn't be pissed about the killings - she's an ex-bosozoku in a cyberpunk cityscape, she's killed innocents before - but more that Sylvie lied to her, didn't trust Priss to help her. Celia, now, Celia would be the one who would treat Sylvie as subhuman in nature and actions. That's why Sylvie wants to meet Sawyer. Being an only-human-enough monster herself, she's more willing to see things in someone like the Gore Gore Girl than Priss. Also we get an intimate moment between them, so... yeah.

Inspector Cara: Oblique reference to the AD Police Files detective girl Iris Cara, who uncovered an unhinged cyberpsychotic serial killer in the only good episode of that trio, The Ripper. I actually ranked The Ripper pretty low on my big ranking sheet awhile back, but then again I hadn't really watched the whole episode properly, and was judging the episode more on the concept. Which is unfair, because... eh. I won't spoil it, but suffice to say that I wrote a paper for my last quarter of undergrad where I argued that The Ripper's cyberpsychotic arc and David Martinez's descent into madness are one and the same. If I ever get permission from my prof to post it, I will.

Monster Revolver: I haven't had the chance to show it off, but instead of a Stechkin, Balalaika now wields an Rsh-12 revolver, which fires a 12.7*55mm round, normally used for short-range engagements in battle rifles like the ShAK-12, getting the stopping power of Lapua Magnum without the range. Why is Balalaika wielding this thing? Because it's big and intimidating-looking, and I can see her using it, maybe even modifying it for sniping somehow. It's a menacing gun for a menacing woman.

Rock Okajima and Celia Stingray: So here's the thing. I wrote Celia very well. I don't doubt that. I know how to write Celia's particular drives very well. It's Rock I'm not certain I did right. Now, negativemidas on Reddit, one of the guys who's been very helpful with hashing out various plot beats I want to happen, said once that Rock is fundamentally a blank slate, added to the story after test audiences for Lagoon's original draft needed someone to relate to. And indeed, Rock is sort of the moralizer of the story for most of it, even if he grows a spine pretty fast and carves out a niche as a negotiator and logistics guy that guarantees his survival. So I guess I have some license to write Rock as fundamentally depressed after, you know, manga-original character Le Majeur died in his arms. Was that the right thing to do? I'm not gonna lie, I basically fridged her, killed her to affect Rock's emotional landscape and set him to a state not unlike where he was at the end of Roberta's Blood Trail, just because I wanted to use a jumping point closer to something like Apotheosis (which is, to my mind, the greatest Lagoon fanfic ever written) than where Rock is in the manga. There's an alternate version of this fic where Majeur sticks around, but what would that even look like? Where would that go? I don't fucking know. More importantly, with the release of the latest chapter of Lagoon in August of this year, I realized I had diverted seriously from Hiroe's vision of Rock. Rock in that chapter has embraced his role as a mastermind, as a savior of Roanapur, as someone who loves the city and is willing to work with Chang to get shit done. And that was a choice that baffled me, because Rock tried to 'save' the city before, in Roberta's Blood Trail, and uh, we all know how that turned out, didn't we? Okay, so he's chosen to throw his lot in with the power brokers of the city like Chang, but is that making anything better? How is this meaningfully different? I think that somewhere during Hiroe's hiatus, he seemed to decide that Roanapur was a Good Place, a place that could save the forgotten and shunned and give them purpose if they didn't get shot in the first week of their existence. Hell, apparently Balalaika said in one of the Urobuchi light novels or someplace similar that she felt that Rock had a future where she didn't. This does not make sense to me. I have my own headcanons about what Roanapur really is, but they run counter to Hiroe's work, now, it seems. I don't like being one of those fanfic authors who doesn't just disregards canon, but actively scorns it. I told a different story for BGC because BGC is a different beast, one that's pliable and loose enough in its worldbuilding that anything can happen. But now the story I want to tell in Roanapur is one that is a 'fuck canon we ball' story. A story where Rock slips back into his old habits and, uh, spoiler alert, it doesn't end well for him. That is the story that makes sense to me.

So I guess if I have to tell a different story... well, so be fucking it.

That's what fanfiction is for.

[mechanicalinertia]

Bubblegum Black: For A World Without Gold - Chapter 3 & Author's commentary

This is the longest chapter I've written for this fic, despite it being mostly characters talking to one another. 11k words of this shit, man. That's either great or terrible, depending on who you ask. Anyway, here we go!

Doctor Hartland: Relatively obscure character, the guy who provided Roberta with her murder-meds during the Blood Trail / El Baile De Muerte IIRC. He, like many such characters Cyberpunk 2020 would call 'ripperdocs', is what I assume is the front line of medicine in a city like Roanapur. I imagine a city where hospitals are either for syndicate soldiers or extremely rich people, and everyone else can rely on doctors who import or print any medicine they can get their hands on. Presumably 'Traditional Chinese Medicine' is pretty popular, too (did you know that the Chinese government, at least in Hong Kong, prescribed traditional remedies for COVID awhile ago? It did not, of course, help, but it was an alternative to Decadent Western Pig-Dog Medicine I guess. Eugh.)

Revy's Custom Ammo: Delayed-fuse HESH rounds, truly terrible fleshripping monstrosities, are actually something I got from Masamune Shirow's work. You know how in the original manga and in the 1995 movie, Motoko goes "Oh, is that so", shoots up the one guy, and then it takes a second before his cyborg body is blown to bits? That's the effect I'm going for. The tungsten tip is to penetrate body armor and dig into a target's vitals, although that doesn't work 100% of the time with heavier armor. Still, even if there's no penetration, damage can still be done. HESH rounds were originally designed to kill a tank crew through spalling, hitting the armor with shockwaves such that slivers of metal inside the tank would break off and kill the crew. This is something one can easily mitigate with composite armor and a Kevlar inner lining in the tank, but to translate that back to body armor is probably a little more difficult. One can imagine shockwaves and slivers of armor lining pulverizing human or light Boomer innards even without penetration.

Seburo M-057: A completely fictional Seburo handgun. For those readers who don't slobber over Shirow's non-porn work the way I do, Seburo is a Japanese gun company built up after around World War Three (in the 1990's in Shirow's timeline). Apparently it might also be a subsidiary company of Poseidon Industrial, the megacorp that becomes the entirety of Japan by the time Appleseed rolls around. Either way, it's a famous Japanese arms company, which makes one wonder: Are handguns legal in Japan in Shirow's world, where they are not in ours? For the sake of lore, let's say that Japan allows organizations like GENOM to possess and manufacture weapons for security purposes, but not individuals. Remember how in BGC2032 there was that whole subplot about how military-grade Boomers in Japan were technically illegal and ideally should only be manufactured offshore? And GENOM just ignored that law for the most part? Well, fuck that game. In the 2060's GENOM happily supplies the JSDF with whatever Boomers they want, the better to defend against China. Anyway, yeah, the M-057 is a caseless pistol, ammo stored in the gun's handle like normal, but a whole lot more of it, we're talking 18+1 per magazine. In the 2060's, caseless weapons are juuuust starting to make a comeback as a concept, aided by new chemical configurations with higher ignition temperatures and better structural integrity. Revy's handguns are the equivalent of a high-performance electric car compared to everyone else's Toyota Corollas, is probably the best way to think about it.

Second-Highest Boomer Per Capita City: First is Anchorpoint.

Lightning Hawk: A silly Resident Evil reference.

The Master: Okay, this is going to take some explaining. Or at least a picture:

Yeah, okay, you see that gun Priss has? Sure looks like a laser magnum to me, doesn't it? And, hey, look closer, that's definitely its name on the side alongside the name of the sight! So, since no one has never done anything with this information, I have decided to do it my goddamn self. Now, as I've said before in the Hardsuit Tech document, laser weapons are actually pretty viable so long as you dial down the pulse train to femtoseconds and thereby jack up the pulsed power to the gigawatt or terawatt range. I do not know what the effective overall damage of a tactical-vehicle mounted terawatt laser would be, so in the end I settled on measuring the gun’s stopping power in joules, easy enough to compare to ballistic weapons. For the record, that max power level, 5KJ, is more stopping power than even 7.62 NATO. Which might be overkill even for futuristic high-density capacitors, but what the hell.

Chiborgs: Abbreviation of Chinaborgs. In this particular iteration of the future, following World War Three between the US and China's respective power blocs (and all the ruination that has brought upon the earth), Cold War 2 has been going on ever since neither side could claim absolute victory due to climate change-induced mass crop failures starving their armies out. So GENOM has one big rival in the 'Sinobloc': The China World Prosperity Corporation, a conglomerate of old State Owned Enterprises that privatized themselves following the war, rolled themselves up into a separate power structure, about as independent from the CCP as one can get, and resumed Chinese imperial efforts in the old Belt and Road bloc. But - but but but - they've never quite managed to emulate the entirety of Boomer technology. Oh sure, they've got robots, but Boomers are biomimicry nanotech down to the cellular level, a common platform for alternative life. WPC doesn't have that, so they've aligned with the turbo-Leninists in the Party, arguing that GENOM's Boomers alienate the proletariat from their labor on a societally toxic scale, and simply continued the use of prosthetics and augmentations coupled with inferior robotics to an absurd degree. A Chiborg, then, is a WPC-produced set of augmentations designed for relatively specialized labor, turning a human into a near-machine relying on constant maintenance and subject to constant surveillance. It’s not like these ‘shells’ are expensive, or cheap but low-quality. The WPC is more than happy to sell, as per Party directives, at an ever-so-slight-loss even in economically turbulent times. The insidious part, besides the addiction to maintenance and the monitoring of every micro-movement the brain orders the body to make, is who ends up with these things permanently grafted into themselves. Migrant workers in the bottom tier of the hukou system; ethnic minorities treated as culturally and mentally inferior to the Han majority; Taiwanese or Koreans or North Viet treated as near-slaves, the ‘curse’ of their WW3-era resistance against the benevolence of True Socialist Xi Jinping Thought with Chinese Characteristics For The Eternal Bright Future having marked entire families with generations of debt only payable by concentration camp labor. Voluntary, of course, but, y’know, not really.

Mycoplastic Packaging: Fungus-derived materials that have replaced most petrochemical-based plastics by 2060. In the case of easily-biodegradable packaging like what the Master comes in, it's more akin to a sort of micromesh made from hymenophore tubes. Check out this Vice article about more high-performance materials that fungi could help make. It's not really the same principle, but I imagine it's... plausible, to grow the right materials with some funky bioengineering.

Singto Phumici: Proud Lion in Thai. Note how some districts have English names and others have Thai. You could, I imagine, track the economic bracket of a given district, or perhaps who it relies on for authority, by the language used in a name. Might throw a Cantonese name or two in there later. We'll see.

Sawyer's Bloody Business: Yes, most of the meat in the 2060's is lab-cultured tissue or an imitation thereof, 3D printed into a meal. And yes, Sawyer feeds human corpses to flesh-eating bacteria which are supposed to build up a nice big blob of biomass that can then be fed to meat cultures. One meat becomes another, just with more extra steps and less maintenance than feeding human remains to pigs as one might do in the old days. You know, they've managed to print lab-grown Wagyu. How much longer before Mickey-D's is marketing luxury synthmeats in its products? I wonder.

Sawyer In General: The idea of Sawyer being an obsessive Priss fangirl has been a fairly crucial part of this crossover ever since I started thinking about it in early April. Perhaps it runs against her canon characterization as a stone-cold killer in Gore Gore Girl, but all we have to go off of for G3 so far is chapter summaries on the wiki, and it strikes me as a somewhat sillier spinoff than mainline Lagoon. Which is fine, but then what the hell, I have license to fuck around with what we're given in terms of Sawyer, because It Is Fanfiction. I guess I find her at once intimidating but kind of pathetic? I mean, those scars on her arms definitely aren't something someone else did to her, if Hiroe's claim that she was based of a friend with depression is to be believed. Without spoiling anything, suffice to say that in earlier drafts of this chapter Sawyer was even more of a mentally unwell gore fiend than she is here. My beta took issue with it, said that there was no way that what I want to do with the character in the long run made sense if she was like that. And you know what, he was right. We haven't seen the last of the Gore Gore Girl, not by a long shot. I didn't write that scene to set a big ol' nothingburger up. You'll see.

Priss vs. Revy: Okay, could Priss actually beat Revy in a shootout, even by one point or whatever? Hard to say. Priss's skill as a marksman is more up in the air just because we've seen less of her overall, and less emphasis is placed on her ability to shoot well. But I think that she's got some skill, at least, from her time as a bosozoku and from having to make crucial railgun shots as a Saber. Also... she kind of cheated. A little. Not a lot, but enough to win. Those who have read Anatomy of a Lovedoll, or remember a little side bit from Chapter 2, will recognize how.

Fediverse: Mastodon is the most famous of these platforms, but the fediverse is more than just 'the open-source Twitter replacement', it's more... federated networks are disconnected communications networks that can still talk to each other over a common platform, so the idea behind the fediverse is a galaxy of 'instances', small servers run by a person or organization that can all share common accounts with differing rules of operation and moderators and stuff. No one company owns the protocols used, and so it's a lot more of a wild west - plenty of people who were kicked off Twitter for good reason (Nazis) have taken root on fedi instances - but the idea in mentioning fediverse-like platforms in the noosphere of the future is that they're sort of the alt-internet, the cyberpunk-y version of the internet that has otherwise been carved up by big platforms and those Everything Apps I was talking about in the Chapter 2 notes (even more prescient now that Twitter-cum-X is being set up by Elon to be Explicitly That). Forums that run the gamut from respectable to shady; software and 3D printing libraries of varying quality and trustworthiness; piracy and crime and all the corrosive forces that eat away at the respectable foundations of the Noose - these are the kind of networks Benny and Jane love to hang out on. In other words, the only ways to use the internet of the future are Facebook, Amazon, and 4chan. God, don't you miss the days of nonplatformed webpages? Let's bring Geocities back, guys. Let's do that to save the internet.

Tewwowizm: Are the Knight Sabers terrorists? In the eyes of many, they probably are, a menace against the prosperous GENOM-lead global order that... you get the idea. The hope is that enough people can recognize that the Sabers mostly kill GENOM execs and blow up GENOM assets like industrial facilities and Boomers, and avoid killing innocents for the most part. To make them superheroes and not supervillains in the eyes of the body public. This was something I wanted to play around with in this conversation as it organically unfolded. At least, I think I did. This conversation textually pulling double-duty as a way to lead Eda off the trail of the Sabers working with the Lagoon Company and also letting Dutch get all weird and philosophical... I'm happy with it, but it's weird all the same. Either way, it does get to the desired outcome, highlighting how easy it is to needle Rock now after... well, have you Lagoon manga readers figured out who died yet? Yeah, I bet you have.

Eda's Pet Naming: Not in the manga, but I think it's funny and kind of mean-spirited on Eda's part, so in it goes. Okay, what else to put in here...

What I'm Stealing From: You may have noticed, dear reader, that I'm writing a lot of Rock. Hell, the next chapter is mostly his perspective again. This is probably not a good thing, because even if I find him super interesting as a character, most people are probably here for the girls, not him. Too much Rock, too much of the Lagoon cast in general and the Sabers risk being only bit players in a larger drama, which they should not be. So that's a balancing act I haven't quite gotten the hang of. Anyway, there's one Lagoon fic I want to bring up real quickly that has had a major impact on how I think about the franchise. It's called Apotheosis, which is, in my opinion, perfect in every conceivable way. While it lacks the balls-to-the-wall super-action of Lagoon as we know it, it makes up for that by having really interesting prose, heartfelt character development, firm grounding in late 90's history, and really getting inside Rock's head, both his best impulses and his worst ones. It almost made me cry at the end, and the only reason I haven't reread it extensively is because I'm afraid I'll either succumb to Fic Envy and start kicking myself, or I'll just rip off chunks of characterization and plot wholesale. Which is kind of what I'm doing now to navigate the Lagoon cast as people, but to a lesser degree. The Sabers have to provide a catalyst, a reactant, stuff like that - that means the plot can't be the same thing beat-for-beat. It better not be. Are there other fics that have made me think about this franchise deeply? Yep. Sure are. But I don't think any are going to be as radically influential on this fic as Apotheosis. We'll see. I have high hopes for this project.

Anyway, rough draft of Chapter 4 is already done, it just has to get edited but it's pretty short. Next time, a deal will be made that will change the way you think about Roanapur forever...

[mechanicalinertia]

Bubblegum Black: For A World Without Gold - Chapter 1 is now live! (& Author's Commentary

It's the first of its kind: A BGC x Black Lagoon crossover, a new paradigm in cyber-powered hyperviolence and waifus swearing like drunken sailors! A new kind of war - A new kind of Crisis!

...Oh, right, I said I'd put in some metacommentary here, in the author's notes, right? Yeah. Time to do that. In essence, I'm going to run through every bit of technobabble or characterization piece that readers might be confused by, and just address them. I am, however, assuming some elementary knowledge of BGC and Lagoon (I will not abbreviate it to BL I simply refuse to fall into the path of degeneracy it will not happen). If there's an element from that you don't know about, uh... read the wiki? Or watch either show, they're both great.

Koh Kood Island: There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Roanapur's actual location in Thailand. It's near the Cambodian border, it's on the water, it’s got a bridge running to it - it’s Koh Chang Island, it has to be. Sure, the real island is steep and forested, sure it’s a mile away from the mainland (one helluva bridge!) but the island is just big enough to house a medium-sized city like Roanapur if you level it out a bit via the powers of Dramatic License. Koh Kood is an island adjacent to it, closer to the Cambodian border. So the scene of the action is close to Roanapur, still in Thai waters, but not that close.

Stemjack and the Cybersuite: Lingo for the usual cyberpunk plug n' play neural interface port. Cyberpunk 2077 may have them in the wrists, but in this particular cyberpunk-y universe they're a much less well-realized piece of technology. That's because most people, as their default information-interface replacing the smartphone, use the 'Cybersuite', an amalgam of several technologies: soft augmented-reality lenses grafted onto the corneas ('corneals' to actualize a 'holofeed' in the 'holocloud', a kind of augmented-reality internet), jawbone-induction microphones and speakers ('mastimikes'), and finger-and-palm haptic sensors to make AR objects interactable by touch ('phantomics'). All this is as cheap and ubiquitous as, well, a smartphone, and in that case who needs a neural interface for anything besides synchronizing with heavy machinery, which requires neural rewiring and training if said machinery isn't humanoid? Absent downloading-information-directly-into-the-brain technology, which isn't quite realized here, there just isn't a huge need outside of military applications or more exotic cybernetics, I think.

Strikesuit Tech: Shape memory polymer artificial muscles are a thing already, albeit unrealized in industrial applications, as is foamed-alloy armor. The Strikesuit is slightly on the heavy side for what it is, especially compared to a Knight Saber hardsuit. It's a relic from before Boomers became common in American-aligned militaries across the world, one of those things that of course Eda would sell for the price of a small car.

NBC Sealing: Short for Nuclear, Biological, Chemical sealing, usually used to refer to armored vehicles.

Kerenzikov: A leftover reflex booster from the Cyberpunk franchise, less cool in all ways compared to the Sandevistan that plays such a big part in Edgerunners. Say that the Kerenzikov is still a reflex booster, but one that's a little less severe in how much it boosts the body and the brain into overdrive.

SSW40’s: Rheinmetall, the gentlemen who make the Abrams’ main cannon, have decided to diversify, apparently, and aside from semi-autonomous 50mm guns for lighter armored vehicles, they’re also working on magazine-fed 40mm grenade launchers. That means more ammo capacity than the current standard M32 / Milkor MGL, and a higher-velocity round because it isn’t a revolver-action, and better reloading ergonomics because, again, not a revolver. That’s the SSW40. Ancient by the time of this fic, but if it saw use in World War 3 it’ll probably see action in Roanapur again, just like Revy’s strikesuit, give or take an update for airburst programming. Also, it felt like a cool update to her old M79.

Saber 5: Read my previous completed fic, Anatomy of A Lovedoll, to know who that fifth Saber is. Or just wait till Chapter 2 comes out. Either way you’ll find out soon enough.

Absolu: A very clear knockoff of France’s largest company, petrochemical giant Total. I do think humanity will get off of petrochemical reliance for the most part save in places where it’s irrationally culturally engrained by midcentury, but it’ll probably be too late to stop the really bad effects of climate change from kicking in (fuck, most of Canada’s forests are burning down as I write this, West and East now). Companies whose bread and butter is commodity extraction will still find ways to poison local environments with stuff like rare-earth mining, if I had to take a wild guess, but hey at least they won’t be shitting x number of gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere annually! Baby steps.

Necessary Evil: Another bit I borrowed from Anatomy. Saber White has never said this in the actual series, but the way I’m writing her, this is something she would say and has said. Which runs contra to how she’s characterized in the OG series’ OVA 8, according to some people, but dammit this is my fic I’ll misinterpret things as I please.

Manhattan: Has anyone here ever read the cyberpunk-ish novel Blackfish City? Anyone know what happens to NYC in that book? Well, I decided to rip that off. Fuck it, here’s the lowdown: Sea levels rose, NYC had a seawall, and then the usual gaggle of postfascist Christian extremists blew up the seawall to flood ‘Liberal Sodom’, and the government did very, very little to help as the city died in bits and pieces, probably because said government was also run by postfascist wackos who saw NYC as the enemy. That time, and that place, are where Revy grew up. Even more unpleasant than her old backstory, yeah?

Red Fraction: I know Revy has a playlist she uses when she’s doing premediated killing. I know Gen Urobuchi put a Rage Against The Machine song on that playlist for the 90’s. But this fic is set 70 years after that time; what the flippedy dippedy was I supposed to do for Revy music? Make shit up? Endless fictitious Black Metal groups? So, in the spirit of a Big Grand Opening, I decided to go for Lagoon’s anime OP. Because it’s such a Revy song, isn’t it? Aggressive, profane, swaggering, and all the same just a little defensive (These aren’t tears / don’t let them trick you). Every part of it feels like a song Revy would sing. So if I was opening with Revy, I had to back that up. Shit, I might sync fight scenes to music more often after this, too.

Riot Boomers: I visualized some very Five Star Stories looking mecha for this particular not-in-the-actual-series Boomer, very exaggerated and top-heavy. I don’t know why.

In the land of the blind…: This is one of the best action movie one-liners I have come up with, like, ever. I’m so proud of it.

The Doberman: The Doberman is probably the scariest-looking Boomer in all of BGC, and it gets only a bit part enforcing order in the opening of OVA 5. So a) I thought I’d bring it back as a scary threat and b) thought I’d rip it to bits with ease so the reader gets an idea of how goddamn powerful the Sabers are in this fic, how after about a year and a half of operation their hardware and tactics are such that they can render one caught-off-guard hunter-killer unit so much nanotech meat and scrap. So maybe it should be a tougher fight realistically, but I wanted to show off. Forgive me.

Gunship’s The Mountain: No real thematic purpose to this particular bit of music. It just feels like really good opening-to-something music.

Rock’s Mental State: Oofah. Our boy isn't doing so good, is he? In tumblrspeak we'd call him a Sad Blorbo Meowmeowman. For real Lagoon fans (Lagoonatics?), you may be wondering how closely I'm following the events of the anime and the manga after that (I do treat the order of events for the first few arcs as being in the anime's canon not the manga's), and the answer, profound and deep, is a great big 'eh'. That is to say: Everything that happened in the manga / anime happened, with only history-updating changes to the characters' backgrounds and their patron organizations changed. But of course I'm going to deviate from where Hiroe-sensei wants to take what's left of the manga. I don't know what he's doing, and I'm not waiting around for ten years or so for him to finish. So: Roberta got fucked up, Feng Yifei / Li Xinlin has found her home in Roanapur, and Le Majeur did join the Lagoon Company. Where is she now? Um... you'll find out later. Suffice to say that I'm guessing that as of the events of the manga as-is (2023), Rock's been in Roanapur about two years, and as of this fic's timing, he's been around for about three. Things can change a lot in a year, especially in a city like that. As for how closely I'm following the spinoffs, again I give you an 'eh' followed by a belated 'not really'. Initial Stage is too tied up in the geopolitics of the 90's to translate lore well to this fic, and Gore Gore Girl introduces a bunch of characters I don't really care about and so probably won't do anything with (untranslated, but I read about it on the wiki. It seems to be a much sillier series than OG Lagoon and that's saying something.) I think the only non-Hiroe media with events I want to trace are the Gen Urobuchi light novels, since they're amusing fun that introduce new characters without going overboard on throwing wrenches into the plot. Well, except for Shadow Falcon. He's not showing up in this fic for sure. Say he's around, but he's on assignment elsewhere.

Opening Credits: So wayyyyyy back in 1991, the first digital-native anime fanfiction megacrossover, one Undocumented Features, was published by a couple of dudes at Worchester Polytechnic Institute. As you can see, a similar thing was done there, something that I find so funny that I've tried to use it myself for my own fics, using JP voice actors for the main cast like real credits (yeah yeah yeah I know, everyone tells me the Lagoon dub is superior, it's probably better for the Japan arc for sure so I don't have to listen to Megumi Toyoguchi choke out 'Haiy Asuhoru' again, but Roberta's seiyuu does one of the best performances of her career there and you can't convince me otherwise), and throwing up some fictitious production companies into existence to amuse myself and others. If you can figure out what they're referencing, let me know and I'll... eh, I'll be internet-happy. It will, of course, be updated on the AO3 version of this fic as I add in new cast members; so far, all I've got there is characters I know have to show up in the fic, with more to hopefully come along the way (might have to just put in seiyuu names without their characters for a bit of surprise? Eh, you could just look them up then if you really wanted to, we'll see).

Anyway, that's that! Hope you enjoyed the work so far! I've got the next chapter written, it just has to be edited, but to whet your appetite, let me ask you a question: How did Balalaika know how to contact the Knight Sabers? And why did Saber White accept her request?

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: The Works of Jeanne Hedge

Ho ho ho ho ho, it's time to bring out an easy recommendation, or rather a series of recommendations, one I'm honestly surprised I haven't done before.

I mean, come on. It's Jeanne Hedge, baby. She didn't write much longer stuff compared to Innpchan or Ben Hutchins, but she wrote really good, really focused stuff. Moreover, the record of the sheer number of 90's-era fic writers who reference her suggest that she was the Carrie Fisher of alt.fan.bgcrisis, a real script doctor for everyone. Whatta character. Pity she died from pneumonia in 2020 - I would have loved to invite her to the more modern corners of BGC fandom, like the subreddit and the discord. Learn from the old masters, yeah? Yeah.

Here's Hedge's old website. For the more convenience-minded among us, here's her FF.net page.

So: Hedge. Sysop of a CompuServe anime and manga forum from 1985 to 2005. Mod for the old Fanfiction Mailing List. Moderator for the fanfiction panel at Anime Central (ACEN) from 2001-2006. In other words, a superfan from a time when Crunchyroll was a ripping site, Funimation wasn't Sony's pawn, when anime was an eccentricity among eccentricities on the old 'World Wide Web'. Incredible, no?

Oh, yeah, and she was a pretty good writer, too! Her writing style isn't particularly fancy, and her topics are usually more light-hearted explorations of the series save for two instances. We'll go through the short stuff first, then the two biggies.

Dear Mom: Not even two thousand words, a gag where some gaijin girl is living in an office building across the way from the LADYS633 and is navigating dealing with the locals while hunting for an apartment. The punchline is that it takes place between OVA 8 and Crash, so of course she sees the Knight Wing launch from the building, and when she brings it up at the LADYS big reopening party, Sylia is all 'whatever are you talking about' and promptly makes sure this woman gets an apartment across the city. "You'd almost think they couldn't wait to get me away from here!" is what's said in the last bit, which is funny as hell. Written, apparently, on a dare.

We Just Want To Help You: Jeanne is transported to what appears to be the BGC Universe, but is, in fact, not. Her attempts to convince Sylia otherwise don't go well. Another one-note gag, but in my mind not as funny as the other one.

Spin Cycle: Linna's power goes out, she needs to do some laundry, goes to a laundromat with a laundry-dispensary Boomer, said Boomer goes rampant and starts terrorizing people, Linna must evade the Boomer and help other customers. Short, silly, charming, and does a nice job of outlining the wider world of Megatokyo, the normalcy of life in the world's mightiest megacity, where clothes still need to be cleaned.

10 Questions: This is a weird one, since it's one of Priss's great-grandchildren asking her about an interview with her she found in the attic. Ten easy questions about what happened to Priss in her public life - the Reps broke up, she started a new band, she started a record company that eventually got to sign Vision, she lost both her legs during the last great Boomer Rampage - hold on, wait, what the fuck?

Yeah, despite Hedge saying in an afterword that she wanted this to be the fic where Priss got to have nice things, she still loses her legs, Linna, and Sylia. The last quarter of the fic, in fact, is her just musing about all the different choices she could have made when Sylia pulled her over back during the fateful night played out in Asu E Touchdown... and I think it's implied Sylia, in the end, walked into GENOM Tower with a suitcase nuke. So... happiness? Even then, it's an elusive thing...

Okay, that's the small stuff. The warmup. Now for the big 'uns.

Into The Shadows: Probably Hedge's most famous work, 19K words detailing, from multiple perspectives, the origins of the Knight Sabers, from Dr. Raven talking Sylia into recruiting other members, to those other members being recruited, and so on. It was cowritten with Andy Skuse of Raven's Garage, which... is kind of a detriment to its quality? I've been rereading Skuse's own multichapter epic, Bubblegum Cross, and it's Not Very Good. I'll probably review it soon.

Anyway, it's part mess of flashbacks, part training montage, part this, that, and the other. Each chapter is fairly short - shorter than I would have written, in all honesty - but there's a good bit where Nene is cool with her EW, where even Linna is scared for a short bit, where Priss is as violent and unhinged as you'd expect her to be. The characterization is really on point here, I think, at least for a certain rendering of the Sabers in their early days. I quite like this one.

True Love: Priss can't catch a break, can she? In canon or in fanon. I mean, holy shit, this fuckin' piece. It's good, but... damn.

It's mostly, Priss's story, a bridge between Crisis and Crash in the darkest sense. See, she's trying to finally get the Reps signed, right? Reasonable, even if the sleazy-producer cliche is coming into play even before Priss's stint at idoldom in Crash. It's not going well. She gets forced into a bad contract by 'Oomori-san' (geddit?) someone's stalking her - and then said stalker shoots her in the throat. Her voice is gone (explaining the change in voice to Ryoko Tachikawa in Crash), she's in protective custody, and... ugh. Look, I don't want to go any further, because probably the best way to describe this fic is a) disturbing (stalkers are creepy people!) and b) depressing (Everyone's mental state gets seriously altered by what's going on here). The other part of the bridge from Crash is that Nene kills said stalker, just picks him up in her Motoslave and drops him into the canyons, and that's kind of the lead-in to her being much more aggressive in Crash as well.

I don't want to spoil more, because this is a 'darkfic' in the best way, a deeply, perfectly uncomfortable way. It's the way that best shows what Hedge was capable of as a writer, and why her death was a tragedy in the truest sense. Read any or all of these, because they're all excellent.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: DeadboltDon's Silent Rift

You know how last year, I lost my mind over Most of The Way To The Moon? Reader, I thought that such perfect Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction could never be written in our fallen day and age, that the really good shit was all in the nineties and the aughts, never to return in this decade. That I would have to be a lone soldier writing this stuff. I was wrong, suffice to say.

And now, I have been proven wrong thrice. Both by this fanfiction, and then by CodyLabs' Once Upon A Midnight Launch. As I begin the process of spinning up a new, better fanfiction project, this fact fills me with boundless joy, especially because it gives me something to review that isn't old or weird or horny or Yours Truly 2032.

And it came out of nowhere, too! Only a week old as of the time of writing, and from a user who I knew liked BGC on reddit, DeadboltDon just dropped this puppy, all 50K words or so of it, on us like that. I just found it, just binge-read it, and I am going to tell you, right now, it's time for you to read it too.

Okay, so here's the setup: Megatokyo is a city whose outer districts are absolutely fucking overrun with trash. Waste from electronics, vehicles, Boomers. Even if those wastelands are postapocalyptic nightmares where only the insane and Moorlockish live, that's still a whole lot of waste, a whole lot of things that are, well... one character in this fic calls it 'ungarbage'.

The main cast are scavengers - an ex ADP-jockey, an old guy, an ex-Outrider... and Lou. Yeah. Lou. The Sexaroid we all thought died in Moonlight Rambler. Weird, huh?

Well, things start creepy, that's for sure, when the team brings in the arm off a Knight Saber hardsuit, and then decide to bring it back, because the Sabers to them are living legends, nightmares who'll happily kill them to retrieve said piece. And the Sabers do show up. Sort of. Black hardsuits with silent flechette-throwing crossbows, something that we know aren't the Sabers, can't be, but who are they, then?

Well, Lou and company wind up in ADP custody, only for the Sabers to break them out in an unhinged rampage through the upper parts of the HQ, where Jeena Malso is an absolute fucking unit, and then a horror-movie like scrabble through vaults loaded with dead Boomers coming to life. Things get... dicey. Not to spoil anything, but the people behind the black hardsuits are a) unexpected villains and b) fucking terrifying because of that. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time for the final fight, I'll say that much.

Oh, and there are references! The WKUK's Sex Robot, various types of power armor stuck in the ADP's prototype division (eg. the Kerberos Panzer Cop suit), and a bunch of quotes from an UrbEx handbook. They're welcome. They energize the fic even more than it already crackles with violent life.

I wish I had more to say about this fic, beyond how much you should go and read it right this instant. Instead, I'll say this much: I think we're in the middle of a minor paradigm shift for Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction. My own work, Cody's work, and so on. I might be the guy who keeps coming back to this fandom, maybe most people are writing one-offs, but the fact that a superfan like myself can expect quality work like this as a baseline for BGC fanfic makes me think the future's bright... especially since I know of more than a few people who are working on new fics as we speak.

I say this with the utmost love: If you have a Story Of The Knight Sabers you want to bring to the internet, don't hold back. Give us everything you've got. Now is the time to rise together, to fill up the silent rift with light and noise.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: Innpchan's Remembrance Day

Remember AD Police Files? The Bubblegum Crisis spinoff series everyone seems to have kind of collectively forgotten about, and for good reason? The series I once called "High Impact Sexual Violence The Animation" and meant it?

Well, it's been on my mind lately, for various reasons. I'll detail them below the fold, but suffice to say that ADP's weirdness and lack of spark parallels its fanfiction - of the half-dozen that can be found on that old Usenet archive, all but one are mediocre in a way that made me put them down before finishing them, save a different one that I read and didn't really enjoy.

All But One.

Yeah, that's right, motherfuckers, the beautiful mind behind Dance of Armor, before he embarked on writing the never-published sequel Arms of the Maiden, wrote this short little squib of a fic, detailing another deployment gone bad and bloody for Tactical Officer Jeena Malso, the somewhat-present heroine of AD Police Files. The prose is delicious, the action is nasty, the tone is full of bleak pale life.

It's midnight in Megatokyo. The streets teem with life that does not live. The AD Police keep order. Or so they tell themselves.

Okay. So. Why ADPF?

Well, I've been thinking a lot about the prospect of a Bubblegum Crisis B-Team. I had this idea back when I started that Anatomy of a Lovedoll that telling stories about the different side characters / guest stars of the various 2032 episodes might be a cool way to explore uncovered sides of Crisis, and flesh out my own understanding of my 206X verse. Sylvie's one, Reika was to be another (and might still be, some many years down the line, I don't really know, it depends on whether or not Witch of Tranquility takes off, or if I decide to go back to Divine Patronage, or or or), and I have two separate ideas for potential stories I could tell centering around Lisa Vanette and Kate Madigan respectively. And then... then there's Jeena Malso. Or, well, Gina Marceau makes more sense as a name to me.

(I also was thinking about Caroline Evers, the Ripper from ADPF, but honestly there's not a whole lot you can do with her.)

She's not really much of a character in ADPF beyond 'borderline psychotic Big Tiddy Tomboy'. Her story is not the one told past the Phantom Woman episode, she's tangential at best. And yet she's by far the most memorable part of the series simply by being big and loud and having a cybernetic arm and saying weird things about women that only a really horny dude (see: Tony Takezaki) would write. (The Boomer went insane because it was a woman, and emotions run high in a woman during sex? Damn, bro, that's some Women Be Shopping right there.)

Then there's the question of Where Is She Now. Obviously since she was conceived of in the middle of BGC's run, she couldn't exactly be a presence in Crisis up until 1990 when ADPF was released. Moreover, since the distributors of ADPF and Crisis were different megacorps - Bandai and Toshiba EMI, respectively - that sort of crossover was restricted solely to Leon being in both series. (Crash, then, was published by Polydor, btw.) Now, granted, there was a manga that was supposed to resolve ADPF as well as hint at the origin of Largo called Dead End City, but the only way I read it, years ago, is through a VK photoalbum that is rather hard to use now because they keep pestering you to make an account. Anyway, in that case, if I recall correctly, Gina had her cybernetic arm attacked by Largo's predecessor entity, had to rip it off, and the day was saved to a degree.

Now, Black Knights Steel Hearts had Gina show up as a merc working for the Super Cool OC, but most of what I remember from that part was her trying to pair off Priss and Leon in the clunkiest way possible. And I don't seem to remember any other fics that are Crisis-centric where she shows up, although the RPG proposed roughly the same path for her, ie going into private investigation or security consulting, only with one arm. I'm not so sure about that. Gina never struck me as the most mentally stable of characters. I can see her becoming a Cyberpunk 2020-style cyberpsycho, you know? Yeah.

Anyway. Where was I? Oh. Right. Remembrance Day. It's really fuckin' good. I'm going to hold off on quoting it verbatim because you just have to read it yourself.

The story itself is incredibly short and simple. Gina and company are assigned to take on a group of rampant construction Boomers who attacked a nightclub and now have fled into an abandoned, semi-flooded shopping arcade. Gina wants to bring in heavy ordnance. Her superior goes against it, but her troopers bring the big stuff (a PIAT? Whuh?) in anyway.

But all the same, they're ambushed. Slaughtered. One trooper, referenced at the beginning of the story, loses her spine but still has enough of herself intact to scream and cry out for revenge and it's just the most poignant scene you ever could see. The op goes bad, the Boomers kill most of the squad, Gina retreats and is marked for 'mutiny' - and, in the locker rooms, freaks out hardcore at poor old Nene Romanova when the news that Gina is likely going to lose her badge is told to her. It's... sad. Again, it's pretty much the only fic that makes me feel for Gina as a miserable person watching everyone die around her. That's why I say unto you: Read this fic.

...You know what, I should make a throwaway google account so I can make a throwaway VK account so I can view Dead End City without a big blue MAKE AN ACCOUNT bar blocking my viewing experience. There's an idea.

================================================

Update 2/12: Investigation by some Discord buddies of mine reveals something I'd forgotten: The PIAT is a real thing, a spring-launched recoilless rifle that was the British answer to the bazooka during World War Two, standing for Projection, Infantry, Anti-Tank:

Now, you might think 'what in the heckledy feckledy is the ADP doing using an almost century-old weapon?' and we came up with the answer to that, too: it doesn't have to be a good anti-tank weapon, because Boomers (usually) less armor than a tank. But the ability to get a big explosive shell in the face of a combat model without backblast would be a deal-sealer, don't you think? You get a big boom, probably bigger than a 40mm grenade launcher (a 55C can tank something like that, if I had to guess), but it's directed enough that collateral isn't a big concern.

Also, there is a gif of an ADP officer using one in Blow Up you can find a little ways down on my feed. I misattributed it to a Carl Gustaf a year or two ago, but the way the trooper is holding it makes it clear. It's something without blast vents, so it's a PIAT, though it's such a blink-and-you'll miss it moment I'm amazed Innpchan found it and did something with it. No, really. It's incredible.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: David Lindquist's Sylia's Choice And DaritanX's Megatokyo 2045

A double-feature, this time, since I don't have enough to say about these two fairly decent fanfics to justify a single post. Neither one is bad, they're just sort of there. One is complete, the other is incomplete but may very well be rebooted some day.

Sylia's Choice: Sylia's taking a bubble bath, trying to soak her head and get rid of her Largo nightmares from OVA 6, and falls into a dream where she and the other girls are wandering Oriental D&D warriors, travelling the land and seeking vengeance against the Genom clan. There's an entire fucking expository glossary at the bottom of chapter 1, you see, which explains how all this came to pass, with Sylia as a warrior-sorceress, Priss as your usual bushi type, Linna as a martial artist, and Nene as Sylia's sorceress-apprentice (a cool concept that actually is followed up on to a degree). Quincy hires them in person to defeat Mason, who seems to have become a lich of some sort, and so the team goes off to fight undead Mason's magic. Only, this is a fic that's only 11K words, so they go to Mason's abandoned temple, he teleports everyone except Sylia to the Shadow Realm (not literally, but you know the meme), there's a you-and-I-are-the-same-Sylia moment, she beats his ass with the power of friendship, Sylia snaps back to reality, that's it. A remarkably unclimactic story with a perfectly fine setting. I sort of wish more total-genre AUs were done with BGC, but what can you do?

Megatokyo 2045: A very strange fic originally set up to be a Shadowrun crossover. By the way, did you know that Shawn Hagen wrote such a thing, called Knights Without Armor? I assume it was another 'Sabers Can Never Win' sort of story, because that's just Hagen for you, but the man went on record multiple times to insist that the BGC RPG's CP2020-based combat was borked and that Shadowrun's systems were far superior, especially since he made a full conversion of BGC into Shadowrun's systems. Anyway, that aside's over, so...

2045 is another single-chapter prelude-to-something-greater where GENOM's gone, the Sabers have disappeared / moved on with their lives... and an older Sho ends up getting captured when he and his friends attempt to raid a corporate lab of some sort. Two of the others die, and one escapes to seek out Priss for help. She gets her hardsuit from an older, mustached Mackie, attempts to raid the lab solo, and gets the shit beaten out of her by a mysterious man with no visible enhancements. Sylia rescues her and that's the end of Part 1.

Again, very little to say. An okay start, but no guarantee things would get better or worse. Certainly the idea of a grown-up Sho is kind of interesting, one I've been kicking around for a day or two in quieter moments. But the original author returned to reddit last year with plans to rewrite the fic twenty-some years on, but it's been like eight months since I heard anything from him as to what came of those ambitions, so who can say? I certainly can't. I really should reach out to him one of these days.