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mashounen2003 · 4 years ago

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Sonic opinions - 2

In large portions of every fandom, it looks like it prevails the idea that you can only take one of two positions: praising the story in every respect, including both the ideas themselves and their execution by the writers, or admitting not to like the story and not to praise any element of it at all. I think my ideas regarding the Archie-Sonic comics and the Sonic franchise in general cannot be pigeonholed into either of these two extremes.

More below the "keep reading" cut.

I loved all the world-building in Archie-Sonic, the elements the comic introduced, their many characters and the potential to tell stories about them; I also really liked much of the art and personal styles of several artists Archie-Sonic has had throughout its history, with very few exceptions (and such exceptions include Ron Lim, of course). That's why, of all the Sonic continuities, I often use the pre-reboot Archie-Sonic comic as the primary source for world-building elements and story ideas.

What really makes me feel bad about that comic, what motivates most of my criticism, is the ideas’ execution by the main writers, as well as aspects that I think are more linked to each writer as a person, the unique way in which each of them has written their stories.

Firstly, Michael Gallagher: the writer for the first few dozen issues of the comic had a terrible sense of humour, and this hurt the comic hugely since those first issues were fundamentally based on that low-quality comedy style. The characterization of the entire cast also suffered greatly from this; in Sally's case, something quite ironic happened too: Gallagher portrayed her as bossy, annoying, temperamental, usually bickering with Sonic, and now that's also how Sally is seen by many fans of the videogames’ continuity (at best). Other than this, not much more could be said about him.

Karl Bollers wrote quite decent stories with some nice comedy, with “Return to Angel Island” being his best work, one of the best stories in the entire comic and perhaps even one of the best in the franchise; but Bollers’s work was "torpedoed" by Ken Penders and then-editor Justin Gabrie, which ruined the stories’ final versions sometimes or led to elements introduced by Bollers being "retconned" and overwritten by whatever Penders smoked and decided to do when taking over. The characterization of Fiona Fox is one of the main examples, with Bollers's Fiona being a quite under-utilized character but with a great potential that would later be wasted by both Penders and Ian Flynn. Another similar case was Sally breaking up with Sonic: Bollers tried to give context to such a drastic decision by Sally and show how she was the one who was suffering the most at that time and also that both she and Sonic were partially right, but Penders and Gabrie didn't let Bollers develop this subplot properly and all we had was a quite infamous scene that unfairly made Sally one of the most hated characters. It’s also known of several plans Bollers had for future stories, and one of them was Antoine being corrupted by the Source of All and turning into a villain; this had the potential to be a good story by subverting the concept of the Source of All and making it an actual threat, but on the other hand, it’d have meant resorting once again to the resource of "this character isn’t doing anything, let's make them evil", something quite disappointing, which later would have disastrous results when Flynn did the same with Fiona a few years later. However, these plans of Bollers were just ideas, and the quality of a story created from them still depends a lot on execution. In the end, I can't say anything about how good or bad Bollers was as a writer, simply because I have no way of knowing what his stories would have been like if he had been given more freedom and had stayed as the writer longer.

There were two writers who influenced Archie-Sonic comics far more than any other writer in its history: Penders and Flynn. The first of them was a retarded pervert with an overly inflated and fragile ego. He became obsessed with the primitive, toxic ideal of "family" North-Americans have. He wrote nonsensical, contradictory stories, having already decided the end down to the last detail long before even thinking about how the story would come to that end (I also made this specific mistake a few times when I was just starting to write fanfiction, I must admit). He increased Fiona's age in order to be able to pair her with the Don Juan that Sonic had become, which also ruined Fiona's characterization forever. The issues 150s -right before being replaced by Flynn- were the worst part of Penders’s run, as Bollers was no longer there to put a stop to his madness in any way, and it was at this time when there was the most egregious case of Penders pouring into the comic his worst perversions and retarded ideas: he hinted at a sex scene in one of the most infamous cases in the history of the entire Sonic franchise, although it wasn’t infamous for the implied sex per se but rather because what happened was technically a rape by deception; to add insult to injury, the writer implicitly blamed the victim some years later when asked about it on Twitter.

I could go on talking about “Ken Perverts”, but I think that's not necessary and would be a waste of time since, as everyone here already knows, he's been the laughingstock of the entire Sonic franchise for years; @ponett even has a whole secondary blog, @thankskenpenders, mainly dedicated to this. On the other hand, there’s still another writer who has also contributed a lot and also made huge mistakes but is not criticized in the least by almost anyone, simply because he was better than Penders.

Ian Flynn usually reduced the characters to slightly oversimplified portrayals, similar to the personalities of the characters in the most recent videogames. Under his pen, Sonic was more sympathetic but his words sometimes sounded too empty and shallow, his apologies for past mistakes didn’t lead to genuine changes on his part, and sometimes he even seemed plain insensitive to all the tragedies happening around him, especially at the Mecha Sally Arc (I nickname Ian Flynn’s Sonic "Plastic Smile" for this). Admittedly, this had already happened several times with previous writers (Penders portraying Sonic as a Don Juan, as I already mentioned), and this is why I think the original Sonic from Sonic SatAM was always better for feeling more "genuine", less "empty", and more heroic and likeable as a result. Perhaps the only ones to escape the oversimplified portrayal have been Shadow and E-123 Omega, whose characterizations in Archie-Sonic were the best in the whole franchise.

Besides, Flynn had strong favouritism for Amy Rose, which only made things worse because this Amy was much more similar to the one in the videogames from Sonic Heroes onwards. Anyway, this also happened with previous writers, like when Amy wished to be younger at the cost of a chance to save Sally's mother and no one ever berated her for it.

Let’s look at the villains. Unlike the typical Eggman from the videogames, with his follies, eccentricities and other absurd aspects, the Robotnik “inherited” by the comic from Sonic SatAM was explicitly a genocidal bastard and crueller while at the same time being sane enough to realize everything he was doing (@robotnik-mun already spoke in detail about this once); however, Flynn tried to combine the two characters into the pre-reboot Archie-Sonic Eggman, and the result created some severe problems with the stories’ tone. Something derived from this was how Sonic let Eggman live and even felt sorry for his fall into madness, in addition to treating him as if they were the Sonic and Eggman from the videogames, Sonic X or Sonic Boom; it’s worth remembering this Eggman technically is a sort of reincarnation of the SatAM Robotnik (his exact nature is quite complicated and includes parallel universes, but yes, he’s supposed to be exactly the same as the SatAM Robotnik, with memories and everything) and this Sonic is supposed to have fought a bloody decade-long guerilla war against him just like his SatAM counterpart.

Scourge was turned into a massive Mary-Sue who achieved easy victories, as subtle as a huge neon sign saying "the bad guys win"; he was also an abusive manipulator towards Fiona Fox, and Flynn was unable to show that properly for fear of making his pet look no longer cool, which makes you wonder how alike Flynn and Penders might actually be in some ways. To clearly understand the horrible damage this has caused: it not only created a generation of young Sonic fans -mostly boys from the USA- who romanticize abuse either consciously or unconsciously, but also there are even women -including scholars, committed feminists and transgender people who are also activists for social justice- who either sympathize with Scourge or think Fiona made a right, wise, rational or informed decision by joining him in the story (I’ll not give names of those women, I’m not really eager to get into heated fallacious discussions about “the true meaning of Feminism”); to top it off, among the writers who started working with Ian Flynn either on IDW-Sonic or the last years of Archie-Sonic, there’s at least one person who got the job of writing official Sonic comics after gaining quite a bit of fame with a fan-comic where they used the pairing of Scourge & Fiona to inspire its readers to feel sorry... for Scourge. And speaking of Fiona specifically: the subplot of her career as a villain was ill-conceived, was built by using as a cornerstone the A-story of Issue #150 (that quite infamous and widely known story written by Penders where Scourge may or may not have raped Bunnie by deception), and was also seemingly "abandoned" as Fiona ended up merely being Scourge's new abuse victim girlfriend and her status as a traitor didn’t even have a significant emotional effect on the Freedom Fighters.

Flynn also followed something like a pattern of taking tropes from famous works and then using them when writing the comic but not actually understanding why those tropes had worked in the first place. Perhaps the prime example of this was Scourge giving Sonic the Joker's "One Bad Day" speech: it almost felt a bit like giving the same speech to the Batman of Batman vs. Superman, as Sonic had already had a whole "bad decade" and was still a hero despite it; also, Sonic's answer to that speech (telling Scourge it only takes a tiny bit of selflessness and decency for him to be a good person) wasn’t that great, not at all compared to the mildly masterful answer Batman had originally given to the Joker in The Killing Joke, and it even made Sonic look more like a bad judge of character.

Lastly, the entire Mecha Sally Arc was poorly planned, had some contradictions with itself and with previous stories, was stretched through dozens of comic issues no matter if that felt forced, and the main events and plot twists throughout the story arc were heavily based on shock-value without giving any substance to this or making it a bit more sense when putting it under scrutiny; meanwhile, Flynn always seemed to have quite a hard time when writing long story arcs, so these long stories looked like he was trying and outright failing to imitate Toriyama (someone quite known for putting together stories ad-lib according to what seemed most convenient at the time).

Despite this, it looks like those Sonic fans who are still interested in material outside of the videogames will keep buying and reading whatever Ian Flynn or one of his colleagues writes, simply because they’re better than Penders... even though it's been 15 years since Penders wrote something official about Sonic. Seriously, we should have gotten over it by now, instead of continuing to compare all material in the franchise with Penders's work, which sets the bar too low for any official content creator. Now that I think about it, Penders's work is to the North-American Sonic canon what Sonic 2006 is to the videogames: people can criticize the latest games all they want, and rightfully so, but if someone even casually mentions Sonic 2006, any Sonic game from 2010 onwards instantly becomes a masterpiece just for being marginally better than Sonic 2006; the same happens between Penders's work on pre-reboot Archie-Sonic and any other North-American Sonic comic written by Flynn after Penders left.

Right now it looks like it's also forbidden to criticize Flynn as a writer at all just because he's much nicer in his personal life and engages with fans more directly through his podcasts, or because Flynn is truly progressive while Penders claimed to be progressive and a feminist and was affiliated with the USA Democrats but his work showed how misogynistic, perverted, retarded, reactionary and downright sick he was. Also, now saying something about Flynn other than total blind admiration for him and his work, even asking for the Freedom Fighters to return in the IDW comics, has become synonymous with agreeing with those assholes who cry "Rally4Sally" or "Udon4Sonic" on Twitter: "nostalgic" fans of SatAM and Penders's work on Archie, in their 40s or 50s, deeply conservative and absurdly paranoid, who claim that those new inclusive cartoons such as Steven Universe or She-Ra "are ruining their childhood", are mad at Flynn just because he hinted Sally and Nicole may be a lesbian couple (and in a rather platonic way, not even romantic in the traditional sense), and try to justify their own warped ideas and fantasies about SatAM by ignoring any “liberal” political messages SatAM may have had at the subtext level.

#sonic fanfiction by mashounen #sonic opinions by mashounen #sonic #sonic the hedgehog #archie sonic #sonic comics #sonic satam #michael gallagher #karl bollers #ken penders #ian flynn

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doomedandstoned · 5 years ago

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Chrome Ghost Give Emphatic Close to the Decade with ‘The Diving Bell’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

There's always been something endearing to me about the sound of Roseville, California's CHROME GHOST. Their last two EPs are decades-long favorites of mine, chiefly due to the bittersweet comingling of earnest vocal harmonies with punishing low-end. Each of their releases has brought unique and unforgettable moments and I've long contended that they would stand up well as openers for the likes of Alice in Chains or Tool, Yob or Bell Witch, in terms of how they compliment and contrast elements of both bands.

'The Diving Bell' (2019) opens in classic Chrome Ghost fashion, with a steadily unwinding ballad with a Lovecraftian twist. "Waltz in the Shadow of the Hillside" will hook you for the long haul. It definitely passed the "hum test" for me, in any event, as I've been thrumming the main vocal theme for days now. "Halo" follows this by unleashing a torrent of pent-up tremors, followed by a calming mantra accompanied shortly by an ascendant guitar lead.

"The Diving Bell" presents a solitude and stillness that is rare, even in genres like depressive and funeral doom. Sadly serene, the song is like the calm leading into a storm, for minutes in a march-like rhythm and growling vocals announce the approach of something awful. Then like intermittent patches of downfall, the storm clears and gives way to a warm, confident stride with dreamlike lyricism. I dare say you don’t need to know the words (at least not on first hearing) to get the full effect of this 14-minute wonder, for on a sonic plane it taps into that mysteriously intuitive musical language we all seem to relate to emotionally. On a compositional level, I’m quite impressed (and satisfied) by how the band has developed to this point in their career. Like I said, deserving of much more mainstream attention.

From ascendant to transcendent, the record closes with the cavernous "Visions." There's something about it that reminds me of Gregorian Chant. Certainly the layer-upon-layer effect of the complementing vocal harmonies aids in its sacred vibe. Unexpectedly, the tempo quickens towards the end of the song, as though a great window to the heavens had opened and Jacob's dream of angels ascending and descending like an escalator is before us.

Regardless of how you interpret it, revelations abound in The Diving Bell, which releases this Saturday, November 30th (pre-order here). And now, Doomed & Stoned is pleased to present the worldwide exclusive debut of Chrome Ghost's most accomplished effort to date. A triumph.

Give ear...

The Diving Bell by chrome ghost

A Listener's Guide to 'The Diving Bell'

We're grateful for the opportunity to visit with Jake Kilgore (guitar, vox), Jake Hurst (drums), and Joe Cooper (bass) of Chrome Ghost, who recently gave us the low-down on their most accomplished effort to date, taking us on a tour from the inside-out.

Art

The cover art was painted by Sacramento artist Molly Devlin (@devlinmolly on Instagram) She has an incredibly sensitivity to her work, and the way she works with elements of nature and organic stuff blew my mind. We are extremely lucky that she was into the idea, and honestly the album cover influenced the way I felt about the whole process. I like to have art done before the recordings are done for that exact reason.

Recording Process

The Diving Bell was recorded in May 2019 by Patrick Hills at Earthtone in Sacramento, California. Patrick has recorded all Chrome Ghost releases to date, as well as CHRCH, King Woman, Tera Melos, and more. We have developed an extremely strong working relationship with Pat, and we tend to understand each other with minimal discussion. Half the time we’re not recording, we are getting through the day by watching stupid youtube videos while files are rendering.

The album tracking was spread out over three days, drums, bass, and guitar, with vocals tracked at home. No click tracks were used throughout the process in an attempt to give the record a more organic feel, and to give us the ability to push and pull the tempo as needed. It goes without saying that this method is way harder, and we definitely punished ourselves with long work days trying to get things right.

We were originally slated to track the album in February 2019, but I (Jake Kilgore) ended up breaking my wrist right before we were meant to go into the studio. The injury not only delayed our plans, but sent me into a spiral. Unable to work, I spent most days on the couch, feebly trying to find positions to hold my guitar so I could keep practicing. In some ways, this benefitted the band by really narrowing our focus. We would rehearse with no guitar, only bass, drums, and vocals. I’d stand there and sing the guitar parts when necessary and it became something of a thought exercise for all of us to stay in sync while only imagining what we were supposed to hear.

General Themes

This record was meant to be personal and introspective, but I also wanted to incorporate more classic gothic themes. Instead of being as blatantly autobiographical as Chrome Ghost has been in the past, I got a little more abstract and started to incorporate images and moods that resonated with me in some way.

Jacob and I share a fear of deep water, and I couldn’t shake the image of a primitive Diving Bell from my mind for months. The idea of being totally submerged, surrounded by a small pocket of air, was so claustrophobic yet serene, and it helped direct the mood of the album quite a bit. Always contrasting the heavier and suffocating music we make with the lighter, more reflective stuff.

Photo by Kevin Carpio

"Waltz in the Shadow of the Hillside"

The opener was inspired by a Lovecraft story called Whisperer In The Darkness, which starts off with reports of massive floods sweeping away strange alien bodies. I was struck by the thought of bodies washing through floodwaters, and it sparked from there. That idea met with this mantra I'd had cycling in my head; Wild Rose, Dog’s Blood. Something beautiful and something terrible, side by side. That sense of duality might be cliché at this point, but it seemed to fit very well in the sense that the water in this song is an element of destruction, but obviously water is an element of life.

We built this song around that clean fingerpicking guitar part after the heavy intro, which I originally wrote while I was still in high school. Everything else was added to accent those voicings and melodies present in that sequence. Exploring that very primitive and repetitive 3/4 rhythm, and twisting it around in different contexts, was a lot of fun to figure out. The droning, experimental part in the middle is probably my favorite because we got to use a bunch of studio tricks on the drums, and I got to use some rad guitar pedals to get those washy reverse guitar parts.

LYRICS

night falls shadows bloom rise slow dance in the hillside

shifting earth hums below outstretched arms drag through the water

soft glow of eyes that shine dark cold shrouds all who wander

obscured shapes draw near long black hair drags through the water

hark! now comes the flood slow rain crushes the hillside

pray they will rest well see them all dragged by the water

wild rose dog’s blood pray all rest well

all that once was is gone from here whispered laments fall on deaf ears

washed clean of all but memory swollen in death and revery

wild rose dog’s blood pray all rest well

"Halo"

Halo was a strange one to write, because the lyrics kinda just came to me in a flurry and I wasn’t aware of what they meant until after the record was made. I sometimes suffer from debilitating panic attacks, and Halo ultimately became an ode to my wife, who in these moments has shown compassion and cared for me to the best of her ability. The song is about that paralyzing feeling of sickness that can render you temporarily dead to the world, but more importantly it’s about the debt that we owe to those who are there for us.

This is our attempt at a pop song. It’s the only song on the record with a chorus that repeats, and it loosely follows a verse-chorus-bridge-chorus formula. Other than that, we got to stretch our limits a little bit by making this the fastest song we’ve written.

LYRICS

healer weakened by the dark

wild rose cloven from the torn gently as the wind had blown resting high upon your crown

frail in your arms aching from the warmth bound to remain here suffer evermore

suspended in this moment of loss every nerve severed and raw the door’s nailed shut chained to the bed i’m so tired my eyes shut again

halo

"The Diving Bell"

The mantra Breathe Deep anchors this song, returning multiple times to reinforce that claustrophobia. This song explores the peak of a true panic episode, catatonia, helplessness, etc. The feeling of being out-of-body, and calling out into the void for help.

Obviously this track is a sort of centerpiece for the album, musically. There are repeating phrases and motifs that let you feel like you’re hearing something new, but in actuality you’re just hearing a different version of something from earlier in the song. This track was meant to showcase the most extreme distance between the heavy and light elements of the band.

Pat Hills also did the dual guitar lead part with us, and that is one of my favorite things we’ve ever recorded.

LYRICS

breathe deep the only way out espaces me

sinking lower in a slow dive

lay here motionless alone

breathe deep in waters of purity lungfuls of what is to be

sinking in waters of purity lungfuls of what is to be

lay here in waters of purity lungfuls of what is to be

quiet weightless catatonic eyes unblinking mute and empty bury me in silt

the pain comes in distant waves echoes of what once were hidden wounds voices cast out through still air listen for me calling home

breathe deep

"Visions"

The lyrics to Visions were meant to give it finality, as the end of the album. It’s about accepting death, and the darkness that follows some of us throughout life. It’s also about holding on, even in our final moments. Asking to be “buried slowly”, to let us all have time to think and work through some shit before we have to call it a day.

This track is a sort of mashup between a spindly clean riff that King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard might use, and a powerful seasick drone that a band like Yob might use. Visions has a very chant-like, almost Gregorian element to the vocals, and when that’s laid over almost tribal drums, we knew we had something interesting on our hands. That sorta didgeridoo-like sound during the choruses is an electric bass with two strings being played with a bow. That was 100% Jacob’s idea and he executed it perfectly.

LYRICS

sickness floating in the eye of all men

fallen tears in the well poison the crumbling earth rose in bloom thorned red and gold baby’s breath like cancer, grows

fading light casts a glow over my face alone when I go bury me slowly when I go bury me slowly

visions

Shallows by chrome ghost

Reflection Pool by chrome ghost

Choir of the Low Spirits by chrome ghost

Follow The Band

Get Their Music

#D&S Debuts #Chrome Ghost #Roseville #California #Doom #Sludge #Metal #Atmospheric #Doom Metal #D&S Interviews #HeavyBest19 #Doomed & Stoned

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redqueenmiku · 5 years ago

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A DECADE’S RETROSPECTIVE, REDQUEENMIKU STYLE

Here we are, facing down the start of a brand new decade. This decade has had its ups and downs for everyone. For me, this has been an extremely eventful decade. So much has happened that it’s actually ridiculous.

So, I got to thinking: as we enter 2020, I want to take a look back at my past ten years of existence and really give you guys a peek into my mind. You’re going to learn where I came from and how I got to where I am now. This decade contained my first experiences with the great wide world of posting to the internet and everything that came with it.

Are you ready? Let’s travel back in time to the start of this decade…

2010

2010 started with the final half of my eighth-grade year. I was an awkward child with a million original characters and no friends.

It was pretty sad.

Eighth grade came and went and summer came around. Wow! Look! What’s that?! Toward the end of the summer that year, a certain character named Jake Speed was born and Diametrics, then known as Lightning Speed, officially commenced. If you don’t know about my precious brainchild, Diametrics, don’t worry. I have something big planned for this summer to coincide with the series’ tenth anniversary that’ll answer everyone’s burning questions.

Then, toward the end of the year, after entering ninth grade, something amazing happened. I officially began my long and storied internet posting career.

Where did I start, you ask?...if you have to ask at all, I mean I’ve mentioned this probably a million times by this point but YES. I got my start as Shinymew76 on Nickelodeon’s official Invader Zim message boards. I was just getting my bearings at this time, so I didn’t do all that much of note, but I was getting ready to make my very first power move…

2011

Now, if you don’t know anything about what the Invader Zim message boards were like, we were kind of a hot mess. We were a tight-knit hot mess, though, and dang if we weren’t proud of it. The main activities of the message boards were making OCs and writing fanfiction. You know how sometimes on fanfiction.net you’ll find those really weird stories that are written entirely in script format? That was our bread and butter on the IZ boards. Just about everyone wrote that way. We had to be pretty kid-friendly too. I mean, what you could get away with depended on what our mod, NickZa, was feeling like that day, we were generally pretty restricted.

It’s important to remember that we were also little baby teenagers in a community revolving around Invader Zim.

In 2011, I began to really try to make a name for myself on the message boards. I started a short-lived gameshow series where people could submit their OCs to compete. It was a Total Drama kind of deal but it never really took off all that well. Then, though, I started a fanfiction titled “200 Years From Now”, which told the story of Dib accidentally transporting himself and Gaz to the future, where Zim has been exiled and a new Irken has been assigned to conquer the earth: Miki. Then, Zim returns to earth and something something rebellion to take down the Tallests. I don’t remember most of the story considering a good chunk of it was lost to time, but it definitely existed. The story also featured Zaz and Zelena, other people’s OCs that they submitted to be part of the story.

I don’t know how big that story made it. I really don’t know the scope, so I couldn’t say with certainty how many people read or enjoyed that story. Younger me, however, thought it was THE BEST. Immediately after it ended, I was already planning for a sequel with the same characters, adding villains from the still-thriving Lightning Speed. The story never actually got written and there was no real plan for anything about it aside from what I just told you, but there you go.

I also branched out further, spreading myself to other Nick.com boards with a variety of usernames because I was a coward. One account was 2darcara2, which was meant for the Danny Phantom and TUFF Puppy boards. I never did anything on the latter, the only remnant being an OC for the series known as Agent Darcara Fox. The former, though, came with two OCs, Annette and Aria Spectrelle, and a fanfiction: Eternal Darkness. The story revolved around Danny Phantom meeting Annette, who was being bullied by her older sister, Aria, and something about Aria being ultra-powerful and wanting Danny dead. Again, much of the story is lost to the ages. 2darcara2 also had an Invader Zim OC to coincide with it: Invader Erin, who had dark powers a la Raven from Teen Titans.

In case you couldn’t tell, 2darcara2 was the edgy one.

Then there was the other account: xxpetalxx. This account was meant for the iCarly and Victorious boards and also had her own Invader Zim OC, a human named Miriam. xxpetalxx published two stories, actually. The first was a crossover for Victorious and Invader Zim, where Zim and Dib end up at Hollywood Arts and Dib tries to get Tori to team up with him against Zim. It never finished, but it was something. More importantly, though, there was iMeet a Hero in Hollywood. I can’t even remember which board this went up on, but it was a three-way crossover between iCarly, Victorious, and Lightning Speed. Yeah. I was getting rather crazy here. I’ll talk more about the unfortunates of iMeet a Hero in Hollywood during that big surprise project I teased earlier, but it was a huge mess. Besides the fact that no one cared and I was way out of my element, it just sort of...dropped off the face of the earth.

Back to the main account, though. I lost the Shinymew76 account somewhere along the way, so I had to take up a new handle for my main account, JS712, named after Jake Speed. After getting bored of trying to maintain two secondary accounts, I cut the whole thing off save for iMeet a Hero in Hollywood and decided to just do things with my main account. That was when I decided to check out the miscellaneous boards. One was a board dedicated to original writing. Of course, I dabbled with posting the first story of Lightning Speed there only to have it rejected the first time around, likely because one of the characters was holding a gun. Yeah. This is how strict things were around there. I got it up the second time, but only by getting rid of the gun. The story never garnered any attention either, so that was a waste of time.

Then there was the video game board. This was a place for discussion about anything and everything video games. I remember everyone there making a big fuss about Chuggaconroy and how he was the best lets-player out there. Simpler times, those were.

On those boards, I attempted to launch a Sonic-themed series known as “Adventures in the Z-7 Station”. The series starred a character named Krystal the Hedgehog, who owned a boarding house called the Z-7 Station, where Sonic, Tails, Amy, Cream, Rouge, Shadow, Omega, Vector, Espio, Charmy, and Eggman lived. I also invited people to submit their own OCs to be included in the story.

No one gave a crap.

Even so, I endured, writing a good number of stories for the series. None of them actually went up, though. Sad, isn’t it?

Finally, I extended myself to the Penguins of Madagascar boards, writing a story known as “Penguins of Madagascar Humanized: Unleashed”. The story revolved around the adventures of the penguins, the lemurs, and Marlene, but as humans. There were also humanized versions of Dr. Blowhole and the android version of Skipper that showed up in, like, one episode of the show. They were the villains of the series alongside an OC named Violet. The story actually garnered a fair bit of recognition...until the whole thing randomly disappeared one day. Considering I didn’t archive it at all, that meant the whole thing was completely lost to time.

Of course, the message boards weren’t the only thing I was doing at this time. I was writing other fanfiction on the side too. One of these things was Shadow’s Story, a mega-crossover where Shadow the Hedgehog journeys across a crud-ton of different worlds to find the Chaos Emeralds to defeat an evil force that has made Sonic into its slave. It was one of the dumbest things in the history of ever, but I wouldn’t be mentioning it if it didn’t become important later.

Then, there came the end of the year, namely the date of November 4th. This was the day that I created a DeviantArt account under the handle KristoonzArtist76, and my life changed forever.

Immediately in the next two months I posted artwork for Lightning Speed, Penguins of Madagascar Humanized, 200 Years From Now, Shadow’s Story, and Adventures in the Z-7 Station. There was also the version of Lightning Speed’s first story that went up on the message boards as well as an attempt to recreate Penguins of Madagascar Humanized in comic form...and it was complete garbage.

I also met back up with people from the message boards during this time, seeing as they also had DeviantArt accounts. The most notable of these were Heidi and Mollie, both of which had been a constant presence on the Invader Zim boards and had actually made pretty significant names for themselves there. Mollie, though, had also been significant on the Penguins boards. I believe she even read the Humanized story before it was deleted.

Anyway, that brings us to the end of 2011. Now we move right into…

2012

2012 was when I started to get really frustrated with the boards...and I pretty much just left. You’re not really going to hear anything about the boards from here on out.

The first significant thing about 2012 happened in February: I bought a thirty-five dollar digital drawing tablet off Amazon. It was a cheap, floppy, plastic thing, but, to a younger me, it was the greatest thing ever. It was with that that I started my grand excursion into the world of digital art, starting with Microsoft Paint.

At the end of February, I decided that I was going to do something special to commemorate the leap year. This took the form of a new original story called The ExPERiMENT, which was about two experimental humans with the absolute worst names in existence, Haretaieto and Aidamizumi, nicknamed Hareta and Mizu for short. The two of them were labelled as defective and scheduled for execution, but are saved and brought to a secret compound for...well...undecided reasons. The story was meant to be told in the form of diary entries dated to the actual days each of them were to be released, but this quickly fell apart and ended up spelling the story’s doom. It stopped after the rescue on April 2nd and was never updated again, despite one or two unreleased efforts on my end to revive it.

In another turn of events, I published what I had for Adventures in the Z-7 Station on DeviantArt. The series went on to introduce Sonia and Manic from Sonic Underground, as well as several new OCs: Spright the Raccoon, Leigh the Hedgehog, and Raven the Echidna. A friend’s OC, Silverdust the Husky, was also included.

Then there was the day I logged on to find children staring me in the face. Heidi, one of the friends I had mentioned earlier, had written a story about her Invader Zim OCs that had also involved characters from Lightning Speed. In particular, the main character, also named Heidi, was involved in a romantic relationship with Dnias Speed, as agreed upon and supported by both of us. Then, one day, Heidi posted drawings of a theoretical set of children for the couple.

Those two children were Dante and Jupiter Speed. They will become extremely important later.

Lightning Speed continued to flourish in this time and I was still keeping up with trying to start getting good at digital art. At the end of May, I opened up five request slots, which ended up getting decent reception...from a bunch of bronies.

Did I forget to mention I was in the My Little Pony fandom at this time?

Things continued on from there. I went to prom, I made more Invader Zim OCs, I reached 100 posts on DeviantArt, I quit the message boards, I started learning how to drive, I pared down my ridiculous number of OCs, I read the Warriors series and actually started writing Warriors fanfiction with a whole four clans full of OCs, I made a group on DeviantArt for Lightning Speed, and many things continued as they already had.

Then, September rolled around and everything changed again.

It began with a class trip and the friend I sat next to on the bus. That friend introduced me to many things that day. One of those things was Law of Talos. Law of Talos is a phase in my life that I referenced for two seconds and then continued to haunt me for the rest of eternity.

The more important thing, though, is my first introduction to Vocaloid. On that day in September of 2012, I became a Vocaloid fanatic for the rest of my natural-born life. This would quickly become both a blessing and a curse.

Then, October rolled around and blessed me with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. I immediately ditched MS Paint and embraced the new art program whole-heartedly. It was a whole new world. Suddenly I had layers and a color wheel and drawings that didn’t look pixellated.

Then, when Christmas came along, it also gave me a shot at a brand new tablet: a real Wacom Bamboo tablet.

I got fed up trying to get used to it and went back to my old tablet, handing the Bamboo off to my sister. I can’t tell if that was a terrible mistake or not, but here we are.

2013

In January of 2013, I discovered MikuMikuDance. MikuMikuDance is a free program that lets one pose and animate 3D models, primarily for use with Vocaloid models but with models for just about everything under the sun existing in one place or another.

This program was the worst thing that ever happened to me period.

Slowly but surely my art started to get completely drowned out by constant MMD images. I had MMD OCs, being crappy recolors of Miku and Rin. I had bizarre lore for different models. I put together those stupid Jewel Hearts that people keep downloading to this very day and I get messages of people favoriting them on DeviantArt constantly and it makes me want to scream because all I did was take a half of a heart someone else had made and just slap the two sides together and recolor it a few times yet it’s literally the most popular thing I’ve ever made someone please end meeeeee.

*ahem*

The MMD stuff wasn’t so bad in 2013, but this is where it started, so I’m obligated to mention it.

As for things that weren’t MMD that happened in 2013, we first have Lightning Speed. In 2013, the final material for the first run of the series was posted on DeviantArt. It wasn’t planned to be the last, but that’s how things worked out. The series still continued outside of DeviantArt, but there’s nothing on the internet to show for it.

There was also the X-Factor OC tournament, a tournament run by Heidi where various Invader Zim characters would be put up against each other in a literary battle of the ages. The character I entered was one I had adopted off the message boards before my departure: Quinn. Three of the tournament’s four rounds took place this year, all of which were wins for Quinn and my admittedly lackluster writing.

2013 also happened to be the time of a monumental shift in fandom for me. I voluntarily left behind the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom. To fill the void, though, I turned to...Koopalings. This, again, was both a blessing and a curse.

And, on top of that, 2013 was the year I attended my very first convention and wore my very first cosplay. I was a hastily-put-together Kagamine Rin. The costume was crap and the convention was just a tiny local event, but I still had fun nonetheless.

Then, at the end of 2013, something incredible happened. Heidi had created a shipping meme some months prior. As her friend, I filled out the meme and, in the process, I jokingly decided to pair Miku up with a cloud. Eventually, the joke devolved, said cloud eventually turning into one certain character of mine that had once had a cloud-like form. Then, that Christmas, I produced my very first annual Christmas shipping picture with said couple: Miku and the character known as Red King.

Yes, dear friends. This is where Red Queen Miku was born.

Oh, I also got a laptop for Christmas. That happened too.

2014

The first thing I did in 2014 was start up a challenge that would quickly become the bane of my existence: the MMD 100 Themes Challenge. This absolutely massive undertaking was the death blow for anything non-MMD related on my DeviantArt account. By that point, I was rarely posting actual art. 80 of 100 themes were posted this year alongside many more MMD images, dwarfing all other posts from this year.

Even through the MMD, though, I found the time and energy to start up my very own OC tournament: the Nightmare Manor OCT. Character submissions for the tournament began in February and, after the final audition phase from April to August, 14 characters had been entered and matched up for round one. After that, round 2 began in December, now down to only 6 participants after eliminations.

2014 was also the year that the first run of Lightning Speed finally came to an official close after over fifty quote-unquote “seasons”, ending officially on September 13th. In its wake, though, emerged Cannonfire, the story of Dante and Jupiter and their quest to escape nonexistence after being removed from their world. At the end of the story, Dante and Jupiter return from the city of those that don’t exist, Cannonfire, now existing in a parallel reality to the Lightning Speed series. The story was written early in 2014 and posted that summer.

Besides that, there were also my first full-fledged fanfictions for the Mario fandom. There was The Show Must Go On, a story about Lemmy Koopa getting kidnapped by a gang of thugs and Iggy and Larry venturing out to try to save him, and Cold Wind, a series of short stories about the Koopalings living in a normal neighborhood, going to a normal school, and doing normal things, based off of events from my own past. A few tertiary stories left over from the original run of Lightning Speed were also posted

Also this year, the final round of the X-Factor OCT began. Quinn ended up winning once again, securing victory over the entire OCT with a piece of writing that, honestly, was rushed and kind of lazy. I’m convinced I only got by because my opponent did literally nothing.

August 2014 would also mark the last time I’d open up requests on DeviantArt, this time only being single-character sketch commissions. I believe it was sometime after this that I abandoned the My Little Pony fandom for good, although not necessarily because of it.

And then tragedy struck. 2014 marked the release of my first Youtube videos featuring terrible voice acting that I tried to pass off as being good. People still watch these things to this day. I hate these videos and everything they stand for.

Most importantly, however, 2014 was the year I graduated from high school and the year I started attending college, going for an Associate’s in Simulation and Game Development at the local community college. I spent my first semester learning the basics and getting adjusted, eventually making my first college friend.

2015

2015 is the year that absolutely everything started changing for the better.

...well, almost everything. First, let’s get the bad news out of the way.

Checking back in on the Nightmare Manor OCT, the tournament’s second round of six contestants garnered a grand total of half an entry. After two separate calls to action, the tournament was abandoned in May without an official statement; a mistake on my part, but I was pretty depressed about the whole thing, so can you really blame me?

The MMD 100 Theme Challenge was also abandoned this year, stopping at theme 97 out of 100. Fun fact: the last three images actually exist. I just never posted them.

Then there was Curtain Call, the sequel to The Show Must Go On. Curtain Call was a disaster and it’s probably the worst fanfiction I’ve ever written besides, well, Shadow’s Story. Please don’t ever read it.

Now for the good news.

Firstly, 2015 was the year that I finally stopped using MMD. Even in the beginning part of the year, I was already posting far less of it. This meant I was focusing more on my art and, when I say that, that’s no exaggeration. 2015 was a huge year of improvement for me, from learning new techniques to adopting a vastly different art style that was more fun for me to use to ditching Autodesk in favor of Krita, allowing me to finally move past my inhibitions and actually use things like pen pressure, which I was too afraid to do in Autodesk, where I’d kept my settings the exact same since 2012. I also obtained a new drawing tablet: a Wacom Intuos 3 given to me by my uncle as a hand-me-down.

The things I wrote this year weren’t anything particularly special, for the most part. Cold Wind continued and Surveyor’s Wings, a crossover involving Larry, Wendy, and Roy Koopa getting transported to the world of Attack on Titan, started up, going into indefinite hiatus a short time later. There was also This is Me, a short one about Larry Koopa accidentally switching bodies with Luigi. Above all of them, though, was In Memoriam Vos, a twisted story where the Koopalings are suddenly thrust into a world that wants Lemmy Koopa dead. This was also the year I created an account on Fanfiction.net, named RedQueenMiku, where I posted “This is Me” and “In Memoriam Vos”.

This year was also the year of the Mushroom Timeline, my first attempt at a Mario timeline that also came with its own map. With that also came my first time arguing a Game Theory video, being that I couldn’t just ignore the fact that their timeline came out the day before I posted my own.

This year was also the year I entered another OC tournament: Origins OCT. I entered Dnias from the Lightning Speed series, partnered with his mental companion of cynical disposition, Yang. The tournament was a blast and I had a lot of fun with it, even with all the mistakes I made in the process. The first three rounds took place this year, all of which I won.

Lightning Speed also received a hard reboot this year, transitioning into the short-lived “Lightning Speed 2”. The first story of this run released this year.

This was also the year that I discovered and subsequently adopted a group of bootleg Koopalings I began affectionately referring to as the Bootleglings. Nonexist was created to coexist beside them later that year. The Sesonia AU was also launched, being an AU that shuffles around Koopalings from both the games and the cartoons and Bootleglings, placing them in a fantasy world heavily themed around the four seasons where magic is a prominent feature. Also, there was KoopaDoopa4321, a joke account I made on DeviantArt. I never did all that much with it, but it existed and I posted some art produced in MS Paint there.

This was also the year I created my Tumblr account, RedQueenMiku, this being the second account of mine to bear this name after the Youtube account the year before (because the Fanfiction account came afterward). Because of this, 2015 was my first year participating in the yearly Tumblr event known as Koopalings Week (as well as the year I created my human designs for the Koopalings). Later in the year, I created a second blog, justkristoonzartist76things, for posting small blurbs and generally ranting out of the way of the main blog. It took me a while to find my footing on Tumblr and get comfortable enough to start posting art, but, eventually, my main blog transitioned from reblog city to a mainly art-focused blog. Two more blogs also popped up toward the end of the year: little-red-dolls, which was dedicated to a dress-up game kick I’d had at the time as a big guilty pleasure that didn’t last that long, and frame-by-frame-mario, a blog devoted to weird inbetweens and animations errors in the Mario cartoons.

Finally, this year had one more significant occurrence: I witnessed my future anime husband, Sakaki Yuya, for the first time over my friend’s shoulder in class. Due to this, I asked my friend to teach me how to play Yugioh. Now you know why I started playing Yugioh. It was all Yuya’s fault for being so handsome.

2016

2016 built a lot upon what 2015 started. In fact, in a lot of ways, I regard it as a continuation of 2015.

2016 was also the year I snagged myself a Core Membership on DeviantArt and finally renamed my account from KristoonzArtist76 to the iconic RedQueenMiku you see today. I also changed the name of my second blog to correspond with this, it becoming justredqueenmiku things. From here on, RedQueenMiku would become a constant handle for me on absolutely everything.

The biggest thing that happened at the start of 2016, though, was me finally playing a certain indie game that had come out the previous year: Undertale. I immediately became obsessed. I drew art for the series, I made a blog specifically for it, rqmundertaleparty, to keep spoilers away from those that didn’t want it, and I undertook the challenge of drawing every single major character from the game, which I ultimately succeeded with, coming out with sixty-two drawings for the challenge.

Then, there were the AUs. Many of my AUs for Undertale at that time were simple derivatives of things I already had, like Sesoniatale, Yangtale (which was planned to have a story, but was scrapped), and Nostritale (based off of the Memoriam series, which had recently gained a new entry in the form of a very basic version of In Memoriam Nostri, which would be expanded upon later). There was also Underfire, an Undertale derivative of Cannonfire that had its own short series of comic strips, and Mariotale, which was my attempt to cast Mario characters in the roles of Undertale characters.

Lastly but most importantly, for April Fools that year, I decided to, as a joke, revive Adventures in the Z-7 Station as an Undertale AU titled Krystaltale. The revival, though, ended up having twisted meta elements that eventually warranted its continuation from the three parts posted on DeviantArt for April Fools. In the AU, Krystal was changed to a skeleton named Lucida, but still retained her memories from her previous incarnation and wished to recreate what she had in this new world she suddenly finds herself in using the powers of resetting and scripting to make events exactly the way she wants them. Sans catches on to them and starts to oppose Lucida, creating the back and forth that would persist for the rest of the series.

Also for April Fools that year, I attempted to start an ask blog on Tumblr for the Bootleglings, titled ask-the-real-koopalings. The blog never took off, however, mostly due to my own lack of motivation.

Also in 2016, Cannonfire received a sequel, Cannonfire 2, in which Dante and Jupiter are brought back to Cannonfire, where this time they would remain alongside another Lightning Speed child, Thicket, and a character that had been scrapped during the transition from Lightning Speed to Lightning Speed 2: Nightmare.

In January of 2016, the final round of the Origins OCT came and went, with myself taking the runner-up spot. Later that year, a second season of Origins would begin, this time with myself entering Dante. After the first round, however, the tournament abruptly ended.

2016 was also the year I finally started watching Yugioh Arc V. I made it through nearly forty episodes this year. I also updated my human Koopaling designs and started doing DeviantArt memes for fun, notably posting the very first version of the first crack lovechild meme I did. My first palette challenge was this year as well and, slowly but surely, I was moving myself away from DeviantArt and toward Tumblr as my primary platform. There was also the first death of KoopaDoopa4321, meant to be on April Fools, but accidentally delayed to April 2nd. This was also the year I changed the anniversary of Lightning Speed from July 12th to July 29th and posted the second and final story of Lightning Speed 2.

Speaking of, there wasn’t a lot of writing that came out from me this year. Besides Krystaltale and Lightning Speed 2, there was a one-shot based on my old headcanons about Bowser’s past titled “Her Name Was Annabel” and a story revolving around Ludwig von Koopa after the birth of Bowser Jr and the subsequent revoking of Ludwig’s birthright that also included elements of Superstar Saga, this one titled “Decomposure”. These went up exclusively on Fanfiction.net along with a cross-post of The Show Must Go On. There was also one more part of Cold Wind that went up on DeviantArt before the series went into indefinite hiatus. Behind the scenes, though, I was already starting up stories for the Sesonia AU, the Bootleglings, the Memoriam series, and multiple things for Undertale including two crossovers and two one-shots. I also received a dare from a friend this year to finally write a sequel to Shadow’s Story in the worst possible way as a great big joke, so that happened too, resulting in Shadow’s Sequel.

On top of all this, I finished the Simulation and Game Development program I was in, our capstone project being producing an RPG titled “Life’s Memory”. It was an extreme prototype of a game, but I believe we accomplished what we set out to do.

Then, at the end of the year, I posted the final awful voice acting video I ever made. It was meant to make fun of the previous ones, but it ended up being cringy in its own right, so I still regret it immensely.

2017

2017 for me started with news of an upcoming move that summer, which immediately sent me into a depression over having to leave behind the place I’d been living for nearly ten years by that point. As a result, I feel into a rather extreme slump. I took on an expression challenge to try to cure my art block, not posting a single finished piece outside of that until the end of February. I started several sketches for images that I never completed and subsequently threw out. I abandoned the frame-by-frame Mario blog after trying to hand it off to someone else with no reception. I didn’t return to DeviantArt until April due to anxiety about the amount of messages piling up from a posting flood at the end of the previous year. Generally, I was just feeling like a piece of garbage.

There wasn’t much that happened in the first part of the year. I was certainly writing more than I was drawing, though. I started two more Cannonfires and a project named “I Can Fix You” that was supposed to go up at the end of that year, but ended up being shoved back. There was also the next story in the Krystaltale saga, “The Mispersonification Ray” which actually did go up on DeviantArt. I did also create the Barian Koopalings AU at the start of this year as well.

Over the course of the year and especially during the move, I started watching more Yugioh Arc V, eventually finishing the series by September. I also watched Yuri on Ice this year. I also got back into the crack love-child meme and, after finishing my second one shortly after the move, I came up with the premise for “The Great S.T.O.R.K. Machine” and created worlds for all the children to live their lives, quickly revamping the first meme shortly after.

Then, on July 29th, I officially revealed Lightning Speed’s final reboot to Diametrics. I’ll talk more about Diametrics in that thing I keep teasing, though, so keep an eye out for that later this year.

Then Koopalings Week 2017 came around, I set unrealistic standards for myself, and it crushed my soul again.

This year also just so happened to be the year that I looked back on my rant on the Game Theory Mario Timeline and said “Yeah, I could have done better”. This led me to start writing theory rebuttals that would eventually turn into full-fledged videos. I created the first version of a video on Game Theory’s Rosalina Unmasked video this year, as well as wrote the first draft of a script on Game Theory’s Mario Timeline and a couple other theories.

Things proceeded as normal into the end of the year. I drew more Arc V art, I started writing my first Arc V fanfictions, I posted the somewhat-sequel to In Memoriam Vos, In Memoriam Eius, I made a Wattpad account that I posted Cannonfire 1 and 2 on and then swiftly abandoned, I drew a piece for Hatsune Miku’s tenth anniversary, I posted a Christmas special for Krystaltale, I made an account for the Yuri on Ice Amino, and…

...oh...right...

that drama started this year…

So, in December of this year, I was approached by a user I’ll keep anonymous for her own sake. This user, who I’ll call “T”, directed my eye toward her DeviantArt account, which contained uncredited drawings of her characters wearing some of the outfits of my Bootlegling designs and Nonexist. I asked for these to be credited and they weren’t. This doesn’t escalate, though, until…

2018

In 2018, the T drama escalated from an argument to an all-out war. I did some things I’m not proud of, but I tried to come at the situation with as much grace and dignity as I could muster. I’m not going into detail because, in the end, it doesn’t matter to the present day—the whole thing is over and no one needs to bring it back up like that—but the only thing worth knowing is that I unintentionally stoked a fire I was ill-prepared to deal with and, somehow, I gained a crud-ton of followers on DeviantArt because of it.

Finally, in April, after T had been ignoring large majorities of my messages and the situation moved far beyond needing my input, I dropped out of the whole thing, making my final statement and leaving it be.

Now I can talk about everything else that happened in 2018. Gracious.

The beginning of 2018 was slow because of the drama debacle, but I started a palette challenge on Tumblr and I drew pieces for Yuri Plisetsky’s fictional birthday and Mar10 Day, along with a third crack love-child meme for The Great S.T.O.R.K. Machine, finally revealing the whole thing on DeviantArt toward the end of the year and even starting on a fourth entry, and I entered a contest on the Yuri on Ice Amino with a picture of Otabek that didn’t end up placing.

April Fools then rolled around and, for 2018, I decided to re-release Shadow’s Story alongside the sequel I’d written two years prior on my newly-acquired AO3 account. The whole thing was massively ridiculous and even included pictures every few paragraphs, just like the original had so many years ago. I don’t know if anyone even caught chapter 19, though...

Summer came, I moved Diametrics’ anniversary to July 31st, I started up a challenge called the RedQueenMiku Redraw Bonanza where I redraw, like, a bajillion old pieces from my past, and I drew pieces and wrote a whole slew of bios for Koopalings Week 2018. Fall came, I went off on Nintendo’s announcement of New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe and the existence of Peachette, I started on a brand-new Mario timeline, I finally posted Roy, I started and subsequently failed my first attempt at a Goretober after only three days, I played Deltarune, I posted a redraw of an image involving Karl from Castle of Nations and Law of Talos that was actually a huge mistake to post, I started a Twitter account, and I created and started taking requests for a brand new challenge called the Yuri Expression Challenge, where I draw characters with expressions from various screencaps of Yuri from Arc V. Brilliant, I know. Praise me for my intelligent brain.

2019

And we finally come to the year we’re leaving behind us tonight: 2019. 2019 has been a heck of a year on its own.

2019, in itself, was a lot like 2017. I started off massively depressed, then, in the summer, we moved again.

In January, we lost our dog and I spiraled into depression again. Between that and computer issues, I didn’t actually do a lot in January. I did, however, join an art group on the Yuri on Ice amino in this time: Artevivo. I posted one more piece for the Yuri Challenge before my desktop failed on me and I was forced to either do art on my quickly-dying laptop or go traditional. The latter is what I did for the first Artevivo prompt post, though I took the former route to make a doodle post announcing my sort-of official return to the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom.

Next up was February. I did a few more traditional doodles, one set of them revealing an Arc V AU known as the Dragonia AU, before I finally got my desktop back online. I drew a couple more pieces after that, including an Artevivo prompt for Valentine’s Day involving Otabek and Mila.

March came with Mar10 day once again and an Artevivo prompt about boy bands in which I made a stupid joke by drawing Yuuri, Victor, and Yurio as Dreamboat Express a la Sonic Boom. I also entered a contest on the Amino for St. Patrick’s Day and, while I ended up just shy of winning the whole shebang, I did place first in my category, earning the title of Emerald Princess. Most importantly, though, I dropped a bunch of titles for future writing projects. Some of them, like “I Can Fix You”, “Yu-Gi-Oh: Arc INFINITE”, “Sesonia: The Dark of Spring”, “In Memoriam Nostri”, and Cannonfires 3 and 4 had already been previously announced, but others like “Tales from a Dark and Stormy Night”, “49”, “Jump Up, Superstar!”, “Memory to Hunt her Down”, and, most notably, “In Memoriam ihr Zerbrechliches Ego”, were brand new announcements.

April came around with a half-hearted failed attempt at an April Fools event that we don’t need to talk about and not much else. There was an Artevivo prompt about Cherry Blossoms, another entry in the Redraw Challenge, and I drew some bears. That was really about it.

In May, I traveled for Animazement 2019, which ended up being a heck of a lot of fun. There was also an Artevivo prompt about sea creatures AND the release of the first real story in “The Great S.T.O.R.K. Machine”’s series on AO3. At the end of the month, though, I had a real scare. I backed up everything on my laptop onto an external hard drive then, about a week after that, my laptop sang its final hurrah, dying to a critical hard drive failure.

June was a much slower month. I drew a few pieces at the beginning of the month, but, by the end, we had already begun our next big move. I managed to squeeze in a Sonic birthday sketch dump before we left and I even got the Artevivo prompt for that month done ahead of time. The rest of the month, though, was pretty much completely dead, as I had to pack up my only remaining computer for the move. At the very end of the month, though, I bought a brand-new laptop, meaning I was officially back in business and better than ever, at that.

July started with me taking on a style challenge on the Amino and just generally drawing a whole heck of a lot. This continued all the way through July.

Then, August came. I kept up with Koopalings Week like I never had before, ending it out with the least fatigue I’d ever felt coming out of a Koopalings week. I also finally finished an enormous piece for Diametrics that I had planned to finish for the anniversary, but that took much longer than expected due to the sheer scale of the piece. There was also an Artevivo prompt about fruit somewhere in there too.

September was a month that I vowed to be productive for considering the previous year’s September I did absolute bupkis. What a productive September it was too. I drew some Sonic characters in Vocaloid outfits, released an Undertale two-shot called “Vodka en Rouge”, added another three entries to the Redraw Bonanza, completed an Artevivo prompt for Fall, and started preparing for another crack at the Goretober I’d failed the previous year by drawing six different practice pictures. We also finally got into our new house this month, so that was great too.

Then, Goretober finally came. Did I succeed this time? Well, no. I managed to get most all of them done, but 27, 28, 29, and 30 were never completed. Even so, I produced a grand total of 25 images this month, which is still absolutely insane. I also made a rule for myself that I couldn’t draw for the same fandom twice, meaning the variety of pieces was vast and I even drew characters that I had never previously drawn like Twelve from Zankyou no Terror, Katara from Avatar the Last Airbender, Sakura from Zombieland Saga, Luluco from Space Patrol Luluco, and Kaoru from Ouran High School Host Club.

When November rolled around, I swore to myself I wouldn’t let myself slump into inactivity like I had after previous challenges like Koopalings Week 2018. With that resolve, I kept drawing. I drew a piece celebrating the new Sonic movie trailer drop. I did a short livestream only one person came to. I drew a piece of steampunk art for the Artevivo prompt. Finally, though, I started the Youtube channel I’d been preparing for for two entire years, RedQueenMiku2, and I started with newly-revamped videos on Rosalina Unmasked and the Game Theory Mario Timeline, just like I’d planned to do years ago.

Finally, we come to the present. December came with three more videos, a Silvaze Christmas piece, a Christmas Aretevivo prompt, and the retrospective you’re reading right now. Really, looking at 2019 as a whole, it’s like what 2017 could have been if I’d done things right. In 2017, I let depression get the best of me and let my work suffer because of it. In 2019, though, I pushed through and vowed not to quit, bettering myself because of it.

That’s the big thing here, really. 2010-2014 was all about me trying to find myself as a young, impressionable teenager, 2015 and 2016 were me discovering where I wanted to be and how I wanted to present myself, and 2017-2019 were me coming to terms with myself and pushing through my own mental roadblocks. Looking at where I started and where I’ve ended up, the difference is staggering. Of course, it has been ten years, after all. Now, as we look ahead to 2020 and the start of a brand new decade, I can only hope things will just keep getting better from here.

Happy 2020, everyone. Cheers.

#sorry for the long #this is just something i wanted to do for posterity's sake #it's fun to look back and see where you came from #also i'm highly sentimental #to a ridiculous degree #so yeah #that's where all this nonsense came from #*jazz hands*#happy new year everyone!!!

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grimelords · 6 years ago

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Finished writing my January playlist up a couple weeks ago and forgot to post it. Sometimes things are like that I suppose. A pretty good mix of all the songs I was very into two months ago.

Terrapin Station (Suite) - Grizzly Bear & The National: It's shocking to think that a 5 hour long Grateful Dead tribute album changed my life but it really did. It's so good all the way through which is a feat in itself and it's a great introduction to every side of a band that can sometimes feel culturally overwhelming to try to get into. This song is a highlight, veering over every kind of territory for 16 minutes but always maintaining the sort of precision of purpose I associate with Grizzly Bear.

New Year - Beach House: January baby! I've got tickets to see Beach House later this month and I'm excited because they really surprised me as an incredible live band last time I saw them, building their songs with a lot more dynamism than the sort of drum machine play alongs their albums are (which I love!!).

BAGDAD - Cap.7: Liturgia - Rosalia: I'm still working my way into fully appreciating how good this Rosalia album is. The Justin Timberlake melody is so beautifully repurposed and I absolutely love the church choir behind the 'junta las palmas y las separa' part. It's just a heartbreaking and beautiful song even if I did have to google translate it.

Signs Of Life - Arcade Fire: I've been thinking a bit about Everything Now and how it was received and weirdly it seems to have a lot of parallels with the Achtung Baby/Zooropa/Pop era of U2, 20 years before it. Well established megastar bands who turned from their extremely heartfelt authentic origins and explored the world of pop and commercialism with varying critical success. Everything Now doesn't feel old fashioned but it's kind of weird they're playing with a lot of the same ideas U2 were in their Pop-Mart era so long ago. Anyway this is one of their best songs ever I think. The disco instrumentation versus the paranoid lyrics is just great, the backing vocals especially.

Discotheque - U2: The vocals in this song are so interesting. There are at times upwards of three Bonos harmonising with each other. It creates an unsettling image of a world overrun with Bonos. I do however love the extremely strangled guitar sound in the breakdown. I sort of wish this song were longer, long as it is, because it really starts to build into something serious by the end but then it just fades out disappointingly.

Violent Shiver - Benjamin Booker: I love Benjamin Booker but he needs to take a lesson from this song and do some hot licks again. He doesn't do hot licks like this in barely any other songs! Benjamin Booker sounds like he's from an alternate timeline where rock n roll stayed black and this is where it's at now.

Dawn Of The Dead - Does It Offend You, Yeah?: Can you imagine naming your band 'Does It Offend You, Yeah?' in 2019? What a time to be alive 2008 was. I absolutely love the steel drums in the prechorus and the bass and 'ooh ah' in the chorus. The production is just so chunky throughout. This whole song is thick.

Golden Skans - Klaxons: Anyway speaking of the heady days of English 'new rave' Golden Skans is a masterpiece. It's also masterfully compact, it's over in 2 and a half minutes. Amazing.

Go Bang - Pnau: I really applaud Pnau for having the audacity to release Chameleon and Go Bang on the same album right after each other when they're essentially the same song. Close enough to be the same song but different enough that you're still completely hyped when either of them come on.

Say You See Why So - Eleventh He Reaches London: I found this extremely serious Perth screamo band a little while ago they're so good i'm surprised I'd never heard of them before. I love the style of just endless new sections on new sections with barely any repetition, it makes you feel crazy which is perfect for this music.

Why Write A Letter That You'll Never Send - The Drones: I don't really know what to say about this song other than imagine literally getting this email verbatim lol.

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me - U2: Fully fucked up that one of the best U2 songs only got released on the Batman Forever soundtrack.

Dead Of Night - Orville Peck: I'm so glad Lana Del Rey has been around long enough now that she's inspired a second wave. I absolutely love the whole concept Orville Peck has going, masked gay cowboy is a criminally underexplored genre.

Trip The Mains - Methyl Ethyl: I can't believe Methyl Ethyl are onto their third album already. I love how dancey this is compared to their other stuff, and his voice is still completely blowing my mind.

Strange Days (1999) - Health: I've had the cover for this single as my lock screen for two months now. It's simply very good and such a direct distillation of Health's essence. They've simplified and moved closer to pop ideas on this album and I'm all for it, they sound like Purity Ring if Purity Ring exploded occasionally which sounds very good to me.

Milk Crisis - The Go! Team: I'm racist because I thought for a long time that this song was gibberish but it turns out it's actually just in Japanese.

Cream On Chrome - Ratatat: It's fucking sick that Ratatat have been able to not only survive but thrive for so long making music that sounds like the loading screen of a Dreamcast racing game.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken - The Staple Singers: This is maybe my favourite example of 60s stereo recordings making completely bizarre decisions. The drums and bass in this are panned extremely far left and the guitar far right, which has the nice effect of letting you take out your left headphone and listen to a very beautiful stripped back guitar and vocals only version.

Angel From Montgomery - John Prine: I'm seeing John Prine next week and I'm very excited. He's approximately one million years old and seems to only now be getting the recognition he's deserved for decades.

(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers - Merle Haggard: It's interesting thinking about the parts of American culture that don't really get exported to Australia. We got Johnny Cash and Hank Williams to a lesser extent but I hadn't really heard of Merle Haggard before this year which seems insane now that I've realised just how massive he was.

Debbie - Architecture In Helsinki: I have so much love for this vocal performance. Sitting in a weird half falsetto out of breath and just shrieking your way through it, mwah mwah I'm doing a chef's kiss right now.

Yandere - Yamantaka / / Sonic Titan: It's reassuring that the enthusiastic art nerd mindset of bands like The Red Paintings and The Sound Of Animals Fighting will never truly die. There should be more bands where they all have costumes and multi-movement songs songs telling an inscrutable story and a guy in the band whose whole job is just doing the lights.

Sweetness And Light (For Life Remix) - Itch-E & Scratch-E: My lifelong grudge against Paul Mac for enabling The Dissociatives and various other crimes will always be slightly tempered by how much this one song bangs.

Ontheway! - Earl Sweatshirt: I am such a big fan of this album. All the way through it feels like laying on the floor feels and it's addictive because of it. Every time I listen to it I just want to start it over again and lay the fuck down.

Mistake - Middle Kids: This song made me feel like a record producer in a movie or something when I first heard it because I got about one bar into the chorus and was absolutely smitten. It's just incredible.

Pressure To Party - Julia Jacklin: "I know where you live, I used to live there too" is maybe one of the best ever breakup album lines I've ever heard.

Our Shadows - Deantoni Parks: Deantoni Parks has a huge brain. The thing he does, where he sort of plays live mpc as part of a drumkit could be extremely naff and I'm sure there's a million guys on youtube doing it and making bad music, but he ain't one of them.. His take on it is so completely alien that the human element serves to bring it back to earth, all the disconnect that you would get from someone making a song like this on a laptop is metered out by a physical human body feeling every sound out personally and it's amazing.

Head To Toe In Morocco Leather - Muslimgauze: What's the word for being a weaboo except about the middle east and getting totally radicalised about it but never leaving England? Anyway Muslimgauze rocks and every six months or so I reread his wiki article and listen to his music exclusively for a couple of days before whatever that feeling is wears off again. I have a lot of respect for him but also suspect he may have just been a nut, which I respect as well.

In The Nervous Light Of Sunday - Circle Takes The Square: Very excited that Circle Takes The Square is on spotify now!!!

I'm In It - Kanye West: I heard that when they were recording this there was steam coming out of the horny meter that they have in the studio and then the glass broke on the horny meter and the needle started spinning around and around because the horny levels were so high.

Do Me A Favour - Arctic Monkeys: Alex Turner has two songwriting modes: incredibly tangible story songs and songs where he's just playing word association rhyming games and the craziest thing is both types are good. This is absolutely one of his best of the first kind I think.

listen here

#playlists

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steve0discusses · 6 years ago

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Yugioh S3 Ep 11 pt 1: Mokuba Gets Kidnapped (Again)

I miiiight have to split this one in two?

A lot happens this episode, and when I cap things it’s mostly to help summarize what’s going on so these posts won’t be so freakin long but visually--a LOT happens this episode. So...there’s a few caps.

Anyways, I’m still trying to not think too much about what it is that Tristan has turned into. Considering that apparently you can exist here without a body it makes you wonder if their own minds are here at all or if we’re just following some shadow selves but again, it’s--that’s way too deep for Yugioh.

Been joking about the team getting turned into Heartless for a whole season and it actually happened. Sort of. Being turned into a monkey isn’t exactly the same as being turned into Darkness but if Yugi, Bakura, and Marik are any indication, being turned into Darkness on this show just means your hair gets kinda big and sometimes you almost (and often do) kill people.

Tristan’s CGI body is now running around and I’m not sure how that works.

Like if Tristan’s ACTUAL body is being stored somewhere, then the CGI body should have vanished, right? Like, his CGI body got incinerated by lava? Anyway, apparently, his body is absolutely fine, and now it’s being controlled by Nezbitt.

I’m glad he found the Kaibas at their familiar territory. Yes, that’s right, they all met up again, reunited after 10 episodes at their favorite place in the whole world. Guess where? Guess where they are?

It’s like meeting at the Cinnabon at the mall. They just all know where to go.

(read more under the cut)

And then Kaiba just kind of acts like he’s been expecting this for years. I mean...there’s reasons to expect that.

TBH if Tristan nabbed Kaiba in the shoulder with that broomstick, Would Kaiba even be able to feel it with all that padding? He’s got like football gear for shoulder pads up there.

We get no explanation of how Blue Eyes Wife made it to the VR zone. Probably willed itself out of pure love or whatever. But, don’t worry, Seto will have to choose cards from a pool just like everyone else at the end of this episode so uh...that’s about all we’ll see from her. Unless she was also in the pool, but I kinda doubt Noah gave Seto a Blue Eyes.

Just so weird that in the same episode she’s clearly here, but in 10 minutes from now, she’s not.

Anyways, everyone else finally shows up and they don't seem to be confused as to how Tristan is just fine when they just saw him die like...just now. They just left the place Tristan was dead and incinerated by 600000 degrees of lava and they were like “Oh good! We found him immediately! Hallelujah!” as if this isn’t very weird.

And...in a past life, Kaiba was the head of the House of York or...something? Like he was in the War of Roses or something? I forget exactly what y’all were saying Kaiba was up to in a past life in some video game spinoff when he and Yugi were European 500 years ago. Their family bloodline really got around.

ALSO, thing I just realized now I’ve actually read the wikipedia, Kaiba is supposed to have been Christian Rosenkruez in this game, which is amazing. Because, if you thought the Kaiba timeline was effed up before, just you wait, because Christian Rosenkruez was a freakin nut. We’re talking Indiana Jones type of nut. I’m pretty sure the game never brings this up, but Christian Rosenkruez is famous because so many people thought that he was the reincarnation of Lazarus.

LAZARUS.

Sorry, I’m like...kinda cracking up as I’m typing this. For those who don’t know your Christian/Middle Ages art, Lazarus is this guy, seen on the right. He’s always wrapped up like a mummy and with this expression like “woah, Jo, I’m alive!? Nice!” as at least one guy in the foreground plugs their nose because he smells like so freakin bad.

Yeah. So now, canonically, a past self of Seto Kaiba swore that he was once Lazurus. Who is...a real freakin nice guy, actually. Which--and this is my favorite part--this means that Lazarus--a real guy from the Bible--was also soul married to a Blue Eyes White Dragon. Hot damn.

I mean, this is a mess, but aesthetically though--Lazarus was a dead guy right? Like a revived mystical dead guy? Wrapped up like a mummy? In a crypt? If you don’t know too much about Christianity, it kinda fits right in with our whole vibe.

And if art twitter is anything to go by, the original fanart was bible stuff anyway, so anime and Bible stuff are absolutely and always interchangeable.

(Sorry, I was about to derail on another art rant hoo boy, a rant within a rant. You know, I hide a LOT of art discourse in these posts. Spicy times. Thanks for bearing with me, I’ve been holding that one in for a WHILE.)

But this is mostly amazing because, completely unintentionally, that means Seto Kaiba’s bloodline met freakin Jesus, y’all.

In fact, lets go over it, so Kaiba’s bloodline was Egyptian wizards who killed Pharaoh Yami (who ends up being Yugi’s bloodline), kinda forgot they were royalty or magical, went up to Jerusalem for a spell, hung out with Jesus and got helllla Christian, then ended up in Germany, fought Yugi who was British royalty for a hot minute, buried Rosenkrueuz in a very weird and mystical spooky sarcophagus, and then both families forgot they were super special royalty and somehow ended up in Japan where Kaiba got orphaned with no knowledge of any of this and got adopted by a crazy Gozaboro Kaiba who is now trying to kill them all with a VR game.

Anyway, if a past version of himself was in the War of Roses, dueling with actual swords should come naturally to him. Or at least would have come naturally if Tristan wasn’t so good with brooms.

(Bro’s Spicy Headcanon: Tristans wooden stick was originally a sword but they edited it out in development. Sure Wtv.)

And surprisingly, Joey got to do a hit in this version of Yugioh--like actually kicked a guy. On screen. And it was Tristan. Wow. Really thought that would get edited out, and I’m glad they left it in because lol this whole sequence is a mess.

Anyway, Tea gets hella mad at Joey because they don’t want him to kill Tristan although this body was in fact incinerated at the bottom of a lava pool not ten minutes ago, and so she decides to go after Tristan herself? Because she figures that Tristan’s body will not attack her? Maybe because Tristan’s body would be too afraid to attack Tea.

And this is Tea, so she is used to people going ghost, getting cray, and then passing out ten minutes later and being like “Oi, love! I seem to have made quite a fuss, again, innut!”

Please look at the bottom of this cap and admire that Joey kicked Tristan so hard, that his body bent a metal door completely the other way around.

That’s right, the motorcycle license is back, and now it gets to serve a purpose!

Guys, when they revealed that Tristan could drive a motorcycle I did not think that later this ability would be yet another insane way to abduct Mokuba.

Lol what?

Moki just...hanging off the side there. Like...he’s not even strapped in. What is it with the kidnappers in this show having just no idea how to properly hold Mokuba? At least this time he isn’t being suspended from a helicopter but it’s still kind of of a lot?

And there goes Kaiba.

They reunite again for like...2 minutes after like 10 episodes and then bam, Kaiba is signing out immediately.

Unfortunately, there goes the only two people here that know how to drive motorcycles, so the rest of our team is just kinda stuck back here with Tristan in a monkey suit.

Because of perspective issues, Serenity appears to be like 2 feet taller than Yugi Muto, dang.

So I think I mentioned before that one of the reasons I was like “Yeah lets watch this show” is because someone tweeted that Yugioh had motorcycle dueling, and so when this happened I was like OMG they’re actually going to do it somehow, right now on this Sonic Adventure Highway. Finally! A motorcycle duel! I thought that was only in the spinoff I’m not going to watch!

I mean look at him go.

JK no motorcycle dueling in this series. My poor hopes. Dashed.

And he runs right into Kaiba’s coat from last season who is wearing just the thickest old timey Southern accent. Ah, I miss when his coat color was nearly his font color and it all made sense.

Bro pointed out that the best part of this scene is how small the motorcycle was compared to how big this fire is now. Like...they should just be able to walk around the fire at this point, right? Like it’s a highway with multiple lanes? What was even in this motorcycle? Nitro?

Anyway, this post will be very long if I don’t chop it in half, so get ready for next time, when we find out what this guy and his accent’s whole deal is. How many references will he make to grits and warm summer evenings? A lot, right? Like a lot?

Anyways, if you just got here, this is a link to read the recaps from Ep 1 S1

#Yugioh #Yu gi oh #recap #photo recap #S3 Ep11 #Does Mokuba have a requirement to get kidnapped every 10 episodes?#Seto Kaiba #Mokuba #Yugi muto #joey wheeler #tea gardner #tristan taylor #robot monkey #Seto Kaiba's Timeline gets more and borked every episode of this arc

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wonderfromdownunder96 · 5 years ago

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"Where's Rouge Now?" (My Version)

Note:

This was originally a Deviantart picture blog thing from 2010, made by D.A. member Gregarlink10. I've basically done my own take on it. I know that we're currently in the year 2019, but some of the things I added that he didn't are written to sound like it would've been written in the same year as the original.

Here is a link to the original version:

Anyway, on with the blog.

Why isn't Rouge The Bat in Sonic games anymore?

Here are some possible reasons:

1. She's A Bad Example For Kids: As Rouge generally goes around trying to steal jewelry - especially the Master Emerald - children, being impressionable and easily influenced, will see it and might think it's a fun, harmless thing to do, because they don't know any better due to their gullible, naive nature. This possibly could have led to some of the burglars and thieves we have in society today. Good job, Sega. Good job(!) No wonder your flagship franchise is seen as a garbage dump nowadays.

2. No Dramatic/Interesting Past/Backstory: Let's take Knuckles for example; he was given the position as guardian of The Master Emerald, which is further detailed in Sonic Adventure 1, shedding light on the Echidna tribe and Tikal, Knuckles' ancestors. In addition, Shadow had arguably the most dramatic and interesting backstory out of every Sonic character to date, having been, in his own words "A research experiment gone deadly wrong" (As said in his own game from 2005), holding a grudge against humanity, but warming to them later on. Rouge, on the other hand, hardly has any sort of backstory. It's just "I'm gaga about jewels, I wear makeup, la-de-da-de-daaaaaa."!

3. Deep Manly Voice: Specifically, the voice of actress Kathleen Delaney, who first voiced her in the Sonic X anime, and continues to voice her in the games to this day, but mostly in spin-offs, such as Sonic Rivals 2. Some people say she makes the bat sound pretty manly for a female animal, and go as far as saying she sounds like a hooker, adding to the "Bad Example for kids" section. Totally a fantastic way to promote woman to innocent minors, Sega(!)

4. She Has Big Boobs: Indeed, great for milf material. This goes back to her being a bad example for kiddies; For boys, if they arn't keen of the breast size, they'd likely grow up thinking they will meet girls, or worse, end up with girlfriends that have that breast size! As for girls, they might be worried that they, themselves, will end up growing boobs that same size as they get older. Oof...😫 But for either gender, they could think that literally every woman has boobies the same size as Rouge!!

5. No Super Form: Almost every Sonic critter has a super form of sorts; Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Shadow, Silver, Blaze etc. Not Rouge. Granted, not literally every character in the Sonic franchise needs a superform, but in my opinion, if more of them did, Rouge included, they'd be that bit more useful.

6. Many Change Of Clothes:

It's been said by a small amount of YouTubers and Deviantart members that the reason the Bat Girl got re-designed in Sonic Heroes was because Sega got letters from parents complaining about a "sexy" or "obscene" character in a game for their kids and demanding they tone her down. I personally haven't come across any official sources that say this, so I don't know whether or not this is true.

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jubilantrose-blog · 6 years ago

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in-depth timeline ;

( TIMELINE FROM PREGAMES TO HER CURRENT CANON / AGE 18 )

while my previous post was more of an outline? this is a fully in-depth look into her timelines. this can and might change with any new information canon gives or if things come up in roleplays ( i will not be going into full depth of the plots of these games -- just the basic jist of them. also some games will not include a summary as i don’t feel there’s a need for one. ALSO I WON’T INCLUDE GAMES AMY ISN’T A PART OF. those games happened, of course, but i’m just doing amy’s game timeline. );

PRE-GAMES ;

( entirely headcanon based ! )

Amy was originally an orphan / street hog. Her original parents weren’t prepared to raise a child and left her in the hands of what they hoped was a ‘suitable’ location. Though the people she was left with weren’t ideal and Amy ran away at a very young age. Surviving on the street for a good while by herself. She became known by people for being a ‘rascal’. And, given she didn’t talk much so people couldn’t know her name, her nickname became ‘Rosie’ which is where the moniker ‘Rosie the Rascal’ comes from.

Luckily, by age 6, she was taken in by a family of travelling fortune tellers. They taught her all about tarot cards and always believed she had a true gift or ability in the art of it. She considered them the closest thing to a family she ever had. And they helped her realize there are good people in the world. They saw the good in her, a mere street hog that often swiped and stole food and acted brash, and made her realize the world isn’t as cruel and lonely as she had thought.

During their travels and home life Amy was able to see the good they brought others. Learning about true love, seeing the best in people, and that ‘even those who are bad might have some good in them somewhere’. She decided to keep her name as Amy and adopt the ‘Rose’ to the end of it. No longer going by ‘Rosie’ anymore.

With Amy as part of their family? The travelling stopped. Them wanting to give her a normal life in a town compared to dragging her place to place.

By the age of 7, Amy had learned a lot about a certain blue hedgehog. Admiring him via newspapers, stories, and tales told by others on their journeys. Hearing about Sonic passing through towns and forest to stop the ‘bad guys’. Her crush and admiration is what inspired her to announce to her family ( after doing a tarot card reading ) that she’d meet him. Her family was supportive but grew concerned about letting her be so young and heading out there. Nevertheless this willful ( and stubborn ) little lady was gone in a flash.

AGE 8 - 11 ;

SONIC CD / MANIA ( the shorts / comic series ) ;

Amy truly had no idea what she was getting into. She was starstruck meeting her idol, her crush, and she went in without thinking. Only to soon be caught by Metal Sonic. Being kidnapped when meeting her idol was terrifying to her. Sure, her life beforehand wasn’t ideal. She got chased back on the streets, dealt with some angry individuals who she stole food from before meeting her family, but nothing like this. Nothing deadly or that serious.

Luckily, she was rescued.

And that made her crush on him grow even more.

Wanting to keep up with him, plus possibly defend herself from being kidnapped, she begins working hard using her piko-piko hammer. Continuing to chase after Sonic and join him along the way. Allowing herself to meet Tails and Knuckles in the process as they all go after Eggman.

AGE 11 - 12 ;

PRE SONIC ADVENTURE ( headcanon based ! ) ;

As the years had passed Amy found herself losing track of Sonic and the others for about a year. She decides to return home to visit her parents. She had been keeping in contact with them and visiting them on most holidays. Telling them stories about her adventures with Sonic. But when she arrived she had found the house abandoned and couldn’t get into any contact with them. A neighbor, spotting her confused, tells her that they decided to return to their traveling ways. Believing that, since Amy was so independent and had been proving herself as such, she didn’t need them as much.

Having spent the last few years chasing after Sonic, plus off on adventures, it dawns on her that...she doesn’t have a home ! So she heads off and, after looking at brochures and other things, decides that Station Square is the perfect place to find an apartment ! Plenty of shopping districts, work opportunities, and more !

She ends up getting an apartment there and happens to find work rather easily. Working at a small diner where she helped an elderly couple that ran the place. It didn’t pay much but it allowed her to keep food on the table and gave her something to do to pass the time.

AGE 12 ;

SONIC ADVENTURE ;

However, while work was ‘something’ to do ? She found herself bored sitting around in the same place. Every day she did the same thing. Wake up, get dressed, go to work, go shopping til she dropped, go home, go to bed. It was mundane compared to those years of being rescued by Sonic and following after him. With him gone, with her having nothing to do, she was bored !

That would soon change.

Little did she know her reminiscing and longing for some excitement would, quite literally, fall from the sky in the form of a Flicky. With a desire to protect it, plus a robot now chasing after her, she soon finds herself running into her hero himself ! Sonic would help her ! He would know what to do to keep this birdie safe ! He would--

Except.... he runs away.

She does manage to catch up to him, though ! And, though admittedly a little scatterbrained, she gets distracted by Twinkle Park. This leads to her being captured and taken aboard Eggmans ship in hopes Sonic would come and rescue her. But it’s not Sonic that frees her from the cell. Instead, she befriends a robot that seems to be different from the others. She would end up standing up to Sonic to protect the robot from being destroyed.

Now this is where my version sort of veers off though not by much ;

Unlike the Sonic Adventure game ? Amy witnesses Gamma’s death and the events happen similar as the show Sonic X. With Amy witnessing their final battle and seeing, to her horror, the destruction caused. While it helped reunite the family it also meant having to see a robot she befriended sacrifice itself. She was able to say her goodbyes and thank the robot. Knowing, in the end, the sacrifice had to be made to reunite the family even if it was painful.

She’s happy to see them together and walks out onto the deck with them. Only to witness the same robot from earlier ( the one that had kidnapped her ) shoot down the small Flicky much to her horror. Angered, plus not wanting Gammas sacrifice to go in vain, she challenged the robot. Vowing herself that this time she would be the one laying down her life if need be to keep the Flicky and its family safe.

She takes the robot on with all her might. And manages to win ! Though she doesn’t celebrate much as she worries and frets over if the Flicky was safe. Fearful that it was dead. However, much to her happiness, it’s okay ! She wishes them all well and is happy to see them all together.

Amy realizes, at that moment, she did something on her own. She saved herself, she helped the Flicky, she made a friend of the robot. She vows from that moment on she would do things by herself ! No more waiting for Sonic, no more being the damsel, no more running away ! She was determined to make Sonic realize she could handle herself !

( She also ends up befriending Big & Froggy during this time ).

SONIC SHUFFLE & SONIC ADVANCE TAKE PLACE.

AGE 13 ;

SONIC ADVENTURE 2 TAKES PLACE ;

Amy is stunned to find out Sonic has been captured. She decides, at this moment, she had to free him ! For once she would be the one to save him and not the other way around ! However, it seems no matter what she’s done she’s left behind. She felt as if nobody had faith in her. Everyone kept running away, leaving her behind, acting as if she’s incapable. And she began, in some ways, to feel the same. When she’s held captive by Eggman and watches in horror as Sonic seemingly dies. She blames herself for it. She’s supposed to be strong. And, once again, Sonic saved her ! But this time he’s....dead ! He’s dead ! And it’s HER fault ! She couldn’t even help Tails fight Eggman out of her own grief ! Yet she soon realizes Sonic is alive. Thank goodness.

Amy, along with the others, listens in to the diary that’s being played. Finding out about ‘Maria’ dying, the grief of the man there, and realizing he’s signed a death wish for the Earth. As everyone goes off to help she fnds herself. again, alone. She contemplates this to herself until she sees him -- Shadow, and realizes that while everyone is fighting she’s doing nothing but standing there. She had to help out, do her best, even if it might be futille !

While the events of the game are canon, with Amy going to help out and sticking around, the only thing that differs is her interactions with Shadow.

While in the game the interaction was brief in her helping Shadow remember ? I personally prefer Amy having sort of a similar role to how they did in Sonic X. With an actual back and forth between them that’s tension filled as it shouldn’t have been so easy to trigger Shadows memory after so long.

She ends up mourning Shadows passing yet is glad he was able to fulfill Maria’s final wish.

SONIC ADVANCE 2 TAKES PLACE ;

Amy meets Cream, Cheese, and Vanilla and begins to form a close-friendship / bond with them all.

AGE 14 ;

SONIC HEROES TAKES PLACE.

SONIC BATTLE TAKES PLACE.

I’m not gonna say much about these two games. Nothing against them but I don’t feel like anything I add will be important. I do, however, dislike how Amy is portrayed in both. And I tend to view this as a time period when Amy thought if she was more ‘aggressive’ and ‘assertive’ that she’d be seen as strong. As she felt that she was seen as weak and dainty beforehand.

Luckily, she grew out of this phase.

( However, she was extremely relieved to find out Shadow was ‘alive’ and was very happy to see him again. )

AGE 15 ;

SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG TAKES PLACE.

SONIC ADVANCE 3 TAKES PLACE.

AGE 16 ;

SONIC RIDERS TAKES PLACE.

SONIC RIVALS TAKES PLACE.

AGE 17;

SONIC UNLEASHED TAKES PLACE.

SONIC LOST WORLD TAKES PLACE.

SONIC GENERATIONS TAKES PLACE.

AGE 18 ;

SONIC FORCES / THE IDW COMIC SERIES TAKES PLACE ;

Amy is stunned to find out that Sonic was defeated in battle. But she believes, like always, he will show up eventually. But as time ticks by, months passing and the world under siege, she’s left with this grim realization: he’s not coming back. She ends up joining Knuckles in his Resistance along with a bunch of others. Being forced to grow up more and realize all those ‘fun adventures’ were no longer fun. With it being months after Sonics’ ‘death’ she still longed for him to be alive yet, each time she felt hope, it was dashed by the realistic explanations by the others. It was also hard as, during this time, she had to keep Cream and her mother safe and also help take care of a Tails that was visibly grieving and not in a proper state of mind.

So, upon finding out he’s alive, she’s relieved. Though, upon being able to see him, she does hug him but mostly keeps the warm welcomes for Tails who needs Sonics’ hugs and support more.

She’s a bit surprised to find out, as time passes and they defeat Eggman ( plus begin rebuilding and trying to get the world back to normal ), that her once ‘love’ for Sonic was...diminished. She still loved him. Yet she’s more quiet about it. Just enjoying the fact she has her friend back and wanting to work alongside him to help rebuild and bring happiness to others again. She recognizes that romance isn't a priority in her life anymore and realizes that, perhaps, the world should come first as it’s a place Sonic loves and a place so many people love as well.

She buries herself in work in the resistance and bettering herself physically and mentally. She may still love that hedgehog, in many ways, but she knows that she’s able to enjoy his friendship and decides that she will no longer be chasing after him and focus on herself / her work instead.

#( ♥ ; nobody took into account how much she’s grown. // * hc )#IT'S FINALLY DONE.#it's not perfect but it definitely captures what's canon to my amy and how she's changed over the years

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