#mostly because all the interesting robot stories in the og series involves the robot being SAD and then getting DEAD

[r0bita]

I think the only reason I'm not entirely on board for 2003 Epsilon was that the design doesn't work for me all that much.

It's very original (sorta bug-like, like many other robots in the 2003 series) but it's not very much what I see for Epsilon.

She got to do more than her previous incarnations but it would have been more fun if she had an episode that focused on her rather than only showing up for a while in a few episodes.

(Meanwhile, Delta had more focus than anyone. He's arguably closer to Atom than most other robots and he had a full character arc too!)

[ot3]

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

[mechanicalinertia]

Another half-baked fanfic concept for the road

No, I haven’t given up on Divine Patronage. Let me get that out of the way. I’m just otherwise occupied. As soon as I can have some leisure time in good conscience I’m going to see if I can finish the next chapter, because I already have an idea of where I want it to go.

That being the case, instead of sitting on what I think are actually quite good ideas for fic, let me just whip one out, as the hero of Blazing Saddles says.

Now, I haven’t seen all of the Iron Man anime, the one Madhouse made way back in 2010 and then again in 2013 at Marvel’s behest. It looks okay at least from the first few minutes I’m watching. Whatever.

Anyway, both Batman (the other tech-hero we all know and envy for his limitless wealth) and Iron Man have been crossed over with Bubblegum Crisis several times, sometimes tangentially and sometimes very directly:

Bubblegum Disaster has Sylia (Celia) be loosely related to Bruce Wayne by way of her mother, to the point that she gets to use the Batmobile against the Gryphon in the Episode 4 redux.

Freezing Knights is a 90′s era (ie when the animated series was the biggest Batman media expression of the time thanks to Paul Dini) fanfic which I haven’t read but involves Mr. Freeze being resurrected by GENOM for reasons. Apparently the guy who wrote it wanted to write a sequel involving Ra’s Al Ghul, which also sounds kinda baller. Not much to say about this.

Hopelessly Lost is the second fic from the Worcester-based anime fanfic demigods Zoner and Ben ‘Gryphon’ Hutchinson, wherein the two, loaded up on some cybernetics and endowed with genius gifts, get portal’ed into BGC2032, join the Sabers, make Iron Man suits, etc. I’m not gonna lie, it’s sort of an aesthetic inspiration of mine, the saturation of high-velocity technobabble and punchy action with just a smidge of cute girls to boot. (Of course, what I think I want to write and what I actually enjoy writing and what people give me feedback on are all very different things, hence why I’m sticking with Divine Patronage for now, so long as I can quiet my own idiotic lust for novelty.)

Bubblegum Crisis: The Iron Age is the reboot of Hopelessly Lost, which does away with portals and simply blends Iron Man’s origin story with Gryphon as Tony’s buddy and hooks all that up with BGC. It’s much more well-blended, in no small part because it was written as the MCU was revving up and providing good context for the plot. I can even forgive him leaning more on BGC2040 as a source of inspiration even though I despise 2040 on every possible level (at least he doesn’t crib Sylia’s personality from there, eh?) Alas! Gryph hasn’t updated this one since 2016, and something tells me he’s perfectly content writing more Strike Witches / K-On / Kancolle / Korra / Kemono Friends fanfic. Am I bitter? Me? Oh. You know. A Tad.

I guess my point is that crossing the Sabers over with tech-oriented Western superheroes is not an unprecedented thing. And so I had the misguided sentiment that, hey, maybe people would like if I did this?

Mind you, I’ve learned my lesson. People just straight-up don’t want to read BGC fanfic but they’ll read Ranma. But let me just get this one out of the way.

1. It’s 2066 (a century since the OG Iron Man cartoon’s airing). Mutants never showed up, Norse Gods never did either. Most superheroes, such as they are / were are mostly tech-oriented, arose around World War Three in the 2030′s (between the US and China of course) and kinda flared out. So Tony Stark was Iron Man, once upon a time. But after marrying and having a legitimate son, he largely was content to just make high-tech weapoonry for SHIELD.

2. Satoru Stark is Tony’s son in the 2060′s, an almost-twentysomething with a rebellious streak similar to his own father’s. Mind you, Tony has wisened with age, slowed down his drinking, etc - just not by much. Seeking to keep his son from following in his mistake-laden footsteps (ie the infamous Demon In A Bottle Storyline), he’s working to merge Stark Industries with the Japanese Sakakibara Microindustrial Group - a loose agglomeration of startups who have only barely managed to fend off takeover by GENOM by virtue of sheer technological genius. Hell, maybe he should just hook up Sato early with...

3. Sylia Stingray (nee Sakakibara), the heiress to Sakakibara after her father’s unfortunate death. She and Sato went on playdates once or twice when they were little kids, but they never went well, in part because Sylia was undergoing a sort of hyper-autisic development stage where her dad’s experimental brain-booster implants were wreaking havoc in her preadolescent mind. Still, though, who is she to deny an offer which could be a lifeline for her and the Knight Sabers, her covert-ops superhero squad dedicated to keeping GENOM in check?

4. So neither half of this new couple are exactly ecstatic about their marriage, but maybe so long as one stays out of the other’s way, things should be okay, right? Wrong. Mysterious armored robots - not Boomers, mind you, but something scarier - attack the wedding and get away with killing Tony Stark (or maybe they just kidnap him?)

5. Sato is pissed, needless to say. He’s been vaulted into the position of CEO of his dad’s company at a time when it seems like every faction on the Board wants to either get him to sell out to GENOM or to just usurp him outright. He has responsibilities, obligations, dangers, a bunch of problems that need solving. He doesn’t want to solve his problems with Iron Man, even though his dad left him blueprints for continuously upgrading the suits in tandem with a bit of Stingray’s tech...

6. At least until his wife reveals that she’s been running the Sabers as a team for years, and talks him into helping her use the team as a blunt instrument to weaken their mutual enemies, avenge their respective patricides, and generally kick ass and take names. So the two pool their tech, build new hardsuits, and thus is birthed the Iron Knights. Cute, eh?

Man, the more I write about this the more I’m interested in the concept. Well, hopefully someone will PM me one day and say they’re interested too.

[amisbro]

Let’s talk:  My fan fic writing

So this is almost like a FAQ about how I write my fics and why I write certain things the way that I do.  I thought that by doing this it might enlighten some of you whom might have never sampled my fics before and I respect that.  My thought and hope is if you read this that MAYBE you check them out but again I will never force anyone ever. With that...let’s get rolling

“You seem to write more ‘fluff’ stories than ‘angst/smut’ stories///why?” This is a question that I am surprised I don’t get a lot from people BUT I’m going to answer it anyways Here is how I look at fic writing When I come home from a day out and I need to just “decompress” and chill out what do I want to read?  - A light ,happy ,fluff piece OR  - A story with a heavy overtone that might make me have to take 20 minutes and now I’m more annoyed than I was before? While I know (and respect) that there are people that love some good Angst having NOTHING but that isn’t healthy.  If you come home beat up and you just want to relax and read a good light story that fills you with the “happy” then that is what I hope to bring you a lot of the time. Now let’s cover this:  Why don’t I write a “smut” fic? This one is harder to explain because ,yes I have been known to go into certain tags and so forth and look at the more “graphic” style of images in terms of that kind of content...surprisingly though I don’t want to READ IT!  I did that around the time I was in my Senior year of high school and then my brain just started drifting away from reading it so now its like “fluff or nope”! The other reason is cos quite literally I CAN NOT write it...maybe a part of that is cos my brain refuses to let me but eyyy Now let’s go to this question “You write a lot a lot of fics where a lot of the ships (OCxCanon or Canon/Canon) are LGBT themed if there is a pairing.  When did this start and why?” So this question would be an interesting one to go into and I got time so let’s The truth of the matter is that I started writing fics around the time that the internet was really like in its infancy.  Like we are talking Geocities was a thing and AOHell was the dominant force (5+ nerd points if you remember “Webcrawler”) I started writing fics with that kind of theme back when I was learning about the seasons of Sailor Moon that (at the time) we hadn’t gotten.  If you are an old school Moonie like myself you remember that back when Sailor Moon was in Syn (that’s short for Syndication) the show would do the first whole season and then up to when all the Phantom Sisters would reconcile on Earth thanks to Usagi and Company.  I then learned through a friend of mine that supposedly the reason that Sailor Moon never got to show the S season (at the time) was because of the fact that two of the Senshi were Lesbians.  This came as a shock to me because of the fact that I had seen the first season and had no issue with Zoisite (and this was before I learned he was changed to a female by DiC.  I still have no issue with this change because to be honest I liked Zoisite no matter what gender he was portrayed with).  It was very interesting though to say the least. So at this time I actually started writing fics for my own (and even back then they were “self-insert” fics...yeah I’m an OG in that community) and in that period I started researching the Three Lights/Starlights and my fave was and always is Yaten.  I remember writing one fic where my character was in love with Yaten but was it Healer or Yaten?  I think that is the first time I remember writing my character as (unknowing at the time) a Bisexual male and it was something I was actually damn proud of.  Keep in mind also this was probably around high school so you are talking close to the end of the 1990s and the idea of people being any sexual orientation other than straight was like “Whoa!” Sadly I never finished this fic Another OG Self-Insert fic I wrote was a Gundam Wing fic where my character was living in the 1990s (or it might have been early 2000s...it was around the time that Gundam Wing came out on DVD) and he was a whiz mechanic that the President had recruited to help build this machine (no one knew it was going to be a war robot for space yet) and then he got called into the President’s office and was asked to participate in another experiment.  THIS ONE involved him literally being injected and then placed into a capsule but he never “aged” past his current year.  When he was shipped out into space it was unknown the # of years that passed to him but he ended up being found by one of the Gundam pilots and then eventually he returned to Earth only to run into Lucrezia Noin and Zechs Marquise.  The latter name was important because something struck with my character and he fell in love with Zechs and they were going to (eventually) turn against Romefeller and OZ but there were some other overtones that were used/going to be used and I remember showing THIS FIC (which was titled “red fences”) to my grandfather whom is one of those hyperconservative republicans...he didn’t blink and he actually enjoyed it!  Yeah that blew me away even when he could clearly see my name with one of the characters and I made it clear they were going to be a couple.  That one still blows my mind Sadly though I never finished this fic So THAT answers the “When did it start?” part but now let’s get to “why?” First off I need to get this out there I personally DON’T identify as any sexual orientation/identity.  If people want to look at some of the things I tweet/blog about and assume one thing or the other you will NOT get me to answer “yes” or “no” to anything but I will let you have your assumptions and go about my day.  Its like my very first Anon ages ago on this site legit asked if I was gay or bi and I just deleted it.  If that person that sent that anon is still around here is my answer Have fun figuring it out I still remember too that Anon was on the day this blog was created 5 years ago on 5/29 and my first thought was “Why do you give a shit?” I still don’t know to be honest So WHY then ,if I don’t identify as one orientation or another, do I write myself a particular way? The answer is this In a lot of series’ that I have watched in Anime since about 1997 there were a lot of characters that ,in my mind, I could see myself with at some point in time.  Its just that most ended up being male characters and I always seem to identify with the ones that were either “Royal” types ,”Mom” types or characters that could just be supportive if my character flew off the handle.  The reason I will write Canon/Canon occasionally is because ,in my head, I always could see certain ships in my mind that maybe some don’t.  I am not totally sure but I might be one of the few that is more ReSaru in K Project than SaruMi.  I’m an occasional rarepair guy and that’s fine (see my EijiHaru straight ship in UtaPri). Now one more for the road “You have been known to write ‘Villain’ characters in ‘softer’ roles while outright unleashing on others that might be fandom faves...what is the reasoning for this?” Aight...let’s roll on this one So let’s look at some of the more “Villain” characters I have wrote in a way that MAYBE canon doesn’t match up with Yukari Mishakuji HEAVENS Those would be two in the “Villain” role that I wrote in a “softer” role Now we know the example of someone I wrote as a villain and just completely went in on a time or two so they don’t NEED to be named...you know if you follow my twitter So WHY do I write some in a more positive light then? While I can say that Yukari is mostly for ship purposes I can say confidently that if I wasn’t going to ship myself with him (and FYI canonically he is one of my f/o’s that is actually close to my real life age) I could still write him as a mentor to say...Domy and Co. as the “Sister figure” (The “Mother” role is already filled by Seri with me) so there is definitely that reason and I’m going to be honest there about that. The other reason though is I like to play with the idea of him being a canonically gay character in that universe (and why the FUCK he wasn’t coded that way legit baffles me...fuck make him genderfluid cos I always thought he could pass for either anyways) but he knows how to go and kick ass and he does he job well.  I HAD thought of writing him as a sinister jackass at one time but this was when Missing Kings was around and not Return.  NOW with “Side:Green” coming in the future I want to see more about my extra B/F. HEAVENS was an interesting one HEAVENS had no canon information to go off of really (and if you think about it as far as actual English information outside of translations we still don’t) so getting behind them took WAY LONGER than maybe it should have.  I blame Broccoli for this cos the way that they ended Season 2 it almost felt like HEAVENS should have ended and then STARISH and QN would go at it so come Season 4 when its all over they can end the series at Maji Love Kingdom and be done with it but they kept HEAVENS around for some reason so...yeah! The thing was that for some reason despite me wanting to see HEAVENS fall in Season 2 that made me even MORE curious about them and then come Season 4 I wanted to see them rise up and be proven to be an equal...that involves writing and that was my issue with the season as I have made my opinion known but as time went on I made this decision “I will NOT write HEAVENS in a negative light until I see what Season 4 does” Season 4 comes and then I felt more sympathy for them after a lot of stuff happened such as Shion’s breakdown Van’s enthusiasm that got misinterpreted (in my opinion) and that set off Ren Eiichi showing (in “Visible Elf”) that he was clearly worried about Shion’s well being and also willing to take the bullet for that project ON TOP OF him basically going “Oh s**t” when he found out about Otoya...that surprised me We could probably go on and on about that but this post is going to be a world book length as is so YEESH! Like I said its easy for me with HEAVENS because I had the time with them from S2 to Season 4 (and hopefully some in the movie) to grow WITH THEM so when I write them yes I kind of make them more sympathetic but its because I fear that they don’t get a lot of love on social media and that is kind of something that bothers me NOW...why would I write some more HARSHLY? Because if I am going to write a story that has a villain I need to make them irredeemable. Think about this When I grew up in the 80s and 90s (pre Sailor Moon obsession) a lot of the shows I watched had a hero and a villain.  In all those shows no matter what the Villain did the Protagonist made sure they got theirs in the end right? This is an approach I tend to use. In my head I feel like I need to make you hate someone.  I need someone to show your vitriol for so I need to make something happen to make you go “Oh s**t...these mothers need to get their asses kicked” (point of order:  when I say “mothers” that’s short for “motherf***ers”) The reason I want you to root against them is so if there ever COMES A TIME when I am going to write them in a sympathetic role its a full-time situation. Let’s use TRIGGER from Idolish7 I know that they have a fanbase...I know it and I respect it (even if I think most of them are on my block list on twitter).  In my mind though from the part that I read/played there was more “bad” that ,even if they didn’t cause it, they BENEFITED from it (and we know exactly what I’m talking about if we remember episode 11 of the Anime) so that made it hard for me to embrace them.  It got HARDER when you realized it felt like they could run over a cat with an 18 wheeler and Tsumugi would find a way to go from “Idolish7 Manager” to “TRIGGER Protection Squad” and that didn’t help me in the least You know what’s even funnier about them? I think the episode that was supposed to make me really feel for TRIGGER was when they confronted Sousuke in his office and in my mind I was like “Okay this is when I’m supposed to embrace them” but literally after that I was like “Wait didn’t HEAVENS just do this in ‘Legend Star’ except for them it kind of backfired?” Like a big part of me literally couldn’t get past the whole HEAVENS thing from Season 2 (trio group ,Leader is the son of the President ,has a ‘cute’ member and a dad friend) so I was like “Oh...okay I’m supposed to hate these guys!” Now if you are wondering why we took this detour its because LITERALLY this was what I was thinking the whole time during the part/season.  The only difference outright was the fact that Saotome didn’t disband them (or put them up for disbandment at Black and White) so that was like THE MAIN DIFFERENCE for me so that was def a thing. Here is the tl:dr version of this The reason I write against certain people harder in my fics is because sometimes the canon material doesn’t really help me embrace them or sometimes its a first impression that rubbed me wrong.  First impressions with me are sometimes harder to shake and when it comes to that then there can be a problem. (And yet Alois Trancy is always going to be a fave...then again I put him in the “did nothing wrong” club and his past is WAY PAST SCREWED UP!) Well sweet Jesus I think that answer went on long enough...I hope that you enjoyed this and I will see you ficwise around August 24th because THIS GUY

is finally getting his birthday fic after I fucked up and missed the past two years Yes friends my beloved Yukari is going to be 35 this year (I have to try and remember he was born the same year as Mamo...who ironically voices Fushimi in K Pro) and I need to do a FABULOUS fic for him on his special day...I hope Shenmue doesn’t distract me Ahh It’ll be grand I promise Aight aight I gotta go BUT since I have one of my GBs on the post let’s add another

(I need these two to interact more...might have them fight over me but that is another story for another day) Later my dear friends and take care