#stmpd reviews fanfiction

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Black Lagoon Fanfiction: Girlycards' A Chance Encounter

So this is going to be something a smidge different than my usual reviews. The fic's under 20k words, and I decided to poke at it after girlycards reblogged my last review joking that she couldn't wait to see what I said about her fic.

I was a little reluctant to do so, not gonna lie. She writes short snippets of Balalaika and Revy being cute-ish with one another, at least as cute as those characters can be with one another being who they are; I write over-the-top explode-y cyberpunk adventures. But I decided to take it as a challenge and give one fic she poked my way a go. A Chance Encounter was that fic.

And, dear reader, it's really good! So let's talk about Balalaika and Revy and why this fic works.

The setup is right there: Lost and free from prison in NYC, Revy tries to mug Balalaika, not knowing who she is. It doesn't go well, of course - this is fucking Balalaika we're talking about - but Balalaika allows her to live, allows her to follow her to her hotel room, and in time to Roanapur. And in time, Balalaika starts to care for Revy. Simple as that. I actually don't want to spoil too much.

In that regard, it's something of an origin story, even retelling the time when Chang shot Balalaika a few times and almost sparked an intersyndicate war. Rock's nowhere to be found, and who cares? This is about two lost hyperviolent women with attachment issues figuring out how to start to attach to each other.

And it works! As Goethe would say, it succeeds in what it sets out to do and it was worth doing. It's funny, too, because BalaRevy has always felt like it would be fundamentally a toxic relationship to me, and the one fic I've tried to read where that relationship is explored - It Will Come Back - never disabused me of that notion. Like, Balalaika is Balalaika. Domination and control is her drug of choice, and someone without a private army at her back, like Revy - what can she do but struggle in the Russian's grip? I'm still hashing out the details of her romance with Celia in Bubblegum Black, but her attachment to her rusalka... well, you've seen how I write it, dear reader. I hope.

So I think what works here is that as much as Balalaika starts keeping Revy by her side initially out of pity, she also sees the woman she once was, the criminal she is now, in a warped way in Two Hands. Oh, Balalaika is still pretty cold even right up until the end of the fic, but one feels like she's getting somewhere. Compare that to It Will Come Back, which I struggled a lot more with because it felt like Balalaika never showed that key moment of intimacy and it was more one-sided pining on Revy's part (couple that with the fact that the author clearly didn't like Rock that much and I really wasn't feeling the fic because, in case you can't tell dear reader, I like playing around with Rock as a character). That mutuality was what made the fic - and the ship - feel possible for me. As such, I encourage you to read it! I think you'll like it.

Now what should I review next, hmm... Last thing I want to do is review YT2032 anytime soon, heh...

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Black Lagoon Fanfiction: LowkeeWB's Apotheosis

In my first Black Lagoon fanfic review for Bullets, I said that some Lagoon fics make you think, make you cry, make you cringe, make you smile. I was thinking of some fairly specific ones when I made that comment.

Many make me cringe, of course. Were one to manifest all Black Lagoon fanfiction as physical material, there would be warehouses of Cool Ex Special Forces Original Character adventures (though there are a handful of good ones in that sub-subgenre by one particular author, I'll get to that) saturating FF.net (not AO3 so much. Different heydays of different sites, if you know what I mean). This annoys me, because rarely (again, that one exception) are these characters interesting or worthy of our time. BGC fics suffered this problem, too, so what the hell. Let's give the Super Cool OC genre a pass for now, and instead talk about a fic that is... Jesus.

I think it might be one of those very rare perfect fanfictions? One of the few that does everything it sets out to do within a reasonable amount of time (75.6K words, only). One which crackles with new, creative ideas that are all laid out one after another without too much bloat between them? One that has actual goddamn themes? Oh. Oh yeah.

In short, Apotheosis is the Black Lagoon fic I wish I knew how to write.

In essence, Apotheosis is about the last days of Roanapur as Rock knows it. Sure, the hypercriminal institution will remain, but the old powers are dying as the history of the late nineties runs its course. The 1997 financial crisis is one little knife in the side of the leviathan; Russia's ailing economy is another; Hong Kong being returned to Chinese control and hurting Triad business there is yet another. The end of history that Hiroe has alluded to Black Lagoon being about is, itself, ending.

Rock knows this. Maybe the rest of Lagoon Company does, too, but none of them want to admit it. A constant theme in this fic is whether or not Rock's addicted to the thrill of poking at the power structures of Roanapur post-Blood Trail, the kind of action he now needs that the Lagoon Company's regular work can't provide.

Anyway, along comes a job, where they ferry a mysterious client heavily implied to be Osama Bin Goddamn Laden to safety. Rock has a strange conversation with the mystery man about the nature of the end of the world, and following it, decides to cash in, handing information over to Eda in her capacity as a CIA operative. Soon, he's working as a double agent for the Agency, even though the powers that be (Chang) know very well who and why. Soon, Revy's in on his weird little plot, too. There's a trip to New York where Revy finally explains who she was to Rock and it's beautifully painful. Honestly, every part of this fic is beautifully painful. Sure, it's not a fic for fight scenes, but it's not about fight scenes. It's, well, it's about Apotheosis. The end of everything.

I wish I had more to say, because this fic has been influencing how I'm writing the quieter parts of Bubblegum Black immensely. It's almost hard to reread because I know it's so good, because I know I can't measure up to it because of the way I write with an eye towards reaching the next goofy fight scene.

But you? You, dear reader, should read the shit out of it. You should have no shame in loving this fic.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Black Lagoon Fanfiction: Ragna Crimson's Bullets

Oh. You didn't notice? Over the past two months or so I've gotten really into Black Lagoon. Like, to the point that I'm working on a BGC crossover fic with the franchise. The Knight Sabers in Roanapur... whatta concept.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about! That can wait! Instead, I'm trying to get my creative mojo back by talking about a fanfic I just finished reading last night, but which is unfinished, and oh boy it's a blast. That's the only adjective which fits Bullets: A blast.

Look, I think the author summarizes it perfectly in the FF.net description, anyway:

We are moving away from murky, emotionally strong stories and dark plots. This story is about a bunch of characters doing crazy shit, where anything can happen.

So. Lot of people, specifically those in the Lagoon fandom, like Black Lagoon for the murky emotionally strong stories and dark plots. And Ragna Crimson, who seems to speak Spanish as his first language (Bullets is in both languages), is acknowledging that. Okay. Good.

But... Crimson also is 'moving away from that'. Which is an interesting challenge, because as much as the fandom likes the dark stuff in Lagoon, plenty of people who are just anime fans seem to find those parts... annoying? The parts where Revy goes ranting about how the world has no kindness and all one can do is keep on killing because otherwise you'll be killed in turn? Yeah. Those parts. I've always held that as much as they tell us a lot about the franchise's philosophy - which I don't necessarily track with all the time - they tell us more about Revy and how she's put herself in this nihilistic hole that's just as bad as Rock's own naivete, as if both characters' morality is more their own thing than it is a gospel truth. Well. Whatever. Moving on. We have to move on, because Bullets doesn't give a shit about any of that.

It is, after all, a story about a bunch of characters doing crazy shit where anything can happen.

Which... isn't that when Lagoon's at its best, anyway? Larger-than-life characters with big guns, pulpy people doing pulpy things? And that is the essence of Bullets. More than that - Bullets distills and amplifies that devil-may-care sense of things. It's action, yes, but it's also nonstop comedy of a sort.

Anyway! The plot. Rock doesn't want to stay with the Lagoon Company, so he decides to be a bartender for Bao at the Yellow Flag, despite the fact that said bar gets destroyed in almost every arc of, well, everything. This seeking peace doesn't last long, though. First we've got a redux of the Roberta arc, and then Hansel and Gretel show up... only this time around, they're working (sort of) for Balalaika, and promptly slip her grasp to fuck shit up with grenades. By chapter four, they take mercy on Rock and agree to call him 'Boss' (Gretel wants to do it more than Hansel, and in fact constantly calls Hansel the more psychotic one. A change from canon - these two bicker incessantly). Only, they've, uh, blown up most of Hotel Moscow and Chang's base already. Including Balalaika's toilet specifically. Hansel blowing up toilets because he's bored, specifically Balalaika's toilets, becomes a running gag.

From there, the fic can be split up into various arcs where Rock and the Twins work with the Lagoon Company, Hotel Moscow, and the Triads to varying degrees. In one, they break a Triad boss from a Taiwanese prison by sneaking in through the sewers and also hosing the entire place down with a minigun. In another, the Washimine-gumi comes to Roanapur and Ginji immediately decides to get in a fight with Revy at Rowan's nightclub. And so on and so forth. You might call the whole series a remix of canon, with familiar locations and characters, but unfamiliar ways everything plays out.

Okay, so it's not entirely unfamiliar. If anything, the familiar is amplified. More swearing. More stupid jokes. A few instances of leaning on the fourth wall (calling other people 'side characters', Rock calling Revy tsundere to Ginji, one Bakemonogatari reference). More weird ambiguous romantic-ish feelings between Rock and Revy. And, uh, Rock's great in this one.

I mean, holy shit, folks. He's still the boy who can plan and / or talk his way out of any situation, no matter how ridiculous. And this time, his manipulative gambits actually pay off, and all the while he becomes more and more... villainous, I guess you might say. More and more of a thrill-seeker, willing to do not-great things for fun. More and more willing to tease Revy so they can have a nice bicker. Also, he helps the Lagoon Company sink an entire cargo ship run by Koko Hekmatyar (from Jormungand, the great and terrible We Have Black Lagoon At Home) using plastic explosives. So you start to root for Rock being less wishy-washy about where he's at in life, and hoping that even when he does dumb shit he'll get away with it, the scamp. That's hard to do - get us to root for a character like that and not bemoan Rock's descent into the darkness - and yet Ragna Crimson does it!

In sum... Man. Fuck. I dunno. Read the fic. Some Black Lagoon fanfics make you think, some make you cry, some make you cringe, but few make you grin and laugh the way Bullets does. I guarantee it.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: Innpchan's Remembrance Day

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

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

All But One.

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

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

Okay. So. Why ADPF?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Reviews Black Lagoon Fanfiction: BigCountry75's Redneck of Roanapur

This one was recommended to me by a dude on the Black Lagoon subreddit, and I clicked on it somewhat reluctantly. It started well enough, I flipped through a few later chapters and it was pretty cool, but it's 288K words, folks. Moby fucking Dick is 209K words. And while it's true that many, many fics are longer than Moby Dick, or indeed most officially published works, there was just something about it. I was reluctant to read an OC-centric Black Lagoon fic, though, because new-guy-comes-into-town-and-fucks-shit-up rarely works in BGC fanfic, so why should it work in this case?

I needn't have worried. Redneck of Roanapur is well-written, fairly competently characterized, and like Bullets, my previous review, relentlessly fun. Reading it over the past two weeks on-and-off has been a fairly good experience, and, too, an exercise in how (in my eyes) to make a fic defined by one Cool Original Character really work.

In that light, if I want to talk about RoR, I have to talk about its main character, a dude from the boonies of Michigan known as Country. No, really, that's the name he gets, nothing else. And, well... okay, the one thing that might sink this fic for you is that when it's told from his first-person perspective, his, uh, accent is written down in the prose. This can be annoying at times, but in all honesty it isn't as annoying as you'd think it would be, because as far as quasi-authorial inserts go, he still describes things clearly enough to make everything work. His spelling's intentionally off, but his grammar isn't. Ergo, I can read it without being annoyed.

So: Country is an ex far-right militiaman who ditched his former comrades in True Patriotism, and in his effort to leave the country stole a goddamn WW2 B-24 and hightailed it blindly to Roanapur. Yeah. That's it. That's his backstory. He gets his hands on another WW2-era fighter plane later, too.

Okay, so compare that to other various OC-centric Lagoon fics which will not be named, ones starring ex-CIA operatives and elite soldiers with more conventionally troubled pasts and their skills mostly centering around the shooting of guns. They're cool in the loosest sense, but I find most of them incredibly boring, and the fic has to work harder to get around that more often than not. (Success is possible, but I've only seen like one guy pull it off.) Country is more interesting to me because a) his backstory is more out-there but still plausible, it's a backstory you don't see every day, and b) he has a unique set of skills that other characters in Lagoon don't have to the same extent.

I mean, think about it. Those two elements are what make an interesting Black Lagoon character in the actual franchise. Roberta with her FARC training and maid getup; Balalaika's Soviet paratrooper glory days and how far she's fallen; Ginji the yakuza who can literally deflect bullets. There's something that makes all these characters more than just ex-spooks or mercs with training. Some eccentricity. Some wackiness. Some small amount of historical grounding. Country has that, even if his backstory isn't super important. Country has his WW2-era planes, which are fun as hell to watch him and Lagoon Company use. So, he fits right in.

Anyway, Country lands in Roanapur, gets hooked up to the Lagoon Company to use the B-24 as a courier aircraft, and pretty quickly things get weird. See, not only does Country piss off the head of a non-canon crime syndicate pretty quickly in a bar fight, but said syndicate head is tied to a nameless Doctor and his equally nameless Benefactor, who are searching for guinea pigs to do immortality / resurrection experiments on. The Doctor resurrects Hansel and Gretel successfully, they escape, they wind up at the airfield Lagoon Company now occupies. So they're hanging out, raised by the team to not be total murderous monsters, and eventually they attract the attention of the Doctor and his Benefactor, who turns out to be a powerful American politician with ties to Extra Order, the Not-Executive-Outcomes PMC from the first arc of Lagoon. Pretty soon, Lagoon Company and their patrons are duking it out with that one non-canon syndicate and EO in short order, culminating in an epic battle for the fate of the city, all of which is just incredibly fun to read in its sheer paramilitaristic ultraviolence.

Anyway the fic swings between that violence and a lot of surprisingly cutesy shipping. Country falls in love with Sawyer, for one, and that doesn't feel weird, doesn't feel self-insert-y, it makes sense for how the characters are being written in that context... Rock and Revy finally get together... Shenhua and Lotton get together, which I'm kinda iffy on but what the heck... Chang and Balalaika hook up in secret... Even Eda and Dutch pair up as secret agents! So everything is very slice-of-life-y when military planning and blowing things up isn't the order of the day. Oh, and Leigharch comes back towards the end, which is great because I always liked him. In fact, I think that's the main flaw in the fic: the ending feels way too cute and tidy for something like Black Lagoon, a franchise where endings, I feel, need to be ambiguous at best and depressing as hell at worst. It undermines the fun one has reading Country and the Lagoon Company operate a bomber to blow the everloving shit out of a PMC submarine base, or drug fields, or mansions, or whatever. It's an ending that feels at once natural for the fic, but not as earned as it could be.

But beyond that, Redneck of Roanapur is a simple, long, but super-fun thrill ride. If you're looking for something silly to read over the long summer months, flip through this and enjoy yourself.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: The Works of Jeanne Hedge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: DeadboltDon's Silent Rift

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[mechanicalinertia]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Anti-Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: J. Austin Wilde's Farewell To Night City

Well! New year, new fanfic reviews. Just like I said a few days ago, I have no intention to stop doing this. Anyway, for the new year, let's get all philosophical and talk about a BGC fanfiction that isn't a BGC fanfiction: Farewell to Night City.

Here, by the way, is the author's page. There's a shit-ton of weird Ranma fic in there, most of which I have no intention of reading, because it looks too self-serious to be good Ranma fic. Seriously, what's with some of these people? Writing Ranma requires one to loosen up in every sense of the word.

Anyway...

Well, I wouldn't say I lied that we're going to review Farewell. But we're going to do some other things, too.

So let's get that out of the way: The corner of Megatokyo Priss lives in is called Ninsei, or Night City, which miiiight be a Gibson reference but is more likely a reference to Cyberpunk 2020.

Let that decision marinate a little, dear reader. What is Wilde trying to do here? Well, this:

Priss is hooked on super combat drugs, strung out, broke, and without the Knight Sabers, living in a shipping crate, needing rent soon before the couple next to her gets her little living space. She won't go to any of the other Sabers, she left her old band, and she's about to go back... and that's it. The fic ends. No Boomer stuff, no other characters besides a drug dealer with a racist accent, just a grumpy, edgy Priss. It's well-written, but you can tell that the author's trying to put Priss in the worst situation possible and then presumably make her even more miserable once the plot kicks off. It's grit for grit's sake, in other words.

Why this? Well, remember when I said that this wasn't really a BGC fanfiction? Here's the author's note:

"Despite its billing as "The Animated Cyberpunk Classic," I never saw much cyberpunk in "Bubble Gum Crisis." For me it was soon-to-be-standard Cute Girls In Mecha fare, with some mediochre J-Pop music, and a few obvious references (visual and otherwise) to the movie "Blade Runner" for color. It was enjoyable, but not what I consider cyberpunk."

"I've often thought about doing a BGC fanfic, and I decided that if I did one, I was going to write it in a truly cyberpunk vein. Something Gibson or Sterling would write. A story that was dirty and mean, about a cast of losers scraping by in an ugly world of fantastic wealth and hope pitted against grinding poverty and despair."

"Priss is, quite obviously, the central character of this tale for that reason. I know there's a general dearth of 'fics that focus on Linna, and I hope to address that issue in some small way in this story, but this is primarily about Priss and how she deals with her life in a post Episode #8 MegaTokyo."

"I know I'm going to piss off some of the core BGC fanfiction readers out there with this story. Maybe not with anything from this Chapter, but as you can see, I've just begun. Some of you will note that my characterization of Priss is closer to what Adam (love him or hate him) Warren did in his own BGC effort for Dark Horse Comics than the canonical Priss of the anime."

Wilde had not, of course, just begun. But the implications are clear, aren't they? Bubblegum Crisis simply wasn't cyberpunk enough for this author's tastes, and cyberpunk, to Wilde, meant misery, sleaze, dark and gritty alleyways in the slums of some megacity or another.

Which... okay, fine, Crisis doesn't really have that. And maybe it's okay to change that (see: Meat Jacket). On the other hand, in Crisis's case, rarely does an attempt to make the setting more miserable go well (see: Grand Mal, which has its moments of brilliance marred by that same frustrating edginess).

So... would this have been a good fanfiction had it been more than a sliver of a prologue? I somehow doubt it. It would have likely been a chance to make the Saber's crusade eternally hopeless, make GENOM unstoppable... and goodness gracious, we all know what I think of that.

I'm not really a big fan of this fic, or the ethos of What Cyberpunk Should Be that it encapsulates. In fact, I kind of want to push back on the conviction that cyberpunk is inherently nihilistic nastiness in the vein of street-level Cyberpunk 2020. Yes, that's right, because in Gibson's novels the good guys do often eke out a win against corporate megapower, and the world does change in new, invisible ways, so this conviction that 'this is how the masters do it' is a lie: Farewell is more Pondsmith than it is Sterling, and it would be nice if Wilde was a little more upfront about that.

It's okay to let the Sabers win, folks. If anything, the genre hybridization of cyberpunk, superheroes, and sentai-esque anime almost calls out for small victories, a sense that even if the world is miserable now it will be a little less miserable tomorrow. That's what Wilde is rejecting so violently in that author's note. That's why Farewell is a BGC fic that isn't a BGC fic.

That's why I reviewed it.

[mechanicalinertia]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It speaks for itself well enough.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Fanfiction: ArrowSMorgan's Group Chat

Remember how I said I wasn't super invested in Cyberpunk Edgerunners? Well, uh, I guess I lied. The anime itself is okay at best, BGC is better, but there's some pretty dope fanfiction in all this mess.

Yes, that's right, I'm doing reviews of Edgerunners fanfiction, stuff that has more views than even Divine Patronage by an order of magnitude more often than not. Most are, as I said in my previous post on the topic, true-blue copium and know it - one might say that an ending which revels in killing off all its cast save two is a bit of a bummer and cries out for alternatives. I've even seen one fic, one which I haven't read yet, argue that a different ending might actually be more punk, less, uh, nihilist? I think that was the implication.

Anyway, let's start with the Edgerunners fanfic that has over 50K views and has earned every single one of them. Ladies and Gentlemen: Group Chat.

The premise is simple if goofy: Lucy, main heroine of the show, starts a group chat for everyone to dick around in, except for Pilar 'cause the last time they did one with him he got people arrested. Which is painfully ironic, because 2 chapters in and the immediate topic of conversation is Lucy talking to Rebecca about how massive David's dick is. Other topics of conversation that come up - how old Kiwi is and how Rebecca thinks anyone who's mature is automatically old, Rebecca's weird cat Butterbean, whether or not Maine is David's dad... and then Maine and Dorio bite it.

And then the second trick the premise is pulling besides shitposting comedy comes into play. Namely, the characters actually communicate to one another. David gets depressed, like really depressed, like as depressed as you would expect from losing the only father figure he ever had in his life, and instead of resolving to hunt down every netrunner who might come after David, Lucy actually tells Rebecca what's going on, and gets her and Kiwi to go buy him groceries and weed and Stay At His House.

After that, communication... happens! And that leads into what even the author calls a Tenchi Muyo situation, with David hooking up with Lucy, Becca, and Kiwi (yes! yes, the Kiwi who decided to sell David out in the anime before he dragged her down with him, that Kiwi!) all at once! And then things get weirder when David meets Adam Smasher in a bar! And they actually get along okay even though they both know better than to try being friends, but David's like super chill with the big ol' murder-borg who talks like, in David's own words, an anime villain! (Smasher types in all caps, too, because of course he does. It reminds me of Homestuck in a lot of weird but good ways.)

So the fic is mostly slice-of-life, with sex scenes relegated to spinoff fanfictions in the same 'series', and with a multi-viewpoint action sequence turned into this really cool micro-visual-novel in itch.io. It's all good fun, like really good fun, especially once the gang settles down and unwinds a little and the world is built out in amusing ways - Kiwi being a master at fighting games, David trying to make Arasaka-brand curry and making sure to get the right brand, not the Adam Smasher super-spicy stuff, David being super cute with Rebecca's cat, David getting to beat up Katsuo again for a different job. Despite still feeling grounded in the world of 2077, it all feels natural, humane, wholesome in a way a lot of other fix-it fics can't quite nail. It feels like - and I'm pretty sure this was the intent, the author's a Fate fan - the Hollow Ataraxia to the main Fate Stay Night.

And what better note to end on than that? Hollow Ataraxia's a blast to read, and so is Group Chat, for roughly the same silly reasons.

Damn. I'm really getting into Edgerunners fanfic even though most of it is a) copium and b) not always of the highest quality. Watch this space; I've got more coming.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Ranma 1/2 Fanfiction: Nemo Blank's Chaos Factor (Or, Ucchan is Best Girl)

Okay. Time for some changes around here.

Yes, that's right. You're not dreaming, dear reader. In my neverending Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath to waste my own time on the internet, I've decided to expand on beyond writing reviews of Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction to review... other fanfiction. My powers grow, and grow, and grow.

Okay, huge forewarning, let's just get it out of the way, I don't actually read a whole lot of Ranma fanfiction. I used to read a lot more, but my tastes always tended toward the somewhat shitty fanfictions, not the actually good ones. So I'm probably just gonna recommend two incredibly good Ranma fics, and then move onto other pastures. There's a particular Homestuck-Pacific Rim crossover I've always wanted to sell people on, stuff like that.

Anyway! Here's a good Ranma fanfiction, incomplete but uproariously funny and maybe too clever by half: Chaos Factor.

Well, then. What exactly is Chaos Factor about? It... um... well... fuck. Hang on.

Were this a fic with weaker writing, I would have a pretty hard time overlooking CF's tendency to veer wildly all over the place in terms of setting and what its attention is focused on. So let's start at the beginning: Ranma goes off to train in the mountains, is accosted by a soul-stealing demon, is saved by his Neko-ken being a giant spirit tiger that mauls the shit out of the demon - and wakes up to Ukyo Kuonji, everyone's favorite crossdressing Kansaiben okonomiyaki chef childhood friend waifu, holding him close to ensure his well-being with a side of pressing her cleavage into his side.

Of course within five seconds Shampoo, Akane, Genma, Soun, Mousse, and Ryoga all show up. Of course there's an altercation where Akane falls into a river, Ranma saves her, and she yeets him into the stratosphere. Reader, Akane is many things in this fic, but she's hardly a kind soul. Which - is okay?

Yeah, let me just get this out of the way, I don't really like Akane. She's a girl out of her depth in Ranma's insane martial-arts world, a normal, sane human being whose dignity is constantly put to the test by the irrationality that is Ranma, his rivals and fiancees, and their goofy superpowers. Oh, sure, she can be cute at times, but more often than not she's the worst sort of tsundere, the childish one who treats any entreaty towards what little order she has left in her life as an affront on her person and then proceeds to beat up Ranma. Oh, sure, the manga probably treats her better, but that doesn't change the fact that Ranma saving her again and again and again and neither of the two admitting they might like each other over and over and over again is not really a healthy relationship dynamic. Sure, the other girls are possessive and jealous too, but at least they can keep up with Ranma to a closer degree, at least they're honest with their own affection. Well, whatever, this argument has been had since Internet Time Immemorial and will likely be thus for years to come. So... Yeah. One of the best quotes from CF (and there are so, so many) speaks to this: "It was true love, all right. True love for eight-year-olds."

Anyway, Ranma lands in his mom's backyard (this is after the manga's failed wedding ending, mind you), and they talk. Turns out Ranma thinks he's got this duty to the Tendo family to join the schools (his dad lied), turns out he doesn't know how to deal with love (he likes the Tendo sisters, but only knows that he doesn't know if he loves Akane), and... suffice to say that Nodoka finally says: No, Ranma, you're staying with me from here on out, and each fiancé will meet me in person and I'll determine their suitability one at a time.

Which would be a perfectly interesting pitch for a fic, you'd think, Ranma having to arrange all those meetings and Nodoka meeting the girls as they try to be on their best behavior. Only, we only get to Kodachi and Shampoo in interviews, because other plot threads are introduced fast. Very, very fast. Blisteringly fast. Among the things that just happen and don't stop happening:

Ranma gets yeeted into the middle of the Sailor Senshi, assumes they're a bunch of fiancés or pervs or whatever, and proceeds to avoid their attacks effortlessly. As Ranma's rivals and the Senshi get more and more intertwined, it becomes clear that a) Crystal Tokyo relies on wiping out everyone save a few million loyal to Serenity, something Sailor Pluto is largely hiding from her charges, and b) The Senshi are terrible at actual fights. Ranma simply summons Happosai (calls his name three times) and misery is had. Now, I don't especially like how the Senshi are sort of the butt of the joke here, especially since many gags are made out of how utterly unstoppable Kuno is by conventional standards, and those jokes are quite funny. But you can't have everything.

As such, when Ranma beats up a Youma without trying very hard, he ends up on the national news. Nabiki's having the time of her life playing the tour guide for the Tendo Dojo, right up until the government decides Ranma could be a useful asset in the war against the supernatural.

Washu from Tenchi Muyo ends up in a time warp where she inadvertently becomes Nodoka's mother (and Ranma's maternal Grandma!) Ryoko thinks having a nephew-niece is nothing short of awesome, and she and Sasami hang out with him and Ryoga for a bit.

Ryoga's wandering capacity is played up as a space distortion, to the point that he can end up in anywhere while going to anywhere else. Kasumi follows him to the bathroom of their house and ends up going through Egypt for a few moments, Mihoshi follows him to an alien planet, things like that.

Ranma flees normal life again, is tracked down by Ukyo using a somewhat terrifying ninja technique involving sympathetic ki, and they fight a samurai ghost together. Ranma figures out how to turn into a dragon and Ukyo falls even more head-over-heels in love with him, because, uh, dragons amirite? Meanwhile, Ranma is convinced that Ukyo wants Ranma to be a waitress for her, and that's cleared up... but Ranma still is afraid of her world, especially because Ukyo wants to become the head of a national okonomiyaki restaurant chain.

And it's all... funny, and sweet, and even if the tone it nails isn't exactly the manga's irreverent tone, as far as harem-adjacent tales go let it be said that Chaos Factor has a tone, and it nails that tone, and it keeps on that tone for 81k words. even if it ends somewhat anticlimactically before, if I recall correctly, Ranma and his fiancés are to have an audience with the emperor.

Look, I'm having trouble describing this fanfic that I've read a half-dozen times over because it's simply that good. I don't just encourage you to read it -- I implore you to do so. You won't regret it.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Ranma 1/2 Fanfiction: The Anime Addventure's Enforced Evolution

Oh man oh man oh man oh man. This is a good one. Long story - both to explain the fic and the fic itself - but it's hyaku-pacento kanpeki desu yo. I would even recommend it to people who haven't seen Ranma, because you can just read the wiki to understand the only two Ranma characters in the whole story, and then after that it's a completely different setting that feels nothing like Ranma at all but is still incredibly cool. I am completely serious about this statement.

Okay, so, first off, the long walk to get there. The Anime Addventure was a sort of internet round-robin wherein users would post a section of fanfiction, then provide other users with four options to progress the plot alongside a 'Something Else' option. In essence, it was a chain-letter anime fanfiction, branching off into different storylines, often restarted spontaneously to provide new stories to tell. Now, the site itself has been gone for several years, but a read-only mirror exists... actually, I just checked and that appears to be nonfunctional, too. Might be a bad wi-fi connection, but something tells me... goddammit, right?

Okay, so a lot of those stories were lame-ass Ranma stories where your boy got laid, and got laid hard. Enforced Evolution was technically one of those, distinguished by high-quality writing (in some parts), high-ambition crossovers, and just genuinely trying harder to tell an interesting story compared to other threads. It went on for a whopping 232K+ words before not being continued, and was eventually preserved on FF.Net HERE. Since it's one big text-dump, I'd recommend downloading it as a PDF (print the webpage using your browser) and reading it on a portable device. Only way to travel with mega-stories like this one, really.

Anyway. Buckle the Fuckle Upuckle, because we're in for a bumpy ride.

The crux of the plot is basically an attempt to weave the Alien / Predator universe into Ranma. Or to be more precise, to transplant Ranma and his craziest fiancé, Kodachi Kuno, into the AvPverse.

So: Wayyy back in the nineties, a Xenomorph hive dropped into Nerima, Tokyo courtesy of the Predators, killing pretty much the entire Ranma cast. The martial artists on hand fought hard, but at some point mere fists can't stop acid blood and a horrible ability to spawn at unnatural rates.

Fast forward a few centuries into interstellar space, and Ranma and Kodachi have been resurrected as clones by Weyland-Yutani-Umbrella (yep, that last part's not a joke) using their DNA - several times over, in fact - to create biological weapons incorporating traits from the Xenomorphs, the Preddies, the super-mitochondria from Parasite Eve, the shapeshifting from the alien from Species (shitty 90's movie I guess), and so on and so forth. Oh, and they have T-Virus zombies in the Sinister Facility O' Evil, too.

So Ranma and Kodachi wake up and escape, alongside Nanami Jinnai from El-Hazard. Of course, all the other experiments do to a degree, but that's not important. What's important is that Ranma, Kodachi, and Nanami (now converted into a hybrid thanks to the other two), are running from the entire galaxy a in luxury-built Firefly equipped with an unshackled Cyberdyne AI. They land on a planet known as Mudpie (which has some genuinely interesting geography and suchlike), try to stay out of trouble - it's just that trouble ends up finding them. Mercs and criminals and colonial authorities all forcing the two to transform, or even convert the dying into something like themselves (including Winry from Fullmetal Alchemist - actually a bunch of FMA characters are colonial cops here), are bad enough. But then the Preddies decide to drop Xenomorph eggs on a cattle ranch outside of the main town, and soon the entire town is caught up in a battle between human, alien, and Predator. At this point, we get a lot of perspective switching, especially to those converted into hybrids (Celes Victoria! Winry Rockfell! Rally Vincent! (actually there's a really cool scene where Rally's conversion saves her life from a Queen chestburster)), and a whole lot of absurd violence as Ranma fights a Predalien Queen (loses) and a Predator leader with martial arts (wins, barely). Also, they reference the Big Bad Robot from Robocop 2 as a security robot that goes insane very easily.

I mean, god damn. This thing is insane in a way that required a lot of human labor to construct in a relatively cohesive way, you know? The grammar and spelling isn’t always perfect, but once the story gets going it’s just one fight scene, one chase scene, one massacre after another as the rain pours down, the Xenomorphs close in, and the transformed humans struggle to do what they can before more innocents die at the hands of hostile alien and corporate forces. It doesn’t finish, Addventure fics never do finish properly, but they get pretty close to an evacuation, to the point that one wants, desperately, for them to succeed, to see the story through.

Look. I’ve got nothing else to say. If you want 80’s style sci-fi mixed with Ranma characters that can be at once super brutal and surprisingly tender - and really, who wouldn’t want something like that - Read This Fic. In fact, just to make things easier, I’m tempted to go and find that Addventure mirror again. Repost it on AO3 in a less sloppy format compared to the ff.net guy. We’ll see if I get around to it.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: Chris Davies' Best Of All The Years 2

I have been doing this for over a year, now. I'm certain of it. It hasn't exactly attracted big traffic, but it's been... funny. Cathartic. Entertaining to me, at least? Look, doing pointless things tied to Crisis is sort of my default mode, and it's not a good default mode, but it's my default mode so I'll cling onto it beyond reason.

Of course, I've been doing a lot less of these. One runs out of interesting fics to review when the fandom is basically a few dozen people on a Discord, a few hundred people on a subreddit, and some ageing Gen Xers who use neither (most of the fiction writers who I've cited, like Shawn Hagen, Bob Schroeck, etc). Or, well, there are still interesting fics to review, but reviewing them would not be a fun process for me. YT2032, Meat Jacket, the usual suspects. Obviously I wrote a well-received post about a common thread in a lot of those fics, but that doesn't exactly mean I reviewed a given fic completely, did I? Well, I'll get to them. Eventually. Someday. Maybe I'll transition to recommending various things that I read? Ranma fic, Edgerunners fic... sky's the limit at that point. Have I talked about doing that before? I have, haven't I? Well, to hell with that.

It's time to talk about Best Of All The Years 2, arguably the fic that got me into the concept of Priss x Sylia being a couple.

Now, look. BoatY 2(oh my god that is the funniest acronym ever that's incredible holy shit what the hell) isn't just a sequel to BoatY 1, it's a sequel to Together Again: 2937 Chapter, Davies' gigacrossover involving pretty much every big anime that ever was popular in America in the 90's. That means not just Sailor Moon is mixed in, but Tenchi Muyo, Dirty Pair, Ranma, Patlabor, Ah My Goddess, Gall Force, and a bunch of other things which are referenced in the story's gigatimeline. I mean, Together again 2937 is like 350 pages of script-format fic (I recommend downloading as a PDF and reading it that way), and then there's the 1996 chapter which is Ranma-centric (450 pages, I think), and then there's the incomplete Silver Millennium chapter - yeah, the stories move backwards in time compared to the order Davies wrote them in - and as such, if you think I'm reviewing that shit, prepare to be very fucking disappointed. Maybe in some later year, when I can explain everything that goes on in it without sounding like a Pepe Silvia-grade nutcase.

For now, though... well, Davies helpfully provides a summary of 2937 on the first part of the story, and the only thing that's really plot-relevant from Together Again is that, after saving Queen Serenity from an elaborate plot involving the Dirty Pair as puppets, Sailor Pluto allows Priss to save Sylia from the suitcase nuke she sets off inside GENOM Tower around 2040, dragging her back to the present. That's it, that's pretty much all you need to know (Well, besides the fact that Nene's dead, but that's not really important). That's it. I swear to god.

After that... Well, Priss lies that she's a clone because she's pissed at Sylia once it turns out Sylia was cyber-enhanced the whole time, and is nervous about having lost most of her memories past 2033 or so, there's a lot of relationship angst, a ghost intervenes, they make up, they make love, and Priss stays on as a hardsuited warrior while Sylia retires to be a detective. I don't know what else to tell you, other than Priss is drinking buddies with Sailor Mars and Ayeka from Tenchi - and was buddies with Shampoo from Ranma until she fucked off into deep space, but again, that's Together Again material. Oh, and Rally Vincent was Sylia's mother. Not sure if we're talking about blonde Rally from Riding Bean, or tan Rally from Gunsmith Cats, but I would have to assume the former considering that Sylia isn't, y'know, of dark complexion.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to talk about this one, isn't it? Mostly because there's not a whole lot there, it's over and done with in I'd want to say under twenty thousand words. And what is there doesn't quite reach the heights or depths of emotional heft that I want from PrissxSylia fanfic, because Davies seems to have decided that Shakespearian-level misunderstandings are key to their relationship troubles (Priss sings a song from ADP Files in recollections during Together Again 2937, and Sylia literally assumes that the song is about how much she sucks and gets all self-loathe-y about it). I want to say I've at least tried to base Priss and Sylia's friction in deeper-rooted misunderstandings about the other woman based off of warped things in their own worldviews, though whether or not I succeeded is really not up to me.

But BoatY 2 still has one good card to play, namely seeing from both Priss and Sylia's perspective what happened once Priss travelled back in time to bail her lover out, there in the bowels of Quincy's kingdom. There are some... interesting revelations on Quincy's part as to the true nature of the conflict Sylia has been waging. I won't spoil them beyond saying that they resemble Bubblegum Crusade's ideas about Quincy's ties to Sylia, and that you can just read part 1 and get them. For that, and that alone, flip through this fic.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: Mike Breen's Father's Pride, Mother's Passion

You know, I wonder if I should tag this with Highlander... eh, nah, wouldn't make a difference. Anyway.

I read Father's Pride, Mother's Passion over the course of several months, really. The first two parts in a burst around New Year's 2022, then I just came back to part 3 and just finished it. It was worth it. Undoubtedly. Perhaps the ending struggles to find its feet for a bit, perhaps you can see the author changing his mind as to where he wants the story to go somewhat last minute, but even so this story continues Death and Life's tradition of being insanely good on every relevant level. Even story beats I don't usually like in other stories I like here.

For context: You can read my original review of D&L here, and access the pages for both these stories (and a few sidestories I haven't read yet) here.

So. Where to start? Well, I'm going to start with the epilogue's author's note, because it says a lot about what FPMP is:

"I got very positive reactions to "Death & Life," and many people asked if I was going to write a sequel. I wracked my brains a bit to figure out where to go with a story, or even if I wanted to. As far as I was concerned, "D&L" was a complete entity, and when I finished it, I didn't really think it needed a sequel. Priss was Immortal, she was the good guy, eventually she'd whack Quincy. Plus the fact I wanted to go back to writing straight HL stories. Simple, ne?"

"Not really. The more requests for a sequel that came in, the more I began to seriously think of one. And the more I think, the more in trouble I get. Many people on a.f.bgcrisis know about my dissatisfaction with BGCrash, and how I felt there was a good story lurking somewhere beneath the crap if only the date was pushed up a year and some explanations were made for the discrepancies between the BGC characters and their BGCrash selves. Oh, yeah, Quincy and GENOM had to be central to the plot again with a suitable explanation for their absence from everyday Megatokyo life, Largo needed to be ejected from the plot entirely, the ADP slacker attitude had to disappear, the hinted-at-in-ep-7 relationship between Leon and Priss needed to be consummated, and Adama had to be severely rethought. Hey, cool. I'll rewrite BGCrash the way I thought it should go. Originally, I was going to write a straight BGC story within the same cycle, but with little or no HL influence beyond Priss' rapid healing and inability to have kids."

"Then they cloned that damn sheep..."

So, yeah, cloning had just been done with Dolly, and that was an inspiration. The desire to see Crash done better was another inspiration. Both good things to draw from.

Anyway, yeah. The story is told as a flashback from four hundred years after BGC, after the rest of the Sabers are long dead, where Priss's Watcher interviews her about the events assumed to be Crash. Of course Priss says that what we know as Crash was cooked up as fabrication by Sylia to hide a far stranger Immortal-related truth (how coy, Mister Breen, how coy) and from there the plot kicks off hard. Priss is friends with a fellow Immortal Patrick happens to know from the bad old days in the nineties, she's started to develop her own label alongside said immortal to help finance less idol-y acts like her own -- and then Sylia comes back into town by just emailing Nene (instead of doing some tomfoolery with hacking a game center) and they've got a new set of jobs - and yet, and yet, Sylia isn't afraid to admit the other Sabers are getting older, and that there's no shame in swapping out the old members for new ones over time. This is a running theme, really: winding down the Sabers instead of destroying them in a blaze of glory. Which even Priss, much mellowed by having killed two other Immortals in the last fic, is down with.

So that means shacking up with Leon, and it means trying to get custody of Sho. And, uh, the scene where Priss explains to Sho that she's an immortal is the cutest thing in the whole goddamn world, I am not joking, it's not even close.

But evil never rests. Quincy and Madigan have some seriously diabolical plans tied to Immortality, and they involve planned blackouts, a different kind of MacGuffin, the Illegal Army, and Adama - no, not the Adama you're thinking of. Something infinitely stranger and more twisted, and uh, tied to the themes of the story, about whether or not Immortals can have normal lives given their supernatural status.

Now, despite loose pacing and plenty of scenes of characters just talking, of the ever-closer bond between the Sabers and Patrick O'Brien, I really like everything that happens. It all happens for a reason, see (and it also justifies Nene going full savage for a moment there), there are a few good hardsuit fight scenes against the Illegal Army, and it all builds up until the end of Part 2. Part 3, though, is when it stumbles. The hardsuited showdown we've been building up to, we just don't get. We get some killings, both of two people we care about and of one person you're probably going to want dead by that point, but it doesn't feel satisfying. The only death that cuts deep is - well, you'll see for yourself. Suffice to say that even with poor execution (heh) in that last part, Father's Pride, Mother's Passion ultimately sticks the landing and succeeds at being the kind of story it wants to be, at once triumphant and tragic, the best kind of stuff.

Did I mention all of Priss's parts of the story are told from first-person POV? It's a nice touch, especially since it helps convey how much of a better-balanced person Priss is compared to the original anime, and compared to most fanfic including my own. Another positive quality.

Supposedly there was to be a final part where Priss finally killed Quincy, but it never came about. Fine, it was made clear it would happen some day. And what we've got is still worth a good readthrough. Seriously, give this one a go. If you've read Death and Life, and you want more of that, you will not regret it.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction - Resources: The Licensed Bubblegum Crisis RPG Books

No. Not my own RPG. That's... in a state of transition. I broke a bunch of stuff in it and will probably need to get back to it someday to fix it. Not high on my priority list.

And no, not the Shadowrun Second Edition Partial Conversion drafted up by Neo No Armor Against Fate's Shawn Hagen. Apparently Shawn maintains that his RPG conversion is better, said he was able to dissect the combat easily on Usenet back in the day. And he might very well be right in terms of mechanics, except, oh, wait, probably not, because it's Shadowrun, amirite folks?

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.

No, I don't claim to make any defenses for the BGC RPG as an RPG book, and I'll explain what I mean in a bit. I will, however, argue that these sterling little books, published in the two years before R. Talsorian went dormant for nearly two decades (cyberpunk 3.0 notwithstanding), are hands-down the best 'guides' to Crisis 2032 you could ever want. If you're writing fiction in 2032, and maybe you're pressed for ideas, I say give these three books, each shorter than the last, a read...

Which you can do electronically, for free, right here.

This is going to take awhile, isn't it? Well, yeah, we're talking a few hundred pages of small-font text and some really good settei (concept art) serving as the pictures, some of which saw no reproduction outside Japan at all. So, like the multi-part epic rant I've had brewing in my drafts folder for the past half a year, let's break it down into sections. We'll start with

DON'T ACTUALLY PLAY BUBBLEGUM CRISIS: MEGATOKYO 2033 THE ROLEPLAYING GAME: ARU PEE GEE NO DENSETSU

For context, and this is kind of an interesting story: R.Talsorian Games, the primary publisher behind the OGBGCRPG (OG for short) made its fame on two big product lines.

First there was wargame / RPG hybrid Mekton, pioneered by Mike Pondsmith back in the eighties as a mecha fighting game, in the halycon days when most anime watchers got fansubbed tapes from conventions or were watching rebranded Voltronesques on Saturday mornings. Anime fandom as we know it, or even knew it in the nineties, just did not exist, and here's Pondsmith drawing up a whole fucking wargame to do it. The most recent edition circa the nineties was Mekton Zeta, which also had the mecha-building sourcebook Mekton Zeta Plus.

The other was Cyberpunk 2013, released in 1988, which was essentially a street level adaptation of Mekton's mechanics (called 'Interlock' 'cause all the systems could, e-hem, interlock), that got a cool sourcebook or two (including one inspired by cyberpunk classic Hardwired that was written by the novel's author) before getting a second edition in like '89 or '90. That's Cyberpunk 2020 - that's what put R.TAL on the map, that's what I wrote a shitty fanfic crossing with BGC about (It wasn't hard to do), that's what became Cyberpunk 2077, and that's also what became Cyberpunk RED once R.Tal got money from CDPR to make a new edition.

With me so far? I bet you're thinking, Kyle, "gosh and golly gee wilikers so they put their anime system together with their cyberpunk system, because all those parts interlocked just like you said, and they made Bubblegum Crisis!"

And oh, my sweet summer child, how your eyes are shut.

Yeah... So, the OG is actually run on a system called Fuzion, which blends R.Tal's loose network of systems with that of the HERO System, which is... one of those really complicated universal systems that they say can build anything and everything, was designed with a variety of advantages and disadvantages for characters to use to represent their character, and isn't GURPS. No, it was made more for a superhero RPG, I guess?

Anyway, somehow the two companies met, decided to make a joint universal system for all their work going forward, and called it Fuzion. Many other licensed games used it for awhile, people made universal themed supplements for it, but it's not in wide use anymore as far as I know.

Why? Let me see if I can explain by way of picture.

Champions used 3d6. Interlock used a d10. The devs argued and argued and argued over which type the game should be balanced around, then gave the fuck up. Does that fill you with confidence, readers?

So there's this sort of... highly elaborate mishing and mashing of various elements of two very different systems such that neither comes out the better for wear. Here's R.Talsorian's Lifepath, a character-backstory generator where you roll dice to build a character (setting-agnostic, because they were trying to sell a universal system); then here's Champions's Perks and Complications, bought using those same precious campaign points you're using to buy civilian gear (but aren't your players playing as Knight Sabers? Who needs real shit to be marked when you're building hardsuits with separate points entirely?), and complications must be activated x amount of times a session even if it diverts from the fun of playing the game. And so on and so forth. Shit, even crossing Cyberpunk with Mekton doesn't always work, since blocks of damage from Mekton (Kills) scale unsteadily with the more dice-driven combat of CP. Worse still is that the mecha system and the hacking system are off in MZ+ and CP2020 respectively, so if you want to custom-build hardsuits beyond the small pool of tools you're given on the last fucking page of the book, or you want your Nene equivalent to do something useful, nyah-nyah, go buy more books.

And then I'm sure Shawn Hagen has plenty of reasons why the combat doesn't work, but we're not paying attention to him. Whatever. Let's talk about what does work, which is a mix of worldbuilding lore, stuff the R.Tal writers seemed to just sort of come up with, and a great gallery across all three books of Fucking Cool Mecha (especially BGC EX).

LORE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS FOLKS

I mean that earnestly. It's hard to get right, especially when said lore reflects upon the tone of the actual content, the plot, the franchise, whatever. But when telling stories with a licensed game, some degree of lore is, to my mind at least, incredibly mandatory. Maybe not so much for games where the story ought to be made up as one goes along (see RPG's like The Sprawl), but in the case of BGCrisis, an anime which at the time had a pretty loyal fanbase chomping at the bit for answers for their questions about the wider universe the Sabers operated in, R.TAL had to do a mix of cribbing from untranslated material, the B-Club special and all that, and making their own shit up without looking like they'd cribbed from their own work (CP2020) overmuch. The result is very uneven, but charmingly so. I almost want to say it feels more grounded than CP2020 or Shadowrun, but is that just because it's comparatively light on the ground? Perhaps. The mandatory universe timeline is one page, and focuses more on putting years to events that were already canon instead of adding extraneous stuff in.

Likewise with what the politics look like worldwide. We get a few paragraphs about how the U.S. is recovering (not collapsed as in CP2020), Japan is doing pretty good for itself as GENOM's puppet-state, Russia successfully integrated into the EU even if Eastern Europe didn't (See? Wacky shit like that can only be called charming), and China's one big North Korea (which I think is a holdover from the CP2020 Pacific Rim Sourcebook, where Deng was assassinated by Maoist radicals.) We get another dry bit about the idea of a zaibatsu lifted straight from CP2020's Corpbook 1, where Arasaka is discussed... newspapers are now faxed (look it was in BGC OVA 1 what do you want me to tell you)... on and on it goes.

I suppose I like the lore independent of the actual characters because of a few clever predictions. One is using all the cybernetics-gone-bad in AD Police Files to explain why nobody has them in the 2032 OVA, a link I sense wasn't really made concrete until this RPG. It's one of the most interesting interpretations of the source material and of cyberpunk tropes I've seen, you know, where all the splicing and dicing of the body turns out to be a fad and a failure, leaving those who bought into the trend left with butchered and failing bodies - in light of the crypto crash that seems to be dragging the stock market down back into recession / stagflation, that seems pretty classic capitalism.

The other is tied to Before And After, covering the impact of the cheap and now even more ubiquitous Boomers of Crash:

I mean, what can I say? I like predictions of the future that actually consider the effects of hyper-futuristic technology in that sort of way.

That's what a lot of the RPG's lore is at its best, basically working overtime to paper in the gaps left ignored by the series' creators. So we get a nuanced look into how ADAMA is different than similarly-sentient Boomers from the ADPF OVA; we get the Largo = Mason + Boomer Messiah explanation theory that the internet came up with just a year or two prior to the RPG's publishing; we get conspiracy theory proposals about whether or not GENOM undermined the cybernetics market to replace the enhanced with Boomers; we get to see the ADP go from hotshot riot suppression force able to slaughter undesirables en masse to actively disdained by GENOM; a weird consideration of how recognizing Boomer rights could still serve GENOM's agenda... on and on and on. It's such a mishmash of ideas, beautiful because of it.

Obviously no sane RPG player would ever give a rat's ass about any of this, but again, this was a product also marketed towards fans who just wanted a good worldbuilding book. I'm not saying you should take every part of the RPG's world into your own fanfiction, but you can take a great deal of it in and things will hold up.

POWER CREEP? YEAH, I'VE GOT THE POWER, CREEP!

The actual sourcebook sections of the sourcebooks are a) the characters, and b) the mecha. That's it, that's all. Civilian gear is almost an afterthought shoved into the front of the book like it didn't need to be there, cybernetics don't show up until Before and After. For although there is a section in the corebook proposing non-Saber campaigns players can run, they're essentially permutations of the already-existing types from CP2020: Corporates, mercenaries, medias, etc. And why, I ask you, would you run anything else but your own fanmade Saber team in your home city, overgrown and under threat? Shit, RTAL even went out of their way to put a few pages in EX, the last book in the series, highlighting player campaigns with online presences (Geocities, email addresses, etc.) and describing them in brief. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for the play sessions of the guys who did Mega-Gotham...

Anyway, back on topic. Both character pages and mecha pages get a great deal of settei transposed onto these pages, concept art ripped straight from Artmic's design docs and provided, again, more as a nerd resource than anything super useful. This especially comes into play in BGC: EX, where all the concept art and mecha are instead from everything that wasn't animated. Rejected concepts for hardsuits with wheels for feet; Boomer sketches only found in old hobby magazines; scribbles one of the Crash! mecha designers tried to get in that were apparently labeled 'problematic' (I guess he was a toy designer before all this?). I unironically love all this shit, even the beam cannons mounted on a hardsuit right where the boobplates are. Shit, my Discord profile pic is a non-Boomer mecha supposedly used by the JSDF, a 'Battlemover' whose origin I have no idea about, but which looks cool as hell. That's the kind of weirdo fan I am.

My point is that if you need to spice up your fiction, throwing 'new Boomer X' at the Sabers is one thing, giving the Sabers some power-up parts you dreamed up is another, but using the designs Artmic came up with before you did is more galaxy-brained than either. Shit, I should know, it was what Craig Reed did for the fanfics that I continued off of back in the day. And it's the same with these extraneous lore details that some rando RTAL staffer dreamed up a quarter-century ago, because they beg to have an entire fanfic made about any one of them. What happened to Jeena, folks? Inquiring minds want to know.

Anyway, that's it. That's all. Read through these and be a better fan because of it.