#I might post production stuff because the amount of things that happen behind the scenes is wild

[lavaflowe]

I FINISHED FINALS AND OUR FILM LOOKS SO GOOD IM SO PROUD AHDHSHSH

IM GONNA POST ART AGAIN!!!

#I’m so proud of our 2D Film It’s everything I hoped for our first try #I might post production stuff because the amount of things that happen behind the scenes is wild #soooo much effort over 8 weeks to produce a 1 minute and 17 second short story #super excited to draw for FUN AGAIN #I NEVER HAVE TO TOUCH A 2000’S STYLE AGAIN #lavachatter #imma post tomorrow I’m HAJDHSH

[meruz]

once again i am answering asks in a big compilation post. included is... gotham, patrick stump, tips about drawing backgrounds, tips about drawing in general, links to my faq, and infinity train

like.... the tv series? No... I’ve drawn dc comics fanart before, though. But it’s been years since I’ve been really into it. I like jumped ship like 10 years ago when the New 52 happened LOL.

AFJHDSLKGH I’m sorry I (probably) won’t do it again??

Actually full disclosure I have a truly cringe amount of p stump drawings/photo studies in my sketchbook right now LOL. He’s just fun to draw... hats, glasses, guitar, a good shape... but I don’t think I’ll rly post those until I can hide them in another big sketchbook pdf.. probably Jan 2022. Stay tuned........ (ominous) 

(ominous preview)

These are all sort of related to backgrounds/painting so I grouped them together even though they’re pretty much entirely separate questions.... ANYWAYS

a) How is it working as a BG artist? Is it hard? What show are you drawing for?

I think you’re the first person to ever ask me about my job! Being a background artist is great. It’s definitely labor intensive but I think that could describe pretty much any art job (If something were rote or easy to automate, you wouldn’t hire an artist to do it) and I hesitate to say whether its harder or easier than any other role in the animation pipeline. Plus, so much of what truly makes a job difficult varies from one production to the next, schedule, working environment, co-workers etc. But I will say that I think while BGs are generally a lot of work on the upfront, I think they’re subject to less scrutiny/revisions than something like character/props/effects design and you don’t have to pitch them to a room like boards. So I guess it’s good if you don’t like to talk to people? LOL

A lot of my previous projects + the show I’ve worked on the longest aren’t public yet so I can’t talk about em (but I assure you if/when the news does break I won’t shut up about it). But I’m currently working on Archer Season 12 LOL. I’m like 90% sure I’m allowed to say that.

b) ~~~THANK YOU!! ~~~

c) What exactly do you like to draw most [in a background]?

@kaitomiury​ Lots of stuff! I really like to draw clutter! Because it’s a great opportunity for environmental storytelling and also you can be kind of messy with it because the sheer mass will supersede any details LOL. 

I like to draw clouds... I like to draw grass but not trees lol,,, I like to draw anything that sells perspective really easily like tiled floors and ceilings, shelves, lamp posts on a street etc.

d) Do you have any tips on how to paint (observational)?

god there’s so much to say. painting is really a whole ass discipline like someone can paint their whole life and still discover new things about it. I guess if you’re really just starting out my best advice is that habit is more important than product. especially with traditional plein air painting, I find that the procedure of going outside and setting up your paints is almost harder than the actual painting. There’s a lot of artists who say “I want to do plein air sometime!!” and then never actually get around to doing it. A lot of people just end up working from google streetview or photos on their computer.

But going outside to paint is a really good challenge because it forces you to make and commit to lighting and composition decisions really quickly. And to work through your mistakes instead of against them via undo button.

My last tip is to check out James Gurney’s youtube channel because hes probably the best and most consistent resource on observational painting out there rn. There’s lots other artists doing the same thing (off the top of my head I know a lot of the Warrior Painters group has people regularly posting plein air stuff and lightbox expo had a Jesse Schmidt lecture abt it last year) but Gurney’s probably the most prolific poster and one of the best at explaining the more technical stuff - his books are great too.

e) Do you have tips for drawing cleanly on heavypaint?

@marigoldfool​ UMM LOL I LIKE ONLY USE THE FILL TOOL so maybe use the fill tool? Fill and rectangle are good for edge control as opposed to the rest of the heavy paint tools which can get sort of muddles. And also I use a stylus so maybe if you’re using your finger, find a stylus that works with your device instead. That’s all I’ve got, frankly I don’t think my drawings are particularly clean lol.

f) Tips on improving backgrounds/scenes making them more dynamic practicing etc?

Ive given some tips about backgrounds/scenes before so I’m not gonna re-tread those but here’s another thing that might be helpful...

I think a good way to approach backgrounds is to think of the specific story or even mood you want to convey with the background first. Thinking “I just need to put something behind this character” is going to lead you to drawing like... a green screen tourist photo backdrop. But if you think “I need this bg to make the characters feel small” or “I need this bg to make the world feel colorful” then it gives you requirements and cues to work off of.

If I know a character needs to feel overwhelmed and small, then I know I need to create environment elements that will cage them in and corner them. If a character needs to feel triumphant/on top of the world then I know I need to let the environment open up around them. etc. If I know my focal point/ where I want to draw attention, I can build the background around that.

Also, backgrounds like figure compositions will have focal points of their own and you can draw attention to it/ the relationship the characters have with the bg element via scale or directionality or color, any number of cues. I think of it almost as a second/third character in a scene.

Not every composition is gonna have something so obvious like this but it helps me to think about these because then the characters feel connected and integrated with the environment.

Some more general art questions

a) Do you have any process/tips to start drawing character/bodies/heads?

I tried to kind of draw something to answer this but honestly this is difficult for me to answer because I don’t think I’m that great at drawing characters LOL. Ok, I think I have two tips.

1) flip your canvas often. A lot about what makes human bodies look correct and believable is symmetry and balance. Even if someone has asymmetrical features, the body will often pull and push in a way to counterbalance it. we often have inherent biases to one side or another like dominant hands dominant eyes etc. you know how right-handed artists will often favor drawing characters facing 45 degrees facing (the artist’s) left? that’s part of it. so viewing your drawing flipped even just to evaluate it helps compensate for that bias and makes you more aware of balance.

2) draw the whole figure often. I feel like a lot of beginner artists (myself included for a long time) defer to just drawing headshots or busts because it’s easier, you dont have to think about posing limbs etc. But drawing a full body allows you to better gauge proportion, perspective, body language, everything that makes a character look believable and grounded.

Like if you (me) have that issue where you draw the head too big and then have to resize it to fit the proportions of the rest of the body, it’s probably because you (I) drew the head first and are treating the body as an afterthought/attachment. Sketching out the whole figure first or even just quick drawing guides for it will help you think of it more holistically. I learned this figure drawing in charcoal at art school LOL.

oh. third mini tip - try to draw people from life often! its the best study. if you can get into a figure drawing/nude drawing class EVEN BETTER and if you have a local college/art space/museum that hosts those for free TREASURE IT AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT, that’s a huge boon that a lot of artists (me again) wish they had. though if youre not so lucky and youre sitting in a park trying to creeper draw people and they keep moving.. don’t let that stop you! that’s good practice because it’s forcing you to work fast to get the important stuff down LOL. its a challenge!

b) I’ve been pretty out of energy and have had no inspiration to draw but I have the desire to. Any advice?

Dude, take a walk or something.... Or a nap? Low energy is going to effect everything else so you gotta hit that problem at its source.

If you’re looking for inspiration though, I’d recommend stuff like watching a movie, reading a book, playing video games etc. Fill up your idea bank with content and then give yourself time/space to gestate it into new concepts. Sometimes looking at other art works but sometimes it can work against you because it’s too close. 

Also something that helps me is remembering that art doesn’t always have to be groundbreaking... like it’s okay to make something shitty and stupid that you don’t post online and only show to your friend. That’s all part of the process imo. If you want to hit a home run you gotta warm up first, right? Sports.

I should probably compile everytime i give tips on stuff like this but that’s getting dangerously close to being a social media artist who makes stupid boiled down art tutorials for clout which is the last thing i want to be... the thing I want to stress is that art is a whole visual language and there are widely agreed upon rules and customs but they exist in large part to be broken. Like there's an infinite number of ways to reach an infinite number of solutions and that’s actually what makes it really cool and personal for both the artist and the viewer. So when you make work you like or you find someone else’s work you like, take a step back and ask yourself what about it speaks for you, what about it works for you, what makes it effective, how to recreate that effect and how to break that effect completely, etc. And have a good time with it or else what’s the point.

for the first 2, I direct you to my FAQ

For the last one, I don’t actually believe I’ve ever addressed artwork as insp for stories/rp but I’ll say here and now yeah go ahead! As long as you’re not making profit or taking credit for my work then I’m normally ok with it. Especially anything thats private and purely recreational, that’s generally 100% green light go. I only ask that if you post it anywhere public that you please credit me.

(and I reserve the right to ask you to take it down if I see it and don’t approve of it’s use but I think that case is pretty rare.)

a) @lemuelzero101 Thank you!!! I haven’t played Life is Strange but actually  that series’ vis dev artist Edouard Caplain is one of my bigger art inspirations lately so that’s a really high compliment lol. And yeah I hope we get 5-8 too...!

b) Thank you for sticking around! I’ve been thinking about Digimon and Infinity Train in tandem lately, actually. They’re a little similar? Enter a dangerous alternate world and have wacky adventures with monsters/inanimate objects that have weird powers... there’s like weird engineers and mechanisms behind the scenes... also frontier literally starts with them getting on a train. Anyways if anyone else followed me for digimon... maybe you’d like Infinity Train? LOL

c) @king-wens-king I’M GLAD MY ART JUST HAS PINOY VIBES LOL I hope you are having a good day too :^)

a, b, c, d) yessss my Watch Infinity Train agenda is working....

e) aw thank you!! i think you should watch infinity train :)

#ask #trying this new thing where i tag people in the body of the post instead

[cosmiclatte28]

Baking! (Yuta x you)

a/n : heyyo it’s friday, let’s have some “me” time and enjoy some imagine with Yuta! Idea came from @yutahoes comment on previous post HOT PATCHED

warning : none! suggestive, how you ended up with a bun in the oven! (your beloved Nami), and of course 2020 was a baking year and I am more than willing to share you the recipe i am referring to for this story! DM me :D also i got a bit too carried away :) but it’s gonna be fun :D

tagging : @2-3-t-i @yutahoes @ailoveyuta

with that said.. enjoy your scene! 

Ever since the pandemic started and staying at home becomes a mandatory rule, you and your fiance, Yuta have been trying to overcome boredom with all possibilities. On the first month of staying home, you two are very excited about having “leisure” time while working at home. Both of you are delighted by the fact that you don’t have to wake up early, drive in the busy streets, and you just have to slip into your proper clothes when there is a board meeting. Considering your job is a magazine editor, you have meetings but luckily not every day.

Second month, you start to do yoga and exercises with Yuta every time he is bored, and he has nothing to do. Well, his comeback is still in preparation, so he only comes for regular practice and always got home when your office hour ends.

Fourth months, you pick up a new hobby and because your magazine company needs to make a new fresh content that suits the situation, the team comes up with a baking page. You are assigned to make the content, including taking pictures and trying the recipes your team made. You also have to do the editing but there’s help with that. You take the challenge, though you never bake before you see this as the perfect opportunity to start a new hobby. Things were great, the content is rising in demand since the world is baking suddenly! You got your raise and you enjoy doing this until your silly ass fell from challenging yourself to a wild yoga pose. You hurt your arms, they are a slightly fractured and you cannot make your baking content for the first three weeks of recovery, but you are so irritated to just stay in front of the laptop and watch your other friend make the pictures and cakes. So, when you can no longer hold yourself back, you plead the director board to give you back the baking section and they did love your job so you won the part back.

“Yuta can you come home earlier today?” you question the man who already wears his mask and has his training bag ready on his shoulder.

“Me?? I guess I’m done after lunch, I only have to practice singing today. Why?” he asks you back

You put on your sweetest smile “Don’t you want to try baking? I need some help with the rubric.”

Yuta’s eyes twinkle, it’s been his wish to try baking but because of practice and the amount of tools to wash and lack of time he hasn’t been able to do it. Now that you are offering him, he thinks he can seize the opportunity.

“Okay, I’ll try, who knows NCT will have a baking vlog after this, might flex about my skills” he smirks and you only grin at his cockiness.

“Okay, you can go.” You push him away after kissing his cheek and blushing when he winks at you and disappear behind the door.

Today you just have to wait for the team to send you the ingredients and recipes. You wonder what you’ll bake today no, what Yuta will bake today.

He was lucky the baking procedure he has to do today is easy. Simple lemon cake and you manage to get good pictures of Yuta’s hands and the aesthetic bowls and whiskers. You manage to hold the camera with your stiff casted hand, but it works even when you look super silly.

“Oh gosh! This is healing.” Yuta exclaims when his first cake comes out of the oven nicely and with a good aroma. You quickly take pictures and once it’s done, Yuta has already cut a slice and pops it into his mouth. “Yummy, I am talented indeed.” He sounds so confident and you hate to admit, his cake is better than what you expect and knowing your husband, you know he won’t stop bragging about this, he might even go as far as trying more baking recipes.

--

Your nightmare comes true, once his promotional schedule with NCT is over, he comes home with a load of baking supplies.

“Yuta, what’s all of this?” you ask when you help him bring in bags of spices, butters, and decorating tools.

“My promotional week is done and I have our well deserved rest! I am going to be productive and bake for you every day!” he smiles like a little kid who just get a chocolate and you can’t say no to him.

“Oh no, not every day Yuta!” you joke as you help him organize the spices into the kitchen racks.

He brought different types of flours and sugars, even bought yeast and baking sodas. Oh he really is planning to bake!

“Well, I have to finish some works have fun baking! Make sure you wear the apron and don’t set the oven too high. Wash the bowls too okay.” You pat his long hair and skip into your room.

Yuta takes his time to shower, sing in the bathroom, check the internet for easy recipes and even compare recipes from different websites.

His choice finally is decided on the famous banana cake, it doesn’t require mixer and he notices you have bananas at home.

“Flour, bananas, eggs, butter…” he bends to take the things out and places them all on the counter. Next he brings out the bowls and whiskers and the rest of the stuffs he needs.

“Okay all set,” he rubs his hands and takes the apron you have. Yuta’s lucky he can use your apron well, (thanks to his small waist). “And where is it,” he walks to the living room to get his small rubber band and as he bites the rubber between his teeth you happen to leave your room to get some water.

“Oh!” you exclaim when you see a hot scene reveling in your eyes. If you bring something, you’d drop it already.

There under the golden hours of the sun from the window, Yuta is tying his hair up and his lip bites is not helping you. Not to mention the apron fitting him well. You kinda regret not buying a “cute” apron.

“Let me help,” you grin when Yuta fails to tie his hair. Somewhat in the middle of tying his hair we was surprised to see you gawking at him. He blushes a little when you step closer and take his hair into one bundle and expertly you tie the band around it.

“There you go! Neat and tidy.” You click your tongue and run a hand down his exposed biceps.

“You’re teasing me, aren’t you?” you playfully ask him this when you learn just how “dolled” up he is. In your apron, smelling good, looking hot, and smirking.

“As much as you want me to tease you, see that?” he points to the kitchen and you follow his finger direction “I am baking you cake.”

You lead him to the kitchen, cool yourself down with a glass of iced water and Yuta starts to busy himself with the recipes.

He starts by measuring the cups of flour, sugars, and spoons of cinnamon and baking soda.

You choose to observe him instead of coming back to your work. You’re glad you have saved your works earlier and don’t have to return for it.

Yuta looks super serious when he cracks the eggs and starts mixing them to the dry ingredients. You take note at how accurate he is, you learned about the small details about baking through your rubric.

“Need help?”  you ask when Yuta starts to whisk the mixture together. He brings his bowl to his waist and with his tilted head and angled hand, he starts whisking the batter.

You have to hold yourself back when you see how he looks delicious right now. With an apron, a tied hair, tongue sticking out of his lips from focusing, his flexed arm and how he smirks at you. Gosh he’s the real cake here! You wonder how will he react if you suddenly come and bite him there on his neck which is inviting you to bite a mark there. Hey mark!

“No, I got this.” He winks at you and continues whisking the ingredients. Another minute passed by, he adds the mashed bananas and some cut apples for better taste. You focus on his actions but mostly enjoying the show he gives to you.

“You look hot.” You blurt that out loud as you secretly eat the choco-chips he will add later. “You think I look hot? You haven’t seen me whisk a whipping cream or make a meringue!” Yuta says as h places the bowl down and begin doing the next step.

You lean over the counter, eager to see what he is doing next. “Okay, all set just add choco-chips and stir and pour to container.” He smiles nicely to you, expecting to get praises or just a satisfied face. But all Yuta sees is your side smirk.

Yuta can always read you like a book, so without losing his cool, he checks you up from head to toe. He notices how you’re not focusing on him, biting your lips, and your ears and cheeks are as red as strawberries right now!

He connects the dots in his head and snaps his finger in front of your face. You jump in surprise “What?” you yell, clearly annoyed that your fantasy session is destroyed.

“No you’re staring at me too intensely! Stop it,” he acts like his innocence just got violated.

You click your tongue “Yuta, blame yourself!” you pull your hair in despair when you feel your body heating up more and feel tingles slowly creeping up.

Yuta is ignoring you when he shows off his flexibility by bending forward to put his container in the oven. “And that’s the right temperature, now we wait!” he tosses the mittens aside and leans his body to the table you’re seating at. He glances to the cup of water with only ice cubes left, he grabs it up and swirls it around before sipping the remaining drops.

“What are you looking at Princess?” his playful remarks are slipping from his lips. You bite your lips down and try to shake whatever idea you have in your head after seeing him drink the last drop of water like that is the best water in the world. His Adam’s apple bopping is not helping you at all, you lick your lips and lowkey will kill him for making this looks so yummy and advertise-able.

“Nothin’” you lie though it is as clear as day that you are “eating” him in your mind.

“You sure? You don’t look like that.” He says and then knocking the glass to his lips to take the remaining ice cubes in his mouth.

You nod your head and turn redder if it’s possible. Dang Yuta is clearly teasing you and you love it. “I-“ you can’t stop your sentence for the next thing he does is taking your lips there with ice cubes in his mouth. The cold sensation wakes you up from your day dream and you press your hands over his trained arms. He passes the cube into your mouth and you’re surprised with this new sensation. Oh Yuta and his surprises!

He continues taking you there until there’s no more cubes left and both of you are already breathing harder and the atmosphere has turn super hot. Next thing you know, you’re already on the sofa pinned down by Yuta as he teases you with butterfly kisses here and there.

“Yuta-“  you moan out his name when you have the chance, your hand pulls on his hair so he can stop kissing you for a while “Your cake.” You breathily remind him about the cake in the oven.

“Hm? My timer hasn’t gone off.” He ignores your attempt to stop taking you here.

“You want this right? Or do you want to eat me instead? You really look desperate earlier.” He nuzzles into your neck and gives some generous kitten licks there.

“Oh you were teasing me!” you defend yourself “Admit it.” You push him away to see his eyes and get the truth out, but Yuta is Yuta and he always has his way of making you lost. “No, I did not. You were this turned on by me, that you were having such sexy thoughts in the middle of the day.” His hand travels south and you already stifle a moan so he won’t be cocky about it.

He already plays with the hem of your pants, only seconds to pulling them away and eating you raw there, but his timer goes off and he has the biggest grin on his face, while you the biggest disappointment. “Yuta!” you’re already sounding so desperate, tears are forming in your eyes and Yuta only chuckles, he wipes your tears and stands up from between your legs.

“Oops! My bad, cake is done! Why don’t we try it when it’s hot?” he leaves you to turn the oven off and takes the cake out. He left you like that! All teased up and messy.

“Yuta- you will pay for this.” You groan before ignoring the pain from the edged pleasure and stomping your feet angrily to the kitchen.

“Come try this, tell me if this is good.” He offers you a forkful and you angrily chomp down on it.

“Bad.” You mutter, as you cross your hands over your chest but still chew on the delicious cake.

“Bad? This is so yummy! I can take this to the boys, and they’ll ask for more.” Yuta towers above you.

You pout “Fine, its yummy.” Your hand reaches out for some more bites, but you stop and shake your head “You. Finish what you did to me, or I cannot enjoy my cake.”

He giggles and in one swift motion already has you in his arms “Alright my princess, let me enjoy my cake instead!” he brings you to the room and you’re already giggly again, giving him kisses and playing with his hair.

You swear you will kill him if he only leaves you in the room and goes back to eat his cake in the kitchen, lucky you he did not do that. You both know that the cake will be cold once you’re done with the session but who cares when Yuta can bake more of them!

 And that is probably how you end up putting a bun in the oven with Yuta!

fin.

#yuta x reader #yuta x you #yuta x y/n #yuta imagines #yuta scenarios #yuta fluff #yuta suggestive #yuta smut #yuta oneshot #yuta soft hours #yuta domestic fluff #domestic fluff #yuta #nct yuta scenarios #nct fluff #nct flirt line #nct yuta fluff #nakamoto yuta #nakamoto yuta x reader

[maxwell-grant]

The crossover fic + learning he's a favorite of yours has me curious: do you think it would be possible to tell a satisfactory Shadow vs. Mr. Mxyzptlk story? I think he'd fit surprisingly well in that milieu as a credible threat: he's something of an older, mistier, shadowy world, kin to fairies and elves and imps, pixies and sprites and genies, bound by old laws and dressed like a parody of 20s/30s class, beyond The Shadow's usual powers and yet...THAT. There a thematic in to this throwdown?

I had never actually thought of Mxy in that light, even though it's very much in line with what he is, because Mxy is one of those characters I don't tend to think about much. He's one of those ready-made perfect villains who pretty much guarantees a fun and creative time whenever he pops up uninvented. Like The Ventriloquist for Batman, he is so uniquely a product of how Superman works and what his stories allow for, that I can't say I ever thought of taking him for a spin outside of them. But there's definitely stuff to work with in putting him and The Shadow together.

Come to think of it, if there's a Superman villain I think Walter Gibson would have liked to play around with, it would be Mxyzptlk. Mxy stories are fundamentally about Superman being thrust into a position where his only way out is to solve puzzles and turn the tables using nothing but his wits, and Gibson spent the majority of his career before and after The Shadow as a writer of books on magic and puzzles, both of which show up a lot in The Shadow stories. You see it even in several covers which contained clues for the stories within.

To an extent, you could argue that The Shadow might figure out quicker a way to trick Mxy, because The Shadow's already has to utilize a constant amount of trickery and deceit and puzzle-solving in his daily adventures, it comprises almost the majority of what his stories are about under Gibson. The usual Mxyzptlk narrative is one that's well within The Shadow's domain.

But on the other hand, it's definitely some extremely unusual territory for The Shadow, villain-wise. A villain who eclipses his powers and scope to such an extent is completely unheard of. The one time I can think of where he fought a villain this weird and who he was completely powerless against was when he met Suven The Clown King of Venus (who's definitely a character that could show up in this meeting), and even then Suven was just a weird alien who looked gigantic next to the shrunken Shadow. Even on the few occasions where The Shadow encountered other aliens or eldritch monsters, he was able to find a way to stop the threat for the moment or even kill it, which is definitely not happening here, because Mxy is a whole other level.

Superman has the strength and endurance and superpowers to roll with whatever mayhem Mxy throws his way. If Mxy decides that The Shadow’s looking too pale so he's gonna give him a tan by throwing him in the sun, what the hell is he gonna do to stop him? I imagine that Mxy would likely take a different approach to messing with The Shadow, since he can't tank nukes like Supes and he's not really a good sport about the game. 

Fine, whatever, Mxy's a creative sort, he's got a couple of ideas for messing around with Mr Grim-n-Serious over there, show him what an Eldritch Monster looks like past the squid monsters and dragons he may have met.

The idea I'm getting here is, on one hand, Mxy attacking The Shadow with the usual goofiness he brings with him. And on the other, him realizing that messing with The Shadow's dignity isn't as fun as he thought he'd be, so he instead goes full SCP Foundation/Awful Hospital/Ice Cream Man on The Shadow until he's stopped, trapping him in amusing and horrifying eldritch nightmares and situations that he has absolutely no way to escape until he solves the puzzle. 

I mean, he's not fighting Superman here, he can kill this guy with a blink, even just stopping his heart with a thought. No fun in that. He's gotta beat the "Master of Darkness" at his own game. He's got a point to prove.

I imagine that much of the story would play out of The Shadow having to piece together what exactly has gone topsy-turvy in his reality, whether it's Commissioner Weston eating spiders for breakfest or the entirety of Manhattan sans him going blind and all lights going out across the country. And when Mxy comes out with that shrill SURPROISE!!!, assuming The Shadow already knows what he needs to do, then he falls for whatever gambit The Shadow's had to cook up to trick him. 

At the end, Mxy is an arrogant bully who lords power over those that can't fight back, and The Shadow's a master of beating those by turning their arrogance against them. It's Duck Amuck, except Bugs is a mind-breaking sadist and Daffy has to fight back.

I imagine something akin to a particularly funny scene from a story called Face of Doom, where a gangster traps The Shadow in a room surrounded by armed henchman so he can enlist him into taking down the city's leading criminal, The Face. The Shadow unmasks himself as Cranston to gain his trust, and the two proceed to talk plans. I'll post the sequence below

Calmly, The Shadow was removing his slouch hat. His arms spread, the black cloak began to drop from his shoulders. Clipper's nervousness changed to elation. If ever a criminal fooled himself, Clipper did so at that moment.

Though The Shadow voiced no agreement to Clipper's offer, the crook was confident that it was sealed. The Shadow was taking a step that no other criminal had ever witnessed.

When Clipper's squinty eyes saw the hawkish features of Lamont Cranston, the crook displayed another of his downward grins. There wasn't any question about the prisoner really being The Shadow.

"A ritzy mug, ain't you?" voiced Clipper. "Well, that makes you the real McCoy. One thing we'd all figured, Shadow — we guessed you was a high-hat guy.

"'You don't get out of here until The Face is croaked! Say, though — maybe one of your ritzy friends could put up a good front with The Face."

"There are others, who might serve. I have agents, you know."

A shrewd gleam brought new ugliness to Clipper's eyes. He had heard of The Shadow's agents. It would be smart stuff—using them to get The Face, then disposing of them afterward. Clipper couldn't hide the eagerness that betrayed his new scheme.

"Good stuff," agreed Clipper. "But how am I going to reach those guys and get them to work with me? They only take orders from you, don't they?"

In reply, Clipper saw Cranston pick up the black cloak and hat. He handed the garments to the crook. For the moment, Clipper was puzzled; then he saw Cranston's hand extend the discarded gloves.

"I get it," chuckled Clipper. "You want me to rig up like I was you. Then the guys that work for you will listen to me. How do you handle them—with some password?"

"Usually," replied The Shadow. "Try on the cloak and hat first, Clipper. I must study the appearance that you make."

It seemed like a give-away of The Shadow's game. Any one could stage this Shadow stuff. All he had to do was masquerade in black, spring a shivery laugh, and shoot quick with his guns. If Cranston could pull it, Clipper could.

The Shadow spends a couple of paragraphs calmly walking Clipper through the steps necessary to pull off a convincing Shadow performance, almost like he's directing him. And then this happens:

The back of Clipper's neck was exposed. Though The Shadow's voice was still the leisurely tone of Cranston, his left hand had lost its laziness. Behind Clipper's back, that fist whipped an automatic from a shoulder holster. Clipper didn't scent the move until the muzzle of the .45 iced his neck.

"It won't work, Shadow," rasped Clipper. "You know it as well as I do! One pop from that gat of yours, the mob will pile in and croak you! There's a wicket in that door; they'll use it!"

The Shadow had shifted low behind Clipper's back. The crook could no longer observe the reflection of Cranston's face. He could still feel the pressure of the gun muzzle on his flesh. "Climb off my neck, Shadow," warned Clipper. "It ain't getting you nowhere!"

It was getting The Shadow further than Clipper guessed. The gun muzzle was actually gone from Clipper's neck. His impression that it rested there was merely an after effect, from former pressure.

Crouched low, The Shadow had now reached the door. Before Clipper guessed what was up, The Shadow twisted the door knob. Wrenching the door inward, he pulled himself behind it.

At the same moment, The Shadow snapped a quick command, in a rasp that resembled Clipper's own harsh tone:

"The Shadow's yours, gang! Croak him!"

It ends for Clipper about as well as you'd expect.

One of the things I like most about Mxy is that you can't take shortcuts with him. It's not like how it is with Riddler stories, where you can half-ass the riddles because you know Batman's gonna win once he touches Riddler and the story's gonna end in a punch-up, Mxyzptlk is completely invincible unless you solve the puzzle he presents, and you'd think of course that, surely, he can't fall for it this time.

He's a wise guy, see, he's seen all of Superman's tricks by now, and what's that dumb old Shadow gonna do that he can't see a mile away? This is almost too easy.

It's so easy, in fact, that The Shadow even agrees, he's lost it completely, and the way he could possibly beat Mxyzptlk is by calling one of his agents to save him, and he's prepared a list of some of his smartest, cleverest agents for this moment. But, no, he wouldn't dare put them in such danger against this invincible, immortal genius, someone has to take this list from him and run, but ZOINKS, Mxy's taken the list. So he's gonna start seeing who is it that the Shadda thinks is smart enough to take him.

Clyde BurKe? Like some dimestore journalist's gonna have a shot, just cause he solves crossword puzzles. Lamont Cranston, yeah, more like, LAMEONT CRANSTON. Harry VincenT, who, the dumb kid who tried jumping off a bridge once? Come on, you gotta give me a hand here, Shadda! Let's see, Pietro, what, some cook? Ya kidding? Moe ShrevnitZ...actually, Shrevy's allright, scratch that one. ShrevY, hey, come on, that's cheating, ya just put Shrevnitz's name again, ya dum-dum. Mr Xanadu, hmm, catchy name but probably not a real guy. And Margo Lane. Yeah, smart dame that one, she could probably figger something out. And ya keep writing everyone's name's weird - WAIT

I KNOW WHAT YER TRYING TO DO HERE.

I KNOW YOU GOT SOME CLEVER SCHEME HERE, I'D SEEN THIS BEFORE, IT'S AN OLD TRICK.

YOU EMPHASIZED THE LETTERS SO THE REAL SMARTEST GUY YOU KNOW WOULD BE HIDDEN WITHIN THEM, SO THAT SOMEONE ELSE COULD FIND HIM.

HAH, THAT'S RICH. THAT'S KID'S PLAY. WHAT, YOU THINK I CAN'T FIND THIS

KLTPZYXM

BY MYSELF?

.

.

.

aw crickets...

#replies tag #superman #the shadow #mr mxyzptlk #dc comics #comic books #pulp heroes #bogleech

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Michelle Kiefer

Michelle has 55 stories at Gossamer. If you haven’t read them, what are you waiting for?! She has great takes on Mulder and Scully. I’ve recced some of my favorites of her fics here before, including Christmas in California, Making Other Plans, and Six Inch Valley. Big thanks to Michelle for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

I’m not sure anyone is still reading my stories.  I haven’t migrated my X-Files ones to AO3. I don’t think Gossamer provides any viewing statistics. I’d be very happy to hear that people still like my work.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

My X-Files fandom experience was amazing.  I remember that sense of excitement and immediacy.  It was thrilling to write stories (and read those of other authors, of course) in an active fandom for a show that was on the air.  It was truly my first experience in an online world--a parallel world to my real life existence.  I learned how to keep a foot in each world.  As I recall, it was very hard to keep my focus in my “meat” world, when the online one was so fast moving and thrilling.  But I did get some balance in my life as time went on.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

Message boards and mailing lists were my experience.  They were primitive compared to the pretty screens now.  I forged some amazing friendships, some of them with people I discovered lived relatively near me.  All I wanted to do was discuss episodes and fic.  The flame wars were a little intimidating, but also amusing if you didn’t get swept up.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

I was very passionate about the fandom--as I said, there were times when my online life seemed to overpower my real life experiences.  I learned to manage that, and think I’m all the better for that.  And I found some amazing friendships that are active and thriving today.  I learned a lot about writing with XF fanfic.  The level of quality was stunning.  A decent percentage of fic were as good or better than traditional published fiction.  But there were so many writers!  I wanted to make an impact on the fanfiction world, but that meant taking my writing very seriously and learning to develop a story, pace that story, make it compelling and believable.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

I had a couple of coworkers that talked about the show all the time.  I was curious, so I watched an episode.  I believe it was the cannibal town one.  I thought David Duchovny was odd looking and wasn’t terribly impressed.  But I tried another episode - Wetwired, which blew me away with the morgue scene when Mulder thinks he’s going to identify Scully’s body.  Ah...I thought, now, I see what everyone is talking about!  And from then I was hooked.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

As I watched, I wanted more.  I was fairly new to the internet (frankly, the internet was new to almost everyone)  I found episode reviews, and some of them were fantastic.  Some mentioned fanfiction.  I was unaware of such a thing, though to be honest, since childhood, I’d been spinning stories in my head about characters on TV shows.  I found some fanfic. The first couple of stories were not great (at least one was horrible) but then I found some that were very good.  Probably a bit soap-operaish, but still readable.  And then I became voracious as I plowed through the mass of stories looking for the good stuff.  And boy was there good stuff.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I’m not estranged from it, but I don’t spend much time with it after all these years.  I’ve found fanfic in some other shows that I like and only occasionally read old XF stories.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I’ve not been as involved with any other fandoms, i.e. following commentary on the show.  I tend to dive into TV shows well after their heyday, so I’m always late to the party. I do read fanfic from other shows, and have actually written fanfic for other shows, but I need a really good idea to write.  None of the other fandoms for my other shows are as busy and active as XF, even ones currently in production.  And none of them have as much fanfic and certainly not the level of brilliance that we had in XF.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

I tend to go for interesting partnerships, very much in the XF fashion.  And a flawed hero is always a plus!  The partnerships don’t necessarily have to be romantic---in fact I find I prefer those that are not.  Really, Mulder and Scully were the only ones I felt deeply as a pairing, probably due to the chemistry between the actors. But the partnerships have to be well-balanced and realistic.  I loved the characters on Sleepy Hollow.  The two main characters were very much in the mold of Mulder/Scully.

My newest passion is British detective shows and I’ve completely fallen for the “Morse-verse” shows, Inspector Morse, Inspector Lewis and Endeavour.  Less of an XF feel, but compelling characters with interesting backstories.  Other favorite partnerships in the British detective genre are on Inspector Lynley and Broadchurch.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

A bit less now, though I’m still involved with a wonderful group of ladies who love the X-Files.  When we get together for a yearly weekend, we binge episodes and eat impressive amounts of junk food.  XF isn’t on network TV these days, but if it was, I’d probably watch it.

A couple of years ago, I listened to Kumail Nanjiani’s XF podcast on my long commute.  I loved the commentary and interviews so much that I did watch some old episodes.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I don’t read much XF fic.  I’m currently reading in some other fandoms, but it’s harder to find good stories--the ones I follow aren’t very active these days and the quality just isn’t what XF was.  We were so lucky.  We had maybe 20 incredible top authors at any one time, then maybe another tier of 50 to 100  good to maybe great writers.  And with new episodes, there was so much inspiration. We were so spoiled.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

Everything from Syntax6, MaybeAmanda, Kel.  A special story for me was “Strangers and the Strange Dead” by Kipler because I remember reading that very early in the morning in my unheated basement in the winter because that was the only time I could use our single computer without others in the family complaining.  I remember actually gasping at the big reveal in the story.  I can even remember the story’s opening line!

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I was just learning how to write fiction when I was involved in XF, so I’m not sure my best work is there, though the bulk of my stories are there.  I liked some of the work I did with others.  I wrote Bone of Contention and Out of the Everywhere with Kel and I think that those stories got the best aspects of both of our styles.  For stories I wrote myself, I think they’re not bad, but they are rather short and it’s always easier to maintain a theme and style for a short story.  I liked Black Cherry Velvet.  I’m writing some Inspector Lewis stories that I think are pretty good--they benefit from the years of experience that I was gaining through XF.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

Never say never, but I probably won’t write more XF.  I used to burn with it, but I think that got burned out a bit.  Still, I have such wonderful memories of the whole period.  It might be worth looking at again.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

As I mentioned, I am currently playing in the Inspector Lewis world.  It’s sad--it’s a very small and not terribly active fandom.  Sad that my best work is in an inactive fandom where I’m lucky if 20 or 30 people are reading them.  It doesn’t help that I don’t write the most popular pairing.  

But I’m really enjoying it.  I occasionally write for Man From Uncle, which really shows my age, as that was a childhood obsession.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

With XF, it was always a take on an episode--did I get a tiny idea that I wanted to develop, or was I not thrilled with the way something went on the show.  Now,  it’s usually a “what if” kind of thing where I get inspired by a possible event and explore how that would play out, i.e.  “What if this character had a one night stand resulting in an unplanned pregnancy?”  What would happen?  How would he handle the consequences of this?  How would it change his life?

What's the story behind your pen name?

It’s literally my own name.  I SOOOO wish I’d used a pen name.  But I was naive and fandom was so new to me that it never occurred to me that a pen name would be better.  I always told myself that my real name sounded like something made up, like a TV newscaster name, and I hoped people assumed it was a pen name.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

My husband and my kids were the only ones who knew about it for many years. Then I went to a fandom/fic gathering for three days and had to explain to a few other family members and my work mates why I was going to Chicago on my own. It’s still mostly a need to know thing and they don’t really need to know.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

I’m on AO3 as msk.  And everything I wrote for XF is on Gossamer.

(Posted by Lilydale on February 2, 2021)

#new post #old school x #xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #xf fanfic author interviews #michelle kiefer

[project-paranoia]

Live Watch: Guardian  Episode One, Part One

It's Guardian!  The show that got me interested in this genre!  I love spooky things and I love mysteries and fantasy!  I simply adore it so much!  When I can't sleep I just put on a playlist of Guardian in the background.  I was aware of censorship before - every country has some version of it, but to some degree this was my first deep dive into how it might effect a piece of media.  Guardian is exceptionally acted and incredibly written, as well as suffering from obvious dubs where the dubbing voice actor sounds nothing like the previous actor and odd cuts that are disrupted.  In some ways it's the little drama that could fighting its way past their studio going bankrupt while they were filming, reshoots, and being taken down and altered several times.

In some ways Guardian's struggle fits the spirit and aesthetic of the show. Worn in like an old pair of jeans but still making an effort.  Putting emphasis where things count and hoping the kindness of the universe will make allowances for the rest.  Attention to detail where the story really matters.  It has the charm of a community production put on out of love with actors and crew who would not be anywhere else in the world for any amount of money.  That feeling of love comes through, and whether or not I'm barely literate I have so many words to share.

Part of why I love it as well is it has that feeling of 80s and 90s fantasy, like Moomin, Xena or Condor Heroes. Everything feels lived in, nothing's been spit shined except for Shen Wei's suits. It's an old city street of a show, it has history and character built in. 

*After all that I don't know that I have a tonne to say about the intro.  It's very good but it's also full of spoilers.  I think having the intro song be in English does make a difference in making it appealing to English speaking audiences as well as standing out as different and interesting, which the show is. Speaking of Spoilers!  Spoilers below!

* The obligatory beginning narration is beautifully animated, I have another post that will be done some time before the heat-death of the universe talking about the fascinating world building options.  Unlike some Make It SciFi plots, this one has legs and implications.

* Remakes rarely are able to meet the original on equal ground - and I struggle to believe the actors would Fit as well - but part of me really wants to have a chance to have the Dixingren worldbuilding really leaned into.  The writing is good enough we get implication but no real follow through.  I want fifty episodes of how Dixing functions, give me more pseudo-science behind the mutations, what are the biological differences.  I'm hungry for more!

* I love the cameos of later characters, and the way there was some effort to be discrete with spoilers.

* It's Ya Boy!  I love Shen Wei.  With that music cue and that sinister turn around they really set him up as dubious.  I wish they went with something a little different with the intro so his character wasn't spoiled.  The writing, directing, and acting was so good and spoiling who Shen Wei is kind of took the teeth out of that.

* Also cheers to the costume designer who outfitted Zhu Yilong so well and made him look jacked with the fit of those clothes.

* Also you can tell this is a real university because the staff has to sit in tiny student chairs.  I'm not joking, please be warned if you're going into academia.  Unless you have tenure life is An Adventure - and even then.

* Also shout out to Shen Wei's Prized Cabbage and the Queen of our hearts, Li Qian.  Why is this actress not in more things?  She has such an expressive and lovely face and she really goes all the way in with her acting.  I respect an artist that acts from their chest. Also that windbreaker, white skirt combo is chic and fun all at once, it draws the eye and makes her melt into the background all at once - perfect for the character.  I love her so much.

* Here's another one of Shen Wei's coats, it's a lovely color for him but it also is so thin that it looks like it crinkled up just from being worn.

* I'm being distracted by details and missing plot stuff.

* Story of my life.

* I love Li Qian hovering along behind Shen Wei like a duckling following their mother.  A) Mood and B) it quietly informs their dynamic.  Shen Wei has like one person he can trust but no one he can really confide in and it's the same for Li Qian. A ship will find a port in a storm and Shen Wei has Big Da-ge Energy. My fanfic heart hopes they found comfort in the pseudo familial relationship with each other while it lasted.

* Even in episode one we receive foreshadowing, we love and respect some excellent writing.  For those of you who missed it - Professor Ouyang is talking about Lin Jing who I love partially because he's so outrageous large but has the total opposite of intimidating energy.  

* What did they feed you Lin Jing? He is so tall and wide, but they do a lot with camera work to try to make him not quite as big.  Side note, I would really love to see the actor who plays Lin Jing (Liu Minting) both in more dramas but more specifically in a role where he was like a minister or scholar - someone intellectual.  I think the combination of being such a big gentleman and also someone who like plots or plans would be really dynamic if it was written well.  

* Also I like the exchange where without a word Professor Ouyang indicates he has one last thing to say, it's private and that he would like Shen Wei to ask Li Qian to leave. That's What You Can Do With Good Actors!

* Li Qian is just so pretty and the actress emotes so well!

* Shen Wei totally understanding what's going on with this shady research immediately and wanting to stay as far away as possible.  We see one of the first examples of him being aggressively polite to remove himself from a situation.

* "i'M jUST aN oRDINARY sCHOLAR." No one buys it Shen Wei.

* Angy Thinking Face

* One thing the show is really good at is using establishing shots really well so you always know where everything is and everything is going

* Guo Changcheng, all around good boy and angel.  We stan a nervous legend

* Zhou Yunlan Arriving.  Why is everyone on this show an Absolute Legend

* Guo Changcheng protecting himself with his certificate is too cute.  This young man is trying his best and I support him.

* Also that coat is Young, Pure, Stylish; I love it

* Zhao Yunlan, what's wrong with you? You are amazing!

* His irreverent style and disregard of usual policy makes him fit in really well with his band of misfits and special cases

* Guo Changcheng's OO face is too good, elastic face

* Da Qing my love!

* Jin Ling, I think he has an all seeing eye on his hoodie thing. Illuminati Confirmed.

* Also they filmed the shots so well, so you always know where everyone is in relation to everyone else

* Our Prized Cabbage!  I love her!

* Great handheld work: shaky and unhinged, but not migraine inducing

* Foreshadowing in the form of a shadow and reaching for the necklace

* Da Qing's cat behaviours. I really want behind the scenes of the actor discussing how cat was he going to cat

* We get our first real example of how Zhao Yunlan doesn't feel safe emoting negatively and so he uses a super sunny mask to hide his feelings, except with Da Qing who he lets his anger show with because he trusts him.

* I'm not even halfway through and I've written so much, peace and blessings to the readers of this.

* Zhao Yunlan's swagger, after his childhood having a little power must feel comforting and good

* I love how Da Qing is talking as a cat less than a meter from the medical examiner.  Does the examiner not care or does he know?  Is he deaf?

* Harassing Guo Changcheng is the new team sport

* Zhao Yunlan Realises Something Music

* Also, Lollipop Measurement

* It's nice to see Zhao Yunlan just being himself with Da Qing, he's able to really be honest and genuine with him

* Slow Look Moment

* This moment is so fascinating!  Shen Wei doesn't know what's going on yet.  He just sees an old friend who winces when he sees him and disappears.  We mostly see things from Zhao Yunlan's point of view, but from Shen Wei's perspective this is a first part of just some Odd and Confusing Happenings

* This cat though!  I love him!

* The delicate way they’re both feeling each other out.  This must be so confusing and startling for Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan is trying to figure out if this teacher is going to bust him or what.

* He forgot to let go, way to set off Zhao Yunlan’s suspicions

* “Mark Stewart” Is he though?  Who picked out that English name?

* Li Qian!  I love her and I love that striped blouse. Fashion.  Got to look good when you’re resisting a mental break. *Also she hears a meow and looks around at eye level, I love that for her.

* Zhao Yunlan!  You can’t take pictures of young ladies without their permission.  What is wrong with you!

* I love Da Qing’s very cat attitude of I Will Have Vengeance for These Wrongs

* Two for one! Shen Wei meets two faces from his past.

* Also, I get a little frustrated about people making a big deal about the 10,000 years versus 1,000 years age thing with Da Qing.  a) He has amnesia and b) the thousand years refers to the amount of time needed to cultivate to a certain stage in Chinese mythology - usually by absorbing energy from the sun, moon, or depending on the animal other sources.

* I feel so bad for Shen Wei, who knows what he thinks.  Were his friends brainwashed?  Did they forget?  Can they not say for some reason?  What is happening?

This review is getting a little long, so join in tomorrow for Part Two~~!

#Guardian #watchthrough

[zumpietoo]

Here’s the thing that Milly/Zelda/Kombucha/Dazey/Lisa/etc and all the socks in their drawers combined don’t understand. It is 20fucking21. If Cole Sprouse was some horrible abuser of women, rather than just the victim of his unfortunate taste in headcases (aka Lili and Bree) – he would be CANCELLED. No army of teenage fans, no amount of popularity in Hollywood, nothing could protect him in this day and age. If Bree had the receipts she and her fans claim she does… where are they? Why hasn’t she come forward properly instead of vague posting about Cole on Tumblr/Twitter/Insta/Twitch/wtfever? Why did all of their mutual friends side with Cole during their breakup? Clearly these people don’t remember when the Bree shit hit the fan. People were ready with RECEIPTS of her fuckery… the head games SHE played, all of her jealous stalking (which she also stalked Lili for a while!!), how she shit all over things that made him happy because they didn’t include her, how she told everyone he emotionally abused her when the reality was she thought they were going to get married and be 2GETHER4EVER (at 19 lmao ok), and then when it turned out he just kind of wanted a girlfriend to have sex with and play video games with (lmao like MOST 19 year old guys), she flipped the fuck out and called it emotional abuse. People had all her crazy documented back then, went after her across multiple platforms, and she ended up deleting everything and claiming it was “his stans” that made it impossible for her to come forward which… no… she just didn’t actually HAVE anything, no proof, nothing. Meanwhile, all of their mutual friends unfollowed her, if not immediately then definitely in the years following. The only reason Bree drops his name anymore is because it’s the only way she stays even close to relevant. It’s not because he actually abused her, mentally, emotionally or otherwise… it’s because she’s a tinkerbell who can’t deal with it when she’s not the most important thing in someone’s universe and when that turned out to be the case with Cole, she threw a bunch of accusations at him, stalked his new girlfriend (Lili at the time) etc. But never EVER in all that did she produce an ounce of proof. No friends that sided with her. No texts. No nothing. Because none of what she claimed ever actually happened.

Fast forward to Lili and we have the same issue. If Lili was the victim of Cole’s horrible emotional abuse… she’d put his ass on blast so fast. Lili has ZERO problem speaking her mind. She shit talks like it’s going out of style, and if she was the golden child of Riverdale, and was loved and adored by the producers and writers and RAS and the rest of the cast, and was the welcome wagon and all of the other stuff that her stans claim, if she went to ANY leadership and said “This is what happened, it was horrible, and I cannot be around my abuser like this” the CW would fire him. Or at least work to accomodate Lili if she was that beloved. Look at how fast they got rid of Ruby Rose on Batwoman when it turned out she was a nightmare behind the scenes? And she was the literal STAR of the show. And isn’t their narrative that the show leadership can’t stand Cole anyway (some of that is true, looking at you RAS and Ted especially, but that’s not because Cole is a nightmare to work with and more because KJ isn’t the fan favorite which, whatever)? Also if Lili DID get the network/show to give him the boot, which if he was abusive to her, she absolutely could, what would Cole do? Sue for breach of contract? When she should have mountains of proof after 3 years? When no doubt the show would’ve seen this behavior happening too? Like, what is their REASONING that Lili suffered and continues to suffer all of this grief that he’s supposedly causing her by flaunting Ari, etc? If she had proof, if anyone had seen all of this happening, they could’ve gotten him bounced in a heartbeat. Look at how fast ALL of Hollywood turned on Armie Hammer? Kevin Spacey’s accuser came forward 30 years after the fact, with almost zero proof and Hollywood cancelled him so fast. This isn’t the early 2000’s or even the early 2010’s anymore. It is 2021 and if Cole was really that horrible, people in the industry would know, and no one would work with him. But instead he’s still booking photography work, he’s still booking movies (two of them, Moonshot and Undercover), he’s inking deals with production companies. His past coworkers are excited to see him when they run into him on the street. Practically everyone who works with him says what a hard working professional he is (or they don’t say anything at all). His podcast that he helped produce and starred in won one of THE awards for podcasts, and is most likely getting a second season. And what has Lili done? Her poetry book was on the NYT Best sellers list for a week and then fell off. Chemical Hearts flopped HARD (to the point where she was recently pimping it MONTHS after it released). Covergirl filmed one commercial with her and did one print photoshoot with her, and then basically cut ties, having Lili put together her own photoshoots. Even if she didn’t buy her way onto PlusMinus or whatever it’s called, she still has 1 movie coming up and nothing else. Nothing even in the works that we know about. She’s the only one promoting Riverdale at all anymore because she has nothing else to fall back on. Honestly, the only reason she has pretty much any engagement anymore is because of her dog, who I actually think might be more popular than she is now. AND on top of all that, her recent whatever with Wallis apparently already has drama while Cole and Ari remain unbothered despite Ken and that other pap being dicks and all of the hate they Cari lobbed at them on a daily basis. Like, sorry Lili stans that she’s on the brink of irrelevancy, but if she had been abused and had her head fucked with like you all claim she has, she’d be lighting Cole up on social media because people would believe her, proof or no proof. Instead, she’s hanging with people who “only validate” her, including a toxic drunk bitch who basically trashed not only Cole but also Dylan at like, 3 in the morning all because Lili had to do a scene with her ex, and her mom who is KNOWN for feeding the fandom BS lies that she later gets caught out in. She’s trickling out a self-staged photoshoot because she hasn’t booked a real one in what? A year? She has 1 movie, and relies on her dog or breadcrumbing with another B-list actress to get her likes. I know its a tough pill to swallow for them and that’s why they’ve doubled down on the crazy so hard lately, but honestly it’s just sad now. There’s zero proof that Cole is anything they say, and if there was proof, Bree and especially Lili would be shouting it from the rooftops, but it doesn’t exist. There IS plenty of proof that Lili has zero work lined up, and a new drama filled relationship, and toxic friends (and that she cheated on Sam to be with Cole… something else they have absolutely NO PROOF of Cole doing). Sucks to be them I guess.

Even their concept of “abuse” consists of “Cole moving on and living his best life/OMG Cheater!!!”

And the latter applies to Lili, not Cole....

[tarhalindur]

Higurashi Gou final thoughts pt. 1

(Spoilers go under a cut:)

Taking this by arc:

Onidamashi-hen: The best executed first cour arc by a significant margin.  Probably not coincidentally, it stays the closest to the structure of the OG arc and thus keeps more of OG’s tension ratchet than the other Gou arcs.  I have two main issues, and I’m pretty sure both of them can be firmly pinned on the anime staff rather than Ryukishi07 himself.  First, it pulls its punch on the stealth sequel aspect.  I’m not entirely sure that going for a stealth sequel was the correct decision (it’s a cost/benefit tradeoff), but if you do you’re going for the wham of the sequel reveal, and the anime undercut this by putting the Rika/Hanyuu scene at the start of episode 2 rather than the end of the arc.  Second, it overdoes the final Rena fight, making it so over-the-top that it’s difficult to take seriously.  Neither of these issues exist in the manga (which has a believable amount of stabbing and has the Hanyuu scene at the end of the arc where it should be), and in the former case we also have a Ryukishi07 interview indicating that this was a change requested by the anime staff, so this goes on them.  (Interestingly, by way of contrast I think this approach might actually work well for the Mieruko-chan adaptation that Passione has coming out later this year.)

Watadamashi-hen: The core issue here (above and beyond fridge logic after Satokowaski-hen) is the finale, which landed like a wet fart.  It both escalates from zero to 100 *way* too fast and has the worst case of “tell don’t show” in the neo-question arcs - we learn about every single dead body in the arc from Ooishi’s end-of-arc narration.  That’s relatively defensible for three of those bodies, which we only learn about secondhand even in OG Watanagashi-hen (though IIRC in OG two of those bodies have foreshadowing from rumors earlier in the arc, and unless I’m forgetting something that’s absent here), but all five?  Yes, keeping Keiichi locked away from the final showdown removes fridge logic issues, but you have prominent security cameras - you can at least have him see the aftermath of the showdown on the screens (and freak out because of it).  Adding insult to injury, the Keiichi vs. door scenes are also so over-the-top as to damage willing suspension of disbelief.  The 0-to-100 issue is harder to fix, because the one thing Watadamashi did right was put the Rika-loses-it scene as an end-of-episode cliffhanger, and “Keiichi et. al. are about to enter the Saiguden” probably wanted an end-of-episode cliffhanger as well for discussion purposes (it might have been able to get away with using the commercial break).  The simplest fix is the same one @tsuisou-no-despair​ floated: cannibalize an episode off of another first cour arc.

Tataridamashi-hen: Amusingly, I think Gou has retained OG’s tradition of having the Tatari- question arc being the weakest question arc.  As I see it there are two interlocking core issues here which boil down to the same issue.  Tataridamashi-hen goes for a very unconventional method of building tension: it doesn’t, instead relying on the viewer’s realization that something bad has to be coming to do so for it (the old “that can’t be right, we’ve still got twenty minutes left in the episode” reaction I more commonly associate with things like police procedurals).  The problem is that this runs into the Endless Eight lesson: even flawless metatext should not be used at the expense of enjoyability of the actual text.  And while the arc got some leverage out of “when exactly is this going to diverge?”, there’s a point much like Endless Eight itself when you realize where it’s going to diverge (i.e, not until the end) and that until then you’re sitting through the same events you remember from OG.  It works about as well as it did for Haruhi.  (Unless you’re a new viewer, but in that case staying too close to Minagoroshi-hen has other issues.)  Worse, unlike Minagoroshi-hen itself (which did something similar to build tension but a) non-source readers hadn’t seen it before so it wasn’t foregone the same way and b) you had several more episodes after the subarc for the main event) the arc ends almost immediately after this.  (The simplest fix here might have been cutting down on the arc time by speedrunning Minagoroshi events, reducing the amount of time you’d have to wait.  You could even have a couple of obstacles collapse faster than expected; this late in the first cour it would serve as foreshadowing for Satokowashi-hen, and would also deal with unfortunate implications concerning the village’s prejudice considering that the staff knew Satoko was going to be the culprit.  Trimming an episode would also neatly solve the issue of where to get an additional episode for Watadamashi-hen from!)  The good news is that the final confrontation is the best of the first cour arcs (it’s somewhat more realistic than the other two, actually not that far behind some of the more memetastic OG moments except for Teppei’s eyes, and not showing Ooishi’s rampage is forgivable given that they knew they would be actually showing it in Nekodamashi-hen), but that’s damning with faint praise.

Nekodamashi-hen: The best Gou arc.  The episode 15 jump cut is the stuff of legends and the best scene in the show by a sizable margin (the one thing the director does well is black humor, it seems), while the rest of the arc isn’t as good, it’s far shorter on demerits than the rest of the show.  The one really, really obvious demerit is that they really didn’t need to spend half an episode on the intestines-ripping scene (if Ryukishi07′s comments are to be believed, once again we’re pinning this on Passione), but effects on my stomach aside there are worse issues to have.

Satokowashi-hen: And here we have the other side of the coin; this is the worst Gou arc, and it’s the one spot where I’m pretty sure Ryukishi07 himself gets some of the blame.  There’s a few issues here.  First, the single most obvious dangling plot thread from Matsuribayashi-hen (Satoshi’s fate) is effectively dropped despite being directly relevant to the other dangling thread that was picked up (how Rika treats Satoko and vice versa); this includes missing an opportunity to show Satoko’s character arc through different responses to learning about Satoshi’s condition.  Secondly and compounding, Shion is also dropped along with the Satoshi thread; AIUI this is kind of understandable given final Satoko/Shion interaction in the Matsuribayashi-hen VN (which IIRC never made it into the anime), but dropping her without explanation still leaves something that looks awfully like a plot hole since a single conversation with Shion is potentially enough to stop the events of this arc from ever happening.  (”Character X had information that would have stopped the tragedy but never had an opportunity to tell anyone” is a classic tragedy trope, but you should really have a *reason* for that character never having the opportunity as opposed to just having them vanish without explanation.)  Finally, there’s just the general issue that while the ending points for both Rika and Satoko are reasonable the path they take to get there just doesn’t quite add up.  I can kind of get there via a combination of “blame the director” (the loops montage could and should have easily shown Satoko’s deteriorating mental condition as she watched - using interlaced cuts to her face with changes in facial expression is a classic method) and mind caulk (Rika was exaggerating for effect when she described her desire to go to St. Lucia’s as a long-time thing and it only really kicked in after Matsuribayashi-hen, Satoko originally only planned to suicide in Matsuribayashi-2 and only took Rika out with her as a crime of passion after feeling betrayed, hence the next few loops lacking her murdering Rika) but being mind-caulkable is not the same as actual good execution.

I mean, I’ve banged on this drum before, but... the basic concept works.  Really well.  Satoko’s abandonment issues and Rika’s treatment of Satoko are two of the major dangling plot threads from OG Higurashi (*eyes both Minagoroshi-hen and anime-only Yakusamashi-hen*).  It makes perfectly good sense that the latter comes back to bite Rika, especially in a sequel literally titled “karma”.  I already suspected Satoko was on the autism spectrum based on OG, her being ADHD in addition to or instead of that makes perfectly good sense given those conditions often overlap.  Rika’s desire to escape the well morphing into a desire to escape Hinamizawa entirely?  Sure, just present it as that.  Satoko steadily losing her support network as her friends are torn away from her by changing life circumstances, then going to a boarding school that she hates, that strips the rest of her support structure for her and starts to take even her one remaining friend (her childhood friend, no less - and one that Satoko is at this point attracted to romantically in true osananajimi fashion) away from her, and then starting to snap with some prodding from a certain witch?  That’s a compelling story idea!  But as present it just doesn’t quite work, and that’s on the execution.

(Side note: I wonder if some of what went wrong with Gou was just the kind of production issues endemic to modern anime, amplified by the pandemic.  I remember at least one comment/blog post somewhere in the wake of WEP’s issues noting some of the effects that production issues can have on an anime, and one of the things they noted was excessive slavishness to the source material as a time-saving measure; that sounds awfully similar to some of Ryukishi07′s comments about how he didn’t expect Passione to take his script quite so literally, and to my admittedly untrained eye it sure looked like there were a bunch more other animation studios than usual mentioned in Gou’s credits...)

Final score: depends on your exact rating system, but given the range I’m looking at I can’t see how I can give it any score other than 3.4/5 for obvious reasons.  (Pending Sotsu, anyways.  It’s possible that Sotsu will resolve some of these issues - in particular, Ryukishi07 always has struck me as the kind of author who would get a kick into baiting us into falling for the same twist twice; it’s not impossible that the apparent lack of unreliable narrators so far is a double bluff, and that could affect the “question arc” scores in particular.  More on this in a forthcoming solution space post.)

[blackjack-15]

Silly Rabbit, Ecological Terrorism is For Kids! — Thoughts on: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek (ICE)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it. As ICE sends off the Jetsetting Games category and moves into the Odd Games category, there will be a section between The Intro and The Title called The Weird Stuff, where I’ll go into what storyline marks this game a bit Odd in the Nancy Drew series as a whole.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: ICE; TRT; mention of FIN; mention of CUR; mention of TRN; mention of SEA.

This meta is under a read more because of its sheer length.

The Intro:

Ughhhhh. UGHHH.

The White Wolf of Icicle Creek has a lot of things that make it distinct in the Nancy Drew video game series — it sports the first new interface since SHA, it has the world’s most boring list of ‘enticing moments’ from the game on the back, its assets look like they were forcefully molded out of gummy bears, it randomly was released on Wii, it’s the best-known game among non-fans thanks to the Game Grumps — but it also stands out because not one of those things make it enjoyable to play or to watch without a heavy amount of MST3K-style commentary.

Also because it features the fandom’s least favorite puzzle of all time…but more on that later.

A point to get out of the way before we get into the game proper is that this game feels a lot like a cheap knock-off of Treasure in a Royal Tower. Like, a lot like a cheap knock-off. One of those animated films called “Bemo’s Lost in the Ocean” or “A Toy Tale” that come out around Disney/Pixar films to try to trick hapless grandmas into buying them.

Just lining it up, we have Nancy stuck in/around a lodge in winter, an edict from the owner of the lodge to figure out what’s up with repeated Incidents and possible sabotage while most guests have left, an academic around Nancy’s age, an Old Coot, an Olympian whose grandparent was important, chores (including food related chores) to do in order to progress in the story, a suspect you can only talk to face-to-face for part of the game…the list honestly goes on in both big and small ways.

While ICE isn’t the only one that tries to do this (since I’m not doing a SEA meta, I won’t get into the fact that SEA literally just remastered DDI’s characters and said ‘good enough’), it does feel particularly egregious because, for all its copying, there’s not enough in the game to distract from it even a bit.

ICE is a game searching for an identity and unable to find one, no matter how many plot points, chores, or games (horrible, unskippable games) they throw at the player. We have full on international espionage and ecological terrorism here (more on that in the next section), and it just…doesn’t matter, at the end of the day. It also takes place in Canada, but your only clue to that is that one of the characters says “eh” a lot, so that’s not great either.

If ICE is a new game to you (it can be a bear to install and even worse to complete, so I’m going to go off the assumption that not everyone will be familiar with it), you’ve probably only heard of the cooking chores, fox and geese, and that this is the game with the Return of Tony Balducci, previously of TRN fame. (Honestly, ICE had a big enough cast without its phone characters, but HER decided to shove three phone characters along with one partial phone character at us anyway.) And, to be honest, that’s pretty much all there is to the game.

Now I know this sounds harsh, but there is a possible explanation to the lack of content in this game. In my previous meta (link at the top of this post) I made a note that CRE’s production in all likelihood suffered because the company was focused on ICE’s new interface. I don’t think it’s a leap at all to say that ICE’s story and characters could also have suffered because of the same thing.

The biggest problem with ICE — besides the weird stuff we’ll get into below — is that it’s a shallow game. None of the characters have any real depth, the plot is a paper-thin copy of TRT, the puzzles are alternatingly impossible and extremely easy, and in an effort to add “depth”, we get…well, we get this next section.

The Weird Stuff:

With each of the Odd Games (ICE through RAN, Heaven help us all), there’s something that makes the game truly…well, odd. Odd for the Nancy Drew series, odd for the age range specified on the front of the box, and odd in general when you look at the rest of the plot.

In this game, it comes in the form of terrorism — or rather, two types of terrorism. Guadalupe is our first (and only, in this series) ecological terrorist, belonging to a fringe group called “Run and Go Free” and being perfectly fine with illegal acts (destruction of the fishing lodge, sabotage of personal property), even telling Nancy that she’s done worse in the name of Run and Go Free.

Nancy Drew Games are no stranger to hippie/naturalist types (see DOG, DDI, CAR, etc.) but Lupe is our first to be legitimately dangerous. Sure, she doesn’t end up being the ultimate Bad Guy, but she is A Bad Guy, and it really does seem very odd to me that after everything Lupe does (and insinuates that she’s done), that she gets away with barely a slap on the wrist in having to leave the lodge.

Lupe in no way fits in with the rest of the plot; there’s nothing to justify her being present in the game, she can appear about halfway through the game and then leaves to become a phone contact soon after, she’s not present enough to be an actual suspect — she has no place in the plot nor the game, and it really does just boggle the mind that a character is in it at all, especially with ICE having a greater than average number of suspects to begin with.

On the other hand, however, we have Yanni, an Eastern European Olympian spy/terrorist, sent by the Fredonian (a commonly used fake country) government to bomb around the lodge to find uranium under the cover of training for the next Olympics.

That is a whole lot of things for one character.

You’d think with the presence of Lupe that Yanni would fit right in, but he doesn’t make her — or himself — any less odd or out of place than he would have been alone. It’s a ‘suspicious Olympian’ character that we already got with Jacques, but he’s a million times worse, setting off friggin bombs to find a metal that his government wants for…well, the normal reason that governments want uranium.

So we can add in “reference to ongoing nuclear warfare” as another thing that makes this game Odd.

Yanni doesn’t fit the game or the plot, which is pretty bad considering he’s responsible for about half the plot in the first place. He also has that weird aside about his grandmother being eaten by wolves, as if HER wants the player to suspect him because of some twisted revenge against wolves plot (which would have been Very Weird) so that they can pull the rug out at the end and be like “see?? He’s a political terrorist looking for uranium for nuclear bombs for his country!!! Gotcha!!”.

Like, it’s not a Gotcha if it’s absolute lunacy. My land.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s get to something a little less Odd.

The Title:

 I actually don’t have much to say here. The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is honestly a great name; it tells us the focal point of the game (the wolf), the location, (Icicle Creek), and even pretty much tells you the season that this game is happening in (white, icicle). It accomplishes a lot in a very short amount of words, and pertains accurately to the game we’re dealing with.

We’ll chalk that up in the “Win” category…especially since we’re going straight back into the “Lose” category with the next section.

The Mystery:

The mystery is a mess, full stop. There’s way too much going on for the amount of payoff (i.e. little to none), and the plot, thin at best, completely drops off at the 2/3rds mark when all the player has left to do is wait for random events to occur and keep putting off fox and geese.

Anyway.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage to parts of the resort. Asked for help by the owner of the resort who’s away on business, Nancy must pick up the slack left by staff who have quit, run food-related errands, and discover who might be behind these attacks before it’s too late.

Oh wait, that’s Treasure in a Royal Tower. Lemme start again.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage —

You get the picture.

The biggest difference pre-game is that after every incident, a white wolf is spotted, only to disappear before the police get there. People start connecting the wolf to the crimes, and go as far as blaming it for cases of food poisoning and slashed tires, as if the wolf is cooking food and using a knife with its paws.

Just as Nancy’s arriving on scene, the bunkhouse is blown up and she hears the wolf howling — so obviously there must be a connection there, and a wolf definitely isn’t just responding to a loud noise.

This part honestly feels a bit like the beginning of CUR, where the game tries to establish Scary Feelings and Ominous Threats and just comes off ham-fisted.

The back of the box features three ‘exciting’ things that Nancy gets to do in this game, which are as follows: cook lunch and dinner, ride a snowmobile and wear snow shoes, and do snowball fights and ice fishing. While it’s sad that those moderately exciting things are the best that the box can boast, it’s even sadder that they really are the best the game has to offer.

It’s easy to lose thread of the mystery nearly as soon as Nancy gets to the lodge, because she’s immediately bombarded with laundry that has to be done before a certain time, meals that have to be done within a certain hour or two, and a suspect (Lupe) that can just refuse to show up.

Oh, and the return of Tino Balducci.

Returning in a game where he doesn’t fit in and where no one wanted him in the first place, Tino’s there to “help” Nancy solve the mystery by giving her a questionnaire for her suspects to fill out that asks what planet they see themselves as, among other inanities.

Honestly, this whole section could be summed up as “Tino returns, among other inanities”.

Nancy, throughout all of this, somehow has time to do a bit of detective work, interviewing a cast of rather one-note suspects, figuring out that more than one person is responsible for the many accidents. Guadalupe’s sabotage is discovered and she’s sent home, Yanni is increasingly unavailable (which is hugely suspicious), snowball fights are more prevalent than necessary, and finally the villain is exposed, all culminating in a glitchy, nigh-impossible snowmobile chase.

Oh, and there’s a half-tamed wolf storyline that kinda pops up every now and again.

All in all, the mystery is a weak thread throughout the game — which is a problem, because it’s the only thread throughout the game — that’s easily overshadowed by the chores, games, and frankly awful visuals throughout the game.

Now, to those who contribute (in a way) to the non-entity that is ICE’s story:

The Suspects:

Ollie Randall is our resident grumpy caretaker and is Chantal’s right-hand man, along with being on the Avalanche Patrol and a firm believer in the bad luck that wolves bring. His wife can’t handle cold temperatures due to a nerve condition, so he’s also his daughter Freddie’s sole parent during the winter.

As a culprit in the game as it now is, Ollie would have been the only sensical option; fed up with the awful guests that come and cause havoc, he starts causing little easily-solved accidents to spook away the less hardy-type guests, but it keeps spiraling as it doesn’t keep out everyone but people like Bill Kessler. Frustrated by the treatment the lodge gets, he decides that if people don’t treat it nicely, they can’t have it at all…

Unfortunately, Ollie is limited to being Grumpy, and not a lot else.

Freddie Randall is Ollie’s daughter and the self-proclaimed Snow Princess due to her ability to stay out in the cold for hours in her snow fort, and to take repeated snowballs to the face courtesy of a teen detective.

Freddie is…I know I talked about how Yanni and Lupe don’t really fit into the game, but Freddie really doesn’t fit any version of this game. She’s there for a mini game, she doesn’t have a personality, you can’t skip her mini game, she’s voiced by Lani Minella…the list goes on and on. Her shining moment of glory is acting as a red herring by throwing a snowball through Lou’s window.

She’s pointless to talk about as a potential culprit, even though she would have been an interesting “culprit” in a case where all the incidents are actually Freddie accidentally causing trouble, but that probably would have been even less satisfying than how the game actually went, so we’ll just move along here.

Our cross-country skiing Olympian from the fictional Eastern European country of Fredonia, Yanni Volkstaia is both our only suspect wearing a onesie and our only suspect with a family member eaten by wolves.

I know, that’s already a high bar to top. Don’t worry, he’ll fall very, very far below it.

Yanni, as mentioned above, is our odd spy/terrorist villain who is disguising his being there for uranium by saying that it’s his Olympic competitors trying to throw off his training. Why an Olympian is training alone without any coaches or security…well, let’s just say that Yanni didn’t really think his cover story through.

Just because Yanni’s the obvious culprit doesn’t mean he fills the role well; Yanni is obvious, annoying, and his paper-thin cover is just annoying enough to be…well, annoying. He throws out that his grandmother was “killed and devoured” by wolves as if he wants Nancy to believe that that’s the reason he’s targeting the lodge but…it still points directly to him. It’s just not great all the way around.

Joining Yanni in terrorism is Guadalupe Comillo, activist from California and hard-to-find suspect. Lupe can, as mentioned above, literally just not appear for a bit, stalling out the game and making her even more annoying than she already is.

Lupe’s cover is that she’s a bird watcher, but she knows absolutely nothing about birds — like honestly nothing, even though she had time to make her cover story (not unlike Yanni).

She gets sent away by destruction of private property (Ollie’s gun – super dangerous to make a gun misaim out in the wild and she’s lucky he didn’t hit anything problematic [like another person] because of it) and good riddance, but appears as a phone friend to rather pointlessly exonerate herself and do pretty much nothing else but stop the game in its tracks until she lets it proceed.

As a culprit, Lupe would have been the other obvious choice, but she’s just not in the game enough, so she’s easy to ignore. Her cover is thin, but so is her motivation (!!! Save the wolf!!!), so she’s one of the most annoying non-entity suspects in this series.

Our second Californian in the cast is Lou Talbot, who is a college student, master of ‘earthitecture’ (inspired by Poppy Dada) and stealer of dinosaur bones for money. He also plays fox and geese with Bill in his spare time. He does a really good impression of the Guy in my MFA twitter as well, but that’s literally it.

No, really, that’s his entire character. I can’t even posit what he would be like as the culprit because that is LITERALLY all we’re given on him. End of bio. My gosh, what a waste of pixels.

Lou’s partner in fox and geese is Bill Kessler, who loves to fish and whose grandmother used to own the lodge before Chantal. While he feels that his grandmother Tilly was cheated out of the lodge, he has little desire to get it back, and really just wants to hide the fact that he’s been to the lodge before (an odd thing to hide, but whatever makes him feel better.)

Like Lou, apart from that, he really doesn’t have any character. He basically is a mix of TRT’s Jacques in his family connection to the lodge and SHA’s Dave in actual amount of motivation (i.e., 0 motivation) to do anything about it. He is, however, the person who makes Nancy play fox and geese, and for that alone, I hate him.

As a culprit, Bill’s played as a red herring for a solid 5 minutes of gameplay (though not very well — why would an avid fisherman blow up a fishing shack?), and then totally discounted the moment Nancy finds out his backstory. He’s really just there — like most of the cast, worryingly enough — to pad out the number of suspects and to give Nancy a taste of Hell through fox and geese.

The Favorite:

There are a few bright spots in this confused mess of a game, so let’s go through them.

My favorite moment in the game is when Nancy, after Yanni says the horrific line about his grandmother being killed and devoured by wolves, can ask “how”. As if that’s a sentence that needs a ‘how’. It’s a great moment of Nancy being absolutely tone deaf, and I giggle like a madman every time I think about it.

My favorite puzzle in the game is probably the cooking minigame, which I dislike in frequency and time requirement, but do love in actual practice. It’s fun to cook in every Nancy Drew game, and this one is no exception. I just wish it wasn’t regimented so heavily.

I love the atmosphere of the lodge; it’s beautifully animated (in fact one of my favorite locations in the ND games), big without being too big, and is never boring, even by the end of the game. The lodge is largely a character unto itself, and is quite successful as a wonderful location.

The Un-Favorite:

There’s a lot to unpack here, but we’ll keep it short because the fix section of this meta is gonna have me by the throat.

My least favorite moment in the game is the moment Tino comes into the game. As the game now stands, there’s no reason for him to be involved, and short a comment about him by the Hardy Boys, which would at least justify it a little, he’s purposeless. He’s worse than that, actually — he’s there to slow the game down, and that’s a cardinal sin.

My least favorite puzzle in the game is a tie between fox and geese (UGH) and the final snowmobile chase. My problems with fox and geese are obvious — they’re everyone’s problems with fox and geese: it’s a required puzzle, it’s hard to do, there’s no way to cheat through it, and it takes forever.

The final snowmobile chase is somehow even worse. It’s buggy, laggy, has nothing to do with the actual plot, has arbitrary win conditions — it’s the worst (or at least among the worst) that HER has to offer with final puzzles. If everything else about ICE was perfect, engaging, fun, and thought-provoking, this final puzzle would still put me off of playing it. It’s just that bad.

The storyline with Isis and that whole backstory isn’t treated well in game; it’s almost as if they came up with the title and then remembered at the last minute that there’s supposed to be an actual wolf. I would have loved more of a focus on that storyline; as it is, it barely counts as a blip on the game’s radar — which is a shame.

The Fix:

Gosh, how on earth will I fix The White Wolf of Icicle Creek? The answer is that I don’t feel like I can just apply a few quick fixes and be on my way; the only answer I could find is to approach this as if I was at the proposal meeting for this game — how would I outline the barebones scenario?

This section will be long, as I’m going to start just from the skeleton and build things in. What follows is my own imaginings of what my own personal ideas would be to create ICE, rather than to fix it from what the finished product was. As an important note, the side-plot with the wolf, as it was really neglected and bare-bones to begin with in the game, is mostly removed.

The first section I’ll work on is structure. Though it wasn’t done perfectly in FIN, I feel like the pacing of ICE could be vastly improved by putting a clock on the game by assigning designated days and tasks. Three days is still probably a good idea, as it lets us easily break the story into a 3-act structure and delineate certain tasks for certain days without overloading one day in particular. We’ll get more into what should happen in Days 1, 2, and 3 later in a general overview of how the plot would go.

The mechanism used to get Nancy there — Chantal being a friend of Carson’s — isn’t bad, but I’d change it up just slightly. Nancy’s not yet a “professional” detective, but we’re only 2 games from her being hired by a foreign country’s authorities, so she should be making her way up there. It stands to reason that Nancy would attract some attention from the business in CRE since the Hardy Boys would definitely mention Nancy in their de-briefing and Aikens is a big name, so let’s build on that from here. Chantal is still Carson’s friend, and she still wants to get these incidents solved while she’s away from the Lodge for legal matters — someone got injured at the lodge and is now suing.

Carson decides to officially hire Nancy — paperwork, legal documentation, etc. — as a “concerned third party” in Chantal’s problems, telling her that her job is to find out two things: find out what’s causing the incidents of sabotage, and give Carson enough evidence in favor of the lodge’s safety that he can prove reasonable doubt against the people accusing Chantal. Nancy will be there undercover as a family friend of Chantal’s, with only Ollie knowing that she’s there in an official capacity.

ICE has a cast that is both unwieldy and characterless, and I feel like the way to fix that is through combining characters. Starting out we have Ned, Chantal, Tino, the ex-maid, her boyfriend, Ollie, Freddie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill — 10 characters that we deal with in the present, plus one other player (in the boyfriend/stalker guy). 11 in total. That is a huge, huge cast that we definitely need to pare down.

The first thing to do is to take out Tino Balducci. He slows down the plot, is completely unnecessary, and isn’t even entertaining. Since there’s no Hardy Boys to play off of him (and I would keep the Hardy Boys out of this game, even with my love for them), Tino needs to go the way of the dodo. And good riddance to him, honestly.

Freddie, an obvious subject to axe, should instead be aged up to around 20 and combined with the maid whose ex-boyfriend’s letter Nancy finds at the beginning of the game. Freddie would handle all the chores the first day except the cooking.

Instead of a nebulous, incident-causing ex-boyfriend, Freddie would have just started a relationship with Lou, keeping our cast tight and visible, rather than one-off characters with nothing else to give to the story.

By now we’re down to Carson, Ned, Chantal, Freddie, Ollie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill. I think we can do a little better than that.

The next step I’d take is to remove Yanni entirely. Yes, I know it’s a big change to remove the canonical culprit, but bear with me. With Yanni and Lupe having so many similarities and together being guilty of 99% of the Crimes in this game, I’m pretty comfortable in combining them. I’d also make the minor change of having Lupe be an Indigenous Canadian rather than Hispanic and from California, since our game is set in Canada and there’s absolutely no reason for a large portion of our cast to be American.

With Yanni gone, Lupe (or whatever her new name would be, since the name ‘Lupe’, all nationality changes aside, in a game ostensibly about a wolf makes me want to kill myself) assumes a few of his personality quirks – most importantly, a family member with a past with wolves. It doesn’t really matter if it’s positive or negative, you just want the association there as a herring (red or otherwise).

That puts us down to 5 suspects to talk to and three phone friends for a total of 8 players in the present. Since Chantal is supposed to be busy, I’d remove the ability to talk to her entirely — anything that Chantal could offer can come through Carson as Nancy’s official “employer”, which brings us to a nice 7 players — an entirely manageable number.

So let’s begin.

The beginning of the game with Nancy at her desk always includes a case file, so this time the case file would say that Nancy, at the behest of her ‘client’, Carson Drew, is flying out to Alberta to investigate strange happenings at Chantal Moique’s lodge. Chantal is trying to settle with people who got hurt there and are trying to sue her, and Carson’s helping to advise her. Nancy’s mission is two-fold: figure out what’s causing the incidents at the lodge, and find evidence that Chantal can’t be held liable for the injuries incurred by the guests suing her.

Wolves are commonly seen around the area of the lodge — Northern Alberta has some of the highest population of wolves in North America — and there’s a rumor at the lodge that the spirits of the wolves that are hunted in the area every winter are causing some of the sabotage.

Chantal thinks the rumor is being spread by whoever is doing the actual sabotage to make her guests leave and force her out of business, so Carson tells Nancy to pay attention to the stories about the wolves — and one snow-white wolf in particular, who is often sighted very close to the lodge. Carson suspects that, if it exists, the white wolf is actually a trained dog (a white/white and silver Siberian Husky, for example) being used to whip up panic, but tells Nancy to keep an open mind.

As Nancy’s arriving at the Lodge, an explosion occurs in the distance, causing the rumbling of snow to start. Ollie, who’s picked up Nancy from her plane, says darkly that he’s been waiting for something like this to happen, and that this will probably cause a minor avalanche (his opinion as the head of Avalanche Patrol in the area), making it impossible to leave the lodge for a few days. He tells Nancy to head straight to bed once they get to the lodge, as she’s in for an exhausting time dealing with the “weirdos” still left at the lodge.

Nancy wakes up and Day One begins with Freddie freaking out outside Nancy’s door. After explaining that the regular chef (who was off for the last month visiting family) can’t get back to the lodge until tomorrow and that Freddie’s only manned the kitchen once or twice, Nancy says that she has experience cooking and offers to take the chef’s duties for the day.

Day One has Nancy meet all the suspects – Bill’s playing a game (I don’t care what it is as long as it’s something that involves writing things down) with anyone who passes by and talks about how out of all the lodges in Canada, this one’s his favorite; Lou hangs out near the bones (make him an archeology major or something related to but not exactly paleontology) and Definitely Doesn’t Know the Cute Girl Who Works at the Lodge, How Dare Nancy Assume; Not-Lupe is gone until 4pm when it starts getting dark because she loves spending time in nature, especially with the Super Special Wolf running around the place; and Ollie’s in the workshop fixing the things that have been sabotaged, worries about his daughter being away from her mother and about her ‘cavorting’ with a guest.

Nancy still preps lunch and the day goes on without a hitch other than Lou having an overheard argument with someone at around 6. Nancy cooks dinner, accidentally (due to smudged instructions from Freddie) sprinkling paprika in everyone’s food and setting off an allergic (mild to moderate anaphylaxis, helped by an epi pen) reaction + hives in Freddie, who they fly out via helicopter that night.

Ollie, feeling hostile towards Nancy, takes a look at the instructions/recipe that Nancy worked off of and says to her that the first page is Freddie’s handwriting, but the second page isn’t — someone did this on purpose. Nancy calls Carson, who says that the soonest he can get there is the day after next, and to keep herself safe above everything — he’ll check in with the hospital Freddie’s at since it’s also in Edmonton, where Carson and Chantal are. Carson warns Nancy that the guests were about to settle the lawsuit when the news about the explosion hit the news, and are now more determined than ever to sue for all Chantal’s worth.

Day 2 opens with the cook (who’s unseen and just exists in order to relieve Nancy of kitchen duty) arriving and a phone call from Carson asking for Chantal/Freddie if Nancy can grab the laundry bags from the guests’ rooms and that the spare key is in the register at the front (of course guarded by a puzzle — I’d even accept a mini fox and geese, as one of the big problems with that puzzle in the vanilla game is that it goes on way too long.

While snooping in the desk, Nancy finds evidence that Chantal might have been guilty of criminal neglect — a few things around the lodge are listed as “fixed” and totally safe when really they still need some maintenance — and wonders how she should tell Carson and if she should wait until she has more evidence. Before she goes out for the day, Not-Lupe mentions to Nancy “in confidence” that she overheard Lou fighting with Freddie before dinner, calling it a “lover’s quarrel”.

After lunch and talking with all the suspects again, Nancy goes to grab the laundry with the master key and snoops in everyone’s rooms, finding various clues and suspicious things: Bill’s journal detailing how Chantal is running the place into the ground and needs to be replaced, along with a few lodge magazines; Not-Lupe’s gloves with suspicious specks of things on them (Nancy takes a sample of it in a Kleenex or something); Lou’s heavy suitcase that has a case with imprints of bones in it; Ollie’s has maintenance books that also detail how to take things apart and maintenance notes that say he saw the wolf around but didn’t have his gun; Freddie’s only thing of interest is a little dinosaur pin on her dresser.

Nancy takes the opportunity to snoop in Chantal’s normal room and finds that the things that were listed in the documents in the front desk really were fixed; Ollie reported to Chantal that things that he fixed were un-fixed by the time he went back to them the next day — most of the time suffering damage as well, such as the sauna that injured the guests that are suing Chantal. Nancy calls her father with the news, and Carson says to save those documents so that he can come get them tomorrow, and to see if she can find any clues to who might have done it.

After dinner Nancy talks to Lou, who confesses that he and Freddie started dating a few days ago after meeting online last semester in a dinosaur enthusiast forum — hence his decision to come to the lodge, as Freddie said there were cool bones here. He was originally going to steal a few small ones and thought no one would notice if he replaced them with resin-cast replicas, but Freddie caught him and they had a fight which ended with Lou deciding not to steal, and Freddie saying that she could help him make replicas for him to take home and keep in his house.

Nancy asks why he’s telling her, and Lou says that Ollie seems to get along with Nancy well, and he’d like Nancy to calm Ollie down if Ollie discovers that he’s dating Freddie. Nancy asks Lou about the wolf, and Lou says that some of the stuff could be a wolf — he’s seen one around the lodge once or twice — but he hasn’t really been paying attention to anything except the bones and Freddie (who he’s looking forward to visiting once he can).

When talking with Bill, he offhandedly mentions that he used to be a handyman — the sink in his room started acting up, but he fixed it easily because he thinks that Ollie has enough to do without doing this easy fix. Bill says that this would never have happened when Chantal’s father was running the Lodge and accuses Chantal of preferring to spend long “business trips” in the city to actually paying attention to the Lodge — he says she should just live in the city and hire a manager with experience who actually cares. Nancy asks Bill about the wolf, and he says if anyone could be haunted by wolves, he’d believe it was Chantal.

Nancy, it should be noted, during her explorations around the lodge, sees a few pawprints and some chewed-on debris, but otherwise hasn’t seen the wolf in person. Just traces and tracks.

Not-Lupe and Ollie both dodge Nancy’s questions – Ollie’s busy as everything seems to be breaking at once, and snaps at Nancy that without Chantal around, he’s the only person keeping the lodge afloat, and he’d be better off without the stress of this job. When Nancy asks him about the wolf, Ollie says that the last thing they need is some idiot tourist being attacked by a wolf, and so he refuses to believe that there’s a wolf around the area.

Not-Lupe is at her normal place at the window (though there’s a chair there because no one stands all day), and when Nancy asks about the wolf, says that that’s why she’s there — she heard the rumor about the wolf and wanted to see it, but that her visit’s been very disappointing — just a junky lodge with incompetent staff and no wolves anywhere. Her hobby is visiting winter lodges, and this one just Isn’t up to snuff.

Nancy tries to pry deeper, but Not-Lupe shuts her down and goes to bed; Nancy investigates the living room as everyone leaves for bed and finds crinkled up under the couch a magazine cutout about the Premier Lodge Group, a company that owns winter lodges all over Canada and the United States, and their plans to build a group of lodges in Alberta as soon as a few “minor inconveniences” with location are solved.

The day ends with Carson calling; Nancy tells him about all the suspects (Carson confirms Lou’s story by having talked to Freddie), the magazine, Ollie wanting to quit, etc. Carson promises to do some research on Premier Lodge Group and tells Nancy to send him a picture of the stuff she found on Lupe’s gloves. Nancy does so, and that’s the end of Day 2.

Day 3 opens again with Carson’s phone call, informing Nancy that he’ll be there in the early evening — he’s having a contact of his look at the photo Nancy sent, but he’s pretty sure it won’t be good news.

Premier Lodge Group was investigated a few years ago for sabotage to their competitors but ultimately nothing came out of it, and Carson suspects that people were paid off to keep quiet about it. Carson says that he’s looked into Ollie (since Carson suspected him the most) and apparently Ollie always grouches about quitting when he’s stressed but has been there for 20 years and is as loyal as they come, so Nancy says she’ll focus on Not-Lupe and Bill — the two lodge-hoppers who seem dissatisfied with the lodge.

Both Not-Lupe and Bill are gone when Nancy gets downstairs, and Lou (who’s planning on leaving that night to go to Edmonton) says that they both got a sack lunch from the kitchen and left early in the morning to go explore outside. He tells Nancy she can borrow his snowshoes and says that they both headed out (independently) in the direction of Skookum Ridge.

When Nancy gets up to the Ridge, she spots the “wolf” — really a Siberian Husky, like Carson thought, who seems very well trained. When the dog comes up to Nancy, a gunshot ripples through the air and nearly hits the dog, who would have gone running off had Nancy not grabbed her collar and yelled not to shoot. Nancy sees Bill across the ridge and waves him over, explaining that it’s a dog, not a wolf. The dog (whose name is something way better than Isis — literally anything else would do) is suspicious of Bill at first, which convinces Nancy that it’s not Bill’s — the only suspect left is Not-Lupe.

When she tells Bill what she knows about Not-Lupe, Bill admits to having seen her before at a lodge that went out of business due to mysterious accidents, but thought it was a coincidence before digging deeper in the magazines he brought and finding Not-Lupe in the back of a small photo of Premier Lodge Administrative Staff — he was worried about keeping it safe and knowing that there would be no cleaning staff until at least the next day, crumpled it up and put it under the couch he normally sits by.

A happy, friendly dog in tow, Nancy and Bill head back to the lodge only to find Ollie and Lou standing outside looking worried. They tell Nancy that they both went outside because they heard a loud noise, only to find the door locked behind them — and every other door locked as well. After realizing that Not-Lupe wouldn’t open the doors for them, Ollie went to get an axe for the door, only to have a note appear on the door’s window that if they forced their way in, the whole Lodge would be burned to the ground in an instant.

Carson calls then, saying that he’s a few minutes away, but that his friend got back to him — Not-Lupe’s gloves were covered in residue from explosives. Bill takes Nancy’s phone and begins to fill Carson in on who they think Not-Lupe is working for and who she is. Nancy asks Lou and Ollie to hoist her up to her own window, which she keeps unlocked, and crawls in, creeping downstairs to the main room to try to find how Not-Lupe will burn the lodge and stop her.

Nancy confronts Not-Lupe, who confirms her identity as a saboteur for the Premier Lodge Group, saying that with the bad press around the lodge Chantal would have already had to sell — but she’s going to go one step further and cause an ‘incident’, blowing up the lodge with fuses hidden around its ground floor — Chantal’s father won’t spend the money to rebuild the lodge, and the only proof that is against her is the word of two American kids, an old man, and a lodge-hopper with a very incriminating diary that would be found soon enough. She tells Nancy that she can either try to catch her or try to save the lodge and runs out the back, intent on escaping as she pushes the button to arm the explosives.

Nancy yells out the window for them to catch Not-Lupe, who’s got to be headed out to the main road, tossing the cushion of the seat Lupe usually sat in so that her dog can catch her scent, then has the final timed puzzle be switching off each detonator (which would be in each of the places where the suspects usually were, with the exception of Ollie’s whose is in the front desk).

As soon as Nancy disarms them, Bill calls out to her that Carson just called — Lou and the dog tracked Lupe to the main road, and Bill called Carson to let him know. Carson’s car stops Not-Lupe (Carson brought a policeman on a hunch), and the day is saved. Premier Lodge is snagged in a major lawsuit by Chantal’s father and other lodge owners who have had the same thing happen to them, and Chantal hires Bill as co-manager to ensure there’s always someone there to manage the lodge and for his wealth of knowledge of what makes a good lodge and good experience for guests.

The game ends with Nancy writing her letter to Hannah (so that Hannah doesn’t worry about them), and with her dad’s praise for a job well done.

I realize that this is a monumental fix; it’s a brand-new game made out of the skeleton of the old one. I also realize that there are a million and one ways to re-write this game; this one takes the idea of sabotage, one of the most frequent inciting incidents in the Nancy Drew world, and just makes it a little bigger.

No terrorism required.

#nancy drew #clue crew #nancy drew games #white wolf of icicle creek #ICE #long post #video games #nancy drew meta

[kazarinn]

Roundup of all the things I’ve translated within the last month

Those who have been following me for a while might know that the last month saw me be very unusually prolific with translation (especially Digimon-related ones), to unprecedented extents. I'll be very honest about the fact that it's because of the current quarantine, which has left me with not a lot to do and a sense of boredom that translation somehow happens to satiate a bit ^^;; That said, the very large number of translations I'd been posting has caused things to get a bit buried, and has made things easily missable, so I've decided to make a bit of a roundup post summarizing everything I've done in the last month.

Of course, there's probably still more to come in the near future -- I have two books (the Digimon Official Super Encyclopedia and the Gakken Digimon Adventure tri. Memorial Book) hopefully coming in the mail soon, and I still have some stuff lying around I might take up if my mood warms up to it, but since I've finally cleared up a ton of the backlog I felt I should take a breather to summarize stuff. (Although, every time I say I've cleared the backlog, suddenly more interesting things pop up...^^;;)

Digimon Adventure, Adventure 02, Tamers, Frontier

Digimon Adventure 02 Drama CD "Armor Evolution to the Unknown" I will be honest in that this is actually my favorite thing to have translated in this past month. Actually, fiction translation has a higher level of difficulty for me than things like interviews -- because I want to be careful with what real people have said, I tend to be less stringent about rewording things, whereas with fiction I hold myself to a higher standard to make things flow well. But that's actually what makes it so much fun, because I can challenge myself to play with wording and broaden my horizons, and moreover Adventure 02 has a ton of characters, and it's really fun to try and make unique "voices" for all of them. That said, translating this was a bit of a wake-up call, because the sheer amount of pop culture references (to things made before I was even born, at that) and wordplay everywhere led me to the very harsh realization of why so few people have attempted to translate this drama CD into so few languages over the past two decades ^^;; I give my thanks to the anonymous Japanese commenters on Nico Nico Douga who pointed out many of the really old and obscure pop culture references, and I ended up spending several hours on Japanese Wikipedia looking up things like said old anime and British punk rock artists. I might not have gotten everything, and I'm sure there are people out there who probably would have been able to pull it off better than I did, but it ultimately became a test of my abilities as a translator, and if it's fun and entertaining and enjoyable, then that alone makes me satisfied. But I think this will be the last time (at least for a while) that I try translating something audio-only with no transcript -- my hearing is not that great, not even in English ^^;;

The Mystery of the American Box Bug A story from Adventure and Adventure 02 director Hiroyuki Kakudou that has some very tangential (at best) relation to Digimon, but is amusing nevertheless.

Digimon Adventure Character Complete File -- Future Encyclopedia Little "dialogue" snippets from an Adventure/Adventure 02-related book, checking in on the kids-turned-adults during the time of Adventure 02's epilogue. I actually translated this a long time ago, but I lost the transcript for it and I'm pretty sure (given how long ago it was) it was probably pretty embarrassing by my current standards, so I went ahead and did this over again. There are some other things in this book that are interesting and/or amusing, like further background info on the kids' family lives and room layouts, so if I have some spare time I might do some of those in the future, although naturally doing the entire book would probably be practically impossible.

Digimon Series Memorial Book: Digimon Animation Chronicle — Special interview with Hiromi Seki, Hiroyuki Kakudou, and Yukio Kaizawa An interview with some perennial Digimon staff members about Adventure through Frontier (and a bit of X-Evolution). We've had no shortage of these kinds of interviews over the years, but this one happens to summarize a lot of things that used to be considered "obscure" in the Digimon fanbase outside Japan, even though this book (and thus this interview) is one of the most prominent resources for diehard Digimon fans out there. Also, Frontier-related development info tends to be somewhat rare, so it's nice to hear about it. The Digimon Official Super Encyclopedia that I'm hoping to get my hands on soon allegedly has a similar interview with the same three people. I don't know specifics about it yet, but I'm informed that it mostly covers similar territory to this one, but also allegedly has some very fascinating details that weren't in this, so I'm looking forward to that as well.

Message from Digimon Adventure producer Hiromi Seki, to Toshiko Fujita Posted by Adventure producer Hiromi Seki to the LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna Twitter on February 8, 2019, right before the 49th day (last day of mourning, in Japanese tradition) after Taichi Yagami voice actress Toshiko Fujita's passing.

Mimi Tachikawa and Lilimon Posted by Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou on his blog, talking about the intent behind Mimi Tachikawa's character and her corresponding track in the drama CD Digimon Adventure: Two-and-a-Half Year Break.

Digimon Adventure tri.

On Creation and Production for “Super Evolution Stage: Digimon Adventure tri.” A post by Director Kenichi Tani about his work on the Adventure tri. stage play. Despite technically being under Adventure tri. branding, the stage play actually has surprisingly little in common with the Adventure tri. anime in terms of both content and production background, and moreover Digimon hasn't had a lot of contact with the stage medium all that much, so I thought it'd be interesting to translate something about its production, especially since this tends to be a lesser talked-about part of the franchise.

October/November 2018 Gashapon Blog interviews with Kenji Watanabe This is actually two interviews, one where Digimon franchise creator and character designer Kenji Watanabe talks about design for a Digimon gachapon set, and one where he talks about Adventure tri.'s Omegamon Merciful Mode, but I'm categorizing it under the Adventure tri. section because I figure the vast majority of readers will be reading the interview for the latter.

Digimon Adventure tri. voice actor comments (Part 1: Reunion | Part 2: Determination | Part 3: Confession | Part 4: Loss | Part 5: Coexistence | Part 6: Our Future) A series of voice actor comments that were posted to the official website prior to each Adventure tri. movie being released. I'd actually had it on the brain to try my hand at these when they were first posted, but various circumstances happened and I never got around to it, until now. In retrospect, though, I think it turned out for the better that I didn't attempt them on the spot. Adventure tri.-related interviews tend to be much more difficult to translate than most Digimon-related ones, and although there are a few reasons why, the biggest one is that, during its run, it had a very tight spoiler embargo, resulting in a lot of vague language being used, and so when you translate from a language like Japanese -- where having proper context can be life or death -- not knowing the original context behind what was being said can throw the end result into completely incorrect and misleading interpretations. While I was working on these, I did actually end up having to pull up the movies again and reference what scenes were being referred to multiple times just so I could phrase the sentence correctly, so yeah, I think it did ultimately work out. Incidentally, this is also the first direct Adventure tri. production-related thing I've translated since 2016 (mainly due to the expenses incurred by importing magazines and my difficulty with translating print media at the time). Looking back at it, I'm honestly kind of ashamed at my own inexperience from back then, but sadly, I don't have the original magazines anymore, so I can't do much to fix it, and so I'm kind of glad to have these as my sort of attempt at "redeeming myself".

Digimon Adventure tri. — Yoshimasa Hosoya interview on “To Me” Also from the official website, discussing voice actor Yoshimasa Hosoya's involvement with the ending theme song from part 3 (Confession), "To Me".

Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna

Anime! Anime! interview series (Director Tomohisa Taguchi interview | Natsuki Hanae and Chika Sakamoto interview | 02 human cast voice actor interview | 02 Digimon cast voice actor interview | Producer Yousuke Kinoshita and supervisor Hiromi Seki interview) I didn't actually know this was a series until very recently, so you'll have to forgive me for translating these out of order. Technically, all of these were posted in February to March 2020, after the movie was released in Japan, but it's pretty much spoiler-free. It's got a huge amount of development and background info behind LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna, so I recommend them as reading for anyone interested in seeing the movie.

"In regards to the new Digimon project" Otherwise known as "what happened when Hiroyuki Kakudou accidentally revealed that they were making another Digimon Adventure-related movie". Since the news that original Adventure director was recusing from LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna due to some kind of creative difference over lore ended up naturally being a hot topic, I felt like having a proper translation of his statement on the matter would be a useful thing to have. Despite technically being LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna-related, it also has a transcription of his tweets regarding Adventure/Adventure 02 background lore along with some surprising production details, so it may interest fans of the original series as well.

Digimon Continues to be Loved Thanks to its Creator’s Commitment — With Digimon Character Designer Kenji Watanabe An Asahi &M article (sort of a half-interview) with Kenji Watanabe over his involvement in LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna, which, unusually for a Digimon anime work, actually had him directly involved in production from beginning to end. I put this on the post already, but this article gets a lot dangerously closer to outright spoilers than you'd expect for this kind of material, so if you're particularly keen on going into the movie "completely clean", best to maybe avoid this one until you've seen the movie.

Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna — Website messages from Hiromi Seki and Yousuke Kinoshita It's just a short greeting message on the official website. I wanted to translate it mainly because it's not on the official English site.

Animage Plus interviews with Yousuke Kinoshita Also something I'd wanted to translate for a while but never got around to (until now). A triple set of interviews with LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna producer Yousuke Kinoshita, who also talks about Adventure's 20th anniversary and the "Memorial Story" short story collection crowdfund.

Digimon Adventure:

Interviews with Yabuno Tenya and Atsuhiro Tomioka (Part 1: V-Jump Web | Part 2: Digimon Web) A two-part interview (each part on different websites) with Digimon Adventure V-Tamer 01 artist Yabuno Tenya and Digimon Adventure: lead writer Atsuhiro Tomioka, discussing their respective works and Adventure:'s surprising relation to V-Tamer.

Digimon Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou’s initial comments on the Digimon Adventure: reboot A triple set of blog posts from original Digimon Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou about the Adventure: reboot and what relation it has to him and the original Adventure (along with some fun trivia about the latter). I figured some people out there might be curious about what the original Adventure director thought about Toei rebooting his series.

Digimon games

Explore the Secrets of Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode’s Evolution! Interview with Habu and Tomono Decode is rather inaccessible to the West right now (being unlocalized, and on the region-locked 3DS at that), so the idea of translating too many things relevant to it is pretty low-priority to me at the moment, but it's still a game of significant interest to the Digimon fanbase outside Japan, and is also notable as one of the first major titles spearheaded by Digimon game producer Kazumasa Habu, so I felt that there'd be quite a few people interested in this one.

Interview with Producer Habu of Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory: Highlights and Future Prospects A 4Gamer interview that I'd wanted to translate since I'd first read it, but never got around to. Incidentally, I decided to go back and make some revisions to the wording for the Famitsu interviews I translated for the original game. They were some of the first things I ever translated, and it...kind of shows. ^^;; Normally I don't like to lock myself into a habit of constantly going back and revising old work, as doing so tends to be a bit of a black hole, but since the original Cyber Sleuth is still quite the hot topic among the fanbase right now (and especially with Complete Edition being recently released), I thought it might be worth it this time.

Famitsu.com interview with Kazumasa Habu on Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory Another Hacker's Memory interview, a bit less detailed than the above but still fairly informative.

Other

Iwata Asks #14: Hatsune Miku and Future Stars: Project mirai Somehow this ended up the only non-Digimon thing on the list ^^;; The version of this game that eventually did make it to the West (Project Mirai DX) is so different from the original game that it meant this Iwata Asks was never officially translated, so I thought it'd be worth taking a shot at this one. I don't have any plans to translate any other Iwata Asks at the moment, mainly because it requires me to have more than a passing knowledge of how each game works for proper context, but I hope you can at least enjoy this one.

#Digimon #Digimon Adventure #Digimon Adventure 02 #Digimon Adventure tri #Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna #Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth #Hacker's Memory #Digimon Adventure Reboot #Digimon Adventure V Tamer 01 #Digimon World Re:Digitize #Digimon Tamers #Digimon Frontier #Vocaloid #Project Mirai

[arecomicsevengood]

AGING ALTERNATIVES

We live in a culture that worships the large-scale spectacle of the obvious. Partly because of this, the most affecting thing a person can do is something with a large amount of effort behind it, delivered to a small audience: An elaborate meal cooked for a loved one, a labored-over zine in an edition of ten. But of course, time has this great leveling effect, and attempting something large scale can easily crash and burn, and in so doing become something only for a limited audience.

There is an ongoing conversation being had about older comics but they are almost always superhero comics, with some weird eighties genre trash thrown in. This conversation includes a great many alternative cartoonists, but it is very rare for a forgotten art comic to slide its way into the discussion. There’s numerous reasons for this: The larger the print run, the larger the chance a work will find its way to a bargain bin. But also, artists are competitive, and largely inclined to promote themselves or their peers. Once an artist is no longer producing work, they are rarely championed.

Obviously, not everyone finds their way into “the canon,” but you would think that work intended to be somewhat personal would end up being valued enough by individual people that you’d hear about it now and again. The case for alternative comics is the same as it ever was: It’s an artistic medium that can do anything, and it’s released in the fairest most egalitarian way, via mass production, for it to find people who will support it. The art is immediately striking in a way that gives it an edge over the written word, but it’s distributed to shops across America rather than galleries, and so should have long life after its initial release. Of course, the vision falters due to the reality that most of what gets produced is pretty bad, and not really expressing anything particularly unique or individual, and this only goes unspoken at the time of a work’s release due to admiration for the amount of labor that nonetheless went into it.

But what ends up happening in retrospect is this thing where banal superhero work gets reevaluated, with certain aesthetic decisions dictated by the technology of the time (like the coloring) becoming romanticized and recognized as things of beauty, while tons of black and white comics made by people who were desperately trying to push the medium forward and make something that works as art or literature get tarred with a blanket dismissal, associated with either the indulgences of the highest-profile practitioners or simply casualties of their pitiful attempts at graphic design. Only the small handful of practitioners whose publishers have steadily championed them and kept their work in print get to escape this fate. But obviously, if you’re working at something risky, you might end up working with publishers who are not economically viable in the long term, or, if they are, it’s because they’re being subsidized by projects way more commercial than yours.

There’s plenty of stuff which had a large enough print run for copies to be found, but functionally exist at the level of visibility of a zine. But, while I might be interested in extending the same amount of charity I would to someone making work with no hope of commercial success, to engage with the work honestly means that the fact that it was attempting to find its place in the world of commerce must be taken into consideration when thinking about the goals it set out to fulfill. That so much fails to meet these commonly-held goals can make one feel pretty depressed about the medium, and maybe this is another reason for people to avert their eyes: When you’re talking about superhero comics of a certain vintage, while they might not have attempted to be art, at least the people making them got paid.

Obviously, The Comics Journal has been fighting this fight for decades. I am sure all of the books I am going to write about, they have already covered, and they probably came to the same conclusions, and depending on the writer, they might’ve been more entertaining to read than I will be. But I want to offer these reconsiderations in light of all the other reconsiderations being made, that are coming to the opposite conclusion of what The Comics Journal would’ve. It is easy to look back at the 1980s now and say, for instance, that Elektra Assassin is a better comic book than American Splendor.  There’s a discrepancy between what is the best work being produced at a given historical moment and what is the most exciting scene to be a part of. I like to think if I had been writing for the Comics Journal in the early nineties, I wouldn’t have gone all-in praising Palookaville, but I get that in the moment it would’ve felt important to do so. Now, of course, there is very little that feels exciting at all, in the context of real-world community, due to the global pandemic. This is an incredibly lonely moment, and nostalgia has a powerful allure.

But I’d like to ensure the nostalgia we feel compels us to fight for what’s human, rather than allow us to simply surrender our past to the colonizing forces of corporate interests. In the interest of the human, I will not make any grandiose claims for the works I’m writing about. I’m not describing anything as a masterpiece. These instead fulfill the humble virtues of being charming, cool, interesting. They didn’t upend my value system of what the comics medium could be. But, since it was all of the Picturebox releases that shifted my perspective on comics on its axis when I was in college that caused me to ignore some of this stuff, that its virtues can endure after such a flip is itself notable. Anyway, I have no reason to have written such a long preamble. I could’ve easily just made separate posts for each comic I wanted to talk about, but all this additional context seemed important to me to articulate. All of these are books I bought online over the past few months.

Shuck Unmasked, by Rick Smith and Tania Menesse

Feel like the main thing holding this comic back is a certain lack of joie de vivre to its line. There’s a certain cuteness to its designs that seems reminiscent of Jeff Smith or Goodbye Chunky Rice era Craig Thompson but it’s a little bit stiff in ways those cartoonists aren’t. The mask Shuck wears resembles the face Chester Brown draws himself having in Paying For It. I feel like this is maybe the only comic I’ve seen that frequently has dialogue that’s misspelled in an attempt to capture phonetic dialect and presents that through lettering that feels like a font. There’s a sense of being rounded instead of being scratchy, a lushness that feels hinted at, but also tamped down. There’s a literary flavor to it, an attention to the language, a deliberate and delicate sense of stately melancholy that’s present.

The Shuck of the title is a demon, living on Earth, tasked with making sure the dead don’t escape the afterlife and roam around. Despite his horned form, he’s able to wear the mask of an old man, and fit in with his neighbors, which include a little girl, with whom he develops a bond. There’s a gentle quality to it, but also a sense of darkness that prevents it from being cloying, an interest in the esoteric that suggests the profound. The premise could be a recipe for sitcom-ish stasis, but actually the status quo shifts quite a bit, over the course of these self-published comics, collected into a book by Top Shelf.  It feels like each individual chapter should be reread a few times before proceeding on; the chapters have a nice density to them. That’s the funny thing about a lack of velocity to the line, it suggests a studiousness with which to approach it, but doesn’t invite the eye to return to it. Two issues of a sequel were self-published afterwards, I would read those.

Tales Of Woodsman Pete, by Lilli Carré

I’ve heard a couple people call Lilli Carré the best cartoonist of her generation. The first time I heard it said, I had never read anything by her, but I was struck by the assertion because there’s so many heavy hitters in that cohort I’m not comfortable making such declarations about anyone. There’s a collection of Carré’s short stories I’ve checked out from the library, but I found that collection inconsistent, with notable highs that didn’t still didn’t quite bowl me over. This could be partly an issue of format - Few cartoonists of Carré’s generation have a short story collection of their work available, and it might not be the best way to examine the work and see its strengths.

(A sidenote irrelevant to the larger thrust of this conversation - I started keeping a google doc of what years cartoonists were born, and have a my own idea of “generations” of cartoonists in terms of whose work it makes sense to consider alongside one another. 1960-1967 is one cohort, then 1968-1975, then 1976-1982, then 1983-some point unclear to me at this point, there’s a generational divide for sure but I don’t yet know the rules of it. I lump Carré in with Eleanor Davis, Dash Shaw, and Michael Deforge, rather than the slightly older group which includes Kevin Huizenga, CF, and Sammy Harkham. That’s not to say the people championing Carre are making the same distinctions, these generational lines are weird and arbitrary and some people are “on the cusp” and everyone chooses their own peers to a certain extent. However, I do think these generations are important or useful to think about, in terms of who came up with access to alternative newspaper strip jobs vs. the Xeric Grant vs. Tumblr, and it’s just generally interesting to think about what was around to serve as an influence at a formative age. People born after 1967 have had very few opportunities or chances for institutional support, by my reckoning. Over time, more people became acclimated to making uncompromising art, and there also became way less economic opportunity for people making work intended for adults. I suspect the forthcoming generation will be more inclined towards making content for kids because they grew up with things targeted to children, and they can be part of the push to make that stuff more diverse. This coincides with all of the economic infrastructure except for libraries being obliterated.)

Tales Of Woodsman Pete is a smaller object, of digest proportions, that Top Shelf released, early in Carré’s career. It’s worth noting her style nowadays is far more experimental and minimal, although I suppose at the time her work might’ve been considered pared-down, closer to folk tales than novels. This comic follows a woodsman, who monologues to no one, speaking to the trophies he’s made of his kills, in a series of short strips. This is juxtaposed against bits involving Paul Bunyan and his ox Babe, who share a camaraderie between them that doesn’t truly abate Bunyan’s sense of loneliness. It is, like Shuck, a gentle thing, and is able to conjure up some emotion, but I wonder if the sense of tweeness present within it is something Carré feels she’s outgrown? That’s not to say I object to it, just that I recognize a shift away from that stuff. I believe Carré is a Calvino fan, this stuff might be closest to the early stories in Our Ancestors, but Calvino’s work became far more overtly experimental afterwards. I don’t know, I still don’t have a bead on who Carré is or where she’s going. And that’s great, why should I?

Hectic Planet: Checkered Past, by Evan Dorkin

In high school, I read a Hectic Planet comic called The Bummer Trilogy, and liked it a lot. That was a single issue collecting three short stories that were the last work Evan Dorkin would do with the characters. While in retrospect, high school is probably the ideal age to read this material, those strips still feel more mature, in a sense of being personal, than much of Dorkin’s work. He’s written some superhero comics for the big two that never did much for me, and he has some collaborative genre comics I’ve never read, but he’s most associated with his humor cartooning, which I have kept up with despite only finding them intermittently funny. There’s always a sense of Dorkin as a performer of his material, where the humor tends to feel angry, but his most self-consciously autobio material is about the fact that his psyche is a dumping ground for assorted pop culture detritus. What’s interesting about this material is that is, in fact, still kind of immature, but it’s moving away from the science fiction premise, to be present enough to make jokes and talk about feelings. It’s the falterings towards finding a voice and having confidence in it, a youthful move towards what might not be maturity, but is, at least, work. So chunks of this are about a dude who’s heartbroken because he caught his girlfriend cheating on him and so he’s annoying all of his friends by complaining all the time and he’s thrilled to meet girls who like the same bands as he does and he goes to the grocery store and only buys junk food and while this might sound dumb, in context, it’s the beginnings of a worldview that feels fairly true to life for someone who would’ve been that age, at that point in time.

So, considering the era, and the sense of a science fiction premise being abandoned, it might make sense to think of this comic as following in the footsteps of Love And Rockets, albeit from an East Coast Jewish male perspective, and nowhere near as good. It almost feels like if a low-budget eighties sci-fi movie had cast a stand-up comedian in it, and when the budget got cut, they let him fill out the runtime with his routines and riffs, in an attempt to make it a star vehicle in case he ever got cast on SNL. Slave Labor put out a lot of alternative comics, and they all kind of got looked down upon to one degree or another. Much of what they published is both really poorly drawn and nakedly chasing whatever youthful subculture audience they could. Dorkin is easily one of the better artists they had, but the desire to be cool according to the terms of the subculture of the times makes for comics that feel dated now. All the characters in this book are really into ska, the back of the book has all these images taken from ska compilations and 7-inches featuring the characters. But that’s also interesting, because sensing the book’s quest to find its readership lends such authenticity to the young adult milieu, of what it means to be on your own and trying to find your people. It’s from a moment in time when talking about young people put a work in dialogue with alternative culture and not major book publishers, who due to generational differences, would not have understood any of the things this comic is about.

(This piece is sort of a variation on what I talk about in my article in But Is It… Comic Aht 2, by the way. There, behind a beautiful Lilli Carre cover, you can see me talking up more explicitly “all-ages” comics Slave Labor published, like Zander Cannon’s Replacement God, and Scott Roberts’ Patty Cake. Halo And Sprocket was a little bit later than the time period the article focuses on, but I liked that as well. Maybe the most interesting thing I’ve read from Slave Labor that wasn’t all ages and was never collected into a book would’ve been Jon Lewis’ series Ghost Ship. I also like the issues I’ve read of Bernie Mireault’s The Jam, which ran at multiple publishers, and I would like to read more of.)

[gargaj]

Getting stuff done - practical solutions for pulling off large projects

So this might be an unusual post for a site that I predominantly intended to be a collection of tech-articles, but over the recent years I've both been observing and noticing in conversations that while there's plenty of technical material online about how to learn to program, do graphics, engineer music, and so on, much of the writing about how to get projects done seem to veer over into either "life hacks" about how you should do stretches and open your window for fresh air, or escalate into the territory of motivational speeches and emotional, heart-to-heart peptalks; now, while I understand and appreciate their usefulness in certain scenarios, they seem to cultivate a misunderstanding that all you need to get a project done is a positive attitude and ab-crunches.

After having been in an industry for 10 years that has a relatively high throughput, and having had many relatively recent conversations with people who were in awe or disbelief about my ability to handle large projects, I was reinforced in my belief that most people are unaware how much of getting a large amount of work done is down to cold science, scheduling, professional planning, and the ability to retain control of a project even when unexpected events happen.

With that in mind I'd like to present a few random bits and bobs about what I learned about project management - not necessarily only in programming, but in any sort of creative activity - while hoping to keep the popular psychology element in them to the mininum.

A quick note before we dive right in: I'll be talking entirely about sparetime activity that you want to invest time in. While it can be useful to apply professional techniques to your sparetime activity, you should definitely not treat the two as they're one of the same. That's a good way to hate what you used to like. (Trust me.)

Who's producin'?

Before we start talking about actual work, it is important to introduce ourselves to an important term, namely production. Most people think "production" is the act of making something, and the "producer" is someone who makes things, while I would wager a large portion of the populace can't tell you what a "film producer" does aside from "making films"; on a day-to-day basis, that role seems to be an opaque cloud to most people, even if it's one of the most important.

The short version is that the producer's job is to make sure that the project is finished on time, and on budget. The slightly longer version is that the producer takes the amount of time available, the amount of resources available (budget, people, inventory, etc.), consults the respective heads of departments actually doing the work, and then comes up with the plan and schedule as to what happens when, when something finishes, who works on what, and what resources will it take; once production starts, they transition their role into making sure everything goes to plan and if something doesn't, what are the options to salvage things.

There is a reason why in most professional environments, there are entire departments for this: it is a tough job, often frustrating, sometimes disheartening, but at the same time a producer is always aware of the state of the project and can have a good idea of progress being done, and whether the whole thing will come together in the end. This will become extremely important later.

Weeks of coding can save you hours of thinking

Projects are usually broken up to three important segments: Pre-production, production, and post-production. These tend to vary from industry to industry as to what they mean, but pre-production generally consists of building a production plan out of the resources and time available. Pre-production is one of the most important parts of a project, because it will define how the rest of the project will be committed, and thus it's important that we first delve into the ins-and-outs of planning.

First thing first, decide if you have a deadline for your project. Deadlines are cruel, they're unforgiving, but that's why they work miracles on productivity; projects without deadlines don't put pressure on the authors and eventually they just get dropped down the chute of "maybe later". Pick a hard deadline, or pick a reason to have a hard deadline. (Sidenote: demoparties work wonders as deadlines.)

Secondly, once you picked a deadline, assess your project's needs: Assuming your project is in some way technically complex, what are the things that you don't have and need to create or acquire for this? If you're doing music, is there plugins or samples you need, or instruments to acquire, or musicians to talk to? If you're painting, do you have the paints and brushes, or is your tablet broken and need to get it fixed? If you're making a demo, do you have an engine, can it do what's needed? Think about every single thing you need.

Once that list is done, break down your project into elements, in detail - this is the most crucial part of production. If it's a song, roughly jot out the parts on paper and maybe the list of instruments you want in there. If it's a large 3D scene, write down the elements you want in it in detail. If it's a novel, jot out the chapter titles. If it's a demo, chart out the parts with rough ideas on how long each is and what's in it. If it's a game, map out all the mechanics, characters, levels, cutscenes, and so on. Break everything down to parts, and do it visibly so that if something is missing, you can spot it. Once that's done, take the parts and break them down further: What is needed for each part? Roughly how long is the duration of each part? What are the technical necessities of each part? What are the assets needed for each part? What is the process for creating each part?

There are many reasons why all of this is crucial. Firstly, this will serve as your gameplan for the rest of the production process. Secondly, and more importantly, the more you break a large project down to small parts, the less daunting it will seem: if you embark on a project that can take months to complete, you have to take it on one day at a time, and each day will need to end with some sort of progress. If you have a roadmap that tells you each day what that day needs to get ticked off at the end of it, you will no longer be fighting an endless battle; instead you'll focus on the task at hand, with a bigger roadmap to keep you in check.

This leads us into another important consideration, and one of the more murky ones: time estimates - for each of the broken down tasks, give a good guess as to how long it will take. Then multiply it by at least two, and that'll give you a good idea of the time you will need. See, the first thing you should learn about when producing is contingency: contingency is a multiplier for each task's estimate that adds extra headroom that accounts for anything the estimate doesn't account for. There are many things that can make a task take longer, and not all of them are relevant to the task: you might run into edge-cases that add extra complexity, but on a much more basic human level, you never know when you're going to break a leg, or your cat will get sick, or your apartment gets flooded - anything can happen, and it probably will, so make sure you account for that, and leave yourself plenty of headroom as contingency, and best case scenario you'll just have a more relaxed process.

Sometimes, however, even contingency isn't enough, and you'll find yourself running behind schedule. This is why this next step is important: Nail down your scope, and stick to it. There are many things you have listed in your above breakdown, but they all vary in importance, so make sure that next to the time needed, you also note down their importance. As the late great Randy Pausch said in his Time Management talk, it's important you distinguish between things that are important, and things that are urgent: there might be things that are urgent for a project, but ultimately not important, and it is up to your discretion to rank them upfront. [Update: I've recently found out that this is called the "Eisenhower Decision Matrix".] As for ranking, this is up to you; you can do it on a scale of 1 to 10, but I personally prefer what they call the MoSCoW method, where "MoSCoW" stands for "Must", "Should", "Could" and "Would"/"Won't", and they signify how important that specific thing is to the project: "Must"-s are the things that are the bare minimum to get a project off the ground, "Should"-s are important, but not necessary, "Could" are polish, and "Would" are just whatever there's time left for if you're ahead of schedule. Ranking by necessity is very important, because once you start running out of scheduled time, the only option you will have aside from having a project fail is to cut stuff. Ranking by importance also allows you to schedule accordingly, making sure that unimportant polish tasks are moved towards the end of the process instead of wasting time with them at the start.

One thing to note here is that it takes decades of experience to get all of this right, so much like your actual skills of making things, your production skills will get better with time - a good rule of thumb here is to just keep your eye on the ball: decide whether an item on the list fundamentally contributes to the production, or is it just something that you think it would be cool to do, or something you wanted to do anyway. It's tempting to get sidetracked by excessive detail like splurging on instrument recordings or adding engine features, but focus on the goal: If it doesn't contribute to your end goal, cut it.

I also want to remark that I actually did the same for this article: earlier I wrote down bullet points about what I want to mention and started arranging them into a flow.

Doin' the work

Once you've planned your stuff out, then it's just a matter of discipline of taking off the next item on your list, and working on it until it's done. This is of course both easier and harder than it sounds, but remember: you made this list with full knowledge and intention to follow through on it, so at this point this is your best bet to get to your goal. I usually reinforce my adherence to the plan by putting the physical (printed) schedule in a visible place in front of me somewhere in the room, to keep me focused on the goal; I also mark off items that I'm finished with, because I personally find the physical act of ticking off or crossing out an item very satisfying - it's the little things, really.

The production document for PILEDRIVER

There are a few things that can help with getting into a good workflow: One thing a lot of people underestimate are placeholders - when your final art isn't done, just stick something in there that only vaguely resembles what you want in there, and every day you work on it, not only will it remind you that it needs to be replaced, but on occasion it will reveal problems in the grand picture.

To bring a practical example, both with "Signal Lost" and especially with "PILEDRIVER" I went absolutely crazy with placeholders, essentially building both of those demos twice as what in the 3D industry they'd call "animatics": just rough boxy versions of the scenes with approximate camera/lighting, just to be able to get a feel for the pacing / length of the scenes, the camera speed, and so on. Making an animatic version of the scene and getting it in the engine usually took less than 15 minutes, but with the music done, I was able to immediately get a feel for whether I need to adjust my initial idea slightly, or perhaps I needed to find another camera angle, or break a section up to more parts.

The PILEDRIVER animatic

I actually went one step further earlier in the process; I knew I wanted the rap part in the middle, but the lyrics I wrote were fairly complex, and I knew Fantom would struggle with some of it (especially in pronounciation), I decided to take the lyrics and put them through my favourite speech synth, Daniel, and then chop it up so that it resembles the flow I thought sounded best for that particular part. This not only helped with the recording, but also reassured me that the idea would work.

Against all odds, I managed to coax Daniel out of retirement.

As you can see, my work methodology was often designed around one thing: quick feedback and iteration. I find myself having very clouded visions about art-related things most of the time, so for me it is very crucial to be able to try stuff as quick as I can and fail early, so especially with music, I do what the late Linds Redding coined as The Overnight Test: If something I make late at night doesn't sound great the next morning, I scrap it and start something new, maybe cannibalizing the good bits from the previous iteration. When on a timer, sometimes iteration means not getting stuck on something that would never work.

Note: I'm aware that Mr. Redding used his term in a more somber context later in his life, but I'm merely sticking to its original meaning here.

And speaking of overnight, let me stress one thing: always do nightly snapshots of what you're doing. If you're making a demo, build the whole demo every night and watch it, maybe run it on your work computer the next day during lunch. If you're making a song, render it out and put it on your portable player and listen to it on the bus the next day. Not only will you internalize the work and make a list of issues to fix over the course of the day, but it assures the integrity of the technical side of the project - I've watched way too many demogroups, as recent as last month, make an awesome prod that just doesn't compile or crashes before the deadline because they were too busy working on content and never tested the actual executable. If you do this every night, or maybe even every few nights (but always at least once a week), you're more likely to realize that your compile config hasn't been updated for a while and you really should do that before you're 5 hours before the deadline and you're drunk.

Sidenote: I'm aware that this is perhaps too specific of an advice to programmers, but probably worth mentioning, and I can imagine variations for other artforms as well, like importing/exporting problems with 3D.

Pushing on

So this is the bit in the text where we might be veering close to pretend version of popular psychology and talk about subjective things like motivation and dedication, so I'd like to make a disclaimer that I've never formally studied these things, and you should not take any of this as gospel or any level of scientific; these are just things I noticed about myself, and tried some simple methods to counter them, and they (mostly) worked fine.

One of the big things I've mentioned earlier is the daunting vision of the road ahead; with large projects, it's incredibly demoralizing to just sit at the start and be crushed by the amount of work that needs to be done, especially if you're doing something where it takes a large amount of work just to be able to have something basic; with music it perhaps only takes a ~10 second loop to feel like to be on the right track, with a full demo, the aforementioned placeholders do a great job, but with e.g. writing a larger engine, it can take weeks before you get to the point where you have anything on the screen simply because of all the modules you need to work on first. My mitigation for this was what I call the skeleton method: What's the least amount of work I need to do to get anything to get on screen? For that, what's the least amount of work I need to do to get something to just run? All of this ends up in the pre-production document as well, so when I start working, I can relatively quickly get to a stage where it's just a blank window, but it's built on an engine skeleton where replacing things is straightforward once I reach that point in the process. I myself noticed that my work morale improves once I'm able to send screenshots or chunks of the thing I'm working on to people, so I try to get there as fast as I can.

Another thing I noticed about my working style is that even with managable work chunks I have problems getting started simply because it takes a while to get into "the groove", so a little technique I've been using is that when I'm about to wrap up for the day, I make sure there's a glaring problem with what I just did, like an obvious bug or mix error that I could fix in a few minutes - and then I leave it like that until the next day. That way, the next day I'm able to jump in and start with something easy.

The final thing - which I kinda hesitate to mention because we're already way too deep into motivational speech territory to my taste - that I found extremely useful is regimen: making sure that there's a period of time either or daily or weekly that I get to work on the project. Perhaps the ultimate guru of regimen is the great Beeple, who has been releasing a piece of art every day for more than 10 years now, and has given expletive-laden talks on the subject of why regimen is important. Now, I think we can safely consider him an edge-case with 10 years of everydays, but at the same time, there's value in doing something in a regular manner, and there's also a consideration of the amount of work you need to do versus the amount of time you have.

One important aspect all of this is that while guilt can be a good force of motivation, you shouldn't beat yourself up if something doesn't work out. Failures are a part of life, and they're an even larger part of any artistic or techical process, and you should accept that sometimes best laid plans can go absolutely up in flames because of a variety of reasons - like, say, because there's a global pandemic going on, and that the existential pressure of it takes away your motivation to do things. All of that is okay. As Eisenhower once (supposedly) said, "Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable."

In summary

I'm mentioning that failing is always part of the process, because I've been listing a lot of rules and constaints and limitations on what you should and shouldn't do, and I must again emphasize that all of this is meant as advice and observations with regards to spare-time activity, and that how much of this you use will depend on how bad do you want one thing over the other: Managing spare time can require a delicate balance especially if you have a healthy social life, and if you do, you have to decide how much to work on retaining that versus how much you work on your passion project, and in my eyes this ultimately all leads back to pre-production: if you know you can't spend time on something every day and the deadline is right around the corner, rein in your scope early so that you can deliver rather than giving up halfway, because no unfinished project is as impressive as a finished one.

#demoscene #demo #demomaking #scheduling #production #game development #gamedev

[clouds-of-wings]

Drinking spiced cherry wine from the discounter and actually reading the lyrics of Beloved Antichrist for once - Part 2 (Act 1)

Narrator: At this point, Seth is still with his parish and has no idea he’s the Antichrist Seth, speaking for the first time: WOE TO YOU, EARTH AND SEA!

PArish not pErish! Learn English! The mistake comes twice in a row, so I know it’s not just a typo.

“Lift from me infant smiles”, wut? Does that mean that he’s being reborn into maturity? Huh... alright.

Actually if I’m going to comment every time they use an expression that’s like a square peg in a round hole I’ll be typing until 4am, so let’s just say WUT really loudly ONCE and let it cover the whole opera.

I’m gonna stop commenting on the bad English too. I say this with all the affection available to me (like 9 affections) but bad English is a job requirement if you’re gonna write lyrics for Therion. This is how it has always been. If you can reliably create a present tense verb form and remember the s behind the third person singular - don’t apply. And the singers always go along with it. I’ll drink some more wine and say it adds to the charm.

The opera passes the Bechdel test in the second song.

Cmon, “United States of Europe”? Is that the best name you guys could come up with? How bout Eurotopia? Eurotzania? Jesus Christ Superstate? Greater Berlin Area? European Union Rules Oll People Everywhere?

There’s actually a lot going on here story-wise. I wouldn’t have thought it since all the songs kiiinda sound very similar to me. I mean I like the opera very much, musically, but the songs kinda merge into one another. They could have been one 3 hour long song. Land of Canaan has more different styles in it to my ear, and that’s “only” 10 minutes. Actually it has more styles to my eyes. My synaesthesia sees all of BA very similarly. Same colours, same textures, same sense of space. How much so? Enough that I kept abbreviating the name of the opera to “BC” instead of “BA” because the colours of the letters fit better and I didn’t even realize my mistake for a while.

I REALLY have questions about the logistics. In a steampunk post-apocalyptic world they have a continent-wide election..? Just, how long does that take? How do they communicate the results? Did they lay new phone lines? Are the old ones still functional? Do they send letters or send a messenger to inform of the regional results? What are the ballots made of? Did they build new paper processing plants? How did they get mass production back on its feet anyway? Whom did they force into the mines?

More problems that the anime adaptation will sort out, I guess.

Johanna does her duty as big sister in warning Helena not to believe every random man who acts like he’s the second coming of Christ & God’s gift to the world, a touch of realism

Seth needs only the barest of friendly pokes to fall from faith, This is Most Concerning. And understandable if you read the notes to the piece in question, but in the actual text of the opera it isn’t even mentioned before that he can’t hear God anymore. A bit rushed. Maybe they cut out a song? IIRC the original version of the opera was half an hour longer.

Also I love how meta “The Solid Black Beyond” is. “Hey WHY do you worship Jesus, I made you, you’re my son, do what I want you to do instead and, uhhh trust me it will TOTALLY work out fine!” - spoken by Satan, who is voiced by - the composer.

The president of Europe reads a brilliant insightful book and immediately realizes how misguided he has been. Hahaha. Ohh bless your hearts, guys. If only.

Garden of Peace needs to be much MUCH longer. None of the stuff mentioned in the summary actually happens in the text. Helena tells Seth her life story? BITCH WHERE!

It really bothers me that the text - not just here - focuses almost exclusively on the emotional content of the scenes and doesn’t tell us much about the story, which is explained only in the summaries. This might work for an album, but watching an opera like this would be very confusing. If you don’t read along with the notes (which afaik the non-limited edition of the CD release doesn’t even have), you’ll be ??? the whole time. I tried to read the lyrics once on some lyrics site, without these summaries, and they made no sense to me without context. A lot goes on in the story summaries. Very little goes on in what the characters actually say. And with many of these things I can’t think of a nonverbal way to communicate them.

I remember Christofer saying in an interview that he can’t write recitatives. Maybe that’s the problem. It’s like reading a text with many nouns but too few verbs. I don’t know though. I’m not too much of an opera buff. I did try to get into them but I find them boring. The only ones I watched the whole way through were Mefistofele (largely a waste of time but with one VERY good scene), and Orlando, thanks to Marijana Mijanovic playing the main character. It made me question my sexuality when she had murder in her eyes and an axe in her hands, but I do remember the story making sense.

I feel like I need to listen to the entire opera WHILE reading the text WHILE high enough that I can hallucinate the stage production in order to really judge the quality of the writing tbh.

I like the amount of characterization the characters get (mostly in the summaries). Helena has a special star she always sees, that’s sweet. Also foreshadowing. She has always loved the morning star, and then she marries the Antichrist.

Also, do Johanna and Helena symbolize the duality of humankind? QUESTIONS! The Two Daughters of Wisdom.

“Lots of stylish guests are strolling around” 8)

The mortal enemies DANCE AT A PALACE BALL. Oh this is SO anime material!

Okay this one line in “The Palace Ball” pisses me off every time I listen to BA. It’s such a small detail but it irritates me to no end. “May I have the pleasure to offer you a dance.” An Old-fashioned Gentleman(TM) would never say this to an Old-fashioned Lady(TM). It implies that he’s doing her a favour. He should ASK her for a dance, not OFFER her one, because (the polite fiction is that) she’s doing him a favour by accepting. This is just basic etiquette! You penguins!

Narrator: Seth finds himself politely rebuffed by Johanna. Johanna: Your powers ain’t shit, plus you’re evil, now fuck off.

I do want to know Seth’s brilliant philosophy that makes the world a perfect place, but it was definitely smart of the people behind this work not to try to come up with one.

Wow this takes a lot longer than I thought. I have acid reflux from the alcohol, which I’m not used to, and it’s late. I’ll do the rest some other time.

#therion #symphonic metal #opera metal #rock opera #music stuff #beloved antichrist

[elyvorg]

Still a Hero - author’s commentary (part 2)

I spent almost all my time for two months planning and writing this fic of mine centred around Kaito’s issues, and that amount of thinking-about-something doesn’t just go away once the thing is finished. This is the second of two posts (the first being here) giving a kind of author’s commentary on the fic. For this one, I’ll be (mostly) taking off my Kaito-analyst hat and putting on my author hat, talking about the writing process and how I came up with the ideas for each chapter given how I knew Kaito’s character arc needed to go.

I say I spent two months “planning and writing” this fic, because the first month of that really was all planning. At first this was figuring out the broad strokes of how Kaito’s character arc should work, while also entirely separately imagining him going through various different kinds of torture that seemed like fun. Then I began to slot these torture methods that I’d already decided I liked the idea of into whichever points in his character arc they fit best for, resulting in me beginning to get a coherent set of scenes together.

As my ideas for the story solidified more in my head and grew more elaborate, I began to get them down on paper (well, virtual paper) to help me keep it all straight. I could remember the broad strokes of each scene well enough, but smaller details of ideas I had for the little things Kaito would be doing to indicate his mental state at any point were nice to get down. That way, I didn’t have to try and keep all of that in my head at once and inevitably forget a whole bunch of it when I started actually writing and was using most of my headspace on coming up with good prose. I could craft the progression of Kaito’s mental deterioration more carefully like this, rather than just winging it as I went along, which I think helped a lot considering that said progression was so vital to get right.

Plus, it was nice to be able to have a phase to the writing process where I didn’t let myself worry about wording and just got down all my raw ideas for the… okay, look, I’d call them “beats” of the story, and also possibly use the term “blow-by-blow” to describe how detailed this plan was, but in this particular context those words can be taken very literally. It wasn’t quite that literal. You know what I mean. And that way, when I actually was doing proper prose writing, it was easier to get started in each writing session (something I often have problems with), since the idea for what needs to happen next is already there and all I need to do is think of a good way to word it. Splitting the writing process into separate idea-splurging and prose-writing periods is a really productive way of doing it, at least for how my mind works, and I’ll probably do it again whenever I next write a fic.

While the plan was so detailed that I probably could have done the actual writing in a haphazard order, jumping all over the place just like I did while doing the plan, I wrote everything linearly from the beginning (with one exception that I’ll mention later). It still helped me be able to keep myself in the right headspace for Kaito’s mental deterioration to have gone through that progression with him, at least while actually writing it. Especially since Kaito’s mindset did still do a few unexpected things that I hadn’t quite anticipated in the plan.

Also, geez, did you notice how I called the chapters “scenes” up there? Yeah, once upon a time I thought this’d just be a longish one-shot fic, so in my head, they were scenes and not chapters for a good while. I did not realise quite how long things would turn out. Which is perhaps a good thing, since if I’d known that this would end up 64 freaking pages long, maybe that’d have made me think twice about actually writing it. And I’m really glad I actually wrote this.

The realisation that this was being so ridiculously long that it really needed to be chaptered happened some way into chapter 6, which at least meant that I got to come up with all the chapter titles all at once. I had fun making them all work together; I knew chapter 6 shouldn’t be titled anything but “Hero”, so I made the rest all fit around that to describe the hero. Kaito is a Vulnerable posturing helpless unimportant losing deluded HERO With Friends; the capitalisation or lack thereof is very deliberately meaningful. The non-capitalised titles are meant to give a sense that Kaito is sort of subconsciously beginning to feel these things are true about him by the end of each respective chapter while not wanting to admit it, and then the all-caps “HERO” is him shouting down those self-deprecating intrusive thoughts once he realises he really is a hero after all. The “Vulnerable” is capitalised not because it’s the beginning of a sentence, since “With Friends” is, too, but rather because those two are the only descriptors being applied to the “hero” that are actually true about Kaito. Really, he’s just a vulnerable hero with friends, which is something I think we can all agree on.

Now to go chapter-by-chapter for some more specific thoughts about my ideas behind each one.

Chapter 0

This chapter isn’t strictly necessary since it’s not part of Kaito’s character arc, but I felt it’d be useful to include to help establish the stakes, in terms of why it makes sense that Kaito needs to hold on for quite a while to protect his sidekicks from being killed, and yet his sidekicks can also be the ones to come and save him without being killed once enough time has passed. (I really love how my cult-takedown AU just naturally lent itself to me getting the best of both worlds here. I didn’t think of the torture scenario until after solidifying this AU in my head, so this was just a lucky coincidence.)

It was also nice to get Shuichi and Maki’s perspective on things to help establish the basic principles of the fic that it’s going to take Kaito six chapters of torture to figure out himself. Is Kaito invincible? Of course not. If he’s not, does that mean he can’t protect his sidekicks? Of course not. I figured it might help readers who aren’t familiar with all of my analysis about Kaito’s hero issues to be given a sense that that’s the angle I’m taking here.

Plus it was neat to show Shuichi and Maki both having their own much faster shift in perspective on this. Shuichi would have answered yes to that first question and Maki to the second question before this scene happened. But they each had one piece of the puzzle from the beginning, which is more than can be said for Kaito.

Not that they knew how much of an idiot Kaito was about this, mind you. They assumed he was perfectly healthily aware of these concepts himself, because they had no reason to believe he wouldn’t be. They knew he’d be suffering, but it didn’t even cross their minds that the worst part of it for him would be the near-destruction of his self-esteem. In chapter 7, when Shuichi hears Kaito say “I didn’t let you down,” and “I’m still a hero,” he’s bewildered and concerned by the implication that Kaito had ever thought those things might not be true. (It’s okay, though; Kaito will be willing to actually talk about it to them at some point during his recovery, so they’ll come to understand.)

This is chapter 0 and not chapter 1 because it felt right to have the real “start” of the fic be with Kaito himself. This fic is after all entirely about his character arc, and the Shuichi and Maki bit is more just a bonus. Unfortunately, AO3 apparently cannot comprehend the concept of prologues (I don’t understand why they’ve never accounted for this; prologues are a perfectly common thing in fic-writing as far as I’m aware), so this makes the chapter numbering kind of awkward on there. I could have just thrown up my hands and accepted the numbers AO3 wanted to give my chapters, but no, screw that, I spent two months thinking of the chapters by my numbers and I refuse to stop doing that just because some silly website hasn’t heard of the number zero.

(If anyone knows how to get this to work properly on AO3, please tell me. I did try manually messing with the “chapter number” field in the chapter-submission page, but that ended up screwing up the order in which the chapters were displayed, which, nope, that’s even worse.)

Chapter 1

I chose a relatively straightforward torture method to start things off with, because this scene was less about pushing Kaito’s mental deterioration and more about just establishing the baseline of his stubborn posturing and insistence that he’s an invincible hero in its purest form before there begin to be many cracks in it. That said, there’s still some psychological stuff getting to Kaito a bit here, aside from the generally terrifying (nope, not terrifying at all, what are you talking about, Kaito is a hero) realisation that he’s about to be tortured.

It may seem like an odd choice that I let Kaito wake up unrestrained, and I must admit that the idea of him waking up and panicking as he finds himself already tied up did seem fun in some ways. But it was very on purpose that I left him free to start out with, because that gave Kaito the sense that he should have been able to escape and not let any of this happen at all. If only he’d been stronger and more of an action hero, he totally could have taken out all five cultists and made a break for it, couldn’t he? Not managing to do that is Kaito’s first small sign in here that he’s not that good of a hero, actually. Sure, he knows that he’s massively outnumbered and the chances were really slim, so he’s not really that consciously upset with himself about it, but the subconscious sense of failure is still there. If he’d been tied up from the start, there’d have been none of that, and it’d have been much more obvious that it’s not his fault and he simply couldn’t do anything.

The kickings were also very much a part of this. Those aren’t a proper structured part of the torture, the kind of thing Kaito can basically expect from this situation; they’re just casual cruelty from his captors, hurting him not even because they need to but simply because they can. The first one wasn’t quite so bad because at the time Kaito felt like it was a retaliation to his attempt to escape, as if he was just paying the natural price for his recklessness not succeeding. But the second one, which came out of nowhere just to make a point, really drove home the horrible sense that they can do anything they want to him in here and there is nothing he can do to stop it. It’s not like these kickings physically hurt any more than the upcoming beating was going to, but they got under Kaito’s skin a lot more than the beating did, and far more than he’d ever admit this early on. (Though he does finally briefly allude to it in the depths of chapter 6.)

Like I said in part 1 of this, I was on a mission to make Kaito feel helpless in every way I could think of. He’s not really consciously thinking about it or tearing himself down that much yet, but this is already beginning to wear at him beneath the surface.

Chapter 2

Somewhat inspired by some articles I’d read about the phenomenon of learned helplessness (hence me referencing that in this chapter), I had the basic idea of some kind of restraints that inflict more pain on the captive the harder they struggle to escape from them, with the intent of eventually making them give up trying. Put Kaito in something like that and he would absolutely stubbornly torture himself with it for hours without his captors even having to lift a finger. I just had to; it was too perfect for the kind of person he is, and so good for creating the first big dent in his confidence when he fails to escape it and inevitably starts to feel more and more hesitant to even try.

I was originally envisaging it taking two or three “rest” chapters of Kaito fully throwing himself at this contraption and getting noticeably more tired and hesitant to do so each time until he gives up. But as I streamlined the plan (in an attempt to not make this any more ridiculously drawn-out or repetitive than it needed to be), this got cut down to basically just this chapter, with him barely even trying at all in chapter 4.

Good thing, then, that Kaito is so counterproductively overly-stubborn that it really only did take one spectacularly self-destructive session for him to be traumatised enough to never want to do that to himself again. (And, again, that’s less from just the pain alone – this probably didn’t hurt any significantly more than the beatings before or after it – and more from the horrible sense of helplessness it gave him along with that.) If he’d been more accepting of the idea that this is obviously going to take him a while and he needed to pace himself, maybe this would have needed multiple sessions to wear him down into giving up.

But nope, no way Kaito’s going to accept any kind of compromise like that. It’s never going to occur to him that stopping before he reaches his limit rather than pushing himself way too far past it, or, god forbid, not even taking the bait at all, is by far the better option. A more sensible person would be able to see that that’s strategically saving his strength for when he knows he’s going to need it, and it’s not even giving up when he knows his sidekicks are coming for him in the end. But Kaito’s definition of a hero can’t afford to do any of those things. Heroes have unlimited strength, and they certainly don’t need anyone else to save them.

Kaito feeling this way about this is just putting himself in a horrendous lose-lose situation: even if he somehow happened to choose not to torture himself pointlessly (or rather, when he does that in chapter 4), he’ll instead be taking the psychological hit of feeling like he’s lost. There is no winning here, not if you’re Kaito. Which, again, is why a contraption like this was perfect and I just had to do this to him.

Shout-outs to a scene in the Breaking Bad movie El Camino for inspiring this contraption, by the way – I edited it significantly to better suit my purposes, but that gave me a foundation to start from. I liked this idea more than just some sort of basic electroshock-triggered-by-pulling-against-chains mechanism that I’d been vaguely envisaging at first, because being physically dragged across the floor gives far more of that visceral sense of helplessness that I needed to inflict so much of on Kaito.

…And, uh, thankfully, it also made sense that the child-slave assassin cult might already have a contraption like this for other reasons, because it would have been a bit much to buy that they built something that elaborate just for Kaito. My original plan for this scene mentioned the device being used on the kids but otherwise didn’t have that big of a focus on Kaito initially trying to escape it on their behalf – he was mostly supposed to throw himself into it on his own behalf. I guess I just hadn’t properly thought about that enough during planning, since the kids weren’t the reason I created the contraption. Thankfully, when I was actually writing the scene, my mental simulation of Kaito became exactly as horrified and furious about what’d been done to those kids as Kaito should, and I let him run with that, because that was far more fun and far more Kaito than him only really thinking about himself.

(This never happened to Maki in particular, though. The fact that she “willingly” volunteered herself meant she was never desperate enough to escape that they needed to do this to her.)

Chapter 3

At one point while brainstorming possible ideas, I was hit with the thought of Kaito finding out that his lead torturer was the same person who trained and tortured Maki. I had some fun imagining Kaito’s reaction to that and a hypothetical back-and-forth exchange between him and the torturer about the awful things he’d put Maki through. Except then I realised that having this conversation, fiercely standing up for Maki and calling out her abuser’s awfulness, was giving Kaito way too much emotional strength – and as fun as that was, I couldn’t let him have that, not when I was trying to erode that emotional strength of his as fast as possible.

So then it occurred to me: maybe his torturer could also realise that having this hero-versus-villain confrontation would give Kaito strength, and so he deliberately completely blanks Kaito’s attempts at this, entirely refusing to engage with him and give him what he wants. That’d deflate the strength Kaito was trying to get from it and result in him feeling even more powerless and useless, excellent!

This incidentally meant that Kaito needed to realise that his torturer was Maki’s trainer by chance, without the torturer actually being the one to bring it up and tell him. This was when I realised that I’d need to give this guy a name, even if it was just an alias. It needed to be a Japanese name, and I’m not familiar enough with Japanese names to be comfortable just picking a random surname in case it had a meaning or connotation that didn’t fit at all. Therefore, I figured (especially since it’s an alias and not his real name), screw it, why not deliberately make it meaningful – and the best way I could think to do that was through the kabuki theme.

I’d already looked into the significance of the kabuki pattern on Kaito’s shirt and the meaning of red (hero) versus blue (villain) a while back, upon realising thanks to this post that that was why that pattern was there. I could not believe that I’d been fixating on Kaito for like a year and a half at the time while being completely unaware of such a delightful detail about his character design – so I guess I wanted to make up for lost time or something by making such a point of it in this fic. That’s why I went and had Kaito’s torturers be thematically-conveniently wearing kabuki-villain-makeup masks to contrast his shirt, giving Kaito an extra excuse to think of this as an overly-simplistic Hero Versus Villain thing that he is therefore totally going to win because heroes always do.

So in order to come up with a name for the “villain” here, I looked into that a bit more. I spent a while looking up famous kabuki plays on Wikipedia, and after a false start in which I was looking at totally the wrong style of kabuki theatre – turns out it’s only a certain style that even uses that makeup – I found a famous play in the overexaggerated-makeup-style called “Shibaraku!”, which turned out to be hilariously appropriate. The hero of the play is apparently the “stereotypical bombastic hero” of kabuki theatre, who shows up in the nick of time to stop a prince and a princess from being wrongfully executed (cough cough, he’s saving two people, a guy and a girl, from an undeserved certain death, how very fitting). He monologues lengthily about his supernatural powers that he just randomly has because of course he’s that cool, proves that the villain has unlawfully usurped the throne and gets him to back down just by using words, and then there’s a gratuitous fight scene at the end in which he effortlessly takes out all the villain’s henchmen anyway, solely to show off his awesome superpowers. I absolutely could not with how perfect a match this was to the kind of over-the-top invincible hero Kaito thinks he needs to be, and so I just had to name Takehira after the villain from that play.

And ultimately, the fact that I’d given him a name that Kaito could think of him by for the rest of the fic meant that this was kind of the point at which Takehira started to take shape in my head as an actual character, rather than just an empty placeholder inflicting this torture on Kaito because someone had to do it. I think that was definitely a good thing for the fic… though I can’t believe that as a result I now technically have a Danganronpa OC who is a manipulative child-torturing asshole. How. How did it come to this.

The actual torture method for this chapter wasn’t inspired by anything in particular; I just used my imagination to add some variations to the regular beating that’d give Kaito more of that all-important visceral sense of helplessness. Again, this was conveniently something the cult might be used to doing, since it happened to fit Maki’s description of what’d been done to her quite well. I guess I also now have a very weirdly specific headcanon of exactly what Maki is talking about in her third FTE.

Chapters 1 and 3 both fade to black in the middle of the torture sessions, and then the next chapters cut back in once it’s over and Kaito’s resting. This was mostly just a decision I made early on out of what was essentially writerly laziness. I knew things were going to go on for long enough that it wasn’t remotely reasonable to cover all of it directly, but my writing style focuses so much on just writing things directly as they happen that I find it difficult to get less direct and more summary-ish in order to imply things happening while a large amount of time passes. I managed it in chapters 2 and 5 and kind of 6 here, so apparently I can do it when I need to, but in the planning stages, the thought of doing that was daunting enough that I just tried to avoid it whenever possible by taking the lazy way out and using a scene break.

I lamented later, after I’d started writing and my scene plans were too finalised to change, that it could have been fun to write Kaito’s physical and emotional reactions to the end of these beatings: after the pain had built up so much and become more and more overwhelmingly hard to bear, his desperate relief at realising that it’s finally over (for now) and he’s going to be able to just rest. There’d have been a lot of weakness and vulnerability from him in those moments that he’d have had a difficult time hiding.

But then again, while this was completely unintentional of me and just born from my hang-ups as a writer, maybe there’s also something fun about the fact that I never showed that vulnerability. As soon as he could once he was resting, Kaito would have mentally pulled himself back together and convinced himself that he never really felt that weak and vulnerable towards the end of the beatings, nope, that just didn’t happen at all. So not showing that vulnerability and only jumping back into Kaito’s inner monologue after he’s managed to paper over it is perhaps an appropriate way to go about this, given the way I’d been pointedly having the narration only directly mention things that Kaito was letting himself think about in general. It really didn’t ever happen, see!? Kaito is still basically fine!

Chapter 4

My idea for this chapter was for it to appear to be setting itself up to be another chapter in which Kaito tortures himself trying to escape the contraption – and then he just… doesn’t, because he’s too hurt and exhausted, not to mention legitimately traumatised from how awful an ordeal it ended up being the last time he tried. And because he’s telling himself that he should be trying to escape, expecting himself to go at it again, he ends up feeling like he’s failing, even though all he’s really doing is making the sensible decision to take the chance to rest and not torture himself unnecessarily. He knows his sidekicks are coming for him, so he’s not really giving up at all, but he feels like he is.

I therefore originally thought of this as actually being just a rest chapter that pushes Kaito’s mental deterioration along a bit more, but in which he isn’t actually being tortured for once (aside from the one time he triggers the contraption). However, as I was writing it, I realised how awful it is to not be able to sleep properly when you’re exhausted and desperately need to (which is precisely why the cable was left higher this time so he couldn’t even sit down), and that that’s definitely a type of torture too. So, whoops, guess this is still a chapter in which Kaito is being tortured after all. He gets absolutely no real chances to rest here. (He would have done if he hadn’t taken the bait in chapter 2, but.)

This was also supposed to be the halfway point of the fic, and it still kind of is in a narrative sense, but in terms of length? Ahaha, not quite.

Chapter 5

My general brainstorming had already given me the idea of Kaito stubbornly declaring that his sidekicks are on a lengthy series of different planets upon being repeatedly asked where they are, as both a coping mechanism and a fuck-you to his torturers. This idea also included the notion of him eventually running out of planets not because he didn’t know any more, but just because the pain got too overwhelmingly much for him to think straight, leading him to be unable to deny that this was getting to him and beat himself up about that, spurring his transition into phase 2 of his character arc. At first I was just vaguely imagining this happening without a specific torture method to go with it, but I decided on the water torture for it in the end. This particular method gives convenient regular intervals in which Kaito can give his series of planets and long periods in between in which he can be stubbornly distracting himself with space facts. But most importantly, it’s a torture method which is less about pain and more about fear, aka the exact thing I needed to force Kaito into finally acknowledging he was feeling.

Another shout-out goes to a scene from the How to Train Your Dragon book series (a series I highly recommend in general) for making me realise the potential inherent in water torture. I knew “water torture” was a thing but had never quite understood how you could torture someone with water or why it was awful and terrifying until reading that scene. If it wasn’t for that, this chapter would have been something entirely different and probably less fun.

Also, can you believe that the mirror wasn’t even a part of this scene until quite late into the planning? I’d pictured Kaito being able to look straight at Takehira while above water in order to stubbornly yell at him about space, except I realised that wouldn’t work when, whoops, sinks are generally against walls. Then I realised that sinks often come with mirrors on said wall and that would work. Then I realised that Kaito would also be able to see far more interesting and relevant things in a mirror than just Takehira’s mask, and that this would also be perfect for pushing Kaito into admitting how weak he (supposedly) is. So that part happened kind of completely by accident.

Because of the fact that I’d been picturing Takehira as standing opposite Kaito until I realised the sink would be against the wall, he also wasn’t originally the one holding Kaito underwater. It was only after I’d written the scene without it that I realised, wait a minute, of course Takehira should be the one doing that to Kaito personally; it’s way better that way (he’s the one Kaito is specifically thinking about trying to win against, after all) than if it’s just one of the random mooks. The one stepping on Kaito’s face at the beginning of the chapter also wasn’t originally Takehira until I realised that that obviously made the most sense and had the most impact. Can’t believe I missed both of those obvious choices in the planning. I guess I was still figuring out Takehira’s character as I went along.

Since Kaito ended up so viscerally traumatised in particular by Takehira grabbing his hair, and since that’d have been a lot less possible if Kaito had still had the hairstyle, can we talk about how I completely accidentally foreshadowed this in my original cult takedown AU post? Maki told Kaito to ditch the hairstyle, so he… stuck his head under some water for a couple of minutes. That time it was a shower and he could breathe just fine, but still. (I edited in the interjection about how there must be a downside to it later, after having written enough of the fic to have decided it was canon that he ironically said that in mock-indignation while never genuinely believing there would be one. But everything else about that bullet point was written before I’d even remotely started wanting to write this fic and conceiving this chapter’s events.)

Obviously I had to do some research about SPACE for this chapter, because Kaito would definitely be reciting accurate Space Facts. Originally he was only going to be listing planets, starting with the solar system and then moving onto exoplanets. Except, just like Kaito awkwardly remembered once he got to Proxima Centauri b, I learned during my research that actually there aren’t really any other exoplanets with unique names, so that option was kind of a bust. Then I remembered that there’s a ton of moons in the solar system with unique names, so I figured Kaito would go for those too and started looking those up. (Takehira wasn’t surprised when Kaito moved onto Phobos and Deimos because he’d read Kaito’s public Hope’s Peak file and knew he was the Ultimate Astronaut, so he was expecting Kaito to do something like that. But the henchmen hadn’t been told that fact, hence why they were surprised. Still, this was probably not the weirdest impromptu coping mechanism they’d seen from one of their torture victims.)

Then I saw during my research that Saturn’s moons included Atlas and Prometheus, and I just couldn’t resist the gratuitous-self-referencing potential. See an ask reply from earlier for more of my thought process with this bit. This was also the moment I realised that Pandora was such a great fit for Maki – I basically just looked at all the feminine-named moons of Saturn in the hope that one of them would fit her because I really wanted to do this shameless-symbolism thing and didn’t want to leave Maki out of it, and luckily I found one. (The reason I brought this up kind of out of nowhere when a slightly less recent ask related to my P4 AU gave me an excuse to do so was very much because it was going to be in the fic and I wanted people to potentially be able to get the reference if they cared.)

Knowing the well-known moons for each planet makes it possible to count just how many times Kaito would have been forced to the brink of drowning here. It was three times before he started the space thing, then he did space, the moon, Mercury to Pluto (minus Earth), Phobos, Deimos, Europa, Io, Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus, Titania, Oberon, Triton, Charon, Proxima Centauri b, the Andromeda Galaxy, like four other galaxies, Kerberos, Styx, Nix, Hydra, Pandora, Prometheus, Atlas, then five or so more times before Takehira realises he still isn’t breaking and gives up. That all adds up to something a little over forty times Kaito had to endure that. He is so strong, and his space-facts coping mechanism genuinely helped so much in that it meant he was only consciously terrified for a small fraction of it all.

I also did a little bit of rather more hands-on research for this chapter, namely holding my breath for as long as I could to get an idea of how to describe what it feels like when it seems as if you can’t possibly hold it any more, since I had to describe that quite a lot. And I may have also filled a sink with water and stuck my face in it a few times to get a sense of the physical sensations one would be most immediately conscious of when that happens. (Don’t worry; this was emphatically not done at the same time as holding my breath for as long as I absolutely could. In fact, I found my brain automatically making me surface much sooner than I’d expected to need to, leading to the conclusion that, damn, water torture must be even more horrendously awful than I’d imagined and Kaito is amazing for being able to endure it for so long.)

So if I ever get asked, as an author, “what’s the weirdest research you’ve ever done for a story?” – well, now I have a very good answer.

Chapter 6

There was also some hands-on research done for this one, involving lying on the floor, folding my arms behind my back, trying to keep my ankles together and then seeing how easy it was to move around in that position. Answer: it’s really difficult and awkward even when you’re not horribly injured and in a lot of pain, so Kaito must have had a great time.

And my final shout-out for torture method inspiration goes to Danganronpa V3 itself, of course. There’s canonically a poison that inflicts horrible pain and is explicitly used to torture people for information? Excellent. All I needed was a quick handwave as to why it won’t kill Kaito here despite being explicitly lethal in canon – which really is just a bonus because that means that the pain can get even worse and last even longer than it would normally – and I was good to go. You may have noticed that I had Kaito be injected with Strike-9 in his left arm, aka exactly where Maki’s poisoned arrow hit him in another universe. …Honestly it’s kind of impractical for them to have injected him in the arm when the ropes would have made the poison’s circulation from there way slower (though I guess we could pretend that was meant to be the point). I might have otherwise gone for Kaito being injected in the neck – easier to access and much more viscerally unpleasant – but screw it, I wanted the parallel to how he was poisoned by Strike-9 in canon, sue me.

For this chapter, I needed a torture method that’d really push Kaito into being convinced that he absolutely couldn’t take it, and that’d let him see just how amazing he was being when he realised that he still could. So it seemed appropriate to use this one, in which the only real limit to how painful it could get was my imagination – and I like to think I’ve got a pretty good one of those. (And, for that matter, Kaito’s imagination let him become incredibly scared of it before it’d even remotely reached its full effects on him. Because he’s so scared already, he’s imagining the absolute worst, which he’d never have done until he was in phase 2. That helped, too.)

Although, I say I could just use my imagination here, but I actually based this quite a bit on some more research I did. (This fic required more research than probably every other fic I’ve ever written combined; I guess I just don’t usually write about stuff that requires particularly specialist knowledge.) I looked into the effects of strychnine, the real-life horribly painful poison that Strike-9 is named after and loosely based on. …Well, technically it’s only named after it in the game’s localisation – in Japanese it’s just called “lethal torture poison”, a fact I also referenced in-fic – but it does still seem to be based on strychnine either way based on a comment Kokichi makes about finding it harder to breathe, which is indeed the usual way that strychnine kills somebody.

Since fictional Strike-9 is not exactly the same anyway (real strychnine does not have an antidote), I knew I could take some liberties, such as with the non-lethality handwave drug, but I still got inspiration for quite a few of its effects on Kaito from things I’d read about strychnine. One of the biggest effects of strychnine appears to be painful muscle spasms, which admittedly doesn’t seem to fit with canon Strike-9 based on the fact that neither Kaito nor Kokichi are ever shown spasming while under its effects. I dealt with that minor detail by deciding it was possible to consciously hold down the spasms up to a certain point – but also that doing so still hurts anyway, of course, because what would be the point if it didn’t.

It was also appropriate, given that this was when Kaito’s self-loathing was at its absolute peak, that this was a kind of torture that essentially felt to Kaito like it wasn’t even being inflicted on him by the torturers (even though he knew it was) and was just coming from inside him. So it was almost as if everything making Kaito suffer here was all from himself. Having him not be distracted by what the torturers were doing to him from the outside here also made it easy for him to get as introspective as I wanted him to. These aspects were actually unplanned; it was just a happy coincidence that the torture method I’d already chosen for this happened to work so well in these ways, too.

My friend antialiasis deserves credit for the part later in the chapter where Kaito’s realisation that he’s still a hero sends him into a weird triumphant euphoria that actually makes the pain go away for a bit. She proposed that while we were throwing ideas around in the conversation that sparked off me realising this’d be a really fun fic to write. Or, well, most of the conversation was me throwing ideas at her and her going “yes good” – but this one was hers, and I liked it a lot so I included it. It seemed so right that, upon Kaito finally realising how proud he deserved to be of himself, that feeling should have a real tangible impact on him despite all the pain.

Chapter 7

At first, my ideas of how Kaito would eventually be rescued were rather vague and… sort of unsatisfying? Not that Kaito didn’t absolutely need to be reunited with his friends, of course, both for the cathartic relief of everything finally being over, and to explore how he was now comfortable showing vulnerability in front of them. But it seemed kind of narratively awkward that he’d gone through so much hell to finally learn how being a hero really worked, only for his friends to then come along and end things in a way that was completely unrelated to the psychological conflict and character arc that he’d been having.

My original vague scenario for the rescue was something like Maki bursting into the room where Kaito’s being held and taking out his torturers to free him. Then I considered that if Maki and Shuichi were coming as part of a big government raid, the torturers might have already rushed out to try and deal with that as soon as it got there, leaving Kaito tied up and alone and hoping for someone to find him (especially if he’s still in need of an antidote, which I’m pretty sure was one of my ideas at that point). But then it occurred to me that, wait, if they were going to deal with the raid, then wouldn’t it make the most sense for the cultists to want to use Kaito as a hostage, knowing he’s important to Shuichi and Maki?

Which at first was a big problem, because I couldn’t quite see a way for Kaito to get out of that situation alive, and yet I refused to imagine an end to this story in which he didn’t. I came up with the way he got out of it purely in a desperate attempt to let him survive somehow (having concluded that the hostage situation really was the most likely way for events to unfold and it’d be kinda contrived for it to not happen at all). And it just so happened, purely by accident, that this escape method I’d come up with involved Kaito feigning weakness, something he’d never have dreamed of doing at the beginning before his character development – which suddenly made the rescue finally feel narratively satisfying. Kaito was saved not just by unrelated outside factors that would have happened anyway, but because of something he did thanks to what he’d learned from his character arc (while still not having been able to do it without his friends’ help, which he’d also learned to be okay with!).

And it was around this point that I started to seriously decide I was going to write this fic. It was finally starting to come together and feel like more than just some fun hypotheticals that were interesting to self-indulgently think about, but also an actual satisfying story that really deserved to be written.

Since I had a detailed outline and could start the actual writing from pretty much any point, the first part I fully wrote was in fact the hug in chapter 7. This was, after all, the Most Important Part that deserved the most passive editing time to give it as much polish as possible. By that, I mean that I’ll often reread bits I wrote just for fun and make small tweaks without consciously thinking of it as an Editing Session – which would usually mean, if I wrote in order, that the end of a thing naturally winds up a bit less polished than the beginning. I didn’t want that for the Very Important Hug, so I wrote it first on purpose to avoid that.

And while I was never not having immense fun writing this, sometimes it would also get a bit emotionally exhausting to write the more brutal torture parts while so deep in Kaito’s head. So it was nice to be able to wind down from a writing session like that by reading over the hug scene and having the catharsis of knowing that Kaito was going to be okay in the end.

Fun with Ctrl+F

The types of words Kaito was willing to use in his inner monologue to describe what he was going through underwent some pretty big shifts as things deteriorated, some of them deliberate on my part and some just unconscious. And, thanks to AO3’s feature of loading all chapters of the fic on one page, and my browser’s word-search feature putting a marker on the scroll bar at each instance of the searched word, I can get some data that actually visualises the distribution of certain key words throughout the fic.

So what the hey, let’s take a look at some of this. You want graphs? I have graphs. Sort of.

The grey bars are a screenshot of my scroll bar, with the yellow markers on them being instances of that word. Also with indicators to separate the chapters, and to mark where I consider each of the three key phases in Kaito’s character arc (discussed in the previous post) to shift into the next. (Daaaaamn though how did chapters 5 and 6 end up so long. Also I told you phase 1 was the longest one; it’s about as long as phases 2 and 3 combined.)

Pain: 110 words Hurt: 54 words

As you can see, Kaito spends the first chapter and a half – more like chapter and two-thirds, really – definitely not being in any pain at all (or at least, if he is, it’s totally irrelevant and not worthy of mention). But when the pain finally does show up, it’s suddenly all pain all the time with no gradual build-up. Funny, that – almost like it was really all pain all the time from the beginning, too.

It was very freeing once I got past that point in chapter 2 and could finally just have Kaito’s inner monologue say that it hurt whenever I wanted to communicate that fact. Getting that across without directly acknowledging it had been kind of fun, but it’d have driven me mad if it’d gone on for much longer than this.

Chapter 5 is a somewhat less pain-filled chapter than the rest, for obvious reasons. There’s also this interesting patch in the depths of chapter 6 where “hurt” became more common than “pain” for a little while. This wasn’t at all conscious of me, but it might be because “pain” is a slightly more detached way to think about it than an immediate, reactionary “it hurts” – and in the desperate, near-broken state that Kaito was in at that point, he was more likely to be doing the latter.

Agony: 26 words

It was very deliberate of me that the first use of this word was during the hellish near-drowning ordeal that caused Kaito to completely forget Atlas and “lose” his Very Important Space Competition. And then after that point I just let myself use it whenever it felt appropriate, so naturally there’s a lot of it in chapter 6. There were definitely some points earlier than this in which the average person would have described what Kaito was feeling as “agony” – heck, that probably happened as early as chapter 2 – but Kaito was not willing to admit so early on that he was hurting that much. It was only once his mental state had grown weaker that he began to actually describe it that way to himself.

Scream: 33 words

Kaito was a little more willing to admit this one earlier on (though not quite as early as this makes it look – that first one was a scream of rage, which is way more acceptable than a scream of pain, and the second is just his shoulders “screaming” at him in protest and not a sound Kaito made). Actual noises that he physically makes do, after all, have a lot less plausible deniability to them. That said, he had some “piercing yell”s in chapter 2 that most people would have called screams, but nope, they definitely weren’t that, not when he’s totally not even in any remotely significant amount of pain yet.

Scared: 33 words Weak: 32 words

“Scared” isn’t the only fear-related word, but it’s the most common one. And yep, of course this one doesn’t show up until phase 2. (That one in chapter 3 is an outlier; he’s talking about how the cult is scared of Shuichi taking them down.)

It was also deliberate of me to not have Kaito use the word “weak” until phase 2 (the chapter 1 instance is another outlier, talking about the kids and not himself). In fact, I consider the moment he calls himself weak for the first time to be the moment phase 2 begins. Up until then, he’d been doing a lot of questioning how strong he is and worrying he might not be strong enough, but once he starts to outright think of himself as possibly being weak, that’s something that’s him actively failing at being a hero and is a lot harder for him to take back and deny.

But though these two words both show up at around the same time, look at how “scared” is then still used a lot in phase 3 (some of those are about the cultists being scared of him, but plenty are still Kaito’s own fear), whereas “weak” is used a lot less from then on, and never to describe Kaito as actually being weak. While him being scared was always true, him being weak never was, at least not in the sense of weakness that really matters.

Pathetic: 28 words

There are various ways in which Kaito expresses his self-loathing, but this is probably the most common single word that’s always used in that way, so it’s the best way to get us a measure of this. It first appears near the end of chapter 2 but is more scattered earlier on, disappears in chapter 5 while he is in SPACE and obviously Totally Handling It, and then reappears with vicious abandon as he tumbles into phase 2 of his arc. I remember thinking to myself at one point while writing around then, “Kaito, you did not need to call yourself pathetic three times in the same page, calm down.” Turns out it was definitely more than one particular page he was being like that for.

Interestingly, this kind of lessens itself out around when he’s finished his uncontrollable sobbing fit over getting his friends killed. I guess at that point he just couldn’t possibly drag himself any deeper than he already was, and so there was no need for him to be quite so vicious to himself? I’m not sure; this part wasn’t on purpose.

Helpless: 30 words

This one’s honestly kind of less about Kaito’s mental deterioration and opinion of himself. A lot of the time it’s more about the fact that he’s just being externally rendered helpless whether he likes it and would want to agree with it or not. But I was curious as to how many times I used that word: quite a few, it turns out. Still in a somewhat higher concentration during chapter 6, too, as you’d expect.

Tortur: 26 words

(Without the “e” so that the search also catches “torturing”.)

You might expect this one to be used a lot more, since the entire fic is almost nothing but Kaito being tortured. But… most of the time, he doesn’t really like to think about that fact. He’s not precisely lying to himself about it and trying to tell himself he’s not being tortured or anything because that’d be a bit too obviously untrue, so it’ll come up occasionally whenever it’s necessary for him to think that word. But still, he’s trying not to dwell on it.

(Also, fun fact, “waterboarding” is, as antialiasis informed me when she read the fic, a term for a very specific kind of water torture that is not actually what was done to Kaito in chapter 5. However, since it seems that’s a fairly common misconception, I let Kaito have that misconception too and left his line about that as-is, mostly because I didn’t want to change it to “water torture” and have him use the word “torture” again when he didn’t have to.)

The exception here is chapter 6, where that word’s a little bit more frequent than in the other chapters, now that Kaito is openly terrified and can no longer stop himself from freaking out about the fact that he’s being tortured and it’s awful and he doesn’t want any of this. As phase 2 set in, I deliberately had Kaito quietly switch his mental terms for the cultists from “henchmen” or “captors”, to “torturers”. They were his torturers the entire time, obviously, but he only began to actively think of them that way when he could no longer hide from how nightmarish this whole thing was.

Hero: 85 words

Man, Kaito uses that word a lot in this fic. Honestly, this is way more than he’d usually use it – normally it’s a lot more frequent to hear “sidekick” from him than “hero” – but in this instance he is fervently clinging to that concept as the thing that he needs to be, or else. Which is really incredibly unhealthy of him, considering what his standards for living up to that are, up until he figures out what it really means.

There’s considerably less “hero”ing in chapter 5 despite him being very stubbornly Totally Fine for most of that chapter. I mentioned that and the reason for it in part 1 of this author’s commentary, and it’s only because of these Ctrl+F-ing shenanigans of mine that I’d even noticed that.

Sidekick: 34 words

The use of this one has less to do with Kaito’s mental state – except when it vanishes for most of chapter 6 – and is more just because this really is how Kaito will naturally refer to Shuichi and Maki together when not using their names. It still shows up at a lot of the same points that “hero” does, for obvious reasons. And then also in chapter 5 when his sidekicks are in SPACE, even though his mental jury is out at that point on whether or not he’s really a hero.

Friend: 29 words

This word only shows up once Kaito breaks down upon thinking he’s getting his friends killed. Impressively, he then manages to use it almost as many times as he used “sidekick” throughout the entire thing. Which is good. They are his friends and that is Important.

Having him not use the word for most of the fic was deliberate. I’ve talked in one of my commentary posts about the kind-of-heartbreaking fact that Kaito almost never refers to his sidekicks as “friends” and might not even quite realise that’s what they are. So at some point during this fic, along with getting Kaito to realise it’s okay for heroes to be vulnerable, I also wanted him to figure this one out, too. I wasn’t sure exactly when that’d happen, mind you, and just kind of winged it when I saw the best opportunity during the actual writing process. Being broken into believing that he doesn’t even deserve to call them his sidekicks any more and that he’s going to get them killed is, uh, not exactly the happiest way for Kaito to finally realise and fully accept that they’ve always been his best friends, but, well, it got him there.

And most importantly, he kept thinking of them that way even after regaining the ability to think of them as his sidekicks, too. They can be his heroes, sidekicks and best friends all in one.

#danganronpa v3 #kaito momota #kaito whump #ramble #kaito's hero issues #writing #torture #and now to finally move on to something that isn't about this fic! probably #that said i still have plenty more Thoughts about this fic #so still totally open for asks regarding it

[aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoldretired]

alrighty! im gonna talk about my two new dr!ocs and some updates on sheon’s whole thing. remember they don’t have names yet adkaljasdkfa

SURVIVOR: the ultimate jazz singer. 

as mentioned, she’s the ultimate jazz singer. pretty subdued personality, but she’s the type of jazz singer who would just. scream into a microphone a la screamin jay hawkins. she is pretty neutral/friendly but disconnected in the prologue/first chapter/second chapter. she gets more jittery as the interactions go on. but once you get to the post-fte section of chapter two, that night she actually tries to kill the protag. at this point its revealed her big Angsty Backstory is she got involved with drugs through the music scene and is currently suffering withdrawal symptoms and is Super desperate (something ive seen a lot with my co-musicians and its not good) big breakdown, really delirious, will eventually be talked off the ledge and calmed down. kind of like if sayaka was actually calmed down in thh chap 1

just so happens that during the night whoopsy someone else was killed. so you two have an alibi but to reveal it means you tell everyone about her issues. either there might be a lying feature like in drv3 to cover, or you tell the truth and end up isolating her. for chapter three and most of four she will keep her distance from the protag bc she’s uncomfortable but will eventually reach out to be friends again after chap 4 execution. 

is generally pretty useful during trials, tends to be a person who tries to help calm down more emotional students and look at things logically. is good at trying to calm down the blackened once the protag catches their bluff bc she understands what its like to be desperate. she does, however, cry during/after every punishment. tells others not to speak poorly of their executed classmates. 

she compulsively chews gum, and one of her favorite gifts would be gum. jokes about having an oral fixation. during school mode she might joke about singing love songs but being so awkward about it in real life. really likes dogs, has a dog plushie in her room. 

a first two fte will focus on her health/wellbeing. the third she’ll ask to not talk about that anymore and the next three are just about general stuff. the final one she’ll basically go a little further into detail but the moral of her story is like, she’s not a bad person for doing what she did, no one is. she’s just a person. and it cn happen to anymore.

dresses in clothes more inspired by late mod/early 70s fashion. hoestly im seeing like a turtleneck/pantsuit combo. short curly hair. big heavy under eyelashes. 

MASTERMIND: the ultimate drag racer (ultimate cruiser)

ok but I LOVE him. personality wise he’s the story’s anxious character, think closer in personality to chap 1 shuichi. quiet, skittish, easily flustered, sometimes cracks jokes that fall flat. he’s framed for the chap 1 murder (someone died in a go kart accident, its assumed he sabotaged the other car, his argument is why would he kill someone in a race in front of all his classmates?) the protag obviously works hard to prove he’s innocent. after the execution he makes a promise to the protag that he owes him one big time, and while it seems innocent at the time, the wording should have like. a slight suspicious undertone. 

he’ll investigate weirder areas of the school instead of practical (sometimes he has clues sometimes not) and if there’s ever a mechanical question for a trial, you’ll generally ask him for clarification. he’s not very trusting of others and is often the one to accuse others/bring the information learned in trials back into the real world and make a big deal out of it. for example, he’ll make a big deal about the attempted murder in chap 2, and he’s the one who’s constantly accusing sheon of being a traitor

at first he seems like he’s just anxious, but obviously, he’s the mastermind, and he’s trying to tear the group apart. 

his fte he’s awkward the first few times but he opens up slowly, showing actual comfort/joy around the protag. wants to be close friends. offers to take protag go karting. while their personality is pretty awkward most of the time, there are flashes of an adrenaline junky every now and then especially when talking about cars, where he seems so full of life and drive it’s almost scary. very competitive during these times, his determination almost taking a sadistic glee when talking about beating others. of course he explains it as his cutthroat sport, but ya know...mastermind. instead of saying we’re going to survive he says we’re going to win. friendly towards the others but doesn’t really care about them focused on protag. is consciously trying to seperate protag from sheon.

for a mastermind he’s actually quite the empath and grows attached to his classmates, which he actually takes pleasure in the amount of despair he feels after each of their executions. reason behind the game is the adrenaline rush he feels, never has felt more alive than on despair. he discovered the rush the first time he got in a car accident, and the moments before his crash where like pure bliss. he wanted to let everyone else feel his feverish joy, and talks about how everyone has enjoyed this, deep down. they’re all getting their sick kicks. breaks the fourth wall and alludes to the fact that the protag (through the player) is having the most fun of all. 

final trial where it’s revealed, he’s still v attached to the protag in like an almost yandere way and wants to follow up on the favor he owes from chap 1. he offers a deal to the protag where if they’re welcome to be their accomplice in all this and get out of the game. protag should push to bargain that everyone can give up their morals, sacrifice themselves to despair, and live as the mastermind’s accomplice in exchange for ending the killing game. 

eventually, he’ll agree, but only if the group decides one life among them to sacrifice for no other reason than to kill an innocent friend. the way to get to the correct ending is to choose yourself which will like invalidate the deal. protag ends up dying and everyone else lives. leaves the mastermind in a despair, but for the first time, he does not derive any pleasure. 

takes a LOT OF GLEE in admitting he convinced everyone else sheon was the traitor when she was not, everyone else is horrified.

anyways. his school mode/love mode events show his more likeable side, he can actually be a really cute partner if it weren’t for the part he’s evil but uh. soft sometimes. 

really likes energy drinks. talks about sponsorships. color scheme is like. a black racing suit but his jacket is tied around his waist and he’s wearing a wife beater. tons of accents of neon all over his outfit from like patches and brand deals. backwards hat. blushes easily. has a mullet. i love him. 

“TRAITOR” : SHEON FUKUDA (the ultimate film maker) 

ok so. still antagonistic. but more in the way of pushing your buttons and pointing out your flaws in a trial. like somewhere between antagonist and kirigiri. super chill personality, cracks a lot of jokes, is hardcore struggling with the games and will be open about her mental illness. her fatal flaw is still her martyr complex

is first framed after chap 2 bc of accused of having the ability to direct and oversee a production like this, and from that moment forward no one can trust her and she’s SUPER alienated. she’s still awkwardly trying to be friends/friendly but people act like she’s going to betray them all. tries to prove innocence multiple times going as far as to beginning of chap 3 announce to the group if they need to kill anyone, let it be her so no one else gets hurt and is super transparent about who she is. but this transparency makes people more suspicious. as she goes on she gets more desperate/gallows humor. last convo bfore chap 5 begins she has a vague conversation about with protag about if they fear death. chap 5 would end up being either a suicide or double murder (they killed each other one in attack the other while being defended against) so there’s no execution but monokuma still wants something. its also in this trial that the ultimate drag racer plants evidence taht makes it look like she’s the traitor and is addressed head on. 

a common motif for her is ‘playing the role assigned’ and knowing who she is and who she isn’t. she’s pretty comfortable knowing who she is but expresses unhappiness about being painted a villain. maybe like, three times through the story to this point it’s established as a motif/quirk of fitting a role she’s assigned bc if the protag asks her a question about herself/past/the overall story, she asks the protag a question like well, what do you want 1) 2) and you choose and she’s like. ok. then its _______. same thing here. as she’s finally excused she stares at the protag and is like do you really believe im the traitor? (yes) stares long and hard, somethng sad and defeated in her eyes. ok then. i am.

the trial doesn’t have a punishment originally planned bc the blackened are not alive. but she chooses not to vote and willingly chooses to be punished because everyone else has decided she’s the traitor and she chooses to play along so they can get closure. her last conversation should be about choosing the act of resistance, no matter how convoluted it can be. she doesn’t fear death. the pain sure, but not death. this was her choice to be punished, not the masterminds, and she hopes they lose any glee they take in her suffering because its a sacrifice for hope instead of a death in despair. last request is that she asks for the protag to make sure the manuscripts she wrote during her time are published, the last great work of sheon fukuda.

EXECUTION: CULTURE SHOCK so she wakes up on a soundstage to blinding light. she’s attached with electrodes. monokuma is sitting on a director’s chair with a director’s hat. basically the premise is as the ultimate film maker, she has to recreate different iconic movie scenes and every time she makes a mistake she gets shocked. she keeps on getting thrown into new scenes into the middle of old ones, throwing her off. after a sequence of costume changes/farces she finally collapses in the soundstage. 

beat. she looks up. above the soundstage is a sign that says “congratulations” or something. everyone gasps. she believes she beat it. a single light comes on in center stage prompting her to take a bow. she stumbles over, stands up, and looks into the shadows in the general direction of her classmates. a teleprompter prompts her classmates to clap. she takes glee, soaking in her win, and bows. as she comes up she smiles for a second before a short rings out. she’s shot through the heart. culture shock!

fte are mostly talking about directors/film references and what its like to be a film maker. real dry humor, sometimes talks about deeper stuff. her backstory is that her dad was working for an american embassy so she grew up in america going to art shool, and she feels out of place, despite being a japanese student with the same basic culture as everyone else. sometimes talks about slimeball directors, sometimes talks about missing certain food, loves takling about movies. as a filmmaker she specializes in dark comedy/farce which makes her suspicious of how someone can enjoy writing somethng so twisted

views are very intersectional, a little new agey, but still well put together. clearly a free spirit, very quirky from working in cinema, super dry sense of humor. likes philosophy

really likes blueberry jam. favorite item is somthing blueberry.

after chap 1 trial she expresses to the protag how she can never be the blackened, not just because of murdering one student, but to get away with it, everyone else would be punished instead, and she can’t deal with the blood on her hands. 

is open about her struggles with mental illness and how she was getting help and showing improvement bfore coming here but now she feels herself spiraling and hates it.

values everyone here as good friends, and while she tries to play it off she hates how they’re painting her as a villain. takes every death very personally. 

color scheme is very pastel, and she wears sweat pants and a collared shirt with a light blue robe. you can’t tell if those are pajamas or an outfit. wears rose-colored glasses. all about the aesthetic, just lean so far into film culture with her. personality/feelings towards style are very influenced by the fact she went to an american arts school instead of a japanese school like her peers so every part of her is slightly off/quirky/out-of-touch

she’ll mostly wear the glasses over her eyes, sometimes pushing them down on her nose for emphasis to make eye contact. only her anger sprite (point) shows her taking them off. 

during her execution she pushes them onto her forehead before taking her bow, almost to meet eye to eye. after she’s shot the last frame is them landing on the ground, cracking. 

i love sheon so much

#dr oc #sheon fukuda #dr after party

[soloplaying]

Bendy and the Ink Machine: "Dreams Come to Life"

Guess what I got my hands on!

My Rating: I'd say...about 3 out of 5 stars. Or a solid B/B-

I really wanted to like this book, and there were aspects that I did enjoy. It was a quick and easy read, the original characters were engaging, and the last 30-40 pages were great! Unfortunately, too much of the rest of it felt like an original coming of age novel had taken a wrong turn into a back alley where our favorite BatIM characters happened to be loitering, rather than a novel rooted in the source material. It was unfocused and, while neither side of the story was bad, trying to mash them together made the final product a bit unsatisfying.

(I probably don’t need to say this, but…spoilers below the cut.)

The Good, the Bad, and the Meh:

The Good:

Buddy, Buddy's family, and Dot. I liked the focal original characters, for what they were worth. The author did a good job of making the reader feel for them and put a lot of effort into making them well-rounded. We just spent way more time with them than necessary.

The Setting. Joey Drew Studios, Buddy's home, and New York as a whole. The story was descriptive in a very sensory way, really making you feel the heat in that long-ago New York summer and the visceral differences between Buddy's world and Joey's farce. This was also effective at highlighting differences between Buddy’s perceptions at the beginning and end of the book.

Joey. Joey is the one game character in the book that received a decent bit of exploration and development. Buddy's initial infatuation with Joey's empty promises and charisma giving way to cold facts and the creeping horror of realization about how twisted he actually is...that's interesting to observe.

Sammy, Norman, Tom, Allison, Henry. To be clear, Henry's not actually present. At all. But the few lines we get about him are almost as much as we get from the game characters that are working at the studio at the time of the novel. What tiny bits we get about them are nice, though! Especially Sammy and the final conversation between Buddy and Tom.

The Studio. It feels properly creepy and convoluted. Since Buddy and Dot spend a significant amount of time exploring it, the studio's atmosphere receives a lot more focus than many other parts of the plot. It doesn’t quite match the game studio’s layout, but that’s a nonsensical mess anyways.

The Meh:

The Ink Demon. I couldn't figure out whether to put this in the positive or negative bracket so I'm leaving it somewhere in between. "Bendy" is properly terrifying and twisted and there's something that hits you right in the gut when you find out it's locked up in a tiny room alone, howling mournfully, when Buddy finds it. Then it gets out and starts killing people and that sympathy goes away very fast. However, it doesn't really feel like the Ink Demon from the game. In the book, it acts like a beast when Buddy sees it but, when you actually stop to think about it, its actions don't make sense for an animal driven by instinct. What is it actually doing most of the time? This might be a sign that it changes between the time of the novel and the game, but its actions in the novel are so contradictory that I think it’s a mistake. So....it's good as a typical PG-13 horror monster, but it doesn't feel like the Ink Demon, or "Bendy", despite the descriptions.

The Subplots. The many, many subplots. Don't get me wrong, I like Buddy, but hyper-focusing on him so much was extremely detrimental to the rest of the story. He had about six different things going on in his life and the first person POV meant the reader was stuck with him for every second of it. This brings us to the biggest problem in the novel and the cons section.

The Bad:

Buddy's Story. Thing is, it isn’t bad. It's a coming of age story about an artistic kid from the wrong side of town trying to find himself in post-WWII New York. It just...has nothing to do with Bendy and the Ink Machine. Even when Buddy is hired by Joey, there's about one page of studio investigation for every ten pages of Buddy's personal life struggles. It felt like the author started writing the first plot then tried to cram Bendy and the Ink Machine into it later on. And it really feels like the author cares more about the coming of age novel than the Bendy/Studio stuff. Joey was a key figure in the book but it was less about his madness driving the studio to ruin and more about Buddy trying to find a role model/mentor and being let down hard. (All of this is until the last forty pages or so, until Buddy talks to Tom and Allison at the party. Then it FINALLY feels like a BatIM book.)

The lack of time spent with the BatIM characters other than Joey. I liked what little we got of them, but I swear there were maybe ten pages, combined, of their roles in a book that was almost 200 pages. That includes Norman, Sammy, Tom, and Allison. Sammy might have gotten a bit more simply because Buddy thought about him a lot, but he wasn't actually present any more than the others, he just got name-dropped more often.

The limited first-person perspective. There are plenty of cases where this is a good choice, but in this book, it was very restrictive. Buddy didn't know much, wasn't interested in knowing much, and didn't focus on the things that the reader found most interesting. We all understand needing to make money to care for our loved ones, but he’s working in an increasingly demonic (haunted?) animation studio. Focus, Buddy! Every time the plot seemed to be teasing something interesting, Buddy ran away from it and, since we were tied to him in first person, we never got to see what happened after he left. If we’d cycled between characters in first-person, that would have been a different matter…but we didn’t.

The lack of Bendy. And Boris. And Alice. Buddy wants to draw, clearly, but most of the time, he just talks about learning to draw and wanting to make cartoons. The subject matter doesn't seem to be important, so even though we're in Joey Drew Studios, Buddy rarely talks or thinks about the titular character beyond lines on a page. The entire book, 'Bendy' just felt like a name dropped every now and then, not the beloved 'dancing demon'.

Buddy's Fate. Getting turned into Boris, I can accept. It's the rest of it. The whole "I took off into the depths of the studio where not even Joey Drew could find me and I watched as it grew and changed, then I decided to write this for Dot.". What? WHERE did he stay? And WHY? Joey was still sacrificing people, and he did nothing to stop it? What was he eating, if bacon soup wasn't all over the place yet? How did he remain undetected in the pre-warped studio? He had family - did he not try to contact them? What about Dot? She still worked there and understood what was going on - he never tried to talk to her? Send her a note? ANYTHING? Why did he write the book AFTER the studio was abandoned? On the face of it, this is a weak resolution, but it's actually worse – all of this is completely out of character for the Buddy we've come to know during the novel.

The whole 'mentally turning into Boris' thing. I get that Buddy's writing a retrospective, but we get a few paragraphs of rambling about his mental state every five chapters or so and it's never consistent – Buddy’s voice is the same the rest of the time, no matter how much he says he’s slowly sliding into Boris. It just serves to remind the reader that they're reading a BatIM prequel. It would have been a better choice to put a longer introduction from his human perspective in the beginning and a fragmented, more 'Boris' follow-up at the end to show the degradation of Buddy's mind.

*Sigh*

It would have been so much better if the author had followed a character more invested in the studio instead of their own life. If it had to be an original character in the current book, it should have been Dot. Better yet, it should have been Tom or Norman – they are both well-known game characters who were personally involved in the horrors going on behind the scenes and Norman came to an end just as bad as Buddy's. Plus, they would have been more focused on the game characters rather than the original characters.

I got the ebook for about $5 and I don’t regret buying it, but I probably won't read it again.

In Short:

The last 30-40 pages were great and everything you could want from a Bendy and the Ink Machine novel. The rest of it read like the author was trying to Frankenstein together a coming of age novel and a short horror story without much success. Other than Joey, that is; the 'unscrupulous, delusional businessman who pushes too far' character fit well into both sides of the story.

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #BatIM #Dreams Come to Life #I kind of want to write a fanfic fixing these problems #Cycle between the perspectives of the named characters #Could even keep most of the plot #Just keep the focus on the BatIM part of it #It all comes back to the lack of focus #doesn't it? #Also #where was Wally for all of this? #Book Review