[16] Run Over

console

< Piro >

"what is a fan to do?"

Monday - September 18, 2000

I think i was suffering from excessive visual stimuli and a quirky caffeine haze on Saturday when I commented on the fate of some of our favorite anime characters. Someone pointed out to me that the characters really don't belong to us, so we shouldn't complain about their fate. That may be true, but still, we do take these things *personally* sometimes. Like it or not, it really matters to us - even when it doesn't to the studio that produced the show.

so, what is a fan to do? your favorite character has been mauled, devastated, destroyed, or altered in ways that you do not like. Do you have any recourses? Can you do anything at all?

If you have enough fans who are totally outraged, and can swell en masse like an angry mob, a studio can find itself forced to change the ending of a show. This happened at the end of the Evangelion TV run - fans were stomping mad at the way the show wrapped up, so Gainax promised to change the ending for subsequent releases. Actions like this are rare. You have to REALLY piss off a LOT of fans to do this - so generally you can much rule this option out.

You can re-write the story - go back to where things were right, and continue from there. Doujinshi (fan art works) area a good medium for this. Doujinshi usually expand upon a story, continuing beyond the end of the show to increase the 'life' of the characters. But they can also be a chance to re-write things in the character's past to try to 'fix' things. If enough fans buy into it, you can change the collective history of that character.

Sadly, tho, many doujinshi actually do more abuse to the characters than the TV show did. Ruri has been excessively abused in doujin titles for years, which to me is unfortunate. So, if you are looking for doujinshi titles that might remedy the problem, and can't do it yourself, you may be out of luck and in fact end up feeling worse in the end.

The next step, of course, is to create your OWN characters and your OWN story... and the HELL with everyone else! This way you control the fate of your characters, and then nothing bad can happen to them.

The creative process, however, can take on a life of its own. When you create a story and a framework for characters to live in, things can develop in ways that you didn't expect. An element of the story grows and falls in to place so well that it really HAS to stay - yet the consequences for a particular character can be dire. I suppose this is how these things happen.

(sigh) I often hope I never end up doing that. Yet as I look at scripts and story arcs for the future of both Megatokyo and Warmth, I am beginning to wonder - will i be guilty of the same thing? I wonder... why am i sitting her chuckling? This is not good... bad piro, bad...

Maybe I should just go finish that Eva/Nadesico crossover doujinshi fanfic i was working on, where Asuka ends up ok in the end...

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< Largo >

"A..Ku..Ro..Su.."

Tuesday - September 19, 2000

[Largo] - 01:29:00 - [link here]

For those who don't quite get the reference, Excel Saga is an anime which has its main character get hit by an oncoming bus in the first couple minutes of the show. It's really a sweet series that people should watch.

Only problem for some with it, is that every episode has some parody or inside jokes that relate to other shows, both recent and ancient.

Due to some email we received, Piro is tossing around the idea of making a redrawn color version ofthe 'speak l33t' episode and putting it on the back of a t-shirt, with the MegaTokyo logo on the front pocket area. If this is something you would be interested in purchasing, let us know in the forum.

Before I forget, I should tell everyone that I was not selected for the Tribes 2 beta, for this injustice, I place a curse on Dynamix! May your project leader leave… err oh.. wait.. already happened…

This weekend I got hit with the nostalgia bug again. So I hunted around for my CD of Infocom games and placed it in the drive, once inside - beloved classics like Zork and Lurking Horror called to me, begging to be played… I did not want to disappoint these eager games, so I gave in to their charms and spent the night in pre-marital text-based bliss.

For those that don't know or remember what Infocom games were, even though you heathens deserve only to be beaten with a wet noodle, I'll explain. Zork and the like were text-based adventure games. They had only text, no texture maps, no fancy sprites, no engines, and we liked it! Of all the Infocom games, I liked one more then any other - 'The Lurking Horror'. This game made me the man I am today, so please, keep it away from small impressionable children.

The game really spoke to your average computer user back in the day, here you were - a college student, on a campus half covered in snow, and a strange evil entity causing havoc for all those around you, and guess who has to stop it? … You get three guesses and the first two don't count.

links-o-plenty

I'm really amazed at just how many webcomics are out there, everytime I turn around I seem to find another dozen comics. So for today I thought I'd share some of them.First up is Sketch of Love, the art style has a manga edge to it, and is really good, in fact I think this artist has a very bright future. Next up is Common Grounds, another sweet and cool comic with a growing readership.

To change gears for a moment, I'm going to point out that the two comics I listed are both hosted on Keenspace, a free hosting service for comic artists to use to grow their strips. This always seemed like a good idea to me, and to prove that it is, another project has started in the same vein, called Cartoon Community.

It is dark... I am likely to be eaten by a grue.