Sunday, August 15, 2004

Sen says the dumbest things.
And I do. Just ask Azure.

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I have had the urge to do something creative lately. With school and the menacing return of piano lessons looming on the horizon I have become a bit worried about getting a few things done. The first and probably most important one is the two-year GATE (It's this school district's advanced program) project, in which we were supposed to do something to "better ourselves." As I've mentioned before, I made it my goal to add to my pretty basic knowledge of the Japanese language.

Of course I don't expect to become fluent in two years- Hell, I'll be lucky if I get all the particles down in time. I just want to know enough to write about five sentences (The ultimate goal is a page) and translate a bit (Anywhere between five words and a page) by the end of this year.

The big problem with that is that it's already been a year and I haven't done jack shit.

We're supposed to be keeping a journal of all out progress, and mine's as empty as the day I got it in the beginning of seventh grade. I'm probably going to have to spend the two weeks before school totally BSing my way through ten or fifteen pages of the little composition book and reading up a bit. I'm still really worried, though.

Of course, it's not like anyone else is much better. Nobody's done anything so far, and they don't even have challenging or even interesting topics.

I can't say I remember many of them off the top of my head, but I do recall one guy saying he wanted to figure out how to make some sort of explosive.

Is that constructive? Is that even a long-term project? I know this guy, it's not like he's even gonna do it anyway, but still, he could at leasta come up with something better than that.

But if anybody calls him on it he'll chew them out. He's a rather interesting fellow, but as a good friend of mine recently stated, "He has personality conflicts with everybody, not just Nick."

Heh. Moving on.

The other thing that's been worrying me is the return of piano lessons. My mom, when she was in her "WE'RE GONNA MOVE TO PITTSBURG!1111!!1!" phase decided to cancel my piano lessons because we were "going to fly to Pittsburg for a month or two" and such. This was a major relief for me, because I never, ever practice except for forty minutes before the actual lesson.

My teacher's nice enough.. On the surface. She acts pleasant, and is kind when you're a piano-slave and spend an hour a day practicing, but you can tell she's displeased and such when you do rather poorly.

And of course it's absolutely entirely her fault, not mine, and that's why I don't want to return.

But I will, because of the occasional rewarding feeling of playing a song I like. Plus four years of extracurricular musical education doesn't look good enough on a college application.

And the third and final thing that's made me antsy is not a requirement- it's just something that I'm really itching to do. Most of this summer has been full of computer-going and gaming, but my creative inhibitions have returned in a desire to exercise my brain (If drawing horribly violent cartoons counts as constructive brain exercise.. o_O). I have been doing my share of drawing, yes, but I also want to do more manga lately. As I've said before, I have a ton of ideas floating around that I've been developing on and off, some more than others, since fourth or fifth grade. I think I'll rant about the ideas for a little while now, just because I know how much you all want to hear it.

Psh. *can't hold in the laughter*

I'll be listing them all in order of when I made them.

Story one- "Gundam G2" I came up with this one in, what, late third grade? It was when Gundam Wing had just been released on Toonami. I was rather infatuated with the series, and one day I thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be cool if I were to make up my own continuation of the series?"

This was years before I had heard of fanfictions. *cough*

The "story" revolved around three kids (Modeled after myself and a couple friends) who "found" Gundams lying around in some mysterious building.

It sucked, plain and simple. In fact, I'm ashamed that I even decided to bring it up.

Story medium: It was a comic. Manga before I knew what Japanese comics were called.
Story's current status: Canned. Totally dead. Never let it see the light of day again.

Story Two- There have been so many titles I can't remember, but the original was "Quest for Time"- I came up with this idea one day when some fifth or sixth graders were making some characters for a video game they wanted to make (Hey, we've all been there). I sort of looked up to them, though I really didn't know them too well, and I felt that I would be able to "contribute" some "interesting" characters.

I came up with a knight that was vaguely modeled after Cloud from Final Fantasy VII in Dragonball Z form, some person in a robo-suit (a lame one) with energy-based weaponry, some person modeled somewhat after Misty from Pokemon who punched things a lot, a martial arts dude with funny hair, a cybernetic dinosaur and some weird flying reptile thing with a bigass cannon on its back.

And how proud I was of them. I would spend hours drawing them, their character stats, and writing up half-assed biographies. The next time I saw the two guys they had dropped the video game idea altogether. I then decided that my characters "deserved" a comic book.

Basically, the main character was the knight guy (David Knight was his original name, though I've toyed around with it since then), who was in training to become a master swordsman dude when this big shadow thing (I think he was originally modeled after Ghastly the Pokemon) with lame/menacing eyes came, destroyed the city and froze time. For reasons unknown to anyone (Including myself, I figured I would BS it when I got around to explaining it) the main character didn't freeze with everyone else and escaped. He then would come across the mech-suit person, the Misty-modeled one, the martial arts guy, the dinosaur and the frog-ish thing. All one at a time, ala One Piece, before I even knew what it was.

I would always get to the second or third issue, find something I wanted to change, and start over again. I don't think I ever got to the fifth, heh. Things changed even more when The Lord of the Rings came out. I saw it with my dad and found a new standard of quality that I wanted to meet.

I then changed the character designs, added some extra story inbetween the original bits, and got rid of the dinosaur and the frog-thing among two other characters (A mutated sibling of the fighter guy and a pile of sludge). They were just holding the story down.

I sort of returned to the "second generation" thing that was started in Gundam G2, and how there was a different group of four people centuries ago that sealed the shadow guy, whom I named Natoro, away in a stone in the middle of the sea.

One of the big things about this comic has always been how there were always four realms- the medievel Europe one, the thirty-first century America one, the Imperial Japan one and the "original" one (Spiritual mages and crap). Recently, however, I asked myself a few questions about that. If the future one was so advanced, why didn't they just dominate the other three? And why wouldn't the other three just adopt the superior one's ways of life? I temporarily fixed that with "They didn't know about each other," but even that seemed a bit unrealistic. I've come up with a couple solutions, the best one probably being isolate three of them, have the futuristic one's elders know but not tell anyone, and there you go, but I still think it could be better. If I could figure out an original way to make the advanced one seem a bit more earthy (Like the Al Bhed in Final Fantasy X, only different so I wouldn't be blatantly ripping them off), that would be a big help. Plus, I shouldn't say Japan and Europe. They should just be like the actual civilizations but not blatantly Japan, Europe and America. It makes things seem a bit more believeable if they're my own creations and not things ripped out of history books and glued together on a piece of cardboard.

I'm currently in the process of changing things again. I'm going to change a few of the character designs around, fill in the blanks that I've left between segments two and four, and most importantly make the script good. I want this series to be my first impressive work. I've stuck with it for almost five years now and it has changed a lot. There is still room for improvement, but I believe that it has potential.

Story medium- I currently consider it to be a manga, that way I could have total control over it, but in the end it might just become an ongoing anime. Current status- The third or fourth revision.. Time to make it interesting to read. Oh, and let's get a good title, too.

Story 3- Backstory to Quest for Time- Ugh, I hate calling it "Quest for Time," but I haven't thought up a good title yet.

This one is just the story of the four people who sealed Natoro away centuries before Quest for Time. I recently decided there only needed to be one protaganist in this one. I want variety, not four heros every time around.

Story medium- It would probably be a short, one-volume manga, if QFT ends up as a manga, but it would probably be better as a couple OVAs.
Current status- I have never put much thought into it. Let's call it "preliminary."

Story four: "Spiritual Advisor Seiki- I devised this one as a one-shot story I submitted to Tokyopop for their second Rising Stars of Manga contest. Basically, the female character Kino goes to a psychic one day and is given a mirror that she is told will bring her good luck in her romance life. As she leaves the store, she looks in the mirror only to see some other person staring back at her. It pops out in the form of a ghost (A human-looking one with the exception of feet). His name is Seiki, and he's a cynical little ghost bastard who has to help Kino with her little social problems.

In the version I actually submitted, Kino wanted to impress her crush by becoming really good at a dancing game. I believe the game was called "Boogie Boogie Dancing Hour." The hole in Kino's plan of having a ghost help her get good at a physical game in a very short period of time? How the hell is a spirit supposed to do anything?

Originally I had Seiki touch Kino's feet and make her jump- You know how ghosts are supposed to make you get really cold if they pass through you. It was a sort of weak resolve, but it worked at the time. Tokyopop gave me a cool little certificate of recognition for it.

Story medium: One-shot manga, twenty pages or so.
Current status: Dormant. This was my first take at romantic comedy, and I haven't really taken the time to develop it. I do like it, though. I'll come back to it someday.

Story five: Summoners(?)- I came up with this one last year. It's basically about this guy who is sent with his childhood friend and some guy he doesn't care about who is his self-proclaimed rival to go find some sort of.. Something, I haven't worked on that yet. The main thing is that they have some psychich abilities, and they have the power to channel spirits and people from other worlds and have them appear in a physical form as a sort of guardian/pawn for killing. I haven't developed it much, but I liked designing the world. Each little realm is based off of a religion, and each conflict they come across paralels a story from each religion (i.e. they are from the Jewish or Christian one, and they are oppressed by the Roman/Greek one, which has some sort of Roman mythology thing going on). This one will need a lot of research before I can do anything with it.

Story medium: It would probably be best as a 26-episode anime series.
Current status: Dormant.

Story six: Ronin Mech- A typical mech anime. I haven't done too much with it.

Story medium: A manga, I guess.
Current status: Dormant, undeveloped.

Story seven: Das Grim (Tentative)- A couple of you (Shin, Syk, PT) are familiar with this one. It's a very dark one-shot that I came up with a while back that revolves around a guy who is a Grim, meaning he basically kills those whose time has come. It's not like the wounds are visible or anything- most of the time he takes a tentacle (A Grim is like a shadow thing. It can stretch and change shape) and touches the victims' hearts with it, which generally leads to a natural death. To the truly deserving, however, he takes his time and does more of a painful/homicidal deal that manifests itself in the form of a bullet hole or a stab wound to a human.

In this particular assignment, however, he has to swifty send a young bedridden girl. He has some issues with this, but is forced to do it anyway. It's not too deep in the one-shot form, but I would definitely expand upon it.

I use a lot of heavy shading in this one to add to the dark tone. It looks sort of cool, in my opinion.

Story medium- One-shot manga, though I would make it a bit longer if I had nothing else to do.
Current status- It's in progress, but it's not my top priority. Right now I'm toying around with how I might draw the first few pages. It would be cool to do semi-abstract mini-paintings on the first few pages..

Story eight: Super Fun-Fun Cosplay Force: Stereotypes in Action!- I made this up right after I made the first sketches for Das Grim. This one is basically about a group of three stereotypical romantaic comedy anime characters- a way-too-cheery, loud female schoolgirl who is statutory-licious, her quiet bishounen crush and a scrawny nerdy dude who find a "severe injustice against the rights of anime fans everywhere," which was really more of a price increase for their local anime convention's admission prices. They then put on their cosplay outfits and become the SUPER FUN-FUN COSPLAY FORCE, which basically makes them fantasy anime stereotypes. The girl is a generic maho-shoujo hero with a staff, puffy pink outfit and cute floating mascot character, her crush is an angsty anti-hero with large muscles and a big sword (Interpret that however you want), and the scrawny kid with glasses becomes a Power Rangers/Ulraman knockoff, and he doesn't look good in his skin-tight rubber suit.

The rest of it is random anime refrences and satire of anime convnetions. It's a fun little thing that I haven't dug too deep into.

Story medium- I designed it as a one-shot manga.
Current status- Undeveloped. I don't think I ever did more than the cover page concept and some character sketches, heh.

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And that's that. I applaud anybody who took the time to read all of that.

And wow, the browser didn't even crash on me halfway through! It must be a sign from God..
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