#ghost in the shell OVA

[morganhopesmith1996]

Major Motoko Kusanagi 😎

[nando161mando]

Must be time for another Hellsing Ultimate rewatch and Ghost in the Shell.

[thedakku]

‘Landlock’ OVA Japanese VHS Tape!

With character designs by Masamune Shirow. There are a total of two 45 minute episodes.

[zackfairmutual]

i fell asleep when i should be filling out a coli grind order on fr

[weaselandfriends]

The Making Of: Fargo

Today, May 4 2025, is the tenth anniversary of when I started Fargo! To celebrate, here is a behind-the-scenes/retrospective on the work. Enjoy!

I. This Is Your Brain On Anime

I started writing Fargo at the lowest point in my life. I'd been watching anime.

For years, I'd managed to not watch anime. Sure, there was Pokémon as a kid, and to a lesser extent Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh. And as a preteen cinephile who followed the Oscars, Spirited Away's Best Animated win got me to pick it up on DVD. I'd later seen a handful of anime films that similarly carried cinephile credibility: other Miyazakis (Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke), Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Paprika. But I had always refused to watch anime anime. You know what I mean. The seasonal stuff.

In 2007, the final fringe of Wild West internet before Facebook changed everything, seasonal anime was exploding in popularity. A lot of this was due to sheer accessibility. No longer did you need to find a VHS release of some OVA or hope for a play on Adult Swim. Fan subbing and dubbing communities rendered more-or-less anything showing up in Japan available to worldwide audiences via a nifty new site called YouTube. This level of immediacy, combined with the niche tight-knit communities that governed the internet prior to social media, made following seasonal anime a social event. Week by week people posted reactions, reviews, theories, and memes, driving up engagement and rapidly expanding anime's reach as an entertainment medium.

The big breakthrough title in this regard is 2006's The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a massively influential show that changed the look and feel of mainstream anime for years. But my first brush with the anime community came via the following year's Lucky Star, by the same studio and with the same moe stylings. As I prowled the boards of Nintendo's official forum, Nsider, and its successor Nsider 2 (after Nintendo, in characteristically Nintendo fashion, annihilated the site from existence without warning), I found myself constantly bumping into people posting pictures of these four hyper-cutesy anime girls with candy-colored hair. They were everywhere. Teenage me took one look and came to an unshakeable and incontrovertible conclusion:

Only girls would watch this!

Saccharine aesthetic? Lack of plot? And, god, all of the characters are girls? Girl show. No doubt in my mind. Nah, none of this "anime" crap for me. I'll stick with real media, like Leprechaun 4: In Space (which I eagerly stayed up until midnight to watch on the SciFi Channel) and Eli Roth's splatterhouse classic Cabin Fever.

Then some devious motherfucker, I don't even remember who they were, told me something truly insidious, something that would haunt me for years to come. "Hey," they said, "what if there was a show like Lucky Star except they all killed each other with knives? Wouldn't that be awesome?"

And they recommended me Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.

(They showed me an AMV with a similar feel to this one to entice me. Unfortunately that original AMV is lost to history.)

I wound up bingeing the entire 50-episode show, in 10-minute chunks on YouTube, across a single 24-hour period. I couldn't stop myself. It was the same obsessive consumption that would infest me when I discovered Homestuck five years later. Obsession so intense that after I finished it, I immediately went crawling in search of more anime and devoured Death Note in another 24-hour span.

Emerging, blinking, back into the sun, I looked around and realized I couldn't go on like this. I couldn't plunge headlong, headless, into anime. I could not become the dreaded "weeb."

So I cut off anime. No more. As quickly as my drop into the abyss began, I ended it. And a few years later, when I went to college, I cut off the internet as a social experience altogether. No more forums, no more chatrooms. I was an adult. Time to do adult stuff, like read classic literature, write novels, and play League of Legends for 10 hours every day.

Despite how it sounds, college was a great time in my life. I enjoyed learning, enjoyed going to classes, enjoyed reading textbooks, enjoyed writing essays. And I was good at it, very very good—even with the 10-hour League sessions. I felt no need to reconsider anime.

Then I graduated.

Graduating college was like slamming face-first into a brick wall. My entire life until then had seemed to be building toward something. Academia is a series of stepping stones to more prestigious levels of academia (middle school! high school! college!) with a golden gleaming Adulthood at the end of the line, omnipresent. And I did it! My success in college got me a job, eight hours in an office five days a week, much better than anyone else in my post-recession cohort. Adulthood accomplished.

It was miserable. That gleaming paradise Adulthood was a sham. I was doing less work and less difficult work than at college but they were demanding I spend way more time doing it. All sense of fulfilment vanished. There was no longer progress, no bigger and better things on the horizon. I had nothing to hope for. I'd achieved the thing people tend to hope for, and THIS WAS IT. The notion that consumed me was that my life had slipped into overtime, a dead zone past its expiration date, treading water in misery. I also had a 90-minute daily commute in SoCal traffic.

My free time was cut down to a fraction of what it was in college, so no more 10-hour League sessions. I tried to maintain my schedule of reading 50 pages and writing 2,000 words a day, but I no longer had the time or energy, and it didn't make sense why I didn't have the time or energy, because I was doing things that were so trivial and easy compared to my college courseload. Work was an arbitrary time-wasting machine with nothing ahead except 40 more years of work. I wanted to die.

Despairing, seeking nothing save relief, I turned back to anime.

In a Skype groupchat I wound up in, there were two teenagers with their fingers on the pulse of the latest anime buzz. They were my guides back into this wretched world. First, I was served up Fate/Zero, which I consumed quickly (though not with the same leisure time to afford a 24-hour binge) before asking for seconds. I was then recommended Angel Beats. Okay, I said, typing Angel Beats into YouTube, which seven years after Higurashi I still assumed was the main way to watch anime. The first result I got was called Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan. Aha, I said. Angel Beats, Bludgeoning Angel, I know what this is. It's an alternate translation of the title.

It's the kind of comedy of errors that could only happen to someone who timewarped directly from 2007 to 2014 with complete ignorance of the intervening years. Angel Beats, of course, is a tearjerking Key show about students in the afterlife coming to grips with their tragic deaths. Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan is about an angel repeatedly bludgeoning a boy because otherwise he will grow up and create a world where every woman stops aging at 10 years old—a so-called "Lolicon Paradise." (As someone who reads classic lit, seeing the bizarre cross-cultural route Nabokov's novel has taken always amuses me.)

When I started Bludgeoning Angel, I was a little uncertain whether I had the right show. Its tone didn't quite jive with Bingus and Bungus in the Skype chat. Hesitantly, I decided to react in chat to the first thing that happens in the show. "Haha," I said. "The angel really just killed that guy."

In a sadistic twist of fate, this is somehow exactly how Angel Beats begins, too. My friends responded as though everything was total normal, and I figured I must have the right show after all. Thus, I wound up watching the entirety of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, which becomes increasingly surreal, violent, and depraved as it goes on, and only learned my mistake after the final episode. That show probably tainted me forever.

Afterward, I watched the real Angel Beats (in my depressive stupor, it made me cry), Mirai Nikki, and the "only for girls" Lucky Star (it also made me cry). I was getting hooked. It was only a matter of time before Bingus and Bungus recommended me a true landmine. They did. "I think you might like this," Bungus said, tepidly, not exactly sure.

"Hit me," I said.

II. Puella Magi Madoka Magica

The League of Legends-induced timewarp that imprisoned me in college had the side effect of allowing me, in early 2015, to watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica completely blind. I hadn't the faintest idea what it was about, or even a hint of its reputation. Bungus said, "Watch it," and I watched it.

Believe it or not, this blindness backfired. Despite the sanctity people place on spoilers, expectations are a crucial component of the narrative experience. Unaware of what I was watching, I was not nearly as impacted by what I saw. The much-famed Episode 3 twist was nothing to me. Why? I was certain, absolutely certain, the death wouldn't stick. I felt extremely confident either Madoka or Sayaka would make a wish to bring Mami back to life.

Nonetheless, the show grew on me. The cute exterior steadily transforming grimmer was a Ratatouille flashback to Higurashi; there's something so delicious about how jaggedly the hyper-poppy upbeat OP jumpscares in the middle of increasingly hopeless situations during the show's back half. After 12 episodes and a movie I needed more. Not more anime. More Madoka Magica.

I didn't get it from the spinoffs, of which there were several even then, most of which I knew nothing about. Instead I went looking for it on more familiar terrain, another relic of my 2007 timewarp: fanfiction-dot-net. This is where people go to engage with media fandom, right? I hit up the Madoka page, sorted content by number of reviews, and got this:

Well, sort of. Fargo wasn't there yet, obviously. The other five were, in this same order. I opened To the Stars, read a chapter or two, found it impossibly boring and nothing at all like the show, and discarded it. Resonance Days, A Happy Dream, and cat's cradle [sic] all looked like shipfics, which was not my speed. That left one fic, which I would read in one day home sick (legitimately) from work, one fic that would prove massively influential on the idea for Fargo I didn't yet have.

Puella Magi Homura Magica by Lestaki, despite its second-place position on this prestigious list (behind only a work once described by acclaimed guy-with-a-blog Eliezer Yudkowsky as the most prescient depiction of future warfare ever written), is a fanfic I have never heard anyone mention once in my now 10-year stint in the Madoka Magica trenches. Even in the subculture it is a blank of memory, which makes sense if you look at its publication and last updated dates. It came out May 24, 2011—barely a month after the show finished airing—and was unceremoniously abandoned, incomplete, little over a year later. It's easy to see the fic emerging in the frenzy of activity prompted by the show's immediate popularity, rising on the tide, and vanishing under the waves of works with more temporally dogged creators.

So what is it?

PMHM is a three-arc story set after the show (and ignoring, of course, Rebellion, which it predates). Its first arc focuses on the three-man band of Homura, Kyoko, and Mami as they prepare to fight against a "demon prince"—an exceptionally powerful, city-destroying wraith—that Kyubey predicts will be born in Mitakihara soon. The demon prince is so powerful that the trio cannot possibly defeat it on their own, causing them to soon be joined by a ragtag team of original characters, spinoff characters, and a contracting Hitomi. The squad butts heads, but ultimately manages to come together to destroy the demon prince when it appears.

The second arc revolves around an inter-city magical girl war. The Mitakihara girls, for reasons I don't fully remember, have to invade and defeat an OC magical girl warlord in charge of another city. Both sides amass allies until the final confrontation involves at least a hundred magical girls. At the end of the arc, the OC villain reveals she manufactured the war to put Homura in a situation where she would be forced to continually use her time-rewinding powers to save Kyoko and Mami (whom she has come to care for over the course of the story), which is part of the villain's plot to generate enough karmic potential that she can create a new Madoka-esque god. Homura is aware that every time she rewinds time, she is helping the villain usurp Madoka, so she's torn between saving her living friends and saving her conceptual girlfriend.

That's where the story abruptly ends, mired in a series of repetitive chapters where the villain keeps finding ways to kill Kyoko and/or Mami and forcing Homura to turn back time. (It seems the author trapped themselves in the concept of showing each timeline in detail and lost momentum fast.)

And that's where Fargo begins.

III. Williston

Fargo was not a conscious work. Unlike most of my fiction, it was not assiduously planned. It was not kicked around in my head for years before I started writing it. It was not drafted and redrafted. Fargo was a creature of instinct, and because of that even now I look at it with a certain sense of wonder. Both Chicago and Cleveland Quixotic originated with me examining Fargo, trying to see what made it so popular, and laboriously reengineering whatever I concluded was the cause (I was wrong both times).

It emerged in my head not as an idea, but a vibe. Frigid, frostbitten wasteland. A tough, take-no-bullshit magical girl, dead inside. She'd use a Gatling gun. Long brown coat.

I was 60,000 words into a draft of a story I'd been planning since I first read Homestuck in 2012, a story I was tentatively calling Soulstealer but would eventually call Modern Cannibals. But I didn't want to write it anymore. At work, I was still miserable. I wanted to write a work of misery. I wanted to write a miserable human being. I abandoned the Modern Cannibals draft despite how far along it was (I was at the scene where Z. rescues Kiki from Mitchum's party). I began, as if automatically, writing something else. It was the same surrender that had led me to anime in the first place. The path of emotional, intellectual least resistance.

It's probably because I was on this path that I wound up unconsciously borrowing so many structural and worldbuilding cues from Puella Magi Homura Magica, especially in the first arc, with the Williston archon substituted for the Mitakihara demon prince. It wasn't even a conscious decision to do what I had seen in PMHM; I didn't realize the overlap until later. I was putting onto page the last thing lodged in my brain, and that was it. At work, I'd recently learned about the homeless crisis in Williston due to the shale oil boom, and that wound up in the story too.

Basically every part of the first few chapters of Fargo manifested on the page without me having any idea what it would build to. When Kyubey told Sloan to go to Williston, I knew he was being deceptive, but I didn't know how, and certainly had not figured out his elaborate plot to defeat Homura yet. Ditto Omaha. Clair Ibsen as Sloan's detested rival was a name I flicked onto the page at random (combining Clair, the gym leader from Pokémon, with Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian playwright, because I figured a character from Minnesota should have a Scandinavian surname). The girl, unnamed, who scuffles with Sloan in Chapter 1 was not yet Anoka; I had no plans for her to reappear, nor plans to make her relevant to how the Williston archon was born. When writing Chapter 2, I had no conception of Delaney or Erika (another Pokémon gym leader) as characters until I started writing them, at which point their personalities emerged, fully-formed, all at once. I didn't know Delaney's backstory, only that she was suspicious.

What made Fargo work is that I very quickly figured this stuff out.

Throwing these ideas and characters onto the board was like putting myself in an escape room, and the challenge then became to figure out how everything slotted together. It was around Chapter 4—which I had written fully before I started posting the story, and which was about the time I realized I actually wanted to go through with what was starting to shape up as a long and ambitious work—that I started seeing the connective tissue. Kyubey's plot came into view, as well as Omaha's role in it. (Hence why Chapter 5 begins with a scene involving Homura.) I figured out Delaney's backstory, though I hadn't yet figured out how she was part of Kyubey's plot yet. The end of the first arc formed in my mind: Erika dead, Delaney alive, she and Sloan en route to Minneapolis to fight Clair. I had the beginnings of an idea how the second arc would go; there was the ghost of an idea for a third arc, but that made the story seem impossibly long, so I wrote with the belief everything would end with Clair. By the end of the arc, when I had started thinking about Clair's goons, I had the idea for Anoka, and incorporated her into the Williston archon's origin story.

I think there are still signs of lack of foresight. The actual plot of Fargo's first arc is like the plot of a Legend of Zelda game. Go to three different places, fight three bosses, then go to the final dungeon where the final boss awaits. What the characters actually do, narratively, is spin their wheels in endless action sequences; all sense of progression is driven by the slow unveiling of Delaney and Erika's backstories, which recontextualizes them as characters, as well as broadening hints toward Kyubey's plot. And Sloan's gradual recovery from the precipice of despair, of course.

That last one was a mirror of the author. Fargo was an immediate smash hit of the kind I had never seen before; I was getting two to three comments per chapter, and they were good comments, too. Before, I hadn't even been able to beg friends and family to read my novels. (I once described the plot of a pre-Bavitz novel to my grandmother; she said, "That doesn't sound any good at all.") I expected obscurity, an obscurity reflected by the aggressively anti-SEO title I decided on as a joke (Fargo being a movie I don't particularly like, and the only real overlap between that one and mine being neither is actually set in Fargo). Receiving any reception at all was a miracle.

At the same time, I moved closer to where I worked, killing my daily commute once and for all. Time, energy, and hope were surging back into me. The dream I had always harbored of being an internationally-renowned author seemed to be finally coming true. Everything was looking up. Riding this momentum, I no longer worried about the ambitious length of my story. It was worth it. I was in for the long haul.

IV. Minneapolis

Clair's personality emerged as the natural foil to Sloan, the brutish, instinct-driven meathead: elegant, careful, intelligent, poised. It was my get-out-of-the-escape-room problem solving that led me to realize this made her similar to Kyubey himself; that connection inspired the plot twist that she was, in fact, a homunculus created by him, which turned into Delaney being a homunculus too. (In early Williston chapters, I repeatedly focused on Delaney's dead eyes to foreshadow her sociopathic turn; this pedestrian bit of description became eerily serendipitous for explaining how she changed her eye color with magic to hide its natural red.)

As an author, I myself was transitioning from Sloan-esque instinct to more careful and intelligent planning. I'd already come up with Anoka, but the other Minneapolis girls emerged in ways I thought would play well off of Clair, emphasizing her uncanny and aristocratic coldness. I entered the second arc with more elaborate plotting, where I would set up characters like chess pieces and knock them over in spectacular and fulfilling ways. It all centered around the Yaldabaoth fight, which was the first part of the second arc I came up with, in a first arc sense of unconsciousness: A massive monster of light, crawling across a city, chasing magical girls as they sped around in a car.

There were some speed bumps. This arc featured the only time while writing Fargo that I scrapped a scene and rewrote it; this being the Terminatrix's introduction, which originally showed her receiving her commission from Kyubey. I felt it was plodding and tedious compared to her current introduction, which remains highly popular. (As a side note, Puella Magi Homura Magica also includes a character whom Kyubey pays to kill magical girls he doesn't like.)

Otherwise, though, I was locked in. Everything just worked. I came up with an idea for a character or a plot twist and it made perfect sense with what I had already established. It was like magic. It was effortless. I was reading literature again, too, after a year away from it; my prose improved as a result. There is unparalleled exhilaration in growth. It was like academia all over again, where I learned new things day after day and always seemed to be ascending to some better place. I started imagining future greatness. It wouldn't stop here. Fargo was just the start. My next work would be even better, would be read by more people. (Modern Cannibals remained bouncing in the back of my mind.) It wouldn't be long before I was breaking out of the internet and into the real world. They'd be talking about me...

V. Mitakihara

Why did Puella Magi Madoka Magica mean so much to me?

Because, as I mentioned, it didn't leave an immediate impact. A lot of what I look at now as masterstroke storytelling—Mami's death, or Rebellion in general—I first watched insensible, uncomprehending, somewhat blandly being washed over. Only a few months prior I had watched Lucky Star, a work that would heavily inspire one of my future stories (Cockatiel x Chameleon), and was profoundly and immediately emotionally affected by it in a way I almost never am. I cried at its conclusion. There was something unbearable and tragic in the ending of such a nice world, no matter how inoffensive that ending was; in the banal high school life it depicted, I saw reflected what I had lost forever, been sealed away from on this side of Adulthood.

(Which explains why my mindset on it changed so radically from when I was an actual high schooler, its ostensible target demographic.)

I didn't have a similar reaction to Madoka Magica. I liked it, for sure, but it was not an emotionally harrowing experience for me. Yet it grew in my mind, in ways I didn't consciously understand. It kept crawling, kept forcing me to think about it, until there was no option but for me to drop what I was doing and write over 300,000 words of fan fiction for it.

I never figured out the answer until a few years later, when I chanced upon a post someone made on Tumblr. "Okay," it said, in typical I-know-everything tone, "but can any of you tell me a single THEME in Madoka Magica?"

It made me think. What IS Madoka Magica about, beyond a plot-and-character level? The story, at least in the show, is so lean and tight that it lacks a lot of obvious signposting in this regard. It's easy to look at Madoka Magica and see a sharp story founded on a series of slick twists, with a banal hope versus despair angle for a bit of emotional punchiness. Regardless of whether you agree with that assessment or not, it certainly couldn't have been what I saw in it to make me so obsessed, right?

It's not even like Madoka Magica is a story that lends itself to fanfic, past the level of shipfic or slice of life AU. Its extreme economy of characters renders it vitriolic to expansion. Everything that matters in the world of Madoka Magica is happening in Mitakihara to five specific people. The system extends beyond them but in a useless way; magical girls in Osaka or Russia or Fargo exist, but they are doomed to irrelevance, doomed to die pointlessly. Every canonical Madoka spinoff falls into this same pratfall; the best involve the backstories of the main cast or past Homura timeloops, the rest fail to rise above sideshow.

I think what gnawed at me, what made me brute force a new narrative into this story that doesn't need one, was the reflection I saw in it. The Lucky Star kids with all their hopes and dreams and pleasant optimism tossed into the clanking reality of Adulthood, forced to work jobs with no point and no hope until they finally just died. The more I rewatch the show, the more I become consumed by a socioeconomic reading of it, the financial disparities between the characters (Hitomi, free from all of this, is rich; Madoka, the redemptive savior, is too—while Mami is faking it and Sayaka is shabbily middle class in a foreboding and monotone apartment complex, consumed by dreams of an upper-class recital she once saw), the conversations Madoka has with her parents (who tell her again and again what "being an adult is like," only to then give advice that is utterly unhelpful), the emotionless and mercenary way Kyubey dissolves all meaning in the universe to a system of pluses and minuses.

Unconsciously, the socioeconomic aspects of the original story emerged in Fargo with even more exaggeration: Sloan is introduced in terms of her outrageous poverty, everyone else is on the economic fringes (prostitutes, drug dealers), and only Clair lives in a state of financial stability. (There's a sideplot in the Minneapolis arc where she plans to gentrify the city by rooting out its Ramseys, all in service of creating a model community to show off online.) Sloan pursues monomaniacal revenge for a betrayal she suffered at Clair's hands, but the crux of the reader's disdain for Clair lies in the unctuousness of her wealth and the disposable way she treats her employees. Plus, there's the plaid-shirted workers who osmose around Williston, silent as they fall into pits and keel over dead on the streets, parts of an economy founded on resource extraction not all too dissimilar from Kyubey's own system (though he, ironically, wonders at one point why humans would get so up in arms over such a "primitive energy source").

Sloan is a have-not and Clair is a have, so there's an innate sympathy for her in favor of her archnemesis, on top of the innate sympathy readers have for protagonists over antagonists. This all sets the stage for what is in my opinion the best part of Fargo, its third arc, where the story's thematic elements come together in more interesting and subversive ways. It's all predicated on Sloan's quest for revenge having been faulty from the start, her motives much less ironclad than they first appear and her bullheadedness making her the perfect pawn in Kyubey's schemes.

The best aspect of the third arc is how Sloan is irrelevant. Seeing the outcome of her self-absorption cuts her off at the knees, and she has to grapple with the fact that the world is a lot bigger than her immediate purview. Ultimately, her role in the climax is tangential, a singular meaningful wrench tossed into a much larger machine that manages to prompt an unexpected positive outcome. She barely even factors into the penultimate chapter. (Fun fact: Chapter 41, Love, with its 10+ character POVs, was both directly inspired by Ulysses but also by a comment I got during the first arc hoping for more POVs with drastically different writing styles.) The emotional power of Sloan's arc stems from her coming to peace with her own inadequacies, both morally and in terms of greatness, and in that way she wound up being a mirror for me to the end, didn't she? In academia, I believed I was going to be someone important, and much of the existential dread of my workplace came from its boundless mediocrity. Fargo allowed me to come to terms with that mediocrity, both in the story and without; though much of that "coming to terms" was based on the new delusion that my popular fanfic would spur me on to mainstream literary success, a delusion I would not need to reckon with until after the minimal readership for my next work, Modern Cannibals.

This also explains my decision to frame Madoka's magical girl heaven as a giant office job. Though I would also defend that decision from a textual standpoint, given the esteem Madoka has for her company suit mother, and how she visualizes her mother as an example of "successful" adulthood in contrast to the cruel failure of the magical girl system.

Lastly, there's the instinctual level of things. All this socioeconomic stuff was not explicitly clear to me even as I was writing it; I didn't consciously think "Oh gotta make this about having a job." It just came out that way, an expelling of the self, the same way I unconsciously modeled some of Fargo's structure and worldbuilding on Homura Magica. The same way, I suppose, I modeled the emotional thrust of the story on Madoka Magica. A bleak downward spiral of misery and death culminating in a sudden and unexpected redemption. When, as a teen, I watched Higurashi, I remember being bowled over by its unexpectedly happy ending. I'd never seen anything like it, not in something otherwise so macabre and pessimistic. As a teen, I enjoyed that ending as a subversion of expectations, an original and novel idea. As an adult, watching Madoka Magica, it held a lot more emotional potency, and that potency was, like everything else, unconsciously replicated in Fargo.

When I wrote that final chapter, I remember being utterly drained. The finish line was in sight and I had been doing this for a year, for 300,000 words, far longer than any other story I'd ever written until then. I remember feeling like my prose was sloppy, like I was stumbling right at the end, like the chapter was no good. But the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and now when I reread that chapter I see nothing wrong with its prose or technique. Even stripped bare, exhausted, that unconscious emotional core remained, and maybe that sense of being stripped down, so that nothing else is there but it, is what gives it so much power.

VI. Retrospective

There are flaws in Fargo. The prose is not always my best, and there are stretches that are clunky. In Chapter 3 I wrote a 5,000-word fight scene, and became possessed by the notion that all subsequent fights must be even longer, which led to some truly overlong combat sequences. There are a lot of continuity errors and mistakes, some small, some embarrassing (there's a scene where Clair tortures Delaney with boiling water and it's clear I had never boiled water before). And, significant to me, there is a lack of thematic complexity compared to my other works, with long parts of the story that aren't interested in meaning anything at all, at least overtly.

That last part might not really be a flaw, though. There is a singleminded focus on plot and character in Fargo, prompted perhaps by the unconscious way I wrote it, that was a major driver of its success. Nobody has ever complained about the continuity errors, either. At the end of the day, people might care a lot more about what comes from the heart, rather than what comes from the mind.

I'm glad, though, to be writing this retrospective on the heels of When I Win, an assiduously structured work with a lot of deliberate thematic potency that managed to achieve similar levels of success as Fargo. For a long time Fargo was a millstone around my neck. What I once looked at as the start of my literary rise started to seem like its peak. This work that I, its author, so poorly understood, could not replicate even when I tried, and yet was by far my most popular story... It was a terrifying prospect for a long time. Though a lot of detail in this regard should probably be saved for if I write a Making Of post for Chicago in the future. (Side note: Despite the prominent role Cicero and the Chicagoans play in the final arc of Fargo, with their own unresolved theater of worldbuilding, I had no intention of writing a Fargo sequel until after the "commercial failure" of Modern Cannibals.)

Even at the depths of my self-esteem, though, I never resented Fargo or its success. It's a story I like. It's a story with a lot to like about it. And, even if I don't fully understand it, it's a story that has a lot of myself in it.

Thank you, everyone, for reading.

The concept art throughout this post was created by Phetaritette, from whom a fan once commissioned art of the main characters. At the end of the Making Of posts for Cleveland Quixotic and When I Win, I talked about where I got the names of the characters from, but other than the two Pokémon gym leader names and Henrik Ibsen reference I mentioned before, most of the names in this story were dredged from people I once knew. The only other exceptions are Erika's surname, which comes from Frank "Doc" DuFresne from Red vs. Blue; Bloomington's surname, which comes from rapper Dennis "Ghostface Killah" Coles (who would be the primary template for the rapper Malkwon in Modern Cannibals); and Hennepin's surname, which comes from League of Legends pro player Johnny "Altec" Ru.

[randomfoggytiger]

Collector's Edition: Fox Mulder Is a Father (Fan-Favorites)

In honor of Father's Day, I wanted to collect other fans' favorite "Mulder as a father" fics.

Thank you to all who participated!

Loose chronological order below~

@spooky-jordan's Picks:

rivkat's and MustangSally's Iolokus 3 (Iolokus 03 - Vix te Agnovi 1/3,  Iolokus 03 - Vix te Agnovi 2/3, Iolokus 03 - Vix te Agnovi 3/3) and Iolokus 4 (Iolokus 04 - Res Judicata 1/3, Iolokus 04 - Res Judicata 2/3, Iolokus 04 - Res Judicata 3/3)

"I'm getting really tired of that song, Scully.  Really tired.  You didn't ask to be abducted, you didn't ask to have your ova taken, and you didn't ask for the cancer.  You didn't choose to have Miranda, and when she inconvenienced your life you dumped her with Emerson and Aileen.  You didn't provoke George into stalking you and you certainly didn't *aid* him when he tried to strangle you," I continued, trying to keep my voice under control even though it was crackling like a cheap stereo speaker. "When things don't go your way, you cave like a house of cards." 

Parts 3 and 4 of the infamous Iolokus is stuffed with Mulder and Scully as parents: both of them unpacking their traumas, fighting for custody of their daughter, and settling into the life they're building together.

@calimanc's Picks:

Revely’s The Unfinished Universe (Gossamer) 

They have a private evening ritual - nose to nose on the bed they practice telepathic communication. 

Scully disappears into the motel bathroom for their soft-shelled display of male bonding, shutting the door behind her with aggravating finality - boys' side, girl's side. Mulder immediately stops casting out brain waves and begins to wonder what she's doing in there. She's awfully quiet. The baby just dozes and tries to nurse Mulder's nose until he manages to work one of his fists into his mouth.

AU-- Post-Requiem Mulder is returned a year later, bonding with his lioness partner and months-old son on the drive back to D.C.

Anjou’s (Ao3) Ghosts (mulderscreek), The Ghosts of Christmas Past (mulderscreek), and The Ghosts of Future Past (mulderscreek)

By the time that the running stroller Mulder had purchased arrived, Will had begun to stand up voluntarily. He wanted to walk, but he was still hesitant, afraid that a show of independence would mean he wouldn't get taken care of anymore. To keep William moving forward, Mulder started including him on some of the loops. This time, Scully sat on the steps and read and they waved at her as they ran by. Mulder loved the way Will's tiny hands extended out from the hood of the stroller as he laughed at the wind. By the end of the third day he was demanding "Again!" when Mulder was all tuckered out. Mulder would take him out of the running stroller and sit him on the red earth while he stretched out. By the end of the week, William was mimicking Mulder's movements. When the tiny running shoes that Mulder had ordered for William arrived, Will began to walk around their trailer and demand to dance with his parents before dinner.

Mulder, Scully, and William (who was saved via Skinner's heroic sacrifice) hide away in motels as she tirelessly works to prevent the anticipated invasion.

@samucabd’s Picks:

Donna’s Goodbyes/Hellos (Gossamer)

"Is it safe for you to be here Mulder? I . . . you can't know how much I've missed you, but is it safe?"

"As safe as anywhere Scully. He insisted we come."

Her surprise was obvious at that. "He insisted?"

"He says you're in danger. We've come to get you."

Post-Existence Scully hands William over to Mulder and tells them to go into hiding. Jeremiah Smith, the incoming invasion, and their friends, allies, and family all pitch in for a "happy ending."

Christy’s (mulderscreek)

Interstice (Gossamer | Story: "Interstice 01 - Saturday" by Christy, Gossamer | Story: "Interstice 02 - Sunday" by Christy, Gossamer | Story: "Interstice 03 - Monday" by Christy, Gossamer | Story: "Interstice 04 - Tuesday" by Christy, Gossamer | Story: "Interstice 05 - Wednesday" by Christy, Gossamer | Story: "Interstice 06 - Thursday" by Christy)

Intellectually, he knew her love. He could see it every day, as they tried to coax another bite of puréed peas past Liam's stubborn lips; as they poured through old files in Doggett's cold basement office; as they sat together on the couch at night, each armed with a red pen, wading through stacks of papers and quizzes.

Mulder left the bedroom, his gaze darting around the family room in search of Scully's shirt. Finally he found it, a puddle of light blue silk on the floor beside the couch, and draped it across his shoulder, still smelling her perfume.

He lifted their coats from where they hung over the back of the couch, then hung them in the closet. After snatching his boots up by the laces, he found Scully's shoes, one near the door, the other kicked halfway under the couch. Gathering everything into his arms, Mulder went back into the bedroom.

It's William's first Christmas, with the Scully family (and their issues) in tow.

Song of Innocence (1/3, 2/3, 3/3) and Song of Experience (1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4)

His dad looked like a superhero, tall and dark and dressed all in black like a secret agent. A spy. His voice was magical, Will decided, soft and soothing as he questioned the injured deputy; then, as he said to Will's mom, "Will you just escort Deputy Wetzel to the hospital?" Will was too busy replaying the sound of his dad saying his name to hear the crazy theories that his mom pooh-poohed whenever she stepped out from behind the ambulance door, where she was hiding from the cameras.

But his dad didn't seem to mind the cameras, even laughing at them a few times during the hour-long show. Will smiled as he listened to them discuss the case, and his dad saying that bright pink was his mom's color. Will didn't think his mom owned *anything* pink.

Then it got exciting. His dad breaking the door down and his mom pulling a gun from somewhere inside the back of her jacket, her fingernails shining against the black metal of the gun grip. Then his mom doing an autopsy, something Will had wondered about for forever but had, of course, never been allowed to see.

Then the dawning in his dad's eye when he solved the mystery, dashing off heroically to save the deputy, his mom hot on his heels. They stalked through an old beat-up house, guns and flashlights in hand, and Will thought they were ten times better than Luke Skywalker because they were real.

He had watched the tape twice more that afternoon before his mom arrived, and then once again with her, crawling into her lap when she started crying, when his dad turned to face the camera head-on for the first time.

Will and his mom took the tape home with them that night, watching it together twice before he went to bed. And even after that, Will could have sworn he heard his dad's soft, gentle voice drifting from downstairs and into his room through the vents... although it could just have been the replay of Will's own memories.

He loved to watch how his dad moved -- his long strides, the fluid way he stepped across the screen -- but it was his dad's voice that stuck with him. Not the soft, reassuring tone or the private, teasing voice he used with Will's mom, but the strong, forceful way he spoke to the deputy, begging from the wrong side of a locked door for Wetzel to "cowboy up" and be a man.

Will had heard that same voice in his head ever since then, when he needed a push. "Cowboy up," his dad said, only it was Will he was talking to, not some stranger. "Cowboy up, Will," he mentally spliced together when he needed to borrow some of his dad's courage.

Post-NIHT Mulder returns seven years later with an implant and selective memory loss. As he heals up and tries to figure out what happened with Scully, his son works through the complicated emotions both are feeling.

Vickie Moseley’s Flight Into Egypt Series (Flight into Egypt 01, Flight into Egypt 02 - Making a Home, Flight into Egypt 03 - Making a Life, Flight into Egypt 04 - Games, Flight Into Egypt 05 - New Life, Flight into Egypt - Doing it Right 1/2, Flight into Egypt - Doing it Right 2/2, Flight into Egypt 07 - Going Home 1/2, Flight into Egypt 07 - Going Home 2/2)

Mulder watched Dana take their son's hand and help the little one make the sign of the Cross, then bowed his head as the prayer began. He couldn't help thinking of their conversation of the morning. Yes, he did feel safe in this place, among these people. But maybe Scully was right. They were still very much strangers, very much alone. It felt good to forget all the danger they'd lived for so long, but the danger was still there, waiting for them to slip up.

Mulder and Scully and William hit the road, becoming fugitives in a small mountain town in order to keep their families together. Of course, ghosts from their past will always find them; and, sooner or later, they have to face the complicated present.

Girlie_girl7’s A Day in the Life (A Day in the Life, 05 and A Day in the Life 12 - A Fractured Christmas Story and A Day in the Life, 14 - Christmas and A Day in the Life, 35 - Fox Mantle and A Day in the Life, 30 - The Shooting/A Day in the Life, 31 - Home Coming and A Day in the Life, 36 - Problem Child)

Mulder carries his daughter into his office all the while rubbing her dark, curly, head against his cheek. He pulls out the desk chair and switches on the computer then sits down with Katherine balanced on one knee. Scully has the baby dressed in a light blue, terry tank top and matching shorts, she kicks her white baby shoe against the desk as Mulder absentmindedly reaches down to still her foot. He brings up his email and begins to open and delete messages. He's just opened one from a UFO hotline when Katherine begins pounding the keyboard and jabbering. Suddenly the screen goes black and the computer shuts off.

"Katherine, you shut me down," Mulder says with a frown.

Mulder and Scully, their children, and her family experience the ups and downs of parenthood: be it holidays, illnesses, near-death experiences, grown bullies at school pickups, and restaurant shootouts. (Note: the stories linked above-- for brevity’s sake-- are mostly Mulder-centric. My favorite is "14 - Christmas": touchingly touch-and-go.)

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

[good-amv-mmv-fmv]

Title: Little Dark Age - 90s Anime

Music: MGMT - Little Dark Age

Anime: Ah! My Goddess OVA, Akira. Angel Cop, Birdy the Mighty, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, City Hunter, Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Ghost in the Shell, Golden Boy, Grave of the Fireflies, Great Teacher Onizuka, Hunter x Hunter, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, Kidou Senshi Gundam F91, Kite, Macross 7, Macross Plus, Memories, Mobile Police Patlabor 2: The Movie, Mobile Suit Gundam The 08th MS Team, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ocean Waves, On Your Mark, Oniisama e..., Only Yesterday/Omohide poro poro, Perfect Blue, Pokémon, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Roujin Z, Rurouni Kenshin, Serial Experiments Lain, Sonic Soldier Borgman, The End of Evangelion, Trigun, Whisper of the Heart, X/1999, You're Under Arrest

Why do I recommend it?: A wonderful carousel of anime from the 90s to get a juicy taste of the best of old animation.

[canmom]

Animation Night 184: Mars Express

Animation Night is baaaaaack from Annecy break!

And yeah, the last couple weeks of this blog have been pretty Annecy focused here on the canmom entertainment sphere. And tonight that will continue! For tonight we shall right a wrong! And that wrong is...

...that wrong is that I didn't get to see Mars Express at Annecy last year. @mendely did and I was super jelly, OK!

For real though, this was among the hottest tickets at Annecy last year, and despite queuing a bunch of hours, I didn't stand a chance to get in without a reservation. But what is it? Well, it's a scifi movie directed by Jérémie Périn. Who's Jérémie Périn?

Well, the true veterans may recall Animation Night 1, when I showed you a certain music video for a song called Fantasy by DyE...

...that's not gonna embed, is it? But if you know, you know. (If you don't know, it's the one where the teens break into the swimming pool to make out and such and then a bunch of them turn into tentacle monsters.)

So Jérémie Périn is the guy who directed that! He's also well known for directing Lastman, a crowdfunded action series in which a boxer battles a bunch of superpowered agents to try to protect a psychic girl, not that you'd gather any of that from this trailer...

and writing for Crisis Jung by Bobbypills - don't blink or you might miss the boob-growing henshin and the guy with a chainsaw dick...

And while Crisis Jung isn't primarily his project, we can still definitely trust that when Périn is at the wheel, we'll seem some incredibly stylish, anime-inflected drama and also some proper freaky imagery now and again.

Mars Express, however, is Périn's first foray into film rather than TV animation, building on the big success of Lastman - and a pretty high-effort foray at that, taking some five years to make. And by all accounts it kicks total ass.

But what's it about? Classic cyberpunk noir material: a detective and the android replica of her partner return to their home planet Mars after apprehending a robot hacker. But the hacker is released, and they're given a new mission - to work with this hacker and go down to a colony where, ostensibly, humans and androids live in harmony, and track down a guy who jailbreaks the androids from their artificial constraints. That sounds pretty shady already, right? But the dirty secrets are only beginning.

Mars Express definitely pays its homages to those classic 90s anime films and OVAs like Ghost in the Shell and Armitage III, as well as games like Another World for the Amiga, but by all accounts gives it a fresh approach, with grounded characters - protagonist Aline struggling with alcoholism, her reconstructed partner Carlos with his floating holographic head carrying the whole identity issue of being a robot clone who's been rejected by his original's wife - which anchors plenty of juicy scifi concepts like renting out your brain as a computer, or something called 'resonance' which is how robots do it. What does that mean? The review I'm reading left it at that! Guess we'll find out.

Like most European productions it brought together a long list of production companies and it's a little tricky to figure out which ones are actual animation houses, but the main company seems to be 'Everybody on Deck'. They previously worked with Périn on Lastman, but otherwise largely seem to have worked on live action films. However, the animation was split among a variety of studios.

We can at least say that it brought in French animators from across the shop, some even on this very website. (At least I seem to recall seeing people having posted about having worked on it, though if I search now I mostly find peoples' reviews of the film). It's animation leans realist, with naturalistic motion taking advantage of anime-style 3s and 2s to give it a weighty feeling, embedding its characters in detailed environments with strong colour design...

And if we want to know more than that, we're in luck, since there's a pretty substantial 16-part making-of series partly available on Catsuka's youtube, starting with episode 1 showing the development of the script, with Périn and co-writer Laurent Sarfati bouncing ideas off each other. Only two other episodes are available: episode 11 shows some of the voice recording, and episode 16, which talks about the actual animation, interviewing various animators and showing some shot breakdowns. The last of these is probably the most interesting (to animators), talking about how the film went about realising Périn's 'precise, clinical' realist style.

The team were evidently very conscious of this being, for France, a first of its kind - a French-animated thriller targeting adults, with big ambitions to become a landmark film in French animation, able to stand up against the best anime. I'm not sure it's actually the first - for example, Summit of the Gods is also a tense, French-animated thriller with a realist art style! - but it's definitely a genre where there are very few examples to compare, and the team's ambition comes across as absolutely genuine.

That's probably enough to go on! We'll definitely also check out some of Périn's other work tonight, but Mars Express is our main feature! Starting in about an hour and a half at 8pm UK time, at our usual place, twitch.tv/canmom! Hope to see you there!

[wanderersrest]

An Abbreviated History of Mecha Part 4.1: THE EAST IS BURNING RED!!! (1990-1995)

(Read in the voices of Yosuke Akimoto and Tomokazu Seki) ANSWER ME, DOMON! THE SCHOOL OF THE UNDEFEATED OF THE EAST!!

THE WIND OF KINGS!!

ZENSHIN!!

KEIRETSU!!

TEMPA KYOURAN!!!

LOOK, THE EAST IS BURNING RED!!!

Welcome back to An Abbreviated History of Mecha! Last time, we saw the proliferation of mecha shows throughout the 80's. We also saw the introduction of an incomplete list of influential industry people who got their start in the 80's. In the 90's, we will begin to see a continuation of this proliferation of mecha works throughout the decade. The 90's will also see a lot of the stories I have talked about pay off, as

What we will also see in the 90's are a few major events that will affect the world of mecha in pretty major ways. The first is the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble, which would cause the Japanese economy to go from an era of excess to one of stagnation known as the Lost Decade. Another is the sudden arrival of a third honorary mecha series, except this honorary mecha series would arguably help to kickstart the slow decline of mecha stories. It should be noted that this series is not the only reason for the slow decline of mecha shows. That is a whole conversation in and of itself, and one that, maybe one day, I will talk about.

The last thing that should be noted about the 90's is that this would also see the creation of a handful of networks in the US that would help to bring anime over to the west, namely one Cartoon Network (and more importantly, its spinoff networks Toonami and [adult swim]) for the people in the US. While anime had seen some popularity in the west thanks to shows and movies like Robotech, Voltron, Ghost in the Shell, and Akira, it would be the four-part knockout of two of the series mentioned here alongside animanga juggernauts Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon that would cause anime to become mainstream.

That should be everything. With all of that out of the way...

Gundam Fight!

READY?! GO!!!

Yuusha Exkaiser/Brave Exkaiser (1991)

Starting us off in 1991, Takara would realize that, due to the sudden success of Transformers in the US, it might be time to diversify as Transformers had no longer felt like it was truly their property anymore. As such, they would create the Yuusha line, with their debut series being Brave Exkaiser. Exkaiser would prove to be a massive hit amongst its intended younger audience and would kickstart a whole franchise, which would also include:

The Brave Fighter of Legend Da-Garn (1992)

The Brave Express Might Gaine (1993)

The Brave Police J-Decker (1994)

The Brave of Gold Goldran (1995)

Brave Command Dagwon (1996)

The King of Braves, GaoGaiGar (1997), which I will talk about next time.

The Brave franchise is important due to how often this series gets referenced by other works, with the usual reference points being either Might Gaine or GaoGaiGar. More importantly, both Brave Exkaiser and the Giant Robo OVA would usher in an era of works that looked to the older mecha shows like Tetsujin 28, Mazinger Z, and Getter Robo for inspiration as opposed to Mobile Suit Gundam.

Super Robot Wars (1991) & Another Century's Episode (2003)

1991 would also see the start of Banpresto's Super Robot Wars, the ultimate crossover of in terms of mecha works. Super Robot Wars is where a lot of mecha-related terminology such as Super Robots, Real Robots, and the Holy Trinity (Mazinger Z, Getter Robo, Gundam 0079) come from. Super Robot Wars would also introduce its own set of original robot designs, each with their own unique pilots. Super Robot Wars would eventually gain a sister series in the form of 2003's Another Century's Episode.

One of the most important factors of Super Robot Wars is that, due to its celebratory (some might even say masturbatory) nature, these games can serve as a good metric behind what is a mecha story.

Giant Robo the Animation: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1992)

In 1992, Yasuhiro Imagawa and company would release the first episode of the now-legendary OVA Giant Robo the Animation: The Day the Earth Stood Still. This OVA, along with Brave Exkaiser, would begin the push for giant robot shows to take inspiration from works that were not Mobile Suit Gundam. The Giant Robo OVA, on top of being one of Imagawa's magnum opera (fun fact: the plural of magnum opus is magnum opera) alongside Mobile Fighter G Gundam, would also be the direct inspiration for western darling The Big O.

Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger (1992) & Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (1993)

If you're wondering why I mentioned Super Sentai in part 2, this series is why.

In 1992, the Super Sentai series Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger would release in Japan. While, to my understanding, it was about as popular as the rest of the Super Sentai franchise, this specific series in particular would attract the attention of one Haim Saban. With some editing here and there, along with filming new segments featuring an American cast as opposed to using the original footage featuring the original Japanese cast, Saban and company would create Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, which would air for the first time in 1993. Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers would go down in history as one of many series that would help pave the way for animanga to gain a foothold in western media.

Denkou Choujin Gridman/Gridman the Hyper Agent (1993) & Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad (1994)

1993 would also see the legendary Tsuburaya Productions, after a long period of struggles, finally make a comeback with their new series Gridman the Hyper Agent. With its smaller budget, the Hero of Dreams would come to be known as the hero who would help Tsuburaya Productions come back to relevance in the 90's.

Due to the success of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, other US companies would want in on the action. DiC Entertainment would buy the US distribution rights for Gridman and would try to put their own spin on Power Rangers by creating Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad.

Eventually, the people at Studio Trigger, who were interested in making an anime based off of Ultraman, would reach out to Tsuburaya Productions in an attempt to get permission to do so. While their initial request for Ultraman specifically was shot down, they were allowed to choose any of Tsuburaya's other properties for their anime adaptation. And they would choose Gridman for their subject, which would lead to the creation of SSSS.Gridman (a show I will talk about later).

If you have time to spare, you should also check out Cheese GX's video on the history behind Gridman.

Patlabor 2 (1993)

The fan-beloved Patlabor 2 would also release in 1993. Reflecting the realities of post-economic bubble Japan and the ensuing Lost Decade, Patlabor 2 would trade out the optimism commonly associated with the franchise with a much more cynical and grounded (even by Patlabor standards) tone. People tend to view this movie as being what Patlabor is all about, but in my opinion, this movie is an anomaly that can only truly be appreciated by knowing the context of everything that came before it.

Magic Knight Rayearth (1993)

1993 would also see the publishing of the shoujo manga series Magic Knight Rayearth. Created by the legendary mangaka group CLAMP, Rayearth would be one of the first magical girl series to really escape the long shadow cast by one Sailor Moon (if I understand my magical girl history correctly, Sailor Moon is basically the magical girl equivalent of the original Mobile Suit Gundam). How was Magic Knight Rayearth able to do this?

By adding giant robots into the mix. That's right: Magic Knight Rayearth is most likely the reason why there is overlap between magical girl and mecha fans. While remembered by many as being an important series in the canons of mecha, magical girls, and CLAMP, Rayearth's legacy would largely be overshadowed by one Cardcaptor Sakura.

Mobile Fighter G Gundam (1994)

1994 would see Gundam return in a radically different form with the martial arts-inspired Mobile Fighter G Gundam. Often considered to be the other iconic series of Yasuhiro Imagawa, G Gundam would mark the beginning of a new era of Gundam by being the first alternate universe series to exist, thus allowing the franchise to flourish while letting the original Universal Century timeline continue to exist and get its own stories. Because of its radically different nature though, G Gundam is oftentimes looked down upon as a series that spits on the legacy of the Gundam franchise.

And again, not to toot my own horn here, but I also have a trilogy of posts all talking about G Gundam. All three posts seemed to be pretty popular relative to my other posts, so there seemed to be something in them that resonated with a lot of readers.

New Mobile Report Gundam Wing (1995) & New Mobile Report Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz (1996)

Following on from G Gundam is 1995's New Mobile Report Gundam Wing, which is arguably the most important Gundam series after the original and Gundam Seed in the 2000's. As a return to the war stories of the original Gundam, the reason why this series is important is because Gundam Wing would be one of the big four anime series that would make anime become mainstream in the West.

In my opinion though, Gundam Wing's legacy begins and ends with it being the first Gundam series to air in the West. In Japan, another series would air at around the same time as Gundam Wing, one that would loom over the rest of canon of mecha due to its impact on the anime industry and Japanese pop culture as a whole.

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) & The End of Evangelion (1996)

Ah yes, the original "Not Like the Other Girls" mecha anime.

The series that would hamper a lot of Gundam Wing's cultural impact would be Hideaki Anno and Studio Gainax's legendary Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the second of Gainax's Big Four alongside Gunbuster. Created as an homage to shows like Ultraman and Space Runaway Ideon, Evangelion would take the zeitgeist by storm, forcing its way into the pantheon of the mecha canon like... well, like an Evangelion Unit tearing through an Angel's AT Field. There was a certain je ne sais quois to the series that made it stick to a lot of viewers at the time, and a lot of the history and context behind this series' production would help shape a lot of its more cerebral moments.

Anno would eventually revisit this series in 2007 by remaking this anime series into a quartet of films known as the Rebuild of Evangelion series. At first just a project to bring Evangelion to the 21st century, the Rebuild films would eventually become the first of the Shin Japan Heroes Thematic Universe, which would come to also include:

Shin Godzilla (2016)

Shin Ultraman (2022)

Shin Kamen Rider (2023)

The problem with a series like Evangelion is that, while it is a culturally important series that deserves a lot of the attention and praise it gets, a lot of Evangelion fans tend to go a little bit too far. It's subversive nature tends to become exaggerated to the point where Evangelion is often treated as being subversive of mecha, and thus, not like the other mecha shows. This is, in large part, why the infamous idea of Evangelion being "Not like other mecha shows because it deals with character drama" comes from, and it's something that I'd like to talk about at some point in the future after all of this.

Conclusion

And there you have it! As we get into the latter half of the 90's, we will see a lot of iconic mecha shows begin to pop up. We will also see [adult swim] begin to really play its part in making anime more mainstream, along with Gundam begin to decline and the end of the Brave franchise. We'll also see the appearance of the crazy man known as Tetsuya Takahashi make his directorial debut in what is quiet possibly the single most ambitious JRPG project of all time along with a surprise appearance by... LEGO?!

Next time, Part 4.2: A Grand Glorious Gathering!!

This will be the key to victory.

[centrally-unplanned]

Watched a bunch of stuff last night, including the Alita OVA from 1993! I thought it was a lot of fun, the thoughts:

--- It did the "obvious" thing of adapting the romance arc with Yugo of Volume 2 as the core, while blending in the events of Volume 1 as sort of backstory and setup as opposed to their own story. This arc is Alita at her most humanized in the early parts of the manga, and its the plot that centers Zalem as the untouchable overlord city most effectively. Any short adaptation is gonna choose this - part of why James Cameron (lol) did the same thing!

--- Speaking of, the manga does not actually have any particular focus on Alita's eyes, but the anime definitely has more than one shot where it establishes them as thematically special. Given that the James Cameron film is famous for going full CGI on Alita's eyes, and he knows about the property from Guillermo del Toro passing him the OVA as opposed to the manga, I think I can see the chain of events that lead to that (ill-fated?) decision.

Her eyes are pretty amazing in the OVA, so I get it! As my previous reblogs showed lol.

--- I think I can break apart the manga into three "concepts": the setting as cyberpunk dystopia, Alita as a character dealing with identity issues as an amnesiatic combat robot, and shounen fighting & levelling arcs. The OVA heavily focuses on the first part, ditching almost all the shounen stuff - its fight scenes are quick and focus on violence & bodily destruction over strength or "fighting techniques", etc. This is great for me, obviously! But it also, almost accidentally, ditches most of her identity issues? Because its less than an hour long, and needs to do a ton of worldbuilding - including even adding in a new character from Zalem to help with that - and is doing Yugo's entire arc, you really don't have time left for Alita's struggles. Yugo actually gets more "inner depth" than she does! She commits to being a bounty hunter, then after that she is pretty much just In Love while Yugo goes through his detailing of his past and collapse.

I'm not saying it doesn't work, it does as a story. Just interesting for something that is known as very "protagonist associated" to have an OVA where she is barely the protagonist.

--- While no Urotsukidoji or anything, this is another one of those OVAs where its reputation, particularly in the west, is as a hyper-violent, gory OVA? And like so many it really isn't. People get decapitated, don't get me wrong, buts its never lingers on those moments. Instead they serve as tone setters for the crapsack world or just are part of the action sequences.

I think in general the OVA era rarely made horror/gore films the way some other mediums/industries did? There are exceptions of course but in the end anime is trying to do too many other things; beautiful animation, focus on character designs, often being adaptations and so doing the plot of those more complex stories, erotic content for audiences that aren't *that* fetishistic on average, and more. All of these priorities compete for space in comparison to having endless jumpscares and blood splatters. So far my track record for watching the famous "gorefest" or "~crazy~" anime is that every one of them is tamer than the rep suggests, and I believe this medium/genre mismatch is why.

--- The biggest question I have around Alita in general is why there was never any more anime? Its weird, right? Its a famous property from a beloved genre, it had a hollywood film for some crazy reason, things like Ghost in the Shell got multi-season anime after all. Why no feature film remake in the 2000's? Why no 13-cour in the 2010's? I don't have an answer to that yet.

Why the initial OVA was so minimal is at least partly answered by Kishiro here:

MNS: Many fans have wondered, why were only 2 anime OAV episodes produced in 1993? YK: It was based on the plan proposed by the animation production company. It might have been better to turn down the plan and wait for a better adaptation proposal to come up, but back then, I couldn't afford to review the plan coolly. At that time, I was still serializing the work and was so busy that I wasn't ambitious to make it into animation.

Essentially he took the "deal on hand", not offering much, because he didn't have the time, money, or business savvy to work the industry for a better proposal. 100% understandable. I don't think the OVA did too well? I can't find a lot of sales figures, but the comments I see are in the "respectable" range, and it didn't get quick or expansive rereleases over time.

More broadly, and again speculative, I think maybe Alita overall isn't that successful? Like sure Kishiro is still out here releasing more sequel manga to this day somehow, but when I look at the "media mix" its just really sparse. No big video game adaptations - it has a PlayStation game in the 90's - it has like a drama CD and a novelization? No big merch waves or tie-ins. I am betting the big anime production committees just don't think its a hot enough property to sell that great. Wouldn't be a bad idea or anything, but not one you have to do like idk Chainsaw Man.

In the western fandom spaces its quite well known because of the idiosyncrasies of licensing history, the weird James Cameron factor, and I think a general fascination with anime cyberpunk; the west eats up any of the older cyberpunk properties for its aesthetic in a way that can blind people to the reality of that just being a subgenre in Japan at the time. Alita might just be niche enough that it not getting any wider anime adaptations is no grand mystery.

(But I hope to dig into this question more)

[ideas-on-paper]

Christmas loot

I am now the proud owner of both seasons of Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.! <3

I already owned the steelbooks of the two re-cut OVAs + Solid State Society (see above), and ever since I've been dying to watch the entire show.

On top of that, I also got seasons 1-4 of Black Butler. ;-)

[karinta-agogobell-unified]

Five underappreciated anime that I would recommend!

1. Canaan (2009)

This is, from what I understand, an adaptation of a side-story chapter for the visual novel series 428: Shibuya Scramble, guest-written by Nasu Kinoko and guest-illustrated by Takeuchi Takashi. That is to say, the Type-Moon guys — the creators of Tsukihime, Kara no Kyoukai, and the now-legendary Fate/Stay Night. However, Canaan doesn’t take place in the Type-Moon shared universe(s), since it’s for another company’s property.

That being said, the anime adaptation is quite comprehensible on its own terms, likely due to the adaptation being written by the prolific and highly skilled screenwriter Okada Mari (Hanasaku Iroha, O Maidens In Your Savage Season, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, Maquia). Her writing imbues the narrative with enough emotional intensity to make up for the occasionally-convoluted nature of the plot, and the backstories of the characters are hinted at just enough so that the viewer can understand their relevance, without taking up too much precious screen time. It can be a little hard to follow at points, but I ended up understanding it decently well anyway.

The production values are very high indeed, due to the anime being produced by P.A. Works, and directed by Andoh Masahiro (Sword of the Stranger, Hanasaku Iroha, O Maidens In Your Savage Season). The action animation is consistently stunning, the characters are beautifully expressive, and the overall look of the show is fantastic.

And the voice acting is an absolute treat, with the lead role of Canaan herself taken by Sawashiro Miyuki, the antagonist role of Alphard taken by Sakamoto Maaya, and Nanjou Yoshino in the role of Oosawa Maria, the POV character for a lot of the story. The supporting voice cast is packed with talent too — Hamada Kenji, Tanaka Rie, Nakata Jouji, Tomatsu Haruka, Hirata Hiroaki, Noto Mamiko, and even Ootsuka Akio in a minor role!

The premise is sort of a science fiction type of thing, but set in the (quasi-)contemporary location of 2000s China, where outside of the sci-fi conceit, the setting is largely realistic. The tone and mood is mostly that of an action thriller, with some nail-biting suspense here and there, but there are some beautifully soft and tender moments as well — often involving Canaan and Maria. Yes, folks, this has yuri in it, although it’s (strongly) subtextual.

Anyway, I would recommend this to people who love Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Kara no Kyoukai, Fate/Zero, and probably also Cowboy Bebop.

2. Tetsuwan Birdy OVAs (1996)

This is distinct from the later adaptation of the original Tetsuwan Birdy (Birdy the Mighty) manga, called Tetsuwan Birdy Decode, which came out in the late 2000s — this one came out in 1996 and was produced by Studio Madhouse in their prime.

The main characters are Senkawa Tsutomu (voiced by Iwanaga Tetsuya), a hapless teenager who gets accidentally killed(!) by an alien spaceship on his way to school one day, and Birdy Cephon Altirra (voiced by Mitsuishi Kotono), a human-looking alien and an intergalactic government agent who saves Tsutomu by merging her body with his. Effectively, they become two people in one body, which can shift between the forms of Birdy and Tsutomu…. except Birdy still needs to deal with all the rogue aliens who threaten the safety of the galaxy, while Tsutomu needs to study for his high school entrance exams. From what I’ve been told, the premise is fairly reminiscent of Ultraman and other classic tokusatsu series.

It’s four tight episodes of classic ‘90s OVA goodness, with a fun and slightly silly sci-fi concept that is nonetheless wrung for some surprisingly effective drama at times. The main thrust of it, though, is action comedy — and it definitely delivers on that front. The fight scenes are superbly animated, including some early-career work from now-legendary animator Suzuki Norimitsu, and the character designs by Takahashi Kumiko (Witch Hunter Robin, Snow White with the Red Hair, Cardcaptor Sakura) are amazingly expressive. Birdy’s striking asymmetrical design is a particular favourite of mine. The direction by Kawajiri Yoshiaki (Cyber City Oedo 808, Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D) is solid, and the writing is quite serviceable despite the brevity and premise.

Overall, I wouldn’t say it’s much of an intellectual watch, but if you just want a fun action-comedy ride with an extremely charismatic female protagonist and stunning animation quality, Tetsuwan Birdy is likely to be your jam. I’d recommend it to people who enjoy classic tokusatsu series, the original ‘90s Sailor Moon anime, and the less-depressing parts of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

3. Noir (2001)

This anime series is perhaps not as underappreciated as the others on this list, but I do still feel that not enough people have seen it. It was made by the studio Bee Train, and it’s the first entry in their so-called “Girls with Guns” trilogy (which isn’t actually a coherent trilogy, since they’re three different stories). The series was made right at the end of the cel-anime era, before the transition to digital colouring and compositing, so the masters were shot on film, but it was also made at the beginning of the slow transition to widescreen TV broadcasts, so it’s one of the very rare cel anime that’s in 16:9. This allows for a beautifully detailed look that, IMO, serves to offset the occasionally-limited animation and the frequent re-use of footage.

The premise is basically “secret assassins in France are caught up in weird intrigue and conspiracies”; as such, there’s a lot of very fun gunplay and kickass fight scenes, but also a lot of suspense and mystery. The writing is a little bit slipshod at times, but it ends up holding together, and the characters and (especially) the fantastically moody vibe make the show worth watching.

The characters are imbued with a lot of life and colour, both by their extremely attractive designs and by their voice actors’ wonderful performances. Mireille Bouquet, a young Corsican assassin and one of the two protagonists, is voiced by Mitsuishi Kotono; Yuumura Kirika, the other main protagonist who is a Japanese schoolgirl who has seemingly lost all her memories (but not her exceptional assassin skills), is voiced by Kuwashima Houko; and the mysterious Chloe, who shows up partway through the show, is voiced by Hisakawa Aya. There are definite yuri vibes between Mireille and Kirika, but as with Canaan, it’s all subtextual.

The main draw of the show, though, is its phenomenal soundtrack, courtesy of Kajiura Yuki (.hack//Sign, Kara no Kyoukai, Fate/Zero, Sword Art Online, Demon Slayer) in her very first anime scoring gig. It’s at times propulsive, at times dark and moody, at times beautifully serene, at times melancholy and nostalgic — and it’s utterly memorable.

I would recommend Noir to anyone who likes Canaan, Witch Hunter Robin, Ghost in the Shell, or anyone who just wishes that James Bond were a woman.

4. Flip Flappers (2016)

This anime was produced at Studio 3Hz and directed by Oshiyama Kiyotaka, in a dazzling yet underappreciated directorial debut that was presaged by his impressive animation work on Dennou Coil, Space Dandy, A Letter to Momo, The Secret World of Arietty, and The Wind Rises. Owing to this extremely solid animation background, Oshiyama was able to recruit a lot of prime animation talent for Flip Flappers, and it definitely shows in the stunning sakuga of the wild action sequences that pepper the show’s narrative.

While the fantastic animation is a key draw of this show, the sheer creativity in the worldbuilding, conceptual, and visual design spheres also contribute to its inimitably psychedelic look and feel. The landscapes of the worlds contained in Pure Illusion — the dream-realm that the protagonists enter each episode at the behest of a mysterious scientific organisation — and of the “real” world are whimsical, storybook-like, and slightly “off” in a slightly unsettling but compelling way.

The dreamlike atmosphere pervades the narrative as well — very little about the mechanics of the world is specified out loud, relying heavily on symbolism and visual storytelling to do the heavy lifting for the audience’s understanding. This might be a turn-off for audiences who prefer to have things spelled out for them clearly, but the point of this story is not always to make perfect logical sense, but rather to work on an emotional and metaphorical level. And work, it certainly does.

The episodic structure involving the various worlds of Pure Illusion explores the concept of the Umwelt (the individual sensory “world” of a person or organism), as well as some Jungian concepts and archetypes, in order to express the strange and sometimes-scary developmental stage of adolescence. The characters of Cocona (voiced by Takahashi Minami) and Papika (voiced by Ichimichi Mao) undergo a metaphorical and literal puberty, a coming-of-age similar in some ways to that experienced by the protagonist of FLCL, but with significantly more yuri. In fact, this show has the most outright yuri of any of the anime on this list. But that isn’t very strange for what is essentially a psychedelic magical-girl show: lots of magical-girl anime seem to include homoerotic vibes in some form or another, from Sailor Moon to Nanoha to Madoka.

There are some minor flaws in the storytelling towards the end, IMO, but overall it’s a wonderfully impactful emotional journey to watch Flip Flappers. Plus, the OP and ED are both extraordinarily catchy tunes that I’ve found myself humming on many an occasion.

I’d recommend this anime to anyone who loves weird magical-girl stuff, weird yuri, and/or amazing action animation.

5. Claymore (2007)

An adaptation of the manga by Yagi Norihiro, this anime is considered by many to simply be “basic”, or at least simply “inferior to the manga”. Now. I haven’t read the original Claymore manga (yet! I plan to eventually), but I found this anime to be compelling nonetheless. And if it really is the case that the manga is better, then I definitely look forward to diving in.

Having been produced by Studio Madhouse in the mid-2000s, it’s unsurprising that the vast majority of this anime was outsourced to Korean animation studio DR Movie, a longtime powerhouse subcontractor for both Japanese and American animation alike. That said, the direction of Tanaka Hiroyuki (director of a portion of Hellsing Ultimate and frequent close collaborator of Attack on Titan director Araki Tetsurou) remains sharp, compensating for the sometimes-limited animation with good storyboarding and a strong sense of mood and atmosphere.

Another aspect of Claymore which helps make up for the occasional visual shortcomings is the soundtrack by Takumi Masanori. The compositions are a mix of harder rock and electronic elements with a strong orchestral backbone, as befits a dark-fantasy setting and mood — the faster pieces are edgy and propulsive, very appropriate for the bloody action scenes, and the calmer pieces have a melancholic beauty to them that sticks in one’s memory. I wish the soundtrack were on Spotify, but alas, it is not.

The other sonic element that helps this anime out immensely is its absolutely STACKED voice cast. The main character, Clare, is voiced by Kuwashima Houko, in a fantastic yet understated performance. The other main character, Raki, is voiced by the less-well-known Takagi Motoki, but nearly all the other roles — including many bit parts — are filled with industry legends. Teresa is voiced by Park Romi, Miria is voiced by Inoue Kikuko, Irene is voiced by Takayama Minami, Rubel is voiced by Hirata Hiroaki, Priscilla is voiced by Hisakawa Aya, Ophelia is voiced by Shinohara Emi, and Jean (whom I cannot help but ship with Clare: there’s so much homoerotic tension there!) is voiced by none other than Mitsuishi Kotono. Yes, they got three of the original Sailor Senshi VAs — and I don’t know why that’s funny to me, but it is. And all of the voice actors deliver killer performances.

The premise of the show, before I completely forget to explain it, is that of a dark fantasy world where demons called youma ravage human settlements, with only the titular Claymores to protect humanity. They are a guild of platinum-haired and silver-eyed warrior women who possess superhuman fighting abilities, due to the fact that they’ve been fused with youma essence, and wield the massive broadswords that give them their name. Basically, (s)he who fights monsters must become (partly) a monster to do so.

I’ve heard the vibe of Claymore compared to manga like Berserk, and I don’t know how true that is (not having read the latter for myself), but there’s certainly a lot of bleakness and monstrosity in this fantasy tale. However, the Claymore manga was published in none other than Weekly Shounen Jump, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the story remains resolutely forward-looking, the protagonists’ arcs focussing on the power of grit, determination, true friendship and loyalty, and protection of the weak and downtrodden. It’s never cynical or sarcastic — always straightforward and sincere despite the frequent darkness of the story.

The writing is consistently solid, even through the controversial anime-original ending (the manga continues long past the point where the anime cut things off), so I’m not sure who to point to for that: Yagi Norihiro for writing the original material, or Kobayashi Yuuko (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Attack on Titan s1-3, Kakegurui, Casshern Sins) for adapting it cleanly for the screen? Either way, it made me want to read the manga to experience more of these compelling characters and their travails.

I would recommend this anime to those who enjoy Kill La Kill or RWBY, or just to those who enjoy powerful women hacking at monsters with massive weapons and making lots of blood spray out.

[nevertoomanyspiders]

I watched the Armitage III OVA and the Dual Matrix sequel film

they were good. nothing world-shattering but they were interesting. both the OVA and the movie had cool visuals and action scenes. there were fun characters, too, like a Billy Idol-ass guy cackling like a looney, an eccentric robot mechanic in the movie...

and whatever the fuck this guy's deal is lmao:

but yeah, I do enjoy the visual style and character designs. that kinda thing can make or break things for me.

the OVA natch looks way nicer to me overall, being a mid-90s product, while the film came out in 2001 and has the trappings of that era of animation production (like more muted colour palettes and jank CG animation)

I do enjoy Armitage's design, still. she's recognizable as herself even with the style evolution.

I was originally interested in checking out Armitage III mostly because the title character's design reminded me a lot of Gally/Alita from Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita, another pint-sized cyberpunk action girl. thematically and in terms of plot, Armitage III definitely owes a lot to Blade Runner, and apparently a lot of the names are in reference to Lovecraft (Dr. Henry Armitage -> Naomi Armitage, Dunwich Horror -> Dunwich/Danich Hill, etc.)

oh yeah, the writer of Armitage III is Chiaki Konaka who is better known for Serial Experiments Lain and Digimon Tamers, among others.

are the OVA and the movie worth checking out? imo, sure, I know I like me some goofy action anime from the 90s, especially if they star spunky girls. I do kinda enjoy the Battle Angel OVA more :'D and naturally, Ghost in the Shell (1995) since they tackle similar themes.

[phantomchick]

Anime Watchlist #4

So Vampire Hunter D is a great movie that adapts the content of a Japanese novel, it's animation falls into the dated but creative category.

This is D our titular vampire hunter ^ It tells an atmospheric vampire story, with a soundtrack and voice actors (and the sub is infinitely more tolerable than the dub so that's what I watched) that conquer the clunky animation's problems and draw you into the story. The characters are each intriguing in their own right and the main character/hero D is extremely fun. This is a film that isn't afraid to be dramatic or ridiculous and it invites you to take its crazy cast of contorted and vicious monsters as serious threats.

According to wikipedia, the director Toyoo Ashida stated that his intention for the film was to create an OVA that people who had been tired from studying or working hard would enjoy watching, instead of watching something that would make them "feel even more tired".

Yoshitaka Amano, the illustrator of the original novels, acted as character designer for the OVA. However, alternative designs were provided by Ashida (who also acted as the film's animation director), and elements from both artists’ works were combined to create final designs by the animators. Personally I think the novel style illustrations would've been too difficult to animate at this point in time but they're definitely beautiful and it's interesting how they were simplified and adapted for the sake of the anime.

Apparently an acclaimed pop artist called Tetsuya Komuro was responsible for the film's soundtrack, and also performed the film's ending theme, "Your Song", with his fellow members of TM Network. Which makes sense because the soundtrack definitely adds to the film's overall quality, so it's clear they really cared about that part.

The fight scenes are necessarily limited in dynamism because of the older animation but they still manage to stay tense, entertaining and engaging, the writing really goes a long way and you can feel the passion for the project. It's easy to forget that everything from the characters to the stills of the environment are hand-painted.

Don't get me wrong.

It's not a game-changing masterpiece experience in line with Akira or Ghost in The Shell by any measure, but it's a really good film and well worth a watch if you can adapt to the art style and accept the premise of melodramatic spooky vampire threats for the sake of 80 minutes worth of a good time. So that's one off the list:

Vampire Hunter D (1985 OVA)

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2001 movie)

FMA: Brotherhood (OVA collection, 2009–2010)

Kino’s Journey 2003 (13 eps)

Hakujuden (1958)

Rose of Versailles s1 (1979) (10 eps)

Batman: Gotham Knights (2008 movie)

Summer Wars (2009 movie)

Serial Experiments Lain (1998) (13 eps)

Rose of Versailles s2 (10 eps)

Next up. I'm loving the character of D and want to see more of him so let's go for Bloodlust!

How big of a difference will 16 years make?

[kae-luna]

//WIP Intro Post: Ultra Drive//

Art by Computerizer

//Title: Ultra Drive

//Progress: Writing early chapters, planning for whole (hopefully) series out of order

//Genres: Sci-fi, cyberpunk, dystopian, biopunk, post-apocalyptic, action, LGBTQIA2S+, drama, psychological

//Links: Wattpad | Tapas (Coming Soon)

//Rating: 16+ for violence, blood, possible gore, swearing, and suggestive content

//Content warnings: death, pandemic, sickness, bigotry in general???, war, fascism

//POV: Third person First person. AlexiKa's POV.

//Setting: In the city of Venicula on the island of Arasai and surrounding areas. Takes place in the future.

//Premise: AlexiKa's world was changed forever the day her family was forced to immigrate to the imperial city of Venicula after the Ebony Plague - caused by mysterious spores - infected her home town.

~(Continued under the cut)~

Now a young adult, she works as a courier (and secretly an anti-corporation activist). When going on a delivery for the all powerful Gaia Corporation, she accidentally uncovers dark secrets and ends up infected with the same Ebony Plague that haunted her hometown as a child. But when she survives the illness and instead develops superhuman abilities, she joins a mutant resistance group - who call themselves Ultras - to fight against the Veniculan Empire, the Gaia Corporation, and other mutants with immoral goals.

//Aesthetic: neon and pastel architecture, holograms, dyed hair, tech gear, infrastructure in derelict conditions, overgrown plants, eco-friendly technology

//Tropes + themes: anti-capitalism, equality, probably found family, female empowerment, globalization, super powers, POC characters, LGBTQIA2S+ characters

//Inspiration: Nausicaa of The Valley of The Wind, Ultraviolet (2006), Aeon Flux (show + movie), Alita: Battle Angel (movie, OVA, + manga), Ghost in The Shell (anime), Fallout (games), 86 (anime), The Last Of Us (games), Blade Runner, The Matrix, 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s in general, vaporwave art, the United States of 'Merica, Sims 4 eco lifestyle

//Characters:

AlexiKa: A young woman with fiery passion and an even more fiery temper, AlexiKa - AKA Lexi - fights for her family's survival in the rough city of Venicula. She hates authority and will gladly fight for you, despite the odds.

Yuki Raiden: Lexi's mom. Japanese. Super sweet and tries to keep the mood positive, even in dark times.

Alessandro: Lexi's dad. An Italian himbo who loves to tinker.

Ellie: Lexi's childhood friend. Super sweet, but a bit cheeky as well. Pacifist. They might have some gay tension.

Empress Vox: Rules the city of Venicula. Politician who does weird parasocial crap over VR/AR. Definitely a good person.

Donovan Vox: Brother of the Veniculan president. CEO of Gaia Corporation.

LaKellan Ramirez: Leader of the Ultra Resistance. Calm and may seem cold, but is actually just a bit awkward and emotionally constipated.

(More coming soon probably-)

//Tags: Ultra Drive, aesthetic, xxx, xxx, xxx...

//Tag list: @digital-chance

//Pinterest boards: Aesthetic inspo | Character inspo

//Playlists: Scenic/Chill - Used for imagining scenery and for calmer scenes.| Edgy - Lots of industrial, trip-hop, metal, and rock beats for angsty, intense, action scenes. Some songs may include explicit content.

//Changelogs:

1.0: Initial Post.

1.2: Added more tags. Added playlist. Added Pinterest board links.

[morganhopesmith1996]

Screencaps (mine) from the 5 Arise OVA’s-Ghost in the Shell The New Movie of Major Motoko Kusanagi 💗