#technically close up and 2nd are finished piece while 3rd is base/less edited version

[mechaseraph]

Every ep of Gavv I just keep saying "Little beepo's (Shouma's) misery is increasing" and it just keeps being the case in following ep

[megamanxfanfics]

Season V - Afterthoughts on the 2nd Arc

This is more about Ep. 11, 12 & 13, but I gave the 1st Arc the same amount of attention. I might as well do the same for the 2nd Arc.

-----------------------------Episode 7-----------------------------------------------

I’ve said pretty much everything I wanted to say about these first few episodes in the arc, so I’ll just leave a true afterthought:

I was really surprised how quickly we got back into the action again, and that X & Zero got all the way about to their boss fights before the episode came to a close.  Moreover, I was really happy that I was able to further develop things from Dynamo’s perspective, who was still recovering from his fight with Zero.

------------------------------Episode 8----------------------------------------------

These were rock solid fights against Spiral Pegasus & Dark Necrobat.  With the way things worked out, I like how Zero barely survived his fight, and actually needed to learn how to work with Alia in order to win.  [In hind-sight, X being able to teleport his weapon chip to Zero is sort of a cop-out, but.. that’s Mega Science, baby.  Alia’s a genius!!]

The rest of the episode was sort of a strange moving of the chess-pieces.  X getting his Gaea Armor part, Zero flying home and everything in between.

But I still love how it ended, with Dynamo surprise attacking the base, once again and this time it was X’s turn to defend their home.

-------------------------------Episode 9---------------------------------------------

This one was pretty climactic.  I really enjoyed X’s fight with Dynamo and exploring more of Dynamo’s sociopathic motivations.

After the fight, I feel like it suffered from some necessary moving of the chess-pieces, but in a way it gave me a chance to do something interesting with Lifesaver’s character.  He doesn’t really trust X or Zero, seeing as they aren’t affected by the Virus in one way or another.  And X’s lashing out against Zero was an unexpected addition, which added tension to their straining relationship. I both liked and disliked this, considering what I was setting up for later.

This one just sort of ended while X & Zero just started their next missions, but Zero got a really good Repliforce flashback out of the deal.  It explained why he was so adamant about finishing them off, I hope.  I wanted to make him seem like less of a loose cannon and more of a focussed warrior with a long-goal in mind.

------------------------------Episode 10----------------------------------------------

I was really happy once this one was over!  Zero’s stage was way more exciting than X’s, but with his new ability of flight, I had to let X spread his wings.  [I also, wanted to get to his fight with Rosered as soon as possible.]

Once the Rosered fight was over and X got to coalesce with Zero, things felt right again.

-------------------------------Episode 11-----------------------------------------------

This episode wrote itself, man!  I had so much fun working on it.

The very first thing I did was take the all the Canon Dialogue to see what I was working with.  I had everything laid out.  The shuttle take-off set-up, and then every possible outcome.  This is where things got very creative.  I had to use colors.

I colored all of the good sequence dialogue in green. Then I colored all the bad sequence dialogue in red. Then I went even further and looked at the failed, time ran-out sequence and saw very usable dialogue that I wanted to take from there.  I colored that in crimson.

As I wrote all of those conflicting sequences out, I added one transition moment in the stage directions which took us from the Good Scenario to the Bad Scenario.  This stage direction was colored in amber.  [That being a piece of debris knocking into Zero’s ship and throwing him off-course at the last minute.]

After playing with colors, I took a look at the Pre-mission set up, and saw what needed expanding in a 2nd session.

X, Zero & Signas reacting to Douglas’ bad news about Auto-pilot not working was very organic and easy to write. This continued into a hallway scene, where X practically begs Zero not to go, but I made sure for X not to volunteer himself either, because the canon dialogue already does that for us, once Zero is strapped in and ready for take-off.

The only other thing I had to set up was Zero going over to the Shuttle to settle in.  I really liked this, because it’s the last time I get to write Zero acting heroic, before everything changes.  More-over, I threw in some interesting continuity regarding all those Technicians he saved from Spiral Pegasus’ base.  One of the new recruits introduces himself as Tack and thanks him for everything he’s done.  {If you’re wondering where I pulled that name from, look no further than the X6 Rescued Reploid list.  Yes... I am setting things up for X6.  But I will not overload us with OCs, because that is not the point of that story.}

With that done, I looked everything over in my 3rd session and expanded upon the worst scenario stuff, in crimson.  Life imitated Art here in an awesome way.  I was writing this segment on my laptop late at night, before bed and my battery was almost dying.  I shit you not, literally after writing the news segment, the computer shut down.  Like, I hit period, Dropbox Autosaved, and then bam.  It was toast!  I could NOT get over that.  I wasn’t very worried about losing stuff, because Dropbox Word Online is pretty good like that.  I double-checked how the file looked on my phone, and sure as shit, everything I just wrote was there.

That was a great way to end Session 3.

In the next days I tackled a Session 4, where I think I opened up The Battle of Two Fates and compared notes.  It was definitely in this awesome place, where I could work on both at once.  One Chapter was showing things from X’s perspective and the other was showing things from Zero’s perspective.  I truly loved what was happening.  My original fan script was finally, truly connecting to the series.  I was finally catching up to my Long-Goal.

--------------------------------Episode 12----------------------------------------------

Then, came the Flashback Sequence from Hell.  [I might’ve used that term before, but this time it was real.]

The Battle of Two Fates, being my first fan script ever had a lot of exposition in it within the stage directions...

Since writing Season I, I always knew I’d come back to this and change that exposition into a cool flashback sequence.  I even started with a long Vile flashback once Season I was done, but I got rid of it almost immediately since it didn’t flow with the rest of the one-shot at all. 

By the time Season II was done, I had done so many different things with Zero that I probably thought it best to just tackle that Exposition/Flashback Sequence once everything was done.

This was a good move, but also very frustrating.

I didn’t know it yet, but this Flashback Sequence was easily going to become it’s own episode.

At first, I followed The Battle of Two Fates exposition to a T.  I gave us the two moments where X & Zero fight Vile from X1.

Then, I was supposed to go where Zero saved X from the Black Clone Zero in X2, but guess what?  Zero’s Maverickism in that Season was a cluster-fuck and rehashing all of that was it’s own chore of a task.

Already, the sequence was messed up.  After that was supposed to be quick shots of their teamwork in X3 & X4, but due to Mega Missions & Xtreme 2...  That Teamwork was now very layered, and complicated.  Not so cut and dry, ‘lets stop the bad guys buddy’, like I had originally depicted from the one-shot.

So...  I picked and chose the highlights of the entire series...  I had to! [How I thought this would cram into the tail end of Ep. 11 is beyond me.]

To go into further detail about how I edited, re-edited, and even further condensed and compromised all of those flashbacks is a fool’s errand.  But I will tell you that I had more fun with colors, opting for X’s narrations to be Blue and his Flashback dialogue to be normal black.  It was also smart to throw his entire narration into it’s own file and see if the monologue made sense, by itself.

[This is definitely mostly the case.]

Once I had all the moments and scenes that I wanted, Episode 11 was like, 42 pages!!!  Easily, split in half, but I didn’t want to do that. I tried cutting down the flashbacks as much as possible, and managed to make it 36 pages, maybe?  Still no good.

So as stated before, I decided that two 18-pages chapters were way more digestible than one, 36 page chapter.

And there we had it, episode 12 was a giant flashback, aftershock chapter where X and we the audience come to terms with the fact that Zero, as we know and love him.. is no more...

--------------------------------Episode 13----------------------------------------------

This one was less about writing, and more about editing than anything else.  It’s also the true beginning of the 3rd Arc, so technically it doesn’t belong in this entry.  But since they pair so well together, here we go.

The Battle of Two Fates was written as a Christmas Gift in 2010.

The editing to this chapter took place technically as early as Season I, 2011. I had already stated putting in both full Vile fights, but that didn’t flow at all so it was taken out.

But the next technical edit was when I created this blog in 2015.  I made a script formatted version, and it was really hard to keep all the dialogue and over-expositional stage directions in.  But I did.

Flash forward to now, 2019 when I was really working on this.  At the beginning of the 2nd Arc, I fiddled with the battle itself.  I noticed that X used a lot of X3 weapons and the Storm Tornado from X1.  All of that was edited to X5 & X4 weapons.  I definitely beefed up the dialogue to this before truly tackling S.V - Ep 7.  I added the Serges continuity from X2 into their hate-talk.  X was way less of a pansy... :p  [I still can’t believe I wrote that. I generally shocked myself from my past writing.]

So from the battle on, I was mostly covered.

I may have opened it, while working on Ep. 8 or 9, just because.  The only thing that was done there was inserting slashes to some of the opening moments of the chapter.  I didn’t want to delete anything yet, but I was sure that certain things weren’t gonna work, or needed big changes if they were going to be included.

This takes us back to the flashback sequence.  Once I was unknowingly working on Episode 12, I slashed out all of that exposition stage direction nonsense, and deleted it.

The familiar Episode 11 sequences were thrown into the beginning to show Zero’s perspective on everything. Adding a “Moments Ago” caption was the perfect solution to my giant flashback episode.  This unfortunately makes Chapter 12 very skippable for folks who just wanna get to the action, but I also don’t blame them.

So even before getting to Episode 13, all of this was kind of pre-done for me.

What really needed working on, mostly was cleaning up the stage directions at first.  The tiny goal from session 1 was to just get to X teleporting to the area.

Once X was teleported and we were in the now, I really had to fix almost all of their interactions.  This took a session or 3 in itself, but eventually everything that I liked, new and old was reworked, nicely.  There was this giant build for one of them to finally throw the first punch, and I really liked how I handled that within their dialogue.

We get a dropkick with a block.  Then a fist-clash, and finally the first charge shot.

The ensuing battle after that was mostly unchanged.  The only thing left to work on was Alia & Signas’ random dialogue before they duke it out.  It wasn’t fully necessary, but I wanted to give a small break in the action, and also keep with the continuity that Alia was going to give X his new armor.  [Only this time, it was going to be the Gaea Armor, rather than the Falcon Armor.]

Those battle changes were already worked on from before, so once I got to this section, is was more logistical clean up than anything else.

My last challenge was to get X home once he gets the Gaea Armor. Originally, he got the Falcon Armor and was majorly overpowered by it.  It’s what gave him the win against Zero (and ultimately kill him.)  [That could not keep for 2 reasons.  1, X already had it.  And 2...  The Falcon Armor is actually pretty.. weak.]  X5′s Armors were designed with checks and balances.  The Falcon Armor was light-weight and new with that special flight ability and sweet charge shot, but you could forget charging weapons.  X4′s Armor was standard, but you had the Plasma Shot and could charge weapons.  And of course, the Gaea Armor was a specialty, meant for spikes and strong defense against enemies.  And a sick Giga Attack.  But other than that, you could forget about speed, air-dashing or using ANY special weapons.  You can’t even equip parts to make him faster or anything.

[Because believe me, that was a plan I had in mind.]

So with that...  This chapter didn’t fall as flat as I thought it would.

X gets his Gaea Armor/2nd chance at life.  But Zero is long-gone.

Rather than have X pursue a 2nd battle, as he did in the original chapter, this was the perfect break in action to come home.  It wasn’t too hard to shift what he and Alia say, in order for her to convince him to come home.

Remember that he hasn’t recovered from any of the fights against Rosered, Dino-Rex and now a fully Awakened Zero who wasn’t holding back.

So this was believable for me to have X get like.. a jump to his system in receiving the Gaea Armor, but that being it.  Not a full power-up.  Not a 2nd lease on life.  Just... being alive at all, and needing to come home and sleep it off, finally.

The last line became Zero’s line.  “It’s time to finish the mission...”

Which means that there is more on Zero’s agenda than just X, after all.

Is there hope for their friendship yet?

You’ll just have to wait and see.

As for right now, the 2nd Arc is over, and the 3rd Arc has opened up to a climactic start. I’m looking forward to figuring out these next steps, but for now, I’ve enjoyed reflecting on all of this.

What about you guys?  What do you think?  Was there a favorite moment you had from the 2nd Arc, or even the 1st?  How about the start of the 3rd Arc??  Was it everything you were hoping for, or were you hoping things would go differently?  Please feel free to leave feedback, and leave comments below.

Until then, later guys.