#as someone unrelated interested in the rpg maker engine this is interesting

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

So when I was an egg in high school, I created a self-insert OC named Yar Kramer. I used him for a bunch of RPs, and several works of fiction, only one of which I actually completed. There were like two sprite comics and one thing I made that was literally just "sprites + dialogue and descriptions of the action", plus an unpublished and incomplete novel.

RP

The original original roleplay was on a Hitchhiker's Guide website called the H2G2, created by Douglas Adams as an attempt at realizing the eponymous Guide (which has been largely supplanted by Wikipedia). My username was originally "Adolescent White American [wronggender] Who Likes 47" (I liked the number 47 to its frequency in Star Trek); people shortened this to "Yankee Kid, likes 47" and subsequently "YK-47" and just "YK", which I backronym'd to "Yaradovich Kramer"[sic], after Yaridovich from Super Mario RPG and Cid Kramer from Final Fantasy 8. He was originally a coolkid Jedi in a red jacket, but at some point I retconned it to generic "psychic powers."

I also roleplayed him on a few RP MUDs, but I don't really remember any details there.

The "Original" Story

The novel was going to be called "Red Jacket", I think. "Yar Kramer" was a witness-protection alias, and his original name was Daniel Lancaster (hmmmm, someone's primary identity doesn't match their birth name!); he and his family had been forced to work for an evil organization called Project Robinson, which intended to create genetically-engineered espers for reasons I'm not sure about now. Project Robinson was led by an evil scientist called Dr. Krause and a computer named Mother Brain; I justified stealing the name "Mother Brain" because there were three unrelated video games which featured a character by that name (Metroid, Phantasy Star II on the Genesis, and Chrono Trigger).

The Grim Reaper was a woman who talked in underlined dialogue, and whacked people over the head with her scythe rather than actually reaping. She'd changed her form in the 1960s because she found the whole "skeleton" deal to be depressing. She had a black motorcycle with a flame pattern and the text "Pale Horse", and the souls she collected traveled in a pink sidecar which said "Binky" on the side in Comic Sans (where "Binky" is obviously a Discworld reference). When I created this in the 00's, there was totally nothing significant about a character who'd clearly changed her gender, nuh-uh.

Yar's love interest was Mackenzie Robinson, one of Project Robinson's creation. Despite the fact that the gummint had an active hand in extracting Yar's family from Project Robinson, there was some FBI/CIA spook called Agent Pinkerton who hounded Mackenzie like Inspector Javert. I know he had a classmate named Eckhart, who was this ratty-faced jerk with a heart of gold, who was inspired by one of my RL classmates.

I also found a half-written script for a comic, which gets as far as a prologue, followed by a scene which estalishes the witness protection business. Yar jokingly introduces himself Trigun-style as "Yaradovich Halvorsen Thompson-Stryfe-Gainsborough Donatello Leonard Raphael Michelangelo Farnsworth Anderson-Smith Jean-Luc Jones Solo Pepper Tibloxley Amelia Fayette-Mahoney Kierkegaard Williamtonshireworth Melora Kramer I." Wow. Let's see, "Halvorsen" and "Kierkegaard Williamtonshireworth Melora" are clearly made from whol cloth, and I'm not sure where "Jones" came from, but other than that, I can see in order ... Trigun (Thompson and Stryfe), Final Fantasy VII (Strife and Gainsborough), all four Ninja Turtles, Futurama, The Matrix, Star Trek, Star Wars, Cowboy Bebop (re-engrished "Pepelu Tivruski"), and Slayers. Again, wow.

First Reality

The "main" sprite comic, which was a sort of Final Fantasy parody made mostly in RPG Maker, and which ran from 2001 to 2004 on Keenspace. Yar Kramer was a "Neo-Samurai" (basically a ripoff of SeeD from Final Fantasy 8), fighting alongside a dude named Shigeru 'Gary' Oak (Gary Oak except as an adult, with a gunblade and dressed as Seifer Almasy, with no sign of any pokemon), and Tina Branford (Terra Branford without her tragic backstory).

The setting was incomprehensible if you didn't have detailed knowledge of Final Fantasy 6, 7, 8, and also Mega Man X; nearly every single place name was named after something from Final Fantasy except for Death Mountain, where they went to in order to get the Triforce (long story). A pink-haired goofy-and-hyperactive Celes Chere was the princess of Mysidia, and was a FF8-Sorceress; she frequently went in disguise as a thief named Fobby, and used a Reploid named Dancer as a body-double.

The main villain was named Darklumen, and his evil plan was to destroy the world by weakening the fabric of existence by leveraging sprite comic cliches, thus demonstrating that I have always been Like That. (The fact that I had a direct author avatar called the "Ultimate Guardian Force" with semi-omnipotent powers over the comic isn't even worth dwelling on, because omnipotent "author" characters are par for the course with sprite comics.)

The other party members: Kefka Palazzo, who was the court jester for Mysidia; Enerion Imusen, a half-Esper who was invented from whole cloth, who overcame his hangups about being half-esper with Tina's help before he got killed off by the bad guy; and "Rock Light" (because one of the reality-damaging sprite comic cliches was "Mega Man is present"), who was actually the Great Guardian Force Yu-Yevon in disguise for convoluted reasons.

In the ending, it's mentioned that Gary marries Princess Celes, and sort of vaguely implies that Yar ends up with Tina. (Tina made actual romantic overtures to Yar halfway through the comic, but they were interrupted by shallow comedy.)

I absolutely refused to let go of a running gag in which a male character would say something that broke the fourth wall, and at least one female character would immediately yell at him for doing so.

... I actually found some MIDI songs in the First Reality files which I personally composed. Well ... I say "composed", but the Darklumen final boss music was clearly based on the Super Smash Bros 1's Final Destination music with techno-twittering from All Your Base, one was based on a boss theme from Final Fantasy X combined with anime music, and Yar Kramer's personal themesong was chiefly based on Glyde's theme from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne.

YaraY

The other sprite comic, hosted on a subdirectory of First Reality's site. The name came from Yar's evil twin, Ray Remark ("Yar" and "Kramer" spelled backwards), and also from the Japanese expression "yare yare" (translated in JJBA "good grief").

It was a shallow Bob and George-esque thing with Mega Man sprites, and invovled Yar's shenanigans opposite Ray Remark; a straightlaced roommate with blue hair named Elbert Ssab (I don't know where I got "Elbert" from, but I came up with "Ssab" after noticing that "Elbert" backwards is "Treble"); a Reploid named Jive who was an orange recolor of Zero from Mega Man Zero; and a girl in a pink shirt named Kira, whose character concept began and ended with "hyperactive blonde girl." At one point, there was a comic which depicted First Reality as an actual console RPG being played by Kira; this comic was then ported directly to First Reality.

I abruptly stopped updating it in the middle of a story arc in which Jive went off with a group Maverick Hunters which inexplicably included Zio from Phantasy Star 4, who was just there to be generically evil rather than actually pursuing any of his canonical goals.

Super Adventure Yar

And finally, the "sprites plus dialogue" thing. It used whatever anime, video game, and internet characters I was interested in at any given moment, and there were inserts from several people I knew online. All of whom were basically overpowered in some respect, i.e. one of the friend-inserts was literally just a redheaded Goku in a trench coat, except his Saiyan name was "Suckarot". It was the most absurd and ridiculous of these things.

Yar was your basic inexplicably-overpowered action-shounen protagonist, and people kept going "What!? Why is he so powerful!?" (If there was going to be an explanation, I never got a chance to give it and I don't remember what it was, but I doubt there was anything reasonable.) Of course, this was also true of pretty much every protagonist.

His fighting style involved throwing energy blasts, and his signature move was named "Island King Kamehameha", because I knew the etymology of the Dragonball attack, but the kind of creative person I was at the time was that nuance, self-awareness, and "general understanding of what I was putting into my stories" were something that happened to other people.

Mayl Sakurai was impulsively violent with a squeaky-mallet.

At one point, while the protagonists were discussing a plot point which Mayl wasn't present for, she said, "What the hell are you talking about?" and then tossed an entire burger into her mouth.

Cut Man's NetNavi was FishMan.exe.

Yar bought Chii Chobits from Strong Bad, who ran an unbelievably shady second-hand electronics store; Chii's copycat tendencies extended to copying other peoples' magic and superpowers.

He also bought a generic NetNavi and expressed the intention to customize it, but all sign of NetNavis were dropped after a few episodes.

The "ageless faceless gender-neutral culturally-ambiguous adventuring person" (AFGNCAAP) from Zork/Enchanter was one of the main characters. They frequently used spells from Enchanter such as "gaspar" ("provide for your own resurrection" -- basically like a Final Fantasy "Auto-Life" spell, but AFGNCAAP was also able to use it on others), "vaxum" ("make hostile creature friendly", and every single target which it actually worked on promised to kill them after it wore off), "krebf" ("repair willful damage"), and "talcor" (healing; this seems to be something I made up myself, because I can't find any references to it in Enchanter canon).

I insisted on using "he/she" and the like instead of just the singular "they", wow I was deep in the egg in 2004. But they did say "I don't have a gender" at one point!

Magus/Janus from Chrono Trigger was trying to take over the world using robotic Sinistars. His minions were "the Terrible Trio", which consisted of Onslaught from Marvel vs. Capcom 1, Dalton from Chrono Trigger, and Dynamo from Mega Man X.

I stole the "now I'm wet and on fire!" joke from the webcomic Adventurers! during a fight between Dalton and AFGNCAAP.

Magus got a Vegeta-style "suddenly I happen to be on the same side of the heroes" redemption with the sudden arrival of, um, the Saiyans. Starting with Raditz as just a retread of Dragonball Z.

After Raditz was beaten, he sent a message to Vegeta and "Zappa", who was just Nappa but with a terrible wig and an atrocious southern accent; I have no idea what I was going for there.

The planet Arlia from Dragonball Z was populated by clones of Alia from Mega Man X5. It had the same fate as in the show, namely that Vegeta and Zappa just casually blew it up after going on a rescue-a-princess quest.

There was an "It's a gundam!" joke there.

The Goku-expy friend-insert taught Yar how to fly Hitchhiker's Guide-style ("throw yourself at the ground and miss"), and how to use bullet-time.

Mayl trained under Magus. At one point, while she was fighting a friend-insert with a sniper rifle (who'd previously stolen everyone's wallets for no apparent reason), Magus remarked that she had "hidden potential" and noted that in her hands, her squeaky mallet was just as powerful as the sniper rifle.

Vash the Stampede showed up, and the plot promptly started getting derailed as everyone around him dropped everything to try to claim his $60 billion bounty (Onslaught, to Dalton and Dynamo: "We'll split it 50-50-50!").

At one point, Vash ran off with Chii for reasons that only slightly made sense in context, and Yar chased them to a town called Las Eisley.

The three of them got into a bar fight at a "restaulant"[sic] (I thiiiink this was originally actual engrish from Trigun itself?) which completely wrecked the building.

After the bar fight, Yar called up AFGNCAAP to make repairs using the krebf spell; AFGNCAAP asked, "Was all the damage willful?" and Yar replied, "Well, I definitely proceeded in the full knowledge that massive destruction would occur." Due to the rules of sprite-comic comedy, this was enough for krebf to work.

There was a "Dear Strong Bad, how do you type with boxing gloves on?" joke.

In the middle of everything else, I started writing an episode introducing Valkyries and Loki -- which displayed a surprisingly deep knowledge of Norse mythology on 18-year-old-me's part -- but I never finished it and my files don't even have the sprites for the main Valkyrie character, who was another friend-insert.

... All of these continuities just feel amazing to me in retrospect, because this is the kind of thing that can only happen in fanfiction. Only something using existing characters, our existing associations with these characters, can possibly reach this level of ridiculousness.

Which isn't to say it's all fun and games, though. I was a particularly un-woke Rotten Egg, which meant that there was rampant sexism, and lowkey fanservice. The concept might look fun, but the execution was invariably "the worst parts of the sprite comic fandom."