#how actually GOOD it is for those YouTube gaming fansongs

[dontmindme2600]

Listening to any of those YouTube video game songs at my age makes me physically cringe (no offense to anyone who does) but that rap Dan Bull made for Fallout 4 before it released absolutely FUCKS and has genuinely the most creative lyrics I’ve seen from any of those types of channels. Like the alliteration??? Holy shit. Like I’ll still be embarrassed but I can’t help listening to it, it literally sounds canon, dare I say better than something that would come out of Bethesda

[kihaku-gato]

Among Us Fansong gushings

(Putting down the timestamp of Sept. 26th, as I’m sure more good fansongs/animations for the game will come up after this)

“auuugh you’re deep in this too-“ yes yes, here you go, under readmore cause this is turning into a bigger happy ramble than I anticipated (mainly cause I’m eating my words when I gonna say “there are surprisingly few fansongs for Among Us yet”), and #Among Us tag so you can have it filtered out of your feed ANYYYYWAYs

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I gotta say before we start that I LOVE the ryhyming in most of these fansngs. 10/10 love.

Emergency Meeting by Random Encounters

- The live-action for it was unexpected as I’m used to most video game fansongs being 2d or 3d animated and/or showing gameplay footage. They put a good amount of effort into this and it shows.

- The dramatical music that sounds both comedic, dramatic, and villainous (despise the context being that it’s the non-imposters singing it)

- The screaming for every poor person struggling to escape before they are thrown out of the spaceship as everyone else sings

- The classic silly sound effects when throwing stuff etc. around at some points

- The crew members being VERY physically animated/expressive with their bodies, really reminiscent of oldschool Power Rangers when they’re talking in their suits

- How it escalates more and more and more and more crewmembers get thrown out of the ship till it’s two facing off each other being both suspicious that they are the imposter

- The fact that after all of the crew is either in space or dead, that it’s revealed that the first dead person who set this in motion was actually alive all along; just was in a food coma and just wakes up to find everyone missing or dead. That is some (dark?) humor right there.

Imposter Imperceptible by NerdOut!

- A LOT of different voices (mainly cause several other really good videogame rappers/singers are in this video are involved in this one) which really expands its vocal variety from the usual, and makes it really feel like the different crewmembers are different; cause they are being voiced by different peeps

- wordgame sharp and quick as expected from them. I really hope some Rap-rating youtubers get on reacting/analyzing this video cause I’d love to hear the lyrics broken down.

- starting with one of the Imposters for the rap and has that dizzying nature of wordgame that intentionally confuses you even though clearly they are the Imposter as they vehemently deny that they are the Imposter

- huge awknowledgement of the gameplay mechanics and even terminologies/accusations that are frequently used by players (”sus” is used multiple times between crewmembers arguing between each other). Despite being animation it stays fairly faithful to the source material. Multiple watches and I’m discovering more and more details that are big nods to the actual gameplay.

- While the Imposters do win in this fansong animation, one Imposter is definitely discovered and booted out of the spaceship

Show Yourself by CG5

- while it keeps faithful to the videogame character models (save for the glass of the helmet being translated as a large singular eyeball- but the previous fansong animation did the same thing so that doesn’t count) this animation makes some liberties in several points that add much comedic affect (ex- the chorus of “I don’t want to be carried away in a Hearse” show him riding on top of a Space Hearse rocketship)

- The fact that the singer bobs to the beat of the song pretty much the entire time. really adds bounce to the entire thing.

- the singer themselves checks off both as the Paranoid one as well as the actual Imposter, and it goes for great comedic affect as well as tragic affect. Those who are not familiar with the game could be easily tricked into thinking that he’s not the Imposter due to not spotting the small signs peppered in the animation (ex- jumping through vents, and more symbolically dressing up like an actor while they say “The actor’s playing the part”, and the mirror of themsevles showing a reflection of themselves holding a knife)

- following the above point, being that he never kills in any alien/monster sort of way, it can be headcanoned that the singer is actually a regular crewmember that became the Imposter due to paranoia that may kick in while living out in space. The fact he keeps pointing at people they kill and accusing THEM as the Imposter really feeds to that tradegy headcanon

- How dramatically lit/shaded the scenes are where crewmembers are being killed or are dead, it really adds a sharpness despite the song being rather upbeat

- The fact the singer disturbs many of the crewmembers during the animation while accusing them of being the Imposter; disturbing them while they are on the toilet or sleeping or videogaming much to their frustration. It’s quite funny

- The Imposter/singer does NOT win in the animation, and it ends with them being kicked out after killing several people and there’s the nod “CG5 was the Imposter“ like you would normally see in the game

[takerfoxx]

An entirely too long ramble about how much Imperfect Metamorphosis means to me

(Tumblr please actually show that submissions are not just text posts please)

So. It’s almost the last day of the decade. I usually get weirdly sad and nostalgic in the last 30 minutes of New Year’s Eve, but this time it’s been like, a whole week, and I’ve been reflecting on this decade as a whole as well as like, my path in life.

The 1990’s were the decade of my birth and early life.

The 2000’s were the decade of being REALLY into Harry Potter.

And my 2010’s were, wholly and singularly, defined and shaped by Touhou. 

I got into Touhou sometime around Easter 2010 when McRoll’d came into my YouTube feed, and something about the music was just so god damned catchy I just had to know where it came from. So I discovered Flandre’s fight and from there, I learned just how great the music of this weird bullet hell game made by some rando in Japan. It quickly became my Thing. When I wasn’t playing sucking at the games, I was listening to the music, and if I wasn’t listening to the music, I was at school (where I’d probably not be paying attention let’s be real here).

So there I was, happily consuming fanart and fansongs and fangames and doing that little smile in appreciation when you see a reference to a thing you like (shoutout to raocow for also playing a few Touhou fangames way back when). It expanded my gaming interests into the sphere of “modding games to make them harder can be fun and cool”, which then lead to a general interest in playing modded and moddable games. It even made me interested in visiting Japan (on my bucket list), not in that stereotypical “weeb” way of visiting all the anime and manga stores, but more in the “something I like put a country on my radar and holy shit some of those restaurants, l want to eat at ALL of these places because they’re gorgeous” way.

You’ll notice that I specifically withheld from mentioning Fanfiction. See, as a teenager who did have the “try something once and if I don’t like it I’ll probably hate it forever because it’s always like that” mentality, I had the unfortunate experience of coming across My Immortal. 

That, and the fact that one of my close friends in High School had taken to reading Twilight Fanfic (and complaining at almost every story she read and their bad use of tropes) kinda solidified fanfiction as “something dumb and stupid written by people who solely want to roleplay fucking the protagonist”. And on that pedestal sat the entire concept of fanfiction for a long-ass time (actually it was about a year and a bit).

Fast forward a while. Patchouli had cemented herself as All Time Favourite Character, I’d begun to grow out of my Harry Potter phase in search of new stories, and I’d made some new friends, one of whom said they read fanfiction all the time and some of it was actually better than original, published books because they had the freedom to explore ideas that weren’t entirely publishable. But also to roleplay fuck their waifus.

At some point in Summer 2011, not too long after it came out, I decided to replay Portal 2, and something about the story left me feeling… incomplete. Empty. I sought people discussing what they thought of the story and hidden nuggets of info peppered throughout the game, and at some long buried comment section on YouTube, someone mentioned how some fanfiction went into a headcanon and took it further. I read it, considered it for a moment, deemed it worthy of being called “not trash”, and immediately set to looking at the Touhou section on FF.net.

The first fanfics I read of Touhou were… Well, they were. There were some good ones and not so good ones. But they were all, in some way, at least interesting. I quickly discovered the frustration that New Friend had brought up once, of when you discover something great but it’s over all too soon. Setting FF.net’s search to include only 100k and up fanfics, I was delighted to discover that there was a fanfiction called “Imperfect Metamorphosis” that was over 350,000 words long. And then my carefully crafted plan of going to bed at a sensible time to maximise Summer Gaming Time was devoured by staying up until 4:30am, reading fanfiction on a shitty laptop that could barely run UFO. Thank fuck it was the summer holidays.

There was something special about Imperfect Metamorphosis. The characters all had their own personality, their own history, their own implied history beyond what was written, they had goals, thoughts, feelings, and different takes towards other people working to further their own goals. And it was all wrapped up in a package that started with a simple premise, grew to encompass a world more broad than mere canon or fanon, and then billowed into an eldritch monster of ungodly size (hi, Yuuka!)((kind of like this post huh)). 

I was so fucking hooked on IM. I went back to school with theories buzzing about my brain as to what was going to end up happening, my mind wandering to the latest chapter and the bits I thought were cool, actually having the drive to focus and actually learn something about story structure in English Literature. I suddenly had the tiniest flame of interest in creating. Maybe one day I could write fanfic, and do my tiny part in expanding the universe of fan-content.

Regardless of the fact that my own attempts at conjuring stories weren’t successful (for a while), IM was there to be read throughout my last years of Normal Schooling, and it served as both a rock and an escape from the stress of school. I laughed with the jokes, I took Marisa’s death harder than the sum total of Harry Potter’s entire bodycount, and I could never hear Soulja Boi without thinking of Mima trolling Satori.

Just like how Touhou expanded my gaming and cultural horizons, Imperfect Metamorphosis expanded my horizon with Literature. I got into reading Neil Gaiman’s work, I read some Lovecraft, I consumed all kinds of works of fiction, across a multitude of genres, which all felt, in some way, like I was reading them because of IM. I mean I only started watching Madoka, and any anime beyond that, because of Resonance Days. Interesting way of coming across a show filled to the brim with spoilers.

It’s been three years since you put Imperfect Metamorphosis onto hiatus, and I have never read anything that has filled me with such emotion to the same extent. Other things have come close, some of them were even written by other people! (the most recent mega-update of Walpurgis Nights hit me particularly hard). And Swiftly Descending Darkness has been such a great read thus far, the slowly ramping tension is so. god. damned. good.

And as I think I mentioned a while back, I finally managed to start grinding out a touhou fic at my own, absolutely glacial, pace. I always find myself asking “is this canon to Touhou, or is it just canon to IM?”. The line has forever blurred in my mind.

I’m not asking anyone to read my work. This isn’t a plea for you to return to the original IM at any speed, I just wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for writing Imperfect Metamorphosis. For the work that’s been a steady constant throughout the vast, vast majority of this decade. For inspiring a wealth of emotions and ideas in the mind of a British guy who you’ll never meet. For just, plain writing a good story.

And for making Marisa the biggest badass to grace the land.

Here’s to the 2020’s not sucking, and to the ever expanding list of stories written by Internet user Takerfoxx. Here’s hoping you find great success.

Thank you.

P.S. Oh, and The Friend Who Said Fanfic Was Good Actually? They’re now my Fiancée, as of last month. Funny how the world works like that.

@diggertron, dude, you honestly have me feeling pretty humbled right now. I have to admit, it’s getting harder and harder not to see anything but the flaws when I look back on IM or RD, to the point when anyone compliments me about my writing my reflexive response is to be self-deprecating about my weaknesses, but this has helped me gain some more perspective about my older work, and for that I thank you, and am glad you have stuck around for so many years. 

And congratulations on your engagement as well!