Final Fantasy Spirits Legacy

My life has been a bit hectic lately, but I'm still trying to get writing done, working on two projects at once. While I'm still in the middle of my Grimm Fanfic (currently at Grimm Forum) I also have let my mind wander to some world building for a sequel to Final Fantasy Spirits Within. I know, the movie wasn't that good, but hear me out, a common theme of Final Fantasy is that there was some event that was almost the end of the world "a thousand years ago" what if the events of Spirits Within is such an event and we do a proper Final Fantasy story one thousand years after the movie?

After the eight spirits neutralized the phantoms, life returned to the world, but not as it once was. Some creatures are benign, like chocobos and moogles that are easily domesticated. Others are vicious monsters that threaten to destroy what is left of humanity. But humans are resilient, they continue to fight, and some are born different, evolving with the monsters, some people have psychic abilities referred to commonly as magic. Of those who exhibit such abilities, males have the power to manipulate electricty and heat energy to generate fire and ice, while females can promote healing and generate protective fields. Females can develop their ability to generate force fields to conjure eidolons, which invariably take on eight forms which people believe are the eight spirits that saved the world during the Phantom War. Thus the Church of Eight Spirits is formed, with the Summoners as the highest order, the White Mages beneath them aspiring to ascension, and the Black Mages ostensibly equal to white mages, but due to an inability to ascend to the rank of Summoner, are in practice forever second class among the church. Eventually there is a schism, the Black Mages decide to revolt and lay claim to the authority of the church themselves. The Red Mages form as a splinter group of weaker males with limited powers who compensate by developing their physical prowess more and side with the White Mages and Summoners and together the Black Mage revolt is suppressed. However, Black Mages continue to be born and not all are conent to join the ranks of the Red Mages, instead, they go off and form their new state of Mysidia with the Order of the Dark Knights serving their cause. Meanwhile, the Church of Eight Spirits continues to build their numbers with the Order of the Dragoons, non-magical warriors who prove themselves in ritual combat against the eidolons and earn the right of holy protectors of the church. The church serves and protects the ordinary citizens while they continue with their day to day lives, but twenty-one years after the Black Mage Revolt, the Mysidian Empire of black Mages reveals itself.

A White Mage named Sara Corneria has just summoned Carbuncle for the first time, marking her as Summoner. Her ascension is paired with the final trial of Biggs Highwind, aspiring Dragoon. The ceremonies are interrupted by Emperor Garland the Blue Mage and his lieutenant Gilgamesh, leader of the Dark Knights and support from tamers, non-magical specialists who command wild beasts to hunt other monsters, or in this case, the mages of the church. In the conflict, four survivors are isolated, Sara and Biggs as well as Wedge Lionheart, one of the last five Red Mages who is only capable of Fira, and Gilbert the Spoony Bard with his dancing moogle Mog. They seek respite at the Gysahl Ranch under the engineer Cid who loans them chocobos and ultimately his own restored vintage airship as they try to save the world by recovering the crystal quarters of the phantom meteor and fulfill the prophecy of the church, that in the darkest of times, hope will lie in four Warriors of Light...

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Samurai Jack Finale

It's been a long time coming, but Samurai Jack's journey is finally coming to an end tonight on Toonami. A long time ago, when Cartoon Network was still new and good, Samurai Jack was the contribution of Genndy Tartakovsky and was a tribute to...well everything he could make a tribute to. Primarily it was derived frommthe graphic novel Ronin which was also about a samurai fighting a demon with a magic sword whose battle is taken into the future. Jack's specific story was told every episode by Aku himself.

Jack's father had defeated Aku when he first emerged using a sword forged by Odin, Shiva and Osiris. WIht the blessings of three gods from three different lands, the samurai weakened the incarnation of pure evil and sealed him away. But then, a few years later, the demon escaped. The samurai sent his son away to be safe and the boy grew up learning to fight in every style humans had ever come up with on Earth. As a grown man, his journey around the world ended where it began and he took up his father's sword and went to finish Aku once and for all, but Aku sent the young samurai into the distant future where Aku rules the entire Earth and has invited many creatures from many worlds to inhabit Earth and terrorize the populace. In this future the samurai ends up with the name Jack and becomes a beacon of hope for the hopeless, fighting a nearly endless supply of enemies. Some battles have been particularly special, like the Woolies, and the jumping apes, and the three cursed archers, and the Spartans. my personal favorite was when he fought five specialized robots and got a cyberarm to help him fight them, mostly because thisis the part most like 7th Moon.

Of course if you ask any other fan, the best part of a ll was the Scotsman, the only recurring character in the entire series, the Scotsman was a warrior with a machine gun for a leg who wielded a magic sword covered in runes and had a habit of sputing celtic gibberish that stood out in a series that got by mostly on visuals and could often go nearly an entire episode without any spoken dialogue. The style itself was pretty impressive, and the character of Jack always seemed to live up to the hype, being so heroic an d selfless, that multiple times he found a time protal that could take him home, but when faced with the choice whether to take the easy way out or help others, he always saved people at his own expense.

Sadly, despite how fun the show was, it just ran on with no clear end in sight until Cartoon Network cancelled it, leaving fans wondering how this journey ended. It was years of no Jack until just a few months ago, Jack was brought back to finally finish what he started. In this final mini-series, Aku has fathered an elite group of assasins who Jack made short work of, except one, named Ashi. For the past few weeks, Jack and Ashi have had a very wierd adventure as Jack reclaims his lost sword along with his destiny, and Ashi learns the true evil of AKu and switches sides, even falling in love with Samurai Jack. Now Aku steps forward to challenge Samurai Jack one last time, but in a twist, the newly reformed Ashi is corrupted by her father and becomes the one enemy Jack can not fight. The stage is set and the most epic battle in american animation ends tonight...

Attack on Titan

So I almost forgot to post something and then I remembered Attack on Titan just returned to Toonami and I never went over this, so, yeah, here we go.

Attack on Titan is...well, wierd. It's not clear when exactly it is set, let alone where, but the basic idea is that titans are giant naked people that just sort of lumber aound until they see humans and then they eat the little people, and because of this, humanity has been forced into isolation in a citadel where people live a life that is mostly like medieval Europe. The one remarkable exception to their lack of technology is the gas powered omni-directional system that allows soldiers to use hooks and wires to propel themselves through the air and attack the titans at their one weak spot, the nape of their neck. The story centers on one soldier named Eren who watched his family get killed by a titan when he was a child and then titans were not seen for over a decade and he joined the military specifically to fight them should they ever return, and sure enough, right after he finished training with his friends Mikasa and Armin, the titans returned. Things get really wierd when Eren discovers he can transform into a titan himself, which begins a period of controversy deciding whether he is a threat or an asset, the latter being assumed when Eren focuses entirely on fighting other titans when he transforms. At first it seems Eren is unique, but then they discover other titans may be like Eren, only in reverse, spying on humans and preparing to attack the city from within. As season one ended, they identified the first of these titans as a member of their own team who, upon being discovered, transformed, fought as best as she could and when all else failed, crystallized herself. Now season two has begun, and the next discovery is that the walls of the citadel that keep out the titans are made of petrified titans much in the same way that their recent quarry crystallized herself.

This show has a very interesting aesthetic, a kind of steampunk resembling the kind of world a JRPG takes place in, but the story is clearly some sort of post apocalyptic scenario that seems quite bleak because with no civilization known outside of this citadel, it seems humanity is doomed by a ruthlessly efficient apex predator that will break through and destroy everything eventually. esistance is futile, and yet the heroes are determined to go down swinging, resulting in a beautifully rendered war between man and monster, you root for the humans even though it seems pretty clear they'regong to lose, you keep hoping they will win, because dammit, they believe they will figure out some way some how. The show has a pretty serious tone, with rare exceptions such as the girl obsessed with potatoes and a scientist who has circumstantial sympathy at best. Almost every scene appears to be at twilight, which may be symbolic of the twilight of humanity. It won't happen all at once, it will take a long time and it will be a long fight, and we won't realize it's over until it's too late. But assuming it doesn't actually happen to us in reality, watching this version is very entertaining, sometimes preferable to the doom of reality.

New episodes every Saturday night right after Dragon Ball Z Kai. Stay gold Toonami Faithful!

Toonami update: Samurai Jack and Tokyo Ghoul, plus Grimm fanfiction

It's been a crazy few weeks and I'm going to catch up a little on some Toonami stuff and announce a new writing project.

Samurai Jack is back and it's pretty awesome. First off, he's not alone anymore, now there is Ashi, one of the daughters of Aku, a cult who have trained girls to be elite assassins in service of Aku who actually doesn't even interact with them so they hunt Jack under the auspices that he is the villain and he is trying to undo the world that Aku created. Ashi is unique because she is the only one of the cult who has doubts, and while the cult sees this as weakness, Jack sees this as possibility for redemption. Jack has had his own troubles, its been fifty years since the beginning of his journey, but he doesn't age(no, we don't know why) and he keeps fighting even aftr he lost his sword. He fights on auto-pilot until he meets the daughters of Aku and discovers they are the first human enemies he has encountered, a significant scene since the show originally skirted censors by having robots and aliens that didn't bleed, but since moving to Adult Swim, finally break the taboos that held them back. They go even further with dirty jokes, swearing, and recently revealing that Ashi was not wearing a skin tight suit, but that she had nothing covering her body but a layer of soot. Oh and the Scotsman came back for a few minutes, but there was a tease that he may have some sort of role in the finale yet to come. Aku is not the same, and not just because his original voice actor Mako passed away and now he is voiced by an imitator, but also because he destroyed the last time portal, and shortly after Jack lost his sword, so he sort of won and has gotten bored with toying with the samurai. Last we left off, Jack recovered his sword and is back in top form, and he and Ashi (and the Scotsman and his daughters?) are goign to finish off Aku once and for all. This should be good...

Also new to the block is Tokyo Ghoul, a morbid yet profoundly sad story of ghouls who are compelled to eat human flesh but still try to be decent people. In this story, ghouls are humanoids that eat flesh, but it has to do with a specialized digestive system and sense of taste that they can't eat anythign else except coffee for some reason. Our main point of view comes from Kaneki, an unfortunate individual who goes on a date with a girl named Rize, only to find out she's a ghoul with a bit of an eating disorder who wants to eat him. Before she can, he tries to get away running through a construction site, only to get into an accident which almost kills both of them, but a doctor transplants her organs into his body, which saves his life, but also makes him a half-ghoul. The bad news is now he needs to eat human flesh like a ghoul. He's horified by what he's becoming and the thought of eating human flesh, but he comes across a ghoul named Toka who brings him to a coffee shop where the proprietor takes care of ghouls who have unusual circumstances, and while Kaneki is by far the wierdest, he's not alone. Toka is trying to pass for human and has actually grown fond of a human and tries to eat her food so she can fit in, even though it makes her sick. Then there's Nishiki, who never liked killing humans, but since he fell in love with a human he's trying to survive on coffee alone because he doesn't want ot kill for her sake. And then there's Hinami, a young ghoul who isn't old enough to hunt for herself and shows a unique innocence in that she will eat human flesh, but only because she has to, otherwise she is clearly a decent person. What really makes all of this so sad is realizing that a ghoul may not necessarily be bad just because they eat human flesh, they have to do this to survive, and it tears them up when they realize they have to live among their prey and befriend them as well as eat them. Kaneki has a slow descent into the worst case scenario while the other three struggle to be decent people despite a biological imperative to be predators.

Finally, I am working on a fanfiction for Grimm. It's been a month since the show ended, but they finished with a tease that has been gnawing at me ever since. My story is about Kelly, Diana, and the triplets twenty years after the series ended, and also thirteen years after it ended which is seven years before the other events of the story. Alternating between flashbacks where they are kids experiencing their first woges and the future where they are adults hunting wesen, it explains how the next generation carries on their parents' legacy. I plan to publish this to the official Grimm forum where hopefully fans get behind it and demand it be made canon. Most importantly we need to cover four characters who need more details because of the lack of info at the end of the series.

• Kelly Burkhardt - part zauberbiest, specifically his left arm which grants him superhuman strength and telekinesis, a handy advantage when fighting wesen, he is also still a Grimm. He is in a relationship with one of Monroe and Rosalee's daughters(see below).
• Juliette - fuchsbau, daughter of Monroe and Rosalee, takes after her mother, named after Eve who never took her old name back. In a relationship with Kelly (see above).
• Monroe Jr. - only blutbadt son of Monroe and Rosalee, like his father he tries to fight his urges, but unlike his father, he has no history of giving in to his urges and without that regret to guide him, he may be more inclined to fall off the wagon. He is in love with Diana, and she kind of feels the same way, but they have yet to admit it to each other.
• Theresa - fuchsbau, daughter of Monroe and Rosalee, named after Truble, she is a bit of a wild child compared to her siblings. She is partial to bad boys and wants to be a criminal defense lawyer like Adalind so she can protect those lost souls she's so fond of.

Well, that's a four part story that is coming up, and I still need to finish 7th Moon Mecha so I need to get back to writing.