In an earlier post I mentioned how Gundam Wing influenced 7th Moon. It first aired in America on Toonami on Cartoon Network, right after Dragon Ball Z. I really think everyone should watch Gundam Wing, especially world leaders, because I feel it demonstrated the futility of war better than any other story I've ever heard. First, let's start with what Gundam Wing is about. Gundam is a franchise of mecha, giant robot anime, and this one was the first offshoot that abandoned the original Gundam Universe and created it's own story line that was similar to, but in no way actually connected to the original Mobile Suit Gundam. Gundam Wing took place in the year After Colony 195, or 195 years after colonizing outer space. The colonies hang just within the orbit of the moon so they aren't that far from Earth. The Earth Sphere Alliance has united all the nations of Earth and the space colonies under their military dictatorship, the weapon of choice being mobile suits, giant robots controlled from within by pilots. At the beginning of the series, the Earth Sphere alliance won using these mobile suits and the scientists who created them are filled with regret and decide to create an even more powerful mobile suit they call Gundams to help a rebellion. The colonies in space are decidedly the primary victims and the scientists decide to recruit young men from the colonies to pilot the Gundams and run special missions to overthrow the Earth Sphere Alliance.
The series lends itself to be about these five young men and their Gundams, each of which is as unique as the pilots. It is good to see how war affects these young men, clearly representing the spectrum of young military recruits. Duo Maxwell is popular among fans, partly because his Gundam the Death Scythe is bad ass, even though it's technically the weakest because it only seems to have the plasma scythe for a weapon, and yet Duo makes it work, he represents the ideal soldier, confident and never wavering, Duo is the only pilot who actually keeps his head on straight through the entire series. Then there's Wufei Chang, who is clearly out for vengeance with his Gundam Shen Long, though he always calls it Nataku, which it seems is a reminder of his lost love who died during the hostile takeover of his colony. Then there's Quatre Raberba Winner, pilot of the Sandrock, who is an idealistic rich kid who fights because he believes in peace and loses his mind big time when he finally realizes that peace can not be achieved through war, though I'm getting ahead of myself on that one. Then there is Heero Yuy, pilot of the eponymous Wing Gundam, who is suicidal, in the first episode he tries to end his own life and destroy his Gundam to get out of having to fight, and throughout the series you get the feeling he's always hoping that he'll get another chance to end his life properly, clearly a traumatized individual he borrowed his name from a martyred pacifist from the early war days and we never find out what his real name is. Finally, Trowa Barton, pilot of the Heavy Arms, also taking his name from someone else, Trowa seems to be a blank slate, possibly a sociopath, he may actually be the most damaged of all as he seems to be going forward on some sort of auto-pilot, just doing whatever he has to to survive.
However, while those five have their own interesting personal stories that reflect the effects of war, the war itself is better demonstrated through Zechs Merquise and Treize Kushrenada. These two men are rivals in war and largely represent the conflict of war in general. Zechs shows up first and we are led to believe that he will be the primary antagonist of the series as he fights for the Earth Sphere Alliance against the Gundams. Treize on the other hand seems to be involved with the rebellion and has an air of charisma that convinces us that he's a good guy. Then we find out that Zechs is actually Milliardo Peacecraft, the son of a family of pacifists who tried to prevent war and ironically the death of Milliardo's parents ignited the war. Milliardo is fighting for the Earth Sphere Alliance because he believes that if one side wins and unites the world, there will be peace, so he picks the winning side and tries to bring about his ideals. Unfortunately, he runs up against a difficulty of realizing that once one dedicates their life to war, there really isn't a place for them in peacetime, he has seen too much bloodshed to be able to live in a peaceful world, mostly just wracked with guilt believing he has to right to stand next to pacifists and civilians that actually managed to stay out of the war. Treize goes even further when we get our big twist halfway through the series, the rebellion actually wins and establishes a new world order with Treize as the new leader. Then something really weird happens, Treize abandons his post as world leader to begin a new rebellion claiming that the new world order is just as corrupt as the last one, even though he was in charge of it.
It really doesn't make sense at first, even the Gundam pilots are confused and don't know what they are supposed to do next. Chang hasn't gotten revenge and keeps on track, Trowa and Heero try to go with the flow having long been disillusioned regarding the ideals their comrades fight for, Duo still believes in his rebellion, in denial about, or completely oblivious to the fact that the Gundams were partly responsible for Treize taking over since he actually believed his rebellion was about independence for the colonies, but Quatre is the hardest hit, when he realizes there are still casualties and all his fighting was apparently for nothing, he actually goes on a psychotic killing spree. However, it soon becomes clear what's really going on, Treize Kushrenada never intended to win his revolution, he just wanted to go down in a blaze of glory and die a hero's death. He never lets on that he's disappointed that he survived the war, he manages to keep up an honorable charismatic facade, because he knows his plan only works if the people still love him. This second half of the series is rather depressing because at first you think "They won, the war is over, why is the story still going? Why is Quatre going insane?" but then you realize the horrible truth, war is never over. Finally, Treize and Zechs/Miliardo have a showdown, one half of the world against he other, and Treize tries to challenge Zechs to a duel and reduce the global conflict to a one-on-one battle of honor. This is about as close as we ever get to seeing Treize show his true colors and admit he's crazy and his followers even moreso for trusting in him to begin with. Zechs refuse the duel because he sees through Treize and wants there to be a spectacle so people can see how pointless war is. In these final episodes it becomes clear that war is pointless on a level that only this series has been able to describe, when you see how different people at all levels of the war are affected, soldiers, officers, world leaders, politicians, revolutionaries and even civilian bystanders, you realize there is never any good reason for war because ultimately, everybody loses and nobody wins.
If you didn't quite get the point watching the main series, they hammer it home with the movie Endless Waltz. This movie features the daughter of Treize Kushrenada, Mariemaia, following in her father's demented footsteps. She's a little girl, but the way she explains what she believes was her father's philosophy with absolute conviction she's actually the creepiest character of all. The title actually refers to how she describes the cycle of war and peace, as if they are just dance steps in the Endless Waltz. Unique for some movies based on anime series, Endless Waltz doesn't contradict the series, but rather compliments it stating clearly what the series was trying to say all along.
I believe if enough people watched Gundam Wing, we would all get the idea that no fight is worth fighting and we should all get along. At least our world leaders should watch and learn and realize that this is how any and every war will end, with everyone losing.
Well, that's it for now. Please watch Gundam wing if you get the chance and get your copy of 7th Moon from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. I believe Gundam Wing is also available on Amazon. Really, even though I may have given away the whole story, the way it's shown will affect you in a way my description falls far short of.
7th Moon
Friday, January 31, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
Monkey King
In my first post I mentioned Journey to the West, the story of the Monkey King. It is one of the four classical Chinese novels, the other three being Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and the Dream of the Red Chamber. When I say four classical Chinese novels, I'm not stating my opinion, I'm stating the opinion of Chinese literati, I have only read Journey to the West and I'm working on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which will be part of the sequel to 7th Moon. These four books are supposed to be very influential to Chinese culture, and it seems they are particularly influential to Japanese writers. Journey to the West is influential enough that I feel I owe an entire post just to this one book, and you may be more familiar with it than you realize. This story has been the influence for two movies made in America, Forbidden Kingdom starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and the Lost Empire, starring Russell Wong. Unfortunately neither of them focus on the main story but rather tell stories that take place after. As much as I enjoy these stories the original is worthy of it's own movie, which does get it's share of attention in China, Japan, Korea and Thailand among other countries of Southeast Asia. Again, fans of Dragon Ball Z, say thank you to Wu Cheng En for writing down Journey to the West, because it was the inspiration for Dragon Ball, with Son Goku being named after the Monkey King himself; his power pole, the flying nimbus, and all of his transformations, especially the giant ape Oozaru are all owed to the Monkey King as well. More recently the story was made into the anime Saiyuki, and if anyone says anything about how that Goku is a rip off of DBZ Goku I'll scream because it's really more the other way around. The cast even made cameos in Inuyasha and Shaman King among other anime, but the purest form to make it to America was Monkey Magic, the version that drew me in because that Monkey King is the granddaddy of all bad asses. Don't believe me? Monkey King actually went to Heaven, told the gods to recognize him as "The Great Sage Equal of Heaven" and then trashes heaven when they refuse. Only Buddha is able to stop Monkey King, though if you really want to get philosophical, "the true Buddha lies within" which actually means that Monkey King is defeated by his own Karma manifested as Buddha, which means the only one who could defeat him is himself. Okay, so that last part has never actually been explicitly stated in text before, but it's implied.
The first seven chapters of the Journey to the West tell the story of the Monkey King's origin, which makes up most of the Monkey Magic anime. The Monkey King was born of a stone on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, and he was as strong as the stone from which he was born, so the other monkeys recognize him as their king. Eventually it occurs to him that he is still mortal and in fear of death seeks out an immortal sage to teach him the secret of eternal life. He finds a sage known as Subodhi (Master Roshi in DBZ) who names him Sun Wukong(Son Goku in Japanese, in english to mean "Monkey, aware of vacuity[nothing]", possibly meaning that Monkey knows nothing) teaches him not only the secret of eternal life but also martial arts (Stone Monkey style Kung Fu) how to ride clouds and how to transform, a skill which Monkey King refines to the point that he can transform a single hair into a complete clone. However, the one thing Subodhi can not teach him the discipline of good behavior and banishes the unruly Monkey King telling him never to return or let anyone know who trained him. Monkey King then visits the Dragon King of the East Sea and gets him to give him a magic iron rod that can change size at the will of it's wielder, so he can shrink it to a needle and hide it behind his ear and extend it to a quarterstaff for combat. Then Monkey King bullies the Dragon King of the South Sea(brother of the first dragon) into giving him a golden crown adorned with the feathers of the rare Fenghuang or Chinese Phoenix. The Dragon Kings complain to the Jade Emperor, the monarch of the gods and most powerful deity in China, who is also taking complaints from the realm of the dead concerning how Monkey King is cheating death. The Jade Emperor sends Prince Nezha(Chiao-Tzu in DBZ) to deal with Monkey King, but despite being one of the most powerful warriors among the gods, he fails to defeat Monkey King. The Jade Emperor then consults the wise Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, and they decide to bring Monkey King to Heaven to be a horse groom at the celestial stables so that they can appese his ego by letting him into heaven and then keep an eye on him. However, once Monkey King realizes this is the lowest position in heaven and he is considered a joke, he crashes the Peach Banquet, the most important feast in heaven, demands to be called the Great Sage Equal of Heaven, and when they refuse he proceeds to wage war on Heaven and wins. Buddha had been invited to attend the banquet and when he arrives sees the chaos that Monkey King has caused and takes a hold of him then challenges him to escape his grasp. Monkey King accepts the challenge believing he can easily overcome Buddha, and proceeds to the end of the universe where he makes his mark on one of five columns. He returns to Buddha to gloat only to find his mark on Buddha's finger at which point Buddha reveals he is everywhere, the columns were his fingers and therefore Monkey had never actually left his hand. Monkey King is then buried beneath a mountain as punishment for his crimes and sins. That's just the first seven chapters. This part of the story may be influenced by Hanuman the Hindu Monkey god from Ramayana, an Indian story. If the dates are to be believed, Monkey King ends up under the mountain sometime in the second century AD and the story could be just as old.
After the story of the Monkey King is told, the story shifts to the story of a priest known in Japanese as Sanzoh(I would presume this is Bulma in DBZ, Sanzoh is often portrayed by females) but the name in Chinese varies so much, I'll just stick with Priest Sanzoh. Sanzoh was actually a real priest of Buddhism during the Tang Dynasty, around the 7th Century AD. At that point, Buddhism had spread through China by word of mouth but there were no written scriptures, so Sanzoh takes up a pilgrimage to India to collect the scriptures from Buddha. That much is historically accurate, but the mythology takes over again when Sanzoh takes on three disciples(four if you count the horse that is actually a dragon) who are actually demons that are in need of redemption. The first disciple is Monkey King, who is subdued with a fillet, or circlet, that tightens and gives him migraines whenever Sanzoh recites a certain sutra given to him by the Bodhisattva of Mercy Kuan-Yin along with the fillet, and it is also enchanted so that Monkey King can not remove it. Next, Sanzoh's horse is eaten by a dragon who must then pay penance by taking the form of a horse and carry the priest for the rest of his journey. Then they meet a gluttonous, lecherous pig demon named Zhu Bajie(ChoHakkai in Japanese, Oolong in DBZ) who used to be a water god until he was caught harassing and molesting the moon goddess in a drunken stupor, then after serving time in hell was so drunk that he accidentally reincarnated as a pig. Finally, there is Sha Wujing(Sha Gojyo in Japanese, Yamcha in DBZ) who just managed to piss off the Jade Emperor on the wrong day(he dropped and broke a dish, apparently a very important one to put him on par with lecher and someone who tried to take over heaven) and got sentenced to dwell in the River of Flowing Sands and be skewered by a thousand swords every day, he eventually took up cannibalism and wears the skulls of nine monks who drowned in his river, surprisingly he is the most mellow of the three disciples. This brings us not quite a quarter of the way through the one hundred chapter novel. Long story short, the rest of the journey is a series of episodes that take about three chapters each and there is nothing that really connects any of them in any order or any way other than that Monkey King is somehow dragged into helping every time, invariably because either Sanzoh or Zhu Bajie gets in trouble. It seems that Sanzoh has led such a sheltered life he is incapable of surviving on his own in the world and the disciples were assigned to protect him as well as be his students. Eventually they do reach their goal in the final chapters, and you can probably skip to the last five chapters after Sha is recruited and the story will still make sense, but you'll miss some of the funniest misadventures you'll ever find in any seventh century Chinese text, or any other text for that matter.
The first seven chapters are so good, I decided to write a screenplay based on just that, with a little from a later chapter to give it a happy ending. I submitted it to Amazon Studios, they rejected it, if you would like to take a look at it and help improve it or help make it into a film, you can find it here. I also have a pilot script for 7th Moon the series there, so you can take a look at that, or buy the book at Amazon.com's main site. They also have a number of translations of Journey to the West available. I first read Arthur Waley's translation and I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend Monkey Magic which you can purchase at Amazon. Good luck finding it online, I've tried, I found it once, but it's one of the hardest to find series, but one of the best.
The first seven chapters of the Journey to the West tell the story of the Monkey King's origin, which makes up most of the Monkey Magic anime. The Monkey King was born of a stone on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, and he was as strong as the stone from which he was born, so the other monkeys recognize him as their king. Eventually it occurs to him that he is still mortal and in fear of death seeks out an immortal sage to teach him the secret of eternal life. He finds a sage known as Subodhi (Master Roshi in DBZ) who names him Sun Wukong(Son Goku in Japanese, in english to mean "Monkey, aware of vacuity[nothing]", possibly meaning that Monkey knows nothing) teaches him not only the secret of eternal life but also martial arts (Stone Monkey style Kung Fu) how to ride clouds and how to transform, a skill which Monkey King refines to the point that he can transform a single hair into a complete clone. However, the one thing Subodhi can not teach him the discipline of good behavior and banishes the unruly Monkey King telling him never to return or let anyone know who trained him. Monkey King then visits the Dragon King of the East Sea and gets him to give him a magic iron rod that can change size at the will of it's wielder, so he can shrink it to a needle and hide it behind his ear and extend it to a quarterstaff for combat. Then Monkey King bullies the Dragon King of the South Sea(brother of the first dragon) into giving him a golden crown adorned with the feathers of the rare Fenghuang or Chinese Phoenix. The Dragon Kings complain to the Jade Emperor, the monarch of the gods and most powerful deity in China, who is also taking complaints from the realm of the dead concerning how Monkey King is cheating death. The Jade Emperor sends Prince Nezha(Chiao-Tzu in DBZ) to deal with Monkey King, but despite being one of the most powerful warriors among the gods, he fails to defeat Monkey King. The Jade Emperor then consults the wise Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, and they decide to bring Monkey King to Heaven to be a horse groom at the celestial stables so that they can appese his ego by letting him into heaven and then keep an eye on him. However, once Monkey King realizes this is the lowest position in heaven and he is considered a joke, he crashes the Peach Banquet, the most important feast in heaven, demands to be called the Great Sage Equal of Heaven, and when they refuse he proceeds to wage war on Heaven and wins. Buddha had been invited to attend the banquet and when he arrives sees the chaos that Monkey King has caused and takes a hold of him then challenges him to escape his grasp. Monkey King accepts the challenge believing he can easily overcome Buddha, and proceeds to the end of the universe where he makes his mark on one of five columns. He returns to Buddha to gloat only to find his mark on Buddha's finger at which point Buddha reveals he is everywhere, the columns were his fingers and therefore Monkey had never actually left his hand. Monkey King is then buried beneath a mountain as punishment for his crimes and sins. That's just the first seven chapters. This part of the story may be influenced by Hanuman the Hindu Monkey god from Ramayana, an Indian story. If the dates are to be believed, Monkey King ends up under the mountain sometime in the second century AD and the story could be just as old.
After the story of the Monkey King is told, the story shifts to the story of a priest known in Japanese as Sanzoh(I would presume this is Bulma in DBZ, Sanzoh is often portrayed by females) but the name in Chinese varies so much, I'll just stick with Priest Sanzoh. Sanzoh was actually a real priest of Buddhism during the Tang Dynasty, around the 7th Century AD. At that point, Buddhism had spread through China by word of mouth but there were no written scriptures, so Sanzoh takes up a pilgrimage to India to collect the scriptures from Buddha. That much is historically accurate, but the mythology takes over again when Sanzoh takes on three disciples(four if you count the horse that is actually a dragon) who are actually demons that are in need of redemption. The first disciple is Monkey King, who is subdued with a fillet, or circlet, that tightens and gives him migraines whenever Sanzoh recites a certain sutra given to him by the Bodhisattva of Mercy Kuan-Yin along with the fillet, and it is also enchanted so that Monkey King can not remove it. Next, Sanzoh's horse is eaten by a dragon who must then pay penance by taking the form of a horse and carry the priest for the rest of his journey. Then they meet a gluttonous, lecherous pig demon named Zhu Bajie(ChoHakkai in Japanese, Oolong in DBZ) who used to be a water god until he was caught harassing and molesting the moon goddess in a drunken stupor, then after serving time in hell was so drunk that he accidentally reincarnated as a pig. Finally, there is Sha Wujing(Sha Gojyo in Japanese, Yamcha in DBZ) who just managed to piss off the Jade Emperor on the wrong day(he dropped and broke a dish, apparently a very important one to put him on par with lecher and someone who tried to take over heaven) and got sentenced to dwell in the River of Flowing Sands and be skewered by a thousand swords every day, he eventually took up cannibalism and wears the skulls of nine monks who drowned in his river, surprisingly he is the most mellow of the three disciples. This brings us not quite a quarter of the way through the one hundred chapter novel. Long story short, the rest of the journey is a series of episodes that take about three chapters each and there is nothing that really connects any of them in any order or any way other than that Monkey King is somehow dragged into helping every time, invariably because either Sanzoh or Zhu Bajie gets in trouble. It seems that Sanzoh has led such a sheltered life he is incapable of surviving on his own in the world and the disciples were assigned to protect him as well as be his students. Eventually they do reach their goal in the final chapters, and you can probably skip to the last five chapters after Sha is recruited and the story will still make sense, but you'll miss some of the funniest misadventures you'll ever find in any seventh century Chinese text, or any other text for that matter.
The first seven chapters are so good, I decided to write a screenplay based on just that, with a little from a later chapter to give it a happy ending. I submitted it to Amazon Studios, they rejected it, if you would like to take a look at it and help improve it or help make it into a film, you can find it here. I also have a pilot script for 7th Moon the series there, so you can take a look at that, or buy the book at Amazon.com's main site. They also have a number of translations of Journey to the West available. I first read Arthur Waley's translation and I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend Monkey Magic which you can purchase at Amazon. Good luck finding it online, I've tried, I found it once, but it's one of the hardest to find series, but one of the best.
Friday, January 17, 2014
Cat girl
Now it's time for part two of two of my original(non-anime) thoughts that went into 7th Moon. Last time I said my first original character was Hidariude, and 7th Moon was really written around this character. Every other character was created to answer one of two questions, "Who or what is Hidariude fighting against? Who or what is Hidariude fighting for?" There is one exception to this rule though, Keisei, the cat girl, Hidariude's love interest was not created to answer either of these questions. No, instead I created her to answer the question "What f the scientists who genetically engineered the super soldiers decided to use that technology for their own selfish purposes and make sexy girls to entertain themselves?" I am ashamed to admit that Keisei originally was part of a hentai.
For those who don't know, hentai is porn, but I really don't want to go into it. I was weak and lonely and 19 when I spent a day or two thinking about sexy babes in the 7th Moon universe. There was no story, if I had goner as far as concept art, even not being able to draw I could've done better concept art than the story I would've actually written. So I went back to my main story and it hit me, I didn't have any female characters yet. Admittedly, it was fairly early in the brainstorming process and I only had six characters, but they were all male and I felt ashamed of how sexist that was and realized I needed to add a female character, so I decided to take the side story and work it into the main story. In retrospect, the feedback I've gotten has made me realize it didn't make nearly the difference I hoped it would.
I think it would make a difference to explain my logic which may not be as obvious as I thought. When I first came up with 7th Moon it was right after 9/11 and the military was a hot button issue that was being covered in the media both real and fictional. Things got even worse when "stop-loss" went into effect and soldiers who thought they were done were being sent back to duty because it was harder to get new recruits to replace them. What interested me were the stories of how these soldiers first got into the military, some soldiers admitted they had enlisted because they didn't have any better options. They would tell stories about how they were poor and couldn't afford college and were offered education and training through the military. Some had backgrounds that were so harsh that even the worst military life had to offer, even war, was a step up. I compared this to what I heard about strippers and to me they sounded similar. It seemed like sex and violence were the last resorts of women and men respectively. I realize some soldiers may take offense at being compared to strippers, but before you judge try talking to a stripper, learn her story, learn about how she got there and what she's going through. Sometimes you'll get a hardcore party girl who actually enjoys her job but sometimes you get someone who just couldn't find any better way to make a living. Hidariude and Keisei are actually supposed to be those people, a soldier and a stripper who ended up with lives they didn't want and now they are trying to get away and live a normal life after the trauma. I would also like to note that I do not condone the abuse that I allude to in Keisiei's flashbacks. I was once accused of "wish fulfillment" by a test reader. I didn't quite understand what she meant at the time because I could not comprehend that anyone would actually believe I would enjoy abusing any other human being. Something to remember about this story is that Hidariude, Kichiku, and the other soldiers are trained Spartan style, from the moment they can walk, they are pitted against each other, there are 108 at the beginning of the story, but that's not necessarily the number that they started with, just the number that survived. I added abuse into Keisei's story because I felt that in order for her to be as strong as Hidariude later on she needed to have a background that made her stronger and motivated her to fight so I provided a much darker background. Keisei is driven to fight against those who abused her and if anything I hope she's an inspiration to any one who is being abused to stand up and fight for themselves.
I'm really not sure if people get the chapter where Hidariude and Keisei fall in love. Hidariude is about 20 years old and he is drawn to this incredibly sexy woman, but he is oblivious to her sexiness because he actually doesn't understand sex. I know people may find this hard to believe that such a man could exist, but I was actually writing about myself. When I was that age, I didn't really understand sex, but I did understand love. I understood that I liked boobs and once I was drawn to a woman with boobs, my next thought was to try to connect with her as a person. This is a very hard concept to get across because it seems most people go from boobs to sex, not relationship, but my mind goes there because I never forget the woman attached to those breasts and I feel that the woman deserves respect no matter what. Women rarely believe that my mind actually goes in a direction other than sex, but it doesn't make it any less true. Hidariude has a very vague instinct to be drawn to Keisei because she's beautiful, but he doesn't know what to do with her because he's a soldier and this is literally the very first woman he's ever seen, so he has that attraction and then he's an awkward 13-year old who has no idea what to do next. Meanwhile, Keisei is a woman who has had to deal with things Hidariude can't even begin to imagine. If you really pay attention, I never actually write that they have sex, I write about foreplay, and then they fall asleep together. If you want to believe they have sex, okay, but understand that Hidariude is actually coming from a much more pure and innocent place and that's what makes Keisei fall in love with him. I don't know if this actually works in the real world, I know that it hasn't for me, but I'd like to think it's somewhere in the realm of possibility that a woman who has experienced unspeakable trauma can find comfort in a man who can understand her and sees her as an equal and treats her that way for the first time in her life.
Shifting to a lighter note, how Keisei became a cat girl. Originally Keisei was fully human, but this conflicted with the naked babe scenario because there was no way to get this around censors if it ever became an animated series. Then came Felicia from Dark Stalkers.
She's naked but it's okay because her fur covers the naughty bits. It's BS, but it works and it's brilliant. Furthermore, cat girls are another anime trope and my goal was to make the ultimate anime, which meant working in every trope I could get in and still have it all make sense. So that's the simple truth behind why Keisei is a catgirl, it was a convenient anime loophole that allowed for relatively uncensored nudity. I'm sorry if you thought I was furry or had some other weird hang-up for cats, but it's actually much tamer than that. Beyond this Keisei was largely inspired by Rei from Sailor Moon. I liked how Sailor Mars used ofuda to burn her foes and it kept coming back to me when I played Final Fantasy and ninjas would throw fire scrolls and how in Naruto the ninjas use paper bombs. It just seemed like a cool thing to let Keisei have that ability so I ran with that. I had fun writing the scene where she learned to use flash paper as a weapon and when she develops pyrokinesis to amplify it. I hope you think she's as much of a badass as I tried to make her. In my mind Keisei is every bit the equal of Hidariude.
Okay, so now that I have gotten those two main characters out of the way and you know what I was thinking outside of anime and video games, we can go back to the good stuff next time. Pretty much everything else in my thought process was from anime and video games, but it's like twenty to thirty years of this stuff, so this could take a while. Until next time, like my facebook page and get my book from any of the links on either page.
For those who don't know, hentai is porn, but I really don't want to go into it. I was weak and lonely and 19 when I spent a day or two thinking about sexy babes in the 7th Moon universe. There was no story, if I had goner as far as concept art, even not being able to draw I could've done better concept art than the story I would've actually written. So I went back to my main story and it hit me, I didn't have any female characters yet. Admittedly, it was fairly early in the brainstorming process and I only had six characters, but they were all male and I felt ashamed of how sexist that was and realized I needed to add a female character, so I decided to take the side story and work it into the main story. In retrospect, the feedback I've gotten has made me realize it didn't make nearly the difference I hoped it would.
I think it would make a difference to explain my logic which may not be as obvious as I thought. When I first came up with 7th Moon it was right after 9/11 and the military was a hot button issue that was being covered in the media both real and fictional. Things got even worse when "stop-loss" went into effect and soldiers who thought they were done were being sent back to duty because it was harder to get new recruits to replace them. What interested me were the stories of how these soldiers first got into the military, some soldiers admitted they had enlisted because they didn't have any better options. They would tell stories about how they were poor and couldn't afford college and were offered education and training through the military. Some had backgrounds that were so harsh that even the worst military life had to offer, even war, was a step up. I compared this to what I heard about strippers and to me they sounded similar. It seemed like sex and violence were the last resorts of women and men respectively. I realize some soldiers may take offense at being compared to strippers, but before you judge try talking to a stripper, learn her story, learn about how she got there and what she's going through. Sometimes you'll get a hardcore party girl who actually enjoys her job but sometimes you get someone who just couldn't find any better way to make a living. Hidariude and Keisei are actually supposed to be those people, a soldier and a stripper who ended up with lives they didn't want and now they are trying to get away and live a normal life after the trauma. I would also like to note that I do not condone the abuse that I allude to in Keisiei's flashbacks. I was once accused of "wish fulfillment" by a test reader. I didn't quite understand what she meant at the time because I could not comprehend that anyone would actually believe I would enjoy abusing any other human being. Something to remember about this story is that Hidariude, Kichiku, and the other soldiers are trained Spartan style, from the moment they can walk, they are pitted against each other, there are 108 at the beginning of the story, but that's not necessarily the number that they started with, just the number that survived. I added abuse into Keisei's story because I felt that in order for her to be as strong as Hidariude later on she needed to have a background that made her stronger and motivated her to fight so I provided a much darker background. Keisei is driven to fight against those who abused her and if anything I hope she's an inspiration to any one who is being abused to stand up and fight for themselves.
I'm really not sure if people get the chapter where Hidariude and Keisei fall in love. Hidariude is about 20 years old and he is drawn to this incredibly sexy woman, but he is oblivious to her sexiness because he actually doesn't understand sex. I know people may find this hard to believe that such a man could exist, but I was actually writing about myself. When I was that age, I didn't really understand sex, but I did understand love. I understood that I liked boobs and once I was drawn to a woman with boobs, my next thought was to try to connect with her as a person. This is a very hard concept to get across because it seems most people go from boobs to sex, not relationship, but my mind goes there because I never forget the woman attached to those breasts and I feel that the woman deserves respect no matter what. Women rarely believe that my mind actually goes in a direction other than sex, but it doesn't make it any less true. Hidariude has a very vague instinct to be drawn to Keisei because she's beautiful, but he doesn't know what to do with her because he's a soldier and this is literally the very first woman he's ever seen, so he has that attraction and then he's an awkward 13-year old who has no idea what to do next. Meanwhile, Keisei is a woman who has had to deal with things Hidariude can't even begin to imagine. If you really pay attention, I never actually write that they have sex, I write about foreplay, and then they fall asleep together. If you want to believe they have sex, okay, but understand that Hidariude is actually coming from a much more pure and innocent place and that's what makes Keisei fall in love with him. I don't know if this actually works in the real world, I know that it hasn't for me, but I'd like to think it's somewhere in the realm of possibility that a woman who has experienced unspeakable trauma can find comfort in a man who can understand her and sees her as an equal and treats her that way for the first time in her life.
Shifting to a lighter note, how Keisei became a cat girl. Originally Keisei was fully human, but this conflicted with the naked babe scenario because there was no way to get this around censors if it ever became an animated series. Then came Felicia from Dark Stalkers.
She's naked but it's okay because her fur covers the naughty bits. It's BS, but it works and it's brilliant. Furthermore, cat girls are another anime trope and my goal was to make the ultimate anime, which meant working in every trope I could get in and still have it all make sense. So that's the simple truth behind why Keisei is a catgirl, it was a convenient anime loophole that allowed for relatively uncensored nudity. I'm sorry if you thought I was furry or had some other weird hang-up for cats, but it's actually much tamer than that. Beyond this Keisei was largely inspired by Rei from Sailor Moon. I liked how Sailor Mars used ofuda to burn her foes and it kept coming back to me when I played Final Fantasy and ninjas would throw fire scrolls and how in Naruto the ninjas use paper bombs. It just seemed like a cool thing to let Keisei have that ability so I ran with that. I had fun writing the scene where she learned to use flash paper as a weapon and when she develops pyrokinesis to amplify it. I hope you think she's as much of a badass as I tried to make her. In my mind Keisei is every bit the equal of Hidariude.
Okay, so now that I have gotten those two main characters out of the way and you know what I was thinking outside of anime and video games, we can go back to the good stuff next time. Pretty much everything else in my thought process was from anime and video games, but it's like twenty to thirty years of this stuff, so this could take a while. Until next time, like my facebook page and get my book from any of the links on either page.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Robocop, a first grade writing assignment, and the left arm
As I've said, this blog is about my writing influences, primarily anime and video games, and last time I spoke about anime and video games. This time, however, I'm going to divert to my one original thought that was seed which anime and video games helped to grow into the full story that is 7th Moon, and that would be my main character Hidariude. Hidariude did not start out in his current form, or even with this name. Hidariude is Japanese for "Left Arm" which is the trait that tends to define my protagonists. I don't know why it's the left arm, that's just one of those little OCD quirks that seems to have come out of nowhere. I have a tattoo on my left arm that was itself the end stage of an evolution of bracelets, wristbands and other accessories that fulfill this strange obsession. But my fantasy versions are much stranger than anything I can actually do in reality. My first and favorite is the cyberarm of a cyborg. I was in kindergarten and the other boys wanted to play Robocop, and I decided to be Robocop's partner with just the arm robotic. No that's not an actual character, that was my first foray into fan fiction, I made up a character for a franchise I knew next to nothing about for my own amusement. We were five, as long as my friend got be Robocop he let me be whatever sidekick I wanted to be. That's how we rolled back in the day.
A year later I was in first grade, learning to write, and I was given a writing assignment to make up a story, and my first story that I ever remember writing was "Spaceman". I have no idea if there are any existing copies of Spaceman, there were two at most, but the basic gist of it was that I did a shoddy rip-off of Superman. The best part of Spaceman(and the bar was pretty low at first grade) was his origin story, He wasn't a full alien, his father was an alien and his mother was human and he was born looking mostly human except for an unearthly discolored left arm. For no clear reason this came with the ability to fly into space and beat up various alien invaders. THE END. No, Spaceman has no reason to ever make a comeback, but I bring it up because it was the next step of evolution of the left arm hero. Over the years there would be a number of different forms, including draconic scaly arm with claws(my second favorite after cyberarm) and mummified corpse arm(used that one twice), the alien angle again, mutants(both toxic and radioactive), and several other variations that were so setting specific I used them once and forgot about them. But the cyborg and his cyberarm was always my favorite, and that was my go to when I finally got around to attempting an original story, though that wouldn't be for many years later.
Before I bring you to the dramatic conclusion of the evolution of my left arm hero Hidariude, I'd like to take a moment to talk about robots. Why? Because robots are awesome. The concept of robots is barely a century old and it really hit it's stride in the eighties when I was a kid. It was an awesome time to be a kid, because while adults were afraid of machines taking over we were being introduced to robots who would be our friends. I already mentioned Robocop, but the trend was probably started by C-3PO and R2-D2 in Star Wars. How could we be afraid of those guys? Those two were not scary, they were cool, and we all wanted to be friends with those two. How incredibly depressing it was when the "Droid" Lucas promised turned out to be just a cell phone. Yes, read the fine print people, Droid cellphones take their name under licensing from Lucasfilm, on the upside there is a special edition droid phone with an R2-D2 case. Of course the droids from Star Wars led to a series of androids and friendly robot stories like "Not Quite Human", "Small Wonder", "Short Circuit", "Batteries Not Included" and of course the series that convinced all of us that robots were totally awesome "Transformers". I will never fear the machines taking over because I know Optimus Prime and the Autobots have my back. As an adult I was surprised to learn that people were generally afraid of robots. Of course it makes more sense when you realize the first generation of robot stories were horror stories like "2001 A Space Odyssey" and "Terminator" although T-600 was redeemed with "Terminator 2:Judgement Day" because apparently James Cameron realized you can't really leave a robot played by Arnold Shwarzenegger as the bad guy. But my generation got the good stuff, we even started out with an educational robot buddy named Alphie(remember him?) and when you outgrew him, Nintendo gave us a robot to play with-with only two games ever. But then there's Mega Man reminding us that in the event of a robot takeover, there will always be one fighting for us. And now I begin shifting back to anime and video games. Mega Man was awesome-correction is awesome, and I know beyond the shadow of a doubt he will save us all from Dr. Wily's evil robots. How could my generation ever doubt that robots will just make the future more awesome?
So yeah, robots are so cool, my ideal superhero is one that is part robot himself. My favorite Marvel character? Forge, the dude with the cyberarm of course. Iron Man is a close second (sorry Tony Stark). But I needed my own character, with my own story. That would happen when I was eighteen and a freshman in college. I had gotten a video game for Christmas called Wild Arms 2. Quick note, video games are the best presents, and the the best Christmases were when I got my first Nintendo, the Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Play Station, PS2 and PSP. Wild Arms 2 was...well mediocre honestly, but it was arguably one of the most awesome set of graphics I have ever seen. I now, some of you will throw your computers against the wall and say that there are way better graphics now on more recent games, and technically you are correct. However, I grew up knowing that RPG's feature super-deformed midget sprites and Wild Arms 2 was one of the last games to embrace that and attach professional anime sequences. The game play was lacking, a quirk early on in the game made the battles ridiculously easy, but the ending set the bar for epic. Anyway, there was this one part that got me stumped and I looked up hints online and found one that said "7th Moon" at the top. I had no idea what it was, and after years of struggling to figure out what it was I found out that it was a special technique used by one hidden optional bonus boss-basically the most obscure reference possible. I also found out that it was a song used as the theme for an anime titled Macross 7, which never made it to America and thus is equally obscure. But it was not the title of an anime, and I decided to make it into an anime, the most awesome anime ever. My inspiration was a promo for Toonami known as "Pardon our Dust":
This clip had more action packed into the commercial break than any of the actual shows that it was promoting had in any entire given episode. I wanted to change that, I wanted to make 7th Moon the anime that Toonami wished it had, that the fans wanted. Who will star, but the left arm hero from way back when! A lot of anime featured characters whose names were just Japanese words for some defining trait. Seriously, most of your favorite anime heroes and villains don't sound nearly as bad ass if you translate them. So I used Jeffery's Japanese Online Dictionary to translate "arm" and the options included "Gishu" meaning "artificial arm" which I thought sounded too much like geisha and might confuse people, so I went with the next one "Hidariude" meaning left arm and a hero was born. To build a story around him, I referenced two of my favorite anime at the time, Gundam Wing and Outlaw Star. Gundam Wing featured colonies in outer space that orbited the Earth like the moon, and I wondered what if we just called them moons and then 7th Moon would be the seventh colony. I didn't care much for the mecha theme, it didn't work well with Hidariude, so beyond that I went with Outlaw Star. Outlaw Star changed my thought process because it had cyborgs just like I wanted, but it also had magic, old school Asian traditional spirituality and martial arts, and most of all it had Twilight Assassin Suzuka. She is the most bad ass anachronistic character I've ever seen. She lives in a space age world travels by space ship, isn't at all befuddled by technology, yet she chooses to dress like a geisha samurai and wield a wooden sword. A WOODEN SWORD! Don't laugh just watch this:
Yeah, that's what I wanted Hidariude to be. I considered trying to make 7th Moon a crossover between the two shows, for a hot minute but that was too hard creatively and left me with copyright issues, so i started over from scratch. So that's it for now, next time I plan to do part two of two of my original thoughts before going back to reviewing anime and video games that made me who I am. Thank you for reading and please get you copy of 7th Moon from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore(by special request, they can order it) or any of the links I've peppered through my blog. In the immortal words of my man TOM, "Stay Gold".
A year later I was in first grade, learning to write, and I was given a writing assignment to make up a story, and my first story that I ever remember writing was "Spaceman". I have no idea if there are any existing copies of Spaceman, there were two at most, but the basic gist of it was that I did a shoddy rip-off of Superman. The best part of Spaceman(and the bar was pretty low at first grade) was his origin story, He wasn't a full alien, his father was an alien and his mother was human and he was born looking mostly human except for an unearthly discolored left arm. For no clear reason this came with the ability to fly into space and beat up various alien invaders. THE END. No, Spaceman has no reason to ever make a comeback, but I bring it up because it was the next step of evolution of the left arm hero. Over the years there would be a number of different forms, including draconic scaly arm with claws(my second favorite after cyberarm) and mummified corpse arm(used that one twice), the alien angle again, mutants(both toxic and radioactive), and several other variations that were so setting specific I used them once and forgot about them. But the cyborg and his cyberarm was always my favorite, and that was my go to when I finally got around to attempting an original story, though that wouldn't be for many years later.
Before I bring you to the dramatic conclusion of the evolution of my left arm hero Hidariude, I'd like to take a moment to talk about robots. Why? Because robots are awesome. The concept of robots is barely a century old and it really hit it's stride in the eighties when I was a kid. It was an awesome time to be a kid, because while adults were afraid of machines taking over we were being introduced to robots who would be our friends. I already mentioned Robocop, but the trend was probably started by C-3PO and R2-D2 in Star Wars. How could we be afraid of those guys? Those two were not scary, they were cool, and we all wanted to be friends with those two. How incredibly depressing it was when the "Droid" Lucas promised turned out to be just a cell phone. Yes, read the fine print people, Droid cellphones take their name under licensing from Lucasfilm, on the upside there is a special edition droid phone with an R2-D2 case. Of course the droids from Star Wars led to a series of androids and friendly robot stories like "Not Quite Human", "Small Wonder", "Short Circuit", "Batteries Not Included" and of course the series that convinced all of us that robots were totally awesome "Transformers". I will never fear the machines taking over because I know Optimus Prime and the Autobots have my back. As an adult I was surprised to learn that people were generally afraid of robots. Of course it makes more sense when you realize the first generation of robot stories were horror stories like "2001 A Space Odyssey" and "Terminator" although T-600 was redeemed with "Terminator 2:Judgement Day" because apparently James Cameron realized you can't really leave a robot played by Arnold Shwarzenegger as the bad guy. But my generation got the good stuff, we even started out with an educational robot buddy named Alphie(remember him?) and when you outgrew him, Nintendo gave us a robot to play with-with only two games ever. But then there's Mega Man reminding us that in the event of a robot takeover, there will always be one fighting for us. And now I begin shifting back to anime and video games. Mega Man was awesome-correction is awesome, and I know beyond the shadow of a doubt he will save us all from Dr. Wily's evil robots. How could my generation ever doubt that robots will just make the future more awesome?
So yeah, robots are so cool, my ideal superhero is one that is part robot himself. My favorite Marvel character? Forge, the dude with the cyberarm of course. Iron Man is a close second (sorry Tony Stark). But I needed my own character, with my own story. That would happen when I was eighteen and a freshman in college. I had gotten a video game for Christmas called Wild Arms 2. Quick note, video games are the best presents, and the the best Christmases were when I got my first Nintendo, the Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Play Station, PS2 and PSP. Wild Arms 2 was...well mediocre honestly, but it was arguably one of the most awesome set of graphics I have ever seen. I now, some of you will throw your computers against the wall and say that there are way better graphics now on more recent games, and technically you are correct. However, I grew up knowing that RPG's feature super-deformed midget sprites and Wild Arms 2 was one of the last games to embrace that and attach professional anime sequences. The game play was lacking, a quirk early on in the game made the battles ridiculously easy, but the ending set the bar for epic. Anyway, there was this one part that got me stumped and I looked up hints online and found one that said "7th Moon" at the top. I had no idea what it was, and after years of struggling to figure out what it was I found out that it was a special technique used by one hidden optional bonus boss-basically the most obscure reference possible. I also found out that it was a song used as the theme for an anime titled Macross 7, which never made it to America and thus is equally obscure. But it was not the title of an anime, and I decided to make it into an anime, the most awesome anime ever. My inspiration was a promo for Toonami known as "Pardon our Dust":
This clip had more action packed into the commercial break than any of the actual shows that it was promoting had in any entire given episode. I wanted to change that, I wanted to make 7th Moon the anime that Toonami wished it had, that the fans wanted. Who will star, but the left arm hero from way back when! A lot of anime featured characters whose names were just Japanese words for some defining trait. Seriously, most of your favorite anime heroes and villains don't sound nearly as bad ass if you translate them. So I used Jeffery's Japanese Online Dictionary to translate "arm" and the options included "Gishu" meaning "artificial arm" which I thought sounded too much like geisha and might confuse people, so I went with the next one "Hidariude" meaning left arm and a hero was born. To build a story around him, I referenced two of my favorite anime at the time, Gundam Wing and Outlaw Star. Gundam Wing featured colonies in outer space that orbited the Earth like the moon, and I wondered what if we just called them moons and then 7th Moon would be the seventh colony. I didn't care much for the mecha theme, it didn't work well with Hidariude, so beyond that I went with Outlaw Star. Outlaw Star changed my thought process because it had cyborgs just like I wanted, but it also had magic, old school Asian traditional spirituality and martial arts, and most of all it had Twilight Assassin Suzuka. She is the most bad ass anachronistic character I've ever seen. She lives in a space age world travels by space ship, isn't at all befuddled by technology, yet she chooses to dress like a geisha samurai and wield a wooden sword. A WOODEN SWORD! Don't laugh just watch this:
Yeah, that's what I wanted Hidariude to be. I considered trying to make 7th Moon a crossover between the two shows, for a hot minute but that was too hard creatively and left me with copyright issues, so i started over from scratch. So that's it for now, next time I plan to do part two of two of my original thoughts before going back to reviewing anime and video games that made me who I am. Thank you for reading and please get you copy of 7th Moon from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore(by special request, they can order it) or any of the links I've peppered through my blog. In the immortal words of my man TOM, "Stay Gold".
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Akira's Dragons
It's a new year and I've decided to start a blog to get attention for my book, 7th Moon. I put this off because I really had no idea what to put up here. I believed I put everything I ever needed anyone to know in the book and on my GaiaOnline profile. I really don't have enough going on in my life to justify a blog. Then I realized bloggers don't blog about their lives, they blog about things, like food, music and books. at least I hope I'm not the only one blogging about my book. Anyway, I've always imagined someday I'd be interviewed about my work, and I like to fantasize about what I'd say in such an interview. This leads us to what this blog will be about, and that is what possessed me to write 7th Moon in the first place. There are several influences, mostly anime and video games, so expect this blog to go on for many entries, but today we start at the beginning, with Akira Toriyama.
However, as I said, those who know DBZ as the beginning are late to the game. For me, by the time I started watching Saban's syndicated English dub in the '90's it was already nostalgia to me. Back when Nintendo started in the '80's, there was one game that made an impression on me called Dragon Power. It was not a great game, the mechanics were pretty screwy and it wasn't clear what we were trying to do. However, it was one of the few games that featured a martial artist and the first one with any kind of decent story. The alternatives were Kung Fu and Kung Fu heroes, neither of which had any story worth remembering. But the story of a boy looking for balls that could summon a wish granting dragon stuck in my mind even though I only played it for a weekend and could never get past the desert bandit because back then most games didn't save progress and you actually had to play through an entire game in one sitting and if you hit game over you had to start over at the very beginning. Yes, Dragon Power was the import of the first Dragon Ball Nintendo game. But it wasn't the only influence that Akira Toriyma, Nintendo and Saban would have on my impressionable young mind, there was also Dragon Warrior. Akira Toriyama did the character design for Dragon Warrior, which was another game that came out in the first days of Nintendo and also featured some problems that came from programmers who were working with a brand new format and did not really know what they were doing. For better or worse, Dragon Warrior was my first RPG. I struggled with that stupid game for years before I finally beat it and it almost turned me off to RPGs but I can't help but love anything that ties together video games and cartoons, something which I would later learn the Japanese excel at. There was an anime series that was imported under the title Dragon Warrior which I watched on channel 8, my local CBS affiliate. Some time after it went off the air, I found that it was tied to a sequel video game, Dragon Warrior 3, sharing the villain Baramos and a number of other monsters, most notably the mascot slimes. A lot of other things may have been mere coincidence, but the slimes Chichi and Coco and the theme music(yes that theme music, if you are a Dragon Warrior fan, you know what I'm talking about) that ended every episode let me know this was genuine Dragon Warrior. I can't say I'm a huge fan of Dragon Warrior, honestly, Final Fantasy 6 would teach me what to expect from an RPG and reset my standards, but as an impressionable child, Akira's dragons would set me up for a lifetime dedicated to anime and video games.
Akira Toriyama is...well, it's hard to say what he is. To say he is an artist is an understatement. Akira Toriyama has done things that could arguably earn him the status of a kami or god in Shinto worship. If no actual Shinto shrine is ever dedicated to him, rest assured his fans have shrines of some sort dedicated to him somewhere. Akira Toriyama created a manga titled Dragon Ball, which evolved into the anime Dragon Ball Z. Some people know this already and if you are a fan of Akira Toriyama and DBZ I hope you will be fans of mine as well. For those of you who do not know, Dragon Ball Z began the modern era of anime in America. Anytime you meet anyone who expresses any love of anime, most likely they will say their first anime was Dragon Ball Z in the '90's. I call these people late to the game. Dragon Ball Z is the later portion of a series that started simply as Dragon Ball in the '80's. The major difference that requires the "Z" added on was that the main character Goku grew up and became a father and a total badass, whereas the original run was about Goku as a child and was mostly ridiculous. Akira Toriyama probably wouldn't say there is really any significant difference as he wrote the entire series as one manga with one name, but reviewing the series it's clear he found his footing later on. Dragon Ball was inspired by Journey to the West, one of the four classical Chinese novels which tend to inspire anything and everything great in Southeast Asian media. For those familiar with the story, it's fairly obvious what transferred over, however, there were some characters that just made more sense when they were introduced. In Journey to the West, the Monkey King, named Son Goku in the Japanese translations, befriends an effeminate traveler, a shapeshifting pig, and a rogue from the desert, who become Bulma, Oolong, and Yamcha in Dragon Ball. Over time, some of these characters become less important and Oolong is the first to fall by the wayside, but his existence generates one of the oddest quirks about the Dragon Ball universe, anthropomorphic animals. To make Dragon Ball work as an adaptation of Journey to the West, anything went, Goku was a were-monkey, people could learn to shoot energy beams from their hands through sheer discipline, and dinosaurs and other monsters of unknown origin would come out of the woodwork to harass our heroes. It really didn't make a whole lot of sense which is why you'll hear more about DBZ than DB, because The other major difference about DBZ was that Akira Toriyama started to actually try to make sense of the story. Goku and his nemesis Piccolo were revealed to be aliens, a saiyan and a namek respectively, and the series shifted focus to this new alien cosmology. Everything about these characters that seemed to have been pulled out of nowhere were suddenly explained as being integral parts of these alien races. Meanwhile, everything else like anthropomorphic animals and other little monsters faded into the background. For the sake of consistency, Akira Toriyama brought back some of them every now and then just to remind everyone he hadn't forgotten what he had established in the past, but the main cast became focused on humans and aliens that had thorough background checks. And so once DBZ settled in as a hardcore action series with heavy metal background music, a standard was set for all the anime to come afterward.
However, as I said, those who know DBZ as the beginning are late to the game. For me, by the time I started watching Saban's syndicated English dub in the '90's it was already nostalgia to me. Back when Nintendo started in the '80's, there was one game that made an impression on me called Dragon Power. It was not a great game, the mechanics were pretty screwy and it wasn't clear what we were trying to do. However, it was one of the few games that featured a martial artist and the first one with any kind of decent story. The alternatives were Kung Fu and Kung Fu heroes, neither of which had any story worth remembering. But the story of a boy looking for balls that could summon a wish granting dragon stuck in my mind even though I only played it for a weekend and could never get past the desert bandit because back then most games didn't save progress and you actually had to play through an entire game in one sitting and if you hit game over you had to start over at the very beginning. Yes, Dragon Power was the import of the first Dragon Ball Nintendo game. But it wasn't the only influence that Akira Toriyma, Nintendo and Saban would have on my impressionable young mind, there was also Dragon Warrior. Akira Toriyama did the character design for Dragon Warrior, which was another game that came out in the first days of Nintendo and also featured some problems that came from programmers who were working with a brand new format and did not really know what they were doing. For better or worse, Dragon Warrior was my first RPG. I struggled with that stupid game for years before I finally beat it and it almost turned me off to RPGs but I can't help but love anything that ties together video games and cartoons, something which I would later learn the Japanese excel at. There was an anime series that was imported under the title Dragon Warrior which I watched on channel 8, my local CBS affiliate. Some time after it went off the air, I found that it was tied to a sequel video game, Dragon Warrior 3, sharing the villain Baramos and a number of other monsters, most notably the mascot slimes. A lot of other things may have been mere coincidence, but the slimes Chichi and Coco and the theme music(yes that theme music, if you are a Dragon Warrior fan, you know what I'm talking about) that ended every episode let me know this was genuine Dragon Warrior. I can't say I'm a huge fan of Dragon Warrior, honestly, Final Fantasy 6 would teach me what to expect from an RPG and reset my standards, but as an impressionable child, Akira's dragons would set me up for a lifetime dedicated to anime and video games.
Of course, it would be years before I realized that I was not alone and that this was only the tip of the iceberg. Anime and video games have been tied together for my whole generation, and we had no idea when DBZ came around we were already set up for the new wave coming. There are some parts of Dragon Ball Z that directly influenced 7th Moon, particularly Android 16 and Gohan and their iconic scene when he turned Super Saiyan 2 for the first time, which led to Kichiku and Douji and the Golden Dragon Shinryuu which was itself inspired by the Eternal Dragon Shenron and looks exactly the same in my mind when I write about it.
Well, I think that's enough for this installment, thanks for reading. I will have more next time on a (slightly) different subject. If you are a fan of anime and/or video games, I highly recommend my book 7th Moon, and try to keep some of this in mind when reading because it is much better when you read it as an anime in the making.
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