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.
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