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".