Random Ramblings CCCLVI · 3:45pm Mar 28th, 2019
IN WHICH I WATCHED SOME ANIME
I put cream in my coffee this morning. I rarely do that, but the cream needed to be used. Watch this. It's brilliant.
So, I have a few bits and bobs to say today, if you'll please follow me past the jump…
WARNING: WORDY BLOG OF WORDS FOLLOWS
So, last night I finished watching the anime Himote House. It's simultaneously terrible -- with its wonky 3DCG and utter lack of plot -- but also brilliant. The end of every episode has a section where the voice actresses ad-lib in-character. About 2/3 of the way in, the writers seem to have given up and I'm pretty sure the last three episodes (of twelve) are mostly or entirely ad-libbed. Episode Eleven is, I kid you not, the girls (who are all between 20 & 25 but look younger) in a bathhouse, discussing cryptocurrency while massaging their own breasts. I can only imagine what the voice actresses were doing in the studio -- they do a VERY good job of making it sound like they're getting off. Earlier, there's an episode that contains some pretty damn savage social commentary on Japan's lack of legal rights for same-sex couples.
I've also been watching Pop Team Epic, an anime I originally stayed away from due to the weird designs of its main characters. The show, such as it is, is very intentionally the anime equivalent of an internet shitpost. How much so? Each episode should only be 12 minutes (like Himote House), but they had a 24-minute timeslot, so they made half an episode and then literally repeated it after the commercial break with only minor changes -- although one of those changes was replacing the voice actors for the (female) main characters with actors of the opposite sex of whoever voiced the first half. So, if the main girls were voiced by men in the first half, they'll be voiced by women in the second, and vice versa. The animation for the show can be some of the smoothest you'll ever see …or it'll be intentionally crap. It's a love-it-or-hate-it show, and I love it. This shouldn't be too surprising, as I've written about my love for crack series many times.
I just posted Chapter Four of Annie, and it's at this point the story finally gets going, in my view. Even though literally the entire chapter except for the end is just …walking through the Everfree Forest. But I've laid the groundwork for what's to come.
It's one of those chapters where I spent a good amount of time doing research into nature so that I could find the exact word for certain formations. English has the largest vocabulary of any language on Earth -- even a hack writer like me would be stupid not to take advantage of that -- due to our millennium long habit of shameless borrowing from other languages, to the point that the original pre-1066 English is literally 90% unreadable. I suppose that's one of the only upsides of Chinese and other languages that use logographs -- even though how the language is spoken can (usually does) change radically over the centuries, people can still read carvings from 3000 years ago because the characters are basically unchanged (let's not get into Red China's move to "simplify" characters in the 60's, which Singapore went along with but Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan did not). But I digress.
Anyone with even a basic level of writing experience -- hard to get more basic than yours truly -- learns quickly how important language is to a story. I mean, duh. But I'm derpily swatting at a bigger point here which I've mentioned in other blogs. How characters speak is vitally important. In Annie, as well as pretty much every story I write, characters from earlier eras don't use contractions. For those of y'all who have read any of my other stories …take another look at Celestia's dialogue. Unless I screwed up, you won't find a contraction …except for possessives, but that's a different part of grammar. Luna of course speaks Early-Modern (a.k.a "Elizabethan" or "Shakespearean") English, and a couple of readers have given me kudos for my good-faith attempt to be as accurate in it as I possibly can.
Eras of English aside, every character has, or should have, a different voice. I certainly don't always succeed, but I try. In Crisis Of Confidence (based on a real event), I wanted Twilight's voice to feel different from Sunset's. Sunset to me is more world-weary, less neurotic despite her other mental issues, and thus sassier. Once I pulled her back from the brink, she became genuine FUN to write because I could count on her to snark at just about everyone, especially Flash, which in turn made him more interesting. When I wrote Exes Meet, a few readers lauded me for "making Flash Sentry an interesting character". I appreciated that -- at the time there weren't very many stories that attempted to flesh him out or make him sympathetic -- but it wasn't too difficult. In some ways, I see myself in Flash, except I was never anywhere near as popular or have as nice a car.
Someone commented on CoC re Sunset, and I quote:
Pffft. No you're not. You're like eighteen and Twi is brushing against thirty.
With no due respect to this reader (who is not one of my followers): You're a fucking moron.
The canon never specifies the ages of any character, but it's VERY obvious from context clues that Sunset is older than Twilight -- there's just no indication of how much older. So I decided that, while the EQG versions of the Mane Six (Sci-Twi included) are aged down a few years, unevenly to put them all in the same class, Prime!Twi is probably around 18 or 19 at the time of her Ascension. Meanwhile, I (eventually) state outright in my stories that Sunset is 25 or 26 depending on how far along we are on her journey. That's KIND OF an important plot point, because Flash learning that is what in my storyverse led directly to their breakup. It also contributes to Sunset's hesitance to reciprocate Rarity's feelings in the Romance Addendum, even after Rarity turns 18 -- the eight-year difference in age (and thus life experience) gives her pause.
Where was I? No goddamn clue. Yeah there's a REASON that I call these blogposts "Ramblings".
Oh! Right. With the publication of Chapter Four, Annie becomes the second-longest single story I've posted to this site. I thought my longest to date was The Rejected, but it turns out to actually be Mayor's Break Time. Here's some fun stats for you:
MY LONGEST (published) STORIES (as of 2019/03/28):
- Mayor's Break Time -- 12,360 words
- Antonovka -- 12,200 words (but less than half the story is out)
- The Rejected -- 11,500 words
- Reconciliations -- 10,880 words
- Ponyville Holds An Election -- 10,610 words
Note that this does NOT take into account that I should have structured The Burritoverse as an Anthology instead of individual stories. I've not tried to add all those together (especially since I still have two stories to finish in it), but it might be longer than Annie when all is said and done.
My forever-unpublished Pinkamena story was over 50,000 words when I stopped writing. Given that I wrote most of it in 2013 and I want to believe I've progressed in my writing ability since then, plus major alterations to the canon since then (including but not limited to giving the Pie Family names and personalities out of step with what I'd already written), it'd require a major overhaul which I don't have the patience to do. It was difficult enough to shoehorn Maud (Best Pie) into my story when the show introduced her.
Like my planned-but-still-unwritten Sunset & Applebloom Dark Arc (I'm sure I'll come up with a better name), Pinkamena has a LOT of characters and world-building that happens.
Amusingly enough, Annie, in addition to being the direct prequel to my Mayor Mare stories, is set in the same universe as the Pinkamena story.
Everything ties together.
The Burritoverse is a "perpendicular universe" which connects all of my otherwise unrelated EQG stories.
I'll let y'all chew on that until next time. I think I've rambled long enough. Thank you for reading to the end. As always, I appreciate y'all's continued support more than you can ever know.
Peace out!
Himote House sounds kind of incredible tbh. I've been watching a lot of My Roommate is a Cat and That Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime lately. As for Pop Team Epic: sounds like the very definition of a shitpost, yeah.
I was reading the MLP comic set Nightmare Knights recently and (it's pretty good) it makes me not feel too bad about not using antiquated english for Luna's lines in my story.