MThe Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum, Side Story - Asia
MLP: FiM
Dark
Sad
Tragedy
Aside from the stories of Marcus Renee, Stephan Bauer and the battles of North America and Europe, there is also the story of the battle in Asia, and of one Yon-Soo Park.
Gore
Human
Alt. Universe
Celestia
Lyra
OC
Other
Kizuna Tallis · 121k words · 100 19 · 2.5k views

So Long I Guess – A Reflection on Old Times and Looking Forward and Beyond · 7:16pm Apr 11th, 2021

Hey, been a while, right?

Well, now that this journal is out, I figure I should speak my own truth.

I’m not really sure how to begin this one out, but I guess the first thing to do is to rip off the band aid.

I’m going to be completely honest and admit that I just can’t do this anymore.

As I’ve made it clear in my previous blog posts about the subject, The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum was a large part of the reason behind why I’d gotten a Fimfic account in the first place. Working on it was a trip of a lifetime before it completely crashed and burned.

I won’t lie - that crash still deeply hurts me to this day. I saw friendships crumbling apart, I was losing my sanity, and had to watch as the project I’d spent a great deal of time on building and trying to make into something awesome cracking under its own weight. And a large part of me felt like some part of the growing “hostility on the set” was my fault, as I was being torn between different sides in what was quickly turning into a shitstorm.

Simply put, that experience left me completely burned out on everything regarding the Spectrumverse.

I can’t look at writing for the Spectrumverse anymore without feeling like it’s… a chore, for lack of a better word.

I just can’t summon the desire to want to write for this project and universe anymore.

I just can’t muster the energy to apply the plan or ideas or anything pertaining to the characters I created for this verse.

And it hurts. It really fucking sucks ass that I can’t scrounge up anything resembling the energy to want to invest time in these creations that I’d previously poured a great deal of love and thought into. I feel heartbroken and devastated that I never got to fully realize the arcs I had planned out, especially those for characters like Comet Tail (both versions), Vinyl Scratch, and Hyong-jin. I feel genuinely angry with myself that I can’t just start writing for them again without drawing a blank.

Not without feeling lost and aimless, even with some skeleton of an idea formulated.

Hell, writing out that “Gainax Ending” took a good deal of effort from me to finish, and that was me throwing my hands up and saying, “FUCK IT LMAO”. If I were going to blow it up like how John Oliver did to a giant 2020 sign, I figured I’d might as well just go balls to the wall. I wanted to give my babies some sense of closure, even if it is one as nonsensical as the ending I gave the Asia Side Story.

The end of OG Spectrum was caused by a thousand cuts. Small narrative and characterization problems accumulated more and more, exacerbated by the clashing visions of authors with different styles and views and creative disagreements that were becoming increasingly more personal. Vox noted back in TheIdiot’s blog post about how Doctor Fluffy put together a “memoir” to detail the troubled production and the road that led to the dissolution of the team and cancellation of the original story as a means of making sense of the mess that came out of the fallout with Red.

I helped a great deal out in writing large sections of that memoir, describing and categorizing important events as a means of dealing with the damage those events left on my mental health at the time. It was a great tool in helping me make sense of things with the benefit of hindsight, especially with regards to creativity.

I’m not sure if it’s going to be “released” in full, but I do want to talk about a couple of things that happened during production that played big roles in my current state of mind with regards to the Spectrumverse. Things that I and the others had alluded to in previous blog posts on the matter but never expanded upon.

The first major problem for me was Sergei and Aquamarine’s relationship. It was largely Red’s idea, but it would be a fatal mistake for me to not admit my own fault in the creation of this particular plotline. I was admittedly intrigued by the idea of Aquamarine having some romantic chemistry with one of the male human Dragons of the East members, and Sergei needed something to develop him out further (which, in retrospect, was bad in itself). But if the set-up felt rushed and shoved in, that’s because it was. Literally, it was a last-minute decision. On top of that, I admittedly felt pressure to just go along with it and let it be in the final product despite feeling apprehensive about some parts, as I really wanted to get the chapter published before my vacation started. Most of all, I really didn’t like how the relationship treated the characters most closely involved in this plotline, Gale and Comet especially.

The problem with Gale was that he was being treated by Red as something of like an afterthought rather than a brainwashed victim who wasn’t in complete control of his own actions (this was a problem that also showed itself in the depiction of Queen Celestia, whose own brainwashing and possession by Tirek wasn’t really being given the tragic due it was owed, which I and the others have detailed as being one of the biggest creative differences that led to the dissolution of the team). Comet meanwhile became this coldly vindictive and almost vicious character, disowning her father in favor of Sergei. Yes, Comet’s a child and children aren’t exactly paragons of logic, plus she doesn’t know Gale is brainwashed, but it still feels… cruel, to say the least.

In some ways, my other side story, The Other Side of the Mirror, was my own subtle form of rebellion against the pairing. Prime-Gale would play a huge role in the story and I took care to show him as a loving and devoted family man. Prime-Comet was revealed to be a “Daddy’s girl” type, if only for the sad irony. And it would all culminate in a confrontation between Prime-Aquamarine and TCB-Aquamarine over the latter’s choice to pursue a new relationship.

In a pre-written scene, Prime-Aquamarine was shown to not be happy with seeing that her counterpart got together with someone else and accuses her of abandoning Gale. What followed was a heated confrontation in which the two mares argued back and forth. Red, putting in some input, went on to write a line of dialogue where Sergei snidely remarks about how Prime-Aquamarine doesn’t know what she’s talking about and questioning how strongly she would hold to her convictions after being turned into a breeding sow for the Solar Empire if the PHL loses the war.

I won’t reprint it word-for-word here but trust me when I say that line still leaves me feeling queasy to this day.

Sure, there is a point to be made that Prime-Aquamarine shouldn’t judge her TCB counterpart so harshly; after all, she can’t possibly understand what her counterpart’s gone through. But she’s also not wrong to love her husband and express concern for his counterpart, who, just to reiterate, has been placed under an obedience spell and thus hasn’t been in complete control of his own thoughts and actions for a long while. And Sergei’s line-that-never-was was so shockingly cruel and full of all kinds of unfortunate implications which even Red expressed regret for writing out.

For what it’s worth, I planned to have the Reboot versions of Aquamarine and Sergei never get into any kind of romantic relationship and even outright sink it, and their break-up in the Gainax Ending was me deciding to kill it dead so that the story’s closure wouldn’t be dragged down by them staying paired together.

Is it petty? Maybe, but at this point, I really am past the point of caring if it is. Hell, I found catharsis in the act.

The second thing that left me burnt out with the Spectrumverse was a side story that never came to be. It was an utter disaster and I’m not exaggerating when I say I hate it. I resent this thing for not just being a godforsaken abortion of utter awfulness, but I also blame it for being the catalyst behind the increasingly hostile attitude Red exhibited towards some of us through 2016 up until the May 2017 split.

It started with a kid who I’ll refer to as Art. Art posted a question on the original Spectrumverse group forum, asking about getting support in writing his idea for a Spectrum side story crossing over with the anime Elfen Lied. Red, who was a bit too willing to let things be incorporated into the canon no matter how nonsensical they were, gave Art the green light and brought him aboard the team.

Immediately, we expressed discomfort at this. This was sprung on us out of nowhere, and moreover, the story sounded like a terrible idea.

I’m aware I’m going to get some hate for this, but I find Elfen Lied to be one of the most overrated anime series ever. I’ll admit that I enjoyed it when I was an edgy teenager, but nowadays, I just cringe at it. The gore and nudity feel more like a “shock value” selling point than anything else, the characters are hard to care for, and it’s so relentlessly grimdark for the sake of being grimdark that it almost loops all the way back around to being kind of laughable. So already, we’re getting off on the wrong foot.

And then there was Art himself, who was… well… I feel bad about saying this, but I can’t mince words - he was incredibly annoying. I don’t want to be That Asshole™, but I can’t help but wonder if he had some sort of issues with socialization and processing cues. This was best exemplified by how he would use the Facebook group chat like it was his own personal Twitter account. Every day, practically, he’d inundate us with messages about irrelevant subject matter nobody cared about, always finding some off-topic way to derail the conversation at hand. He’d talk about lists of what books he was reading, his visits to the library, his college applications, among other things. (I COULD go and try to get some receipts but that would require me to go rummaging through the old Facebook chats and my head already hurts enough while I write this.) This interrupted legitimately important discussions too, like a proposed update for Calm Before the Storm. And because Red was insistent that we be nice to Art, this created a vicious cycle where we were stuck having to put up with Art’s antics and being forced to hold our tongues, all the while...

This went on for nearly a whole month and in that time, Red constantly defended Art and was convinced that the Elfen Lied crossover elements could somehow be integrated into the Spectrumverse even though it made no frigging sense. I personally suspected that it was because Art, for lack of a better term, was… something of a suck-up. And apparently, that outweighed things like actual contributions, quality of writing, years of friendship, and otherwise helping to grow Spectrum over the years. Everyone was growing frustrated and impatient more and more with each passing day. One day, finally, we decided to give Art an ultimatum: write up an outline and make progress or be booted out of the group.

On one hand, I do admittedly regret we did this because this was no doubt a major catalyst behind the increasing hostility between us and Red that plagued the group’s final year as a team. On the other hand, I don’t regret it, because the “outline” Art made in response vindicated every single one of my worst fears and then some.

To call it an outline would be comically inaccurate. It was a barebones and unfocused paragraph I can safely say was one of the worst things I’d ever read in my life. I don’t want to repost the whole thing word-for-word here because that would just be needlessly vindictive on my part, but I will post the last two sentences which still stand out to me: “There will be character development. And there will be blood and gore.”

What?

Okay, look, I tried to write my stories with some sort of arc for each main character. Yon-soo starts off as a pampered celebrity who takes up a level in badass and learns humility. Hyong-jin is a North Korean experiencing the outside world for the first time while being caught up in the middle of a devastating war and finds himself in the process. Comet Tail was going to be the broken and bitter child soldier who slowly recovers from her trauma and finds love and healing in the future. There ya go, character development. Yay. So… in this case, what character development is Art speaking of? What writing, even, seeing as he’d done absolutely nothing but spout off on random and irrelevant bullshit that had nothing to do with the discussed subject matter at hand?!

I groaned in exasperation when I saw it. Fluffy just straight up smacked his head into a pillow.

Everyone on the group, minus Red, agreed that we were not keeping Art around another second longer. We let him go as cordially as we could and while Art was naturally saddened, he did seem to understand why we didn't feel his story was going to work out.

To say that Red was angry would be an understatement. He was especially angry with me and Doctor Fluffy for being the most vocally against Art’s inclusion from the start. Red said that he felt bad for the kid, and admittedly I can understand that, given that Art apparently didn’t have that many friends in real life and really did respect us, wanted to be part of the group, and make something great. But frankly, it’s skeevy to be putting a person like Art in that kind of position in the first place.

This whole incident drove a deep wedge between Red’s relationships with me and Doctor Fluffy. It still hurts when I think back to it.

What was the point of this? Well, this is a lot of things for me. It’s primarily a catharsis for me to get out a few particular bugbears that haunt me still. And then I just figured I had no real reason to continue trying to convince myself that I could get a second chapter out for the Asia Reboot.

I’m still friends with everyone, and I’ll continue to support them in their writing endeavors, but when it comes to the Spectrumverse itself, I think it’s something I should probably just let go of.

So, what am I doing now writing-wise?

Well, I’ve largely decided to keep to small-scale projects, solo efforts where I don’t have to deal with the “franchise” and collaboration issues that plagued Spectrum. I’ve also found a great deal of fun in writing thirst trash. Writing Insouciance in particular really helped me reground myself. Honestly, I credit that story with reigniting my joy and reminding me of why I like to write fanfic.

Take care of one another. If you have any other questions, feel free to PM me.