Nov. 8th, 2015

dmxrated: (Mai)
Brian still has yet to read the actual entries, and it does help that he and Marie will both be staying even longer over Thanksgiving weekend than he's staying for right now. However, I did manage at least to bring my issue in general up with him going out for lunch.

To start with, all I need technically is some stuff to lead the party up to meeting Maria and finding out about her toxic relationship with her parents before they help her sever ties with them and venture to save her brother, Peter, from an abusive rehab facility they had sent him off to. However, that would be like if Shigesato Itoi simply had you traveling through Twoson and Peaceful Rest Valley straight to Happy Happy Village to save Paula, instead of throwing in additional events involving Everdred, Apple Kid, and the Runaway Five (assuming he was just making stuff up as he went along, as opposed to planning stuff well in advance).

(While I'm on this topic, I have decided in advance, that maybe Nurşen, rather than being met where she lives, should make her own way from Turkey to meet the party somewhere in Greece. I did mention a year ago (offhand under the cut) that potential leadership is something she ought to assume at at least one point, and this would also double as one of those times where you'd take control of someone other than the first protagonist, as well as a reversal of the events from between the first and second mana spots.)

In general, Brian had several points to make overall.

First of all, one thing I need is some real-world experiences. While traveling overseas is very much out of the question, he did offer to arrange for me to come to Boston again, since he and Marie aren't going to live there forever.

Second, while only indirectly related, he did say that metabolism has a big part to do with things. In an analogy, he said that he performs better at coding when he's been working out regularly than when he slacks off from the gym. This also has something to do with helping blood flow to the brain; he mentioned that people who exercise for just one hour early in the morning, while having to unwind right afterwards, generally feel great for the whole rest of the day. (So far, I've been kinda on-and-off with my own workouts; been going with Dad in the morning these days, but I tend to wait to go with Mom in the afternoons when I've got stuff to focus on, since mornings are when I focus best on anything. So, looks like this is doing me some good for next time I decide to write anything.)

And finally, he said some stuff about plausible deniability and not being too blunt about the darker subjects that come up. While the author could presumably confirm inspiration for a given thing from real-life events (I would), it would be in his interests here to be able to deny it should anyone draw any particular analogy. This is actually the very subject of an episode of Game Theory that I watched just the other day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=552iTUDwYb8

Basically, while Mother 3 continues the tradition and explores stuff like war, animal cruelty, animal testing, and hallucinogenic drugs, none of it is actually shown in graphic detail, and most of it is toned down with humor. I already mentioned the Pigmask Army just the other day, and Fassad is somewhat laughable too, due to his trademark favorite food (bananas) and how he gets reconstructed after a would-be-fatal fall he takes (i.e. to communicate via trumpets for a small robot to translate).

On my part, I compared it to Avatar: The Last Airbender, which deals with feudal war but involving martial-arts-based manipulation of stuff and without showing any actual bloodshed or corpses. I also mentioned that, even in Lucky Star, the girls talk at times about stuff like kidnappings and, in one case, terminal illness, but the writers keep the show itself cute and whimsical by keeping such stuff offscreen.

For Starbound, I could tone something like the aforementioned rehab center down in some way or another. One of the main antagonists, Director Daniel van Slyke of a chimera laboratory in Canada, will be based on Dr. Kyoji Ogami from Amazing Nurse Nanako (here's the first episode, and Ogami appears 9 1/2 minutes in; not for you, Chelle), and would be a rather serious character for someone borrowing narrative elements from both Fassad (as a recurring villain) and Carpainter (holding Claire as a prisoner), but give him similar personnel of his and throw in similar antics from ANN (minus fanservice, of course), and he could be The Comically Serious. Desiré is currently an illegal immigrant from Mexico, probably living in a neighborhood filled with poverty and crime, but that shouldn't be too much trouble. And then there's the still ongoing war in Darfur that was talked about a lot during the 00's; this is where I've been planning for Nurşen to wind up after the whole party is divided up across the globe, in order to showcase a war that's already been going on even prior to the invasion, but only after having chosen some random spots for everyone's relocations via Google Maps and RandomInteger.

For the record, all I plan to treat truly seriously would be the party's main nemesis, a teenage-looking boy named Ivo Weil. While most of the time he might just be shown abducting girls to torture (starting with Akira Kogami mid-story), the endgame will see him, on-page, go far beyond Giygas, Porky, Fassad, and the Masked Man combined in both seriousness and depravity. In case I need to drive that point home without any real spoilers (aside from his final victim), Do you really want to know? ) Obviously, my intentions otherwise to emulate the tone of Earthbound, along with continuing the timeline of Lucky Star, would only do wonders to make him stand out that much more.

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Someone whose post Chelle re-blogged decided that this month is No-Shame November, and while I wish they had planned this about a month in advance (or had they?), I think I'll hit the bandwagon here and take my own shot for the first time in five years at drawing something. Normally, artwork is something I commission people for, mainly so that I can focus on other things, but it only helps that I've already put my main agenda on hold for the time being.

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