That was fudging awesome.
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Hill of Swords
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Bumping this because I just finished it.
I....wow. Just....fucking wow. As I said in my review on FF.net, I don't know if I can actually go and look at Familiar of Zero proper now. I think it would be a letdown compared to how this wrapped up. Holy shit. --- "Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay waste."  OpMegs Wrote:Bumping this because I just finished it.Exactly my impression... -- Sucrose Octanitrate. Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
FoZ suffers from a common syndrome of shows.Almost good enough. Basically, there are all sorts of interesting bits to latch onto and memorable enough characters... but the way the series goes about it just leaves people with a need to fix it. This need to fix it leads to people repeatedly talking about the series... and arguing how to fix it. A self contained, engaging, well written series that wasn't mind shatteringly good will often fall into obscurity. Cameo fodder. Those series just don't stick with you. Now a series that is engaging enough to keep you watching, but riddled with irksome things... that attracts fanfiction.
If you take a series that has crazy amounts of fanfiction... your going to find that the series is engaging yet irksome. Harry Potter.Ranma 1/2, Naruto, Bleach... seriously Bleach some repeat the first main arc badly..., what they have in common is people feel the need to change something and have enough actual intrest to focus on it long enough to write something. Granted Yaoi fangirls (and other demented shippers) are doing distresting amounts of this, but the point stands. With FoZ main issue people have is that Saito is irritating. He isn't evil enough to be worth hating. He isn't cool enough to like. Just a loser with a bad attitude (often hard to blaim him though). One who get powers and occassionally does cool things like stalling an army of 20 thousand. Solo. But he just seems such a bad choice for someone perfect for her. *shrug* Basically, your doomed to keep thinking of who would make a better summon and wanting to throttle the male lead. OTOH you may find out that the reason Saito is 'perfect' for Loius and that he is about as nice as Louis' mind can take before uncanny valley mode sets in. So much focus on dominance games and dickery intwined with relattionships on that world, that Saito is the equivalent of the Nice Guy Harem Magnet... a sad thing really. So you can watch FoZ now... but your going to be seeing it with an different bend than you would have beforehand. Great. Now I want someone to write a FoZ crossover that feature a male lead that is a nice guy loser with a good attitude... and the girls are bouncing between attraction to the exotic and thinking of that kind of personality only existing in romance novels. As a cover for some Lovecraftian Horror from Beyond Space and Time. Later on it turns out that the people that write these books are working from a LHfBSaT that had foreseen his arrival and spent the past hundred odd years setting things up to make all the girls paranoid.
I believe that Rumiko Takahashi works generally attract this sort of fanfiction. I bet that the only reason there's very little Urusei Yatsura fanfic is because of AnimEigo only releasing it sub-only...
In fact, I can pretty much name a whole boatload of anime that I see has a lot of wasted potential, waiting for somebody to fix it. sparkthatbled Wrote:I believe that Rumiko Takahashi works generally attract this sort of fanfiction. I bet that the only reason there's very little Urusei Yatsura fanfic is because of AnimEigo only releasing it sub-only...Yeah. Sailor Moon gets it too... -- Sucrose Octanitrate. Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
With Sailor Moon you gotta remember that it was originally intended to be a parody of two genres (Seinen and Mahou Shojo)... but fandom took it entirely the wrong way and demand for more became widespread.
Wisely, they decided to try and patch things up. Notice how later seasons had more plot to them?
to attract a lot of fan fiction in my experience it takes a series that is good enough to get a large following and bad enough so that everyone thinks they can do better.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?" B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
Lets be fair... Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball was an entertaining martial arts comedy with mystical stuff occurring at random. DBZ is The More Power! parody... only people tended to take it seriously. They missed that most of the epic combat was either flying sissy slap fights... leading into tossing more energy than actually exists at each other. Add in the infinite unoccupied battle grounds from nowhere and where things like Vegita swearing vengence on everyone involved in the Nappa/Vegita arc and he swears vengence on 'Whoever it is that cut my tail off!!!' Maijin Buu was an attempt by the writer to kill the series with stupid. This went over the fanbases head almost entirely. He gave up bashing his head against that fan wall and someone else handle GT. A hundred years later and the entire universe is back to DB power levels (they did post series thing about a Goku descendant roughlt 80-100 years later).. So apparently whoever is incharge of that universe caused DBZ to clean the system of stupidly overpowered crap.
This is also why Krillian (who had a power level of around 30-35k while fighting a SS10) lasted so long... Krillian is nightmare fuel for Frieza. He broke the paradym and nearly got offed by someone with (1,000,000/30,000=100/3) 3% of his power almost one shotted him... skill beats power... everyone, but Krillian largely ignores that in series. In short, DBZ is a parody stealthing itself so much in Epic that the largest part of the fanbase missed this entirely. As did its largest force of detractors and haters. Overly effective camouflage I guess. I had a cousin who hadn't watched any westerns to speak of watch Blazing Saddles. We stopped part way through as he was utterly baffled on how this was any kind of entertaining.. Parody is wasted on the unready.
Enh. A parody is only funny for a very limited amount of time, unless it's fed new material. As far as I can tell, DBZ was a parody for maybe a volume or three, after which it was milking a dead cow for more money because the fanbase wanted more of 'more power'.
That said, going back to the original topic (sort of), I've been told that the light novel version of Saito is a bit more likable, and considerably more awesome. I've also found that fanfiction is more common the more one dimensional/stereotyped the main character is, as it means that more novice writers are more comfortable/reasonably sure that they can at least approximate how they're supposed to act (Which also explains the SI phenomenon to a certain degree as well.) Quote:Enh. A parody is only funny for a very limited amount of time, unless it's fed new material.Depends on the parody... though I will agree that any show relying on 'current news' for comedy tends to end up near meaningless in 3-5 years. It is possible to make the parody a good show in its own. As for novel Saito... probably derivative syndrome. I first saw this media disease with Ranma 1/2... which went something like:" Japanese Manga, Japanese fanfiction, Japanese anime... and the English version of fantranslations start up in there somewhere.middle of that. Each version of the character's is a derivative. The most infamous is Akane turning from the kind of girl that habitually provides psychotherapy to whoever kidnapped her... to a derranged, vaguely Akane shaped chatroom banbot. Notable the Kuno family ninja is lifted with permission from a random Japanese fanfic the writer read. There was an epidemic of people writing Ranma fanfics who had never seen an episode... that disturbingly in turn had a pyramid scheme of nth level derivatives. When I bought the first two seasons... I looked up the manga translation as the characters were just that different. Though my current worst case of this is Rosario X Vampire... in which they took out everything useful (or character developing) for more fanservice. Its a war crime of adaption decay. Did worse things to the show then those 15 minutes of Highlander 2 they edited out for time... which bizarrely contained the entire plot. No I'm not kidding. |
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