Quote:I had thought they were called "Chang Group" but can find no reference to it outside of fan fiction with a quick search.Quincy in episode 7: "It must be the work of the Chang Group." (Chang-gumi, I believe he said, which, yeah, that's a pretty organized-crime way to put it.)
Some dude: "You mean the Hou Bang?"
And then there's the part in the car where Daley exposits on their origins.
I was going over Shadowjack's 'In Which I Watch' BGC thread the other day, and picked up that he thought that Reika's origins were tied to that Triad just 'cause Triads were a big deal in Hong Kong action movies at the time. So I'm torn between keeping that origin when I drag in Reika or someone like her - a megacorp-sized Triad with contacts across the diaspora - or just straight up the CWPC, a conglomerate of privatized SOE's, and 'Reika' a dishonored daughter of a princeling who got offed after the last Stalinist purge.
Quote:I did brush across Rob Kelk's BGC FAQ in the process (Hi Rob!) and will continue to assert that one item in it is flat out wrong: We see the name spelled "Celia" on screen, that's as canon as it gets. "Sylia" is on all the packaging etc. and commonly accepted, but if the image on the screen contradicts it then all the packaging etc. is as wrong as if it said it was a box of animal crackers rather than a VHS cassette.I went and changed the name in my screenplay after reading this. It makes more sense that Celia is her name - but do I have to rename Miss Yamazaki Lena by that token?
Quote:So the plan is still 'live in peace'.This is all really good stuff, but I'm not sure what I oughta do with it. I could adapt OVA 1 into something like this, tie it into larger plot threads like the Ambassadors, but I don't think I want to go back to it being the Sabers' first job, or putting it in medias res as the original OVA did.
Unfortunately, she needs to deal with at least two major factors. The first is her bosses, so long as she's under their thumb and starts talking about how their plans are impossible she's going to die. The second is whatever group she gets to extract and protect her, who are not going to let an asset as useful as her escape.
So she accepts her position as an advisor/aide to somebody powerful in the USA government (probably), or at least somebody in the USA military-industrial complex. She's constantly watched because she's important, but at least to outsiders she's not critical. She pushes feelers out to see if somebody is willing and able to help her disappear and runs into GENOM and more importantly Mason. Not being stupid, she expects to be betrayed, so she makes sure that she has fallbacks and cut outs and a well prepared escape route and false identity to disappear into the system with. Be it to build her own faction or live out her life, but probably more the former than the latter.
The movie simply doesn't have time to get into anything but generalities. Living in peace could after all include 'destroying all threats', but she's not currently in a position to really dismantle the threats. She has no resources for it. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that playing the extraction and retrieval assets against eachother while she slips away and is presumed lost in the fighting is a bad idea...
The USA/her handler, faced with a sensitive asset disappearing in an allied nation cannot deploy their own forces, even covertly, without diplomatic trouble they don't want to deal with because it'd highlight how important Cynthia is, and hires the Knight Sabers. Not being stupid, Japanese law enforcement etc. is also informed, just like with the KS not everything being told. Enter the climactic clusterfuck for the final combat scene.
One thing that dawned on me today is that the running sequence of events that makes up the second Crash! OVA would probably fit the narrative better than the relatively simple thing going on with Crisis 1 - I always liked how Priss and Adama spent most of their time underground, first in the sewers, then the subway, then Geo City itself. (Also her fight with the stupidly-designed scorpion Boomer was pretty bitchin' too.) Paralleling that, maybe bringing a Saber or two into the floodwater repositories under Megatokyo (like the ones they have today but bigger) would be cool...
Anyway! Back to the main screenplay and the minute details there. I cribbed a bunch of the scene where Priss agrees to go a-Sabering with Sylia Celia from Alyusa's Bubblegum Cry, which is about the Sabers being werewolves (and all the dom-sub bullshit that entails) but has a good opening scene with the two. Tone's similar, Celia's lofty and vague language is all but identical. So now I've got the meeting with Linna, then the trio rescuing Nene from Boomers ransacking her apartment sans hardsuits (the Boomers are looking for the engram of her significant other she swiped on her way out of Mason's project), then Sylia showing her hardsuit to the rest of the gang, and that's Act 1.
Two things I'm trying to figure out how to do without having this first Act be too long (book I picked up said they should be about 30 pages), though.
One, I need to somehow bridge the gap between Priss being a rough-and-tumble bosozoku in the time before the 'film' and also an underground singer at least by the end of the movie - like I said, I want Konya Wa Hurricane to go over the ending credits. So: Did Priss sing professionally while she was a bike gangster? I don't think there's really room for a B-plot where Priss is trying to get a band (The Replicants) together, especially since I want to focus on each of the Sabers approximately equally for the bulk of the movie. Maybe music was a hobby she never had time for, and now Sylia's gotten her to take it up as a professional thing, so she has a somewhat consistent stream of non-Saber income? Where would she get a band, then?
Two, I want to establish Mason as a villain by the end of Act 1. Just that he exists, and that he's the Bad Guy, and that he and Sylia used to be close when they were really little. I think making Sylia's conflict with Mason more personal than 'your dad killed my dad now you must suffer' is a fertile ground for interesting scenes. So there needs to be at least one interaction they have before Mason shows up in Act 3 at her building. By the same token - do I have time to include flashbacks as to what happened with Priss and Nene, their respective tragedies involving Mason? Or should they just tell those stories to the other Sabers as exposition and be done with it? Just thinking about this.