Fiction: The Evil Possum/ Beer War Battle Demo!

 I've ended up on a break from this blog that I was going to let go a bit longer, but I decided to come back with a repost of something I already tried and hilariously failed to plug on my beautiful, useless Wattpad page, a battle demo for a new adventure of the Evil Possum! This is, in fact, for the Beer War story line I already posted one demo for. If you read it, this might make slightly more sense. Maybe. And yeah, this is what No-Hands' enemies were always like...

The machine gun emplacement looked like an exploded egg. Its concrete shell was caved in and bowed out. Within was carnage, so blackened and charred that the organic could not be distinguished from the inorganic. The most misshapen form of all was what finally sat up. It was a possum, species Didelphis sapiens, by name Heinrich Hilfiger, 40 centimeters tall. Bloodshot eyes came wide open as he sat up and hissed. He shook off the soot and dust that covered him, revealing a gray and black pelt only somewhat charred. In a moment, his eyes fixed on a machine gun, miraculously intact. He looked at the end of a belt still in his hand, then he began to wind it around himself. Momentarily, he had a doubled bandoleer over his chest, a belt wrapped twice around his waist and a loose end thrown over his shoulder. He threw three drums into a shoulder bag, one as large as the other two together, and slammed another large drum into the gun. It was a total of 600 rounds, enough for 30 whole seconds of fire. For good measure, he stowed two spare barrels. He examined the gun, and found half the bipod missing. He hissed and knocked the remainder off with a sharp blow. Only then did he emerge, the gun at his hip. He saw a figure even taller than himself, already receding. He all but strangled his own words as he snarled, “Nicht est Konig!!!” Then he opened fire.

No-Hands turned his head before he heard the cry. There was just time enough to choose whether to run left or right. For better or worse, he ran right, toward a basement loading dock for the warehouse. He stayed just ahead as the adversary behind him fired a barely controlled stream of fire. A final volley knocked his prosthetic leg out from under him, and he tumbled and rolled where the ramp dropped below the level of the pavement. Hilfiger loaded and emptied another drum blindly, while No-Hands slid down the ramp toward the open loading door. Directly behind him, a half-second volley disintegrated one of the barrels lined up just inside, spilling beer across the floor. Hilfiger loaded a second drum. He finally leaned into view, peering over the rail. No-Hands returned fire with a rifle longer than he was tall. With both eyes, he might have felled his foe then and there, but his snapped shot merely tore through the railing. Heinrich dropped out of sight, while No-Hands retreated to what cover there was among the barrels.

At least two more gunmen added their own fire, driving him further down the ramp. However, only Hilfiger ventured to approach, firing a score of bullets at a time. He gave a snarl as he paused to replace not only the drum but the visibly glowing barrel. The latter ejected from an opening in the side of the perforated housing with a hard metallic clang. He allowed it to clatter to the pavement. Already, he had the replacement in hand and sliding in. No-Hands fired his revolver twice as the foe once again revealed himself. This time, Hilfiger confidently let fly, without slowing or hastening his descent down the ramp. Three more barrels burst apart on the loading dock floor. Behind them, two whole stacks came tumbling down as another volley cut through the middle tiers.  No-Hands retreated from the cascade, into a warehouse floor lined with racks of beer barrels three and four high.

An appreciable fraction of a centimeter of beer splashed underfoot as Heinrich Hilfiger stepped onto the warehouse floor. A leaking keg came rolling toward him, spilling beer behind it. He stopped it with his foot. Another came flying from the right. He blew it apart in mid-air. He leaned around the nearest rack of barrels and emptied the rest of his final drum in the direction from which the barrel had come. A dozen barrels and more trickled and poured, adding to the fluid. Hilfiger calmly pressed his back against the rack. He played out one end of the belt that wrapped his body before he loaded it into the machine gun with an audible “chunk” of the cocking handle. His ear twitched at a second metallic sound. He dropped to the floor just as No-Hands fired his rifle point-blank into the other end of the line of barrels behind him.

The first barrel burst in the center and at both ends, rupturing another barrel in the other half of the rack beside it. No-Hands gagged and coughed at the resulting spray of suds and splinters, so he could not have seen if there had been time the resulting trail of destruction. Another ruptured catastrophically. A third had one or both ends blown out. A fourth was left intact by a fluke as the bullet dropped below it and ricocheted off the metal frame of the rack. The projectile went on through three more barrels before it burst out the far end, straight over the foe’s head. Hilfiger spat out beer as he rose up on hands and knees, then squalled as more poured down on his head. He whirled and fired around the rack. Another barrel disintegrated on the far end of the next rack. Over his head, the leaking barrel burst, spilling what remained of its contents on Hilfiger’s head.

Hilfiger held his fire. The sound of leaking barrels and sloshing beer came from all around. Then there was a louder splash as No-Hands loped deeper into the warehouse, past one line of racks to a third and final one. Hilfiger ran after him, through beer that had reached his ankles. No-Hands’ own saucer-like ears swiveled, triangulating the path of his pursuer. For a moment, he leaned around the rack he had just reached, his rifle at ready. Then he hissed and retreated yet again, just before two scores of bullets chewed into the rack. Hilfiger continued firing as he made his way down the line. No-Hands managed to fire one shot. The barrel it struck burst. Hilfiger jerked his head back just as the far end of the one beside it blew out still intact. Yet again, he took a spray of suds to the face. The bullet ricocheted off the next rack. Hilfiger dropped to a crouch as the unseen projectile went winging through the warehouse, finally bursting a keg on the far side of the floor.

Heinrich Hilfiger reached the far end of the floor, wading through beer halfway to his knees. By then, half the belt at his waist and the bandoleer over his left shoulder had disappeared. His tail swished behind him, stirring up a trail of ripples. He squalled in triumph at the sight of the door to a loading dock, closed and securely locked. He took a position directly in front of the door, next to a column of stacked barrels. He looked one way and then the other, but there was no sight nor sound of his opponent. He hissed and gripped the shroud of the gun. He squalled and drew back his hand. He cursed as he hastily ejected the overheated barrel, tossing it behind him. He turned, befuddled, at a splash and simultaneous metallic clang. No-Hands stood at point-blank range, holding the barrel in the pincer that served as his right hand.

Both possums dropped their jaws as they roared. No-Hands swung the glowing barrel. Hilfiger staggered from the blow, his face scalded by the heat. He countered with the replacement barrel in his hand, catching No-Hands on the tufted flanges of his chin. The only known specimen of Archididelphis invicta took a step back as he raised the revolver already in his hand. Hilfiger’s tail wrapped around his massive wrist like a whip, deflecting two shots into a barrel. Hilfiger slammed the barrel into his gun as No-Hands rushed to close the distance, with a third again the mass of his wiry frame. Another round from the revolver destroyed the padlock on the loading gate. Hilfiger’s tail lashed for No-Hands’ throat. Then Hilfiger screeched in triumph as the barrel went home with a ching. He promptly fired a volley into a barrel behind him. Three more came tumbling down. No-Hands’ raised arm somewhat reduced the force of a barrel that bounced off his high brow. With his pincer, he flung open the gate… revealing a trailer full of barrels backed up to the gate. That was when Hilfiger opened fire.

A veritable avalanche of barrels rained down on both combatants. No-Hands managed to retreat while Hilfiger took the brunt of the downpour. He paused to open his revolver for reloading. A wild volley blew the weapon out of his mechanical hand. He turned to see Hilfiger scramble out from under the barrels, even as more came tumbling down. He ran once more, and Hilfiger finally held his fire as he pursued, instead playing out more of the belt. The pursuer fired a short volley before No-Hands disappeared between two racks. He zagged left and then right, just ahead of a score and half a score of bullets. Directly ahead lay a third gate, a counterpart to the one through which he had entered. A volley from behind was cut short. A single shot from the rifle blew it halfway open. A swing of the rifle butt backed by No-Hands’ momentum knocked the left door off its hinges. “Linkshander!” Hilfiger called out. No-Hands turned back, to see his foe load the other end of a broken belt into his weapon. Simultaneously, he loaded another round into his rifle and fired.

It was an incendiary round.

No-Hands grabbed the bottom rung of a guard rail to haul himself up, ahead of the wall of blue flame that erupted through the loading gate. He vaulted over and dropped to the pavement as the barrels that had not been destroyed burst or burned, prolonging what would otherwise have been a short and relatively cool blaze. Only then did something else rush up the loading dock. It was a nearly unrecognizable form awash in flame, racing blindly forward. As it ran, it cast aside a weapon and a belt of ammo that already popped like a chain of fire crackers. No-Hands only shook his head as he tracked the figure toward its clear objective, a polluted sluice pond. It became all too clear how ill-considered it was when Heinrich Hilfiger dived straight into the deepest part. The surface of the pond itself lit up in a sheet of admittedly short-lived flame.

“You were never my equal, Hilfiger,” No-Hands said, “only my opposite. You still came closer than most.” Then he picked up the machine gun and slung it over his back.

Futures Past: The Captain N comic book

 As I write this, I'm two months and counting in my sabbatical from blogging, and have also spent two weeks watching my retro gaming parody/ fan novel not sell, and bought a new computer for good measure. In the midst of all this, I got to thinking more about something I mentioned once before, a traumatic experience that scarred an entire generation. I speak, of course, of Captain N: The Game Master, a show even kids who were several years/ eons away from Batman: The Animated Series knew was kaka. And what really brought me back to it wasn't writing a 100,000-word novel, or buying a Samus figure for three times its retail price, but finding out there was a comic book. And by reputation, it is actually... good? Okay? Tolerable??? Clearly, I was going to have to investigate first-hand.

So, to back things up, I did indeed watch Captain N first-hand during its run, and as usual, I have some very distinct recollections  that I now know don't line up with the actual run of the show. I'm sure I saw it first during a vacation that could have been before I had a TV at home, a story arc I assumed was the pilot that I figured out would actually be episodes 4 and/ or 5. It could easily have been a year or more before I watched it again, on the same network affiliate where I first saw Darkwing Duck, in a slot that required getting up early to watch it at all. I can recall several of the more famed/ notorious episodes (including their Tetris one!), of which I'm sure all were in a half-hour, single-story format. From the research that I did for this post, that means I only saw seasons 1 and 2, the last episode of which aired in very early 1991. However, I'm sure I was watching it well after that, probably into 1992 if not later. This fits with certain reports that it was in network syndication as late as 1994.

Now, with all the easy jokes already at hand, I'm sure everyone is expecting me either to destroy this show or defend it as a neglected classic. However, that simply isn't how it was. The now-storied clashes of titans that defined modern animation were all happening after school between Fox Kids and the Disney Afternoon.  Even back then, it was obvious that Saturday mornings were the low end of the pool, the usually short-lived experiments, the outdated-on-arrival tie-ins, the reruns and reboots of shows you had thought you were too old for the first time around. If you accepted the ritual of getting up before 7 in the morning, then you were probably going to watch whatever they threw at us without complaining. And you could get lucky, with shows like Darkwing Duck or a good episode of Garfield And Friends. Then again, you could get the likes of ProStars, Karate Kid and Hammer Man, all of which I most certainly watched in the same timeframe if not the same network and lineup as Captain N. And in their company, yes, Captain N reached the proverbial high standard of mediocrity. We were already past the Dark Ages, into a time where even a low-tier cash grab could be expected to have some measure of technical quality and narrative coherence. If it came to that, when Mother Brain was competent, when Simon Belmont wasn't actively stupid, when Kevin and Princess Lana aren't vying to be both bland and irritating (yes, even compared to Simon and Kid Icarus), when they actually did something creative with the "guest" game characters no matter how little sense it made in relation to the game, it could be entertaining.

And then there is the comic, which I had absolutely no idea existed until noting a few passing mentions in connection with Metroid. This one was published by Valiant, also responsible for a Super Mario comic I'm now sure I encountered in the wild sometime in the 1990s. The first issue was published in May 1990. Alas, the run ended in September of the same year after only five issues. In its short run and after, it gained a reputation as both more faithful to the source games and far better in quality than the TV series. Unsurprisingly, copies are scarce and quite expensive. Fortunately, the real-world heroes at Captain N.net have assembled a library for all the internet to read, for the moment.

Meanwhile, what brought me to this comic was its chief claim to fame or infamy: Unlike the entirety of the TV series, it featured Samus Aran as a major character. In fact, she was introduced as a "guest" character in the last of several storylines in the first issue of the comic, and continued to appear at least once in every remaining issue of the run. In the first appearance, titled "Money Changes Everything", she was set up as a neutral bounty hunter willing to consider an offer from Mother Brain. By "The Happy Zone" in the following issue, she was already established as a member of the "N Team" and a rival to Princess Lana for the affections of Captain N/ Kevin, which admittedly wasn't a big deal in the TV series. After appearing in a single panel of "The Fabulous Powers of Captain N" in issue 3, she got a full protagonist treatment in "Breakout" in issue 4, where a corrupt judge sends her and Princess Lana to a prison planet from which they must escape. In issue five, she got not one but two appearances. First, in "Garbageworld", a time travel mishap sends her to a future where Kevin is finally willing to reciprocate her interest, but also is reduced to leading the remnants of the resistance to Mother Brain from an interstellar garbage dump. Then in "When Friends Fall Out", Princess Lana discovers evidence that the bounty hunter was responsible for the disappearance of the old king of Videoland, in a story that was obviously meant to be finished in the announced but never printed issue 6.

So, with that out of the way, is this comic any good? Having read the Samus story arc, and skimmed a few more storylines, I can certainly affirm that this is vastly better than the TV show. The unavoidable punchline is, this is pretty much like saying the show was better than the Battletoads pilot. We aren't just comparing two different things, but two things in very different stages of development. The relative strengths of the comic come down to the fact that it is trying to establish its world and characters, but there was a point when the show made some effort to do the same. Whether the same level of quality could have been maintained over a longer run is unknowable at best. What can be seen all too clearly is that this is far from a top-notch comic for its own or any other time. The artwork is no better than average for a newspaper comic, and particularly weak when called on to establish a larger setting, the one thing that the show was undisputedly good at as long as it was trying at all. The stories serve up several duds, notably "Breakout". The real bottom line is that the comic is still everything the show was reviled for, a middling to low budget cash-in built around references to niche pseudo-mythology, though with the difference that it gets said mythology mostly right.

And then there is Samus, the one thing that made this at all memorable. As with many things, you can see where they were trying, not so much where they did this right. Sure, she's a developed and sympathetic female character with a "dark" side that isn't simply waved away by the power of love (yet...). However, while her open infatuation with the male lead isn't exactly "stereotypical" as such, it is quickly magnified to a level that can only be regarded as either actually disturbing or wholly contrived, to the point that she seriously goes through with accepting the garbage world timeline. Given the general intelligence of the material, it can be allowed that this really is meant to show her conflicting emotions and very gray morality. The deeper problem is that the story arc never pushes its own point. Every time she is presented with a choice between her mercenary ways and the good guys' ideals, the story always throws a softball rather than making her admit to past misdeeds or ongoing flaws. It's by all means a step forward, especially for a video game tie-in (Hell, the show wasn't afraid to show the dark side of unrequited "love" either), but it's the kind that shows just how far we still had to go. Oh yes, and this could all look far, far worse if we actually knew how the Hell old our "hero" is... 

So that's Captain N, the show and the comic book. So, was this worth it? Considering how notorious this has gotten, it was definitely worth a rematch, and I'm more than happy to have dug up the comic book. For myself, I hope I have at least given some perspective. By my standard rant, this wasn't "good" by any means, but anyone who thinks this is the "worst" we got is either too young or suffering from repressed memories. (Hey, sometimes, I wish I could come down with that...) All in all, a weekend isn't too much time for a trip down this rabbit hole. That's all for now, more to come!

Image credit valiant.fandom.com.

Fiction: Retro gaming parody novel publication announcement!

 

It's Labor Day, which means this is still technically the last weekend of a month when I've so far done only two posts and absolutely no movie reviews. I'm breaking the silence to announce that my Nintendo fan/ parody novel (see demos 1, 2,  and 3, the mythology appendix and extra) is up for sale, as linked to here.  In the meantime, I threw in some art on top of the cover I already spent too much on, resulting in the interior title page above from an artist named Carlos Miguel Garcia. My specific instructions were to make a "1980s futuristic" ship, and I will be the first to admit that really is what Eighties "kit-bashed" sci fi ships were like. Here's another piece of artwork I shelled out for. For context, the description in the book has the mother dragon monster using a chokehold. And they're both being held hostage by the empress of an evil magic-mirror dimension...

So that's what I have to show for 4 and a half months of work and definitely more money than I'm remotely likely to get back. So was it worth it? Well, it probably helped keep me sane, which is something. And while I'm at it, here's my final version of the ship design everybody kept telling me not to use.

That's all for now, more to come... I'm still not saying when.

Adaptation Insanity: The one that was an anime more anime than anime

 

Title: Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer

What Year?: 1984

Classification: Unnatural Experiment/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

As I write this, I’m rounding out the month while editing an actual novel, and I decided it was time to do another entry in this still-new feature. It also happened that I’ve been down an extra rabbit hole with a decades-old multimedia franchise I’ve only just heard of. That brought me to one particular artifact I decided to write up for this feature, even though it is animated. As we will be seeing, however, it’s also a very odd treatment of a strange and often retrospectively horrifying property. Without further ado, I present Urusei Yatsura 2, a film based on a franchise where a literal stalker and a compulsive womanizer are the couple we’re supposed to want to get together.

Our story begins with a contest between clubs at a high school whose student body includes Ataru, a slacker who harasses every female in sight, Lum, an alien with electroshock powers who insists she is already married to him, and Mendou, a rich kid who can afford his own tank. As events progress, the cast begin to notice things that are odd even in their frame of reference. Soon, they find themselves in an empty city where electricity, water and food simply appear without explanation, an arrangement the slacker seems happy to accept at face value. But the rich kid and his self-described spouse are determined to get to the bottom of it. They discover that the familiar cityscape is really a reproduction floating in space on the back of a turtle, but even that may still be an illusion. It’s up to the slacker to find the truth, and along the way, he must confront the nature of reality and his relationships!

Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer was a 1984 theatrical animated film, the second based on the manga and anime series created by Rumiko Takahashi. The film was written and directed by Mamoru Oshii, also the director of the preceding film Only You, reportedly with little or no participation by Takahashi. The film was released in Japan in 1984, and on US home video with an English dub in 1993. It was initially poorly received by fans of the manga/ anime series, but became well-regarded as a pioneering anime film with themes that anticipated later works such as Ghost In The Shell. (Dammit, I’m going to have to do that one…) It is currently available for free streaming on Tubi.

For my experiences, this all started because someone introduced me to the original Urusei Yatsura manga, which I have found simply mindboggling. I would have to give it a separate writeup if I was going to cover it at all, but it will suffice to say that I can only find it comprehensible by comparison with my own Exotroopers series (see the Samus figure post/ rant): These are characters who are and should be absolutely horrible, yet are entertaining enough for us not to want them to die. After going through a few volumes of the manga run, I came to the present film, and I found something different and much stranger. What I found especially striking was its timing, obviously well after the beginnings of anime (compare with Castle of Cagliostro and Lily CAT) yet still well before it took the forms we would take for granted now. As a corollary, it is a full-blown case of what I call the Anachronistic Outlier, for once already noted by many besides me, with the especially curious tendency of comedies and parodies (see Dark Star, Twitch of the Death Nerve and less auspiciously Galaxina) to be more innovative than “straight” treatments from the same time and even significantly later. That, of course, leaves the question whether it is good, and a lot will depend on taste and mood.

Moving forward, the main thing to get out of the way is that this film very much presumes prior familiarity with the franchise. If you don’t understand the characters, relationships and assumed world already (or like them in the first place), you aren’t going to have many chances. The paradox on this front is that this does not become a source of “insider” humor. Indeed, the movie doesn’t have that much in the way of humor, beyond the bizarre situations and wildly flawed characters already built into the franchise. On a deeper level, the film genuinely shifts the perspective, which in turn becomes foreshadowing of what will be revealed. When the focus moves to the secondary characters, the “stars” simply look like idiots that nobody else would have any reason to care about, unless of course this world was literally built around them. The final twist is that when the actual main character takes charge, he really does manage to think through the situation.

That leaves the story’s visual, and that brings us to one more paradox, little if anything here is “psychedelic” or even surreal. The “baseline” style is semi-realistic human characters in realistic and often very detailed environments. I will say personally that this is absolutely a believable portrayal of how “real” mental illness works, and I will shout loudly that it makes for an exponentially better payoff as the dream world encroaches on the setting. It should be of further note that even then, there is not a fundamental change in the animation style, which is where certain pros and cons come in. Again, it is effectively acknowledged that people who experience hallucinations often perceive them as part of the actual world. On the other hand, many sequences simply feel like a sane person’s idea of madness, which I have already ranted about. Per my longest-running complaint, the part that films like this often overlook is the breakdown of the very sense of the passage of time and linear causation, which is exactly where even the severely delusional will realize they are hallucinating without necessarily pulling out of it. The most intriguing example is Shinobu’s encounter with a spectral girl whose status is never made clear as her own surroundings become distorted. She clearly realizes that this is not the “real” world, yet this is still short of the terror of total breakdown.

That leaves the “one scene”, and the one I knew I would go with is exactly at the half-hour mark. At this point, a nurse/ priestess who is easily the most intelligent and consistently competent character in the franchise has gotten in a cab at night. She voices the suspicion that the ride is taking longer than needed. The cabbie starts to talk, quite charmingly, and this becomes our introduction to the antagonist, voiced by one Draidyl Roberts in the English dub. He begins with what could be a casual joke that time feels slower in a cab. That leads into a metaphysical ramble in which he asserts that time, space and reality itself are all products of human perception, all while the lady clearly grows more aware that this is not simply a talkative driver. What keeps this interesting is that none of his points are inarguable in universe. Human perceptions of the universe may be shaped by all manner of biases, but it will become clear that this character’s own angle is talking up his own power to warp reality. Even so, the lady is already able to see through his illusions. What matters is that this battle of wits is clearly just beginning, which is exactly why a good scene like this matters.

In closing, what I find I come back to is my own feelings about anime. I’ve already regularly commented that people who know me would expect me to be a lot more of a fan than I am. The underlying reality is that I have never tried to “follow” anime in any comprehensive way. That means that I have undoubtedly missed a lot that is very good, and even more that is very, very bad. I consider the present film a good example of why a little anime can be better than a lot. It’s a well-made entry in a long-running series that requires some background knowledge but not a detailed knowledge of everything that came before. Perhaps most significantly, it’s a well-regarded and influential anime that was never hyped up into a “classic” you have to watch for fans to take you seriously. (No way I’m naming names…) It’s just good fun from a time when that was still the benchmark for the artform. Watch it, if you have the time, and you won’t be disappointed. With that, I’m calling it a day.

Futures Past: Nintendo exotrooper figure!

 

As I write this, it's the last week of the month, and I realized I had something backlogged. While I was spending the last 2 1/2 months writing a Nintendo fan novel (see my fourth demo), I finally gave in and tried to buy a figure of one of the classic NES characters I was obviously ripping off. I refer, of course, to Samus Aran, from the iconic game I can't recall playing or seeing anyone else play once. I found a landscape of figures pulling scalper prices, and with a whole lot of bonus points, I got the newest and in all likelihood least impressive one. Then, of course, I took it out of the packaging, because I do this to make "real" collectors cry. Here's pics of this thing on card.

You know the suit is from the 1980s because her shoulder pads are literally bigger than her helmet.

Now to go all the way back, I can recall being aware of Metroid in the 1980s and '90s, and what stands out is that it didn't have that big a profile. Up to when I was in junior high, there was still only the original game, from the ancient year of 1986. From what I heard back then, it was simply a space adventure with a where-do-I-go element that a whole bunch of games were trying to do. It didn't help that the main reason I heard about it was because Mother Brain was the main villainess and quite possibly the most irritating character on the now-legendary Captain N TV series, which I really did watch regularly. It was in a revisit of the game in Nintendo's propaganda outlet that I first learned of the reveal that quite possibly created Rule 34: The space adventurer in the armor was actually a lady.

Now for the figure, this is a figure released this year by Jakks Pacific, which has been making figures of this character since at least 2014. The most distinctive thing about this figure is that it has a matte texture where earlier figures had been glossy. I have to admit, this is pretty good. The points of articulation, while more gimmicky than useful, are in places that make sense. The detailing is the right balance between realistic and stylized. And, wonder of wonders, it's quite easy to persuade this thing to stand up. Here's some pics of the figure.

And for a little fun, here's a couple articulation tests.

Okay, I was not expecting Samus as a cheerleader, but it's probably out there.

And here she is with the 4-inch Space Guys (whose own adventure was ironically derailed for all this). These figures are usually listed as 4 inches, but this is definitely bigger, I can believe 4.5 inches.

Now, the question I come to is what put this one in this sporadic and meandering feature, where does Samus really fit in pop culture evolution? There were plenty of lady adventurers before her, as evidenced in Heavy Metal (which I repeatedly reference in my novel), though it was something new in video games. I would propose that the character had more impact through popularizing the combat exoskeleton/ mech suit, though I can attest that I was drawing such things in the late '80s-early '90s timeframe independent of any direct influence. (I swear I kind of invented the term "exotrooper", but I have never had to explain it.) The biggest step forward was a game with a focus on exploring an environment, which as alluded was quickly done to death. To me, she remains what she was then: A cool character.

And to wrap this up, here's a couple sketches I did for the book. I was trying to think of an exotrooper design crossed with Greek armor, so I drew a finback with a sort-of Corinthian face plate. I spent a lot of time trying to work out how it would raise, then an illustrator I am working with just drew it scrunched up in a way I'm going to have to work into the book. And the other one is a Flower Girl who can turn into a Psittacosaurus-dragon thing.

And one more, because the best sketch is always the one that goes completely wrong...

And with that, I'm calling it a day. That's all for now, more to come!

Fiction: Assumed mythology line-up!

 It's the start of the weekend, and I still don't have the second post of a three-post week. That left me without anything in particular outside my fairly massive and ridiculously quickly written novel that I already posted a spoiler for. I considered one particular chapter to post, because I keep revising it, with more spoilers and a whole lot of stuff without the introduction or buildup. Then I decided to do something different that was actually fun to do. I like to work mythology and folklore (see Chelsea the (bad) Social Worker, which has some overlap) into my stories, and for this project, I had the idea of a whole culture based on ancient Greek mythology but with such a skewed perspective that their take would be equivalent to theistic Satanism. (Yes, I've encountered that in the wild...) With that in mind, I went as far as writing out a list of the characters these guys would choose as their heroes. So, here goes...

These are the names of the 12 Heroes of the Myrmidons, who defied the gods who are not gods and brought the wrath of gods and men, and the accounts of their deeds as told among them and the Misthioi.

 

Aeacus the Ruler: He was a demigod king of the island of Aegina and founder of the Myrmidons. Seeing that he was loved by his father Zeus and his people, jealous Hera destroyed his kingdom with a plague. Finding himself among the bodies of his subjects, he beheld the ants and the brotherhood and good order with which they marched. In grief, he called on Zeus to make him a new people and a great army from the ants. Zeus granted his wish, and the ants became the first Hoplites of the Myrmidons. He lived long and well, and when he came to the shores of Tartarus, Kind Hades appointed him as a judge of the souls of the dead.

 

Aesclepius the Healer: He was the greatest of physicians and kindest of men. It was said that his medicine could cure all disease, and some even told that he could return the dead to life. Kind Hades pled that his power be drawn back, lest the living fill the Earth until there was no food to eat or land to grow it. Instead, Zeus slew him, fearing that one with the power to restore the dead to life might also learn the secret ways to slay the immortal gods. But the people revered him in death, even as a god himself, and Just Hades honored him with the sign of the serpent in the heavens.

 

Amphion the Defender: He was the founder and builder of great Thebes, the impenetrable city, and husband of rash Niobe. When the gods slew his sons for their mother’s insult, his daughters prevailed on their mother to come to the temple of the Sun and Moon in penitence by the promise of a false oracle. Guessing the gods’ trap, he breached the temple to find his daughters slain beside the bodies of their brothers, save Meliboia. He fought the Assassins of Olympus, one against two, and it is said that he wounded the arm of mighty Apollo, or else moved him to mercy by his show of valor. But the cold Lady of the Moon cast a dart he could only slow with his shield and his body. Then, knowing himself mortally wounded, he cast himself down from the temple mount so that the gods could not claim to have extinguished his line by their hands alone. But where he fell, only persephones were found, to show that Kind Hades and his Queen had favored him.

 

Arachne the Challenger: She was the greatest and proudest weaver of all mortal men, so great that she challenged Athena to prove herself better. They held a great contest, which only Zeus would judge. Arachne showed the sins of the gods, where Athena showed the fates of those who had defied them. And the gathered peoples said that Arachne was the better, save that Athena wove with finer thread that no mortal had seen from the wealth of the heavens and the depths of the Earth. But Zeus judged his daughter victor, and in spite, the goddess smashed Arachne’s weaving along with her loom. Then humiliated Arachne prepared to hang herself with her last measure of pride, but the gods or mysterious Fate transformed her to a spider, the first of her kind on the Earth. To this day, Athena curses the sign of her kind.

 

Cassandra the Counsellor: She was the greatest and wisest of all prophets and seers, moved to warn the kings and their people of disaster. Mighty Apollo wooed her, for he knew his own oracles could not match her vision. But when he offered to make her the very Queen of Heaven if she would foretell to him alone the dooms that might yet fall on the gods themselves, she spurned him. So the god laid on her the curse of Moira, that ever after, she would foresee every doom, but no mortal from outcast to king would believe her or heed her until the Fates she foretold had come had already come to pass. Worse, it would be her lot to fall in the path of every great calamity, to warn in vain and then suffer, yet never find death. And so she wandered the Earth, from land to land and age to age until east became west and tomorrow became ancient legend, and some say she wanders still, warning of the doom that will yet smite the very stars from the sky.

 

Chloris the Accuser: She was the daughter of Amphion and last princess of Thebes, wounded by the gods themselves but not destroyed. It is said that she was first named Meliboia, meaning Honey And Milk, but when men beheld her risen from the tomb of her family, they called her Pale One. Ever after, it was appointed to her to testify to the evil deeds of gods and men, whether in the courts of Olympus or the halls of Kind Hades. From of old, the rescue of Chloris and the love and valor of her mother was portrayed in song and in stone. Yet, many of the ignorant and unknowing instead tell that the daughters of Niobe fell nameless beside their brothers.

 

Hephaestus the Armorer: He was an Olympian, the god of the forge and of arms and armor, and the only one besides Kind Hades to earn the veneration of the Mymidons. He was born to Zeus and Hera, so ugly and deformed that his mother cast him from the Heavens. Yet he returned, and proved himself by casting the most beautiful ornaments and most cunning weapons of the gods. A day came when he defended his mother after his father wronged her, and his father cast him down again. Then he taught his arts to mortal men, and the Myrmidons say it was he rather than Prometheus the First Benefactor who first revealed the secret of fire. At last, Zeus restored him in fear that he would arm the men of Earth as the gods themselves. And so he crafts his father’s mighty thunderbolts, yet it is said that he keeps the deadliest bolt of all for himself, in case a time should come when the gods plot to expel him again.

 

Idas the Redeemer: He was the faithful lover of Marpessa, whom Apollo sought as a trifle. He alone prevailed against the gods. His lady was not tempted, for she loved Idas and was wise enough to know that gods were rarely true or kind to mortal women, but they both feared that the god would not leave them in peace. So great was his love and bravery that Idas dared to challenge mighty Apollo to combat for honor, and Zeus feared the disgrace of all the gods if the mortal man prevailed or if the god resorted to treachery to best him. For the first and only time, the King of Heaven pledged to honor the choice of a mortal woman between god or man. The true mortal rightly received his bride, and Zeus was forced to swear that the gods would trouble them no more.

 

Mestra the Maiden: She was the daughter of Erysichthon the Hungry, whom even the Myrmidons count most justly accursed, yet the punishment of the gods caused more woe to her than the sinful King. Consumed from within by Limos, the Demon of Famine, her father became a deathless ghoul who devoured the harvest of his kingdom, and all the food his wealth would buy, and finally his own servants. He at last threatened to consume Mestra if she did not bring him food. To escape him, she agreed to be sold as bride to six master even crueler in exchange for a ship full of food. Her suitors thought to cheat the king with moldering bread, diseased livestock, putrid meat, poisonous fruit, bitter herbs and ancient bones. Each time, her father consumed the offering in a day, while she escaped with her power to change shape and returned to be sold again, and when her husbands pursued her, the ghoul devoured them as well. Her seventh suitor was Autolycos, master of thieves. To him, she revealed that her father could not look upon his own reflection. Mestra lured the ghoul into a chamber lined with mirrors, and the gallant thief sealed him in. Trapped, the wicked king consumed himself, and the Maiden became Autolycos’ lady and partner. She is held up as an example of the virtue of fulfilling all oaths and the bonds of family, even to the unworthy, but her marriage is a byword for a bargain made in desperation and bad faith, to no benefit.

 

Orestes the Avenger: He was the heir and avenger of Agamemnon, whom Aegisthus slew for his throne and the favor of his faithless queen Clytemenstra. Orestes slew the usurper, but for presuming to slay his king, the gods sent visions of the Furies to torment him to madness. Against the specters he alone could see, he raged and flailed, until he dealt a mortal wound to his sister Electra, believing her a Fury in a mortal guise. He then prepared to murder his mother, who confessed that his father was not Agamemnon but Aegisthus whom he had killed, and then slew herself instead. At the last, he swore that the gods were not gods if they would drive men to greater evil for a sin made in ignorance and madness. Only then did the Furies disappear from his sight, never to return.

 

Palamedes the Diviner: He was a wise king and commander in the war against Troy. Of the great heroes, he alone was wronged by men and not by the gods. Among his many deeds, he invented the dice, and in so doing learned much of the ways of Fortune and Fate, which are greater than the so-called gods. It is said those who rolled against him came to mistrust him and resent the debts they owed. It was perhaps for this reason that he came to be accused of treason and spying, and finally charged based on a letter many held to be forged by his chief enemy, the famed Odysseus. He submitted his doom, proclaiming that his own fortune had been cast, and some say it was this injustice that led to the disastrous voyage of Odysseus.

 

Sisyphus the Truth-Teller: He was the founder and king of Corinth, and judged the most cunning of all men. He brought riches to his city by his dealings, which some said were gained by murder and treachery against his guests. But others told that he could tell no lie nor break any promise, but could by omission and incomplete truths deceive more completely than the most brazen liar. It was even said that he escaped Death and Hades by his trickery. The greatest test came when an enemy of Zeus sought a hiding place where the god had taken a damsel, and Sisyphus gave witness against the King of Heaven, revealing what he knew of a secret place he had seen the god enter. Some say that for this, he was punished to an eternity of hard and futile labor, others that he defied the gods in the knowledge of the doom that already awaited him.

Fiction: Retro gaming novel battle demo!

 

It's Thursday of an off-week, and I've been trying to do a week of posts while trying to finish my Nintendo fan/ parody novel (see Demos 1 and 2) in an insane amount of time. As part of this, I went ahead and let out some very spoiler-ish material for what I wrote as the "final battle" part (as a "song fic"...), so I made the further decision to post that and a little more here, plus some autoshape sketches of what the setting is supposed to look like, the version that looks good above and the one that's more accurate further down. Long story short, it's a star fort on a floating Sky Island, and this is still my Metroid-parody heroine. Also a reminder, I used to write a series called Exotroopers, and I started this blog with a story where the protagonist cuts off his own leg...

Meliboia opened fire on two advancing Myrmidons with her 7.5mm rifle from what cover the caryatid on the left side provided. One of the attackers fell with a shattered visor. She activated her shoulder pods, and promptly launched an anti-armor rocket from the righthand pod at the pair who operated their own launcher from cover. The blast blew out a gout of rock and rubble. The Hoplite reloading the launcher staggered, either stunned or blinded, and then fell with a cry. The one with the launcher popped up again, only to find himself exposed. A three-shot burst shattered his helmet. Mel pivoted, just as a fighter came out of the clouds. From her left pod, she launched a single anti-aircraft missile. An engine burst into flames with the blast, and the left wing twisted off at the rear as the craft pitched and rolled out of sight, its weapons still blazing. A single bolt obliterated a section of the upper balcony, leaving the right caryatid supporting only crumbling entablature. Then another, much larger craft rose up from below. “Euphonia,” she said. She retreated as the chorus played…

 “It is the end of the day

There is only the bill left to pay

Let the Fool rise

When Amphion falls!”

 

The bolts of the Euphonia’s starboard medium plasma cannon sailed through the Keep, occasionally detonating with the force of concussion grenades against the columns and walls. As often as not, they sailed straight out the other side of the deceptively porous fortification. An incendiary rocket detonated against the hull next to the gun, only briefly fouling the alignment of the gun. “All Hells!” Mel shrieked from behind a column. “Fire a missile already!” Then she glimpsed the incoming parasite craft. She hefted a translucent ammunition cannister over her shoulder, racking five rockets directly into the conjoined muzzles of the launcher. Already, the transport was shifting, giving the unseen gunner a more favorable angle. Before the next shot could come, the transport banked and swerved, too late. Its portside wing was struck by the bottom wing of the out-of-control fighter, catastrophically damaging both craft. As the parent craft reeled, the loops on the far side flickered with the silhouette of the approaching parasite. She fired the full load of rockets through a sally port and ran up the stairs to the upper balcony. The craft disintegrated as the chorus replayed…

 

“It is the end of the day

There is only the Boatman to pay

Let the Fool rise

When Amphion falls!”

Mel emerged outside the door of the uppermost structure where she and Ajax had spent what she counted as their true honeymoon. She came almost immediately under fire. She activated the shoulder pods for suppressing fire. On the right, her reconfigured 6mm rifle raked the balcony with bursts of fire, felling one of the two Hoplites who came vaulting over. On the left, her grenade launcher fired down at another who had topped the corner battlement. She raised the 7.5mm for what she was sure would be an attack from the center. She still froze as a final parasite craft rose into view, with two Hoplites clinging to the weapons racks. She leaped backward through a window behind the bed, just before they opened fire.

Meliboia crashed down on top of the nuptial bed, propelled by the blasts behind her. Her rifle flew from her hands. She kept rolling, crushing already splintered wood. The sheet and blankets wound around her, tearing where they met rough edges. She frantically tried to deploy the pods, producing only urgent warnings to withdraw for repairs. The final verse of her challenge was all she could hear over the ringing in her ears…

“Behold the old gods have fallen,
Their idols are cast to the flames!
Now let us worship
The Fool, our new God,
He is better than no God at all!”

Two Hoplites burst in the door to the left of the bed, melee blades drawn. An apparition came rushing to meet them, trailing streamers of cloth like an unwinding shroud. The first had only a glimpse of the shape before a leaf-shaped blade drove under his breastplate. The second parried over the body of the fallen companion, then delivered a stroke that was parried in turn by a blade that sprang from Meliboia’s left wrist. Then a bedsheet fell over the adversary’s head and torso, to be wound tight enough to haul him off his feet as the apparition circled behind. Her sword drove into his lower back, and her wrist blade laid open his throat. The apparition rose, now crimson, at a pounding at the door. Just before it smashed to pieces, a grenade plowed through, catching her in the chest.

The force of the concussion grenade threw Meliboia back to the wall. She rose to hands and knees, to look through a spiderwebbed visor. “Autolycos,” she said. “You’re an ass, but you are my brother. Walk away.”

“Oh, all Hells, Mel!” he exclaimed. “You think you can tell me that? I’ll tell you one last time, baby girl, just because Aeacus makes us play nice with you doesn’t mean you’re one of us.”
“No,” she said, “I suppose not.” As she spoke, she completed an emergency override, just before she realized exactly what she was activating.

Her second anti-aircraft missile launched. It did not go even five times its length before it hit Autolycos in either the belly or the groin. It blasted him straight off the balcony, past the corner of the bastion, before its overstrained mechanisms exploded at a fraction of its intended minimum range. She had a brief, searing glimpse of his upper body flung upward as his legs dropped to either side.

The Anthology Anthology: Bolos giant robot tank books!

It's one day into a new week, and I have something I've been meaning to get to long enough that I already did a Youtube video about it (kind of...). I'm talking about the archetype of the sci fi giant tank, and one of the earlier examples of an SF multimedia franchise, the Bolo series. And let's start at the beginning, with the first of these that I got.

Bolo was a series of stories written by Keith Laumer, featuring the titular giant tanks. This in itself was an intriguing departure from earlier pulps, where larger-than-life heroes and quirky scientists were the usual basis for a running series. Laumer instead offered a future history (itself a reasonably well-established convention) shaped by the evolution of battleship-sized tanks piloted by artificial intelligence. The original story was "Combat Unit", a 1960 story told from the perspective of a captured AI mech being studied by mysterious aliens. After an incidental appearance in the 1961 story "Courier", an installment of Laumer's popular Retief series, the Bolos got their proper introduction in the 1963 novella "Night of the Trolls", where an astronaut awakes in an unusually functional post-apocalyptic world ruled by a warlord with his own giant tank. From there, the series evolved or devolved into tragedy with "The Last Command" in 1966, in which a Bolo decommissioned and buried as radioactive waste breaks loose into a peacetime world it cannot understand. The downbeat tone continued with "The Last Command", in which an authority figure must convince a frontier town to decommission their Bolo pet/ mascot, and "Field Test", where an experimental tank discovers heroism to its creators' alarm. In 1976, the stories were collected as Bolo. And outside of a few odd entries later in Laumer's career, that was the end of the line.

But, of course, that was not all. In the 1980s, the Bolo stories were used loosely as the basis for the classic strategy game Ogre, and for two video games. Then in 1993, just after Laumer's death, Baen Books released the first of an anthology series expanding the series and increasingly directly undermining its original point, Bolos Book One: The Honor of the Regiment. I bought the book soon after picking up the Laumer collection. I was immediately impressed. Then I went full junky as soon as I got hold of Book 2: The Unconquerable.

In full hindsight, the two books together are a snapshot of 1990s "original" anthologies as well as '80s/ '90s combat SF. Between the two, the emerging format was a strikingly unintrospective recapitulation of the "colonial" incarnation of military science fiction: A human settlement is attacked without warning or provocation by an overwhelming number of aliens (which in almost all cases never appear again), and the only defense is (usually) one Bolo. In fact, the stories that really follow this format (conspicuously "Ghosts of Resartus" in Book One and "Shared Experience" in Book 2, both by Christopher Stasheff) are more of a plurality in a reasonably diverse lineup of adversaries and scenarios. S.M. Stirling's shows a primitive AI tank with a stranded military force in "near future" Latin America across both volumes, while S.N. Lewitt shows a Bolo defending naive settlers from raiders and slavers in "Camelot" and "Sir Kendrick's Lady". The human-on-human theme continues with the otherwise routine "Legacy of Leonidas" and the much better "Operation Desert Fox" in Book One, where Bolos face a theocratic regime and a corporate-funded force of mechs. Book 1 ends with a bang with "As Our Strength Lessens" by David Drake, where the Bolos face a very mysterious alien civilization whose A.E. Van Vogt far-future tech can absorb and then replicate any attack.

As alluded, it's a few stories in Book 2 that truly cement the series. For extra color, this volume is the one in my personal collection that has literally fallen apart, and I'm still reading it because it is absolutely out of print. The completely bonkers fun read is "You're It" by one Shirley Meier, where a damaged Bolo and the last technician able to repair it are hunted by a hostile empire's knockoff AI tank on a pseudo-Mesozoic planet. An entry that seems to be divisive is "The Murphosensor Bomb" by Karen Wehrstein, an Asimov-style puzzle story where a scientist must find a computer virus that is immobilizing the Bolos. Things stay solid with "Legacy" by Todd Johnson (who wrote the longest and probably worst story in Book One), where pacifist far-future archeologists must repair an ancient Bolo to defend them. Then the end is again the best with "Endings" by William R Fortschen, which finally takes the non-human perspective in the aftermath of an apocalyptic war that has already destroyed both sides. All very heady stuff to read late at night in 8th grade...

Inevitably, a good thing was followed by more, and back then, I skipped straight to number 4. Book 3 was printed in 1995 in sequence with the first two, and to me it was the odd one out. There's only four stories by two authors. The first one "The Farmer's Wife" puts the Bolo second to a crippled human colony ship, while the last "Miles To Go" tries to ramp up tragedy with what I find to be a completely contrived scenario. I finally bought this one just in the last few years, and still haven't reread the whole thing. Book 4 was released in 1997, and the brief delay marks a vast jump in quality. It's some of the best entries in the series, especially "The Traitor" and "Hold Until Relieved", but it's already feeling like more of what we have seen before. (And we had enough Arthurian references with the actual "Camelot" story...)

So, that completes a rundown of a pretty good sci fi franchise. To me, it's what happens when a group of people just decide to have fun. It may not be "classic", but I can attest that I am still coming back to it. I will also freely admit that it had a whole lot to do with the evolution of how I write. I've said my peace, and I'm calling it a day. That's all for now, more to come!