Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

As you may have noticed, I made a tag and a database for my shorts.

Expanding on my comments on the first one, I'm not sure why I claimed that I would learn better, as that doesn't seem plausible. Also, I likely misremembered the character limit. In yuri shimai (which I've been rereading for other stuff), at least, it was far dinkier than 400. I may just end up posting all my comments on the Web and just say 「こちらではスペースが足りませんので、下のURLへどうぞ」 or some such.

Meanwhile, the fact that I've been using plurals should tell you that I've thought of another one, even if you can't access the database. I just thought I might make a spaghetti Western for the hell of it, and it happened to be in relation to the YuriHime Bumon that I thought up an actual story for that genre. (At this rate, I oughta call it "Project Ichijinsha Taishō" or something.) Of course, I've barely even seen any Westerns (probably less than the number of space Westerns), and I'd require a hell of a lot of research to make it historically accurate. This is also my only chance to use 19th-century firearms, so the ideas I can only use there bring more clutter to the plot.

Incidentally, it's interesting that Clint's famous line is not actually from a Western, just from a character who acts like he's in one. It doesn't seem to be listed on Wikiquote, but as you can see here, the line is completely changed in Japanese. Fortunately, I was planning on wording the official translations to convey my messages and to sound good, not to be exact translations of the English (or vice versa).

Also, it occurred to me that even Project AnthraXX has much more focus on male characters than anything published in YuriHime Comics (unless you count the one with the transsexual), so maybe that wouldn't be such a good place for it either. Maddie's Maids might work, but considering it takes place after the events of AnthraXX, there's no need to be thinking much on that anytime soon.

"Your lawyer?"

"His pastor."

( Frank discussion of sexuality )

Also, when I was looking up details for the post subject (as you can see, I couldn't find one of the names, so I kept it from the misquoted source), I happened to read a bunch of complaints about that episode on the site. People were outraged that NBC was willing to depict a fictional Christian sect as extremist fanatics. At least one registered user said that he was going to boycott the show because of it. In the 18th season, you're boycotting a show because of portrayal of guest charas in one episode? Is it so offensive to suggest that it's possible for self-proclaimed Christians to be zealots? (I guess that means that—just like the Holocaust—the Spanish Inquisition, the KKK, and so on are only myths.) But it's all right to have an episode where a Muslim guy beats an ADA within an inch of her life to prevent her from prosecuting the man who raped his sister?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's true that the Bible doesn't specifically state that you must kill those who sleep with Muslims. (Apparently the prophets didn't predict that part. I think Sean was actually talking about how adultery is against one of the Ten Commandments.) As far as I've heard, nor does it specifically say that you have to lynch black guys, or prevent gays from practicing their beliefs, or persecute any other innocents.

On that subject, I was surprised by this (coincidentally, also at NBC, since that was the first hit that seemed to have the more common wording). However, it sounds as if the people who are willing to admit that they're not on the only path are the more casual practitioners, not choir boys and ordained clergy.

As was the case with Spanish back when I thought I knew it, I'm planning also to publish official Japanese versions of my projects. (Of course, as I've noted here, my first one might be a bit heavy on the English even in the Japanese version.) I'm far from fluent, of course, but this way I can provide translations that are much truer to the author's intent than most. The expanded exposure this should provide would also give me a chance to come into contact with people who are fluent, which means I could have a chance to actually learn the language, and perhaps impose on someone to correct my work. (I think I'd have more trouble bothering to make the rest of the appropriate site bilingual to cater to these people.)

Another thing that I've pondered at times is that, since I'm going to have to learn to draw anyway, it would be really nifty if someday I could get one of my works published in my belovèd YuriHime S (not the main Comic YuriHime, as I don't imagine I'll ever manage to write works appropriately feminine or comedic for there—with Ms.? Natsuneko's work there, I might have hope, but it's nothing compared to Picard's, as I'll note later). If I did manage to achieve widespread popularity as noted above, they might let me do it cold turkey, but the more likely way is through the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō （「大正」ではなくて「大賞」） or other yomi-kiri (the comic equivalent of a pilot episode). The problem with that is that, as I've no doubt mentioned before, I don't think of many good one-shot ideas lately, as I'm so absorbed in crafting intricate webs of full-sized projects. (Even Project Cow Level, which was pre-planned to be a short, simple "practice" project, is expected to run to about one graphic novel's worth.)

And yet, oddly enough, I happened to think of an interesting one-shot idea yesterday. Although it relies on a lot of tropes, it has a major setting element that I haven't seen used for this before, and unlike some, the premise is distinctly yuri, not just a romance that happens to be between two ladies. (Oddly enough, the unusual setting for a yuri story may have caused me to have a dream last night about sleeping with a man (don't remember for sure). If so, at least I was the seme. . . .) Of course, as a short story, it doesn't have much to reveal without actually writing it, and I'd rather keep the good parts to myself just to avoid anyone else stealing them. (Yes, that's my delusions of grandeur talking again.)

If this somehow did come to pass, there's the problem that the format only allows 400 characters of commentary, much less than I'd normally use. I'd probably put most of it (and the official English translation) on the Web as a supplement to the published part, as Ms. Miyahara does. For the actual printed version, I'm thinking the essentials are along the lines of 「男で申し訳御座いません。いつか必ずレディーにもよろこんで頂けるまんがを描ける様になりますから、今は違った味でがまんして下さいませな。」 (although I haven't bothered to boot up Word to get a character count).

The "chigatta aji" bit overlaps with the question of how predisposed these Japanese folks will be to publishing stuff by some American git. I can't do much about that, but I might consider working in a more Japanese style than my own. For some reason, it seems to be coming out with a larger-than-usual proportion of pseudo-comical elements despite the fact that I don't have a sense of humor (perhaps to make up for the fact that romance is an alien concept to me), so it'll be an outlier in my portfolio in more ways than one (hey, more dovetailing with the post subject).

By the way, in the excessively megalomaniacal mōsō situation that I actually got to do a serial, Project AnthraXX seems at this point as if it would actually be palatable. Of course, it would be helluva Webcomic time in a quarterly mook. . . .

I've decided to start my experiment with characters for Project AnthraXX, since I removed them earlier. (I took down a page from Homuncupunk as well, but as it stands at the moment, AnthraXX has actually become slightly more publishable, since it has something vaguely resembling a story and themes to go with the sex and weirdness.) This may be a bit of a waste of time if I manage to later get other people to do it for me, but it's pretty easy to edit, so this is a reasonably good way to keep notes for my own use as well. It would be even peachier if I could figure out how to make a template for a little info box like they use on other wikis.

David Morgan-Mar recently posted about Webcomic time and RPG time, both concepts with which I'm quite familiar. The former is of course just as prevalent in other media, including print comics. For instance, in Nana-Misu, the characters have passed through seasonal events several times (including, for instance, two Valentines) but still seem to be the same year in school as they were when they started. In a more extreme example, Ramma 1/2 ran for nine years without any of the characters aging. Less dramatically, STRANGERS IN PARADISE strongly shows the author's changes in style and purpose over the 14 years of writing and drawing, while the characters only aged about eight years. Also amusingly, the kaki-oroshi in CHIBI DEVIL! 2 shows Ms. Satō and Ms. Tōdō in their high school uniforms, despite the fact that the former graduated a couple of years ago in the show, meaning it must have been earlier than that in the original source material (which is confirmed if you look at the publication date of the compilation).

All of this explains why I'm very vague about the temporal setting of Projects AnthraXX and Maddie's Maids, which are set in an approximation of the real world. I'd like them to be generally contemporary, but I don't know whether circumstances will allow me to release them correspondingly (if at all).

I've thrown together a bit of information about Choriopolis at the time of Project AnthraXX. (Maddie's Maids is planned to take place after this, so I'm thinking that HomeMaid may not have been founded yet.) Other than the presence of this area somewhere in the Midwest and numerous fictional companies and brands, the most ostensible difference with the real world is the occurrence of several cataclysms that have been identified as terrorist attacks and kept under wraps by agreement of international law enforcement. The Second Gunpowder Plot of 1897 is said to be the first of modern times, but the largest-scaled was probably the nuclear blast from Redwood City in 1981, resulting in the San Mateo Crater quarantine zone remaining to this day. Many of these incidents are characterized by surprisingly low numbers of casualties considering the degree of devastation. I'm not too sure whether readers will follow this difference, as the incidents are not too strongly linked to the plot, but at least I have a reason to mention them early in the story.

As if I weren't busy enough with my application and more equipment training, apparently the stress caused my mind to wander, because I suddenly stumbled upon another really stupid coincidence (or Freudian slip?) that I should have noticed long ago. As you know, I have two projects that are set in a setting closely based upon the real world. You may not notice because of the omissions, but there are exactly three native Japanese characters among the many dozens of characters I'm currently developing for those two projects. And all three are lesbians.

「今さら何ほざいてんだてめえ」とは言われそうだから言っておくが・・・*

As noted in the first paragraph of the previous link, I don't write lesbian stories. I write yuri. Judging by the notes I'm keeping in my head, of those many dozens of characters, those are the only three lesbian-identified individuals I have planned. So how the hell did this happen? To tell the truth, in all three cases, I just made them Japanese because of the names I thought up for them. (It's not as much of a coincidence as it might have been, as the two from Project AnthraXX are connected in terms of their background.) As noted in the disclaimers, I don't have any intentions of perpetuating stupid stereotypes (even ones I accidentally made up myself), and I certainly didn't do this on purpose. It just goes to show that I don't pay much of any attention to how my projects end up looking, which means I'm just going to get even more flak as I release any of this stuff. I really need to look more carefully at these things before they are (hypothetically) published.

Meanwhile, as with the other night, I'm putting myself on a slippery slope trying to bring up half-remembered lines off the top of my head and using them as post subtitles. I've read both of those at least half a dozen times, but they're really dipping into the archives; I'm not sure if I've even opened either volume in several months, much less read those chapters. At least one of them I plan to check at some point to corroborate something else I vaguely remembered, so hopefully I'll use that opportunity to correct myself. Being obsessive-compulsive is rather dumb sometimes.

*Yeah, another line that I'm too lazy to try and figure out how to say in English. It's not terribly important to the so-called flow of my blabbing, so those of you who can't read it don't need to feel left out.

Edit (2008.05.03): Fixed vowel length and punctuation in the quote

Typing of which, it turns out that all the years (just barely "all" rather than "both") since I developed the project, I was mistaken in thinking it was a "tower." That scuppers my connection to the Tower of Babel. Of course, the reference to the gargantuan folk of that particular residence hall ends up being worthless, because upon closer inspection, Alighieri seems to have invented the part about Nimrod & Co. being giants himself (since I didn't find it anywhere else, and it's so mentioned in His Majesty's article).

P.S. Hmm, I always wondered where Ms. Yuki got the name "Etemenanki."

In an attempt to avoid being associated with or having the same names as real colleges, I looked up "anthorpe" on Wikipedia, only to receive absolutely no hits. Considering how many I get on Scroogle, this is somewhat baffling, particularly noting that there are no longer unsearchable words. Still, the fact that adding "college" or "university" to Scroogle doesn't turn up anything early on suggests that if there are any, they're obscure enough that I needn't worry about them. Still, Wikipedia would be quite useful to look at what real towns would be associated with the one I use (although it's still allowable because it's not in a real state). From a cursory examination, the hits on Scroogle that are actual locations all seem to be in the UK, and they're not indexed on Google™ Maps.

Also for the same project, I heard something on CA$H CAB about a condition about lack of feeling or something like that called something like "anedonia." Sadly, I didn't have the closed captions open at the time, so I can't figure out how to spell it and thus look it up. Does anyone know of such a thing?*

Edit (2008.05.03): *It was later pointed out to me that it was "anhedonia"—pretty obvious once you think about it.

Unusually enough for me, Project Cow Level has no sex in it, as I didn't have any interest in having such content in a story about tauren and dwarves. While I'm at it, I'm considering keeping the violence to (MPAA) PG as well. That may be difficult for one of my adventure-based (type B) projects, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, as I've mentioned before, Projects Umbra and Homuncupunk are coming to have more and more sex, while Project AnthraXX is coming to have more and more story, thus blurring the gap between A and B. Consequently, AnthraXX is probably the most ready of my original projects, owing primarily to the fact that its setting is heavily based on the real world, thus preventing me from needing to create mecha designs from scratch. Of course, it's still quite controversial, but at least there's plot to thin out the sex and I don't portray YHWH in quite such a bad light. I also think that the witches' and demons' subplot doesn't overpower the main story about the protagonist and heroine, but it's still tangential enough that I haven't completely thrown out the idea of making it a separate project.

In other previews, I've thought about vague subtitles for the three story arcs of Project Homuncupunk:

Part One: The Bounty Hunter
Part Two: The Prodigal Son
Part Three: The Emissary

I chopped the first two down to one word each for better parallelism. The subtitles reflect Jūzaburō's role in the story. ("So, what's with the second one if he turns coat at the beginning?" you might ask. Now that would be telling, wouldn't it?) Riku's backstory relates mostly to the first story arc, but the second half of it has a spoiler for something in the middle of "The Hunter," so where I include that will depend on how long each volume runs. I'm also not quite sure about the wording for the third part (and can't explain without spoiling it), but there's plenty of time to think about that.

I'm thinking of also making Project AnthraXX in three parts, corresponding with the three trimesters of Ms. Brown's freshman year. These would likely be short enough that one volume of the hard copies could be devoted to each, with one extra story as an extra for each. I don't have subtitles for the trimesters, as I don't know quite where the breaks will be, but the first two extras are currently known as "Time-Gilded Paradise Lost" and "The Dark of Gomorrah"; I'm not so sure about the third, as it doesn't really seem to add anything to the series.

As you may remember, I've always tried to posit that my intention with my projects is not to make anything realistic, but to create total fiction. I've tried to express this in recent drafts of the disclaimers. (I had them on the main page, but they quickly outgrew the 2-kB limit. I should probably put them somewhere else so you could access them without joining, but then I'd have to reword the second-to-last sentence. . . .) Of course, I have no knowledge of legal issues, so I just cobbled the document together arbitrarily. If you have any ideas on improving it, I'd be interested in hearing them.

I've also removed a couple of documents from the Project AnthraXX and Homuncupunk sections because they contained the most glaring misogyny on the site. Sadly, those pages were the main sources of information for those two. Hopefully, I'll get around to updating and re-uploading them sometime in the near future.

Just as I was about ready to start on Project Cow Level, Ms. mizuno_youko happened to be getting rid of an old (but still functional for the moment) scanner, and you know how I feel about free stuff. Just for fun, I tried it out before opening it. As you can see, it's perfectly good quality for a fan-comic—to the point that I should be able to draw each page on an 8½×11 sheet and still have the content of a reasonably sized page. (I may upgrade if I ever get to the point that I can make my own projects.) Since I won't be allowed to publish this one in hard copy, I don't think there's any particular reason to keep consistent whether it's portrait or landscape orientation. Actually, I really have no idea how the Comic Genesis engine works, but it's not a big deal. I'll get to that after my proposal is accepted. (Optimism? Who am I and what have I done with archlords?)

Also, as I noted here, I did a very small number of sketches before getting distracted by new comics. (I just got a bunch more after I finished them, so there won't be any more for quite a while.) They're test designs for a couple of main characters, as well as stock tauren. Some notes: *The mask idea came from my belovèd Poisoned Wind Globadiers. However, I was thinking that dwarves don't use warp-technology like Skaven or chaos energy like gnomes and goblins, so I came up with the lower-tech idea of just using some sort of gauze as a filter. Of course, gauze porosity is rather difficult to represent in comic illustrations. More mechanically importantly, the kerchief doesn't fit well over his muzzle (and makes him look a bit too much like a bandit), so I'll probably use a more direct copy of the Globadiers'. As you can see from the sketch in the middle, I wasn't sure about the framework for the cylinder, but upon closer inspection, there's a metal ring around the end. *Dwarven goggle straps don't fit well on races that have heads extending parallel to their lines of sight. I'll probably have them integrated into a cap (again, like the Globadiers) that buckles below the chin. I like the Globadiers' slightly convex lenses, but these are supposed to be based on a standard design (only altered to fit the tauren), so I'm keeping to the original schematics, excepting logistical changes. *I don't know how to properly draw braids, which are an integral part of the character designs for the project. For Aonghus, at least, they'll be solid black, so no one will notice. (Unlike in AnthraXX, he wears colors, so I don't have to go to the trouble of adding non-black lines to delineate him.) For the others, I'll probably use the primitive method seen here. *Speaking of braids, I considered giving Aonghus eartails but nixed that so you could see the chin-strap. *I don't really like cattle's noses with their big open nostrils, so I squished them. *I'm not sure about whether I should leave Aonghus's horn stump bare or use a cap (a couple of test designs on the middle right). I suppose a metal cap would help to emphasize his cosmopolitan appearance.

I pretty much have the first few chapters laid out, so I can get to that whenever I'm less distracted. I was originally going to start with the origin story, but I think it'd be more entertaining if I jumped right into the action. I'm thinking about it putting the flashback in Chapter 2 instead (as Chapter 1 is just an introduction to the team), but I'm afraid of doing that too crudely, like in HELLSING. I at least have an idea to link it to what the characters are doing right after Chapter 1, so hopefully it'll work a bit better.

My readership appears to be at an all-time high (apparently at least two regulars!), but I've accumulated quite a lot of stuff during its absence, to say nothing of my sloth and the fact that I've built up a lot of new things due to year's-end-and-beginning splurging. So, I'd like to see if you have any requests or suggestions. What I've got in the works is as follows:

( Ridiculously long notes )