Being that I completely forgot to mention it in my last post, I actually meant to lead up to a rambling of sorts on the feasibility of importing various cultural norms from the 97th Non-Administered World into the Midchilda setting of post-StrikerS Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha.

The gist of the matter is that going by Hard Science, there is no reason whatsoever for our holidays and traditions to turn up in any recognizable form for the native denizens of Midchilda. And yet, from the squishy softness of the sci-fi of MSLN, it somehow seems plausible for the characters to be celebrating Christmas or some such, albeit possibly by another name.

And seeing as this is, at base, an anime made in Japan for predominantly Japanese consumers, the holidays featured would be Japanese ones, as well as Japanese interpretations of international occasions. The canon has not, to my knowledge, dealt with this in any depth as such; there’s the post-A’s O-Hanami in the Sound Stage (third one, I think), which involves mainly the Uminari City set of people, the Wolkenritter (who’ve probably gone native), and the crew of the Arthra (who might conceivably have picked up on Lindy’s slightly warped Japanophilia). Tanabata will probably be given a pass, since it’ll be fairly obvious to all that the stars on Midchilda will probably not look the same as on Earth.

Yet, the possibilities for fanfiction are tempting. We could use Nanoha’s knowledge of her own culture to introduce Vivio to the joys of Hinamatsuri; Subaru and Ginga could have picked it up from Genya, and Caro from Fate (who, in turn, probably learned of it from Lindy or the Takamachis). Christmas-analogues are so common among the softer edge of speculative fiction, especially those marketed at a mass enough audience, that it is within the realm of Keeping To The Spirit of the Nanoha-verse to include something like it, particularly as Christmas is seen as a primarily romantic holiday in Japan. The religious aspects might be interpreted through the Church of the Sankt Kaiser, which could lead to some awkwardness on the part of Vivio.

All of this (and the previous post) was actually inspired from something which I took for granted when writing anime fanfics: Valentine’s Day. The complex interplay of Will She Or Won’t She, shading into Is She Or Isn’t She, revolving around the one emotion which makes it all indispensible: hope. On a less dramatic note, there’s always the puppy love image (although with the Three Years Later of the SSX sound stage, the dynamics have gotten more… interesting) of Caro and her handmade chocolates presented shyly to a furiously-blushing Erio. Of course, if we’re willing to break the mood with some comedy, Lutecia could be standing by with her own handmade chocolates, Ensuing in Hilarity.

Which is still quite tame, compared to the potential of my favourite StrikerS duo.

Teana: Just so we’re clear, this is obligation chocolate, and nothing more! Obligation chocolate! There’s no deep or hidden meaning in this, okay?!
Subaru: ^_____^

The Time-Space Administration Bureau of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha oversees at least 97 “non-administrated” worlds, since Earth is number 97. The title of “non-administered” is distinct from “uninhabited”, so we can assume that all of these worlds have some sort of population. The number of “administered” worlds is unknown, but is probably more than one. Depending on how accurately certain sources have been translated, the highest number I know of offhand is either 12 or 61.

Judging by events in the series, the Prime Directive is loosely enforced in the case of the non-administered worlds, and there is no injunction against revealing the existence of the TSAB when necessary.

Due to MSLN’s position on the scale of sci-fi hardness at a general consistency of ketchup, we have yet to have any problems with language barriers, much less culture shock.

It’s a bit hard to decide the traits for a brand new character who’s supposed to seem a bit “foreign”. Foreign to where? Japanese elementary school children can converse perfectly well with magical artefacts speaking in English, and do battle complete with banter with magically-constructed beings from several thousand years ago, who wield weapons speaking in German. Later, all of them head to an alien world where everyone speaks Japanese. We may postulate the existence of translator microbes, or some sort of magical equivalent, but That Way Lies Madness, where the soft sci-fi of MSLN runs head-on into the hard sci-fi tendencies of fandom.

For the sake of our collective sanity, we’ll leave out of our considerations the creator in-joke of naming almost every significant character after a motor vehicle or associated aspect. This does provide for some odd mental images when I see an ad for the Nissan Teana.

The core media of MSLN is the anime, and it clearly eschews physical, sociological, and anthropological barriers in order to tell a Cool Story. Later, the extra materials of the Sound Stages, the manga, the DVD informational booklets, and random creator interviews attempt to explain away the inconsistencies after the fact, but these usually raise more questions than they answer.

Thus far, I’ve had to completely discard two entire fanfic uberplots due to canonical incompatibilities that have, in the anime, all the emphasis of a passing mention, or a single medium-sized manga panel. (Indeed, the first attempt was shot down because of a single manga panel, which I had hitherto not seen before.) Altering the plot is inconceivable, quite literally; an odd quirk in the way I formulate stories means that these uberplots are extruded whole, a complete work requiring only filler text to be presented as a finished item. On the upside, everything is tightly-plotted, and the guns of Anton Chekhov sound off in perfect time. On the downside, it’s all a house of cards, and I don’t think that I should continue the bizarre metaphors any longer than necessary.

All of this has given me a sort of blase attitude towards writing MSLN fanfic. While I try to scrutinize every aspect of my Card Captor Sakura fanfics for inconsistencies, the ever-changing canon explanations for How Things Work in the Nanoha-verse has led me to fall back upon the default answer of “Because”. I shall have Vivio and several friends attempt a school project, botch it horribly, and then try to hide the results from Grown-Ups, at least until Nanoha-mama comes home and wonders why Zafira has grown thirty times his usual size. Is Vivio even able to do this? Isn’t she supervised closely by the authorities? Would her accidental mischief be allowed to go that far? What of the laws of conservation of mass? I’m certainly open to suggestions, but as long as I can present a given quantity of fun, regardless of what readers think afterwards, then I consider my mission well and truly accomplished.

And yes, I have been criticized for this already. Not my stories, but my belief in just letting things be. The slippery slope is brought up quite often, as well as accusations that I have completely done away with Common Sense. I have yet to truly grok why the debating techniques used are so… antagonistic.

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha has a weird place in my List Of Anime I Like. Every time someone asks me about my Top Ten (or Five or Three) anime, number one will obviously be Card Captor Sakura, and number two will be The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, since both of them made me see the world in a whole new way. (For non-anime fandoms, this also applies to Discworld.) After that, things get kind of fuzzy; I like a lot of anime, but not so much that I’d stridently defend them against all comers the way I do for my top two. For the most part, I might be sorry if they didn’t exist (say, for Princess Tutu), but for all I acknowledge their quality and enjoyability factor, they didn’t completely reshape my world the way CCS and TMoHS did. There’ll always be something else, at least for me.

By all rights, MSLN should be the same way. Which is why I’m not entirely sure why I place it as my number three anime of all time (counting all three seasons together), but it seems right, somehow.

There are several possible reasons for this. Off the top of my head, I recently got into an argument with another MSLN fan, which would have been extended if I hadn’t decided to cut it short with an Agree To Disagree clause. (I didn’t feel like dealing with that person’s antagonistic and confrontational debating technique. I understand that it’s How They Are, but I also reserve the right to not like it.) The gist of it was that he could not comprehend why I preferred the magical girl aspects of the show, while I could not explain why I did. I’ve heard several independent opinions on this multi-genre appeal of MSLN, in that there’s Something For Everyone, and I believe that there’s some aspect of this in play here: the person I was arguing with likes MSLN because, to him, it was very little like the magical girl series he disliked, and he hopes that future seasons or productions would remove the remaining magical girl aspects he found annoying. For me, I like MSLN because despite all the cross-genre reputation, it still has magical girl aspects at heart, and I hold out my own personal hope that these will never depart from the series.

One of us is obviously and logically going to be disappointed.

And it is something in that magical girl aspect of MSLN which snagged me with a hook for fanfictional ideas, which makes it prominent among the anime I’ve watched: only two other anime have made me write this many stories for them, and MSLN has surpassed CCS in terms of the number of story concepts I’ve come up with. (The champion, if you’re wondering, is still Ranma 1/2.)

A part of it could be due to the bad parts of the show. I generally write fanfic when I get either one of two reactions to watching something: “This is awesome!” and “This could have been awesome, but it’s not. I can do better than this!” The Nanoha-verse is full of Cool Ideas, and regardless of how the canon characters and their adventures are protrayed, the Cool Ideas remain.

There’s also my start in writing fanfiction for ReBoot. A mage and her Intelligent Device is not that much different from a Guardian and his Keytool, and the idea of freelance (or close enough to it, at least) troubleshooters with Special Powers that go around Protecting People is a strangely compelling one. Superheroes with a loose organization and official approval, of sorts.

This setup makes it friendly for original characters, unlike TMoHS, where the SOS Brigade is fairly well-formed already and any recurring additions will just seem like an intrusion, or CCS, which already has a complete uberplot, necessitating major fanfic-only characters to exist in prequels, sequels, or another continuity. And interaction with the canon cast can be dictated as simply “the TSAB told you to”, which does away with the usual plot contortions to get the new character in the same general area as the canon cast, much less meeting them.

The net result is a bit like my view of Spore: if pressed, I can’t say that it’s good. In fact, it’s a little bit shallow, and there’s not a whole lot of substance in there which stands up to close scrutiny. But that doesn’t stop me from spending six hours a day playing around with the universe in question.

This is likely to be but the first post in a series. So it goes.

It requires a bit of discipline, or at least a healthy amount of guilt, in order to stick to even the vaguest schedule for blogging. Best-laid plans and all that, however, expecially when one is laid low by Real Life and illness, thus reducing the available time for Deep Thoughts about anime. I could regurgitate yet another Nanoha GamerS comic, or a quick one-liner with regards to some new facet of the Summer Season in the 2008th Year of our Lord and Saviour Sephiroth the Pretty, but that feels a bit like cheating. So I’ll shift one square to something in the general proximity of anime in general, even if it is not exactly blogging about anime as much as blogging about stuff related to anime.

In this case, anime fanfiction. Yes, again.

I’m still working on several pieces of fanfiction at the same time, in an astonishing display of multitasking that probably would be more impressive if it weren’t about sock-puppeting fictional characters owned by other people into some semblance of plot and drama. One of these stories is, as has been mentioned before (and which I am too lazy to link to), something set in the universe, nay, multiverse of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, post-season three. I have a large and unfeasibly detailed timeline of events which spans one thousand and five hundred years, albeit clustered with specific dates in the periods where the stories actually take place. The cast stretches to, if not thousands, then at least Far Too Many to be comfortably introduced without the reader feeling like they’ve stumbled onto a Baby Picture conversation. (You know the type.)

This is considered par for the ficwriting course for me. What struck me hard enough to trigger a seed of blog post inspiration, and this is not very hard at all, was the assertion that since I have so many original characters, this was no longer a work of fanfiction, but original fiction instead.

I can, with some effort, understand the claim: after all, for the most part, fanfic readers wish to read about the canon characters, rather than the diseased creations of an amateur author’s fevered imagination. What they want the canon characters to do is best left for another discussion, especially since I’m trying to keep this blog at least somewhat family-friendly. The gist is that since the canon characters take something of a backseat to the action in the fanfic, it is no longer worthy of that “fanfic” label. What it is to be called now is anyone’s guess.

And yet, I cannot quite tell the story I wish to tell without both using the world of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, as well as relegating the canon characters to the sidelines, at the same time. This is not for lack of trying, but just that the story requires several character types who do not appear in a major capacity in the canon. In fact, the only one who qualifies is Yuuno, who was carefully set aside to the relegation bench from a large part of StrikerS, possibly due to possession of a Y chromosome.

The Nanoha-verse is large, varied, intriguing, and almost criminally unexplored. There is a great deal of background information in the setting that we simply Do Not Know, a limitation which apparently Seven Arcs share as well, considering how bizarre some of their explanations have been. (How many moons are there over Midchilda?) And the large majority of the canon character show absolutely no sign of interest in exploring these mysteries, preferring instead to blow things up. I have created my original characters almost by necessity, for lack of anyone else to act as the Watson to Yuuno’s Sherlock.

If anyone else has any better idea on how to proceed, I’m certainly open to suggestions. Or, to be honest, I will be once I get over this accursed virus.

I’ve been bitten by the fanfiction bug, again.

This isn’t to say that I’m abandoning all my other stories, but like my habit of starting new characters in City of Heroes without first attending to the level grinding of older ones (a habit known among CoH players, and probably MMORPG players in general, as “altitis”), I shall be juggling multiple self-imposed responsibilities in the service of my hobbies, in much the same way I will move mountains for that which I find interesting, but will recoil away from anything remotely resembling actual work.

Shin of Atarashii Prelude has made posts on this phenomenon here, here, and here, if you wish to find out more. I have inadvertantly ramped up my participation in the associated AnimeSuki thread, which has taken on the self-appointed task of establishing what appears to be an unofficial Official Fanon, at least with regards to the AnimeSuki community, if not wider. I have no official place or title in this New Order, but I spam my input anyway, because the Muse is a chronic workaholic.

For those who are inveterately lazy, I welcome you as fellow slackers, and provide a brief summary of the concept: switch the genders of the characters in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Explore the possibilities.

My interest in this endeavour is manifold, and I should admit in the interests of full disclosure that not all of the reasons are entirely wholesome. The general impression of Female Kyon, who has apparently gained a fandom nickname of “Kyonko” (there’s a whole list of fandom nicknames for the genderswapped counterparts, as well as alternates due to this being fandom), is that of a short ponytailed snarky girl. Someone described her as “aww… tiny little cute sarcastic person“, and I keep that description close to my fanboy heart, if only because it is reinforced by the fanart (mostly worksafe) of exactly that.

But I’ve always identified more easily with Itsuki, and in keeping with the “more good-looking than thou” motif, Female Itsuki provides the eye-candy. (If you’re wondering, Female Itsuki’s Japanese fandom name is Itsuki-with-different-kanji, while her English fandom name is Itsuko. I tried to push for “Mitsuki” a bit half-heartedly, but it didn’t stick.)

On a more rarefied level above the cries of “squeee cute“, I’ve always been fascinated by switching gender roles in stories. And I do mean “gender roles”, using the slightly more sociological definition, rather than simply changing the Y chromosome to X and vice versa. If I change the characters from male to female, and vice versa, what would the effects be on both their fictional environment and the consumers of that fiction?

Almost by necessity, the large-scale “everyone changes” projects are the domain of fanfiction. There are several stories out there with a single character, or perhaps a very small group of them, who change genders, but everyone else remains the same. Whether or not gender roles are explored in the first place, and how far they go if so, varies greatly. In Ranma 1/2, Ranma’s experiences with cold water are often played up for comedy, or occasionally as an aspect of battle. In Kashimashi, Hazumu’s alien-induced sex change focuses on the romantic angle, and takes a back seat to the love triangle which forms (with all three participants being female).

In those cases, the plot is that the character used to be Male, and now he’s Female. (Or vice versa, but I’ll use Male-to-Female as a convenient example.) The main characters know that the Female used to be Male. The story, if it bothers to, could revolve around how the former Male now comes to terms with being Female, and how the other characters react with the Female That Is when they’re used to the Male That Was.

And then there’s the other approach, which is that the character has always been Female, and how this would make the story inherently different from the canon Male version. Expand it, and now everyone is genderswapped; how does this change things? Alter the initial conditions, and watch how the experiment progresses.

To take the MoHS example, we have Haruhi Suzumiya, loud and brash. Now convert her to one Haruki Suzumiya (the Japanese fandom appears to prefer the name “Haruhiko”, as in “Haru-hiko” rather than “Haruhi-ko”), and consider what reactions to this person would be like. Would he be seen as a delinquent? Would he be called a “loudmouthed nutjob” to his face? In fact, how different would he be, when he gets going, from the stereotypical loud-and-brash shounen protagonist made of GUTS and COURAGE?

What of Mikuru Asahina, now converted into a shy wide-eyed boy named Mitsuru Asahina? Opinions appear divided about whether he’s still supposed to wear the bunnygirl outfit, even after the change. Is he to crossdress (the costumes forced on him by Haruki, of course)? Would he be wearing a maid outfit, or a butler outfit? Would The Adventures of Asahina Mitsuru Episode 00 be focused on the travails of a time-travelling combat butler?

Such considerations can occupy us happily for weeks. The genderswapped versions of the girls into bishounen appears to have a surprisingly high acceptance rate among the male portion of the fandom, and the guys-into-girls of Itsuki and Kyon have garnered approval from the female portion. Apparently the appeal of Altered Interactions is enough to overpower the mere lure of fanservice.

I will have to admit that when writing out the first-person narrative of Kyonko, I have drawn heavily on my experiences in female-dominated fandom communities. After Fandom Wank and Television Without Pity, neither of which I have participated in but both of which I have delved deeply into, I have no illusions on women being any more “gentle” than men. I have ramped up the snark and sarcasm level, and may Haruhi have mercy on my ficwriting soul.