mythos revision

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So thankfully we’re at a period of time where we’ve accepted that fanwork isn’t simply the effort of copycats and children, but is a vital part of how a culture interacts with the art it circulates. Sequels and adaptations in commercial media in particular are often (loosely) definable as fanwork given the shifting of roles and new faces. Superhero comics have so many writers per serial overtime that a single character comes to represent the culture it was produced from more than a single auteur’s vision (which is not to diminish the insight of individual creatives).

Anyway, point I was gonna get at was: have any of you kidses ever wanted to be in charge of your own interpretation of a particular piece of media? I was gonna make this just about games but honestly why not make it more inclusive. Games are my thing in this case. I like old videogames for their simplistic narratives because of what you can fit into the negative space. I write a lot of notes on what I’d like to do with certain franchises, though I can’t say for sure what medium I’d use them for. My general philosophy for capital-F Fanwork as opposed to something more official is that canon is negligible.

short version: headcanon thread. spoiler tag the spoilers.

Here’s some of my sloppy notes copypasted from google docs:

Castlevania

  • The disparate relationship between an entire family tree and one continuously reviving entity (is it “reviving” if he’s undead?) and the endless battle between them is a theme I’m a fan of, even if it’s not unique here. Jojo, Zelda, etc.
  • Death being only second to Dracula in power is a really neat symbol, though for narrative sake it might be better to not write Death as simply a subordinate. Maybe he is subordinate, maybe he is a close friend, maybe he is merely someone who uses Dracula to his own ends? The battle between the legendary Belmonts and the impaler himself is of such significance that Death probably stands to gain something from being present.
  • Really interested in the implication (maybe outright statement in-canon) that the castle is alive. A grand piece of gothic architecture that falls apart and rebuilds endlessly in different forms. The fact that the castle falls apart when Dracula dies is significant, but I wonder how much I want to posit that Dracula is the castle’s owner? I like the idea that maybe Dracula stumbled upon the castle in his rise to undead power. Are the hordes of beasts only existent within the confines of the castle, or do they exist elsewhere? Probably the latter, since there are significant entities that end up there (Galamoth, Legion, etc). Anyway, I like having the castle be alive, and while I don’t know about having it be sentient, I do like the concept of it having instinct. I want it to be aware of the Belmont as they move through it. It’s a passive creature, but it pays attention.
  • I love when a really significant thing is titled very simply. The holy whip that is passed down through generations to kill vampires is called the Vampire Killer! It is named for purpose first, which may imply that it gained its holy status sometime after its creation. Probably not actually holy, tbh.
  • Possibly could work Getsu Fuuma Den and 8 Eye’s into this setting!

Sonic the Hedgehog

  • The original sonic games function as a series of more or less the same anti-industrialist fables. Technically the third game (well, both S3+S&K) had the most and narratively kind of replaces the previous two. Nature is exploited and drained, destroyed, or replaced by a maniacal robotist who uses living animals to power machines. Robotnik is portrayed both as a bumbler and an evil mastermind of tremendous potential. The emeralds represent the power of the earth’s resources (yknow, gems). Knuckles siding with Robotnik at first is definitely a metaphor for resource exploitation, since he’s the emerald guardian.
  • Sonic and Tails represent the familial side of nature and how different species support each other (kinda stretching that description). Not sure what to do about Tails’ own inventions lol. Maybe I could make his use natural energy. An aeroplane that is powered by wind/solar? Robotnik is clearly diesel.
  • Metal Sonic is literally the best nemesis I can think of. It’s been downhill since then. Time travelers, apocalyptic monsters, c-clones?. It’s all just garbage. Nothing is a better symbol or nemesis than the Soulless Imitation. I’m a huge fan of the classical trope of the Shadow as an antagonistic force (whether it be the Persona kind, Dark Link, etc), and I feel like it doubles down in this case.

Mega Man

  • He’s literally a Pinocchio boy. Sakurai’s interpretation of Rock in SSB4 is my favorite. When it comes down to it, he’s still a machine, and all his expressions are imitation. He moves stiffly and his eyes are a screen playing an image of someone’s (?) eyes. In the future, X would be built with the technology to feel like humans do, but until then Rock is a prototype. I want a story of Rock becoming aware of the “concept” of humanity, and reaching a similarity of it in his own way, given his limitations. Stories where the puppet literally becomes flesh are cool but I want to explore humanity in nonhuman form. Rock probably doesn’t use first person pronouns, since that implies the knowledge of a self.
  • Light obviously was a huge music nerd in his youth come on. Probably has a ton of vinyls he plays around the lab.
  • Some part of me really likes the concept of Wily as a plagiarist. He either steals robots or their designs.
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Mega Man is Chappie???

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perhaps chappie was the mega man fanfic all this time. perhaps district 9 was space invaders!

I haven’t actually seen chappie but I assume it was treading old ground.

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Extremely old. The movie is a good ass time though. It is recommended by me.

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I haven’t read the Mega Man comics, but have seen some bits I like where they do seem to hit up on the fact that the robots aren’t truly free willed as they first seem, like a fight with Needle Man and Rock is all wanting not to fight and saying that he wasn’t built to fight but took up that role, and Needle Man responds that Rock’s programming is a big broad “help people” or similar which fighting off Wily’s bots applies under, while his programming is explicitly “Destroy Mega Man” with no wiggle room.

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[edit: whoops, somebody mentioned it while I was editing this post. also, bloody [details] don’t work.]

vaguely obligatory mention on imperfect non-human Mega Man depictions with the Archie series depiction, [details=robots with sentient personalities explicitly lacking full free will until the Reploids]

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[/details]

much earlier, roboticists were shown debating over the morality of anthromorphizing tools inevitably to be sent into dangerous situations (“Why give a robot a heart we can break? Why build a robot that could break ours?”). later on, the 2 / 3 robot masters were rebuilt post 3, and half of them agreed to be decomissioned because they refused to have their personalities tampered with to provide peacetime / industrial functionality

…

if I tried to scribble down any personal Touhou headcanon it’d just be a dramatic embellishment of the cosmology of the ever-so-forgotten canon, where the heavens hid away in distanced stasis to save themselves from an unbelieving humanity and left the lesser deities / demons behind. where those both flee as refugees into a liminal fantasy preserve of a simulated distant past, bickering / partying / studying in divisive factions to fuse and forge new identities. where being monsters doesn’t have any future amongst other monsters when you’re no longer anything more than oblique references, and moving on means finding some purpose in a society of former tales while absorbing any nearby related properties one can get

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And speaking of Reploids and their free will, I haven’t kept up with X canon in eons, did the games ever go back to Mavericks just being assholes instead of the whole “It was a virus all along!” that took the oomph out of the whole free willed robot thing?

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To be totally honest, I’m mostly oblivious to X canon. I only ever really played most of the first! That virus concept certainly kills the premise, though.

Also clearly the writer for Archie Mega Man is doing my dream job or something. I should read them if they’re all that fun.

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When I was in college, playing through the Megaman collections that came out, I sorta started making this made up version were he’s just a kid in his pajamas and a football helmet, who is an only child and is lonely, so he makes up this world and robot masters based on stuff around him. In some versions, the masters were other kids in the neighborhood who thought he was weird or something. Obviously, Dr. Light is just his single parent dad. Never really came up with a concrete person who Wily was, though I probably could.

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My pet theory is that the monsters are essentially the castle’s immune system, and it attracts or creates them specifically to fight the Belmonts/Alucard/Etc. The more damage the hero does, the stronger the immune response becomes. Dracula using this as a “feature not a bug” of his abode is interesting, but potentially more interesting would be the castle using Dracula as the ultimate defense response, essentially making the castle into the creator of the Belmonts’ and Dracula’s self fulfilling prophecies.

I’m all into these nonsensical but ultimately technical explanations of things

For instance! Pikmin 1 and 2 ostensibly take place within a short time of each other. But yet! There is no human technology in Pikmin 1, but in Pikmin 2 you find fucking Duracell batteries. So the planet is definitely Earth, or somewhere near it. I like the idea that the Olimar lives in an alternate dimension where time passes much more quickly, but when he lands on Pikmintopia (whatever the planet is called) time slows down to a normal human scale for him. So as soon as he leaves, relatively, the planet develops by hundreds or thousands of years. And the treasures he finds are the things that humans lose and drift into his dimension.

Shamefully, this theory is based on an episode of Voyager.

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Ah, I just assumed he landed in a different garden – a nature park in 1, and someone’s trash heap in 2?

Amusingly they lack the sensors or eyeballs to detect massive cities from orbit!

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You revisit old locations in Pikmin 2, sorry!

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does everyone think that fanwork is a vital part of how a culture interacts with the art it circulates

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i do and i am obviously the most important person

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I always wish those energies had gone into creating entirely original work; piggybacking gets a boost of notoriety in exchange for creating less new in the world. I get tired of the internet’s endless churn through the same products, the Infinite Recombinator, and how that is beginning to inflict commercial pop art.

I like the shock of the new! Down with the comfort of the regurgitated! Cast your ideas in new skins so they can prove themselves on merits they alone possess!

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and yeah I still think about the ME3 ending thing and can’t not take sides because subverting expectations is my prerogative and favorite

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So fangames annoy me because I wish they had made new things with that level of effort; the promise of user-generated content in anything with real fidelity (Minecraft escapes, but Mario Maker, Little Big Planet, etc suffer) has curdled into references.

Some of this is I old now (read: was ten when I first used internet), but I wonder how much this is like action figure play. I’ve never cared for toy roleplay and never got much out of action figures; do people enjoy Minecraft skins because they roleplay as another character in this world?

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Unpack this

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I am a staunch defender of fan content and derivative works! I don’t think that people create derivative works because they wish to have the notoriety, I think they genuinely wish to engage with their favorite things in a meaningful, creative way!

It is fundamentally different from creating a totally new work (which is itself impossible but let’s not get into semantics), and I think should be considered separately. It’s the same argument as “well you could have spent all that guitar hero time getting better at guitar,” i.e. that certain things are inherently more valuable. But they are different, and only compared because they seem similar on the surface.

So for instance, a work of fan fiction about Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy becoming lovers in their last year at Hogwarts is a subversion of an existing work and therefore more powerful than a “new” creative work about two magicians who fuck.

And yeah, I read it, it was great. I can’t get it out of my head, they’re so right for each other (if you ignore much of what happened in canon (the author is dead))

Right, anyway, what was I saying?

So yes, fan works are very much a different beast than other types of creative works, and have a value all their own. They’re a conversation rather than a statement, and a way for fans to modify and claim things they are passionate about.

Perhaps take this with a grain of salt - it’s coming from a person who views Super Mario World ROM hacks as minor political statements and reclamations of a public figure that should, by all rights, belong to the public by now. I obviously take it very seriously.

I agree, however, that things like the Marvel Movies and endless commercial regurgitation of the same ideas in slightly different coats of paint is nauseating. It sucks. In fact, I would argue that it is the opposite of a fan work. The same author (or company, whatever) repackaging their ideas strictly to make money rather than make any meaningful statements or subvert expectations is the opposite of what I respect about fan works.

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I only have a lot of experience with Mario Maker, but I think this is largely because the audience is young, and creativity at that age usually is just referencing things you know about. Older authors learn to shroud their references better.

In my experience, it’s an expression of one’s aesthetics rather than a role playing experience. My current skin is the Raincoat Killer from Deadly Premonition because that is the only game I truly love (not true).

i’m kinda going hog-wild in this here thread huh? i forgot how passionate i am about fan works while not really creating any myself.

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Here’s my understanding of the situation:

The ME3 ending angered people because:

  • It wasn’t what people were expecting
  • It didn’t include a ‘total victory’ ending

But those elements were central to the thrust of the endings: it was unexpected because this ending was set up in ME1 and not properly followed through on by ME2 or 3 (good job BioWare); it didn’t allow total victory because this was fundamentally unresolvable by force, a central theme of ME1 (also mostly dropped in ME2, 3).

I see the relationship as a storyteller’s relationship: here is a model of how the world works and the consequences arising from it. The lessons to be taken from it are directly created by the storyteller.

But it’s clear than many fans have a different relationship: here is the story I want to tell with these tangible details. Why can’t I tell my own story?

So, it it legitimate to intentionally take player control away in a story? Is this a useful tool? I think it’s great to shock and anger people, to get them to really think about the argument you’re making. You can’t give them comfort forever because then you’re never challenging their assumptions.

I don’t like art (even pop art) that gives me everything I want. I really don’t like arguments that a given piece should have a different message so that it can’t be misconstrued – an argument you see often around films.

So I get defensive when a massive pressure campaign builds up to change the ending of a story, and even moreso when the publisher caves and spends a million or two on content to inflect their mistake. Don’t think that that isn’t a lesson that won’t be applied in the future.

(even though he too often uses his powers for stupid, I can’t not love Kojima and his endless ability to be wildly popular while subverting expectations. I love MGSV act 2 by the way)

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