Another one · 4:04am May 1st
The song up there is pretty fantastic btw, I highly recommend it and the anime it comes from, Sentai Daishikakku (Go! Go! Loser Ranger!). I'm doing this now because, as my track record will show, I will forget if I don't. I cannot do like, anything productive if I've got time off, which is nice since I only spend a few hours in a day actually working at work, but terrible when I have long periods of time off. I'm going to have to find a cafe to go to during longer breaks just so I can get some shit done in the future. It's bad.
Speaking of bad habits, the anime I mentioned up there only has four episodes at the moment, but the manga has 136 chapters with about 20 pages per chapter... and I read all of it. While I like everything it's done so far, there's one moment in the story where our main character asks one of the main rangers a yes or no question, and all he does to answer is smile. It's like three sequential panels, and it's fucking cinematic. It makes what was already a really fucked up situation that much worse, and I can't stop thinking about it. I love, love, love this series, and you really should give it a shot.
While the series has more villains than anything, one major antagonist is such a fun character because his whole thing is "Bro, you just didn't read deep enough into the show, this was in the lore the whole time" and that's literally how his powers work. He just makes shit up on the spot and justifies it by saying 'this one thing happened this one time, it was foreshadowed.' Even the other characters call him out for being bullshit and he continually says, 'nah, bro, go back and watch the episode.' It's actually fantastic. While I've never seen it, people say this is like The Boys with power rangers. If that means anything to you, great. If it doesn't, I'd describe this as power ranges if everything was incredibly morally gray and there are basically no good people in the series. Two of the power rangers are also like, worse than the villains more often than not.
Green Keeper is actually Chainsawman, don't let them fool you.
Unrelated to my new obsession, I'd started a story that I intended to enter into the Wonderbolts contest that just ended submission a little while ago. As they do, the story sort of ballooned out of hand and now I've got about 17K words of half a story that I'd planned to enter. I'm going to finish and publish it anyways, and it will be yet another sequel to Grounded in the bright future continuity this time featuring Prism. I wasn't going to lean super heavy into the continuity of the series since it was initially for the contest, but now that that;s off the table, I'll be going back and adding more references to things that have happened when I do the big edit. For now, since Star Overhead V6 is in the editing phase, I'll work on this until I'm done with it, and I may even post it before the end of the month. I'm making a pretty good pace on my stories (so long as I'm at work, that is), and I usually get two to three solid hours here just to get shit done. On the one hand, I wish I was paid more, but on the other hand, this ain't a bad gig. Essentially, I've achieved my dream of writing for a living... kinda. The story, Glorified, Is more or less about dreams and how to achieve them so I hope you enjoy whatever it is I end up with.
In other other news, I managed to hit my desired word count for April which brings me to about 9K under my current goal. January has so far been the only month I've not met the goal, so I'm pretty happy about that. Provided I can pull that 9K out somewhere, I should be able to get on track or even ahead in the coming weeks. With that in mind, I'd also like to try and finish the Star Overhead series this year. Mostly because I've already got a bunch of ideas for what to do with the girls after they've grown up and I really want to get into a deeper narrative with that. Also, Volume 7, which I know is going to be fun to write. Not to spoil what happens or anything, but there's a character who has been talked about a lot in the series, and the next book is more or less about that character and their impact on everyone else. Comedy and tragedy are my OTP.
Before I expose too much of my plans, I'm going to pivot here to talk about this fucking weak season of anime we're going through right now. Sequels, Isekai Garbage, Romance Garbage, and very little else. That's not to say there aren't some banger sequels coming out right now like Mushoku Tensei 2(2) and and Konosuba 3, but we've also got shit like My Hero Academia: the recap, and Demon slayer is still going on in spite of having a plot and characters written by a ten year old. There's also Slime 3 after like, three years of absence, and Black Butler is also still being animated for some reason? Literally who is watching this shit anymore?
While I'm not going to pretend I'll even watch everything airing, my stand outs this season are as follows:
Shounen action show about a guy who just wants to be a kaiju slayer, but has gotten old working the clean up crew and has just about given up on his dreams. (I took heavy inspiration from this for Glorified). So far, it's promising. The ED is some trash american pop song (genuinely, my least favorite kind of music), but the OP is cool as hell.
REALM OF THE FUCKING BEST GIRL. Ahem, This is about a Prince who has been cursed by a different witch who then decides to climb a witch's tower in hopes of having his wish (to be uncursed) granted. The witch, however, explains that she cannot do that, but will work to do whatever she can to help lift his curse. When she explains ways around his curse, i.e. finding a woman who can withstand the excess magic produced by his children in the womb, he thinks for about a minute before saying, "what about you?" From here follows the quest of our prince to woo the witch and I absolutely love their relationship chemistry. These two are a joy to watch together and the show is fun outside of them as well. The animation goes unreasonably hard too.
People bring their troubles to the bar, and the bartender is there to listen. This is just a relaxed show about the various people who go in and out of a certain bartender's bar and their stories. It's a good time, and really nice to have a drink while watching.
Girl runs moves to Tokyo to get away from her family in an attempt to go to college, all the while her parents are telling her she will fail. Here she meets a member of her favorite band who's thinking of quitting music and moving home all together after parting ways with the other members of that band. "How about we tell the whole world to fuck off and start our own band?"
This show is a 3D animated show, and it looks like it's on par with a studio orange show, i.e. really, really good. The animation is unique, it doesn't seem cheap or done shoddily, and the characters have a good dynamic. I won't call it my favorite show this season, but it's decent, the music is good, and it's not the billionth isekai or random sequel this time around.
See above, if you take no other recommendation from me, please watch this.
Anyways, that's all from me. More on SOV6 and Glorified in the coming weeks provided I can remember to write a blog. I might try to move these to mondays... once I start working mondays again since I've also got next monday off as well, but yeah. Trying for once a week.
Until Next Time~
-KCZ
That video was highly amusing and I bet they had a ton of fun making it.
More material for the "MLP in Real Life" series, eh? This can only be a good thing. In the meantime I finally got my copy of Book 5 in, and I still say that its cover is the best so far. I didn't even notice that the fruit trees in the background weren't uniform until I had the book in my hands.
Hooray for meeting writing goals! I too had a bad January, although that's largely because I didn't specify my goals for the year until it was more than halfway over and I'd been very lazy that month. I've been consistently meeting my goals since February though, and while I'm still 17k behind on my 2024 goals I'm pretty sure I can make that up in the coming months if I just keep this momentum going. It helps when you have things you're genuinely interested in writing, doesn't it?
Girls Band Cry is giving me NaNa flashbacks, despite the details being a little different.
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Like, on top of being just an awesome song too. It's incredibly real and I love it.
Volume 5 definitely has my favorite cover so far and I went back and forth with my artist to get it just right. I'm going to have to figure something out for the recording though because I don't have as good a space for that as I used to. My new room is echoy which may mean I'll be sitting in a closet with my mic for a few hours every day for a while.
Since this one is solidly about the next generation and not parents parenting, I've had to really detail some characters who either had small parts to just names mentioned in other stories. I'm thinking about making a glossary or something, if only just for my own reference.
As far as writing goals go, I've made additions to my spread sheet of where I want to be and where I should be each month. I've made about 1K over my minimum from February onward, so slowly, surely, I'm catching up. It'll be nice when I've hit the target for May and I'm really just piling on.
I believe Girls Band Cry is anime original, so it might actually get a solid ending. There's another show right now called "Jellyfish can't swim in the night" which seems to have a similar vibe that I've been meaning to check out too. I'll definitely let you know how it goes come July or so