oh my god why the fuck did i have this idea
lets call it
FIVE PITCHES FOR IMAGINARY ANIME SHOWS
wait! I still have a KICKSTARTER running for my NEW BOOK.
Only THREE DAYS to go if you want this book! We may never re-print! KS ends on Thursday Dec 1st at 7pm UK Time!
LEGEND OF PSYDUCK WARS
Psyduck can't say anything but "Psyduck" or derivations thereof, but Psyduck can read minds and thereby knows all about language and the thoughts and dreams of others and it is in their voices that Psyducks story is told, a kind of epistolary tale.
Like a Philip K Dick story from the point of view of psyduck; decaying realities, conspiracies, fractured memories, identity manipulation.
A saga of the Pokemon universe, a story of psychic warfare, occurring over generations, hidden from most of the Pokemon world. A secret war! fought in shadows! A war over the nature and perception of reality itself with the aesthetic of the 'spooky' Pokemon cryptoculture elements like the ghosts and fragments, strange stories, lost levels of old games, that decayed pixel art look, glitch art.
I feel like I might be the wrong writer for this as actually I know almost nothing of the lore of the Pokemon universe and most of the crackpot theories are things I’ve heard other discuss first but for a start;
Pokemon being a Post-Apocalyptic land - I think there is allegedly a single 'soldier' character in the lore and no army for him to belong to.
Pokemon being slaves - the first Pokemon game was meant to end with you deciding not to play digital dog fights with your Pokemon any more as they were Sentient and often quite self-aware, but in fact this carried on and expanded, why? Universal mind-wiping and memory alteration.
Ghost Pokemon - what are they the ghosts of?
honestly there are a tonne of these
So the series would be a diegetic investigation of all the cryptic Pokemon lore and all the inconsistencies and incoherencies of that imagined world, treated not as fictional constructs but as actual ruptures in reality, brought about by and cloaked by psychic power, the actions of spirits or world-ending abominations
And only Psyduck knows the horrible Phillip K Dick truth of this reality and cannot speak it but must instead be a lonely guardian over the invisible fissures in consensus reality. For if the ordinary people knew how fragile their constructed truth really was the centre would not hold
and madness, or despair, would engulf all.
COW MASTER: FIRST HERD
An historical agricultural procedural;
It’s the fertile crescent about 11,000 bc. Aurochs haunt the plains! Unkillable monsters! No man may face them and live!
In a valley somewhere a genius is born! But - his father is killed by an Aurochs. He swears revenge, he will defeat the Aurochs - ALL OF THEM, and make them slaves to the tribe! (this series does have milk fetish elements).
What follows is a deep dive into (late Neolithic?) proto-agricultural culture and a perhaps multi-generational saga of researching, capturing, breeding and living with the descendants of wild Aurochs and their conversion into cows. Really going in deep on each individual problem and the procedural methods for solving them.
Because the main character is totally obsessed with cows it’s as much an in-depth look at them (cows) as it is about the culture of the main character. Like any situation where you learn a huge amount about someone, or something, sympathy results and the story is as much a strange one of reconciliation between man and cow. Maybe the main character turns against the taming project at the last minute but now it is TOO LATE as there is simply too much power in the COW. Society has changed, probably forever.
This could be part of a series about the gradual assembly of the Eurasian agricultural animal 'package', including Dog, Horse, Cow, Sheep and possibly Pig, and Chickens could be a mini-series
(no Goat Master as really we have never truly mastered Goats), (and there could be a Cat series but that would have to be called 'Man-Master: First Purr' since in that case the taming process went the other way round), not sure what genetics is currently telling us about the timing of these various animals. I think a few of them may have common, quite narrow bottlenecks.
Really the development of the Eurasian agricultural package is perhaps the longest, most intensive and most productive scientific project in human history. Since all of these creatures were originally either useless or dangerous to us and the end of the process you eat your eggs then get on your horse to go out with your dog and round up your sheep and cows.
Only now, with this series, do we fully understand just how strange and miraculous the nature of these symbiotic servant species truly is!
MARLBOROUGH!
A multi-series epic following John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, from (relative) penury through service to the King to becoming the ultimate super-diplomat, scheming bastard and possibly the best field general Britain has ever had.
Key thing here is that Marlborough was an irl Bishonen when he was young, so you can have hott young Marlborough for the first few series, and then we get older Marlborough, a very classical japanese/anime protagonist, (actually I'm pretty sure the main guy in Legend of the Galactic Heroes is partially based on Marlborough, specifically his looks and how he got his place in court), the warm/cold mysterious charming manipulator who take incredible risks and gets away with it.
Confidant of the King, he betrays him at exactly the right moment, (and possibly before), and issues in the Glorious Revolution. Later he battles in Europe while his wife is frigging off the Queen!
Big battles! clever tactics! outrageous risks! fantastic fashions! Wonderful hair! Secret plans, told to no-one which turn the tables at the last minute, a wonderful villain in Louis the whatever.
There really hasn't been a BIG pop culture depiction of the 'Age of Ann' that I can think of; the Glorious Revolution and the early days of the Saxe Cobergs. There is 'The Favourite' but that’s arthouse and ignores the quite-interesting Euro-geddon, omni-scheming and giant armies marching
men pointing at maps
That anime thing where a single fight takes like nine episodes would actually work pretty well for a very large period battle, you could spend each episode following one character and group, isolated in their experience and makind decisions based on what they know and as you watch more of the episodes you get more of a global awareness of the battle than any group in it, so what before seemed like heroism may be foolishness, what seemed like a crazy risk was actually part of a clever plan etc, then in the last episode you cut to Marlboroughs POV with his just-according to-plan speech about how he planned to win this particular battle.
(Oddly enough one of Marlboroughs (way down the lists) soldiers was a Captain Blackadder.)
The massively different versions of Marlborough you get depending on whose record or analysis you read would fit quite well into a multi-person epistolary view where the focus of each episode moves from person to person, with each of them having an entirely different opinions of Marlborough, so he could be the 'villain' of his own series for an episode etc.
THE PATH TO POWER
Anther multi-series epic about a politicians career based on a very long biographical series. (Honestly if you stripped out the endless repetitions and re-descriptions, each book would be about the length of an anime series), along with an involved social history of the United States.
Nice thing about Caro is that he writes, and or finds, _scenes_, not just information; Johnsons fathers vividly described physical and mental collapse as he bankrupts the family. Young LBJ writing his name in huge letters on the school blackboard. Young LBJ insisting on being the one to ride the mule to school. LBJ betrays Leland Olds and destroys him in the senate! LBJ an the meeting where his team schemes up a way to escape the corruption charges which will tank his (second) senatorial election, the high-risk move of going straight to the supreme court!
And the first series has LBJ going to college! Its a fucking school drama! Classic Anime! Along with LBJ being an utterly evil scheming prick and using every questionable method imaginable, from secret societies to whisper campaigns to straight-up blackmail, to take CONTROL OF THE STUDENT COUNCIL - its literally the birth of an Anime Villain
THE STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT WAS REINCARNATED AS CANNON FODDER IN A NIGHTMARE FUTURE
Its a post-isekai isekai which reverses the usual socio-cultural matrix of the classic isekai which is; introverted loner and social failure gets reincarnated into a world where he can become a hero.
Instead we have a high-achieving athletic, social and sane normie, just an all-round great guy
who happens to also be very successful and generally a positive influence, (and it’s important that he is generally a rational, logically positive person, intelligent and adaptable), and somewhat successful with the ladies. Great future ahead of him, well-liked, and deserves it.
Then he gets reversed over by Truck-kun and wakes up in the off-brand 40k Nightmare Future where he has been forcibly recruited into the auxilia and is thrown into the meat-grinder against the demon robot forces.
Key thing is - he is still the same guy, still intelligent and capable, a natural leader and at least to begin with, fundamentally a good person, so he rapidly gets over his shock and does his best to survive and even thrive and decides, since he has protagonist energy, that he is going to bring sanity, reason and decency to the grimdark future.
However instead what we get to watch is the slow corruption and maddening of an anime protagonist as every victory, success or story of survival against the odds involves the Student Council President more and more deeply in the broken moral ecology of his new reality until he slowly becomes exactly the kind of corrupt, deranged and cybernetic maniac who would order the retrieval of random souls from parallel worlds to recruit into the penal legions or whatever.
Been rewatching Treasure Island with my son. Best anime show ever made, I'm convinced, because let's face it: No one does period pieces set in Europe (or european culture) better than the Japanese. So I'd totally want to watch your Marlboro-show.
ReplyDeleteI've talked a bit on my blog before about how for as popular and ubiquitous as pokemon has become, and for all the weird deep lore stuff that people explore, there have been surprisingly few attempts to meaningfully explore the full implications of it.
ReplyDeleteThe implication of a big Pokemon War, the fact that children go off on frivolous monster fighting adventures; it always had to me a sort of Mad Max 1 vibe- like there is still a vague semblance of civilization as we once knew it, the remaining adults still remember, but the children have only known this anarchy. They set off for monster collecting and battling and adventure because they rightfully don't see a future in the old ways, the adults are just holding on to a fading fragment of the past.
I also thought the Detective Pikachu movie did a good job of demonstrating how Pokemon are really more like Sídhe, Nature Spirits, Fey Creatures, however you want to think of it. Some of them are intelligent, much more so than humans, but ultimately they mostly don't really have autonomy or agency in the way we think of it. I think this view on it makes them more interesting than if they were just glorified animals, reconciles some of the things that don't otherwise make any sense, and also bypasses some of the inherent grossness of the animal abuse side of it.
Also wrt the Neolithic setting, Sofinho / Alone in the Labyrinth / Pariah is imo the king of Neolithic psychedelic OSR, but I do agree that there is much more to explore here. The burgeoning of civilization as a concept, of much of what we think of humanity and the world, the biomancy or geomancy (or engineering if you will) of it all, Neolithic "cyber"-augmentation, there's a lot to explore there.
I feel like I really missed the boat on not being into Pokemon as a kid. It is the one cultural touchstone amongst my peer group that I envy others intuative knowledge of..
DeleteMaybe there is room in this world for a sad, ellagic Pokemon book
I'd prefer the psyduck story as a bizarre folio similar to the atrocity exhibition over an anime. But I want the der0 book first!
ReplyDeleteI'll do what I want!
DeleteWill you, Patrick? Will you be able to, knowing a man you have never nor will ever meet is sitting halfway around the world with his exact personal consumerist itch left unscratched? How do you sleep at night you beast
DeleteI take it that The Path to Power would depict the Texan high schools of LBJ's youth as unusually palatial buildings.
ReplyDeleteNever watched an isekai in my life, so the pastiche elements may be beyond me. Still, there's something grimly arresting about Canon Fodder.
Nope I would d Path to Power as accurately as possible. Its a social history as much as it is a political one, and LBJ's poverty as a youth, the great depression, him going to the college for poors in the Hill country, all of those are vital for telling the whole story of the man and the nation.
DeleteShould be an episode of Cannon Fodder where an enemy psyker reads Class President’s mind to impersonate characters from his past life. Like Class Prez thinks he meets ex-classmates as resurrected soul-stolen soldiers but it's all a ruse.
ReplyDeleteOr he finally gets morally corroded enough that he makes the regimental Psyker re-write the minds of act-alikes so that they *think* they are his classmates. Or even we never find out if they truly are or not but his obsession and need for them means he treats them as such.
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