So This is What I Do When I'm in Serious Pain and Can't Sleep

The best part about Trump being president? We have plenty more ridiculous gifs like this left to come!

So, one of my resolutions for this year was to post on this blog more... As you can obviously tell, it's February and I've already failed to keep that promise. Sorry, but seriously compared to Twenty-thirteen and Twenty-fourteen, the past few years I haven't been posting on this blog much (with only seven posts in Twenty-fifteen and two in Twenty-sixteen) and I intend to change that. Granted, my biggest plan for this blog is to use it as space for extended authors notes for the fanfic I'm currently working on A Charlatan Among Saints, but given that I'm still writing the first draft and of that first draft I'm only on Chapter Three of a planned forty, so yeah... That's gonna take awhile. I guess in the mean time I can tell you a bit about it and what I'm going through with the writing process. I'm not sure how entertaining that's going to be, but it's not like you care. According to my blogs statistics you most likely just came from some obscure Iranian dating site and are probably confused as fuck as to what the hell this is. Welcome to hell my friend. Welcome to hell.

Well, to begin with, let's start with how we got here. No, not in hell. I believe that would be best explained by the gif at the top. No, we're going to tell the story of how I came to abandon the idea of Hi no Nami and decided to work on this new fic.

It all started early on in Twenty-sixteen. At that point, I had been working on and building the world of Hi no Nami for about six years and had been writing the two fanfics The Game of Life and Black Diamond for about three. When I was writing them, I just wanted to tell my own version of the Shugo Chara! story mixed with more adult themes, crossovers with other Animes such as Vampire Knight, Hetalia, and Death Note and the Hunger Games book series, and add in a crap ton of the dark and satirical humor that I loved from shows like Family Guy and South Park. For the longest time, I thought this was a good idea. Clever, even. No one else would probably even think to do anything like this.

...And for good reason. Why? Because it was a terrible idea. First of all, and this was probably the biggest mistake I made with this series, the four of the first five books would have been a complete retread of the original Shugo Chara! series, only with the original characters of Marceline, Sarah, Carl, Taylor, Logan, and Roman thrown in to add side plots and story lines that would mean almost nothing once I got to my own original plot. That was clear and blatant copyright infringement, I did get called out for it (something which will come up again later), and I did correct the problem with what remains of the fics on FFN (It barely contains any scenes from the actual show and what it does contain were the few I actually made changes to.) and I do plan to delete the Hi no Nami blogspot page at the end of this year to erase any and all remaining traces of it. (I'm mostly putting it off to give myself time to save anything I may actually want to.)

The second thing was that the main character was a blatantly over-powered Mary-Sue. Sure, she doesn't display any of the over-powered-ness in what I had written to the point where I had ended it (although she definitely displayed her Mary-Sue-ness), if the series continued on you'd realize how over powered she was. I tried to subvert a lot of this by doing things like giving her legitimate PTSD, giving her some sense of remorse despite her repeated sociopath-like actions, and making the character a romantic asexual (something rarely seen in any kind of media, let alone wish-fulfillment fanfiction.) but she was a terrible person and a terrible character overall and I just couldn't justify continuing on this story or this character anymore.

Thirdly, and I think this one is obvious, but the mix I was trying to create wasn't going to come out good. Anyone could see that. I had too many varying series with too many varying characters with too many varying themes and too many varying types of storytelling to ever make something like that work. Think about it, when you add all of those series and ideas together, it just comes out as a big mess. Seriously, do the math! An anime about a young girl transitioning from one chapter of her life to another with magical girl elements thrown in + a vampire romance story that in some ways is worse than Twilight + a satirical web comic about (possibly homosexual) countries + a psychological thriller consisting of a battle of wits between a young high school student who uses a magical notebook to kill criminals and the detective trying to pursue him + a story about a girl in a dystopian future who rises up against the oppressive government all of those in her world live under + the dark and insane humor from two of the most dark and twisted comedy shows of all time = a huge fucking mess. No amount of tweaking or editing I could even try to do to that story would be able to save it.

Also, I know there's an elephant in the room about the Marci/Logan plotline from Black Diamond, but I don't want to address that other than saying I was trying to parody Fifty Shades of Grey without reading Fifty Shades of Grey. That was the worst idea I ever had, especially considering the implications. That's all I'm gonna say about it.

It took me a long time to accept this, but eventually I realized what pure shit this story was and that, after six long years of trying to find a way to make this work, I had to give it up and move on. Believe it or not, it took a review on FFN for me to realize this. A troll review nonetheless, and even though this fucker told me I should kill myself, they did have one good, legitimate point in their review. What I was doing was copyright infringement and against the law, but the story couldn't stand on it's own without the Shugo Chara! plot weaved into it, and if it couldn't do that, then it had no right to exist at all. So with that, I finally decided to move on.

...But move on to what? Well, that answer came to me faster than I ever expected, and it happened one night just a little over a year ago when my sister forced me to sit down and watch a little movie about two (rather attractive) Irish brothers who are given a mission from God to rid the world of "evil men". Of course I'm talking about... 

Oh hell yes!

Now, I'll be the first to admit that neither this movie, nor it's sequel is the best films I've ever seen (I'd currently give that as a three-way tie between The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Saving Private Ryan.) nor the best films ever made (as many, many, many people who have reviewed these films will tell you) but I still find something that draws me to them and makes me want to re-watch them again and again (other than the aforementioned rather attractive Irish twins). I think it may have something to do with the fact that I find the idea of a civilian taking the law into their own hands is fascinating. Granted, they don't really go deeper into the topic outside of the justification that the brothers got permission from God, so it's okay, and what the brothers say to Rocco after the hit at the Copley Plaza and their speech at the end of the film, and only display the other side of the argument at the end with some of the on-the-street interviews during the end credits, but still it's a topic I'm attracted to and something I've pondered quite a bit since I first heard about Death Note. If you had the power to kill all the evil people in the world, would you?

Obviously after I watched this movie it stayed on my mind for quite a bit. I heard there was a sequel, but it took me awhile to get around to watching it (for no reason other than I'm a lazy fuck who can't even be bothered to sit in front of a single screen and keep my attention on it for over two hours) but while I was between movies my mind (as it often seems to do) began to speculate and form a story around what I thought would happen next in the story with the very little information I had. All I knew about it was that it took place eight years after the first film, the brothers were getting revenge on someone who framed them for the murder of a priest, and this film had a female lead. 

Then I saw the actual movie and it was...

 Thank you, Andy.

Alright, I've warmed up to it after a few viewings, but I do agree with a lot of the criticisms launched at this movie. Specifically that it was, more or less, just a complete retread of the first one.However, the cliffhanger did intrigue me and I am very much curious as to how they are going to handle it in the next movie.

However, despite assurances from Troy Duffy, Sean Patrick Flanery, and Norman Reedus that the third film wouldn't take as long to come out as the second one did, it has now been eight years since the second film came out and we have yet to see any signs of a third, other than clickbait article titles that claim the movie is going to be made soon (that more often than not have Norman Reedus' name featured prominently in the title of the article to draw in anyone who recognizes him from the Walking Dead). The last legitimate information I've heard about the fate of this series is that Troy Duffy has been considering doing a prequel TV series? This was in Twenty-fifteen, though, so this information may be outdated, but that's... Um... I don't know how good that's gonna work out, especially considering that it's pretty much confirmed that Flanery and Reedus will not be starring in it if it actually does get made. So, yeah, that's where we are right now.

So, given the cliffhanger ending, the fact that I already had the beginnings of a story of my own brewing around in my mind, and the fact that I am a twenty-year-old girl with no aspirations, no hope for the future, no job, and nothing better to do with my time, it only seemed natural that my brain would eventually concoct a story that would properly satisfy my need for more, and naturally I would want to share that with the entire world, for some  reason. So, be expecting that sometime soon if our new president doesn't get us all killed.

    Seriously, we made this guy President? This guy?