Villain Names and Secret Societies

Anytime you talk about comic books and the like, someone outside the genre notes that the entire thing is unrealistic.  While the superpowers and a number of the pieces of equipment are definitely in the land of fantasy, a lot of other things take flack as well.  A number of people note the ridiculousness of the different code names and villains, secret identities and secret societies and what not.

Fantasy Ethnicities

So there's a rather humorous youtube video up showcasing the similarities between the Streetfighter franchise and the characters in Naruto.  It's called There can be only one.  Of course, the fact that streetfighter characters are basically raw martial artist archetypes means that it has characters with a lot of similarity to a large number of other franchises, but that it is still amusing to point out where characters are very, very similar to existing properties.

Morality

Morality is a funny thing, everybody seems to base it around different things.  Everybody seems to have a very different idea of what is right.  There is a current trend in fiction towards grey vs grey morality.  The basic feeling is that if you look at matters from all the different points of view possible that it is difficult or even impossible to ever call any particular action morally right or wrong.  The tendency is to point out that there are no absolutes, that no one group is any more evil or good than another and thus that the whole question of morality is moot and pointless.

Because according to the shades-of-grey idea, there are no absolutes.

To my mind, this is wrong.

My Girlfriend is a Gumiho

Title: My Girlfriend is a Gumiho
Episode Length: 1:04 to 1:09
Series Length: 20

Premise: Cha Dae-Woong is a young man trying to become the world's next big action movie star.  However, his grandfather is getting tired of the way he irresponsibly throws money around and the way he skips school and tries to drag Dae-Woong away from his classes and to a military college.  Dae-Woong escapes, but in doing so finds himself stuck on a truck heading for a country shrine where he unwittingly releases a nine-tailed fox (Gumiho) from its prison.

49 Days

Title: 49 Days
Episode Length: 1:05 minutes
Series Length: 20 episodes

Basic Premise: Shin Ji Hyun is a girl who has to have everything.  She is rich, she has loving parents and many friends.  She's about to get married to Min Ho and hoping to introduce her best friend, In Jung, to one of her fiancee's friends.  Then an unfortunate series of events leads to a car accident that puts her into a coma and puts her soul wandering out into the world.  Not long after, she meets a Scheduler, whose job is to guide people to their appointed times and places of death.  Because Shin Ji Hyun's death was not on the schedule, she has a chance to come back to life.  If she can prove that three people not related to her by blood truly loved her by collecting tears of 100% pure love.  Given that she is considered one of the kindest most genuinely honest people anybody knows, this doesn't seem difficult at first.  Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems.  First, she has to borrow the body of Song Ji-Kyung, who has her own tragic past, and second she can't tell anybody who she is or about or her mission.

Themes: Transformations

Transformation is something that shows up fairly often in my stories in one form or another.  There is something that intrigues me about the idea of a person or thing becoming something something other than what they started out as.  I frequently make use of literal transformation and almost always end up with a matter of metaphorical translation if enough of the story moves along.

Themes: Unusual Relationships

So, this is less about writing skills because it's not about what makes a good story, but does deal with things I like to use in stories.  I'm fairly sure this started with the same sort of juvenile "cool lesbians" thoughts a lot of guys end up having at some point in their lives.  That said, I've always liked stories and, as said in my bit on candy and distractions earlier this week, just randomly adding in sex scenes usually results in me losing interest in a story as it becomes repetitive.  I am much more interested in emotions and interplay of the characters involved than merely the physical expression of the emotions.  That said, I've found that I like doing what some people would consider weird things with relationships.

Characters have many names

In the course of a story you are going to refer to each character several times, however, you do not want to be repeated "Luke said" or "Luke wrote" or "Luke did whatever" over and over again.  The repetition of the name would get grating on the reader and it has the character of an inexpert speaker.

Faith Manages: Dawn of a New Campaign

Hopefully the first of several screencap comic pages based on Babylon 5...but I suck at this and have only REALLY basic software.

Book Review: The Turning

This book is a play on the popular trend in supernatural romances that are out in the market today.  There are some significant differences from the standard formula of the young woman falling in love with the vampire that make this an interesting variation.

Book Review: Sacred Promises

This is a fairly interesting young adult fantasy romance that has some moderate issues connected to it.  Granted, some of what I might have to say may be a result of this story being outside the normal realm of my preferred genre, but as much as the setting and circumstances are interesting, I can't say I much enjoyed the story.  I'm sure many people would, but there was a lot of the storyline that made me feel uncomfortable.