Hello, hello! I’m back on the writing grind, this time messing around with talking about anime titles I like and other related topics. Honestly, I really just wanted to tell that story about Heavy Object (which I still maintain is going to be a show about rocks), and everything else kind of just spun out of that. Anyways, hope you guys enjoy my first proper post in about two weeks! Hopefully you don’t find my writing muscles too stiff.
I kind of spoiled any bonus content by listing some of my favorite titles in the post proper, but I hope you guys will like what I came up with instead. A list of titles from the fantasy stories I talked about in the post! Yes, this is a look in the past life of a young Bless who wrote fiction, not anime criticism!
Lefur and the Five Gods: a short story about a young man who encounters a god who tells him, “Without love and trust, you cannot win the world.” He returns to his mother to tell her he will win the world for her, as she is his source of love and trust. Very anime, I know. Would you believe this was written ~8 years before I even knew what anime was?
Silver’s Gold: an unfinished fantasy novel series starting off with a destroyed village that forces a young boy out into a harsh world, where he meets a mysterious girl named Silver. The sequel novel follows the a girl who belong to a species of winged humans, and the next book in the series united both paths into an elite magical warrior group that defends a kingdom.
Cohretts: named for the continent on which the story takes place, a young man in his twenties leaves him home to join a group of international border guards, eventually finding his way into an elite group of magical warriors (sound familiar?) called the Glory Purgers, who are actually the good guys.
Untitled Project: I had many of these, but this one went by the working titles of Eridel, the name of the main character. Written in the wake of reading Eragon, it bears many similarities, but also represents my most successful foray into the land of fiction, as I complete over 170 single-spaced pages before I got bored and moved on to other projects.
A Restless Piece: filled with exotic humanoid species with fantastic powers, they all eventually join together in…you guessed it, an elite magical warriors group.
Blazing Swords: the very first fantasy story I ever wrote, it’s basically Ocarina of Time, but with more fire.
Six Heroes: a reimagining of the Bionicle story, except I wanted the Toa of Light to be a main characters, so he is.
Speed Twins: this is as far as I got.
Hope you guys enjoyed those! It was pretty fun for me to get to look back at my past writing life—I’ve come a long way!
Mage in a Barrel 
So you’re a writer for Crunchyroll now?
I know it’s a bit late, but congratulations none the less!
I really like the name Eridel. Its got a nice sound to it (or at least it does when it’s pronounced the way it is in my head) and a good namey feel to it. Was the name attached to a male or female character? It feels feminine to me.
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Yup, since June! Thanks for the congrats! It’s a really exciting opportunity!
Eridel was a guy, even in my younger days I was a fan of guys with an effeminate/softer name, so that could be why.
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So are you going to finish the impression for week 7 and 8? I love to see your writings.
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Keep your eyes open tomorrow! 😉
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I think my favorite translated light novel title ever is, “I was reincarnated as an evil god and my subordinate demon army is on the verge of collapsing… What should I do?”
I didn’t know you used to do fiction writing too. That’s great! You probably don’t need me to say it, but don’t ever throw those out. You never know when something you wrote in the past might inspire another idea to write something else, or when you might just want to have it for reference. I gave one of my poems to a friend in high school once without keeping a copy of it, and to this day I kick myself for that; it was a really cool Highwayman-inspired piece, and besides just regretting that I can never re-read it again, there have been a few times I’ve been working on other ideas where it would’ve been helpful to look back at it too.
Did you ever take a stab at writing any fanfiction?
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That’s why I keep a haiku notebook… you never know when those odd bits might come in handy. I’ve moved onto Google Docs (which has some drawbacks), but it’s available whenever I have a whim and wherever I have a data connection.
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Oh, yeah, I’d never get rid of those writings! I was saying on Twitter yesterday, I’m not embarrassed about any of them because they really do represent the kinds of stories I was looking for at the time and that I wasn’t getting anywhere I looked. Knowing that, it’s not surprising that I feel hard for anime, because many, many, many of anime’s stories are exactly the sort of thing I wanted all through my younger years.
I’ve never had much of an interest in fanfiction, honestly. I like stories the way they are, which is why I think I turned to criticism when I started watching anime. I had the stories I wanted, so what else could I do but celebrate that I had finally found them?
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I am SO GLAD that I’m not the only person who actually liked Bionicle. They’ve rebooted the series, but it’s not quite the same yet. I don’t think I ever got around to giving my stories a definite title. Kinda that whole “How do I summarize a six-novel plot into ten words or less?” thing.
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Oh, they’re rebooting it? Man, I know how this makes me sound, but the early arcs and early figures were the best. I really felt like it all got sanitized the longer it went on.
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Reading about those stories you wrote really makes me smile; my favorite from these blurbs alone is Lefur. It reminds me of my first ever short story in high school (god, almost ten years now…), which at first was really embarrassing to re-read, but then I marveled at how earnest, confident, and just so… damn honest the whole thing was. I know my present self would ever be able to write something like that again, and in a way it makes me sad (also, I really wanted to write fantasy stories back then due to the influence of late 1990s Japanese RPGs, but always got stuck at the world building part).
Favorite manga/anime title: 1)Read or Die! 2) Now and Then, Here and There 3) Please Save My Earth 4)Kimun Kamui
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For me the world building was the easy part. I ran AD&D games for my friends for a number of years, and in that time I invented two different campaign settings out of whole cloth, each with its own world map, history, pantheon, and everything. I had notions once of being another Raymond Feist, who used one of his own D&D campaign settings as the basis for the Riftwar books, but when it came time to turn loose plot bunnies into a coherent story I always got stuck sooner or later.
And yeah, I agree. Lefur sounds like the most interesting blurb to me too.
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I can’t believe you guys don’t like “Speed Twins” the best! 😛
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Honestly, if I started writing fiction again, I don’t think it would be all that different than what I used to write. I mean, hopefully it would be better technically, but I’m still charmed and absorbed by the same sorts of stories now as I was back then. It might just have a bit more maturity (I hope) to it.
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Believe it or not, rocks is also the first thing that came to my mind whenever Heavy Object pops up. 😛
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Good man!
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Speaking of interesting titles, let’s invoke Nasu:
Kara no Kyoukai/The garden of sinners
The Japanese title translates to “boundary of emptiness”. This may be a reference to the Eastern Buddhist concept of “emptiness”, or “the void”.
The English title seems to suggest the Western Abrahamic narrative of sins and Eden.
It’s clever to see the two titles evoking relevant cultural imagery for the target audience.
How does this symbolism actually apply to the story? I’ll leave it up to everyone to decide.
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Oh, that’s very interesting. I know nothing of the story of Kara No Kyoukai, so I can’t comment on the title’s relevance there, but I’m always fascinated by the ways different cultures (particularly religions) bump up against each other and have interesting resonances.
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