Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Two thoughts went through my head when I watched this:

1) "Screw CGI and rendering...this is the real thing."

2) THIS is why I love writing science fiction. The fact that the universe is full of this absolutely fascinates me and makes me want to write something about it.

"Cosmic Child", ending credits theme to the anime Gall Force 2: Destruction, by Takako Shirai & Crazy Boys.

( translation below the cut )

During the winter of 1993, having just graduated college and living in a shoebox apartment on Beacon Street in Boston, I was pretty much on my own and at the very start of figuring out what the hell I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wasn't in the best frame of mind (having lost connection with quite a few friends and not having many in town), and had nothing to show for my four years at Emerson, aside from aborted stories and screenplays.

One of the things I did to pass the time was rent out videos from Tower Records--specifically anime, something I'd been interested in but never followed up on. I pretty much schooled myself on various movies and shows that I'd heard of but never seen (or saw only briefly), such as Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2, Akira, and so on. One of the titles that caught my eye was Gall Force: Eternal Story, It's not a big-name anime (although the character design is by Kenichi Sonoda, who worked on many 80s animes such as Bubblegum Crisis), but I'd like to think of it as the little anime series that could.

Long story short, it's humans (called "Solnoids" here, and all female) vs their mortal alien enemy (the liqueous "Paranoids", playing the male, natch) in a seemingly never-ending fight for dominance. What the lead characters don't know, at least not right away, is that a secret meeting between the two races have created a project that would finally unite them in peace. The twist is that this story focuses more on a group of Solnoid cadets attempting to keep this forced unity from happening; and finally, once they realize the outcome could save them all, protecting this new "offspring" on a pre-human Earth. This storyline stretched from this movie to two OAVs to an additional three story arcs taking place over the course of many centuries. I was intrigued by its worldbuilding, and its unique take on a space opera/Alien/Creation Myth story.

I bring this up because this was the series that pretty much opened my eyes to science fiction, and changed an overworked Infamous War Novel into a completely new and fresh story called Vigil. Admittedly, this version of the story didn't go too far, but it was the seed that would end up becoming the created world of the entire Eden Cycle universe. In particular, it was this song that inspired me to start toying with the idea of aliens being related to us humans in a very distant way, what that meant to those here on Earth, who would be for it and who would be against it. That idea never made it to Vigil, with that story focusing instead on the titular underground hacker group I'd created--basically the original characters of the IWN dropped into a science fiction plot. Nonetheless, I finally picked up that alien-relation idea in the next version, True Faith...and you know the story from there. That was it--a tired, overworked, trunk novel I'd toyed with since the mid 80s, given a new life and a new universe all because of one anime series, specifically one of its ending theme songs.

This is annoying.

I'm distracting myself for some dumb reason, because I don't want to write. Why don't I want to write? I have no clue. Perhaps I'm worried that if I say hell with it and call it a night, I'm going to be doing that for the next two weeks and nothing will get done. And it'll just snowball from there.

Gods, I hate it when this happens.

Y'know, it's not as if I have writer's block or anything. Well, maybe I do to a small extent, but it's never bothered me before...I dunno...maybe it's just that I've just been frustrated at the world for the past few weeks, for reasons I won't go into right now.

Heh--which brings me to an interesting sidebar. Some friends ask me why I hardly ever drink alcohol. Well, the last few paragraphs is a good enough explanation, really. I'm just one of those people who, when I have a few drinks in me, my emotions/thoughts/actions just get amplified. So if I got drunk now, there's a good chance I'd be a sullen, morose bastard who wouldn't think twice about saying something that I know I'd regret later. In fact, there was a very brief time that I proved this point while living in Boston, and I'd rather not be in that position again. Wasn't pretty. So yeah--if I only have one drink at a bar then have soda the rest of the night, there's a good reason, and please don't try to pressure me into having more.

Whoo! Boy. Didn't mean to go off there just now. That wasn't aimed at anyone...just felt like venting.

Oookay then.

Maybe I should just log off, calm myself, and try this writing thing again... :D