Guests' Web Picks

Okay, you say "Patrick who?!". Well, I am Filipino, in my early 30s and have been an anime fan for over 20 years. It all started in 1978 when several big robot anime (Voltes V, Danguard Ace, Mazinger Z, Gaiking and others) got shown on television. Less than a year later all such shows were yanked off the air by Presidential Decree. About the only anime to survive was a few shojo anime, most notably "Candy Candy" which lasted about a year.

First of all, I would like to thank Jei and Nikkou for giving me this opportunity to spout my thoughts and have them recorded for posterity.^_^

Well, I started cruising the net looking for sites related to the anime/manga that I was all fired up for at the time I first got net access. Namely, Ranma, Kimagure Orange Road, Maison Ikkoku and the first Tenchi OAV series.

The first good resource I came across was the old Berkeley server and the first it tells me is to go to the Anime Web Turnpike.

After going around the various sites on offer, I downloaded images, text files and various other things on offer via the web. If I found something I liked, I copied and pasted the URL into a readily available file on the computer . Those that I truly liked, I included in my bookmark file.

I would return to those sites and go through them again, looking at things I didn't had time to look at the first time. And after having gone through the entire site, I'd go, "Well, what now?".

While this was happening, I was also lurking on rec.arts.anime.stories (back when Megazone was still running it) and reading practically every fanfic that appeared there. After a while I became more discriminating and stuck to those fanfics that I liked, or were based on those anime/manga that I had some familiarity with.

Of course, a lot of the fanfics I was reading were already several chapters old and I wanted to get the previous chapters. Being a newbie I got the locations for archives if it was included in the body of the fic, in the sigs of particular authors by reading various FAQs, announcements in USENET, and in the mailing lists I lurked on.

And now, I cruise the net primarily for fanfics. Like Takahashi Rumiko said when asked if she would ever write a proper ending to Urusei Yatsura: it was up to us fans of her work to make our own endings. (This is what my memory came up with; sorry if it was misquoted.) I took this to mean the writing and reading of fanworks, whether fanfic or full fledged doujinshi. It is a way to keep alive those anime and manga that have already been finished in Japan like Maison Ikkoku and Kimagure Orange Road.

Well, enough ranting and raving on to my pics.

First up is John Walter Biles' massive crossover fic "The Dance of Shiva" at http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/Shiva/

This a massive fic set in the MegaTokyo of Bubblegum Crisis. The Knight Sabers are the central characters with the characters of Tenchi Muyo! and Sailor Moon filling in crucial roles in resolving the events of the story. Also included were characters from Kimagure Orange Road, Mobile Police Patlabor, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and Die Hard to name a few.

Next up is Chris Davies' "Together Again" at http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/johnette/139/tog.html

This is another massive crossover involving many of the same series as Bilesu's fic above. Both fanfics do a very excellent job of melding pretty seamlessly (as far as I can tell) the backstory of several wildly different universes or creating something if that works better.

Of course, in order to keep everything straight both authors needed various notes and encyclopedia and have also posted such on their web-sites. And since both fics are so massive, in terms of story elements, the reader tends to miss a few things when reading the story for the first time. The notes helped a great deal and I didn't even notice a few things until I read those notes.

Of course not all crossovers are this massive involving three or more different sources. Most involve just two series, this being simpler for both the author and reader to keep straight.

An example of one is a Ranma/Sailor Moon crossover "Lines of Destiny" by Louis-Philippe Giroux at http://www.upc.qc.ca/~phoenix/phoenix.html

This one has Ranma and Akane as reincarnations of people who died just before Beryl destroyed the Moon Kingdom. It also makes them siblings (in the past) to two current members of Sailor Moon's inner circle, and in the case of Ranma a cousin to another member of the inner circle.