Somehow.... smells to me like the One-Year War is going to take a level in SEED.Yet another idea I haven't mentioned before. A few months ago, I had this idea of Zeon Deikun's widow choosing to place her children under Degwin Zabi's care rather than having them run off with an obviously crazy Jimba Ral. The entire Zabi family ends up agreeing to it for one reason or another:
And thus the siblings who would've been Char Aznable and Sayla Mass in another universe grow up without having live in constant fear for their lives. Artesia in particular is absolutely loved by the common folk for her spirited support of humanitarian efforts across Side 3; even Gihren admits that the good PR comes in handy for painting the Principality in a better light. Casval meanwhile is the no.1 poster boy of the Zeon military and Dozle's personal favorite for his sheer aptitude at asskicking.
- Degwin because he doesn't want children's blood on his hands.
- Gihren because marrying Artesia off to Garma grants the Zabis legitimacy.
- Dozle because he's got a soft spot for kids.
- Kycilia because this way, Casval and Artesia can be kept within arm's reach in case they get ideas about overthrowing the new regime.
What I've been thinking today is a simple addition: what if Casval and Amuro knew each other before the One Year War? In particular, Tem Ray and his son spend the summer holiday at Side 3 - in actuality, the EFSF caught wind of Zeon's military R&D being up to something mobile weapon related and sent Tem in to sniff around a bit under the guise of being at Side 3 on a holiday. One time when Tem is going off to spy again, he and Amuro part with Tem ordering Amuro to not wander around because he'll get lost again and Amuro irately replying that they aren't on Earth this time around. Thing is, a group of street punks overhear this, conclude that Amuro is an Earthnoid and decide to teach him a lesson for not staying home. They toss Amuro into a back alley but before they can really get to the physical part, they're interrupted by Casval casually asking them what they're doing while leaning against the wall at the entrance of said back alley. Cue fistfight where Casval individually dominates the punks until they gang up on him, at which point he starts having a hard time... until Amuro joins in.
Cut to the two of them, scuffed and bruised, lounging on a hillside and sharing a fistbump after a victorious joint asskicking.
Well, I'd like to know some of your plans on it first, so I can properly weigh in.Unrelated to that... what do you think about me giving TTGL the rewrite treatment?
Well, things I've been thinking of:
- Reimagining the whole deal around spiral energy from "explicitly supernatural stuff born of willpower" to somewhere more along the lines of "ridiculously fucking advanced technology born of a very high-level understanding of quantum physics present-day theoretical physicists cannot even dream of".
Mmkay.....
Oh, yeah, I remember this one!The initial inspiration for this was a what-if scenario that occurred to me... say... two years ago, I think? The premise was simple: what if Kiyal cheered Simon up after the latter had his freakout upon seeing Kamina and Yoko together and ended up capturing his heart before Nia did? Lots and lots of butterflies.
....gotta admit, I'm not 100% of how that works, narratively-speaking.
<Simon not referring to Kamina as 'Bro'>The pre-fall era is generally treated by current humans as a "time of myths" kind of deal passed down via oral tradition.
Well, that was the original impetus. But yesterday while watching someone's blind reaction series about TTGL, I thought - "hey, why not go all the way and overhaul it completely instead of rehashing the same plot"?
- The story's "airtime", as it is, would be increased considerably, with the Four Generals being recurring antagonists instead of one-off deals.
- The standard terrain outside would be steppe instead of desert. Hell, the story might not even take place on Earth anymore but on a terraformed pre-fall colony world, with the locals having forgotten their origins.
- Simon sees Kamina more like a surrogate father figure than a big brother type.
A super-cool dude who has convinced me to withdraw my prior objection.
A super-cool dude who has convinced me to withdraw my prior objection.
(long, fearful silence)
Stalin: Comrades. This is the last time I am not informed of the existence of something of this magnitude. Have I made myself clear?
(terrified nodding)
Stalin: Good. Now... (taps on a newspaper photo of a Gehenpanzer) I want this for our forces. You have one year.
Mussolini: That is truly the crown achievement of fascism. Can we perhaps... talk about export?
Hitler: No.
Mussolini: As fellow fascists, I'm certain we can work out something-
Hitler: No.
Reposting from SB after an overwhelmingly positive response.
----
A question that came to me while watching a let's play of Wolfenstein: The New Order.
If Nazi Germany were to develop a dieselpunk version of a Zaku I using 1939-era technology, what would their name for a mobile suit be?
I was thinking that sometime in the thirties, the highest echelons of Nazis are discussing Jewish Physics when one of them brings up the Jewish legend of the golem (know thy enemy and all) as a dismissive example that fairy tale levels of stupid shit is the best those entartet untermenschen can possibly come up with. Except Hitler, being Hitler, promptly starts handing out orders that military R&D is to round up the top mechanical engineers of the Reich and have them top that with something Aryan that would strike terror into the hearts of the enemy and scare them away from attacking the Fatherland ever again.
Not to mention that the whole idea of a giant killbot is so ridiculous that western intelligence efforts will never ever believe it.
Development is difficult and ponderous. The first major issue is found to be the powerplant: even with batteries borrowed from the Kriegsmarine's Type VII submarine, the prototypes couldn't operate for more than a few hours while untethered and nuclear reactors haven't even reached the conceptual stage yet. Ultimately, the engineers just threw up their hands and supplemented the battery with a diesel generator.
Then there was the fact that not only the whole thing was so insanely mechanically complex that no human could possible drive and fight at the same time, it was hard enough just to learn how to make it walk without losing balance. Ultimately, a three-seater cockpit was squeezed in: a driver seat at the bottom with levers and pedals for operating the leg hydraulics; a gunner seat in the middle with foot pedals for rotating the torso, hand-operated winches for moving the arms and a small cathode ray tube TV screen connected to a boresight camera mounted onto the bottom of the hand armament; and finally a commander seat at the top with pedals for rotating the head so that it can be used as a periscope with a far longer line of sight than any tank's.
Even so, it was an utter nightmare to maintain, even with compromises put into the design. The arms had a highly limited range of motion to keep the joints as robust as possible. The fingers weren't actually usable, nor did the hand armaments mount an external trigger; those handles were just handles for holding and aiming the weapon, with the firing mechanism being directly wired to the gunner's controls. Switching weapons mid-battle is also out of the question.
Nevertheless, the go-ahead was given for a limited production run. And thus in September 1939, the Polish Army received the fright of their life...
Although ponderously slow and cumbersome, absolutely nothing the Polish had on hand could go past the Sd.Kfz.400 Gehenpanzer I's massive armor plates. Even artillery shells bounced right off before either the head-mounted 2 cm autocannon or the magazine-fed semi-automatic rifle version of a Flak 38 obliterated the offender. Far too slow to participate in blitzkrieg maneuvers, the behemoths were instead driven straight into the heaviest clusters of enemy resistance like a hammer while the conventional forces followed behind to provide covering fire against flanking attempts and to mop up any resistance left after the big boys' passing. Not that the latter was really needed; brave as the Polish were, more than once the Germans had the tattered remains of whatever Polish unit they most recently encountered hysterically begging to surrender after the Gehenpanzers were through with them.
To them, the Gehenpanzer was not a monster of a war machine; to them, it was an act of God. As hodgepodge the design was, its sheer psychological effect who'd never seen anything like it in fiction, much less in real life, was undeniable. Think Tiger tank times 10.
In the spring of 1940, the Wehrmacht rolled into Denmark while the Gehenpanzers remained home to receive a thorough check-over and tweaking in preparation for the real deal in France. Hitler personally inspected the war machines during this downtime and upon returning to Berlin, immediately approved a budget expansion for expanded production and crew training. Meanwhile British and French intelligence were scratching their heads in confusion about what could've happened in Poland because the first-hand accounts they have speak of invincible steel giants that wield cannons like men wield rifles. They speculate it may have been just a really big tank that spooked the refugees, or maybe even a Guntank-esque deal. But walking machines? Preposterous.
They were quite spectacularly proven wrong when in May, the Gehenpanzers attacked the Maginot Line with overwhelming force. Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a problem because the French had the following strategy in case of German invasion:
What happened in real life is that the Germans slipped through an area the French didn't think they'd try due to rough terrain, split the Allied forces in half, pushed the British into the sea, then turned south, flanked the Maginot Line from behind and was in the process of grinding it down when the French capitulated and ordered the remaining defenders to stand down. A similar sequence of events went down this time as well - except the French were not planning for Gehenpanzers when building the Maginot Line, nor the fact that they were actually pushing through (albeit with casualties). Because of this, the French panicked and ran down south for damage control, only realizing that they were set up when the rest of the German army rolled out of the now-undefended Ardennes with shit-eating grins on their faces. They couldn't have been able to bring the Gehenpanzers through that way due to having had to cross that rough terrain in a timely manner to maintain the element of surprise, so they instead threw them into the thick of it as decoys.
- If the Germans attack the Maginot Line, flank through Belgium.
- If the Germans try to go through Belgium, link up with British expeditionary troops to the north and dig in.
- In either case, the Germans cannot make any headway and will eventually get ground down via attrition due to the Allies having sea superiority, just like it happened in the last war.
German propaganda covered up the Gehenpanzer losses at the Maginot Line to give them an aura of invincibility when they were finally unveiled to the world at the Paris victory parade. After finding their jaws, the world's reactions are along these lines:
- GB: "...allies or no allies, no way we're going back there. Not without much bigger tanks than what we have now."
- US: "...daaaamn. Good thing we're not involved."
- Japan: "That gaijin monstrosity is... impressive. It appears we made the right choice in allies."
- USSR:
- Italy:
...I really should stop reading other people's Eva fanfiction. It just gives me more ideas and plot bunnies at a time when I really don't have the time to write.
This time, I wondered what it would be like if I were to write something in the style of SCE but by mashing together original and Rebuild instead of worldbuilding a new setting from zero?
Things that came to my mind:
- The Vertical Mecha Fins are explicitly called multipods and can store a lot more varied stuff than just a single prog knife each: ammo mags, kunai-style exploding throwing knives, micromissiles, etc.
- The Evas all have compressed air boosters on their backs. They don't have the endurance for flight, don't work in space or underwater and take quite a while to recharge when used, but can give the Eva a quite powerful kick for long jumps, dodging an attack or cushioning falls.
- Provisional Unit 05 has an improved version built into the legs, allowing it to retract its wheels and glide around at high speeds like a Hover Tank, even over water, at the cost of being problematic to use in enclosed spaces (that's what the wheels are for). This function (and the Eva itself) would debut against Gaghiel.
- Unit 00 is the Eva that was made of Lilith and ate Yui, not Unit 01. Thing is, a combination of Lilith's flesh, Lilith's soul in Rei and a Lilim control intelligence in Yui made the Eva so apocalyptically powerful that the second they turned it on, it instantly manifested a Rebuild-style Door of Guf and NERV barely managed to restrain it by force-ejecting the entry plug using a backup circuit physically isolated from the rest of the Eva so that it can't reject the command. After a second attempt ended the same way and several people (including the Suzuharas' mother) were liquefied into LCL by the Eva's anti-AT field, NERV got desperate and surgically removed the Eva's core, swapping it with Unit 01's to simultaneously restrain Unit 00's power to a controllable level and give Unit 01 a power boost from the new core naturally synergyzing with the pilot.
- Smashing an Angel's core doesn't kill it, merely "banishes" it for a while as it retreats to regenerate. Actually killing it requires Ludicrous Gibs, though that takes a while for NERV to figure out.
- Shinji is less wimpy and more indecisive.
- Gendo's and Rei's relationship dynamic flipped. Instead of Rei seeing Gendo as a surrogate father figure but Gendo considering her nothing but a tool, it is Gendo who sees Rei as a daughter figure but Rei doesn't consider him much more than her creator and the person who gave her a purpose. This is because shortly after Gendo made Rei, he had a breakdown of the My God, What Have I Done? kind and gave up on getting Yui back. Gendo explicitly doesn't want Shinji to pilot but has no choice and being Gendo, he doesn't dare let Shinji know because he's afraid Shinji's reaction will be along the lines of "Oh, you care now?! Well, fuck you too!" It's classic hedgehog's dilemma.
- Asuka's personality is more in common with Shikinami than Soryu.
- With Gendo having given up on his canon agenda, Rei's purpose is to pilot. And she basically got Asuka's level of unhealthy obsession with it: she doesn't mind being helped or backed up, but actively trying to wrestle away the position of best pilot is the fastest and surest way to get on her bad side because she believes that becoming obsolete means losing her very reason to exist. This causes serious friction with Asuka's own competitiveness to the point where the two get into at least one fistfight over Rei warning Asuka to back off, Asuka telling Rei to go fuck herself, Rei feeling threatened, Asuka feeling being looked down on... cue the two coming to blows.
- As mentioned above, Mari will be a factor from Gaghiel onward by way of using Unit 05's hover capabilities to fight the Angel on her own terms. In fact, the reason why the first battle against Israfel is lost isn't because of an anvilicious aesop about teamwork but because Shinji had a Naked First Impression of Mari exiting the shower and can't put the image out of his mind, preventing him from concentrating on the fight.
- Due to Gendo's crisis of faith, as described above, his belief that nobody can possibly love a man like him is reinforced to the point where the breaks up with Naoko. As a consequence, Naoko is still alive, in charge of NERV's research division and the foremost expert on the Evas' cybernetics. Ritsuko, on the other hand, is the foremost expert on the Evas' metaphysical biology stuff, but Naoko frequently bullies her into deferring to her mother's opinion whenever their opinions clash. Ritsuko also explicitly has a thing for Gendo but it's clearly unrequited.
- Misato and Kaji didn't have a messy break up, they simply became separated by work. Thus when they get reunited, Misato doesn't play hard-to-get tsundere but simply makes it clear that if Kaji wants to continue things, she's single.
- Sakura is the same age as Toji and is a factor right from the beginning. Ends up as the pilot of Unit 03 sooner than Toji did in canon and Bardiel doesn't emerge immediately, so she gets to do stuff as an Eva pilot. Doesn't get very badly injured during the Bardiel incident and may get Unit 04 for the endgame as a hand-me-down from Kaworu. Has chemistry with Shinji and doesn't back down even when Asuka enters the picture and stakes her own claim, forming a love triangle; in fact, Naoko picks her as an Eva pilot specifically to make Shinji behave. Resolution is up for grabs, but I'm currently leaning towards OT3 resulting from Kaworu pointing out that they'll only break Shinji's heart if they force him to pick one.
- Kaworu still dies, though how he does is still up for grabs. Currently leaning towards him sacrificing himself to perma-kill Zeruel by inverting his AT-field into an anti-AT field and liquefying them both.
One, personalities are too different. Two, Shinji considers [Rei] a stepsister. Three, Rei is too busy getting the message that being a pilot is not all she can do with her life.
Maybe Kaworu could help her out with that last part.
I mentioned that Asuka would have more in common with Shikinami's personality than Soryu's. I was thinking, why would that be the case?
So I thought, we know that Asuka didn't really like her father in canon. But he's still her, as far as we know, only living blood relative. So what if he were to suddenly die, leaving Asuka with literally no blood relatives, thus well and truly alone in the world? Would that happening less than a week before she were to depart for Japan mellow her out enough?
I'm not thinking of turning her into a stereotyped tsundere, if that's what you're thinking.
First sighting of Asuka we'd have is her lying on a hospital's corridor bench a few hours after her father passed away, staring at the ceiling with empty, half-lidded eyes and one arm hanging off the edge of the bench. Imagine a non-nude, monologue-less version of the bathtub scene from episode 24.
Then Kaji shows up and tells her that it's time for them to leave, as the carrier group transporting Unit 02 is due to leave port in a few hours. So Asuka just lets out a tired sigh, gets up and leaves with him, glancing back at her father's hospital room's window before their car rolls out of the parking lot.
She also wouldn't go out to greet Misato and co. on the flight deck; instead, Shinji would spot her from a distance, gazing out at the sea with her hair billowing in the wind.
Second, who should the antagonists be? I'm completely stumped on this. Two ideas I considered:
- Eldritch abominations drawn to Earth by humanity's use of gravity distortion technology. Possibly from a parallel dimension?
- Aliens who arrived to the Solar System on a slower-than-light generation ship for colonization purposes, only to discover the hard way that Earth is already inhabited. As of the story, their ship is currently idling in lunar orbit and launching scouting parties, which is what the protags fight. There is no convenient common language or universal translator, so the two sides cannot communicate and have no idea who each other is (from humanity's perspective, aliens suddenly invaded with no warning; from the aliens' perspective, they finally reached their new home, only to find squatters occupying the place).
a magical girl version of Eva.
Namely, the Angels are humanlike entities that go around sucking energy out of people, as usual in the genre. However, not all of them drain people to death and they're shown to consider what they're doing a dirty business.
What's going on is that the Angels are the last remnants of an Adamite civilization that developed on Earth prior to Lilith's arrival during First Impact. When it did, the clash between it and Adam ended up destroying the world; these Angels are the only ones who escaped the catastrophe by way of an Instrumentality. Second Impact did not awaken Adam, it only loosened the seal on it enough for it to materialize the Angels back to the physical plane of existence and send them out to collect energy for it to break the seal and fully awaken.
But what the Angels are actually trying to do is to use that energy to reinforce Adam's seal, not break it, in order to keep it from destroying the world again. Additionally, they seek out Lilith's resting place not out of mistaking her for Adam, but as a backup plan to find a way to destroy her so that even if Adam gets loose, he won't turn humanity into roadkill fighting her.
The Angels themselves look human for the most part but still have a core sticking out of their lower chest. Although it is extremely hard (far harder than their bones), it is entirely possible to damage it; even the tiniest scratch to it is agonizingly painful for the Angel, akin to your internal organs being slowly cut with a yellow-hot blade. If it is actually shattered, the Angel does not die right away but instead slowly dissolves into LCL over the next few minutes, fully conscious and aware until the very last second but mostly powerless and unable to do anything about it.
Essentially, the core is the Angel's phylactery that keeps their soul bound to the body. The reason why they need cores but humans don't is because of Angel souls having an innate "Your Mind Makes It Real" effect that hooks into their AT-field to create all the physics fuckery stuff we see them do in canon. Thing is, this also makes the soul incompatible with a physical body due to the soul's lack of grasp on a fixed reality (that is, the soul being able to make reality conform to it rather than being restricted by it) making it unable to assume a fixed form - which is where a core comes in, basically acting as a filter between the soul and the body. Without this filtering, the body breaks down into its base components due to the soul unintentionally making its AT-field ever so slightly fluctuate physical constants like the fine-structure constant, breaking the chemical bonds holding the body's base components together.