Remember back in my days of character-stealing for my original letdown of a "franchise"? Well, something like that is prone to happen again with my new indie series, Aozora's Adventure, but will be taking a much , much smoother and less critical approach than Super Justin did.
But before you bring out your banhammers, allow me to spare the details.
Currently, all of the major characters in Aozora's Adventure are all original/semi-original designs by myself and a variety of people that I've met via my carrier as an amateur indie artist since early '09 (I'm not aiming to be perfect. Just great by most standards), and not once have I taken/used a character from another series or franchise (the later being a word I refus to say under most instances) without permission, and I do not wish to do this if it'll cause such a rucus similar to what happened two years ago (causing an entire fanbase to strike against me). Like I said, this will not cause many, if not any problems compared to Super Justin. And I'm not going to be "stealing" them. I'm going to earn permission to use non-original characters the only way I can: Making the Aozora's Adventure series good, release it to Japan online as Aozora no Tabi, get it popular (but not that popular) in that country agmonst the web, re-release several freeware Aozora's Adventure games that were originally printed in English, wait a long time, and attract the attention of major anime, manga, and video game retailer Animate. Oh yeah, you know where this is going.
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Well durrhurr yes. If you haven't heard of him already, let me give you a pointless history lesson. Anizawa Meito, the character shown in the image above, is the current main mascot of Animate, and is the protagonist of his own series; Anime Techno. Piror to this, the character and his sidekicks made major cameo appearences in the well-known and popular anime/manga series Lucky Star, which in all honesty, does not require an introduction, and features many other cameos. Seriously, that's how popular it is. And Anizawa is always trying to sell his shit to good ol' Konata Izumi, but tries too hard, flipping shit upside down and over-reacting with army and warfare sequences, and fails after so much effort, even in scenarios where he becomes so close to succeeding. I don't know how many times this has been done in the series, nor if it's a common theme, as I've never seen Lucky Star. So don't complain if my info is incorrect.
Now back to Aozora's Adventure. Yea I would like Anizawa Meito to be a character in my own series. It happened to Touhou Project, why not mine as well? Well, Touhou Project is currently the most well-known doujin series in history, so I can see why Animate would notice and like their own characters to appear alongside the Touhou girls in a crossover title starring Anizawa as one of the main characters. And so around Animate's 10th anniversary, that's exactly what the fans got: Anime Techno X Touhou Project. If that wasn't enough, Anizawa made another cameo in Disgaea 4 as some kind of attack character. Yea clearly Anizawa Meito has the power to appear in everything ever, and take over the otaku culture world just like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but even with a good number of cameos, mainly in Lucky Star, he still remains a strange and almost unknown figure outside of Japan (IMP, it's my perspective).
And because a few series could do it, I wanted to see if maybe once Aozora's Adventure becomes well-known, I could get permission from Animate (as well as give them some ka-ching), to use Anizawa and his gang in the series. It will not be like me butchering characters from Rosenkreuzstilette and Pokemon in Super Justin by changing their personalities, backstories, and in a few cases their appearances, giving little to no credit to the original designer(s). Anizawa and the other Animate characters would keep their initial personality and appearences from the Anime Techno and Lucky Star OVAs- for prime instance Anizawa still likes to make dramatic expressions, flip all over his Animate shop when a specific person drops by (in this case, the main characters in Aozora's Adventure, mainly Aozora) and blow shit up for no reason other than to give the message "buy my f&cking products!" And he still brings up Comiket, fights with his lesser-employes over disagreements over dead out-of-print products, plus his enemies, spins like the Tasmanian Devil, and set fire to himself when explaining the reason successful animes are successful in the first place. Here however, along with the basic stuff, his attempts would be plotted much more insane, even re-arranging the entire store to parody a movie in the shoot-em-up/war genre, and planting stronger cameras on the outside of his store to spot Aozora from far away down the street so he can quickly re-arrange Animate just before Aozora enters so he can exploit his plans flawlessly. As with Lucky Star, all these plots fail, sometimes with close successions, and other times with Aozora sabotaging one or more of the Animate employes by knocking them out or engaging in a short fight scene. As the series progresses and more failures from Anizawa, Aozora purposely enters the store not to browse, but for him to have fun with Anizawa and watch he and his allies fail at convincing him to buy something from the store, even at booths during events. Much later in the anime's lifespan, Anizawa evolves from an enemy of Aozora to a minor anti-hero, kicking some mecha and witch ass for himself (mostly without the main protagonists) and slowly forgiving Aozora for many tradegies, while still having a small hatred for not buying Animate's products earlier in the anime). Call it a stupid idea, but like before, I'm all up for criticism. And besides, this may not exactly happen.
I'll bring this up: The currently non-existing Aozora's Adventure anime isn't really considered to be made for a profit, just for fun. And even if it does get made, it will be mostly a type of cross-genre anime, spoofing and parodying many other series, both obscure and well known. If I am able to secure rights for the Animate crew, then Anizawa would appear about halfway via the first season, and subsequent appearances in later episodes, both major and minor.
Peace out.
2 comments:
you don't need permission to use rks characters! if doing that really turned the fanbase against you, then you are pandering to them way too much!
Good article!
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