ninthfeather | Entries tagged with makin' it mecha

mirrorfalls said: You have been offered an exorbitant sum of money to (somehow) remake The Untamed as a mecha series. What Do You Do?

So, this is actually a bit trickier than the times you asked me the same about Detective Conan and Fruits Basket. Both of those stories are ones that I’ve interacted with for a long time and they have cores that I feel work with varying amounts of sci-fi and tech involved as long as certain elements stay stable. Meanwhile, the Untamed’s specific version of xianxia cultivation is pretty heavily tied to its plot. But I think it’s still doable.

Ok, so, for The Untamed, the most central plot is ultimately the one about the dangers of rumors and hearsay, with the theme of the complicated nature of real-world morality being almost as central. Other than those, my favorite theme is probably the whole ongoing narrative of each generation’s actions affect the next. None of this stuff would be out of place in a traditional sci-fi style mecha series set in space.

So, my inspirations here are primarily gonna be Magic Knight Rayearth, Sakura Wars, and the bits of various Gundam shows that involve what’s collectively referred to as space magic.

The concept: this is still, to some extent, xianxia. People still cultivate, they just do it on non-Earth planets and moons (note: if this is something that is specifically not allowable in Taoism I would appreciate someone letting me know). Each of the clans has their own planet/moon, corresponding in climate to the locations we see in the show and presumably named after those locations on Earth. The Burial Mounds is probably a subsatellite of the Yiling moon orbiting Yunmeng. The costuming will not change for the most part, though because space travel exists, there will be space suits—just made of materials available in the setting. I’m picturing some real funky ship designs, and also probably some scenes of cultivation-based metalworking to justify the existence of the spaceships in the first place. The sets would probably also look very much the same, but with occasional modern devices made with obviously ancient methods, thrown in just often enough to be subtly jarring. Tech levels would probably vary by clan—the Jins would have the most, the Lan would have the least, the Jiang would have a few weird things that Wei Wuxian came up with but not much else, etc.

As far as the mechs themselves, my solution here would be essentially creating a magitech setup, with mechs more along the lines of the ones from Magic Knight Rayearth or Scrapped Princess in piloting mechanics—i.e., they’d have magic bubble cockpits, transfer damage directly to pilots, and run on the pilot’s energy. I’d probably go ahead and have mechs be essentially summons that are exclusive to cultivators and tied to their swords, which adds even more layers to a number of scenes in the drama (people’s swords being stolen, certain people losing the ability to cultivate, the Nie saber stuff, etc.). Maybe people who have spiritual tools like Zidian can use them to power up their robots? Also obviously Wei Wuxian builds himself a new mech in the Burial Mounds and ties it to Chenqing.

I’m seeing the great clans all having very traditional sort of fantasy robot designs (like, Escaflowne/Rayearth/Dunbine vibes), color-coded by clan, with some design variations to differentiate them–I can see the Lans having the most curves, the Nie units being really blocky, the Jin units having extra ornamentation, the Jiang units being sleekest, and the Wen units being the most pointy. And then, just, the robots made through demonic cultivation? Evangelion-type eldritch horrors that are, given how demonic cultivation works, most likely made of organic material from dead bodies and scavenged bits of metal.

So, ok, it’s the Untamed, but everyone’s got robots. The thing is, they don’t only have robots. The show that results from this would probably end up including a mixture of the original series’ sword & cultivation combat and robot battles. There are some fights, for example, that basically have to take place indoors or right next to buildings, and those would probably end up involving sword combat. On the other hand, some fights would be just as fun if they involved two giant robots zooming around in the sky.

Some specific scenarios: a lot of the Sunshot Campaign involving simultaneous space and ground battles, the First Siege of the Burial Mounds starting with a gigantic robot assault before Wei Wuxian knocks enough of them out of the sky for them to try sending in ground troops, the battle between Lan Zhan and Xue Yang in Yi City happening in mechs while Wen Ning fights [spoiler] on the ground. It could be cool. Also, it would really emphasize the difference between people who can cultivate and people who can’t.

I’m not going to go full spoilers here, but I think you can imagine how the feelings of certain characters who aren’t strong cultivators would be even more intense in this type of setting. And how much easier it would be for them to argue that they felt weak, and vulnerable, and threatened!

I don’t think there’s any reason you’d need to add robots to The Untamed. But I think if you did, you could have a lot of fun using them to reinforce existing themes and make situations that were already gutwrenching even worse.

So, for that unlimited budget? The majority would be spent on getting as much of the original team as would be willing to return to make The Untamed: But Robots This Time, or replacing the cast & crew members who were unwilling to participate in this level of nonsense. The rest would go into hiring a robot-focused effects team with a focus on recruiting people who worked on Pacific Rim or Transformers, and then paying them to do a lot of work.

Once again, disclaimer: if I screwed up anything on a cultural level, feel free to tell me. I genuinely do not mean anyone any harm I just like putting robots in stuff.

mirrorfalls said:You have been offered an exorbitant sum of money to (somehow) remake Fruits Basket as a mecha series. What Do You Do?

Take it. I’ve got a plan.

Ok, this is 1) A long post and 2) Full of Fruits Basket SPOLIERS. Stop reading if you haven’t finished the entire manga.

Ok, so Fruits Basket as a mecha anime would probably bear a strong resemblance to the middle section of Evangelion, after it turned into a combination of mecha show and psychological drama but before all the surrealist nihilism.

The setting is the far, far future. Nations exist as people-groups rather than sovereign territories; no one alive remembers the last full-scale war. Honda Tohru’s mother dies in an accident and she ends up squatting on the property of the reclusive Sohma family while waiting for her grandfather to finish remodeling.

And the Sohma, for as long as they can remember, have been training in secret for an attack from outside Earth. To an outsider, it sounds silly—they’re expecting aliens to come! But this is more than expectation, it’s tradition, and the Sohma take tradition seriously.

Generations ago, the Sohma built mecha. Thirteen piloted suits, one named after each animal in the Chinese Zodiac, plus a fleet of automated units to serve as false enemies. To ensure that these units couldn’t be used by people from outside the family, they put a specific type of DNA lock on them, one that recognizes specific sequences that show up in Sohma family DNA (note: with an unlimited budget, I’d probably get a science consultant to help with this bit, since I am not that knowledgeable about DNA). Ever since, the robots have been passed down through the family to descendants with the right DNA, along with the legacies of their original pilots. The Rat pilot is always the ace, for example, and the Ox pilot is generally expected to be stupid. But then there’s the issue with the Cat unit—piloting it mutates people, and even Sohma tech is only good enough to cover up those mutations, not reverse them.

Tohru stumbles into the Sohma’s secret world by accident. Normally, they’d just wipe her memories, but Akito, the head of the family and “God of the Zodiac” who pilots the automated units and can seize control of the other units, is curious about how she’ll affect the pilots. So Tohru finds herself knee-deep in the interpersonal dramas of a family that expects disaster constantly, in which children are taken from their mothers immediately after birth to be tested for their suitability as pilots, and in which relationships for members of the Zodiac are all but forbidden. She watches as the Sohma attend school and then participate in piloting exercises afterward and on weekends.

Her goal in all of this shifts from “brighten the lives of her housemates” to “end the Zodiac pilot system,” as she falls in love with the pilot of the Cat unit and then finds out that he, like every Cat pilot before him, will be locked in a cell on Sohma territory after graduation and released only to pilot in exercises.

In her quest to end the system, Tohru delves into the history of the Zodiac pilot system. Eventually, even as the system is falling apart, the original promise that started the system is revealed. The longstanding tradition started as an effort to reassure a nervous cousin, nothing more. There was never any real indication that aliens were coming. But as the first “God of the Zodiac” became drunk on power and his Zodiac enjoyed each training fight, they lost their original purpose and started taking themselves too seriously. The Cat pilot rebelled, and tried to leave, trying to make his machine inoperable in his wake. But the Zodiac he left behind just decided to find another pilot, one that they could force into piloting.

Eventually, the ending would be very much like the ending of the manga, starting with the Kureno reveal and leading up to a more action-y version of the scene where Akito and Tohru meet in the woods. Also there’d be symbolic robot destruction and also probably Kyo getting gene therapy or the futuristic equivalent thereof.

With an unlimited budget, I’d spend a lot on getting a good voice and animation cast. The animation cast would be focused on doing background shots and facial expressions, with a special unit devoted to making the mecha fights look good. But there’d be a lot of zoomed-out shots with Makoto Shinkai-type skies in the background and the whole thing would probably be very washed-out, color-wise—closer to Natsuki Takaya’s Twitter sketches in palette than to the current anime.

The thing is that it was Takaya-sensei’s editors, not Takaya, who suggested the animal transformations. They’re important and useful and funny, but the core of the curse was always the “promise” that warped into a “bond”—which can be anything, even a bunch of genetically-locked robots.

Also, the above summary sounds super-serious, but I would keep as many jokes from the original Fruits Basket as possible. Especially the running gag about Shigure’s house getting destroyed (gotta crash a robot into it once), but also most of Haru and Ayame’s gags and every single Manabe Kakeru appearance ever.

Finally, while I’m making changes, I would tone down Kagura’s tsundere stuff and Shigure’s perviness. Also Ritsu would be a trans woman and if possible I would let some of the ambiguously bi characters like, say, Haru and Ayame, be actually bi.

mirrorfalls said:

You have been offered an exorbitant sum of money to (somehow) remake Detective Conan as a mecha series. What Do You Do?

First of all, I would take that money.

The adaptation would be a compressed one, because in general mecha shows do not run for quite as long as Detective Conan. I would be focusing on including the cast, the most important themes, and the most enjoyable tropes from the original show.

This post is a monster so I’m adding a readmore.

( Read more... )I actually thought about this over the course of the week, and I think I have a workable concept. The setting is Tokyo circa 30XX A.D., and most people have one or more robots, which are not sentient, but can be controlled via neural uplink technology. Robots are registered to individual users, so in an ideal situation, everyone is only using their own robots. But the truth is that it’s relatively easy to find and access methods of briefly taking control of a robot that doesn’t belong to you– these methods are how people loan out their technology and they also get used for pranks pretty frequently. Of course, commandeering a robot is also the most common method of committing crimes. After all, why bother committing a crime in person when you can use a metal exoskeleton with no fingerprints and inhuman strength?

With most crime being carried out via robots, most crime-fighting is carried out the same way. Police officers and detectives still exist, but they’ve largely been supplanted by a robot-piloting Robot Crimes Department (RCD) in charge of intervening in robot crimes when they happen, and a squad of computer and neural uplink experts tasked with tracking the digital aspects of the crimes. The police come to the crime scene last, and no one really expects them to do much.

Shinichi and Ran were in training for the RCD together until the day Shinichi ran off at the amusement park. Being a child in this setting presents different challenges. Technically, he still has access to neural uplink technology, but it hasn’t been tested on children of his physical age, and he generally experiences adverse physical symptoms (exhaustion, dizziness, pain) if he uses it for an extended period of time. Additionally, he still has difficulty getting most people to take them seriously.

Except for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, which is underfunded, floundering, and will at this point take help from anyone, including a small, bored genius who is definitely not a normal child. Thus begins Shinichi’s apprenticeship in old-fashioned crime solving. Or, at least, somewhat old-fashioned crime solving, since the crimes are still being committed using robots.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department is staffed by canon’s Division 1 and a few other canon cops. Their personalities are also similar, although the fact that their skills and contributions are constantly disrespected by the RCD has made all of them a little bit pricklier, in particular Satou and Megure. Kuroda and Matsumoto are both members of the RCD. Naeko Miike and Yumi Miyamoto both work on the technology support division associated with the RCD.

Ran is an RCD trainee who specializes in karate. Since I am adapting, I am making the rules, and Ran knows. She finds out early on, during the adaptation of one of the canonical suspicion arcs, and the tension in their relationship switches from the canonical reasons to tension over the fact that the two of them were close to possibly moving forward into some sort of romance when Shinichi got himself de-aged, and now things are back to being awkward and unspoken.

Rather than being a veteran police officer, Kogoro is an ex-member of the RCD who used to work closely with Megure. His abrupt departure signaled a downturn in how the MPD was treated by the RCD and Megure has never really forgiven him.

Most of Ran and Shinichi’s classmates aren’t named characters, but Hakuba Saguru is attending another RCD training program in Ekoda. Hondou Eisuke will eventually transfer in.

Sonoko went to middle school with Ran, but currently attends a prestigious high school along with Kuroba Kaito. She meets up with Ran after school and on weekends.

The Detective Boys are students at Conan’s school who also start hanging out around the MPD.

Haibara is basically the same as canon, but she also knows a fair amount about neural uplinks and can provide computer support when necessary.

Agasa is responsible for building several different custom mecha for Shinichi, all of them tailored to different situations that he might encounter as Conan during a crime.

Hattori Heiji is training for the Osaka equivalent of the RCD.

The Black Organization… Honestly, I don’t feel like I have to make a lot of changes there. We don’t really know what they want in canon, other than to do crimes, and in this setting, they would still want to do crimes, just using different methods. Some of their tech would probably be different – like, Gin would probably be a really great pilot with a custom gunner unit instead of a sniper, and Vermouth would use things like holographic masks in her disguises– but they would basically be the same characters.

What I would really want to change is, starting a little bit before Eisuke’s introduction in the timeline, I would wrap up whatever season the show was on, give the next season a nifty subtitle, and do everything from the Clash of Red and Black to the Scarlet Arc primarily from the perspective of the FBI. Imagine Raiha Pass with mechs instead of cars. Imagine the Scarlet Arc version of Raiha pass with mechs instead of cars! It would be a really good way to further establish the worldbuilding by showing the FBI characters, who are older and have more experience with using robots as weapons. As the season(s) progressed, this focus would expand to Masumi and Amuro as well, further expanding the audience’s view beyond Conan’s limited perspective. It would also be a way to move the plot forward at a bit of a faster clip.

Akai is the ace pilot (naturally), but Jodie pilots too and Camel’s better at maneuvering (while Akai’s better overall in a fight). Hidemi’s a decent pilot but a better infiltrator. Amuro is also an ace pilot because he’s Amuro. Masumi probably joins the RCD training program.

Some of the really notable cases from that period of time that have no connection to the FBI characters could also be included as OVAs. (If I could get the budget for KID OVAs featuring him stealing stuff with his dad’s decade-old custom mech, I’d do it.)

After those seasons focused on the FBI/the general spy shenanigans end, the perspective can return to Conan, (probably with a new subtitle after the title) and show the effect of the accelerating plot on him, his allies, and the city in general. Depending on when I hypothetically received this money and what Gosho’s plans are, this arc might carry us up to the end of the series, or I might get to write my own ending.

Please note that if I get to write my own ending for this kind of DC adaptation, it will involve Shinichi fighting half of an epic robot battle over a piece of defining evidence as Conan, doing himself permanent injury, and then getting a temporary antidote just in time to make it out with the evidence while all of his more-skilled friends cover his retreat. The last episode would be about everyone’s lives afterward and would be decidedly bittersweet.

As much as I’d love a Real War, Gundam-style series with Conan characters in it, it wouldn’t be anything like an adaptation. This at least preserves the mystery elements while adding mecha elements. In practice, it’s probably more similar to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex than anything. But I still like the concept.

~~(drabbles may eventually happen in this ‘verse)~~