Final Fantasy Fun

 OH. EM. GEE. From <user=filkertom site=livejournal.com>: 

This is a full hour and twenty minutes, and it takes about 5 minutes to set up and introduce the voice actors (including John DiMaggio -- Bender/Wakka/Kimahri/Migelo -- and Tara Strong, Bubbles/Rikku/Twilight Sparkle). 

Various well-known voice actors read the script of Star Wars using their characters. No, Tara Strong is NOT playing Leia. I'm not going to spoil it, but pan forward to about 7:00 to have your brain explode.

I will be watching the whole thing tomorrow. With an inhaler ready. 

[[EDIT: mostly hilarious, but I did not find the black jokes funny. whisky tango heliotrope?!]]

Signal boost from thene .

Author David Gaider judges fanfic based on Dragon Age and has some helpful concrit based on reading those submissions.

I'm not sure I agree with all of them, but I must reconsider my own Tolkienesque habit of starting with description.

 There are many, many, many problems with the late 70s "Buck Rogers in the 25th century" show, starting with the fact that Gil Gerard, the Buck Rogers actor, is an ass. (Although he does manage the "charming doofy rogue" character fairly well.)

 owlmoose's post about girlsavesboyfic got me to thinking about the basic plot of the episode I watched last night. FWIW, girl saves boy's butt three or four times in one 2-hour pilot: 

 

( Spoilers... )

And of course, the villain of the piece is a princess who's plotting to conquer the Earth so she can get out from under her father's thumb and depose him. Ardala's plotline is seriously undercut by the fact that she's trying to recruit Buck to be her second-in-command since Kane is not sufficiently manly for her. 

I do not expect this trend to last. I believe the first season received lukewarm reviews, after which the show got hit with a terminal case of Stupid. And I think Wilma will quickly be whittled down into a more typical subservient female role so Buck can get on with being the star. 

 But... day-um. And it was frickin' BUCK ROGERS. 

With heavy nods to Star Wars, which had come out two years before, the plot boils down to: "Princess Leia is a tough-as-nails military officer who keeps having to bail Han Solo out of whatever awful scrape he's gotten himself into, while Han teaches her to loosen up a little."  Which, come to think of it, would've been a rather fun story.
 

 

ARCHIMAGE IS FINISHED.

GO. READ. LEAVE COMMENTS.

Archimage is a fanfiction sequel to the original series which picks up all the loose threads and weaves them in a suitably Utenesque fashion to tell a heck of a yarn. What happened to Utena? Anthy? Juri? Miki? The rest of the messed-up crew? This is one of those fanfiction stories that will become instant head-canon.

Well, well. This hardly qualifies as a drabble, but I found myself totally incapable of limiting these two fascinating characters to 100 words.

Title: MYST: Age of Spira
Fandom: Final Fantasy X-2/MYST (Crossover)
Characters: Lulu, Catherine
Rating: G
Warning: Spoilers to both games to help orient readers who may only be familiar with one of 'em.
Word Count: 2700
Prompt written for:wired_lizard

A/N: The best part of this? It explains why that cave with the combination lock on the door showed up on Besaid in the sequel!

( A meeting of minds... )

P.S. I'm going to put this short trailer here from the Y2K remake of MYST just because EVERYONE must hear Catherine's voice. Oh, Catherine....

1) FFX Lulu/Yuna Drabble: "Communion"  (R)
posted on ff_yuri_drabble 



2) Cleaning out my old Geocities websites (NOTE: GEOCITIES IS SHUTTING DOWN IN LATE OCTOBER!), I found an old Utena/Anthy fanart I drew while watching Revolutionary Girl Utena for the first time....

"Anthy's Revenge"  (Click for full size)



At the time, it seemed to me that Anthy would drive a sporty little green VW bug. Now I think maybe a Minicooper with flames on the sides.

Web flotsam picked up off my flist.
Very, very, VERY FUNNY.


Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

It's really bizarre to have a game exploiting the voice-acting talents of Brian Blessed, Christopher Lee, Bruce Boxleitner (Tron! Why have I never seen that film!?) and as many of the VAs as possible (Mulan! Aladdin! Pooh Bear! Ariel! Megaira! Jack Skellington!) and then to have Aerith voiced by someone who sounds as bad as some of the worst dubs of FFX. It's a pity, since it's made what might have been an amusing scene with Cloud (now serving as earthquake-proofing by propping up walls with his Angst) unwatchable.

On the other hand, the crack, it is beautiful.

Most of the game is typical self-insert -- ahem, Sora-insert fanfiction, but every now and then, I think the designers locked themselves in the Tiki Room for 24 hours with lots of caffeine and sugar.

Tifa wandering through at random intervals, smashing the walls within a joule of structural failure, scaring the bejeezus out of the party and wandering off with a vague smile is making me cackle. If she ever finds Mr. Angst, will she pound him into a pancake with little spikey yellow bits sticking out? I hope so, because otherwise "Tifa searching for her Man" is not quite so entertaining.

Or, better, I want a Tifa minigame in which one gets to beat clues into various Final Fantasy characters. You could start out with easy characters like Lulu and Zidane and work your way up to the real blockheads. I would consider some of them impossible, except that apparently Tifa's fists are no longer using regular Strength and Agility stats, but have been converted to the Richter Scale.
 
An incredibly minor moment in an incredibly complex and HUGE game, but, anyway.

So far, I have felt that pretty much all the worlds are engrossing and the storylines in each were fanfiction immersion of the sort I like (even for the two whose films I haven't seen, Tarzan and Tron). The only one that fell flat was Pirates of the Carribbean. It felt to me like what happens when I or many fans attempt fanart: at best, a stiff, flat, and somewhat inadequate attempt to capture something of the original, with no original spark. Odd, because the graphics were quite good. I think excerpting the "best movie quotes" and stringing them together as a synopsis of the movie was a little too restrictive; Mulan, the only other one where they basically recapitulated the film instead of doing a fanfiction set in that universe, also had a bit of the same problem.

Entering the Winnie-the-Pooh world through a pop-up book is pinging my MYST (and Manhole) nostalgia.

The minigames are going to kill me, though. Arthirtis is missing turn-based play. It's a good thing most battles can be won with flailing, because I am simply not quick enough to get off much magic in a system like this.

Particularly heavenscalyx.

Splinters of the Past.
Susan Ivanova/Talia Winters.

 

I'm sick today-- donno what it is, maybe a cold or something -- so I went hunting up "Axel's Hips Don't Lie" to amuse myself. For some reason that thing entertains me even though I've never played the game.

I happened to notice another Kingdom Hearts fanvid in the sidebar.

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URL in case that didn't work: Kingdom Hearts Random Crap: The Musical (Spoiler warning)

Some bits are better than others, and they need to fix the volume of some songs to match the rest, but there are parts of it that had me hooting for oxygen.

My favorite is Demyx. The Clueless Trio saying "Hello nurse!" to Auron is also...um...something. O.o ;;