You may have noticed that the IRC entry down there, #1508, has an air of a restart about it. This is deliberate.
When Suburban Senshi started back in 2002, it was just as an occasionally updated blog based on the premise of the
outer senshi and their less-than-perfect every day lives. Over time, the site and its notoriety grew, and it became updated 3-4 times a week.
It went from being a quickie blog to more of an ever growing fanfic written in bits and pieces, accreting as time goes on.
This was a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, That's a lot of character development for Haruka-tachi-- almost half a decade of new history, digging back and pulling forward. At same time, it means almost every joke that can be said, has been said. SS has been slowly repeating its memes for a while now. Think about it. There were more or less 1400 IRC logs filled with plots and gags until now. That's *novels* of data.
There are three fates that inevitably befall fanfics or webcomics based around seminal gags. They either a) quit while they're ahead to avoid staleness, b) drag on so long that they become boring, old hat, cliche and forgotten and then fade out in ignominious cancellation, or c) dare to risk a new direction.
I choose C, because I'm not done with the sub.sen juuuuuust yet.
Haruka-tachi (with the exception of Michiru, who NEEDS to be developed, I keep telling myself) will be fading into the background for a while, as we shift our
focus to Aino House and the inners. They will still interact with the outers, but I want to see what ground we can cover with the inners.
Jay from Genvid made a good point to me this morning. He said that fans did not know the outers, which is what made SS work. And in retrospect, this is true. I picked the initial cast from the most interesting of the underdeveloped characters. With the exception of Michiru, I'd like to think I succeeded in giving them depth and nuance within the parody frame that is SS. Jay was concerned that anything I did with the inners would fail, because they got the most screen time and thus
have their personas indelibly etched in the fandom mind.
I have to give him that point. But as I thought about it, I also realized that the inners we "know" as fans are those of
junior high / high school age. It's now over a
decade later since we've seen them (bar Minako, who we've seen in Sub. Senshi for years now, despite only coming in a guest to mock PGSM). So the approach for
SS now will be
"...a decade is a long time. Get to know the Inner Senshi all over again."
Crystal Tokyo is something I've hated Takeuchi-sensei for. It's boring. It robs the girls of a chunk of their lives. Even the SS version does. It was like she decided "oh let's put them in the FUTAR and it will be so COOL", except being perennial guards to a queen / family would NOT be cool for girls who loved the joys of every day life. I mocked this by making CT an amusement park, but even then, the girls were still tied to their fate, to their queen. Well now they've escaped. Now they're back in their milieu, but the world has gone by a bit. Let's join them as they pick up the pieces and in the process discover just how dysfunctional their former idols, the Outers, really are, shall we?
Comments welcomed below, as I'm just getting this ball rolling.
--X
