Word Vomit

Well... okay...
Good time as any to vent my frustrations about 信秀....

( There is no more sanity... )

... I forgot how I heard of this drama, but I started reading the manga adaptation first because I have no patience for sitting still and watching stuff anymore. But then the manga takes forever to update, so I thought I'd just go watch the actual thing.
( Not review, just a lot of whining )

To be perfectly honest, I actually saw this a while ago, but never got around to doing it. Then I sawdaeva_neesan  did it, so... why not? (sorry dae, I borrowed your translation, hahaha)

01. What is your nickname?
Agas or Renoir
02. How old are you?
I'm legal. Period.
03. Are you a man or a girl?
A derp girl
04. Where are you from?
The beautiful Emerald of the Equator
05. What's your occupation?
Wannabe Game Designer (still a student)
( Read more... )

Rough ideas of, well, an entirely new story that has nothing to do with real history. The setting is still inspired by Sengoku Japan, but it's not Japan per se. No Takeda Shingen, no Uesugi Kenshin, no Ashikaga Shogunate, NOPE. Just an entirely fictional not!Japan. With a good bit of Chinese influence because my main steampunk influence/reference source are Chinese movies. 

Well, actually it's a rather anachronistic setting where it's a fusion between the Edo period and the Muromachi or something. The technology is equivalent to late 1700s to early 1800s in the real world, but the government is still like that of the Ashikaga shogunate, not the Tokugawa. The shogun is weak and the daimyo all over the land do whatever the heck they want. Not!Japan is not closed off to outsiders, but is more strict in regulations regarding the comings and goings of foreigners than it was in the Muromachi era. I'll have to look up the travels of Indians in this time because I know some Japanese monks have gone to India to study the Buddhist sutras or something and I want to know if the Indians returned the favour and visited Japan. Or, if not, I'll just make it happen anyway because I have the leeway of this being a fictional universe and all. 

 And I still think I'm leaning more towards clockpunk than steampunk because what I use is intricate gearwork mechanism that has nothing to do with steam engines, but we'll just see... 

The POV character is a young sailor, around 17-21 years old, who returned home after being out at sea for a few years to be closer to family. This sailor went to look for work in the local area/province (are regions already counted as provinces way back then?) and ends up being caught up in crazy court and political and warfare issues as warlords vie for the position of Shogun. This being an original story, I have even more freedom and less guilt about getting things wrong, LOL. This person's story is kind of loosely inspired by the book The Signore (forgot the author's name), but different because my POV character is a rather active participant in the kerfuffle while the POV character of The Signore to me seems more like a passive observer.

I hesitated to call the POV character of my story a "main character" because I'm pretty sure I'm actually just telling the story of this huge Shogun war, with the POV character being the "camera" through whom the readers experience the story. Even if the POV character is kind of closely involved, the main focus of the story is the war and the most active participants (i.e the 3-4 top contender daimyo and their highest-ranking generals and retainers), not our POV character.



Rough doodle of the POV character and close friends. Bad anatomy 'cause I just want a quick visualization.

Middle: Our POV character. Goes by the name of Jinnai (it's kind of a nickname rather than real name, but eh, spoilers). 
Far right: Korei, Jinnai's younger brother. Works at a tea shop.
Second from right: Ryouen, the daughter of Jinnai's boss (on land, not on the ship).
Second from left: Tadakatsu, a daimyo's disgraced younger brother who has been taken in by another daimyo.
Far left: Chiyo, a governor's daughter.

 Again, not main characters per se. Heck, I don't think people like the younger brother and the governor's daughter are all that essential to the plot. They're just people close to the POV character. I like making characters. Shame on me, I shouldn't make pointless characters, but... Yeah. Will work on cutting down the cast as I write.

Need a little more info on hierarchy here. From what little I find, governors can be minor lords who aren't daimyo. Like, Akechi Mitsuhide was a governor (or at least some kind of ruler) of Hyuuga. I... don't know what that place even is. Is it a city? A village? A region? I don't know how the area divisions work! There's provinces, there's towns, there's villages... Eugh.

I've been taking world-building for granted, apparently. At first the idea seemed simple. Steampunk Sengoku Japan. Shouldn't be too hard, no?

WRONG.

griswaldterrastone.deviantart.com/art/How-to-Create-Your-Own-World-344907941

That link gave me much to think about. Not entirely a bad thing, though. Technology shapes a culture. If a nation had high-end steam tech available to them, what would their opinion on others be like?

The realization first hit me when I read a book about Europeans in Japan in the Sengoku era and I saw that it mentioned the straits of Malacca.

The Portuguese entered Japan around the same time they started roughing up South East Asia.

It was a shame that I actually forgot that because it makes me feel so unpatriotic, but I was not very good with history back at school and I only remembered the Dutch colonization because it lasted longer and left a lot of relics and buildings that are still around to this day. I have NO IDEA if the Portuguese ever left anything in places easily-accessible to me and I haven't bothered to check (again, shame on me).

This was the colonization period. This is the time when the Europeans got out to the world and colonize people. Because... they think they're better than you. And fight each other a lot back in Europe, apparently.

( Read more... )

Just a quick note because lack of info. In his letters Nobunaga would refer to his vassals by their titles and not name (with the exception of HIdeyoshi who apprently doesn't have one). A retainer named Mashiru Yasunaga, for example, was referred to in the letter as "Yamashiro no Kami" (lord of Yamashiro?). Akechi Mitsuhide was referred to as "Koretoo Hyuuga no Kami".

But that was letters to other people. What I want to know is how people address each other. And, of course, how Nobu and son call each other. I remember taking note of a letter from Nobunaga, but I don't remember who is it TO. I thought it was to his son, but I may be remembering wrong because I also took note of a letter from his son Nobutaka and I may have mistakenly remembered Nobunaga's letter as a reply letter. Ekh.

DAMMIT THIS IS NOT IMPORTANT. Even Japanese people wouldn't have issues if I wrote names as names, but now that I've stumbled upon this info, I just WANT TO KNOW!!!!!

(official portrait)

KOEI's illustration for the game Nobunaga's Ambition

Oda Nobuo, Nobunaga's second son, is the "hero" I chose for the Siege of Osaka story. Well, rather, I kind of wanted to explore this guy's life story at some point, but I chose Siege of Osaka as my "test run" of writing his character because I wanted to do the Siege of Osaka anyway.

( Read more... )