Because a new one was long overdue and I don't want anything relating to that oc showdown blog as my pinned anymore
And I figured it'd be fun if I answered some questions still because I'm sure plenty of people by now have gone;
"Sege I thought this was the Sonic brainrot always blog, what the hell is all this Pokemon Gurren Lagann stuff going on?!?"
At the end of summer 2024 I rewatched Gurren Lagann for the first time since 2011. And then the brainrot took hold. The difference between me in 2011 and me in 2024 is that I can draw humans and anime men now. Which means I can just keep making my own stuff for this anime that's been over for almost two decades--
At the same time my dormant Pokemon obsession finally became active again for the first time in like 2 years. And it became VERY active. So Gurren Lagann did what it does best and combined with the reignited Pokemon hyperfixation rather than being pushed out by it.
It didn't help that I was being enabled via my friend @/riftclaw who's had a long time Pokemon au xe is now writing and went "Kamina and Simon can be canon to my au" (I originally intended for it to be an au of an au)
You should go read the stuff xe has out for the au so far btw I love it and it's part of what threw me face first back into pokemon GO READ IT
Anyway obv these are not my OCs so it's not like I have written out lore here or have OC memes to reblog and answer questions for. So I'm gonna answer some questions under the cut as a sort of FAQ as to what's wrong with me lately and what's going on with these au versions bc I think they'd be fun to answer.
AU FAQ under readmore
What are Simon and Kamina doing in your friend's Pokemon au??
Chilling-- shdHSGDHS. Ok in-univers they're just regular(ish) dudes that were born in that world. The irl reason? My sudden Gurren Lagann hyperfixation happened simultaneously as my Pokemon one. And I'd spent like all year reading snippets of the fic Blake was working on, along with worldbuilding for it.
In that au's lore, a lot of the people in Blackthorn are dragon hybrids. This results in them having naturally occurring bright red hair, or blue hair. They also have some dragon-esque traits like fangs or sharp teeth. The Tatsumi family (Lance's and Clair's family) have red eyes.
The red eyes given are EXACTLY like the ones Kamina has in canon. So while juggling these two hyperfixations I was like "Haha hey Blake you know how Kamina gets drawn with fangs in canon super often, has red eyes, blue hair, and an affinity for capes? What if I made an au of your au where he's Lance's and Clair's brother" and then Blake was like "He's canon TO the au now" and the ball kinda got rolling from there (Thank u Blake)
Simon is also a hybrid tho not a dragon one. There's a town in the au that gets literally wiped off the map because of an earthquake/massive sinkhole. So I plopped Simon in there to keep his earthquake trauma. Even tho they're not from the same town, Kamina and Simon still find each other and Kamina takes him in to Blackthorn after the town's disaster happens and Simon loses his parents in it.
Extra bit of info: Kamina's full name in this au is Kamina Tatsumi, and Simon's is Simon Takashi. I know it's popular fanon to give them the last names of Jiha/Giha since other characters in canon have their last names be the villages they came from. But I don't subscribe to this since they tried so hard to get AWAY from their village I don't think they'd adopt it into their names, so I got Simon a whole new last name even tho this is an au.
Are other Gurren Lagann characters in this AU?
PROBABLY although they would be background/side characters since Kamina and Simon are what I focus on here. They have a whole wide world to exist in so they could be out and about. Like I can't imagine Simon NOT meeting up with and eventually dating Nia. If Kamina gets to live then she should get to live too. She'd probably be a fairy hybrid of some sort because I mean. Look at her.
Kittan might be somewhere out there too as a friend Kamina occasionally meets up with and bickers with, kind of like a rival. I don't think he'd be a hybrid because I think it's funny how in episode 4 when Kamina met him he was like 'SHOW ME YOUR TEETH SO I CAN SEE THAT THEY'RE FLAT AS PROOF YOU'RE NOT A BEASTMAN' like he doesn't frequently get drawn with fangs.
Tl;dr: Yes the other GL characters could potentially be out there even if my focus isn't on them. It's a big world out there and Kamina and Simon are traveling it, so they're meeting all sorts of people all the time.
Ok but Sege you appear to have gone insane over Adaman/Kamina? How did this happen? Is it a crackship?
This is not a crackship-- at least not by the og definition. Nowadays it seems to get used as a term for 'a ship that isn't canon' but the og definition meant 'silly unserious joke ship'.
Adaman/Kamina is canon to the au and is treated completely seriously.
Did I mean for it to happen? Nope! It was another case of 'author does the writing and then the character end up doing whatever they want instead of anything that was planned for'
In this au Kamina is the one that ends up living through the events of Legends Arceus-- except unlike in the game he gets to bring himself and Ingo home after fighting Arceus.
To me Adaman is bisexual af, and I figured he'd have a crush on Kamina. It was meant to be silly-- Kamina is an acearo that hasn't found the words for it because he's just not focused on that. He's focused on Pokemon and battling and traveling the world. He's oblivious to a lot of advances. So Adaman runs into a lot of situations where Kamina's absolutely dense about how he feels.
But then I was like 'well. Adaman is impatient, and he's got no lack of confidence. I don't think he'd keep these feelings to himself for the entirety of Kamina's stay in Hisui'
And things kinda spiraled from there because then we have Kamina, who's been stuck in Hisui for a couple months or so at that point. The Pokemon team he's familiar with-- some of which he's grown up with, isn't there. There aren't even that many dragon types in Hisui for him to speak to and be himself around (he's hiding the whole dragon thing given how the people of Jubilife are around Pokemon alone)
He's been separated from his family and friends. Ingo and Adaman are the people he hangs around the most, and some of the only people that know (save for a few other Diamond clan members that were there when Adaman himself found out)
He's got no people to be around most the time, no one to really let in his personal space. And as someone that's grown up with a bunch of siblings and then gone on to make a bunch of friends, that's a big thing for him.
He's lonely af, so when Adaman confesses by kissing him, he gives in to that. They end up with a sort of arrangement where they both get affection for different reasons. And then it starts deepening beyond that. It's queerplatonic rather than a strict romance, so what that means to them fluctuates through the story. All the while they're keeping it a secret just so it doesn't seem like the guy who fell from the sky is playing favorites with one of the clans over the others.
But by the nature of how Legends Arceus would end if there was an option for the player to go back from wherever Arceus plucked them from, it does mean that they get separated in the end. They know this will happen but they stay with each other until the end anyway.
They move on with their lives, but they do end up reunited even though it's years down the line
Anyway that's why I've been insane lately SHDGSHDHHSD. Will add more stuff if I think of any or get asked
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Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. β€οΈ
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is βMartin and Bosco Dayβ. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
people NEED to stop gatekeeping making music like ohhhh i donβt have an instrument ohhhhh i donβt know music theory ohhhhh iβm not gonna pay for some program. SHUT UP. take my hand.
you need NONE of that shit!!!!! thereβs a website called beepbox.co. literally all you have to do is press things until it sounds a modicum of nice. itβs easy itβs free and it works on anything which has a browser because itβs a website.
if even ONE person starts making music bc of this post it will be worth it.
making bad music is just as important and okay as it is to write badly or draw badly or sing badly. you ARENβT BEHOLDEN TO MAKE GOOD MUSIC. making music is not utilitarian HAVE FUN. HAVE FUN!!!!!!!!!
love how people will encourage people to just start making shit and see what happens when it comes to drawing and writing but when it comes to beginner musicians (music makers if you wish to be less formal) itβs just COMPLETE RADIO SILENCE. it feels like no one even knows you MAKE music it just sprouts up from the ground one day and some guy picks it up. am i alone in this dark cave
Alternatively if you wanna get into music producing in a more βproperβ way, you still donβt need any money.
Ableton has excellent free websites to learn the basics:
Learning Music
Learning Synths
You can learn basically everything you need on YouTube. I recommend:
Mercurial Tones Academy
Dan Worrall
Bthelick
A lot of your favorite artists, mainly in electronic music, likely have done track breakdowns, you can watch those to learn how they do things.
DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) ultimately all do the same things, and Cakewalk is a great FREE fully fledged one. Sure it has some issues, and doesnβt have many plugins included, but it works just fine. All the music I released so far was made there, before I made the jump to Ableton.
As for VST plugins:
Vital is an excellent free synth
Native Instruments Komplete Start is a good free collection of plugins
TDR Nova is a great free EQ
Thereβs a lot of others and I donβt wanna name everything Iβm aware of here, but feel free to DM me for more (Or if you have any other questions and stuff too).
And as for samples, you can get a bunch of free ones at:
Cymatics
Ghosthack
Having good headphones is nice and what Iβd recommend you invest in first once it comes to it, but even your current ones will probably be fine, mainly if you slap AutoEQ onto them to flatten the frequency response. And ultimately, music isnβt all about the mixing, the most important part is conveying an emotion.
I know this goes against the spirit of the original post a little, but I want people to know that getting into music production also no longer costs thousands, you can just do it at home on your computer without no money.
Yeah, there is still quite the learning curve, I get that, though itβs also why itβs managed to hold me as a hobby for so long.
I do however have something of the exact opposite variety too, the most simple way to make music I know of, and a wonderful little semi-social experience, along the lines of the game Journey:
The New PLINK! is the long overdue update of #plink by @DinahmoeSTHLM. Jam with friends and strangers all over the world.
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βthere's whole mystery dungeon-esque societies developing out there in parallel to all the humans' drama on the other side of the fence!β
oh that sounds REALLY interesting. like so interesting. donβt suppose uβd be willing to part with any lore π?
so in geo pokemon are all descended from mutated animals, so they've inherited a bunch of instinct and behaviour from them--but they're entirely sapient, and because pokemon can generally understand the egg group languages, they quickly become aware that all the other pokemon species have the same internal experience they do. they've also watched the humans put up the fences, rebuild their cities, and start farming food again.
and eventually the question arose; "well why can't we have this too? what's stopping us from growing our own food and building houses?"
there wasn't one particular community that started it, more a bunch of groups all over the world asking themselves the question and trying to put the idea into practice. many groups moved into abandoned human settlements beyond the fences, others attempted to build or dig their own. even obligate carnivores seem to be fine eating berries, so they started trying to figure out how to grow those more efficiently instead of relying on forage. some pokemon would go digging through abandoned human settlements for useful items; others would jump the fence and go steal things from the humans directly. the majority have barter-based economies and divide labour according to skill because that's what makes the most sense to them.
in the present the communities are not super large (the biggest probably hit maybe a thousand members). the idea is going to spread and become increasingly popular over the next couple decades though, as more animal instinct is forgotten over the coming generations. one of those big cultural shifts that takes time but nobody understands why it did when they look back on it
there's no mechanism for humans being isekai'd, though there are post-humans and hybrids who live beyond the fences in these communities (notably, n was stolen from one). the fences themselves are a big reason that most of these settlements are safe to develop--there are always poachers, but largely humans stay inside them and the pokemon that live there tend to be ones that want a human to help them get better at fighting or just provide food and shelter.
in tohjo specifically the largest pokemon community is in an abandoned town north of the lake of rage; it's led by a japanese-speaking electabuzz named ebu who started out stealing stuff from the humans but decided to go live beyond the fences after a few close calls. this was where silver was staying during that year of solo training--silver doesn't bring anything to the group except some training techniques and knowledge of how the fence system works but they tolerate him as long as he's nice and helps out now and then.
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Where you can tell somethings Wrong even by the way he just. Exists. The 'Batmanning' thing he does with his cape where its just draped over him. Like hes a dragon with his wings folded. Hes Never shirtless anymore, always at least wearing that anime sleeveless turtleneck. Tired eyes. Sometimes even messy hair
And thats just his Appearance. Then theres Everything Else, like his self isolation when Kaminas always been one to work best as a team. Like yeah theres his pokemon team there always but he just. Never meets up to travel with anyone even for a little while. Might join a sibling in taking down a Team Rocket hideout but thats it.
The way he fully left Simon up to be raised by Blackthorn full time, because he cant even trust himself to keep him safe. He couldnt keep his big brother safe, hows his little brother supposed to stand a chance?
Mainverse Kamina who befriends people on his travels vs Crimson Dragon who helps people out but then goes on his way with no attempt at connecting
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I'm doing a HeartGold playthrough as Kamina and getting to Blackthorn with everyone in-game being like 'WHO THE HELL ARE YOU!? HAVE YOU HEARD OF LANCE??' and Clair refusing to give him the badge was so funny when you consider it in-universe that we decided to make it a plot point where everyone in town gaslights Kamina by acting like they've never seen him before
He wakes up the next morning to Simon having 'won' the badge he was supposed to get with a Sandshrew, and a Dratini egg
Clair's reasoning is that it was 'a very strong egg'