#aghht srtuc posts

went on TVtropes yesterday, found the SRTUC page again, started adding to trivia and though, hmm, I've been getting "earlier anthro action cartoon" vibes from this show for a while now.... wonder why that is?

and guys, adding some of the art peeps there no the TVtropes trivia, I noticed that supervising producer ben jones actually worked on SWAT KATS as a character designer for 3 eps! what a connection to make!

my brain at that moment:

edit 1(27.06.2023) - ok, turns out I just mixed the actual show up with this show.... but it's sorta nice for me bc I like reminiscing about Swat Kats haha xD

on with the old post!!

a post with all my longer Samurai Rabbit: the Usagi Chronicles posts! not quite a masterlist, but I wanted to put them all under one list so I can find them later for referencing sake :D 

Yuichi Usagi - what’s in a name? (a lil bit of theory)

Usagi is a given name (part 2) - more theories and observations

keikogi for reference - for Yuichi Usagi’s outfit

Samurai Rabbit w/ Stan Sakai & The Usagi Chronicles Creative Team (interview links)

re-listening to “Samurai Rabbit with Stan Sakai & The Usagi Chronicles Creative Team” (this one is a longer analysis post) 

My doodle-tag and my art post tag = :-D

Just realized this morning - by the end of season 2, aren't the small appliances in the city also powered down during night? 🤔 

But lol I can only guess that the citizens prob use those smaller batteries in the household for things like refrigerators and other smaller machines. 

From this and the episodes featuring the temple and the Ashibasha, we can only assume; the batteries can power either one big unit (Ashi and Kiyoko) or one whole room (seemingly? from the ep “Common Sensei” where Kitsune is seen lugging one battery to the temple and back)

“These batteries itch...” like it’s an interesting use for them bc it implies that before Usagi came to town and wrecked stuff up and swept everyone along for fixing a 1000 year old issue, the Ki-stone must have been experiencing blackouts and fluctuations enough to warrant backup batteries, being plugged into the cities power-supplies on the constant. After going wireless at the end of S1, this becomes a non-issue.

like there’s no battery here, but if the Ki-stone is the only thing powering these appliances, they’d have to find a use for those batteries used before the Ki-stone was restored to full power, I guess. just some thoughts!

like don't get me wrong, he is absolutely a reckless and very low-wisdom kind of character. like his friends have to look out for him with a lot of stuff. but when you start to notice it, he's not actually as dumb as he looks! He's the person coming up with solutions or noticing some things even before his fast training arc. it's interesting how he is written in the show.

I'm reminded also of how I used to write my own characters when I started making comics at 9 and how it was absolutely impossible to write my characters if I suddenly started writing them "off" and out of character for the sake of plot ...and this just reminded me also of the CBCC interview with the Langdales where they mentione a similar thing about "Chizu won't let me write this!" - the characters themselves have enough life in them that you can't just write anything random in and hope that it's in-character x3

I know I literally just put out tags for an anniversary collab we as a fandom could do but I'm not good at tag deciding so I'm just putting a few tags out publically to kinda rattle them around my head for a bit xD

lol I started thinking with that previous post that, while it's nice that the creators and crew of the show don't see some of the stranger drama and stuff that happens with fandom spaces on here and twt, I think it would be nice to get a hashtag trending alonside the usual ones, just to track the collab a bit :P

I read "Senso" over the end of March and the last week and reviewed a bunch of interviews again and man i dunno how to post abt it but it seems that Yuichi Usagi is actually intentional as naming? And yes, Yuichi can be a last name also, but is still mainly read as a first name.

Like specifically it seems that it’s a reference to the ending of “Usagi Yojimbo: Senso” in a similar way to how the rest of the show is also intentionally an homage to that story as it’s main source of inspiration.

“Yuichi” commonly has the meaning "heroic first (son)" (雄一) and in the japanese subtitles, Yuichi is spelled as both 雄一 and ユウイチ - Yūichi. So let's take the japanese subtitling as additional canon as that’s how the character’s introduce themselves. (I'll link this Japanese-Names website as an online source for now since I'm not fluent in it myself.) The subtitles are based on the english dub of course, but it seems the japanese dub is similar on the name introductions for the most part (not a native speaker myself so I can only guess).

Spoilers for Senso if you haven't read it. I recommend you do, if really nothing else. It’s a really nice mashup of sci fi in Usagi Yojimbo, in a very “War of the Worlds” type clash. I really loved the foreword comic and the illustrations before the story. It's a really good story. Here’s a nice spoilerless review of it by Nothing but Comics.

(edit 9.11.2025): Interviews I am going to reference:

Stranger Worlds interview with Stan about Senso (Sept 7,2015)

The CBCC interview with Stan and art director Khang Le + the showrunners/writers Langdales (May 9, 2022)

Film Rejects interview with Stan and crew (May 14, 2022)

POPverse interview with Stan and Khang (May 31, 2022)

Other interviews I am going to vaguely ref are here: SR trivia

So from interviews we know that the Samurai Rabbit crew was inspired by and drew influences from six-issue book Usagi Yojimbo: Senso - you can see it in how the Makkine were designed and episode references (S2, ep 9 "Eggs!" - the falling martian ships are called eggs in “Senso”) and mainly the story outline of aliens invading edo-period japan.

So why give Yuichi Usagi a first name as a last name?

We see this backstory in "Willow Branch" in season 2.

The sword was lost. That is a storyline they included to make an interesting story out of it but to also connect the show and og comic in a different way. A "passing of the torch" in some sense, but also literally what the comic tells us about og Usagi and his swords. In Senso: "They are my soul. Pass them down to your firstborn… then to his [...] then down the line…” And in the show we see that Willow Branch is found and recovered by Yuichi and the sword accepts him as the next in line. The firstborn son.

So from this we can make the fan-theory that perhaps in the show canon, Miyamoto Usagi’s family maybe named their next firstborn in line Yuichi, to honor their forebear Miyamoto Usagi's last wish, again if we're going by the thought that this was inspired by "Senso". (Jotaro being his last surviving member in this verse possibly, we don't know here bc it's intentionally left vague to not spoil series-only viewers + keep the mystery open for anyone who decides to read the comic after the series for the first time). It could even be a possibility that they just kept that as a surname for sentimental reasons, because the family had women as first-born children for so long (if we assume based on Usagi's auntie and missing parents), but they wanted to keep that memory going for as long as possible, since the sword was lost shortly after Miyamoto saved Edo from Kagehito’s plan a 1000 years before Yuichi’s time. But that’s already just speculation from me as a fan of the cartoon.

And before die-hard comic readers swoop in, yes, in Senso the swords are not lost, but again, it’s an alternative universe story situation for the people making the show, and I find what they did was interesting.

The one-shot comic’s ending is tied into the world of “Space Usagi” as well, without spoiling it too much, which is a storyline Stan did in a space opera setting. The connection between being inspired by Senso which is tied to this story may also be why so many interviews and articles call Usagi Chronicles as inspired by Space Usagi directly, since both are spin-offs that take place in a distant future, even if the inspiration can only be seen in early concept art when the show had to pivot.

Or you know, it could also just be that they wanted an easy-sounding name for their main character to call that wasn't only Usagi, since they have two in the series: their own and the original.

But all in all, whether the name comes as a reference to the original comic, or from simple use of a common name, it can’t be ignored that this is just how the show calls it’s main character.

But you can still call him Yuichi, as that is what both the crew (his creators) and Stan Sakai call him when talking of both tbe Usagis. (Or, in the case of Stan, "my Usagi" and "Their/Samurai Rabbit/the show's Usagi") It could be that out of respect for the work the crew put into his series, Stan didn’t suggest more naming conventions for the character because he already liked the work and story the crew did. It could be that they put a pin in it at first and then got used to it as pre-production continued. Could even just be that he loled it right away. But I don’t find it that useful to speculate on that as much, because the cartoon we have is already made and finished how it is and well, we don’t know the exact authorial reasonings from the show crew side much, so Yuichi Usagi it is.

Though also, the way that his names are used in the show (Auntie mainly calls him Usagi and family usually adress via 1st name, Yuichi is never used mich beyond introductions) and how it's used in the interviews when talking about Miyamoto Usagi as well, it feels like they meant to give him two first names, and couldn’t decide on a surname-sounding last name so, Yuichi Usagi was left in the final script. But that's just my guess as a fan and viewer again.

Maybe other fans have had similar or better discussions about it? It would be interesting to know if the show has more japanese fans and how they find this, for example. What they think about how the show introduces him as Surname-Given Name, but then every other character switches to just calling him Usagi right away. In japan, people usually use last name+ honorifics when they have just met. But both Usagi's new friends and Usagi himself switch to first-name basis after their first day meeting each other and going through a few fights. Is it just because the show has a mostly western audience(my assumption), and we're meant to use his given name as an audience to be more familiar with him... or is it only because he's a rabbit and some of the characters (like Lord Kogane) don't really care more? Perhaps a 1000 years into the future, they've partially lost the use of some traditions?

In any case, it doesn’t feel like the show made that big of a faux pas naming Yuichi the way they did. Ould be that my guess is wrong and it wasn't as deliberate a reference to Senso. It seems a much higher possibility that they thought of that, thought it sounded nice and then kept it because it was an easy way to call him differently from comics-Usagi during production itself, but still getting to call him Usagi in the show-proper.

This is just me basing this on official interviews and the Senso book, but this just seems more likely than them picking a random name with no meaning to it. Of course, I could also be wrong, but based on interviews alone, the showrunners and creative team seem so genuine in wanting to give the comic a good show that it doesn't make sense that they wouldn't research it. Or at the very least, ask about it from Stan himself or even just get a note from him about it, since he reviewed everything else. Candie and Doug (showrunners) even mention (in Comic Book Couple's Counceling podcast interview) how they really wanted to go deeper with research this time and art director Khang Le mentioned how they took a lot of cues from modern japan as well, from their research trips there.

I know this probably won't put any future discussions/rambling about this to rest among other fans, but well, just some thoughts on this. While I think it's probably kind of silly of me to be writing long essays abt a cartoon show I like, I do think it sort of warrants more discussion abt how we talk about characters and how we refer to them. For another show i'm a fan of for example, the character has an official name and a nickname, but the show itself consistently only used the nickname to let the reader be familiar with her. While characters like teachers and enemies might refer to them with their given name, even her full name, their family and friends mainly use the easier nickname. But it seemed that the reverse happened with that show's fandom, as the more unique given name became more used than the nickname the show itself gave us. And this was sorta the same thoughtprocess I had here with Usagi Chronicles.

Anyway, this has been a post x3 I meant to make this shorter and just about Senso, but I sorta started rambling more after the auntie and generations of female Usagi descendants theory x3

edit 5.05: fixed some grammar and sentence logic mistakes! added clarifications where ref was missing (CCBC podcast)