Suikoden

Even if it's to save your life, there are some things you just don't do.

--Viktor to Annabelle, Suikoden II.

I can chart the course of my life by Defining Stories.  Age 9 to about 14, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."  Age 15 to 16, "Star Wars."  Long break.  Age 23 to 25, "Harry Potter."  Age 25 to 26, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."  Age 26 on ... "Xena: Warrior Princess."  And then ... I thought that I would never have another of those stories again.  See, the odd thing is that it's not that linear.  I'll still quote Ninja Turtles in my journal.  I used to be a staunch Leonardo fan and by this point, he and Raphael are tied for my favorite Turtle and I'm sure that will shift again at some point in my life.  I attempted to go back to Buffy several times, and although time and energy and other commitments kept thwarting me, I still intend to rewatch it all sometime in the not-too-distant future.  "Harry Potter" never went away, but kind of went into hibernation after the seventh movie came out, when suddenly I was hooked on the Dangerverse and my internal "Harry Potter" canon is forever changed.  I tried to like "Xena" better than all the others, but I don't know if I ever did ... at least for itself.  I liked being part of the fandom, and that necessarily made me spend so much time thinking about "Xena" that I didn't have energy to go and find a new story.  Since I left "Xena" fandom, I've found stories that I felt as strongly about ... as  happy in the moment, as content to obsess and daydream and write and read and make videos.  But I haven't found another story that changed me as much.  I thought that all the "essential story" slots in my head were full.

Until a certain friend of mine suggested that I play Suikoden.

There hasn't been enough time for me to know whether this story will last in my life.  A lot of stories that I thought would last, didn't.  But I started playing Suikoden this past Christmas.  Severely sleep deprived and not feeling well, I intended to play for an hour or so.  Eight hours later at two in the morning, I finally turned the PlayStation off.

Thus, the second portion of my blog will be for posts compare/contrasting themes in "Xena: Warrior Princess" with themes in the Suikoden series.  I'll put all of these posts under spoiler cuts, and notate at the top what they are spoilers for (example: spoilers for Xena through season 2 and for Suikoden 3").

For this introduction, I would like to present my videos!

This one isn't really mine -- my friend Dreamer98/Skypie was the person to actually create this and deserves most of the credit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJaoQvrBJV0

Here is my only solo "Xena" video that I'm proud of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4OkIFjYNls&feature=youtu.be

Keep checking this page for updates.  I have an idea for a Gabrielle/Perdicus video to Tamar Kaprelian's "The Other Side."  It occurs to me that there aren't any pure Gabrielle/Perdicus romance videos out there.  There isn't much to work with in an episode and a half, but "The Other Side" is perfect for them.

I have two Suikoden videos so far.

This one has spoilers for the "good ending" of Suikoden 2.  It's also a Christian song (giving that disclaimer so no one is offended in either direction -- either for listening to Christian music or for using that music for video games!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iquuw4z12J0

And, this one has spoilers for the whole of Suikoden 3, as well as stray bits of information from the first two games.  It's also the most angst I've ever crammed into seven minutes (which, why yes, I'm very proud of that).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhgUXfVVeIc

At the moment, I'm working on a Suikoden 2 video set to another Christian song.  I had the idea to take the little mini-scenes from the "good ending" and expand them.  This will involve drawing and coloring some backgrounds, then tracing characters from printouts of Suikogaiden pictures and scanning them over backgrounds -- which will take an insane amount of work.  My crayons are all set out on my kitchen table ready to get to work.

I think the point when I realized just how important Suikoden had come from was when I was playing through one of the two paths possible in Suikoden 2 and suddenly a huge and visceral analogy to my own life leapt off the screen at me.

Even at his most powerless, man's existence is never without meaning.

--Suikoden Introduction