Konuju

Wow, I've been on this site for nearly 8 years and never filled in the 'about me' thing.

Well then.

Most of my time here is spent in Pokémon: Rise of the Rockets, so you'll probably find me there. In fact, while I enjoy video games, most of what I play is Pokémon. I'll occasionally branch out into other games like Fire Emblem or Undertale. I'm also a big fan of Earthbound/Mother, despite having never played any of those games. I need a Wii U.

If you scroll down to the 'interests' portion of this page, you'll see that I also like Digimon. That's right, back when all the kids on the playground were bashing Digimon as a ripoff of Pokémon or vice versa, I was one of the few that actually enjoyed both. I've always felt like Pokémon had the better games while Digimon had the better anime, although I never actually played a Digimon game other than those little pedometer Digivices so I guess I can't accurately judge that. Anyway, Digimon's emphasis on story and character development kind of helped me draw inspiration for Rise of the Rockets.

I guess if I'm chronicling my life, I should put Bionicle next. It really defined my childhood -- I still associate any year between 2001 and 2010 with that year in Bionicle. After 2005 or so I didn't get as many sets (probably cause my brother stopped buying them so we only had one person contributing to our shared collection), but I diligently bought and read all of the books. I also have a handful of the comic books, mostly from 2006 onwards. I've kind of followed 2015 Bionicle via the online animations, but nowhere near as diligently as I did in its first generation -- I guess Rise of the Rockets has been taking up all my time!

In August 2013 I somehow stumbled across Princess Eilonwy, the "Lost Disney Princess." I had no idea who she was, and that air of mystery around her intrigued me... and so did her name (I'm a sucker for e's and y's apparently). It turns out she's from the 1985 Disney movie The Black Cauldron, which apparently bombed at the box office so bad that Disney has since denied its existence. The Black Cauldron in turn is based on the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, a series of books written in the 60s. I had some free time and my curiosity got the better of me, so I rented the movie and streamed it through Amazon. To my surprise, it was actually not that bad. I was instantly sucked in by a nostalgia of old hand-drawn animation, and The Black Cauldron was filmed in 70mm, which is like ultra-widescreen. Not to mention, the soundtrack was amazing. All in all, it was a nice little gem. But everything I read about it said it paled in comparison to the books. So I went to a local used bookstore and found the first book in the series, The Book of Three, and bought it. The bookstore didn't have book 2 though, so I just bought a boxed set online. In a similar vain to Harry Potter, the books consecutively got better. Then I reached the fourth one, Taran Wanderer. In it the series' protagonist, a lowly Assistant Pig-Keeper named Taran, goes on a personal journey to discover his ancestry. Halfway through the book, his journey shifts to one of discovering who he even is and what his place is in the world. As a college student struggling to find a direction in my soon to be post-college life, this spoke loads to me, and brought the series from a pretty neat and entertaining series to the best series I've ever read. The ending of the final book, The High King, was the first book to actually make me cry in a long time.

The next summer, 2014, I decided to try out Lloyd Alexander's other famous book series, the Westmark Trilogy. I'll admit, the reason I read it in the first place was because of Rise of the Rockets. The premise of the first book is an innocent youth named Theo is thrust into a world of lies and deceit, and he struggles to find his own moral standing. This sounded similar to what I was trying to do with my RotR character Ellen at the time, so I thought it would be a good source of inspiration. I was not disappointed, and although the second and third books in the series didn't have as strong of a 'find your moral compass' theme as the first, they were no less compelling. The entire trilogy was based on Alexander's time serving in World War II, and it's definitely darker than Prydain, but it retains those deep and thought-provoking messages I so loved about Prydain, even if the answers to the questions it raises aren't always clear.

Another thing I love about Lloyd Alexander is how he was such a humble and down-to-earth guy. And as a kind-of-writer with Rise of the Rockets, I've found myself agreeing with pretty much everything he's ever said in an interview about writing. I've also found Rise of the Rockets to be an interesting source of introspection, for I've written a bit of myself into each of my characters. Maybe I'll come back here and write more about that one day.