No Ryuji Story This Week

[der meister 3,246]

               I've written a lot of media for this site over the years – certainly more than a single novel's worth in terms of pure word count, as the Ryuji series is well over 20,000 words at this point – and not all of my ideas have been winners. If I had to pick, the synchronicity of the Christoph Klose story arc is probably my favorite, simply because of how long I managed the SHL's Seattle franchise before hitting UFA with VHL Klose and finding myself with the Seattle Bears for my final season. The Till Lindemann story arc never really reached a satisfying conclusion, largely due to real-life circumstances that led me to being semi-active at best. And while I enjoyed the Casey Jones and Essian Ravenwing stories, I got tired of both, and in Jones' case, it became increasingly difficult to come up with new content, because there's only so much Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle lore a guy can pull from before he's drained the well.

 

               So where does that leave Ryuji? Now that I'm over 1,000 TPE with the spiky-haired Japanese youth, I thought it might be interesting to do some reflection, especially with it being a new calendar year.

               Early in the Ryuji cycle, I could basically transplant scenes from Persona 5 into the VHL Universe, build off of what was already established as what I'll call Ryuji Canon. He was angry, swore a lot, and was fast. He sometimes felt like a victim, mostly because he was, but he had moments of righteous anger on the behalf of others, as well. But there's only so far that archetype can take you before it starts to feel stale to me, as the author, and undoubtedly to you, as the reader. I mean, how many "Sakamoto swung his stick at the goalpost, causing it to split in two, and I could hear his bellowed obscenities even over the roar of the hostile crowd," can you read before you call it quits? Ryuji had to evolve.

 

               Changing teams and continents early in a player's career can lead to some really good media. I enjoyed researching Istanbul, in particular, and trying to figure out what a 19-year-old Japanese kid might feel like in that city. If there's one thing I do a lot of for these pieces, it's research, even if the results of the research don't show up on the page, so to speak. Having actually been to Toronto, it was very easy to imagine how an Asian kid might feel in that city, even though I'm white enough to get sunburned on an Irish beach on a chilly, overcast day [yes, that actually happened].

 

               The move to Seattle provided a bit of a challenge, at least with regard to the fact that I've never been to the Pacific Northwest, so I leaned a bit into my knowledge of the Shadowrun Universe, which had its origins in Seattle though ultimately expanded to include Hong Kong, Germany, and other non-American locales. The Shadowrun material laid a nice foundation for the geography and some of the author's biases leading into those first few weeks of material, and part of me wants to lean hard into it and make this media series into a World War Z-esque docu-drama, wherein Sakamoto gets entrenched in a corporate conspiracy and uses his world-class athletics to navigate the shadows. Eh. We'll see.

 

Ryuji's future alter ego?