It’s not always easy for brain to switch tracks. For the last week I have been reading Gundam Wing and writing Bleach. I have missed Gundam Wing... but Gundam Wing on fanfiction.net is to be avoided. Too many children have tried to write it, and whereas I will always encourage others to write and to share their knowledge of the world and indulge in their own creativity, that does not mean that I am willing to read it for fun.
Luckily there are many good Gundam Wing websites out there, my favourite being Raygunworks.net. GWaddiction is good too, but the search function has been down for several years now, and that basically turns it into a large and confusing database where you have to note down your place as it is all in frames and your browser will never remember where you were if your system crashes. Saying that, system crashes are not the danger they were when I was first discovering this fandom, four computers and two operating systems ago.
Moving between Gundam Wing – futuristic war torn civilisation that has mastered both space habitation and spare warfare – and Bleach – modern day mythology with monsters thrown in for good measure – is a little disorientating. The two are wildly different, although they both do have rather large casts, Bleach more so than GW, although as Bleach has at least six times as many episodes it makes sense that it has a larger cast of characters.
Bleach seems to have more background for each character, it was a manga that gained in popularity and became an anime, and because of that it seems that each character is very well rounded. GW was put together hastily as a way to sell mecha figurines of the gundams, and it’s popularity as a series was almost unexpected, leading to several additional manga volumes and Endless Waltz. I am very familiar with most of the events in the Anime, although I believe I have only managed to watch all the episodes once. Unfortunately the basic nature of the artwork, when compared to more recent Anime, seems rather unfinished and inconsistent. It is the idea of Gundam Wing – five fifteen year old freedom fighters fighting a war in the most brilliant mecha science and imagination have to offer – that makes it popular, rather than the presentation.
Not to say that Bleach isn’t awesome, in its own way, and evidentially it is the more successful series, in that it is still going while GW’s brief flash of glory is long over. Still, I think that the very things that made GW the less successful anime make it so wonderful to write about. You only have the bare bones of each character’s backstory, which makes it very easy to add in whatever you like, and the world is both massive and loosely defined. Gundam Wing took a cast of, say, ten main characters, made them interesting and then turned them loose into the world, and that gave the fans the leeway to imagine their future, shaped by the war that they have already fought.
I suppose the point to this entire ramble is that I love Gundam Wing. It will always have a special place in my heart, although other bigger and better anime’s have superseded it. I don’t really feel the need to continue writing GW fanfiction, that urge passed long ago, but diving back into the delights of Maldoror’s ‘The Arrangement’ or Mel and Christy’s ‘Death and the Dragon’ is like picking up a well worn novel you loved when you were younger, and will still love. There is only a handful Bleach fanfiction I have ever felt like that about - Tituba3’s ‘Odalisque’ and StarkBlack’s ‘I Come to you in Pieces’, although there are several FFVII stories that also fit the bill. I don’t know if it is just that I know where to look with the Gundam Wing fanfiction to find the really, truly awesome stories and I haven’t found the same archives for Bleach, or if it’s that the equivalent stories for Bleach have not yet been written. Bleach has been around long enough to get some real hardcore fans though... perhaps it’s the sheer amount of fanfiction on fanfiction.net that makes it hard to sift through to find the gems. A little hypocritical of me I admit – I go to specific fan sites for my Gundam Wing and stick to FF.net for my Bleach.
Bleach has almost gone on for too long now, although I still felt a pang of sorrow when Tite Kubo announced that the current Manga arc will be the last arc. I expect that Bleach will go the same way as Naruto and never really die. Thinking on it, perhaps fans have less reason to write in depth Bleach fanfiction, as there is more canon plot to come. Gundam Wing is over, we can expect no more new material from the universe, and so the only continuation is to write fanfiction. There is a security in writing fanfiction once the universe has ended, compared to writing while the story is ongoing, spilling from the creators mind week after week – and the creator may reveal one plot twist or another that throws your entire work of fiction off track. Think of how many fanfics became unexpectedly AU one JKR killed Sirius, for example.
Random streams of consciousness written during breaks at work end up in interesting places. This one ended up talking about a completely different issue to the one that first caught my attention – that I was splitting my brain between two fandoms with little apparent effort. The human brain is a fantastic computer. I hope that the technologies to explore the human mind, perhaps to save the data of a lifetime into a HDD, are developed within my lifetime, as seeing science fiction come to life is always a treat.
