The KidVegeta Anthology/The Great Sushi-Eating Contest

Ah, The Great Sushi-Eating Contest. Anyone who's read my prior anthologies should find that name familiar. Yes, I originally wrote a story about Tarble and Ledas having a sushi-eating contest a long time ago - November 3, 2014. The published version wasn't put on this site until June 19, 2016. I believe I even stated on my deleted stories anthology page that this was a story I wanted to re-write eventually. And I did. It was placed as the last story in The Heels of the Unknown very early in the creation of that one-shot collection. I paired it with Cyleria and it became a winter story because of that. It always felt right to make it a winter story though. Summer would be too easy, as would autumn, and spring wouldn't work at all for this story. It's a comedy, yes, but it's not comedy without consequence. That's why it's winter.

My description for this story, written on August 15, 2015, was: "8. Ledas - This would be the sushi eating competition between Ledas and Tarble, expanded a little bit to show some information about Ledas' life since TF.". As can be seen, there wasn't much there. Indeed, almost everything about this story was me "expanding a little bit to show some information about Ledas' life since TF". I went very wild with all of that. I thought about this story often in the months leading up to me writing it, and I developed numerous ideas during those times. By the end of 2015, I think I had a basic idea of what to do for this story in terms of the sushi part, but I did have some vague notions that I wanted to tie this story to my upcoming fan fiction, Dragon Ball: Heart of the Dragon. That fan fiction will be a coalescing of many of my stories. Almost every story of mine that involves a living fanon character is building up to Heart of the Dragon in some way or form, but I think this was the first story that really went all out in that regard. It wasn't originally planned, but something I realized as I was writing the other one-shots in THOTU was that I was tying all sorts of little things together in them. So by this point, I was actively trying to do that, and The Great Sushi-Eating Contest, as a result, features some of the most integrated story elements of any one-shot I've ever written. There's a ton packed in this comedy that is of serious consequence for future stories of mine.

I primarily got drunk to write earlier comedies in The Heels of the Unknown (most notably, Cool Cat). That was not so with this story. I got high to write it. Writing high and writing drunk produce two different styles of writing, in my opinion. For me, I'm far more aesthetic when high - I write prose that is more colorful and beautiful, I believe. I'm funnier while drunk, though, I think, but it's much more sloppy. Being high influenced so much of this story, it's hard to even list everything here, so I won't try. Ledas' ridiculous outfit is one example, though.

In terms of the plot of this story, I had much of what I thought it'd be about planned long before I got to this story. I expected to mainly just transport the above-linked old draft of the sushi-eating contest and then edit that and add a few things here and there. But then I got an idea to use Beelzebub. And then I got an idea to add in The Benefactor's warning as well as setup for Heart of the Dragon. I really don't remember when those ideas came up - it might've come up when I was writing, or when I got high in preparation to write this story. And of course, since this story took multiple days to write, I'm sure I got ideas for later sections after writing earlier parts of it. Either way, this story turned out a lot different than I expected it to at first. It's funny, too, because from the moment I created The Heels of the Unknown, this was one of the stories I felt little pressure about writing. I thought I was ready to write it day 1. And I probably could've written something in early 2016, but it wouldn't have looked anything like what The Great Sushi-Eating Contest looks like now.

This story follows Crushing Blue in being a more mature comedy story than I'm a Candy Man and Cool Cat. I think that works well, tonally-speaking, because autumn and winter are more mature months than spring and summer. With that in mind, it feels like much of this story was still improvised while I was high. I really don't remember when I figured everything out for this story. But it did take a long while to write.

I began writing this story at 8:45 pm on June 16, 2016. I was writing Black Dawn concurrently. To take a break from Black Dawn, when I reached a road-block in the riding, I began working on this story. For reference, when I wrote the first paragraph of The Great Sushi-Eating Contest, this was the last line of Black Dawn that had been written at the time: "“Then I come in from behind and blow their brains out. Make sure you take out their scouters.”". It may not look like much, but I had 10 pages of Black Dawn done at the time. And ironically enough, even with such a massive headstart, I'd end up finishing this Ledas story before that one.

I wrote from 8:47 pm on June 16th until 12:49 am on June 17th. I completed the first drafts of the first two scenes in that time (being high, I took many breaks and wrote quite slowly over that stretch); the second scene was mostly a re-writing/polishing-up of the above-linked sushi contest, but that still took quite a while to re-work. I next worked on the story from 3:33 pm to 6:26 pm on June 17th, editing the first two scenes and writing the first paragraph and a half of the third scene in that time. I continued writing from 8:45 pm to 10:41 pm, finishing the third and fourth scenes in that time. I had not touched Black Dawn since I started working on The Great Sushi-Eating Contest. So the eighth story was finished before the seventh.

But there's more! I edited the third and fourth scenes from 2:18 am to 2:48 am on June 18th. The entire story was written and fully complete at that point (or so I thought). Then, later in the day on June 18<sup<th, I continued and ultimately finished Black Dawn. During the final stages of editing that story (past 1 am on June 19th), I did additional editing on this story, but that was pretty minor stuff. And I actually finished the minor editing on Black Dawn first, so I guess technically this story was the last one completed in The Heels of the Unknown. It should also go without saying that I was high for practically every moment I wrote this story, including the editing.

The theme song for this story was originally going to be Choke by Bowling For Soup. That would've been a great song if I only did the sushi-eating contest. Like, the fragment that exists on my deleted stories anthology - that would work well with this song, because Ledas chokes big time in that. But as the story expanded, and I started making it a more consequential narrative, the song lost its use, so instead, I used Weight of Living, Pt. I by Bastille. This song is amongst my favorite Bastille songs, and I liked it so much, I made it Ledas' theme song because of its inclusion in this story. The lyrics itself tie to Ledas rather well, especially because he doesn't age physically (but probably still has a lifespan). He's been through a lot, and all the weight of living is not getting lighter, because he's going to go through a helluva lot in Heart of the Dragon and Nowhere to Go. The lyrics go really well with Ledas in general, though I don't want to be too on-the-nose about that stuff here. I also just think this song goes really well with the opening of this one-shot.

Most of what I want to say about this story will be in the endnotes below. The Great Sushi-Eating Contest is a complex series of small stories with a vague overarching sense that Ledas is building up towards a confrontation with some people in the future (namely, The Benefactor, and Haimaru and Raimie). Thus, it's difficult to make sweeping comments about the story up here. So I won't try. Onto the endnotes!