The KidVegeta Anthology/Black Dawn

I had the idea for this story long before I came up with The Heels of the Unknown. In fact, it was a consideration for Things Were Better Then, although never a very serious one, as I didn't want too many major fanon characters in that collection. I also considered releasing this as a standalone story before coming up with THOTU. However, I always thought this would be a one-shot.

After I got the idea for The Heels of the Unknown, this story became an immediate member of that collection. I placed it in winter because it's a sad tale that doesn't have a happy ending and that, I believe, evokes the starkness and bitterness of winter well. It was paired with Ledas' story early on mostly because I feel that Ledas and his mother sharing a season is just really cool. There are other reasons Ledas' story deserved to be in the winter binary over summer or autumn (it wouldn't work as a spring story whatsoever), but I'll get more into that in the next anthology.

The original description for Cyleria's story was: "7. Cyleria - This story details Cyleria's last days alive as she and her squad clear a planet, get marooned on it, and are met by Zarbon. A fight ensues, where Zarbon and his lackeys kill all of the Saiyans, despite Cyleria's plea for mercy since she's pregnant.". I didn't entirely follow this description, but the basic setup is the same. I think this is a good story to compare to the description I wrote for it, because I wrote most of the THOTU descriptions on August 15, 2015 - months (in this case, almost a year) before the stories were written. A lot changes in those months, and when I have a working outline, I am able to develop things more. This occurred with both the Saiyan team and the PTO team, as well as Cyleria's characterization, primarily in the opening scene of Black Dawn.

I did extensive character building before starting this story. I wanted each character to be fleshed out, to have a unique personality and fate, and to seem real. For this, I created a doc with some cursory personality traits for everyone. Most of what I thought about them was contained in my mind, and the outline was merely a tool to help me remember what I wanted to do with everyone. The outline is as follows, and it also contains all of the name puns for the characters:

Saiyan team:

1. Kolhrai --- (Kohlrabi) leader, reserved, elite, refined

2. Cyleria --- (Celery) second in command, stronger than Kolhrai

3. Araegon --- (Tarragon) guy who is reserved, expert cqc fighter, lusts for Cyleria

4. Namizu --- (Mizuna) crazy girl who loves explosives

5. Rutach --- (Rutabaga) fat tall guy who dies of heart attack

Attacking team:

1. Ajira--- confident female shark alien, powerful

2. Habaro & Anero --- tall/short combo alien (golden for one/white for the other)

3. Jalipek --- brutal alien

Notice that I didn't put anything in for Cyleria, since I already know her character and I thought that would just be a waste of time. Some personality traits were not actually used, such as Araegon being reserved, for Kolhrai was also had a reserved personality. One of the things that changed between the original concept of this story and the actual story that was produced is that I fleshed out the PTO team significantly. Originally, Zarbon was going to attack them himself with a few nameless sycophants like the team Dodoria uses in the Bardock special to attack Bardock's team. I decided to make these characters more important, because if Zarbon appeared, he would have taken out all of the Saiyans in a matter of seconds. To not have that happen, I needed to have other characters be important.

Ajira's team is kind of like a serious Ginyu Force, although I'd liken them more to Cui and Appule and people like that with Frieza. They are more professional than the mercs, and they relish in the fact that they know what happened to Planet Vegeta when Cyleria and her team do not. Habaro and Anero were a bit of a DBZ trope of having two twin warriors (think Abo and Kado, or Rasin and Lakasei.

In terms of the Saiyans, Kolhrai was largely based on the character Minh Young Kim from the Gears of War series. He is also meant to look like Kim. I like Kim a lot. He's professional, not cocky, smart, and caring about his team. Kolhrai is very much the same, and this is especially seen when he sacrifices himself.

Rutabach was an unseen character who I have die before the team's last mission for a variety of reasons. There's foreshadowing there, there's a bit of superstition involved with him dying, and his death also drops the team one member so they have only 4. I based the Saiyan team off of Bardock's team, which had five members as well, but I didn't want to have to deal with five living Saiyans, as that was a bit too much. Also, in the original draft, his name was "Rutach" (as seen above), but I changed that when I first wrote his name in the doc as I was writing the story. "Rutach" doesn't look right, so I added a syllable.

You'll notice that Nazumi was named "Namizu" in the above outline. I changed her name just before beginning to write. I think Nazumi is a much better name. Anyways, in terms of who she is based on, Edward from Cowboy Bebop comes to mind, although Ed was never a pyromaniac to the extent Nazumi is. She's probably a meshing of several characters/archetypes in my mind that I can't hope to elaborate on any further. But yeah, Ed is the only character who comes to mind as being an influence on Nazumi. Her being a pyromaniac and just crazy in general was me playing up her destructive Saiyan tendencies as well as offering up a unique personality in this group.

Araegon was originally created primarily to be a love interest for Cyleria, working in tension with her relationship with her mate, Layeeck. Araegon lusts for her, I think. I don't believe he actually loves Cyleria. Cyleria doesn't really like him, although she has feelings for him because they are on the same team. Those feelings are not romantic, however. He's a bit of a tragic figure, I think, as are most of the Saiyans on the team, but Araegon definitely has an added sense of sadness around his character, particularly with how he dies. Cyleria feels guilt for not loving him, but I don't think that makes her love him. Rather, she is sad that she could not love him. Even if she didn't have Layeeck, I'm not sure she would have ended up with him.

So for the plot, almost all of it was improvised. I got ideas in my mind as the months and weeks went on, after coming up with THOTU, and certain things, like the weather motifs and Cyleria's inner monologues, were influenced and shaped a bit by my earlier stories in the collection. The first scene was an idea I came up with pretty late in the process, after I decided that Rutabach would die off-screen of a heart attack. The progression of the battle was not really planned out beforehand, other than Cyleria would be the last one left and Zarbon would eventually kill her. I expected that everyone else would die, but as it turned out, Ajira also survived. She is later brought to justice in volume III of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Planet Trade Organization (KV note: as of writing this commentary, I haven't written that chapter yet) when she has an encounter with Majin Sesami and Ledas much further in the future. However, Ledas does not know Ajira's role in his mother's death when he ultimately kills her.

When I was preparing stuff for THOTU, everything for this story came naturally and quickly. The name was one of the first names I came up with. I had its placement and its description written very early in the process. I had its flower and Japanese scroll picked out early on as well. As well, its first theme song, which I'll talk about more below, was one of the first theme songs chosen, and I almost kept it as the final theme. This was never a story that I struggled with conceptually. The problem was always one of length. As I figured out more and more of what I wanted to accomplish with Black Dawn, I began to realize that it would be very long. At one point, I expected it to reach 15,000 words, which would be an insane length for a one-shot. When I was writing it, the sections actually ended up being shorter than I expected, and Black Dawn was completed at just north of 8000 words. It is my longest one-shot, but it's not nearly as long as I expected it to be. This is also what happened with Cool Cat, although I never expected that one to be anywhere near as long as I expected this story to be.

So in terms of writing, I began Black Dawn on June 15, 2016 at 5:08 pm. I finished the first section at 6:15 pm. I then edited that section from 8:17 am to 9:20 am on June 16. From 11:09 am to 4:07 pm, I wrote up to about 1/3 of the way through the third scene. I took many breaks in that time frame though. I next edited the second scene and what was written of the third scene on June 18 from 3:56 pm to 5:29 pm. I continued writing the third scene at 9:43 pm, finishing it, as well as the fourth scene, at 11:45 pm of the same day. I then edited the remaining 2/3 of the third scene and the fourth scene from 11:48 pm on June 18 to 1:42 am on June 19. Notably, I edited the last two sections immediately after finishing writing them - a rarity for my style. I usually take an extended break after writing before returning to edit, but in this case, I was ready to be done with the story. As well, I had been writing The Great Sushi-Eating Contest in tandem with this story, so I wanted to release both of them at the same time. Ledas' story was actually completed before Black Dawn, and part of the reason that it took me so long to write Black Dawn is because I was also writing Ledas' story on the same days as I was writing this one. I was highly productive from June 15 to the early hours of June 19. I wrote both of these stories together, often alternating between them when I get stuck on one. That is also why I didn't write Black Dawn at all on June 17, for I was working heavily on the Sushi story on that day. Either way, I finished them both around the same time and was able to post the mother and son stories together to finish The Heels of the Unknown in the early hours of June 19.

I'm not going to lie. It was a grueling process. This was one of the hardest stories for me to write, and it's also quite an emotional story, I think. It's very sad. There's so much lost potential with Ledas' younger sibling dying in Cyleria's womb, as well as Cyleria herself dying, and her whole team dying too. The tragedy of the Saiyan race being exterminated was something I was trying to capture in this story by showing it from a very personal perspective. We focus in on a few Saiyans here to understand the total destruction of their species and culture. That's why there were conversations about the last Legendary Super Saiyan and why I also focused on the destruction of the Saiyans on the natives of the planet.

Saiyans aren't good people in general - they are ruthless genocidal barbarians. But there are good ones in the bunch, and I think, even as they are, how they are is more a matter of culture than them being generally evil. Bardock's team is like this in his special - they massacre the Kanassans, yet we still feel something for them. They are people with fleshed out personalities who are killed in a great injustice. In a way, it's a poetic end to their lives (which is also true for this story's Saiyan team), but I don't think that makes their existence any less tragic. This story deals with the ideas of good and evil, or rather, the lack of that being a useful descriptor of people, more so than in any other THOTU story. That's why the concept of "清", or purity is associated with this story. There's irony, as there is with "respect" being the concept for the Bojack and Super Handel stories. There is purity in this story, though. Cyleria's happiness is pure; her desire to live with her family, to raise her kids, and to get out of the warrior's life, is also pure, I think. The tragedy is that her purity is tainted by others and that her dreams go unfulfilled.

The original theme song for this story was "The Numbers" by Radiohead, which was originally called "Silent Spring". Specifically, I wanted to use this live performance of the song. I had picked that out before Radiohead's newest album released, which had the song on it. It's a good song that's lyrically related to the PTO's subversion of the Saiyan race and also foreshadows the collapse of the PTO and the semi-rise of the Saiyans in the future. But I don't know, it just didn't work well enough. I eventually ended up using a live performance of Bodysnatchers by Radiohead, which I felt had more thematic resonance with this story. The guitar especially in that song reminds me of winter storms. This is a great, underrated Radiohead track, and one that I had grown very fond of around the time I wrote this story.

So yeah, that's all I can think of for this section. Now it's time to dissect the the longest one-shot I've ever written (so far)!

More to come...