Memoirs Discussion

[Inu-papa]

Dude, I have a song!

www.nicozon.net/watch/nm3538716

This is actually an image song from "Nadia: Secret of Blue Water" sung by Inu-papa's Japanese voice actor (interestingly, Inoue Kikuko (Izayoi) is in that series, too). It's actually the only song I could find that was an Ohtsuka Akio solo. But the lyrics, man, THE LYRICS! This is an Inu-papa song all the way! The song is called "Ikitekure" ("Please Live", Papa's final words to Izayoi).

Tatoe donna riyuu de mo
Kuni wo hitotsu horoboshita
Sonna ore ga ikiteiru
Yasashisa wo sute ikiteiru

Omoku seou tsumi to batsu
Itsuka kako wo tsugunau to
Inochi kakete chikau no da
Chi nurareta michi susumu dake

Tatoe donna ni chi wo nagashitemo
Ima wa yaraneba naranu no da
Shinu wake ni wa ikan
Ima wa mada
Kanarazu kono te de jibun no shinnen
Tsuranuki toosu made
Ima
Ikiteiku hitori de mo
Ikiteiku hitori de mo

Sude ni suteta yasashisa mo
Wasureteita namida sae
Nazeka ima wa yomigaeru
Ima ichido ai torimodosu

Namida nagasu toki wa mou nai to
Sou sa omotteita dake ni
Omae no me ga kokoro
Hirakaseru
Hito wo aishite watashi no bun made
Omae wa ikitekure

Nido to ayamachi kurikaesanai
Tatoe mizukara chirou tomo
Omae no te ga inochi
Nagomaseru

Hito wo aishite watashi no bun made
Omae wa ikitekure
Sou
Ikitekure tsurakutemo
Ikitekure tsurakutemo

For one reason or another
I overthrow a country
That's who I live as now
Discarded my kindess, but still alive

Burdened with the weight of my sins
Should I someday be redeemed for my past
I swear on my life
I can only walk a blood-stained path

No matter how much blood I spill
It's something I have to do
I can't die yet
Not yet
Not until my personal convictions
Have been fulfilled
So now
I will survive, even if alone
I will survive, even if alone

I'd already discarded my kindness
But those forgotten tears
For some reason are now returning
To find love once again

There is no time for tears
That's what I told myself
But your eyes
Caused my heart to open
That you could love a person such as me
I want you to live

So that these mistakes never happens again
Should I someday fall
By your hand
My life has softened

That you could love a person such as me
I want you to live
Yes
Please live, even if it's hard
Please live, even if it's hard

[Inu-papa]

Chapter 108, now up and ready to read. This chapter is more or less "If Akagane's going to go into the final battle, he needs to prove he's not going to need rescuing and can take care of himself." I mean, we know he can, but he does end up the Dude in Distress kind of often, and I wanted to get him out of that role before the final showdown.

[Inu-papa]

After sitting on a backlog of fanart people have submitted for like... a year, I finally updated the Memoirs Picture book with some art from Puppy and beneaththestars. Plus a new one from me. So, Puppy and beneaththestars, if you're still lurking around here somewhere, your stuff's up now. Sorry it took me so long to get around to it. ^_^*

[ciradrak]

Dressed in humble denim garb, Cira rides up on his black Bianchi and skids to a stop.

Mmm, sorry I lost track of my password and had to make a temporary new account. I'm going to try to provide you some feed back on the latest chapter. I apologize if it's overly critical and has other failings. I participated in too many emotionally violent reviews of my work; and it gets a bit ingrained after a while. Anyway, yes I do enjoy reading the memoirs and don't want you to be discouraged.

Propping up the bike, he reaches into his weapons-grade bag of tricks extracting a small crystalline orb. This he lightly throws between the pillars which hold up the bulletin board system. Shattering midair, the orb spills a scintillating cloud of milky shards; resulting in a holographic display. The angular forms of the readout looks more akin to a cyberpunk wanted poster than a review paper, but your ryuu friend always did do things with an odd (read: weird) flair. With that cira distracts himself by weaving thin highly flexible sticks into a sculpture of a bird, giving one time to read the analysis.



CHAPTER 108

Seishi's cold refusal to speak directly to ${Woof} effectively builds his self absorbed character.

The battle flows well. The way the text creates the right amount of confusion to match ${Woof}'s perception of Akagane status, intentional or not, is good. Akagane's cold fury is a point of positive tension on which this in the preceding couple of chapters turn. The reader is payed back emotionally when Seishi is finally affected by it. (Give and take bro.) So seeing Aka-chan nail him in place is fun.

This reads a bit rough between the two sentences and could probably be worded so that it flows better:

The Meioujuu charged up another attack, but without breaking his gaze, Akagane commented with calm annoyance, "Bake-inu, block that." I blinked and made a slight surprised yelp when he addressed me, having been frozen in trepidation right along with Seishi.

Maintain your use of unique voice for each character. You did an excellent job of that in earlier chapters. ${Nice Guard} is starting to sound a bit like Akagane, but then, he is a bit like him; which is why Akagane relates to him. Don't let them become the same though.

Seishi is rather heartless, more willing to be underhanded, darker than Miriku. Resolving him will be fun. Turning him effectively into a likable character will take more than one 'episode'. ('Bad' guys that too quickly experience a change of heart always bothered me. A certain amount of remorse and soul searching is required for honest repentance.)

One possibility would be for his behavior to have been partially an act. Though his open confession that people's opinion of him is of supreme importance, makes that less likely. A continuation of the tentative truce seems more likely until furtherance of the plot creates a new possibility for their collaboration.

Meanwhile, GO WOOF! *cheers*

[Inu-papa]

Yay, the first actual chapter comment in almost a year! Thank you so much!

I do realize I have problems with sentence structure. ^_^* It's a bit repetitive and unvaried, and I have something against short sentences because they feel like abrupt halts to thoughts or action, when most things are meant to be taken as a complete thought. Hell, I just rambled on a couple different topics with that sentence. I guess it's sort of my "style", but Puppy does regularly inform me that some sentences are just hard to follow.

Nice Guard having a similar tone to Akagane is intentional. Although, Nice Guard is supposed to come across as polite while Akagane is stuffy, but in English text it's a bit hard to differentiate the two. I tried to get across Nice Guard's tone more with his accompanying actions, since his speech was indeed pretty similar.

I haven't quite decided on how I'm going to ultimately "resolve" Seishi at this point, although he is supposed to be a sort of "Miroku played straight". Miroku's behavior was played for laughs, but if you look at it objectively, he was actually a pretty terrible person who never did reform (since he's still swindling people in the epilogue chapter). Sure, he has reasons behind his swindling and lechery. Seishi does, too. But the lesson here is that it doesn't excuse that behavior.

It's a lot of the reason Akagane's "ulterior motive" about getting the armor keeps getting brought up. It's sort of an examination of what drives people to desire certain things and the actions they'll take to get them, and how you define what's "legitimate" vs. what isn't. That and it's an exercise in dealing with a contrarian sociopath.

Thank you so much for your comments, and thanks for still following the story after this long. :3

[ciradrak]

Cira finishes his first 'bird'. Walking over to the nearest oak tree, he uses length of string from his bag and hangs the model from a twisting horizontal branch. Returning, he pulls more material from his bag and starts on a second bird while listening to Inu-Papa. (My apologies, but i listen better when i'm working.)

*chuckle* Well I have my linguistic oddities so I'm not trying to call you a 'black' kettle. Please, if I say anything that seems too terribly negative, do me a favor and take it as "constructive criticism". Personally I'm a bit of a punctuation nut. I love to use semi-colons and hyphens to add additional structure to long sentences, and to create interpretive emotional pauses.

What finally resolved Miroku for me was a later episode where he was trying to teach some villagers how to read and write. Apparently -- Miroku only knows a few characters; daughter, woman, princess, mother . . . they're all names for girls. (Presumably he deals with the paper wards he creates as images rather than words?) That struck me as a demonstration of complete devotion. He really cares more about girls than anything else.

Really, he's spent his whole life either chasing Naraku or thinking about girls. Obviously, he's obsessed; on both accounts. With the exception of when we first meet him; when he tries to abduct Kagome; he never does anything directly aggressive (physically) with his second obsession. (That first scene is out of character, which I chalk up to the author's development of Miroku.) (I sat down and calculated that, for the number of books that I knew of, that Takahashi would have needed to create no less than six pages per day -- along with characters, plot, backstory, and everything else. At that production rate, I can forgive a few inconsistencies sneaking past.)

Cira pauses, holding up the second wicker bird to examine its flapping wings, before hanging beside the first.

But yes, it was a very slow resolution if there ever really was a resolution. Maybe Seishi will wind up a how-do-you-deal-with-that-jerk-at-work character? After all, one does seem to get stuck at work with contrarian psychopaths rather frequently. Besides, he will help Woof realize that his own failing aren't actually a worst possible case scenario.

(I don't know how you can write straight through. I must rewrite and rewrite and rewrite to get out all the annoying errors.)

[Inu-papa]

Chapter 109 is now up. Hopefully the resolution of this chapter doesn't seem too simplistic and/or abrupt. The Meioujuu was nothing more than a plot device in canon as well (it was simply used as a Kongousouha receptacle so that Mouryoumaru could absorb it and get both the Kongousouha and its armor).

This mini-arc is still not quite over yet, but I want to get the plot moving on to other things more quickly. ^_^*

[ciradrak]

Cira takes down the new post and reads it thoughtfully.

Actually, getting over my initial obvious reactions, the first thing I though of was: poor Eika. I mean -- that was the last time Sansazume was used to cut through a youkai's barrier. . . .

I'm not sure how much of my thoughts I ought to post. XD But it seems some resolution will be needed for this one as well.

Cira skips a stone, watching it vanish eventually into the Meijou's lake, before returning to weaving another flapping bird.

[Inu-papa]

New chapter is up, and now we're delving into stuff that's really hard for me to write: spirituality. XD I did do some research into Shinto rituals and practices, but as you may have been able to tell from my whole "youkai power = general relativity" assertion, my brain insists on there being some underlying physical explanation for everything. But since spiritual power is the opposite of youkai power, I figured it should also function in the opposite manner as well: relying on faith rather than work.

However, since it's much easier for me to internalize the effectiveness of work as opposed to faith, hopefully the chapters dealing with it don't come across as sounding unnecessarily incredulous.

[Inu-papa]

Happy New Year! Chapter 114 has been added. It's sort of a meta chapter in that not a whole lot happens in it, which may try readers' patience, but the lesson of the chapter is not letting a lack of progress frustrate you into giving up on yourself.

[Grimmkitty]

Personally, and now that I'm all caught up on Memoirs...lul...I found chapter 114--and the previous one--rather enlightening, even if I did feel a little bad for the poor puppy having to deal with all these spiritual shenanigans.

(Fffff I couldn't resist making an account on here to actually leave my thoughts on the story now that I'm caught up. VERY IMPORTANT TBH though wow I haven't been on a proboard in a dog's age, pardon the pun. How even work?)

Anyway, caught up as I am now, I'll be most excitedly waiting each and every chapter hereforth, and I seriously commend you for carrying on with your tale for so long! =D This makes me want to draw all the things!

[Inu-papa]

Jan 15, 2014 1:48:49 GMT -5 Grimmkitty said:

Personally, and now that I'm all caught up on Memoirs...lul...I found chapter 114--and the previous one--rather enlightening, even if I did feel a little bad for the poor puppy having to deal with all these spiritual shenanigans.

(Fffff I couldn't resist making an account on here to actually leave my thoughts on the story now that I'm caught up. VERY IMPORTANT TBH though wow I haven't been on a proboard in a dog's age, pardon the pun. How even work?)

Anyway, caught up as I am now, I'll be most excitedly waiting each and every chapter hereforth, and I seriously commend you for carrying on with your tale for so long! =D This makes me want to draw all the things!

Awh, thank you for reading. And thank you for commenting, since it's been pretty quiet around here for a long time so I have a hard time judging who, if anyone, is reading it anymore.

Hopefully the next chapter will round out this little "spiritual journey" story, since I do feel like I'm starting to pad things out a bit much in the lead-up to the "big boss battle", although nothing that's happened has been completely superfluous. I know it's hard to move on, but lil' Papa's gotta grow up sometime.

If you do get the urge to draw something, the site does have a gallery of fanart from story fans that you're welcome to submit to.

Thanks again for reading!

[Grimmkitty]

Well, I drew three, but I only managed to lineart two. Lines are as far as I'll ever get on anything due to how little freetime I have, but...it's something, I think. |D I think...this is where the site says and redirects to submit art, and I read through the thread, saw some other fun bits in here. x3





If you think it's cool enough for the site and all, then you can credit it to inu-taiyoukai on deviantart. uvu I just really enjoyed drawing these. I haven't drawn in a while!

[EDIT] Those are Photobucket thumbnails btw. clicking on them should make them not so lamely small fffff.

[Inu-papa]

Jan 16, 2014 3:26:03 GMT -5 Grimmkitty said:

Well, I drew three, but I only managed to lineart two. Lines are as far as I'll ever get on anything due to how little freetime I have, but...it's something, I think. |D I think...this is where the site says and redirects to submit art, and I read through the thread, saw some other fun bits in here. x3





If you think it's cool enough for the site and all, then you can credit it to inu-taiyoukai on deviantart. uvu I just really enjoyed drawing these. I haven't drawn in a while!

[EDIT] Those are Photobucket thumbnails btw. clicking on them should make them not so lamely small fffff.

Awh, those look great! Yachouon is is all cute with his little angry fang, and puppy-Papa is all "You wouldn't want to slay ME, would you? *_*".

Don't worry, my only criteria for posting art on the site is that it not be obscene. ... That's not to say I forbid people from going Rule 34 all over this story if they really want to for some reason, it's just not going to get posted to the site. XD

I'll put those up with the next update. Thanks a lot!

[Inu-papa]

Chapter 115 is up, along with Grimmkitty's art! Another side-story is finished, and I'm running out of loose ends to tie up before proceeding to the big final battle. Well, not "final"-final battle, but the final battle of this major arc.

Also, the forums appear to have been "upgraded" in an annoying manner that's asking everyone to re-confirm their accounts and doesn't let you log in directly from the forum page anymore, which is obnoxious. I also dislike the layout and I'll see if I can get it back to closer to what it was. Hooray for change for the sake of change.