Because a new one was long overdue and I don't want anything relating to that oc showdown blog as my pinned anymore
And I figured it'd be fun if I answered some questions still because I'm sure plenty of people by now have gone;
"Sege I thought this was the Sonic brainrot always blog, what the hell is all this Pokemon Gurren Lagann stuff going on?!?"
At the end of summer 2024 I rewatched Gurren Lagann for the first time since 2011. And then the brainrot took hold. The difference between me in 2011 and me in 2024 is that I can draw humans and anime men now. Which means I can just keep making my own stuff for this anime that's been over for almost two decades--
At the same time my dormant Pokemon obsession finally became active again for the first time in like 2 years. And it became VERY active. So Gurren Lagann did what it does best and combined with the reignited Pokemon hyperfixation rather than being pushed out by it.
It didn't help that I was being enabled via my friend @/riftclaw who's had a long time Pokemon au xe is now writing and went "Kamina and Simon can be canon to my au" (I originally intended for it to be an au of an au)
You should go read the stuff xe has out for the au so far btw I love it and it's part of what threw me face first back into pokemon GO READ IT
Anyway obv these are not my OCs so it's not like I have written out lore here or have OC memes to reblog and answer questions for. So I'm gonna answer some questions under the cut as a sort of FAQ as to what's wrong with me lately and what's going on with these au versions bc I think they'd be fun to answer.
AU FAQ under readmore
What are Simon and Kamina doing in your friend's Pokemon au??
Chilling-- shdHSGDHS. Ok in-univers they're just regular(ish) dudes that were born in that world. The irl reason? My sudden Gurren Lagann hyperfixation happened simultaneously as my Pokemon one. And I'd spent like all year reading snippets of the fic Blake was working on, along with worldbuilding for it.
In that au's lore, a lot of the people in Blackthorn are dragon hybrids. This results in them having naturally occurring bright red hair, or blue hair. They also have some dragon-esque traits like fangs or sharp teeth. The Tatsumi family (Lance's and Clair's family) have red eyes.
The red eyes given are EXACTLY like the ones Kamina has in canon. So while juggling these two hyperfixations I was like "Haha hey Blake you know how Kamina gets drawn with fangs in canon super often, has red eyes, blue hair, and an affinity for capes? What if I made an au of your au where he's Lance's and Clair's brother" and then Blake was like "He's canon TO the au now" and the ball kinda got rolling from there (Thank u Blake)
Simon is also a hybrid tho not a dragon one. There's a town in the au that gets literally wiped off the map because of an earthquake/massive sinkhole. So I plopped Simon in there to keep his earthquake trauma. Even tho they're not from the same town, Kamina and Simon still find each other and Kamina takes him in to Blackthorn after the town's disaster happens and Simon loses his parents in it.
Extra bit of info: Kamina's full name in this au is Kamina Tatsumi, and Simon's is Simon Takashi. I know it's popular fanon to give them the last names of Jiha/Giha since other characters in canon have their last names be the villages they came from. But I don't subscribe to this since they tried so hard to get AWAY from their village I don't think they'd adopt it into their names, so I got Simon a whole new last name even tho this is an au.
Are other Gurren Lagann characters in this AU?
PROBABLY although they would be background/side characters since Kamina and Simon are what I focus on here. They have a whole wide world to exist in so they could be out and about. Like I can't imagine Simon NOT meeting up with and eventually dating Nia. If Kamina gets to live then she should get to live too. She'd probably be a fairy hybrid of some sort because I mean. Look at her.
Kittan might be somewhere out there too as a friend Kamina occasionally meets up with and bickers with, kind of like a rival. I don't think he'd be a hybrid because I think it's funny how in episode 4 when Kamina met him he was like 'SHOW ME YOUR TEETH SO I CAN SEE THAT THEY'RE FLAT AS PROOF YOU'RE NOT A BEASTMAN' like he doesn't frequently get drawn with fangs.
Tl;dr: Yes the other GL characters could potentially be out there even if my focus isn't on them. It's a big world out there and Kamina and Simon are traveling it, so they're meeting all sorts of people all the time.
Ok but Sege you appear to have gone insane over Adaman/Kamina? How did this happen? Is it a crackship?
This is not a crackship-- at least not by the og definition. Nowadays it seems to get used as a term for 'a ship that isn't canon' but the og definition meant 'silly unserious joke ship'.
Adaman/Kamina is canon to the au and is treated completely seriously.
Did I mean for it to happen? Nope! It was another case of 'author does the writing and then the character end up doing whatever they want instead of anything that was planned for'
In this au Kamina is the one that ends up living through the events of Legends Arceus-- except unlike in the game he gets to bring himself and Ingo home after fighting Arceus.
To me Adaman is bisexual af, and I figured he'd have a crush on Kamina. It was meant to be silly-- Kamina is an acearo that hasn't found the words for it because he's just not focused on that. He's focused on Pokemon and battling and traveling the world. He's oblivious to a lot of advances. So Adaman runs into a lot of situations where Kamina's absolutely dense about how he feels.
But then I was like 'well. Adaman is impatient, and he's got no lack of confidence. I don't think he'd keep these feelings to himself for the entirety of Kamina's stay in Hisui'
And things kinda spiraled from there because then we have Kamina, who's been stuck in Hisui for a couple months or so at that point. The Pokemon team he's familiar with-- some of which he's grown up with, isn't there. There aren't even that many dragon types in Hisui for him to speak to and be himself around (he's hiding the whole dragon thing given how the people of Jubilife are around Pokemon alone)
He's been separated from his family and friends. Ingo and Adaman are the people he hangs around the most, and some of the only people that know (save for a few other Diamond clan members that were there when Adaman himself found out)
He's got no people to be around most the time, no one to really let in his personal space. And as someone that's grown up with a bunch of siblings and then gone on to make a bunch of friends, that's a big thing for him.
He's lonely af, so when Adaman confesses by kissing him, he gives in to that. They end up with a sort of arrangement where they both get affection for different reasons. And then it starts deepening beyond that. It's queerplatonic rather than a strict romance, so what that means to them fluctuates through the story. All the while they're keeping it a secret just so it doesn't seem like the guy who fell from the sky is playing favorites with one of the clans over the others.
But by the nature of how Legends Arceus would end if there was an option for the player to go back from wherever Arceus plucked them from, it does mean that they get separated in the end. They know this will happen but they stay with each other until the end anyway.
They move on with their lives, but they do end up reunited even though it's years down the line
Anyway that's why I've been insane lately SHDGSHDHHSD. Will add more stuff if I think of any or get asked
dehumanization as horror is great and all but what about humanization as horror. Being forced into a role that was not made for you. Being forced to fulfill expectations that you can never achieve. Being made to exist in a society that so cruelly expects you to act in a way that is against your nature.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/7asxci/oc_ygathok_the_ceaseless_hunger_final_boss_of_our/
This is the reveal of this ridiculousness during their game
It's too bad there's no "I have, unfortunately" button here. I have a sibling who is 10 years younger than me, so unfortunately I had to watch a lot of children's nonsense with him in the past, like Oddbods, PJ Masks, and other.
evrything you've ever done is a piece of you now.... just accept the oddbods in your life....
Thinking about Kamina's labyrinth in Dying is Easy
In the dream he was never injured, and was never forced to stop fighting. But this manifests as him having to fight, as dream!Sol City is under constant attack by enemy ganman. Kamina is hailed as a hero for piloting Gurren Lagann with Simon and leading the defense of the city, but at the end of the day Kamina has no time for anything else. He can fight, he must fight, but he can't cook, he can't paint, he hardly has time for Simon outside of the cockpit. He can fight, but he's miserable.
He starts to realize something is wrong when they're up against a ganman wielding a spear similar to Byakou's. The spear comes close to slicing through Gurren, but Kamina is hit with a memory of the spear landing, tearing through his chest and painting the cockpit with his blood. The fight goes on while Kamina tries to reorient himself, and when Simon desperately calls for his help he thrusts forward with his left arm to grab the spear with Gurren Lagann's hand, but flinches back from the movement as soon as he makes it. But. . . it didn't hurt. Why did he think it would hurt? He looks down at his chest and slowly traces the line of a missing scar. This isn't right.
When he looks back up, the enemy ganman isn't just wielding a spear like Byakou, it is Byakou. And it's aiming right for Kamina. He jerks on the controls to swing Gurren Lagann out of the way, just barely missing the spear thrust, then grabs the over extended spear to rip it from Byakou's hands and drive it into Byakou's cockpit instead. Byakou crumples. Kamina's hands shake.
He knows he's alone, whatever was pretending to be Simon is gone from Lagann's cockpit. Which means he need to find the real Simon, and fast. Careful of the scar tissue flickering in and out of existence, Kamina guides Gurren Lagann into the sky to look for his brother.
Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didn’t succumb to madness. What- no I’m not a cultist, James. For Christ’s sake. What you’re forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasn’t a flexible man. His brain simply wasn’t stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you can’t remember if you ate lunch or not. What’s the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You don’t need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.
During a Eldritch Horrors based tabletop RPG my character was a young dandy who wasn't particularly interested in all this monster mystery stuff but his father (my brother's character) was a researcher who WAS very into it, so Bertie went along to make sure the old man didn't get into too much trouble. It was your average Eldritch Horrors RPG in that you don't make your characters with the expectation that they will survive for very long, both the game itself and the genre are very intent on turning your characters inside out, driving them insane, and blowing them up in no particular order.
The thing was, everything in this nightmare hellscape just seemed to keep coming up Bertie because the man was too stupid to realize what genre he was in. Every time he had to roll for a sanity check whenever he saw something crazy, the dice treated him so well that he just... didn't get it. Gee that sure is a funny costume. There's something wrong with that dog. These mean guys in stupid hats are trying to hurt that young lady, we can't have that! I had not built him this way, his intelligence stats weren't even that bad, random chance just made it so that this man was living a scooby doo adventure while everyone else was being consumed by The Horrors.
The final straw was at the end of an adventure when Bertie escaped from the cultist headquarters by breaking out through the mansion's front window on a motorcycle with a hot rescued sacrificial maiden clinging to his back and leading the cultists on a merry chase through the hedge maze while the other adventurers escaped. His sanity score? HIGHER than when the adventure had begun. He had found the whole experience quite thrilling and felt very good about life in general!
Bertie retired from adventuring to marry the maiden he rescued and care for his aging father and delight and bemuse his friends at the gentleman's club with stories of his 'wacky' adventures. I didn't want to risk breaking his ridiculous lucky streak.
Animals with visually pleasing/appealing color schemes?
Ok, so here are some frog color schemes i greatly enjoy...
Santa Fe White-lipped Frog (Leptodactylus laticeps), family Leptodactylidae, Paraguay
Poisonous.
photograph by Daniel Kane
Klappenbach’s Red-bellied Frog (Melanophryniscus klappenbachi), family Bufonidae, found in the Gran Chaco in northern Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil
Poisonous.
Captive frogs that are fed low alkaloid diets are much less toxic than wild toads.
photograph by Rudy van Santen
Splendid Leaf Frog (Cruziohyla calcarifer), family Hylidae, Costa Rica
photograph by Milan Zygmunt
Splendid Leaf Frog (Cruziohyla calcarifer), family Hylidae, Costa Rica
photograph by Milan Zygmunt
Purple Harlequin Toad (Atelopus barbotini), family Bufonidae, endemic to the uplands of central French Guiana
This species status is in dispute amongst herpetologists, some consider is to be a subspecies of A. spumarius. A few otheer species are considered to form a “species complex” with A. spumarius.
This species does not have a CITES listing, but the population is in decline, and may be CRITICALLY ENDANGERED.
photograph by Josh’s Frogs
Dyeing Poison Dart Frog (Dendrobates tinctorius), “Northern Bakhuis” morph, family Dendrobatidae, Regina, French Guiana
I really like the mundanity of day-to-day Pokemon life, because while you can be a world-famous Pokemon trainer you can also be Steve From Accounting who works a normal desk job and just so happens to own a giant lizard with axes for teeth
