My goal with Project Shenmue is fairly straightforward: create a tribute to the Shenmue game series’ story, but with an emotionally satisfying conclusion and less racism. Seems simple enough, but I’m approaching the subject of China as a complete outsider. I know some basic history and have seen some films, but there’s still a lot I don’t know, and I want to at least put some level of research into whatever representation I give my story. Not because I’m hoping to earn some SJW brownie points, I don’t think Project Shenmue will even reach the eyes of the arbiters of woke, but really just for my own, personal satisfaction and artistic pride. I don’t have any great goals beyond telling a pulpy adventure story with less racism than the pulpy adventure stories that inspired it. But I hope at least that I can make something better than Bullet Train or Shogun (stories I… have very strong opinions about). To that end, I have set about getting my hands on whatever decent research texts I can find on the subjects I want to incorporate into Project Shenmue, which leads us to the topic of today’s article.
If there’s one blog that has inspired my site more than any other, it’s the Fake Geek Boy Press. No, really. When Malcolm asked me what I wanted my website to look like, I basically just said this but with my own signature color scheme. It’s always great when you find a critic whose tastes are similar to your own, because if there’s some media you’re interested in, finding their thoughts on the matter is a good indicator of how well you’ll like or dislike it yourself.
Unfortunately, this similarity in taste also means that, more often than not, you both have basically the same things to say about the same works. Several times, going back to my Youtube and Fantastic Fiction days, I’ve found some work that I’m excited to talk about, only to find that the Fake Geek Boy Arthur has already said everything I want to say about it, and said it far better than I ever could. Obviously, there have still been plenty of works where I’ve had my own unique things to say, but when I started on what I like to call the “Sam Neill is frightened by horrors beyond the ken of mortal man” trilogy, I found myself with very little to say concerning its first two installments (Possession and In the Mouth of Madness) that Arthur hadn’t already said beyond “Oh those cosmic terrors give him such a fright!”
But when at last I came to the third and final installment of the trilogy, I found to my pleasant surprise that there was actually a whole lot I had to say which Arthur didn’t really go into. So that’s what I’m gonna do here.
Hi everyone. I’m doing this partly to test out titling, and see how well that works, and partly to tell you all about two films I recently watched.
Super Mario Bros. (1993)
For years, Super Mario Bros. has been something of a bad joke, arguably the start of the “video game movie curse” that every video game adaptation has tried to avoid. And even despite gathering a cult following, the virulent distaste towards the movie expressed by stars Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper provides ample ammunition for the people who hate this movie, and believe me, people loathe this movie.
What do I think? Honestly… I unironically love this film? I went in thinking that it was going to be so-bad-it’s-good, but after finishing it I was genuinely confused as to why the movie got so much hate when it first came out. Like, sure it’s not the most accurate adaptation of the games, but let’s be honest, the first Mario game with a story deeper than “collect these things” wouldn’t come out for another three years after this movie, and the central conceit of Mario and Luigi being Brooklyn plumbers sent to another dimension was commonly accepted lore at the time. As for Daisy, given how pretty much all her backstory, even to this day, comes from a single Game Boy game, there’s nothing to say that she isn’t a cyberpunk princess in the games. Indeed, I think this is the very first piece of Mario media to establish Luigi and Daisy as love interests, with them being suitably adorable and sweet.
The Heavenly Sword is a very important book to me. When I was first looking for publishers who would be interested in an Urban Fantasy story set in Hong Kong, I began by looking through the companies that had published the nonfiction texts which I’d used as research. When I went to the website of Earnshaw Books, one such publisher, I saw, prominently displayed on the site’s front page, The Heavenly Sword. The synopsis promised fantastic adventure with an historic backdrop, in the tradition of wuxia greats like Jin Yong. And because of its inclusion in the Earnshaw Books catalog, I was able to pluck up my courage, contact the publisher, and proceed on my current journey with Project Shenmue.
More than that though, Alice Poon, the author, despite being a successful author and in a position that seems like a dream to me, is polite and sociable on social media. She has taken the time to answer questions I’ve posed to her on Twitter, given me likes and comments on my own platforms, and even was kind enough to mail me some bookmarks with characters from The Heavenly Sword. Thanks to her, I have made a contact in the writer realm, and she has been nothing but kind and encouraging to me.
Because of all this, I really wanted to like this book. To not like this book would be a sort of critical parricide, and, leaving her writing completely aside, Alice Poon seems like a genuinely cool person, whom I would love to get to know more and perhaps even become proper friends with in the future. So I can’t simply write The Heavenly Sword off and leave it at that, especially since I know that Poon herself will almost certainly read this review.
However, there are issues with this book that ultimately dragged down the experience for me, and I would not be able to write an honest review if I did not address them. My policy with criticism has always been that, so long as I do not personally insult the creator or the fans, anything goes. But, even though I know “constructive criticism” has become a BS buzzword like “just asking questions” or “devil’s advocate”, for this review, I will endeavor to frame every criticism I have in the most constructive way I can. This one is gonna be light on jokes, folks.
Hey folks. I just wanted to let everyone know that no, I am not dead. And I haven’t abandoned the blog. It’s simply that because we’ve just made the site, there are still some bugs we’re working on, and I want those to get fixed before I proceed with a regular posting schedule.
In the meantime! Some news. Firstly, I’ve been taking this time to work on Project Shenmue, and today I finished the first draft of the First Day, which came at a total of around 27,000 words. Given the goal is 80,000-100,000 words, that puts me right on track. And if I keep this schedule of two months per Day up, I should easily reach my goal of having Project Shenmue ready to ship off to the publisher before the year is out.
Right now, I am reading two books to write reviews for, and will have them on the site once the bugs have been fixed. I also may review the og Super Mario Bros. movie, which I watched recently. I found myself enjoying it far more than I anticipated.
Until then, peace. Since it’s 4/20, I guess I’ll tell you all to light up a bong, if you’re into that sort of thing.