I hope you are enjoying my overgrown fanfic that turned into a Smash Brothers parody that turned into something else entirely.
This story began as the idea "What if Iji fought Samus?" which raised the question "Where would Iji fight Samus?" with the obvious answer being "Smash Brothers." That raised the next question "Who would bring Iji to Smash?" Then, "How would they get there?" and "What would they have to deal with along the way?" The story fell into place from there.
The prequels were written long after Episode 1 and then front-loaded ahead of it to set the theme of recruitment before Mick's encounter with Jill. The characters recruited here will reappear later as part of the tournament community, except for Midnight who has retired.
Most of the characters are expies or parodies of someone in Smash Brothers or another media. You can give yourself a pat on the back if you recognized them. They carry along some core concepts of the original characters but are given different quirks and personalities to make them new characters so that I can take them in different directions without worrying about their canon.
* The town of Westglen parodies the entire genre of television Westerns from the 1950s and 1960s. Andy Olson is the typical TV hero who fights in clean TV style, but he's not what Harkness is looking for in a tournament fighter. The other guy is what she's looking for.
* Dick Wood was first planned to be an expy of Duke Nukem but he was reduced to a Generic Tough Guy before he was given a Western background.
* Irene Harkness is an original character.
* Lady Midnight mixes elements of the Smash Brothers character Sheikh and the assassin from Assassin's Creed. She was intended to reference Midna from Twilight Princess but carried over nothing but the name and the association with nightfall.
* Princess Strawberry and Sergeant Hawk are obvious parodies of the Nintendo characters Princess Peach and Captain Falcon. Strawberry is older and nearing retirement, and Hawk is just an Officer Friendly whereas Falcon is a detective. Their manager Howie looks a bit like Newman from Seinfeld, and his name is a reference to the old Howard and Nestor comic strip in Nintendo Power.
* Cat Black is based on Lina Inverse from Slayers.
* The baseball player is Casey Striker of the Big City Bandits, a reference to the mid-20th-centry New York Yankees. He will be introduced in Episode 12.
* The man in camouflage is Sneaky Weasel, a parody of Solid Snake from Konami's Metal Gear series. He will be introduced in Episode 8.
* Casey and Sneaky are led by Antonius Zexler who is loosely based on Zorg from the Fifth Element and the J.K. Simmons portrayal of J. Jonah Jameson from Spider-Man (2002).
* Jill is based on Iji by Daniel Remar.
* Mick is an original character who represents the stereotypical fanfic writer: an unattractive loser who thinks too much of himself and already knows everything about the characters because he is familiar with their stories.
* Celestia is based on Celes Chere from Squaresoft's Final Fantasy VI.
* Alex Smith is a knockoff of Nintendo's Samus Aran from Metroid crossed with beaten-up Star Wars style armor and the voice of Darth Vader. Her hip magazines are inspired by the hip holster of 1987's Robocop. Her refusal to be identified as a woman is a reference to the original game’s marketing materials which kept this fact a secret to be discovered when the player won the game.
* The swordsman in black armor is Lord Conrad who is a cruel and evil parody of the happy and smiling Fire Emblem characters in Smash Brothers. He will be introduced in Episode 7 and have a major role in Episode 12.
Other References:
* The Crash Championship is a reference to Nintendo's fighting game series Smash Brothers.
* The Fruity Oaty Bar is from Serenity, the Firefly movie.
* Mick's lightsaber is another Star Wars reference.
* Mick's spaceship design is based on Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne.
* Celestia's last name van Rijndael is a reference to the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm. Although she is mysterious, it has no meaning other than it having been on the author's mind when it was time to give her a name.
* The holographic displays on Mick's ship are inspired by the displays in the 2002 film Minority Report.
* Flower Power is a reference to the hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
* The upside-down floor as a ceiling in the space station mall was not intended to be a reference to the movie Inception, as that sequence was written before the movie came out, but they are so similar and the movie does it so well that it deserves mention.
* The scanner in the clothing store is based on the typical sliding-bar scale one sees at a doctor's office, minus the sliding bar.
* The pink swimsuit-like softsuit in the armory is supposed to be Samus's bodysuit from the original Metroid.
* The Hawkochino drink is a reference to Starbucks's Frappuccino.
* Red Dog is a breakfast chain like Dunkin Donuts.
* The Death Box is the name of a custom Smash Brothers arena designed by one of the students in the Sonoma State University Computer Science Club.
* The use of "chains" as the currency of the Core Worlds is a reference to blockchain technology.
Mick's "emergency transport pattern alpha" beams the threat into the upper atmosphere. Mick is a jerk that way. So that Jill is dead. So how does Mick hire her? Remember what Mick said about being licensed for "dimensional splitting". He makes a copy of the dimension before trying to pull anyone out of it. Each copy is slightly different from the original. He will simply (and expensively) make another copy of the original dimension and enter it at a different point in time. So he will literally "try again another time."
Splitting a dimension is like adding an extra decimal point of precision to a number. If you have the number 1.23456, you could also call it 1.234560. 1.234561 would be a slightly different number, as would 1.234562, 1.234563, and so on.
Mick destroyed Celestia's antagonists in her home world by dropping a nuclear bomb on their base camp, wiping out the antagonists, their entire army including Celestia's former unit, and the city that they had under siege. Mick later guessed that she would not be happy to learn he had done this, so he hides this information from her and discourages her from wanting to go back.
Celestia is given a helmet because she is a soldier. It is an open-faced Barbute style so that one could see her expressions.
Alex's arm cannon takes one of four interchangeable modules.
1. Orange = regular shots, fires straight forward.
2. Purple = spiraling anti-shield weapon, less effective against physical targets
3. Blue = rapid fire beams, drains power directly from shields
4. Green = time freeze, slow firing and uses lots of power. Used very rarely because they are no longer made and cannot be replaced.
The bunks in the crew’s quarters are cryogenic suspension chambers. Jill has not seen enough sci-fi to recognize them.
Different universes have different currencies to hint to the audience that these are different units of value. Alex’s universe uses “credits”. The Core Worlds use “chains”. Celestia’s world uses “guilders”. Jill’s world used to use “dollars” but the alien invasion made those useless.
There was a long road to get to "Red Dog" as the name of the doughnut shop. The coffee chain and doughnut shop were originally written as two different places. When this was a straight Smash fanfic, before the names were changed and the characters were tweaked, Captain Falcon did a pitch for a fictional chain called Dead Dog Coffee, a play on the name of the defunct Petaluma coffee shop Deaf Dog. His pitch ended with the great line "Dead Dog, because you're addicted and we know it." In the rewrite I made their coffee non-addictive so I had to take the line out.
The separate doughnut shop was introduced in the rewrite as "Satan's Doughnuts", a play on the name of the chain Tan's Doughnuts. Both names had a problem: you need to be a Sonoma local to get the joke. Out of this context the names are disturbing but not absurd enough to be funny. Both had to be renamed.
When writing parodies, it is important to create value outside of the parody context. The bad movie parodies of the late 1990s and early 2000s would redo scenes from other movies without adding value to them. They were not funny if you did not know what they were making fun of. The great parodies like Airplane, Spaceballs, and Hot Shots were watchable stories that worked if you had not seen the movies that they were based on.
It makes sense that a doughnut shop would sell coffee and vice versa, so I merged the two businesses together to simplify the universe. Working from a copy-and-paste of the first fic, I now had "Dead Dog Coffee and Doughnuts." What a clunker. Inspiration struck randomly, as it does, and the name "Red Dog" came to me in a flash. Should I emphasize the shop as a doughnut shop or a coffee shop? Should it be "Red Dog Doughnuts" or "Red Dog Coffee"? The answer is "no". Just "Red Dog". Especially in an ad.
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