Fiction

[Update: So I literally just posted this but immediately afterward, I heard that Bioware, the studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect, shut down. While their projects weren’t as close to my heart as they were to my friends and peers, I was nevertheless shocked by the news. This is a tragedy for the games industry, whose death is proceeding more depressingly than ever with each passing day. Fuck EA, fuck Andrew Wilson, and fuck every single corporation that has profited off the hard work of this industry’s best and brightest without ever showing them, their art, or the players to whom that art resonated a single ounce of respect. I wish them nothing but the maggots that will eat their corpses.]

I’ve been starting way too many projects over the last year and I’ve barely finished any of them, so it may seem like the height of counterintuition to start another, but in my defense, Cyberpunk Edgerunners II just came out. You think I’m gonna miss that shit? And I know what you’re thinking – Matthew, you dumb slut – that’s not what the title says. Well, I promised my friend that I would wait to watch it with him and sure, maybe I didn’t promise him that verbally, but I felt the promise in my soul and that matters about as much (probably). So instead I’m gonna talk about a completely different Netflix animated series that came out nearly four years ago and that has lived in my head rent free ever since, mostly as an excuse to finally create something and chip away at my writer’s block… huzzah.

From Korean animation studio Red Dog Culture House, director Ki-Yong Bae, and creator Mairghread Scott, Dragon Age: Absolution is a six-episode animated series based on the Dragon Age video game series created by Bioware. It follows from the conclusion of 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition and follows a group of mercenaries tasked with infiltrating the Tevinter Imperium to steal the Circulum Infinitus, a powerful artifact fueled by blood magic. When their heist goes wrong, the mercenaries find themselves surrounded by overwhelming forces, confronted by betrayal, and haunted by their pasts.

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My good friend, “Sad Scientist,” is an awesome writer and two years ago he wrote a short story called Scorpion Grass. It was a supernatural mystery set in Japan following two high-schoolers trapped in their school during the holiday break of Oban.

For two years the work went unfinished. Sci had made some changes on a whim and ended up erasing the original ending (happens to the best of us). Thankfully, I still had a saved copy of the original story, so he got to work editing it and perfected it. And now he’s created his own WordPress to publish it.

We all have our inspirations and Sci’s are works of modern fantasy such as Monogatari and the works of Kinoko Nasu (Tsukihime, Garden of Sinners). My love for modern fantasy is well-documented so I was all on-board. I encourage anyone looking for a good read to check out his work. Fans of Monogatari will surely get a kick out of it, and it has enough of an identity on its own that you’ll be itching for more when you’re finished.