Despite the rather negative feelings I've expressed about my RP in chat this year, I've decided to write a Wrapup post anyway, because there WERE things I liked about it. My plans for this year revolved around wanting to tone the stakes down from "Rewriting history so only WE get Pokemon", "Giant Space Dragon Destroys the Wrong Earth", and "Slightly Less-Giant Space Dragons want to destroy Gensokyo". I feel that overall I accomplished that much; Griff kidnapping people to be corporate slaves and a doofus evil cult leader were certainly less destructive in their own ways. There were a lot fewer plot events this year than last because I didn't want to devote as many of my Saturdays to plots this year while the Clovenix Conundrum benefitted from having so many events; I don't think doing fewer events necessarily detracted from the quality of Anguir' Management Issues though.
As Gooper Blooper remarked in chat, Anguirus didn't really do that much this year despite the plot being named after him. I feel I was too hesitant to have him go antagonistically kaiju on Argo, both for his sake and Argo's sake. I had similar misgivings about doing something like that in Olympia with Megalon during his brief RP appearance as well, but Megalon didn't have a plot named after him. Overall, his role in the plot didn't even end up that well defined; someone asked in chat what he was even there for and - as of writing this paragraph - I haven't gotten around to explaining that in a post, which I plan to make part of Anguirus' epilogue for the year. To sort of but not really spoil it, Anguirus was called to Argo by Clownpiece and Seregios' mom to stop people from sucking the Chaos out of living creatures to haul off to whatever was behind Griff's Stargate. Why not ask the Kobbers? Because she didn't know they were there; Great Master Ghidorah is a dead monster in the middle of the planet and Earth is a big place. She was lucky to get a monster to listen to her at all.
Anguirus also presented a challenge that Goops had with Doug, but unlike Doug I didn't have an elegant solution that would allow him to interact with more of RP. He showed up for a few giant monster things, had an event focused on finding him, and showed up for a few srsposts, but I committed the sin of not giving him enough things to do.
Gooper was right when he said that I was tying up a lot of loose ends this year. Individually, I liked how the plot events went. They just weren't a great, coherent plot like last year was. I didn't put enough thought into plotting out how Anguirus would be tracked and studied; if I'd done things better, we might have spent the first half of the season tailing Anguirus, maybe an actual event where'd be fought to discourage from approaching Argo instead of shoehorning the Goblins in to provoke him. The Goblin city would have been discovered after a July event and THEN explored, leading to Griff eventually. That's sadly not how it happened though.
Cut Content
There are a few things I cut from RP this year that I'd had planned or considered for something and either just didn't get around to doing or ended up just not doing because things were already muddy enough as it.
The Echolux Crucible was underutilized in general this year and I regret that because I think it's a near concept. Keeping the Kobbers away from the Echolux was a good idea from an in-universe perspective but a terrible decision in hindsight from a storytelling perspective. The named characters like Groza, Annabella, and Furina ended up with few plot appearances and a few scattered bar appearances while a couple of characters I'd really hoped to use just flat out didn't appear at all and were indirectly referred to a few times. Milly and Meryl (pictured above) are from the late 90s anime Trigun, where they worked as roaming insurance investigators. They would have played a similar role in RP, going around and investigating events. They are still canon - Meryl was mentioned in my Chris Yukine epilogue and I'm hoping to use them to some extent next year - but their activities were exclusively unseen.
Initially considered as Phase 1 of my year's finale, the Goblins would have instead been driving their own train towards the Stargate and when confronted by the Kobbers, they would have prayed really hard to the ghost of Smartslice and the train would have turned into a massive Smartslice demon to battle against in front of the portal, ultimately being destroyed by Griff in the Cybersaurus. This was abandoned because I decided the Jack cult raid ending with a major enemy defeated so that the finale could be all about Griff would be more satisfying than "Guy we beat up gets turned into a Goblin God" after that was basically what happened in the cult warehouse already. Plus, fighting Griff on a train was a great excuse to actually have half of the finale happen on a train and I haven't done a train plot yet. If Whalestrand was the Evil Mushroom God setting, then I guess Argo is the Train Fight setting???
Similarly to Smartslice Phase 2, I had considered trying to find a way to squeeze in the giant Skullcrawler from the Godzilla vs Kong vs Justice League comic series, but there didn't seem to be a great, organic way to make it happen. There also aren't a lot of great pictures of it since it only appears towards the end of that comic series. It would have been great for a one-off post fighting Anguirus, in hindsight.
There was a brief period before I settled on what exactly the finale should be where I considered having Griff survive the year only to be completely impoverished and indebted to the Paradigm Corporation, who would have put him to work in Season 16 as a clerk at the Echolux Crucible helping Kobbers register for fights and other activities, forced to be subservient to the enemies he once thought he'd outsmarted and outmaneuvered. That wouldn't have been as satisfying though, so the idea was tossed in favor of Griff trying to make another 'bold escape' to run away to somewhere Kobbers couldn't reach him:
SPACE!!! another dimension where there were no Kobbers.
Individual Characters
If this section feels a bit haphazard, it's because I'm writing it in the order of what I feel like writing at any given moment.
To SK's chagrin, I used AI to make a lot of pictures this year. It's not something I particularly like doing, but where else am I going to get pictures of griffins in top hats and FF14 Goblins dressed like Jack of Blades? Or Lancers fighting? It makes pretty backgrounds too. I'm hoping to do less of it next year, for what it's worth.
Smartslice of Manymasks is inspired by an antagonist from Final Fantasy 14's Heavensward expansion who also leads a group called the Illuminati. Delilah was originally going to be more involved in dealing with Smartslice's group because in Heavensward, Smartslice's inspiration, Quickthinx Allthoughts, was using the Primal Alexander to try taking over Eorzea using time travel shenanigans. Delilah didn't end up more involved though. Smartslice's goal was to try and use Primal Summoning to become Jack of Blades after the guy's death in Season 13 because who doesn't love becoming God?
The Illuminati was brought in to be the muscle behind doing the evil acts of violence of the plot while Griff did the scheming and manipulation, the two sides working together until they no longer wanted to work together. Smartslice wasn't particularly deep as a character, but he played the role of Secondary Antagonist well enough. I enjoyed setting him up as someone Griff could seem to control until he no longer had anything to control the Illuminati with, setting our favorite Best Buy employee up to need to lower himself to asking for help from his enemies to avoid the worse consequence of Smartslice's Skullcrawler henchmen from wrecking the city.
Griff was one of the earliest aspects of Anguir' Management Issues that I'd planned. He made his brief appearance in Season 14 to sell Vanessa and her WRO the location of evil robots to pit against the Kobber in exchange for large amounts of money, enough that he could quit his shitty Best Buy job in Albequerque, but having money wasn't enough for him. He needed influence and power too, so he went somewhere he could try buying a position in to start his ascension. What wasn't well-explained was that he needed a lot more money to keep his Standard of Living and got outside help from another corporation, the Paradigm Corporation, which has been mentioned once or twice on forum before, which agreed to further fund him in exchange for something that I don't think I specified. Eventually they gave up on him though for not getting results.
We'll find out someday when Paradigm returns.
He was able to buy himself a major role in the Echolux Crucible and had enough credibility to convince the head honchos to keep Kobbers out so they wouldn't find him and try exposing him or worse, the one thing he learned from Tara Skew. He was never going to keep them away forever though, especially because he was scheming naughty things with other naughty people to make himself even richer and doing petty things like trying to kill Mabel and Margit. Hints were dropped at the connection between Griff and the Goblins during the Goblin City investigation; shipments were being sent to the address of his old US headquarters that had been bought out by Paradigm.
Eventually, he was forced to do something he didn't want to do: talk to Kobbers. I kind of awkwardly implied that Beelzebub was influencing him to do so and never got around to her telling someone - probably Lovely Frederika - that she did it because the Kobbers would have found the warehouse eventually but not until monsters exploded from it to murder innocent people. Once Kobbers were aware of him - many of them aware of him for the first time ever - he had to go full public bluster and get himself some heel heat by capitalizing on what he convinced Coyote Williams into doing in prison.
Belatedly, I realized his post-cult behavior was a lot like a certain current president. I'd say I unintentionally took inspiration, but this is a post about my plot, not politics.
Pitohui's Dry Country story helped give me the perfect excuse for setting up Griff's final ploy: trains and slaves! How did Griff enslave people? We'll find out next year, I promise. The train idea happened enough in advance that I had minions capitalizing on other train-related events to culminate in the most Griff-y of grifts: letting the Kobbers fight a fake Griff while the actual Griff was hiding in his mecha robot transformer train.
Cybersaurus had been introduced back in Season 12 as a way to destroy the Scorchbeast and could have been a potential boss fight, but it ended up not being seen, so it was a great Anguirus-sized final opponent with a lot of pictures that I could grab to show off. Another loose end tied up! I ended up calling it Cybersaurus this year, but in the original Dark Horse comic and earlier seasons I'd called it by its proper name: Cybersaur. Mable using Power Bombs to disable its shields was originally going to be Chris using X-Drive to use EMMI-powered anti-shield missiles to lower the defenses instead but then I had Chris lose her Symphogear to Raven Beak to hype up that boss fight, a decision I don't regret. I wanted to make dropping that shield a moment because this is supposed to be a robot strong enough to fight Godzilla; it takes something extreme to make it vulnerable, like an awesome callback to a weapon that was an actual threat to Kobbers.
Plus I got to have a train plot, so nyeh. :p
Be honest, how many of you who played Pokemon Sword/Shield expected a heel turn from this guy, especially after JRM had his right-hand lady Oleana back in Agama? Rose Wyndon (last name taken from the big city in Sword/Shield) was intentionally brought in to subvert that expectation, someone who could be familiar with Pokemon and be an energy mogul (which Argo has a lot of). He was intentionally made a more Kobber-friendly side of the Echolux who was willing to work with them even if the majority of the board had sided with Griff. I will say he does have a Pokemon team, though I won't specify what he trains until it becomes relevant.
I should probably talk about Anguirus since the plot was named after him, even if he ended up as mainly a side character in it. While the teaser image from 2024 showed a very different Anguirus, I was always careful to use depictions of his Showa-era version and comic appearances based on it. He fit my plans for the year better than a lot of other kaiju I could have chosen: he burrows and can live underground, he's lower on the power scale as far as Godzilla's roster goes, and he's got a cool, fairly-simple dinosaur design. He wouldn't be shooting off dozens of beams or spraying acid everywhere, just being a cool dinosaur and not on the Titan level of monsters that the Legendary series of Godzilla films has established.
If I had done the plot properly, the second event of Anguir' Management Issues would have probably been a bit more combat-oriented, with Anguirus getting too close to Argo and needing to be lured away or blasted, but as I write it I realize that those approaches would be somewhat mutually-exclusive: it'd be hard to entice him with some characters while others are potentially attacking him. I think a better way of handling him would have been to have him be more antagonistic with scenes of him destroying mines and stuff until we could discover that he was actively hunting Goblins, perhaps by showing that certain facilities were more wrecked than others.
I would have also been better off creating a new character to study him instead of roping Margit into doing it because "Pokemon are basically small kaiju", an Argo local who would have lead the charge in Anguirus events instead of Chris Yukine doing everything. Don't get me wrong - I love Chris and she'll be around, but I should have at least given her an Argo partner for this plot and to Argo things so she could go to Tennessee and Outer Space. Or at least roped Zeldoten into doing that sooner since he has experience with them thanks to DeMonde's Rampage pets. Also, not enough Zeldoten this year. Shame on me.
He got to be one of my planned Jiggy bearers for awhile, with it lodged onto one of his spines away from his body so he could unconsciously draw on its power to heal him after his fights with Sin Eaters made by the Goblins under Argo, which transferred to Smartslice's possession during the Goblins' attempt to have him attack the city to give Griff ammunition to eventually offer the Cybersaurus' services to Argo, giving him an edge in the city's politics.
As I mentioned above, Anguirus was drawn to Argo by the Great Master Ghidorah to fight the Goblins' Sin Eaters because stealing Chaos is not cool. He respects Doug as the local Alpha and I'm sure Sheep will be glad to know that he still poops from time to time.
Shoehorning her into plot to look at monsters and nearly being murdered aside, I'm pretty happy with what Margit did this year. I wanted to have her exploring and finding new Pokemon, and she did. I originally had a Pokemon fangame wiki open that had Crystal type versions of certain Pokemon like Crystal Onix in case I needed her to find something cool in a post, and I BS'd some Pokemon information for her to suggest during her studies. She also got to visit the Dry Country and find another Onix! Dry Country seemed like the best plot for her and I wish I'd sent her on more of those events, especially the final one so she could have talked about Jormungandr but alas. She was also present in Tennessee during Brine's finale because she considers Jackson and Lee her friends, but she didn't do anything noteworthy, just fought some dudes. I considered having Clovenix show up at some point during the season, but there didn't seem like a good time for it.
Her admittance into the Echolux Crucible was decided entirely because she won the 2024 Chao Rumble, which translated into RP as her winning a Rumble-style event to get a spot instead of joining the Argo Pokemon League like Chairman Rose thought she would, making her a target for the battle-loving Matoimaru. I swear she isn't going to get kidnapped every year, even if it's for her own protection.
As of this writing, she hasn't gotten her 2025 finale post, but she will eventually get a rematch with Matoimaru.
I really appreciate the effort JRM put in to give Matoimaru a rival in the form of Susamaru; I wish I'd done more to reciprocate. One of my regrets character-wise is not having my new characters do more things, largely because of the "No Kobbers Allowed" Echolux rule that in-universe was an unspoken rule that Echolux fighters shouldn't go to the Crown Jewel or do Kobber things. Because of this, I feel like Matoimaru is more of the Informed Ability or Informed Attribute tropes, because she's the Echolux champion...but she hardly went on any plots and probably her biggest appearance was in the Trash Echolux/Neo-Cardholder event. She showed up a few times but didn't do much, particularly in one of the early Trainplot events.
I think she's really cool. She's a cool demon lady from the Arknights mobile game who uses a spear. During my tenure playing the game, she was one of my better units, but I fell off of playing it because I'm not very good at tower defense games, especially ones where I can only use what the gachas give me. It's the same game Brine's Jenny is faceclaimed from.
I'm hoping I'll get around to fleshing out her character a bit more now that I've rid myself of the No Kobbers Allowed to the point of making an entire post of Rose talking about it. All we know about her right now is she likes fighting and she got 'noblesse oblige'd out of the Burrows for petting rocks too hard. Contrary to what some people may think, she's not an undefeated champion; most of her losses were either before she became champion or happen in non-championship matches like fighting Lancers.
It was a good year for Chris Yukine to participate in plots. Being a professional problem solver tends to be a good excuse for her to just join in on random things, even if she wasn't involved before. She kind of stumbled into being involved in Destiny's shenanigans by being concerned about her going nuts with her Radiance and Chao was nice enough to let her support her "Idiot Children" by helping Malin and Nue be space cops with the Concord stuff being relevant enough to her professionally to tag along on Gashadokuro stuff. She's also been good for working with people from the Argo government to help it feel like the locals aren't just twiddling their thumbs while a group of out-of-towners solves all the problems for them.
I know a few people were concerned that Chris losing Ichaival, her Gear, was a sign that she was going to be stepping away from RP, but I'll say again that she isn't going anywhere. I'd planned something like it to happen during my own finale, to have Chris use the last EMMI power of anti-shields to lower the Cybersaurus' defenses and make it vulnerable, but having her sacrifice her armor against Raven Beak felt like a better use for the moment, to show how dedicated she was to making sure evil was beaten even if it cost her something, which led to her needing to find other ways of fighting Benedictine in Nashville. Chris losing her Gear also meant I was free to give the cool sacrifice moment to Mabel.
Where does Chris go from here? She's down her cool power armor and has a robot hand. She might get her hand back before the next season starts, but she's not getting a replacement power-up for awhile at least; undoing the sacrifice just like that isn't something I want to undo lightly. Fighting the EMMIs meant she had to learn and adapt, and she'll keep fighting with her brain next year too.
The Library of Alexandria continues its mission of being there to study the weird things that happen and to study solutions! Solutions backed by cool giant steampunk mechs. I've committed to keeping them around for awhile by proposing the Library keeps making branches everywhere the Kobbers go so we're not taking for granted that Jade will keep bringing back the Church of Anime. Maybe cosmic beings get tired of all these Lesbians and Kamen Riders; who am I to dictate?
Garvan got to be the main girl in Whalestrand with Delilah/Alexander being a large part of the Clovenix Conundrum, so I tried to have Macka take the lead more often than not in plots this year. She certainly benefitted from forming a partnership with Chloe and scarves becoming the year's Smurf and Turf for weird foods. Sometimes she wore her Arknights Doktor coat and sometimes she wore her white robe that Chloe made, but I liked having her around to try solving issues with magic and knowledge rather than brute force, like trying to cure the Shadows or performing an exorcism in an abandoned mine. Hopefully we'll get some more Shadows from Sheep next year! I was glad the Library got to be involved with the Elementals plot; it really felt like a situation where we couldn't just punch people until things were better and needed a long-term solution. We'll see how well Evangeline fits in as a Library girl next year when she's learning magic.
Since Swack isn't around, it was up to Macka to do the yearly "Stone Carving insulting JRM villains".
Delilah and/or Macka will likely find their way into next year's Brawl if I can think of a way to make them interesting. I still have regrets about how Power Creep-y Garvan's own Brawl entry felt. They will be bringing 2,000,000 metallic spheres to plots next October though.
Probably my busiest newcomers, the ladies of Ironreach Terranautics actually went out and did things on plots, including Shashake winning the RC Robot Rumble and being a pain in Goops' side by not giving up her Jiggy until the last moment possible. Maybe they could have done a few more things and maybe Tahzah (the cat one) and Gleiffane (the tall one) could have made more appearances, but I'm actually pretty happy with their level of activity. We haven't left Argo yet, so I'm sure there will be more opportunities for them to get down with the Kobbers. Shashake's one-sided feud with Attami was fun and I'm glad Goops and I were able to work it into the Jiggy finally being handed over.
Groza and her security team are another group of newcomers that I have some mixed feelings towards. More mobile game girls, Third Chance owes its existence to them because I wanted a way for them to be wary of Kobbers without being outright antagonists. Being survivors of the biggest battle in Agama just trying to survive in a new place was a nice angle I wish I'd done more with, but I'm glad that Third Chance as a whole was embraced so eagerly by everyone as an origin for many of their own characters and plots for the year. I do wish I'd done a bit more with them in the bar, but they had some good appearances as the Third Chance Militia and showing up to fight off dangerous things there. Groza maybe should have taken up a large part of Chris' role or shared that role in my plot as a liaison between Argo's government and Kobber consultants. Not all of them got text colors either, but maybe that will change next year.
It'll change when they enter the Brawl using all my slots to be a team. No.
I don't have terribly much to say about Spider-Gwen beyond I'm glad she was actually picked to be the Secret Fiter this year since Gwenpool was also entered. Are they related? My head canon says yes, but unless I set up a summit with Roserade to discuss the topic, their relation to each other will be left ambiguous. She was fun to throw into the bar and a srspost as a cameo/minor role. Maybe she'll show up next year, maybe not. I don't have plans for her.
I've said my laments about the Echolux Crucible and how I mishandled it enough, but I still like the concept of it. A big combat arena with big fights of its own (Fites is a registered trademark of Fite Yer Mates) including cool giant robot action has a lot of potential to show that the Kobbers don't have an exclusive monopoly on Combat Sports. I feel like I at least gave it a nice cast of characters, from Rose at the top to the board of directors (representing four of the five corporations from the Lancer TTRPG) and a few other non-fighters to show up from time to time. Two of them (pictured above) even defied the "No Kobber" taboo to actually show up in the bar. I liked Annabella, who uses a Rich Boy faceclaim funny enough, sufficiently to name my Legends Z-A character after her and Furina's another cute Genshin Impact girl. We'll probably see more of them next year. A couple of Lancers also got to cameo in the bar and have minor roles in a few plots where giant robots would do well.
Lancers are a nice compromise between my love of giant robots like Gundams and Mechagodzillas while still being big enough to be threatening to a group of ordinary Kobbers. Nothing truly big enough to be super destructive while still being cool to see fight.
The darlings of AA Gaming the last year or so, I really enjoyed playing Helldivers 2 casually and figured they wouldn't be too difficult to slot into RP, even if Argo is rather opposite of the style of play, though if I heard correctly they added underground missions. RP Helldivers aren't as fanatically devoted to Argo as game Helldivers are to Super Earth, but a group of well-armed special forces who fight swarms of bugs underground wasn't too far off from the Deep Rock Galactic gang of Harpy's and their role as Argo's armed forces meant generic Helldivers could be thrown at any large scale battle around the city without feeling too forced.
Did you know that, according to the Vs Battles Wiki, Youmu has Low Multiversal Striking Strength and Durability? That's the same rating as known character Tenshi Hinanawi. Makes you wonder why we even need that peachy dodo around when we could have this cool Yamurai. Chao wanted a section about her in this blog and I aim to please.
I was more than a little surprised to see how many things Tara Skew was doing this year. I'd brought them back in case some kind of legal stuff came up and I was not disappointed. Unofficially DALI's legal represenative, Tara ended up attending several Concord and Dry Country events in their role as a lawyer and ended up being the instigator of undoubtedly my best event of the year: the Garbage Echolux/Neo-Cardholder event. Tara does nice things because they still don't understand the Kobbers' 'doing good deeds for their own sake' mindset but is started to get it after having a chance to do Cardholders better while sticking it to Griff at the same time.
A slight bit of Cut Content is that if I'd had to do the Margit Kidnapping Thing as a solo post, Tara would have been restored to life to fight the Balor in their Tarrasque form. Fortunately, the stars aligned to give me that extra day to plot.
I don't feel like giving Darkness and Aqua their own section, but their roles this year were deliberately smaller than they were last year. If we do something like JRM's Voice of the Deep again, maybe Aqua can make a comeback, but I just didn't have ideas for her and Darkness was meant to go on SK's plots as part of her relationship with Ms. Victoria Thorne. If Victoria returns next year, Darkness will be around in some capacity. As long as DALI is around though, Tara will likely keep showing up.
In the year of wrapping up loose ends, Mabel Black ended up doing a lot more than her fellow Neokama, 2B. Both were guaranteed to be making a comeback in Argo because I'm promised Chao they would be joining in a Neokama Brawl Squad, but I didn't have many plans for them at the beginning of the year. Mabel joining in the Brawl provided me with a good excuse for bringing back the RX Group, who had nebulously gone to prison at the end of Season 12 because Griff's a jerk. Being brainwashed somehow and sent to kill Mabel and Margit with their robot, El Dorado, which had briefly appeared a couple of times in Agama, was a good way to eventually give them a happy ending. More details of what Griff did will be revealed...eventually...
It was Chao's ideal to finally have Mabel's unrequited crush on Alex finally be...requited. He messaged me privately towards the end of the finale and suggested the two of them deliver the finishing blow to Griff and then smooch. Very thoughtful of him! Mabel and 2B will likely be around in the background as long as the Neokama are present; we'll see how major their future roles be though.
Figured I should talk about these two at least a little. I hadn't planned for them to be major antagonists this year. They worked with Griff at the behest of their boss, Alex Rosewater, as part of long-term plans. I expect they'll show up next year in some capacity, but they won't be a major problem until AT LEAST Season 17. The characters were specifically chosen because I've taken up the mantle of forcing in more Symphogear characters. Pharah, the green one, was granted the honor of wrapping up loose end and notable awful person Bergman to keep our heroes from knowing what was going on until the bad guys already had Paul Jr. back in Argo for the evil cult.
In retrospect, probably good that I didn't have a native Argo kaiju expert because then I'd've had no excuse to bring back Bergman for her expertise and then her permanent destruction, dying doing what she loved: being calculatingly pragmatic.
The Plot Events
While I've said that I'm not satisfied with the plot as a whole, I can at least say that I think the individual events went well! I feel I at least bridged them together well even if in retrospect I'd done them a bit differently, ordered them differently and tried putting in some other events. Each event was good and beautiful even if they didn't complement each other as well as they could have.
The Ground Down Under
Personally my favorite event I ran this year and the only one I had firmly planned out before the season began, I deliberately wanted to start off with a non-combat plot that any character could attend as a way of demonstrating the lower stakes I'd attended, to say "Okay, there's a big monster. What if we learn about it before busting out the artillery?" People could spend less time worrying about how to fight something and more interacting with each other and being creative about what they wanted to discover. It was a great way to introduce Anguirus as a potential nuisance threatening Argo's resources. If I were to change anything, it'd be letting the Kobbers take a souvenir body home and even that wasn't too bad.
Deep Underunderground
Another interesting non-combat plot even that I enjoyed thinking up to give us another chance to learn more about a new file and find clues about why they're in Argo. If I could do the plot over, I would have swapped this with the July event, With A Purposeful Grimace and a Terrible Scowl and had the discovery of Goblins there lead us to their base. I really liked some of the character interactions that happened and some of the skill sets that were showcased.
With A Purposeful Grimace and a Terrible Scowl
I had to hold myself back from talking about this one in the previous section. This was a good event to get the harder action of the plot started with a nice, clear introduction to a hard antagonist. Like I said above, I think this would have been better as the June event as it would have better made a twist out of Anguirus not being as antagonistic as originally presented and would have served as a better transition from Anguirus to Goblins/Griff as the real danger to be resolved. Another revision I would do is to have the first round actually be about fighting Anguirus before realizing there was something on him provoking him. Looking for Smartslice's Jiggy would have also been a hook for investigating Goblin Town. A swap would have also helped mix things up going non-combat to combat and back.
Loose Ends
A very appropriate title for what this event ended up doing for the plot. For the most part, I'm happy with how I set this up, doing some foreshadowing. The RX Group from the Miss Black General is a goofy bunch but they're also really dangerous; we got to see some of how strong they were back in Olympia when Dark Matter invaded but we never got to see it firsthand besides getting Mabel and GG-Chan in the Brawl so it was nice to work them back in for an event with a few cameos by the Scientist and Miss Water-B afterwards. We'll get more exposition on what their deal is later, I promise. This event was also a great way of showcasing that Griff was still a petty, cowardly jerk who couldn't seem to stop himself from making evil decisions.
Another good reason for this event was to bring back the big robot, El Dorado, which I picked because it's a colorful joke version of the GaoGaiGar mech Sanae got to use in Olympia. It was too fun to just abandon, like the Cybersaurus.
If I have an issue with the plot execution, it was that Margit had two weeks to tell peya out the dead Sin Eater dragon and didn't mention it to anyone who might recognize it. It was a clumsy way to get Griff to try killing her. There are currently no plans to have Margit get involved in an assassination next year.
The Great Margit Heist
This year's Garbage Character Event almost ended up being a solo post if I hadn't had that Sunday free up! Hard to believe that one of the most-enjoyed events of the plot almost didn't happen. I really enjoyed springing the surprise twist that, once the plot itself actually started, it wasn't going to be two groups of Garbage Characters fighting each other over Margit, but rather all of the Garbage teaming up to fight a serious boss opponent. It was also really fun giving Tara a chance to unleash their inner Theater Kid that previously was only unleashed for their boss event back in Season 12 as the Queen of Stages with Darkness, Mabel, and Mabel's pet EMMI serving as the leaders of the Neo-Cardholders, whose own Cards mirrored my Season 12 Cardholders as closely as I could manage.
The "No Kobbers allowed!" rule of the Echolux really allowed this Garbage Character Event to be the best it could be though, the one storytelling benefit to the rule. Tara might still be learning to embrace the whole Kobber generosity thing, but they still are of the opinion that the Kobbers don't have a subtle bone in their bodies to pull off something sneaky like kidnapping Margit without being obvious about it. It doesn't hurt Griff as much if he can go "This was a Kobber psy-op! See? They're trying to wreck the Echolux!" afterwards, after all. The only exceptions to the "No Active Kobbers" rule I wanted in place was Malin and Nue, because Chao asked nicely, they were affiliated with the original Cardholder group, and he made a good case for why they should be allowed in: they could be the first cops to respond and their own Kobber-aversive attitudes meant they wouldn't call ZFPD. It also gave them a connection to Tara when the time came to reveal the scheme and why they pulled it.
Coming up with some Garbage Echolux and Neo-Cardholders of my own was fun too, even if they haven't returned in any capacity like some other users' Garbage did. Even if Goops hadn't brought Takane, creator of other bootleg cards, to the event as a Neo-Cardholder, I'd always intended her to be the creator of Tara's set of Neo Cards. Will Tara get a new Azure Queen of Stages card to replace her Jiggy? Maybe.
There are currently no plans to have Margit get involved in a kidnapping next year.
Rage Bait
If I had a least-favorite event this year, this one would be it, mostly because the execution felt clumsier than the concept deserved. Beelzebub bullying Griff into approaching the Kobbers was kind of out of the blue and heavy-handed. I also didn't have a solid plan for what would happen beyond "Smartslice does a Season 14 and gods himself." Anguirus' inclusion felt especially awkward; if I had gone with a "Goblins turn themselves and Paul Jr. into Sin Eaters and attack Argo" it might have been more natural for Anguirus to show up to chase them around, but they were confined to the warehouse.
It ended up being a fun contrast to SK's Golden Spiders, at least. The Goblins had their god and aggressively wouldn't accept any other to the point of trying to turn their leader into that god (to the point where Griff just had to claim to be Jack of Blades' successor to trick the survivors into serving him) while the Golden Spiders were so desperate to have ANY god to call theirs that they summoned horrors from beyond space.
Seregios getting to do the "Are there Goblins here?" bit was a highlight though. I had a huge giggle writing that out.
The Final Grift
How long has it been since I did a finale that wasn't a two-parter? They tend to follow a formula of a big army/minion battle on the first day and then a big showdown on the second day, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing and won't be changing in the foreseeable future unless I do Cagliostro's Pizza Panic Plot where Day 1 is just her wickedly making everyone pizza and Day 2 is figuring out a labyrinth of coupons and check splitting to somehow make her owe Celestia money. No, I enjoy the Army Day/Boss Day format too much to casually do away with it.
For all my misgivings about how things went overall (take a shot if you're tired of hearing THAT ;p ) I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'm especially proud of the title; it would have made a good title for the overall plot. The build-up to the plot was some of my best work this year in terms of world-building too, with Griff putting on his best display of Griffitude for the world to see: a lot of noise about how great and valuable he is and how much his MORTAL ENEMIES want him dead! Super brave pigeon he is, he naturally only started exposing himself to the public when he knew his potential enemies knew he was around AND he knew that any Kobbers that would actually try to take a shot at him weren't around. He lied and cheated and did all kinds of nefarious things while swearing innocence, getting ready to run as quickly as he could despite having a giant robot that could blow up a city.
Smartest move he made was wanting to get out of Dodge. Dumbest move was advertising it.
Even the battles themselves were intended to be as Griff as possible. He sent as many henchmen as he could to fight off the people trying to rescue his captives and recover his loot. Even when 'he' emerged from his train to fight the Kobbers, the big purple griffon was essentially a remote-controlled drone to draw attacks away from where he actually was. A coward to the very end, only showing courage when he had an invincible force field to hide behind. A giant knock-off Mechagodzilla is still a pretty cool and tough opponent though, even with Griff at the wheel, and it took an equally cool and tough lady to wrap up having one more Heidegger-spec EMMI around. Chao wanted the EMMIs to feel like actual threats and even now I wanted to honor that by making the Chris-killer - the EMMI that Griff himself had paid for years ago - crucial in defeating Griff once and for all.
It was also Chao's idea to have Alex and Mabel deliver the finishing blow to Griff himself even as it was a big group effort to destroy the actually-dangerous robot. The part with Original Ghidorah eating his soul was my way of saying that Griff is dead and gone and unable to be revived ever again. He's dead, Jim. The last loose thread wrapped up at long last: Mabel's Disaster Lesbian crush on Alex. ;)
Now we just have the mysteries of how Griff was able to brainwash people, how he turned a giant dinosaur robot into a train and back, where he was going anyway, and why he was a robot too. Good thing there's still another year of Argo RP ahead of us!
Wrapping Up the Wrap-up
All things considered, I give myself a 12.6/21 for the year. Overall successful even if there was room for improvement. Thanks y'all for joining me on another crazy year of ZFRP and I hope you - yes, YOU - will join me for more next year! Was there something I didn't discuss that you want to hear about? Is there a topic you'd like me to say more about? Have suggestions for the Alex/Mabel ship? Just want to leave a big, comprehensive comment replying to everything I've written? Post here or on the forum; as always, I like to hear what people think.
