Before anything else, I'd like to say that peace was always an option. Well, a peaceful resolution to the plot. I really should have written this sooner when the details were fresher in my mind. Oh well. This year's theme was me finally getting to do a giant monster-centric plot as well as getting to drop a whole ton of Fallout stuff into RP that I'd wanted to use because for some reason I still like Fallout 76 despite them not making enough content to keep things very interesting. ANYWAY...enough about video games, let's talk about plots.
Giant Monsters
This plot has its roots back in 2019 when Doctor Bergman was introduced as a member of the Curse. It was a good time to be introducing bad guys, but Olympia was never going to be the setting of a giant monster plot, especially after what happened in the actual plot. I did smaller-scale robot battles and other less-destructive antics for my plot that year and a slightly-more destructive mecha plot the next year, but I think the battle with Zilla and Shin-Godzilla's early form was still a fun event even if I had to make it happen as far away from Olympia as I could. Bergman did a lot that year that wasn't just setting up a giant monster plot though, which I was glad for.
It's a plot I've been wanting to do for awhile because kaiju have been a part of my life for about as long as giant robots. It's really hard to say which came first since I had a lot of Godzillas and Transformers as a kid growing up. I already did Transformers and Mecha though, so the monsters get their time. The anime Big O was a great source of a neat variety of giant critters to throw at the Kobbers that almost nobody would see coming. Chao has seen Big O, so he was probably smugly sitting at his train console having a good kek. Fallout was obviously another big influence on the plot since I drew a lot from Fallout lore regarding The Institute, Synths, and a lot of the smaller creatures and locations I drew upon for plot events.
Cut Content
There's not a lot of cut content this year that I can remember. Some things changed about the plot, but those ideas were mostly still used even if it was in a different form. There were a couple of ideas that I'd had floating around for this since 2019 though.
Because I can never let the Decepticons go apparently, I had a couple of different plans to introduce a team of Decepticon combiners as Doctor Bergman's minions. Pictured above are Monstructor and King Poseidon. Sheep probably would prefer the Monstructor recolor from a Transformers anime, Dinoking, who would have worked just as well I'm sure. King Poseidon's history is that he's the Generation 1 combiner, Piranacon, except renamed and his backstory is only his chest component, Turtler, is a sentient robot and the other parts are mass-produced drones.
Monstructor's gimmick as a Transformers toy is that each of his limbs are Pretenders, Transformers that have monster-like shells that go over their robot modes they can remote control, and they also combine. They would have joined forces with Bergman, who would give them their Pretender shells to go pretend to be monsters while doing her dirty work. They were eventually replaced in the story by Frank Horrigan, Chris Yukine, and Dess Kirika Akatsuki as her henchmen and henchladies.
King Poseidon's role in the plot would have been similar to the Big O kaiju I used, basically an experiment of Bergman's in "cloning" Transformers to give Captain Halfshell's evil-er cousin Turtler his own Seacon team so he could be big and powerful without having to work at a hotel in Kuwahawi. He eventually got replaced with Monstructor because of the "Bergman likes making organic monsters to be her minions" thing, not to mention we already got the better anime Seacons in the form of God Neptune.
I do kind of feel bad that we didn't get Turtler going "KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE" to start combining.
Even though I don't consider him truly cut since he didn't get much if any consideration to begin with, I do feel compelled to talk at least a little bit about this guy, Fallout 76's Flatwoods Monster, named for the legendary Cryptid of Appalachia. He also turned out to be Kauket's dad in Gooper's plot. Mr. Gooper expressed relief that I hadn't tried to fit this guy into my plot because of his own use of the character and I'm glad things worked out. What made it work for Goops is also what made it not work for me: the dude is an outright alien. Fallout 76 recently had an alien invasion event going on and these guys showed up in it. He doesn't fit aesthetically with anything else I had Bergman use, so he was never even considered for events where I had Fallout creatures appear. His big power in the game is to mind control other enemies and buff them too, so he would've sent waves of brainwashed people to fight for him, so...another no.
About halfway through a later section, I remembered an idea I idly had early in the season and decided against: Suika Ibuki, my 2021 Secret Fiter submission for the brawl, was going to fight Gojira at the Battle of Boston event because one of her Touhou powers is size changing. I ended up not going with this idea because her minute Brawl presence kind of put me off of including her in future things and I thought of something much better for Suwako anyway.
One event that did get cut was a fight against Kirika using an experimental Kaiju Symphogear. She got one based on Gigan in the mobile game, Symphogear XDU that is really cool and may someday end up in RP still. It would have taken place after Bergman's attack on the Magitech College's campus. Penny would have learned where Bergman was hiding and gone off on her own to try to get revenge only to be met at the door by Kirika, who would confront her as a member of security while testing her Kaijugear. They would start fighting with Kirika admitting she'd wanted to battle Penny for awhile even if she didn't understand why. Mid-battle, Bergman would have begun testing her new ORCA, which would serve to drive Kirika berserk, activating the Gear's kaiju function to turn Kirika into a 40-meter tall berserker. Kobbers would arrive, beat Kirika, and it wouldn't really have done much besides mark Arktos Pharma as a place of interest, not to mention I couldn't think of a good reason why Kirika would have Gigan powers besides Rule of Cool.
Chris and Kirika were also intended to get access to more of the XDU-exclusive Gears, but it didn't work out as they didn't attend more plots to really get to use them. They would have been developed using data from the Asterisk Bergman had bought.
Sins of the Father
So while the plot's major influences were Fallout and kaiju, I realized at some point that some of the backstory I wrote for these weird robot ladies was going to be convoluted enough to be a Metal Gear plot, so I named it after a Metal Gear Solid 5 song and tried to use as much Metal Gear music as possible. I don't know if I can say I intentionally planned to make it as hokey and silly as some of the old 50s and 60s Godzilla movies, but it certainly turned out that way.
Penny and Pietro Polendina
Ah, poor Penny. Originally slated to be the heroine of the plot, the ditzy, lovable counterpart to Doctor Bergman and valiant protector of the magical college. The majority of her role ended up going to Kirika, however, leaving her mainly with her job as a sort of faculty member of the magical college. She still played a major role in the plot, but outside of it she had a greatly diminished role, serving mainly as a way to get Bergman to find Pietro Polendina, Penny's father/creator back in RWBY, and try to get some very human-like payback on the man. Since he was the creator Penny, a combat android who might as well be Magitech based on how many flying swords she can store in her back, he got to be a member of the mysterious organization, The Institute, as the creator of its Synth infiltration robots and more or less the father of not just Penny but also Kirika and Bergman, someone whose position in a secret society founded by politicians, scientists, and other influential American prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis would have enough knowledge of the mysterious and secretive Agama to run away there when The Institute began its in-fighting.
I'll take this opportunity to explain what Synths and The Institute are. If you know Fallout lore or want to read that instead, go for it. The short version is that The Institute in Fallout is a secret society made of scientists and influential figures who built an advanced bunker under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to escape nuclear war who spent centuries furthering science and technology for basically its own sake by the time Fallout 4 happens. They send Synths to kidnap test subject or replace influential members of Wasteland society for their own ends.
Synths are humanoid robots unlike any other in the series. They wear armor, carry handheld weapons, and are used as The Institute's soldiers and servants. The old ones might have some outer casing that is very obviously not human, but the more advanced ones are supposed to be able to perfectly mimic humans, down to even being able to eat and...other bodily functions, completely indistinguishable from a human until you kill one and find a computer in its brain.
Sadly, I didn't try hard enough to really give Penny things to do outside of my plot, so she mainly ended up being a bit of a foil to Kirika, someone to give the normally-bubbly Dess pause and make her think about her life, which caused her to complain to Bergman about another Synth-like being who got to be cool and have a life outside of being a robot. And not just because Pietro designed Kirika to want to kill other Ultracite/Magicite Synths. (Ultracite's another Fallout 76 thing, a radioactive element that lets the player build Ultracite power armor and special ammunition.) I gave Penny friendship with Constanze and Sucy to give her more ties to the college, but I missed out on having that make her go to the bar more.
Monsters
I used a huge variety of monsters in this plot. Godzilla, Big O, just about everything from Fallout 76/4, and a few others I think. If I remember correctly, Fallout 76 more or less took every critter from 4 and added a few, and frankly most of them aren't worth discussing in their own sections. I left out were the Yao Guai because that's just a bear, wolves and dogs because they're just wolves and dogs, and a lot of the bugs because you get the idea. Aside from the Grafton Monster, the Fallout critters were chosen mainly to be throwaway mooks that were dangerous and cool but not important.
I picked the Grafton Monster for the initial event of the plot because I think it's one of the more memorable creatures Fallout 76 introduced and, outside of the plot, it gets its own event dedicated to it: Grafton Day, in which you have to fight and kill a Grafton Monster that escaped from its robot handlers during a parade. It's not the weirdest-looking new creature, but it's cool. I like it. He also got to appear in the mine invasion event as a vine-controlled/enhanced monster because there's a chance it will be the final boss of an event focused around a plant creatured called the Strangler Heart.
MOTHMAN! He's really neat and one of the rarest random enemy encounters in all of Fallout 76. Another oddly-important creature in the game because he also has an event dedicated to him, killing a lot of fireflies and giant toads to fire up a lighthouse to summon him. The 10% exp buff he gave during the Arktos Pharma invasion event is a reference to the buff he gives you when you complete the event. Another weird thing that's part of the Fallout 76 mythos is the Cult of Mothman, a cult based out of a real-world Mothman museum. You can encounter them at various parts of the world and they have all kinds of neat shrines to Mothman. Since the one you summon as part of his event is a Wise Mothman, I decided he was smart enough to not get himself killed fighting. He's...really neat.
Titanus Namazu/Hyrus did not get a cool name in the anime. The Big O wiki just calls it the Eel (its original form) and the Hydra (its three-headed form). It was probably the most significant of the three kaiju to appear in Big O as it not only got to be the featured baddie of one episode, but it was actually brought back for the second season as the Hydra. It got to be the first of the Big O kaiju to appear in the plot because I felt its gimmick of absorbing energy and electricity was a good reason to have it actually going into Agama to attack, thus giving y'all a reason to go into the jungle and track it down to get the plot going in earnest. I'm glad that having its official boss fight as the three-headed hydra was able to surprise some folks too.
Perro, the adorable cat and later the adorable giant monster. Much like Nibbles' voice lessons in Season 10 served as foreshadowing towards him later speaking during the Zonder finale, me bringing cats into the bar early in the season was intended to foreshadow Bergman using her own kind of genetically-altered cat to serve as spies and assassins within Agama and, later, a giant cat monster who was meant to destroy the bar from within when the time was right. If only he hadn't become friends with a certain blonde android. While he had his own brief battle with the Kobbers, he later made a full recovery thanks to local Surgeoneer, Doktor DeMonde, and had the genetic triggers to make him grow into a kaiju disabled. He still wears the little suit though.
Daemonseed was the Big O anime's third and most unusual monster, serving as an organic means of enslaving a bunch of poor miners whose entire history will be explained next season, I promise. I had to get creative with this one though because all it does in the anime is grow. Very large. Destructively large. But it didn't attack anyone, it just grew to Godzilla size and then some, causing destruction. I ended up pairing it up with the Strangler Heart, a large plant that has slowly taken over part of Fallout 76's map and can implant its vines into other creatures to control them. Combining a giant tree beast with body-snatching pods made for the perfect organic security system for Bergman's mine. While the Daemonseed was not battled directly as part of the plot, that's okay since that event was more about exploring the mine and finding secrets, including several bits and bobs foreshadowing 2022's Silvania plot.
This is as good a place as any in the blog to discuss...Suwako! Believe it or not, Suwako wasn't originally going to be a giant 120-meter tall death lizard! In the weeks leading up to the Boston event though, I saw some really cool Titanosaurus fanart and decided it was as good an excuse to throw it in. Her planned stand against Gojira was still part of the plan for the Boston event, except it would have been her doing Geokinesis (or whatever you want to call manipulating) to do the giant hand thing and then, as mentioned before, Suika would get summoned by her to have a fist fight with the King of the Monsters. She got to have an increased presence this year because I'd already established her as having connections to giant monsters last year. Her role was originally just going to be focused around teaching Clownpiece to use her own giant monster powers and she eventually got roped into doing various giant monster things, like dealing with Varan and fighting Red. Every so often we joke in chat about the powers wiki entry I found for her with all the crazy abilities; I've adopted some of them for her, but since I abhor trying to RP someone who is all-powerful and perfect, her crazy powers get balanced by her being tired of being involved heavily in mortal affairs. Basically, she's retired from being a goddess and long, LONG retired from being the Alpha Titan of the planet, leaving most of the actual divine stuff to Sanae and Kanako and mostly just providing goddess power for Moriya Shrine miracles. While Titanosaurus is largely-immune to radiation since Suwako is a very mineral-inclined goddess, her human form is less so, making it detrimental to herself to use her full kaiju power. Rest assured, the Kobbers aren't rid of her, Wriggle, or Clownpiece yet. Sorry not sorry.
Frank Horrigan, chief enforcer of Doctor Bergman and one of her earliest experiments. His backstory in ZFRP is largely taken from the source material, a fanatically-loyal Secret Service agent who guarded a president. Since ZFRP doesn't take place in the 2200s though, I made it a real president during the post-WW2 years and made him be experimented on by Doctor Bergman into a loyal soldier brainwashed into thinking he was serving America by carrying out Bergman's bidding. I wanted the battle against him to be something different than just another boss fight, so I accepted Chao's offer to have him as a Card Holder and then compounded it by having an Asterisk user too, combining the card's ability to enhance a being's powers with the Shieldmaster Asterisk to make the ultimate fortress, an enemy that would require someone like Utsuho at full power to overwhelm with brute force...at the expense of everyone else there as well as an Unacceptable amount of collateral damage. So instead of beating him up, I made y'all find alternatives and I'm frankly quite happy with how it turned out, getting his brainwashing removed and having him give up after realizing he was doing naughty things. I deliberately went with the Bravely Second Asterisk Boss theme though to separate him from the Asterisk Users in Chao's plot. He currently hangs out with Big Band in Olympia.
Gojira is an exception to the "I don't want to RP all-powerful beings" rule. He was introduced during the off-season in a series of collaboration blogposts between me and Chao as an excuse to give Kanade her XDU-exclusive Godzilla-themed Symphogear. Not wanting to introduce him as an entity just for that though, I worked him into the plot as a threat that couldn't be beaten. Godzilla is iconic and while I'm fine with Gamera being beaten to a pulp every other Brawl, I felt this idol of mine deserved more respect and presence.
Now I need to pause for a moment to explain some nomenclature, because I remember at least one person got confused by so many Godzillas.
Gojira
Eldest of the Godzilla family
Represented by Legendary's Godzilla
Millions of years old.
Godzilla
Son of Gojira
Represented by the 80s-90s Godzilla.
Significantly younger and less grumpy.
Represented by Godzilla Junior from the 90s
Godzilla equivalent of a teenager.
Godziller
Cousin to Godzilla
Represented by the Hanna-Barbera Godzilla
Briefly appeared in the early years of RP
With that out of the way, Gojira was admittedly never intended by me to actually be fought by the Kobbers aside from the fight with Suwako/Titanosaurus in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and in one of the planned endings for the plot, he would have even joined forces with the Kobbers to battle Godzilla Earth. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, a peaceful resolution was always intended as an option to my plot, so when you all actually accepted Bergman's surrender, the plot actually was going to just ended there and then. Fortunately, Harpy had the great idea of fighting Gojira so the second plot day wasn't wasted and Godzilla Earth still got to happen.
NAME: GODZILLA(?)
RANK: KAIJU CLONE
CODENAME: SHIN
Couldn't resist looking up this guy's old Curse codename. Originally appearing in Season 9, Shin Godzilla was always meant to be apart of this plot and served as a way to help introduce Doctor Bergman as a member of the Curse. She needed the Curse's resources to further her ambitions of making a kaiju of her own in order to bring about her plan to restore nature through giant monsters. No, it doesn't make sense but it's also not something I made up myself, admittedly. Shin served as both a prototype for her ideal world-restoring giant monster and a way for her to cover her tracks once she evacuated The Institute in Boston so she couldn't be followed. Shin Godzilla is a very weird monster and one of the most creative ideas the franchise has ever had; viewing concept art and cut ideas for the movie of the same name served as a great source of inspiration for making Shin mutate mid-battle for more peril. While I have promised to never have a plot cause that kind of destruction again, I really enjoyed getting to trot out this amazing beast.
Godzilla Earth
Perfected Godzilla Synth
Represented by Godzilla anime trilogy
While I think Shin Godzilla is one of the best things the Godzilla franchise has ever done, I also think the Godzilla anime movie trilogy is one of the WORST things to come out of it. The CGI done for Godzilla is very stiff and slow and boring. The concept behind its Godzilla, that its body is based on some kind of metallic plant cell or something like that, isn't bad, but a lot of the trilogy's execution is poor, in my opinion. HOWEVER, a 300-meter tall Godzilla being the ultimate endgame of Doctor Bergman's experiments, as pure and powerful a clone as she could possibly make, was too good to pass up as a potential "final boss" and got plenty of hints leading up to the finale. While Gojira technically got to be the actual boss fight, I really enjoyed writing the battle between Gojira and Godzilla Earth and having the kaiju Symphogear girls (including Cordie) teaming up to deliver a killing blow to Bergman's ultimate weapon, using strategy to succeed where raw force wasn't working. Plague's comment about watching Godzillas fight made me chuckle too.
The Battle of Boston
While other plot events can be covered as part of discussing particular creatures or characters, I felt like this one deserves its own section. The single most destructive event I have ever done in RP came about because of an amazing coincidence: Fallout 4's The Institute, which served as Bergman's creators, and the final climactic battle of Godzilla: King of the Monsters both were located in the city of Boston! It was just too good to pass up, making for a serious battle to establish Bergman as a very misguided extremist and a huge threat to the Kobbers. Using her experience as the Curse's monster expert, Bergman made a fully functional version of the ORCA (also from King of the Monsters) to lure monsters in from across the world to dispose of potential competition for her own monsters and to dispose of both Shin Godzilla, her failed test subject that was too tough to simply kill, and The Institute, her base of operations, so nobody could trace anything to where she had moved to. It also served as a tipping point for the friendly antagonists Kirika and Chris, making them realize that their boss was a complete nutjob and was not in fact really going to bring about world peace. It also made me realize that my plots are getting too high in terms of stakes to maintain, so Season 12 at least will have a smaller-scale plot.
Kirika Akatsuki
Dess! Originally intended to bring us one step closer to having all the important Symphogear girls in RP, she eventually became what I feel is the heart of the plot, a way to set into motion the eventual downfall of Bergman. To better squeeze her into the plot, I took inspiration from one of Symphogear XDU's side stories and decided to make her a Synth. In that XDU story, Kirika is an android built by Shirabe. Bright-eyed and bushy tailed, she could partnered with fellow Bergman henchman Chris Yukine in a mission to spy on the Kobbers by hanging out in the bar and helping on plots, with Chris even sacrificing herself during the battle with Synthoid to protect her.
Look, I needed some way to get them to interact with others, okay?
She was eager to do so and experience all these wonderful new things like drinking and partying and Mole Mondays! It gave her a hopeful, happy point of view to counter Chris' jaded, bitter attitude she'd developed. Making her an android really did help her fit in to my zany, convoluted robot spy plot and helped give her connections to her 'sister' Penny. I underutilized her gimmick of being able to rattle off facts and statistics and then not really know what she was saying due to having a Bluetooth connection with an Arktos database; technically the Planetary Scale genius Suwako wishes she could be except she can't control it.
Originally designed as a prototype for a Synth built with magically-rich materials smuggled out of Agama, Pietro Polendina realized her potential for dess-truction was too great and sealed her away out of fear, programming her to be wary of other machines rich in Magicite/Ultracite, leading to some tensions with Penny that were intended to lead to the two of them having an outright fight, but eventually manifested in the milder distrust of Penny and resentment of Pietro. Her real revenge was taking Penny's prominence away. She also got the distinction of being Bergman's least-evil minion and thus was the most horrified when Boston was destroyed, leading her to being a great plot device for getting info on Bergman to the Kobbers.
I'm really happy with Berserker Kirika, both in that dashing artwork and in her execution. She might not have gotten other Gears, but she got an Asterisk of her own thanks to Chris making contingency plans. In addition to being really cool and an interesting alternative to her Symphogear, I just enjoyed being able to reuse the Asterisk that would have otherwise gone abandoned. In the potential ending where Godzilla Earth would have been battled, Kirika would have used the Asterisk combined with Yoshiko's Shin Getter Robot to remove a barrier defending the giant monster so it could be damaged.
I'm looking forward to seeing her again next season. Dess.
Chris Yukine
As Chao can attest, I had about three or four different XDU Symphogears picked out for Chris to use in various plots. Only one of them actually made its way into RP though: the Gamera suit, which is both my favorite and the most relevant, though RP Chris gets Gamera Gauntlets instead of Gamera-themed guns like she did in XDU.
This also seems like the best place to discuss Chris and Kirika's Symphogears, Ichaival and Igalima. Part of Chao's lore for Hibiki and Kanade is that they're the only ones who have legitimate Symphogears, so while I call Chris and Kirika's armored suit Symphogears or Gears in this post, my plan for them was that they would be more like Iron Man's suits, slowly evolving over the season from the Fallout-style power armor they wore in the first plot event with the Grafton Monster to suits they needed help to equip to eventually becoming more like the original Symphogears in that they could summon nanomachines from their pendants with voice-activated command phrases.
And because Ichaival and Igalima were creations of Doctor Bergman's, I asked Gooper to redesign the Gears to be more like suits than the sort of metal swimsuit aesthetic the anime was going for to show that while Bergman was studying various kinds of magic to integrate into her own plans, she was also a lot more practical than most magical girls, giving Chris and Kirika more armor and a Halo-style overshield to give them more protection from attacks, though this defense didn't help against the Berserker Asterisk. Being Magitech also meant that Bergman could install backdoors to deactivate the Gears as a safety precaution.
Fun fact: Chris was originally slated to be Bergman's lone Symphogear minion! Thankfully I threw Kirika in as well, because as written in RP Chris was very dedicated to Bergman's goals because of how they met. Chris' origin story is largely the same as it was in Symphogear with a couple of changes: Symphogear had Chris being abducted following her parents' deaths and being sold into slavery instead of being conscripted as a child soldier and later rescued by the United Nations instead of a villain.
So Chris ended up being more or less raised by Bergman and Horrigan as a pawn in Bergman's professed plan of bringing about world peace so things like her parents being killed and kids like her being conscripted would never happen again. She grew up being taught how to fight and shoot guns and all kinds of neat spy stuff along with a very advanced education in order to one day be the very best assassin she could be, something Bergman found satisfying since that was more or less what her creators had intended for her. Isolated as she was, Chris came out suspicious and untrusting, even knowing that she was being used as a weapon but being satisfied with that life since it was all she had.
And then she and Bergman got a happy, bubbly android out of a forgotten storage unit and she began to finally understand what it was like to have a friend and someone who actually cared about her. When it was just her and Bergman and the brainwashed mutant Horrigan, she could justify and rationalize all the terrible things they did as furthering their goal of world peace through controlling the biggest weapon. Boston she could say was necessary to keep their plans from being found out, but Bergman bullying and threatening a member of their own team, one who was actually a decent person and her only friend? Kirika was the tipping point that got Chris to finally admit she was doing shitty things, and that turned out to be the best reason for Kirika to be in the story, because it was going to be a lot harder to find a realistic way for Chris to turn on Bergman without someone she cared about being threatened, making her slowly realize there were better ways to save the world without burning the village down to save it. She ended up using the power of being paranoid and suspicious to arm Kirika with something she could use to protect herself even without her Gear: the forgotten Berserker Asterisk. I'd briefly considered giving Chris the Bard Asterisk, but she ended up forging a pact with Gamera and getting to use the Gamera Symphogear instead to fight Bergman.
After serving some jail time and helping to save the world from Bergman, Chris legitimately went into being private security with Kirika. S.O.N.G., the name of their company, is blatantly stolen from Symphogear except I made the acronym better, posted here at Gooper's request.
Symphogear: Squad of Nexus Guardians
ZFRP: Security Operations Non Government
Melissa Bergman
Despite Metroid Other M being the bane of Chao's existence, stuff from it sure does keep showing up in RP, doesn't it?
Melissa Bergman, the mastermind behind Godzilla Earth and an ambitious plan to destroy humanity in order to let nature heal itself. I think she's got one of if not the most convoluted backstory of any character I've thrown into RP except maybe Clownpiece. An android built by a shadowy cabal of the USA's most influential politicians, scientists, and other personalities called The Institute to serve as one of many shadowy enforcers in a post-nuclear war America that never came to pass because cooler heads prevailed, unlike in Fallout's universe. An android who watched as this elite group of supposedly-enlightened minds argued and bickered about how best to rebuild the country, a secret society whose members' personality conflicts were slowly growing from the Cold War they sought to escape to the nuclear war they expected to happen. Bergman watched as America's 'best' and 'brightest' wasted resources vying for control of The Institute to the point where her fellow Coursers, an elite model of Synth, were all destroyed by each other. She could tolerate them no longer, using the skills and combat abilities they had given her to accelerate the self-immolation she expected her masters to inflict on each other, except she did it in a way that would preserve their resources for her own use. Now the master of her own fate, she began putting into motion her own plans to save the world from the same human race that had created her kind and then destroyed them. She did all kinds of things to get what she needed, including joining the Curse to get at InGen's technology and spending a ton of money to build a corporation in Agama to cover up her activities.
It's an origin convoluted enough to be from a Metal Gear game, I think.
The driving force of her plan would be theories from her 'mother' suggesting that the presence and energy given off by kaiju would be able to undo the damage humanity had done to Earth, an idea I took from Godzilla: King of the Monsters, where the antagonist sets all of the Titans loose and attempts to control them with the ORCA. Scenes from the movie's credits suggest that, in the Godzilla Legendary universe, this actually works to an extent. It would almost certainly not have worked in ZFRP though. She was a brilliant, ambitious person whose prejudices and ego blinded her to the fact that nobody else would think her plan was actually a good one. In contrast to some of the villains that have appeared though, I also wanted her to be rational enough to at least admit that she could reconsider her plans when confronted about them. She won't admit she's wrong though.
Being a secretive bad guy operating from a secret base did make it difficult to expose her to the heroes though and show them the kind of person they were dealing with. Fortunately, I had the revelation that I could use the "Bergman can transfer her mind between robot bodies" to have her control the Kobbers in the Eel's lair to exchange words without having to expose her to the chance of being captured and thus plot over.
Because I'll admit that if people tried to capture her and she DIDN'T have that ability, I would have had to change a lot of plans because I can only bring myself to railroad y'all so much.
Another thing that caught me by surprise and really shouldn't have was the general reaction to Bergman announcing her plans and then obliterating a major US city. It was very naïve of me to assume you WOULDN'T completely hate Bergman after all of that. I don't know why she wouldn't be reviled. Very silly of me.
I really enjoyed writing scenes for her because I like showing how she thought that being a machine made her superior to organic lifeforms while at the same time displaying all of those awful traits that made her go on a killing spree to begin with. Revenge, hatred, pride, avarice. If Kirika proved that you didn't need to be human to be humane, Bergman got to show that being tormented didn't stop you from being a tormentor yourself.
While I liked there being an air of mystery to Bergman, I did want folks to feel like you were making progress towards defeating her and not just having her endlessly jumping from body to body like she was a cartoon bad guy, so while she did blow up an old body in Regigigas' hand during the Hydra event, I made sure to make it very clear that she only had one body left when she escaped to Isla Sorna.
Well, technically only one body. In one of my ideas for the finale if her surrender hadn't been accepted would have been to have her using the last of her power to transfer her consciousness to Godzilla Earth, awakening it for a final battle. Except instead of being an all-powerful kaiju, she herself would have merely been a passenger aboard it, having designed Godzilla Earth's Synth body to be controlled entirely by its own bio-computer brain and completely resistant to outside influence, including her own. She'd still be able to watch and see if her and her mother's theories were correct about kaiju without being able to affect the world.
Since I'd always intended a surrender or cease fire or something to be part of this plot, the ending was originally going to be a lot different from the one we got. The first idea would have been a confrontation with Bergman in Arktos Pharma with the Kobbers being led to her by Chris under the premise of the doctor preparing to unleashing her ultimate weapon, Godzilla Earth, in the middle of Agama. Upon arrival, there would have been a small army of Synth troopers ready to open fire only for Bergman to have them stand down in favor of trying to work out a deal that would let her keep doing science but somewhere she couldn't hurt anyone. Then two things happened: Kirika before the season started and Boston getting such a "wow Bergman is a monster we need to crush her" reaction that, as stated earlier, I for whatever reason didn't expect. That reaction also nixed an idea I almost proposed to Gooper for Bergman to try meeting with Plague in West Virginia at the Whitespring Resort, a real world location that features prominently in Fallout 76, to tell her side of events and at least try to get him to understand her perspective out of respect for Plague.
So instead we got me continuing to have her appropriate abandoned InGen property by going to Isla Sorna to continue her experiments. Having Dino Riders be there is because dinosaurs wearing power armor was definitely appropriate for the plot AND really fucking awesome. It also gave the finale more flavor than just "Kobbers arrive and oh look it's time to fight a giant monster."
Rest assured: Bergman will never leave prison ever. She had her fun and now she's being punished for it.
For a little Arktos Pharma background, it's a location in Fallout 76. An event that happens there involves an experiment where you protect three modified animals from other predators. It made for a convenient secret villain base for a geneticist.
Silvania and the Accidental Hero
It's finally my turn to RP the beloved bartender and create the bar setting for all of our casual shenanigans! I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a great character to sling drinks in a place that was unlike anything we'd done before, trying to incorporate the concept of a Magitech city into both bar and tender.
We've had giant squids, robots, gnomes, cowboys, and bartenders tending the bar, but nobody I would call an adventurer like the kinds of folks who actually visit the bars we conjure up. I do enjoy the trope of retired adventurers running bars or shops, so that formed the core idea of Silvania: a retired adventurer who cared more about meeting people than actually making money. A good start, but not Magitech enough! She needed some obviously magical bits on her to contrast with the rest of her and some cool-looking prosthetics fit that need perfectly. Peg legs are pretty standard and face plates are pretty common in cyborg characters, so I decided those were cool but giving her robot fingers instead of just a robot hand was special enough. From my notes in the RP Discussion thread leading up to Season 11, I described each of her fingers as having its own built-in magic spell that she can use, a set of cantrip picked out specifically to be useful to a bartender. I threw in things like her pet Owlbear and Polybrigus to give her some extra spice. Polybrigus wasn't intended to be a major thing, but I saw this picture of it and thought it would be a funny joke that Polybrius the game actually existed in the form of a sentient arcade machine that ran away back to Agama and that's why nobody could ever find it.
Maybe it was a bit overstepping, but I also wanted Silvania to be more involved when things were happening inside of the hotel or around it, like the Sintendo Girls plot or things like Agony approaching the bar or Chao's yakuza stuff because those things affected her home and her community. The bartender is supposed to be there to tend bar, but I also wanted to give her a bit more of a connection to RP outside of it. I want to think JRM for indulging me in having Silvania chew out the Sintendo Girls for causing a bit of a ruckus; hopefully I still managed to portray her as being neutral in the arcade contest.
She's got a past written and we'll get to explore it more early on in Season 12 when we do a Silvania-centric short plot I call Scorched Earth. The Daemonseed plot event introduced some crumbs to her past and led to the introduction of a couple of Agaman government officials, Goldlewis and Ningguang, who have history with our current bartender. What could it be though? We'll find out in...uh...about a week, right? Week and a half?
It's no secret that I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy 14 these days and it had a lot of influence on my ideas for a bar. I went to the most Agama-like city in the game, Gridania, and walked around its Inn to get some inspiration. The city-state of Gridania is a very natural-looking place where the city is built in the middle of a huge forest, almost like Agama and its jungles. Final Fantasy 14 also has the Magitech-loving Garlean Empire that opposes the heroes with their hordes of black-armored EVERYTHING. I wanted to combine the aesthetics of the two without just outright taking screenshots of the Carline Canopy and saying "Okay, this is our bar." I worked with an artist friend of mine to bring my ideas of combining nature and technology together, including specific things like the bar, the glowing lines on the pillars, and the holographic Notice Board. The 2021 RP Discussion board has all my notes on designing the bar and hotel if you want a refresher.
Just having natural-looking bar wasn't enough for me though. Aside from having a Cid in every game, one of the most enduring tropes in the Final Fantasy series is the airship. Whether it looks like an actual boat or a futuristic spaceship, pretty much every mainline Final Fantasy game has at least one airship; they're practically needed for a fantasy setting these days. So I made the hotel into a crashed airship called The Silver Tribute, divided it up into hotel-like pieces. It just felt right to have it in the middle of our most Final Fantasy-esque setting to date. We'll get to find out more about it too next season.
Yoshiko Filia Tsushima
After Season 10, Yoshiko spent more time look like Filia from Skullgirls than Yoshiko from Love Live as she slowly worked on coming to terms with having Samson living on her skull fulltime. Their relationship wasn't perfect though and it showed when, in the words of a wise woman, "I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS PLOT MADE YOSHIKO BALD." Yoshiko was a strong fighter, but she couldn't reach her full potential as she was, confronted in the dream world with the fact that she and Samson were on friendly terms but still not united, having to slowly learn to get along and coexist. She'd gotten very close to Tsubasa by the end of the season and that gave her the motivation to try and do better, especially as she slowly pieced together the circumstances of Tsubasa giving up her own dreams to be the Sword of the Kazanari.
I want to thank Pitohui for letting me have that scene where Yoshiko had that sparring match with Fudo. I'd been thinking of something like that for awhile as a way to give Yoshi a chance to meet her new nemesis in the fight for Tsubasa's heart and soul. She used a sword to try and get a measure of Fudo's skill without giving up too many of her own secrets; had it purely stayed a sword fight and without Samson's help, Yoshiko would have easily lost that fight because she's not a sword fighter. She learned enough though, knowing then that just being tough and angry wouldn't be enough to actually defeat Fudo.
Because Yoshiko is my Hot Blooded Super Robot Martial Artist Girl, she had to join a fighting tournament at some point to show off her growth as a fighter and as a person, pitting her against powerful opponents from across Heart Star. It was also a good reason to bring in yet another Touhou, Kasen Ibaraki, who would later go on to do stuff related to Cirno.
An early idea for Yoshiko vs Kasen would have been for Lil Cirno to fall out of Yoshiko pocket during their fight, prompting Kasen to loser her temper and try to smack the doll only for Fumo Swarm to show up and pummel her to foreshadow a connection between the Fumos and Cirnoil. JRM said Lil Cirno was unavailable though, so it just became a battle of wills and ideals.
Yoshiko vs Master Asia was the ultimate display of everything she'd learned during her time with the Kobbers, taking the lessons she'd learned from her friends and applying them to her fighting style, including her deepening connection with Samson. Friendship is Magic and Martial Arts.
I was very fortunate that, while I was on a trip during HP's finale event, I wasn't doing a whole lot that day and could mobile post well enough. I was also EXTREMLY lucky that I could get someone on very short notice to draw the picture of Filia wearing the Gungnir Symphogear that night so it could be ready for the finale. I really enjoyed writing Tsubasa and Yoshiko coming together to deliver the LOVE LOVE SEKIHA TENKYOKEN as a demonstration of their love and admiration for each other.
Filia wearing a Symphogear is really badass and I love that picture to death. She'll be back next season too, though likely in more of a supporting role unless someone really needs to be kicked for being a bad parent.
Momoyo
Momoyo, yet another Touhou girl, was originally just going to be a brief shitpost, appearing when Lego Indiana Jones found where some centipedes live. Now she's involved in the ever-expanding Clownpiece deep lore, appearing in a very ancient mural depicting her fighting a Ghidorah. Maybe someday we'll get to explore her origins and why she's a cute girl sometimes and not always a centipede.
Maybe.
Fumo Swarm
Whoops! Almost forgot I had things to say about them. Thanks to the pandemic, I worked from home for about a year and saved a lot of money on gas, so I decided I'd use that money on an expensive collection instead: the legendary Touhou Fumo dolls. Initially, I was just going to get a Sanae Fumo and call it a day, then I got Tenshi, then Youmu, and yeah. ANYWAY...they originally appeared as mostly a throwaway gag after a Yuyuko Fumo appeared in Mr. Hippo's finale and were originally going to be a Brawl entrant. I got cold feet at the last moment because they weren't a great entrant on their own and were more fun as something Malizza the Swarm Master could summon. As is bound to happen though, I got new ideas for them that would actually matter, particularly in relation to Cirnoil. I don't remember if JRM said Cirno as retiring by that point, but I wanted to have the Fumos do something for Cirnoil to help in her post-Dark Matter life. She'd been beating herself up over her anger issues and guilt over her role in what happened to Heart Star Gensokyo, so for Cirno Day I revealed that the Fumos were the souls of people from Gensokyo (Disclaimer: they weren't the people the Fumos resembled because I can't kill off the alternate versions of peoples' characters.) that had come to ZFRP Prime to forgive Cirnoil and to ask her forgiveness for mistreating her. I know Cirno Day is supposed to be silly, but I thought it would be a good idea to give Cirnoil some closure.
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Was there something about Dracoplot 2021 that I missed that you'd like to hear more about? Just leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer your questions. Thanks for taking the time to read these long-overdue thoughts on my plot!
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Was there something about Dracoplot 2021 that I missed that you'd like to hear more about? Just leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer your questions. Thanks for taking the time to read these long-overdue thoughts on my plot!
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