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[malymin]

Thinking about the monster trainer rpg premise I had. I think it shouldn't be obvious at first that the starter is actually John Carpenter's The Thing™.

I think it would be really funny on multiple levels if at first it's just presented as... a very special dog-based 'mon. The Thing's dog-form as an association of the flesh-assimilator-alien concept is a fun toy to play with. Space Family Carlvinson plays with it with its dog alien character, who is also named John Carpenter. To Your Eternity (2021) sadly turns very bad after its first three arcs, but that anime stars a sympathetic body-assimilator, and it's rather noteworthy that the first form Fushi ever assimilates is a pet wolf, and that the first arc, where Fushi meets and loses the person who becomes their human face, takes place in a desolate, isolated arctic setting.

Specifically, I'm thinking a sparkledog inspired dog mon. Of course, your dog is extremely customizable, and can turn into everything, it's a Mary Sue overpowered wish fufillment OC! It's the special-est dog within a species of special magic dogs! Don't worry about it, your dog can do all this because it's the chosen one and not a weird alien pretending to be a dog. Only after some time spent in the game would it become clear that it's it's more akin to a Ditto - something fundamentally plastic and amorphous - than to a weird Evee that can unevolve and re-evolve at will.

(I don't think I'd have evolving species in this game - every critter would be a one-stager. Because each species would be highly variable, the roster would have less padding in number of species than something like Pokemon.)

Now I'm of two thoughts of how to design the dog species:

• Playing sparkle dogs morphology straight with a sort of foxy, wolfy, spitzy coat and shape, or
• make it look more like a Chinese Crested hairless dog, to make it less "just a generic sparkledog," and to play with how show-groomed crestie hair evokes scene-subculture hair and heisei-era anime hair - the two major non-animal influences on the aesthetics of sparkledogs and similar 00's therian OCs.

On an only half-related note... I'm begging for someone to analyze trends in anime hair. Like straight, up what hair in anime looks like is so different from era to era... both in terms of actual hairstyle (heavily reflecting real fashion trends, I imagine) and in terms of how the hairstyles themselves are stylized. I feel like you don't see as much of the big spiky stuff (that Americans made so much fun of in the 00s when calling anime and jrpgs cringe) anymore.

Comments

[lb_lee]

I’m not familiar enough with anime to WRITE that essay, but I too want to read it!