Guest Post by Stone Sanchez

The year is 1998. I’m sitting at home watching the latest airing of Power Rangers in Space, excited to see my favorite multicolored team of heroes take out the newest baddie on the block. Up until now, the draw of other shows has been meaningless and nothing has been able to take me away from the Power Rangers franchise that I may have been a little obsessed with. (If I’m honest with myself, I’m still a little obsessed with it.) Outside of mega titles like X-Men, Spiderman, and Superman: The Animated Series—shows that I only watched with some form of regularity—the Power Rangers franchise had me completely hooked.

Until that fateful day when my brother runs into our room just as the theme to Space is about to start and he changes the channel on me. All of a sudden I’m greeted by the image of what looks to be two aliens flying in front of the moon. The words “I wanna be the very best, that no one ever was” play in my ears … and from that moment my world was changed. I had just experienced Pokémon for the first time, and by extension, anime.

The word “anime” is usually mistaken to come from the word “Japanimation,” a word that was coined in the 1980s and commonly used to reference animated series made in Japan. This origin, while seemingly very possible, is inaccurate. Anime is actually the Japanese’s shortened word for the English word “animation.” In Japan, the term is used to describe any works that have been animated—be it from Japan or anywhere else. Outside of Japan, using the word anime is reserved and specified for Japanese Cel Animation only.

What is anime, though? What makes it different from any other regular Saturday morning cartoon? Absolutely everything! A major difference between anime and cartoons is in the art. While American art is very basic, usually putting just enough effort to make the characters recognizable, anime is very artistic and creative when it comes to the depiction and distinction of each character, depending on which stylized version of anime you watch. But the biggest is in story.

In Cartoons we only see kids deal with kid situations, and adults deal with adult situations. This line is skewered in anime. Case in point: Gundam Wing. Five teenagers ages 15-16 are sent to Earth from the Space Colonies to begin terrorist attacks on the unsuspecting OZ organization. In the fallout, these teens must deal with being hunted, hated, and targeted at every turn. Throughout the show they deal with emotional strain from constant war, being betrayed by the home they thought they were protecting, and become ostracized by the world.   Teen depictions in Cartoons are usually comedic while dealing with their issues. Even in the great American Cartoons like Avatar: The Last Airbender, tense situations are usually broken by a comedic gesture so that the tone of the show isn’t too heavy.

There are different ways anime can be categorized.  Luckily for us, the Japanese have given us several ways to do this:

1. On one hand, it can be broken down anime by genre. You have your run of the mill action/adventure, horror, sci-fi, drama, progressive, and then one not so normal: game-based. This is used to denote animes that are based off a game. (Yu-gi-oh is a good example.)
2. More specifically, you can categorize anime by demographic. The Japanese have specific names for each demographic.

• Shojo: This brand denotes anime made for young girls from the ages of ten to eighteen. (Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Kaicho wa Maid-sama)
• Shonen: This is usually targeted at male ages ten and up. There’s no age cap to seal that limit. (Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, Bleach)
• Seinen: Targeted at males over the age of eighteen, Seinen is sometimes mistaken  for the Japanese Hentai category. In actuality, Seinen anime emphasizes storyline and character development instead of focusing on just the action and powers of the characters. Oftentimes, due to its concentration on plot and characters, Seinen may be confused with Shojo, but ultimately comes out as Seinen as the show is played out. (Ghost in the Shell, Hellsing, Akira)
• Josei: Young women ages fifteen to forty-four are the target market. Unlike Shojo anime, this category is more restrained with its animation. There are no sparkling eyes, although the wispy features of the characters are kept. Unlike Shojo, Josei deals with a very realistic aspect of relationships and takes away the romanticized view of everything that Shojo usually contains. (Paradise Kiss, Loveless, Between the Sheets)

1. One of the last ways to classify Anime is by the themes of the story:

• Bishojo: Anime with beautiful girls. (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Sailor Moon, Lucky Star)
• Bishonen: Anime with guys with pretty, girlish features. (Kaicho Wa Maid-Sama, This Ugly Yet Beautiful World, Getbackers)
• Sentai: Anime with teams of fighters. On a reference note, Power Rangers was based off a Japanese show called “Super Sentai” (Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, King of Fighters)
• Mecha: Anime with giant robots in them. (Gundam, Robotech, Neon Genesis Evangelion)
• Post-apocalyptic: Anime taking place after the world has already ended. (The Big O, Cassherin Sins, Desert Punk)
• Maho Shojo: Anime based on magical girls. (Sailor Moon, Princess Tutu, Shugo Chara!)
• Maho Shonen: Anime based on magic boys. (G Gundam, Nagima! D.N Angel)
• Expertise: Sports, arts, cooking-related anime. (Whistle, Prince of Tennis, Kaleido Star )
• Harem: One guy with a lot of female romances. (Tenchi Muyo, Shuffle, Love Hina)
• Reverse Harem: Anime where a girl has romances with multiple guys. (Candy Candy, Fruits Basket, Princess Army: Wedding Combat)

These are the building blocks of anime. Some of these themes can be translated into anime’s counterpart, cartoons, but usually most cartoons aren’t willing to go as far as anime is. Liberties are taken with darker tones, risqué characters, and “grey area” subject matter. Whereas cartoons in America are specifically seen as things for kids to watch, with the exception of shows like South Park and Archer, anime in Japan has a categorization for every demographic and is not strictly seen as childish or immature.

Anime is a very broad subject, and this post barely scratches the surface. There are many differences between anime and cartoons and within anime itself. If you’ve never watched any anime before, do so. You may be surprised to find out you’re one of those “anime people” after all.

Here are my top picks: Cowboy Bebop, Gurren Lagann, Ghost in the Shell, Eden of the East, Clannad, Gundam 00 (I’m obsessed with Gundam), Desert Punk, Tenchi Muyo, Another, Yu-Yu Hakusho, The Big O, Samurai Champloo.

Stone Sanchez is an aspiring professional author that has been active in the writing community for the past two years. Currently Stone is associated with the Superstars Writing Seminars by recording, and managing the production of the seminars when they occur. He’s also worked with David Farland recording his workshops, and is currently the Director of Media Relations for JordanCon, the official Wheel of Time fan convention. Often referred to as the “kid” in a lot of circles, Stone is immensely happy that he can no longer be denied access places due to not being old enough.

Photos are courtesy of the website http://www.animegalleries.net/

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Leigh talked a bit about writing good villains earlier this month.  I’m going to touch on a related topic – how do you make your antagonist likable? You might not always want a likable antagonist. But when you do, how do you pull it off?

I’m going to borrow a definition from Writing Excuse’s podcast on the Hollywood Formula.  An antagonist is not always the villain. Heck, in the really good stories the antagonist is often a friend or confident of the hero. So, using the Hollywood Formula an antagonist is “person who places obstacles to that goal in the path of the protagonist. . . . The antagonist is the one whose goals are diametrically opposed to the protagonist, and they’re the one who is blocking the protagonist’s journey.”

As an example from Writing Excuses, in the Dark Knight movie, Batman is the protagonist. His goal is to quit the dark knight gig and return to  a “normal” life with the woman he loves. The person who stands in his way of that goal is the antagonist. Who is it?

One hint: it’s not the Joker.

It’s Harvey Dent, the prosecutor who loves the same woman. When it looks like Dent and the love interest can’t both be saved, Dent begs Batman to save the girl.  In the end, because Harvey won’t be the man he could be, Bruce has to don the cowl and become the dark knight. Harvey’s your antagonist. but he’s not very likable. Is he?

Why not? Well, read on.

Let me take another example: Victor Laslo in Casablanca. Casablanca has the same love triangle that Dark Knight does. Follow the movie beats, they’re a lot of similar notes. Rick wants the girl, but Laslo already has her. Like Dent, Laslo represents more than just himself. When it looks like Elsa and he can’t escape, Laslo begs Rick to save Elsa. In the end, because Laslo is honorable and stays true to his goal, he makes Rick want to be a better person and rekindles his faded patriotism.

Plot-wise. Casablanca and the Dark Knight are more similar than dissimilar.

So, why do I like Laslo but not Dent? To me the difference between Harvey Dent and Victor Laslo, is that Laslo is willing to give up everything for the greater good. Dent isn’t. Fundamentally, Dent is selfish. He’s more interested in catching the headlines than catching the crooks. He’s not the best boyfriend. When he falls, he falls hard.

So, how do you make the antagonist likable?

1. Just like your protagonist and villain, your antagonist needs a goal (other than messing with the protagonist for the heck of it). I tend to like characters whose motivations I can understand and ring true.

2. The antagonist has his own morals and strengths. I dislike Harvey because once you take the shine off, he’s selfish and immature. He refuses to accept the truth Batman sees – that he (Dent) is a symbol of more than self. Dent is a weak character. First he’s seduced by power and fame. Then, the Joker seduces him with the idea of revenge. I don’t tend to like people I can’t respect. Dent loses my respect over the course of the movie.

3. The conflict with the antagonist makes the protagonist “better” in the long run.  Rick’s hope rises from Pandora’s box, but Batman is condemned to a life he tried to escape. Batman is worse off in the end.  

4. Even though the antagonist stands opposed to my protagonist, I almost want the antagonist to win. This goes back to the first few points. I want to be able to identify with this character and feel good about it. I’d like to be Laslo. Not so much Harvey Dent.

Have you come across a likable antagonist? If so, what made you like him or her?

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As a Software Engineer and Security Analyst, one of the things that always bothers me in modern media is how programmers and hackers are portrayed. There seems to be a common belief that they have almost magical powers to pull usernames and passwords out of the air or complete complex tasks in seconds. I know my complaint is common and that anyone in a specialized profession can share my angst, but I thought I would write a little bit on how it actually works. In order to maintain the tempo of your novel, you may be inclined to skip all my advice and use HollywoodOS (the fake Hollywood systems) but at least you’ll be more informed. I’ll try to talk about where we are and where I believe we’re going in the future.

Starting with programmers, we’re a group very similar to writers. All of our work is creative in one way or another. Most of us are given (or help create) a specification that defines what the finished project will be like. Consider this your outline that talks about each chapter and how the characters move around in it. And much like writing the pages of the novel takes time, writing a full application takes a while to code. This is changing even in our lifetimes, however. Frameworks exist that give the developer the ability to create fully functional applications in a short time. Consider this like having a library of plot snippets that you can freely take and insert into your novel. All that is left is to customize the look and flow between the parts. As this advances, I can easily see a future where ‘programmers’ just tell a system what they want, how they want it to look, and the resulting application is built for them.

Next we have the hackers. I will say that the term ‘hacker’ has many connotations and many of them are negative when they shouldn’t be. The word hacker itself is used to describe a group that enjoys the challenge of building new things. This can be that kid down the road that turned his wagon and lawnmower into an awesome go-cart, or even you as a writer. It also commonly talks about people who break software or computer security. Technically, this group should be called a cracker, but since using the term hacker to refer to this group is so common, I’ll bear it and follow suit.

Hackers have many different subsets and it’s hard to classify them as a group. I’ll touch on a couple of the subsets here, but I can’t touch on all of them. First, I’ll talk about the lower class members commonly (and usually derogatorily) called script kiddies. This group attacks using software or scripts obtained from various sources. While their methods are effective, they often do not understand the full mechanics of the attacks they are carrying out. They are quick to take advantage of systems that are out of date and not very well maintained, but are unable to penetrate well maintained systems that may not have any vulnerability already exploited. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a well organized group that gathered and used these scripts as a form of cyber-warfare.

The other side of that coin, and in my eyes the elite group, are the security experts. These are the members who write the code and find the exploits that the other groups use. This group looks the systems and start prodding them to try to figure out how they work. The simple way of looking at this group is like a spy attempting to enter an enemy’s base. They first scout it to determine how it’s configured and look at all the entrances. With enough information they can pretend to be someone else and walk through the front door, or learn the weak points and attack there. Most commonly, unlike the movies would have you believe, this process does not involve the user sitting at the login screen trying to guess the password. They involve lots of surveillance, analysis, and a great deal of luck.

There is one final group that should probably be included and that’s the social engineer. This is probably the most common type of hacker in television and tv. The social engineer doesn’t look at exploiting the computers, but rather the people who work on them. A social engineer attempts to deceive the users to give them information that can then be used to access the system. This information can be usernames, passwords, secret information concerning the infrastructure, or even just access to the secure systems themselves.

While this only briefly touches on these technological roles, I hope you find them useful in building your characters and perhaps making them a little more realistic. If you have any questions or comments, please ask them below!

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I waited until 2011 to watch Oliver Stone’s 2004 movie Alexander, even though I’m a fan of Stone and a sucker for ancient Greece. Critics and moviegoers alike trashed the film, so I put off seeing it until I was sick last week and needed to kill three hours from the couch. I’m glad I waited, though, because now I can draw a critical storytelling lesson from this failed epic.

Critics slammed Alexander on many levels, but I saw one central problem with the movie: a tragic failure to give us a central character that we’ll want to watch for any length of time—not to mention for nearly three hours.

Stphen Hunter writes:

If you played a word-association game with “Alexander the Great,” you’d probably come up with “conqueror,” “king,” “warrior,” “legend,” “despot,” “wastrel” or “killer.” Unfortunately, Oliver Stone has chosen to build his epic of the Macedonian military genius around a word highly unlikely to make the list: “crybaby.”

It’s almost as if Stone set out to make one of the world’s most storied conquerers as weak and unlikable as possible. With a strong, charismatic Alexander, this film might have turned out fairly well. Without such an Alexander, it’s a disaster.

The first problem I found was that few characters in the movie actually liked Alexander. David Farland once pointed out in one of his free Daily Kicks that in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, one of the reasons we like Ferris is because everyone else does; he’s incredibly cool. Stone’s Alexander isn’t. His soldiers argue with him. His mom thinks he’s a “boy” even when he’s a grown man. His dad nearly kills him and frequently threatens to do it. His wife doesn’t respect him. Many of the finest men in his army think he’s a royal putz.

And you expect me to care about the guy? Maybe if Alexander seemed like a real victim–just a poor misunderstood guy. But that’s not what we get here.

Compounding this problem is Colin Farrell’s portrayal of Alexander (I liked Farrell in In Bruges, btw). His errors remind us that a protagonist shouldn’t make us want to slap the snot out of him in every scene. Desson Thomson writes:

Farrell puts a lot of energy into his role, but his character’s pulled and tugged in so many directions, we’re not sure what to make of him. He’s tough in the battlefield, anguished over mutiny from his soldiers, torn between lovers, impulsive and fearful, heedlessly brave and fitfully sensitive.

Hunter again:

His Alexander, as expressed through the weepy histrionics of Colin Farrell, is more like a desperate housewife than a soldier. He’s always crying, his voice trembles, his eyes fill with tears.

So, few characters in the movie really like Alexander and Alexander himself is a jittery mess. Can we at least feel sorry for him? I didn’t. Sure, he had a complicated childhood. But Stone and Farrell never gave me much to actually like about Alexander.

Alexander says he wants to do good things for the people he conquers, but this feels hollow when he seems to be driven by an ambition that comes out of his Oedipal psychology. Then he actually does some nice things for the conquered, but his men sneer at him for favoring foreigners. Even when he marries a sexy Persian dancer, Alexander gets no dap from his boys.

Our protagonist just wants to be loved, but even after he sexually conquers his tigress of a wife, he whispers something in her sleeping ear (or at least he thought she was sleeping) about her heart being a pale reflection of his mother’s. Meanwhile, Alexander doesn’t have the conviction to give himself to his true love (his boyhood friend and lover Hephaistion) in a passionate way; or, if he does, it happens off stage.

And then he wants his men to cross snowy mountains to die in India, while none of them seem to want to go along with him.

What am I supposed to feel now?

Pity? Meh. How many people has he gotten killed?

Admiration? What’s there to like?

On top of all of this, Alexander just seems bland. Roger Ebert writes:

Farrell is a fine actor, but on a human scale; he’s not cut out for philosopher-king. One needs to sense a certain madness in a colossus; … Farrell seems too reasonable, too much of ordinary scale, to drive men to the ends of the world with his unbending will.

Stone and Farrell gave us plenty of reasons to dislike Alexander and few (either unconvincing or undermined) reasons to like him.

As a writer, telling a good story with an unlikable protagonist takes great skill and creativity. When a story like Alexander’s depends wholly on that central figure then it’s even more important that the character works. When writing about a relatively unlikable figure, at least give us something to like or respect about the character, and at least define him well. Alexander wasn’t likable to begin with, we never quite figure out who he is, and he ultimately meets a tragic end without redemption. So I just watched a movie about someone I want to choke, someone I don’t understand, whom no one else seems to like.

And then he dies.

Note to self and kids: Don’t try this at home.

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