| abstract
| - Brave is a one-shot that I wrote about ten days after completing Tyrant. I was beginning to form the idea before I sat down to write Brave that it would be part of a collection with Tyrant, Lionheart, and Bluestreaker, but this idea wasn't as set in stone with this story as it was with the next three Black and White collection stories. As mentioned in the Tyrant anthology page, I wanted this collection to have stories about three villains and three heroes. The decision to base a story on Tapion and Minotia just came to me a few days after Tyrant was completed. I didn't spend any time going over who would be the protagonists of this first hero one-shot. It just seemed natural to do Tapion and Minotia. I knew I wanted to show what happened to Tapion after the end of his movie, as him traveling into the past presented a few problems that the Dragon Ball universe never addressed. For one, when he returns to the past, his past self will be there, so there will be two Tapions. Obviously, that's a problem, so I didn't think Tapion could really stay in the past. He would have to come back. But what could he come back to? That's where I started to research Minotia. There was very little information on this Konatsian on Dragon Ball wiki, so I just opted to re-watch the beginning of Wrath of the Dragon, where his only two scenes in the series come from. I used these scenes as reference to develop Minotia's character (his obsession with smiling, trying to be brave, etc). Aside from that, Wrath of the Dragon also helped me frame (and accurately write) the first section of this story, as it's basically a retelling of Minotia's death scene with added perspective. A unique thing about this one-shot is that it is the first story that I ever wrote on google docs (since Brave, I've written most of my Dragon Ball fan fictions from docs, aside from the quasi-fictions like The Perfect Lifeform and Be a Man). At the time, I didn't have access to microsoft word (the primary application I had used to write all of my stories on), so I used google docs. I looked up a few other internet writing programs, but docs seemed to be the best. When I wrote Brave, I did not initially title it. Like with Bluestreaker, Brave's name was chosen after the story was fully written. I remember a little bit of the actual writing process. The early section was dominated by me switching back between a Wrath of the Dragon video and my document. After that first section was done, I knew that I was building up to the death scene, so I immediately looked for a song for that section. What I soon thought of (and decided on) was "Fix You" by Coldplay. Now, I don't listen to Coldplay, and I'm not much of a fan of them in general, but I had heard this song before, during the season 1 finale of the Netflix show "Derek". I loved that closing scene, and thus the song stuck with me. I already had an emotional connection to it, and putting it in this story just heightened that. I wrote this song late into the night, and finished in the early hours of the morning. I probably listened to "Fix You" dozens of times that night, trying to position it within the prose perfectly and have the text compliment it completely. I personally found Minotia's death scene extremely heartbreaking. It's the closest I've come to crying while writing any of my Dragon Ball fan fictions (which is saying something, since I've written many an emotional scene). After I completed Brave, I immediately considered it the best one-shot I had ever written and potentially the best story I had ever written. I considered it better than In Requiem, but was less sure of how it stacked up to Spindlerun and The Forgotten. Because of this feeling, I didn't want to anthologize this page for a while, to allow myself to get some distance from the piece and be able to look at it in a more objective fashion. As of writing this, I don't know that Brave is the best one-shot I've ever written anymore. I'll address this in my self-review thoughts below. As far as the other mechanics of the page go, I continued my minimalist philosophy from Tyrant here: no intro, no description of the upcoming story. Just my property and universe template at the top and the Black and White collection template at the end. This keeps the page cleaner and keeps focus on the actual text of the story. As for the pictures, I just wanted to try something new. Each picture helps add atmosphere to the piece, especially the last one showing Minotia smiling. Minotia smiling despite being in pain is what defines his character, what makes him brave, and that picture illustrates what he looks like when smiling. So it certainly helps. I was fortunate that there were enough pictures to use throughout this piece. For others, like Lionheart, it would be nigh impossible to add relevant pictures. One final thing - after I completed Brave (and before writing any more one-shots), I made the page for the Black and White collection. It was this story that finally gave me the impetus to bind all of my recent one-shots together. In doing so, I decided that there would be seven stories - three about heroes, three about villains, and one about a true neutral character. I consider there to be three pairs of two in the Black and White collection, with one villain and one hero story apiece (Bluestreaker and Sleep being group 1, Lionheart and Yellow being group 2, and Tyrant and Brave being group 3). I decided to place Brave with Tyrant because of their thematic similarities. Both stories struggle with the concepts of life and death and living with oneself. In Tyrant, Frieza's story ends in a very depressing, hopeless way. Brave ends on a far more optimistic note (despite no one dying in Tyrant and Minotia dying in Brave). This is why the last image of Minotia smiling is so pivotal to this story. It shows the divide between the heroes and the villains, between Frieza and Tapion/Minotia. Minotia dies, but he's brave. Frieza lives, but he's a pitiable wretch. This striking contrast is really only seen in the context of the Black and White collection and is why I had to bind all of these one-shots together after making Brave.
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