| abstract
| - Ah, The Great Sushi-Eating Contest. Anyone who's read my prior anthologies should find that name familiar. Yes, I originally wrote a story about Tarble and Ledas having a sushi-eating contest a long time ago - on November 3, 2014, to be precise. The final version wasn't put on this site until June 19, 2016. I believe I even stated on my deleted stories anthology page that this was a story I wanted to re-write eventually. And I did. It was placed as the last story in The Heels of the Unknown very early in the formation of that one-shot collection. I paired Ledas with Cyleria and his story became a winter story because of that. It always felt right to make it a winter story though. Summer would be too easy, as would autumn, and spring wouldn't work at all for this story. It's a comedy, yes, but it's not comedy without consequence. That's why it's winter. My description for this story, written on August 15, 2015, was: "8. Ledas - This would be the sushi eating competition between Ledas and Tarble, expanded a little bit to show some information about Ledas' life since TF.". As can be seen, there wasn't much there. Indeed, almost everything about this story was me "expanding a little bit to show some information about Ledas' life since TF". I went very wild with all of that. I thought about this story often in the months leading up to me writing it, and I developed numerous ideas during those times. By the end of 2015, I think I had a basic idea of what to do for this story in terms of the sushi part, but I did have some vague notions that I wanted to tie this story to my upcoming fan fiction, Dragon Ball: Heart of the Dragon. That fan fiction will be a coalescing of many of my stories. Almost every story of mine that involves a living fanon character is building up to Heart of the Dragon in some way, though I think this was the first story that really went all out in that regard. It wasn't originally planned, but something I realized as I was writing the other one-shots in THOTU was that I was tying all sorts of little things together in them. So by this point, I was actively trying to do that, and The Great Sushi-Eating Contest, as a result, features some of the most integrated story elements of any one-shot I've ever written. There's a ton of stuff packed in this comedy that is of serious consequence for future stories of mine. I primarily got drunk to write earlier comedies in The Heels of the Unknown (most notably, Cool Cat). That was not so with this story. I got high to write it. Writing high and writing drunk produce two different styles of writing, in my opinion. For me, I'm far more aesthetic when high - I write prose that is more colorful and beautiful, I believe. I'm funnier while drunk, though, I think, but my prose gets much more sloppy. Being high influenced so much of this story, it's hard to even list everything here, so I won't try. Ledas' ridiculous outfit is one example, though. In terms of the plot of this story, I had much of what I thought it'd be about planned long before I got to this story. I expected to just copy the above-linked old draft of the sushi-eating contest into a google doc and then edit that and add a few things here and there. But then I got an idea to use Beelzebub. And then I got an idea to add in The Benefactor's warning as well as setup for Heart of the Dragon. I really don't remember when those ideas came up - some might've come up when I was writing, others when I got high in preparation to write this story. And of course, since this story took multiple days to write, I'm sure I got ideas for later sections after writing earlier parts of the tale. Either way, this story turned out a lot different than I expected it to at first. It's funny, too, because from the moment I created The Heels of the Unknown, this was one of the stories I felt little pressure about writing. I thought I was ready to write it day 1. And I probably could've written something in early 2016, but it wouldn't have looked anything like what The Great Sushi-Eating Contest looks like now. This story follows Crushing Blue in being a more mature comedy story than I'm a Candy Man and Cool Cat. I think that works well, tonally-speaking, because autumn and winter are more mature seasons than spring and summer. With that in mind, it feels like much of this story was still improvised while I was high. I really don't remember when I figured everything out for this story. But it did take a long while to write. I began writing this story at 8:45 pm on June 16, 2016. I was writing Black Dawn concurrently. To take a break from Black Dawn, when I reached a road-block in the writing, I began working on this story. For reference, when I wrote the first paragraph of The Great Sushi-Eating Contest, this was the last line of Black Dawn that had been written at the time: "“Then I come in from behind and blow their brains out. Make sure you take out their scouters.”". It may not look like much, but I had 10 pages of Black Dawn done at the time. And ironically enough, even with such a massive headstart, I'd end up finishing this Ledas story before that one. I wrote from 8:47 pm on June 16th until 12:49 am on June 17th. I completed the first draft of the first two scenes in that time (being high, I took many breaks and wrote quite slowly over that stretch); the second scene was mostly a re-writing/polishing-up of the above-linked sushi contest, but that still took quite a while to re-work. I next worked on the story from 3:33 pm to 6:26 pm on June 17th, editing the first two scenes and writing the first paragraph and a half of the third scene in that time. I continued writing from 8:45 pm to 10:41 pm, finishing the third and fourth scenes in that time. I had not touched Black Dawn since I started working on The Great Sushi-Eating Contest. So the eighth story was finished before the seventh. But there's more! I edited the third and fourth scenes from 2:18 am to 2:48 am on June 18th. The entire story was written and fully complete at that point (or so I thought). Then, later in the day on June 18th, I continued and ultimately finished Black Dawn. During the final stages of editing that story (past 1 am on June 19th), I did additional editing on this story, but that was pretty minor stuff. And I actually finished the minor editing on Black Dawn first, so I guess technically this story was the last one completed in The Heels of the Unknown. It should also go without saying that I was high for practically every moment I wrote this story, including the editing. The theme song for this story was originally going to be Choke by Bowling For Soup. That would've been a great song if I only did the sushi-eating contest. Like, the fragment that exists on my deleted stories anthology - that would work well with this song, because Ledas chokes big time in that. But as the story expanded, and I started making it a more consequential narrative, the song lost its use, so instead, I used Weight of Living, Pt. I by Bastille. This song is amongst my favorite Bastille songs, and I liked it so much, I made it Ledas' theme song because of its inclusion in this story. The song's lyrics tie to Ledas rather well, especially because he doesn't age physically (but probably still has a lifespan). He's been through a lot, and all the weight of living is not getting lighter, because he's going to go through a helluva lot in Heart of the Dragon and Nowhere to Go. The lyrics go really well with Ledas in general, though I don't want to be too on-the-nose about that stuff here. I also just think this song goes really well with the opening of this one-shot. There are two final things I want to mention. 1: this story is the first tale about Ledas after Dragon Ball: Cold Vengeance, narratively speaking. Sure, he's set to appear in The Last Saiyan in some capacity, but I haven't gotten there yet (the prologue which he does currently appear in will be re-written; the current version is not canon to my universe anymore). So this story, at the time of its publishing, is the furthest we see Ledas in the timeline. Cold Vengeance was completed in 2012. The Forgotten wasn't finally completed until 2014, but it was largely done years before that. This is like the first new Ledas content in years. Since this story came out though, I've focused more on Ledas because he's great and I love him, and there have been numerous stories about him since. But this was a groundbreaking story in that it got me to focus back on Ledas and write about a character I truly like writing about. It was bizarre to write about him in prose though, since The Great War, The Forgotten, The Redacted Scenes, Cold Vengeance, Nowhere to Go, and (when I start writing it) Heart of the Dragon are all written in drama format (and even his now-non-canon prologue in The Last Saiyan is written in an irregular style similar to drama format). So writing for Ledas in standard prose was a new thing for me, and it was really exciting. I had a ton of fun writing this story. The Great Sushi-Eating Contest allowed me to explore writing for Ledas and realize that I need to spend more time writing about my own characters, developing them, expanding on them, showing pieces of their history that may be important, etc. This story directly influenced the direction I took in a number of stories that are featured in A Short-Lived Dream, which is the one-shot collection directly succeeding The Heels of the Unknown, and, as of my writing of this commentary, is not yet complete. 2: After completing it, I considered this story to be the best one-shot I'd ever written. Bear in mind that I thought this after just completing Black Dawn too. For perspective, Black Dawn is currently my highest-ranked one-shot (before I do the below endnotes and come up with a rating for this story), so it'll be interesting to see if my initial impression of The Great Sushi-Eating Contest is still what I think several months later. Most of what I want to say about this story will be in the endnotes below. The Great Sushi-Eating Contest is a complex series of small stories with a vague overarching sense that Ledas is building up towards a confrontation with some people in the future (namely, The Benefactor, and Haimaru and Raimie). Thus, it's difficult to make sweeping comments about the story up here. So I won't try. Onto the endnotes I say!
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