| abstract
| - Crushing Blue is a story I came up with rather late in the creation of The Heels of the Unknown. It was not part of the original 8 stories finalized on August 15, 2015. Indeed, I didn't come up with it until January 12, 2016, a day after I came up with Starfall, when I decided to replace a story about The Benefactor. So the original #6 slot was taken up by a story about The Benefactor. We haven't seen him since he was imprisoned inside Verlate's mind prison in chapter 69 of Dragon Ball Z: The Forgotten. The original blurb for that story was: "6. The Benefactor - A comedy story about TB escaping from the ice world, dealing with space truckers and the like." I did exactly zero work on this story before I abandoned it. I didn't do any pre-plotting, didn't do any research... nothing. In truth, I think I knew subconsciously that I would never write this story. I basically hadn't decided what to do with The Benefactor at the time. I didn't know if I wanted him to survive Dragon Ball: Cold Vengeance or not. I've since figured out what to do with him, and I may yet write a story about his escape from Niflheim (if he does escape), but I don't know. Anyways, I just didn't feel comfortable writing about The Benefactor at the time. Especially since it had to be a comedy (all other serious-story slots were already taken up), that limited what I could do a lot. So basically, I never liked the original idea, and it was definitely going to be replaced by something at some point or another. That something ended up being a story about Super Handel. I don't remember exactly what made me turn to him. It might've been me re-reading Ain't No Hero, or me thinking about various unresolved issues in my universe. Certainly, with the way Ain't No Hero ended, Super Handel's fate is left unclear. That was a deliberate choice on my part. Also, Super Handel is just one of my favorite characters, so exploring him a bit more in a story was something that interested me. As well, since this story is a comedy story, that made it easier to write, since Super Handel is a comedic character in general. He provides most of the comedic highlights in Ain't No Hero, I think. So in terms of the actual story, the concept and the end product are vastly different. This is my original blurb for the story: "6. Super Handel - A story about Super Handel, his drug addictions, hookers, murder, poker, and of course his pet cat. Set in a cyberpunk world - must have lots of focus on the city, the rain, the technology and the disparity between machine and man." I ultimately ended up using very little of that in Crushing Blue. Originally, it was going to be a total cyberpunk story, with Super Handel doing all this crazy stuff in a lighted city at night as it rains, chasing ghosts and drug dealers through skyscapers and whatnot. That idea is still cool, and I may do something similar to that in a future story, as I never got to "scratch that itch" here, but I don't know. Anyways, I abandoned almost all of those ideas for the final product. The main reason for this is Gears of War 3, one of my favorite video games. I had been playing it a lot (I always play it a lot, but I was playing it much more than usual) around the time I decided to write Crushing Blue. I had also been watching various online videos about the game, and those influenced the direction of the story as well. Much of the story was improv'd. I basically got drunk, sat down, and wrote what came to mind. I had a few amorphous ideas in my head, such as the mongrel Makyan descendants, and the end with Tao, but most of this was fleshed out in the actual writing. The ending was written deliberately ambiguous again, so that it's not clear if Super Handel dies in this story either. That is a nod to Ain't No Hero, and it also means that this story could either take place before or after Ain't No Hero. I probably will not come up with a "true" answer as to when exactly this story takes place, ever. Crushing Blue is one of the most consequential one-shots in The Heels of the Unknown. You may think it's just another drunken story, relying on raunchy and dark comedy to get through a plot. But it's really not. There was extensive lore developed in this story, mostly influenced from my lore-focus on earlier stories in this one-shot collection. By this point in The Heels of the Unknown, I had realized that this one-shot collection was tying more things together, lore-wise, than any previous collection of mine. This is seen in many of the stories, and it's perhaps at its apex here (or perhaps the apex comes with The Great Sushi-Eating Contest, but we'll get to that later). The plotline with the Makyans is tied to Dragon Ball Legacies, specifically Were It So Easy, as well as to Cool Cat. The Makyan stuff in general is a subtle, indirect plotline wholly introduced by The Heels of the Unknown that I developed through several stories, a unique aspect of this one-shot collection. And the stuff with Tao ties this story to canon (he's the only canon character in Crushing Blue, preserving a long-running streak of me having at least 1 canon character in every story of mine since Were It So Easy). As well, the person Super Handel meets before Tao (the guy who breaks his wrist in the bar) is a major character set to appear in The Last Saiyan, and there's a lot of foreshadowing to his purpose and role in that story here. It was particularly fun to start referencing stuff with The Last Saiyan here, as I'd pretty much neglected that story for years, and very few of my other stories tie into it whatsoever. So that tie-in in particular was important for me, as it helped me not forget or neglect TLS any further. It's a significant moment that one of the biggest references in Crushing Blue is to TLS, which hasn't been referenced before elsewhere in any of my other stories. I wrote down a few ideas for this story in the early hours of May 31, 2016. It was mostly just stuff involving the first two scenes and the plot direction I wanted to take. Similarly, I added in some more notes on the night of May 31 and the early morning of June 1. My final pre-writing notes were added in on June 2. Most of this stuff were either quotes I wanted to reference, or general phrases I wanted to use in the story. The actual writing began on June 7, 2016. I got drunk before writing. I began writing at 12:22 am and continued writing until 2:39 am. I briefly continued on at 3:02 am, but then took an extended video games break before continuing on again at 5:18 am. I edited and wrote until 6:08 am before going to bed. In that time, I wrote and edited most of the first section of Crushing Blue. Continuing at 9:01 pm on June 7, I finalized edits on the first section and then moved onto to new sections. Once again, I was wasted while writing this story. That made the writing go slowly and made editing Crushing Blue very difficult. I wrote until 11:20 pm, and by that time, I had finished the first draft of the entire story. I took lots of breaks during those three hours or so, but I still put a lot of effort in. I edited the second and third sections from 2:43 am on June 8 to 4:02 am. Then, I posted the story on this site. I'd say that, looking back on it now, editing those last two sections took a surprisingly long time, and that's probably because I was drunk and had to be extra careful. The main theme of this story is the idea of 敬, or respect. This tea ceremony aesthetic principle is crucial not only to Crushing Blue, but to the other Autumn story, Starfall. These two stories have many parallels, especially in the personalities of their protagonists. Super Handel is not meant to be seen as a good guy. He's not. That's not to say that I don't love him, though. He's great. But he has a lot of problems with respect. His lack of respect ultimately is what leads to his fateful encounter with Tao, amongst others. This idea that Super Handel is living life on the edge is ever-present in the story. He disrespects everyone until someone can humble him. That's the game he's playing, but I think he's too arrogant to see that. It was cool to write a story about a character so important to one of my longest stories out there, Ain't No Hero. It's interesting to note that all of my significant stories have an epilogue of sorts on The Heels of the Unknown - TF, IR, and Spindlerun. And yet, Ain't No Hero is grouped in with those. I didn't consider ANH to be on the level of those other stories at the onset of this one-shot collection, but perhaps I should rethink that, especially since I naturally did all these things. I didn't sit down and wonder how to make an epilogue for all of my most famous stories. It's just how it happened. So the theme song for this story was originally Get Home by Bastille. That song worked quite well in my original concept of this story, as a cyberpunk one. But when I changed the story, the theme song had to be changed too, so I turned to a more comedic song, Deutschland by Die Prinzen. This song is great for its cheeky boasts, its blaring, pop-sounding instrumental, and the fact that it's sung in German. Super Handel of course is of German descent, and he frequently cusses in German in Ain't No Hero and in this story too. So the song was perfect for this story. So anyways, that's all I can think to say up here, so onto the endnotes!
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