Post by Colt of Personality on Mar 1, 2016 3:22:12 GMT
Author’s Notes-Tournaments
Warning: What you are about to read is my personal opinion and thoughts. I mean no disrespect and I don’t intend to speak for anyone it’s just my observations.
So a fun fact about me is that one of my all-time favorite anime arcs is Yu Yu Hakusho’s Dark Tournament Arc/Saga. Granted this is something I think I realized in retrospect but I do remember watching some of that arc and thinking how cool it is. The idea of Yusuke, Hiei, Kurama, Kuwabara, etc., going to this island to fight all these teams of demons leading up to the final showdown against team Toguro. I remember being a little kid and pretending/imagining that my characters were in a tournament like the Dark Tournament fighting to become world champs. (Bear with me I may refer back to the Dark Tournament as examples throughout this blog.) Also I know tournament arcs aren’t new to anime and there are plenty of other series that have their own tournaments; merchandise shows like Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon build up to these arcs. Dragonball Z has the Cell Games and most importantly throughout the series’ history there was always the World’s Martial Arts Tournament aka Tenkaichi Budōkai that dates back to Dragon Ball. For fans of One Piece you know the latest Dressrosa Arc has the coliseum fights. Naruto has the Chunin Exams in Part 1. There are so many more examples out there.
So for this returning Author Note I want to talk about Tournaments and why I feel a Vice Tournament would be a good idea. I will cover how it could be set up, what could come from it, and also some of the drawbacks and reasons we may struggle with it.
Why would a Vice Tournament Be a Good Idea
To start off I want to say I KNOW there have been attempts to do this in the past and it has always been something thrown around. Some examples being Kuma’s Osaka Underground Fighting and the fun non-canon Dream Kombat fights. Both of these have been attempts to set up a way to do a Tournament Arc RP in the ViceVerse and while we have come close we’ve never gone through with it. That not to say we never will but I feel like as an Anime RP forum the Tournament Arc is just too good to never do. As I mention above the Dark Tournament in Yu Yu Hakusho has always been a favorite of mine because it was just so cool; the preliminaries, the fights, the character development, story progression, and the finale were amazing. (Who doesn’t remember Hiei’s Dark Flame Dragon!). The idea of taking that formula that plot, and putting are on twist on it could result in amazing story moments.
Now I don’t want to copy and paste that Saga because there are some limitations but the idea of some of our best heroes, villains, neutrals and NPCs fighting one on one. The end result being to determine an overall winner a Champion of the Vice could create a giant breathe of fresh air in terms of creativity. One thing I think we have going for us is that we have a literal world field with various NPCs or characters we don’t use that often but with a Tournament arc would could open up our individual character libraries and really bring unique players. This not only gives writers more chances to write with and against new characters but makes a bigger tournament overall. Now most of these characters would be fodder or 1-hit wonders but every tournament has those characters who are meant to jokes for the main cast to knock out easy.
Another thing I think we have going for us is that we have several organizations who would be interested in having representatives or even created teams to compete. Again drawing reference to the Dark Tournament that was organized by teams so if our tournament followed this formula we could have a BHA team (maybe one for each Branch), a JHWAB team, a Kuro-san team, a Crow led team, a HWIC team, a Seamstress Team, a wild card team of random characters together, a Spirit Boxer Team! I could literally go on forever! Whether these teams are official or not having them would create interesting elements. I mentioned a Kuro-san team what if they are the villainous team trying to take first place for some plot and it would be up to the other teams to try and stop them. I’ll go into more detail in a minute when I explained how we could set this up.
With opportunities for great story moments, really cool CANON fights, our world of unique NPCs and characters, and finally various organizations with stakes in the tournaments. I believe a tournament RP is not only a good idea but something that will happen one day.
How to set it up: Rules, Plot, and Structure
So this is where it becomes more of my opinion because we all may have different views of how to do this but I will explain how I would set it up.
STORY: So this is where we could get really creative to come up with an overall story that holds this together. Some of the easier stories could be that some company or organization has created this tournament to determine the strongest fighter now maybe the organizers of the tournament are evil and set it up for their own plans maybe they are just after a profit either way pretty straight forward. Another story reason for the tournament could tie into the Hidden World where it meant as a celebration of unity or cooperation between various factions or something. Maybe some billionaire just has a fetish for bloods sports. (If it became a repeating thing the host and story could change each time). Now some of the deeper plots we could create could involve an evil team (maybe a Kuro-san led team) trying to win because the winner gets something they need. Maybe a villain created this tournament to gather strong fighters to collect energy, you could even go universal scale and say it some game between cosmic deities. Whatever floats your boat?
Another story element to consider would be a prize, why would all these characters willing fight one another other than because we are writing it. While we could really come up with creative prizes I think the straight forward approach would be best. We have a first place, second place, and third place prize based which are large sums of money. (500 million for 1st 250 million for 2nd and 100 million for 3rd) With an added bonus being the first place winner would is granted one wish or an artifact of power or some magic tool. All of this could play into why an evil team would want to be enter and win if something like this is on the line. Imagine like the champion belt has some crazy powerful jewel in it that most people assume it just fake or average jewels but a select few know it a reality bending gem.
RULES: This is where things get a bit more difficult because we would need a set of Canon rules that exist in the tournament and OCC rules that we follow as writers so that there is no salty feelings amongst us. The Canon rules might be easier to come out with and they would follow the story behind this tournament depending on the structure. My examples for rules would be:
• Competitors Fight till KO, Ring Out, or a Submission
• Both FEET must touch the ground to be considered a ring out
• If a fighter is unable to answer a 10 count it considered a KO
• Any outside interference is declared a DQ for both competitors
• NO Low Blows, Eye Pokes, or Dirty Tactics any instances received 1 warning followed by a DQ
• Weapons are Limited (Swords, Knives, Guns, etc) and must be registered Poisons are BANNED Hidden Weapons are BANNED. Equipment must not exceed a certain weight limit.
• Killing is PROHIBITED
These rules can be discussed and edited for story purposes and what not but I think a set of OCC rules should be agreed upon beforehand. Now we have done things like Dream Kombats and we do have a good community so we should be able to fight with good faith in one another. These rules would help keep fights from getting too long or too complicated. They would include things like limiting the number of posts between each writer and maybe even the amount of characters they can enter but this is where I will talk about the structure.
STRUCTURE: This is again more of my opinion of how I would structure this tournament arc, as I mention perhaps one of the OCC rules we would discuss is limiting the numbers of characters one can enter in this tournament. Someone using 10-15 characters has a better chance of winning then someone using 2-3 characters so maybe limiting the numbers of characters to 5 each then we have the OCC teams base of the characters we choice. (Team Gunslinger, Team Kuma, Team Vapo, etc.) This may be the fairest way to do it but I still like the idea of the canon organizations and characters forming their own official teams. No matter if it was canon base teams or OCC base teams I think the base way to handle the tournament would be one on one match up single elimination style.
I would break the tournament down into two sections, the preliminaries and the actual tournament, the preliminaries would be an open RP type thread that sets the matches it would be more comical and relaxed. It would be about setting up the matches by putting the competitors through various tests to determine who would fight who based on the results. It would also give the writers some time to discuss how to handle each fight or to interact with potential opponents and/or team mates. The actual tournament matches would be individual threads (imagine it being Vice Tournament: Crow vs Callis) but to make things a bit interesting they would also be open threads this allows other characters to watch the fight as audience members, allow ring announcers to comment on the match, and more while the fights are going on.
I could go more in to detail about the stadium, the set-up, rule conditions, judging matches by points, and more but this is all still hypothetical and just me talking about things I would love to see happen or how I would set it up.
The Overall Outcome
So I discus how the tournament would be set up and what the plot would be along with why I personally think it would be a cool thread to do but what is the outcome of all this. Other determining a winner, a Champion of the Vice, what is the end result? This where it becomes more about what I think is a greater overall goal. As I mention one of the cool things about these tournaments in various series is that it gives this characters really great development and builds more stories from it. For example Yusuke arc in the Dark Tournament training with Genkai to eventually defeat Toguro imagine some of our characters following a similar arc. I think another interesting bit of character development is those who lose or get beaten it would give them incentive to train harder become stronger to eventually defeat those who beat them. Unfortunately this is where I don’t have a lot of thoughts because it would all depend on what the story is behind this what are the motives of these characters and even who they would face through the tournament.
Possible Flaws in the Plan
So while it has been fun to talk about this and think about all the hypothetical dream matches that could come from it here comes the bummer section of this blog. As I mention there have been plenty of times we talk about this and considered this. We even come up with test and trails threads to see how it would play out but we never actually gone through with it. One of the main reasons is because of length when you think about we are talking something that would make take a year plus to finish from first preliminary post to the tournament final. And A LOT can happen in the year, people come and go, plans change, people lose interest and more. Because anything could happen in a year it’s very hard to commit to something that may take so long to see to the end.
Conclusion
So there you have you the return of the Author’s Notes discussing my thoughts and ideas on a possible Vice Tournament? Tell your thoughts about it? How would you set up such a thread, what would be your rules? What plot should drive it? How should it be structured? What are some of your dream match-ups that would come out of it? And let’s talk about other tournaments in anime and manga? What are your favorite tournaments and matches in anime?
Also tell me what you thought of this Author’s Note? Do you like the format do you think I should change some things? I’m going to try and keep this as frequent as I can there are a lot of topics I have in mind to cover.
Signing Off…See Ya Later Space Cowboy
Last Gunslinger
Hello Vicers!!! The Gunslinger formerly known as Lobos here to bring you the return of Author’s Notes, the self-proclaimed greatest personal writer’s blog to grace the threads!
So enough fooling around let me explain this really quick, for those that don’t remember or those who are new and don’t know but back on the old AnimeVice site I created my own personal blog. The covered a wide range of topics that felt would be cool to cover in terms of writing of the canon ViceVerse. They were fairly irregular but fun to write and I been thinking about bringing them back and didn’t know which topic to cover first. I plan to change up the format a little bit and try to make them more of a regular thing. While I was going to do the first returning Author’s Note blog on the Normal World I thought this would be a much more interesting topic. Warning: What you are about to read is my personal opinion and thoughts. I mean no disrespect and I don’t intend to speak for anyone it’s just my observations.
So a fun fact about me is that one of my all-time favorite anime arcs is Yu Yu Hakusho’s Dark Tournament Arc/Saga. Granted this is something I think I realized in retrospect but I do remember watching some of that arc and thinking how cool it is. The idea of Yusuke, Hiei, Kurama, Kuwabara, etc., going to this island to fight all these teams of demons leading up to the final showdown against team Toguro. I remember being a little kid and pretending/imagining that my characters were in a tournament like the Dark Tournament fighting to become world champs. (Bear with me I may refer back to the Dark Tournament as examples throughout this blog.) Also I know tournament arcs aren’t new to anime and there are plenty of other series that have their own tournaments; merchandise shows like Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon build up to these arcs. Dragonball Z has the Cell Games and most importantly throughout the series’ history there was always the World’s Martial Arts Tournament aka Tenkaichi Budōkai that dates back to Dragon Ball. For fans of One Piece you know the latest Dressrosa Arc has the coliseum fights. Naruto has the Chunin Exams in Part 1. There are so many more examples out there.
So for this returning Author Note I want to talk about Tournaments and why I feel a Vice Tournament would be a good idea. I will cover how it could be set up, what could come from it, and also some of the drawbacks and reasons we may struggle with it.
Why would a Vice Tournament Be a Good Idea
To start off I want to say I KNOW there have been attempts to do this in the past and it has always been something thrown around. Some examples being Kuma’s Osaka Underground Fighting and the fun non-canon Dream Kombat fights. Both of these have been attempts to set up a way to do a Tournament Arc RP in the ViceVerse and while we have come close we’ve never gone through with it. That not to say we never will but I feel like as an Anime RP forum the Tournament Arc is just too good to never do. As I mention above the Dark Tournament in Yu Yu Hakusho has always been a favorite of mine because it was just so cool; the preliminaries, the fights, the character development, story progression, and the finale were amazing. (Who doesn’t remember Hiei’s Dark Flame Dragon!). The idea of taking that formula that plot, and putting are on twist on it could result in amazing story moments.
Now I don’t want to copy and paste that Saga because there are some limitations but the idea of some of our best heroes, villains, neutrals and NPCs fighting one on one. The end result being to determine an overall winner a Champion of the Vice could create a giant breathe of fresh air in terms of creativity. One thing I think we have going for us is that we have a literal world field with various NPCs or characters we don’t use that often but with a Tournament arc would could open up our individual character libraries and really bring unique players. This not only gives writers more chances to write with and against new characters but makes a bigger tournament overall. Now most of these characters would be fodder or 1-hit wonders but every tournament has those characters who are meant to jokes for the main cast to knock out easy.
Another thing I think we have going for us is that we have several organizations who would be interested in having representatives or even created teams to compete. Again drawing reference to the Dark Tournament that was organized by teams so if our tournament followed this formula we could have a BHA team (maybe one for each Branch), a JHWAB team, a Kuro-san team, a Crow led team, a HWIC team, a Seamstress Team, a wild card team of random characters together, a Spirit Boxer Team! I could literally go on forever! Whether these teams are official or not having them would create interesting elements. I mentioned a Kuro-san team what if they are the villainous team trying to take first place for some plot and it would be up to the other teams to try and stop them. I’ll go into more detail in a minute when I explained how we could set this up.
With opportunities for great story moments, really cool CANON fights, our world of unique NPCs and characters, and finally various organizations with stakes in the tournaments. I believe a tournament RP is not only a good idea but something that will happen one day.
How to set it up: Rules, Plot, and Structure
So this is where it becomes more of my opinion because we all may have different views of how to do this but I will explain how I would set it up.
STORY: So this is where we could get really creative to come up with an overall story that holds this together. Some of the easier stories could be that some company or organization has created this tournament to determine the strongest fighter now maybe the organizers of the tournament are evil and set it up for their own plans maybe they are just after a profit either way pretty straight forward. Another story reason for the tournament could tie into the Hidden World where it meant as a celebration of unity or cooperation between various factions or something. Maybe some billionaire just has a fetish for bloods sports. (If it became a repeating thing the host and story could change each time). Now some of the deeper plots we could create could involve an evil team (maybe a Kuro-san led team) trying to win because the winner gets something they need. Maybe a villain created this tournament to gather strong fighters to collect energy, you could even go universal scale and say it some game between cosmic deities. Whatever floats your boat?
Another story element to consider would be a prize, why would all these characters willing fight one another other than because we are writing it. While we could really come up with creative prizes I think the straight forward approach would be best. We have a first place, second place, and third place prize based which are large sums of money. (500 million for 1st 250 million for 2nd and 100 million for 3rd) With an added bonus being the first place winner would is granted one wish or an artifact of power or some magic tool. All of this could play into why an evil team would want to be enter and win if something like this is on the line. Imagine like the champion belt has some crazy powerful jewel in it that most people assume it just fake or average jewels but a select few know it a reality bending gem.
RULES: This is where things get a bit more difficult because we would need a set of Canon rules that exist in the tournament and OCC rules that we follow as writers so that there is no salty feelings amongst us. The Canon rules might be easier to come out with and they would follow the story behind this tournament depending on the structure. My examples for rules would be:
• Competitors Fight till KO, Ring Out, or a Submission
• Both FEET must touch the ground to be considered a ring out
• If a fighter is unable to answer a 10 count it considered a KO
• Any outside interference is declared a DQ for both competitors
• NO Low Blows, Eye Pokes, or Dirty Tactics any instances received 1 warning followed by a DQ
• Weapons are Limited (Swords, Knives, Guns, etc) and must be registered Poisons are BANNED Hidden Weapons are BANNED. Equipment must not exceed a certain weight limit.
• Killing is PROHIBITED
These rules can be discussed and edited for story purposes and what not but I think a set of OCC rules should be agreed upon beforehand. Now we have done things like Dream Kombats and we do have a good community so we should be able to fight with good faith in one another. These rules would help keep fights from getting too long or too complicated. They would include things like limiting the number of posts between each writer and maybe even the amount of characters they can enter but this is where I will talk about the structure.
STRUCTURE: This is again more of my opinion of how I would structure this tournament arc, as I mention perhaps one of the OCC rules we would discuss is limiting the numbers of characters one can enter in this tournament. Someone using 10-15 characters has a better chance of winning then someone using 2-3 characters so maybe limiting the numbers of characters to 5 each then we have the OCC teams base of the characters we choice. (Team Gunslinger, Team Kuma, Team Vapo, etc.) This may be the fairest way to do it but I still like the idea of the canon organizations and characters forming their own official teams. No matter if it was canon base teams or OCC base teams I think the base way to handle the tournament would be one on one match up single elimination style.
I would break the tournament down into two sections, the preliminaries and the actual tournament, the preliminaries would be an open RP type thread that sets the matches it would be more comical and relaxed. It would be about setting up the matches by putting the competitors through various tests to determine who would fight who based on the results. It would also give the writers some time to discuss how to handle each fight or to interact with potential opponents and/or team mates. The actual tournament matches would be individual threads (imagine it being Vice Tournament: Crow vs Callis) but to make things a bit interesting they would also be open threads this allows other characters to watch the fight as audience members, allow ring announcers to comment on the match, and more while the fights are going on.
I could go more in to detail about the stadium, the set-up, rule conditions, judging matches by points, and more but this is all still hypothetical and just me talking about things I would love to see happen or how I would set it up.
The Overall Outcome
So I discus how the tournament would be set up and what the plot would be along with why I personally think it would be a cool thread to do but what is the outcome of all this. Other determining a winner, a Champion of the Vice, what is the end result? This where it becomes more about what I think is a greater overall goal. As I mention one of the cool things about these tournaments in various series is that it gives this characters really great development and builds more stories from it. For example Yusuke arc in the Dark Tournament training with Genkai to eventually defeat Toguro imagine some of our characters following a similar arc. I think another interesting bit of character development is those who lose or get beaten it would give them incentive to train harder become stronger to eventually defeat those who beat them. Unfortunately this is where I don’t have a lot of thoughts because it would all depend on what the story is behind this what are the motives of these characters and even who they would face through the tournament.
Possible Flaws in the Plan
So while it has been fun to talk about this and think about all the hypothetical dream matches that could come from it here comes the bummer section of this blog. As I mention there have been plenty of times we talk about this and considered this. We even come up with test and trails threads to see how it would play out but we never actually gone through with it. One of the main reasons is because of length when you think about we are talking something that would make take a year plus to finish from first preliminary post to the tournament final. And A LOT can happen in the year, people come and go, plans change, people lose interest and more. Because anything could happen in a year it’s very hard to commit to something that may take so long to see to the end.
Conclusion
So there you have you the return of the Author’s Notes discussing my thoughts and ideas on a possible Vice Tournament? Tell your thoughts about it? How would you set up such a thread, what would be your rules? What plot should drive it? How should it be structured? What are some of your dream match-ups that would come out of it? And let’s talk about other tournaments in anime and manga? What are your favorite tournaments and matches in anime?
Also tell me what you thought of this Author’s Note? Do you like the format do you think I should change some things? I’m going to try and keep this as frequent as I can there are a lot of topics I have in mind to cover.
Signing Off…See Ya Later Space Cowboy
Last Gunslinger
