The Truth (Pixiv Fanbox)

I think it's time to finally come clean... it's time to be honest with you all. It's time... to reveal the secrets of my project. At least in part. You see, my whole Anniversary Project was born out of many brainstorming sessions for a possible April Fool's joke.

It all began one day while sitting on the John. With nothing else to do but stew in my own thoughts, I began to think what I wanted to do for April Fool's. This was before Halloween had even happened, mind you. I could do another Marle situation, where I do some character that no one expects nor wants... but that's quite boring. Predictable even. I wanted something... more.

That's when it hit me harder than the bowel movement I was on the throne for. My... grand idea. It was a troll of trolls. It was going to be a completely normal post. Nothing odd, no odd characters, nothing. No one would second guess my intentions. Not until they open up the video file on gofile. It's be a POV video as one might expect. But it'd be a POV of someone at a computer, rubbing their hands together eagerly as their download finishes.

Basically like this, yeah. They open up the file... Rick Astley. Disbelief, then anger... fists slamming on the desk. As they stew in their rage at being duped so simply, light from an opening door floods the room. They turn in alarm, then... darkness. A URL appears on screen.

If you followed the link that was shown, it'd lead you to a Choose Your Own Adventure story. It starts as one would expect. You wake up from the darkness... "Hey, you. You're finally awake." Of course, as the cringelo- I mean memelord that I am, it has to be Skyrim. But that does change, of course. You see, the story of this CYOA would be a pseudo-parody of a typical fantasy story. A dragon kidnaps a fair princess, and it's up to you to be a bad enough dude to save the princess.

And now, things start to fall into place, don't they? The princess outfit that I've shown and talked about it being the sole theme originally... that was why it was the way it was. The whole 'story' was about how you're saving the princess. Based on the decisions made within the CYOA, the "maiden" you get at the end of it all would change, and at the time there were more troll results than 'normal' ones. That was the sole reasoning for going for such a cliche looking outfit.

But... all that has pretty much disappeared at this point. Some of you might be totally on board with the idea, but the issue is... not everyone would appreciate the trolling and the whole CYOA sort of thing. The longer the CYOA is, the more likely people are to either give up or skip through things, and then they might land themselves on a result they don't want and ultimately find it an unpleasant experience. And having too many troll results would also further sour the experience for a lot of people who otherwise might be into the idea. As much as I like to be a troll, I don't want to be a complete ass.

So, things got downsized and scaled back and eventually it stopped being an elaborate April Fool's joke. Instead, it moved to my 5th Anniversary, because the amount of characters and content I began to plan out was growing too large to just be an April Fool's joke. It seemed more appropriate for my 5th Anniversary over April Fool's, especially since I had zero plan for my Anniversary. I mean, there will still be some ideas that gets dragged along from the April Fool's idea, notably a handful of "troll" character picks, but overall I opted out of the whole "bait-and-switch" thing around the same time I started to tease the whole project.

For a good month, the plan was a smaller scale CYOA thing, something that'd take, at most, 5 minutes to complete, but each person only had one shot at it. To get everything, people would need to collaborate in some manner to get the passwords to the folders in a gofile link.

That has gone the way of the dinosaur as well. While there'd be a very small 'roadblock' to all the content, all the content I plan to have WOULD be released at once, and it feels like... kind of a waste, kind of overwhelming, and kind of anticlimactic. So, over the past few weeks, I've been brainstorming again. And I've sort of got something. It'll still need some hashing out, but it kind of harkens back to my original idea, without compromising anything, while also just giving people the content they want without any sort of barrier to entry.

The new plan is simple. Starting March 1st, I'm going to release a single character and their animations, and from that day on, a new character will be posted every single day until it's 'complete'. At least here on Fanbox/SubscribeStar. Pixiv will probably be once a week, with the characters up to that point being dropped all at once. I don't want a huge block of all these releases to clutter up the pixiv account.

At the same time, I would like some sort of CYOA analogue to go on alongside it that would be totally optional. The main issue is I'm not totally sure what to do. Like, I know what I want to come of it - depending on the choices made, there could be a double release, or there could be something changed about the content, or a specific character might get released next, etc. It's just trying to figure out the best way to accomplish that is... tricky. How would the format work? How would the timing work? How much time and effort will I have to put in? These sorts of things are a conundrum. The simple solution is to have nothing at all, but the whole idea was born of some sort of user participation, so I want there to be something. Even if it isn't super elaborate, I want there to be a little something. So I guess you can throw some ideas my way.

As for how MUCH content will be in this... well, guess I can reveal that too now. I've already shown off, what... nearly thirty? I forget the exact count at this point. Even if it's thirty exactly, it's not quite half of the characters I am 'planning' to do. I've been really cagey, because I wasn't sure I'd get through with it all. Well, if I do the release schedule like I'm planning now, I can probably do all of them. 64. That's the number. In the CYOA, there were three major choices, and four choices to be made in each of the major choices. That is 4**3, which is 64. The "Choose Your Own Adventure" was gonna be called "Maiden Quest 64" because that made too much sense to my brain at the time.

Worse still, it was never just gonna be "one animation per character". Not even "two animations per character". Four. Four animations per character, plus a climax, because I am apparently a masochist deep down and have a secret fondness for crushing my own balls in a vice without actually physically doing such a thing. 256 animations, 320 if you count the climax as is its own animation. My current progress? 21 characters done... sort of. I haven't animated the climaxes for the majority of those, due to them grinding progress to a halt most of the time. But yeah, there's a reason why I call it my "Big Dumb Project'. "Big", because it's big, and "big dumb" because I am the big dumb.

I am a lazy bastard at my core but when I get it into my dumb head to do something... I tunnel vision and can't stop. It can be a problem at times. Still, 64 Final Fantasy characters - admittedly about 5-6 trollish characters in there - means I will be taking a break from Final Fantasy after this. This wasn't a 'quantity over quality' decision, so much as a means of doing all the characters I had at some point or another said "i'll get to eventually" and never did, I would finally like to do stuff other than FF for a while. I'm not retiring it for good or anything. SuccubIris is a Halloween tradition for me so I'll probably do more again this year, but I've been meaning to expand out from Final Fantasy since 2021 and I just haven't done it because there's always a character I mean to get to, but I end up just doing the same ol' same ol' instead due to not having the little 'push' to make me do something. This has been that push I needed, in a way. With this, I'm hoping my brain will be like "alright. let's do something else now". Soul Calibur, Tekken, King of Fighters, Persona, Fire Emblem, Nioh, Dynasty Warriors, Monster Hunter, and whatever else I might feel like doing. Sky's the limit, as they say.

But as a final send off... here's a troll character that will sneak their way into the frey.

Anyway, I probably won't be posting anything until the next poll animations, unless another ramble bubbles its way up into my head.