The History of the Big Bar Brawl 10

Here we are like in olden days, happy golden days, of brawl! Yes, the tenth year of this titanic tussle has concluded and the results are on display for anyone to see! But making this thing is always a process and a half, so in a Brawl filled with traditions and callbacks, it's time to do another key part of this yearly tradition... the behind the scenes blogpost!

Let's dive right in early with something you all might not have seen in a while... me failing spectacularly at Mac Tonight's head shape!

You'll notice the banana crescents aren't alone this year! Technically this is a compilation of half-completed and scrapped images from different pictures slapped together in one photo, but we've got an ugly Bubs from the side head floating in there and the start of Gezora's head before I decided I needed more space to draw the picture of the referees and all. This'll be the last time we can watch my many failures at making Mac's head, and there's probably some I could have gotten away with using here, but a lot of these heads weren't speaking to me. I think the thing is you have to get the spacing right on how much space there is in the head, it sometimes feeling too squashed or too open. There was plenty of erasing this year to try and get images right rather than full on scrapping, and while the art isn't my best work, I think my output had a solid baseline of quality compared to some years where you can see obvious flagging.

We're just gonna spill out a few more of the Behind the Scenes staples here too before we get to a stronger structure of things! This year was a little loosey-goosey in a few ways, one I've mentioned in chat already where a lot of kills weren't outlined in advance and I let the writing take me to them. Notes were often just on who should kill who and if they were getting assistance or not, and once more, me and the stats seem to disagree on what constitutes helping so my attempts to keep people visibly active aren't as present! I know it's not truly a big deal, but things like Mel looking like she did little if you take a pure stats approach are just one of those things!

Anyway, we had thirty posts for the Brawl this year, and to make that number work I had most posts include 3 KOs, one had 4, and then there's always things like assistant and team member deaths tossed in top of "progress kills" where an entrant is removed. 3 progress kills was a minimum for all but the special posts like the finale and such and we wrapped up the overall Brawl at a fairly good pace this year! But, if you were wondering what the post titles were, here they are with some small bits of commentary to help understand a few of them:

Brawl Start
Lessgeeon (name is a reference to MXC. My notes place Basu in the city fite for this part but he joined later instead)
Busy Already
FuzzFace Focus?
Giants and Chaos
Silly and Serious
The Mystery Revealed!
Time Stops (there was actually no one listed for Malzanek's killer so Basu ended up getting it due to flow)
Big Destruction
Let's Get Wild (Komachi was actually listed as Craven's killer initially!)
Tyzien Could Have Gone Ape But Doesn't (originally titled Tyzien Goes Ape, but the Ozaru transformation felt like it was being crammed in just for the sake of being there since he went out relatively early. Rasppule was slated to force the transformation to try and cause a turnaround but it wouldn't pan out of course. Furthermore, Purnima would be the one to stop the rampage and then she'd Deadly Efficient him a new outfit since he'd be naked! Far too much to cram into the same post he'd be dying in)
Rematch?!
Nerds Meet Minions
Nerds and Gold
Vengeance and Legends
Opportunists (Jinako was going to kill Tsubasa at first before I decided on double KO. Leo and Kino also almost fought in the store instead as they tried to take control of it, but it was pretty wrecked by this point so they fought outside)
Light and Steam
Heroes and Villains (aka our 4 major KOs post)
Fire! A Few Different Meanings of It! (this had Jonesy and Oda in it just so you get it :V)
Giants Fall
Thinning Alliances (DeMonde was going to break A3515's shield initially)
Cute Plus Serious
Farewell Classics
Big Votes, Big Falls (high vote getters like Widow Maker and Eclair died here)
Top 13
Brutality (featuring our back to back Fatalities)
7 Heading for Heaven
Final Four (originally Game Gear was going to squish Purnima! I think that note was made before I had a good point for blowing up Brawl Planet so the atmosphere drop wasn't on the table)
Puddlenaut Versus Hard Girls
Epilogue

You'll notice, like last time, these names don't tell you a lot about the posts sometimes or only cover one or two entrants. FuzzFace Focus? starts with FuzzFace and then moves on for example, the names are usually just so I can more easily split things during writing rather than really being fitting. If you want a better look at the sticky notes, here's a screenshot of some of them!

Might want to view that in a separate window!

Also, I thought I'd do something I've never done before even though it's been a tradition in itself! Every year, to help sort out the KOs after finding out the order of who will place where, I get out a sheet of paper and right the names in descending order, drawing lines and arrows to help me plan who will kill who. Sometimes the KOs change between the planning phase, and sometimes I accidentally forget to put Tsubasa on there so I have to cram her into her spot after already cramming every name in tight. June 26th is almost always just planning the KOs, making sticky notes, and all that kind of stuff as I feel some time is needed to develop the ideas before jumping right in, but I did do write the first post of the Brawl on the 26th at least! However, that's something else, for now, let's look at that promised picture!

Definitely an image you'll need to view in full size! Any inaccuracies to the actual Brawl are inconsequential really since I was just throwing together plans and might have made errors here or changes in the writing to better mix things up.

As for our arena, Brawl Planet was at first me sort of recycling the Moon 2 setting idea I had, of just some small planetoid floating near Earth. I never intended Brawl Planet to be a moon of course, just a full orb we could fight on, but I think pretty quickly after the Moon 2 idea was dropped I then shifted course and knew well in advance BBB10 would have a planetoid arena. I was worried, as I wrote, that there would be no point to blow up Brawl Planet. Possibilities like EXPLOSION and Big Zam were too early, but I still had them sort of wear down its integrity. I wasn't even sure where to stick it as I was getting deep into writing! However, as I looked over my notes for Optimus, I found Del's comment that the Matrix could destroy a planet and was like MWAAA! BEAUTIFUL! Perfect for solving that problem and Optimus drops out at an almost perfect time! Top 10 in a destroyed arena usually feels pretty right because it injects a huge burst of variety for characters we've seen active for a while. As for the patchwork design with all the different regions based on old brawl arenas, it just felt right. I knew the walkways wouldn't do too much because they didn't in BBB3 but they had small moments, and in the bigger arena that felt more excusable.

I tried to give the fite room for every place to get highlights, hence why the barely used island got picked for the finale (also for the Ecco Jr. joke/ havin Puddlenaut's home turf nearby to make people wonder if he'd go into it). You might not remember but there was a cruise liner docked at the island in the original version of the Brawl opening post that got removed because like, SS Literally Can't Sink filled that role already! Maybe THAT was the docked cruise liner, eh? Anyway, flat open stretches are just as important as water, but integrating BBB8's bubble arena was a challenge at first because it felt superfluous. Then I realized I could do a cute shoutout to the Secret Fiter Scuffle and Consolation Brawl, aka the things that had their winners enter the Brawl, to really make the arena feel complete, and I found two fairly reasonable ways to put some fiters there and make use of them. I didn't want the factory to be too involved just like I only had the Silver Dollar itself have any real interior decor, I feel like an already complicated arena could get bogged down in the details. We spent a lot of time in the city, but that was sort of the rankings's fault since so many perfect people for it were good to place there, and our forest wasn't with us long, but I think it's more a case of only using things when appropriate rather than forcing it or feeling like it never got its day. Those Pennzoil cans, they had to be there since BBB4 was another dirt arena defined mostly by its advertising theme, and while I did consider billboards, I'm glad I just went with the gas cans for the little running joke after Sheep's vote highlighted them so much. Yes, I only used them as much because of Sheep, but I'm sure they'd have done something, probably much more minor, otherwise.

Anyway, that's a lot of the planning and note stuff, so now let's move along to something like...

PRE-FITE SHOW

And I guess actually let's discuss those referees first! Bringing back the five referees could have been a pointless stunt and I didn't really have any good ideas for them when the concept was cooked up. I did consider having a few possible things happen with them, such as Elliott making clones of them to distract or body block other fiters, and there was a point where I tried to think of something the five could fite themselves. Whitey and Refbot might not be much use in a scrap though, but Elliott again could have maybe had good use with an allied clone Gezora or Marvin. They get different random small moments in the Brawl itself to try and still have them somewhat present and Gezora even got to be a bit of a platform for a bit, but as we all know now, their best use proved to be in hosting the pre-fite show!

The concept of theming it around the many years of RP so far was a fairly natural one and so to did it become pretty easy to imagine the referees introducing each new segment, but going in I wasn't sure how things would be split up. I didn't know if one year might only have one clip or some other year might be crammed with a bunch of them, and the funny thing is, I really didn't have the year assignments set up until after I had fully written the Brawl! I did have the subdivisions already in mind though, all the characters were already slated to speak to whoever else they interacted with in the pre-fite show, meaning things like FuzzFace that would be a little odd without that context were going to be ready to go even if I hadn't written out the whole story of how he met Ren and Basu until after. Pure coincidence put me at twenty scenes I wanted to do and then it was just a matter of assigning the themes, and while some certainly feel less theme appropriate than others, I don't feel like I ever made big compromises or had any truly arbitrary scenes this year!

However, I do think that, if we all really sat down and looked at the ten years of RP and tried to put them in a tidy single word box, we probably wouldn't use the terms I chose. Some years, the Vegas years especially, were kinda potpourri or would easily overlap with the themes that were stronger in others. I think a few of them were truly on point though. 10 is looking to be our Legacy year more and more, Year 1 is obviously a beginning, Persistence is a nice twist on season 2, and there was a lot of Exploration in our second year on Kuwahawi as we actually really embraced the setting. Entertainment for 5 and Adventurous for 7 feel the weakest to me but it's probably no coincidence they're both first years in a setting.

One thing I did enjoy doing was putting the arena stuff first! Usually that's late or even last as it mostly just foreshadows Mystery/Secret or shows something off about the arena. I also wanted to really nail in that this is Mac Tonight's last turn in the Brawl. It is always possible we could see him again, maybe some future Brawl has a weird gimmick like CHAMPIONS RETURN! but he won't be making his yearly drop-ins and I really don't have anything in the cards. I almost wondered if JRM himself should even appear at all before it felt kinda lame to do the big anniversary brawl without the character who runs it all!

Other pre-fite considerations included whether I reveal Varrick and Zhu Li in advance but it felt more fun to get to know them first, and I've already mentioned in chat the reason Eyedol ended up in the Pre-Fite show was because my list of Big Bosses for Big Bobby had multiple Killer Instinct characters but I felt bad that none of them felt like they naturally came up. I tried to draw from a variety of sources with Big Bobby's boss usage in the Brawl and since we're here I might as well talk about it! I made a pastebin of all the bosses I considered for inclusion that you can look at here https://pastebin.com/jXUUFGqz along with the minor notes made so I wouldn't forget who the character is. Some I left out of the list simply because I knew I'd have more on hand then I could ever use, and others like the Wii Fit Trainer were odd cases because they were actual characters or probably should have just been Fite Club opponents anyway. I decided not to pull anyone from the stranger BBBPs mostly for simplicity's sake. Bobby whipping out just one character from asdf City or one of the vehicle missions didn't make much sense, nor did the weird trips Kaede took to Cornwind backstory land.

Some characters I knew I had to use though. Ogre was the first ever BBBP so with Bobby taking his bow it felt right to have the first ever there and to give him a big spotlight in a battle. I knew I had to put Godzilla in just to please the crowd even though I kinda wasn't excited by him myself. My propensity for the weird, obscure, and underutilized made it a little difficult to say "here's this guy that you've seen so many times in so many ways". I almost was sad when I realized, as Bobby's death approached, that I hadn't used Quadraxis, who was one of the first bosses I thought of the moment I read Bobby's summoning power. Luckily, the time limit was a good excuse to shoo anyone out no matter how strong, and while some people didn't notice it, he could only have one boss out at a time by his own entry! Octosuchus wasn't a necessity but he was part of a handful of bosses like Wasgo I was determined to get in. One year of BBBP was basically just Ven throwing random deviantart creatures at Lysias, and when that's pretty much the identity of a place for a season, it's good to have something from it in there during the big callback Brawl! I tried to draw bosses from multiple users as well, hence why we saw Del's Commander Farsight put in a brief appearance, but there were of course some bosses I regret not using.

Like I said, Eyedol almost never had his day, but since Sheep seem interested it worked out wonderfully that I could put him in a pre-fite show with David Mammoth. I really wanted to put Sturgeon General in for that nice Zoofights callback, but no moment ever felt right for him. Wamuu's appearance was probably the most "drop someone in here" and could have been other characters, but he felt right for something smart and with interesting powers to guide that part of the fite. The Rake would have been really fun to have appear because of how terrifying it would be, but maybe that scrapes up on SK's season 3 plot and wouldn't technically gel? BBBP's always been a little strange on what's real and what's fabricated, and I left out Cell specifically because Cornwind made a big deal out of how this character could now technically exist in ZFRP. Sebulba would have been pretty fun with his racing focus instead, Mr. Dream was there in case I went a different direction with Hibiki's boxing moment, I wanted Scornet Maestro in because of how weird a pick it is but how fun it would be to have the weird bird around, and Grunty having two goes as a boss meant she would have been an appropriate face to see. My biggest regret really though is not having Colossatron, a boss who appeared as a battle in two different years and had a really cool gimmick of having different weapons on different body segments. Had I not felt the need to put Godzilla in I likely would have used Colossatron there as Bobby's big ace in the hole.

Moving back to general pre-fite, I'm not finding much in the way of scrapped content. A lot went together cleanly, although I know a version of Hibiki and Honoka meeting with Elliott happened in view of Tsubasa to better motivate her alliance with Carla. Certain things like that will undoubtedly be discussed in character sections, but I guess I can give insight to certain alliance arrangements here too. While there was speculation on DeMonde's web of allies being enormous, the fact she wasn't actively searching for them meant that it felt like she'd only tap on the ones that felt natural. She was definitely written in a "won't fite certain characters" way, as in she never crossed Jester Chao for example, but early versions of the Brawl did have ideas like Jester Chao riding Lizzie into battle. Instead, the idea of Motormer and Jester Chao sharing bad jokes was too good to pass up and thus they became part of the only alliance without a really good name! You could call it Nerd Club... even though only two official members of that are in this six person team. Motormer was surprisingly loyal to it though, that backing of allies being a good confidence boost for the self-conscious car. Lining up Shimmer with a specific group was enough of a challenge that Voyd got a pre-fite show joke out of it, but the small Planeswarden group looked like they could be punched up and so they went to them.Carla and Tsubasa came together almost solely because how well they worked for setting up the Purnima scene, Tsubasa a good motivator/instigator and having her own outcome tied to it while Carla needed a push and reason to actively get on the train she knew belonged to her old fear.

Jewel Man with the Royal Guards... well, I was iffy on whether he should outright be like "you're gay and I'm totally going to be supportive all up on that." We haven't had a male/male couple in the Brawl and hardly any in general, and he actually became a sort of leader of the trio. Like an old veteran passing his knowledge to the new blood... it's kinda crazy to realize how far back some of these characters go! Oceanus and Puddlenaut I wasn't sure of at first because I didn't have a specific moment of them meeting for the pre-fite show but they were a good pair-up in the Brawl to keep you from thinking either was rocking too hard on their own and thus suspecting future outcomes. I'm not always angling for surprises but I try to make the end result not too transparent while also flirting with hints and the like that certain characters will push far. Can't reveal my hand too much of course or else I'll have to get craftier! Ren is the only person noted for two pre-fite shows even though she didn't appear for the cop one, I just wanted to make sure to mention her loose alliance there to make her city appearance make more sense. The Cure/Cop thing felt incredibly natural to me, especially because of Frost being the perfect bridge and both sides rather small without the shoring up. Jake and Kino was probably the oddest and loosest alliance set up deliberately, just more a way to influence their opening actions instead of general behavior.

Finding out who to put on the boat was hard at first because I knew I couldn't just do the same thing twice. It's even acknowledged in the pre-fite show that no one is just gonna climb aboard this time, and that's why it was mostly sort of disconnected people and weirdos. The Drunks almost had just a single bit of dialogue or two before the booze was offered for an abrupt "they took the booze" joke but it felt like I was skimping instead of telling a joke so I punched it up. This scene also included Komachi and Nitori separate from their alliance, because while alliances talking is all well and good, I don't think all of them need to sit down and say "we're friends" so instead we saw the Touhous spread across different pre-fite shows while acknowledging their alliance!

I can't think of much pre-fite stuff that got trimmed save for one element. Mystia joining the Friendlies almost had an element where Enid would test her character by giving her a bud or seed that she would say is the focus of her power she'd be drawing on for the Brawl.  It was a trust test only though, and when Mystia destroyed it during the Brawl to sabotage Enid, Enid would realize her ally was false all along and end her for that reason. I decided to go for a different angle that wouldn't completely smear Mystia while still making for a clear betrayal, and I feel the seed wasn't the best idea in the first place even though a test of character could have been a good element.

MYSTERY, SECRET, AND SUNDRY

Now's the part where I talk about the Mystery Fiter! And perhaps more than most years that's a pretty substantial thing due to the concept! Much like the arena, the concept of throwing it all in has been kicking around in my head for a while, but the execution was to be the sticking point. I wanted EVERY SINGLE MYSTERY FITER EVER but also didn't want it to actually be all of them spilling in because then each and every single one would need a KO. Already during the Brawl it felt difficult managing so many of the fake fiters, and ones like Captain Underpants and Noah I nearly forgot existed just because there were so many people to keep track of! One reason so many of them are dealt with off screen was because at some point I had to be like "the Brawl isn't about these guys so they can't demand too much of the screen time" so it ended up being more about who was worthy of highlight or could slip in somewhere well. Dunston was naturally given a highlight because he was a fakeout joke back in his day, never getting to fite himself and now we could get to see what he could have been like! Almost conversely, the Flying Dutchman was the only truly absolutely fake one, the whole "smoke and mirrors" literally joke being his substance and serving as a deliberate contrast in that Dunston was actually revived and flesh and blood compared to the hokey trick that is the ghost.

When it came to who else I could highlight, it was a matter of weighing importance, time since we've seen them, and other little factors. Mac Tonight robot being destroyed first was a good callback of course to how the Big Bar Brawl in general kicked off and it sowed the seeds of doubt about the authenticity of this huge character invasion. After that, Monstars got some love mostly because the EXPLOSION moment was a good callback to the BBB2 bomb and I wanted to give Bang the proper KO pic he never got back in the day. John Freeman was kind of a ball of memes in his year but not a big hitter, whereas Captain Underpants definitely got his time with his deep run and didn't feel like he needed to be showcased. B-Rex I probably could have done more, but early on I decided the Green Giant was a good place to put whoever would be behind the Mystery Fiter invasion and I stuck to it, so he got the highlight instead. I think B-Rex also put up more of a fite in its year compared to the giant who kindly stood aside most of it and fought a penguin. Wicked Witch and Noah were pretty recent so I didn't want full on retreads either. I was pretty happy with how the image introducing all of them turned out! I know the Monstars don't look the best and I'll never be able to draw Dunston it seems, but the character distribution wasn't awful and some like Noah riding the B-Rex is not only delightfully sacrilege but a fun bit of posing.

One thing that made me sure I wanted a mastermind for the Mystery Fiters though was that I wanted BBB10 to have its own Mystery Fiter as well. Saying the Mystery Fiter was a bunch of old ones probably wouldn't bug most people, but it's also kind of denying the anniversary year of one of a Brawl's identifiers. You got things like the champion, arena, and mystery fiter that would be in a little Wiki info box on the hypothetical fite yer' mates wiki, so giving year 10 its identity was important rather than it being ALL callbacks. And so, the search for a good fit began, and Mysterio came to mind relatively quickly I feel. It wasn't a fully solid pick, mainly because I was worried Cornwind might poach him right up until Brawl Day pretty much, especially since he used the Vulture as a basis for Dawn and I even wondered if she might upgrade to this spider-man villain next. I'm glad Fite Club and BBBP weren't active in the leadup this year because I was worried Mysterio could crop up there, the reason of course being that Spider-Man: Far From Home put him back in the public conscience. Unlike Captain Underpants, I wager a big reason Mysterio came to mind was his increased importance due to being in the film, although I didn't see Far From Home until I think a week before Brawl sign-ups kicked off, and I specifically watched it to see if Mysterio had fun tricks to draw on. I would be using the comic design and character rather than his film version regardless, but watching the film did help!

The biggest help the film gave was the visuals of the illusions making me want to play in that space more. The first idea for Mysterio was that whoever popped open the Green Giant would find him inside, we learned the truth, and then in reference to things like the Spider-Man video game where Mysterio could be taken out in one punch, Mysterio would die to one punch here. He still didn't do much actual fiting himself, but he had his moment to show his powers all the same. The film also gave me the idea to have drones fill in for the Wicked Witch and such instead of them being straight animatronics like other Mystery Fiters. It made more sense due to the flight and gave them the power to use fire without it breaking their illusion. I think the film (and playing Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions which has Mysterio as a big villain) also definitely sowed the seeds of Jester Chao getting the powers and using them for demented pranks. Chao gave me express permission to take Jester Chao whatever direction I pleased based on his placement, I'm sure any weirdness he has in mind for the Chao possible to integrate that freedom on my part so long as I didn't go overboard... but the mid-tier placement made it perfect to continue the confusion on just what Jester Chao might be. Mysterio's power allowed him to be borderline eldritch and play into his demented jokester persona without ever crossing the line into complete evil or reality-warping. We get the insanity we want to see from him but get to keep the confusing but cute chao, and while it's not much, one of my favorite little visuals was Jester Chao waddling away from the burnt up Quentin Beck in the Mysterio costume that definitely didn't fit him.

If Cornwind had leapt on Mysterio in some form though, I had a back-up! I'm pretty sure I had multiple, I think I even considered the Grinch again using that cart from Grinch Night to summon all the Mystery Fiters somehow. But, the one I had settled on as back-up was... THE MASKED MAGICIAN! Again, I like to pull characters from unusual and new sources. Mysterio kind of covers comics again despite Captain Underpants being from them, but Masked Magician was real world performer Val Valentino who had a TV show for a while where he revealed how the magic tricks he performed were done, making his concept a good fit for a guy who unveils all his tricks the moment he's discovered. He'd also be very fragile, killable with a hard punch, and could be swapped in relatively easily, and I even had a planned bit where someone would remove his mask, expecting a reference or callback only for the Val Valentino reveal that no one would be surprised by because thy don't know who that is. I think Mysterio was definitely the better pick, especially since Masked Magician might be a very specific personal pull that no one else might pick up on. Mysterio was certainly going to be recognizable on top of facilitating the idea, and I might have even been like "I HAD HIM FIRST" if a day or two before the Brawl someone revealed him in a minor capacity. As a plot villain? Might have swapped it, but as a fite club opponent or something I'd probably eat the overlap. It would have been sort of cute after all, and unlike the Secret Fiter, I'm not too worried about the logistics of how mysterious the mystery fiter is.I did avoid bringing up Spider-Man Far From Home specifically to avoid putting Mysterio back in people's heads though!

Secret Fiter I have a tight lid on because I can't control other people's actions and so need some rules around it to keep the reveal safe. This year had the fun congruity of the Brawl winner also getting their Secret Fiter in, and Chicken Man is definitely one of our weirder Secret Fiters! ...Well thinking back on many of them actually there's a good spread of weirdness, but a unit from Totally Accurate Battle Simulator with a polygonal appearance and whose power is basically CHICKENS might top even the likes of Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs in inexplicableness. Chicken Man being such a "wut" character worked in his favor too. Doing the whole ALL THE MYSTERY FITERS and then whatever simple secret fiter was picked was always going to be a little weird and I didn't want to overshadow the pick either, but Chicken Man was uniquely weird and such an off the wall thing that having him oddly appended to the group was a good joke. He definitely got to shine in the fite too because I turned chicken summoning into a threat even though he had no godbeast level powers or anything. I didn't want to go full Queen Goat, both of them summoning waves of rather off animals, but Chicken Man was a good lower scale animal swarm threat. Drawing him went better than I thought when I realized capturing his polygonal nature could be an issue. He looks kind of like Spider-Man and the chickens are deliberately kind of shit to match their source material, but he's strange so it didn't feel inappropriate.

As for Sundry, I guess this is as good as place as any to put the new version of the Brawl Wish List! Who do I want to see in future Brawls? Let's take a look! This will be somewhat copy paste and updated pretty much based on stuff from the past two years rather than digging around in old stuff, and while there are old characters I do want, this also includes that time I updated the Brawl wish list to remove characters I felt would never happen. Funnily enough, DeMonde was one of those and I finally got her, so maybe I COULD reintegrate them, but instead, just enjoy people I want with an Olympia update!

BRAWL WISHLIST
HARPY
Xavier
Garnet
Frankie
Oboro
Cindy
Kirby
Dashra
Erin

Tamara

Troy

Nikki

Hiroki

IVEL
Deekin

Unicorn Jabu

Hydra Ichi

Vert

BRINE
Etch
Morgana
Eshe
Eva
Rory
Euryale
Kayle
Famine (Considering we got Morgan, maybe not, but I won't act like they're interchangeable!)
Trace
Rin
Iodine
BREE
Lord Puddington
GOOPERBLOOPER
Baltan/Kauket
Sheryl
Gamble Man
Junko
Tron Bonne
DJ Candy
Huge Hermit
X Demolition
Sakura Atari
Samhain
Beheeyem
Piper

Rexy (a lot of character has been added to this rejected Secret Fiter!)

RUBYCHAO
Josuke
Corporal Guy (w/Axem Blue)
Mizuki
Tom Turbine
Kotohime

Biek Fowler

Nova

Kanade

STEELKOMODO
Daniel
Chatalie
Katsu
Stanley
Alex the Raptor
Wiz and Boomstick
Carol
MLG Toon Link

Lilith

CORNWIND EVIL
Bluejay
Chastity
Charlie
DELETER
Jackson Howard
Krieg
DRACO
Parsee
Vina or Rebecca Sealander
Flu
Drachen Sisters in Some Capacity
Cloak/Goggles/Armor
Malizza

Skullmageddon (knowing him so much better now than I did as a Secret Fiter makes the loss of him all the more painful!)

C'tari

Volan

Wriggle

Yoshiko

M SHEEP
Drip
Eleven Thirty

Haehyun

HOODED PITOHUI

Myuri

Ravio

Yuka (or Isabella)

Now then, I believe we should move onto the part you've all be waiting for... Individual Brawler Thoughts!

INDIVIDUAL BRAWLER THOUGHTS

IVEL

Kicking off first with the champion himself of course! I've said it before but I was really hoping the anniversary year would be the first victory for a new user, and we got it! Funnily enough, despite doing 200 efforts for PUDDLENAUT, I didn't expect him to win! However, it was very good preliminary accidental research, having reread so much about him to fill out that silly effort post. I definitely like Puddlenaut, he started to become one of ivel's main three basically during the Kuwahawi years, and things like Prinnynaut and the Kisha romance were definitely things that made him have a bit more to him despite his limited ability to speak. Hook Jaw had a pretty strong tie to him too, and he went pretty far from falling to John Freeman in his first Brawl run to coming out on top now! Even without the effort I made he still had at least 20 points I believe which is a fairly good chance to win, but the funny thing is, even after doing all that research, I had to keep telling myself "don't just do another spear kill". I wanted the final kill to be the dramatic hoist up into the air, and I don't know why I didn't do some long range finishers since he does throw the spears after all, but I was happy to give the shark arm a workout too. The epilogue was a tricky situation though. I promise not every year will have a saccharine "meet the loved ones" ending from now on after two in a row, but him reuniting with Prinnynaut and Kisha felt obvious once I realized the removal of his helmet was a good angle. I couldn't give us a face though since I couldn't directly get a solid answer from ivel on it. I tried to trick the truth of Puddlenaut's appearance out of him by asking about what's behind the helmet, and I laid the "result" of that question early in the Brawl to throw ivel off the trail of suspecting it had a greater purpose. Maybe back in season 1 or 2 I'd have been like "here's Puddlenaut's face, DEAL WITH IT" but instead I didn't want to force an identity on ivel. I do think he's a good pick from the ivelcast and a character who I associate with the user himself, and his simple friendliness was a good setup for things like working with Oceanus and Tank which gave him more flexibility and more to do than he can do alone. If I ever thought ivel would win the Brawl though, I had been expecting it to be GINO even though no one has ever won with a "mascot" character. Gino is a staple of ivel RP and the first you think of when it comes up, and he's been with ivel the whole ride basically, even a bit before he ever joined! Slowly he was doing better each year and he always mixed up his approach, but the tractor just tossed him aside this year, something that was easier to swallow with ivel taking the win itself. His relatively low placement meant he wouldn't be in play long, but he got to do something with his new bow and its skills before he went down. He was also taken out by a big monster so it's a bit more reasonable this Brawl veteran dropped so early when his foes were such powerful creatures. I did manage to cram in a lot of the abilities in his short time at least, and while he couldn't use his very fun Crisis Escape, I still got in most of what his crossbow could do. PHOENIX IKKI's return was something I'm surprised I didn't expect, but in the big anniversary year, it feels like he, Gino, and Puddlenaut are sort of ivel's big three! They've all been in multiple Brawls and handled his action after all, and I think having a break year for Phoenix made his return turn out pretty nice. It felt like his abilities were all nice to see again, like you're waiting to see the Illusion Fist or the Leo Gold Cloth because it has been some time since they've appeared in the Brawl. He was a perfect fit for the Pennzoil too, and this was a good year for callbacks with rematches, and while it's obvious that callbacks would favor early years or recent years, I was happy to have a chance to go for the middle with a Nitori/Phoenix rematch. For some reason I have him fite Kappas a lot because he fought Tomi one year too! Coupled with him practicing with Bob and we got a little bit of Phoenix history here! I think Aldebaran would have made it even more callback friendly but he had a really good year last year and I don't know if he would have done as good a run in competing with the ivel all-stars. Speaking of, we also have the freshest contender for the title, NEPTUNE. I still haven't played her source series, but seeing more memes, in-context moments, and her role in Gun Gun Pixies, I pretty much could move with confidence that I wasn't doing her wrong, and ivel has pretty much made her memey in what she did last year too! I was much more willing to be silly and use the word Nep this year and the addition of the Nepgeardam meant she, like Gino, came in with a good weapon. I was worried at first about blowing it up, partially because I wasn't sure if she had her abilities from last year without her special sword. Hence, a joke was made about it! But, I did do wiki research, and she has tons of different swords in her games and still calls on the ability, and it helps some of her powers seem fully independent or really just a fancy way to use a blade instead of something that draws power from it like Tsubasa's powers. I did want to just tease the jet rather than pull it out like I did last year, and Purple Heart was an in-the-moment idea that just made sense rather than being a planned thing like the jet aversion. I did sort of regret removing Nepgeardam's hands early because it meant I had to keep remembering not to grab or anything. It helps when your whole giant body is a weapon, and I had to keep in mind her proportions, using game images to determine she wasn't really on scale with our giants. She was a good excuse for why the Planeswarden alliance was a bit sturdier before the separation though! If there was one ivel entrant I feel like I could have done more with this year though and wasn't limited by placing like with Gino, it would be ALMARIC/KNUD who, appropriately, are ivel entrant number 5 on who I think embodies his RP participation right now V: But, after a pretty good presence last year, at least I can say they haven't been outright buried in the Brawl. I did have a lot of fun ideas for what they could have done after it was too late though :V If I get them again I intend to better show some of the concepts I had, but one big one I had was the idea of Knud's traps continuously cropping up even after his death. It interfered in later battles again and again because no one knew to expect them, and during the actual fite with them it inspired me to whip out the Kinect-based form for Xyra. They both got to use their new tricks of course like Almaric's ice spell and Knud's jack-in-the-box trap, but I think my idea of Almaric going down with Tokiko ended up not feeling as definitively an Almaric kill as intended? Knud got to rough up Motormer quite a bit and all, but maybe I could have done more with them in the early parts where they were salvaging the dead Mystery Fiter mechs for parts. I did actually consider having them raid Grab-N-Go early on for stuff, hence the pre-fite show, and I even considered working in Ethical Mouse Traps somewhere in the Brawl to continue the joke, but Grab-N-Go getting so crowded and wrecked really changed its path. Clearly we need a Brawl in a dungeon to really let these guys shine! I always wonder how much time Knud realistically needs too, and I try not to get tripped up on logistics since it's more fun to have the traps go HELLO! instead of the details bogging it down. While ivel tends to bring back his characters the most, I'd say the ones I still have the clearest new ideas for if they do return are these two, to the point I don't want to share the behind-the-scenes thoughts so they're still good for surprises! Of course, maybe I'll forget before the big day, which would be a big but sort of predictable shame!

JUMPROPEMAN

Oh hey! That's me! Yup, I got second place in the Brawl this year, and I think that's pretty much where I'd like to be. As in, if I want a character to do well, I'd like them to go this far but no further! I want the win to go to someone else, but I still like some of my characters enough to like them to go a pretty good distance, and the next best spot to top is a good place to drop out! MEGA DRIVE AND GAME GEAR were my second placers, and because they got so far, I decided to keep them both on board until the end. In the same way it can seem suspicious to keep both members of a team around so long in anticipation of a victory, doing the opposite keeps people guessing! Bob lost Jim before his finale, but Silence kept Blade until victory, and I think I've basically made it where there's no true meta clue for how the end will go with people who enter with teammates or assists. One thing I didn't do but considered was having a moment that played on the growing Game Gear/DeMonde pairing where Game Gear would have been pretty beaten up only to be pulled up and motivated to fite again by the Doktor, but I imagine that moment would have come after Motormer exploding or something and that car went too far to pull off the pairing tease. Pretty much the moment the girls were confirmed for the finale I knew the sort of "explosive moment" that these endings have where some new power or interesting twist comes into play would be Mega Drive leaning on all the famous Sega characters instead of grabbing for the obscure. I almost didn't do the image since I was worried it wouldn't turn out, the sprites proving to be harder to grab than you'd expect! The Gunstar Heroes were the hardest to find in a decent post and with proper transparency and all, and originally, Ronald McDonald was going to be among the sprites but I figured he wasn't really known for a Sega game despite being in a not-so-obscure one with Treasure Land Adventures. Tails wasn't going to be part of the image at first until I realized he was a good "keep Tank busy" addition and it filled out the upper area which would have only had Robotnik otherwise. I considered Knuckles but I think a broader grab was better, and I almost put ToeJam and Earl amongst the group but they never had a specific moment besides just dying compared to some attacks landing or giving Puddlenaut a different type of character to overcome. Most of the references seen elsewhere save Ecco Jr. were seat of the pants references. Game Gear pulling on Star Wars near the end felt smart though, having a lightsaber is a big step over the other kinds of items she pulled out, although I did hesitate damaging the backpack because there would be a point of no return for it being irreparably damaged. Of course, I control the narration so I could just avoid that, but still! Mega Drive I didn't want to just pull from game protagonists, hence why we had really deep pulls like Snake Lord, and Snake Lord specifically was why I wanted to make sure each referenced character had a url to show who they are. Describing that guy for his little role wouldn't be worth the effort! Naturally, I don't have the references ready to go with the girls, often having more an idea of the general theme of what game they'll draw from like Big Boss or Sci-Fi and then I'll look through my options, although some come to mind without a game list crawl. One minor thing I'm glad to have done is finally establish which spells Mega Drive uses for healing and other Digital Magic related things like the charge time. One reason Mega Drive got her kill on Hibiki with the book was to foreshadow her using her book as a bludgeon in the finale so even at that final moment she doesn't seem completely helpless, although it did have that sort of triumphant buildup in Puddlenaut's favor that gave away the direction. Sometimes you gotta play into that glory instead of keeping them guessing though! Specific game reference time, Twin Freaks was picked because he's an infamous boss for people who have played Dynamite Headdy, because even though Trouble Bruin' or the flying baby head are more interesting bosses, but Twin Freaks is sort of infamous and while no one in the community besides me has probably played Dynamite Headdy, he can back up the threat he poses with in-game difficulty so Hibiki goes down to something tough. Can't really pull off the gimmick too well that makes him such a bother but oh well! SHIMMER AND VOYD I would have also been happy with if they went the almost-distance, mainly because Shimmer is such a staple of my RP and RP of the past few years in general! Really though, burying Voyd was probably the harder part but still a necessary one due to the placement they achieved. For some reason I feel like my creativity with the twosome wasn't as high as usual, perhaps because I controlled their opposition as well, but it could have also been the sort of dampening I do with my own characters so that I'm not turning it into the JRM show whenever they're on screen. I do wish Shimmer did better than her last spin, but Voyd was on a character arc of increasing confidence only to get punted down a bit, but she's not in a bad place at least.One benefit of the Brawl though was me finally looking up her shield forms again so those can appear elsewhere! I just settled into the memorable ones instead of the full selection during regular RP. Shimmer smiling in her KO pic felt right even though I didn't request it, but I did hesitate on whether to make the KO more gruesome or not. SK noted Rain wouldn't hold back and that's why he was picked for killing the likeable Shimmer in the first place, but brutalizing her was probably too much and I didn't want to make Rain look cruel beyond the way MK characters are sort of naturally cruel by dint of what they do. NIFTU I expected to bottom out, but even when his time came, I felt sort of bad for him. Mainly because as I wrote the Avox beatdown on him, I felt like he should be able to rise up and get in a few more hits, his death a bit quick... but at the same time, sometimes that's just how a battle goes. I didn't want to artificially lengthen it, and it's not like he did nothing before then since he was part of the city battles, but he was sort of ganged up on and torn down with little recourse. He probably could have done with using some biotics during the exchange to even it out but even that was sort of reserved. His mech was definitely his main tool and it makes sense considering he doesn't want to pop his brain, and I enjoyed drawing attention back to how far Niftu had to push to get those powers by having Ash unable to Center them properly. I do think he would have been better in last year's Brawl but he also didn't have the mech then or degree of character he does now, it's more he would function better as the head of a company and his allies this year were sort of scattered by the nature of how they relate to him. Still, I'm not upset with his performance, he did better than expect almost since I was prepared for an even lower placement! ELLIOTT got surprisingly far, although considering people were pushing for his inclusion, it's not too much of a surprise! Still, he never got a direct kill, but that's in his nature, isn't it? One of my favorite parts of writing him and the citrus duo though was writing how shit with guns they were. They tried to make the steam weapons work but they just didn't have the aiming training required to really make them a threat with them! Elliott almost being a Honoka backpack was perhaps put a little too close to his death while also deliberately meant to make you think he was still in the game. Really, I worry I disappointed with Elliott. He was around a lot, and when he was you never knew who was real, but he didn't copy many direct attacks like he did in RP, instead of relying on a lot of flooding the area with a threatening character like Lord Death Man or the Uncontained Whimsy. I think he did have a lot of room to keep cropping up but also could have become a bit overplayed if he was constantly poking into situations unrelated to him.I almost feel like though no matter how many times he could Brawl he'd never fully reach his max potential and that's just the nature of the power. Duplication is just so versatile, and sticking around a while at least means it could keep showing up. He did talk more than most of my characters, partially because it was something to do besides copy stuff. I did have his death be a little "normal" to emphasize his physical weakness, just a shot through the eye instead of something dramatic or explosive. I guess the cutting room floor for him would be things like "should he make copies of Bobby's big bosses?" and other moments of just wondering if he should chime in, although with things like Godzilla I did go "that's too much toner". Of course he made multiple trains buuuut those were sort of moving battering rams in function rather than atomic breath kaiju. At least having to spend time reclaiming toner would excuse some of his absences. CROCOMIRE AND STOKE had the sort of "grab bag" gimmick I do a lot now where I have a huge list of potential abilities that just require plucking them when the time comes, and Crocomire actually had the Speed Dash move picked specifically for the Brawl! I considered using it before the day of just because the giant happy alien dashing about at high speed was kind of hard to pass on, but I held out and he got to just be super speedy Crocomire zooming around the Brawl. It wanted to make sure he rammed into people with it too, and luckily for me, Bogleech did a creature feature on Metroid II's enemies recently enough that Skorp was fresh in the mind for the close quarters battle with Jacket. Like Rain killing Shimmer, Jacket was picked to kill Crocomire so that any heat given from picking on a friendly person wasn't spent on a character who had to answer for it. Stoke had to be there to facilitate Crocomire's mutations but I do feel maybe he could have been utilized a touch more. He stuck around a bit after Crocomire's demise only to die to chickens, maybe he could have had a "held my own" moment but it's not like he's a character who needs it or would even seek it. I didn't want to go overboard with Crocomire's mutation amount since they're one at a time deals and it wouldn't make sense to machine gun through them in the time he had in the Brawl, but I think the picks were reasonably easy to understand compared to some creatures I could have pulled out. Conveniently I didn't have to draw any of them, but that's also because the one kill worked out to be natural Croco talents instead of having a mutation active that would require drawing the strange shapes Crocomire can assume. I perhaps feel too clever for Crocomire's small throat size being relevant, the beet swallowing problem close to his debut paying off with the buzzsaw being so effective when thrown down his throat. It wasn't deliberate setup, but I'd be even prouder if it wasn't my character having such a small detail become very relevant.

M SHEEP

Perhaps one of the wackier moments of tractors favoring a certain person, this Brawl really did just pile up a bunch of his characters near the top, to the point they were going out back to back at one point! I knew I couldn't really space it out any better than I did because of the three KOs per post idea I used to get things in a nice 30 posts, but at least they were just barely low enough that I could add some KOs to the top placing characters instead of having Sheep have to fite himself. PURNIMA of course placed higher than the cluster, and if there's one more image I could have done for the Brawl it would probably be her in the Deadly Efficient clothes she made for herself in the sort of Boss Fite segment near the end. During most of the Brawl, Purnima's participation was behind the controls of her train, so I definitely wanted her finale to be more intimate and about facing her instead of the vehicle. I wasn't sure how animate or alive the train was (ie would it count on the rankings!) and the orbital drop was partly to dispense with both of them at once safely, but the notes do mention Purnima being squashed instead of the method I went with before that concern hit me. Mel dying to the angel missiles I think really helped Purnima's stand feel less like those "get powerful, get wrecked" moments that crop up so often, and the funny thing is, the angel missiles weren't really meant for that purpose going in. I tried to think of places they could arise but eventually I decided to throw them into the back since Purnima would make it that far, and it worked as a good cap to that moment, and it allowed me to swap out the idea that Mel get the space kill with Purnima getting killed in space. I was very pleased to hear my imagined weapons for Purnima in her Deadly Efficient outfit line up with canon, and I'm also happy to see Tsubasa getting Symphogear-inspired clothes is helping her a lot outside the Brawl. I meant to throw that scene in earlier because I feel like Purima usually invites at least one dress up of someone else in big fites like this, but also, I enjoyed playing into the reality bending a lot with the mirror sequence. It let her show how unhinged she was at the time after being more amicable earlier on and let me play with the space in the train. Tracking train damage was definitely hard, but I imagine a lot of it was holes in the material side instead of attacks on the organic parts like the spine. I should have used that skull beam cannon more but I did keep track of things like the lost front limbs! THE DRUNKS were really fun to write even though they took time to arrange. I had selections of Scottish and Irish slang on hand, I used a slang thesaurus and plucked things from mostly English regions, and I threw in some spicy "breakdowns" where a simple word was turned into components like the phrase "gravefill". Still, despite putting down some of those phrases myself, they even look a little impenetrable in retrospect, but I assure you they all have clear meaning if you have all the resources! One idea I hit on early for them was pestering other battles while scrying rather than directly participating, and another was the whole "one white magic but two gargoyles need it." Partly why I went with Craven being the healed one was so I could pull off the scrying interference idea still, and it's why Annan picked him really, if you translated the bickering there. The first time I started writing them actually attacking felt a little wrong but having some tiny drunk gargoyles was fun, it was like if three flying monkeys had stuck around causing trouble last year! Distributing kills did mean they lost one member pretty early sadly, and Annan lost his people to talk to before his fall, but while they were the only Sheep entrant to drop low, I feel like the important parts were touched upon right down to them essentially having a voting section in the Brawl. BASU was always pegged for brutal kills, and pretty much each one he was responsible for involved not skimping on describing him just dragging that dart through flesh and getting deep in there. Not really gruesome since I still avoid that in general, but he's a warrior and he fought like it. Saving the charges for his special stuff was difficult, since I'd have to remember over a weeklong period if he still had any good to go, I really should have made notes or something on it instead of just saying "remember this" to myself! I don't think I was too happy with my Basu art though. I think he looks good in his death picture relatively but it deteriorated in each image I drew after it. Getting far definitely allowed him to get in multiple kills though, which looks good on his character since he feels like someone who would be bummed if he didn't. I tried to do fun stuff with the rope dart but it probably would have gotten more play if he had areas like the forest or city on his docket longer, but the debris of Brawl Planet definitely got in a fun use with it hooking onto rubble for attacks. Reflector was the surprise workhorse though, and while a Reflector can't be used infinitely even in RP context rather than narrative, it was hard to not just have him pop it on as he fought Rain for so long! The Crash Gate is the kind of power I would probably abuse if it wasn't so limited, but I think it's fun to have each use of a power be so important too. He was a good pick for Rain's killer since he could get a similar Fatality kill to what the ninja could put out, although I wish I could have better captured the torn up tin can look I was hoping for in the art. DAVID MAMMOTH I apologize for you being buried at the start! He picked up the moment he did make his first true appearance in the fite but I do think he was slated to throw his weight around in some early skirmish with Jacket or something but fite flow trumped early ideas and David ended up sidelined in favor of focusing on a different selection of characters. I do feel I probably could have used his squash and stretch powers more but was also a bit worried about crunching him up too much since they have a physical toll on him. He definitely got some in, just like Basu he benefitted from the planet explosion by getting to show them more, and his scythe was a good contribution to late game Puddlenaut run. When it came to the golf clubs to pick, I wanted to make sure to include the ones Sheep said he wished he used plus some of the more unique ones, but the deep run also meant a lot of them get to be shown regardless of what I tried to emphasize, and I even got to slip in some new ones! The bone was definitely just there for the Greater Dog fite to have an excuse, but I left its origin vague so Sheep could either play with it or to avoid anything unfortunate in implications. I did enjoy that fiting Carla meant he could have a little rant about his work and how to fite, finding a point for bluster in the Brawl can be difficult sometimes! I kept imagining him doing the Mammothman trunk spike and its probably best David doesn't use his elephant parts because I don't know if I could have resisted trying to make it happen if he did. I do feel bad that he didn't get to be flustered by sillier Brawlers like some people predicted for pre-fite, but I had already planned for him to be frustrated with Panty's behavior before I knew of that desire so I hope that satisfied instead! MOTORMER was our last Sheep char, and just like Jason-3 he made a surprisingly deep run! It was getting to the point I was worried I might be pulling out far too many new abilities for him just to keep him having something interesting under the hood, but he was driving in and out of fites a lot, really good at allowing me to say a character was present in a battle but had to deal with not getting run over while the focus was on other people. I tried to keep the new Motormer abilities like fire suppressing foam reasonable within his purpose as a car character in a movie, although things like using his headlights offensively feel less like a new power and just a natural way of using his body. I used his stilts surprisingly little despite being conceptually useful, same for the smokescreen, but he still did stuff with most of his kit, even the ice cream maker! At some point he was dented up pretty bad so he stopped being good at driving people around, but he was one of the most loyal alliance people fittingly! The moment he thought he saw Jason watching in the sky is confirmed for Jason now but I wasn't going to cement it at first since it would make you wonder why Jason is floating about in a visible range. Might as well give him his moment instead of losing it in quibbles. Picking him to kill Optimus was a fairly easy jump to make, but the how was a bigger question, and it ended up being that I thought of something that lined up with how I could take out Brawl Planet. I do think I should have tried to slip in more jokes for Motormer, but space for dialogue in the Brawl can always be hard to make as it can slow down a moment. He got in a few of course, but he got seventh so it's hard to say he got in an appropriate amount considering the time he had to make them!

HARPY

Let's go MEL! Harpy had a pretty good cast this year in general with a few I would have liked to see in the top spot, but Mel was the one who got the furthest. While I've struggled to make the anti-grav skates relevant outside of roller derby since Shimmer has started to wear them, Mel was able to make good use of hers when Brawl Planet was destroyed. I thought of the honey thing first of course, then realized "wait she has the skates" but then decided to keep the honey thing for a bit of humor. I definitely got the most callback indulgent in her fite with Stocking. The Black Legend as the means of killing Stocking was a sort of natural idea even if its not the sort of mountain of chocolate the food became in its later incarnations, but the other callbacks were me either trying to cram in things or realizing there were too many openings for them. Praying Mangoes was meant to happen earlier, as in, Mel would hurl them at Wids herself and Widow Maker would roll her eyes and say "of course these would show up" but I still didn't want to sacrifice them since I tried to have a broad range of both regular and Brawl callbacks. The food flood was inevitable, but choosing vanilla custard was a callback motivated decisions because it is sort of odd our anniversary year didn't have the Custard Kittens in any capacity. One of the few moments of corpse tampering was used to make the reference more overt, and with a CKR character no less! Pudding with a Gun was another callback Mel could facilitate and it made sense as a means of impeding Panty's ability to use her weapons, but I'll admit in general I got carried away and should have at least spaced them out! Trying to think of what Mel could cook was probably the only limitation on the food powers I wanted to use and I can't think of any specific meals I rejected for it, just that it influenced what did show up. I was a bit more iffy on what food tools to implement though. Slinging grease around was a good one I feel, but I started wondering like, people use blow torches on desserts and stuff, and the right bladed tools would basically just give Mel a sword, so I avoided a lot of that line of thought in favor of more fun or weird ideas. I could probably never use up every idea for her and even now I am thinking up more utensils and treats she could use in a fite. Perhaps she could have gotten more physical, but sometimes, if you've got great powers for range fiting, getting in to strike them personally feels like something you don't want to do even if you can do it. ECLAIR ended up mostly about balancing when to be Dark and when to be Light. The lines between them blurred at times and I often wondered whether to have her one or the other, but while Light was in the limelight longer, Dark still got a pretty big showing, and I was happy there was time to not only have them do a team attack, but have a little "I respect you" moment. Who knows if that will linger after Brawl but at least in this battle they could recognize the need for the other at times. Of course, after dying that might reignite some resentment as both sides would probably blame the other, but whatever! I bet if I played La Pucelle I could do her magic better justice, and of course, despite having the eyepatch in the reference images, it wasn't consistent in the art. I do like that CKR gave Dark Eclair a mirror version of the patch although that wouldn't make much sense realistically speaking. Their expressions in the duo attack in general are pretty fun! Eclair, for some reason, felt like the face of The Royals to me despite Sonia explicitly setting it up. Perhaps because Eclair was the most flexible helper whereas Sonia was a flyer? I'm honestly surprised she ended up with the biggest push of Harpchars when it came to vote weight, but she definitely rode it pretty deep! I finally got my boy HANSEL in a Brawl even though the field was so packed I couldn't vote for him! Hansel channeling his magics through different weapons was one of those things where I'd have to pull over, ever so briefly, to make sure he's using the weapon/magic combo that makes sense, and I tried to draw from different areas of his spell list even though there were plenty I wanted to use but never got the chance. That's how it goes often with the long option lists of course, Plant Growth and Polymorph being the clear ones but I'm sure others could be fun too. Of course, it's been a long while since he was an active Kobber so I figured he wouldn't make a deep run despite being a character I like, but he was still active and his weapons continued on past his expiration point. Hansel's weapons ever got their time to shine as they were pretty useful tools in other people's hands just as blunt instruments though. I was planning to put him in the Royals pretty early before it eventually clicked in my mind that he isn't technically one, but I was able to concoct a good enough reason for him to be. Also, having Black General peg him as a hunk was definitely to make Dakota related jokes as well as a good way to set up him KOing her, although it ended up being a group effort. CARLA returning ended up being more interesting than I anticipated, and I think part of that was definitely the chance to have her meet with Purnima and bury that hatchet. I still have the specter of April fearing confrontation with Priscilla hanging over me even now, and if Carla had just been fleeing every instance of Purnima's giant train on the battlefield, it might have gotten stale. A rematch seemed like the obvious thing to do, but as I thought on it, the forgiveness route was a more interesting one, opened up fun possibilities, and allowed Purnima to be dramatic without being struck down. Maybe if Purnima had bottomed out I wouldn't have chosen that route, but it was something to give to Carla because apparently this Brawl I was not too afraid to give character moments to people! I definitely made sure to dig for Carla's Mega Man powers from the past to up her abilities in a fite, and while the entry noted there would be new stuff she wasn't comfortable using, I didn't jump on any of it. Seeing the old abilities was practically like pulling them out of nowhere almost, and I never felt like she needed a new skill before she was blasted to pieces. Funnily enough I made sure to emphasize that important parts were destroyed mostly because destroying a robot usually needs to be more thorough to emphasize the deed is done, but this is also the girl who was thoroughly killed back in BBB3! If she had gone further perhaps I would have dipped into that "pick new Mega Man Powers" for her well that was implied, but considering her generally nervous nature it would require something extra for that risk I feel, and even confronting Purnima was spurred by Tsubasa. I tried not to make her too Cirno-y, but also, I didn't draw on the Hydrokinesis too much even though it was an option to differentiate her. If anything, she had a pretty good spread of powers so it never felt like I had to dive in too deep to pull out something good for the situation! And lastly, the empress STELLA returns just in time to make me keep thinking of her when we're talking about the Cat Boomer in chat instead! Really though, she came with a pretty good mix of stuff like Carla. Elemental guns (that I mostly always had her use for their elemental purpose because why would I have her hit with boring regular bullets? :V) and the ninja skills (mostly relevant in dodging and the close range fite with Game Gear), but of course, then we had speechcraft. I had a lot of fun writing it out! It's easy to just say she Mimics Darlavon, but I liked to lead with her speaking only for it then to be pointed out as a skill she was using, and doing things like trying to trick the Sega Hard Girls into helping them was a good case where it would have seemed innocuous if Mega Drive wasn't smart enough to think deeper on it. Writing the meandering sleepy chat and other instances where the intent appeared after was a fun way of getting in dialogue for her too, and even with all that talking she still had regular talking with people like Joy! A very dialogue heavy character comparatively, and considering she was an orator first, appropriate I feel! Ninja was perhaps the hardest to emphasize because she doesn't have any noted ninjutsu so it was just about being skillful physically on top of crafty. Having her stick to Rain was a bit hard since it made sense but they would fite so differently, and that's why we had things like Motormer handling Rain when Stella fought the Hard Girls so different skillsets could shine instead of the two trying to make their styles click. They definitely can work together, they took down the B-Rex robot after all! Of course, a lot of entries have joke weaknesses or strengths, but the Sheep presence never came up here, and while Cornwind thought I might work in the Sheep still, it never really got anywhere beyond "maybe I'll make a cute little reference if the situation is right". The Sheep itself has been gone for so long I feel like a weak return wouldn't be fitting, and since the Brawl was already crammed with false Mystery Fiters there was no real room for invaders when I already couldn't do robot Noah justice! That Stella enty art looks really nice though, the half step pose and smirk really feel like the Stella we know instead of that orator art that's way outdated! Speaking of, seeing human Hansel finally was nice even though it's pretty serious. I know with Dakota he's still got that nervous smile that I associate with the character, although I still can't help but see it on a Kirby. What if I recolor Hansel's head in the picture yellow and add little hands and feet to it... no no, we've got so much more to write! Moving on!

RUBY CHAO

I'm very happy Chao waited to enter HIBIKI AND HONOKA until this year because now they could ride the hype of being practically the definitive Olympia characters to a very solid fifth place. While they took a bit to get rolling in the Brawl, they definitely did a lot, and while I didn't pull on like, Hibiki's berserker mode or anything too dramatic, they did have plenty of moments that I felt drew out some of their best aspects that wouldn't have been present last year. Biki being boxing champ meant we got a whole fite segment devoted to her getting a kill with just her fists and grit, and while Honoka funnily enough never said it herself, one of her clones got in the Faityo Dayo we definitely needed somewhere. Honoka had her baking referenced in her battle with Mel too, and while I can certainly draw more from these two if they won, I think they got a lot of their definitive traits in and showed off both excellent teamwork in how they worked together and fought well without Sympho. Honoka killing Frost was specifically designed as a "no power" takedown for Honoka to show she is tough and deserved to last up until the end, and the closeness of their friendship is pretty much why they lasted together as a twosome so long! I'm not sure there's too much I would have wanted to change except maybe milking their teamwork with Elliott more, but that was more something I feel Elliott could have done more, and they had their moments both in Pre-Fite and when he sent them off with the second pendant for double Sympho goodness. Having them depowered for their death felt like a good way to send them off, not because it made them look good, but because it was a good way to show how worn down they were and give a clear excuse for how they were overpowered, especially since one was killed by a pie avalanche and the other just repeated blows with a very heavy book! HERMAN AND OTTO I was initially worried might bottom out, especially when my votes meant I couldn't give them and the Citrus duo support. Oh yeah! Forgot to mention that I had a vague idea of Hibiki and Honoka meeting Ebirah and him being repulsed, but that's a minor gag that wouldn't really work in the plans for any of the involved characters. Anyway, the Steamworks duo funnily enough lived on with Chao's characters after their weapons were pilferred. Their weapons stuck around a long time because of the Citrus Duo and Elliott claiming them, and at first I worried I might not even be able to do it! Their ties to steam power made me hesitant since refilling them would be an issue... but Elliott could just keep cloning back-ups to basically refill them so long as he did so before they were run dry. Still, they did a lot with them themselves, their battle with Nadine and A3515 basically a big "we can hold our own too" moment and designed specifically for it. Nadine is sort of big technology user and more advanced than them, and even though they lost a guy to winning the fite, they definitely showed they were no slouches. Herman was the ideas guy, and while I didn't write it out, I meant for it to be when we didn't see them that he was coordinating the tactics like the steam smokescreen and Otto sneaking around during it. The mine feint was also that, and too that end, Herman I think was going to get inspired by scrap in the arena before I knew the results and maybe build something new for the twosome to use. I ended up killing Herman first despite his value as the more creative of the two though. Otto making due but also knowing how to keep the stuff fiting fit made his solo run make sense all the same though. I don't think I was happy with how any of the Steam weapons looked in my art though, they're obviously quite different and complex from regular stuff but practicality won the day. Meanwhile I think three makes a pattern, and as JAKE MARSHALL now shows, bartenders don't do much in the Brawl! I do enjoy their presence and was definitely happy to have him finally, but these are technically brought in more for talking than fiting. Jake's held his own in fites before though like the bartender battle and the Olympics, but I think the single gun approach might have been a bit small for a Big Bar Brawl. Really I should have attached him to long term allies instead of the loose association with Kino to give him more to do with just a gun, but he still got in his kill. Funnily enough, during his showdown with Joy, I was actually writing maybe the first half of it under the impression Jake comes out on top before I thought to double check my notes. Maybe I should have had him shoot at the Mystery Fiters of substance instead of Flying Dutchman too, just to have another mark he left. He wasn't a wimp in the fites he was part of, and he overcome some tight situation just by being smart and swift. Perhaps I could have had him use his talking more like he did in the pre-fite show to set up where three people would be at the start? I think he'd need something extra if he did a return run to really let me explore his potential, since he was sort of the most "Guy with a Gun" of the guy with a guns we had this year. None of these are really complaints on the entry himself though, more just me failing to find a good niche for a guy I've wanted so long! Speaking of long time wants, not getting Tom Turbine did sting, but NITORI was good on her return run even if she didn't go too far. Once she got in the water especially she started to become a huge threat, although she was basically water-bending before that to keep her alliance a big threat in a crowded battlefield. One thing I noticed is we never had a look at how the kappas look when transformed and I believe, in some part, it's deliberate to avoid thinking about how weird it might be, but I promised to have a kappa kill and drew it as such too! The big arm swipe was an attempt at stylization that probably doesn't work when it's the only one of its kind, but I tried to go sorta-but-not-full kappa in her design. Using the kappa form successfully against Phoenix and turning the much bigger water pool against him was definitely how the fite turned out so differently this time, and she was perfect for also getting us down to the bubble arena! While Nitori's fire run of course had the sort of "everything in" approach a new entry usually has, a rerun usually means a tactic or approach can take focus, and taking us into the water with kappa form was certainly the angle this time. She still used her gun and even her big backpack that wasn't brought up in the entry at all. Komachi getting lower placement means they didn't get to do much as a couple, but Nitori pulled her weight on her own at least and made the return well-deserved. We've already talked a bit about JESTER CHAO in the Mysterio portion so this will feature some retreads, but ol JC (who I almost made too many Jesus Christ jokes about) is another character I'm pretty happy with despite him not getting a particularly noteworthy spot in the rankings. We didn't actually have a brawl-wide song or hypnosis this year, but we did have Mysterio's cluster around him get confused and Jester Chao got the bigger catch with the alliance cluster coming under his spell, and designing that fever dream was definitely difficult. Mysterio was going for basics and callbacks like everyone in the bar dying, but Jester Chao I wanted the sort of demented prankster angle without going for cliche creepy clown iconography or a carnival setting since he's not a carnival clown. Jester Chao was initially part of an evil team TECHNICALLY and he's sort of loosely good now, but no commitment was made on where his heart truly is, which is sort of good because he had minor character development recently and he didn't really get so far that he needed something closer to Purnima's breakdown to show a darker side to him. The flamethrower to Mysterio's face as definitely meant to show his laughing cruelty without it being like, TRULY cruel. It was a valid use of his weapon, but also being resistant to the horrors of the illusions was meant to continue to show that warped mind in the little guy. I was worried his powers might get lost in his turn with the Mysterio armor, but he still got a lot of flamethrower activity in due to his alliance, making me think I did pick the right allies for him after all even though riding one of the Rampage Trio into battle was the initial plan for him.

STEEL KOMODO

I'm so glad we finally got RAIN, one of my favorite SK characters of all time! I think it's sort of funny SK felt like he entered before, because it did feel like he should have after all! Can't say he got hurt by finally taking his turn in the arena now, he was SK's highest placed entrant! I watched some videos of Rain's history in Mortal Kombat, both how people used him and his different abilities and fatalities. I have in my notes a mention of a charged roundhouse kick I never had him use in the Brawl, but I definitely wrote him closer to Mortal Kombat than the way I wrote him back in Season 1 when there was a lot of going off script. I still did so here of course, but there were direct references to fatalities like using water to crack someone's feet to the side and using a powerful uppercut as a finisher. I feel like the Storm Sword was a bit of an oddity hanging around though. One reason Shimmer sealed it up for a while was so I could spend more time playing with just his lightining and water skills and then later he could break it out and start integrating it into his moveset more. Rain had a lot of background presence due to his alliance and holding back Basu until their climactic fite. Pitohui's Fatality death was all OC as I liked designing me some fatalities while Shimmer's was the more referential one. His entry noting no aversion to brutality really let me go all Mortal Kombat with him despite the little mercy he showed the already defeated Shimmer, and I probably used the water teleport a lot more than I expected! PANTY AND STOCKING aren't really joke characters, but they're funny characters, and so they were used a lot for gags, and I don't mean ball gags! Yeah, playing into lewd humor was always going to be a tightrope, but I think the only moment I really doubted myself was when I wrote the Chicken Man cock joke. I didn't want the wording to be too ridiculous, but having Stocking around to undermine Panty's horniness was a good counterbalance to the lewd moments if it felt like I was going too big. There was definitely moments where she wasn't focused on finding men, but Panty's speech was usually used for injecting humor. Stocking's sweet tooth meant she was on a crash course with Mel of course, although maybe I should have waited to throw her that way or at least shown it some more before the angels were back in focus. Figuring out just how damaging their weapons would be was of course a challenge but mostly it just manifested as not landing lethal hits even when they left their marks. I took some really unclear notes on who would kill Annie so originally I was writing it so Panty killed her before I realized I had set the KO aside for Phoenix. I do enjoy the pair now that they've had time to settle and definitely enjoyed writing them, and I'm sure they'll be fun in DYM and RYM and so on. A character with attitude and the one grounding them is usually a fun setup but Stocking has her own weakness as well. The fact actual underwear was important to their powers made their fites with Mammoth and Ikki really good for silly moments, so they were definitely a good fit for the Brawl! RYUGA AND LAURA dropped really low though, and as Goops has pointed out, a packed field likely killed their chances. So many good vote choices even within the SK cast, but I think one other thing is Ryuga wasn't going with his Wyvern. While everyone saw Miyu and Fay last year and thought they'd be better in their Arwings, I think Ryuga was hit with that this year since we rarely saw him out of his ship in combat. Laura's raptor robot was a fun design but I didn't think there was really anyone good to attach her to after Ryuga's death so she ended up going down close to him, but I still tried to get the two to leave their mark in their time with us. I did want Ryuga to Brawl because he was a part of Olympia and the anniversary year definitely put us at risk of missing out on native characters in favor of celebratory ones. Ryuga was sort of Guy with Gun too but he also had the benefit of going down in an early fite compared to Jake's later elimination, which sounds weird, but also means Ryuga can benefit from chaos more and his opponents could work together against him. BIG BOBBY I feel like I already talked about up above in the Boss highlight section. I guess the main thing beyond the bosses was making sure he didn't get lost in the shuffle himself! I made sure he had moments where his fencing and flash stepping were still important, and definitely the rhymes got their moment to be sublime! If this truly is his curtain call I wanted to do almost all I could with it and still I feel like I wanted to do more, but while at first I was wary of writing the rhymes because it requires a lot more careful wording and thought then just expressing how an attack is delivered, I tried to give it key moments to arise without it asking too much out of me or Bobby. His death was perhaps one of the ones shown the most reverence because he is a character on his way out and an institution with him, and I kinda feel like FYM is going through that too. RP has changed a lot but it's great things like Bobby's Pavilion were part of it, but he gets to go out like a star instead of fizzling out. I was a little bummed when he was removed from last year's lineup, but he was a great fit here, got far enough to do a lot of fun stuff, and SK's effortpost for him was maybe my favorite of them all this year.I would have loved for him to go further so I could truly empty the bag of tricks, but a good showman knows that quantity is not as important as quality, and Bobby put on a dazzling show. JEWEL MAN didn't do too hot though, and he didn't do too hot his first Brawl run! I guess, despite being a fun guy in RP itself, he just has issues with magnetizing votes to him, meaning he sort of drops out early. However, having the Royal Guards attached to him meant he was very active despite being an early Brawler, earning the first KO and facing an alliance and all that. I wanted to get that jump glitch in like I always do but it's hard to concoct interesting uses for it, especially when only very certain people jump for their moves. Crocomire and Greater Dog couldn't, Mystia flies, Enid and Buzzkill have like no reason to do so. I do think I messed up the KO pic a bit because the leg for the kick is far too long even after digitally shortening it, but hey, it conveys the important info. Jewel Man without his big jewel crown was also something I had to internalize because you know it woulda got hit if it was still around, but instead, he used his expected moves and then had to exit because the tractor said so. High and lows on SK's roster thanks to tractor really, but Jewel Man didn't chump out because he could make decent use of his time. Unlike Nitori though, I don't think he had enough time to really show off his new angle well, which in this case was almost being the mentor ot the two Royal Guards!

HOODED PITOHUI

I can't say I'm surprised PITOHUI came back for round two, but her more down to Earth mindset did mean I didn't feel like I needed to emphasize her insane kill hunger this time. She was picked immediately to target Oda to both give her a massive victory while not saying she hadn't done much of note. Oda is basically an army so Pitohui had to put in the legwork and exhaust herself to claim that win, meaning she couldn't kill as much this year. A few ways I manifester her character development include calling her a gun nut instead of gun maniac V: but also, she did drift back towards her allies now and then and help, while the fact she drifted away at all still showed that Pitohui is still the same woman as last time. Picking when to use certain weapons was definitely a trick in a similar way to Basu's charges. Getting the grenades out at the right time for someone who goes in deep is key, and the Photon Sword having limited charge made me constantly consider if it was time yet. Having her two definitive guns on hand I felt was a good pick of the initially too large assortment, and I do wonder if certain tools would have been lost in the clutter if they hadn't been thinned down. I know Frost had more than I expected her to have on hand when she did her inventory, but that was partially me forgetting small things like the swiss army knife rather than the things she had been deliberately holding onto. Pitohui's trench knife was definitely the lowest on the ladder of usefulness of course, but while she didn't leave a hot streak through the Brawl, she gets to keep her ego by placing in the top ten again while showing that sometimes skill does carry you far multiple times! Of course, if she had dropped out there's the old "big threats get more focus" argument to save us from the concerns! KINO WITH HERMES sort of hit on the issues Aimiko and Cauren did, aka people who Pitohui reading this might not have the context for! Mainly, people who come into the Brawl with a goal besides killing are climbing a huge uphill battle. Getting people who worked up the courage to fite for 10 million bucks to turn back after all the pain while everyone is watching feels like it would work only on select people, but Kino still had her moments, such as trying to pass on success to Leo and things like watching her ammo count. Ammo is rarely a concern in the Brawl save for when it makes for a dramatic moment, but having each bullet be a hard decision was an interesting angle that I could follow through on! I do wish I had done more writing of Hermes dialogue, especially since I wanted to come up with a misunderstood phrase but never found the right spot for one without it being forced. These two are rather reserved and don't seem like they'd speak uselessly so setting up and paying off would be harder for a mixed metaphor joke too. They did a lot better than expected considering their angle too, and one reason they didn't get a big moment before their fall was because it felt like they were going for that "avoid detection" angle while I still didn't want them to just chill and do nothing. They had the Honoka clone thing, they helped with Jester Chao's takedown, and were there for the Mystery Fiter reveal, so they were around until they were forced in the spotlight. Stealing Hermes I did consider, but it didn't feel right. Maybe he should have gone with Jake and the two could have been closer allies! Of course I have this thought in retrospect where it does me no good! One rejected idea I had was Leo and Kino both in Grab-N-Go for their fite and you can see the hints of it, but the store was wrecked and filled with water at the time so I pushed Leo out and he had his fite with Kino outside instead. TSUBASA was a character I don't think I had much investment in Pre-Brawl but now I really like! She was still the stern swordswoman early in the year who was just starting to break out of that shell, and while I worried about having her enter the Brawl alone and then attach to Carla, Carla was good for turning it into an angle of friendship and leading to the moments where Tsubasa was less warrior and more human. Besides the symphogear joke, having the Brawl step aside for her to get a gifted dress was also me poking at the idea of softening her up while also giving her something that would help her both in Brawl with taking more hits and out. Of course, she ended up facing the Grab N Go girls in her outfit and got stabbed in the neck instead of where the outfit protects, so it didn't look like it helped too much, although her taking the shelves like a champ was meant to represent that. I tried to get good use out of all her abilities and she cropped up a few times so she could use them, but I think some like the shadow ability could have had a spotlight moment if things went a different way. I look forward to where Tsubasa goes partially just to justify my interest in her after finding her interesting putty to work with :V Poor JACK SPICER got pretty low, but again, stacked field. I did want him to have time with his own body in the Brawl to better express his personality and approach to things, the Jackbot Olympia was just too strong and rigid to really do that! It tanking and reflecting the Explosion magic was something I had hoped no one would come up with but me but I should have known with so many people evaluating it would come up, but it was also perfect for giving Megumin her moment without it  being TOO insane. Thinking up how the reflection would manifest kept going back to ice blast even if that might not be the perfect reversal, but I like CKR's drawing of the ice attack, especially the snowflake eyes! The ice trench maybe could have been mentioned more besides it later use in the Stocking vs. Mel battle. Jack's nervous character was fun, especially since its more nervous enthusiasm instead of Voyd's straight nervousness. Jack trying to be cool in taking down Big Zam was fun, especially since they were all comedic themselves so the fite could play into that goofiness more. A lot of early Brawl is pretty silly, but Jack still got to be awesome and goofy thanks to circumstance! I do wish I had conceived of something better for him in the Pre-fite show besides being silly, but I'm not sure what could have been more fluidly done. Meeting the Zakos in advance would be foreshadowing but weird to wrangle with other plans, and it would leave Grab-N-Go pretty empty. Lastly we got MYSTIA LORELEI and my battle to decide how much of a heel to make her look like. I should have known Pitohui planned explicitly for her deception to be revealed, but at the same time, it didn't feel in character to know she's on television and be fully committed to looking bad for the sake of success. She tried to spin it as Enid was a traitor instead, and I actually used some of her talking with Elliott in the Jester Chao event for specific inspiration on how she approaches it. She's a lot more forceful and accusatory than conniving or deviously clever. She gets her way by trying to put you on the defensive and in a bind where her suggestion is an out from the assault, hence why her trickery was to try and turn Enid attacking into her as the more blatant and visible betrayal. Of course, her allies were naive but not really the kind to hold grudges, so it was more Enid and Mystia in the situation and she couldn't pull on the backup needed to succeed against Enid. I think I mentioned earlier but Enid was going to give her a seed that was supposedly the seat of her power in the Brawl that Mystia would crush at what seemed like a moment Enid would die if she lost, but a more plausible deniability approach worked better I feel than something contrived. Mystia could claim she was trying to help even though Enid was put in a tight spot by the tactic. Enid having allies of course also limited how much she could do her singing that otherwise could have caused musical mayhem no doubt, but the night sparrow still got to draw on her attacking methods like the claws and blindness so she wasn't all trickery. Her being a morally grey Touhou really intrigues me, and she was the only Touhou in the Brawl that didn't join the alliance known as the Touhous! Mystia at least died at a point where she didn't have to betray someone she'd get more heat for. Enid is a grown woman and a pretty serious one too, so it's not like she betrayed someone pure or adorable that would make forgiving her after harder to justify. She did kinda betray Greater Dog and all of course, but not directly is the important part!

GOOPER BLOOPER

Since GRAB N GO was mentioned relatively recently let's lead with them! I do enjoy that the Salvager event got to show off the store early and start putting ideas in my head for how it might be fought, but one thing I didn't anticipate would be how hard it would be to draw it doing things! Getting destroyed in its KO, having only Reiko get KO'd, it was odd working in an entire business front to the picture while still showing the important information. Picking which girl would go down first was a matter of a few things. Reiko going out first would make the Grab-N-Go less capable, Mary was the better fit for taking down someone invading the store with her stone cold attitude and willingness to get physical, and that left Jinako to be a bit uneasy with her role as the survivor so she got her highlight by carrying the torch despite having the least clear benefit to the team of the three. It was a very nice way to get all the girls into the Brawl instead of having to slip them in individually, but I think the store itself was sort of in the Nepgeardam range of height, meaning it wouldn't be part of kaiju battles but could dominate smaller groups if it got going. It certainly faced off with both sides of that coin, Bobby getting giants to wreck it and small invaders cropping up to try and take it down. Specific items in the store was a bit hard to decide on. I considered them having Pennzoil but went with the deliberate swerve to Quaker instead partly so it wasn't like I was legitimately advertising for them :V It's just an oil brand I knew back when I made the original joke! Kitty litter needed its mention and the Dr Pepper popping up was one of those wink wink moments for self-appeal. The entry never said the main sign could shoot lasers but it felt like such a good visual that it felt right to do for Bobby's takedown, although drawing it again was a challenge in concept and sizing. The smokescreen was the only tool I think didn't get a big showing but it's also because that's a retreating weapon compared to the more active ones like the hoses, and the shelves did their job at the time but were taken out and left the store with few interior defenses. I was worried as I put Hibiki in there at first as I had no plan for getting her out! Sometimes I just write myself into a corner and then we get something out of me letting myself reach a vulnerable spot. WIDOW MAKER was a Veteran we practically had to have, and the Widow Mech was something new for the Brawl even though I've written it before. Widow Mech did have the whole "keep track of the damage" factor though as after the Gamera battle I was a little surprised how much damage I let it take. I wanted the battle to be pretty even and deserving of the gravitas Gamera gave it so Mecha Widow Maker got torn up to the point it was sort of limping from then on. Widow Maker herself went pretty far but I saw no reason to de-mech her until it was time to reveal Stag Beetle. Gooper put the stowaway hint in his entry and I guess others didn't pick up on it since it surprised people! Stag Beetle was who I knew it was meant to be to start and I just needed the right spot to put him, and then I couldn't resist the callback to the eye removal he did because of the eye damaged Enid had already suffered. It was robbed of its visceral nature by being a dangling electronic one of course, but I would have probably drawn the eye removal and even told Goop I would if he didn't draw Stag Beetle's arrival :V It wasn't meant as a threat, and I really like that triumphant looking image of him appearing that we got better than what I would have done. Just like how I can draw Widow Maker with ease after doing it so many times, it was easy to slip back into writing natural Widow Maker, but I did wonder if I should acknowledge the baby revival at first before I gave it a bit of a bump after deciding to do it. It interrupted some action in a way that let it settle as well, meaning Basu and Rain weren't going to have their big battle yet because Baby Widow Maker was such a momentum killer. I did realize we almost got some legit eyegore when I came up with the idea of basu's rope dart landing between those big ol' eyes, but while older me might have let it happen, I decided to spare people :V I emphasized her genre savvyness more then some years, probably because there wasn't much competition in the meta sense and the anniversary year was of course a chance to get a little meta, and being a little meta actually inspired things like Big Zam getting a second shot off to avert the expected outcome. CORDIE AND CACTUS GIRL I was worried would place pretty low and they kinda did, but the alliance as good for Cordie getting in stuff before her demise and her Morgan fite really got to let her be fully spider before the end. Cactus Girl of course got the bigger focus by dint of being able to continue on, and while she's not the kind of character you might expect to do much, her attitude was a perfect fit for jokes in the police crew. She was pretty simple battlewise too, just spikes and a lasso, but bringing that no-nonsense attitude and outsider nature into things made her play off others well, and she was even pegged early on as a perfect fit for a Saguaro PI BBB1 callback with her death method. I felt a little bad for burning her and Morgan both, since fire is a bad way to go and Cactus Girl could legitimatelly be unrevivable if we're cruel about how she handled it, but of course Goops wasn't and we got someone in the Brawl we might not have ever seen otherwise! This is becoming more about Cactus Girl but the entry did sort of become about her because Cordie could only do what the tractor allowed, but cute spider girl was welcome and someone who hopped on the bus the exact right time. Would she have become a forever wish list character otherwise? Who knows, but I don't feel like she was wasted here even though her impact was outshined by her ally. FROST was in the same alliance as the girls and basically became Cactus Girl's replacement ally, their simple power sets basically complementing each other even as early as the Laura fite. Damn did that girl go far! One of the more surprising high up people I feel because perhaps we emphasized her normalcy more than the fact that even on Curse she was incredibly capable and hard to beat. She knew how to control situations and I definitely had a lot of fun with that barbed wire that perhaps did more than people anticipated. It was 50ft of barbed wire and it gave Frost a versatile tool that wasn't limited charge traps! I tried to keep track of those charges too but learned I was being perhaps too hesitant in using them. She still got to use most of her stuff to their potential though, even the granola bar! Having one smoke grenade made it important to use it well, and come to think of it, if last year was about the crossfire chaos that was carried over to this Brawl with multiple people fiting in clusters, this might have subtly been the year of precise strikes with certain skills and limited use items. I didn't just throw them out without thought, their moments were meant to be important! Flare gun was one of those tools that sat around a while because it was waiting for a moment, and taking on the Citrus Duo was made better for leaving some things on the table until the close and personal scuffle. Of course, having a trap user get near to the top ten was a little worrying since she had to fite in more open areas, but collecting a gun helped with that some, and she was more smart about where she engaged than people who were comfortable in the open spaces. And lastly, XYRA WITH TOKIKO who you clearly can't accuse me of bias for considering they were some of the worst performing goopladies! 47th isn't bad though, but like, it's an odd spot where I can only shrug and go "well, I was rooting for ya Xyra". I did appreciate having the room to make a new Xyra form, and while all of them were based on systems more directly, I feel like the Non-Sensor I went with can be her Xbox 360 form if we need to tie it to one since it embodies where the Kinect started. I almost thought of it having straight up be the INEPT boss from Yooka-Laylee, but when I looked up its design I saw the concept art and the Non-Sensor they didn't go with was perfect for not being a thing from something while also embodying the Kinect and its concept. The idea of sensing the traps was a good impetus for the new shift because I didn't want to just do something that was like "different but strong" to something like Xyra X. Which forms she used came pretty natural to the situation otherwise, although Gamesphere getting mentioned offhand rather than focused as deliberate because I didn't feel up to full-on featured inclusion despite wanting to still make the joke. Like many characters, you got a lot of fun stuff, and it can't all fit in, so I wanted to get Xyra X in for sure and Stadia was a flexible one to pull from and new too, but funnily enough, Big Bone never got her day! It's part of the reason the Pre-Fite show specifically pointed at its unreliability since it never did appear for a battle. I wanted some vanilla Xyra in there too but she is kind of just the eye laser combatwise. Tokiko I feel like did a lot more in my head than she did in battle. I think her and Almaric was meant to be a closer battle but it wrapped up quicker than anticipated, and I know I wrote out a better pre-fite show scene for her in my head than what hit paper when it was finally time to write it. Her focus on heroism is why she had the double KO angle, and attempt to take down a mean threat that didn't work out because of her inexperience and low power. I think the detail is what needed to be cranked up rather than the situations, and I almost didn't have Xyra shoot the Kinect's really weird thing green lasers at Almaric so that Tokiko could fully get the kill but I decided it felt weird for her to sit by and watch her ally die to poison without doing something!

DELETER

I think Del and I both were surprised OPTIMUS PRIME both got the push he did and went as far as he did! He didn't do anything after Season 1 nor was he a definitive character of it, but I guess we were left waiting so long that it was an explosion of support for something that felt like a huge nostalgic pull. He had the real world connections too no doubt as in to his media franchise. I was a little surprised he didn't bring his Energon Axe because for some reason that became his weapon in my eyes, maybe because of playing Transformer games. Still, he was the sort of noble giant who was easy for keeping people at bay. There wasn't really much use for his trailer's radar function, but it ended up proving to be the perfect equalizer for the fite against Motormer where it was kind of hard to think of a truly powerful way the little volkswagen could break through the Autobot leader. I mentioned earlier that the Matrix of Leadership saved my bacon when it came to blowing up Brawl Planet, but you know I looked that thing over when it cropped up and considered if it could make a transformer. The SS Literally Can't Sink could have been a fun one if it didn't have to sink so early, but not much else leaps out at me. Maybe a horrorific take where Motormer's car body becomes a transformer and destroys his organic components which would make Sheep happy at least :V Oh yeah, guess I'll mention here that I left out Motormer's transforming cannon because of its ties to Midwich plus it was more fun to play with subdued weapons, but it could have been the equalizer against Optimus before the trailer crush happened. There was a version of the KO image where CKR misunderstood what I meant about the trailer crushing him, since I said it was the Semi trailer without the truck and she read that basically opposite and we got this:

Not oriented correctly or anything since usually the images sent to me get gussied up in some manner before posting, mostly rotation! Other than that, the main thing I decided to emphasize is his original more heroic persona. The Del entry had a sort of almost worldweary bent to it, like Optimus here would be more jaded and bitter despite losing his memories of the time with the Kobbers. I probably would have had Lightwing support him in my big effort thing if Del wasn't specifically trying to bury that part of Optimus's history! JONESY came back for another go and I think it was a more definitive one too. Entering in her normal form a few years back and relying on Omnus didn't feel like the Jonesy we expected in the Brawl and was sort of Jonesy on the decline as well, but coming back with no current baggage on her let her slip back into the classic Firebat armor and Brawl how we all expected her to back when she rose to prominence. She got to keep some of her post Manhattan stuff too by having the demon stuff pulled in, and funnily enough, despite pegging the Sega Hard Girls as her killers, I was worrying that maybe Del might not be happy with that outcome since he seems tepid on them and I mostly tried to avoid having a video game boss directly take a kill. Instead, I decided to take Del on his weakness listing and have Jonesy's demonic powers backfire! I did consider the possibility of calling in a demon and thought of maybe cute ones like Doomrider but he sort of turned away from the Warp so that wouldn't work. Nothing solid ever came to mind, so instead, Jonesy pushed too hard and got blowed up. The warpfire was a good lingering danger too that impacted fites like Oda and Pitohui so she still left her mark even though her main battle moment was probably facing off with Ren. That whole little skirmish was almost confusing to me because I knew cloning was in the back pocket the whole time with Elliott nearby. Jonesy being like "fuck it" on the grudge felt right too. I know fiting Sine would be ultimate callback time, but just like Carla didn't want to be defined by a grudge, I feel like we had two seasons plus of a grudge that sort of extended unfortunately out of RP, so let Jonesy have a clean battle where she fites as herself without anything weighing it down conceptually. It helps to have aversions and stuff too so things don't feel like a samey procession! KAMEN RIDER CYGNUS aka Annie Bishop, if I had known that killing Blancwing would permanently depower her I probably wouldn't have done it but it seems like Del is really running with the idea so I can't say I regret it! She got to do a lot with them in the brawl too, although the concept of the Advent card deck and all was a bit too wiki crawly for me to go in-depth about them. I went with what Del noted so others didn't have to try and piece apart the things that sent me to the Kamen Rider wiki, and she used the relevant ones besides the shield since I felt she'd want a strong weapon out at all times to match her aggressive style. The scene on the Literally Can't Sink where she fought on the dance floor was a scene planned before the Brawl results were even in and one of the ones I had very clear in my head before it was time to write. Cygnus making the deal and taking her weapon back anyway, teleporting in by disco ball, it all was something I really hoped would work out and while it got a little twisted in that I had to kill DJ Grooves earlier than intended, I still got my scene. Cygnus also got a fite that didn't lead in a kill with Avox, a moment type that doesn't crop up often because damn would the Brawl be long otherwise! I did actually worry about Blancwing due to its soul-stealing concept but also having it get killed was planned very early on too because having her out of her suit seemed like a good lead in to her death. I think the design of the pre-fite show dojo was specifically because Cygnus made me think of mirrors so much so it had to have mirrors even though they weren't really relevant! I considered having Blancwing sort of floating luminously in them, but I also worried about making the metal bird to Nyarlathotep-like.  BUBS or as his entry calls him Thnikkaman, is me averting a pretty common joke type I do. Paper thing disguises often work or are viewed with mild suspicion in fites and such, we even had one last year with Robbie Rotten! But I kept calling Bubs by Bubs to really nail in how ineffective this one is, really playing with the idea that even the universe knew this specific disguise is pretty shit. We still got Thnikkaman jokes from it like the pre-fite confusion if anyone is meant to believe it plus Bubs trying to pretend that the Thnikkaman died but Bubs is here to help. As said the fite on the ship was pretty much ready to go before the Brawl was ready to be written, and it provided the setup for playing into Bubs's merchant side. I wasn't sure what Bubs would give Annie at first to mess with the birds' choreography, but I knew it would be something and I like what I settled on! Bubs's shotgun was also a good fit for instigating the Drunks having their debate, so Bubs definitely filled a role here even if he didn't get far. While he was simple if you looked at him statswise, he was a pretty good mold for the sitautions he ended up in! JACKET was a surprise entrant, but a really cool one! I really need to play his games even though I watched someone play through both in their entirety, but I think most of the spoilers faded from memory... only for me to dig them back up specifically for Jacket here! I didn't delve too deep into the masks talking because I wasn't sure how much to retool them for RP compared to game and instead had simple "here is what the masks say" statements, but I did toy with his narration style a bit in Pre-Fite and a little more subtly in Brawl. Perspective shifting is important to battle rhythm to avoid it feeling one-sided, but I wanted to pay tribute to Del's twist on writing RP narration. I've anticipated the day I'll need to figure out Gridman and will probably do a similar mixed approach. maybe with some indicator like Gridman saying "fine I'll wear a text color to make this easier for you". Jacket's time rewind was a fun concept too. I definitely leaned more into brute force with a mix of experimental for how he used it, feeling out a foe without concern for his own safety since he knew he'd be back and could try again. Of course, the idea of that time rewind being stopped was important, and even though attacking Crocomire was a good way to set up for a karmic death by having the Friendlies avenge him, the Nebulous Time concept felt like a better way to do it. Having a half dead Jacket was fun, and he'd be able to make Sakuya less insanely capable before he went so I got a one-two punch of finding an appropriate death for Jacket and a way to nerf the time maid. Swapping the masks without showing his face is probably not something we're supposed to think of, but I kept mask-swapping low since I felt like he wouldn't do it too liberally. Going for weapon retrieval makes sense in Hot Line Miami terms and he did get some so it worked out, but I was worried about him not even starting with so much as a bat! While this hired killer probably could have had a higher bodycount believably, I don't think he was really underutilized save Rasmus not having a good spot to come up and the realities of balancing his strange narration approach.

DRACO

Let's lead in with my top vote for this Brawl, DEMONDE, who I would not have placed lower than her animals if I had any say! DeMonde's bag of tricks was big and fun to pull from, the vampiric glove having an obvious moment of importance but sadly I never found the right moment to whip out the manta ray cloak even though it was pretty fun in concept. If she had been brought down to just Lizzie I think it could have been feasible, but sticking with George and Oda would be in character and she wouldn't just go hop into the water for a dip. Early on I decided I didn't want DeMonde to spend too much time whipping up concoctions and all for her alchemical formulae, as we saw in Roller Derby she got really good at high pressure use of them and reading "DeMonde starts concocting so and so" again and again could get a bit stale. Unless she would be interrupted it was important to get to the fun part. I had the DND spell lists open when she was doing her thing, and while Cleric didn't get as much show because it's not as hearty a list to pull from for offense or trickery, it was nice to go through those old lists like I did in the past. I think the last time I looked at one was for Malizza appropriately, since that was the last fite I did before Brawl :V I find it sort of funny that as I wrote her I was a little shocked that DeMonde wore such regular pants! I don't know why that's crazy, but it felt like she might have something else on! One thing I considered was having George later reveal a giant scorpion tail that DeMonde affixed to him, but how would he hide it and how would she apply it if it wasn't there to start kept it out. I can't even list how many spells DeMonde has to use that I couldn't work in, but most of them were just me seeing them in the list, going "that's nifty, maybe I'll find a spot for it" and never doing so. Despite being distinct entrants, THE RAMPAGE TRIO were basically DeMonde's assists in the same way the Dawnlings would all work together obviously. As soon as I saw building climbing prowess as a strength I considered having them climb the ones in the city area, but I think the closest we got was maybe George on Grab-N-Go unless not even that got in! Lizzie did get time in the Slums underwater, but there she was as big as the buildings so it still didn't pan out perfectly. Ralph's webbing had to be used once I learned of it, and even though I tried to watch the Rampage movie before the Brawl, it wasn't available in any reasonable way. My family's got like four streaming options and still Rampage is squirreled away on something else! Ralph was picked to be the first out though because he didn't have the raw strength of Lizzie that makes the alliance fearsome or the intelligence of George that makes for more flexible fiting. I didn't really realize that Ralph was placed so close to other deaths that might affect Draco though but I didn't want Gino going out without something on his belt, and Ralph felt like he was in the right power range for Gino and Mel to work together to take him down. Ralph was funnily enough the one with the most built-in flexibility when it came to powers, and maybe the movie people gave him that because he was the middle child when it came to obvious uses. George was perhaps the highlight of the group though. Lizzie hit hard of course, but George was able to act a lot more humanlike because he's an ape after all! Putting the barbed wire on his fist got a surprising amount of mileage. For some reason I now forgot I thought of using a different Rampage monster for something, I don't think it was even Brawl related, but I'll leave Draco to any Rampage pulls... although looking at the wiki now, it's hilarious. https://rampage.fandom.com/wiki/Monsters Look at the lower Rampage monsters from Ultimate Destruction, where it starts saying "drank Scum Soda and had a violent reaction" but then someone starts trying to punch up the identical descriptions and then slowly the descriptions, even the longer ones, become formulas for later ones! I'm very happy to get the three giant animals though, and it's funny that just being big and strong doesn't feel like it's such a huge edge these days. They weren't really pegged as major threats but still held in a long time! CUPHEAD TRIO seems to continue Dr. Deer's trend of getting in the Brawl through a second chance event and not going far. They basically got a pre-fite show all about how Cuphead would die at the start though, me picking on that gambling weakness for what it was worth. Each one having a different shot type made them stand out of course, even though fiting situations didn't let them always get the most out of the hypothetical best use case scenarios for them. Miss Chalice was a surprising addition but I feel a smart one. Cuphead duo was familiar from the Secret Fiter Scuffle, but Miss Chalice was a new addition that would make their fiting stand out, and as shown in Pre-Fite, it gave a different attitude to the group. If Mugman had been alone after Cuphead's death he might not have been as good a match for Ping-Ping. The soul revival thing is a fun idea and one that lets me be rougher with characters. I'm still itching for their DLC to come out though, but it was announced enough in advance Miss Chalice could attend our little bloodbath. I thought about watching the Cuphead show in preparation but it seems like it still isn't out? Most of their abilities were pretty straightforward and just filtered through different attitudes though so it was just about figuring out how they'd be firing in the current situation and if they could leap for revivals and parries! Parrying pink stuff was a fun concept but not as much pink stuff as I would have hoped cropped up in the action. BIG ZAM was sort of like Big Bobby in how I almost got him last year but he slipped from my grip, so when he came back and Draco got worried about him this year, I made sure to put in my effort post to show I appreciated having the Zakos finally! The trio's dynamic was fun to use when the battles started to go into the cockpit, and Big Zam itself was still an imposing threat despite its bumbling owners. Destroying the walkways was both a convenience for my writing and a good way of getting that attention you don't want in a Brawl to justify Big Zam's early exit. I know some people consider Big Zam the entrant but I'm not sure it's technically allowed by the way I lay out the rules since it doesn't seem sapient in any manner, and that's one reason we didn't get a Big Zam hijacking moment. If it had stuck around longer though its possible it could have happened and I could have had Zakos scrambling to get back into it, but instead it had to go down with the zakos to appease the possibility of rule quibbles in the future. I don't want a precedent biting me in the butt, but I dodged it expertly and still got us to have Big Zam use most of its weaponry and fite some big and strong opponents. Tyzien was a good normal sized for for it that could pull off the KO, but I had Mecha Widow Maker on hand too so I wouldn't have to have Tyzien blast apart the giant mech just to seal the deal. Zako banter was certainly a fun thing to write and why I had more than one cockpit invasion, and these bumbling robots accidentally killing one of their own worked well in context. The double Big Zam beam was explained in Widow Maker's part, but something unique to this part is me looking up Big Zam info to try and capture their weapons perfectly and then getting scared off the research! Gundam doesn't seem like its too clear cut on certain aspects and I worried that watching the videos and reading about it seemed to deviate a bit from Draco's stuff and its own descriptions elsewhere, so I stuck to his entry stuff! This also came up with GAMERA AND EBIRAH and while wiki research on Gamera famously bit me in the butt once long ago, Ebirah inspired a few wiki trawls and... they weren't agreeing on him much either :V some called him shrimp, others lobster, some just said a fictional crustacean... mainly, I was looking around for anatomy stuff. I wanted to use the image Draco provided first and foremost but a better picture of the tiny legs and such would help for how Puddlenaut attacked the stomach, but again, Ebirah has looked different ways and people disagree on why and even what is on him. Gamera's angle for fiting Widow Maker was a really good idea on Draco's part! I think Gamera went the perfect distance to pull it off too. I broke them apart for a bit so that Gamera could sneak in a kill on Conductor and Widow Maker moved off to face Big Zam in the mean time, but they could come together soon and resume the fite without it feeling like they're at a stalemate for too long. I tried to give the fite a lot of the old FYM feel with things like the heavy damage, heading into space briefly (a reference to BBB3 in a way!) and having Gamera lose a leg! The leg loss partly was because the Plasma Limb is such a cool ability though. Still, these two staples going toe to toe for a big sendoff to their years in FYM was worthy of the respect and weight behind it even though they weren't really rivals so much as buddies facing off finally. I am still sort of sketchy on the whole "characters as narrators" concept in RP, but Gamera was the first and feels like, if anyone has a right to it, he does, so he got a narrator joke in too since this is probably his last turn on the Brawl stage so why not try to really give him the showing he deserves? Ebirah gave us a good water battle early and one to give Puddlenaut an early showing so he's not waiting to win or anything. I do lament that I couldn't do a citrus joke with him, Mel or the Citrus Duo could have pulled one off, and I remember weakly thinking maybe the island has some, but instead, he was just a big mean crustacean machine that roughed up our aquatic attackers before he bit the bullet. His concept of keeping people off Gamera was smart in that it meant Ebirah would go for smaller characters and both explain what some people were up to and why certain kaijus weren't ganged up on! MISS BLACK GENERAL AND GG-CHAN were the real wild cards though. I was unfortunately not among the people who were briefly big into her and GG-Chan so I didn't have the canon behaviors and all to go by. I did do some research though! More reading sporadic scenes of GG-Chan from the manga that seemed to be most of her cutest moments, and then random Black General scenes as well. Getting Black General's name down was maybe harder than her character though, and I tried to stick sort of close to both the tone of the entry and the scene we did get establishing RX Group. The not being able to get a knife at Walmart ended up being a fun concept for a Pre-Fite Show, especially in how I could avert them entering with a knife all the same without making them weaker than necessary. Who knows what the true strength of these two could be if acting at optimal capacity, but I went with a "bite off more than they could chew" approach. Black General also wanting a hunk meant she might run afoul of Panty if I had them target only the available hunks, but since I know Draco likes Hansel, I pegged him as a good target for her attention. He's not totally hunky, but he's definitely good looking as a human, and the Dakota jokes that might not arise elsewhere were fun to slip in here. Fiting with almost nothing to work with at least meant Black General showed off her normal might, but GG-Chan I feel like I probably should have accentuated her noisy movements more but also it would probably slow down the action to do so. She got her embarassment in, I knew Bree would target this character with Meiling if she could so I did it for her, and GG-Chan got some focus in the Brawl as well by being separated in combat by the Royals. Funnily enough, while I considered having Game Gear and Mega Drive reveal their names before the Brawl to make writing them easier, I didn't, and stuck to their longer names mostly. This may seem like a tangent, but while Mega works as a shortening, Game Gear still didn't have one besides maybe GG, but we have GG-Chan over here. We now know Game Gear's name of course so it won't ever happen again, and it's not like anything was hurt by removing an acronym option I would have refused anyway, but the GG-Chan name is certainly something! Never found a different name for her but also digging for Black General stuff wasn't always easy since a lot is in Japanese still.

RAINBOWDASH

One entry means we only need to discuss RAINBOW DASH! I'm not truly sure if this is the last year for the pegasus pony we've had with us this long. Her user seems like she might not settle for anything but the eventual win, but it's clear some interest wane may mean she doesn't bother eventually. We got her for the ten Brawl run though and I'll tell her when it is Brawl time next year, but who knows if she'll keep going. She only did three pieces of art this time but they were all big and explosive ones at least. The character, I wanted to make sure this could be her last Brawl if it is, but if she comes back, I can't guarantee those won't be her going out with a fizzle if they are her finale. This year though, she had the perhaps long overdue match with Dawn and got to be taken out by someone my sisters enjoy, Widow Maker. It was really playing into the longrunners, and while she didn't go for Gamera or anything, she did get to get in a Mac Tonight kill of sorts to head out on if she is really retiring. Some years I don't dig into the old moveset too deep for RD, but this time I decided to whip back out someone like the Rainblow Dry that have been on the shelf for a while just so that Rainbow Dash isn't predictable every year. She did come in with the Sonic Rainbooms like usual though, mainly because again, if this IS the end, you have to have them! Last year she might not have used them if not for Kaede really, but this year had to celebrate Rainbow if she's no longer gonna stick around. I would have loved for her to win, I have so many plans for how it will go if it does happen, and they're staying under the hat JUST in case. I did think maybe RD the user would enter the Pokemon Eiscue this year but I don't know if I had any other suspected entrants, but of course, she was slow to enter and just went for the sole Rainbow focus, and she got far at least! Tank was definitely treated much better this time though. BBB3 you could say some old habits like expendable assists were still pretty hot, and Tank being just a tortoise with a propeller made him easy to toss out without much celebration. However, the inexplicable necropost gave him new life as a meme, and with him back in the battle, I had to at least respect him and make him more part of the fite instead of a tagalong. I did have tagalong moments mostly to emphasize the speed disparity, but he got to squash Stag Beetle and even contribute to the finale! Still not sure what RD might think when she learns that Tank went the distance but Rainbow Dash didn't, maybe that might sate her? Tank is Alive was definitely done for the meme, and I briefly considered having RD draw the image of Puddlenaut hoisting him up triumphantly, but the need to explain it (even with deceptive wording) and her general low output meant it wasn't very feasible. Making Tank useful was a bit more natural than expected, and I think I said it before, but Tank helping Puddlenaut was even an idea before Tank lasting until the end was imagined. Tank's role in the final fite was almost lessened though, as in, he was just gonna suddenly appear and help briefly instead of tangling with Tails, and the Game Gear assist was definitely more than even I imagined when I got to that point. I think, now that I'm more comfortable with Brawl writing in general, I can give unassuming characters like Tank moments!

SPY

Alas, while CONDUCTOR AND DJ GROOVES brought a lot of new gimmicks to the table, The Conductor couldn't ride a wave of inexplicable success a second time. The train being able to stick around so much last time was a great asset, and that was partly why Uncontained Whimsy didn't have too many onboard battles and some that were ended up pretty weird. I had plans for the SS Literally Can't Sink, the most obvious being just going underwater in general, but while I got the scene I basically had ready to go before any votes were made, the Two Birds boss battle was a monkey's paw in that it lead to their early elimination. DJ Grooves was killed instead of The Conductor because it felt wrong to reward his massive success last year with an immediate failure this one if I could literally decide which of the two died, and having that death weaken The Conductor was a good excuse for why he didn't do as well. He definitely went down swinging hard this year specifically because of his impressive indomitable spirit, and he even took a basically wrecked ship to a fite with a kaiju just to get all that piss and vinegar out in one glorious attack. DJ Grooves, I listened to a compilation of all his voice lines, and tried to get in his personality where I could like the pre-fite and the exercise video joke. Seeing the actual Two Birds boss fite made me really want to replicate parts of it, it was a perfect mix of chaos and the other Brawlers aboard the ship could contribute in their own ways, and Kamen Rider Cygnus was durable enough to have multiple things pop up during it without outright killing the target. This certainly won't be the year Conductor is remembered for, but I tried to give him the best sendoff I could with the results, and he even got to get use out of the ol' knife again. OCEANUS being back in battle was a fun chance to go for the ol' RoBro full of toys style writing I did back in the first year of RP. I noticed his middle finger missile is gone, but they were overfilled with weapons and Oceanus's kit is more cohesive now. I made sure to play with the Robot Master weapons a lot, and since this is Spy's last Brawling year, I made sure he got in one big impressive Goop-drawn punch to go out on. It's no God, but the god options were limited! Oceanus getting killed by a facepunch perhaps isn't the most original idea though, but it was more "he's brittle, and if we're gonna have him shatter, let's be a little thematic with it". Having Puddlenaut as a buddy did mean that he could slip into and out of battle as well as if to refresh what attacks felt fresh to see. I do feel bad that Oceanus is so low confidence here even though I know a plot will put him back on a good path, but the middle placement is kind of appropriate/harsh for that atittude and I just want the goofy green guy of the past to be happy is all! He is pretty much the Spy character even though Zephyrus is one of those titanic figures of early RP, and so the year of Spy's last stand having Oceanus place in the middle just made me hope for more. I did still give him a few little fites around the place so it can't be said he didn't make a good stand and he used his abilities a lot, so I hope this important character got his proper spotlight. LEONARDO is what the kids call a complete character, in that he's got his happy ending and you can of course find new stories for him, but it's nice to see that some tales end with people in better places. We're basically bringing him in for a fite when he is technically at his best because he's all sealed up and at the top of his game. His magic is better so I got to have more fun with his weapons than in his first Brawl run, he's got a weapon this time so he could fite properly up close, and while Ricard isn't here, he slipped into the Royals alliance and took their help pretty far into the battle. He's probably the most unassuming of the Spy entrants because he's more subdued emotionally, but because he's short, he got a very strange death! He got to be a bit more personable in his fite with Kino when they talked, but he certainly ended up in a strange situation near the end. I definitely have a soft spot for him since I had Edyth romance him, and now that I think on it, the idea behind Greater Dog killing Leo was probably because they're both knights, it just ended up manifesting in a very strange way. RASPPULE was hard to spell because of the two Ps, BUT ALSO deciding if he's together or not was a big question. I didn't want to kill them while they're Rasppule JUST because it's easy but considered the idea still, and ended up having it be that Appule would die earlier so that Raspberry could have a good "I AM more powerful now!" moment as his little Brawl sendoff thing. Appule will always have his little Brawl invasion to lean back on for something memorable, but Raspberry getting an ego boost was a nice way of helping him out, although I did wonder if it was technically possible... and then said who cares and decided the meaning and interesting angle of using the special ki abilities was a better angle. I do think I could have used the fused form MORE but also I'm not sure how I imagine the Brawl's time frame in general. Does it truly last til midnight? Is it shorter in real time? The only defuse we got was from weariness, not time. I know I did consider having others be inspired by the fusion dance to try it themselves, but I won't pretend to remember who it was and almost think I did mention it elsewhere so perhaps it will reappear to inform us one day. I do wish I had worked in their Ginyu Force maneuvers, I even researched them and had them in my notes, but one thing about DBZ moves is the build up and situations needed to make them fluidly enter the fite. Mostly Rasppule would fite people on the ground and their one possible fit for DBZ fiting was on their side, so it ended up being mostly fiting, beams, and quirky behavior for these two. BOB BIFFORD being back went surprisingly well! I do always feel bad about the Champion Drop, where a champ often fizzles out early in the rematch, and while it makes some canon sense since people want to take the former champion out before they're trouble or gang up on them, Bob really went the distance! Not in his Title Defense year though, so that can also explain some of that success. The new toys definitely helped. With no Jim for gimmickry, Bob would probably be reduced to tackles and slams if he wasn't armed. The Skaven stuff was one of those free ticket things and so I researched the Skaven a lot, but nothing too big popped out to me, so I had sort of vague poisons and all be the main thing instead. Gnoblars I probably latched onto more than intended and upped their abundance accordingly, but living ammo was an interesting tool! The t-shirt cannon, I didn't see Bob being so silly he'd use it often, but for what he did, it felt right and fun. Punching up at the Rampage Trio was definitely Blood Bowl-esque. One thing I forgot to say earlier was I did waffle on the mask removal joke with Bob and Panty. I didn't know if she wouldn't find him interesting after it since we don't know how freaky Panty is yet, but it was a joke I really wanted to do and Bob's beat up face at least means he has that to excuse her reaction. The image of the reveal is based specifically on Shrek removing his helmet and smiling at Fiona in the first film, to the point I told Goops specifically to use it as reference, but referring to him as a metal hippo came from my early look at the title card and saying how unfortunate it was that the mask made him look like a hippo instead of himself. I think I sort of lost track of the shield for a while and was scared to use it, mainly because it was used in the Nebulous Time Zone a little, but the good thing is Bob could fite well without it! I picked him to kill DeMonde specifically because he could crack her back for the kill believably and leave her in a revivable place, since DeMonde revival was an old worry and I knew, with Sonata needing back surgery, we can't say its irreparable comparatively. George getting revenge for it was easy to imagine next of course!

CORNWIND

We almost didn't get TYZIEN, so why not lead with him? Cornwind was worried that putting him in the Brawl would risk his winning year be with someone who wasn't one of the people he really wanted to win, and despite getting a good vote push, Tyzien didn't place too high all things considered. I sort of figured he would be in before Cornwind told me that worry and it's good we got him in still without potentially upsetting Cornwind's apple cart. Tyzien, as mentioned before, almost went ape, and Rasppule would have deliberately instigated it, either by bringing Tyzien to the side of Brawl Planet where the moon was visible or some other trickery the Appule side inspired, but when it came time to possibly do it, I didn't feel it was a natural idea. Purnima was slated to actually give him a replacement Deadly Efficient outfit after he tore up his clothes transforming that was going to play on his bad fashion joke, and I think Shimmer was even slated to cut off the tail but also finish him off? It was a crowded moment and too much for too little payoff, I really should have done any transforming during the Big Zam battle instead but wanted to have the tail shots be how the Zakos die since its a fun little way of killing them PLUS it made it more plausible they weren't going to get destroyed when Big Zam was being focused and attacked. Tyzien's Xingshinken, aka Pseudo-Super-Saiyan, also didn't get a big DBZ Highlight The Change moment oddly enough. He used it for sure, but perhaps appropriately, he was more subdued than the show as he is meant to be subdued here too. This was certainly the year of Cornwind's legends contract, although ASH AND CHRISTINE didn't exactly seem to live up to old hype compared to the others, again because of placement mostly. Christine, while it was noted she didn't really want to be in the Brawl, was set to die first to avoid any moments of her being blamed for failing Ash or others. While it's perhaps a little expected, it allows the character to do things unimpeded by negative emotions, and she got to fite with people like Jacket and all in a way that felt appropriate even though she never went for the kill. While we are told she doesn't want to be in the death tournament, I think she'd feel pretty bad if the people she cared for got even more hurt or did worse because of deliberate choices she made. Ash though, his thing was just biting off more than he can chew to go down rather than any failure of Christine or his own character. The Center power is an interesting one that I drew on more than usual this time because it really changed how he could approach a battle. He may be the more grizzled version of the golden hero (and from a meta sense, these two are definitely where the Golden Alliance got their name from despite the denials!) but I feel he'd have a different approach to fiting, hence the reliance on power trickery over physical power. Goops wasn't sure if Christine was wearing glasses or not because her reference picture is so small and poor quality and I went with no glasses, but I also wondered whether to emphasize her sort of withered state and chose against it just so that there was no "she failed the team" angle again. I have to admit I kept forgetting his sword was Injustice now while also knowing simultanously it's not Erdrick. The extent of Christine's time manipulation was a question I had a lot to myself as well, since she prefers it for healing but also could benefit in combat a lot from using it for other reasons. At least Stream poisoning is a good reason they don't go nuts with these powers! JOY definitely didn't get as much a spotlight this year partially because Cornwind's playing up the funk she's in. I actually didn't intend for Pitohui and Joy to have any sort of rematch at first but circumstances drew them together, but it wasn't one either felt they had to stick to because they had moved on from the need to have it. I definitely didn't make Joy such a slouch she couldn't hold her own though, but she was more willing to work with an alliance and hang back because she wasn't the thrillseeking firecracker as a result of new life perspective. She still was destroying a city, so it definitely wasn't a major reduction! Her lightning weapons mostly manifested as guns because it felt the right way to use her with her cowgirl angle, but I made sure it wasn't exclusively guns! Riotous was back and I think I found a good use for him even though it was separate from Joy. The barbed wire trap made sense as something to separate them, so the mechanical horse got to be used in the Avox battle as both backup and weapon against her, and I made sure to really have it crunched up in a ball so its reconstituting or anything wasn't plausible. Riotous's moment of course meant we didn't get anything armor related from him. Recency bias probably meant having Joy lower in power than last year meant she would have felt underplayed comparatively anyway, but she didn't do bad either, it's just like Pitohui where she became more carefully applied rather than needing the explosive moments. SINE returning was a very appropriate anniversary year idea, although I did sometimes forget that her new weapon means you can't really tell its her on the field. Seeing her in the title card made me remember, and while I wrote the suit appropriately, I still always sort of imagine her face exposed still because she's Sine! That cropped image of her is pretty iconic by now! Anyway, some might have seen the pre-edited version of Sine's entry where she had a pocket dimension full of extra weapons she could reach into that I immediately went in and removed. That is a no-go big time! I already don't care for the idea of a bag of holding in general since it takes the fictional allowance of hammerspace and exploits it outside of its intended convenience/cartoonish purpose, but the main thing about it was that it was basically just Sine bringing in all the weapons she'd ever went but having them to the side. I know weapon allowances are strange these days and people like Oda can whip them out of thin air due to their powers, but there's a difference between exercising your powers and making a possibly endless weapon stash. Of course, Cornwind had no issue with its removal, but I felt it an important detail to mention for future reference I guess! Sine's suit already could make most any weapon similar to Cauren's Ensemble, and that had the reasonable limitations of limited mass, time to form, and other little things that make it more balanced. I perhaps could have been more Spawny with it to match the suit's inspiration, but I felt more of a pragamatic approach worked better for miss logic here. How much I wanted to highlight mother-daughter stuff weighed on my mind, but they've never been too affectionate, so it was more pragmatic but also had the tint of Cosine Family Revenge when her daughter came after Neptune for the death. Her run this year won't be as memorable as BBB2's of course, but it was free of humiliation and Sine fought like a Brawler. DAWN was back and the throwback to the old body was a neat touch. I even acknowledge the history of Dawn's many Brawl bodies with Rainbow Dash's confusion over it, but going back to the Hypotenuse who I didn't know what to think of at first was nostalgic for sure. I did wonder how much the Devil's Plaything stayed the same, but once I committed to it mentally having the same properties of being a bunch of arms linking together, I became more confident in its special usage for gripping and such. Dawn's entry mentions "special additions" vaguely as another blank check to me, and I decided that while Dawn wouldn't be able to use nanites for combat this year, she would have them in her to make new limbs to help combat the problem of limb loss that always emerges in these sorts of battles. It allowed her to become spider-like as well and I emphasized just how much her limb advantage was this time with how she killed Neptune. This was also a year of no Joltik, or French Anthems, or any of that, and while referencing them could have been fun, instead, we got her to have funny moments without being the butt of the joke, such as talking with the simpler Neptune and Rainbow Dash. Dawn overestimating her strategy against RD felt in-character without it being an unearned death, it's practically family tradition to have tunnel vision on your plans, and it wasn't like it backfired so much as Rainbow adjusted and got the kill. Who knows if she'll Brawl again, just like Rainbow Dash I had ideas for how it could manifest if it ever happens I won't reveal yet just in case, but they also shift the longer it takes to get these possible wins.

BREE

While we all knew KOMACHI wouldn't go the distance a second time, it was still strange to see her get 58th place. When the numbers are so big these days that doesn't feel as huge a drop, but it's also not bottoming out hard or anything which is almost more expected! She got to hang out with Nitori quite a while though, and I didn't need to store any cool moves until later in the Brawl whenever she came up. Distance manipulation was not only featured more, but Ash centered it to gain the edge against her, and Ash is certainly not someone to sniff at so his win over her was definitely plausible. Komachi killing Ping-Ping was mostly inspired by the fact she was perfect for cleanly cutting them in half and revealing the truth, but her method of ending them was more fun than just using the scythe. I decided not to have any soul stuff this year save for being tricked by Lord Death Man technically, moreso that I don't think she'd whip them out for something small, a factor that was important last year too! Komachi is sort of like Joy in that both have deteriorated in some regard since last we saw them but I didn't choose to really draw on that much, but I did make sure that there was no sleepymachi this time. I don't think she'd take a Title Defense as lightly as she did the start of the previous Brawl, and even though she was sleeping to start back then, she didn't doze off during the event at all. Nitori's water powers meant Komachi sort of floated around the alliance cluster which makes sense as a means of wearing her down too, and I had to make the extra note that Ash sort of slashed at the split corpse of Komachi to assure the kill after last year she held on after one hell of a body destruction. She did have help from some Touhous this year of course, although unlike some alliances there was a lot more fiting near each other or using powers at the same time instead of coordinated attacks. SAKUYA was great to finally get but Bree made no specific notations about how legal her time powers were besides to say perhaps the opposite about any limitations! I always think back to the old "no bringing a black hole" joke from old fite rules that we wouldn't allow something that instantly ends a match, but it still felt sucky to have to have a line in the Brawl specifically go "here is how we limited Sakuya's power". Maybe I could have done it in pre-fite instead, but the whole Nebulous Time Zone was partially to prevent her from being overpowered. She didn't have free rein in there and Bobby was a superior force in the time stopped plane, and by the time people like Bobby dropped out, Jacket did his damage to Sakuya and she couldn't use time powers so freely. Sakuya also got to experience some of that good ol' make it really far in the fite despite serious damage magic!  The funny thing about Sakuya's powers is, unless she gets up close and goes for the jugular, throwing knives around isn't really fatal so much as super dangerous. The swords could do more though of course, being able to pierce deeper, but I'm sure some Brawlers just picked them out and kept going with minor wounds. I think the real surprise is she did the best of Bree's entrants even though she's been pretty background since we left Vegas. MEILING of course has been going strong for about as long as Bree has used her, and for an anniversary year, I was glad to have her again. The Kill Bill outfit was one of those things that could be easily overlooked in art but I think we all got it right! I did waver on whether Meiling would agree to the Hibiki boxing match and see it through to the end, but I feel like Meiling would be willing to go through it all after committing to it. She did get to use her transformations and all beforehand anyway, repelling kaiju and such, and using her mix of new transformations was fun. Still, I fell back on the ol' fenghuang, which almost feels like a callback because it's not a favored Meiling transformation when she's in Bree hands. Partly because dragon form definitely does the same job in action events I wager, but the fenghuang form was both a good pick for calming down the illusion confused people and getting her up to Jester Chao. Her punching out Jester Chao was almost me continuing the initial idea of a quick takedown on Mysterio with a punch, but of course, Jester Chao was able to do a little bit more than just take a hit. I made sure to mention her mild ki attacks, partly because I feel like they get forgotten and partly because it makes it easier to imagine her in the cluster with teammates who also mostly attack from range. I do think maybe if her KO was different we'd see more move diversity, but I do enjoy that it allowed me to call back to the tai chi fiting research I did for her long ago and gave a unique moment to point at in the Brawl. REN I sadly can't say got her day in the sun, but that's because it would kill her! I worried about the fire kill because everything that can kill a vampire seems to either be super permanent or else not enough to actually kill them no matter what, but I appreciate Bree and Chao treating their vampires as more middle ground, reasonable creatures instead of how fiction flip flops between indestructible and paper thin. Ren did get more than FuzzFace battles though because just having that would be pretty sad, but she got to defeat Laura and she put up a hell of a fite against Jonesy despite how confusing it was. I do think maybe I could have used her forms more, but also her opponents were heavily armored and robot... and FuzzFace. All very hard to kill things that being a wolf wouldn't do much to! Lower placement meant less time to really dig into the power bag, but I was sure to keep the psychic part present even though I'm sure I could have easily leaned in full to vampire if I wasn't careful. I think if she went further she could have gotten a Basu fite but Jonesy landed in a good spot of tough enough to take her on but tough enough to get badly damaged too. I think Ren's bristly attitude was partly why she might not have received the votes needed to really rise above the rest, but for someone in 76th place at least she didn't just show up to die! ENID went impressively far on the other hand, really making the Friendlies alliance one of the unexpected surviving alliances late into the action. It helped it was trimmed down to a twosome for most of its run I guess, and it allowed Greater Dog to be pointed at action without having to get around his innocent nature. Enid's power was said to be diminished on Brawl Planet since she's not near the grove but I never wanted it to be so limiting we couldn't see her powers really thrive. It does come up in narration at a point, but while I did do a lot of mana weighing because Bree gave specifics on which ones cost a lot, she was never going to have the limitation be the grove is not near. Instead, the big mana ones sat in the pocket until she needed something big, and most of her times on screen involved her going around the lower cost ones until a big one pops in to clean things up. I don't think I'm too happy with my treant art in the end because I had a much better mental picture but no time to really try hard for it, and I bet I still would have disliked it. While Dr. Stoke is certainly incredibly intelligent, Enid felt like the head of the Friendlies, appropriate since she's responsible for uniting them. I fluidly got to get in her clawed bark arm when I was worried she'd be mostly long range magic! Having the spell list was helpful but also meant I didn't use the regular plant magic as much as I might otherwise. It's not a complaint at all, but sometimes I would think of doing it and go "wait, should I use a spell?" but usually the plant magic won out when it was interesting enough, and we got enough of it that I don't feel it underutilized at all. I avoided Beast Sense in favor of more legitimate allies and bonds and Innervate didn't really have a place, but a lot of the spell options did crop up! SONIA is our last Bree character and I was wondering how to count Malazanek in regards to rankings and character count and such. Counting Gregor's horse and Tuskarr Jouster's turtle always felt strange to me but also, Chocobilly didn't because he's more of a mount with character and a history. Uncontained Whimsy meanwhile was counted by others while I was unsure how much its organic nature would make it more vehicle than living thing to account for, but it died with Purnima to dodge that question! Malzanek died close to Sonia partially for the excuse of why she would go down, but also so the KO pics, despite not being one after the other like some double ups, could be reasonably paired despite being essentially two separate images that didn't need to be! That is the only picture of Malzanek technically since I never made one for the horse before the Brawl or anything and I think the lack of picture might have lead to the perception too. I did enjoy having demon horse because it was such a good mount to add to Sonia's fiting ability, even the wing claws getting play, but Sonia really was mostly the sword when off him. She used her negotiative abilities pre-Brawl though, but in the midst of things there's no much room for debate, and she still did hold her own against GG-Chan all the same. She did TRY to convince Royal Guard 02 so it wasn't forgotten, but also time is a factor and she didn't have long to appeal to him. Malzanek's flight and fierce nature does make him interesting for a mount so it was never like I had to force good combat from the rider and ride.

BIG BLUE

Big Blue brought us three fiters this year, and let's lead with the recently mentioned ROYAL GUARDS. Surprisingly lasting a while despite being pretty basic in their source game, they got to do a lot with a little. The ice cream got to contribute not only to the battle by being shoved into people, but it was a good set-up for the Pre-Fite show, although maybe looking back I should have introduced the setting before it was relevant rather than waiting until it was addressed. Anyway, Royal Guards 01 and 02 kept their Undertale names because it's not exactly like there was something else to call them. Bunny Guard and Reptilian Guard were used without the uppercase of course, but 01 and 02 had that very mook-y sense to them that fit their origins but maybe not as much my attempt to give them more character and strength. They held their own and were actually pretty strong, befitting their muscles after all, and while Big Blue probably just picked that specific picture because it was cute, I made a whole moment of Buzzkill questioning why one was armorless and the other wasn't AND IT WAS A STRATEGY TOO AND NOT JUST A JOKE! Buzzkill wanted them vulnerable and attacked their vulnerabilities, but the real weakness was one dying. I watched their fite in Undertale again of course and read all their possible dialogue, and I even added more "bro"s and "dude"s to the writing later on when I felt maybe it wasn't enough! Main thing though, when one went down, the other would always be sad, so 02's run after that had a lot less bros and such. Describing their attacks from the game was interesting because its unusual danmaku, and I seemed reticent to outright say the vegetable shaped ones were actual vegetables because it is very weird they use them! GREATER DOG was not too surprising an entrant looking back. The dogs were a lovely part of Undertale and it's a silly character without being a pushover or anything. Greater Dog I at first conflated with Lesser Dog and wondered about the pets making its neck stretch, but looking into it I got the appropriate reminder before mistakes were made. Greater Dog is noted as being in control of giant armor rather than filling it though, and I RAN with that feature. Greater Dog's interior armor became a battlezone for a bit, and it allowed me to kill Greater Dog without being too mean to him by having him trapped in the armor and drifting off into space. I wanted the image to look better but again, time constraints, but he didn't die sad was the important bit! He was pretty strong and capable and helped a lot in the fites he was in, but I made sure to give him dog moments like chasing Optimus and not meaning to really kill Leo, but also he wasn't totally toothless as the Chicken Man kill was deliberate. He and Crocomire were practically meant to be friends since they both have that innocence while still knowing they have to fite. Greater Dog didn't go too deep into dog to prevent it from looking harsher to hurt him, and I was happy when I realized the death method would allow for Mammoth to get in a straight up golf swing into the Brawl. I did write it to avoid the JoJo comparisons when I realized someone might make them, and they still came up anyway but I guess everything is a JoJo reference anyway so why fite it :P MEGUMIN was Big Blue's last entrant but now in Gooper's cast! I didn't expect her to stick, but I feel like some of the research I put in now has more applications beyond her early drop out. That barcode on the butt knowledge I have will be relevant one day, I know it! Anyway, I watched a lot of videos of her doing explosions, all in subs, and I never realized until I did that the voice clip EXPULLOOOOSION I've heard elsewhere came from Konosuba! I did see a lot of dramatic long spells that do seem sort of pulled from Megumin's imagination more than really invoking certain powers, but if that evaluation is wrong I still stuck to incantations from the show. She only really got to do the one EXPLOSION pre-fite and one during the Brawl, but I'm glad there was a lot that could be hit by it! One Brawler died, Mystery Fiter robots were decimated, Death Man got his first fake fall, it was a busy blast before you even factor in the reflection! I did feel bad that she had to go out so fast and only got one in, hence why Nadine copied it with her power, but Nadine didn't even have a really good moment to do it due to her placement! Instead, she was used to curb the incredible strength of DeMonde's alliance a touch, and while blowing up Oda's guns was sort of User fiting Self, it was more to explain why Oda wasn't going too ham too early. Megumin had to go ham as early as she could to make her mark, but it's good she'll see more out-of-brawl use so she's not just a footnote in our history. I try to make the lower placing guys not forgettable or anything, but Megumin really was a one-trick pony despite me making it so she didn't wipe out from one single cast to ensure she was even less of one! Maybe if she put a knife on the end of that staff to make is scarier...

BRINEHAMMER

Let's begin with Brine on A3515 who, despite her name being a bunch of numbers mostly, I never decided to shorten an I continue to read out mentally in its entirety even though I'm sure some people call her Aesis. I guess it's that C-3PO kind of thing in my head that sees no issue with a small cluster of numbers and letters that makes it not bother me! Anyway, A3515 was the most spell listy of Brine's entries this year whereas some years he really brings me a book's worth, and I've said it before I enjoy that! It wouldn't work with every character, but especially for A3515 who would be a shieldbearer only without them, having this collection of abilities I can reference to amp up her participation in some form is really helpful. And of course, Brine is also good at limiting them, even though that's no doubt just a carryover from the roleplay systems his characters are often based in. While A3515 did heal a lot, I tried to make sure the strength of it played into the limitations properly so she wasn't pulling on the strongest one too often or anything like that. It is a bit of a shame that the way the rankings worked out meant she outlived her entire alliance, and like Elliott, since she was support she really didn't land a kill so much as constantly assist in the battles were they were achieved. Her own death was a bit awkward pretty much from concept to writing to art but it makes sense in the way it was executed, I think I just couldn't decide if I wanted to really break A3515's shield or not and ended up going with what we got with the fire and being crushed by it instead. I probably could have done more with her energy storing aura and things like the 4th level spells maybe deserved a bigger spotlight, but I think a defensive focused ally was a nifty inclusion in the Brawl and she had her moments like when she worked alongside Nadine where the shield really got to shine! Oh, speaking of NADINE I was a bit surprised how low she got, but maybe that was the curse of being pegged for copying the Explosion magic early! Whatever the reason I mentioned the Explosion magic quandary up above, but it was meant to be this lingering "uh oh" kind of thing but then she really didn't go deep enough for it to have a dramatic moment and I wanted the Steamworks guys to face her for archaic tech vs. future tech so Explosion would have rocked their world too hard. It was a good way to lower her MP for that skirmish though. I worried I wouldn't get to do much magic copying in general with her dropping so low, but her working alongside A3515 made me realize she could copy some of her ally's magic for a little help! Nadine's opponents actually got to draw out a few things from her still like her special eye augments, but I didn't really have her set up for the nifty Magic EMP that could have really messed up certain Brawlers hard. If there had been some troublesome magic user maybe she would have been the perfect character to bring them down for a bit. That big ol' gun was definitely a big danger for anyone who couldn't take it so that couldn't be used lightly either, but 71st place mostly meant that as soon as I saw where she was I had pretty much picked what she'd do in her short time and it was mostly "I wish I had more room to use her" rather than having rejected moments for her. If anything, things like copying A3515 just emerged nicely from her situation and gave her more to do, just like having the sword briefly come up! I had thought it would get forgotten since it was range vs. range but then I found a perfect spot for that little detail and it actually helped her a bit since they had no response to full on melee. ODA returning to the arena sort of benefitted similarly to Phoenix Ikki I feel. Having her back in was a nice way of seeing all her abilities and have them both feel fresh while also having the whole "there's that move!" thing. Of course, she brought so many new guns that it wasn't just all relying on the old tricks! In fact, it was probably too many guns :V I couldn't figure out which one she would want to use at certain points because she's able to conjure so many, and while I did like the idea of her stronger ones getting stolen, she can just make them go away so any weapon stealing was basically until Oda noticed the weapon was gone or wanted to use it herself. Otherwise, I probably would have permanently gifted some of the heavier ones to other characters. While this year Oda didn't do much trench digging or building up a space (mostly because it didn't gel well with her family's battle approach), she did get a bigger emphasis on how effective the floating weapons would be. Rather than facing foes like The Skeleton King who could handle them, Oda fought people like Ash and Pitohui who would struggle with weapons aiming down from every angle. Like I said, a veteran often gets to switch from the full platter being focused to one strategy really being explored, but at the same time, I did want to add in pretty much every Oda ability I could without it being a pile-on. The bombing run and all was something I really wanted to make sure got in there, but while she has poison gas and satellite lasers and all, it is a bit much to pull them all in unless she's really going to get multiple big focus moments. They're the big guns after all so you can't just keep whipping them out, but she got to use her more literal big guns, with me liking that Phase Rifle due to its destructive power balanced with lower speed. Very dangerous but plausible to avoid, whereas the Smartgun I had to kind of immediately incapacitate because that thing is sort of OP. Not that any of this is complaining about power levels, if she had a strength match they would have been fun to let go wild, but the Brawl doesn't bring many literal one woman armies so you have to balance her incredible might with who she will be able to fite. Of course, the list of weapons and all also made it make sense why the alliances were so busy without progress since going up against Oda is a survival game until you make the right mark! Being reminded of her blood composition made me really want to emphasize it somehow and that's partly why fire was so prevalent in the lead up to her death even though it wasn't directly responsible. MORGAN I was asked not to kill in too cruel a manner by Cornwind and I even said "believe me, I don't want to be mean to the precious girl either"... and then I set her on fire! And had her freak out when fiting Cordie! Every time I started writing one of those I realized I was perhaps going against what I said but it wasn't deliberate aversion! It is just how it happened! I did have Morgan pass out before the flames could end her fully though to spare her that pain. Morgan's drain power was a neat new method of killing someone. While technically vampire drains and stuff have ended people, the weaponized famine has not, and while this wasn't really the Brawl of murder innovation (I feel like I relied on stab throughs a bit too much maybe) it did have kills like this! Brine's scene of Avox talking with Morgan pre-Brawl really influenced the fact they stuck so close together, and while splitting the Golden Alliance might seem strange on paper, things like the different strategies and Nadine being distrustful of robots meant they could unite if it suits them but I also didn't have to have them all piled on top of each other either. Morgan's rifle having that little bayonet on it did wonders for its lastability since it suited Frost well. Morgan being information girl didn't get as much focus as it could have because of the size and spread of the alliance though, but she was sort of like a more active support compared to A3515, and she got in a few clever tactics like having her aura impact people from the other side of walls. Unless the other Famines have like, a list of magic spells, I probably got most of what I'd want out of a Famine in the Brawl, that being the draining ability, and yes, Cordie was picked to die to Famine because of the spider girl's association with eating stuff. It's the kind of irony I can't resist! AVOX is our last cool brine lady and part of the reason so much fiting happened in the city! The siren's tactics meant she wouldn't want to drive her allies mad with her song, but I realized pretty quickly that one way I could keep it at bay until it was worth using was Niftu's sirens on his mech. It meant Avox wouldn't be able to just quickly pull in everyone for an easy kill, and while I do wish she had done the strange consuming of people's synapses and such just to show off the power, we're also dealing with people's beloved characters and all. Maybe if Niftu had been able to stick around more after the mech was destroyed he could have been zombified, but then he'd be a pretty useless little ball instead of the kind of servant that would be interesting to have. Avox's rubbery body almost sabotaged my death method for her! I wanted the whole Riotous soccer kick to the head to do her in because it was a funny way of dying and it kind of showed both Riotous's removal while having an interesting takedown for people who were in a pickle on how to kill her. However, whether or not she could have her neck snapped or skull cracked suddenly became a concern for me. I mean, she's sort of described like an octopus who can slip into surprisingly small cracks, and they can be killed with a good head smash, but I made sure to add the extra touch during her death of her tail going crazy and hitting her with the beam as well, which would definitely be able to distort her beyond her capacity to handle it. Gravity powers are a fun toy of course that I feel I got good use out of, and while I voted A3515, I think Avox is my preferred Brine lady of this bunch now because she's just a fun little alien weirdo. She definitely got to do a lot by being the primary hazard of the city with Morgan making her more of a terror, and while her powers could have made her hard to believably keep from going on a kill streak, I think I found a good balance for what could reasonably limit her!

CUSTARDKITTENSROCK

And lastly, my youngest sister and her entries! SPIDER-PIG made his big return rather than the expected Custard Kittens or even Wet Tiger, and I think I even directly asked her why not the cats but didn't get a direct answer. Instead, she brought back the big joke of her BBB3 entry, and this time around, I tried to have him do a little more. It helps he was on the ship with other small and limited power individuals at first, so he could contribute there, and him being flung around the SS Literally Can't Sink in its final moments was meant to be a fun touch. He got to fite Dunston, who was about on his power level, and Chicken Man, who overpowered him, but he wasn't just some throw-out character despite his impact being small and his foes being pretty small physically. Sort of like Piggy Tyro and Dudeguy Man, his fite was of a scope fitting the pig. CKR specified that the spider sausages this time were spider sausage links, which I took to mean the little connected line of sausages but could also mean a bunch of individual ones. However, having the spiders in them was no longer a secret but it did its thing as well, helping on the ship and killing Dunston even though Gamera didn't feel the pain. While CKR has had a lot of fun and interesting entrants over the year, some like Polka-Dot Man really leaving an impression, Spider-Pig was sort of a fun callback to her sillier side, and I almost feel like how I wrote him here compared to his initial run is a bit of a sign of how far Brawls have come in general, where I try to highlight all I can rather than seeing a pig in a Spider-Man costume and feeling like I struggle to make it do something important. I guess it helps when the field is 80+ strong and you can find a good match for such a character in there somewhere! LORD DEATH MAN was not a comic villain I expected even though I do know him thanks to Batman: Brave and the Bold. I do wonder if that's why CKR selected him in general since I know we both liked the show and that's how we got Music Meister in the past. Lord Death Man in his source material of course did more reasonable death faking rather than the absurd lengths he went to in the Brawl, but I felt it more fun to really go wild with how he pulled it all off. Like, this is a man so obsessed with pretending to die that he has an incredible degree of contingencies in place and tries to set things up perfectly to play into how he intends to deceive us this time. I did waver on it at first, how far should he be able to fake it? I even tossed in the one mention of a wire puppet just so we can see that there is some logic to the more wild death faking such as the grenade death in the pre-fite show obviously involving some trickery that didn't put the real man at risk. Other things, like how he was counting on a very precise cut, show he lives on a knife's edge, but one thing I had planned pretty early was that DeMonde would be the one to undo however much I leaned into defying death since she would be learned enough to get around all the deceptions. Drawing them all was a concept I had but wasn't sure I'd have the energy for, but Goops art saved the day and kept giving us the gimmicky death where KO wasn't spelled properly to hint at his survival. Funnily enough, he died a lot but his weapon for fiting with was not very extravagant, so he left a big impression despite not so much being a threat as he was hard to put down. While Hellcow didn't have much personality because cow, just like Polka-Dot Man, I really like to lean into the fact these are supercriminals CKR draws from, so they are often much meaner than other entrants or menacing. Like, Lord Death Man was a goofy death faker in concept, but Otto was overwhelmed by how unkillable he seemed, and Death Man killed him almost passively since he's used to killing as part of the job. BUZZKILL, on the other hand, I just made into a huge dick! I don't think CKR had much in mind for Buzzkill and when she got last, I really didn't feel too bad about making her a full on jerk. I watched her stuff in the Community episode that featured her and she was either sort of normal or had the moment making fun of the GI Joe PSA where she parodies overly zealous hippy mindsets, but I decided to just really lean in deep to trying to spoil the fun. I didn't get too meta or mean with it because I feel it could undermine things, especially since she'd be at the start of the event, so it was more like a bad person taunting Jewel Man and the guards instead of me going for something meant to really bother real people. She was sort of fun to write because I could remove the filter or have her pry at something that really isn't worth prying at just to dig her hole deeper. Her ability really is just the buzzsaw too so perhaps going out early is good since it meant she wouldn't have to try and make that work too much. She had a bad attitude and that did not pay off at all, and while I'm sure CKR would have liked her to go far just like any of her entrants, I think she'll enjoy the character I gave her because she usually does! I'm sure she'll love to hear how I made FUZZFACE almost invincible and a nuisance to some of our most serious and angry Brawlers! FuzzFace, in Double Dragon Neon, can't be killed once you find him, the player needing to turn off the game to get rid of him or just have an unfortunate glitch make him go away. He's helpful in the game, dropping all the goodies and all, and his high-pitched warbling is easy to tune out, but you can hit him. That doesn't make items drop since it seems to be the opposite in that he'll drop them the longer you don't hit him but we'd never see them in the Brawl if that was kept :V However, taking no damage as he gets hit meant killing him seemed implausible, but we still know he can die in canon because he is resurrected from a grave, and plus, we'd have to kill him in the Brawl somehow. Ultimately, I keened on the idea of the friendship aura, FuzzFace needing to stay friendly to keep himself safe, but if he drops the behavior, then he leaves himself open to injury and therefore death. Of course, despite concocting this weakness, I think Basu ended up finding something that could logically kill him anyway. Choking on snow you're buried under is definitely a new Brawl kill method in a Brawl that could have used more of them, and while I struggled to think of how to draw that at first, I went with chubby cheeks FuzzFace in the end since it captured the important part rather than showing the entire snow crush scenario. Ren and Basu were picked for reasons I feel obvious, they were two of the entrants most likely to get flustered by his aggressive friendliness and loudness, and making him a sort of unwanted friend for his joke probably panned out better than if he had joined someone like the Friendlies or just attached to someone neutral to him. He didn't go far so he couldn't be the companion of anyone, but he was also probably always going to be support no matter what... even if that was going to be unwanted support like what we saw. While I can't lean into the surrender focused fiters too much such as Kino and Cauren, I think treating people who want to be just helpers as such is something I'm better fit to handle these days! Our last character to focus on in this whole blogpost is perhaps the most CKR entrant I've ever seen. PING-PING is such a gonzo idea for an entrant. It's not even like Varrick and Zhu Li spend too long in the platypus bear in the show, they're consistent characters throughout Legend of Korra with a long arc and everything! I know because it has a surprising number of AMVs I came across highlighting the relationship when I did my research. One thing I picked up from that was the "Zhu Li, do the thing!" line that cropped up a few times, but I didn't want it to be too gratuitous or used out of place so I think we maybe got 3 or 4 total depending on if you count pre-fite show. They are fun characters in their source material and I feel like they could be interesting in regular RP, but of course, here they were defined by the stuffed bear! In the show one scene has them drop money out of the stuffed bear's butt that I considered using, I think it might even be in my notes to do so, but instead we got a lot of fun weirdness like the fite with Mugman and Miss Chalice going into the bear. Slicing it in half was its destiny of course and having them spend some time trying to fite more as humans instead of in their ridiculous disguise, and one thing I enjoyed was writing it move illogically like when it was trying to clamber back on the walkway by swinging its butt around. They may not have gone too far or even left a huge impression, but I think similar to Spider-Pig or Wet Tiger, it's such a CKR entry that it's going to stick in our heads for years to come. In the show the two fite in robots and much better equipment, but its CKR, so here they are in a stuffed playtpus bear instead. The meta knowledge versus in canon knowledge of the deception was hard to balance, and I even made sure to have the pre-fite that gave us a good look at the two people piloting the bear was noted to not be seen by any Brawlers to keep the in-universe surprise strong. They also didn't outright say "we're in the bear" at all despite it being pretty obvious if you knew, and Zhu Li did drag it around and pretend to be it in pre-fite... It wasn't meant to be a perfect obfuscation of the disguise or anything! Just enough for plausible deniability in-universe!

And that, my friends, is another year's blogpost wrapped up and ready to ship! I know there's always more I could have said that just slips my mind as I write these things, and others I've said elsewhere so at least some information is out there, but feel free to ask questions, maybe you'll jog this old memory and I can give you the thoughts on why something happened or remember other rejected moments!

But for now, thanks again for joining me for another Brawl season. The future is definitely uncertain. Coming down after an anniversary year is always going to be a little unsteady and shaky, but I don't think BBB11 will disappoint at all. It will be new but familiar territory, a chance to continue to grow while still bringing everything we love back. We got our year to be self-reflective an make a menagerie of callbacks, but I am eager to continue to provide Brawls as long as I can, and I'm sure we'll continue to have amazing moments to look back on for whenever we hit the 20th anniversary and we do this angle all over again!