Detective Conan story arcs: The Beginning ("Conan Arc" and introduction)

Detective Conan is an extremely popular detective and crime fiction comic book series created by Gosho Aoyama over at the Shonen Sunday magazine. The series has been going strong for over 20 years by now as it first started in 1994.

The premise of the story is about an intellectual boy named Shinichi Kudo, 17 years old after the first movie, getting beat up by men wearing black suits (well, one of them) whose codenames in their organisation Conan later learns of being Gin and Vodka, and he gets fed a drug that shrinks his body into that of a elementary school boy. After surviving the attack and the heart

Gin is potentially the main villain of the series.

pounding, body burning side effect of the drug, he decides to go back home and has to explain to a good friend of his, inventor Professor Agasa Hakase, that he's in fact Shinichi. Conan decides that he will get his hands on the drug once more and sets his mind on defeating the organization. In order to do this he requires the help of many, many different people and the story begins as he moves in with his childhood crush/friend Ran Mouri and her father Kogoro Mouri who is a private eye drunkard that never gets any calls for work because of Shinichi. Conan will live with the Mouris, awaiting for different cases to come by making Kogoro a popular detective with a cheat in order to every now and then stumble on a case that the "Black Organization" may be a part of.. Conan meets friends in the elementary school he goes to and other different people as the story goes on.

The "Conan arc" takes place between episodes 1 to 128. In this part of the story the core cast of characters are introduced. The "detective boys"; Ayumi, Genta and Mitsuhiko that Conan befriends and joins tend to solve normal clue puzzle cases over the course of the series. The "DB" aren't that important to the story but they allow the author to come up with different, more normal mysteries and they also allow Conan to develop as a character over the course of the first 100 episodes as he turns from a murky person who wants to leave them as quick as possible into someone who cares and thinks "it's not so bad after all."

 Conan gets to meet his biggest rival and best friend, Heiji Hattori. As Shinichi is known as the best detective in East Japan, Heiji is the best in the western parts. This kansai-ben speaking character is a personal favourite of mine. He's as smart as Shinichi is but his biggest flaw is that he's hot-blooded in personality so he can change the way the culprits thought their plans would go or he can also dig himself into a hole and lose his "match" just as well. Heiji tends to bring his childhood friend Kazuha Toyama around with him everywhere, she's kind of like Ran. Once every fall or so there tends to be
a Heiji case in the comic series. His cases are soft-boiled, Agatha Christie-like supernatural murders with the usual "inner circle" cast and case, and a "sealed-off" setting for serial killings to potentially take place in.

We also get introduced to Shinichi's parents, Kudo Yusaku, the what could be the smartest character ever, and a great female character Kudo Yukiko, who plays a bigger role in the later parts of the story.
Another technically rival appears called Kaito Kid. A mysterious phantom thief that steals jewels just to get a peek at the light inside of them once you look through the gems towards the moonlight. The first few Kaito cases are amazingly handled and he serves to bring actually supernatural type of cases to the series as he's kind of superhuman in a sense. Kaito Kid is a tie-in character from another ongoing series of Gosho Aoyama's called "Magic Kaito." Conan isn't interested in mere thieves with his detective pride but Kaito's style is to trick the police and send challenges before the act, so it's a whole other story.
Conan learns during the "Bullet Train" case that the two people who drugged him are from an organization and have the codenames "Gin" and "Vodka." Another codenamed member of the org gets introduced called Tequila and an important character called Miyano Akemi is introduced.

The cases in the first 10 volumes of the series are mostly averagely written in the logical sense but are very much fun to follow because of the characters. Afterwards the author perfects his style and manages to write more compelling short stories as Conan's main pull is in the variety of the types of cases it has. Overarching story during cases, long soft-boiled cases, normal tricks, puzzles, apartment cases with closed room tricks and so on.

Aside from the individual cases I may talk about in greater detail later that's most of the summary for the introduction arc. Next up is the arc that introduces a certain traitor.

Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- sucks

The constant hype surrounding this adaptation of the Re:Zero light novel series has truly made me think twice on listening to hype in the community.

Aside from couple of movie type adaptations I've truly never liked any light novel adaptations because of the cringeworthy dialogue, one-note designs, overuse of tropes and cliches, a terrible cast of characters and a nonsensical plot that is almost purely fanservice. Re:Zero is not as much different from other LN adaptations the fanbase wants to think it is and it will more than likely be forgotten in the upcoming weeks after the series ends as it's currently in its 20th episode. One can only hope that there is not going to be a second season.

When I was getting into the series I just thought that I could get used to the animation and like it that way, as the animation is great in the series half the time. But no. The presentation since episode one has been really awful. The series repeats a certain pattern that is annoyingly clear and it hooks newcomers in with this so called "foreshadowing" that people like to call good writing. It's not in this series I can assure you and let me explain why.

Why!? Tell me why!?

 The story begins with a boy, our main character Natsuki Subaru, who is sort of a fourth wall breaker at first getting thrown into a fantasy world. Throughout the series it's as if he's never even been in the "real world" however, as he never once has a thought of going back there or anything. He's your stereotypical light novel protagonist with a twist; he's an emotional loser. Big time. He gets constantly attached to people he doesn't even know, all one-note characters. The side character "knights" in the series look like they're fodders from "Tales of-" games. Really generic looking designs for everyone except the main character, sometimes, as his face turns into all sorts of things during his "character development" progress which doesn't feel natural at all in the series as the MC has a power to keep going in a world where death may anytime be around the corner. He has a cheatcode almost literally. In comparison you can look at someone like Light Yagami from "Death Note," Light is a character who develops more naturally along as the story progresses as well as make choices based on his emotions (I know people will bring up that Subaru's a normal boy who's an overly emotional freak etc.). Anyways, as the story progresses the main character gets very, very annoying and overcomes his emotional obstacles and turns into a hero. Generic LN protag with a twist as he's an asshole in one part of the story. Oh and I've heard people say that the plot and characters are like in Higurashi... Just no... That was actually well plotted out and had better twists (yes I know "Re:ZERO has "twists") but it was stretched out I will admit.

Wow, an actually decent side character.

As I've ranted enough of the MC, there's really nothing to talk about any of the side characters. All and I mean every single one of them are just badly written cheerleaders in the end. It's time to summarize my problems with the so called "well written story" that the series has.
 Slight spoilers ahead.




Subaru, the MC of the story, has a power, or you could call it a curse, which he calls "revival by death." It allows him to quite literally revive in a way in which it seems he himself had gone back in time after dying. What does this mean, then? It means an extremely shittily fleshed out and repetitive storylines. The "arcs" in Re: Zero go like this:

Story starts as the MC is shown dying and revives -> we see the story go back to that point of "zero" which is a "checkpoint" in time that Subaru will revive in -> mc is unknowingly getting brutally killed ->  revive, same story we already saw, nothing gets skipped -> MC faces hardships and dies yet again in the end -> MC revives. Same freaking story we already saw once again and the MC dies after getting almost to the root of the problem and revives -> After collecting himself up and showing his true plot armor, he stays victorious. And yes, there may have been atleast one more revival and repeated time that the story was told once again but I'd love nothing more than to not remember that.
The so called "foreshadowing" of the series is done poorly because the story never advances. It simply loops and repeats itself infinitely in each arc without any real progression. The main character is an invincible self-insert that will make the watcher feel disgusted with him and sympathize with him.

Rating of the series: F for Fail

What is your dream

"While many can pursue their dreams in solitude, other dreams are like great storms blowing hundreds, even thousands of dreams apart in their wake. Dreams breathe life into men and can cage them in suffering. Men live and die by their dreams. But long after they have been abandoned they still smolder deep in men's hearts. Some see nothing more than life and death. They are dead, for they have no dreams." 
- Griffith from 'Berserk'

Lack of motivation, anxiety, downwards spiral in morality, negative thoughts, effort, time, money, feel of accomplishment, senses, thoughts and excitement. These different concepts and many other may have taken place in different fprms and ways in your everyday life during small things you like doing, wasting your time on, so to say. Coming home from basketball practise, doing everything you can to get noticed at work in hopes of promotion one day. Sweat and tears from positivity and negativity. Tonight I was thinking of the time it would take to write many stories as I have some in mind, but one which is still a work in progress, though not far from end, is still annoying me as I haven't yet found the motivation to finish it. Simplest way would be just to finish it. Write. That's easy in all technicality, however as I thought about these works something somehow surprising came into my mind... Why do I want to put all of the effort into imagining something like a novel series? After thinking about it for a while I still couldn't come up with any real explanation other than "I just want to see if anyone can create popular series" which is just a roundabout way of saying "I want people to buy my creations" no matter what it is. It's not enough of an answer for me.

So I would imagine many other have vague ideas of wanting to do things without a clear long-time goal in mind. You'd want to spend time doing something you enjoy or once enjoyed doing and have become fairly good at doing it over the course of your life, right? For me, I believe that thinking about what first motivated me to become invested in the art of novel writing would be a great help in figuring, molding out the form for what I truly want. Well, gathering the motivation and energy to actually physically do it is another thing.

Thriving for your dream goal may be hard, very, very hard. It's a dream for a reason, right? Many people are going to say things that will hurt your pride. People that don't truly even matter. Teachers, people on net, co-workers you barely even know. Anyone can potentially say something to you that they won't realize will without doubt hurt you, burn you from inside out. It's important to realize that nothing should stand in your way if it's irrelevant and unmotivational. Go watch motivational videos. You will have earned the place to keep going, to never stop from people saying "don't do this right now" or "you can't do that" or "this is not good at all, you should really stop" if you, yourself, know that you've put your all into doing something and hate it when people who don't understand your passion say something that they won't even realize the meaning of. Everyone's a different type of individual from the inside, much like our fingerprints.Anyway... Don't let people control your thoughts, especially the important ones. Chances are that they're not any better than, in fact they are most likely less experienced at what you do and you're not  the one in the wrong.

How to avoid getting caught by writer's block

“Get your character in trouble in the first sentence and out of trouble in the last sentence.” 
Barthe DeClements 

"Holy crap! That's alot of headaches!"

Camp NaNoWriMo ended for this summer just recently. I wrote my first novel, or maybe you could call it a draft, which had 50 000 words as a goal. I passed the word count  at 23:57 in other words right before the month changed, so just in time. Gave me a great feeling for a minute there. However the novel isn't done. I will probably get to 65 000 words by the time it ends, with all the editing and so on afterwards also being something that I'll have to go through.
Anyways, I had started my project 7 days late and had things to do for a good week with moving where I couldn't write anything, so if you were wondering "is it possible to write a novel in half a month?" The answer is a big "YES" even from an amateur like me who took his time thinking about the plot, characters and story. I can't confirm it but on the NaNo forums, apparently there were some reaching over 50 000 words in one day. Sounds ridicilous.

Ahh, yes. The problem of "writer's block." Truly a problem I've heard some people have. The story just doesn't start on itself, or the motivation just isn't there. That's true. I myself rarely had any motivation to start writing... Until I did. You see... I never hit a writers block for one simple reason and that was that I had started creating a work that was challenging 'enough' for me. After introduction parts I focused on writing something that would make me 'feel' many different types of emotions and disappear into the story for hours after hours without even noticing. Sometimes I stopped to imagine the setting in what it would look like 'in real life', which was a great way of adding words to the story as I described everything. Another time I took my time to draw on the 'Paint' program how a floor of a building would look like, how the rooms are placed on the floor and where the characters were at that point in time. Imagining it, writing it, experiencing the story made me shed tears atleast dozen times from the feeling of suspense I constantly had. Always write what interests you the most is what I'd like to say about this. 'Plotting vs pantsing' is one of the most heated debates when it comes to writing in general, but all humans grow tired on anything as time goes by. This is why we need variety in our lives, we need exciting, new things to happen to us. People tend to grow tired of plotted out stories and those will never be finished. To be honest, that's one of my fears also. Leaving a story unfinished, that is.

So... When it comes to pantsing, readers sometimes tend to have this notion in their heads that plotting = good writing, pantsing = bad writing, but completely plotted out stories, even if logically completely sound, may be the most boring stories out there. If you want to become an author you should try to understand what readers prefer and what they don't. Becoming familiar with the genre of the type of fiction you want to tell will get you far. I know "reading is boring" and so on, but if there's a story you just have to tell and you know the genre, you really should try to read that type of literature to understand how a story forms, how the rising and falling action works in actuality etc.

This last part I wanted to write this post about the most as it was what I used. It's pantsering, just technically forcing myself to write (though during these parts I mean in this part of the post I did enjoy writing those parts of my story) through everything. I just let my mind come up with reasons as to why something is there, if I was wondering about something, my main character would wonder about it. Twists that I could not have seen coming started happening in the story...
In other words: When you start hitting that keyboard, don't be afraid of the things that you may find as 'asspulls' in your story. This isn't the same as deus ex machinas and forced tropes and cliched writing. It's about you writing a story as it progresses. Once you get better at writing itself, people won't even tell the difference of a plotted out story or a pantsed out story. Though I suggest plotting it along the way. It takes a while to write, after all. Remember to avoid writing plot holes that may make you rewrite your story from half point on or something like that, that's terrible.