... babble for Lady_Aquill.
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So when I told you I like to babble, what I meant is I have verbal diarhhea.
(Lady_Aquill doesn't know either ff7 or gw so it's a bit hard reading that crossover thing. Sorry for the spam, y'all. Plz correct me on where I'm wrong. Or ohhh, quote your favorite bits of the canon. It's always shiny.)
Gundam Wing: Typical mecha show. Themes are political/realistic/normal humans in the future. Everything looks a lot like now, except with Big Robots.
Some 200 years ago the Earth created satellites at the five Lagrange points in space, the colonies creatively called L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5. Eventually Earth and the Colonies started having friction. Colonies want independence, Earth doesn't want them to yadda yadda. 15 years (?) before the start of the show, a pacifist named Heero Yuy was assassinated which makes things a lot worse.
Current times, Earth is led by a military coalition? I think? Or something. Military was important anyway. XD;; three political factions on Earth : the peace doves, led by the Peacecraft royal family before they were all killed ded, Romafeller (arms dealers and warmongerer generals who stand in the background and push to war) and the rising Organization of the Zodiac, also named OZ, which is a military faction following a rising star called Treize Kushrenada. They tend to be damn good with Mobile Suits (IE giant robots. mmm giant robots.)
From the Colonies, a group of five old scientists who worked on the first MS prototypes decide that fuck it, no, and they each make one superspecial giant robot with badass Gundanium plating; IE the Gundams. They were funded by some old noble family that wanted them to go to Earth and terrorize people and then drop a colony on them, mmm nuclear winter, but the doctors also decide to say "fuck it no" and instruct their chosen pilots to be a little more discriminatory in their choice of targets.
The pilots are all conveniently 15 and they all have number-based names but it's supposed to be invisible in-universe or something. XD
L1 : Heero Yuy (code name, he has no real name. His Gundams are Wing and Wing Zero.) Was funnily enough raised by the hitman who killed the real Heero Yuy (then the guy saw the repercussions and regretted it quite a bit. Taught Heero to shoot and everything.) At the start of the series, Heero is obsessed with completing his missions, but his action kind of say he's also trying to commit suicide. At some point he's tricked into destroying a plane that he thought contained Romafeller and OZ higher ups, but the plane was full of Doves. He spends a long time trying to atone for that. Heero is kind of weird -- cold and analytical, it shows he wasn't around kids his age while growing up, but also with a very, very high sense of devotion to his mission and his goal, once he's found it. To avoid surrendering his Gundam, he self-destructed it and himself with it. Didn't die because Trowa wanted to play nursemaid but that was close.
Also one day he broke his leg and set his own bone like a crazy person. >_>; He also threatened to kill Relena because she knew who he was, only to spend the rest of the series doing everything he could to save her life and protect her ideals. They forge a very strong connection during the series.
Heero has a sense of humor! Though it's very stealthy.
Duo: you can't do this! It would take a miracle!
Heero: A miracle for you, but I can handle it.
Trowa: *admires heero for self destructing* *ponders doing the same*
Heero: In that case I have one piece of advice for you. Dying hurts like hell.
L2: Duo Maxwell (Gundam Deathscythe and Deathscythe Hell): At first Duo comes across as a fun, friendly, animated guy; apart from the braid he's one of the most normal-behaving of the five. hahaha.
L2 is a very shitty run-down place. Duo was a street rat. He named himself after his friend Solo who died in his arms from a plague to which Duo survived. Then age eight, he got taken in by a church run by Father Maxwell and Sister Helen; no one wanted to adopt him because he was a hellion but Maxwell and Helen decided to keep him even though he was a dirty heathen, yay. (Best quote: "I don't believe in God but I believe in the god of Death, because I've never seen a miracle, but I've seen lots and lots of dead people.") Then the Resistance takes over the church because they think the Alliance (bad guys) won't dare destroy a church. Hahaha. Duo was out to steal them a Mobile Suit so they would GTFO his church, but he arrives just in time for Helen to die in his arms. Mm.
A few years later, he's caught stowing away on Professor G after breaking through some pretty neat security. G is amused and trains him to become a gundam pilot. By then Duo has started calling himself Shinigami/the god of death, because he's the common denominator between the plague wiping out his posse and the destruction of his church.
Duo is a competent mechanic and a great pilot -- eventually Heero admits he trusts Duo's skills with aircraft even more than his own, and considering Heero has to be the best at everything, that's something.
During the war, Duo spots Heero trying to kill Relena because she saw the Gundam; he shoots Heero to save Relena, but Relena gets in the middle to protect Heero from him. Then he's all "hey wait, NOW i'm the bad guy? D:" Later on he saves Heero when he gets captured and brings him and the Wing gundam to a ship full of scavenger/resistants he's friends with; Heero repays him by stealing parts of Deathscythe to fix Wing and then zips off. Duo isn't very amused, but I think he admires the ballsyness because he doesn't seem to resent him much.
During the series, Duo seems quite fascinated, amused, put-off and confused about Heero; I think he wanted to learn what was going on in Heero's head but most of the time not even Heero knows that. XDD
At some point, Duo gets captured in turn, and is about to be questioned, but Heero breaks in. He planned to kill him so he wouldn't talk, and then (... am I really remembering right???) kill himself because escaping seemed pretty impossible; but Duo just closes his eyes and smiles and he's all "okay go ahead", so instead Heero decides to break him out. Oh Heero. He makes so much sense. XD;
Anyway, Duo acts a bit like a joker (not as much as the fandom pretends, though, my god he gets angry too, he's not smiling all the tiiime DX) but underneath he can get very dark.
L3: Trowa Barton (Trowa Barton is also a codename. Gundam Heavyarms) ... the character I care about the least, so I can't explain him very much. He's extremely quiet, reserved and emotionless, but not like Heero who is very intense inside; to me Trowa comes across as if he's empty and waiting for something to fill him. *cough* *not like that >.>*
During the series his most notable moments are when he picks up almost dead!Heero and brings him back to the circus where he's staying (yeah really XD) then follows Heero on his "hey, family of paficists I killed, here's a gun, get revenge on me please" quest. (all the paficists tell him to STFU and live, because it's harder than dying) Trowa at some point tries to self destruct to do like Heero, but then his adoptive sister Catherine slaps the hell out of him and he feels Very Bad. u.u ... Also toward the middle-end of the series shit happens and he loses his memory for a while, but that doesn't last too long.
Trowa's speciality is that he's an acrobat; he can even make his friggin' gundam do backflips. Also he likes big guns that spray bullets yet he keeps running out of them. Oh Heavyarms. -___-;; Also he's totally fucking Quatre. They, like, play music together. And stuff. It's crazy the subtext they have. Sadly I don't care much about either of them, so. XD
L4: Quatre Raberba Winner (Gundam Sandrock) He's supposed to be ethnically Arab, but it really doesn't show, he's all blond/blue-eyed. Maybe he's a berber... >.> His father is more swarthy but not very Arab-looking either. He kinda looks spanish to me, actually. XD;
Quatre is kind, very polite, a good negotiatior, great at planning coordinated assaults, and he always gives his enemies a chance to surrender. He's also really, REALLY rich, seeing as his papa is the head of a huge multinational firm and more or less owns a huge chunk of L4. Quatre has 29 older sisters (yes really) but his dad wanted a male heir just that bad, I guess. All his sisters are test-tube babies; he believed he was, too, and it made him a little spoiled asshole because he was sure his father could just create another little clone if Quatre failed to perform, but then he meets a lot of good people (resistance fighters incidentally) who are test tube babies and it calms him down a bit. It turns out he's a natural birth (and having him killed his mother but who cares, her hubbie has a male heir now!) Quatre stays in contact with the ... magnanacs... maganacs... manganacs... stuff, and they treat him a bit like their beloved, chosen lord
Quatre wants to get down to Earth and fight, Quatre's dad is a hardcore pacifist. Quatre takes the gundam and leaves. Huge daddy issues. (it's even more LOLtastic because Quatre's dad looks like Trowa with a porn 'stache. Mm oedipus.) At some point Dad gets killed and kind gentle little Quatre has a HUGE breakdown, destroys a colony, and almost kills Trowa when he gets in the way (which is where the bout of amnesia comes from.) That snaps Quatre back to sanity and then he gets to spend some time guilting about it since he thinks he killed Trowa.
He's also totally gay. Especially for Trowa. Oh yeah. But people think he's a total uke... hahaha no. Quatre is very much of the steel fist in a velvet glove kind.
Anyway. He's interesting but too polite, so he's also mister Not Appearing A Lot In Asuka Fics. XD
L5: Wufei Chang (Gundam Shenlong, but he calls it Nataku.) Wufei's colony is full of Chinese nationalists who were exiled up there for being too pissy and stuff. Mmh. Wufei at 14 is the scholarly kind, complete with dorky glasses; he's convinced it's useless to do anything "meaningful" because nothing ever really changes; even if you do good, humans will always fuck it up again. Of course that means he clashes quite a bit with Meiran, his also 14 year old wife. (arranged marriage. They're both extremely arrogant and mule-headed, which really doesn't help.) Meiran is a spitfire who strongly believes in Justice and Right and Wrong and getting off your butt to fix things. She nicknames herself Nataku for some deity I'm not remembering right now. She's always training in martial arts to become stronger so she can protect her ideals, so the fact that her husband is a pessimistic four-eyes bookworm doesn't sit well with her. So she challenges him; turns out Wufei was pretty kickass even back then so he wins, and she's really not happy. (she believes that Right makes Might, like just because she's righteous she should win. Oh Meiran, you were such a kid back then. XD;)
Your Friendly Local Scientist was grooming Meiran to become the pilot of Gundam Shenlong, but when the Alliance attacks, Shenlong isn't finished so she takes a lesser mobile suit. Wufei thought he didn't want to get involved but it turns out that when it's his wife out there he does care. XD; He grabs Shenlong and goes to help her chase the assailants out, but it's too late, she was badly injured; she dies a little time later.
Turns out he did love her after all. So he decides to fight the war in her name, for her ideals. He nicknames the gundam Nataku after her. (he also inherits her silly "right makes might" ideas, which drive him to a HUGE loss of confidence when Treize Kushrenada defeats him one on one and then he mopes like a bitch quite a lot.)
At some point, his colony decides to self-destruct, allowing him to escape, rather than being taken over by the bad guys. Which is another rather bad shock. Prrrrr. he suffers so prettily. *__*
Wufei is proud to the point of haughtiness, has an extremely developed sense of honor and justice, firmly believes that weak people should not fight; he also comes across a misogyne because he goes "Onna!" at some female characters and wants them to GTFO the battleground, though to me it's partly that he's been raised that way, partly the "weak people shouldn't even fight", and partly that he compares all women to Meiran and finds them all wanting. He can definitely come across as an asshole, but he also has a sense of humor.
He's definitely flawed, but he has high ideals and he always strives to better himself. He has a series-long Noble Rivalry with Treize that ends up when Treize allows Wufei to kill him during the final fight. Turns out Treize had some pretty extreme and dubious methods, but he planned to sacrifice himself so there would be peace from the start. Wufei cries when he kills him. Woe. T__T
And since she's also pretty important...
Relena Darlian: Starts out as the pretty normal spoiled, beloved daughter of a pacifist minister. Finds Heero washed out on a beach, calls an ambulance like a nice girl, only to see Heero beat up the poor guys and steal the friggin' ambulance. XD; Some time later Heero turns up as the "new guy" in her class and she's all "hay mysterious and hot stranger wanna go to my birthday party :D" and he's all ^-^ "I will kill you." Then there's the incident where she ditches her own party to go after Heero and Duo has to rescue her when Heero pulls out a gun.
Anyway at the beginning she's pretty normal -- a little spoiled, used to being loved, kind of bored with life, but a good girl underneath -- then tadahh! Heero bursts in her life and everything changes.
Then her father dies, and she learns she was adopted; she's really the daughter of King Peacecraft the well-known pacifist and there are all these grand ideals she has to uphold in both their memories. (incidentally, her unknown brother Milliardo is now going around as Zechs Merquise, Treize's right hand man) She struggles with that, is used as a political pawn and smart enough to knows it but agrees because if she's in the public eye maybe she can do SOMETHING, and does a lot of growing up in the meantime. Kicked out of her figurehead "Queen Relena" position, does some more stuff -- and a year after the end of the series she's a vice-minister of foreign affairs in charge of collaboration between Earth and the Colonies, and she's barely 17. u.u And she goes by Darlian again, because he was her real father who raised her and transmitted his views to her, and she doesn't care about technically being royalty.
She's an usually serious young woman, with a lot of poise, very polite, gifted orator, incredibly determined; there's a lot about how she got her strength and determination from Heero's example... while he says he got his own from hers. D'aw.
It's in fashion to hate Relena for being a stalker, and she DOES turn up in a lot of places just because Heero was there... but then again he does the same. XD I like her, though I have no clue how to handle her most of the time. Thankfully, she has a lot of responsibilities so it's not hard to explain why she isn't in the plot much. XDD
(Common points between the younger cast: Real Names are overrated. Also, it's a bad idea to have family in the GW series. You will lose it.)
What else, what else... there's an older OZ cast who are more important than I make them sound, but I never cared much about them so I can't explain them well.
Final Fantasy 7!
Alternate magical universe with both cars/bikes/computer and magic. The Planet -- or Gaia -- has a different map, but the main difference is the Lifestream -- it's the vital energy and memories of the Planet and all living things, when they die, come back to it. When something else is born, its vital spark comes from there; when you die you can apparently hang out there, though eventually you become one with the rest. The Lifestream runs under the crust just about everywhere on the Planet. It usually acts like a liquid, but you don't drown it it. Physically at least.
For the plot, I'm going chronologically because all the revelations make it hard to tell it straight. Also for my purposes all the brand-new prequels and retcons and shit don't count. >_>
- 2000 years ago: The Ancients (also named cetra) roam the Planet. They're in contact with the Lifestream, and apparently their role is to "settle it" and then move on. Whatever that means. Then an alien, sentient space virus (haha yes really) crashes on Gaia and possesses a Cetra. The body looks like it's dead, but, not so much.
-Some 30 years ago:
----- a man named Shinra realizes that you can use the Lifestream as a source of energy, extracting it via reactors. Only problem is that it causes the crops to die, mutant animals to pop up, and the Planet to be kind of "hey hey you're killing me dude" but who cares! It's a huge progress, soon enough the company is huge, has its own army, and behaves like an actual state. Also a lot of people are employed by Shinra Inc.
----- Almost all the Cetra are extinct. Which sucks because the scientists of the Shinra Company kinda wanted to examine them. They finds Jenova and thinks she's a Cetra, and decide to see what happens when you take a normal guy, shove concentrated Lifestream in his veins, and shoot him full of Jenova cells. That's called a SOLDIER and they're pretty badass. They were wondering what happens if a kid is given jenova cells right in the womb and HEY! Second Scientist in Command got this pregnant girlfriend hanging around so why not.
Gast (scientist 1) finds Ifalna, a Cetra, but he falls in love with her and they run off. Hojo (scientist 2 and a total creep) takes over as the head of the science department.
-A few years later: Hojo's girlfriend is catatonic, but she gave birth to an adorable little lab rat of a son, Sephiroth. Gast's girlfriend, Ifalna, gave birth to an adorable little half-Cetra, Aeris. Hojo decides to get "his specimen" back and get rid of the better scientist Gast, and has Gast killed and Aeris and her mom captured. A few years later they will escape again, but Ifalna dies and Aeris is adopted by a nice widow, Mrs Gainsborough. Meawhile, Sephiroth is quickly climbing up the ranks of the Shinra military even though he's, what, maybe fifteen at the time.
-Some more years later: A friendly, ambitious hick named Zack leaves his village from bugfuck nowhere in the forest to become a SOLDIER like his idol Sephiroth. He manages! He's a pretty cool guy. Befriends Sephiroth the iceman. Also happens to meet with a pretty girl named Aeris, and they start dating. Socute.
-Some more years later, a runty, determined hick named Cloud Strife leaves his village from bugfuck nowhere up the mountain to become a SOLDIER like his idol Sephiroth. He does not manages to pass the screening process. He's crushed! But he is befriended by Zack, because Zack is a nice guy like that. Cloud had a pretty shitty life back in his hometown; single mother, a runt, the other kids ignore or bully him. He sort of likes Tifa, the daughter of the mayor, but the mayor does not approve. Tifa doesn't really notice him, but she's a nice girl, so when she hears about his dream of becoming a SOLDIER she encourages him; then of course when Cloud fails and he's tapped to come on a mission with his idol Sephiroth and his friend Zack and some nameless trooper, he's not happy. He kind of planned to come back home all awesome and cool so the local idiots could suck it, so coming back after a failure, yeah, no. He spends the entire time wearing a face-covering helmet and pretending he's someone else.
They hire Tifa as a mountain guide and go up the mountain. Turns out that's where Hojo kept the space virus body. And she starts seriously messing with Sephiroth's mind. He's grown up a lab rat, his father was HOJO and the guy saw him as a test subject and nothing else, then he was made a soldier and sent on to win wars and stuff, he never had much of a normal life -- but at least he thought he was human. Then he finds a report on how he's not human, but a Cetra's son, and that coupled with Jenova's mental pushes, and he snaps pretty spectaculary, and goes around burninating the countryside. He believes that the humans stole the Planet from the Cetra -- therefore, from his "mother". Therefore he'll get it back for her, and if they can't have it then no one can, and certainly not those filthy traitors, the humans.
Zack tries to stop him, but gets owned; when Seph turns back to his Mother Cloud picks up Zack's sword and finishes him off. OR SO THEY THINK.
Then Hojo comes by and he's all "oh, you killed Specimen S, then you can replace it."
Then Zack and Cloud spend the next five years being experimented on. Cloud snaps, losing his mind in the Lifestream, since one of Hojo's favorite tricks was to see how long it took them before they pickled in it. Eventually Zack breaks them out, and manages to drag Cloud across two continents to go back to their city and his girlfriend. Cloud is still catatonic.
Then Zack gets shot down in view of the capital and dies, and Cloud snaps out of it. Kind of. Now he believes he's a SOLDIER, and he's absorbed a lot of the attitudes and memories of Zack -- in fact, he rebuilt his past to incorporate Zack's.
He meets with Tifa again, and she knows something is a little wrong with him but she doesn't know how to confront him, so she hooks him up with paying mercenary jobs -- incidentally, with rebels who want to destroy Shinra because it's killing the Planet. And at the beginning, oh how he doesn't care. Barret is the leader of that squad (named Avalanche) and they keep butting heads.
That's where the game starts. XD;
After that, Cloud meets Aeris, who thinks he seems a little familiar, he's forced to crossdress so they can infiltrate a bordello and save Tifa who didn't really need to be saved (Tifa is a kickass martial artist and she got kidnapped deliberately, anyway, she needed intel) but hey, Cloud in a dress will never get old; Aeris gets kidnapped for being a Cetra and they go to rescue her and meet Red XIII, a sentient cat-wolf-thing -- and they also meet a ghost? clone? of Sephiroth; they have to leave the town in a hurry.
After that, Cloud, Tifa, Aeris, Barret and Red (... am I forgetting someone?) decide to travel together -- and then it comes out that Cloud remembers seeing Tifa back home, chatting with her, being an awesome SOLDIER, but Tifa doesn't remember seeing him at all. But she doesn't say anything. It's only the first hint that Cloud Is Not Alright.
Stuff happens blah di blah, during which they meet with Cid the gruff mechanic/pilot and Caith sith the weird talking robo-cat-plushie, go into space, raise chocobos, meet more of Sephiroth's possessed meat-puppets/clones, visit a shitload of neat towns, dodge the Shinra's Men in Black liek whoa, see Hojo pulling babes on a beach, and raise some more chocobos.
Chocobos are awesome.
At some point, Sephiroth decides to use the Black Materia to summon a huge meteor and destroy the Planet. Of course Cloud and company rush to take the Black Materia first, but it turns out they were playing right into his hands, because Cloud has a hell of a lot of Jenova cells in him and it's super-easy to possess him and make him hand it over. Thanks, Cloud.
Then Aeris realizes that her mom's white Materia that never did anything might actually do something, and leaves the party. When you catch up to her, it's just in time to see her get skewered by Sephiroth. She dies. Her materia is lost. Woe. Damn it Aeris why did you have to go alone. DX
Some time later(?) Cloud falls into the Lifestream and Tifa has to dive in after him, but at least it seems to make him a little saner, yay. Blahblahblah go after Sephiroth blahblahblah kill him a bazilion times until he stops getting back up blahblahblah.
Ending video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4fWHaFqdAM
Anyway. It's an epic game of epicness. T.T I hate my brother for taking it with him a lot.
In Advent Children Cloud is pretty emo, but in the game he's no-nonsense and kinda caustic. Life kicked him in the balls a lot, but he always got back up. Go Cloud. T.T
Tifa is a kickass martial artist, but at times she's kind of unsure emotionally speaking, wheras Aeris is very weak physically (she's a healer) but has a will of steel. Though both of them are really nice. Just Tifa is more likely to hug and comfort you and Aeris is more likely to tease you into getting back up.
Barret is very rough, loud and aggressive, but he's environmentally conscious so yay. He has an adopted daughter and it's socute. X3 (she's the girl living with Tifa and Denzel in Advent Children)
Red the wolfcatthing has his own issues, where he thought his dad was a traitor but it turned out he wasn't, wahh. He's 45 or 47 and he seems very wise, but for his species he's actually a teenager. You see him a couple hundred years after the game and he's still kicking, just with more gray in his fur.
Caith Sith the robocat thing is friggin annoying, also a turncoat. He's controlled by Reeve, who is actually a high-ranked guy in the Shinra corporation. Reeve wants to help save the world too but for a while he's conflicted as to how and I so don't care about either he or caith sith I couldn't tell you anything else. XD;
Cid was working for Shinra in their brand new space exploration program, his dream was to be the first man in space, but he had to abort the launch to save the life of one of his mechanics and then Shinra yanked the funding. he's pretty disgruntled about it. He swears like a sailor and smokes a lot.
Then there's two optional characters, Yuffie and Vincent. Yuffie is the heir of an island kingdom that was invaded by Shinra and Sephiroth and their pride broken; she rebels against her defeated father. She's the perky, bouncy, sometimes annoying kind. Also a ninja.
Vincent worked for Shinra back in the day, but he was in love with Hojo's woman at the time she got pregnant with Sephiroth. Hojo used him for experiments and now he shapeshifts into weird creatures. he also spent 30 years in a coffin and he keeps moping about how he could have saved Lucrecia but she loved Hojo best and look what Hojo did to her and to her child. Oh Vince. -___-;
There's also Rufus Shinra -- the guy in the wheelchair -- and his Turks,but I really don't care about them at all. Rufus has more class than his father, at least, and he isn't totally corrupt and decadent, but he still seems to believe in his inherent right to rule the masses, so ehh. XD;
And hmm I can't think of anything else, so I'll stop the babble here. if there's anything that's unclear, prod me. XD;
So when I told you I like to babble, what I meant is I have verbal diarhhea.
(Lady_Aquill doesn't know either ff7 or gw so it's a bit hard reading that crossover thing. Sorry for the spam, y'all. Plz correct me on where I'm wrong. Or ohhh, quote your favorite bits of the canon. It's always shiny.)
Gundam Wing: Typical mecha show. Themes are political/realistic/normal humans in the future. Everything looks a lot like now, except with Big Robots.
Some 200 years ago the Earth created satellites at the five Lagrange points in space, the colonies creatively called L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5. Eventually Earth and the Colonies started having friction. Colonies want independence, Earth doesn't want them to yadda yadda. 15 years (?) before the start of the show, a pacifist named Heero Yuy was assassinated which makes things a lot worse.
Current times, Earth is led by a military coalition? I think? Or something. Military was important anyway. XD;; three political factions on Earth : the peace doves, led by the Peacecraft royal family before they were all killed ded, Romafeller (arms dealers and warmongerer generals who stand in the background and push to war) and the rising Organization of the Zodiac, also named OZ, which is a military faction following a rising star called Treize Kushrenada. They tend to be damn good with Mobile Suits (IE giant robots. mmm giant robots.)
From the Colonies, a group of five old scientists who worked on the first MS prototypes decide that fuck it, no, and they each make one superspecial giant robot with badass Gundanium plating; IE the Gundams. They were funded by some old noble family that wanted them to go to Earth and terrorize people and then drop a colony on them, mmm nuclear winter, but the doctors also decide to say "fuck it no" and instruct their chosen pilots to be a little more discriminatory in their choice of targets.
The pilots are all conveniently 15 and they all have number-based names but it's supposed to be invisible in-universe or something. XD
L1 : Heero Yuy (code name, he has no real name. His Gundams are Wing and Wing Zero.) Was funnily enough raised by the hitman who killed the real Heero Yuy (then the guy saw the repercussions and regretted it quite a bit. Taught Heero to shoot and everything.) At the start of the series, Heero is obsessed with completing his missions, but his action kind of say he's also trying to commit suicide. At some point he's tricked into destroying a plane that he thought contained Romafeller and OZ higher ups, but the plane was full of Doves. He spends a long time trying to atone for that. Heero is kind of weird -- cold and analytical, it shows he wasn't around kids his age while growing up, but also with a very, very high sense of devotion to his mission and his goal, once he's found it. To avoid surrendering his Gundam, he self-destructed it and himself with it. Didn't die because Trowa wanted to play nursemaid but that was close.
Also one day he broke his leg and set his own bone like a crazy person. >_>; He also threatened to kill Relena because she knew who he was, only to spend the rest of the series doing everything he could to save her life and protect her ideals. They forge a very strong connection during the series.
Heero has a sense of humor! Though it's very stealthy.
Duo: you can't do this! It would take a miracle!
Heero: A miracle for you, but I can handle it.
Trowa: *admires heero for self destructing* *ponders doing the same*
Heero: In that case I have one piece of advice for you. Dying hurts like hell.
L2: Duo Maxwell (Gundam Deathscythe and Deathscythe Hell): At first Duo comes across as a fun, friendly, animated guy; apart from the braid he's one of the most normal-behaving of the five. hahaha.
L2 is a very shitty run-down place. Duo was a street rat. He named himself after his friend Solo who died in his arms from a plague to which Duo survived. Then age eight, he got taken in by a church run by Father Maxwell and Sister Helen; no one wanted to adopt him because he was a hellion but Maxwell and Helen decided to keep him even though he was a dirty heathen, yay. (Best quote: "I don't believe in God but I believe in the god of Death, because I've never seen a miracle, but I've seen lots and lots of dead people.") Then the Resistance takes over the church because they think the Alliance (bad guys) won't dare destroy a church. Hahaha. Duo was out to steal them a Mobile Suit so they would GTFO his church, but he arrives just in time for Helen to die in his arms. Mm.
A few years later, he's caught stowing away on Professor G after breaking through some pretty neat security. G is amused and trains him to become a gundam pilot. By then Duo has started calling himself Shinigami/the god of death, because he's the common denominator between the plague wiping out his posse and the destruction of his church.
Duo is a competent mechanic and a great pilot -- eventually Heero admits he trusts Duo's skills with aircraft even more than his own, and considering Heero has to be the best at everything, that's something.
During the war, Duo spots Heero trying to kill Relena because she saw the Gundam; he shoots Heero to save Relena, but Relena gets in the middle to protect Heero from him. Then he's all "hey wait, NOW i'm the bad guy? D:" Later on he saves Heero when he gets captured and brings him and the Wing gundam to a ship full of scavenger/resistants he's friends with; Heero repays him by stealing parts of Deathscythe to fix Wing and then zips off. Duo isn't very amused, but I think he admires the ballsyness because he doesn't seem to resent him much.
During the series, Duo seems quite fascinated, amused, put-off and confused about Heero; I think he wanted to learn what was going on in Heero's head but most of the time not even Heero knows that. XDD
At some point, Duo gets captured in turn, and is about to be questioned, but Heero breaks in. He planned to kill him so he wouldn't talk, and then (... am I really remembering right???) kill himself because escaping seemed pretty impossible; but Duo just closes his eyes and smiles and he's all "okay go ahead", so instead Heero decides to break him out. Oh Heero. He makes so much sense. XD;
Anyway, Duo acts a bit like a joker (not as much as the fandom pretends, though, my god he gets angry too, he's not smiling all the tiiime DX) but underneath he can get very dark.
L3: Trowa Barton (Trowa Barton is also a codename. Gundam Heavyarms) ... the character I care about the least, so I can't explain him very much. He's extremely quiet, reserved and emotionless, but not like Heero who is very intense inside; to me Trowa comes across as if he's empty and waiting for something to fill him. *cough* *not like that >.>*
During the series his most notable moments are when he picks up almost dead!Heero and brings him back to the circus where he's staying (yeah really XD) then follows Heero on his "hey, family of paficists I killed, here's a gun, get revenge on me please" quest. (all the paficists tell him to STFU and live, because it's harder than dying) Trowa at some point tries to self destruct to do like Heero, but then his adoptive sister Catherine slaps the hell out of him and he feels Very Bad. u.u ... Also toward the middle-end of the series shit happens and he loses his memory for a while, but that doesn't last too long.
Trowa's speciality is that he's an acrobat; he can even make his friggin' gundam do backflips. Also he likes big guns that spray bullets yet he keeps running out of them. Oh Heavyarms. -___-;; Also he's totally fucking Quatre. They, like, play music together. And stuff. It's crazy the subtext they have. Sadly I don't care much about either of them, so. XD
L4: Quatre Raberba Winner (Gundam Sandrock) He's supposed to be ethnically Arab, but it really doesn't show, he's all blond/blue-eyed. Maybe he's a berber... >.> His father is more swarthy but not very Arab-looking either. He kinda looks spanish to me, actually. XD;
Quatre is kind, very polite, a good negotiatior, great at planning coordinated assaults, and he always gives his enemies a chance to surrender. He's also really, REALLY rich, seeing as his papa is the head of a huge multinational firm and more or less owns a huge chunk of L4. Quatre has 29 older sisters (yes really) but his dad wanted a male heir just that bad, I guess. All his sisters are test-tube babies; he believed he was, too, and it made him a little spoiled asshole because he was sure his father could just create another little clone if Quatre failed to perform, but then he meets a lot of good people (resistance fighters incidentally) who are test tube babies and it calms him down a bit. It turns out he's a natural birth (and having him killed his mother but who cares, her hubbie has a male heir now!) Quatre stays in contact with the ... magnanacs... maganacs... manganacs... stuff, and they treat him a bit like their beloved, chosen lord
Quatre wants to get down to Earth and fight, Quatre's dad is a hardcore pacifist. Quatre takes the gundam and leaves. Huge daddy issues. (it's even more LOLtastic because Quatre's dad looks like Trowa with a porn 'stache. Mm oedipus.) At some point Dad gets killed and kind gentle little Quatre has a HUGE breakdown, destroys a colony, and almost kills Trowa when he gets in the way (which is where the bout of amnesia comes from.) That snaps Quatre back to sanity and then he gets to spend some time guilting about it since he thinks he killed Trowa.
He's also totally gay. Especially for Trowa. Oh yeah. But people think he's a total uke... hahaha no. Quatre is very much of the steel fist in a velvet glove kind.
Anyway. He's interesting but too polite, so he's also mister Not Appearing A Lot In Asuka Fics. XD
L5: Wufei Chang (Gundam Shenlong, but he calls it Nataku.) Wufei's colony is full of Chinese nationalists who were exiled up there for being too pissy and stuff. Mmh. Wufei at 14 is the scholarly kind, complete with dorky glasses; he's convinced it's useless to do anything "meaningful" because nothing ever really changes; even if you do good, humans will always fuck it up again. Of course that means he clashes quite a bit with Meiran, his also 14 year old wife. (arranged marriage. They're both extremely arrogant and mule-headed, which really doesn't help.) Meiran is a spitfire who strongly believes in Justice and Right and Wrong and getting off your butt to fix things. She nicknames herself Nataku for some deity I'm not remembering right now. She's always training in martial arts to become stronger so she can protect her ideals, so the fact that her husband is a pessimistic four-eyes bookworm doesn't sit well with her. So she challenges him; turns out Wufei was pretty kickass even back then so he wins, and she's really not happy. (she believes that Right makes Might, like just because she's righteous she should win. Oh Meiran, you were such a kid back then. XD;)
Your Friendly Local Scientist was grooming Meiran to become the pilot of Gundam Shenlong, but when the Alliance attacks, Shenlong isn't finished so she takes a lesser mobile suit. Wufei thought he didn't want to get involved but it turns out that when it's his wife out there he does care. XD; He grabs Shenlong and goes to help her chase the assailants out, but it's too late, she was badly injured; she dies a little time later.
Turns out he did love her after all. So he decides to fight the war in her name, for her ideals. He nicknames the gundam Nataku after her. (he also inherits her silly "right makes might" ideas, which drive him to a HUGE loss of confidence when Treize Kushrenada defeats him one on one and then he mopes like a bitch quite a lot.)
At some point, his colony decides to self-destruct, allowing him to escape, rather than being taken over by the bad guys. Which is another rather bad shock. Prrrrr. he suffers so prettily. *__*
Wufei is proud to the point of haughtiness, has an extremely developed sense of honor and justice, firmly believes that weak people should not fight; he also comes across a misogyne because he goes "Onna!" at some female characters and wants them to GTFO the battleground, though to me it's partly that he's been raised that way, partly the "weak people shouldn't even fight", and partly that he compares all women to Meiran and finds them all wanting. He can definitely come across as an asshole, but he also has a sense of humor.
He's definitely flawed, but he has high ideals and he always strives to better himself. He has a series-long Noble Rivalry with Treize that ends up when Treize allows Wufei to kill him during the final fight. Turns out Treize had some pretty extreme and dubious methods, but he planned to sacrifice himself so there would be peace from the start. Wufei cries when he kills him. Woe. T__T
And since she's also pretty important...
Relena Darlian: Starts out as the pretty normal spoiled, beloved daughter of a pacifist minister. Finds Heero washed out on a beach, calls an ambulance like a nice girl, only to see Heero beat up the poor guys and steal the friggin' ambulance. XD; Some time later Heero turns up as the "new guy" in her class and she's all "hay mysterious and hot stranger wanna go to my birthday party :D" and he's all ^-^ "I will kill you." Then there's the incident where she ditches her own party to go after Heero and Duo has to rescue her when Heero pulls out a gun.
Anyway at the beginning she's pretty normal -- a little spoiled, used to being loved, kind of bored with life, but a good girl underneath -- then tadahh! Heero bursts in her life and everything changes.
Then her father dies, and she learns she was adopted; she's really the daughter of King Peacecraft the well-known pacifist and there are all these grand ideals she has to uphold in both their memories. (incidentally, her unknown brother Milliardo is now going around as Zechs Merquise, Treize's right hand man) She struggles with that, is used as a political pawn and smart enough to knows it but agrees because if she's in the public eye maybe she can do SOMETHING, and does a lot of growing up in the meantime. Kicked out of her figurehead "Queen Relena" position, does some more stuff -- and a year after the end of the series she's a vice-minister of foreign affairs in charge of collaboration between Earth and the Colonies, and she's barely 17. u.u And she goes by Darlian again, because he was her real father who raised her and transmitted his views to her, and she doesn't care about technically being royalty.
She's an usually serious young woman, with a lot of poise, very polite, gifted orator, incredibly determined; there's a lot about how she got her strength and determination from Heero's example... while he says he got his own from hers. D'aw.
It's in fashion to hate Relena for being a stalker, and she DOES turn up in a lot of places just because Heero was there... but then again he does the same. XD I like her, though I have no clue how to handle her most of the time. Thankfully, she has a lot of responsibilities so it's not hard to explain why she isn't in the plot much. XDD
(Common points between the younger cast: Real Names are overrated. Also, it's a bad idea to have family in the GW series. You will lose it.)
What else, what else... there's an older OZ cast who are more important than I make them sound, but I never cared much about them so I can't explain them well.
Final Fantasy 7!
Alternate magical universe with both cars/bikes/computer and magic. The Planet -- or Gaia -- has a different map, but the main difference is the Lifestream -- it's the vital energy and memories of the Planet and all living things, when they die, come back to it. When something else is born, its vital spark comes from there; when you die you can apparently hang out there, though eventually you become one with the rest. The Lifestream runs under the crust just about everywhere on the Planet. It usually acts like a liquid, but you don't drown it it. Physically at least.
For the plot, I'm going chronologically because all the revelations make it hard to tell it straight. Also for my purposes all the brand-new prequels and retcons and shit don't count. >_>
- 2000 years ago: The Ancients (also named cetra) roam the Planet. They're in contact with the Lifestream, and apparently their role is to "settle it" and then move on. Whatever that means. Then an alien, sentient space virus (haha yes really) crashes on Gaia and possesses a Cetra. The body looks like it's dead, but, not so much.
-Some 30 years ago:
----- a man named Shinra realizes that you can use the Lifestream as a source of energy, extracting it via reactors. Only problem is that it causes the crops to die, mutant animals to pop up, and the Planet to be kind of "hey hey you're killing me dude" but who cares! It's a huge progress, soon enough the company is huge, has its own army, and behaves like an actual state. Also a lot of people are employed by Shinra Inc.
----- Almost all the Cetra are extinct. Which sucks because the scientists of the Shinra Company kinda wanted to examine them. They finds Jenova and thinks she's a Cetra, and decide to see what happens when you take a normal guy, shove concentrated Lifestream in his veins, and shoot him full of Jenova cells. That's called a SOLDIER and they're pretty badass. They were wondering what happens if a kid is given jenova cells right in the womb and HEY! Second Scientist in Command got this pregnant girlfriend hanging around so why not.
Gast (scientist 1) finds Ifalna, a Cetra, but he falls in love with her and they run off. Hojo (scientist 2 and a total creep) takes over as the head of the science department.
-A few years later: Hojo's girlfriend is catatonic, but she gave birth to an adorable little lab rat of a son, Sephiroth. Gast's girlfriend, Ifalna, gave birth to an adorable little half-Cetra, Aeris. Hojo decides to get "his specimen" back and get rid of the better scientist Gast, and has Gast killed and Aeris and her mom captured. A few years later they will escape again, but Ifalna dies and Aeris is adopted by a nice widow, Mrs Gainsborough. Meawhile, Sephiroth is quickly climbing up the ranks of the Shinra military even though he's, what, maybe fifteen at the time.
-Some more years later: A friendly, ambitious hick named Zack leaves his village from bugfuck nowhere in the forest to become a SOLDIER like his idol Sephiroth. He manages! He's a pretty cool guy. Befriends Sephiroth the iceman. Also happens to meet with a pretty girl named Aeris, and they start dating. Socute.
-Some more years later, a runty, determined hick named Cloud Strife leaves his village from bugfuck nowhere up the mountain to become a SOLDIER like his idol Sephiroth. He does not manages to pass the screening process. He's crushed! But he is befriended by Zack, because Zack is a nice guy like that. Cloud had a pretty shitty life back in his hometown; single mother, a runt, the other kids ignore or bully him. He sort of likes Tifa, the daughter of the mayor, but the mayor does not approve. Tifa doesn't really notice him, but she's a nice girl, so when she hears about his dream of becoming a SOLDIER she encourages him; then of course when Cloud fails and he's tapped to come on a mission with his idol Sephiroth and his friend Zack and some nameless trooper, he's not happy. He kind of planned to come back home all awesome and cool so the local idiots could suck it, so coming back after a failure, yeah, no. He spends the entire time wearing a face-covering helmet and pretending he's someone else.
They hire Tifa as a mountain guide and go up the mountain. Turns out that's where Hojo kept the space virus body. And she starts seriously messing with Sephiroth's mind. He's grown up a lab rat, his father was HOJO and the guy saw him as a test subject and nothing else, then he was made a soldier and sent on to win wars and stuff, he never had much of a normal life -- but at least he thought he was human. Then he finds a report on how he's not human, but a Cetra's son, and that coupled with Jenova's mental pushes, and he snaps pretty spectaculary, and goes around burninating the countryside. He believes that the humans stole the Planet from the Cetra -- therefore, from his "mother". Therefore he'll get it back for her, and if they can't have it then no one can, and certainly not those filthy traitors, the humans.
Zack tries to stop him, but gets owned; when Seph turns back to his Mother Cloud picks up Zack's sword and finishes him off. OR SO THEY THINK.
Then Hojo comes by and he's all "oh, you killed Specimen S, then you can replace it."
Then Zack and Cloud spend the next five years being experimented on. Cloud snaps, losing his mind in the Lifestream, since one of Hojo's favorite tricks was to see how long it took them before they pickled in it. Eventually Zack breaks them out, and manages to drag Cloud across two continents to go back to their city and his girlfriend. Cloud is still catatonic.
Then Zack gets shot down in view of the capital and dies, and Cloud snaps out of it. Kind of. Now he believes he's a SOLDIER, and he's absorbed a lot of the attitudes and memories of Zack -- in fact, he rebuilt his past to incorporate Zack's.
He meets with Tifa again, and she knows something is a little wrong with him but she doesn't know how to confront him, so she hooks him up with paying mercenary jobs -- incidentally, with rebels who want to destroy Shinra because it's killing the Planet. And at the beginning, oh how he doesn't care. Barret is the leader of that squad (named Avalanche) and they keep butting heads.
That's where the game starts. XD;
After that, Cloud meets Aeris, who thinks he seems a little familiar, he's forced to crossdress so they can infiltrate a bordello and save Tifa who didn't really need to be saved (Tifa is a kickass martial artist and she got kidnapped deliberately, anyway, she needed intel) but hey, Cloud in a dress will never get old; Aeris gets kidnapped for being a Cetra and they go to rescue her and meet Red XIII, a sentient cat-wolf-thing -- and they also meet a ghost? clone? of Sephiroth; they have to leave the town in a hurry.
After that, Cloud, Tifa, Aeris, Barret and Red (... am I forgetting someone?) decide to travel together -- and then it comes out that Cloud remembers seeing Tifa back home, chatting with her, being an awesome SOLDIER, but Tifa doesn't remember seeing him at all. But she doesn't say anything. It's only the first hint that Cloud Is Not Alright.
Stuff happens blah di blah, during which they meet with Cid the gruff mechanic/pilot and Caith sith the weird talking robo-cat-plushie, go into space, raise chocobos, meet more of Sephiroth's possessed meat-puppets/clones, visit a shitload of neat towns, dodge the Shinra's Men in Black liek whoa, see Hojo pulling babes on a beach, and raise some more chocobos.
Chocobos are awesome.
At some point, Sephiroth decides to use the Black Materia to summon a huge meteor and destroy the Planet. Of course Cloud and company rush to take the Black Materia first, but it turns out they were playing right into his hands, because Cloud has a hell of a lot of Jenova cells in him and it's super-easy to possess him and make him hand it over. Thanks, Cloud.
Then Aeris realizes that her mom's white Materia that never did anything might actually do something, and leaves the party. When you catch up to her, it's just in time to see her get skewered by Sephiroth. She dies. Her materia is lost. Woe. Damn it Aeris why did you have to go alone. DX
Some time later(?) Cloud falls into the Lifestream and Tifa has to dive in after him, but at least it seems to make him a little saner, yay. Blahblahblah go after Sephiroth blahblahblah kill him a bazilion times until he stops getting back up blahblahblah.
Ending video:
Click to viewhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4fWHaFqdAM
Anyway. It's an epic game of epicness. T.T I hate my brother for taking it with him a lot.
In Advent Children Cloud is pretty emo, but in the game he's no-nonsense and kinda caustic. Life kicked him in the balls a lot, but he always got back up. Go Cloud. T.T
Tifa is a kickass martial artist, but at times she's kind of unsure emotionally speaking, wheras Aeris is very weak physically (she's a healer) but has a will of steel. Though both of them are really nice. Just Tifa is more likely to hug and comfort you and Aeris is more likely to tease you into getting back up.
Barret is very rough, loud and aggressive, but he's environmentally conscious so yay. He has an adopted daughter and it's socute. X3 (she's the girl living with Tifa and Denzel in Advent Children)
Red the wolfcatthing has his own issues, where he thought his dad was a traitor but it turned out he wasn't, wahh. He's 45 or 47 and he seems very wise, but for his species he's actually a teenager. You see him a couple hundred years after the game and he's still kicking, just with more gray in his fur.
Caith Sith the robocat thing is friggin annoying, also a turncoat. He's controlled by Reeve, who is actually a high-ranked guy in the Shinra corporation. Reeve wants to help save the world too but for a while he's conflicted as to how and I so don't care about either he or caith sith I couldn't tell you anything else. XD;
Cid was working for Shinra in their brand new space exploration program, his dream was to be the first man in space, but he had to abort the launch to save the life of one of his mechanics and then Shinra yanked the funding. he's pretty disgruntled about it. He swears like a sailor and smokes a lot.
Then there's two optional characters, Yuffie and Vincent. Yuffie is the heir of an island kingdom that was invaded by Shinra and Sephiroth and their pride broken; she rebels against her defeated father. She's the perky, bouncy, sometimes annoying kind. Also a ninja.
Vincent worked for Shinra back in the day, but he was in love with Hojo's woman at the time she got pregnant with Sephiroth. Hojo used him for experiments and now he shapeshifts into weird creatures. he also spent 30 years in a coffin and he keeps moping about how he could have saved Lucrecia but she loved Hojo best and look what Hojo did to her and to her child. Oh Vince. -___-;
There's also Rufus Shinra -- the guy in the wheelchair -- and his Turks,but I really don't care about them at all. Rufus has more class than his father, at least, and he isn't totally corrupt and decadent, but he still seems to believe in his inherent right to rule the masses, so ehh. XD;
And hmm I can't think of anything else, so I'll stop the babble here. if there's anything that's unclear, prod me. XD;