No preamble, let me get right to it: After years of Crisis lying largely dormant, perhaps for the better (you will not convince me 2040 has any redeeming qualities, or ones that outweigh the cavalcade of garbage decisions made in turn) (and AIC is basically a zombie company trying to return to life anyhow), a dude on the internet has machine-translated heaps and heaps of old BGC side media that I think many fellow fans (mostly here? I'd HOPE) will appreciate. 3 light novels, 3 audio dramas, 1 EXTREMELY rough B-Club translation, all magic.

Someone else translated some 2040 side material, but it's all very minimal and none of it is good, so... very 2040, that.

Hard Metal Guardians: The 2012 Light Novel that has the Sabers as high school girls and... I can't tell if this is a licensed web novel fanfic, or just a naked attempt to revive the franchise by being the most 2012 LIGHT NOVEL Crisis can be.

Priss is a Light Music rocker, whacks a Boomer with a guitar; Nene is small and cute and there's a weirdly more innocent Kuroko-Misaka dynamic between them; Linna is the heiress of a keiretsu who also works at a maid cafe all the same; the Hardsuits have a goth loli dress alt form before they become hardsuits. It's bizarre. And perhaps it has merit because of that!

1980s Light Novel 1 - Silent Fanfare: Drawn up by showrunner Toshimichi Suzuki himself, Silent Fanfare could very well take place between OVAS 2 and 3, and is great because it feels like a canon lost episode. The Sabers are trying to find a way to remotely monitor Boomers for the AD Police when they track a Boomer trying to seduce and interrogate a GENOM employee. Meanwhile, Priss stumbles across an innocent child who seems oddly tied to Boomer rampages. The story that follows touches on the 'what is Sylia' question, and even has an interesting bit of thematic bite against the idea of global unified culture and the 'global village'. It's great, it really is, there's a whole third of the book where the Sabers need to handle just one Boomer without killing it while also fighting it in a super skyscraper on the verge of being blown up by the police. So much other wacky stuff happens: The Sabers blackmail Quincy and Mason right to their face, Linna is a midnight aerobics show DJ and handles it as extra-ly as possible, etc.

1980s Light Novel 2 - Break Down-48: The lesser of the novels, Suzuki says in the afterword that this came about while he was writing Red Eyes as a weird side project. It seems to be its own continuity, and is oodles more hyperbolic - GENOM Tower is destroyed, Sylia communes with a Boomer mind, nothing appears to be strictly canon but rather a compressed and exaggerated version of it. It's fun, and it's interesting, but never coheres.

Audio Drama - Soldier Blue: Audio was ripped to the archive by some shmuck I used to internet-know and wish I didn't, script was translated here. This is an infamous bridging story between Crisis and Crash where Sylia has a psychotic episode she needs to enter her own mindscape to handle, where she realizes Largo's Back. The audio's actually pretty good, no one can accuse Yoshiko Sakakibara of not knowing how to fucking act. But the intent and the script are both lackluster. It's Crash, man. It's... it's adequate.

Audio Drama - To Love-Ru Wars: Two separate comedy bits. First link is to text files to follow along, second is to the audio itself. One is about the gang needing to go on a variety show to catch a TV hijacker; the other has Sylia head off to Paris and leaves Linna in charge of raising funds for the team. Shenanigans Ensue. Actually pretty funny, especially the second part.

Audio Drama 2 Watch out! Knight Sabers Haven't listened to the whole thing, appears to involve a boyfriend of Nene’s being blackmailed by GENOM. Also where the image of Nene in a pool and her hair wet, among other things, comes from.

The 1991 B-Club: You know, one of the big art books from Japan. Use a pdf of the actual book and follow along. Admittedly poorly machine-translated.

Anyway, it’s great because it has translations of interviews with the Saber voice actresses: apparently they had a GREAT time in the old Holiday in Bali special, grew as friends. It’s really sweet. Also Sakakibara sounds very philosophical in a way that is so charming. It makes sense Mamoru Oshii used to go out of his way to give her voice roles; I feel like they talk in similar ways.

The guy who did all this has an ongoing translation project for Go Go Sabers but it remains somewhat incomplete. Anyway, I'm throwing this at the forum because it's all amazing stuff, and even if The Iron Age is inactive, Crisis still has a foundational impact on UF and other work, so we ought to honor it a bit more, right?

LAST EDITED ON Nov-09-26 AT 07:17 PM (EST)
 
> (you will not convince me 2040
>has any redeeming qualities, or ones that outweigh the cavalcade of
>garbage decisions made in turn)
>Someone else translated some 2040 side material, but it's all very
>minimal and none of it is good, so... very 2040, that.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Holy smokes, did you have that in your back pocket this entire time or was that just for me? I suppose it took minimal work to make, but you really... put in that effort! Gee! I'm not sure how to respond here!

It's not as though other people on this forum have been kinder to the show, save liking 2040's Nene more than I do.

>It's not as though other people on this forum have been kinder to the
>show, save liking 2040's Nene more than I do.

I think you may be reading lack of interest in your opinion re: 2040 as agreement with your opinion. :D

For the record: I quite liked 2040. Certainly more than Crash, though not as much as the OG.

--sofaspud
--

LAST EDITED ON Nov-09-26 AT 11:55 PM (EST)
 
>For the record: I quite liked 2040. Certainly more than Crash, though
>not as much as the OG.
>

I mean, in the end, 2040 had a lot of influence in the versions of the gang we have in CoH, and I can't imagine life without them. Or what they led to, for that matter. 2040 could be unfiltered dog shit instead of a decent late 90s anime and I'd still love it for that.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

>I think you may be reading lack of interest in your opinion re: 2040
>as agreement with your opinion. :D

Never was the point. All the other stuff was.

Look, I made a dumb aside. I'd checked on the forums before, direct search, not a whole lotta love for 2040 around more than a few threads. I made an assumption about how people felt. Lack of interest in my opinion? I didn't care, I said *a* thing in passing and got flipped off by a meme for it. If it was a joke, it wasn't a very funny one, just a weird one.

Look where all this has gotten me. We won't even talk about what I actually crossposted! In the future I'll restrain myself, I guess.

This is some cool stuff. Appreciate the links!

As for the controversial bit, as I get older I find myself more and more trying to live by the idea of letting people enjoy what they enjoy. Today's Internet isn't very good at that, admittedly, and in this thread that seems to cut both ways. So let's all calm down, unclench our sphincters, and enjoy the cool stuff. Shall we? Let's not be grumpy.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Of course. I'll see if I can figure out a way to upload those translated 2040 bits later maybe, as an olive branch.

Slightly related note: with AO3 down I've found myself with an itching desire to return to reread some old Crisis or whatever fanfics, like FF.net or before-that work, outside of here and Drunkard's Walk. I'm trying to poke an internet friend into reading Hopelessly Lost, even. It's fun to go diggin'.