You know what else is good with sour cream?
My mom!
Hello, it's andromeda, and today I wanna discuss my struggle with including more "serious" business during the development of "Brain Carnival"!
I want Brain Carnival to be a silly slice-of-life, sometimes surreal comedy thing that happens to feature characters based on songs from the infamous "2000 Series". And in that regard, things went smoothly. Since most of those tracks are quite bizarre and not particularly serious in tone, incorporating them into my series posed no problem.
But through this, I happened to run into some "problem children"
'Joubutsu 2000', 'Suuhaa 2000', and 'Waraeru 2000' are frequently mentioned as some of the most disturbing and creepy songs in not just the 2000 Series, but in Taiko no Tatsujin as a whole.
So what do I do with 'em?
I can't just exclude them, no chance. That won't do... I guess I'll just have to do it.
When I first put them in the project, I made the grave mistake of making their characters as serious as the songs themselves. Of course, this created a huge tonal mismatch.
Putting a very realistic and angsty character or storyline in the middle of a bunch of exaggerated and silly ones is not a good idea, and for the longest time, I had no clue how to deal with it.
The truth is, I wanted to have my cake and eat it too.
I wanted to force something in the project that really wasn't appropriate to be there. It'd be like if I read my suicide note out loud in the middle of a birthday party, then moved on like nothing happened. Not cool...
And how did I deal with this?
I ate my cake and baked another one in its place!
I just accepted that Brain Carnival isn't the place for such things. If I wanted to have a dramatic BL romance story that badly[1], or depict things like depression, drug abuse, and dealing with death realistically, as much as I hated to admit, then BC wasn't the place to shove it into.
I hesitated on doing this for a long time. I always knew I could just make a new project in place of that[1], but by that time, the characters grew on me way too much, and making new ones just didn't feel the same. But I had to let it go.
(I'll still miss it though... I'll remember you forever, potential canonical Mada x Waraeru.......)
Ultimately, I'm actually happier with this. The new project will let me explore themes beyond things that fit the songs, and will help the old characters feel more in line with the songs they're based on.
It ain't easy out there.
Learn to let go, everyone. It's important. Goodbye! Farewell!
[1] For more context, see my post before this.
