So I'm working on a Bubblegum Crisis reboot screenplay...

[STMPD]

I'm not sure if this is an unreasonable request, but oh well, here we go.

So I'm working on a semi-serious fanfic project. Yeah, yeah, I know I should finish Vigilante's Run, but I've put that unofficially on the back burner for the time being. Yeah, yeah, I should work on my Fan RPG, but what the hell, I just did a bunch of work on it and I'm kind of burnt out on that.
Anyway, it's a reboot / origin story for the Knight Sabers in the style of a Hollywood screenplay, the imaginary anime / live-action / whatever movie this long-dead franchise deserves. We get the Sabers together, they fight Brian J. Mason's Sinister Plot, then Mason gets stabbed in the throat at the end. Simple. Only, not. That's why I'm turning to you all, who are, like, the Great Ancient BGC Nerd Council.

I'm working on it in a proper piece of screenwriting software, but since that uses my real name you'll just have to settle for the Plot layout Google Doc. Anyway, here's some stuff I'm thinking about for it:

ACT 1: Sylia recruits all the Sabers.

- I've already written most of Priss's recruitment and am generally happy with it, and I have a nifty idea for Linna that I stole from that one BGC audio drama - namely, that Linna knows Sylia from after her parents took Sylia and Mackie under their wing after Sylia's dad got ganked. But Linna hasn't seen Sylia since like college, where Linna dropped out to save money and Sylia went to Oxford to begin her Bruce Wayne-ing. So on one hand Linna has a better idea of what sort of questions to ask Sylia ('This is about your dad, isn't it?') but Sylia also knows that Linna's a middle-class ball of insecurity and anxiety, has a better hold on her than she does Priss.

- Then I'm trying to figure out how to get Nene in there - screenplays only have so many pages, usually act 1 is about 30 pages. It's tempting to not even give Nene an individual recruitment scene, or to play it for laughs ('Would you like to be a superhero?' 'Shit yeah.'), but I think it's worth at least thinking about what Sylia gets from Little Miss Cyberpunk and what Nene gets in exchange. I've got in this opening scene that Sylia's not recruiting skilled mercs because she needs people who have a personal stake in fighting GENOM, so the idea of her getting recruited via hacker-puzzle doesn't really work...

- And somewhere in all this I need to establish Mason as a threat. Basically, Priss's bosozoku buddies tried to do something involving stolen tech for him, the deal went bad, and she was the only survivor - that's what establishes her grudge against GENOM, and how Sylia finds her. Plus, Sylia and Mason were childhood friends - at least until his dad killed her dad, and then she got shit uploaded into her brain, and Mason's been sexually frustrated and obsessed with her ever since. (Yeah, I stole that from Bubblegum Disaster. It was a good plot detail. No judging.) So that's good connective tissue, good to make an antagonist like him personal, but he has to be introduced by the end of Act 1, somehow - and introduced specifically as the Bad Guy.

ACT 2: The Sabers get their shit together and start their first job - figuring out what it was Mason got from Priss's bosozoku.

- Yep. Bulk of the plot and I have no idea what I want to do with it. Mason's got a Sinister Plan going on, the Sabers figure it out, hurt him bad. What's that Sinister Plan? Something dark and cyberpunk-y. I was toying with the idea of running a big con job on the world - selling conscious uploading 'backup' technology, then using the half-assed backups as personality implants to make Boomers seem more human - because it's sort of a running theme that people can pick out even highly anthropomorphic Boomers by little unconscious ticks. I like some of the ideas there - transhumanist ambition used for grubby commercial purposes, an ongoing struggle between people's perception of the uncanny and GENOM's desire to mitigate it - but I dunno. And I don't want to bring in the orbital kill satellites quite yet. So - I need another idea that I can still tie to Mason's deal gone bad. Any ideas?

- Act 2 ends with Mason deducing Sylia's identity and sending Battle Boomers after the LADYS633, just like in episode 3. I really like how Dartz told that story in YT2032...

ACT 3: The Final Battle
- To the point that I want to crib the idea of him coming in person to her after wrecking her building and proposing she come work for GENOM. Of course, Sylia politely declines, he leaves, she loses her shit. Good stuff all around.

- By the same token, Mason brings his 12B Boomers and his bodyguard boomers (Razordolls) to the final battle, reveals he knows the Sabers' identities. He doesn't get backup, of course, because Quincy has lost patience with him. So the Sabers kick his ass, preferably somewhere that isn't GENOM Tower but has some symbolic relevance to the plot.

- Mason almost chokes Sylia out, Sylia stabs him in the throat, the Sabers ride off into the sunrise. Priss gets to play Konya Wa Hurricane over the credits.

So - yeah. I just need some help hashing out the plot. Many people on this forum are better at writing than I am. Any ideas? Help would be much appreciated.

[robkelk]

Hmmmmm...

What's that Sinister Plan? Something dark and cyberpunk-y. I was toying with the idea of running a big con job on the world - selling conscious uploading 'backup' technology, then using the half-assed backups as personality implants to make Boomers seem more human - because it's sort of a running theme that people can pick out even highly anthropomorphic Boomers by little unconscious ticks.

There's your bridge between Acts 1 and 2, and your reason to recruit Nene.

Real-world application programming on that scale is done by teams, not by individuals, so it's reasonable to assume that a brainscan app would be written by a group of people. Making some more assumptions: Nene was part of that team when they were "a few guys in a garage". Her significant other was also on the team - and volunteered to alpha-test the app when the behind-the-scenes investor demanded results now. Of course it went horribly, horribly wrong. Said significant other is now a vegetable in palliative care, what little personality that was actually uploaded is a pale shadow of the person so there's no point in trying to put it back in the body even if they knew how... and the investor was somebody in Brian J. Mason's office at GENOM. Later, when the scan process doesn't personality-kill people and Nene discovers where the money came from, Mason orders that she be dismissed from the project for #reasons. Sylia discovers Nene mentioned on one line on page 47 of a 50-page briefing that she managed to grab in a hack of GENOM systems, becomes intrigued, and contacts "little miss cyberpunk" to hear her side of the story... and the rest is history screenplay.

Opinions?

[STMPD]

Hmmmmm...

What's that Sinister Plan? Something dark and cyberpunk-y. I was toying with the idea of running a big con job on the world - selling conscious uploading 'backup' technology, then using the half-assed backups as personality implants to make Boomers seem more human - because it's sort of a running theme that people can pick out even highly anthropomorphic Boomers by little unconscious ticks.

There's your bridge between Acts 1 and 2, and your reason to recruit Nene.

Real-world application programming on that scale is done by teams, not by individuals, so it's reasonable to assume that a brainscan app would be written by a group of people. Making some more assumptions: Nene was part of that team when they were "a few guys in a garage". Her significant other was also on the team - and volunteered to alpha-test the app when the behind-the-scenes investor demanded results now. Of course it went horribly, horribly wrong. Said significant other is now a vegetable in palliative care, what little personality that was actually uploaded is a pale shadow of the person so there's no point in trying to put it back in the body even if they knew how... and the investor was somebody in Brian J. Mason's office at GENOM. Later, when the scan process doesn't personality-kill people and Nene discovers where the money came from, Mason orders that she be dismissed from the project for #reasons. Sylia discovers Nene mentioned on one line on page 47 of a 50-page briefing that she managed to grab in a hack of GENOM systems, becomes intrigued, and contacts "little miss cyberpunk" to hear her side of the story... and the rest is history screenplay.

Opinions?

Words cannot describe how much I love this. Thanks a bajillion.

Yeah, and then maybe Mason wants to roll out Totes-Not-CP2020-Soulkiller with bugs anyway? Knowing he might kill a few hundred people, but as long as he gets the requisite 'souls' it's no biggie, he's working on the software through shell companies and it not killing people was never the point anyway? So the Sabers are racing to some giant server farm on the outskirts of Megatokyo in Act 3 to prevent him from 'Harvesting' people? And maybe Mason's last act is to plug himself into not-Soulkiller, everyone thinks he's uploading to servers Nene just bricked, but he actually sent his 'remains' to a black server in GENOM Tower, so one could go for the post-credits scene of some Boomer fabrication machinery whirring to life as Largo is created, etc.

Awesome. I can make this work. Again, thanks a bajillion.

[robkelk]

Happy to help.

[classicdrogn]

As for the location, why not just give the place they were building the Superboomer a less tongue in cheek name than "GENOM Appliance Research Division, John R. Maytag Memorial Facility?" Or use the smaller GPCC pyramid from the Largo arc, since I don't think the former was anything interesting visually in the brief moment we see it before it goes kablooey.

[batzulger]

So are the Boomers in this version, droids with semi-complete/experimental personality downloads? Are they like the original as servitor units gone rogue by Mason's plan, or are they something else?

[hazard]

The official story is servitor units gone rogue.

The actual story is... complex. Part emerging machine intelligence, part programming failures and part personality engrams.

The first Boomers were cleverly programmed to provide the neural net with baseline instructions. However, it was a sizable programming overhead burden because for them to function in any reasonable timespan their programming needed to be very specifically tailored to their hardware and tasking. It could be done, mind, but it did mean that they generally had very narrow competencies and unpredictable and potentially dangerous reactions to unexpected instructions. Personalities, if any develop, tend to be very innocent; not in the sense that they don't want to do harm, but in the sense that they don't and often can't conceive of the consequences.


Enter the mind upload technology, which covers most of the flaws in the programming by providing Boomers with greater mental flexibility. Sure, what engrams GENOM has are at best incomplete, and often deliberately altered after the fact to get any sense of identity out of them. This is not a good thing, because it makes the engram unstable; one of the reasons Boomers go through maintenance is so that their programming (and engrams) can be reset to factory specifications, and some form of violent psychosis if maintenance isn't done properly is common. But they've found that using the brain scans of people who worked the job the Boomer's meant to replace give better results, if not necessarily more stable ones, depending on a number of factors including the mental health of the people that were scanned.

Given that military Boomers do military jobs and the sort of veterans that won't be missed are the sort of veterans to be suffering from PTSD among other issues military Boomers are... volatile, as are many other Boomers meant for jobs were violence and high stress environments are likely. Yes, this means that the storage staff Boomers in the back of the shop are very unlikely to go rampant compared to the customer service Boomers.


And then you have the emerging intelligence issue. Boomers that last long enough start to develop a sense of self not that unlike humans. Even Boomers without an engram running in their heads develop a sense of self. This is the other big reason maintenance is required; part of the process involves wiping the undesired personality forming in the Boomer's brain. That doesn't mean that all of the personality is wiped though; Boomer brains are complex neural networks and the sort of maintenance cycle that's needed to fully scrub it clean is just too much effort. This means that plenty of Boomers, already not necessarily with very stable minds running the bodies, regularly get brutalized in ways that are hard to conceive. Some lucky ones end up stable, or at least functional, most go mad.

In a not quite cyberpunk twist, places which don't maintain their Boomers properly but treat them decently have very low incidence rates of Boomer rampages. In a completely genre appropriate twist, maintenance of Boomers is tracked (Boomer rampages are quite dangerous), and if the ADP runs into improperly maintained Boomers they often get confiscated and destroyed as a risk. If you are a Boomer, you just can't win.

[itsune9tl]

It would be interesting if Mr. Mason wanted Priss for her brain, and Music Talents. As in Feed Priss a bunch of Brain Conversion Nanites (Actually a Stingray Process. Ask Sylia{Celia?}.) then Copy the Brain pattern for use in a "Sexaroid" package.

[STMPD]

As for the location, why not just give the place they were building the Superboomer a less tongue in cheek name than "GENOM Appliance Research Division, John R. Maytag Memorial Facility?" Or use the smaller GPCC pyramid from the Largo arc, since I don't think the former was anything interesting visually in the brief moment we see it before it goes kablooey.

Yep yep yep. Good visual, outside the city, deniable-enough for Mason's ambitions.


Also, I'm seriously toying with the idea of having someone call him 'Moonshot Mason', just 'cause he's the head of special projects and whatnot.

The official story is servitor units gone rogue.

The actual story is... complex. Part emerging machine intelligence, part programming failures and part personality engrams.

The first Boomers were cleverly programmed to provide the neural net with baseline instructions. However, it was a sizable programming overhead burden because for them to function in any reasonable timespan their programming needed to be very specifically tailored to their hardware and tasking. It could be done, mind, but it did mean that they generally had very narrow competencies and unpredictable and potentially dangerous reactions to unexpected instructions. Personalities, if any develop, tend to be very innocent; not in the sense that they don't want to do harm, but in the sense that they don't and often can't conceive of the consequences.


Enter the mind upload technology, which covers most of the flaws in the programming by providing Boomers with greater mental flexibility. Sure, what engrams GENOM has are at best incomplete, and often deliberately altered after the fact to get any sense of identity out of them. This is not a good thing, because it makes the engram unstable; one of the reasons Boomers go through maintenance is so that their programming (and engrams) can be reset to factory specifications, and some form of violent psychosis if maintenance isn't done properly is common. But they've found that using the brain scans of people who worked the job the Boomer's meant to replace give better results, if not necessarily more stable ones, depending on a number of factors including the mental health of the people that were scanned.

Given that military Boomers do military jobs and the sort of veterans that won't be missed are the sort of veterans to be suffering from PTSD among other issues military Boomers are... volatile, as are many other Boomers meant for jobs were violence and high stress environments are likely. Yes, this means that the storage staff Boomers in the back of the shop are very unlikely to go rampant compared to the customer service Boomers.


And then you have the emerging intelligence issue. Boomers that last long enough start to develop a sense of self not that unlike humans. Even Boomers without an engram running in their heads develop a sense of self. This is the other big reason maintenance is required; part of the process involves wiping the undesired personality forming in the Boomer's brain. That doesn't mean that all of the personality is wiped though; Boomer brains are complex neural networks and the sort of maintenance cycle that's needed to fully scrub it clean is just too much effort. This means that plenty of Boomers, already not necessarily with very stable minds running the bodies, regularly get brutalized in ways that are hard to conceive. Some lucky ones end up stable, or at least functional, most go mad.

In a not quite cyberpunk twist, places which don't maintain their Boomers properly but treat them decently have very low incidence rates of Boomer rampages. In a completely genre appropriate twist, maintenance of Boomers is tracked (Boomer rampages are quite dangerous), and if the ADP runs into improperly maintained Boomers they often get confiscated and destroyed as a risk. If you are a Boomer, you just can't win.

This is a wayyyyyy more nuanced vision of what a Boomer is than I was planning to address in this particular 'film' (yeah I wanna do more, make a whole more OVA series. Retell OG OVA's with my own twists). And it's not really what I was going for with Totally-not-Soulkiller: the 'engrams' are new tech, an overlay on existing Boomer neural nets hoping that they'll be able to fool humans just a little better, generate better sales. Imagine that - granny's upload forced into some secretary bot. Ech.

So: how I'd like to do Boomer consciousness...

Basically, Boomers are nanotech lifeforms, inorganic carbon structures strung together in quasitissue, including neuromorphic transistors in their big fat skulls. Like modern neural nets, they can do some stuff pretty well, especially when they're being fed database info from the cloud (like a facial-recognition bank) - even better than humans. They can even simulate creativity by drawing on those massive databases of prior Boomer experiences - AlphaGo wasn't creative, but it did something unorthodox by fiddling around with what had already worked.

Are they conscious, though? Hoo boy.

There was an article in Aeon years ago by sci-fi genius Peter Watts where he drew on the suggestion that consciousness doesn't require a specific neural structure, only sufficient complexity in the brain. So, theoretically, a Boomer should have some degree of self-awareness. This is very bad and GENOM has no desire to make such things. So they institute blocks - prevent e-mag resonance in one portion of a Boomer brain from altering the oscillation of neural signals in another part. Hook one part of the brain up to the cloud-link. Feed the master lobe info which it relays to the slave lobe, uplink their sensory inputs back up into the cloud for other Boomers to sense, and you've got a Bicameral Mind. Shit, better than that; you've got a bicameral hivemind, a semi-consensual network of inputs and outputs that isn't really conscious in the way we'd think of it.

After all, ants are a rough hivemind, swapping information at the speed of pheromones, acting as one will without much self-awareness - just error correction. Would you call a network of ants conscious? Of course not. Neither would GENOM. The 'personas' Mason's adding are just there to fool people for long enough, just long enough to suppress the uncanny-valley reaction that is so deeply wired into the twenty-first century subconscious - theoretically just long enough for them to trust the Boomer. Trust GENOM.

(I dunno if that works better thematically, I just think that rendering every Boomer a nascent Robocop feels like it's retreading - well - Robocop. Same way GITS 2017 was just Robocop but ScarJo. I'm not so interested in the question of 'are they human' as I am the question of 'what happens to the humans when robots take all the jobs but it's not a Keynesian paradise with 15-hour workweeks'? A capitalism with no human labor base, able to perpetually sustain itself, to commodify everything in an economy - yeesh. Spooky stuff.)

Of course I could work in some of your ideas regarding personas as the series progresses. Have the engrams be just bulky 'skillchips' similar to the ones in CP2020 (which in turn stole from the ones in When Gravity Fails, but who's counting?) - not for humans, of course, but just to help Boomers replace ever more complex skillsets. I think in my setting they're already using CG replicas of old actors in movies and other media, cutting out new blood in exchange for helping the stars of the past century achieve a sort of symbolic immortality - what would happen if someone tried to take a persona and shape it, hone it into, I dunno, your own personal Keanu Reeves? Or synthesize different personalities together to make a hyper-capable SuperBoomer - and wait, shit, that's just Shasti from Warren's Dirty Pair. I dunno.

Point is...

It would be interesting if Mr. Mason wanted Priss for her brain, and Music Talents. As in Feed Priss a bunch of Brain Conversion Nanites (Actually a Stingray Process. Ask Sylia{Celia?}.) then Copy the Brain pattern for use in a "Sexaroid" package.

They ain't doing this.


On the broader topic of Sylia's enhancements - eh. I'd say nanotech enhancement, not outright replacement. There's so little we understand about the brain, how dynamic and plastic it is; mapping it frozen in one moment wouldn't give you enough info to make a full emulation, I think, especially if you couldn't account for all the feedback loops the brain has with the rest of the body (immune system, gut bacteria, etc.). (this is why methinks CP2020 may actually have the whole concept of cyberpsychosis on point - ripping a brain out and sticking it in a new body is an imperfect copying-over). Replacing it with plot-bullshit nanomachines also seems to push credibility.

So Dr. Stingray figured out how to make Elon Musk's neural lace, and it only works on little kids - brains are plastic enough to accept substrate being grafted onto the tissue, see. Sylia's just patient zero.

Which reminds me of one more plot thread I want to toy around with for some later story.

Warren's Intellectual Assets (now Dead Bang's villains) never really made sense to me - I don't see Quincy as the type to ignore advice from transhumans he built. Hell, I think Quincy's ultimate agenda is to render IA's - I like to call them Ambassadors, because they're essentially the meat-mediation element of a human-AI supergenius hybrid - the master race, and Boomers the slave race, for a panstellar empire (with 'baseline' humanity rendered impotent and extinct after a few megagenocides). Of course, they might try for their own coup d'etat against Big Daddy Q, maybe try to rope Sylia (Big Sister) in as a co-conspirator. And then that'd be the climax of something, Quincy's faction and his hidden countermeasures (The OMS? What if he is the OMS?) vs. the Ambassadors vs. Largo and his perpetual ability to not fucking die vs. the Sabers.

Actually, now that I think about it, my first draft of this script involved Cynthia (from OVA 1) not as a Boomer, but as a proto-Ambassador built by the military as the ultimate strategist. Could never figure out what to do with her - what her objective with escaping (not being kidnapped) was besides the usual live-in-peace cheesy bullshit - but I think I'll keep the Ambassadors plotline around for some later project. We'll see.

[drakensis]

Given that Bumas wouldn't need as much life support, it seems likely they're heavily in use for space operations.

Which suggests that if Mason believes his bumas can take control of this, he'd have the high ground and potentially rule the world (I know, very cliche).

It does also raise the prospect of a epilogue of a buma with Mason's engrams, Largo, escaping on a sub-light interstellar ship with e a crew of bumas.

[classicdrogn]

Oh yes, the space model buma I used in Bubblegum Disaster is a canon design seen on screen, if only for a blink. (Not the Doberman, Mr. Big-Head whose designation I can't remember, who was tasked with maintaining the laser satellite and talks to Sylia after she goes all Lensman battleship against Moldiver Largo.) So is an undersea miner, for much the same reasons of easier life support and a sturdier frame to handle the dangerous environment and move heavy loads. Those were actual Stingray designed models IIRC.

[hazard]

This is a wayyyyyy more nuanced vision of what a Boomer is than I was planning to address in this particular 'film' (yeah I wanna do more, make a whole more OVA series. Retell OG OVA's with my own twists). And it's not really what I was going for with Totally-not-Soulkiller: the 'engrams' are new tech, an overlay on existing Boomer neural nets hoping that they'll be able to fool humans just a little better, generate better sales. Imagine that - granny's upload forced into some secretary bot. Ech.

You don't need to address this matter in the first film. Call it a sequel hook, or something to use to hint at a greater moral complexity, but at the same time it's perfectly fine if the Boomers in the first movie are all machines committing violence and mayhem at their master's instruction.

Likewise, R&D takes time. Just because the memory engrams are used now doesn't mean that Stingray had access to the technology. The discovery that the memory engrams work that way could be very recent, and that the ramifications of that technology haven't gotten through to GENOM yet. Sure, the pilot programs indicate that it results in more stable Boomers, and that if you shove in the right engram it works as a skill enhancement system, but it's not been rolled out to the public. Yet.

Warren's Intellectual Assets (now Dead Bang's villains) never really made sense to me - I don't see Quincy as the type to ignore advice from transhumans he built. Hell, I think Quincy's ultimate agenda is to render IA's - I like to call them Ambassadors, because they're essentially the meat-mediation element of a human-AI supergenius hybrid - the master race, and Boomers the slave race, for a panstellar empire (with 'baseline' humanity rendered impotent and extinct after a few megagenocides). Of course, they might try for their own coup d'etat against Big Daddy Q, maybe try to rope Sylia (Big Sister) in as a co-conspirator. And then that'd be the climax of something, Quincy's faction and his hidden countermeasures (The OMS? What if he is the OMS?) vs. the Ambassadors vs. Largo and his perpetual ability to not fucking die vs. the Sabers.

Actually, now that I think about it, my first draft of this script involved Cynthia (from OVA 1) not as a Boomer, but as a proto-Ambassador built by the military as the ultimate strategist. Could never figure out what to do with her - what her objective with escaping (not being kidnapped) was besides the usual live-in-peace cheesy bullshit - but I think I'll keep the Ambassadors plotline around for some later project. We'll see.

Hey, 'I want to live in peace' isn't bullshit, especially in Cynthia is well aware of what sort of destruction is gonna be wrought if she starts triggering the orbital weapons. You'd probably not be able to address it in the movie though.

Also, it's not megagenocides. It's just genocides.

[Mamorien]

Actually, now that I think about it, my first draft of this script involved Cynthia (from OVA 1) not as a Boomer, but as a proto-Ambassador built by the military as the ultimate strategist. Could never figure out what to do with her -

Given that she's voiced by Hiroko Kasahara, I always figured that, if she'd lived, she would've grown up to be Naomi Armitage. ^__-

[STMPD]

Oh yes, the space model buma I used in Bubblegum Disaster is a canon design seen on screen, if only for a blink. (Not the Doberman, Mr. Big-Head whose designation I can't remember, who was tasked with maintaining the laser satellite and talks to Sylia after she goes all Lensman battleship against Moldiver Largo.) So is an undersea miner, for much the same reasons of easier life support and a sturdier frame to handle the dangerous environment and move heavy loads. Those were actual Stingray designed models IIRC.

Given that Bumas wouldn't need as much life support, it seems likely they're heavily in use for space operations.

Which suggests that if Mason believes his bumas can take control of this, he'd have the high ground and potentially rule the world (I know, very cliche).

It does also raise the prospect of a epilogue of a buma with Mason's engrams, Largo, escaping on a sub-light interstellar ship with e a crew of bumas.

On the topic of space exploration, I had an interesting idea. I'm setting this reboot around the late 2060's, so in spite of the Sino-American cold war, most of the nations of the world have ponied up to pour money and their individual space programs into the SPDC (the one from OVA 5), which is supposed to deliver a luxurious lunar colony in 2069 and a Space Elevator in 2169. Trouble is, this semi-public megacorp, which holds theoretical monopoly rights for any asteroids or lunar ore it can get back to groundside or at least LEO, is a puppet of GENOM (as you've said, they need automated labor to build stuff), also prone to infighting between GENOM and the China World Prosperity Corporation (a conglomerate of old SOE's who were privatized after WW3, re-merged as 'revenge' against the Americans, and are GENOM's most fierce rival despite having no mass-automation technology of their own), and just generally bloated and overvalued for the slate of technology they actually are developing.


Long story short - well, you ever heard of the South Sea Bubble? Imagine that, but played out across mid-2070 or so, a big fat arc involving Sylvie (who doesn't die in the OVA 5 analogue, but gets to become the fifth Saber), a re-resurrected Largo holding the world hostage Heinlein-style, and revelation after revelation about how over-valued and behind-schedule the SPDC really is. Imagine the repercussions - the damage dealt to the megacorporate system, already teetering and unstable, and who might come up to exploit those weaknesses (The Ambassadors or allies of the Sabers).

Hey, 'I want to live in peace' isn't bullshit, especially in Cynthia is well aware of what sort of destruction is gonna be wrought if she starts triggering the orbital weapons. You'd probably not be able to address it in the movie though.

Not what I mean. I'm saying that it's sort of a cliché of robot-related sci-fi media, and it might take some effort to make it work.


Also, not sure I want to bring particle-beam satellites into this particular canon. The whole concept was kinda out-there even back in the 80's when Reagan and co. tried to sink money into it (Star Wars was never its real name, but a derogatory nickname from the Democrats that stuck). Rods from God or orbital nukes I can buy, that's a matter of just getting existing technology into orbit. But even then I never was on board with the whole idea of a Boomer black-box in some 'innocuous' disguise (because, like I said last post in so many words, I don't think it would be very hard to sniff out a Boomer even if it was wearing human skin). So she's a strategic asset because she can plan everything down to the last detail; how many planes to build, how to make them, where to put them. Minimum ambiguity, a plan delivered straight from the biggest data-crunch in human history.

My sort of follow-up to that was a sort of Day the Earth Stood Still concept. Cynthia realizes no side can win, that short of mutual disarmament reignition of WW4 will mean mutual annihiliation - or that even if one side 'wins', its power-brokers, Cynthia's makers, will end up fighting amongst themselves or be ejected from office by popular discontent. Every scenario she tries ends in failure for her bosses, and her bosses will not accept failure, they'll just kill her and find some other kid to be the meat-brain. They've done this already - and so she reaches out to a splinter faction within GENOM, planning to break herself out of the government's grasp, then the megacorp's, to do - what? Live in peace? Destroy the Intellectual Asset program entirely so no one else will ever be like her? Become a pre-Largo Boomer Messiah? I wasn't really sure how to do her motive, and then tie that to good action scenes for the Sabers. So I restarted the script.

[hazard]

So the plan is still 'live in peace'.

Unfortunately, she needs to deal with at least two major factors. The first is her bosses, so long as she's under their thumb and starts talking about how their plans are impossible she's going to die. The second is whatever group she gets to extract and protect her, who are not going to let an asset as useful as her escape.

So she accepts her position as an advisor/aide to somebody powerful in the USA government (probably), or at least somebody in the USA military-industrial complex. She's constantly watched because she's important, but at least to outsiders she's not critical. She pushes feelers out to see if somebody is willing and able to help her disappear and runs into GENOM and more importantly Mason. Not being stupid, she expects to be betrayed, so she makes sure that she has fallbacks and cut outs and a well prepared escape route and false identity to disappear into the system with. Be it to build her own faction or live out her life, but probably more the former than the latter.

The movie simply doesn't have time to get into anything but generalities. Living in peace could after all include 'destroying all threats', but she's not currently in a position to really dismantle the threats. She has no resources for it. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that playing the extraction and retrieval assets against eachother while she slips away and is presumed lost in the fighting is a bad idea...


The USA/her handler, faced with a sensitive asset disappearing in an allied nation cannot deploy their own forces, even covertly, without diplomatic trouble they don't want to deal with because it'd highlight how important Cynthia is, and hires the Knight Sabers. Not being stupid, Japanese law enforcement etc. is also informed, just like with the KS not everything being told. Enter the climactic clusterfuck for the final combat scene.

[classicdrogn]

So she accepts her position as an advisor/aide to somebody powerful in the USA government (probably), or at least somebody in the USA military-industrial complex.

Like, say, whatever the public face of Hou Bang is, that had the facilities and budget to build a one-off super-prototype battle mover (far sleeker and apparently more capable than the government walker tank design that was shown) and let Reika run off with it in her quest for revenge? Sure, they may have lost that contract to the GENOM/Gulf & Bradley Sabertooth project, but an organization with that kind of pocket does not live or die by a single deal. I had thought they were called "Chang Group" but can find no reference to it outside of fan fiction with a quick search.

Maybe "American Fruit Packing Company?"

I did brush across Rob Kelk's BGC FAQ in the process (Hi Rob!) and will continue to assert that one item in it is flat out wrong: We see the name spelled "Celia" on screen, that's as canon as it gets. "Sylia" is on all the packaging etc. and commonly accepted, but if the image on the screen contradicts it then all the packaging etc. is as wrong as if it said it was a box of animal crackers rather than a VHS cassette.

(Or hopefully a DVD case, since I've had boxes of animal crackers last longer than VHS tapes, in the ancient 2nd-gen VCR that was the one and only ever owned in my family. I'd swear that thing had actual fangs and a malicious AI living inside it.)

[STMPD]

I had thought they were called "Chang Group" but can find no reference to it outside of fan fiction with a quick search.

Quincy in episode 7: "It must be the work of the Chang Group." (Chang-gumi, I believe he said, which, yeah, that's a pretty organized-crime way to put it.)

Some dude: "You mean the Hou Bang?"

And then there's the part in the car where Daley exposits on their origins.

I was going over Shadowjack's 'In Which I Watch' BGC thread the other day, and picked up that he thought that Reika's origins were tied to that Triad just 'cause Triads were a big deal in Hong Kong action movies at the time. So I'm torn between keeping that origin when I drag in Reika or someone like her - a megacorp-sized Triad with contacts across the diaspora - or just straight up the CWPC, a conglomerate of privatized SOE's, and 'Reika' a dishonored daughter of a princeling who got offed after the last Stalinist purge.

I did brush across Rob Kelk's BGC FAQ in the process (Hi Rob!) and will continue to assert that one item in it is flat out wrong: We see the name spelled "Celia" on screen, that's as canon as it gets. "Sylia" is on all the packaging etc. and commonly accepted, but if the image on the screen contradicts it then all the packaging etc. is as wrong as if it said it was a box of animal crackers rather than a VHS cassette.

I went and changed the name in my screenplay after reading this. It makes more sense that Celia is her name - but do I have to rename Miss Yamazaki Lena by that token?

So the plan is still 'live in peace'.

Unfortunately, she needs to deal with at least two major factors. The first is her bosses, so long as she's under their thumb and starts talking about how their plans are impossible she's going to die. The second is whatever group she gets to extract and protect her, who are not going to let an asset as useful as her escape.

So she accepts her position as an advisor/aide to somebody powerful in the USA government (probably), or at least somebody in the USA military-industrial complex. She's constantly watched because she's important, but at least to outsiders she's not critical. She pushes feelers out to see if somebody is willing and able to help her disappear and runs into GENOM and more importantly Mason. Not being stupid, she expects to be betrayed, so she makes sure that she has fallbacks and cut outs and a well prepared escape route and false identity to disappear into the system with. Be it to build her own faction or live out her life, but probably more the former than the latter.

The movie simply doesn't have time to get into anything but generalities. Living in peace could after all include 'destroying all threats', but she's not currently in a position to really dismantle the threats. She has no resources for it. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that playing the extraction and retrieval assets against eachother while she slips away and is presumed lost in the fighting is a bad idea...


The USA/her handler, faced with a sensitive asset disappearing in an allied nation cannot deploy their own forces, even covertly, without diplomatic trouble they don't want to deal with because it'd highlight how important Cynthia is, and hires the Knight Sabers. Not being stupid, Japanese law enforcement etc. is also informed, just like with the KS not everything being told. Enter the climactic clusterfuck for the final combat scene.

This is all really good stuff, but I'm not sure what I oughta do with it. I could adapt OVA 1 into something like this, tie it into larger plot threads like the Ambassadors, but I don't think I want to go back to it being the Sabers' first job, or putting it in medias res as the original OVA did. 


One thing that dawned on me today is that the running sequence of events that makes up the second Crash! OVA would probably fit the narrative better than the relatively simple thing going on with Crisis 1 - I always liked how Priss and Adama spent most of their time underground, first in the sewers, then the subway, then Geo City itself. (Also her fight with the stupidly-designed scorpion Boomer was pretty bitchin' too.) Paralleling that, maybe bringing a Saber or two into the floodwater repositories under Megatokyo (like the ones they have today but bigger) would be cool...

---

Anyway! Back to the main screenplay and the minute details there. I cribbed a bunch of the scene where Priss agrees to go a-Sabering with Sylia  Celia from Alyusa's Bubblegum Cry, which is about the Sabers being werewolves (and all the dom-sub bullshit that entails) but has a good opening scene with the two. Tone's similar, Celia's lofty and vague language is all but identical. So now I've got the meeting with Linna, then the trio rescuing Nene from Boomers ransacking her apartment sans hardsuits (the Boomers are looking for the engram of her significant other she swiped on her way out of Mason's project), then Sylia showing her hardsuit to the rest of the gang, and that's Act 1.

Two things I'm trying to figure out how to do without having this first Act be too long (book I picked up said they should be about 30 pages), though.

One, I need to somehow bridge the gap between Priss being a rough-and-tumble bosozoku in the time before the 'film' and also an underground singer at least by the end of the movie - like I said, I want Konya Wa Hurricane to go over the ending credits. So: Did Priss sing professionally while she was a bike gangster? I don't think there's really room for a B-plot where Priss is trying to get a band (The Replicants) together, especially since I want to focus on each of the Sabers approximately equally for the bulk of the movie. Maybe music was a hobby she never had time for, and now Sylia's gotten her to take it up as a professional thing, so she has a somewhat consistent stream of non-Saber income? Where would she get a band, then?

Two, I want to establish Mason as a villain by the end of Act 1. Just that he exists, and that he's the Bad Guy, and that he and Sylia used to be close when they were really little. I think making Sylia's conflict with Mason more personal than 'your dad killed my dad now you must suffer' is a fertile ground for interesting scenes. So there needs to be at least one interaction they have before Mason shows up in Act 3 at her building. By the same token - do I have time to include flashbacks as to what happened with Priss and Nene, their respective tragedies involving Mason? Or should they just tell those stories to the other Sabers as exposition and be done with it? Just thinking about this.

[classicdrogn]

I was going over Shadowjack's 'In Which I Watch' BGC thread the other day, and picked up that he thought that Reika's origins were tied to that Triad just 'cause Triads were a big deal in Hong Kong action movies at the time. So I'm torn between keeping that origin when I drag in Reika or someone like her - a megacorp-sized Triad with contacts across the diaspora - or just straight up the CWPC, a conglomerate of privatized SOE's, and 'Reika' a dishonored daughter of a princeling who got offed after the last Stalinist purge.

Having the corporate leadership tied into a crime family does give them an excuse to be more minded to let her go on a personal quest for bloody vengeance, and to have black money to throw around in pursuit of it. OTOH, if it works better for the plot (or just the running time) to leave that out, by all means make the change.

I went and changed the name in my screenplay after reading this. It makes more sense that Celia is her name - but do I have to rename Miss Yamazaki Lena by that token?

Since it's intentionally a new retelling you don't "have to" do anything, but you certainly can if you want to. I don't remember seeing that one myself, but in 2040 it was always pronounced LEE-na like the sorceress who throws explosive spells around like candy at a parade, so maybe that's where they got it from?

One thing that dawned on me today is that the running sequence of events that makes up the second Crash! OVA would probably fit the narrative better than the relatively simple thing going on with Crisis 1 - I always liked how Priss and Adama spent most of their time underground, first in the sewers, then the subway, then Geo City itself. (Also her fight with the stupidly-designed scorpion Boomer was pretty bitchin' too.) Paralleling that, maybe bringing a Saber or two into the floodwater repositories under Megatokyo (like the ones they have today but bigger) would be cool...

Go ahead and try it; if it works, great, if not maybe you can adapt it for a later part. The only thing I'd absolutely keep from BGC OVA1 is the Silky Van as a mobile transport/support unit to let the Sabers deploy without being seen hop-skipping halfway across the city (or launching a highly distinctive aircraft RIGHT OUT OF THE SUPPOSEDLY SECRET HQ like in Crash...)

One, I need to somehow bridge the gap between Priss being a rough-and-tumble bosozoku in the time before the 'film' and also an underground singer at least by the end of the movie - like I said, I want Konya Wa Hurricane to go over the ending credits. So: Did Priss sing professionally while she was a bike gangster?

Probably? If nothing else, she's gotta pay for food and gasoline (and the expensive custom bikes she keeps driving to destruction) somehow after all, and even as a gang member she doesn't seem the type to be dealing drugs or running prostitutes.

Getting a band together is probably not that rard though, at least if she has some kind of connections to the local music scene. Just floating the word that she's got a line on some gigs (through Sylia's finagling with venue owners maybe?) and/or needs some guys for a few recording sessions should be able to get your standard druns, synth, bass & lead guitarist together in the short term. Getting along and being successful enough to stay together is another question, but with how she apparently flakes out of shows on the regular having "the Replicants" be a rotating group of whoever has the night free and doesn't completely suck would also make some sense.

Two, I want to establish Mason as a villain by the end of Act 1. Just that he exists, and that he's the Bad Guy, and that he and Sylia used to be close when they were really little. I think making Sylia's conflict with Mason more personal than 'your dad killed my dad now you must suffer' is a fertile ground for interesting scenes. So there needs to be at least one interaction they have before Mason shows up in Act 3 at her building. By the same token - do I have time to include flashbacks as to what happened with Priss and Nene, their respective tragedies involving Mason? Or should they just tell those stories to the other Sabers as exposition and be done with it? Just thinking about this.

It might work better to cover Celia and Brian's past with a comment that it's really disappointing how he changed as a reaction to one of the other Sabers' stories, though some of it could also be worked in if she gets a call at some point and he's inviting her out to dinner - "We haven't talked in so long, it seems we've both become busy adults," or something along those lines - and one of the others (Nene for preference, but any could fit) tease her about having an admirer, but she strongly disapproves of any such ideas, and adds "You know him as well, or of him - Brian J. Mason, head of GENOM Special Projects. It seems he's become a real snake," thereby prompting their own story.

[drakensis]

Could have Priss come to Sylia's attention by having her attempt a confrontation with Mason when Sylia is present. Say that Mason and Sylia are both attending the same reception or whatever (some social thing that shows they move in the same circles, Mason as a senior (but not top tier) member of Genom while Sylia is a significant local figure). Mason slimes up to her, Sylia keeps her temper and Mason leaves. Possibly Sylia has a brief flashback or conversation with someone as she watches Mason's limo depart... but she then sees someone on a bike heading after the limo.

Cut to Priss attempting a hot-headed interception. This goes badly, she's lost her bike, she's wounded, staggering away through an alleyway... Sylia's Mercedes pulls up and opens the door. Priss hops in, pulls a gun on Sylia and then sees that Sylia already has her own gun out and aimed at her. Sylia asks "do you want to argue or leave?" Priss sighs, her gun's empty already. They drive and talk - why did Priss go after Mason, why does Sylia care/help Priss...?



Regarding Priss' music, maybe her boyfriend was headlining the act and it was his side-gig outside the gang. Partway through Act 2 she's still frustrated, looking for a way to vent. She slams in one of his old demo tapes to listen to (or MP3 or whatever) and starts spilling out what she's thinking and it slips into her singing it (mad machine maybe?). Finally she's sitting exhausted, vented, one of the other Sabers (Nene or Linna) walks past and asks what band she was playing (not realising it was Priss singing). Priss sarcastically asks if they think it was 'nice' (implying soft), and the response was "No, it sounded raw. And powerful." Which is a 'huh' moment for Priss. And this sets up that instead of Priss taking up her boyfriend's role as a gangleader, instead she takes up the path of music.

[classicdrogn]

... Yeah, ignore what I edited in about hiring a band, Drakensis' is better. Or maybe use both to fill out each other?

[hazard]

It might work better to cover Celia and Brian's past with a comment that it's really disappointing how he changed as a reaction to one of the other Sabers' stories, though some of it could also be worked in if she gets a call at some point and he's inviting her out to dinner - "We haven't talked in so long, it seems we've both become busy adults," or something along those lines - and one of the others (Nene for preference, but any could fit) tease her about having an admirer, but she strongly disapproves of any such ideas, and adds "You know him as well, or of him - Brian J. Mason, head of GENOM Special Projects. It seems he's become a real snake," thereby prompting their own story.

Or she could comment he was always a snake, she just didn't realize until it was too late.

[Bob Schroeck]

Mason always struck me as the grown-up version of the kind of kid who threw rocks at puppies and pulled goldfish out of bowls to watch them suffocate and dry out on a tabletop. Maybe she could reference something along those lines she witnessed when they were both ten or so.

[STMPD]

It might work better to cover Celia and Brian's past with a comment that it's really disappointing how he changed as a reaction to one of the other Sabers' stories, though some of it could also be worked in if she gets a call at some point and he's inviting her out to dinner - "We haven't talked in so long, it seems we've both become busy adults," or something along those lines - and one of the others (Nene for preference, but any could fit) tease her about having an admirer, but she strongly disapproves of any such ideas, and adds "You know him as well, or of him - Brian J. Mason, head of GENOM Special Projects. It seems he's become a real snake," thereby prompting their own story.

This is pretty much what I was thinking of doing, segueing Priss / Nene's stories into Celia's, only she's intentionally much more vague about what he was like. I mean...

Mason always struck me as the grown-up version of the kind of kid who threw rocks at puppies and pulled goldfish out of bowls to watch them suffocate and dry out on a tabletop. Maybe she could reference something along those lines she witnessed when they were both ten or so.

This is pretty much what I was thinking, too. Like Peter in Ender's Game.
I've also been toying with the idea that he had a childhood crush on Celia - wanted to sort of be her white-knight savior or something - and then, when her already accelerated cognitive development got kicked into overdrive with her father's last message, she froze him out. He never understood why - his dad never told him 'yep son I killed Celia's dad for the good of the company lol' - and he's bitter about it. Holds a grudge. Wants Celia to be his, his, his. Can't understand why she won't join SpecProjects, he knows she's a super-genius not just some fashion-designer ditz, why doesn't he like her? He can have any other woman he wants 'cause he's Moonshot Mason, he even has his Razordoll security detail's head Boomer sculpted to look like her, but it's not her. Then he figures out she must be Saber White in a deep dive through GENOM's databases after the Sabers have begun to undermine his plans for not-Soulkiller (Koshchei is the name I was thinking I might give it), and lashes out - sends Battle Boomers into the heart of Megatokyo to wreck her shit. Of course, this is what makes Quincy decide to not send him the forces he wants to crush the Sabers - rampant military hardware in the middle of GENOM's model city is, contrary to the original OVA, bad for the megacity-reconstruction business that GENOM makes so much money off of...

Could have Priss come to Sylia's attention by having her attempt a confrontation with Mason when Sylia is present. Say that Mason and Sylia are both attending the same reception or whatever (some social thing that shows they move in the same circles, Mason as a senior (but not top tier) member of Genom while Sylia is a significant local figure). Mason slimes up to her, Sylia keeps her temper and Mason leaves. Possibly Sylia has a brief flashback or conversation with someone as she watches Mason's limo depart... but she then sees someone on a bike heading after the limo.

Cut to Priss attempting a hot-headed interception. This goes badly, she's lost her bike, she's wounded, staggering away through an alleyway... Sylia's Mercedes pulls up and opens the door. Priss hops in, pulls a gun on Sylia and then sees that Sylia already has her own gun out and aimed at her. Sylia asks "do you want to argue or leave?" Priss sighs, her gun's empty already. They drive and talk - why did Priss go after Mason, why does Sylia care/help Priss...?

I'm not really sure this would work, if only because it implies that Celia hadn't been already monitoring Priss, waiting to swoop in like a savior at her lowest moment - which is how I've got it written right now. I dislike too much coincidence in my writing, but I can't deny that this proposed scene does a great job of establishing everything really well. I'm gonna stick with what I've got - go with introducing Mason a little later - and maybe if I get stuck I'll go back and write those opening scenes differently.

Regarding Priss' music, maybe her boyfriend was headlining the act and it was his side-gig outside the gang. Partway through Act 2 she's still frustrated, looking for a way to vent. She slams in one of his old demo tapes to listen to (or MP3 or whatever) and starts spilling out what she's thinking and it slips into her singing it (mad machine maybe?). Finally she's sitting exhausted, vented, one of the other Sabers (Nene or Linna) walks past and asks what band she was playing (not realising it was Priss singing). Priss sarcastically asks if they think it was 'nice' (implying soft), and the response was "No, it sounded raw. And powerful." Which is a 'huh' moment for Priss. And this sets up that instead of Priss taking up her boyfriend's role as a gangleader, instead she takes up the path of music.

This, though, I'm gonna try to do. It might not be her boyfriend who was doing the music, though - I subscribe to the PrissxCelia school of shipping that Bob had so much fun
poking with that one scene in DWII. Just putting that out there. I can see this, too, as an intro to a montage of Things Happening - Celia building the hardsuits to each user's biometrics while the other Sabers try to establish new lives (Nene in the ADP, Priss singing, Linna allowing herself more time to do kata, etc.) Play it to some redux of an iconic BGC song (probably not Mad Machine, though) and we'll be good.

---

Okay, you know what, I've been coy long enough. Here's what I've got so far in Google Doc format. I like what I've got so far, and I like leaning on y'all for story beats when I get stumped. Read it, see if you like it, please don't sell it to a major movie producer 'cause I wanna do that some bajillion years in the future.

I'm coming up on the bridge from Act 1 to 2, where Celia sells Linna on the Sabers, then drags her and Priss to rescue Nene from Boomers ransacking her apartment in plainclothes. Still trying to figure out what exactly Celia's angle is - especially considering I have Linna call her out on the Saber project being a mix of superheroic fantasy delusion (because, remember, she knew Sylia was really into super sentai when she was young) and an inability to lay her father to rest (I dunno why but I see Linna as being the most spiritually inclined of all the Sabers, a good Confucian-Shinto-Buddhist in contrast to the lapsed Orthodox Nene and the cynical Celia and Priss). I mean, I like that Linna goes down that route after Celia pushes her a little, if only because it's a rant motivated by a lot of little things that Linna is unhappy about with this particular reunion, and it's sort of genre-aware in a way most superheroic fiction actively refuses to be. I don't want to cut that out, but... eh.
I see this iteration of Linna as a very anxious sort of person, someone who wants to be liked, wants to be recognized, is sort of an overachiever, not just another basic bougie bitch stuck in an ever-shrinking middle-class income bracket. Celia knows this, knows that her parents getting ganked by Boomers (canon in 2032 if I recall correctly) affected her differently than it affected revenge-obsessed Celia. Made her come very close to losing the stability and security money provides - and made her willing to sacrifice her happiness and personal ambitions (martial arts, dance, etc.) to hold onto that security. (Perhaps because it leans into this uncomfortable side of Linna, I sort of like the ancient fic Midnight Hour.) 
So... how to exploit that? Sylia promised Priss revenge and a chance to restart her life - what would be the words she uses to sway Linna that wouldn't piss her off? Hrm. I think I can figure this out on my own, I just want to see what others think.

[classicdrogn]

Play it to some redux of an iconic BGC song (probably not Mad Machine, though) and we'll be good.

Soldier Girl? I think that's the name of the piece I'm thinking of; it's the almost only recognizable English lyric anyway ("We want you soldier girl, soldier girl...") followed by something I remember my headcanon translation-to-fit-the-melody as being "guarding your heart with armor."

I'll take a look at your WIP, hopefully sooner than RSN but not quite now. Yet. Whatever.

what would be the words she uses to sway Linna that wouldn't piss her off?

I take it you decided against "Lena" then?

Linna was the one most concerned about the cash in the original, yet still having some signs of the ... innocence? Idealism? ... played up more in 2040 as the newbie. Being offered a fat payday to sweeten the deal of putting her martial training to use in ways being a McDojo instructor never could and taking revenge for spilled blood and tears might get her to stop and think, but - even if not stated aloud, or not until later - making an effort at keeping anyone else from having their world shaken the way hers was could be the thing that makes her decide to agree.

Wait, now I can't remember, was she a martial arts instructor in canon, or just aerobics and dance? My own story, long neglected as it's been, trips me up that way sometimes.

I don't know, I just see her as a straightforward person, I guess - money is important because it buys security, and everyone wants that. If she can get paid for trying to make sure everyone has a little more of it against things that money can't fix or replace, even better, right? Not everything has to be complicated. It would also tie in to how she seems to have strong friendships but poor luck in love, if she's a little blunt about things and gets offended by the social lubricant sort of "white lies" in a closer relationship.

[firvulag]

Soldier Girl? I think that's the name of the piece I'm thinking of; it's the almost only recognizable English lyric anyway ("We want you soldier girl, soldier girl...") followed by something I remember my headcanon translation-to-fit-the-melody as being "guarding your heart with armor."

I think the song you're referring to is "Kodoku no Angel"