Zseni wrote:

This thread, plus influential family game of coming up with manga ideas more Japanese than Japan, plus an extensive and troubled afternoon perambulation around the local farmlands, inspired a BRAND NEW AWESOME MANGA IDEA.

I don't draw; it's common. But here is the awesome idea anyway:


In the new future a young woman lives each day in a strange alienation, troubled by mysterious impulses that she can't seem to place. Influenced by her boyfriend's habit of incessantly watching martial arts movies she heads out into the local park to self-consciously play punchy and kicky in sko private area - it seems to satisfy those mysterious impulses. Over time this becomes her habit and with practice and refinement she realizes that certain moves have very unusual effects: it starts off with the traditional shattered streetlight when she tries a certain open-palm strike, and then a crushed mailbox etc. etc. until one day she understands how to topple buildings and submerge streets in the earth. Her powers develop further: she is unable to harm any living thing, but she can cause water and wind to change course and vines and trees to grow almost instantaneously through chi manipulation. Aww she loves all the little flowers and shit too!

FREAKY WILD. But she started out a little bit of a Luddite, and with her development she has gotten more and more hippy. Then, suddenly, one day there's a "future home of" sign at her beloved park: it has been sold off to build a housing development. That night she talks about it with her boyfriend, who does not know about her growing powers, and he explains that it's the way of things - there are many people, they have to go somewhere, even a wild plant in the forest will grow and spread and push out other plants. WELL FUCK THAT SHIT. After a night of deep contemplation she dons some suitably dramatic outfit and GOES REBEL AGAINST MANKIND on behalf of a force whose natural order she is by her very actions perverting.

The story continues on with her warring against mankind but simultaneously unable to seperate herself from the comforts of progress - from soda pop to intensive care units - and continually tormented by the contrary and essentially hypocritical impulses that drive her. Destroying construction projects and replacing them with lavishly-forested plots is only good for so long - then she begins to see the dramatic effects of her actions on the economic life of the city and the fear and need of the people around her. What is she really fighting against, and why? How can she resolve the terrible contradictions in her philosophy with the astonishing powers she has developed? Isolated by her mission, won't she get lonely? And what does that mean? What kind of human is she? Will the earth itself fight against her? Will man realize the folly of his ways - or is there actually any folly in his ways? IS SHE THE GOOD GUY OR THE BAD GUY?

FIND OUT NEXT ISSUE?!!