Yuri to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito

A Shoujo ai centred Weblog

Pangya – Storylines born from the void

Posted on | October 12, 2008 | 3 Comments |

Hi all,

Since love has moved away to London for the year I am all alone in Coventry and so I’ve begun to pick up bad habits again…

No, not pantyflipping patients’ nightgowns. You sick person.

I’m talking about Pangya

Some of you might have noticed a Pangya tag in my categories list, and that is because long, long ago (well, 2 years or so), I played Albatross18 (the American equivalent) fairly religiously and got fairly good. However, due to OGPlanet not really keeping updates going and keeping the game interesting, I weaned myself off it and was all the better for it. I came back briefly when they released Season 3, but even that failed to pique my interest.

And here I am a year down the line, having spent a good proportion of a day giving myself a headache trying to find a good way of getting a Japanese IP so I can play on their servers… I have come to the enlightened conclusion that proxy servers are pretty similar to porn site passwords – i.e. free ones get abused to death and die within 5 minutes of posting.

But anyway. On to the meat of this week’s topic.

Those of my readers who are also avid doujinshi collectors such as myself will have seen that the games market holds pretty much equal sway in the otaku imagination as the anime and manga market. In fact, probably just as many doujinshi are written about games such as Pangya as popular anime such as Gundam SEED.

I guess I find it interesting, since here in the West we are used to computer games being mainly things of entertainment with no significant storyline to spam fanworks from. Even games with storylines such as Half Life probably don’t have a huge fanfiction fanbase. Oh, I’ve just thought of a great exception to this – Dauthi’s Guitar Hero yuri fanfic fluff from a while back. I guess that really embodies “if you can think of it, there’s fanfic of it somewhere”

I mean, I understand stuff being written about story driven games such as Final Fantasy, but how can you write an imaginative piece about characters where the only thing you have to go on is pretty much their appearance, their wardrobe and their occupation (pro golfer, of course).

I guess the best argument to resolve this is that doujinshi for the most part aren’t imaginative works – much like the porn film has the stereotyped plot, doujinshi will often fall into the preprogrammed lines of “bodyless penis rapes moe character who protests but actually enjoys it rather too much”.So you might argue that in some cases “no story is required”. And you’d probably be right.

Which brings me onto my next point – surely it is the attractiveness of the characters and the artwork that spurs people on to make fanworks of certain characters in game. Once game creators realised that female characters in games stimulates the same male interest as female characters in anime, there has been no shortage of eye-candy for those that want it. Pretty similar in fact, to writing “porn without plot” fanfictions about popular celebrities. If the characters are moe enough, who needs a storyline anyway?

But perhaps it is merely the popularity of games that stimulates imaginative works. Suffice to say, fighting games and MMOs in particular are probably more popular in Japan than in other countries, so combining this with the doujin works culture that accompanies it is not surprising the number of fanworks that result.

So enough of the boring bit.

I guess the real point of this post was to show that even I could make story out of thin air. So I’ll be taking you through the world of Pangya – Yuribou style.

The Characters

Pangya is a fantasy golfing wonderland. In terms of golfers, there are four main female characters and four male ones (though of course we disregard them – though Max and Kaz are very bishie ^^ Maybe they used to be girls.) Anyway, the four female characters are Arin (the magical girl), Kooh (the pirate loli), Cecilia (the airship captain) and Hana (the default character. Poor girl.)

Hana

Yuribou Fanservice guide classification: Major – Energetic, Minor – Submissive, Unexpectedly embarassable, Yuri. Accessory – Sempai obsession, catgirl avatar

Hana is the ordinary girl of the group – overshadowed in many respects (namely bust size and golfing ability) by the other older girls, she makes up for it with her energy and sunny personality. She seems to be extremely naive about the ways of the world, since her life has been fairly sheltered. She has a tendency to latch onto people that she admires – especially Arin, who loves to tease her over her innocence. Although she is unsure of her feelings, she thinks she might have a eensy little crush on her.

However, once she reaches a high enough level, the truth about her is revealed – in reality, Hana is the avatar of a cat-eared goddess whose purpose is to convert the world into catgirls – in an unnecessarily intimate fashion. Needless to say, she gets her own back on Arin, but that’s another story – which I haven’t the energy to write yet ^^

Kooh

Classification: Major – Taciturn, Minor – Uncanny ability (agility), Older than she seems, Obsessed over breast size, unexpectedly kind

Kooh is a pirate girl who looks to be quite young. However, she has been the captain of her own ship for a number of years and she is actually about 25 years old since there is a weird genetic inheritance in her family in which the female members never go through puberty. She has had a hard childhood on board ship since her parents died when she was little when they fought with the airships of Silvia Cannon and she was brought up by her shipmates. Despite having a girl’s body, her mind is more than mature and she turns her nose up at the amorous antics of the other girls; in fact, she seems a little jaded when she talks down upon such activities. However, if one of the other girls is in a pinch, she will grudgingly help out with their love troubles (It seems like she’s been through it all before!)

Kooh has come to terms with her appearance through hard training to increase her agility and power and enhance the advantages of having such a slight frame. However, though she seems happy with where she has gotten to, in moments of weakness she occasionally explodes in jealousy over her own flatchestedness. She especially gets annoyed with Cecilia, who she hates both because of her connection with her parents’ deaths and because she has always treated her like a child. Secretly, though, she finds comfort in Cecilia’s mothering embrace though she would never tell her that…

Arin

Classification: Major – Vamp, Minor – Uncanny ability (magical girl), Younger than she seems (Tall and Cool), Dominant, Rich, Regional accent

Arin is the daughter of an aristocratic family and enrolled in a magic college. She speaks with a cultured Kansai-ben accent. Although on the surface Arin seems the perfect student to her parents, in fact she is more often found lazing under a tree near one of the water hazards on the school’s attached golf course. She is admired throughout her school (especially by Hana) as having a cultured air about her and being tall and cool, but actually this is a front she puts on for her fans.

Behind closed doors, she is actually quite a dominant person – her hobby is luring attractive girls to her lair under her favourite tree and leaving them two hours later shell shocked and feeling rather violated. Her second favourite hobby is teasing her underclassman Hana about her sexual naivety, but secretly she hasn’t had any actual experience with fourth base and this is another of her false fronts. She has an ultra secret crush on Kooh, since her favourite type are cool quiet girls. However, Kooh is one of the only girls who sees right through Arin’s facade and finds her too shallow to even bother talking to.

Cecilia

/ The text says – You expect me to play golf in this?

Classification: Major – Classical lady (Ojou), Minor – Handy, Mothering, Ditzy (Mamama~), Sensible/Voice of reason.

Cecilia is a captain of one of the airships of Silvia Cannon. Despite giving an air of ditziness, all her crew respect her as an excellent airship captain and she always has good advice to dispense in all situations. Being older than the other golfers, she tends to mother them a little, which gets mixed reactions. Hana purrs like a cat and Arin pulls away as she has always had bad relations with her parents. She was not involved in the battle that killed Kooh’s parents, since her ship was in drydock for repairs on that day, but feels guilty about it since if she was there, then Kooh’s family’s would not have been falsely identified as an enemy ship. She knows that Kooh secretly likes being smothered in her motherly bosom and takes every opportunity to try and make amends for her past sins.

Already having been happily married to Brie for 10 years, Cecilia looks on the love triangles within the group with a degree of amusement, especially Arin’s one sided and somehow completely inappropriate crush on Kooh. Occasionally she manipulates things a little from the sidelines to help things along.

Hope you enjoyed that – They were harder to write than I expected! Tune in mid week for some extra stuff that I didn’t have time to write this weekend!

Category: Editorials, Humour?, Pangya!

Comments

3 Responses to “Pangya – Storylines born from the void”

  1. Patrick
    October 13th, 2008 @ 7:28 am

    An interesting read as always. Also, check your bold tag, everything past Kooh’s name is all bold.

  2. Tye The Czar
    October 14th, 2008 @ 9:59 pm

    Ah, good old Half-Life. Instead of fanfics, people just make lots of mods for the game. Most can be found in HL’s section on moddb.com, where there lie so many other free goodies(Celestial Impact, etc.)

  3. Asuka
    November 7th, 2008 @ 2:41 am

    Aah, back to the good old stories.

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