"Look, Norman, it doesn't have to be this way. You said it yourself: we're friends. You don't want to fight me, and I most certainly don't want to fight you. All you have to do is... accept that I just might know what I'm talking about, and step aside."

"Blow it out your ass."

"I gotta ask," I said, turning to look at Dean, who paused the show just before the fight scene could resume. "What... what would happen if Norman wasn't there, if he, Iunno, got hit by a bus when he was sixteen, and wasn't the one to stop Napoleon?"

I'd opened with the hypotheticals, when Dean showed up at my house and I showed him to the guest bedroom because my own was a horrendous mess that could only be safely navigated by someone who lived in there. But now that we were done with that, Dean had his laptop hooked up to the TV, and we were watching Chain of Thorns Season 1. We'd actually started last week, and we had gotten through six episodes so far; today, we'd be getting through Episodes 7 and 8, and finishing off the first season.

Despite my initial misgivings of... honestly, pretty vague origin, I was actually really liking Chain of Thorns. It was surprisingly densely plotted, in a way that delighted me; this was the kind of breakneck pacing I'd only really seen in the first two parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and I was really impressed that it only took these guys eight episodes to get me invested in these characters and their struggles while telling a full Season 1 setup and introduction story that didn't feel like an introduction because it did not waste time getting to the good shit. It didn't waste a single moment anywhere, and yet, it didn't feel oppressively breakneck, because that quick pacing didn't mean there were no scenes of people relaxing and talking shit; that happened a lot, to develop the characters and their relationships in a very efficient, effective, and entertaining way.

Also, exposition frequently came up in casual conversation, as did some clever and fun foreshadowing.

It was a fucking masterclass, and I was very glad Dean had made me watch this show with him.

"There's actually a spinoff movie about exactly this, and it's pretty controversial among the fanbase," Dean said. "On the one hand, it's a more serious and sober-minded exploration of the setting, without the anarchic nonsense of Joe Norman going around and flipping tables. On the other hand, though, a lot of people quite vocally did not and still don't want that, because the setting is quite deliberately a paper-thin pastiche of generic fantasy so as to provide the funniest backdrop for the kind of guy who writes and performs his own Abridged Series, and with him not present, the story loses the spark that made it so special in the first place."

"Huh," I said. "...What, uh... what happens in that movie?"

"Avolex awakens the mantle of Maid Of Void, and manages to kill Napoleon in this first big fight on the Pennybacker Bridge, but then she is completely unprepared to handle what comes after, which I'm not going to spoil for you because that's what happens in Season 2. And then, uh... well, it's a tragic ending, but there's a sequel hook because now there's a resistance movement that props up Avolex as their figurehead martyr, and Arriel is one of its leaders."

"...So, is the movie any good, or..?"

"It develops a few of the characters in interesting ways, but it's also a less funny retread of the first season, which you need to have watched beforehand in order for it to actually make sense, and then they cut things off before they start treading any new ground that'd actually be interesting in its own right. I think they might make a sequel? But they're also well aware that a lot of people didn't like the first one, and might be a little gunshy about digging that hole any deeper. This is the thing we were talking about when I said that the movie was bad, but everyone was wrong about why it was bad."

"Fair enough. Well, let's keep watching."

Joseph Norman then proceeded to take a cheap store-bought baseball bat and absolutely demolish Joseph Napoleon and most of the bones in his body, beneath the harsh light of the Black Sun.

---

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"So, when we were in pre-pre-production, and Monty was pitching ideas to us, he would get frustrated that we never got his references, and so he decided, if we were going to make an anime-inspired show, then we'd have to watch a bunch of anime. And ideally, we would've already watched all those shows on our own time, spread out so we could properly digest them and incorporate them into our creative processes, but we had a deadline, so we just fucking, binged a shitton of anime."

After Season 1, the creative leads did a big interview slash podcast thing answering a few fan questions, but in a way that was pretty transparently just them cherrypicking the questions they wanted to answer so the could ramble about what they wanted to ramble about; tight pacing and economical writing was for the show itself, and the podcast didn't get writing at all.

Naturally, Dean and I were still going to watch it.

"I mean, it wasn't bad, Monty wasn't making us watch trash, it was all classics that held up, but we did have to watch a lot of it and we had to watch it all at once. Which isn't quite how you're supposed to watch Cowboy Bebop, but I did still like it, so..."

"Yeah, I remember making a joke about, what if we just ripped off the opening scene from the Cowboy Bebop movie? And that sort of 'man, what if we did this stupid thing?' ended up spiraling into the unreasonably detailed in-joke that is RWBY. Which is, a topic for another day-"

"Oh, but I do wanna talk about how we did watch some trash, just for fun, and how that resulted in Team RWBY being just a stupid mishmash of waifus- we had the flatchested tsundere, and the goth chick who wore all black and red and a miniskirt and a corset over her clothes and had a fucking scythe, and the even gothier chick whose outfit was designed to look like she's just wearing lingerie on top of her actual clothes and is also a catgirl..."

"And, of course, the piece de resistance, a blonde chick with huge boobs. Because you can't go wrong with the classics."

"Of course."

"The Directors sure are classy people, huh?" I said, turning to face Dean.

"Also, a really hamfisted allegory for racism that pretends it's adding pathos to the catgirl because the tsundere would send her to the salt mines if it came out she was a catgirl."

"The classiest," Dean said dryly.

"No, but like, we did get some inspiration that was good, and the most important part of that, I think, was from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 2: Battle Tendency, in the form of Joseph Motherfucking Joestar."

"Oh god, you and JoJo's."

"So, I fucking fell in love with the anarchic bullshit and harebrained schemes of Joseph Joestar, who, on the one hand, really is that smart, but on the other hand, it's mostly just him being really fucking good at messing with people, so he does still sometimes overextend and eat shit, to keep things interesting. And what I decided was, I'm going to make our protagonist be Joseph Joestar, just... with a different last name, to cover our asses."

"And then we had to come up with other characters, and I decided, well why not make a Caesar expy? But like, we can't call him Caesar, that's too recognizable, so who else can we name him after? And I started looking at other historical Italian warlords and generals and the like, and I think, for a few days, it was a tie between Luigi and Brutus? But then I was talking about it with Burnie over lunch and he said 'well what about Napoleon?' and I was like, 'that's amazing, I'm going with that.' And that's how we got Joseph Napoleon."

"Napoleon wasn't Italian, dude."

"He was from Corsica, which was Italian until right before Napoleon was born, and then became a French holding. Most Frenchmen of the time would have regarded Napoleon as being Italian-born."

Wait. Hang on. I remember my misgivings about Chain of Thorns. My oldest past life, she had been told that she really was that specific Joe Norman, just corrupted, and Chain of Thorns was the story of her life, had she not been fucked over by an outsider.

These complicated and deeply emotional relationships I've been watching and learning and getting invested in, that's what was taken from me.

And the thing that really made it set in?

My blissful ignorance about the fact that I was based on Joseph Motherfucking Joestar was also taken from me, by a boy I'd thought of as a friend.

Holy shit.

I tried my best to pay attention to what came next, but... fuck, that was one hell of a weight to carry.

"Alright, well," Dean said, once the commentary wrapped up. "What'd you think?"

"It's... really fucking dense," I said. "I'm gonna need some time to digest it all, figure out how I really feel about it. I'm... overall positive? But it's more complicated than that."

"Fair enough," Dean said, nodding and packing up his laptop. "Well, good luck, and if you wanna see some analyses of Season 1 that I'm fond of, just shoot me a message and I'll send you the links."

"Will do," I lied. "Take care, see you at lunch."