Sunday, July 5, 2015

GHWP Presents... Godzilla Fan Fiction? or How I Decided to Become a Writer

     I am a little surprised I am doing this. I thought I was going to leave this story in the past with only the small handful of pen pals and a college creative writing class having had the chance to read it. This story meant a lot to me even as a fan fiction, but I soon left it behind because I wanted to write something that could go somewhere. Then I dropped off writing altogether for several years when pressures in my family became too difficult to handle. I felt like I had given up my imagination. I found myself leaving both fan fiction and original stories behind, and it didn't help that I kept losing back up copies on failing computers. This story, however, was written on and printed out from my first computer, and I still have a paper copy that has been sitting in my writing folder for over a decade (note: I have to admit that an extra copy was mailed to me from a friend to replace several lost pages, so I still have "most" of the original paper copy).

     My writing history goes back to the age of eleven (maybe get a snack and strap in because this is going to be a long story). Forgive me if much of this story is told with a naive and childish excitement, but I'm tapping into some deep and innocent memories here and want to relay it with as much of the same feeling I had at the time. I was a fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys and cartoons, and a battle with pneumonia in the seventh grade started me on the path to collecting comic books while I was out of school and bedridden. Although my first comic book was given to me when I was three years old (Amazing Spider-Man # 231, which I still have), I only collected a small handful of random comics before I turned eleven. Archie Comics began publishing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon spinoff comics just a few months before I caught pneumonia, and I still remember seeing Leatherhead grace their cover shortly before seeing Erik Larsen's Venom on the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #346 on a shelf at Wal-Mart. That was it for me. The Infinity Gauntlet would be released a short time later as well as Marvel trading cards that would transition me from collecting baseball cards to reading even more comics, and I stuck to the Archie TMNT series faithfully as well as Amazing Spider-Man, Sleepwalker, and Darkhawk (yes, I was a big fan of those "cheesy" new blood Marvel superheroes of the early 90s).

     But this is about a Godzilla story, not my Marvel fandom or my sordid TMNT fandom (the TMNT story gets a bit ugly, but I learned just how much I matured from it). Back in 1985... well, if you know Godzilla at all, then you know what happened. I was seven years old when the movie came out. I don't know why I never saw it in a theater, but I did catch its first television broadcast. I wandered around my yard for three hours crying and clutching an Imperial Godzilla toy tightly after he fell into that volcano. Godzilla 1985 was the first new Godzilla movie made in my lifetime, and I thought they had brought him back just to kill him for good. I had to resign myself to older Godzilla movies for the next several years and never really wanted to see 1985 again. It made me cry every time, so I allowed my tastes in old sci-fi and horror movies to shift over into video games and comic books. I still had other favorites I could see and enjoy on Saturday afternoons with horror hosts like Grampa Munster, Commander USA, and Tampa, Florida's local horror host Dr. Paul Bearer. Meanwhile, I still had a meager but growing collection of VHS tapes of Godzilla and Gamera movies. TMNT toys, cartoons, and comics primarily inspired me to become a writer, but, at the time, all I was doing was creating a silly little universe around my toys and childhood fantasies. My family had moved from Texas to Florida during this time, and I had a new life to build in front of me. It was fun, but my stories illustrated how I wanted it to be better. Making my life better became even more important when my parents separated and my mother began a new and abusive relationship that eventually forced us to move back to our original Texas home. I'd spent five (well, four and a half not counting the divorce) happy years in my new home, and now I had to go back to a life I had convinced myself was better off left behind.

     In September of 1992, my family made the arduous trek back to Texas to live with extended family while we tried to get back on our feet. I'd left Texas five years earlier believing I had no friends and that Godzilla was dead forever. I was mistaken on both counts. I discovered that I was more well-liked than I used to believe, and high school brought me many other new friends as well. I spent most of high school writing my little fantasy superhero stories, still wishing in the back of my head that I still lived in Florida where all the stories were set. I spent a great deal of time in the library reading books on Greek and Norse mythology, reference books on the history of comic books (which were loaded with Golden Age reprints of several classics), but there was still a feeling of emptiness and unhappiness inside of me. I thought I had been born into an era where Godzilla didn't have a place anymore. Sure, I had access to the old movies and was a fan of things that typically were produced decades before I was born, but I had missed out on a part of the experience of Godzilla: the experience of something new and made in my time. I found a Dark Horse manga adaptation of Godzilla 1985 and read it several times. Somehow, I could handle that without crying but not the movie. Then everything changed when I walked into the town Blockbuster Video for the first time and perused the shelves. I instinctively went to the "Sci-Fi/Horror" section first, and there was something magical on the bottom shelf. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was a Godzilla movie I'd never seen or heard of, and it looked so fresh and new. It was Godzilla vs. Biollante.

     I can't describe the elation I felt when I popped that HBO Home Video cartridge into the VCR and hit play. It was like a bad childhood nightmare was unraveling in front of my eyes. It opened with the final moments of Godzilla 1985 and very quickly established that the King of the Monsters had been having a nice sauna for the past several years. He wasn't dead. I watched in awe as the mad science from my favorite old science fiction stories intermingled with James Bond-style espionage, psychic phenomena, and the notion that a human spirit could remain earthbound after its body died. All of this coalesced into Biollante, whom I still consider one of the best monsters ever designed for a Godzilla movie and mark among my top three favorites (other than Godzilla himself, which would include Angilas and Mothra). I rented the movie several times, never able to buy a copy for myself because the only way at the time would have been to order it for a whopping 80 bucks from a massive catalog Blockbuster kept behind their register. Eventually, I found the movie for a more reasonable $20 at a Suncoast Video store when I was in college.

     1994, of course, was the year TriStar first announced that it would be making an American Godzilla movie, and Dark Horse was moving forward with publication of comics based on the character as well. My flights of writing fancy in superheroes took another shift when I started spending time in the school library looking up articles on new Godzilla movies on newspaper microfiche. For years, this would be the only way I would know how Godzilla was progressing beyond Biollante and the only way I could "collect" Godzilla movies because it would be several years before I discovered the Internet and fan-subtitled bootleg VHS from Japan. I led a sheltered life, and I didn't communicate with anyone much outside of family and school. Over the next two years, I had watched Biollante countless times and picked it apart piece by piece, and I had found out one of the reasons I loved it so much: its potential. Although this film is not regarded very highly with its low box office numbers and what is considered a slow-paced script, I found much to love about the story even with any unrealized potential it had in it. I loved the characters, and the story of Biollante was groundbreaking and completely unwilling to end inside my own head the way it did in the film. Biollante seemed destined to return, but I had learned already from news articles that it was not to be. Godzilla was set to die again, and the rebooted franchise of the 1980s and 1990s Heisei series was going to be left behind forever... with Biollante having provided some of the most glaring loose ends. Biollante had introduced two major components to the franchise that never were fully explored: the potential existence of ghosts and a human spirit residing in the body of a monster. It could have turned the Godzilla franchise on its ear.

     If the movies weren't going to do it, then I had the innocent and naive idea that perhaps Dark Horse could. I began an attempt to incorporate an adaptation of Godzilla vs. Biollante into the continuity of the Dark Horse Godzilla timeline, and I set about finding a place for Biollante to thrive after being abandoned by her creators. Before I did that, however, I was nuts about crossovers, and I had so many ideas about famous characters meeting face to face. At the time, those were the best ideas I had, so I used them to try to "break into the industry." Without a clue what I was really doing, I submitted synopses of story ideas I had to a few publishers, and, of course, the only rejection letter that I got back that really impacted me was the one I received from Dark Horse after sending them a three-page synopsis of a Godzilla vs. Predator crossover idea I had (Dark Horse had license to both franchises at the time). Whereas every other publisher sent me a one-page form rejection, Dark Horse sent me an instruction manual on how to script comics as a writer and what types of stories they could accept. Although I never pursued a career in comics, I can't thank Dark Horse enough for their kindness and inspiration toward me as a young writer. Third-party franchises like Godzilla and Predator, unfortunately, were not on their acceptable submission list, but that didn't stop this ignorant little upstart. I wanted to know why, and the only place I could find the answer was Godzilla's owners themselves at Toho. So I wrote them a letter detailing my idea, what I wanted to do with it, and asking them how their license applied to Dark Horse Comics with regards to Godzilla stories and if Dark Horse could in any way connect to the films to offer an alternative perspective.

     Imagine being a seventeen-year-old, emotionally stunted and sheltered young man coming home from school to hear he had received a certified letter from "Godzilla" himself. My mother had to sign for it and everything. Now imagine that same kid as his heart sunk in his chest to find that the letter was, in fact, not from "Godzilla" but from his lawyers. That's right. Rather than to answer any of the questions this young fan had asked, they just threatened to sue me. I'd gone straight to them to find out more about their business practices with regard to licensing Godzilla, and they took it as an outright attempt at trademark infringement. Toho was overly litigious in the 90s, and I have a couple of friends that got similar letters. If they had their way, then I suppose fan fiction would be a punishable crime, but I made it very clear in my letter that I wanted to submit potential stories to one of their licensed publishers of Godzilla, Dark Horse Comics. It didn't matter to them. Their knee-jerk reaction was that someone was asking them how to make money off something they owned. Perhaps my wording was childish and easy to take out of context, but I thought I made myself clear. I never once thought of money when it came to writing. I only thought of telling a story. I was told in no uncertain terms to keep my imagination to myself or else.

     I was crestfallen only temporarily, however. I had had a fan letter printed in Dark Horse's Godzilla comic, and I soon became flooded with pen pals that expanded on my view of Godzilla fandom. This was my first and only real connection to the world outside my little hometown, and it was eye-opening. I shared my stories with them, and they cheered me on and shared stories of their own with me. So I kept writing them. I didn't discover the Internet until three years later, and the first real exploring I did was to find more information on Godzilla (I said I was stunted. I had a sheltered childhood. I couldn't have been the only eighteen-year-old male not looking for porn, could I?) Finally, I had access to more Godzilla movies through bootleg tape sites, but I also discovered fan fiction. Here, on these myriad websites, people were doing the same thing I was doing, telling stories that filled in holes and expanded upon the movies we loved. They existed as fan productions with no expectation of profit, and that was the same ideal I had about my stories. Still, with the Internet as a new and somewhat intangible thing to me in the 90s, I didn't believe typing the story up and putting it on a website was good enough. I needed to have it on paper somewhere. I needed to be published. That brought me to G-Fan magazine. The original Dark Horse Biollante story I had written sat for a few years as other avenues in my early adult life began opening up, but it had new life breathed into it when I read my first G-Fan magazine. I suddenly had a new idea: why not just write a direct sequel to Biollante that does everything I want it to do instead of tailoring it to meet the script and license requirements of a comic book. I never wanted to make money in the first place. I just wanted to tell the story. Perhaps G-Fan would offer me the chance.

     I still have the synopsis of a three-issue Dark Horse Biollante series on paper somewhere, but now I was working on a whole Heisei continuation of my own. I had all of the franchise under my belt now, having shed my tears to see Godzilla die a third time and to see another timeline of the franchise left behind with Mothra and Gamera taking center stage before the turn of the millennium. I still had a thing for crossovers, and that would lead me to my first and only published article in any magazine, "The Ghidoran Theory," which was published in G-Fan in late 2000, shortly after I had attended G-Fest 2000 with the sole purpose to meet Heisei Godzilla star Megumi Odaka in person and for the original, uncut 1954 Gojira to be the first Godzilla film I ever saw on the big screen (they oversold tickets and I sat in the aisle. It was worth it). "The Ghidoran Theory" was an attempt at explaining how all of the Godzilla timelines could connect and branch out from one another, but this was more to serve my own purpose of continuing my own fan fiction than to create a theory anyone else might accept. Still, that was what it turned out to be, an eight-page analysis of film background and some real collaborative scientific theory that posed that King Ghidorah was the prime suspect in the fictional breaks in Godzilla's timelines. And I'll come out and admit my other ulterior motive in writing it now: I wanted to explain the connection between the pantywaist mutant clone adversary in my least favorite Godzilla movie, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah at the time and separate him from the "true" King Ghidorah that appeared in the Showa series and Mothra 3. It seemed that Ghidorah was the only constant in the Godzilla universe that existed on a cosmic level, and I theorized that an entire species of "Ghidorans" could have existed since the Big Bang (and that is pronounced "GHI-do-rans." One of my worst pet peeves is hearing his name pronounced "Ghi-DO-rah." If you don't have time to go back and listen to Nick Adams say it right, then I have no time for you. That goes for you, too, Atari Games.) Through this theory, I suggested that the Dorats that mutated into the 1991 Ghidorah were, in fact, inadequate clones created from cells taken from the "original" Ghidorah after he was defeated by Mothra in 1999 in attempt to harness the perfect weapon, and the Futurians' true motive was to use the atomic bomb test that would create Godzilla in 1954 to complete the process.

     Ghidorah 1991 was a time-travel mess of a story to me, and it sought to erase my two sentimental favorites, 1985 and Biollante, completely from history. What made it bug me even more, however, was that it did no such thing. References were still made to Biollante and pre-1991 events even though the plot suggested that the Futurians had replaced Godzilla entirely with their clone Ghidorah in 1954 and that Godzilla would not awaken until 1991 when an even more powerful nuclear explosion in modern times made him even larger and more aggressive than before. Biggest plot hole in a Godzilla franchise ever, and time travel stories give me a headache. Nevertheless, Biollante still happened, and there were bigger unanswered questions for me than time travel. Biollante was referenced in the penultimate entry in the Godzilla franchise, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla (which has its share of displeasure in the fan community, though I never sought to find out why). There never was a confirmed theory about how Space Godzilla was created in the film. There were only two hypotheses the characters discussed. The first hypothesis was that Space Godzilla was an offshoot of Biollante, created when her Godzilla cells floated into space. This certainly had some credibility because Space Godzilla shared a couple of Biollante's features as well as Godzilla's. The second hypothesis was that some of Godzilla's skin cells were stuck to Mothra's body when she left the planet to destroy an asteroid that was on a collision course with Earth. Why can't it be both? I thought. I was writing a potential Godzilla sequel, and I had just spent the better part of a year creating a theory that connected timelines and explained continuity. All the pieces were there, and I had the chance to bring everyone I wanted into the story. My stable of all time favorites was absolute: the story had to have Biollante, of course, but it also had to have Angilas and Mothra. Angilas had not been introduced into the Heisei series, but Godzilla was also dead after his battle with Destroyer (feel free to call me a hypocrite for being bugged about how to pronounce Ghidorah's name but not using the official pronunciation or spelling of Destoroyah. I won't fight you over it. I know I'm wrong "officially," but I have to be true to my education. I have an English literature degree, and it's an English word. I see no point in using an "Engrish" spelling and was a little upset when my Ghidoran Theory article was edited for publication and changed Death Ghidorah's name to "DesGhidorah" along the same lines. I have the official Death Ghidorah Bandai toy. It clearly says "Death Ghidorah" on the box in English, and DesGhidorah just leaves more room open to keep emphasizing the wrong syllable in the name... which it did in the dubbed versions of the Mothra trilogy).

     I had a lot to establish with a story that left off only hinting that this world still had a Godzilla at all. I decided to take an en medias res approach. Something had happened after the end of Destroyer to establish Godzilla Junior as the new Godzilla, and his first adversary in my mind, not unlike the original Godzilla, would have been Angilas. This Godzilla, however, would have a connection to humanity through his past experiences, but he also would suffer from the confusion and alienation of humanity fearing him, attacking him and wanting to destroy him for the frightening reminder of his predecessor and adopted father. This would set up Angilas to be a kindred spirit to Godzilla and a friend, reestablishing the stories of the Showa series that had them as allies in later films. This Angilas was a creature lost in time, discovering very quickly that he was completely alone... but didn't have to be. The post-Destroyer Heisei world in my head was a little more optimistic with kaiju that had more potential for heroism and adventures that did not require as much military intervention, but it was Biollante that truly set up those possibilities when it was discovered that humans could connect and communicate with kaiju on a psychic and, in Junior's case, even a physical and emotional level. Perhaps I personified Godzilla a bit much with the initial idea, but the movies did a little of that as well, especially with Junior. My lead character, however, was someone that only had about five minutes of screen time, and she was dead. The real star of my story was Erica Shiragami, the daughter of Biollante's creator and, as it was confirmed when the battle between Godzilla and Biollante was over, an existing force within Biollante herself. Throughout Biollante, two unseen forces were fighting for domination over the actions of a new creature: the animal instincts of Godzilla and the spirit of a human being. And yet, despite the introduction of extrasensory perception and psychic phenomena, the paranormal subplot of Biollante was not explored beyond a ghostly image and the claims of hearing a faint disembodied voice. What happened to Erica, really? What happened to Biollante? What had mad science wrought that tethered a lost human soul to a kaiju that supposedly could not die? Was Biollante's final evolved form truly the extent of her physical capabilities (a question I had asked mostly because the Trendmasters toy had legs instead of roots, and that really bugged me at the time)? I had to answer these questions for myself, and I wanted to share them.

     Fleshing out the story completely became the primary focus of my work in a creative writing class during my final year of college. Literally days after the final draft was done, my hopes were struck down to submit it for publication in G-Fan magazine when Toho decreed the magazine no longer could publish fan fiction using official characters from the films. This time, that was it. I felt defeated. The potential for paper publication was what I wanted most, and I had no desire to rewrite the story all over again to post on a website. I had one paper copy left in my possession after all was said and done, and, as far as I was concerned, everyone important to me had read it already. My remaining pen pals had copies, and my creative writing peers followed me to the end. From that point on, I still had stories outlined to continue this new little expansion, but I was slowly drifting away from it because it couldn't go anywhere. I had other stories, original stories, and I wanted to try to do something with them instead.

     I soon began to think that the universe was trying to tell me to let the story go. I started to think it was cursed. When I tried to transcribe it on a new computer some time later to preserve it digitally, something went wrong every time. I made three attempts to transcribe the paper story and was plagued with problems. The first time, I lost the back up on a bad floppy disc. The second and third times, I lost the back ups to faulty hard drives. I still have the glorified paperweight of a corrupt hard drive with the third attempt trapped on it. I lost so many original stories on that drive as well and never could bring myself to reformat it or throw it away. I don't know if it can be salvaged at all, and I have not had the technological requirements to try up to this point.

     Now, I am using this blog as a means of daring to transcribe it a fourth and (hopefully) final time to get it out of my head once and for all. I have moved on from my picky idealism in the early stages of the writing, and I have a different perspective about the world and the Internet. Time has passed, but the story is still in my head with enough vivid imagery that I feel I can pull out what I lost in the transcription drafts and elevate the story to its true and deserved final draft. I was still very much a child on the inside when I wrote it, and I think the story has matured with me. Yes, it still will be a flight of fancy and a story rooted in science fiction that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, and it will be something that draws heavily from the films and requires knowledge of and appreciation for them to follow. It still will be a story best imagined as men in monster costumes trampling miniature sets, but it will have a little something more as well. If you're not a fan of Godzilla vs. Biollante, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, or the Mothra trilogy, then this just may not be a story for you. They are my story's greatest source material. I feel more and more now that the story deserves to be told rather than hidden in an old folder somewhere forever. It is a story for virtually every generation of Godzilla fans from young to old, and I hope that it is enjoyed when I finish publishing it here piece by piece. It may take a while, but I'm going to do it. It might even reignite some lost writing inspiration for other stories I have left behind for too long.

     I had intended to type up my glossary of characters in this post, but I spent a little too much time on the life story. As usual with my writing, it's well past my bedtime as I finish up. I hope to bring this story into the light of day very soon.

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