hey so the name of this story is just outright a red vox reference, specifically to the lyrics of From the Stars. being a song about space and death, it fits with the story being about nearly dying when falling from space. also "your star is bright and glowing" is here being used as a more poetic take on the idea of the flames on a spacecraft during reentry.
up front, i would like to state that drop man and all of his lore baggage is me blatantly inserting ODST's from halo into the setting. i think they're cool. i mean shit the whole "door ejecting" thing is extremely just the crash sequence from halo ODST minus having to manually arm the door
does anyone else think it's weird that the commander of the maverick hunters after "sigma" was "signas"? does anyone else think it's weirdly restrained of capcom to never go the obvious route and have him secretly be an aspect of sigma the whole time?
regarding the mention of city pop, i always thought it would be sick as fuck to play city pop over footage of a drop pod. specifically always imagined jajauma musume. go listen to it while watching the drop sequence in the intro of halo odst or the helljumpers scene in halo 2, it fucks i think
the bit of this story where i had to un-fuck the situation i engineered was fun. i enjoy writing how a robot would be able to solve problems. linking thrusters to fire based on readings from your own inner ear seems like a cool solution. sort of my take on the rotational docking bit from interstellar, i guess?
i think i really cooked with the idea of a mostly robotic military wing in space that, being mostly robotic, doesn't really care about keeping their stations pressurized.
what's neat to me about this story is that I never really got to explore that drop man is a huge whore in the server's writing. something about rp stuff is that by nature you can't really have your own characters interact much or be too lost in the weeds with npcs. it just doesn't fit the format very well. like if you wrote a scene that was just you directing two of your characters at each other, it would kinda just be yapping? and, like, don't get me wrong, rp is a robust format and you can use narration and implication and environmental storytelling to imply a whole lot about the lives and interiority but like also if something never comes up, i mean, it just doesn't come up. imagining, like, the scene i was involved with where drop man is fighting fucked up slime and scrap zombies during the invasion arc and he's just like "by the way i'm doing this because of the sexy human im fucking. this kill is for the dudes im having gay robot intimacy with." like come on. but if i'm writing my own story i can kinda just engineer peril that forces the dude to reflect and be like "damn. i actually think my career is in danger of really hurting these people. i'm thinking about these memories and wowie thats kinda fucked up."
it's a balance, y'know?
anyway, i don't really have any idea who the big robot on tanuki man's paramedic team is supposed to be. sometimes you just need to invent a guy to do stuff so the scene feels a bit more lived in. disposable npcs. some of my favorite characters have even come from disposable npcs, but not here.
i'm proud of establishing early on the advantages of energen power versus conventional batteries and i'm proud of my take on the x2 intro. i think it's important to establish early on that, yeah, the maverick hunters are depicted as a well-equipped military outfit with the UN, who run the world at this time.
final thing: so wily tower was a hugely important location in bnw and it's kinda gonna come up a whole lot. it was sort of like the citadel from half life 2, just this big scary imposing place. the wily kids that remained loyal hung out there and it had self contained defense manufacturing and shit. the basement is basically an SCP foundation facility?? it's where fucked up stuff got contained. this comes up a bunch in bnw and it comes up a few times in this anthology (assuming you're reading these commentaries after each story instead of all at once at the end.)