As noted numerous times throughout this blog, I've been playing BattleTech on and off since 1996/97 or so, not counting any of the video games (MechWarrior and MechWarrior 3050 were gateway drugs). Since I never get rid of gaming stuff, I still have my old BattleForce 2 rules and several far out of date rulebooks from way back when.
But, I never got into the novel fiction because finding the books (before eBay) was next to impossible in Nebraska. The first "book" I bought, ironically, was Target of Opportunity from the MechWarrior Dark Ages line, and whilst it was super good, oof was I kind of lost versus all of the sourcebooks and figuring out how we went from the FedCom Civil War to there was a feat of mental gymnastics. Also, I really don't enjoy Stackpole's writing much. I know, I know, he's not a -bad- writer by any means, it's just that so many of the characters I abhor in the sourcebooks came out of his Mary Sue writing and it's... Icky. He's no Pardoe, that's for sure.
That's a common gripe of mine, and I'm sure that I've vented about it enough times that it doesn't need a retread.
With that in mind, because Catalyst is now doing Print on Demand, I'm replacing copies of older novels as I can with new ones, and storing the old ones. Which I started to acquire from used book stores about 6 or 7 years ago. And since I'm getting new copies, I'm rereading them. And as I'm rereading them, I'm seeing unintentional similarities in characters.
Shin Takeda is NOT a copy of Shin Yodama. I only knew of Yodama peripherally through the BattleTech CCG and the FM: Draconis Combine sourcebook, not anything about him in detail. So, when I decided to name my mercenaries Kuroi Kaze, it wasn't because Yodama was a member of the Kuroi uh... I can't remember off of the top of my head... Black Mist? Maybe? It was more twofold; Shin Takeda is named after Shingen Takeda (I love Sengoku history, thanks Koei), but could also be taken as a shortened form of Shinigami because Gundam Wing was on Cartoon Network when I really started to deep dive into BattleTech and the unit's name comes from a line in a GW song that I barely even remember now, but that translates roughly to "the black wind that seduces death" (I've mentioned this elsewhere), a track in relation to my favorite GW character - Duo Maxwell, the God of Death. Unit coloring being heavily black was also because of Duo's Gundam. I went with red accents (before knowing about the Widows) because I preferred that, but then later added a light gray to better differentiate since red and black as a combo is so heavily used in BattleTech.
Yodama was a Yakuza MechWarrior, whereas Takeda had some Yakuza ties on Solaris VII (this was a roleplaying holdover from MultiPlayer BattleTech on Kesmai/GameStorm/AOL as was a lot of early unit history). But Takeda also perished prior to the Clan Invasion, which is where Yodama's story really began. As an aside, there's a current KK pilot who has a backstory similar to the Yakuza girl in one of the Kill Bill movies. Also entirely unintentional.
Which actually brings another point up, going into Shiro Takeda's life. I've gone by Fenris since the late 90s, and because of that and being a gamer, I was asked if I'd ever played any of White Wolf's World of Darkness games (which I now have a blog for as well, obv) and Shiro comes from that, ie "White." So his SO, Hiroko Foster-Takeda, wasn't based on Theodore Kurita's SO, though they share similarities, she's literally an NPC from White Wolf's Aeon/Trinity RPG that came out in '97. I liked the idea of a doctor/medtech type character marrying a MechWarrior and being almost like his social conscience in conducting war. Long before I knew anything of Kai Allard-Liao's relationship.
So, I dunno, it's funny to me, going back and reading these older novels -now-, and seeing how it would be easy to look at my BattleTech history as cherry picking some great ideas from them, but honestly, I think it's because Stackpole isn't any more imaginative than an average 16 year old kid and we both fall back on commonly used tropes when creating characters and backstories.
That makes me feel a LOT better about my talents as a writer, and kind of sad for Mike...
Nah, he's really good overall. Like the new Kell Hound novellas are really, really good (and I generally hate the Kell Hounds, mostly because Phelan is my least favorite fictional character in any fictional medium) & the ongoing stories in the Shrapnel "magazine" guarantee that I'll be getting every issue as they come out.
