Maniacs' Blog

Time to return to the saga of Annihilation. In the first installment after our two year hiatus, we finally meet a couple of characters that have been waiting in the wings since the beginning.

Today, October 25th is the fifth anniversary of Annihilation’s first update on the Mechanical Maniacs site.

The significance of that milestone is somewhat lost considering our fourth year was non-existant, as was our fifth as far as most people know. Just over five years ago, AXE was in a similar situation. We were close to the end of our ongoing storyline, but we lacked the momentum to get there. I had a clear vision of how I wanted it to end though, so I was determined to finish it even if I had to do all the writing myself. After that, I wondered if that finale should serve as the team’s sendoff. It could have been, but we decided to give the team one more shot. We recruited some new members with new ideas for a fresh start and it worked. The spirit of the team was rejuvenated…at least for the first year and a half before the same decay of interest and inspiration started to affect the update schedule.

So once again I found myself in a situation where the ongoing story was closer to the end than it was to the beginning and there were plenty of cool ideas for where it should end up and beyond, but we lacked the free time to realize all those ideas. In February 2013 I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to at least finish this storyline, I’d have to take over and do it completely. Since then I’ve been writing fairly consistently, finishing the overdue fifth and sixth parts, and even extending to a seventh. It was all leading up to this, the return of updates to this page, and the guarantee that those updates will be regular weekly for the next six months.

It’s not a revival, it’s more of an extended sendoff. Starting next Friday, I’ll be posting the end of Annihilation’s Dark Ages storyline one page at a time. Every fourth week will be an update for art and miscellaneous content. Once it’s all over, that’s when we close up shop. It’s not that there hasn’t been interest in continuing the team. There are even at least three more storylines in the planning stage. I just won’t be able to do anything with it alone. Last time I hoped it would help to share the burden of keeping the team active by recruiting some eager new members, and today the Mega Man Team community is stretched more thin, so I don’t think another membership drive is in the cards. It’s time to exit gracefully.

My teammates haven’t all vanished off the face of the earth. I’ve been chatting with some of them over the last 8 months regarding this plan, and we’re in agreement this is the way to go. They’re generally glad that I was even willing to do all that writing, and I’m grateful that they were available to discuss their ideas for their characters even when they weren’t able to write themselves. I hope everyone can read and enjoy how the seeds we planted 5 years ago have grown.

There’s the slight problem of getting caught up, though. Whenever I want to get someone interested in the newest part of the story, the usual response is some variation of the phrase, “I just have to go back and get caught up.” They might as well be saying “I am embarking on a dangerous journey. I don’t know when, but I promise to return someday.” and I wish them luck, but deep down I know I shall never see them again.

I blame only myself for that. AXE is the beast I made it into. It comes from an early fascination with the soap opera writing format as a fan of Marvel comics, Saturday morning cartoons, and game series like Mega Man Battle Network. I always liked the idea of creating a fictional universe with characters and settings I would continue to build on indefinitely. I never really grasped the nuance of accessibility that makes stories like this compelling to new or lapsed readers though. If someone wants to get into my stories, they don’t know where to start. If they start with the latest installment, they immediately feel lost, so they look back to see how much reading they have to do to (maybe) be caught up, and then get overwhelmed because even the first part of Season 2 perhaps relies a little too much on the resolution of Season 1, and if you’re bold enough to venture back to Season 1 you might start noticing references to Viral Infection stories that don’t even exist. Reading up on AXE backstory is a time-consuming and thankless job. I don’t blame anyone for avoiding it. If anything, I would rather someone ignore the references to things they missed and keep reading forward instead of looking back. With that in mind, for the first update of this final stretch, I’ve prepared a recap of events. If you get lost, please refer to these notes. No excuses for when Part 5 begins next week.

Stay tuned. The end is just beginning.