I did some work on a Cross Arc story that hasn’t yet debuted on the site, but I’ll be putting up a teaser for it soon. It’s actually an idea I’ve had for a long time but only recently decided to promote to preproduction. You may already know this, but Japanese school uniforms are based on military uniforms, Prussian Army uniforms for the boys and sailor’s uniforms for the girls. (It gets explicitly mentioned in Kill La Kill, for instance.) Knowing this and looking at how school life in Japan works, I thought about how much a Japanese high school reminded me of a military unit. The school could be a battalion, each grade a company, each class a platoon, each file of desks a squad. I then thought about what might happen if Japan was invaded. While Japan is currently looking to build its military muscle, the Jieitai wouldn’t last too long against, say, a full-scale invasion by the PLA. I considered how desperate Japan was in light of the prospective US invasion during WWII and imagined a last-ditch effort at national defense via universal conscription. It was one thing ’45 when militarism ruled the day, but how would it work now when most of the citizenry is staunchly pacifistic? Fertile ground, my friends. Fertile ground. Now, I could’ve made an alternative history/speculative piece to this effect, but I instead opted to take the concept and translate it to the Cross Arc, where I’m not quite as bogged down by real-world baggage. You’ll certainly see the similarities to the real-world basis for the scenario, but change of setting grants me a little more freedom. Maybe this’ll interest you and maybe it won’t, but I felt like sharing. I may play with this story some more, but I also need to give consideration to TTWC2. Stay tuned.

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