Kyon: Big Damn Hero

Better, but the hands still seem a little long for the size.

It's the forearm itself that is to long. That and the torso or legs may seem too long, because I feel this Kyon drawing should have him playing for the NBA.

Yeah, the hands seem slightly too large. Also the arm is connected pretty high up, like it's coming out of his neck instead of a shoulder. The ear is a little too far back and low as well; if you extend a line along the lower part of the jaw it normally runs just below the ear before curving upward to intersect (although with wedge shaped faces typical in anime the ear usually extends along the same line as the jaw when viewed from the front.◊ The top of the ear is usually about at eye level. Normally if you extend an imaginary line from the center of the neck upward, the front of the ear is almost that far forward. It pretty much starts where the jaw ends.

Here's a mostly complete profile shot of Kyon's head.◊

Looks like a good start though.

Edit: Tamult is right about the forearm being too long. On myself at least, the distance from my fingertips to my wrist is about 2/3 as long as the distance from my wrist to my elbow. I'm quite tall (6'3) and have somewhat larger than average hands for a man. On Kyon it looks like the distance from his fingertips to his wrist is less than half the distance from his wrist to his elbow. The forearm itself is also longer than the upper arm, when they should be about the same length.

edited 5th Aug '11 4:11:27 PM by PaxEmpyrean

My main opinion of that is 'so this is an out of body experience...'

I have no technical advice to offer or intention of doing so. XD

@Augustine almost a page ago

Funny? Reads post again.... Oh, Sailor Mercury! I just wrote down a line from a Blues Clues song I remember.....XD

You know, it being Sailor Moon and all..

edited 5th Aug '11 7:01:39 PM by Jigaboo

@Agasa

Now you only need to add the banana in bananazumi.... Heeheehee!

edited 5th Aug '11 7:52:11 PM by Jigaboo

@Pax: Sorry but the profile of Kyon's head is unreacheable: "Hotlinking not allowed", it says. Edit: Nevermind, fixed. Ok, i followed all your precious advice. How is he looking now?◊ I hope he's not straight out of Slam Dunk anymore.

edited 6th Aug '11 2:45:32 AM by Agasa

Looking better with each update. The ear is still a little too far back, although it's not quite as low as it was before.

It might help if you draw him with a detached earlobe instead of a fused one. His earlobes are detached in the official artwork, and drawing them the same way might help with them looking too low on his head.

edited 6th Aug '11 10:36:08 AM by PaxEmpyrean

New story posted.

I'm torn between wanting to read it or not. I never cared for tragedy/horror at all. But it is Durandall we're talking about here, so it'll probably be good anyway. Then again, I probably wouldn't like a depressing story even if it's well written, so even though I give him the benefit of the doubt in writing skill I still don't like tragedy/horror stuff. I'll probably wait until it's done and read the reviews to see what others think about it.

I'm a little worried that if Durandall has taken such a massive swing away from his usual stuff to start writing horror stories, he might be a little depressed. Creator Breakdown would be a tragedy, since nobody else in the Haruhi fandom delivers quite the same payload of Awesome, Heartwarming, and characterization that he does.

I have read all of Surprise yesterday. I kind of understand the ending. What i don't understand is Koizumi with his "Haruhi's power is weakening" talk. It's obviously clear that he doesn't mean it's weakening in the...most immediate sense. So what does it mean? Maybe that her power is linked to the lack of control she has of her emotions, and becoming an adult is making it less effective for this reason? It kind of makes sense, but i don't think it's what he meant.

Help? Also, next i'm adding clothes. Apart from the obligatory longcoat, what can i dress Kyon in? You decide.

School uniform. He ends up wearing it more often than not.

Maybe with the skinsuit under it, covering his hands and around his face.

Durandall really DOES need a grief seed for his soul gem.

I have a feeling Puella Magi maybe the culprit in this new story. I just don't get it though. Puella Magi has most of the themes he doesn't like in a fic. Who knows though? I might be entirely wrong and this new story might end on a happy note.

EDIT: Excuse me, acts I mean.

edited 7th Aug '11 1:56:40 AM by Jigaboo

I read it all. It's well written as always, but it burns. It burns. Someone bring me a bucket of salt and a shinto priest.

Cough Cough. I wasn't clear, but the above is meant to be humorous. I like your writing as always and look forward to the happy ending. You manage to break my carefully crafted fanfic mind compartments - I guess that's bonus points for you.

I apologize. I didn't read the last paragraph correctly. Was Haruhi depowered?

edited 7th Aug '11 5:40:31 AM by Agasa

Hmmm.... I didn't quite understand it either, but maybe Haruhi's broken over what had happened. She sees Kyon kissing Mikuru. I believe she always thought of herself as someone special in Kyon's eyes.

The thing is she sees them kissing, which leads her to believe that she is no longer special, which is why her powers kick in and make it happen. Basically her powers destroyed themselves. I don't know....

On another note, did anyone else LOL at Durandall's direct jab at another fanfic on his profile page.

EDIT: Thanks, bro!

edited 7th Aug '11 9:13:16 AM by Jigaboo

[[ qouteblock ]] Some text [[ /quoteblock]]

Kinda odd that you need to use the word quoteblock, but there you go. It should be in the Markup help.

Well, I finished Surprise, myself. I quite enjoyed the ending, and laughed out loud at quite a few parts. I did find myself missing Durandall's writing style, though.

Also, does anyone have a link to that picture of the whole class roster of class 1-5? The one that shows everyone's name and faces, and where they sit? I've been trying to find it again, and I can't.

@thedarkfreak: Related post.

So this popped into my head while thinking about K:BDH. I have to get it out or i'll explode.

For her sake, He went beyond the impossible.

Thanks to his well placed trust,

this world comes unbound from the illusory shackles of normalcy.

edited 9th Aug '11 1:42:41 PM by Agasa

"Her" being Sasaki, right?

And I'll continue it, also out of compulsion:

And with the chain's sundering, their strength only grew.

The bonds of friendship made deeper, as they all united.

Even love, which was tangled before, now flourished and became greater, still.

Edit: I thought that "her" meant either Yuki (saving her from deletion) or Haruhi (for having faith in her when he decided to tell her that he's John Smith)...

2nd Edit: Although, if Sasaki ends up in the SOS Harem somehow...

edited 7th Aug '11 5:29:25 PM by MadKitsu

That *

edited 7th Aug '11 6:22:33 PM by Filraen

@Specular: Thanks for that.

So, my thoughts so far on Surprise:

I didn't think that Canon would do a Gemini incident before K:BDH did.

So, Sasaki was in Haruhi's elementary school, eh? Interesting.

I really like K:BDH!Fujiwara more than Canon!Fujiwara. I suppose that's because I enjoy the story more when it's going down the Path of Maximum Awesome. If what Fujiwara says about Asahina is true, though, I do feel some sympathy for him. Still surprising that he and Kuyou tried to kill Haruhi. That pretty much kills off my sympathy.

"Her" was actually Yuki, and the trust was placed in Haruhi not demolishing the universe on the spot once learned the truth (well, technically, the world took a definite turn for adventurous, but that's not necessarily a bad thing).

Thinking about it, it works for every last one of them, and this is wonderful. Kyon has a big heart.

You know Agasa, you bring up a good point. A lot of harem stories are pretty much just pure male wish fulfillment, with the male lead usually being some variety of Unlucky Everydude or This Loser Is You. If the female characters were anything more than a collection of aesthetic and personality fetishes, we'd wonder what in the world they see in that guy.

Not so with Big Damn Hero. Kyon is still in the enviable position shared with other harem leads, but he is both far more capable than your typical harem lead and far more deserving of the attention he gets. He is intelligent, empathetic, long-suffering, mature, and both willing and able to defend his love interests from just about anything that might threaten them in any way. He's also a fantastic make-out partner. He'd be a Marty Stu except for a few mitigating factors. Specifically, he's not even in the top three in terms of power (Haruhi, Kuyou, Yuki and Koizumi are all more powerful), he works for everything he gets instead of having the plot just give it to him, and the negative connotations of 'Marty Stu' just don't seem to apply to him.

This is great because it not only gives some justification for having so many girls attracted to him, it also makes shipping everybody more fun. The girls in Big Damn Hero have far more depth than you'd typically find in almost any harem story, since they had quite a lot of characterization before Durandall got to them and gave them a little bit more from scratch (or a whole lot, in Kuyou's case), plus all the ongoing character development. The result of all of this is that we have a bunch of female characters who are interesting in their own right and who the readers actually care about apart from just their relationship with some generic, wish-fulfilling, reader stand-in, male protagonist. We're happy not just because the guy we care about gets the awesome girl(s), but because the girls we care about get the awesome guy.

The characters are all fantastically done and their relationships are a solid reconstruction of a genre that typically requires a lot more suspension of disbelief than most. The tone of the story is very positive so the whole thing just comes together in an awesome sort of way. Instead of just ranting on and on about how much I love this story, just look at this◊ (it's my face when reading/discussing/thinking about Big Damn Hero) while imagining another ten minutes of muted trombone sounds like you'd hear when adults are talking in Charlie Brown. It's like that.

edited 8th Aug '11 12:33:47 PM by PaxEmpyrean

Well, this is me when a new chapter's up◊ and most of the time in class when I'm spaced out....