Ranier

When the Star Wars franchise rebooted in 2015 with the release of Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, I remember seeing a FIRESTORM of angry neckbeard dudes pi**ed off at the idea of a woman being a Jedi.

This fascinates me because some of the dopest characters to exist in anime and fantasy are women, and I just don’t know why anyone would limit their imagination by only wanting stories that feature male heroes.

Kill Bill didn’t need a male protagonist.

Kill la Kill didn’t need one either.

I like the the idea of Dasha being a Starfire-esque character who is actually the most OP of the squad, and her only limitation is herself.

She’s driven to avenge her parents who were massacred by the Empire (I still don’t know what the empire is, or how I’m going to build that part of the world, so we’ll see lol) and she wants nothing else but to see the vaporization of the state-sanctioned violence that took her family away.

She’s a necromancer who can grow an arm out of your collarbone and make it attack you, or she can graze the side of your arm and make it crumble like sand.

But because she’s so focused on this singular goal, she constantly neglects her own health, wounds, heartaches, and wellbeing — choosing burnout and vengeance over balance and sanity again and again.

Olex is a self-taught genius. An avid people watcher who likes to tinker in stranger’s heads.

Imprisoned for 1,000 years for the crime of Illegal Thought Leadership and Propaganda, Olex kept himself sane by learning to escape his mind and project his consciousness onto other people.

A former political activist and automation engineer, Olex has the power to create desirable and undesirable realities that not only invade people’s minds, but changes them. Like an automated script that keeps running, Olex can place people on “programs” to do anything from fetch a jug of beer or carry out a complex hit job on an elected official.

He is unwell and can't tell what's real or just his own propaganda, what's his memories or someone else's. He hates what he's become because he can't remember who he was.

Throughout my Sophomore and Senior years of High School, I was deeply depressed and isolated from my family and friends.

I spent most of my time alone in my room upstairs, glued to Myspace, Gunbound, and online pool chatrooms because that was the only space that allowed me to be social and have fun for zero dollars.

If I did go out, I’d walk around the neighborhood with my iPod blasting Green Day or Ben Jelen while I fantasized about finding a random duffel bag of money or possibly a single girl who wanted to date a depressed high schooler and aspiring artist.

If it was free, I was down. My first camera was from a Sony Ericsson phone that my brother stole and gave to me.

Every week I’d ask to get dropped off at Eastridge Mall so I could spend a few hours flipping through magazines and art books since it was also free.

But around Junior year, I started to realize that amidst all of this loneliness and darkness, I genuinely enjoyed this quiet life of art, gaming, and solitude.

As someone with a low social battery, I felt most like MYSELF when I was alone in my thoughts and free to express my emotions.

At the same time, I started to see family and friends suffer from the 2008 housing market crash, and the money-hungry attitudes that preceded them.

I started to recognize how easily I, my family, and others were duped into believing that happiness could be found only in homes like this. Or with salaries like that. And I started to compare the expectations that were placed upon all of us living in the Bay Area to earn as much money as possible, and the reality of what it actually took to make me happy.

So at the young age of 17, I declared (without realizing it) that I was NOT going to be persuaded by the Capitalist dream of making more money for the sake of making more money.

I was not going to subject myself to the pain of trying to fit in with the Joneses by chasing a version of happiness that wasn’t centered around the things that ACTUALLY make me happy.

17 years later, I can proudly say that I was on the money. That same anti-Capitalist vein runs through so much of what I do (and don't do) to this day.