In Fandom, the Grass Is Always Green

I may or may not be tsundere when it comes to “go to koshien” stories, but I do have a soft spot for anime characters playing recreational sports in fan recreations. When the fiction itself is not prose, that gets me over the hump of dealing with people’s slashes or whatever. So, for some reason, I’m reading the brief recaps from the Anime Studio Baseball tournament and I’m in stitches.

I mean, I guess because I also read Murrican Sportsball writing in my spare time, so I really could see how all of this can be threaded narratively into a hilarious story between two distinct but unrelated matching. The jokes not only write themselves, it’s so ripe that you can probably write jokes you didn’t even know that exists. Calaggie over there does a good job generating the scores and results (although I guess the game has started already, I can’t bracket them up at this point), and there’s a small write-up, but I feel like we can spin this out more. A lot more.

And this is where I can see myself doing something. A big thing about sports narration is explaining who everyone is and coming up with the story that threads the game together, the players together, and give context to what is happening. A big part of this anime baseball nonsense is knowing the characters. Even I don’t know everybody, but I do know many, so it should be fun to come up with something. Maybe that’s why I find this funny?

Like Minko putting up baluts inning after inning. Or Lulouch went 3 for 6 against a Iri, Ryougi Shiki, and a penguin. Tsunemori Akane’s bat is bigger than Tendo Akane’s.

The schedule, which is probably the most important thing, is here. The roster is posted on the team pages. Can Haruka handle the hot corner? Their first game rightly puts them against one of the toughest (sounding) lineup in the tournament: Pretty Cures & Salior Scouts. I guess we’ll find out next week.

As for the nuts and bolts, Anime Baseball is actually just a simulated sort of thing, using a simple dice rolling system called Home Plate. I can’t even find it on BGG, so I have no idea how it works. The roster is biased towards what the guy organizing the tournament likes, but it’s pretty representative anyway. I’m going to assume the play-by-play data is available but you’ll have to get @Calaggie to export it from iScores.

Lastly, something to think about.

PS. This isn’t all that different than those replay fiction that turns into light novels, huh.