Zero’s idea, really. Picture featured – Zero holding his latest creation (lol)
Looking back on 2021 – or, really, these two years, it’s been a remarkable time. So many things have changed – in terms of how we live life, how we make things, what sort of things we play. It’s always a little early to say if these changes are good or bad, but it’s been tremendously interesting for me to see how things change over time.
No joke, right now, in doujinshi, there’s a bit of a mixed feeling here. Traditional venues, events, methods, are slowly dying out. For instance, for Zero, the convention in his home town – the one where it got him into all this as a whole – is really struggling. Yet there’s plenty of opportunity too – subscription based models, art-turning-idolru (in the Japanese fashion), NFTs, you name it. While great artists on say, Pixiv or artstation have hundreds of followers, easy accessibility to digital art-making tools coupled with modern technology like Discord enables hundreds of private communities and fandoms to crop up. I feel that even reddit is slowly being displaced – to say nothing of forums or imageboards.
Like I said, interesting times, isn’t it? On one end you have tiktok, vtubers, and augmented reality/virtual reality, on the other end you have something like us.
For me, I think it’s been a marvelous experience watching how Pacific blossomed over the years. For us here, I think by now, I’ve been witness to the rise and fall of many, many, many KanColle derivatives. Even Azur Lane is coming and going – to be replaced by other gacha games. No doubt these franchises’ll stay as long as their creators intend – and that goes for us here at Pacific as well.
Looking back, again, I think it’s interesting to me personally how we turned out. Unlike the universe we depict, we’ve really only got one “reality” here in our real life world. While it’s interesting to ponder in terms of what could have been, in the end, the biggest factor to what sort of storytelling Pacific ultimately took (is taking, or will take) ended up largely self-determined. By that, I mean it’s a mixture of things that we can’t control (for instance, my health issues) and things we know for sure that we want to control (we’re all history geeks).
So, it took a while for us to settle on this specific form of “storytelling” – but it ended up being perhaps the best way for us to share with you the things we’re interested in: depicting events in a world recognizable by us, people living in the modern era, albeit with shipgirls. It also happens to have become what to us still the most sensible method, since our circle – at least this section – treat it as a hobby. In a way, there’s little reason, motive, or pressure for us to do the usual #hashtag like rate subscribe leave a review sort of thing. The team’s often used the analogy of us being the local hole-in-the-wall place pub. We welcome anyone who want to try our stuff out – but we certainly aren’t interested in having us appear on national television (or youtube, I guess, given this is the 2020s).
That’s exactly it. We’ll be here if you want to look for us.
If this stuff looks familiar, remember – I’m habitually repetitive (laughs). We’ll still be here sharing our little tidbits in our usual fashion. I don’t anticipate there being much changes, honestly – Pacific, after all, is a product of our times – we’re about as old as say, F/GO or Granblue Fantasy (think about that for a moment…), and we’re as much of a witness to the shifting landscape of the world as you are.
Honestly, it’s been a great trip. Some of you regulars have been writing in for years, while others I know – based on my back-end – but haven’t interacted at all. Thanks for being a part of this journey – let’s see what lies ahead next year!