The Curse Retrospective, Part 2: About The Cast

With the biggest plot of all time came the biggest cast of all time. There are far, far too many Curse members for me to give my thoughts on them all, but I will at least offer a bit of commentary on each of my own additions, plus a few honorable mentions for some of my favorite guest Curse.

Admiral De Loco 
My rationale for putting De Loco in RP is similar to why I did a Bonus Boss fight with Admiral Alfonso: you don't get a real fight against them in Skies Of Arcadia, and I wanted to make it happen. It's not as bad in this case though since you do at least face De Loco in a ship battle, whereas Alfonso is never fought at all. The Chameleon was a nice addition to The Curse's resources. It didn't make many appearances but it was nice to have for worldbuilding purposes. The toxic gas that used a tractor for effects was fun - one of the few times I was happy with tractors in RP this year, after deciding midseason to begin moving away from them.

Alien Green
Here's the first of several Curse members who almost didn't get into the plot but managed to find a niche thanks to someone else's plans - a great example of the interconnectivity of The Curse between users. This is also the first of a lot of members who got in because of the same sort of mentality I used in the past for Fite Club combatants - "I like this character enough to pay tribute to them in RP, but not so much that I want them as an actual character". So Curse it was!

Alien Green was originally just a filler idea if I wanted another elite mook, but the idea of adding him to The Lodge came to me and he slotted very nicely into that concept. He got a lot more attention than expected thanks to that, as well as an upgrade to be more dangerous and competent than I'd originally thought he might be. This worked well though since his debut appearance featured him being pretty competent and successful (the scene where a gang of Curse members fights several ZFPD members and manages to win). He added a great extra dimension to Lodgeplot's second-to-last event and I'm glad JRM let me join in!

Balrog, Sagat, Vega, and M. Bison
M. Bison and Balrog were two of my earliest ideas for Curse members. I wasn't initially sure I would include them, as I didn't know if I would find a good place in the plot for them. But then Chao got into Punch-Out, and Hibiki's season-long Punch-Out arc became a thing. This was the PERFECT way to use Balrog, and the rest just kind of fell in around him - M. Bison was the big bad boss, Vega found a space as Balrog's manager, and with three of the Shadowlaw foursome in, I had to get all four, so I came up with Sagat's dojo and got him in there as well.

When it comes to Street Fighter, my personal experience pretty much begins and ends with Super Street Fighter II on Sega Genesis, so that was my main source for the characters (and this is why I prefer to call Bison's group "Shadowlaw" over "Shadaloo", because the SSFII manual uses that name!). This is why Sagat was present, rather than F.A.N.G. - I don't know the latter, and a Shadowlaw without Sagat didn't feel right to my old-school sensibilities. I had already been planning on Sagat being the nicest of the group even before I checked the Street Fighter wiki and discovered he actually does a genuine heel-face turn in SF canon! I guess I figured he felt like the "honorable combatant" type, and I was right.

A great thing about Vega is that he got me a Naoko appearance. Similar to how Chao is a big fan of my minor character Allison the steampunk maid, I'd taken a liking to Chao's minor character, former Council of 13 member Naoko Hoshino. He'd mentioned in his Council blogpost that Naoko might have gotten a promotion to a minor protagonist if Maria hadn't taken off instead, but I'm a fan of ninja girls (see also: my love of Kela) and was interested in giving her a happy ending, so we worked out what happened to her after her arrest and now she's living a pleasant life in Olympia, working at a restaurant and being a kinder, softer version of herself.

Bio Rex
Bio Rex was originally conceived as an extra mook for an F-Zero plot... one that I was going to run! One of my earlier ideas for a Curse member was Don Genie, as a tip of the hat to Chao. But when I told Chao about my idea, he confessed he was ALSO planning to use Don Genie, so I deferred to the expert and let him use the Don, keeping only Bio Rex. That turned out very, very well - Don Genie wouldn't have been nearly as important if I'd used him, but he ended up being one of the season's biggest villains!

But about Bio Rex... there's not much to him, he's just a racing brute there to add some additional Curse muscle to a plot, but after Chao took Don Genie I planned to have Bio Rex be a part of the Don Genie event. Then, however, we got the idea to do F-Zerosephine, the little arc Josephine had where she went through an alternate version of the F-Zero GX story mode. I'll use this spot to go over those real quick.

Chapter 1
In F-Zero GX: Captain Falcon strolls through the city, sees Black Shadow gloating on TV, and heads to his garage to do some practice driving in VR.
In RP: Pretty much unchanged, aside from Josie having a lot more swagger in her step and Plague replacing Black Shadow on the TV display.

Chapter 2
In F-Zero GX: Captain Falcon is harassed by Samurai Goroh, who tells him THE LAW HERE IN RED CANYON - if you lose a race, you forfeit your machine. Falcon is forced at swordpoint to race, but wins and drives away, having no interest in claiming Goroh's ride, which randomly explodes anyway.
In RP: The setting is changed to the Grand Canyon. While Falcon considered Goroh a mere annoyance, Josephine takes THE LAW IN GRAND CANYON seriously, and later successfully has the Fire Stingray repossessed. It was the law, after all!

Chapter 3
In F-Zero GX: Silver Neelsen begs Captain Falcon to enter the BET Race, a small F-Zero race of 13 cars where people gamble on the winner. Disguised as someone else so that the payout will be larger, Captain Falcon reluctantly enters the race (CONSIDER IT AN OLD MAN'S LAST REQUEST) and wins, but when he hears about Black Shadow causing trouble, he throws his half of the winnings at Silver and runs off to deal with it.
In RP: Josephine is so eager for a payday that she agrees to Silver's offer before he can even finish begging. She enters as herself, as she's still a relative rookie, and gleefully poses for pictures with her half of the money. The other racers are given more importance, too, as this event kicked off Josephine's rivalry with Don Genie - he had bet on two of his underlings, Bio Rex and Michael Chain, to win, and Josie screwed it up. The two of them resolve to take down Josephine.

Chapter 4
In F-Zero GX: Michael Chain and his gang The Bloody Chain harass Captain Falcon while he's trying to chase down Black Shadow.
In RP: Pretty similar! However, Chain gets some more interesting backup here in his final battle with Josephine, including Titan, Futo, and Robbie Rotten.

Chapter 5
In F-Zero GX: Captain Falcon rescues Jody Summer from a building that's about to collapse. Before rescuing her, he sees Black Shadow on the roof of the building, making ridiculous overexaggerated motions and reveling in the destruction.
In RP: This chapter was made into a significant exposition moment, featuring Josephine infiltrating an abandoned InGen base to swipe some old files that teased of future Curseplot developments. Myra Rotspring was also present at the base, though, and triggered a bomb which Josephine had to outdrive. The "Black Shadow flailing like an idiot" scene was moved to after the escape instead of before and Black Shadow is again replaced with Plague, who had no idea what was happening but enjoyed the wanton destruction and made the same flailing expressions of joy.

Chapter 6
In F-Zero GX: Captain Falcon gets a bomb planted on his vehicle by Blood Falcon that will go off if he drives below a certain speed. He gets rid of the bomb by scraping his car against a crane.
In RP: In RP, Monsoon planted the bomb and Bio Rex attacked Josephine afterwards to try and force it to go off. In one of the most ridiculous moments of the plot, Josephine locates the bomb and uses her white magic to perform three teleports - one to cling to the outside of her car and grab the bomb, the second to teleport into Bio Rex's car with the bomb in hand, and then using the third to escape after force-feeding the bomb to Bio Rex.

Chapter 7
In F-Zero GX: Captain Falcon competes in a race against Black Shadow and 28 other racers. Other aggressive racers like Blood Falcon and Pico serve as lesser antagonists during the race.
In RP: Josephine competes in a race against Don Genie and 28 other racers. Tux, Clutch, and Heavy Lobster served as the lesser villains. Josephine didn't win the race (not surprising since this event was tractored rather than scripted) but she didn't need to, and she still claimed a personal victory by performing better than the Don.

Chapter 8
In F-Zero GX: Captain Falcon is challenged by Deathborn to a one-on-one race in a dangerous lava-filled course.
In RP: Josephine and Deathborn have a race in Green Hell Zone. Unlike with Falcon's race, this one had little in the way of stakes and Josephine didn't know who Deathborn was. (Since he was revealed a few days later to have won the election to be Olympia's new mayor, we can assume Josephine has no interest in local news or politics.)

Chapter 9
In F-Zero GX: Captain Falcon is challenged by bizarre, heretofore unmentioned spirits called "The Creators" and races a staff ghost.
In RP: Josephine has a dream about racing the ZFRP community.

Overall, F-Zerosephine was a fun character study and a good way to get her plenty of screentime in her new redesigned form. I enjoyed playing with expectations throughout the series (especially Chao's) and contrasting Falcon's heroic do-the-right-thing superhero-like personality with Josephine being a bit more of an antihero - she's still a good person and still does what's right, but she's more pragmatic, greedier, and willing to do nasty things to people who deserve it.

Bonebreaker
One of several Curse members who was on the backburner as possible filler if I needed someone relatively expendable, Bonebreaker found his niche when talking with Cornwind led to the creation of the Underdome, which ended up being one of The Curse's most notable facilities! Bonebreaker made a few appearances there and developed a rivalry with Joy, and I decided to kill him off during the Curse/Ravage event to give Ravage some credit for their efforts against The Curse. The tank he used as a lower body survived, though, and returned later as part of Sogmaster's rebuild for a fun callback.

Bubble Bass
A lot of people know about Bubble Bass from what is by far his most famous appearance on Spongebob, "Pickles". Until Curseplot, though, most folks assumed that was his one and only appearance (unless they remembered him sitting on Plankton in "F.U.N."). But no, turns out the show brought him back after over a decade of no appearances and he's a recurring character now. You miss a lot when you stop watching a show due to seasonal rot!

I got so much goddamn mileage out of this stupid meme fish. He was basically the main foe of Curseplot for the entire first arc, from May through the middle of June. Doing his show at the same time every week was a fun gimmick, and I wasn't expecting people to want to see him redeemed, but I was fine with it! There was a much worse end planned for Bubble Bass if people had been less sympathetic, though - a powerful Curse member (dunno which one) would have turned him over to Dr. Mandrake for experimenting, and he would have become... a monstrous hamburger zombie thing that the Kobbers would be expected to kill, like what I tried to do with Dr. Wu. Bass was spared this ghastly fate by Bree, however, and now occasionally pops up on Jenny's radio station to offer 100% honest restaurant reviews.

Channel Dee News
An early scrapped concept, Channel Dee News would have been a propaganda machine for The Curse that talked them up and made them seem better than they were, but I decided not to pull the trigger on the concept when I decided not to make Olympia TV a Curse-affiliated business. Hooded Pitohui and Chao had other plans, though, and they made Olympia TV one of The Curse's major acquisitions alongside InGen. With Natasha Nielsen running the show, I opted to slot in Channel Dee for a minor appearance during her big event.

Channel Dee was also one of the early hints that the Kirby franchise had deep ties with Curseplot.

Cordie
Originally conceived as a protagonist, I was unsure if Cordie would just be a flash in the pan and wanted to give her a test run before committing to her as a regular character, so I had her be part of The Curse but in a sympathetic role where she was friendly and amicable with the Kobbers despite being on the enemy team. She proved fun to play as and people seemed to take a liking to her, so I made her face turn official as part of the Sedusa/Futo event.

One concern I had with Cordie is that, as a friendly spider girl who talks about eating humans, I didn't want people to think I was ripping off Draco's incredible work in 2016 and 2017 with Yamame. Fortunately, although comparisons were inevitable, I seemed to make Cordie work as her own character and not a Yamame clone. I think part of that is the different ways they fight - though both used spider abilities in battle, Yamame relies more heavily on melee and is portrayed as being bulky and strong, while Cordie is much more delicate and prefers to use guns, only switching to melee attacks when her guns are failing her. Leaning into her western influences a bit helped too, though in practice the main thing that came from this was her friendship with the Prospector.

D21
One of the jokier additions to The Curse, D21 was an impulse add that tied in well to my decision to stick Meme Man into RP via the Revue Of Rejects plot. Not much to this guy, but he was fun.

D21 also took on aspects of a rejected Curse member, who we will meet in the next Curseplot blogpost.

Dr. Geo Mandrake
Another product of my continued desire to mine Contra Hard Corps for every last bit of RP material, I made sure to get full use out of this guy. CHC's big gimmick is that it has branching paths, which means you have to play through it five times to see every level. Due to the branching levels, there are three completely different fights with the doctor in the original game, and I included all three in his run in RP. On one path you fight Mach 777 (his transforming pod mech), which I included in the first Mandrake battle. Another path sees you take him on after he's been transformed into a spider-like creature, which I used for the final round of his second encounter. But the star of the show, no doubt, was his animal combining machine, fought on two of the paths in CHC. For a very long time, I've been inspired by the crazy possibilities the combiner afforded, part of that being due to the boss music that plays alongside it, a crazy track named "Format X" that I even used in RP - way back in Bulgrave's plot in Season 2. It was great to finally use the man himself after having been inspired by his mad science and hardcore bop for so many years.

E-123 Omega
Another last-minute rescue, Omega was originally planned to be part of a Team Dark power trio with Rouge and Shadow, but was cut as I didn't have any good ideas for him. He was added back in when Sheep requested robotic characters for a Green Hell Zone event. The same event also led to Heavy Lobster getting promoted from minor to major Curse - more on him in a bit.

Elvira
Like Cordie, Elvira was originally planned to be a protagonist. I sent her to the scrapped pile eventually, but like some other Curse members I had "scrapped", she saw a chance to squeeze back in via another user's plot, in this case M Sheep's event featuring medieval/fantasy-flavored Curse members taking over Parr Sports. As a Disgaea character, Elvira fit right in, though I used her as a protagonist instead of an antagonist.

Elvira early on had a gimmick where she'd help anyone who was losing regardless of which side they were on, though I de-emphasized this aspect after deciding it might get annoying. I was worried she wouldn't find much to do and might even just get written off without an event, but towards the end of the season she found a bunch of small roles to play and ended up playing a notable role in the Screenslaver event to finish her Curse tenure. Similar to Cordie, I felt Elvira passed her "can I be a real character" exam, and she is planned to continue appearing next season.

Fortran and Grand Dad (Mr. L and Dr. Mario)
The concept here started as a way to finally put the Dr. Mario jokes to bed. I'd used him for a joke cameo in 2011 and ever since then JRM and Chao had been making jokes about him. The only way to stop them was to wrap up the character, so I brought him back, and Mr. L was added alongside him to form a complete Mario and Luigi duo.

A common running gag among Mario fans back when Super Paper Mario was new was to insist that Mr. L and Luigi are two different people despite how blatantly obvious it is that they are the same. This joke continued way back when VGCW was popular in the community around 2012-2013. I personally never found it all that funny, but I saw a way to leverage it for the plot. You see, while Dr. Mario doesn't have similar gags about him, I actually have often considered him as separate from the "real" Mario, no doubt because of how he is a separate character in Super Smash Brothers instead of being an alternate costume. With this mindset, I decided to use the two fake Mario brothers for a "big reveal" that was kind of a parody of big reveals, done right before Brawl Season kicked off to act as a climax for the early arc of Curseplot. I took the gags to their natural conclusion by showing that, no, Mr. L really WASN'T Luigi, just a bootleg Mario disguised as him. And Dr. Mario was a bootleg Mario disguised as the real Mario. I made them kinda sympathetic in the end and it earned them jail time over being killed.

Frost
I've never played Rainbow Six Siege, and I don't plan to - it's a multiplayer FPS, a genre I've never had the slightest interest in. I found out about Frost after stumbling across some cute fanart of her and becoming smitten with her cool design. I've always liked half-masks, and that's a huge part of it, but I also thought her trap-based toolkit was a lot more fun than just "soldier with gun" and The Curse had plenty of gun nuts as it was.

Frost ended up being one of the most notable Curse members, and a rare case of the tractor benefiting a story instead of harming it or being a neutral party. I wanted to play Frost as a rare case of a genuinely intelligent antagonist. We always get villains every year who wind up forced into bad situations due to making bad decisions, but they usually have to make those bad decisions or else the plot doesn't end in a satisfactory way. If Hardcore Prawn remote controlled CRAYNet and turned it off and vropped halfway across the world when he lost, that would have been smart, but it also would have been a really lame way to end the fight. Frost, however, could get away with always doing something smart every time we saw her. She started out by not fighting the Kobbers in person, only leaving traps behind for them. When we finally took her on, she fought in a group and the only folks who went to fight her rolled poorly, allowing her to beat them up and get away when things looked bad for the rest of her team. Finally, in her last event as a villain, she helped split the party in a divide and conquer strategy, focusing fire on the characters she had already bested previously. When she was eventually cornered, she immediately gave up and switched sides, providing no further resistance or stonewalling. It was a calculating move, Frost selling out to whichever side she saw as stronger... but as we spent more time with her, it became clear she was actually a sweet girl once you peeled away the military and Curse stuff. Frost became one of my favorite new debuts of the year, and is now a full-blown regular character I've added to my ZFPD roster. The role she's played in Pitohui's redemption has been great, too. I'm extremely happy with Frost's overall arc so far and she will definitely be back for Season 10 and perhaps even beyond that depending on how I feel this time next year.

Heavy Lobster and Heavy Mole
There's not a whole lot to these guys aside from foreshadowing. Heavy Lobster appeared very early on and was one of the biggest hints of the plot's climax, being a robot lobster manufactured by CRAY Computing and all. They're also both from Kirby games, again furthering the connection to my 2020 plot. Heavy Lobster saw a lot of action in the late stages of the plot as his simple Elite Mook nature proved
useful to have around. Heavy Mole showed up pretty much solely because of that picture of Heavy Mole riding Heavy Lobster.

Impact, Puma, Ogre, Troll, and Titan
There wasn't much to this bunch either. I included them more to ensure I covered every single member of The Curse more than anything else... though The Corps has only just this month launched a new phase of the toyline that reveals one of the good guys (Recoil) has revealed himself to be a double agent and is a Curse member. Too late to work him in!

Titan was the Titan Tank driver because I couldn't ignore the name similarity, the Titan Tank being an unrelated vehicle that's used in the toyline by The Corps rather than The Curse (the tank came first, is partly why, I imagine). I loved Plague's goofy little tank but I did want the more properly intimidating Titan Tank in there, so it was a good slot for him. Ogre and Troll were mostly there so The Ravage could off a few Curse members, though I got some extra mileage from them later with Trollgre. Puma was part of Shadowlaw to buff up their ranks. Impact has my favorite design of these five and I'd wanted to do more with him, but at the height of summer I was a little concerned about how much Curse I had left to do and so scaled back plans here and there, meaning I couldn't give Impact multiple appearances like I'd wanted.

Kabal
Another of the Curse members I kept in reserve for use as a "disposable" member to send when people wanted a Curse member to beat up and I couldn't spare anyone else. He was initially introduced to be Ravage fodder, but I wound up being so busy during that event that I had no time to use him. He wound up in a holding pattern for a while until Chao approached me with the concept for the Weasleby event. Kabal seemed a perfect fit for joining the traitors, and he made a good opponent for Janga.

Kaikias
AKA the knock-knock robot. This dude was mostly here for worldbuilding purposes and had an offscreen backstory. The implication was that he was the Dark Star version of Skeiron, built by Dr. Twilight (the Dark Star version of Celestia). Like Skeiron, he gained a consciousness and has a dumb sense of humor, but unlike Skeiron he turned to evil and joined The Curse of his own volition, though still more out of ignorance than anything else. He eventually rebelled against his master, and unlike the softhearted Celestia, the more jaded Dr. Twilight was content to let him rot as a result of his poor life choices and moved on after her initial efforts were met with violence.

We never saw any of that on-forum because it wasn't important - the idea here was to present a character and let people draw their own conclusions about what his presence meant.

Mach Rider
Another cut-but-resurrected Curse member. Mach Rider's initial design was as an anti-F-Zero character who wanted to sabotage the Grand Prix. With F-Zero and The Curse becoming entwined (and ESPECIALLY with Don Genie being the one to ask for Mach Rider's assistance), I dropped this aspect and just focused on Mach Rider being a bike-riding pain in the butt. The surprise female reveal was an irresistible bit of lore from the Mach Rider arcade game I couldn't pass up.

Masher
This guy was originally planned to make THREE appearances last year, having a scuffle with the Kobbers in all three of my plots. He only actually turned up for the raid on Scramble's fortress, but he was also planned to show up during Halloween Plot's Attack Of The B-Movie Monsters, and was also pegged for an appearance during Deep Freeze, the Pokemon Plot event about infiltrating the Plasma Frigate. Unfortunately both of those events had so much going on already I simply forgot to include him - he was going to fit into the B-Movie event by playing up his "living suit of armor" look, and the Pokemon Plot by connecting how he looks like a knight, as do Team Plasma grunts (though not Neo Team Plasma grunts, which is what we were fighting, but...) Masher was then going to get away once again this season and appear AGAIN for the final time as one of Queen Sectonia's top underlings, and he'd have a final battle with the Kobbers where he transformed into a massive kaiju version of himself (this being Masher 2 from Kirby: Right Back At Ya) with wings and demon horns.

I mentioned in the previous blogpost that the Primal Clash toyline has an evil supercomputer named Evolution as the unseen antagonist. Masher was originally going to either fuse with or actually BE Evolution and appear as the final boss of Curseplot, but by the time the season started I had changed my plans and made Hardcore Prawn the final boss instead.

Masher ended up being the butt of jokes for how long it was taking for him to do something - this is partly because one of his appearances was delayed and cut down (the Plague/William Leather confrontation) and partly because I was saving him for the late stages of the plot as I tried to determine his direction. I settled for making him an ally of Queen Sectonia and Screenslaver, then started using him much more frequently to silence the jokes. The popular vote told me not to let him get away again, so his final form was simply the red Masher with a shield from Kirby's 3D Rumble (a subgame in Planet Robobot that features a gang of Mashers as the main antagonists, and the reason I added him to RP at all) and the anime kaiju form was scrapped entirely.

Metxel
I've made no secret of my love for the Costume Quest series. I briefly considered using Metxel in an October plot that featured Samhain, but decided Curseplot couldn't afford to have a minor league event that late in the year. Not limiting myself just because Metxel came from a Halloween-themed game was definitely the right call, and I'm doing the same trick again next season with Kronoculus, not letting Costume Quest content be restricted to October.

Millennium Bug
Millennium Bug was tied to Amiga from the beginning - it was only a little later, towards the end of Season 8, that I decided to add him to The Curse as one of the first members to be revealed. While he never really got an event of his own, the Bug played a lot of useful roles in The Curse and I appreciated his presence numerous times. I took care to make him somewhat sympathetic so his death at the hands of Screenslaver had impact.

Monitamon
A horde of Monitamon were initially conceived as opponents for Screenslaver's event, but were scrapped. When I saw a chance to use some (as Sheep so eloquently puts it) Garbage Curse at Weasleby's event, I dug up a single Monitamon and made him an ineffectual doofus who got chomped by Rexy but at least served a purpose as a spy for Screenslaver.

As I go through and add pictures to this blogpost I notice now that Monitamon never got an icon made... and that meant he also never showed up in the "EVERYONE IS HERE" segment of The Curse's finale. Whoops! Guess not everyone was there!

Myra Rotspring
Jumpropeman once linked a picture of Myra and lamented that Hearthstone had lots of cool character designs but that he was unlikely to ever find a place for them in RP. Naturally, I saw potential here and snatched her up as one of the earlier solidified Curse members. Myra's role was mostly in the background - she only made one brief appearance before the event where we fought and eliminated her, but she played pivotal roles in other ways, such as being the one who brainwashed Shovel Knight and also being the one who made the chemicals that made Crave bars so addictive.

Popple and Birdo
Originally planned to replace Rouge as the thieves Zeldoten would get to deal with personally, I instead moved Popple and Birdo to the Hot Wind Blowing event as Popple fit the stated goal of robbing a bank. And Zeldoten got to fight them anyway, so it worked out! As a bonus, these two also acted as a little goodbye tribute to AlphaDream, the game developers famous for making the Mario And Luigi roleplaying games, of which Popple originated from. Birdo was Popple's sidekick in one of the many battles Mario and Luigi have with him in the first M&L game, Superstar Saga, so I carried that over to here.

Prizm
A running gag at first that showed up because I liked the design and died instantly because he's weirdly weak in his source game, but much like Prospector, I wanted a real ending for Prizm. I eventually came up with turning him into Bonechill. Originally he was going to use InGen technology to mutate himself into the stronger but no-longer-infinite-respawning ice demon dragon thing, but less than 24 hours later Harpy was talking about Ladeca and I realized I had the perfect fodder for her to mutate into a Ba'al. It was a weak Ba'al, but if you use crappy ingredients, you get a crappy result.

Prospector
Initially used as a simple throw-away gag, I promoted the Prospector to a normal Curse member when I decided I wanted him wrapped up properly instead of just being a joke, as well as, like I did with Junko years ago, taking a meme and then actually trying to make something of the character. I gave him silly depth and silly character development (now he can throw CANS, too!) because I wanted him to stay as a source of comic relief even as Curseplot reached its' serious climax.

Reaper
One of the three Curse members from the original toyline that had the strongest presence in the plot, along with the Shrapnel and of course Plague. The funny thing is that Reaper's figure isn't very good - it's essentially a static statue. You can move the arms, but the way the figure is sculpted, there's really only one good pose for them, and that's a simple shooting pose achieved by having him hold a gun. Still, lame figure or not, he has a cool design, so I worked with it and made him the Shrapnel's boss.

Reaper was considered for one of The Curse's top positions, but I decided pretty early on to make it a "Big Five". This of course changed when Chao and Hooded Pitohui brought such strong leaders to the table that I expanded to a Big Six and then a Big Seven, but the initial intent was to keep it to five since the Curse icons were laid out in rows of five, and I chose five because that's how many icons could fit on a row when I viewed the profiles thread on my tablet. So my tablet is why we got a Big Seven. Of course, Reaper was one of the lategame promotions towards the end of Curseplot when things were falling apart - alongside a few of the other lategame players like Janga and Chompette, he rose to a position of prominence as The Curse collapsed. So ultimately he did kinda get the star treatment of an elite Curse member, considering how big his final event was.

Rouge the Bat
Rouge was originally going to be a rival to Zeldoten, hence the rank of Master Thief and the discussion that revealed Zeldoten was asked to join The Curse but was offered a lowly rank due to Rouge's presence. I'd wanted some sort of "test of thievery" between the two that Zeldoten would win, but I couldn't think of anything I was satisfied with. Turning to Plan B, I pulled on Rouge's less-often-seen side as a government agent, revealing she was a mole planted in The Curse to keep an eye on them, InGen in particular, due to the existence of the Biolizard. We still got to see her thievery as part of the Sedusa/Futo/Cordie event, too, but ultimately she fled The Curse without a direct confrontation with the Kobbers.

The thing that pushed me to put Rouge into RP? Miyu and Fay. I wasn't up for Rouge attracting a lot of "lel she's a furry" jokes, but then JRM used those two and kinda tested the waters with female animal people, and what few gags about the subject ensued mostly just came from JRM himself! I saw the coast was clear and let Rouge in.

Sedusa
There's no sign of it on the forum, but it was discussed at the time in Chatzy - when Him was first offered by CustardKittensRock as a Fite Yer Mates entrant in 2013 for Fite Week 2, Sedusa was his planned assistant. JRM shot down the idea as Him was already powerful enough he didn't need such a strong partner, and Him ultimately didn't make it to RP until the fourth Big Bar Brawl the next year. I saw a chance for a fun callback, though, and since I like to make the weird characters the JRM Sisters enter into the Brawl a bit more integrated with our overall verse instead of just being random additions from nowhere, I did this bit to give Him a little more continuity. It helped that I was already a fan of Sedusa to start with. She made a great early-game Curse antagonist, and I got to use pretty much all the major aspects of the character (the hair weapons, the Cleopatra artifacts, and the Ima Goodlady disguise) so I'm satisfied with her run as a villain. She was also a great way to reinforce Futo's return to the Kobbers and Cordie's face turn, showing the two friendlier ladies joining the Kobbers to help fight one that couldn't be redeemed. And, true to Powerpuff Girls form, she got the shit beat out of her, but lived and was tossed in jail.

Shadow the Hedgehog
One of my earlier ideas for Curseplot, Shadow was originally planned to play a more significant role as a prominent gang member, encountering the Kobbers a few times as they took over Curse territory in a series of street fights. Like Impact, he was demoted to a one-time villain due to the size of the plot. I tried to get in some Ow The Edge jokes, but there wasn't much time for them. And, unfortunately, Chao's drifter gal Maria couldn't attend the event for more memes.

Shovel Knight
Another of the numerous callbacks in Curseplot, Shovel Knight was here due to missing out on the previous appearances of his franchise in RP: Shield Knight was a Neo Kobber in 2015 and the Order Of No Quarter got an entire plot to themselves two years later, but there was no sign of the man himself despite his affinity for crossovers making him perfect for RP. He was ultimately added in as one of the first Curse members to fall, having essentially been made an elite mook via brainwashing. His yelling about butts referenced the infamous "Butt Mode" cheat code in Shovel Knight that replaces every instance of the words "Shovel", "Knight", "Magic", and "Health" in the text with the word "Butt", resulting in Shovel Knight being called Butt Butt, King Knight being called King Butt, and so on. Once the brainwashing was broken, Butt Mode ended and Shovel Knight talked normally.

Sogmaster
One of the last of The Curse to be conceived, I ran across The Sogmaster while web browsing and thought his design was good enough and his concept silly enough that he'd make a great part of this complete breakfast. Everyone was surprised he survived Blastoplot Finale, but I had found myself enjoying this ridiculous dork so much I wanted to have another round with him later, and the Kappa Plot where we fought Catbert and crew was the perfect place for him. He's in prison now, having a great time making license plates.

The Street Freaks
An early pick for Curseplot, The Street Freaks were originally a protagonist trio not unlike my old characters The Great Conehead Brigade. The dynamic of Dead Stop being mute, Fright Lights speaking in beeps, and Horror Hydrant talking normally was always present even before I decided to make them bad guys.

The Street Freaks initially played a bigger role back when The Curse was smaller, and even had an arc to themselves at one point. They would have failed at some early-season hijinks, then be confronted by a NEW set of Street Freaks that claimed to be their superior replacements. The two groups would then feud, climaxing in a face turn from the original Street Freaks. This was cut for time, but right up until Hot Wind Blowing I considered tossing in the replacement Street Freaks somewhere. You'll meet them in the third installment of this blogpost series.

Tunnel Spider
Yet another example of how I've wrung a ridiculous amount of RP material out of Contra Hard Corps, this robo-spider was mostly just there to be a CHC reference and because he fit the chase scene nature of the Impact/Shadow event well. Selena had talked about salvaging the robot's parts and making him into a friendlier robo-bug who would fight for good, but we didn't see that this season. Perhaps he'll be deployed next year?

Valentine 
Selected solely for looks over any actual experience with Skullgirls, Valentine seemed to trigger a small current of Skullgirls popularity, with Big Band and Peacock also making Curse appearances. I think I made her friendlier here than she is in Skullgirls canon, but that's kind of par for the course with me most of the time, isn't it? She'll be back next season as one of the Undercity's more skilled medical professionals.

The Shrapnel 
All the fun of roleplaying as Stormtrooper Squadron, except they were actually bad guys this time! It was kinda funny that the Stormtroopers never spent any time in RP as villains, but The Shrapnel did a great job of fulfilling that purpose. They're whatever you need them to be. Expendable kill fodder? Joke material? Even, dare I say, ACTUAL CHARACTERS? We got all of that and more, with a few notable Shrapnel (Slade, Kenyon, and Jeanne) even getting names! My favorite thing about The Shrapnel was how versatile they were, and they were put to use all across the season, with a few even getting to persist into next year as part of The Cure.

Dr. Henry Wu
Dr. Wu has spent some time as the secret final boss of the Jurassic World franchise. Appearing in the first film as a friendly character, his true intentions were revealed when he resurfaced over 20 years later for Jurassic World, and he escaped at the end of the film to make another appearance in Fallen Kingdom, where he once more survived. It's very unlike the Jurassic series to let a human villain persist this long, which is part of why I plopped him into RP - to give him some overdue comeuppance. ...But then it turned out he survived THAT, too, though he certainly did get punished this time! I thought for sure he'd be killed, but Harpy wanted to save him from his admittedly very nasty fate of being turned into a monstrous dinosaur hybrid and killed in battle in the Underdome. So now he's in prison, where he'll remain for a very long time.

Giovanni and Team Rainbow Rocket
While I wasn't exactly impressed with how little Ultra SM added/changed from the original Pokemon Sun and Moon, the brief Rainbow Rocket sidequest you get after beating the champion isn't bad and made for good RP fodder. This was kind of a remnant from an old 2017 Pokemon Plot I'd wanted to due that involved elements of every Pokemon "evil team" fighting amongst themselves with Team Skull caught in the middle. The Rainbow Rocket sidequest had a similar idea, which was cool to see. Giovanni was a good, more serious villain in contrast to Plague's goofiness, and the blogpost he debuted in helped to sell him as a threat when he murdered Spitfire. I added in Sam and Monica to give Giovanni some backup, and they weren't terrible people so they got off easy at the end and joined Hazel in Kuwahawi. We may see Monica again at some point since I like the female Rainbow Rocket Grunt design quite a bit, but she'll probably only turn up if Hazel also comes back.

Lord Dominator
I considered Lord Dominator for a comedy villain role years ago, and that story was recounted back in an old installment of Rejected Characters Depot (I haven't done one of those in a while because I haven't built up enough interesting rejects since the last one to make another one worthwhile, but I have been saving the names and should get another one up here eventually, maybe by Season 10's end). Ultimately she was rejected for being TOO evil - I wanted a goofy, mostly ineffectual villain, but Dominator was incredibly powerful and supremely evil. With the conception of The Curse, however, I saw a chance to finally give her a proper run. A major reason she was considered (aside from me just thinking she's neat) is that she's an alien, and I focused very hard on the urban and cyberpunk aspects of Olympia in a lot of my planning while not giving much attention to the interstellar tourism side of things. Including a prominent alien villain was a good way to add some weight to that side of the scale.

Of course, she still got softened up. I wasn't comfortable roleplaying as a villain who had EVER been capable of casually destroying entire planets on a whim - that's a level of power that, in my view, should only be reserved for the most extremely insanely dangerous of massive kaiju, and not anything human-sized that appears regularly or anything like that (So, for instance, The Maw didn't break my suspension of disbelief or freak me out too much when it was shown to be capable of destroying a small planet). So for RP, I discarded a lot of the grislier details of her Wander Over Yonder stuff and instead she had a superweapon that was tested on uninhabited planets but never destroyed anything inhabited or overly large. I also gave her a character arc that led to her having a change of heart, though she still ended up in jail. I didn't want to kill Dominator, I had too much fun with her for that, so she was shipped off to prison and maybe someday we'll see her in some sort of friendly role, though she's definitely not a slap-on-the-wrist character like Cordie or Frost who gets to immediately be a Kobber.

Screenslaver 
This dude made a big impact on me in 2018 when I saw Incredibles 2. His MO and style made him a perfect fit for Olympia and The Curse, though I toned down the brainwashing signals a bit to basically just stun people and he never deployed them across all of Olympia at once, using them more for self-defense than as a superweapon. Instead I played up his skill with technology and made him a master hacker.

My earliest plans had no particular character behind the mask - Screenslaver was just Screenslaver. When the plot was revised to have Hardcore Prawn as the final boss, though, I realized Seanet would be the perfect partner in crime for him. Like Prawn, we never got a satisfying defeat of Zoofights 4 villain Seanet. They were dealt with, yes - at the end of Zoofights 5, Croctopus and Ourobouros' time battle resulted in us getting booted to a world where they weren't in charge - but it wasn't a very satisfying way of claiming victory over Seanet, so I gave us that victory by having them work with the lobster in an oceanic alliance.

Plague
I already talked a good bit about Plague in the previous installment, but to address JRM's comment here - I didn't intentionally make Plague resemble myself, but he does indeed share the toy collecting angle as I thought it'd make him endearing and this was a case of a villain I was intentionally making relatable and friendly because he'd be appearing constantly all season and I didn't want him to be hated or to elicit groans every time he popped up. I think it worked very well, especially since the requirement of "well now there has to be a REAL villain to punch" was filled so well by Hardcore Prawn. Incidentally, a reason he specifically got "toy collecting" as a trait was because of the plot's origins lying in toys. I was pretty vague as to why so many toys existed of things that were real in-universe, running into the old JRM bugbear of "hey, I played your video game!" that he dislikes so much, but fortunately Sheep brought in a toy designer (Jack Whacky) as Garbage Curse and boom, everything makes perfect sense! Especially since Plague was absolutely the type of person to want merchandise of his own evil organization.

Dana Zane, Lisa Basil, and Xyra
The plot's last big twist - the reveal of what Plan X was, and how it was actually a three-pronged assault instead of a single superweapon! It was stopped pretty easily, but the reveal was the main point, and it got us some nice friendship moments, particularly Jason-3 with Xyra and Honoka with Dana. These three were chosen as the three that would get corrupted a few months before it happened - the original plan was for only Xyra to be Plan X, though this replaced an earlier concept where Lisa Basil was the only one of the three to be fought, and she would have been a true villain instead of a brainwashed victim! I didn't want to go back to the "surprise heel turn" well again this year, though, so I made her SEEM like a troublesome antagonist for the Kobbers with her hatred of magitech but then subverted it by showing she's not evil - just prejudiced and concerned about the city's bottom line. We may see more of her next year as we dive deeper into Olympia's inner workings and explore the setting further, as her high position makes her a good character for worldbuilding about Olympia's history. As for Dana, she was added to the equation when I realized I could make her prosthetic arm and nanomachines CRAY in origin.

Hardcore Prawn
Our final boss! For most of RP's existence (since at least 2013), I've wanted to let CW get a chance to beat up Hardcore Prawn to get his revenge on a "cheating" Zoofights tournament champion. We'd never had a bad guy win a ZF tournament before, but due to the way ZF worked, it wasn't a serious problem for them the way it would be if the villains won in our roleplaying. Zoofights generally just discarded everything (except for a little scene flavor or fun cameos) year to year and focused on a new cast each time, so it didn't matter if the winner was a crude dude. But in ZFRP, we're all about taking down bad guys, wrapping things up, and solving mysteries in a satisfying manner (except for Sheep, who has always been an advocate of NOT letting us solve every problem, and every so often JRM does it too, but I digress). So I wanted to give Cornwind the satisfaction of finally dishing out justice to that dang lobster. Originally it was just going to be a Fite Club or Bonus Boss match, but fortunately I never got around to doing one of those. Later, the idea came to me to have Prawn be the final boss in a Zoofights-flavored 2020 plot as part of our milestone celebration of ten years of RP. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked tying him to Curseplot, and so I merged the Zoofights plot idea with The Curse and did it this year instead.

The inclusion of The End (the Russian lobsters that entered Zoofights 2) was a super-late addition, thought of while I was writing the post. Initial plans were that Prawn had made copies of himself, though not Deadly Duplicates. I remembered the other lobster-themed Zoofighter just in time, though, and it meant that Zoofighters from five of the six tournaments made appearances in the plot!

Shout-Outs
That's all of my Curse members, but I can't end this blogpost without giving a few mentions to some of my favorite guest Curse.

Jumpropeman contributed a bunch of great Curse members, but Janga was easily the one I enjoyed most in terms of what they contributed to The Curse as a whole. He rose to prominence as the group began to decline, and appeared on enough plots that he almost felt like a protagonist despite his evil nature. Considering his personality and all, it had to end in his death eventually, but he put up a hell of a fight and I was actually a little sad to see him go! In a different world I could have easily seen JRM present this dude as an antihero instead, but he was an awesome Curse member and I thoroughly enjoyed him. Don't cross The Curse!

Sheep embraced The Curse so hard it was essentially his main plot for the year, though he worked it in with his own personal plans of a Parr Sports/Jeffery plot and it turned out great. A lot of his most prominent members like Scarab and the Piraka weren't very loyal to the cause, but it still gave them connections and was a great excuse to toss in more Curse members. Sheep also popularized both the term "Garbage Curse" and the practice of doing events that involved tossing a bunch of no-hoper Curse derps into one big event to eliminate en masse. It was great! Harv and Sal are the characters I think of most often when I think of "Garbage Curse" (Noonsa gets an honorable mention, though), and they seem like good representatives for the concept as a whole, but overall Sheep had so many incredibly fun and silly ideas for Garbage Curse, like Spat and Cactus Gunman. Tons of fun. Money for nothing. Chicks for free.

Draco had some really great Curse members. King Biruritchi was a very fun concept, Dr. Bergman contributed a lot to the plot and was a very interesting case of a villain doing something really heroic but then continuing to be a villain afterward, and of course Paul Blart, Mall Cop was an A+ addition. But the top shout-out has gotta go to Robbie Rotten, who could have been a complete joke but instead ended up being shockingly competent! Not only did he make it to the top 20 in the Brawl, but he also came very close to pulling off a diabolical scheme with many moving parts that nearly defeated two experienced and skilled veteran Kobbers - Sumireko and Zeldoten. Draco's idea to use him as the antagonist in the Sumidoten pairing confirmation event turned out great beyond all my expectations, and I loved seeing the ridiculous We Are Number One meme guy made into such a competent, legit threat. What a fun way to use the character!

Another user who devoted basically all of their plotting to The Curse was Hooded Pitohui! Pitohui the character got her own little plot arc that wasn't all about The Curse, but even that was Curse-flavored in some ways like her rivalry with Ol' Skool and becoming a friend of Frost. But the star of the show was undoubtedly Natasha Nielsen, who ranks right up there with Frost as one of the smartest villains we've ever had. I mentioned more than once in Chatzy how much I liked Natasha's strong personality, independence, and cleverness. This is a woman who had a scheme for every possibility and backup plans for her backup plans, AND she had the testicular fortitude to punch a Crite in the mouth if it looked at her funny. I loved her. I loved her so much I even seriously considered the possibilities if we face-turned her, but realistically I knew it was a longshot and I accept that she's gone from RP now. Still, though, what a great character. Really impressive work from Hooded Pitohui for his first major villain.

Don Genie sort of represents the moment I knew Curseplot was going to be a success. His massive network of allies and the resulting promotion to make him one of the elites really showed how well the plot was going. I had originally considered a rule that no guest Curse members could be part of the Curse's elite, but Don Genie laid out such a strong case that I offered to promote him, and then that opened the door for Natasha to nab a promotion as well. The Big Seven was a really strong, cohesive group with a talent for every situation, and part of the reason I did that Big Seven Meeting right before Dr. Wu's mutation was because I wanted at least one scene that depicted all seven of The Curse's heaviest hitters in the same place at the same time. It was Chao's suggestion, as he wanted to see that as well, and I thought he was absolutely right, so I wrote it out as one last look at The Curse as a united front before the top members began to be eliminated and The Curse went from decline to outright collapse in the later stages of the season. As for Don Genie himself, an excellent villain! And like Natasha, he was a noncombat bad guy, which was a really valuable addition for The Curse's lategame since I didn't have many Curse members who were noncombat but also still hostile. I really appreciated having Don Genie and Natasha around in the fall for that angle.

And, of course, I have to give very big, very heartfelt shout-outs to Futo and Chompette. These two played INCREDIBLY important thematic roles in The Curse, even if their actual actions weren't as major as some other characters. They were Plague's lifelines when he needed support during the worst of times, and their existence is a big part of why I went with the concept of Plague face turning outright - earlier versions of the plot ended with him in prison, or Plague sacrificing his life to help defeat Hardcore Prawn. I'm a big fan of both characters, and I love how Futo got so much development from her time as a Curse member, which climaxed in King Of Fighters Plot when Futo was the one to defeat Adelheid. I also really liked Chompette's more subtle development. She began as a wild, untamed animal with a child-like personality, but the longer the season went on, the more mature Chompette got, becoming smarter and more eloquent, capable of pulling off an ambush or carrying a normal conversation. By season's end, she felt like a fully-formed character, and honestly was my favorite new Brine character of the season (Giselle takes a close second). You two adorable derps were awesome!

And that wraps up the second, biggest installment of The Curse Retrospective! If you have any questions about The Curse and the plot in general (because there's JUST SO MUCH to Curseplot that I can't possibly cover it all alone!), feel free to ask either here or in the Blogpost Bulletin Board thread on the forum and I will answer your queries the best I can in the final installment. In addition to my answers to your questions (if any), that post will also include all of my scrapped Curse members and any unused images I have lying around!