| abstract
| - Ain't No Hero is the spiritual successor of Sink to the Bottom. Destructivedisk proposed a second collaboration between me and him a few day after we had completed STTB. He came up with several story ideas for this story and then presented them to me on skype. Unfortunately, neither of us remembers all of the story ideas, though I do remember that one of them was about Appule's life. Obviously, another was about Gohan's life. I told DD that the Gohan story was the most interesting story idea he had shown me and that I wanted to work on that one the most. So that's how we got to writing about Grandpa Gohan. After that, I made the page and chapters. Since DD had named Sink to the Bottom and its chapters, it was only fair that we traded responsibilities for the next story. We didn't have much of a story concept at the time of creating the page, other than we would somehow show how Gohan found the Four Star Dragon Ball. In many ways, this could have turned into a grand adventure/hero story, akin to Spindlerun: The Tale of Yajirobe. As I was creating the page, I quickly realized that I didn't want to do that. I wanted to try something different instead. I wanted to tell a story about a man who was thrust into the position of being a hero, yet was not. Thus, the name of the story was born. To me, Grandpa Gohan isn't the hero type. He lived alone in the mountains before finding Goku. He didn't ever seem to have a big ego, despite his love of women and friends. I wanted to reinforce how atypical a protagonist Gohan was throughout the story. And yet, his actions show just how noble and heroic a man Gohan was. That is why I chose the Helen Keller quote and used it at the top of the page (evoking some old memories of me using similar quotes with Dragon Ball: Legacies stories). Dragon Ball has always been about glorifying heroes and demonizing villains. But how many true heroes are there in the Dragon World? A few dozen? Half that? I don't know, but I don't think it's that many. I think plenty of people have heroic qualities - Yamcha, Gohan, and Vegeta are a few that come to mind - but they are not heroes. A true hero to me would be more like Goku, who tirelessly works for the sake of "goodness". Pretty much everyone aside from Goku is a flawed character in some way or another and thus is not always heroic, not always acting like a hero. Grandpa Gohan is one of many of these characters, but he also represents all the others as well. Writing this story was me trying to get past the cliche of heroic stories featured on this wiki. I've made many characters in my own stories seem like heroes, so it was refreshing and exciting for me to delve into the idea of someone who doesn't want glory and doesn't want to save the world being thrust into a position that requires them to be a hero. We wrote the first chapter of this story much like we did with Sink to the Bottom, only each of our sections were going to be around 800 words (whereas the STTB sections were mostly 500-700 words). But as you'll see in the below endnotes, this was more of a dream than reality. Also, we decided to use opening quotes with this story like we had done with Sink to the Bottom, though they were meant to be more directly related to the plot this time. Now, the main difference between this story and Sink to the Bottom is that DD and I only collaborated for one chapter of Ain't No Hero (while collaborating for all of STTB). The writing process, therefore, ended up being significantly different than it was with Sink to the Bottom, though the process for writing the first chapter was actually quite similar. One last thing I want to mention is that since DD came up with this story idea, in many ways, Ain't No Hero is his story. I likely would not have written Ain't No Hero if it was not originally a collaboration. DD eventually gave up writing this story because he found Grandpa Gohan hard to write about and didn't like writing multi-chapter stories anymore. At the time he told me that he wouldn't be writing chapter 2 or anything else, I was quite angry at him. And to this day, I'm still disappointed in him for abandoning this story. Sink to the Bottom was, in my opinion, one of the best stories either of us has ever written, and I'm disappointed that ANH didn't get to be like STTB. The magic of our collaborative efforts is missing in this story since DD contributed very little to the actual prose (his contributions to chapter 1 below are in bold). So why didn't I delete the story after DD gave up on it? I'll answer that in a variety of ways in the below endnotes, but the main reason is that I don't delete stories if I don't have to. I try not to give up on stories. If they have problems, I try to fix those instead of abandoning the project. Abandoning something at the first sign of something going wrong is a bad philosophy and won't help you become a better writer. I'm always trying to become a better writer, so by sticking with stories, I can get more experience with editing and revising and coming up with plots and character development. I think there was always something compelling about this story idea and I particularly liked writing for Super Handel. But that doesn't mean it was always fun. I had a very hard time writing this story and I was almost always angry while writing it. At the time of writing Ain't No Hero, I saw it as something DD left me with and I was very determined to make it the best I could in spite of him doing so. I'm not so mad at him anymore, though I don't know if I will ever do another collaboration with DD because of what he did. That said, I am still proud of this story, but make no mistake - the moment I finished this story was a moment of relief, not a moment of triumph.
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