| abstract
| - On March 1, 2014, I created three new stories - From Magic to Monsters, Be a Man, and The Perfect Lifeform. The Perfect Lifeform was ultimately created for the same reason From Magic to Monsters was - to give the backstories of characters who I could use in future stories, potentially. With From Magic to Monsters, these characters were artificial and true Majins, but in this story, they were Dr. Gero's androids. I didn't have much of a plan going into this story, like which androids I was going to use or anything. That is the main reason why I finished this story last out of the three; it took me quite a long time to come up with the plots and format for this story. At the time of creating them, I knew that From Magic to Monsters and Be a Man would be told in unusual formats, but I had originally planned on writing this story like a normal prose story. When I first began working on the three stories, I wanted to cycle through them all by writing one chapter in each before going on to a second chapter. This worked only at first, because I wrote the first chapter of From Magic to Monsters on March 5, the first chapter (or rather, part of the eventual first chapter) of Be a Man on March 7, and the first chapter of The Perfect Lifeform on March 8. After doing this once, I realized it was unsustainable. It was too much work for me to write three stories a week; it would be far easier (and better) for me to give attention to each story one at a time. I did this by focusing on From Magic to Monsters first, then completing Be a Man, and then returning to The Perfect Lifeform. I completed Be a Man on June 25, but did not begin writing The Perfect Lifeform again until July 11. This is because I was very conflicted on the format I was using to write the story. Even when I was still writing Be a Man, I was struggling with this story. I had written one chapter in prose, and not a lot had been done in it. Because of that, I realized that this story would take many, many chapters in prose to complete. It would be a lot like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Planet Trade Organization in that it would take an enormous amount of my time. I didn't want another story like that, but I also didn't want to delete the chapter I had written. This left me conflicted for almost two weeks after I finished Be a Man. I finally decided on deleting the first chapter and re-writing the story in a similar manner to From Magic to Monsters (though it is actually quite a different approach). I did this mainly because The Perfect Lifeform would have taken a huge amount of time to write in prose, and quite frankly, I didn't want to spend that much time on it. I had a good concept for a story, and using character reports to tell the story was a good, quick, and unique way to tell that tale. If I had ultimately chosen to write it in prose, I likely would still be writing TPL to this day. I spent a lot of time coming up with the template for the androids and what parameters it would have. Getting the size, the colors, the function to hide and collapse categories took quite a bit of time and effort, and I am proud by how the template turned out. I used the character pages of From Magic to Monsters as a reference point, but I did not want to copy them. The history and fate sections were quite important, so I did carry those over from From Magic to Monsters, but the pun section was unneeded for androids. Additionally, I added an appearance and personality section for each android to make them feel more alive and make it seem more like something Gero was writing. The main difference between TPL and FMTM was that FMTM was written like a history with an omniscient narrator. This story, on the other hand, was written from the perspective of Gero. He never planned on showing these reports to anyone, either, so they function as a sort of diary too. The reports are for his own purposes, cataloguing what went right and what went wrong with each of his creations. I found it fun and interesting to work with an unreliable narrator like Gero; it also felt very real to me. In canon, I could see Gero keeping these kinds of notes about his creations. Once I had the new format figured out, I wrote all of histories for androids 1-20 in a two week period, finishing on July 25. I then wrote the prototype section three days later solely because I was staying at a friend's house and didn't have much free time to write (I ultimately wrote the last chapter early in the morning of July 28, after waking up earlier than anyone else and getting some precious time to myself). Because I was not writing in prose, the writing itself went very quickly. I could have done several androids a day if I had wanted to, but at the time, I was also writing many other stories, so those took up my time as well. Had The Perfect Lifeform been my only story, I would have finished it in about five days after coming up with my new format for it. I wrote all chapters on the wiki, like I did with BAM and FMTM. One thing I did is that I saved the history sections for last every time (as I did with FMTM), since they were the most time-consuming parts, and they also defined the characters the most out of all of the sections. Writing out the appearance and personality sections first allowed for me to create a character who I could then inject into a plot of my own creation and develop them with traits I had already given them. Almost all of the plots were improvised, though I knew I wanted to use General Copper and his officers (their names being detailed in the last chapter of Be a Man) in some way before I began writing this story. In fact, most of Android 9's plot was set up long before I wrote his chapter. Also, by the time I finished Android 8's chapter, I knew that Androids 11 and 12 would be the two main androids I would set up to be able to be used in future stories (though there were other androids I also left open for use, like Android 14, and Androids 21 and 22). But aside from them, pretty much everything else was improvised. One last thing I want to mention is that this is one of my few stories that has conflict with the "official" Dragon Ball media because of my canon policy. In most of my stories, my canon policy doesn't really affect much (though it influences who I write about - for instance, I have no oneshots about Turles or Janemba because they don't exist in canon, to me). Here, however, it does. Since I don't view the Android 13 movie as canon (and neither should you!), that meant I would be creating unique characters for Androids 13, 14, and 15. This could be confusing to some readers, but it is what it is. There is no official canon, and since the Android 13 movie could not have taken place in the normal timeline, I personally didn't see the movie as taking place at all. I briefly considered using the three androids anyway (the "official" 13, 14, and 15 models), though with different histories to make them canon. In the end, I didn't do this though because it was more interesting for me to create new characters. I recognize that the Androids are a part of the official Dragon Ball media, but they are not canon to me. This story (and the chapters about Androids 13, 14, and 15) is/are a great example of the differentiation between official media and canon media, in my opinion.
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