I'm probably thinking too much, but...

[Miguel]

See, I've been contemplating the relationship of Megaman and Roll throughout the various series'. There are four specific incarnations I have in mind.

The original series, where they're robo-siblings who get along like bee eff effs. This has decent Rule 34 potential, but the fact that Rock and Roll are mentally and physically in the Age of Innocence deters any possibility of that in canon.

The Legends series, where they're humans (more-or-less) and Like Brother And Sister, but Megaman has a tendency to "Accidentally" peep on Roll. They're teens who aren't blood-related, so it's pseudo-acceptable.

The Battle Network series, where they're not even Like Brother And Sister, Roll.EXE has what I call Princess Zelda Syndrome (Always ending up crying for help from The Link (In this case, Megaman.EXE), despite being more then capable of handling the problem herself), and the canon ending strongly suggests that they got together like their Operators.

And the Ruby-Spears Animated Series. I know, it's totally not canon, can't even stay consistent within itself, but still.
It's based on the original series, and the relationship is more or less the same, except Roll is supposed to draw in the ten-year old feminist demographic and it kicks the Age of Innocence defense in the teeth by having them be more like teenagers and making Roll the token Hottie that every animated series seemed to need by law in the 80's and 90's.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that in the origin flashback in the first episode has Rock call Roll pretty, and then in approximately the same scene she gets thrown on top of Rock while they're facing each other in a very Rule 34-able manner (cue someone captioning a screen-cap of that moment with Roll saying 'Rock, what's poking me in the thigh?')

So to re-cap, every incarnation of Megaman after the original to feature Megaman (Word Of God directly states that X is not a rebuilt Megaman) has had Roll in it, and they're more shippable instead of being blatant relatives, and even in certain alternate universes they're still shippable (or at least pr0nable) despite being family.

I wonder... Which of the three options is it?

A) Capcom are trying to draw in a bigger demographic by attracting shippers, and the Ruby-Spears cartoon was just weird.

B) Capcom's secret fetish is incest, and the Ruby-Spears cartoon was just weird.

Or C) I'm thinking about this too much, and the Ruby-Spears cartoon was just weird.

(You can't deny the Ruby-Spears cartoon was just weird. I wouldn't directly call it bad, since there were some particularly good episodes and it's quite quotable (Doc Wily: Mega Man! That's my building! GIVE IT BACK!!), but it was definitely weird. Like, in the same flashback where Rock and Roll (Damn Capcom, with their love of puns...) become prime Rule 34'ing targets, Dr. Wily uses some kind of light-gun thing to reprogram the Mega Man 1 Robot Masters at the pull of a trigger, but in the very next scene, he's got the twins strapped to tables and seems to have to open them up to reprogram them. What was stopping him from using the reprogram-o-ray he turned the Robot Masters with?)

Discuss.

[viruszero]

As far as the options go... C all the way. You've had a little bit too much time to think about this.

As far as Wily and the reprogramming ray go, I see 3 options:
1- It could always be that Wily was a sadistic old fart and wanted to personally enjoy reprogramming Rock and Roll. Kinda like a "Take this Dr. Light... I'll take your greatest creations from you, just cause I can." As some revenge and whatnot.

2- It could also be that the reprogram ray only works on deactivated robots. (As in it rewrites the boot up sequence and assigns new ownership that way.)

3- Or alternatively it could be that Rocks/Roll's systems were too different for the reprogram ray to work on them. (This way it'd prevent people from just building a reprogram ray and taking over all the robots with one swoop.)

All 3 explanations could make sense, so I guess it's whichever you prefer.

And forgive my misuderstanding but Rule 34 is stated to have no exceptions, does it not? So the fact they are underage and siblings is likely irrelevant to those who would create for rule 34.

As for the battle network... Since they're not siblings or anything like that,. I guess it's ok. (Though it's still a bit wierd... I mean they're computer programs and all.)

[Miguel]

It can't be option two. He uses the ray on them when Rock makes them accidentally activate by crashing into them (He dived at Protoman, who simply stepped aside.)

I know Rule 34 has no exceptions, but there are times when Rule 34 material is possible in canon (See Ben's relationship with Gwen in Ben 10), but with the Original series the Age of Innocence factor makes any shipping at all absurd.

And in Battle Network, technically Megaman.EXE is a human. Near the end of the first game it's revealed that Lan had a twin brother who had some terminal illness so their dad made him into a Navi to save him.

[VileMKII]

Considering the battle-network pair, it's more or less true. After BN6 theres a fastforward to the future where Lan and Maylu have a child. Considering that each of them held one of the two mentioned its a good guess to say that Rock and Roll ended up together. Not to mention there was this...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3O1IWCU0Ds&feature=PlayList&p=5294F535A15017FF&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1
try around 1:51

Ya there was a marrage appernetly. Weather or not it went through I have no Idea. I havn't seen all of the exe anime. But what takes the cake is that throughout the beast series theres a baby navi named Trill who is taken care of by, yep you know it, the Rock and Roll team! So their married and have a child. Im sure thats enough to say what capcom thinks.

[Miguel]

The point of this thread is that I find it odd that every incarnation of a pair of siblings, past the first one, have been as likely ships that Capcom does.

[Chaos Tank]

Well you've put far more thought into this than I ever would have, but I think the answer is A. Give any series shipping possibilities and it will always attract more fans. However, the characters in classic are more childlike than adolescent, in addition to their family ties and this makes them hard to ship. Rock and Roll? Siblings. Blues and Roll? Still siblings. Bass and Roll? Possible, if she could overlook the whole obsession over killing her brother and she was into bad boys. And the doctors of course no because that's major pedo, not to mention they're human and she's a robot. The only other pairing would be if they shipped her with some random Robot Master, say Cloudman or Fireman, Flashman, anyone. Or all of them, just let the Robot Masters pass the 10 year old housekeeping robot around! No. And that about sums up all the possible pairings of classic, I think the only other notable female in the series is Kalinka and while I've seen her with Blues before, there's not many with her. Its just weird to ship classic.

Then you get to the X series and an explosion of new fans. You get deeper story than "Wily is taking over the world, go and stop him Megaman!" and after a couple of games Capcom realizes they need to open the door for shipping. So they introduce Iris. They introduce the navigators. And there's a big Maverick Hunter organization filled with nameless people that fans can drag into the story. Is it any wonder why most RPs, fanfics, fan art revolve around the X series and onward? Classic gets very little attention in this regard, and its not just because its so old that none of us were around to buy MM1 on release day. Its because they expanded the series far beyond classic's limited universe.

Zero x Iris. X x Alia. Gate x Alia. Zero x Layer. Axl x Pallete. Zero x Ciel. Niege x Craft. And then we have the Rock and Roll pairings.

Capcom loves recycling. They just LOVE recycling. The love recycling plots, they love recycling characters to be used in other series' and sometimes even in the same series... And its Megaman. The game is called Megaman, you better have a Megaman in it. So why not bring back Roll? Why not make them older and remove the family ties, make them good friends and let them get in on the shipping action too! You make more money that way.

And Megaman and Roll.exe have even more reason to be shippable. They're not just characters in a game, there's a new Megaman cartoon! And what's a cartoon without romantic tension between some of the main characters eh? The same could be said about the Ruby Spears one, but most of the tension there came from Mega never letting Roll come along on missions and Roll stressing that she was in fact capable. Hooray for empowering the females. But I'll agree that its riddled with holes and script mistakes but hey, you don't notice those when you're a kid.

So yes, though Rule 34 enables classic Rock and Roll to ship, its strange. And I actually think Capcom isn't into incest but wants to encourage shipping which is why they made the characters older in later incarnations and removed the family ties.

[randomdrifter865]

I'm going to say C you are just thinking too much after all I did get to see your old journal about pairings and I was like okay... So your hobby is pairings with in cannons of particular things which I find interesting in an odd sense too don't get me wrong on that ,but the point is should we really stress over the matter?

You see this a lot in comics too you know and in some shows are the same way. Basically where the producers whoever they are reuse the same material and change it to get popularity in their shows and or productswhich provides better mula for the company in return because they are doing an almost similar adaptation ,but changing it to try something different as well as to draw in new fans to their finished product.

I agree with Chaos on the whole shipping thing so that does basically make sense. I also agree that the Ruby and Spears Cartoons series was weird and when I was kid watching these cartoons I didn't really know any sort of difference other then it was about Megaman scraping robots. Then after getting older I figured out that it was just way to odd and that X was just retarded in the cartoon series versus the video game persona I knew as fight for everlasting peace to muscle bound confident jug head in the cartoon series. Yeah the ray gun thing got me too...

[Miguel]

For Bass and Roll, that could still technically be incest. I'm pretty sure the first eight robot masters (The Mega Man 1 set and Rock and Roll) were built as a collaboration between Light and Wily, so Bass, being built by Wily, would sorta be her half-brother.

This doesn't count out all the robot masters though. In Mega Man 3 they were worker 'bots probably built by some third party, Mega Man 4 they're Cossack's crew, 6 Wily kidnapped them and all the rest were either built by Wily or Light.

And the story wasn't really that much deeper in the X series. It was basically seven darker and edgier games of 'Sigma gets eight reploids to go Maverick because reploids should be the dominant life on the planet or something, X and his bisho-buddy go beat the crap out of him', then X8 came along and surgically removed what little sense the plot ever made, the only good moment being Axl's Shut Up Hannibal during Lumine's big speech.

But yeah, there is fertile shipping ground to be found in the X series. My personal favorite being Zero/Cinnamon (For someone who thinks about this sort of thing as much as me, trust me, it works.)

And I know how much Capcom loves recycling. Part of one of the fortress stages in X5 is taken straight from MMX for SNES, and one of the bosses is nicked directly from the same game, just with some kind of Egyptian makeover.

And I didn't really like that dynamic between Mega and Roll in the Ruby-Spears show. I can't really see Mega as the type to shout "Stay in the kitchen!" at Roll. But then, I can't really see him just standing there letting heavy objects fall on his head either.
And I think the best part of the Ruby-Spears cartoon is it may have inspired Bass.
Everyone says they must not have played very far into MM5 when they made Protoman a bad guy, but they must have, since Darkman (the 'bot who Wily built to frame poor old Proto in MM5) shows up in one episode voice by Gary Chalk (Optimus Primal in Beast Wars, Prime in the dubs of various TF anime series'). So why did they make Proto a bad guy? Because Wily's 'bots have enough trouble beating Mega Man on his own. Put his big brother in there, and Wily might as well hand in his Evil Genius Club Membership. It's a balance of power, they intended for Protoman to be a wise-cracking anti-Mega Man with an obsession with taking him down personally. Sound familiar? Minus the wise-cracking thing, that's Bass to a tee. And The Ruby-Spears show was canceled before Capcom brought the Classic series to SNES, so obviously they liked the idea of an Anti-Mega Man so much (but had the common sense not to mess with Blues) that they made a real one.

So there you have it, the Ruby-Spears show gave us Bass. Kind of. Probably.

[Raikon]

Jun 26, 2009 0:50:26 GMT 2 VileMKII said:

Considering the battle-network pair, it's more or less true. After BN6 theres a fastforward to the future where Lan and Maylu have a child. Considering that each of them held one of the two mentioned its a good guess to say that Rock and Roll ended up together. Not to mention there was this...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3O1IWCU0Ds&feature=PlayList&p=5294F535A15017FF&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1
try around 1:51

Ya there was a marrage appernetly. Weather or not it went through I have no Idea. I havn't seen all of the exe anime. But what takes the cake is that throughout the beast series theres a baby navi named Trill who is taken care of by, yep you know it, the Rock and Roll team! So their married and have a child. Im sure thats enough to say what capcom thinks.

What.
First off, that marriage was a filler episode.
Second, it wasn't a real marriage
Third, they were forced into it.
Fourth, Trill has nothing to do with Rockman and Roll.
Rock took care of him because he was a plot-device for the entire season (Trill was the one that made Rock do the Beast-Henshins) etc etc

[VileMKII]

I was just saying its a hint from capcom. I also stated I havn't watched all of the MMBN series.

[randomdrifter865]

Megaman 4 and 6 robotmasters were not Wily's robots ,but didn't the ones from 3 have his serial number DWN whatever numbers they were hinting they were created by Dr. Wily? So Wily could make off with Gamma in the end.

[Miguel]

I thought all the Robot Masters had DWN serial numbers in the end credits?

[VileMKII]

No random is right. In MM3 Dr.Wily did make them, because he had 'become' good and was working with Dr.Light.