Reader reviews and responses, #1

Heyo guys! So if someone's left me an interesting review or has a question about one of my fics and I can't respond via PM or whatever, I'll just yap about it here.

This is in response to Mr. Navit, about my Digimon/Trollhunters story Imposter Syndrome:

It's a shame that this is a one shot and not a full story. This has potential and Patamon being supportive good partner to tk was cute even if he's not the real tk

Firstly, the comment is greatly appreciated, Mr. Navit. :) I'm glad to see IS has been well-received so far. 

While I do find the idea of Digimon and Trollhunters crossing over pretty fun for reasons I've discussed here before, I'm afraid it's looking more than likely that I'm not going to do anything further with this. Partly because I'm just not a super big fan of the Trollhunters... animated universe, I guess I'll call it (I don't know what the books are like), and partly because I already have a ton of stuff on my plate. My apologies.

But -- this is why I will happily give my permission/blessing to you or anyone else who wants to pick up this concept and play with it further. I feel I have to say this because these days people I think are waaaay too overprotective about what are basically transformative works for properties that they don't even own the rights to. Unless someone is actually copying me word for word, I don't care if you want to use a plot idea from me or continue something I wrote about.

January 2025 status report

Happy New Year's one and all, hope everybody had a good one! The rough draft for New Dogs, New Tricks is roughly around 50 - 55% done. The rising action (including a number of the fight scenes and traps the RR face) and climax still need to actually be worked on, but I feel like I'm cooking here.

Since this is the fic I've had the most muse for as of late I've just been leaning into it. I might also start on the follow-up story afterwards just because I'm feeling really excited for it.

Still brainstorming and planning out other things on the side too, like a couple of Disney-related things, the Sonic reboot, and one of my original concepts. One-shots are still hard to do. I've thought about just doing a list of all my one-shot ideas that I'd like to write and the various roadblocks I keep running into with them.

And I still draw, although I haven't done anything in the last few months because of real life obligations. I would like to get back into it at some point though.

The Character Corner: Blitz

 

 This animated character took my job, my spouse, the kids, and my house!

I mean, that's what you'd think from listening to the anti-Blitz folk rant and rave about him... 😏

Opinions on Blitz vary. There were and still are a ton of folk out there who react to his existence like this:

As for the people who are more receptive to him as a character, you got people who basically thirst for him because he fulfills their furry muscle fetish/or and project their personal issues/trauma onto him:

 

And finally, people who treat him as a doll they can slap a new generic hero/romantic lead type personality onto:

 

It's pretty lonely for somebody like myself who's actually interested in developing Blitz as a character and showcasing said development throughout her stories. I'm going to try my best not to sound like one of the aforementioned weird cringe fail Blitz fans who clearly are just using him as their self insert, so here goes:

I haven't always liked him like I do now, but seeing all of the ridiculously over-the-top, all-consuming hatred and rage the majority of the fanbase has had for him for decades now has honestly made me start taking more positive notice of him. Like yes, he could be annoying at times in the show, but I found the other Rovers to be just as annoying at times. Later rewatches of the show just made me end up feeling more and more sorry for him. 70% or 80% of the screen time he gets is just devoted to crapping all over him. This kind of humor is unappealing and not funny to me. 

In Road Rovers, character development often tended to be sacrificed purely for the sake of humor, and it seems the writers were really reluctant to have Blitz actually grow up. A perfect of example of this can be found in "Storm On The Pacific". Blitz didn't believe that Hunter could be a good leader, but in the end changed his mind and admitted Hunter wasn't bad at his job. But in the final episode "A Day in The Life", the writers now seem to have completely forgotten that this matter had been resolved already and had Blitz bickering with Hunter over his being the leader again. Just... oy, that kind of bad characterization bugs me so much.

Honestly, it's a real testament to his character that he still sticks by the other Rovers in spite of everything and goes out into the field with them. That to me indicates that he isn't that much of a chicken if he's still willing to put himself into danger like that. I mean, he could just refuse to go all together. Wasn't he the one having to push Shag into action in the pilot (I think?), telling him "Come on Mop Boy."?

The way his cowardly streak gets handled is fairly inconsistent. In a number of episodes, such as the pilot, "A Hair Of The Dog That Bit You", "Storm Over The Pacific", and "Hunter's Heroes", he doesn't hesitate to charge straight into the action. He also appears to act more courageously as a normal old dog. He only becomes scared whenever he wound up in real danger, like when Fluffy grabbed hold of him or when he was taken prisoner by Zachary Storm's troops in the aforementioned episodes. His faint-hearted nature seems to come and go, but reveals itself most when he's in legit danger. I'm inclined to think that this fear also ties into a character trait he's demonstrated several times -- he's a glass half empty type of guy, the best example of this being his asking Hunter exactly how were they going to free all the dogs Parvo had imprisoned in "Hunter's Heroes", citing the sheer number of dogs there were. To me, the overall vibe he puts off in that scene, as well as his expression when Hunter responds "[Yeah, and] we're gonna free all of them" reads like he doesn't think the Rovers'll be able to pull it off. And if you go around believing that the worst is always going to happen, especially to you, then well, that's probably not going to make you feel very emboldened on literal life and death missions and fights.

Blitz has had his moments of actually not making rude comments and even being *gasp* nice! He was even given a few badass moments. I love it when, in "Hunter's Heroes", Blitz and Hunter are ready to split after the Rovers have rescued all the imprisoned dogs, the Groomer shows up, and she's pretty pissed. Blitz's response? "Sorry crazy lady, we don't have time to play. Maybe later, okay?" and pulls out his piece and opens fire, sending her packing. I also love seeing him chasing around the cano-mutants earlier in the very same episode. I might have to actually rewatch the show to see if there are any other scenes like this.

Yet viewers carry on like Blitz is literally this supervillain barely able to restrain himself from raping anything female and attacking their wonderful, beeooootiful  totally not annoying at all LOL OFCs. People make Blitz out to be both unnecessarily and overly aggressive, threatening, and outright cruel towards others (small children and other animals included) when all he did in the cartoon was just be a silly pompous windbag and a one-time catcaller at worst (for the record, do I like cat-calling? No, but that doesn't make Blitz a woman-hating rape machine). He's viewed as the worst kind of chauvinist pig, a mean bully, or a threat to the Hunter/Colleen ship (crazy shippers strike again!). It all just begs the question: if Blitz literally is Satan, P. Diddy, and Hitler all combined, then just why would the Master recruit him in the first place? Doesn't that reflect poorly on him? Makes him look like a real bad judge of character if one of the Rovers he picked was pure unfiltered evil, y'know. 🤔

But it isn't like the people screaming about all this are super logical in general and write the Master's character very well either in their fics either, so...

Someone once said that he'd leave the rest of the Rovers behind just to save his own skin. Um, wasn't Colleen totally willing to abandon him to the villains at least twice (again, see "Storm" and "Day In The Life")? 

Oh, it's okay when she does it? My mistake then, I'm so sorry.

Honestly, I don't get the people who quite clearly intensely hate Blitz and yet still include him in their fics. At this point I'm of the mind that you should either write such a character out of the story altogether somehow, or even kill them off. I mean, y'all are just making yourselves mad by having Blitz there hitting on Colleen or being abused by your OCs tormenting your OCS or whatever. But the show made sport out of bashing him, and people who hate Blitz seem to get up early in the morning to burn incense and animal sacrifices at the alter of Hunter, so maybe that's why. If one character is literally Jesus, that you need somebody around to be the devil.

Most Blitz fans don't do a good job of handling his character either. Most of them tend to whitewash his flaws and turn him into an entirely different character with none of his old quirks just so he can be their idealized leading man. To me, doing that completely defeats the whole point of writing fanfiction in the first place. You might as well just use a fan character in that case. I've also noticed that some people who do stuff like this tend to have these completely off the wall views about Blitz as well as the rest of canon. I'm sorry, but there's no evidence in the series indicating that Blitz hates the other Rovers and wants to seriously harm them. No, they don't hate him either -- he irritates them, yes (some more then others), but they don't actually hate him. Again, all that stuff was played for laughs and these are the good guys. You know, upright, heroic, generally caring types, the exact opposites of villains? Yet ya'll have them all acting just like villains. But the people who think that the other Rovers want to snuff Blitz in his sleep also treat him as a proxy character they project all their personal issues onto. I've always found this kind of thing to be frankly, well, pathetic, as well as extremely uncomfortable to witness. Just go and talk to a reliable mental health professional. Stop going after other people for not conforming to your bizarre, obsessive views on a cartoon doberman.

Now with the way Colleen usually treats him, I can at least see where the whole "she hates him" thing actually comes from. But even so, I still can't really see them actually wanting to murder the other in cold blood or anything like that, Blitz especially. I'd like to think that she'd be just as worried as the others would be if Blitz were to be say, seriously hurt or something, but unfortunately the show often made it seem like she wouldn't give a -- pardon my French -- golden shit. The show definitely had her go way overboard in how she dealt with Blitz, to the extent where she's the one who comes off as a complete jerk and a bully a lot of the time. Granted, while rewatching RR before their interactions weren't quite as physically abusive on her end as I remembered them being, but still. A very passionate (a polite way of saying "batcrap crazy") ColleenXHunter shipper (I want to try to avoid making generalizations here, but speaking honestly ColleenXHunter shippers in my experience tend to be very exhausting people to be around) once told me that Blitz deserved the grief Colleen gives him because he called her stuff like "pretty girl dog" instead of using her actual name. Yes, because that's the adult way to handle a problem with a teammate. Schoolyard taunts and constantly antagonizing them! Not just that, but if the situation was reversed, then do you guys honestly think Blitz could get away with doing all that to Colleen?

I think the Blitz and Colleen interaction in the show would've been far more bearable if he was allowed to successfully sass her right back. I know he tried to a few times in the show, but just never really had anything good to say back to her. So after while it really does come across like her just picking on him for no reason whatsoever, and it becomes insufferable, dull, and unpleasant to watch. Why not have them snipe at each other like how Homer Simpson does Patty and Selma? Or how Uncle and Tohru's mom in Jackie Chan Adventures basically had insult battles, or Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter, you know, make things more even? Not just that, but it'd be so much more interesting than just rehashing the same tired "Who are you again? Oh I know, Blinky/Fluffypants/[insert some dumb name here]!" gag from Colleen that I see get repeated in both the show and fandom over and over again. Do people actually still think that's funny in the year of our Lord 2024? 

Like I was saying before, there are people who like Blitz just because they have a furry muscle fetish. Honestly, I don't even care if anyone does have a harmless (read: doesn't involve harming anybody else, animals included) fetish. What I do care about is you (and this is something that the aforementioned people like to do) yelling at everybody else demanding they not draw rule 34 or fetish art while you sit there and draw it yourself. What I care about is you rubbing your fetish in my face constantly while smirking and repeating "This isn't a fetish! If you think it is, then you're the weird one!" 

The people I'm referring to here always act horny on main while being massively hypocritical at the same times, and it's so repulsive and grating. Do you go to your grandmother and constantly talk about your gooning habits with her? Your boss? I sure hope you don't. Just treat everybody like you do Grandma, unless they themselves actually tell you it's fine to do otherwise.

Some people approach Blitz as being stupid because of how pigheaded and hung up on himself he acts in canon, but I don't actually feel he's stupid as much as he just brags a lot, is impulsive, makes bad decisions, can be rude, has a big mouth, is a cynic, and tends to be rather unobservant. I also think he suffers from social ineptitude to a certain degree. I mean, in the show he never seems to pick up on the fact that the other Rovers tend to find his attitude annoying, and still persists in acting that way. 

That's a bunch of character flaws right there, but you know what? I find flawed characters that canon recognizes as being such vastly more interesting than the "crafted by the gods from 24 karat gold" supermen and women type characters (see: Hunter, Princess Elena [and weirdly enough, Elena actually has visible flaws, but canon barely ever wanted to treat them as being such]). 

When I look at a flawed character, I ask myself three questions:

Why is he/she like this? 

Do they have the capacity to change and become better, more well-rounded people? If so, how? What is that process like? For the sake of interesting storytelling, it can't be easy.

I know the talented Jeff Bennett gave Blitz a bombastic-sounding voice suited for spitting out the character's self-aggrandizing, flighty dialogue (though I think all the Rovers have this problem), but voice /= personality. In this instance, when I refer to voice, I literally mean how the character sounds and speaks. I acknowledge that it can be tricky to make sure Blitz still sounds like Blitz while allowing him to grow beyond the confines of what the show laid out for him. 

Blitz also definitely seems like an Arnold Schwarzenegger parody to me -- the whole bodybuilder thing and the way Jeff Bennett made him sound like Ahnuld. I love the fact he isn't the stereotypical vicious doberman seen so much in popular culture. The idea of this big scary-looking dog like a doberman being a chicken in actuality is a fun and novel concept. I just don't like the way Road Rovers ended up handling it.

Somebody on FIM Fiction.net had a particularly interesting quote pertaining to characters like Blitz: 'I've personally always seen flat/underused characters as more like seeds that you could grow into something really neat if you take the time and effort to do it right.' I completely agree. I feel like so many of the characters people turn their noses up at have the potential to have some very interesting hidden depths to them, Blitz included. Aside from doing a redemption story for him, I would also like to actually flesh him out and make him more interesting to read about.

There's a little show on Netflix called Stranger Things. I dunno, you might've heard of it. Well, I've never actually watched the series before myself, but did see a retrospective on YouTube about it a while ago that made me interested in watching the first season at least, in part due to a character in it named Steve Harrington. Steve is apparently an obnoxious jock who grows throughout the show into a better person. That's what I want for Blitz.

Yes, I know the odds of his undergoing this sort of transformation if RR had gotten a second season is pretty slim, but you think I seriously care about what canon would or wouldn't do?

There are a few people who complain that the Rovers' powers are boring, but I think they work for them myself. I mean, it makes sense for a guard dog to have super jaws, teeth, and claws that can rip up anything. Really, Blitz should be like Wolverine, or Inuyasha whenever he busts out his Iron Reaver attack, just slicing people up left and right. 

Thinking about this made me wonder if the producers or whoever partly decided to make Blitz a coward so they could get around showing a dog person mauling people in a cartoon aimed at kids and their families.

I don't have this limitation when writing fanfic.

Switching gears, Blitz/Colleen shippers are the ones I referred to earlier as the ones who are most often guilty of just suddenly turning Blitz into what they perceive to be a more suave or gentlemanly personality, but in the process also making him extremely bland and depriving him of the traits shown in the show. Though as I said before, I do think he'd be much cooler were there more to his characterization than just his calling everybody "[Adjective] Boy" (which isn't even something he does all the time in canon like fics would have you believe) and being obsessed with biting people in the rear. But I don't believe completely changing his personality in the blink of an eye is the solution. 

I deplore it when people pair together characters who either dislike/or hate each other, or one character dislikes/hates the other. So as you can imagine, I'm not a ColleenXBlitz shipper. At all. Plus, Colleen is also usually extremely OOC in these kinds of stories (or what passes for being OOC with her anyways, given her extreme flatness in the show), so I avoid them like the virtual plague. ETA: Also, there's this subgroup of BlitzXColleen shippers who seem to (poorly) write... really weird, juvenile, fetishistic stuff about them.

I'm personally of the mind that Blitz's whole thing with Colleen was lust rather then love. He did seem to dial back his flirting with her later in the show, though that could've also been due to him seeing that his attempts weren't successful.

As you may have guessed, hell no I do not ship them together. I can only think of one scenario where I could ever see that happening, but both characters would need to be in their golden years, i.e. pretty old, and their respective partners would both have to either be dead or otherwise out of the picture.

When it comes to Blitz pairings, I prefer either OCs or crossover pairings, where a character from a different series/movie/game/etc is bought in somehow and they go on to develop a relationship. No, I don't have any crossover couplings for him at the moment. I've seen some fans pull for Blitz/Exile, which I'll take over the Blitz/Colleen ship, but personally I just prefer for Blitz and Exile to be chums more than anything. One reason I'm not real interested in them as a coupling is due to my latest headcanon about the age difference between the two characters. Let's just say that I think Blitz is actually much too young for him. I'll discuss this further in my headcanon section in the follow-up post to this one. I'm still mulling over what Blitz's romantic life will be like within my fan-verse. 

I simply just don't like Hunter, so pairing him with Blitz makes me go "blegh". If someone ever did write a fic that was really different -- for one, they actually took the time to explain how a romance could develop between them in the first place and toned down Hunter's Gary Stu aura -- then I might check it out out of curiosity (I say "might" because RR is a fandom where I have to screen authors ahead of time to make sure s/he isn't somebody who has preexisting beef with me or something). But I never see anything like this. It's always just Hunter and Blitz suddenly making out together and being lovers with no buildup whatsoever. I think this is just furbait basically.

I will say Blitz's paramour is not gonna be Huntress (OC created by a fan called Greywolf Lupous who's Hunter's sister and Blitz's girlfriend in Greywolf's fics, as well as the fics of a few of her friends) per my setting -- at least, not in the long run. In my AU, they date early on and wind up having an amicable breakup. There are other fan characters I'm eying as eventual partners for him. I'm finding that I prefer for Blitz's ships to be subversive -- you expect him to prefer a certain type of lady as a girlfriend just because of how we see him behave in Road Rovers, but oh, surprise -- you wind up getting something totally different instead. And then I as the writer have the fun task of trying to show readers how we got from point A to point B with him and his beau in first place.

The Road Rovers fandom can give Sonic The Hedgehog and Disney fandoms a run for their money in terms of sheer social ineptitude, obsessive behavior, and unpleasantness, so if I get anyone trying to attack me for my opinions here, then I'm not going to even try and engage, I'm just gonna nip that mess in the bud immediately. Please understand that I don't mean calm rational disagreement, I mean flinging insults and throwing temper tantrums over my having a different opinion than you/or your favorite BNF.

Attack of the spammers

Or, "Why Can't You Guys Just Find Gainful Employment?"

So there's been this rash of spammers running rampant on Fanfiction.net as of late. You get a PM from somebody who tells you how much they love some random fic of your's and that they want to draw art for it, only for them to gradually reveal they want money for their "gift art". And their PMs and story reviews are always chock full of spelling and grammatical errors. 

The general consensus from people is to block these individuals, then report them so their accounts can be removed. I completely agree that that's the best course of action, but I've been getting hit with at least twenty of these spam messages recently and wind up finding myself either too tired, too busy, or just not in the mood to sit down and try and report every single account.

Just...

Shag has a Digisona now, I guess.

The best part of the Digimon Adventure reboot?

This big adorable fluffhead! 😍 I love the fact that he's based on a komondor.

October 2024 status report

- Still working on New Dogs, New Tricks.

 - A few months ago I said I had a one-shot for a '90s movie in the works. The rough draft is (mostly) done, but the entire thing still feels... incomplete to me? And I might've gone and got distracted by this anime I used to watch, and want to do a short prompt fill crossing it over with Gargoyles, so, yeah lol. 

- I've been worldbuilding for stuff like my Sonic reboot, a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic AU, and my original stuff. 

- I'm in the process of working on the next entry for Character Corner.

- Regarding my old New Lease fic, I'm not sure what I want to do with it at this point. I have been seriously considering going ahead and just canceling it. The other Extinctioners-centric story I posted was removed (yeah, fanfics for a hyper-obscure niche furry comic, dry your tears everybody). Long story short, I no longer want to engage or associate with Extinctioners for personal reasons. If anybody cares enough, then I may post a summary of what I was planning to do with New Lease, since I'm doubtful I'll ever return to actively writing on it (even though the main character, who's from a completely different franchise, is one of my favorite fictional characters). 

The Character Corner: Exile, Part 2

It's story time with Uncie Exile, kids!

 INSPIRATION

Regarding his personality, my inspiration in writing him just comes from how I perceive him to be in the show. He strikes me as being a genuinely enthusiastic, generally happy character who typically openly expresses his thoughts and feelings there. The one time he wasn't, when he thought he had turned into a werewolf ("A Hair Of The Dog That Bit You"), I interpret his behavior there to stress and fear of hurting his teammates. He cares about others. I am just not a fan of this icy, closed-off Exile I tend to see in fan works. He's truly invested in the well-being of others and wears his heart on his sleeve: off my head, in "A Day In The Life", he comforted Colleen when she was upset about Hunter's potentially having a special someone (who wasn't her), he was very enthusiastic about Hunter's plan to free all of the imprisoned dogs in "Hunter's Heroes", in the same episode he apologizes to Blitz when the latter slips and falls on an ice sheet Exile had created to waylay some cano-mutants (and if you're someone who thinks Exile wasn't being sincere in that moment, then why he'd even apologize to Blitz in the first place then??? If he really didn't care, then he either wouldn't have said anything at all or just made a smartmouth comment when he did), he loves giving out hugs. We got thirteen episodes of Exile behaving this way, so I tend to feel like this is what his personality is typically like.

So why do so many fans either make Exile a jerk/or this ultra-serious stoic robot in fan works?

We don't know anything about Exile's past beyond what little we get in the pilot. He isn't a fleshed out character. We don't know what his personal hobbies, interests, dreams, and fears are. Many fandoms would salivate at this, getting to come up with their own takes on a major character's backstory and flesh them out further. Look at all the diverse ideas people spin for character histories in stuff like The Lion King, NCIS, the Transformers franchise, Power Rangers, or My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Countless fandoms. But the Road Rovers fandom... hardly anybody seems even remotely interested in offering up anything for Exile (based on what I've seen of a number of other people on Fanfiction.net and deviantART, I would say that I don't think any of them really want to either). It's the same for the other characters minus Hunter, whose backstory we did (kinda) get. Honestly, I feel like that's partly a side effect of how the show was written. The fandom treats the rest of the Rovers the same way the show does -- all of them play second fiddle to Hunter. They're just not as important as Hunter is (my original stance on Hunter has only hardened over the years), so who cares about explaining who they are and where they come from? The fact that original characters likewise heavily dominate fan works doesn't help matters any. It's sad.

The only two fans who I've personally ever seen demonstrate an actual interest in Exile (that was unrelated to shipping him with their fan characters) were Usami and That One Evil Writer. I borrow some of their ideas for my own story-verse.

As far as relatives for Exile goes, I use the original family members created by Usami for her story Power Of The Pack. It's a pretty solid story about Exile discovering that his family members have been turned into cano-mutants by General Parvo. I thought these new characters were cool, and decided to incorporate them into STARS. Oddly enough, out of all the canon characters, a lot of fans love giving Exile siblings who are either evil or get brainwashed into becoming evil the most. I don't know why that is. But Shurik, Illya, and Star (Zevezda in STARS; "zevezda" simply means star in Russian) are some of the better examples of this trope.

FUTURE PLANS

So what will Exile be getting up to in the STARS-verse? Well, right now my major guiding point would be giving his character more dimensions instead of just being a joke machine like in the show. I can say for certain that I'll have him revisiting his past, including having him meet up with his former owner to let him know what's happened to him and see how he (the sled team owner) is doing, an idea Evil Writer mentioned to me. Looking at fanfics in RR fandom, you wouldn't even know the Rovers have owners in the first place (their current masters and, in Exile's case, the sledder who used to have him back in Siberia). They're treated like they barely exist, and most of the time you never even hear anything about their existence. The Rovers just seem so indifferent towards them. One would think that when Hunter is going to marry Colleen he'd go "Oh wow, you know, I'd like to tell my master the truth about me being a Rover so I could invite him to the ceremony!" Or go and talk to him about marriage or whatever (although I know Bill Clinton is a controversial figure, so maybe that's not one of the better examples I could've used. But the only reason I picked him as my example in the first place is because guess the Rover who's most often shown getting serious in a relationship/or getting married? I'll wait). Pretty weird, considering how the Rovers acted so happy about getting homes in "Let's Hit The Road". Again, I think it's just more evidence to show that most fans are only vaguely interested in the show's concept, a few characters, and nothing else. 

Another fan named Bart Walls actually devised an archenemy for Exile named Boris "Hacker" Sanhusky. I really like the idea of Exile getting to have his own personal foe, so Hacker is a character I've chosen to incorporate into my own 'verse. He'll make his appearance sometime in the near future in a story I'm calling The Island Of Misfit Rovers. Of course, we'll learn more about him then.

I also plan to focus on exploring his relationships with other characters, both canons and original. Yes he will be getting his own love interest, which will be an original character. And... he'll also be getting a power up!

HEADCANONS 

• Early on he is the closest thing Colleen has to a 'girlfriend'.
• His favorite thing to eat are beef pirozhkis. 
• Out of all the Alphas, Exile is the one who keeps on top of the latest technologies. 
• I don't really understand the point of the cartoon's giving him night vision, since dogs can naturally see in the dark and all. Either the writers didn't know that, or did and his night vision was just supposed to be better then most dogs (the show never stated how good it was). I just say his night vision's on par with a feline's. 
• His heat vision relies on the heat within his own body, so if his body temperature drops enough, then he really can't use that particular power.
  
• Usami came up with a couple of interesting theories regarding Exile, including the ones that I'm using about his heat vision and his getting glasses. She pointed out how Exile seemed to have trouble locating a certain image in one of those "find this object" picture books and had to ask Shag for help, who found it right away, plus, how he needed glasses to read a manual. She was fully aware that all those instances were just gags, but suggested the idea of Exile having trouble with his eyesight could be turned into a serious issue. I think Exile would look nice in glasses, and his having to get some is a cool idea. 
• Exile and Blitz are best friends in the vein of Shawn and Gus (Psyche).

If you're someone who wants to approach Exile and Blitz's relationship in a testier manner however, then may I suggest you watch the series One Piece* and take notes from it? Two of the major heroes in it, Zoro and Sanji, often argue, fight, and poke fun at one another. At the same time however, the story demonstrates that when push comes to shove, both has the other's back. They've agreed with each other in certain situations. Zoro and Sanji also think pretty highly of each other's skills and abilities -- although they probably wouldn't outright admit it to the other's face lol. They're a terrific example of frenemies done right. 

ETA: Here's the link to the video showing Zoro and Sanji together; YouTube won't let me post it in video format here.

By comparison, the way that not only the Rovers but lots of heroes from other western media who work together in a group are written, having that one person that barely anybody else on the team likes and picks on, well, I don't think the good guys would actually function as a unit nearly as well as they do in canon. But I'll touch more on this issue when I get to Blitz's analysis. And I specified western media here because I noticed anime like the aforementioned One Piece tends to be much better about handling this kind of thing.

Now, when you're animating for a weekly show, the character designs need to be simple enough in order to be easier to animate and therefore meet deadlines. That's not a bad thing, it's just a thing in the industry. That's what they did with Road Rovers. In my setting, which I freely admit at this point is an AU from the Kids' WB show (that's right Canon Cops, my fics aren't canon because they're NOT supposed to be canon!), I've tweaked Exile's design to be more like a real husky's as well as more detailed, and so make him a little more interesting to look at. I'll try to get a pic of him up soon. His design in the cartoon isn't bad, just simplistic.

 PERSONAL 

Discussing Exile has been a different animal (ho ho ho 😏) when compared to my talking about Esteban before. Road Rovers, like many cartoons back in the day, is a lot more episodic in nature when compared to Elena of Avalor, which has plot elements that are carried on to later episodes. The show's also interesting in that no one character held the spotlight (though the writer seemed to have a strong bias towards a certain one...), and we didn't get much of anything in regards to consistent character development. This means that Exile, as well as the rest of the Rovers, are pretty flat when compared to some of the other characters I'll be talking about in future installments here. Basically, I have had to build his character from the ground up, but that's okay, because the show gave me some good stuff to go off of for him.

ETA: I wonder... why did the people working on the show decided to pick the name Exile for him, and not a more standard Russian/or Russian-esque dog name, like Boris? That'd be a far more interesting question for Tom Ruegger (the creative mind behind Road Rovers), instead of pestering him about when the show's coming back. 

I can answer that last one. It's not ever coming back. Never. It's been gone for two decades. If it ever does return, then it'd probably be as a reboot, and even then I cannot see that happening.

*"One Piece is a really mid anime, OLU!" Okay, but you're missing the forest for the trees. Please listen to the point that I was trying to make about how Sanji and Zoro are written.