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RadenWA β The WILD Bunch
Published: 2011-05-22 16:13:16 +0000 UTC; Views: 7991; Favourites: 83; Downloads: 241
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Description
Heaven knows what I'm supposed to be working on instead of this very random homage to the serie which deserves as much popularity as FF.WILD ARMS. No other serie can pack the badass Wild Western theme as epicly as this colossal series.
You know how much I loathed the installments after WA3, but I decided to do some research about them. Well, I found they still got interesting stories, and the more I looked at the characters, the more I start falling for them. Lucky for Dean, I've just recently found the awesomeness of that slightly-higher-heeled, square-toed harness-cowboy boots, so I gave a special exposure of his boots.
I'm still inclined to draw Jude and Dean looking like retards, though.
And you know it's my specialty to make badass stuffs look cute. So enjoy a pile of these playful lil' cowboy drifters and sorry I don't have enough life to draw their weapons.
Characters: Rudy Roughnight, Ashley Winchester, Jet Enduro, Jude Maverick and Dean Stark are from Wild ARMs, who belongs to their respective and respectable designers.
Art and obsession belongs to me, *RadenWA
Sorry for not including Shayenne from WA Twilight Venom, Maxi from WA Flower Thieves and Levin from WA Crossfire. But all three of them deserve a mention for their awesomeness, especially the middle one.
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Comments: 121
You know what would be more awesome? WILD ARMS LUCKY NUMBER 7
I will be veeery willing to make it happen if I could
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Hellz yeah. Couldn't have put it better myself!
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My favorite series of all time. <3
I've yet to play 5 or ACF though. Lack of monies makes it hard. I absolutely adore everything about this series.
WA4 was a pretty huge change but I liked it overall. The only thing that really bothered me was that EVERY SINGLE CONVERSATION was always about "children vs adults" in one way or another. How stupid adults are or how bratty children are or some crap like that. Dialog aside the story was still decent and the world was beautiful in spite of it's dreary atmosphere.
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I haven't played anything over 2 because I don't have PS2 :<
Well JRPG is good because of their message, but sometimes they do overemphasize it.
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I'd say it's definitely worth playing the others. WA3 pretty much takes everything WA2 did and improves on it gameplay-wise. Then they changed everything in WA4. It's a game for gameplay more than story for sure.
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wild arms 3 is my favorite all around but damn i do like the hex system. i think the voice acting in the later games is pretty meh and was a detraction save for kartikeya's infectious laugh and sass XD
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I loved the HEX system as well. I haven't played 5 or finished XF yet but I really love the changes in the gameplay from 3 to 4. I definitely agree that WA3 is the best overall though (sans potentially WA5, obviously)
WA4 had all kinds of neat concepts but they really screwed up with the dialog. When literally every conversation in the game is repeating the same "children vs adults" crap you've done something horribly, horribly wrong.
And yet I cannot hate it because everything else from the gameplay to puzzles to world are amazing.
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I agree with you, the story in Wild Arms 4 needed to calm down with that age group thing. Every game had its flaws, but I think the strengths of each game were so excellent they well exceeded the shortcomings. I could deal with the iffy controls in 3 because the ENVIRONMENTS WERE SO GORGEOUS AHHH I just loved that game's cel shading and stylefilters and its music holy shit. Also the millennium puzzles (save for the satanic puzzle #19) were so awesome i spent days just flying around on Lombardia just to solve them XD I also kinda liked the lack of MP; on one hand it was awesome never running out of that shit, but on the other hand it made Devastate too broken in Gallows' hands since he could spam it indefinitely once he reached level 20 and deal more damage than Clive on the physical side
Devastate is powerful as hell in Cecilia's hands but at least she can run out of MP and have to hit things with her staff 12 times to be able to cast it again, that balances it out.
We don't talk about Raquel with Intrude. I'm glad they nerfed it to take 75 FP in Wild Arms 5 so it couldn't be spammed endlessly.
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I've only played 3 and 4 once so I haven't experimented with them yet or done all the optional bosses and whatnot. I remember Valiant kicking all kinds of ass though. Valiant spam pretty much obliterated the entire game. lol
I definitely like the fact that the WA games took out MP. It was pretty unnecessary in WA1 to even have it considering you could destroy anything before you ran out.
I'll always consider WA1 the worst in the series. Not because it was necessarily a bad game but because it was merely a good foundation for the rest of the series. Every time someone plays WA1 I implore them to at least play one other game in the series. WA1 has turned more people away from the franchise than I care to count.
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Yeah I get what you're talking about, I like what Alter Code F did to it though. The expanded storyline/playable characters and superior translation (though Agetec seems to have an issue with homophones, I don't think I've seen even one correct usage of its/it's lol) really makes me almost uninterested in the original, I might buy it just to have a complete set of the games once 2 shows up (which I ordered a few days ago). Too bad my Wild Arms 5 came from a gamestop and they stripped it of the holographic box and artbook. fuck gamestop :I
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I still need to get ACF myself. I keep forgetting to add it to games I haven't played. I really want to. I suspect it will make me dislike WA1 much less overall.
When I get WA5 I'll be sure to get it online so I can hopefully get a proper case. I don't make a big fuss over the cases normally but this is Wild Arms we're talkin' about here. I should own legit copies of all of them. I gotta get a hard copy of WA1 still. I just got it off PSN a few years ago.
Wild Arms forever. One of my favorite game series' of all time. Hoo-ah!
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Oh I was playing through ACF and I'm very confused because Berserk calls Alhazad a "her" and I'm like "umwat". It was probably a translation error but like, WHAT IF BERSERK KNOWS SOMETHING WE DON'T?
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If I remember right (and I might not) I think that same translation may be in the original so I don't know. It could just be that Alhazad isn't supposed to be referred to by any particular gender and they switch off between him and her due to the ambiguity of Alhazad's gender. They do the same sort of thing in Final Fantasy IX with Quina.
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Given Alhazad's form, who knows. Maybe Alhazad is actually female and Berserk watches her shower. Oh god, why does my mind do things like that.
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Ha, you said it. Not me.
I've heard all of the Quarter Knights have their own themes in ACF. I've been avoiding them on Youtube so I can hear them in-game when I get it.
Did you hear that a new WA may be in the works? I'm so hyped and I've been looking out for any news on it.
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OH MY GOD YES it's actually what got me back into the series (I was a rabid fantard of 4/5 in my early adolescence and for that I am ashamed)
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Fantard, eh? Yeah, that describes me to a T when it comes to the WA series. xD
I heard 5 is basically a total improvement over everything in 4. I want it soooo bad.
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Oh I just discovered the attack on titan theme is clearly a vocal remix of wild arms 2's standard battle theme. when i play them over each other, i shit brix
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I haven't seen Attack On Titan yet so I hadn't heard it until I just Youtube'd it but holy crap it really does sound like it. LOL
You know there was going to be a fan-made prequel to WA2 that looked pretty amazing. It was gonna take place during Anastasia's time period. I don't know what happened to it but I've seen nothing of it for years. Such a shame.
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That sounds like it would have been really cool, except I'm leery of fanon on the whole since it's so subjective. What I'd really like to see is a proper remake of Wild Arms 2 with a proper translation and no watering down any of the content. It's 2014, we can handle the idea of fictional characters being gay or getting busy now.
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Yeah, fanon can be really hit and miss but sometimes you gotta take what you can get. Wild Arms artwork is scarce as hell so I was glad to run into this particular one that we're commenting on.
I would absolutely adore a WA2 remake. It was my first WA game way back when it was new and until the last four or five years I had never played any other WA game. You could say it's what got me into RPGs in the first place and remains one of my favorite RPGs of all time.
I would also argue that it needs more animated cutscenes. We got a whole whopping [i]one[/i] the entire freakin' game besides the openings.
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I can agree with that last point, especially since the playstation wasn't exactly graphically proficient, the FMV cutscenes allow for much more appealing visuals than sprites and blocky models XD (though I have to admit the environments particularly the towns look REALLY NICE even by today's standards)
Wild Arms 5 broke a cardinal rule of the series: no anime intro which plays every time you load the game. I hate that :C the only intro plays just once and it uses the character models. /never skips the intros since they are always so spectacular
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They really did a good job with the graphics in WA2. Unlike a lot of PS1 games that have actively rendered backgrounds none of it looked muddy or blocky. The textures were amazing even when they were simple.
I had heard about WA5 not using an animated opening and I'm sad that this happened but at least the song itself is absolutely amazing. If I remember right, Michiko Naruke stopped composing as of WA5 so that song really makes me look forward to the soundtrack in it. Plus if it's the same person who did XF's soundtrack it will probably be amazing anyway.
I never skip the openings either. Resistance Line is my favorite song and opening besides the WA5 intro song.
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Wild Arms 5's soundtrack, even without Michiko, is still fantastic in a different way though, the gameplay mechanics are perfectly balanced so nothing accessible is overpowered, and the AI is so fucking brilliant it's scary ;~; Probably the smartest AI I've ever dealt with in an RPG.
basically the game's difficulty isn't "fake" difficulty, it's everything which SHOULD be challenging. If you can outwit the game it will never be too troublesome. Well, except for Kartikeya, the second fight with him is just...well, Seymour Flux would bite his controller in rage and curse up a storm at it. ONE HIT KO ATTACK IN A SOLO FIGHT? GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE
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One hit kills in solo fights are dumb indeed. Scapegoat would take care of that problem though.
As unbalanced as it was I feel that WA4 had a weird sense of balance also because all it took was one wrong step to turn a battle against you and vice versa. I've heard WA5 is way more balanced though and I welcome it.
Seymour Flux was probably one of the cheapest bosses I've ever fought for sure. I only played that far into FFX once though so maybe I'll do better when and if I ever replay it.
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BOOMERANG IS SUCH A CHEAP-ASS BOSS THO
I only got away with using just one continue because I got super lucky with Cecilia cockblocking all of Luceid's attacks for like...4 consecutive turns.
Also I ran into Alter Code F's map disappearing glitch, it made me laugh to be quite honest. The ice continent just...poofed, had to go into a dungeon to refresh the map and get back to town XD
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I dunno how hard he is in ACF but in the original Boomerang was manageable if you managed to use Quick on Cecilia enough to make her faster than both of them. I hear ACF is a lot harder than the original though.
I didn't know there was a map disappearing glitch. At least you were able to fix it. I remember having to reload a save from like thirty minutes back once because the map disappeared in Deadly Premonition as I was driving around. It just disappeared and when I tried to turn around the rest had gone as well. xD
I've been playing Wild Arms XF all week. I actually restarted since it's been awhile since I last played. I'm almost caught up and I've found that the game isn't nearly as restrictive as I originally thought and I'm having a lot of fun managing all the classes. I can't wait to finally start getting farther again. They've started throwing some massively huge plot points at me but I can't make heads or tails of them yet.
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Right now, my brain is hurting over "Anything Crimson", listed as Ashley's favorite hero in the manual of Wild Arms 2. I know this is probably a casualty of the translation but seriously what the hell would that even mean originally is there some type of inside joke only Japanese players would get which I'm missing? Or does Ashley just like any hero who has a crimson color scheme? I'M SO CONFUSED HALP
The game also seems contextually confused - I'm not sure if all of it is the translation's fault either. Why are there tiles with Zodiac symbols? How does that make any sense in context? Filgaia is an exoplanet which would have a DIFFERENT VANTAGE POINT IN THE GALAXY from us; I really doubt they'd see similar constellations we do to base astrological symbols on. Also the term Kuiper Belt irks me because that is SPECIFICALLY the ice comet belt in OUR SOLAR SYSTEM. Yet Word of God has confirmed that Filgaia is the same planet in each game just alternate timelines, and is definitely extrasolar since it coexists with Earth (it also seems to be quite a few light years away, since transit takes a really long time, if the ships are traveling close to the speed of light it's probably about 1,000 light years away). Also there's a character who says "in French, that would be-" HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT FRANCE IS, YOU'RE AN ALIEN STOP THAT. It's made better by the fact that the canon of this game is very clear that the humans are endemic to Filgaia in this continuity. The only explanation I can think of is that these cultural things popped up on Filgaia INSTEAD OF Earth in this timeline, and the zodiac symbols are a massive fucking coincidence?
Don't get me wrong I love the game overall, it's just the contradictory storyline/context which never ceases to confuse and irritate me. I know some things were a failure of the translation (such as the use of "how/where on earth" figures of speech, an offense no other Wild Arms game is guilty of for obvious reasons), but...
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I honestly didn't know that it was confirmed to be in the same universe. I've never seen anything in the games that even remotely suggests it.
I don't know why it says "Anything Crimson". Could be cut dialog from the game or something.
WA2 definitely has a huuuuuge problem with translation and dialog. It seems to share that with WA4 somewhat but the themes behind it are amazing nonetheless.
You've actually put far more thought into the game than I ever did. xD
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It's confirmed in the one you haven't played, 5, by the superbosses, which come from alternate timelines and drop golden angel items which can be traded for cameo-outfits. This was of course after Media Vision (allegedly, I've never seen it actually sourced) confirmed the same world, alternate universes thing in response to fanmail.
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I'm getting WA5 as soon as possible. I need to know all teh things about the series! ;-;
I'm tired of claiming to be one of the biggest fans in the series but haven't played all of them. I must remedy this.
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I know I feel that pain.
Me I have too much fun brewing headcanons XD
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I have my own sorta headcanons about the WA games as far as the timeline goes so I have fun with it as well. Like how WA3 could very easily be the same Filgaia from WA1 (of course, assuming that they aren't all on the same world anyway) and the reason there are discrepancies is that so much time has passed that information has changed.
Plus there's the books about Anastasia and Marival in WA3 which suggest it's either a part of WA3's world history that turned into fable or the world of WA2 is actually an alternate Filgaia that's leaked over to the WA1/3 Filgaia enough to have stories about it.
Then I start going into many-worlds and string theories and it all devolves into madness. xD
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My headcanons are mostly biology, which explain some of the video game logic. Going to just kinda copypasta this.
Filgaian people are denser than water, which is why pools are such a widespread hazard, thereβs no tubs in anyoneβs house, and no one is ever seen swimming, just riding on boats. This is an adaptation to the drier overall climate of Filgaia, where less fresh water is available.
Their body compositionβs higher percentage of βheavyβ materials contributes to their overall toughness, which is why gunshots, which are LETHAL to Earth people, hardly phase them, and they can walk away unharmed from bomb blasts strong enough to rip compromised rocks and wooden crates to shreds. Their extreme toughness is the reason why they had to engineer the ridiculously powerful ARMs in the first place, since regular firearms fail. Muscle tissue is the toughest and densest of all, and standard bullets will bounce right off of a particularly fit individual.
This headcanon only applies to the continuities of 2,4, and 5, where the humans are actually alien lifeforms and not colonists from Earth.
Because of the mutations accomplished in the White Orphanage, I also have a 4th Detonator-specific headcanon that the humans in that specific continuity are descended from arthropodal rather than reptilian ancestors. If a little genetic tweaking can turn them into...those...who knows how their DNA actually differs from ours?
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A lot of that could probably just be explained away as "video game logic" I definitely prefer your explanations. <3
Although there's a possibility that humans could be descendant from the Metal Demons on some level as well which would equally give them the constitution to live in such harsh environments. If you think about it, they are artificial beings on some level anyway. Especially Harken. She was originally human but was turned into a demon. Who's to say they couldn't have reproduced after such changes? There's also nothing saying they couldn't reproduce with humans at all.
All that is pretty out there though so headcanon is where it's gonna stay, methinks.
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The Metal Demons only exist in the original game and Alter Code F's continuity though so that would only ever be plausible there, haha.
The canon was very clear that Metal Demons' organs work the same way as humans and Elw, which I think implies they are all born the same way, barring the transmutation-assimilation option for Metal Demons. I wonder if it would be possible for Metal Demons and humans to breed - I would think their DNA structure wasn't altered during transmutation either, and real-world lab studies have shown that organic creatures can in fact duplicate and use synthetic DNA. I think what would most likely happen though is fully human offspring, since the DNA would most likely still code for a human being. They were only physically modified, but they were born human, so...
I kinda hope this is the case because Zed/Aura babies? Yaassssss
Another fun subject to ponder is genetics of fantasy hair colors. Since Arnaud and Raquel's baby had hair color which was intermediary between the parent's, it can be inferred that brunette and Raquel's pinkish-white have impartial dominance, like how straight + curly hair produces wavy hair. I really wonder about blue hair, particularly in the continuity of 2 - it's really common there, so I suspect it's a dominant trait. The reddish-brown may be recessive and Ashley was a carrier, so one child inherited the dominant blue, and the other two recessive reddish-brown alleles.
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That's not entirely true. I don't remember where but some of the books in WA3 suggest the Metal Demons existed there but I don't think they explicitly said. Plus the existence of Ziekfried.
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yeah i forgot about that. the continuities of 1 and 3 do seem connected - maybe they are closer AUs than the other games?
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Yeah, like I said, there's enough evidence in WA3 to consider it directly connected to WA1 in a lot of ways. So much time has obviously passed that some information could have been obscured. You could take it as being references but I think it's more likely to be very far into the future in the world of WA1.
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That is indeed plausible. It's not clear how long ago the humans arrived on Filgaia.
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It's sort of a retcon but I think that ship in WA3 could very well be how humans got to Filgaia. I can't remember if they confirm or deny that outright or not though.
Plus in WAXF they further proved that there are multiple dimensions, possibly other Filgaias, that could explain how some things in the games seem mixed together but not quite from the same universe.
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Yeah apparently "Word of God" is contradictory in that aspect - they once said the Filgaias are different, then said it's the same planet but different timelines/dimensions. I think the many-worlds interpretation explains both of those statements though.
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Many-worlds theory explains everything.
One of the reasons I love the WA series so much is that they play with stuff like that, and the origins of life, and the potential paths of lifeforms. Some of it can get lost in the dialog but the series does it in a way that few others can replicate.
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Yeah. I've been exploiting the Glaive le Gable mythos to make mud jokes in a parody fic. Where everyone from 2 is made of mud. It's hilarious.
I also think it's really nifty how there's alchemy-based nanotechnology like HOW COOL IS THAT
I want to make androids with magic :C
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I think I've heard something like that before about humans' origins lying in mud. Not in WA specifically but in general.
I think the thing that interests me most is the demon realms. We always fight what comes out of it but don't actually see the inside. The closest we get is probably The Abyss.
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The demon worlds are interesting too, I really wonder about the identity of some common monsters on the field. The Largon (cobra/turtle) creatures for example look like naturally occurring animals to me, I mean they are actually pretty believable creatures. But then there's the spiritual ones, where do they come from? And are they part of the ecosystem, or form a separate one of their own? I'm intrigued!
I'd like to try working out Filgaian ecosystem maps, it might be interesting.
Another thing I wonder about is in the continuuities where the humans did not come from Earth, if the domesticated animals were derived from monsters. Like, were cats domesticated Elbuckies? I've seen Barghest monsters actually used as police dogs in 2, which I think gives a lot of plausibility to the idea that the dogs in their world were bred from them.
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An ecosystem map would be very interesting indeed. Especially with creatures like Balloons. They've been a common enemy in the WA universe for a long time. There was also that one girl in the Town of Meria who mentioned being curious about a particular Balloon that wanders near the town but never attacks it. It shows one of two things: Balloons typically only attack in groups or they aren't entirely feral creatures.
Wasn't it said in one of the games that Balloons are actually spirits of the dead, or am I thinking of something else? It's been awhile since I've read all the books in WA2 and 3 so it could be there, if I'm not mistaken about the whole thing.
It has been proven that some can be domesticated, for sure. There's also the Gobs. In some games they are just monsters but in WA3 and 4 they not only talk but have (very basic) societies as well. Perhaps an evolution of the species?
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I just thought of something specific to the continuity of 2. You ever notice that gaudy hair colors (especially blue) are a lot more common in men than women? The only female character I recall having blue hair, barring Kanon since she's shown in flashbacks with brown hair so it's probably not natural, was Anastasia, but there's a CRAPLOAD of men with blue hair. And Brad's multicolored hair is most likely natural because, I mean, where would he find the time to bleach/stylize it, especially when he just broke out of prison? I think he's probably piebald.
What if at some point in time their predecessors were sexually dimorphic like many birds, with males having flashy hair colors and females being dull-colored, but this was lost over time as society progressed and people became worth a lot more than their hair coloration? Thus it's no longer absolute, there's guys with dull hair and very rarely women with flashy hair colors, but a general trend still exists.
OR WHAT IF THEY ARE DESCENDED FROM AVIAN ANCESTORS AND THEIR HAIR IS ACTUALLY FEATHERS? Would explain how it always stays so perfectly stylized all the time. They're alien people, you never know...
Okay the last part was silly but the rest of this headcanon I'm serious about.
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It's an interesting thought indeed. I think Brad's hair has the white in it because he's kinda old though. He's also lived a stressful life as a soldier and spending a few years in prison. Stress is known to cause grey hair.
I have noticed that there are a lot of blue-haired people in the series, not just 2. Particularly the protagonists. I think Jude and Virginia are the only protagonists that don't have blue hair.
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