Next Era



"I had the chance of having a life companion, but fate has taken her from me. Now she has one life and I another, but I will always watch over her.

Raines W. Xenox, Creation"

Next Era, which can be found at the Next Era Network website, is a universe based on Mega Man X. It started with merely creating a few Original Characters for fun, but got out of hand quick and now has its own webpage with all the stories, a comic in progress and art gallery.

Has a crew of three artists, four and a half writers, one guy we're not sure what he does, a bunch of Swedes and one guy from Thailand. All in all, this is five people.

Has a wiki.

For tropes that apply to the specific stories and characters themselves, please refer to the internal Tropes page. The fact that it's overdosed entirely on purpose is the reason the author of this page did not want to list them here.

The project provides examples of:

 * Adaptation Distillation, bordering on Ultimate Universe
 * All There in the Manual: Lots of information has been revealed only on the wiki. Some information is even revealed only on the tropes page of the wiki. This is mainly due to the two main writers being lazy.
 * Alternate Character Interpretation: For a few of the Mega Man X characters that's being used All over the place. Even some of the original characters have been subjected to it.
 * Alternate Continuity: The entire thing.
 * Art Evolution: It was never bad, but has definitely gotten better along the way. Compare, for instance, this page to this. Or just look at this.
 * Big Bad: Averted. While Sigma is some kind of ever-present threat, he only headed attacks twice in the history of the canon, so most evil plots that happen are, in fact, not his doing!
 * Development Hell: Symphony, supposed to be this great epic story, has been a work in progress for years. Please refer to "writer being lazy".
 * Fan Wank: The entire thing is a Mega Man X Fan Wank with fan characters!
 * Growing the Beard: Project-wise, it was when the current website was launched. Storywise, it largely happened with the arc that started with Type and ended with Friend (arguments could be made for Self being the end of that arc, but there's a non-existant story that should take place between those two) - before that, stories had (with one exception that's not canon anymore) been largely self-contained.
 * Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All story titles consist of a single word.
 * Omake: "Interview with an Indecisive Doodler", as well as all the fillers. Here. Not to mention the Next Era version of 12 days of Christmas that ran in December 2008.
 * Original Character: 30+ and counting.
 * Our Vampires Are Different
 * Retcon: A few stories have been wiped out from continuity entirely. Most of them were actually stories set in a possible future, but introducing new characters and plot points in the "present" made it essentially impossible for them to happen.
 * Rule of Cool: The universe is fueled by it.
 * Shout Out: Since the entire crew working on the project are insufferable geeks, this happens a lot. Two of the stories were essentially written to be nothing but shout outs to the classic Mega Man series.