Rex Duodecim Angelus turns five years old!

The [S] Rex Duodecim Angelus flash is almost ready to go to kindergarten. Yep, one of the coolest fan projects ever made is now five years old.

It’s astonishing to me, to this day, that this flash even exists. Worked on by, what, a hundred artists? A project whose original creator and organizers basically vanished? A more complex animation than anything in the actual series it’s based on? That it exists is phenomenal. That it’s actually well-made is nothing short of a miracle.

I worked a lot on this project when I was like, sixteen (I was one of the original organizers who basically vanished), helping compile a forum thread’s worth of random illustrations and trying to fit it all together. In that time I also was active on a small IRC channel (wow those were the days) with people who worked on the project, and we hashed out a lot of what would become the final project.

I ended up making a ton of storyboards for the various segments of the animation, some of them made specifically to utilize already-made assets and some based on my own ideas. Most of these did not at all make it into the final product, though! My overall contribution to the finished product was comparably minimal to the countless hours spent by the artists who helped make this happen.

But I’m still gonna talk about it anyway! Because it was really important to my life for a couple months.

My work remains in two areas of the total 8-minute video:

• The “generic battle” sections from 1:00 to 1:20 and 2:40 to 3:00 is comprised about half of material that I had storyboarded, though because of how collaborative the early stuff was, I can’t remember exactly what.
• The Eridan/Feferi segment, and the next “generic battle” section, from 4:00 to 4:45, is almost entirely based on the storyboards I made. The only thing that I didn’t come up with in this that I can recall is the very end, where Karkat and Terezi team up and slice some dudes. Very specifically, the moment where Eridan aims his scope and then his scope is on Sollux at first was 100% the product of my dumb teenage mind, because I really thought that that would be subtle character development. Clearly, it wasn’t, but I still like it.

Also, two of my favorite in-jokes made it into the actual [S] Rex Duodecim Angelus flash itself. First, was about 3:00 when Equius launches his most powerful bow and then breaks it. That was joke art someone had made, but I had placed it into storyboard as if it were real, and it got through somehow. Second was in the “generic battle” section where Terezi is stabbing/riding on one of the chess piece horse monsters.

Actually–and my memory may be flawed here, but if I wasn’t the one who came up with it, I at least was the biggest advocate for doing it–the entire chess piece horse monster thing was added because of my dumb memery. Nothing in canon had ever pointed to them, and I think a lot of project members were iffy on it because of the fact it could be invalidated in that way, but I was huge into the idea of us showing off fanon chess piece knights, rooks, bishops, etc. as cool new enemies to fight. And somehow, it happened.

Literally nobody but me cares about what portions of Rex Duodecim Angelus I directly contributed to, but this flash is the first major creative project I’ve ever been involved in that succeeded. And seeing as it has several million views on Youtube over these five years, it is by far the most popular thing I’ve ever been involved with. Even if my contributions weren’t as signficant as most, I am still infinitely glad to have been a part of it.

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