Hello, all. I am gutza1, someone who has been in touch with one of the GoF's members, The Mr E, on Reddit for more than a year while serving as the "science advisor" for his ongoing fanfic, The War Before Time. I figured that, as he has many plans for the series, it might be good to establish a presence here so I can support him if needed. I also have a "fanfic" of my own cooking up that I'll be sharing relatively soon.
As for my background, I am 21 years old and currently an undergraduate student in my senior year studying materials science and engineering. Dare I say it, my childhood passion was not dinosaurs but space travel, as I grew up within driving distance of NASA's Kennedy Space Center and the possibility of exploring the cosmos captured my heart. I even wanted to study aerospace engineering in college, but eventually decided against it as I wanted a degree that was more broadly applicable.
My relationship with The Land Before Time is complicated to say the least. Even though I wasn't usually much of a dinosaur person as a kid, I watched a few of the sequels and fell in love with the characters and the strange, alien world they inhabited. Of course, my usual proclivities manifested as I would often daydream about the dinosaurs developing a technological civilization and scientific knowledge (little did I know that scientists had seriously considered this possibility - look up the "dinosauroid" or the Silurian Hypothesis to learn more). Thus, my childhood memories of LBT are fundamentally tied to exploration and scientific inquiry - something that I realized is a very different interpretation than many others here. When I saw VII and witnessed aliens make their presence in LBT, I was elated, as this was exactly something my space and science-obsessed child self had wanted all along. However, as time went on, I realized that the producers had a fundamentally different vision for the franchise than I wanted, and the TV show finally made me give up on it and move to other pastures.
I began to rediscover this part of my childhood after stumbling upon, of all things, a Hearts of Iron IV mod called "Equestria at War" that recast the world of My Little Pony as a fantasy dieselpunk setting. Playing it made me remember how I used to do something vaguely similar to the LBT world, and the memories started flooding back, helped in part by Jenny Nicholson's video. I also began to seriously do research into dinosaurs after having discovered the Silurian Hypothesis, and fell in love with the radical vision of the Mesozoic world put forth by modern science and works such as All Yesterdays. However, I didn't act much on it until I stumbled upon a drawing of Dagara, one of War Before Time's OCs, that The Mr E had posted on the r/dinosaurs subreddit. I nitpicked it a bit on its accuracy, but The Mr E instead asked me to give him feedback on Mentors of Yesteryear, WBT's prequel. I started reading and got hooked, and now I have remained in conversation with him for over a year. I can't say much about his future plans, but I think WBT has a bright future ahead of it.
In addition to my professed love of space travel, I am also an aspiring science fiction writer who has currently developed two settings: a hard sci-fi space opera, and an elaboration on my "civilized dinosaurs" ideas called Paravian, which is explores a species of dromaeosaur called Paravisapiens evolving sapience in the end-Cretaceous and developing industrial civilizations. Think of it as Mesozoic dieselpunk. I hope to develop it into an animated series at some point in the future.
As for my other interests, I have to admit that my first "fandom" experience was with Homestuck, which I discovered at 13. Despite its bad reputation it did make me interested in the power of 2D animation to tell more "adult" stories than is usually associated with the style. Currently, I am a major fan of BioWare RPGs such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age, as well as grand strategy games made by Paradox Interactive. I am currently the team leader on The Final Front, which is the space race patch of The New Order: Last Days of Europe: a narrative-driven alternate-history Cold War mod set in a dystopian timeline where the Axis powers won WW2 and the US is engaged in a three-way Cold War with them. I can talk more about my work on TNO somewhere else.
In the past few months, I have fallen in love with Outer Wilds, a space exploration adventure game set in a miniature solar system where you play as an astronaut stuck in an endless time loop who must solve the mystery of an ancient precursor civilization called the Nomai. This game has a unique style that blends the aesthetic of camping with physics-based gameplay and space travel. It was exactly the kind of experience I was desperately looking for when I watched LBT as a kid, and I regret that there was nothing like it when I was young. The LBT "fanfic" I mentioned I am working on previously is related to it - you'll see more in the future.
Anyway, feel free to ask me questions. I probably will be more of a lurker than anything, but I'm happy to connect with fellow fans of something that meant a lot to me as a kid.
