But I still somehow wanted to maintain my streak of never missing an update even while AKOTAS was on sabbatical, somehow. When the idea of AKOTAS-2 came to me it engaged my enthusiasm the way your body craves certain food when it's in need of an element of that food.

Then it got to be the end of March 2009, and I began to feel that I was going very, very stale with AKOTAS and needed the sabbatical earlier than update 2000 in November - say, AKOTAS's fifth anniversary May 21. This was possibly, as has happened before, attributable to last-half-of-the-semester crunch. In that case, it would most likely clear up with the end of the semester two weeks before the anniversary, and the issue could be reassessed then. I didn't want to go on sabbatical before update 2000, because first I wanted to resolve Lancelot's Wild Man story and space Gareth's origin story, and Lancelot - gone for "two years" according to the sources - wouldn't be back to Camelot from Carbonek until late 2009 at the earliest. (Hm. I could always resolve Gareth's story after the sabbatical, in the fairy tale arc ...) But I'd do it at the anniversary instead of waiting, if I still thought AKOTAS needed it then. So here we are.

KAITAS was the Star Trek/Doctor Who fanfiction crossovers I created 1996-2004 with the franchises' proper nouns globally replaced by proper nouns from the King Arthur legends. Arthur for Kirk, Excalibur for Enterprise, Lancelot for Spock, Guenevere for McCoy, Merlin for the Doctor, Morgan or Nimue for the Doctor's girl companions, etc.; the cast pictures above probably illustrate the concept pretty clearly. KAITAS was the inspiration for the space arc in normal AKOTAS. And both Star Trek and Doctor Who have experienced revivals since I retired KAITAS at the inception of AKOTAS. Other screen properties were also brought into those fanfiction stories and were subsequently adopted into the expanded KAITAS universe as other legends and folklore; Hercules for Superman, Robin Hood for Babylon 5, Horus for Luke Skywalker, etc. Those other matchups - and/or revised or new ones - may appear in AKOTAS-2 as well.

In a way KAITAS was, and AKOTAS-2 is, crossover fanfiction of imaginary screen sources which are funhouse-mirror reflections of real screen sources. Maybe that's hard to follow, and not any more accessible to any given reader than normal fanfiction would be. (Accessibility was one of the reasons I decided to start AKOTAS. (Then I invented the time-jumping...)) Try it this way: I'm transforming tv heroes I love into public domain heroes I love, to satirize both.

But then, the 21st century revivals of both the major screenworks that are AKOTAS-2 sources involved war across space and time, and changes to history: if Arthur's beardless and/or in a black uniform shirt and if Merlin is whining about being the last of the Avalonian sorcerers after the Magic War with the Dragons (as in the very first AKOTAS-2 cartoon), then it's new history.

Again, the cast pictures above may help make this clear. Below is a character timeline chart that may be of assistance to those with familiarity with the major events of the characters' screen histories.

But AKOTAS-2 doesn't have an expectation of line drawings. Being based on KAITAS, it arguably rather has the expectation of triangles. Also, if I give up line drawing for the time I give up regular AKOTAS, when the hiatus is over I'll be just as eager to get back to line drawing as to AKOTAS. So, sorry. Deal.