Alright, I know I'm rather late on this one (blame it on Real Life, as well as the since of shock which I've been feeling ever since), but I still need to get it out of my own system...
At the beginning of this month (February 2015), the highly talented and beloved animator Monty Oum suddenly and sadly passed away. He was only 33 years old.
He first burst onto the Internet scene nearly a decade ago with his fan videos in which he pitted different video game characters against each other, such as Haloid (featuring a Spartan like the Master Chief from Halo and Samus Aran from Metroid fighting each other) and Dead Fantasy (featuring various characters from Dead or Alive and Final Fantasy fighting each other). More recently, he had contributed to some of the fight scenes in the machinima series Red vs. Blue, and also created and contributed to the original animated series RWBY (where he also provided the voice of the character Lie Ren).
(Obviously, he was a master at choreographing fight scenes.)
Alright, that obviously sounds too much like your run-of-the-mill obituary, but please allow me, Seth Shirer, a.k.a. "StellarStylus" to say something of my own.
To the spirit of the late and great Monty Oum, as well as all of his family, friends, co-workers and all other forms of loved ones...
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry for your loss of such a great person who was so integral to your lives... but that's not all I feel sorry for.
I'm sorry in that I wasn't able to get the chance to contact him and tell him how much I admired him and his work, and I'm sorry that I didn't take the time to do it. Just the sheer creative talent which he possessed blew me away.
This isn't actually the first time where I just barely missed the chance to tell a great and talented person how much I loved and admired his or her work. True, in those few other instances where it did happen and I just barely got to heap some praise onto a storyteller, it was because the person in question was an older person who was suffering from the kind of health problems which typically come with old age. But just like everyone else, I certainly didn't expect Monty to suddenly pass away at the still-relatively-young age of 33 because of some allergic reaction which put him into a coma.
From his fan videos like Haloid and Dead Fantasy to the original series RWBY (the last of which is a favorite of yours truly), he never ceased to amaze me. I especially like RWBY for its creative world and how all of the characters are pastiches of and homages to real-world characters from history and legend alike. Oh, and the fight scenes, of course.
Like so many other people, I had also donated a nice chunk of change to the fundraiser which would have gone into paying his medical bills... but since that never happened, then let his family and kin make good use of the money for their own support in life.
After his sudden passing, his friends over at Rooster Teeth suggested that the best way to honor his memory would be to be creative and create something. I would be more than happy to fulfill such a simple request; not that I'm not already a creative person working on my own thing, and not that he hasn't already been an inspiration, but I would be more than happy to go about it with his wonderful example in mind.
...And that's just about all which I want to say for now.
Monty Oum: An Inspiration for All.
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