First of all, introduce yourself to everyone! How did you first discover the MOTHER series, and what about it resonates with you?

Thank you for having me! I’m AYBT, an illustrator and shop owner based in New York. I first interacted with the MOTHER series while growing up with my brother; he had bought a copy of Earthbound when it first released in the States. He started playing it again around when I was first starting to understand how to read, and I really took to the game, begging him to play it every day after school.

Since you are first and foremost an artist yourself, what’s helped influence your creative style over the years? You have a very distinguished style when compared to the contemporary “MOTHER” look!

Besides MOTHER, game series such as Puyo Puyo and Disgaea were some of my biggest style influences. My two roommates (@scaerie and @crayola_hell on Twitter) have been with me through thick and thin, and we bounce ideas off of each other all the time. I thank them for all of the growth I’ve been able to achieve as an artist living and learning with them. I greatly respect other artists with shops, like OMOCAT and Kinwamonster, and I look to them for guidance.

You’ve previously been involved with SIDELINE☆STARS and A Tie That Binds, two YuGi-Oh! zines. How did those opportunities come about, and how did it help lead you into organizing Your Name, Please?

SIDELINE☆STARS was a project that I applied to as a contributor, but ended up becoming a mod. Previously, I had joined another zine that sort of fell apart due to poor management and communication. I really wanted to get into the zine scene for YGO, but I felt discouraged after that other project. The two moderators on SIDELINE☆STARS invited me from my application to help them moderate, both of them being first time moderators themselves, and we had a blast figuring it all out together with our contributors. With only three moderators, while I am listed as a Finance/Graphic mod, all three of us helped each other in every area of the project. I feel like I gained valuable experience for every position there. Overall, it was an incredible time!

For A Tie That Binds, I was invited to be a moderator by the mod team, as I was already a contributor in their other zine, Project Sakura. ATTB was a bigger zine, but it was a digital-only release. This zine taught me a lot about marketing and finding a style for your project to sell it; digital zines can be hard to get off the ground as most people only want to purchase things they can hold in their hand. I had to really think about what exactly I need to focus on and how I can set the zine apart from the other 4 YGO zines that were running at the same time.

Both zines taught me a lot about the reality of how hard it can be to manage a large project, how much time it takes, and how important it is to communicate and make sure everyone is on the same page. The moderator teams on both zines I helped moderate had their ups and downs; SIDELINE☆STARS only had two other moderators, so if I didn’t pull my weight and then some we’d all drown. On the other hand, ATTB had a large moderator team of six, all in different time zones; we needed to make sure we knew what each other was doing, as otherwise we’d step on each other’s feet.

The MOTHER fandom by extension perhaps has one of the earliest histories with online fandom zines. There was the EarthBound Anthology in 2007 (with several smaller art-centric petitions preceding it), and PK Zine in 2013. Did you contribute to any of these, by chance? Did they help inspire Your Name, Please in any way?

I was too young of an artist to participate in either of them, but I knew about both before starting the project. I’m also familiar with Mother’s Cookbook, as well as the 2018 MOTHER zines – Bein’ Friends, Bein’ Foes, and Eagleland Travelogue; however, I caught all three of them late.

I would not say they inspired me to start the project; many things inspired me to start a zine, but it was never because “I want to make a zine like x.” That said, I do think of the other zines when considering Your Name, Please’s graphics. All of the previous zines listed had their own unique flavor to them, and I hope for Your Name, Please to be able to stand strong on its own. I think of PK Zine a lot, since many of the contributors on that project inspired me to draw when I was younger, so I hope that contributors and appreciators alike can look back on Your Name, Please in a similar fashion!

There are several members on the team, including: Masquerade, RedTed, Polly and Yurei. How did you all meet on this project and decide what roles to designate to each other?

Masquerade, RedTed, and Polly are three of my close friends. I met Masquerade and RedTed from a MOTHER server that they both manage with some other friends. Polly and I met over Twitter, talking about Ace Attorney. I’ve known all three of them for a year or two at this point.

Masquerade has a lot of moderator experience from being the leading mod in several large communities. He’s very particular and detail-oriented, and I rely on him to voice opinions and scenarios that I wouldn’t have thought about. He’s never managed a project like this, but because of that he often thinks up scenarios and options that I wouldn’t have considered.

RedTed, or Reddy, is a Smash Bros writer I met through Masquerade. He works as a college beta reader, and loves to nitpick my writing like a hawk. He always has something to say and it’d be so much harder for me to write professionally if I didn’t have him looking over my words and making them easier to digest.

Polly is someone I personally invited onto the project. She’s one of my best friends, one of the rare people I message daily. She works as our social media moderator because she’s one of the only people I can count on to reliably watch three social media accounts, our zine email, and post at peak user times. I work as a Night Auditor for a busy airport hotel, so I can’t upload at the hours she’s able to. She’s incredible and is often the first one to notice a question about the zine.

Yurei joined the team by submitting an application to join our team as a shipping/packaging moderator. They manage a shop and have previously worked as a merch moderator on Homemade in Hyrule. In general, they have been incredibly helpful and come with a lot of experience. I appreciate their presence on the team greatly.

There certainly are a lot of artists and writers online eager to contribute to these projects! Since you already have a set format for the zine prior to the application process, is it really challenging deciding on which pitches get approved?

It’s very challenging!

We won’t be approving pitches until contributors are accepted, but the pitches you submit on your application are what we will associate with you during the consideration process. More often than not, an app will have zine-quality writing and art. The pitches on your app are what we actually put up against another applicant, and even then, it’s likely that we will like both sets of pitches. Narrowing down the pool of applicants to our target number of contributors has not been easy.

What are generally the types of submissions for zines that most excite you? Have the ones for Your Name Please been really diverse?

In general, I really appreciate pitches that are heavily detailed. Whole paragraphs that I can think about, with multiple characters involved. Especially ones that hark back to an ingame event. We have quite the pool of pitches, they have been very diverse.

What in your words makes Your Name Please different from previous MOTHER zines and the YuGi-Oh! ones you’ve worked on?

With the YGO zines, much of the fandom were already used to zines. Many zines came and went when I was active in that community, so marketing for those zines could easily follow a “typical” zine format. Templates for graphics, a post every now and again, zine prices could follow the general prices zines usually sell for.

Your Name, Please needs to be run differently from this static formula, as the majority of the community is not familiar with zines. It is a much smaller community compared to YGO and there’s different wants for the community. The MOTHER fandom is quirky, fan-driven and experimental, many individuals in the fandom have projects of their own. The moderator team on Your Name Please is very open to experimental mediums for the zine, because the MOTHER community is open to those sorts of mediums. Not many zines would be interested in having non-narrative writing, 3d mediums, or pixel art in a zine, but for our project we are especially interested in those sorts of pieces.

Due to high demand, EarthBound 64-related submissions were included in the project. Was this something surprising to see? Is there any challenge in perhaps differentiating MOTHER 3 submissions versus EarthBound 64-specific ones?

I would not say it is surprising, but it is something I’m very happy to see. I’ve always been interested in content for EB64. We actually haven’t had any issues differentiating MOTHER 3 submissions from EB64 ones, but it is something to keep in mind.

What do you wish to achieve once the zine is finished and published? Do you hope to collaborate with the team of organizers and artists again in the future?

My main hope is that the project becomes something that fans and contributors can look back fondly on. I don’t have any grand plans for the zine besides making a fun project and fostering the MOTHER art and writing communities I hold dear to my heart. In terms of working again in the future, I would like to keep some form of contact with everyone on the team. For SIDELINE☆STARS, the contributor list can still be easily accessed on the zine’s bigcartel site, along with everyone’s social media. I have incredibly fond memories of both of the projects I worked on, and it’s a wonderful thing to be able to look back on something you and a bunch of other people worked on together.

To cap things off, please send forward a message to our readers and the MOTHER community!

Thank you for this opportunity to talk, and I hope reading this has made you even more excited to see Your Name, Please come to fruition! Keep loving MOTHER, and remember all the fond memories we made together as a community.