#(partly bc of whatever the fuck is. happening with them in the comics right now / since their introduction)

[morninkim]

was gonna wait until the big RotMMPR Movie post to show off designs from it

HOWEVER. i like these, so here's the team unmorphed :)

Distant Thunder takes place in the summer following Billy, Kimberly and Tommy's senior year, and Rocky, Aisha and Adam's sophmore year - so it's been about a year since the final battle with Zedd

[camilliar]

hi sorry to bother u but i saw u reference 4.19 in check please and just realized it’s ? not on the website? do u know why bc i’ve managed to miss it and not see anything lol

Hi, don’t be sorry to bother me. I’m here to be bothered. Bother me.

You’re right; 4.19 is not on the website. It had only been released within the second First Second volume, Sticks & Scones, and on Ngozi’s Patreon. It has also been disseminated pretty widely within the fandom because it leaked in February, along with the rest of the comic’s conclusion, as an Amazon “look inside” preview. If you wanted to find it, a good place to look might be a search in the fail-fandomanon archives – or you could e-mail someone who still supports Ngozi’s Patreon but doesn’t mind sharing this strip under the table if they have a copy they could send you.

The comic hasn’t been posted online (at least, not yet) because it’s about Kent Parson coming to the Haus to talk to Bitty, and apparently whenever Kent appears in the comic there’s a lot of drama surrounding him and Ngozi doesn’t want to have to deal with it. I am sure that’s at least partly true, but there’s also something contradictory, to me, about claiming you’re hurt by the negative energy around this character as you performatively tease the existence of this strip, setting it into the narrative and the strip sequence and then demonstratively removing it.

I hesitate to suggest that an author would be disingenuous about the stress they’ve experienced from fans who are vocally invested in a story, and since I’ve spent time hanging out in various OMGCP-critical and Parse-positive spaces and chatting with people who inhabit them, I can definitely attest to the fact that some fans (or maybe they’re just anti-fans) seem pretty strident and petty. If nothing else, there are people who are pretty uncharitable. (In their defense, I think it’s because they’re grieving and angry.) In my experience this isn’t the majority of people, but I do know that Ngozi’s a visible figure in the fandom, so I’d guess that means she encounters displeasure with her choices pretty often, and that’s unpleasant, maybe really traumatic at times. Of course, the flip side to this is that some criticisms and comments are really well-intended, and even if they’re not well-intended, so long as they don’t cross the line over into, like, nastiness, I dunno, when you put artwork into the world as a commodity the exchange you’re making, regardless of whether the content has been accessed for free, is that consumers get to have thoughts and feelings on it, then and they can talk about their thoughts and feelings with other consumers.

It feels like what’s happened with 4.19 is that Ngozi is frustrated that she can’t control some aspects of this process, and so she’s decided to withhold this particular strip from a space where it’s likely to be commented on. I think she’s bet, correctly, that the people who are most disposed to hate what she’s done with this installment are also the people least likely to pay for the book. And so long as it’s behind a paywall, it’s pretty much declasse to talk about it openly. Despite some comments on Patreon that are effusively complimentary about how Parse has eaten some crow – I mean, pie – this strip is a goddamned mess with a really depressing moral lurking behind it, and I am completely positive that if this thing were posted online for free like a normal episode of OMGCP it would resulted in yet more commentary and we all would have felt really bad about it. I mean, more than usual.

In keeping with Jack’s comments in 3.7 about his relationship with Parse, the dialogue in 4.19 is in many senses unspecific and doesn’t give us much more about what actually happened between them. Kent says, “I was shit to him,” and it’s entirely unclear if he means at Epikegster or “at 18, as a rookie in the league,” or before that. (Kent would have been a rookie at 19, of course, but let’s ignore that, I guess.) An interesting point about this is that we all found out Parse would be apologizing in this strip in January 2019, and the comic was posted for Patrons without dialogue for Parse’s birthday in July 2019. So there’s been plenty of time for everyone to comment on the idea that Parse was going to show up and apologize to Bitty. It seems to be a rebuke to readers who pointed out that Jack previously told Bitty he and Kent “owe each other a lot of apologies”; in 4.19 Parse says, “If he thinks he owe me an apology for that, he doesn’t.” The “that” in question here is “The shit I was doing at 18, as a rookie in the league … wasn’t good for him.” What does any of this fucking mean?

For a long time – I mean, not for a while now, but for the first couple of years I was in OMGCP fandom, I really did believe that many of these exchanges were purposely muddled and vague because they were going to be clarified later. Which apologies did Kent and Jack owe each other? What did Jack mean when he said “it takes a lot of growing up to realize someone wasn’t good for you”? What happened between them that wasn’t good for Jack? I really, seriously thought we were going to find out what dynamic or precipitating incident caused all of this. In 2.16: “Can we please know what happened at the draft?” And then, “How about Shitty tells us his first name!”

We now know Shitty’s first name, but I guess whatever the fuck it was that happened between Kent and Jack is just going to keep being Shroedinger’s fandom wank until some later date, or maybe forever.