#I’ve seems some panels compared to what we got in the adaption and I feel like like

[cherrysnax]

okay one last thing abt naruto, I rlly wanna read the manga but everyone and their mom says that once u do you’ll never go back to the show 😭

[everythingsinred]

Let's Talk About NatsuMikan: Natsume (pt.7)

Well, Natsume's really in it now! Today we'll be talking about what lengths Natsume will go to in order to protect the people he loves. He's not a normal boy with a normal first crush, after all. He has no intention of wooing her or flirting. In fact, his instinct is to distance himself, and going forward we'll see that instinct is motivated by more than just a low self-esteem.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Natsume has some major character flaws. He’s kinda a jerk in general and is rude and abrasive. He’s chronically selfless and seems to be drawn to situations where he can sacrifice himself for others, which is a very unhealthy way to be. He’s also terrible at keeping his word.

Natsume only made this decision on his own, but he’s pretty bad at carrying through with it. He’s the one who told her to stay away, but Natsume will have more and more trouble staying true to such an agreement.

At first, he makes an effort: Mikan is being bullied for her stupidity and sees Natsume. He glares at her, another discouragement from coming any closer. He doesn’t argue with her or join in on the bullying.

But in no time at all, the whole class is riled up in study mode because of Mikan’s example, and for many kids in Class B, the best person to turn to for tutoring help is Natsume, who is actually quite smart when he actually does the work--though he’d prefer not to. And he does help, though not with any kind or supportive words. He’ll leave that to Mikan. Maybe to him it feels a bit like a cheat, like he can afford to give in a little bit. He later walks alongside her after an exam, like he’s part of her circle, and although he’s not really engaging with her like the rest of the kids are, it’s enough that he’s near her.

And it’s enough for the ESP and Persona to notice.

We can see the ESP looking down on them from his headquarters room, still covered in shadows to maintain his mystery, but his figure is familiar enough for a reread. Natsume has been caught and he will have to face the consequences.

Persona subs in for Makihara-sensei (and we must wonder if Makihara was really unable to proctor his exam or if he was ordered to stay away so that a point could be made to Natsume), and despite his disguise, Natsume can tell it’s him instantly. After all, he was supposed to recognize him. Natsume looks horrified.

So far, Natsume has had to more or less balance two very different parts of his life: a more light-hearted life in Class B and his life as a spy and black ops agent. They’ve been difficult to juggle because of how different they are, but they’ve been pretty separated. Here, the lines are blurring. Was there really any divide at all or was that just an illusion? Persona can invade on his happiness any time he wants, on a whim, and nobody else will notice that anything is amiss. Only Natsume will be bothered, and that’s enough.

Natsume later catches up to Persona, asking him what the hell all that was about.

Permy and his fans aren’t the only ones to notice that Natsume has been softer lately--he and the ESP have noticed as well, and he’s been ordered to put a stop to it. He mentions a “kitten of a different color” who has been of interest to the ESP too, and Natsume plays dumb, his last-ditch attempt to protect Mikan from being drawn into this.

Persona comments on the strangeness of seeing the infamous Black Cat that he trained himself, who he’s supposedly only ever seen in action, sitting and taking a test like a normal kid. He reminds him that he’s not a normal kid. There’s no point in trying so hard. He won’t make it to ever see his family again, so why even bother?

And then Persona makes a point to discourage Natsume from getting close to that “kitten of a different color”. Natsume argues that they’re the ones who made them partners in the first place! And he might as well be giving himself away. Again, Natsume seems convinced that the partners thing was a decision from pretty high up, but I don’t think it was. Here, it seems like Persona is trying to clean up the mess Narumi made before it gets too out of hand. Natsume is a perfect tool and anything messing with that is inconvenient. They can’t unmake them partners (yet) so the most they can do is threaten Natsume.

And now we can see what kind of alice Persona has. It's a real threat, killing that plant. It's a reminder to Natsume what he's capable of, that his friends and loved ones could end up just like that plant.

And so Persona does.

Natsume is anguished here, because he’s been trying his very best to avoid this situation, but he should have known that Mikan was already in the academy spotlight and his feelings would be quickly caught. It was too late from the start and he was doomed all along to add Mikan to the list of people he will do anything to protect.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The next chapter opens with Mikan being confused and hurt by Natsume’s sudden new coldness. She has no idea what’s brought this all on, but we do. Natsume has no choice now but to completely try and cut her off. It’s for her own good, after all. If he’s not careful, she could get hurt. Protecting her is worth it, even if it means he has to be even more of a villain than usual.

We don’t see a lot of Natsume in this chapter, actually, because he’s trying really hard to stick by his word this time. We see him trip up a little, staring at her in class. When she catches him, he turns away coldly, but from this we can see that Natsume really doesn’t want to be leaving her alone like this. If he had it his way, in an ideal world, he’d be much nicer to her. Unfortunately, Natsume doesn’t waste his time thinking about his ideals, so he keeps at it, pushing her away.

The next time we see Natsume, it’s after we’ve been thoroughly introduced to the concept of the life-shortening alice. This is one hint of many that he has such an alice, several chapters before we get a real confirmation.

The scene where Natsume struggles on a bed full of pills is perhaps more dramatic in the anime, but it’s no less potent here. It’s like a sucker punch. You don’t want it to be true. He’s ten years old, for heaven’s sake! TEN YEARS OLD! And he’s suffering, hunched over, face red, gasping for air, clutching his chest, next to the biggest bag of medicine I’ve ever seen. It’s the biggest hint we’ve gotten so far, especially in the context of Kaname’s illness.

It's heart-breaking to imagine that most of the time, Natsume is simply pretending like he's not in absolute physical agony.

Kaname stays at the hospital for long stretches of time, staying for weeks and sometimes months at a time. He’s hospitalized more than he’s able to walk around free. There’s a lot to consider when that treatment is compared to Natsume’s. Natsume is the DA favorite and is sent on many missions. His trips to the hospital are never for weeks or months at a time, not because he doesn’t need the rest, but because the school can’t stand to go so long without their prize fighter. Natsume might be in even worse condition than Kaname, but there’d be no real way to tell unless we got it from him, because he has no choice but to put up with it and pretend like he’s not living in constant agony. And on top of being terribly and terminally ill, he gets physically beaten somewhat regularly… this school beats sick children and then threatens them when they find any inkling of happiness.

There is a bittersweet tone about Kaname’s story. He’s already sick anyway but he will probably die if he keeps using his alice, but he wants to, because he wants to bring people the same happiness that making Bear brought him. It’s tragic and heart-breaking, but it’s touching too. That sweetness is missing from Natsume’s appearance. His situation feels miserable and helpless in comparison, because not only does he have no way out, but nobody even knows the extent of his struggles.

He only lets himself feel this level of pain when he’s all alone in his bedroom. He’s been having a horrible past few days, having to ignore Mikan when she’s all that’s made him happy in recent memory. All that together, and we know that this night was a rough one for him.

The next day, we see everyone saying good-bye to Kaname. Once again, Natsume is completely separated from the rest of them, all alone in the classroom, sitting and looking as miserable as one can expect. It’s strange seeing him now after we’ve seen what his nights look like and just how painful they can get.

I just want him to be okay. Why is that too much to ask?

There’s some text on his panel: “I want the future I spend with the ones I love to last just a little longer.” Yet another hint that maybe his illness is more than just that. He has very little time left, and very little time to spend with his loved ones, but even worse: he can’t even spend time with Mikan because doing so would put her in danger. Even with Youichi and Ruka the amount of time he can spend with them is limited. They have their own lives and he doesn’t want to hold them back or hint in the slightest that there’s something up with him. He doesn’t want to worry or burden them. And so he sits alone in the classroom, looking despondent and lonely.

And now we know more than ever that this was never his choice: he has to be like this.

No, he’s not the asshole he makes himself out to be, somebody who doesn’t care about others and cuts others off because he thinks himself above them. All he wants is to protect people from getting too entrenched in his dark life. Natsume being this level of a jerk is a method to protect people, a method an adult would have to take.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I’m quite relieved to have finally passed the point where the anime adapts the manga. From now on, I can focus entirely on the manga. I passed 22k words on this essay too! This whole thing will be sooooo long. I hope it’s an enjoyable read so far. It’s quite fun for me to write.

This chapter is the beginning of a long and dramatic arc. There’s been incidents of people losing their alices. The academy is withholding information about the gravity of the situation, lying that the students have not been affected so far.

But even with the little information the kids have, Class B is full of concern. Everyone is discussing these incidents, debating whether losing one’s alice would even be a bad thing. After all, they’d be able to go back home and see their families. Nonoko brings up a great point, that her alice is a part of her identity, something she loves about herself. It’s not something she’d ever willingly part with. Furthermore, she doesn’t want to leave all her friends at the academy either. Ultimately, the kids all agree that they wouldn’t want to lose their alices.

At this, Natsume stands up and leaves the room. He’s heard enough.

Natsume doesn’t just have complicated feelings about his alice--he feels hatred for it. After all, if it weren’t for his alice, he could live to a ripe old age. He could still be with his family. He could be happy, not used as a weapon by the academy to fight until he dies. He can’t relate much to the conversations about fondness for an alice. From what we can see, he’d be over the moon to be rid of it for good. This is a concept brought up now, because it will be incredibly important later on.

Not to spill about my personal life or anything, but I’m an English major (in an anglophone country so my focus is literary analysis and writing). Writing literature papers in school was a love of mine that I translated to my other interests. I’m writing what I can here about general themes and even visual parallels. I want to write as thorough an analysis as I can. Unfortunately, I can’t effectively pick apart word choices and phrases when they’re translated from another language and when so many conflicting translations may exist.

I’m saying all this as a disclaimer because I want to analyze word choice now and I am aware that this might not carry to the original Japanese or even to other versions of the English translation. (For reference, I’m using the TokyoPop versions for my analysis for the first 15 volumes and then I’ll be using whatever I get my hands on for the rest. The pics I use are from scans, but the main source I use for now is TokyoPop.)

"Nowhere!".... hmm let me read way too much into this.

Natsume leaves the room and Ruka chases after him, asking where he’s headed. Natsume responds, “Nowhere.” This might be a nothing point to make, but it stands out to me whenever I read this part. It’s a reassurance to Ruka, sure, but there seems to be more to it. On the surface, we can tell that Natsume doesn’t have a destination in mind; he just doesn’t want to be in the classroom anymore, listening to all that upsetting talk. Deeper than that, he really is heading nowhere. He’s stuck there, at the academy, unlike the rest of them who will eventually leave to go back home once they’ve graduated. Natsume will probably die at the school, trapped within its gates. He will probably never see his family again. He is, in that sense as well, going nowhere.

The rest of their conversation is just as packed with meaning. Ruka can tell something is up and he wants Natsume to talk to him, to let him in, but Natsume knows that Ruka has made a pact not to smile if he’s not smiling. So even though Ruka is asking and wants to know what’s wrong, Natsume won’t give anything away. Being miserable is one thing, but letting Ruka know that something is worse than usual would only make Ruka miserable too, and he can’t have that. The bottom of one page has him frowning, maybe steeling himself, and then at the top of the next page, he turns around with a grin to tousle Ruka’s hair.

Don't mind me. I am simply crying.

“It’s nothing,” he says with his smile, looking so gentle, and Ruka still looks concerned, but he can’t argue anymore.

In reality there’s a lot going on with Natsume. Later, when we are introduced to Tono, he mentions being concerned about Natsume’s health, having heard that he was making frequent visits to the hospital. We already know he’s sick and going on ceaseless missions, and on top of all that he has to ignore and be cruel to the girl he likes. It’s a terrible situation. But Natsume can’t tell Ruka any of this without worrying him, so instead he will keep it to himself. After all, it’s nothing that can be helped or changed. It’s something he feels he has to cope with on his own. To him, spilling his secrets would be selfish and only cause suffering.

Chapter Thirty

Iinchou has finally returned from his visit to his hometown. He’s brought gifts and anecdotes and everyone is quite happy to see him, until Iinchou attempts to use his alice and finds himself unable to.

It’s a shock to the whole class that a kid at their school has lost his alice. They had been so relieved that at least it wouldn’t affect kids like them, but now one of them is a victim too. It makes the fear much more real. If it could happen to Iinchou, it could happen to any of them.

Things get tense when Iinchou returns to class and says that this might have been the fault of a woman he encountered outside of the school, someone who was probably affiliated with Z. Everyone who was involved with saving Natsume when he was kidnapped is shocked to hear about Z again, but none more than Natsume himself. He gets up and leaves, just like he did last chapter.

He’s thinking about the proposal Reo gave, that Natsume should join Z and fight against the academy he despises. But he’s not alone with his thoughts, because Ruka followed him again, and so did Mikan this time.

She tries to ask him about Z, see if he has any more idea about what’s going on. She’s confused and he knows more than anyone what happened during that incident, but he’s refusing to acknowledge her presence, let alone answer any of her questions. He’s keeping up his charade of cruelty to keep her safe, but it’s driving Mikan crazy. She finally breaks, screaming at him that he should pay attention when people are talking to him, and further that if he has any issues with her he should just say it to her face.

Just like last chapter, we see a panel of Natsume steeling himself, ready to do the selfless thing to protect the other person. Only this time the next panel has him glaring at her, saying he doesn’t like anything about her. He hates everything about her.

Natsume has no choice but to lie all the time about how he's feeling, because everyone else must always come first.

It feels different, but in reality this is the same thing he did to Ruka last chapter. He can’t be honest about his feelings when he’s feeling upset, and he can’t be honest about his feelings when he’s actually starting to fall for a girl. He always has to hide his true feelings, repress and bury them, lie about them in order to protect everyone around him. It’s hard for him to do, but he thinks it hurts him more than it could hurt her, so he manages it.

What adds even more layers to this is that Ruka is observing the whole thing. He sees Natsume’s actions as selfless but misfires on the motive a little--but only a little.

He recalls eating strawberries with Natsume and Aoi, with Aoi cheerfully discussing her newfound love for the fruits. And so Natsume gives his to her. Aoi is surprised, because strawberries are his favorites. He responds easily, “I hate them now.”

"For you," Natsume says.

Ruka knows what kind of person Natsume is, that Natsume would reject something he loves so that his loved ones can be happy. They’re both aware that they like the same girl, and Ruka can’t help but put the math together and assume that perhaps Natsume is doing this for him, hurting himself and bringing himself pain so that Ruka can be happy and pursue a girl he has a crush on guilt-free.

He’s even more convinced of the theory with the tiny panel that reminds us of when Natsume shoved Ruka into Mikan so they could dance. Natsume loves Mikan too, but he wants Ruka to be happy, so he will give up and even ruin his own chances to help out his best friend over himself.

When I say it’s a misfire, I mean that Natsume has a lot of other things going on, including Persona and his imminent death. It’s not that he definitely isn’t doing this for Ruka, it’s just that it’s not as major a factor as other things. He’s mainly doing it because of the threats from Persona. If Ruka is involved in his thought process, it’s mainly a bonus. Ruka’s theory is definitely not unfounded; just not completely accurate.

In any case, it does add extra substance to the dynamic between the three of them, where they all walk away from the moment with completely different kinds of misery.

Before any of them can sit with their sadness, though, they receive word that an intruder from Z is at the school.

Conclusion

In this section, we explored how Natsume has no choice but to distance himself from everybody, and even how the methods he uses to distance himself look different depending on the person. Ultimately, despite the fact that he isn't the sweetest kid you'll ever meet, Natsume being cruel to this extent isn't a quirk of his personality: it's what he has to do. If he didn't have so many things being held against him, he might be much kinder to Mikan, or more honest with Ruka, but he has no choice in the matter.

In the next edition, we're getting more involved in the Z Arc and going into how come Natsume goes from telling Mikan he hates her to backing her cause and going on a dangerous mission with her.

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[freckledbodty]

Stripping Away The Bloat - The Umibe No Etranger Movie Did The Manga Dirty

I finally got around to watching the movie of Umibe no Etranger - a movie I didn’t know existed based on one of my old favourite BL mangas. And oh boy, does this adaptation reflect a painful trend in manga to anime/movie adaptations overall. Allow me a moment to rant, if you will...

TL;DR: READ THE MANGA BY THE LOVE OF GOD IT’S WONDERFUL. Also the movie is super pretty, but here’s a semi-detailed look at why it still really didn’t do the manga justice. You bet I came with receipts.

A few important notes before you start: 

1. Remember this is just my opinion, and I’d love to hear other people’s point of view on the matter, whether you agree or disagree! 

2. I am not fluent enough in Japanese to read the original without a translation, so my thoughts on the manga are coming from fan translations, which 100% might have affected how I view this! The anime I’m a little more sure on as I can generally tell when the subtitles have deviated, but that does mean I may have missed something/something was lost in translation that means something I say here is incorrect. I’m very sorry for this, so remember this is my view based on the media types I’ve consumed. 

3. Also the manga cuttings I use are not the best quality because of tumblr’s sizing, so even more of a reason to go read the books yourself! 

I’m aware I’m very late to this party, but when I saw the other day that this movie had been made, I was horrified that I hadn’t known about it sooner. I read the manga years ago, and adored it - it’s genuinely a sweet and beautifully drawn romance, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone. With that, however, the movie was a huge disappointment to me and I just need to have a moment to gush in a less than positive way. 

The Pros: 

Let’s get this out of the way, I’d still probably recommend this movie to anyone who likes romance anime-style movies. It’s beautifully animated. Seriously, this movie is stunning, with wonderful expressions, bright colours, and a pretty well suited soundtrack too. The animation tries to match the original art style of the manga, and frankly, I think it captures it perfectly. 10/10. Gorgeous. Watch it just for the prettiness. 

I’m also a big fan of any BL/GL adaptations that get a little more into the mainstream. This movie is definitely a huge win in terms of representation, especially when the manga (on the whole) avoided the more negative tropes that the BL/GL genres have historically been known for. (More on that later...) So that’s a win, and I will take it. 

The Bloat Cut: 

To put it simply, this movie fell into the trap of what I call (in my head) ‘cutting out the bloat’. As a long-time anime and manga fan, who has seen countless adaptations over the years, it’s a common theme that tends to make or break an anime. 

‘Cutting out the bloat’ to me means that the adaptors cut out a lot of the ‘smaller’ moments and panels that are seen in a manga. This movie was thankfully very good at following the original plot and took us through the same beats that the manga did (many adaptations don’t bother doing that at all), but they left out a lot of the extra stuff - the aforementioned ‘bloat’. 

The bloat isn’t really bloat in that it is pointless, however: the problem is that these little moments and scenes are seen to be pointless by the adaptors. Again, understandable: they have a limited run time, and it’s hard to include every little tiny moment, especially when they are ones that are easily scanned passed. Some bloat cutting is necessary to make an adaptation viable at all, but sometimes, it can be hugely detrimental to the piece. Umibe no Etranger is a key example of this. 

Setting: 

I watched this movie without rereading the manga, and as such, I was quickly thrown off by how bad the movie was. This was one of my favourite mangas, wasn’t it? Had I really had such terrible taste? (Yes, let’s not go there, but this manga was not one of my high-school bad decisions). 

The characters felt strange. Personalities did complete 180s after the time skip and did some questionable things that I couldn’t recall finding issue with when I read the manga. The two main characters felt so hot and cold that it didn’t feel like the story I remembered. Even the pacing felt off and janky at times. 

After watching, I went back and reread the manga, and this is where I saw all the ‘bloat’, the little intricate moments and minor panels that were easy to overlook but made the story what it was. Here’s a few of the biggest examples I could find. 

Shun:

Oh, Shun. What did they do to you? 

Shun’s character was bizarre. In the first 15 minutes of the movie, he was bubbly, friendly, and even bold enough to flirt with Mio. After the time skip, he was sour, cold, and completely withdrawn from the world. I understood Mio’s confusion because after the time jump he was a completely different character. 

The manga is often focused on Shun and his inner thoughts, and he’s the one who is hurt the most by the bloat cutting. For starters, he wasn’t as over-the-top friendly at the start of the manga as he was in the anime, and we’re able to see his inner thoughts and worries that cause his reservations from the first few pages we meet him. We also get more hints earlier on as to Shun’s past that explain a lot of his behaviour as a whole, as well as getting little hints as to why he’s even more negative and exhausted after the time jump. 

Mio: 

The biggest bloat cut out in terms of Mio is the big plot point of the phone call. For context, before leaving for the time skip, Mio promises to call Shun once he’s gotten to his new home. In the movie, this is never really brought up again, focusing on the relationship in the present, but this was a huge point to leave out. I think it was cut out because it was explained in one short scene in the manga, and therefore easily mistaken for bloat. 

In the manga, it’s explained that Mio does call, but it’s Eri who answers, and there’s a very important conversation that sets up Mio’s whole character development and explains why he returns to the island set on having a relationship with Shun. Eri warns him that calling Shun, despite knowing that Shun has feelings for him, is cruel and unfair, and tells Mio he shouldn’t contact him unless he’s worked out his feelings. It’s a great scene, and a real shame to leave out when it explains firstly why Mio never called back, and secondly why he is so adamant about his feelings and love for Shun when he does finally return: because he saw Eri’s warning to mean ‘don’t come back unless you are serious’.

Relationship:

In the movie, Mio and Shun didn’t really seem to have a relationship until the drama kicked up and then it quickly seem to disappear again. Shun was extremely held back and reserved, and barely ever seemed to return Mio’s feelings (even in the scenes he was instigating) - he even totally avoided anything resembling physical contact at first. 

Compare this to the manga, where there are little hints of their relationship progressing throughout the chapters. For one, Shun is never as cold and blank as he seems in the film, and when he does seem that way, the manga quickly shows a glimpse of his thoughts to explain how he’s exhausted or distracted - without those little bloated thought bubbles, he just seems... a little cruel frankly.

A really good example of this is the beach kiss scene. In the movie, as Mio is about to kiss him, Shun suddenly announces that he’s hungry and avoids the kiss altogether, leaving Mio confused. 

In the manga, they actually do kiss - it’s their first kiss, in fact. Shun seems embarrassed and his ‘I’m hungry’ feels like more of a way to distract them both. He explains he’s exhausted (which is fair enough, this is a big thing for him to process on little sleep that his inner thoughts earlier in the chapter already set up) rather than just outright shunning him. (Ha. Shun. shun. Get it?) 

A more *noted* bloat they cut out is that Shun and Mio get physical in the manga way earlier than the movie, the touches just not quite being everything Mio wanted. Without those more tender moments, where they actually seem like a couple, it seems like Mio is chasing after Shun desperately, whilst Shun couldn’t care less about him. It detracts from the whole relationship. Below are some examples of the two of them actually seeming like a couple that were cut from the movie, including longing looks from Shun, Shun hugging Mio whilst he’s asleep, and Shun asking to kiss and touch Mio. 

The Issue: 

Bloat cutting always annoys me, but usually, if it’s not hindering the story, I don’t mind. What bothers me most of all in this movie, is that without these subtle little panels and moments, the relationship between Shun and Mio seems... forced, frankly. In the movie, Shun seems to be the instigator of the flirting, and then after the time skip he acts practically disgusted, avoiding a lot of Mio’s advances, and we don’t get to hear his inner thoughts like we do in the manga to explain why he’s feeling this way. 

In the manga, during these ‘bloat’ pieces, Shun is an actual willing participant in the relationship, and Mio isn’t just forcing his advances onto Shun. It’s natural. It’s not flipping between hot and cold, or suddenly ramping up after a big moment of drama, it’s slow and careful and a real relationship. 

This would be a bad change in any adaptation, but it’s especially so in this one. Anyone who is a fan of BL specifically is probably aware of the genre’s bad rep historically for having some... questionable consent issues. This manga didn’t have them. The movie? I’m not so sure, and that’s why it’s rubbed me the wrong way. I could spend another 1000 words talking about this issue as a whole, but I’ll leave it there, you get the idea.

Expected? Yes. Okay? Meh. 

There’s no real point to this post aside from to complain a little and point out just how much more the source material gives us. Cutting the bloat always happens, and I don’t want it to stop happening per say, that would be impossible, but I’d kill for adaptors to just take a little more time to work out what is unnecessary and cutable bloat, and what is something they should really keep in. 

The movie is still cute and beautifully made, so please go watch and see for yourself! Mostly, I’d highly recommend the manga: it’s got the same gorgeous art style, only about 5 chapters long, and the story and relationship is that little bit more firmly built. 

I’ll stop ranting now, and I hope this actually made sense? Anyway, congrats on making it all this way.

[ghosthan]

what would you say are the differences between 616 Tony and MCU Tony? 🤔

Hi anon! Many people have talked about this and I'm certainly not the authority on the topic, but I’ll try my best to explain some of the major differences that I have noticed! Thank you for asking and I’m sorry it took me so long to answer you.

Important to note: neither version of Tony has had a totally consistent characterization. Depending on who you ask and which comics/movies they've consumed, they might give you a different answer here and not be wrong.

616 Tony is even harder to put into one box because his character has been around since Tales of Suspense in the 1950s. That’s a long time. Things have changed over time, under different writers, changing political atmospheres, and outside pop culture influence (including influence from the MCU, unfortunately, in recent years.) You get the picture. So I’ll be making some generalizations and try to be clear about which eras I’m speaking when I make these comparisons, but ultimately, if someone wanted to be contrarian, you could probably refute a lot of what I say here if you cherry pick canon. Which is fair enough! That’s sort of the fun of comics, there’s so much to choose from and something for everyone.

So here are some observations from me, under the ‘read more’.

1. Physical Appearance

This is sort of an easy one, but worth mentioning!

MCU Tony does not look like 616 Tony. RDJ is great, but he would not be most 616 fans’ casting choice on looks alone. MCU Tony is tan, a Malibu man, with brown hair and brown eyes, and RDJ has sort of round facial features (a funny sloped nose, big, round eyes, round forehead, not a particularly sharp or classically “superhero masculine” face.) As you may know, this lends well to certain fanworks and tropes, such as Tony having Bambi eyes.

Or Tiny Tony. He is not actually canonically small, but he's smaller in the MCU than in 616 and from what I can tell, a portion of fandom has latched onto that. He’s a grown man, but RDJ is pretty short, and of slighter build than 616 Tony. RDJ is 5′9, but they make him act in heels, and I believe his canon MCU height is 5′11. Another popular trope I’ve seen is shrinking Tony in fanfic/fanart for a dramatized height difference with Steve, making him weak or fragile; this is fine because everyone has their own taste, but for the official record, he’s a capable, strong guy! Especially in earlier stages of the MCU, in which he’s a bit younger. Tony isn’t just a brain; he carries out his plans with his own two hands! He builds his armor, he remodels his lab, he survives hand to hand combat when he doesn’t have the armor. Muscles!

616 Tony is 6′1 without armor and 6′6 in armor (making him taller than his 616 Steve counterpart in armor and very close to the same height out of armor!) 616 Tony is generally paler with black hair (sometimes the classic blue-black I love so much) and blue eyes, and it obviously depends on the artist, but he has a pretty typically ‘masculine’ face and build. Generally he is drawn with a squared jaw and a high bridged nose (such as in the Extremis storyline, or drawn by Marquez), but again, this varies from artist to artist! Here's some examples of 616 Tonys.

Wait, you might be saying, but I have seen comic panels where Tony has brown hair/brown eyes!

Yep. Due to a combination of forgetfulness, inconsistency, and the MCU bleeding into the general consciousness of the comics, sometimes Tony is randomly depicted in the image of RDJ, or if not in his image, at least visually inspired by the MCU-- hair color and style, eye color, dialogue, etc.

616 fans don’t typically love this; he’s very handsome when drawn this way, of course, (look at him!) But it isn’t really the same character.

Also, MCU Tony has (at least for some of his movies) a reactor built into his chest. While 616 Tony has, at times, been more or less physically connected/dependent to his tech, he doesn’t have the built in reactor (most generally speaking, there are times in comics when he temporarily has the tech built in, but this isn’t really the status quo.)

2. Relationship with parents/ family history

While it is definitely implied in the MCU that Howard was not a good father to Tony, (such as in Iron Man 2 when Tony says “You're talking about a man whose happiest day of his life was shipping me off to boarding school” and “He was cold, calculating, never told me he loved me, never even told me he liked me”), Tony has a different sort of attitude toward Howard in MCU than in 616. It’s kind of weird, and hard to discuss. To me, it seems implied that MCU Howard was emotionally abusive to Tony based on what Tony does say about his childhood, and yet, the films kind of randomly give Howard weird moments of “Well, he tried his best and deep down he loved me the whole time!” forgiveness. MCU has a Howard kink and I'm very cringe-face emoji about it.

For example, Iron Man 2 shows that old film reel of Howard talking about how Tony is the greatest thing he ever created, and in Endgame, when Tony goes back in time, he meets Howard and has a very weird interaction with him in which Howard declares he would do anything for his son, (to his deeply damaged son who is a new father himself.) Yet, for all his talk, it's his actions that speak, and his actions left Tony damaged, traumatized, and emotionally inept at forming healthy relationships. So.

Sorry. I’m a little bitter. I'm just uncomfortable with how they sort of set up an abuse history but then treated it kind of lightly and Howard gets off the hook as "well, he tried his best" without really acknowledging the hurt he caused.

Avengers: Endgame 2019

I won't go super in depth into the abuse stuff because it's a little touchy and could take up a lot of this post. But.

I’m not against any reconciliation and I do appreciate the fact that a lot of times, victims of abuse feel a desire to forgive and reconnect with their abuser-- my issue with the MCU depiction of Tony and Howard is that Tony never really gets the vindication of his abuse being recognized for what it was before he forgives Howard. To me, that’s not forgiveness as kind of... gaslighting himself that it wasn't as bad as he remembered his own experience being, because of a sense of nostalgia and grief. It’s not the same, and I have issues with it.

However, a lot of my opinion is based on subtext and it is just my opinion; with depictions of abuse, different people are going to react differently, and other people may have found these scenes touching and gotten something positive out of them, and that's totally fine too!

It’s also a bit difficult to talk about Tony’s relationship with Howard in 616, for a few reasons: shifting timelines, lots of canon that I have not read all of, and the fact that it really is difficult to sum up such a complicated relationship.

Right off the bat, I’ll address the basics. I used the same scene in another ask, and I think it's frequently cited in any meta regarding Howard, but in Iron Man Vol. 1, we see more into Tony’s childhood and see Howard verbally abusing his family, drunk, at the dinner table.

Iron Man Vol. 1 #285

We get this scene with adult Tony’s retrospective commentary on how his own issues that he blamed himself for were actually a cycle starting with his father, the insecurity and abuse and alcohol, and that he realizes how much this has influenced him. Both MCU Tony and 616 Tony have some form of “stop the cycle of shame” arcs, but I don’t really see how this works narratively in the MCU because Tony makes excuses for Howard and continues to blame himself for a lot of his own personal struggles, whereas I think there’s just a bit more nuance in 616.

But uh. This isn’t totally true, and in recent years, things got real weird. I choose to ignore this chapter of canon, but in the Dan Slott run, Tony Stark: Iron Man, Tony’s whole backstory gets imploded. For one thing, the little of Tony’s childhood it shows in a flashback is uh. Uh. Well, it’s certainly out of character compared with previous 616 material, depicting Tony as an overly confident poor sport.

Basically, Tony is adopted. Tony has an evil brother. Tony’s biological parents make an appearance, as do his ‘classic’ parents, Howard and Maria. It’s just weird. It’s kind of out there. I’m honestly not a huge fan of this and ignore a lot of it, but it is certainly a difference between MCU and 616.

3. Personality

I’m going to be very general. Both Tony’s have an outer self which they present to the public and an inner self, but they’re a bit different. Both Tony’s have struggled with self loathing, but I think MCU Tony’s actual self worth is a bit higher, even just at some points in time. Even if his ego is part of his facade, I think he does believe some amount of the “I’m awesome”, even if just when it applies to his own work/inventions/saving people. Not to say that these moments of fluctuating self esteem make him egotistical, but this combined with his egotistical act and snarky, non-stop sassy dialogue, he’s quite different in general personality from 616 Tony, who is much more reserved.

Some more recent iterations of 616 Tony have been adapted to reflect the snark of the MCU, but he’s not so snarky and he tends to approach things more seriously. This is not a dis on MCU Tony; I think MCU Tony uses false ego and excessive sassy jokes as a means to deflect and control, which I think is very interesting and it’s nice to see this explored more in depth in fic where you get to see the thought process behind the bravado. MCU Tony is a partier, a good times guy, especially during Iron Man 2, in which he really does disregard consequences to have fun (driving his race car, partying drunk in his suit, letting pretty  girls play with the armor, shooting off repulsor blasts for fun in a crowded room); I’m not bashing MCU Tony-- I think he had psychologically understandable reasons for behaving this way, the man was dying-- but 616 Tony really doesn’t act this way generally, and I think it’s a personality difference more than a difference of one being “better.”

616 Tony handles his stress differently, and they just have different psychological patterns, I think. I’m coming up kind of blank trying to think of a good comparable 616 arc, (sorry, I’m brain dead) but a less-than-perfect  example might be Tony’s brain delete arc; he’s “dying”, like in Iron Man 2 he  knows his expiration date, (circumstances are quite  a bit different), but he throws himself more into work, into a cause, and as he really fall apart, we  see him spiral into self doubt, remorse, fear, and insecurity, sort of falling into  himself with lots of manly tears and calling himself pathetic.

(Some things happen in this arc that a lot of people find Gross. I also find these events gross. But. I don’t count the sex in “World’s Most Wanted” as partying to cope with personal mortality, because I think both character involved are in “end of the world” mode, and it’s more seeking intimacy for comfort than partying to numb the hurt. Does this distinction make sense? No? Perfect, moving on.) 616 Tony is generally much more humble.

Whereas MCU Tony, I think, tries to outrun those feelings via parties or making dozens of new suits, or seeking comfort by comforting others! Gifting things to people, building things for people, highly personalized individual living quarters, teaching Nebula games and trying to show her a fun time when they were in peril together.

They have some traits in common, for sure! But canon being inconsistent both in the MCU and in 616, my observations aren’t the rule, because I’m kind of cherry picking and going based on limited memory. But off the top of my head, they’re both extravagant gift givers! Recall Tony gifting Pepper the giant bunny in Iron Man 3, and compare this with Tony carrying a mile high pile of Christmas gifts after shopping with Rumiko in Iron Man Vol. #3.

I would say that while both Tony Starks are considered humanitarians, this is much more fleshed out and supported by canon in 616. Some examples of his philanthropy in the MCU: Tony makes charitable donations of art and money, Tony has an organization which provides disaster relief/cleanup which is referenced in Spider-Man Homecoming, Tony has an MIT grant for students and staff members. But to be honest, a lot of his MCU philanthropy is only mentioned in passing, or is largely handled by other people on his behalf and on his dollar.

In 616, we see Tony using charity almost as a means of therapy: it’s something he does very privately, not in the public eye (at least, not always), and it’s something deeply personal to him. One example that immediately comes to mind is Tony’s home for disadvantaged girls in Iron Man Vol. 3, and we see scenes of Tony basically driving the streets at night, picking up underage prostitutes, feeding them and listening to their stories before bringing them to a home he’s established where he knows all the residents, and provides educational opportunities and protection.

Another more recent example in canon that the Tony fandom loves is that Tony canonically holds babies at an orphanage. Sorry I don’t have panels for all of this, this section got long and I have been working on answering this ask in a very scattered way for a very long time.

Both Tony’s are romantics, I literally could write a whole other post about their canon love life similarities and differences, but I will briefly say that while MCU Tony does the long on and off, and eventual ultimate commitment, to Pepper Potts, 616 Tony is a serial monogamist; he is always falling in love, and he’s definitely not a playboy, but the hero-ing, self loathing, and lifestyle make it very hard for him to keep anyone in his life, and most of his partners fuck his life up and betray him. Needless to say, 616 Tony is not married, and certainly not to Pepper Potts.

Oh, and I guess this is so obvious I almost forgot to include it, but a huge similarity between both iterations of Tony is that they both constantly use their own life as a bargaining chip, and will pretty much die for anything. Or be the bad guy for a good reason (at least, in his own mind... see Civil War, or Hickmanvengers; 616 Tony, especially, does not shy away from making the hard decisions, and this leads to a lot of guilt and tension in his  relationships-- often with Steve because 616 Steve/Tony angst fans are well fed, I guess)

Remember that time Tony had Steve’s mind wiped because Tony felt that Steve’s inflexible morality might hinder the Illuminati’s ability to save the world? And it eats Tony up inside and erupts into a homicidal fight when Steve finally gets his memory back? Me too.

Tony Stark as a character is defined by sacrifice, both of his own life but also of his own happiness and reputation and conscience, I think, in a lot of ways, and we see this in many universes. I could go on about Tony’s propensity for sacrifice in the less obvious ways, because I think in terms of heroic sacrifice, Tony has done a lot that other heroes wouldn’t be able to do because of moral inflexibility and conflicting philosophical schools of thought; Tony really is the “whatever it takes” type, and often believes the ends justify the means if he deems a threat worse than the potential wrong that could be done in preventing the threat. We see this a little bit in the MCU in the creation of Ultron, and in Civil War with the Accords. But there’s a whole lot more going on there I don’t want to get into.

4. Alcohol

MCU Tony’s alcoholism is never really explicitly explored. He is shown drinking in Iron Man 1, and in Iron Man 2 he drinks a lot and makes a fool of himself publicly, but MCU Tony doesn’t get any specific narrative arc focused on his drinking, and if I recall correctly, I don’t think he ever refers to his drinking as alcoholism in the movies? Also, while his binge drinking and embarrassing behaviors ostensibly stop after the events of Iron Man 2, he is shown drinking on screen at least one other time after that which I can remember, and it wasn’t a “falling off the wagon” moment, and an alcoholic in recovery such as 616 Tony would not take a drink casually. This article sheds a little light on some decisions made about Tony and alcohol in the MCU.

Alcoholism is a huge part of 616 Tony’s personality, which I went a bit more into depth about in this post, so I won’t repeat myself too much.

5. Their relationships with the Iron Man armor

A few points here: MCU Tony is famous for the “I am Iron Man” line being repeated throughout the franchise after he blows his own secret in the end of the first movie. MCU Tony sees himself as one with Iron Man, and the suit is the tech that enables him to be this version of himself. He sees Tony Stark and Iron Man as inextricable: you cannot separate them, and his identity is public. He, as Tony Stark, is an Avenger.

You may remember MCU Tony’s induction into the Avengers; in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury is forming the Avengers and tasks the Black Widow with going undercover to assess Tony to be a part of a hypothetical initiative. “Iron Man yes, Tony Stark no” and the comments about Tony as a narcissist may be funny, but the fact is, the snark and erratic personality of MCU Tony at the time of the formation of the Avengers in the movies is not at all like the Tony of the comics, at the time of the Avengers being formed. 

In 616, things are quite a bit different! Tony invents the Iron man armor to save himself (like in the MCU) and uses it for hero-ing, but in secret. He works very hard to protect his identity as Iron Man, and for a long time, as far as the world is concerned, Iron man is a mystery man piloting armor built by Tony, hired as Tony’s personal body guard, (hence the 616 Steve/Tony fandom’s proclivity for identity porn as a trope!) When the Avengers form, Iron Man is the Avenger, close friends with the Avengers, (particularly Steve!) and Tony Stark is just the benefactor of the Avengers, providing them with a place to live and finances with which to operate.

In the very early days, Tony did not have the “reactor” like in the MCU, but his chest plate did keep him alive, leading to some very dramatic shots of Tony charging up using a wall socket, lamenting the plight of a secret hero.

616 Tony, generally, and especially in some of these earlier comics, was quite reserved, rather serious, and very angsty, (in private of course.) He may be wealthy, but speaking generally, he’s much less ostentatious than MCU Tony, less of a show off, less into flashy things and grand gestures. Of course, this isn’t always true in the comics, and some iterations of Tony are more like this than others, but MCU Tony is showier, sillier, and more of a fun-times guy. Any MCU fan would find those panels quite contrary to the Tony Stark you know:

Iron Man 1

Iron Man 2

I think I would say that while MCU Tony sees himself and the Iron Man identity and the  armor as all being inextricably connected, we see a bit more compartmentalization with 616 Tony, who pretends that the armor is a whole separate person for years when his identity was private, and we see instances in older and newer comics, in which Tony  is uncomfortable with some aspect of himself as Iron Man (for instance, during the second drinking arc, Tony temporarily swears off being Iron Man entirely, or for another example, when Tony is in a comma and Tony AI exists during Secret Empire, Tony “lives” in the Iron Man suit, and I think this could be interpreted as a meta parallel to Steve during this arc; Steve has had some core aspect of his character inverted, Captain America becoming Captain Hydra, so Tony experiences a similar inversion-- Tony Stark and Iron Man are forcibly merged, in a way that Tony seems deeply uncomfortable with, if his digital drinking relapse is any indication. But I digress; sorry for the tangent.)

Okay this post is inexcusable long, and very, very tangential, and I don’t feel like I’ve really covered everything I wanted to. But it has been sitting in my inbox for too long and if I don’t post it now I never will, so I hope this long, rambling thing has been a little bit helpful to you! Thank you so much for asking, I had a lot of fun rambling about this.

If you want to read a similar post, but well written and organized, with other insights, this post by Sineala answers a similar question!

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic  during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Dreamshaper

Dreamshaper has 54 stories at Gossamer. Her stories often feature Mulder and Scully exploring their feelings in ways you really, really wish you could’ve seen on the show. I’ve recced some of my favorites of her stories here before, including Found in Memory, Just By Existing, Purpose, and Promise. Big thanks to Dreamshaper for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

I'm not at all surprised people are still reading X-Files fanfic! There's a deep catalogue of good and interesting fiction there, and the X-Files still has cultural significance. And of course there were the recent seasons to bring it back to mind. I think if you had asked me in 2000, I might not have supposed that it had this kind of staying power. So now I'm thinking of this interview as a time capsule--what will my answer be in 2040?

My own fic was not designed to have staying power. If anyone is reading it now, bless them, they are kind and patient. I would only recommend probably reading the first and last things I posted just to see what kind of growth is possible. The first time I ever posted fic, someone told me to never write again. I was a teenager. I was crushed but I went on writing anyway, and I worked hard to improve.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I think of two things. As for the show itself, I still think of Mulder/Scully as the ultimate in romance. I can still picture certain moments from the episodes, from the movie. I look for pairings with tension that reminds me of theirs--an almost-regency level of UST, but with a modern element of danger.

As for the fandom itself, I grew up in it. My entire online life and the core of how I participate in fandom was formed here. I was 17 or so when I started writing and posting MSR. I was 18 or 19 when I started meeting fans in real life. I was fortunate enough to fall in with people who were equal parts gracious and nerdy, and while my own nerdiness is innate, I remember and emulate the kindness which was shown to me.

I have an entire side post to this question about how strongly I disagree with the current age stratification in fandom--this idea of not interacting across artificial age divides is tragic to me.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

ATXC, and mailing lists. I don't actually remember the names of all the mailing lists! I can picture myself sitting in my kitchen on my computer, and what the emails looked like--the font, the signature lines--but not the names. I can even remember specific conversations we had! One of them must have been Scullyfic, because I remember the first meetup being planned. Is that right? Was it the Scullyfic meetup? [Lilydale note: Probably was Scullyfic. There was a big email flurry when the first Scullyfic mailing list meetup was being planned.] My mind was absolutely blown by the idea of a fan con. Now I've led panels at a dozen of them.

I remember some of the arguments, too. It's funny that some of them are the same arguments I still see here and there, like whether or not criticism of a fanwork is valid. Real Person Fic being this unbelievably shameful thing you had to ask to be shown, and the doyennes of the fandom would have given you the cut direct at Almack's if they'd found out, you know?

This was also the era of AIM and ICQ. mIRC too, right? I spent a lot of time in channels. I absolutely loved when people started to be more open about themselves in chats. I was always so interested in how fandom fit into people's lives. Some people I talked to were moms, college students, people who had interesting careers, and they all just found ways to make fandom work for them. They had a need and were meeting it, despite the pressures of their offline life.

I don't know how to explain the impression that made on me, but--it normalized fandom. That seems obvious, maybe, but I hadn't known this was something you could integrate into your everyday life.

It also normalized the idea of women taking their own needs as primary, in a way that went beyond what I was exposed to in my home life, or through the feminism of the 1990s. There was this wild intersection of the--the domestic and intellectual life of women, and the playful life of women, just making itself known to me in a way I'd never seen before. That was enormous. Absolutely a foundational experience for me.

My experience was that ATXC and email lists were like, these surface-level interactions where people figured out, roughly, if your mind ran on a similar track to theirs, and then you were invited to make deeper relationships in more private corners of the internet. Social media filled both functions at once, I think, for a while. But the privacy was missing. I'm not surprised that Slack and Discord are starting to fill that private corner gap--everything old becomes new, etc.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

UST and monsters. This is still an unbeatable combination for me!

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I loved romance novels--I read so many of them. Somehow, before we even had a computer at home, I started to tell myself romance novel stories with Mulder and Scully as the lead characters. This was how I talked myself to sleep--I wasn't a good sleeper. Then when I got online and did whatever search led me to ATXC, I was just shocked. Shocked! Can't do the surprise justice, in this era where fanfic is relatively mainstream. Other people had also independently invented this thing I loved! But they wrote their ideas down! I jumped on the bandwagon immediately.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

It's like my relationship to my childhood, frankly. Foundational, but I don't think about it all that much on a daily basis, right? I smile and reblog gif sets. I get nostalgic. I get embarrassed by social mistakes I made. I feel the way many of us do about memories from our teenage years. I wouldn't be who I was without it, but I'm not still in it.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I was. I've spent 20 years in fandom! I did some beta work for someone who'd started writing slash--The Sentinel. The actual Sentinel, not just an endless loop of Sentinel AUs based on Sentinel AUs based on etc. I had some idea at the time that I was queer, but this was my first real exposure to romances that weren't straight. So I tore my way through the early 2000s slash fandoms as they developed: The Sentinel, Due South, Stargate Atlantis. Popslash, where a mix of good writing and absurdity ruled. Bandom, where I met my wife. Since then, many smaller fandoms.

It's hard to compare any of these things to each other, let alone to the X-Files. In each one, I was lucky enough to find a circle of women who were strong beta readers and good friends. I never wrote as much or for as long as I did in the X-Files.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I watched the new episodes. I've shown friends important episodes--I remember that a few years ago, another friend and I tried to hook a third friend on the show by binging some favorites--mostly shippy MOTW, so it was like, Arcadia, Triangle, Bad Blood. Fun stuff!

We finish watching and I'm like, well? And? And she says, that was fine, but I'm more of a man-pain, secret babies kind of person? I'll never forget it. She had no idea but she'd hit the nail on the head! We were wheezing with laughter. We went back and watched mytharc episodes, which was much less fun for me, but much more interesting to her.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I don't read X-Files fic often. I look at new things sometimes, and I've reread a few old classics, but my reading taste has changed so much. I still love straight romance, but it needs to be fast and sharp in a way that is hard to find.

I read fic in other fandoms when I have time. In the past few years, I've finished a degree, had a daughter, renovated a small Victorian and then sold it and bought another one during this pandemic--so time has been short. Currently I read some Untamed fic, some Good Omens fic, Magicians, Schitt's Creek...a sampler. Whatever friends are writing, whatever they recommend.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I never have a favorite of my own fics. I'm never satisfied. The second I post something, I'm always full of regrets. I've written fics that did very well and still hated them a month later. People have asked me over the years to move more of my stuff off Livejournal and onto ao3, but I do it really reluctantly and only by specific request. Everything's ephemeral! Let the old works diminish, and go into the West!

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

I have no oldies to dust off. I do periodically think of X-Files stories I would tell, but I don't have enough time for current interests--and so it goes.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I do. I was most recently writing in The Magicians fandom. I posted a couple new stories in an old fandom last year--I'd written Good Omens fic fifteen years ago, and then again for the Amazon adaptation. I have a pile of original novels in various stages of completion, but I'm never happy with them. One day I'll figure myself out, perhaps, or I'll just keep writing myself this and that and leaving it all in a drawer.

What's the story behind your pen name?

So AOL had a character limit for user names--I think it was 10. I was a teenager at the time I was coming up with the one I'd use for fandom, so I went with Dreamshaper. It was kind of literal, in the sense that I was going to share the stories I'd been telling myself to help me sleep. But the character limit meant I went with Dreamshpr, which I later liked because of the alternate reading of Dream*shipper*. A reminder to the younger fans that we were the original shippers!

I would also come up with new pen names when I wanted to experiment with a fic that didn't fit my usual style. I don't remember any of them. I probably did that a dozen times, so, sorry to those poor completely abandoned stories.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

Giddygeek on tumblr and ao3. I'm most active on twitter, but largely about my domestic life with dips into fandoms or original writing; message me on tumblr if you're an old friend who'd like to reconnect elsewhere.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Just gratitude--I'm so glad that I found people to share an obsession with, and that they were good people, at a time in my life where that made a significant difference to me. I don't know where I'd be now without my time and my growth in this fandom!

(Posted by Lilydale on December 22, 2020)

[deans-asscot]

LatAm Dub Voice Actor Panel: Translation/Transcript

Hello all, I have taken it upon myself to translate the panel with Guillermo (Memo) Rojas: Dean's LatAm Voice Actor. There is a lot of confusion and I think it's best if you read for yourself to come to your own conclusions. The translator in the panel failed to translate important things and also added in her own opinions/interpretations. I also think there were times when they were talking about different things. I don't blame her, because I'm sure she was nervous/excited and live translating is hard! I would like to thank her for doing  the panel and trying to get us answers! I have added my own opinions/notes in red. I have included some time stamps so you can follow along in the video. I tried to focus on all the important parts regarding the dubbing and also useful background info. Please note that everything is translated by me except for the Translator's own translations, I left those in English as she said it. I apologize if there are any mistakes, I did my best.

[9:54]

Memo: I got covid in the last two... I don’t remember if I got it during.. uh, during.. the last episode of the season or during the special or during both. I have doubts, cuz I still haven’t recorded them. I have to record them from what I understand.

[Translator translates]

[10:37]

Translator: [Spanish] We’re going to start with the easy questions. Because there’s one... I’m not sure if you know but you guys in the Mexican dub broke the internet. 

Memo: Yes

Translator: [Spanish] Oh, you already know?

Memo: Yeah, sorry to interrupt you. A lot of people reached out to me and I feel bad not being able to, broadly speaking, answer all of their questions. But I was in the middle of my covid situation and a tracheal situation where I couldn’t talk without choking. Now I’m working in therapy with this situation. And if that wasn’t complicated enough it seems like I have 2 sequels: one is confirmed the 2nd not yet. So I couldn’t respond to EVERYone that was reaching out to me on the internet. From various means, from Insta, Facebook, Youtube. Actually a very old channel that I’ve never used. With respect to the situation with Dean and the other guy.

[11:49]

Translator: [Spanish] How different is the process between directing for live action and directing for animation? And which do you prefer?

Memo: Okay, so what’s the difference between one and the other: basically, you can say that it’s a little similar. Because we’re talking about a certain quality that we have to respect or give, in this case. There are guidelines [interrupted by Translator] that we have to follow.

[12:10]

Translator: [translates] It’s very similar because we have to give the same quality in both senses. There is a process that we have to follow.

Memo: Yes, correct. Now the guidelines are usually given to us by the production company, in this case, what we call the client.

Translator: [translates] The lines are given by the producer house or what we call the client.

[12:31]

Memo: In this case, so we have to stick to the guidelines that they ask for. The ones which go hand in hand in regards to the production that is being worked.

Translator: [translates] We have to follow the rules. Which go hand in hand with the kind of production we are doing, either animation or live action.

Memo: Yes, actually, saying that both are the same would be lying to you. Because we could have 2 live actions and they’re not the same. Guidelines: there are basic technical points to follow but when it comes to acting and theatrical production, they change.

[13:03]

Translator: [translates] I would be lying to say they are the same because if you  have two different live actions they are going to have different procedures. So when you are acting them that is when the change come in.

Memo: The greatest difference I could tell you would be the technical points to follow in each of them. And for the acting part, in this case, it would be to give 100% from each and every one of us.

Translator: [translates] and uh, in the technical those are the differences but in the acting sense I can tell you that  the important thing is to give 100% every single time.

[...talk about other acting jobs...]

[17:42]

Memo: [Talking about the show 911] I don’t think there’s a piece that I enjoyed more watching being dubbed by a translator and directed by Fogatry. Who has an amazing gift to not only direct but also adapt dialogues. And there has been great synergy working on this series and others that he has done me the favor of supporting me as an actor to give me roles. And that I enjoy doing a lot. Not only his directing but also... I don’t know we have a certain synergy so he can direct me and I can act how he indicates and he makes me feel it, you know? It’s... it’s something interesting.

Translator: [translates] It is one of the series I most enjoy as... I also  enjoy to be directed by Fogarty because of special synergy. He makes me feel the characters better so we work very well when he directs me.

Memo: Yes, I sincerely love working with him.

[...talks about voice acting...]

[19:51]

Translator: [Spanish] Well now that you already mentioned the guidelines, and I mentioned in the beginning: comes the big questions. What were the guidelines in that final line in Supernatural that broke the internet?

Memo: Its a curious thing because... because I don’t even think the director nor the translators had any idea of the tendency (inclination) that existed. Because there wasn’t information that said previously that something like that could happen.

Translator: [translates] It is very funny because neither the director nor I had any idea of what was coming. We didn’t know that something like that could happen.

[...talks about his birthday and eating cake...]

[20:52]

Memo: Yes, so uh, being honest, when we recorded it, it was very like, “blink blink (squints)” [takes off glasses and looks confused] “What’s going on? What’s happening?” But, we did it, you know? But none of us in the production team saw anything in him during filming that would say something like that.

Translator: [translates] When we saw it, it was like a blinking moment and we did it. But at the time we never thought that it would happen./ [Spanish] And here I have to ask for clarification. Because obviously we are referring to the fact that Castiel confessed to Dean after ...12 years... of intense stares. [Memo laughs] But the main question is Dean’s response. Because everyone heard, in your voice, very clearly “y yo a ti” (and I, you).

Memo: [same time] “Y yo a ti” (and I, you).

Translator: [Spanish] where did that “Y yo a ti” (and I, you) come from? Was it in the script? Was it you? What happened there?

[21:50]

Memo: The adaptation was completely from my director. And the guidelines for acting came from him and I did what he asked me to do.

Translator: [translates] Everything was...okay everybody I asked about “and I you” I know that Tumblr was waiting for this moment. And he says, everything came from the director. He adapted it, he gave me the guidelines. It was his fault.

(Note: Memo only knows what his director told him. Adaptation = edited translated script for lip synch etc.)

[others laugh]

[22:16]

Memo: But we all love him. We all loved it. We never saw it coming so directly.

Translator: [translates] But everybody loved it everybody wanted it at the end. We didn’t see it coming so directly but it was great.

[22:28]

Memo: If we remember correctly, from the length of all of Supernatural we rarely see a situation where Dean is seen being involved with a woman. It didn’t happen. Unlike his brother.

Translator: [translates] If we remember all the seasons of Supernatural, we never saw Dean romantically involved with a woman unlike his brother./ [Spanish] Here I will just correct you as a fan, it did happen a few times but it was before your times. (He started voicing Dean after season 12.)

[22:52]

Memo: Yes, it was before my time but it was never more than a general empathy.

Translator: [translates] Yeah it was before me but it was never farther than a general empathy.

Memo: He was never involved. Neither directly nor [cut off]

Translator: [translates] He was never involved, not completely.

Memo: It wasn’t his thing, right?

Translator: [translates] It wasn’t his.

[23:10]

Memo: Especially, because we can compare him with his brother.

Translator: [translates] Especially because we can compare him with his brother.

Memo: We remember the last relationship he had in the last 2 season.

Translator: [translates] We remember his relationship that he had in the last 2 seasons./ Uh, Eileen, the deaf woman.

Memo: Exactly, with Eileen, that was really intense. And [gets cut off] at the end.

Translator: [translates] Was very tense and painful at the end.

[23:33]

Memo: Dean basically didn’t suffer that. Like for me, to a certain point they tied him more emotionally with the fact that he lost his mother...more than once.

Translator: [translates] With Dean, he didn’t suffer what Sam did, because he was emotionally more tied with the fact that he lost his mom more than once.

Memo: Yeah, so uh [gets cut off]

Translator: [Spanish] We have a question. So  it’s not a “rogue translator”, it’s a “rogue director”? Says [asker’s name].

Memo: uh... yeah yeah, I’m seeing it [the comment] yeah [laughs] Look, Fogarty has a tendency... Fogarty has really intense abilities. [gets cut off]

Translator: [translates] Fogarty has an intense ability.

Memo: Yeah and one of them is adapting the dialogues.

Translator: [translates] And one of them is to adapt dialogue.

[24:16]

Memo: When you see a piece that Fogarty translates and he manages to adapt when he has time to do it, even if he won’t direct it, and he’ll leave it for you in Spanish.

Translator: [translates] You see a work by Fogarty when he is going to translate even if he is not going to direct and he leaves it in Spanish.

Memo: So, the dialogue goes like this, if I remember correctly, it said “tambien yo (me too)” or it said something like that.

Translator: [translates] The dialogue said, if I remember correctly, “tambien yo” “and so do I”. If I remember correctly.

Memo: Exactly. And then we changed it to “Y yo a ti” (And I, you).

Translator: [translates] And then we changed it into “Y yo a ti” “and I, you”.

Memo: For the effect of lip syncing, rhythm, and more things.

Translator: [translates] Because of the formation of lip vowels and other things./ Before you came in I explained it as a translator. My absolute hate for the lip... [Spanish] my hate for the lip syncing.

[25:12]

Memo: [laughs] Yeah, it’s an impressive topic to discuss. Now a days with the speed of production that we have it’s difficult to give attention to that part. Which we should, that much is very clear to me of course. But not all of us have the ability that Fogarty has in that sense specifically. We don’t have the speed that Fogarty has to adapt like that [snaps fingers](to adapt fast).

Translator: [translates] Uh, we don’t have the time now a days to do it, we should but we can’t. But we don’t have all the...brain cells and the speed that Fogarty has to make those changes.

Memo: We all have different abilities. And when we work together, but well not everyone pitches in all of the different abilities that they have, and Fogarty does his part.

Translator: [translates] we all have different skills and when we work together we all put all job there, and Fogarty does his part.

Memo: We all need a Fogarty in every company.

Translator: [translates] [laughs] We need a Fogarty in every, in every enterprise... in every company./ [Spanish] I have to make a pause cuz you saw my cat pass by...

[...talks about her cat hating Sam...]

[...redirected to comments...]

[27:35]

Translator: [reads comment in English] They are asking a lot about if you know what Dean said in the original English Script before Fogarty got his hands on it. [translates to Spanish] If you know what was on the original script before Fogarty changed it?

Memo: Again. What? [Did not hear/or did not understand the question]

Translator: [Spanish] If you know what the original script said. What it said originally.

[28:00]

Memo: Yes, If I remember correctly... yeah, yeah, it was... it was something allusive, WOW, it was totally correct of course. [get’s cut off]

Translator: [translates] it was uh...

Memo: “y tambien yo” (and me too) or “tambien yo a ti” (And I, you as well) it said something like that. [gets cut off] (so its difficult to understand what he says next but sounds like “unmistakable, unmistakable”)

Translator: [Spanish] Ladies, the original script said “yo tambien” (me too) okay so [name] asks if you listened to the original while dubbing?

Memo: Yes, of course.

(NOTE: I think for Memo, the “original script” was the first Spanish draft before they adjusted/adapted for lip synch and what not.)

Translator: [Spanish] No. Say that (unclear) [laughs] yeah

[28:30]

Memo: No, immediately I would’ve been like [takes off glasses and leans in] “What?”

Translator: [Spanish] Yeah, yeah. What happens is that. Supernatural has a very intense, very loyal fandom. As you can see now [points to the comments] so it’s been uh...which the change brings the big question [gets cut off]

Memo: [reading comment in English] Someone translate it! [laughs]

Translator: [Spanish] What was your favorite episode to dub for Supernatural?

Memo: With my short term memory, this last  episode.

Translator: [translates] So I asked him which one was his favorite Supernatural uh Episode to dub and he said that with his short term memory, the last one

Memo: It’s cuz, it says a lot, it says a lot.

Translator: [translates] It says a lot.

[29:19]

Memo: It says a lot. In one scene it says everything.

Translator: [translates] In a scene it says it all.

Memo: So it’s very impressive, it’s really nice. I never... I never saw it coming. Never saw it coming.

Translator: [translates] I never saw it coming. But it was beautiful.

Memo: Yeah, yeah

[...talks about breaking Tumblr, Dean finally getting a dog, Memo watching Supernatural...]

[31:40]

Translator: [Spanish] Once more, you broke the internet. And they’re asking: if the original script said something in regards to Dean’s feelings for Cas, [Memo says “no”] or was it all added in by the director Fogarty?

[31:54]

Memo: no, no, no. Actually the original booklet that we had never had any indication that told you that he was in love or that he reciprocates the love and that they knew. No. Nothing. Really, that phrase was what topped off the entire series.

(NOTE: I think Memo is talking about the first Spanish script he saw and all the previous scripts, saying he saw no indication UNTIL that one line.)

Translator: [translates] Okay guys. I’m going to go slow with this so it’s put to rest. No. The original did not say it. It was not... stated clear. With the last phrase was what concealed the whole series. The whole thing.

Memo: None of us saw it coming.

Translator: [translates] No one saw it coming.

Memo: No.

Translator: [translates] No one saw it coming but... it was the director adding it because that was what made sense. (NOTE: Memo never said this part about the director!!!)

[32:46]

Memo: Actually, when they started to bombard me with a bunch of questions on the internet, I started to investigate what happened, right? And yeah, I saw clearly, how the director and the writer decided to take a very hidden tendency with respect to them both. In various scenes, in very, very simple dialogues. In which they made that like allusion that they both had feelings for one another. But it was so, so faint that almost no one noticed it.

(NOTE: I think Memo is referring to the English writers/directors and the questions people asked him were in regards to being surprised that Dean reciprocates.)

Translator: [translates] He is saying that uh what the director... the dubbing director saw that... the director in English were creating this love story but it was so subtle and so “tenue (faint/dim)”... so discrete that no one saw it coming./ Which brings us to the fact that yes, this man is a heller.

[33:41]

Memo: I think that it’s clear to all of us that the fact that it broke the internet with this information, it was a surprise for absolutely everyone. Because well, we would all say, right, that if you want to be a real man, you gotta be like Dean.

(NOTE: I think Memo thinks that people were shocked Dean reciprocated because everyone views him as a manly man. I don’t think Memo is referring to the English/Spanish dubbing differences.)

Translator: [translates] I think that with the great effect.../ hold on [Spanish] You are going to break the internet again with this.[laughs] [translates] Okay I think that we... have to see this is... that how we can because after all everybody says that if you want to be a real man you have to be like Dean Winchester./ And Dean Winchester is in love with Castiel. [laughs]

[34:35]

Memo: And to me... it’s... actually it’s something really beautiful for me. Because it doesn’t have to do with gender it has to do with the feelings. And it... it was a marvelous play made by the writers. Marvelous. Marvelous. You didn’t see it coming. And look at that, you liked it.

Translators: [translates] I believe... that it’s very beautiful it was a play by the original writers, by the American workers, that you didn’t see coming but when you see it, you like it. And you end up loving it.

Memo: Yeah

Translator: [reads comments in Spanish] Um, we have 2 questions. One is from [name] that asks if something got left out of the translation?...

Memo: No.

Translator: [Spanish] No, nothing. [translates] Nothing was out of the translation. [Spanish] And the other is that they ask if they ever called you back to rerecord that “Y yo a ti” (and I, you)?

Memo: No.

Translator: [translates] No./ The “Y yo a ti” isn’t going to be redubbed people, calm down.

Memo: [laughs] No

Translator: [English] He was not called to remake the dubbing.

Memo: No... no, no, no. It’s clear to me that my director understood perfectly the context of that text.

Translator: [translates] It is very clear that the director understood perfectly the texture of this text./ [Spanish] I have a question. From experience, because at one point I got to dub, I got to translate, dub some lines, not that controversial... but very complicated that the client returned it. The client, when he heard it he said, “No, we can’t do this” Okay the line was, you’re gunna see why they returned it: “I’ve listened to jazz since I was a sperm in my father’s testicle.”

Memo: Okay [laughs]

Translator: [Spanish] So... so the client told us, “No, change it.”

Memo: What did the original say?

Translator: [Spanish]  That’s what the original said!

Memo: [English] So, what?

Translator: [Spanish] It was in Japanese, but that’s what the original said. Uh but since it was for “kids” because it was anime, they returned it.

Memo: Ohh, okay, okay, okay. Maybe they asked you to smooth it over like “I’ve listened to jazz since before I was born” and that’s it.

Translator: [Spanish] Exactly. So my question is do you know if Supernatural has a quality control from Warner?

[36:52]

Memo: I would be lying if I said yes. But I have worked with Warner for a long time as an actor and director. And some very specific works like superhero type and things like that might have a filter like that. But series like Supernatural... I honestly doubt it. I think that the delegations and decisions on these situations would be totally up to the director.

Translator: [translates] Okay, so I asked him if there was quality control for Supernatural in specific and Memo tells me that he doesn’t believe so./ [Spanish] Okay, now comes the big questions cuz you broke the internet. [looks at comments] um, these are going really fast, ladies. Two people ask if you acted Dean as someone who was always in love with Castiel this whole time or did it surprise you  too?

[37:46]

Memo: No. Never. Same (also surprised).

Translator: [translates] No, it was a surprise.

Memo: Actually, I’m going to be very sincere with you guys. For me, Saying to a friend I care a lot about... to someone I care a lot about... to someone of the same gender, I tell them “Te amo (I love you).” I don’t have a problem with that.

Translator: [translates] I’m going to be very truthful with you. If I have a friend, a very close friend of my same gender I will tell him “Te amo” (I love you) and I don’t have any problems.

Memo: So, I felt it in that way. Honestly.

Translator: [translates] I felt it for that side./ [Spanish] And then you found out that no. (In regards to it not happening in English).

Memo: uh huh, exactly [laughs] “Hey, what happened?” [jokes]

[...talks about Jensen on The Boys, using Facebook...]

[40:42]

Translator: [reads comment in Spanish] Guillermo, what’s your opinion, now with all that you know, about the relationship that Dean has with Cas?

Memo: Okay, it was a revelation for everyone. Including me.

Translator: [translates] It was a revelation, first.

Memo: I love how they did it. Because nobody saw it coming. Not even us, who record it.

Translator: [translates] I love him.. I love how it.. how it come cuz no one saw it coming, not even we that we are recording it.

Memo: And I think that with all the personality and the psychology that we have of the character, we can reason that if someone knows how to hold back their feelings, it’s Dean Winchester.

Translator: [translates] And we can tell by the psychology of the character that if there was someone that knew how to keep his feelings at bay, was Dean Winchester.

[... talk about co-star, deep voice, and Memo not seeing the finale yet until he records it...]

[...he’s asked to say “Hello, Cas” in Dean’s voice if Cas were to return from the Empty...]

[44:40]

Memo: Oh, It’s assumed that I told him I loved him too, as long as he didn’t come back! [jokes]

[...talk about his ideal finale of a peaceful happy ending for TFW...]

(In conclusion I don’t think Memo saw the original English script. And to him the “original script” is the first Spanish draft before they adjust for lip synchs. He thinks his director is great and did his job correctly. Memo’s shock was in Dean being in love with Cas (not necessarily the dubbing discrepancies) but he understood why it happened once he researched and saw all the hidden allusions left by the writers. I don’t think adding “rogue director” to the discourse is helpful because I don’t think Memo knows either. Here is a link to the director’s dubbing fandom page (it’s in Spanish): Adrian Fogarty.)

[adrenalineguide]

Jeep Wrangler Sport S and Mustang 2.3L Convertible: Two Fours for Summer Fun

Words and Photos By Michael Hozjan

No I’m not talking about cases of beer. I’m referring to the number of cylinders found under the hood of two American icons in the automotive landscape – the Jeep Wrangler and Mustang. Don’t scoff, four cylinders have been making a huge come back in recent years and no, these are not your grand dad’s four cylinders. Both the Jeep and the Mustang rely on turbocharging to get the extra oomph when needed all while delivering below average thirst numbers compared to their V6 and V8 counterparts. Let’s face it do we really need all that horsepower all the time and isn’t it nice to save some bucks at the pump.

Jeep Wrangler Sport: Back to its roots

“There’s something amiss here.” I tell myself as the engine comes to life. I hit the off button and check for the glow plug light, there isn’t one. For some reason the engine doesn’t sound the same, and yet there’s something eerily familiar about the sound.  I mistakenly expected the Wrangler to be diesel powered, which it was not. The diesel mill is offered in the Gladiator that I was due to drive, but at a later date. Blame it on old age or just on my eagerness to get behind the wheel of one of my favorite rides.    

Well one thing lead to another and another and before I knew it, it was several days later that I popped the hood to gaze upon the turbocharged inline 2.0L four cylinder. THAT’S what the sound was… somehow, the engineers at Jeep have managed to get the sound of the old familiar World War II era four cylinder Jeep into this modern, 80th anniversary edition Wrangler…or maybe it’s just me. One thing is certain, it doesn’t sound like the Wrangler I’ve been accustomed to.

Maybe it’s just coincidence, maybe it’s good corporate planning, with Jeep’s closest off-road capable rival, the Ford Bronco making its debut this year, Jeep has stepped up the ante, not only have they launched the Wrangler Xtreme Recon equipped with the first ever 35-inch rubber straight out of the factory, but are also offering a slew of powerplants to make any competitor nervous: beginning with this week’s tester, there’s the 2.0 L turbocharged four cylinder mated to the 8-speed TorqueFlite automatic, the trusty old 285 horsepower Pentastar 3.6L V6s remain and come with either a manual or automatic trans, there’s also a mild hybrid version mated to the 3.6L tagged the eTorque, a 3.0L EcoDiesel V6 with 442 lb-ft of torque and 260 horses and for the first time in four decades, the Wrangler gets a V8. Available exclusively (dare I say for the time being) in the Rubicon 392 trim, the 6.4L throws out 470 horses and the like amount of torque through the eight-speed TorqueFlite automatic transmission and Selec-Trac full-time active transfer case.  It blasts the Rubicon 392 to 100 km/h in less than five seconds making it the quickest Wrangler in history!

Well it appears the Jeep has come full circle with their mills, reverting back to four cylinder power to move their off roaders about. But don’t think for a minute that these are the old WWII flatheads. No sir, and not one but two count them, two four cylinders are offered. Aside from my Snazzyberry Pearl colored 2.0L turbocharged tester which pumps out 270 horses and 295 lb-ft of torque, capable of towing 2,000 lbs (907 kilos), that’s 35 more lb-ft of torque than its V6 counterpart, there’s also an electrified four cylinder that adds an electric motor. The plug in hybrid 4xe delivers 375 horses!  Stay tuned for more on this one.

Above and below: There’s nothing missing in the four that you wouldn’t find in the six.

If you’re a regular reader of my posts you’ll know that I do NOT check performance numbers or price tags before I get a feel for what the vehicle feels like. Does it feel like 300 horses, does it feel like 400 lb-ft of torque? I tend to reserve looking at the stats until after my first, second and third impression. That said, despite having 270 horses, it still seemed a bit anemic from my previous Wrangler encounters (with the V6). There’s a noticeable difference at half throttle when leaving a red light or stop sign, but that quickly disappears as you build up speed. Punch the go pedal however to wake up the turbo boost and grab on to the steering wheel. The torque kicks in and bites the tarmac like a banshee. Suddenly Jeeps decision to go with this combo makes perfect sense.

On the highway the four delivers smooth, linear power and actually feels better mated to the 8-speed automatic than the six. Passing semis or climbing grades isn’t a problem and while I didn’t get the chance to go off-roading I suspect that the added torque would be able to let this Wrangler do some serious climbing prowess without hesitation.

Of course one of the other main attributes is that the Wrangler can shed its top when the weather turns warm. With two tops available it still remains the only convertible SUV in the market.

Above: A hidden cubby hole under the trunk floor comes in handy

One of the Wrangler’s Achilles’ heals has always been it’s thirst for fuel. My best has usually been around 12L/100 kms even when feathering my foot. Well the 2.0L netted me a 9.75L/100 average, on top of which a $200 saving over the automatic trannied V6 makes getting into a Wrangler a lot easier. The Sport S starts at $45,465, my fully loaded tester came in at a substantial premium, which leads me to want to see this mill in the 2-door Wrangler variant with a manual transmission. Now that would truly be full circle. If you’ve always wanted a Wrangler but weren’t crazy about their fuel consumption Jeep has just given you several reasons why you should reconsider.

Price as tested: $62,030 *

*Includes excise tax and destination fees

Mustang 2.3L Convertible: Is this the best Mustang ever?

It’s a balmy July afternoon, the kind we wait all year long for and fantasize about from December through to March. I’m in the left lane of the 401 heading west, passing semi after semi. The sun is beaming down on me and I get to thinking how nice this thing would be for a cross-country run. Indeed it doesn’t get much better than this. There are so many semis it reminds me of the rocking chair scene in The Bandit, only I’m not driving a T-top black Firebird with a roaring V8 and Sheriff Buford T Justice chasing me, but a drop top Antimatter Blue (yes that’s the hue) Mustang with a turbocharged 2.3L four cylinder.  

For decades Ford has been grappling with the notion of having both a high performance Mustang and an economy Mustang, and yes when it first debuted there were trims that encompassed both. But over the years that concept got lost with muscle cars taking the limelight. It wasn’t until the gas crisis of ’73 that the economy car resurrected itself in the Mustang II, but in the process lost the muscle slice of the pie.

Well guess what, the 2.3L fits both bills easily. Yes diehard muscle heads may pooh pooh the thought of another four cylinder in a Mustang but they have no idea what they’re missing out on.

Pillaged from the darling all-wheel-drive Ford, the Focus RS, the 2.3L mill has been turned longitudinally to fit into the pony car. Although Ford has given the Mustang a larger twin scroll turbo, there are 18 fewer horses pulling the pony car over the RS. Torque however has been retained.  

With 310 horses and 350 lb-ft of torque on tap mated to an optional 10-speed automatic my tester galloped along without so much as missing a breadth. Thankfully Ford has retained the 6-speed manual. My unofficial timing showed zero to a hundred kilometers shot in at 4.6 seconds!  I have to say that as sweet as the four cylinder is, the exhaust note just tries to hard and gets annoying after a while.  It’s like look at me, look at me. Oh shut up! Thankfully there is a shut off switch.

My ‘stang came with the High Performance Package, a $6,500 option inherited from the Mustang GT, which meant stickier 19” Pirelli rubber over the base car’s 17” units, larger brake rotors with four piston calipers, stiffer springs, a beefier rear sway bar, strut tower brace, a larger rad, a 3.55:1 limited slip diff. In other words, all the right stuff to make this a serious tourer.    

Above and below: Top up or top down the Mustang looks great. Front spoiler is part of the High  Performance Package.

Another plus for the four-cylinder argument is better balanced shedding 147kilos (auto trans) off its front axle. The result is a crisper handling ride with a nominal amount of body roll, less nosedive under hard braking. Switching driving modes from Normal to Sport mode for attacking the lakeside twisties shows the car’s true potential with the engine’s responsiveness hitting the sweet spot over 2,500 rpm and the fun factor sans V8.  

This would make an interesting track car.

Inside you get all the usual fan fare of goodies including cooling and heated power leather seats.  The hi-po package adds an oil pressure and turbo boost gauge and engine spun aluminum instrument panel. Fit and finish is spot on with comfortable buckets making the drive that much more enjoyable.

Above: Despite what it looks like my 6’ frame spent several hours back there in a friend’s convert for a three-hour trip to the Syracuse Nationals a few years back without a single complaint.

Like the Jeep the Mustang doesn’t come cheap. While the base price is a very reasonable $43,370, my tester’s option list added another $11,800 to the price tag. Stepping up to the $6,500 high performance package is a no brainer, especially if you’re a serious driver, but while the 10-speed is perfectly matched to the engine and responds wonderfully to throttle inputs I’d go with the 6-speed manual and trim $1,750 off the tag. Other options included $1,000 AM/FM/CD/HD radio, $2,300 for adaptive cruise, voice activated touch screen navigation and the Ford Safe & Smart package.

In a move I just don’t understand is the spare tire/wheel has been relegated to option status! In its place is a compressor - just the ticket for a bent rim, blow out or flat in the middle of nowhere on a dark rainy night. Come on Ford!

Yes the Mustang buyer has a number of trims and powerplants to opt for all the way to the 100 grand Shelby GT500 but really, wouldn’t you rather have a car that hits all the right fun buttons without breaking the bank while still passing a gas station or two ( I averaged 10.7L/100 km). Oh and let’s not forget the savings on the insurance premium on the four cylinder So shrug the V8 monkey off your back and hit the road in a four.

Price as tested:  $56,970*

*Includes destination charges

[popculturebuffet]

Paul Dini’s Jingle Belle: “Sanity Clauses” review or Santa’s Court Ordered Family Therapy Holiday Special

Merry Christmas everyone! I”m finally back on the reviewing reindeer after a week out with a cold, aside from the usual ducktales review, and it’s once again a comission from friend of the blog and the only guy who pays me for reviews weirdkev27. If you have your own holliday hyjinks you’d like me to review I do reviews of television and comics for 5 dollars an episode/issue, wtih variable prices for trades in comics case depending on length. Hit me up via my dm’s here on tumblr or send me an ask for my discord if you want to know more. WIth that plug out of the way away we go.  This one was a bit unusual... in that when Kev bought it up I assumed he was going to buy a few issues of Jingle Belle, Paul Dini’s creator owned character we’re talking about today, and just have me review those. What I didn’t realize is he was buying me the full package, a collection of pretty much every jingle belle tale, as well as the released after it “Handmade’s Tale”. one shot. So yeah, while I had’nt really thought of rules for this kind of thing before from now on your free to buy a work for me to review... just keep in mind i’ts both not required for me to review something, and will not wave the commission fee as I use those fees to pay bills, buy things I need like charger cables, and just generally keep my bank account afloat while I look for a day job. 

But... since I hadn’t firmly established any of this yet, and since Kev’s gift means a bunch more commissions from a guy who not only made sure I could afford Christmas, but who has provided me steady work while i’m out of work... this one’s on the house.  So with all the jargon settled, who is Jingle Belle? Jingle Belle is an indie comics character created and owned by Paul Dini in 1998. Paul Dini is an animation god, who thanks to this review I know more about his career than I did before and as much as I always should have. Dini got his start in the 80′s, writing for everything from He Man to Gary Coleman Adventures, before getting called up to the big leagues for Tiny Tune Adventures around the time of the animation renaissance. To my shock, as  I wasn’t aware he wrote for that fine program, he wrote 35 episodes including my personal favorite Prom-ise her Anything.  But while a talented comedy writer, his main talent would show when he moved on to Batman the Animated Series as a writer and story editor. He was one of the main creative forces along with Bruce Timm, with the two going on to make the DCAU, aka some of the best superhero shows ever made, after already making easily one of if not THE best with BTAS. And Timm’s influence showed, Co-Creating Harley Quinn with Timm, and writing the series best episode Heart of Ice, which reworked Mr Freeze from a hoaky silver age villian into the tragic and thoroughly sympathetic character he’s been since that episode. Seriously that’s another one to add to the review pile.. which is giant and sentient at this point. And seriously EVERY episode on his imdb page credits is an utter classic and one I remember fondly. The guy is one of the most talented and seemingly nicest guys in the business and both the world of batman and the world of animation owe him a LOT.  So to my surprise, I found out in the 2000′s he had a comic, Jingle Belle.. then for whatever reason just never dug into it till now. But now post digging Jingle Belle is Paul Dini’s long running series of one shots and series at various companies following the adventures of Santa’s rebellious teenage-ish daughter.. techincally she’s in the 200′s but still looks and acts like a teenager. The idea came about when he got a christmas card from Stephen Speilberg, and wondered how the kids of famous folks dealt with that and if they resented their famous fathers. And whose more famous than santa?. The series spins both out of that brilliant idea and out of Dini’s love for sunday comic strips, back when the panels were larger and creators were given more freedom to go nuts, though even today i’ve seen plenty of great stuff so it’s not all lost pauly.  So in that spirit rather than one long ongoing Jingle Belle is instead a series of one shots, stories in anthologies and what have you, one and done stories more focused on the comedy. The comic has bounced around from various publishers, starting as something pitched to Oni Press, home of Scott Pilgrim and not much else, and has bounced around various publishers since, most recently ending up at IDW, where the trade i’m reading from comes from. So how does a great concept from one of the world’s most creative minds shake out? Let’s unwrap this present and find out. 

We open with an appropriately christmasy rhymey opening as we get the story of Jingle Belle: She’s the daughter of santa claus and mrs. claus, in this case the Queen of the Elves. Which isn’t established until the next story but whatever. And as you’d expect she grew up a cheery, rosey little girl who loved helpiing dad in the workshop.. then everything changed when puberty attacked. 

As you can see Jingle is now your standard Bratty Teenage Daughter sterotype. At least in this story. See this initial story feels much like a pilot: It’s clear things aren’t ironed out 100% for the idea, and i’ts more a self contained way to get across the general idea, that being Santa has a rebellious teen daughter, via what comes off as an snl skit in comic book form. THat’s not an insult, it’s a GOOD snl skit, and I am genuinely surprised only one movie company’s attempted adapting this comic: the concept is great. I’m just letting you know what i’m working with is all. 

So naturally as a high concept comedy skit, Jing soon, after sharing some cigarettes with the local eskmo boys and accidently lighting her Reindeer’s butt on fire and wrecking her sleigh and some surrounding property, Santa is at his witt’s end and we end up in family therapy. And honestly.. Santa in a family therapists office is a great concept. IT’s why I compare it to a sketch: It’s just a simple one line proposal that’s really damn funny and really damn eye catching. It’s often REALLY hard to get a good santa parody going, so I admire how well he pulled it off here.  But what really centers it is Jing giving her side, making her a bit more than the mostly one dimensional bratty rebellious daughter she’s been pegged as. Oh sure tha’ts still mostly what she is here, I’ll leave it to later stories to flesh her out hopefully, but she gives vallid reasons WHY she acts out: She points out no one even knew Santa had a daughter, and she has no songs or specials or any of that about her. The most Santa can offer up is “Jingle Bells” because the boys say “jingle all the way”... which really, especially in 2020, just makes HIM come off worse for not only slut shaming his daughter, but that the best defense he can offer is “Well some local boys talk about how you boned them that counts right?”. 

That.. poorly aged joke aside Jingle brings up another good point on how sh’es on his shit list.. errr.. naughty list. Still a good gag. And yeah the therapist is understandably surprised Santa dosen’t give his own daughter presents, though his wife does give a valid counter to that: He has to hold a higher standard than anybody. 

And that’s why I’m really intrigued by this concept and want to read more: WE have plenty of stories about Santa’s kids, i’ll grant, from him adopting a kid like in elf, to him passing on the legacy with films like Arthur Christmas and Fred Claus, or even just films about his legacy, like the Santa Claus, aka that time Santa died and his clothes forced Tim Allen into a job he dosen’t want with weight and beard gain he didn’t ask for via yuletide mummy’s curse to become the new santa and nearly loose custody of his child. What i’m saying is the concept is inherently fascinating and The Santa Clause is deeply terrifying if you stop to think about it for two seconds.. as is the sequel what with it’s Nazi Robot Santa Claus Tim Allen. Yes really. 

But this one’s unique in that it’s not about the legacy. Oh sure Santa tries to get Jing interested, and his last attempte wound up with them having to take the bus, another great gag and i’m glossing over most because this is a very funny little comic, but the main focus is more on what kind of pressure that puts on a kid: wouldn’t you rebel too if your parents wanted you to be perfect and to follow in the family business of being basically a perfect human being? Jing herself sums it up perfectly towards the end of the story. 

Granted after a tearful hug, Jing internally says “that new snowboard is mine.. but i’ts hard not to feel that a godo chunk of this is genuine. Sure she’s playing her parents a bit but.. you’d crack too if your dad was freaking Santa. I’m really intrigued to see where this goes both comedically and character stuff wise. 

So we end on another christmasy narration bit as Belle plays good for a while, snapping only when it docent seem like she gets her snowboard. A comedy ending and an eh one. Not the best honeslty, I feel the comci would’ve been better ended just at the snowboard is mine bit, but i’ve seen worse. 

Final Thoughts: A really good story. WHile it’s rough around the edges, clearly Dini and others have buffed them out over two decades, and i’m really intrigued to see more of this this holiday season and others. Again some parts, mostly playing Jing being sexually liberated for “OH HAW HAW SHE’S A SLUT” laughs is cringe inducing, but most of the jokes have aged well and for a pilot it’s not bad. I really look forward to reading more of the character and diving into her this season and beyond. 

Until then be good to one another, have a happy holidays and always remember: There's  always another rainbow. 

[katharkness]

Wayne’s Boys: Brad’s Dad Chapter 2

For @glumshoe

I’m not so happy with this chapter - I think I got a little too caught up in worldbuilding my WB’verse. I had been hoping to get further in the story, but the chapter was getting too long.

I’ve been...almost overwhelmed by the response to chapter one. I just fear chapter two won’t live up to it.

I have been asked if this is on AO3. No, it’s just on Tumblr. I’m keeping it separate for now because it’s not actually part on my WB canon. I may some day adapt it so it is, but I haven’t decided.

Please feel free to PM, reblog, etc.

Chapter 2

 The garage at Wayne Manor had one Ferrari, a limo, four more ordinary cars, and nearly a dozen motorbikes. All black.

“Bruce buys a new sports car every year, but he doesn’t drive them very often,” Helena explained as she and Brad piled into the back of Jason’s car. “He puts the old one up at the annual Independence Day Charity Auction. I believe Lex Luthor has bought at least four of them.”

“Why does he keep buying them if he doesn’t drive them?” Brad asked.

“Oh, it’s just that there’s never enough passenger seats,” Helena said. “I mean, today he’s got Tim and Dami with him, and there’s no back seats in the Ferrari.”

Brad nodded. Bruce must love having the latest flash car.

Jason muttered something in that other language, and Helena laughed without translating.

“So why has Bruce taken Tim and Damian with him to the Tower?” Brad asked. “Even if Damian’s a little young, he wouldn’t be left alone with you two around.”

Jason chuckled. “They get bored left at home all the time. They prefer to work in the Annexe.”

“Work, like, part-time jobs?” Brad frowned. “That’s a little…”

“Oh no, not really,” Helena shrugged. “B Inc. Tim puts a lot of work into R&D, but Dami usually has to ride herd to keep him on budget. And they do it because they want to.”

Brad tried thinking that through. Of course he knew Bruce was in some way involved with Batman, but to casually hear that a fifteen-year-old and eleven-year-old were working for the vigilantes…

“Why does Batman allow such young boys do that?”

Helena frowned. “Because the absolutely most important factor is trust. We all have proved our trustworthiness. That’s something you’ll need to understand. There’s things we can talk about, and things we really can’t – even when we’re not involved, we hear things. We know things. And if you hear things, or see things, you have to keep it to yourself. Even if it’s not B Inc stuff. There’s people who’ll try getting anything they can, and we don’t always get much privacy. It does mean a lot to us to have people we don’t have to be on guard around.”

Brad nodded. “I can be discreet. I hope I can prove worthy of your trust.”

Helena smiled. “That level of trust, that’s more important to us than blood.”

“Probably will want to test for blood relationship anyway,” Jason grunted. “Just to be on the safe side.”

“Didn’t Bruce do a paternity test on Dami?” Helena asked. “And he really is the spit of Bruce.”

“Think so,” Jason called. “I wasn’t around at the time. But then, you know Talia.”

Helena pulled a face. “I would gladly never meet her again.”

“Can’t blame you,” Jason muttered, and degenerated into foreign-language mumbles for a time.

“What is that language?” Brad asked eventually.

“Romani,” Jason answered. “It’s Dick’s native language, and uncommon enough that we use it for private conversations in public, and often in private as well. It’s just a habit.”

“Talia is Dami’s mother,” Helena continued. “Happened to meet her a few months ago, and she really is a piece of work. There’s a reason Bruce now has sole custody.”

“We try not to talk too much about her around Bruce or Dami, ‘cause they both have soft spots for her still,” Jason continued. “Hang on.”

The car had entered an underground parking lot, with names on all the bays. Jason pulled into one of several marked “Wayne”.

Helena unstrapped and hopped out. Brad hesitated for only a minute before following.

“This way,” she said, and headed towards a large shutter-door.

Brad looked around. The other cars seemed a lot more…fancy, and at the near end of the lot was an elevator. The first parking bay next to the “Wayne” bays was marked “Lucius Fox”. There was very little reason to doubt this was under Wayne Tower, but the shutter-door…

Brad noticed he was being left behind, and hurried to catch up.

There was a more normal door next to the shutter. Helena passed her bracelet over a sensor. The sensor beeped, flashed, and the door clunked. She pushed through.

The room beyond looked most like a high school locker room. Jason brushed past Brad, as Helena started dipping in and out of lockers.

“Here,” she said, thrusting a bundle into Brad’s arms. “Shirt, pants, boots, gloves, belt.”

Brad stared at the bundle. “What?”

Helena opened another locker. “It’s safety gear that doubles as normal wear. Depending on what’s being done, this place can be a serious safety hazard. Get changed.”

Helena and Jason both turned their backs on each other, put down their bundles, and in near-synchronization, pulled off their shirts. Brad squeaked. “Why are you stripping?! Just out here in the open?!”

“I’m not looking, Jay’s not looking, you don’t have to look,” Helena called out, still turned away. “You’re the first person through here to have a problem with it.”

Face red, Brad turned around and started to change. “But, I mean, surely some privacy curtains?” He was having problems not thinking of Helena’s back and bra straps…and actually, Jason seemed to have quite a few scars.

The collar of the shirt was more of a turtle neck, a very long turtle neck, combined with a hood, and all sorts of rigid bits. It took a bit of scrambling to get it sorted.

“Done yet?” Jason called. Brad looked over his shoulder, still grappling with the outfit. Jason and Helena were stolidly staring in other directions.

“Give me a minute,” he said. Why was a supposedly simple outfit so tricky? “Do I really need all this?”

“You can just shove the gloves in the belt, but keep them with you,” Helena called.

“What’s the point?!” Brad exploded at last. It just didn’t make any sense!

“There’s a lot of hazardous stuff in here,” Helena explained. “These outfits, if put on fully, will completely cover your skin. There’s an air-filtering mask in the collar, and safety lenses in the hood. There’s precautions against any leaks, of course, but there’s always the chance of an accident. If an alarm goes off, mask up, hood down, gloves on. We’ll make sure nothing happens to you, but part of that is taking sensible precautions.”

“And as an added bonus, we’re working with people who don’t like showing their faces anyway,” Jason added.

Brad finished fiddling with the boots and grabbed the gloves. “Right, yeah,” he said. “Think I’ve got this.”

Helena gave him a quick once over. “Yup, that’s it,” she said approvingly. “C’mon.”

The next door didn’t have any kind of scanner lock, just a number of lights on a panel next to it. The only one lit was green, which was good, because the other lights had things like “airborne toxin” and “asphixiant” next to them.

Beyond the door was a garage, or parking lot, but a very different one. There were more motorcycles, bulkier ones. There were partly-built aircraft, and watercraft. There were three Batmobiles. Helena approached one, Brad trailing behind her.

There were someone’s legs sticking out from under it. “Need help there?” Helena asked.

There was a muffled grunt. “Could do with Jay having a look,” the man – mechanic? – said. “You go on up. Left the boys at the stupid computer.”

Jason grabbed a sliding-trolley-thing, and headed for the car. Helena gently took Brad’s elbow, and led him up a ramp that ran around three-quarters of the room. Then they emerged into the main Annexe.

It was…very different. From anything Brad had ever seen before. Wide open in the middle, stuffed with equipment around the sides. A ladder running up four, five floors. Glass floors, natural-looking lights, a lot of gentle humming. It was incredible.

“It’s not too big, compared to some, but it’s extremely sophisticated,” Helena explained. “Obviously, a lot gets passed on to other places in Wayne Enterprises, but in certain areas, this facility rivals even LexCorp and Cadmus.”

Brad whistled. He’d never seen a real lab before, unless high school didn’t – which didn’t, really. “What does all this do?”

“Tim could give you a better tour,” Helena shrugged. “First floor is chemical and biological. Second is physical sciences. Third floor is hardware, and fourth software. Fifth floor is for when Nightside need a breather.”

“Nightside?”

“Yeah, Nightside.” Helena shrugged. “You know, Batman, Nightwing, Robin…Nightside.”

Brad shook his head. “It just seems incredible that you know Batman.”

Helena ducked her head. “Oh, I’m not sure I’d say that. Really, I’m not that involved. It’s just…you hear things, y’know? Lot of misinformation flying around, though. Don’t believe everything you hear, that’s all.”

She shrugged again, and started climbing the ladder. Brad hesitated before following. It seemed a long way up. Then he shrugged, and followed. After all, how could the day get stranger?

[thefabytm]

Will Your Next Smartphone be a Xiaomi? S20 FE 5G vs Mi 10T!

I must start off by saying WOW. Just a few short years ago, I wouldn't have dared to compare a pretty high end Samsung device to any Xiaomi phone. Here we are though, it's 2021, Huawei is pretty much out of the picture given that their phones don't have access to the Google services, Samsung makes great phones, but are usually quite pricey and Xiaomi isn't focused on making only cheap, budget smartphones anymore. Although not available worldwide, the Mi 10 Ultra, which takes every spec and brings it to the max is Xiaomi's way of giving us a sneak peak into what the future holds when it comes to their high end phones.

We are going to divide this comparison into 6 categories: Design, Screen, UI, Performance, Camera and finally, which one deserves your hard earned cash the most? If you're only interested in a specific, feel free to jump to that section through the video progress bar.

Ok, so first of all, the design and quality of the phones. This one is pretty easy, with Samsung you can feel that some corners were cut in order to bring the price down, we have seen this happening with most flagship killers. The back is made out a hybrid material, something that Samsung calls glasstic, but really, it feels like matte plastic. On the Mi 10T, we have Gorilla glass 5 not just on the front, but also on the back with this mirror-like effect. Also, the color of the back shifts from dark grey to almost silver, depending on the light. The frame is made out of aluminium on both, which is to be expected, but overall, the design of the S20 FE is just uninspiring. From the plain camera bump, to the larger bezels, I just don't think the S20 FE takes the crown when it comes to design. The bezels on this phone are slightly larger than on the predecessor, the Galaxy S10 Lite, so I can't say I'm pleased with this. Although the bezels aren't really slim on the Mi 10T either, when holding the phone, you can feel that the materials are of much higher quality, mostly because of the back. The camera bump is more pronounced but at least more interesting than just throwing 3 cameras in column and making the bump much wider than necessary. I must mention, this is not a 4 camera system, as the holes would lead you to believe, one of them is there just for the sake of symmetry. I will say though, the Mi 10T is quite a bit heavier than the S20 FE, a bit larger, mostly because of the larger screen and about a milimeter thicker, so if you appreciate thin & light, the Mi 10T might not be for you. If these things don't bother you, the Mi 10T is an absolute winner, being much closer to flagship territory than the S20FE, when it comes to the design.

Things are going to get a lot more interesting now, let's talk about the screens. On paper, the screen of the Mi 10T might look like the winner. After all, it's larger, coming in at 6.67 inches instead of 6.5 inches and it has an impressive 144Hz refresh rate, rather than 120Hz. There's a catch though, the screen on the Mi 10T is an IPS LCD panel, unlike the Samsung which has an AMOLED screen. This right here is a significant difference and the sole reason why the screen on the Mi 10T is not as good as it could be. Blacks are not as deep as on the AMOLED, because of the backlighting, the refresh rate isn't as impressive as it sounds on paper, because of the high response time, which looks like ghosting if you pay attention. I'm not sure it would've fit the budget, but I can honestly say a 90Hz AMOLED screen would've been the better choice, instead of going all out on the refresh rate but not feeling this benefit because of the LCD panel. Because of the LCD panel, it also means that you are missing out on Always on functionality, but this is the smallest of drawbacks, if you ask me. On the other side, with the Samsung, it's the usual AMOLED with really saturated colors. If you switch colors from vivid to to normal, the colors become too washed out, much more than I'm used to on my iPhone. What I ended up doing is using vivid mode with the blue light filter activated. I'm sure color accuracy suffers because of this, but at least the screen looks closer to what I'm used to.

Next up, we'll discuss the UIs, because it's an important category. This does come down to personal preference though, so what I'll do is tell you what each one can do and any drawbacks that they may have. Let's start off with Samsung, this S20 FE 5G rocks One UI 3 on top of Android 11 and to be honest, Samsung has got their stuff together when it comes to UIs. I get updates quite frequently and will continue to get Android updates until Android 13, Samsung has their own identity now, I like their browser better than Chrome. Also something great that Samsung did for one-handed use is using these large headers at the top, which disappears when scrolling, but mean that you can easily access the buttons when opening the app. Samsung's dedicated one-handed mode is elegant and can be adjusted so the screen shrinks to exactly the size you need. As far as bugs and glitches go, I can happily say that I haven't experienced none and the interface is smooth. On the Mi 10T we have MIUI 12 running on top of Android 10, so we're starting off already with an older version of Android, but this should be updated to Android 11 at some point, hopefully... MIUI feels a bit snappier and it has a lot of great looking notifications, maybe a bit overdone, but it cheers me up seeing stuff happening instead of the boring notifications we all got used to. I like the fact that I can get to the quick settings panel through a single swipe on the right side of the screen instead of two swipes on Samsung. The video toolbox is extremely useful as it lets you listen podcasts on Android with the screen closed. It's not all rosy though, the phone app is for example the stock android one and the UI elements just don't seem MIUI-like, the background of the app is blueish, whereas all the other apps are black because I have dark mode on. Sometimes, an app I use frequently, cellmapper is stuck open and the only way to close it is by force-closing. I am happy to report, though that there are no ads here. In the end, it comes down to personal preference, if you like your phone to be more animated, you'll like MIUI, if you want a more sober experience, go with One UI.

Performance wise, not much to say, both are at the flagship level, given the Snapdragon 865 equipped by both. 6GB of RAM on both, as these are the base models, MIUI seems to be a bit more aggressive with RAM management but this can be tweaked on a per-app basis, so your most used apps aren't going to get closed. I'm impressed that I don't feel the change in the refresh rate on the Xiaomi, as it is adaptive, it's smooth all throughout. One thing I like about the Xiaomi is the side mounted fingerprint reader, it's blazing fast, much faster than any phone I've used so far. With the on screen fingerprint sensor on the S20 FE, I almost always struggle to get it to unlock, it's harder to keep your finger stationary on glass and it seems to have a hard time reading my finger. Overall, I'll give this to the Mi 10T, the fingerprint scanner tips the scale in its direction for sure.

Cameras are a category where sometimes you can really feel that corners were cut. In this case, the Mi 10T doesn't have a telephoto camera, Xiaomi choosing to offer a 5MP macro lens, which although miles better than the 2 MP, it still doesn't come anywhere close to the telephoto when it comes to usefulness. The main camera is a 64MP shooter on the Mi 10T, using pixel binning to get 16MP photos, whereas on the Samsung we have a 12MP sensor. Overall, both take good shots, with the Xiaomi having more details, but losing out on dynamic range and in low light conditions, which is why I'll give this one to Samsung. The Mi 10T shoots 8k video, but that's a gimmick, as there is no video stabilisation at 8k, so you'll most likely end up shooting 4k to get usable video.

So, now the final question. Which one should you get? Well, here's the deal, both of these smartphones are great, but for the price difference, $699 vs about $499, it's hard to justify the price of the Samsung. Yes, the camera is better on the Samsung, but on the other hand, the design on the Mi 10T is higher quality than on the Samsung. I can only recommend the S20 FE if you want an all-around better camera system, partly due to the telephoto, partly due to better dynamic range and low light capabilities or if you absolutely can't live without OLED, though I'd recommend checking it out in real life before making the call. If the camera's not your main focus, spare the money and get the better looking, higher quality built Mi 10T.  

Mi 10T (US): https://amzn.to/3bpXrlq

Mi 10T (UK): https://amzn.to/2NXvfi4

S20 FE 5G (US): https://amzn.to/3pKokpC

S20 FE 5G (UK): https://amzn.to/2ZKs67C

[betweengenesisfrogs]

Homestuck is My Favorite Sprite Comic

Yes, you read that right.

Homestuck is my favorite sprite comic.

Those of you who remember the earlier days of the internet are probably looking at this post in disbelief right about now. Others of you might be scratching your heads, not knowing what I’m talking about.

But here’s my pitch: Homestuck is the culmination of an entire genre of internet art, and the tools that make it so powerful are the very tools that made that genre once so reviled.

Homestuck is the greatest and most successful sprite comic of all time.

And honestly, I’ve wanted to talk about that for ages, so let’s do it.

WHAT SPRITE COMICS WERE

Many of my readers are probably too young to remember the era of sprite comics. So: what were sprite comics?

Sprite comics were a genre of webcomics made entirely by taking pixel art from video games – especially character art, called “sprites,” but also backgrounds and other images—and placing them into panels to tell a story. They were near-ubiquitous on the internet in the early 2000s, emerging right as webcomics in general were seeking to establish themselves as an art form.

They were not, shall we say, known for their quality. The low bar to access meant that art skill was not an obstacle to starting one. The folks behind the huge swell of them tended to be young people, kids and early teenagers recreating the plots of their favorite video games with new OCs—not the most advanced writers or artists. They were the early 2000s’ quintessential example of ephemeral, childish art. Unfortunately, they look even worse today—blown-up pixels don’t hold up well when displayed on higher-resolution monitors.

Today, they’re mostly forgotten, remembered only as a weird, strange moment in the youth of the internet. Someone who evoked them today, such as a blogger who compared them to one of the most successful webcomics of all time, would be inviting good-natured teasing at the very least.

It would be unfair to dismiss them entirely, though. In this low-stakes environment, comics where the author could bring more skill—engaging writing, legitimately funny jokes, or especially, a real ability to work with pixel art—really stood out. (Unsurprisingly, these authors tended to skew a bit older.)

The obvious one to mention is Bob and George. Bob and George wasn’t the first sprite comic, but it was the most influential. Conceived initially as Mega Man-themed filler for a hand-drawn comic about superheroes, it quickly became a merging of the two concepts, with the original characters made into Mega Man-style sprites, full of running gags, humorous retellings of the Mega Man games, elaborate storylines about time travel, and robots eating ice cream. It was generally agreed, even among sprite comic haters, that Bob and George was a pretty good comic. Worth mentioning also are 8-Bit Theater, which turned the plot of the first Final Fantasy into a spectacular and hilarious farce, and of course Kid Radd, my second favorite sprite comic. (More on that later.)

But even if you weren’t looking for greatness—there was something just damn fun about them. The passion of sprite comic authors was clear, even if their ideas didn’t always cohere. To this day, I think the sprite comic scene has the same appeal pulp art does—it’s crude and rough, full of garbage to sift through, but every so often, something deeply sincere and bizarre shines through, and the culture of its authors is a fascinating object of study in itself.

Okay, full disclosure: I was one of the people who made a sprite comic. I’ve written about my experiences with that in more depth elsewhere, but yeah, I was on the inside of this scene, rather than a disinterested observer, and from the inside, maybe it’s a lot easier to see the appeal.

Still, let me make this claim: even with all their flaws, sprite comics were doing some incredibly interesting things, and Homestuck is heir to their legacy.

TAKE ME DOWN TO RECOLOR CITY

One of the problems people always had with sprite comics was the sprites themselves. They’re the most repetitive thing in the world. You just keep copying and pasting the same images over and over again, maybe with a few tweaks. That’s not really being an artist, is it? It’s so lazy. Re-drawing things from different angles keeps things dynamic, develops your skill, and makes your work better in general. Right?

I’m mostly in agreement. Certainly I think it’s fair to rag on the Control-Alt-Delete guy, along with other early bad webcomics, for copy-pasting their characters while dropping in new expressions and mass-producing tepid strips. And to be fair, digging through bad sprite comics often felt like an exercise in seeing the same slightly-edited recolors of Mega Man characters over and over again. You got really tired of that same body with its blobby feet and hands.

(It should be noted, though, that there were folks in the sprite comic scene who could pixel art the quills off a porcupine. I salute you, brave pixel art masters of 2006. I hope you all got into your chosen art school.)

All this said, I think the repetitive and simplistic nature of sprite comics was often their biggest strength.

THE POWER OF ABSTRACTION

In his classic work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes an observation about cartooning that has stayed with me to this day.

McCloud notes that simple, abstract drawings, like faces that are only few lines and dots on a page, resonate with us more strongly than more detailed drawings. This is because our minds fill in what’s missing on the page. We ascribe human depth to simple gestures and expressions based on our own emotions and experiences – and this makes us feel closer to these characters as readers. Secretly, simple cartoons can be one of the most powerful forms of storytelling. If you want your readers to fall in love with your characters, draw them simply, and let them fill them in.

Video game sprites work very well in this regard. They have that same simplicity that cartoons do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a huge part of the success of SNES-era RPGs was simple, almost childlike character sprites drawing people in. I think sprites did the same for sprite comics.

Here’s the weird thing: Bob and George worked. Despite four different characters being variations on the same friggin’ Mega Man sprite in different colors, they immediately began to seem like different people with distinct personalities. For me, George’s befuddled, helpless dismay immediately comes to mind whenever I picture his face, while with Mega Man himself it’s usually a wide-eyed, childlike glee. I would never confuse them. This, despite the fact that the only actual difference between their faces is that George is blonde. It’s pretty clear what happened. The personalities the author established for them through dialogue and storytelling shone through, and my brain did the rest.

Sprites, in short, were a canvas upon which the mind could project any story the author wanted to tell. Even the most minute differences in pixel art came to stand, in the best sprite comics, for wide divergences in personality and ideals, once the reader spent enough time with them to adapt to their style of representation.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this somewhere before? Character designs that focus on variations on a theme, with subtle differences that nonetheless render them instantly recognizable?

Oh, right.

Look at what greets us on the very first page of Homestuck. An absurdly simple cartoon boy, abstracted to a ridiculous degree—he doesn’t even have arms!—followed a whole bunch of characters that follow suit. Though many other representations of the characters emerge, these little figures never quite go away, do they? Why is that?

Simple: they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re modular—you can give John arms or not, depending on whether it’s useful. You can put him in a whole variety of poses and save them to a template. You can change out his facial expressions with copy and paste. You can give him a new haircut and call him Jake. It’s all very quick and easy.

Sprite comics proliferated because they were very easy to mass-produce. Andrew Hussie’s original conception of Homestuck was very similar: something he could put out very quickly and easily, where even the most elaborate ideas could rely on existing assets to be sped smoothly along. We all know the result: an incredible production machine, churning out unfathomable amounts of content from 2009-2012. I’d say it was a good call.

But it goes way deeper than that. The modular nature of sprites always suggested a kind of modularity to the sprite comic premise. George and Mega Man were different people, true, but also two variations on a theme. Was there something underlying them that they had in common? Perhaps their similarity says something like: We exist in a world which has a certain set of rules? One of my favorite conceits from Bob and George was that when characters visited the past, they were represented by NES-era Mega Man sprites, while in the present, they were SNES sprites, and in the future, the author used elaborate splicing to render them as 32-bit Mega Man 8 sprites or similar.

Suppose there was a skilled cartoonist thinking about his next big project, who wanted to tell a story centered around this kind of modularity, a narrative that was built out of iterative, swappable pieces by its very design. He might very well create a sprite comic named Homestuck.

Homestuck is a story about a game that creates a hyperflexible mythology for its players, where the villains, challenges, and setting change depending upon what players bring to the experience, yet which all share underlying goals and assumptions. What more perfect opportunity to create a modular story as well? Different groups of kids and trolls have motifs that get swapped around to produce new characters, whether that’s through ectobiology, the Scratch, or the eerie parallels between the kids and trolls’ sessions. And yet each character can be analyzed as an individual.

This is an incredible way to build a huge emotional investment from your readers. Not only does this kind of characterization invite analysis, the abstractions draw readers in to generate their own headcanons and interpretations. A deep commitment to pluralism is at the heart of Hussie’s character design. Then, too, it encourages readers to build their own new designs from these models. Kidswaps, bloodswaps, fantrolls—these have long been the heart of Homestuck’s fandom. And what are bloodswaps if not sprite recolors for a new generation? With the added bonus that now a change in color carries narrative weight, evoking new moods and identities for these characters in ways that early sprite comics could only dream of.

In Hussie’s hands, even the dreaded copy-and-paste takes on heroic depth of meaning. Even when Hussie moves away from sprites to his own loose art style, he continues to remix what we’ve previously see. Indeed, Hussie talks about how he would go out of his way to edit his own art into new images even when it would take more time than drawing something new. Why? Because he wanted to evoke that very feeling of having seen this before—the visual callback to go along with the many conceptual and verbal callbacks that echo throughout Homestuck. This is at the heart of what Doc Scratch (speaking for Hussie) called “circumstantial simultaneity:” we are invited to compare two moments or two characters, to see what they have in common, or how they contrast. Everything in Paradox Space is deeply linked with everything else. And Hussie establishes this in our minds using nothing less than the tool sprite comics were so deeply reviled for: the “lazy” repetition of an image.

(It’s fitting that some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous images in Homestuck—dream bubble scenery and the like—are the result of Hussie taking things he’s made before and combining them into fantastic dreamscapes.)

But it all started with the hyperflexible, adaptable character images Hussie created at the very beginning of Homestuck.

And if you need more proof that Homestuck is a sprite comic, I think we need look no further than what Hussie, and the rest of the Homestuck community call these images.

We call them sprites.

THE FIRST GENRE-BENDERS

Was Andrew Hussie influenced by sprite comics in the development of Homestuck? It’s hard to say, but as a webcomic artist in the first decade of the 2000s, he was surely aware of them. It’s likely that he quickly realized that his quick, adaptable images served the same purposes as a sprite in a video game or a sprite comic, and chose to call them that.

One purpose I haven’t mentioned up until now: sprites lend themselves very well to animations. In fact, in their original context of video games, that’s exactly what they’re for: frames of art that can be used to show a character running, jumping, posing, moving across a screen. It’s not surprising, then, that sprite comic makers quickly saw the utility in that.

Homestuck was, in fact, not the first webcomic to make Flash animations part of its story. There were experiments with various gifs and such in other comics, but I think sprite comics were among the most successful at becoming the multi-media creations that would come to be known as hypercomics..

Take a look at this animation from Bob and George. It represents a climactic final confrontation against a long-standing villain, using special effects to make everything dramatic, but ultimately, like many a Homestuck animation, leads to kind of a pyscheout. The drama and the humor of the moment are clear, though. This relies in large part on the music—which is taken directly from the game Chrono Trigger. This makes total sense. Interestingly, it also contains voice acting, which is something Homestuck never tried—probably because it would run contrary to its ideals of pluralism. What I find fascinating is that in sprite comics, animations like these served a very similar purpose to Homestuck’s big flashes: elevating a big moment into something larger-than-life. Another good example is this sequence from Crash and Bass. Seriously, it seems like every sprite comic maker wanted to try their hand at Flash animation.

(By the way, it’s a lot harder than it looks!! I envy Hussie his vectorized sprites. Pixel art is a PAIN to work with in the already buggy program that is Flash.)

The result: because of the sprites themselves, sprite comics were among the first works to play around with the border between comics and other media in the way that would come to be thought of as quintessentially Homestuck.

What it also meant was that another genre emerged in parallel with sprite comics: the sprite animation. Frequently these would retell the story of a particular game, offer a spectacular animated battle sequence, parody the source material, or all three. Great examples include this animation for Mega Man Zero, and this frankly preposterous crossover battle sequence. Chris Niosi’s TOME also found its earliest roots as an animation series of this kind. You also found plenty of sprite-based flash games, in which players could manipulate game characters in a way that was totally outside the context of the original works.

The website the vast majority of these games and animations were hosted on?

Newgrounds, best known to Homestuck fans as the website Hussie crashed in 2011 while trying to upload Cascade.

What’s less talked about is that Hussie was friends, or at least on conversational terms with, the owner of the site, hence the idea to host his huge animation there in the first place, and other flashes, like the first Alterniabound, were initially hosted there as well.

It’s hard to believe that Hussie wasn’t at least a little familiar with the Newgrounds scene. I suspect that he largely conceived of Homestuck as part of the world of “Flash animation—” which in 2009 meant the wide variety of things that were hosted on Newgrounds, including sprite animations.

The freedom and fluidity sprite comics had to change into games and animations and back into comics again was one of their most fascinating traits. Homestuck’s commitment to media-bending needs, at this point, no introduction. But what’s less known is that sprite comics were exploring that territory first—that Homestuck, in short, is the kind of thing they wanted to grow up to be.

PUT ME IN THE GAME

I would be a fool not to mention another big thing Homestuck and sprite comics have in common: a character who is literally the author in cartoon form, running around doing goofy things and messing with the story. This was an incredibly common cliché in sprite comics, no doubt because of Bob and George, who did it early on and never looked back. You might have noticed that the animation I linked above concerns a showdown between Bob and George’s author, David Anez—depicted, delightfully, as another Mega Man recolor—and a mysterious alternate author named Helmut—who is like Mega Man plus Sepiroth I think? It’s all very strange. I could ramble for hours about the relationship between Hussie and the alt-author villains of Homestuck and what it all means, but I’m not sure I can nail anything down with certainty for these two. Maybe Bob and George was never quite that metaphysical.

But yes, bringing the author into the story in some form was already a cliché by the time Homestuck started up. Indeed, I think that’s why Hussie’s character refers to it as “a bad idea” to break the fourth wall—he’s recognizing that people will have seen this before, and are already tired of this sort of shit. And then he goes and does it anyway and makes it somehow brilliant, because he’s Andrew Hussie.

Homestuck breathes life into the cliché by taking it in a metaphysical/metafictional direction. I don’t think that was really the motivation for most sprite comic authors, though. Let’s see if we can dig a little deeper.

I think the cliché kept happening because sprite comic authors were writing about a subject that very closely concerned themselves: video games. I’m only kind of joking. The thing about video games is that even though they’re made for everyone, playing through one yourself feels like an intensely personal experience. You develop an emotional relationship to a world, to its characters, that feels distinctly your own. Now, suddenly, thanks to the magic of sprites, you have an opportunity to tell stories about that world for others to read. Of course you’re going to want to put yourself in the story in some form.

When it wasn’t author characters in sprite comics, it was OCs. You know Dr. Wily? Well here’s my own original villain, Dr. Vindictus. You know Mega Man? Here’s my new character, Super Cool Man. He hangs out with Mega Man and they beat the bad guys together. Stuff like that. Most sprite comics retold the story of a game, or multiple games in a big crossover format, with original elements added in. There was quite a lot of “Link and Sonic and Mega Man are all friends with my OC and they hang out at his house.”

What’s interesting, though, is that because these sprite comics were very aware that they were about video games, this was where they sometimes got very meta. It started with humorous observation—hey, isn’t it funny that Link goes around breaking into people’s houses and smashing their pots? But sometimes, it grew into more serious commentary. Is Mega Man trapped in a never-ending cycle, doomed to fight the same fight against the same mad scientist until the end of time? Is it worth it, being a video game hero?

Enter Homestuck. What I’ve been dancing around this whole time is:

Homestuck is a sprite comic…because Homestuck is a video game.

Or more specifically, Homestuck’s a comic about a video game called SBURB, where the lines between the game and the comic about the game blur as characters wrestle with the narratives around them, both those encoded into the game and those encoded into our expectations.

Homestuck presents the fantasy of many a sprite comic maker: I get to go on heroic quests, I get to change the world and become a god. I get to be part of the video game. And then it asks the same question certain sprite comics were beginning to ask:

Is it worth it, to be that hero?

I want to tell you about my second favorite sprite comic, a comic called Kid Radd.

Kid Radd distinguished itself from other sprite comics of the time by being a completely original production. Its sprites looked like they could be from a variety of NES and SNES-era video games, but they were all done from scratch, and the games they purported to represent were all fictional. Kid Radd used animations with original music, and sometimes interactive, clickable games, to tell its story. It also used all sorts of neat programming tricks to make it load faster on the internet of the early 2000s, which was great—unfortunately, these same techniques made it break as web technology evolved, something Homestuck fans in 2019 can definitely relate to. The good news is, fans have maintained a dedicated and reformatted archive where the comics can still be seen and downloaded.

Kid Radd’s premise is that video game characters themselves are conscious and alive—more specifically, their sprites. Sprites developed consciousness as human beings projected personality and identity onto them, remaining aware of their status as video game constructs while also seeking to be something more. The story follows the titular Kid Radd, at first in the context of his own game, commenting on the choices the player controlling him. He must endure every death, every strange decision along the way to save his girlfriend Sheena. Then the story expands into a larger context as Radd, Sheena, and many other video game characters are released onto the internet as data. They try to find their own identities and build a society for themselves, but struggle with the tendency toward violence that games have programmed into them. The story culminates in an honestly moving moment where Radd confronts the all-powerful creators of their reality—human beings.

It’s a very good comic.

The first sprite comic authors wanted to fuse real life with video games. Later sprite comic authors decided to ask: what would that really mean? Would it be painful? Would you suffer? Would you find a way to make your life meaningful all the same? Despite the limitations of sprite comics, these ideas had incredible potential, and in works like Kid Radd, they flourished.

Homestuck is heir to that legacy.

It takes the questions Kid Radd was asking, and asks them in new ways. It tries to understand, on an even deeper level, how the rules of video games shape our own minds and give us ways to understand ourselves.

At its heart, Homestuck is a sprite comic, and it might just be the greatest of them all.

EPILOGUE

I’ve seen a lot of good discussion recently on how Homestuck preserves a certain era of the internet like a time capsule: its culture, its technology, its assumptions, its memes.

I think sprite comics, too, are part of the culture that created Homestuck. Do I think Hussie spent the early 2000s recoloring Mega Man sprites? No, probably not. But what I do know is that sprite comics were part of his world. The first webcomic cartoonists came of age alongside an odd companion, the weird, overly sincere, dorky little sibling that was sprite comics. Like them or hate them, you couldn’t escape them. They were there.

And maybe a certain cartoonist saw a kind of potential in them, in the same way he summoned Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff from the depths of bad gamer culture.

Or maybe he just knew, as some sprite comic authors did, that the time was right for their kind of story.

On a personal level—Homestuck came along right when I needed it.

Around 2009, the bubble that was sprite comics finally burst. People were getting tired of them, or growing out of them, and blown-up sprites no longer looked so good on modern monitors.

I was more than a little heartbroken. I’d enjoyed Bob and George, read my fill of Mega Man generica, and fallen utterly in love with Kid Radd. I’d been working on my own sprite comic for a long time out of a sense that there was huge potential in them that we were only scratching the surface of. I’d dreamed of maybe someday doing something as amazing as the best of them did. But I was watching that world disappear. I had to admit to myself that my work wasn’t going to continue to find an audience. That I could live with. But it was painful to think that the potential I sensed, the feats of storytelling I wanted to see in the world, would never be realized.

And then, in the fall of 2010, a friend linked me to a comic that broke all the rules, that mixed animation, games, music, images and chatlogs. A comic that crafted its own sprites, just as Kid Radd did, and remixed its images into an ever-expanding web of associations and meanings. A comic that took on the idea of living inside a video game with relish and turned it into a gorgeous meditation on escaping the ideas and systems that control us.

That this comic would exist, let alone that it would succeed. That it would become one of the most popular creations of all time, that it would surpass other webcomics and break out into anime conventions and the real world, that it would become such a cultural juggernaut, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine an internet without Homestuck—

I can’t even put into words how happy that makes me. It’s the reason I’m still writing essays about Homestuck nearly eight years after I found it.

And it’s why Homestuck will always be my favorite sprite comic.

-Ari

[Notes: The image of the kids came from the ever-useful MSPA Wiki—please support and aid in their efforts to provide a good source of info about Homestuck! They need more support these days than ever.

For more on Homestuck’s place as a continuation of the zeitgeist of early 2000s experimental webcomics, this article by Sam Keeper at Storming the Ivory Tower is excellent and insightful.

Thanks for reading, y’all.]

[unluckyxse7en-moving]

Can I ask a question? I have been wondering stuff about myself and in the panel where it says "before 'me' disappeared." it stuck out to me. I've never had a good grip on who I am and figured I had to build it. Idk hat that is. Nor do I expect you to answer that. My question is, could you explain it more?

Yes, absolutely, you’re totally welcome to ask! and idk how well I can explain it but I’ll do my best based on my current personal understanding and experience! obligatory disclaimer, many systems have unique experiences and it’s not always consistent or cut and dry from system to system, but if something about this does hit home I encourage you to look into researching it more as you feel comfortable! Also a heads up, I’m going to probably overexplain terms and concepts since I’m not sure what you do know, plus if someone else reading this isn’t familiar I figure that may help them too, so bear with me! ^^ (this got incredibly long and incredibly personal, I hope that’s ok! We’ve found hearing about personal experiences from others always helped give us a way to compare our experience better in ways that medical definitions don’t help with, so we got detailed in hopes it’ll be helpful to someone. heads up, there’s some references to feelings of unreality.)

Gonna try to put this under a cut since it got so long, let’s hope tumblr cooperates!

So admittedly, I was intrigued when you sent this line in, because while I’ve reread this comic a couple times before posting it, I didn’t remember writing a line exactly like that. As it turns out, the writing was meant to say “when ‘He’ disappeared” but it’s really oddly unclear whether it’s an H or an M at first glance compared to the rest of the script? If I’m honest I actually prefer your interpretation better, especially because the ambiguity lends more to the comic’s meaning in retrospect. I’m not gonna say something like ‘oh one of my alters must’ve done that on purpose’ because back then our handwriting was just an inconsistent mess in general and the most involvement we could probably credit to the alters was just one person tried to write that H in their handwriting when someone else was supposed to be writing it. But I thought that was an interesting case of serendipity so I couldn’t help pointing it out lmao 

 That said, I think your reading actually makes just as much sense in the context of the comic, and is a phenomenon I think I can readily explain that I have had a little experience with. Currently, my system setup is a little bit like an archeological dig. The alters that have surfaced the most, who have been the ones in charge of actions/words/emotional responses/etc, aka ‘fronted’, are all the ones who have formed in more recent years. The ones from years past are further back, and harder to access because we’ve developed a protective setup where the newer alters act as barricades to keep the older ones from being more exposed to trauma, or anything else they can’t handle. At its core, that’s what the function of a system is - to develop other alters who can handle situations more vulnerable parts can’t - but not all systems are built with an onion-layer setup like mine either, so just keep that in mind.

That said, since I’m built with an onion-layer setup, that means most of my system experience is based upon those older alters being shielded and walled up. When you add enough layers, we can’t dig them out again and for us that’s where most of our ‘disappearance’ comes in that we know of.  There’s another phenomenon that could cause the ‘disappearance’ effect but we’ll touch on that in a moment. In our case, we just eventually feel so distanced from who “I” was supposed to be, whoever that is. Very few of the ones who have been out in recent months are from older times. We’ve had a small handful who are from our high school years (we’re 25 now), and maybe caught a glimpse of alters older than that once or twice. We very rarely remember much of the time from that far back, and what we do remember feels incredibly detached. Almost more like we saw it in a first person pov movie rather than actually been there. We’ve gone through name changes a couple times by now, and I highly suspect that those name changes are further reflective of our archeological layers and who we decided to try to model our collective behavior around, to try to seem like one whole person. 

“Erika” was a girl who behaved one way. “Erin” was someone who behaved another way. and “Cleo” has been our current blueprint for who we’re supposed to be on the outside when being incognito. And what’s interesting is that you mentioned feeling like you had to ‘build’ yourself, because while it’s not so precise or in our control, we’ve approached it much the same way. For each name change it was like different models. out with the old model and in with the new, now introducing Cleo v2.0, with these personality patches and old bugs fixed. Around the time we changed to Erin, we had firmly decided we wanted to put our ‘old self’ behind us and improve ourselves. We had come out of toxic experiences eyes open, and we were terrified of reflecting that internalized toxicity outward. So we took ourselves to the metaphorical workshop, and spent many many years scrutinizing who ‘Erika’ was under a microscope for our faults, our flaws, what made us work that way, so that we could iron out the kinks when introducing ‘Erin’. As we took ‘Erin’ for test runs in college, we would find different flaws and faults that needed fixing, so once we’d accumulated a comprehensive list of those we took Erin in for workshopping and shortly after we dropped out of college, out came Cleo. Our entire life experience from the outside has been a long-running fixer-upper project, and for a while we were proud of ourselves to see the long strides in improvements we’d made upon “myself”, for being so quick to see our flaws and find ways to manage them. 

But what was really happening under the hood was, we weren’t actually changing as an individual, cohesive person.  We were adapting and forming new alters, or at the very least reassigning them based on who handled what better - so if we had become sick of our short temper, we swapped that alter out so that what normally caused them to respond, would instead elicit someone less volatile and slower to anger. If one of us froze up at the sight of blood, they would be swapped out of the front for someone who had no problems with it. This is why we ended up onion-layering ultimately, to lower the risk of the other alters being in front at poorly timed moments.

So tl;dr for us, a lot of our ‘Disappearance’ of our selves was us trading them out or hiding them away, and most likely encouraging a state of alter dormancy - when alters become inactive for long periods of time. (for some of us we describe it like sleeping - I think it tires us out on a physical level if one alter is active too long, it probably works certain parts of the brain more depending on the alter, but that’s all speculation.)

Backtracking a little - there is another experience that would cause a more definite and permanent ‘Disappearance’ effect. We haven’t experienced it since coming out as a system to ourselves. But we’re pretty sure we experienced it once, or twice, way back when. It’s formally known as Fusion. Fusion is what happens when two or more alters end up “physically” (for lack of a better word) merging together. They cannot separate, and they become an entirely different alter. The new alter often has some elements of their components in terms of personality traits and memories, but also isn’t a complete merging of everything. Memories and emotional attachments can often get lost in the process. This is where the other Disappearance can occur.

We know it happened to us at least once. Somewhere around middle or high school, for no apparent reason, we had developed an acute awareness and fear of Amnesia, and the identity death that would inevitably come with it. We were always scared, what if we hit our head and lost our memory? What would we remember, if anything? Would we get it back? Media always dramatizes amnesia, where amnesiac characters have some twinge, some spark, where they get drawn to things super important to them from before the memory loss. Would that happen to us? What if it didn’t? What if we never remembered the things that mattered so dearly to us? Would we even be the same person anymore?

If you compare that to the concept of fusion, it’s almost uncomfortably spot on. But we had no idea about systems or fusion back then. Which can only mean we had experienced a fusion, and somehow that caused a disturbance in the system that led to that latent fear to hang over our heads, along with the constant feelings of unreality and dreaming that followed us all through high school.

But somewhere along the line, just as suddenly as that fear developed, it just. Dissipated. It’s still a terrifying concept for us. But we no longer obsess over it like we did back then. We also suspect that’s probably related to another fusion of sorts. We have no clue who they were, or who they are now though. 

So to tie it all back in, in the comic the ‘Me/He’ disappearing would be parallel to an alter going dormant, or possibly fusing. The characters the protagonist and Tormenter are built around were originally part of a storyline of two separate identities that ended up ‘fusing’ to form a different whole, and while I can’t say the comic is faithful to the scientific or actual experience in a system, since I didn’t know about it at the time, I’m pretty sure it was based on what I had picked up on in my subconscious, so that’s the implications there, inaccurate representation though they may be.  I have heard from a few sources that fusion is often the result of a necessary function, to help protect or help an alter that can no longer function or cope the way they have been by creating a new alter that can cope better, so with this understanding, and the direction of the comic, it makes a sort of sense. 

These are my thoughts in regards to your question about ‘disappearance’ in the context of the comic based on my personal experiences, I hope it helped! Feel free to ask more or send in followup questions or statements, hopefully now that I’ve given a lot of context I won’t be quite so long-winded haha

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Fruits Basket 2019 Episode 14: “That’s A Secret”

Me before this episode: “I’m a big strong adult who can DEFINITELY deal with watching Momiji’s backstory and the grave visit get animated in the same episode :)”

Me two seconds into this episode: *insert sad cat picture here*

Anyway this episode is dead even though it killed me and now I’m typing this from beyond the grave.

Thoughts under the cut.

Right off the bat, this episode actually gave us a new set of OP and ED themes, which I’d been curious about for a while. They hadn’t said anything about it for the longest time, and then they just announced it a day or two ago, lol.

The new OP is really going to need some time to grow on me. I can’t help but feel like it should have been swapped with the first OP, since this is where things keep getting heavier. I know there’s some people who disliked how slow and mellow the first OP was, but I loved it, and this super energetic one is kind of hard to get used to.

But the new ED is absolutely AMAZING and I love it. The song feels very similar in tone to the first ED, which is nice because that was also a really nice song, but the visuals are a real departure from basically everything else in the show. From what I’ve seen people seem a bit divided on how they feel about that as an artistic choice, but I love it. I really like how it seemed to be real footage of figurines and dioramas mixed with digital backgrounds and effects. Which reminded me a bit of some visual tricks used in Sarazanmai last season [fun fact that I definitely haven’t just been waiting for an excuse to bring up: the person who did the zodiac animal character designs for this series, Kayoko Ishikawa, is also the person who did the character animation designs in Sarazanmai!]. Though I think my favourite part is the very first shot of Tohru.

Anyway, even though I knew exactly what was coming with this episode, and it was more or less exactly what I expected, it still managed to take me by surprise with just how emotional it was.

For the record, this adapted chapters 23 and 24 of the manga, which were also adapted into episode 15 of the 2001 series. Which also means that the reboot’s just gotten to the end of volume 4 of the manga. I still think we’re looking at about 70 episodes total for the reboot, give or take.

It’s pretty interesting to compare this to the 2001 version, since it’s technically a less drastic difference than the Valentine’s episode, but it still highlights how the 2001 anime made the conscious choice to remove any foreshadowing or character development that hadn’t been resolved in the manga by about volume 8 or so, which is what was out when the 2001 anime was made. From what I remember of the 2001 anime version of this material, they did a really good job with the Momiji side of things, since they kept it pretty 1:1 with the manga, but their version of the grave visit chapter really suffered because so much of Kyo’s character development and depth got taken out across the entire original adaptation, which in particular really took out a whole layer of foreshadowing from this part. It was still fine, from what I remember, but it lacked the sense of mystery and intrigue that the reboot version has, and the whole scene with Kyo and Tohru at the very end of the episode was entirely removed in the 2001 version.

It’s a much less noticeable change than how the 2001 anime had to basically remove a whole chapter or so of content for their Valentine’s day episode since that part of the manga was so heavy with foreshadowing, but at least if you know where things go with the story in the long run, you can really notice all the intentional set-up going on in this episode.

I’m really excited for anime-only people to eventually figure out what’s going on and what exactly this episode is hinting at, especially since more people seem to be starting to develop theories about what they think’s up with Kyo and Yuki’s backstories and how they tie into Tohru and her mother. So I wonder how they’ll all feel about this when they can look back on it later.

I’m definitely biased since I’ve read the manga, and I’ve seen a lot of anime-only people still make largely incorrect guesses about what’s going on after this episode, but wow does a lot of this foreshadowing seem super obvious in hindsight, lol. It’s not a bad thing, but when you know what’s going on, you can really tell how heavily they’re hinting at stuff. In particular the bit with Yuki at the end made it seem really obvious that he’s the one who gave Tohru the hat, but I feel like that’s something that anime-only people might end up forgetting about compared to all the stuff going on with Kyo.

And on the note of that whole final scene, I loved the abrupt cut to the new ED. It was such a neat shift from how every episode thus far has ended with a relatively mellow and slow lead-in to the ED theme. And most [but not all] of the previous episodes had ended with fun and light-hearted scenes. So having this sudden and relatively surprising admission of guilt from Kyo and an abrupt cut to a new ED theme was really neat.

But of course, the True MVP [tm] of this episode was Momiji, our resident precious bunny boy. I’ve been bracing myself for this exact episode for weeks now, but oh man it still hurts so much. I know the reboot’s been really good with it’s dramatic moments, but I wasn’t expecting how intense and visceral everything about his backstory would be. I had to check back at how the manga presented it, and even though it’s mostly the same, the reboot’s a lot more explicit about showing that Momiji’s mother started engaging in self-harm after he was born. In the manga there’s one panel that shows her vaguely laying on the ground with one of her arms tied in bandages, but that’s about it. And in the manga, the bit with Momiji and his dad didn’t really have a clear setting, but the reboot makes it very clear that they’re at the hospital after his mother hurt herself. Which made it hurt all the more.

I also feel like they were a little more visually explicit with Tohru’s flashbacks to her mother’s death and her going to the hospital. That was also presented as a set of small and relatively vague panels in the manga, but the reboot went all in on making sure you knew exactly what was going on. Like always, I think both approaches work well for their different mediums, but I appreciate the reboot’s commitment to giving every scene a sense of time and place, especially when it comes to flashbacks. It gives it a very different feel to the manga at times, which helps it feel fresh and interesting.

Momiji’s backstory is pretty interesting and noteworthy, since even though we’ve already had tragic backstories in this series before, this is basically the first time where the series really starts to specifically explore and develop this theme of parent/child bonds, and how the curse plays into all that. I think that the way the manga handles the theme of being born ‘with a curse’ and how that impacts your relationship with your parents is actually my number one favourite thing about it, and something that I think it does almost perfectly. It’s a big part of why it means so much to me as a story. It’s not really something you see explored often in media, especially not with this level of nuance, and from as many different angles as this series looks at it from as it goes on.

Trust me when I say that I have A LOT I want to say about this whole theme of the story, and this is definitely where it first becomes a big part of it all, but specifically I’m waiting for the Kyo arc to happen later in this season before I really let loose all my thoughts on it. Pretty much like 90% of the main cast have different sorts of messy relationships with their families, and with the state of their bodies, but Kyo’s story is the one that speaks to me the most. Going by when I think the reboot will get to that part, I’ll probably spend most of my post on the season 1 finale talking about that, which would be a pretty fitting place to do it.

Though on the topic of Momiji, I do want to say that the scene where Tohru hugs him and they both cry together is one of the most memorable and hard-hitting parts of the manga. It’s such an raw and emotional example of the sort of acceptance and love that Tohru represents to the Somas. With how many examples we get across the whole story of the zodiac animal forms being a curse that the characters are hurt by, and which cut them off from other people, the image of Tohru hugging Momiji’s bunny form, and Momiji letting himself cry in his bunny form and be hugged by her, really just goes to show why Tohru is such a pivotal character in all this, and why she in particular is the one who manages to get through to the Somas so well.

Also, before I forget, people are talking about the whole debacle with his accent again, and my two cents on the matter are that he definitely comes across like he’s either a native German speaker, or he’s intentionally acting like one, and I tend to lean toward the former. Especially early on, he uses German very fluently and frequently, and there’s a whole running gag of him misspeaking simple phrases in Japanese, so either he’s genuinely more comfortable with German and not fully fluent in Japanese yet, or he’s trying to come across that way intentionally. It’s also worth noting that Momiji even says in this episode that his little sister ‘isn’t very good at speaking Japanese yet’. Basically I don’t think we’re really meant to question the in-universe logistics of whether or not it’d actually make sense for Momiji or his sister to speak German as their first language when it seems like they were both born and raised in Japan, lol. [And on the note of his sister, the short moment of her looking back at him while her mother pulls her away is another one of those little details that make it clear they’re setting up for way later scenes]

Anyway, this was an incredible episode, and it makes me really happy that they’re committing to adapting the entire thing, so all of the foreshadowing in this episode will be followed up on and developed.

[amazildoessomethingstupid]

Chapter 102: Escape Route

So… I have a confession to make.  

I actually read this chapter weeks ago, when I had those few missed updates a while ago. And since reading it, I find myself for the first time ever since doing this rant series…lost for words.  

I know! 

And I don’t mean that to say this chapter is confusing, or aggravating, or too good to talk shit about, it’s just…empty. Which is weird, given that on paper there’s some juicy elements to talk about.  In fact, I was initially pretty excited to go into this chapter given that this is the chapter that gave us:

So how the hell can I say there’s nothing to talk about? Well, it’s all in the summary.  The chapter starts with the panel I presented in the beginning, where Lucy establishes that it’s Augustus’ birthday.  There’s a bit of back and forth which is cute, but it’s all just fluff to get us to…

A retcon of that one chapter where Lucy tried to ride the bus with Augustus!  Except instead of being kicked off the bus for bus hopping, she instead gets to stay.  Now that might seem like a semi-interesting concept, but it’s really not and it’s evident in the chapter.  It’s basically just this

Lucy sees the place that Augustus lives in, and what it’s like in the inner city, and a glimpse into his home life. She’s culture shocked, and ends up sleeping over, where she has

THE DREAM

but then we snap back to reality and nothing is really changed.  I’m glossing over a lot here, but the thing is, while reading this chapter I felt oddly underwhelmed.  It felt like I already knew everything that would happen in this chapter.  Which might be chalked up to me being spoiled about the Alejandro dream when this chapter initially came out, but then again I’m no stranger to spoilers.  And in fact, a lot of times spoilers lead to more interest from me, because I want to know how we got to those big moments, and a lot of times there’s things that were missed while everyone was focused on that big moment which is where a lot of my rants get their material from.  A good example of this, being the carnival.

I knew about this line and the implications when it came out, but it didn’t spoil it for me. There were plenty of surprises and criticisms to throw outside of this one boneheaded moment.  There was more than just this one scene to make me perk up and dive into, such as Lacey’s behavior following this confession.  But here?

Outside of the alleyway nightmare sequence, there’s nothing to dig into.  Which baffles me so much I’ve had to sit and stew on what the fuck to even talk about for weeks!  Because there SHOULD be something to talk about here, there’s a new event going on, a return to form of having an alternate take on a previous situation. You’d think, as someone who basically started their artistic comeback doing that exact same thing I’d have more to talk about here, but I’m kinda stumped.  What do I talk about?

Oh, we see that Augustus lives in poverty and has bad parents? Yeah, we already knew that!  

Well okay, we may have known that but maybe this is about showing that Lucy knows that now too, and it’s showing her come to this revelation! Which that might be true, except for the fact that

WE ALREADY KNOW LUCY KNOWS THIS SHIT, WHEN AUGUSTUS TOLD HER!

But what about Alejandro? Maybe this chapter is meant to be a refresher to the audience to remind us that Alejandro’s a threat, except that’s even weaker because his existence as a real threat, was already reestablished THE SAME CHAPTER LUCY CAME BACK IN!  

Any information to be gathered from this chapter is either surface level shit, or just stuff that every reader already knows about.  And what makes this even worse is the fact that THIS WAS A FUCKING REDRAW OF A BCI EXCLUSIVE COMIC!  

So anyone who actually read that, and paid money to see that exclusive storyline was rewarded by having to wait at least TEN FUCKING WEEKS to read the same fucking shit they read before! And yes, I am going to talk about the BCI exclusive, because it made me kind of excited to dive into this chapter knowing that I could double dip, by comparing the BCI exclusive version to the canon version.  And it would’ve been a moral dilemma for me to show you this, because I do respect Taeshi’s private art and not showing what she may not want to show.  And I would feel bad about showing something that people paid money to exclusively see… if it weren’t for the fact that IT IS A COMPLETE PANEL-BY-PANEL CARBON COPY OF THE FUCKING EXCLUSIVE!  I COULD SHOW YOU THE ENTIRE FUCKING BCI COMIC, AND IT WOULDN’T MATTER AT ALL, BECAUSE IF YOU’VE READ THIS CHAPTER YOU’VE ALREADY READ THE FUCKING EXCLUSIVE SO IT DOESN’T EVEN MATTER!  

“But wait!” you might be saying, “That’s not entirely true.  Taeshi redrew the pages, and changed bits of the dialogue!”  And you know what?  You’re right!  She did, let’s talk about that shall we?

These are the only things she changed, just dialogue tweaks.  And you might be thinking, “Okay I see what you mean.  These are all just minor changes, that really don’t deviate in any substantial way to the chapter’s story.” Except… if you pair this with the other thing that wasn’t in the BCI exclusive, it’s quite clear what these little changes really insinuate, and what they mean.  Because, you know what wasn’t in the BCI exclusive?

This scene and yes the entire dream sequence, which I haven’t touched too much on wasn’t in the BCI exclusive.  It was created solely for the canon adaptation and if pair this with the minor dialogue changes I specifically brought up, you’ll see why they’re actually significant..  

First of all, I just need to point this out because I saw it, and now you can’t unsee it either.

Lucy’s going full owl head here.  These guys must be freaks to hit on someone doing the fucking exorcist full neck turn. But don’t let the owl head distract you, bear in mind that those five panels I showed from the BCI was the entire exchange and reaction between Lucy and these creeps.  However, in the canon…

It actually lingers on a bit more, we see the guys’ faces and them leering at Lucy, it has more implications outside of a simple cat-calling (no pun intended).  It’s more focus on Lucy trying to act tough and stifle her fears.  

But this change really shows what the changes are really trying to get at here.  The original line insinuates more than violence, but could mean death.  Whereas the change to “He’d be more than excited to know you came way out here.” Is pretty clear in its implication.  And this implication is indicative of what this chapter is really trying to establish. And the implication is…

THE R-WORD. And no, I don’t mean THAT R-Word you assholes; I mean the R-word that gets brought up whenever you talk about Augustus x Daisy, the R-Word that is tied to Alejandro, the R-Word that is brought up to excuse Lucy’s change in character, the R-Word I refrained from using in the carnival chapter because I don’t want to talk about that...  I’m talking about…

Rape. 

You wanna know what the whole purpose of this chapter is about?  If you break away all the needless information that we already know about Augustus, the only thing to take away from this chapter and its dream within a flashback…is that Lucy was almost raped… it has traumatized her, and she need serious help.   And after realizing that, and the fact that the entire trip is pointless in giving the reader anything new to chew on, I can’t even give a thought to the rest of that dream sequence, as it’s just that Lucy distrusts her friends and feels isolated.  Even if I talk about that, and what interesting things to gather from it there may be, I know it doesn’t matter because it’s a fucking DREAM WITHIN A FLASHBACK!  And if we look at this chapter and break it down to brass tacks, all this chapter tries to accomplish is trying to make us sympathize with Lucy by bringing up the absolute worst fucking thing imaginable.  And it just so happens that this is during after we’ve seen Lucy do some messed up shit to her former friends. Perhaps this chapter is meant to make us feel pity for Lucy, and let that pity excuse the bullshit she’s done.  But pulling out the rape card?  That’s fucking low.  This chapter aside from the rapey bits, is just numbing.  Like I said, everything that this scenario could’ve dived into or revealed were revealed and reinforced already.  And I remember when this chapter was coming out, even us shitposters and loving haters were fucking bored to tears, counting the fucking days for this chapter to end. But I know what some might say,

“You’re being unfair, Lt! Of course you know this stuff, you’re a fanatic!  This is a refresher for everyone, because they may not remember the stuff with Alejandro! They may not be so well versed, and you yourself even complained how there were minor things you forgot about in the canon that needed to be reminded to you!” and you know what?

Ya might be right there, pally.  You might be right, the dedicated fanbase probably could use a refresher on the threat of Alejandro, I mean who’s gonna remember that plot point from all the way back in Volume 1?  Except that like I stated in the beginning of this rant...

THE THREAT OF ALEJANDRO AND THE EFFECT HE HAS ON LUCY AND AUGUSTUS WAS ALREADY RE-ESTABLISHED SEVEN CHAPTERS AGO!  HIS INFLUENCE IS EVER PRESENT WITH AUGUSTUS!

“But that’s seven chapters ago! In real time, that was like a year difference.  You can’t just expect readers to remember that!” Well maybe you’re right, maybe you’re right.  But wait!

AREN’T YOU THE SAME PEOPLE WHO TELL ME AND MANY OTHER READERS THAT THIS COMIC IS MEANT TO BE READ IN BINGE FORM?!  WHERE IT’S CHAPTER BY CHAPTER!   BUT NOW YOU WANNA GIVE A BREAK TO THE ADDICTS WAITING WITH BAITED BREATH DAY ON END FOR AN UPDATE!?  WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT?!  

 sigh...

In closing… This chapter above all else, and I’m surprised to say this…  Is utterly pointless.  It’s nothing but shock value, meant to reinforce the fucked up part of BCB and these characters.  It gives us nothing new, and it’s a chapter that I feel is just a waste of time.  We already knew the things it brings up, and what we didn’t know, we could easily infer.  Not to mention that its placement before December, muddles the motivation of Lucy’s suicide attempt if not exposes a missed opportunity because it would’ve been a lot more interesting and moving to have Lucy think about her friends outside of Mike before jumping, and we see there that she has that mistrust in them.  But nope, that’s not what we get and this chapter does absolutely nothing except tell the audience, “Hey!  Lucy was almost raped and it’s fucked up!  We didn’t take the time to explore this, and establish her feelings before (even in times after this flashback supposedly takes place) so we’re going to bring it up now!  And it’s a flashback so we can say it was there the entire time!  But in reality, we just didn’t want to dive into it back then, but we’re gonna bring it back in now!”  And hey, why not recycle an entire storyline that you did before and change next to nothing.  Because that’s super creative.  

I give this chapter a hollow 2/10 I’ll give it an extra point because the nightmare sequence was actually well done.  I liked Taeshi’s use of vertical paneling and experimenting with the webcomic style in that way, and it was done very effectively.  However, that doesn’t change that fact that it was nothing but shallow shock value in my eyes.

[thewadapan]

I rewrote the most infamous Transformers comic of all time.

I wanna give fair warning here. See, when I started working on this comic, I wasn’t really expecting it to turn out quite as dark as it did, and I suspect neither are you. After all, this is The Beast Within, right? The story where Grimlock goes crazy and talks in Comic Sans? How bad can things get? It turns out that - with just a few decisions made in poor taste - the answer is “very”, to the point where I feel the need to stick some kinda content warning at the top of this post. Unfortunately, I also feel like I’ve got a responsibility to the story, and there’s no way for me to do so without ruining it, so this is the best you’re gonna get.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a comic like this. All the way back in 2016, I made “its christmas... so what??”, a kinda-bad re-lettering of a four-page ‘80s Marvel comic called “The Night the Transformers Saved Christmas”. I wasn’t too happy with the result, so half a year later I tried again - producing “PASS”, a re-lettered version of an obscure six-page UK-exclusive Marvel comic originally titled “Peace”.

“The Beast Within (My Pants)” is quite a different, uh, beast.

Each of the three comics I’ve produced was intended to be the last of its kind - standalone, yet fitting into the same overarching continuity. You can read any one of them alone, or you can read all of them in the order I made them. They’re individually available as albums on Imgur at the following links:

“its christmas... so what??”

“PASS”

“The Beast Within (My Pants)”

Alternatively, you can download the whole set as .cbz files - renamed .zip archives of images which you can open with a standard comic book reader.

It’s not too late to turn back.

Still with me? All caught up? Good. You’re probably wondering what the hell I was thinking...

I. I Have Summoned You Here For A Reason

Our story begins all the way back in 2004. The UK company Metrodome, looking to spice up their DVD box-set releases of the original ‘80s The Transformers cartoon, hired some local talent in the form of Mr. Jamieson (owner of a then-notable fansite) to write up some bonus features. They also commissioned him to write a mini-comic to be packed in with the set - with art by Mr. Gibson, a self-proclaimed fan since childhood with seemingly no other ties to the franchise.

The comic wound up being published in two parts (the second being subtitled “Consequences”) across the “Season 2 Part 2″ and “Seasons 3 and 4″ box sets. As a kid, I actually owned the latter of those box sets, and would watch it almost religiously - to what I can only assume must’ve been great annoyance from my poor parents - but I have no memory of it including a comic of any kind. Maybe it did, but it got separated at some point, and is lying around in some forgotten folder. A damn shame, that is. No, seriously.

I’m sure some record of the fan response at the time exists out there, in the doldrums of one of the many hard-to-search often-defunct forums which existed back then. I can’t really be bothered looking for it, sorry. You’ll have to content yourself with this TFWiki talk page for “The Beast Within” from mid-2007, which speaks of “Consequences” in hushed tones - as though it is a fabled artifact, prophesied to bring about Armageddon.

Another record - this one from 2009 - comes in the form of an eight-page TFW2005 thread ominously titled “Anyone afraid of the Dinobot combiner?” If you’re reading this commentary, you’re already strapped in for the long run; I recommend reading the thread in full. Well, okay, I don’t: it made me wince throughout, and I’ll be explaining the salient bits here, so there’s really no point subjecting yourself to it.

User “Razorrider”, after reading the TFWiki article on the Beast, opened the thread, noting “I don’t feel afraid of him myself.” The reactions soon started to pour in - some agreeing that the design was in fact “awesome”, others describing it as “hideous”.

Just going off my own personal opinion here, I think it’s fair to say that effectively nobody on the first page of the thread had any idea what they were talking about - and the pages that follow fared little better.

I think the main issue stemmed from the fact that a lot of those users didn’t think to explain the metrics by which they judged a “good” design (or, indeed, a “bad” story). When one person says “I think Optimus Prime has a good design”, they might just mean “I think he looks cool”, or they might mean “I think his proportions and colours give him a heroic stature which reflects his personality”. In that sense, a “good design” is one that communicates aspects of a character visually, even if it’s ugly. The Beast is hideous, yes, misshapen, yes, and it looks like the result of a teleportation accident, fine - but those are all intentional design decisions that perfectly reflect the nature of the character. In the foreword to the first part, Mr. Gibson notes the following (you’ll have to imagine that it’s written in Comic Sans for yourself):

Creating ‘The Beast’ was probably the most interesting aspect of the project. I wanted him to be a grotesque, twisted character that contained the design elements of the Dinobots he is created from.

People proclaim that the Beast “should never have existed” - a line from the comic’s narration, note - but somehow fail to realise that this is the comic’s own intent.

(Compare the Beast’s design to that posted by one user on the second page of the thread, which - minus an admittedly-inspired Triceratops-fist - just looks like an upscaled version of Grimlock.)

Okay, the alarm bells should be ringing in your head now. This is all starting to sound disturbingly like I’m some sort of The Beast Within apologist, isn’t it? How slippery is the slope that leads from “the Beast is a good design” to “The Beast Within is a good comic?” Have the hours spent poring over this thing in MS Paint turned my brain to mush, capable of only vague all-caps-Comic-Sans-penned ponderings?

...Well, yes, but- look, just stick with me!

The most accurate recurring statement in the thread - though perhaps not in the way it is intended - is that The Beast Within reads like a work of “fanfiction”. See, Transformers is a franchise with an ever-growing history, and many of those who work on it now have been lifelong fans themselves. This is true of many franchises which have stumbled into the new millennium, finding themselves seemingly unable to die. We live in an age of fanfiction - yet some fanfictions are fanfiction-ier than others.

When compared to the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek and Marvel’s comics, one sees a marked difference in Transformers. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, every story Hasbro put out seemed to fit vaguely into a single guiding narrative - each distinct strand of their multimedia barrage falling into contradiction with one another, yet still seeking to adapt some underlying premise. The 2001 series Robots in Disguise - in the West at least - saw a complete departure from that narrative. The ramifications of that strange borderline-afterthought cartoon cannot be understated, yet in retrospect feel like they’ve been a part of the franchise for as long as anyone can remember.

Almost every year since, Hasbro has effectively wiped the slate clean. Each new series tries to be its own thing. Continuity between series - if it exists - is understated, ignored, or overwritten. To date, this is still something that confuses us geeks; so used are we to the mired pits that are the canons of Star Wars and its ilk. This can be frustrating - there are only so many times one can retread the same story - but so too has this rare cycle allowed authors to really explore the concepts and themes presented by the premise of “car robots” to a level of depth which I believe is simply unattainable in franchises which adhere stringently to a single narrative.

That’s the bright side.

In practise, many Transformers stories have become increasingly myopic - existing only in service of themselves, or (more often) in service of older (better?) stories. The single most influential of these stories is almost certainly 1986′s The Transformers: The Movie, and it’s that influence which is felt most strongly in The Beast Within.

Of the countless insights offered by Terry van Feleday - if you don’t know who that is, don’t worry, I’ll explain later - I find that this one rings most true:

When Optimus Prime du jour mouths off “One shall stand, one shall fall” for the twentieth time, there is simply no longer that understanding that he will not be the one who stands.

Where so many modern Transformers stories are misguided recreations of the animated movie, The Beast Within is a reaction to it. But we’ll get to that. First, let’s talk a little about the story’s artwork.

Mr. Gibson himself, I believe, deserves almost none of the criticism he’s received over the years for his work on this comic. Though his layouts are occasionally cluttered, and he does seem to have been trying a little too hard to emulate the style of Pat Lee (the man behind Dreamwave Productions; license holder for Transformers comics at the time) in the first part, his panels have a strong sense of energy and tone.

Though he didn’t exactly get to explore a broad range of emotions over the course of the comic, he managed to keep the characters expressive - always a challenge, when dealing with visors and mouthplates - and, crucially for a cast of this size, on-model. Look at the fury on Razorclaw’s face! The way Prime’s fist flies out of the panel! Menasor, torn in two! Predaking’s sundered legs! The mishmash of heads inside the Beast! The sickly colours of the second half! While it lacks the practised ease seen from some fans-turned-creators on more recent books, it’s still impressive work.

Regardless, Mr. Gibson’s first outing with Transformers proved to be his last. He didn’t end up getting paid work from Dreamwave Productions as he’d perhaps hoped (though in retrospect, neither did most of the people who illustrated for that company, so that was probably for the best). There’s no mention of The Beast Within on his personal website, which bills him as a “children’s picture book illustrator”, amongst other things. To put it simply, the guy’s always been a talented illustrator, and his style’s come a long way since this comic - the portfolio work on his website is very impressive.

(On a whim, I went back to late 2004 on the internet archive, and did in fact find the comic’s first spread buried at the back end of his portfolio. The entire website is a product of the early-2000s - there’s a link labelled “Go to Flash site” in the sidebar, though the page it takes you to sadly seems to have been lost to time. It all seems like it was borne of another age entirely.)

Anyway, let’s get back to that TFW2005 thread. The thing that makes it particularly notable is that, on the fourth page, Mr. Jamieson himself wades in to try and set the record straight. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

For a lot of people, I think, the idea of interacting with an author might seem strange. They’re aware of J.K. Rowling’s online antics, and are becoming increasingly comfortable with celebrity interactions on Twitter, sure. But there’s a difference between those kinds of interactions and the kind that take place on forums or in chatrooms - places where everyone’s on a level playing field. I come from those corners of the internet, and am lucky enough to have had conversations with lots of people who’ve made things I like, and have seen almost the full range of approaches those people take when dealing with their audiences. It’s safe to say that Mr. Jamieson’s approach in that decade-old thread is just about the worse one there is: over the course of just five posts, he smugly lashed out at the people in the thread, whipping them into a fervour that lasted for three more pages after his departure.

Regardless of whether or not Mr. Jamieson was correct - in the attacks he levelled at the other users, in the defence he offered for his work - there can be no question that this kind of behaviour is grossly inappropriate.

(Whether it is more or less appropriate than digging up old threads and archived web pages in an attempt to justify a bastardisation of a much-maligned comic book remains to be seen, I suppose.)

The key point that Mr. Jamieson kept returning to is that he sought to avoid the dreaded “info dump” (a hallmark of early Transformers stories), and didn’t want his readers to be “spoon fed”. A recurring criticism of the story is that it seems to begin halfway through, with little explanation for what’s going on - but I, like Mr. Jamieson, don’t think that complaint holds water. The Beast Within begins “in medias res” because we already have the context: eighty issues of a comic, ninety-eight episodes of a cartoon, and - crucially - a movie. Everyone knows the story of the Transformers, because the story of the Transformers - ironically enough - never really changes. “Is it ever really over, Jetfire?”

(That’s the last line of the original version of The Beast Within, by the way. I had to add the comma in myself.)

Like the impact of Robots in Disguise, the impact of The Transformers: The Movie is kinda hard to see unless you were there at the time - and I wasn’t - but in 1986, it did something which was profoundly shocking to thousands of children: it introduced them to death.

That’s about all I’m going to say about the movie itself, because much more experienced critics than me have already mined it for every ounce of subtext. I’ve already quoted the work of Terry van Feleday, who did some excellent scene-by-scene analysis of the film in a thread all the way back in 2010 - and I’ll come back to her writings a few times in this post. This very year, sorta-famous YouTuber hbomberguy released his own long-form take on the movie - what I find interesting when comparing the two interpretations is that van Feleday struggles to find much merit in the movie outside of its opening, while hbomberguy employs a reading that allows him to be much more optimistic and charitable even towards the end of the movie.

In a way, I think Mr. Jamieson had an intuitive subconscious understanding of the subtext which both of those critics later brought to light, an understanding which directly informed the premise of The Beast Within. In the same way one can read the monster planet Unicron as a physical manifestation of death, so too can one view the Beast - and Mr. Jamieson (almost certainly unconsciously) posits that, although death does not belong in a children’s cartoon, it is an inevitability that all children must eventually face. It is the dark spectre that lurks beneath the surface of every childish thing made by an adult.

An author places some of themselves in a book - but the reader withdraws something of their own perception as well. I wondered what I might see in the book: a child believes a lie because they know no better; a grown adult sees the lie because it fails to line up with experience. In this way, a child’s story could be so many different experiences. With enough subtext, a thing made for a child becomes an entirely different world to an adult. [...] There’s no telling when subtext will defeat the facade of a thing.

(I’ll tell you what that quote’s from later.)

I wonder, perhaps, if the endless swathes of edgy reimaginings of children’s stories are something of a mass outcry from those who grew up being told - every Saturday morning - that when people got blown apart, they’d be put back together by the next week’s end. What was it like for those children, in December of ‘86, to learn that some people could never be rebuilt?

II. It Pleases Me To Be The First

It occurs to me that I never did really do a commentary on “its christmas... so what??”, although I did talk about it a little in the commentary for “PASS”. Its title is a reference to the famous (well, you know what I mean) cover of “Stargazing” (issue #145 of the original UK run), which featured a banner reading “IT’S CHRISTMAS!” over an image of Starscream, arms out, yelling “SO WHAT?”

(Side note: at first I thought that I hadn’t read that particular story, but it occurs to me that as a kid I used to borrow a lot of Titan Books’ reprints from my local library - and I do in fact have distinct memories of reading Transformers: Second Generation, which did collect “Stargazing” amongst other Christmas stories - so I guess I probably did read it, even if I don’t remember doing so.)

The Women’s Day comic is something of a curio, as explained in this excellent article (which reprints the comic - with its original text - in full). It’s basically the only US strip which was published outside of the eighty issues of the run proper. This rare, standalone nature is something I have sought across every re-lettering I’ve done - from the UK annual-exclusive not-by-the-usual-author set-in-the-future “Peace” to the UK DVD-box-set-exclusive set-in-an-ambiguous-cartoon-inspired-continuity The Beast Within. These works feel like they’ve been lost to time - and corrupting them feels like unearthing buried treasure (and smearing it in turds). But I’ll get to that.

Back to “its christmas”. As I explained last time, I just went through the comic panel-by-panel and changed stuff to whatever I thought would be funny. I didn’t edit the two-line introductory blurb (which ended up informing the backstory detailed in the new set of AtoZ profiles). I barely paid attention to established portrayals of the characters beyond Soundwave’s association with music. I had no large-scale plans.

There’s a lazy (and poorly-conceived) gag where the little girl calls Bumblebee “gay” (also note that at the time, I misinterpreted the art in the third panel of the third page - I thought it was the girl speaking, when in fact it was her mother - leading to some erroneous dialogue), which in retrospect feels like a less-drawn-out version of the excruciating opening scene from Freddery McMahon’s Combiner Wars abridged special. That spoof somehow manages to be less funny than its source material, and I sometimes think that the same holds for my own creations.

Still, that’s not to say that “its christmas” doesn’t do anything that I like. I’ll admit that lines like “lol without mustard christmas will be CANCEL suck it nerds”, “toot toot here come some flutes”, and “help me drag it to the hospital” still kinda make me laugh. I like the way Bumblebee drowns out the little girl’s insults by tooting loudly at her. The final panels - wherein the humans steal Bumblebee’s blood as the other Transformers watch impassively - have an offbeat intensity to them, and when it came to writing Bumblebee’s AtoZ profile it was those which I chose to call back to.

If I had to sum up “its christmas” in a single word, I’d pick “childish”. The jokes, the characters themselves, the entire concept behind the comic - all feel kinda immature, and that was kinda by design. Summer Meme Sundae was a terrible piece of work, but - if I had to ascribe a theme to it - that theme would be growing up; realising that you’re running out of summer holidays. “PASS” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)” kept that atmosphere, but became increasingly cynical and obscene. That was just the natural direction they had to go in.

III. Every Place Reminds You Of Some Place Else

I’ve long had an idle fascination with abridged series, and have toyed with the thought of making an abridged series of my own. Most notably, I’ve long fancied the idea of abridging Machinima’s Prime Wars Trilogy of Transformers cartoons. Here’s an extract from a message I posted in Allspark Chat (the Discord server associated with the Allspark Forums):

I'd probably try and keep Megatron mostly the same as he is in the show as it is. Optimus'd be kinda murderous - you can tell he can't wait for Rodimus and the rest of the Council to kick the bucket so he can retake unilateral control over Cybertron. I'd maybe try to go for something of a more sympathetic Starscream - he wouldn't actually have any plan, he just has Cybertron's interests at heart and ends up trying to use the Enigma solely to rid the world of Megatron and Optimus forever. Windblade'd maybe be trying to force some hero's journey stuff - picking fights with progressively bigger opponents in a misguided attempt to prove her narrative worth

As pitches go, it’s not much. It doesn’t help that, as I previously mentioned, Freddery McMahon himself - pretty much the only name in Transformers abridging - has already tackled the series; his style of parody isn’t really to my taste, but his production value is fairly impressive and would largely overshadow any improvements I made on a script level. I feel like the Prime Wars Trilogy has potential, because it’s a fascinating piece of media, but I find myself unable to answer the question of how to parody something that already feels so much like self-parody. Sound familiar?

By the time the last entry in that series - Power of the Primes - was wrapping up, I'd been posting semi-frequently in the Allspark’s threads with a borderline-apologetic tone. Takes included:

The emptiness of Cybertron lends it a Beast Machines-esque tone

The Mistress of Flame’s death is cathartic

You can see right through the script

I want to get off Machinima’s wild ride

Wow, Windblade sure screams a lot, doesn’t she

The finale of Titans Return is good, actually

Hearing Megatron say “piss me off” is an unpleasant surprise

Hey, this soundtrack’s pretty good

Wait, no it’s not, but Galvatron’s implied reversion to Megatron is

Narrative emergence gives rise to Buddhist allegories in TFTM

Grimlock acts like his cartoon self - but only around friends

Okay, for realsies, the soundtrack’s good now

They’re right to kill Sludge; he’s the least toyetic Dinobot

I’d probably describe a lot of what I saw in the Prime Wars Trilogy as a kind of narrative pareidolia - only instead of seeing faces in inanimate objects, I was seeing value and meaning in an indefensible web series.

The problem with abridged series is that they require a ridiculous amount of effort. You need to be a good writer in the traditional sense, but you need to be able to work around the visual material available - you’re gonna have to edit everything yourself, you’re probably gonna need to do custom animation, and you’re certainly gonna need to wrangle a cast of voice actors. All of that for ten minutes of animation that’s probably gonna get taken off YouTube within ten minutes of upload. It’s just not feasible - and yet there’s part of me that loves the idea: commentary and content, all rolled into one.

To pretend that it was Combiner Wars that led me to create “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a little misleading, however. The real answer - I’m sorry to say - has more to do with ponies.

See, every now and again I get very acute nostalgia for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which was perhaps my first brush with fandom - or at least, proper fandom. It’s heard to measure these things, y’know? Anyway, when that happens, I realise that I don’t really want to sit and watch a cartoon for little girls, so I usually just listen to some fan-made music or - as was the case last time - rewatch one of the abridged series based on the show. I use the word “series” here in plural because there were in fact two (well, two that matter): Friendship is Witchcraft and The Mentally Advanced Series. There’s long been quiet debate over which of the two is the (soundwave) superior series, and I’ve historically believed that they’re (buy some) apples and oranges. The latter is a more thoughtful parody of the source material, while the former is more polished and standalone.

However, after blitzing through Friendship is Witchcraft once more in its entirety over the course of a couple of days, something about it clicked for me - a bigger-picture thesis - and I realised that it had much more to say about its source material than I (or, well, most people) had given it credit for. It was at that moment that I felt the awful urge to create a My Little Pony fanwork of my own.

(The quote I used earlier, about subtext in children’s stories, was spoken by Princess Celestia in Rainbow Dash Presents: The Star in Yellow, a Mentally Advanced Series special inspired by a fanfiction which, fittingly enough, was written by Matt Marshall (AKA Blueshift/blue/Yartek/RockLordsRock), who was also the man behind the infamous “JaAm” relettering which effectively inspired all of these projects of mine. It’s like poetry.)

As we’ve already established, making a fancy-schmancy animation was out of the question - but a crudely-edited-in-MS-Paint comic was the next best thing, clearly. I started glancing through IDW Publishing’s official My Little Pony comics - having purchased a few in a Humble Bundle many years ago - but, aside from a couple of promising stories, quickly realised I didn’t have much hope. The comics are just, to put it frankly, not as good or as interesting as the show, and the fact that I’d need to adapt at least two issues at once (over forty pages) to tell any complete story made doing so an unappetising prospect. Furthermore, IDW’s comics are still very much in print, and (as the abridged series show) any such parody would stand on shaky legal ground.

Seeing as I wasn’t about to delve into the dark realm of prose any time soon, and the idea of messing with some other fan’s work rubbed me the wrong way, I decided to give up on my equine dreams and instead turned back to more familiar territory. I glanced over the list of old Transformers Marvel comics, but nothing like those I’d previously relettered stood out to me. I perused the short stories included in Dreamwave’s 20th Anniversary Transformers Summer Special. I even looked into some Fun Publications stuff. Nothing sparked my interest.

Perhaps my most promising lead was “An Arcee Sort of Day”, a vaguely-maligned (as in, “meh”) three-page standalone comic released mere months ago by IDW as part of an anthology - but the poor resolution of the available scan (the comic had been released in its entirety as part of the free preview for the anthology) meant that editing it would be a nightmare, and there was very little in the way of dialogue for me to mess with besides. More than that, the idea of directly mocking a comic from a compilation designed to showcase female creators (particularly one featuring Arcee, who’s been a controversial character in recent years) struck me as tasteless in the extreme. If only I had an easier target!

Oh wait, I did.

IV. Let The Slaughter Begin

If I actually ever read both parts of The Beast Within before starting work on this project, I don’t remember doing so. I do remember reading the Beast’s TFWiki page when I was much younger, and remember feeling like the wiki’s take on the concept seemed disproportionately harsh. To be honest, it was quite vindicating to read the source material and discover that I still agreed with my younger self’s assessment - the problems with the story are not on a conceptual level, but in the execution.

I barely gave myself time to digest the story before diving in and working out how exactly I could mess it up. I knew from my previous comics that the Autobots would all be unrepentant shitheads, so the natural choice was to portray the Decepticons as favourably as possible. Where the Autobots are callous, poorly-spoken, stupid, and divided, the Decepticons would be caring, articulate, intelligent, and united. In the story’s context, these traits would be weaknesses: remember, only the Beast has the killing instinct needed for decisive victory in this endless children’s story. I also knew that everybody in the story would hate Grimlock, and that - unlike with Roadbuster in “PASS” - they’d be right to do so.

That was pretty much the extent of my planning. I gathered up all the pages and started clearing out the text from the speech bubbles. Already, I had something of a problem: the use of the infamous Comic Sans MS font in the first part of The Beast Within was one of its most iconic features, and I wanted to retain that, but my own previous reletterings had canonically established Times New Roman as the “voice” of the Autobots. In fact, as far as those older comics were concerned, Times New Roman was the voice not just of the whole Cybertronian race, but also of the narrator.

The only lines which used a different font were those where I’d chosen to retain the comic’s original lettering, and with Roadbuster’s dialogue. It’s hard to articulate what exactly the joke with Roadbuster was - he seemed like the odd-one-out in the opening panels of the story, so I ran with that by having him be persistently ostracised by the other Autobots. The twist, as you find out when he finally speaks, is that he seems to be the only Autobot who’s unambiguously a good person; the rest bully him for effectively no reason.

In the commentary for “PASS” I released earlier this year, I explicitly ask:

If these are the Autobots… then what were the Decepticons like?

My own gut feeling was, I think, that they were people like Roadbuster - genuinely good individuals who never wanted a fight - and so for this comic I knew I had to give them Roadbuster’s Arial voice. I also knew that I’d have to keep the Autobots’ Times New Roman voice for the most part. The only question, then, was what to do about Grimlock, the combiners, Jetfire, and the narration.

(It’s worth noting that Soundwave and Triton were both Decepticons too, yet they both spoke in Times New Roman. The Doylist reason for this is simply that, at the time, I was happy to have everyone share a voice. In Triton’s case, the Watsonian reason is that he’s trying to mimic the Autobots’ “accent” to better fit in. If I had to make up a reason for Soundwave, I’d say that he’s only recently defected from the Autobots, as a reference to van Feleday’s insane Soundwave-as-an-ex-prisoner-of-war theory. Had Soundwave had a speaking role in the comic, I’m sure I would’ve explored that backstory in his AtoZ profile - but alas, it wasn’t to be.)

In fact, there was initially some ambiguity over who the comic’s narrator would be - if I used Times New Roman, would I have to keep the voice of the same narrator as in the previous two comics? In the end, I decided to draw from my source material: the on-panel narration would be Grimlock’s inner monologue, rendered in full Comic Sans glory, while the "Interlude” would employ a more omniscient third-person voice. That third-person voice is, I think, distinct from the narrator of the previous comics, and feels like a more solemn version of the narrator of the AtoZ profiles I released alongside the commentary for “PASS” (or, indeed, the latest batch included here). Remember, I wrote the first two comics years before all of this recent material. More on the text-only pages later.

When he speaks out loud, Grimlock uses the regular Times New Roman of the other Autobots. In fact, the only dialogue which uses Comic Sans is that of the Beast, which I view as the true externalisation of Grimlock’s feelings. You can also view it as the “real world” (as depicted in the text-only pages) leaking through into the comic’s reality, in much the same way that an aware-of-death adult perspective seeps through into a seemingly-innocent children’s cartoon. The other combiners simply use a slightly bigger font than the individual Decepticons. Oh, and all of the combiners use red text.

In the original toyline, Jetfire was something of an odd-one-out, as he was really a Macross “VF-1S Super Valkyrie” toy licensed by Hasbro from Bandai (who had in turn purchased the molds from the recently-bankrupted Takatoku toys). Both Whirl and Roadbuster have similar origins. I was under no obligation to do anything special with Jetfire’s dialogue, but because of the way he’s introduced in the comic - and as a nod to his shared real-world history with Roadbuster - it felt right to give him his own voice. Though he still uses Times New Roman, the font is scaled up and he speaks entirely in capital letters. His dialogue was a challenge to write, as most of his speech bubbles are very small, but I think this worked out in my favour: his speech often ended up butting up against the bubbles’ outlines, giving the impression that he’s always speaking just a little bit too loudly.

The lettering in the first part of the original comic - aside from being technically legible - is generally shoddy on every level. For emphasis, it alternately uses italics or inconsistent font size. Occasionally, the dialogue switches to lowercase, which kinda gives the impression that everyone’s been shouting the whole time. Most of the text is left-aligned. Some bits of text seem to have been squashed. Most of the narration boxes are parallelograms, but some are plain rectangles. Red hand-lettered text is mostly limited to the combiners’ speech, but also sees use a couple of times for Megatron and Optimus Prime. Some of the combiners’ speech just uses normal red Comic Sans MS text. Meanwhile, the second part switches entirely to black hand-lettered text - presumably from Mr. Gibson - which is a marked improvement in terms of tone and consistency, if a step down in legibility.

It’s interesting to me that, despite my version of the comic sharing the dearth of commas and full stops which plagues the original, it reads very differently. For all its stylisation, it’s my hope that each line I write for these comics comes across realistically - not in the sense that it’s something you’d hear someone say, but perhaps in the sense that it’s something you’d maybe read on the internet. More on that later - first, some miscellaneous notes on the comic’s text:

When I first wrote it, I used the style of self-censorship from “PASS” (and, by extension, the rest of Summer Meme Sundae) wherein the first letter of any curse is replaced by an asterisk. It was one of my prereaders, Tindalos, who noted that “the censoring kinda takes a bit from it”, and I decided that I agreed with him - it felt like I was holding back. You can decide for yourself; I’ve collected the pages with lines that were revised between drafts in an album.

Through pure coincidence, it’s Springer (well, Bulkhead) who gets the first line of dialogue in the comic - just like in “PASS”. In case it’s not clear, the joke is that he thinks he’s safe on the floor and berates Jazz for not doing the same thing, seconds before getting stomped by Megatron. I think this sequence perfectly encapsulates a big part of what I wanted to show about the Autobots: they all criticise one another relentlessly, despite being deeply flawed themselves. It’s a dynamic that, to me at least, actually evokes that of the Autobots in Michael Bay’s movies.

The line “thats me grimlock in the corner losing my religion” is, of course, a reference to R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion”, which was itself included as part of writer James Roberts’ “soundtrack” for More Than Meets The Eye. Though he did not appear in the issue for which Roberts selected the song, Grimlock was a recurring character in that series. Hopefully my depiction of the character surpasses that one - though if you ask the people I usually talk to, I wouldn’t be setting the bar particularly high with that comparison.

Optimus uses the insult “grimdick” shortly after Grimlock’s narration provides the example “grimcock”. I intended this to show that, while the dynamic between the two’s been cemented for a good while, Grimlock is always a step behind and still can’t predict Prime’s actions.

Snarl’s line was originally “hey speak for yourself swoop me and grimlock are tight as *hit”, which expresses effectively the opposite sentiment to his final line. The idea that Snarl was okay with becoming part of the Beast was intended to add a bit of brevity to the sequence - but I decided it was better to keep as much emotional impact as possible in the moment.

A more minor change a couple of pages later is Grimlock’s line “how do they do it”, which replaced “love is stupid”. I wanted to expressly draw a parallel between the Beast’s combination and Predaking’s.

The line I’m happiest with is “eat shit megatron this is what you get for being such a fucking weapon”. One of my friends occasionally cracks out the word “weapon” to describe someone - and what better application for it is there than a guy who literally turns into a gun?

Megatron’s line about the “black hole” in Optimus Prime’s spark is a twist on Megatron’s own canonical link to a black hole - an aspect of his original bio which was revisited by Roberts.

I struggled to think of Menasor’s final words. The longer I stared at the panel where he gets torn in half - from which I’d already cleared the speech bubble - the more I was struck by the emptiness of the scene. If one considers Menasor to be a symbol for the Decepticons as a whole, then his silence in that panel is my way of showing that - from this point forth - the Decepticons no longer have a voice; the second part of the comic shows naught but their corpses. Death exists, and nothing is good any more.

None of the text on the final page of the first half remained unchanged between drafts. I wan’t happy with Optimus Prime’s original line at all, and the internal monologue “don’t you deserve happiness” felt a little too serious. The phrase “no u” is the archetypical low-effort comeback, and seemed like the perfect beat to end the first part with.

Prime’s line “gotta jettison some dead weight” is a nod to Astrotrain’s iconic line in The Transformers: The Movie: “Jettison some weight, or I’ll never make it to Cybertron.” I had to check for the exact quote just now and found “jettison transformers the movie” in my search history, so obviously I’d done the same when writing the panel. More than just being a trite reference, I was hoping to draw an obvious parallel and to contrast the unilateral decision Optimus Prime makes on the following page against the more shall-we-call-it-democratic process the Decepticons used in the movie.

I’m probably a little too proud of “big red irredeemable fucking monster of a robot semi fuck”, which is a line that could absolutely only exist in this travesty of a comic.

Jetfire’s use of the phrase “GOTTA BLAST” is a reference to a line spoken by the titular character of the early-2000s CGI cartoon Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, one which has turned into something of a meme. When I wrote the panel, I intended to imply that Jetfire was aiming to crash into the city - but I think it ended up doubling as foreshadowing for the fact that Jetfire flies his passengers into the sun. Additionally, the meme often sees use as innuendo, which shines through in the following panel: Jetfire expels propellant into the Beast’s face while Bumblebee remarks “gah okay i did not want to see that”. The less said about the sound effect “CHOOOM!”, the better.

Remember how all the text in the first part of the original comic was left-aligned? So’s the text in my version! MS Paint simply doesn’t have the option to change the alignment of your text - I actually had to throw in extra spaces at the start of each new line, eyeballing things until I had an approximation of centre alignment. This is something I never did with “PASS”, and I found that doing so gave me more freedom to squeeze more stuff into the speech bubbles.

As immortalised by countless memes, you can’t rotate text in MS Paint either. I tried to use this to my advantage on the comic’s first page, where the steps between the words in Grimlock’s narration give them a faltering quality.

Grimlock’s narration actually ended up being one of the most challenging parts of the comic to write. I wrote a draft of the first page pretty quickly, but decided I wasn’t happy with it and that I’d have to replace it later - which I did, but only after having written pretty much every single other bit of dialogue.

I think the central conceit of “PASS” - that somebody’s farted and the Autobots are trying to find out who dealt it - didn’t solidify until I reached the second page and looked at Rodimus Prime’s body language. In much the same way, the crux of “The Beast Within (My Pants)” didn’t solidify until it came to writing Swoop’s line.

V. Me Grimlock Not Nice Dino

At some point during the creation of “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, I started thinking a lot about incels.

(To be clear, this is the part of the commentary where things get a bit weird, and I start talking about storytelling decisions which I think were made in poor taste but which I don’t think come across overtly in the comic itself. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section. Or, y’know, stop reading entirely.)

Grimlock is childish, despite his age, and is desperate to be liked - no, respected - at any cost. His only asset is his BRUTE STRENGTH. He hates Prime, but wishes he was Prime. He has trouble treating any of the other Autobots like people. He rages against an outgroup whose ideals are - at least ostensibly - rooted in empathy.

I wouldn’t say “I wrote a comic where Grimlock is an incel”, because that’d be a pretty stupid thing to write and I’d feel pretty stupid saying it.

Looking back at a lot of my previous work on this blog, some things do crop up again and again. In abstract, I’d say that the idea of a character seeking friendship and/or respect - and failing to understand why they can’t find those things - is one that I’ve revisited a couple of times. This was a strong theme in the latter half of Another Son - a story which dealt heavily in misanthropy - which featured a character inspired by Sam Witwicky from Michael Bay’s Transformers. The protagonist of Retrace Steps spent the whole story unable to even ask the question “why am I alone”. Many of the characters in Are You Happy - particularly Mr. Hernandez - deal with similar problems to varying extents.

So this makes, what, practically four stories in a row? I didn’t set out to approach things this way again with this comic, but from the moment I wrote Swoop’s line I knew I didn’t have a choice. When people talk about the Beast’s combination sequence, they talk about how violative it appears. Metal tentacles spring from Grimlock like one of Alien’s chestbursters, penetrating or melding with the other Dinobots’ bodies. After that, the resulting monstrosity ambles around, horrifically murdering its former peers. As much as I can have the characters in the story play this stuff off for laughs, I’ll never be able to erase the undercurrent.

This isn’t supposed to be a direct mapping - a perfect metaphor - and by the time this commentary’s done I hope I’ll have pointed in the direction of some alternate perspectives. It just seems important to put my cards on the table and say that, when I was working on this comic, this is the kinda thing I was thinking about. We thought children were safe with Transformers, and then a gun came and shot people they cared about, and for some reason we were surprised to see that they got upset.

With all of that in mind, I take some solace in the fact that I actually found getting into Grimlock’s head to be extremely difficult. His dialogue was a breeze to write, sure - that’s the outsider’s perspective - but actually trying to construct his thoughts in anything approximating a convincing manner was very difficult. The first draft of his narration literally included the phrase “we live in a society”.

VI. Such Heroic Nonsense

I’ve already touched on Terry van Feleday’s opus a couple of times, but I think it’s worth delving a little deeper into how exactly her analysis influenced this comic. For some reason the idea that nearly five-hundred pages of borderline-conspiracy-theorist-level ramblings about perhaps the most maligned movie franchise of the 21st century might be a tough sell is one which I can’t quite wrap my head around. I’d say that it’s because I’ve read the thing and already know that it’s good, but in truth I was pretty much sold from the moment I found out it existed.

Anyway, I frequently get into not-quite-arguments with internet strangers about Transformers, and during those discussions I frequently find myself saying “a good Transformers story should do X”, and then I have to resist the urge to add “like Michael Bay’s movies” because doing so would completely delegitimise the point I’m trying to make. The problem is that, because I’m deliberately omitting the context of my opinions, they come across as being even more bizarre.

I think that same problem exists in some capacity with this comic, where I’m drawing on sources which are intuitive to me but completely alien even to a typical Transformers fan. I’ve yet to even mention the other primary inspiration for this story, which is even more arcane.

Perhaps it’s important to stress that van Feleday doesn’t offer a typical "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" take. Rather - and I realise I’m about to butcher this - she shows how the humans in Bay’s movies give increasing amounts of power to an alien cult leader because their only alternative is to get wiped out by an alien warlord. So in terms of this comic, “Autobots bad” is very much rooted in her reading of those movies, while “Decepticons good” is just something I thought would be funny.

Well, not exactly. I’ve already mentioned Combiner Wars; something that continues to baffle pretty much everyone who watched that show (and its sequels) is that, while it seems to have no idea what it’s doing most of the time, its portrayal of Megatron is an absolute riot. He is absolutely the protagonist of that series, the Only Sane Man in a world of bizarre psychotic caricatures. I think the same kinda holds in the continuity of my comic, only he’s had more time to bring the people he takes in around to his way of thinking.

Let’s not forget the official “good-is-bad” continuity of Shattered Glass, which - while heavily compromised - was the source of many interesting reinterpretations of popular characters. Effective reinterpretations require you to forget what you know about a character and strip them back to the core signifiers, which you can then put to different use. One of the posters in Terry van Feleday’s thread, “Lobok”, observes:

I like the idea that Bay or the writers looked at Optimus Prime and thought "What would a guy who calls himself that really act like?" Imagine you knew or heard of someone, a human, who called themselves the equivalent of "The #1 Bestest Superior" or "King Supreme Ultimate" - do you not picture either a 7-year old boy or a mentally deficient oo-rah alpha male? Maybe the two combined? Seems much more apt than a wise, noble father figure.

Of the course, I don’t for a second think that Michael Bay had any such thought - but the connection still exists for the audience to make. Therein lies one of the greatest unspoken strengths of Transformers storytelling: the sheer breadth and depth of the signifiers at play. Much of what van Feleday did in her thread was to boil down the concepts found in Transformers stories to reveal those core signifiers.

(Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece for the Refined Robot Co. blog which explored some of her findings by delving into the subtextual meanings of the countless alternate modes worn by Megatron over the years.)

By the same token, I think there’s something to be said for the way Grimlock’s alternate mode ties into his portrayal in my take on The Beast Within. He turns into a dinosaur - something which is rooted in the past, extinct, unable to develop - while most of the other Autobots turn into modern vehicles. Kids may love dinosaurs, but they’ll likely grow up to have a stronger interest in cars or tanks. Grimlock is immature almost to the point of childishness; his beast mode is the lizard king, and he doesn’t understand why you won’t bow.

(Obviously I’m making some big generalisations here for the sake of a point - the other Dinobots have their own prehistoric disguises, and kids’ interests develop in varied enough ways that perhaps this link is only noticeable to those who experienced the transition I describe. When I was much younger, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and would consume all the dinosaur-related media I could get my hands on. Eventually, however, my crippling fear of sea monsters led me to stop reading books about them - I'd turn the page, see a full-spread painting of a pliosaur taking a bite out of a pterodactyl, and shit my pants. Okay, no, that’s a huge exaggeration: more likely it just got to the point where I knew basically all of the cool dinosaur facts already, and suddenly the deep lore of the grim darkness of the 41st millennium or whatever seemed way cooler. I just find it funnier to imagine that my prosperous future in paleontology was averted for fear that I’d discover the last living specimen of a plesiosaur.)

VII. Where’d You Learn To Talk Like That

Back in “PASS”, I think there was some question as to who exactly was the coolest dude; the biggest guy. Rodimus was in charge, but the others didn’t really respect his authority in the end. Although Triton was an underdog in that story, he wasn’t at the bottom of the pack - no, that role went to Roadbuster. Everyone seems to like Ultra Magnus, but it’s never really made clear as to why that is.

Grimlock’s personality and role within the Autobots was pretty much the first thing I solidified when it came to writing “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. I knew that he was the lowest of the low; the nail in every Autobot’s tyre. As Grimlock evolved, so too did Optimus Prime - the second-most-prominent character in the comic. "The #1 Bestest Superior" became a murderous jock, and the Autobots became his cult of personality.

Speaking of cults of personality, I’ve been posting regularly in the Homestuck Discord server since November of last year. There’s no other place like it on the internet, and - truth be told - I’m not sure any explanation of it I could provide would suffice. The server was created by some guy called Makin - at least, we're pretty sure he’s a guy - who nobody’s ever met but who seems to have an uncanny knack for managing online communities.

Major events in that server have been comprehensively catalogued since July of 2017 by long-standing moderator “Drew Linky” in his journal Several People Are Typing. Between the entries and the related materials, it’s probably around half a million words in length. There’s no other document like it on the internet.

For the first fifty or so pages, Drew had no intention of making his document public. Apparently, one of the reasons he wrote it in the first place was as a way of holding Makin accountable - the guy used to be (and sometimes still is) a bit of an ass. Now, I wasn’t around in 2017, so I can’t really comment on the accuracy of the document’s early entries - but as a newcomer I was struck by how different Drew’s depiction of the server was to my own experience there. If I had to guess, I’d say his style of prose and the cherry-picked nature of the document make it seem like a much more hostile place than it actually is.

In particular, Makin effectively starts out as journal’s main villain (alongside various problem users and Homestuck creators) - a capricious and unknowable entity with absolute power over the server - and many of the entries deal in some way with what users jokingly refer to as his “redemption arc”. Of course, in reality, he’s just some guy, and everyone knows that real people don’t have character arcs.

I still haven’t finished reading SPAT, but I was doing so around the time when I was working on the comic. At some point I started to draw parallels between my bizarro version of Optimus Prime and the journal’s bizarro version of Makin, and I decided to play them up. Much of Prime’s dialogue is inspired by Makin’s style of speech, using phrases like “shut the fuck up”, “nobody cares”, “holy shit”, “get fucked”, “lmao”, “literally”, “literally [...] who”, “guys”, “rational” and “you’re welcome”. I just checked and at the time of writing, with the exception of “literally who” and “you’re welcome”, he’s used every one of those phrases within the last week. Oh, and while the word “suckers” isn’t really a Makin quote, in Homestuck it’s associated with the not-quite-biggest-bad evil empress. It bears mentioning again that the complete lack of punctuation in the comic’s dialogue mirrors the most common style of typing I see online, where people drop their capital letters and full stops.

(In fairness, a lot of us kinda talk the same way in that server. I remember one time Makin said “I also need to worry about lmao becoming some kind of anime catchphrase for me”, which cut pretty deep as I’ve been overusing that phrase instead of “lol” or “haha” or whatever for ages. Look, it’s just a funny word to me: in my head I pronounce it “luh-mayo” instead of “el-em-ay-oh”. Like “I throw my sandwich in the air sometimes / saying aaay-oh / I ordered maaayo...”)

In the comic, the self-aggrandising Optimus Prime is hostile and dismissive to those around him. It might all be a front, but it might not. Even though Grimlock hates Optimus, the Dinobot seems to agree with him a lot of the time, and the narrative itself never really manages to conclusively condemn his actions. The name “Optimus” echoes the word “optimise”; so frequently thrown around in rationalist circles. One could even go so far as to say that Optimus Prime’s ultimate goal in the comic is to kill death-in-the-form-of-a-shitposter.

In seriousness, I’m drawing these comparisons in a pretty tongue-in-cheek way. I don’t actually think that the Homestuck Discord server is a cult of personality - even if, to check the user-contributed “SPAT Epilogues”, some of its populace seem determined to behave like it is. Even if this section of this commentary exists. At the end of the day, I’m gonna write what I know, and I like to think that I know a little about online communities and what happens when they go wrong. I wish I could say that “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a cautionary tale to that effect, but in truth I don’t think it offers any conclusive answers in the same way that “PASS” perhaps did. “Only worry about the opinions of people who actually care about you,” maybe? “Death is an abomination and we shouldn’t let it anywhere near our kids”, perhaps? “You can’t force other people to like you”?

“You can’t force other people to like the things you made”?

VIII. Burnt-Out Toaster Ovens

In the re-released version of “PASS”, it seemed right to throw in something in the way of extra content. I had fond memories of the Seacon profiles published alongside the original “Peace”, and lifted the format to create short bios for all sixteen characters who appeared in the comic. These fitted neatly on a four-by-four spread (though I ended up merging Topspin and Twin Twist’s profiles and throwing in an extra one for Computron, who did not appear in the comic proper).

From the start, I knew I wanted to do something similar for “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. In fact, I already had two text-only pages to work with; each part of the original comic was prefaced with a prose introduction and a note from Mr. Gibson. I decided that I could rework the text-only pages and add another spread of profiles, using the freedom granted by prose to explain away many of the comic’s oddities.

It took me some time to carefully erase the existing text from the scans that I had, using nothing but the brush tool in MS Paint. It took me even more time to work out some potential approaches to take with the text itself. Eventually, I came up with the following ideas:

A flashback depicting Grimlock and Swoop’s breakup.

A conversation between Grimlock and Jazz (or, perhaps, Slash).

“How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, the interlude which I ended up using.

A synopsis of events between “its christmas... so what??” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, which ended up being my first stab at the introduction.

Some in-character commentary as Mr. Gibson, which I did end up including.

From the moment I conceived it, I was pretty set on “How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, and it ended up being a breeze to write. I didn’t end up getting a chance to squeeze in the title - a reference to an issue of More than Meets the Eye - as it didn’t really fit the original format of the page. The introduction, on the other hand, proved much more challenging. My main problem was that, were I to preface the story with a text page, I’d be asking them to read a bunch of probably-mostly-serious words before allowing them to read the comic proper. Not the best first impression!

Nonetheless, I gave it a go - you can read my first attempt in the album of the draft pages. It mostly served to lay out the continuity between my three comics. Rodimus Prime’s crew were abandoned on Cybertron by Optimus Prime (presumably Hot Rod changed his name in Optimus’ absence). Megatron, Optimus and their crews crash-landed on Earth, and millions of years later the events of “its christmas... so what??” occurred. Meanwhile on Cybertron, it took a few million years for the other Autobots to wipe out the remaining Decepticons, as seen in “PASS”. Humanity was wiped out by Optimus in retribution for their transgression (a nod to Mr. Gibson’s depiction of Earth as an empty wasteland), prompting the conflict seen in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. Much of this timeline remains implicit in the final version of the comic.

When I wrote it, I was pretty happy with the way this information was conveyed in the first draft. It was the ever-ardent Gitaxian - one of my long-time prereaders - who made me realise just what a mistake I’d made:

Something was rubbing me the wrong way about that first prose page and I finally realized what it is / Expositing that Optimus is horrible right off the bat takes away a good chunk of the impact the comic had before you added it

He was right. My prereaders’ initial response to the comic was that Optimus Prime’s motivations were completely opaque, and I overcorrected, not realising that his inscrutability was one of the things that made him interesting. You kinda want him to behave like the Optimus Prime you know and love, but he keeps doing weird things and you never really find out why.

Suddenly, I was back at square one - no closer to having a clear idea of how to introduce the comic. Another of my prereaders, gearshift, had the solution:

It's Transformers or some shit. You've seen the cartoon right? The one with the tape guy? Yeah, the tape guy is barely in this one. What do you mean no sale? Look, fuck, it's got the dinosaur guy. He's right on the goddamn cover, you like the dinosaur guy right? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Bitch.

I liked her pitch because it seemed like it’d do a good job of filtering out readers who wouldn’t enjoy the comic. To quote Alexander Wales, author of Worth the Candle:

I kind of hate blurbs and taglines, especially for something so large and varied as Worth the Candle / My ideal synopsis would tell people what kind of story it was without actually telling them that much about the story; it would select for all the people who would fall in love with the story, and select against all the people who would find it a waste of time. / How to actually write that ... I've got no idea.

(Side note: I’m one of the people who fell in love with that story, to the point where I’ll use any opportunity to recommend it to others. It’s maybe my favourite thing written by anyone ever.)

A closely-related issue is that of content warnings: so far as I’ve been able to work out, there is no warning which I can give for “The Beast Within (My Pants)” which adequately selects against people who won’t like it while also preserving its conceptual twists and avoiding colouring the audience’s interpretation.

Getting back to the actual content of the introduction - I wound up writing less than I would’ve liked, leaving the page looking a little sparse, but hopefully making things easier for the reader. There’s relatively little to talk about in the way of trivia here. When I wrote the phrase “cut right to the spectacles” I was probably thinking of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut To The Feeling”. When I mentioned “moist towelettes” I was probably thinking of Hawthorne Wipes. The phrase “truth time” was an iconic - to me, and literally no-one else in existence - line spoken by the trolling narrator of a crack story written by a high school friend of mine, the energy of which I feel like I’ve always been channelling with these comics.

The interlude, on the other hand, is crammed full of references and was a breeze to write. It was the first piece of prose I completed for the project. In general, I was trying to write in a verbose style that would be simultaneously at odds with the bulk of the issue and reminiscent of the prose of veteran Transformers scribe Simon Furman. He was known for using certain distinctive phrases repeatedly in his writing - one such phrase being “like some vast, predatory bird”. The phrase “neither sufficient inclination nor wingspan” is supposed to subtly evoke another Furmanism: “CANNOT, WILL NOT”.

In all likelihood, the interlude would not have existed had I not noticed that Ratchet’s head was in its cartoon colours in the first part of the story, but in its Marvel colours for the second. I had the idea to explain that error away in story - tying into the general schtick of “correcting” the comic - and did so by way of a reference to Ratchet’s original toy, which had a sticker with a face on it behind the windshield rather than a proper head. I was also determined to highlight the fact that Predaking’s legs remain standing for like three pages; I think this minor detail in the artwork is pretty indicative of the fact that Mr. Gibson did a good job.

The way Swoop’s contribution to the combiner is described as “puny” ties nicely to the history established between him and Grimlock in his profile. I like the way the Beast tries to hit Optimus Prime with a “truck-sized fist”. The “antimemetic shielding” was my attempt to explain the recurring disappearances of Optimus Prime’s trailer in a novel way - I did so by namedropping the key phrase from qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division; the trailer’s there, you just can’t perceive it and forget that it exists. Finally, “dull surprise” refers to the vague expressions that characterised Dreamwave’s house style.

For the most part, I was able to retain the ordering of the pages as in the original comic, to keep things print-friendly. The one exception to this is the prose page for the second part, which I unfortunately had to move forward so that its cover could fall across a spread. The original comics must’ve included something in the way of backmatter - art cards, perhaps, or adverts - which made up the space.

The huge cast of The Beast Within made creating a profile for every character an impossible task (especially when so many are just crowd-fillers like some of the Technobots were in “PASS”) - but it was perfectly possible to provide one for each non-combiner character with a speaking role.

(If you’ll indulge me in one last barely-relevant tangent as we head into the final stretch of this commentary, there are some rather odd inclusions/omissions in The Beast Within. On the Autobot side, pretty much every 1984-1985 character appears, with the exceptions of Trailbreaker, Hoist, Tracks, Smokescreen, Grapple, Beachcomber, Seaspray, Perceptor and Omega Supreme. The Autobot combiner teams are absent with the odd exception of Silverbolt. Twin Twist - who had been pretty much entirely absent from the original US fiction - makes an odd appearance without his partner Topspin. Steeljaw is the only one of the four 1986 Autobot cassettes to appear. Meanwhile, on the Decepticon side, oddities include the toy-inspired versions of Viewfinder and Spectro (most of the rest of the cast use cartoon-inspired character models) and the omissions of Spyglass and Buzzsaw. Some Decepticon combiner team members - Motormaster, Wildrider, Breakdown, Blast Off and Swindle - only appear in combined form. Just two of the four 1986 triple changers - Springer and Octane - appear in the comic, looking slightly out-of-place in a cast consisting mostly of characters present in the first two seasons of the cartoon. Oh, and the Deluxe Vehicles and Deluxe Insecticons are absent, but that’s to be expected in a cartoon-inspired setting.)

Here’s the first draft of Optimus Prime’s profile:

Unpredictable. Unstoppable. Unrepentant. Many words have been used to describe OPTIMUS PRIME, yet the abrasive leader of the Autobots remains something of an enigma even amongst his followers. He has ruled Cybertron for many millenia, by dint of the fact that he's apparently the only Cybertronian with a shred of competence.

It’s a product of the time where I wanted to really flesh out Optimus Prime and communicate his thoughts clearly to the audience, and as such is pretty blunt with how it characterises him. The final version is a little more subtle, drawing in elements of the scrapped introduction. I figure I may as well go through the other profiles one-by-one to give a sense for what I was thinking:

Megatron initially had a much more personal bio - which seems to have been lost to time - but I wound up cutting much of it to make space for elements of the story’s scrapped introduction.

Starscream draws inspiration from van Feleday’s interpretation of the character - she posited that Michael Bay’s version of the character was actually the Decepticon most loyal to Megatron. The contrast between that interpretation and pretty much every other in the franchise’s history (excluding Shattered Glass Starscream, of course) is pretty funny to me. I tried to use the phrase “fools errands” in as benign a way as possible, which I felt evoked a more traditional relationship between him and Megatron. “Starscream, you fool!”

Razorclaw has little in the way of characterisation in the comic beyond “noble warrior”, and his profile is a wholesale reference to The Chronicles of Narnia: he stands in for Aslan; the rest of the Predacons for the Pevensie siblings. So yes, this version of Razorclaw is a Christ-like figure. As for the witch... maybe Blackarachnia? Eh, who cares. Oh, and the idea of combining with a dead bot was one which cropped up a few times in IDW’s comics, most notably with the Combaticons in Mairghread Scott’s Till All Are One.

Onslaught was in a similar boat to Razorclaw. I found myself drawing from Till All Are One once more, hinting at a (complicated?) romance between him and another teammate.

Blitzwing has only one speaking role in the comic - a shared line with Megatron and Starscream - but I decided to count it for the sake of having a nice set of sixteen characters once more. In Transformers Animated, Blitzwing had multiple personalities, and would change forms depending on which was in control. This interpretation of the character has seen plenty of criticism, so I deliberately tried to come up with something new. I quickly settled upon the idea of tying his vehicle forms to his mood, a metaphor which seemed to dovetail nicely with the way aerial alternate forms were treated in “PASS” and which also allowed me to cement the Decepticons’ supportiveness.

Bulkhead was borne of the realisation that Springer appears prominently in both “Peace” and The Beast Within. This inconsistency is entirely the product of my decision to place my versions of those comics in the same continuity, and I decided to correct it in the tradition of “Bluster” and “Firster Aid” by having them be two separate (but related) characters. I named the new Springer after Energon Bulkhead, who was inspired by “Generation 1″ Springer - the name’s since been used more prominently by an Animated-original character and variations thereof, and is effectively fair game for “Generation 1″ stories. His actual characterisation was inspired by Springer’s behaviour in “PASS” - I liked the idea that Bulkhead bullied Springer, and Springer bullied everyone else in turn. Oh, and I wanted to tie their helicopter modes back to Blitzwing’s profile on a thematic level.

Bumblebee is the only character from “its christmas... so what??” to recur with a speaking role in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. After scrapping the original introduction I’d planned for the comic, I was left with a single profile to bridge the gap between the two stories. My original idea was that, for their negligence in allowing the humans to steal Bumblebee’s blood, Prowl, Tracks, and Hoist would have been executed by Optimus Prime - though I’m sure he didn’t pull the trigger himself, it’s safe to assume that he didn’t warn them before setting off the nukes.

Ratchet has a characterisation inspired by something “Jonny Angel” posted in van Feleday’s thread: “Ratchet is an ambulance who practices no medicine”.

Jazz is an extremely prominent character in the comic, despite the fact that his only line is a scream in the opening panel. The comic relies on the wider context of the brand to let the audience be invested in him, but in a vacuum it’s kinda funny to see the Autobots fret so much over an effective nobody. Pretty much the entire joke in my version is just a reference to Ryan Gosling’s misguided quest to “save jazz” in La La Land - some of his character’s lines are lifted wholesale to comprise Jazz’s profile, which takes pains to avoid using any kind of pronouns (thereby maintaining the confusion over whether or not “Jazz” refers to the character or the music genre). His profile was the first I wrote.

Ironhide has a role amongst the Autobots loosely inspired by that of Drew Linky (or at least, the version of Drew Linky presented by SPAT) in the Homestuck Discord. I thought there was some symmetry there with Ironhide’s history in IDW Publishing’s comics.

Skids was a tricky character to portray, but ultimately his profile turned out to be one of the ones I’m happiest with. It’s kind of a loose riff on his portrayal towards the back end of James Roberts’ stories, where much of his arc revolved around his relationship with Nautica. According to Word of God, he had unrequited feelings for her - I decided to amp this up by giving him unrequited feelings for everyone. To tie this back to Homestuck, think Eridan/Cronus. Oh, and in terms of the Homestuck Discord server, think your typical hornyposter (and then follow the implications through in terms of Optimus Prime/Makin). The actual name “Skids Maximus” is a play on the way the suffix “Maximus” has historically been used for some combiners, “Optimus Maximus” in particular. I’m convinced I’m not the first person to do a joke like that, but nobody I asked could think of any older examples.

Grimlock was fleshed out pretty well by the comic itself, so I took his profile as an opportunity to expand upon the history of the Dinobots. I saw them as being akin to a group of friends who stuck together throughout school, winding up as an impenetrably toxic and incestuous mess with a ton of deep lore. In a way, there was a time when I was the Grimlock of my group of friends... but we all grew up.

Swoop is Grimlock’s ex-partner, a concept inspired by the other Dinobot combiner we all wish we could forget about. I’m pretty happy with the use of the word “bottom” in this context.

Snarl is based on a combination of various people I’ve known in real life - people who are perfectly nice and reasonable but have zero patience around certain other individuals. From the outside, it’s behaviour that comes across as pretty damn harsh, but - and please note that this is not an endorsement of such behaviour - it’s usually the product of a long period of aggravations.

Jetfire was the last character introduced in the comic, so it felt fitting to save his profile until last. His biography is effectively a mashup of his portrayals in the original cartoon (where he gets frozen in the Arctic Circle) and in Revenge of the Fallen (where he was a Seeker who wound up on Earth), a combination which neatly parallels Bay’s Megatron’s origins. It also references J.J. Abram’s infamous “mystery box” storytelling device, which I intended to mirror the offbeat lack of closure in the comic itself.

The final challenge I faced - one which had hounded me throughout the development of the comic - was what exactly to title it. Titles considered included:

“The BEE” (Tindalos’ suggestion)

“The BEE Within”

“The REEEE Within”

“SHIT” (Gitaxian’s suggestion)

“IM THE BEAST”

“AWWW SHIT” (Fear or Courage’s suggestion)

“AW SHIT ITS THE BEAST”

None of these resonated. Then, almost a whole month later, out of nowhere:

This was the entirety of Daniel111111222222’s contribution to the story - and what a contribution it was.

There were several reasons why I loved his idea. Firstly, it was easy to edit: most of the other suggestions would’ve required me to move lots of letters around, while this one would simply require me to append a few. More importantly, it felt like the title of a Chuck Tingle novel.

The subtitle for the second part - “No Pants” - seemed like a natural choice after that, the idea being that it evokes Grimlock’s inhibitions falling away with his transformation into the Beast. It narrowly edged out “Pants Off”, which I managed to squeeze into the final version of the introduction.

The parentheses in the comic’s title were my own addition, and in retrospect I kinda regret them. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m not sure why. I was wrong to try and improve upon perfection.

IX. Why Throw Away Your Life So Recklessly

So far, the bulk of this commentary has mostly focused on the aspects of this project which I think went pretty well. In a way, that's probably fair enough, because - on balance - I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

At the same time, I can't help feeling that “PASS” - a comic which I probably threw together in the space of one day two years ago - is both funnier and more meaningful than the one which I spent a couple of weeks on.

When I started working on “The Beast Within (My Pants)” towards the beginning of May, I expected to have the project finished and out of the door by the end of the month. If you glance at the release dates of the various things I made, you'll see that I like to put out major projects on the last day of a month - it's a way of setting myself a deadline and it lets me associate a given project with a given period of time.

My first draft of the dialogue was released to prereaders on the 11th of May; my second on the 13th. Around that point, exam season started to kick in and I decided to prioritise to other projects - the Retrace Steps commentary and the Are You Happy retrospective - which both ballooned out into much longer pieces than I'd planned. I successfully met my self-imposed deadline for those projects and pushed back the release date for the comic to the end of June. I released the first drafts of the text-only pages on the 9th, but the profiles didn't follow until the 24th. By the time you read this, I'll have been working on the project on-and-off for over three months; despite the fact that I was ostensibly on vacation for most of that time, I was somehow busier than I tend to be at university.

For context, it took me just four months to adapt Retrace Steps from a short film script to a webcomic (well, “webcomic”), and that was a process which actually required original artwork. At the time I noted that I needed to re-evaluate the way I approached commentaries, as the amount of time required to produce one of a high standard seemed only to increase - they're extremely valuable to me, and seem to be well-received by the few who read them, but are they justifiable if they take longer to create than the things they comment on?

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that I've probably spent more time thinking about The Beast Within than the vast majority of people who know about it, and that I kinda regret that. See, in the sense that The Beast Within provokes a visceral emotional reaction, it’s a “good comic” - but so too does a punch to the face. The Beast Within is not a good comic. It’s mean and deconstructive and poorly-done. My version is borne of contrarianism and hubris, and softens the blow not one bit.

At the time when I was writing Grimlock's dialogue, I found that my own typing style was becoming increasingly acidic.

The truth is that “PASS” is probably the most successful thing I have ever made, and I wanted to make a comic which would put it to shame, and I failed miserably. In fact, I feel like I’ve made something which only I could ever enjoy. It’s derivative in the extreme. As my deadline for this project drew closer, I resorted to drafting bits of the commentary on my phone in public, and at one point somebody idly asked me what I was writing, and - after failing to think of a convincing lie - I said something along the lines of “it’s kinda a long story, and I wouldn’t enjoy telling it, and you wouldn’t enjoy hearing about it”. They seemed perfectly satisfied by that answer, but I wasn’t.

Must we justify the things we create? Mr. Jamieson’s attitude seemed to be to say “screw you, I don’t have to justify myself to stupid people” (while pointing at everybody else in the room). My attitude, as evinced by this commentary, has been to justify every aspect of everything I make in excruciating detail, so that if you tell me “I don’t like X” I can say “I already explained why I thought X was a good idea” and you can say “well you were wrong” and I can say “maybe”.

You’ve probably twigged that, throughout this commentary, I’ve referred to the creators of The Beast Within only by second name. At first, perhaps, it came across as some mark of mocking respect - like citing a scientific source - but the real reason is cowardice, not confidence. Some people occasionally put their own names into Google. There’s a couple of people to whom I really don’t want to have to justify myself.

Over a decade after the release of the The Beast Within, Hasbro released a brand new set of Dinobot toys which combined to form Volcanicus. The creators of the Prime Wars Trilogy and of the Earth Wars mobile game gleefully included the new combiner in their stories, and the fandom at large embraced it wholeheartedly.

As her thread drew to a close, Terry van Feleday wrote something which I think about often:

Of course [...] let’s not forget that no matter the amount of earnest work put into something, sometimes it just turns out shit. There’s a strange perception I noticed in critical response where people seem to find it difficult to consider something both earnest or satirical and, well, not very well made. Sucker Punch can’t be an honest indictment of cinematic objectification and a somewhat poorly conceived, almost hypocritical attempt at being more clever than you should. Transformers can’t be an inversion of the traditional hero/villain narrative showcasing the effects of authoritarian propaganda and a meandering, under-focused, often poorly communicated, destructive mess. Maybe it’s a strange entertainment-version of the Just World Fallacy where lacking results must necessarily result from lacking effort, or maybe it’s modern audiences’ strange worship of subversiveness, where a work critical of old tropes must by default be better than the works it’s commenting on throwing to the dustbin of history, but either way, people are extremely resistant to the idea that films they found emotionally dissatisfying could express depth and meaning and tend to dismiss them as another ‘genre film’.

Mr. Gibson is a children’s picture book illustrator. The Beast has no place on his website.

X. Proceed On Your Way To Oblivion

TFNation - the UK’s biggest Transformers convention - has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me, and (as of the time of writing) I’ll be making that pilgrimage in a matter of days. If you see me there, feel free to come over and punch me. Or, y’know, just say hi. I’ll have some limited-edition printed copies of “PASS” to give out. For more information on that - and for infrequent Transformers-related musings and updates on future projects - wander on over to my twitter!

What are those future projects? Well, after the convention I’m planning to release an original short story. It’s not very good, but it’s got a few stylistic similarities to this comic (read: lots of swearing). I might have a little bit in the way of Transformers prose coming out down the line, but can’t really elaborate further on the form that’ll take. I’ve been planning to get back to Huskyquest for ages, and hopefully I’ll finally be able to do so once I settle back down at university. After that, I plan to focus my efforts on prose, so you may as well expect more radio silence from me.

If you’ve made it to the end of this almost-fifteen-thousand-word monstrosity, you, uhh... win all my internet points? Sorry, that’s all I have.

Remind me never to do this again.

[stray-tori]

The Promised Neverland: An adaption with a different approach

Some infos before I start:

I am anime only. I have read the manga alongside the anime until (including) episode 5, then I stopped because I wanted to stick with the anime's experience.

Anime deserve to be judged as stand-alone works. When compared to the original source, an anime can be bad (FMA because it doesn't follow the manga's plot) but the anime itself can still be good or even better.

I am biased. I saw the anime first. You are most likely biased as well. There's nothing wrong with being biased.

Opinions can't be wrong. Let’s just respect them ^__^ 

Things I've constantly seen being critized about TPN's anime all seem to belong to the same motivation: Being more grounded in reality and distrust. The things I'd group in this "explanation" are:

No Inner Monologues/Thoughts

No flashbacks

No Thoughts

Okay, so this one is the first one I noticed this trend on. In case you didn't know: TPN basically scratches all inner thoughts or has the characters say them out loud instead. Why? I think I know: Trust.

I'll abuse Ray as an example for this: I didn't trust Ray after and during Episode 5. Can you really blame me? LOOK AT HIM:

The anime overdid it, even if it's mainly because movement emphasizes his  gestures. I was inclined to trust Ray but after THAT I wasn't so sure anymore. He SAYS he did it for them. But who can tell if he says the truth? The only place people are honest is in their head. But we can't see in his head. It's not very likely, but it could still be that he lies to Norman. We can't know for sure. But the thing is, when I read the manga content of episode 5, it's really clear where Ray stands, because he thinks it very clearly.

You might say “It was obvious Ray thought this way” but you can always say that afterwards. Fact is, it planted doubt in my head and therefore it could have been both. And the Anime presumably makes this change to make instances like this more extreme and suspenseful. We can only judge Ray (and everyone else for that matter) on how they can judge each other: on what they say and what they do. Not what they think.

Think about it, the anime REALLY tries to put us in the character's shoes: There are all these weird perspective shots around weird corners and angels, it feels like someone is watching them, at all times. We feel anxious about it. Just as they probably do about being found out. These shots are also mostly when they do something in secret or talk about the plan directly. 

They can't know what the others think. They can't see in their head. Neither can we in the anime. We mistrust everyone as much as they could, if they wanted to. 

And I don't wanna say that it's better that way. It makes everyone a blackbox, which makes it harder to have easily understandable characters and harder to know what they are plotting in their heads. It doesn't feel like we know them very well, because we don't really do. MHA is the best example of me enjoying simple characters a lot more. I have trouble understanding very complex characters, so I'm the last person to be against inner thoughts but I think not having them is an interesting choice here.

And lastly: The flashbacks. Some people have said the anime is cutting content (which from what I've seen I've only noticed in instances that weren't too important to me or where important information was conveyed differently, for example: Mama playing chess with the trio. It was in the manga, I saw it and it wasn't in the anime, but in EP1 they said that they never were able to beat Mama at chess. Information covered, also it's less in your face). 

Listen, there's no way they CAN'T cut content. They have to press like 40 chapters into 12 episodes. That's a lot. I won't deny it. A few more episodes wouldn't have hurt this adaptation. But honestly I'd rather have a somewhat closed arc than a random cut somewhere in the middle. So far I don't feel like we've missed stuff that was integral to the story, but I also don't know if some of the stuff was foreshadowing something.

But I think this also ties in with making us feel more like the characters: Flashbacks don't happen in Real Life. If I talk to someone and they tell me about something I wasn't present at, I won't just start to see it. I can visualize it, but that's it. AND If you see somehting, you're more inclined to believe it. That’s why TV News work better. That’s why when you see a dead person on photos it’s more impactful than reading “Someone died”. In that way, it makes us distrust the statements/stories more because we have no reason to believe it actually happened.

I think this approach is amazing and it works on me. I stopped reading the manga because it confirmed/denied (don’t wanna give it away) my doubts about Ray. I felt like this wasn't the way I wanted to experience this story.

BUT. there's a problem. It's tonally interesting and makes for a much more suspenseful experience imo (something else the anime really likes to emphasize: suspense) BUT it creates problems when there's important information in these flashbacks or inner thoughts that can't naturally be converted to be conveyed differently. And that's how Krone becomes stupid; screaming out her plans for everyone in the house to hear.

Yes, it's annoying. But these changes are too consistent between each other, all adding suspense and distrust and somewhat putting us in the character's shoes, to not be intentional. I don't think this is shortening things or trying to ruin the manga. It's a different way to experience a story and I enjoy it a lot personally.

It also makes this somewhat unusual shonen even less shonen-y.

The Composition

This kind of ties in which the last one, but it's a smaller thing. Some shots of the manga have been changed or made less "visually interesting" in the manga, which I think it another part of trying to be more grounded and have less extreme moments animation-wise that takes you out of the usually pretty normal and dare i say somewhat "boring" shots. It's creating a different visual style with the 3D models and pans indoors, etc.

I really can't argue much here, I think this is mostly due to medium, though I won't deny this was probably an active change/choice by someone rather than adapting to a different medium. I like both styles, it's just in different mediums and plays to a different atmosphere.

Small thing but I wanna talk about it: The Nightmare (EP5)

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh boi. This exploded in my social bubble. If you don't know: Norman "hugged" (more like grabbed their faces) both Ray and Emma in the manga and the anime... yeah, made it about Emma.

I'm biased. I like them together so I screamed internally.

But it never bothered me, even after I knew. And at this point, I really like Ray (EP7 really sold me on him), and I'm still not upset about it. And I think I know why: I didn't trust Ray as described above.

But Norman does, somewhat. And I get that.

But he just got told that he'd have to essentially choose between Emma and Ray. And I think even without inner thoughts it's obvious that he wants to choose Emma in this thing, he wants to believe in her optimism. But if he "chooses Emma", she could die because of it despite wanting the best for her. I think this is what the dream wants to emphasize (since it seems to imply he did choose to not lie to Emma, since Ray says something about “I told you”), while the manga seems to go for the dilemma of wanting them both to be happy and for it to work out, but it won’t if he won’t decide. That he can’t have it both ways.

I won't deny it depicts Norman as someone who only cares about Emma and that's wrong and misleading. 

But honestly? I just saw Ray laugh and look like a psycho, and I don't trust him. Having Norman hug him in the dream would tonally contrast that. And since the anime (probably intentionally) made Ray less trustworthy, it would be weird to see it directly afterwards. 

Not to mention the scene alltogether changed a lot from the manga to the anime so to say they just changed this one thing for the sake of it would be wrong. For example the anime leads into the dream while it comes out of nowhere in the manga (another thing where the anime builds on suspense where the manga builds on surprise), also Ray doesn’t even fall down in the first place (so Norman doesn’t just leave Ray on the ground, actually Ray even dissappears in the wide shot) and so Norman doesn’t try to carry/drag him and Ray is also a little more creepy and guilt-tripping than in the manga (at least it felt that way to me). 

They actively chose to do this, obviously and they could have chosen to not do it, and I do agree it would have been important to reestablish the bond between Norman and Ray after that conversation and portraying Ray as creepy AGAIN isn’t helping trusting him. But at the same time I didn't think "huh, guess he doesn't care about Ray and everyone else", I thought "welp, there are some complications with Ray right now so it makes sense".

Plus, don't kill me, but I think the manga panel looks awkward. He essentially grabs their faces, it seems more DESPERATE which is fine emotion to have in that situation but it doesn't feel very careful and loving for the lack of a better word.

In the anime he really touches her carefully (that sounds so wrong save my soul pls), and I can’t even say it's better, it's different and I want to believe it was because of the contrast and the meaning it could have as well as symbolizing a different mindset about having to choose between them.

Or the one responsible for storyboards / directing really just likes Noremma WHO KNOWS.

But at the same time, in episode 1 they changed the way back to the house. Tbh there they toned down the ship, Emma isn't clinging to him and seemingly searching for physical support. Don't get me wrong, I was like "I was robbed of this moment" BUT I prefer the anime’s way of doing that. I like the moment, but I think for the overall tone and characters it's better the way the anime did it. I can't say the same with as much confidence for the Nightmare scene but I don't believe it was to emphasize Noremma or remove Ray actively. I think it was a choice to be able to animate it more easily, to portray the dilemma within the dream and to have more tonal consistence.

And that's really what I have to say. The anime does things differently and I prefer it. I'm biased, yes. 

And yes I get it I’d be frustrated too when anime leave out stuff I like (Noragami cough) but I don't feel like TPN did anything to lessen the experience, and if they did end up doing so, I believe it was in an attempt to do a different approach.

Even after having watched the Noragami Anime first, I mostly prefer the manga of Noragami in terms of plot and build-up, but I don't feel the same for TPN. 

I pretty much think they [the anime and the manga] are on equal footing but with different strengths and the anime deviating at times. But I won’t know my final opinion on this until the anime ends (I don’t want it to thoooo) and I have read the s1-content of the manga.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.

if you excuse me I will prepare to be executed now.