#and the only way to do that is to write and make comics that no ones going to see >:)

[thankskenpenders]

Thoughts on two specific areas of the writing in Sonic X Shadow Generations

The best new 3D Sonic game in over a decade (or even two, depending on who you ask) dropped late last year. And I didn't write anything about it! Sometimes life happens. Well, I've finally sat down to finish Shadow Generations, and by now everyone has already been singing its praises for three months. This is the rare instance where the entire Sonic fandom, and even mainstream reviewers, are in agreement on something. The level design is the best it's been in a long, long time and the cool factor is off the charts, embracing Sonic's peak cringe era in an incredibly confident way. It's great. If you're even reading this post, you probably don't need me to tell you that. So I won't!

No, what I'm really interested in here is the writing. Because this is me we're talking about. But I actually don't want to talk about the main narrative of Shadow Generations, which is really solid little story about Black Doom trying to mold Shadow into his perfect soldier. No, I'd like to zero in on two other aspects of the writing here: the revisions made to Sonic Generations, and Gerald Robotnik's unlockable journal.

The updated Sonic Generations script

The new package mostly presents Sonic Generations how you remember it. There are some tweaks, but it's not a major overhaul. Graphically, I don't think the game has been touched much, if at all. I certainly can't notice any difference without a side-by-side comparison, despite playing it on a PS5. The most notable update is that the game's script has been rewritten by Ian Flynn.

Naturally, this caught my attention. Generations always had a nothingburger story, so with Ian rewriting Pontac and Graff's lame dialogue there was nowhere to go but up. (I don't like to pin the blame for those games' stories entirely on them, as a ton of it was dictated to them by Sonic Team, but, well, I don't think they're very good dialogue writers.) But it's less a complete rewrite and more like Ian was brought on as a script doctor for some minor touch ups here and there. Many lines of dialogue are completely identical to how they were originally written in 2011, and many others only have slight wording changes. Ian was clearly not allowed to request additional scenes or extend the ones that already existed. He has to match the original beat for beat so that they can reuse 99% of the cutscene animations. Don't expect it to be a whole new experience compared to the original.

Still, I think the new script is an improvement, albeit a minor one. Various things have been tweaked to maintain characterization consistency. Cream calls Sonic "Mr. Sonic" instead of just "Sonic." Instead of calling Sonic "buddy," Rouge uses the pet name "Blue," like she tends to do in things like the IDW comics. Espio doesn't have to remind you in the dialogue that he's a ninja, and he no longer has a line making it sound like he has some kind of soul reading power. I also like that Modern Sonic now actually has responses to what his friends say when he rescues them, rather than being silent like Classic Sonic. They won't blow you away, but they make Sonic feel a little more engaged with everything.

In general, the altered dialogue just seems tighter to me, and some of the more childish or trite wording of Pontac and Graff's script has been altered. Here, let's actually make a direct comparison, just because this stuff is interesting to me as a writer. Here's a couple lines from after the Egg Dragoon fight late in the game, in the original script:

Modern Eggman: Ooooh... I can't believe this! I was supposed to beat you this time. Modern Sonic: Aw, I'm sorry! I didn't get that memo. I beat you every time! [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat this guy every time. It's like it's our job or something!

This is a simple exchange. Eggman is mad that he lost. Sonic is unflappably confident because he always beats Eggman, and he explains this to his younger self. But the wording here isn't particularly good. Eggman's simple and direct wording makes him come off like a little kid who's mad because his older brother beat him at Mario Kart, rather than a mad scientist who just had his plans foiled. It's making light of the situation.

And I've never liked Sonic saying "It's like it's our job or something!" That doesn't feel like a thing Sonic would say, it feels like a thing an outside observer would say about Sonic. This is a frequent problem with so-called "MCU dialogue," where quips meant to echo the commentary of a casual, somewhat disinterested audience are inserted into the story itself so that the writers can be like "See? We get it. We're genre-savvy, too!" It also just reminds me of bad Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric lines like "Rings! It's like they're made for me!"

And then here's Ian's rewrite:

Modern Eggman: I recalibrated everything! This was supposed to be my time! Modern Sonic: Oh, please, keep dreamin', Egg-head. I beat you every time. [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat him every time. Our score card's flawless.

Eggman's still mad about his defeat, but the line "I recalibrated everything!" makes it more specific. He put all this work into the engineering side of his latest scheme and got tunnel vision, thinking if he got his creations just right there'd be no way he could lose. "This was supposed to be my time!" also turns it into a time travel pun, which is a bonus. He's still pitching a fit over losing, but it feels more like Eggman pitching a fit, rather than sounding childish.

And then instead of saying that beating Eggman is "like his job or something," Sonic says he's got a flawless score card against Eggman. He doesn't take Eggman seriously as a threat—at least, not to his face. He acts like it's all a game. But he conveys this in a way that feels truer to the character, rather than feeling like the words of a real world observer poking fun at the tropes of the Sonic series.

Is this amazing, A+ dialogue that blows me away? No. Again, it's not a completely different scene from the one we already had. Ian had to fit the beats of what was already there. He couldn't go all out and write an all new story confirming his longstanding headcanon that the Time Eater is a remnant of Solaris or whatever. But the wording here makes the existing story land a little better and feel truer to the characters in subtle ways.

But to me, the main change is that the Sonics and Tailses seem to have a more solid understanding of what's going on with the timeline and the Time Eater, compared to how idiotic they sometimes seemed in the original game. Which is good! No more standing outside Green Hill and wondering why it seems so familiar. Thank god. As part of this, yes, there are a few more references to past games in the dialogue, like Sonic briefly being confused about the fact that they're time traveling without the Time Stones, or South Island and Westside Island being acknowledged as the normal locations of Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Yes, ha ha, insert joke about how Ian loves references here. Look, it's Sonic fucking Generations. It's a game built entirely out of nostalgic references. Just own it! And, again, in this instance Sonic and Tails come off as less stupid when they make it clear that they do, in fact, remember their adventures from presumably less than a year ago in-universe.

Eggman, too, seems to have a better understanding of the powers he's toying with. Where in the original vesion his focus was simply on going back in time to undo his previous defeats and he seemed kind of oblivious to how much the Time Eater was actually fucking up the universe, here Eggman says he wants to use the Time Eater to give himself complete control over the entire timeline. Eggman also makes way fewer references to his own failures and shortcomings. Of course he won't admit that Sonic has defeated him time and time again. To him, he's never truly lost—Sonic just keeps delaying the inevitable total victory for the Eggman Empire.

So, yes. The new Sonic Generations script is better. It won't blow anyone away, but it's better than it was. It's been elevated from "kinda lame" to "fine." No, if you really wanna see Ian flex his ability to breathe new life into old Sonic stories, look no further than...

Gerald Robotnik's Journal

Hoo boy.

The story of what happened aboard the ARK has always been... a bit confusing, to say the least. Fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the script for every route of Shadow '05 may disagree, but it's the truth. We've had all the pieces to understand the story for a long time now, but that info was given to us out of order by a pair of unreliable narrators—Gerald, who became a vengeful lunatic shortly before his death, and Shadow, who was subjected to multiple rounds of amnesia and altered memories. Some of the ambiguity left by Sonic Adventure 2 was cleared up in Shadow '05, but that game also retconned in a bunch of new elements to Shadow's backstory (aliens!) that lead to further confusion. Not to mention the fact that that game had multiple routes and only revealed the truth about Shadow if you sat on the ultimate final boss battle for WAY longer than the fight would normally last. Or the fact that Sonic X made its own tweaks in its telling of the story. Or the fact that none of these things ever had the best English translations. I can't blame anyone who hasn't played those games in two decades for not remembering the truth about these characters and getting some details mixed up.

What we needed was something to piece together all of the info we have into one coherent backstory, told in chronological order. And thanks to Shadow Generations, we have that, in the form of an official journal tying together what we knew from Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow '05, and Sonic Battle into the tragic tale of Gerald's rise and fall.

Ian Flynn was the perfect man for the job here as the guy who started his career by tidying up the mess that was the first 159 issues if Archie Sonic. This is what he excels at: taking disparate bits of weird Sonic lore from multiple different sources, boiling them down to their most interesting elements, and connecting it together in a way that will make the audience see the dramatic potential he's always known was there. Rather than feeling like a cynical exercise in franchise building, going back and explaining things that never needed explaining so that people can add more bullet points to the wiki, he puts a new spin on things that retroactively enriches those past stories. The story here means something to the characters involved and gives us a better understanding of them as people, rather than as plot devices to motivate Shadow.

(And, of course, Ian didn't do this journal alone. He wrote the story, but I also have to give a huge shout out to Evan Stanley, who made the final product. All of her handwritten journal entries, sketches, and "photos" included throughout. The physical damage done to the journal over the course of 50 tumultuous years, passing from Gerald to Eggman to a certain special someone at GUN. The way Gerald's handwriting gets less and less legible as his mental state declines. So much love was put into what could have been a mere text dump in a menu, and it really elevates it to the next level. Congrats on officially getting hired by Sega, Evan, you've sure as hell earned it!)

The main idea the journal conveys is that Gerald was under a lot of pressure from a lot of different parties—GUN, the President, his colleagues aboard the ARK, Black Doom, even his own family—and boy did it get to him. The known incidents aboard the ARK mentioned in previous games are put together here to form a story where everything slowly spirals out of control as Gerald keeps compromising his morals to further his research, thinking he'll eventually find some way out of all this because he's a genius. I won't recap that whole story here (if you haven't already played the game and read the journal entries, I would highly recommend at least reading it on the Sonic wiki), but I'd like to highlight my favorite elements of the story, as Ian tells it here.

1) The Eclipse Cannon

Here's something that never quite made sense in Sonic Adventure 2: why does the ARK have a laser that can blow up the Earth built into it? It was supposed to be a peaceful research colony. Sure, Gerald went crazy and swore revenge on the Earth, but, like... when did he have an opportunity to go back up to the ARK and modify it? Did he have someone else do it? How? The ARK was raided by GUN and shut down! And then they arrested him, held him in prison for an unclear period of time, and executed him by firing squad when he was no longer useful! It doesn't add up. Shadow 'the Hedgehog '05 would give its own answer by introducing the Black Arms and saying that the Eclipse Cannon was always supposed to be a secret trump card against the Black Comet. But, like... we know that's kind of a bullshit answer, right? You don't need enough power to blow up a whole planet just to destroy a comet.

Well, the new journal retains what we already knew, but it paints a much more complete picture.

See, long before Gerald ever made a Faustian bargain with Black Doom, he had already made one with an even greater evil: the military. GUN gave Gerald much of the funding for the ARK, Gerald's personal utopian research station in space, but it didn't take long for GUN to start pressuring him to design them weapons. Gerald tried to get GUN off his back by personally contacting the President of the United Federation, and the President gave him an alternative: how about, instead, you just use your genius brain to figure out the secret to immortality for us, so our soldiers can be immortal? Gerald was initially sickened by the notion and found it completely absurd, like chasing a shadow... but given no other option, the sarcastically named Project Shadow soon began in earnest. (Maria would later put a more positive spin on the name after Shadow's awakening, pointing out that a Shadow can show us the direction of the light, like she says in the game itself.)

Of course, this search for the ultimate life form didn't go very well, and without any results on that front GUN kept hounding him for weapons. Gerald would throw them a bone here and there to get them off his back. His research on Chaos resulted in the Artifical Chaos prototypes, which he worried would be used for warfare but could at least theoretically be used for search and rescue missions in floods, in his mind. But that wasn't enough. So he gave them Chaos Drives to power their mechs. And that still wasn't enough. He's got Emerl. He'll give them Emerl. They're not impressed by Emerl. They'll shut the whole ARK down if Gerald doesn't give them something big.

Fine! GUN wants something big? Gerald builds a huge fucking laser cannon into the ARK. However, as a middle finger to GUN, Gerald makes it so powerful that it would destroy the Earth if it was ever fired at any target on its surface. In other words, GUN now has their ultimate weapon of mass destruction, fulfilling his contract, but they can never actually use it. Oh, the delicious irony. (And also Shadow will blow up the Black Comet with it in 50 years yada yada yada.) Is this perhaps extremely shortsighted and naive of Gerald, to believe that such a weapon would never actually be used just because of the risk? Of course. But hey, that's Gerald for you. And I love this as an answer.

(Also, this, uh, kinda echoes something from real life! Remember the bit in Oppenheimer where he says all nuclear war will become unthinkable, and Edward Teller responds "until somebody builds a bigger bomb"? Yeah, Teller went on to conceptualize a superweapon codenamed Project Sundial that would have been able to kill all life on the planet, as the ultimate deterrent for war. This was never made for obvious reasons, but hey, there's a basis for this sort of thinking outside of heightened sci-fi! There's a whole Kurzgesagt video about this if you're interested.)

2) The Biolizard

The Biolizard is, of course, brought up as the initial failed prototype of the ultimate life form, from before Gerald met Black Doom. We don't really learn all that much about it that we didn't already know, but I just love the way it's framed in the story.

As you can see above, we actually get to see a picture of Maria holding up the cute little salamander that would end up mutating into the Biolizard through Gerald's experiments. (Researchers want to figure out how to replicate salamanders' regenerative abilities for humans in real life, too, so this was a natural starting point for the project.) And then, after it grows to a monstrous size and goes out of control, Gerald has to lock it away in an unused sector of the ARK. He needs to keep the poor thing alive for his research into harnessing Chaos Energy, building life support systems directly into it, but he doesn't have the heart to tell Maria what happened. So it just becomes this first dark secret weighing on his conscience. The Biolizard becomes Gerald's Tell-Tale Heart beating beneath the floorboards of the ARK. I love that.

3) Lost Impact was the breaking point for the ARK

Remember the level Lost Impact in Shadow '05? The flashback level on the hero path where Shadow is running around fighting Artificial Chaos enemies on the ARK 50 years ago? Yeah, that wasn't just a random incident. That was important, as we now know due to its placement on the timeline.

See, Emerl's rampage aboard the ARK that was chronicled in Sonic Battle and Dark Beginnings set off a domino effect. Emerl riled up the Artificial Chaos, causing Gerald to lose control of them. They became violent, and so Shadow had to stop them, as depicted in Lost Impact. The thing is, that incident sent an SOS signal to GUN telling them that shit was going down on the ARK. Gerald didsn't fully understand the trouble he was in and assumed that he'd simply be reprimanded by the higher ups, or maybe face legal action. But, well... the next time he heard from GUN, armed troopers were raiding the ARK.

So Lost Impact was the straw that broke the camel's back. I just really like that detail.

4) Maria

And, of course, there's Maria herself. Maria has often been more of a symbol than a character, this perfect embodiment of everything that's good and pure in this world who gets killed to motivate Shadow and Gerald's revenge plots. But I really like the wrinkles this journal adds to her and Gerald's story, and their relationship. This is the most fleshed out they've ever felt.

For one, the journal leans into the idea of Maria's intellectual potential. The rest of the Robotnik family is all geniuses, after all, and she was proving to be a really bright kid. She excelled in her studies on the ARK, and she even helped design Shadow's jet skates and inhibitor rings. When Maria died, the world didn't just lose a symbolic personification of purity. She genuinely could have been a hugely influential scientist who did so much good for the world. That's what Gerald wanted for her. But we'll never know, because GUN killed her.

Speaking of her family, their presence isn't just mentioned for the sake of fleshing out the Robotnik family tree. It's mentioned that as Gerald struggled to find a cure for Maria's illness through his genetic research, he faced mounting pressure from his family. They didn't want Maria to be up on the ARK forever. They wanted Gerald to hurry up and find a damn cure, or otherwise just send her back home to Earth so she could be with her family again. She'd been up on the ARK for so long that Gerald's coworkers started thinking that she had been born up there. Eventually she gains a baby sister on Earth who she's never met. A rift forms between Gerald's two sons, and he's unable to really deal with it because he's so consumed by his work. There's this sense that the family is falling apart, and that everyone is dreading the possibility that Gerald will never find a cure and that Maria will just spend her final years up in space and die far away from her family, because Gerald just couldn't let go. If that happens, it'll break the whole family. But he can't stop now. So he just keeps working. Curing Maria is the only way to win his family back, in his eyes. It can't all be for nothing.

But my favorite detail regarding Maria is this one paragraph:

Maria is growing into a lovely young woman. It breaks my heart that someone as bright and energetic as her is diminished by disease. There are no visible effects, and I've caught my fellow researchers muttering to each other, doubting her illness. It is infuriating. I find all my reason and restraint vanishes when she's slighted.

This is SUCH a great addition to the story! It's always been true that Maria doesn't really seem all that ill, just looking at her in cutscenes. With this one little comment, Ian flips that issue on its head and turns it into a story about invisible disability. She doesn't act like she's in chronic pain, so she must not be, everyone thinks. And this really, really gets to Gerald, as does the pressure from his family. He's dedicating his whole LIFE to saving her, and they think she's faking it?! It's such a small addition, never referenced elsewhere in the journal, but it adds so much flavor to the story, as does the implied family drama. It grounds Gerald and Maria and makes them feel more like real human beings, rather than being pure archetypes. It's just enough info to let my imagination run wild filling in the blanks.

You also get the feeling that Maria being such a walking ray of sunshine was the only real source of joy Gerald had left in his life before Shadow was awakened, and the only thing keeping him from snapping under pressure sooner. All this stuff just keeps piling on, everything's spiraling out of control, but at least Maria is keeping her chin up, right? It makes so much sense that losing her would make him go off the deep end when it's framed like this.

It's just... man, I never thought I'd care so much about Gerald and Maria. But that's the Ian Flynn touch. After years of less than stellar Sonic writing that seemed to be embarrassed of itself, I'm so happy to have new games coming out that fully embrace the history of the series like this, making its world feel so rich and real instead of just serving as an excuse for a string of platforming levels. I don't even like Shadow '05, but I'll be damned if Ian and the rest of Sonic Team didn't make something amazing by "yes, and"-ing Shadow's cringe past here. Sonic has truly reached levels of "we're so back" never thought possible.

[kaccvcate]

I didn't mention it on here at the time because it was depressing, but when I lost my job and moved into the bando, I started drawing comics and writing music because it was the only way I had to make money without a car. That's the only reason I made the jump to doing this full time, I had nowhere else to go because my family are extremely abusive.

I was drawing the early comics (the ones in which I'm a ferret) at the bando, then walking to the dollar store a mile away on the highway, charging my phone and photographing them to post them. I went sometimes 3 days at a time without food (fasting, as many practitioners refer to it) cause I didn't want to get caught stealing food for myself, I prioritized cat and dog food. I had a lot of major spiritual breakthroughs and several full blown visions during this time, as I decided to dedicate all my extra time to performing rituals.

I've only been a professional artist for two years, so if you think I'm not Somebody yet, watch this

[maxwell-grant]

I managed to finally read The Chimera Brigade and it's given far, FAR more to talk about than I ever expected, and much like last time with Mina Murray and my LOEG breakdown, I'm devoting a separate post to a specific character that gives me far too much to talk about to include in the main write-up. The character in question is a French pulp hero I've covered some years ago by the name of Leo Saint-Clair a.k.a The Nyctalope - here presented as the "protector of Paris", entrusted by Marie Curie herself to watch over the city, and just about detested by everyone who has to interact with him on a daily basis, with the feeling very much reciprocated. He is a profoundly funny character, one of the smartest and most purposeful usages of a classic pulp character I've ever read, and one of greatest, most incisive takes on a pulp hero I've ever seen.

The official English translation of the comic calls him "The Eye", because despite being from 1911 and not having seen any kind of continuous publication since his author was disgraced for becoming a Nazi collaborator, apparently there are Nyctalope rights holders from Jean de La Hire's family who forced them to change the names for this comic and to alter it for all releases of the prequel series Lehman and Gess did, which is a hilariously obscene and yet fitting note to start this on - the very idea of Nyctalope rights holders invested in the sanctity of their hero, which is very funny considering that, within the story of The Chimera Brigade, the Nyctalope is driven in no small part by the fact that his legacy was entirely penned by hack pulp writers, and he desperately wants to correct that so he can take his place next to the greats that he claims he used to be on equal level with. It's an extension of the all-consuming insecurity that completely defines him and makes him such a pathetic, funny, and ultimately compelling character to watch, regardless of how much context you have for who The Nyctalope is.

Saint-Clair, as his alias indicated, has the ability to see in the dark after an injury. He has an artificial heart. He leads a crimefighting organization, the CID.

His decline is all the more pitiful: after traveling through time, rediscovering Atlantis and exploring an errant planet called Rhea, Saint-Clair becomes a collaborator in a 1944 tale called Night of the Nyctalope.

Even as an outcast, he remains a major figure in the French imagination, the missing link between the "gentlemen crimefighters" of the end of the 19th century and the modern adventurers of whom Bob Morane is emblematic.

He is painfully aware that, next to the likes of Lupin and Fantomas and Holmes, he is an insignificant nobody, that history will simply not remember The Nyctalope the same way it did them, and he has no idea why. We can certainly understand easy enough why he is generally despised by the other characters: he's a weasel, he's a cop, he's vindictive and petty, he's a reactionary, he's uncomfortable to be around, he's rude and snooty and demanding, he's self-obsessed, he's a piece of shit, he's unlikable, and we eventually learn he failed his most important promise on the most profound level possible and has only aggravated the problem ever since. And he is aware of all of that, and none of that, in his view, should have any kind of bearing on his record. Up until the finale of this, he had brushed off his failure to protect Spain from fascism, the dying promise that Curie entrusted to him above all else, as a quirk or flaw on the record, comparable to Holmes' cocaine addiction. None of these flaws explain to him why is it that he is not on the level of Lupin and Fantomas, despite having known them and been, theoretically, on their level. He has no context for his own existence.

He doesn't know how profoundly the world is gonna forget him. He doesn't know he's the last of a kind already on their way to extinction. He doesn't know what Jean de La Hire is gonna do in 1940. He doesn't know that whatever legacy he could have as a proto-superhero is gonna be tainted to shit because his author was a hack who sold out to the Nazis and fled town for it. He just knows that there is a Canon, and he is not a part of it, and this fact is killing him and blinding him to everything that doesn't revolve around his attempts to secure a legacy for himself.

The streets of Paris are adorned with big signs of him as it's protector, he is invited to political conferences as an international player of note, and Marie Curie, whose discovery of radium and whose scientific institute defines the backstory of the entire setting, entrusted him to protect the city, a huge unthinkable honor that her own children are baffled by, and none of this truly matters to The Nyctalope, because it's not enough. He holds a position of authority and power, but he is far less concerned with the impending war and bloodshed than he is at what's going to happen to his own legacy. Best exemplified by a particularly funny sequence in Issue 4, where he attends a Soviet conference and and learns firsthand about the alliance/treason kicking off the war that's gonna ruin all their diplomatic efforts so far, and his immediate concern is "what about the Eisenstein biopic I was promised??".

A single hour of darkness, and the vampires will tear the city apart.

What is Saint-Clair waiting for?

The first deaths. The public will crucify us, all he'll have to do is name the place. Well played.

It's in large part this obsession with legacy and imagery that makes him such an unpleasant person. The Curies even state in Issue 3 that the Nyctalope is willing to let the Chimera Brigade fail publicly and let casualties occur if it means he can take greater credit for fixing a problem they failed to contain, and eventually you can even see why he is so obsessed with the public perception: all of his victories and achievements have been hidden. Defeating and killing the secret ruler of the world, protecting the city from the shadows or up top in his airships, keeping dangerous beings hidden in his cave, none of that gets the public applause the Chimera Brigade got for stopping that alien frog.

If he'd kept up his promise to Curie and saved Spain, no one would have seen it happen. He says as much in the last issue that even now, to him, Mabuse is nothing, no more of a threat than Cagliostro, and certainly not as big of a priority as those dirty communists at the Curie Institute he will publicly deal with first. If you stop the threats before anyone sees you do it, they might as well not have existed, and he can't afford that anymore. He needs to have something to show for it all, he needs to have a victory that matters, he needs to belong in The Canon, and he has no way of understanding why he doesn't already.

I've said before, on my old post about the Nyctalope, that he is inherently emblematic of failure in a way that I find very interesting in so far as what it can say about the genre he's part of. How, disturbing origin and weird sci-fi adventures and design aside, he really was essentially a fairly clean-cut superheroic do-gooder. A Superman, a Captain America, indistinguishable from any other idealized patriotic do-gooder, and how none of that changed when his author sold out to the Vichy government. How just that single turn exposes how contextual and finnicky the entire premise of a pulp hero/superhero is, and how what happened to the Nyctalope could have befallen any number of other characters within the medium.

The Chimera Brigade's take on Nyctalope isn't even really about that historical fact surrounding him, although it is very much cognizant of this fact - it is more so about the failure state he represents and lives in. He stands for France, and thus stands for the failure of France in the pre-war era, the failure to do anything against it's fascist neighbors, the failure to assist in containing the threat of Nazism until it was far too late, the obsession with legacy and preservation of image coming at the cost of human lives. The failures of the Nyctalope are the failures of France, and he is a perfect character to stand in for failure. He is the perfect character to do this kind of thing with.

Significant and recognizable enough that he matters, not too significant or recognizable enough to not be irrelevant. A guy who was a perfectly ordinary pulp hero, if not for these strange proto-superhero quirks and that inescapable shame of his creator. He is part of the Canon, but he doesn't define the Canon, and the Canon will not wait for him to join it. He is just one of many pulp heroes, significant as a missing link between the ones that actually matter, and nothing more. Self-proclaiming as the last of the greats, instead of just being one of the greats or the next step of the greats - of course he wants to be the last of the great Gentlemen Vigilantes so that no others can come after him and overshadow him - ultimately a historical curiosity rather than a true step in the genre.

There is indeed real pity, even sympathy, for this contemptible schlub. There is an acknowledgment that his past deeds indeed mattered, and that it's his failure to move past them and grapple with his true present obligations that damns him more so than anything else. A lesser story absolutely would have cared about giving this guy some due, some respect or acknowledgment, but The Chimera Brigade is unflinching and the Nyctalope is not spared. He is laid out in clear terms as a colossal fuck-up loser too obsessed with his own myth to be of any help, and why would he be depicted otherwise? What does it actually mean to be The Nyctalope? What does he want to be remembered for? What does he HAVE to be remembered for?

For his great past deeds that nobody really saw? For his great magnetic personality? For the promise that he never kept, for the city that he doesn't protect, for the country he's failed, for the allies he's pushed away and the enemies he enables? For all these great adventures and accomplishments boiled down to nothing anyone really cares about, penned in cheap disposable pulp magazines? He desperately wants you to overlook everything else that surrounds him and listen to his assertions that he is one of The Guys, because his legend doesn't speak for itself, so he has to babble for it instead. And that's the note he ends on - finally realizing that there truly is nothing left for him, and that he failed on the most profound level possible. That even his tragic realization of failure is accompanied by a hilariously pathetic reveal - that all this time, in his most private quarters, he has all of his supposed "peers" framed in posters looming above him, and he was waiting to put himself next to them.

Holmes, Lupin, Fantomas, they were seismic shifts, they were major notable steps in their genre, they changed the world as a result of them, they were The Guys - and The Nyctalope wasn't. He was noteworthy, respectable, but just that, and he couldn't deal with that - that his legend will fade instead of endure. Ultimately, all he wanted was a spot on the wall next to them, and he's at last acknowledging that not only he will never have it, but that he never deserved it.

Whether you knew all this context about him or not going into this story, all along, deep down he knew the same thing that you did.

[emeraldspiral]

Mopiness of Doom Script Doctor

So I know Mopiness of Doom is a fan favorite unfinished episode, but I think there's always room for improvement. Plus, since we've had access to the script for decades, there's no way they'd ever finish the episode or publish it as a comic as-is because we'd know all the jokes already and there wouldn't be any surprises. So the only way we'd ever get this story in a completed form would be with a massive re-write anyway.

So to begin with, I think having Dib give up on the paranormal because a talisman he bought at the mall didn't work as-intended is kind of a weak motive to give up on his life's ambition so suddenly. I think it would make more sense if he suffered a particularly humiliating defeat at Zim's hands or if there was another instance of Zim very blatantly giving himself away in public and no one noticing or believing him when he points it out. So he's like covered in garbage or slime or something disgusting, he looks like a total fool, people are pointing and laughing, and it's so demoralizing that he finally feels like it's just not worth it anymore.

Instead of Zim instantly becoming depressed, I'd have him laugh maniacally and gloat about how the earth will soon be his now that he's eliminated Dib as an obstacle. But first he has to come up with a new plan, but he can't. And after racking his brains for hours, he still can't come up with anything. But he figures inspiration will come eventually so he might as well take a break and watch some TV. He's got all the time in the world. No rush now that he doesn't have to worry about Dib anymore.

Then we'd have Dib go home and clear out his room. Gaz sees what he's doing and questions him about it, but instead of being disturbed she's actually happy that he's not going to talk her ear off about shit she doesn't care about anymore or force her to watch Mysterious Mysteries when she wants to use the TV to play a console game. But after Dib gets rid of all the paranormal stuff in his room, it's totally sterile and devoid of personality and he doesn't know what he's going to do now to fill that void in his life. So he asks his dad if he can help him in the lab.

Meanwhile, Zim has begun his transformation into a couch potato, but is totally un-self-aware about it. It occurs to him that he hasn't called the Tallest to brief them on his mission progress in a while. He panics after looking at a calendar and seeing just how long it's been. But then he reconsiders calling the Tallest since he still hasn't come up with a new plan, so there's not much to report. He tells himself that he's really got to get a new plan together today so he can call them tomorrow, but he'll do it after he finishes this next episode. A commercial comes on promoting Membrane's latest invention, and he sees Dib at his father's side and instantly dismisses the notion that his lack of motivation has anything to do with Dib as soon as it pops into his head.

Dib and Membrane are having a good time bonding together at the lab when they get a call from Gaz asking why they aren't home yet. They tell Gaz that they were just wrapping things up and about to head home when they suddenly had a breakthrough, so they tell her to just order take-out and have dinner without them. The next morning, the breakfast table is covered in papers and scientific instruments and Dib and Membrane are excitedly chatting about whatever they're working on, barely acknowledging Gaz when she walks into the room. Their science stuff leaves no room for her to even set down a bowl of cereal. They decide to pick everything up and finish breakfast in the home lab, but it's not because of anything Gaz said, they didn't even hear her complain, they were just really eager to get back to working on their project together.

As Dib is about to leave the kitchen, GIR smashes through the window and begs him to hunt Zim again so he can have the couch back. Dib looks back and forth between GIR and Membrane before telling GIR things are going great for him now, why would he ever want to go back to the thankless job of chasing Zim? Membrane is pleased and Dib leaves with him while GIR cries, pounding his fists on the ground. Gaz tells GIR that she doesn't like how much of their dad's time Dib is monopolizing now, so she'll help him get Dib and Zim back together.

Gaz goes to pay Zim a visit and finds him on the couch covered in take-out boxes with his eyes glued to the TV. One of three different scenarios happens here:

Gaz encourages Zim to come up with a new evil plan to make Dib regret brushing him off. Zim temporarily regains some motivation and tries to get something together, but he either loses steam or the plan just fails to tempt Dib, so he goes back to the couch and sinks deeper into depression.

Gaz tries to encourage Zim and he tries to muster up the effort to get off the couch, but he can't. So she props him up with a broom and lets him think he's doing the work when she's really doing everything to put together an evil plan. For a moment, it seems like it's going to work and Zim starts laughing maniacally and gloating and taking credit for Gaz's idea. But even though Gaz's plan is a legitimate threat, Dib just doesn't care about the imminent demise of the human race anymore. Whatever happens happens, it's not his problem. So the plan is aborted and Zim sinks deeper into depression.

Zim is still in denial. Why would he want Dib back to ruin his plans? He's just taking a little break, but any day now he'll totally make that insolent earth boy regret underestimating him. He doesn't need any help from Gaz. Gaz goes back to Dib and tells him "Zim's totally doing something super evil right now, better go stop him" but Dib brushes it off.

Rather than spending the whole episode seeming like he's totally fine and then dropping real science out of nowhere, Dib does have moments throughout the episode that show he misses the paranormal and is mostly just pushing Zim away because he's mad about being humiliated. He's trying not to click on links recommending him pages about new paranormal discoveries he might be interested in. He and his dad are about to watch a boring documentary together on the TV and he looks longingly at the thumbnail of a cool monster movie he was looking forward to but then pretends he's too mature for something like that now. He hides a UFO magazine behind a scientific journal so no one knows he's still reading that stuff. But it gets to be too much for Dib when he and his dad are hanging out and having a seemingly nice time together, but Membrane keeps making insensitive comments about how happy he is that Dib's gotten over his "delusions" and isn't "insane" anymore. Dib realizes that his dad's acceptance of him is conditional and it feels really shitty to only be liked when he suppresses his true self.

So just as he and Membrane were supposed to head to the lab together, Dib says "Actually, I'd rather not. It was nice spending time with you, but this shit's boring and what I really wanna do right now is catch me an alien". And then Membrane curses the heavens and Gaz smiles smugly as Dib runs off.

Dib barges into Zim's house declaring his intent to stop Zim's latest evil plan. Zim instantly perks up and kicks all the garbage under the couch so Dib won't know what a wreck he was without him and pretends like he definitely does have an evil plan in motion right now that Dib will never be able to stop.

Instead of Zim trapping Dib in a bubble, he starts shooting at him with lasers from his PAK while Dib chases him around his living room with handcuffs. You can hear crashing and car alarms and police sirens and animal screeches from all the destruction being wrought by Zim's lasers misfiring and blasting through the walls and devastating the neighborhood outside. But Dib is totally oblivious to how much more danger humanity is in now while he makes his grandiose speech about stopping Zim's reign of terror. The whole time Zim and Dib are laughing and playfully insulting one another while trying to kill each other, GIR is enjoying the newly unoccupied couch, kicking his little feet in delight as he picks up the remote and puts on some Floopsy Bloops Shmoopsy. The End.

[aamy2100982]

(I never get tired of being a hater of the Symbrock from the movie)

Eddie just doesn't get any development in any movie. I don't know why.

Especially since Tom Hardy always bragged that he worked alongside the writers to make the movies, which I would assume would make him more fond of his character and the things he would do to grow and become interesting and endearing to the audience.

But no, Eddie is an idiot in all the movies. In the first one it's understandable, because he's scared, but from the second one onwards he's just an idiot.

I think the choice of personality for Eddie was terrible. Because he is not a good character for a superhero movie (or anti-hero in this case). I HATE making comparisons, but Eddie from the comics enjoys what he does. Investigating bad people, killing criminals, getting into dangerous situations, looking for trouble. Eddie from the comics is arrogant and cocky and believes himself to be indestructible under his suit, allowing himself to joke around and tease his enemies even when he is in tight situations.

Comic book Eddie also has a no-brain eating policy and yet he keeps a healthy and happy symbiote that loves him and would give its entire life for him. And Eddie would do the same, because he is a suicidal maniac.

I'm convinced that Eddie in the movie never wanted this. Ever since the second movie, when they split up and Eddie was happy, I swear, the happiest man alive at that moment and he didn't start to worry until he realized he was in danger from Carnage, I realized that Eddie doesn't give a shit about Venom.

The only reason Eddie wanted Venom back is because he was afraid of dying, nothing more. They are not lovers, not like brothers, not even friends. Venom thinks they are, Eddie doesn't care.

And at the end of the third movie they try to show us this "touching" scene where Eddie is supposed to be missing Venom. But it feels so forced! The whole "lady liberty" thing was something they developed specifically in movie 3 and not something from every movie which makes us feel deeply hurt that Venom won't be able to enjoy it.

And that's just the aspect of their relationship, but Eddie doesn't really evolve in any way.

I think the only thing he grew as a character is that he outgrew Anne... and I'm not so sure about that.

And... I don't know, I guess he sweat less in this movie than in the first one... is that something?

Apart from that, Eddie is a character with a static personality that does not evolve or devolve. He just is

Don't let Tom Hardy write characters again, there's a reason he's an actor and not a screenwriter

back on tumblr momentarily to say i watched venom 3 for the first time yesterday and god what a shitshow. not even going to get into details bc it's all self evident if you watch the movie but like one thing i would like to say is that i do NOT ship venom and eddie in the movies not from movie 2 onwards. eddie is an asshole he's upset all the time he hates venom and hates having fun. meanwhile venom's charming, curious, has many interests, is optimistic, appreciates the good in life, has a lot of love in his heart and is just after a good time... literally: venom leave that wretched beast and come into my arms i will take you to karaoke i will take you dancing we will eat chocolate so big you wont need brains but i will allow you to eat one occasionally as a treat. and so on.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

HOT, SINGLE, UNSTUDIED SPONGES. 3000 NAUTICAL MILES AWAY. Come sail the distance and read Tiger Tiger!

[rupeenotruby]

That was long. Keeping this short. Not sure about this one. Thank you to @/runecatwrites for this [Click] analysis post as it was pretty helpful for the Wild and Wars dialogue (though I think the analysis is better).

[fictionadventurer]

I think I have accidentally become very protective of the story of Snow White.

[wickmitz]

— THE ELECTRIC-FEVER REMEDY.

[skitskatdacat63]

"Arrogant, ruthless, and by all reports (including his own) utterly charming."

(I don't know why I drew this but please take Revolutionary War British officer George, I think it suits him, okay!!!)

+ George Russell the type of guy to t-pose in front of rebels

+ the usual

Okay first of all, process, as always:

I drew this in one day hahaha....Actually really fun! I haven't finished anything in almost a month, and haven't painted for even longer, so I'm kinda dying at the fact that 18th century George Russell got me motivated 😭 Sometimes when painting, I realize I have free will and can actually just start painting over the lineart, and that's the best moment of every drawing process 🙏

Also I'm very proud of his face!!! I've said before, but art progression is such a weird thing. You'll keep repeating to your self "I'm no good at [insert art thing.]" And then randomly realized you can in fact do it. That's me with drawing real people's faces 😭 I'm just so shocked I got his face pretty good in one try!!!

Okay about the pose and quote. God its so fun to misappropriate quotes for my own evil deeds. Both of these are from this one officer from the Revolution: Banastre Tarleton. Idk, I randomly saw his painting in a history video, and it's stuck in my mind ever since. And then yesterday, bcs I spent a lot of time looking at George, I'm like "hey you know what he kinda reminds me of-" and thus we have this.

I just found that quote about him from some historian to be funny, so I put it as a caption, as I would with Napoleon. This won't be an AU by any means but. I think if George was in the Revolution, he'd be the most stereotypical, evil British villain in American media type guy ever. And Tarleton is kinda that guy tbh, to the point where him and others like Arnold Benedict are the poster boys of evil Revolution guys. He even has a mocking nickname! "Bloody Tarleton/Ban", very "Osama bin Russell," no? 😭

Some notable moments from Tarleton's campaign that I think fit George: Apparently killed a bunch of American soldiers after they surrendered, making sure everyone was dead(😭😭), threatened to burn an American general's house down to make him surrender and then took him hostage, went toe to toe with George Washington himself and Washington even taunted him and Tarleton got a shot in, has a helmet named after him(very slayful.)

[stealingyourbones]

Gotta love when folks write Superman incredibly anti-clone even though he had good reason in the beginning to Not Like Superboy (HES A WINDOW INTO WHAT CLARK WOULD HAVE BEEN WITHOUT THE KENTS) and decide that forever on he’ll be spiteful towards clones even though he literally Does Not Care if you’re a clone unless you’re Superboy.

[sonknuxadow]

my honest reaction

[ganondoodle]

after i finally do the big botw2 ganondorf design post- what next? (more polls bc polls be polling)

*you dont have to specify if anything of it is fine with you, but its useful to know whats interesting to others

(to be clear, i want to do/finish all of this!!! question is if or how to mix it up and what the priority should be; like i want to do everything at the same time but obviously cant)

[lightbulb-warning]

i used to freehand comics all the time as a child and since the part i liked was the drawing part i would just draw panel after panel because i didn't want to stop drawing to think about icky icky words, plus the story TOTALLY still made perfect sense! to me! and noone else, but 'whoooo caaaaares omgggg its not like comics and sequantial art are a communicative meeediummmm lmaoooooo'. i spent my entire childhood telling myself stuff like "oh pfft I know this story by heart- ill SIMPLY remember the dialogue and write it later" ...and. I can't help but admire baby maiora's (call that a minora ba tm tsk) fucking audacity? hubris? confident wrongness? kid couldn't even remember to finish the comics in the first place? INCREDIBLE levels of unearned self assurance, wish that were me, genuinely- what an icon!!! anyway i think i have forever cursed myself

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Not beating the allegations.

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[finalgirlsamwinchester]

like, ultimately, spn could never actually break the cycle of abuse and familial violence, bc to truly break the cycle would've required its writers to have the radical imaginary to look beyond the status quo. the show just reifies the idea of a paternal authority over the world. god dies but he has to be replaced you see, but it's okay, it's someone better now. family is hell but now family is also heaven.