#but I have curse of cartoonify

[lockpickingliar]

Hello! May I request information regarding The Ghost Kokichi OC? I have been informed of its existence and am now curious. Thanks in advance!

I'm gonna be real, at FIRST, I had NO IDEA what you were talking about when I got this. I thought you were talking about one of our DOA kids, Cookie, Cusp, or Gemini.

However!

@woobifykamukura has since informed me that you're actually asking about a Kokichi expy I made for an original story they and I collaborate on for our old podcast, Zero to Chaos! (Note: Currently this podcast is on indefinite hiatus due to the fact we are taking the time and care to revamp the story and start it again from scratch.)

Without going too in-depth about the entire world, I will at least explain that there is a fundamental concept in this world for spirits and the afterlife. There is a distinct Spirit Realm where there are three types of spirits: spiritborn, those born in the Spirit Realm to other spirits; halfborn, those born to a living human and a spirit; and humanborn, someone who was born a living human and who has since died and become a spirit. Humanborn spirits typically manifest with some distinct attribute that relates to how they died.

With that out of the way, I will tell you about The Boy! He doesn't have his own name yet, since I haven't had much of a chance to think on it (read: I'm having too much fun with the development of the character himself to think about little details like a Name), so for now I've taken to calling him Bloodkichi.

Bloodkichi is a humanborn, meaning he was once a living person who died and came to the Spirit Realm in his afterlife. As of now, the circumstances of his death are mostly the same as Dangan Kokichi: He was in a snuff film type killing game, and in an attempt to usurp the rules he sacrificed himself in a gruesome death by hydraulic press to obfuscate the identity of the victim.

As a result, he takes the form of a poorly-formed mass of blood and viscera, which he can coagulate at will to shape himself into the vague silhouette of his former self. I love him so much he is such a goopy mess. He leaves a trail of blood wherever he goes and is able to change his viscosity to a degree to squeeze through small spaces and slink across the floor kind of like an Inkling from Splatoon swimming through ink. He likes to slink around like this to sneak up on people and pop up to scare the everloving shit out of them. Carpet is annoying because he gets soaked up in it and it slows him down, and he has to sleep in a container of some sort like a bowl or tub because he will just be sopped up into beds and blankets like a sponge. You could probably put him in a jar and shake him up just to watch his one (1) eye swirl around in it and make him dizzy. When he gets stressed out, he has more trouble maintaining a semisolid form, so he literally "melts" under the pressure into a little puddle.

But to be honest it's actually kind of distressing being a sentient mass of coagulated blood because he can't ever really be hugged or touched by another person without their arms just squishing through him like a wet, bloody clot, which people find gross. Not to mention his overall grotesque appearance makes him kind of unapproachable in general, which makes people avoid him in general. It makes him kind of lonely.

Not that he'd ever admit that, though!

Spirits in the Spirit Realm also have distinct powers unique to them in some way. For humanborns, this also often reflects the manner and circumstances of their death. Typically they manifest as a spirit accepts their death, but due to the nature of suicide, spirits who die via suicide have their powers manifest very quickly and explosively.

Bloodkichi is the Spirit of Illusion--or the Spirit of Deceit, as he likes to tell people (it sounds cooler!). He is able to warp people's perception of the world around them, on both large and small scales. He is capable of large illusory projections on par with hallucinogenic-level altered reality, but it takes a LOT of energy to maintain that perception because it doesn't actually change the reality. Once a person realizes that they're being deceived, it all completely falls apart, so it's not really worth the trouble most of the time. No, he's more likely to change people's perception of small things. He'll give you a basket of pears only for you to realize later that they were actually tennis balls. Things like that. Just like with his plan where he made it appear that he wasn't the one who died, he can make things around him appear like something they're not to others. Obfuscates reality in a way.

Sometimes he makes people see him as a Normal Boy instead of a malformed mass of blood, usually when he first appears to them to appear more approachable. He really wants people to like him. However, the longer he interacts with people, the more likely something will happen to make the illusion fall apart--they'll touch him, or catch him at a bad time. Once that happens, he'll never be able to trick them again. They'll always see him for what he really is. A bloody monster.

He's so silly, look at him!

[skaruresonic]

I never saw the Wolf Pack from Satam as being native American esque. If anything they always came off as vaguely Greco-Roman to me

Do me a solid and tell that to Tumblr. And Twitter. And the Sonic fan wiki. Because that's precisely why the Wolf Pack are dogshit at being Native American rep.

Knowing that Pat Allee and Ben Hurst also cartoonified Cherokee history in their version of a play meant to generate revenue for the Uyá·taʔ nation dealt an extra round of psychic damage. The Wolf Pack are laughable stereotypes at best, but now I know these guys really were that racist in their work like holy shit

Like, we don't "place curses on people" because you're fucking with witchcraft, and fucking with witchcraft is one of the four things traditional Haudenosaunee avoid doing at all costs. You don't mess with kačíkačiks even in jest because it’s a sin. Or more specifically, something that saddens the Creator.

Apropos of a lack of research, if you knew Native folks in general, you'd pick up on how we tend to be... I guess, not superstitious per se, but sensitive to the supernatural, particularly with scary or unpredictable encounters. Rez stories usually include some form of "I was walking down the road at night and saw the most fucked-up thing ever and ran back home lmao fuck that." There are some things you just don’t do or say because there are understood to be specific consequences. Because of that, Indians tend to be wary of occult stuff like Ouija boards, whereas white people tend to be more cavalier about it.

This wouldn't be particularly obscure knowledge to come by, either; just look at Native memes on YouTube and you'll see some variation of that sentiment. That's how I know the writing tells on itself.

Now granted, I don't know how other tribes feel about the matter, but given how Pat Allee was once described as being "an expert on Native American tribes," you'd think that she would be above writing lazy stereotypes.

Sonic bloggers think the Wolf Pack's fake curse is a neat subversion of expectations because ~lmao the Natives are sticking it to the colonizers~ when the real subversion would simply not have them place (fake) curses at all.

This isn't the only thing wrong with the Wolf Pack, I'm just pointing it out to illustrate the gulf between writing and reality.

~incredibly indigenous-coded~, they claim, and then say "living in huts," "in harmony with nature," and speak of indigenous culture as a monolith with zero awareness of the stereotypes involved. ever heard of a Longhouse? or a wiigiwaam? do you know what land stewardship is by any chance?

I legit cannot with people any time someone compares colonization to the suffering of fictional cartoon characters. yes, what these fictional wolves went through at the hands of a fictional egg-shaped man is definitely the same thing as my great-grandma getting the language beaten out of her at residential school. /s

also, if the Wolf Pack lived in pueblos, then they cannot be Eastern Native American. that's like saying Russians eat baguettes and smoke while reading highbrow literature under the Eiffel Tower. like what.

"living in huts" brb going to go gnaw on the nonexistent drywall of the hut that I live in

[mst3kproject]

Dawn of the Mummy

Like Horrors of Spider Island, this is a movie predicated on putting a bunch of attractive women in a dangerous situation so that we can watch them run around and scream, and like Devil Fish, they’re all Italian but we’re not supposed to notice.  The director, Frank Agrama, is best known for the Robotech movies, and most of the actors were never in anything else (one of them did play a victim in Bloodsucking Freaks), so it can fairly be said to star nobody and feature nothing.  Boy, it sucks.

Long ago, the evil Pharaoh Sefreman rode around Egypt being an utter bastard because he was a god incarnate and he could do that. He wanted to continue doing it after his death, too, so a priestess puts a curse on his tomb – if his treasure is ever stolen, Sefreman and his armies will rise and kill!

Thousands of years later, a bunch of robbers blast the tomb open despite the dire warnings of the wicked queen from Snow White.  It’s not them who end up angering the mummy, however, it’s a bunch of models and their photographer, who decide that an undiscovered tomb is the perfect place to hold an impromptu photoshoot.  After way too much pointless dithering, Sefreman makes with the rising and killing, culminating in a full-on zombie feeding frenzy.

The leader of the three robbers is a guy named Rick.  It’s been a while since we had a Rick.  The actor playing him, Barry Sattles, overacts so hard in every scene that you’ll be looking for tooth marks in the rocks.  The guy who dubbed his voice is even worse.

And that’s just one tasty morsel of the delicious cheese platter that is this movie.  The ancient Egyptians dress in taffeta and gold lame.  The dubbing is atrocious.  Sefreman’s ‘treasure’ is a bunch of cheap souvenirs with a layer of gold spray paint.  People running through wide open desert can’t seem to keep ahead of slowly shuffling zombies. The music is intrusive and both it and the accents are obnoxious stereotypes – the end credits in particular are set to a cartoonified ‘Egyptiany’ piece that reminds me of the theme from Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  If I had to pick a stinger I don’t think I could do it.  I mean, there’s the wicked queen popping into shot screaming, there’s the guy getting attacked by a rat, there’s the lady wandering through the tomb wailing about how lost she is, there’s Rick screaming Sefreman’s name over and over… it’s hilarious.

There’s not much of a plot through the middle part of the film – just Sefreman and his minions wandering around eating people and horses.  Occasionally there are hints of story, like one of the models falling in love with Rick (why!?) or the photographer’s desire to be famous, but these never really amount to anything.  The climax is a total free-for-all, as zombies invade the streets of the town and crash Omar the Hookah Guy’s wedding! This is plenty amusing, but would be more so if we had a better idea what the hell was going on.

Sefreman is finally defeated by two of the models and a couple of guys from the town, who lure him into a shed full of dynamite and blow him up.  This actually isn’t a bad ending.  I’m pleased that they didn’t decide to try to turn Rick into the hero, and that the women didn’t need personality transplants in order to save the day.  After the shack blows, they squeal and jump up and down and hug each other – which is exactly what we would expect from the characters we’ve been following this entire movie.  Omar’s wedding is a fun choice of climax, since we get to see some Egyptian culture, and there’s even a sort of subplot in which it’s rather heavily implied that he’s got to marry this girl in a hurry because she’s already pregnant.

I do have many questions about the old woman I’ve been referring to as the wicked queen.  How does she know where Sefreman’s tomb is when supposedly everybody who did know was killed?  She’s played by the same actress as the high priestess who sealed him up – is she supposed to be a descendant?  Maybe even the same person, immortal for some reason?  Why does Sefreman kill her when she immediately swears her devotion to him? Why does she talk about Sefreman ‘reclaiming his kingdom’ when that was never mentioned in the curse?  All the curse was supposed to do was keep his treasure safe.  The best I can say about her is that she’s slightly more explicable and relevant than the pet shop hobo from Hellraiser… but that’s a low bar.

So what is this movie about, besides the obvious ‘mummy killing women’ level?  I don’t think it’s really meant to be about anything.  Dawn of the Mummy is just a monster movie, but it carries with it a certain amount of baggage from its genre. Mummy movies in general are about the West’s unease with archaeology.

Archaeologists dig up all kinds of things, of course, but tombs are a major subset, because the dead bodies of our ancestors are a wealth of information about how they lived.  Modern science can tell where people grew up, what their diet was like, what diseases they suffered from, the colour of their hair and eyes, and all kinds of other things… but there’s still the fact that you have to dig up somebody’s dead body to get there.  Some people are okay with the idea that their mortal remains might be a subject of study in centuries to come.  Other people are not.

The Egyptians would almost certainly have been horrified by what has become of their dead.  Mummies were meant to remain in their tombs for all eternity so that the souls of the departed would have a home, with their grave goods to take care of them.  A mummy in a museum, separated from its context, means a soul that is alone and penniless in a foreign place.  If they could have put curses and booby-traps in their tombs to prevent this, they would have.  What does that mean for archaeologists?  Do we have the right to disrespect these people’s wishes, just because they’ve been dead for a really long time?

Archaeologists will frequently lament the fact that their profession is also basically destructive – once you’ve dug something up and taken it apart, it will never be pristine again.  Modern archaeology takes great care to preserve as much as possible so that people in the future, who will presumably have better techniques, can still learn something, too.  Dawn of the Mummy sort of deals with this, as we see two groups of people who have no interest in preserving what they’ve found. Rick and his friends blow holes in it looking for a treasure chamber, and the models are in their own way nearly as destructive.

Dawn of the Mummy devotes significant attention to the fact that light is damaging to artefacts.  Mummies on display in museums are always under dim light, because bright light will degrade the wrappings and tissues that have spent millennia in darkness. But the first thing the photographers do is set up a bunch of bright lights, and we see shots of icky blue fluid bubbling out of the mummy’s wrappings where this hits it.  I wondered if this is supposed to be what activates the curse – since the title is Dawn of the Mummy, maybe the magic mistakes it for sunlight falling on him?  If so, the writing should have taken care of that I wouldn’t have to sit and figure it out.

The models also touch everything they come across, leaning on walls and statues covered with thousand-year-old paint, getting makeup all over everything and probably sweat, too, as they constantly complain about how hot it is in there. The movie never entertains the possibility of actual archaeologists finding Sefreman’s tomb, but any who did would find it hopelessly compromised.

Mummy movies are also about imperialism, which is inextricably tied to archaeology.  Modern Egyptology in particular began when Napoleon’s troops raided the country for stuff they thought was pretty, and as I discussed in my review of The Pumaman, a lot of this is still kicking around in museums, private collections, and garage sales, with no provenance or context.  Archaeology derives from treasure-hunting, embodied in Rick – he’s not here for knowledge, he’s here for wealth.  The models are not really any different.  They want images of this exotic place that will please their audience, without much caring about the context behind them.

The mummy, with his magical powers and undead army, is a punishment for this greed, and represents the west’s constant fear that conquered peoples will fight back.  You see this in those facebook graphs talking about how white people will become a minority in America unless we make abortion illegal.  Why should that be a problem?  Because we’re afraid we will be treated as we have treated others. Sefreman’s magic is completely unknown to the Americans and they have no defense against it.

Of course, none of this is actually relevant in Dawn of the Mummy.  These themes are inherent in the premise, but they’re not part of the story this particular movie is telling.  The result, with its Styrofoam tomb art and ostentatious overacting, is great to make fun of but impossible to take seriously – perfect material for some do-it yourself MST3K.