#i had to dig into my own screenshots for reference. the wiki is so bad it has like No pictures of anything oh my goddd but anyway!!!!!

[neptunesailing]

hi hi neptune :> saw your requests are open post and was wondering if you'd be up to drawing tamao from yohaji? full kitty form and regular form are both okay!! :>

!!!! ofc! he is so silly i think

[brushstrokesapocalyptic]

it’s time for the “overanalyzing one-off lines” show!

so the very first thing magnus says when he sees pit in chapter 2 of kid icarus: uprising is as follows:

“Well, I didn’t expect to see an angel here. Hope this doesn’t mean I’ve kicked the bucket.”

now, i’m not sure if you’re aware, but that’s a really weird thing for someone to say, and it’s even more weird that no one comments on it. pit and palutena go on talking about unrelated things, as if that’s a totally normal and expected thing for magnus to say.

now, if you’re like me, you probably also didn’t really react to this line the first few times you saw it. it’s the second chapter, kiu has a lot of slightly-odd lines which turn out to be foreshadowing. me, personally? my first thought was “oh, i guess angels are probably associated with escorting the dead to the afterlife,“ and then i moved on.

they’re not, though. that’s what reapers do. and there’s no way humans have these two races mixed up. just fucking look at them.

do they look anything alike to you??? no. they don’t. which raises the question of why, exactly, magnus said that.

now, we don’t know a lot about angels as a whole. pit (and by extension dark pit) is emphatically not the gold standard of angeldom. we can assume he looks fairly ordinary for an angel, seeing as no one has trouble identifying him as such. beyond that, though, a lot of what we know about angels comes from what pit isn’t. for starters, he can’t fly. and there’s something else, too, but i���ll get to that later.

before that, though, i’m gonna go through the various unsubstantiated comments made by people with a dubious level of authority on the subject. (incidentally, i sourced these screenshots from the wiki— much more convenient than trying to dig through youtube for every single random conversation.)

without any further ado! let’s get into it!

Angels as Messengers

Gaol: Aw, Palutena’s little messenger boy. And Magnus, it’s always a pleasure. (src)

in the specific context of overanalyzing magnus’s first line, this is an important sentence to pick out. magnus and gaol are both humans, both with presumably a fairly similar history as mercenaries up until gaol got stuffed in a suit of armor. but while magnus makes a weird comment about death, gaol calls pit a messenger.

and pit agrees with her!

Viridi: I wish I had an angel to do my bidding. It’s like having an intern.

Pit: I’m not an intern. I’m a messenger of the gods!

Viridi: Poor Pit. Don't you know that the definition of angel is "errand spirit"? (src)

this particular conversation is the most insight we get into angels as a whole, i think. viridi thinks of angels as like divine interns, there to do little tasks for gods, and palutena doesn’t exactly disagree with her. pit says they’re specifically messengers, which lines up with biblical mythology. i could see the traditional role of angels in the world of KI being exactly that, showing up to tell the humans what the gods have to say because the gods themselves are too busy being petty jerks to do it themselves.

The Angel’s Code of Conduct

Magnus: You go in fully dressed? Don't you at least want to change into a...swimming tunic or something?

Pit: Oh, no no no! The angel's code of conduct says that we must always be ready for duty.

Magnus: I guess you wouldn't be an angel if you didn't do things by the book. (src)

Pit: Hey! You know the angel's code of conduct! I need to be prepared at all times! (src)

another random little thing is the angel’s code of conduct. without a larger sample size, we can’t know if it’s a real thing or just an excuse to save on laundry, but apparently it’s against the rules to not be on call at all times. in pit’s case, the duty he has to be ready for is doing palutena’s dirty work, but it can easily mean just about anything— including, of course, being a messenger.

No Warrior

Chariot Master: But you are no warrior, angel. Tell me, why do you fight?

Pit: I fight for Lady Palutena. And I fight for the people under her protection!

Chariot Master: That's not reason enough for an angel. (src)

remember how i said there was something else weird about pit? the chariot master seems to think angels aren’t very prone to battle— or perhaps even that they’re actively opposed to it. this lines up well with the idea that they’re supposed to be messengers, peaceful go-betweens for gods and mortals. this does not line up well with pit, the adorable weapon of mass destruction.

and it also does absolutely nothing to explain the question driving the whole existence of this post.

you know what does kinda lean towards an explanation?

No Other Angels

Pit: Do all gods have their own angels, like you have me?

Palutena: No, I don't think that's necessarily the case. (src)

i said before that the Intern Pit conversation had the most illuminating information on angels. this is what i was actually referring to. on its own, it’s pretty innocuous, but it’s just as weird as the magnus line. shouldn’t pit know about other angels, seeing as he is one himself? but he doesn’t know if there are other angels.

the only angels we ever see are him and his clone. no one ever directly references the existence of other angels, they only make general statements about what angels as a whole are like— statements which clearly don’t apply to pit, meaning they’re not just extrapolating based on the one angel that definitely does exist.

the one time someone does comment on the hypothetical existence of other angels, palutena gives a vague answer to the tune of “no,” the topic is changed, and no one brings it up again.

let’s go over everything i’ve established about angels up to this point. they can fly, they’re peaceful messengers of the gods, and pit is the only one that seems to exist as of the start of KIU.

it should be pretty obvious at this point what answer i’m dancing around, if it wasn’t obvious from the start. pit is the only angel around because all the other ones are dead. the reason why magnus said what he did is that his thought process went something like this:

See an angel.

Think “Aren’t angels extinct? Is that a ghost? Am I a ghost? I sure hope not.“

Make a quip about that.

Move on with his life, because he isn’t dead and evidently neither is this guy.

i’m not gonna pretend i went into this post with the intent of any other conclusion to that mystery. anyone who’s bothered glancing over a plot summary for the original kid icarus can draw that conclusion. it’s certainly what i did, reinforced by fics by people who had the same thought!

the truth, however, is that this was all a trick to get you to read my analysis of the theoretical nature of angels as a race. now that you’re invested, i’m going to dramatically throw aside my cape and reveal my TRUE FORM: telling people that fandom consensus is wrong, and my ideas are cooler and better than everyone else’s and you should all throw roses at my feet and bow before your king.

(or just, y’know, take it as the subjective analysis that it is. whatever floats your boat.)

Hot Takes

the original kid icarus does not actually tell you about angels going extinct. here’s the wiki article with the full text of the backstory, just for convenience, so you know what i’m on about for the rest of this post.

so, the part of the story that i think gets misinterpreted is this part about palutena’s army.

Medusa led a surprise attack on Palutena's army which could barely fend off the attack. Palutena's army suffered major losses and was heavily defeated in the final battle.

specifically, i think a lot of people interpret said army as having been made up at least partly of angels. sure, in the actual game it consists entirely of centurions, but you have to take old NES games with a grain of salt. i know i don’t buy for a second that pit was part of palutena’s guard before the original game (he was just too goddamn young), there’s nothing wrong with reinterpreting things.

recall everything i established about angels already, though. this is the hot official lore, from the game everyone knows and loves. angels are messengers, and if the chariot master is to be believed, never warriors. pit is an outlier. palutena’s army consists of centurions, not angels. if medusa wiped them out, it wasn’t because they were fighting for palutena.

(and honestly, i don’t think angels are necessarily associated with palutena exclusively. sure, she’s got the wing imagery, and she’s got the one known surviving angel working for her, at least up until pittoo is born. but angels are messengers of the gods, not messengers of palutena. again, pit is an outlier.)

which all brings us to the real question of this post.

what the FUCK happened to all the other angels? why is there only pit? why does magnus act surprised to see a messenger of the gods, and make a quip about being dead, if not because angels are otherwise extinct?! WHO KILLED THEM, AND WHY?!

thus concludes the “over analyzing one-off lines“ show. see you next, uh, maybe at some point if i feel like it!

(also another thought i had but couldn’t find room to fit it in properly: the gods don’t really act like angels are all extinct, but i feel like that can be explained through the sheer scale of a god’s lifespan. if we assume they were wiped out sometime around the original kid icarus (even if not as palutena’s army) then that’s a whole twenty-five years. that’s a long time for us humans, but for a god, that might as well be last tuesday. “yeah, i know what angels are like. sure wish i could have one. too bad palutena’s got a monopoly on the one single angel that medusa didn’t manage to wreck.”)

[preemshots]

johnny + the nomads lore

alright, i know this is a screenshots blog but i'm going to go ahead and start dropping some juicy lore tidbits as i dig them up. part of what i'm doing outside of just photo diarying is shard hunting, and BOY is there a lot the game likes to hide in those little shards for idiots like me who like to read so we can write unnecessarily accurate fanfiction! 

full disclosure, i know jack shit about the TTRPG/cyberpunk 2020 rulebook except what i read in the wikis. 

so here’s my lore roundup so far of everything i know about johnny joining the nomads

we know johnny likes to narrate v’s quest objectives. here’s the first mention where he says it himself: 

during the voodoo boys quest "transmission" there's a shard in the maglev tunnels beside the ice bath, presumably from brigitte's research into johnny in the first place:

okay, so the timeline is this: johnny joins the nomads after trying and failing to rescue alt. johnny hides out in the badlands for some years. then he and rogue come back to night city and nuke arasaka tower help alt escape the arasaka subnet by uploading liberator to their network once and for all.

this ultimately makes sense. in alt’s flashback, we meet santiago, who is a nomad/connected to nomads, joins rogue and johnny when they're trying to get alt back, and eventually becomes the leader of the aldecaldos. 

part of santiago’s TTRPG lore is that he, johnny, and rogue have to lay low in the badlands with nomads after they storm arasaka headquarters (i am aware the game takes many liberties with the original lore so who knows the full accuracy of anything from the original rulebooks)

ENDING spoilers: in the rogue+johnny storming AHQ ending, it's revealed that rogue has a son while they're prepping for the job. if you eavesdrop on her calling him while you're at the afterlife, you hear her tell her son to (paraphrasing here) "pull over and look at the stars", which immediately made my brain go to: nomad, badlands, santiago = dad? maybe. (santiago also canonically has a son according to the TTRPG lore)

this immediately reminded me of another interesting shard that i believe you can find in multiple locations around night city: “"what REALLY happened in arasaka tower?“

i love this dang shard. at first i thought it was just a cute conspiracy with some juicy gossip (and i love how 99% of the shards that mention johnny in this game are reminding us that he's not a real rebel, he's a poser) but it brings some interesting shit together

one: it tells us where johnny got his hands on the nukes! he and the nomads jumped a militech convoy and jacked some bombs! 

which is never directly explained, even as saburo arasaka is interrogating him shortly before using soulkiller. very nice of johnny to protect his homies like that. 

...or maybe he didn’t. saburo emphasizes that the dead don’t lie like the living do, and we don’t know what exactly arasaka did to johnny’s construct in mikoshi. 

it also explains why the obvious media narrative is that militech nuked arasaka, a nice neat political bow to the end of the fourth corpo wars, which is an entire section of the TTRPG lore that makes my eyes cross when i read it. 

it also makes the star/nomads ending extremely interesting, because i originally believed it was the ending where V’s journey deviates the most from rewalking johnny’s path... which also has weird implications if the johnny’s nomad era is being kept from v. 

(this also leads into my belief that the star ending/the devil ending are narratively two sides of the same coin, but that’s a WHOLE ANOTHER POST for another day.)

TWO, just straight up the fact that they turned the raid where they actually obtained the nukes into an action flick BD that pretty much ANYONE could watch. who the hell was doing that?? 

well, who else other than the guy who johnny (optionally) punched the shit out of for filming alt's death: thompson, media guy, and according to rogue, “bad luck”. because you know, recording your crimes is straight up evidence that can be used against you.

during the alt flashback we meet thompson, and just after that in cyberspace before meeting alt, johnny tells v that he has no idea what happened to him and that they never worked together again. 

oh, johnny, you lying bastard man

this is blatantly untrue, and if V even had two braincells and better memory than a goldfish they'd know this--in the first flashback sequence where johnny and rogue nuke arasaka tower, thompson is on the comms as they ride the AV towards AHQ, questioning their plans and use of violence. 

which leaves me with some questions, like where the fuck is thompson, why does johnny keep lying about this, why doesn't johnny say almost anything about how you interact with the aldecaldo clan nonstop throughout the game when he himself may have been a member of the family for some time?? is he continuing to protect the nomad clan that saved his ass? we know that a lot of his flashbacks are unreliable at best, that johnny changes shit up as desired when presenting V with his memories.

in 2077, you can also find that there’s a remake of “badlands raid” in the shard “new release braindances” that is pretty much everywhere. that shard doesn’t add much, but does mention something along the lines of “many people don’t know the ending of the original” which probably means johnny punched thompson out for filming again, or something. 

my running theories: rogue ditched santiago and the aldecaldos with johnny and thompson to nuke arasaka tower, and when johnny died she was stuck looking for (heavily implied by johnny here:) corpo sellout ways to survive.

adam smasher obviously has something to do with this since johnny/rogue's vendetta against the guy isn't entirely clear beyond the smokescreen of "he killed johnny and he sucks". i have done 0 research into this though i'm tired of typing okay

i obviously cannot be certain i have found everything related to this in the game as i’m not even done with this playthrough where i’m trying to pay attention, but i hope this is fun for someone else to dig into. 

enjoy, fellow silverhand freaks

EDIT: additional findings

ALRIGHT I HAVE DONE MORE DIGGING AND I AM BACK WITH MORE NOMAD/JOHNNY FINDINGS. these ones are kind of a bummer but VERY interesting.

there’s a shard called “excerpts from a history of the nomads by bb pires” that goes into detail about how nomads came to be

there’s an interesting quote in it: It's hard to imagine a group less inclined to wandering than farmers, but in fact they were the ones who sparked the age of nomads. Natural catastrophes, crops ravaged by bioplagues, armed conflicts and martial law allowing corporations to speculate and privatize land - all this forced them into a life on the road.

when you ask johnny why he wants to take down arasaka, he begins by referencing this himself!!

it’s a little awkward to imagine a nomad V doesn’t also know what he’s referencing, but hey, V is the fool because we are as players and that’s only one life path... so sure.

johnny also has unique dialogue during this scene about a nomad origin V, telling them that he’s been trying to understand how V thinks, and came to the conclusion that “their family was a crutch” and essentially made them stupid because they always had a safety net (lmao johnny calling v privileged basically)

BUT this also may reference why johnny would find it confusing as hell that V doesn’t immediately share the views he does when nomads, in terms of values, seem to be more aligned with johnny than V is. but once again V is the fool for a reason and this is all my own speculation so YOU KNOW.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, at the end of chippin’ in, when you ask johnny what he meant by letting down his friends... santiago is named directly

i thought this was interesting since the only glimpse of their relationship that we get is seeing johnny meeting santiago via the alt flashback for the first time.

so now it’s obvious that while johnny and rogue were with the nomads their friendship developed, and johnny went on to disappoint santiago in some way by being his normal dickhead self

but HOW? how did he disappoint santiago? is santiago even still alive?? did smasher kill santiago and is this why rogue mentions during chippin’ in that she wants smasher to “settle a score” moreso than avenge johnny??

the only additional hints i have are from this shard, which you can find at the aldecaldos camp: “nomads at ground zero”

i’m just gonna transcribe here and bold for emphasis:

It was no secret that Night Corp offered generous pay and, in some cases, free cyberware and biomonitor upgrades to anyone willing to help clean up the crater of radioactive rubble at AHQ ground zero. Some firsthand accounts recall the incessant ticking of Geiger counters, like the loud buzz of cicadas in summer. In retrospect, we can only guess how many "crater cleaners" lost their lives to radiation sickness shortly thereafter. Both the city government and Night Corp have claimed casualties were kept to a minimum, while providing no official statistics to substantiate the claim. That being said, they have never been under pressure to release such figures. After all, most rescue, engineering, and rubble cleanup teams were not local Night Citizens, but nomads. Surprised you didn't know? Don't be. It is a fact many history courses tend to overlook. The city employed hundreds of nomad mercenaries, primarily from clans in Aldecaldo nation. These nomads were hungry for gainful work and the city needed experts who were not only experienced but brave enough to knowingly put their lives on the line - all so Arasaka could one day erect another tower in its place. But history is not without its sense of irony. These nomads, who so deliberately live outside our so-called "system," came to its very rescue. Not for the first time. And not for the last.

a main theme we find in this game is the idea that the system of corps and exploitation cannot be stopped by grandiose rebellious gestures--no amount of samurai songs, assassinating mayors, or even planting nukes in towers will change things. yet johnny, his friends and mercs at atlantis in the 2020s, including rogue, chose to rebel any way they could, thinking it better than not. johnny criticizes her lack of rebellious spirit CONSTANTLY in 2077.

but ultimately, johnny, trapped in mikoshi, didn’t get to see the outcome of what detonating the AHQ nukes did to night city’s fragile ecosystem. rogue, however, did--and likely watched their former allies, the aldecaldos, be forced to take dangerous work at AHQ’s ground zero (from lack of other opportunities as detailed in this shard), then die from radiation sickness throughout the following decades, all as a result of what she and johnny did to try and fight the system. and she also watched all the former mercenaries of atlantis be hunted down by arasaka.

so rogue sees firsthand what the cost of rebellion is and johnny doesn’t. and nomads, considered the most free of any of the factions we encounter in the game, are the cost.

[novastarlyght]

That Time I Named an Invader Zim Background Character and Everyone Thought it was Canon: The Story of Ixane

Like a lot of others it seems, the premiere of Enter the Florpus has recently made me think back to my first stay in the Invader Zim fandom many years ago. For me it was between 2006 and 2007, and I was 14-15 at the time. IZ was and still is a very special cartoon to me, not only for how it influenced me creatively but also the fact being a part of its fandom was my first really positive experience in a fan community. And I wanna talk about that experience because it... lead to something very interesting. Something that only could’ve happened in the now bygone days of the early internet where reliable sources were harder to find and misinformation was much more common, but somehow, has lasted until today. 

This is how Ixane, a silent extra that appears only in the episode “Backseat Drivers from Beyond the Stars,” got her name.

So first off, you might be wondering “Who the heck is Ixane?” As I mentioned, she only appears as a background character in the 21st episode of the original series, titled “Backseat Drivers from Beyond the Stars” which I’ll abbreviate for the rest of this post as just Backseat Drivers. She’s a member of The Resisty, a resistance group against the Irken Empire who also only appear in that episode, although they were planned to become more significant recurring characters later down the line before the show was cancelled.

In 2006 I LOVED the Resisty. They were my favorite group of characters in the entire show, probably because I was fascinated by all their potential which sadly didn’t get the chance to be explored before IZ was canceled. What planets did each of them come from? What are each of their individual species like? How did they form into a single resistance group? What were their names, their personalities? Their hopes, dreams and fears?! THEIR FAVORITE DRINKS?!?! I attempted to provide my own answers to some of these not-so-burning-to-anyone-but-myself (or so I thought at the time...) questions by writing a fanfic called “Resisting Authority,” which I published on Fanfiction.net and later DeviantArt. It’s since been taken down on FFN while the DA version is currently in private storage on my old account, so here’s a screenshot just to prove it existed:

(click here for larger image)

Despite being more adult in tone than the show it was based on and rather melodramatic (then again, I was 14, and probably so was everyone else reading it), “Resisting Authority” became really, REALLY popular... at least for a fic that didn’t feature any of the show’s main characters, given it was entirely about the Resisty and told mostly from the perspective of its leader, Captain Lard Nar. Regardless it got a large amount of positive feedback and significant fan art on DeviantArt, most of which is no longer online although there’s still a little bit hanging around - mainly featuring Lyn, an Irken OC from the story who chooses to rebel against the empire and falls in love with Lard Nar, leading to a star crossed lovers conflict.

Because the purpose of the fic was to further explore the Resisty along with the idea of “What if an Irken betrayed their own?” several characters that appeared onscreen for only a couple of seconds in Backseat Drivers were fleshed out considerably in “Resisting Authority,” where they were given names, species names, home planet names, backstories, motivations and personalities. And of these the one who received by far the most development was a feminine, blue-eyed alien in a hooded purple cloak who I decided to name “Ixane.”

Ixane would become one of the most important characters in “Resisting Authority” right behind Lard Nar and Lyn. She is a Xanan from the planet Xana, a race of spiritual mystics. She is initially distrustful of Lyn, despite her actions and claims to be as much of a rebel as the rest of them, due to her hatred for the Irken Empire and how they destroyed her home. She believes Irkens are more like machines than living creatures, their bodies merely being empty shells to carry their PAKs around, making them incapable of genuine emotion. When she discovers Lyn and Lard Nar have been in a secret romantic relationship, she becomes even more hateful towards Lyn both due to jealousy, since she’d been harboring feelings for Lard Nar herself, and her genuine belief that Lyn’s feelings aren’t real, something that will only hurt Lard Nar in the end.

However throughout the course of the story her views are challenged and eventually Lyn manages to prove her wrong by displaying what she can’t deny is anything but legitimate love for Lard Nar and compassion for her allies in the Resisty. Unfortunately Lyn is fatally injured during a battle with a number of Irken soldiers sent to hunt down the rebellion. Now wanting nothing more than happiness for the person she loves, Ixane uses her mystical powers to save Lyn’s life while sacrificing her own in the process.

This character development (both in the meta sense and in the context of the fic itself) plus her selfless heroic sacrifice is what I think made Ixane one of the fic’s breakout characters and caused her to stick in the minds of those who read “Resisting Authority.” They were no longer thinking of her as just some extra, but as this fully developed character complete with an arc that I’d made her into - as the character of Ixane. But it didn’t occur to me just how big of an impact this may have truly had until about 9 years later.

In 2015, the official Invader Zim comic series by Oni Press began publication and I found myself extremely hyped about IZ again for the first time in almost a decade. It was during this time I came across a particular IZ wiki article and section of its TV Tropes page...

(Sources are here and here)

And I thought to myself “Wait... I thought I named her Ixane...?”

Because at this point I seriously couldn’t remember. I hadn’t thought about “Resisting Authority” in years, and with TV Tropes in particular noting that Ixane’s name was given “in the [episode] script” I wondered if I didn’t actually come up with the name. Maybe it was in the script for Backseat Drivers after all so I used it in the fic. Being unable to find said script (the original script as made by the episode’s writers, not a transcript) I couldn’t confirm it, so I mainly shrugged it off and thought more than likely I just had a bad memory. It wouldn’t be on a (still regularly maintained) wiki if it didn’t at least have a high possibility of being canon, right?

Cut to last night, August 2019. Me and all my other friends and fellow nerds who also grew up loving IZ are still buzzing over Enter the Florpus and our childhood/teenage fan content comes up in conversation. I dig up “Resisting Authority” from my old DA storage for perhaps a good laugh and a bit of nostalgia when more of when I first wrote it starts to come back to me. “I know the wikis all say her name was in the script, but I swear I came up with the name Ixane myself,” I thought, wondering if there was any way I could prove it.

Turns out I could. All the proof I needed was in a drawing of the character I posted to DA in January of 2007, which like the fic was still in storage:

(click here for larger image)

“Um...I bet a lot of people who read Resisting Authority got the impression she was an OC. She technically isn't. She is a Resisty character we saw VERY BRIEFLY once or twice in Backseat Drivers and I just elaborated on her for the story. The cloaked girl, yasee. Just look here: [link] “

That link no longer works normally, however putting it into Wayback Machine provides a snapshot taken in September of 2006, which would be around the time “Resisting Authority” was first published on FFN. Scrolling down on that page gives us...

(click here for larger image)

Additionally, opening the image itself reveals the filename “resistycloak.jpg” rather than something like “ixane.jpg” or “resistyixane.jpg”

For those who weren’t in the fandom back then, The Scary Monkey Show was a very well known IZ fansite and its Encyclopedias section was basically a resource for the show’s lore, one considered highly reliable, before things like fan wikis became commonplace. I actually used this site as a reference for the different types of Irken ships and other planets in the IZ universe brought up in the fanfic and so did many other fic writers at the time. If any site on the internet would know a minor or even background IZ character’s name, if it really was in the official episode script, it’d be The Scary Monkey Show. Yet her name is listed as unknown.

So why am I telling you this?

Because as wild as this whole situation is, I’m not a person who likes misinformation. I feel like IZ fans, both young and old, should know Ixane is not actually this character’s canon name as given to her by the writers of the show. That being said...

I see no reason to stop calling her Ixane. That’s just her name now.

Heck, it’d probably be difficult to go back to thinking of her as having no name given how long the name has been used on all these wiki pages and whatnot. And I’m completely fine with receiving absolutely zero credit for actually being the one who came up with the name in the first place, because here’s the thing...

I may have made the name, but it was the fandom that spread it. The IZ community, primarily in my absence too, were the ones who codified, legitimized it. Who added it to those wikis and accepted it as canon all these years. Who believed in it enough to assume it came from the official episode script, from the IZ crew themselves!

Ixane isn’t my name for her. It’s our name for her, as the fans who made Invader Zim the cult classic it is today.

And I want that to be something we all can have and be proud of ❤︎

[theshinobiway]

The whole Lee being bald thing was just a mean hoax. It was never verified by any legit sources, just a bogus reddit post. There’s been plenty of those.

PSA: Rock Lee isn’t balding! I repeat, Rock Lee IS NOT BALDING! Here’s the Proof!

I knew that not watching Boruto would catch up with me eventually, so here’s me amending my previous statement: There’s no official confirmation that Rock Lee is actually balding in Boruto. 

And BOY did I do a deep dive of the internet for this. Saddle up kids, I’m about to throw on my amateur detective hat and take you for a wild ride through the internet to end this rumor once and for all.

Warning: Long, picture-heavy post where I cross-examine multiple sources.

Part I: The situation!

Here’s a compilation of the screencaps from Boruto episode 58 that sparked a thousand rumors.

Looking at the top-left screencap, we can see a strange rendition of Lee’s hairline. Following this introduction, Boruto and Yurui begin their match. When Yurui unleashes his unnamed Bubblegum-Pop jutsu, Boruto is thrown back. Rock Lee then grabs his hair due to the heavy winds that emanate from the burst. Putting the two together, it looks vaguely like Rock Lee has a strange hairline that accompanies him frantically grabbing his own hair.

Part II: The “Sources”

Okay, I spent probably close to 4-5 hours scouring through different links and articles. Here’s a breakdown of the internet’s say on the matter:

The first major source is from a website called “Comicbook.com” It’s the website that was linked in multiple other copycat articles, blog posts, and forums, and was the first result for any Google search of “Rock Lee balding” (or variations thereof)

Okay, this isn’t so bad. I see that there are sources linked, so I should be able to logically follow the trail back to either an interview or the name of the “book” in question. First, let’s look at where these so-called linked ‘sources’ lead. 

In any part of journalism, linking your sources is the most important step to ensure your audience that you cross-referenced with legitimate sourc-

aaaand YOU HAVE FAILED Journalism 101. 

Hm. despite the fact that this is a Reddit post and not an actual link to ANY book whatsoever, the link’s dead. Deleted. Frankly, this whole search was an endless loop of dead ends, but I was deadset on getting to the bottom of this.

So thus far, I’ve got one lead that wasn’t solved: there’s a rumored “Book” out there somewhere, and it was referenced at “some point.” My first guess would have been a databook, but I’ve read those. Perhaps the one I read had a translation error?

Scrolling through the comments of this Reddit post, I came across this:

Important context clues here: It’s not stated in a Databook. That means Naruto’s Jin no Sho, the Fourth official databook, is NOT the source of the rumor. Also, I was able to find a scanlation of Rock Lee’s page for the very same book here:

Rock Lee’s balding also certainly wouldn’t mentioned in any of the previous databooks where Rock Lee was, y’know, a teenager. All four official databooks are off the table.

Secondly, the link posted by user “Hydrobolt” leads to a twitter post with the following:

No sources, no reference to a book, nothing. Except for a few screenshots of Boruto Episode 58. I’ll discuss these shots later, but this appeared to be yet ANOTHER dead end. (Also, this twitter thread has ZERO links or sources!)

I can see why the post was deleted by the mods, but this was troubling: Did this whole rumor start from ONE twitter post from a shipper (that had single-digit likes/reblogs?) 

I didn’t think so. Even if this random tweet was picked up by a semi-popular media outlet, I still needed to answer the following questions:

What was the “book” that supposedly had Kishimoto’s confirmation? Did it exist, or was it a bluff?

Where could I find a scanlated (and hopefully English, though my husband speaks Japanese) version of the Rock Lee page?

Part III: The Search for the Non-Databook “Book”

Even if it wasn’t in a databook, there are multiple interviews and exo-textual sources that can be used to glean information about the characters. I knew I wasn’t looking for an interview–in part because the key was “book,” and also because Kishi has only given a set amount of serious interviews in the past, and most of those are available in translation. Thus, there might have been a storyboard, book, or some other source that was exclusively released that might hold this information.

The most promising lead was from a site called narutoforums.org

The original post:

Okay, first, there’s no actual link on “here”. That’s a major red flag, especially given that the post is currently only a year old (posted 7.27.18) 

And it’s yet another dead end.

…Sigh.

But wait!

User “Platypus” mentions that the source was a ‘movie booklet that’s been out for three years.’ That’s a lead!

A movie booklet, huh? Here we go: Sometimes, highly-anticipated animated movies are released in Japan with exclusive manga chapters or other easter eggs, as well as other goodies.

So, let’s talk about this unnamed “Movie booklet” – Three years prior to 2018 would have marked the release of the Baruto movie in 2015. That means the booklet would have been this one: Zai no Sho

This was the most difficult piece to dig up information on. The booklet in question was only released in Japan and during the original premiere of the movie in 2015. I couldn’t initially find scalations, so I did the next best thing: Looking for a table of contents. Good ‘ol Naruto wiki was here to save the day.

Boom. It even has page numbers!

Now, I had a supposed book source and even the page numbers. All that was left to find a translation. After some deep digging, I found one—right here on Tumblr via user Emotionalrockfish.

This was the moment of truth! I opened the link for Rock Lee’s page and carefully read over the description…

Rock Lee

Tireless effort and ambition! With his hot-blooded passion, he guides a genin!!The leaf village’s pride, an expert of taijutsu. He possesses absolutely no skill for ninjutsu, but refines his taijutsu by exceeding the limits of effort with the gutsiness he inherited from his master, and does nothing but aim high. He and his son, Metal*, absolutely can’t miss their daily training!

*Metal Lee is shortened to just Metal here, so no, he’s not called Lee like his father.

(*Pterodactyl screeching*)

AND THERE IT IS: After a whole trail of vague suggestions and dead links, I‘d finally come to the final source material. And there’s nothing! Nothing there that even remotely mentions Lee’s baldness!

N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

Conclusion: RUMOR UNSUBSTANTIATED

Part IV: So where did this rumor all start? And what’s with “that” scene?

The Situation Unfolds: The whole situation is from Boruto, Episode 58: The Tournament Begins! The wind in this scene is shown to originate from Yurui’s jutsu.

The bubblegum pop emits a wind blast, throwing Boruto back. The very same blast tussles Lee’s hair.

It’s an obvious gag, but not about Lee: it’s meant to convey the sheer strength that emits from Yurui’s bubbles popping. This is a common trope in anime: Character emits a powerful attack, the audience sees/feels the “force” from the fallout wind. 

The audience now knows that there are some stakes to Yurui unleashing his gum-based jutsu, because the force of the blast not only throws Boruto back, but can also reach a good distance away to where the proctor, Rock Lee, was standing. 

Further Explanation: It’s also fairly obvious that Boruto (and Ikemoto’s style) deviate from Kishimoto’s, so we should expect some variation in character appearances outside of the expected “age-up” factor.

Here are some original renditions of Lee with his hair (flying) up and his younger self’s hairline:

In Part I, we see that Lee’s hair falls into a widow’s peak. Then, in concept art for the Naruto: The Last, we see a far less defined peak—in fact, the hairline is decidedly square-shaped.

Then, finally, in the Boruto animation, Lee’s hair is almost circular (but also shown from an extremely tilted perspective.)

So we see a distinct transition in the actual SHAPE of Lee’s hairline in conjunction with the evolution of SP/Kishi/Ikemoto’s style. A story written over at least 17 years and spanning over three different series has a change in style? More likely than you think.

Conclusion: It’s a change in the animation style and a throwaway gag aimed at emphasizing the fallout wind from Yurui’s jutsu. Nothing more.

I rest my case, Pumpkin OUT!

[lexyeevee]

Correcting the record

Some people are saying some things again, and I don't really have a masterpost of why those things are off the mark, so here is one. I guess I'll update this if anything else spicy crosses my radar, for ease of linking.

(That doesn't mean to send me new things; I don't need to be kept constantly up to date on the latest hot takes from Breitbart Jr.)

I know this is long, which means most people won't bother to read it. But hey, that means it must be true, right? That's how it works for callouts, so surely it works the same way here.

Foreword

KiwiFarms is a forum that grew out of a wiki dedicated to the sustained stalking and harassment of an autistic trans woman. Their biggest subforum is called "lolcows", referring to the idea that certain people are valued only for the forum's ability to squeeze mockery out of them.

This is the source of much of the scandalous "truth" about glip and myself.

They don't lie, not exactly. Instead, they find a single tweet or sentence somewhere, then concoct a story that fills in the details. That way, they can present the original source as "proof". A casual reader will notice that the source matches their story, and take the story as true. The source doesn't prove the story, but that's a subtle distinction.

Sometimes they'll even claim that the source says something slightly different than it actually does, and still most people won't notice. Maybe the order of sentences gets reversed. Maybe "this will happen" is spun into "I want this to happen". Close enough.

Once they have one reason we're horrible, they can take for granted that we're horrible, which justifies interpreting the next snippet as proving that we're horrible. The more horrible we appear to be, the easier it is to justify digging ever deeper.

They collect mountains of these stories, which makes it very difficult to push back. No matter how many individual tales we respond to, there will always be more. It's actually a well-known poor debating tactic, but it works.

A huge post about how awful someone is looks like a documentary, even though it's carefully constructed to only "report" on things to make the subject look bad. Things we've disproven or apologized for years ago still show up in callouts. Just a few days ago, I saw someone link a post that didn't even exist any more; it had been replaced by an apology. Neither the person who linked it nor the person they linked it to seemed to notice this.

Juicy gossip spreads very quickly, both among people who love gossip and people who genuinely want to do the right thing. Retractions and corrections are boring; nobody spreads those. Besides, if you spread something awful about someone, and it turns out to be false, what does that say about you? Once you've spread gossip, if you want to save face, it's in your best interest to insist the gossip is true — whether it really is or not.

Other people are discouraged from pushing back on our behalf, since that risks attracting the same scrutiny. Besides, if you try to say someone isn't abusive, you may get called an abuse apologist. That makes no sense at all, but it doesn't matter.

And there's no downside to doing any of this. If something false spreads to thousands of people, who's accountable for it? Nobody. You can outright make things up about people and nothing bad will happen to you — but if it's just a misunderstanding, all the better.

Keep all that in mind as you read this.

glip did not refer to autistic people as emotionless robots

Let's start out with a particularly great example of callouts in action. The log screenshot used as "proof" that glip said this about autistic people actually proves it false, because the conversation was:

pk: know what also pk: the section on sociopaths was creepy pk: they’re like emotionless robots

glip/eevee didn't really self-diagnose as autistic

It's weird to be accused both of thinking we're autistic and of insulting autistic people.

But no, not really? We've both observed that lists of symptoms are conspicuously familiar. We don't make any effort to call ourselves autistic, we don't claim to know anything about autism, and our lives haven't changed as a result of this observation.

I don't really get why people care about self-diagnosis anyway. I "self-diagnosed" with ADD before going to a psych who then regular-diagnosed me with ADD and gave me magic brain pills for it.

eevee did not put glip's boobs online

Another good example, though I don't think this ever spread beyond the confines of the forum thread.

I have a public filedump, full of files. One file is called "bewbs.jpg", and unsurprisingly is a photo of some boobs. Someone assumed the photo was of glip's boobs, and so it became truth.

Surprise! It's not. I don't know who's in the photo. It's some image I found online, probably over a decade ago. I don't have the slightest idea why I uploaded it. You can even check out the metadata and see that it was saved from Photoshop 4, which I've never used. Also, Photoshop 5 came out in 1998, when glip was 8, so... prooobably not them.

our cats poop a lot i guess

No, seriously, I've heard this complaint. Our cats do poop a lot, but I'm not really sure what it's supposed to say about us, or what we're supposed to do about it. Corks?

glip is not abusive

The "abusive" label is usually ascribed to a massive callout post by PengoSolvent, but he never said that. He did say "potentially abusive", but left the conclusion up in the air. The difference seems significant.

Oh, and he later recanted, and he's now on good terms with glip. Turns out it was all a series of misunderstandings.

Also, I've been dating glip for nearly a decade now and I'm pretty happy with them, but for some reason, nobody seems to think that counts for anything.

fieldoftheother's level 100 post is bad

Previously.

glip is not trying to get kids to see their porn

I've seen a couple people cite this line from the Discord, claiming it means glip wants 13-year-olds to read forflor:

my legacy will be 13 year olds secretly reading forbiddenflora and realizing they're gay and/or trans

But this was said because people were talking about having themselves been young teenagers who secretly looked at porn and realized they were gay or trans. It was a tongue-in-cheek observation: teenagers will look at porn one way or another, and if they read forflor, its themes may very well jostle some realizations.

I've also been told that glip must want everyone who reads the main comic to also read the porn, because they put character development in the porn. But if that were the case, why would they have the sites separate in the first place? How would anyone even know there's porn, just from reading the main site? The only place that even comes close to linking is in a heavily-disclaimered blurb at the bottom of a few character profiles, on the volunteer-edited wiki, which neither of us even knew about until someone told me in response to this very post. This makes no sense as a master scheme.

The truth is much more mundane: glip feels attached to their characters and likes to make comics with character development.

It is true that glip doesn't care if teenagers seek out their porn. I don't care either? We're not your parents, and we have no way of stopping determined horny teens anyway. It's tagged and separated so people who don't want to see it don't have to, but if you're trying to seek out porn then that's your own business. Just, uh, please don't try to talk to us about it, that's super weird.

glip drew a porn comic with an underage character, but...

This is true. They later took the comic down, and they've since talked about how it was a way of wrangling with their own experiences with CSA.

glip is not transphobic

I think people say glip is transphobic because their comic has a girl with a dick who doesn't hate her dick?

Well, er, newsflash: not all trans girls hate their dicks? It seems like this complaint is implying glip should only depict stereotypical self-hating trans characters, and I don't really understand how that's any kind of improvement.

Ironically, I've seen this claimed multiple times by people who refer to glip with the wrong pronoun.

glip's irc does not prey on children

Someone we knew as spaggledagger claimed that people hit strongly on her on our IRC, despite knowing that she was only 13 and had never had any kind of sexual interaction. She also claimed to have gone to the police and asked them some details.

I've been over this before, but the short version is:

She never mentioned she was 13 until the day she left the IRC for good (because of alleged ageism on our part — she'd invited a friend and the two of them were being incredibly disruptive). On the contrary, she made frequent reference to drinking and having had sex, so by all accounts she presented herself as an adult.

The thing she says the police told her is technobabble. It makes no sense at all.

We cannot find any shred of evidence of the conversations she says she had. However, we did find one thing she claimed was said to her — it was in public, and wasn't directed at her at all.

She mentioned having lied to get an ex-boyfriend in trouble. We also got a message from the moderator of another small community who'd interacted with her before, warning us that she tried to get back at them for banning her by claiming elsewhere that she'd been abused.

She claimed to be paranoid because we mentioned living near her, but she told us where she lived, after someone else in the channel mentioned living in the same area. We've never lived anywhere near either of them.

So this was someone with (by her own admission!) a history of lying to screw over older people, who never told us her age, who supposedly got incomprehensible advice from police, and whose few concrete details were completely wrong.

This particular claim appears to be a total fabrication. To get back at us for not wanting her friend around, I guess?

eevee does not support legalizing child porn

I once read an article that argued for it, and I said "I'm not sure I disagree" — referring to the argument, which was that outlawing a photo of one particular kind of crime was inconsistent. I'm bothered by inconsistency, but obviously it wasn't right to just legalize child porn, therefore the argument must be wrong. So I thought about it out loud.

That's why I also asked someone why a photo of a particular type of crime should be illegal. It wasn't rhetorical; I genuinely wanted to know what the other person thought about the inconsistency.

I wasn't especially clear about this at the time, and it didn't occur to me that my lazy phrasing could be taken as active support for abolishing the law. It was also pretty insensitive to treat a serious topic like debate club — especially one that almost certainly had impacted some of my audience. I know I upset a couple people, and I'm sorry for that.

The tweets have since been dug up and transformed via a game of telephone to "supports legalizing child porn", "has talked extensively about legalizing child porn", and straight up "is a pedophile". Sorry, no. I just like nitpicking, and I made a very poor choice of thing to nitpick.

I've also tweeted about this before.

eevee is not trying to help kids to look at porn

In a FurAffinity journal from 2009, I played armchair lawyer over FA's handling of minors and their access to porn. FA had (and, I assume, still has?) a policy that if an admin finds out a user is underage, their account will be prevented from seeing porn — "agelocked" — until they turn 18. This was usually said to be for legal reasons. I was saying there weren't any legal reasons.

The claim is thus that I wanted teenagers to look at porn for some kind of nefarious reasons. I don't know what those reasons could be? I didn't even draw porn at the time, so it's not like I was trying to lure anybody in or whatever. My actual motives were much more mundane:

I like nitpicking. See above.

I'd seen a few cases where people had done some very invasive snooping to find someone's age. I thought that kind of near-stalking — especially targeted at someone already suspected to be underage — was pretty creepy, and I saw the policy as encouraging it.

glip had been drawing porn since they were 16, mostly in the form of commissions, and at one point had been agelocked. They were 19 when I made the post, so it was still relatively fresh in my mind, and I was annoyed that the policy had landed squarely on glip's main source of income.

(That said, FA is a rickety thing, and I don't think they'd ever tried to agelock a porn artist before. I believe the result was that glip could still post porn, but then not see their own work. I don't know if that was ever fixed.)

eevee did not let her cat die rather than give him medicine

I heard this one second-hand so I don't know exactly what's being said, but regardless I am fucking livid about it. It boils down to a sentence from my old tumblr:

given that atenolol’s most common side effect is lethargy and styx already spends most of his time asleep i don’t think i’m going to do this

My cat, Styx, started rapidly losing weight around the beginning of April. I spent the next month and several thousand dollars being shuttled between vets, trying to find a cause. At one point I was sent to a cardiologist, who — shockingly — diagnosed him with a heart condition.

He was prescribed atenolol, a beta blocker and the usual treatment for the heart condition. I was hesitant to give it to him, since also on the table was FIP — a disease with no cure and a life expectancy measured in days. Beta blockers can cause lethargy, Styx was already sleeping most of the time, and I didn't want to cost him his last few waking hours for no reason.

I decided to wait a few days for the vet's formal diagnosis. What I got was the post linked above, saying the most likely cause was FIP; the heart condition wasn't even on the list. So, yes, I decided against the vet's recommendation, and did not give him the medication for the condition he probably didn't have that wouldn't have affected him until years later anyway. There was never any indication that the atenolol would've helped his FIP in any way; I interpreted the vet's advice as being just in case he had the heart condition instead.

A week later, the vet finally started talking about looking into experimental treatments for FIP — a full ten days after the first mention of a disease that can kill cats in as much time.

Four days after that, we buried the cat I loved. He'd just been sitting in pools of his own diarrhea — the same thing that had ultimately led a vet to recommend we put down our elderly cat.

That month was by far the worst thing I've ever been through. I did everything I could think to do, burned through cash, spent every waking moment with him, and it wasn't enough. I still can't reread his eulogy; it's the only thing that makes me cry.

Extremely cool that some jerks who are desperate for a reason to hate me are now trying to use my dead cat against me.

eevee/glip are not... usually... mean online

It's not uncommon to see people calling us super mean based on a tweet thread that they've carefully cropped to remove the part where the other person was being an asshole. Maybe check for that first.

We get enough assholery that we have fairly low bars for who qualifies as an asshole, too, so there might be false positives. If that's you, ah, sorry. We try our best!

But also, it's common for someone to be a dick while feigning politeness, and we tend to have little patience for that, whereas other people have seemingly infinite patience for it. If you see us snapping for seemingly no reason, we probably got a very different read off of someone.

Final thoughts

I'm sure there's more, but hopefully this is enough that you're starting to suspect a pattern. Most of what we're called out for is wildly misinterpreted or misreported just enough to be damning.

These are people who misgender us and use glip's old name, then call us transphobic in the same breath. They follow our every public move with bated breath, while being largely anonymous or sockpuppets themselves. They show up as one of the top referrers every time I publish a game on itch. They've dug up a comment I made on a friend's LiveJournal from 2004 and implied nefarious explanations. They archived the entire "styx" tag on my old Tumblr, meaning they read everything I went through and their only takeaway was some new "dirt". They've taken the worst things that have ever happened to both glip and I, and used them as blunt weapons to say we're awful. They put this crap in the Tumblr floraverse tag, inflicting it on people who just want to share fanart. They hide in our IRC and our Discord, waiting for new logs they can post and reinterpret. Only completely locked-down spaces are safe from their obsessive eyes, and they openly speculate about what happens behind closed doors as well.

Does this sound like a reasonable way to behave? If a single person acted this way towards someone else, anyone would be rightly horrified — this is straight up stalking. But people reblog their callouts and never question their tactics. I guess stalking is okay if we "deserve" it, and we deserve it because we're awful, and you know we're awful thanks to the stalking.

Here's my question: if they know all their existing stuff is true, why do they keep looking? Ostensibly they believe that we're both proven to be complete monsters, so what else are they hoping to find? Do you think I accidentally tweeted a confession to a murder? Does my old MySpace contain the plans for an orbital superlaser?

Or look at it this way: who have we hurt in the however many years this has been going on? Where are all the actual victims of our cruelty? Who has been protected by this muckraking, and from what?

They have no interest in what's true, only in what's titillating. It's right there in the name of the forum: "lolcows", not "investigative journalism".

And, hey. If you want to hate us for actual reasons, please go ahead. I'm thoughtless and insensitive at times, and I'm bad at maintaining friendships. glip is short with anyone who appears to be acting in bad faith. We both fuck up sometimes. If any of that has put you off, fine. If you think we're insufficiently horrified by the idea of a 17-year-old somewhere sneakily looking at a drawing of a boob, sure, hate us for that too.

But don't make stuff up to fulfill your power fantasy of defending the world from a cartoon villain. Yeah, you — I'm sure a bunch of Kiwi folks are eating up every word of this post simply because I've written it. Hot tip: the first thing to enter your brain is not automatically the truth. How cruel are you being if you're wrong?