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tyrantisterror · 4 years ago

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I did a four part series of trivia posts when ATOM Volume 1: Tyrantis Walks Among Us! came out, and that was pretty fun! You can see that set of trivia posts here if you’d like. I thought it’d be fun to do another now that ATOM Volume 2: Tyrantis Roams the Earth! is out - just one this time, because a lot of the trivia I talked about with Volume 1 still applies.

I’m gonna divide this into two sections: non-spoiler trivia, for things that really don’t give a lot of plot points away, and spoiler trivia, for things that DO give away major plot points. I recommend not reading the spoiler trivia until after you’ve read Tyrantis Roams the Earth!, for obvious reasons, and will put the spoiler trivia under a cut.

Ok, let’s go!

- So if you read ATOM Volume 1, you probably noticed that the book is split not only into chapters, but “episodes,” which consist of four chapters a piece. It’s kind of a nod to how the series owes a great deal of its DNA to various monster of the week shows, with Godzilla: the Series and The Godzilla Power Hour being obvious influences. It also allowed me to pepper in some illustrations and cheesy b-movie style titles into each volume.

- The first “episode” of Volume 2, Tyrantis in Tokyo, pays explicit homage to the giant monster movies of Japan, perhaps even moreso than the chapters that came before it. Given how much Japanese media influenced ATOM - from tokusatsu like the Godzilla, Gamera, and Ultraman franchises to anime like Digimon and Evangelion (hell, the title of this episode itself is a tip of the hat to Tenchi Muyo by way of one of its spinoffs) - it kind of felt obligatory that Tyrantis visit Japan and pay his respects.

- Tyrantis in Tokyo also fits in a tribute to another staple of Atomic Age pop culture: Rock and Roll.

- Kutulusca, the giant cephalopod that appears in Tyrantis in Tokyo, is one of the oldest kaiju in this series, dating back to the first iteration of Tyrantis’s story that I put to paper back in 2001 or so. It’s changed a lot since then, but its fight with Tyrantis goes more or less the way it originally did.

- Old Meg, the giant placoderm/shark, and Nastadyne, the bipedal beetle, both owe their existence directly to Deviantart’s Godzilla fandom. Old Meg originated as a dunkleosteus monster I submitted to a “create a Godzilla kaiju” contest held by Matt Frank, while Nastadyne is based on a Megalon redesign I made during the “redesign all the Godzilla kaiju” phase of DA’s kaiju fandom.

- The second episode, Tyrantis vs. the Red Menace, gets dark as we visit the USSR, which had enough REAL horror with atomic power in its history to make creature features seem a bit defanged by comparison. It’s probably the episode with the strongest horror elements - ATOM’s always been influenced by Resident Evil, and this is probably where that influence shows the most strongly.

- It also features the first fully robotic mecha in the series, the mighty Herakoschei! Its name is a combination of “Heracles” and “Koschei the Deathless,” with the former part being added by its Russian creators to make it seem a bit more international as they offer it to the U.N. in hopes of gaining aid for a very extreme kaiju problem they’ve developed.

- Most of Tyrantis vs. the Red Menace takes place in the Siberian Monster Zone. Its name is a reference to the Lawless Monster Zone in Ultraman, which is such a cool fucking name I wish that I wish I could go back in time and steal it.

- The next episode, Tyrantis’s Revenge, is... full of spoilers, so we’ll move on for now.

- The penultimate episode, Tyrantis vs. the Martian Monsters, is a love letter to MANY different sci-fi stories that involve life on Mars, though the most prominent of them is of course The War of The Worlds (one of my top 3 favorite books) and its various adaptations. From its tentacles sapient martians, the tripodal leader of the titular monsters whose name includes the word “ulla” which is uttered by said sapient martians, the plant monster made of red vines, the cylinder-shaped spacecraft the Martian monsters are sent to earth on, the copper-skinned stingray-esque flying martian who shoots lasers from its tail, and the fact that every chapter title in this episode is a quote from the book, the H.G. Wells influence is STRONG.

- The final episode, Invasion from Beyond!, is shamelessly inspired by Destroy All Monsters, although there’s a dash of “To Serve Men,” Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, and The Day the Earth Stood Still mixed in as well. It’s also sort of a tribute to my first “published” bit of a kaiju fiction - a rewrite of Destroy All Monsters that included EVERY Godzilla monster that had appeared at the time, which my middle school self wrote back in 2002 or so for Kaiju Headquarters, a kaiju fansite I’m not sure exists anymore. Invasion from Beyond! is just as ambitious (but hopefully better executed) as my DAM Remake, with dozens upon dozens of different kaiju duking it out, earthlings vs. aliens.

- There were three different documents I made to outline the final battle of Invasion from Beyond! It’s the largest episode of the series so far and more than half of it is that fucking fight. My inner child is pleased, though, so hopefully you will be too.

Ok, that’s all I can share without spoilers. READER BEWARE WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW THE CUT!

JUST MAKING SURE you know that SPOILERS will follow from here on out. Read at your own peril! YOU WERE WARNED!

(I’m gonna start with lighter ones just in case you scrolled too far and want to turn back)

- There’s a number of explicit Spielberg homages in ATOM Volume 2, from a “we need a bigger boat” joke during a chase with a giant shark to the fact that Invasion from Beyond! opens with a group of people flying to an island of monsters to review whether or not it should get more funding.

- When Tyrantis appears in the first chapter, I snuck in modified lyrics of The Godzilla Power Hour’s theme song. “Up from the depths”... “several stories high”... “breathing fire”... “its head in the sky”... Tyrantis! Tyrantis! Tyrantis!

- The two rock bands in Tyrantis in Tokyo have real life inspirations ala Gwen Valentine, albeit a bit more muddled than hers. The Cashews are inspired by The Peanuts (see what I did there), while The Thunder Lizards are a mix of The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper. I wanted The Thunder Lizards to be more akin to the myth of a famous rock and roll band than the reality - less the real Beatles and more the Yellow Submarine cartoon version of them.

- The song The Thunder Lizards write for Tyrantis was written to fit the tune of “The Godzilla March” from Godzilla vs. Gigan, though ideally if someone made an actual song of it it would be its own song. I got the idea from Over the Garden Wall, which used the Christmas song “O Holy Night” as a a starting point for “Come Wayward Souls.”

- Perry Martin, UNNO reporter and peer of Henry Robertson, is a nod to Raymond Burr, with his name being a combination of two of Burr’s most famous roles: Perry Mason, and Steve Martin from Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956).

- Dr. Rinko Tsuburaya is a few homages in one. Her name comes from Rinko Kikuchi (who played Mako Mori in Pacific Rim), while her last name is obviously in homage of Eiji Tsuburaya. Her being the daughter of an esteemed scientist is inspired by Emiko Yamane from the original Gojira.

- Nastadyne’s Burning Justice mode is named after a similar super mode from various Transformers cartoons, though it’s more directly inspired by the Shining/Burning Finger super move from G Gundam.

- Martians sending kaiju to different planets via shooting them out of cannons (with or without cylinder spaceships around them) is another War of the Worlds shoutout. So is martians living on Venus after their homeworld was made uninhabitable, actually.

- Kurokame’s vocalizations are described as wails in explicit homage to Gamera. His name can be translated as either “black tortoise” (a reference to the mythical guardian beast Genbu, which can also be construed as a Gamera reference thanks to Gamera: Advent of Irys implying Gamera and Genbu are one and the same) or a portmanteau of the Japanese words for crocodile and turtle - “crocturtle.”

- Burodon’s name is just a mangling of “burrow down.” It also sounds vaguely like Baragon, who Burodon is loosely inspired by. AND, since Burodon is sort of a knockoff/modified Baragon, that kinda makes him a reference to various monsters in Ultraman!

- The final battle of Tyrantis in Tokyo is sort of a hybrid of the finales of Ghidorah the 3 Headed Monster and Destroy All Monsters.

- The Japanese kaiju teaching Tyrantis the art of throwing rocks at your enemies is both a joke on the prominence of rock throwing in Japanese kaiju fights AND the tired trope of an American hero learning secret martial arts from a Japanese mentor ala Batman, Iron Fist, etc. In this case, the secret martial art is throwing rocks at people.

- When introduced to Herakoschei and its pilot, we are told that the strain of piloting this early mecha is so intense that many pilots have died in the process, with the current one passing out on more than few occasions. This is of course a Pacific Rim homage - sadly, no one invents drifting.

- Herakoschei’s design is a loose homage to Robby the Robot and Cherno Alpha, because big boxy robots are cool.

- The Writhing Flesh and ESPECIALLY Pathogen are both hugely influenced by Resident Evil and The Thing. Giant body horror piles of raw flesh, tendrils, mismatched mouths and limbs may be a bit outside the main era of monster design ATOM homages, but they fit the themes and bring a nice contrast.

- I came up with Pathogen long before Corona but MAN it definitely feels different in 2021 to have a giant monster whose name is a synonym for disease driving other creatures crazy in a quarantine zone than it did when I plotted out the story in 2016.

- The chapter title “Hello, Old Foes” is a riff on “Goodbye, Old Friend”

- Minerva, the kaiju-fied clone of Dr. Lerna, is meant to be an homage to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, which is a genuinely good giant monster flick. I am sure many of you will also believe I included her because I’m a pervert whose into tall women, but you’d be wrong! I included the seven foot tall Russian mecha pilot Ludmilla Portnova because I’m a pervert whose into tall women. Minerva’s inclusion was just coincidental, I swear!

- Since Promythigor is a play on the archetypal ape kaiju to contrast Tyrantis as a play on the archetypal fire-breathing reptile kaiju, their fight has a lot of nods to King Kong movies. Promythigor attempts the famous jaw-snap maneuver of Kong (with less success), J.C. Clark paraphrases the “brute force vs. a thinking animal” line from the King Kong vs. Godzilla American cut, and Tyrantis slides down a mountain to knock Promythigor off his feet in a reversal of Kong doing the same in King Kong vs. Godzilla.

- Tyrantis sliding down a mountain on his tail doubles as a Godzilla vs. Megalon homage.

- Though Promythigor is the archetypal Ape and Tyrantis the archetypal Fire-Breathing Reptile, I think it’s fun to note that in some ways, Promythigor is the Godzilla equivalent in their matchup, and Tyrantis the Kong. Promythigor has a slight size advantage, was scarred by humans performing unethical weapons technology, and is associated with violent explosions. Tyrantis is a good-at-heart prehistoric beast who humanized in part by his unlikely friendship with a human woman.

- Of course, in the context of the famous quote from the American cut of King Kong vs. Godzilla, they remain in their archetypal lanes. Promythigor is the more intelligent of the two (though not necessarily wiser), and Tyrantis is in many ways a brute reptile. Their battle is a rebuttal of sorts to the assertion that Kong is the “better” animal because he is closer to human. Promythigor’s near human creativity and emotions don’t make him the kinder/more benevolent monster, but instead fuel a very self-centered and destructive attitude that makes him the far more dangerous threat. On the other hand, Tyrantis, who is less intelligent, limited in communication with others by his reptilian mindset and instincts, and simple in his thoughts and desires, is nonetheless a sweet creature that is easily dealt with when others consider his animal needs and mindset. There’s a quote from Hellboy I love that probably sums up all of my writing thus far: “To be other than human does not mean the same as being less,” and that’s what the matchup between these two in particular tries to illustrate: the “less” human Tyrantis is nonetheless more benign than the “more” human Promythigor.

- Kraydi the psychic lizard began life as a soft sculpture I made of the Canyon Krayt Dragon from The Wildlife of Star Wars. The sculpture didn’t look much like the illustration, but I liked how it came out, and so I made it an original monster named Kraydi (see what I did there). Figuring out an explanation for that name in ATOM’s world was possibly the most difficult kaiju naming task in the series, but it worked out in the end.

- Kraydi and Promythigor having psychic powers is a result of my time on Godzilla fan forums in my middle school years. Most of the forums had OC kaiju battle tournaments, and SO many of those kaiju had a wide array of beam weapons and psychic powers just to win the tournaments by beam-spamming and mind controlling their foes into oblivion. There’s a special kind of rage you get when your original creation is beaten by “Fire Godzilla” because he has a genius level intellect and the power of unstoppable telekinesis. Kraydi began as (and still is I suppose) my attempt to do a psychic kaiju well, while Promythigor’s villainy being tied to psychic powers being forced on him is sort of my passive aggressive commentary on people foisting powers on a monster without any real thematic reason for them.

- Henry Robertson and Dr. Praetorius chewing out the laziness of people giving kaiju completely unaltered names of mythic beasts will probably be seen as a jab at the Monsterverse and/or the numerous writers in the kaiju OC scene who do the same, but it’s ACTUALLY a jab at my past self, who had DOZENS of kaiju whose names were just Greek mythological figures verbatim. There are dozens of kaiju named Hydra, Scylla, Charybdis, Chimera, etc., past me, try to make the names stand out! Oh wait you did. I mean, don’t pat yourself on the back too much, you still went with “Mothmanud” as a canon name and never came up with something better, but, like, good on ya for trying I guess.

- Dr. Praetorius takes his name from the evil mad scientis in Bride of Frankenstein, who basically has all the wicked traits that Universal’s Frankenstein downplayed in their take on Dr. Frankenstein. Ironically, ATOM’s Dr. Praetorius is a bit less evil than his fellow mad scientists in ATOM. I really like how his character turned out, he surprised me.

- Isaac Rossum, the pilot of the USA mecha Atomoton, is named for Isaac Aasimov, whose robot stories are to robot fiction what Lord of the Rings is to high fantasy. His last name is a reference to Rossum’s Universal Robots, which is where the word “robot” came from.

- The unfortunate pilots of MechaTyrantis in ATOM Volumes 1 and 2 are all nods to Jurassic Park. John Ludlow = John Hammond and Peter Ludlow, Ian Grant = Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant, Dennis Dodgson = Dennis Nedry and Lewis Dodgson.

- A good way to pitch Invasion from Beyond! would be “what if the staff and monsters were able to fight back when the Kilaaks tried to take over Monsterland?”

- Ok, here’s a fun joke that no one will get but me because it requires a very specific chain of logic based on some obscure and loosely connected nerd bullshit. There’s a rocker in ATOM’s universe named Sebastian Haff, right? One of his songs, “Darling Let’s Shimmy,” is referenced right before a mothmanud larva emerges from the ground in both ATOM Vol. 1 and 2. Ok, so, in the Bubba Hotep, an aging Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff claims he is actually the real Elvis Presley, having changed places with the real Sebastian Haff as a sort of Prince and the Pauper deal that went wrong. Got that? Ok, so, in UFO folklore, a common joke is the theory that Elvis didn’t die, but was rather abducted by aliens (or he actually WAS an alien the whole time - the whole “Elvis didn’t die, he just went home” joke in Men in Black is a good example of this). Ok? Ok. So, in ATOM’s universe, we can surmise that their equivalent of Elvis, whose name is Sebastian Haff, WAS abducted by aliens, and that his song “Darling Let’s Shimmy” is subconsciously influenced by his repressed memories from his time aboard the Beyonder spaceships, which is why it accidentally awoke a Mothmanud larva in Volume 1. There’s a lot of bullshit jokes I put into ATOM, but this is perhaps the bullshittiest of them all.

- One of the most common bits of feedback on ATOM Volume 1 I got was “I kept waiting for something to eat Brick Rockwell, he’s such an asshole.” And I had to smile and go, “Oh, yeah, guess he never got his, huh?” the whole time without letting on that he was going to die here all along!

- Dr. Lerna and Brick Rockwell’s nature as foils to each other is probably most apparent in Invasion from Beyond!, where both are given fairly similar situations - a nonhuman approaches them with a solution to a global crisis - and react to it very differently. I worry that some people may think they both made the same choice and got different results, and that that’s hypocrisy on my part, but I hope I wrote it so you can see how their choices and situations actually differ in key ways, and why their decisions, while similar on the surface, are ultimately very different, and thus result in almost opposite outcomes.

- So, when I planned out this book in 2016, I swear I didn’t know about the Orca from 2019′s Godzilla King of the Monsters. Having the plot hang around Dr. Lerna deciding whether or not to use a sonic device to rouse all the kaiju to save the earth was not INTENDED to be a Monsterverse reference - it came about from me looking at Pathfinder’s take on kaiju, who are all explicitly influenceable by music, and thinking, “Oh, wow, music and songs DO have a major connection with kaiju in a lot of media, I should do something with that.” Whem KOTM came out a few days after Volume 1 came out I realized I was kinda fucked here, because the comparison was definitely going to be made, but I’d also set this all up already and you can’t just change suddenly to avoid looking like a copy cat and make a good story, so... I dunno, I leaned into it a bit, but it is what it is.

- While most people will probably think they’re a reference to the Reptoids of UFO folklore, the Reptodites are more inspired by the Dinosapien of speculative evolution fame and, even morso, by the Reptites from Chrono Trigger. Me wanting to avoid the “lizard people control the government” conspiracy theory trope is one of the main reasons why Reptodites have this non-interference clause with humanity.

- Lieutenant Gray is a bunch of different humanoid aliens rolled into one - a little Hopskinville goblin, a little classic gray, a little this one weird alien with five-fingered zygodactyl hands, etc.

- There’s some Beyonder Mecha in this volume that are basically kaiju-fied versions of the Flatwoods Monster. The species that built them ALSO engineered the Mothmanuds, because connecting Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster is fun!

- Pleprah is, obviously, a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater.

- Tyrantis’s brush with death, in addition to being so very anime, was inspired by my dad outlining how mythic heroes often have to travel to the underworld/land of the dead before they can finish their journey. It’s one of the plot points that I’ve had planned for this series since middle school.

- I’m sure some will view it as hackneyed and corny, but as a person who’s battled with depression for decades, having Tyrantis’s choice to live be the big heroic turn of the finale was very important to me. Tyrantis incorporates elements of a lot of imaginary friends I made as a kid, and in many ways he’s kind of the face of my more positive side in my head. He’s been telling me to choose to live for a while, and while maybe to an outsider it may seem hackneyed, it’s just... very Tyrantis. He chooses life and kindness in the face of pain and struggle. That’s Tyrantis.

- Tyrantis’s powered up form is called “Hyper Mode,” which is another Gundam reference. Originally it was a lot gaudier and involved him turning gold like a fuckin’ Super Saiyan. I opted for something a little more toned down here.

- Also, speaking of KOTM references, I decided to make Hyper Mode Tyrantis’s final duel with Pathogen be a sort of foil to Burning Godzilla’s final bout with Ghidorah in KOTM. Instead of ravaging the city, Hyper Tyrantis’s pulse of energy rejuvenates his fallen allies, and as a result he is “crowned” not out of fear for his supremacy in the wake of killing a powerful enemy, but in gratitude for his kindness. See? Leaning into it!

- And now I can finally reveal that Yamaneon is ATOM’s equivalent of The Monolith Monsters - that is, a kaiju that is also a mineral. I took the “strange continuously growing rock” thing in a very different direction, though, as unlike The Monolith Monsters, Yamaneon is actually alive.

- At various points in the pre-writing process, either Promythigor, MechaTyrantis, or both were going to die fighting Pathogen. I ultimately decided to let them both live, with MechaTyrantis even getting his flesh and blood body back, because I think it’s more interesting and thematically consistent that way. They get a chance to heal their wounds by changing their ways.

- The Great Beyonder and Dorazor both almost didn’t make the cut, as I felt they didn’t have the same pull as villains that Pathogen, Promythigor, and MechaTyrantis did. But then I thought that could actually be the gag - build them up as the final boss, only to have Pathogen take their crown. I want to explore post-face turn Dorazor a bit more, though. We’ll have to see about that in a later volume.

- Volumes 1 and 2 make up what I call “The Ballad of Tyrantis Arc” for ATOM. I call it that because Tyrantis’s storyline in these two volumes was patterend after Chivalric ballads like Yvain the Knight of the Lion. Tyrantis, a heroic warrior who is kind but dumb of ass, learns of strange goings on outside his home and investigates. During his journey into the unknown he falls in love with a powerful woman, whose favor he tries to win. Through happenstance he is separated from his love and, distraught, wanders around fighting various foes to prove his worth, before finally returning to his love a better hero. Invasion from Beyond! could even be seen as a sort of Morte d’Artur, with Tyrantis and a bunch of other kaiju heroes (including Nastadyne and Kemlasulla, who are built up as Hero Kaiju of Another Story) take part in a huge battle that threatens their idealic kingdom (of monsters).

- Volume 2 isn’t the end of ATOM, but it’s designed to work as an ending if you want to tap out here. As a reader I feel a definitive ending is important, but as a writer I’m always tempted to revisit my beloved characters, so I feel giving closure while leaving a few doors open for possible future adventures is a good compromise between these positions. There will be more ATOM stories, some (but not all!) following Tyrantis and Dr. Lerna, but if you want to know that Tyrantis and Dr. Lerna get an ending and the resolution to their arcs such a thing promises, here you go. An ending, if not THE END.

#The Atomic Time of Monsters #A.T.O.M. Trivia

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shadowofthelamp · 4 years ago

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The cape thing is true, and also the reason why Dib’s big head jokes were made. I think it was called “Save the Dib” or something similar and they tried to make his design more interesting because he was considered annoying or a bully by most of the audience

God save the Dib, yep! Lemme just... here we go. Might have to open in another tab because the text is kind of light. More analysis under the cut.

The execs didn’t like Dib because... well, I love him dearly, but in the first dozen or so episodes he’s a sadistic little weirdo who often started shit and enjoyed seeing Zim in pain, which is a bit of a hard sell when the character is the human child stopping an alien invader who obviously should be the bad guy! The human trying to stop that should be the good guy! Right? Meanwhile, the closest comparisons I can think of on another kid’s cartoon show (as main characters, anyway) are Mr. Crocker from Fairly Oddparents, or later, a weirder and more antisocial version of Candace from Phineas and Ferb, both intent on stopping the protagonist's fun.

He had to play center stage with Zim, who’s outrageously over the top, and so he had to be a credible threat to him with a strong enough personality to not get steamrollered. Nick probably felt like he was too unlikeable and not funny enough- Zim loves causing humans pain, sure, but he’s way more bombastic and amusing about it, with a funnier voice to boot. They kind of switch off being dueteragonists instead of having a ‘true’ protagonist and a ‘true’ antagonist. It basically depends on the episode- you’re supposed to be on Dib’s side in Battle Dib, for instance, but cheer when he gets his comeuppance for being a straight-up sadist in The Wettening.

As the memo says, ‘Dib’s becoming a whiny bitch’- the balance of ‘snappy and anti-social but still likeable’ is hard to hit, and to pump Zim up, it seems like some of the staff weren’t doing enough with Dib’s character and reducing him to something more one-dimensional. (I can personally attest from fic that every single main character is haaaaard to write from this show. They all have pretty complex inner motivations/interesting speech patterns.) He wasn’t funny enough, and episodes starring him couldn’t get approved because of that.

I assume this is part of the reason why Dib’s feelings towards Zim in particular shifted fairly drastically- early Dib is still completely fired up about being able to DESTROY THE ALIEN MENACE AND PROVE EVERYONE ELSE WRONG, end-of-series Dib was more resigned to the fact that no one was probably ever really going to listen, so he’d thwart schemes as they came but didn’t purposefully stir anything up. It’s a little less... abrasive, for lack of a better word, but his own sense of duty kept him from just checking out entirely so he had a reason to be there for the plot while they could dial his personality back a bit. Middle-series Dib kinda depended on the needs of the particular episode. It’s understandable character development (Zim doesn’t destroy the Earth for a year straight, Dib realizes maybe Zim’s just kind of incompetent) but definitely was part of this initiative too.

Anyway, yeah, the ‘big head’ jokes 100% came from this, according to this chart his head actually should be BIGGER than his body, even without the hair spike. They wanted him to look silly because the show is supposed to be, at heart, a comedy about a pair of similar genius outcasts being idiots and fumbling around doing dumb things for attention they’ll never get.

#anyway I have Dib Thoughts #as if I ever don't #iz #iz blogging #invader zim #dib #dib membrane #putting this in the tag bc I put a smidge of effort into writing this so #Anonymous #asks

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recentanimenews · 4 years ago

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FEATURE: How I Got Into Sakuga

Kaiba, Directed by Masaaki Yuasa

If you’re an anime fan, you’re likely an animation fan in general. But how do you know when an animation is “good”? How do you learn to identify an animator by only what you see, or tell when their drawings are better than usual?

English-speaking anime fans have adopted sakuga as a general catch-all term for exceptional animation. While the word sakuga itself means “animation,” in this context, sakuga has come to mean something very specific: Not just animation that looks cool, but the deliberate handiwork of specific animators with specific artistic aspirations. For example, a single-animator project might have a lot of “sakuga shots” because it has a personal, highly-refined style. Meanwhile, a television series might have an entire team of varying specialists for a larger narrative. Some of this might be attributed to specific key animators, while some might be credited to an entire studio — transformation sequences, explosive missiles, robots — that’s all fair game to be called sakuga. But how do you really know if what you’re looking at really is this so-called “sakuga?”

Like most art, it’s almost entirely subjective. Here’s my story.

Project A-ko, a high-energy 1986 OVA series best remembered for its exceptional animation staff

(Image via Retrocrush)

All’s Fair in Love and War Games

When I was a kid, I got my hands on the English-dubbed Digimon: The Movie on VHS. This notorious release was a three-part recut of Mamoru Hosoda’s Digimon OVAs released from 1999 to 2000, heavily featuring his second film Digimon Adventure: Our War Game. Of course, I didn’t experience this package as a “Hosoda anime” at the time. Besides the inspired inclusion of Barenaked Ladies’ "One Week" to the soundtrack, I strongly associate these films with Hosoda’s signature interpretation of Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru’s original Digimon Adventure character designs. Compared to the Toei-produced television series, these renditions of the Digi-Destined are charmingly off-model and move with awkward intention, like actual kids up against terrifying monsters.

In a sense, that’s what most people mean by sakuga — animation that makes us lean in and notice traits about the world and characters that can’t be communicated otherwise. Sakuga, in particular, places special emphasis on an individual animator’s keyframes, or the drawings used as a basis for in-between frames during movement. That’s what I mean by the phrase “Hosoda anime.” If you watch Summer Wars or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time enough times, anyone will notice a stylistic palette of idiosyncrasies.

Digimon Adventure “Home Away From Home” directed by Mamoru Hosoda

(Image via Hulu)

An Emerging Style

When I got older and realized there was more anime than what was on cable, I kept returning to “flat” style animation with films like Tatsuo Satō’s 2001 Cat Soup and Shōji Kawamori’s 1996 Spring and Chaos. Around this time, contemporary artist Takashi Murakami also began developing his own “superflat” style (coined in his 2000 book Superflat and later in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture) we’ll return to. Once I got a taste for the experimental, I never turned back.

But back to Hosoda. Less focused on the details of models and more fixated on a “flat” or fluid style of movement, the key animation in Hosoda’s films makes body language a priority. This is perhaps the best thing about good sakuga — its potential to express deep emotion even under production constraints. My favorite example comes from the first Digimon short film Hosoda directed, the simply titled Digimon Adventure from 1999.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Directed by Masaaki Yuasa

Originally conceived as a standalone for Bandai’s then-new Digital Monsters virtual pet toys, this version of Digimon is less loud, more atmospheric — and sincerely preoccupied with the question: “How would little kids actually handle a giant monster of their own?” The result is an unforgettable shot of Kairi, Tai’s little sister desperately blowing her whistle, stopping to catch her breath, then spitting and coughing in an attempt to calm down their newly evolved kaiju Greymon friend.

For the television series, Hosoda directed the episode “Home Away From,” depicting the two siblings clinging to each other as the other slowly drifts back to the Digital World. In both scenes, characters don’t constantly move, but only act when necessary via careful manipulation of the frames. This technique not only makes everything seem more “realistic,” but also acts as a visual cue for the anxiety Tai and Kairi feel. In other words, painstakingly controlled animation serves both form and function, especially when you’re selling an emotional climax of another kid-meets-monster plot.

Tomorrow’s Joe, 1980 film adaptation of the 1970 TV anime series directed by Osamu Dezaki

(Image via Retrocrush)

A Little History Lesson

After Digimon, Hosoda and Nakatsuru collaborated on films like Summer Wars and the Takashi Murakami-inspired pop art short Superflat Monogram. Hosoda is no doubt inescapable to sakuga fans today thanks to the ubiquity of his feature films. Still, Hosoda obviously wasn’t the first sakuga animator. Animators like Yasuo Ōtsuka, known for his cinematic work in a pre-Ghibli era of anime film with Toei, documented the growth ‘60s and ‘70s of Japan’s animation industry in his 2013 book Sakuga Asemamire. When the demand for films lowered in favor of anime television during that era, animators took risks. Classics of the era like Tiger Mask and Tomorrow's Joe literally held no punches, and Osamu Tezuka’s own Mushi Productions dove headfirst into experimental adult films. Animators, and especially keyframe animators, had creative control. In this perfect storm, the advent of sakuga was inevitable.

Everyman Ken Kubo is taught the ways of eighties anime in Otaku no Video

(Image via Retrocrush)

Why Bother With Sakuga?

In 2013, animation aficionado Sean Bires and company hosted an informational panel titled “Sakuga: The Animation of Anime” at Anime Central Chicago. Uploaded to YouTube that same year, this panel informed my younger self’s understanding of not just the “how” of sakuga, but the “why” it even needed to exist in anyone’s vocabulary. Accessible, meticulously researched, and full of visual references, Sean’s two-hour panel-lecture does the heavy lifting of contextualizing anime not just through a historical lens, but within the broader project of expanding cinematic techniques. This primer might sound heady, but considering the popularity of Masaaki Yuasa’s series like Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, and references to animator Ichirō Itano’s “Itano circus” missiles in American cartoons like DuckTales, it’s hard to say sakuga isn't relevant. Nowadays, it's practically a trope to parody one of Dezaki's most iconic shots. Supplemented by a rich community of blogs and forums, it couldn’t be easier to learn about animators like Yasuo Ōtsuka or the early days of Toei if you want a bigger picture. Blogs like Ben Ettinger’s Anipages and the aptly named Sakuga Blog are a good place to start, not to mention dozens of dedicated galleries of anime production and art books published by studios themselves. Now couldn’t be a better time to vicariously live your art school dreams through anime masterworks.

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, a 1989 film featuring animation by Yasuo Ōtsuka best known for his work on the Lupin III franchise

Sakuga Is For Everyone

Fans have always been obsessed with the technicalities of animation, even if they weren't artists. As early as 2007, uncut dubbed collector box sets for Naruto came with annotated booklets of episode storyboards. More recently, critically-acclaimed series like Shirobako further explicated this love for animation as a team effort — people love attaching other people to art. In contrast, psychological horror series like Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent features an episode about an anime studio’s production going terribly wrong. Not to mention the endlessly self-referential Otaku no Video Gainax OVA and its depiction of zealous sakuga otaku. Anime fans adore watching anime be born over and over. It’s that simple.

Digimon Adventure “Home Away From Home” directed by Mamoru Hosoda

(Image via Hulu)

Today, I’d comfortably call some shots from Hosoda Digimon films great sakuga. But Koromon is still weird. Sorry. The love for sakuga isn’t a contest to one-up fans on production trivia or terminology. It’s about taking the time to appreciate the fact that anime is ultimately a collaborative artistic endeavor. From tracing back the lineage of animators like Yoshinori Kanada to Kill la Kill, to appreciating the visual sugar rush of Project A-Ko alongside slow-paced Ghibli films, “getting into sakuga” isn't a passive effort, nor a waste of time. Besides, wouldn't it be fun understanding how your favorite animator achieved your favorite scene? The phrase "labor of love" is cliché, but maybe that’s a good synonym for what role sakuga inevitably plays for artists and fans alike — work that brings you joy, no matter how you cut it. Who is your favorite animator? When did you get into sakuga? Let us know in the comments below!

Blake P. is a weekly columnist for Crunchyroll Features. His twitter is @_dispossessed. His bylines include Fanbyte, VRV, Unwinnable, and more. He actually doesn't hate Koromon.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Blake Planty

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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dearlystars · 11 months ago

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as much as i fully get that lack of/shit skin tone options are a much bigger issue because the consistency of the problem compared to just how fucking easy the solution is is ridiculous, it does make me sad when i see a picrew going around and i want to participate because community is #COOL only for me to go open it up and see that the base body is adventure time finn mertens chic. like obviously i don't want to assume that every artist that doesn't add body diversity to their picrews hates fat people or anything and that the real issue is just picrew limiting the amount of options any particular dollmaker can have so creators are given the options of "add more body types at the cost of cutting the number of customization options you have in half/third/quarter/etc." "don't add body diversity and allow for more proper customization options" or "go out of your way to make multiple picrews all in the same style each with a different body type and effectively double/triple/quadruple/etc. your workload and worry about any potential issues cropping up in all of them instead of just one despite knowing that when most people share them they'll only share the skinny one" like it's 100% more an issue of medium rather than anything else but it's just like. argh. i am fat i do not hate that i'm fat my stupid idealized cartoon version of myself in my head is fat but i can't make my stupid idealized cartoon version of myself in my head in this stupid idealized cartoon version of yourself dollmaker without feeling like i'm lying. it's not even like feeling bad about my weight like again i REALLY don't mind being fat it's just like. I Do Not Look Like That and the disconnect between what i look like and what i'm able to make usually just makes me drop the picrew out of annoyance and hope that maybe the next one won't make me feel like i'm deceiving people just by using it

picrews are frustrating me again

#property of ruf #ruf's chit chat #tw venting #i guess #also #tw fatphobia #just so people that don't want to get reminded of shit don't have to #also way smaller issue but 99 times out of 100 the facial hair options also suck ass #which is annoying #but also like at least for me my stupid idealized cartoon version of myself in my head has stupid anime stubble lines #instead of the like full on beard i actually have #so like that's something i can usually get over lmao #anyway sorry for being whiny i just have issues and problems god bless

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 5 years ago

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Is It Really THAT Bad?

I’m going to warn you all now. This one is going to get a bit angry at the end. Normally I would try and remain as professional as possible, but in this case, I don’t feel like I would be able to.

Batman & Robin is a film that has lived in infamy since its release in 1997. Upon release, it was critically reviled, and this hatred of the film continued long into the modern day, where it frequently tops “worst films of all time lists” to the point where it actually is listed on the Wikipedia page for “List of films considered the worst.” It was nominated for at least 11 Razzies but only won a single one, and it went on to be a frequent punching bag on the {REDACTED] Critic’s web show, where he would get irrationally angry at the mere mention of the Bat Credit Card. In contemporary reviews, Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle stated “"George Clooney is the big zero of the film, and should go down in history as the George Lazenby of the series,” which is less of a criticism and more of a compliment, if I’m being totally honest.

Most of the stars would take a negative stance towards it as well, with legend stating that if you tell George Clooney that you saw the film in theaters, he will refund you for your ticket out of his own pocket. Chris O’Donnell likewise is not particularly fond of the film, stating "It just felt like everything got a little soft the second time. On Batman Forever, I felt like I was making a movie. The second time, I felt like I was making a kid's toy commercial." And, perhaps most depressingly, Joel Schumacher himself was apparently very apologetic for the film, though this may or may not have come about because of years and years of vitriol being directed at him for making this film.

In the wake of Mr. Schumacher’s passing, I decided to re-watch the film, as I am famously rather fond of it, and I am going to tell you all why the answer to the question “Is it really THAT bad?” is a loud, resounding, NO.

THE GOOD

There’s honestly quite a lot to like here, more than you might think. I think first and foremost what you need to understand going in is that this is a silly, cartoonish take on the Burton style, blending the silliness and camp of the West series with the drama and aesthetics of the Burton films, all while adding some over-the-top, colorful flair. John Glover, who appears in the film as a cartoonish mad scientist, even has gone on record as saying "Joel would sit on a crane with a megaphone and yell before each take, 'Remember, everyone, this is a cartoon'. It was hard to act because that kind of set the tone for the film”… the last sentence makes the statement very baffling, but at least even the actors were aware of what they were doing. If this doesn’t sound appealing, well, the opening is sure to warn you off, as it is a suiting up montage with various shots of the firm butts, large codpieces, and stiff batnipples of the Dynamic Duo. The movie is very upfront about what you’re in for.

On the subject of the infamous batnipples, Schumacher stated "I had no idea that putting nipples on the Batsuit and Robin suit were going to spark international headlines. The bodies of the suits come from Ancient Greek statues, which display perfect bodies. They are anatomically correct." It seems a very odd choice, but it’s pretty clear that he meant it as an amusing little design choice and nothing more. Of course, this hasn’t stopped everyone and their mother from spewing homophobic comments about how he was purposefully making the film gayer, even from star George Clooney, who has said that he played Batman as a gay man and was told by Schumacher Batman is gay. It’s so disgusting that people did and continue to do this, because honestly, the costumes are fine, and even if they are meant to be fanservice… so what? O’Donell and Clooney’s asses look nice, as does Alicia Silverstone’s when she dons a suit. The fact hers is just as form-fitting as the other two really shows that the whole idea Schumacher did it because he was gay is ridiculous; the man was very egalitarian about the fanservice in the movie.

Whatever else Clooney says, he does a pretty great job as Batman and Bruce Wayne. His speech at the end of the film where he talks to Mr. Freeze and reminds him that he is a good man and offers to help him is honestly one of the few moments in any Batman film where Batman actually feels like the one from the animated series, a man who fights crime but also wants to help the people he’s trying to stop. Clooney just has a very natural charisma that lends himself to playing a hero, and while there are a few awkward moments in the performance, he captures the fun and charm a more lighthearted Batman should. Michael Gough’s last turn as Alfred is also surprisingly poignant, and a lot of mileage is gotten out of his genuinely tearjerking subplot.

Of course, the very best part of the film is the villains. Uma Thurman is clearly having a ball as Poison Ivy, and she gets to have a ludicrous amount of costumes as well as numerous moments of fanservice. She also has the power to turn every man around her into a simp, which is absolutely amazing and leads to quite a few scenes of Batman and Robin slapping each other over her. But f course, there’s really no doubt that the best part of the film is Mr. Freeze. He’s a combination of the sillier Mr. Freeze from the West days and the more modern take of the character most are familiar with, the tragic anti-villain who wants to save his wife; such a character would take a talented man capable of comedy and drama in equal measure. And who better than Arnold Schwarzenegger? Joel Schumacher wanted a man who looked like he was chiseled from a glacier, and Arnold certainly fits that description. He spends the movie juggling some of the most corny puns you can imagine and a lot of truly powerful, understated drama, and it really does work. You honestly get the sense that Arnold really gets Mr. Freeze and what makes him a great character. Also, that suit he has is amazing.

As a final note: the Bat Credit Card is absolutely not stupid. Linkara has defended it in the past, giving reasons why and how it could actually work, but really, all that needs to be said is… is this any more ridiculous than Shark Repellent Bat Spray?

THE BAD

So don’t get the wrong idea here; this film is far from perfect. As is the case with any comedy, the humor can be hit or miss; not all of the puns land, not all of the jokes are great. You’re never going to get a perfect comedy no matter how hard you try, and this is no exception.

As for performances, I think O’Donnell’s Robin and Silverstone’s Batgirl are a bit wonky. O'Donnell has long been a source of derision for his whining, and while I think the hate is a bit overblown, he does spend a ludicrous amount of time in this film being snippy, miserable, and arrogant. I think he actually fights with Batman more than any of the villains! Still, his performance isn’t horrible, he just gets a bit too whiny at a few points.

Silverstone is a bit of a bigger problem, but she’s not quite as bad as even I remembered. She’s pretty much Batgirl in name only, since she’s related to Alfred in this, but she’s mostly okay. The issue really is that her arc in the film is relatively bland and feels a bit shoehorned, which comes to a head where she fights Poison Ivy in a designated catfight, obviously because they didn’t want Batman to punch a woman in the face I guess. There’s just one issue with that:

On the subject of Ivy, while she definitely does have plant powers here, they’re strangely underplayed. She rarely uses them even when it would probably be beneficial, instead relying on Bane to do most of the fighting for her. Ah, Bane… Bane is one of the few things about this film I can’t really muster up any sort of defense for. While his creation scene is rather cool, it doesn’t lead to much of interest, as this version of Bane is pretty much a mindless supersoldier lackey who serves Poison Ivy. Now, this was still relatively early in Bane’s existence, as he had only debuted in 1993 and was really most famous for his signature “breaking the Bat” move, but it still is baffling why, with that famous thing fresh in everyone’s minds, that they would just choose to go and basically make Bane into Evil Diet Captain America. Surely they could have either saved him for a sequel or utilized him in a way more befitting of the character? I think this Bane is kind of responsible for the negative perception of Bane as this big, dumb bruiser, something that works like The Dark Knight Rises and Arkham Origins have thankfully gone a long way to rectifying. Bane is at his best when he’s a cunning genius bruiser; here, he’s nothing but a glorified prop.

Is It Really THAT Bad?

The answer is no. No it isn’t. AT ALL.

I’ve always felt this film came out at the wrong time. It was towards the end of the 90s, during the Dark Age of Comics when everything was dark, gritty, and edgy. The world didn’t want a movie like this back then; they wanted stuff like Blade, who would come in shortly after this film and show us how to make that aesthetic work. I guess in terms of Batman they wanted something more like Dawn of Justice, which really speaks volumes to how awful the 90s were for superheroes.

Look, I’m not trying to convince anyone this is the greatest Batman film ever. Even I don’t think that; Batman Returns, The Dark Knight, and Under the Red Hood are all much better films. But is this really the worst Batman film now that we have the deeply misogynistic and disgusting The Killing Joke and the relentlessly bleak and unpleasant Batman v Superman? Hell, it’s not even worse than Batman Forever! At least the Batman in this film has some kind of emotional range beyond “plank of wood!” And even calling it the worst sequel ever is just… so baffling. Again, this is definitely better than Batman Forever, lack of Jim Carrey notwithstanding. And can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me that this is worse than any of the Terminator sequels after the second film? Worse than Iron Man 2 or Thor: The Dark World? The almost half dozen Alvin and the Chipmunk sequels? This is only the worst sequel or even a bad sequel if it is the only sequel you’ve ever seen in your life.

A lot of the hate for it from back in the day carries a strong undercurrent of homophobia. Much like the infamous backlash against disco, it’s seriously uncomfortable, and it definitely is cruel how accusatory people were towards Schumacher’s intentions for the suits of the heroes in the film. The fact that even the two main stars have gotten in on it is a bit disgusting, though O’Donnell questioning why there needed to be a codpiece is certainly less offensive than George Clooney saying he played Batman as a gay man for… whatever reason. Was he implying that Batman being gay made the movie worse? I’m not sure what he’s on about there. Even The New Batman Adventures made a cruel dig at the film; notice the sign and the effeminate-looking boy. You could only get homophobia this good in the 90s!

The hatred of this film is absolutely overblown. It’s so ridiculous. #70 on the bottom rated movies of IMDB? #1 on the 50 worst films of all time list from Empire? Doug Walker’s personal punching bag whenever he needs to talk about a bad sequel, to the point where he literally said no one wanted a comedic take on Batman in his worst sequels video? Come the fuck on.

Joel Schumacher may or may not have ended up hating this film, but he certainly was made to feel like shit for making it… and it is honest to god not that bad! But he was just absolutely eviscerated, to the point where this was a fucking headline when he died:

Literally fuck all of these people. Fuck io9 for their insensitive headline. Fuck Empire for rating this as the worst film ever. Fuck Doug Walker for his constant bashing and his shitty old “chimp out over the Bat Credit Card” gag. Double fuck Mick LaSalle for shitting on George Clooney’s performance while also trying to say George Lazenby’s Bond was bad. In fact, fuck George Clooney for his weird idea that playing Batman as gay is a bad thing (sorry George, but I can’t defend this). Fuck the Razzies. Yes, it was nominated, but I just feel it’s always a good time to say “Fuck the Razzies.”

I will never say you have to love or even like this film, but the sheer amount of vitriol and hatred for it is absolutely beyond me. At worst, this film is just a bit too goofy, and at best, it is a fun tribute to the campy days when Batman just couldn’t get rid of a bomb. I didn’t take off my score this time. I’m proud to say I gave this an 8/10, personally. If I’m being honest, a 6.6 – 6.9 is more appropriate, because it does have quite a few issues, but god, this film is not bad at all. It’s silly, goofy, campy, and fun… but bad? Not by any stretch of my imagination. And fuck the critics for convincing an entire generation that this is Batman at his worst, when we have Batman fucking slaughtering his ways through criminals and fucking Barbara Gordon on rooftops these days. I will always take stupid ice puns over misery, murder and creepy intergenerational sex, thank you very much.

youtube

I hope you can rest easy, Mr. Schumacher. Maybe you didn’t love your film in the end but, wherever you are, I hope you know I loved it.

#Is it really that bad?#IIRTB #Review #movie review #batman & robin #joel schumacher #George Clooney #Batman #Uma Thurman #arnold schwarzenegger #Poison Ivy #Mr. Freeze #superhero movie

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jimclassicstoycollection · 4 years ago

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TransArt

4 Mode Commander (Optimal Optimus knock off)

Voyager class?

by Unknown

I got this from Aliexpress for about $60; I think it was the most I’d ever spent on a knock off toy before.

I am a huge fan of the old Beast Wars cartoon, and for a time I loved the Optimal Optimus toy, when I learned there was a scaled down knock off of the toy I knew that I wanted it, but I wasn’t sure that paying $60 for one was the best idea, so I sat on this for almost a year and a half until I decided to purchase it back in January 2020, and it arrived sometime in either late February, or early March (I think we were already into the lock down when it arrived...).

This toy isn’t quite a 1:1 exact comparison of the 1990′s Super Beast class toy, there are improvements made to this mold.

Beast Mode:

Starting off with the beast mode this mammoth monkey is super teched out in his Transmetal bod.

Even scaled down to voyager class figure (or slightly voyager adjacent) it still feels like gargantuan gorilla is big deal! All of the sculpting is reproduced (and scaled down) quite competently, and the vacuum metal chrome looks quite solid (though the blue is a lighter shade than the official Beast Wars toy)

Though the toy looks good, sadly he’s not as solid as I would like, and the is mostly regarding with the toys knees.

Optimal Optimus has double jointed knees, and for the beast mode the thighs are collapsed into the calves to allow the gorilla mode a shorter, hunched stature, but this means the legs can be a bit floppy, and difficult for posing the beast mode.

Any of the ratcheted joints are solid, so he can hold a pose, but the knees are pretty much held together with friction, and the toy is (obviously) a bit top heavy so it is sometimes an issue.

AS I said earlier this toy is NOT a 1:1 reproduction of Optimal Optimus, and I’ll talk about the changed here:

Ball joint on the head: Yes that’s right, this version of Optimal Optimus has a ball jointed head, which is really good! The original toy had simply a hinge (was part of the transformation) but the gorilla couldn’t looks left of right; well now this one can! Be careful, however for the head tends to pop off the ball joint, and try not to be too rough with the ball joint assemble for it’s thin plastic.

Thigh swivel: Such a simple mechanic often seen in toys today was a pretty alien thing back in the 90′s. For the KO Optimus the legs are tooled for a thigh swivel, this helps so much with the posing!

Ankle pivot: The Beast Wars Optimal Optimus toy did have an ankle flex, but never had a pivot as well! Again, this helps so much when it comes with posing of the figure.

Toe bend: That’s right Optimus’ toes can bend at the...knuckle? Do toes have knuckles? Regardless this means you can pose the toy walking, and it’ll look more natural (if you want to call a giant robot monkey natural), however the two bend is very loose, so I wouldn’t rely on it to bare any load.

Another issue with the beast mode is the backpack. The backpack makes up about 20% of the toy, and it fairly heavy. It might be a little too heavy to really be supported by the thin, and loose plastic swiveling hinge, which is mounted to the toys back, and lastly it just drags on the ground due to the loose support hinge. So it does make for an unstable beast mode, and sometimes it just looks like the beast mode is just dragging his backpack-ass.

I think this could be a possibly breakage issue in the future...

MUNKYS!

Robot Mode:

Transformation to robot mode is (almost) exactly the same as the official toy.

With the original Optimal Optimus the vehicle wheels would pop out and separate and be where the shoulder blades would be, while the beast head was tucked inside the body. Due to the retooling the wheels stay with the body, and the beast head fits into the same cavity as where the robot head occupies while in beast mode. It’s a clever use of space, however since the beast head has a tendency to pop off you have to un-transform the backpack, pop the beast head back on, and reconfigure that part of the robot again. it can be a hassle.

Continuing on with the backpack you get the traditional Optimal Optimus form where the backpack stick out of the back and the nipple guns coming out of the chest, OR this SCALED DOWN KNOCK OFF VERSION allows you to collapse the the guns into the body and fold the backpack down (over top the exposes beast head) just like the cartoon series did.

It’s beautiful. ::sheds tear::

Circling back to the knees one last time, as I mentioned earlier Optimal Optimus has double jointed knees; the top hinge is on a decent ratchet joint, the bottom hinge (part of the beast transformation isn’t. Which causes stability issues. The bottom hinge can loosely lock into the calf, however the slightest of breezes and it’ll simply untab itself and the knee will just buckle under the toys own weight.

That’s been a problem since Beast Wars so...no changes there, I guess...

Look at that head sculpt! Cartoon accurate, AND it’s not just on a swivel, it also has a pivoting neck! ::sheds more tears:: It’s beautiful!

And I cannot emphasis enough how important it is this figure has a thigh swivel, ankle pivot, and a toe bend! It does make posing better.

Looking at Optimal Optimus from the back you can see how backpack can fold down for the robot mode, and the beast head play peek-a-boo where the robot head would store while in the beast mode.

My OG Optimus Primal is still in storage, so I couldn’t do a comparison of the two...if I can dig it out, I’ll retro actively post it here.

Just take a gander much bigger he is compared to that Earthrise Prime?! He’s got some crazy He-Man proportions next to the old Big Mack.

Accessories:

I suppose now is good time to talk about the accessories which comes with this figure, because there are some changes to some of them as well.

For starters he does NOT come with an orange machine gun. No big loss in my opinion.

Second, he comes with two clear plastic missiles, and they can either store on the sides of his legs (like the original) or can be placed into the nipple guns when they are deployed. When the guns are retracted the missile will not fit the spring loaded mechanic can’t function.

Blast Shields:

However Optimus can’t actually hold them while deployed, so does it really even matter? You’ll have to lean them up against the toy, and do some choice camera angles to people won’t notice....

And lastly the blast shields. Much like the Beast Wars toy the can store on either on the arms, or the shoulders, however they are not spring loaded, exploding debris which fly off in six different directions, they just peg in on a 5mm port, and have hinges; which means the blast shields can unfold in a similar way they did that one time in the cartoon.

As previously stated the KO version has these hinges on the blast shield, and pegs which allow the side to stay closed, however the weird catch is in order to close up the shields you have to remove the side from the hinges, slide it into those side pegs, and then lock it back into place with the hinge...That’s pretty odd...but it does hold.

Still, I think this looks pretty cool. Thanks to the hinges, I suppose you could use the blast shields as arm blades. I can dig it.

Jet Mode:

It’s pretty much still a flying monkey with jet parts hanging off of it.

It’s good, it’s fine; it is what it is.

Truck Mode:

It’s a thing...

Even back in the 90′s this was a tacked on and superfluous mode.

It rolls.

Final Thoughts:

Do I like this toy? I think it’s okay; I like the novelty of the idea of a smaller version of the Beast Wars toy, and I appreciate all the improvements made to the toy which could have made the original much better.

However considering the fact that some of the parts are just too loose and fiddly kind of kills some of my enthusiasm that I have for the toy.

I don’t regret my purchase, and for a Chinese knock off it exceeded my expectations; it’s just...you know...fiddly...

Knock offs, Ahoy!

#toys #action figures #Beast Wars #transformers #maximal #optimal optimus #ali express #knock off #KO #transmetal #transart #4 mode commander

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fuse2dx · 5 years ago

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June '20

Trials of Mana

Maybe not the highest profile remake Square-Enix have put out in recent memory, but one that was pretty exciting for me. I played a fan translation of the Super Famicom original some 20 years ago, so while it's not particularly fresh in my head, there's just enough there to enjoy some infrequent little pangs of nostalgia. The move to 3D has made for some welcome changes to to combat - jumping adds a vertical element to combat that wasn't present before, and enemy specials being clearly telegraphed and avoidable puts a little more control in your hands. There's still a good amount of 16 bit jank though - combo timing feels unreliable, the camera's often a pain, there's plenty of questionable hit detection, and you definitely wouldn't want to leave your fate solely in the hands of your party's AI. Willing to put most of this aside, what actually mattered more to me was that it still had the kind of playful, breezy nature, it looks and plays nicely, and that it progresses at a nice clip. Party selection will change the way you fight moment-to-moment, but only provides minor and very brief deviance from the main storyline, most of which is the kind of schlocky cartoon villainy that will have you looking for a skip button before it would illicit any kind of emotional response. But you know what? Overall, I still enjoyed it a lot.

So while it may not be revolutionising the action RPG, what it does show is that Square-Enix is capable of acknowledging their history of previously untranslated works, and that they also now have a pretty good template for getting a B-tier remake of such titles out in a reasonable timeframe. Where do I send my wish list in to, team?

Sayonara Wild Hearts

As a one-liner found on the back of the box, 'A pop album video game' is about as on-the-nose as it gets. The old "it's not for everyone" adage is definitely applicable, and its defiance of traditional video game metrics is not in any way subtle. How sophisticated is the gameplay? Not particularly. How long is it? Not very. But how does it make you feel? Now you're talking. It presents a simple but deeply relatable story of a broken heart, and leads from there with a catchy tune into a fast and colourful onslaught of new ideas, perspectives, and concepts. That is to say: it has the potential to make you feel all kinds of things.

One especially celebratory note was how well the game is structured to fit into the album structure it boasts about. Stages flow quickly into one another, and while shorter, more compounding numbers are often about introducing new ideas and themes, moving on to the next is a few simple button presses and a brief, well-hidden loading window away. Inevitably there are more standout stages, those that feel like the hit singles; the longer, verse-chorus-verse type joints that grant the space for more fleshed out visual story telling, and that smartly synchronise their percussive hits, soaring vocals and the like to appropriate beats of play. A lot of the gameplay can easily (and cynically) be reduced to "it's an endless runner", but to liken this to a cheap re-skin of a confirmed hit-maker is to wilfully dismiss so much of what it does better and so much beside. You can play it on damn near everything, and for the time it takes, it's well worth doing.

Twinkle Star Sprites

I've meant to play this countless times before. I've almost certainly passed it by while strolling through arcades, the Saturn version has never been hoovered up into my collection, and the PS2 collection this particular version belongs to - ADK Damashii - is no longer a cheap addition to anyone's library. The digital version of it for PS4 however was however recently on sale at a point that saw me receive change from a fiver. David Dickinson would be proud.

Having now credit-fed my way through the game's brief arcade mode, there's no doubt in my mind that the nuance of its systems are going to be glossed over in this rather ham-fisted appraisal. At least at face value, there's plenty of character and charm to appreciate in its colourful and cutesy style. As a two-player, vertically split-screen title, its a pretty clean break from a lot of a shooter's typical characteristics - rather than 6(ish) stages of hell, its a series of one on one battles - and all the better suited to 2 players for it. As enemy waves come at you, taking them out in chains can generate attacks to the other player; however if these attacks are too small then it's entirely possible they'll be killed off again, and an even bigger attack will come straight back at you. Think of a bit like competitive Tetris, but with shooting rather than puzzling. It's a neat and curious little game, that's likely best experienced properly, with a friend on the other side of the sofa to hurl abuse at.

Blasphemous

Let's get the lazy-but-effective description out of the way: it's a 2D MetroidVania Souls-like. You've got "that" type of map, definitely-not-bonfires and definitely-not-Estus Flasks. You are encouraged to return to your body upon death, the combat system is very reliant on parries and dodge-rolls, and there's even a dedicated "lore" button to use on every item you pick up.

While this likely sounds dismissive, it's more about addressing the elephant in the room. To give some context, these are both types of games that I love, and the end product here has done a pretty good job of bringing them together. The exploration is pleasantly open - gatekeeping is typically done less by specific items and abilities, and more by just which areas you're brave enough to poke your head into. It's a little bit of a shame that most of the new abilities have to be switched out for others rather than adding to a core arsenal of moves, but at the same time its base setup gives you plenty of ways to deal with any number of combat scenarios. This is of course best demonstrated by the boss encounters, which are wonderful affairs - big, gruesome, thoughtful variations on approaches to combat, which drop in at a nice pace to keep you from ever getting too cocky. The theming in general is wonderful, and the name is certainly appropriate - there's a lot of deep catholic inspiration in its gorgeous backdrops and environments, but then layered on top are some chilling elements of religious iconography, along with a cast of disturbing devotees and martyrs to sufficiently unsettle you. It's arguably a small intersection of the gaming population that it'll appeal to, but if you're in there, it's a real treat.

Death Come True

The first thing you see upon starting is the game's central character breaking right through the fourth wall to tell you directly not to stream the game or to share anything that might spoil the story. The first rule of Death Come True, and so on. I consider myself fairly well versed in such etiquette, so to then have the screenshot function entirely disabled for the whole game felt a little like being given a slap on the wrists for a crime I had no intention of committing. I don't envy the team trying to market it, that's for sure.

The reasoning behind this is clear at least - it's a game that is in total service of its plot. Consider a mash-up of a 'Choose your own adventure' book and a series of full-motion videos, and you're mostly there. Unless you were to walk away from the controller or perhaps fall asleep, there seems very little chance that your play time will deviate from the 3 hour estimate - which will certainly put some people off, but is understandable given the production values, and personally, quite welcome in the first place. In terms of replay value, there are branching paths that a single route will obviously skip: as an example of this, in looking up a screenshot to use in lieu of taking my own, I found a promotional image of the central cast, only to not recognise one of them at all. One thing that such a short run-time does ensure though, is that minute-for-minute, there's plenty of action; without wanting to speak about the story itself (rather than in fear of reprise for doing so, I might add), it kicks off with plenty of intrigue, shortly thereafter switching to full-on action, and then strikes a pretty fine balancing act between the two for its run time. It doesn't get quite as deep or as complex as I would've hoped given the team's pedigree, but I do like it, and think it'd actually be a pretty fun title to play with folks who normally don't concern themselves with games. By the same token, it's probably not for the 'hardcore' types looking for something to string out over dozens of hours.

Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight

After the generous main course that was Persona 5 Royal, I figured that I'd follow up with dessert. I did however wait until a weekend where I knew my girlfriend would be away, so as not to trigger any unpleasant flashbacks to looped battle themes, and the chirpy, indecipherable voices of Japanese schoolkids that made it so painful to endure as a non-gaming cohabitant.

Immediately, it's clear that very little has changed since Persona 4's take on the rhythm action genre. The core game, while still functional and fairly enjoyable, hasn't changed a lick. Perhaps the most notable improvement to the package as a whole is in scaling back on a dedicated story mode, and instead just having a series of uninspired but far less time-consuming set of social link scenes that pad things out. The biggest flaw is repeated wholesale though, in that trying to stretch out noteworthy tracks from a single game's playlist into a dedicated music game leads to repetition - and there is a much less prolific gathering of artists involved in remixes this time. I'd be willing to wager that it's a very similar story once again with Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight, but I'm not about to ruin a perfectly good dinner to start with the sweet just to find out, if you'll excuse a second outing of the metaphor. Still, again compare these to Theatrhythm though - where Square-Enix plundered the Final Fantasy series in its entirety, along with spin-offs and other standalone titles to put together a library of music worthy for the one single game. Cobble the tunes from Personas 3-5 together into one game, and you're still coming up very short by comparison.

#trials of mana #seiken densetsu 3 #sayonara wild hearts #twinkle star sprites #blasphemous #death come true #persona 5 dancing in starlight

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duhragonball · 5 years ago

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Dragon Ball Z Movie 15: Resurrection F

“Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection F” premiered on April 18, 2015. Notably, it had a U.S. theatrical release only a few months later, in August. Movie 14 got a U.S. theatrical release, but it took a lot longer, and fans didn’t really have any reason to expect that much. In 2013, we were just waiting for Funimation to release it on home video. But I think it says a lot about how successful Movie 14 was. Not only did the sequel get made only a couple of years later, but the big shots in Japan who run all this stuff finally realized that there’s an international audience just as eager to pay for this stuff. I want to say the Broly movie got released in the U.S. even faster, but I’d have to look it up. And from what I understand, the Broly movie did even bigger business than Movies 14 and 15, so I think it’s safe to say that if they keep making more of these, we can count on a speedy localization.

Do we have Fox to thank for this? I mean, would any of this Dragon Ball revival have happened if “Dragon Ball Evolution” hadn’t bombed so badly? I mean, let’s say they did a good job and made DBE really kick ass, like the Thor movies. By now they probably would have made a nice little trilogy, starring a mostly whitewashed cast. Maybe the third one would be looked down upon, or they’d try to do a reboot like with the X-Men franchise, and people would write pointless thinkpiece articles asking stupid questions about “Dragon Ball fatigue”. Teenage Justin Chatwick stans would be blogging things like “OMG Did you know there was a Dragon Ball Evolution cartoon?!?!?” Maybe those live action movies would be better than Dragon Ball Super, but they’d probably also mark the end of the franchise. At least with things as they are, there’s no telling how much more Dragon Ball content we might be getting in the 20′s.

Gee, Toei, how come your mom lets you have two logos at the start of the movie?

I just found this out last night, but Res F has the distinction of being the first movie where Toriyama wrote the actual screenplay, as opposed to just coming up with the plot and story, as in Movie 14. I’m a fan of Toriyama’s work, obviously, but I’m don’t subscribe to the idea that anything he does is pure gold and everyone else who contributes to this franchise is ruining it somehow. There are GT apologists who would try to argue that GT was more legitimate because Toriyama had some vague influence on the production, and he drew SSJ4 Goku once, so that means it’s magically awesome. It just doesn’t work. Movie 14 is better than Movie 15, and I don’t think that’s because one screenplay was better than the other, but the point is that you can’t just add more Toriyama labor and guarantee a superior product.

So there’s three big problems I have with this movie, and when I rewatched it this morning, my opinion hasn’t budged since 2015.

First, the sole premise of this movie is that Frieza comes back to menace the good guys again. That’s a bad move, period. I find Frieza overrated to begin with, and they’ve already done handful of Frieza comebacks before this movie was ever conceived. Even if it was a good idea, it’s so obvious that it’s barely worth doing. When the DBS: Broly movie was first announced, I was worried that they were making the same mistake again, but then it turned out they had a bold twist on the character to justify the effort. And that’s what it takes. If you do something obvious and predictable, if you repeat an idea you’ve already used before, then you’d better have some sort of big twist to make it fresh. Movie 15 does not have this. It does an admirable job in spite of that flaw, but it’s a pretty serious flaw.

Second, the visuals are bland and unimpressive. The point of this movie is that Goku and Frieza are going to have a rematch of their epic showdown on Namek. I just went back in my archives and pulled up a still from the Frieza Saga, and it looks ten times cooler than anything in the movie. They were fighting on an exploding planet, surrounded by red skies, lightning, molten lava, and tornadoes. Movie 15 boasts the same guys, supposedly more powerful than ever, but they fight like they’re in a video game, and the background is just this dismal cloudy sky. They had 23 years to figure out how to raise the stakes, and all they could come up with was making Frieza yellow and Goku blue.

Third, everyone acts like an idiot in this movie. Like I said, we’ve done this dance before, but everyone just repeats the same mistakes and forgets that characters can do things that they’ve done in the past. Sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s an honest flub, or a deliberate callback to classic DBZ. All I know is that I remember how it went the first time, and you’d think the characters would too, since they lived it.

Now, in spite of those issues, this film does a pretty decent job working with what it has. It’s not nearly as bad as Movies 10 and 11, which commit these same three sins and puts the main characters on the sidelines. But it’s a step down from Movie 14, and around the same time, Dragon Ball Super was starting up on Japanese TV, and that show was just adapting the movies for the first 32 episodes, so I was pretty displeased with the state of the franchise in 2015.

All right, let’s get started. The movie opens in hell, which is pretty interesting, because up until now we’ve only ever seen Toei’s version of DBZ Hell. There’s a lot of inconsistencies, like whether or not you get to keep your physical body, and whether or not hell is even that bad a place to be. Since Toriyama wrote this thing, I have to assume this is his official version of DBZ’s Hell. Conveniently, we find that it’s got plenty of layers to it, including a scary looking realm full of bats, an ocean full of Pokemon fish, and underneath all of that we have an idyllic meadow with pink trees.

This is where Frieza’s being kept, and he just has to hang from the tree in some sort of testicle-looking thing. There’s angels and fairies and a stuffed animal marching band, and it’s pretty cute, but I can see where you’d get sick of it after a while.

And Frieza’s been here for a while. This movie is set in the year Age 779, and Frieza was killed by Future Trunks in Age 764, so he’s on Year Fifteen of his infinity-year sentence. Has he been stuck in this particular torment for the entire time? Who knows? I don’t know much about Japanese afterlife mythology, but my understanding is that it’s like an even more complex version of Dante’s Inferno, where there’s all these different ordeals you have to suffer through for extraordinarily long periods of time. Maybe they let him out part of the time so he can get beat up by Pikkon and watch Goku beat Majin Buu.

One touch I appreciate is that he’s still in his Mecha-Frieza form. Does it make sense for him to retain his cybernetic parts when Trunks chopped him up into so many pieces? I don’t know, but Mecha-Frieza is my favorite Frieza, so I like the nod to that moment.

Meanwhile, Frieza’s private army somehow still exists after all these years. This movie calls it the “Frieza Force”, which I’m not too wild about, but I’ll run with it. I think it’s kind of stupid to keep calling it that so long after Frieza’s death, but maybe it’s a bluff to anyone who doesn’t know Frieza’s dead. At this point, all they have left is the name. One of Frieza’s administrators, Sorbet, has taken charge of the whole thing, and I guess he’s done a fairly impressive job if he’s kept it going this long, but all he’s really accomplished is to oversee the slow dissolution of Frieza’s holdings.

Funimation made a lot out of the idea of Frieza as an emperor, suggesting he was a head of state and the planets he conquered were part of a vast interstellar nation. I think in the dub there was a comment about how the Frieza Force used to control like 70% of the known universe, but none of that’s in the Japanese version. The original premise of Frieza is that he just has a bunch of guys fighting his battles for him, and he buys and sells planets to finance all the wine and spaceships he goes through. I rather prefer that sort of aimlessness about his organization. If he were like a Roman Caesar, you could at least balance out his brutality with the semblance of authority he brings to his conquests. A Pax Friezae, if you will. But he’s not Diocletian, he’s a trust fund baby who just happens to be nigh invulnerable. He never cared what happened to anyone else, or how things would run after he was gone.

Anyway, Sorbet just doesn’t have the manpower to hold their territory, and all he can do is pull his soldiers out when uprisings get too intense. His only recourse is to wish Frieza back to life with the Dragon Balls, except he can’t find the Namekians’ new homeworld. There’s Dragon Balls on Earth, except that’s where all the Super Saiyans live, so it’s dangerous. But today, he’s decided there’s no other way. To be on the safe side, he leads an away team with just himself and his aid, Tagoma. That way there’s less chance of them being noticed by the ki-sensitive fighters on the planet.

Sigh... this is why I hate the fucking Frieza Force right here. It’s the same old spaceships, same old uniforms, same old plans. Their shuttlecraft just looks like their regular ship, only smaller. Frieza’s been dead for fifteen years, and after all this time, their biggest idea is to try to bring back LOWARD FUREEEZA SAWMA. If that was such a hot idea, then why did he get killed in the first place?

What annoys me is that there’s probably an interesting explanation for Sorbet’s strategy. You’d think he would be happier with Frieza gone. He runs this whole outfit, and even if their domain is smaller than it was under Frieza, it belongs to him, so he’s richer and more powerful than he’s ever been. But maybe he just can’t appreciate that, and he liked it better when he was a middle-manager for a big shot like Frieza. But that never gets explored in the movie. Sorbet just acts like he’s wishing back Frieza because he’s supposed to.

Anyway, it would be risky to try to go through Bulma to get the Dragon Balls, but Emperor Pilaf has a Dragon Radar of his own, so they strongarm him instead. I wonder where he got that thing. General Copper from the Red Ribbon Army had one that was never seen again, so maybe they stole it from him?

Meanwhile, here’s baby Pan. I thought Pan’s appearance in these later movies conflicted with the final three episodes of DBZ, but maybe not. The dub said she was three, but the subs said she was four. And those last three episodes took place in Age 784, while this movie shows her being newly born in Age 779, just five years earlier. So Pan could still be four years old when she fought Wild Tiger, and her birthday just hadn’t come along yet.

Anyway, Piccolo’s keeping an eye on her while her parents are shopping.

Then the sky gets dark, and Gohan and Piccolo know that someone’s wishing on the Dragon Balls, but they don’t know who or why. Oh, by the way, there’s a big statue of Mr. Satan here, and that’s his only appearance in this movie.

So Sorbet makes his big wish to have a resurrection... of F. Which stands for “Frieza.”

Just like the title of this cartoon!

But Shenron explains that it would be kind of dumb to do that. This was the thing I never understood when this movie was first announced. During the Frieza Saga, Shenron was used to wish back everyone killed by Frieza and his men, and Kami said that this would only work for those who had died within the past year. The implication being that Shenron can’t revive people who have been dead for a really long time.

But Toriyama seems to have taken that into account here. Shenron explains that he can revive Frieza, even after fifteen years, but he can’t restore all the damage to his body.

This leads to a quick flashback of Trunks killing him way back when. I’m glad they included this, since it’s worth explaining just how Frieza died in the first place. Trunks chopped him into pieces, then blasted the pieces. Apparently, after all this time, Shenron can only undo the blasting and the dying, but not the chopping.

However, the medical technology used by the Frieza Force has advanced somewhat since the Namek Saga, so Tagoma believes they could finish the job of putting Frieza back together. Sorbet decides it’s worth a shot, so we’re off to the races.

So Shenron plats along, and a bunch of Frieza chunks fall to the ground. I like the sound effects they make when they land.

Creepily, the pieces try to gather together again. I don’t know if this is Shenron’s power trying and failing to complete the resurrection, of if this is some function of Mecha-Frieza’s cybernetics. Either way, it doesn’t work.

But the pieces are all still alive, which is siiiick. Frieza’s eye even opens and looks at them, suggesting that he’s somehow still conscious in this state. See, this movie still has some cool stuff in it.

Then Shenron asks Sorbet what he wants for his second wish, and Sorbet had no idea that he would get more than one. He considers wishing back King Cold, but before he can decide...

... Shu wishes for cash, and gets it. Sorbet’s angry about this, but he has to hurry up and return to the ship before the Z-Fighters find him. The funny thing is that Shenron leaves after this second wish is granted, but in the Dragon Ball Super version, he grants a third wish, and Mai uses that one too. This is why I’ve spent the last 16 years confused over whether Buu-era Shenron grants two wishes or three. Apparently, the deal is that it’s three, unless you use one to wish a lot of people back to life at the same time. Then it’s two. So did Toriyama goof, or was the wish to bring back Frieza hard enough that it counts as two wishes? It doesn’t matter much, since Movies 10, 13, and 14 all played fast and loose with Shenron as well.

So now they have to load all the Frieza chunks into a big garbage can and haul them back to their ship.

They almost forget a piece, but Pilaf saves it for them. I wonder what would have happened if they left that eye behind?

So then they heal the pieces in their medical machine. I don’t know how this was supposed to work, but I assume they needed someone to stitch the pieces together, then they loaded him in the tank for a while, and then they had to take him out again, dress him up in his uniform, and put him back in to cure a while longer. Also, they have Japanese punk band Maximum the Hormone playing on the stereo the whole time they do this.

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“F” is a pretty good song, and I’m glad they put it in this movie, but I’d probably like it more if I liked Frieza more. The story goes that Akira Toriyama heard this song, probably because the band wrote it as a tribute to his character, and the song inspired him to create the story in this movie.

Anyway, Frieza breaks out of the tank and splashes green crap everywhere because he’s such a drama queen.

Sorbet explains everything that’s happened, and Frieza seems mostly bemused by it all. He’s displeased that he had to wait in hell for so long, but at least he’s out. Sorbet mentions that they plan to wish back King Cold next, but Frieza tells them not to bother, since he apparently doesn’t like his dad that much. This should be the tip to these idiots that this scheme will get them all killed.

Frieza kills a guy just to see how his skills are holding up, and he declares his intent to take revenge on the two Super Saiyans who defeated him. Remember, he still owes Goku for beating him up on Namek, but Trunks killed him before he could get to that point. And that’s my main problem with all of this. We already did a Frieza comeback, and it was Mecha-Frieza invading Earth in the Trunks Saga. He miraculously survived Namek, his soldiers spent months putting him back together, and then the very first thing he wanted to do was go to Earth and kill Super Saiyans. Does any of this sound familiar?

Besides that episode, we had several other stories that repeated the same theme. Movies 5 and 6 were basically the same idea, but with Frieza’s brother as a stand-in for Frieza himself. Episode 195 of the anime had Frieza come back as part of a revolut in hell. Movie 12 had Frieza come back, only to get killed again by Gohan. Dragon Ball GT had Frieza come back and fight Goku. I think Toriyama’s attitude is that he didn’t write those stories, so they don’t count, but it doesn’t change the fact that the audience still saw all of those. By the time this movie came along, “Frieza comes back for revenge” had been done several times.

Tagoma points out that maybe we shouldn’t rush back to Earth and get wiped out in a hopeless battle. Again. He suggests that it might be wiser to focus on rebuilding the Frieza Force, but Frieza kills him for his impudence, along with several other flunkies who just happened to be nearby.

At least Frieza has a reason for wanting to start with revenge. As far as he’s concerned, the Frieza Force can’t rebuild to its former glory, not if they have to hide from the Super Saiyans the whole time. Sorbet points out that Goku’s even stronger than he was before, citing his defeat of Majin Buu. Amazingly, Frieza’s heard of Majin Buu, since his father once told him that he should never mess with Buu or Beerus.

But this doesn’t worry Frieza much. He figured Goku would become stronger, and he thinks he can as well. Frieza was born with this unnaturally incredible power that he has, so he’s never needed to train or improve his strength. But now, he thinks that if he does train, he can surpass Goku after about four months. This is basically the Dragon Ball equivalent of “Why doesn’t Bluto eat some spinach and beat the hell out of Popeye?”

Here’s what blows my mind. In the subs, Frieza estimates that he’ll reach a power level of 1.3 million. I’m amazed that they’d even cite a power level this late in the franchise, let alone a number that low. Frieza claimed to be at one million in his second form, so I think everyone agrees that we passed 1,300,000 a long time ago. Hell, there aren’t any scouters able to measure that high anyway.

Seriously, is this official canon? It has to be right? Toriyama wrote that line himself. Is he saying eveyone from Second-form Frieza to Golden Frieza ranges from 1 million to 1.3 million? So like, Perfect Cell would be 1.1 million, I guess, and Majin Buu’s 1.2? That’s wild. I kind of like it.

What I don’t like is that it’s a little convenient that Frieza can catch up to Goku so easily. It took Gokue fifteen years to reach the level he’s at in this movie, and Frieza manages to tie him in just four months? If it was that easy, why didn’t he just do pushups for a week before he came to Earth the last time? He could have wiped out Trunks in an instant.

Moving on, a few months later, Jaco the Intergalactic Patrolman arrives on Earth to warn Bulma that Frieza is coming to Earth with a thousand soldiers.

I won’t get into Jaco’s whole deal, because I still haven’t read his manga yet, but baiscally he was friends with Bulma’s older sister back in the day, and Tights told him that Bulma knows the Super Saiyan who beat Frieza. The problem is that Goku and Vegeta aren’t on Earth right now, because they’re training with Whis on Beerus’ world. Bulma can contact Whis by holding up delicious food and calling out to him, but she doesn’t know if he’s listening. Also, Jaco waited until an hour before Frieza’s arrival to say anything, so now Bulma has to scramble to alert the others.

Here’s some bank robbers. I like this bit, because in the dub, they say “We’re as rich as rich guys!”

There’s just one problem...

Krillin’s a cop.

Then Bulma calls him and tells him the bad news. I feel like somewhere in the dub, Krillin observed that Majin Buu and Gohan could at least buy them some time, but then it turned out Buu was asleep the whole time, which was why he didn’t show up in this movie. I must be thinking of the DBS version. This is why I’m not big on Buu as a good guy, by the way. They have this insanely powerful good guy on their team, and then they never do anything with him. He slept through this crisis and the Tournament of Power, and I didn’t see him in the Broly movie either.

Anyway, Frieza killed Krillin the last time they met, but Krillin’s got big brass balls, so the first thing he does is suit up to fight his punk ass. 18 offers to go in his place, but he wants her to protect their kid while he’s gone.

Also, he asks her to shave his head, so he’ll look even cooler for this.

To be honest, I liked Krillin’s hairstyle in this movie, but yeah, bald Krillin is the way to go.

As he flies off into the face of certain doom, his big brass balls clanking as he goes, 18 thinks about how cool he is. Get you a lady who admires you half as much as 18 admires Krillin.

As Frieza returns to Earth, he goes over some details with Sorbet. In particular, no one could find the Super Saiyan who actually killed Frieza, and Sorbet speculates that he may have moved to some other planet or died while Frieza was in hell. Of course we know that Future Trunks returned to his own timeline, but Frieza doesn’t and never will. This loose end doesn’t seem to bother him much, and I don’t think that makes sense. Yes, from a dramatic standpoint, he ought to be more concerned about avenging his loss to Goku, but Trunks was the one to kill him, and I feel like Frieza doesn’t spend nearly enough time in this movie thinking about his own mortality.

Sorbet points out that even if Frieza kills Goku, he could just be wished back to life like Frieza was, right? But Frieza plans to destroy the Earth along with Goku, thereby eliminating the Dragon Balls and Earth’s hell. For some reason, Frieza seems to think that Earth has it’s own particular version of hell, and the only reason he ended up in that meadow of fairies is because he happened to die on that planet. So I guess he thinks that if he blows up the Earth, that hell will cease to exist as well? How does he know that?

Is that why he’s not worried about dying again? Does he think if he dies someplace else, he’ll end up in a more favorable afterlife? What happens if you die in outer space? What sort of hell is Tagoma in right now?

At any rate, Frieza thinks he has all the angles worked out, and he checks to make sure Sorbet is prepared for his “emergency plan” in case things don’t work out. This is as close as we ever get to any sort of character development for Frieza here. The last time he went to Earth, he didn’t have a plan B, and now he does.

Meanwhile, Goku is training with Vegeta and Whis, just as Bulma said. Recall that Whis is even stronger than Beerus, who dominated the boys in the last movie. So Whis can fight them both at once without any trouble at all.

But their training wakes up Beerus, so they have to explain how they pay Whis for his lessons with tasty food from Earth. Beerus is annoyed that Whis would eat this stuff without him but he’s awake now, so he can have some of the pizza they brought over.

Meanwhile, Frieza’s ship lands on Earth, and a bunch of his goons come out.

Then he blows up North City, which he calls his way of saying hello.

So it’s up to the Z-Fighters to hold the line until Goku and Vegeta check Whis’s voice mail. Unfortunately, they’re kind of light on guys. We have Piccolo, Tien, and Krillin, and Gohan’s here, but he hasn’t kept up with his training. That’s why he wore a tracksuit to this party, because he couldn’t find his gi after all this time. Tien told Chiaotzu and Yamcha to stay out of it, since this fight would be too much for them. Okay, but why? Frieza will blow up the Earth if he wins, so what difference does it make if they stay out of this? At least if they show up they can help.

On the other hand, Krillin brought Master Roshi along, He can’t even fly! Somehow, everyone involved in making this show decided that Roshi is cooler than Yamcha, which is stone cold, 100% false. Master Roshi belongs in jail, and it doesn’t even need to be a fancy jail with a roof because he can’t fly out anyway.

Then Bulma shows up with Jaco to tell the others that she couldn’t raise Goku and Vegeta. Also, she wants Jaco to help, even though he only planned to pass along the message and GTFO. Bulma trash-talks Frieza, because she figures they still have the upper hand. After all, Gohan’s strong enough to kill Frieza, right? But Gohan explains to her that Frieza’s much stronger than he was 15 years ago, so none of them stand a chance this time around.

She asks Frieza to wait for Goku, so he agrees to hold off for ten more seconds, and then he sics his army on the Z-Fighters. I bet she wishes she had told Goten and Trunks about this rumble.

People talk about this part as the highlight of the movie, and it’s definitely one of the better parts. It’s certainly fresher,since we normally don’t see six or seven guys battling a whole army like this. Also, I like the approach of limiting the cast to a manageable number. I think it’s tactically unwise to leave Yamcha, Gotenks, Buu, and Chiaotzu out of this battle, but leaving them out of the movie is worth it, if it gives Tien a chance to shine for a moment. I’m not saying I like Tien better than the others, but we’re in a situation now where they can’t all share the spotlight, so if we have to pick one, let’s make that decision and run with it, and hope Yamcha gets a turn in a later film.

The problem I have with a fight like this is that they have all these extras floating around in the background of almost every scene, so it’s like Piccolo will do some cool spot with five or six bad guys, while fifty more just sort of stand there and watch. The only explanation I can come up with is that the Z-Fighters are moving so fast that most of the bad guys simply cannot react fast enough to keep up.

For example, you have this scene, where Gohan zips through a whole bunch of guys and takes them all out while they look like they’re standing still. Also, it’s pointed out several times that the Frieza Force isn’t nearly as strong or as well-disciplined as they used to be. Hell, the next movie makes a plot point out of how hard it is for them to recruit good fighters.

Even Jaco makes these guys look like geeks, and he’s a comic relief guy.

But he’s clever, like when he tricks the bad guys into getting eaten by a giant fish. How did he know this thing lived on Earth?

At this point, Sisami enters the battle, and he’s at least strong enough to give Piccolo a hard time.

Also, his shorts are a size too small, but his slutty uniform is his only distinguishing feature, really.

But Gohan steps in and turns Super Saiyan to take him out. Not sure that was a smart play, since they’re trying to buy time for Goku to arrive. A drawn out battle with Piccolo might have been just the thing they needed. But I suspect this scene was intended to introduce the Super Saiyan concept to the audience.

To wit, Sorbet is horrified by how easily his best warrior went down, but Frieza isn’t surprised at all, since he’s the only one on his side who’s seen Super Saiyans in action. He didn’t know Gohan could turn into one, but it’s the same diff.

This blue guy tries to apologize to Frieza for their defeat, but Frieza blows them all up. I’m just pointing him out because this guy was voiced by Team Four Star’s Scott Frrerichs, which still blows my mind to this day. Also, for some reason, I thought he played Sisima--Shisami, Sashimi... the red horny guy.

Everyone agrees that they stand no chance against Frieza as he is now, and Frieza takes out Gohan first just to emphasize the point. I guess this is his meta-revenge for Movie 12.

Piccolo has to use a ki technique to restart Gohan’s heart, and a senzu bean helas him after that, but they only have one left, so that won’t last them much longer.

Finally, Whis checks his messages and Goku and Vegeta hear about Frieza. Whis can take them back to Earth, but it’s a 35-minute trip, so it’s up to Goku’s Instant Transmission.

All right, let’s get on with this. Frieza insists that he’s learned from their last fight, and he starts out with his “final” form, except it’s not his final form anymore, because he has a new one, so right off we see that he really hasn’t learned anything. He wants Goku to turn Super Saiyan, but Goku doesn’t need to, and they fight like this for a while. Does this really make sense. Frieza came here for revenge, so why is he bothering to play-fight like this?

Eventually Vegeta gets so bored with this part of the battle that he jumps in and starts attacking Goku. Frieza mistakes this for a show of loyalty to him, but in fact Vegeta’s just sick of Goku milking his turn.

They agree to put all their cards on the table, so Goku reveals his strongest form, which he calls a combination of classic Super Saiyan and the Super Saiyan God form he used in the last movie. This eventually came to be known as “Super Saiyan Blue”, because duh, but for marketing purposes it’s still officially called “Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan” or “SSGSS” for short. I have no idea who thought that was a good name for this.

So Frieza shows Goku his new form, which is just his “final” form with a different color scheme. He says he “settled” on this color, implying that he could have made it look different if he wanted to. I like that idea, because it goes along with my contention that the Xenoverse games should let you customize transforms along with your character. If you want your guy to turn into a Super Saiyan Purple, you should be able to, or if you want your Frieza Race guy to have a Crimson form instead of Golden, you should get to have that too.

On the other hand, this is fucking stupid. It’s the same fight from 1990, except the characters are different colors. This is the sort of thing critics make fun of DBZ for, and Toriyama did it unironically. I mean, I get it, Super Saiyan 3 is just SSJ1 with longer hair and no eyebrows, but it’s the way the character is used in the story that sells the form as being more powerful.

The problem here is that both guys have new forms at the same time and they’re supposed to be stronger than almost every other character we’ve seen before. And yet this fight doesn’t look all that different from what they were doing a few minutes ago, before they transformed.

On top of that, we have these really shitty CGI animations that look like they were taken out of a PS3 game. I mean that literally, because when I watched this movie, I noticed it right away, because the way the characters move looks exactly like they do in the games I play all the time. I didn’t mind it so much on the first viewing, but now that I’m looking at screencaps of it, it just looks really awkward and bad. It’s fine in the games, because it’s interactive, and I can control what’s happening. But in a movie, it doesn’t work at all, because Goku has this blank expression on his face the whole time. Also, there’s no physics on the tails of his belt. He’s rushing Frieza here but they’re just hanging at his hip like he’s standing still.

Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? These shots aren’t even that long, and they don’t look that complicated, so I don’t understand why they didn’t just go ahead and use traditional animation. I mean, the Frieza soldiers from earlier were rendered this way too, and I get that, because there were literally a thousand of them, and they wanted to have hordes of them milling about in the background. but this is the main hero and villain in the forefront of the action. If the entire movie looked like this, I wouldn’t have a problem with it at all, really. It’s a “contract with the audience” thing. If the whole movie is CGI or 2D animation, we can accept the visuals we’re given, but once you start switching media unexpectedly, it becomes very jarring.

Then Beerus and Whis finally arrive to collect the dessert Bulma offered them. Wait, he said it would take 35 minutes to get here. Have Goku and Frieza been fighting for 35 minutes?

I get the joke here, that you’ve got this interplanetary grudge match playing out nearby, and these two dorks are more interested in eating ice cream, but it sort of undermines what little tension there was to this story. When Res F was first announced, lots of fans joked that Frieza would find himself completely outmatched by the Z-Fighters. Goten could kill him by himself. But Toriyama introduced Golden Frieza to get around that, which means at this point, Frieza has leapfrogged Cell and Majin Buu to become the strongest villain again, to the point where he might rival Beerus if he put his mind to it. Frieza’s a big deal again, except there doesn’t seem to be much concern over it. Everyone seems confident that Goku can handle it, and if he can’t then Vegeta can, and if things really got out of hand, Whis could kill everyone in one hit.

At one point, Frieza finally notices Beerus and asks him if he’s going to interfere in the battle, but Beerus insists that he’s just here for dessert, and he’s totally neutral in this.

And Frieza seems to think he’s winning, but then Goku informs him that this Golden Frieza form has a weakness. Frieza was so thrilled to have the new form that he rushed to Earth as soon as he discovered it, but he hasn’t learned to regulate his power at this level, so he’s going to tire out in a few minutes. Goku should know, because he ran into the same problem with Super Saiyan 3 a few years back, and the same thing happened to Frieza when he fought at 100% of his full power because FRIEZA HASN’T LEARNED A DAMN THING SINCE THE LAST TIME THEY FOUGHT. This movie is just so dumb. The fact that Goku has to explain this to him again is absurd.

Frieza thinks Goku’s bluffing, but this time the CGI battle shifts into Goku’s favor, and Frieza can’t hit the block button fast enough or break Goku’s combos.

Then they fight underwater, which is just as murky and grey as the sky, only there’s bubbles down here.

Finally, we reach the point where Frieza’s punches don’t even work, and Goku pokes him in the tittly and punches him.

So Goku tells him to get out of here, just like he did on Namek, and Frieza throws a fit, just like he did on Namek. This fight is the worst. I mean, it’s not Gohan vs. Dabura levels of bad, but at least Gohan and Dabura did original stuff while they were shitting the bed.

Then Frieza signals Sorbet while he’s crying, and Sorbet shoots Goku with a ray gun to take him out of the fight.

And this is dumb too, because it’s the same mistake Goku made on Namek, twice. Only this time, Frieza actually got the drop on him, which is dumb because he’s basically doing the same thing Piccolo did to Goku at the 23rd World Tournamnet. Whis even warned Goku about this overconfidence earlier in the movie. I mean, it was forteshadowing, which ought to be okay, except when everything else in this movie is a retread of Frieza’s other appearances, foreshadowing is kind of a bad move.

But Goku’s not the only dumbass in this movie. Frieza decides not to kill Goku while he has the chance, and instead invites Vegeta to do it for him. He even offers to make Vegeta his second-in-command, although his entire Frieza Force is dead except for Sorbet. Geets declines, which isn’t exactly a shock, since he’s hated Frieza for destroying Planet Vegeta. You know, the thing that happened forty-odd years ago that Frieza probably should considered before asking Vegeta to rejoin his team?

Instead, Vegeta tells Krillin to give Goku a senzu bean, and when Frieza tries to stop him, Vegeta deflects his attack so that it kills Sorbet instead.

In return, Vegeta demands to take over the fight, now that we’ve come to his favorite part, the “Frieza-murdering” part. Frieza mocks him for thinking he stands a chance, but Vegeta turns Super Saiyan Blue himself, and now Frieza realizes he’s totally screwed. I guess he figured Goku would be this strong, but he never imagined he’d have to fight Vegeta at the same level at the same time.

This is my favorite part of the movie, where Vegeta informs him that he learned to go Super Saiyan shortly after Frieza’s death. Then again, why didn’t Frieza know about any of this? Sorbet had been spying on the Earth for years, and he seemed to know just about everything else about what was going on. Why didn’t he tell Frieza that Vegeta was living on Earth and that he was about as strong as Goku? “Hey, look, I know you think you can handle Goku with this Golden form, but just understand that you’ll probably be fighting Vegeta at the same time, and he’ll be about the same level.”

For that matter, why did Frieza invade without checking to make sure Goku was on the planet first?

So it looks like everything’s coming up Vegeta in this movie, although this part of the fight is anticlimactic, becuase Goku had already softned Frieza up for him.

But then it turns out that Vegeta swallowed a bottle of idiot pills too, because when Frieza’s Golden Form wears off, he gets desperate and blows up the Earth to escape. You know, just like he did on Namek. At least I can sort of excuse Vegeta for this, because he wasn’t there the last time Frieza pulled this trick, except that Vegeta should have seen it coming, because he pulled the same stunt himself when he first came to Earth.

So yeah, the Earth explodes, again, which just makes the Dragon Ball Wiki that much harder to read, because they count both explosions as dates of death for every character. Goten died in Age 774 and Age 779 and whenever else he would have died naturally.

But all the main characters who were watching he fight are okay, because they were standing next to Beerus and Whis, who made a force field to protect them. Vegeta’s dead, though, because he suffocated when the planet blew. On the other hand, Frieza would have survived, because he doesn’t need air. On top of that, he took out the Dragon Balls, so there’s no way to undo this with a wish.

Then Whis reminds Goku that he has the power to rewind time by three minutes. Yeah, I forgot about this. Earlier, when Beerus woke up from his nap, Whis mentions how Beerus has a nasty habit of destroying things accidentally, so Whis has the power to rewind time and undo it if Beerus does anything especially stupid.

So now Goku has a chance to kill Frieza properly, which he should have just done in the first place.

KILLER QUEEN DAISAN NO BAKUDEN BITES THE DUST

So Frieza’s dead again... until they bring him back for the Tournament of Power, because for some reason fans want him to keep coming back for more of this crap.

Vegeta is understandably upset, because he thinks Goku just jumped in for no reason, but he calms down once he finds out Frieza was about to blow up the planet.

Bulma promises a big feast for Whis and Beerus for helping them, but she adds that it’ll have to wait for them to wish back everyone who died when Frieza destroyed North City. Well, that’ll take six months, because the Dragon Balls haven’t reset since the last wish, right?

Then Goku proposes that he can Vegeta actually practice working together, in case they need to really join forces next time. Vegeta’s like “nuts to that” and Goku’s like “same here”, so at least they have that much common ground.

youtube

The end credits are accompanied by “Z no Chikai” or “Oath of Z”, by Momoiro Clover Z. This song rules, and it’s really much better than Movie 15 deserves.

In the post credits sequence, Frieza finds himself right back where he started, and the angels and fairies welcome him back to hell. Looks like Tagoma had the right idea after all, huh?

And I guess that about sums it up. I feel like this movie wasted an opportunity to do something truly interesting with Frieza. You have a guy who was invincible, then he got killed and spent 15 years in hell, only to get wished back to life by his desperate troops. This could have been a chance for him to ponder his own mortality and the futility of power and revenge. What good does it really do to kill Goku when they both know what awaits them on the other side? What difference does it make to escape the afterlife when you know you’ll just have to go back eventually? You could try to have Frieza answer those questions and have him become a much more desperate and complex villain. Instead, Toriyama just went right back to what he had already written in the Trunks Saga.

Sadly, this looks like the final entry under the Dragon Ball Z brand. Now that Dragon Ball Super is a thing, it looks like any new Dragon Ball stories, like the new Broly movie, will be produced under the DBS branding. I kind of wish DBZ could have closed out on a better note than this.

On the other hand, that Broly movie was a lot better, and even if it was officially titled “Dragon Ball Super: Broly”, I find that it’s hard for the Z to drop out of the public lexicon. When I went to see it in January, the theater had it listed as “Dragon Ball Z: Super Broly.” Old habits die hard, I guess. Maybe one of these years, we’ll see the end of the Z, but not yet.

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kaz3313 · 6 years ago

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Hell is in the Ink Machine

Chapter 3 and not close to being done (this story was originally going to be 5 chapters lol)

@a-rae-of-sunshine thank you for all the support you've given to me and for inspiring to create this!

Also I added a few Ocs that I just meant them to be a one time use kind but I might actually expand on them (and make versions of them out of this AU!)

As always TW violence/gore

(PS I live for reblogs and comments and tags and you can just key smash and it will warm my heart. So thanks to all those that have done any of those things or all of them I appreciate it)

Screaming is never a good sign especially in accordance with Henry’s new violent tendencies.

Wally closes his eyes hearing the screech. He’d made it to a vent and was planning on leaving the place through it. Henry made no attempt to join him, just aimlessly walked away, and for once Wally felt he’d be able to escape.

But that scream...it sounds a lot like Miss. Campbell...how could he leave her if she is in trouble? Wally is the only one Henry wouldn’t attack outright he should stay with him to keep him in line.

Though why should he? He’s barely twenty-three and he shouldn’t have to babysit a man who in an instant could kill.

The moral dilemma sits in his mind like a stomach full of food poisoning. Susie is one of the nicest people he knew; the two would gossip, eat, and even go shopping together (Both Shawn and Sammy poked fun at him for it. Wearing clothes he knew he could never afford was always fun to him it felt like an adult game of dress up). When she was new to being a voice actress at the studio Wally would always encourage her. The two even did funny voices together to pass the time on slow days (though Wally half the time only exaggerated his voice). He left Tom and Alison without a second thought and even if neither were hurt he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Wally sighs but his mind is already made up.

Sammy’s vision still is sinking in darkness when he manages to crawl to his office. His body yells in protest as he forces himself to his knees scrambling in one of his drawers. He pulls out an extra pair of pants and shirt he saves in case of an ink leak. Instead of a usual new stain of ink on the old clothes splotches of red show on the grey fabric. His fingers tremble as he attempts to tie both articles to his chest.

The loss of blood finally makes a bigger impact as the world wobbles but Sammy tries to counter it with rhythmic breathing and sheer will. Luckily he’s stubborn enough to stay conscious as he scoots his way to the office phone. He dials the police department’s number but nothing-not even dial tone- answers his call. Suddenly he realizes the lines dead and drops the phone emitting a small whimpering noise. Out of all the days-

His half broken thoughts are interrupted by the scream echoing through the studio. The voice seems so familiar but Sammy can’t place it. Not that he needs to he sends silent empathy to whatever poor soul is caught in line with the axe and the man behind it.

He swallows again not knowing what to do. He assumes either everyone in the art department is dead or unaffected; Henry doesn’t seem to have any in betweens. If there is alive people he could do his best to explain but...well the dead have to use Not only that but Sammy isn’t too sure how long he'll last with the pain he’s forced to endure. Stairs seem unpleasant and time consuming at the moment.

Now he can always travel downward but the chance of encountering Henry again was high. Then again it would be a better chance to find alive people then the animation department.

The exit is in the animation department though he could escape, collapse in the road, and someone may be a kind Samaritan to bring him to the hospital. If he leaves though the studio will be,without warning or mercy, in the hands of Henry.

He closes his eyes to better consideration unknowingly he’d fall under the ever present threat of a restless sleep.

Shawn hears the scream as clear as day and as much as he’d love to run to be hero he fears he’s too late. Last he knew Susie was I an unsuspecting storage room with shelves to block the door but based on the scream and a gut feeling Shawn guesses she didn’t stay there long.

He stares at his desk knowing the selfishness of grabbing his stuff in case he needed to leave quickly rather than looking and helping people out beforehand. He reasons with himself that he can’t help anyone if he’s dead as well as reasons that if he has no money he might as well be dead.

A familiar whistle fills his ears as his head pokes up seeing the wandering man in the department. Shawn recognizes him instantly.

Henry; Head to toe he’s covered in dried blood and from lack of apparent wounds Shawn guesses it it’s not his own. He whistles the theme of the cartoon and Shawn remembers he’s the whistler for the theme. That fact does little for him at the moment of the approaching murderer. He quickly shoves himself beneath his desk searching for anything that could be of use to defend himself. All he can find is a sewing needle that he holds like one would hold a pocket knife.

Henry walks slowly and begins to mess with the machines that fill the room. He stuffs then takes out plushies with a mad sort of daze in his eyes. Henry flips switches on and flips them off before turning to the time clock. He repeatedly punches in a time card while muttering phrases under his breath. Although these actions could just seem a little odd Shawn is terrified.

After a few minutes of Henry doing virtually nothing he walks over to Shawn’s desk the Irish man still under. Henry stands staring at Shawn but makes no move toward him. Almost like he can’t see. Shawn breathes out; whatever is in this man’s vision it definitely wasn’t him.

“Don’t even notice me, do ya? You’re in ya own world, ain’t ya? Well at least I’m not there,” Shawn states and Henry tilts his head to the side. “Can ya here me? Do you know where the noise coming fr-“ Shawn feels a pit develop in his stomach as Henry raises his hand. His father always told him not keeping his mouth shut would kill him; Shawn never thought much about the warning.

Henry places a hand on the other’s head and waits. Minutes pass and Shawn feels sweat form on his face. Something more had to happen right? The man is just waiting to kill him? Is he just drawing it out.

Nothing.

Henry leaves; Shawn realizes his opportunity missed but can’t seem to blame himself. There's something otherworldly about the animator. Something that terrifies Shawn even more than anything else.

Screaming and running is a very stereotypical thing for ladies to do but for once Susie decides that it’s not the time to be a groundbreaking women. No, all Susie wants to do is scream and run and cry into Sammy and be held and-

With all her heart she just wants to be saved and out of this hell. Quickly she finds a large room and barricades herself in breathing heavily. The room she noticies has another glass window and it looks about the same as the last one; why is everything down here so confusing?She sinks to the floor holding her legs to her chest and burying her head in her knees.

“Woah, Boris don’t scare me like that,” Wally jumps just hearing the older man’s voice. He manages a smile out of noticing the twisted irony. He would love to know why he’s always referred to as Boris but hey as long as “You found a weapon buddy?” Henry plucks the pipe Wally has out of his hands.

“That- it’s not yours Henry,” but he just swings it around no desire to give the new item up. “Please, you been calling me buddy and everything. I’ll keep it safe for you,” Even with asking nothing happens and Henry ventures on. Not wanting to leave him too his own devices Wally follows along.

Henry feels sick to his stomach as he grips the pipe tighter in his hand. The world around him a blend of cartoons and reality. His mind is muddled with memories but a sinking feeling in his chest told him something is off. Something off with the studio closing down, with him leaving, and the ink machine. He couldn’t get his timeline straight but he presses forward hoping an answer would provide itself at the end of his adventure.

His adventure full of ink and horrors no one should live through. At least Boris has joined him; otherwise it would be a rather lonely road.

“Where are you?” These question drifted to his head a few times previously. He was in the hellish Joey Drew Studio in the toy department.

“What are you doing?” Obviously trying to get out; too bad all the falling just lead to his spiral downward.

“Why are you attacking?” The ink creatures were attacking him! He has to defend himself.

“Why have you let your mind succumb to the Ink Machine?” This thought leaves him in a curious wonder. It’s an odd scary thought but something in him resonates with him...but not for long.

They encountered a room full of dead Borises; how horrific.

Wally is forced to see the horrific beginning of the massacre. As soon as he walks in the room full of people he knows bad things are to come. None of them suspected a thing. Wally tries to shout out, a desperate attempt to give them any warning but it was too late. Henry is already coming toward them so without a word Wally swiftly leaves.

Screaming, crying, begging, chaos that Wally decides he won’t experience experience again. Even if his own mind berates that he’s a coward, at least he’s going to live. A guilty conscious is better than no concious.

Daisy Patch has worked, in the toy department, at Joey Drew Studios for a little over month. It isn’t bad job to say the least nice people, paid enough to provide for herself, and all she has to do is make dolls sometimes even getting the benefit of taking one home when Shawn botches the smiles on them. Her own small smile creeps on her lips thinking of the Irish man. She already knew he wouldn’t be interested in her, well he wasn’t interested in any gal, but a girl could dream. Dream she did and keep all the dolls he gave to her. Daisy always reminded herself that he gave the plushies to everyone, not everyone but anyone who was halfway decent, but the thrill of getting a gift from a crush always gave her the blushes. Or when he greeted her, or when he asked for her to bring some message to another. or when she much delivered his love letters written in Irish to Wally; she read them like they were her own but who wouldn’t?

Speaking of Wally she just saw him dart out of the room when- her eyes widen as she notices the man covered in blood in the doorway. Her coworker,Stephan, stands up about to say something to the man but he strikes him with a pipe. Stephan shouts and the rest of the toymakers begin to panic. Daisy can’t bring herself to leave her seat and watches the mass of bodies run around like chicken with their heads cut off. Blood man is meticulously striking them down with his blunt tool.

Worker after worker falls; he beats them to unconsciousness and hits them a few more times, whether good measure or insanity Daisy isn't sure. Blood fell to the floor and many people along with it.

Stephan, who's closest to her, lays on the floor unmoving. Blood runs down his face and is matted in his blond hair. Daisy scoots from her chair to the floor beside him.

"Stephan?" She gently pulls at her friend's clothes but he doesn't stirr. He won't stir will he?

Daisy stares at the dead man pondering morality and wondering why she hadn't screamed from this morbid sight. Why she fails to cry; instead she sifts her fingers through his hair not noticing that all her other coworkers have fallen. She doesn't even notice the murderer right behind her. Not until with the pipe connects with the back of her head.

#batim #bendy and the ink machine #graphic descriptions of violence #implied character death #tw murder #tw death #henry stein #wally franks #shawn flynn #susie campbell #sammy lawrence #ocs

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mst3kproject · 6 years ago

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Kronos

This movie has lots to offer, including but not limited to Jeff Morrow from This Island Earth, John Emery from Rocketship XM, Morris Ankrum from Beginning of the End, and a stupid cartoon robot. These star in a movie with a complex plot and a lot to say, and nothing like the talent required to say it. There’s also George O’Hanlon, who was best-known as the voice of George Jetson, although you don’t really notice it in the character he plays here.

After the opening credits play over Ominous Fifties March Music that I’m sure I’ve heard in some other movie before, we begin with some guy getting zapped by a flying saucer at the side of the road. Rather than being abducted and probed, however, he is instead taken over by alien control and drives to a government lab, where he passes the alien influence on to director Dr. Eliot and then immediately drops dead.

Not far away, a couple of nerds named Les and Arnie are playing with their building-spanning supercomputer SUSIE (Synchro Unifying Sinometric Integrating Equitensor – and why, no, that doesn’t make sense) when they notice what they think is an asteroid on its way to collide with the Earth! The government launches some stock-footage nukes to destroy it, but they only make it mad. It lands in the ocean off the coast of Mexico, and Les and Arnie, with Les’ girlfriend Vera, rush to investigate. There they find a giant robot stomping out of the sea, devouring energy and growing bigger and bigger!

There’s all sorts of riffable stuff in Kronos. The first actual shot in the movie after the credits is a blinking cartoon flying saucer zipping across a starfield, to the accompaniment of theremin music. There’s the fact that none of the scientists seem to notice that their ‘asteroid’ is oddly UFO-shaped and has blinking lights on it. The Mexican couple the scientists are staying with on the beach don’t seem to speak any English and I find myself imagining that they have no idea who these white guys are or why they’re in their house. The actors in the helicopter that is definitely flying in the air and not sitting on a soundstage somewhere.

And the robot. Dear lord, the robot. It looks like a five-year-old’s destroy-bot built out of old-fashioned wooden blocks. There’s an inaccurate drawing in a newspaper that’s much more impressive than the robot itself… I think it was probably concept art that never quite made it to the screen. It walks by raising two legs at a time straight up and then putting them straight down again, which looks astoundingly stupid even as a cartoon and makes an amusing squeaky-dog-toy sound.

At the same time, a couple of the things they do with the robot are kind of neat. I do like that it’s not humanoid. If you really squint you can see it as having a head and a body, but even if that’s the case the form has been stripped down to the barest, most symbolic essentials. It makes the thing seem more alien, and I like the way it pulls its ‘head’ and ‘legs’ in like a turtle to brace for attack. There’s also some shots, when the characters are supposedly flying around it in a helicopter, that actually do make it look huge – but it still looks small, as if it’s a tiny toy blown up to building size, like something out of Ant-Man or Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Since it’s a device that transforms energy into its own mass, maybe it was originally very small.

There are several things that go on at once in Kronos. Most of the time we’re watching Les, Arnie, and Vera in Mexico, wandering around watching with somber expressions as the robot destroys stuff. Every so often, though, we cut back to Dr. Eliot, who is in a hospital with the alien influence still controlling him. Episodes of electroshock therapy intermittently bring him back to himself, allowing him to try to warn the world, but soon the alien takes over again. As well as controlling Dr. Eliot, it is controlling Kronos, directing it to power plants and nuclear stockpiles. During a moment of lucidity, Eliot explains to Les that the robot was built by a civilization that is almost out of power, and has therefore sent these things across the cosmos to collect more.

Now, to an astrophysicist this really wouldn’t make sense – the most powerful objects in the universe are things like black holes. Harness even a small one of those, and you’d never need to worry about running out of energy again. But this movie isn’t about practicalities, it’s about energy use. The beings who created Kronos are suffering from an energy crisis that may lead to their own extinction, and Dr. Eliot warns Les that humanity may someday end up the same way.

The movie isn’t subtle about this moral: it’s spoken blatantly by the character best placed to understand it. It would have been nice to see the movie go into it a little more, discussing some of the ways in which our own civilization wastes energy. Instead, the characters spent much of their time roughing it in a shack on the beach in Mexico. Another way to make the point would be to give the possessed Dr. Eliot a fixation on conserving energy, or conversely, by consuming it, for example by having all the lights on even when he’s sleeping. This is not done, either.

Slightly more gentle is the point about what humans do with the energy we produce: we destroy stuff, primarily by building atom bombs. In the world of the movie, this has two undesirable side effects. First of all, it makes us easy prey for Kronos: the possessed Dr. Eliot recommends to the government that they nuke the robot, but it just turns that energy back into mass and heads north for the nuclear stockpile at Hueneme. Second, it means that we may also destroy ourselves by too much energy instead of by too little.

This point is rather undercut by the ending, in which the scientists manage to ‘reverse the polarity’ in the robot so that all the mass it has built up turns back into energy… right in the middle of Los Angeles. By now Kronos has devoured half the power plants in Mexico and a literal nuclear explosion, so shouldn’t that have burned California to a crisp? Maybe they only had one stock footage nuclear explosion and didn’t want to use it twice.

The vital clue to defeating Kronos comes from Dr. Eliot, temporarily de-possessed by an electric shock. I spent most of this movie honestly confused what the nameless alien needs with Dr. Eliot. It gets a list of power plants from him, but since it evidently found out who and where he was without needing any Earthlings to tell it, I’m not sure why that was essential. It also gets him to recommend nuking Kronos, but somebody would have done that sooner or later, too. Nor am I sure why electrocution puts it to sleep and lets Dr. Eliot reassert control for a while. If this is a creature that feeds on electrical energy, as Eliot himself says, shouldn’t zapping it make it stronger?

The scene in which the alien leaves Dr. Eliot’s body is also rather strange. He falls on the floor, and a liquid seems to run out of his head to the wall where the computer is installed, where it sparks and sizzles. Does this mean the alien is dead? But we close on one of those ominous moments where the characters are worrying that more robots may come. So did it just return to the flying saucer? What happened to that flying saucer anyway? Is it still on the seafloor? Still in space? Did it transform into Kronos?

The alien in Dr. Eliot is never really justified, and is therefore a transparent plot device. Two more things that are transparently unnecessary are Arnie and Vera. The former is comic relief who talks about how his computer is his girlfriend, and the latter is a love interest who’s there to sigh whenever Les chooses work over spending time with her. Neither of them really do anything but orbit around Les. He needs people to interact with, obviously, but the script doesn’t allow either of them to contribute anything. This is meant to establish that Les is a genius, but it makes it seem like he lets these people hang around out of mere indulgence. Even the giant computer, while it does a few bits of calculating, doesn’t have nearly a big enough role to justify giving it a name.

I get the impression that the people who made Kronos had some big ideas but rushed them into production without working them through. Much more could have been done with the themes of energy and consumption, and the characters could have been treated far better. The robot doesn’t appear until the movie is half-over, which leaves the early scenes feeling dull and bloated. Even so, it seems like everybody’s hearts were in it. Fifties sci-fi movies come a lot worse than Kronos, and it would have made for a classic episode of MST3K.

I should warn you, if you want to watch this movie (and there is a version on YouTube), Dr. Eliot and his psychiatrist do discuss the idea of suicide. This made me expect Dr. Eliot to try to kill himself in a lucid moment in order to get rid of the alien, but that never happens, so the topic was entirely gratuitous.

#mst3k #reviews #kronos #episodes that never were #tw: suicide #50s

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twitchesandstitches · 6 years ago

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Disney Growth AU

One of my holdovers from my old blog was what I called the Disney Growth AU, and I’m bringing it back! Mostly for the odd snippet or story post here or that, and partly as a component in some of my other AUs, since those mentions might not make a whole lot of sense without this AU’s particulars.

And also since it would fill a bit silly reposting older stories or edits of them without giving everyone the background of this AU, and anything i happen to think of. No sense posting stories and just throwing you into it blind, even if you’re familiar with it. It would just feel strange!

The Disney Growth AU is a combination of all the various disney properties (or at least the ones that fit into the Disney animated canon, with the various cartoons as having a more nebulous connection but are present), centering largely around the Disney heroines and major lady characters of their respective franchises and sub-series, with a focus on magically induced transformations and a particular emphasis on hyper curves (gigantic boobs, hips and butt, with variance for individual body types and personality-appropriate looks, and with more monster-y/human divergent form styles) and giantess.

In that later case, the princesses and other heroines are absolutely massive, with none of the usual limits i typically have in my usual AUs or giantess scenarios for the sake of tiny/giant interaction; they are a mile high at minimum when not deliberately suppressing their powers, and when they’re fully powered up, the giant Disney girls can be as big as entire planets, if not solar systems… and even larger than that, with their proportions scaling up to match.

Of note, this AU is broadly split into two continuities of a kind; one where this AU is its own thing and its relation to other fic ideas isn’t important, and one where it is a sub-set of Crossthicc as an important aspect of the multiverse, and the distinction has to do with which aspect I’m playing up.

Both versions heavily emphasize magic, and the basic premise is the same: the heroines, or princesses (whether they are actually royalty or not, such as in the case of Mulan or Moana; the title is a catch-all for ‘important heroine’ as a consequence of their actions) are living embodiments of raw magic, both conduits for the stuff of the soul and transformation, and generating it in the same way that stars create elements and light. This causes them to transform over time, growing bigger and curvier, and eventually take on more individual, inhuman alterations to reflect their raw power and coolness.

Their villains are, of course, around and up to No Good, and in between slice of life shenanigans, pranks, and attempts to simply live their lives while also being benign giant goddesses, they might thwart the plans of their equally gigantic villainesses and foes, who have transformed to become Big and Thicc too, and seek to impose absolute dominance over all existence.

In the former case where its a standalone AU, the setting is more mundane… as much as they CAN be, in the context. They live on a single version of Earth, with a different history to justify how a Powhatan diplomat, ancient Chinese war icon, Germanic fairy tale, and outright mythical figures can all exist at the same time. Effectively, they have been given a Kingdom Hearts style lighter and softer treatment, with ancient countries still existing in the modern day and altering history in subtle ways for this all to make some kind of internal sense. (For instance, modern America may not exist; instead you have the original countries of the First Nations expanded and industrialized and existing as a broad union similar to modern America,) Something similar applies to outright fictional countries or landmasses, with the world altered so that their likely geographic locations makes some kind of sense. Agrabah, for example, is a bit of a tricky case.

In this case, all the princesses are modern women, but have existed in many incarnations throughout history as great peacekeepers, champions of justice, mighty warriors, and paragons of virtue to teach others. In relatively recent times, their actions ensured a massive burst of magic that permanently brought raw, wild and Good magic back to the world, imbuing them all with it and making them living generators of it, awakening new power and making them into new goddesses, with great stature to match. Apart from now being potentially planet-sized and warping local space via their raw power just to fit into the world - packing mountain mass into a very small area - their lives are still mundane, and much of their time is spent adjusting to their new power and finding things to do with it.

Something similar would apply with the villains, most obviously Maleficent and a cadre of other villainesses following her; while not as powerful as the heroines, they are nonetheless massive and powerful goddesses… just not on the same level as the heroines, but they have the benefit of a massive horde of spooky monsters and less imposing foes that are mighty in their collective dangerous-ness.

Periodically, Marvel characters may make appearances (especially the more cosmic ones, such as Thor); assume this is a meeting of the multiverse kind of deal, with the other Earth perhaps being merged into the Disney one and the superheroes making do, with the new supervillains coming into conflict with the villains. Alternatively; emphasizing the Awesome of the heroine and supporting characters to serve roughly the same purpose as having legit superheroes here. For instance, consider Maui as being a Thor analogue by emphasizing his myth-appropriate raw strength and heroic deeds. Guy pulls up oceans during fishing trips!

(That said, the Marvel Growth AU from my old blog is now its entirely own thing, combined with some ideas I have for a DC one as well, as well as BNHA/My Hero Academia, as a cohesive general superhero setting. The tone of Disney Growth AU is more mundane slice of life that just so happens to take place for giant hero ladies dealing with their newfound powers, and just a hint of epic fantasy.)

Generally speaking, i will probably tag fics and thoughts specifically meant for this AU as JUST ‘disney growth AU’, for the sake of simplicity, without additional specifications.

The other version of this AU is explicitly intended to work with Crossthicc, and relies on the multiverse aspect and incorporates more obvious elements from the different versions of the characters in question. In this version, the princesses are explicitly goddesses; not just powerful heroines made mighty, but actual goddesses, and have been for some time.

They are, in-universe, widely worshiped across the multiverse under many different names and culturally relevant touchstones, but when one person pays homage to a raven-haired personification of Good Governance, and another gives their love to a goddess of orphans and adoption, it is still Snow White they worship. Consequently, they are enormously powerful and have a lot of potential domains under their influence, and mostly dwell upon a vast plane of magic that dwells beyond the material realm. This huge coterminous plane is effectively an elemental plane of magic, perhaps the metaphysical engine that keeps the World Tree of the mortal universes going, supporting that delicate soap bubble that is so easy to pop… and constantly on guard from the dreadful things trying to do just that.

It is possible that even this realm is but a reflection of their true divine power, a somewhat accessible an diminished echo of their full nature, but it's so mighty that they cannot properly exist in the mundane plane without wrecking it, instead manifesting as avatars. Depends on the need of the scenario, honestly.

The MILF fleet of crossthicc comes across these goddesses during their travels, earning their favor and interest, and a few of them send mortal avatars to stay with the fleet and experience the mortal universe, far weaker than their true selves but still shockingly powerful, and members of the God Squad that is a club of benign deities that for whatever reason are endorsing the MILF fleet.

Their home planea is much more mythic in tone, with an explicitly magitech vibe; imagine epic D&D style fantasy in an infinite universe of soaring mountains and mighty landscapes, with magically empowered technology serving the role of more mundane technological advances, and magic being absolutely universal. Take your grandest high fantasy ideas, ramp them up a 100 times, and mash them into the tropes of nobility and honor being actual forces of nature, and you have the basic approach! Here, mighty heroes fight grand monsters… and usually it's the goddesses doing this, the mightiest beings in all the cosmos, and fighting manifestations of entropy and cosmic non-existence. Their villains here are embodiments of forces like that, perhaps linked to the mysterious monsters the mortal plane is plagued with.

In this realm, mighty brave warriors ride on fearsome dragons to confront demon kings, mountains get up and walk to wrestle with one another, and the geography of the plane can shift at a moment’s notice when the currents of magic are strong enough. IT is in fact a source of magic, and does not conform to mundane notions of space-time. The plane is infinite, continuing forever, with ever more wild landscapes dissolving into chaotic potential and randomized impossibility as you get from civilization: mountains made of teeth, seas turning into boiling oil and crystalize laughter… and it gets weirder from there.

The goddess-heroines are so powerful that they stabilize this realm with their mere existence, growing more powerful and drinking deeply of the magic they generate and are empowered by, growing stronger still, and in doing so, they also reinforce the mortal realms, which is given life by this plane in some fashion. But the universes of mortals have been badly wounded, and the same applies to the princess’ realms too, and horrors pour out from them, and they must constantly quell those in hope of helping to bring peace, in some fashion, to all realms.

It is also important to note that given the different scale, they are far larger than in my usual giant lady fare; since space is more of a polite suggestion, this causes few problems, and they aren’t just planet sized. They are often universe-sized, if not even bigger, though they can adjust local space to fit them if they please, and even if they don’t, their presence causes no damage if they don’t wish it; their steps could reduce worlds to powder, but not a single living thing will be bothered by them stepping down.

(It is also possible that this realm is a primordial birthplace of souls, or an afterlife; people who perish come here, and after they work through their remaining problems, they pass on to another afterlife and perhaps later reincarnation. IT is the fate of evil beings to be reduced to food for the princesses, becoming monsters to be slain that reflect their evil hearts… or both. Some few mortal villains retain their willpower and become meances the princesses strive to defeat, and these are the villains of Disney canon that otherwise don’t fit the motif for the villainesses. Something similar might apply for the heroes and prince-types, but in terms of heroic spirits or great priests/followers of the goddesses in life. They came to love their goddesses so much, they remain by their sides forevermore. The goddesses themselves, or their bodies, may also constitute an afterlife as well.)

One more note; while this applies to the more mundane AU too, it's more prevalent here: the princesses here aren’t just based on their Disney interpretation but have elements from their other fictional interpretations too. Those who are public domain fairy tail characters, such as Snow White, have attributes from those stories as well as their many different stories incorporated in some fashion. Those who are historical figures will have attributes from real life applied more freely; for instance, in both AUs, Pocahontas is more like her real life analogue (apart from being the same age she is in the movie), down to that not being her actual name. There may also be liberal Fables (the comic series) invoked here, because i just plain like that series.

However, this AU is still intended to be mostly epic fantasy and high adventure, and should have a more or less light tone; thus, exceptionally dark or grim elements (such as those rooted in what may be the Grimm storyteller’s potential issues with women) will be ignored outright, reinterpreted, or applied in-universe as faulty propaganda.

There may also be a lot of mythological elements brought in. For example, the Seven Dwarves of Snow White are her adoptive fathers, in a sense, and are mostly Norse mythology style dwarves (and possibly svartalfar/dark elves, depending on whim), with their disney names, Doc and Sleepy and such, as pet names Snow had for them. For instance, Brok and Sindri are definitely there; Grumpy and Doc, respectively.

Effectively, in whichever AU, all the Disney cartoons are canon, with the ones more akin to Disney’s fairy tale vibes being more closely tied. More gray areas will be subject to weirdness; for instance, the series of Kim Possible might either be as more or less mundane figures in the magical plane of the goddesses, or as characters from a universe of superheroes who happen to have a connection to an appropriate goddess.

#/#//#///#////#/////#Disney Growth AU #AUs #queued #i might also work RWBY in there somehow but idk how yet

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resmarted · 5 years ago

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i am golden embers from the oldest burnt out flame that somehow manages to stay alive well past the party. i don’t know how we got here, but i’m drawing little cartoon skulls on the back of your hand and ruminating on death culture and our historical fascination with it, not to mention this modern day obsession. wake up, i’m worrying at you. i know, it’s been a long time since we’ve talked like this, in this house with all the windows open for anyone to be able to look in and see. me, a shameless blubbering idiot and you, an omnipresent interdimensional being that changes names and faces depending on what time of day it is. i wish we could be friends like normal and not these shapeshifting spaces that descend and disappear before they can even get a chance to form. i’m out of practice, but shall we? i am the cutest boy in school, (get over it, i just am.) and you are my closest friend. at least you were when we were kids, before puberty made things weird and gender norms influenced the politics of our relationship. back when life was endless summers in a treehouse and i was the only dude in your life besides your dad, and then even more significantly when he left. we were such pure vessels of innocence, or at least i was, you were more of a terrorist in an young girl’s body. we spend our days playing with your barbies, one of many secrets we take to our graves, and we have intricate plot lines for each of their relationships. i make scenery for them out of legos, a lawn to lounge on and a clunky castle to sleep, they even had a hot tub. we have an entire world that nobody knows about and eleven thousand inside jokes based within it, this galactic sandbox that goes on for miles where nobody can hurt us. in seventh grade two boys from our school come over and spot the dolls laying in the corner of the treehouse and they give me hell for it, and i mean it gets really bad. they carelessly pull apart their tiny clothes, some of them handmade by your aunt, and hold them up like torches made of naked plastic flesh. it is startling and i know fighting them will only make it worse, will only turn them into even bigger deviants, so i don’t provoke them any further and take all necessary precaution to keep it from happening again. admittedly, this is where shit starts to hit the fan with us. i tell you the next day you can’t bring them in here anymore, and that this is not a storage facility for your girl stuff, to which you respond with a look only the demon possessed child that you are could invoke. we don’t talk for what turns out to be the longest week of my life, and i try to compromise because i miss you terribly and all of our stories, how are all of our characters (ripped directly from episodes of 90210) even doing right now? i ask what if we just, yknow, not use the dolls anymore, but still play the game. we finally come to an agreement and spend the rest of the year lounging around telling stories in the air, playing without the physical evidence, just these long sagas that never get written down or repeated or acted out with dolls of any kind.

you’re growing up faster than i am, your body is developing first and you got a nice set of big naturals before we even get to high school. and what am i supposed to do, not notice? i try not to. i try to act like it’s totally not making me feel any type of way when you start to experiment with makeup and of course i’m not jealous of the boy band members you secretly fawn over when no one from school is around to make fun of you. what do all these meatheads got that i don’t got? besides muscles and money and matching wardrobes with dope harmony skills. i magically take up guitar the next summer and whenever you start to talk about another hollywood hunk i am just like so anyway, here’s wonderwall. you never seem to catch on, never showing to have the slightest clue, and over time our stories become fewer and farther between because you’ve got new daydreams now. you’ve grown tired of the dramatics in our pretend romances and you want a real one. you want jake who has a mustache and works at gadzooks in the mall or bryan who is always hogging the pinball machine at skate country. i call him a dweebmunch and you just drift further away from me. by high school we barely know each other, you can hardly even remember i exist as you join all these teams and squads and athletic girl gangs, and i still haven’t lost my baby fat. you’re dating marcus who plays defense on our school’s football team and at some point the new normal becomes this sort of familiar strangers vibe where we barely acknowledge each other when passing in the halls but wave to each other’s families when passing them in real life. we don’t actually talk again until prom night when you show up drunkenly to my backyard like the last four years never even happened. your mascara is running and your dress is torn, your pretty hairdo that took hours at the salon that day is all disheveled, and you hold a bottle of wine to your lips like it’s water. you are barely able to steady yourself long enough to climb up into the treehouse where you find me choking on a hit of weed with a look of terror like i’ve just seen a ghost. technically i have. you slur your words and ask me for a hit and i’m terrified of you, just take whatever you want, you monstrous beauty queen. you tell me that you hate your boyfriend but don’t go into detail, that prom sucks and your friends suck and everyone is fake and nobody will even be able to outgrow this version of themselves because their parents never did, and at one point you’re holding up the bottle yelling with burgundy stained teeth that nobody in this town cares about anything other than football. which is true, it’s just one of those towns where our whole identity is based on touchdowns and score boards because that’s all anybody’s got to live for. you curl up in a corner, finding a couple of your old dolls safe and secure and you smile at me, saying you thought they weren’t allowed up here anymore. i don’t even look back at you when stating that obviously abby and olivia don’t count since they are notorious rule breakers. you hold one up to sit atop my shoulder and talk in one of your stupid voices, requesting a live rendition of wonderwall. don’t be silly, i’m eighteen now, i’m too cool for oasis and have upgraded to strictly radiohead, the bends album specifically. we start to argue like we are ten all over again when you insist i am just being pretentious because i can’t acknowledge the obvious golden child that is karma police, and without thinking i retort that i’d rather be pretentious than pretend i’m dumb just to fit in with those who are. you knock me square in the jaw with your trusty right hook and i land harder than you expected. you’re not even concerned, and why would you be? you’re three sheets to the wind and screaming things like you think i wanted things to end up this way? you gave up first, if you would have just been a real friend to me none of this ever would have happened. you’re crying hysterically now like all good prom nights end, and i am rubbing the sore spot on my face.

i don’t fight you though, i know better. instead i just bundle you up and put you to bed like the little trainwreck that you are, and in the morning when the birds chirp and the sun fills this tiny space, you can’t remember how you got here or why your head is pounding so hard now. i am sitting up reading a burroughs novel because i’m cultured and mysterious now, with a thermos of coffee already waiting for you. you lean over to puke outside and it lands twenty feet below, and you hate when i tell everyone this story because i always say that’s the part where i knew i loved you. but it’s true, i had never been more certain of anything in my life than when i saw you hurling out this red river across the yard and thought how nice it was to have you back around, if even for a very delirious moment in a state of great confusion. we get breakfast at a diner we used to fantasize about being old enough to go to without our parents someday, and somehow that manages to be the beginning of the first of many best summers of our lives. now we’re old enough to go all kinds of places without our parents, and it’s still very novel for us to hold hands in public and be out past curfew. somehow we manage to stay these wild eyed teenagers no matter how old we get, and i wouldn’t want to grow young with anyone else.

#long reads

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