#these comics are making my drawing skills skyrocket

[heavyheavycream]

Will there be more of that food festival comic? -heart eyes--

yeah i was going to do a part 2 but then this happened:

so yeah things are taking are bit more time to figure out, but i'm hell bent on getting my vision through- even if it means drawing a car from every concevable angle :'>

also before anyone gets their hopes up, when i say "p💖rn" i mean it in the tamest, vanillaest way possible-

[jade-everstone]

Art Goals for 2024

This post is a mirror of a post on my website (here)

It’s a few days into the new year. While the feelings of uncertainty from 2023 still lingers, I set myself a handful of goals going forward to give myself some sense of direction, 8 in fact, though I’ll mostly be focusing on my art-related goals here.

Technical improvement isn’t a major focus this year (I mean, I just did 4+ years of that lol). I think it’s time to focus on more external factors of art, like gaining some stability, pouring more focus into doing it part-time while maintaining the personal side. As well as strengthening skills not directly related to illustration. It’s something that’s fell to the wayside until senior year of college, and now that I’m out of school I think at least for this year I can let these factors overtake direct art improvement.

-

Finish PC-Mania!

My short webseries! This was launched as part of my senior thesis, but has had multiple hiccups in terms of production. This year I want to smooth out those bumps & be able to wrap it up by the end of this year. The reason I say by the end of this year? My drafts are roughly 40 pages, and even with my other plans for this year I’ll have more time on my hands to focus on comics. So I’m pretty confident I can wrap it up regardless of how it happens.

-

Launch Support Streams related to my art

This one was inevitable. Even if it’s a goal of part time vs. full time, I want to be able to do art as a career. Meaning I have to have some form of income to be able to continue doing it comfortably. This one will need time to sort-out though since there are hurtles; Notably my overall lack of reach, as well as inflation times.

Lack of reach is likely due to struggling with consistent posting (even reposts & WIPs slip by me), not wanting to completely bend my practices to algorithms, and migrating between platforms. So that one may be harder to sort-out while keeping it fair to my self & my limits. Inflation is tricky. Art is a luxury afterall, and when the cost of living has skyrocketed across the board I don’t blame people for choosing food and rent over art. I’m likely going to keep it to one-time payments & tip jars indefinitely since I don’t want to launch subscriptions in a time where people looking to cancel them to make ends meet. Plus, with my issues with consistent posting, I’m not in a position to be doing subscription-based works & would also like to better sort out my boundaries before even considering (ie: I don’t want anything that could potentially lead to people feeling entitled to my attention).

I still want to try pushing for commissions & freelance, even with a lack of success over the past few years. Though I also want to look more into online shops & tabling since last year, all of the money I made from art was from IRL sales. So it’s a matter finding those events that are original-art & zine friendly (I’m uninterested in monetizing fanart beyond commissions. Fanart to me = Personal art & I’d like to keep it that way). As well as researching more into online shops as a means to get things out there outside of the convention space.

-

Better-establish OC Lore & Worlds

This one is likely gonna be harder than it sounds. Because on one hand I am excited about these project, but I’ve always struggled with getting ideas-to-paper. While I don’t want to claim much since I don’t have an official diagnosis as of writing, I’m very sure I have ADHD meaning getting down schedules, and getting projects done before I jump to another interest has been a long-term struggle. It’s part of what hampered PC-Mania & reach, and hampers my ability to put more info about the projects I’m working on & are excited about (hell last year, I think I ended up drawing Io way more than art for said projects…).

I don’t know if there’s any ���ADHD-friendly guides to maintaining projects before you forget them” out there (I’d argue most project guides & tips I’ve seen don’t consider it), so I’m pretty sure I’m on my own in this department. Currently I’m thinking about leveraging my website for this since it’s meant to be a work archive as is, and even if progress is inconsistent it’ll at least give me a central hub to link back to.

If you are curious, the main one I want to establish is Doverhill! It’s where a PC-Mania takes place for reference, and it’s set in modern times in the fictional town of Doverhill MA. Perfectly normal, except for the occasional paranormal encounter. The main cast that has to deal with them are a group of friends & neighbors who live in an apartment complex together. Story-wise it’s an episodic comedy about the sheer absurdity that is life. Even if it’s not a hard world-building project, it deserves a central hub to link back to.

The other one I’m debating on is Fang and Iron, a dark-sci-fantasy world building project about demon-hunting androids. But I think it needs more time in the oven, and I don’t plan on making it a main focus for a long time.

-

Learn Blender for making assets & Blocking

I’ve thought about the other skills I’d like to strengthen & learn for future projects, notably writing skills, drawing mecha, desktop publishing software, and 3D. But I picked learning 3D, since I feel like this one will have a ton of versatility in terms of making references for myself. If you’re wondering using 3D assets for references is extremely common, especially within the world of comics where you need to re-draw backgrounds and props. So having knowledge on how to block out scenes in blender will help massively in the long run, especially when my schedule starts filling up again.

(now I just need to finish that donut)

-

Shorter Comic Project?

I’m considering this one optional, but if I can squeeze in another smaller 8-16pg comic or zine along the lines of 9:15 Slushie I’d like to. I have an Idea I want to do for it (an idea that existed before 9:15 slushie did!) so the next step is carving out time to make it happen

Those are my main art goals of 2024. For the other 3 main resolutions of mine, I’ll list a short summary of those instead:

Get a job alongside art (I’ll need it. Bills be upon me + even with help from family members, I’d like to transition into being self-sustaining & be able to front the costs for my supplies & projects going forward)

Get my Drivers License (Also needed, especially if I want to continue tabling & other hobbies, and for getting to whatever job I end up at)

Get better at IIDX (and by extension BMS) so I can say I suck at normal 7’s vs normal 4’s lol (my only “hobby” goal of this year. I’ve wanted to get into IIDX for a long time too, so since I’m planning on getting my license & income anyways, I’ll see if I can squeeze this one in)

[hannahhasafact]

Personal art ramblings below:

I always have a weird relationship with my art, but god waiting to hear about artist alley entry stuff truly makes the relationship weirder.

Because if I get in: That would be WILD, and CRAZY, and AMAZING and I would have a lot of work to do. And if I don’t get in… I don’t get in. My financial situation is not immensely changed by not being accepted into artist alley.

I’m at this point where I’m like: Hey, if you want to be able to sell your art, you have to create art you can sell. Why not work on creating art you can sell now?

And I have! I’ve been thinking more and more about dimensions of my art, what file types I’m using, what things I think would make people interested in buying. And it just puts this weird, “you have to be marketable/you have to become capital” energy on creating that feels weird.

A lot of my “art I desire to create” type of art is art I can’t sell. I make fanart for dnd shows that would definitely not be sellable at events. I make silly fan comics that wouldn’t print well. (And this isn’t about the legality of selling fanart, because that’s whole conversation that I have researched SO MUCH and literally took a class about in college.)

So I get stuck in this weird “make art that is marketable” vs “make art YOU want to make” mindset. And don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy making “marketable” art! But not as much as the “silly times” art I make. When I make “for fun” art, I can see it turns out better than my “marketable” art. Which is frustrating, but makes sense!

And a weird side to that- despite having a minuscule art following… I do believe I have the skill art wise to be able to sell just a little bit. Before my R*b*bble was suspended (for literally no reason, but I needed to close it anyways I guess?), I sold art. I sold art that honestly I think wasn’t that great. But I was able to sell a few things. And I think my skills have skyrocketed since selling art on that site. I’ve seen some art that has sold at conventions and thought, “Yeah. Skill wise, I think I could do this.” Granted, maybe that’s some false confidence, but like… I think I could do it. (Also two of the years I’ve applied for K-Con’s AA I was waitlisted? And last year I was on the “you’re within ten miles of the con, can you be ready to sell in two weeks?” Email list [I could not be ready in two weeks]. So… just saying.)

And what makes it weirder is that I don’t really want a full time art career. If anything, I would like to be able to have art be a part time thing for me. Do I want to sell art at events? Yes! But I also like having a reliable source of income, insurance, and I want to still enjoy creating. (which I know sometimes can be affect by those who are full time artists. Having a job in art is still that; a job.) But no matter what kind of “marketing” energy you put on art, it’s still going to affect the relationship you have with art. Not to mention, I’ve been wanting a new job for awhile, so drawing when I should be job searching puts a weird strain on things. Because yes, I’m working on making stuff to potentially sell, but I could be working on other aspects of career stuff. Job stuff is important! Creating art is important! Am I wasting time by working on art???

Not to mention my constant “I should be working on this I should be working on that I should be-“ etc mindset I live with that just gives me stress about existing. Because if I’m working on one thing, I’m not working on another aspect of my life that I need to improve on. Because my life is never at a satisfactory point, I always have to be working on making myself better somehow (but that’s a story for another day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Anyways. I love creating art. Creating art is stressful.

God I just want to know if I got in or not.

[mxttellion]

Politely asking for the 300 pages of Matt headcanons

they're not 300 pages (sadly) but it's the sequel to that hc posts i said i was gonna make a part 2 of

So

Lets GO

- Gets lost in his thoughts a lot. Sometimes you can find him silently staring at the void before being snapped out of it.

- Let's start off with one hc I literally thought about a few minutes ago lmao

The only "things" left from him being a vampire are the incredibly pale skin and the side powers: meaning super strength, super speed, enhanced senses, telepathy and mind control. NONE of them are useful to him in anyway let's be real here (especially mind control)

and not only that, his hyperactivity skyrockets the speed and agility related powers

- I guess this ties in with this sort of alternate future timeline i have in mind with my hcs? but well, Matt can be a very great liar and manipulator. And not-so secretly wishes to take over the world, mostly for fame and all that junk that comes afterwards. Yknow, people praising him for being an amazing leader. which leads him to keep the time machine from wtfuture hidden somewhere. And going by the comics? He probably built one if that got destroyed for any reasons.

- He drinks sometimes. He has stolen Tom's drinks more than once and surprisingly enough, he has a decent resistance to it. But he becomes even more chaotic when drunk lmao

-out of the 4, he's the one who openly expresses his feelings the most. It's pretty easy to understand what he's currently feeling. He's very expressive when it comes to facial expressions and talking, meaning he probably even gestures when speaking (italian matt real?) and of course, he mostly doesn't think before speaking. He swears like a sailor. He tries to keep some kind of "elegant" or "sophisticated" language but in reality he would create a new swear just for you. He also makes up words, and he's 100% convinced the word he said was right.

-He has probably tried to dye his hair in his teens. He failed miserably, and had to cut his hair. Speaking of teenage years, yes, he had an emo phase because I said so

-When it comes to love, he goes through DEEP denial. He would rather insult his crush than admitting that he loves someone else that isn't himself. But once the denial phase is gone, he becomes a clingy ass motherfucker and a huge sweetheart at the same time. Even thought it IS kind of difficult for him to express his love for someone fully. And might accidentally put his lover down when he's being vain once again. Hard times not gonna lie. Matt is usually the one coming up with stuff to do with his partner and in general, he comes up with stuff that the partner doesn't necessarily agree on doing.

- You CAN guess who Matt goes along best in the household, and also who can read him like a book. Just look at my blog ffs

- When he's upset or pissed, he just keeps his >:( face. He isn't led to tears easily, despite being extremely expressive.

-His memory is EXTREMELY bad. He keeps thousands of notes and phone alarms for everything, he has skipped a lot of appointments (even important ones) due to his awful short time and working memory.

-Matt's hair is naturally messy, like very messy. Only hair gel or cutting it can make it less messy. So yeah, when he keeps a mullet he has like an insane amount of gel.

-Going back on the manipulation stuff, Matt knows exactly what to say to break you. He remembers secrets and all that junk from his friends, he'd pull a "you would never do that, would you?" when he wants.

-Hobbies? film making. He made films canonically, he loves to experiment his skills and has TRIED to take a few classes there and there. He has tried drawing aswell, but it doesn't really stick. It's very complicated ngl- He's more headed towards creative hobbies, though. Has tried cooking, but he burnt the house. He also tried some fashion design stuff, following his mother's steps, but nope, none of that worked

-Family time once again!! His biological parents are divorced, and he's an only child, but with a lot of cousins there and there. His father (who i once called Harold in an old au of mine jdhsk) divorced with his biological mother shortly after the incident where Matt was dropped. He later remarried another woman, and Matt honestly considers her to be his actual mother. His parents are both really protective of their child and just want him to grow a pair at times. They've spoiled him to hell and back, but then one day decided "HEY how about YOU try to get some money and buy what you want YOURSELF"

That's,,, all i can think of rn and i'm sure I have some more that I don't remember right in this very moment, and i'll probably rememeber when i hit post ofc

[vkelleyart]

Dear Vanessa! I am forever in love with your art and it helped me through my depression back in spring, I am very grateful for it. There is something special about how you painting emotions, it makes me so soft and sentimental, but I can't figure (as a painting method) what exactly do you do - to pass them so truly and touching. I'm working on my drawing skills (I'm a beginner) and faces are my weak spot. If you can - can you give some tips on how get better at drawing them (faces and emotions)?

Oh wow. ��� I’m so touched to hear my artwork had a positive impact on you during such a tough time. Thank you for sharing something so personal with me, and I hope you’re feeling much better now!

As to drawing emotions, I’m so happy you think I do a decent job, because it’s something I work hard to improve on all the time. I could probably do a tutorial series on just this topic alone, but as the internet has loads of resources on drawing emotions already, I’ll try to expand a bit on what I do personally to push expressions into more subtle territory.

Let me just start by saying there’s nothing wrong with hunting down photographs and using them as references for painting expressions if you’re having trouble articulating an emotion. It is, however, easy to over-rely on them and—especially where illustration, sequential art, or animation are concerned—you run the risk of drawing a face that, because it’s a facsimile of a photo, might not have that living “spark” that comes of inhabiting a character from the inside and drawing “off-script.” And illustration needs to tell a story, not copy an expression.

1) Step into your character’s skin.

When I drew last Saturday’s scene from Wayward Son, I literally made every expression on the page as I was painting them, because the value of the scene was in the subtext, or things unspoken (i.e. Baz and Simon’s faces needed to do double-duty in communicating what was happening). Making the faces as I drew made a difference because, in wearing the expression myself, I could feel how the muscles in my face changed, and where my eyes, eyebrows, mouth, etc. were “storing emotion,” if that makes sense.

Let’s take Baz’s face in this panel:

Rainbow gives us a very brief description of what Baz looks like at this point: “His eyes are narrow and shadowed.” Naturally, I started there, but that’s not quite enough to visually convey what’s also happening here:

Baz is hiding his pain.

So what do we do when we are both in pain but trying to shield others from seeing it? When I tried that emotion on for size, I realized I wouldn’t make eye contact at all. My lips pursed a bit, as if to seal my mouth shut and prevent the pain from leaking out. My eyebrows furrowed, not quite in anger, but rather in resignation. Sitting in Baz’s skin, I realized I wouldn’t slouch either. These are all things that informed teeny adjustments to the sketch and helped back up Simon’s assessment that Baz was lying.

Here’s another:

We don’t get any description of Simon’s horror at seeing what has happened to Baz’s chest. What we get is a gruesome and graphic depiction of what Baz’s skin looks like and Simon’s italicized “Baz.”

It takes stepping into the character’s skin to see what his face would look like (and that would go for anyone who’s reading the book, let alone drawing from it). So I thought to myself, the person Simon loves most has been wounded in a way he’s never seen before. When I “tried on” that scenario, a hybrid expression took shape on my own face. My upperlip was slightly curled in horror. My eyebrows pulled in and up in fear. My eyes went wide, but stayed just a bit soft (because that’s the product of mixing shock with concern). And the end result is what you see above.

Sometimes I have a mirror handy for this sort of operation because emotions are complicated things to nail. But often it’s enough just to feel it and see if what I’m looking at on the screen or on paper is matching what I feel. If not, I have to reassess and see where certain lines can be pushed/pulled to capture what I am aiming for. Occasionally this strategy doesn’t work, but I will say that my success at nailing expressions skyrockets when I act it out myself. Lol

2) Build emotions from broken down gestures. If you are a beginner to drawing expressions, it helps to think of the face as an equation with components that add up to an emotion. Look at comics, cartoons, and other illustrations/art to see where certain gestures show up again and again, and use that exposure to build a vocabulary of features that you can mix and match to create some basic expressions.

For example:

(Forgive the crudeness of the above illustration. I’m cranking this out on my lunch break! Lol)

3) Experiment! Honestly the best way to get good at drawing emotions is to practice and play (and those are not mutually exclusive terms) with expressions. I started out studying the work of one of my all-time favorite animators, Glen Keane, because I always thought his characters looked so soulful. So I looked at his character sheets for Ariel, the Beast, Tarzan, etc. and tried my hand at duplicating them. It helped me learn that I often had to be more exaggerated with my expressions than I was naturally inclined to be if I wanted people to resonate with the emotion I was trying to convey on paper.

That’s all I’ve got for you today, but I hope this gave you a bit of insight into my personal process. Again there are LOADS of resources on the web if you even just type in the words “how to draw facial expressions,” but the above should help take you a bit further than the tutorials and establish a personal connection to the art that you produce.

Good luck, and if you feel so inclined, I hope you’ll share your creations!

[duels-of-infrno]

Writer: Y'know, considering a lot of minecraft ask blogs are coming back, the whole drawn ask-answering thing, the small comics of interaction between them, all of that? I guess I felt the need to say something to... well, all of them. You're all so freaking important to who I am today and you don't even know it.

I remember way back in the day, I hadn't known about this thing called RPing at all, my spelling was horrible even after spending months on minecraft servers getting grammar nazi-ed every 5 minutes and coming onto tumblr I found out my spelling was STILL in need of grammar nazi-ing as often as it had been when I first got on minecraft servers (every. Single. Thing. I said. Had something spelled wrong) but I benefited from it. No one made fun of me for it, they just corrected me and moved on.

I found the minecraft RP community by ACCIDENT, and community is the best word for it. Everyone knew everyone at least somewhat. I had a blog I made based off of my experiences in a minecraft server, and it just happened to fit perfectly into the minecraft rping scene. Heck, Infrno is only called Infrno because it was my screen name at the time!

But... I found a home with everyone. Artists who drew their characters used "Artist:" instead of words like muse and mun, and that got me to call myself Writer on here. The minecraft RP community was a haven for a weird kid like me, like so many of us. I made friends, fell in love, had my heart broken, and wrote a silly little accidentally created character named Infrno into one hell of a complex dude who has by all means taken on a life of his own. He started as literally just me in minecraft, and he evolved as I became a better story teller, and I only became a better story teller because of learning from EVERYONE in the minecraft community.

And that community, that home on the internet I found? That was held together far more than I knew, than likely any of us knew, by the ask blogs. Names like enderbro were known unanimously, tons of different artists of every skill level across the board interacted with eachother, letting their characters do so many interesting things that it was a gift to log into tumblr every day just to see what was happening.

Without tumblr, without minecraft, without the community that grew so inviting to some idiot who couldn't even write his native language properly... I never would have made my goal to become an Author. The day I took on the name Writer, I vowed to one day change it to Author, and that's a promise I keep to this day. A lot of personal issues slowed me down, but I saw so, so many artists go from silly little ask blogs with characters made far more out of love than skill end up so freaking skilled that the stuff they make blows my mind now. I can't draw, I don't have the time or patience to learn, but thanks to RPing for so many years and developing a love for creating a story, I'm going to follow in their footsteps and make something amazing. And then I'm gonna make something else amazing. And then another!

I know I'm not the only person who found a home back then, I know I'm not the only person who misses that home so much that even all these years later it still hurts sometimes, and I know there were a lot of family members that we lost along the way, but...

Thank you. Thank you so, so much, minecraft ask blogs. You were the foundation of my home and while I know this is probably something temporary once more, thank you for taking the time to come back and potentially serve as that foundation for someone else's home, and to show all those young artists and writers out there how unbelievably far they can take what they might only see as a hobby right now. You're all miracle workers, and you should now as much.

Special thanks to @endermanalbino , you weren't 100% consistent, but you were always there. I hope this new age of minecraft ask blogging makes your blog skyrocket in popularity. You've pretty effectively become my favorite one because of that, and I can't wait to see more Daster, but only if it's something you're still interested in

[popwasabi]

“The Other Guys” wants cops to go after the real criminals

Before director/writer Adam McKay pivoted into populist screed’s against capitalism and political corruption in films like “Vice” and “The Big Short” he was largely known as one of the many “dumb comedy” directors working in Hollywood.

In fact, with major productions such as “Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights,” and “Step Brothers” he could almost be billed as THE dumb comedy director or certainly THE Will Ferrell director at least.

(To a certain extent, THE John C. Reilly director too.)

Those movies are certainly divisive amongst some filmgoers, as you either fall into the “turn your brain off and laugh” category or the “this is pure nonsense” crowd. I’m somewhat in the middle on all of it but one McKay/Ferrell vehicle provided a bridge between the “dumb comedy” years and his more serious satires of American politics and that movie was 2010’s “The Other Guys.”

Billed as just another parody of buddy cop flicks, “The Other Guys” is a comedy that still holds up pretty well by today’s standards. Mark Wahlberg in many ways plays an unhinged caricature of every tough guy persona he has ever played in detective Hoitz and perhaps more brilliantly Ferrell, as detective Gamble, is allowed to be the straight man of the duo for change, finding humor in a more subdued performance. Together they form a kinetic duo that play hilariously well off each other in a film that is rarely dull from start to finish.

(Flawless logic here in the famous Tuna vs Lion debate)

“The Other Guys” takes some decent shots at the violent nature of cop culture from excessive police overreach in the film’s hilarious opening scene to cops’ shoot first ask questions later approach with detective Hoitz backstory involving shooting Dereck Jeter during game 7 of the World Series. In between more typical Ferrell comedy flare involving hot wives and ex-wives, hobo sexy orgies, and TLC references there’s a lot of pointed, tongue-in-cheek humor at the police that one can find great humor in.

It’s a descent satire of the cop movie and the culture around law enforcement on this alone but McKay’s real target isn’t the police so much as it is who the police aren’t going after.

(For the record, peacocks and cops, for that matter, don’t fly.)

2008 probably feels like eons ago to many of you at this point but it was the year I personally came of age. I had graduated high school, The Lakers were good again, “The Dark Knight” and “Iron Man” had just come out, I had hopes and dreams as I entered college at San Jose State and oh…the Great Recession had just started!

I’m not going to go into extreme detail here but our economy had it’s worse collapse since the Great Depression caused by the subprime mortgage crisis due to vast widespread failures in financial regulation, breakdowns in corporate governance, vast trading and over borrowing, housing bubbles bursting, and heads of businesses just vastly ill-equipped to handle their hubris in that moment.

Major businesses and banks were on the verge of collapsing and then at the last minute the US government passed a $700 billion, with a capital B, bailout to put them all back in the green.

Corporations like Bank of America, Citi Group, Morgan Stanley etc received between $10-$25 billion each for their struggles and were able to stay alive in the country’s ever worsening state. This was great, except 2.6 million average working-class people lost their jobs during this period, including my father.

By the way, a guy like Joseph Casano, an executive at AIG, got a $34 million bonus for helping lead companies such as his into the recession.

This is McKay’s real target in “The Other Guys.” The satirical cop humor is largely window dressing to draw audiences in to the theaters so that he can show all of them who the real criminals of this country are.

As the plot of the story starts to kick into full gear the more obvious culprits of a typical Hollywood cop movie are dismissed. Though Hoitz is convinced it’s more the usual cop movie style villains of “sex and drug traffickers” at first, Gamble slowly pieces together a plot of dastardly insider trading. What it ends up being is that the bad guy is really just a doofus hedge fund manager named David Ershon played comically by Steve Coogan who made one too many bad investments to bad people.

Ershon has put his people and the people he owes money to deeper into the red, not at all unlike the wealthy CEOs and bankers who messed up the country during the 2008 recession, and it has led him to take desperate action to get everyone’s money back. Ershon, of course, tries to get Hoitz and Gamble off his tale by bribing them in a variety of hilarious ways (one of the funnier sequences of the film) but eventually gets caught up with the SEC and those who prosecute white collar crime (who are unsurprisingly also in bed with the people he owes money to).

(Somehow, I don’t think this is far off from reality...)

Hoitz and Gamble continue on the case but find that taking on white collar crime is…complicated to say the least but most importantly ineffectual as detailed in this scene.

(Again, probably not far off from reality...)

The 2008 recession, wiped out millions of jobs, with rural parts of the country getting hit the hardest and in many ways still feeling the effects today. If you were a POC you were even more unlikely to not recover from the crash. Property values plummeted, student high education success rates dropped, opiod overdoses from “unemployment deaths” and many more awful things happened during this period of great economic distress.

And what happened to the folks largely responsible for causing this mess? They got a fat fucking payday and a dismissive finger wag largely by our own government.

“The Other Guys,” more or less, ends the same way. Despite putting away Ershon, the company he was swindling, who gambled their people’s money, was still bailed out by the US government. A real “happy ending” that is played as a dark, matter of fact, joke before the credits roll.

(Again, we laugh but how far off from reality is this really?...)

I graduated from college in 2013, tens of thousands in debt from student loans and trying to navigate a largely bereft job market where wages had largely not changed in as many years. In 2008 average rent cost about $850 a month, by 2013 it was $953, today in 2020 it’s $1,097. The average entry level salary (for a clerical/ office professional) between 2008 and 2018 went from $46,886 to $45,882 showing a decrease in value.

In 2008 the richest man in the world, Warren Buffet, was worth $64 billion. The richest man in 2020, Jeff Bezos, is worth $200 billion.

If the fact that Jeff Bezos is worth more than some countries on this planet doesn’t make you infuriated alone I don’t know what will.

Btw Buffet’s net worth increased as well to $79 billion himself, in case you think it’s “unfair” to compare him to Bezos.

Sometimes I think the reason people aren’t angrier about this worldwide is 1) a bunch of us think we are all one hard working day away from being filthy fucking rich ourselves, one of the many great lies of capitalism and 2) many of us don’t actually know just how big a BILLION dollars is, so here let me help you all out:

With COVID in 2020 we’re seeing it all happen again, just as it did in 2008. Record unemployment rates, small businesses closing, evictions skyrocketing because no one can pay rent and all we got for it was a $1,200 band-aid (assuming you did get yours). Meanwhile billionaire slugs like Bezos and Elon Musk saw their net worth rise sharply during this period, hell even the fucking Lakers got a $4.6 million dollar “small business” loan (though they did return it…only after getting caught…).

The highest sum of cash ever stolen from a bank was $18.1 million (equivalent to roughly $30.1 million now) in 1997. These are the people cops and other “loose cannons” in popular actions movies are usually running up against. If you think stealing $30.1 million is a lot of money worth sending the cops over then $700 billion of our own tax dollars given to people who ruined the lives of millions of Americans should make you fucking furious. The only real difference here is one was made legal by our own elected government.

Adam McKay’s “The Other Guys” may be on its surface just another “dumb comedy” that mostly satirizes cops, but its villains are very real and unfortunately as American as apple pie. Under capitalism our labor only continues to get devalued every year (even the skilled positions), while the richest 1% of the human race only get fatter with their wealth. Things are only getting more expensive and the working man is getting priced out of more and more daily luxuries and even essentials. This way of life is not sustainable, especially for our environment which these dragons continue to plunder, and eventually we will need to actually hold our overlords accountable for letting it get this far.

If we don’t, they will continue to steal every penny in our pocket and bleed us dry until the next disposable drone can fill our place. If law enforcement won’t take this on, sooner or later we might have to…

Remember, pimps don’t cry...

[goingoverthegardenwall]

Chapter 8: Babes in the Wood

In this last hurrah of explicit homages to animation of the past, the most obvious discussion point is Merrie Melodies and its ilk: Babes in the Wood is essentially a full-episode reference to the bouncing musical shorts of yore, where everything can sing’n’dance and the villain is a blustery bozo who’s defeated with a sight gag. If we expand to children’s entertainment in general, as we did with Greg’s Beatrix Potter episode, then The Wizard of Oz is our logical next step: the song welcoming him to Cloud City owes everything to Dorothy’s introduction to Munchkinland, complete with the fact that our hero has just entered a dream.

And look, there’s nothing wrong with talking about the obvious. But as we near the end, I think it’s a little more interesting to instead explore the very beginning. So let’s go back to a newspaper cartoonist in New York—the one who inspired fellow New York newspaper cartoonist John Randolph Bray to become an animator, which in turn led fellow New York newspaper cartoonist Max Fleischer to become an animator, because it turns out that just like the birth of superhero comics a few decades later, the birth of American animation hinged on print artists who dreamed big in the city that never sleeps. 

A boy named Zenas was born in Michigan on September 26, 1871. Or maybe he was born there in 1869. Or maybe he was born in Canada in 1867. He said one thing, and a biographer said another, and census data says another, and I wasn’t there. It’s similarly unclear when or why he started going by his middle name, but by the time he took his first job at age 21 (or 19 or 17) as a billboard and poster artist in Chicago, he was calling himself Winsor McCay. They sure did know how to name ‘em in the 19th century.

McCay began his newspaper career as a freelancer, but moved to New York in 1903 to work for the New York Herald, where he wrote a variety of comics before hitting it big with Little Sammy Sneeze. McCay’s art was always brilliant, but his gag work was formulaic to a fault: the joke for Sammy Sneeze was always the same, he would sneeze and ruin everything right before the last panel. That devotion to formula would continue in his second big comic Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, where a fantastical events would occur for ever-changing characters before the lead woke up in the last panel, revealing it was a dream.

That second formula was the basis of McCay’s masterpiece. Already a successful cartoonist in the two short years since he’d moved to New York, his fame skyrocketed with Little Nemo in Slumberland, which used the same “wake up at the end” formula but with recurring characters and a running story. He toyed with the medium like none had before, playing with panel arrangement and innovating the portrayal of motion in comics, and his art skills only improved with this full-color strip. His success led to the vaudeville circuit, where he turned the act of drawing into a performance, and this combination of stage entertainment and his continuing comic work led him to seek new ways to dazzle the crowds.

By 1910, the earliest animated shorts had already started to emerge, and McCay was inspired by pioneers like James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl to try animating the characters of Little Nemo. Under Blackton’s direction, McCay singlehandedly drew around four thousand fully colored frames to produce his first animated cartoon, presented at the tail end of a filmed short about said cartoon in 1911. As mentioned, animated shorts were already a thing. But none of them looked anything like this. (If you’re concerned that there might be racist caricatures in it, don’t worry, there definitely are, McCay had a lot of strengths but overcoming garbage prejudices was not one of them).

The sheer quality of his work, continuing with the legendary Gertie the Dinosaur, directly led to the invention of the rotoscope as a means to mass-produce cartoons of similar finesse. The influence of Winsor McCay over animation as we know it is hard to overstate (and let’s stress again that this was his side gig, and he was just as influential over comic art): as crazy as it sounds, it’s safe to say that Over the Garden Wall would not exist if not for a story about the whimsical adventures of a little boy who traveled across a land of dreams from his bed. 

“Where’s Greg, Wirt?”

Babes in the Wood is delightful and goofy and lighthearted exactly once.

In the same way our fourth-to-last episode mirrored our fourth, this third-to-last episode mirrors our third: Chapters 4 and 7 focus on Wirt, but 3 and 8 are Greg’s. It’s not simply a matter of who the main character is, but what these episodes are about: Greg’s love of fun clashing with his drive to help others. Both times he's spurred by the desire to help others to go off on his own, both times he gets distracted by whimsical wonders involving funny animals and physical humor, and both times he ends up deciding to help out anyway. But despite switching his goal from making the whole world a better place to just helping his brother, the stakes are actually far higher now, so the fun has to be that much more fun if we want the full horror of the ending to sink in.

There’s no tonal shift in the series that’s more devastating than Greg falling prey to the Beast after nearly ten minutes of goofiness in Cloud City. It turns a moment of welcome relief from the growing tension of Wirt’s despair into a dagger in the heart, and the knife is twisted when we learn in our next episode what the Unknown truly is.

That despair is evident well before Wirt explicitly gives up. We get our second opening in a row featuring Beatrice in a hopeless search, and things aren’t much better for the boys. All sense of progression from the first episode feels lost, with Wirt reverting to mumbling poetry and Greg reverting to Rock Facts. Their boat is an outhouse and Greg uses a guitar as an oar, because (if you’ll pardon my French) they’re up shit creek without a paddle. When they land, Greg’s victorious bugle is a ridiculous sign of hope, but he soon drops it in the same way he abandons the guitar: in Schooltown Follies he takes instruments to help others, but this time he loses them.

Wirt’s frustration with Greg threatened to boil over in The Ringing of the Bell, only to be cooled when the Woodsman interrupts them. This time there’s no such interruption, so after Greg’s total failure to read the room gets to be too much, his brother finally snaps. It crucially isn’t entirely unjustified, as Greg’s antics might be funny to us but have not been appreciated by Wirt, and despite Greg’s age excusing his lack of emotional intelligence, it’s still gotta be frustrating for a teen to deal with that behavior nonstop. And Wirt’s “tirade” reflects his depression, because he doesn’t even seem that angry: he doesn’t shout or rave, he’s just openly irritated as he argues that they’ll be lost forever. This is apathy and fatigue, because he’s lost the energy to be furious.

But the most chilling part of the exchange isn’t Wirt cruelly blaming Greg for their mess, or abandoning their search. It’s when, after Wirt asks if they can give up, Greg responds with a chipper “You can do anything if you set your mind to it!”, a sentiment that the Beast will fiendishly repeat verbatim while tricking Greg. It’s such a generic positive expression that Greg hangs a lampshade on it, but it shows the darker side of the power our minds have over our well-being. Sure, it’s a great lesson that focus and dedication can help us achieve our dreams, but if we use that focus and dedication towards self-destructive behavior, there’s no limit to how badly we can hurt ourselves. 

After a goofy sort of prayer (incorporating lines from the classic Trick or Treat poem, which will become super relevant an episode from now), Greg is whisked away by so-creepy-it’s-funny cherubim to the score of a so-overwrought-it’s-funny song. His flight aboard the bed/cart pulled by a donkey across the sky feels legitimately magical, but we soon switch to the surreal world of 1930′s songs and physics.

Cloud City is such a stark contrast to the tone of the episode so far that it instantly feels delightful, and such a stark contrast to the tone of the entire series that it lends a special sort of wonder to Greg’s dreamland. References to old cartoons are everywhere in Over the Garden Wall, and before we delve into the tension of our last two episodes, we get one last gigantic celebration of the past with a sequence straight from the golden age of animation. 

The transition alone is enough to make this scene hilarious, but the actual jokes help quite a bit: Greg’s growing impatience with the numerous Wizard of Oz reception committees is my favorite gag of the night. Everything is cute to the point of being cloying, including our three angels that look and sound an awful lot like Greg, and the parade that he leads seems like such a fun and peaceful affair after so much time wandering alone. It’s easy to get as roped into it as Greg when we first watch it. But considering the events of our next episode, the scene destroys me every time I rewatch it, because there’s a very specific place Greg is being welcomed to.

Babes in the Wood gets a lot less cute when it becomes clear that it’s a welcoming committee for a dying child. Greg and Wirt are drowning, and this is the episode where the shock wears off and the cold sets in and the younger and weaker of the two looks into a bright light. Greg’s near-death experience is hammered in when we get to The Unknown, but for now it’s being rationalized in a way that brings him comfort.

The cold is Greg’s enemy, and the same childish tone is used to show that he’s willing to fight for his life: thus, the North Wind segment is ironically more hopeful to me than the parade’s warm welcome of death. This third song sounds enough like a Randy Newman number that I’m honestly still convinced it’s an uncredited Randy Newman performance, and it jolts us back to reality for a moment as we see the effect this bitter wind has on our babes in the woods. The boys are starting to freeze, and we again see Beatrice searching for them, getting so close before an owl that looks remarkably like the one we saw in our first episode scares her off. The episode doesn’t want to lose us completely to the sky, and this grounding helps keep the stakes clear as we complete Greg’s dream.

The Popeye-esque battle between Greg and Ol’ Windbag is a hoot, between the latter’s grumbling anger and the former rolling up his sleeve to get back into the brawl. Its conclusion is hidden from us, so we have no idea how Greg gets him in a bottle, but that fits right in with the weird logic of this throwback and allows us to meet the Queen of the Clouds.

I ought to bring up the theory that everything we see here is an illusion created by the Beast, even though I don’t really subscribe to it myself. The most obvious “hint” is that this sequence directly leads to Greg deciding to join the Beast with an off-screen promise, but we also have the old man in the welcoming march wearing an outfit just like Wirt’s and holding a lantern, perhaps a reference to the Beast’s intended fate for Greg’s brother. Plus there’s lines in the songs that seem like they’re luring Greg in, especially the assurance that the wonders of Cloud City “ain’t gonna lie,” which sounds a lot like what a liar would say. Both the Queen of the Clouds and the Beast pointedly call him Gregory instead of Greg, but so does Old Lady Mrs. Daniels (and Wirt when introducing him in Songs of the Dark Lantern). 

While it’s a neat enough idea, I think the Queen of Clouds is pretty clearly on Greg’s side for real: she seems upset at his fate in a way that doesn’t make much sense for an ally of the Beast. I also think it’s more meaningful for Greg to truly have the choice between happiness and responsibility, between the possible peace of rest and the definite struggle of life, and for him to choose the latter right as his brother is giving in. But I’ve got no beef with folks whose interpretation of the show is enhanced by this theory, so believe what you want to believe about this ambiguous situation.

Either way, we cut back to Wirt instead of Greg when the dream ends, and he’s still annoyed as he’s trying to sleep. Greg’s strange new seriousness is already cause for concern, and asking Wirt to take care of the frog is even more alarming, but even that doesn’t compare the horror of realizing where he’s actually going. Or rather, with whom.

This is another reason why I think the Queen is an ally: while it’s obviously dangerous for Greg to go with the Beast, that’s what it takes for Wirt to snap out of his funk. It’s a hell of a gambit, but as soon as he starts to awaken, he’s immediately concerned for Greg’s safety despite whatever anger or resentment he had, sparing no time or thought to the branches creeping over him as he runs after his brother. 

The quiet distortion as we follow his frantic search is soon met by the Beast’s song, but even as he blames himself for Greg’s plight, Wirt is no longer content to wallow in despair. Because it turns out that these brothers are more similar than they seem, and neither is truly capable of letting the other suffer. In the folk tale for which this episode is named, two children abandoned in the woods eventually die and are covered in leaves by small birds (with some versions seeing them enter heaven), but as we’ll see in our next episode, this isn’t a folk tale.

The thrumming noise intensifies as Wirt slips on the ice, then we add visual distortion as he plummets into the freezing water. He’s saved, but this isn’t water that sees him reborn: the distortion finally breaks as Beatrice asks the episode’s terrible question, and we’re left in the cold.

Every even-numbered episode of Over the Garden Wall, perhaps by virtue of airing twice per night, ends in a mood-setting cliffhanger that grows tenser and tenser with every iteration (or at least it does until the end). First we got a leaf symbolically caught in a fence, then the Beast’s introduction, then the fallout of Adelaide, and now the capture of Greg. Getting trapped has always been a threat for these roving heroes, but the greatest threat of all, that of Wirt trapping himself, has been handled. Things look bleaker than they ever have, but despite the glee of Greg’s dream contrasting with the harshness of reality, Wirt’s ability to climb out of the pit of despair keeps hope alive: even in absence, Greg’s influence looms large.

Rock Factsheet

Dinosaurs had big ears, but everyone forgot because dinosaur ears don’t have bones.

Where have we come, and where shall we end?

Most of these were mentioned in the main analysis, but it’s great that we hear Wirt’s description of Into the Unknown right before the episode itself shows us what happened.

[creideamhgradochas]

Thanks to the lovely @green-eyeddragonfanfiction for taking the time to answer these! Get to know more about her, go give her a follow and then show her some love!

These questions are from this list. You should check it out, there’s 50 questions all together and they’d be great to ask your favorite fic writer!

1) How old were you when you first starting writing fan-fiction?

Around 20, I think.

2) Do you prefer writing OC’s or reader inserts? Explain your answer.

Reader inserts, definitely. I don’t mind throwing OC’s in there if I need to, though. I really like reading reader inserts. I think it’s really fun and engaging to imagine yourself in a story.

3) What is your favorite genre to write for?

Super Heroes! Although I really adore fantasy. If I were to write a book, it would be fantasy.

4) If you had to delete one of your stories and never speak of it again, which would it be and why?

I’m… not sure. I s'pose it’d have to be One Mistake, simply because I think it’s worst piece.

5) When is your preferred time to write?

Whenever I actually find the motivation to write, which usually ends up being around 1-4 am. Aka I’m a Mess: Part 1

6) Where do you take your inspiration from?

Have you seen this man?

I suppose I also draw inspiration from comics, movies, TV shows, and video games where applicable.

7) In your Winter’s War Series, what’s your favorite scene that you wrote?

Out of the entire trilogy? Dang, that’s tough. Maybe in Ghosts of War when Bucky, Reader, and Nat are sitting together, sort of like some messed up little family? If not that, then it’s probably in Winter’s War when Reader, Steve, and Bucky reunite after the Azzano goes up in flames.

8) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?

I don’t think I’ve ever received “criticism.” I’ve received very polite corrections of some of the German in WW from some native speakers, but that’s about it (I haven’t corrected any of it yet because I’m a lazy pos).

9) Who is your favorite character to write for? Why?

Bucky Barnes. Because he’s Bucky Barnes.

10) Who is your least favorite character to write for? Why?

I don’t really write characters that I don’t like. Even villains are fun to write, even if I hate them. If I had to choose, I guess it’d be Ashley Williams, from the Mass Effect series. I’ve only written her once, but she’s a damned space racist and I hate her, even if I didn’t hate writing her.

11) How did you come up with the title for the Winter’s War Series?

Winter’s War was named with the final scene of the first book in mind, as well as what reader and Bucky would be turned into for the second book; Winter Soldier(s), and the war that led them to being created. And because they “die” in the snow and ice. Ghosts of War because that’s what Reader and Bucky are in the second book. Ghosts. Shells of themselves. War torn and weary. Weapons. War of Attrition because, in the third book, they fight tooth and nail for every scrap of memory, personality, humanity, and they don’t always win. They’re going to hit a lot of roadblocks, mostly in the form of other humans, their past and their guilt, and sometimes each other.

12) How did you come up with the idea for Winter’s War Series?

I always liked the thought of a Bucky x Reader series where they both ended up as Winter Soldiers. Everything kind of grew from that. It follows very closely to the canon, so everything was trying to figure out the most believable way to weave a reader character into the existing story.

13) Do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?

“Abandoned” is a strong word…. *stares guiltily at The Way I Do and Two of a Kind.* I just haven’t found the inspiration to write them recently, but I do plan on finishing them… eventually.

14) Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?

I plan on doing a second part for A Night to Remember when October rolls around. I also plan on adding more monster!Bucky’s to The Monster Series. My other series are complete or in progress and I don’t plan to add more to them (except to finish them in the case of the WIPs).

15) Are there any stories that you wished you’d ended differently?

I don’t think so, no.

16) Tell me about another writer(s) who you admire? What is it about them that you admire?

@angryschnauzer​ writes absolutely divine smut. I absolutely hate writing smut, so I wish I had her skills. There are others, but she’s the first one that came to mind. If I listed out every single author on here that I admire and why I admire them, we’d be here for another ten paragraphs!

17) Do you have a story that you look back on and cringe when you reread it?

I only started writing back in August. Anything written before that’s been lost to the Great Laptop Death of 2017. So, luckily, most of my writing is relatively recent and cringe-free.

18) Do you prefer listening to music when you’re writing or do you need silence?

I prefer listening to music (I love loud music and hate silence), but it’s distracting. My brain sometimes can’t process correctly so it tries to write the words I’m hearing instead of what I actually want to write. RIP me and my stupid brain. Aka I’m a Hot Mess: Part 2.

19) Have you ever cried whilst writing a story?

Haha. No. I’m dead inside. I very rarely (if ever) cry when reading, too.

20) Which part of your Winter’s War Series was the hardest to write?

Oh god the entire Agents of SHIELD part of War of Attrition. That show is so dense and woven so intricately into the MCU that it was difficult as hell to figure out where to put the reader so that it’d be relevant and set up for the next parts of the story. I love that show, but it was so hard *sobbing*.

21) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?

I almost never make outlines. WoA has been the exception because, as stated above, the content was way denser and I needed a clear path to be able to write them from point A to point B. That being said, I’ve only gotten as far as just after AoU. I haven’t decided what to do with Civil War or Infinity War yet.

22) What is something you wished you’d known before you started posting fan-fiction?

A) How Tumblr worked and B) that it’s a terrible, terrible site with horrible coding that, if it were a person, I would shoot as a mercy. Other than that, I read a lot of fics on here before I started posting some myself, which meant I had a pretty good idea of how to format it to be reader-friendly. Still had to google a lot of stuff, though.

23) Do you have a story that you feel doesn’t get as much love as you’d like?

Hmmm. I’m lucky in that I think I have a lot of readers/followers who leave lots of likes/comments/reblogs, but if I had to choose one? I think it’d be my recent Steve x Reader fic, Promise.

24) In contrast to 23 is there a story which gets lots of love which you kinda eye roll at?

Oh god. Again, I’m grateful for every like, comment, and reblog I get, but By Chance. It’s by far my most popular one shot at a staggering 1,925 notes. I like the a/b/o verse, but I posted it pretty early on in my writing career and it skyrocketed which completely blindsided me. The same thing kinda happened with Dumped, Drunk, and Angry. I wrote a one shot in a day or two because inspiration hit me like a freight train, and somehow they’re both over a thousand notes now.

25) Are any of your characters based on real people?

I s'pose Reader is always based off of me, just a little bit? Every other character (except the rare OC) has an established personality, but if I made reader a completely faceless, bland being it wouldn’t be that fun to read, would it? So even though I’m always careful to never describe reader too much physically, s/he always ends up with at least some of my personality.

26) What’s the biggest compliment you’ve gotten?

Oh goodness, I don’t know. My readers are amazingly kind people. I get a lot of asks and comments saying very, very nice things all the time. I don’t think I could choose just one if I tried..

27) What’s the harshest criticism you’ve gotten?

I was told very politely I spelled some German words wrong/used the wrong German words.

28) Do you share your story ideas with anyone else or do you keep them close to your chest?

I word vomit on my real life friend sometimes if I’m really stuck. It’s not always super useful because she doesn’t follow/watch any MCU stuff. Mostly, ideas just bounce around in my head until one sticks.

29) Do people know you write fan-fiction?

Yeah, most of my real life friends know. The friend I mentioned above writes fanfic, just not for the MCU. The rest are big nerds, too, so they don’t judge me.

30) What’s your favorite minor character you’ve written?

I loved writing Ran Shen and Mila Hitzvig for The Bitter March arc in Ghosts of War. As far as OC’s go, Dean from my series Time is probably my favorite.

31) What spurs you on during the writing process?

Interest in the source material has a lot to do with it. For example, I was writing easily 4k+ words a day when I was writing about the events of Captain America: the Winter Soldier. Other than that, I wait for the urge to hit me… which sometimes means I don’t write for a few days and sometimes a week depending on what’s happening in real life.

32) What’s your favorite trope to write?

So far? Soulmate. A/B/O was also fun and I’ll probably write it again at some point.

33) Can you remember the first fic you read? What was it about?

Oh jesus, no. I have the worst memory ever. I’m lucky if I can remember things a week ago, much less years ago.

34) If you could write only angst, fluff or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why?

Uhh… Not smut, I know that much. But I have this bad habit where I can’t write fluff without some angst and vice versa? I don’t think I could deal with writing cotton candy fluff for the rest of my life, though. So…. angst, I guess? But I wouldn’t be happy about it.

[franeridart]

I honestly LOVE your bakushima kids, but did you have any ideas on what the rest of the bakusquad's kids would be like if the others did have kids? If you have thought of it, would the next gen of bakusquad be friends like their parents or not so much?

Thanks!!! And to be completely honest with you, the only other kid I have for that specific AU is the todo//deku one :0 not cause I haven’t thought about the bakusquad ones, but cause I still haven’t managed to decide which ships I wanna go with? Do I do kami//sero or kami//jiro or kami//mina? Do I do mina//jiro or momo//jiro? how about sero//mina? I like so many ships for the squad that I can’t manage picking just one haha but what I already have decided is that whoever Kaminari ended up with his kid is Tai’s best friend. I dunno who that kid is, but they’re best friends 👍

Anon said:Hy i have a fan account on ig it’s @o.urarakaa i want To know if i can repost one or your art thanks 🙏

Ahhhh sorry, but as it’s written more or less everywhere on my blog I don’t allow reposts of my stuff - thank you for asking, tho!

Anon said:Have you ever considered MomoJirou????

I have! Have also drawn it and posted it in the past, actually!

Anon said: FRAAAAAAAN! I love your art from the bottom of my heart and every little doodle makes me smile and gasp in awe because they’re beautiful. And since I love it so much, I often comment under it: Is it troublesome for you or I can continue? Idk, maybe it feels exaggerated or repetitive or annoying and I wouldn’t want to bother you :3 Have a lovely day and thank you for sharing your art! (Your KiriBaku give me life)

No no no it’s super totally okay don’t worry about it!!! Actually thank you so so so so much for always taking your time to let me know you liked my stuff!!!!

Anon said:legit crying at your latest comic. its too fucking soft and adorable i cannot handle it. you’re amazing. thank you for everything you share with us

;O; thank you so much???? oh my god!!!

Anon said:I’m always awkward w/ these BUT!!!!! I JUST NEEDED TO TELL YOU I ABSOLUTELY ADORE YOUR ART AND YOUR ART STYLE SO MUCH!!!!! I always look forward to any new art you post (even if it’s outside my fandoms!!) and I always SMILE/GET MEGA EXCITED WHEN I SEE A NEW ONE!!!! I personally really love your Kiribaku ones though sO THAT NEW KAMIJIROU ONE ESPECIALLY SENT MY HEART SKYROCKETING!!!!!! I sincerely love you as an artist so please know that!!!! Thank you for drawing!!!!!! They make me so happy!!!!!!

HOLY SHIT THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!! this seriously means the world to me, I’m so happy I can make you enjoy even stuff out of your fandoms!!! Seriously thank you for sending this ask, it made my day ;O;

Anon said:What do you think of Bakugou/Shinsou? I stumbled across the pairing recently, and it’s a bit of a rairpair, but it’s so cute???

It’sssss not really my thing actually - well, generally I’m a picky shipper with Bakugou anyway, not gonna lie, but the only interaction Baku and Shinsou ever had made it pretty clear Shinsou can’t stand him and I usually don’t ship Bakugou with people that don’t like him ??? I’m more drawn to his canon happy relationships honestly haha

Anon said:Oh my goodness, you’ve opened my eyes on the similarities and contrasts of both kiribaku and kamijirou (also, Kamijirou is one of my otps, thank you so much)

Haha that’s cool to hear !! They aren’t exactly similar as ships, but they are fun ships to put next to each other cause they contrast in some pretty funny ways imho! :D

Anon said:That’s so cute fran, how do you even come up with these comics they’re perfection

Thank you!!!!!! And I’m gonna be honest with you, that kamijirou one came up mostly just cause I wanted to write the “you’re an asshole how do you have a bf”/ ”for one, I’m not an asshole to my bf” exchange lmao

Anon said:your comics (bakushima in particular) make me so happy, thank you so much!!!!!!!

YAY!!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!! I’m glad I can help you be a lil bit happier!!!!!!

Anon said:I love ur art!! I hope u had a nice day!!

THANK YOU! I hope you’ll have a great day too!!!!!!!

Anon said:R u a cat person or a dog person?

Generally a cat person, but just cause I have two cats and love them with my whole heart haha I love dogs a lot too, tho!! Always wanted one ;u;

Anon said:Hi! How was ur day?

Weirdly tiring, but generally good! I hope yours was a good one too!!!

Anon said:Okay but like… I am 100% a lesbian but your art of Tyki and Wisely is so gorgeous that it makes me feel just a little bit straight. Like, wow.

Holy heck, that’s high praise!!! Thank you so much???? :O

Anon said:Your krbk concert art makes me weep. It’s so beautifullll.

SOB thank you!!! This means a lot to me cause that AU means a lot to me, so really, thank you so much!!!! *hugs*

Anon said: I’m laughing, your Shinsou’s are both the most beautiful and the most relatable. I really love the colour scheme.

THANKS!!! Purple is one of my fav colors so I always have lotsa fun with its shades!!! :D

Anon said:i would love to see more bakucamies from you! their friendship is lit

I love and live for all Bakugou relationships, so more of that one will happen for sure! She made him laugh after all, she already owns my soul for that ;^;

Anon said:How do you feel about the other noahs?

Jasdevi means the whole world to me and I miss them more ever passing day, Neah and Mana are my kids whom I need to protect I really just wish for both of them to be happy though I know that’s probably not gonna happen ;;, Road!!!! is!!!!! My girl!!!!!!! Love her, like her better when she’s not hurting Lavi but generally I’m always happy to see her, I have conflicting feelings about Feedra, Sheryl is slimy and I can’t trust him, everyone else wasn’t around enough to know for sure how I feel about them honestly, I’m interested but not particularly invested :0

Anon said:You’re my favourite noah:)

This is??? A weirdly cute ask??? Thank you!!!! :D

Anon said:genuinely shrieking over your doodle of tyki. i love him so fucking much and aH,,

I’M GLAD TO HEAR THAT he’s!!!! so great isn’t he ;O; *sigh*

Anon said:Fran, did you know that I’d die for you and your art?? And also I just really love the extra little things you put in the tags when you post things, idk it makes me really happy to read those little tidbits and for me it just really completes the art,, also your ocs are actually the cutest things I’ve seen in my entire life ((I may or may not be gay for like half of them))

THANK!!!!! YOU!!!!!!!! the oc thing especially, that means the world to me oh my god ;O; still can’t believe people actually like them aaaaHHHHHHHHHHH

Anon said:A concept: someone getting flirty with Kirishima and a jealous Bakugou

A good concept which I’m always up for, but to be honest with you I’m more of a fan of the other way around :O like, Kiri is so good and bright and friend with everyone, jealousy might as well be something Bakugou’s used to by this point - but Bakugou, people tend to avoid him or think of him as rude and annoying, Kirishima wouldn’t be used to jealousy at all you know? So I like it that way around more haha

Anon said:Hi! as a fellow artist I just wanted to rant bc I thought you might understand how I feel. my art never comes out looking right and it’s just so frustrating ugh is this what you call artblock ;; I just want my art to look good sigh

I wouldn’t call it an artblock, it’s more like… like your mind is one step ahead of your skills, I’d say. If treated right, you can turn that feeling into improving your art! What is it that you don’t like? Can you break it down to smaller things? Is it the line work or the coloring style, or even just the way you draw eyes or hands or noses? If you can focus on the smaller parts of what you don’t like in your style you can then look up a way to do the same thing that you do like, and practice that till you’re satisfied with it! One small thing might not mean much by itself, but putting all these small things together is how you make improvement happen :D 

Anon said:Perdona se non scrivo in inglese, ma sono un totale disastro. Volevo solo dirti che ammiro tantissimo il tuo lavoro ed è un balsamo per l'anima quando appare in bacheca.

AHHHHHHHHH ;O; GRAZIE MILLE !!!!!!!!!! E non preoccuparti per la lingua !!! siamo italiani dopotutto, l’inglese non è necessario per comprenderci haha

Anon said:omg you and your all time low references, I love it so much (everytime I listen to afterglow I think in kiribaku bc of your drawing and now I’m going to do it with the last young renegade 💕)

Hahahaha they’re one of my favorite bands after all, I fall back on them a lot lol I’m glad you like that, tho!!!

Anon said:a concept: angry bakugo next to a smol duck

*me, crying* i-it’s beautiful ;o;

Anon said: *sobs* I LOVE YOUR YULMAS SO MUCH T-T

I’M HAPPY YOU LIKED THAT ONE????? Happy yulma is what keeps me going honestly I love them so incredibly much ;O;

Anon said:I ship the squad x Sero’s hammock

So do I hahaha

Anon said:YOU ADDED GLASSES BAKUGOU TO REDBUBBLE THANK YOUUUUU

I DID! Happy you were happy about that!!! haha

Anon said:What’s your opinion on bakucamie? Both as a friendship and a relationship

Absolutely not as a romantic thing, but I love it as a friendship! As I said, anyone who can make Bakugou laugh owns my soul forever hahaha

Anon said:your bakugous are so good!! also you drew my new fave girl camie i love her so much and i espicially love her in your style!!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh thank you!!!!!!!!! I’m glad you like how she came out, tho I admit I feel like I still don’t have her down properly… will have to draw her more :O

Anon said:Your art style is so amazing, and I love your different au’s and Bakushima comics!! Any plans to draw some BakuCamie brotp in the future?

Thank you!!! And I don’t ever have plans for what I draw until I actually sit down to draw it, but more Baku and Camie is totally possible!!

Anon said:hey fran! i adore your art, been here from the very first page of your tattoo au!!!! i just wanted to say 2 things: 1. when baku laughed this chapter i thought of you! and 2. every time i see your todoroki my heart explodes in my chest he’s so so pretty in your style :00 hope you’re having a wondeful day!

YO THAT’S SUCH A LONG TIME!!!! I’m so happy to hear you stuck around this long!!! ;O; and thank you for the compliment oh my god!! ;O; Todo is so damn fun to draw, I’m glad to hear he comes out well enough!!!

Anon said:OH MY GOSH LITERALLY ALL THE BAKUGOUS YOU DREW IN YOUR MOST RECENT POST ARE SO FUCKING CUTE AND PRECIOUS AND PRETTY AND IM DEAD. The colours look amazing! And his facial expressions are so soft and nice. My favourite is probably him with the dog cos his hair look so freakin fluffy and soFT. I also love him laughing because didn’t everyone just die at that manga panel and you make him look extra sweet! I also love him talking to camie cos he looks exciting and a little shocked to have a friend! /// I love the other ones too obviously they’re all amazing! But I just wanted to share my favourites and how much I love them!

SO MUCH LOVE IN JUST ONE ASK!!!! Thank you so much for sending it all this way aaahhhhhhh

Anon said:Hiii, I hope you are having a good day! I want to know if you sell posters of your art online because I would love to have one of your kiribakus hanging on my wall 😍 idk why but your art makes me happy, like your style is so beautiful and your headcanons are so cute so it is like the perfect combination that always cheers me up when Im sad 💕 thank you

THANK YOU!!! And yeah I do, I have a redbubble shop!!! ;O;

[battlegeekplus]

Battle Geek Plus: 6 Years Later

Hey guys, Ryan here.

It’s been 6 years since we’ve launched Battle Geek Plus into the wild. On October 1, 2011, we launched the official BGP website with 10 videos on our old YouTube Channel and now defunct blip account. Around March of 2012, we lost our adsense account and decided to move to our current channel in August of 2012. Alot of people think we started in 2012 due to our channel stating that in our about page, but we really started in 2011 and I wanted to clear up that confusion.

After six years, we have over 5000 subscribers and over 700 videos, so where do we stand now?

Battle Geek Plus is not my first foray as an internet content producer. I’ve been through the ups and downs of internet success and failures, but I have entertained millions of people worldwide in various different ways.

I want to talk about not only the origins of Battle Geek Plus, but a bit into my background and to do that, we at least need to go all the way back to my childhood and teen years, most specifically 1997-1999. This is reflection on my nearly 2 decades of content creation.

As a kid, I always loved being creative. I did everything from write stories, draw pictures, make comic books about video game characters, etc. None of these things I was particularly good at, but I had so much fun doing them anyways. From an early age, I always *had* to be making stuff and being creative.

In 1997 as a teenager in high school, I got into making webpages about various subjects like video games and Sailor Moon. In 1999. had achieved my first *real* success, a Dragon Ball Z website called “Vegeta Insane” dedicated to the character of Vegeta under my old nickname “Castor Troy” from the Nicolas Cage movie, Face/Off. You can still find remnants of my DBZ work by looking up “Castor Troy DBZ” on google.

Since Dragon Ball Z was exploding through Cartoon Network and even topped the search engines over Britney Spears in 1999, I garnered a massive audience of fans and it was the first time I felt I received real recognition for the silly ideas in my head. Later in 1999, I made my first AMV (Anime Music Video) and that literally skyrocketed my traffic to the point where I had to leave free website hosting services like Geocities and accepted a hosting deal with the prestigious planetnamek.com, which was the biggest Dragon Ball Z site on the web at the time.

In 2000, I rebranded Vegeta Insane as “Ginga GIRI GIRI” in order to cover all of Dragon Ball other than just Vegeta. Sadly the Internet Advertising Crash of 2000 happened which forced me to move Ginga GIRI GIRI off planetnamek. The early 2000′s was a pretty horrible time to have a website. Many of the free providers like Geocities were enforcing a 1GB bandwidth limit for their webpages per day. Homestead, Angelfire, Tripod, and Fortune City would literally plaster your pages with ads, and many people we knew who had hosting and servers didn’t wanna touch us. Those who hosted us would literally kick us off within a few months so our site URL was always changing.

In 2001, my site partner Mike aka Dr. Bond decided to finally get us a dedicated server that he was paying out of his own pocket and by 2002 they gave us our final bandwidth warning and shut us down. We finally decided to close the doors on the DBZ web as I moved onto AMVs.

Working on Vegeta Insane and Ginga GIRI GIRI not only let me express my creativity and love for Dragon Ball, the skills I learned making those sites landed me jobs in both the web and graphic design fields, allowed me to have a casual business relationship with FUNimation that we still maintain to this day (They put me on the DBZ Resurrection F Blu Ray Extras!), and helped me develop a large audience and make more friends than I could ever dream of.

In the early 2000′s, AMVs were starting the take off, especially digitally edited ones on computers as opposed to 2 VCRs. I wasn’t an early generation AMV editor like Bobby “C-Ko” Beaver, Maboroshi Studios, Kusoyaro Productions, Kevin Caldwell, etc, but I was lucky enough to catch the AMV ride on the advent of the digital age and the massive influx of AMV contests at conventions. A friend of mine convinced me to enter AMV contests at conventions and over the years AMVs provided me a ton of great opportunities that I would have never dreamed of. I’ve won over 2 dozen awards, coordinated several Multi-Editor Projects, was a guest at conventions, spoke on panels, had an AMV play in the Nokia Theater (now the Microsoft Theater) where the winners of American Idol were announced, ended up working in the film industry as a paid professional editor, entertained packed rooms of 6000+ people, and made tons of fans and close friends that I still remain in contact with to this day.

In 2005, the AMV community wasn’t prepared for the advent of a new and upcoming website:

YouTube.

Now AMVs existed in a legal gray area where we were protected by fair use as our AMV work was transformative in nature, so the anime companies would usually turn a blind eye to them. However, the music industry was not so forgiving as we usually used full, unedited songs as we mashed up anime footage to the rhythm of the songs. Anime Music Videos.org, one of the biggest resources for AMVs on the web was hit by a cease and desist letter by the record label of Creed, Seether, and Evanescence forcing the .org to remove all videos containing songs with those bands, regardless of the lead singer of Evanescence being a huge fan of AMVs to her work.

People were also uploading our AMVs to YouTube without our permission, usually gaining thousands upon million of views, so we had to begrudgingly join YouTube in order to combat these unauthorized uploads. I started my first YouTube account in 2005 and gained millions of views for my AMV uploads.

After google purchased YouTube in 2006, things began to change as YouTube began rolling out “Copyright Violations” which was what Content ID was called back in the day. I remember getting my first copyright violation in 2007 and was forced to delete one of my AMVs from my channel. A year later in 2008, I got my first copyright strike from TOEI animation. Throughout the years, my videos would constantly get both copyright violations and strikes, but never hitting the 3 strikes needed to terminate my account. Sadly, in 2011, my first YouTube account finally bit the dust as TOEI finally gave me my third strike. I’ve tried to appeal various times, but to no avail.

Also in 2011, my interest and passion towards AMVs was dwindling down because I had wanted to finally start moving onto filmmaking and directing. I tried to convince myself to pursue filmmaking and do AMVs on the side, but I realized I couldn’t do both, so I had made the decision to finally retire from AMVs in 2012 and go out with my final video “Naruto Ball Z Shippuden: Heroes Come Back” which was a crossover between Dragon Ball Z and Naruto Shippuden. It went on to win over a dozen awards, including Best of Show at Sakura Con in Washington and my home con of Anime Expo. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to go out with a bang.

Even though I’ve been on YouTube since 2005, I was still very unaware of how the algorithm worked and what audiences liked, I was a huge fan of the Angry Video Game Nerd, The Nostalgia Critic (who was on blip at the time), Angry Joe, Mega64, etc. Back then, YouTube was just a dumping ground for my AMVs and never thought it was something people could make a living off of.

In early 2011, Josh had created the original Battle Geek Plus as “Wild Project Battle Geek Plus” which was a parody of Japanese sounding titles. He only recorded 5 episodes and asked me for feedback on them. He also said he was going to be moving to California from Indiana and asked if I wanted to be involved with BGP. My initial reaction was we were going to continue the current “Wild Project Battle Geek Plus” show and I would be a supporting character.

When Josh and his girlfriend (now wife) Heather came to California to do apartment hunting, we had dinner and Josh explained he wanted to do a reboot of the Battle Geek Plus brand from scratch, so I proposed that we follow the structure of The Nostalgia Critic’s site: thatguywiththeglasses.com where we would have a site featuring videos.

When Josh and Heather finally made the move to California in Summer of 2011, I had just won a $1500 prize from the Anime Expo 2011 AMV Contest and used that to buy our first DSLR camera, the Canon T2i which was highly recommended by our friends. We filmed several videos over the summer and finally launched the BGP site on October 1, 2011.

Our initial audience was just our family and friends at first, but we had our first semi-viral hit in Nov 2011 with our “Batman Arkham City Addiction” skit which got over 10,000 views overnight. I was still very unaware of how successful content creators released videos on YouTube since the only thing I knew from The Nostalgia Critic was to release a video weekly.

As the weeks went by into 2012, our videos were only averaging 60-100 views even after the success of Batman Arkham City Addiction. By 2011, the YouTube Algorithm had changed to cater to longer videos and the majority of our skits were on the short side. Sometimes we would get 500-1000 views if we got lucky, but the traffic was never consistent.

In early 2012, we got an email from former MMA fighter Bas Rutten who saw our “Boss Booten” parody videos and complimented us. Bas was awesome enough to send us free shirts and even invited us to hang out at the beach with him. This was our first real celebrity encounter from doing Battle Geek Plus.

In March of 2012, there was an exploit going around YouTube called “clickbombing” where people would use programs to massively click ads on videos to raise the revenue and would end up getting your adsense account shut down. This happened to quite a few YouTubers, most famously Markiplier’s first channel. I remember checking our adsense account and noticed we had earned several thousand dollars from a Skyrim parody video. Hours later, when I tried to log into our adsense account again, I got the dreaded “Your adsense account has been suspended” message. I’ve tried to appeal several times, but was denied each time. We stayed on the old channel to at least try to get more of an audience until August of 2012.

It was really difficult having to start again from scratch because out of our 2000+ subscribers we earned from the old channel, only about 200 of them followed us to the new one and less than 50 watched our reuploaded videos.

In 2013, I tried to apply to attend E3 with the Battle Geek Plus website and YouTube channel, but was denied. A friend of mine from the AMV community put us in touch with Team Kaizen Games who were able to get us into our first E3 and we’ve been great friends with them ever since. At E3, we were able to meet alot of developers and even had dinner with developers and executives from Eidos Montreal and Square-Enix.

Later in 2013, Screwattack used to feature user content on their front page and advertised several of our videos which brought us some good traffic. I had also decided to send some of our videos to the newly developed Smosh Gaming Alliance and they praised and awarded several of our videos on their channel.

The biggest prize of all in 2013 would be when Capcom was hosting a Ducktales Sing-Along contest for their Ducktales Remastered release, so I went to Disneyland and filmed a video there dressed as Scrooge McDuck. Not only did I win the contest, I was featured on the Ducktales Remastered Homepage and I was given one of the rare Ducktales Remastered Press Kits. Thanks to the Screwattack, Smosh, and Capcom promotions, we earned about 1500 subscribers about a year into our new channel.

However, because I didn’t have an adsense account anymore and I couldn’t monetize any of these new opportunities. I got a partnership with Maker for a 50/50 split which was a big mistake. Luckily I was able to break away from Maker in 2015 and joined the much better Screenwave Media MCN.

2014 was one of the toughest years of my life as I was fired from my previous full time job in 2013 and after getting nothing from applying to every job I could, I went with a temp agency that placed me at jobs only lasting from one week to one month. It was stressful for me that year because I never knew how long my jobs would last and if I would be able to pay the rent.

However, 2014 was also probably the most important year for BGP for the following reasons:

- We made our first business deal with PDP and Nintendo at E3 2014 to promote their Wired Fight Pads for the Wii U.

- We applied for the thatguywiththeglasses.com (Now Channel Awesome) talent pickup and were accepted out of 1200+ applicants.

We were still a small channel at 1500 subscribers and only getting 10-60 views a day regardless of the Screwattack, Smosh, and Capcom promotions from the previous year, but we were able to make our first real business deal and get a chance to work with one of my idols, The Nostalgia Critic months within each other.

However, all of this was short lived as 5 days later after our acceptance into Channel Awesome, I was let go from my current job which added alot of stress to my life. Unfortunately, we were still months away from our debut on the site, so my main goal was to not starve/be homeless/etc. to finally see our videos get posted on Channel Awesome.

Throughout most of 2014, I started to feel tightness in my chest and muscles throughout my body, regardless of keeping up my workout regime consistently. In October of 2014, I had finally felt my first full on panic attack which literally felt like I was having a heart attack. I called 911 and was immediately rushed into the ER. I was informed by the doctors that it was a panic attack and not a heart attack and there hasn’t been a day since October of 2014 where I haven’t felt tightness and numbness in my body due to stress. I’m taking medications now, but the main culprit of all of this was the stress I was feeling not being able to keep a job and wondering if I was going to still keep a roof over my head.

In 2015, I wanted to finally do a big crossover with all of the other Channel Awesome Producers which was the Capcom Bidding War. While the video didn’t get the reception I expected, it was hands down, the most beneficial video I ever did for the channel as it helped me get in contact with the rest of my Channel Awesome producers, it helped land us cameos in the TMNT 2014 and Hocus Pocus Nostalgia Critic reviews, and tons of other cameos with the other producers. I still remember how excited I was when I got my first email response from Doug Walker himself only a few hours after I emailed him saying that he was totally cool with cameo-ing in the Capcom Bidding War and getting his footage days later.

Shortly after E3 2015, Josh sat us all down and tried to explain why our channel wasn’t growing as fast as we wanted it to. It was mostly because we weren’t focused and were trying to release a different video every week. I always thought just as long as you had a consistent schedule, that’s all what mattered, but our schedule would be a different type of video each week and audiences weren’t always into different videos. Josh also explained we were a small 4 person team trying to make enough shows to become our own network.

For example, one week would be a sketch, the next week would be a Kung Kwon Todd video, then the week after that would be a Jimmy Buckrider video, etc. Even though we were posting consistently week after week, our content wasn’t one consistent show that our audience was expecting every week.

Josh saw that one of our old Let’s Play videos got a decent response, so he suggested we stick to doing a Let’s Play video every week and we called the show just plain “Battle Geek Plus” which was eventually re-branded to “Battle Geek Plus: We Play Games”.

The reception to “Battle Geek Plus: We Play Games” was modest, but nothing spectacular. I had alot of difficulty editing the show mostly because we agreed to keep episodes 15 minutes or shorter, but we had over 30+ of footage each time and it was *very* difficult to cut that all down to 15 minutes. Also, “Battle Geek Plus: We Play Games” was on a much tighter deadline since we could barely have episodes done ahead of time due to our different schedules.

In 2016, our main gaming review show, “Awesome Video Game Memories” was beginning to pick up some steam and Josh was also pushing us to have a podcast for many years. Seeing the feedback eventually made us decide to focus on “Awesome Video Game Memories” as our flagship weekly show and we also released our first “Waxing Pixels” podcast episode that year as well.

Josh also recommended that we start playing games live on twitch and I started streaming daily, but burned out heavily midway into 2017 trying to balance streaming and producing edited content.

After the reception to the Capcom Bidding War, I was pretty discouraged from doing another big crossover with my fellow Channel Awesome producers which is why we didn’t do one in 2016. I decided to bite the bullet and wanted to create a documentary based on our own experiences with the Nintendo vs. Sega war. I came up with an outline, a script, and asked Doug Walker if he wanted to be part of it and he immediately agreed.

I was incredibly afraid to release a big video on this scale due to the reception of the Capcom Bidding War, but to my surprise, the Nintendo vs. Sega video with the Nostalgia Critic not only received a massively overwhelming positive response, which was a complete 180 from the Capcom Bidding War. It became our most successful video to date which still gets us views to this day.

Now that it’s been 6 years since we began Battle Geek Plus and 20+ years since I started doing internet content in general, where do I stand now and what are my reflections of all of this?

I would have to say my internet content “career” in general has been alot like Kevin Smith’s (my favorite director).

DBZ Websites: Clerks AMVs: Chasing Amy Battle Geek Plus: Tusk

DBZ websites were my first initial claim to fame which got me millions of views throughout the years, AMVs while a much smaller community, was my most well received work critically, and Battle Geek Plus was my more experimental phase with mixed results, but nowhere near as well received as the previous 2 efforts.

I left the DBZ web site community mostly because of bandwidth problems in the early 2000′s, but I brought back my DBZ site in 2010 as an archive of all my work at http://www.3gkai.com

Alot of people have criticised me personally on why I left AMVs when I was at the top of my game and the main reason was to pursue filmmaking. Like “Why did you give up all that fame and fortune to do YouTube videos in an already saturated market?”. My declining interest in anime and amvs was already beginning to become apparent as far back as 2006 after the big YouTube boom with members of the AMV community quitting altogether to pursue other things and it was hard to stay motivated without the community I was used to. I was also going through that phase in 2006 where I was entering my last 2 years of college and had to wonder “What am I gonna do with my life?”. When I was managing the 4th Video Game AMV Project in 2007, I *really* felt the massive dissonance of working on that as opposed to the 3rd Video Game AMV Project in 2005 where we had a more dedicated and motivated group. An archive of the 5 Video Game AMV Projects I helped coordinate is at: http://www.vg-projects.com

2005 was the year I felt was the last really big year in AMVs in terms of community, innovation, and general camaraderie before the YouTube boom and every one I knew moving onto different things. After seeing AVGN, The Nostalgia Critic, and many other webshows, that was the path I wanted to start moving towards.

I still put every bit of energy into all of the AMVs I did from 2006-2012 and announced my retirement when my Naruto Ball Z: Shippuden video won the Best of Show at Sakura Con 2012.

When doing Battle Geek Plus, my absolute favorite part of any AVGN, Nostalgia Critic, or Angry Joe video were the sketch parts, so I wanted to mostly focus on different types of sketches with wacky characters based on video games.

Unfortunately, when we entered the webshow scene in 2011, the YouTube algorithm had already changed to cater to longer videos and reviews were still king, so we were kind of doomed from the very start in a way.

Shows like Battle Geek Plus Adventures, Kung Kwon Todd, Jimmy Buckrider, Boss Booten, Totally Tubular Tim and many other of the wacky characters we made are shows I could *never* pitch to anyone convincingly, so I always made those shows for myself because *I* wanted to see how they would turn out. I do admit that I cringe watching alot of my older videos, but I actually started rewatching alot of the older videos while vodcasting them on our twitch channel and had a good time watching them again because I remember I loved the “new-ness”, the excitement, and remembering the happy person I was years ago working on them.

There are many times I felt that I wanted to turn back the clock and just begin with reviews right off the bat instead of sketches, but now I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything in the world because of the great memories and excitement I had coming up with and working on them to see the finished products.

Every time I feel sad and frustrated due to the lack of views and growth, I always have to remind myself: I chose this path. I could have easily stayed on the top in the AMV community, but I would see AVGN, Nostalgia Critic, and many other webshows through the looking glass and say “I wish I could be like them.”. Now, my group and I are part of that.

Without the sketches and wacky characters me and the crew have created, Battle Geek Plus would not be where it is today. We certainly would have not been praised by Bas Rutten himself, get our first business deal with PDP and Nintendo, and get on Channel Awesome. Even though we were a much smaller channel back in the day, they all saw a potential in us through our work itself rather than the views and subscribers.

This is why my stance on views, subscribers, and especially *the numbers* have changed and they don’t mean to me as much as before.

Let’s be honest here. It’s not difficult to get views.

We can simply start making drama videos, calling out other youtubers, capitalizing on controversial topics, etc to easily get the clicks.

Or we can simply ride on the latest fads like Spider-Man vs. Elsa, and many of the other ones throughout the years like reply girls, Gangam Style, etc.

In all honesty, the content we make would have been far more relevant in 2007-2008. Who wants to see another “Mega Man 2 review” in 2017? Why not focus on all the newer games?

Because I wanna make the content that *I* want to make without trying to cater to the YouTube algorithm or trying to get those clicks. Yeah, people have done tons of Mega Man 2 and Super Mario Bros reviews before, but I wanted to explain my personal memories with them because they are my own and nobody else’s.

It’s *very* easy to manipulate the system in order to just get views, but I don’t want to do that. I tried reviewing newer games while they were still relevant in the past, but would always get far more traffic for videos covering older games.

I want to make content that I’m passionate about and want to be proud of. Audiences can EASILY see when you’re being dishonest and desperate for attention and relevance. I never want Battle Geek Plus to be the center of any drama or anything controversial. I simply came into this just wanting to express the weird ideas in my head rather than trying to be the next *big youtuber*.

I’ve been through the highs and lows of internet fame multiple times before and it’s *NEVER* easy to be in a big position no matter how much views, subs, and money you get. Everything on YouTube is dictated by advertisers and constantly changing algorithms. YouTube is honestly in a weird place right now where it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Back then, YouTube was a place where you could put your cat and family videos, hence why their old motto was “Broadcast Yourself”. But with the TV and Movie Studios constantly imposing their copyright rules, people abusing the system for clicks and views, YouTube is trying to move into being more of a corporate TV station rather than a place where people used to post videos for fun, so I’m very uncertain about the future of the platform.

I feel that I’m very fortunate to have gotten into content creation far before we were ever able to get paid for it. I never earned a dime for any of my DBZ websites or AMVs (except the $1500 prize money from Anime Expo 2011′s AMV Contest), but working on those led me to actual paid jobs and careers over the years. DBZ websites and AMVs were never about the money. It was always about just having fun and expressing myself.

When it came to YouTube and the promise of a monetary reward, I do admit I used to be really obsessed trying to make YouTube my living for a long time and even tried to make content catering to *their* rules with mixed results. I would feel discouraged and jealous at times saying “Why did that guy who filmed himself falling off a bike get far more traffic and a sponsor deal than the videos I spent hours on?”.

I’ve seen a ton of people trying to get into the YouTube game feeling all gung-ho at first and after the first few months or years without any progress, they immediately quit. It pains me to see people not live up to their potential because of the prospect of being able to become famous and make money was their major goal and not doing it for the fun. I had a friend who made really good comedy videos, but he quit due to the lack of views.

Personally, I’m just “wired” to make content and be creative. Playing games is fun and all, but I’ll go absolutely *nuts* if I don’t create something. I absolutely love the entire process of making content from the initial thought process to the finished product.

Do I still want to do videos for a living? Absolutely, but I’m not as concerned or obsessed as I was about it before. If it’s gonna happen, I’ll get there *my* way without catering to short lived trends, advertisers, and algorithms. I want to create a body of work that can still be evergreen no matter when you watch it. I want an archive and a library of work rather than quick videos nobody will watch in the future.

I’d rather do a review of Bubble Bobble than Destiny 2 any day of the week.

I got into DBZ Websites and AMVs just at the right time, but I entered the realm of webshows in 2011 which was already far past the prime date to grow. But, I don’t let that discourage me.

Battle Geek Plus is in a weird position on YouTube where we don’t get that many views on the initial releases of our videos, but over time, people begin finding alot of our older stuff. While the view count still isn’t huge for our archive, it shows that people are still finding our work regardless of it being years old.

I know we’ve slowed down alot in the variety of shows we do mostly for time reasons and my personal health. I really want to approach things from a more relaxed and chill perspective rather than trying to chase the shiny object that will get us the most views. I’m at the age where I really need to be more concerned about my health and don’t want to stress out over things like subscribers, views, and numbers that take away from me creating videos.

As we move into the final months of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, here are few things I have planned that I can disclose right now:

- There’s going to be a major step up in quality for the “Awesome Video Game Memories” series as we’re planning to make bigger, better, and more in-depth episodes. We’re also going to slowly incorporate alot of the classic Battle Geek Plus humor like we did in our Nintendo vs. Sega video in a way where it won’t disrupt the video. I know alot of people have been asking “When’s Kung Kwon Todd or *insert character here* coming back?” and even though our original characters haven’t been a main priority for a while, you’ll see them come back in many ways as we really step up the quality of the Awesome Video Game Memories series.

- We’re going to focus alot more on twitch streaming and also doing alot of special stuff to make our streams more fun and interactive. I burned out on streaming a few months ago, but now I feel that I’ve found a good pace for myself without feeling forced or mentally exhausted. The other BGP crew members are also planning on streaming on days that I won’t be streaming.

- We’ve moved our Waxing Pixels Podcast to a live broadcast on Twitch with audio only versions being released on YouTube and itunes. We also plan to have special events and guests in future episodes.

- Since the Battle Geek Plus Universe is so huge and expansive, there will be a huge emphasis on our “Universe” with our new channel trailer and special videos and events that will reference that.

- I’ve already spoken with Doug Walker and there’s going to be *several* collaboration videos with the Nostalgia Critic next year as opposed to only one per year. I also plan to do more collaborations with my fellow Channel Awesome producers and other producers.

As they say, the journey is always far more important than the destination and doing webshows felt like the fresh start from the bottom I needed after being on the top in the DBZ and AMV communities for several years. I do admit there were times I felt discouraged about my lack of growth, but nowadays, I’m grateful for every little victory and opportunity I’ve had with Battle Geek Plus. Starting from the bottom again has really made me appreciate the hard work that me and the rest of the BGP crew puts into every aspect of our production and now it’s time for us to scale things up to *our* liking and not for any trends, advertisers, or algorithms.

I’m still excited for the show more than ever. Not in the “OMG new-ness” way back in 2011, but from a more refreshed and relaxed perspective. I want to work smarter and not harder. I still want to do this as my living, but I realize even if it never happens, I still have a massive body of work for over 2 decades or more that I’m going to be really proud of.

As for wondering if Battle Geek Plus has been successful or not? Well, I work with some of *the* greatest content producers on the internet, work with various gaming/tech/anime companies, and got the attention of a celebrity like Bas Rutten. We get to go to tons conventions and events, meet new people, and BARELY any of this has to do with views and subscribers as our work speaks for itself. Even though we have small fanbase, I’m always happy to chat with them on twitter, our comments, and twitch. Whether we have 10 or 10000 subscribers, I’m always willing to take time out of my day to tell them how I’m doing and ask about how they’re doing as well.

Right now, I work a really stable day job that I enjoy, doesn’t stress me out, and pays me well to still invest in the show. I live in a nice apartment that’s a short commute from my job, and I exercise regularly to keep my stress levels down. All of this is a major positive change from 2014.

Battle Geek Plus sits at over 5000 subscribers and while that’s still considered small, it’s far leap from when we struggled to even get our first 50.  I’m here to continue the journey to grow as both a producer and person with the simple mission of expressing the wacky ideas I have in my head.

Here’s the links again to all of my old and current work:

3G Kai - Ginga Giri Giri Kai: My DBZ and AMV archive: http://www.3gkai.com/

Video Game AMV Projects: http://vg-projects.com/

Battle Geek Plus YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/bgpawesome

Battle Geek Plus Website http://www.battlegeekplus.com/

Battle Geek Plus Twitch: http://www.twitch.com/battlegeekplus

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThatRyanMolina

BGP Twitter: https://twitter.com/BattleGeekPlus

Thanks for reading and stay awesome!

- Ryan

[samcatthorne]

Story Time

So I was reading a list of testimonials today entitled “21 People Reveal the Most Shocking, Hurtful Things People Ever Told Them”. Needless to say, it was depressing as fuck.

But it got me thinking about my own experience. I wanted to comment and share my experience (share as in tell, not as in Facebook Share), but it occurred to me that I’m still FB friends with the subject of said experience, and because Facebook LOVES letting other people read comments you’ve posted for whatever fucking reason, they might see my comment, and I just didn’t wanna deal with that drama.

Still, I do want to share it. Why? Idfk. I just do. It’s gonna be kind of a long story, so I’ll put a break here.

Throughout the entire last half of my grade school career--years 7-12--my best friend was also my biggest bully, though I didn’t realize it until after I graduated. In retrospect, I’ve come to realize that, although she is responsible for my self-esteem skyrocketing as I left middle school, I was never allowed to be more confident than she wanted me to be. I’ll explain: she is directly responsible for encouraging my loves of writing, drawing, and anime, but I was never allowed to believe I was better or even as good as her at the first two.

During my junior year in high school, we both took the same art class during the only year we had an art teacher who actually gave a damn. I will forever be grateful to my art teacher because she made me want to challenge myself to become a better visual artist. Well, at the very least I wanted to draw better. I’d even asked my parents to get me sketch pencils and a sketchbook for Christmas that year.

Now, my self-esteem was (and still is) very fragile, and anything I wasn’t 100% sure I was good at was likely going to be hidden away from the rest of the world because other than rejection and abandonment, one of my most crippling fears at the time was humiliation. So, if I was proud enough to show something off to you, especially if it was a skill I wasn’t particularly confident in, you knew that was something special. Now, given that my best friend (we’ll call her Jane) had held that title for several years now, you would think she’d have known that.

Well, one day, during art I had gotten an idea for a fan comic of an anime series I was into at the time. I was concentrating hard all period and at the end of the 45-minute class, I’d had a full front and back page finished. And it looked good! I was proud. Prouder than I’ve ever been of a drawing before or since. Naturally, I raced to the already-packed lunch room (art was right before lunch), sped through the lunch line, and plopped myself down beside Jane at our usual table to show off my handiwork.

I was practically bouncing in my seat with anticipation as Jane finished the front half and proceeded to the back half of the page. All of a sudden, she did something that took the wind right out of my sails in an instant:

She laughed.

And not a light chuckle like she’d just read a quick little joke I’d written. No. It was a full on guffaw. With shoulders down to my stomach, I asked what was so funny. She pointed to a frame with a single character in the foreground and cackled,

“His head’s too small!”

Horror-stricken and heartbroken, I pored over the character like a madwoman, wondering was the head really that small? I couldn’t tell. It seemed fine to me. But she was the artistic one of our group. Maybe she could see something I couldn’t.

Slowly, it dawned on me. What did it matter that the head was too small? I’d just shown off my proudest piece to my best friend, and she’d laughed in my face. I didn’t know much about how friendships worked back then, but even I knew that you just don’t do that. Frustrated and betrayed, I needed a way to portray my distaste. I was angry. I spotted my pencil bag and grabbed it. I wanted to throw it at her head, make her feel physically what I was feeling emotionally. But I couldn’t. I chickened out. Instead, I granny-tossed it with limp-wristed finality, and it arched over her shoulder and skittered to the floor.

It was like watching someone flip a switch inside her brain.

Suddenly, she was all up in my face, demanding to know why I’d thrown something at her. Feeling guilty but justified I told her: “You know I’m not confident in my drawing ability.” I’d wanted it to sound firm, accusatory, but it came out like a whine.

Her response: “Well, you know my family life isn’t all that great, either.”

First thing: I didn’t mention my family. Second: Really? Your family life isn’t all that great?

Let me tell you about her family life. She didn’t exactly live a hard-knock life. She came from an average middle class family with an older sister out of high school and a little brother with Asperger’s Syndrome. Both her parents worked, so she often took care of her brother after school until their parents got home later that evening.

That’s it. She wasn’t neglected. She wasn’t abused. She was just a middle child.

Of course, at the time, none of that came to mind. No, at the time her cheap tactic of diverting the focus actually worked. So, having no counter in the moment, I picked up my pencil bag off the floor, threw away my untouched food, and spent the rest of lunch period crying alone in the girl’s bathroom. My confidence, my heart, and my dignity were all shattered.

She didn’t come and find me. She didn’t apologize. In fact, every time I would bring it up later (the few times I was stupid enough to do so), she denied it ever even happened. Bitch, I remember the inside of that bathroom stall! I remember your fucking cackle! I remember you turning on me faster than I could react! Don’t you tell me it didn’t happen.

TL;DR My best friend beat me down harder than any bully ever could, and my confidence in my drawing has never recovered.