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inbabylontheywept · 5 months ago

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bad dating stories time: the shoe incident

so in highschool, my best friend wasnt allowed to go on dates unless there was another couple there to keep an eye on him. part of this was his parents being insane, but also, part of it was him being insane. in a problem with no reasonable parties, there are no reasonable solutions.

at some point in my junior year, my sorta-gf broke up with me, and i just wasnt feeling dating, which was bad for my friend, because he had a good thing going with a girl he met in court.

he kind of hounded me about it. kept pushing me to just put me feet back in the dating pool and i wasnt real thrilled about it, because i knew he was pushing me for his own benefit, not mine, so i kept telling him to fuck off, and after a few weeks of being told that i would date when i was damn well ready, he eventually said: okay. what if i paid for the date AND found you a blind date AND all you had to do was show up?

and i shouldve said no, i know, but i let him wear me down, and i will own my fault in that. a date starting on such a stupid premise could never have gone well.

but he still managed to find a way to make it worse.

i dont know how long he tried to set a blind date up. it couldve been multiple attempts. he couldve stooped to this immediately. but what happened in the end was that he called a girl from the ward he attended - a girl that he knew had a giant, mushy crush on him - and he said: hey! how would you feel about going on a date this weekend?

(you know, implying it was with him, but never actually saying it.)

and she said YES WOW I WOULD LOVE TO and he said great! and then he called me up and said he found me a date.

i did not learn about his crimes until several weeks later. i will die swearing before god almighty that i would never have allowed this travesty to happen if i had known.

that was on a monday. the date of the date rolled around that friday evening, and im sorry to confess, i really phoned the whole thing in. i showed up in my favorite comfy outfit, which was also a fashion crime: basketball shorts and flipflops and a baja hoodie. it was super comfy but it made me look kind of crazy. i picked him up first, and then i picked up his date next, and then we went to pick up my date, and thats where you're gonna get the play by play.

i arrived, walked across the yard, and knocked on the front door. she opened it almost immediately, like shed been waiting right by it, and i could see her expression go from OMG IM SO EXCITED to super disappointed, then disgusted and finally pissed. and because i didn't know about my friends sins, i thought it was from my outfit. which seemed... harsh. like, hey, im allowed to be quirky, fuck you. also its a blind date, i thought the deal was that we were both going to be sad broken sacks of mortality.

anyway, we looked at each other for several seconds before she slammed the door in my face.

i looked back at my friend. he was sweating bullets. i dont know what he expected from this, but there was this big long pause where we both tried to figure out what to do, and then the door opened up, and her dad invited me in, and he said she was gonna need a few minutes to finish getting ready, and that in the meantime we could sit and talk.

we did not talk. we did sit. i sat down on the couch, and he sat down in a chair across the couch, and then instead of talking he cleaned his pistol on the coffee table. i wasnt actually sure if it was a threat, or if it was just a fidget thing for 40+ year old republican men, but when i tried to help he got snappy so i just watched him put a pistol back together.

he was okay at it.

eventually my date came downstairs, still mad as hell for reasons beyond my ken, and i felt pretty guilty for being such a mess because i thought that was why she was so angry. i tried to make up for by walking her to the car and getting the door for her, just generally trying to be extra polite, but before i could make it back to the drivers side, her dad called me back to the door. so i flipped around, went to the door, and immediately regreted my decision.

soon as i was within range, her dad got waaaay too close to me, leaned in, and said "whatever you do to her, i will do to you," and my brain went into overdrive making three consecutive realizations.

realization one was, damn, the pistol thing was a threat. that sucks. what an asshole. realization two was, wait, im autistic and even i know theres a 0% chance me and my date even hold hands, least of all boink. does this guy actually think there's even a 1% chance of anyone in that car getting laid tonight? is he an idiot? and then realization three went through, which was wait, is this guy threatening to fuck me? and unfortunately, with my brain doing so much processing, my mouth was left to run amok, so somewhere between realization 2 and 3, i said:

"i can't get pregnant"

which, i swear, wasn't actually me trying to be a smartass, it was just me pointing out that he couldn't actually follow up on that threat. it just wasn't possible. we do not live in the omegaverse and im not scared of you.

still, it was an insanely catastrophic thing to say, and the moment we both heard it, we bluescreened. that single sentence obliterated both of our momentary streams of consciousness like a saltine in front of a sand blaster. problem was, he'd probably gone his whole life not even realizing someone could say something that stupid, and making that realization was going to cost him a lot of thinking time. me though? i had been saying shit like that for 17 years, i didnt have to rewrite my expectations of human nature, i just had to plan an exit and start striding. so i was already halfway back to the car before i heard "hey. hey come back. Hey. Hey. HEY. HEY WAIT. HEY GET BACK HERE. HEY-"

and then i was in my car, and i drove away.

if this happened today, he'd have called her, and the whole thing wouldve imploded then and there, but back then, there were still a decent number of teenagers without cell phones. especially the teenagers of insane, gun toting parents. so she just said: whoa what was that all about? and i said: dont worry about it, he'll tell you about it when you get home.

and she said: ok and went back to staring daggers at me and my friend.

WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.

we went to an improv comedy show, and it was a disaster. it shouldve been like, 7/10 tops, but between my date being mad, and my friend having a good time, and me having the existential terror of knowing that a guy with a pistol was probably waiting outside his house for me to come back, it was easily 11/10. i laughed way too hard at everything. especially the jokes that flopped. id sit there in this mostly silent room and laugh until i dry heaved a little, and my date was absolutely disgusted, and even my friend was a little embarrassed, which would just make me laugh harder. i laughed so hard that night i could barely talk the next day. and then the show ended, and my friend said, you know, that was a good time, but i think we should maybe do something a little chiller? who wants to walk around the park? and his date said yeah, and my date said no, and i finally had mercy on the poor woman so i said, look, im gonna drop you off. and i am so, so sorry about this, but im dropping you off like a block away. super duper sorry.

do talk to your dad about the pistols thing if you dont want this happening more in the future tho.

and she said: okay. so i dropped her off, and she walked a block down, and that was that.

then i drove my friend and his date to a park that was good for wandering. i figured they wanted something more private, so instead of following them around point blank, i chose a park with this 30 foot rope tower, and i climbed to the top and i said: hey i can see you anywhere from up here, you are officially chaperoned from a distance. get panopticoned idiot. except my friend really is an idiot, and he didnt really get the whole 'now i dont have to third wheel so insanely hard with you guys' thing so he climbed up the tower too, and then his date followed behind him, so there are three people basically sitting together on top of a telephone pole.

and then they started making out.

i was close enough to hear it.

i didnt really know what to do so i was just kind of sitting there, dissociating, when some college kids came around and started shaking the tower. my friend's date went aaaaaaaaaa im afraid of heights :( and my friend went oh, dont worry, ill hold you tight ;) and i went hey, im gonna climb down and ask them to stop.

so i did climb down, and i did ask them to stop, and they flipped me off, which i wasnt even mad about. at that point i was i was like yeah, it would be weirder if this wasnt a mess. gods plan has been to fly this day like a 747 into my metaphorical twin towers and brother he is close enough for me to see him grinning through the cockpit window. still, eventually the college students got bored, so they climbed up the tower, which gave my friend and his date a window to climb down, and together we walked back to my car.

now, i cant explain why this is, but sitting back in the drivers seat was my carriage-back-into-a-pumpkin moment. i'd been chill about all the chaos, just rolling with the punches, but sitting down made me realize how much of a shitshow the day had been, and while i couldnt go back and fix all of it, i could go back and fix one thing.

so i told my friend and his date, hey, you two, stay here and don't do anything weird. don't. then i walked back to the rope tower, and i started picking up the shoes the college students had left at the base in order to climb.

about halfway through this, i realized that if i took all their shoes, they might think i was in it for the money, and i actually wanted them to know i was in it specifically to spite them. fuck those guys. so i put all the right shoes back, gave myself a 100 foot headstart, yelled "nice shoes, assholes", did a little jig, and started running.

my advice to everyone is that college students are faster than you think. even with the headstart, and the whole climb down the tower thing, i was still only fivish seconds ahead of them by the time i got to my car. i flung the door open, looked in the backseat, didnt see anyone, flung the stolen shoes in the backseat, heard two "ow"s, took that as proof of presence, jumped in and pealed out of the lot.

my friend and his date popped up a few seconds later. they were, uh, doing something weird in the back seat. my one request - obliterated.

they climbed up to ask where the hell all the shoes had come from, and i was like yeah i stole them from the college students, and they were like oh. cool. hope you had fun. and i was like, i did. i did. but speaking of fun, what were you doing back there?

and for the first time in my buddies life, i think he was actually embarassed.

#dating stories #anecdotes #long post #funny story #babylon #im really bad at dating #like i can do a lot better than this but also it just was kind of a nightmare for me #shit like this did make the whole thing easier tho #like #every date after this i could go you know ive seen how bad it can get #and i lived #didnt even get shot #writing

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screampied · 6 months ago

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‘ SHE’S A VERY KINKY GIRLLL ?! ★

geto, toji, choso, gojo, nanami, sukuna. jjk men finding out your nasty little kinks

cw. fem! reader, unprotected, size kink, spıt, daddy kink, hair pulling, shibari, premature ejaculatıon, first time squırt, size differences, dirty talk, praise, brēeding, blindfolds, spānking, overstim, phone sēx.

wc. 4.8k

☆ NANAMI KENTO + hair pulling.

“you’re gonna get me fired, sweetheart,” nanami jokes, a dry laugh following his words. he had you right where you wanted - bent over, arched right over his work desk like some slut. not that you minded, you were needy. the rumbles of the old wooden desk continues to scream out creaks and creaks until it sounds like a broken record. nanami’s belt buckle occasionally rubs against your skin, the repetitive clanks it makes on your flesh has you throbbing for more. “oh my, such a nasty girl. ‘s this what you wanted? for me ‘ta stop what ‘m doin’ to give you a little more attention?”

“y- yes, ‘ken,” you whine, not even caring that your was face was practically being shoved into his unkempt pile of documents. as your cunt’s being stretched open by the size of his twitching shaft, your lips part into a circular open shape. “mmf,” and you pause, feeling a familiar calloused hand grab onto the back of your head. a tiny yank suffices and your pussy pulses almost immediately from the pull. nanami felt it, and so did you. “do .. do that again, kento. please.”

with a low, timbre chuckle, his hips come to a sudden halt. “oh,” he mutters, and he’s a bit more amused at your sudden arousal. gentle fingers skim near your waist, another focusing on the crown of your head before he hums. “do what again, my sweet? pull your hair?” and you whine once more as those silk words pour from his lips like dripping honey. you were desperate, grinding back your ass against him in carnal want. with a soft smile, he gives your hair a more tugging yank before starting up again. “why of course. anything for the kinky wife, hm?”

nanami was balls fucking deep, every time he’d deepen and piston his strokes with his hips, your moans only get louder. he’s so thorough too, not missing a single spot with his cock that’s simply rummaging through your goopy insides. “k- kennn,” you whine, hearing his breathing significantly pick up from behind you. raspy, gruff pants from nanami bellow out from his raw vocal chords. it’s sexy, every few seconds he’d take a glance at his watch to check the time. you were gonna get him in trouble. “harder, mhm. h- harder.”

nanami smiles, and he’s so stuffed inside of you that he’s molding a little bulging mark that’s all due to the size of his thick cock. “make up your mind, my love,” he mutters in a low voice—beads of sweat racing down each sides of his face. his irregular pants doesn’t become unnoticed, and the grip against your hair tightens to your liking. “hey, goin’ somewhere? don’t run, gorgeous. you want me to pull so ‘m gonna pull.”

and you moan, feeling the elastic stretch of his girth blowing a fuse through your cunt. he finds the way you try to crawl forward from his dick, but only grabs you right back. it feels good, you’re shivering and not just from his touch. already, your knees start to weaken and buckle as he’s got you hunched over his desk, staring face first into various piles of papers he was supposed to be signing. instead, he was buried deep into your needy cunt, making it cry out squelches over and over on repeat.

“m gonna c- cum,” you babble out, although you weren’t even sure if that’s what the build up pressure was. as you clench down on your jaw, it’s something else. your breathing becomes a bit more pitched and you whine, fisting a ball within your hand, knuckles burning a single color. “kento, kento f- fuckkk. ‘s gonna come out.”

“make a mess, don’t be shy.” he gets right up close against your ear, his grip being a bit more secure.

your head tosses itself back and he flashes you a warm grin, lust and desire all in his mahogany brown eyes. “atta girl,” he purrs once he sees the white form in your eyes, you’re rolling them back toward the outer sockets until you’re not even seeing color anymore. succumbing and falling into the blissful pleasure, you gush out. nanami pauses, his cock’s remaining to tuck itself into your sobbing cunt before your orgasm finally shrieks out your throat. “there it is,” he brings a kiss toward the nape of your neck. you twitch, your body sending itself a wave of convulsing jitters as you’re coming undone on his dick.

the room suddenly feels hot, or maybe it was just you. nanami blinks twice, feeling your pussy continue to release itself for a few moments before he peers down. with a soft grin, he furrows a brow as a thumb bedaubs a long stripe down your soddened slick opening.

“did you just .. squirt on me, sweetheart?” and there’s a bit of wry humor in his voice. with a hand still raking against your head, his thumb still collects a swab of your filthy slick before he pops the same finger into his mouth. sliding his tongue around to savor your taste, he hums. “you did.”

☆ GETO SUGURU + phone sex.

i touch myself just thinkin’ about you.

geto always knew you had a thing for listening to his voice. you ended up 'accidentally' letting him know of your little kink and he now calls you every time he’s away. he’s a busy man, but that doesn’t mean he’ll never make time for his pretty baby. with two crumped up fingers curling inside of your weeping cunt, you dial his number by heart.

on the second ring he answers in a sly, “hey girl.”

maybe you were a little dramatic, but the abrupt twitch that ghosts against your exposed pussy makes you whine. a raspy chuckle breaks through the phone speaker and it’s a bit staticky. “sugu,” you pant, and you were already so close. so so close to your inevitable, incoming release. through short millisecond heaving breaths, you speak in a needy voice. “i miss you.”

“i miss you more, baby,” he whispers, and you can hear his heavy pants through the other line. “fuck,” he murmurs, purposely growing silent to hear the slippery slick sloshes of your responsible cunt in the background. “don’t tell me you’re playing with her when ‘m not here, aw.”

you dip your two fingers inside of your pussy, coating the entirety of your digits with your moist before pouting. putting the phone on speaker, you slouch. “s- sorry, you’ve been fightin’ all day ‘n i was just imagining my fingers were yours.”

“you were, yeah?” a low voice replies, and you can hear how his voice pitches deeper. it’s low, your throbbing only intensifies and you bite your lip. as you multitask, occupying your hand by holding the phone, another with fingers burying itself into your cunt, you sigh. “mhm, baby’s all out of fuckin’ breath. you close?”

“y- yesss,” you start to babble, feeling a wave of crashing shockwaves pulse through your clit. the shock of it all was electrifying - surging all through you. your eyes flick back for a bit until you’re seeing splashes of obsidian black. “keep talkin’ to me suguru, please. your voice ‘s gonna make me cum.”

he stays quiet for a few seconds before purring in a seductive voice. “oh baby,” and his pants against the line was enough to make your legs give out. your pathetic little fingers could never compare to geto’s. his was far thicker and longer, easily stretching out your cunt with just a few thrusts. you could almost drool from imagining him easing your tight walls with his two beloved digits. whether it was his dick, fingers, or even his long slick tongue, he knew how to make you feral.

“silly girl, you there? i said you can cum.”

“o- oh, sorry,” you whine, snapping out of your short fantasm. and with your fingers still shoved into your wet opening, you lean back against the cushioned mattress behind you. “s- suguruuu,” you whimper, hearing his candied sweet praises in the background. he’s telling you all the right words and you could tell he was probably touching himself from the few subtle grunts that would escape from his lips every few pausing seconds. the moment you come undone, it’s short and quick. it’s within a quick as a blink of an eye, one minute you’re whining and the next you’re covering your two slender digits with sprays of your juices. “ngh, fuck s- suguru.”

he snickers to himself, even his laugh was attractive on its own — it's husky, it turns you on a lot more than you thought it did. as you’re trying to calm down from your most recent release, geto hums into the phone. “god i wish i was with you right now. wanna see the mess you fuckin’ made,” and as he pauses to breathe, geto groans. “i already know you’re on my side of the bed too, messy girl.”

“y- yeah,” you murmur with a sheepish smile.

sucking his teeth, geto has a cunning grin forming on his lips before he responds. “ah, such a brat. but y’know what you can do for me until i get home, baby?” and once you respond a sweet ‘what’, geto speaks huskily. “put those fingers in your mouth ‘n your mouth ‘n send me a pic of it.”

“can you send me a audio of you whining though?” you plead, still panting.

as he tchs at your little question. geto eye rolls, secretly loving how you always wanted something in return. “yeah. but don’t blame me if ‘s like twenty minutes long though.”

☆ SUKUNA RYŌMEN + shibari.

you were sukuna ryomen’s favorite,

the minute you bring up wanting to try shibari with him, something lights up within him. oh, he’s adored shibari for centuries. eons. loving nothing more than to tie his precious lover up and have his way with them. so when you tell him you grew a special liking to it, he just had to indulge in your fantasies.

“tell me if it’s too tight, little one,” he purrs, his voice as rough as ever. you felt the brief tightening of the ropes around your body, securing your weight as you dangle near his chambered walls. your nude body’s like art to him. an empty canvas he’d soon fill with his own type of paint. you give him a nod, gasping once he restrains you in a way so that your legs sprawl widely open for him. “hmmm,” he groans, getting right behind you.

his growl sends you shivers, your cunt’s sopping wet and he brings a hand to feel against your body. sukuna’s touch itself was hypnotic.

“you’re already soaked, how amusing,” and judging from the devilish rasp in his tone, he sounds offended. leaning up against your ear, he dips a single finger inside. “tell me, did these filthy fingers touch her while i was away?”

“n- no,” you mumble, the soft padded strokes of his fingertips making your head throw itself back. he was right behind you, you were hanging with the safe gripping of ropes securing your thighs open before you moan. “didn’t touch myself all day, ‘kuna. waited for you to c- come back.”

“don’t like when my girl lies,” he snarls, and you moan again once he gifts the entrance of your cunt a mean smack. it’s rude—the way his palm hits against your folds causes the very center of his hand to get coated with your wetness. he’d be lying himself if he said that didn’t turn him on. in fact, with the attention he’s giving your pussy, it’s making his dick twitch beneath the expensive homemade fabric of his royal kimono. “ugh, gettin’ me hard,” and he pauses before another finger delves inside. you’re whining, feeling how easily he stretches your opening up with two solid digits. as your legs remain to spread, his eyes flicker toward the rope that’s got a nice grip against your breasts. “mhm, such a pretty body though. would be a shame to edge ya right now.”

“s- sukuna,” you whimper, leaning furthermore into his touch. a curling of your toes starts to make an appearance before he swirls both fingers in and out of your pussy. he’s so deep, a long dragging meal dies from your throat rawly before you’re already being pulled into a teetering orgasmic edge. “fuck, ‘s good. your fingers- please don’t s- stop.”

“quiet, princess,” he warns you, you throb from the mature authority in his voice. with his fingers getting lost into the deep never-ending exits of your cunt, you squelch all around his fingers. scarlet, ruby eyes stare at your exposed body and a long forked tongue licks against his lips. “keh, imaginin’ you touch my pussy ‘s almost laughable,” and your jaw hangs itself down the moment his lengthy digits locate your g-spot. it doesn’t take him long at all. with a sly smile compressing against his lips, sukuna brings a kiss toward your neck. “oh, you’re so predictable. you want me to tie you up but you have the audacity to touch yourself. ‘n ya can’t even do it right at that, you poor thing.”

his words did something to you — it wasn’t pity, no, it was more of him teasing you. maybe a sprinkle of humility, but either way, you throbbed from it regardless. and yet, the last thing you expect is for the demon to get right in front of you, leveling his head down toward your open legs before licking against your sweet cunt. “s- sukuna,” you whine, and your first instinct was to grab onto his hair for support. but then it dawned on you. you couldn’t, you were tied up. damn it all.

you’re shivering from his flat tongue. he’s like a cat, giving it a few subtle sloppy licks. the texture of his forked tongue makes you shudder before he pulls his mouth back. that’s all he’d give you for now. “mhm,” he grumbles, pressing a thumb against your pulsating twitching muscle. once he sees your pout, he chuckles. “oh, do you want me to continue?” and you nod, desperate for his tongue to go back to its place. “very well.”

and sukuna brings a sharp blackened fingernail towards your folds, gently grazing it near your nub before a tongue slowly slithers its way over his lips. you gulp, meeting eye contact with the king of curses.

and now, he knew what his brand new meal was.

☆ GOJO SATORU + blindfolds.

“thaaaat’s.. kinda kinky, gojo flashes a coy grin, carefully tying his blindfold around your eyes. once he secures a little knot near the back, he hums in amusement. “but okay. jus’ lie back, angel. ‘m gonna take good care of my girls.”

his ‘girls’ being his most precious beings which was—

you, what’s between your legs, and of course, your tits too.

but with those, he’d tend to them another day. right now, he was focused on you from behind. as his weight’s directly pressed up against you, he smears his leaky tip against your entrance with one hand. “easy, good girl. jus’ feel, let ‘toru the talkin’ angel,” and his body heat was so hot against yours. you pout from his teasing because he’s not even fucking you yet - but he just wants to toy with you for a bit. as his blindfold’s tied over your eyes, he makes your wrists pin behind your back. “so pretty like this.”

“s- satoru,” you frown and once he makes your back arch, you slump forward. gojo grabs a hand full of your ass before squeezing it. with a spank, it recoils against your skin before he’s sinking his way into your drenched cunt. “mhm,” you bite your lip, and the tremendous shaking starts. he’s thin, his cock was even thinner, but the fat girth solely makes up for it. with a gasping whine and your mouth becoming ajar, he’s splitting you open. it doesn’t take long before he’s bottoming out, getting you in nothing more but a prone bone position. “fuck me, f- fuck meee.”

“m tryin’ to,” he huffs, groaning at the way his peeling foreskin sinks its way into your clingy cunt. your grip was so good that it makes it fall back effortlessly. but fuck, he’s already about to cum. one pump champ satoru, he talks a big game for someone who can barely last sometimes. it’s been a while and he didn’t expect for you to feel so good. “s- shit.”

gojo grunts, swollen fat shaft making an attempt to bully its way into your walls. you’re still facing forward, your vision replaced with nothing but pitch darkness before you whine in rapture. he grabs onto your neglected tits, playing with your nipples with the hot tips of his thumbs, and that’s when he starts humping against you. it’s sloppy slow thrusts, grinding his rotating hips against your core as he’s trying to start up a pace but the sensation creeps up against him. “oh, f- fuckkk,” he groans lowly, snowy brows contorting together in pleasure. you’re sucking him in so good, swallowing him whole with your pussy it’s almost embarrassing. as your stomach caves in, you start to pant. chasing your breath ridiculously as if it was a marathon race—gojo was mirroring your actions. it was cute,

your body underneath him continues to jolt before his hand finds its way around your throat, wrapping around like a snake. a thumb caresses the tiny hairs that stand up against your neck before he spanks you.

again, and again and again,

“f-fuck, gonna make me cum. slutty little— hngh.”

right as he’s speaking, gojo spurts out a few droplets of cum, and it turns into a whole bucket. his teeth was shattering, jaw lowering itself open as he’s giving you a nice amount of warm, seasoned cum. it was raunchy, you’re struggling to stay still yourself as your arms could barely hold up your twitching body. your cunt was squelching for all of him and only him, puckering hole just aching to be filled that your tongue stupidly lolls itself out for a few seconds. you still can’t see, yet you can feel everything.

“s- sato—”

“be quiet, wanna listen,” he whines, lightly shoving your head into the mattress. with an oof, your head goes into the pillow as he’s dumping such loads of raw cum right into your welcoming hole. it’s a lot, it’s got him drooling all down your neck, he hates finishing early but he couldn’t help it. gojo’s shaking just as much as you are, pink lips of his press together as he stares at himself pumping you full. with a greedy pout, he flips you over abruptly and snatches his blindfold off you.

still feeling his slimy ropes of cum pour out your pussy and alongside toward the edges of your thighs, you meet his hungry gaze and he’s so needy for more. spreading open your legs, he gets a single taste of his own seed before nibbling against your cunt. “hold still. i- i need to clean you. let me eat, ‘m fuckin’ starved.”

☆ CHOSO KAMO + breeding.

“give me a baby, ‘cho.”

once those sweet five words come from your lips, his eyes widen. leering into them, all you could see was pure lust.

choso was always aware about your breeding kink, how you loved to milk his cock over and over and over again.

and despite knowing he’s infertile - a mere half curse half human being, chances were that he probably wouldn’t even able to give you what you really wanted. except, you liked to pretend. and besides, thanks to you—he started to develop a little breeding kink of his own.

“a b- baby,” he repeats, his words in the mere form of a sweetened question mark. choso’s got you laid on your back, stuffing your cunt full of cock before he pauses. with a thumb stroking your cheek, he has a timid smile. “how many do you want this time, princess?”

playing along, you hum to yourself— throwing your arms over his shoulders. “hmm, let’s try for triplets this time,” and you bring him toward you, planting a kiss against his forehead before feeling his dick twitch inside of your cunt. “can you do that for me baby? leave me full like last time?”

“yeah,” he nods, admiration sparkling in his eyes. the more he stared into your blown, doe irises, the more he falls in love. in love with love, in love with you. choso’s rough hands meet yours, intertwining with your fingers as they tangle with might before he starts up again. “m- mhm, i can do that. i can .. i can give you triplets, promise.”

he was so determined, he didn’t wanna disappoint.

choso’s pace was simply relentless. despite how sweet and tender he was, his rhythmic hips that struck deeply into your core was an entire different story. as bodies move and dance against each other in harmony, you whine against his ear. rough yet sweet yet passionate. “like that, choso. f- fuck, right there baby. don’t miss, p- please.”

your voice were so close up to his earlobe that he could hear the warmth of your breath cascading down from your lips. oh, you sounded like an angel. so harmonic and blissful. it makes his dick throb whilst it’s still plummeting in and out of your insides. skin against skin, it mercilessly slaps against each other, pap and papping away so roughly that it makes your toes curl. “promise, ‘m not gonna miss. gonna g- give you so much, ‘s gonna pour out so much, baby,” and he was even more whinier than you. with breaths of his own leaving out of his filled up lungs, he squeezes against your sprawled out thigh. “ugh, you’re so warm. ‘m not gonna last this time i think. o- oh.”

the thrashing crown of his cock extends inside of your walls and he leans in to kiss you. once, then twice, then thrice. choso’s lips were sweet like candy, as he’s rutting into you — your gummy walls gripping onto him tightly, it starts to pour into you in tiny volumes. it’s so thick, it’s so much that he starts to drool into your mouth. choso slows down as a wadding knot dribbles its way into your welcoming cunt. he whimpers as your lips mash against his, sucking against his tongue. “s- so much, so much to give you, pretty,” he babbles, breaking away from your lips a bit.

you pant right along with him, he goes back to holding your hand, giving it a firm squeeze before his eyes turn hooded. sable drawn pupils never leaves yours, and his cheeks flush with adorable heat. “that’s it baby, jus’ let go ‘n fill me up okay?”

as he’s growing quiet, listening to the sloppy tune between your legs pitch louder, he groans. piles and piles of cum pour into your cunt. it’s so much that it’s not even humanly possible to take it all. so it spills out, right between the crevices of your thighs. it’s insanely gooey, choso stares at it and he’s got the most smug cute grin, knowing he did that. it’s warm and sticky. his ears ring all at once as his tip’s still emitting such ropes of velvety seed into your entrance. “mhm, baby. you always t- take it so well.” he huffs, feeling the weight of his chest deflating. you remain still, laid against the bed frame as he’s just basking in your gorgeous sight. you looked like an angel to him. no, you were an angel, especially with how you were always so cute whenever he came inside. you were moaning just as much as him, eyebrows furrowing and mouth shaped wide and open, so so pretty.

with a huffing sigh, you wrap your arms around him, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “thank y- you, ‘cho. feels so good.”

“should be thanking you,” he murmurs, his voice a bit more deep and raspy. as he’s still positioned between your legs, choso grabs your palm, giving it a sweet kiss. mwah after mwah, the texture of his lips couldn’t have been even more warmer. you were so full of cum that you couldn’t even move. you just stayed there, staring deep into his eyes before he whispers against your ear. “marry me, p- please. wanna give you quadruplets next time, baby. be my wifey.”

☆ TOJI FUSHIGURO + daddy kink.

“tch. can never work out without you givin’ me some shit,” he groans as your hips picks up its pace briskly.

toji, being nothing but the usual of covered in perspiring sweat, wears a simple white tee with basketball shorts. lazily, he slouches back against the bench. scheming green eyes peer at your twitching body and your sloppy cunt makes him gnaw on his lip. a big hand, calloused and all squeezes against the fat of your ass. the curvature, he acknowledges every little angle before tracing his fingers alongside your hips. “ya didn’t miss me, you missed dick, huh?”

“i.. i did miss you, toji,” you lie through your teeth, feeling the milky ring around his base stick against your rear. just a few moments ago, he’d just gotten done pumping a load into you. with toji, it was always a lot. he never half assed anything. you’ve been riding him for so long you were surprised your legs didn’t up and give out. collapsing and buckling from his fat cock. “i- missed you s’much, daddy.”

it was an abrupt pause — the silence was strikingly deadly.

a thin brow of his quirks up in amusement before he brings your hips to a sudden stop. you whine, seeing the stretching smirk grow against his face. the scar slashed near the right side of his lips curls in gladden before he grabs your chin. “missed who?”

“missed you, toj-”

“girl don’t fuckin’ play with me,” he side eyes you, gingery peeling your bottom lip down with his thumb. he inches his face closer, and you could smell the intoxicating whiskey on his breath. “who’d you miss? repeat that, y’know ‘m losin’ hearin’ in my right ear, heh.”

he was so sassy, you wanted to roll your eyes but you couldn’t even bother with how stuffed your cunt was. the stretch, another whine was about to rip straight from your throat before you lean into his touch. speaking shyly, you moan as he spanks your ass for you to hurry up. “missed you, daddy,” and the moment toji starts to bounce his thigh, your breathing starts to pick up. the friction has you weak, his jade, verdant eyes staring into your soul. “missed you all day.”

“mhm, y’er a weirdo,” he snickers, feeling his dick throb within you once you call him that. with his muscles flexing idly, you get the urge to touch all around them. so you do, running a hand up his burly biceps before he grabs your wrist. “no touchin’ daddy, gotta say please first. we talked about this, babygirl.”

hearing him address himself as your little kink makes your cunt twitch. as you try to create a bit a movement with your hips, he spanks your ass once more, baring a fang slyly at the gripping fat that recoils from his palm. “t- toji,” and he smacks your ass again, giving you a raising brow. “i mean daddy, can- can i c..cum, please?”

“hnnn,” he grunts lowly, his voice a mere vibration of itself. with the way his tone was so deep, it was raw and scratchy. throaty, he’s still buried into you and your cunt’s still deliriously sobbing for more. you just wanted to move, your arms sling around his broad shoulders before you whimper into his ear. “wanna cum on daddy, eh,” and your eager nod against his chest makes him chortle. you were so eager, entirely so — as you try to create haste, he rolls his eyes. “fine, give it to me.”

and the moment he complies to your desperate wants, you came, giving into your lewd pleasure with the cutest moan leaving your throat. you’re shaking within his hold, two rough hands sliding down your waist as he rests a chin against your neck.

“good, good girl,” he murmurs, cold voice still booming near your lobe. you’re so wet, unapologetically damping his lap with your slick as your hips buck forward. yet, toji wasn’t exactly done. with two thickset hands, he lifts you up before lightly shoving you on the bed, having you lie flat on your bare chest. “nah, don’t get up. stay there,” and his words sent a plethora of butterflies straight toward your pussy. toji takes a moment to stare at your drooling cunt from the back, stopping himself from getting a taste right then and there before he smears his tip against your opening, preparing to go in raw. “shit,” he groans, the left side of your face sinking into the cushioned mattress. as your whines ring and reverb through the thin walls, he lifts your ass right up against him. “arch for me, girl. daddy’s ‘bout ‘ta make ya a mommy, heh.”

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thankskenpenders · 6 months ago

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The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings review

The day has finally come. Many, understandably, thought we'd never get here. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten here. We've been through so much. Lawsuits, reboots, redesigns, unreleased NFTs, empty legal threats over the fact that movie Knuckles has a dad, an attempt to license out Scourge the Hedgehog to fans that immediately got canceled (in both meanings of the term), and many, MANY idiotic Twitter controversies. But now, here we are.

Thirteen years after first announcing it in the middle of his legal battles with Archie and Sega that changed the American Sonic comics forever, former writer Ken Penders has released the first part of his new series: The Lara-Su Chronicles.

Yes. I had to buy the book. I had to take one for the team. Look at the fucking URL of this blog, a blog I've been using to talk about the American Sonic comics for nearly a decade while the specter of this book loomed in the distance. The one time I've actually been paid to write an article about anything in any professional capacity, it was an article about the Penders lawsuits. I'm cited on his Wikipedia page. There was no way I was going to skip reviewing this, and there was no guarantee that scans would ever turn up online given the incredibly small audience for this trash. (Only 166 people preordered this, and even that number feels way higher than it should be.) No, I had to preorder it to ensure I could get a copy and cover it for the blog... even if that meant my name would be forever immortalized in the list of "supporters" in the back of the book. These are the sacrifices I must make as a woman who stumbled ass backwards into being an amateur Archie Sonic historian.

So, what exactly is in this book? How much of it is new? How bad is it? How did we even get here in the first place? How can this exist without Sega pursuing legal action? What happens next? And, most importantly... why are there multiple depictions of an Archie Sonic character breastfeeding in this book?

I'm here to answer those questions as best I can, and in agonizing detail.

First, for those just tuning in to this decades-long saga or those who maybe don't know the full story, here's a refresher on the background info.

"What the hell is this?"

The Lara-Su Chronicles is Ken Penders' long-dreaded long-awaited continuation of his 1994-2006 run on Archie Sonic, ignoring everything written after he left by other writers like Ian Flynn. In particular, it picks up from the cliffhanger ending of the 2003-2004 arc "Mobius: 25 Years Later," which was set in what Ken considers the definitive canonical future of the series. It stars Knuckles' daughter from that future era, Lara-Su, among other new and returning characters. The project was first announced near the start of Ken's legal battle with Archie in 2011, and he's been posting WIP previews online for about a decade. Now, after all this time, a Lara-Su Chronicles book finally exists.

We'll get to the actual contents of that book in a bit.

"He can do that without getting in trouble with Sega?"

Believe it or not, yes, he can.

Thanks to the outcome of Archie Comics' woefully mismanaged lawsuits against Ken (yes, they sued him after he started filing for copyrights, not the other way around), he now has full legal ownership of every story he wrote for Archie Sonic and every character he created for the series. This was explicitly granted to him in the terms of the settlement between him and Archie (acting on behalf of Sega). He can even reprint his old Sonic material as-is to his heart's content. The main catch is just that he can't write new stories featuring Sega characters or trademarks, and his new stories also have to be distinct from Sonic at a glance to avoid confusing readers. As such, reprints can't use Sonic iconography on the cover, a few Sega characters (mainly Knuckles) have been renamed and slightly redesigned in the new stories, and the art style has been changed to less closely resemble Sonic. But otherwise, he can do whatever he wants with his own characters.

All of this is because Archie lost the original copy of Ken's work-for-hire contract that signed over the rights to his work. Without that (or any alternative that was considered permissible in court), his comics and characters are the property of their creator by default. Yes, those old comics are full of Sega stuff, but Sega doesn't automatically own the copyright for every drawing of Sonic in existence. And Sega put their stamp of approval all over those comics and let them get sold at retail for decades, even though (in the eyes of the court) there was no legal paperwork granting them ownership of any of it. It's almost like they were unwittingly distributing a fan comic for years and declaring it a fair use of their property, and now there's no takesies backsies. It's a strange and unique copyright situation. Again, they worked all this out in the settlement. And, yes, fans have long speculated that Ken stole and destroyed his own contract to regain the rights to his work, but frankly Archie was so incompetent throughout the lawsuit (it went so bad that they had to fire and replace their lawyers midway through) that I completely buy the idea of them just losing important legal documents.

Also, in case it needs to be spelled out: while Ken's a weirdo, it's ultimately a good thing for creatives everywhere that Archie lost their lawsuit against Ken. We do not want to live in a world where corporations can claim ownership of peoples' work without the contracts to back it up. That would be an incredibly dangerous legal precedent to set. And more comic creators, and artists in general, should own their own work! Corporations are not your friend! They'll delete your work for a tax write-off in a heartbeat! It's just bewildering that this guy, of all people, was the creator who ended up successfully getting his shit back, and that this is what he's doing with it.

"What about his old collaborators? Are they involved? Is he paying them?"

Ken is mostly doing The Lara-Su Chronicles solo, though he has, in fact, talked about compensating the artists involved in any material he's reprinting. The ones who give enough of a shit to get paid for a small scale reprint of something they did 20 years ago, anyway.

On the subject of his collaborators, it's also worth pointing out that Ken's wasn't the only contract that was lost. Most of the early Archie Sonic writers from before Ian Flynn's time seem to be in the same boat as Ken, with the ownership of their stories and characters defaulting back to them. Again, Archie fucked up big time. But like I said, most of them don't really seem to give a shit. For most of them, Sonic was just a random temporary gig they took to pay the bills while Marvel was busy going bankrupt in the '90s, not the thing that defined their entire careers.

The only other Archie Sonic contributor who's tried to do anything on the level of what Ken is doing was writer and editor Scott Fulop. In 2016 he attempted to sue Archie for the unauthorized use of what are now retroactively considered his copyrighted characters and stories, and he even announced a standalone comic about his most famous Sonic character, the recurring villain Mammoth Mogul (sort of a pastiche of DC's Vandal Savage and Marvel's Kingpin, with wizard powers added for spice). However, Fulop lost his lawsuit because he didn't put together a particularly compelling case. Since then he seems to have wiped all traces of his ill-advised Mammoth Mogul comic and his company, Narrative Ark Entertainment, from the internet. For now, this leaves The Lara-Su Chronicles the only project of its kind.

"What about those other Archie Sonic reprints he just announced?"

At the time of writing, Ken is once again claiming that he's trying to get the band back together to reprint all of Archie Sonic, now under the bad new banner "Floating Island Productions: MOBIAN LINE" that I can't imagine he consulted literally anyone else on.

So, like, look. As we've established, Ken can reprint his own stories. And if he can work something out with the other contributors whose contracts were lost, he can print their work, too. But there is no fucking way he's getting his hands on Ian Flynn's run, which Sega undoubtedly holds the copyright for. Even if they don't, Ian needs to maintain a good working relationship with both Sega and IDW if he's to keep his job, so he'd never go for this. Not to mention that Ian and Ken just... don't get along! Ken's whole plan here seems to be predicated on IDW going out of business (a thing he REALLY wants to happen) and freeing up the Sonic comic license, after which he knocks on Sega's door and goes "hey I've still got dirt on you guys," blackmailing them into giving him the Sonic license back so that he can reprint the later comics. Every step of this plan is ludicrous. It's never gonna happen.

He's been saying he wants to reprint the whole series for a few years now, though. This isn't really anything new. And despite his lofty plans that set Sonic Twitter ablaze, he quickly backpedaled. The only specific things in the works right now are a "two-volume omnibus" of all of his Knuckles stories and a collection of artist Scott Shaw's work on the very early Archie Sonic issues, since they're on good terms with each other. I have no idea how Ken plans on packaging these when he can't put any Sega characters or the Freedom Fighters on the covers, but these projects are small enough in scale that there's a decent chance they'll see the light of day. Scott Shaw only did like five issues. But anything beyond that? I'll believe it when I see it.

Or, y'know, this could've all just been a publicity stunt for his new book. I wouldn't put it past him. Let's just focus on the book that actually exists.

"So he finally did it? He made a whole Lara-Su book? It's out? He finished it??"

Yes and no.

The book that's out now is The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, a prologue for the series of seven graphic novels Ken somehow plans on making, even though it's taken him 13 years to put out literally anything new. I don't know whether or not this counts as book one of seven, because it only features 30 pages of new comics. 30.5 if I'm being generous.

Most of the book is actually just a reprint of his infamous Archie Sonic storyline "Mobius: 25 Years Later", which ran from issue #131 to #144 in 2003-2004. (Again, yes, he can reprint this, he just can't put Sonic on the cover.) Why's it infamous? Well, Ken had been building anticipation for this future era of the series for basically his entire run. We kept seeing King Sonic and Queen Sally from the future. Knuckles' entire backstory hinges on his dad having a vision of this future. Several years before Silver the Hedgehog was created, it was Lara-Su who was Sonic's equivalent to Future Trunks, the cool-looking child of one of the main characters who traveled back in time to try and prevent a dark future. Believe it or not, yes, there was hype for Lara-Su. And then we finally got M25YL, and none of that cool stuff happened. Instead it really ended up being about how unbearably boring the middle aged Sonic, Knuckles, Sally, and co. are in this peaceful future where Robotnik is dead and they're all married with kids, forced into traditional nuclear family gender roles. Lara-Su is present, but she mostly just does generic teen girl stuff and complains about how Knuckles won't let her do anything even though she REALLY wants to be the new Guardian of Angel Island, like, super bad! Come on, dad!!!

In its original printing, this meandering arc ended on an abrupt time travel cliffhanger that Ken was never able to follow up on before he left Archie in 2006. This new printing slightly changes that ending, using the unresolved timey-wimey shenanigans as a convenient excuse to alter the entire timeline. This creates the slightly different world of The Lara-Su Chronicles, where the few relevant Sega-owned characters have been replaced and everyone is ten times uglier.

After this, we finally get two short new stories picking up where M25YL left off: "The Storm," starring Acorn Kingdom super-spy and known creep Geoffrey St. John, and an early release of the first chapter of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows, the first full TLSC graphic novel.

And now that we're all on the same page about what we're looking at, let's actually talk about the book!

The cover

Let's start by beating a dead horse. The cover art: it's still bad! But why is it bad?

The cover is, of course, based on Patrick Spaziante's cover from Archie Sonic #131, the start of the "Mobius: 25 Years Later" arc. (Ken did the layout for that cover, though, so in the eyes of the law he's the original creator who owns that cover.) That cover was, itself, a tribute to the iconic cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, the issue that introduced the version of the team with Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, etc.

Ken seems to have forgotten that the point of both these covers was to hype up the arrival of a new cast of characters. The new guys are supposed to make a dramatic entrance front and center. That's the focal point. Meanwhile, the cover for Beginnings has the old timeline versions of the cast from Archie Sonic dramatically bursting out of a shattered crystal ball, while their new counterparts look on in mild bemusement - if they're even bothering to look at all, since most of the characters here are just copied and pasted from their profile pages. That's just not how you do this particular homage! The point is supposed to be "out with the old, in with the new." And why are they using a crystal ball to view the past? Hell, why are they even using a crystal ball at all? The original arc was presented as a magical vision of the future courtesy of Tails' uncle Merlin (don't ask), but the new story leans all the way into being futuristic sci-fi.

Of course, there is no real artistic intent at play here. The old versions of the characters are placed front and center in the crystal ball simply because Ken traced over Spaziante's original art of Lara-Su and Julie-Su (the only two characters on the Sonic cover he owns) and threw out the rest, ruining the composition in the process. Look at the awkward empty space where Sonic, Sally, and Rotor once were, and the new drawing of The Character Formerly Known As Knuckles who's no longer properly centered between his wife and daughter. Even if Ken can claim ownership of the cover because he did the original layout, this all just feels scummy and lame.

And, yeah, if it needs to be said, the new characters and Ken's new rendering style look like absolute fucking dogshit. Putting new Lara-Su directly next to old Lara-Su does her no favors. The shattered glass effect looks absolutely atrocious. I could go on, but we'll have plenty of time to talk about the art style when we see how bad the stories inside look.

Changes to "Mobius: 25 Years Later"

Overall, 99% of M25YL is presented identically to its original printing. Sonic, Sally, Knuckles, et al. are still present with no changes to their names and no tweaks to the art. Even the original cover for issue #131 is included only a few pages into this book with its Archie, Sonic, and Sega logos still intact and everything. Again, because of the weird copyright situation described above, these preexisting comics can be released without any changes.

There is exactly one bizarre change to the art, though, where a hand drawn shot of Angel Island is replaced with an unfitting photo background and the ugly Floating Island photobash that Ken has been using as his personal logo for decades. I think he only did this as part of a test for his motion comic app that nobody asked for. I don't know why this had to make it into the print version. It's like the book is firing a warning shot for what's to come if you keep reading.

The new content begins on the final page of M25YL. In the original wet fart of a cliffhanger ending, Sonic and co. accidentally alter the timeline with an old time machine of Robotnik's and Lara-Su begins to fade away. Then, after everything goes white, we just cut to the present day heroes going "gee, you ever think about the future?" In this new printing, that last bit has been cut, and the rest of the page has been awkwardly shrunk down so that Ken can fit in a new panel. We now see the hands of an off-screen villain, seemingly named "Override," proclaiming that "the Praetorian" (Knuckles) has messed up the timeline again and that they'll finally get their revenge.

Who is this Override? I have no fucking clue. The new stories in this book make no mention of them. You have to buy the next book to find out.

My confusion over the identity of this villain overlaps with another big problem: name changes. So many names and nouns have been arbitrarily changed in The Lara-Su Chronicles, even ones Ken didn't have to change for copyright reasons, and I only know what half of them are replacing because Ken's been tweeting about this shit for years.

The echidnas are now a totally original alien race called "the Echyd'nya." Even in flashbacks to events from M25YL attempting to mimic the old art style, if it's on a new comic page, they're gonna call themselves "Echyd'nya." Evil echidna faction the Dark Legion is now the "Cyberdark Dominion," hailing from the "Cyberdark Colony." The Brotherhood of Guardians is still the Brotherhood of Guardians, but now the main guardian is called "The Praetorian." Angel Island is still called "The Floating Island," like it was in the older Archie comics, but it's ALSO sometimes called "Avion"? When I read this I wasn't sure if he had randomly renamed Albion, the other echidna city from the Archie comics. But no. Now we have an Albion AND an Avion. Sally is mentioned simply as "Princess Acorn," while Sonic is referenced once as an unnamed "blue-spined Erinaceinae," using the scientific name for hedgehog to make it sound more sci-fi. In an incredibly ballsy move, Ken even mentions Robotnik as "the Insurrectionist Kintobor," retaining his original surname from the Archie comics that's just "Robotnik" backwards. Guess Sega never trademarked that one.

Aside from every name change being a downgrade, this leads to confusion when you're not sure if something is supposed to be new, or if it's just an Archie thing you're supposed to recognize despite having a new name and design. Is "Override" someone I'm supposed to know already? Am I just supposed to have read a fucking tweet from Ken where he said he changed the name of some existing villain to "Override"? The answer is no, but I had to term search his Twitter just to verify this.

Moving on!

New story #1: "The Storm"

If you've been following the WIPs, this is that story about Geoffrey St. John that Ken's been posting previews of for almost a decade. The title page copyright dates it to 2015, and that absurdly long gestation is probably why the art is so inconsistent here. Even the style of speech bubbles and the font change between pages two and three.

This is a problem when there's supposed to be a deliberate and noticeable change in art style here signaling the moment where the time travel stuff alters the timeline, replacing the Archie Sonic world with the Lara-Su Chronicles world. If you don't already know that's what's going on, the idea isn't conveyed clearly at all. It just goes from one hideous art style to a slightly different one with no explanation.

The main problem here is that Ken has hitched his wagon to a franchise about anthropomorphic animals when he can't draw furries to save his life. (Though a bit later in the book we'll also begin to wonder if he can even still draw humans.) He's shifted away from the cartooniness of the original designs and given them more human proportions and facial features, but this just ends up making them look incredibly uncanny and lumpy and gross. With some designs he's trying to lean into more of a Star Trek alien vibe, but then he still insists upon retaining the giant Sonic eyes on most characters even though he has no idea how to make them emote.

The rendering of these godawful designs doesn't do them any favors, either. Ken's going for more of a painterly look now, but it almost seems as though he's shading everything with Photoshop's burn and dodge tools that are designed to darken and lighten select areas of a photo. The result is a muddy, smudgy look that makes it feel like the color layer has been smeared in vaseline. And it only looks worse after coming off of 14 chapters of M25YL that have way more palatable art.

The backgrounds, too, are a complete mess, a jumble of low res jpeg photo elements (sometimes with extremely noticeable pixelation), stock textures, and smooth digital gradients. There's no real sense of place here, and it gives everything a surreal, dreamlike quality when you can't really tell where anything is supposed to take place. This first story is seemingly set in a high-tech stronghold below Castle Acorn called "the Bunker," but it could just as easily be confused for the bridge of a spaceship. This whole story features characters speaking to each other over floating video displays and hologram projectors from three different locations, but without a hologram effect and without a clear sense of where the characters are it often feels like they're just in the same room as each other. Characters will be in one location on one photo background, and then the camera angle changes and they're in a completely different place, because Ken just uses mismatched photos off of the internet. It's been like 25 years since he first tried using photo backgrounds in the Archie comics and he hasn't gotten any better at it.

When I had my boyfriend read the book to see if it made literally any sense to him (it didn't), Anthony said this: "This is the kind of shit I'd see linked on a Second Life world that hasn't been touched since 2004." I think he really hit the nail on the head. Now, there's actually a contrarian part of me that thinks that might theoretically almost be kind of cool, in sort of a messy counterculture way. I love weird indie shit. I was a Homestuck reader! But this isn't a scrappy mixed media zine, or experimental outsider art from someone just messing around with Photoshop, or a loving throwback to weird old internet art, or even something intentionally bizarre and offputting like Xavier: Renegade Angel or a PilotRedSun video or whatever where the fact that it's weird and ugly is part of the humor. This is supposed to be a sincere sci-fi epic drawing on Star Trek and Jack Kirby comics, made by a guy who's been drawing comics professionally since the '80s. This is supposed to look good. This is supposed to compete with mainstream comics that are on sale right now. He thinks any day now IDW's gonna go out of business and Sega will come crawling back to him so that he can stamp the Sonic logo on shit like this. It just doesn't work.

But, okay. It's ugly. We knew it would be ugly. But that ugliness would be much easier to accept if it was in service of an otherwise genuinely good story. So what about the writing? After all this time, how does Ken choose to kick off this new saga? Well, credit where credit's due. "The Storm" feels like a proper continuation of Ken's writing style from M25YL.

Because it's eleven pages of characters standing around and talking while nothing fucking happens.

Here's the synopsis: A dog woman named Brownie, an ensign in the Royal Secret Service fresh out of training and the only character who's almost cute, walks up to Geoffrey to deliver a report. He's immediately suspicious of her, asking who let her in and if she's a spy for Elias (Sally's brother, if you're new here) or Alicia (Sally's mom). The art style suddenly shifts when the timeline is altered, but the scene continues uninterrupted. Geoffrey points a gun at Brownie when she won't say whose spy she is. Geoffrey is distracted by a call and proceeds to have a conversation via a mix of holograms and video screens with Remington (head of Echidnaopolis security), Spectre (Knuckles' great great great great great grandpa, the one with the helmet who always looks evil), and a new scientist character named Dr. Zephyr/Zephur. (The spelling of this character's name changes multiple times throughout the 11-page story, because I guess nine years wasn't enough time to spellcheck this shit.) They say a bunch of made up technobabble nonsense about how it looks like the timeline was just altered and Knuckles and co. seem to be involved. It's complete drivel that I'm not even going to try to make sense of. Everyone decides to investigate further, and the conversation ends. Brownie tells Geoffrey she's his spy, then walks out and implies she's actually Alicia's spy in her inner monologue.

To be continued!!!

Yes, that's it. It's really just a bunch of technobabble where some characters talk about how it seems like the timeline has been fucked with. That's it. The whole time Geoffrey doesn't even get up out of his damn chair, which he's of course sitting in backwards to show how cool he is. It's just 11 pages of Geoffrey sitting in a chair and talking to people and looking uglier than he's ever looked. Nothing happens. Nine years for this.

I'm also struck by how meaningless all of this is to anyone who hasn't read Archie Sonic. The added context from M25YL may help a little, but "The Storm" focuses on characters who weren't in that arc, and the story does very little to introduce who any of them are. Brownie could've been super useful as an inexperienced point of view character who's only meeting the others for the first time here, but instead she's really just a passive observer who's here as part of some kind of 4D chess game between Geoffrey and Alicia, an off-screen character whose motivations in this era of the story are completely unknown to even returning readers. Who are the good guys and bad guys here? What are the conflicts and the stakes of the story moving forward? What do these characters want? Basic questions like this aren't really answered. I can't imagine a new reader being able to make heads or tails of this. Hell, I can't really imagine a returning reader who hasn't been following the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets about this story making heads or tails of it, either.

...Maybe more will happen in the next story?

New story #2: Shattered Tomorrows preview chapter

After another message from Ken, the story of The Lara-Su Chronicles proper begins with the redesigned Lara-Su walking along a jpeg photograph beach at sunset and crying while thinking about how Knuckles - sorry, his name is K'Nox now - is dead.

Yep! Straight into the dad stuff!

Look, I'm the last person to complain about writers getting super personal and drawing from their own baggage in their writing, but Ken's just no fucking good at it. There's no nuance, nothing interesting to say. He just keeps writing mediocre-to-horrible dads whose misdeeds are always justified by their "good intentions," and then sometimes they die and their kids are like "we may have fought but actually you were the bestest dad ever and I'll miss you forever, I'll never be able to fill your shoes!"

This is the only part of the new material here that feels like it has any heart behind it, because I know how much his complex relationship with his late deadbeat father means to Ken (there's an author's note in this outright saying as much). But the guy died 42 years ago, and it doesn't feel like Ken has had any new thoughts about this part of his life in those four decades. He's just not an introspective or self-aware enough artist to actually mine his personal baggage for anything beyond "father knows best."

Anyway, so then it jumps forward in time(?) and now we're following this human guy who looks like this.

Previously, Ken got a lot of shit for literally just using the likeness of Anthony Mackie for this guy, based on his IMDB profile photo. Ken has thus redesigned the character... and by that I mean I think he looks more like Ernie Hudson now? Ken's clearly just working off of photo references (if not straight up tracing), given his face is the most detailed and realistic-looking thing on any page where he's present.

But you may be wondering: who is this, and why is he here? Well, for one, he's here to run around in front of some low res space photos while making trite references to things like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek. Haha, he makes a joke about red shirts! Original!! But beyond that, Commander Mykhal Taelor (yes, that's really how he chose to spell it) is a human... from Earth! Archie Sonic readers are probably confused, because in those comics Mobius is Earth in the distant post-apocalyptic future. Well, despite being a Planet of the Apes fan, Ken always hated that particular worldbuilding decision from Karl Bollers, always preferring to think of Mobius as a separate alien planet. And now he gets to make that canon in his own stories and throw out Karl's ideas. So Mobius is basically just, like, a Star Trek planet now, with its own alien creatures that sometimes just so happen to look like anthropomorphic Earth animals.

Also, at one point Taelor wonders if the inhabitants of the dead Mobius might have been human, and the alien ally he's talking to over the radio says it's unlikely. "I don't understand why your kind has a problem understanding you're a minority within a minority." Perhaps poor wording for a line said to the only Black character in the story.

Anyway, Commander Taelor here seems to have discovered the uninhabited husk of Mobius after the vague time-space cataclysm everyone was worried about in M25YL has come to pass, and he finds an audio log from Lara-Su that I presume will explain what happened. I guess those are the titular Lara-Su Chronicles. In theory this flash forward establishes some sense of pressing danger, but when the threat to the planet is so unclear and technobabble-y it just kind of lands with a thud.

It doesn't take long before we get back to Lara-Su being sad about her dad. A good little chunk of the chapter is spent with this new timeline's Lara-Su recalling moments in her life, including echoes of the original Lara-Su's memories from M25YL, which feels redundant coming hot off the heels of a straight reprint of that entire arc. And boy, for anyone who read the later Archie Sonic comics, the protagonist having vague memories of the old version of the series from before a lawsuit-related timeline reboot sure does sound familiar, huh?

The art inconsistency somehow becomes even worse in this story, with Ken flip-flopping on whether or not he wants to use outlines, with the no-outline art managing to look even worse by relying entirely on Ken's awful rendering. By this point in the book, readers are also likely to start noticing how often Ken reuses art from previous panels. This is a shortcut that tons of comic artists use, of course. Invincible famously did a joke about this. It's often understandable. But, again... it sure does stand out in a book that took 13 years to make with only 30 pages of new art. Amusingly, Ken even manages to combine his inconsistency and recycling problems by reusing the same art with and without outlines. And, of course, any time Ken tries to draw the Archie era designs it's just... the worst.

And, yes, it's in this dreamlike montage sequence of Lara-Su's life that we get...

The uncomfortable family nudity scene, followed by the dual timeline Julie-Su breastfeeding scene.

Yeah, you might have heard about this one already. If this incredibly eerie presentation of Lara-Su's hazy memories of the two different timelines make it hard to tell what's going on, don't worry. There's another, clearer version later in the book as part of Julie-Su's character profile, because I guess Ken was just so proud of it.

(I censored these myself because I'm not playing Russian roulette with Tumblr's inconsistent nudity rules and risking getting banned lmao)

Like, okay. Is a mother breastfeeding her child really that shocking of a thing to see in a story? No, not at all. But, like... when it's two characters who you previously created for an officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comic for 7-year-olds... and some of those officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comics for 7-year-olds are reprinted in the same book... and when it's drawn like this... yeah, it's kind of a shocker.

It just looks so unnatural. Julie-Su is posed very deliberately so that you'll see both of her breasts, and in the new timeline version she's barely even holding Lara-Su so you can really get a good look at her supermodel body, showing zero physical signs that she just gave birth. Most people will immediately jump to this being Ken putting his fetishes in his work (a type of criticism that I'm incredibly tired of - it's 2024, all the cool artists are blatantly putting their fetishes in their work now). And my immediate response is that, no, this is probably just Ken trying to come off as really mature on a surface level, a thing he's been obsessed with since the Archie days. Free from the shackles of writing a licensed children's comic, of course he's going to jump immediately into depicting some nonsexual, artistic nudity to try and prove he's A Real Mature Artist For Grown-Ups who just thinks the human body is beautiful and breastfeeding shouldn't be a taboo etc. etc.

But then, like. You look at some of the other character designs. Like Espio's daughter Salma, who's now this horrifying alien lizard person who's always nude, and her scale pattern puts scales exactly where her nipples should be. Or you look at his comments about the Echyd'nya age of consent. Or you look at how he keeps drawing Lara-Su in this. Like, does the shuttle really need this, like... reverse chaise lounge thing in the cockpit? So that we can keep getting these shots of the 16-year-old Lara-Su lying on her stomach and posing with one of her legs kicked up, her naked ass in plain view?

The vibe isn't great, is what I'm saying!

I'm not going to try to ascribe authorial intent here. I don't know. I'm not a psychic. Given his very blatant reliance on photo references elsewhere in the book, it's entirely possible he just referenced some figure drawing photos that were maybe just a little too sexy. And also, he's an American comic book artist, and a boomer one at that. Those guys tend to draw women a certain way, even when it's not supposed to be sexual. I don't fucking know. It just sucks. I'm not gonna make some hyperbolic statement about how this makes him a literal pedophile who should be in jail, but it is deeply offputting and objectifying.

But if you already knew about the nursing scenes and were hoping there was some other really shocking stuff in there for me to talk about in this review, sorry to disappoint, but nope. That's the only shockingly weird new thing in here. Once again, not a lot happens in this story, and what does happen is pretty boring.

Once we get past the recap stuff and the human guy, the plot developments boil down to this: The timeline was altered at the end of M25YL... but not as much as you might think. In the new timeline, Knuckles ("K'Nox"), Cobar (now looking significantly younger), and Rotor (now a rhino just called "The Emissary") still traveled via shuttle to go find a time machine in the Badlands and fix the time-space continuum, like in the climax of the original arc. This time, though, Sonic wasn't there, and Lara-Su came along without having to stow away. Lara-Su watches the ship while the grown ups go deal with the time machine, and then after a couple panels Not Rotor comes back with Cobar and is like "Hey, Cobar got hurt, we gotta leave. Dunno what happened to your dad." And then they just, like. Presume that Knuckles must have died. Even though we have no idea what happened to him. And then they just fly away. And then Lara-Su is sad that her dad died.

And that's pretty much it!

This is supposed to be a really emotional sequence - it's literally the scene where Lara-Su learns that Knuckles is dead - but instead it comes off as unintentionally funny because of how poorly it's portrayed. Not showing Knuckles' actual disappearance is a huge misstep, for one, making his uncertain fate more confusing and anticlimactic than dramatic. But also, Ken keeps just using the same two drawings of Rotor for two pages, so he doesn't really seem to be emoting at all, and he's in this spacey hazmat suit that honestly just makes him look like fucking Moltar from Space Ghost. So the whole time I'm just reading his dialogue in Moltar's deadpan voice as he's like "I dunno. We did what we could. Anyway, let's leave."

After this, we get a two-page spread previewing the rest of the story from Shattered Tomorrows. It's basically like a trailer in comic form. It has one of the most mystifying layouts I've ever seen in a comic book. I have no idea what order I'm supposed to read this in.

Yeah, I kinda have a feeling this is the full extent of what Ken has drawn for the rest of that book. I'd love to be wrong, but I fear that I'm right.

Bonus material: Data files

These are mostly very dull, recapping a lot of events shared between Ken's Archie run and the new Lara-Su Chronicles timeline. It seems like almost his entire run is still considered canon to the backstory of the new timeline, just with some names changed, and things only really diverge at the climax of M25YL. But I'll share the interesting stuff here.

Lara-Su

The main thing you'll notice in Lara-Su's profile is the massive, unreadable wall of text where Ken felt the need to list the entire Knuckles family tree, split across both pages.

This is literally so long that Lara-Su's personal history has to awkwardly cut off mid-sentence and be continued on the final page of the book, after the rest of the data files.

Also, please note that this list gives Julie-Su's mom's full name as Mari-Su of the House of Atrades. Incredible on all levels.

There's also a reference to the dark timeline Lara-Su was originally supposed to come from. You know, the one where Julie-Su is the leader of a rebel movement fighting against a Knuckles who had gone mad with power? The timeline that would have been way more interesting than the one in M25YL? Here it seems to have been written off as the result of another "timeline disruption." Lara-Su allegedly has vague memories of this timeline, in the same way that she has vague memories of the M25YL timeline.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey's bio mostly recaps events from the Archie comics, which means the Sonic/Sally/Geoffrey love triangle has to be alluded to. His rivalry with Sonic is described like this:

"He would later resurface when Kintobor was transporting his latest hi-tech weapon, the Dynamac-3000. It was during that mission he discovered a rival for the Princess' affections. Whereas the Princess would be one of a line of conquests where St. John was concerned, the blue-spined Erinaceinae who protested doth a bit too much regarding his affections for the Princess for St. John's taste would prove to be a source of great sport and amusement."

Yes. It's gross. Saying that Geoffrey saw Sally as "one of a line of conquests" is gross. Ken writing this and then still treating Geoffrey as the coolest badass ever is gross. The "Princess Acorn" is also first on the list of Geoffrey's "female relationships" elsewhere in his bio, though I suppose how much of a "relationship" they had is left vague. Honestly, at this point the fact that Ken didn't explicitly confirm that Geoffrey took the underage Sally's virginity in the book comes off as a display of restraint. The bar couldn't be any lower, I know.

Remington

His bio is, frankly, shockingly long for such a minor character, though I guess he does get a large portion of the word salad dialogue in "The Storm." There's a lot of stuff here about how the identities of his biological parents are shrouded in mystery, a plot point that fans have long speculated Ken just straight up forgot about in his time at Archie. (Ian confirmed that Kragok from the Dark Legion was Remington's dad, though, so this isn't really much of a mystery.)

Lien-Da

She gets a bio even though she's not present in the two new stories, just so we get to look at her awful new design and compare it to how Steven Butler drew her earlier in the book:

Commander Taelor

We get to see two drawings of him with the same exact Ernie Hudson face side by side! That's fun.

Julie-Su

She gets a list of "known friends," but the only character listed is Knuckles' mom. Poor Julie-Su.

Also, Ken feels the need to reiterate that Knuckles and Julie-Su are still distant cousins. He made a whole new timeline where he can change whatever details he wants, but THAT had to remain canon. Thanks, Ken.

And then after the data files we get the special thanks page, listing everyone who preordered the book and/or bought TLSC merch from Ken.

With my name on the list. Because I had to buy a copy to cover it for the blog.

My name is on the very next page right after the breastfeeding panel in Julie-Su's data file.

Yep. He got me.

Is it at least a well put together book? Like, in terms of manufacturing quality?

Its physical quality is... fine. It's a nice, sturdy hardcover. The print quality seems fine, though mine does have a bit of smudging from some sort of printing error on one page. The pages don't seem like they'll fall out on me. The image quality is crisp. The colors are vibrant. This is a low bar, but this is one of the few places where I'm able to give this book anything resembling praise.

The formatting and graphic design work, on the other hand...

(I didn't crumple those page corners, it came like that.)

For one, the placement and sizes of the M25YL pages is inconsistent, largely due to the fact that the book doesn't actually match the proportions of a comic. A lot of pages aren't properly centered vertically. Some pages go all the way up to the top edge of the paper, while others leave a visible gap of about half a centimeter. Every page has a 1cm gap to its left and right, which is sometimes filled in with a solid color or gradient that doesn't quite match the page it's surrounding. I have to assume Ken didn't have any sort of source files or original artwork to work off of, as those ideally would've had more generous bleed to account for slight shifts in printing. It kind of seems like he just got the highest resolution versions he could find of the digital releases online and printed those. The colors are a dead ringer for the digital versions, which have always looked slightly more saturated and pastel than they did in print.

I can't say this bodes well for his further plans for Archie Sonic reprints - sorry, Mobian Line reprints. If they ever come out, please, for the love of god, do not buy those. I don't care how much you love Archie Sonic, they aren't going to be good reprints. For comparison, IDW's similarly priced hardcover Sonic collections have none of these formatting problems, because they're made by people who know what they're doing with access to the actual source files.

The book also has its fair share of text-focused pages, split between the data files and messages directly from Ken about the history of his career and this project, and these are formatted in the most amateurish way possible. Just massive walls of Arial text over either plain white backgrounds, simple gradients, or faded photos. I've seen school yearbooks with better graphic design. Even ignoring my subjective feelings about the art and stories within, this book does not feel like it's worth $36 USD.

It's frankly shocking how shabby he let this thing look considering it's supposed to be his baby. And doesn't that really sum it all up?

Closing thoughts

Obviously, I did not expect this to be any good. But I'm still left kind of dumbfounded by it.

I think what really strikes me about it is that Ken had a blank check to do whatever he wanted here. He got an opportunity many writers would kill for when he gained complete ownership of his most famous work. He's free from the limitations of a monthly licensed comic book for children, free to make whatever creative decisions he wants without editors or other writers or Sega to worry about, free to completely reinvent the series to his heart's content and finally tell the story of his dreams. And with that opportunity and 13 years of his time, he made... this. A direct continuation of "Mobius: 25 Years Later" that barely changes anything about the characters or world beyond their awful new designs, even though much of the word count is spent rambling about how the timeline has changed. A story that makes zero concessions for new readers, or even returning readers who don't already have the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets explaining his creative decisions burned into their memory. 30 pages where nothing really happens and the story barely moves forward an inch despite the decades-long wait - but maybe something will happen if you buy the next book!

Who is this for? Maybe this really is a project for no one but Ken. Maybe he just really, really wants to finish the story he started, a story that's personal to him due to the family history it evokes, and the number of people who enjoy it or buy it beyond that is irrelevant. I think that many of the best artists are incredibly self-indulgent ones working with that exact mindset, artists whose enthusiasm for their own work jumps off the page or screen. So, if that's the case, then why the fuck isn't he telling the damn story? What's stopping him? Why is he still spinning his wheels? Where is that passion for his own work? Because it sure as hell isn't there on the page. There's a huge part of me that really wishes I could say "Man, what a weirdo, but you do you, Ken. You tell your weird little story." But there's barely any story here. It's like he loves styling himself as a storyteller, but he's terrified of finally having to actually tell a story after all this time. He's still stuck in the exact same mode of writing he was in almost 30 years ago when he was doing 6-page backup stories about Knuckles, just killing time and stringing readers along until he's eventually able to truly realize his vision. If not now, then when, Ken?

Even the back cover blurb is mostly just a dry recap of the history of this thing. It was a Sonic comic, the original arc was published in these issues, it went unfinished, Ken left Archie, the lawsuits happened, now he's continuing the story. There's nothing about why anyone should give a shit about this as its own story, even though Ken has spent years trying in vain to convince people TLSC is its own beast that shouldn't be judged as a Sonic story. I think deep down he knows that there's no pitch for this beyond the novelty of it originating from Sonic. And that's why, despite declaring that he'd leave the site, he's still on Twitter riling up Sonic fans. It's the only attention he gets at this point.

Maybe this is too harsh when those 30 pages of new comics are just intended as a preview for the "real" book. But the elephant in the room is that we have no idea if that "real" book will ever actually come out, let alone the entire series of seven graphic novels that will supposedly complete this saga.

Ken is undeniably a complete jackass and all around unpleasant, vindictive person who's rightly become an industry pariah. He's a self-proclaimed paragon of progressive values who'll send Comicsgaters after his successors for the crime of not worshiping the ground he walks on, and then turn around and announce he's going to reprint their work without even consulting them. He's a sore winner who already won his copyright battle on a level most comic writers would never dare to dream of, and yet still won't truly be satisfied until he sees an entire major comic publisher go out of business, putting god knows how many people out of work, because he thinks this would get him back the license to a video game franchise he doesn't even like.

But I still have to pity him.

As an artist, the trajectory of his life is my nightmare. I think all of us fear dying before we can tell all the stories we want to tell. There's simply never enough time to do everything. And here's Ken in his 60s, talking about how he's still planning on making his magnum opus all by himself out of stubbornness and pride, despite demonstrably proving he can't handle the workload, and also talking about how if he dies before the project can be finished he'll have to pass the torch on to his kids and get them to finish it for him. It's so grim. Even just typing that sends a shiver down my spine. It took nine years of his limited time on Earth to finish and release an 11-page comic about Geoffrey St. John sitting backwards in a chair.

This is a purgatory of his own creation. And yet... I'm not sure he's ever been prouder. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I guess if I want people to take anything away from this review, it's this:

Lesson one: If you're an artist or writer of some kind, or an aspiring creator, don't wait around. No one else is going to tell your story for you. Start writing that novel. Start drawing that webcomic. Start making that game. If Penders can put out this damn book that no one asked for after 13 years of work, then proudly proclaim that he's still going to make six or seven more books and also reprint hundreds of comics he doesn't have all of the rights to, then show up to cons with that foul Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows banner and sit in front of it beaming with pride, fully aware of his critics but saying "fuck 'em, I know I'm hot shit," then you can do fucking anything. Tell the weird, sincere, cringe story of your dreams. If Ken Penders doesn't have imposter syndrome, then nobody should.

And lesson two: Don't buy Ken's books.

#tkp post #tlsc #tlsc beginnings

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