#hark a vagrant nemesis

[jimthemenace]

was anybody gonna tell me that Kate Beaton, creator of Hark a Vagrant!, is an OMFD fan????

ICONIC!!!!!

#our flag means death #kate beaton #hark a vagrant #i've loved the nemesis comic for years #let's make it happen in s2 pls pls pls

[lonepower]

it’s not like i thought people were exaggerating, and yet i was still unprepared

#like i knew he was doing it on purpose but i don't think it quite sank in HOW On Purpose it really is #fucking incredible #chi plays ultrakill #chi liveblogs #also like. deeply amusing myself with the idea that v1 100% reciprocates the whole 'lets tear out each other's entrails' thing but it just g #oes COMPLETELY over their head that this is in any way unusual for him because that's just what machines do for fun #gabriel: speedrunning hark a vagrant nemesis in like 3 days #v1: just happy to be here

[victoriacircuits]

This is one of my all-time fav memes. So I had to.

Zurg's fucking hat in the last panel, pfffttttguahahahahaha! Like ye no, he prolly doesn't sleep in his helmet, but taking it off? That would ruin half the joke in my mind.

#hark a vagrant #meme #nemesis #Zurg #buzz lightyear #blosc #buzz lightyear of star command #Zurg/Buzz #Buzz/Zurg #BuZurg #lightyear

[rukafais]

are they, you know [mimes stabbing motion]

out of the abyss is a super fun read!! anon if you’re out there...know that you have great tastes in shady grandpas

#vizeran devir #grin ousstyl #out of the abyss spoilers #out of the abyss #rukart #grin is so cute. i love how hes a lil shit #also i choose to believe that vizeran and gromph are bitter exes #full on hark a vagrant nemesis comics style

[cellarspider]

Since I’ve been thinking about it all morning: here. A partial introduction to my favorite villain.

In the days of yore, when I was a teenager and video game hype was almost exclusively magazine-based, I saw a kid reading a copy of Game Informer.

“Hey,” said I, “could I see that for a second?”

The kid, not knowing what they were about to unleash, handed me the magazine.

I had seen this on the cover:

I had no idea what this was, but I knew that I wanted whatever it was selling.

I found out that this was an advertisement for City of Villains, an expansion to the previously-released MMO City of Heroes. I’d never played WoW with its Alliance and Horde split, so the idea was new to me. WoW also failed to present me with anything like the vibes of the newly-introduced lead villain, Lord Recluse.

Yes, they liked this art so much they did it twice, and I’m glad they did. More below the fold on why he was so appealing for a young queer kid, for those who are intrigued.

I’ll keep this focused on a single topic for now: The intensely queer vibes that Recluse acquired over the course of the game’s plot. Keep in mind that this game came out in 2004, so the actual amount of openly queer content was very minimal. However, CoH/CoV developed a reputation as an extremely queer-friendly space, with a community Pride event becoming a semi-official yearly celebration, complete with the devs showing up as major NPCs, custom assets, and spawning in unique raids that tanked everybody’s framerate. Equivalents of this have carried over past the game's tragic shutdown in 2012, with community-run servers still staging their own Pride events.

If the art above doesn’t make it clear, Recluse had a much-beloathèd archnemesis, Statesman. If the art above doesn’t make it abundantly clear, this was always an extremely fraught relationship, with a complicated backstory that became more and more tragic the deeper you got into the game lore, eventually bordering on cosmic horror. But one thing was for certain, this was Hark A Vagrant levels of obsession over a nemesis.

The game at first seemed to backstep on that: oh, it turned out, Recluse had once been villainous life partners with a woman who went by the villain name Red Widow. She died decades ago in the collateral damage of one of Recluse’s nigh apocalyptic confrontations with Statesman, and her death left him with nothing but his obsession. So sad.

And then when Statesman died in the course of the game’s plot, Recluse spiraled into depression and nihilism that was only halted when someone managed to dig Red Widow’s soul out of storage and resurrected her.

It was always deniably presented, but the implication was very much that the two were functionally equivalent emotional anchors to his psyche, and losing both of them was something he couldn’t survive.

Also, there was that one time that the game’s Valentine’s Day event was advertised with a heart split down the middle, half Statesman’s iconography and half Recluse’s, topped with a banner that read “AMOR OMNIA VINCIT”, meaning “LOVE CONQUERS ALL”.

And that’s without getting into the first tie-in book. A prequel starting at the end of the 1920s, it was a delightfully and deliberately pulpy book, which… centered around a complicated man slowly dying of lingering health problems after his exposure to mustard gas in WWI, and his very good friend, estranged from his family for unknown reasons, who’d devoted the last ten years to caring for the protagonist, and helping him seek a cure. This has carried on year after year, even though the man’s illness has made him unresponsive to the emotional needs of others, something they both know is going to culminate one day in the two parting ways.

…And then they get superpowers, and their relationship does not get any healthier from there. But what it does gain is a surprising trans metaphor as our now-antagonist slowly metamorphoses into the spidery villain I know and love.

I completely missed this back in the day. I have no idea if it was intentional. But there’s a scene where this man looks in the mirror and sees the first signs of his oncoming physical transformation, and he likes what he sees. He has no idea where he’s going, but he’s excited for it.

…And he’s started killing people who refer to him by his former name, in the most literal case of “dead naming” I’ve ever seen.

Throughout the rest of the series, Recluse is unapologetically who he is, putting him in that category of queercoded villain that doubles as a power fantasy. He’s grown physically monstrous and loves it. He has respect from everyone around him, either legitimately for his capabilities or out of fear of what he can do to those who don’t give him his due. A new demigod who is only matched by the man he’s never stopped obsessing over. He wins just as often as he loses, and often salvages something from his defeats in ways that nobody expected.

He is terrible. And he is wonderful.

#city of villains #lord recluse #I have so many more thoughts #and the canon is so wild and engages on metatextual themes so thoroughly that it really deserves more analysis #just in general #but for now #this will do

[slabime]

(Long post im so so so sorry)

(also took me so long to post this my bad. I asked like 3 months ago atp.)(I was genuinely spending the entire time trying to figure out the Read More on mobile)(they only added it recently)

ok some of u lovely awesome great ppl said u ARE interested in warlson pirate au so here we go cringe laser beam blast GO.:

very very simplified story is Warly is a captain of a pirate ship. wilson, after being legally declared dead on duty in the royal navy(where he lost his eye) after multiple mishaps(will explain. eventually) joins his crew for fun and also he needs money. andtheyre gay. time period is like. golden age of piracy. 1650-1720 ish. theres matelotage arc.

the crew(as of Right Now) includes willow, winona, wes, wolfgang, woodie, webber, wigfrid, and sometimes Walani,but shes frequently doing her Own Things.

maxwells there also hes. Still in the royal navy. bc I thought that wld be so fucking funny and it IS no concrit. Yes he wears the stupid fucking wig. alsohe earnestly believed wilson was dead AND mourned him for several months b4 seeing his ass robbing a navy vessel and said hey. hey wait a fucking minute.

anyways wilson and maxwell have a goofy ass one sided rivalry. maxwells going full Hark A Vagrant Nemesis Comic #327. Wilsons too busy having a romance arc with Warly and building found family dynamics with the crew to notice this.

huge HUGE credit to my beloved friend and fantastic writer cookingwithcyanide who contributed Immensely to the entire story say thank u to them theyre really really good at this.

#dont starve #don't starve #dont starve together #dst #ds wilson #wilson dst #wilson p. higgsbury #warly dst #ds warly #ds wes #wes dst #ds willow #willow ds #warlson #ds winona #winona dst #ds maxwell #maxwell dst #ok i think thafs everyone. in this post. #pirate au #salami au #salami words: dst #q #giggles. #long post #long post warning

[ryuubaro]

the fact that it's kazuma who gives ryuunosuke that photo of young barok in 2-4 reminds me of that hark! a vagrant comic. like what were you carrying a picture of your nemesis around for, huh?

#the great ace attorney #barok van zieks #kazuma asogi #dai gyakuten saiban #asobaro

[thecrenellations]

Has anyone made a version of the Hark! A Vagrant “Nemesis” comic for Mysterious Lotus Casebook yet? (If they have, good, I’d like to see it. If they haven’t, I may have to…)

#many takeaways from this show but this is definitely one of them #mysterious lotus casebook #lian hua lou #di feisheng #li lianhua #li xiangyi

[ziracona]

I really don’t get how Hunter can literally be like “No he was acting the whole time. Like there’s definitely an unexpected attraction, and he would never admit it but also a respect, but it was a long-con,” and people will be like “no but he was so convincingly soft for her.” Baby that’s the point. He was fucking acting at a tier people dream of being able to achieve. Performance of the century. You wish you could bullshit like him; you wish you had the range. Like a conflicted Tyler would be interesting but like. All out batshit rage boy so much better. Like he’s pulling off a long con so next level it should be put in the Smithsonian. He’s practicing latte art for a girl he is secretly at war with knowing she isn’t even going to care, just to commit to the bit. He’s such a freak he was super mad about being tortured but also was like “God damn it she figured it out. I hate it but respect though.” RESPECT??? He is one of 2 people to ever beat that girl in her LIFE. “He’s so clearly in love” yes and that’s the Oscar performance!!! He’s the best liar you’ve ever seen! That’s so much better! He’s the Hark A Vagrant comic sleeping with a nemesis photo. He’s fucking crazy. He’s getting revenge of all time. He managed to keep a rage monster alter under control while working customer service solo staffed. He let someone torture him to commit to the bit. He rolled with punches that would have killed lesser freaks. He was a character of all time.

#wednesday spoilers #Wednesday #he’s my beloved but please love him right he’s fucking crazy and it’s so good #he’s literally the most impressive manipulative long con man I’ve ever fucking seen my brain altered with the ‘to lose’ monologue #He and Haley Stark from Hard Candy exist on a level others only dream of achieving when it comes to crime and lies and revenge #Tyler Galpin

[sammysdewysensitiveeyes]

My minor pet peeve of the day - when panels from of a webcomic get pulled out of context and turned into a meme, and passed around and parodied with no acknowledgement of the original creator or where it came from. Like I saw so many variations of "Clean all the things!" from Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half, or parodies of the "Nemesis" comics from Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant with no link back or "credit to" info. Allie Brosh's "Why I'll Never Be An Adult" task failure chart gets recreated and posted on Reddit with the exact same text retyped as a "meme" with no credit given to her at all. People take this stuff and either pass it off as their own, or as a sourceless meme.

I don't care about pulling moments from TV shows, like the "Donald Glover carrying pizza walking into a room that's on fire" meme (from Community) or the "Good for her" meme (from Arrested Development) or the Castiel love confession news format, because those are all well-known shows and the actors originally got paid. But if it's an independent creator or a webcomic, link that shit back or acknowledge the source. Support small-time creators.

If you are parodying this stuff or using as a meme with credit given, I have no quarrel with you friend, you are doing it right.

#I'm sure I've been guilty of this myself from not knowing the source #my blog is equal parts fandom nonsense and complaining these days

[chicago-geniza]

a propos the debate format Agnes proposed. as the novel title goes, Enemies: A Love Story; as the fanfic trope goes, Enemies To Lovers Arc; as the meme goes, Hark! A Vagrant Nemesis Strip dot png (or, as I am always saying, Gilmore Girls Paris/Rory endgame)

#philosopher polycule tag #fascinated by whatever she has going on with RH incidentally

[mathlann]

Also with all the Hark! A Vagrant being thrown around Rogue Trader between here and Reddit, disappointed I haven't seen 'Nemesis' get used yet.

#the whole cat and mouse in Act 2 is dying for it

[mandorways]

Why did no one tell me they made that Nemesis comic strip from Hark! A Vagrant into a drama

#mysterious lotus casebook

[rebrandedbard]

Your wish is my command @greyduckgreygoose​!

Bonus post-mountain version of ‘Lay Down Your Loyalties’

#my art #my witcher art #witcher #the witcher #geraskier #geralt of rivia #jaskier #valdo marx #valdskier #hark a vagrant edit #hark a vagrant 327 #hark a vagrant nemesis #kate beaton #doodles #cirilla fiona elen riannon #yennefer of vengerberg #priscilla #essi daven #cahir mawr dyffryn aep ceallach #thank GOD his name has an established tag because no way in a stone cold frozen hell would I have known how to spell all the rest of that #second panel valdo is my favorite #and second panel jaskier in 'no one else' is my favorite

[soiruntotheriver]

Bringing this baby back because I had the sudden thought of: What if Flint and Silver were rival captains? And the answer is ^ this right here. I mean, that third strip is literally canon.

For the new folks - Nemesis is part of the webcomic series Hark! A Vagrant drawn by the fantastic Kate Beaton. Go buy her stuff!

#hark! a vagrant #comics #nemesis #kate beaton #silverflint adjacent #black sails adjacent #what if #black sails crack

[originlist]

@caemthe​ сказал(а):

gives you a kissito, gives asclepius a kissito, gives hektor a kissito, gives ivan a kissito, bullies salieri, gives emiya a kissito, gives archimedes a kissito, gives lancelot a kissito, gives-

“hey, what the fu--?”

#caemthe #salieri legally cant say fuck outside of extenuating circumstances #GIVES U A SMORCH THO I LOVE YOU... EVEN THO UR LIKE THIS..... U ARE MY NEMESIS (HARK A VAGRANT STYLE)