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thewadapan · 2 years

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I can offer a perspective on this, albeit not one informed by reading any number of classic (or modern) doorstoppers—I fizzled out two-thirds through The Two Towers, so don’t really get the appeal of Tolkeinesque fantasy in the first place. So-called “rational fiction” hinges on the drive you characterise as going “back into the ocean”: to take a fantastical conceit, and make that the “single point of departure” from the real world, otherwise keeping it as realist as possible.

(In practise, “rational” fiction often fails to depict the influence of human emotion, base or otherwise, but that’s a separate issue—I’m talking about the intent.)

I think, honestly, that specific subculture stems from the CinemaSins-codified fixation on “plot holes”, things which break suspension-of-disbelief for a certain kind of reader/viewer. It makes sense that the growing consciousness around “realism” in fantasy would require a large body of “unrealistic” media for audiences to notice common contrivances. There's an audience that likes the trappings of fantasy/sci-fi, even specific works in those genres, that literally wants nothing more than those exact works without the distraction of “wait, but that world wouldn’t work that way if its inhabitants actually behaved how real people do”. They don’t read realist fantasies in spite of their unfantastical elements—rather, they read normal fantasy in spite of the self-consciousness that it’s escapism. I think people want escapism but don’t want to be aware they’re reading escapism—to be reminded that the good/fun parts of that world could never exist in real life!

Your question about the purpose of fantasy at all, if it’s solely as allegory for reality, is a fascinating one. In CxC, the most striking moment is the intrusion of unmodified real-world present-day events into a story that up ‘til that point has been only loosely inspired by real events/people, if not entirely sensationalised fantasy altogether. See also, Obama in Chicago. If you want to write about the American zeitgeist, why invent some fake magical non-America?

I guess to give one reason: from an escapist point of view, you can’t end racism by punching some guy in the face—and if you wrote a real-world story where that happens, it’d be laughable. But in some fantasy world ruled by an evil wizard, maybe you can, and get the same catharsis in... better taste? People want to write how things feel. I could write a story about, I don’t know, how much I hate my boss, but it’d be a boring story because my job is boring, and all the minor slights might not come across to a random reader. Turn them into a draconic overlord that breathes fire and makes me fetch them treasure, and that’s more fun. See also your quandary over how to write an ennui novel without it being mind-numbing drudgery itself. Obviously with good enough prose, you can make any idea interesting and entertaining, but allegory is just easier for most writers, something you bake in at the premise level rather than throughout the execution.

Evolving to Go Back into the Ocean: On the Fantasy Genre

In a week or two I plan to begin writing an epic fantasy story that I’ll release serially, probably starting in August. The path to developing the idea for this story was long and unusual, so I thought I would talk about it a bit, as well as my thoughts on the fantasy genre as a whole. Fantasy is not a genre I am an especial fan of. I have read, watched, and played fantasy media in various forms, but I wouldn’t consider myself particularly enamored with fantasy in particular. As such, my perspective is probably quite different than people who have totally immersed themselves in fantasy as a concept.

Over a decade ago, I had an idea for a fantasy story where the characters would come to learn that they were characters in a fantasy story. The author of this story, Ian West, was desperately trying to write the final installment of a successful trilogy, under pressure from his publisher and his agent Maximillion, but the characters would grow resentful of their roles and start to act “off script.” The concept was similar to the film Stranger Than Fiction (a film I resented because I only learned about its existence after I came up with this idea). The desperate author would try to guide the story to its intended conclusion despite the unruliness and outright rebellion of its principal actors.

Enamored with metafiction at the time, I came up with an onslaught of ideas for how Ian West and his characters would interact. I had big, bold plans: an unintended incident would leave most of the main characters dead or missing halfway into the story, and the author would frantically attempt to cobble together a cohesive plot by ascending what had until then been minor background characters into leading roles. I thoroughly developed this idea and even attempted to write it five or six times.

The problem was I could never get far. For me, that was unusual; I’m usually good at finishing stories that I start, and this was a story that I was particularly excited to write. I wasn’t even sure why I wasn’t able to finish my drafts at the time. In retrospect, though, it’s pretty obvious.

All of these subversive, metafictional ideas that I was so excited about necessitated that the actual story without those elements be as generic as possible—you can’t subvert audience expectations without operating on a baseline level of audience familiarity with what you’re subverting. And so in the early parts of the story―prior to all the big twists I had planned about the author, the ascended minor characters, and so on―I was trudging through a bog standard fantasy tale that I had absolutely no interest in writing. I would be both bored to death describing a big fantasy war with a hero and a dark lord and also unhappy with what I was writing because I felt it was dry and lifeless as a byproduct of my boredom.

As I started over again and again, I progressively attempted to limit the size and scope of those early parts. I pushed the author reveal forward and forward until I was basically writing half of a chapter of “typical fantasy” before pulling the rug. And yet skipping directly to what I actually wanted to write didn’t make anything better, because now the big twists weren’t twists. They were just the premise. There was no way to convey that the story was “going off the rails” from Ian West’s perspective other than simply saying it. The minor characters who became major characters were just major characters from the beginning of the story.

So I never wrote the story. Years passed.

Writing Modern Cannibals I needed a fantasy author and an agent, so I repurposed Ian West and Maximillion to that end. MC wound up being more relevant to Ian West’s story than just that, however. In earlier drafts of MC, I coincidentally encountered a similar issue to the one I had with Ian West, although in a completely different context. In these drafts, Z. was obsessed not with Faerie Endless, but with a game called Gryffonquest, which I depicted as an utterly generic JRPG similar to Dragon Quest. The problem was it was difficult for me to write about someone being so passionate about something so boilerplate. The elements of Z.’s fandom were constantly dry and banal, and I was never happy with how I depicted her in that context.

Around this time I saw a video called “How to Recognize a Terrible Anime (in just one episode)”. The video was about the JSDF propaganda isekai, GATE. While the video’s complaints about GATE’s first episode were numerous, one of the first points was about the main character’s otaku fandom for a generic, Dragon Quest-inspired JRPG. The video posited that by making the character so passionately a fan of something so boring, it made the character seem boring too.

I think I would actually delve a little deeper than that. It’s not necessarily that it makes the character boring. People can relate to a character who is obsessed with a piece of fictional media, even if the particular media they’re obsessed with isn’t interesting. That’s how relating to a character works, it’s never a 1-to-1 “this is exactly me” type of situation. I think the main problem is that by putting almost no passion into the piece of media that the character themselves is passionate about, the author is in some way being dismissive or insincere in their depiction of the character. It’s glib, even condescending in a way, evoking the concept of an otaku without being earnest about believing in it. Reflecting on my own Dragon Quest-obsessed otaku character, I found that was at least the case for my perspective on her. In those earlier drafts I wasn’t just disengaged from Z.’s boring fandom, but I looked down on Z. herself. I was emotionally distanced from her, because she was passionate about something that I was desperately uninterested in. It made it a challenge to write her in an authentic way.

For the final draft of Modern Cannibals, I changed Gryffonquest to Faerie Endless, gave it a more unique aesthetic, and interjected offbeat oddball twists like “everyone goes to Hell” (thank you for the inspiration Final Fantasy II and Super Paper Mario) that made it seem like something for which someone really would have a niche but fervent passion. In fact, probably my favorite part of MC to write was the description of the game’s plot. Making that change, I was able to more earnestly depict Z.’s obsession with the property, and thus more earnestly depict Z. herself, making her a significantly more effective character than previous drafts. (I would take this approach to the fictional properties in CxC, too.)

Modern Cannibals does not describe Ian West’s stories in as much detail as Faerie Endless, but I did drop a few lines in there that painted his work as a gruesome, adult dark fantasy series that gave it a bit more dimension than a completely generic fantasy. With that buzzing around in my head, I revisited my earlier idea of a metafictional work featuring Ian West, this time with the (perhaps obvious to everyone except me) idea: “What if the fantasy world WASN’T generic?”

I started coming up with more unique ideas for the fantasy world. The main character went from a generic hero to a morally-ambiguous philanderer who began the story by being exiled from his community for cheating on his wife with the mayor’s maid. Instead of a standard medieval European fantasy world, I developed a world modeled on colonial America, with muskets and hunter-trappers and Age of Reason philosophers and firebrand revivalist preachers. A world that was as of yet untamed by man, without grand castles or kingly lineages, where (taking cues from the transcendentalists) capital-N Nature was a wondrous and brutal thing and the true power over the realm.

It was a world I at least thought was cool. A world I was eager to write. Only I discovered a new problem instantly.

The subversive elements that were fundamental to the plot were now a betrayal rather than an exciting twist. If you actually LIKE a fantasy story, want to see where it goes, care about the main character, how are you supposed to respond to a big metafictional twist that causes the story to “go off the rails” and random background characters to replace the main cast?

My subversive metafictional twist was dependent upon the reader not caring too much about what came before the twist. But not caring about what came before the twist made me incapable of writing it with enough earnestness for the twist to work, either.

So why not eliminate the metafictional elements entirely? After all, that stuff’s all been done in Stranger Than Fiction anyway. Just write a non-meta fantasy story with a cool world. But when I try to envision the story in that light, I start to wonder what the point is.

Fantasy is by far the most escapist genre of fiction. Science fiction is the only genre that comes close, but even then the genre is often overtly speculative in nature, depicting possible or theoretical avenues humanity might take in the coming decades or centuries. (There are some science fiction works, like Star Wars, that are in no way speculative, but these works are generally blends of science fiction and fantasy to begin with—science fantasy, as it’s called.) Every other genre is generally grounded in the world we live in, and is meant to engage its readers via the portal of a familiar reality, even if a story is set in a fictional location featuring fictional people. Classical myth, for instance, which is in many ways the precursor to modern fantasy, is framed as historical record, the foundation of the culture that produced it, and even the romances of Arthur or Charlemagne follow this blueprint despite how blatantly anachronistic they often are.

But modern fantasy can take the reader to a world that doesn’t exist, in a time that doesn’t exist, where the rules of reality are not as they exist. (Urban fantasy excluded―which is why until now my fantasy writing has been urban fantasy in nature.) This freedom seemingly allows for endless storytelling potential, but also forces a problem to the forefront: How do you make it matter? How do you make the reader care? People respond better to stories to which they can relate in some way, but in a genre where you are encouraged to eliminate as many elements relatable to human experience as possible, how do you keep them engaged?

The early history of English-language fantasy stories (mainly late 1800s to early 1900s) skirted this issue either by being set in a “lost continent” somewhere on Earth or being basically isekai where a person from Earth travels to a fantasy world. That way, the story was experienced via a fundamentally relatable protagonist, and thus all non-relatable elements of the story were compartmentalized within that framework. As the genre started to develop into its own, however, and there became a cultural consciousness of “fantasy” that was in and of itself relatable to real people, these framing devices became increasingly superfluous. The Worm Ouroboros (1922), for instance, begins with a frame narrative in which someone from Earth travels to a fantasy world (set on Mercury); but both the frame narrative and the Earthling disappear from the story after the second chapter. By Lord of the Rings (1954), it had become commonplace enough for fantasy stories to simply be set in fantasy worlds, without any framing device at all. (Lord of the Rings was not the first English work to do this―that would be William Morris’ The Well at the World’s End in 1896―but it certainly popularized it.)

My point is that it took a certain culture-wide level of genre-savviness to develop fantasy as a genre to the point of Lord of the Rings, with a fully immersive fantasy world. This isn’t even mentioning how the “seemingly endless possibilities” of the fantasy genre were in actuality highly limited to slight deviations from the mythical underpinnings of the culture. Almost all early fantasy in English drew upon one or more of the following: English fairy or folktales, Celtic myth, French chivalric romance cycles, or Norse myth. English culture, language, and ethnic identity itself being a weird potpourri of all of these backgrounds, these inspirations were generally familiar in the English cultural landscape even prior to the earliest modern fantasy works.

As such, authors were able to plunge readers into entirely fantastical worlds that were nonetheless relatable by drawing on relatable cultural myth. And as fantasy as a genre itself became more popular, the general level of cultural familiarity with the subject matter an author could expect their reader to have rose as well. You never have to explain to a reader what an elf is, especially not post-Tolkien; everyone knows what an elf is. And a dwarf. And a dragon. And now we’ve gotten to a point where fantasy is such a prominent genre that the baseline cultural comprehension of all this utterly fictional stuff has reached levels where it is starting to become an impediment to itself. A lot of elements of fantasy are no longer just familiar, but are taken for granted.

Consider a traditional, Tolkien-esque fantasy story. Although this story is set entirely within an immersive fantasy world with no overt tie to our real world, the main character is a humble provincial fellow, probably one who has never stepped foot outside their little village until the events of the plot kick in and they are forced onto a grand globetrotting adventure. (The first Wheel of Time book, published in 1990, starts this exact way, showing just what a long shadow Lord of the Rings cast over the genre.) This starting point is commonplace but maintains the “fish out of water” protagonist that an Alice in Wonderland-like isekai has, which is necessary for easing the reader into a world utterly unlike their own. Frodo has never seen an elf before, so when he sees one, his reaction is much more aligned with the reaction of the reader than had he simply shrugged and said, “Nothing special.”

The problem is that as the fantasy genre has become increasingly ubiquitous and its readers have become increasingly savvy to its techniques, the reaction of the reader to seeing an elf or dwarf or dragon HAS become to shrug and say, “Nothing special.” (Admittedly, this was true also for some of Tolkien’s readers. One of his compatriots in his fantasy group The Inklings, upon the introduction of an elf character, shouted, “Not another fucking elf!”) Tolkien and the forebears whose shoulders he stood upon are now “generic” despite their groundbreaking novelty in their own time, despite innovating an entirely new type of fiction completely divorced from the “real world.” And the genre has adapted the way its audience has. Many fantasy stories now will go out of their way to indicate how different their elves/dwarves/dragons are from the Tolkien mold, while others eschew the fish-out-of-water protagonist outright and steep readers immediately into fantasy worlds where elves and the like are treated as nothing particularly special.

As part of a fantasy arms race whereby authors continually try to set themselves apart from the crowd, more and more unique fantasy elements have been injected into the genre, to the point where if you can think of it in even your wildest dreams, it’s probably been done in a fantasy novel by now. To be more unique, these elements have strayed further and further from the Anglo-Saxon mythical heritage that underpinned the early English modern fantasy genre, either by introducing elements from other cultural heritages or by introducing complete neologisms. It was this logic that led to me modeling my proposed fantasy world on colonial America instead of medieval Europe.

I recently read Marlon James’ fantasy novel Black Leopard Red Wolf (2019), which depicts a fantasy version of ancient Africa instead of ancient Europe. Although I’m not sure if I liked the novel on the whole, it was undoubtedly a creative and unique experience compared to my understanding of the genre. I have no doubt I could write my colonial America fantasy novel with a similar level of creativity and uniqueness and put forward a work that stands out among the genre as a whole. But then I look at the wuxia genre, or the onslaught of anime and manga set in a fantastical ancient Japan, which have themselves reached a level of genre saturation on par with medieval European fantasy thanks to the gigantic Chinese and Japanese pop cultural spheres. I think: Is this just another element of the fantasy arms race? Mining the whole of human culture until every cultural tradition has been done to death within the escapist non-real template of fantasy? And then what?

For a look at the “and then what,” you can jaunt on back to the Western fantasy sphere and see what’s successful now that the genre has become so saturated even people who aren’t media poisoned are sick of it. Consider the recent explosive success and influence of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, in which fantastical elements are downplayed in favor of a more “realistic” or “historical” setting. Game of Thrones is a cultural juggernaut thanks to the HBO adaptation, but even in the more niche world of fantasy literature, you can look to the popularity of Brandon Sanderson, who takes fantasy elements like magic and presents them in a more science fiction-like “speculative” way, with complex logical rules. Essentially, fantasy is now striving to get closer and closer to the “real world” it initially broke away from.

Western fantasy evolved to leave the ocean, and after being on land long enough to get tired of it, is evolving now to go back into the ocean.

It’s conceivable that in a decade or so people will be sick of the Game of Thrones or Sandersonian style and suddenly you’ll see a renaissance of Tolkien-esque high fantasy―evolving to go back on land. Rinse, repeat, rinse repeat. It reminds me of the fluctuations in epochs of Western literature; moving from the Age of Reason to Romanticism to Realism to Modernism to Postmodernism to Post-Postmodernism, a constant cycle between more “realistic” modes of writing and more “unrealistic” modes of writing, each mode arising out of boredom with whichever mode came before.

To write something that isn’t just part of the current wave or a pigheaded reaction against it (because if you are simply trying to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing, you’re as beholden to the zeitgeist as anyone else)―how do you do that? As I thought about it more, that was the core problem facing me whenever I set into my head to write a “fantasy” story at all. So I decided to stop trying to write a “fantasy” story and just try to write a story. That happens to have fantasy elements.

I’m far more confident in my plan now. Writing serially will lock me into my plan, so it’ll be up to me to execute consistently on a week-by-week basis without the benefit of a pre-established world like my previous serial works, but what I’ve got here is exciting. I’m excited to write it, at least.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the genre. I’d love to hear from someone who has a broader interest in fantasy, who perhaps is more directly familiar with its works and historical trends and specific examples that adhere to or reject the hypotheses I’ve come to. What’s the best way to write a unique story that isn’t either following the trends or pushing against them? And what is the purpose of fantasy as a genre that is striving to move closer to the “real world” that it initially broke away from? Is it that people are simply so enamored with the idea of “fantasy” as a genre that they will enjoy fantasy stories that are deliberately trying to be unfantastical, or is there some real merit to depicting more real-world themes and topics from the lens of a fictional world?

#rational fiction #writing #fantasy

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thewadapan · 4 years

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in the grim darkness of the far future there is only cred

(This is a complete archive of the @Ask_Triton Twitter account created for April Fools’ Day 2020, based on my previous comics “PASS” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. A behind-the-scenes commentary is included at the end of the post.)

triton ebooks

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

autobot code sparknotes

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

wikihow cred acquisition

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

toyhax insignia stickerfixer

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

wait *hit i thought this was google

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

hi. my names triton. and the great war was the best thing to ever happen to me

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

rodimus finally convinced springer to let me join the rockers. rock and roll

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

springer is giving each of us a special nickname. were supposed to call him springax 219.31 alpha. apparently im now tritus 717.25 beta. wonder what he meant by that

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

shut the *uck up road buster

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

roadbuster be quiet challenge

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

triton can have little a cred. as a treat

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

hey whirl do you wanna play im a spy? wait *hit

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

if anyone ever finds out im a decepticon im gonna get *ucking shot. thats cancel culture baby

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

no cred? no thanks

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

boy am i glad impactor ate *hit and died. that guy was not *ucking around

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

YEAH uh huh YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS green and yellow green and yellow green and yellow green and yellow

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

no whirl this is not a poncho you *ucking cyclops

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

starting to think the special rockers assignment springer gave me and whirl was just a clever ruse to get rid of us. like theres no way all of the empties we just shot were decepticon moles

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

when you triton your best but you don't succeed

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

whirl no offense but theres absolutely no way im hitching a ride with you back to autobase. no its not because my arms are too weak to hang onto your landing skids for that long. no see this is your problem youre just *ucking annoying end of story

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

got that sinking feeling again lads. wait no i just forgot to transform before jumping into the sea

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

sky of blue im a green / and a yellow submarine

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

10,000 hics under the sea

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

sometimes underwater. always undercover

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

yeah springer can drive and he can fly but he sure can't bob around the sewers like a piece of *hit can he

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

felt cred might delete later picture cred: @ikkadkarf pic.twitter.com/cQKer3asaW

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 2, 2020

ultra magnus just held a door open for me. his magnusnimity knows no bounds

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

if you think you know where im going with this tweet your wrong but what you were thinking of is probably more good

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

3000 kilograms? yeah thats me. triton

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

you wear a mouthplate just to hide your face and you wear it because you think your cooler than me

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

met scattorshot in the hallway. he was like "i never heard of an autobot who was a submarine" and i said "im not" and he said "what" and i said "a submarine". clutch save

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

springer just got back from patrol and says hes finally killed all the decepticons. good thing he doesnt remember that time we got absolutely spannered at maccadams and i got up on a table and start shouting im a decepticon

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

yeah weve all heard of the last autobot but what about the last decepticon. just something to think about

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

actually this reminds me of a funny story about how the word spannered came about. it all started when straxus decided he wanted to cross this body of water. i said id carry him but he just gave me this weird look and said he had a better idea

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

thinking of getting a massive flame painted on my chest. just kidding who do you think i am clodimus prime

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

not MY prime

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

stop talking about me behind my back. im not talking to anyone in particular. dreadwind

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

yeah im going through a bit of a phase right now. phase six

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

its hard being a double agent. its hard and nobody understands

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

sometimes i wish i was a car robot

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

just got tackled by sandstorm. had to scream at him to get him to move his rotor away from my throat. thought it was a funny hat not a deadly weapon. most terrifying experience of my life aside from when computron stepped on me

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

im horny

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

bots with no rights: horny people and decepticons. lucky for me two no rights makes a right

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

i have discovered the secret of combiner technology. step one. stand up straight with your shoulders back

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

why wont afterburner combine with me

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

springer is *ucking ugly. who even paints themselves green and yellow. piss off

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

im like dropping hints that im a double agent

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

TR-8N

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

inside you there are two faction symbols. one is an autobot the other is a decepticon. you are triton

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

not faction-swapper! dont like that term. freelance double agent. for certain social remuneration of course

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

hnng megatron im trying to sneak around but the clank of my *ss cheeks keeps alerting springer

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

you think cred is your ally? i was born in cred. molded by it

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

springer put me in the inhibitor harness again

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

sick of being a loser nobody. wish my life could have an issue 0 where i was actually the man of iron all along

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

it isnt easy being green

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

this planet isnt relevant to my interests anymore

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

better dead than no cred

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

just called roadbuster an idiot. back on top

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

im springers oldest enemy but he hates roadbuster more

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

Yo waspinator, is everything allrignt??

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

its like people dont even remember my name

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

sometimes its hard to reconcile the continuity error of my life with the established canon of me being a huge *ucking ledge

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

im the first in a new generation of transformers. introducing the credacons

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

tritons in disguise

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

more ton meets the tri

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

if i hit broadside on the back of the neck hard enough either hell turn back into a boat or just *ucking die. either way i win

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

join the TCC today. Triton's Cred Club

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

got cred?

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

just found out about the beast. damn that *hit sucks

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

if i was there with the beast i wouldve stopped it. rip to megatron but im different

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

lol i remember telling megatron i wouldnt go native but look at me now not a single capital letter in sight

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

pictured: me and the other great decepticon leaders beat the *hit out of rodimus prime pic.twitter.com/6ShZrPgV8l

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

for *ucks sake lightspeed stop trying to correct my grammar you mechanical throwback. i know how to use *ucking apostrophe's

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

mucho cred

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

mucho mucho man

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

nosecone keeps asking me to follow his account. at drill or something. what a plonker

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

desperately trying to think of a funny joke to make ultra magnus and the rest of the gang laugh

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

Leader Class Triton With Triton Master Triton

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

excuse me roadbuster who said youre allowed to laugh at my jokes

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

hate how i always have to be triton. sometimes i want to be tritoff

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

topspin and twin twist should legally change their names to blue and white. wait *hit theyre both blue and white *uck *hit i didnt think this through

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

richard starkings stop sending me to voicemail

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

i am triton. the last living decepticon and incognito espionage specialist amongst the autobots. ask me anything

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

Anything?

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

pass

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

hey nosecone ive got a favour to ask. so ive been thinking of getting an upgrade lately. basically what i want is to be able to fly away from this place by means of large quantities of gas expelled at high velocity from my rear. now allow me to explain how you fit into all this https://t.co/Mt9ELmLNLU

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

we get it. you strafe

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

had the nightmare again. the one where springer figures out im a decepticon. i try to use the waterways as an escape route but when i get there broadsides fat *ss is blocking the estuary pic.twitter.com/XMZbkZsYs0

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

squad goals pic.twitter.com/PkI92HCHCn

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

in my dreams im always fighting my new friends. everyones super ripped. oh and impactor is there for no reason pic.twitter.com/Uzl9asiZCY

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

when im staring down the barrel of the gun im *hitting myself and i always thought that was stupid because if you die in the dream then you dont die in real life you just wake up. but now im wondering if thats what im afraid of. having to go back to pretending pic.twitter.com/fEZbfu81nf

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

primus forgive me but its time to go back to the old me pic.twitter.com/hh1vXZO5WS

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

Triton: A Transformers Story

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

few can remember how the war started. fewer still can now make the distinction between good and evil. but everyone will remember this particular day. because this is the day the war ended

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

are you tired of being nice. dont you just want to go *hit

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

all I wanna do is BANG BANG BANG BANG and a *transformation noises* and BRAAAAP

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

first you fard. then you *hid. then

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

cybertronian vandal

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

uh oh! stinky!

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

just saw blurr speedwalking to rodimus primes office at mach 2

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

you are about to enter the courtroom of judge rodimus prime. the bots are real. the cases are real. the rulings are final. this is judge roddy

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

Autobot Leader Gives Road Buster 11,453 Stern Looks

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

first one to talk gets to stay on my planet

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

getting flashbacks to that time unicron attacked. he picked me up between his fingers and vored me. i barely escaped with my cred

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

not on your life. its a fake. total fiction. it didnt happen. not fact. im innocent

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

it could be you. it could be me. it could eVEN BE

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

GHAA!

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

my Rash Action has led to a Fatal Consequence

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

i used to think that my life was a tragic. but now i realise. its a comic

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

now i understand. he who smelt it dealt it. i have been a smelting fool

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

ultra magnus i dont feel so good

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

dont reveal the shield. i said dont

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

the decepticon high command on cybertron have judged this account to be anti-decepticon and the firecons have been despatched to Earth to incinerate all copies. in order to thwart the firecons make sure you fill out your credit card details below

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

Notes

The Ask Triton tagline, “in the grim darkness of the far future there is only cred”, is the tagline of Warhammer 40,000 except it replaces the word “war” with “cred”.

I’ve got no idea when I started working on this project, except that it was many months ago. I opened a note on my phone and wrote the words “triton ebooks”, and thereafter whenever I thought of a Funny Joke™ I’d crack that bad boy open and slap it in there. I wasn’t entirely sure when or how I’d ever release the material; I could copy my direct inspiration for the account, @prowl_ebooks (and its own ancestor, @Horse_ebooks), by making a bot that’d periodically post a random tweet, but felt like there was some degree of serialisation in what I was writing. Despite the content of its tweets frequently being utterly absurd, and completely at odds with its source material, the genius of prowl_ebooks is that it manages to paint a picture that somehow feels like an accurate reflection of IDW Prowl’s canon self. Seriously, I’ve seen many of the tweets this bot pumps out countless times, and they still crack me up. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live up to that, but I had other tricks up my sleeves.

The Autobot Code originated in Simon Furman’s comics for Marvel UK and featured more prominently in James Roberts’ stories for IDW Publishing, where it was presented as a laborious tome of rules. SparkNotes, meanwhile, is a well-known site hosting CliffsNotes-like study guides used by students primarily to avoid having to read assigned literature in full.

wikiHow is an infamous encyclopedia devoted to tutorials, which often feature illustrations using a distinct style and deliver questionable advice.

Toyhax is the company that produces “Reprolabels”, effectively stickers for Transformers figures designed to replace vintage labels or to enhance newer figures (though I personally find the results to be pretty questionable). At one point they sold a product called a “Stickerfixer”, which I think was basically just a pen of glue? Anyway, Triton presumably wants one to (re)apply his fake Autobot insignia.

Google is a popular search engine for the world wide web. Its inclusion on the account was last-minute, and I was uncertain that Triton would actually have any understanding of what Google was, but figured if he was already using Twitter I could stand to show exactly how far I was planning to stretch disbelief from the outset, and that it’d work to explicitly tie together the intent behind the opening salvo of tweets.

Though I couldn’t be bothered tracking down an exact quote, “hi. my names triton. and the great war was the best thing to ever happen to me” was a reference to narration from Netflix’s Daybreak zombie-apocalypse series. I wrote a single paragraph about that series, specifically focused on that line, in an article which probably requires far more context than I’m able to give here. Of course, the general phrasing there is a common enough trope that this probably serves as a reference to any number of things. The halting style of dialogue used in Ask Triton, where full stops are the only form of punctuation, was a product of necessity, but it’s significantly at odds with the run-on-sentences used in the original comic. By my count, this is the fourth piece of media set in the “PASS” universe, but there’s no singular consistent presentation of that canon; every time I’ve revisited it, I’ve extrapolated and reinterpreted aspects of what has come before in ways which simply don’t match the original intent of the work. It’s kinda like the Star Wars expanded universe, where throwaway beats of the source material spin out into entire stories, ones that obviously don’t match the intent of what those beats were implying in the first place.

The Wreckers’ catchphrase is “wreck and rule”. I can’t find the exact tweet, but somebody recently realised that it’s supposed to be a play on “rock and roll”, which blew the minds of me and a whole bunch of other people. Hence, “the rockers”.

Ask Vector Prime explored the concept of “universal streams”, categorised by the multiverse-observing TransTechs using arcane identifiers. Springer’s nicknames are plays on these, substituting “Primax” for “Springax” and “Malgus”/”Iocus” for “Tritus” and encoding the dates 25/07/2017 (the original release date for “PASS” on Summer Meme Sundae) and 31/02/2019 (the date of its rerelease here) as 717.25 and 219.31. Springer uses the last part of the identifier, a Greek letter, to label himself as an “alpha” and Triton as a “beta”.

I’m not sure where it originated, but “x be quiet challenge” is a phrase which people sometimes use on Twitter when they effectively want someone to stop posting for once. I think I was probably introduced to the phrase when someone addressed it to Makin, then-owner of the Homestuck Discord server? Suffice to say, that probably informed its usage against Roadbuster.

“Cats Can Have Little a Salami [...] as a treat” was a Google preview of the article “Can My Cat Eat Salami?”, which became a snowclone on Discord and Twitter.

“I spy” is a famous guessing game where someone picks an object they can see and answers yes/no questions about it until another person is able to identify it. I have not played this game in a very long time.

“Cancel Culture” is a phrase used unironically mostly by assholes, in reference to the practice of “cancelling” problematic individuals in the court of public opinion on social media. I wish somebody had cancelled Triton.

For the life of me I cannot discern what “no cred? no thanks” is a specific reference to - there are probably many words you can substitute “cred” for in order to obtain an existing joke.

The phrase “eat shit and die” is one I enjoy using way too much, mostly in contexts where it’s absolutely unwarranted. What’s that? Someone said hi to me in the street and I didn’t say hi back in time? Well, guess I’ll eat shit and die then.

“YEAH uh huh YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS green and yellow green and yellow green and yellow green and yellow” is just Wiz Khalifa’s “Black And Yellow” only with green instead of black. Somehow I mostly associate this song with its usage in The Lego Batman Movie.

A poncho is a loose bit of fabric worn over the torso. Speaking of Lego, I was probably thinking of the poncho worn by this Mariachi minifigure, which resembles the triangular shape of Triton’s armour more closely than an actual real-world poncho. A cyclops is a one-eyed giant from Greek myth. Look, I know I don’t need to tell you all these things, but I wanted to really drive home just how pointless this venture is.

The “special rockers assignment” was a last-minute addition to the account; the tweets were posted in a completely different order to the one I’d written them in, with many thematically-related tweets collected into threads, and I needed a way to tie together several of the early ones into a clear narrative throughline. The Empties are fuel-starved unaligned Cybertronians from the Marvel comics. I considered having Springer’s ruse claim that they were all Robosmashed, but figured the cartoon reference was kind of at odds with the canon’s source material, and that it’s somehow funnier if Triton legitimately believes all of these robots are incognito like he is for just long enough to murder them all.

I think the goof of Triton substituting his name for vaguely-similar-sounding words references a habit developed by Chang in Community. “When you try your best but you don’t succeed” is the much-memed opening line to Coldplay’s “Fix You”. When I went to get that link, I realised that I do actually quite unironically like that song. Could it be wooorse...

Again, I wanted to make explicit that Triton was returning to Autobase, where the rest of the story would unfold, so Triton refuses Whirl’s help and uses his submarine mode to return home.

Triton’s alt-mode was suggested to be a submarine by Dreadwind in the letters’ pages of the Marvel UK comic. Triton reacts to this piece of Word of God in a later tweet.

“sky of blue im a green / and a yellow submarine” is a rewrite of the lyric “sky of blue sea of green / in our yellow submarine”, from The Beatles’ famous song “Yellow Submarine”.

I substituted the Cybertronian unit of length “hics” (roughly kilometers) into the title of Jules Vernes’ story 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which I only now realise took place 20,000 leagues under the sea, and not 10,000. Perhaps if it wasn’t for my crippling fear of sea monsters, I would be better acquainted with this story. Wait, shit, I told myself I was going to break my crippling tendency to mention my crippling fear of sea monsters!

A common simile used in Homestuck is “like a piece of shit”, hence its inclusion.

The profile picture of the account was cropped from a piece of artwork drawn by my friend Ikkad, who also created the artwork that inspired/was-inspired-by my short story Dendrochronology. He posted it in the TFWiki Discord server on 07/03/2020, and it immediately galvanised me to prepare to launch Ask Triton, but the subsequent mass outbreak of Coronavirus led me to decide to delay the launch until April Fools’ Day. I coloured Ikkad’s lineart using colours taken directly from the scans of the comic, which didn’t result in a perfect match to how it looks in print but is close enough. At Ikkad’s suggestion, I replaced my first attempt using flat shading with a softer paint-like style that better matched the tone of the original comic. For the profile picture, I flipped the image so Triton faces the text of the tweets; I used a version with a blue background (flipped again to accommodate a status indicator) on Discord as a way of promoting the account. I’ve yet to decide whether I want to keep it on a more permanent basis. “felt cute might delete later” (the exact wording varies but I like this one best) is a snowclone usually posted alongside terrible selfies, or alongside bad pictures of fictional characters. Naturally, the tweet including the full artwork wasn’t planned in advance.

Substituting Ultra Magnus’ name into “magnanimity” is another terrible Chang-esque name pun. Ultra Magnus’ old AtoZ profile describes him using the phrase “top-notch geezer”, which was prominently used in a sketch show made by a friend of mine.

The line “if you think you know where im going with this tweet your wrong but what you were thinking of is probably more good” is a rewrite of the final narration box from “PASS”, which reads “believe me if you think you know where im going with this your wrong but what you were thinking of is probably better”. The joke is that you expect the tweet to end with “better”, and not “more good”, except I’m sure literally nobody who saw it remembered the narration box, because why would they? See, the thing about Ask Triton - arguably the crux of the whole thing - is that it exists in a fictional world where "PASS” and its related materials form the whole basis of an entire fandom, one which presumably documents its deep lore in the same exacting detail as we do, and for which the account’s jokes are actually funny.

A “ton” is a unit of weight which varies somewhat but can be basically used as a shorthand for 1,000 kilograms. Hence a “triton” is 3,000 kg. I am very smort.

“you wear a mouthplate just to hide your face and you wear it because you think your cooler than me“ is a minor rewrite of the lines “You got designer shades / Just to hide your face / And you wear them around like you're cooler than me” from Mike Posner’s “Cooler Than Me”. As you can tell, I mixed up the words slightly, moving “wear” forward and using bits of the line “And it's probably 'cause you think you're cooler than me.” from later in the verse. On the one hand, this goes to show that I should’ve done more research (indeed, there were a fair few other misquote flubs like this which I did correct in time for publication), but at the same time for crying out loud why is this paragraph not over yet.

Triton’s implied to be afraid of Scattorshot, whose AtoZ profile described him as the kind of person that says hi by sneaking up behind you and putting you in a headlock - if you’re thinking that’s a little specific, yes, I have had not one, but two friends like this. The word “clutch” is used by Gamers when they pull off something precise; a “clutch save” is usually a difficult last-second move made to win a game.

Maccadam’s Old Oil House, or just Maccadam’s, is the name of a bar on Cybertron which first appeared in Furman’s “Target: 2006″ Marvel UK comic storyline, which introduced the Wreckers. It’s risen to prominence in the 2000s, appearing in multiple stories, with Maccadam himself recently being explicitly revealed to be one of the legendary “thirteen original Transformers”. The tweet which mentions it was sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing I wrote to better set up the one which follows it in the thread.

“The Last Autobot” is another some-time member of the Thirteen, introduced by Furman towards the back end of his Marvel run. The phrase “the last Decepticon” crops up multiple times in the original text of “Peace”. The phrase “just something to think about” comes from SCP-2293, which I know entirely due to the fact that my friend jenny in the TFWiki Discord quotes it incessantly. She was the one who asked me to make this commentary, which absolves me of responsibility entirely, because I totally wasn’t already planning on writing it. The form of this very commentary is inspired by her annotations for Ask Vector Prime and TFWiki’s notes sections, which I think plays nicely into the idea of an alternate universe where “PASS” is an official piece of source material and Ask Triton is funny. I also like being able to mix these kinds of thematic tangents into banal observations about bad memes with wild abandon.

Again on a whim, I chose to make explicit the inspiration behind my use of the word “spannered”, an oblique reference to the US comic “The Bridge to Nowhere!”, which revealed that Decepticon Lord High Governor Straxus’ new space bridge was in fact constructed using the still-living body of the unaligned scientist Spanner. This was probably the closest the account ever got to genuine stream-of-consciousness.

Rodimus Prime expresses some level of indecision over his paint job in PASS, which Triton mocks by pretending he’s considering getting a flame painted on his chest. There’s a line in Rodimus Prime’s AtoZ profile which is interesting in light of what we learn in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, where he’s described as “the oldest AUTOBOT”. I guess he’s the oldest in terms of age, but Optimus Prime’s the real leader? Weird.

#NotMyPresident was a hashtag that got circulated on social media following the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Wow, I regret this sentence. Wow, I regret this project.

Speaking of problematic jokes, the line “yeah im going through a bit of a phase right now” refers to “It’s not a phase mom”, a phrase used to mock kids making life choices perceived as questionable. It’s combined with a reference to Furman’s six-phase “infiltration protocol” from his IDW comics; Phase Six sees the complete annihilation of whatever planet the Decepticons are sneaking around on.

“its hard / being a kid and growwing up / its hard and nobody understands” is a line from Homestuck spoken by Eridan to Kanaya, which gets called back to multiple times later in the comic. This is another case of me misremembering a quote, as I forgot the “and growing up” part. I previously namedropped Eridan in the commentary for “The Beast Within (My Pants)” as the inspiration for my version of Skids, but I think it’s safe to say that he informed my versions of Triton and Grimlock to some subconscious extent.

Car Robots was the Japanese name for the 2001 series Robots in Disguise. The phrase “car robots” itself was used in the opening narration for “PASS”, hence its inclusion.

Triton describes Sandstorm’s propeller as a “funny hat”, in reference to propeller hats. Sandstorm’s characterisation in his AtoZ bio was a play on his The Punisher-like murder spree in IDW’s comics. The incident Triton recalls about getting stepped on by Computron is phrased in reference to this I-guess-meme (the lines between sincerity and insincerity increasingly blurrr) where people say they want their crush to “step on” them. The crude mapping between combiners and relationships began in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, which slotted surprisingly well into the “restraining order” gag from Computeron’s AtoZ bio (written to make up the numbers for a neat grid of sixteen), and I flipflop between thinking it’s the funniest shit or just thinking it’s legitimately fucking awful, but canon is canon.

Sadly, this theme doesn’t stop there. “im horny” is a terrible innuendo referring to Triton’s horned helmet.

Triton tortures the “two wrongs make a right” fallacy by mixing it with the common refrain “horny people have no rights” (which perhaps originated in this tweet but for fuck’s sake I’m not wasting any more time looking this up).

This continues when Triton claims to have “discovered the secret of combiner technology”, which is a phrase that seems to crop up in various places in 21st-century Transformers comics. It turns out that Triton’s solution is the first of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (ugh, thanks, Spotify Discover Weekly). Jordan Peterson’s this asshole with a rabid following of straight white guys; my impression is that he uses a lot of overwrought pseudoscience to justify his ideology, but I personally think his twelve rules are actually pretty solid, which seems to be a perfect example of wrong-working-right-answer.

Afterburner’s AtoZ profile written as backmatter to “PASS” described him as “Cybertron’s bicycle”; Triton wonders why he refuses to combine with him and god this is fucking stupid.

“I’m like dropping hints that I’m single / I’m single” is a pair of screenshots from one of Kim Kardashian’s shows, which frequently see the word “single” substituted for various other things.

“TR-8R” was a nickname given to a Stormtrooper that appeared in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, famous for his funny weapon and his loud accusation that one of the protagonists, Finn, is a “traitor!”

“Inside You There Are Two Wolves / One Is Gay / The Other Is Gay / You Are Gay” (the exact wording and concepts used vary) is a snowclone most commonly associated with various images of a black wolf and a white wolf.

“Not bounty-hunter, yes? Don’t like that term, understand? Freelance peacekeeping agent, yes? For certain financial remuneration, of course” is dialogue spoken by Simon Furman’s character Death’s Head in his sort-of-debut appearance in issue #113 of the Marvel UK comics.

“Hrrrrnnggh Colonel, I’m trying to sneak around but I’m dummy thicc and the clap from my ass cheeks keeps alerting the guards” was a tweet written from the perspective of Metal Gear character Solid Snake which turned into a snowclone and got so big that the actual voice actor for the character did a dramatic reading of it.

“Oh, you think darkness is your ally. You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, moulded by it” is famous dialogue from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.

The “inhibitor harness” is a piece of technology namedropped in Nick Roche’s Last Stand of the Wreckers, used to restrain Triton and the rest of Squadron X. It was itself a reference to the inhibitor claw and inhibitor band from Furman’s Marvel UK comics; I chose “harness” both because of its explicit connection to Triton and because it’s a funnier word.

In Simon Furman’s Transformers ‘84 issue #0, a prequel to the Marvel comics, he made a number of retcons, one of which revealed the identity of iconic Marvel UK character “the man of iron” to really have been the character Fastlane, who wasn’t conceptualised until 1987.

“It’s not easy being green” is a famous song sung by Kermit the Frog.

“This chat isn't relevant to my interests any more.” is the rare quote used in Ask Triton which comes from a completely arcane source, being the punchline to an anecdote someone told in the Worth the Candle Discord server. The channel where it was told is currently archived and inaccessible, but it centered around somebody leaving a group chat of friends in spectacular fashion, something I thought was apt considering the events of “PASS”. Anyway, I guess this is my excuse to tell you to go read Worth the Candle, as is obligatory of me.

“Back on top” is the punchline to a series of Limmy’s Show sketches.

One of the handful of replies received by Ask Triton over the course of its run simply read “Yo waspinator, is everything allrignt??” Suffice to say I was pretty baffled by this, as I’ve legitimately got no idea at what point my own profile picture got presented to that person, or whether they just genuinely mistook Triton for him.

The Maximals and Predacons of Beast Wars have occasionally been described as a “new generation” of Transformers, though I didn’t track down any kind of exact quote.

Robots in Disguise and More than Meets the Eye were the two famous ongoings launched by IDW Publishing in 2012, written by John Barber and James Roberts respectively.

One minor plot beat in More than Meets the Eye revolved around the notion that if you hit a Cybertronian in a certain spot, they’ll transform involuntarily. Broadside was noted in his “PASS” AtoZ profile to have transformed very rarely, causing great inconvenience in the process.

“TCC” is an acronym for “Transformers Collectors’ Club”, a fan club run by Fun Publications from 2005-2016, the logo for which was frequently placed on Transformers packaging.

“Just found out about racism...damn that shit sucks...” was a Tweet that turned into a snowclone.

The same goes for “if i was at chernobyl i wouldv stopped it / rip to ur gradma but im different”.

The Decepticons (and Roadbuster (hmm)) all speak with proper punctuation and capital letters; a minor retcon implies that Triton used to speak this way but lost his “accent” over time.

The image of the Decepticons surrounding Highbrow and Rodimus Prime is Dan Reed and John Burns’ inside cover artwork for the 1989 Annual which included Peace; the characters in the image are drawn from that book’s comic strips. I like the way Triton implies that frikkin’ Apeface, Snapdragon and Mindwipe are “great Decepticon leaders”.

Lightspeed's AtoZ bio (like Nosecone’s) is based around an inversion of the Technobots’ typical characterisation as being generally intelligent, claiming “A broken clock is right twice a day. LIGHTSPEED wishes he could be that clock.” This implies that he’s wrong about everything, but I thought it’d be funny if the one time we hear about him doing anything he’s actually right, i.e. he’s right once a day.

As mentioned in the commentary for “PASS”, “mucho cred” is a meme phrase amongst readers of the superhero web serial Worm, which I strongly recommend but not as much as Worth the Candle.

“Macho macho man” is a phrase from “Macho Man” by Village People, which I only now realise actually already included the phrase “mucho” a bunch. I only wrote the tweet referencing it off-the-cuff, thinking the phrase “mucho cred” wasn’t quite funny enough in a vacuum.

At a certain point, I decided I wanted to namedrop every single character that appeared in “PASS”, so in a Man-of-Iron-like twist, noted idiot Nosecone is implied to be behind the famous twitter account @dril.

The line “desperately trying to think of a funny joke to make ultra magnus and the rest of the gang laugh” came to me at some point while I was sitting staring at the note on my phone. In a way, it’s a mission statement for Ask Triton. I don’t think “PASS” was ever written with the metaphor of social media in mind - it was instead a story about pointless tragedy, and of giving up too much in pursuit of some fantasy ideal of social standing. In retrospect, I most strongly see it as a story about... falling out with people, of the disconnect between the things people say and the things people think, and the breaking points where people start saying “actually, I’ve always hated you.” At the same time, however, it’s kinda just a funny joke comic, one that didn’t have a complete clarity of purpose at the point of its creation, so sometimes I wonder if by talking about it in these terms I’m acting against the spirit of the thing. Regardless, Triton is the perfect character for telling a story on social media, as he’s all about facades and the hit of dopamine that comes when someone smashes the mfing cred button.

“Leader Class Triton With Triton Master Triton” is written like the kinds of online solicits we got for Titans Return, where each figure included a “Titan Master”.

I’m not sure this entirely needs explaining, as it’s not really a reference, but the idea of a person being “always on” usually implies that they’re putting on a persona of some kind, most often by trying too hard to make everything they say funny.

The interchangeability of Topspin and Twin Twist formed the basis of their shared AtoZ profile. Seriously, the name “Topspin” is so dumb, he’s not a frikkin’ helicopter!

Richard Starkings wrote “Peace” under the pseudonym “Richard Alan”. He’s most famous for founding Comicraft, the first major computer-lettering company. I have not attempted to contact Richard Starkings in any capacity. Please do not tell him I exist.

I knew going into Ask Triton that it needed something else going for it, as it was both derivative of prowl_ebooks and less funny than it, and so drew inspiration from the one bit of official Transformers fiction to significantly use social media: namely, Ask Vector Prime. I predicted that I wouldn’t get much in the way of interaction, because I never do, but figured I could pitch Ask Triton directly down the middle and lean more towards “roleplay ask blog” or “shitpost bot”, depending on which way the wind blew. My friend gearshift observed towards the end of its run that “if it was meant to involve external engagement like AVP like the name suggests rather than just being something fun to look at, the format of him rattling off to himself 99% of the time makes it a little difficult to know where to step in and interact”, which I think was spot on. As one last-ditch attempt to solicit interaction before heading into the story’s finale, Triton reintroduces himself by saying “ask me anything” in a way that’s probably most famous nowadays via the r/IAmA subreddit. I took quiet pleasure in drawing a comparison between those threads and Ask Vector Prime.

Sure enough, only one question came in, simply asking “Anything?”. This was brushed off with the reply “pass”, in reference to the title of the comic, a goof that became even funnier to me as it became clear that no more questions were incoming.

To my surprise, gearshift sent me something that completely blew me away - a digibash of Earthrise Blast Master as Triton. To hear her tell it, she’d just picked out a recent figure that was “adjacent” to a submarine, but I immediately drew more connections that formed the basis of the eventual tweet. She sent me four different variations on the colour scheme: one “perfect” deco to match Triton’s colours in the comics, two different decos that’d require about the level of paint complexity of Siege Rung (above average for a retail toy), and finally one deco that seemed realistic for what could be achieved on a retail budget. We agreed that the last one was the best, but I bumped the saturation waaay up on it to better match the inks used in the comic (the digital scans don’t do it justice, the printing in the annual is stupidly saturated).

“We get it, you vape” (perhaps more commonly “We get it, you smoke weed”) is a snowclone posted alongside images containing smoke of any kind. It mostly serves to mock people who are perceived to have no character traits beyond vaping (for an astonishing examination of this archetype, check out the ongoing serial masterpiece Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation). Strafe’s AtoZ profile states that his only character trait is loudly broadcasting the fact that he can fly.

Again in reference to his AtoZ profile, Broadside ends up blocking a route. (In response to the tweet in question, one of my friends who goes by the name Broadside remarked “i do indeed have a”, which made me laugh.) The thread continuing from that tweet was written when I realised I had an opportunity to drill down a little deeper into Triton’s character, and to incorporate the handful of pieces of official art depicting him; the first is Andrew Griffith’s cover to Sins of the Wreckers #2, while the rest are Nick Roche illustrations inked by Griffith. All of these pieces are coloured by Josh Burcham, lending them a nice consistent tone for the dream sequence.

“Squad goals” is a phrase posted alongside images of people that the poster’s group aspires towards. By posting it alongside an image of Squadron X, Triton expresses that he wishes his current friends were more like his old ones.

“You die in the dream/game, you die in real life” is a conceit used across countless stories by this point. The word “pretending” was chosen as an oblique reference to Pretender technology; Triton isn’t a Pretender, but hey ho, I just thought it fit.

“Lord Forgive Me But It’s Time To Go Back To Tha Old Me” is a snowclone mostly posted alongside edgy pictures of cartoon characters. Triton’s referring to his time as a Decepticon, but the accompanying image shows him as a corpse, bluntly foreshadowing his death. Evidently, this thread landed; a friend of mine remarked “Jesus wads that bit about dreams was grim / Poor Triton :(”

I could’ve sworn that Bumblebee was referred to as Bumblebee: A Transformers Story at some point, but I’m probably just mixing it up with the likes of Solo: A Star Wars Story. EDIT: Locoman informs me that the movie was at one point called Transformers Universe: Bumblebee, which is definitely what I was thinking of.

Narration from “Peace” was added last-minute practically verbatim purely as a way of making up the numbers: “few can remember how the war started. fewer still can now make the distinction between good and evil. but everyone will remember this particular day. because this is the day the war ended“. I could probably have changed this into a joke but I figured the melodrama that comes with taking it into this context was enough of a joke as it was. Sue me. (Richard Starkings, please don’t sue me.)

“Are you tired of being Nice? Don’t you just want to go ape shitt” is a famous Yahoo! Answers post. Naturally, Triton’s most interested in the very last part of that sentence. This was another last-minute addition.

“All I wanna do is-*BANG BANG BANG BANG*-and a-*cash register noises*-and take your money” is the chorus line from M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes”. “Brap” is onomatopoeia for a fart, used in shitposts.

I refuse to explain what shidding and farding is. Fuck you. God, this was in such poor fucking taste. What the hell was I thinking.

The second season of American Vandal centered around somebody putting a powerful laxative in a school cafeteria’s lemonade. I actually genuinely recommend this show, it’s got a lot going on.

As proof that I was legitimately getting tired of the poop jokes, the phrase “uh oh! stinky!” was used, referring to this one gross-ass video making fun of the style of humour.

Blurr’s AtoZ profile was the hardest to write, because he’s got a couple of lines in “PASS” (hence I couldn’t invent characterisation whole-cloth) but doesn’t have anything in the way of personality beyond his use of the word “ayy”. In retrospect, I guess his characterisation ended up being based on Gamzee from Homestuck, this creepy stoner. History repeated itself when it came to writing Ask Triton, as I realised I’d namedropped every character except Strafe and him. I was barely able to sneak him in under the wire; I considered having some Shattered Glass-style joke about him being really slow, but ended up deciding that the phrase “speedwalking [...] at mach 2″ (twice the speed of sound) was funny enough to carry a tweet.

The introduction to reality TV show Judge Judy goes “You are about to enter the courtroom of Judge Judith Sheindlin. The people are real. The cases are real. The rulings are final. This is Judge Judy.” Its inclusion was an oblique nod to another time I’ve used it, in a Transformers non-fiction work which might see release soonish, but this is definitely one of the weakest jokes on the account, written for the sake of numbersNUMBERS.

The video which introduced me to YouTube comedian Gus Johnson was titled “Man Gives His Cat 11,453 Stern Looks”. Another late reference which I found by going into my playlist of random videos to use in community streams.

Having forgotten I’d already referenced the movie, “First one to talk gets to stay on my aircraft” is a line from the infamous opening scene to The Dark Knight Rises. I made a comic adaptation of that scene using Marvel’s terrible Create Your Own editor, which is kind of an inversion of “PASS” in that it keeps the text of a story but substitutes the visuals. I’d previously used that editor to create the original Spider-Man comic Everything Is Red Now.

I just saw the word “vored” in here, so it looks like I’m going to have to plead the fifth again. Let’s talk about Unicron instead. Unicron is an Orson-Welles voiced character from The Transformers: The Movie, who appears in Worth the Can- WON’T SOMEBODY MAKE ME STOP?

“Not on your life. It’s a fake. Total fiction. It didn’t happen. Not fact. I’m innocent.” is from the Kevin James/Neil Cicierega video “Beyond Believability: FACT or False”, which parodies the Johnathan Frakes reality show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction.

“It could be you. It could be me. It could EVEN BE-” is an iconic line (but then again, which of these lines aren’t iconic?) from the Team Fortress 2 short “Meet the Spy”. This foreshadows Triton’s imminent death.

“GHAA!” is Triton’s parting word in both “Peace” and “PASS”, a rare bit of text to go completely unchanged in my version.

In the supplementary material for Nick Roche’s Last Stand of the Wreckers, the Rash Action and Fatal Consequence were two different ships aboard which Triton was second-in-command.

“I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realise it’s a comedy” is a line from the infamous movie JOKER, featured prominently in its teaser trailer.

“He who smelt it dealt it” is a textbook response to somebody calling attention to a fart. “The Smelting Pool!” was the Marvel issue, featuring a torture device of the same name, that led into the aforementioned story “The Bridge to Nowhere!” Like “Peace”, it’s a Marvel story prominently known for introducing and killing a comic-only character.

“Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good” is an iconic line spoken by Peter Parker at the end of Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War.

Reveal the Shield was a subtitle used for a Transformers toyline back in 2010, which referred to the heat-activated rubsign insignias of the toys (the gimmick being that you supposedly wouldn’t know which side the toy was on until you took it out of the package and got your grubby fingers on it).

The first page of the 1989 Annual begins “The Decepticon high command on Cybertron have judged this Annual to be anti-Decepticon, and the Firecons - Sparkstalker, Cindersaur and Flamefeather - have been despatched to Earth to incinerate all copies. In order to thwart the Firecons and protect your Annual, make sure you fill out the special Autobot citizenship card, below, with your name and address. The Firecons will only dare to attack Annuals if they are sure the owner is not under Autobot protection. This card could save your annual...” This page left quite the impression on me as a child, and (to what I can’t decide is my shame or my pride) I did in fact take a pen and fill out the card in my copy.

Towards the end of this project, I realised that there’s a certain symmetry between Ask Triton and the very origins of “PASS”, in an old meme page I once ran. Effectively nobody followed that page, and it was mostly me shouting into the void; like Ask Triton, many of the posts consisted of things which resembled jokes, where all the individual pieces fit together in some logical (if impenetrable) fashion, but when taken in aggregate none of them were really funny. Like Ask Triton, it turned into an attempt to tell a story using a medium utterly unsuited to storytelling. This time around, I think I succeeded, even if the story being told is one that already existed. Ask Triton consisted of 111 tweets. If I ever finish and release the epilogue for my old meme page, it’ll consist of 111 posts.

“PASS” has made the rounds on Twitter twice now, and each time the response has astonished me. On a pure numbers level, it’s nothing, but the people who share it around seem to derive so much joy from it. I made a handful of print versions for the comic to give out at TFNation 2019, and everyone there seemed to love it, so if TFNation 2020 goes ahead (god, I hope it does) I’ll make sure to print off some more. It’s something that’s torn me in two directions, where I want more people to see it, so they can get something out of it, but I also don’t want to run it into the dirt. As such, this ended up being one of the rare projects of mine nowadays not to receive any prereading (aside from a couple of the conventionally-funniest jokes being sent off to close IRL friends, to their amusement/bemusement), in the hopes that the whole thing would be a pleasant surprise rather than an uncertain slog, and I think that decision paid off.

In the TFWiki server, phrases like “shot on the spot for being a don” crop up frequently, with a handful of emoji cropped from the comic seeing a lot of use. It’s weird to be confronted with your own work so often, especially when that work was something that you threw together in an afternoon back in 2017, before you’d even started interacting properly with online Transformers fandom. At the same time, it’s nice to feel like one of the things I made genuinely mattered to people, at least ones who don’t know me.

If you’ve made it to the end of this notes section, then I’m sorry, but someone with as much cred as you simply cannot be allowed to live. Report to the TFWiki Discord server for your immediate execution.

#Transformers #Marvel #Ask Triton #PASS #Triton #The Wadapan #10/04/2020

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thewadapan · 4 years

Photo

Cybertron does not bury its dead.

(I wrote an honest-to-god Transformers fanfic. It’s three connected conversations strongly inspired by concepts from Brian Ruckley’s ongoing series for IDW Publishing, but very much set in a continuity of their own, with no background reading required. Nautica is in it. Artwork by my pal David “Ikkad” Salamante.)

“You know what I love about the sea?” asked Nautica.

A moment later, a faint burst of static came from her commlink. It sounded like a sigh. “I don’t know. You seem to love the ocean for a whole myriad of reasons, few of which make sense to me.” Though she was in her submersible mode, Nautica’s turbines remained still. She sank. “All right. What is it this time? The fish? The feeling of weightlessness? The way the corrosion eats away at your finish? It’s the fish, isn’t it—it’s usually the fish.”

Nautica couldn’t smile, but she would’ve. “I love the silence.”

“Ha, ha. Well, I’ll shut up then.”

“No, don’t,” Nautica laughed. The walls of the trench rose to meet her. “Road Rage. Roaaad Raaage. Say something.”

Another burst of static. “Something.”

“I just mean that it’s nice to sometimes be in a place where… where the only breaths you can hear are your own.”

“I don’t think you could’ve worded that in a creepier way if you’d tried,” remarked Road Rage.

“Oh no, I didn’t mean it like that,” said Nautica. She liked talking to Road Rage, but she frequently found herself phrasing things more to bait out a reaction than to get her point across. As a scientist, Nautica felt it was important to be good at communicating herself clearly—and yet. “It’s just… up there, everything’s alive. The walls are alive. You can hear it all the time, the wind in the hallways.”

“I like that. It makes me feel like I’m part of something, like I’m never alone.”

Nautica’s headlights finally fell on the seabed. She started her engines. “You should come down here sometime.”

Static, laughter. “You know I can’t do that. We’re not all airtight. I’d sink, you’d have to fish me out… it’d be no fun for anyone. Plus, I’d stink of rust for ages afterward.”

“Like me, you mean?”

“Hey, I didn’t say that.”

Nautica fell silent for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Look, I dunno, I just feel like maybe you’d feel differently if you came down here once in a while. Like, even now, when you’re about as away from it all as you can be, you’re still with Tidal Wave.”

“He’s sulking, by the way.”

“And the sky is blue.” Tidal Wave was dependable, but dependably sullen. Part of Nautica wanted to put that down to age—he was something of a giant—but apparently that was just how he’d always been. She liked to think that they were kindred sparks of a sort, as neither one of them much liked walking, but aside from that they had little in common.

Quietly, Nautica knew that one day she would be a giant like him. A submarine so heavy that it would never again be able to surface.

“Don’t tell me you’re sulking too,” came Road Rage’s voice.

“No! No, I’m not, I’m just-” A shadow separated itself from the gloom ahead, moving into Nautica’s floodlights for just a moment before vanishing again. A round form, coated in iridescent verdigris, with spindly limbs and sharp fins.

“Was that a sharkticon?” asked Road Rage. Nautica was quietly pleased to realise that she’d been paying attention to the optical feeds. “Since when do they come down this deep?”

“They don’t, usually, they prefer the shallows,” said Nautica, making no effort to hide her excitement. “This is new.” Another sharkticon swam through the beams.

“So why are they here?”

“I don’t know. Something must have…” In the distance, Nautica saw a faint pinprick of blue light. “Something must have drawn them here. Whatever that is, it’s drawn a whole shiver of sharkticons.”

Slowing her engines, she let the current carry her closer. The sharkticons swarmed around the light, occasionally darting towards it only to veer away at the last second. They ignored Nautica entirely. Eventually, she realised what she was looking at.

“It’s a spark,” she whispered.

“That’s impossible.”

Nautica drifted until she was almost directly over it. “You’re seeing what I’m seeing, and I’m seeing a spark.”

The sharkticons circled. “Nautica, you can’t bring it with you. If you transform, they’ll be on you in moments.”

“I’m faster than them.”

“Nautica, no, you can’t do this.”

“I can’t not do this. Look how big it is already—if it doesn’t get put in a protoform soon, it’ll collapse.”

“Yeah, and when you go to grab it, and you get…” For a couple of moments, the commlink transmitted nothing but static. “Well, what’d be the point in that?”

“I can do this,” Nautica insisted. “Do you trust me?”

“I trust you, which is why I really don’t want you to die.”

“Okay, then I won’t.”

Nautica transformed.

Far, far above the surface of Cybertron, Rubble stood in the outstretched palm of Metroplex and gazed out across the landscape. Bumblebee was talking to him.

“...And you see those spires, way over there in the distance? That’s Trypticon,” said his mentor, pointing, then glancing down at him to see if he was paying attention. He made no response.

Slowly, he raised a hand out in front of his optics, pointing his digits upwards. He lined it up with the glittering hands that made up the skyline.

“The Titans have lived for Millennia, Rubble,” said Bumblebee after a moment. “So will you. You’ll grow up to be just like them.”

“They’re all so still,” Rubble spoke.

“Well, when you get to that sort of size, moving around is very tiring,” Bumblebee laughed. “To say nothing of how the poor bots living inside them feel when corridors start going topsy-turvy.”

Rubble thought about that as he surveyed the landscape. Limbs and bodies, half-submerged in thick smog. Eventually, his optics fell on a Titan which stood out from the rest. He pointed. “That one doesn’t have any lights.”

When Bumblebee saw which one he was looking at, his mentor’s face settled into a strange expression. “That’s the Necrotitan,” he said. “I’ll take you there one day… when you’re older.”

Satisfied by that, Rubble turned his attention to another, one with gargantuan treads forming what might once have been described as a torso. “They can’t transform any more,” he observed.

The expression on Bumblebee’s face intensified. “No, they can’t.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t transform yet. You can.” Again, Rubble turned his hand to face the sky. “They could, but now they can’t.”

“That’s how life works. We’re all good at different things, and we all help each other out.”

“But their faces look so…” For a moment, Rubble struggled to find the words he was looking for. He turned to Bumblebee. “They look like the face you’re doing,” he said, finally.

Bumblebee didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Rubble turned back towards the palm’s edge, and stepped closer to it. “Aww, no,” Bumblebee said. He moved in front of Rubble, taking the protoform’s hand into his and stooping until they were at optic level. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know this would upset you, I shouldn’t have brought you up here. Let’s go back inside,” he said, but Rubble shook his head.

“It’s okay. I’m not upset.”

Bumblebee squeezed Rubble’s hand. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.”

Bumblebee led Rubble over to one of Metroplex’s fingers, which towered above both of them, and they sat down with their backs to it. For a while, they simply stared up at a blue sky full of stars.

“Have you given any more thought to what you’d like to be?” asked Bumblebee eventually.

“Yes,” said Rubble. “I liked flying with Thundercracker today.”

“Oh? Really?” asked Bumblebee.

“Yes. It was scary, but I got to see a lot.”

“So you like the idea of being a jet?” Bumblebee stretched his arms out to either side and moved them, like they were wings.

For a moment, Rubble smiled, before his face fell back into its default expression. “I don’t understand what jets do.”

“Oh.” Bumblebee dropped his arms, and hesitated. “Well, Thundercracker’s a good friend of mine, I’m sure you’ll see him again soon. You should ask him yourself.”

“Okay.” Rubble fidgeted, struggling to get comfortable against the hinge at the base of Metroplex’s finger. “I don’t want to be a construction vehicle.”

“Is this because of the things Hook said?”

“It just seems like a lot of responsibility. Like once you pick that, that’s it. You spend all your time putting up buildings. You have to do it right, so the spark goes into them.” Rubble made a motion, like piling things on top of one another, before his hand settled once more into a titanic pose. He studied it intently, trying to work out where exactly he would be sitting, were he a miniscule version of himself. “Everybody wants you to do a good job.”

“I’m sure you’d do an excellent job,” smiled Bumblebee, but Rubble just shook his head. Bumblebee sighed. “I knew leaving you with Hook was a bad idea.”

“I could just be a car,” Rubble said. “Like you. Then I could do whatever I wanted.”

“You could,” said Bumblebee. “You’re special, Rubble. You can be whatever you want to be.” He peered down at the highways in the distance. From this far away, the traffic barely appeared to be moving.

“What does Nautica turn into?” asked Rubble, but Bumblebee didn’t answer. He was staring at the cars. Rubble poked his mentor impatiently. “I want to know what Nautica turns into.”

“A submarine,” said Bumblebee, finally tearing his gaze away. “She’s a submarine.”

“I don’t know what that is,” said Rubble.

Bumblebee turned away once more, and pointed at another part of the horizon—a great streak of orange trapped between the black smog and the blue sky, surrounded by countless Titans. “You see that huge flat area over there?”

Rubble nodded, but his mentor wasn’t looking. “Yes,” he said.

“That’s the Sea of Rust,” Bumblebee said. “There are special alt-modes called boats, which float on its surface. A submarine is like a boat, only it goes below the surface instead. Nautica’s interested in sea life, hence… submarine.”

“I want to meet her one day,” stated Rubble. “Maybe I want to be a submarine too.”

“She’d be very happy to hear that.”

“I was reading about petro-rabbits the other day,” said Megatron.

With a grunt, Orion Pax pushed a log into the forge. He wiped a layer of condensation from his forehead. “I don’t suppose you could lend me a hand, so long as you’re waxing poetic?”

Megatron laughed, and hefted a log of his own. “Gladly, if you’ll lend your thoughts.” He carried the log over to the edge of the smelting pool, before balancing it with one end on the ground. He took a moment to collect himself. “On the surface, they seem to be quite stupid creatures. Sparkless. Living metal living on instinct alone. And yet, when one of their number dies, they drag its body down into the part of their burrow where it once lived, and they collapse it.” He tipped the log over the edge, and it landed in the forge with a hiss.

“All right,” said Orion Pax, as they watched it slowly sink into the molten liquid. The smoke was clouding his optics. “I suppose you want me to ask why they do that.”

“Well, you see, if they leave the body where it falls, turbofoxes come and consume it. And the petro-rabbits and turbofoxes are natural enemies. If the turbofoxes are well-fed, then they’ll multiply, and more of the petro-rabbits will die.”

“Clever,” said Orion Pax. Internally, he wished his friend had picked a less morbid metaphor. Turbofoxes—and other mechanimals, like sharkticons—had a deeply unpleasant method of subsistence. “You think that’s just hard-coded behaviour, I suppose? Not something they’ve learned?”

Megatron shrugged. “That’s not what I’m getting at here. It just struck me—the petro-rabbits bury their dead.” He turned away from the pool, and gestured at the great molds which lay empty below. “We bury our living.”

The log disappeared entirely below the surface, meaning it was time to add another. “How is Rubble doing?” asked Orion Pax as he moved over to the pile.

“Very well. We’ve seen each other just once since his forging. His mentor, Bumblebee, seems to be an upstanding bot.” Turning back towards the forge, Megatron held his hand out to feel its heat. It was ravenous, insatiable, and yet so oddly comforting. He turned his hand over and, after a moment, rubbed away the layer of black soot that had collected there. “His spark has settled. You know it was touch and go at first.”

“That’s good to hear.” Orion Pax dragged a log from the pile. “From what you said, it was a miracle he’d survived for so long down there.”

“It was, and a miracle he was found.” Megatron sighed deeply. “Senator Starscream wants to keep the whole thing under wraps. If Cybertron at large finds out that sparks are appearing at the bottom of the Sea of Rust—and dying there—there’ll be outcry.

“I think we deserve to know. It’s horrific.”

“It is,” agreed Megatron. “And yet… I find the notion of a submarine generation all the more horrifying. There is no more room here, Orion. You know this to be true, better than most. We could be out there, searching for new worlds like this one—but instead we’re turning in on ourselves, scrambling to save countless sparks while consigning them all to early deaths.” For a moment, Megatron was silent. “The senate and the populace both—it’s the dissonance between their stated values and their behaviour. It’s mass delusion, it’s self-deception.” He watched his friend feed the log to the forge. “You’re quiet, today.”

“I don’t know, Megatron. We aren’t built to make these kinds of decisions.” Again, Orion Pax walked away. “If I’m being honest… you scare me sometimes, when you talk like this. It’s so… callous.”

“You’re not scared of me because I’m callous. You’re scared of me because I’m right.”

“I don’t know that you are.” With a harsh sound of metal scraping against metal, Orion Pax turned on the spot. “The Titans, our generation… I think our roots run too deep. We’re stuck here. And if we aren’t the ones to leave, then who? Who, Megatron? Yes, perhaps not your submarine generation—but maybe the one after that.” He turned away. There was only a single log left in the pile. “It’s like with petro-rabbits, only the opposite. Not death leading to more death, but life leading to more life.”

Megatron gave no response to that, instead settling into thought and descending to the base of the forge. There, he turned his attention to the control panel.

Above, Optimus added the final log. “Has the situation with Road Rage improved?” he asked as he made his way down the ramp.

“Physically, she’s made a full recovery.” Living metal flowed out into the mold, casting Megatron’s face in orange light. “If the Senate follows Starscream’s lead, however… we’re concerned that she’s going to get herself into more trouble.”

“...And Nautica?”

The flow shut off with a hiss. “She’s alive,” said Megatron, turning away. “It’s for the best that Rubble doesn’t see her, for the time being.”

The words hung in the air. Orion Pax said his goodbyes and transformed, leaving Megatron to his work.

As he wound his way down through Metroplex’s arterial catacombs, Orion Pax counted the layers. The chambers of the lower levels had not been used by anyone other than the blacksmiths for a very long time, and the thick smog of the forges choked the tunnels. Those who had once lived here had long since outgrown their accommodation. Now, they were part of the world, and their voices were naught but the low wind that whistled through its fingers.

Metroplex’s own voice had left the audible range a long time ago, but his spark practically overflowed from his body—an inescapable will which permeated every wall. How many more skyscrapers?

Orion Pax thought about the things that Megatron had said. The Necrotitan cast a long shadow. Though Megatron had never gone so far as to speak his heresy aloud, Orion Pax knew him well enough to know that, if he had his way, the sparkless city would become the raw material from which Cybertron’s future could be forged. The world would forget that death existed, at least for a little while.

One by one, Orion Pax counted the layers, until eventually he lost count. He always lost count.

Even when the smooth panels of Metroplex gave way to the rough latticework that formed Cybertron’s old surface, Orion Pax’s journey was not yet done. He followed the trail between the stumps for a very long time, until finally he came to the forest’s edge. There, at last, he transformed.

He took his axe, and got to work.

Commentary

This story owes its existence entirely to Ikkad. In the aftermath of San Diego Comic-Con 2019, he was the one to comment that the axe of the new ‘cel-shaded’ Optimus Prime (designed to evoke his appearance in the 80s cartoon and celebrate the brand’s 35th anniversary) could’ve been improved if they’d made it cartoon-accurate orange. I got thinking about Prime’s axe, and realised that—despite it being an iconic design aspect for many of his incarnations over the years—there’d never been a take on the character that leaned into the lumberjack associations of such a tool.

Of course, Cybertron is a metal planet; it’s not traditionally known for its verdant forests. I wondered what sort of Cybertron could support the existence of Optimus Prime as a logger, while still allowing his rise to command of the Autobots to feel like a natural progression.

I. There Are Listed Buildings

The pitch for Dendrochronology was written on my phone, apparently around midday on Friday 19th of July, which means that I must’ve been at work at the time. I thought I’d written it on the train, but no, apparently I just spent my lunch break writing Transformers fanfiction, because I guess that’s the sort of person I am.

The idea of metal trees was inspired by some mixture of the organic life on Beast Machines Cybertron and the Tangle of Mirrodin from Magic: The Gathering. I envisioned the trees as being made from ‘living metal’, a phrase which evoked the ‘sentio metallico’ and blacksmiths of IDW’s first original comic continuity.

(Mirrodin Besieged was my gateway into Magic: The Gathering. In fact, had any other expansion been on the shelves at the time, perhaps I wouldn’t have fallen down the rabbit hole; I’m just kinda fascinated with metal worlds, I guess. When I spoke to him about it, Ikkad—despite being a fan himself—apparently didn’t know that it existed, and was quite taken with its landscape.)

I didn’t intend to write anything like a proper story based on the idea. Rather, I wanted to try and tell a short story entirely through worldbuilding: a descriptive piece with complete themes and something of an arc. I drafted some prose to that effect on my phone’s notepad app, then threw it on Pastebin. I’ve reproduced the text here:

Cybertron is very crowded.

When a new spark is born, it is placed into a specially-forged protoform. Although Cybertron is a world made entirely of metal, not just any metal will do - protoforms must be made of the "living metal" from which all Cybertronian life is formed. As the spark grows, so too must the protoform grow to accommodate it. As the protoform grows, so too does the amount of energy required to power it.

A Transformer can live forever, but their spark will never stop growing. At each new stage of their life, they must visit the blacksmiths, who nurture their growth by adding new layers of living metal. The most drastic change occurs when it is time for a Transformer to choose their alternate form - a complicated process steeped in tradition, by the end of which their body will have doubled in size.

The oldest Transformers fell still millennia ago, and their titanic frames form the cities in which their descendants now live. To keep the cities alive, new suburbs must constantly be added - all constructed entirely from living metal.

Long ago, as the borders of the cities met, they expanded in the only direction available: up. Vast quantities of living metal were moulded into towering skyscrapers, piled endlessly atop one another, reaching - grasping - at the stars, at life. Their voices became naught but the low wind that whistled between the spires.

Cybertronians do not bury their dead. They bury their living.

The youngest Transformers do not know where living metal comes from. They live in the newest dwellings, above the thick layer of smog which obscures the lower levels. It is no great secret. If they so wished, they could see the source for themselves - were they willing to spend the years needed to venture down the endless stairwells and navigate their way through the arterial catacombs along which fuel yet flows. Along the way, they could count the layers for themselves, and witness the lifetime of their species. At the end of their journey, in the strangled air of Cybertron's wilderness, they would find the trees, and witness how little remains of that lifetime.

When thinking about trees made of living metal, and Cybertronians harvesting that metal, I found myself thinking that it’d be much like if we lived in a world where trees were made of flesh. To me, that seemed to imply a completely different use for them—and yet at the same time I couldn’t escape the idea of trees serving as construction material. So I hit upon the idea that the Cybertronians’ bodies and buildings were one and the same: the smaller Transformers lived inside bigger ones (drawing inspiration from the so-called ‘citybots’ from the original toyline, and from the countless other figures with ‘base modes’).

A society stratified by size further implied something which has almost never been touched upon in Transformers stories: the idea that a Cybertronian might grow over the course of its lifetime, rather than simply having been born or constructed to a certain size. Of course, if the only way a Cybertronian could grow is through the addition of more living metal to their body, then there needed to be some biological imperative to do so—thus, I had the idea that the spark is always ‘growing’, requiring ever-greater amounts of living metal to provide it with physical structure.

I saw this as having links to ideas of transhumanism, and to the idea that Transformers are driven by a very literal kind of change: they change their own bodies not just as a means of self-expression, but because they must in order to survive. I’ve given a lot of thought to the idea of identity through the lens of Transformers, particularly in terms of selecting an alt-mode—the Cybertronians literally must choose what they’ll turn into.

This premise came with ready-made conflict, too. There was an in-built, ever-increasing cost to the life of each individual Cybertronian. Dwindling resources have been a common theme in Transformers since its inception, which had its roots in the energy crisis of the 70s, but approaching this through the angle of raw material seemed novel. It also seemed more reminiscent of real-world agriculture and deforestation, while not exactly a direct mapping.

In this case, I had this image of civilisation encroaching on nature, one that stripped away a lot of the complexity of the real world. The restrictions placed on space and on resources were directly linked, and every aspect of the system was alive. I’ve always liked the idea of Cybertron as a world choked with smog and acid rain—and of course, the idea of feeding logs to a forge seemed like a cool inversion of their typical use as fuel.

The close relationship between the trees and the Cybertronians probably—I speak in retrospect here—also had its roots in the Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead, which I had to read for an astrobiology class I took a couple of years ago. I didn’t care much for the book itself, but it left an impression on me nonetheless. Unlike the relationship between the trees and the aliens in that book, the dynamic on Cybertron is much more adversarial.

Another conceptual convergence occurred when I recalled the last Transformers setting to place a heavy focus on size: Gigantion, the ‘Giant Planet’ from Transformers: Cybertron. Each colossal Transformer on that planet was partnered with a much-smaller ‘Mini-Con’ (a concept itself drawn from previous series). Their lives were spent constantly building and subsequently abandoning new cities; by the time of the cartoon, they’d started building new cities atop old ones, creating a layered planet. I could see a similar concept tying into the emerging themes of generational divides—each new generation literally being built upon the last.

I immediately drew a connection to the tree rings which appear annually in the cross-section of a tree trunk (in fact, I’m not sure which idea preceded the other). A quick Google search for tree rings threw up the word ‘dendrochronology’, which turned into the title of the pitch. I’m not actually that keen on that title, but couldn’t think of a better one (this seems to be par for the course with the things I write).

One of the main goals of my pitch was to communicate as much as possible with as little as possible, and as such there are a lot of ideas that it only hints at. The sentence about the ‘drastic change’ that occurs when a Cybertronian picks their alt-mode was intended to imply it to be an analogue of puberty. The use of the word ‘suburbs’ was probably supposed to evoke more ideas of generational conflict (I think a lot of my peers resent the older generations for creating the housing market as it is) while also implying that Cybertron moves at a slower pace than one might expect; suburbs are quite unchanging places.

I tried to avoid proper nouns aside from ‘Cybertron’, ‘Cybertronian’ and ‘Transformer’, as I feel like a lot of Transformers fiction has a tendency to throw out buzzwords (something which this story still ultimately wound up being guilty of), but did use the word ‘titanic’ specifically in reference to the Titans. There’s a beat in the final fic where Rubble moves his hand into a ‘titanic pose’; this was a word choice I went back and forth on, having at one point settled on ‘titan-like’ instead. I also had mixed feelings on the word ‘mechanimal’—an established portmanteau of ‘mechanical’ and ‘animal’—but stuck with it, even going so far as to name sharkticons, petro-rabbits and turbofoxes (some of which have historically been rendered as proper nouns).

When I wrote the pitch, I hadn’t intended the line about skyscrapers ‘grasping’ to be entirely literal, but it seemed like an evocative idea, so that’s how it shook out in the final story, and I ended up adding the hands as a backdrop to Ikkad’s design for Orion Pax (which I’ll talk more about later). The resulting image, to me, actually brings to mind zombie fiction—an unintentional connection, but one which holds weight in a story so heavily centred around death. To be trite, the Titans are like reverse zombies: alive, but unmoving.

Not everything that I came up with made it into the pitch itself, and not everything in the pitch made it into the story proper. I envisioned the story as having less of a focus on death and more of a focus on tradition: of people living with the decisions of older generations. I liked the idea that some of the younger Transformers would use the living metal from mechanimals, becoming versions of the Maximals and Predacons from Beast Wars and facing persecution from the older generations, who’d perceive this method of growth as being unnatural.

In case I’m not being clear: I hadn’t intended the story to be a cut-and-dry kind of ‘old people bad’ screed. The younger Transformers—in my head I was using the word Mini-Cons, but aside from size they have little in common with traditional Mini-Cons—were naive, literally living above the cloud layer obscuring the cost of their lives. In the pitch, I’d intended the hints towards an interstellar exodus to be read with a veneer of colonialism (like that of IDW’s comics), but decided to go with a more charitable presentation of Megatron’s beliefs when it came to writing the story proper.

Finally, you’ll note that—despite its roots—the pitch made no mention of Optimus Prime whatsoever. I envisioned him as being a younger bot who had lived above the clouds but travelled down to work as a logger. This seemed like a path that could ultimately lead to him returning to the world above and inciting change in Cybertronian society. One aspect of the pitch which didn’t survive the transition to proper prose was the idea that the Titans were so large that travelling from the skyscrapers all the way down to Cybertron’s surface would take years; I’ll talk a little more about this later.

II. My Year in Lists

The Pastebin’s reception was unanimously very positive, though admittedly the only people I showed it to were good friends of mine with similar sensibilities in terms of what they like to see in Transformers stories. At the time I was determined not to develop the pitch further, as I was in full ‘get as many of these old projects out the door as quickly as possible’ mode (over half a year later, I seem to have more projects on the go than ever). I knew that, if I wanted to do the pitch justice, I’d have to devote significant resources to it, and between work and “The Beast Within (My Pants)” I was decidedly occupied.

Once I’d released that comic, I started to feel fatigued with Transformers in general. Particularly in the aftermath of TFNation 2019, it seemed to be consuming my mind, and I suddenly felt a growing concern that there wasn’t really a future for me in the fandom. Not just in terms of the things I was making—look, nobody wants to read Transformers fanfiction—but in terms of the people I was meeting; outside my friends on Discord, I was increasingly feeling that I just didn’t want to talk to other fans. I’ve written more about this elsewhere, in a non-fiction work that is unlikely to see the true light of day.

Somehow, my efforts to divert my attention towards more productive things failed at every turn. I wrote a review of Transformers: Galaxies #1 for the Allspark, along with a long article about toys which might see a public release at some point. I made a bunch of posts promoting frikkin’ Hauler as a candidate for 2019′s baffling Hall of Fame vote (he didn’t win). I devoted an increasing amount of time to the Allspark Chat Discord server, and then—once that crashed and burned (a little more on that later)—to the TFWiki Discord server. Apparently taken by a fit of madness, I decided that I wanted to read every single Transformers comic Marvel ever put out (in a similar vein to the comprehensive BIONICLE read-through I subjected myself to during the summer), and while I’m barely a sixth of the way into that run I still have vague plans to expand my reading list to include a significant majority of Transformers print media, along with as much of the abominable original cartoon as I can stomach. I’m working on two different Transformers-related secret projects. And, oh Primus, I’ve spent money on action figures.

It seems like this might just kinda be my life, at least for the time being, so I may as well try to own it.

Marvel’s Transformers comics are, in my newly-informed opinion, severely underrated in the fandom’s current landscape. This is partially a result of the fact that there is no single definitive method in which to read them: IDW’s Classics reprints were the first to comprehensively print the US material in order, but their remastering process kinda butchered the artwork and introduced errors to both the colouring and the lettering. Their Classics UK line (which prints the various UK-exclusive comics mostly written by Simon Furman to slot between issues of Bob Budianski’s American series) seems to have been quietly put on indefinite hiatus, but working out a reading order with which to swap between these two series of books is challenging for the casual reader anyway.

Another factor that’s led to these comics falling into semi-obscurity is the relative prominence of the concurrent Sunbow cartoon, which—certainly in the US—reached a much wider audience and left a stronger impression, despite objectively being much worse. Modern audiences will be surprised to find that many of the most successful aspects of the live-action movies or IDW’s comics were actually present in the franchise from its inception, having been pioneered by the likes of Bob Budianski.

The original four-issue limited series in particular—written by varying combinations of Bill Mantlo, Ralph Macchio and Jim Salicrup, though I’ll specifically note that Macchio was the one to script the first issue’s iconic prose—is a pretty enthralling read, presenting a vision of Cybertron which actually feels very fresh when compared to its successors, and laying out the Earth-based conflict in a compelling way. The Classics reprints include Jim Shooter’s original pitch for the series:

“Civil war rages on the planet Cybertron. Destruction is catastrophic and widespread, and yet no life is lost. None, at least, in the sense that we know life--for the inhabitants of Cybertron are all machines. There is NO ‘life’ on Cybertron save for mechanical, electronic, ‘creatures.’ As mankind is first among the organic denizens of Earth, intelligent, sentient robots are the dominant species on Cybertron. Even the planet itself is one vast mechanical construct. Perhaps there was once a ‘real’ world upon which Cybertron was built on, into, under, and through until no trace of the original planet can be found, but the origin of the planet is unknown, lost in antiquity. Similarly, it is unknown whether the robotic ‘life’ of Cybertron was originally created by some mysterious, advanced, alien race in the dim, distant past, or whether these strange metallic beings somehow evolved from bizarre, basic life forms beyond human comprehension.”

“What is certain is that the sentient, robotic beings of Cybertron are destroying one another.”

I was quite taken by the presentation of this premise, and posted it in Allspark Chat. Ikkad idly noted that it reminded him of the ‘lumberjack Prime’ pitch, and when I started reading the first issue of the comic itself, one panel immediately jumped out at me...

This is the very first view we’re given of the Transformers. It’s unlikely that any of the figures drawn here were supposed to be the actual characters they resemble: just by eye, there are colour schemes matching Bumblebee, Trailbreaker, Sunstreaker, Hound, and—most notably—Optimus Prime, whose actual body design could be interpreted as a pre-war version of the more toy-accurate design he’s seen sporting just a couple of pages later.

Having already been reminded of the existence of my pitch, I couldn’t help but see this Optimus Prime lookalike and his peaceful Cybertron as being dead ringers for those I’d written about months prior, and Ikkad agreed. Later that same day, he posted a pencil sketch that kinda blew my mind.

This sketch is basically the first time that someone’s drawn artwork inspired by something I’ve made! Suddenly, I felt the urge to tell a real Dendrochronology story, something with more than an hour or so devoted to it. Of course, if you’re here, you’ve already read the result, but I’ll talk about that later—suffice to say that once I finished writing, I started converting Ikkad’s sketch into a proper cover image for the story. Digitally colouring a photo of a pencil sketch is quite challenging, as I needed to clean up the linework; I’m not very good with the pen tool.

Once that was done, I began working out a colour layout. I took hues directly from the Marvel artwork and copied the layout for Prime’s upper torso. For the rest of him, however, I drew inspiration from his Animated incarnation; that Prime’s defining characteristics are his relative youth and inexperience, and he carries the trademark axe. I felt like Ikkad had himself used the character for inspiration, cleverly drawing a conceptual parallel between the double-wheel-heels found on many Animated Optimus Prime toys and those depicted on Optimus Prime’s Cybertronian ‘combat vehicle’ mode in the Marvel comic (which also provided the chest detailing for Ikkad’s design).

I’d originally planned to give him an orange axe, like the one he wielded in the original cartoon, but knew from the rest of the layout that it wouldn’t work. That didn’t stop me from attempting to make the logs on his trailer orange (there’s a certain order to how I used colour in the story itself, which I’ll discuss later), and sure enough I was immediately unhappy with the result. I also wasn’t happy with the white stripe across his chest, despite its origins on the Animated colour layout; Marvel had consistently used an outdated character model which lacked the stripe, and besides, I couldn’t help feeling like it made the chest of Ikkad’s design look like a moustachioed face!

For the final layout, I made the logs a blue-grey reminiscent of Optimus Prime’s original trailer, and opted for a red stripe, which I felt resulted in a cleaner look that was more faithful to the comics. I already had a sense of the tone I wanted to achieve with the final image: I wanted it to look, at a glance, like a piece of artwork from the poor scans of beat-up 80s comics I was reading. My version of Photoshop had a ‘color halftone’ effect, which—while not exactly authentic—was close enough for my purposes. I also deliberately avoided fixing minor colouring errors, particularly on Prime’s legs, to create a rough quality to the flats; this head-to-toe gradient also seemed to mirror the setting itself.

For the final version of the cover, I added hands in the background, roughly traced from stock photography using Photoshop’s vector tool. Their proportions could stand to be more titanic—the arms in particular should be much blockier—but I liked their dynamism too much to make changes, and worried that I’d block out too much of the sky (again, I’m sure you can see what I was going for with the gradient). The title (‘OENOROCHRONOLOGY’, heh) was just blocked out in a Transformers font I’d downloaded a while back, while working on the trading cards for the Allspark’s unofficial Hasbro Heroes Sourcebook Extended, with an outline applied.

I don’t have any aspirations of being a colourist, but I enjoy it, and working on lineart like this was pretty special. Ikkad gave me pointers towards the end, which certainly improved the finished piece.

III. The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future

The only constraint I placed on myself for Dendrochronology was that it had to feature Optimus Prime (or Orion Pax, as he ended up being called) in some significant capacity. I quickly decided that I wanted to include Rubble, the breakout audience surrogate from Brian Ruckley’s ongoing comic, and preferred the idea of porting over Bumblebee as well instead of setting up a new mentee/mentor dynamic between him and Orion Pax.

As I didn’t want to spend too long on the story, I gave myself two choices: either I'd do the whole thing as a single continuous scene, or I’d skip around a few short scenes with timeskips between them. The latter seemed like an interesting approach, because the time-adjacent concept of age was at the forefront of the setting’s themes. I’m not sure how exactly the idea to tell part of the story from Nautica’s perspective came about, except for the fact that her recent spotlight issue of the comic had left an impression on me. If I was telling the story in one scene, I’d have used dialogue to establish that she’d been the one to find Rubble’s spark; were I using connected scenes, I’d just have a short snippet of the moment itself.

(Like I discussed way back in the commentary for Another Son, I have something of a morbid fascination with the ocean. Also, the second #writing contest for the Homestuck Discord server—prior to the channel being shut down for being dead as a doornail—had a prompt about a submersible, but I didn’t enter, and since then I’d been vaguely feeling like I wanted to tell a story like that. You can read about the first of those contests in the commentary for “Cowboy”, if you like, though I must warn you that the two works I’ve linked in this aside are amongst the worst ones on this blog.)

There's a text file on my computer titled ‘DendrochronologyOutline.txt’, dated to the 24th of October, which simply reads:

- In the Sea of Rust, Nautica conducts a survey of mechanimal life. She finds a spark. - Rubble stands in the palm of Metroplex, with Bumblebee. - Orion Pax talks with Anode.

After writing that, I figured that if I dawdled any longer then I wouldn’t end up writing anything, so I just started typing. I wanted Nautica to have someone to talk to, and Road Rage—her partner from her aforementioned spotlight issue—was the obvious choice. But of course, Road Rage turns into a car (or a flying car, I guess), so they’d be physically apart. I liked the asymmetry of the dynamic: they talk as though they’re right next to each other, but there’s distance between them.

Thanks to the fandom, I’d actually misremembered Nautica and Road Rage’s dynamic as being more than the friendly professional relationship portrayed in the comic itself. Look, I’m not much of a shipper, but in this case it seemed like the natural angle from which to approach my versions of the characters; Nautica’s job is an isolating one, and Road Rage’s is far less evocative than her occupation as a bodyguard in the comic. I drew a lot from the idea of dating in the information age, where a huge amount of interaction just takes place over text.

(Later issues of Ruckley’s comic would actually bring the ‘subtext’ to the foreground, with Road Rage having unrequited feelings for Nautica; I’d approached the relationship from the opposite angle!)

Although I briefly considered using Broadside, in homage to the handle of a friend in the TFWiki server, I settled on Tidal Wave as a cast member very early on. The character is a favourite of the old Allspark Chat regulars, and indeed of the fandom at large, with his role in Nick Roche’s Sins of the Wreckers providing most of his characterisation in this story. I remember also thinking about the water mages from Worth the Candle (a niche web serial that’s basically my favourite story ever; I swear I mention it practically every time I write a commentary, for the love of god what are you doing here just go read it already, if I tell you Megatron is in it will that be enough to convince you), and saw Tidal Wave as having a similar relationship with the ocean. This didn’t really make it onto the page, as thematically I was already digressing pretty far from the core ideas I’d started with, but if I ever revisit the character that’s an angle I’d like to explore. A related metaphor serves as the focus of Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder, a graphic novel which I didn’t much like at first but which I seem to grow fonder of as time passes.

Perhaps the biggest challenge with Nautica’s scene was that I couldn’t have the characters physically interact. Plus, as a submarine, Nautica doesn’t have any way of emoting! Still, I tried my best. I ended up describing Nautica’s spatial movement in more detail than I would’ve otherwise, and occasionally used the static from the commlink to punctuate Road Rage’s dialogue.

The prose mentions Nautica’s ‘headlights’, and at one point I actually debated a little about whether or not to throw a space in there. See, when editing a story for another friend from the TFWiki server, I’d noticed that they’d mistakenly described a character as having ‘head lights’, which I thought evoked the idea of a car with a literal head, like the Vehicons from Beast Machines. It seemed like a pretty soulful bit of prose, and I filed it away for later use, but ended up deciding that it’d be confusing in the context of this story. Another time, perhaps!

There’s an awkward line in the dialogue where Nautica says “And the sky is blue.” I wrote this intending it to be an expression of ‘yes, obviously’, but then realised that Cybertron might not have a blue sky, and that even if it did, it’d be filled with smoke on most parts of the planet. I couldn’t think of a replacement line that made sense in the context of both Cybertron and Earth, and didn’t want to trip up the reader, and couldn’t think of an entirely different beat to substitute, so the line persisted through to the final draft. I’m not really happy with it, but maybe you didn’t notice it; I made sure to describe the sky as blue above the smog in the subsequent section.

As a result of the challenges of this scene’s setup, I briefly considered playing up the parallel I was drawing to real-world messaging by switching format to Homestuck-style chatlogs, with no descriptive prose whatsoever. Looking ahead at the vague plans I was piecing together for two scenes to come, I realised this’d cause me more problems in the long run, in addition to serving as (yet another) barrier of entry to the story. Plus, I liked the imagery with the Titans’ voices from the pitch, and felt like there’d be thematic dissonance if I never actually had any of the smaller characters speak out loud.

When I laid out the image of the sharkticons circling the spark, I had a specific scene from another story in mind, but I couldn’t work out exactly what I was thinking of. Perhaps it was something from BIONICLE—fish circling a mask? Or maybe I was just remembering a couple of the illustrations from Another Son. The sharkticons actually caused me a bit of a headache; in traditional portrayals they usually transform, and are pretty aggressive, whereas I needed some reason for them to ignore Nautica at first. I settled on the idea that Nautica was safe so long as she remained in submarine form, a sealed unit that keeps the spark’s ‘smell’ in much like it keeps liquid out. The sharkticons could smell Rubble’s spark, and would approach it, but found that it held no living metal upon which to feed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a nice way of explaining this logic in the story itself, so it’s kinda up to interpretation.

I considered using other kinds of mechanical sea life from Transformers history, but the only ones which came to life were the Allicons and the other fish seen on the planet Quintessa in The Transformers: The Movie. In particular, I wanted to namedrop the squid-like creature that attacks Hot Rod and Kup, but apparently it was never named in the script or in derivative media. Maybe I would’ve called it an ‘octobot’, except I’m sure a brief Google search will show that there’s a billion other things with that name, and it sounds pretty dumb anyway. Speaking of Google searches, I had to look up what a group of sharks is called, and was not disappointed!

IV. Hold on Now, Youngster...

When the first issue of Brian Ruckley’s ongoing came out, I wrote a pretty impassioned review of it for the Refined Robot Co. Though the series has since surpassed that issue, it’s still the one which lingers most strongly in my mind, because there’s a real weight to the scenes that are just Rubble, Bumblebee and Windblade bumbling around the landscape of Cybertron—a powerful atmosphere of endless possibilities.

By the time it came to write the second scene, I’d very much settled on structuring the story as being three conversations between three distinct pairs of characters. There’s a delicious irony—which I’m sure was Ruckley’s intent—in using Bumblebee, the audience’s traditional point of contact with the robotic casts of Transformers stories, as the mentor to an entirely distinct audience surrogate.

In the end, my own take on the dynamic between the two wound up feeling more cynical than Ruckley’s. My Rubble struggles to express himself, and at times is almost vaguely hostile towards Bumblebee, who finds himself out of his depth with most of his mentee’s observations. A key trick I used with Rubble’s dialogue is that he speaks entirely in flat statements, using periods instead of commas and never asking questions (that is, until he finally asks about Nautica). Conversely, I deliberately made a significant proportion of Bumblebee’s dialogue into questions.

Bumblebee namedrops Thundercracker mostly because their friendship in the first IDW continuity was one of the highlights of those comics—certainly in the eyes of the ex-regulars of Allspark Chat, for whom Thundercracker is another favourite—and it seems unlikely to recur in Ruckley’s run. I wanted to characterise him in an oblique way, by hinting towards the idea that he spent a significant amount of time flying Rubble around but never actually explained what his job was.

Hook, meanwhile, was included in reference to Tyler Bleszinski’s “Constructicons Rising” arc of Galaxies, the other book set in IDW’s new continuity, which was shaping up pretty well at the time when the story was written. I saw him as just being his typical arrogant self, with Bumblebee being right that Rubble was put off mostly by his attitude.

The Titans Metroplex and Trypticon are both namedropped, but they weren’t the only ones I considered including. Aside from Fortress Maximus and Scorponok, I liked the idea of mentioning Omega Supreme as being the only theoretically-spaceworthy Titan, tying into the themes of the third scene, but ultimately decided against it. The Titan with treads on its torso that Rubble points out was intended to be Grandus, but I chose not to name him in the text itself.

I came up with the idea of reimagining some of the original combiner teams as hodgepodged-together citybots themselves, but it was an uneccessary complication. I could’ve also used the various Micromaster bases; there’s a certain pleasant irony in turning some of the smallest characters in Transformers into some of the biggest.

I saw cameos like these as being a good way of expanding the world; the existence of Thundercracker and Starscream implies that there’s a Skywarp out there (I actually wanted to namedrop him (her?) somehow, but I couldn’t find a neat way of doing it) while Hook implies that the rest of the Constructicons are around too.

One of my prereaders asked me what face the Titans and Bumblebee were making around the midpoint of the scene—this was something that I’d originally made explicit, but I realised that Rubble would lack the frame of reference to interpret a lot of expressions, and chose to introduce an aspect of ambiguity. For the record, I envisioned them as looking sad; Bumblebee worries that he’s made Rubble upset, but really he’s just upset himself.

The second part has the most heavy lifting to do in terms of laying out key aspects of the setting, but I did everything possible to avoid it becoming an exposition dump. There’s a fair bit in the way of physical description and imagery, albeit a clumsy sort, and most of the worldbuilding details are presented in a way which allows readers to fill in the blanks for themselves.

Bumblebee’s line “You’re special, Rubble. You can be whatever you want to be.” was a fairly late addition to the story. I wanted to make the frame of reference that I was drawing on—namely the millennial experience—a little more explicit. I was planting the seeds of Megatron’s “submarine generation”, a phrase which was supposed to evoke the so-called ‘snowflake generation’. In case you're wondering, yes, that’s why I used the snowflake-like design of sentico metallico from IDW’s comics as a dinkus.

(Huh, “millennial”. The Titans have lived for millennia—does that make them millennials?)

V. The Fall of Home

From the start, I’d planned to save Orion Pax until the final scene, wherein he’d talk to a blacksmith. At first, I wanted to use Anode—an original character from James Roberts’ Lost Light, with whom he’d explored the concept of a Cybertronian blacksmith—but there were a few problems with that idea. First, I’d feel the need to include Lug (Anode’s partner) in some capacity. Second, being a Roberts character, Anode’s kind of a jokester, and I had a specific tone I was angling for. Finally, I just felt like she wasn’t principled enough to lead the conversation I wanted.

Considering that I’d already completely reimagined Optimus Prime’s original occupation, I felt comfortable retooling another character into being a blacksmith, and I only really had one option: Megatron. I follow a one-time official Transformers artist on this site who, for reasons I cannot particularly fathom, likes shipping Optimus Prime and Megatron, and I think they must’ve rubbed off on me. Then again, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of compelling interactions between the two in official media.

I envisioned the scene as being something of a departure in form from those preceding it—I wanted the characters to disagree, but then to ‘leave the camera rolling’ and shine a spotlight on Orion Pax’s viewpoint. Megatron would temper his ideas in his forge, and Orion Pax would turn introspective on his solitary journey.

Once more, I found myself running into problems with the physicality of the scene. I liked the idea of having the characters feed logs to the fire, but wanted to avoid making the prose too repetitive. Hopefully I was able to keep some interest. I think the forge—which looms over the conversation—is a decent enough image, described as ‘insatiable’ to bluntly show that, so long as there are Cybertronians alive, more metal will be needed. I wanted to reference the Smelting Pool from the Marvel comics, which I thought was a suitably horrific comparison to draw. The idea of the forge having ‘molds’ is, of course, an oblique reference to the molds used to produce Transformers toys; I’m probably more pleased with this than I should be.

Orion Pax describes Megatron as “waxing poetic” in reference to Impactor’s famous “not more poetry” line from IDW’s first continuity, which cropped up a couple of times in interactions between him and Megatron. ‘Revolutionary thinker’ portrayals like this have (for better or worse) become the norm for pre-war Megatron, sharply contrasting with the ‘warmongering megalomaniac’ approach taken by older stories.

Megatron’s “petro-rabbits and turbofoxes” metaphor was inspired by Silva’s “last rat standing” soliloquy from Skyfall, which is a friend of mine’s favourite movie (yes, we know it’s got its problems, but there’s some good stuff in there). I was probably also drawing on my experience programming a ‘rabbits and foxes’ simulation for my computer science qualification back in high school. The metaphor was included entirely as setup for some version of the ‘bury their living’ line from my original pitch, as I was quite proud of it but didn’t want the Cybertronians in the story to have interacted with humanity.

My original concept for Maximals and Predacons on this Cybertron reared its head slightly in the prose where Orion Pax thinks about the mechanimals’ ‘unpleasant method of subsistence’. I was hoping that the reader would put the pieces together and realise that the trees aren’t the only source of living metal on Cybertron.

For this final conversation, I found myself cribbing a lot from rationalist ideology (although neither character takes a particularly rationalist stance). Rationalism—at least the kind that I’m familiar with, as a denizen of weird spaces on the internet—is about behaving in a way which produces outcomes that match your values; this is what Megatron finds frustrating about the “dissonance” he sees in Cybertron’s populace. To make some huge generalisations, a lot of rationalists generally care a lot about not dying, and take greater pains than most to avoid death, and think that everybody should be immortal. They also tend to be more interested in space than your average person.

The key points of disagreement between Megatron and Orion Pax concern the next generation and the Necrotitan. Megatron doesn’t want more Cybertronians running around, because he thinks they’ll be a drain on the world’s resources that won’t contribute to its long-term survival; Orion Pax wants to give as many people as possible a chance to increase the likelihood of some small number of them learning how to solve the world’s problems. Megatron wants to tear down the Necrotitan and start using mechanimals as sources of living metal; Orion Pax is deeply uncomfortable with these ideas and sees them as temporary measures anyway.

Of the two, Megatron’s point of view is the more radical, but in my opinion—to be glibly centrist—neither of them is entirely right. This is a world where mechanimals are empirically less sentient than Cybertronians (they lack sparks), and where the reasons against melting the Necrotitan are entirely cultural; it would be a tragedy for any Cybertronian to die when these sources of metal are so readily available. On the other hand, it seems obvious that the world’s current population isn’t equipped to solve its problems, and time is unlikely to change that (most Cybertronians are very old; if they were going to do something, they already would have done it).

The Necrotitan was actually a fairly late addition to the story; I remember going back to the Rubble/Bumblebee scene to insert the beat concerning it while I was writing the Orion Pax/Megatron scene. The original Necrotitan appeared in John Barber’s comics for IDW’s first continuity, and I’ve always thought it to be a pretty evocative conceit. In the setting of Dendrochronology, it serves as a reminder that death is real, ever-present on the skyline.

Starscream is the only additional character to be namedropped in the final section, drawing inspiration from both of his IDW portrayals. Until this point in the story, I hadn’t given much thought to factions—in fact, I deliberately chose Decepticons as cameos in earlier scenes, wanting to present the image of a united planet. With the final scene, I wanted to plant the seeds of the Decepticon movement; Megatron’s use of the phrase “self-deception” was intended to be the origin of its name. I wasn’t too interested in laying out the whole conflict, but suffice to say that Megatron would fall out with Orion Pax and ally with Starscream, with Orion Pax using his unique insights to lead the opposition.

Throughout the story, I tried to use colour for effect. The Transformers movies are a prime example of the ‘blue and orange’ filmmaking trend, and it made sense to call attention to those colours in the story itself. The spark and the sky are both blue, and they share associations with the future. The forge and the sea of rust are both orange, and they’re associated with the ugly costs of living.

VI. A Slow, Slow Death

There’s one major aspect of the story that I’ve left untouched thus far, that being the ultimate fate of Nautica. While writing the end of the first scene, I (unironically) became concerned that I was introducing pro-life undertones. I was approaching the setting on a generational basis—the question posed being ‘how many sacrifices should we make for the next generation’ (answer: lots)—but the actual mechanics of the Cybertronian life cycle meant that sparks were a direct analog to unborn children. This was my intention, in the abstract sense of ‘we have an obligation to those who have yet to be born’, but that’s subtly different to ‘we have an obligation to unborn children’, and I was worried that people’d be more inclined to read it as the latter (which is a much more concrete real-world point of contention than the former).

So yeah, in the scene, Nautica risks her life to save the spark that’ll become Rubble. At the time, I didn’t want her to die—hence her “then I won’t” line—but as I headed into the next scene, I started running into problems.

See, my issue was that I’d never intended Nautica to be Rubble’s mentor; I wanted instead to present the idea that the whole world has an obligation to young people. If Nautica raised Rubble, she’d be his parent in all but name, and the setting hadn’t been created with themes of parenthood in mind. I found the idea that she’d never met Rubble very compelling, and wanted a reason for that to be the case.

At first, I considered that it’d be a case of governmental meddling, perhaps with some functionism mixed in—‘we can’t have submarines raising our kids’—but once again, I was really muddying the waters in terms of what the story was about. It’s not a story about government oversight, nor is it a story about about institutional discrimination, nor is it a story about adoption. I believe a lot in economical narratives and clear themes, and kept finding myself with neither.

So I was like, well, damn, I guess I’d better just kill Nautica then.

The final exchange between Bumblebee and Rubble was absolutely supposed to create the sense that she’s not around any more. I wanted to juxtapose the possibilities of Rubble’s lifetime against a lifetime with no possibilities left. From there, Nautica’s death becomes a shadow which hangs over the story’s conclusion—a real and personal symbol for the cost of life. It was made explicit in the original ending to the exchange between Orion Pax and Megatron, which lacked a few lines present in the final version:

“Has the situation with Road Rage improved?” he asked as he made his way down the ramp.

Living metal flowed out into the mold, casting Megatron’s face in orange light. “Physically, she’s made a full recovery.”

The words hung in the air.

Although I think that first draft of the story was a little cleaner, it was a weaker, more conventional approach, and all in all I found myself pretty uncomfortable with it.

In terms of the writing on this blog—and most of the writing off this blog—I don’t have a stellar record in terms of doing right by girls. I was initially happy to realise that, thanks to the conversation between Nautica and Road Rage, Dendrochronology passes the Bechdel test, being the first of my stories to do so.

(Although their conversation does include a brief mention of Tidal Wave, for the most part it’s squarely concerned with the relationship between Nautica and Road Rage. However, one might argue that Rubble’s spark—the focus at the end of the conversation—counts as a male character, thus invalidating the test. Either way, this is still less ambiguous than candidates from previous stories of mine: the conversation between Lizzie and the maybe-a-figment-of-her-imagination devil at the end of Are You Happy, and the conversation between gendered-according-to-interpretation characters at the end of Retrace Steps. If it sounds like this is becoming a little tortured and overwrought, there’s two reasons for that: one is that the Bechdel test is kind of a dumb metric, and the other is that I don’t write enough about girls.)

If I killed Nautica, I’d be fridging her, perhaps burying her too (though I suppose textually that’s open to interpretation). It felt grossly cynical, and pretty far removed from what I’d set out to say with the pitch. Ultimately, my friend gearshift from the TFWiki Discord server came up with a simple solution: not killing her.

In abstract, leaving Nautica grievously wounded is a kind of fridging all of its own—but the key difference is that it leaves room for her condition to improve. This neatly mirrors the state of Cybertron itself: she’s not doing well, but with a little care, she’ll survive. Aside from clarifying that she’s alive, I decided that the less said in the story itself, the better. Whatever condition she’s in, it’s bad enough that they don’t want Rubble to know about it. I see Road Rage as wanting nothing to do with Rubble; she can’t help but blame him. This fate also has symmetry with the events of Nautica’s spotlight issue in Ruckley’s comic.

VII. ...And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison

From a certain perspective, Dendrochronology fails to live up to its potential. Had I been able to devote an unlimited amount of resources to the fic, it’d look wildly different. The stratified society would ideally have provided the structure: the story would begin at the highest point on Cybertron and end in the forest on its surface, with the protagonists passing down through the layers and witnessing their life cycle in real time. It’d be told more traditionally, with, y’know, actual events, rather than the kinds of static conversations which usually constitute short stories. Ideally, it’d have more thematic focus.

Aside from that, I’ve deliberately avoided giving the hypothetical fully-realised version of this story much thought, because I have other stuff I want to work on. The idea of writing Transformers stories strongly appeals to me—and heck, I’ve talked a stupid amount about them—so it was nice to finally put my money where my mouth is and write a piece of serious prose. I’ve got maybe three or four pitches or openings for different Transformers stories sitting around on my hard drive, but they’re all too ambitious, which is why the goal here was to always keep things as constrained as possible. Right now, I feel like I can’t commit any real amount of time to any project like this; maybe one day the world will convince me that the things I make will be read by more than a dozen people, and I’ll be able to justify it. Or maybe when more people read my stuff I’ll just feel bad for not making enough? I don’t know. We’re in the doldrums of the commentary now, where I realise I’ve spent more time writing about the thing I made than on the thing itself, and start thinking about the fact that after I add the thing to the list of things I made I’m probably not gonna hear about it again, and that I’m not entitled to anything more than that anyway. Okay, this paragraph’s gotten needlessly self-indulgent and depressing, time to abort.

Ikkad’s favourite Transformers is Cosmos, and I drew a terrible redesign for him in MS Paint. I figure maybe in the good ending of Dendrochronology, he’s the first in a generation of spacefaring bots. I had this vague idea in my head—and I suppose Cybertron would look quite different if this were true—that the Transformers maybe wouldn’t grow if they were in stasis, and that once a ship escaped the pull of Cybertron’s gravity it would fall dormant, only awakening its crew members upon arrival on another planet. Y’know, kinda like in the 80s stories. Or maybe Cosmos is, for the time being, one-of-a-kind, tumbling through space as far away from home as anyone’s ever been. He’s historically been characterised by his loneliness.

Yeah, I kinda suck at drawing. Poor Cosmos didn’t deserve this. Here’s a compilation of stock photos of my sources of inspiration for this redesign, in case you want to steal his look.

Okay, okay, I’ve kept you longer than I should’ve—I’ll wrap things up.

This project has been sitting completed in my drafts folder for many months now, and that’s in large part down to the fact that—for most of those months—the future of my long-time home in the Transformers fandom, Allspark Chat, was deeply uncertain. This isn’t the place to tell that story, but the long and short of it is that most of the longstanding members of that community were ultimately forced to abandon what was once one of the fandom’s most eminent forum. We’re making a go of it in the brand-new official TFWiki Discord server, and we’d love for you to join us—certainly, that’s where people will be chatting about this story!

Without the ex-regulars of Allspark Chat, Dendrochronology really wouldn’t exist—in many ways, it’s a love letter to them, and the scores of conversations we’ve had. I hope that one day I’ll be able to dedicate to them something with a higher word count! More people responded to the original pitch than I can name here, but in particular I should thank my prereaders, who gave me a ton of feedback and encouragement: Fear or Courage, gearshift, and shiny. I’ve already talked about Ikkad’s role in the creation of this story, but I should thank him one last time for all of his support.

If you enjoyed this story, tell your friends about it! The ones who’d be interested in Transoformers fanfiction, that is. The rest of my writing—including rewritten versions of old Transformers comics—can be found right here on this blog. In terms of wholly-original fiction, I recommend checking out Retrace Steps if you haven’t already. If you want to be informed when my next project gets released, you should follow me either here or on twitter (where I mostly just ramble about robots occasionally)—and as always, my ask box is open. Thanks for reading!

#Transformers #fanfiction #fanfic #IDW2 #Maccadam #Maccadams #Nautica #Road Rage #Rubble #Bumblebee #Optimus Prime #Orion Pax #Megatron #03/03/2020

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thewadapan · 5 years

Text

Cowboy

(I wrote a short story for the Homestuck Discord’s first writing contest. This is where I’d put a content warning, but if I’m any more specific I’ll spoil it, so consider this a warning of its own.)

Mad Joey had never been much good at naming things. He was good at cards, and drinking large quantities of terrible lager, and had quite the uncanny ability to walk more than ten feet on his hands alone - but whenever he was asked to name something, he’d just pick the first thing that came into his head. On his tenth birthday, his mother had bought him a cat, which he’d named “Kitty” - it had ended up dying a couple of months later, in an unfortunate accident involving a litter tray and a lighter. His mother had herself died only a few months after that, coincidentally in another incident involving a lighter - although, in this case, it had not been a litter tray, but rather several gallons of petrol.

The name “Mad Joey” had been his own invention, too. All of his friends (well, both of them) agreed that it was a terrible name: Joey was not mad - so they argued - just a bit of a prick.

Despite the fact that he’d been riding on it for almost two whole days, Mad Joey’s workhorse had yet to receive a name of its own. It was a tired thing, propelled along by four spindly legs which somehow managed to transmit each and every undulation of the ground beneath up through the worn saddle and straight into Mad Joey’s ass - even though not one of its legs touched the floor. The workhorse’s repulsor technology worked fine on the level roads found on the core planets, where remaining a fixed difference above the ground made for a relatively smooth ride. Here in the outer reaches, however, its lack of suspension was sorely felt.

“Piece o’ shit,” Mad Joey muttered, thinking that’d make a fine name for his steed.

Glancing back through the thick cloud of fine smoke being kicked up behind his vehicle, Mad Joey could see the faint outline of his pursuer’s speeder - noticeably bigger than the last time he’d looked. He was losing ground.

Searing pain shot through Mad Joey’s arm, the product of a harpoon fired by the pilot of the craft behind. “Fuck!” he yelled as he let go of the reins and tried to pull it free. “Son of a bitch!” It was no use. The cable was already taut; he found himself being dragged from the craft, face-planting into the dust below and rolling to a stop.

By the time he’d recovered, the other speeder had come to a stop. He ignored it and remained where he was on the windswept ground. With his good arm, he tore off his helmet. Though it stank something fierce, the air here was just about breathable - of course, it’d have to be, for what he was planning.

Mad Joey sat up, retrieved his flask from his suit, and took a long swig of the whiskey contained within. It tasted like piss, and he almost choked on it. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the speeder’s occupant climbed out and approached through the settling smoke. “A’ight mate, this has been a laugh, but enough’s enough,” a voice crackled from behind the mirrored glass of their helmet. “You gonna come quietly? I got a taser.”

Mad Joey laughed at that. He was busy stuffing a rag into the flask - a difficult task, with just one hand to work with, but not an impossible one. “Not a chance, partner,” he said, trying the word out for size.

“The fuck’s that voice you’re doing?”

Slowly, Mad Joey got to his feet. “Here’s how this is gonna go down,” he drawled. “You’re gonna turn around, get back in that speeder, and mosey the hell away from this dustball.”

His adversary took a step forward. “And why the fuck’s that?”

Mad Joey gestured around expansively. “Gunpowder.”

“You what?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Mad Joey chose to repeat himself. “...Gunpowder.”

“Nah mate, I heard you, it’s just…” They trailed off, their helmet swivelling as they took in their surroundings - as if for the first time. “Wait, that’s what this shit is?”

In answer, Mad Joey brandished a lighter. This proved tricky, because his good hand already had a flask in it, but he managed.

“Naaah, that’s fuckin’ batty. The whole planet’s made of this shit. How the fuck would a rock like this even form?” They shook their head. “This is why you’re doing all cowboy shit, innit?”

“Ah’m gonna blow this whole place sky high,” Mad Joey said, “go out in a blaze o’ glory.” His bad arm was stinging like a bitch. His good hand was shaking. “They’ll see the blast from the central planets.”

The lawperson looked around again, one hand raised to their helmet to shield their eyes. It was almost midday, and the sun bore down brightly. “No, they won’t - there won’t be any blast, mate, the wind’ll put it out.”

Mad Joey faltered. “Reckon it’ll be enough to take the both of us out, at least.” He looked down at the cable dangling from his arm. It was like a lasso, he thought. “Get outta here. Tell ‘em Mad Joey won, tell ‘em he burned his way into hell.”

“You didn’t win shit,” they snorted - forcing a burst of static out through the speakers in their suit. “They had the fires out in like, ten minutes - fire service’s a lot better than it used to be. They literally only want you for wasting everyone’s time.” They advanced, arms spread wide - but Mad Joey raised the lighter, and they froze. “This is fucking daft,” they pressed. “Mate, look, I dunno who you are, I dunno how you found this rock, but you gotta admit this is a bit much.”

Mad Joey looked away, and his gaze fell upon the workhorse, which had crashed into a nearby dune and now rested with all four legs pointing in the air. “I killed my mu- mom,” he stuttered. “I burned the house down with her in it, ‘cause she was a bitch, and nobody knew I did it.”

“You…” The lawperson reached up with both hands and removed their helmet. From beneath the mirrored glass, Mad Joey saw a face emerge which was a faint reflection of his own - older, with bleached-blonde hair - and heard a distantly familiar voice. “...Joel?”

“Mum,” said Mad Joey. He staggered forward, dropping the lighter and the flask. They fell into the gunpowder, which didn’t ignite.

“I didn’t even recognise you,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “You look like shit. Also, you were talking in a fucking cowboy voice, you twat.”

“I just thought it’d be cool,” sobbed Mad Joey. “Cowboys are so fucking cool, Mum,” he bawled.

“Shh,” Joel’s mother said, drawing him into a hug. “You don’t have to be a cowboy to be cool.”

“I know, Mum, I’m so sorry-”

“-No, I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing him tighter. “I’m sorry I was such a shit mum. After- after the fire- after I’d thought you died- I tried to sort my shit out, really.”

“You did, Mum,” said Mad Joey. “You’re a fuckin’ police lady. That’s cool as shit.” After a couple of moments, he pushed her away slightly. “Watch this,” he said, taking a couple of steps back. He sucked in a deep breath, then quickly bent over forwards, flipping up so that he was standing on his hands. Unfortunately, one of his arms still had a harpoon sticking out of it, and it gave way instantly - sending him crashing into the dust with a shriek. “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck!”

“I-” started his mother, not really sure what she’d just witnessed.

“Nah, nah, I’m all- fuck! I’m- I’m all right. Fuck. Was just… I can do this cool thing, where I walk on my hands, y’know.”

“I know,” she nodded, not knowing. She knelt down next to him and put an arm around his shoulders. “I’m sorry I shot you - we’ll get you to a hospital or something, get it looked at, yeah?”

“Are- are you gonna arrest me?” asked Mad Joey, haltingly.

His mother nodded again. “You did crimes, Joel. I’m sorry.” She reached into a compartment in her suit and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. “I know I’m your mum, but crimes are against the law.”

“Yeah, okay.” Mad Joey wiped the tears from his eyes, before holding out his hands. Once the handcuffs were on, his mother helped him into the speeder, and - as they flew away - he stared down at the planet of gunpowder in pensive thought. After thinking for a while, he spoke up. “Mum… now that we’re up here… do you wanna set the gunpowder off?”

She turned around in the driver’s seat. “Haven’t you burnt enough things today?”

Joel supposed he had.

Commentary

The Homestuck Discord got a new #writing channel towards the end of December, last year, after a survey in which a few users requested one. For some reason I didn’t post there until over a month later, but - as the amount of time I spent in the server increased - I found myself growing fairly invested in the channel. See, it’s always struggled a lot in terms of activity - often playing host to one or two short conversations, if that - and, as it was introduced on an experimental basis, it’s always in danger of being archived.

This isn’t really the place to examine the channel in detail. What I will say is that perhaps its most important role is to provide a place for people to shill their own writing, where it would otherwise be buried in #general or laughed out of #mspa-lit.

I’m pretty sure I was the first person to meaningfully suggest doing a #writing contest, all the way back towards the end of February: “could be a two-week contest with a decent prompt, where idk the winning story gets posted in #shilling or something”. It wasn’t until after spiral became the art-cosplay pseudo moderator that anything came of this - only instead of one prompt, there was to be four, and instead of a #shilling post being the prize a couple of the server’s resident artists offered to grant a free commission to each of the winners.

Determined to put my money where my mouth was, I got right to work on my own entry. First, I had to pick from the prompts:

DIALOGUE PROMPT: "You don't want to live in a society like this, yet you don't want to do anything about it!"

ART PROMPT: “Chilly Night” by Martyna "Marcia" Chmielewska

SETTING PROMPT: A vast, barren planet devoid of most resources except one rare mineral.

SENTENCE PROMPT: In the ballroom, full of swishing skirts and duplicity, there was one thing left unaccounted for.

I was sorely tempted by the “we live in a society” prompt, but didn’t think it’d be possible to incorporate it naturally into a piece.

(As it happened, a few people did choose that prompt, and I was pleasantly surprised by how effectively they used the line.)

In the end, I settled on the one which fell within my own comfort zone - the setting prompt. I remembered seeing a post by Drew Linky which mentioned “nitroglycerin”, and - even if it didn’t quite fit the spirit of the prompt - I couldn’t get the idea of a planet made entirely of explosives out of my head. So I ran with it.

I did a bit of research into what large amounts of dynamite looked like when they exploded - by which I mean I watched some random YouTube video - and decided that gunpowder would be a much more evocative substance to make a planet from; it’d look like black sand.

The thing that I found most rewarding when writing this story was that each new idea felt like a natural progression from the last. Gunpowder evoked Western stories, so I decided to present the story as a standard Western - only to pull the rug out from under the reader as the description of the “workhorse” progresses and it becomes apparent that the story’s set in place. I wanted to have an outlaw and a sheriff of sorts, and they needed to be on the planet for a reason.

You can probably guess how the story’s opening line came about. I was staring at a brand new Google Doc and wanted to give it a title, and went with the first thing that came into my head: “Cowboy”. To get myself in the mood, I wound up reading some article about gambling in the Old West (effectively none of which made its way into the story). All of the little details and anecdotes in the first couple of paragraphs were pulled pretty much from thin air; I very much wrote this story by the seat of my pants, rarely stopping to go back and edit or to plan ahead, so in retrospect I’m pretty pleased with the extent to which I was able to incorporate them into the story’s climax.

The idea that Joey’s workhorse has no suspension was probably inspired on a subconscious level by the scooter which I used to ride as a kid. It had solid wheels, which meant you felt every bump in the road. Boy, that thing was fun. The ground’s described as having undulations, by which I meant the wavy patterns left in wind-swept sand; the fact that the planet’s windy is important, as it’s later stated that Mad Joey probably won’t be able to spread a fire across its whole surface.

I liked the idea that the workhorse was kicking up a big cloud of gunpowder as it went - kinda like those ships in The Last Jedi - which seemed to mirror the semi-literal trail of smoke which Mad Joey had been leaving all his life. Speaking of things inspired by sci-fi, didn’t somebody get a harpoon through a limb in Firefly? I had a specific image in my head when I wrote that scene, but I’ve forgotten where exactly it was from.

The line about the air being breathable plants the idea that he’s planning to set something on fire - of course, by then, we already know he’s capable of arson.

I probably only included the beat about whiskey because of the infamous “pass the whiskey” voice line from Fistful of Frags, which I’d briefly played a month or so prior to writing the story. From there, the idea that he’d make a kind of Molotov cocktail using the whiskey was a natural step - see what I mean about this story writing itself?

It’s around this point that the dialogue kicks in. When I wrote this story, I’d been working on “The Beast Within (My Pants)” for a good couple of months, and I quickly found myself slipping into the abrasive cartoonishly-British voice I’d used for many of those characters. Mad Joey himself speaks with my own poor impression of a cowboy, which seemed about right. In all honesty, I’m not sure how well the conversation comes off. My goal was to juxtapose the absurdity of many of the lines against the fact that Mad Joey is getting talked down from the edge, so to speak.

I found myself tripping over the fact that I hadn’t established a gender to his pursuant - I’d given them an opaque helmet and described them in ambiguous terms to keep my options open. In reality, this effectively shut down other avenues for the story’s resolution, because - in terms of economy of narrative - I had to provide some kind of payoff. Glancing back at the beginning of the story told me that I had only one option - Mad Joey was being chased by none other than his own mother. I felt like this was an effective twist because her dialogue seems pretty... laddish? It also generally seems to fit the themes of contrivance and absurdity I’d established with, y’know, a planet made of gunpowder.

The turning point occurs around the time that Mad Joey looks at the workhorse and sees it lying dead on the ground. You see him almost drop his persona in the line “I killed my mu- mom”; he soon drops the drawl entirely.

After the twist is revealed, the dissonance ramps up to eleven. I’m particularly happy with the exchange “Cowboys are so fucking cool, mum” / “Shh. You don’t have to be a cowboy to be cool.” Also, “You did crimes, Joel. I’m sorry. I know I’m your mum, but crimes are against the law.” Something I’ve always found is that, in real life, emotionally-charged moments like this are often very ugly things, where the things people say would seem very strange to an outsider. Mad Joey’s attempt to walk on his hands serves to emphasise this theme.

In terms of the story’s main theme, it’s... kind of a story about shilling? Or at least, within the context of #writing itself, it’s about doing things you don’t really want to do just for the sake of being known, of having people pay attention to you. Ultimately, the story presents this as something harmful - it almost leads to Mad Joey’s oblivion - and says that resolution comes from people who already care as opposed to the nebulously-defined world at large.

I paid a fair bit of attention to the presentation of the story, because I wanted to draw people into it. Once I’d written it, I deliberately cut it down until it fit on four pages instead of four-and-a-bit; I thought people’d be more inclined to read a four-page story than a five-page one. I’ve been trying to minimise my use of italics for a while now - it’s a crutch, and it causes trouble when copying text around - which I suppose would hypothetically make it easier for people to post quotes in Discord without having to mess around adding markdown back in. There are a couple of places where I had no choice but to use italics, but for the most part I think this was a successful effort.

The plan, once I’d drawn readers in, was to challenge them. The use of profanity is excessive. The story’s central conceit doesn’t make a lot of sense. The twist is contrived. The ending doesn’t quite feel complete. Like Mad Joey’s own persona, this was, to a certain extent, an attention-seeking stunt. Why, then, was this story met with abject silence?

See, #writing is slow enough that most of its users see everything that happens there. A lot of other stories got feedback of some kind. If you think I’m going somewhere with this, I’m not - I was genuinely quite perplexed by this response, and still am. Oh well. The three winning entries all turned out to be genuinely better than my own - which I was glad for, because the thought of this piece o’ shit being the best thing the Homestuck Discord could muster is pretty depressing.

Speaking of depressing, the second contest is in a very strange limbo at the moment, having received only a handful of entries and having provoked little to no discussion. I’ve been pretty busy working on other stuff, and wasn’t too fussed on the prompts, so I guess I’m at least partially to blame for that. Hopefully the channel will flourish a little more in the future...

If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the short stories I wrote for the r/WritingPrompts subreddit a couple of years ago, which can be found under the header What Our Future Looks Like on the list of things I made. Some of them are pretty ropey, so read at your own risk! In terms of my longer works, I recommend checking out Retrace Steps.

See you space cowboy...

#writing prompts #creative writing #writing #short story #The Wadapan #31/08/2019

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thewadapan · 5 years

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I rewrote the most infamous Transformers comic of all time.

I wanna give fair warning here. See, when I started working on this comic, I wasn’t really expecting it to turn out quite as dark as it did, and I suspect neither are you. After all, this is The Beast Within, right? The story where Grimlock goes crazy and talks in Comic Sans? How bad can things get? It turns out that - with just a few decisions made in poor taste - the answer is “very”, to the point where I feel the need to stick some kinda content warning at the top of this post. Unfortunately, I also feel like I’ve got a responsibility to the story, and there’s no way for me to do so without ruining it, so this is the best you’re gonna get.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a comic like this. All the way back in 2016, I made “its christmas... so what??”, a kinda-bad re-lettering of a four-page ‘80s Marvel comic called “The Night the Transformers Saved Christmas”. I wasn’t too happy with the result, so half a year later I tried again - producing “PASS”, a re-lettered version of an obscure six-page UK-exclusive Marvel comic originally titled “Peace”.

“The Beast Within (My Pants)” is quite a different, uh, beast.

Each of the three comics I’ve produced was intended to be the last of its kind - standalone, yet fitting into the same overarching continuity. You can read any one of them alone, or you can read all of them in the order I made them. They’re individually available as albums on Imgur at the following links:

“its christmas... so what??”

“PASS”

“The Beast Within (My Pants)”

Alternatively, you can download the whole set as .cbz files - renamed .zip archives of images which you can open with a standard comic book reader.

It’s not too late to turn back.

Still with me? All caught up? Good. You’re probably wondering what the hell I was thinking...

I. I Have Summoned You Here For A Reason

Our story begins all the way back in 2004. The UK company Metrodome, looking to spice up their DVD box-set releases of the original ‘80s The Transformers cartoon, hired some local talent in the form of Mr. Jamieson (owner of a then-notable fansite) to write up some bonus features. They also commissioned him to write a mini-comic to be packed in with the set - with art by Mr. Gibson, a self-proclaimed fan since childhood with seemingly no other ties to the franchise.

The comic wound up being published in two parts (the second being subtitled “Consequences”) across the “Season 2 Part 2″ and “Seasons 3 and 4″ box sets. As a kid, I actually owned the latter of those box sets, and would watch it almost religiously - to what I can only assume must’ve been great annoyance from my poor parents - but I have no memory of it including a comic of any kind. Maybe it did, but it got separated at some point, and is lying around in some forgotten folder. A damn shame, that is. No, seriously.

I’m sure some record of the fan response at the time exists out there, in the doldrums of one of the many hard-to-search often-defunct forums which existed back then. I can’t really be bothered looking for it, sorry. You’ll have to content yourself with this TFWiki talk page for “The Beast Within” from mid-2007, which speaks of “Consequences” in hushed tones - as though it is a fabled artifact, prophesied to bring about Armageddon.

Another record - this one from 2009 - comes in the form of an eight-page TFW2005 thread ominously titled “Anyone afraid of the Dinobot combiner?” If you’re reading this commentary, you’re already strapped in for the long run; I recommend reading the thread in full. Well, okay, I don’t: it made me wince throughout, and I’ll be explaining the salient bits here, so there’s really no point subjecting yourself to it.

User “Razorrider”, after reading the TFWiki article on the Beast, opened the thread, noting “I don’t feel afraid of him myself.” The reactions soon started to pour in - some agreeing that the design was in fact “awesome”, others describing it as “hideous”.

Just going off my own personal opinion here, I think it’s fair to say that effectively nobody on the first page of the thread had any idea what they were talking about - and the pages that follow fared little better.

I think the main issue stemmed from the fact that a lot of those users didn’t think to explain the metrics by which they judged a “good” design (or, indeed, a “bad” story). When one person says “I think Optimus Prime has a good design”, they might just mean “I think he looks cool”, or they might mean “I think his proportions and colours give him a heroic stature which reflects his personality”. In that sense, a “good design” is one that communicates aspects of a character visually, even if it’s ugly. The Beast is hideous, yes, misshapen, yes, and it looks like the result of a teleportation accident, fine - but those are all intentional design decisions that perfectly reflect the nature of the character. In the foreword to the first part, Mr. Gibson notes the following (you’ll have to imagine that it’s written in Comic Sans for yourself):

Creating ‘The Beast’ was probably the most interesting aspect of the project. I wanted him to be a grotesque, twisted character that contained the design elements of the Dinobots he is created from.

People proclaim that the Beast “should never have existed” - a line from the comic’s narration, note - but somehow fail to realise that this is the comic’s own intent.

(Compare the Beast’s design to that posted by one user on the second page of the thread, which - minus an admittedly-inspired Triceratops-fist - just looks like an upscaled version of Grimlock.)

Okay, the alarm bells should be ringing in your head now. This is all starting to sound disturbingly like I’m some sort of The Beast Within apologist, isn’t it? How slippery is the slope that leads from “the Beast is a good design” to “The Beast Within is a good comic?” Have the hours spent poring over this thing in MS Paint turned my brain to mush, capable of only vague all-caps-Comic-Sans-penned ponderings?

...Well, yes, but- look, just stick with me!

The most accurate recurring statement in the thread - though perhaps not in the way it is intended - is that The Beast Within reads like a work of “fanfiction”. See, Transformers is a franchise with an ever-growing history, and many of those who work on it now have been lifelong fans themselves. This is true of many franchises which have stumbled into the new millennium, finding themselves seemingly unable to die. We live in an age of fanfiction - yet some fanfictions are fanfiction-ier than others.

When compared to the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek and Marvel’s comics, one sees a marked difference in Transformers. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, every story Hasbro put out seemed to fit vaguely into a single guiding narrative - each distinct strand of their multimedia barrage falling into contradiction with one another, yet still seeking to adapt some underlying premise. The 2001 series Robots in Disguise - in the West at least - saw a complete departure from that narrative. The ramifications of that strange borderline-afterthought cartoon cannot be understated, yet in retrospect feel like they’ve been a part of the franchise for as long as anyone can remember.

Almost every year since, Hasbro has effectively wiped the slate clean. Each new series tries to be its own thing. Continuity between series - if it exists - is understated, ignored, or overwritten. To date, this is still something that confuses us geeks; so used are we to the mired pits that are the canons of Star Wars and its ilk. This can be frustrating - there are only so many times one can retread the same story - but so too has this rare cycle allowed authors to really explore the concepts and themes presented by the premise of “car robots” to a level of depth which I believe is simply unattainable in franchises which adhere stringently to a single narrative.

That’s the bright side.

In practise, many Transformers stories have become increasingly myopic - existing only in service of themselves, or (more often) in service of older (better?) stories. The single most influential of these stories is almost certainly 1986′s The Transformers: The Movie, and it’s that influence which is felt most strongly in The Beast Within.

Of the countless insights offered by Terry van Feleday - if you don’t know who that is, don’t worry, I’ll explain later - I find that this one rings most true:

When Optimus Prime du jour mouths off “One shall stand, one shall fall” for the twentieth time, there is simply no longer that understanding that he will not be the one who stands.

Where so many modern Transformers stories are misguided recreations of the animated movie, The Beast Within is a reaction to it. But we’ll get to that. First, let’s talk a little about the story’s artwork.

Mr. Gibson himself, I believe, deserves almost none of the criticism he’s received over the years for his work on this comic. Though his layouts are occasionally cluttered, and he does seem to have been trying a little too hard to emulate the style of Pat Lee (the man behind Dreamwave Productions; license holder for Transformers comics at the time) in the first part, his panels have a strong sense of energy and tone.

Though he didn’t exactly get to explore a broad range of emotions over the course of the comic, he managed to keep the characters expressive - always a challenge, when dealing with visors and mouthplates - and, crucially for a cast of this size, on-model. Look at the fury on Razorclaw’s face! The way Prime’s fist flies out of the panel! Menasor, torn in two! Predaking’s sundered legs! The mishmash of heads inside the Beast! The sickly colours of the second half! While it lacks the practised ease seen from some fans-turned-creators on more recent books, it’s still impressive work.

Regardless, Mr. Gibson’s first outing with Transformers proved to be his last. He didn’t end up getting paid work from Dreamwave Productions as he’d perhaps hoped (though in retrospect, neither did most of the people who illustrated for that company, so that was probably for the best). There’s no mention of The Beast Within on his personal website, which bills him as a “children’s picture book illustrator”, amongst other things. To put it simply, the guy’s always been a talented illustrator, and his style’s come a long way since this comic - the portfolio work on his website is very impressive.

(On a whim, I went back to late 2004 on the internet archive, and did in fact find the comic’s first spread buried at the back end of his portfolio. The entire website is a product of the early-2000s - there’s a link labelled “Go to Flash site” in the sidebar, though the page it takes you to sadly seems to have been lost to time. It all seems like it was borne of another age entirely.)

Anyway, let’s get back to that TFW2005 thread. The thing that makes it particularly notable is that, on the fourth page, Mr. Jamieson himself wades in to try and set the record straight. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

For a lot of people, I think, the idea of interacting with an author might seem strange. They’re aware of J.K. Rowling’s online antics, and are becoming increasingly comfortable with celebrity interactions on Twitter, sure. But there’s a difference between those kinds of interactions and the kind that take place on forums or in chatrooms - places where everyone’s on a level playing field. I come from those corners of the internet, and am lucky enough to have had conversations with lots of people who’ve made things I like, and have seen almost the full range of approaches those people take when dealing with their audiences. It’s safe to say that Mr. Jamieson’s approach in that decade-old thread is just about the worse one there is: over the course of just five posts, he smugly lashed out at the people in the thread, whipping them into a fervour that lasted for three more pages after his departure.

Regardless of whether or not Mr. Jamieson was correct - in the attacks he levelled at the other users, in the defence he offered for his work - there can be no question that this kind of behaviour is grossly inappropriate.

(Whether it is more or less appropriate than digging up old threads and archived web pages in an attempt to justify a bastardisation of a much-maligned comic book remains to be seen, I suppose.)

The key point that Mr. Jamieson kept returning to is that he sought to avoid the dreaded “info dump” (a hallmark of early Transformers stories), and didn’t want his readers to be “spoon fed”. A recurring criticism of the story is that it seems to begin halfway through, with little explanation for what’s going on - but I, like Mr. Jamieson, don’t think that complaint holds water. The Beast Within begins “in medias res” because we already have the context: eighty issues of a comic, ninety-eight episodes of a cartoon, and - crucially - a movie. Everyone knows the story of the Transformers, because the story of the Transformers - ironically enough - never really changes. “Is it ever really over, Jetfire?”

(That’s the last line of the original version of The Beast Within, by the way. I had to add the comma in myself.)

Like the impact of Robots in Disguise, the impact of The Transformers: The Movie is kinda hard to see unless you were there at the time - and I wasn’t - but in 1986, it did something which was profoundly shocking to thousands of children: it introduced them to death.

That’s about all I’m going to say about the movie itself, because much more experienced critics than me have already mined it for every ounce of subtext. I’ve already quoted the work of Terry van Feleday, who did some excellent scene-by-scene analysis of the film in a thread all the way back in 2010 - and I’ll come back to her writings a few times in this post. This very year, sorta-famous YouTuber hbomberguy released his own long-form take on the movie - what I find interesting when comparing the two interpretations is that van Feleday struggles to find much merit in the movie outside of its opening, while hbomberguy employs a reading that allows him to be much more optimistic and charitable even towards the end of the movie.

In a way, I think Mr. Jamieson had an intuitive subconscious understanding of the subtext which both of those critics later brought to light, an understanding which directly informed the premise of The Beast Within. In the same way one can read the monster planet Unicron as a physical manifestation of death, so too can one view the Beast - and Mr. Jamieson (almost certainly unconsciously) posits that, although death does not belong in a children’s cartoon, it is an inevitability that all children must eventually face. It is the dark spectre that lurks beneath the surface of every childish thing made by an adult.

An author places some of themselves in a book - but the reader withdraws something of their own perception as well. I wondered what I might see in the book: a child believes a lie because they know no better; a grown adult sees the lie because it fails to line up with experience. In this way, a child’s story could be so many different experiences. With enough subtext, a thing made for a child becomes an entirely different world to an adult. [...] There’s no telling when subtext will defeat the facade of a thing.

(I’ll tell you what that quote’s from later.)

I wonder, perhaps, if the endless swathes of edgy reimaginings of children’s stories are something of a mass outcry from those who grew up being told - every Saturday morning - that when people got blown apart, they’d be put back together by the next week’s end. What was it like for those children, in December of ‘86, to learn that some people could never be rebuilt?

II. It Pleases Me To Be The First

It occurs to me that I never did really do a commentary on “its christmas... so what??”, although I did talk about it a little in the commentary for “PASS”. Its title is a reference to the famous (well, you know what I mean) cover of “Stargazing” (issue #145 of the original UK run), which featured a banner reading “IT’S CHRISTMAS!” over an image of Starscream, arms out, yelling “SO WHAT?”

(Side note: at first I thought that I hadn’t read that particular story, but it occurs to me that as a kid I used to borrow a lot of Titan Books’ reprints from my local library - and I do in fact have distinct memories of reading Transformers: Second Generation, which did collect “Stargazing” amongst other Christmas stories - so I guess I probably did read it, even if I don’t remember doing so.)

The Women’s Day comic is something of a curio, as explained in this excellent article (which reprints the comic - with its original text - in full). It’s basically the only US strip which was published outside of the eighty issues of the run proper. This rare, standalone nature is something I have sought across every re-lettering I’ve done - from the UK annual-exclusive not-by-the-usual-author set-in-the-future “Peace” to the UK DVD-box-set-exclusive set-in-an-ambiguous-cartoon-inspired-continuity The Beast Within. These works feel like they’ve been lost to time - and corrupting them feels like unearthing buried treasure (and smearing it in turds). But I’ll get to that.

Back to “its christmas”. As I explained last time, I just went through the comic panel-by-panel and changed stuff to whatever I thought would be funny. I didn’t edit the two-line introductory blurb (which ended up informing the backstory detailed in the new set of AtoZ profiles). I barely paid attention to established portrayals of the characters beyond Soundwave’s association with music. I had no large-scale plans.

There’s a lazy (and poorly-conceived) gag where the little girl calls Bumblebee “gay” (also note that at the time, I misinterpreted the art in the third panel of the third page - I thought it was the girl speaking, when in fact it was her mother - leading to some erroneous dialogue), which in retrospect feels like a less-drawn-out version of the excruciating opening scene from Freddery McMahon’s Combiner Wars abridged special. That spoof somehow manages to be less funny than its source material, and I sometimes think that the same holds for my own creations.

Still, that’s not to say that “its christmas” doesn’t do anything that I like. I’ll admit that lines like “lol without mustard christmas will be CANCEL suck it nerds”, “toot toot here come some flutes”, and “help me drag it to the hospital” still kinda make me laugh. I like the way Bumblebee drowns out the little girl’s insults by tooting loudly at her. The final panels - wherein the humans steal Bumblebee’s blood as the other Transformers watch impassively - have an offbeat intensity to them, and when it came to writing Bumblebee’s AtoZ profile it was those which I chose to call back to.

If I had to sum up “its christmas” in a single word, I’d pick “childish”. The jokes, the characters themselves, the entire concept behind the comic - all feel kinda immature, and that was kinda by design. Summer Meme Sundae was a terrible piece of work, but - if I had to ascribe a theme to it - that theme would be growing up; realising that you’re running out of summer holidays. “PASS” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)” kept that atmosphere, but became increasingly cynical and obscene. That was just the natural direction they had to go in.

III. Every Place Reminds You Of Some Place Else

I’ve long had an idle fascination with abridged series, and have toyed with the thought of making an abridged series of my own. Most notably, I’ve long fancied the idea of abridging Machinima’s Prime Wars Trilogy of Transformers cartoons. Here’s an extract from a message I posted in Allspark Chat (the Discord server associated with the Allspark Forums):

I'd probably try and keep Megatron mostly the same as he is in the show as it is. Optimus'd be kinda murderous - you can tell he can't wait for Rodimus and the rest of the Council to kick the bucket so he can retake unilateral control over Cybertron. I'd maybe try to go for something of a more sympathetic Starscream - he wouldn't actually have any plan, he just has Cybertron's interests at heart and ends up trying to use the Enigma solely to rid the world of Megatron and Optimus forever. Windblade'd maybe be trying to force some hero's journey stuff - picking fights with progressively bigger opponents in a misguided attempt to prove her narrative worth

As pitches go, it’s not much. It doesn’t help that, as I previously mentioned, Freddery McMahon himself - pretty much the only name in Transformers abridging - has already tackled the series; his style of parody isn’t really to my taste, but his production value is fairly impressive and would largely overshadow any improvements I made on a script level. I feel like the Prime Wars Trilogy has potential, because it’s a fascinating piece of media, but I find myself unable to answer the question of how to parody something that already feels so much like self-parody. Sound familiar?

By the time the last entry in that series - Power of the Primes - was wrapping up, I'd been posting semi-frequently in the Allspark’s threads with a borderline-apologetic tone. Takes included:

The emptiness of Cybertron lends it a Beast Machines-esque tone

The Mistress of Flame’s death is cathartic

You can see right through the script

I want to get off Machinima’s wild ride

Wow, Windblade sure screams a lot, doesn’t she

The finale of Titans Return is good, actually

Hearing Megatron say “piss me off” is an unpleasant surprise

Hey, this soundtrack’s pretty good

Wait, no it’s not, but Galvatron’s implied reversion to Megatron is

Narrative emergence gives rise to Buddhist allegories in TFTM

Grimlock acts like his cartoon self - but only around friends

Okay, for realsies, the soundtrack’s good now

They’re right to kill Sludge; he’s the least toyetic Dinobot

I’d probably describe a lot of what I saw in the Prime Wars Trilogy as a kind of narrative pareidolia - only instead of seeing faces in inanimate objects, I was seeing value and meaning in an indefensible web series.

The problem with abridged series is that they require a ridiculous amount of effort. You need to be a good writer in the traditional sense, but you need to be able to work around the visual material available - you’re gonna have to edit everything yourself, you’re probably gonna need to do custom animation, and you’re certainly gonna need to wrangle a cast of voice actors. All of that for ten minutes of animation that’s probably gonna get taken off YouTube within ten minutes of upload. It’s just not feasible - and yet there’s part of me that loves the idea: commentary and content, all rolled into one.

To pretend that it was Combiner Wars that led me to create “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a little misleading, however. The real answer - I’m sorry to say - has more to do with ponies.

See, every now and again I get very acute nostalgia for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which was perhaps my first brush with fandom - or at least, proper fandom. It’s heard to measure these things, y’know? Anyway, when that happens, I realise that I don’t really want to sit and watch a cartoon for little girls, so I usually just listen to some fan-made music or - as was the case last time - rewatch one of the abridged series based on the show. I use the word “series” here in plural because there were in fact two (well, two that matter): Friendship is Witchcraft and The Mentally Advanced Series. There’s long been quiet debate over which of the two is the (soundwave) superior series, and I’ve historically believed that they’re (buy some) apples and oranges. The latter is a more thoughtful parody of the source material, while the former is more polished and standalone.

However, after blitzing through Friendship is Witchcraft once more in its entirety over the course of a couple of days, something about it clicked for me - a bigger-picture thesis - and I realised that it had much more to say about its source material than I (or, well, most people) had given it credit for. It was at that moment that I felt the awful urge to create a My Little Pony fanwork of my own.

(The quote I used earlier, about subtext in children’s stories, was spoken by Princess Celestia in Rainbow Dash Presents: The Star in Yellow, a Mentally Advanced Series special inspired by a fanfiction which, fittingly enough, was written by Matt Marshall (AKA Blueshift/blue/Yartek/RockLordsRock), who was also the man behind the infamous “JaAm” relettering which effectively inspired all of these projects of mine. It’s like poetry.)

As we’ve already established, making a fancy-schmancy animation was out of the question - but a crudely-edited-in-MS-Paint comic was the next best thing, clearly. I started glancing through IDW Publishing’s official My Little Pony comics - having purchased a few in a Humble Bundle many years ago - but, aside from a couple of promising stories, quickly realised I didn’t have much hope. The comics are just, to put it frankly, not as good or as interesting as the show, and the fact that I’d need to adapt at least two issues at once (over forty pages) to tell any complete story made doing so an unappetising prospect. Furthermore, IDW’s comics are still very much in print, and (as the abridged series show) any such parody would stand on shaky legal ground.

Seeing as I wasn’t about to delve into the dark realm of prose any time soon, and the idea of messing with some other fan’s work rubbed me the wrong way, I decided to give up on my equine dreams and instead turned back to more familiar territory. I glanced over the list of old Transformers Marvel comics, but nothing like those I’d previously relettered stood out to me. I perused the short stories included in Dreamwave’s 20th Anniversary Transformers Summer Special. I even looked into some Fun Publications stuff. Nothing sparked my interest.

Perhaps my most promising lead was “An Arcee Sort of Day”, a vaguely-maligned (as in, “meh”) three-page standalone comic released mere months ago by IDW as part of an anthology - but the poor resolution of the available scan (the comic had been released in its entirety as part of the free preview for the anthology) meant that editing it would be a nightmare, and there was very little in the way of dialogue for me to mess with besides. More than that, the idea of directly mocking a comic from a compilation designed to showcase female creators (particularly one featuring Arcee, who’s been a controversial character in recent years) struck me as tasteless in the extreme. If only I had an easier target!

Oh wait, I did.

IV. Let The Slaughter Begin

If I actually ever read both parts of The Beast Within before starting work on this project, I don’t remember doing so. I do remember reading the Beast’s TFWiki page when I was much younger, and remember feeling like the wiki’s take on the concept seemed disproportionately harsh. To be honest, it was quite vindicating to read the source material and discover that I still agreed with my younger self’s assessment - the problems with the story are not on a conceptual level, but in the execution.

I barely gave myself time to digest the story before diving in and working out how exactly I could mess it up. I knew from my previous comics that the Autobots would all be unrepentant shitheads, so the natural choice was to portray the Decepticons as favourably as possible. Where the Autobots are callous, poorly-spoken, stupid, and divided, the Decepticons would be caring, articulate, intelligent, and united. In the story’s context, these traits would be weaknesses: remember, only the Beast has the killing instinct needed for decisive victory in this endless children’s story. I also knew that everybody in the story would hate Grimlock, and that - unlike with Roadbuster in “PASS” - they’d be right to do so.

That was pretty much the extent of my planning. I gathered up all the pages and started clearing out the text from the speech bubbles. Already, I had something of a problem: the use of the infamous Comic Sans MS font in the first part of The Beast Within was one of its most iconic features, and I wanted to retain that, but my own previous reletterings had canonically established Times New Roman as the “voice” of the Autobots. In fact, as far as those older comics were concerned, Times New Roman was the voice not just of the whole Cybertronian race, but also of the narrator.

The only lines which used a different font were those where I’d chosen to retain the comic’s original lettering, and with Roadbuster’s dialogue. It’s hard to articulate what exactly the joke with Roadbuster was - he seemed like the odd-one-out in the opening panels of the story, so I ran with that by having him be persistently ostracised by the other Autobots. The twist, as you find out when he finally speaks, is that he seems to be the only Autobot who’s unambiguously a good person; the rest bully him for effectively no reason.

In the commentary for “PASS” I released earlier this year, I explicitly ask:

If these are the Autobots… then what were the Decepticons like?

My own gut feeling was, I think, that they were people like Roadbuster - genuinely good individuals who never wanted a fight - and so for this comic I knew I had to give them Roadbuster’s Arial voice. I also knew that I’d have to keep the Autobots’ Times New Roman voice for the most part. The only question, then, was what to do about Grimlock, the combiners, Jetfire, and the narration.

(It’s worth noting that Soundwave and Triton were both Decepticons too, yet they both spoke in Times New Roman. The Doylist reason for this is simply that, at the time, I was happy to have everyone share a voice. In Triton’s case, the Watsonian reason is that he’s trying to mimic the Autobots’ “accent” to better fit in. If I had to make up a reason for Soundwave, I’d say that he’s only recently defected from the Autobots, as a reference to van Feleday’s insane Soundwave-as-an-ex-prisoner-of-war theory. Had Soundwave had a speaking role in the comic, I’m sure I would’ve explored that backstory in his AtoZ profile - but alas, it wasn’t to be.)

In fact, there was initially some ambiguity over who the comic’s narrator would be - if I used Times New Roman, would I have to keep the voice of the same narrator as in the previous two comics? In the end, I decided to draw from my source material: the on-panel narration would be Grimlock’s inner monologue, rendered in full Comic Sans glory, while the "Interlude” would employ a more omniscient third-person voice. That third-person voice is, I think, distinct from the narrator of the previous comics, and feels like a more solemn version of the narrator of the AtoZ profiles I released alongside the commentary for “PASS” (or, indeed, the latest batch included here). Remember, I wrote the first two comics years before all of this recent material. More on the text-only pages later.

When he speaks out loud, Grimlock uses the regular Times New Roman of the other Autobots. In fact, the only dialogue which uses Comic Sans is that of the Beast, which I view as the true externalisation of Grimlock’s feelings. You can also view it as the “real world” (as depicted in the text-only pages) leaking through into the comic’s reality, in much the same way that an aware-of-death adult perspective seeps through into a seemingly-innocent children’s cartoon. The other combiners simply use a slightly bigger font than the individual Decepticons. Oh, and all of the combiners use red text.

In the original toyline, Jetfire was something of an odd-one-out, as he was really a Macross “VF-1S Super Valkyrie” toy licensed by Hasbro from Bandai (who had in turn purchased the molds from the recently-bankrupted Takatoku toys). Both Whirl and Roadbuster have similar origins. I was under no obligation to do anything special with Jetfire’s dialogue, but because of the way he’s introduced in the comic - and as a nod to his shared real-world history with Roadbuster - it felt right to give him his own voice. Though he still uses Times New Roman, the font is scaled up and he speaks entirely in capital letters. His dialogue was a challenge to write, as most of his speech bubbles are very small, but I think this worked out in my favour: his speech often ended up butting up against the bubbles’ outlines, giving the impression that he’s always speaking just a little bit too loudly.

The lettering in the first part of the original comic - aside from being technically legible - is generally shoddy on every level. For emphasis, it alternately uses italics or inconsistent font size. Occasionally, the dialogue switches to lowercase, which kinda gives the impression that everyone’s been shouting the whole time. Most of the text is left-aligned. Some bits of text seem to have been squashed. Most of the narration boxes are parallelograms, but some are plain rectangles. Red hand-lettered text is mostly limited to the combiners’ speech, but also sees use a couple of times for Megatron and Optimus Prime. Some of the combiners’ speech just uses normal red Comic Sans MS text. Meanwhile, the second part switches entirely to black hand-lettered text - presumably from Mr. Gibson - which is a marked improvement in terms of tone and consistency, if a step down in legibility.

It’s interesting to me that, despite my version of the comic sharing the dearth of commas and full stops which plagues the original, it reads very differently. For all its stylisation, it’s my hope that each line I write for these comics comes across realistically - not in the sense that it’s something you’d hear someone say, but perhaps in the sense that it’s something you’d maybe read on the internet. More on that later - first, some miscellaneous notes on the comic’s text:

When I first wrote it, I used the style of self-censorship from “PASS” (and, by extension, the rest of Summer Meme Sundae) wherein the first letter of any curse is replaced by an asterisk. It was one of my prereaders, Tindalos, who noted that “the censoring kinda takes a bit from it”, and I decided that I agreed with him - it felt like I was holding back. You can decide for yourself; I’ve collected the pages with lines that were revised between drafts in an album.

Through pure coincidence, it’s Springer (well, Bulkhead) who gets the first line of dialogue in the comic - just like in “PASS”. In case it’s not clear, the joke is that he thinks he’s safe on the floor and berates Jazz for not doing the same thing, seconds before getting stomped by Megatron. I think this sequence perfectly encapsulates a big part of what I wanted to show about the Autobots: they all criticise one another relentlessly, despite being deeply flawed themselves. It’s a dynamic that, to me at least, actually evokes that of the Autobots in Michael Bay’s movies.

The line “thats me grimlock in the corner losing my religion” is, of course, a reference to R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion”, which was itself included as part of writer James Roberts’ “soundtrack” for More Than Meets The Eye. Though he did not appear in the issue for which Roberts selected the song, Grimlock was a recurring character in that series. Hopefully my depiction of the character surpasses that one - though if you ask the people I usually talk to, I wouldn’t be setting the bar particularly high with that comparison.

Optimus uses the insult “grimdick” shortly after Grimlock’s narration provides the example “grimcock”. I intended this to show that, while the dynamic between the two’s been cemented for a good while, Grimlock is always a step behind and still can’t predict Prime’s actions.

Snarl’s line was originally “hey speak for yourself swoop me and grimlock are tight as *hit”, which expresses effectively the opposite sentiment to his final line. The idea that Snarl was okay with becoming part of the Beast was intended to add a bit of brevity to the sequence - but I decided it was better to keep as much emotional impact as possible in the moment.

A more minor change a couple of pages later is Grimlock’s line “how do they do it”, which replaced “love is stupid”. I wanted to expressly draw a parallel between the Beast’s combination and Predaking’s.

The line I’m happiest with is “eat shit megatron this is what you get for being such a fucking weapon”. One of my friends occasionally cracks out the word “weapon” to describe someone - and what better application for it is there than a guy who literally turns into a gun?

Megatron’s line about the “black hole” in Optimus Prime’s spark is a twist on Megatron’s own canonical link to a black hole - an aspect of his original bio which was revisited by Roberts.

I struggled to think of Menasor’s final words. The longer I stared at the panel where he gets torn in half - from which I’d already cleared the speech bubble - the more I was struck by the emptiness of the scene. If one considers Menasor to be a symbol for the Decepticons as a whole, then his silence in that panel is my way of showing that - from this point forth - the Decepticons no longer have a voice; the second part of the comic shows naught but their corpses. Death exists, and nothing is good any more.

None of the text on the final page of the first half remained unchanged between drafts. I wan’t happy with Optimus Prime’s original line at all, and the internal monologue “don’t you deserve happiness” felt a little too serious. The phrase “no u” is the archetypical low-effort comeback, and seemed like the perfect beat to end the first part with.

Prime’s line “gotta jettison some dead weight” is a nod to Astrotrain’s iconic line in The Transformers: The Movie: “Jettison some weight, or I’ll never make it to Cybertron.” I had to check for the exact quote just now and found “jettison transformers the movie” in my search history, so obviously I’d done the same when writing the panel. More than just being a trite reference, I was hoping to draw an obvious parallel and to contrast the unilateral decision Optimus Prime makes on the following page against the more shall-we-call-it-democratic process the Decepticons used in the movie.

I’m probably a little too proud of “big red irredeemable fucking monster of a robot semi fuck”, which is a line that could absolutely only exist in this travesty of a comic.

Jetfire’s use of the phrase “GOTTA BLAST” is a reference to a line spoken by the titular character of the early-2000s CGI cartoon Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, one which has turned into something of a meme. When I wrote the panel, I intended to imply that Jetfire was aiming to crash into the city - but I think it ended up doubling as foreshadowing for the fact that Jetfire flies his passengers into the sun. Additionally, the meme often sees use as innuendo, which shines through in the following panel: Jetfire expels propellant into the Beast’s face while Bumblebee remarks “gah okay i did not want to see that”. The less said about the sound effect “CHOOOM!”, the better.

Remember how all the text in the first part of the original comic was left-aligned? So’s the text in my version! MS Paint simply doesn’t have the option to change the alignment of your text - I actually had to throw in extra spaces at the start of each new line, eyeballing things until I had an approximation of centre alignment. This is something I never did with “PASS”, and I found that doing so gave me more freedom to squeeze more stuff into the speech bubbles.

As immortalised by countless memes, you can’t rotate text in MS Paint either. I tried to use this to my advantage on the comic’s first page, where the steps between the words in Grimlock’s narration give them a faltering quality.

Grimlock’s narration actually ended up being one of the most challenging parts of the comic to write. I wrote a draft of the first page pretty quickly, but decided I wasn’t happy with it and that I’d have to replace it later - which I did, but only after having written pretty much every single other bit of dialogue.

I think the central conceit of “PASS” - that somebody’s farted and the Autobots are trying to find out who dealt it - didn’t solidify until I reached the second page and looked at Rodimus Prime’s body language. In much the same way, the crux of “The Beast Within (My Pants)” didn’t solidify until it came to writing Swoop’s line.

V. Me Grimlock Not Nice Dino

At some point during the creation of “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, I started thinking a lot about incels.

(To be clear, this is the part of the commentary where things get a bit weird, and I start talking about storytelling decisions which I think were made in poor taste but which I don’t think come across overtly in the comic itself. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section. Or, y’know, stop reading entirely.)

Grimlock is childish, despite his age, and is desperate to be liked - no, respected - at any cost. His only asset is his BRUTE STRENGTH. He hates Prime, but wishes he was Prime. He has trouble treating any of the other Autobots like people. He rages against an outgroup whose ideals are - at least ostensibly - rooted in empathy.

I wouldn’t say “I wrote a comic where Grimlock is an incel”, because that’d be a pretty stupid thing to write and I’d feel pretty stupid saying it.

Looking back at a lot of my previous work on this blog, some things do crop up again and again. In abstract, I’d say that the idea of a character seeking friendship and/or respect - and failing to understand why they can’t find those things - is one that I’ve revisited a couple of times. This was a strong theme in the latter half of Another Son - a story which dealt heavily in misanthropy - which featured a character inspired by Sam Witwicky from Michael Bay’s Transformers. The protagonist of Retrace Steps spent the whole story unable to even ask the question “why am I alone”. Many of the characters in Are You Happy - particularly Mr. Hernandez - deal with similar problems to varying extents.

So this makes, what, practically four stories in a row? I didn’t set out to approach things this way again with this comic, but from the moment I wrote Swoop’s line I knew I didn’t have a choice. When people talk about the Beast’s combination sequence, they talk about how violative it appears. Metal tentacles spring from Grimlock like one of Alien’s chestbursters, penetrating or melding with the other Dinobots’ bodies. After that, the resulting monstrosity ambles around, horrifically murdering its former peers. As much as I can have the characters in the story play this stuff off for laughs, I’ll never be able to erase the undercurrent.

This isn’t supposed to be a direct mapping - a perfect metaphor - and by the time this commentary’s done I hope I’ll have pointed in the direction of some alternate perspectives. It just seems important to put my cards on the table and say that, when I was working on this comic, this is the kinda thing I was thinking about. We thought children were safe with Transformers, and then a gun came and shot people they cared about, and for some reason we were surprised to see that they got upset.

With all of that in mind, I take some solace in the fact that I actually found getting into Grimlock’s head to be extremely difficult. His dialogue was a breeze to write, sure - that’s the outsider’s perspective - but actually trying to construct his thoughts in anything approximating a convincing manner was very difficult. The first draft of his narration literally included the phrase “we live in a society”.

VI. Such Heroic Nonsense

I’ve already touched on Terry van Feleday’s opus a couple of times, but I think it’s worth delving a little deeper into how exactly her analysis influenced this comic. For some reason the idea that nearly five-hundred pages of borderline-conspiracy-theorist-level ramblings about perhaps the most maligned movie franchise of the 21st century might be a tough sell is one which I can’t quite wrap my head around. I’d say that it’s because I’ve read the thing and already know that it’s good, but in truth I was pretty much sold from the moment I found out it existed.

Anyway, I frequently get into not-quite-arguments with internet strangers about Transformers, and during those discussions I frequently find myself saying “a good Transformers story should do X”, and then I have to resist the urge to add “like Michael Bay’s movies” because doing so would completely delegitimise the point I’m trying to make. The problem is that, because I’m deliberately omitting the context of my opinions, they come across as being even more bizarre.

I think that same problem exists in some capacity with this comic, where I’m drawing on sources which are intuitive to me but completely alien even to a typical Transformers fan. I’ve yet to even mention the other primary inspiration for this story, which is even more arcane.

Perhaps it’s important to stress that van Feleday doesn’t offer a typical "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" take. Rather - and I realise I’m about to butcher this - she shows how the humans in Bay’s movies give increasing amounts of power to an alien cult leader because their only alternative is to get wiped out by an alien warlord. So in terms of this comic, “Autobots bad” is very much rooted in her reading of those movies, while “Decepticons good” is just something I thought would be funny.

Well, not exactly. I’ve already mentioned Combiner Wars; something that continues to baffle pretty much everyone who watched that show (and its sequels) is that, while it seems to have no idea what it’s doing most of the time, its portrayal of Megatron is an absolute riot. He is absolutely the protagonist of that series, the Only Sane Man in a world of bizarre psychotic caricatures. I think the same kinda holds in the continuity of my comic, only he’s had more time to bring the people he takes in around to his way of thinking.

Let’s not forget the official “good-is-bad” continuity of Shattered Glass, which - while heavily compromised - was the source of many interesting reinterpretations of popular characters. Effective reinterpretations require you to forget what you know about a character and strip them back to the core signifiers, which you can then put to different use. One of the posters in Terry van Feleday’s thread, “Lobok”, observes:

I like the idea that Bay or the writers looked at Optimus Prime and thought "What would a guy who calls himself that really act like?" Imagine you knew or heard of someone, a human, who called themselves the equivalent of "The #1 Bestest Superior" or "King Supreme Ultimate" - do you not picture either a 7-year old boy or a mentally deficient oo-rah alpha male? Maybe the two combined? Seems much more apt than a wise, noble father figure.

Of the course, I don’t for a second think that Michael Bay had any such thought - but the connection still exists for the audience to make. Therein lies one of the greatest unspoken strengths of Transformers storytelling: the sheer breadth and depth of the signifiers at play. Much of what van Feleday did in her thread was to boil down the concepts found in Transformers stories to reveal those core signifiers.

(Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece for the Refined Robot Co. blog which explored some of her findings by delving into the subtextual meanings of the countless alternate modes worn by Megatron over the years.)

By the same token, I think there’s something to be said for the way Grimlock’s alternate mode ties into his portrayal in my take on The Beast Within. He turns into a dinosaur - something which is rooted in the past, extinct, unable to develop - while most of the other Autobots turn into modern vehicles. Kids may love dinosaurs, but they’ll likely grow up to have a stronger interest in cars or tanks. Grimlock is immature almost to the point of childishness; his beast mode is the lizard king, and he doesn’t understand why you won’t bow.

(Obviously I’m making some big generalisations here for the sake of a point - the other Dinobots have their own prehistoric disguises, and kids’ interests develop in varied enough ways that perhaps this link is only noticeable to those who experienced the transition I describe. When I was much younger, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and would consume all the dinosaur-related media I could get my hands on. Eventually, however, my crippling fear of sea monsters led me to stop reading books about them - I'd turn the page, see a full-spread painting of a pliosaur taking a bite out of a pterodactyl, and shit my pants. Okay, no, that’s a huge exaggeration: more likely it just got to the point where I knew basically all of the cool dinosaur facts already, and suddenly the deep lore of the grim darkness of the 41st millennium or whatever seemed way cooler. I just find it funnier to imagine that my prosperous future in paleontology was averted for fear that I’d discover the last living specimen of a plesiosaur.)

VII. Where’d You Learn To Talk Like That

Back in “PASS”, I think there was some question as to who exactly was the coolest dude; the biggest guy. Rodimus was in charge, but the others didn’t really respect his authority in the end. Although Triton was an underdog in that story, he wasn’t at the bottom of the pack - no, that role went to Roadbuster. Everyone seems to like Ultra Magnus, but it’s never really made clear as to why that is.

Grimlock’s personality and role within the Autobots was pretty much the first thing I solidified when it came to writing “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. I knew that he was the lowest of the low; the nail in every Autobot’s tyre. As Grimlock evolved, so too did Optimus Prime - the second-most-prominent character in the comic. "The #1 Bestest Superior" became a murderous jock, and the Autobots became his cult of personality.

Speaking of cults of personality, I’ve been posting regularly in the Homestuck Discord server since November of last year. There’s no other place like it on the internet, and - truth be told - I’m not sure any explanation of it I could provide would suffice. The server was created by some guy called Makin - at least, we're pretty sure he’s a guy - who nobody’s ever met but who seems to have an uncanny knack for managing online communities.

Major events in that server have been comprehensively catalogued since July of 2017 by long-standing moderator “Drew Linky” in his journal Several People Are Typing. Between the entries and the related materials, it’s probably around half a million words in length. There’s no other document like it on the internet.

For the first fifty or so pages, Drew had no intention of making his document public. Apparently, one of the reasons he wrote it in the first place was as a way of holding Makin accountable - the guy used to be (and sometimes still is) a bit of an ass. Now, I wasn’t around in 2017, so I can’t really comment on the accuracy of the document’s early entries - but as a newcomer I was struck by how different Drew’s depiction of the server was to my own experience there. If I had to guess, I’d say his style of prose and the cherry-picked nature of the document make it seem like a much more hostile place than it actually is.

In particular, Makin effectively starts out as journal’s main villain (alongside various problem users and Homestuck creators) - a capricious and unknowable entity with absolute power over the server - and many of the entries deal in some way with what users jokingly refer to as his “redemption arc”. Of course, in reality, he’s just some guy, and everyone knows that real people don’t have character arcs.

I still haven’t finished reading SPAT, but I was doing so around the time when I was working on the comic. At some point I started to draw parallels between my bizarro version of Optimus Prime and the journal’s bizarro version of Makin, and I decided to play them up. Much of Prime’s dialogue is inspired by Makin’s style of speech, using phrases like “shut the fuck up”, “nobody cares”, “holy shit”, “get fucked”, “lmao”, “literally”, “literally [...] who”, “guys”, “rational” and “you’re welcome”. I just checked and at the time of writing, with the exception of “literally who” and “you’re welcome”, he’s used every one of those phrases within the last week. Oh, and while the word “suckers” isn’t really a Makin quote, in Homestuck it’s associated with the not-quite-biggest-bad evil empress. It bears mentioning again that the complete lack of punctuation in the comic’s dialogue mirrors the most common style of typing I see online, where people drop their capital letters and full stops.

(In fairness, a lot of us kinda talk the same way in that server. I remember one time Makin said “I also need to worry about lmao becoming some kind of anime catchphrase for me”, which cut pretty deep as I’ve been overusing that phrase instead of “lol” or “haha” or whatever for ages. Look, it’s just a funny word to me: in my head I pronounce it “luh-mayo” instead of “el-em-ay-oh”. Like “I throw my sandwich in the air sometimes / saying aaay-oh / I ordered maaayo...”)

In the comic, the self-aggrandising Optimus Prime is hostile and dismissive to those around him. It might all be a front, but it might not. Even though Grimlock hates Optimus, the Dinobot seems to agree with him a lot of the time, and the narrative itself never really manages to conclusively condemn his actions. The name “Optimus” echoes the word “optimise”; so frequently thrown around in rationalist circles. One could even go so far as to say that Optimus Prime’s ultimate goal in the comic is to kill death-in-the-form-of-a-shitposter.

In seriousness, I’m drawing these comparisons in a pretty tongue-in-cheek way. I don’t actually think that the Homestuck Discord server is a cult of personality - even if, to check the user-contributed “SPAT Epilogues”, some of its populace seem determined to behave like it is. Even if this section of this commentary exists. At the end of the day, I’m gonna write what I know, and I like to think that I know a little about online communities and what happens when they go wrong. I wish I could say that “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a cautionary tale to that effect, but in truth I don’t think it offers any conclusive answers in the same way that “PASS” perhaps did. “Only worry about the opinions of people who actually care about you,” maybe? “Death is an abomination and we shouldn’t let it anywhere near our kids”, perhaps? “You can’t force other people to like you”?

“You can’t force other people to like the things you made”?

VIII. Burnt-Out Toaster Ovens

In the re-released version of “PASS”, it seemed right to throw in something in the way of extra content. I had fond memories of the Seacon profiles published alongside the original “Peace”, and lifted the format to create short bios for all sixteen characters who appeared in the comic. These fitted neatly on a four-by-four spread (though I ended up merging Topspin and Twin Twist’s profiles and throwing in an extra one for Computron, who did not appear in the comic proper).

From the start, I knew I wanted to do something similar for “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. In fact, I already had two text-only pages to work with; each part of the original comic was prefaced with a prose introduction and a note from Mr. Gibson. I decided that I could rework the text-only pages and add another spread of profiles, using the freedom granted by prose to explain away many of the comic’s oddities.

It took me some time to carefully erase the existing text from the scans that I had, using nothing but the brush tool in MS Paint. It took me even more time to work out some potential approaches to take with the text itself. Eventually, I came up with the following ideas:

A flashback depicting Grimlock and Swoop’s breakup.

A conversation between Grimlock and Jazz (or, perhaps, Slash).

“How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, the interlude which I ended up using.

A synopsis of events between “its christmas... so what??” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, which ended up being my first stab at the introduction.

Some in-character commentary as Mr. Gibson, which I did end up including.

From the moment I conceived it, I was pretty set on “How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, and it ended up being a breeze to write. I didn’t end up getting a chance to squeeze in the title - a reference to an issue of More than Meets the Eye - as it didn’t really fit the original format of the page. The introduction, on the other hand, proved much more challenging. My main problem was that, were I to preface the story with a text page, I’d be asking them to read a bunch of probably-mostly-serious words before allowing them to read the comic proper. Not the best first impression!

Nonetheless, I gave it a go - you can read my first attempt in the album of the draft pages. It mostly served to lay out the continuity between my three comics. Rodimus Prime’s crew were abandoned on Cybertron by Optimus Prime (presumably Hot Rod changed his name in Optimus’ absence). Megatron, Optimus and their crews crash-landed on Earth, and millions of years later the events of “its christmas... so what??” occurred. Meanwhile on Cybertron, it took a few million years for the other Autobots to wipe out the remaining Decepticons, as seen in “PASS”. Humanity was wiped out by Optimus in retribution for their transgression (a nod to Mr. Gibson’s depiction of Earth as an empty wasteland), prompting the conflict seen in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. Much of this timeline remains implicit in the final version of the comic.

When I wrote it, I was pretty happy with the way this information was conveyed in the first draft. It was the ever-ardent Gitaxian - one of my long-time prereaders - who made me realise just what a mistake I’d made:

Something was rubbing me the wrong way about that first prose page and I finally realized what it is / Expositing that Optimus is horrible right off the bat takes away a good chunk of the impact the comic had before you added it

He was right. My prereaders’ initial response to the comic was that Optimus Prime’s motivations were completely opaque, and I overcorrected, not realising that his inscrutability was one of the things that made him interesting. You kinda want him to behave like the Optimus Prime you know and love, but he keeps doing weird things and you never really find out why.

Suddenly, I was back at square one - no closer to having a clear idea of how to introduce the comic. Another of my prereaders, gearshift, had the solution:

It's Transformers or some shit. You've seen the cartoon right? The one with the tape guy? Yeah, the tape guy is barely in this one. What do you mean no sale? Look, fuck, it's got the dinosaur guy. He's right on the goddamn cover, you like the dinosaur guy right? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Bitch.

I liked her pitch because it seemed like it’d do a good job of filtering out readers who wouldn’t enjoy the comic. To quote Alexander Wales, author of Worth the Candle:

I kind of hate blurbs and taglines, especially for something so large and varied as Worth the Candle / My ideal synopsis would tell people what kind of story it was without actually telling them that much about the story; it would select for all the people who would fall in love with the story, and select against all the people who would find it a waste of time. / How to actually write that ... I've got no idea.

(Side note: I’m one of the people who fell in love with that story, to the point where I’ll use any opportunity to recommend it to others. It’s maybe my favourite thing written by anyone ever.)

A closely-related issue is that of content warnings: so far as I’ve been able to work out, there is no warning which I can give for “The Beast Within (My Pants)” which adequately selects against people who won’t like it while also preserving its conceptual twists and avoiding colouring the audience’s interpretation.

Getting back to the actual content of the introduction - I wound up writing less than I would’ve liked, leaving the page looking a little sparse, but hopefully making things easier for the reader. There’s relatively little to talk about in the way of trivia here. When I wrote the phrase “cut right to the spectacles” I was probably thinking of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut To The Feeling”. When I mentioned “moist towelettes” I was probably thinking of Hawthorne Wipes. The phrase “truth time” was an iconic - to me, and literally no-one else in existence - line spoken by the trolling narrator of a crack story written by a high school friend of mine, the energy of which I feel like I’ve always been channelling with these comics.

The interlude, on the other hand, is crammed full of references and was a breeze to write. It was the first piece of prose I completed for the project. In general, I was trying to write in a verbose style that would be simultaneously at odds with the bulk of the issue and reminiscent of the prose of veteran Transformers scribe Simon Furman. He was known for using certain distinctive phrases repeatedly in his writing - one such phrase being “like some vast, predatory bird”. The phrase “neither sufficient inclination nor wingspan” is supposed to subtly evoke another Furmanism: “CANNOT, WILL NOT”.

In all likelihood, the interlude would not have existed had I not noticed that Ratchet’s head was in its cartoon colours in the first part of the story, but in its Marvel colours for the second. I had the idea to explain that error away in story - tying into the general schtick of “correcting” the comic - and did so by way of a reference to Ratchet’s original toy, which had a sticker with a face on it behind the windshield rather than a proper head. I was also determined to highlight the fact that Predaking’s legs remain standing for like three pages; I think this minor detail in the artwork is pretty indicative of the fact that Mr. Gibson did a good job.

The way Swoop’s contribution to the combiner is described as “puny” ties nicely to the history established between him and Grimlock in his profile. I like the way the Beast tries to hit Optimus Prime with a “truck-sized fist”. The “antimemetic shielding” was my attempt to explain the recurring disappearances of Optimus Prime’s trailer in a novel way - I did so by namedropping the key phrase from qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division; the trailer’s there, you just can’t perceive it and forget that it exists. Finally, “dull surprise” refers to the vague expressions that characterised Dreamwave’s house style.

For the most part, I was able to retain the ordering of the pages as in the original comic, to keep things print-friendly. The one exception to this is the prose page for the second part, which I unfortunately had to move forward so that its cover could fall across a spread. The original comics must’ve included something in the way of backmatter - art cards, perhaps, or adverts - which made up the space.

The huge cast of The Beast Within made creating a profile for every character an impossible task (especially when so many are just crowd-fillers like some of the Technobots were in “PASS”) - but it was perfectly possible to provide one for each non-combiner character with a speaking role.

(If you’ll indulge me in one last barely-relevant tangent as we head into the final stretch of this commentary, there are some rather odd inclusions/omissions in The Beast Within. On the Autobot side, pretty much every 1984-1985 character appears, with the exceptions of Trailbreaker, Hoist, Tracks, Smokescreen, Grapple, Beachcomber, Seaspray, Perceptor and Omega Supreme. The Autobot combiner teams are absent with the odd exception of Silverbolt. Twin Twist - who had been pretty much entirely absent from the original US fiction - makes an odd appearance without his partner Topspin. Steeljaw is the only one of the four 1986 Autobot cassettes to appear. Meanwhile, on the Decepticon side, oddities include the toy-inspired versions of Viewfinder and Spectro (most of the rest of the cast use cartoon-inspired character models) and the omissions of Spyglass and Buzzsaw. Some Decepticon combiner team members - Motormaster, Wildrider, Breakdown, Blast Off and Swindle - only appear in combined form. Just two of the four 1986 triple changers - Springer and Octane - appear in the comic, looking slightly out-of-place in a cast consisting mostly of characters present in the first two seasons of the cartoon. Oh, and the Deluxe Vehicles and Deluxe Insecticons are absent, but that’s to be expected in a cartoon-inspired setting.)

Here’s the first draft of Optimus Prime’s profile:

Unpredictable. Unstoppable. Unrepentant. Many words have been used to describe OPTIMUS PRIME, yet the abrasive leader of the Autobots remains something of an enigma even amongst his followers. He has ruled Cybertron for many millenia, by dint of the fact that he's apparently the only Cybertronian with a shred of competence.

It’s a product of the time where I wanted to really flesh out Optimus Prime and communicate his thoughts clearly to the audience, and as such is pretty blunt with how it characterises him. The final version is a little more subtle, drawing in elements of the scrapped introduction. I figure I may as well go through the other profiles one-by-one to give a sense for what I was thinking:

Megatron initially had a much more personal bio - which seems to have been lost to time - but I wound up cutting much of it to make space for elements of the story’s scrapped introduction.

Starscream draws inspiration from van Feleday’s interpretation of the character - she posited that Michael Bay’s version of the character was actually the Decepticon most loyal to Megatron. The contrast between that interpretation and pretty much every other in the franchise’s history (excluding Shattered Glass Starscream, of course) is pretty funny to me. I tried to use the phrase “fools errands” in as benign a way as possible, which I felt evoked a more traditional relationship between him and Megatron. “Starscream, you fool!”

Razorclaw has little in the way of characterisation in the comic beyond “noble warrior”, and his profile is a wholesale reference to The Chronicles of Narnia: he stands in for Aslan; the rest of the Predacons for the Pevensie siblings. So yes, this version of Razorclaw is a Christ-like figure. As for the witch... maybe Blackarachnia? Eh, who cares. Oh, and the idea of combining with a dead bot was one which cropped up a few times in IDW’s comics, most notably with the Combaticons in Mairghread Scott’s Till All Are One.

Onslaught was in a similar boat to Razorclaw. I found myself drawing from Till All Are One once more, hinting at a (complicated?) romance between him and another teammate.

Blitzwing has only one speaking role in the comic - a shared line with Megatron and Starscream - but I decided to count it for the sake of having a nice set of sixteen characters once more. In Transformers Animated, Blitzwing had multiple personalities, and would change forms depending on which was in control. This interpretation of the character has seen plenty of criticism, so I deliberately tried to come up with something new. I quickly settled upon the idea of tying his vehicle forms to his mood, a metaphor which seemed to dovetail nicely with the way aerial alternate forms were treated in “PASS” and which also allowed me to cement the Decepticons’ supportiveness.

Bulkhead was borne of the realisation that Springer appears prominently in both “Peace” and The Beast Within. This inconsistency is entirely the product of my decision to place my versions of those comics in the same continuity, and I decided to correct it in the tradition of “Bluster” and “Firster Aid” by having them be two separate (but related) characters. I named the new Springer after Energon Bulkhead, who was inspired by “Generation 1″ Springer - the name’s since been used more prominently by an Animated-original character and variations thereof, and is effectively fair game for “Generation 1″ stories. His actual characterisation was inspired by Springer’s behaviour in “PASS” - I liked the idea that Bulkhead bullied Springer, and Springer bullied everyone else in turn. Oh, and I wanted to tie their helicopter modes back to Blitzwing’s profile on a thematic level.

Bumblebee is the only character from “its christmas... so what??” to recur with a speaking role in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. After scrapping the original introduction I’d planned for the comic, I was left with a single profile to bridge the gap between the two stories. My original idea was that, for their negligence in allowing the humans to steal Bumblebee’s blood, Prowl, Tracks, and Hoist would have been executed by Optimus Prime - though I’m sure he didn’t pull the trigger himself, it’s safe to assume that he didn’t warn them before setting off the nukes.

Ratchet has a characterisation inspired by something “Jonny Angel” posted in van Feleday’s thread: “Ratchet is an ambulance who practices no medicine”.

Jazz is an extremely prominent character in the comic, despite the fact that his only line is a scream in the opening panel. The comic relies on the wider context of the brand to let the audience be invested in him, but in a vacuum it’s kinda funny to see the Autobots fret so much over an effective nobody. Pretty much the entire joke in my version is just a reference to Ryan Gosling’s misguided quest to “save jazz” in La La Land - some of his character’s lines are lifted wholesale to comprise Jazz’s profile, which takes pains to avoid using any kind of pronouns (thereby maintaining the confusion over whether or not “Jazz” refers to the character or the music genre). His profile was the first I wrote.

Ironhide has a role amongst the Autobots loosely inspired by that of Drew Linky (or at least, the version of Drew Linky presented by SPAT) in the Homestuck Discord. I thought there was some symmetry there with Ironhide’s history in IDW Publishing’s comics.

Skids was a tricky character to portray, but ultimately his profile turned out to be one of the ones I’m happiest with. It’s kind of a loose riff on his portrayal towards the back end of James Roberts’ stories, where much of his arc revolved around his relationship with Nautica. According to Word of God, he had unrequited feelings for her - I decided to amp this up by giving him unrequited feelings for everyone. To tie this back to Homestuck, think Eridan/Cronus. Oh, and in terms of the Homestuck Discord server, think your typical hornyposter (and then follow the implications through in terms of Optimus Prime/Makin). The actual name “Skids Maximus” is a play on the way the suffix “Maximus” has historically been used for some combiners, “Optimus Maximus” in particular. I’m convinced I’m not the first person to do a joke like that, but nobody I asked could think of any older examples.

Grimlock was fleshed out pretty well by the comic itself, so I took his profile as an opportunity to expand upon the history of the Dinobots. I saw them as being akin to a group of friends who stuck together throughout school, winding up as an impenetrably toxic and incestuous mess with a ton of deep lore. In a way, there was a time when I was the Grimlock of my group of friends... but we all grew up.

Swoop is Grimlock’s ex-partner, a concept inspired by the other Dinobot combiner we all wish we could forget about. I’m pretty happy with the use of the word “bottom” in this context.

Snarl is based on a combination of various people I’ve known in real life - people who are perfectly nice and reasonable but have zero patience around certain other individuals. From the outside, it’s behaviour that comes across as pretty damn harsh, but - and please note that this is not an endorsement of such behaviour - it’s usually the product of a long period of aggravations.

Jetfire was the last character introduced in the comic, so it felt fitting to save his profile until last. His biography is effectively a mashup of his portrayals in the original cartoon (where he gets frozen in the Arctic Circle) and in Revenge of the Fallen (where he was a Seeker who wound up on Earth), a combination which neatly parallels Bay’s Megatron’s origins. It also references J.J. Abram’s infamous “mystery box” storytelling device, which I intended to mirror the offbeat lack of closure in the comic itself.

The final challenge I faced - one which had hounded me throughout the development of the comic - was what exactly to title it. Titles considered included:

“The BEE” (Tindalos’ suggestion)

“The BEE Within”

“The REEEE Within”

“SHIT” (Gitaxian’s suggestion)

“IM THE BEAST”

“AWWW SHIT” (Fear or Courage’s suggestion)

“AW SHIT ITS THE BEAST”

None of these resonated. Then, almost a whole month later, out of nowhere:

This was the entirety of Daniel111111222222’s contribution to the story - and what a contribution it was.

There were several reasons why I loved his idea. Firstly, it was easy to edit: most of the other suggestions would’ve required me to move lots of letters around, while this one would simply require me to append a few. More importantly, it felt like the title of a Chuck Tingle novel.

The subtitle for the second part - “No Pants” - seemed like a natural choice after that, the idea being that it evokes Grimlock’s inhibitions falling away with his transformation into the Beast. It narrowly edged out “Pants Off”, which I managed to squeeze into the final version of the introduction.

The parentheses in the comic’s title were my own addition, and in retrospect I kinda regret them. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m not sure why. I was wrong to try and improve upon perfection.

IX. Why Throw Away Your Life So Recklessly

So far, the bulk of this commentary has mostly focused on the aspects of this project which I think went pretty well. In a way, that's probably fair enough, because - on balance - I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

At the same time, I can't help feeling that “PASS” - a comic which I probably threw together in the space of one day two years ago - is both funnier and more meaningful than the one which I spent a couple of weeks on.

When I started working on “The Beast Within (My Pants)” towards the beginning of May, I expected to have the project finished and out of the door by the end of the month. If you glance at the release dates of the various things I made, you'll see that I like to put out major projects on the last day of a month - it's a way of setting myself a deadline and it lets me associate a given project with a given period of time.

My first draft of the dialogue was released to prereaders on the 11th of May; my second on the 13th. Around that point, exam season started to kick in and I decided to prioritise to other projects - the Retrace Steps commentary and the Are You Happy retrospective - which both ballooned out into much longer pieces than I'd planned. I successfully met my self-imposed deadline for those projects and pushed back the release date for the comic to the end of June. I released the first drafts of the text-only pages on the 9th, but the profiles didn't follow until the 24th. By the time you read this, I'll have been working on the project on-and-off for over three months; despite the fact that I was ostensibly on vacation for most of that time, I was somehow busier than I tend to be at university.

For context, it took me just four months to adapt Retrace Steps from a short film script to a webcomic (well, “webcomic”), and that was a process which actually required original artwork. At the time I noted that I needed to re-evaluate the way I approached commentaries, as the amount of time required to produce one of a high standard seemed only to increase - they're extremely valuable to me, and seem to be well-received by the few who read them, but are they justifiable if they take longer to create than the things they comment on?

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that I've probably spent more time thinking about The Beast Within than the vast majority of people who know about it, and that I kinda regret that. See, in the sense that The Beast Within provokes a visceral emotional reaction, it’s a “good comic” - but so too does a punch to the face. The Beast Within is not a good comic. It’s mean and deconstructive and poorly-done. My version is borne of contrarianism and hubris, and softens the blow not one bit.

At the time when I was writing Grimlock's dialogue, I found that my own typing style was becoming increasingly acidic.

The truth is that “PASS” is probably the most successful thing I have ever made, and I wanted to make a comic which would put it to shame, and I failed miserably. In fact, I feel like I’ve made something which only I could ever enjoy. It’s derivative in the extreme. As my deadline for this project drew closer, I resorted to drafting bits of the commentary on my phone in public, and at one point somebody idly asked me what I was writing, and - after failing to think of a convincing lie - I said something along the lines of “it’s kinda a long story, and I wouldn’t enjoy telling it, and you wouldn’t enjoy hearing about it”. They seemed perfectly satisfied by that answer, but I wasn’t.

Must we justify the things we create? Mr. Jamieson’s attitude seemed to be to say “screw you, I don’t have to justify myself to stupid people” (while pointing at everybody else in the room). My attitude, as evinced by this commentary, has been to justify every aspect of everything I make in excruciating detail, so that if you tell me “I don’t like X” I can say “I already explained why I thought X was a good idea” and you can say “well you were wrong” and I can say “maybe”.

You’ve probably twigged that, throughout this commentary, I’ve referred to the creators of The Beast Within only by second name. At first, perhaps, it came across as some mark of mocking respect - like citing a scientific source - but the real reason is cowardice, not confidence. Some people occasionally put their own names into Google. There’s a couple of people to whom I really don’t want to have to justify myself.

Over a decade after the release of the The Beast Within, Hasbro released a brand new set of Dinobot toys which combined to form Volcanicus. The creators of the Prime Wars Trilogy and of the Earth Wars mobile game gleefully included the new combiner in their stories, and the fandom at large embraced it wholeheartedly.

As her thread drew to a close, Terry van Feleday wrote something which I think about often:

Of course [...] let’s not forget that no matter the amount of earnest work put into something, sometimes it just turns out shit. There’s a strange perception I noticed in critical response where people seem to find it difficult to consider something both earnest or satirical and, well, not very well made. Sucker Punch can’t be an honest indictment of cinematic objectification and a somewhat poorly conceived, almost hypocritical attempt at being more clever than you should. Transformers can’t be an inversion of the traditional hero/villain narrative showcasing the effects of authoritarian propaganda and a meandering, under-focused, often poorly communicated, destructive mess. Maybe it’s a strange entertainment-version of the Just World Fallacy where lacking results must necessarily result from lacking effort, or maybe it’s modern audiences’ strange worship of subversiveness, where a work critical of old tropes must by default be better than the works it’s commenting on throwing to the dustbin of history, but either way, people are extremely resistant to the idea that films they found emotionally dissatisfying could express depth and meaning and tend to dismiss them as another ‘genre film’.

Mr. Gibson is a children’s picture book illustrator. The Beast has no place on his website.

X. Proceed On Your Way To Oblivion

TFNation - the UK’s biggest Transformers convention - has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me, and (as of the time of writing) I’ll be making that pilgrimage in a matter of days. If you see me there, feel free to come over and punch me. Or, y’know, just say hi. I’ll have some limited-edition printed copies of “PASS” to give out. For more information on that - and for infrequent Transformers-related musings and updates on future projects - wander on over to my twitter!

What are those future projects? Well, after the convention I’m planning to release an original short story. It’s not very good, but it’s got a few stylistic similarities to this comic (read: lots of swearing). I might have a little bit in the way of Transformers prose coming out down the line, but can’t really elaborate further on the form that’ll take. I’ve been planning to get back to Huskyquest for ages, and hopefully I’ll finally be able to do so once I settle back down at university. After that, I plan to focus my efforts on prose, so you may as well expect more radio silence from me.

If you’ve made it to the end of this almost-fifteen-thousand-word monstrosity, you, uhh... win all my internet points? Sorry, that’s all I have.

Remind me never to do this again.

#Transformers #comics #The Beast Within #The Beast Within (My Pants)#The Wadapan #14/08/2019

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thewadapan · 5 years

Video

youtube

I tried to make a sequel to my badly-made animated series.

I’ll admit, I considered reneging on my promise to put out whatever I had of the then-untitled sequel to Are You Happy by the end of the month. See, I’d known that it’d be very different to the original series, and probably not as good - but the more I developed the script, the more I felt like putting it out would actually diminish the original series by association. The original series doesn’t exactly have far to fall.

As I briefly discussed in the last commentary, work apparently began on this sequel some time last year. The file itself is named “Friday, September 21 2018 2:52 PM” - the date of its creation - and its position at the top of my list of plots implies that I created it after the application was updated to version 1.30.0. That update added a handful of “INSPIRATION” plots using some of the update’s new features; I can’t actually recall what those features were, but I do remember being happy to see three (or four) new characters.

One of those plots - “Have an argument with yourself!” - ended up being the inspiration for the main character of what I was then envisioning as a full sequel series. It featured “Chrissy the custom character” and “Chrissy the copy” (both named for “Chris the custom character”) on a split-screen red-and-blue background; I thought it’d be cool to use the device to show an anxious Chrissy over-analyse a series of interactions with characters from the original series.

Aside from the example plot, there were a few more inspirations at play for this device. Bo Burnham’s “Left Brain, Right Brain” (I briefly mentioned Bo Burnham upon the release of Are You Happy; he has a song under the same name) sees him play both sides of a conversation between the (impulsive) right and (analytical) left halves of his brain. The interactions between Jeremy and his “SQUIP” in Be More Chill were probably also an influence.

Max Harms’ Crystal Society stars a robot whose consciousness is split into a “society” of sub-AIs, each with conflicting personalities and goals, and is told from the perspective of the robot’s “Face”, whose job it is to present a unified front to the humans. According to my notes, I read that work towards the end of November last year; if I’m to believe the date of creation on the plot, it can’t have been an inspiration, but I certainly had it in mind when I started working on the script again last month (I liked the idea of Chrissy’s red half acting in the same capacity as Face, though this didn’t come across in the final product).

I vaguely remember planning to replace Mr. Hernandez’ role as the teacher with one of the other two characters added in the update - “The Hunk” and “Mahatma Ghandi” - though I can’t remember if I’d settled on The Hunk at the time. Truthfully, although I do remember aspects of the planning phase, it was a legitimate shock to me when I came back to the plot and found that I already had the beginnings of a scene in place: from the start of the plot to the first split-screen cut, with Chrissy’s “I think he’s onto us” line. I didn’t remember starting work on the script, even though its actual contents were familiar to me.

I soon realised why I’d dropped it in the first place. I had no idea what kind of story I wanted to tell, or how it’d end. Still, I kept at it - as I’ve asserted before, using Plotagon is fun in its own right, and I was determined not to let my past self’s work go to waste.

I plodded along until shortly after I had The Hunk enter the scene (”How is this not blowing your minds?”), before realising I’d hit a dead end. Wanting a second opinion, I fired a message to Sam (the same Sam I briefly mentioned in the Retrace Steps commentary, and the friend who gave Santa his Genghis Khan quote), who joined me in a voice call to watch what I had so far.

He confirmed my suspicions: it just wasn’t that funny. To my surprise, he found the second half more tolerable than the first. I was quite happy with the beats where Chrissy hurriedly names herself after Chris (neatly mirroring the real-world origin of her name) and asks him about his favourite number (trying to connect with him through a very robotic point of interest), but Sam found them aimless.

(The concept of a favourite number in general is kind of an absurd one; numbers are just numbers, y’know? Then again, some numbers do have special meanings in our culture - like lucky seven or unlucky thirteen or ayy lmao 69420 - and I guess having a favourite number is just a more personal version of that. My favourite number is nine, for the record.)

We discussed potential endings, but I wasn’t really happy with any of them, and felt like I was just about ready to throw the whole thing in the trash and pretend it’d never existed - but decided to give it one last shot, just for the hell of it. At Sam’s suggestion, I removed the extras from the classroom (reducing the number of possible robots to just two). At first, I considered editing the start of the plot to add an explanation for this, but couldn’t think of an elegant way of doing so. Later, I shook things up by introducing Gandhi in the brashest way I could think of, and soon enough I found the story drawing to a natural conclusion. When I showed the completed version to Sam, he was much more positive - even claiming that the ending redeemed in retrospect what he’d perceived as a slow start.

In terms of actual production, I learned a lot about Plotagon this time around. It turns out that its voice synthesis includes some pre-recorded exclamations: both Chris’s “What?” and The Hunk’s “Impossible!” seem not to have been constructed from phonemes. There were a few other cases where I had to reword dialogue to avoid these; generally, I paid much closer attention this time around to the actual delivery of the dialogue, having seen firsthand how the stilted voices can harm the pacing.

Plotagon gives three options for rendering a plot: as a plain video, as a video with onscreen subtitles, or as a video with subtitles in a separate .srt file. When I’d been working on the original series, I’d been disappointed to find that the third option seemed to apply the subtitles in the video as well - but that wasn’t actually the case at all; the video player which I’d used to check had simply turned on subtitles automatically and was pulling them from the other file. While rendering the sequel, I took the liberty of re-rendering all thirteen episodes of the original series to get a full set of .srt files, which are now on the YouTube uploads as closed captions - though I had to spend a while correcting the timing for each caption, as Plotagon didn’t do a very good job. Hopefully, they’ll let you see how strange certain lines ended up looking just to get them to sound right. As a side note, it turns out that another change made in the last Plotagon update was to add a watermark in the top-right corner of the screen - a disappointing choice, but not one I really care about.

I went a little overboard on the gifs this time, knowing that I might not get another chance to create them. Most of them are included in this post, though I’ll note that the bizarre compression on display here seems to be tumblr’s fault, rather than Plotagon's. I actually kinda like how these look, though I wish Plotagon let you produce a gif of several script elements at once.

In an attempt to distance it from Are You Happy, I avoided non-diegetic sound in the sequel (an approach I’d previously used for the eighth episode of the original series) and limited myself to the classroom setting - which proved challenging, as there were relatively few camera angles that let me maintain the illusion that there were three (or four!) people in the two-person scene. I also moved away from the episodic format of the original series, resulting in a single five-minute scene - another way of cementing the sequel’s standalone nature.

The idea to kill The Hunk was, I guess, inspired by Hogwarts’ seemingly-cursed Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching position in Harry Potter. Originally, I had The Hunk introduce himself as “Eddie” (a name I plucked from thin air), but I didn’t like the fact that I’d manufactured a specific aspect of his identity like that. In the final draft, he just introduces himself as the “replacement teacher”. It turned out that I’d already done something similar, however - in the original series, Santa gives his real name as “Craig” (though with Plotagon’s voice synthesis, it sounds more like “Greg”) - so I guess I needn’t have bothered.

Gandhi’s characterisation as a ghost came about simply because one of the few facts I know about the real-world Gandhi is that he’s dead. I tried to load his lines with as much implication as possible - the underworld is real, ghosts are real, Gandhi had links to the US government... it’s conspiracy-theory stuff that feels right at home in the context of a story about robots infiltrating human society.

All told, I’m still not that happy with the result. My “official” stance on the canonicity of Are You Human is that, while Are You Happy is canon to it, the reverse does not hold. The original series could (plausibly) be entirely devoid of supernatural elements, but the sequel unambiguously has both a robot and a ghost, and I just think it’s too much of a thematic departure to be considered anything more than a bonus feature.

As to what those themes are... well, thanks to Plotagon’s own machine-generated nature, robots are a very good fit for the application. I liked the idea that all the characters in the plot would be somewhat robotic, even though only one would actually be a robot. There’s this pure moment where Chrissy models Chris effectively enough to guess that he’ll pick the number seven twice - but when Chris tries to get help with a more serious task, the government shows up and shuts everything down, and there’s an implication that The Hunk’s death (which was entirely the product of his own past mistakes) will be pinned on the robot. This is all a very trite and one-dimensional metaphor for the real-world controversy surrounding AI, so it bears mentioning that I don’t think the story accurately reflects my own viewpoint (or any salient viewpoint whatsoever).

I was quite surprised to see popular YouTuber austinmcconnell release a short film made in Plotagon shortly after I’d restarted work on Are You Human - coincidentally, it had something of an AI focus itself, in that it was entirely scripted by one. In terms of its narrative, the film is pretty standard bot-generated fare, and while seeing the Plotagon-based visuals is an interesting twist, I was somewhat disappointed to see that Mcconnell had provided full voiceover himself - this felt rather against the otherwise machine-generated spirit of the project. All the same, as of writing the film’s approaching two million views.

More recently, Aris Martinian, the creator of Parahumans Worm Abridged, showed up in the Homestuck Discord server to talk about the future of their own series (which I briefly mentioned in the original commentary as being the inspiration for this whole thing). When I mentioned that the free desktop version of the program seemed to be dying, they said that they realised Plotagon was too limiting halfway through the third instalment and plan to use different software entirely if they ever continue the series.

I was surprised to hear this, because I’ve found Plotagon to be surprisingly powerful, and the program’s restrictions often give rise to some great jokes. I really don’t think another piece of software exists that allows for such a quick turnaround on content of this quality. Even though I can’t imagine wanting to make anything else in the application any time soon, the notion that I might not have the option actually makes me pretty sad. Maybe it’ll continue working after June 30th, who knows. I sure hope it does.

EDIT: It doesn’t. Well, it sorta does, but only if you’ve already got it downloaded.

#Plotagon #animation #web series #Are You Happy #Are You Human #The Wadapan #30/06/2018

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thewadapan · 5 years

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Are You Happy: one year later

Today marks the first anniversary of Are You Happy, a dumb web series I made in a terrible bit of animation software. In celebration, I’m... un-unlisting the series and writing a post to pat myself on the back. Huh.

Normally I wouldn’t bother with this kind of thing, but I think my own general appraisal of this series has shifted somewhat since I put it out into the world. I’ve yet to receive any feedback of any kind from the internet at large, but a few friends of mine have ended up watching it at various points - the last of whom suggested that I should “totally” make the videos public. Well, fine, now I totally have.

I’ve rewatched the series a handful of times since its release and have come to the conclusion that it’s a pretty mixed bag. I’ve come to like many of the individual episodes a lot more, but as a whole the series doesn’t come together for me. In this post, I’m gonna build on what I wrote in the original commentary by briefly shooting through the episodes one by one.

As the first episode of the series, “I Hate You” is pretty much just me getting to grips with the program. I like the way Chris storms out, gets as far as the elevator before he starts feeling bad, and comes back - only to find that, naturally, Samir also left. Back towards the tail end of secondary school, my friends and I got in the habit of just hanging around in classrooms outside of classes - the teachers weren’t technically supposed to let us do that, I think, but they did. I figure that’s what Chris and Samir are doing here - just standing about in a quiet spot. Chris does something annoying, Samir slaps him... business as usual for these two.

Anyway, I showed that first episode to one of my friends, and he helped me out with “The Meaning of Life” by offering a Genghis Khan quote and sitting around as I made it. Plotagon has relatively few options for direct interaction between characters, and I immediately pegged the “slap” action as the funniest of these. It’s even funnier when combined with a sharp cut and a scare chord.

Back in school, we had these two acronyms: WALT and WILF. These stood for “What Are (We) Learning Today” and “What I’m Looking For” and were used by our teachers to lay out the objectives for each class. I guess it seemed funny to me to go completely in the opposite direction for “What are we Learning Today?” - it’s the student who has to try and poke the teacher into giving the class any kind of information whatsoever - but the execution’s poor. This episode is funnier if you imagine the five preceding minutes of silence, during which Mr. Hernandez is having a completely undetectable internal meltdown.

I knew that the stuff I was making would be quote-unquote “in continuity” - but I wasn’t particularly expecting it to “have continuity”. That changed with “Why Nobody Likes You”, which establishes that Lizzie and Chris are friends of a sort. I like to imagine that Lizzie is one of just two people Chris ever talks to (the other being Samir), and that the only reason they interact at all is because they happen to be the only people catching their particular bus. They really have nothing in common, and struggle to hold an actual conversation - although I figure that’s mostly Chris’s fault.

A fair bit of time has probably passed in-universe between the first and second times Mr. Hernandez and Santa meet on-screen. In “A Bad Teacher”, Santa seems a little more chill - rather than sitting at a distance on the bench, he’s standing. Perhaps Mr. Hernandez just treated him to a coffee, or something, and they’ve just exited the shop. Whatever. I’ve suffered my fair share of bad teachers, and one of the things they all have in common is that they’re completely oblivious to the fact that they’re bad. It’s like... bad students exist, but if (as a teacher) you honestly think your entire class consists of bad students, that’s the point where you should realise that you’re the problem. I think that tendency to place the blame on the students is the kind of thing that leads to whole-class detentions, which are a hallmark of bad teachers.

I’d originally pegged “White-Hat Hacking” as my least-favourite episode - for reasons outside of my control, it’s the first to break the one-minute mark - but upon subsequent rewatches I’ve come to feel more positively about it. Jessica’s line about V for Vendetta and zip bombs always takes me off guard, and I like the way Detective Raymond describes himself as “the smartest and most controversial detective”. It’s also funny to me going back to the source file and seeing a ton of lines marked “JESSICA (flirty)” and a single line marked “JESSICA (surprised)”.

My opinion on “The Faculty Bathroom” hasn’t really changed. As far as self-contained concepts in this series go, “insecure teacher talks to himself while on a smoke break, then dies in a fire” is easily the strongest.

Of all the episodes, I think “Nobody to Talk To” is probably the most forgettable. It opens with Chris, who’s lamenting the destruction of the school (mostly because it means he's even more bored than usual). There’s a medal hanging above his bedside table - I like to think that he bought it himself, only to find that he couldn’t think of something to get inscribed on it. Maybe it just says “CHRIS”. Anyway, the rest of the episode is a soliloquy from Lizzie - I’m not sure how exactly the idea of her being a well-connected anarchist came about, and the way that aspect of her character is introduced here feels a little jarring in retrospect. Still, I guess this episode does slightly redeem itself with a surprise appearance from Detective Raymond.

I’m gonna have to take a few paragraphs to talk about “Ever Get Tired of Movies?” - there’s a lot that I failed to cover in the original commentary. In terms of sound design, it’s probably one of the most ambitious episodes - all the sound effects come from the TV, so there’s nothing in the way of ambient music - but I’m not convinced that having the movie drown out the dialogue at the beginning was a good choice. I still love that Katia and Philippe’s colour schemes each match those of their sides of the room; I didn’t design the characters that way!

In the last commentary, I mistakenly said that I’d forgotten to use Ms. Green - when in fact, I’d used her as the reporter in this episode. I repurposed Plotagon’s “convention booth” scene as the newsroom, which works surprisingly well - combined with Ms. Green’s dialogue, which was intended to sound entirely unlike that of an actual reporter, the overall effect is one of a really incompetent production team on the show. This is entirely accurate: the production team consists of me.

Katia and Philippe have an odd role in the narrative - they’re basically an atomic unit from a completely different story. Of the teens in the series, Philippe is the only one who’s happy with where his life is; Katia is suffering from existential boredom. I think, in showing a failure in communication between these two, the episode fails to properly communicate what’s going on to the audience: Philippe is usually content just to do the same stuff over and over - watching movies, as it may be - but that doesn’t mean that he dislikes new things, only that he’s not the sort to actively seek them out. So the conflict is that Katia is doing the same stuff because she wants Philippe to be happy, while Philippe is fully expecting Katia to be pushing for new things - which she finally does here, when she suggests breaking Lizzie out of jail. Another aspect of this dynamic which I think is unclear is the fact that Philippe’s happy to do pretty much anything - including literal crime - but draws the line at taking off his sunglasses. Katia’s presumably been trying to get him to do so for months; her narrativist instincts are telling her that he must be hiding something. I figure he’s not - he just really likes his sunglasses.

Anyway, enough of that. “The Easy Way” is another fairly-forgettable plot-centric episode - but I like the way it handles the third and final appearance of Santa, who at first glance seems to have no reason to be at the office. The reveal that the whole thing’s been a distraction for the breakout is probably the closest the series comes to ever having a plot twist - I think it sits very well in the series as a whole, which (for technical reasons) never shows the big, important moments on-screen. I’m pretty proud of Santa’s monologue, which I wrote myself as a bookend to his opening quote, and the little glimpses of his history given within. I also like the moment towards the middle of the episode, where Detective Raymond - having been left to his own devices - wonders aloud “how can one man be so based”, right after threatening a teenager with torture and right before getting duped by a homeless man in a Santa suit.

Getting four characters into a single scene was a real challenge, let me tell ya, but I think “The Agenda (Part 1)” pulls it off decently enough. It offers some decent closure for the minor characters: Katia and Philippe get their adventure; Jessica’s mad hacks keep the cops off their backs. I think Lizzie’s “true power of love” realisation is a sincere one, but she won’t get her closure until a little later. Her expression upon seeing Chris again strikes me as similarly sincere. By this point, I’m banking on the audience having forgotten about Samir - so Lizzie’s actual goal here should come as something of a surprise.

In “The Agenda (Part 2)”, the penultimate episode, the series comes full circle. There isn’t really much to say about this one; the way Chris and Samir make up is pretty much the same as the way they fell out in the first place. Lizzie is just a facilitator here - she’s still planning to leave, but this time has decided that she doesn’t want to leave Chris entirely on his own.

Finally, in “The Agenda (Part III)”, we end up back at the bus stop, where Lizzie talks to Literally The Devil - who turns out to be a much better conversational partner than Chris ever was. This episode tries to strike a balance between jokes and introspection, but I don’t really think that it properly achieves either. Still, Lizzie’s shift to optimistic nihilism here feels like a good conclusion to her arc within the series.

It’s obvious that I was writing Are You Happy by the seat of my pants. While this lead to a pretty unpredictable plot, it lead to fairly poor economy of narrative. Although many of the characters get rudimentary arcs of their own, there isn’t a clear throughline which connects them all - I didn’t know what I wanted to say with this series, and so it ended up saying pretty much nothing.

On the other hand, this is just fifteen minutes of content - and I think it packs a lot of individually-quite-good snippets into that runtime. Usually, when I’m writing something, I hit a point where it starts to be a chore; that wasn’t really the case with Are You Happy, thanks to the fast turnaround provided by Plotagon and - perhaps more importantly - the fact that I didn’t need to worry about writing full descriptive prose.

Plotagon provided a huge amount of great background music - seeing as I didn’t go into detail in the last commentary, here’s a breakdown of which pieces I used:

“cruising rap battle” is something of a leitmotif for Chris, appearing during “I Hate You”, “The Agenda (Part 2)” and his scene in “Nobody to Talk To”

Lizzie, meanwhile, has “hideout”, which appears during “Why Nobody Likes You”, her scene in “Nobody to Talk To”, and the final scene in “The Agenda (Part 1)”

Santa naturally has “jingle bells” for all three of his appearances

I guess you could say that “happy music (care free)” from “What are we Learning Today?” is technically a Mr. Hernandez song, but I’d consider this to be more true of “sentimental” which plays throughout “The Faculty Bathroom”

Detective Raymond’s theme is “Detective Noir background”, which appears during the endings of “White-Hat Hacking” and “Nobody to Talk To”

Jessica gets two songs - “pirate ditty” and “suspenseful”, appearing in “White-Hat Hacking” and “The Easy Way” respectively

Katia and Philippe technically get “zombie theme” and “news intro” in “Ever Get Tired of Movies?”, but that’s just the stuff that plays from the TV - it’s not until “The Agenda (Part 1)” that they get “anticipating”, which I consider to be theirs

Fitting neatly with the vague stabs at liminality present in “The Agenda (Part III)”, Literally The Devil gets “muzak”: elevator music

Other bits of music include “lounge” in the actual elevator in “I Hate You” and “french bistro” for the cafe in “The Meaning of Life”

Upon booting up Plotagon, I was greeted with the disconcerting news that it’s being discontinued on desktop at the end of next month - ostensibly so the developers can focus on mobile platforms, although I can’t help but notice that this announcement was shortly followed by a flash sale on their “Plotagon Studio” subscription service for desktop: just $49.99 monthly, or $499.99 annually! Yeah, uhh, I’m good. This is pretty disappointing, but not entirely surprising - I’ve always kinda felt like the software was about to disappear in a poof of smoke, and now it kinda has.

However, I was also greeted with some good news: apparently, it turns out that I’d previously revisited the program all the way back on the 21st of September last year, to start work on a sequel to Are You Happy. Although I knew that I’d made vague plans to do so, I’d completely forgotten that I’d actually gone ahead and produced any new material! The sequel will likely share a portion of its cast with the original series, but based on what I’ve currently got it’ll probably end up dealing with pretty different themes.

With any luck, the application will continue to work offline past that date - but just in case it doesn’t, I’m going to try and accelerate production on the sequel. Don’t get your hopes up. If I can’t finish it, or I’m not happy with it, I’ll still try and put it out - but it’ll be more as a “bonus feature” than as a fully-fledged instalment in the continuity. More importantly, as is the case with everything made in Plotagon, I can’t promise it’ll be good - I can only promise that I’ll have fun making it.

#Plotagon #animation #web series #Are You Happy #The Wadapan #31/05/2019

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thewadapan · 5 years

Photo

It's Friday night.

You've locked yourself out.

The streets are empty.

> RETRACE STEPS

(I finished an MS Paint fan adventure.)

Creator’s Commentary

Normally, when I post stories on this blog, I throw the whole thing beneath the spoiler break - but that’s not really possible this time around. Click the link above if you haven’t read it yet - it only takes about ten minutes - then come back here if you want.

All done? Still with me? Okay, cool, because we’re going to be heading into spoiler territory here pretty quickly.

“RETRACE STEPS”

OPEN ON BLACK:

INT. – LATE AFTERNOON

A door opens on the right, spilling light into the threshold. The ceiling light automatically flickers on. Alice enters frame and heads to her door.

She tries the handle, but the door doesn’t budge. As her hand depresses the handle, the title briefly becomes visible.

We return to the original angle. Alice reaches into her left pocket, and finds nothing. She turns to lean against the door, facing the camera, and checks her right pocket, then the pockets of her hoodie. She tries the handle again, but the door is definitely locked. She leans, for a second, motionless.

ALICE Fuck.

She stalks out of the threshold, and the door closes behind her.

I. Making friends is harder than I thought.

When you’re a kid, people sorta make friends for you. Maybe your parents’ friends have kids, so suddenly those kids are your friends. Maybe you go to nursery or school, and then your classmates are kinda your friends too. At least some of those people will probably never stop being your friends. As you move through the education system, that cohort diffuses through the local schools - but chances are a few of your friends will stick with you all the way.

When you arrive at university, chances are you’re completely alone.

You’re thrown through the gauntlet of fresher’s week, forced to put yourself out there as you identify new friends and foes. One of the main attractions of university-managed accommodation - particularly catered accommodation - is that it places you with a huge amount of new people. Heck, part of the idea behind having a roommate is that they’re your “designated friend”.

(I didn’t have a roommate, and ended up going to university with two of my school friends, so these are less experiences and more observations - but that’s not to say I didn’t go out of my way to make new friends in those first weeks.)

After a month or so of the dreaded “three questions” (”What’s your name? Where are you from? What are you studying?”), the cliques have mostly solidified. The college relationships have crumbled, after one or both parties realised they were mostly in it for the sex. The cool people have long since stopped showing up to lectures. You haven’t gone back to any of the sports clubs and societies you signed up for. Maybe, just maybe, you’re occasionally glancing at your phone and wondering if you should finally give your parents a call to let them know you haven’t died.

If you’re lucky, you’ve met your new best friends. If you’re unlucky, then you’re very, very alone.

But of course, it’s not all down to luck.

She stalks out of the threshold, and the door closes behind her. Outside the threshold, there is a shot from the banister above of Alice walking down the stairs, facing away from the camera and typing on her phone.

Outside, Alice sits on the wall and stares at her phone. There is a brief montage of her slowly pacing up and down the path, leaning out into the road to check if anyone’s coming, checking her phone, peering into the downstairs window, kicking loose stones back into the gravel, and back to her sitting on the wall. After a few seconds, she puts her phone away and trudges out of frame across the stones.

II. Coming up with stories is harder than I thought.

I can’t exactly remember what I put my name down for during freshers’ week, but one way or another I ended up dragging a new friend to a writing workshop for my university’s filmmaking society. A bunch of strangers from all years were crammed around some tables that had been pushed together in our Student Union’s bar.

This guy, the head of the- president of the society? Sure, the President, let’s go with that. The President stands up and sorta fumbles his way through an introduction, before telling us to turn to the person next to us. I turn to my friend, because I don’t like talking to strangers. Then the President tells us (I might be misremembering here) that we’ve got one minute to come up with a story.

There’s a moment of awkward silence, because nobody wants to be the first person to start talking about the first dumb idea that’s popped into their head at those words.

Then the conversations start.

I went into that first minute expecting to come up with absolutely nothing. To be honest, I’m pretty sure we came up with nothing. I think there might’ve been some implication that they’d go around the table once time was up asking for quick summaries - this terrified me not just at the prospect of having to bluff my way through a pitch, but at the prospect of having to listen to everyone else do the same. Honestly, the moment that’s stuck in my mind most since was when I talked to the guy sitting on the other side of me, and he started trying to tell me about Lord of the Rings, which... okay, I don’t like Lord of the Rings, sue me, whatever. Someone else talked about the Batman movies at one point, and - actually, that might’ve been the same guy. Y’know what, I’ve gotten off track.

The point is that at some point during that meeting, Retrace Steps was born. I don’t remember when exactly, or how I came up with it - I suspect I’d locked myself out of accommodation at some point, or knew a friend who had, and thought it’d be funny to do a story where someone does that and can’t for the life of them get back in. In order to add complications, I decided that their roommate wouldn’t answer their texts, and that the residence office would be out of hours - and that was when the idea that everyone had disappeared came into my head.

INT. MAIN BUILDING – LATE AFTERNOON

Over-the-shoulder shot of Alice entering a corridor in the main building. The camera focuses on the sign saying ‘ON DUTY’, then pans across to the door to the general office. It focuses on another sign saying ‘The office is now closed...’, then across to another sign by the door with a phone number on it.

Foreground with Alice comes back into focus. She takes out her phone and dials.

ALICE Hello? I’ve locked myself out, do you have a spare...

She trails off, and puts the phone away. Clearly, someone’s answered but has hung up. Cut across for a close-up of her face, trying to figure out her next move.

SERIES OF BRIEF SHOTS:

Alice looks for her keys in:

A) a computer lab B) a library C) a laundry room D) a games room E) a bathroom

There are no keys, and no people. Alice goes to the kitchen and gets a mini-doughnut out from a box in a cupboard. She eats it thoughtfully. Once she’s finished, she reaches out to grab another, hesitates, and decides against it.

III. Making movies is harder than I thought.

A lot of the ideas being thrown around the table were for some pretty high-concept stuff, and I remember thinking - hang on, aren’t you supposed to actually be filming that? I’d approached the challenge from the angle of “what do I have, and what can I make with it”, not “what do I want to make, and how can I make it”. In an unfortunate twist of fate, my film - of all those that were conceived that day - would end up being far and away the worst. But I’ll get to that.

For a student film, the "everybody disappears and you’re locked out” concept made perfect sense - you could film it at your accommodation, you’d only need a single actor, and it’s a story that your audience will probably (if not immediately, then at least after another month or two) be able to relate to.

(Side note: I obviously hadn’t come up with this concept whole-cloth. Michael Grant’s Gone series of YA novels - which I’d finished reading midway through secondary school - is a superhero story about a bunch of kids on an island where all the adults have suddenly disappeared. More pertinently, Starscribe’s The Last Pony on Earth is the diary of someone who wakes up completely alone in their city, only in the body of a cartoon horse. Yes, Retrace Steps has its roots in My Little Pony fanfiction, and I’m very sorry about that.)

My friend wasn’t interested in sticking with the society - he mostly did it to back me up - but I guess I was. Knowing that most people would be angling for directorial roles, I signed up as a writer and threw together a script. An email came back the following day; apparently from el Presidente himself:

Thank you for sending the script Retrace Steps. As you have said in your original email, the script is quite short. But I do think it is a very intriguing concept nonetheless, one that is probably helped more so than hampered by its brevity. After all, the nature of your script would to a degree require an empty street, as well as a quiet hall, both of which are rare commodities indeed, especially during the weekends.

Anyways, since the script is well formatted, I will just offer a suggestion, one which I hope may help your final edit before the deadline, should you wish to do so.

Your script portrays excellently Sam's anxiety over the course of the narrative, from his inability to find his keys, then his inability to find anyone at all. I do however believe that you could make the final scene perhaps have more impact. How this is done depends on the overarching theme of the story you are telling, as what you would emphasize at the films' conclusion would depend on it.

Is it an allegory to the anxieties of the average student (Sam), who finds himself socially isolated by a sense of exile or ignorance of the larger community? Or is it perhaps more of an absurdist comedy, or even horror? Though I could wrong, I was under the impression that it was more likely to be the former than the latter. If so, could the story end with it emphasizing Sam's exclusion from society, such as a close up shot to the door and keyhole?

As with all feedback, you are under no obligation to take them to heart, and the things I pointed out are but small things to consider on an otherwise great piece of work. Thank you for making this piece available to the rest of the society.

It seemed that I’d successfully communicated the theme of isolation - less so the theme of entitlement. Bringing that theme to the fore would be my biggest challenge throughout subsequent drafts of the script (where I failed miserably) and the development of the fanventure (on which the jury’s still out).

(Those subsequent drafts would also see the characters “Sam” and “Chris” - those being the names of two friends I’d pegged as backup actors for the roles - get renamed as a more generic “Alice” and “Bob”.)

The Retrace Steps team consisted of a director, a producer, a cameraman/editor, and me. I met with the director only a couple of times - she seemed pretty competent, but decided that she couldn’t commit the time to the project and stepped down. Our producer was all too happy to take over the role.

Auditions started shortly after the teams were assigned - although I’d used male pronouns in the script, I’d anticipated that there’d be a greater demand for male actors (because most of the writers/directors would be male and most of the actors would be female) and planned to go into the auditions with no preference one way or another.

In truth, however, I think the gender of the story’s lead does have a noticeable impact on how it comes across - at least in film, where there’s no good means of narration. Speaking very broadly, when dealing with themes of isolation, I think the key question that comes to an audience’s mind is “why is this person isolated?” - and if the character is male, I feel like they’re more likely to assume the answer is a personal failure of some sort; there must surely be something wrong with him. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in pretty deep on the internet, where I think these issues of perception are less pronounced - so if your instinct is to buck against those assumptions, well, I’m glad.

(The fanventure would end up using second-person narration, they/them pronouns and androgynous character designs to sidestep these issues entirely, while drawing the reader directly into the conflict.)

Our producer/director wasn’t able to make the callbacks (which felt like another red flag), so it was down to me to relay back to her what I thought of everyone. It was kind of a challenging process, because - as I’ve said - I don’t like talking to strangers and I certainly don’t like telling them what to do. Still, I was able to more-or-less settle into it, and eventually the director and I settled on a girl who seemed to know what she was doing. I feel a little bad for effectively putting her through the project, but the joke’s on us: within a year she’d been elected el Presidente of the entire students’ association. I can only assume that none of her opponents knew about the movie; it might’ve made for a pretty good smear campaign. Or not, nobody really cares about student politics anyway.

(The director couldn’t make it to the meeting where the society allocated the actors either. Basically, the President went through the actors one by one, and the teams would negotiate for each of them in turn. I’m fairly sure only one or two of the other teams were after the same actress as we were - I basically just said “we only need one cast member and we thought she’d do best,” and that was all it took; once that was settled I simply left and pretty much didn’t interact with any other members of the society in person until the screening. The other roles she could’ve got were minor anyway - although, in retrospect, she might’ve been better off.)

I think I’m not going to bother explaining exactly why the Retrace Steps short film turned out to be such a disaster. I’m pretty willing to pin the blame at the director’s feet - she’d arrange shoots at strange times with little notice, only to show up half an hour late herself. When she and I disagreed on part of the story, our cinematographer generally sided with her; she had the strongest personality of any of us, while I didn’t want to cause trouble. Our other team members - the actress and a lights guy who the society’d lumped with us (the lights ended up being a collaborative effort) - stayed out of it.

As the end of the semester approached, we were missing crucial swathes of footage. Our director pulled an ending out of her ass - a brief confrontation between myself-as-Bob and the actress, that... somehow involved custard creams? The script called for doughnuts, but we weren’t organised enough to have bought those in advance, and the biscuits were all we had at hand. I can’t actually remember exactly how it went, because it didn’t make any sense, but I remember enough to know that it actually ended up indirectly inspiring the execution of the revised ending present in the fanventure.

The end of the semester arrived. The society had hired out the small hall in the students’ union to screen all the movies. The screening started, and there was no sign of our director or cinematographer - they’d apparently been editing all afternoon. Eventually they arrived and sat down near myself and our actress.

I’m not gonna lie. What followed wasn’t the most embarrassing experience of my life. It probably wasn’t even in the top ten. But it was pretty embarrassing. All the movies were pretty awful in their own ways, but ours was uniquely terrible. To our director’s credit, she’d managed to cut the footage together into something we could maybe pass off as an absurdist comedy (which, to my own credit, had been kinda what I’d pictured in the first place - I’d just pictured something with a little more in the way of actual narrative). Even so, despite the awkward laughs - or perhaps because of them - it was atrocious.

I’ve only seen the movie once, at that screening, and I cringed the whole way through. Some time later, the director messaged me asking if I had a copy - apparently it hadn’t occurred to her to save one for herself, and our ex-cinematographer had gone AWOL - but I didn’t. Stupidly, I’d decided not to chase after one either, because in the moment I couldn’t imagine wanting to put myself through the experience of seeing it again. Almost half a year later, when I was almost done with the fanventure, I got back in touch with both the director and the society: I wanted to have the movie on hand so I could write about it in this commentary, but I didn’t say that, because I didn’t want to let on that I’d remade it as a frikkin’ webcomic. The person from the society said she knew someone who had a copy, and that she’d ask, but she never got back to me and by the time I remembered to chase her up it felt like it was too late to actually do so. It’s likely that the movie will never resurface - which I guess is good in a way, in that there’s no way in hell I’m gonna show it to any of you.

I was bitter. I wanted nothing to do with student societies. I wanted nothing to do with filmmaking, and haven’t made a film since - not unless you count Are You Happy, which I pretty much only made because I could do so entirely on my own. I’m much more leery about the prospect of collaborating with strangers, although I suspect that if an opportunity came my way I’d probably take it.

(Side note: last October, in an interaction which wound up being pretty excruciating in its own right, I contributed a satirical listicle to another society. This was a nightmare for a variety of reasons, but - suffice to say - it’s not particularly pleasant to discover that somebody’s made a bunch of edits to your work without telling you, especially if the changes are for the worse. I wish I had more positive things to say about collaboration, really, I do. Actually, I will say that my experiences working with others in the Transformers fandom have been pretty darn good - you can find details of that stuff over on the list of things I made.)

For a good while, I suspected that Retrace Steps would never see the light of day. I entertained the idea of rounding up a few of my friends and bashing the thing out myself over the course of a few weekends, but I ended up being pretty busy with other stuff. Besides, the society had the nice lights and cameras, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of borrowing from them. Most of all, there was the tiny voice telling me that my script probably hadn’t ever been much good in the first place, and that I should switch back to pure prose - a medium with a much faster turnaround.

(That voice was right, as I’m sure you’re seeing for yourself. Look, it was a student film, there’s probably no such thing as a good student film - I’m just banking on fanventure-adaptation-of-a-bad-student-film still being fair game.)

EXT. STREET

Wide shot of Alice walking through the street, shouting. It is raining.

ALICE Hello? Is anybody there?

Overhead shot as she looks up and squints at the sky, then reaches back and lifts her hood.

Everything slows down. Cut to a side-on shot of Alice lifting her hood. A muted sound slowly turns into the jangle of keys as things speed up again. Cut across to medium shot face-on, as Alice looks confused. She reaches up with her other hand into her raised hood, and pulls out the keys. She holds them between two fingers, and the camera focuses on them.

ALICE Oh, for fuck’s sake.

IV. Talking about Retrace Steps without talking a little bit about Homestuck is harder than I thought.

Homestuck was this big multimedia webcomic that ran from 2009 to 2016. Homestuck was very good, and its unique “MS Paint Adventures” format inspired thousands of “MS Paint Fan Adventures” - some of which take Homestuck’s premise, but many of which are otherwise entirely original stories.

The oldest writing on this blog, in fact - presuming I haven’t hidden it out of mortification - is a rudimentary (and really god-awful) fanventure called You’ve Just Been FiRED. Don’t read it, it’s very, very bad, and I abandoned it after about thirty pages - some of which remain unpublished as of writing.

My second attempt at a fanventure, which - no joke - I wrote in the pages of my school planner during one exam season, is called SP00KY M4N0R; unlike traditional fanventures, which use the aesthetic of interactive fiction but none of the non-linear storytelling, this one was a fully-fledged choose-your-own-adventure story. In the following year’s planner, I started writing a spiritual successor called W1LT1NG (the setting of this one is slightly less self-evident: it took place inside an Egyptian pyramid). Neither of these stories have seen the light of day outside of a couple of my friends (and teachers) - but they might, so I’ll discuss them no further.

At some point in high school, I tried adapting SP00KY M4N0R for the web - first in MS Paint, then later in Photoshop CS2 - but put the project on the back burner and never really picked it back up again.

It wasn’t until after I joined the Homestuck Discord server that my interest in fanventures was rekindled. I became its 9615th member on the 6th of January, 2018 - in other words, a good while after we’d wrapped on Retrace Steps - but very quickly realised that its rate of activity was far to high for me to keep up with anything, duly muted it, and pretty much just forgot about it entirely.

Months later, something - presumably in either the Worth the Candle server or the Worm server - drew me back, and I found myself lurking there infrequently. On the 2nd of November, I briefly waded in - to ask some questions about Cordyceps - and after that, I think I lurked on-and-off for pretty much a whole month while I finished the remaining works on Makin’s List of Shills (if you’re wondering what all of these names in italics are, you might want to click that link). After that, I was pretty much there to stay.

A small but notable number of the server’s regulars ran fanventures of their own, and so I found myself becoming much more aware of the format than I ever had been while working on SP00KY M4N0R. Eventually, I decided I wanted to make something of my own - this was shortly after I’d finished working on Another Son, which had ended up being something of a mixed bag in a lot of ways - and hit upon the idea of adapting Retrace Steps as a fanventure.

You see, the thing about fanventures is that many of them begin with the same premise - “you are mysteriously alone”, and then things escalate as you learn more about the world the second-person protagonist has found themselves in. Retrace Steps has that same premise, with a very simple twist - the reason you are mysteriously alone is simply that nobody likes you.

SERIES OF SHOTS:

A) Alice re-enters the building B) She heads up the stairs, C) reaches the door to the threshold D) (a brief return to the original angle from the very beginning of the film) and enters the threshold. E) Extreme close-up of the key entering the lock. F) Over-the-shoulder shot as the door is unlocked and starts to open. G) (180-degree cut) She stares, dumbfounded at what she finds within. F) (Her POV) Her room is full of people, all holding red plastic cups and staring at her.

V. Drawing is harder than I thought.

Before I get into the meat of the work, I should probably give a broad overview of the process I used for creating the images - which, for the most part, was identical to the process I’d used for SP00KY M4N0R. The panels in Homestuck are 650px by 450px; in order to create a rougher (read: more forgiving) look, I halved these dimensions to 325px by 225px. I’d originally planned to scale the images back up to full size during publication, but ended up deciding that the negative space around the smaller frames helped create an atmosphere of isolation. Besides, I wasn’t sure if it’d be possible to scale the images back up without any anti-aliasing.

If you don’t know what anti-aliasing is, I’ll briefly explain - it’s when pixels at the edge of shapes in digital images get changed to a slightly different colour, to create smoother outlines. This works well at high resolutions, but at lower resolutions muddies detail and makes the image appear somewhat blurred - the effect is particularly pronounced if the images are entirely black and white. Homestuck avoids anti-aliasing pretty consistently, and doing so is a hallmark of the MSPA style.

Thankfully, Photoshop CS2 allows you to turn off antialiasing on pretty much every individual tool. I drew all the graphics using a 4px brush, but thanks to a beat-up old variable-pressure graphics tablet I could reduce this to 2px as needed. The 2px brush size was employed pretty heavily for detail in some of the busier environments, and at times I found myself using the selection tool to nudge stuff around at a pixel-by-pixel level.

Although Retrace Steps is adapted from a script, I’m pretty sure none of the dialogue from that script ended up making the jump into the second-person narration of the story. In fact, very few of the script’s locations remain either. The words and the artwork developed in tandem - I was rarely more than a few panels ahead in the script, and would generally let the physical on-panel action inform what was being written.

I occasionally looked up bits of reference - most notably to get some architectural details for the Tesco store - but otherwise winged it. Occasionally, in the more complicated images, I’d start out by drawing some perspective lines. For a couple of the images in the credits (specifically the cup and the Poké Ball) I went so far as to use autoshapes as guides, because I was struggling to draw passable circles freehand.

(No, those shapes on the right aren’t my attempts at circles, they’re the guide I used while drawing the doughnut.)

I’ll give more specific thoughts later, but broadly speaking I think my drawings suited the story I was trying to tell about as well as they could. I’m not an artist, and in the future I’m going to stray away from visual projects like this; the part I value most is the writing process, and I’d say that only a tiny fraction of the time I devoted to this project was actually spent writing. The flip side of that, of course, is that people generally much prefer stories with a visual aspect - it’s hard to convince them to read a webcomic, much less a prose story.

ALICE What the actual fuck are you all doing in my room? BOB (somewhat passively) Uhhh… didn’t you get my email? ALICE What email? Everyone in the room stares at her. Then, as one, they move to push her out of the room and shut the door. She protests, until-

ALICE This is my room!

BOB (poking his head back into shot with mucho sass) Yeah, but it’s not though, is it? He slams the door the rest of the way shut, and the lock clicks back into place.

Back to very first angle.

ALICE (quietly, to herself) What the actual fuck.

She knocks on the door loudly.

ALICE (shouting, her face inches from the door) This is my room!

Silence. She tilts her head forward, hitting the door with a sad thud. Then she turns and sits down, back to the door, and the camera cuts to join her at this new level.

She sits for a few seconds, thinking, then gets up again and leaves frame.

VI. Writing this commentary is harder than I thought.

Anyway, I figure the best way to get down into the details is to just start at the beginning and work my way through.

The first twenty panels take place in something of a liminal space - the corridor on which the reader’s room lies. I made sure never to show any of the other doors in the corridor; so far as the reader is concerned, they may as well not exist. The door is numbered “41″ - this being a truncation of “413″, the most ubiquitous of Homestuck’s so-called “meme numbers”. I kinda envisioned the room as being the first on the fourth floor of the building.

(If I’m feeling cheeky, I’ll say that the other doors are the ones up in the site’s navigation bar - they literally exist outside the scope of the panels.)

I probably didn’t spend as much time as I should’ve perfecting this environment - the door’s very wobbly. My first attempt placed it at the end of the corridor, but I didn’t like the way that looked at all.

Just in terms of the site itself, there’s a couple of things to take note of. The first is the solo cup sitting at the top of page, next to the advertisement, which is also the story’s icon on the site - and its only splash of colour (well, except in the ads, which I don’t have any control over). The second is that the link to the next panel is “->” - a slight variation on the command used by Homestuck, which was “==>”. The significance of this should be obvious to Homestuck readers, but I’ll comment no further on either of these details until later.

(Fun fact: I didn’t find out that those big red American plastic party cups had an actual proper name, and that that name was frikkin’ solo cup, until well into the fanventure’s development, if not after I’d finished it entirely. One of my friends used the term in passing conversation - I can’t remember what about, because I was too busy freaking out internally. It’s like pottery; it rhymes.)

On panel 3 - once they’ve walked into the corridor - the lights have turned on, and the entire colour scheme for the comic flips. The idea of having automatic lights was present in the original script, but it wasn’t until pretty late in the fanventure’s development that I decided to make them plot-relevant!

Out of all the images, it’s the close-up of the door on panels 5-7 that comes closest to matching a shot description in the script. The original idea was that the door being locked was the inciting incident that would lead the protagonist to go look for their keys - so the title/command “RETRACE STEPS” would literally appear as they pressed the handle. In the first draft of that panel, this was in fact the case - but my prereaders didn’t think it looked that great, and I was inclined to agree; besides, the title also appeared prominently on the title page and during the credits.

It’s not until panel 7 that we get any words at all - a simple “huh”. In the original script, I made relatively heavy use of profanity in Alice’s dialogue - this was supposed to signify hostility. I wasn’t happy with how this came across, and completely backpedalled in the fanventure - the second-person narration is entirely devoid of swears. I wanted to portray your inability to curse to as a deficiency: you’re unable to fully express yourself. Like most aspects of your character, this isn’t something you’re supposed to consciously notice or understand until after the story’s twist is revealed.

Panel 8 includes a command: “Try door again.” Generally speaking, the commands used in Retrace Steps are much more perfunctory than those in Homestuck - they’re almost entirely devoid of snark, with many being only a single word.

This entire sequence has a lot of legwork to do in terms of laying out the situation in a believable manner without giving too much away. On panel 14, the narration lists your inventory: a phone, a packet of tissues, and a wallet. The phone and the wallet both play direct roles in the narrative, but I consciously chose to include the tissues because I think the word itself has connotations with illness, sadness, and loneliness.

It’s worth noting that these items are those that I personally carry about in real life. Other than the abstract geography of the corridor, this is perhaps the clearest example of me drawing directly from my own day-to-day experiences. The word “self-insert” is kind of a dirty word in a lot of ways, but the truth is that I wanted the protagonist of Retrace Steps to serve as both a self-insert and an audience surrogate. This is why I felt like the MSPA format would serve the story well.

(None of that is to say that you should draw conclusions about me as a person based on the behaviour of the character in the story. Superficially, they share a lot of my tics, but their actual thought processes and motivations are different in many ways.)

Panels 17-19 are just repeated images of the empty corridor; the lights turn off on panel 20, and the site’s colours briefly flip again. Heading into this project, I had the rough idea that I wanted to tell the story in a “nice” number of pages - maybe a hundred, maybe less, maybe more. I decided that, if I repeated the door image, I’d have a buffer to use to shorten or lengthen the final page count as needed - but that turned out not to be necessary. This little span establishes that the lights in the corridor are on a timer, a fact which turns out to be relevant down the line.

The first scene change occurs on panel 21, which shows a stairwell. My original version of this sequence confused basically everyone who saw it - I’d envisioned the camera as being at the bottom, looking up, but everyone presumed I’d done it from the top down. The current approach makes much more sense, as all of the lines of action in the image point towards its centre.

As you descend the stairs and thinks about your roommate, the narration rambles much more. In this story, I decided that use of the internet would be a signifier for loneliness in some way - the roommate has an old-fashioned phone and communicates only by text. I wanted to give the impression that they’re bad at checking their messages; preferring instead just to talk to people face-to-face. That’s not the whole story, though - to a certain extent, they actively ghost you.

Once more, I’m drawing pretty heavily from my own life experiences for this sequence. For a long time in high school, I used to have a terrible flip phone - my parents didn’t want me to have anything better. I eventually upgraded to a terrible smartphone, which I mostly used to play Hill Climb Racing and Glow Hockey. Late in high school, I wound up using a bulky Kindle Fire as a portable computer, with my brother’s old terrible smartphone in case I needed to call anyone; the phone was pretty much always out of battery. It was only within the last six months - halfway through my second year of university - that I got an actual honest-to-god good smartphone. This stuff becomes relevant again later, during the Pokémon GO sequences.

(As I said earlier, I didn’t have a roommate, but my neighbour did - his roommate kept strange hours, and I’m pretty sure most nights he didn’t come back to accommodation to sleep. They got along, but there was an arrangement in place there.)

The image of seeing someone at meals but never speaking to them struck me as a fairly strong one - in student accommodation, you’re forced to interact with people because you use the same amenities, but the extent to which you actually communicate with those people is a matter of personal choice. The narration uses the word “sit”, which I think implies a lack of understanding of that element of choice - you don’t sit together, therefore you cannot speak. The idea that you totally could sit together just doesn’t occur to you.

Anyway, panels 25-33 take place immediately outside the building. With public buildings like this, people who smoke are unlikely to stray far from the door - and the smell lingers for a while after they’re finished. Public smoking has always been one of my pet hates - I’m asthmatic - but I consider the extent to which it bothers me to be something of a character flaw. The protagonist of Retrace Steps is kinda built of flaws like this: things which sound reasonable but are rooted in their lack of empathy.

The narration uses the word “ramble” to describe the text sent to your roommate - later on, we learn that the word “rant” might’ve been more accurate.

This is the point where the story itself notes that it’s a Friday night - a fact which was previously stated in the very first line of its description. The idea of not doing anything on a Friday night is a pretty common symbol for loneliness; it’s the night when most people go out with friends, at the conclusion of the workweek. Tropes are tools - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The other symbol for loneliness in this sequence is slightly less obvious, I think - it’s when the reader kicks a single stone out onto the path. The narration notes that they “don’t know” why they did that; this was intended to mirror the story’s central mystery. In the original version, they kicked the stone from the path back in amongst the rest - the idea being that they’d kinda fallen by the wayside, and wanted not to be alone. I kinda go back and forth on which version I prefer, but they get the same thing across.

Panels 34-35 are each “unique” images, in that they only recur in the credits. It felt like a waste to spend a long time drawing complicated images like this without reusing them in any capacity, but I’m glad I did.

The first of these unique images was supposed to convey the city’s emptiness in a clear way. It’s probably one of my favourites, even if it’s pretty rough in places. The forced perspective is more strongly felt in this image than in any other in the fanventure, and it led me to mess up the scale of the protagonist - this was something that I only fixed after the comic was otherwise pretty much done.

I was on the fence as to whether or not to include the billboard. A lot of the imagery in the fanventure is very on-the-nose, but the billboard is easily the most blatant in this respect - the protagonist completely ignores the concept of self-improvement so they can play Pokémon GO. I ended up showing the panel to an uncredited friend, and they convinced me it was a good idea to keep it in.

The Pokémon GO stuff is pretty much when the fanventure jumps the shark, to be honest. You can tell, because the command - “Pokemon GO on your phone” - is a reference to a dumb thing Hillary Clinton said during the 2016 American presidential election.

See, the thing is, the vast majority of the game’s mechanics are designed to encourage going outside and interacting with others - you can ignore or circumvent this, but it’ll cost you one way or another. Which is fascinating to me! The game is easiest if you go out of your way to make friends with other people who play the game. This is a common theme throughout much of Nintendo’s output - and it somehow usually feels less cynical than the kinds of forced interaction you find in many other mobile games.

The bit that’s really fascinating, however, is the lengths people go to avoid these inconveniences. They’ll buy both versions of each new Pokémon game, rather than trading with someone who has the version they didn’t buy! They’ll buy a second Nintendo DS, just so they can get the Pokémon from one game to another! I can’t begrudge them, because I’ve certainly done similar things myself in the past, but I think you can certainly frame it in a way where it looks like all these gamers treat social interaction as an obstacle to overcome. Who’d’ve thought?

The narration on panel 37 ended up going through several revisions, thanks to feedback from Gitaxian. Back when I was new to the Homestuck Discord, Gitaxian was one of the people who made me feel welcome - we both really like this one obscure essay about the live-action Transformers movies (and totally recommend that you should read it). He responded pretty positively to Everything Is Red Now, a Spider-Man comic I made over a year ago, and was my first choice for a prereader on Retrace Steps.

Gitaxian found the sequence in its original form to be a little over-detailed, and suggested that I change its tone from “explaining the game” to “complaining about the game”. He also noted that making it “rantier” would be a way of concretely validating the roommate’s perspective. I followed his advice, and I’m much happier with where the story ended up as a result.

Knowing I’d be revisiting these panels later in the story, I ended up taking the time to polish them up a little: I added details of a fence and path in the background, and tweaked the hand in the foreground. By this point, I was starting to get pretty tired of drawing; of the project in general. I’d put aside other things I was working on, and had academic assignments to deal with as well.

Panel 40 is one of a couple of panels that I feel would benefit from similar polishing. The idea was that it’d be a top-down view of the street, with two streetlamps providing light. The round shadows would give the impression of a pair of eyes or binoculars, with the lampposts themselves being pupils - tying into the paranoia described in the narration.

I thought that, by zooming out and letting the darkness creep into frame, I’d be able to force something of a tonal shift - and I think I was reasonably successful in this regard, particularly as the colours of the site itself flip once more. The prose also shifts slightly in tone, as the tail-end of the rant leads into the realisation that something’s wrong.

In its original form, people were confused by the image - the shading wasn’t nearly heavy enough, and the composition was unusual. This is where the art style works against me; I only have two colours to work with, and it can be hard to distinguish between detail and shadow at such a low resolution.

(There’s an animated music video for SIAMÉS’ “The Wolf” which uses a similar monochrome-plus-red palette to Retrace Steps - I saw it long before development on the story started and forgot about it until just now, so I don’t think it was an influence on the fanventure, but it’s definitely worth a watch!)

In the very first draft of the script, the protagonist found the key to their room in their hood. Seriously. Like, it’d start raining, they’d put their hood up and there’d be the key. I couldn’t think of a good ending, so I just came up with something daft and called it a day. The “doughnut offering” aspect of the story didn’t appear until I redrafted the script, a little ways into the film’s development (probably before we shot anything), but I can’t remember exactly how it came about. Originally, the script simply ended with the door getting slammed shut - the last line being a “what the actual fuck” from Sam/Alice.

(At the time when I was writing the story, I didn’t make a habit of buying mini doughnuts. I still don’t, except for on some occasions when I’m eating at a friend’s house and want to bring something low-commitment - even then, it’s usually cookies or muffins or full-sized doughnuts. Presumably, it was Retrace Steps which influenced that particular habit.)

On at least a literal level, the story’s message is “buy people doughnuts if you want them to be friends with you”. But naturally the actual message - and, I think, the reality - is that it’s not so transactional; really it’s just about assuming the best of people and being nice to them. Of course, there’s plenty of pitfalls in that approach - I’d be tempted to write a whole ‘nother story about them, if I didn’t think it’d end up being a little too dark and deconstructive. Be nice! That’s all I’m saying.

At least when I was writing the script, I’d actually planned for the protagonist to buy doughnuts from the local Sainsbury’s store. We have a Tesco store as well, plus a bunch of bigger supermarkets, but the Sainsbury’s is usually the quietest - it’s expensive and poorly-stocked. Plus, I just felt like it’d look better on-camera.

(If you’re not from the UK, all you need to know is that Tesco and Sainsbury’s are the two biggest supermarket chains. Well, apparently Asda overtook Sainsbury’s last month, but we’ll see how long that lasts. I’d say they’re generally pretty-much-indistinguishable, but at least in my mind I associate Sainsbury’s more closely with the middle classes - Tesco, meanwhile, is ubiquitous.)

When it came to adapting the script, I realised I could use any supermarket I wanted, and I picked Tesco. Specifically an “Express” store, which is a smaller shop found in town centres and the like. It fitted the story better - and besides, I’ve always liked the colloquialism “Tescos”. As in “aight mum I’m poppin off Tescos, our Jack says they’ve got a bogof on Lucozade, works out a quid for two litres so I’m buzzin, you after anythin or nah”.

(As part of let’s-call-it-research for the story, I found an eight-page thread on Mumsnet where a mum asks “am I being unreasonable to get really annoyed with people who call Tesco ‘Tescos’?” - this was immensely funny to me, and pretty much cemented my decision to use a real supermarket in the story as opposed to a made-up one.)

So yeah, panels 41-44 take place outside this Tescos. It was my brother - credited as “patipon” - who noted that I needed to use more solid black in the image. Most of what we discussed about the story took place in voice calls, which is a shame; historically, it’s been uncommon for me to solicit him for feedback on projects like this one. I consulted him on several of this story’s panels - he devotes much more time to graphics and artwork than I do - and his suggestions were always useful.

The prose on panel 43 is probably one of the bits I’m most proud of. It’s an awkward mix of metaphors coming from a character who isn’t used to being able to think when they’re at this particular place. I like the phrase “fumbled passes in the aisles” a lot.

(Gospar, one of my IRL friends and another prereader on Retrace Steps, occasionally graces us with the saying “ah, another day, another butchered social interaction”. Meanwhile, I went through a short-but-embarassing phase of butchering the trivial social interaction of “how are you?” by replying “I’m here” - something which I can’t excuse, but which I sure can immortalise in a webcomic.)

(All of this talk of Tescos reminds me of a draft I’ve had sitting around on my hard drive forever - the beginning of a first chapter which I wrote early in secondary school. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic snow-covered Britain where people travel around in sailboats on skis, and opens with some guy going into a buried Tescos for supplies. There, he runs into some orphan, who persuades the guy to let him hitch a ride on the snow-boat - snoat? Sure, whatever, snoat. The twist was going to be that the guy was planning to nuke some settlement, for reasons which I never wrote down and have since forgotten, and the kid would work this out and have to kill the guy to stop him. I note this simply to say that, while my stories may have gotten slightly less dumb and bad since I started writing, it seems that Tescos will be an enduring feature.)

(Wintry post-apocalyptic settings will also be an enduring feature, come to think of it: around the time I was writing Retrace Steps, I was also running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for some friends which was basically standard fantasy - only it was set on an infinite-in-every-direction ski slope. I’m not a very good Dungeon Master, so I let the campaign die after a handful of sessions over the course of the year - which is a shame, because I’d planned a KILLER TWIST for that story too. Anyway, enough nonsense - back to Pokémon GO.)

I suppose at this point I should note that the two Pokémon you run into are Dugtrio and Magneton. These two are the evolved forms of Diglett and Magnemite, and are kinda-unique in that they’re literally just three of their previous stage grouped together. Hopefully, the symbolism of someone trying to obtain these Pokémon - and only succeeding after offering them a berry - should be clear enough.

(Note that the narration on panel 46 says you’re “not sure why this thing wants the berry” - at this point in the story, the protagonist doesn’t understand the significance of gestures like this.)

(I’ve yet to obtain either of these Pokémon in-game myself; Diglett and Magnemite are surprisingly hard to come by.)

The second half of the fanventure - from panel 51 all the way to panel 100 - takes place back inside the corridor. There’s a lot in the way of repeated panels with very little narration here - I was going for a more introspective tone, and this seemed like a good way to achieve that.

On panel 52, the narration notes that you plan to message your internet friends, then call your parents. It’s a little beat, but I felt like there was something kinda sad about the idea of having a closer connection with people you’ve never met than with your own parents. This is a pretty irrational way of looking at it - in my experience, most people on the internet who talk about their parents have pretty frayed relationships with them. Besides, there are plenty of cases where random peers will be better-equipped to help with specific problems - it’s just a case of balancing that against the fact that your own parents will probably care about you far more than any of those people.

I wanted to convey the image of someone who has the vast majority of their social interactions online. This theme is crucial to Homestuck itself, but while Homestuck demonstrates it by communicating its story pretty much entirely in chatlogs, in Retrace Steps I try to communicate it by showing everything except the chatlogs. Homestuck kills off everyone except a bunch of internet friends and their guardians; Retrace Steps just quietly omits everyone except a bunch of strangers standing in a room ha ha ha whoops spoilers.

Anyway, on panel 53, we start to see an environmental change caused by these strangers. For the first time, it seems like you’re not completely alone in this world.

The light's motion-activated - it turns on when you open the door, and then turns off again after around ten minutes. You've been gone much longer than that... meaning somebody else must have triggered it since then.

While working on this commentary, I decided that the original text of panel 55 - present in the story since its original release on 04/04/2019 and preserved in the above quote - was kinda overwrought and clumsy. Usually I’m pretty loathe to make edits to a story after it’s out on the internet, but this one felt acceptable - “Why was the light on when you arrived?” is much more succinct way of communicating what’s going on.

This panel’s artwork is also pretty clumsy - in case you’re having trouble parsing it, that’s supposed to be your head at the bottom. I tried to put a bit of light shading on it, but I’m not really happy with the result. Like I say, at this point I was getting pretty tired of drawing. Nah, I’m not changing it.

On panel 58, there’s a rare bit of onomatopoeia as you finally think to knock on the door. The negative space encroaches in from the right... but what does it hide?

Oh hey, it’s your roommate!

I think to a certain extent, this is another confusing image - Gitaxian observed that it didn’t really make much sense spatially. It’s kinda supposed to be a side-on cutaway, but that doesn’t really come across - I briefly tried adding a wood grain, to communicate that it’s the open door, but that didn’t make much sense at this scale and only confused matters further. In the end, I tweaked the boundary between the door and the corridor to give the impression of a couple of hinges and called it a day.

Panel 61 is, I guess, the big twist. You wanted to know where everyone is? Surprise! They’re in your room! Having a party! And you weren’t invited!

I wanted the reader to have a second to contemplate this, so the next couple of panels swap back-and-forth between you and the doorway. To underscore the silliness of the twist, one of the people in the back takes a big long sluuuurp from their solo cup - this breaks the spell, and you point for them all to leave.

It’s panel 67 that breaks the narration for the first time in the story. I wanted to present the roommate’s dialogue as a sharp contrast to the inner voice of the protagonist - it’s full of abbreviations, completely devoid of punctuation, and written entirely in solo-cup-red. The roommate simply sighs that you “never change”, and slams the door on you (with yet another cheeky bit of onomatopoeia appearing on-panel).

The idea that being around other people somehow supplants your inner thoughts is a very deliberate one - the commands cease entirely, the narration goes away. In these moments, we see you how everyone else sees you - as someone who’s pretty much entirely silent. On panels 69-70 there’s simply some ellipses, which kinda lengthen into a brief return of narration as you’re left on your own once more.

The reason this party’s taking place in “YOUR room” - as noted in the narration on panel 71 - is simply to show a feeling of entitlement. On the surface, you’re mad that you can’t get into your room - but you're also just feeling like people should invite you to parties.

Hopefully, the questions on panel 72 and panel 74 should be answering themselves by this point. You don’t know it at the time, but these will prove to be the last pieces of narration in the story.

After you’ve had some time to sit in the corridor and feel sorry for yourself, your roommate starts feeling bad and comes out to offer a sincere-but-backhanded apology. We’re into the last quarter of the comic now - starting with panel 76, there’s no text outside of what is spoken by your roommate.

The command used to advance to the next page has changed from “->” to “-->”. The story isn’t about just one person any more.

(This device is lifted directly from Homestuck, which switched from the command “==>” - used when the comic had four main characters - to “======>” when it swapped to a cast of twelve. Many fanventures - such as Oceanfalls - riff on this concept further, and mine is no exception.)

Out of all the text in the story, I’m probably happiest with the monologue on panel 79 and panel 80. I think it speaks for itself.

(As I always find myself saying, these commentaries kinda show that I don’t trust my stories to speak for themselves. I did hold off on writing this one for a couple of months, but there was lots of behind-the-scenes stuff I wanted to get on the record and I ultimately couldn’t help myself. The truth is that pretty much nobody reads these things - the commentaries, or the stories they’re for - and so the whole thing’s pretty much for my own benefit. I get to declare what I was going for, you get to decide whether or not I got it.)

Panels 81-95 are pretty much a frame-by-frame animation of you offering your roommate the doughnuts, and them leading you into the party. It’s basically two actions, but I try my best to draw them out as long as possible - by this point, the story’s said pretty much everything it needs to, and now it’s all just... emotional payoff? I feel like I’ve never been much good with character arcs, but I’m proud of how this turned out.

As promised, panels 96-99 are a straight repeat of panels 17-19 - the automatic lights turn off and the site’s colours flip for the last time, neatly mirroring the story’s first two panels in its last two.

Back in the kitchen, she opens the cupboard again and grabs the box of mini doughnuts.

She returns to her door and knocks again.

ALICE I bought doughnuts?

There is a long pause. The door suddenly opens and Bob pokes his head around, reaches out to grab like three doughnuts from the box, and then darts back inside. The door slams shut again.

ALICE Hey!

VII. Animation is harder than I thought.

This story is titled Retrace Steps because, in its original script form, it mostly focused on somebody retracing their steps in the hopes that they’d find their keys. The fanventure, however, drops this aspect of the plot entirely - leaving it with something of an artifact title. Maybe I should’ve come up with an alternate title, but I didn’t. On some level, it now simply refers to the trip to Tescos - on another, I think it implies that something’s been lost. I think it was the nagging feeling that the title no longer held enough significance that led me to create the story’s final flash.

If you haven’t read Homestuck, all you need to know is that pages with commands that are prefixed with an “[S]” are usually longer animations set to music, used for particularly important moments in the plot (or, just as often, for random chicanery). Having a flash of this sort is a point of prestige for fanventures - especially if it approaches any real length of complexity. I’d vaguely liked the idea of letting music play a fairly prominent role in the short film, and it felt right to return to those roots.

There wasn’t really any question as to which song I’d pick, either. See, back in college, I ran this terrible meme page called Summer Meme Sundae. It was absolute garbage. Please don’t click that link. Basically, its deal was that - for the latter half of its run - I tried to introduce something of a plot across the “memes”, wherein the page’s mascot got castaway and wound up in Australia. It was very silly and absolutely incomprehensible. Like I say, don’t look at it. This isn’t reverse psychology, it’s legitimately unfunny and bad. Anyway, the last post I made was something of a rudimentary flash in its own right - set to “Pizza for Breakfast” from The Meme Friends’ Last Week’s Pizza EP. I know basically nothing about The Meme Friends, but I thiiink they were some randos on 4chan’s /mu/ board.

It’s fair to say that the aesthetic of Last Week’s Pizza, which includes such tracks as “Cold Pizza”, “Everyone I Ever Loved is Now Dead”, and “Executive Pizza Party (Business)”, kinda appeals to me. If you’re reading Retrace Steps, the chances that you’ve heard the track before are next to nil - it comes with zero baggage. Moreover, it’s from a freely-distributed independent project created by a collective that hasn’t put out anything in years - it’s extremely unlikely that anybody’s going to come and tell me off for using it.

I specifically picked “No Forks, No Knives, It’s Pizza Time” because I felt like its tone was closest to that of the story, and because it has a relatively short runtime of just over two minutes - which still ended up being a little too long, but I don’t think it turned out too bad.

The flash opens on the image of the door in the corridor from the previous panel, which is gradually cut into smaller and smaller pieces by black lines until it disappears altogether. Cue title. One of the reasons I like the flash format - aside from the lack of antialiasing - is that you really have no way of telling how long the video’s going to be or what happens except by watching it. There’s none of YouTube’s functionality for skipping around - you’re forced to sit and watch the entire thing start-to-finish without stopping.

(I think Retrace Steps is definitely best read in a single sitting, and the final flash is a big part of that. My fourth prereader, Multivac of the Homestuck Discord server, was unable to watch the flash at first - I forget why - and found the story unclear. After watching the flash, he seemed to backpedal on this sentiment. Time will tell whether his initial assessment was correct; I picked Multivac because he’d previously responded positively to Everything Is Red Now, and because I’d usually consider his reaction to something to be a pretty decent rough baseline for the general reaction of the Homestuck Discord server.)

When stuff starts happening, it starts happening fast - you see the protagonist’s descent down the stairs again, but this time you see all three panels at once, as if there’s more than one person on the stairs. The minute you get outside, you start seeing entirely new people - many with red accents of some kind. Someone smoking, someone who’s been shopping, someone with a rucksack...

The people outside Tescos had a little more in the way of thought put into them. On the left, there’s a homeless person, and someone walking by with headphones on. Over on the far right, there’s someone holding their phone out in front of them - they’re wearing a hat famously worn by Ash Ketchum in the Pokémon anime, just in case there’s any doubt as to what game they’re playing. Someone sorta tired-looking crosses away from the rest. Everyone in the frame’s kinda collectively ignoring the two people holding hands.

(Textually, Retrace Steps is a story about... platonic fulfillment? If that’s a phrase that makes sense? My personal take is that the protagonist of this story struggles to create and maintain friendships. However, I tried to leave room for interpretation - particularly in terms of this section of the flash - and I think a reading definitely exists that brings in more romantic subtext.)

(Actually, I already kinda explored this last year - much less effectively - in Another Son. Like in that story, I wanted the audience to understand why the characters are lonely - but I used a much more sympathetic approach this time around, which crucially makes you actually want the story’s protagonist to stop being lonely. Something which bothers me about certain stories - and this is a really common failing of music videos, which lack the introspection of prose - is when the narrative takes its protagonist and frames things in a way which says ��you should feel sorry for this person” while they proceed to do really unsympathetic things. If you’re going to give them a victory, the audience should feel like they actually deserve it!)

After a brief segment where you finally catch that Dugtrio, the flash cycles back through the various locations until we arrive back in the corridor. This sequence was added mostly to pad for time, but also serves to bring things full circle for the flash’s final shots. On the final beats of each bar - which fall on a higher note - the colours flip; this was purely an aesthetic choice.

The next section of the flash is just credits, which I kinda wanted to use to lull the audience into a false sense of security. See, the original plan was for the final image of the comic to just be you, standing completely alone, holding a solo cup - an ending which I think is much more ambiguous.

I still think this original ending provokes a much stronger emotional reaction - and indeed, it did at the time. As Gospar said, “also you sure you wanna keep the sad end / I think the fade out on others and the static / sort of implied they hadn’t changed?” Gitaxian agreed - “I think having the crowd fade to just the two of them, and then ending there, would be the best ending”. I’d already considered doing that, but had decided against it for reasons I’ve forgotten.

See, by this point in the story, you’ve made this connection with your roommate - but everyone else remains a stranger. I like this ending for its optimism: instead of saying “you're still alone”, it says “this is a good start”.

Oh, and remember the solo cup that’s been sitting up next to the ad? Yeah, that’s gone now.

She protests and knocks on the door again. Just before she kicks it, it suddenly opens again. Bob has like three doughnuts in his mouth.

BOB These are pretty good actually.

He grabs the whole box and opens the door fully, lightly beckoning for Alice to enter. She does so. The door closes.

We cut to inside the room. Everyone is standing in cramped, uncomfortable silence. Somebody hands Alice a red plastic cup.

CUT TO BLACK.

THE END

VIII. Knowing when to shut up is harder than I thought.

I just went to Tescos and bought a box of mini doughnuts.

(I didn’t set out to do that, but they were selling a single box for next to nothing and I felt like it was too serendipitous to ignore.)

It’s the end of the year. Classes finished over a month ago. I always end up staying for a good while after, because doing so gives me more time to work on projects like this, but most of my friends end up leaving before me - in other words, I don’t have anyone to share the doughnuts with.

(They have strawberry-flavoured icing and multicoloured sprinkles, and they taste frikkin’ great, so I can’t say I’m too beat up about that.)

I’ve played very little Pokémon GO since I started working on this fanventure. I... think I kinda ruined it for myself?

When I finished Retrace Steps, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do the fanventure format for a while. That lasted all of about four days, after which I started Huskyquest. It seems silly to give away this new fanventure’s plot here, so all I’ll say is this: it’s got dogs in it, it’s got more than three colours, and you should definitely drop it a like because I’ll hopefully be picking it back up again pretty soon.

In the meantime, feel free to peruse all the other things I made on this blog! There should be another project coming out here very soon, so if you wanna be informed when that happens, drop me a follow either here or on twitter. And of course, if you have any questions, my ask box is always open. Thanks for reading!

...You’re still here?

It’s over.

Pokémon GO home.

> Go.

#MSPA #MS Paint Adventures #MSPFA #MS Paint Fan Adventures #Homestuck #fanventure #Retrace Steps #The Wadapan #04/04/2019 #31/05/2019

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thewadapan · 5 years

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I rewrote an obscure Transformers comic from the 1980s.

Creator’s Commentary

It’s 1984. Marvel’s four-issue Transformers miniseries has been a smash hit, and they’re already expanding it into a full monthly ongoing. Marvel’s UK branch is looking to import the book, but they have a problem - the newsagents want weekly issues, and there simply isn’t enough comic to fill those pages.

To meet demand, they bring on Simon Furman to write extra comics weaving into the US material. Because he’s the only one with any idea what's going on, he continues to churn out Transformers stories for almost ten years - with only occasional contributions from other authors.

“Peace” is one such interloper.

Written by letterer/editor Richard Starkings under his “Richard Alan” pseudonym for the 1989 Transformers Annual (which was actually published in 1988), it presents one of Cybertron’s alternate futures. Its exact placement in continuity was contentious - even within the comics’ own letters pages, where the editors (writing in-character as Transformers) gave several contradictory answers to questions regarding its canonicity.

The comic opens when the final Decepticon is killed by the Wreckers - an elite group of Autobot shock-troopers. With the war over, the very-very-tired Autobot leader Rodimus Prime announces that he’s going to step down - letting the Wreckers’ leader, Springer, take his place.

Unbeknownst to the Autobots, not all of the Decepticons are dead after all - the double agent Triton still hides amongst their ranks. In an attempt to incite conflict, Triton suggests that Ultra Magnus would make a better leader. The Technobot combiner team agrees, and an argument breaks out between them and the Wreckers. Whirl argues with Triton, Triton punches Whirl, Roadbuster pulls a gun on Triton, Scattorshot shoots Roadbuster, Sandstorm shoots Triton, and the war begins again.

It’s a grimly interesting story, one forever doomed to remain a footnote in Transformers history. Fittingly for a bot of subterfuge, Triton’s alternate mode was a submarine - at least according to Dreadwind in the letters pages. Marvel UK fanboy-turned-creator Nick Roche much later reinvented him as a member of Squadron X - sworn enemies of the Wreckers in IDW Publishing’s Transformers continuity.

In its most recent reprint as part of the twenty-second volume of The Definitive G1 Collection, “Peace” was left stranded as an afterthought alongside Regeneration One - with the rest of the UK strips being collected across the first twenty volumes alongside their contemporary US material. That partwork was curated by Simon Furman, who still writes Transformers stories to this day - despite pleas from some corners of the fandom for him to just call it quits already.

Richard Starkings, meanwhile, went on to found Comicraft - bringing lettering into the 21st century by pioneering the use of digital fonts in comic books.

I wasn’t alive when most of that happened. My first brush with Transformers - at least, as far as I remember - came when I saw Transformers: Armada’s Land Military Mini-Con Team on the shelves of my local Woolworths (a much-loved now-defunct chain of British department stores). I didn’t get it at the time, but when our birthdays rolled around (or maybe Christmas? I was young; I barely remember any of this and neither do my parents) my brother and I got a bunch of Mini-Cons. Our first brush with Generation 1 would come much later, when we found a knackered Strafe at a car boot sale.

For a long time, my only experience with Transformers fiction came in the form of the cartoons - they didn’t show Armada on Freeview so I missed most of that, but Energon and Cybertron both aired in their entirety on CITV. I had the pack-in comics, and the Armada and Energon annuals - which basically just collected random Dreamwave comics without context. All of which is to say that, at the time, I felt pretty starved for good Transformers stories.

Finding the 1989 Annual in a secondhand bookshop, then, was like finding the holy grail.

I won’t lie. I had basically no idea who any of these characters were, or what was going on. But damn if I didn’t pore over every inch of those pages trying to work it out. And I sure as hell was gonna sign the thing, lest those abominable Firecons paid me a visit to finally incinerate what was presumably the only Annual they’d missed back in 1988.

Years passed. Some movies came out. I drifted away from Transformers for a while after my parents said “aren’t you a little too old for these” one time too many. Well, it was either that or the hordes of overpriced Bumblebees clogging the shelves at the time.

Eventually, though, I was drawn back to the franchise. A Humble Bundle of IDW’s comics and Thrilling 30 Sandstorm was all it took.

For some reason, at some point I decided to start a meme page. I don’t know why. Please don’t look at it. I don’t want to talk about it. Most of the edits I made were atrocious, although I’ll admit there’s a few I still find pretty funny. I actually referenced Transformers a bunch of times. There was this whole thing where I tried to work in a plot, so really the whole thing was much closer to a terrible webcomic than an actual meme page.

Perhaps the most involved reference to the franchise came in the form of a relettering of “The Night the Transformers Saved Christmas”, a 4-page comic originally published in a 1985 issue of Women’s Day. Why did I make that thing? I don’t know. Maybe a little more context would help.

Y’see, waaay back when the first Armada toys hit shelves, fans weren’t too impressed - to say the least. They’d seen pictures of highly-articulated prototypes, only to find that articulation completely absent in the finalised figures. To make matters worse, the first pack-in comic was pretty lacklustre - thanks to the trilingual dialogue squeezed into its speech bubbles.

One enterprising fan (Yartek, now better known as Blueshift) expressed their dissatisfaction by completely rewriting that pack-in comic’s dialogue - reimagining Hot Shot as a deranged, jam-obsessed cannibal. It was an idle joke, but one that tapped into the collective consciousness of the fandom at the time. Its popularity grew to the point where it was even referenced on the license plate of a later Hot Shot figure.

By Blueshift’s own admission, the comic isn’t all that great. Nowadays, the atmosphere surrounding Armada’s launch is but a hazy memory for most of the fandom - leaving the comic’s depiction of Hot Shot looking more like an uncomfortably ableist caricature than anything approximating a real parody.

But I digress. I was barely aware of Transformers when all of this happened. My point is that JaAm was like an abridged series, only presented as a comic, and I thought that was a neat idea. I was looking to make a post that was a little bit different for Christmas Day, and remembered the existence of that old Women’s Day comic. Thus was born “its christmas... so what??”

My process for that one was pretty straightforward. After reading the comic once to get a broad sense of its plot, I went through it again panel-by-panel - blocking out each narration box with an autoshape and adding my own text. Mustard features pretty heavily in it... I guess as a reference to jam? Honestly, I was writing this thing entirely by the seat of my pants and - with the exception of the choice panels I’m including here - it’s pretty unfunny as a result. I’m not proud of it. Even at the time, I felt like I could’ve done better. So, half a year later, I did.

When the mood eventually took me, there was only one option in my head - Richard Starkings’ “Peace”. This time, I took a moment to plan the whole thing out in my head before diving in.

I think my idea for the plot came about simply as a result of Rodimus’ body language and expressions on the second page. I reckon I looked at them and thought, “man, he looks like he’s just caught a whiff of something pretty nasty.” From there, my mind jumped to Triton... the culprit, naturally.

When you go back and read some of the early Marvel stuff, there’s a bit of dissonance between the Furman-esque galaxy-spanning conflicts and the more offbeat “the Transformers crash a wrestling match / concert / car wash” stories written by US author Bob Budiansky. At times, the Transformers could be figures of real gravitas - and at others, they were almost like children.

For both “its christmas” and “PASS” I tried to lean into the latter interpretation as much as possible. As a reflection of that, the dialogue and narration - both written in Times New Roman - are completely devoid of punctuation, capital letters, or special formatting. Well, mostly...

There’s a few instances in “its christmas” where capital letters are used for emphasis.

Roadbuster’s dialogue gets to keep its punctuation, and is written in (I think) Arial, because he’s supposed to be more mature than the rest.

Each comic had one panel which retained some of its original dialogue - the fourth on the first page of “its christmas”, and the fourth on the fourth page of “PASS”.

There’s a couple of instances in the comic where characters use swear words, only the wrong letter’s censored - “sh*t” became “*hit”, “f*ck” became “*uck”. That’s simply an artefact of the comic’s origins in my old meme page, where that was a running joke.

In addition to changing the text, I also made a few visual edits...

I changed the comic’s title from “PEACE” to “PASS” (as in, to pass gas) by chopping up and rotating bits of it.

I changed the credits for “RICHARD ALAN” (writer) and “GLIB” (letterer) to “ME” and “ME AGAIN”.

On the fifth page, I rotated Springer’s, Ultra Magnus’ and Sandstorm’s mouths by 180 degrees - changing them from horrified grimaces to jaunty smirks. That’s why they’re kind of lopsided relative to the rest of their expressions! Honestly, the original version looks pretty strange to me now.

I likewise modified Sandstorm’s and Ultra Magnus’ expressions in the first panel of the final page, and Nosecone’s in the second panel.

I scribbled out the question mark in the little “THE END?” box on the final page. This is the definitely the end; no need to beat around the bush.

The idea to make Roadbuster a butt monkey stemmed from the fact that he was the only non-triple-changer to appear on the first page. I saw that panel with the four of them together and thought “one of these guys is not like the others.” And of course, I knew that he’d be dead in a few more pages.

Once I’d established Springer as a bully, I started to get a sense for what life was like amongst the Autobots - but there were still things I wanted to leave open to interpretation...

Why does Roadbuster hang around with the other Autobots so persistently, when all he receives is abuse?

Is Triton’s fixation on “cred” overblown, or is it the only reason he’s survived as long as he has?

Is Rodimus really past his Prime?

Who’s really the coolest Autobot?

Are the Autobots inherently bad people, or simply products of their environment?

If they’re the latter, does that excuse their actions?

If these are the Autobots... then what were the Decepticons like?

Here’s some other miscellaneous notes...

There’s a single speech bubble on the fourth page where the speaker’s off-panel. In the original comic it belonged to Triton, shouting “HEY!” Here, I like to think it’s Whirl speaking.

In the narration of the second panel, I refer to the Transformers as “car robots” - a nod to the Japanese name of the Transformers: Robots in Disguise series.

Rodimus’ “light their darkest hour” line is, of course, a quote from the 1986 animated Transformers movie. Yes, I’m as tired of those references as you are, but no, I couldn’t resist.

I can’t remember if it was deliberate, but I’m pretty sure “if you catch my drift” was a nod to The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye - where original character Drift stars as Rodimus’ third-in-command.

Speaking of More than Meets the Eye - when it was relaunched as Lost Light, Rodimus got a brand new purple colour scheme. In “Pass”, Rodimus agonises over whether or not to get that same paint job.

“Mucho cred” is kind of a memetic phrase amongst readers of the superhero web serial Worm. I feel like “cred” is one of those inherently funny words (along with “cahoots”), so that was enough to justify its inclusion here. If you’ve somehow made it this far into this post, trust me when I say that Worm is a rabbit hole well worth tumbling down.

“Peace” has a very strong atmosphere. It’s about a group of individuals - who’ve known nothing but conflict for thousands of years - suddenly finding themselves with nobody to point their guns at. That exact same scenario played out decades later in IDW Publishing’s Transformers continuity, where it was explored in much greater depth - but in just six standalone pages, “Peace” presents its broad themes with impressive clarity.

I think we’re very much invited to root for Triton - he’s a real worm, but he’s also an underdog. When characters are created whole cloth in Transformers stories, they’re marked for death.

“Pass”, on the other hand, is about a group of kids who’ve lost all sense of perspective. The most important thing to each of the group’s members is how they are perceived by the rest. They’ve been living under ever-increasing social pressure, and things are finally reaching a boiling point - and people die as a result.

And I say “kids”, but the truth is that I still see these dynamics amongst grown adults today - admittedly without the death. For any given subculture, you’re going to find ingroups, outgroups, and the awkward middle ground between them. If I thought there was a clear-cut solution, I would’ve put it in the comic. But oftentimes - like I said in the closing panels - there isn’t really anyone at fault.

If you fart in public, don’t stress about it too much. Nobody really minds. Just own up. And whatever you do, don’t try to pass the blame - or else...

As one final nod to Marvel UK’s Transformers comics... here are some short AtoZ profiles for the entire cast!

You can follow me on twitter if you want to see more of my Transformers ramblings. The rest of my writing can be found right here on this blog - I recommend starting with Everything Is Red Now, a dumb comic about Spider-Man.

#Transformers #Marvel #comics #The Wadapan #31/02/2019

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thewadapan · 5 years

Photo

I wrote a story for Inktober 2018.

-announced the voyage yesterday. This news comes not two weeks after the explorer was accused of “peddling myths and delusions, not science” in a review responding to his controversial presentation at the-

-need only glance at the fossil record. The scientific community has comprehensively failed to explain these striations, yet the answer becomes eminently obvious the moment one considers the rest of the evidence: we are not the first-

-confess that I have trod the streets of that world in my dreams, I have felt that primordial light on my face. Their own faces are obscured from me. Naturally, I dare not speak to another living soul of these visions, lest-

-departed at dawn in spite of severe weather warnings. "Our position - relative to the sun - shall be critical if my instrument is to function correctly," declared-

-witnessed the ocean's might for myself. Peculiar, I believe I finally understand how such a civilisation as theirs could be crushed beneath its weight... and now recognise that our own so-called civilisation is itself barely clinging-

"-off course, we barely have enough supplies to see us home if we turn back now!"

"That's out of the question. We ration the food. There won't be another opportunity in my lifetime, and I'll be damned if-"

"-boy who keeps the birds, you talked to him yet? He wouldn't meet my eyes when I went to hand him today's report, but I didn't see him blink even once... I dunno, he's got a right look to him-"

"-but that madman's fool quest will be the death of us all."

"So you say. It's not too late. Why, this might be our only opportunity to-"

-NOTHING TO FEAR FROM THE HUMBLE

A SWAN-DIVE BORNE OF A STUMBLE-

-SMALL-MINDED EMISSARIES

SHORT-SIGHTED VISIONARIES-

-SELF-DESTRUCTIVE ACCORD

SWUNG A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD-

-know little of what happened out at sea that day, over a century ago. One homing pigeon did eventually reach shore, carrying not a final report but a confession of love that received immense scrutiny in the press and resulted in-

-a nationwide search for the letter's intended recipient. The newspapers did eventually find the girl in question, who was by all accounts deeply unsettled by the letter's content and the media attention. It is perhaps for the best then that-

-this saga was what lingered in the public consciousness, else the expedition itself might've served as an inspiration for those looking to undertake a similar voyage. One thing is clear: the deaths of sixty-eight men-

-can be attributed solely to the blind obsession of that wealthy crackpot. Perhaps the wreck lies with the mythical sunken city; that is to say, like the city, it shall never be found-

-love you I love you and I know my birds will carry my love to you surely better we might be united in God's heaven than on this cruel-

-was last seen by her housekeeper almost a week ago. This marks the family's second disappearance, following that of famed explorer-

"-shouldn't watch so much television, son. Those men are all the same: vultures, and they've dragged our family name through the dirt-"

-has a wonderful imagination. He demonstrates the ability to solve challenging problems. He is a confident speaker, but should try harder to positively connect with the rest of the class. Your child would benefit from-

"-he's a creep! Like, he thinks he's a big deal, but... he's totally not? I don't know... I just shut the door on him. Is it bad that I don't, like... I don't even feel bad about-"

-his business acumen has already earned him a reputation in the industry. His latest announcement has therefore surprised many: over the coming weeks, the majority of his assets will be liquefied to finance a state-of-the-art oceanic survey-

-regret to inform you that your research proposal has not been selected for funding. The board has found several assertions of dubious validity in your proposal, a detailed evaluation of which follows. We recommend-

-but I learned not to talk about you. People always think I'm crazy or something, but I'm not crazy, and I don't think you were either. The man I've seen in your papers is nothing like the man the world made you out to be. I think that-

-if you were still here, you'd... you'd get it. You'd be proud of my accomplishments. I mean, I've made sacrifices - I've rebuilt the family fortune, and I've practically spent it all on this journey, on replicating your instrument, so-

-I can finally find out what happened to you out there. I want to see the wreck, at least. That would- well, it'd be a kind of closure, anyway. A hollow, bitter, nihilistic sort of closure - it'd prove them all right... still, the idea-

-rings false to me. I've seen your drawings of the lost city (though of course, you didn't label them as such) and I've never seen someone write with such conviction. I don't know how you knew, but you knew. No, I simply-

-can't shake the image: that I'll finally go down there, and I'll find you waiting for me with open arms outside the gates of your drowned city. Just a daydream - after all, if they were so much better than us, then why-

-AS IT HAPPENED THEN

START ANEW AGAIN-

-NOT PETTY PROPHECY

BUT PROBABILITY-

-AND ALL THAT IS DONE WILL THEN BE UNDONE

AND THE EARTH WILL SHINE LIKE ANOTHER SUN-

Writer’s Commentary

When I moved away for university, I really just traded one small town for another - much colder - small town. It’s got three beaches, but it’s really only warm enough to visit them at the very beginning and end of each academic year.

So there I am, at the end of the year, walking the longest beach with my parents. My dad asks me if I’ve had any thoughts for Inktober.

I haven’t.

I’d previously contributed outlines and text to his run participating in the March of Robots challenge, back in March 2018, starting with day 18. He’d decided to tell a single continuous story while sticking to the challenge’s list of prompt words, and was struggling to find a natural way of incorporating the later ones. I gave it some thought and soon enough captions were completed for the rest of the series.

Inktober 2017 was the project that got my dad - a lifelong professional illustrator and graphic designer - onto Twitter in the first place. His first illustrations on the platform followed a mouse on a journey around Europe, visiting various national landmarks. By the time Inktober 2018 started to loom in his mind, he’d accrued a decent following and wanted to attempt something a little more ambitious.

Maybe a little too ambitious.

Leviathan

People who’ve spent a lot of time around me generally know that I have an irrational fear of sea monsters. I say “generally” because it’s usually completely irrelevant, and I might never end up telling them, and I say “irrational” because - as dangerous as sea monsters are - they mostly don’t exist any more and certainly can’t hurt me. In fact, I think it’s a fear of large things in the water in general - megahydrothalassophobia.

It’s the fear that comes with being trapped in open waters, where any number of carnivorous giants may be lurking beneath. You’re an interloper in the environment of an all-consuming creature of unimaginable strength, one that is completely apathetic to your existence.

A long time ago, there were occasions where I’d be in the shower, and I’d start thinking about sea monsters, and I’d have to get out of the shower.

You can bet I struggled with swimming pools.

Despite all that - or perhaps because of it - I’ve retained a mild fascination with the ocean. Stories such as BioShock and Ever17: The Out of Infinity prove how much power can lie in a world below the waves - but I think my personal interest in the ocean as a setting goes back much further. I mean, look at SpongeBob. Stories of the Bermuda Triangle. I saw Disney’s Atlantis like once, and that giant lobster scared the heck outta me, but think I still enjoyed it enough to remember snatches over a decade later. Finding Nemo didn’t scare me, so I’ve seen that one a bunch of times. I had a lot of Alpha Team and Aqua Raiders and Atlantis Lego. Anyone remember the second Charlie Small book? How about the third Mortal Engines book? The eleventh novel in A Series of Unfortunate Events? The entirety of How to Train your Dragon? My favourite Astrosaurs book might’ve been the one on the ocean planet (wait, no, it was the one with the ghost dinosaurs on the mining planet - the ocean planet one was my second favourite). My favourite episode of Doctor Who was “Under the Lake”. My favourite episode of Bojack Horseman was “Fish Out of Water”. My favourite year of Bionicle was 2007 - the one where they all went scuba diving - but my favourite of the books was the one where they went on a boat trip through a maze of underground tunnels full of sea monsters. My favourite Transformer was Depth Charge - think Batman, only he turns into a giant manta ray. And a jet - he can turn into a jet too. Sorry, what were we talking about?

Oh yeah, the ocean. Actually, around halfway through October I read Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder (having previously seen an episode of Strip Panel Naked examining its panel composition), and towards the beginning of that comic I was surprised to see similar themes of obsession and paternal relationships coming up. I haven’t had a chance to play Return of the Obra Dinn yet, but apparently it came out during October. It’s a monochromatic story about piecing together some grisly events that took place at sea. By that point, Another Son had been written pretty much in its entirety - I remember seeing Obra Dinn’s trailer and thinking “aww man, that looks so much better.”

But anyway, that was all still to come. I’m standing on that beach, with the big blue to my side. I think about Inktober - the moody, scratchy, detailed visuals that often come with use of a traditional ink pen. I think that I don’t want my dad to have to draw the same thing thirty-one days in a row.

Well. The ocean it is.

For a good while, Pixar’s Up was my favourite movie. It’s a story about this old guy, and when he was younger he idolised this explorer, so he has a dream to go exploring too - only he meets some girl, and they get married and live their whole lives without ever getting the chance to follow that dream all the way to South America. So in the present - when the movie’s set - this old guy’s obsessed with his house, which to him represents his past and his now-dead wife and their dreams, and everything’s changed and he hates everyone and refuses to move. Eventually he turns the house into an airship and flies to South America, only some kid stows away, and the kid teaches the old guy to care about people again, and it turns out the explorer who the old guy idolised is still in South America, only he’s totally evil, and they fight. And at the end of the movie, they have to leave the house behind in South America, and the old guy looks after the kid, and they live happily ever after.

I like that movie a lot.

There’s something about Up’s old-timey adventure story aesthetic that appeals to me. You see it in Philip Reeve’s Larklight (and, to a lesser extent, Mortal Engines), and a myriad of the other stories I’ve already mentioned. It’s a style I dabbled in for “Alien Fireflies”. It’s characterised, I think, by this sense of the untouchable - civilisations lost, creatures untamed. The protagonists of these stories are filled with wonder, or with greed, and - ideally - their quest fails.

Witwicky

Remember the first Transformers movie? Of course you do, even if you don’t think you do. In the scene where we meet our human protagonist, Sam Witwicky, he’s giving a class presentation about his great-great-grandfather, Archibald, a "very famous explorer.” He elaborates that his ancestor was a pioneer, one of the first to set foot in the Arctic Circle, which is a “big deal”, but that he went insane after the expedition. His class isn’t impressed - and neither is Sam, really, who’s just trying to sell his grandfather’s junk to raise funds for a car.

Anyway, it turns out that Archibald saw a giant metal man beneath the ice, and that aliens were real the whole time, and - despite ostensibly not caring about his grandfather - Sam’s got one hell of an ego, a feeling that he was made for great things, and then there were another two movies.

Something that rubbed people the wrong way about those movies is, I think, Sam’s misanthropy. He basically hates people, he idolises the Transformers, he basically wants to be the Transformers, and he thinks he’s better than everyone else. And, ultimately, the Transformers ruin his life. Like, he straight-up kills a guy at the end of the third movie. He’s a deeply-flawed, tragic hero who only really changes for the worse.

(Check out Terry Van Feleday’s I Actually Kinda Appreciate the Transformers Movies for a wider analysis of the franchise - I promise it’s more than worth your time.)

Ultimately, I think I made the same mistake Transformers did. But I’ll get to that.

Premise

So fine. It’s the ocean. And there’s this explorer. Only I don’t want my dad to be drawing the same stuff every day - so let’s do half the story in the present, and half in the past. And it’d be cool to do Up, only maybe darker. Lots darker. Do the reverse of Up’s arc - no, combine it with Transformers’ arc - it’s a story about the explorer and his obsession, and the guy in the present’s garbage, so he never stops idolising that explorer. And...

And they destroy the world together.

Here’s my first draft of the synopsis, typos and all:

It is the late 19th century. After years of public ridicule, a wealthy explorer decides to set the record straight. He hires a crew and charters a vessel. When warnings of a storm brewing out at sea reach his ears, he refuses to delay his departure by even a day. His quest? To find the lost city of Atlantis, using an instrument of his own design to measure fluctuations in the Earth's gravity. At first, things seem fine - the vessel makes good progress. Things immediately take a turn for the worse, however, when the storm makes its scheduled appearance. The ship is hundreds of miles off-course, and it seems that there may not be enough supplies to make it back if they continue. Convinced that they need not worry about supplies if only they can make it to Atlantis, the explorer presses on. By the time they reach the patch of ocean within which his instrument claims the lost city lies, the crew is starving and on the verge of a riot. Nonetheless, he drops the anchor, gets into the diving suit and slowly makes his way to the ocean floor. There, he finds something - blocks of carved stone. All that's left of his sunken city, everything he ever dreamed of. He follows the blocks and comes across an object, sticking out of the ocean floor. He reaches out... Meanwhile, tensions at the surface have reached a breaking point. The crew polarises, with most of the rank and file turning against a small group of loyalists. In the ensuing fights, the winch is tripped. Before the explorer touches the object, his breathing tube suddenly goes taut and he is pulled at breakneck speed towards the surface. The effects of decompression sickness set in almost immediately, and he loses consciousness. The winch is stopped, but it is too late - he hangs and drifts. The fight in the boiler room has meanwhile escalated, and a fire starts. The boiler explodes, splitting the ship in half. The wreckage is never found. The ship had sent regular communications back to land via homing pidgeon, and when it sank all that remained were sent at once - attached to one was an unsigned confession of love, written in a hurry and addressed only with a first name. The press is unable to identify either the sender or the intended recipient. The explorer's wife, left with nothing but a brute of a son named after her missing husband and piles of debt, jumps from a bridge.

The son is raised by the state and eventually has a boy of his own. He tells his son what his carers told him - that his grandfather was a fraud, a quack, and a fool. As the grandson reaches adolescence, however, he rejects this reality in favour of his own: that his grandfather was a misunderstood visionary. As he grows older he suffers perceived misfortune after misfortune - his estranged mother flees the country, he is rejected by girls, universities and employers. Still, he invests well and amasses a shipping empire from scratch. Once he is confident in his position he commandeers one of his vessels and, under the pretense of sponsoring a biological survey, sets out to succeed where his grandfather ultimately failed. Guided by a modern replica of the instrument in his grandfather's notes, he finds the same spot and dives. At the sea bed he finds a length of black tubing, and he follows it past the blocks until he reaches the black metal monolith. There, at the end of the tube, his grandfather waits. They talk, and the secrets of the Atlanteans are revealed. They ruled the icy wastes once - strange, inhuman creatures. Wars were fought. Weapons were built. Used, melting the ice and creating the oceans. One remains. Bitter, alienated, and seduced by the voice speaking through his grandfather's corpse, the grandson reaches out and touches the black metal. For the second time, the planet shines like a second sun.

Change

So how does that differ to the final version of the story?

The lost city is explicitly Atlantis - I decided to avoid using the name, because neither the explorer or his descendant see their belief in the city as the cliche’d fantasy it is.

The explorer’s instrument explicitly uses the Earth’s gravity - in the final version, day 5′s “relative to the sun” note is all we learn about it.

The explorer rationalises pressing on by deciding that they’ll be able to salvage supplies from the lost city - I thought this was a bit too stupid, and just made his emotional motivations (the idea that he’ll only get one chance) more explicit during the argument on day 7.

The love-letter subplot (which begins on day 8) is different - more on that later.

The sunken city consists only of sunken blocks of stone, as seen in day 10 - it was my dad’s prerogative to make them more building-like, and the end result looks much better than I’d envisioned.

The mutiny is covered in much more detail - I decided to play up the sense of speculation, of being a historian looking back on events, by cutting it down to just day 13′s winch scene and the ship sinking on day 17.

The circumstances of the explorer’s wife’s suicide are clearer - I couldn’t really find a way of concisely conveying that information with in-universe text, and it was ultimately just covered on day 18.

The descendant is just the explorer’s grandson! This was entirely an error on my part; I did a rough mental calculation that was completely wrong. In reality, he’s probably a great-great-grandson (as Sam was in Transformers).

More detail’s given on the descendant’s parents - in the final version, we don’t technically even know if the one parent we see (on day 19) is his mother or father. For thematic consistency, I envisioned him as the father.

The details of the descendant’s path to darkness are different - I added day 20′s presentation as a direct nod to the Transformers scene, and didn’t really cover how he got to the point where he could finance the survey (seen on day 22). The “rejection letter” idea was reconstructed as a rejection for funding (seen on day 23), which felt like a far less contrived and far more thematically relevant way of presenting the information.

The story’s climax features exposition on the lost civilisation from the ghost/zombie explorer. The “ghost” only ended up appearing on day 28, and I left it more ambiguous as to whether or not he exists at all. The exposition ended up mostly being left to implication, told over the six “prophecy” days but most explicitly through the image on day 29.

Looking back on all of these changes, I think they generally improved the story. Except one.

Letter

I can’t remember when I came up with the love letter subplot - probably in the car on the way home. Originally, I intended it as a single page, a little interjection of someone else’s story into the otherwise pretty focused narrative. As you can see from my original outline, the recipient was originally never going to be identified, as a sort of mirroring for how the ship and the city were themselves never found.

But I decided it was a little darker to play up the asymmetry of the sequence - tying more closely instead to the explorer’s themes of obsession - and turned the letter into a stalker’s last words. There was something darkly compelling about the idea that the letter drags its intended recipient into the story, against their will - and years later, this stranger’s all she’s known for. It seemed like a cool subplot, and it kinda still does.

That was when things started to go off the rails - I couldn’t find a way of squeezing the subplot into a single in-universe document, and it ballooned out - beginning on day 8, where I cheated a little by just having an unnamed crew member talk about the “boy who keeps the birds”. The payoff comes on day 13, day 14 and day 15 through the documentary extract, with an extract from the letter itself appearing on day 17 alongside the pigeon.

Unfortunately, I’d already planned for day 18 to be a nod to the explorer’s wife. This is where things get messy. I’d planned to mirror the letter’s recipient against the explorer’s wife, but the immediate transition from the former to the latter caused some people in the audience - very reasonably - to read them as being one and the same. Of course, that creates logical inconsistencies elsewhere, but the story’s format makes it hard to check those. At this point, the story becomes confusing, and the readers end up doubting either themselves or me. The fact that none of the characters in the story receive names and none of the dialogue/documents are attributed adds to the confusion. The letter itself, at least, clearly doesn’t come from the explorer - it refers to the birds specifically to show that it’s written by the boy spoken of on day 8.

Another Son is very dark, and it’s very fragmented. I wanted the readers to piece the story together - work out how the captions relate to the images, to each other. That’s one of the main reasons I wrote as much of the story as possible in the form of documents from within its world: I wanted the readers to feel like historians working from incomplete, primary sources, struggling - like the explorer - to understand something they can never be part of.

There’s a problem with hiding your story like that, though - with making your characters so unlikable. It’s the problem with the Transformers movies. If the readers don’t care about the story, then why should they bother? The very moment they lose interest, the moment they throw their hands up and say “whatever, I don’t get it” - that’s the moment I’ve failed as a writer.

Art

After writing the story’s outline, my next step was to translate that into art direction for each of the thirty-one images my dad would need to illustrate over the month.

1. Cover. 2. The interior of a fancy, lived-in office overlooking the port. 3. Schematics for the instrument. 4. The explorer's illustration of what his vision of Atlantis looks like. 5. The ship on a calm sea with the wind in its sails. Clouds on the horizon. 6. The storm. 7. Seen only in silhouette through the window of his quarters, the explorer argues with his first mate. 8. The cages where the pigeons are housed. 9. The explorer dons the diving suit, while the rest of the crew sullenly watch. The engine that operates the winch is prominent. 10. Wide shot of the explorer being slowly lowered parallel to the chain of the anchor. 11. He traces a path through the ruins. The black object is visible in the distance. (composition parallels that of day 4) 12. He reaches the black metal object, and reaches out... 13. By the winch, a brawl has broken out. 14. He is yanked backwards by the tube, up and away. 15. He clutches at his throat. Bubbles escape the suit. 16. He hangs limp. 17. Above, the ship burns and sinks. Birds are seen fleeing. 18. A woman stands on a bridge. (composition parallels that of day 9) 19. A young boy sits in front of a bright television. Behind him, in the shadows, a large man watches. 20. The boy gives a presentation about his ancestor's expedition to the class. 21. A bunch of flowers, trampled in the rain. 22. The interior of a fancy, modern office overlooking the port. (composition parallels that of day 1) 23. The new instrument. (composition parallels that of day 2) 24. The ship travels past icebergs. 25. The grandson prepares to dive. (composition parallels that of days 9 & 18) 26. Surrounded by bones, wreckage, and the barest hints of the ruins - all buried in layers of crustaceans and plant life - the grandson sets foot on the sea bed. 27. He stands between two ancient cables, dragged back towards the black object looming over him. 28. His grandfather stands between him and the black metal. 29. The Atlantean civilisation, as it was - ravaged by war. (composition parallels that of days 4 & 11) 30. He reaches out to touch the black metal... 31. Seen from the outer solar system, two stars glow brightly.

There wasn’t really much in the way of images that we cut - at one point I’d suggested doing an image of the anchor being lowered, and another of the ship’s hold. That image was to be accompanied with an excerpt from the ship’s inventory/manifest, as a way of illustrating that the crew was running out of food in the wake of the storm - my dad was quick to point out that if I was having to research what a reasonable amount of food for a ship of this size was, then I couldn’t expect the audience to work out what was too little.

We passed back and forth on the two A4 pages of thumbnails. I kept encouraging my dad to be more adventurous with his compositions to create more eye-catching imagery, but - apart from a couple of times where my descriptions were misleading - his illustrations continually blew me away. I mean, just look at them! The tone, the detail... these drawings are even more impressive when you take them in the context of the rest of his work, which covers such a wide range of styles.

You can notice that I noted in some places where I thought composition could be used to draw a link back to earlier moments. The final story ended up using that technique a little more than I’d expected - day 5 and day 24 share composition. Day 27 ended up using the same “lost city” composition as day 4, day 11 and day 29. That is, incidentally, my favourite of my dad’s compositions - my only suggested changes were to make the buildings’ architecture more alien (you can see the original look in the rough pencil drawing above) and change the direction of day 11′s fish so they swim away from the black object.

Something I always tried to stress was that the black object should, from the moment we first see it, be this textureless blot of ink that just sort of consumes the page. The story’s ending, starting with day 27, features it very prominently, but it’s perhaps day 12 that achieves the effect most successfully.

Text

Thanks to the hashtags we were using, I only had 241 characters to work with for each of my captions - and some of them really came down to the wire. It was mainly that limit, along with a desire to keep characters as nameless as they are faceless, that inspired the fragmented paragraphs. Making sure to start and finish each one in a way that made it clear you were only seeing part of a sentence was often pretty tricky!

Many of the science-y bits of the story were directly inspired by a module in “astrobiology” (read: aliens) that I took last year. We learned about things like the Apex chert and ALH84001 controversies, and I was struck by just how personal those conflicts were - you can see that influence directly on day 3. I’d originally planned to go much deeper into the effects of the black object, perhaps tying it into the faint young Sun paradox.

To a certain extent, I envisioned the black object as being a metaphor for some combination of climate change and nuclear weapons - something catastrophic that feels kinda inevitable, but which is ultimately within our power. The only solution is to do everything you can to avoid it. The icebergs on day 24 were a stab at that kind of ecological imagery, but it would probably have made more sense to have had them appear back on day 5 instead.

Prophecy

I knew from the start that I wanted the story’s final line to be about the Earth shining “like another sun” (well, “like a second sun” - the story’s preliminary name was just “Second Son”). The “prophecy” came about in the form it did mostly because I had some space to fill! I very occasionally write (terrible) lyrics in my spare time (and have had occasional success with poems), so I liked the idea of doing a good ol’ fashioned rhyming prophecy - it seemed like a much more interesting way of providing exposition on the lost civilisation than just by having the explorer’s ghost say it, as in the original draft.

“nothing to fear from the humble / a swan-dive borne of a stumble” - pride can be dangerous; small delusions can quickly snowball into much bigger ones

“small-minded emissaries / short-sighted visionaries” - the lost civilisation was advanced, but kinda hypocritical and unwilling to compromise; they didn’t understand the repercussions of their conflict

“self-destructive accord / swung a double-edged sword” - they knew what the black object would do; they were still unanimous in their decision to use it

“as it happened then / start anew again” - the black object acts as a kind of “reset”; they knew their successors might activate it themselves

“not petty prophecy / but probability” - the black object will survive its activation; it’ll only be a matter of time before something triggers it again

“and all that is done will then be undone / and the earth will shine like another sun” - it’ll scorch the planet

I think the most important tip I’ve ever picked up for writing verse is that, once you get a couplet, you should swap each line. Generally speaking, you come up with one line, then come up with one that rhymes with that, and take for granted that that’s the order they’ll have to be in - but you get a stronger, more unpredictable rhyme by swapping them. As far as I can remember, pretty much all of the prophecy’s couplets was written that way.

Oh, and ignoring what I wrote in the original draft, here’s one final thought on the prophecy - what’s to say the black object was something they created? Maybe, like the explorer, they just found it.

Record

Here’s a full list of in-universe sources that appear in the story:

2, 5, 18, 22. newspapers 3. open letter 4, 6. explorer’s journal 7. dialogue (first mate, explorer) 8, 9. dialogue (crew) 10-12, 29-31. prophecy 13-16. documentary 17. love letter 19. dialogue (father, to descendant) 20. descendant’s school report 21. dialogue (girl, present-day, on descendant) 23. rejection letter to descendant 24-28. descendant’s journal

End

It’s ironic that the mistakes I made here snowballed in the way they did - a swan-dive borne of a stumble.

Another Son is too confusing, too dark, and is trying to be waaay too clever. You can see that the descendant’s journal was a direct attempt to course-correct the story’s ending, by making things as clear as possible. It asks a pretty straightforward question - “if they were so much better than us, then why” did they all die? And the answer’s simple - because they didn’t do enough to stop that from happening.

Of course, the descendant can’t even finish the question.

The fact that the explorer’s wife even exists isn’t even known until day 18, after his death - and that’s entirely deliberate. There’s this entirely one-sided relationship between the boy who keeps the birds and the girl he writes to - hopefully, his letter comes across every bit as deranged and creepy as I intended it to. Day 21 is the only occasion in the story where we hear from a female character first-hand - she’s venting to a friend, having scorned the descendant’s advances.

Throughout this story, I wanted to convey the idea that these men weren’t owed anything. I wanted to say that sometimes, you’re allowed to ignore them - because they’re wrong, and they make more people wrong. When that last girl asks whether it’s bad that she doesn’t feel bad about rejecting this guy, I wanted to imply the answer that it’s totally not. But in the moment, she doesn’t know that. Worse, a big part of me feels like this story conveyed the opposite - that the reason the descendant killed the world is because nobody would ever give them what they wanted. And then it’s like, well, were those people wrong to reject the roses, reject the research?

I don’t think so.

Be sure to follow my dad on twitter - if you want to know more about any of his artwork, just tweet at him. He regularly posts illustrations in a huge variety of styles, so there’s definitely something for everyone there. If you’re in need of a freelance designer/illustrator, don’t hesitate to contact him!

My own ask box is always open, but you can also follow me on twitter (where I mostly just talk about Transformers) if you prefer. You can view the rest of my writing on my blog - I recommend starting with Everything Is Red Now, a dumb comic about Spider-Man.

#Inktober #Inktober2018 #Inktober 2018 #IBAnotherSon #Another Son #The Wadapan #31/01/2019

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