#and i remember very clearly i was watching the Pop Culture's video on the trope (he was the one who named it i think)

[inadequate-nefelibata]

okay, i've seen some posts talking about 'mlvn is Born Sexy Yesterday for 12 year olds'... i'm going to have to get this off my chest before it becomes part of the ship war drama, right? (bc I've been thinking about this for aaages)

[paulisweeabootrash]

2020 mini-review pack

Di Gi Charat (1999)

Episodes watched: 7

Platform: VRV (Hidive)

Di Gi Charat (pronounced like “carrot”) is a series of fast-paced 4-ish-minute shorts nominally about Dejiko and Rabi-en-Rose, rivals trying to be Earth’s greatest idol.  Who are, respectively, a catgirl and a bunnygirl.  Oh, and also they’re aliens?  That’s... uh... certainly a premise, I guess.  The actual show consists of self-contained gag-filled episodes with no ongoing story, in almost a sitcom kind of way, throwing the characters into situations without context, but with a stable “baseline” situation (unlike, say, Pop Team Epic, where the characters serve more as stock personalities playing different roles in different sketches).  Dejiko is a snarky schemer.  Rabi-en-Rose is a snarky schemer whose main activity seems to be bothering Dejiko at work.  Puchiko is a small and quiet child and behaves accordingly.  And Gema is... something?  I have no clue, honestly, and neither does the fan wiki.  Other recurring characters fill stock roles such as “manager” and “otaku”.  A lot of the humor centers around poking fun at fandom.  It’s a show by, for, and about otaku from an era before our current internet culture, and since I’m a millennial and not from Japan, that makes it unusually hard to evaluate.

W/A/S: 8/2?/5?

Weeb: Chibis.  Catgirls.  Idols.  Kappas.  Kawaii verbal tics.  Akihabara.  Low-detail background characters who look like blobs or thumbs with faces.  Kanji left on-screen but untranslated.  Particular sorts of highly-exaggerated facial expressions we may have become familiar with through emoji, but which still haven’t made their way into American media generally.  This is ludicrously Japanese.

Ass: This really isn't that kind of show.  Although it is certainly designed for adults, as evidenced by the presence of phrases like “naughty doujinshi”.

Shit: The art is fun.  It has style shifts from comic strip to watercolor painting to mainstream 90s anime, and looks better than some of its contemporaries that were, uh, “real” shows.  The opening takes up about a quarter of the total runtime and gets annoying quickly (but that's because it’s clearly designed for being part of a broadcast block, not binge-watching).  Still, unless I’m missing hidden cleverness on account of not having the background knowledge, there’s not much to it.  It’s just okay.

-----

First Astronomical Velocity (band, active 2011-present)

Platform: Spotify, surprisingly

Okay, this one is a bit different, and I’m jettisoning the whole format for it.  Remember how I said the music-centered episodes of SoniAni were actually pretty good, even though the modeling-centered episodes were so offputting I never finished the show?  Well it turns out that First Astronomical Velocity, Sonico’s band, has released several IRL albums.  Physical copies may be a little hard to come by, but official uploads of a lot of their music can be found on Youtube and Spotify.  Do your musical interests include at least two of: string arrangements that would be at home in a particularly sappy movie soundtrack, 90s-00s alternative rock, synthesizer beep-boops, and that constricted cutesy Japanese women’s vocal style (you know the one I mean)?  Then this is for you.  They’re a pretty good... uh... alt-pop-rock band, I guess is what I’d call them.

-----

Interspecies Reviewers (2020)

Episodes watched: the entire 12-episode season

Platform: I plead the 5th.  But it’s getting a video release soon, so it will finally be legitimately available in English!

I started this year with a plot-light fanservicey animal-people show, and now I’m ending the year with... a plot-light fanservicey animal-people show.  But unlike Nekopara, this show had me cracking up, eagerly clicking “next episode”, and not complaining about the premise.  I’m sure a lot of people do have a problem with this show’s premise -- which centers almost entirely on various forms of sex work -- and I understand and respect that they will want to skip this show.

But for the rest of you: Interspecies Reviewers is a wildly-NSFW comedy about a group of fantasy world adventurers who gain fame and fortune reviewing brothels of different species.  I expected excessive nudity and fantasy tropes, but I didn’t expect to also get serious thoughts.  Like showing, in the golem and Magic Metropolis episodes, some of the unsettling problems that are looming IRL as deepfakes and sex robots are in development -- note especially the contrast between consensually and non-consensually basing automata on real people in those episodes.  Or the discussion in the last episode of how much riskier sex would be in a world without magic (i.e., ours).  This is a much smarter and more interesting show than you’d expect, considering that it has so much sexual content that it got dropped by two of the networks airing it and even its US distributor.

W/A/S: 5/10/4

Weeb: Although heavily influenced by the Western fantasy media canon of European mythology and Tolkien and tabletop RPGs, familiarity with the tropes of fantasy anime will help you “get” this too, as will familiarity with the -sigh- character dynamics and censorship practices of hentai.  Especially because it’s a comedy, there are probably also instances where I have completely missed topical references or wordplay that a Japanese person would get, but I can’t think of any specific instances right now of “there was clearly supposed to be a joke but I missed it”.

Ass: Look, this could not possibly have more sexual content without unambiguously becoming porn.  Genitals are (almost) always carefully hidden by viewing angle or conveniently-placed glowing (something lampshaded in one episode as an actual feature of one of the species they review), but otherwise, expect lots of nudity and almost nonstop crude humor.  Do not watch this with children.  Do not watch this with your parents.  Do not watch this with friends you don’t know well enough to know how they’ll react to something like this.

Shit: This show is better-made than it deserves to be.  It’s pretty dumb at points, but it’s fun enough to make up for it.  The art is consistent and pleasant, and the opening and ending themes are extremely fun, but it’s not a serious standout in any of those departments.  Also, I swear the background music is stock music, but I don’t remember what other show(s) I’ve heard it in before.

Stray thought: Crim is a precious and relatable cinnamon roll and I love them.

-----

OreSuki OVA (2020)

Platform: Crunchyroll

So, I know I didn’t cover the whole season in my initial review, but I still want to mention the hour-ish-long finale of this show, which was released straight to streaming.  Short version of the rest of the season: Joro starts to actually fall for Pansy, but a new challenger, Hose, appears.  He is irritatingly attractive and effortless at maintaining the right persona for the situation, leading Joro to describe him as “the main character”.  Hose is the sociopathic manipulator Joro wishes he could be, and Pansy, who has a bad past with him, clearly wants nothing more than for Joro to stand up to him.  But, since this is OreSuki, it’s not going to be handled simply.  No, instead, strap in for a grand finale of Joro and Hose competing in, and trying to manipulate through rules-lawyering, an absolutely ludicrous competition to win the right to date Pansy.  And, on top of it, we also get to finally see how Sun-chan got to be the way he is and what happened at that pivotal baseball game that set off the whole plot.  What has Joro learned from the experiences of the past season?  You’ll see!  And you’ll facepalm about it!

Really, you must watch this if you watched the regular season.

W/A/S: 6/5(!)/4ish

Weeb: Basically the same as I said before.  Gags referencing other Japanese media, anime and otherwise, and it's better if you’re familiar with the high school romcoms and harem comedies Joro thinks in terms of.

Ass (and slight content note): -sigh- Why does the camera need to be there?  Also, Joro, you just committed a little bit of sexual assault for the sake of this contest.  Stop.

Shit: I want to rate this overall better than I did the regular season because I think it’s an excellent finale overall because, even though it ends in a very “let’s leave everything unresolved” way that’s common in media that rely on absurd relationships to propel the plot, it does so in a way that makes sense in character.  I personally think it would’ve been stronger if it had, well, confirmed its title, and at least some of the other “challengers” had lost interest in Joro, but I guess they probably want a Season 2, since they have so much more source material to work from.  There are... oh god 14 light novels?!  That is too many.

-----

Your Name. (2016)

Platform: DVD

Two high schoolers -- small-town girl Mitsuha, from Itomori, and big-city boy Taki, from Tokyo -- find themselves in each other’s bodies for a day.  They both think at first it must be a very vivid dream, but when it happens again, and they start finding clues like notes they don’t remember writing and comments by friends and relatives about their out-of-character behavior, they realize the body swap is real.  This begins a relationship of mutual understanding that nobody else can really understand -- or would even believe (except Mitsuha’s grandmother, who is... familiar with this phenomenon) -- and the plot then pivots to a tense adventure where they use their connection, some crucial information Taki has, the skills of Mitsuha’s friends, and the intervention of Itomori’s patron deity, to save the town from an impending disaster.

And that’s all I’ll say about that, because I really do think this is something you should go into blind.  My only remaining comments are that (1) the red string of fate is critically important imagery, and is particularly interesting to me here because, if I took a particular scene correctly, Mitsuha made her own red string of fate from sheer necessity, which is a very different twist on that trope, and (2) I am now curious about the history of the body-swapping phenomenon in-universe.

W/A/S: 4?/2/2

Weeb: As mentioned above, symbolism of the Red String of Fate shows up throughout the movie, as do the occasional distinctly Japanese quirk like a wildly out-of-place vending machine or a café with dogs, and but for the most part it’s a cross-cultural story of understanding and dealing with someone else’s life, and of forming a connection other people don’t -- can’t -- truly understand, and to some extent of divides between urban and rural and modern and traditional that I think could play out in any country with just the local symbolism tweaked.  The significance and content of Shinto beliefs and practices depicted, particularly kuchikamizake, are made pretty explicit, so although foreign to the vast majority of the non-Japanese audience, I feel like this movie also has nearly no barrier to entry for people not familiar with the cultural context, so I don’t want to rate it very high on this scale.

Ass: Look.  It involves teenagers switching bodies.  What do you think they do?  Especially Taki?  But it’s played for laughs, not titillation.

Shit: This movie is beautiful and punched me in the feels and was very satisfying.  The closest I have to a complaint about any aspect of it is that the musical breaks that I guess are supposed to mark acts of the movie almost make it feel like binge-watching a short series instead of watching a single self-contained movie.

[thenightling]

The New Netflix / Nickelodeon movies:

I watched the Rocko’s Modern life and Invader Zim Netflix / Nickelodeon movies. today.  

First Rocko: 

Rock was better than I expected.   

I was worried it might be boring and preachy with the plot focus on Ralph Bighead transitioning to Rachel Bighead.   The protagonists took the change well.   Ed Bighead (Rachel’s father) reacted poorly but to my relief it wasn’t out of transphobia itself but actually Ed was just having a bit of a break down because there had been too many changes in his life all at once.    First with the return of Rocko (whom he never liked.)  Then the trouble at work.  And finally reuniting with his long-lost son only to find he actually has a daughter.   Mrs. Bighead took it a lot better than Ed.  She even immediately found her a cute pair of shoes to wear (which was adorable).    

Rocko still had a lot of the classic Rocko humor but it sends a bit of a mixed message.  The majority of the plot is pro-progress and change.  Rocko’s Modern Life was always supposed to reflect... well, modern life, pop culture and technology, hence the show’s name.  However there were a few moments that deviated from that like their repeated digs at barely recognizable and bad reboots such as the two trend chameleon twins trying to make an unfunny and soulless Fatheads cartoon reboot in cheap CGI. (Sounds like the Rocko show creators were reacting to someone’s suggestion for what the movie should be.  And I loved that dig.) My big complaint about the Rocko movie is it relies heavily on “Remember this?” and “Remember that?” It’s full of references and nods just so you’ll be like “Oooh, I remember when they did that!”  and “I remember that guy!” They even had Rocko’s Bighead VHS tape be orange in reference to 90s Nickelodeon home videos. (which was funny but still a Nostalgia-trap.)  It kind of preyed on nostalgia at times which was a little distracting but in general it was good.

______________________

Invader Zim.

I must admit The Invader Zim animated movie was a little better than the Rocko one.   It felt like an actual episode of Invader Zim with far less “Remember this?” and “Remember That?” moments.  It didn’t prey on Nostalgia the way the Rocko movie sometimes did.  

The animation for Invader Zim was very, very good, and clearly an upgrade while keeping the characters pretty much to their original models.  It was as if the cartoon had just gotten an improved budget.

It was good hearing the original voice actors in both these animated movies.    

Some favorite moments included Dib’s anime-esque opening narration.  The use of Tak’s spaceship (and its personality.)  The All-Mighty Tallest flailing in a distorted reality where they were apparently puppets. And Dib’s surprisingly heartfelt family plot.  However it was painfully predictable (and a bit annoying as I saw this trope done to death with skeptic parents in 80s cartoons like the Real Ghostbusters) that his father never accepted that aliens are real, no matter what he went through. But at least Dib now knows his father is proud of him.  That part was sweet.  I just get annoyed at the skeptic that never changes their views even when it becomes ridiculous that they doubt what is going on.  It hasn’t been funny to me in decades.  I don’t think that was ever funny to me.  

One disturbing thing was the Professor Clembrain (Membrane clone) that sounds and looks nothing like Professor Membrane and is obsessed with chocolate pudding.  If that thing was made from Membrane’s DNA it might have been intelligent once but there is a creepy tell-tale scare in the middle of his forehead, indicating a lobotomy scar.  That is dark.   But Invader Zim always had subtle darkness if you were looking for it.

I also wonder how bad-off is Nickelodeon that they had to release the movies based on two of their own shows over on Netflix just to afford the classic animation styles and voice actors?  That’s a little depressing when you think about it too long.

Still it was good to visit with these old friends,  Especially you, ZIIIIIIIIIIIM! 

[the-desolated-quill]

‘But They’re Covered In Nipples’: The Story Of Destroy All Humans - Quill’s Scribbles

Another E3 has come and gone. There was some good announcements. Square Enix unveiled their Avengers game, Keanu Reeves came on stage to give us the release date of Cyberpunk 2077, Ubisoft are making another Watch Dogs set in London, and... um... what else happened?

Oh yeah!

DESTROY ALL HUMANS IS BACK!!!!!!

Yes, the cult classic Destroy All Humans is returning next year, developed by THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games. This was quite possibly the nicest surprise I’ve ever had. When the teaser trailer came up on my YouTube recommendations, I practically screamed the house down. It’s a level of excitement I felt when 20th Century Fox announced they were finally making a Deadpool movie. 

Yeah. That excited.

Destroy All Humans was my favourite video game series growing up. I played the first two games non-stop on my PS2 and I even bought a Nintendo Wii and PS3 just so I could play Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon (yeah, we’ll get to them). Unfortunately, while the series was reasonably successful, it never quite broke through into the mainstream, and it ended up having a very short lifespan, making it one of the most underrated franchises of all time.

So, to mark the return of Crypto and Pox, I thought I’d take a retrospective look at the series as a whole. Analysing each game in the franchise and talking about what made them so good, whilst also looking at how it faded into obscurity and how THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games can hopefully avoid this fate with their remake.

Radioactive, Exploding, Zombie Cows

The first Destroy All Humans was developed by THQ and Pandemic Studios (the latter probably most famous for making the original Star Wars Battlefront games. You know? The good ones that weren’t overloaded with loot boxes and microtransactions) and was released in 2005 on the PS2 and Xbox. You play as a Furon warrior called Cryptosporidium 137, or Crypto for short, who is tasked with harvesting the brains of humans in order to extract pure Furon DNA from them. His leader Orthopox 13, or Pox, explains that the Furons are at risk of cloning themselves into extinction as they are unable to reproduce naturally due to a lack of genitalia and the DNA in their cloning banks are starting to degrade. Fortunately the Furons visited prehistoric Earth on their way back from destroying the Martians and took the opportunity to ‘let off some steam’ with the natives. As a result, humans possess a strand of Furon DNA that can hopefully restore the Furons’ reproductive organs. Unfortunately a secret government organisation called Majestic (a sort of cross between Project Blue Book and the Men in Black) have caught wind of the Furon invasion due to Crypto 136 crash landing in Roswell 10 years earlier. So Crypto 137 will have to be extra cautious in his quest to take over Earth.

The game was released four years after Grand Theft Auto III, which had completely revolutionised gaming with its open world sandbox. As a result, other companies were attempting their own open worlds and putting their own spin on them. While Destroy All Humans didn’t quite have the same scale as GTA, it made up for it with quality over quantity. The game offered six small open world areas for players to have fun in and its central premise was utterly captivating. After countless games where you had to fight alien invaders, Destroy All Humans allowed you to play as the alien invader.

Pandemic Studios completely embraced the alien invasion premise, giving the player a vast number of weapons and abilities to wreak havoc on planet Earth. You had access to weapons like the Zap O Matic, Disintegrator Ray and Anal Probe (no, really, there’s actually a gun called the Anal Probe and it’s as funny as it sounds) as well as mental abilities such as Psychokinesis, Hypnotism and the Cortex Scan, which allowed you to read the thoughts of humans and was also used to help maintain your Holoblob disguise in stealth missions. And if that isn’t cool enough, you also get your own flying saucer, which you can use to destroy buildings and landmarks. The game gave you a lot of freedom, essentially dropping you in a small destructible playground and telling you to go and enjoy yourself.

But the thing I loved most about the first game was the writing. The plot itself is actually pretty good with plenty of twists and turns as the military and Majestic become more and more desperate to stop you. And the humour, my God the humour! Honestly Destroy All Humans remains to this day one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. It’s use of satirical humour and 50s pop culture references never failed to make me chuckle. There was one moment that I’ll always remember where I scanned the mind of a police officer and it revealed that he was thinking about forming the Village People. If only he could find a cowboy, an Indian and a construction worker. 

The game’s main source of comedy mostly came from poking fun at the culture and attitudes of the time period. 1950s America was of course gripped by ‘the Red Scare,’ which the game mocks frequently as we see Majestic and the US government try desperately to cover up alien activity by blaming the death and destruction on communists, to the point where it just gets more and more absurd. At the end of each mission, a newspaper headline is shown, often blaming recent events on freak weather or communist propaganda. Yes, that should explain perfectly why people’s heads are exploding and why the cows are glowing green. It’s all perfectly normal. No aliens here. What’s that? A little green man in a flying saucer is blowing up ice cream trucks? Damn you commies!

The game also pokes fun at 50s sci-fi B movies, often parodying and lampshading the tropes and gimmicks one would expect in a low budget sci-fi flick. For example, the game ends with you fighting a giant robot that houses the President’s brain. It’s fully aware of how ridiculous and stupid it all is and clearly revels in it. Killer robots, mind control, radioactive animals, mad scientists and secret government conspiracies galore. Destroy All Humans is very much a love letter to cheesy sci-fi.

But by far the biggest draw was the main characters. Crypto and Pox. They’re both such funny, wonderfully realised and likeable characters. Pox is voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz, who you may remember from Invader Zim, and he gives the character a maniacal glee. I honestly could listen to his rants all day. He’s the quintessential evil genius. Crypto meanwhile is voiced by J. Grant Albrecht, who gives the character a Jack Nicholson-esque voice. Unlike Pox, Crypto is crass, crude and craves destruction, which often puts him at odds with Pox, who favours more subtle styles of invasion such as mind control. The two characters often bicker and squabble, which never fails to be entertaining, and yet there is an underlying respect and fondness for each other that helps ground the relationship. It’s the perfect double act.

Destroy All Humans was a good game, but does it still hold up? Well there are a few issues. Controls can be a bit clunky at times and missions can often get repetitive. Destroy x number of farmers. Collect x amount of DNA. That kind of thing. Also, annoyingly, there’s no checkpoints, which means if you die or fail the mission, you’re automatically sent back to the Furon Mothership and you have to start the mission all over again. But the writing, humour and entertainment value more than make up for it.

Hot Monkey Love

While the first game wasn’t what you’d call a hit, it was successful enough for THQ to commission a sequel. Destroy All Humans 2 was released in 2006 on PS2 and Xbox, just one year after the first game, and this time Crypto was going international.

Set in the 1960s, ten years after the events of the first game, the KGB in Russia learn about the Furon’s takeover of America and plan a counterattack. They nuke the Furon Mothership, killing Pox, and try to assassinate Crypto 138, who is posing as the President of the United States. The assassination fails and Pox’s mind is able to survive in hologram form. The two then embark on a global adventure, seeking revenge against the KGB and uncovering a massive conspiracy that puts the entire Furon invasion at risk.

Destroy All Humans 2 is an ambitious sequel that increases its scope from the first game. No longer confined to America, we see Crypto terrorise San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Russia and even the Moon. Our arsenal of weapons are also expanded. The original weapons from the first game return as well as some all new ones such as the Disclocator, which fires a purple disc at a human or vehicle and sends them flying around the map, the Burrow Beast, which summons a Tremors-esque space worm to cause carnage, and Meteor Strike, which I think speaks for itself. We also get a few new mental abilities such as Transmogrify, which allows you to turn objects into ammo, and Free Love, which causes everyone in the general vicinity to start dancing, allowing you to make a quick getaway while they’re distracted. The saucer too has some extra features, including a cloaking device and the ability to drain vehicles of health using your Abducto Beam.

This sequel pretty much takes everything that worked from the first game whilst tweaking the things that didn’t. The GTA style Alert system got a complete overhaul. If you want to raise or lower the Alert level, all you have to do is bodysnatch a cop or a soldier and make a call using a police box (you can also make prank calls from them, which is good for a giggle). Holoblobbing has been replaced with Bodysnatching, which works so much better and it does away with the annoying Concentration meter, so you can PK cars and humans to your heart’s content. There’s also a lot more stuff to do now. There are numerous collectables such as Alien Artefacts, which unlocks the Burrow Beast weapon, and FuroTech Cells, which are your main currency that can be used to upgrade your health and weapons. Missions have greater variety than in the first game. There’s a lot more side missions, including Odd Jobs and my personal favourites the Cult of Arkvoodle missions, where Crypto brainwashes humans to worship the Furon God Arkvoodle of the Sacred Crotch.

As you can tell, the humour is still just as wacky and ridiculous as ever. Destroy All Humans 2 lampoons and ridicules the 60s mercilessly, taking aim at the Cold War and the hippie counterculture movement. It also pokes fun at 60s sci-fi films, spy films and Japanese movies like Godzilla. In fact there’s a boss fight that involves you fighting a Godzilla-esque monster and it’s honestly the best boss fight in the series. It regains health by destroying buildings, so you have to destroy them first before you can kill the monster. It’s a great premise.

Story-wise, Destroy All Humans 2 is a worthy successor, raising the stakes and expanding the lore. We’re introduced to the Blisk, the Martians that were presumed extinct by the Furons millions of years ago. It’s a brilliant conflict and ostensibly allows the developers to make commentaries on America and Russia at the time using the Furons and the Blisk respectively as stand-ins. Crypto and Pox are well written, funny and likeable as ever and we’re also introduced to an assortment of new characters, including the Russian spy Natalya and MI6 agent Ponsomby (voiced by none other than Anthony Head from Buffy). The game is engaging and rewarding, but it crucially never takes itself too seriously. For example there’s one instance in Tokyo where Crypto learns about the battle between the White and Black Ninjas and he guesses that the conflict started because of the cliche student betraying his master type origin, but it turns out that both groups of ninjas were originally Grey, but then they ran out of grey fabric and disagreed over which colour they should be instead. There’s so many great comedic moments like that and they pretty much hit bullseyes every time.

That being said, there was one aspect of the game I didn’t like and that was the crude sex jokes. Crypto 138 is the first clone to have pure Furon DNA, which means he now has genitalia. As a result, this new incarnation of Crypto is far more randy than 137 was in the first game.  This mostly takes the form of Crypto constantly trying to hit on Natalya, despite her showing no sexual interest, which I personally found pretty gross. Worse still, the game ends with Crypto cloning Natalya and ‘making a few adjustments’ so she will consent to have sex with him. The word ‘creepy’ doesn’t begin to cover how I felt about this. If THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games ever decide to remake the second game, I really hope they consider rethinking that ending because... Jesus!

On the whole, Destroy All Humans 2 was a brilliant sequel. It was also sadly the last Destroy All Humans game to be developed by Pandemic Studios before they were bought by EA and eventually shut down in 2009. Unfortunately this would have a severe impact on the future of the series going forward.

Limp Willy

The next game in the series was a spinoff for the Nintendo Wii, released in early 2008 and developed by Locomotive Games. A PS2 version was also planned, but was scrapped due to budget cuts (remember this. It��ll become relevant later).

Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed was... underwhelming, to say the least. Set in the 1970s, six years after the second game, Crypto and Pox have opened a fast food restaurant called Big Willy as a way of disposing of the corpses left behind during Crypto’s missions. However a rival fast food chain, run by Colonel Kluckin’, is stealing their business and socialite Patty Wurst is threatening to expose Big Willy (smirk). So it’s up to Crypto to protect Pox’s Big Willy (haha) and maintain their cover on Earth.

Now you’re probably thinking this sounds quite tame compared to the previous two games, and yeah, it is. But it’s a spinoff, so I can understand to a certain extent. However there are a few narrative discrepancies. The big one being Crypto has retired from being the President. No explanation given as to why and we have no idea what Crypto is doing instead. When we first see him, he’s watching TV. He doesn’t even know Big Willy exists until Pox brings it up. So what’s going on exactly? Are they still trying to invade Earth or have they gone native? Also, compared to the grand conspiracy stories of the previous games, Crypto protecting a fast food restaurant sounds a little beneath him.

Gameplay is virtually unchanged from the previous game. There’s some new guns such as Ball Lightning and the Zombie Gun, but nothing special. The biggest addition is Big Willy, the restaurant mascot that’s actually a Furon battle mech in disguise. It’s... fine. Not that much different from the Saucer really. We also get some new locations. Harbor City, Fairfield in Kentucky, Fantasy Atoll (a weak parody of Fantasy Island) and Vietmahl (a painfully obvious homage to Vietnam). None of these locations are particularly interesting however. There’s also a multiplayer mode, which... exists.

Honestly the game as a whole is just lacklustre. The story just isn’t as good as the first two games and the humour doesn’t have the same wit or intelligence. Most of the comedy surrounds the fact that Pox has called his restaurant Big Willy and isn’t entirely aware of the double entendre, which admittedly is funny for the first few missions, but by the time you’ve finished Harbor City and move on to Fairfield, the joke gets old real fast. There’s less of an effort to actually satirise the culture or films of the time, instead merely making 70s pop culture references without ever actually doing anything with it. It’s like the Family Guy school of comedy. Take Fantasy Atoll for instance. A pisstake of Fantasy Island, but instead of Mr. Roarke and Tatoo, we get Mr. Pork and Ratpoo. That’s the level of humour we’re talking about here.

What’s worse is that J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Steven Horwitz don’t return as Crypto and Pox. Sean Donnellan and Darryl Kurylo voice the characters instead and it’s just not the same. It doesn’t feel like Crypto and Pox. So from the very first cutscene, we’re already off on the wrong foot.

And then there’s a bunch of other stuff that I find really questionable. The most obvious being the revelation that Colonel Kluckin’ makes his chicken wings from the corpses of the Vietmahl (Vietnam) war, which just seems in very bad taste to me. If there is a satirical point being made here, I can’t find it for the life of me. There’s also some side missions where Crypto finds out that he and Natalya have a son, which goes absolutely nowhere and doesn’t feel like something that should be in a Destroy All Humans game.

Overall, Big Willy Unleashed was a massive dud meant to tide us over until Destroy All Humans 3 came out later in the year. Honestly the one aspect of it I thought had potential was the side missions involving Crypto and Pox being assessed by a Furon Efficiency Expert called Toxoplasma Gondii. Considering what happened in the second game, including the destruction of the Furon Mothership, the return of the Blisk and the Furon operation on Earth being jeoprodised, this could have been a great premise for a sequel.

Instead what we got was... 

Disco Inferno

Oh boy. Where do I begin?

Path Of The Furon was developed by THQ and Sandblast Games and released in December 2008 on the Xbox 360 in North America. The PS3 version was cancelled because Sandblast (and Locomotive Games) was closed down before development was finished due to THQ’s financial problems at the time. However the PS3 version was released in Europe and Australia, so either THQ got another studio to complete it or, more likely, they just released it in a broken, buggy state.

Fans really didn’t like this game, myself included, but before we go tearing it a new one, lets look at the few positives the game has. First off, J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Steven Horwitz return to voice Crypto and Pox, which is great. As a result, the original chemistry is back and they help salvage the game when the writing fails to deliver. There are a few cool new weapons, like the Black Hole Gun and the Venus Human Trap, which creates a giant man eating plant. The Saucer’s weapons have been tweaked, so now they affect the environment as well as destroy buildings. So if you fire your Death Ray at the ground, for example, you can create scorch marks. PK now has its own dedicated button, which means you can pick up and throw objects whilst using your guns simultaneously. There’s also the titular ‘Path Of Enlightenment,’ which upgrades your mental abilities significantly as well as allowing you to freeze time.

That’s the good stuff. The bad stuff is... pretty much everything else.

The humour is, again, quite poor. Rather than satirising 70s culture, the game continues to make references to 70s films like The Godfather and Star Wars, but not actually doing anything with them. Just making the reference. The writing as a whole is quite substandard as the plot pretty much recycles the plots of Destroy All Humans 2 and Big Willy Unleashed, except instead of the Big Willy restaurant, it’s the Space Dust casino and instead of the Blisk, it’s Nexosporidium warriors, who are basically Furon cyborgs. Things do threaten to get a bit interesting when Crypto and Pox discover someone has been manufacturing synthetic Furon DNA, but nothing ever really comes of it. Instead the game focuses mainly on the Master.

Ah yes. The Master.

In an attempt to recapture the magic of the second game, Path Of The Furon tries to spoof kung-fu movies just like how DAH 2 spoofed spy films. Unfortunately this leads us to a slew of unfunny gags, cultural appropriation and some of the worst racial stereotyping I think I’ve ever seen. The Master is a Furon who crashed on Earth a hundred years ago and embroiled himself in Eastern culture, enhancing his PK abilities. This is what he looks like:

YYYYeah.

Oh and if that’s not awkward enough, he also speaks in an over the top ‘ah so’ accent. It’s incredibly cringeworthy and made me want to crawl out of my body and hide in the darkest corner I could possibly find. How anyone involved in this game’s development could look at this deeply racist and downright embarrassing excuse for a character and think this was okay, I don’t know.

And before anyone tries to excuse it by saying that he has been living in China for a hundred years, so he’s bound to pick a few things up, please note that Nolan North is in this game playing the Furon Emperor Meningitis, who also has an over the top ‘ah so’ accent. Now I suppose some could argue that the game is satirising how Asian people were portrayed at the time, but if that’s what the game is going for, they’ve failed miserably. See, the problem with that argument is that replicating something doesn’t count as satire. By recreating over the top racist caricatures, you’re not making fun of them. If anything you’re just reinforcing them. The first game’s satire of the Red Scare worked so much better than this because there was an actual point behind it. It comments on how paranoid the people of the 50s were at the time by using Majestic to exploit the threat of communism in order to cover up alien activity, and everyone willingly buys into it because of that sheer paranoia. Now yes, admittedly the humour in Destroy All Humans isn’t the most sophisticated in the world, but it used to be a LOT better than this. Not only do I find the racial stereotyping in this game deeply offensive, it’s also frankly beneath this franchise. And it’s not just limited to the Chinese either. The final act takes us to the Furon homeworld (which was pretty underwhelming after four games worth of buildup) and we meet another Furon called Endometriosis whose only characteristics are that he has an Italian accent and wears a beret. It’s these broad strokes and general laziness that makes this game such a disappointing experience.

Path Of The Furon is subpar in every way imaginable. The writing, the humour, the gameplay and even the graphics. The first two games looked so much better than this and they were on older consoles from the previous generation. It’s shocking.

It’s hard to blame Sandblast Games for this considering they were shut down before development was finished. It was THQ’s mismanagement and financial woes that killed off this franchise and indeed themselves. The company went bankrupt in 2012 and their various IPs were sold off to other studios, with Nordic Games buying the lions’ share, including Destroy All Humans, which briefly reignited hopes that we might get another game, but that seemed unlikely considering the franchise has never exactly been a mainstream success. There was even talks of doing an animated sitcom based on the games for Fox, to be written by the same guy who did King Of The Hill, but that never went anywhere.

No. It seemed like Destroy All Humans was gone for good and fans reluctantly made peace with that. It was fun while it lasted, but perhaps it was time to move on.

Oh The Furonity!

I’m not going to lie. I was pretty sure we were never going to see Destroy All Humans return. Not just because of its lack of mainstream appeal, but also because game development studios and publishers in recent years have become more and more reluctant to make single player, mid-tier games. Instead pivoting toward massive triple A releases and ‘live services’. So it came as a rather pleasant surprise when Nordic Games, now named THQ Nordic, released Darksiders III in 2018, a sequel to a series of games that were also not very mainstream but still had a significant cult following. This briefly reignited a small flicker of hope within me that maybe, just maybe, we might see our favourite Furon return.

And as you already know, I got my wish. A new Destroy All Humans game will be released next year by THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games.

So what can this remake learn from the franchise’s past? Well thankfully the writing and voice acting is going to remain the same, so story, characterisation and humour won’t be an issue. They’re also incorporating elements from the sequels such as Transmogrify from Destroy All Humans 2 and giving PK its own button like in Path Of The Furon. There’s also a few new additions that I’m excited about such as the ability to dodge and strafe using the jetpack. That should make combat much more exciting and dynamic. I know a few people have a problem with the new cartoony designs of the humans and the world, but I honestly don’t mind. In fact I think it suits the tone and setting quite well. Hopefully people will eventually get used to it. The big question mark hovering over all this is whether they’re planning to remake the other games in the series. I for one would love to see a remake of the second game. As for Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon, I think it’s best to leave them firmly in the past. The big dream would be to see Crypto and Pox have further adventures together beyond the first two games. Hopefully even have enough sequels to get the characters to the present day. We’ll just have to wait and see what the future brings. My only word of advice for them would be to never forget what made the first two games so good and so beloved. Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon lost their way, as its writing and humour grew lazier and lazier. If we are fortunate enough to get more games, the developers will need to remember what it was about the first game that made it so special and build off of it.

This is a second chance. Not a lot of franchises get this. Don’t waste it. Here’s hoping the remake will provide the definitive Destroy All Humans experience and that it will gain the success it deserves.

[lcmawson]

Part 1 I'm sending this to all of the autism related blogs I'm following because I'm not seeing this talked about anywhere at all and if I'm not just imagining things I think someone with a bigger reach than me needs to start talking about this. Recently a trailer was released for a horror movie called Brightburn, the general gist of the movie seems to be what if Superman were an evil horror movie villain starting when he was a little boy.

Part 2 Now, I can see how that could be something with potential as a horror movie. The problem is when I watched the trailer it seemed to me the little boy was coded as autistic. They made an autistic child the murderous villain of a horror movie. If I knew how to attach a youtube video to an ask I would but you can find the trailer easily just by searching for Brightburn.~~~~Yeah, I saw the trailer, and I here are my thoughts:1. A trailer is not enough to pick up on characterisation in a movie. All we see are very quick shots. That’s not to say that we should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it will be fine, but I refuse to start a shitstorm before actually seeing the piece of media that the shitstorm is about.2. Alien-coding looks like neurodivergent-coding in movies. Like, it just does. Always. There has never been an alien character who was supposed to have noticeably alien mannerisms that hasn’t been written in a way that lines up with neurodivergence.3. That includes Man of Steel, which went hard on the alien angle of Superman, and that this movie is clearly riffing on (there are shots lifted almost directly).4. All creepy children in horror movies are coded as ND. All of them. Always.5. #4 is a problem all on it’s own, but that’s a discussion that I don’t feel this movie necessarily warrants because...

6. This just looks like a bad movie? Like, the newest set of Superman films kind of ruined the idea of “what if Superman was more realistic (by which we mean grimdark)?” Like, the fact that this film lifts so much from Man of Steel is weird because it’s just taking what MoS was actually attempting to do to a ridiculous extreme? So it lacks the stark contrast of, say, a film that did the same with the iconography of the Richard Donner films. Or, hell, if they think people won’t remember that, the Smallville TV show. Anyway, even if it looked like it was going to do a good job on its premise... The premise doesn’t really fit with where we are right now on the grimdark/bright-and-happy pop culture scale. People are sick of “deconstructions” of superheroes and I think this film is gonna suffer for it.So, yeah, the round up of my thoughts is: aliens are always coded as ND which I don’t see as a problem in a lot of media, in the same way I don’t see androids coded as ND as a problem. It only becomes a problem when those characters are dehumanised. This film looks like it might dehumanise the character, but I don’t feel that we can be certain on that from a trailer, though it is a fairly safe bet because if it’s the “creepy child” horror trope, they’re always coded as ND, which is nearly always a problem because they’re nearly always dehumanised. But that’s a different conversation that I feel is more productively had by talking about other horror films until this film is out and we can a) talk with certainty and b) know if this film will actually be culturally relevant because there’s no point* in fussing over a film that might bomb.***I mean, anyone else can do what they want, but I am tired and busy

**Talking about less popular media is interesting if you wanna do a deep dive into it, but you can’t do that until the film is out, so...

[shark-myths]

Church: Video Meta

This morning it is my great privilege to present a true piece of Peterick scholarship: an intensive examination of the Church video by my dear @leyley09!

I came into the FOB tumblr fandom (as opposed to all those ‘normal’ people out in the world) via two screen-based fandoms - Sherlock and Supernatural - so I am used to overanalyzing camera angles, immediate cuts, and music layered over images. And with a song and a video like Church, it’s impossible not to put some of that to use.

It’s important to remember with any kind of film media that someone has chosen what we are seeing. No one does anything in a single take. Multiple versions of every shot were filmed, and someone specifically selected the ones we get to see because those shots do the best job of telling the story that person wants us to ‘hear’.

For most films or tv shows, that’s generally the director, possibly with some writers or producers thrown in depending on the project. We at The Peterick Institute would like to point out that rumor has it Pete exerts a lot of creative control over the music videos. I’m going to go with “someone” and let you all jump to your preferred conclusions.

continued below the cut!

  We open with one of our protagonists approaching a building before running into Pete. On a surface plot level, there is no purpose for Pete in this scene. The first few seconds were enough to establish that this guy is someone we’re supposed to be watching. So what is the point of having him run into Pete and drop his phone?

Since you’re reading this post on this blog, let’s assume there’s a deeper explanation, shall we?

It could be that the protagonist is a representation of Pete. They are dressed in similar colors. This guy is approaching a building that Pete appears to be leaving. He could be representing a younger version of Pete, one who is on his way into the phase of life that “current” Pete is exiting.

But what about the phone?

The dropping of the phone could represent the temporary loss of communication, which we all know was pretty much the hiatus.

Let’s move on to the building. First point - that is not a church. I've spent way too much of my life in "church", and churches don't have walls like this:

You know what does? Mausoleums (which was nicely confirmed in the behind the scenes video)

There is a major difference between a church and a mausoleum. You go to church to worship. You go to a mausoleum to lay someone to rest. (“you only get what you grieve” … )

(And sure, maybe they just picked it because of the cool stained glass, but how disappointing would that be?)

Let’s go back to that initial image for a second:

That’s right, humans of all sorts, that’s Patrick Stump looking like a Byzantine icon.

Ex: One of my favorite icons from the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. (Patrick’s just got a bigger halo.)

In addition to reinforcing the idea of “holiness” - in western/Christian iconography, only the most holy (“you’re holy to me”) are given a halo - a big, bright circle also does an excellent job of drawing your attention to whatever is inside it. It’s like a bright white bullseye.

Patrick is not the only one who gets caught dead-center in this halo. Less than a minute into the video, so does Pete:

What else is happening at this precise point? Patrick is singing "swallow it for me".

Let me repeat an idea from earlier: someone decided that this ^^ is the mental image you should pull up every time Patrick sings "swallow it for me". (I’ll wait while you process that.)

While Patrick is singing the first verse and Pete’s being holy for swallowing (look, they said it, not me), we meet our other protagonist. Together, these two make up a pair of doomed lovers (the second pair of doomed lovers we’ve seen represented in music videos for this album alone). They appear to be of different ethnicities, which is still frowned upon by some (ignorant) people. So, perhaps they are symbolic of other "non-traditional" relationships?

We cut immediately from their affectionate reunion to this:

To run with our subtext, we’ve cut from Guy-representing-Pete kissing his girlfriend to Patrick in a halo singing “trust me that’s what I will be”.

“Oh the things that you do in the name of what you love” layers directly overtop our doomed lovers being spotted by someone spying from an upper level, someone who is not pleased to see them together. It’s clear they’re taking a risk being together in public, but people do a lot of things (make a lot of risky choices) when they’re “in love”.

Cut immediately to this:

For our surface level plot, Patrick in a coffin singing “you were doomed but just enough” is pretty obvious foreshadowing - this couple is doomed because someone is going to die. But why not throw a few extra layers of subtext on that, just because we can.

First, I want to introduce another layer of sub-plot. Remember Pete, from earlier? Leaving a mausoleum (a place you go to lay someone to rest, to grieve) for no apparent reason? Can it be a coincidence that Patrick is the *only* one we see in a coffin?

This Patrick here, this is not the current “version” of Patrick. This is not 2018 Patrick’s aesthetic. In addition to the suit jacket and the fedora, he has obviously had makeup applied. While this does also emphasize the idea that he’s supposed to be dead, it also harkens back to a time when Patrick had more pronounced cheekbones. (This is by no means a negative observation; people change over time in all sorts of ways, and THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.) There has been some debate among the three of us contributing to this meta about what period this is supposed to represent, but personally, I don’t know that the specific time period matters. I think what’s important here is that a past version of Patrick has been laid to rest. WE WILL COME BACK TO THIS.

In addition to the foreshadowing for our doomed lovers, if that particular line is supposed to throw back to anything besides "I'm half doomed and you're semi-sweet", I don't know what it is.

Let’s move on to The-Guy-In-Charge.

We at The Peterick Institute refuse to think it is anything less than intentional that this guy appears in a similar outfit to that worn by “God” in the Youngblood Chronicles. Someone with a lot of power who walks into a “church” to punish people for a forbidden behavior? That’s a pretty common viewpoint. He’s also making a “prayer” gesture with his hands post-phone call. But it’s not exactly like “God”, is it? It’s just the outer layers that are the snappy white suit. Underneath, he’s wearing a dark shirt. To me, that reads as someone who just thinks they’re god - someone who thinks they’re that important, thinks they rule over your whole world… someone like a record label executive who might think they get to decide who you can and can’t be romantically involved with in public, perhaps?

Plus the ‘villain in a white suit’ trope is very common to Pete’s favorite pop culture time period. And when has Pete ever been able to resist a pop culture reference?

FUN FACT INTERRUPTION:

If you pause just right, you can get Pete making this face at the same time Patrick’s singing “I’d get on my knees”, which isn’t related to anything really, it just makes me giggle.

Next, our “villains” enter directly out of a bright light - bit like the “light at the end of the tunnel”, yes? This really just reinforces the idea that this is some kind of “divine justice”....or at least justice that thinks it is divine.

Our star-crossed lovers attempt to escape. They clearly know that this was a possibility. They knew being together was dangerous. They must have thought they were safe in this crowd because they weren't being the slightest bit discreet, but they weren't.

It’s fairly easy to see that, while they’re trying to hide in a back room, our lady protagonist takes off a necklace and puts it on her boyfriend. But it happens very fast, and it’s difficult to see what’s on the chain. It took me several viewings and a lot of frame-by-frame skipping to figure it out -- it’s a ring. (Seriously, just when I think this video can’t get any more painful.) She pulls it out from underneath her choker, so it’s something she was hiding.

These two aren’t just hiding a relationship, they’re hiding the nature of that relationship, the seriousness of it. So why reveal it now? And even better question, why follow the ring with a shot of Patrick in the coffin?

You've got to have a lot of nerve to drag someone out into a group of people, into a well-lit public setting, AND THEN KILL THEM. These guys had the perfect opportunity to stab our protagonist in the back room, and Guy-In-Charge chose to drag him out of there, shove him into the crowd (getting everyone's attention), and then stab him. That's a helluva statement. That isn’t a small statement for a small audience ("I don't want you to be with this particular guy"); that’s a big statement for a public audience (“this is what happens to people who don’t follow the rules”). This is someone being made an example in order to scare other people.

When our hero gets stabbed....he doesn't bleed right. That's not what fake Hollywood blood looks like; that's not what actual human blood looks like. I’ve seen some suggestions that it’s glitter. It is sparkly. But frankly, even if there’s glitter in it, the color/consistency looks a lot like the shitty grape juice I've spent most of my life drinking for Communion. (**After seeing the BTS video, there’s definitely a liquid involved.) WE WILL COME BACK TO THIS MOMENTARILY.

The last thing you see in this video is Patrick-in-the-coffin. Not the woman who's just seen her boyfriend murdered, not the two of them together in some kind of Romeo-and-Juliet style final embrace. No, the last thing you see is what appears to be a younger version of Patrick laid out like a wake. That's the impression they have chosen to leave us with, the one image they want to linger on our minds along with the final line of the song, “I’d get on my knees, yeah”.

So we’ve seen one layer of story - a pair of lovers torn apart against their will, a couple who are willing to risk everything to be together, a relationship that ends in conflict due to outside forces. If you’re familiar with shark-myths’ Tryst Theory, this could not fall any more in line. (If you’re not, um, this is basically it without the details.)

And underneath this surface layer, we have a past version of Patrick being laid to rest with only one visible mourner:

And the thing that we are supposed to associate most with this “dead” Patrick?

 “I’d get on my knees”

He sings some part of that line four times from the coffin, five times if you want to count the final “yeah” after the last actual lyric.

(If you’re curious about the other things coffin!Patrick says, it’s “you were doomed but just enough” 2x and “confess my love”, so feel free to read into that however you’d like.)

Now that we’ve done our scene-by-scene breakdown, what are some other themes we’re seeing in this story?

First, I promised to address this:

Pete singing along is not a new phenomena, for sure, but singing along to a line like “confess my love” is….interesting, to put it mildly. It puts us at The Peterick Institute in mind of this quote from Patrick: “I don’t think Pete thinks of himself as a bass player. I think he thinks of himself as a singer. He sings through me.” What a lovely demonstration of Pete using Patrick’s voice to express himself.

Next, I want to touch briefly on how little we see Joe and Andy in this video. While that used to be (unfortunately) more common, more recent videos have been better about giving screentime to these guys. This was one of the first things I noticed watching this video the first time through. You're nearly halfway through the video before Joe or Andy get their first close up or solo shot, and neither of them gets centered on that halo like Pete and Patrick do. Andy gets closest, but it looks more like an accident, just because the drums are set up in front of it. It’s not the nicely centered in the frame kind of shot that both Patrick and Pete have. In addition, neither of them play any part in the coffin!Patrick subplot whatsoever, which also reduces their screen time.

This is interesting mostly as it relates to Pete. Patrick is the one signing; by default, he becomes the center of attention. One would expect the majority of the “concert” screen time to go to him. Additional “concert” screen time should be split fairly equally between the rest of the band. It is not.

You have two options for why that is. 1) The people-making-decisions are idiots and assumed that everyone would rather look at Pete than any of the other guys, or 2) it's intentional. What's the point of making the people you see most in the video besides our doomed lovers Patrick and Pete? Gee, I wonder.

 Communion --

I mentioned Communion earlier while discussing the not-blood we see when our protagonist is stabbed. I think that’s a very relevant point. For one thing, it’s one of the main rituals associated with “church”. For many believers, that ritual confers a degree of holiness upon you when you participate in it. You’re supposed to confess and repent of your sins before you take Communion; for at least that brief moment, you’re as holy as you’re going to be. (At least in the tradition I’m familiar with.)  

In addition, Communion is a fairly common part of a lot of funeral services, which is also very appropriate for our setting and subplots here.

And it’s not the first time this has come up:

In case you’re wondering why I chose only these two images, it’s because there aren’t matching images for Joe and Andy. You get a shot that is probably supposed to imply that they participated, but you never actually see them do it. (And shhh, don’t tell me that it’s probably for the same reasons you don’t see Andy eating/drinking/doing drugs in Young Volcanoes, shhhh.)

In my experience, two people dressed in white up in front of God taking Communion…...are getting married. (My dad wore a white tux in my parents’ wedding, so...)

 Death/Rebirth --

This is not an idea that is new to this album. A quick glance back at SRAR and the Youngblood Chronicles is plenty of evidence of that. We’re connecting it directly to the images of a past!Patrick though. The fact that Patrick is made to look so different in the coffin than he does in the “performance” shots is a huge visual clue.  As I mentioned earlier, I personally don’t think it matters which period of time this past!Patrick represents for each of us. What matters for the metaphor is that a past version of Patrick is dead/gone/doesn’t exist any more. As someone who was overly-churched, it reminded me a little of the idea that Christians are (IDEALLY) supposed to "die to the world" -- leave ideas/behaviors that aren't church-compliant behind them, in the past, as they are "reborn" into a sparkly new-and-improved version of themselves.

We’ve seen Patrick do this before in the Save Rock & Roll video, where he rejects the [brainwashed] version of himself and ends up in heaven, in a new-and-improved (AND WHOLE) version of himself.

To me, the depiction of a past version of Patrick - AND ONLY PATRICK - as being dead is big, huge jumping-up-and-down-with-pom-poms metaphor that the version of Patrick we’re being shown in the coffin doesn’t exist anymore.

As we at The Institute debated this issue, I received the following message from @shark-myths:

“The idea of possibilities dying out and ending *in order for them to be rejuvenated* is so key here. Like, they were doomed from the start and have always been each other's certain doom, and they destroyed each other and the band, and then impossibly and against all odds they ROSE AGAIN TOGETHER. Now there are no limits.

if you believe in peterick no end is final and no death is real.”

I read that email, minimized my browser, and looked right at this on my wallpaper slideshow:

“No end is final” indeed

To borrow one of my favorite pop culture quotes:  "And what do we say about coincidence?" "The universe is rarely so lazy."  

  Thank you Leyna!!! Your contribution to scholarship will live on forever. Just like Peterick. 💜💜💜