#the culling of hexes also kind of sucked. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

feynites · 7 years

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(1/2) omg I have to tell you that I just came across your tumblr post about "Evil Chancellor Traytor" & it made me laugh so hard and reminded me so much of my own childhood in which me & my sister had all kinds of elaborate characters for our society of toys (including one of my mom's old Barbies from the 60's whose hands had been chewed by mice in my grandmother's attic) & my little brother also used to follow our stories-anyway the point is! What you wrote was hilarious & I would totally...

(2/2) ... read more tales from your society of childhood toys! It was hilarious and awesome! Also you seem really cool! Ok that is all! :)

Thank you!! X3

Having siblings you get along with seems to be a real boon on this front, it seems - lots of energy to bounce off of, and someone to consistently share and re-tell all the stories with.

We played a ton of games, although probably none as easily summarized in an entertaining short story as Evil Chancellor Traytor. But. Lemme see... uhm... oh! Okay, we can try the story of the king who was friends with him. King Bazooka.

To begin, we’ll need context. One of the major sources of toys when my siblings and I were a bit younger was the local convenience store (which my dad ran... into the ground). But, while it was around, it had a selection of cheap plastic action figures. Which we could acquire at-cost, and so, we had plenty of them ourselves. This is where we got our cheap Power Rangers knock-off toys (one of which would eventually become the king mentioned in Traytor’s story).

For reference, they looked like this:

There were a few basic models, all of them very ripped, in a variety of colours ranging from the above yellow and red, to blue and pink and white and black and so on and so forth. Their limbs could move and their knees could bend, and their feet and hands could also be rearranged to some extent (I think, maybe not the hands) but they weren’t exactly durable, so their limbs popped off pretty regularly.

Anyway, we had a veritable army of these toys, but also something of a problem with them at first. See, my sister and I were both girls, but none of the models for these toys came with the usual, y’know, curvy boob-and-hips figure that would typically denote them as women. There were pink ones, and of course we were well familiar with the concept that pink = girl, but the pink Ranger Warriors were also savagely ripped. But we didn’t want to have an army of all boys, how would we apply our usual range of soap opera cliches? Who would get unexpectedly pregnant or engaged? In space?

The solution came by way of a library book about female body building, that I had semi-recently discovered and quickly recollected. I, in all my worldly older sister glory, asserted that these toys were totally capable of being women, they were just really muscular women. Skepticism was expressed by my younger brother and sister. The Book was called for. A magazine was acquired instead. Images were found of ripped lady body builders, and scrutinized for accuracy.

Skepticism was retracted. It was agreed that this solution worked, and that, in the tradition set before us by the Power Rangers television show, all pink and yellow versions of the toys (and any others we considered suitably effeminate for some reason or another, but definitely those ones) were The Girl Ones. Dilemma resolved, we immediately set about playing with them, of course, and constructing stories around them and incorporating them into our existing populace of toys. We discovered some neat stuff about these action figures. One was that their hands could hold onto stuff pretty well, and were quite suited to dangling them off of lines and chords and the attachments for blinds and tying them to strings and whipping them around like helicopters. ‘Space exploration’ required a lot of this. Of course, this also meant that our most intrepid heroes tended to be the ones who suffered injuries like ‘lost thumb’, and ‘severed limb’, and ‘complete dismemberment’.

Most of the time, though, when something broke, it could be popped back into place. Thumbs, torsos, and heads were the general exception to this, I seem to recall. But every so often the ball that locked into the socket for a limb’s joint would also break, rather than just popping loose, and then the only hope was glue (which would reattach the limb, but also result in ‘mobility issues’ where it couldn’t move around at all).

So... in essence, we had an army of space-faring disabled gender non-conforming lady bodybuilders, and their brothers/husbands/boyfriends/etc, protecting the universe. We developed ridiculously deep attachments to some of these toys, with all their wonky limbs and wobbly knees and scratched paint, and we’d do our best to keep them away from the dog (but the dog didn’t go for them too often, because the plastic was too hard), and also any adults who might throw them away.

Eventually, though, the convenience store closed, and we no longer had easy access to new Ranger Warriors, or even the option of replacing ones who got too damaged to keep playing with. So my sister and I determined that it was time for our space adventurers to retire. No more whipping them down staircases or tying them to fan blades. They became Space Veterans, who would walk among the populace of other toys, and recount gruesome war stories and endure PTSD flashbacks and sometimes sit outside the tavern, drinking and looking up at the stars. Wistful, but by and large also resigned to the fact that their space exploration days were done, and they had other things to do. Quieter lives to get on with.

All but one.

Bazooka.

See, each Ranger Warrior was named after some kind of weapon. Names ranged from the creatively-dubbed ‘Gun’, to stuff like ‘Scythe’ or ‘Artillery’. The last Ranger Warrior we got before the store went under was a red and silver one, and by then most of the standard names were taken, so we dubbed him ‘Bazooka’. With a name like that, it was possibly inevitable that he was kind of an over-dramatic hothead.

But Bazooka had no battle scars, no lost or broken limbs. He had barely gotten a chance to fight in the Space Wars before his unit was recalled, and the peace treaties were signed. His older sister had a medal of Highest Honours, and had lost mobility in both of her arms, and could tell tall tales about the days when her unit would wade through alien wilds on daring missions. Bazooka was still pretty fresh. Signing up was supposed to be his chance for glory, his chance to prove himself! But instead, he had been washed out with all the old-timers, too.

Even though our space heroes might have retired, though, not all of their enemies did. One of the treaties signed granted an embassy to the Happy Meal Barbies. Twin sisters, forever rooted in place against plastic stands, with eerily off-model eyes. One of them had a bicycle prop, but neither of them could actually move off of their stands, because they were actually alien shapeshifters who had... misunderstood some images of humans, before they ‘locked in’ their final forms and found themselves stuck with them. So one just had this bike, fused to her, that she never rode, and that was technically part of her body. The other I don’t recollect as vividly.

Anyway, they were evil, like genuinely to the bone evil, but also sometimes sympathetic because one of them was part bike. And so of course when the dog claimed the old king, they hatched a scheme to become the Queens of Action Figure Dystopia.

The details of that particular adventure are lost to the sands of time. What is known, though, is that it involved a lot of hexes, and a giant purple marble called The Esper, and when all was said and done the twins only managed to be queens for a short period of time before they were overthrown. In a scene ripped straight from The Transformers Movie (the old cartoon one, not the Michael Bay stuff that was nowhere to be seen yet), Bazooka touched The Esper and ended up becoming the next king by way of ancient whatsits and magical such-and-such, regardless of his appalling lack of actual qualifications. All hail the new king!

He sucked at it. For a long time. The theme of ‘Bazooka has no goddamn idea what he’s doing’ was a pretty substantial one, in my memory, but it probably only lasted for a few days before he started getting his shit in gear and tried to solve problems with methods that did not require explosives. And he earned the friendship of his Evil Chancellor, who he would come to trust above all others and would not stand to hear besmirched (of course, to most other people’s eyes, this just looked like a resilient strain of his incompetence, and general opinion was that Bazooka was well-meaning-but-dim, and Evil Chancellor Traytor was... well... evil).

By the time Traytor died, Bazooka was among the last of the remaining Ranger Warriors. Many had been thrown out by then, culled in an effort to curtail our childish messes because, of course, nearly all of them were visibly broken in some way. Others had been misplaced or destroyed in any number of ways. Bazooka’s sister was long gone, and so were my two favourites, and pretty much it was just down to the king, who had grown weary even if his parts still moved and his armour was unscratched. The deaths of so many of his friends and loved ones weighed upon him. In his way, he had always been separate from them, always straddled a divide as someone not quite a veteran, not quite a hero, not quite a politician. He never really achieved any of the greatness he sought. Only the wisdom to realize that this greatness had probably never existed in the first place.

When he buried himself in Traytor’s name, it was, in many respects, the final chapter of the space heroes’ saga. In the end, few of them met happy fates. But while they were around, they witnessed the cosmos from the edge of spinning fan blades, and got possessed by alien brain worms who made them try to drown their best friends in the kitchen sink, and found out that they were secretly half snake alien and had mental breakdowns over it, and maintained orbital facilities in obscure parts of space where the only company they had for months at a time was the voice on the other side of a quantum transmission, and even became royalty (a few times).

So, as a toy’s existence might go, none of them did too badly, either.

#holmesianpose

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