Patrick Alexander (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} zpxlng) wrote,@ 2007-05-11 00:01:00 |
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You don't need me to tell you that MegaTokyo by Fred Gallagher sucks some big bitch titties. But there's still plenty to be said about...
Why MegaTokyo Sucks
Some Big Bitch Titties
a brilliant LiveJournal entry by Patrick Alexander,
a superior cartoonist and human being
Firstly, it's not because Rodney Caston left. Rodney was boring. Don't tell me he contributed humour, because you have to be funny to contribute humour. "HUR HAR ROBOTS NINJERS GURRRRR!!" Come on. In the early days of MegaTokyo, the less Rodney had to do with the strip, the better it became.
I followed MegaTokyo in those early days. If it wasn't great, it certainly seemed like it could be: It was set in a sort of 'alternate' Japan -- half real, half reverse engineered from fanboy wet dreams -- that I considered clever and self-aware. The two lead characters were archetypes from opposite ends of the 'hardcore gamer' spectrum -- and it seemed to me that little by little, as his vision for the story grew, and his ability to tell it improved, Fred Gallagher was not only turning MegaTokyo into some sort of ingenious and powerful statement about how perception shapes reality -- he was also using the culture and vocabulary of videogaming to do it!
It struck me as some pretty brilliant, even generation-defining shit, so you will understand that I was very excited about MegaTokyo. Not so much for what it was, but for what it would be. "MegaTokyo," I would inform people, "is the first gaming comic in both content and theme. You wait and see."
[insert waiting and seeing]
So, the first big reason MegaTokyo sucks is the wasted potential. It felt like it was going somewhere special and interesting, but before long, it became apparent that all the electric ideas, unexploded plot points and varied characters were just a detour on the way to Boring Fucking Shit Town.
MegaTokyo is boring. I don't need to explain this to you. Moving on.
It also became apparent that I had given Fred too much credit when I took the aforementioned fanboy wet dream stuff for self-aware cleverness. MegaTokyo isn't a clever, self-aware fanboy wet dream -- it's just a fanboy wet dream. A fact that is not in itself, but leads us to, the biggest reason MegaTokyo sucks, which I will try to explain for you now:
In a nutshell:
MegaTokyo is embarrassing to read.
To expandify:
Fred Gallagher is a sexually repressed weirdo fuck-up, with a moral high horse not merely between his legs but actually working its way up his arsehole. We learn this about Fred from reading his comic. He isn't aware, of course, that his slip is showing, which is why it's embarrassing.
Plenty of stories are fanboy wet dreams. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But MegaTokyo is a repressed and, paradoxically, judgemental fanboy wet dream.
To continue my little story: I stopped liking MegaTokyo, but kept reading it in case it got better. It didn't -- it got worse and worse, so I started hating it. But I'd still check in from time to time, because I'm an idiot. A while back, on this very LiveJournal, I linked to this page...
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?stri
...calling it the most embarrassing page of MegaTokyo thus far. And it's certainly a good example of what I'm talking about. The heroic Piro nobly and boldly censures the wicked Miho for daring to have a personality and sex drive. And of course she is immediately, tearfully remorseful, because that's how it would go in Fred's world.
About Fred's World, Though...
Fred's world has two layers: The first consists of his genuine fantasies: virgin schoolgirls, sex robots, goth girls with low self-esteem, etc. The second layer, formed from repression, moralising and so on, is basically his denial of the first layer. The second layer is the fantasy that poor, repressed, pussy-whipped Fred thinks he should have -- the fantasy where he doesn't take advantage of the girls from the first layer; holds hands with Kimiko after they fall in love, and so on.
The two layers of MegaTokyo are responsible for all its infuriating contradictions: Fred draws sexy women, then gets angry at his fans for wanting to fuck them. Fred surrounds Piro (ie. himself) with a fantasy harem, then turns them into a bunch of nutcases. Then Piro, uh... helps them? Or something? I dunno.
If MegaTokyo were just the first layer, it would be a fun, sexy romp. But it's both layers, and the upshot of that is -- and this deserves its own line -- this:
MegaTokyo is a sex fantasy where no-one gets laid.
More to the point: MegaTokyo is Fred's sex fantasy where Fred doesn't get laid. He's a pervert and a prude at the same time, and that's what makes his comic so unbearably awful.
Why Can't Fred Just Enjoy Himself?
'Cause he's fucking pussy-whipped, that's why!
The thing is that Piro is Fred. Piro can't have wild orgies because he is, officially, a fictionalised version of Fred, so Fred can't let Piro do anything Fred wouldn't. Fred's sexual fantasy is Kimiko, but because everyone knows that Piro is Fred, and Fred is, in fact, married to Sarah, who Kimiko is officially not...
Well! How to solve this conundrum, eh Fred? How to maintain both your public anime girl fantasy and your marriage to a woman of iron? Here's how Fred did it: He put Sarah in the comic, too, as a character called Seraphim -- Piro's conscience.
Let that sink in for a minute.
[a minute]
Fred is so repressed that to stop himself from enjoying his own fantasy, he invited his wife (then girlfriend) into it, to play the role of his conscience.
The character of Seraphim -- of all the revealing, embarrassing elements of MegaTokyo -- is the most revealing and embarrassing. I mean, my god. My god.
You poor bastard.
Anyway!
I told you about how even though I hated it, I would visit MegaTokyo from time to time, just to make myself angry. Well, the last time I did that, this is what I saw:
http://megatokyo.com/index.php?stri
http://megatokyo.com/index.php?stri
I began this entry by calling Rodney Caston shit. Nonetheless, Fred turning Largo (Rodney's character) -- who I don't even like; never did -- into a second Piro... it's too much. I haven't been back to MegaTokyo since then. Except to write this entry, of course.
And soon, this entry will be finished, and I'll never have to think about MegaTokyo ever again! People will ask, "What do you think of MegaTokyo?" and I will point to this entry and say, "That."
So, with the big reasons out of the way, here's why else MegaTokyo suckles at the parched teats of Satan:
THE END
UPDATE: Thanks for all the comments so far. A couple of them prompted replies from me that I think are worth appending to the main entry...
imsoalone wrote: The reasons you hate the strip are the same reasons that people read the strip. People love to anticipate stuff. Megatokyo keeps promising stuff, and then not quite coming though with the goods, then effectively promising the same damn thing next episode. It's a well established form of writting.
I have no problem with the formula you describe, Dan -- for instance, I really enjoyed Love Hina back in the day. A good storyteller can tease his audience and still make it fun and satisfying for them.
Fred, however... Fred tries to do the teasing thing, but ends up either (a) boring his audience, because he's a poor storyteller, or (b) judging his audience, because he's so ill-at-ease with his own story.
"Hey audience, wouldn't it be fun if so-and-so did such-and-such? Eh? Eh? Wouldn't it? Eh?
"WELL GUESS WHAT, THAT'S WRONG AND BAD!! AND YOU'RE WRONG AND BAD TOO!! Now I'm going to make all the characters as angry and miserable as you've made me."
coyotecoyote wrote: I can't believe he still hasn't bothered to ink any if the pages after all of this time!
Fucking word.
If you can't ink and hand-letter, you're not a cartoonist. Maybe I'm an irascible old traditionalist, but I'm talented, so I can be whatever the fuck I want.
To be fair, Fred's pencils used to be really tight, but compare the Miho strip with his current stuff -- I reckon he's let himself go a bit.
And in any case, 'really tight pencils' take ages to do and still look like shit, especially in print. If Fred -- and his imitators, for that matter -- would just learn to fucking ink, they would save themselves a lot of time and effort, in the long term.
The inability to ink is not a fucking style.
What if you met a 30-year-old who never learned to walk? He's just crawling around. "This is just my walking style, man." Fuck off, you lazy dipshit cripple.
* * *
Thanks for reading and stay tuned, because my next entry of this nature will be about a comic I actually like. My goodness! What could it be...?
Some Big Bitch Titties
a brilliant LiveJournal entry by Patrick Alexander,
a superior cartoonist and human being
Firstly, it's not because Rodney Caston left. Rodney was boring. Don't tell me he contributed humour, because you have to be funny to contribute humour. "HUR HAR ROBOTS NINJERS GURRRRR!!" Come on. In the early days of MegaTokyo, the less Rodney had to do with the strip, the better it became.
I followed MegaTokyo in those early days. If it wasn't great, it certainly seemed like it could be: It was set in a sort of 'alternate' Japan -- half real, half reverse engineered from fanboy wet dreams -- that I considered clever and self-aware. The two lead characters were archetypes from opposite ends of the 'hardcore gamer' spectrum -- and it seemed to me that little by little, as his vision for the story grew, and his ability to tell it improved, Fred Gallagher was not only turning MegaTokyo into some sort of ingenious and powerful statement about how perception shapes reality -- he was also using the culture and vocabulary of videogaming to do it!
It struck me as some pretty brilliant, even generation-defining shit, so you will understand that I was very excited about MegaTokyo. Not so much for what it was, but for what it would be. "MegaTokyo," I would inform people, "is the first gaming comic in both content and theme. You wait and see."
So, the first big reason MegaTokyo sucks is the wasted potential. It felt like it was going somewhere special and interesting, but before long, it became apparent that all the electric ideas, unexploded plot points and varied characters were just a detour on the way to Boring Fucking Shit Town.
MegaTokyo is boring. I don't need to explain this to you. Moving on.
It also became apparent that I had given Fred too much credit when I took the aforementioned fanboy wet dream stuff for self-aware cleverness. MegaTokyo isn't a clever, self-aware fanboy wet dream -- it's just a fanboy wet dream. A fact that is not in itself, but leads us to, the biggest reason MegaTokyo sucks, which I will try to explain for you now:
In a nutshell:
MegaTokyo is embarrassing to read.
To expandify:
Fred Gallagher is a sexually repressed weirdo fuck-up, with a moral high horse not merely between his legs but actually working its way up his arsehole. We learn this about Fred from reading his comic. He isn't aware, of course, that his slip is showing, which is why it's embarrassing.
Plenty of stories are fanboy wet dreams. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But MegaTokyo is a repressed and, paradoxically, judgemental fanboy wet dream.
To continue my little story: I stopped liking MegaTokyo, but kept reading it in case it got better. It didn't -- it got worse and worse, so I started hating it. But I'd still check in from time to time, because I'm an idiot. A while back, on this very LiveJournal, I linked to this page...
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?stri
...calling it the most embarrassing page of MegaTokyo thus far. And it's certainly a good example of what I'm talking about. The heroic Piro nobly and boldly censures the wicked Miho for daring to have a personality and sex drive. And of course she is immediately, tearfully remorseful, because that's how it would go in Fred's world.
Fred's world has two layers: The first consists of his genuine fantasies: virgin schoolgirls, sex robots, goth girls with low self-esteem, etc. The second layer, formed from repression, moralising and so on, is basically his denial of the first layer. The second layer is the fantasy that poor, repressed, pussy-whipped Fred thinks he should have -- the fantasy where he doesn't take advantage of the girls from the first layer; holds hands with Kimiko after they fall in love, and so on.
The two layers of MegaTokyo are responsible for all its infuriating contradictions: Fred draws sexy women, then gets angry at his fans for wanting to fuck them. Fred surrounds Piro (ie. himself) with a fantasy harem, then turns them into a bunch of nutcases. Then Piro, uh... helps them? Or something? I dunno.
If MegaTokyo were just the first layer, it would be a fun, sexy romp. But it's both layers, and the upshot of that is -- and this deserves its own line -- this:
MegaTokyo is a sex fantasy where no-one gets laid.
More to the point: MegaTokyo is Fred's sex fantasy where Fred doesn't get laid. He's a pervert and a prude at the same time, and that's what makes his comic so unbearably awful.
'Cause he's fucking pussy-whipped, that's why!
The thing is that Piro is Fred. Piro can't have wild orgies because he is, officially, a fictionalised version of Fred, so Fred can't let Piro do anything Fred wouldn't. Fred's sexual fantasy is Kimiko, but because everyone knows that Piro is Fred, and Fred is, in fact, married to Sarah, who Kimiko is officially not...
Well! How to solve this conundrum, eh Fred? How to maintain both your public anime girl fantasy and your marriage to a woman of iron? Here's how Fred did it: He put Sarah in the comic, too, as a character called Seraphim -- Piro's conscience.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Fred is so repressed that to stop himself from enjoying his own fantasy, he invited his wife (then girlfriend) into it, to play the role of his conscience.
The character of Seraphim -- of all the revealing, embarrassing elements of MegaTokyo -- is the most revealing and embarrassing. I mean, my god. My god.
You poor bastard.
I told you about how even though I hated it, I would visit MegaTokyo from time to time, just to make myself angry. Well, the last time I did that, this is what I saw:
http://megatokyo.com/index.php?stri
http://megatokyo.com/index.php?stri
I began this entry by calling Rodney Caston shit. Nonetheless, Fred turning Largo (Rodney's character) -- who I don't even like; never did -- into a second Piro... it's too much. I haven't been back to MegaTokyo since then. Except to write this entry, of course.
And soon, this entry will be finished, and I'll never have to think about MegaTokyo ever again! People will ask, "What do you think of MegaTokyo?" and I will point to this entry and say, "That."
So, with the big reasons out of the way, here's why else MegaTokyo suckles at the parched teats of Satan:
- Shitty art
- Shitty everything
- Shit shit shit
- Poo
- Tits
- Cock
UPDATE: Thanks for all the comments so far. A couple of them prompted replies from me that I think are worth appending to the main entry...
imsoalone wrote: The reasons you hate the strip are the same reasons that people read the strip. People love to anticipate stuff. Megatokyo keeps promising stuff, and then not quite coming though with the goods, then effectively promising the same damn thing next episode. It's a well established form of writting.I have no problem with the formula you describe, Dan -- for instance, I really enjoyed Love Hina back in the day. A good storyteller can tease his audience and still make it fun and satisfying for them.
Fred, however... Fred tries to do the teasing thing, but ends up either (a) boring his audience, because he's a poor storyteller, or (b) judging his audience, because he's so ill-at-ease with his own story.
"Hey audience, wouldn't it be fun if so-and-so did such-and-such? Eh? Eh? Wouldn't it? Eh?
"WELL GUESS WHAT, THAT'S WRONG AND BAD!! AND YOU'RE WRONG AND BAD TOO!! Now I'm going to make all the characters as angry and miserable as you've made me."
coyotecoyote wrote: I can't believe he still hasn't bothered to ink any if the pages after all of this time!Fucking word.
If you can't ink and hand-letter, you're not a cartoonist. Maybe I'm an irascible old traditionalist, but I'm talented, so I can be whatever the fuck I want.
To be fair, Fred's pencils used to be really tight, but compare the Miho strip with his current stuff -- I reckon he's let himself go a bit.
And in any case, 'really tight pencils' take ages to do and still look like shit, especially in print. If Fred -- and his imitators, for that matter -- would just learn to fucking ink, they would save themselves a lot of time and effort, in the long term.
The inability to ink is not a fucking style.
What if you met a 30-year-old who never learned to walk? He's just crawling around. "This is just my walking style, man." Fuck off, you lazy dipshit cripple.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned, because my next entry of this nature will be about a comic I actually like. My goodness! What could it be...?
