a bit (because i still have a lot more too say tbh) about my opinion on tf2 comic, it's quality, inconsistency, how it "works" with the game and fandom's perception
i don't want to go over this for the hundredth time (but I will ! 😍) cuz i've already done it and talked about it a million times, i've got voice messages totaling more than half an hour on this topic alone, and i can genuinely yap about it forever, but. god, it tilts me so hard that TF2 was originally such an incredible fucking thing
because of the style, which had a unique approach put into it; because of the attention to detail in how the characters were created; because both they and their world are extremely caricatured, but that caricature works together with such a careful, detailed approach that it's obvious this isn't some lazy hack job. the devs squeezed everything they could outta tropes and archetypes
the fact that the fandom is huge is absolutely expected. every character feels like a separate story you want to dig into. THAT'S why the fandom has been alive for so many years, and why ideas, headcanons, fanfics, and fanart just never stop. in the absence of a clear, unambiguous "canonical" resolution to most things, we're left with a really solid information base with massive potential for expansion and development. THIS is what grabs people about TF2, and this is the reason it doesn't die
the comic… has literally none of that?? in the game — in the voice lines and the cinematics — we have memorable, interesting characters, solid humor, and a very distinctive style that reeks of the era the story takes place in. once you find out that the comics exist after enjoying the characters and cinematics, you're probably like holy crap! you have in mind all that describe above quality and hope to get answers to all your questions about the characters, their backstory, their relationships with each other. like, that's what gets you about TF2. and it'll be there, and considering all the potential and valve's influence and possibilities, it must be soo worth it! right? right?? sooo um. what of that is actually present in there?
flanderized characters who have completely lost their charisma, barely any interaction with each other and when you look at how they're "written" it's painfully obvious that the writer had no idea what these characters even are or what path they've gone through? (not a single hint of scout’s huge family. not. a. single. one. even though that is literally the foundation of his personality and motivation. which just aren't here)
a plot that has absolutely nothing to do with the original game? (i have a theory that the cringiest and most pointless australium bullshit was introduced purely because the writers didn't like the widespread idea that tf2 shares a universe with portal and half-life and they wanted to invent some kinda contradiction to that… well, and for marking high-priced items, of course)
and that same plot, which is already doomed from the start, also gets resolved through nothing but deus ex machina bullshit? and this is not an exaggeration: all seven chapters of the gold hunt lead to soldier going "oh so it's in the cave where i live lol". does that sounds like a satisfying and the deserved resolution of the whole story?
characters who in the game are unhinged, sure, but still clearly got their jobs because of extremely high skill, turn into — according to comic lore! — the worst team imaginable, completely incompetent, winning only by SELLING THEIR SOULS TO THE DEVIL.
and the style of their uniforms and the locations where the war takes place turns out to not be a direct reflection of the era or aesthetic at all, but instead the fact that mann co apparently has a fuckton of other teams with advanced overdesigned equipment that doesn't fit the grounded setting at all, and Team FORTRESS (get it? 7 comic reveals that all this time, the name of our beloved mercs' team means F. as in, a grade. as in an evaluation of their skills. this is "canon" comic fans are justifying btw) is the worst of all teams, which is why they're portrayed as talentless fucking clowns
and on top of all that — the complete absence of any meaningful engagement with the setting…
(A BIT more off-topic: in the game we've got cartoonish, caricatured 1960s, a shadow government, conspiracy theories, the cold war… while in the comic it genuinely feels like the characters could pull out smartphones at any moment and it wouldn't even fucking even feel outta place.
like what's even the point of the specific time period and a lore that's mocking the political state of america at the time when here we've got, for fuck's sake, heavy and his family being exiled to khabarovsk (which for some reason they call siberia which it is not but well ok), somehow getting outta there, his family for some reason being left alive after allat, then him casually going back there FROM FUCKING AMERICA, IN 60-70 DURING COLD WAR MIND YALL, nobody noticing anything even when other mercs show up there too, and then they ALL just return to the US??? question is, what the fuck was even the issue with heavy's sisters and mother supposedly having trouble leaving the ussr? they're out here in the middle of the cold war just goin back and forth from exile to america and making calls to australia like it's a casual fucking walk, and THIS is the script people seriously rely on and consider worthy of being called canon??? are you kidding me???
yeah sure we can make up an explanation like "it was all covered up by the administrator" but that's the thing. it's not implied or mentioned even once. it's not my fucking job to patch the writing and go Well actually the USSR is portrayed accurately because it’s cold and our Russian guy is fightin a bear. i honestly don't mind stereotypical or cartoonish portrayals. at all! if they're done with the same level of care detail and thought as the original TF2 tho. i'll get into the difference between how caricaturized characters are handled in-game versus in the comics a bit more later)
what i was getting at is that it really pisses me off that TF2 was originally such an amazing piece of media. but somehow the majority of the fandom relies on… on the fucking comic… where literally none of the qualities that made the game and cinematics so good exist. a lot of people haven't even actually played the game. and i have no problem with someone having no possibility to play or just not liking the gameplay, i barely play any games myself, but the fact that most of fandom's impression comes from something not even remotely high-quality, like the COMIC, where there's no trace of the original style or the characters, is not only super disappointing and makes finding good fan content and a sane perspective on the characters hard, it's also just confusing as hell to me
yeah i've actually seen tonsa people who in order to get into TF2 fandom only read the comic. and when people want to "get to know the media" or "understand everything" that's the first thing they’re recommended.
you could say it's not that hard to just ignore all of this yourself but the thing is, at some point it became really useful for me personally to come to the realization that it's all fucking bullshit and that i need to rely on the original, actually well-made og material. over time i started to develop my own, pretty specific vision: for the lore, the characters, their backstories, and so on. and (almost) every time i write about the mercs i make a point to rewatch and remind myself who and what they actually are, so it comes out authentic and not too warped by my own vision (which is unavoidable to some degree but i try to keep it at least somewhat reasonable)
and as i was developing all these ideas, enough if not for a long-going fic or cartoon series, then at least for a separate wiki page lol — what started to really consume me and interfere with my art was… cringe… because i felt like i was being way too pretentious. i felt like any kind of angsty take in this universe and for these characters was just inappropriate, and that whenever it does happen it's either by authors who've drifted too far from the original or by corny kids for whom the peak TF2 angst is just another overplayed drama with totally unrealistic whining about spy and scout's relation
while i was thinking about all this, my opinion of TF2 started to feel like it was getting worse and worse… i mean, ik it just wouldn't let me go, i got an insane fixation and i'm sure i'll still be there on it creatively for a couple more years. but honestly my feelings were increasingly full of negativity and disappointment because it felt impossible to take it seriously. like, truly doomed. "the characters are flat and dumb, what conflicts could they even have?" that's what i thought, cringing at my own deeper perspective on them
but basically, because of that, at some point i came to this thought: wait, what the fuck!!! why did i loved TF2 in the first place if it's supposedly SO bad?? and for real… i checked out the game itself, the soundtrack, rewatched the cinematics, noting all the details and direction, LISTENED TO THE CHARACTERS’ VOICELINES!!! and suddenly everythin clicked!!! holy shit, this game works with seriousness!!! not heavy-handed or forced dark, but it fits, goddamn!!!
look at the mvm trailer, for example — it's SERIOUS while simultaneously being insanely cool. this ost, holy shit… and TF2 even shares at least one of the writers with portal, that despite the caricatured, brutally capitalist dehumanizing company, still manages to tell a serious lore and story, and these things complement each other!!! because the dark events aren't devalued, and the absurdity actually amplifies the creepiness, like they're trying to hide something more serious and dark from you. THIS is the format that actually suits TF2.
and fuck, realizing that was such a relief + boost in my love for the game, realizing the scale of it's quality that i (and i feel like a lot of people too) underappreciated a lot, and realizing it's full potential… i'd spent so long thinking the mercs were actually dumb, flat morons because i, along with the fandom, had gaslighted myself into this vision that concidered "canon" and "right"…
prob kinda funny that the problem ended up being both this piece of media itself and the people who simplify things that were originally capable of being complex? even though, to my relief, i realized the root of the problem, what still pisses me off the most and makes me want to keep these people away from my art — are the ones who unironically say "it's not that deep" (anything deeper than a puddle might as well be a fucking ocean to yall atp)
the way franchises that have a plot about mocking capitalism but then eventually just devolve into the authors' desire to make money and ignore it's original artistic value is nothing new (ahem b*rderl*nds) but i find it especially hilarious that TF2 — a game mocking american culture of the past century, including capitalism and the family values it shoved down everyone's throat — ended up as an abandoned game with a ruined style and its only function being to make cash from keys and cases. and then in the comic, the story turns into characters becoming innocent flanderized normies (idс about them regularly doin stuff like slapping people's necks, it's not portrayed as an actual murder but as a gag that has nothing deeper behind it. which is not something bad in general, even in the context of original TF2 ig, but i think it's important to note in this case), starting families and popping out kids — that are also literal cardboard cutouts with no personalities whose only function is fanservice. and people eat that up, because they see the fanservice, the "aaaawww cute children!" of their favorite characters as caring parents and fall for it (yep once again maybe scout end up with no wife and children from different mothers, maybe not the "perfect" example of nuclear family, but does it really matter if they still exist as no-personality dummies as a way to make the reader say awww)
i didn't like the comic 7 from the start and i'm not super eager to bash it because, considering all the problems that existed from the beginning, expecting any ending other than a fucking cringefest was pointless. i'm not even just talking about the fact that the mercs’ arcs weren't resolved (they literally didn't even start. they had no personalities to begin with, what else was there to add?), it's more about the fact that, honestly, this ending feels like…
the end. look, once we had those well-deisgned, interesting, charismatic characters. they were grounded in a world, had depth, and their mercenary work wasn't random — it was a way to mock the system, to mock america enforcing that system. and now? they've grown up, been sanitized, forgotten that they were ever mercs, and turned into brainless, over-polished parodies of themselves. they don't mock the system anymore — they are a part of it. they're being shown as examples of perfect nuclear family people. no punchline. that's it. that's the end.
seriously, are you still living in the past, clinging to who they were and what the concept of TF2 was twenty years ago? you want to play with a toy that's been handed around and messed with for decades, even by the devs themselves? grow the fuck up! move on! so many years have passed, in their world and ours while the comic was being drawn, and you're still stuck on this shit.
why treat team fortress like art when it's mostly just a cash grab now? half the players online are afk waiting for item drops, and valve, once pushing the industry with high-quality, culturally meaningful projects, is now just releasing cases and moba games with ugly characters for nothin but donations.
another brilliant wormie's post about tf2 canon and why it's sux so much.
I completely agree with all the takes, especially the one about how the comic and the main TF2 lore have absolutely nothing in common.
The comic looks like some kind of au with cliche tropes, as if valve made it following the "comic book for dummies" manual, where the plot is required to feature some villains who come from nowhere and are beaten up by our valiant protagonists. Naturally, there's some specific goal, because it's a comic, and apparently there can't be a comic without an end, so to speak, main objective? Where the main characters and I are chasing some fucking australium which was added to play out this stupid cliche with some very important, expiring resource that urgently needs to be obtained because Valve didn't come up with a plot goal. We get it.
The comic is frankly very stupid. Literally. In early days, when I caught myself thinking this, I'd go, "Damn, TF2 is supposed to be funny and satirical so i guess it's fine." But the thing is, unlike, for example (I won't compare Postal2 and TF2, oh no, oh no, oh no), Postal2, which is also a satirical game for calming my nerves, TF2 became some kind of fucking buffoonery, not twisting the SATIRE into absurdity, but twisting everything into absurdity, which is why it just looks like one big stupidity. Although if we look at the cinematics, the balance of humor and seriousness is maintained perfectly, showing a comedy. Specifically, a comedy, and not a circus. It's a very fine line, I understand, but damn, Valve, they've made so many games, including some with comedic elements, and they screwed up a game that's supposed to be a fucking comedy.
I feel like they handed the comic plot over to someone else and forgot about it, just to feed the fans something and not make any updates. Basically, only someone who lives under a rock doesn't know already that Valve doesn't give a shit about their game and only gets off their ass when some specific uproar starts, and even then, that uproar still needs time to simmer. It's just stifling crap, with a boring, terribly drawn-out plot in which Miss Pauling must gather the mercs like kindergarteners to fight the evil. (like they're not the evil themselves)
And in the end, everything is fucking great, children for everybody(the more the better) , they have absolutely no problems in their lives, no urge to return to violence either, they never miss their companionship, just a quiet and peaceful life, curtain call, turn off this fucking millennial crap.
The charm of the cinematics was that they had situations that played out in the context of their job, and not somewhere in the future. They were quite realistic, interesting situations with elements of humor, like sketches about the lives of dangerous thugs who get into their own troubles specific to their workplace. The comic, on the other hand, is just a lazy speedrun of a plot made up by some poor Valve employee locked in a closet without food or water under threat of a lobotomy. it feels like TF2 is a homework that Valve did with the chat gpt and then went playing with their friends, because why bother with this boring crap if they have more important projects?
Morons, no one would care about your game if it weren't for the fanbase. For the several years, only fans have been tolerating your half-baked crap. Gimme a break
(overworked voice): i need a filthy self-indulgent fic about miss pauling forced to have a (paid) vacation where she gets to sleep, do absolutely nothing, play games and get fatter and everyone should tell her how pretty and fun and loved she is. someone help...
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