Click here for my webcomic! Click here for my art tag. Also I tweet sometimes. (and here's a twitter just for webcomic updates.) I'm just here for the food.
terrified of unwittingly enjoying the shadows in the cave. the song you didn't know was a cover. the movie you didn't realize was a parody. the game you never knew was a bootleg port. and then even after you find out, there's something in you that still likes the shadow better than the real thing
When I was a kid in the early 2000's, I got a CD player for my birthday. One of the CDs I harvested from my parents' collection was a Kenny Loggins CD in which he sings and covers a bunch of children's songs. Return to Pooh Corner was my favorite to start, but I also came to appreciate his Rainbow Connection and All The Pretty Little Ponies. I must have listened to this CD a thousand times, replaying my favorites and skipped the ones I didn't like.
Later on in the soundtrack, he also covers a song called the Last Unicorn.
I loved the light tinkly piano and ethereal 90's synth pads. There's something quiet and haunting to Loggins's rendition, singing of a mythical creature who has persisted past the last eagle and the last mountain, and as a child I always wondered what had happened to all the other unicorns in this song. I assumed I would never find out the answer.
It wasn't until adulthood that I learned that there was an entire animated film from the 80's dedicated to answering that question.
I pestered my mom and sister into watching it in the mid 2010's, and they were unmoved. But I was struck by recognition: the first few minutes of the film played an entirely alien rendition of The Last Unicorn song I knew and loved, this time by a band called America.
This rendition was a folksy, almost country-sounding song, with prominent guitar strumming and flutes. Even so, it had the haunting aspect I was so familiar with, like an old man telling a story in a tavern, a very old and time-worn story about an age thought to be gone from the world. I fell in love with it instantly, but it was a different kind of love from the song I played endlessly as a child.
The rest of the film kept me spellbound in its embrace, spinning a lovely tale of a unicorn who is told she is the last and goes out into the world to find the others, eventually coming into conflict with a divinely powerful creature called the Red Bull. Finally, the question I'd asked myself since childhood had an answer! I can tell you all the flaws and shortcomings of this film, as there are many, but they don't matter to me because I love it anyway for bringing this decades-long satisfaction. But even this, too, was still a shadow.
When I finally reached the beginning, The Last Unicorn novel by Peter Beagle, I devoured it in an afternoon, rediscovering the fantastical majesty my childhood self had seen in Kenny Loggins's cover all those years ago. Here it was-- every question I had ever wondered about the unicorn, every fear I'd ever had of the Red Bull, every unasked question about the lore of this place, spelled out in heartwrenchingly beautiful prose that mesmerized me at once.
Here it was-- the original creation that had cast shadows across me for my whole life. I love this book dearly, but I love its shadows too.
Derivative works aren't shadows in the Platonic sense. They aren't inherently diminished or untrue in nature, or inherently less valid or valuable than the original. They're simply a continuation of a conversation. A love letter passed from the original creator to the next one, shaped by many different hands in its passing. If a derivative work changed you, that means your mind and soul have been influenced by two or more creators, not just one, and that experience can be beautiful if you choose to look at it that way.
I'm biased of course, but I can't help the feeling that my experience with The Last Unicorn was the ideal one hahaha. Many people who watch the movie out of context in adulthood are often dismayed by its flaws, but my viewing was marked by childhood wonder instead, and that helped me love and appreciate the book so much more when it finally reached me. All in all, I had a chain of increasingly beautiful experiences with the Last Unicorn across my life, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter
Please keep making art. Please make it for yourself. Please donât let everything become even more of the same flat general appeal nonsense that doesnât seem to have anything to say
OK THIS IS NOT A FUCKING DRILL EVERYONE FUCKING REPEAT AFTER ME. THIS IS WHAT YOU WILL DO WHEN YOU WATCH MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL THIS YEAR:
You will navigate to the page on disney plus (and it has to be here. Unless someone has actually uploaded the REAL movie anywhere else you cannot get it elsewhere)
BUT YOU WILL NOT HIT PLAY. You wonât do it. Because itâs NOT THE REAL VERSION OF THE FILM AND DISNEY IS FUCKING LYING TO YOU AS IT ALWAYS DOES
You will scroll down HERE. To EXTRAS instead. You MUST GO HERE. This is non -negotiable
THEN YOU WILL SCROLL DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE EXTRAS AND YOU WILL THEN HIT PLAY ON THIS BAD BOY: THE FULL LENGTH VERSION
And you will watch it. And you will thank me for having been so blind and led astray by that stupid fucking mouse. Youâre welcome.
ok children gather 'round because all of these kindof have the same answer and I am way too passionate about this subject and the history behind it that I physically cannot remain silent about it
So if you were a 90's kid like me, you grew up with this film on VHS. if you were also like me, then you probably remember it very differently from how it was released recently both in blu-ray and on streamer formats and probably were freaking out thinking this was some kind of mandela effect for years: and THIS IS BECAUSE. THERE IS A CRUCIAL SCENE MISSING. AND LITERALLY I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. THE TWO MINUTES CUT KINDOF CHANGE THE EMOTIONAL IMPACT OF THE WHOLE MOVIE??? and allow me to explain why.
That video above it the Deleted Song "When Love is Gone" was ONLY EVER featured on the VHS release of The Muppet Christmas Carol that came out through the 90's. Why? because initially, some uppity disney executive market tested it and went "kids are gonna get antsy with that and not like it" so they cut it then for the theatrical release, but then Brian Henson (director, son of JIM) somehow managed to get it into the VHS cut of the film. Kinda went rogue about it if memory serves. Now, as a child, this was kindof... a huge part of the movie for me? like I remember listening to it and crying a bit as a kid because this one song is just... so emotional? like seriously. other than the fact that it's being sung by Meredith Braun (who at one point played Eponine in Les Mis, and you gotta have some SERIOUS pipes to do that) AND Michael Cain, and it's a love song in a way, like it's very clear that she still cares for Ebenezer but she recognizes that her love for him is different than his love for her and she has to leave him, meanwhile THE MAN IS BEHIND HER CRYING AND SHE DOESN'T EVEN SEE HIM AND CLEARLY IT'S THE BIGGEST REGRET HE HAS And honestly? That's a HUGE part of what made it stand out for me as a child. Like. The muppets themselves were all fun and good but then you have this song for a second... and it really feels true to the dickensian spirit guiding the whole film, and it's what's made it to me the most true to form adaptation of his yet. It's phenomenal. And this dumbass disney exec said "it's too adult emotional for the kids" (an argument that always has and will always continue to be completely fucking stupid).
So then what happened? why didn't they put it in the DVD and Blu Ray releases that have come out throughout the years? Well, literally DISNEY LOST THE FOOTAGE. APPARENTLY. so when they went to restore it and reformat it for those releases AND THEN SUBSEQUENTLY for the streamer release, it was literally missing. and Brian Henson has been asking them to look for YEARS. FINALLY they found it back in 2020, and then only last year did they upload the fully restored version that you see me ranting and raving about.
"But Egg", you ask, "why does this matter? What does this small 2 minute sequence change about this movie SO MUCH that it merits a huge ass post about it that is making people confused?"
Because let me tell you friends. Belle does not seem very significant and kindof pointless to flashback to without that song. It's like ok. she's there. She tells Ebenezer she's breaking up with him. and then... THE MUPPETS CRY ABOUT IT??? and that's it. That's all you get. you don't get any of the sense of how deeply this affected this guy- the LITERAL PROTAGONIST THAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO CARE ABOUT. And it's all because, again, say it with me folks: the dipshit disney executive said "It's Too Emotional For Children".
Not ONLY that. But THIS SONG IS LITERALLY THE REPRISE THEY SING AT THE END OF THE FILM. WHICH. LET ME TELL YOU. IT'S FUCKING WEIRD FOR THAT TO LITERALLY COME OUT OF NOWHERE COMPLETELY LEFT FIELD AS A NEW SONG AT THE END. Like it makes no sense. ok sappy sentimental "the love we found" all right. BUT REMEMBER. THE ORIGINAL LYRIC IS "LOVE IS GONE". IT'S SYMMETRY. IT'S POETRY. IT'S FUCKING VITAL. An the movie is good as it is but literally trust me this makes it infinitely better when you see it as a whole. Please. Just trust me on this. Thank you and goodnight.
oh yeah and here's a decent article that talks about it and that shall serve as my source for a lot of this
The Mouse... lost something that would make It money? WTF. (eyeroll)
(Disclosure: I have taken the Mouse's money and in return for it did good work that I'm still pleased with, in a universe I'd loved since childhood; so, as we say around here, "sorry, Not Sorry." Yet all the people I was working with at Disney in the late 80s were well aware of the Rodent's more greedy-and-grasping qualities. "They didn't get so rich by overpaying their writers," was one theme that made the rounds a lot.)
Anyway; I can't imagine this movie without that song. The pain is necessary for the full joy later. Seek out the full version if you can.
ETA for European viewers (and maybe others, who knows): On Disney+, the "Extras" page for "The Muppet Christmas Carol" now explicitly offers both the excised song (as a standalone) and the version with the excised song.
This post is your reminder that you are not obligated to blog about current events.
Things are bad. Really bad. Do not let people guilt trip you into tormenting yourself even further over the fact that things are bad. Doomscrolling is not activism.
If you're just on tumblr to blorbopost or reblog pretty pictures, you are not harming people by inaction.
You are not a bad person for not dedicating every aspect of your life and leisure space to whatever disgusting mask-off attack on human life and dignity some government has decided to enact.
Take action where you can, but don't confuse doomscrolling and digital self harm for action.
If you need to lose yourself in blorboposting, go for it.
If you need to log off for the day, whether it's to take irl action or to protect what little sanity any of us have left over the past 7 years, then by all means, do.
Morale is important. Hope is important. Small joys keep us from burning out completely in times like this. Do not let any "if you don't reblog this I'm judging you" guilt trip convince you otherwise.
I can't remember if I ever drew this observation, but I sure as hell talked about it before: Specter Knight very clearly is wearing a helmet. Meanwhile his past, alive counterpart looks to be donning a ski mask with a metal visor super glued to the top and you can't convince me otherwise.
Well, goodness, this one resonated much more than I was expecting. I mean, I get it. My mind was also blown wide open when I found out "demand avoidance" was a thing that existed, and that I'm not the only weirdo in the world who suddenly wishes it wasn't her birthday after anxiously waiting for her birthday for days.
Loads of people in the tags are asking how I do it? I feel this won't be groundbreaking advice, but here is what I have learned:
Previous experience. Really no way around it. Now that I hit thirty, I feel like I have done enough things to know, intellectually, from experience, what will feel nice if I overcome the avoidance, and what won't.
For example, every time I go to the beach, I wake up early and would rather eat a tire than get off the bed. But I remember that every time I got up and went to the beach, I was glad I did it. So I just get up, feeling like shit, and get ready, feeling like shit, and I get to the beach and magic!! I feel great, I love the beach!! Sometimes you just gotta do it scared feeling kinda like shit.
Am I avoiding the thing or getting to the thing? I have a lot of demand avoidance around just, y'know, getting up, getting ready and going out the door. Universal human experience. If I notice that doing the actual thing (Swim in the pool!) sounds nice, but I'm avoiding having to rally myself to go do that (Fetch swimsuit! Sunscreen! Towel!), then I know it's demand avoidance and I should just fucking go.
Is the thing making me feel excited at all or just anxious? I have had previous occasions when I did the opposite; I convinced myself it was just demand avoidance when I really just. Hated the thing. And wanted to stop. If you feel a mix of excitement and dread, or excitement and anxiety, that might be demand avoidance. But if thinking of doing the thing just makes you feel actively anxious, then yeah. You don't want to do the thing.
Do the thing a little bit. Used often with dishes. I've seen this advice float around Tumblr a lot and it's correct. Commit to doing just a bit of the thing; a little bit of the thing; the smallest bit of the thing you can do. Getting started will make it clear right away if you don't want to do it (and in that case, you have permission to stop), or if you just having trouble getting started.
Iâm writing a manuscript rn and every single piece of feedback iâve gotten has boiled down to âuse more technical languageâ and âbe more formalâ, and I have been actively going âi will not be doing that, thanksâ but my GOD do they not like it.
OK so this is a genuine issue in scientific communication where a paper requires very Precise language, and because people aren't really used to writing that, they crutch on rules of Formality, because they've never been taught how to write with Clarity.
In the above example, 'huge' is not a very precise term. Could mean anything from "lots" to "About the size of a battleship" to "bigger than expected". Not a very precise term. I'm not sure what OP's field is, but they should probably be using a word that's more specific like "Statistically Significant Differneces" instead of "Huge differences", or maybe "Widespread Impact" instead of "Huge Impact". Whoever is providing critique here should say "the use of 'huge' here is imprecise and can confuse what you're talking about, please use a more specific descriptor".
What people generally are asking for when they want something 'understandable' is Clarity. Complex topics are perfectly fine, but they need to be explained clearly. Purdue has a good guide here, which I'll share the outline of, because it's genuinely good advice for many genres or writing:
Go from old to new information and keep the timeline straight. No Dr. Who Plots.
Use Transitional words when bridging concepts. Words like however, therefore, in addition, also, but, moreover, etc.
Keep your sentence structure simple, and mind where you put subordinate clauses. This is really hard for ADHD people who srt of tend to zig-zag across concepts, but in general, it's better to have several simple sentences than one huge rambling one.
Use Active Voice. Good: "The Comittee decided to postpone the meeting". Bad: "A descision was reached to postpone the meeting by the comittee"
Use Parallel Contructions. If you're comparing several things, use the same gramatical structure to describe each thing.
Avoid using the noun version of verbs. Good: "The Plan was implemented sucessfully." Bad: "The implementation of the plan was sucessful."
Avoid Multiple Negatives. Double negatives are confusing as hell, triple negatives are worse.
Chose Action verbs over forms of "to be". Good: "TV can report on events much faster than newspapers." Bad: "One difference between TV and newspapers is the relative speed at which they can report on things."
Avid Unclear Pronoun References: If you use terms like It, They, He, She etc. make sure it's very clear who or what that pronoun is referring to.
It is not enough for you to understand what you mean. You must write so clearly that it is nigh-impossible for others to misunderstand you. Take every sentence and ask yourself âif this became a popular post, how would people misinterpret thisâ? Find the sentences that are not excruciatingly clear and rearrange them. If you find the same types of comments coming back on your work, look at them and ask yourself âwhat am I consistently writing that can be misinterpreted, or suffers from a lack of clarity? How can I more accurately convey what I mean?â
The example I like to use when Iâm mentoring is the directions on the back of a bottle of shampoo. âWash. Rinse. Repeat.â Ok, seems simple enough. But letâs see where we could go wrong.Â
Wash what? Right, reminder to the editor of the technical document, every verb needs to be attached to its noun clearly.Â
Rinse - with what? Is rinsing your hair with champagne the newest celebrity craze? Again, ârinseâ needs to be attached to the noun ârinse with waterâ. Preferably specified as shower water.Â
Repeat - for how long? (Lizzie Maguire movie voice: You know how the shampoo bottle has directions, right? Lather, rinse, repeat? I donât repeat.) Any action must be defined by length, as well as a milestone given when its done. For academic papers this is the conclusion, or continued questions post experiment, or simply place where you end the paper. For writing technical directions you want to define the successful project outcome. Is the project complete when every deliverable is turned in? (No, bad, youâre making a mistake.) OR is the project complete when every deliverable is tested, the test returns a defined successful outcome, errors or problems have been mitigated, and a corrective action plan has been developed for future errors? (Good, pass go, accept the project as delivered.) Also, when is it done? âWe accomplished this experiment in a weekâ - no, I donât know what a week is. Monday to Friday? Wednesday to the following Wednesday? 12:01am Monday est. to 11:59pm Sunday est?
But then you have to specify when the actions are taking place. Should a shower be taken every morning at 7:30 am? Every calendar day, or every business day when you have to leave the house? Or can the shower be taken at any time - but must specifically be taken when you are unclean? If thatâs the case, define the parameters for determining when you are unclean. For your academic paper this is the defined range and scope of your work. Does this drug work for every potential illness? Or specifically this range of stomach bugs? Â
Who is involved? For your academic paper you need to specify the individuals involved clearly, so that they canât be mistaken for each other. Specify who did what, and separate the order of the actions and the tools used by each individual. Shorten your sentences if you have to. I canât tell you the number of papers Iâve read where the author, in citing previous efforts, failed to explain the chronological timeline explaining which predecessor was responding to which other predecessorâs research.Â
Define your nouns. What kind of shampoo? âThe digsiteâ - no, stop and explain where/what/size/timeframe etc. âThe softwareâ - no, what exactly are you using? âReview of the previous literatureâ - ok you had better say what previous works exactly. Letâs say youâre writing about the interactions of multiple drugs in a study. Itâs better to name each drug when it appears in a sentence if thereâs potential that they might otherwise be confused. Your reader should never have to guess which noun you are referring to.Â
Use firm numbers. Also, timelines and measurements are not intuitive. You need to state exactly what you mean. Seven calendar days is a different length of time than seven business days, so the statement âthe project was completed from start to end in seven daysâ is not a clear technical statement. A year can be measured as a calendar year (Jan. 1 - Dec. 31), a fiscal year (Oct. 1 - Sept. 30), a period of performance or contract year (ex. a contract year of 3/1 - 2/28), a school year, etc. Were your experiments conducted using fahrenheit or celsius measurements? Miles or kilometers?Â
Donât be wishy-washy. You shouldnât âthinkâ or âfeelâ or âguessâ or âsupposeâ your hair is clean or the experiment achieved sorta-X or your conclusion is kinda like Y. Be firm! Â
â[The older generation of writers who had established the rules for modern fiction under the assumption that their experience was âuniversalâ] gained the ability to write stories where they could âshowâ and not âtell" ⌠They had this ability not because they were masterful stylists of language or because they dripped with innate talent. The power to âshow, not tellâ stemmed from the writing for an audience that shared so many assumptions with them that the audience would feel that those settings and stories were âuniversal.â (Itâs the same hubris that led the white Western establishment to assume its medicine, science, and values superior to all other cultures âŚ) Look at the literary fiction techniques that are supposedly the hallmarks of good writing: nearly all of them rely not on what was said, but on what is left unsaid. Always come at things sideways; donât be too direct, too pat, or too slick. Lead the reader in a direction but allow them to come to the conclusion. Ask the question but donât state the answer too baldly. Leave things open to interpretation⌠but not too open, of course, or you have chaos. Make allusions and references to the works of the literary canon, the Bible, and familiar events of history to add a layer of evocationâbut donât make it too obvious or youâre copycatting. These are the doâs and donâts of MFA programs everywhere. They rely on a shared pool of knowledge and cultural assumptions so that the words left unsaid are powerfully communicated. I am not saying this is not a worthwhile experience as reader or writer, but I am saying anointing it the pinnacle of âcraftâ leaves out any voice, genre, or experience that falls outside the status quo. The inverse is also true, then: writing about any experience that is âforeignâ to that body of shared knowledge is too often deemed less worthy because to make it understandable to the mainstream takes a lot of explanation. Which weâve been taught is bad writing!â
â â Cecilia Tan, from Uncanny Magainze 18 (via violetephemera)
Explaining stuff plays a very important role in fiction writing, particularly fantasy/sci-fi. Anything in your setting that is different from your audience's real life (aka: probably the vast majority of it) will need to be explained to them in one way or another. You can "show don't tell" a lot of it, but if you have a sentence like "It was custom for the Glorpians to not show their name badges to anyone except close friends and family," it sure would take a lot of words to properly scaffold/depict that cultural practice. If that's Not What Your Story Is About, it's completely fine to use a shorter sentence so you can focus on the important stuff.
The one caveat is that the stuff you "show don't tell" is more likely to emotionally resonate with your audience. That's fine and normal-- people are naturally going to lend more credence to the things they figure out themselves over the stuff you tell them. It's just human nature. But there is power in this truth! If you explain the default assumptions of your world concisely, this gives you power to combine and juxtapose them interestingly later. "Tell" the premises to the audience, combine them in a logical way, and you will have "shown" the emotional truths of your story through deductive logic.
Consider a story about the Glorpians again. You want to convey the depth and nuance of Glorpian romance, so you open a blank word doc and type the following words:
Tell: "Glorpians have deep and nuanced relationships with each other."
This sentence probably doesn't resonate with your audience -- they don't have the context to understand what this means or to feel emotions about it. Consider the alternative:
Tell: Glorpians never show their name badges to anyone but close friends and family.
Tell: Blorpia showed her name card to Florpio way earlier in their relationship than he was expecting.
Tell: Florpio felt uncomfortable at this display of affection and distanced himself accordingly.
Tell: Blorpia was heartbroken and vowed never to show her name badge to anyone again.
Tell: Klorpio saw Blorpia crying at a bus station and, since he was young and naive, showed his name badge to her as a gesture to cheer her up.
How does Blorpia respond to this? Good question! You now have a plot with characterization and tension. And in the process of telling those base story facts, you've now Shown the truth you stated earlier, which is that Glorpians have deep and nuanced relationships with each other.
Long story short, the more puzzle pieces you tell your readers, the more options you have for combining them in interesting ways later. And the more time you spend showing/reinforcing the way those pieces connect, the more they'll resonate with audiences. Cultural differences can make communication challenging because of the lack of common ground, but that difficult communication is all the more valuable because it has the power to challenge people's assumptions. And readers who are willing to broaden their horizons will likely find those works to be immensely valuable as a result.
Twitter is all in a tizzy about the Halloween Hack as of late. The apparent reason for this is because the Halloween Hack uses a word commonly used as a homophobic slur, not taking into account that the hack was created in 2008 (when the internet was a different place) and that 2008 was 14+ years ago (and people are known to grow and change over this time). There appears to be some amount of discussion over whether Toby Fox should be âcancelledâ for this.
Iâve seen a fair bit of banter from both sides on this, but what I havenât seen people on the internet talk about is the CONTEXT of the game in which this word is used. And while I donât spend a lot of time talking about HH due to Tobyâs stated embarrassment when people draw attention to it, if the internetâs gonna go dig up old drama for some reason, then by golly, Iâm going to go dig up my old love for this game.
So if you want to come take a wild ride through some internet history and literary analysis, then go buckle your seatbelt and click the Readmore.
(content warning: discussion of homophobic slurs)
A quick bit about me: I am an adult on the internet, and I fall into the original Halloween Hack (hereafter abbreviated as HH)âs target demographic: teenagers who existed on Starmen.net, an Earthbound fan website, in 2008. I am also a current admin for Starmen.net, which puts me in a good position to comment on the history and culture of the site as a whole, and how that ties into the reception of HH.
Starmen.net has a long and rich tradition of events called Funfests, in which the site staff run a combination art/writing/music/etc contest for the site members, usually coalescing around a theme such as âEarthboundâ, or sometimes âWinterâ or âHalloweenâ. These events offer prizes such as forum avatar/rank privileges, and historically they sometimes even offered physical prizes. The 2008 Halloween funfest had an entire website made for it, which you can view here. Toby Fox submitted HH to this 2008 Halloween Funfest under the internet handle Radiation.
This is the context of HH: a passion project made by a teenager for a fan website full of other teenagers/twenty-somethings. If you go to a high school science fair, you could rightfully lambast every project for being undeserving of a Nobel Prize, but thatâs not why we host high school science fairs OR Starmen.net Funfests. These events are an opportunity for teens to show what they are capable of and receive commendation from both their peers and a panel of judges selected specifically for this age demographic and venue.
For perspective, hereâs what one of the hosts of the 2008 Funfest had to say about HH:
âRadiation nearly outclassed himself with this effort of skill labour and love. What a lot of fun. Despite getting repeatedly killed in the sewers this was one thoroughly enjoyabe hack. I Think Iâll go and play it again!â
HH won an award in the 2008 funfest-- a #1 in the âMost Effortâ category. For some perspective, few people on Starmen.net go to the lengths of creating an entire game for a Funfest (and HH has a playtime of roughly 5-6 hours!). Of those who do, most of the resulting games are consistent with the output you would expect from a teenage userbase, since itâs not fair to expect teenagers to produce professional-quality work. That said, I can say with confidence that HH is a standout in the areas of both effort and quality.
Another thing that needs to be said of HH is that it is not a standalone game made in todayâs modern game engines-- it is a hack of a preexisting game. Earthbound's codebase is notoriously complicated, and a lot of the tools that modern Earthbound hackers use to make their jobs easier (eg Coilsnake, Ebmused) didnât exist in 2008. Toby had to do a lot of manual coding grunt-work to make HH, up to and including manually typing hexadecimal values into his computer in order to compose Megalovania. (Source: Toby wrote a really in-depth post about the process he used to make HH way back when, which Iâm referring to here, but itâs unfortunately been deleted since then.)
I can imagine a hypothetical objection at this point: âok but high effort homophobia is still homophobiaâ. In this post, I am also going to argue that Tobyâs usage of this word can be considered artistic merit when taken in context, but youâll have to bear with me for a bit while I explain that context. Iâll also talk about some of the cool and neat things this game does along the way because I think theyâre worth talking about.
HH is, at its core, a derivative fan work of the video game Earthbound. And while I love Earthbound deeply, I also recognize that itâs a cult classic that not everyone has played. So while I encourage people to play the game I love deeply, Iâll also sum up a few relevant plot beats here so folks can understand the source material HH draws from:
--Ness, a thirteen year-old boy, meets a creature named Buzz Buzz from ten years in the future who tells him that an alien named Giygas has destroyed the world (direct quote: âAll is devastationâ). As such, Ness and his friends must save the world.
--One of Nessâs friends is a shy boy named Jeff with a penchant for shooting bottle rockets at enemies
--Jeffâs dad is an odd character named Dr. Andonuts. Dr. Andonuts is a reclusive scientist who lives in a snowy region called Winters who sent his son off to boarding school at a very young age. Andonutsâs lab includes no other signs of life, certainly not any indications of a wife/Jeffâs mother. Andonuts ends his conversation with Jeff by saying âLetâs get together in another ten years or so.â
--Towards the end of the game, Dr. Andonuts uses a device he created called a Phase Distorter to send Ness and his friends to the venue for the final battle. This is very clearly telegraphed as a one-way trip, as the kidsâ brains are described in text as needing to be transplanted into robots to get there, but the kids go along with it anyway because the world is at stake.
--The kids go on to fight the final boss in a spectacle that words canât do justice to here. All Iâll say is that after a long-fought battle, in the grace of an unexplained Deus Ex Machina, the souls of the four kids are impossibly returned to their bodies so they can enjoy their happy ending.
These are all canonical events that happen in the base game of Earthbound. Earthboundâs sequel, Mother 3, was released in 2006, two years prior to HH, although the English fan translation wasnât released until around the time of the 2008 funfest, interestingly enough. Mother 3 does develop Dr. Andonutsâs canonical character somewhat, but I wonât discuss it in further detail here other than to say it mostly re-emphasizes his odd, solitary nature and his overly cavalier attitude towards his science experiments.
Itâs also worth noting that in an oddball game like Earthbound, there are a lot of weird and funny idiosyncrasies to theorize on. There are pencil-shaped statues that block your way, which need to be removed with a device called a âpencil eraser.â Ness and his friends fight robots, aliens, and Krakens, but they also fight handbag-wielding ladies and walking mushrooms. Dr. Andonutsâs character oddities, while strange, fit nicely into the evenly distributed mesh of oddities that comprise Earthboundâs world.
Derivative works, particularly fan works, exist in conversation with the source material. They answer questions posed by the source, interpolate details left out of the original, and otherwise build on the world of the original in a collaborative way. This conversation sometimes happens in a one-on-one manner, between fan and original creator, but it also happens in conjunction with the fan community as a whole. When a theory takes traction, it will begin to appear in more and more fan works, growing in popularity and notoriety until it is âacceptedâ as the most common interpretation of canonâs strange idiosyncrasies. Newer or more fringe theories are less likely to be taken as a âdefaultâ interpretation, but they are more likely to be taken as âfreshâ or âinterestingâ until/unless they, too, begin to gain traction.
HH exists in a few conversations: one with the source material, one with the fan community of Starmen.net (and the broader Earthbound community as a whole, although there was much more overlap between the two back in 2008), and one with Starmen.netâs Funfest culture. In order for HH to be well received by the Funfest judges, it would need to be aware of the community sensibilities as well as push the boundaries of the fan conversation with Earthbound as a whole-- a careful balancing act of being both interesting but also recognizable.
So, the fundamental fan question that HH tries to answer is âwhy is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THAT?â
This is an absolutely fair question, and Toby was certainly not the first to ask it, although his answer in the form of HH is one of the most high profile now.
HH is set in the world of Earthbound a few months after the final boss fight in autumn, but one where Ness and his friends did not magically return after their one-way trip to the final boss. Word has it that Dr. Andonuts has turned evil and must be defeated. On its surface, this is standard fare for a throwaway plot for a Funfest submission, but the magic of HH is that it does not treat this premise as a throwaway plot. It sets out to earnestly discuss why this happened by delving into Andonutsâs psyche.
Coming back to the idea of derivative works existing in conversation with the source material and interpolating unexplained details: Earthbound does not explain why Dr. Andonuts lives in solitude, nor does it give any hint as to the identity of Jeffâs mother. It also gives no indication as to why Andonuts didnât seem to have bonded well with his son other than the handwavey explanation that Andonuts is just âlike thatâ. HH initially poses the question of âwhy did Andonuts turn evilâ, but leaves the reader to puzzle that out while battling monsters in Earthboundâs RPG engine.
At first, Toby offers a partial explanation: in HH, Dr. Andonuts is portrayed as feeling immense guilt at having sent his son into what he perceived as a death trap. (quote from the game: âThe world is dead, and Iâve become senile with guilt and rage.â He also says stuff like âwhatâs the point in living without themâ.) As such, he turned evil and created zombies to storm the world of Winters, causing a surge in refugees and desperate survivors. This is why the main character was sent to kill him.
(image transcription: a picture of a menu with the text âWhat do you do!?â followed with a single option: âKill himâ)
But in order to see the depth of this explanation, the true answer to the question âwhy is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THISâ, the player must hit âBâ to cancel out of a menu at the correct moment, something Earthbound players tend to learn by habit from closing the equipment menu so many times, but never used as a plot-relevant mechanic in the base game. HH takes this subconscious muscle memory and turns it into a mechanic gating off half the game if you donât âspareâ the enemy, a precursor to the âspareâ mechanic that would debut seven years later in Undertale.
When the player does this, they enter Dr. Andonutsâs âMagicant,â a dream-construct representing his inner psyche, with his hopes and dreams and fears all laid bare. The main character is tasked with finding Dr. Andonutsâs lost Courage. In the base game, Ness enters his own Magicant, so this feels familiar to a veteran player, but it also gives Toby the chance to more closely examine Dr. Andonutsâs character than he otherwise might be able to do.
Over the course of the rest of the game in Dr. Andonutsâs Magicant, the player continues to control the main character, a bounty hunter named Varik, but the NPCs in the game often mistakenly treat Varik as Andonuts. The dialogue we see from these NPCs reflects memories from Andonutsâs own life. We see a lot more characters try to make connections with Dr. Andonuts (âhey donât you want to play baseball instead of doing math?â), but these are apparently rebuffed througout Andonutsâs life. One NPC guarding the entrance to the path leading to this lost Courage advises âBe careful. Be yourself.â We see memories of Dr. Andonutsâs presumed wife/Jeffâs mom, who is an OC Toby created for this work to answer the questions posed by canon.
Varik is tasked with fighting three âdemonsâ behind three doors, where each demon is said to be stronger than the next. Since this segment takes place inside Andonutsâs mind, these are unsubtly implied to be Andonutsâs inner demons. The second and third doors represent Andonutsâs relationship with his son and his guilt over getting people killed; the first door is relevant to this post, so Iâll talk about it in more detail.Â
Inside the first door, Varik sees Andonutsâs memories of something called âRemember Me,â who despite being faced in a battle, is friendly and affectionate and causes no damage apart from being âhard to think about.â This enemy has a stock overworld sprite of a male NPC from the base game.
(image transcript: a smiling purple sprite in an Earthbound-style battle. The text box says âThe Remember Me? was a little hard to think about againâ)
At the end of this map, we see a cutscene in which itâs implied that Dr. Andonuts felt disconnected from his wife, perceiving her as an incessant insect. She says things like âLately, youâve been acting kind of... disinterested in me. Is there something wrong with me?â She asks if Dr. Andonuts has been hiding something from her, which triggers the following battle:
(image description: an Earthbound-esque battle against three enemies, each a sprite depicting a closeup of a manâs muscular body: a bicep, a chest, and a swimsuit-clothed groin area)
All three of these enemies are named NO. The music that plays in the background is deliberately unsettling, and their battle moves consist mostly of âflexing in a masculine wayâ, âslapping their buddies in a masculine fashionâ, and âbeing hard to think about againâ. After three turns, these enemies deliver a series of un-dodgeable moves that kill the player before itâs possible to defeat them, ending the game. The only way to proceed in the game is to select the Flee option in the menu.
To summarize the themes being presented here, Dr. Andonuts is gay and repressed his homosexuality to try to preserve his relationship with his wife due to his lack of courage. From a game design and literary merit standpoint, this NO battle is actually a really poignant way of portraying Andonutsâs mindset and all of the fears that kept him in the closet, portraying menâs bodies as an enemy that he must fight, or in failing to do so, must run from. Remember that Earthbound takes place in 199X-- none of the 1990â˛s were known for being especially tolerant of gay men, nor was 2008 when Toby made this hack; 2008 was the same year that California passed a bill intended to ban gay marriage. In another since-deleted web page, Toby said that one of his motivations for creating HH was âthe lack of non-stereotypical, major homosexual characters in mediaâ. With that in mind, this is a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of the pains of repressing oneâs sexuality, especially from a teenager.
Toby also portrays some complexity in Andonutsâs relationship with his son Jeff, making the case that Andonuts helped Jeff in his fight against Giygas as a way of living vicariously through him to feel like less of a monster. From this standpoint, itâs easy to see that Andonutsâs abrasive language might be a defense mechanism for his own self esteem issues, calling others monsters to deflect from the fact he sees HIMSELF as a monster.
(image transcription: a screenshot of the main character fighting Andonuts from the end of the game. The text in the textbox from Andonuts says âyou idiots. look at your decaying, frostbitten bodiesâ)
(and just as a side note, I think the reminiscence of this dialogue to Floweyâs dialogue in Undertale is funny and interesting)
Dr. Andonuts says the following: "If I can't live with myself, why should anybody else? Ergo, nobody will live. Then, everybody will understand all the pain I went through. When everyone understands me... They'll cherish me so." This isnât the expression of a healthy mind, but it is a portrayal of someone whoâs experiencing some serious pain. Iâd also argue that itâs a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of a character who is clearly in a crisis.
Another Andonuts quote: âyouâre going to kill me, because thatâs what a hero does. he has to kill that monster, right? even in this form, i am shaking with fear. i donât want to die. leave me aloneâ
The second-to-last fight in the game is against an enemy called Id. In Freudian psychology, the Id is the representation of oneâs most base desires, in contrast to the Superego who restrains a person from operating on these desires. The game up until this point does a good job at portraying Dr. Andonutsâs Superego-centric repression strategies, so getting to see his underlying base desires directly is a novel development. The enemy Id consistently reiterates a desire to be left alone and for the main character to not kill it. At the end, it apologizes for not being much of a fight. Only then does Varik fight Dr. Andonuts proper, and without the Id, all thatâs left is the Superego-fueled repression, labeled in-game as âhatredâ.
Andonutsâs villain monologue starts as such: âI know what this feeling is. Itâs hatred for the person who came so far just to destroy an old man. My mind is gone. All that is left is pure hatred.
YOU SEE THIS BURNING, BLOODY UNIVERSE. YOU SEE THIS ULTIMATE, UNLIMITED POWER? Varik. I HAVE FUCKING HAD IT WITH YOUR SHIT. you little fuckers are going to have your bodies ripped in half. iâll shove your asses so far down your throats that when you crap, youâll sing fucking beethoven.â
This monologue is the precursor to the infamous line:
(image transcript: a screenshot from the final battle, in which Andonuts says the words âtl;dr: eat shit, faggotsâ)
As established earlier, this is a line uttered by a gay character who is in a tremendous amount of pain, which would make it an act of slur reclamation. We could argue about whether Toby Fox is in a position to justify this usage, but I refuse to have that conversation because I donât think real life queer people should have to out themselves in order to justify the art they make. Whether Toby Fox is actually queer or not is, I would argue, immaterial to the story heâs trying to tell here, which is nuanced in a way that a homophobe would be unlikely to write.
We can also have the conversation of whether this word choice is a good decision or not-- and there are, I would argue, a lot of parts of this game that a storyteller with more experience and maturity would have handled better. There are some parts that come across heavy-handed and needlessly edgy, and there are parts that could have been handled with more grace. We can discuss whether âbury our gaysâ stories were stale by 2008, or whether stories of queer pain had fallen out of vogue for stories of queer joy. But again, this is a work made by a 16-year old, and being needlessly critical of a fangame made by a teenager for a community of predominantly teenagers feels needlessly meanspirited. Just because the game has been unforeseeably thrust into the public light like this doesnât mean we need to eviscerate it from a 2023 lens. Itâs not fair to Toby Fox, neither the original 16-year old creator nor the adult celebrity today.
So Iâm not going to do that. What I am going to say is that a queer reading of this work would indicate that this word usage may very well have been a decision made with artistic intent, and a death-of-the-author reading of this work might indicate that this word has artistic merit anyways. If a gay character sees gayness as bad and uses a slur associated with gayness to demean his opponent, that does fundamentally say something about this character, and in this case it reinforces the existing themes that Toby had put in place. I wouldnât recommend people in 2023 take this approach in storytelling lightly, but I can see and appreciate the spirit in which the game and this word choice appear to have been made.
In the end, Varik does defeat Dr. Andonuts and kill him.
(image transcript: Varik standing above the machine containing Dr. Andonutsâs dead body, not depicted onscreen. The text box reads âYou feel a little like this situation could have been avoided.â)
This is one of the last text boxes of the game, and I think itâs a good ending note for this work-- saying that queer lives do NOT need to go this way, that we do not need to bury our gays, that this genuine pain that Dr. Andonuts experienced is not an inevitability.
In conclusion, I do love Halloween Hack for what it is, imperfections and all. It was very clearly a labor of love made by a very earnest and well-meaning teen, and a lot of the things that would later go on to make Undertale so popular are present in their nascent forms here. HH has some genuinely interesting things to say about Earthbound, from both a plot and a character standpoint, and itâs clearly a good-faith attempt at grappling with queer and psychological subject matter. If people on the internet were to engage sincerely with it rather than judging it (and its creator) based on one out-of-context screenshot, I think they might find a diamond-in-the-rough that still manages to be an absolute gem of a fangame.
like there comes a point where you think something is fundamentally wrong with you. and then it turns out itâs just Friday and you havenât washed your hair in three days and maybe youâre also just a little lonely and the combination of all three of those things is whittling a hole into your chest every time you breathe. but also the sunâs up. and youâve survived everything so far, so youâll survive this too, even if it hurts, even if you have to survive it many times.
Honestly needed to read this, irl stuff has made my heart been pretty loud, never sure if I'll really figure it out or if I'll last. But reading this really helped
I keep rereading the sentence "the students are not allowed to bring their own books from home because they have not been approved" over and over like it will make it any better. It's like the world just became a tiny bit more of a 1984-esque hellscape for kids when I wasn't looking.
