OK I’m starting reading end town. I finished it in an afternoon and night so like seven years of comics I think. Because I definitely have a life and I have one thing I have to say I fucking hate Aaron Marx that doctor who ripoff and like what happened to petey and stuff I was really into it until after the milk trial and unity then fuck they do that to Holly. I’m just really mad anyone who sees this and also read in town. Please explain to me the actual because I’m still confused what’s happening because there was like some sort of 1940 cartoon like Tom and Jerry I don’t understand and apparently they use Holly again as bait, but as trixie and fucking kirblee go die in a hole …. I also like flask. She was hot. She did nothing wrong yeah well at least I have topsider tales now ottor girl is superior to lizard well, that’s enough I will return to sonic stuff…
Is there any hope for Endtown? Aaron seems to be somewhat worried about the floundering state of his Patreon, and the rumors of two major arcana being Endtown focused makes me think he, at least in some level, realizes he has to right the ship somehow. I feel like this arc might be his final indulgence into Marx wankery, killing Eye, and resetting the universe. Maybe that's just me being too hopeful though.
Personally I'm REALLY skeptical.
I've gone over or added to thoughts about how much of a cancer Marx is a few times already so I can keep explaining that facet to a minimum for another difficult angle in the story itself: he's completely annihilated the scope and worse trivialized any reason for investment in the actual characters.
Think about it for a second: there's an established multiverse where copies of the main characters exist at any point of their lifespan, from start to finish, and can be accessed by Marx at any point to do anything to them. Someone dies? Replace them! It's that easy!
Why does anyone have to be invested anymore if Aaron already established that Cardoodle hybrids are quite literally stupid and shallow people, Topsiders cannot 'cure' the mutation phenomenon or make it stop and thus will spitefully persist as humanity's rage as it dies or become inhuman mockeries that will kill and eat each other at a drop of a hat, and Marx caused this unnatural existence for unknown but frankly no good reason at this point. He just subjected inhabitants of a doomed world to live in a suffering hell and keeps doing it.
And why should the audience care about anything when Aaron seemingly doesn't? The whole Benny situation unfolding right now was long overdue and feels more like he finally remembered that was the driving force behind the conflict for half of the Eden storyline he never resolved, and the resolution is Marx constantly mocking and chiding Duffy for having real human emotions and wants in a storyline that doesn't give a fuck. And that's the rub: the undercurrent of how the drama and stakes for the characters we're supposed to be invested in is a joke to Marx for him to fart on and dismiss despite the bones of Endtown being BUILT on the characters as well as their struggles and the drama of their lives in this world.
If he were in any way planning on changing course it would have happened already, but the latest update alone is proof that isn't the case. He's still shitting on the characters for their feelings while simultaneously drawing them in emotional agony. With that kind of poisonous mindset how can any return to Endtown be positive when we last left Endtown at its most dramatic and lowest? With his track record I almost anticipate a soft retcon of what likely would develop after Pig Arc, same as what happened after Milk Trial, and that's being generous.
Hope is if he finally establishes under no uncertain terms that Marx is a villain and the characters have to escape or conquer him somehow, until we see acknowledgements for that then just enjoy watching the fire burn, I know I am.
It’s another one of these! Spoilers for the January Endtown Update just as a forewarning.
In my other Marx rant I went over a good amount of Marx but I feel the newest updates to Endtown really drive it home how horrific Marx is and how damaging his presence is on this story and how cruel a god entity he is just via context alone. I think I need to appropriately break it down so people can really grasp this with both hands rather than be dazzled by fancy art and faded memory.
More under the cut!
Marx is basically the creator, the author if you will, of the Endtown world. He chooses worlds which are slotted for destruction and manipulates the circumstances within them to seed a new sandbox for him to play around in. Multiple sandboxes even!
During the Ship Arc it’s revealed that the parallel worlds to Endtown’s world are dead. Nobody survives the apocalypse, which typically is caused by resource squabbling. Marx, horrible god that he is, sets up Endtowns in these worlds that shelter and preserve humanity which we see during the post-mortem Flask epilogue and again in Holly’s flashback where she and Doc Chase are sent to Endtown.
He also gives Apex (Topsiders) means to survive the resultant Armageddon as well as evidenced by Amesworth’s Exposition segment of the Eden Arc:
Marx left his ‘clue’ about what was happening to the world and tampered with the biosuit’s plastics which allowed the Topsiders to persist when they would have all transformed or perished. This makes him responsible for the Topsider’s existence and their genocidal rampage on the mutated (grexed) humans.
Now the cause of the mutations were revealed to be due to some thinning of reality’s walls which allow a completely unrelated universe, not parallel but cosmologically distant to this one, collide and infect it in a way where people turn into cartoon animals. This may, perhaps, be seen as a kind of accident if you are so inclined to believe so. Like a boulder crushing a sparrow’s nest it’s an act of nature the occupants never would have foresaw or anticipated until doom was upon them.
But what if I told you that there was a man who pushed the boulder in the first place? Enter a brief but incredibly damning comment made by Dr. Amesworth in a quiet aside during the Exposition segment:
Isn’t this a really curious thing for her to say? Almost as if Marx chose the nature of what the universe collision was. Which, if you think about it, might be actually true. Marx has been shown to accomplish anything and has not faced something that actually stands as a challenge to his skills or will and expresses nothing but fawning adoration for Cardoodles.
We have from his own admission that he’s been manipulating Wally’s ‘story’ to serve the purpose of feeding him to Eye and ultimately combining his soul with Cracked Cat and that he’s done this countless times. He’s admitted in this most recent update that he’s watched or been aware of Duffy committing suicide ‘8 million times’ but only now supposedly thought to stop him. And why?
Marx seems to have this happen where his outreach for characters not named Wally are curious larks rather than anything in his rigid five billion step plan to whatever endgoal he’s looking for with his sandbox. This happened much earlier for Flask too.
And in fact ONLY seems to happen when he’s ‘curious’ if that really is earnest and not another lie to get the circumstances of what he wants to happen, happen. He’s a master manipulator after all, privy to countless permutations of how a situation will go and pulling the strings accordingly. He doesn’t save Holly because the Ship reveals what her ‘deal’ was and deems her too fundamentally broken to fix (even though there could be opportunities to fix her, I feel like Marx cared more about Holly fixing Wally and getting him out of Endtown rather than Holly’s own wellbeing and orchestrated Milk Trial to break her fundamentally).
He doesn’t save Walt because he knows exactly what happened with Walt, there’s no mystery to his actions because it’s a perfectly understood progression. How tragic but not anything he has to deal with, people die every day!
And he doesn’t save Heather because, uhmmm...
He just doesn’t okay?????????????
Endtown’s served its purpose! Who cares about the innocent people left behind in there, it’s fine and dandy to pull some parlor tricks like making your eyes bleed to scare the fascist you put in office or make a sad pose as Walt disappears from existence, maybe the audience will forget you’re actually the reason this all happened and give you a pass for not intervening when you did it for Wally and now Duffy.
If the characters are not serving Cracked Cat’s ascension then they’re disposable. It might be neat to see what new thing can twist the story around for Marx’s point of view but each ‘tweak’ is fundamentally not important to his main goal. If something affects the main goal, like Holly, he’d gladly throw them in the garbage. And he has every right to do this in his eyes. Why?
Because he made the world. Everyone’s lives were forfeit to his whims the second he ‘saved’ them from an apocalypse. Nobody in Endtown is supposed to be alive, absolutely nobody. So if this world was supposed to die he can do anything to it, can’t he? He can cross a cartoon universe over the one he’s chosen, make the inhabitants change into cartoons. Why? How else can he make the Cracked Cat he wants to see?
I spent all day on this so you 16ish people I hope enjoy it (at least reading all of Endtown again to snag every fucking cap to composite and make this into its own thing was mostly enjoyable if a bit time consuming)
I’m not dead! But I am taking a break, I was updating at a blistering pace y’know? Plus Endtown’s been a bit of a slump especially with the latest updates. Here’s Dr. Capitol from Topside Tales leering at an (impending) doomed Marx.
Since I’m here y’know what? I’m gonna talk about Marx.
Marx has ALWAYS been awful in Endtown but for different reasons than what now exists thanks to the Eden arc. Marx was an irreverent buffoon, tonedeaf to the suffering of the people around him or the dangers presented that he so merrily faced with no concerns whatsoever. This was explained by him being a massive godsue, a character with the power to basically warp reality around himself to suit his needs. He could pull open wormholes to travel where he wished, he could swallow missiles like the Mask, he could pull a bizarrely flavored gum created by a specific person to present with all the ease comparatively to showing someone a business card. He saves the soul of a psychotic murderer and grants her happiness after death and orchestrates the subversion of a previously functional government which resulted in the deaths of many.
Later on we find him regaling young Endtowners with the sad tale of Holly Hollister and her fate to wither away and die in a lotus eater machine, to which Doc Chase her only living relative demands he bring her back and rescue her. Marx rebuffs him and then grouses about it later in a bath (in the Oracle) as if the request was unreasonable and nobody understood what it was he was doing here. Ruining people’s lives is hard and nobody understands, apparently.
Prior to Eden we’re given some impression Marx is working towards some ‘Greater Good’ and even have a lens into Eye’s looming threat in the Unity Arc. We hear “Greater Good” a few times from him, but here’s the kick: Greater Good is the mantra of evil people who commit atrocities while pretending they’re supposed to be good people.
And boy howdy do we find out just what Greater Good Marx was working up to the whole time! He’s orchestrated all this suffering just to set Wally up to be the evening special for Eye! Possession, exposition, exploding into flames, death! Wow! Everything he’s done is to trick Eye and destroy him!
Now this would be terrible if it was just one instance of him building to this point, as if he has been working hard at trying to find one way Eye could be defeated. With the Unity segment a reader may be so inclined to think so, especially given the world where Eye’s bloodied mush went against a Female Marx’s cavalry only for them to all bite it. However, this isn’t the case!
Marx has been doing this over and over and over and over again, it’s cyclic as each universe where he meddles he set up these circumstances.
Worse still, he has the AUDACITY to say Eye is stupid for falling for this trick every time while ignoring how his own solution to defeat Eye involves the deaths of countless people, a good amount of them INNOCENT, all to make one eyeball choke on cat food!
And we’re not done yet reader! Riddle me this: if a man saves lives by building a shelter for the apocalypse this makes him a good man, yes?
If a man also creates a whole faction of genocidal psychopaths hellbent on killing those who are affected by a transformation phenomenon then what does that make him?
If a man uses his reality powers to subvert a government that had been functioning to spiral it into a cannibalistic society what does that make him?
If a man uses his godlike powers to save the soul of a murderer then later allow the soul of a vigilante doing the right thing to fade then what does that make him?
If a man grooms someone to serve as the ritualistic sacrifice for a cosmic horror without ever fully clueing him into this then what does that make him?
Marx is so utterly reprehensible it bends my mind that ANYONE likes him. He’s a horrific sociopath who plays with lives like one plays with a Lego set. He has no empathy, he has no sympathy, unless it’s served up on a Flask shaped plate. Perhaps that’s why he saved her soul, then, because while she was a murdering heartless bitch he’s practically the same as her. He’s killed through machinations and manipulations, he sees other lives as inferior to himself, and the ends justify the means for his actions no matter how horrible it is.
The world would have been better off if everyone died in WW3.
A bit of Farx (Fox Marx) for an anon who loves the guy. He definitely wins in the category of Best Marx but that’s not a very high bar to jump. Lucky for him given how short he is.
This saga is a scenario dreamed up to why Dottie was so OOC in the Pig Arc. She was kidnapped by Marx after her talk with Walt at the docks and replaced with a ditto copy to perform ‘her’ job in the Pig Arc. Aaron Marx is portrayed as a (more obvious) villain here, and is also implied to have done the same to Holly at some point too.
The Heather-taxidermy was the ‘answer’ to what happened to her body after she swan-dived from the Administration level. There’s a pair of rugs upstairs that are panda and brown bear respectively as well!
