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Sorry about the delay on this months full moon post. My husband had been sick with a cold and he passed it on to me. Thankfully my version of it is much milder than his (but that's what immunosuppressants do).

Ran from Clover!

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#clamp #clamp full moon wallpaper #clamp clover

This is a part 2 of my post from 2024 where I compared CLAMP's manga Clover to the obscure 90's multimedia franchise GADGET, the original post you can read here. But a quick recap for CLAMP fans who don't know: Clover very heavily based many of its backgrounds, especially in the full-color illustrations, and a few of its characters off of GADGET to such a clear extent that at least some versions of the reissue credit GADGET'S creator, Haruhiko Shono, in the copyright section. Also, anyone familiar with how the GADGET series is compared to Clover will doubtless be very baffled at the... shall we say, very creative direction CLAMP took with it. I just did my second read-through of Clover and found even more examples of references, so I'll jump right into them.

I had completely forgotten until this second read-through that there were not one, not two, but THREE separate characters based off of the GADGET character Theodore Slowslop, who is a very mysterious presence of unknown motivation who acts as the handler to the protagonist, Louis Hausmann.

"I can be your angle... or yuor devil"

Kazuhiko has the dark hair and black outfit (whose name might be a combo of GADGET's creators but idk), Gingetsu has the title of Commander and the emotionally distant personality, and Bols has the round sunglasses and seems to be the closest to Slowslop's vaguely middle age. It's like Slowslop got hit with a beam that made him undergo Tumblr Sexyman mitosis. I just wanna ask who on the CLAMP team was so interested in Slowslop and why. I'm not judging, I'm just confused. If you play GADGET or read the spinoffs you'll know Slowslop has zero charisma or charm on purpose. But notice that none of these clones sport Slowslop's fascist-style haircut, cause that would've been - heaven forbid - kinda ugly looking!!!

The second-most obvious GADGET inspiration is Sue's cage where she lived most of her life, which is very obviously based off of the recurring GADGET location known as the National Observatory, such as the windows and the foliage. There's so many examples I can't fit them all so I'll just give a few. I actually don't mind the heavy referencing in this case cause the Observatory is the best location in the series imo:

A Clover background based off of renders of a train station from the art book Inside Out with Gadget (the inspo is more obvious with the Kazuhiko part of this diptych which I brought up in my first post):

Lastly here's this Gingetsu and Ran illustration, which is heavily referenced from a recurring background element with the same or similar windows/gates and bricks that you'll find in many of the train stations in the GADGET games:

I still don't believe Clover is an outright ripoff of GADGET, most of the other characters and the plot as a whole is very different, but at times it does feel like the setting of GADGET is being used as a fanfiction playground for other people's OCs to play around in, if that makes sense.

#clamp #clamp clover #gadget past as future #90's manga #90's video games #point and click #clamp illustration #clamp manga