Story Pile: th3 wh0l3 3l3ph4nt — Megatokyo In Full
In 2011, the novel Fifty Shades of Grey was published and over the next two years became a bestselling novel in the erotic thriller genre. Telling the story of nobody cares and it doesn’t matter as they not gunna check, the book was successful on an unexpected scale, prompting critical reviews and then an examination of the success itself. Fifty Shades of Grey put its author, one EL James, into the Forbes’ list of highest-earning authors, and resulted in a highly publicised, successful movie trilogy. As of date, it’s made over one and a half billion dollars.
The examinations of Fifty Shades of Grey involved bringing to light its origin as a Twilight alternate-universe fanfiction on a fanfiction forum, published weekly from 2009-2011. It is one of the most successful examples of a new web creator, where someone made their own transformative fanfiction, it gathered an audience, that audience then were enough to propel the form into the attention of conventional publishing, and that publishing drew in and solidified that existing audience, then used its greater access to propel the work to higher and higher stages of what we typically call ‘success,’ because people paid money for it, and money is what we use to fill our souls in a capitalist system.
This success seems completely decoupled from critical reception, which was, it seems, overwhelmingly negative. I have yet to find someone wholeheartedly speaking well of any of EL James’ actual work as a writer, now that the fanfiction version has been deleted off the forums it was being posted on. The world we live in now is one where it isn’t hard at all to find people willing to present a new, interesting examination of Fifty Shades of Grey, having read it all, that has to establish that whatever else it has going on, the book series is quite bad. Criticising it, though, automatically brings with it the possibility of being seen as anti-smut, or anti-woman, or anti-Twilight (which is a good thing to be), and there is therefore a typical critical perspective that in order to engage with Fifty Shades of Grey, one cannot merely watch a scene and respond to it, or hear the idea and react to that, but instead, one must completely examine the text, read the books, the notes, and the movies, and then, armed with references and citations, explain what they already knew, at the start, that this book is as bad as they thought it was, and in fact, it was worse.
This is a huge task! It’s not enough to react sensibly to a thing you know, then, the impetus is that you have to understand it deeply and thoroughly. One must eat the entire elephant.
This isn’t about Fifty Shades of Grey.
This is about Megatokyo.
I want to introduce you to my elephant.
Spoiler Warning, and Content Warning, and Size Warning. I’m going to spoil the entire plot of Megatokyo in this article. I’m also going to talk about ideas like racism and misogyny and transmisogyny in a largely PG-rated webcomic. Finally, at the point where I’m writing this paragraph, this text is sitting around 15,000 words. I’m going to do what I can to make it more approachable, but this is not a breezy little read. There’s also a Table of Contents below this point, and each section has a ‘back to table of contents’ link for your convenience in reading. If you’d like to watch this article as a video instead, it’s available on Youtube, here.
While I’m at it, a Kindness Warning; I don’t want you to go about showing this to Fred Gallagher, the actual human with actual feelings who may have even harsher opinions on this work than I do. By all means, please share this work with your community and show it to friends who are interested, but if one of those friends is Fred Gallagher, please be thoughtful about whether it would be helpful and kind to do so.
Oh and art for this one is a bit of a bear, given that, well, obviously, I should be using Megatokyo art to explain Megatokyo, right? On the other hand, Megatokyo art is largely twenty years old, quite low resolution, and a little noisy. I did some algorithmic upscaling but there’s a limit on how good small .gifs can look upscaled. Assume all work is credited to Fred Gallagher, but also, primarily there to break up the flow of reading and not illustrative of the post.
Table of Contents
Part Two: Methodology
Part Three: The Text of Megatokyo
Part Four: Praising The Good
Part Five: Interrogating the Author
Conclusion
Too-Brief Summary
The Full Summary
The Prequel And First Day
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
A Week Break
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
What Does This Author Care About?
The Author Isn’t Good At This
The Author and Games
The Author and Misogyny
The Author and Emulated Oppression
The Author and Racism
The Author and Authorship
I had an obvious problem when I started this project, because I simply do not normally engage with the kind of work Megatokyo is. It isn’t the same kind of long-form a piece of work as something like a TV series or a long book or even a few movies. Such works, typically speaking, convey their points specifically and with many hands and oversight on the project to make sure it’s something that can be reasonably addressed as a chunk at a time and the result is that there’s a coherence to it. Even bad TV shows with stories that contradict themselves are made up of episodes that more or less express some consistent ideas. What this article became isn’t like that, because the webcomic Megatokyo is an analysis of a large text that is also made up of one thousand, six hundred and change individual, distinct, less-coherent texts.
Further, the form this analysis takes is trying to address a problem of scale. Any analysis of such a long form text can step on three different rakes:
It runs the risk of replicating the text in a less interesting way, being just a giant pile of words that is as daunting to read as the original.
It runs the risk of summarising the text so small as to disappear important information, and therefore anyone who goes to check will find pieces of the analysis missing.
It runs the risk of being exactly the right size and the writer doesn’t know it and therefore instead veers into one or the other.
This treatment started in 2023, which was when I first got the idea of re-examining Megatokyo. That was on a tight schedule with no clear idea of what I was doing, and led to me writing a long-form piece that examined only the first year of the comic, and considered it in that context; I wanted to think about the work as a 25 year old webcomic that had been worked on and what that work looked like when the comic was at its ‘most prolific.’
At the time I think I came away from the comic with a conciliatory position. I thought about the work as something that clearly overburdened its artist; it chose a schedule early on that at no point did it ever successfully maintain, and then, rather than consider that the schedule needed to change, it instead opted to pad out the space or skip days and apologise for it. This led to it failing to keep up with its schedule, and at the time, I noted that about a third of Megatokyo wasn’t Megatokyo.
Further to that, I reflected on how the current state of Megatokyo, as a long-running webcomic with a biannual update schedule that nonetheless had a Patreon (around $1,500 a month as of this writing) and advertised a store and stood under the shadow of a Kickstarter, a story that is still updating the original narrative that was started in 2000, without any kind of plot overhaul or retcon or reflection on its origin, was a special kind of prison that could only impact someone under capitalism. The actual human making the project was someone who very quickly became just successful enough to make something he couldn’t ignore (as a value generator), but also couldn’t actually sustain (as the demand for art and story was higher than he could deliver).
What this original treatment did not do very much of was reflecting on Megatokyo as a text – as a thing that represents what it is, what the story includes and how it tells that story. At the time I imagined that it wouldn’t be hard to read all of the remaining pages and get back to a ‘part two’ of the article, maybe in one year.
That was three years ago.
I resolved that it was unwise to try to reconstruct off that article, and instead opted for a fresh start with a proper methodological approach, which is a fancy way of saying ‘a plan for how I did this.’ Now I’ve done that, and in order to show how I did this, in order to demonstrate all the angles of the elephant, it is time to show you the plan.
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Part Two: Methodology
I didn’t want to consider the many different real world influences that complicated the situation of Megatokyo’s creation. For a start, it’s just hard to do; tracking a real world calendar of events and the events in the publically known lives of the people making Megatokyo seems just a huge headache and honestly, gets a little stalkery. I know from reading the archives that during the making of Megatokyo, a person involved in the creation had a kid, but I don’t want to sit down and chart out ‘oh this is when the kid started school’ or something just to see if I could map that onto information in the comic. That seems both hard to do and really horrible.
Instead, what I chose to focus on was the idea of treating Megatokyo as if Megatokyo was a text. This is tied into what I think of as the ‘fantasy’ of a serialised webcomic, which is presenting a serialised narrative, one page at a time, that all comes together into a coherent whole.
Part of discussing this is that there’s a person involved in all of this, who is known as Fred Gallagher. I am not interested at all in examining who he is as a person and his influences, and doing so would be dreadfully unfair, and turn him into just an effigy for the problems in the comic that are probably not the result of an individual artist’s preferences. I have no interest in psychoanalysing the individual. It’d be really easy to just sit here making fun of the things in Megatokyo and then saying ‘wow, Fred sucks,’ and if this many words on this many ideas doesn’t make it clear, I’m not here for an easy route at all. The aim here is to take a look at Megatokyo with a Barthesan approach. You might recognise that name from the phrase the death of the author (Death of the Author, 1967), where Roland Barthes established the idea that the author does not possess unique meaningful control over how the work must be interpreted. Where Death of the Author is super valuable for finding unintentional or subconscious themes in work, it also is a great framing for this kind of work where the author is literally unavailable to examine the work – the author wrote this text twenty-five years ago and has no trustworthy record of anything it means.
That means that I’m going to refer to ‘the Author’ in this work but that refers to a character invented for this analysis, and constructed as a person interpreted from the choices made to tell this story as it is. That is, the Author is the person to whom the story of Megatokyo makes sense.
In order to construct a body of text to read (the corpus), I downloaded a full archive of the webcomic from The Internet Archive. This archive presented all the images as .pngs, which they’re not; whoever archived these files renamed them without changing their format, which creates some loading problems, especially where the comics are animated. This archive also ended at comic 1550, which meant for the last seventy comics or so, I read them on the website.
Once I had the archive, I renamed all the files to match their appropriate type and comic number (there’s an off-by-one error in the archive), and parsed through the text to look for what I consider ‘filler.’
‘Dead art days,’ where the comic doesn’t advance but instead shows something like a pinup or some cool art.
Omake stories, which tend to live between the Chapters of the story. These may reflect information in the story, but this is already a sizeable elephant I am eating and I shouldn’t need omakes to illuminate them.
‘Making of’ comedy comics.
‘Shirt Guy Dom’ days.
Guest art days.
This did however include a number of pages that one could reasonably consider ‘outside’ of the story, with a large pin-up and a low-impact 4koma. These pages could be dropped because they don’t do anything or show anything that matters later in the story, but at that point I’m making judgment calls about specific in-story comics as to their value. Keeping them in pads the page count a very small amount but being reasonable about it, who cares, right? It’s maybe five pages out of a thousand, it’s not meaningful.
With this rough first pass, I then kept a second directory of non-story pages. Whenever I encountered a page that belonged in the non-story group, I moved it there. This provides a little bit of data for the curious:
Of the 1620 pages, 353 pages are non-story.
The first year had 12 non-story pages, but that’s an outlier given the comic started in August.
The second year was produced with a three-comics-a-week schedule (which assumes 156 pages), and featured 54 non-story pages. By comparison the past five years of Megatokyo have featured three non-story pages (out of 34 total pages).
The non-story pages are concentrated at the start of the comic’s life, but that concentration also reflects more of the problem with the schedule than anything else.
Across two days, from the 19th to the 20th of December, 2025, I read the entire archive up to that point, numbering 1,236 pages. For comparison, Maus and V for Vendetta both have a page count of 296, Watchman is 416, and The Dark Knight Returns compiles to 224 pages. If it was volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist that would be six volumes. During this reading experience I was probably quite insufferable as I pointed things out of context to my friends and family and to all of them I wish to apologise. I also set up a spreadsheet of every comic, and took notes of things I noticed that were worth commentary, then went back and back-referenced things that became significant later. This became important over time, because otherwise some of the details of the series, especially the timeline and characters’ identities can be easily missed.
I wrote notes on 409 different comics, and the word count of the notes is over 17,000. Which means this piece is actually the abridged criticism of Megatokyo. I have processed a lot of this data in a spreadsheet and made some honestly unnecessary tables showing the breakdown of Megatokyo. Most of it isn’t actually that interesting! It took Megatokyo three years to reach page 500, and the most recent three years has featured twenty pages. That’s a novel stat but all it tells you is ‘Megatokyo isn’t being produced very quickly,’ and that’s almost the very example of ‘so what’ fact.
My plan is to discuss Megatokyo in three stages. First I am going to present the timeline of the actual sequence of events in Megatokyo, constructed through notes, aiming to be as neutral as possible when presenting what’s in the text. Then, I’m going to explain things that I think Megatokyo does well that it appears to be trying to do. Third, I intend to discuss Megatokyo in terms of interrogating what choices the Author of Megatokyo thinks of as important based on the choices in the story. Then, finally, I aim to analyse Megatokyo as a whole text based on this reading experience.
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Part Three: The Text of Megatokyo
Too-Brief Summary
Piro and Largo are two guys from America who like videogames and are scared of women. They leave America to go to Japan, where they meet Nanasawa and Hayasaka, women they white knight and sexually harrass respectively. Over the course of twelve ‘days’ of story, Piro and Largo wind up in relationships with these women, with the remaining story threads being the introduction of a magical girl called Yuki, a robot girl called Ping, Piro’s ex-girlfriend Tohya, and a collection of kitsune including an unvoiced girl named Ashe and a fun punk called Mugi.
If you’re wondering ‘what happened’ in that time, then the truest, simplest answer is not much. If you’re familiar with Megatokyo and wonder ‘how did they fill that in?’ it’s actually less interesting than you think. If you dropped out around the time you saw Piro, Largo, Hayasaka and Nanasawa running around, then all you really need to know is Piro avoided having sex with teenagers, but not without dating at least one, and then wound up with the first named woman he met in the story, and Largo wound up dating the woman he sexually harrassed way back in year one, and these are both treated as very sweet.
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The Full Summary
Nonetheless, this is eating the whole elephant and so, in order to account for what I’m doing and prove that I’ve done it, I’m going to give a rundown of the sequence of meaningful events in Megatokyo. When I say ‘meaningful’ I mean things that are probably going to be supported later in the story, or express some idea the author seems to want to reiterate. Furthermore, there are things that happen in a comic that I am skipping over because they don’t matter. The actual movements of Dom and Ed don’t matter because there’s no tension to where they are or what they’re doing – they’re just nebulous villains that appear out of nowhere whenever they want and function without any consequences. Seraphim barely exists to do anything but provide useful information about age of consent laws. The entire story with Asmodeus kidnapping Seraphim and being rescued by Boo is a plot cul-de-sac that doesn’t actually change anything, as is the ‘evil Seraphim’ idea.
Presented then, in as best as I can accord a meaningfully true and largely nonjudgmental description of the sequence of events in Megatokyo.
The Prequel And First Day
We are introduced to Piro and Largo. They are both young white men from America, who are of an age to recently graduate from college, putting them at around 22 years of age. They are both, for lack of a better descriptor, losers, who have nothing in their heads beyond videogames. They have tastes that diverge slightly, in that Piro likes games where women are objects with decision trees and Largo likes games where women are objects who are old enough to have tits.
The comic starts with Largo and Piro going to attend E3, an industry trade show that they can’t get into, because they’re not part of the industry. They lie their way in, and attend E3. Largo gets black-out drunk and while he’s compromised and unable to fight back, Piro gets him onto a plane and they go to Japan, which is a thing you could hypothetically joke about doing back before 2001. Without passports, they have to beat a ninja at Mortal Kombat V to get into the country, which introduces Junpei. Junpei is, no joking, one of the most important characters in the story. Junpei speaks in broken English, even when he speaks in Japanese.
Piro and Largo arrive in Tokyo, max out their credit cards, and crash with their friend Tsubasa. They attend the Tokyo Gaming Show, where Largo sexually harasses a woman who threatens to break his arm. This is how we are introduced to two of the important women of the story, Hayasaka and Nanasawa. Neither of them are given names, and the only thing they do in their introduction is complain about Largo. Hayasaka, the woman who broke Largo’s arm, will be dating him after five days of character development. Nanasawa is an Anna Millers waitress that hits Piro in the head with a coffee pot accidentally when they go to Anna Millers to ogle the hot waitresses, a theme that is going to come up again — both random violence as punchline and ogling Nanasawa specifically as she does her job.
The boys freeload on Tsubasa for six weeks, then borrow some money from a friend in the United States, which introduces us to Ed and Dom. They are two of the villains of the story, as best I can tell. They lend Largo and Piro money, which they immediately waste on not going home, and instead spends it on disposable gamer stuff. Piro, realising that this is not, in fact, a good thing that he just did, and not wanting to refund the material to get the money back, instead goes to a book store to read shojo manga, where he is seen by Yuki. This introduces Yuki, who is a schoolgirl, and about fifteen years old.
This is also when Seraphim, Piro’s conscience is properly introduced and offers him some meaningful plot-relevant information: He should not have sex with that teenager. The story explicitly states that he is not a teenager, that she is a high schooler, and that this age gap is bad. In this meeting, he loses his sketchbook, which Yuki finds and reads, and plans on returning to him, including trying to contact him (which his conscience calls a ‘close call’). Piro, seeing someone modestly distressed about not having a rail card, hands them his rail card and walks home instead. The someone in question is Nanasawa. Neither recognise each other, which stands to reason because Piro is not memorable or noteworthy as a blonde American in Tokyo that she hit in the face while at work.
Following this, Seraphim does not introduce any meaningful information to the story, and is otherwise a rhetorical device for interrogating Piro’s inner life with two unreliable narrators.
Piro accidentally gets a job at a fan merchandise store by doing literally nothing. Largo accidentally starts a zombie apocalypse with the aid of his new conscience, the hamster Boo from Baldur’s Gate 2. We are also introduced to Tohya, a young woman that scares Largo. We don’t get her name for over a year. Tsubasa visits the game store where Piro works, and introduces Ping, a dead-eyed robot peripheral meant to plug into a PS2 and take on personalities from visual novel characters. At the end of this day, Largo and Piro return to Tsubasa’s apartment, only to find it empty, with Ping left on the floor. Tsubasa has left the country to pursue his dream of a girl from Oklahoma or something, inspired by Piro’s example, which is horrifying.
They get evicted!
This ends the prequel, with the status quo of the comic almost completely established. Piro and Largo are homeless with their PS2 peripheral high school girl Ping, Piro has a job at a gamer store without ever trying for it, alongside Hayasaka, who got him the job. Hayasaka and Nanasawa are roommates, and Nanasawa is working at Anna Millers, while looking for voice acting work. Yuki has Piro’s sketchbook and wants to return it.
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Day 1
Things should speed up now that all the pieces are in place.
Piro goes to work where Hayasaka bullies the boss into giving him an apartment upstairs. Largo stalks Tohya to school and in the process is mistaken for, then becomes a schoolteacher at a Japanese highschool. Largo does not speak Japanese.
Yuki comes to Piro at his job and returns his book bag. Piro finds that Yuki has taken notes on his artwork, pointing out that bras look uncomfortable or his hair design is bad.
Ping befriends Tohya at school, and then Tohya fights with Largo at an arcade. Piro, passing by, meets Tohya. No information is exchanged. Piro is confused.
Nanasawa goes to work, where she’s sexually harassed and respond by pouring coffee in the harassers’ laps. Then, reflecting on her roommate’s coworker Piro, she gets spaghetti at work to take to him, with intention of sharing it with him. When she gets there, she finds him with Ping, the high schooler robot in his apartment, and leaps to the conclusion that she should not intrude and definitely not ask, and gives them the spaghetti before leaving.
We see Dom and Ed, gun-toting villains, on a boat to Japan.
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Day 2
Yuki is upset about not having done more when she returned the sketchbook to Piro. This continues through the day, with her thoughts only being occupied with the American artist.
At Piro-and-Largo’s place, Tohya shows up to take Ping to school. Largo meets Erika at Piro’s work, for a second time, and immediately sexually harasses her. Piro sends him out to go make fake robots out of trash. Largo left a note for Junpei, who shows up to help. Ed and Dom show up in Japan now, looking for Largo. Largo meets Tohya and threatens her. She doesn’t want to fight him, and sends him to his job at the school she attends.
Nanasawa has a voice acting audition. She doesn’t nail the actual audition but she does impress the director, who decides that they may be able to overhaul the game’s plot if they have a voice performer like that to build around.
At school, Yuki has more feelings about not having done more with the book bag exchange. Tohya goes to class with Ping, and faints. Ping panics and tries to help her friend. Largo considers trying to kill her. Junpei and Ping take her to the nurse’s office. Ping stays there, protecting Tohya and beats up Ed when he tries to kill Tohya. Tohya takes Ping home that night, and Ping phones Piro to criticise him for not being more aware of what she’s doing.
Seraphim gives Piro a little speech about how people will usually assume the worst of him for his incredibly socially normal interest of anime in Japan. Piro bemoans that he didn’t do anything wrong. He spends the rest of his workday having a little spiral about it. Yuki approaches him and asks for drawing lessons, and after some dissent, he agrees. We also see Largo show proof that not only does he actually have a teaching position, but he is being paid for it after one day of work. Hayasaka takes Piro, Largo, and Nanasawa out for dinner at a beer garden, where Piro and Nanasawa learn that Piro is the one who gave her the rail card.
Also in this day, an Evil Conscience named Asmodeus is introduced, and I am dropping him from this summary because he does not matter and you should not care.
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Day 3
We start with Piro at work. Yuki reminds Piro of the class that night. Ping and Tohya head to highschool together. Largo continues paranoidly constructing robots out of extremely valuable trash, which is freely available. Dom and Ed meet Junpei, threaten him, and lose their guns. Largo teaches his class, by taking them to a Japanese arcade. Tohya and Largo once again have a battle at the arcade, playing a videogame. Piro goes to talk to Nanasawa, and they learn she is the one who hit him with a coffee pot. Also, she learns that Piro likes the character she’s going to voice, and he gives her some fanart of her, getting to be Nanasawa’s first fan. There’s a thread through here discussing Piro and why he always draws sad girls. Don’t worry, he reassures: It’s not because he’s sad. Finally, Piro forgets the class with Yuki and goes to read a bunch of free shojo manga at the bookstore.
Meanwhile, Largo gets arrested and sees a rampaging Kaiju. To fight it, he manipulates Ping into attacking him, then fools her into attacking the Kaiju. Then he gets arrested again. Then, he returns to the story, with a new Special Contact Operative qualification with the Japanese police, which is also an unlimited credit card.
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Day 4
We start the day in Piro and Largo’s place. Largo has built a big computer network because he has unlimited money now. It is cooled with beer and insulated with breakfast cereal. Ping needs a bath, so Tohya takes her to a public bath.
Yuki is depressed because Piro forgot her drawing lesson.
We learn that Hayasaka used to be someone very famous, and now isn’t.
Tohya meets with Largo and Piro and there’s something of an explanation as to who she is and what this means. This explanation is very confused and does not clearly convey meaningful information, but it also doesn’t matter, so you don’t have to worry about it!
Ping and Hayasaka meet. Hayasaka immediately sides with Ping. There’s a thread in this day of Nanasawa, a voice actor for a visual novel, seemingly criticising visual novels as a media form being ‘too easy.’ Hayasaka is stalked by her fans, and Largo repels them.
Oh and finally, Piro forgets the drawing lesson again.
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Day 5
Hayasaka’s identity is leaked and the store is mobbed. Piro and Largo save her from this. We learn that Yuki is the daughter of the cop that arrested Largo. Largo plays videogames against Hayasaka and constantly sexually harasses her.
I am not kidding, this is everything meaningful that happens in this stretch of 107 pages.
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Day 6
Hayasaka has settled immediately into a routine of meeting with her fans, but only one at a time. She wants a computer, so she gets Largo’s help building it. Ping brings an invite to a nightclub to Piro from Tohya. Nanasawa continues to do voice acting work. Hayasaka goes to buy a computer, and gets sexually harassed by strangers, and there, we know it’s bad. Ping deliberately blocks a phone call from Nanasawa to Piro.
Nanasawa was calling to psych herself up for an interview on the radio, and in the process says something that she thinks goes badly – she Stands Up For Fanboys, mocking the woman mocking men, and then taking the Chad cohost down a few pegs, too. This goes super well, and the hosts want her back, but she doesn’t stop to ask them that and just assumes everything fails and sucks.
Ping blackmails Piro into two dates. Piro takes Ping to the nightclub to meet with Tohya. Tohya sexually harasses Largo, which is framed as horrifying. Piro rescues a very drunk Largo and takes him home, and a magical girl (who is revealed to be Yuki’s mother) fights Junpei. Yuki discovers that Nanasawa is a voice actress and her brother is a fan of hers.
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Day 7
Nanasawa gets positive feedback on her radio appearance. Largo sees a high school student doing compensated dating and ignores it because his feelings are hurt by Hayasaka, and that student then challenges him to a videogame because she’s sad that Great Teacher Largo has given up. She speaks fluent English to do this, because Largo doesn’t speak Japanese.
Yuki finally gets her art class with Piro. Piro claims that he doesn’t draw sad people because he’s sad, they’re not his feelings (again). This class is interrupted by Tohya feigning distress and upsetting Ping (at Piro). Dom threatens to kill people at random, with a gun.
Fanboys overwhelm the store, following Hayasaka, and Largo rescues her from her Fanboys. Ping rescues Tohya from the ensuing mess, but drops her, and Yuki gets hurt. Yuki’s dad, the cop, is there, and he notices and comments. We learn that Hayasaka is friends with Yuki’s parents, but was for some reason told to keep her distance from them, because they didn’t want her around Yuki. This is it turns out, a lie.
Ping gets distressed about being a ‘bad character.’ Piro reassures her by doing nothing.
Yuki steals Piro’s book bag. Again.
Largo explains his distrust of ‘leeches’ to Hayasaka and relates a story about Piro and his shared history with Tohya, but it’s told vaguely, so we’ll cover what actually happened later when a clearer version of the story is presented. For now, know that it Dominics the Deegan.
Nanasawa continues doing her voice acting work, but has problems with singing. She then goes to her Anna Millers job, where she is mobbed by fanboys. Piro shows up to help protect her. She’s upset by their behaviour (thanks to their interaction with Piro highlighting what’s happening) enough to threaten to flash the room her panties, only to see everyone pull their cameras, then storms off in disgust. Piro asserts himself over other fanboys, and breaks someone’s camera for trying to take inappropriate pictures of Nanasawa. Nanasawa is not shown seeing this. Nanasawa is upset at Piro for what he did, mad that he tried to ‘save her,’ and as she gets on the train to storm off, she says ‘you probably even thought it’d help you get laid tonight.’ Piro simply responds with ‘I didn’t deserve that,’ as the doors of the train close, and Nanasawa has a little breakdown on the train for realising what a terrible thing she’d just done to him.
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Day 8
Ping wakes up with boobs. Tohya shows up to pick up Ping for school, but then offers to have breakfast with Piro and Largo. Hayasaka builds the computer Largo designed for her, and gets naked to do it, because she believes Largo’s belief that nudity is necessary for computers. Largo rebuilds Piro’s workplace to be a cardboard labyrinth of traps. Nanasawa tries to quit the voice acting job, two days in. Hayasaka asks for Piro’s help with her computer and also wants him to get nude. Largo starts his English class on making computers, and demands that his room full of children strip naked to do it. Tohya negotiates him down to merely putting everyone in their sports uniforms. Ping is bullied at school for having interesting hair and huge tits. Yuki protects her. Tohya protects Yuki. Tohya tells Yuki that Yuki is a magical girl. Yuki doesn’t believe her. They abandon Ping in the middle of an emotional breakdown. Yuki falls off the power-lines where she was talking to Tohya (without realising) onto a boy she likes.
Nanasawa brings Ping to Piro at his workplace, they talk, they hug. Largo goes to hang out with Hayasaka. Piro and Nanasawa fall asleep together watching TV, Largo and Hayasaka start to make out, but Largo runs because he is awkward.
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Day 9
Largo, Piro, Nanasawa and Hayasaka all chat with their respective same-gender friend about their interaction with the opposite-gender friend. Nobody communicates well. Tohya rescues Nanasawa from Dom, who shows up to threaten a woman with proof that he’s surveillancing her. We get our first hint that Tohya isn’t a normal person when she teleports her and Nanasawa away from Dom while he draws his gun. We also learn that Tohya is Piro’s ex and their relationship was a remote one, and she is in fact, old enough that this isn’t super weird, but also, she’s still going to high school in a school uniform for some unexplained reason. Dom tries to claim Nanasawa as an idol for his parent company.
Nanasawa decides not to quit the voice acting job.
Hayasaka makes a date to have dinner with her old friends with Largo.
Yuki pursues Piro as he goes to confront Nanasawa’s stalkers that met with him on the internet. Yuki dresses as a maid at a maid cafe. There, they learn that the company Nanasawa is trying to quit is about to fold. Nanasawa resolves to attend the public meet-and-greet for the game she quit made by the company that won’t last the day, at a mall. The zombie apocalypse Largo unleashed eight days ago finally comes to a head, in the mall as a crush of people that Largo has to fight his way through to try and get Piro there, in an ‘action’ sequence that takes over a hundred pages. Piro decides not to go all the way and instead waits outside, because this isn’t about him. Then, Nanasawa’s stalkers get him to Nanasawa, because they love him because they think he represents the ideal protagonist of the game she’s going to voice in. Piro boldly decries them, because he is not the protagonist, she is.
Tohya clears up the zombies thanks to a friend, or their permit ran out.
Largo gets fired from his special combat position, and arrested, but he evades it thanks to Hayasaka.
We see Dom, who invests in the company Nanasawa quit and unquit. Then Ed shoots Tohya with many mega-lasers, implying she’s dead.
A Week Break
For something ‘like a week,’ nothing happens. In this time, Piro gets his glasses replaced after Largo broke them two days ago that didn’t get mentioned because it didn’t change anything.
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Day 10
Ping’s boobs are gone. Largo is dating Hayasaka, Piro is dating Nanasawa. Largo still is doing his job at the school, and Largo is using a terrible translation device to get by (rather than learning Japanese). Nanasawa suggests Piro submit his art to the company making her game, since he already loves the character. Ping is bullied at school for having great hair and no tits.
The story names Junko, the student who was doing compensated dating that Largo ignored. She has a bad relationship with her dad. He and she will not matter in two days’ time. Junko then finds that Ping and Yuki are ‘special’ and her world is now full of weird powerful people.
We finally learn the backstory proper of Piro and Tohya. They were friends on an MMORPG. Their relationship extended beyond the game, to phone calls and photo exchanges. This game was capable of sustained worlds, with ongoing simulation and character options such that it’s possible for characters to have sex, and those characters that have sex can get pregnant. We find this out because Piro played a woman and had sex with at least Tohya’s character (who was a man). Piro’s character got pregnant, which distressed Piro. In the ensuing fighting over this, Tohya claimed to be a man in real life, mocked Piro, and Piro was upset by believing he’d been lied to, leading to him quitting the game.
While this is explained, Ping and Yuki try to look for Tohya, who is, as far as they know, missing, after we, the audience saw her being shot with big super cannons that implied she’s dead. This information is in part revealed because Yuki steals Piro’s laptop on which he has the logs of all this information.
Yuki goes to a nightclub looking for Tohya. Largo and Hayasaka go there, too, to help her out, which degenerates into attacking people at the club who may or may not be zombies of some variety. Yuki learns about Tohya, that she is ‘a story’ people play. Yuki follows this thread and finds Tohya, alive, in what looks like a hospital bed. The pair escape out the window, but wind up back at the nightclub, where they meet up with Hayasaka and Largo, where he defeats the horde with a single clever move, and then they head home on the train.
Piro arrives at the hospital, only to find the window broken open and the bed empty.
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Day 11
Piro wakes up in his jail cell after having beaten up Pedobear. Yes, that Pedobear. He insists he has no idea what’s going on and bails out on about seventy bucks. When he gets home he finds Tohya asleep in his bed. She explains, across multiple locations, that she is an undead story about a girl who died, and there’s a ‘horde’ chasing her when they can follow her story. Yuki is upset about hurting the boy she has a crush on. We are introduced to Mugi, a kitsune who is a friend of Tohya’s. An enormous explosion follows as the horde (which is kind of just abstraction and explosions) attempts to consume Tohya. Yuki impersonates Tohya and flees, leading the horde after her. Piro punches Largo in the face, hospitalising him. Tohya holes up at Piro’s place, where she argues with Nanasawa, who punches her in the chest, hospitalising her.
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Day 12
At the hospital, the horde comes for Tohya again, but Nanasawa impersonates her and fakes dying, with Piro’s help. Junpei takes Tohya back to his place to hide, and Piro sneaks Nanasawa away so the horde doesn’t see that she hasn’t died.
Ping has different hair and belly fat now.
At this point the story takes a sharp turn and spends time introducing lore for the kitsune characters. They take up a lot of space at this point, and are central to the last two hundred pages of the comic, but their story also largely does not go anywhere because there’s nowhere for it to go. There are kitsune in this Tokyo, and they are an interesting family of overly visually similar characters with specific quirks. We get some slice of life with them.
Ping tries compensating dating, but don’t worry, it’s her dad. That’s a glib summary, but not wrong!
Piro and Nanasawa wind up at a love hotel, and they fuck.
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Day 13
This is only a partial day, largely focused on expanding the kitsune story and cementing how good Largo and Piro are with their respective partners, who they have known for something like twenty days.
That’s it. That’s the plot of Megatokyo across its chapters and days.
Part Four: Praising The Good
It’s relatively easy when talking about any work, especially a troubled work like Megatokyo for the thousandth time, and moreso after spending so much time as I have reading and rereading the text, to reduce the text to a sort of silhouette of its worst traits. And make no mistake, I’m going to talk extensively about Megatokyo’s weaknesses. Nevertheless, it is a work of some impressive qualities, and I wish to construct a more whole, more real image of what it is, so that when I cut into it, it bleeds appropriately.
Let us then, speak about things about Megatokyo that I think merit unvarnished praise.
Megatokyo’s visual presentation is, for the standard of webcomics in 2000, a cut above. It was by no means the prettiest 2000 webcomic; Shutterbug Follies is a full comic-ass comic, beautiful and well composed within its genre, and Sinfest (no, I’m not fucking linking that), for all that it’s a relentless downward spiral of an authorial narrative (and one day we will speak on that one) did come to the internet in 2000, and it looked incredible from day one (probably due to the six years of newspaper publication).
Those two striking outlier examples aside, Megatokyo is one of the best-looking webcomics of the time, and notably one of the few that’s trying for the visual aesthetics that people knew existed but had not seen actually implemented anywhere. It’s a style now that we sometimes attach to the idea of ‘Amerimanga,’ where an artist who has been informed by watching exported anime and manga of the 90s aggregates visuals from all that space.
Megatokyo the art style, while it has its weaknesses, is still distinctive. This art style is distinctive enough that it’s hard to find artists who can properly replicate it. This was stated as one of the challenges in making the Megatokyo visual novel. The art style combines a particular kind of expressive, wide-faced head with a long body that can include detailed clothes, varied heights, and a range of detailed eye-based expressions. It does this by, in part, sacrificing the detail of facial features like noses and mouths, and mostly limits head shapes to a small number of familiar blobs.
Another impressive part of the style is that the artist understands architecture and framing in a way that webcomics of the time often didn’t. City-scapes are rendered in detail, buildings are varied rather than big white boxes, and rooms have things like support beams or features that speak to an understanding not just of how shots are composed but how the buildings that make up those shots matter.
While we’re on the visuals of the comic, the visual language for representing comedy and timing are quite good! There are points in the storytelling where the comic presents an action, then a wide shot showing the first, then second beat of the reaction, for example. There’s a bit of the classic Takahashi style comedy, only showing the aftermath of a reaction. Where Takahashi’s Ranma ½ (for example)uses this to represent super-fast actions, Megatokyo uses it to present a character entering a scene after an action (usually Piro discovering the aftermath of one of Largo’s ideas).
Another thing that the art does a truly incredible job of representing is about being swarmed and overwhelmed by hordes. This plays into one of the themes that I think Megatokyo does a good job expressing. See, running through most of the arcs, as a background element that seems to show up almost as if it’s a natural conversation topic, is an ongoing anxiety about consumption. The story seems afraid of being consumed, of being reduced to being a thing for consumption and disposal, and when the story bends around these ideas, it’s really quite good at representing it. Piro’s inability to control his own spending, Largo’s alcoholism, these are smaller metaphors for them as consumers, while Nanasawa and Hayasaka view the world as a thing that wants to consume them and they need to be prepared for it. Tohya’s whole story is about being turned into a thing for a relentless audience to feast on, no matter what she wants for herself, to the point where they want her to die while she wants to live. Numerous scenes show thoughtless hordes of consumers pressing against our focal characters, and it’s a claustrophobia the story invokes and the art expresses well.
I also think that in the Nanasawa/Piro relationship, there’s a point where Piro describes being Nanasawa’s ‘first fan,’ which presents a very pure, very sweet idea of loving something, but also, loving the people who make it, for who they are and what they are doing. I think in this one scene, there’s a really sweet way to read that, in defiance of the way Megatokyo normally presents fandom, which could be used to inform the greater reading of the whole.
While we’re talking about the way the story is structured, common interpretive lens that I think holds the ideas together well is that the story treats the characters of Piro, Largo, and Tohya as characters from types of videogame, with different genres that inform the stories they’re part of.
Largo’s narrative is somewhere between Unreal Tournament, Gears of War, and Dead Rising. In his narrative then, this informs the way he sees the world, as a series of vending machines he can ‘interact’ with that give him stuff, the default position of the world is dangerous, he can recover very quickly from harm without any explanation, he can drink bottomless quantities of alcohol, and weapons and ammunition are both easy to obtain and convenient to use.
Piro, on the other hand, is more like the protagonist of that category we now call ‘cosy’ games, with a bias towards dating sims. We do see him playing a farming game at one point, at least as he says. This is why his experience is largely dialogue-driven exchanges with women where the narrative carries him along from point to point, rather than require him to do things that require skill or focus. The most common thing Piro has to do is manage a schedule, and his failings are usually doing something ‘wrong’ in a dialogue choice.
Tohya is also it seems, part of a visual novel, of the same genre as Piro’s tastes, and it’s expressed in how she can move around the world, and how she treats all interactions in terms of ‘playing.’ This isn’t as well-explored or as explained as the other two perspectives, but that may be because while Piro and Largo represent types of player characters, agents, Tohya’s form is that of a subject, upon whom agents act.
Also, as much as it may feel like faint praise in the context of the greater scope of these things, you don’t get thousands of words of notes and writing on a comic that has nothing going on. I’m not about to unpack Checkerboard Nightmare and find this much to say, even if it comes from the same mind as Candle Cove. Nor is Sluggy Freelance the kind of work that presents a singular coherent story that’s meant to play out across its whole reading length.
Megatokyo wants to tell an intimate story of fragile hearts, it wants to show high-impact panoramic action, and it wants to express a love it has for what it imagines of all its cultural interests from a headwater of remembering a time when those interests had to be gathered in rare, tiny pockets, when they were precious things and not the dominant, hegemonic, global cultural framework.
Where Megatokyo affects me, I find it very charming, which makes my frustrations with its failings much worse. I do not think that the worst of its evils are because of an intention to promote bad ideas, and I don’t think it is the work of someone hateful or foolish. It is part of the great tragedy of Megatokyo: It is a work with potential, elevated to intense scrutiny, and then never given the support it needs to be better – which includes meaningful, thorough critical engagement that regards the text as a work of intention and effort. Rather, it is a work that has been nitpicked and hated, and I understand – I really do, in this moment, I hate Megatokyo.
But I think I hate it better than anyone else.
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Part Five: Interrogating the Author
Michel Foucault — jumpscare! — describes that the idea of the author is a title and a role that isn’t connected to the task of writing, but rather than the role of an author is created by an audience seeking someone to whom they can attribute praise or punishment for writing they’ve read (What Is An Author, 1969). This is a simplification of the author-function but consider this: are you an author, if you write a bunch of words in a book and then nobody ever sees it? Is making a book nobody sees authorship, or is authorship a role we attribute to a person that distinguishes them from just someone who has done the action of writing?
The philosophy I approach Megatokyo with, as a text, is to consider it as a whole text, made by an author, that presents the story they want to tell, and chooses to tell in this way. I know this isn’t true; there are real material factors that impacted the lives of Rodney Carston and Fred Gallagher and all the other people who contributed to Megatokyo. The timeline of non-canon pages and also just that the story takes twenty five years to play out suggests that it’s impossible for this actual author to be actually unaffected by the flow of time.
For this treatment, I am going to describe a character called The Author. The Author is the person who is responsible for Megatokyo, and Megatokyo is, in its current state, the story the Author wants to tell. This does create some strangeness, but because we have this composite character, we don’t have to try and reason out whether or not what The Author is choosing to do is a good or smart thing, because the important thing is just that it is what The Author wants the story to include. The Author is assumed to be executing on their wants. This does not imply the Author is competent at their story, or that they are immune to making mistakes! We assume in this context that the Author is a person, and that person has human experiences and wants, which include things like their norms.
Here’s an example; the Author communicates fluently in English. This is an easy idea extrapolated from the fact that Megatokyo is written in English, and when it represents non-English languages, it tends to represent them in English. This means that if there’s something Megatokyo seems to value, it’s probably because it’s something that The Author wants to talk about or value.
Now, with this character devised we approach a new problem:
The Author is a big dipshit.
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What Does This Author Care About?
The tag-line on Megatokyo on its own website and merchandise is a reassurance and an inclusion, relax, we understand j00. It’s constructed in l33tspeak, an internet dialect of the time and it’s meant to indicate a sense of inclusion. Who then, is the ‘you’ this webcomic seeks to include? What does its vision of ‘you’ encompass, and who does it exclude?
Well, the You of Megatokyo, based on my reading, has definitely an interest in games and anime fandom of the time, as a sort of fanboy. They also seem to be overwhelmed or scared of women, interested in Japan, and they are likely sympathetic with the Author of Megatokyo’s anxieties about how hard it is to be an author. From this, we can interrogate Megatokyo in terms of the Author’s relationship to games, their relationship to misogyny, their relationship to emulated oppression, their relationship to racism, and their relationship to the challenges of being an author.
The Author and Games
Let us start with the shortest and simplest, he lies. Megatokyo discusses the idea of play only as it pertains to videogames, with a minimal interest in or engagement with the idea of play in most of its forms. Play is represented through commercial purchase of items, and the actual play of games is largely represented off-screen. There are a few scenes of ‘game play’ but they are themselves things that can be represented by avatars of the players (Piroko and Largo), and in that case, they typically present a vaguely explained MMORPG that vaguely resembles Monster Hunter to me, and a PVP arena shooter inspired by Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament.
I think of play as an incredibly expansive idea in media. Play is a useful descriptor for any situation in which agents are able to engage with ideas and spaces in a way that is understood to follow rules and express a fiction that people can accept and share without ever committing to the need of those rules or fiction to be enforced. Play in Megatokyo is mentioned in surface and slightly confused ways, without a coherent model of what it means to play, or what counts as playful behaviour.
Something I think of as important to demonstrating an awareness of play, as a topic that the speaker can provide meaningful insight on, is whether or not they can understand the scope of the idea. Basically, if someone wants to talk to me about ‘what games do’ or ‘how games work,’ and their example or description immediately runs into a counterexample from material, physical games, or social games, or deduction games, or indeed, even videogames, then it’s not that they’re wrong per se, but it suggests that whatever idea they have is simpler than they necessarily think it is. Play can be constrained tightly by rules or it can be very free of rules and instead more about the fiction of it – something Roger Caillois describes in Man Play and Games (1961), as being between the play of an actor or the play of a gear.
There’s no discussion of sports. Of tabletop games. Of board games. Not even the fandom-related types of play, like cosplay! In Megatokyo there’s even a character who cosplays, regularly, but she does it entirely for work. She does not make her outfits. She does not care much for her outfits. The outfit changes are used by the story to explain Piro’s reaction to schoolgirl uniforms, but not anything about what she’s choosing to express or finds interesting.
There is a thread through the story about making a game – Nanasawa is working on a game, after all, contributing to the voice acting of a visual novel. This is used as a platform to talk about making characters for games, and how those characters need something imbued into them to make them real. Given the shallow reference pool, and the lack of engagement with the ideas of how and why people play with one another, and how this idea intersects with the idea of a fear of being consumed, it seems to me that ‘games’ are less about any awareness of what goes into a game or how a game works, or why people play it, than about the existence of games as a consumable object.
From this I make the case that the Author does not understand or care about videogames, but is using them for a metaphor for being an author creating an ongoing webcomic.
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The Author and Misogyny
We must now move onto this one, because it builds on Megatokyo’s most obvious failing. Megatokyo is a misogynist story. It is a story where women are objects, and men act on those objects. Rather than just take this as granted, I thought I’d make a short-list of normal events that happen in the story as part of other events, that help to indicate the way this narrative regards women.
The first woman in the comic is an off-screen reference to a Lara Croft cosplayer.
In comic 102, the comic shows its first instance of a woman talking or thinking about something that isn’t Piro or Largo.
In comic 113, the comic almost passes the Bechdel-Wallace Test, here, with two women talking about a dropped object, but at this point, Tohya doesn’t have a name.
In comic 125, we do pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, with Hayasaka and Erika talking about work. However, showing that the Bechdel-Wallace test is not a uniform signal of representation, while it’s happening, Hayasaka is being sexually assaulted by a stranger grabbing her ass.
One of the main characters is a girl robot that one of the other characters owns, and they routinely assert that she isn’t a real person. She is discarded like a posession. Her seeking her own agency and identity is treated as a confusing ethical question. Her vagina is mentioned twice. This is despite it being also stated that Ping is not meant to be enabled for such functionality. Ping also attends a high school.
When Boo returns to the conscience organisation, he’s presented as getting whatever he wants because the women consciences are overwhelmed by how cute he is. The men consciences react to this with a ‘well, of course that’s what they’re like.’
Voice actresses are described as messed up in the head, or airheads, by a woman, so it’s okay.
Idols and magical girls are resources that companies fight over and are referred to as being ‘used up.’ Specifically, an idol is described as ‘not a person, but a commodity.’ It’s by a villain, I hope.
Seraphim talks about women in a thoroughly demeaning way, including invoking their sexual agency to exploit Piro over Piro’s ability to choose not to have sex with them. Seraphim also flashes another conscience to ‘defeat’ him. Seraphim, specifically, is a misogynist.
While on the topic of teenagers and sex, the story touches on Compensated Dating briefly, and describes it as the teenager taking advantage of an older man. This is even presented as a memory of a robot with no specific reason to lie.
I could go on.
So I will.
Here are some incidents I could find where a woman is sexually harrassed:
Page 21, a character threatens a woman in a videogame so badly she shoots him.
Page 23, a character sexually harrasses a booth babe dressed as Kasumi from Dead or Alive and gets attacked for it, breaking his arm.
Page 99, a character calls a woman ‘evil.’ He knows nothing about her, like, literally, he’s never even seen her before.
Page 135, a character gropes a high schooler.
Page 211, a character meets a woman and before asking her name, asks if her breasts are real.
Page 296, a character breaks from a conversation to point out a character has large boobs, then suggests they have sex.
Page 415, a character expresses disgust at the bodies of women, be they robots or not.
Page 544, a character randomly grabs a woman by her breast and gets distracted by it.
Page 623, a character finds a woman who wants some privacy after experiencing harrassment, and ignores her telling him to leave her alone. He wants to play videogames.
Page 626, while playing a videogame with a woman, a character comments on her breasts repeatedly. This woman has been harrassed all day.
Page 653, a character tells a woman to strip naked to use her computer, because he incorrectly believes it prevents static buildup.
Page 761, a character watches a child he’s responsible for doing compensated dating and ignores it. We subsequently see this child’s underwear because she’s playing a fighting game with him (page 771). When the child thinks she’s being sexually harrassed, and reacts badly to it, this character criticises her for defending her boundaries. He then claims ‘all women feel threatened when you try to help them.’
Page 880, Ping wakes up with breasts. A character immediately leers at them.
Page 918, a character tells a room full of children to strip naked, to use their computers better.
Page 1363, a character immediately sexually harrasses one of the foxes in her first appearance. Then he gropes her in front of a group of teenagers. This is noteworthy because this page is from 2013.
What a long and needless list of random incidents of sexual harrassment, right? Well, here’s the thing, this isn’t a list of times ‘characters’ sexually harrassed someone in the whole comic, this is just stuff Largo did. Remember, Largo is meant to be one of the heroes of the story. Furthermore, there is a point where Largo gets sexually harrassed by Tohya (groping), which the story frames as as deeply horrifying and bad, despite him having done it to at least five people at this point, which makes it very clear that the story recognises that actually, violating people’s boundaries is bad.
I’m not done though because Largo’s story and his immense constant misogyny gets to be part of the background material for one of Megatokyo’s worst and most vile sins.
Did you know Largo gets a girlfriend?
Did you know she’s the booth babe who he sexually harrassed back in page 23, and who broke his arm? And the woman he sexually harrassed regularly up to page 626, when they became a couple? Her name is Erika Hayasaka, and she is one of the most interesting characters in the story. Erika is a former voice actor and idol, who at the start of the story is doing a variety of work that seems to focus on her being involved in fanboy franchise material, cosplaying and promoting the goods, while keeping her identity as a former idol secret. Hayasaka is presented as someone who is, I think, broken by the abuse and expectations of the world around her — she’s the woman groped by a stranger on the train while she explains that in order to succeed in voice acting, sometimes you just have to accept the roles you’re given. Hayasaka is shown as being superpowerdly strong, physically capable, and having her life together. Her story arc is about that threat of being consumed, with an audience that only want her for what they imagine her to be, an object for consumption. She retreats to the back room of the store, where Largo goes, ignores her asking for privacy. He drinks beer and plays videogames against her, and immediately starts talking about boobs.
This is treated as the transition point for their relationship. Largo has not changed and not stopped insulting women, degrading women, abusing his power and his friends, and has definitely not stopped relentlessly sexually harrassing her specifically.
After this they start dating.
The Author has put this theme through the whole breadth of the comic, at every level, incidental or focal, which means that there’s no indication or point in which the story actually ‘gets better’ about this kind of treatment of women, even recently, like the past few years. Women are objects to be won, they are things to be consumed and claimed, and while there is a right way to have access to them, that way is never about improving or changing as a person and it absolutely is not about understanding them or respecting their boundaries.
Now this excess of explication is to make it very clear that when I say ‘Megatokyo is a misogynist story,’ I’m doing so after reading the whole thing and I’m bringing lists of examples where women aren’t just objectified and demeaned, but also treated as unreasonable and cruel for how they fail to flatter and support the egos and mindsets of men who have done nothing to improve in their lives. And this isn’t even the point here, this is foundational to the point.
Another element of this analysis, our Attack of the Clones of this point is the way that Largo and Piro treat one another, mostly focusing on how Largo treats Piro. It’s not a complicated relationship; Largo belittles, degrades, and exploits Piro, ignores his opinions, and dismisses everything he’s interested in where it fails to overlap directly with things that interest Largo. Piro can play Largo’s games, but Largo does not play Piro’s games, because Piro’s games are not correct. This is because Piro is weak, a sissy, is girly, and is emo.
This structure of a man degrading another man for being a man inappropriately is a structure you might be familiar with as ‘toxic masculinity.’ Finger in the page there though, because we know that Piro is not ‘a man wrong.’ Piro is shares in masculinity with Largo as shown by him asserting himself through appropriate violence, and being similarly oppressed by women (in the universe of Megatokyo).
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Surprise, The Author And Transmisogyny!
The bridge in Megatokyo between the misogyny and men patrolling the boundaries of gender, the & Knuckles of the structure, is the question of realness of women, and the disgust expressed at anything that doesn’t strictly rest in the ‘correct’ category of either. Women can be women wrong (by being threatening, by playing games wrong, or by being sex workers), men can be men wrong (only by being like women), and at this point it’s very easy to see how these are the same ideas being projected on two different types of people. It’s cissexism, as described by Julia Serano (Whipping Girl, 2011), where there’s a proper way to be your gender, and the system of patrolling and violence is wielded in order to ensure that only women are women right and only men are men right. This creates a superstructure where a man being mistaken for being a woman is a problem but a man being a woman is taken as a deep, horrifying betrayal. It shows you the boundaries of gender and how they are to be patrolled.
This transmisogyny isn’t what I’d consider very intentional. I think that the Author doesn’t actually know anything about trans women, and therefore the idea of an actual relationship with a gender is a void. Piro playing girls in videogames is seen as something alien to the conversation about Piro’s gender, and Piro being misidentified in a game as a woman startles and confuses him, because that suggests there’s something impossible about a man who can be identified as a woman.
This absence of understanding of trans people, and their relationship to gender, creates an obvious gap in the story that can be answered incredibly easily. Tohya and Ping are both constantly confused by other people about whether or not they are ‘real girls.’ Ping and other robots like her are a kind of sex worker you can own, but it is seen as intuitively wrong to treat them as women, despite them being literally entirely coherent and prone to behaving like women, with interests and emotional reactions and anxieties and preferences about how they want to be treated. If you have a coherent model of gender and identity, it’s impossibly easy to handle this – Ping’s a woman because Ping wants to be a woman, and at that point, the dehumanisation that comes into the idea of a programmed identity just vaporises.
And we know people can choose to be women! Piro plays at being a woman in the game with Tohya, has had sex as a woman, and has become pregnant as a woman! This is treated as something shameful to avoid and escape, even though it’s literally the most interesting thing about him and touches on something I think that a lot of online mmo-engaged millenial boys have experience with, the idea of ‘playing a woman’ and then disengaging from the thought for fear of what it ‘might say.’
From this I make the case that the Author is most concerned about in Megatokyo is women, specifically, the fear and hatred of women as an other, and therefore, the deep and abiding fear of being a woman.
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The Author and Emulated Oppression
It’s a common thing amongst authors in privileged classes — like me, just to be clear! — to be unaware of how their work replicates systems of oppression. We tell stories that include ideas of racism and misogyny and cissexism and all sorts of other axes of oppression that don’t ever engage with the position we inhabit in that. Megatokyo demonstrates structural oppression in its narrative, but not racism or cissexism and instead targeting Piro and Largo as ‘fanboys.’ This is a bit of a term of art here, mind you; the story doesn’t settle on a specific term, using fans, fanboys and otaku at different points.
In Japan, where Megatokyo is meant to be set, visual novels, anime, and videogames are common, mainstream, even unimportant forms of interest. Despite this, whenever those interested in these things are introduced, the audience of the text – characters in the world – express disgust or disdain for them. There is a common term for ‘fanboys,’ a specifically gendered term, referring to men who express these interests. Women are not represented as having these interests, and typically even have disdain for them – even women who are involved in these industries. Megatokyo’s cast inclues Nanasawa, who is a voice actor working for a company making a visual novel, Hayasaka, who is a former idol who works for a Gamer supplies store, and Tohya, a character who is from a visual novel, in the real world. Ping is a visual novel peripheral, an entire sapient humanoid made to support this game type.
Not one of these women expresses any interest in the genre of media they represent. Hayasaka cosplays, but it is never shown as anything but for work, and she even expresses a distaste for the job because of having to interact with the people interested in it. Nanasawa doesn’t ever express any interest in playing the game she’s involved with adapting. It doesn’t even seem to be an idea she’s considered, and that’s one of those norms. Girls don’t engage with games, they are a thing for boys.
Despite these people all being directly involved in these industries, they are still positioned as outsiders to the interest; they are things that oppose the ‘fanboys,’ who exist to supply money and buy things and to be culturally disdained for their social incompetence. That is, there are the consumers, and there is the consumed, and this class of consumers are people who are, by default, there to be disregarded, homogenised, and exploited. People think the worst of the ‘fanboy’ class, and they are a common normative object of disdain. They are compared directly to zombies, and there appears to be almost no engagement with ‘fanboy interests’ that is not treated by the story as fundamentally poisoned.
Now, this is not to say that Largo and Piro are meaningfully marginalised. The Author does not seem to want to present them as suffering for their interests, which is why they have so much social infrastructure without meaningful challenges. Largo is capable of having a job as a schoolteacher, and gets paid day-to-day, in cash, Piro gets a job without applying for it (and that job seems incrediblyforgiving of his time management), with no-or-low rent lodging, and all within a few weeks of arriving in Tokyo. Neither are subject to racist policing or commercial exclusion, and Piro isn’t even seen as being not-Japanese. They can freely acquire computer hardware, weapons, armour, and clothes, and just ludicrous quantities of alcohol. Their ability to exist in Japan is itself on a visa category that seems biased towards fanboy interests (playing Mortal Kombat V).
Nonetheless, both Piro and Largo express dismay at being seen or treated badly not by specific people, but as part of category-wide oppressions. Piro asserts that women interpret what he’s doing for the worst, even when he’s in the middle of coincidences that he should be able to address by communicating with the women in question. It’s not just Piro, and it’s not just misogyny, though – Largo thinks that womenmisunderstand him and fail to appreciate him for all the good, hard work he does. What’s more, this kind of attitude about how he’s treated is in direct contrast with the way that unnamed and irrelevant characters – like his students! – routinely talk about how great everything Largo does is.
A place to look for the hallmarks of marginalisation is the law. In Megatokyo, the law doesn’t get involved too often, since it is mostly there to bounce against Largo who lives almost consequence-free. In Chapter 11, when Piro is arrested, we see that his bail post is insultingly low (around $70), because the police believe it’s impossible for him to have it. He is, after all, an Otaku, a term they use in the translation of their Japanese, implying that this is a specific, keyed noun, and probably therefore, a category. When Nanasawa blows up on the radio program criticising the hosts, it isn’t a matter of standing up for men– she attacks the male host who has too much comfort and ease with women for being an oppressor, too.
From this I make the case that the Author presents fanboys as experiencing a specific axis of structural oppression, while seemingly not recognising other, more real forms.
Now after all that you may think ‘hey, that’s a lot, surely we’re past the worst of it.’
I have some bad news.
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The Author and Racism
It’s pretty reasonable a guess that the Author is American. They position their point-of-view characters as American, the story starts in America, the default text of the story is written in American English, and the reference material the story uses seems to align pretty closely with the experience of an American person. The story is set in Tokyo and I think before I go a step further I have to reintroduce the work of Edward Said.
Orientalism is a 1978 book that’s so important that’s literally all of its title, and it’s a book that did a lot to change the way that academia considered the way that ‘the Orient,’ which is to say, every part of the world that isn’t the European-American west, is examined and described. This idea of Orientalism is a really powerful one for considering the way a dominant culture describes and examines a culture that isn’t their own, and the way that it uses the other as a reference to itself, and in the process, the other cultures get squished down into a caricature of what they are.
The simplest version of Orientalism is ‘get a load of these white people.’
I bring up Orientalism because I need the term to refer to Megatokyo. It isn’t what you might consider, conventionally, ‘racist,’ if you’re used to seeing racism as someone calling someone else a slur. The racism of Megatokyo is instead that of orientalism; an uninformed person trying to describe an othered culture through their own lens, and with the assumption that their own experiences are universal and the people they are describing are mysterious, and unknowable. It’s dehumanising even as it asserts the position of the outsider as expert.
How then does Megatokyo represent its Japan? What informs its vision of Japan, and how is this story, set in Tokyo about or like Tokyo? Or what are the signs we can draw on to indicate that the Author sets their story in Japan, while thinking that Japan is basically America?
Across my reading experience, I took notes every time the comic displayed something about the world that was obviously not how the world works in Japan, but is representative of how things work in America. Some of them, I suppose, are to be accepted under the context of being humour, like it’s totally understandable that Largo can get a job in Japan as an English teacher because that’s meant to be a joke. It would be pretty cruel of me to just list the ways that Megatokyo’s Japan was instead representing America.
Let’s do that then.
Japan has national public health insurance, which means you don’t get health insurance through your job, and paying to replace glasses is like, thirty dollars.
Businesses in Japan don’t have American-style dumpsters where you throw functional computer parts. Japanese waste disposal is handled with common fenced off areas. (page 215)
Japan has a lot of well-supported gun control laws, which is why you can’t pull guns in the street and not immediately draw attention (this happens on so many pages it’s ridiculous).
Japanese police don’t hold you until you pay bail; they hold you for the maximum time to investigate, which is 23 days. Police have a lot of control over these things.
Japanese script is traditionally written top to bottom, right to left, not left to right, top to bottom. Junpei gets a note on a Unicorn that is written ‘American style.’
Japanese language expresses the self with a range of personal pronouns that express ideas like gender and relationship to the other. Junpei, in Japanese, calls himself Junpei, and speaks in Japanese in the same broken English translation he does when he speaks English. That’s weird, and it implies that Junpei’s ‘Japanese’ is ‘broken English, in brackets’ and not its own language with its own clear modes of expression.
The police in Japan don’t keep their heavy weapons and armour at home.
Japanese people are typically, very aware of non-Japanese people, based on their phenotype and appearance, and can be quite racist about foreigners, even other Asian foreigners (such as racism against Korean people). Piro and Tohya both, despite being not Asian, blend seamlessly into Japanese society, masquerading un-commented-on in high school.
Piro complains that eating convenience store food is bad, which seems petty.
Japanese vending machines don’t use quarters.
This is me trying to point only to the easiest things to check. There are other implications, like the idea that Largo would be able to bluff being an English teacher when he can’t speak English, or that teachers can leave the school building freely with their class without comment, or the way that Piro can just start living someplace without paperwork or passport, and that therefore, the boys can just bring their assertion, their identity of ‘belonging here’ everywhere they go, because they are the default humans, white American males.
Now, one could describe these as mistakes, and they are! They’re just incorrect things for representing Tokyo that anyone could address with a simple DuckDuckGo search! The problem with the errors is that they’re common and widespread and persistent through the whole of the text, which suggests it’s not a matter of some ideas slipping through the research but rather just no research being done at all. Which also implies that there’s no need for research, which is another orientalist trope; the idea that the dominant culture does not need to do anything to understand the othered culture, because the othered culture is just a subordinate curiosity to the dominant culture. The Author doesn’t need to do this research because they already understand the space, and their understanding of the space is informed by what does show up in Tokyo – things like Godzilla, videogames, and horror stories of otaku culture.
There is an extremely generous interpretation of the text in which these are cognates with the words ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Japan’ from our world, but instead represent entirely fictional spaces in a suburb of Milwaukee, but unfortunately, I think that that’s not the case here.
From this I make the case that Megatokyo is a comic by an American author striving to represent a fantasy version of Tokyo as informed by the fandom materials the Author understands.
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The Author and Authorship
Well we’ve tackled the misogyny and the racism, let’s do something light to round out the important ideas of Megatokyo.
Megatokyo seems to consider itself in a position to discuss the idea of creating characters in media for people to consume, and what it means when people express interest in and appreciation of characters. There’s conflicting sources across the text, but one repeated theme is the place of characters in stories that have some form of negative feeling, and what that means for the story and its audience. There’s this joke, from one of the guest comics early on, that Piro as an artist needs to be calmed down from self harm by imagining ‘sad girls in snow,’ and this carries through into the sketchbook Yuki critiques. The girls are sad, and that’s what Piro connects to drawing.
There’s also the story of Nanasawa, who expresses sadness which gets the directors to express the character she came in to voice differently. Hayasaka refers to being constrained by the narrative around her, and Tohya then takes that idea and amplifies it (continuing the trend of doing things twice).
From this I make the case that Megatokyo is a comic by an author who believes that there is a metatextual value to characters suffering that is comparable to real suffering, and that is both necessary and tragic for the creation of the art they make.
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The Author Isn’t Good At This
Then there’s a host of problems that feel a little unreasonable to point out that are much less about the things the story’s trying to do and more that are just about the execution of the storytelling. It isn’t just that the ideas are bad, it’s that they’re kind of incompetently expressed. It’s entirely possible, for example, that everything I’ve described so far is only set-up to pivot to a reveal that actually, every major theme of the comic up to this point is wrong, but because it’s taken so long to get to this point it seems almost impossible for the narrative to deliver on that kind of twist.
There’s a problem persistent through the art of the run, which is ‘same-face.’ Most characters have very similar faces, and it can mean there are story threads where if you turn from page to page it can be unclear who is talking, not because they’re not on-page but because the person on-page looks indistinguishable from even the person they’re talking to. This is brought to a head with the example of Hayasak being able to recognise a disguised Nanasawa, because Hayasaka broke Nanasawa’s nose once, and her nose (which you can’t see) has been permanently marked by it.
The architectural art, which is really nice most of the time, in the pencil style, means that in any situation where the background is wooden, gives these over-filled backgrounds where the characters seem less important than the wood they’re standing in front of.
The pacing of the story, as a webcomic, seems to work directly at odds with things the comic is trying to do. There are a few times where the comic drops on a punchline that tells you something about the story, then immediately the next panel on the next page undoes that punchline. As an example, when Yuki examines Piro’s sketchbook, the punchline panel is her being upset by what she finds, implying there’s something inappropriate and sexy in the book, but then the next panel is her explaining – to nobody! – that actually, what she was looking at was not so bad. It feels like a direct attempt to undo something that the writer had already been committed to. It’s cowardice.
This pacing problem is also evident in just how long these things take versus how long they are in the universe. The relationship between Nanasawa and Piro suffers obviously from this, where they sleep together (romantically, not sexually) on page 963, which is seven years after the comic started. And that’s a pretty good example of a slow burn story time frame… except diegetically, these two characters met and exchanged their names five days ago. The Largo/Hayasaka relationship took place over the same frame of time, and during that time, Largo fought Godzilla!
I think under the same pacing problem, there’s a trend towards the Author repeating plot points, sometimes almost immediately. Yuki tries to return Piro’s bookbag, twice. Piro forgets Yuki’s drawing lesson, twice. Piro has a first-time meet cute with Nanasawa, twice. Nanasawa quits and unquits twice. Hayasaka and Tohya have plots that immediately follow one another, about being secretly famous and having a horde come to consume you. Most fascinatingly, a woman with a crush on Piro pretends to be Tohya and fakes her death to distract the Horde, leading to an enormous physical disaster, twice!
Under this model of The Author we have so far, the Author is divorced from all material needs or reasons this can happen. An actual human who made this comic over the source of two and a half decades, that human can have things like schedule slippage or wanting to take a mulligan or forgetting what they were doing or not realising they want to make a character more important later, and all of those can explain those story choices which I’d normally file as just mistakes.
Where the Author is presenting the story they chose to tell, though, this is hard to explain and reconcile. Why would you just have Yuki and Nanasawa do the same thing, twice? Why did Yuki bother doing her thing, only to have Nanasawa do the same thing but modestly better? Why did Piro and Nanasawa have two meet-cutes? It’s not like two is a super important number to the story.
All of this, though, is amplified further by the fact the Author’s writing is reliant on referencing the familiar to fill in information. That makes sense, when the point of the story is about ‘belonging’ to the ‘fanboy’ category. As an example, the Largo/Hayasaka relationship has the structure of a narrative that’s pretty common in anime like Urusei Yatsura or Ranma ½, but without any of the thoughtful character writing that those series have. In Urusei Yatsura, there’s a story of the alien girl Lum falling in love with and ending up with Ataru, a lecherous idiot, but an important part of making that story work isn’t that Ataru is a Good Person sometimes, but rather that Lum is stupid. Similarly, Ranma ½ as a reference point seems to map, where you have this guy who does something stupid, then a woman responds with violent retaliation, but in Ranma ½, Ranma goes through development and gets to know Akane better, showing regular and routine attempts to improve and do things for her and much of his sexual harrassment of her is a mistake or a coincidence. By contrast, Megatokyo’s Largo/Hayasaka relationship refers to something, but can’t support the depth of the material it’s referencing. Which in some cases, makes sense! How are you going to encapsulate the depth of a 600,000 word visual novel with a single page in a comic?
The issue then feels like it’s more about feeling authentic. Just like the way the story talks about Tokyo itself; there’s an impression of attempting authenticity. Nothing in the narrative has the depth of the material it’s referencing, which I have to assume reflects that the Author lacks an awareness of ways to make these ideas more deep, or to draw on them in a way that’s more meaningful than just surface .
It’s one of the things that feels like it should be a strength of Megatokyo; it’s not about fandom, but it’s about being a fan. It wants to encourage and include as many as people in their own fandoms as possible, but it’s more interested in the perceived aggrieved pressures against that fandom membership than it is in any way in the actual fandoms themselves. And god help you if you’re not a white guy.
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Conclusion
I started this examination by telling the story of the work of EL James. It wasn’t just because I think Megatokyo is badly written; after all, I haven’t read any ofJames’ work, and it all sounds dreadful so I’d rather save myself the aggravation. Rather, it is because that Fifty Shades of Grey exists because of a fruitful fandom that was willing to both gas up a creative and indulge deeply in a thing they wanted. It doesn’t matter how absolutely embarrassing your terrible smut is if it can find the people interested enough in the ‘what if Edward Cullen was a different kind of abusive dickhead’ premise. Everything I’ve seen indicates that James is a frightfully tedious writer and person, just a real embarrassment of a human, and she had a community of people she could argue with and who would flatter her work, resulting in a chain reaction that culminated in a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey being glued shut and chucked in the Bow river to make a point about NFTs.
But that was not an opinion of someone on the forums.
That was not an opinion of someone who, once upon a time, was a fan.
I’ve never heard from anyone who makes media or writes essays or reviews books who was on that same forum where Snowqueens Icedragon made the start on her billion dollar hoard and I don’t imagine that anyone who was particularly invested in that time winds up in a position to make essays about how actually, the fanfiction had some good points.
I, however, was.
I was there, when these old words were laid down.
I graduated high school in the year 2000, and I have memories of sitting in the last few science classes, where we were all just messing around because all the essays had been done and the teaching was past, and showing my friends these things I had downloaded and printed off and really enjoyed. I showed them Lil Gamers and I showed them Sluggy Freelance and I showed them several pages of the best-looking comic amongst them, Megatokyo. This was maybe October, with a comic that had been publishing for months at most. I read Megatokyo aggressively during this period of my life. When I first brought my friend who became my girlfriend who became my partner into my bedroom, I had a printed Megatokyo on my wall. I tried to draw art that was trying to look like Megatokyo, with the soft pencils and the firm lines.
What I’m saying is that this is my circus, and I am one of the monkeys.
I didn’t spend thousands of words revisiting Megatokyo because I think this work is trash. I wanted to revisit it to do what I think is healthy for all writers, which is to reflect on the things that inspired you and influenced you, and to examine what that means. Undeniably, there was an immense amount of work done in this project, twenty five years of updates, and all without many of the things other comics of their type use to help address the problems only webcomics can have. Some webcomics trail off, some reset their continuity with a bomb of some variety, some double back and start over, and some even make comics trying to explain why their decisions ten years ago were bad, actually. There’s a certain kind of courage in moving forwards, more or less, with what you were doing, more or less, nine years ago, more or less.
At the same time, the Megatokyo in aggregate is every bit the same kind of thing as Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s an unedited first-draft of best impressions from a writer who is not up to the task they’ve put themselves and whose production is spread so thin that they can’t do any of the things that would make them better, or make their work any easier. It is a work of effort and pain and none of that makes the work better, or venerates it in any way.
Once upon a time I said that the kindest thing that we could do for Megatokyo would be to institute universal basic income so that it could be Fred Gallagher’s personal project that he could tinker away at freely, and pick out the best editors to help him with the task because the worst things about Megatokyo were directly coupled to its presence as a commercial and commercially successful venture.
Megatokyo is something with a heart that I want to nurture, with a desire and a hope for its potential that seems preposterous for a product that has been successful, raised its money, fallen over and sunk into the swamp. The want for what Megatokyo wants to be is something that I feel very strongly, but I think that part of that want is about engaging with the thing as it actually is. Megatokyo is a thing that reflects everything of what it was and where it came from; a time of booth babes and underexamined racism and a community that couldn’t find a black person we hadn’t successfully driven off. It is a work that said to me, relax, we understand you, and the you I was and the you it understood are people I have to forgive myself for being even as I am so delighted to say I’m not any more.
Games are bigger than this. Anime is from Japan, which is a country, which has its own culture and which we can learn about because we can talk to people who have been there. Women are people who have wants and inner lives that aren’t about us, because us isn’t just guys who want to position women as mysterious instead of us as unwilling to listen. And writing is hard but it’s hard because it’s worth doing and what makes it worth doing is sharing it with people who care about it and by extension care about you. Everything that Megatokyo wants to care about is stuff that’s worth caring about, and the fact that Megatokyo fumbles it relentlessly isn’t because it’s wrong to care about them.
Megatokyo is a time capsule of August, 2000, and it is a beautiful marker on the way to show how far we’ve travelled. It is still being produced by someone who still cares about it and I’m glad it is. I want to make it better, I want to help it be better, and part of that is making sure you and I remember what it is.
Here it is.
The whole elephant.
I hope you have enjoyed.
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