That’s assuming that Carla doesn’t learn about Walky’s former career as a child actor. It would be awful if certain Hymmel the Humming Hymnal videos were made public…
Short-sleeved blue button-up over white shirt plus a striped pink beanie doesn’t seem “gay as hell” at all to me, but I do agree that it’s awesome, and it goes nicely with her hair.
Fair enough. I tend to have a hard time seeing any correlation between choice of attire and sexuality anyway, but it mostly seems charmingly generic to me.
I love the hierarchy of anger. Like, casual transphobia. Oh, it’s a longer lasting hate, but not a deep one, because that’s just everyday awful.
Insulting her favorite TV show, though? Oh, no. No, you don’t do that. Prolly won’t last as long as a hate on, but you know what they say about the candle that lasts half as long, burning twice as bright.
And by burning twice as bright, you mean a psychically induced gravitational singularity of destruction that consumes all light, heat, and life, leaving nothing but cold dark death. =)
This is actually simple anger, which burns brightly, but cleanly. Hate is like a low, guttering ember, which continues to damage things even when you think the fire’s out.
Hate is like a grease fire, it makes a lot of smelly smoke, using water to put it out only makes it worse, and even when it’s gone the residue it leaves behind will haunt you.
Actually I think it’s more like “Yay, Walky’s about to be murdered, ” say a bunch of people posting nanoseconds after the web comic goes live. I’m sure someone must have said that Carla is too invested in Ultra Car, but I missed it or mentally edited it out or something.
We always knew someone would get tired of faceless bureaucrats running their life and begin the destruction of the European Union. That it was Great Britain is a fun twist.
We always knew that someone would become the ultimate Internet Pornlord. That it was David Willis is a fun twist.
It wasn’t released in the US, but there was a completely trippy manga, in which U.C. is stuck in an Amazonian tar pit and was hallucinating her whole existence until then. I only saw it in translation, and didn’t understand any of the pop cultural references.
I thought the third amendment of internet law is the government is not allowed to trash talk anyone with whom they are not already engaged in a flame war.
(And mine was that people on the internet tend to behave, well, like Walky when there’s little likelihood of the consequences of what saying stuff in person would bring.)
(Are we done explaining our jokes to each other now?)
That would be way too humanizing. Besides it’s a SECULAR Cartoon. It’s totally full of sin! It’s bursting at the seams with SIN! EVERYWHERE! Just looking at that door is probably sinful.
Mary watched the Christian variant where Ultra Car was just a regular station wagon that a pastor drove around and imparting sermons because only Jesus has the power to fly around and save people.
Not ‘variant’ so much as ‘shameless ripoff’ and spelling the series title ‘Ultracar’ (no spaces) allowed a legal loophole.
It’s hard to be sure unless you’ve just mainlined every episode of Ultra Car before watching that the similarities are there, to be honest; switching from a creative cartoon show about a sapient car to a live-action low-budget series that crudely shoehorns in bible stories as metaphors for whatever event the pastor came across leaves you thinking they have nothing in common, at a casual glance.
That said, the station wagon WAS red with disturbing headlight eyes, and the similarity in titles would be enough to make Mary think they’d both watched the same show. Misunderstandings ensue.
I actually would like that. Cause there’s always those odd fans that seem to miss out on most of the point of the show and take some weird message out of it, ignoring the parts that resonate with more marginalized fans.
Most famously, I’m thinking of all the MRA “red pill” asshats who obsess over Matrix as some glorious macho philosophy about teh evils of feminism when the actual movie is the most trans thing ever produced ever.
I’m not doubting you, but I haven’t seen The Matrix since I was like eight. Can you expand on that line of thought? I know the Watchowski siblings are trans, but I never realized it effected that particular movie.
It’s kinda all over the movie in major themes. Like, there’s the fact that Neo the main character has a name used with his online friends that all the Matrix folks always respect, but the agents only refer to him as Mr. Anderson, always putting emphasis on the mister part and referring to how he needs to make certain choices to put that “other life” away if he still wants to remain employed or a valuable member of society.
There’s visual effects, like Neo wearing a slight amount of lipstick early on in the movie as if he had lipstick on the night before and hadn’t quite wiped it all off before starting his morning the next day. There’s the super trans way all of Morpheus’s folks present each other. The train scene actually being based on the moment Lana Wachowski realized that she needed to transition and she couldn’t bottle it up anymore. The way Cypher’s betrayal is played like someone detransitioning and selling out his old friends to the TERFs because the transphobia was just too much to deal with. How the wiping out of the group evokes the painfully high trans murder rate and how Switch actually echoes the last words of a somewhat prominent LA trans person who was murdered a few years before the Matrix was made.
Bootleg girl has a really good summary on a lot of the notes that has been mostly synthesized into a Youtube video by The Film Runner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2-m3ZksNGM
But overall, watching it again specifically looking for transgender elements, it’s rather stunning just how blatant the Wachowski’s were with the metaphors, sometimes even straight up echoing societal messages about trans folks.
If I may add to your very solid analysis…
Thomas Anderson lives a life of quiet desperation and constant searching due to a feeling that something is not quite right but cannot seem to pin down exactly what it is. One night he meets someone who starts him on a journey of self discovery wherein he discovers what what was at the root of those feelings of discontent with his life and the systemic bigotry against those who feel that way by those who feel such people’s very existence will ruin their way of life. He is changed by this, one cannot just put the genie back in the bottle as it were, but has trouble accepting the truth about himself. In the end because of the love and acceptance of those now around him he finally accepts who he is and undergoes a radical and fundamental change to how he presents himself to the world ending in a confrontation with those who previously showed him such bigotry. The film ends with a warning to others like these bigots that he is no longer cowed by their system and is going to change it such that they are themselves merely a relic of the past.
I’ll just put one of my personal favorite quotes from the film here just because: “To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.”
The sequels are rather rank when it comes to how they present such things, just as they kinda are in general, because of how much of the process for making them involved so many ideas from people other than the Wachowskis. Certain elements can absolutely be read as reflecting how some of the cis LGB part of the LGBT communities can have the same problematic viewpoints of and interactions with trans individuals as are common among the straight communities.
There’s also the simple fact that there’s a character named Switch who was originally supposed to be played by a female actor in the Matrix and a male one outside of it.
The story, as I have seen it, was that he was trans due to a glitch in the Matrix, giving him a female body when he was really male. And the “residual self image” kept him female. Over time, though he was modding that image to become more male–hence the androgyny.
Thus the line “not like this” was not about dying from being unplugged, but he died while still looking like a woman.
Every now and again, I encounter a media interpretation that completely re-contextualizes the way I have always thought about something. This is one of those times.
It makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE when viewed through the lens of trans media.
Especially the whole rabbit hole motif. That is… yeah. I know that feeling of standing outside the rabbit hole with no way to know where it leads but knowing that following it is important to you but also knowing that if you do follow it, everything will be different forever and you don’t know if the difference will be good or bad or mixed but worth it or what.
Yeah.
(In not-unrelated news, I am/have been questioning certain parts of me for a while now annnnnd yeah. That’s rabbit hole thing is a thing I am feeling HARD right now).
Ever had that thing where you meet a person who opens your eyes to something being possible on the personal level rather than the intellectual and it is like a punch in the gut because they’re everything you never realized you wanted to be?
When I was sixteen I met my best friend. He identifies as female, lives as male, and had a female persona as a coping mechanism. They were my first introduction into what it actually meant to not be cisgender- and that was the catalyst for my eventual realisation of identifying as male and starting to transition.
In this case it was more a re-meeting of person. A trans dude I knew before he transitioned and then met up with him at another thing later and noticed folks were calling him by a different name and he looked fucking amazing like he’d been carrying a huge weight and had just set it down. Plus his body looks how I have always wanted to look and always got shit for wanting to look like because “too butch” and “you don’t want to look like a guy.”
And yeah. Hate to say it but my gut reaction was overwhelming jealousy.
I remember how I loved so of the designs of Morpheous group members because some of them were so androgynous , it resonates something on my child mind! (heck even Neo has some androgenous feel no wonder I alwayd found him so pretty even if I don’t like the actor).
Trivia: This week was the 50th anniversary of the first airing of the last episode of Ultra Q–which also means that next week is the 50th anniversary of the first episode of Ultraman.
Is… Is that ashort circuit 2 reference? I know the quote predates sc2, but Willis is a huge fan so… Whatev. If it is, I’m thoroughly thankful for the nostalgic reference 😀
I’m okay with the cliffhanger… i can’t stand what they are doing with the Reboot reboot… The Users are going to be guardians… like WTH are you thinking?
My most prominent memories of Duck Dodgers are when he traveled back in time to steal Tom Jones’ voice, and when he mixed up his laundry with Hal Jordan and became the Green Loontern.
There was also an episode about the Martians using soft jazz braiwaves to mind control the population of the Earth, and Dodgers and Co. had to unfreeze Megadeath and help them regain their memories to rock hard enough to destroy the brainwave emitter.
It wasn’t so much that Ruff and Reddy were that great, but they were on Saturday morning before Sky King which had teenagers sometimes flying airplanes.
Pokemon. In retrospect, the show wasn’t that great, or at least the dub wasn’t, but damned if I didn’t get excited to see every episode when I was little.
The Pokemon anime is really formulaic, but I think that’s why it works. Yeah, it doesn’t have deep plotlines or awesome writing, but as a kid I LOVED watching pokemon ACTUALLY fighting against each other, seeing their moves play out in front of my eyes.
The formulaic nature also works wonders with children: I’d giggle every time Team Rocket entered the shot, because I knew they’d “blast off at the speed of light!”, and I was ready to be amused by their failed attempts at capturing pokemon.
That speech of theirs was gloriously hammy, too.
Pokèmon is up there for me, but I’d have to go with the Powerpuff Girls. Extreme violence in the pursuit of JUSTICE is always one of the things it’s nice to have animation for, especially when the consequences are explored a little so we can see that yes, it’s fun, but when you go overboard or jump the gun it doesn’t end well.
Man, Powerpuff Girls was awesome. I still watch reruns when they air, out of sheer nostalgia and love for the cartoon.
The really nice thing, as with a lot of things made by Ellen Faust, is that behind the cover of silly fun, there are pretty awesome morals and stories. Not just about consequences of one’s actions, but about a lot of stuff.
Lain, as in Serial Experiments Lain? And you understood it as a kid?
If so, then I think I understand your ability to analyze things with such detail. I had to go to the TechTV website to understand that show. And I’d just watched Crest of the Stars, which I understood fine.
It took a lot of rewatches, but I watched it over and over again. It and Cowboy Bebop were the first anime series I watched that really clicked for me. I’m sure that it’s just a coincidence that of the two series that really resonated at a young age, one is about a lesbian becoming *spoilers* and the other has a non-binary main character…
You now, I honestly couldn’t choose a favorite childhood cartoon before, but apparenty I forgot Digimon. I was so enamored with it that I still like the movie, knowing all its flaws.
Saint Seiya! It’s this awesome 80’s shounen anime based around Greek Myths (and ended up a melting pot for different mythologies because Shintoism, yo!), and the characters were awesome and the fights were perfect and I think I’m going to go do a marathon now.
X-Men TAS, totally stopped reading Willis comics for about four years after he said Storm’s VA delivery was ridiculous, because I felt at the time like I didn’t need that kind of negativity in my life.
(YES IT IS RIDICULOUS, BUT THAT’S PART OF THE CHARACTER AND EVO STORM IS BORING AND HER DEPICTION IS KINDA… NOT GOOD IN A BUNCH OF CREEPING AND INSIDIOUS WAYS.)
Imma have to stop you right there Spencer, now I respect your opinion, but the only thing that Evo had going for it over TAS was Kitty Pryde over Jubilee. But Evo was too based on the horrible movies to be better than the 90’s X-men.
Plus, Evo didn’t make you fall in love with a completely original character to straight up kill him off in the pilot… that was some great and evil things to do to a kid in the 90s!
You know… as much as I disagree with you willis, I feel honored that you cared enough to rebut me! At least Fox X-Men wasn’t nearly as bad as X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men… besides being a horrible title… that brown suit was bad. I just have fond memories of the Fox X-men and i know i look at it through nostalgia glasses but dammit I don’t want to see its shortcomings!
X-Men: TAS has its charms (Gambit, for example, is a delightful scumbag to the point that I’m amazed some of his lines made it on to children’s television), but Evolution is superior in every way. Except maybe the portrayal of Storm.
I KNOW I LOVE IT. The fights take place at an eternal mall AND not every non-white character has to be related to each other!
Seriously, I listened to the episode of Jay and Miles where the director of Evo showed up, and dammit! I sometimes hate being right. That guy was super racist and he didn’t even know he was doing it. SO uncomfortable.
As a little white girl I was really bad about socialising with people who weren’t like me. But aged four I wanted to be Storm.
I like what Evo was trying to do and I’ve tried really hard to take it seriously, but I dislike school AU stuff intensely, and I reeeeeally didn’t like how it handled some of the minority stuff. TAS just wanted to be a big dumb action show, and they still managed to fit a huge amount of the 616! stuff into the show. And really interesting vibes, too, like when Bishop showed up, was discussing stuff with the others, and then they had to be in the 1950s for a bit??? (I can’t remember why) and it’s like NO DAMMIT RACIST CANTEEN LADY WE HAVE OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT THAN PUTTING BISHOP AND STORM IN ONE SEATING AREA, AND THE OTHERS IN ANOTHER, AND BEING PATRONISING ABOUT XAVIER’S WHEELCHAIR. It came out of nowhere but they didn’t ignore it! I loved stuff like that.
Also it’s thanks to TAS that I own some unrepeatably incredible cels, like one of Gambit in ’90s skiwear and Kurt still in his monk outfit, looking shocked. I don’t have a cap to hand but you can see the jacket here and it’s extraordinary.
My most cherished childhood cartoon was actually the entire Disney Afternoon/Zoog Disney block, Rescue Rangers, DuckTales, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, Goof Troop etc, as well as the entire Spielberg Cartoon collection and Reboot
Two of my favourites as a kid, you can’t annoy me by shitting on, because I shit on them more than enough myself – the original Transformers and GI Joe were fucking TERRIBLE, as I learned watching as an adult (I will never again forget a Skystalker cutting a HISS Tank in two with its WING, and coming out unscathed). (I’m still a fan of the Transformers franchise, (the toys and some more recent media – Animated, Prime, RID, IDW comics, the first of the Bay movies), so I’m pretty glad my taste as a kid was crap. >_>)
Talk shit about the third (Jem), on the other hand, I will fucking fight you.
(Rewatching Jem and She-Ra as an adult I noticed that shows aimed at girls hold up fairly well, where as shows aimed at boys are pretty universally stinkers. Shows without a specific gender demographic in mind hold up well, in general, too.)
You know, Shiro wanted to test a hypothesis by asking about our cherished cartoon memories and off we went. But we never asked and never found out about what the hypothesis was.
That title belongs to Mary. Hell Mary is out to ruin the lives of others just to get her own way. Carla at the very least has been shown to have empathy that Mary lacks.
Then there is ToeDad, whose beliefs made him want to threaten the lives of others because she cut her hair. Oh and because she likes girls.
Maybe you meant to put a comma after “Hell” there, but you inspired this. For those with a Catholic background:
Hell Mary, full of hate.
The Lord ain’t with thee.
Cursed art thou among bigots,
and cursed are the fruits of thy works,
malice.
Phony Mary, bother of God,
you loathe all “sinners”,
and so we all wish for your death.
Bongo.
…this needs work (and that last line would probably be better as something a little more profane, but I wasn’t sure how acceptable that’d be here).
Walky’s improving! At least the door was closed and he wasn’t insulting someone clearly visible from his point of view but outside the frame to people reading the comic.
Duh, they managed to get a DVD set released a few years after it ended that included the unaired eps. No question Carla bought it. I mean yeah, she could’ve torrented everything, but sometimes you gotta demonstrate your devotion for the sake of something that considers an episode selection menu a special feature.
If this is her trans awakening work, the work that resonated deep inside enough for her to want to name herself after the main character, I guarantee that she has not only tracked down every episode, but has the half-animated pilot episode, a few test scripts by the writers, and a signed copy of the DVD.
When a work resonates like that, it ends up occupying a very special part of one’s shelf… not that I can say the same about the work that resonated so hard I named myself after a character from it… *surreptitiously hides necklace of said character I custom-ordered for my birthday*
Other executive: *Walks up to whiteboard, erases “action” and “don’t”, writes “fashion” where “action” was*
Rest of the board of directors: *Nods in agreement behind steepled fingers*
First executive: GENIUS! Jenkins, I’m putting you in charge of the ‘Ultra Car’ series. Use this idea of yours to salvage it. We’ll beat the tar out of those bastards at XYZ and their monkey show!
So every character on the show got a pointless love interest, and the previously strong female characters were unrecognizable. Outraged fans stopped watching, the slowly climbing ratings tanked, and the series was doomed to a graveyard slot before getting canned halfway through its first season.
It’s not rude, but unfortunately, my name is uncommon enough to pose me problems reporting it in public. It’s from a comic series anyways (though there were a number of shows that resonated with me growing up including the ones I’ve mentioned above as well as Teen Titans).
Now see, I was assuming that it was a necklace with an amulet of Cerberus and the notion of a trans-ardvark was blowing my mind. Though I think technically Cerberus was established as both male and female as a plot point. And of course the famous scene with Pope Cerberus throwing the baby still works.
Of course not. You spelled it wrong.
Or rather, he did.
I still maintain that the first half or so of Cerebus, before Dave Sim went crazy, is a brilliant piece of work. The rest is practically unreadable. How nasty he got really taints the good parts.
Thejeff, I would argue that if you read the entire thing as satire, it still works. Just avoid reading anything alse that he may have written, most particularly comments on his own writting. And what is this spelling thing you mention? We all know that correct English spelling is really a conspiracy made up by English teachers for job security. I’ll just have to retrain myself not to picture Cerberus as an ambiguously sexy ardvark sitting behind a typewriter.
Clif, I really don’t think you can. I don’t think it holds up that way. Unless, in addition to anything else he wrote, you skip the long internal tracts on the Male Light and the Female Void and his take on particle physics based on that, as well as his commentary on the Torah, also based on the same theory. And well, pretty much everything else.
That said, even with the crazy, the talent occasionally shown through. Even towards the end there were some brilliant character moments. It’s more sad than anything.
I stopped reading all of Sim’s walls-o-text very quickly, just skimming them to get a vague concept. Didn’t everyone?
Which kept it readable and at least somewhat enjoyable, mostly. But by the end I was really reading it more out of a sense of obligation and complete-ism than anything else.
Whatever he was going through, he was still having fun with Quebec and uploading of personalities (you realize if it lives forever, it still isn’t you) and the ingratitude of children and the hell of getting what you want, up to the very end. But the particle physics justification of reincarnation and his turn everything on it’s head anti-feminist meta analysis of the Torah were absolutely hilarious. And I’m reasonably sure it was actually the Female light and the Male Void. It was why it was so funny when in spite of the character’s determination and best efforts, the light gets his hero in the end. Which I suppose is a spoiler, but ehhh.
And there was that episode that turned up online recently, leaked by one of the animation team. Trippy stuff. Visuals only- they never finished recording the sound. But then some fans did a dub, and the voices aren’t THAT bad.
She might still torrent them, just to be contrary, or to watch stuff while the DVDs were being shipped, or to watch stuff the creators weren’t legally permitted to release that WHOOPS SOMEHOW WAS LEAKED.
That, and she wants to spread the greatness that is Ultra Car to new viewers, since the DVDs are no longer available and Amazon Marketplace is charging like $100 for ’em used.
The tricky part would be to get Walky to 88 miles an hour every time he needs to take back something he’s said. Great Scott! We’re going to need more plutonium!
“nobody liked it. nobody understood it. nobody cared about it. yes, i hold it very dear and identify with it absolutely. check your hetero-normative privilege elsewhere, ‘life-was-easy-for-me’ boy”
fyi, i’m not entirely ok with the phrase ‘check your privilege’, but i feel that it fits too well here to not use it
Aw shit, I missed that part, but yeah, that’s gotta be especially galling for Carla, because when you’re super marginalized, there’s always that life experience or show or something that more privileged people go “ugh, how could anyone like that” because it doesn’t resonate with their more privileged life experiences. And it’s always dismissed as “nobody” being interested in it, because in their heads, if they don’t like it, how could anyone else?
In short, Walky is being a privileged goober-head here.
Walky, I’m disappointed. Out of the Eighteen episodes That aired, only six were really bad per se (Ep. 1, 3, 4, 5, 9(the crossover), and 18). Episodes 2, 11 and 12 were masterpieces, and Ep. 13 was nearly as good. There were a few other good ones, and the rest were at least decent.
And the unaired season finale. Holy shit, right in the gut. You can tell the creators threw everything they had into that as a gift to the fans who bought the DVD.
Luckily there’s the kickstarter for the movie, so we can find out what happened to Ultra Car’s sister.
It’s things like this that make me wonder if Willis draws inspiration from these sorts of comments when thinking about what the in-universe shows were like.
Obviously, he couldn’t have taken inspiration from the ones here because of the buffer time, but it’s come up in months prior.
Others say Walky’s about to get murdered; I say he’s about to wake up strapped to a Clockwork Orange setup and find himself forced to watch the show until he learns to appreciate it.
That’s actually the opposite of what the Ludovico Technique was meant to cause. That was meant to create an aversion to violence by associating it with the drug-induced negative sensations.
All I remember is watching the trailer with my brother in the theater and he asked, hypothetically, why they were growing corn when there apparently aren’t any organic beings around. I pointed out they could make ethanol with it.
Yes. Where Cars was occasionally sly and clever, Planes was ham-handed — including one painfully blatant product-placement plug for American Airlines’ new paint scheme for its jumboes. And I’d almost be interested to hear what some commenters here would think about the (again, ham-handed) mini-story-arc about the car-plane hybrid trying to find its identity.
How anybody can diss “Cars” or “Cars 2” — or even “Wings” — when there was animated dreck like “Turbo”, “Rango”, or even “Gnomeo and Juliet” out there is completely beyond my comprehension.
Wow. Walky really is the embodiment of clueless dude privilege isn’t he? IN EVERY WAY. “Listen, *I* didn’t like that series so clearly it must be awful and my own geeky obsessions are completely different!”
I think this is where we’re all reminded that Walky has a lot of growing up left to do and how much he’s been skating on the fact that he looks like he was sculpted out of caramel.
He’s also been skating on his assumption that since he had good grades effortlessly before, he can continue that into a more challenging educational system.
It is seriously easy to slip into “Ehh, I’ve got this!” when you’re that cocky. I remember actually calculating how much Social Studies homework I could ignore and still pass. I remember it fondly, but when the mindset screwed with the grades of classes I actually enjoyed, it ended up being much harder to go back.
There you go! I bristled at toxic masculinity, because, while that’s part of it, it doesn’t cover all of it. But clueless dude privilege? That’s nearly perfect.
If you could work in the part about being so smart that he’s never had to try, it would be perfect. “Smart dude privilege”, with the “clueless” part implied?
Usually I see toxic masculinity describe a specific suite of behaviors wherein men feel under pressure to prove their masculinity to avoid the punishments given those deemed feminine and so get locked in a self-reinforcing spiral of negative behaviors to any they deem feminine in order to avoid facing social consequences for being seen as “girly”. And this includes things like the normalization of sexual assault, casual assault of femme gay guys and trans women, thinking it lessens someone to cry or admit to mental health stuff and so on.
So, I imagine the distinction is clueless dude privilege is just faceplanting over how the world is set up to assume that dudes are the default gender and so realizing that not everything in the world is for you and that can be either a symptom of toxic masculinity (men assuming that everything is there’s by right and that women getting a scoop of ice cream from the ice cream machine is somehow stealing something that’s “for” them and reacting with anger or violence because being sad or thinking about things isn’t “manly” or worse assuming women’s bodies are simply theirs for the taking, because that’s how “men” act) or can just be someone faceplanting so damn hard on their privilege in assuming that just because they don’t like something then no one could, because they can’t imagine not being the audience for something.
Growing up I didn’t act manly (side effect of Autism is emulation of people you’re normally around, which ended up being adult women). This would upset my dad, I recall being told to not position my hands a certain way, some thing about being gay (loose fist with the thumb of other hand inside said fist and rest of hand resting on top of it) that I still do to this day and twitch out of it afterwards.
When I had starting dating, I don’t know what surprised my family, including extended, more. That I was dating, where I had shown no prior interest, or that it was a woman. Whatever I did was seeming never good enough for them. Kinda with her as well, but it was more a “You can do more, and I want to help you do more.” Born of love, just not Ross-love (thankfully).
Walky being described as toxically masculine is a bit like describing Kitty Pryde as a member of a paramilitary racist organization. Technically, it’s true but it’s kind of understated. Walky is sexist, egotistical, and privileged with no real desire to change his way of looking at a world designed to appeal to him but he’s not really malevolent.
It’s more he’s a fan of DEXTER AND MONKEY MASTER but can’t see why someone would like another cartoon with the same passion because OBVIOUSLY they’re different.
My wife loved it. Honestly, my opinion is the movies were never as bad as people thought they were. I like Alice, Jasper, and wish Laurent had stayed the entire time.
In my opinion:
1.) Amber (sadly obvious)
2.) Ruth (because all the reasons)
3.) Amazi Girl (parkour incident)
4.) Carla (accident caused by prank victim, but originating from prank device)
5.) Joyce (adorable breakdown)
P.S. Mostly sarcastic
P.S.S. I honestly can’t remember enough of the dangerous qualities of the guys that aren’t the push away friends/ruin their own lives sort, so theres probably a few in the non-sarcastic Top Five, maybe even enough to knock the others off the list entirely.
P.S.S.S. I think I need to archive binge now…
I absolutely love this strip, not just because YAY CARLA! (but seriously yay Carla, always yay Carla, never not yay Carla)
But because of how much is going on here. We’ve got Dorothy, recognizing a social car wreck coming a mile away and trying to steer her boyfriend clear of it and even correcting his grammar at the end and reminding him of a lesson she’s probably gone over with him multiple times over to no avail. And her just total surrender at how he’s yet again infuriated someone by pissing on something they hold dear.
We’ve got Walky and his utter lack of thought about what he’s saying and the smug superiority he often adopts when he thinks he’s right. And we’ve seen that backfire on him badly before, most notably when he said that Joyce was super brainwashed while she was less than 10 ft away.
And I love his criteria for why Ultra Car was bad because it hints of some geek elitism bullshit. Ultra Car is bad in his eyes because it was cancelled early and wasn’t commercially successful and because its crossover with a more successful work had a crappy episode.
And I suspect that it’s the crossover episode that really galls him, because so often crossover episodes in general suck and the attempt to meld two shows with wildly different sensibilities just ends up with some mediocre pap that just makes both the shows look terrible. And so, given his attention to detail and completness with D&MM, he’s probably watched the series a billion times, always wondering if he should skip over the bad crossover episode and just getting more and more frustrated with this “dumb” cancelled series making a bad episode in his perfect cartoon.
And it’s just illustrative of the flavor of obsessive fan he is.
And Carla… oh, you do not poke the fangirl in her favorite series. Especially if it is an “underappreciated gem” that helped her figure out who she was and resonated and comforted her when everything was super chaotic and confusing.
Trans fans can get hella obsessive about the work that truly clicks for them and can get super protective about it, because that’s the first work that they saw themselves reflected in. Hell, queer fans too (I’m thinking of how She-Ra, He-Man, and Xena having long lasting fanbases entirely based on them being shows queer folk used to figure out they were queer).
And that cult classic among a marginalized folks is such an interesting phenomenon because it often confuses the fuck out of more privileged people, because sometimes those resonating shows are legitimately terrible (I love Xena to death, but none of us were watching that show for the subtle and nuanced acting or complex plots), but they’ve got that piece that just… hits.
And when that work or character hits so thoroughly that it ends up being the basis of a chosen name, that’s a special thing to a trans person and that work becomes a strong part of themselves, tied to their identity. And so I understand Carla’s fury, I’d probably round on someone in a similar way if they were ignorantly shitting on the work or character I took my own name from.
Because that’s the power of the thing that finally cuts through all the cisnormativity of what we think we have to be and truly slams into who we’ve always been.
And poor Carla, this is the second time this weekend, she’s had some privileged git just stumbling into an important part of her identity like an asshole.
Yup, for Carla UltraCar is far more than just a cartoon. But there is also another layer to this scene, and that is how Walky and Carla meet on the same level.
The last confrontation, Carla took down a transphobe who attacked her very identity. This time it’s a clash between obsessive, geeky fans. Just as when Walky and Leslie sniped about the best episode, or when Walky and Dotty started dating, Walky and Carla are now entering that special subcultural space where whatever else you are, you are a FAN.
Yeah, the stakes are lower here and she’s a fangirl defending a work that’s very important to her, but this time, at least, she’s not having her identity as a person being overlooked or undermined.
Also, I just love Dotty here. Just as you say, she sees what’s coming, she tries to stop him and she takes time to correct his grammar. Her panel 2 expression is priceless. “…huh, Walky is doing a Walky.”
“Like, who the heck puts Firefly on their door? Is it there ironically? I mean, it was a FAILED sci-fi series. It did so bad they didn’t even air all of its episodes. They didn’t even HAVE a Dexter and Monkey Master crossover. What kind of loser hitches themselves to that wagon?”
Well, that’s one way to put it, but you can also go with
“Like, who the heck puts Angela Anaconda on their door? Is it there ironically? I mean, it was a FAILED childeren’s show. It did so bad that Disney bought Fox Family just to cancel it. The way it was shoehorned into the American Digimon Movie was awkward and out of place. What kind of loser hitches themselves to that wagon?”
Sometimes a bad show can resonate with someone. Doesn’t make it not bad, just relatable.
Glad to see someone else who thinks so. Never did get what people liked about Firefly. And to top off the awfulness, that show really pissed me off, once I realized that Mal and his browncoats are based on the confederates in the American Civil War. Yet we’re supposed to unironically see them as the good guys. It’d be one thing if Whedon had used the movie to make it clear that Mal never realized he was on the wrong side, but instead he did the opposite…
About the only similarities between the browncoats and the confederates are that it was a civil war and the more rural revolutionaries lost. I don’t think that you’ll find that the browncoats were supporting human slavery or that the American union was creating human Magog by way of social engineering.
But that’s the thing, I would have respected Whedon more if he’d taken the parallels further. Because the similarities were there, not just that they were the more rural revolutionaries, but that they were fighting for the equivalent of state’s rights, which is what present day supporters of the confederate side, love to claim that the confederates fought for(even if said ‘state’s rights’ were primarily about preserving slavery) .
Whedon could have taken the opportunity to have Mal grow as a person and realize that the people he was fighting were doing so for a just cause. Instead he used the movie to made the Alliance ûberevil, thus justifying the Browncoats cause..
So because the Star Wars rebellion is fighting for the equivalent of states rights against the empire, you’re pissed that Luke never realized that he was on the wrong side in opposing Darth Vador?
Actually, in the novels Luke eventually had an epiphany that his actions in the original trilogy weren’t spotless. Not evil, but certainly a little blinded to the realities of the situation.
Spending 75% of my day looking for the exact passage didn’t work (it was at least fun, but now I’ll be playing catch-up all week) but the bottom line is that Luke was lecturing his son on how violence and killing are unacceptable, and then Ben called him out on how many faceless Stormtroopers he cut down in the Galactic Civil War. This was DECADES after the fact, and Luke, now Grand Master of the Jedi Order, automatically started to respond with, “But they were all evil,” before the weight of a whole war hit him midsentence.
The rebels fought a war, and that’s never pretty, but for all that there were good people in the Empire (and a few monsters among the Rebels) Palpatine had to go.
Joss wasn’t trying to “code” his series. He actually wanted to do a Western where it wasn’t a stand-in for Confederate apologetia bullshit. Hence why the Alliance practices slavery and the Browncoast were against it. You can’t get much more clear than that.
I liked it at the time but after a few years have passed and I learned what Joss had planned for the later seasons, I am incredibly thankful it was cancelled.
Yes, but what Joss had planned for the early shows was equally bad and had only a passing relationship to what reached the screen. Captain R. did not start out as an overly sympathetic character.
The primary thing wrong with Joss W. TV series was his penchant for killing off perfectly serviceable characters. Much better to stick with safe family fair like Game of Thrones.
As a big, but former, fan, I compare him to a comedian who only has one act’s worth of material.
And the first time you see it, it’s a great, funny act.
But then you catch his next cable special a few years later, and it’s the same act. Maybe he’s added or changed a couple of jokes, but that’s all.
Then he gets his own sitcom, and it’s just the same thing, over and over. You can call off the familiar beats by the numbers, if you care enough to keep watching.
(and perhaps the worst or most ironic part is that I developed a lot of my awareness of tropes – before That Wiki ever came along, though I note Buffy was its origin as well – from watching him, and the personal spin he put on the old cliches. He taught me to notice these things.
And eventually I noticed he’d just replaced them with his own cliches.
So basically, Joss Whedon ruined Joss Whedon for me. :p )
I both like firefly and don’t mind that it was canceled. Honestly the mystique of what the show could have been, but probably would have failed to achieve, is part of why it developed such a fandom.
To put it more into perspective: “No matter the subject, no matter that I haven’t been asked, I absolutely MUST shed the light of my utterly dismissive opinion upon an uncomprehending world.”
Reminds me of the show “A to Z”… that show was the f***ing bomb and it got canceled midseason. Too many great shows just don’t get appreciated in time.
🙁
Now imagine every show you wished had been allowed to end while you could still remember them fondly. Rather than having their death dragged out season after season until they became meaningless parodies of themelves.
The Hundred, though that one would have then had to be cancelled before the sixth episode. Sorry to Clexa fans, but I will never forgive that show for killing Wells.
It is actually super cool how she’s learning a lot of political skills just navigating her circle of friends.
She’s got the hothead who runs at the mouth and creates situations one has to deftly handle in her boyfriend. She’s got the emotional conservative scared of changing her mind that she’s learning the skills of piece-meal introducing new concepts that can open new outlooks in Joyce. She’s got the moral dilemma of disclosure in Amazi-girl’s everything. She’s even got how to deal with hostile scumsuckers trying to destroy her in Mike.
It’s all the practical skills she’ll need as a politician, but on a less dire scale.
I can’t call Mike a scumsucker, he’s in a class all his own. But he does teach Dorothy that sometimes she isn’t the target and she’ll need to keep up to prevent her allies/ boyfriend from getting hurt.
Robin’s clearly in town now too. Hopefully Dorothy gets to ask her questions?
Sure, but she never really did anything. She just kind of showed up and said cute things.
Kissing Becky and tearing into Joyce, Sarah and Dorothy over how they perceive her as a child, and following that up with Walking with Dina, one of the best chapters in the entire series, did wonders for me.
You know, Walky should be writing down these things that Dorothy is telling him. Not because he’s actually going to be paying any attention to them, but so that he can make a mint on his book, Advice the President Gave Me.
Given the reaction, I actually suspect that Walky never even watched the aired episodes. He just saw the crossover–which, as was stated up above, is often bad just from putting two different types of shows together.
Our illustrious bard isn’t old enough to have watched Supercar during its first run (I was), but he may have seen it later and derived a little inspiration. We all know he’s a Transformers fan, a little mashup of the two isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
It’s a hyper-infectious earworm and was nigh inescapable for a period of the 2000s meaning a lot of people have very strong feelings about it because of that.
And to think Mary didn’t have to insult Carla’s gender to get under her skin. She could’ve watched hours of secular godless cartoons and then belittle the one that is Carla’s favorite.
As we grow up, we learn there are certain things we should not say out loud, in order to avoid offending/upsetting those around us. Thus, our brains learn to filter certain thoughts so that they do not reach the mouth.
Walky’s problem is that as soon as he was out from under his beloved smother’s thumb, he completely disengaged that filter and sabotaged it to prevent it from being put back up. He’s in that “I am no longer being monitored by an authority figure 24/7 and cannot be held accountable for my actions, thus I can say and do as I please” phase of adulthood.
The question now is if he’ll ever live long enough to grow out of it.
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♪There’s a killer on the street, she’s moving from house to house♫
You have no idea how glad I am that you didn’t start singing “beep beep I’m a jeep”.
Link doesn’t work for me – says the user didn’t make it available for my country. :/
You can still see the title of the video and google it, right?
♪There’s a killer on the road, His brain is squirmin’ like a toad.♫
Oh, look, an immient murder.
BRUTAL murder even. BLOOD EVERYWHERE!
And all the clues point toward… MARY!
So if there was blood everywhere, then would it be a BLOODY MARY? Heh heh, *snort*
No? Yeah, I thought it was a stretch too.
This is Ruthless’ floor, so it must be Tuesday.
Sunday actually. A good old Sunday murderin’
Not murder, but I wouldn’t rule out a Cold, Swift, and Absolutely Ridiculous Revenge(tm) in the offing.
Walky’s gonna get pied with extreme prejudice.
Dead man walking, right there.
You’re not in trouble, Walky. You’re dead where you stand.
Maybe they can trade baseballs?
Dead man Walky, even.
OR WAlky could wake up one day with a giant middle finger machine in front of his door, disguised as a box of mac&cheese
No No, a box of chicken McNuggets.
Walky, stop being such a banjo.
He’s not wrong.
Dexter & Monkey >>>>>>>> Ultracar
Carla’s Hit List:
—————————–
Curtain TwitcherCartoon Boy
AnvilPro
Well he’s probably gonna get murdered
Now that was rude, the first boy blunder had some manners – joker (under the red hood)
Carla talks big, but her only real weapon is being ultra-annoying … and Walky is
completely insensitiveimmune to annoyance.That’s assuming that Carla doesn’t learn about Walky’s former career as a child actor. It would be awful if certain Hymmel the Humming Hymnal videos were made public…
Au contraire! Personally, I think it would be effin’ hilarious!!
that’s not a good look for carla
It’s a gay as hell look and therefore an awesome look, especially for Carla
Short-sleeved blue button-up over white shirt plus a striped pink beanie doesn’t seem “gay as hell” at all to me, but I do agree that it’s awesome, and it goes nicely with her hair.
Are you a gay? Because it’s p gay to me, who am gay.
Fair enough. I tend to have a hard time seeing any correlation between choice of attire and sexuality anyway, but it mostly seems charmingly generic to me.
Fury has consumed the organic unit you call Carla. Please call back later to see if she is back. In the meantime… run.
Run.
Look upon the Face of DEATH, and know true fear.
“My name is Carla, you insulted Ultra Car, prepare to die.”
“To insult Ultra Car is to insult Carla, and to insult Carla is to die!”
Stop. SAYING. That!
ha ha HAAAAAA murdercar
Anybody who makes fun of Ultra Car has been driven to diss traction.
These puns haven’t even begun to accelerate yet but I’m already tired.
I would think you would be tyred instead.
North American spelling 🙂
If I rode a bike through London, I would’ve been two-tyred, as well.
I can tell you that going through London os really a braketaking monent.
This thread is spinning out of control. Gonna end up in a ditch.
I would have thought this thread would have had more drive. However, it seems to have lost traction.
Indeed, it’s a Car-dinal sin.
http://i.imgur.com/m2uQbN8.gif
I think this might be the angriest we’ve seen Carla in the strip.
There was the once she was so angry she just kinda stood and stared blankly for a minute.
This is just functional murderous rage.
Not even Mary got murdered.
Sadly this is true. But I refuse to despair; there’s always next week 😎
Well she insulted Carla, not Ultra Car. There’s a difference.
I love the hierarchy of anger. Like, casual transphobia. Oh, it’s a longer lasting hate, but not a deep one, because that’s just everyday awful.
Insulting her favorite TV show, though? Oh, no. No, you don’t do that. Prolly won’t last as long as a hate on, but you know what they say about the candle that lasts half as long, burning twice as bright.
And by burning twice as bright, you mean a psychically induced gravitational singularity of destruction that consumes all light, heat, and life, leaving nothing but cold dark death. =)
You say po-TAY-to, I say po-TAH-to.
I scream po-TAY-to from atop a mountain of skulls.
But I like Reltzik’s version better. And it ever so tastefully matches the mountain of skulls.
This is actually simple anger, which burns brightly, but cleanly. Hate is like a low, guttering ember, which continues to damage things even when you think the fire’s out.
Hate is like a grease fire, it makes a lot of smelly smoke, using water to put it out only makes it worse, and even when it’s gone the residue it leaves behind will haunt you.
Carla might be a little too invested in ultra car
What do you mean? Too invested in a fictional character? That’s not a thing.
So true, even my harem of waifus agree with me on this topic.
Hunting for like button.
She’s a geek girl! 😀
She don’t try to hide it/ Wheelies on the soles of her shoooes….
Geek girls are the best girls. Everyone else is merely human.
“Carla might be a little too invested in ultra car” says a bunch of people posting 3 minutes after a webcomic goes live.
“If thou gaze too long into Carla, Carla will also gaze into thee, and then hit you in the face with a pie.”
Actually I think it’s more like “Yay, Walky’s about to be murdered, ” say a bunch of people posting nanoseconds after the web comic goes live. I’m sure someone must have said that Carla is too invested in Ultra Car, but I missed it or mentally edited it out or something.
We are all Carla. The Carla is within us.
When you look into your own eyes, you do not see you staring back, but rather Carla from the depths of your soul.
I’m actually 3 Carlas in a Cerberus suit.
Sneering at other people for having tastes different from yours should only be done when you are out of earshot from them.
(One could actually not waste time caring about trivial shit regarding other people, but that’s crazy talk.)
We always knew someone was gonna murder walky. That it’s Carla is a fun twist.
I love the rhetorical pattern. It can be used or abused so well.
We always knew someone was going to use the emergency powers of the US President to do a Ceasar. That it was Hillary Clinton is a fun twist.
We always knew someone was going to start World War III. That it was Donald Trump is a fun twist.
We always knew someone would get tired of faceless bureaucrats running their life and begin the destruction of the European Union. That it was Great Britain is a fun twist.
We always knew that someone would become the ultimate Internet Pornlord. That it was David Willis is a fun twist.
Ultracar is Firefly?
no, firefly’s crossover episode with dexter and monkey master was fantastic
That’s true, as I love the unexpected chemistry between Jayne and Sensitive Scanner.
I can honestly say that there is no episode I would prefer to see over and over.
Of course not.
Ultra Car was cool and didn’t totally deserve to be cancelled.
http://i.imgur.com/PYhMLR6.png
http://m.imgur.com/gallery/AAAjx
I don’t know, it doesn’t look like Ultra Car got a movie sequel in which a main character got Whedoned.
If it did, would it have been a sentient truck that died?
You know, because Willis likes to mess with us.
“Oh my gods! Why did Max Truck jump in front of that human and get killed?! It’s not fair!”
I don’t know if Ultra-Car got comic books too after it got cancelled.
It wasn’t released in the US, but there was a completely trippy manga, in which U.C. is stuck in an Amazonian tar pit and was hallucinating her whole existence until then. I only saw it in translation, and didn’t understand any of the pop cultural references.
If you’re going to like trash, you should be prepared for people to shit talk it.
Oh yes the 3rd Amendment of Internet law.
I thought the third amendment of internet law is the government is not allowed to trash talk anyone with whom they are not already engaged in a flame war.
The trouble with internet law is that it doesn’t work so well when people try to apply it within grabbin’ distance.
(The joke/reference is that the united states’ third amendment prevents the government from making civilians house the military during peacetime.)
Our founding fathers felt it would be better for the peacetime military tor be homeless. Some still feel the same today.
(And mine was that people on the internet tend to behave, well, like Walky when there’s little likelihood of the consequences of what saying stuff in person would bring.)
(Are we done explaining our jokes to each other now?)
No, I think Yotomoe get’s the last word.
Carla can’t handle Walky’s shit taste in everything. It’s not her fault.
I think she is. Which is why she’s prepared a verbal beatdown in response.
Dunno, she looks pretty prepared to me. That looks like a “bring it on” face if I ever saw one.
Suspect she’s been down this road before with other mortals.
The fleshbags will know her wrath.
Wonderbug!
Yay!
Just “yay!”
id have the same expression carla does if someone insulted guardians of the galaxy
Disturbing thought: Mary will turn out to be a major league Ultracar fan.
how dare you
Hahahahaha
That would be way too humanizing. Besides it’s a SECULAR Cartoon. It’s totally full of sin! It’s bursting at the seams with SIN! EVERYWHERE! Just looking at that door is probably sinful.
Mary watched the Christian variant where Ultra Car was just a regular station wagon that a pastor drove around and imparting sermons because only Jesus has the power to fly around and save people.
Not ‘variant’ so much as ‘shameless ripoff’ and spelling the series title ‘Ultracar’ (no spaces) allowed a legal loophole.
It’s hard to be sure unless you’ve just mainlined every episode of Ultra Car before watching that the similarities are there, to be honest; switching from a creative cartoon show about a sapient car to a live-action low-budget series that crudely shoehorns in bible stories as metaphors for whatever event the pastor came across leaves you thinking they have nothing in common, at a casual glance.
That said, the station wagon WAS red with disturbing headlight eyes, and the similarity in titles would be enough to make Mary think they’d both watched the same show. Misunderstandings ensue.
biblecar
ultracar doesnt sound like an anime to me
“I watched the superior Sentai version of your car show that was dubbed and ruined for Western audiences.
Seriously can Mary being a total weeb be canon?
She draws that way, so I’m still holding out for it.
Maybe she can get into a dubs vs subs argument with one of the Rachels.
You are thinking of Ultraman.
I actually would like that. Cause there’s always those odd fans that seem to miss out on most of the point of the show and take some weird message out of it, ignoring the parts that resonate with more marginalized fans.
Most famously, I’m thinking of all the MRA “red pill” asshats who obsess over Matrix as some glorious macho philosophy about teh evils of feminism when the actual movie is the most trans thing ever produced ever.
Don’t forget how the Secret Meaning(TM) of Angry Birds was about the Evils of Immigration.
what
Thark’s not joking.
There are… there are folks out there pushing that narrative w/regard to the angry birds movie.
Going away to search the Interweb.
But Ronnie himself said to tear down that wall…
Agreed. Though in fairness, it was someone else’s wall.
I’m not doubting you, but I haven’t seen The Matrix since I was like eight. Can you expand on that line of thought? I know the Watchowski siblings are trans, but I never realized it effected that particular movie.
It’s kinda all over the movie in major themes. Like, there’s the fact that Neo the main character has a name used with his online friends that all the Matrix folks always respect, but the agents only refer to him as Mr. Anderson, always putting emphasis on the mister part and referring to how he needs to make certain choices to put that “other life” away if he still wants to remain employed or a valuable member of society.
There’s visual effects, like Neo wearing a slight amount of lipstick early on in the movie as if he had lipstick on the night before and hadn’t quite wiped it all off before starting his morning the next day. There’s the super trans way all of Morpheus’s folks present each other. The train scene actually being based on the moment Lana Wachowski realized that she needed to transition and she couldn’t bottle it up anymore. The way Cypher’s betrayal is played like someone detransitioning and selling out his old friends to the TERFs because the transphobia was just too much to deal with. How the wiping out of the group evokes the painfully high trans murder rate and how Switch actually echoes the last words of a somewhat prominent LA trans person who was murdered a few years before the Matrix was made.
Bootleg girl has a really good summary on a lot of the notes that has been mostly synthesized into a Youtube video by The Film Runner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2-m3ZksNGM
But overall, watching it again specifically looking for transgender elements, it’s rather stunning just how blatant the Wachowski’s were with the metaphors, sometimes even straight up echoing societal messages about trans folks.
As an aside, let me just note for the record that Bootleg Girl is exceedingly groovy.
https://i.imgur.com/7j15tXU.jpg
If I may add to your very solid analysis…
Thomas Anderson lives a life of quiet desperation and constant searching due to a feeling that something is not quite right but cannot seem to pin down exactly what it is. One night he meets someone who starts him on a journey of self discovery wherein he discovers what what was at the root of those feelings of discontent with his life and the systemic bigotry against those who feel that way by those who feel such people’s very existence will ruin their way of life. He is changed by this, one cannot just put the genie back in the bottle as it were, but has trouble accepting the truth about himself. In the end because of the love and acceptance of those now around him he finally accepts who he is and undergoes a radical and fundamental change to how he presents himself to the world ending in a confrontation with those who previously showed him such bigotry. The film ends with a warning to others like these bigots that he is no longer cowed by their system and is going to change it such that they are themselves merely a relic of the past.
I’ll just put one of my personal favorite quotes from the film here just because: “To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.”
Yup, the Wachowski sisters get really obvious in places and I absolute love it.
Thanks, those are some really solid points I hadn’t noticed before. It’s definitely an interesting way to view the film.
Sisters! They both transitioned? I thought it was just Lana. Wow, I am behind the times.
Yup, it’s Lana and Lily Wachowski. Lily had a great blurb about it when she was about to be outed by the Daily Fail, the UK’s worst snot rag:
http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Second-Wachowski-filmmaker-sibling-comes-out-as-trans-/54509.html
That’s so typical of the Daily Heil, outing someone and trying to look all concerned.
. . . it makes so much more sense now. Are the sequels still stupid, though? I’ve basically blocked them from my memory.
I haven’t rewatched them under a trans lens, so I’m not sure yet, but it’s on the docket.
Yes they are. No lense can fix some of those plot points.
The sequels are rather rank when it comes to how they present such things, just as they kinda are in general, because of how much of the process for making them involved so many ideas from people other than the Wachowskis. Certain elements can absolutely be read as reflecting how some of the cis LGB part of the LGBT communities can have the same problematic viewpoints of and interactions with trans individuals as are common among the straight communities.
There’s also the simple fact that there’s a character named Switch who was originally supposed to be played by a female actor in the Matrix and a male one outside of it.
The story, as I have seen it, was that he was trans due to a glitch in the Matrix, giving him a female body when he was really male. And the “residual self image” kept him female. Over time, though he was modding that image to become more male–hence the androgyny.
Thus the line “not like this” was not about dying from being unplugged, but he died while still looking like a woman.
Every now and again, I encounter a media interpretation that completely re-contextualizes the way I have always thought about something. This is one of those times.
It makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE when viewed through the lens of trans media.
Especially the whole rabbit hole motif. That is… yeah. I know that feeling of standing outside the rabbit hole with no way to know where it leads but knowing that following it is important to you but also knowing that if you do follow it, everything will be different forever and you don’t know if the difference will be good or bad or mixed but worth it or what.
Yeah.
(In not-unrelated news, I am/have been questioning certain parts of me for a while now annnnnd yeah. That’s rabbit hole thing is a thing I am feeling HARD right now).
Massive *hugs* and lots of love as you explore your rabbit hole of self-discovery, wherever it may lead.
Yeah. It is a thing.
Ever had that thing where you meet a person who opens your eyes to something being possible on the personal level rather than the intellectual and it is like a punch in the gut because they’re everything you never realized you wanted to be?
Cuz that. That was a thing that happened.
Sounds like an exact retelling of the moment I realized I was trans for reals.
But whatever your own path is, I have all the *hugs* and support waiting for you. Good luck!
When I was sixteen I met my best friend. He identifies as female, lives as male, and had a female persona as a coping mechanism. They were my first introduction into what it actually meant to not be cisgender- and that was the catalyst for my eventual realisation of identifying as male and starting to transition.
In this case it was more a re-meeting of person. A trans dude I knew before he transitioned and then met up with him at another thing later and noticed folks were calling him by a different name and he looked fucking amazing like he’d been carrying a huge weight and had just set it down. Plus his body looks how I have always wanted to look and always got shit for wanting to look like because “too butch” and “you don’t want to look like a guy.”
And yeah. Hate to say it but my gut reaction was overwhelming jealousy.
I remember how I loved so of the designs of Morpheous group members because some of them were so androgynous , it resonates something on my child mind! (heck even Neo has some androgenous feel no wonder I alwayd found him so pretty even if I don’t like the actor).
Mind = blown
… Wow, it is, isn’t it? Considering who that’s the brainchild of, everything suddenly makes so much more sense.
I am almost betting she thinks american animation is inferior to anime… just because.
Mary being a closet fan would be hilarious in so many ways.
She is already a fan of Dexter and Monkey Master. She has similar purple wristbands to the ones that Dorothy (and also Malaya) have.
Trivia: This week was the 50th anniversary of the first airing of the last episode of Ultra Q–which also means that next week is the 50th anniversary of the first episode of Ultraman.
Now where’d I put that beta capsule?
And on that day, Walky was murdered. Oh well. Time to replace him with a robot duplicate or clone or something.
How ’bout a cyborg formed from parts of his robot duplicate, clone, and evil tw… wait, on second thought, leave Sal out of this.
(I know Sal’s not evil.)
How about a clone made out of… tacos?!
His twin has to stand in for him.
All right…
LET’S PARTY.
Is… Is that ashort circuit 2 reference? I know the quote predates sc2, but Willis is a huge fan so… Whatev. If it is, I’m thoroughly thankful for the nostalgic reference 😀
Will there be disassemble all over the place?
He’s gonna get murdered
Well of course Carla is going to feel insulted. She’s one of the most selfish characters in this strip.
I don’t think you have been introduced to the majority of the cast if you consider that.
Why are y’all so determined to be rude about Carla.
“I am upset that you insulted this thing that is important to me.”
“Ugh, how selfish of you.”
Ugh, caring about things. How selfish.
Lordy me, the weird internet belief that not caring about things somehow makes you a better and more worthy person can’t die fast enough.
I try so hard to be apathetic, yo. That means I’m the best at not caring.
hey wait
So what is your most cherished childhood cartoon? I want to test a hypothesis.
zoids
Ulysses 31
Ulysses 31: Jedi Jetpack Jesus fights hi-tech Greek Gods IN SPACE!
That sounds awesome.
Reboot.
I am still mad about that cliffhanger.
I’m okay with the cliffhanger… i can’t stand what they are doing with the Reboot reboot… The Users are going to be guardians… like WTH are you thinking?
I think that would either be Oban Star Racers or Duck Dodgers. Can’t choose.
My most prominent memories of Duck Dodgers are when he traveled back in time to steal Tom Jones’ voice, and when he mixed up his laundry with Hal Jordan and became the Green Loontern.
Duck Dodgers was rad, yo.
There was also an episode about the Martians using soft jazz braiwaves to mind control the population of the Earth, and Dodgers and Co. had to unfreeze Megadeath and help them regain their memories to rock hard enough to destroy the brainwave emitter.
Rocky and Bullwinkle, hands down. Unless you mean young child in which case it was Ruff and Reddy. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A9jN6j8NC7w
It wasn’t so much that Ruff and Reddy were that great, but they were on Saturday morning before Sky King which had teenagers sometimes flying airplanes.
Likewise, but I remember Oban better.
So much love for Molly Star-Racer.
Oban high-five!
Duck Dodgers is a childhood cartoon for you?
*was already feeling old…this clinches it*
Maybe it was the original Merrie Melodies short?
I vaguely recall there was an actual series, but it’s that short that I first think of. And it was old when I was young.
Duck Tales
Batman TAS — the last true television show for me. I can barely stand to watch anything else anymore.
The Real Ghostbusters.
At least before they put everything into the Slimer spinoff. I HAAAAAAAAAAAATED that thing. I’ll keep the rest of my comments out of here. 😛
Pokemon. In retrospect, the show wasn’t that great, or at least the dub wasn’t, but damned if I didn’t get excited to see every episode when I was little.
The Pokemon anime is really formulaic, but I think that’s why it works. Yeah, it doesn’t have deep plotlines or awesome writing, but as a kid I LOVED watching pokemon ACTUALLY fighting against each other, seeing their moves play out in front of my eyes.
The formulaic nature also works wonders with children: I’d giggle every time Team Rocket entered the shot, because I knew they’d “blast off at the speed of light!”, and I was ready to be amused by their failed attempts at capturing pokemon.
That speech of theirs was gloriously hammy, too.
Pokèmon is up there for me, but I’d have to go with the Powerpuff Girls. Extreme violence in the pursuit of JUSTICE is always one of the things it’s nice to have animation for, especially when the consequences are explored a little so we can see that yes, it’s fun, but when you go overboard or jump the gun it doesn’t end well.
Man, Powerpuff Girls was awesome. I still watch reruns when they air, out of sheer nostalgia and love for the cartoon.
The really nice thing, as with a lot of things made by Ellen Faust, is that behind the cover of silly fun, there are pretty awesome morals and stories. Not just about consequences of one’s actions, but about a lot of stuff.
Kimagure orange road (yea, we had Japanese anime on national TV in France in the 80-90′)
Case Closed (Matantei Conan).
I am probably not your target demographic, location-wise.
Daria and Lain were the two for me. There were definitely no signs that I was a queer girl growing up.
Lain, as in Serial Experiments Lain? And you understood it as a kid?
If so, then I think I understand your ability to analyze things with such detail. I had to go to the TechTV website to understand that show. And I’d just watched Crest of the Stars, which I understood fine.
It took a lot of rewatches, but I watched it over and over again. It and Cowboy Bebop were the first anime series I watched that really clicked for me. I’m sure that it’s just a coincidence that of the two series that really resonated at a young age, one is about a lesbian becoming *spoilers* and the other has a non-binary main character…
No signs of my queerness whatsoever…
Now-Justice league.
Then- Probably Digimon.
You now, I honestly couldn’t choose a favorite childhood cartoon before, but apparenty I forgot Digimon. I was so enamored with it that I still like the movie, knowing all its flaws.
*know
Animaniacs
Pink Panther
Robotech
Noggin the Nog.
Nog is Inescapable.
Saint Seiya! It’s this awesome 80’s shounen anime based around Greek Myths (and ended up a melting pot for different mythologies because Shintoism, yo!), and the characters were awesome and the fights were perfect and I think I’m going to go do a marathon now.
X-Men TAS, totally stopped reading Willis comics for about four years after he said Storm’s VA delivery was ridiculous, because I felt at the time like I didn’t need that kind of negativity in my life.
(YES IT IS RIDICULOUS, BUT THAT’S PART OF THE CHARACTER AND EVO STORM IS BORING AND HER DEPICTION IS KINDA… NOT GOOD IN A BUNCH OF CREEPING AND INSIDIOUS WAYS.)
Bro, I’mma level with you.
Evo was leaps and bounds better.
Also there is a comic Marvel’s putting out called X-Men ’92 that’s a sort of pseudo sequel to the cartoon and it’s hella rad.
Imma have to stop you right there Spencer, now I respect your opinion, but the only thing that Evo had going for it over TAS was Kitty Pryde over Jubilee. But Evo was too based on the horrible movies to be better than the 90’s X-men.
Plus, Evo didn’t make you fall in love with a completely original character to straight up kill him off in the pilot… that was some great and evil things to do to a kid in the 90s!
Fox X-Men was lukewarm garbage. Not even hot garbage.
You know… as much as I disagree with you willis, I feel honored that you cared enough to rebut me! At least Fox X-Men wasn’t nearly as bad as X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men… besides being a horrible title… that brown suit was bad. I just have fond memories of the Fox X-men and i know i look at it through nostalgia glasses but dammit I don’t want to see its shortcomings!
I will not be silenced until the world understands how terrible Fox X-Men is!
X-Men: TAS has its charms (Gambit, for example, is a delightful scumbag to the point that I’m amazed some of his lines made it on to children’s television), but Evolution is superior in every way. Except maybe the portrayal of Storm.
I KNOW I LOVE IT. The fights take place at an eternal mall AND not every non-white character has to be related to each other!
Seriously, I listened to the episode of Jay and Miles where the director of Evo showed up, and dammit! I sometimes hate being right. That guy was super racist and he didn’t even know he was doing it. SO uncomfortable.
As a little white girl I was really bad about socialising with people who weren’t like me. But aged four I wanted to be Storm.
I like what Evo was trying to do and I’ve tried really hard to take it seriously, but I dislike school AU stuff intensely, and I reeeeeally didn’t like how it handled some of the minority stuff. TAS just wanted to be a big dumb action show, and they still managed to fit a huge amount of the 616! stuff into the show. And really interesting vibes, too, like when Bishop showed up, was discussing stuff with the others, and then they had to be in the 1950s for a bit??? (I can’t remember why) and it’s like NO DAMMIT RACIST CANTEEN LADY WE HAVE OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT THAN PUTTING BISHOP AND STORM IN ONE SEATING AREA, AND THE OTHERS IN ANOTHER, AND BEING PATRONISING ABOUT XAVIER’S WHEELCHAIR. It came out of nowhere but they didn’t ignore it! I loved stuff like that.
Also it’s thanks to TAS that I own some unrepeatably incredible cels, like one of Gambit in ’90s skiwear and Kurt still in his monk outfit, looking shocked. I don’t have a cap to hand but you can see the jacket here and it’s extraordinary.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aBsGgRNmWag/hqdefault.jpg
Super Chicken. (My childhood was a long time ago.)
I love super chicken… if only because it’s like one of the best theme songs for a cartoon ever
Alakazam the Great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alakazam_the_Great
Yes, I lived in an age before good cartoons.
That was still well after Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies, which are still some of the all time best cartoons.
Yay, someone older than me!
Toss up between Jem and She-ra
as a kid it was veggietales.
right now it’s steven universe.
Batfink, as a kid, then later Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Reboot, and now Steven Universe, Venture Brothers and of course Archer.
Crap, I forgot Kim Possible.
Transformers, probably Beast Wars at the top.
My most cherished childhood cartoon was actually the entire Disney Afternoon/Zoog Disney block, Rescue Rangers, DuckTales, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, Goof Troop etc, as well as the entire Spielberg Cartoon collection and Reboot
Two of my favourites as a kid, you can’t annoy me by shitting on, because I shit on them more than enough myself – the original Transformers and GI Joe were fucking TERRIBLE, as I learned watching as an adult (I will never again forget a Skystalker cutting a HISS Tank in two with its WING, and coming out unscathed). (I’m still a fan of the Transformers franchise, (the toys and some more recent media – Animated, Prime, RID, IDW comics, the first of the Bay movies), so I’m pretty glad my taste as a kid was crap. >_>)
Talk shit about the third (Jem), on the other hand, I will fucking fight you.
(Rewatching Jem and She-Ra as an adult I noticed that shows aimed at girls hold up fairly well, where as shows aimed at boys are pretty universally stinkers. Shows without a specific gender demographic in mind hold up well, in general, too.)
You know, Shiro wanted to test a hypothesis by asking about our cherished cartoon memories and off we went. But we never asked and never found out about what the hypothesis was.
Pretty sure Shiro was addressing Leon, but given the nature of the readership this was inevitable.
Try again.
You know, I’ve lost the ability to tell when comments criticizing Carla are genuine, and when they’re parodies.
Even if they mean it, at this point they know exactly what reaction to expect, and most likely revel in it.
That title belongs to Mary. Hell Mary is out to ruin the lives of others just to get her own way. Carla at the very least has been shown to have empathy that Mary lacks.
Then there is ToeDad, whose beliefs made him want to threaten the lives of others because she cut her hair. Oh and because she likes girls.
Maybe you meant to put a comma after “Hell” there, but you inspired this. For those with a Catholic background:
Hell Mary, full of hate.
The Lord ain’t with thee.
Cursed art thou among bigots,
and cursed are the fruits of thy works,
malice.
Phony Mary, bother of God,
you loathe all “sinners”,
and so we all wish for your death.
Bongo.
…this needs work (and that last line would probably be better as something a little more profane, but I wasn’t sure how acceptable that’d be here).
Haha yeah, comma after Hell. I suppose it’s fitting though.
and sold on buying tickets to watching Walky get his shit kicked in.
Hello, my name is Carla, you insulted my alternate self, prepare to die!
Other world?
Walky’s improving! At least the door was closed and he wasn’t insulting someone clearly visible from his point of view but outside the frame to people reading the comic.
You know, these in universe cartoons are a way to read Willis do something as cartoony as shortpacked again. Maybe even more cartoony!
May the Cheese have mercy on you, David Walkerton.
But he’s like, what, three hours away?
Murder-Car, the never produced darker and edgier sequel.
Sounds more like Ultra Car’s EVIL doppleganger, like KARR is to KITT.
She even does “appalled” adorably
DoA: For all your murderous red-headed sophomore needs.
Yeah, that face says “Walky’s gonna get murdered.”
Also, what are the odds that Carla’s seen every episode, even the unaired ones?
Duh, they managed to get a DVD set released a few years after it ended that included the unaired eps. No question Carla bought it. I mean yeah, she could’ve torrented everything, but sometimes you gotta demonstrate your devotion for the sake of something that considers an episode selection menu a special feature.
If this is her trans awakening work, the work that resonated deep inside enough for her to want to name herself after the main character, I guarantee that she has not only tracked down every episode, but has the half-animated pilot episode, a few test scripts by the writers, and a signed copy of the DVD.
When a work resonates like that, it ends up occupying a very special part of one’s shelf… not that I can say the same about the work that resonated so hard I named myself after a character from it… *surreptitiously hides necklace of said character I custom-ordered for my birthday*
That’s genuinely adorable, I love seeing what people custom order for themselves. It’s a little something that’s uniquely them, you know?
It’s my power amulet. 😀
She also checks Etsy on a regular basis for Ultra Car fanmake, as the network hated money and didn’t make official merch.
*serious executive voice*
Well, girl action figures don’t sell, right?
*sound of Carla’s fury breaking the world behind me*
Other executive: *Walks up to whiteboard, erases “action” and “don’t”, writes “fashion” where “action” was*
Rest of the board of directors: *Nods in agreement behind steepled fingers*
First executive: GENIUS! Jenkins, I’m putting you in charge of the ‘Ultra Car’ series. Use this idea of yours to salvage it. We’ll beat the tar out of those bastards at XYZ and their monkey show!
So every character on the show got a pointless love interest, and the previously strong female characters were unrecognizable. Outraged fans stopped watching, the slowly climbing ratings tanked, and the series was doomed to a graveyard slot before getting canned halfway through its first season.
Would it be considered rude to ask what show and what character that is? I’m genuinely curious, and always on the lookout for awesome shows to watch.
It’s not rude, but unfortunately, my name is uncommon enough to pose me problems reporting it in public. It’s from a comic series anyways (though there were a number of shows that resonated with me growing up including the ones I’ve mentioned above as well as Teen Titans).
Now see, I was assuming that it was a necklace with an amulet of Cerberus and the notion of a trans-ardvark was blowing my mind. Though I think technically Cerberus was established as both male and female as a plot point. And of course the famous scene with Pope Cerberus throwing the baby still works.
It is most certainly not a Dave Sim comic.
Of course not. You spelled it wrong.
Or rather, he did.
I still maintain that the first half or so of Cerebus, before Dave Sim went crazy, is a brilliant piece of work. The rest is practically unreadable. How nasty he got really taints the good parts.
My favorites were the one’s with Groucho. Loved the comic though Dave Sims himself went off the rails before the end.
Thejeff, I would argue that if you read the entire thing as satire, it still works. Just avoid reading anything alse that he may have written, most particularly comments on his own writting. And what is this spelling thing you mention? We all know that correct English spelling is really a conspiracy made up by English teachers for job security. I’ll just have to retrain myself not to picture Cerberus as an ambiguously sexy ardvark sitting behind a typewriter.
If Sim had only known how to draw a Vanaheim, everything would have been so much different.
Clif, I really don’t think you can. I don’t think it holds up that way. Unless, in addition to anything else he wrote, you skip the long internal tracts on the Male Light and the Female Void and his take on particle physics based on that, as well as his commentary on the Torah, also based on the same theory. And well, pretty much everything else.
That said, even with the crazy, the talent occasionally shown through. Even towards the end there were some brilliant character moments. It’s more sad than anything.
I stopped reading all of Sim’s walls-o-text very quickly, just skimming them to get a vague concept. Didn’t everyone?
Which kept it readable and at least somewhat enjoyable, mostly. But by the end I was really reading it more out of a sense of obligation and complete-ism than anything else.
Whatever he was going through, he was still having fun with Quebec and uploading of personalities (you realize if it lives forever, it still isn’t you) and the ingratitude of children and the hell of getting what you want, up to the very end. But the particle physics justification of reincarnation and his turn everything on it’s head anti-feminist meta analysis of the Torah were absolutely hilarious. And I’m reasonably sure it was actually the Female light and the Male Void. It was why it was so funny when in spite of the character’s determination and best efforts, the light gets his hero in the end. Which I suppose is a spoiler, but ehhh.
The worn out off-air VHS recordings are enshrined in her bedroom at her parents’ house.
And there was that episode that turned up online recently, leaked by one of the animation team. Trippy stuff. Visuals only- they never finished recording the sound. But then some fans did a dub, and the voices aren’t THAT bad.
She might still torrent them, just to be contrary, or to watch stuff while the DVDs were being shipped, or to watch stuff the creators weren’t legally permitted to release that WHOOPS SOMEHOW WAS LEAKED.
Incidentally, that’s how she learned how to hack.
That, and she wants to spread the greatness that is Ultra Car to new viewers, since the DVDs are no longer available and Amazon Marketplace is charging like $100 for ’em used.
No bet.
Even without the fourth wall knowledge we have, Walky should realise he’s personally insulted Carla. Not cool, man.
Tbf, the door does say ULTRA CARLA right at his eye level, he should be able to put two and two together.
but its walky were talking about
The man needs a capacitor between his brain and his mouth.
a flux capacitor
The tricky part would be to get Walky to 88 miles an hour every time he needs to take back something he’s said. Great Scott! We’re going to need more plutonium!
You’re assuming he puts forth thought into the things he says.
he puts more thought into his farts
With most characters that’d be snide hyperbole.
With Walky it’s 100% accurate.
Hand-crafted artisinal farts
Just ‘cos it SAYS “ULTRA CARLA”, how was he to even KNOW?
I think he’s about to learn that first hand!
Walky is very dim once his fanboy part of his brain wakes up.
“nobody liked it. nobody understood it. nobody cared about it. yes, i hold it very dear and identify with it absolutely. check your hetero-normative privilege elsewhere, ‘life-was-easy-for-me’ boy”
fyi, i’m not entirely ok with the phrase ‘check your privilege’, but i feel that it fits too well here to not use it
Aw shit, I missed that part, but yeah, that’s gotta be especially galling for Carla, because when you’re super marginalized, there’s always that life experience or show or something that more privileged people go “ugh, how could anyone like that” because it doesn’t resonate with their more privileged life experiences. And it’s always dismissed as “nobody” being interested in it, because in their heads, if they don’t like it, how could anyone else?
In short, Walky is being a privileged goober-head here.
Can my Dumbingverse counterpart use the screen name Privileged Goober-Head?
Well, okay, it’s really for me to use somewhere completely different.
Walky, I’m disappointed. Out of the Eighteen episodes That aired, only six were really bad per se (Ep. 1, 3, 4, 5, 9(the crossover), and 18). Episodes 2, 11 and 12 were masterpieces, and Ep. 13 was nearly as good. There were a few other good ones, and the rest were at least decent.
And the unaired season finale. Holy shit, right in the gut. You can tell the creators threw everything they had into that as a gift to the fans who bought the DVD.
Luckily there’s the kickstarter for the movie, so we can find out what happened to Ultra Car’s sister.
It’s things like this that make me wonder if Willis draws inspiration from these sorts of comments when thinking about what the in-universe shows were like.
Obviously, he couldn’t have taken inspiration from the ones here because of the buffer time, but it’s come up in months prior.
Is that blood coming out of her mouth? Alas poor foolish Walky, we knew him well.
What is on that blue label on the door? ZUP?
311D?
It’s probably short for “What’s up”
And I say HEY-Yeah-Yeah, yeah yeah, Hey, yeah, yeah…
I say hey! What’s going on?
Choose one: A or B.
I linked neither precisely because I couldn’t choose.
That’s a lesson I’m proud that I never learned.
Others say Walky’s about to get murdered; I say he’s about to wake up strapped to a Clockwork Orange setup and find himself forced to watch the show until he learns to appreciate it.
…we know how well That ended in the movie.
I’m not saying it would work. Though the end result wouldn’t be as horrifying as the film, given the different material being viewed.
That’s actually the opposite of what the Ludovico Technique was meant to cause. That was meant to create an aversion to violence by associating it with the drug-induced negative sensations.
Tomorrow:
Walky has an encounter with the only known millennial who cites “Cool Cat” as her greatest inspiration…
Oops, that wasn’t all supposed to be bolded!
Oh well– here’s another Cool Cat link, whether you want it or not.
Holy shit, I actually remember that character!
Still not as bad as Cars though.
Or Planes.
Has anyone actually watched that movie? Is it even real?
All I remember is watching the trailer with my brother in the theater and he asked, hypothetically, why they were growing corn when there apparently aren’t any organic beings around. I pointed out they could make ethanol with it.
It might not be. I have memory of starting it just to mock it, but I have no clue what actually happened past trailer clips.
I did! It was good. Though I mainly just pretended it was Seekers on Cybertron (or a lost colony).
Yes. Where Cars was occasionally sly and clever, Planes was ham-handed — including one painfully blatant product-placement plug for American Airlines’ new paint scheme for its jumboes. And I’d almost be interested to hear what some commenters here would think about the (again, ham-handed) mini-story-arc about the car-plane hybrid trying to find its identity.
How anybody can diss “Cars” or “Cars 2” — or even “Wings” — when there was animated dreck like “Turbo”, “Rango”, or even “Gnomeo and Juliet” out there is completely beyond my comprehension.
Hey, I liked Rango. I agree with you about the other two, however.
Oh, you did not just diss a movie in which a friendless nobody crafts a new identity as a dependable hero in the Wild West.
If it wasn’t for the fact that Johnny Depp was voicing the title character “Rango” would have been a direct-to-video release.
Time for a bit of the ol’ ultraCarlalence.
pfffffffffffft
It’ll sharpen Walky up for the real world.
Wow. Walky really is the embodiment of clueless dude privilege isn’t he? IN EVERY WAY. “Listen, *I* didn’t like that series so clearly it must be awful and my own geeky obsessions are completely different!”
Me, my wife, and Twilight. Right there.
I think this is where we’re all reminded that Walky has a lot of growing up left to do and how much he’s been skating on the fact that he looks like he was sculpted out of caramel.
He’s also been skating on his assumption that since he had good grades effortlessly before, he can continue that into a more challenging educational system.
It is seriously easy to slip into “Ehh, I’ve got this!” when you’re that cocky. I remember actually calculating how much Social Studies homework I could ignore and still pass. I remember it fondly, but when the mindset screwed with the grades of classes I actually enjoyed, it ended up being much harder to go back.
There you go! I bristled at toxic masculinity, because, while that’s part of it, it doesn’t cover all of it. But clueless dude privilege? That’s nearly perfect.
If you could work in the part about being so smart that he’s never had to try, it would be perfect. “Smart dude privilege”, with the “clueless” part implied?
In my mind, clueless dude privilege *is* toxic masculinity. I don’t understand the distinction you’re drawing between the two.
Usually I see toxic masculinity describe a specific suite of behaviors wherein men feel under pressure to prove their masculinity to avoid the punishments given those deemed feminine and so get locked in a self-reinforcing spiral of negative behaviors to any they deem feminine in order to avoid facing social consequences for being seen as “girly”. And this includes things like the normalization of sexual assault, casual assault of femme gay guys and trans women, thinking it lessens someone to cry or admit to mental health stuff and so on.
So, I imagine the distinction is clueless dude privilege is just faceplanting over how the world is set up to assume that dudes are the default gender and so realizing that not everything in the world is for you and that can be either a symptom of toxic masculinity (men assuming that everything is there’s by right and that women getting a scoop of ice cream from the ice cream machine is somehow stealing something that’s “for” them and reacting with anger or violence because being sad or thinking about things isn’t “manly” or worse assuming women’s bodies are simply theirs for the taking, because that’s how “men” act) or can just be someone faceplanting so damn hard on their privilege in assuming that just because they don’t like something then no one could, because they can’t imagine not being the audience for something.
Growing up I didn’t act manly (side effect of Autism is emulation of people you’re normally around, which ended up being adult women). This would upset my dad, I recall being told to not position my hands a certain way, some thing about being gay (loose fist with the thumb of other hand inside said fist and rest of hand resting on top of it) that I still do to this day and twitch out of it afterwards.
When I had starting dating, I don’t know what surprised my family, including extended, more. That I was dating, where I had shown no prior interest, or that it was a woman. Whatever I did was seeming never good enough for them. Kinda with her as well, but it was more a “You can do more, and I want to help you do more.” Born of love, just not Ross-love (thankfully).
You can be clueless without being an asshole about it. (Much of it is not assuming that anything which bothers you is some grave injustice.)
If Walky just stays angry and always drags the topic up whenever he sees Carla, however…
Walky being described as toxically masculine is a bit like describing Kitty Pryde as a member of a paramilitary racist organization. Technically, it’s true but it’s kind of understated. Walky is sexist, egotistical, and privileged with no real desire to change his way of looking at a world designed to appeal to him but he’s not really malevolent.
There’s a big difference between Walky and EMPIRE’s Lucious Lyons, for example.
I disagree about the “clueless dude priviledge” characterization. I see it as more of a cartoon snob thing.
It’s more he’s a fan of DEXTER AND MONKEY MASTER but can’t see why someone would like another cartoon with the same passion because OBVIOUSLY they’re different.
Wait, you like Twilight?
My wife loved it. Honestly, my opinion is the movies were never as bad as people thought they were. I like Alice, Jasper, and wish Laurent had stayed the entire time.
Next Slipshine:
Walky Loses the Ability to Perform a Sex
Carla doesn’t strike me as a Windows-user kind of person. She’s about to rebuild Walky as a UNIX box…
You mean, rebuild him as a eunuch box?
This might be the best joke i’ve see all year
ugly snorting laughter on my part
Does UCSD exist in the Dumbiverse? Because it should.
This is so genius i love it
Better than Ruth…?
I dunno, we need a list of “people most likely to kill everyone in their dorm wing”.
In my opinion:
1.) Amber (sadly obvious)
2.) Ruth (because all the reasons)
3.) Amazi Girl (parkour incident)
4.) Carla (accident caused by prank victim, but originating from prank device)
5.) Joyce (adorable breakdown)
P.S. Mostly sarcastic
P.S.S. I honestly can’t remember enough of the dangerous qualities of the guys that aren’t the push away friends/ruin their own lives sort, so theres probably a few in the non-sarcastic Top Five, maybe even enough to knock the others off the list entirely.
P.S.S.S. I think I need to archive binge now…
Billie in a Post Tramatic Cheerleading flashback.
Walky’s going to get a taste of Ultra-karma.
I absolutely love this strip, not just because YAY CARLA! (but seriously yay Carla, always yay Carla, never not yay Carla)
But because of how much is going on here. We’ve got Dorothy, recognizing a social car wreck coming a mile away and trying to steer her boyfriend clear of it and even correcting his grammar at the end and reminding him of a lesson she’s probably gone over with him multiple times over to no avail. And her just total surrender at how he’s yet again infuriated someone by pissing on something they hold dear.
We’ve got Walky and his utter lack of thought about what he’s saying and the smug superiority he often adopts when he thinks he’s right. And we’ve seen that backfire on him badly before, most notably when he said that Joyce was super brainwashed while she was less than 10 ft away.
And I love his criteria for why Ultra Car was bad because it hints of some geek elitism bullshit. Ultra Car is bad in his eyes because it was cancelled early and wasn’t commercially successful and because its crossover with a more successful work had a crappy episode.
And I suspect that it’s the crossover episode that really galls him, because so often crossover episodes in general suck and the attempt to meld two shows with wildly different sensibilities just ends up with some mediocre pap that just makes both the shows look terrible. And so, given his attention to detail and completness with D&MM, he’s probably watched the series a billion times, always wondering if he should skip over the bad crossover episode and just getting more and more frustrated with this “dumb” cancelled series making a bad episode in his perfect cartoon.
And it’s just illustrative of the flavor of obsessive fan he is.
And Carla… oh, you do not poke the fangirl in her favorite series. Especially if it is an “underappreciated gem” that helped her figure out who she was and resonated and comforted her when everything was super chaotic and confusing.
Trans fans can get hella obsessive about the work that truly clicks for them and can get super protective about it, because that’s the first work that they saw themselves reflected in. Hell, queer fans too (I’m thinking of how She-Ra, He-Man, and Xena having long lasting fanbases entirely based on them being shows queer folk used to figure out they were queer).
And that cult classic among a marginalized folks is such an interesting phenomenon because it often confuses the fuck out of more privileged people, because sometimes those resonating shows are legitimately terrible (I love Xena to death, but none of us were watching that show for the subtle and nuanced acting or complex plots), but they’ve got that piece that just… hits.
And when that work or character hits so thoroughly that it ends up being the basis of a chosen name, that’s a special thing to a trans person and that work becomes a strong part of themselves, tied to their identity. And so I understand Carla’s fury, I’d probably round on someone in a similar way if they were ignorantly shitting on the work or character I took my own name from.
Because that’s the power of the thing that finally cuts through all the cisnormativity of what we think we have to be and truly slams into who we’ve always been.
And poor Carla, this is the second time this weekend, she’s had some privileged git just stumbling into an important part of her identity like an asshole.
Yup, for Carla UltraCar is far more than just a cartoon. But there is also another layer to this scene, and that is how Walky and Carla meet on the same level.
The last confrontation, Carla took down a transphobe who attacked her very identity. This time it’s a clash between obsessive, geeky fans. Just as when Walky and Leslie sniped about the best episode, or when Walky and Dotty started dating, Walky and Carla are now entering that special subcultural space where whatever else you are, you are a FAN.
Yeah, the stakes are lower here and she’s a fangirl defending a work that’s very important to her, but this time, at least, she’s not having her identity as a person being overlooked or undermined.
Also, I just love Dotty here. Just as you say, she sees what’s coming, she tries to stop him and she takes time to correct his grammar. Her panel 2 expression is priceless. “…huh, Walky is doing a Walky.”
Uh-oh, you called her Dotty. I trust you are prepared to die?
I’m sure she will only treat me with sarcasm.
She might send you to see her Uncle Doug Piranha.
Oh, interesting. I didn’t think of that reply as a correction before, but that could be.
If ever there is a never not yay Carla, then forever never Carla will not yay.
It’s okay Carla. I like things that are unpopular too. And I’m not even a hipster.
To put the coming ragefeud into perspective:
“Like, who the heck puts Firefly on their door? Is it there ironically? I mean, it was a FAILED sci-fi series. It did so bad they didn’t even air all of its episodes. They didn’t even HAVE a Dexter and Monkey Master crossover. What kind of loser hitches themselves to that wagon?”
Now, let our battles be joined.
Well, that’s one way to put it, but you can also go with
“Like, who the heck puts Angela Anaconda on their door? Is it there ironically? I mean, it was a FAILED childeren’s show. It did so bad that Disney bought Fox Family just to cancel it. The way it was shoehorned into the American Digimon Movie was awkward and out of place. What kind of loser hitches themselves to that wagon?”
Sometimes a bad show can resonate with someone. Doesn’t make it not bad, just relatable.
I had to Google that one. Wish I hadn’t. Very disturbing images. (More so since I have SafeSearch off by default.)
Then again, Firefly *was* pretty awful.
… I hope your computer has good flame war insurance.
Gratz walky, you found someone that’s as much as a cartoon nerd as you are. Except a different cartoon.
That’s gonna be fun
Glad to see someone else who thinks so. Never did get what people liked about Firefly. And to top off the awfulness, that show really pissed me off, once I realized that Mal and his browncoats are based on the confederates in the American Civil War. Yet we’re supposed to unironically see them as the good guys. It’d be one thing if Whedon had used the movie to make it clear that Mal never realized he was on the wrong side, but instead he did the opposite…
About the only similarities between the browncoats and the confederates are that it was a civil war and the more rural revolutionaries lost. I don’t think that you’ll find that the browncoats were supporting human slavery or that the American union was creating human Magog by way of social engineering.
But that’s the thing, I would have respected Whedon more if he’d taken the parallels further. Because the similarities were there, not just that they were the more rural revolutionaries, but that they were fighting for the equivalent of state’s rights, which is what present day supporters of the confederate side, love to claim that the confederates fought for(even if said ‘state’s rights’ were primarily about preserving slavery) .
Whedon could have taken the opportunity to have Mal grow as a person and realize that the people he was fighting were doing so for a just cause. Instead he used the movie to made the Alliance ûberevil, thus justifying the Browncoats cause..
So because the Star Wars rebellion is fighting for the equivalent of states rights against the empire, you’re pissed that Luke never realized that he was on the wrong side in opposing Darth Vador?
Actually, in the novels Luke eventually had an epiphany that his actions in the original trilogy weren’t spotless. Not evil, but certainly a little blinded to the realities of the situation.
Spending 75% of my day looking for the exact passage didn’t work (it was at least fun, but now I’ll be playing catch-up all week) but the bottom line is that Luke was lecturing his son on how violence and killing are unacceptable, and then Ben called him out on how many faceless Stormtroopers he cut down in the Galactic Civil War. This was DECADES after the fact, and Luke, now Grand Master of the Jedi Order, automatically started to respond with, “But they were all evil,” before the weight of a whole war hit him midsentence.
The rebels fought a war, and that’s never pretty, but for all that there were good people in the Empire (and a few monsters among the Rebels) Palpatine had to go.
Joss wasn’t trying to “code” his series. He actually wanted to do a Western where it wasn’t a stand-in for Confederate apologetia bullshit. Hence why the Alliance practices slavery and the Browncoast were against it. You can’t get much more clear than that.
Also I’m thinking their treatment of River Tam might have been a clue they were ûberevil long before the movie came out.
I liked it at the time but after a few years have passed and I learned what Joss had planned for the later seasons, I am incredibly thankful it was cancelled.
Yes, but what Joss had planned for the early shows was equally bad and had only a passing relationship to what reached the screen. Captain R. did not start out as an overly sympathetic character.
I don’t think Mal was supposed to be terribly sympathetic.
Show me a TV series that wasn’t
The primary thing wrong with Joss W. TV series was his penchant for killing off perfectly serviceable characters. Much better to stick with safe family fair like Game of Thrones.
Firefly was terrible garbage and I hate it with the fiery intensity of a thousand suns.
Nice try.
It’s just Cowboy Bebop but every character has the exact same personality as Buffy Summers.
Or more accurately, the only personality Joss Whedon is capable of writing because Joss Whedon sucks so hard.
Yeah, but Cowboy Bebop was so mind-bogglingly great that even after being filtered through Whedon it’s still better than anything else around. 😀
Mm, Cowboy Bebop. Ahhh.
That’s some good memories right there.
Great, now I have another anime to watch. I’d always browsed past it, but now it’ll be next. Thanks for the recommendation.
It takes some getting used to, but it really is that good.
It was my introduction to the wonderfulness of Anime.
The only similarity to Cowboy bebop is mercenaries in a run down multi ethnic universe going on adventures in a rundown ship.
That and the fact that Mike would have been a great addition to the crew.
Jane/Mike slash fandom alone would have been worth the price of admission.
Firefly would have been better with a genetically engineered corgi as the secret mastermind.
Wait. Firefly could have been better?
Wait. Firefly had a secret mastermind?
Wait. Joss wasn’t a genetically engineered corgi?
As a big, but former, fan, I compare him to a comedian who only has one act’s worth of material.
And the first time you see it, it’s a great, funny act.
But then you catch his next cable special a few years later, and it’s the same act. Maybe he’s added or changed a couple of jokes, but that’s all.
Then he gets his own sitcom, and it’s just the same thing, over and over. You can call off the familiar beats by the numbers, if you care enough to keep watching.
(and perhaps the worst or most ironic part is that I developed a lot of my awareness of tropes – before That Wiki ever came along, though I note Buffy was its origin as well – from watching him, and the personal spin he put on the old cliches. He taught me to notice these things.
And eventually I noticed he’d just replaced them with his own cliches.
So basically, Joss Whedon ruined Joss Whedon for me. :p )
Are you insane? You know you’re on the internet right?
I both like firefly and don’t mind that it was canceled. Honestly the mystique of what the show could have been, but probably would have failed to achieve, is part of why it developed such a fandom.
A cancelled show just leaves more room for fan fiction.
Which wouldn’t stop me from scowering the multi-verse for the episodes we missed.
To my understanding, it failed due to the ‘Firefly Effect‘.
To put it more into perspective: “No matter the subject, no matter that I haven’t been asked, I absolutely MUST shed the light of my utterly dismissive opinion upon an uncomprehending world.”
Well of course. Some things go without saying.
HOW. DARE. YOU.
WALKY
Carla: “I will RAGEMURDER anyone who besmirches the name of Ultracar.”
Walky: “THIS IS THE HILL I DIE ON!!!”
*cue fanwar*
Reminds me of the show “A to Z”… that show was the f***ing bomb and it got canceled midseason. Too many great shows just don’t get appreciated in time.
🙁
Now imagine every show you wished had been allowed to end while you could still remember them fondly. Rather than having their death dragged out season after season until they became meaningless parodies of themelves.
-The Simpsons-
Yeah I said it.
>_>
The Hundred, though that one would have then had to be cancelled before the sixth episode. Sorry to Clexa fans, but I will never forgive that show for killing Wells.
Oh, poor Walkie, only able to like things if they’re successful/trendy.
Yes, Carla! Tell us more about Dumbiverse Ultra Car! At length! With citations if necessary!
Yes, this is a thing that must happen.
Would one expect Walky to provide counterpoints from D&MM? Do we want to hear those?
Maybe.
Ah Dorothy! He wouldn’t be Walky if he had a brain-to-mouth filter of any kind! 😀
Walky is in deep shit, man!
I must say, this makes me more curious about the Ultracar cartoon than Dexter and Monkey Master.
Well based on comments above it’s theorized that it’s the DoA’s Universe counterpart to Firefly. So I wonder now what D&MM’s would be.
And so God opened his arms and said…”Let there be murder.”
I wonder who the supporting cast for Ultra Car are in this universe. Manny, Moe, and … um, Machel?
Jacqueline. Goes by “Jack”.
Wow… Mary will get a demo of what Carla is capable of when REALLY pissed
I cannot help but notice that Dorothy already knows this is a fight one shouldn’t start. The political mind already is developing in this one.
If she can navigate this circle of students she will do fine.
Her experience with Walky will teach her how to deal with most of Congress as well. Hell as President she’d probably have to dress them as well.
It is actually super cool how she’s learning a lot of political skills just navigating her circle of friends.
She’s got the hothead who runs at the mouth and creates situations one has to deftly handle in her boyfriend. She’s got the emotional conservative scared of changing her mind that she’s learning the skills of piece-meal introducing new concepts that can open new outlooks in Joyce. She’s got the moral dilemma of disclosure in Amazi-girl’s everything. She’s even got how to deal with hostile scumsuckers trying to destroy her in Mike.
It’s all the practical skills she’ll need as a politician, but on a less dire scale.
I can’t call Mike a scumsucker, he’s in a class all his own. But he does teach Dorothy that sometimes she isn’t the target and she’ll need to keep up to prevent her allies/ boyfriend from getting hurt.
Robin’s clearly in town now too. Hopefully Dorothy gets to ask her questions?
It’s about damn time somebody murdered Walky.
Well he’s not that bad, at least he’s not .
I have a feeling that you got edited Orion… censored somehow because otherwise.. i’m thinking At least he’s not a period!
Nope, on purpose. Just trying to avoid the GEH.
I love that Carla has been in the comic so much lately.
Ain’t it grand? Carla used to just be a fun background character and now she’s rocketed to the main character status she so richly deserved.
She’s like Dina, in that regard. I never used to care about her and then she smooches Becky and suddenly becomes one of my favourites.
And yet Dina had the same loveable personality before.
Sure, but she never really did anything. She just kind of showed up and said cute things.
Kissing Becky and tearing into Joyce, Sarah and Dorothy over how they perceive her as a child, and following that up with Walking with Dina, one of the best chapters in the entire series, did wonders for me.
Fair enough.
Now that Shortpacked! is done, she seems to be given more air time.
I will never complain about more Carla! Yay homoromantic trans ace representation and an awesome amazing character!
watch out, Walky, she’s gonna Rube Goldberg you!
You know, Walky should be writing down these things that Dorothy is telling him. Not because he’s actually going to be paying any attention to them, but so that he can make a mint on his book, Advice the President Gave Me.
Walky: “Okay, Carla, calm down and don’t murder me!”
Carla: “Oh, give me a break. I’d never murder anyone for making for of Ultracar.”
Walky: “Oh, okay. Good. Glad to hear-”
Walky: (waking up sometime later deep in the Amazon rainforest) “MOTHERFUCKER!”
Better than being murdered, but watch out for jaguars…or some of the natives(not all are friendly).
Alternatively: Walky wakes up to a joint effort of Mike and Carla: his bed, surrounded by rubber band launchers, all aimed at his face.
Given the reaction, I actually suspect that Walky never even watched the aired episodes. He just saw the crossover–which, as was stated up above, is often bad just from putting two different types of shows together.
Her name is on the door, Walky.
How many here remember the Supercar TV series? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercar_(TV_series) It was a favorite in my younger days.
Wait. So Jimmy Gibson was the original Monkey Master?
Our illustrious bard isn’t old enough to have watched Supercar during its first run (I was), but he may have seen it later and derived a little inspiration. We all know he’s a Transformers fan, a little mashup of the two isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
What kind of loser uses “A billion zillion times” as their favorite hyperbole? They kind who are about to be murdered, that’s what kind!
Dis gun b gud
Goodbye, Walky.
We will always remember you in a pink mouse costume.
That is the truth.
He’s gonna get murdered
His phone is going to be playing “All Star” for the rest of his life.
He’ll try to change it, but nope. Always All-Star. Even when he buys new phones.
RUTTECH KNOWS.
Is it too much to ask for this joke to be explained?
Orion Fury-
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/dog/
Alright, now can someone please explain that joke? Smash Mouth reference doesn’t make any sense to me, on the surface at least.
I don’t really get it myself, but I think the song was in the movie “Rat Race” which means something or other.
It’s a hyper-infectious earworm and was nigh inescapable for a period of the 2000s meaning a lot of people have very strong feelings about it because of that.
Ah, so I just wasn’t the joke target demographic. Song never bothered me and never noticed the earworm effect it had on others.
Ultra Carla’s gonna get you.
Gonna knock you right in the head.
Better get yourself together.
Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead.
This long-time Shortpacked reader always applauds any Shortpacked Easter eggs.
And to think Mary didn’t have to insult Carla’s gender to get under her skin. She could’ve watched hours of secular godless cartoons and then belittle the one that is Carla’s favorite.
The top three ways to earn Carla’s wrath:
3. Question her awesomeness.
2. Question her gender.
1. Question Ultra Car.
Hm. If I have to pay homage to one’s awesomeness to not earn that one’s wrath, that is a sign said awesomeness does not stand much close examination.
Oh, I finally get it.
Carla is ‘Trans’portation.
Murder! 😀
…I mean…
(Murder.)
As we grow up, we learn there are certain things we should not say out loud, in order to avoid offending/upsetting those around us. Thus, our brains learn to filter certain thoughts so that they do not reach the mouth.
Walky’s problem is that as soon as he was out from under his beloved smother’s thumb, he completely disengaged that filter and sabotaged it to prevent it from being put back up. He’s in that “I am no longer being monitored by an authority figure 24/7 and cannot be held accountable for my actions, thus I can say and do as I please” phase of adulthood.
The question now is if he’ll ever live long enough to grow out of it.
And then Walky proceeds to break Carla by making her realize that HE IS THE GATEKEEPER and all taste flows through him.
Does that make Dorothy the KEYMASTER?
Monkey Master was always destined to destroy the world. 🙂
Murder. Murderous Rampage.
Yes, hovertext, I am ready to learn!
A comic about the rudeness of sneering at other people’s tastes.
Comment threads of people sneering at other people’s tastes.
Ah Internet, I love you so.
I assume that was sneering at other people’s comments.
Otherwise you’re doing it wrong.
Well, of course.
In Ankh-Morpork, this would be classified as “suicide”.