I Have A Thing For Mario Castles, So This Is Going Into Reference.

The classic.

Original storyboard for the opening of Batman: The Animated series by Bruce Timm

It’s officially Thanksgiving in the USA

Time to smell the gravy, marvel at your auntie’s pretty place-settings, and listen to the 5edgy9me once-a-year intellectuals crawling out of their local Starbucks like zombies from the damn grave, moaning

C̪̹͉͔͔̳̕h͈̼̯̥̭̗̍̒ͧ͟ṙ̠͍̹̈̄̈́͗ͥ̅͟i͎s̸̭̣̬̼͚͊̊ͨͬ̈́̅̚t͍͌̏̏͐͞o͈̐̉̓͐̅p̮̞͟h̦e̶͌ͪr̬̻̩͕̱̎̌ͩ͗ ̐̔͏͕̲͉̺͕Ċ͉̰͕̹́̊ͯ͆̓̾ͅo͇l̮̟͡ů̱͖̬͙ͣ̓͋̆̎m̧ͫb̵̠̲̗͂u͎͗s̟̤̭̼͕͈̃̉̒̔ ̖̹̗͔̮̱̯ͭ̅̋̆ͯ̽̍w̱̰͈̰̔̃͆́͋͌a͚̮̬ͮͨͤͬs̩͖͙̬̟̦ͫ̓̀ ̝̰̼͇̹̲͑̉̿̽͒͞a͔̬̮͠ͅ ͙͙͇̖͇͛͞m̠̲͖ͯͫ́̿ͤ͜u̪̪͖̮͂ͪ̎̽̚r̰̜ͪͩ̀ͫ̅d̬̹̲ͯè͖͇̦̖r̝̀è̯͙͈̻͖͓̪͌ͤ͑r̵̭͖̖̋ͥ̂ͅr̸̭͎͈͑r̞̫̀̔̅r͎̖̿̑̒͠r̬ͬ̄ͫ

@sixpenceee has already joined in the festivities of hilariously bad revisionist history with this little gem:

‘Cept Christopher Columbus never actually set foot on American soil – And Thanksgiving has nothing to do with him.

Thanksgiving in the USA was officially adopted as a holiday during the Civil War, though it had been off-again-on-again celebrated since 1621 – This is thought to be the famous ‘Pilgrims at Plymouth’ Thanksgiving.

Originally, it was celebrated because of a particularly successful harvest was managed less than a year after the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth colony with the few surviving members of the journey from Europe. This sort of feast wouldn’t happen again until a bountiful rainfall broke a treacherous drought in 1623.

Only one or two other colonies celebrated similar days of thanks, and all of them were related to farming practices. Natives frequently attended these meals. Indeed, the first Thanksgiving saw about 90 Natives join in on the festivities.

That might not sound like a lot initially, but keep in mind that there were only 50 Pilgrims there, so the feast was almost 2:1 Native.

Now, with respect to ‘Genocide’, lemme learn  you some knowledge..

Claims of Native genocide by the Pilgrims mostly originate from happenings during the 1637 Pequot War – Also known as the Mystic Massacre.

Essentially, in the area the Plymouth Pilgrims had settled, there were a few major warring Native bands. Specifically, the Pequot, the Mohegan, the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Algonquians.

Basically, the Pequot sucked. They were the most powerful tribe, and were constantly trying to expand their territory – Even before the Pilgrims had come. They regularly raided the Wampanoag and the Algonquians, and bullied the Mohegan and Narragansett. When the fur trade started up, they tried to scare all the other tribes out of competition.

This led pretty much all of the tribes in the area, with emphasis of the Mohegan and Narragansett, to ally with the Pilgrims when shit started to go down.

The Pequot seemed to have the least resistance to the foreign bacteria the Pilgrims brought in, and it weakened them a lot, leaving the other tribes and Pilgrims the ability to reclaim or take over a lot of their land.

About 700 Pequot died during the war. A great deal of them were also taken/given to the other tribes as slaves.

A great deal of the bullshittery surrounding the settlement and colonization of North America comes from people who are unwilling to admit that Natives were brutal with each other… That they were just these awesome, no-socialist hippies that just sang songs and ate berries all day.

I don’t just think that’s dishonest, I think it’s pretty derogatory.

I remember vividly a time I was on a long busride in my home of British Columbia, which has a very high Native population. I was seated next to an Aboriginal man from a Kwakwaka'wakw band and he told me, very proudly, about his tribe’s impressive archive of ancient weave records depicting a great victory over neighboring tribes leaving 600,000 of them killed by the Kwakwaka'wakw warriors, who were greatly outnumbered. I would find out later that Kwakwaka'wakw were known headhunters and cannibals. 

Once again, Thanksgiving was celebrated very sporadically, and certainly not as a consistent holiday, until the Civil War.

Thanksgiving never had anything to do with the Natives, other than their participation in a mutually-beneficial relationship with people who genuinely appreciated their help, and thus were willing to share what little food they had with them. It was about farming and harvesting, and later about peace and reconciliation.

We here in Canada celebrated Thanksgiving back in October, but I’ve always liked the story of American Thanksgiving better. To me, all of it’s incarnations have represented unity in one way or another – Different people working together to make everyone’s life better. Whether that be the Natives and the Pilgrims, or the Northern and Southern States.

People just being good to each other, if only for a little bit.

(Oneida Indian Nation has participated in the Macy’s Parade every year since 2010 in what they call ‘The True Spirit of Thanksgiving’)

Happy Thanksgiving, guys!

I'm hearing a lot of things about how prologues are bad and that you should never put protagonist backstory in the prologue but that causes a problem for me. My character's hatred for the antagonist is explained in the prologue along with the urgency of their rivalry. What should I do?

Take that information and weave it into the story like you would with any backstory info. Unless it’s necessary to explain something that can’t be woven in (like an event that the protag knows nothing about), scrap your prologue.

As storytelling goes, which is more intriguing?

“My sister hates this kid in her class because he teases her best friend and also stole her Fruit Roll-Up, so today during recess she punched him.” 

or 

“My sister punched some kid at recess today.”

The first one tells the whole story in one go and allows for limited response. The second one leaves the listener thinking “Oh my god, why? Tell me more.”

Likewise, the rivalry and the urgency should be included within your story, not wasted in the prologue. The reader doesn’t even know your characters yet to care that they hate each other. If you saw two strangers in the street and someone told you “Oh yeah, they hate each other because of this and that…” you’d be thinking, “That sucks, but like, who are they and why should I care?”

That’s your readers when you try to tell the story before it starts.

—

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Something I wrote ages ago about villains and motivation from the Super Mario Games. More a meditation than a straight-up essay.

On Villains and Motivation

Since Cleanup Crew obviously isn’t written in the gag-a-day format like many if not most other webcomics, it’s given me a lot of opportunity to think about storytelling. And since I realized I have a ready-made blog for the comic here, I figured I’d file some of my thoughts here as they occur to me.

Having played every Mario Bros. RPG through Bowser’s Inside Story, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the big flaws of these games is the villains.

More specifically, their lack of motivation.

Now, we can talk entertainment and characterization until the cows come home, about how much fun they are to watch, but the simple fact of the matter is that a villain needs a WHY, and no amount of plans or goals, the how and the what, will make up for the fact that there’s literally no reason for any of these villains to do what they do. This failure of characterization steals context and meaning from their actions.

Take Grodus, of The Thousand Year Door. As impressive as his organization is, as clever as the plot and storytelling are (that game does such tricks with the fourth wall that the couple of times it breaks it directly just barely limp along), it’s really hard to get invested in the villains because Grodus simply has no -drive- to accomplish his goals, no reason to do what he does. Given the fact that he’s a robot with a noble title and a pretend magic staff, his lack of even a token backstory is rather jarring.

On the other hand there’s Count Bleck of Super Paper Mario (which we will pretend is an RPG for conversation’s sake), who suffers from a broken heart and intends to solve that problem by committing a rather exagerrated form of suicide. THAT is a motivation, something Grodus is severely lacking. In fact, Super Paper Mario gives a lot of character to its villains, judging from what you can dig up about O'Chunks and Nastasia. Now, Dimentio hasn’t got any stated motivation, but this is deliberately done to emphasize his mystery – the game very obviously knows what it’s doing as far as the villains are concerned. (On a side note, the only real problems I have with Super Paper Mario are that it’s just a little too impressed with itself – to start with, the story is addicted to waxing melodramatic – and that it’s not actually a Mario story. It’s really about the game’s original characters – Mario has literally nothing to do with anything, Peach and Bowser are involved only for the sake of a joke, and Luigi has more involvement with the plot than all three combined, only because he’s the villains’ patsy).

But the rest of them, Cackletta and Fawful and the Shroobs (we’ve already discussed Grodus, and you could say the same about the Shadow Sirens) are devoid of motivation. You can see this in how they’re remembered less for their stories and more for their gimmicks. Cackletta is remembered primarily for being 50% of Boobser Bowletta rather than her desire to screw around with the all-powerful Beanstar; Fawful is bonkers and has a speech impediment, and “crazy narcissist” is not a decent motivation any more than “evil” is one, and then there’s the fact that the guy has no real plan except to set himself up as the local bigshot until he decides to destroy absolutely everything just for the heck of it. The Shroobs almost have a motivation that you can reverse-engineer by studying their actions (do they *need* to prey on the Mushroom Kingdom?), but putting the burden on the audience like that is bad writing for lazy authors.

This failure to motivate the villains is especially notable in Smithy, who argues with the heroes as if Super Mario RPG had an Honest to God *theme*. Smithy’s got enough going on that you can almost piece together the motivation that should be there. He wants to take over the Mushroom Kingdom as a stepping stone to ridding the world of wishes (which suggests that it’s no accident that Exor broke the Star Road on the way in, nevermind the fact that his minions have all been collecting the pieces), but why? Well, for most of the game, all the information on Smithy is at best second hand, suggesting he’s taking a leaf out of Orcus’ book, but when we get to finally meet him face to face, we realize he’s been busy the whole time. Smithy has been building his army piece by piece, by hand, and then delegating responsibility so he can keep building. Smithy is a craftsman, achieving his goals through the work of his hands, definitely -not- making wishes to get what he wants the easy way. All this together suggests that Smithy has some kind of enmity with the stars and their habit of granting wishes, a hatred so strong that he’s willing to conquer entire planets to get a shot at completely shutting them down. But after that, everything else would be pure speculation.

Now, I admit that this sort of thing’s not easy. Bowser’s generally easier to write than coming up with new villains wholecloth, insofar as he comes with the motivations built-in, like “FINALLY succeeding where he’s failed so many times before” and “sticking it to Mario once and for all”. I generally tend to ignore the “romantic interest in Princess Peach” motivation that he’s occasionally saddled with, because the implications are creepy in ways that make “Asmodeus covets Sarah” look Appropriate for All Audiences. I’m generally more favorable to the idea that Bowser takes an interest in the Mushroom Kingdom because he’s spent his whole miserable life a corner of Hell and the Mushroom Kingdom is a place of beauty and plenty and Her Highness may figure in his eyes as an emblem of all things beautiful, hence his fascination with her, since he only knows ugly things. You could get some serious mileage if someone spent five minutes figuring out a halfway decent motivation for the King of Awesome.

Something like, say, “somebody invaded his castle and stole something from the treasury, so now he’s driven to get it back and punish whoever had the gall to penetrate his fortress security and make a goon of him and his forces”.

And now I have spent entirely too much time writing about Mario characters.

Does Tom King hate Superman, or something? I don’t read the guy’s work regularly, but between this and Batman scoring a home run against Superman’s pitch a few months ago, I can’t help but notice some definite Supernerf in King’s work.

muthafugga replied to your post: You, Tom King: Harley Quinn could take out the…

Are you fucking serious? Is this a thing that actually happens in that comic?

encouragement mario

Almond Breeze undeclared MILK recall

Thousands of cartons of Vanilla Almond Breeze are under recall for containing undeclared milk. I don’t care what you think about vegans, nondairy milk, whatever… This could kill people if word doesn’t get out fast enough. Here’s a link to the recall. It covers a lot of states:  Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin Please share this. Dairy allergies can be fatal and many people with them choose to drink almond milk.

Good luck, kid, we’re rootin’ for you.

DC, Marvel announce Jack Kirby centenary publications, but what’s missing?

US comic publishers DC Comics and Marvel have both announced their plans to mark Jack “King” Kirby’s centenary in August. Kirby, born 29th August 1917, who died in 1994, was an Am…

Jack Kirby’s Centennial is up on us! (I’ve been looking for an affordable version of his works -- caught the Humble Bundle special about a month ago, but that only had Silver Star and some romance comics. Everything else was derivative).

So I suddenly developed a much greater appreciation for the Mega Man Mastermix #3 variant cover by Josh Perez when I realized it was a tribute to Rock & Rule.