#when I write “fanarts” I end up reading “farts” and that makes me laugh for some reason

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Alex ze Pirate “Mini Review” 1: About Male Abuse

Alex ze Pirate is in my opinion the WORST “comic” series Dobson has ever written up until this point (date for archives: June 2020). Sure, I agree with people that his “hot take” comics on Star Wars Fans, political issues and virtue signaling for the sake of making brownie points are worse overall cause they are uneducated propaganda that give insight in how much of a loathsome human being driven by spite he genuinely is, but Alex “offends” me as someone who enjoys fiction. It may not be the worst thing ever written, but it just does so many things wrong in terms of storywriting, storytelling, presentation and creating fictional characters, I can’t help but wonder what went wrong that Dobson even remotely thought this thing would be a “successful” comic series to establish him as a creator. Cause I can tell you, having read the likes of Don Rosa’s work on Disney, Hilda, Cleopatra in Space, Spirou, Asterix, One Piece (of which I will talk a lot in my next few posts) and many more, I can confirm by comparison that Dobson’s pirates as a published comic would have only one use on the public shelves: alternative for toilet paper during the COVID-19 epidemic

 Believe me, I would love to write an in depth analysis of everything wrong with Alex ze Pirate, from the lazy artwork up to even the publication history of this trainwrack. But doing so would take a lot of time and there is one individual part of this I think deserve at least extra attention. Something that in my opinion embodies quite well a lot of things I consider wrong with this comic. So before I am going over Alex in its entirety (and believe me, the day will come) let me just talk within the next few posts about one certain aspect and story of the comic, that genuinely got me to loath this comic to the core: Sam the Cabin Boy and “his” own individual story Dobson drew in three parts around 2010.  

For starters, lets talk who Sam is: Sam is one of the main characters in the comic and actually the first person who joined Alex and Peggy in the initial pages of Legends, the “original” form of Alex ze Pirate.

See, back in 2004, Dobson released Alex ze Pirate in form of a single comic volume called “Legends” which features Alex trying to recruit a crew. The thing is around 78 pages thick and based on what I saw pretty terribly paced. For comparison: When Luffy in One Piece got his crew together, he spend multiple volumes and at least three minor story arcs to get Zoro, Nami, Sanji and Usopp to join him. All while also giving us good insight into the kind of people his new crewmates were (especially Sanji’s and Nami’s backstory got to me), defeating the likes of Buggy and Captain Black, meeting Dracula Mihawk and defeating one of the biggest bastards Eichiro Oda ever created in form of Arlong. What is the story how Sam joins the crew? An orphanage organizes an auction and sells kids off. Which I assume was even illegal in pirate times, so kudos for already showing us how despicable the world of Alex ze Pirate is to begin with and how much it deserves to be nuked in some sort of alien invasion.

 Sam also doesn’t really get anything to do when he is introduced, just helping Alex escape on a small boat. Which is weird because he does not know her at all, she is just some stranger who bought him off and has no means to keep him in check, so why even bother following her and not let the mob get rid of Alex? 

Anyway, I wish I could tell more about Sam’s involvement in Legends, but I don’t have really more than some scans of it in the beginning and near the end. So I don’t know his involvement in the rest of the volume. I also can’t say how he plays out in volume two, because that does not exist at all. Cause for reasons I will never understand, Dobson just abandoned the idea of telling a “coherent” and ongoing story with Alex ze Pirate and instead went to his colored one page comics/strips with it, turning it into what some people called “Garfield with Pirates” (which I consider a genuine insult towards any newspaper comic out there, even something as Boondocks). And the first thing we see of Sam in “classic” Alex ze Pirate?

 The perverted dwarf of the crew showing of his shota underwear so that Alex and Sam stop bickering who is the cutest, leaving him embarrassed and humiliated.

 Which kinda sums up his role in the comic to a t. Cause this is what Sam is: He is the buttmonkey of the crew. And honestly, I would not have a total problem with Sam being a buttmonkey, if a) he wasn’t it all the time, b) he would actually do something to deserve any form of humiliation and c) if the other characters in this comic itself would not be some of the biggest assholes I have ever seen, who get away with abusing the poor lad.

 See, here is the problem: In a crew featuring a choleric homophobic soulless ginger

 A black rat person who wants to fuck the ginger even without her consent

 A furry abomination that has the same brain wavelengths as Chris Chan 

And a perverted dwarf who tries to impersonate Happosai from Ranma 1/2

 Sam is the only decent person in the entire crew. He works hard, he even questions the morality of his friends at times, he is honest, he is not perverted, almost good to the point of childish innocence and he has a very humble “goal” which is he wants to own his own piece of gold. Not even a big pile of treasure, just one single coin would be enough for him.

 So he is likeable and relatable. In fact, if anything goes by, he may have been one of the most popular ones in the comic. And yet he is the one who gets constantly abused by “fate” and his friends, because as Dobson would say it, he is supposed to be the buttmonkey. There is just one problem: People do not necessarily like buttmonkeys.

I can primarily speak only for myself here, but I hope what I have to say resonates with others too. See, I get it: A character who is the butt of a joke can be fun. Like Daffy in Duck Amuck. But there is a fine line where a character being humiliated for the sake of a joke is fun (and perhaps even deserved because of his own shortcomings or deeds/actions that make the humiliation sort of kharmic, like lets say Johnny Bravo) and a character being humiliated to the point it feels disproportional, unfunny and mean spirited if not outright sadistic, can be crossed. Take Meg Griffin from Family Guy for example whose only “purpose” for existing within the last 12+ years is to get shat on by her family and the writers. People have no idea for a plot with her, so what do they do? Have her father physically and emotionally abuse her, fart in her face for what is supposed to count as a joke and then add additional insult to it by acknowledging that they are only doing this, because they have no other idea for her and think abuse is fun. Let me just tell you from experience, it is not.

And that is essentially what Sam is: He is the Meg Griffin of Alex ze Pirate, used by his creator as the butt of very unfunny jokes, even if he does not deserve any of the things said or done to him. Want to see some examples?

 How about the description Dobson gives Sam within the introduction of one of his volumes, showing how little Dobson as the creator even cares for him.

Why is he called an unworthy “slob” if he is the only one who actually works? Shouldn’t a slob be someone like Dobson, who can’t even take care of himself anymore? Also the confirmation that he was kidnapped at the age of 16. And as we have no clarification how much time passed between Legends Vol. 1 and anything afterwards, that means that in a way Alex is a child abuser.

And now, here some examples by the rest of the cast. Like Uncle Peggy framing him for all sorts of his perverted actions and even trying to kill him for no apparent reason?

Alex trying to kill him with chicken pox…

…Destroying all his worldly posessions which is hilarious because he is a poor orphan…

…Essentially describing him as worthless because he was born with an Y-chromosome…

… doing the kind of thing Dobson claims women would never do to man, using their sex appeal to hurt them…

…forcing him to do some unnecessary and rather petty work for her in a physics defying manner (seriously, the way he holds the axe does not compute with how he swings it. Try it out yourself)

… stealing his food and just being a cruel sadistic cunt to him just because it is fun.

Which is “funny” in so far as that there are a few comics indicating she would jump his dick and ride it like a little pony if she could.

 By the way, Talus and Atea are not better. None of them calls Alex out on her bullshit on average, Atea uses Sam to trigger traps in one story arc…

And Talus, the closest to a “friend” he is supposed to have, once for no apparent reason made him dig through his litterbox

And don’t get me even started when the characters decide to gang up on Sam, to the point he gets sexually harassedor is called to be less worth as a human being than the dirt you find in your belly button

Fuck’s sake, even in fanart everyone gangs up on him, even the freaking big bad of the story everyone is supposed to hate or be afraid of

 Bottom line, Sam is an abuse victim played for laughs in this comics. And just to clarify, I do not think this was Dobson’s intention. But if the character is undeservingly the butt of jokes for the majority of over 120 strips, it turns nasty. The way Sam is treated, I just find disgusting and indictive of just how unlikable any other character in this comic is to the point I do not want to see this being turned into a proper “franchise”. And I assume others were disgusted by it too, cause Dobson eventually decided to make a story more or less addressing the treatment Sam receives, while also attempting to prove that deep down the assholes with starring roles in this trainwrack care for him. How did this play out? Well, I am going to talk about it, so likely not well. If you want to see the details, grab yourself some popcorn and take a toilet break before we tackle part 2 of this thing.

#andrew dobson #so you are a cartoonist #sjw #comics #comic #webcomic #alex ze pirate #sam the cabin boy #legends #tom preston #disgusting #male abuse #unfunny

[dfcfanfics]

Howling Into The Wind About 2018

(Or: My first State of the MiraculElse Address. This is a text rant, not a story, so if you're not up for that you should not feel bad about pressing F to show respects and skipping it.)

I started writing fanfiction this past spring -- not just for the Miraculous universe, but period. It had been a very long time since the creative writing bug had bitten me, unless annoying people on message boards and Twitter counts. Long enough ago that the last time I'd dabbled in anything resembling that, it was on Usenet, back when Usenet was an actual communication medium and not just a transmission vector for spam and porn and binaries.

Those of you young enough to ask "What's Usenet?" are forgiven. Suffice it to say that I am olde. Old enough to be a grandfather to a few of you, and a Weird Uncle to most of the rest.

I am old, and writing fanfiction for what is at least nominally a kids' show. Yes, my wife gave me a bit of a funny look when I told her that, and yes, she should've. (She's watched some of Season 2 with me and enjoyed it; she thinks Marinette is unbearably cute and liked the humor in it. But I'm handling the obsession part for the two of us.)

Why? As my profile pages state, it's a love letter to this show and its creators. Even within the frustrating framework of 22-minute non-serial episodes with nearly no defined running order, flaky continuity and scheduling snafus, it's a marvelous show with a ton of heart at its core. The characters crack me up and remind me of some of my own teenaged battles with unrequited love, back in the dark ages. It should have stopped there, if I was a rational person.

But I read the leaked half-transcript to Troublemaker and thought, Hmmm, I bet I could take that somewhere interesting! I read a couple of flailing attempts at fanfic that someone posted on Reddit and thought, with egotistical glee, I could do better than THAT!

And so I did. I lashed together what became Summer Break, put it up on FFN, and figured that three people would say "that's nice" and it would disappear and I would go back to being a normal old fart.

But people seemed to like it! And that encouraged me to start writing a handful of "episodes," canon-respectful one-offs meant to mimic the status-quo, 22-minutes-and-we're-out format. They got nice feedback as well. "What if I did a multi-parter?" I thought, and I tried it. THAT got nice feedback, including people clamoring for more of it when I posted the last chapter. (And here I thought I'd already rambled on with it too long! Maybe... I was getting the knack of this?)

A discussion about a theme in that story inspired me to write The Marinette Project... and its fan reaction EXPLODED beyond my wildest dreams. I watched all the numbers go up on FFN and AO3 and couldn't believe my eyes. I still can't. (I remember showing my wife when it hit 5000 views on FFN and losing my mind over that. It's at eleven times that now, and ten thousand hits on AO3 (where hits are counted more rationally than FFN's system). Who ARE you people?)

Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright followed. I figured that this was going to be a short thought experiment, dabbling in non-canon with an AU Kwami personality and a generic villain and my usual piles of fluff and one-liners and references. But people _loved_ the Kwami I'd invented, the villain took on a distinct personality of her own, and before I knew it four chapters turned into nine and I had another hit on my hands.

My current project (Let's Take It From The Top) was probably overambitious from the start, and it's never found the same kind of audience as the last two. But it's been fun to write, and those who have read it have enjoyed it, and that's good enough for me.

"So what?" flits through the reader's mind at this point, either in the form of "I already knew all of that" or "Get to the point, you old fart."

The point is: Once you get past the reference to my Summer Break story above, NONE OF THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. None of it was anticipated by me. I had no idea that I was going to turn the corner from "a guy who wrote a short story once" into A Writer.

You and people like you made that happen. The response to everything I have put out there (even the two crackfics!) has absolutely blown me away from the start. It's been overwhelmingly positive and every last word of it has been appreciated. I've read my PMs and comments and reviews and grinned from ear to ear. I've laughed out loud, I've gotten good ideas and interesting speculation, I've acquired some regulars, I've had many requests for sequels, I've had others recommending my stories, and my mind is absolutely BOGGLED. Boggled, I say. I shake my head and letter dice fly around and people make words from them.

(Those of you too young to know the "Boggle" word game are, of course, excused again.)

I was particularly astonished when something legitimately mindblowing happened twice -- other people made their own creative responses to something I had written.

@yunyin did me the considerable honor of sending me a pair of images, one a depiction of a scene from Let's Take It From The Top, the other a portrait of La Tigresse from Tyger, Tyger. My first fanart ever! My post gushing over them is still on my main page, so if you haven't seen them, scroll down and marvel at them. I'll wait.

Not long after, @brittsarts reached out to me and blew my mind when she asked permission to do a comic version of Tyger, Tyger. (As if I was going to say "please, no, DON'T pour your heart and soul into bringing my characters to life in a visual format!") She has been doing a wonderful job of interpreting my story and making it come alive, and that comic is the reason why 95% of the Tumblr followers I have found me in the first place.

So here I am. I am banging out the ending to Let's Take It slowly and steadily, concluding my longest story to date. I am debating which of several ideas will be the one I tackle next. I am checking my comments and PMs and reviews on FFN and AO3 more often than is healthy, because every time something pops up there it warms my heart. I am still wondering how I got to this point. And to all of you who've read my stories, enjoyed them, and encouraged me in all these ways and more to keep creating them:

Thank you so much.

And now, off to bed because I remain an old fart who needs his sleep.

#fanfic #old fart babbles at cloud