Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Revolutionary Girl Utena 🌭

Sean has promised me that this won’t be one of our public columns, so I feel safe admitting this only to you, our loyal patrons: I have always wanted to be a magical girl. 

I want to spin around as pop music plays, yelling random entries from a bootleg thesaurus while spotlights explode out of my head and my clothes disappear piece by piece, to be replaced by heart-themed armor which leaves nothing to the imagination. I want to defeat a giant robot snake with the power of love. I want to join my soul together with all of my friends to fire a huge pink spirit arrow into the moon, which has become sentient and wants to destroy romance. I want to do all of these things, but I have no idea how to start. 

So on this Nerding Day, in which we unabashedly engage in our twerpiest fantasies, I’m going to watch magical girl anime and try to learn how to unlock the Transcendably Mule Pluto Kick that I know lies within me. Let’s get to the very first installment of…

BROCKWAY’S MAGICAL GIRL HOLE (PLEASE RENAME BEFORE PUBLICATION)

We’ll start with Revolutionary Girl Utena, because just the title makes me laugh. It sounds like you translated ‘pro-life terrorist’ into Chinese and back. As we can see from the opening credits, this show, like most magical girl anime, is about two middle-school girls almost kissing and spinning around in roses.

I don’t mean to freak out any of our proudly square readers, but I think this show might be a little gay. Of course, this being Japan in the 1990s, they couldn’t outright say that. To get across the message that homosexuality is natural, they couldn’t just show two Fiona Apple fans making out in the back of a minivan — they had to write an epic about tweens pulling phallic objects out of the black holes in their foreheads to unlock interdimensional portals shaped like vaginas. We basically wouldn’t have anime if Japan just let gay people hold hands on TV, so I guess… thank you for the oppression? 

Let’s see if you can spot the main character of this show:

Oh, is it the only girl with hot pink hair? The girl whose outfit is 1400 times more ornate than anyone around them? The girl whose introduction is framed by baroque ironwork and giant spinning flowers? If you’re ten inches taller than everyone around you, dressed in a complicated outfit and sporting a bright pink mohawk, congratulations: You are the main character of an anime. 

Or you’re… Seanbaby?! Shit, I just realized I’m the inept sidekick in Seanbaby’s anime.

I’d better put down all these dishes before I’m surprised by a half-naked lady and fall out a window. 

So anyway, that’s our main character, Utena, and she’s facing off against the most dire of villains… the student council. You know how student councils are: A bunch of petty, pedantic teenagers LARPing bureaucracy. Always tweaking the theme of the school dance and receiving letters from the apocalypse telling them to break the egg of the world:

“Yeah, hey that’s awesome Chris — but for today’s meeting I think we’re gonna backburner the request from Armageddon to C-section the Earth Chicken, and really focus on getting Monster put back in the vending machine by the gym.”

Here’s the president of the student council, a man far prettier than any of the women in this show, introducing himself in a perfectly acceptable manner:

If one of your wishes goes terribly awry and you find yourself trapped in an anime while Fabio’s disappointing son introduces himself as a “totally normal boy,” you need to take several steps back, because he is about to turn into a winged robot knight cursed by Aphrodite to fly into a rage at the sight of panties — and also look down: you are now wearing panties and they are visible.

Instead of denying A.V. club an Oculus Quest, this student council spends their afterschool hours having sword fights in the abandoned forest arena behind the school.

Behind my school there was a dumpster where kids smoked cigarettes because they weren’t getting enough attention at home, but the alternate universe forest arena with the spiral staircase to a cloud platform that hosts battles under the inverted sky casino seems like a pretty sweet place to burn a Lucky Strike, too.

Whenever somebody ascends those stairs in Utena, the craziest fucking music you have ever heard starts playing. And listen: I am familiar with anime. I get that the songs are wacky. I am telling you this is not that. This is a Girl Group backed by the Trans-Siberian orchestra, singing lyrics written by Danzig’s increasingly terrified translator as Glenn tries to argue his way out of a Japanese prison.

This isn’t one of my wacky ‘I’ve swapped the subtitle file’ experiments. The subtitles on this show are great. That means this band is saying exactly what they mean to say:

I should specify that these aren’t all lyrics from one super insane ballad. It’s the same band playing a different, exponentially more crazy song every single episode.  

There are 39 episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena. Damn near 40 songs where Japanese opera singers try to read a Welsh science textbook with every third word removed. It is a staggering accomplishment in lunacy.

And it’s even weirder because these songs pulled from the Hellraiser dimension’s Top 40 Station accompany very brief, boring sword fights that always play out the same way. A shy girl appears dressed like a member of the Rhythm Nation:

Our heroine pulls a sword from the exploding sun between her tits:

And then she fights a member of the student council, exchanging catty banter as a news ticker tuned to a raving hobo crawls above them.

Utena inevitability gets in trouble, at which point a ghost prince comes down from the space castle to merge with her soul while the Japanese Evanescence describes their trip to Seaworld:

Then Utena powers up and slices off her opponent’s flower, which is how you win a fight in the Budding Lesbian’s Fencing School For Lunatics.

Oh, and it turns out that all these duels are for ownership of the shy girl with the sword-tits. Yes, as is the way with all afterschool activities in Japan, we were competing for the deed to a young girl’s sexual agency this whole time.

Somewhere between the Upside Down Space Castle and the Apocalypse Chick, I have lost the metaphor. Is this a sub/dom thing? Is it about the commoditization of women? I don’t know. But I do know that the shy girl is basically just a storage bin for slaps. 

And nobody slaps like anime. The characters spend most of the runtime of this show just palming her smile halfway across the room. Every once in a while somebody steps up to suggest that this demure, quiet, book of a girl is perhaps not the best place to practice your open-handed fighting technique:

But let’s see how Saionji feels about that:

And it just wouldn’t be a magical girl anime without a cute animal companion to break up the screaming and visual metaphors for genitals. Unfortunately, Utena has Chu-Chu:

Look at this piece of shit. This is the avatar that child predators use in chat rooms when they want a challenge. 

His fucking scribble eyes speak only of darkness. Madness. Apocalyptic ammonia. Bensonite. I understand what those crazy songs are about — they’re trying to describe how hard Chu-Chu should go fuck himself and they’re running up against the limits of human language. 

His old-man eyebrows and rosy cheeks are how anime artists depict naughty uncle touches.

Eat shit forever, Chu-chu. Devour feces in the baptism of the universe. We need new words of hate! Unspool the birth certificate fuck backwards on the resolution! God damn it! 

Categories
LEARNING DAY

What Ever Happened to Fingerboarding?

I remember the first time I truly understood that there is injustice in this world. It was when I learned about fingerboarding. 

“Jeremy,” I said to my bully at the time. “Look at these guys. Why are you slapping my hocks when these dorks are pretending to skateboard with their hands? You’re choking down hamburger when you could be dining on steak!”

“I’m not sure,” Jeremy shrugged, his bowl cut hiding a pair of thick, befuddled eyebrows. “I know with certainty they should be attacked, and yet I do not feel like attacking them.”

“They go unmolested for finger-miming a better hobby, but I get pushed in the girl’s bathroom for pretending to be a wizard? At least wizards are cool.” 

At this point, Jeremy began beating me savagely. The school principal actually saw it and moved to step in, but I waved him away. 

“I deserve this one,” I said. And he just nodded. He understood.

Anyway, let’s learn what happened to the most embarrassing fad this side of erotic pogs. 

It’s crazy that fingerboarding caught on, since none of the videos from the ‘90s even tried to make it look cool. They were named like kung-fu pornography:

And featured socially maladjusted children with terrible haircuts looking like they’d died of boredom hours ago and only rigor mortis was making them smile. Here’s what’s supposed to be a wild fingerboarding party… 

There’s no glamor in that photo — no child saw those poor bastards crammed unhappily atop the kitchen counter, huddled around a splayed Ukrainian exchange student who looks like he’s trying to explain how other people have fun without accidentally having any himself and thought, “that could be me — that should be me!”

But an entire industry popped up around fingerboarding, with commercials and everything:

This ad promised that “like real street skating, you can earn respect by shredding new obstacles!” And it was the single greatest lie of a generation. You fingerboard once and the word ‘respect’ is erased from your memory. You will laugh every time Aretha Franklin comes on, wondering aloud “what is this fucking idiot trying to spell?!” This blatant falsehood kickstarted the Truth in Advertising movement which now makes it illegal to promise that Carl’s Jr. is actual food, and not an elephant laxative.

This commercial started with a bored kid playing internet, only to find his hand has become sentient and fled his keyboard in favor of a fingerboard set…

Look at the abject fear on that child’s face. He does not want this to happen. He does not want to discover this about himself. It’s like he’s unearthing a shameful fetish for the first time, and can already feel decades of society’s judgment crashing down on him.

Yet another commercial features children fingerboarding everywhere — at school, at home, even on the bus! Yes, this brash young man grinds down the bus seats, even doing tricks over a strange woman’s legs… 

I am 100% certain that ‘fingerboarding a pop shove-it’ over an unconsenting woman’s lap is sexual assault, even if it’s to a degree so low that the mace to defend against it is cinnamon flavored.

Then one child makes a terrible mistake: He playfully ‘grinds’ his bus fare into the receptacle…

Forgetting that all public bus drivers are one shenanigan away from a stabbing spree. The director cuts away. We do not get to see this child die.

And yet, even with all of these advertisements that function like dire warnings, people kept fingering their boards. Here’s a Wikihow from last month, still advising people on how to start fingerboarding, rather than directing them to seek the help they need:

Even the How-to guide for fingerboarding refers to it as a ‘micro-sport,’ which is a bit like calling sniffing used socks ‘micro-sex.’ Even avid fingerboarders feel compelled to post polls asking other fingerboarders, “is fingerboarding stupid?”

Self awareness is banging on the door — begging, pleading to be let in — and they’re diving headfirst out the god damn window.

I’m not surprised that 69% of fingerboarders do not think fingerboarding is stupid, but I am surprised that 31% of fingerboarders recognize they have a problem and are simply helpless in the face of it. 

But here’s the real problem with fingerboarding: A lot of time has passed since the dark age when Tech Decks ruled the Earth, and that means many of its modern practitioners are adults. Here is what an adult fingerboarder looks like:

If you are a parent, please check your hand now. You will be surprised to find that you have unconsciously removed your phone from your pocket and already dialed the police. You can hang up now, but do take solace in the knowledge that your primal parental instincts are keen. 

Now, let’s hop into an interview with him:

Women, please check your panties. You will find that your genitals have sealed shut like a fallout bunker on doomsday. This is normal. This is a normal response. You don’t need to visit your doctor — you just need a long hot bath, some kitchen tongs, and to never read this next part:

I told you not to read it! Damn it all. I’m sorry, ladies, but you now have one less hole in your body. 

Photographs of grown men fingerboarding evoke the kind of quiet, aghast horror normally reserved for Scientology documentaries and forensics techs examining the apartments of adult fingerboarders.

Look at that screencap from a nightmare. That promotional still from an Eastern European horror movie. Just picture coming across that scene in a remote rest stop, when he slowly turns to make eye contact with you. Both of you know there’s no help for a hundred miles. Then it’s all darkness and pain and tiny wheels across your body, on your lips, moving down, inexorably down….

Every single grown man talking about fingerboarding is really talking about what they’d do to a RealDoll of Emma Watson if they could ever get enough fingerboard sponsors to afford one. 

I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that, in some dark corner of this Earth, there are people still gleefully fingerboarding. You’d think they would have died from wedgie complications by now. I simply cannot imagine a thing less cool than pretending to skateboard with your fingers-

Touche, dorks. 

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Kemono Michi Rise Up

When I plugged the synopsis of Kemono Michi: Rise Up into the Weiner 2600 — the machine that decides which aspect of Hot Dog our content represents — the damn thing told me to schedule it for Fucking Day. And I just don’t understand: Kemono Michi is supposed to be an anime about a Japanese professional wrestler who loves animals, then gets sucked into a kind of fantasy world where he has to become a wild beast tamer. Look at these adorable scenes from the opening credits:

This show is about a man becoming best friends with a bear, Weiner 2600. While I do find that concept intensely erotic, the Attorney General of Alaska has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am an outlier in that regard. This shit is as wholesome as a church picnic before someone mentions the gays.

Of course, I am well aware that Japan can turn anything into a porno, and the whole country grows 4% more erect every time you doubt that fact. But I just don’t see it happening here. 

The setup is that our hero, Animal Mask, wants to quit wrestling to open a pet shop. Most professional wrestlers dream only of the day they can quit injecting steroids straight into their testicles professionally, and switch to strictly recreational use. This guy dreams of selling puppy chow. That’s downright heartwarming. 

And this is Japanese professional wrestling we’re talking about here — if American pro wrestling is about veiny meat-monsters thigh-choking racial stereotypes for ‘roid money, Japanese professional wrestling is about all of those things plus war crimes. You ever see a fluorescent light match? You’re supposed to flee the county if you so much as crack one of those suckers, and Japanese pro wrestlers spend forty seven minutes shoving them up each other’s assholes. 

This guy…

Is the most adorable thing to come out of wrestling this side of Captain Lou Albano struggling to read cue cards about video games he only understood enough to fear. 

Our purehearted paladin even does his wrestling moves alongside his adorable little dog:

I am all in on this show. It’s even got a proper, full-body dropkick in the first scene, and proper, full-body dropkicks are my spirit animal. 

In the middle of the match, Animal Mask gets pulled over to some generic fantasy world, where he’s supposed to be their hero…

And he instantly bodyslams the mystical princess that summoned him. 

This show may have a pure heart, but there’s only so far you can bend the suspension of disbelief…  and implying that a woman might go unviolenced within twenty feet of a professional wrestler just pulls the audience right out of it.

But you know, the suplexing princess scene actually makes me understand what’s wrong with this categorization: Weiner 2600 analyzed the show for panty shots and came up with a rate of 865/hour, so it mistakenly shuffled this show into Fucking Day because it doesn’t know that’s Japan’s absolute legal minimum. 

That’s okay, Weiner 2600: I will accept gratuitous cartoon panty shots that make me embarrassed to be a man, to be human, and to have working eyeballs, if that price buys me cute dogs doing dropkicks. I’ve seen anime before.

There’s even a legitimately funny bit where Animal Mask runs out into this fantasy world dressed like a benchwarmer at a Kubrick orgy and the townspeople instantly call him out on it.

He tries to plead that he’s all wrestler and no molester:

…but we all know the only difference between those two things is a referee. 

I know this site is for showing you hopelessly broken things that slithered over here from the Wrong Dimension, but I messed up on Kemono Michi. This is just my new favorite series. I honestly don’t see how this show about a Speedo-clad man who loves animals could go wrong.

I immediately see how this show about a Speedo-clad man who loves animals can go wrong.

Oh fuck it’s happening so fast. No, you can’t do this to me — w-we had a rapport going, show. You just spent ten minutes establishing credibility, charm, normality; there’s no way our adorable hero is going to-

…instantly transform into a sex monster and try to power-rape everyone he sees. What the screaming shit, Kemono Michi? We’ve gone zero to the bathroom in a furry convention in .6 milliseconds. This has to stop, this-

…is going to get so much worse before it gets better, isn’t it?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

Here we go.

I feel immensely betrayed, and all goodwill I have for the world has been irrevocably shattered. 

In that screencap up there, a cat-girl is begging our hero to stop taking deep, perverse huffs of her wolf-man brother. But Animal Mask only came to this world to do two things: Smell animal crotches, and smell animal crotches (after banging them). For the record, none of the sentient beast people are into this at all:

And there is zero doubt that Animal Mask thinks Informed Consent is some sort of Yes cover band. 

I’m so sorry. I should have given you a trigger warning. If you’ve ever helplessly stood by as a psychotic bodybuilder groped your poodle, you are surely having flashbacks to Jason Statham’s birthday party by now.

Oh, okay. It’s just belly rubs.

That’s seriously how the show tries to justify this scene, forgetting that they spent extra time drawing the naked terror in the wolf-man’s eyes as his autonomy was taken from him. Wolfie is shown here apparently enjoying it, though later he is overcome with shame and guilt, and tries to shower off the psychic filth. That is not a joke, that scene happens in this show. Kemono Michi goes out of its way to show you the consequences of Animal Mask’s unwanted advances, but never stops him from doing it.

I hear at level 55 you get an epic mount. Do not ask what the epic mount is.

HIS CROTCH-SNIFFING LEVEL IS OVER 9000!

The show loves to set up the same joke over and over again. See, Animal Mask seems like he’s suggesting perverted things…

When really he just likes animals! 

Then, before you can relax, they flash to his idea of ‘liking’ an animal, which is straight pornography:

I do not understand the joke! 

If the setup is that Animal Mask says something that sounds sexual, when he really means something innocent, you cannot punctuate that by smash cutting to him twisting a wolf-girl’s fuzzy nipples. 

Every scene plays out like this:

“Oh no, he’s a pervert.” 

“Oh wait, he meant something innocent.”

“OH SHIT HE IS INSIDE OF ME I WAS INCORRECT ABOUT MY FIRST ASSUMPTION.”

That’s not a joke structure, that’s tearful testimony.

How did the pitch session go for this show? Did they bother actually writing down the words ‘SUPERPOWERED ANIMAL RAPIST GOES TO DISNEYWORLD’ or did they just tongue-kiss a panda on the conference table until the producers were so psychologically broken they’d greenlight anything?

I am not cherrypicking one scene out of context here. Later in the episode, Animal Mask encounters a cerberus, body slams the beast…

Then gleefully huffs its asshole. 

Magical sparkles of delight alight in the air around his head. This scene drags on for like a full minute while the camera zooms in on him growing happier and happier with what he’s found in the hellhound’s anal glands.

I want to be clear: This is not classified as pornography. I didn’t turn on my special Recursive VPN (that’s a VPN that routes through another VPN in case the feds raid the first VPN) and trudge through the dark parts of the internet to unearth this obscure, condemnable porno. I found this fucking show on Hulu right next to Friendly Neighbor’s Pie Enjoyment Competition and Nick Offerman Reads Poetry To Ducks.

This is the worst thing I have ever seen in anime and I have seen anime before.

Here are the ending credits.

Pretty cute way to close out a show about raping werewolves, Japan.

Weiner 2600, I once again owe you an apology. Your methods are unimpeachable and I understand now, too late, that you were trying to warn me.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Double Dragon The Movie 🌭

The Double Dragon series left an indelible impression on me as a child, mostly because this is the opening scene. 

“I’m like 8 years old,” I tried to explain to the arcade cabinet. “I don’t need to see a loving pixel render of a woman getting punched in the gut so hard she partially digests her spine.”

“Double Dragon” the arcade cabinet said. 

And it was hard to argue with that.

(By the way, I hope you appreciate that gif. I had to search “Double Dragon Girlfriend Punch” to find it, and that’s how Google translates the name of a brutal Chinese human trafficking gang. I am now on several watchlists.)

Anyway, this is not about the video game series. We’re here to talk about the Double Dragon movie, which was so ‘90s you are now wearing rollerblades. Go ahead, check. 

They’re metaphorical, dipshit. 

First I should explain that I am now very poor, and so am watching the movie on Tubi, which is perhaps the best of the free streaming services. And that’s a little like claiming you could beat the shit out of any child in the chemotherapy ward. It might be true, but there is no pride in that boast. Tubi is like the Discover card: Barely accepted.

Here, look at this:

I’m not sure if something is wrong with my version of Tubi — like it knows that I will only use it to watch terrible video game movies from several decades ago, and cannot bring itself to respect me for that decision — but the UI does not disappear while you’re watching. That’s probably not the biggest deal, and I’ll do my best to crop it out for most of these images. But I wanted subtitles on for these screencaps, because “we’re starting to look like the double dorks” is the most subtle and well-written line of dialogue in this movie. Yet Tubi is such a fly-by-night operation that the video progress bar overlaps the subtitles. Meaning that the more of Double Dragon a deaf person watches, the less they will understand. 

Of course, this is also true of a non-deaf person, because the team behind Double Dragon opted to adapt it as a wacky ‘90s mystical cyberpunk gang comedy, like if Shadowrun boned The Fresh Prince and made The Warriors watch.

I don’t think any of us will benefit from analyzing the plot of this film, since every movie in the ‘90s was about how, if we all got together, maybe we could beat up capitalism? And there’s no point dissecting characters whose backstory is “punch lady. Bad?” But there is one thing we can learn from Double Dragon…

Fashion. 

That’s right, I lured you five hundred words into this article just to spring a fashion show on you. It’s too late to back out now, you’re committed. You should learn to skim, motherfucker.

We’ll start with the main villain, Koga Shuko, whom you might recognize as the T-1000 from Terminator 2, but only if you ignore his pleas to not do that. Oddly, Koga sports one of the film’s most approachable looks. 

His ensemble features bold lines carefully crafted to make him look like a curious little boy trying on mommy’s pantsuit. That outfit is so terrible it actually overshadows him saying “Lotus Flower, I’ve missed your sense of peasant justice.” That is an insane sentence, and the only thing that could possibly distract from it would be if you delivered it while wearing a Business Jumpsuit that makes you look like Wesley Snipes’ accountant.

Here it is again. He’s saying “sudden molecular steroids” and everything about that begs for elaboration, but the first thing you’re going to ask is “does Grace Jones know you stole her everything?”

One more time: Here he is saying the craziest shit I have heard this side of a rap battle for stroke patients…

…and the only thing I can think is, “I remember this all-dwarf porn parody of Max Headroom being more erotic.”

Here’s one of Shuko’s henchmen, Bo Abobo, absolutely rocking the ‘fat Akira.’ 

He’s jazzing that old look up with a saucy little military jacket and white thigh-highs which say, “I might be a horde of meaningless flesh bubbling in crude mockery of the human form, but who wants to Go-go dance?!”

One of the many gangs in the movie appear to be some kind of vampire mimes…

This one is caught in the cruel demilitarized zone between ‘16th century undead’ and ‘sullen teenager reluctantly attending clown college because he comes from three generations of disappointments and feels he owes something to the bloodline.’

Here’s another of the clown gang:

Now, these goofy bastards might not be great fighters, but they do privately rejoice in knowing that each swipe of their bulbous fingers leaves an entire crime scene worth of children’s blood and clown semen on their victims. 

The rest of our gangs range from average punk rockers to criminal mailmen to ‘90s R&B sensation Luther Vandross.

One of them consists entirely of grown men dressed like Ness from EarthBound.

While the most prominent group, the Maniacs, are trying out a bold new look this summer: Frayed knitting over dirty underwear. 

That’s their leader, which is absurd…

Since this guy is my president.

‘Nick Fury in a rapidly dissolving cable knit sweater’ is the pornographic search term I save to finish with, and this movie has brought him to life. If only he was somehow also in a filthy dress, I would…

This article will resume after a brief intermission.

…

Only slightly less sultry are our final gang, the Huffy Boys. 

They have no unifying theme aside from that every one of them loves their cheap, heavy bike from the least popular aisle in Toys “R” Us. 

The villains don’t get all the aesthetics, though. Here’s our ‘good guy militia,’ the Power Corps: 

…looking like somebody briefly explained anarchy to the cast of Blossom. 

The Power Corps are like a Benetton ad for Occupy Wall Street.

Even the children are forced to dress like a colorblind racist explained the flags of Africa to a synesthete. 

But none compare to the sheer madness of the leader of the Power Corps, Alyssa Milano, who wears mom-jean Daisy Dukes sewn to lingerie garters that keep up her extremely baggy, multicolored canvas shinpants. 

I don’t know what that outfit is for: Making sure your knees stay unbloodied while you fuck in the killzone of a Black Friday riot at Kohl’s?

All of this textural gibberish leaves our normie heroes looking boring until the very end, when they get the Double Dragon amulet. (Remember: the producers of Double Dragon greenlit the movie at the words “Double Dragon,” and then insisted “we’ll come up with the rest” before railing 16 grams of cocaine off of an abused tiger kept solely for this occasion). 

There’s Billy and Jimmy powering up for their ultimate transformation, exploding out of a smokey glitter dust cloud to…

Stand uncomfortably in rhinestone karate gis. 

They look like two children realizing that mom’s hot glue gun can’t make you a Transformer after all. Those are the outfits a drag queen wears to make fun of Eddie Murphy in Raw. These are the uniforms that separate well-trained ball torturers from cheap escorts aimlessly stomping you on the dick. This is the moment Billy and Jimmy Lee realized they’d never pull off their MC Hammer cosplay without going full blackface. 

…

And now, because I am a complete child, here’s every time I giggled because the captioner transcribed the fighting sounds as ‘whacking.’

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Fanfiction Showcase: My Little Pony – Cupcakes

When our generous, wise, only slightly acidic sponsors over at PoxCo (Spread the Pox!™) first assigned me the fanfiction beat, I immediately tried to commit ritual suicide. The knife penetrated, I saw the blood, felt the pain, but there was no sweet release of death. The wounds sealed shut before my very eyes. The head HR mantis, Vexxox, informed me of three things: that death simply does not work that way in the Wrong Dimension, that instead of my life I had actually just cost myself the ability to feel one human emotion, and that my first assignment would be Cupcakes, a My Little Pony fanfiction by Sergent Sprinkles. I would say that’s an adorable name, but apparently it was the ability to find things cute that I lost. Is that even a human emotion? I always thought ‘finding things cute’ would be categorized under ‘love.’ Have I lost the ability to love altogether? Let’s find out! 

Okay, you know where this is going. All fan fiction starts like this: We’re going to enjoy a lovely snippet of normalcy that could come straight out of the show, and then Harry Potter poofs in, waves his wand around and says “Ponium Pantieus Vanishera!” Cut to one masturbation session later and boom! — you can feel shame again. We’ll skip through the next section, which is just about Rainbow Dash, who looks like this:

Hurrying to meet Pinkie Pie in her bakery:

Man, you almost can’t blame the Deep Nerds from jacking it to this stuff. Those are halfway to pornstar names, and the artists gave the ponies makeup. Listen, I’m not saying it’s right to want to fuck a cartoon horse, but I am saying that if you slap a miniskirt on one you lose the right to be surprised when a 34 year-old anime enthusiast puts it on a bodypillow. 

So here, they meet up in the bakery and…

Right. Exactly as expected. I’m certainly not going to blame the victim in this scenario, but if somebody invites you in and insists you eat something, then gets super coy when you ask why, you were actually already roofied from touching the doorknob and I’m sorry I could not get this warning to you earlier. 

All right, well, here we go. I guess we’re doing this. Let me just check real quick to make sure suicide doesn’t work and nope — still here. Think I just lost the ability to feel sunshine on my face which, again, I wasn’t aware was an emotion. Is that under ‘happiness’? Did I just lose all happiness? 

Yep, it was all happiness.

Look, fine, I’m going to unzip, but I’m not going to be happy about it. I literally can’t.

Wait, what? What in the unholy scrabbling fuck? I thought I was prepared for this. I was prepared for such terrible sights, but not in the Hellraiser sense. I never thought I’d be disappointed that a cartoon pony is getting out of this scenario with its hymen intact, but here we are. You’ve taken another thing from me, Internet.

Hold on, I need to know whether or not this is…

Yes, this is several thousand intricate words of My Little Pony torture porn. 

That last sentence should not be. It reads like a thesis written by an AI to justify its eradication of the human race. I never thought I would type those words in that order, but I also thought I would be an astronaut, when the closest I’ve ever gotten to drifting aimlessly in the void is right here, right now, reading this:

Solid comedy bit, Pinkie Pie. Do we really need to take a torture break to try out riffs from your Seinfeld spec script? Many is the time I’ve wished for physical maiming instead of having to attend a friend’s improv class, but I never thought it would be inflicted upon innocent ponies instead. Truly this monkey’s paw has curled down three fingers and left me with the middle one.

I write horror for a living and I am finding this My Little Pony story to be a bit much. I will say: good job on channeling a basic injury we can all relate to — the torn hangnail — and incorporating a hardcore version of it into this children’s story meant for little girls (and boys still figuring some things out). I thought MLP was already about as polluted as a fanpool could get, since a grown man in a My Little Pony shirt is how nature signals you to shut down your genitals, but this is worse. 

I’m not going to subject you to the thousands more words there are of this, so hopefully what you’ve seen so far has been enough foreplay and the recap alone will help you finish:

Pinkie Pie cuts pieces off of Rainbow Dash, then makes her eat herself, drives hot nails into her hooves and then runs an electric current through them, and finally guts Dash, all while running her tight five minute comedy routine because an audience is an audience. There’s way too much loving description and needless urination here to say this is entirely non-sexual, but if you do find yourself aroused just know that this is the step between killing small animals and hunting prostitutes on a private island. 

Take us out, Pinkie Pie. 

Honestly, there’s no surprise here. This was the only way to close Pinkie’s arc. Taxidermying her pony-friend is just basic storytelling structure. Like Tom Joad marching off to change the world, there was no other way this story could end. And until Eli Roth finally signs on to the Care Bears remake, this is going to have to tide you over, anthropomorphized cartoon animal torture fetishists. 

As for me, I’m pretty sure I can still be exploded or incinerated, so it’s not like I don’t have hope. 

Oh, no — turns out I cannot be exploded, and I have quite literally lost ‘hope.’ 

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Guardians of the ‘Hood 🌭

I first encountered Guardians of the ‘Hood when I was 13 years old, and thought gay jokes were the height of sophistication. Implying that my friends might enjoy penis was my Frasier, and even I knew something was wrong with Guardians of the ‘Hood. I played my first game, turned to Soccer Scottie and, after first assuring him that he might enjoy balls if only he tasted them, then asked: “Is this exploitative, or at best, problematic?”

I knew neither of those words. It was not my voice that I spoke with. Soccer Scottie fled in terror and I endured six long years being vigorously exorcised by the Catholic Church. Guardians of the ‘Hood destroyed my life. It is time to revisit the source of my trauma.

Guardians of the ‘Hood existed in that fraught time where we knew video games should look more realistic, but had zero clue how to accomplish that. Some games tried FMV, some tried pre-rendered backgrounds, I’m pretty sure Guardians of the ‘Hood tried Santeria and nothing else. They sacrificed two cats to a picture of El Chapo and were mystified when the game still looked like garbage.

It looks like you blurred a better fighting game to protect its identity.

It looks like the store-brand version of Mortal Kombat, Kortal Mombat.

It looks like security footage of a hate crime.

But looks aren’t everything – it also controls like an abused child. It hates you, but it cannot fully escape your influence. Button presses are obeyed in only the most passive aggressive of ways. You requested a punch; you’ll get a punch. It might not be who you want to punch, when you want to punch, or even how you want to punch — you might press the jab button, then fully turn around and uppercut a homeless man instead of the racist caricature you intended, and you will forever wonder which option was worse. You’ll get a better fighting game experience making uncomfortable requests of Russian camgirls.

Poetry Interlude:

A Better Fighting Game Than Guardians of the ‘Hood

“Nadia, slap Katya”

…the silence of donation, impending

Limp-wristed slap. In the eyes a distance, a regret.

Here’s your cast of characters, each of which come with a set of unique abilities and one unique part of a shirt.

Clockwise from top, we’ve got your uncle trying to fix the air conditioner, the porn parody of Lisa from Saved by the Bell, a man using suspenders to keep his tits up, and the human equivalent of an IROC-Z.

We are next treated to an introduction of each character in stunning 2FPS video.

Connor and Chief look like separate camera angles of the same bootleg pornography, while Javier looks like you’ve only glimpsed a prediction of him in coffee grounds. Tanya, as with all women in ‘90s video games, is both the least and most developed. We are informed she is “cat-tall” and the screen desperately tries to advance before we can question that insane descriptor. She takes up eight inches on all fours? That is wildly disrespectful, Guardians of the ‘Hood.   

The central plot of this game is “you guys work out together, might as well fight crime together.” That is sorely overestimating the bond between gym buddies. The closest I’ve ever felt to a fellow gym-goer is when I’m making hard eye contact with them on the Hip Abductor.

What could possibly stop these gangs?! The police? Systemic social reforms? A breakdancing competition where the true prize is brotherhood? No! Tanya has a bike and is cat-tall: She’s the hero we need right now.

And you know what? It’s a fair fight, because our central villain is a white female Michael Jackson impersonator. 

But for my first playthrough, I’m going with Chief.

Listen: Somebody is going to get strugglefucked in this game. The opening cinematic guaranteed that. And it is my philosophy that if one must choose, it is best to be the strugglefucker, rather than the strugglefuckee.

My first mission is to ‘Beat the Dreads’ who are, of course, Jamaican. They’re named things like Nigel and Toots, and their lo-fi dialogue ranges from “hey mon” to “we be jammin” — that’s so basically racist it’s almost cute. It’s like grandma racist. That’s the example a kindly teacher uses to explain racism to first graders. But don’t take them lightly…

We are four seconds into the game and a purple Jamaican has already thrown a homeless man at me. This is how lunatics tell you to wear a hardhat.

And I’m already worried that Chief is not up to this challenge. He kicks like ghosts are trying to steal his shoes…

And he punches like he’s trying to show his girlfriend a weird growth on the inside of his elbow.

You do get special attacks, but only the enemies know when you’re actually going to do them. Your inputs are like desperate prayers to an unloving god. He might indulge you one of these times, and the hope of it is almost worse than its absence.

But all of these moves are irrelevant, because neither you, nor the AI want to be in this game. I spent the next five minutes chasing this guy around the car like two sexual predators reenacting a Bugs Bunny cartoon. 

The only people in Central City are gangs organized around racial stereotypes, gym-rats who love justice as much as they hate sleeves, homeless people, and prostitutes. Here I am trying to throw a hooker — which is frankly insane but I learned it from watching you, game — and getting exactly what I deserve.

When you’ve finally assaulted enough spandex-clad dreadlocks to populate a hot yoga class, you get this guy:

My building superintendent on his day off, demanding that you Hunger Games your friend to continue.

I don’t have any friends, so I have to beat up a woman. I was prepared for the shitty graphics. I was not prepared for the cutting social commentary.

If you lose this mandatory match to your friend, then it’s game over. They continue on, you have to pay start again. The game actually stops just to spit on your relationships. Guardians of the ‘Hood hates friendship more than No Heart from the Care Bears, and it loves capitalism like a tech bro just discovering The Fountainhead.

Continue on and the levels are more of exactly the same. Really, the only thing that changes is the dinginess of the alley, which is the kind of revelation I’d expect to hear from a gutshot detective in a noir novel, not a ‘90s Beat ‘Em Up from Atari. You do get new enemies, but they get less visually coherent with every screen advance.

I believe what I’m looking at here is two fat skinheads having simultaneous coronaries, only to realize their souls are neon punk rock girls, while a Greek bodybuilder pulls the very spirit of business out of himself, for he is done with the workaday world. 

Guardians does throw you for a loop once in a while. I found myself in a porno theater for one boss fight, albeit one that only catered to the niche fetish of blurry women turning to look at you with disdain.

I give the film 2 stars (very tough to masturbate to), but the audience gets top marks. I beat several minorities to death in that theater — our silhouettes blocking the screen the entire time — and at one point a shirtless man in chef pants burst through the screen to spin-kick me, and nobody even turned around to shush us.

Anyway, the game ends here, because I met Boris. He beat me like he was on his way to see his dying mother and I stole his bus fare.

He strangled me…

He punched my head into the ground…

He shot some kind of magic worm at me…

I tried to leap out of Boris’s sweat-lubricated orgy of fists, and the motherfucker jumped with me like his boot had lived in my crotch for so long the two couldn’t bear to separate.

When I finally, mercifully died, he apparently felt bad and tried to revive me…

Only to strangle me to death again.

Seriously, Boris fights like he might earn a promotion out of this game for it. This is what it’s like to survive a skinhead attack with such severe brain damage that your memories only come in 4p resolution. This was an excellent simulation of what it’s like to be mauled to death by a Russian superhuman overcompensating for impotence problems.

Guardians of the ‘Hood did have one killer mechanic: When you defeat a gang boss, they join your crew and become a playable character. It’s some kind of corrupted Dragon Ball Z logic: The only thing separating your enemies from your friends is one fist, liberally applied. Try it at home, kids! A bully is just a friend you haven’t hurled a hobo at yet!