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TEAMWORKING DAY

Teamworking Day: The 2-Bru Krew šŸŒ­



Brockway: Uh oh, looks like somebodyā€™s uncleā€™s about to get kicked out of a tourist pow wow.

Seanbaby: This looks like something that would appear over the words “alone on haloween but dressed up any ways šŸ¤£” on a Jan. 6th insurrectionist’s Facebook page.

Brockway: At the risk of insider industry jokes, a cover like this lets you know the author has a Livejournal manifesto about the evils of traditional publishing. Wait, the authorā€™s name is The 2-Bru Krew? Is it a collective of cowpoke writinā€™ frat boys?

Seanbaby: This makes me feel stupid for not coming up with a team name for us. We could have been HoT BoY Patrol or Budeez Who Have Seen D Film Powder. Wait, no: Los MaXimum Men. Don’t say yes to any of these yet. General and Lieutenant Pubic Mound. I might be confused. Are they morning DJs who publish Alamo fan fiction?

Brockway: Itā€™s better. These two doughy middle-aged men are in an author gang, and they write all their promo material in struggling rhyme.

Seanbaby: Oh fuck yeah.

Brockway: We could make fun of their book covers ā€“ each one like a direct-to-video Steven Seagal movie called Sunset of Blood (his name would be Jayce Sunset and heā€™d be playing the first black cowboy). We could mock their jacket copy flow, with all the sick rhymes of a summer camp talent show. But thatā€™s not what this article is about. Itā€™s about their many, many self-produced book trailers.

Brockway: The amount of views here are criminal, that number is 12 page refreshes from the 2-Bru Krew and 30 from me. In 2010 a single ironic Digg post would have already made these guys millionaires. This is such perfectly executed accidental comedy that it canā€™t exist on this self-aware, jaded internet. All my TikTok parody alarms are going off. This looks like found footage somebody recovered from a burnt garbage can outside the Tim and Eric Show.

Seanbaby: We might be too wired for irony and outsider comedy. We see this guy and we’re like “oh, this is a Derrick Beckles sketch,” but if a bigfoot museum curator saw him they’d say, “This fucking guy agai– hey! You can’t come in here telling people sasquatch is an interdimensional soldier; that theory has been debunked, he is a creature of peace!”

Brockway: Wait, which bigfoot? The Blood Bonded Apes are- No, we canā€™t get distracted. Iā€™ve looked everywhere and if the 2-Bru Krew is doing a bit, itā€™s to nobody, itā€™s never acknowledged, and the kayfabe is absolute. If iā€™m wrong and this is all a secret avant garde comedy scavenger hunt that I didnā€™t get, Iā€™ll tank that hit. This is masterfully done.

Seanbaby: Agreed. Let the record show that if this is a prank we will kiss for one minute. So vows The Wildman SquaAad.

Brockway: At least one minute! Letā€™s take a look at their book Keepers of the Gate.

Brockway: Hereā€™s the cast of characters in their words:

ā€œVictor Von Luther, the antihero gunfighting exorcist priest.

Drago Borislav the brave immortal knight with supernatural abilities who lives only to wage war on demons.

Father Gino Benelli, the elderly exorcist priestā€¦ who was once a mafia hitman.ā€

Brockway: Itā€™s like Cocktails butā€¦ no, this is exactly like Cocktails.

ā€œAnastasia, the half fallen angel nephilim ex-KFB agent, whoā€™s as deadly as she is lovely.

Trixie Miller, the young woman caught in a forbidden love affair with the priest Von Luther who saved her from demonic possession.ā€

Seanbaby: “Anastasia! Anastasia, hi, no I can’t afford a table dance until Friday! You smell nice, I called you over to tell you I put you and Trixie in my new novel! Your character is half fallen angel / half regular angel and HOT! Trixie gets to fuck m– the main character! No, I never thought to give them motivations! Do girls even have tho– okay, bye! I’ll bring you in a copy!”

Brockway: I think a total of one female character is mentioned in these trailers and sheā€™s referred to as ā€œan intellectual tavern maiden.ā€ If thatā€™s not a secret ode to a Hooters waitress who has problems enforcing boundaries, the Los MaXimum Men will kiss for four straight minutes.

Wait, we missed my favorite character!

ā€œAnd Ivan, the paranormal wolf with an uncanny senseā€¦ of being able to hunt vampires!ā€

Brockway: A fire-breathing wolf who hunts nude vampires to explode their tits sounds like my favorite Persona summon. The 2-Bru Krew can never leave well enough alone. Thereā€™s always one more thing than a coherent premise allowsā€¦.

ā€¦

And then a long pause and eight more things.

Seanbaby: I take it back about being fooled by this obvious Laser Cats shit. There is no way the fire sneezing wolf is sincere. That’s a clip from Hilarious Zero Budgets Try Not To Laugh Challenge Subscribe For More Make 299 ETH Kidnapping Tourist.

Brockway: If weā€™re wrong we will k- no, this is getting weird.

The book is introduced as being ā€œwritten by the authors who revolutionized the vampire genre, the 2-BRU Krew!ā€

This is their first novel.

Seanbaby: Man, that’s weird, because I spotted a few cliches in 2-BRU Krew’s character backstories.

Brockway: Cliches? You son of a bitch, tell me youā€™ve seen this before: Hereā€™s a chubby priest doing gun-tutting stunts to fairy swoops.

Seanbaby: This looks like a crowdfunding video for a right wing comedy movie called The Pope’s Express Pizza Hut Shooter.

Brockway: This looks like the Devil May Cry you have at hom-

Brockway: Oh, he wasnā€™t done. Iā€™m sorry. This looks like Steven Seagal in Sunset of Blood II: Cardinal Sin, he pla-

Seanbaby: ha ha ha this rules.

Brockway: Jesus Christ weā€™re going to spend this whole afternoon watching a Kansas steak house scourge go for his black belt in Catholic gunkata.

Seanbaby: “For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church has lived by the same old routine. But a lost scripture found in one special boy’s attic is about to change all that. Coming this summer, Ronald McDonald is… Cardinal Fuck You.”

Brockway: Between religious pistol juggling, weā€™re treated to stolen footage from a French EDM video.

Seanbaby: I think I figured it out. The 2-Bru Krew’s day job is filming stock footage clips and since no one ever bought “Christmas Karate Priest Pulls Gun (74 Variations)” or “Undercover Cop 1980s Selling a Handjob” they built this trailer around them.

Brockway: Oh itā€™s a How To with John Wilson situation, but from the opposite direction. I get it.

They close the trailer with ā€œprepare to be scared, prepare to be thrilled, prepare to be shocked, prepare to beā€¦ surprisingly enlightened!ā€

Oh shit.

Is this a Christian thing?

Brockway: Itā€™s a Christian nerd thing.

Seanbaby: “Christian nerd” is almost as redundant as “antihero gunfighting priest,” boom, in your face, Cardinal Ronald McDonald.

Brockway: No. I donā€™t think you understand-

Seanbaby: “Redhead Wormhole Jesus with Mike and Others” is available from 2-Bru Stock Foo2ge for $29.99 and comes with 11 “Candyland Priest Fussing With New Gun” clips of your choice.

Brockway: Youā€™re not listening.

Seanbaby: Holy shit.

Brockway: Holy shit.

Seanbaby: I have no idea what’s going on. I never got this far in Lutheran CyberTales: An Interactive CD-ROM Adventure.

Brockway: Youā€™re supposed to use the meta-spikes on the laser gate. You get the missive from the Martintaur in Thesesā€™ Labyrinth, the answer to his riddle is ā€œhe was on a Diet.ā€

Seanbaby: What a journey. This was so many steps to show several people a commercial for the 9872nd post apocalypse novel exactly like this. It’s arguably too long for a full adaptation, 40% of it is variations on nothing, and at no point during blue laser Jesus or fire-squirting wolf did they think, “we should cut something, anything.” If a 7-year-old made this, their most supportive grandparent would say, “maybe hire an editor, you self-indulgent piece of shit hack.”

Brockway: So thatā€™s it, weā€™ll g-

Brockway: Alright, letā€™s move on t-

Seanbaby:

Brockway: ā€¦

Youā€™re not getting me again.

Brockway: The 2-Bru K-

Seanbaby: There’s something strange about this. I mean besides the obvious. Co-creators can’t produce a project like this. Especially brothers. Brothers tell each other when they suck. I don’t care who your brother is, if they walked in on you inventing pistol karate in a priest costume and riding gloves you would instantly feel the shame of that. They wouldn’t post the video as a book trailer. They’d post it as “My Brother The Star Wars Kid: Dickhead Caught Making Christian Equilibrium.” My point is, this doesn’t have “Krew” energy. This feels like a man alone in the woods with a trial version of After Effects.

Brockway: I donā€™t think anyone but a Fort Worth Golden Corral waiter has ever told the 2-Bru Krew to stop. Hereā€™s the actual prose from Keepers of the Gate.

Brockway: Look how many words it takes them to say ā€œdamn, women be shoppinā€™.ā€

Seanbaby: The hot half-angel/half-different-angel girl bought two Master Panda’s Chop-Suey Palace t-shirts at $24.95 a piece in a very long rant about prices nowadays. In writing we call this “good writing.”

Brockway: Even the copyright page needs medication.

Seanbaby: There are two parts to a good joke. Part 1 is a 350-word list of every person and thing you can think of, and Part 2 is something unexpected like only having a Part 1.

Brockway: Letā€™s get into the book itself. Itā€™s dedicated to a quote by The 2-Bru Krew. One more time: They dedicated their book to a catchphrase they made up. I have dedicated books to my dogs, whiskey, and spite, and even I find this frivolous.

Seanbaby: “Everything in this book is parody. Furthermore it is fictitious, complete parody, and parody. We dedicate it to truth, whichever one you want.”

Brockway: The prologue is also a quote by the 2-Bru Krew. Itā€™s also not a prologue.

Seanbaby: … between destiny and forever stands Maybelline.

Brockway: There are three forewords, and none of them are forewords.

Brockway: Now the book startsā€¦

Seanbaby: I don’t believe you.

Brockway: … with a section header warning you about the incoming chapterā€¦

Seanbaby: I don’t believe you.

Brockway: via a quote from the 2-Bru Krew.

Brockway: I read it for an hour and I never made it to the actual book.

Seanbaby: What the shit is going on? Did a robot malfunction, or did an isolated fundamentalist upbringing go exactly according to plan?

Brockway: It might be both. This is what youā€™d get if you programmed an AI to raise a religious dork and it accidentally trawled The Dresden Files. This is pinging all of my Amazon scam sensors. These books must be 50 pages long and plagiarized from fanfiction.

Brockway: 1586 pages??

Seanbaby: If this moves up 73,019 spaces, it’ll make it into Amazon’s Top 2,000,000, or as we call it in the industry, “Moms Who Tried To Print And Accidentally Published a PDF to the Kindle Store.”

Brockway: Philip K. Dick needed the threat of poverty and the promise of amphetamines for half this output. He only made it seven months before his best friend was a head in the sky. And this is all within the last six months? We were so close to being right. Iā€™ve got it now: this is an AI chatbot scam.

Seanbaby: I know enough about madness to know there’s no way you solved this already.

Brockway: You called it. I ran this through every AI checker I could find, and they all said thereā€™s a zero percent chance. Iā€™ve never seen the percentage so low. The robots want no part of this.

Seanbaby: What would an AI have to be trained on to make this? A teenage boy’s dream journal who went missing at the premiere of Dracula 2000 over and over and over? No, that’s not it. I know enough about madness to know I just gave the Dripping Springs sheriff’s department their first lead in years, but there’s no way we solved this already.

Brockway: We havenā€™t even finished complicating it! There are also ā€œANIME-Illustrated Light Novelā€ adaptations of the books, written and illustrated byā€¦ ā€¦ ā€¦ ā€¦ the 2-Bru Krew!

Seanbaby: God damn it, of course there is.

Brockway: Iā€™ve been professionally on the internet for 15 years. I recognize the art style of a Sonic the Hedgehog DeviantArt profile with plenty of commission spots still open.

Seanbaby: Yeah, it’s like we’ve been training our whole lives to decode this, and yet here we are dumbfounded by its mystery like the 2-Bru Krew with a bra strap.

Brockway: I offered Amazon anything they wanted, and I bit my lip as I emphasized ā€œanythingā€ ā€“ but it still says theyā€™re not available. Letā€™s move on.

Seanbaby: I bet you ninety seconds of kissing that these are each 20 pages of intro, six or seven unfinished comic panels, and 170 pages of behind-the-scenes sketches.

Brockway: Iā€™ll take that bet and raise you 12 straight minutes of kissing and gentle hand stuff. They wrote 1600 pages of urban fantasy tropes and then seven hours of trailers for it. Output is not their problem. Or it is, but in a different direction.

Letā€™s try another, Deceivers is the spinoff series of Keepers of the Gate.

Brockway: Itā€™s about ā€œwerewoofsā€ – they pronounce it that way in the trailer and it is adorable – who bioengineered a plague of demons to start a nuclear apocalypse. Maybe? Itā€™s so many hats on hats that God will teach mankind humility and scatter this tower of hats which intrudes upon his kingdom.

Seanbaby: It’s crazy to me how there’s no Sharknado vibe to any of this. The 2-Bru Krew have no idea this is bad, and they’re not being cute. They, with all their hearts, think this is awesome. I thought this type of wholehearted incompetence died in 1991 when the film Cool As Ice starring Vanilla Ice strangled it to death.

Brockway: The Deceivers trailers star my favorite character since the rapping grandma in Cool as Ice: meet Nuclear Werewoof.

Brockway: Man, Legacy of Kain really holds up for a PS1 title.

Seanbaby: It was such a bold decision to add 4x strategy elements to a second person werewolf bombing game.

Brockway: They use this same werewoof and its two animations over and over again, green screening it in front of stock footage like heā€™s killing it at karaoke.


Seanbaby: ” ā™Ŗ But then you ate so much you nearly split your pants so girl starts gawkingguys y- walken styou starts talkin’ says says she wandance! kzh… likes togroove! So don’t jus– fatso bust a move! Musical break four measures!. ā™Ŗ “

Brockway: Letā€™s move on from OH SHIT chubby Catholic cosplay gunkata INTO double reactor werewoof.

Seanbaby: Oh, wow. You can’t even render those images unless you’re running on a cracked version of Windows XP.

Ā 

Brockway: The other 2-Bru Krew series is a historical western, which starts with Old San Antone ā€œDawn of the Legendā€ The Chronicles of Hondo Stone and Kid Carter Book 1. Itā€™s the first book title with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Brockway: This man is not welcome back at several rodeos. This looks like Bobby Sixkiller in a Scottsdale community theater musical adaptation of Renegade.

Seanbaby: This looks like a waiter who got fired for breaking character too many times at Tumbleweed Todd’s Wild West Chop-Suey Palace. He looks like a Motel 6 guest in Santa Fe who threatened his family he would “go have fun without them” and they called his bluff.

Brockway: Hey look, this won the Literary Titan Gold Book Award, which is an award you can buy for $59 dollars and 3 seconds of Googling.

Seanbaby: If someone is selling $60 fake book awards to hopeless authors, there is no limit to what they’ll do for money. The white board at the Literary Titan Book Awards definitely says “Blackmail kids? Get jobs at hospice & sell elderly as dog food? Trump rap?”

Brockway: I know just the rappers to do it.

Iā€™m tired of dunking on these guys by naming the awards theyā€™ve won, when all theyā€™ve done is gift us boundless joy. Letā€™s get to The Old San Antone trailers.

Seanbaby: Fuck! Fuck!!

Brockway: It rules, thereā€™s no universe in which this doesnā€™t rule. But you will have to tolerate incessant narrator rambling. It sounds like the trailer voice guy is sundowning. The 2-Bru Krew will orbit an idea for two minutes and never once land on it. Itā€™s like watching a seagull circle a dead possum on a busy highway. You know he wants to go for it, but the second he does heā€™s going to be obliterated by a truck. But right when your eyes glaze over listening to all the ways Websterā€™s Dictionary defines a man, you get sucked back in with a snippet of blazing action.

Seanbaby: Is something wrong with this image? All I see is a thrilling blur of motion. If I had to describe it I’d say, “at inhuman speed, a bean bag chair becomes Death?” It might be an error on my end. That double werewolf gif gave me a lot of system errors I’d never seen before.

Brockway: Thrilling skit after skit, enough to test the limits of even the most patient Tombstone gift shop cashier!

Seanbaby: I read somewhere that becoming Star Wars Kid was really hard on Star Wars Kid, but I think Star Wars Kid would feel a lot less alone if he knew these existed.

Brockway: The 2-Bru Krew wouldā€™ve called him a punk and made him watch all 17 hours and 84 costume changes of The Old San Antone trailers.

Seanbaby: I don’t think this is second hand embarrassment he’s making me feel. I mean, there’s that, sure. But it’s more of a creeping sense of danger, like any moment I’m going to hear a gasp behind me and someone scream, “No no don’t look at that that’s private THAT’S PRIVATE!!!” And then I’ll barely have 17 seconds to dodge as he quickdraws his six shooter to protect his most shameful secret. But no! He thinks this kicks ass! He uploaded these on purpose! All of them!

Brockway: Youā€™re already overloading on 2-Bru Krew cowboy play, but Iā€™m telling you that I have shown restraint hereā€¦

Seanbaby: I guess he could have filmed all these in a few days, but these really do give the sense he has been playing Cowboys and Nothings, by himself, for several human lifetimes.

Brockway: Wait, they have an actual show!

Brockway: A giant diamond and silver cross hangs below his golden cross tie pin beside his full finger crucifix ring. If you tell him thatā€™s too much heā€™ll spin kick you right over the Golden Corral gravy ark.

Seanbaby: If you’re not doing everything at 3740% into the void why bother doing it at all?

Brockway: What those incredible trailers are missing, if art can be said to be imperfect at all, which it canā€™t, how dare you, are the personas of the Bru Krew themselves. There is a lot of awkward hip hop slang somebodyā€™s youth pastor learned secondhand.

Seanbaby: Oh thank God, they’re finally doing something unlikeable. I was worried I’d leave this wanting to read 70,000 pages of their nuclear werewolf novels, my playa.

Brockway: Letā€™s be clear: I love them with all my heart. These boys are-

Wait. Why is there only one? This is no Krew. The host ā€œO.G. Foxā€ doesnā€™t explain, he just says ā€œhere with me in spirit is my bru, my brother, my best friend, Duane ā€˜Mr. Bearā€™ Campos.ā€ Putting aside those nicknames and their undeniable proof of my DeviantArt theory, one of the Krew is in none of the trailers and canā€™t be bothered to show up for the show?

Seanbaby: Oh no.

Brockway: Hold on, heā€™s fucking dead??

Seanbaby: Oh no, what the fuck.

Brockway: Is he dead?! O.G. Fox pours one out for Mr. Bear, but also refers to him in the present tense and never says how or when he died. Itā€™s even crazier to dedicate this stuff to the honor of his memory if he’s just like, in Atlanta.

Seanbaby: Well, fuck. Now I love them again.

Brockway: We just found out one half of this rhyming cowboy Christian author posse is a ghost, if you donā€™t fall in love with that you need three visions and a Christmas miracle to turn your heart.

Mr. Bear, seen here in the best strip mall dojo gi $47.85 can buy was-

Oh, holy shit it looks like he may have died before this and never had any part in the books?

This has just become impossible to discuss. This revelation short-circuited my moral compass. Thereā€™s no comedy handbook for this kind of bonkers. Itā€™s totally sweet to incorporate the memory of your deceased brother into your writing; itā€™s fucking crazy to incorporate him into your LLC. Itā€™s a noble gesture to consider a dead person still part of a crew; if you consider him a full partner you probably have a basement full of stolen mail. This may be a genuine lunatic. I think thatā€™s against the rules to make fun of. Fuck. Is morality going to force us to delete everything we just wrote?

Seanbaby: Don’t you dare. Of all the journeys dark artifacts have taken us on, none have twisted like this. This is like if the Sixth Sense was 79 hours long and about playing cowboy in the mirror. My brain is a centerpiece on the tablecloth of reality getting yanked away by a clumsy magician. If you delete a single word of this I will co-write 11 pirate centaur novels with your corpse.

Brockway: No, youā€™re right. We have to hit publish. it would be immoral not to boost this joy. It’s Roko’s Basilisk but for born-again hip hop cowpoke spirit brothers. If we donā€™t do this then future generations of ascended humans will find the 2-Bru Krew in our digital rubble, and theyā€™ll know we withheld it from humanity. Theyā€™ll make virtual copies of us to torture forever. Those will be our faces in the 2-Bru Krew trailers, eternally magic blasted by French ravers and devoured by Playstation werewoofs. Theyā€™ll make us kiss for up to 17 minutes, aggressive hand stuff! Oh no!

This article was brought to you by a hot Hot Dog Tip from Chase.