originally posted at https://comicalmomentum.tumblr.com/po...
so we’ve caught up far enough with the main comic that we need to read more EGS:NP, I think. Since there have been minor mentions of EGS:NP - mostly regarding outfits - lets do that now.
The order you get clicking through stories is completely different to the order in the drop-down menu, which is confusing! We’ve previously covered up to Dan in the MUD in click-through order.
EGS-Con 2006
so it’s a skit on conventions. Susan and Sarah attend a convention. The second comic has a crappy fatphobic joke about harassment. The convention has a shitty badge policy.
Someone is in skimpy cosplay and there are some really uncomfortable jokes where I’m not sure what direction they’re supposed to be punching.
So now it’s time for Cameos Of Comics Dan Shive Reads. None I recognise.
Yeah this wasn’t great.
Oblivious Wand Waving
Tess, who is one of the many variants of Tedd but I forget which context (one of the many AUs maybe? the one where she’s dating Elliot apparently) gets a magic transformation wand and starts accidentally transforming people left right and centre, oblivious to its effects.
Wait I misread this. Tedd acquires a magic wand which appears to not just transform people but also retroactively change memories so it’s as if they’ve always been transformed. In the process Tedd starts going by Tess under the effect of the wand. Of the main cast, Elliot appears to be unchanged but dating Tess, Sarah appears to be made into a male-coded figure, Susan is refusing to transform, Grace appears to be smaller but otherwise unchanged? And maybe dating Sarah?
Diane and her crew get transformed in size, Raven gets transformed into a gothy female-coded figure and is pissed off, Dr Germahn’s assistant Amanda gets made huge, and then the storyline is abruptly shelved.
Skip forward three months to early 2009. Now we’re at a point where the titles are, helpfully, not labelled in the comic. Instead we need to click around in the randomised drop-down menu until we can match the comic to a particular storyline title.
Even more confusingly, the ID number in the database seems to have gone right back to the start: we are now on EGS:NP ?id=1. Yeah. (The series began with ?id=12.) We’re also skipping over ?id=2, which appears to be about Scribblenauts. Maybe we’ll bump into it later.
Revenge of the Jokes
So after capping off the previous storyline, we start with Dan-Shive-by-way-of-Susan’s commentary on vampire romances. Dan Shive is pretty dismissive of the genre, arguing that it’s a bit weird to fantasise about a lover who views us as food. I think the appeal of vampire stories is a subject too complicated to get into here - there are some very reductive readings that tend to spin it very negatively, but it’s a very broad genre which uses a lot of different metaphors so I’m rather more hesitant to make blanket proclamations (and, to lay my cards on the table, I’m into the occasional vampire Rosemary fic). I guess it might be an interesting topic to discuss - you have the aristocracy metaphor, the ‘loves me but might give in to the hunger or whatever’ abuse metaphor, the ‘drinking blood from someone’s neck is pretty hot actually’ metaphor kink…
OK now we hit ?id=2. So the sequence is… 1,3,6,2,7,5,8,4… did he reorder these or something
It’s becoming a bit of a gamer comic for a while, mostly Nintendo focussed, but with the EGS characters. It works about as well as your average gamer comic.
(Not that I want to give the impression that the club is a bad place, mind you. I chatted with Mookie of Dominic Deegan there once, which was fun, and it’s the one place in the game where 90+% of the people seem to stay in character.)
What the fuck, Dan Shive knew Mookie? (If you’re not familiar, Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire is one of the comics the internet (or at least certain parts of it) absolutely loves to hate. At length. As in, writing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of forum pages extensively taking the piss out of the comic, remixing strips into memes (then called ‘strip slays’), following every development in detail… I am only familiar with the instance on the GiantITP forums, though if anyone remembers when Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad trolled the shit out of the webcomics world, Dominic Deegan was one of its favourite targets.
[cw rape]
There are good reasons to be extremely critical of Dominic Deegan - the storyline that’s a contrived scenario to make a rape “morally justified”, by way of gross colonialist stereotypes, being the worst one probably.
[/cw rape]
But I do find it remarkable how the hatedom was so dedicated to the comic - perhaps more devoted than the most ardent fans. Also that my younger self found it worth it to follow those threads and even produce “strip slays” of my own. I don’t think I have them saved, or that they were particularly worth saving.
TF Busters
The numbering scheme is back on track. We have a mythbusters pastiche featuring the transformation gun. There’s more crappy fat jokes, which is unfortunate.
Christmas Intermission
that’s gay ^_^
Standalone Jan 2010
Back to videogame jokes. Nothing much to talk about… ok so Dan Shive does a strip in defence of furries, which is, whatever… but the commentary has some evopsych nonsense in it about attraction to exaggerated figures which would seem to really break down when you accept that attraction is by no means a cultural universal, that the ‘hourglass figure’ Dan Shive discusses is not at all universally considered attractive.
I don’t have a lot to say about the rest? There’s stuff about Star Trek Online, which surprises me as I didn’t realise it was that old! and a ‘fuck the haters’ comic which makes me wonder if this took place in the YWIBAYSFB era.
After that, it goes on hiatus until 2014, so we’ll go back to the main comic until then!
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