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believe victims

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  1. believe victims
    Let's start this off simply: I have been a member of the BZPower comics community since December of 2007, or almost seven years now. I've been involved in this community for longer than Dark709 at this point (as he started making comics in 2004, and left the site in '09-'10). As such, I'd like to think I've learned a lot about the interesting sort of culture that has formed there for practically a decade now.
     
    If I had to describe it, and if I weren't prone to theatrics at the time, I'd describe it as "stagnant". (If I were prone to theatrics, it would be "diseased".)
     
    BZPower comics have been at a complete standstill as far as innovation in comics goes. Well, not a complete standstill, but more on that later. Humorous comics are bound to all be bound by a single thread: a studio-based comic with an author avatar main character. I don't know who started the trend, but I know who popularized it the most, and that's Dark709. He was so singularly influential in the late 2000s comic making scene that, if I had to hazard a guess, 95% of comics were studio comics, and 80% used Chimoru Omega. And nobody ever expanded upon the idea, or took in a new direction. It was always played out the same. The author avatar was either cool-headed or completely crazy if the situation demanded it, some character had a stupid food obsession, some villain wanted to take over the comics (though as time dragged on that became less common), etc. In terms of story, I'd say we haven't seen much innovation since, say, 2008.
     
    There were exceptions, of course. The apocryphal "the Group" made several original comics, including the legendary Generic Quest. Of course, the comics forum was already pretty set in its ways by the time comics like that started forming, and what that meant was, instead of promoting diversity the forum, a new sect of derivative comics cropped up: the photorealistic, heavily detailed kind, and the rigorous MAS adventures. The former I'll touch up on in a bit, but the latter was interesting, because what usually happened was they flopped terribly. I don't even remember if Generic Quest itself ended, but its generic brand products usually fizzled out after a couple author cycles at most. Nobody had the motivation, the organization, or the conviction to pull it off, but nobody learned, either. They just kept popping up until the forum itself started to lose momentum following the downtime.
     
    Both the points I've said I'd touch upon are, in fact, the same point: photorealism/attention to detail. "The Group" and other comic makers like Nuparurocks, whose skills in image editing programs were far above those of most other people, started a veritable arms race for high-quality graphics in comics. I had forgotten about this bit of culture until recently, when I checked out a comic series at random, and found that they had gone as far as to put reflections on hardwood floors, shadows beneath the characters, and even kept the sheath of a katana on-screen after it had been discarded. All of this, and yet one thing was still missing: humor. In all the years of battling for graphic supremacy, no one had changed the formula for actually coming up with jokes. Your average BZPower comic still spouts "jokes" that have been used since I started making comics, if it has what could be called a joke to begin with. Often humor is derived from poorly-conveyed slapstick or Tim Buckley-esque blocks of text to lead up to some inane joke. Rarely have I seen people improve so much, yet so little at the same time.
     
    Remember, a part of this is that I was in this. For the longest time, I made studio comics where my mediocre author avatar lorded over a cast of cardboard cutouts as I injected my terrible sense of humor into it. The only reason I don't anymore was that I broke free. I did something the Comics forum desperately needed, and innovated with my still-slightly-derivative series, BIONICLES ADVENTURS COMIXS.
     
    The backlash was terrible, and continues to be. People still say I don't take the business seriously because I tried a comic the forum had never seen before, the ironically terrible. Any time I enter a site-wide contest, I'm met with harsh, passive-aggressive comments, suggesting I shouldn't have bothered, or that my entry is a joke (ironic, for the comics section). It was rough at first, true; the early comics are my most regrettable. But if I had quit and gone back to studio comics, I would have been all the worse off. Instead, I forged ahead, and some friends joined with me in making comics unlike anything this forum had seen before.*
     
    BAC isn't a pinnacle of perfection, and I don't want this to come across as blowing my own saxophone. In fact, when people make new comics that try to fit the same niche, it's disappointing to me. I don't want to start a niche of comics, and BAC is really the sort of thing you can only pull off once. I want everyone to question why you make studio comics, why you use the sprites you use, or even use sprites at all, and what is truly the meaning of making visual entertainment. I managed to break away from making the same, dull comics for the rest of my BZP career, and I encourage anyone with the strength and inspiration to try something new to do so.
     
    (This whole rant aside, I can think of a couple other comic series that have innovated recently, and I'd be remiss in omitting them. Rahkshi Lalonde's A Grim Development appears to be trying to break into the horror genre, and I am interested in seeing where that story goes. Kakaru's Studio Comic, despite its name, is finally breathing some new life into the genre, with a unique art style and sense of humor.)
     
    *Okay, this isn't technically true. I can think of at least one other series before BAC that tried to break into the ironically awful gig, but it was pretty much straight-up sbahj jokes transplanted in a Bionicle setting, whereas BAC has started finding its own identity
     
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
     
    Apologies if this seems incoherent. This isn't so much an orgnaized essay as much as it is a stream of consciousness thing, an outpouring of my thoughts on different things about the forum, from an inside perspective. I hope this is an interesting look at a small part of the strange subculture of BZP comics.
  2. believe victims

    PSA

    By believe victims,

    If your story about the genus Brontosaurus being revived is accompanied by a tail-dragging, swamp-dwelling, camarasaur-headed, wrinkly elephantine monstrosity then I hate you.
  3. believe victims
    their theme colors look nice together
    they're the only main Elves to appear in a first wave set together without Emily Jones
    their personalities mesh well together (daydreamer+inventor)

    it's time to see the light
     

     
    it's gotta be canon
  6. believe victims

    Giraffes

    By believe victims,

    imagine your favorite animal is giraffes. You adore giraffes, and have dedicated a sizable chunk of your life to learning everything there is to know about giraffes. You are a giraffe expert.
     
    Now imagine that there was a highly influential movie about giraffes released a couple decades ago, one that spawned an entire giraffe franchise. People would expect you to be ecstatic, but you can’t be. Why?
     
    Because the giraffe movie made giraffes thirty feet tall, purple monsters with rams horns and bare skin. Because the giraffe movie said the giraffe’s closest relative is the blue whale. Because the giraffe movie featured an idiot mathematician who knows nothing about giraffes who talks about how a giraffe-themed theme park was always doomed to fail because “chaos theory”.
     
    and the majority of people who see that movie accept that as what giraffes are like. everywhere you go, you see purple giraffe toys with horns. People make weird guttural screams and say they’re making giraffe sounds. People protest actual giraffe facts in favor of what was featured in this giraffe movie. And when you complain that that’s not what giraffes were like, people shut you up and say “calm down, it’s just a movie, it doesn’t have to be realistic” even though the movie presented everything about those giraffes as direct fact and most people took it as such. People call you a giraffe pedant for hating that movie and what it did to giraffes, and paint you as irrational.
     
    in case it wasn’t glaringly obvious, that’s what Jurassic Park is like to me.
  7. believe victims
    There is a very big difference between "old-fashioned" and "outdated and bigoted", and for some reason people who are the latter like to claim they are the former. I'm here to point out the difference between the two that I thought was very clear, but for some reason people like to muddy. I'm going to give you some examples of worldviews, and then explain whether it's old-fashioned, or just straight-up bigoted.
     
    Let's start easy.
     
    People of different races are fundamentally different in ways that makes one or the other superior.
     
    Got an answer? Well, I hope it was "that's racist" because that is exactly correct. If you hold the above opinion, you are not old-fashioned, just racist.
     
    Let's try another one.
     
    I prefer the way people dressed in the '20s.
     
    That one's a bit trickier, but I believe that's simply old-fashioned. Preferring a dated method of dress doesn't perpetuate harmful myths. It's just a taste in fashion.
     
    Women are not fit for combat.
     
    This is the one I wanted to get to, because I have seen someone on this very site say it and defend it as being old-fashioned, and I am here to tell you it's not. It's just sexist. There are many, many women who serve in the military or who can defend themselves or wield a weapon or do any of the things men do in combat situations. Women are not more delicate, more in need of protection, or weaker than men. That is a stereotype perpetuated by society to make men seem superior to women.
     
    I'd love to go on, but this entry was really just to hit that last point, and to push anyone who defends their beliefs as simply being old-fashioned to look at what they believe, and ask themselves, "Is this really just old fashioned, or is this belief actively hurtful to other people?"
     
    I'm leaving this entry open in hopes there will be some good discussion. Be cool, y'all.
  8. believe victims

    Classic BZP

    By believe victims,

    Remember back in 2010-2012 when if you so much as whispered the word "gay" your blog would explode in controversy as people tried to tell you you're wrong and disgusting as passive-aggressively as possible?
     
    Haha. Good times.
     
    Old BZP was terrible.
     
    (of course now I can say I'm a lesbian all I want thanks to the work of the administration :3 )
  9. believe victims

    Natural Selection

    By believe victims,

    (you probably thought this was going to be a rant about how wonderfully true evolution is but don't worry it's not)
     
    Last night, on a late-night whim (that also led to a somewhat hare-brained scheme related to starting the Crow Agricultural Revolution), I wrote a bit of a short horror story. I say it's a horror story but honestly I may have gone to subtle with it and ended up with a multi-paragraph description of evolution. Anyway, point is, I wrote a short story.
     
    Here it is.
     
    I'd appreciate any comments or criticism people can give me on it. I think I've actually got a good idea here, but some outside perspectives could help me make an all-around better story.
  10. believe victims
    So, as of today, Bionicle's return in 2015 is confirmed. Which means LEGO is banning the Hero Factory toyline, even though it's story didn't even get to finish. That's why I want all the fans of Hero Factory to come together and barrage LEGO with complaints. Demand LEGO finish Hero Factory! Bring back my favorite toyline! Force LEGO to repeal the ban on Hero Factory! Who's with me?
  11. believe victims
    the protags die in chapter one. villain wins and gloats for the rest of the book
    everything explodes for no reason
    in the last chapter it suddenly switches to the end of a completely different story without resolving the previous one
    twelve straight pages of “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

  13. believe victims
    Remember real dinosaurs? I don't mean that upright-walking bipedal garbage, I mean this. Giant iguanas are so much cooler than what palaeontologists have reduced dinosaurs to. Active lifestyles? As if they could possibly know that from JUST BONES. Sick of all the sensationalism in palaeontology.
  15. believe victims
    You groan. "No," you grouch, "and I was hoping you never would." However, you clicked on an entry about Jurassic Park by me knowing full well what that entails, so chances are you're going to read the whole thing anyway.
     
    Jurassic World is the latest in a series of movies that have probably done as much harm to public perception of dinosaurs as they have good. However, its impact will be worse than the previous three, almost entirely because of when it's being released.
     
    Jurassic Park, for all the flaws I will happily call out, was actually rather revolutionary for a dinosaur film. Besides some very stupid errors, the dinosaurs were portrayed as more active and more realistic as animals than ever before. It brought then-modern depictions of dinosaurs to an audience that sorely needed to see them. This, I acknowledge.
     
    Now, it's been what, twenty years since the original movie? Something like that? Why, we've discovered all kinds of things about dinosaurs since then! Think of the feathers! Think of the lifestyles we can emulate from our best guesses! Think of how much we could expand on the original movie's idea of dinosaurs evolving into birds! Thinking of all that?
     
    Well, they didn't. In fact, they practically thumb their nose at paleontologists with the phrase "We have learned more in the past decade from genetics than a century of digging up bones". Just as Jurassic Park brought dinosaurs from the 90s to the audiences in the 90s, so too does Jurassic World bring dinosaurs from the 90s to audiences in 2015. Their skin is wrinkly and elephantine, their pupils are slitted, and even their mosasaur has a "frill" running down its back, straight from a 60's illustration.
     
    And it's not just me who's disappointed. Actual paleontologists, people who make their career doing this sort of thing, are disappointed in how little thought was put into this. If Jurassic Park was a loving nod to paleontology, Jurassic World is a kick in the groin. This isn't a dinosaur movie, it's a monster movie.
     
    Now, there are a couple arguments as to why the dinosaurs "needed" to look like this, most of which are complete bull. The first thing anyone says is "continuity", which is absurd, because if it was about continuity, the dinosaurs would not look like those from the first movie; they'd look like those from the third, the last Jurassic Park movie before this one. That's how continuity works.
     
    "They were genetically engineered to look this way!" Okay, who's going to say that to the audience? Who's going to straight-up say "this is not what actual dinosaurs looked like"? Or is this being left up to fan theories to explain away criticisms made by people who care? Because if nobody in the movie says "this is not what dinosaurs look like", a majority of the people who see the movie will think "this is what dinosaurs look like", which is what I care about here. It's not just about the inaccurate depictions, but about the fact that people take these inaccurate depictions as fact. As a result, there are people who will vehemently oppose any dinosaur depiction that doesn't match what they saw in Jurassic Park. That's why it matters how clear it is that this is not how dinosaurs looked.
     
    Next up, someone says "it's just a movie" and tells me to stop making such a big deal out of this. I smirk like a Yu-Gi-Oh character as I reveal you have activated my trap card, Scientific Study. It rationally explains the effect media has on public understanding of science, sending your Bad Argument to the Shadow Realm. I place a face-down card and end my turn.
     
    "So then, Wise Jess," you say, bowing before my humble form, "what do you think the reason for not changing the dinosaurs is?"
     
    Well, it's simple: nostalgia. A majority of the people who are going to buy tickets for this movie are already enormous fans of the original film, and what that means is they've already made up their mind about changing their precious "velociraptors" and "T rexes" and they will not stand for any of it. Just look at the massive backlash paleontologists have received for voicing their concerns; the Jurassic Park fanbase is very resistant to changes in our understanding of paleontology. Just about any BANDit (BAND=Birds Are Not Dinosaurs) will cite Jurassic Park depictions as what they believe dinosaurs looked like as they fight against the idea of feathered dinosaurs.
     
    So in the end, this was a foregone conclusion. Dinosaurs are so entrenched in the idea they have to look "cool" that at this point, the Jurassic Park franchise has no choice but to stick with outdated dinosaurs until the end of time, or else they lose their fanbase, which claims to "love" dinosaurs. Love is in quotations, because as I put it rather recently:
  16. believe victims
    Okay, imagine this: imagine if, in order to understand any new Transformers series, you had to watch the entirety of the G1 cartoon.
     
    Now, imagine if, instead of running for three years, it ran for ten.
     
    Now imagine if it wasn't actually a cartoon, but a story splattered across books, comics, online serials, winning BZP stories, and random answers from the author lost to time.
     
    Now imagine if it didn't gain a massive following, but more of a niche audience, when it first aired, thus making access to most of those resources spotty.
     
    Imagine what would happen to every new Transformers series if that were the case.
     
    Spoiler alert-- it would flop like a bad diver from a 100 foot drop on a pool. And it would hurt about as badly.
     
    That is the most compelling evidence that Bionicle 2015 will be a reboot-- to do otherwise would be an awful, terrible, horrible business decision.
  17. believe victims
    (This is related to the latest in S&T arguments, but reading the argument is not necessarily a prerequisite for understanding this entry. Additionally, while it was sparked by something bonesiii said, this entry isn't necessarily directed at him.)
     
    I've heard that Bionicle was supposed to take some work to understand a few times now now, and it just doesn't click with me. When I think of a story that requires work to understand, I think of Snowpiercer, with its rich, deep-running themes that run throughout its entire core. I think of The Great Gatsby, which is filled with symbolism that works towards its greater ideas.
     
    Basically, when I think of a story that takes some work to understand, I think of theme.
     
    The reason I think of working towards theme is that it's one of two fulfilling things to work for when reading a story. (The other is mostly applicable to detective stories, which is working out the mystery before the answer is revealed.) I've said it before (where it fell upon rather deaf ears) but theme is at the heart of every story. Every story sends a message. (Maybe more. (Imagine.)) In fact, one could say that conveying a theme is the goal of all stories (besides those that also strive to sell toys.) To understand a theme and unwrap the author's intent takes a lot of work, and doesn't even always have a concrete correct answer, but what it gives you is a deeper understanding of the story. Snowpiercer takes work to understand, but when you do understand it, it's so much more fulfilling than just an action movie on an apocalypse train. It's this work that I expect a story to provide, and it's the lack of such work that usually results in me finding a story unengaging, because without theme, there's just not much there. Things just happen. It's why it infuriates me when I see someone say to turn your brain off and enjoy the movie; to me, no story should ever only be enjoyable without thought. It needs substance. That is how a story should make you think.
     
    Contrast this with the evidence I've seen that Bionicle was meant to make you think. Bionicle's theme is mind-bogglingly simple to figure out, imo; it's a nine-year story about team work, and occasionally more refined aspects like leadership. That's not what I'm told needs thought. What I'm told I need to think about is the height of robots, or the wacked-out physics, or whether Kapura teleports via flatulence. Even just piecing the wildly tangled knots of storylines is work. That's not the work I expect from a story; I'm not supposed to figure out the logistics of the fictional world. It's not worthy work to come up with the midichlorians of Bionicle, because what does that actually have to do with the story? How is my understanding of the story itself actually enriched by that? Is the thinking required to make sense of this story actually worth it?
     
    idk, that's my thoughts on the role of thinking in stories. I don't want to turn my brain off, but I want my efforts to actually be rewarded with a deeper understanding of the story rather than simply making sense of an author's inability to organize storyline coherently.
  19. believe victims

    "ohwunners"

    By believe victims,

    I've noticed, especially on tumblr, a lot of people attempting to push the term "ohwunners" as a term for people who irrationally dislike the new Bionicle. Its origins are obvious; it comes from the term "genwunner" used in the Transformers and Pokemon fandoms, only with "ohwun" used to allude to Bionicle's first year.
     
    To me, that seems like a misnomer. People who loved 2001 above all other years actually seem to be the most vocal supporters of the new Bionicle. In fact, if anyone has shown the most irrational dislike for the line, it's the people who preferred the later years. This seems counterintuitive to what most fandoms experience, but it's pretty easy to see why to me.
     
    The reason is what it turned out to be (which, as I've said before, is pretty much the only way it was going to be). Fans of 2001-03 who grew more critical as time wore on had been begging for Bionicle to return to the feel of Mata Nui, the atmosphere and the mythical nature. They were most of the people disappointed in the 2008 Toa Nuva not resembling their former forms, and most of the people disappointed in how complex and hard sci-fi the story was getting. It's easy to see why they would welcome a reboot that returns to the mythical, brightly-colored island, with Toa that mostly bear resemblance to their previous incarnations, with open arms. (Obviously, there are those who aren't pleased with how the new Toa look, and some irrationally hate that they aren't just the Mata repackaged, but I don't think those are the majority of those angered by the new line.)
     
    Meanwhile, fans of the later years were those most likely to root for a continuation, to pick up the mangled cable of storyline Bionicle left off, to make sets for all the characters who were never meant to have sets, to finish serials a majority of the people buying the toys weren't even reading. They were the ones most likely to be up in arms about rebooting the story, and returning to a simpler premise, and only including the six Toa Mata from the original story, and simplifying things for easier accessibility to the target audience. Someone who preferred, or even just came in at, the later years of Bionicle are more likely to interpret the new story as mind-numbingly simple compared to the previous one, even though it's no simpler than the original Legend of Mata Nui. Simply put, they had the most to "lose" in a reboot.
     
    Obviously, it's not black and white in any way. People have legitimate criticisms of the new line, and people don't fall into these archetypes cleanly by any means; there are people who could be described as "ohwunners" and those who preferred the later years who welcome the new story. However, when it comes to the largest population of irrational hatred, labelling them "ohwunners" seems disingenuous, because '01 is likely not to be the year they prefer, or even the year they started at. Chances are, they preferred the story in its final stages.
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