Monthly Archives: September 2017

Red vs Blue Season 15 – What the Hell is Payoff (SPOILERS)

By playerprophet Posted in Criticism, Shows Tagged

I’m going to start with a disclaimer that I love Red vs Blue and I’m about to be really mean about it and it’s brand new writer and I feel really terrible. BUT I also feel obligated as an armchair narrative critic to call out its shit so it can be better next time. This post was constructed over a few hours with no editing, in classic narrative word vomit style.

In any narrative, for things to feel really good when it all comes full circle, you have to earn it. As a writer this can be easy to screw up because there’s a lot you need to juggle, especially with a large cast. Things have to be seeded, called back, developed and wrapped. There’s a lot of work involved in good character development.

In Red vs Blue Season 15 there is a lot of this happening. In fact, I would say, too much. Actually what I mean is that it was a goddamn disaster. Things were built, developed, and paid off with a fart sound (Grif and Simmons). Some things came up as payoff completely out of nowhere (Locus). Characters were developed who have already been developed, didn’t need development, and the development they got was shit that had already happened to them (Tucker and Sarge). There was some interesting stuff in Season 15 and some really good jokes, but in the end it feels like it was a waste of time and accomplished nothing.

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Webcomp: the not-Webcomic

By playerprophet Posted in Comics, Games, Those Without Shadows, Webcomps Tagged , , ,

Webcomics have evolved beyond being what we formally understand to be comics. We use the word “comics” for them because, while they sometimes don’t look like comics or sound like comics, readers don’t have language to call them anything different. We say “webcomics” because they’re often image-heavy stories we read online. I believe that this simplification can be harmful to people who are creating narratives outside the box, because it’s difficult to find our market. How will people know what to look for when what they want isn’t anything like a webcomic?

This is what I want to call a Webcomp: a Composite Web Narrative. A webcomp is a story where the medium is the web, and it utilizes any and all of the features available to it in that format. There is no operating terminology for this form of storytelling that encapsulates what it is. Most often, readers will refer to it as a “webcomic”, in spite of everything that it isn’t, because it’s the best word we have to describe it.

Let’s get into this in some more detail.

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