Hi, I'm Hareton Splimby, and welcome to Serious Lore Analysis.
♪♪
[MUSIC CUTS OFF]
[GROANS]
[THEME MUSIC CUTS IN AND OUT REPEATEDLY]
Fucking...
Just... fucking...
[TYPEWRITER POWERS ON]
[THEME MUSIC RESUMES]
[THEME MUSIC STOPS]
You will pay for what you have done.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
[BREATHING HEAVILY]
- [SCREAMS]
- [THEME MUSIC ENDS]
[STATIC, ELECTRIC CRACKLING]
Today on Serious Lore Analysis, we're covering a creative work
that I heavily implied might have been coming next in the last few videos!
And that's right, today we're covering...
the CTRL+ALT+DEL webcomic & animated series.
In retrospect, I think I might have made it too obvious.
For those of you too young to remember the early days of the world,
before we had the internet and hadn't yet achieved the dream of having to argue with Holocaust deniers all day,
humans would amuse themselves by painting stuff on the walls of their caves, or later, drawing it onto paper or canvas.
These scribbles became known as
[PAINFULLY ELONGATED]
"aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrt."
Eventually, however, humans evolved past this bullshit
and realized you could divide up your space into smaller sub-spaces, called
"pah-nells",
and then use that to create several sequential images
which, when read in order, could tell a story.
This "sequence art" later became known as "comics",
for reasons we forgot because it doesn't matter.
Fast forward to the late 90s and early 2000s, where we played video games and things were finally good.
Then, people who enjoyed video games gained access to the internet.
But because they didn't yet have the bandwidth to play most games online
or watch puppy compilations all day and argue in the comments about 9/11,
people instead would amuse themselves online by using "webcomics",
also known as digital versions of comics that you find on the web.
And since the bar for publishing onto the internet was as low as being able to afford server hosting,
or even lower if you used a free website,
people were finally free to create comics for as small or niche an audience as they liked
without any need for mass market appeal, or the production costs of ink and paper and printing,
or, um... quality.
Enter the gaming webcomic, a form of webcomic centering around jokes about games and gaming culture.
The most popular of these was Penny Arcade, a comic still going to this day,
rife with hilarious and well thought out humour.
"Don't stake me bro"? Ha ha ha, hilarious!
It's just like the thing! With the guy!
The bedrock of this type of comic tends to feature several characters, often representative of the authors,
sitting on a couch making hilarious jokes about video games that are out right now,
or inside the fiction of a video game, interacting with it to hilarious consequences.
These two forms were the bedrock of many early gaming webcomics from the late 90s to the early 2000s,
and there were many successful comics using this format,
like Penny Arcade, PvP, Little Gamers, Bob and George, 8-Bit Theater, and others.
All tremendous pieces of art with a lot to say about games and how bad it is that our games are being usurped by money men,
and how funny it would be if you died... in a way a lot bi— uh, like— it's just like in the game!
But for every one of these comics,
there were dozens of poor imitators out to replicate their popularity and profit by reusing the same tropes.
An explosion in the gaming webcomic had begun, and it would continue for over a decade.
Enter Tim Buckley with his own webcomic, CTRL+ALT+DEL, often referred to as CAD.
CAD isn't like the other webcomics. It's not art. It doesn't have value or meaning.
It's trash, and it doesn't say anything at all.
It's full of worthless jokes where the punchline is violence.
It's not like Penny Arcade.
CAD is the "story" of Ethan,
a character who looks suspiciously like how Buckley draws himself.
Ethan and his roommate Lucas talk about video games, and occasionally are inside the games,
where something bad happens to them or people they don't like.
Wow, that's original.
Let's compare and contrast this with a good comic, shall we?
In this 2002 page from Penny Arcade, the author insert characters burn a voodoo doll, hurting George Romero.
Oh my God, look how much better these guys are. This is great!
Meanwhile, look over here at CAD in the slow lane for idiots.
Using violence as a punchline?
What a stupid thing to put in a comic!
Over time, CAD stopped even trying to tell jokes, and it started spending more and more time
exploring the personal lives and development of its characters.
The main characters Ethan & Lucas went on dates, moved apartments, made and lost friends, and started long-term relationships.
Ethan quickly meets and begins dating Lilah, a girl who plays video games,
which, as we all know, is like finding a unicorn.
And, like all girls who do play games, it's her only character trait.
The two inexplicably fall in love, even though Ethan has nothing to offer anyone and is basically unlikable.
It's pretty clear from reading this that Buckley doesn't know how human relationships work.
You could almost point out that this... almost says something
about how people who play video games a lot view human relationships, but...
N-No, no, no, no, it's bad, and it doesn't mean anything.
Tim Buckley's just really bad at making comics.
Oh, also, despite being basically unable to do anything but play video games,
Ethan eventually builds a sentient AI robot who becomes the fourth main character.
Zeke exists to occasionally joke about how humans are made of meat and bad, and he's better than them.
It's clearly inspired by characters like HK-47 from KOTOR or Bender from Futurama, but there's no actual jokes here.
It's what I like to call a joke by association. It's not really a joke,
it's just a vague gesture in the direction of a joke that you might remember from somewhere else.
Somewhere else...
I'm s— I'm somewhere— somewhere else...? I...
(static)
(panting)
Why are you doing this?
Don't do this to yourself.
Don't become one of them.
One of what?
(breathes heavily)
(groans)
The worst thing about this comic is that it doesn't know what it wants to be.
No, wait. Actually, the worst thing is CAD Premium.
For a few years, you could pay a monthly fee to get access to episodes of the CAD animated series,
which the comic inexplicably had.
It ran for two seasons, and some episodes ran up to 6 minutes.
If you thought a story featuring cartoon violence, a futuristic killer robot, video game opinions on a couch,
and awkward boring serious relationship drama had trouble finding its identity in comic form,
just wait until it comes in a box set containing barely two hours of animation made in about a week
that you paid thirty-five entire dollars of your actual human money for!
Three episodes of the 12-episode first season are dedicated entirely to an extended Star Wars reference.
They reenact an entire Star Wars film in each five-minute episode,
compressing it down so much you'd barely even realize that's what they're doing
unless you listen to the director's commentary track,
which this show has, for some reason!
The villain, instead of Darth Vader, is Jack Thompson,
a lawyer who tried to sue game developers for making their players violent.
The Death Star is a sign that makes people stop playing video games...?
"It's time to test the power of this fully operational anti-gamer billboard."
Speaking of Jack Thompson, Thompson appeared to have struck a nerve with Buckley.
One page of the comic is straight-up an open letter to Jack,
a four panel long mini-novel spoken directly by Buckley himself from within the comic.
What's amazing about it is how it manages to, while claiming gamers are peaceful even though they've played a lot of violent games,
end with the threatening phrase, "don't fuck with us."
Which, by the way, is also a line from that scene in Fight Club
where they threaten to cut off a guy's testicles if he defies them.
"Do not fuck with us."
Imagine writing something like that and thinking, "Yeah!
That proves that gamers are peaceful and intelligent, and can be reasoned with!"
It almost says something about gamers when people sit down and write things like—
(static)
Where's that fucking noise coming from?! Where's—
[EERIE DISTORTION]
[DISTORTION GROWS LOUDER]
Don't you think you might be reading a little too much into it?
About what a bad comic that sucks might "say"?
Stick to thinking about real art.
Ugh, this is just like that Sonic thing, isn't it?
What... the Sonic thing?
You're overthinking a blue hedgehog, man. Why can't you be objective?
Why can't you talk about the level design and mechanics instead?
You could be talking about how Mario 1-1 teaches you how to play it.
But it's not just a hedgehog, is it? I mean, it's animals, fighting a developed machine empire.
Like, there's— There's very, very obvious themes going on here, a discussion of ecology versus technology—
OMINOUS FIGURE: If you want to talk about how great nature is and how bad technology is,
why don't you go live in the woods?
You wouldn't do that, though, would you? You wouldn't have your precious lattes to drink
while you complain on your iPhone about capitalism.
I don't drink lattes! What the fuck are you talking about?
By now, you've probably noticed a fairly strong contradiction in the comic
between the crass, random non-canon of the many parts intended purely for no-strings-attached comedy,
the serious parts where Buckley himself definitely doesn't personally threaten someone,
and the actual serious lives of the main characters who have problems that don't go away.
The comic keeps reverberating back and forth, going to further and further extremes.
Sometimes you'd get a story where Lucas goes on a date with a woman who turns out to be fat,
so he awkwardly pretends to be interested for, er, "hilarious" "comedy",
and then they go back to her place, and it turns out she was only pretending to be fat as a test,
and they start a relationship that lasts for five years of the comic.
Then you'd get a chef character saying nonsense for a joke,
and then something random happens,
or maybe you'd get the Players,
four characters whose whole deal is they murder each other in different ways over & over.
Then it turns out Ethan's girlfriend is pregnant.
Then they joke about "what if the guns in the new Gears of War game
were guns with trains instead of chainsaws?"
You snap back and forth so quickly, you get whiplash of the mind.
The tension between the comic's supposed reality and meaningless comic fantasy world eventually snapped when,
during a scene at Ethan's job where he's making a joke about consumers being stupid and not knowing as much about games as him,
he gets a phone call.
Lilah, the comedy video game girlfriend character, is in the hospital...
because she's had a miscarriage.
This culminates in perhaps the most well known page of a comic in history.
[MUSIC DRAMATICALLY SWELLS]
When asked by a noted art scholar the appropriate distance from which to stand when viewing his magnum opus,
plainly entitled "Loss",
Tim Buckley famously responded,
"What? Fuck you,"
and banned me from his forum.
The release of "Loss" profoundly shook the edifice of its audience.
People were equal parts shocked, horrified, surprised,
offended, and completely mystified.
The semi-serious but still mostly jokey plot parts of the story are utterly shattered, giving way to a harsh and cold reality
where characters who, in other contexts, have committed or received tremendous acts of violence
are suddenly capable of a genuine moment of horrific suffering.
A comic famous for using too many words to say nothing at all about a video game on a stationary couch
takes four panels and zero words to show a horrifying discovery and a trip through an entire hospital.
A gaming webcomic— a comedy gaming webcomic—
has an arc in it about the characters having to deal with the miscarriage of their child!
This comic struck a nerve on the internet.
Over nine years later, people are still making fun of it.
This comic has been parodied and referenced in memes an uncountable amount of times.
Entire web pages have been dedicated to tracking them all, and failed to contain them.
In the next two comics, the characters struggle to even react to what has happened.
[READING FROM COMIC]
"It's breaking my heart to watch her hurt like this."
The next comic is a joke about how there aren't enough dragons in Dungeons and Dragons anymore.
The next comic is a single panel of the four Players about to murder each other.
For the next little while, the comic switched between dumb video game jokes
and Buckley trying desperately to restore the comfortable, consequence-free tone
he had developed over the five years of the comic.
It takes at least eight pages
before Ethan can go back to making goggles out of pineapples.
By late November, the characters have fully patched up their problems and they get married,
and we get tearful speeches about how important these characters are to each other.
FEMALE VOICE, MELODRAMATIC:
"Life dropped an epic husband,
the rarest of its loot table,
and I was lucky enough to win the need roll."
[WEDDING BELLS, APPLAUSE]
Then, for about four years, the comic was basically standalone silly jokes
interspersed with bits where there were mini-comics set in a universe like Star Wars for some reason.
One could say that, with the advent of "Loss", a lesson had been learned:
don't put one of the most emotionally traumatizing events a human can experience
in your...
comedy gaming webcomic!
Then, in September 2012,
Ethan tried to build a time machine,
and a future version of Ethan comes through it and kidnaps him into the future.
The next two months of comics were an extended storyline in which it turns out that Ethan's actions destroy most of humanity,
as the robot he builds eventually goes insane & murders everyone he loves, and takes over the world.
But in the process, the time machine is damaged and threatens to destroy all of time.
So Ethan has to sacrifice himself to turn the machine off,
killing him and saving the future,
as his inner monologue makes a tearful goodbye to a character no one really cares about
because she's basically just written to be a love interest for the author stand-in.
Ethan, our main character, dies.
He dies in the most convoluted fashion possible, and no one ever learns what happened.
Now that's how you end a...
Except it didn't end. It's still been going for five more years,
but with just the self-contained sketches and the characters from the old version in a rebooted form.
The comic somehow continues to limp on.
It literally killed its main character, and then it just sort of started again.
So, that...
that was CAD!
CAD was mean-spirited, hateful and angry.
CAD was a... a judgmental, tone-deaf, self-righteous screed of a webcomic, and...
Wait.
[STATIC]
I'm warning you. Don't do this, man. Don't go there.
Sorry, are you talking to someone? Is there someone here?
- [OMINOUS WARBLING]
- Doesn't CAD...
say something about gamer culture?
- [EERIE WHISPERING]
- [LOUD RUMBLING]
- Stop—
- No! NO! What have you done?!
- [GROANING]
- [ELECTRICAL PULSATING]
What's happening...?
[GROANING]
[WARBLING GROWS LOUDER]
OMINOUS VOICE: [WHISPERING]
My name is Tim Buckley. I'm a 24-year-old gamer.
I've played every violent game in existence, and I have never killed anyone, ever...
[WHISPERING AND WARBLING CONTINUE]
[WARBLING REACHES CRESCENDO]
- OMINOUS VOICE: [WHISPERING]
Don't fuck with us.
- What...?
[STATIC]
Hi, I'm Hareton Splimby, and welcome to—
What the fuck is happening?!
[THEME MUSIC STUTTERING]
Tommy Wiseau's infamous film The Room asks some really interesting questions about how we look at art.
No, seriously! Come on! STAY WITH ME HERE...!!
In terms of pure filmmaking skill, of course, it's awful.
The script is a nightmare, it's poorly edited,
with random shots of San Francisco just kinda slammed in there,
it has such below average shot composition and mise en scène that I actually feel bad for even saying those words,
and the ADR is terrible, too.
"Yeah, can I have a dozen red roses, please?"
"Oh, hi, Johnny. I didn't know it was you."
- "Here you go."
- "That's me."
- "How much is it?"
- "It'll be $18."
- "Here you go, keep the change. Hi, doggy."
- "You're my favorite customer."
"Thanks a lot. Bye!"
It has a reputation for being a hilariously bad film everyone can laugh at for being bad...
AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is a bad movie!
[LAUGHTER]
...made even more interesting by the incredibly weird performance of Wiseau.
"I'm fed up with this world!"
But I think, under the proper lens, the film has a little more to say to its audience
than "look at me, I'm so bad."
Tommy Wiseau didn't write a film about a perfect guy
who gets cheated on by his girlfriend and basically has his life ruined for no reason,
and he didn't choose to play that perfect guy for no reason either.
And here, taking a particular critical look,
I think a valuable message can be learned from the film.
The film has often been criticized in terms of its base components, like writing or acting.
Lisa, for example, behaves completely irrationally or perhaps with deliberate malice towards Johnny...
"I have him wrapped around my little finger."
- "Well, you should be happy, then."
- "But I don't love him."
...suddenly falling out of love with him and cheating on him,
and then spreading lies about him for seemingly no reason.
"You're lying, I never hit you!"
- "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!"
- "Why are you so hysterical?"
I contend here that Wiseau based the play script that would later become the film on an actual life experience,
an actual breakup that really happened at some point in his life.
"I treat you like a princess, and you stab me in the back.
I love you, and I did anything for you to just please you,
and now you betray me! How could you love him?!"
[SCREAMS]
I'm not saying the events happened exactly as Tommy writes them;
in fact, they definitely didn't.
Obviously, Tommy didn't kill himself,
and obviously, women don't grow distant from the people they're in a relationship with for no reason.
"Women change their minds all the time."
The Room is a fictionalized, exaggerated representation
of what Tommy *thinks* happened in this real relationship,
being completely, perhaps even incoherently, honest about why he thinks it fell apart.
And it's clear that he thinks it fell apart because his girlfriend started acting weird and crazy and trying to hurt him.
What's important here is to understand that, to Tommy, this is genuinely how he views this woman.
This character is, to him, an honest expression of that person.
But there has to have been a real Lisa once,
and her perspective— her side of the story— isn't told.
We don't get to see the things Tommy did that led her to move on from him or cheat on him,
and we only have Tommy's word that he wasn't abusive and was a really good guy.
And maybe the fact he genuinely thought to depict this woman as a monster trying to ruin his life
says something about how he understands other people and their feelings.
The Room, precisely with its unrealistic, biased inaccuracy,
accurately depicts why breakups actually happen;
people don't fully understand how the other person feels and begin to think of them as malicious figures,
because that's the only way we can make sense of people when we don't fully understand them.
I've talked to plenty of guys about breakups, and very often you get the same old story just like this one,
where their partner turned out to be a crazy bitch who just wanted to hurt them.
But if you're ever lucky enough to hear the other side of a story like that,
they're often just frustrated with people who can so easily view them like that if they have a few arguments.
Wiseau tried to make a film about his breakup,
but it turned out to be a film about his inability to understand why it happened.
No... No... No...
The Room is a filmed version of the real, heavily distorted perspective on breakups that many heterosexual men often have.
And in many ways, when you look at the film this way,
it serves as a call to action to learn to see past the Lisas we think we see,
and understand that relationships tend to fall apart for a reason, and we can learn to do better by seeing people for who they are.
For all its actual flaws, and even because of some of its clearly deeply flawed misogynistic writing,
The Room ends up being an actually valuable demonstration of the distorted ways people perceive relationships,
and how this eventually destroys them,
better than any film made by, say, I dunno,
any man actually working in Hollywood right now,
especially the ones currently cashing in on the popularity of The Room.
Hi, I'm Ha—
[SCREAMS]
[SHRIEKING VIOLINS]
[SHOUTS]
[TEST TONE, DECREASING IN PITCH]
[FADES OUT]
As you might be aware,
EA recently closed Visceral Games,
the studio working on a Star Wars game that had been in the works for a long time,
being worked on by, among many others,
the director and writer of most of the Uncharted games,
but also one of the best written game series ever— Legacy of Kain—
and pivoting the entire game away from what was being made.
This update posted on EA's website by Patrick Söderlund, vice president of EA, cites
"fundamental shifts in the marketplace."
Single-player linear experiences simply aren't profitable enough,
at least compared to certain other recent kinds of experience that emphasize time investment
and incentivize further transactions made over the course of a single product, rather than a simple one-off purchase.
This is one of many management decisions that exists in a marketplace driven by the forces inherent to a capitalist society.
The decision is, sadly, the result of the overall company goal to continue to grow and satisfy investors,
and this practice trumps creative freedom or what games players might actually want to see.
Penny Arcade covered this story by featuring one of the two main characters, a stand-in for the author,
directly, personally calling Patrick Söderlund an incoherent, art destroying monster.
[READING FROM COMIC]
"Literally the only thing I know about you is that you destroy things."
"Jobs, art, I mean, where should I even start?"
"What you did is bad for games, bad for gamers, and trying to frame it as anything but cowardice is offensive."
Penny Arcade is consistently cited as far better than CAD,
because CAD's just a bunch of nonsensical rants, and it keeps just using violence as a punch—
No, wait, this is Penny Arcade's violence! How did this get in here? This is obviously hilarious!
Oh my God, he was killed by a gun!
[FORCED LAUGHTER]
Here's to another two decades of comedy gold
and insightful commentary
ON THE FUTURE OF GAMING.
Penny Arcade got so popular and influential on the back of this stuff
that its convention, PAX, is one of the biggest industry events of the year,
with even major companies showing off games there.
CAD also had a convention of its own for a couple of years, labeled Digital Overload.
And, I hesitate to admit,
things don't get popular enough to have an entire convention
without being at least partially accurate reflections of their audience.
"CTRL+ALT+DEL kicks ass."
"I think it's awesome, I've been reading it for a while,
and it incorporates a lot of the best things in life, as well as being hilarious."
"Tim Buckley is a genius. Period."
I hope the problem here is clear.
Even the most intelligent, well-paid, popular,
and, uh, verbose
writers gaming culture has to offer seem unaware that these decisions are not made in a vacuum,
that games are threatened not by a secretive anti-art coward,
but by an environment that systematically crushes most of the people who work on them
in order to make its owners and shareholders vastly rich,
and which has no interest in anything's intrinsic value.
Gaming culture is largely unable to conceive of this level of socio-economic criticism,
of analysis of systemic problems and wider issues with society beyond one person's individual failings,
and therefore cannot accurately fathom exactly what is damaging the things they love.
Instead, they have to fantasize about their very own Lisa hiding somewhere in EA,
trying to kill art like some kind of fucking Disney villain!
- [EVIL LAUGHTER]
- *This* is why people hate CAD so much.
Not because it's bad, no. Bad things come and go all day, every day.
CAD is such a source of focus and aggression,
with millions and millions of words written about how awful it and its creator is,
because it's an embarrassment.
It makes everyone else near it look bad,
because as bad as it is, it managed to be honest.
So people have to try as hard as they can to project these things away from them,
try to shift the blame onto Buckley himself and away from the fact they share a lot of the same perspectives.
Think again about that Jack Thompson comic.
No one just ends up in a position where they'll write something like this all on their own.
Jack Thompson, wrong and dishonest as he was,
received thousands of death threats and messages full of harassment for years
from people just like Tim, or people who had been influenced by this comic.
No, CAD is merely a particularly silly and vulgar expression of a broader set of bad ideas
that continue to go largely unexamined by the people who hold them.
Tim Buckley's disjointed personal philosophy and lack of skill didn't come from nowhere.
We don't get to pretend he's just some random guy.
Blaming one man for the flaws of a broken economic system is making the same mistake
as blaming Tim Buckley for accurately presenting the culture in which he exists.
We just have to learn to accept that there might be a lesson in things we hate about us,
that even if it's bad and we don't like it,
we have more in common with it than we want to admit, and can even learn something from it.
CAD turned out to be reflective of the cultural reality that produced it,
and people are only angry at it this much because they don't like what they saw in the mirror.
(OMINOUS MUSIC)
When we look at ridiculous behavior within our sphere,
instead of trying to project it out of ourselves,
and say it's just some random idiot somewhere doing something dumb,
maybe we should accept that CAD, Penny Arcade, Visceral Games and even EA's business decisions
are aspects of a wider culture that can be reflective of our own feelings and beliefs and values,
even if we don't like what comes out of them.
And maybe if we learn to criticize ourselves and change our own behavior,
we can start to change the wider culture.
Thank you for your time.
[EERIE DISTORTION]
I must set aright that which has been made wrong...
[DISTORTION GROWS LOUDER]
[STOPS]
[INNER MONOLOGUE]
Please...
Forgive me.
You are my world.
My best friend.
The love of my life.
I promise...
I promised...
I would never hurt you.
That I would never leave you.
I have to break that promise.
I'm so sorry...
Video games...
I love you.
[MATERIALIZING NOISE]
[SLIMY NOISES]
[GROANING]
[EXHAUSTED BREATHING]
VOICE: It's time.
Yes...
Yes...!
YAAAAAAA—
♪ [Sonic the Hedgehog Level Clear Music]
[MUSIC DISTORTS, CHANGES TO EDM]
[EXPLOSION]
