Words
Awareness of the outside world. Daily Science Fiction! Free short fiction AND they pay their writers. Okay, not New Yorker rates, but better than paying in the dreaded Exposure Dollars.
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Fictional this & that after binge reading Let’s Play, links below.
Text Exchange
Indie Game Designer: Your package arrived.
Eva: Awesome!
IGD: Stop sending your orders to my address and requiring a signature.
Eva: Sorry. 😦 You know my building has porch pirates.
IGD: Just because I am WFH doesn’t mean I’m not busy. Do you know how irritating it is to pull yourself away from negotiating a diplomatic treaty with goblins and remember to speak muggle-English? Postal drivers object to be addressed as Foul Lord of the Deeps. Plus I have to find pants.
Eva: 😦 😦 😦 Pizza? 🙂 🙂 🙂
Comic Idea
Let’s Play has characters represented by animal avatars, e.g. Monica as a pink wolf in in episode 80 (listed as 84 online), and Link as a protective lion in the dog park during episode 45 (listed as 48 online).
What if a comic expanded on that? Every human character would be accompanied by an animal to represent their non-verbal side. Animal characters would be accompanied by human avatars that would convey the animal’s interior monologue.
Sometimes, human and animal would act in unison, as with B*tch Wolves United, in episode 81 (85 online).
Other times, the human and animal would diverge.
Scene. Two people sitting at a restaurant table having pleasant conversation over dinner. Meanwhile, their animal avatars are circling and growling. Or sniffing and flirting.
Scene. Kid at school or adult at meeting. Human sitting up, appearing to pay attention. Meanwhile, their animal avatar is wandering around, peeing on the furniture.
It would be double the work, since you would be telling dual stories and every character would have to be drawn twice, once as human and once as animal. Plus fitting all the creatures into each panel.
The animal avatars could grow or shrink depending on the internal needs of the story &/or the external space requirements of the comic.
What’s cool is that it emphasizes the advantages of the graphic novel/comic format. There would be no way to do this in text without insane amounts of exposition.
And then there are copyright issues. I have no grasp as to how much of that idea belongs to the creator of Let’s Play. How much does one have to change an intellectual property to make it one’s own? When does Romeo & Juliet become West Side Story? Or would WSS be copyright infringement if Shakespeare were still alive. Any IP lawyers out there?
Meta Moments
In places, the author has the characters refer to comic tropes or refer to an awareness of being in a comic. For example, in episode 101 (105 online), two characters eat lunch in an alcove rather than in the open area of a pub. As they sit down, one of the characters says, “… And with this as a backdrop for the scene, the artists don’t have to worry about drawing a lot of people in the background.”
This could easily be translated in text, thereby giving the blogger a third item to round out the post.
A “Dear Reader” for the 21st century.
Let’s Read
Read Let’s Play for free here. Kickstarter for volume 2 here. Volume 1 is available as tier or add on. Check out the funding amount!?! Fandom here. Assist to a recommendation by Whatever.
Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott
Virtual Brush Box 