near and dear, though obscure

[surnachi]

im making a thread that i thought would be nice to hear other peoples input on
do you have certain pieces of media that you hold nearly and dearly to your heart, though absolutely fucking NOBODY knows/cares about them somehow? does it PISS YOU OFF? share it here and let them be heard!
i dont know, this might just be a me thing since i delve so much into the internet a lot. i dont have that much i wanna share off the top of my head, just two things i really adore.

one of my most near and dear though obscure things is one of my all time favorite and most inspirational artists to me, ryanide. super old deviantart furry, 2007 old. his stuff scratches all of my itches and i absolutely ADORE all of his work. classic early internet anime-inspired furry style, and unbelievably charming and well-made flash animations, despite looking pretty amateur at first. though, ive heard through the grapevine that apparently hes nothing like he once was any more, and that made him decide to disappear off the face of the internet altogether. makes me bummed, but also makes me determined to carry the torch he once held. one day...
https://www.deviantart.com/ryanide/gallery/all
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6CQ-2Lzoj4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV-9FMmrt38
ive rewatched these two animations way too many times to count

the other thing i wanna share is blue marble, one of my favorite bands. absolutely NOBODY fucking knows about them! its insane to because the feel of their music is absolutely perfect for me, super happy and nice while really interesting sounding for each different song. but all their songs posted on youtube always have around 300 or less views somehow! heres my absolute favorite song from them, titled after the first of their only two albums, valerie:
https://youtu.be/3WytMz7Op3E

id love to see what other people would have to share!

[Meatman]

DUUUUDE i am constantly fucking thinking about the dendyn dynasties intro. it never occurred to me to go digging for the dudes other stuff

[surnachi]

it is SO fucking good dude

[Commander Cello]

While I haven't ever rewatched it, I was always really surprised how little traction the show People of Earth got. I'm a bit iffy on linking a trailer, since I don't think any of these do a very good job at representing the show, but it helps to have something, so:

At least when I watched it in middle school, I thought it was a really good show—maybe that's just because it was about aliens and it was a comedy, though. It ended up getting cancelled after only two seasons, so I was hoping that the massive success of the following show the creator made, Our Flag Means Death, would maybe mean more people check this out... but as far as I know, that hasn't happened. It's been so long that I don't really remember enough to say that much more, but maybe that's good for anyone who sees this and is now considering giving the first episode or two a try. I will say two more things though:
1. For anyone who knows me on other sites, one of the aliens might seem familiar, which is because I basically swiped his design (save for making it yellow) and I use it as a personal icon.
2. This technically contains spoilers for both People of Earth and Our Flag Means Death, so I'm spoiling it:

► Show Spoiler

If you're a fan of Our Flag Means Death because it gets gay, then you might be pleased to know that People of Earth also gets a little gay. Not nearly as much and not nearly as fast, but it still does.

[peppyk]

QUEER DUCK!!!!!!!!!!

Oh my god i can do highlight on text

[Deacon Blues]

wow! a whole lot of great stuff in here. i think i remember you sending some of those animations on chase's discord server, surnachi, i'm glad to see them again! that second one is really great, i super like the shot at the end where the lady is on the floor looking up at the ceiling and it swings over to the butlery guy.

and jack! i didn't know your alien mascot was inspired by anything in particular (besides the idea of a big-headed alien with large black eyes, i guess). ill try to check it out sometime! add it to the vast mental list.

my obscure pick is Zot! by scott mccloud. despite pretty much every comic book fan having read (or at least knowing of) his book understanding comics, nobody knows about his prior work! hell, he wears a shirt with zot's emblem throughout all of understanding comics. bah. Zot is about Jenny, a sensitive teenage girl who moves to the suburbs outside new york from california. she meets zot, a teenaged superhero from a utopic parallel earth, and they become friends immediately! it's a heartwarming, heartfelt, and thoughtful comic with a wonderful cast of realistic teenaged characters. and it's also a super awesome action packed super hero comics! so read it, NOW!

oh it's also where my forum signature comes from

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[surnachi]

oh man, i still gotta read understanding comics. every snippet from it that ive seen hasnt missed a single beat, it looks really funny.. and also probably informative. but people only share the funny stuff
also hehe nice, i thought id never get to know where your forum signature came from! i sure am lucky i made this thread cus it feels like i would have never gotten to learn otherwise

[Commander Cello]

I also second Zot as a fantastic obscure comic—even though it really shouldn't be (obscure, that is. It has every right to be fantastic). One of the things that I think would sweeten the deal to a lot of people is that it is one of the first American comics to ever be inspired by manga, and you can definitely tell. This is getting into opinion territory, but I think a lot of modern comics try to emulate manga too much, almost to the point where it almost feels like they want to avoid American comic concepts or tropes and just want to make "manga." I'm no nationalist (and I'm even a far cry from patriotic), but it disappoints me to see so many young artists taking to manga/anime-style work so quickly, without ever looking to their own country's history of visual storytelling (I'm not even just talking about America—so many countries have lots of great comics and art overall).

Anyways, after the first story arc, Zot becomes a black-and-white slice-of-life-esque story that is just absolutely fantastic, so if you really hate bright, colorful superhero stuff, you can at least check it out for that manga-adjacent goodness.

[ghoul_house]

This isn't really a recommendation so much as a lament.

My favorite light novel in all of human history is Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka?, also known as So I'm A Spider, So What? I specify light novel because, every single adaptation its had has sucked shit. Unforunately, the light novel is very inaccessible to people not already familiar with the light novel reading experience, so the greatest isekai ever written will never be loved as much as even the shitty adaptations.

Spoilers follow.

► Show Spoiler

So I'm A Spider is a story that plays on common assumptions and accepted facts about the bog-standard isekai. There's the most obvious assumption is shattered upfront - that you will enter a human body when you reincarnate in another world. However, it goes a lot deeper than that!

The core premise is that an entire classroom gets shunted off into seperate corners of a fantasy land, including our dear protagonist who ends up in a spider body in the middle of a worldwide labyrinth. The brilliance is in the assumptions you will have about that premise, and how they are categorically wrong.

It's told in a non-linear, non-chronological order, but for the first 4 volumes, it's done in such a manner that never reveals this. All the side-story about the reincarnated humans is assumed to be taking place simultaneously. But then, in one of those classic twists that made sense all along, the main character spider finds a vampire baby that has the soul of her classmate! What happened? Well, a spider is conceived and born and matures in a short timespan, but humans take 18 years to become adults. And it makes sense now that I think about it, but when I first read this novel it totally blindsided me.

And that's not the only twist like that for me. So here's the one that really got me - the memories the spider has aren't even from the same past life as the rest of the cast. Throughout the story, the cast mentions two classmates who are unaccounted for, confirmed neither dead nor alive. So logically, I assumed that the spider is in fact one of these two missing classmates. It's made especially good of a red herring because the two options are either the social recluse or the aloof pretty girl. Both of whom are hinted to be kumoko (the spider) at different points in the story.

And then both of them show up in the same room as kumoko.

So, the big appeal of this story to me was its writing, its fight scenes, and how the unreliable and often childish narrator led the reader to entirely wrong conclusions. HOWEVER. The fucking adaptations butchered everything but the fight scenes.

The manga is told linearly, untangling the complex timeline and just showing you the story beats in order. This sucks for a lot of obvious reasons. A less obvious suck-reason is that for a good stretch of time, the protagonist it follows has fucking nothing to do, because that's when the story was focusing on plot twists from other parts of the chronology. It basically turns the quick check-ins on the protag to remind us she's important, into an entire arc. It sucks so bad.

The anime tries to do the tangled chronology again, but dumbs it down and uses really dramatic stings whenever a clue to the twist is on-screen. It's like, imagine if the thing 1982 played a really scary noise every time someone pretending to be human was talking. You'd be like. "Okay well I guess that's the bad guy, makes sense." with none of the mystery. and it fucking BLOWS. No sense of tension and confusion to solve. It never lets you believe incorrect information for longer than 5 freakin minutes.

It's infuriating to me. The original story was really good, but not accessible to most people because it has to trick you into thinking it's shit first. Instead of using the addition of visuals to add a hook, a cool factor to pull you into the story, they just change the whole story to be slightly worse but look cool. It's like instead of using the reader's presumptions to trick and wow them, it just fucking leans into them.

Anyway, that has been my lament for Kumo Desu Ga, Nani ka?. Thank you for listening.

[Deacon Blues]

recently, i discovered this wonderful comic called the jam on youtube. it's about this guy, gordie, who wears a superhero costume while he walks his dog. his sister made it for him one year for halloween, thinking of his childhood devotion to the adam west batman show. really, gordie just wears it as a joke, but because he wears the costume and walks around on rooftops, he ends up falling backwards into adventures! it's a great comic, and really fun to read. probably cause gordie is such a laid-back guy, everything he does ends up being kind of funny. the art is also GREAT!!! it's all black and white and the inking is just beautiful. it sort of resembles a woodblock etching. it also has a fun loose quality (really, everything about the book is fun). it is for adults, though, cause there is sex and stuff in it. so kids! don't read this. anyways, here are some pages from the jam

► Show Spoiler