LNH: Liminals #3

[Adrian McClure]

On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 3:41 PM, Drew Perron <pwerdna at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yesss, drawing on a wider and wider range of Internet and fandom history <3

That's a big part of the goal of this series! And my recent LNH work
in general. I feel like after a certain point the LNH stopped engaging
with the wider net culture as much, and that's been something I've
been trying to rectify since LNH20. Of course LNH20 has been around
for a while now so a lot of the references which are cutting edge at
the time are very retro now. (I still want to use Longcaticus someday,
though.) In this case I'm deliberately referencing a layer of fandom
from the past that LNH hasn't engaged with--especially important since
it's based in primarily-female fic-fandom. (That's also part of the
inspiration for what we've done with Merissa.)

> You know, I never imagined B-TB in the "cute but messy to be around" slot,
> but it works?

Hey, Fuzzy and Syncity seemed to like him! (His appearance here was
kind of inspired by that Jaelle story.)

> I wonder what Ultimate Ninja thinks of our current focus on legacy
> characters. I mean, the original MG who annoyed him so much went away
> eventually, only for a new one to come around and, well...

The original Manga Girl is still around as a ghost! Is she secretly
haunting hte LNHQ? No one knows for sure.

> !!! YES Manga Girl II's backstory! :D

I figured I'd throw that in rather than holding it out for JI because
this series in general is supposed to be a jumping on point and all.

> This is SO COOL. :D Question - this is Manga Man Gold, right?

Yep. JI is going to get into this in more detail. (TBH thinking about
it more I'm still not 100% sure where this fits on his timeline,
though I know he does do some time-jumping at one point.)

> awwwwwww. That's fascinating. :o Not what I'd have expected from someone as
> expressive as Manga Girl.

That's the thing--she's very emotionally expressive but also
independent, which means she keeps some things to herself, even in the
relationships which are important to her--with her family, the
Liminals, the LNH as a whole. Could this cause trouble for her
sometime in the future? Well maybe...

> Oh, yeah, I have one of those across the street from me! :D

Again, when I write Net.ropolis it's usually either Toronto or
Pittsburgh since those are the cities I know best. (What I had in mind
was Carnegie.)

> X3 I love how cheerfully sexual MG is.

Yeah, that was something I liked about the original Manga Girl series
when I reread it just now--even though of course the handling could
have been better. But there was all that straight guy horny in old LNH
so it was nice letting a girl be horny for a change.

> Ah! I knew you said this was gonna be furry. :>

Haha yep. I've been developing more of an appreciation of that
aesthetic, and getting into Goodbye to Halos by Valerie Halla was the
turning point--a comic which was a huge inspiration for some of the
worldbuilding introduced in this issue, and the tone and mood of the
series as a whole.

> I love how she just tangents into this. She has Such Art Feelings

I put a lot of thought into this speech because I didn't want her to
be dismissing conceptual art as a thing. So much of discussion of all
forms of creative work is defined by bullshit dichotomies like SFF vs
literary fiction, superheroes vs "art" comics etc, which have a lot of
frustrating and arbitrary value judgments build in, and I wanted to
avoid that even though fine art's not really my thing. I think she has
an understanding of art on an instinctive level, since she's made of
that.

> AWWWWWWWW! Oh my god cat affection YES GOOD

I love cats. That's all.

> Same! :D The way Tom has just kept developing and getting better has really
> just made me feel that, if I keep working on it, I'll never stop improving.

YES


-- 
Adrian "The Dark Spaceknight" McClure, now with sig