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I had the pleasure to participate in the Marvel vs Capcom Legacy Art Collab! by drawing classic Mega Man! 🍋

It was a lot of fun; all the artists who took part in the collab did an amazing job.👏

you can find the big completed image here!

The second time I read it I paid more attention to those parts and realized that they were an essential part of the story. This key component of fascination with a human pastime is the axis that the themes revolve around.

Some of the segments are not really "about" sports, such as the destruction of the lightbulb, where the satellites mourn the "death" of an inanimate object that has meaning because it's been given meaning.

But, if you think you don't care about sports, and therefore don't pay much attention to the parts of the story that are digging deeply into the technicalities of the bizarro football games, you still miss a lot of the story's meaning, because the layers of depth and close examination and exploration show how love for something transforms it, making it endlessly fascinating and new.

I understood the theme of play as a counteracting force to our existential anxiety and feeling of need for "progress" and "meaning," but on my initial read I missed how the story is about love. Not love as an experience between people, but love as an orientation towards existence and your surroundings.

In my re-read it came through so clearly that WOW, this writer really, really loves football. And in the story, football is so inexhaustibly complicated and meaningful, to the point that it's impossible to ever fully appreciate, because people love it and they are always exploring new ways to play it.

You see, 17776 doesn't begin with the space aspect. In fact, when you first load it, it looks like a normal article. Of course, it quickly goes away (and if you're fast enough, you can read the words "Something is terribly wrong" repeating) and you see a calendar (which would be considered the "actual" beginning).

But. The article, disappearing or not, is extremely important to understand the story. Because, before it goes into Something is terribly wrong, it's trying to talk about something real, something that is, in fact, terribly wrong.

It talks about CTE.

Here's the screenshot:

Why is college football less popular? Because more people know about CTE. What's that, you ask?

From this study:

"Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with exposure to repetitive head impacts such as those from American football." And it's not just a disease.

From this article: (recommended read)

"During impact, individual neurons can be stretched and damaged. Brain chemistry gets out of whack. Concussions make people “see stars,” become disoriented, lose consciousness, become sensitive to light and sound, get headaches, and have sluggish or confused thoughts for weeks and even months.

Heads and bodies get smashed and shuddered every week during the football season. And despite changing the rules to allow for more severe penalties and fines for flagrant helmet-to-helmet hits, the NFL has not succeeded so far in preventing concussions."

CTE is a dangerous disease. It's undiagnosable before death, but it's associated with serious consequences. And no matter how much more "safe" the NFL tries to play it off, the truth is that it is being discovered that's even more grave than previously thought. In these conditions, American football, and especially college football, is slowly being seen as a sport maybe no one should play. This, of course, is something the people in charge do not want to admit, lest they lose their money. So they hide the studies. They say that actually, new equipment makes it safe (it doesn't). And Jon Bois, a sports writer, knows this well.

And now read the image again.

In 17776, the people are immortal. They can't even get injured, because technology has advanced to the point they can heal instantly. And what do they do with this newfound power? With this invulnerability?