Post-Fall Falls False Starts

I've decided to make a masterpost with all the pages of ImpROBaBILL Improvements in finished form (that will be edited to add more as they come out). Here it is- all 14 pages so far!

(I'm also gonna have this pinned on the blog since it's my Most Popular Thing™.) Part 1 post | Part 2 post | Part 3 post | Part 4 post

-

Hi there! First post in a while.

PFFFS has aged better for me because it's written. Sometimes when trying to write new content for it I feel like I just can't get into the same groove I was in when writing the earlier chapters; I reread them, trying to capture what made them special, but there was just something about my enthusiasm early on with it. Since drawing the first few chapters of Improbabill, however, my art style has been refined a lot; there's so much about them I would change. So much off-model-ness, weird and inconsistent line quality, bad typesetting, and more! It's probably the sort of thing I notice more than readers do. but I could do better nowadays. I don't want to redraw the old chapters because doing that would probably kill my motivation to make new ones (no timeline on that but I do plan on it along with posts about my monster falls lineup- at some point.)

I have an idea I really want to make for an improbabill chapter about art therapy.

the word Sonder ("The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it") was actually coined in 2012 for the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project by John Koenig, who decided to invent a bunch of words for super-specific emotions that would otherwise take a whole sentence to describe. it's probably the most successful word from that project in terms of actually making its way into the lexicon. Seeing it in the title of an actual official TV episode is pretty cool with the knowledge of where it came from. I wonder if Koenig knows. I wonder if at some point the fact that it's a neologism will be forgotten and it'll just be a normal word. Is that happening already?

There's still Bill's character arc in Improbabill, I guess, and there are some moments in my notes doc that I think would be really cool to draw/write. But with one of the main characters now disconnected from the story, I'm just thinking about how, if at all, I should change my approach going forward.

His personality was that he was super childish and easy to make cry, and a victim of helicopter parenting. but he was 12-13 and a new kid at Elmore Junior High, not actually a young child. he just acted like one because he was emotionally (and/or developmentally?) stunted.

this kind of post is incredibly out of left field for me, I know, but I was excited about this innocuous throwaway line when i first heard it because, and hear me out, this is the very first time (as far as I remember- I could very well be forgetting something) that it's been confirmed Jewish people exist in Elmore. now, you could ask, "why wouldn't they exist?" which is fair, especially since at least secular christianity is confirmed (most prominently by the existence of xmas). and there are biblical names like Sarah, and even straight-up Judith. but it's still cool to see something like a bar mitzvah mentioned. hey, bar mitzvah age is around Gumball and Darwin's age bracket, does whoever this is go to their school? does Elmore even have other middle schools?

it made me think about questions I've never considered before. there would probably need to be entirely new fields of halacha for stuff like sentient objects/animals/food and the weird standards of modesty the town has (The Pants was a whole episode on that lol). How does the existence of ghosts/ the existence of an underworld and the ability to visit it interface with theology in Elmore overall? if elmore has a Jewish community or communities, is it entirely offscreen, or are any of the characters we've seen (even background characters) Jewish already and we just haven't found out? this line isn't supposed to imply Larry is jewish... or is it? (I know you don't have to be to do a bar mitzvah photography gig, I have at least one family member who fits into that category). but he does have meyer in his last name which could be something. he is definitely not keeping Shabbat, but maybe society's total dependence on him makes it pikuach nefesh in the same way it is for doctors (or maybe he's just secular, or maybe I'm just going down a rabbit hole here and the line doesn't imply anything to begin with.) and he makes cheeseburgers obviously. so that's a point against any kind of observance.

wait. Julius' last name is Oppenheimer and he's around bar mitzvah age (well, the character clash cards have him at 14, but we know how those things are). and his mom wears a head covering. and he's based on fleischer-esque cartoons and the fleischer bros. were jewish (i'm really stretching it now, aren't I?)

I just finished watching TWWWOG, the whole thing so far. What a ride- my ballpark is usually more "point out funny little details" than "give an actual critique", so I'm not the type to give an actual review, but, to sum it up: Gumball is back and I'm so glad it is! there were definitely some insta-classics in there for me!

Regarding PFFFS (excuse me if you're coming across this through tags and have no clue what that is- it's my long wacky crossover fanfic that this blog is supposed to center on): Obviously a ton of stuff contradicts it... but a ton of stuff is also weirdly close to it. the Awesome Store guy wears a hood, and it looks pretty much like the hood I've been describing & drawing him with for a long while! he's a tough-love father figure for Rob! there's the not-S&P-approved gag, which basically makes that episode a gravity falls crossover already if you have the world's laxest standards. And, if anything, the tenuous Stan&shopkeeper similarity is strengthened by the stuff he says and does in these two new appearances. like that last line about selling junk to people! AND THEY EVEN USED THE WORD "INTERDIMENSIONAL" WITH REGARD TO THE SHOPKEEEEEEPER! Should I be calling him shady guy now?

I know for sure that there were some details/gags that lined up uncannily well with details/gags in PFFFS, but unfortunately I wasn't taking notes, so I'll just have to post them as I remember them:

the thing with Gumball and Darwin getting entangled in the most recent chapter happens several times in TWWWOG, which isn't a major thing but it was fresh in my memory at the time since I just wrote that chapter before watching

there is a running gag in PFFFS with there being a ton of characters named Bill. now we know Idaho has an uncle Bill, which is another one on top of the pile, and brings Gumball's canon-characters-named-Bill-count to 2, or even 4 if you count William and Billy as "potential Bills"! How to get all of these people in the same room in the fic, I wonder...? No, I need to add more of them first. That isn't a joke. (Remember this tag that has been on the story this entire time but hasn't been relevant yet?)

Sarah being freaky strong has actual canon backing now!

there was a chapter called The Survivalist in the fic, and an episode called The Survivalists in the show.

As expected, Elmore's citizens become vigilante chaos-makers and set everything on fire when any incident happens, a pattern that existed in the original show, was referenced in PFFFS, and reoccurred in TWWWOG.

I just noticed that PFFFS and TWWWOG both have acronyms with a triple repeated letter!

Now, so I don't sound delusional: there are obviously a ton of differences, maybe even more differences than similarities when it comes to background stuff that would affect the present in both canon and the fic (obviously the events in the present day are not at all similar because of the drastically different settings). I already accepted as far back as the miniseries that the whole "elmore is still around, but in the void" thing isn't canon, so I'm not worried about that. But how to square the differences? Do I keep going with my version of, say, things like the Shopkeeper's appearance? Do I change it and pretend it's always been canon-compliant? Do I write an extremely meta chapter to make an in-fic excuse for the changes to the continuity? I'm leaning towards this third option, and I have some ideas on how to write it, but nothing that has fully crystallized into a usable chapter outline yet. Much to think about. Maybe the shopkeeper's appearance isn't even described thoroughly enough to justify bringing up the discrepancy, all I said is that he's made of shadows (right) and has a middle-aged man build (wrong). Maybe that was a bad example to use. what about that doll from the cheapmas? I gotta work her in somewhere! But how? At this point, I'm rambling.

the part in question involves a Puritan woman who talks to Bill (possessing a goat) and describes him as having the voice of an Englishman (sorry for the awful readability):

here's what I think happened: I'm 99% sure that Alex Hirsch heard the oft-repeated (and heavily simplified) fun fact that old-timey British people had an accent more like present-day Americans than present-day British people, but he misunderstood it and thought it meant, "an old-timey American would think a modern-day American sounds English", when really that wouldn't be true because it's not like the accents switched places with one another, they just diverged differently and American English retained some of the features that British English lost. And in the time period that page takes place in, that is to say, 1692, the accents wouldn't even have diverged very much yet, so ???

https://archiveofourown.org/works/50753623/chapters/191861851

Because one, it features a non-TWWWOG-infuenced version of the van shopkeeper, and two, the TWWWOG-influenced shopkeeper is on everybody's minds right now, I'm not posting the full text since it'd be confusing for anybody without the context. This one ended up being way bigger than I thought it would be. This caps off the first storyline of PFFFS- I want to do a second one, but I need to think about where and how to begin.