#crackder

Caption: *Heel Stomp*

Caption: *Sky Uppercut*

Caption: *Steel Drill Peck*

BAGGET: Cuff him!

BAGGET: Well, “hero”, what sayest thou now?

CHRIS: All I wanted for over two years was a boyfriend-free girl to make into a sweetheart from the ground-up whom I can love and trust! Why is it illegal to find true love? But in this situation, I can only say one thing…

CHRIS: HELP!

For once, Christian Weston Chandler has been bested. And he’s not immediately going to turn around and whoop Bagget, either, like he does with Mary Lee Walsh and your average manajerk who gets the upper hand. Chris not only is legit taken down by Bagget and Crackder, but he stays captured for the rest of this episode and most of the next. This stretch in the Off Target storyline is the longest Chris is ever incapacitated in the comic and one of the only times Chris would be completely toast without the help of someone else. If Crystal wasn’t here, Chris would have been vanquished by Mary Lee Walsh once and for all. These moments Chris allows himself a darkest hour are few and far between.

One thing to remember is, again, Chris was still awaiting prosecution for this incident when he drew the comic version. His victory hadn’t yet been assured in real life, so he didn’t want to write his comic victory quite yet. If he hadn’t had the charges dropped against him, perhaps the peachy ending of Sub-Episode 8 wouldn’t have been so peachy. McAttack, the only other two part story, was split because it was the merging of two real life events at the same McDonald’s two days apart. Off Target is a two-parter because Chris didn’t know the ending to the true story.

Caption: *map scope*

Caption: {target} = Get-Tar

Caption: {rook chess piece} = Private Villa of Corrupted Citizens

Caption: {Space Invaders alien} = Crackder

Caption: {orange dot} = Crystalina

Caption: Later, at PVCCitzens…

COUNT GRADUON: I sense our servants are returning!

MARY LEE WALSH: Good!

BAGGET: My mistress, I have returned victorious! Here is the being you requested for dinner. One lonely heart and soul!

CHRIS {thought}: This is the pits!

MARY LEE WALSH: You’ve done great, Bagget! I’ve been waiting for this! Hang him above the cauldron! Ha! Ha! Ha!

CHRIS (thought): Got to… hang in… there… hmmm…

I do believe this is the last or at least one one of the next to last appearances of the map scope; he sort of phased out that trope over the course of the comic.

The long horizontal road is likely supposed to represent US Route 29, a long highway with termini in Maryland and Georgia that runs straight through Chris’s world, which Chris’s Target is right off of. The rest of the map doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the rest of Chris’s roads around Charlottesville.

Bagget kneels at the feet of his mistress Mary Lee Walsh, which leads to the question: why would officers of the law be subservient to a dean of discipline of a community college? Well, that’s because in the land of Christian Weston Chandler, Mary Lee Walsh is some kind of empress who has some kind of actual control over events, like the Target debacle, because by Virginia is for Virgins logic, Mary Lee Walsh has a vested interest in keeping Chris from getting laid forever, not just in that brief moment their lives intersected at PVCC. He contextualizes each of these events that had nothing to do with one another - getting kicked out of PVCC, getting banned from the Fashion Square Mall, the Wal-Mart affair and the Target arrest - as being one big conspiracy orchestrated by the same people, which would eventually somewhat be the case once the trolling started.

SFX: WHAM!

Caption: *Shadow Ball*

MAGI-CHAN: So, we meet again.

Crackders are apparently plane robots without pilots, so Magi-Chan tries teleporting in to each one and individually overriding their systems with orders to crash. Suddenly he’s hit with a Shadow Ball to the face and is revealed to have been attacked by Silvana.

Caption: *Steel Wing*

SFX: *Crash to grass*

After hitting the energy ball back at the SAV, baseball-style, the ball slices a hole clean through the Decepticlone. Reginald was lucky he didn’t accidentally hit his beloved Angelica with that energy ball, as she was flying mere feet away, using Steel Wing to destroy a PVCC plane. Steel Wing is a Steel-Type Pokemon attack that can apparently cut clean through a plane. I think these are supposed to be more Crackders, by the way.

Angelica’s flight path is really weird. She cuts off the wing of one plane, but then she swoops behind the first plane then in between the two planes to slice the front off the other one.

CRYSTAL: *gasp*

CRYSTAL: I’m coming brother!

BAGGET: Looks like we’ll have to torture you until your trap is shut! Crackder! Drop him!

CHRIS: AAAAAAAH…!

Caption: To be continued…

Now, in real life, Chris’s mother bailed him out for the Target incident, as she always does. But Crystal’s replacement of her gives an interesting insight into what Chris wants his women to do. Up until this point in his life, the only woman in his life was his mother, who babied him and gave him whatever he wanted and bailed him out for everything his whole life. And, because he knows his mother won’t last forever, his main want in a girlfriend was someone who would take over for all of that, plus give him a little china on the side. But when it came to the comic, he had a weird dilema - it’d be embarrassing to admit he was rescued by his mother, and at the same time it’d be embarrassing to create a fictional girlfriend in his comics (although after several fake troll girls he would give up and create one anyway in Lovely Weather). So Crystal was a compromise - she was a younger girl, but she wasn’t a girlfriend and (technically canonically) isn’t having sex with Chris, but she’s doing everything else he wants his future girlfriend to be, like saving his ass here, supplanting his mother because, again, it’d be embarrassing and drive the china away to admit his mother saved him.

Bagget’s main “torture” is to drop Chris… and then what? If they’re trying to kill him there are much more efficient ways Crackder could do it, and if they’re trying to torture him, again, this just doesn’t seem very efficient.

Caption: *Mega Punch*

CHRIS: That will confuse them. But I really need to Spin-Dash its spark out! And I have just the…

So Chris dodges a big ball of flame from Crackder and runs up to attack him again. The second and third panels are designed to show Chris-Chan Sonichu’s super speed. The second panel is (Chris’s approximation of) a perspective shot, much like ones used in Sonic the Hedgehog games and cartoons, to show the ground Sonic has covered. The third panel is of his feet with speed lines - surprisingly he doesn’t use the “Wheel of Feet” technique common in Sonic media.

BAGGET: I don’t think so!

SFX: Beep

SFX: *SMASH*

CHRIS: Holy Vector Sigma!

BAGGET: I have you in my hand now! Taste the arsenal of my change bot, made from parts imported from Cybertron. Crackder! Take him down!

CRACKDER: YES!

Here’s where we take a hard left from parodying Power Rangers and Excel Saga into a Transformers ripoff. That thing is Crackder, the first of many Transformers Chris created for Sonichu; Crackder is one of his oh-so-clever counterparts to the Transformers villainous faction the Decepticons, the Decepti-Clones. Crackder is inspired by Thundercracker, a minor Decepticon who can transform into a fighter aircraft featured in Transformers: The Movie, which these Sub-Episodes borrow many elements from.

A Vector Sigma is a supercomputer from the Transformers franchise, an incarnation of the deity Primus, the creator god of the Transformers. Invoking the name of Vector Sigma is likely equivalent, in this franchise, to invoking the name of Saint Peter or the Virgin Mary.