#dreamrock

See, now this is a megapost. The goth one was only about two unique pictures. This one has three.

Current theme song for Anarchy in Prague. Harkens back to the days when it was described as a “Stoner Rock Scott Pilgrim”. 

Drawn by @dalf

She’s 27 at the time the story starts. She is literally on the edge of being a Millennial (I’m one of those who thinks the cut-off between Millennials/Generation Y and iGeneration/Generation Z should be 2001, but some say it’s actually 1996).

Drawn by @alouissever 

If two people share a 1-Up, how would that work? Also, you can tell they’re getting close to 30 just by how stoned they look when, in fact, they’re trying to stay awake for New Year’s. I love this aspect of Anarchie, rambling about how Millennials are growing old and are no longer the dominant youth generation. In 2024 (which is 7 years away), there will be 40-something Millennials. I’ll be 30, holy fucking mother of fathers.

Drawn by @dalf

Muriel and Malfiore. Pan’s goth “girls”. Muriel’s, like, 28. However, Malfiore/Marie is 37. She’s still a Millennial, yo. 2024-37=1987. She’s a fucking ‘90s kid and she’s already growing some grays and finding the protoforms of what will one day become wrinkles.

Drawn by @alouissever

Arthur and his sister, Daria (yes, I know it was Darya; deal with it). Daria’s nonplussed about how childish Venus remains.

Drawn by @alouissever

I actually couldn’t find the bottom image for the longest time, so I think this is the first time I’ve posted it to Tumblr. See? It’s not all reposts. I kinda like how Venus looks like a ghost in the second picture, but Dalf forgot about the Saint Vitus logo! And yes, that’s a Pepper robot. I imagined that they might gain a bit more utility between now and 2024. Also, funny thing about Venus being a “hipster”. She’s actually not. She’s more of a moddie than a hipster. But since Arthur’s a hipster, she sometimes tries to be one ironically.

Drawn by @dalf

Arthur Tartakovsky, Venus’s ultra-hipster boyfriend. This was before he gained his ironic mustache. He used to be in an indie pop band in an earlier draft, but nowadays he’s still in an indie pop band. The actual change was his other hobby: before, he was a comic artist. Now he’s an indie game dev specializing in retro games and VR cyberpunk. The world of indie game devs can get hectic, especially in a tight job market. He has to deal with rival devs sabotaging each other and himself sometimes, which is why he developed electrokinetic powers.

Early sketches of the original trio. Only Venus has really changed visually. She was much less notable.

Drawn by @dalf

I already did the posts where @pan-pizza gets his nuts crushed. I see no reason why I should post them again other than to goad Pan into reblogging this megapost. Pan, do not  reblog this.

Drawn by @alouissever

Drawn/animated by @spookyfishcakes

Drawn by @nicolas-px-art

Early form of Malfiore. She always wears Ed’s clothes (a la Ed Edd n Eddy), but it was much more faithful in the earliest sketches. Just ask Alouisse-Ver. Also, she used to have Daria’s hairstyle.

Muriel’s first sketch, back before she had her top hat. I created her as a loveletter to Pan Pizza and his gothosexual tendencies; Malfiore was always going to be a part of the story.

Drawn by @alouissever

Anarchie’s still got a lotta stoner rock in it (Venus’s band and their scene mates are all either stoner rock or heavy rock), but even back in 2014 when I first created the story, I left some room for indie rock. Nowadays, they both take up an equal amount of space. If it ever becomes a movie or a cartoon, it’ll probably be the only one in history where the OST consists of Nebula, Kyuss, Radio Moscow, and Orange Goblin right alongside The Pillows, Kodaline, Arctic Monkeys, and Porno Mags. Radiohead one second, Pentagram the next.

And, for now, that’s all for Anarchie. I’ve yet to commission pictures of Kalo, Syd, Adamski, or Azura Meco, but those are coming. I’m just actually working on the story. Shocker, I know. Even I’m surprised. I just did a 30,000 word outline in about 10 days; the real rough draft should be finished by April.

And now for BGM, which is basically “Anarchie + Cyberdelic Pharmaceuticals”. The early posts here don’t show that off well, but the world will know...

Title card still pending.... I made that 3 yea— holy fuck, I made that three years ago?! How is it 2017 already? 

Pure stardream. It sounds like dreamrock, honestly. The moment I heard this, I knew I had found BGM’s BGM. No pun intended. It was either this or Stand Up. 

Belle. Belle Grand-Mär. British moddie, real name “Indira Elizabeth Jones”, elective mute, severe and antisocial, freeskating and freerunning traceause, yadayadayada. If Venus was a female Scott Pilgrim fused with Murdoc Niccals, Belle is Ramona Flowers + Haruko Haruhara + Ryuko Matoi + Garnet + a mime + Neku Sakuraba + a silent cartoon character. I’m glad I’m a writer. Try creating a silent character! You’d better have mastered visual emotion.

Aurora. Real name “Farideh Moradi”, Persian-Briton moddie, freerunning traceuse, Belle’s closest friend and whatnot. She literally got her name from the reference to the Aurora Borealis in A Flock of Seagull’s uber-80′s hit “I Ran (So Far Away)”. The 2020′s are basically the ‘80s with more cyberdelia, after all.

Bomb. Real name “Madeleine Violetta Dumont”, French moddie, actually dead and works as a psychokinetic grim reaper whenever she feels like it. Also Belle’s rival and foil. Freeskating traceuse. She was created in 2009 as the lead character in a story that was literally “JSRF: Jet Set Radio Future + The World Ends With You”. This is why she seems like someone badly took a character from each of those games and fused them together.

Drawn by @alouissever

Parov Stelar’s beautiful little electroswing track. It’s so 2020′s.  BGM has much more of a stardream atmosphere than the down-to-earth feel of Anarchie. There’s a lot more chiptune, dreamier rock, electrofunk, and whatnot. If you took the soundtrack to Super Mario Galaxy and Steven Universe, mixed it with the soundtrack to Jet Set Radio Future, and made it thrice as eclectic, you’d get something like BGM’s presumed BGM.

You may have noticed that all the characters for BGM thus far are moddies. That’s no mistake or coincidence— it’s a moddie story. It has a stronger character than Anarchie, to the point I can even call it when aspects of Anarchie “seem like something out of BGM”.  Moddies are already getting started, though no one’s yet calling them moddies. But you see how vaporwave’s gotten so big? How neon and pixel art is dominating Tumblr? Seapunk and dyed hair are everywhere, everyone loves hallucinogenics, and everyone loves the ‘80s once more. Major Lazer, for the fucking win. Right now, we say that these are signs of hipsterdom. But in the 2020s, we’re going to look back and realize what it really was— the birth of the moddies. We’ve not yet reached the moddies— we still need a Transhuman Be-In, cheaper OLEDs, and a Sgt. Pepper moment for electronic music (where people stop seeing it as purely dance music). And I don’t see anyone who owns a robot like Pepper or ASIMO yet either. And while luminescent hair is definitely a thing, it’s not yet become a common thing. Nor has leaving up Christmas lights all year, or being obsessed with bright primary colors.

But we’re getting there. And the thing that will trigger the final separation between post-hipsters and moddies isn’t a Transhuman Be-In, but simply time: us Millennials are indeed growing older. I was born in ‘94, and I’m 22 going on 23. Millennials brought back hipsterdom, but ‘10s hipsters suffered a brutal blow due to the loss of Bernie Sanders and the rise of Donald Trump. Our whole zeitgeist became fragile. Hence why people are looking for harder music instead of the previously comfortably twee indie pop and nu-folk. Being vintage and authentic hasn’t helped us one bit, and the kids— those younger than ourselves— don’t believe in our ideals. They just see a blizzard.  Some may mock the hair colors, but they secretly love it. They want something more than what Millennials are offering. They are loving several aspects of what’s big— aforementioned things like vaporwave, electronic music, dyed hair, cyberpunk revivalism, ‘80s and ‘90s love, etc.— but other aspects, they are eager to discard. There’s a strain of neo-futurism in the iGeneration, which isn’t surprising considering they were raised as something of a proto-cyborg generation.

And that’s the moddies in a nutshell. Kids who recognize they live in “The Future™” and wish to own it. They don’t just listen to electronic music because it’s cool; it also aids that whole sense of living in years that previous generations thought were purely sci-fi. They don’t see electronic music as just dance club/background music. They want electronic versions of prog rock and conscious hip hop. They’re more than happy to drop acid and fuck robots. They don’t love the obsession with a minimalist future with sterile colors— they want neon. Neon lights, neon paint, and a cyberdelic attitude. If that means making cities look like one giant rave, so be it. Because ha ha, they live in the Future.

Four years ago, Vision Eternel released its long-delayed music video for Pièce No. Trois. Here are some behind-the-scenes stills from the video shoot that took place in Old Montreal with cinematographer Jeremy Roux.