::prayerlocket::

location

Megatokyo

22 min read

Info

Log

Volume 1

By Fred Gallagher and Rodney Caston

Chapter 0 - 2022-08-31

todo: examine the implications of the logo being in all-katakana (oh they use the kanji later on so it must be stylistic on some level)

i think it’s ok for the first comic of a webcomic to suck ass, generally. why is philippe standing on the paper? i dunno. nobody does.

page 22: it took a while, but the two gamers are finally on something resembling a couch (no, the airplane seats don’t count).

24

Like many people who spend a lot of time online, a good chunk of my social interaction with people is on IRC.

50 piro confirmed egg

63-65: the 2000s must have been a trip, since having a dramatic moment felt perfectly natural reading through this (and was honestly one of the more intriguing developments so far), yet people complained because there wasn’t a joke in there?

73 piro confirmed egg!

80 dammit he’s just like me

85:

People almost threatened bodily harm if we didn’t make t-shirts with “3v1l l33t” on them.

it truly was a different time…

89 they’re baiting this so hard for people like me

102 ed recites the litany of fear to play ddr, and therein predicts itg

i feel like the piro and the largo stories are two completely different things… one of them wanted to tell a wacky japan story, the other wanted to tell an introspective stranger-in-moscow story about being alienated in a place that you’ve always been fascinated by, and i predict we’ll see the latter winning out more and more…
like even now largo is starting to feel superfluous to the story that i think piro wants to tell, and he exists more as a foil than for any other reason. he’s here to drink beer and game, but geographically he can do that pretty much anywhere, ping notwithstanding.

119 is tsubasa basically the lyman of this series? already?

124 yes, i remember the launch of the ps2… (god i’m old).
126 (finally… two gamers on a bench)

the pictures of mt-chan on 142-143 really speak to me in terms of how art on the web really used to be.
god it was so much sketchier, all the way through, and the details it did have came in the form of indulgences. she is absolutely an overdesigned character, but that’s part of the style then and that makes her interesting!

people say that the internet led to art becoming more democratized. this isn’t quite true, but it is, but not really, but let’s assume it is because i think one component worth pointing out is that with democracy comes populism. with every year the standards required to be noticed as a creator become increasingly higher, and from this vantage point it’s then easier to look back on legacy-popular works and feel…
…perhaps feel a charm that this is what we used to think was good. but maybe it still is! and maybe we lost something when we collectively decided to raise the bar for production values so high.

Volume 2

Chapter 1: “Do you want to save before you quit?” - 2022-09-14

can love truly bloom between a weeb and an actual minor?

i’ll say that the manga-style format does make it feel much more natural to read, and the 4koma format now feels stilted in comparison. the 4koma forces each panel to have a beat, and for the final panel to have a concrete resolution. here, the beats come when they come, and a resolution isn’t guaranteed by the end of the page (though it usually still happens, for now).

the lens of japanese-ness (a universe of chrome and neon lights)

it’s quite apparent that this is no ordinary tokyo: this is megatokyo. this is a distillation of the stuff westerners know about japan (and little that they don’t) packed into one location. a place where the robots are hyper-advanced and the manga flows free. where every high school girl dreams of becoming a seiyuu and godzilla is still an active threat.

so it’s theme park japan, but it also doesn’t claim to be otherwise. and what is maybe interesting about the comic is that it has the awareness to recognize that even living in theme park japan as a gaikokujin would kinda suck.

when the westerner gazes at japan, they yearn in the same breath for both the unknowability and for that unknowability to be accessible.
they enroll in japanese 101 and then drop the class the week after hiragana is introduced.

i want to say that the problem faced by the characters is exactly the problem of comprehending japan outside of the lens. the media-filtered reality is not the actual reality, even in this case where the reality is the media-filtered reality. even as godzilla roams the streets, it turns out that shoujo manga still won’t help you solve your interpersonal struggles.

Chapter 2: “Things change little by little” - 2022-09-29

  • i, too, like it when the girls are sad
    • but the thing is, if i were a sad boy then i would definitely want to believe that some girls would be into boys who are drawn to sad girls. and so i would hope, and i would pine, and i would wait for that day to come.
    • actually, now that i think about it, there’s a certain kind of sad boy who is so preoccupied with the notion that no girl would actually want him that the only fantasies he can realistically envision involve girls rejecting him. i would know. i have forty-three minutes and twenty-one seconds of evidence.
  • social awkwardness runs through this story, and i feel like only a socially awkward person would write something like this.
  • xboxes as “full of pure evil” (i’ll have to ask ali if the specs confirm this) (the dev interviews make it sound like selling your soul to the devil provides certain benefits…)
  • leave it to seraphim: ah yes, now this is webcomics
  • [212] “manga-ka ja nai” (p. 59):
    oh to have no faith in your own work…
  • [219] “nothing but grays” (p. 65):
    “a girl of nothing but grays…”
  • oh hey they did tackle 9/11. (it’s pretty milquetoast all things considered: grieving our loss, believing that we can rebuild the rest)

the meeting: 2022-10-04

during the meeting we talked about how largo had, for lack of a better way to say this, actually gone insane within the past few years. normally i guess this would be a tragic coda: a peek into a where-are-they-now that we wish we didn’t take. but what really makes it fucked is that largo’s storylines already exhibit a relative detachment from reality – or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they center on his perception of a grandiose reality that the webcomic decides to make literal more often than not.

…could fred have known what he was making? or, since he had known largo for years beforehand, had he seen signs of this already, and maybe just written them off as him exaggerating for t3h l0lz?

Volume 3

Chapter 3: “Am I Your Number One Fan?” - 2022-10-10

time to break some hearts and torch some relationships right out of the gate.

[341] “the disappointment of reality” (p. 30):
“Don’t take it personally. Fantasies are always better than real people.”

Chapter 4: “Low Ping Rate” - 2022-10-13

(p. 104):
another piro confused for female moment

there’s a certain kind of brain that can come up with the idea of believing that none of the girls are into him while at the same time all of the girls are into him. like he imagines that he could easily become some casanova type were it not for all that gosh-darned anxiety holding him back, or that damned awkwardness causing him to sink every potential lead.
(or maybe i’m just projecting)

the meeting

so we’ve decided that this book has two big reveals:

  1. that hayasaka was a former idol
  2. miho and piro may have been in a cross-gender relationship in that mmo

Volume 4

Chapter 5: “Color Depth” - 2022-11-01

fr33talk: i both remember this era of the web, but i also don’t. i remember learning how to write html around this time, but the extent of my experience from there involves dumping the results onto tripod for nobody to read. i assume that’s how the web worked for most people: you make the site, you upload it to one hosting provider or another, and they work their magic to get it on the web. i assume that’s how it still works now.
so when i read about him needing six servers to manage the traffic for the site, i find it specific and fascinating. where did he store them? how did he load-balance them? i know how these problems could be solved now, but i’m writing from a time when “the cloud” has shifted from a buzzword to a fact of life, and he’s working in a time when you were considered lucky if you lived in a place with cable internet.
(2004-05 would’ve been the start of the transition away from dsl and toward cable, right?)

[569] “boo hoo.” (p. 47):
“How terrible that all these people still love her. Most people are lucky to have anyone give a damn about them in their lives.” holy shit

[574] “player statistics” (p. 52):
the l33t skillz page might be one of my favorite pages so far.
i am glad that this page exists. i think the tide of discourse should be shifted away from talents and towards special interests.

[603] “going with whatya got” (p. 78):
“Pathetic people need love too!”

Chapter 6: “Operational Insecurity” - 2022-11-03

so this plotline is just my date with the president’s daughter (as i remember it).

oh no. it’s my insecurities… they never left me, huh…

[678] “some expert” (p. 139):
holy shit holy shit holy shit. i feel so goddamn seen by piro.

[724] “already broken” (p. 181):
i feel seen and i hate it, but also it’s cathartic.

[742] “Leave it to Seraphim! - Earth Friendly Fashions” (p. 187):
is that a haibane renmei shirt?
a: in this [120] piro art day, he talks about how they’re inspired by “essence” by yoshitoshi abe. so, same creator who made that anime (and prior manga), yet different source.

[731-739] “Megatokyo Omake Theater: Circuity”

oh now this is absolutely indebted to Haibane Renmei (2002)
but also… i found it incredibly moving…
i somehow managed to fall in love with this world too.

Volume 5

Chapter 7: “Known bugs and security flaws” - 2022-11-16

ok so men are pigs. that’s the party line, and maybe there’s some truth to it. but there’s a certain kind of sensitive guy who lets that get to him, to the point where he starts to feel guilty for having any sort of sexuality at all. that could be what we’re dealing with here, or maybe i’m just projecting.

[767] “none of them are mine” (p. 28):
“draw feelings. you know, those fragile things that get hurt a lot?”

[813] “it wrecks me” (p. 68):
aww and kimiko is too emotionally moved by music to do it too

[816] “unexpected help” (p. 71):
dammit anime girls really are unsteady on their feet

[850] “a powerful healer” (p. 93):
“damaged goods? damage can be healed”

there’s also something kinda Gender about the story of b3tr4y41 largo tells erika at the end of this chapter. we’re to understand that erika is interpreting this as a girl choosing another guy over him. but we also know that this girl is piroko. (and the guy is thus likely miho)

  • did piro and largo meet through the game first?

this still makes me feel terrible. this still taps into my deepest insecurities.
and fuck, i’m almost 30, right? why can’t i get over these?

Chapter 8: “defect mapping” - 2022-11-24

time for my weekly dose of psychosexual frustration
and i commemorated this by buying the poster too!

[877] “filling in” (p. 117):
“make sure he doesn’t off himself or get all girly” this comic i swear
and i assume that ping has a really annoying voice. like, that anime annoying voice.

[912] “how i want to feel” (p. 146):
…i think i understand this

[934] “real behavior” (p. 167):
this is a cute one of yuki

[950] “a few error codes” (p. 183):
“everyone has some errors”

and i’m glad they’re together. i’m glad neither of them blew it.

reader’s guide intro: “everyone has different perceptions of the world around them.” and ok this captures what i was thinking early on. it’s hard to believe that everything we see here is actually really real (in-universe).
…also wait. every chapter has been a single day?

the meeting: 2022-11-24

once again, we discussed piro being trans – or specifically, being someone who would be inclined to transition in this day and age. sigourney brought up that:

  1. in the time that this was written (early 2000s), even though trans people did still exist and there was some cultural awareness of them, there was a much higher barrier to transition. informed consent didn’t exist, you needed a letter from a psychiatrist to get hormones, getting your name legally changed was more intensive… and unless you were fiercely determined it would be easy to think that going through it (and facing the uncertainty on the other end) just wouldn’t be worth the hassle.
    i think it’s a bit more complicated than that, though not in a way that matters. there were online resources out there for trans people, yes, but you had to know where to look. and maybe you could buy back-alley premarin if you really wanted to, but that’s only something that someone fiercely determined would do.
    but also this whole thing has got me wondering about, were i born a decade or two earlier, would i have transitioned? and the more i think about it, the more i doubt i would…
    don’t get me wrong, i’m happy being lilly, and i’m grateful that i both get to be lilly and that everyone else has been so accommodating. but if i were piro’s age then, in that same situation, i think i would’ve just made peace with the fact that i don’t get to be one of the beautiful ones. and in time i would’ve found a wife, and had a kid or two, and this discontent would hopefully fade into the background – taking its place alongside all the others.
  2. she also said that if piro had transitioned, or if he somehow became a girl, then she would likely just end up being a dandere or something. and i felt extremely called out by that.
    i think i project too much into piro, and that probably isn’t great.
  3. on the topic of fantasies, erika + largo is an interesting pairing because we have someone who has spent her whole working life embodying others’ fantasies, and then someone who is too enmeshed in his other fantasy world to bother projecting fantasies onto others. so he takes erika on her own terms, and might be one of the few capable of doing so.

Volume 6

Chapter 9: “overlo4d” - 2022-12-07

fr33talk: “It took three of the 10 years I’ve been working on Megatokyo to cover these two days.”

[989] “instant message” (p. 11):
wherein largo goes nonverbal

[1025] “panic” (p. 35):
aww they make such a nice couple
though it’s a bit funny/painful that largo seemed to have stumbled into a more fulfilling relationship, despite piro overthinking every step to the point of mental exhaustion.

[1093] “bad 3nd” (p. 97):
damn, going right for the art…

Chapter 10: “A.F.K.” - 2022-12-08

apparently this is when it all goes to shit?

…

why are they so mean to ping!
though ping and tohya are interesting characters because they’re definitely the most misunderstood in-universe – deliberately so, even.

[1193] “less hope this time” (p. 188):
wherein the burner wants to burn

[1206] “a different kind of stupid” (p. 200):
ah the pain of past relationships, and i think this came from an era where online relationships weren’t given the same weight as they are now (or maybe i’m just in strange circles)

[1240] “the source” (p. 233):
(oh to run facefirst into titty and have it make a bomph! sound…)

the meeting: 2022-12-08

  • one thing i find interesting is how it deals with a lot of issues which would’ve been relatively novel extrapolations of the current state then, but which feel like much more real issues now. like there’s the online relationships part, and how the comic seems to grapple with how real those relationships must necessarily be.
    and also it seems like it should feel really unrealistic how someone’s popularity can explode literally overnight, to the point where they now have hordes of fans stalking their every move. it should feel that way, and in 2010 it did feel that way, but now that we’ve reached the era where anyone on twitter can become a main character overnight… is it really quite so unrealistic?
  • they suggested that the magical realism which had underpinned the series had been coming to the forefront here more.

The Beyond Realm

Chapter 11: “Remanence” - 2022-12-16

[1277] “the one who laughed”:
would this be fan abuse? or is this just the pain of dealing with someone who is loose with her emotions?
this arc is just them making each other feel bad…

also now that i’m reading this on web, i get to see the art days more often, and wow there’s so much piroko. piro is egg confirmed!
“so i’m not saying that i’m a girl. but if i were a girl, this would be what i’d look like. and also this one, and this one, and this would be me dressed as this character, and here’s me dressed as this character, and here’s—”

[1297] “denial is futile” + [1298] “on base percentage”:
ah, the overprotective dad trope… though:
“i didn’t think i could ever actually help anyone. so i didn’t.”
omg even the mom is a sad girl, though in the way that appeals to me.

[1304] “what happened”:
the subtle coloring in yuki’s eyes is a nice touch.
but yeah it really does feel like it’s spinning its gears relative to everything that came before it. but it couldn’t not be this way, right? all its story developments lead to untenable positions: kimiko has a huge fanbase, miho has a huge fanbase, yuki apparently has her classmate admirers…
everyone is too special and maybe it hems people in.
(this honestly reminds me of what i was trying to do with stumps, until i decided that doing so was asinine and i cut both it and the project it came from)

[1310] “walking out the door without being seen”:
piro confirmed kyubey
(though the magical girl being hit with a kyubey is a fun touch)

[1320] “the scene i’d play”:
wherein piro gets headpats
god there’s so much gender comedy here.
holy shit we’re really leaning into fan abuse territory.
maybe this would’ve been the sort of thing i would have written, had i continued in a mentally-unwell state.

[1337] “AN ARMY OF PH33R (100% COMPLETE!!!!)”:
god she wants him to look so bad…
is largo really the only one in a healthy relationship?
because he lacks the willingness to overthink what he got himself into?

this arc feels the most like what being with allison is like, or what it might end up becoming.
or maybe it only feels that way with how fatalistic miho is.

[1345] “rollplaying”:
wherein piro gets pregnant (what happened with this webcomic?!)
…i can’t believe how much sex this webcomic doesn’t have.

[1362] “OSE: keep playing then?”:
wherein piroko and largo are together and largo mentions seeing piroko naked…
holy shit she’s such an egg…
just transition already!

[1366] “My Science was not looking!”:
and why is largo going off about catgirls?! what even is this webcomic anymore?
piro the unlikely…

[1401] “that kind of monster”: ★ holy fuck this story
…and i think i finally found that real magical girl i’d been looking for since the very start.

fred absolutely views (viewed?) male sexuality as disgusting and depraved, or perhaps he’s aware enough to see that it’s stereotypically thought of as disgusting and depraved, and he’s internalized this stereotype enough to see that his exemption to the rule is faulty in other ways and he’s not actually exempt anyway.
(if you’d like to see more of this line of thought, look at me pre-hrt!)

Chapter 12: “Broken” - 2022-12-21

healing miho is a nice callback to how piro healed her in the mmo story and i like how they spell that out too.

[1446] “stuff they couldnt fix”:
oh nice, foxboob.

[1451] “DPD: Comfy!”:
setting:cozy room

i don’t really understand otaku anymore because i’m marginally mentally healthier now than i used to be, but miho writes them out to be more of a menace than i think they would be.
but then again, i think that’s what kimiko is trying to say too. they don’t want the specific action; they just want to feel what the action once made them feel.
(but then the death reenactment happens anyway…)

[1497] “more skilled than sparkly”:
…is this the characterization that people want to see?
and then the next strip has a literal “please do not damage my love of the genre”

[1499] “little reflections”:
i feel like this says something interesting here…
(also is this what m.a.s.h. is like?)

[1513] “play”:
holy shit it took 18 years but i think piro is finally going to get laid.

[1517] “nothing bad”:
(hey, raburabu is a legitimate genre direction)

[1531] “don’t waste it”:
what is this comic even…
god like i assume fred has a steady lay and yet he has some real fucked up ideas about sexuality that are worth working through…
(unless he pigeonholed himself into keeping those fucked ideas around for continuity’s sake?)

[1533] “but no one else would be”:
what is with the foxgirl racism too?

[1543] “value”:
this just feels icky… but is that just me?
but maybe we hit the ping sex worker arc and it’s just like yeah, ok, i guess her story was always circling around this sort of thing huh.

[1549] “the sum of our parts”: todo_refs
ok so this is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if fred did his research on otaku via otaku studies, because this line reminds me a lot of what is in azuma esp. how otaku break characters apart into a collection of moe elements.

[1554] “the parts needed”:
it’s ok, ping. sometimes i wonder if i have those parts too.
…and now we reach the storyline that has fascinated me for all these years…

1555-1564 (/1569): moeko-chan

  • wherein fred draws boobs with nips!
    • but also it’s kinda creepy? they feel weirdly fetishized here… and if erika is playing this one out then it would make her weirdly bi
    • it’s unclear whether erika is playing the role or if she’s genuinely channeling the spirit of this girl.
  • along with magical girl mom, this story also lends credence to the idea that anime characters are based on irl people quite frequently.
[1561] “little girl stuff”: the one that got me into this whole series
  • before i started reading megatokyo, i assumed that i would just need some context about the characters and the story in order to understand this strip. once i started reading it, i figured that it would all make sense once the story shifts into “what it becomes later on.” it’s only now, after finally getting here, that i realize that understanding this strip requires familiarity with the themes of the series and how those themes are reified within the physical reality of the universe.
  • yet it’s still so heartbreaking.
  • there’s something that hurts about seeing yourself dramatized beyond what you could ever physically be, i think… to see yourself loved by proxy yet receiving none of that for yourself… to watch a life you could’ve lived play out in front of you…

the remainder

you know, this comic sure has a lot of talking about sex, yet very little showing of sex.

[1576] “couldn’t help it”:
fred expy discovered
1582 just let people fuck, god

[1583] “the heartbreak of other people’s luck”:
and now we get that other image i found moving… except i don’t think i like the background context behind this one as much.

watermoon — Today at 6:57 PM
i think we’re punching ourselves using each other at this point

Chapter 13: “Redemption” - 2022-12-22

ok so it’s heavily implied that they fucked last night, but he doesn’t actually show the fuckin’.
this probably makes sense, since drawing a full scene would take literally all year, but still…

[1590] “beautiful”:
i assume that asking to touch a foxgirl’s tail(s) is a pretty big faux pas.

[1603] “Easy Mode and Bad End”:
wait… are these two new characters?
and now we’re nearing the end of 2022 and only six strips came out this year.

the final meeting - 2022-12-23

depiction of women as incredibly powerful