What went wrong?

Now this was some OG weeaboo shit.

A comic that is very much early 00s and has never evolved past that time. It's a time capsule of that era.

It's funny to me that guys like Gabe of PA used to be in awe of his art and then over time they surpassed him while he just sat perfectly still in exactly the same place.

>Largo leaving after Piro asserted control over the entire thing
I feel like this undersells it. Piro literally gave Largo an ultimatum, either hand over all rights to the comic and leave, or Piro would just quit and end the comic entirely. Piro's an asshole on a level that his whole shy dork persona is calculated to conceal.

It really is weird. There's just more time spent on each page, but the technique is the fucking same from page one.

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To be honest, I don't think it's calculated or any shit like that. Based on what a classmate who met the guy once told me, I think Megatokyo quickly became Piro's personal security blanket/catharsis/etc. Like probably the damn day after he started getting ideas and wrapped himself up in what he could do with the comic. I still read the thing past the point in time where he was able to quite his day job and just work full time on it. Which, to give him SOME kind of credit her deserves, he did actually achieve that kind of success.

Buuuut... there wasn't a Marvel or DC editor holding the rights above his head so he was always in a position to be ultra possessive and go "MINE MINE MINE" because it became that important to him. Lord only knows what would have happened if Largo didn't budge.

Shit, now I wonder if MT would have even been a blip if it lasted for less than enough pages to fill a single issue and or what Piro would have done after ward. ...Assuming he didn't quite comicing forever or suicide or something bad.

...that "Mom" woman is clearly doped to the gills on pain meds, right? Right? I certainly hope so because I can't think of any other reason a character would talk that way.

I think he has a naturally stagnant avoidant/fearful personality, isn't he still obsessed with that one dating sim as well, even though it must be 30 years old at this point?

>Lord only knows what would have happened if Largo didn't budge.
You mean if Largo had let Piro kill the comic rather than let him have it? I can think of two things offhand: people in general would remember Megatokyo much more warmly (as something that had great potential it never got to realize) but consider Piro a villain (fans especially), and Piro would have tried to write a much more VN-esque, weepy story that probably would have bombed.

This is mostly just an unrelated reflection, but has it struck anybody else how bizarrely... alienizing the weebing about Japan is in this comic? I mean, I get that it's a product of its time, and I also get that it's necessarily going to be supercringe since it's weeb wank, but he's portraying Tokyo like it's a different fucking planet, like they fell into a time portal or got shot out of a gun to Jupiter by mistake. I keep wanting to say you could never get away with depicting Japan this way nowadays but I remember the nineties and going to Japan and I don't think you could get away with it any more back then! Except clearly he did, so...

I think I stopped reading MT some point after the voice actress got comic-Piro the signed artwork from that artist he liked. Which honestly could have been taken as a "Get the fuck outta Dodge" moment.

But yeah, I was asking what if Largo had let Piro kill the comic. To be fair I think it would EITHER bomb like you supposed or if the fans followed him to a new project he would have had mild success but probably be worse off than he is right now making 2500 a month off patreon.

God patreon is such a scam.

2500 dollars a month and he hasn't updated in a year?

Though, I remember when they still had the amount they were making, Sakimichan was pulling in 60k every two weeks or something ridiculous like that.

The entire cyberpunk genre from Blade Runner to Shadowrun has roots in the basis public perception of 80s Japan and their economic boom.

This isn't like RWBY which inexplicably turned out to be lightning in a bottle that somehow appeals to audiences in both the US and Japan, (and I'm not saying that its good or bad, just that there is a big fucking fanbase) but Megatokyo had this instant appeal--specifically to westerners-- because anime and manga were just creeping out of the very niche market it had been in before DBZ and Sailor Moon and Pokemon made all the fucking bank. To kids/teens/college dorks like myself, the comic had a quaint almost comfy concept of two wacky college buddies who go to the land where all this anime and video game stuff comes from.

For people who were renting two episode Evangelion and Nadesico VHS tapes from Hollywood Video and realizing Viz had been reversing the page layouts of Ranma 1/2 this whole time, the comic felt like a window into what we were hoping to get next.

Actually, he updated the comic 4 days ago, it's just his most recent live journal rant is from last may...

>To be fair I think it would EITHER bomb like you supposed or if the fans followed him to a new project he would have had mild success but probably be worse off than he is right now making 2500 a month off patreon.
Frankly, given the extent to which he ultimately leaned into the Largo lolrandom shit he originally hated and which was his claimed reason for the split (he wanted to focus less on the humor and crazy stuff), I don't think he would've had any success outside Megatokyo. Largo was always funnier, and his zany bits are what got the comic a following and retained it, long after he himself was gone. Piro writing a comic wiith none of that stuff stuck into it already and needing to be taken into account would have just meandered into high school drama bullshit with creepily fetishistic sad girls in serafuku.

How far did everyone get/remember getting? I got to the part where the teen girl became a thieving magical girl and the city was nearly destroy.

Last thing I remember was Largo blowing up a club with a Rick Roll bomb and then hiatus and I stopped.

Where is everyone getting all this info about the piro/largo split? From what I remember all I ever heard was "creative differences" happened causing them to stop working together.

I'm not really sure. I vaguely remember that one goth girl they were convinced was a vampire leading one of the main guys to a club in the basement, but that might just be the only memorable part before I dropped it.

>The entire cyberpunk genre from Blade Runner to Shadowrun has roots in the basis public perception of 80s Japan and their economic boom.
*80s* Japan, sure. In the 1980s I can see the exoticism and make sense of it, with fuckin' Karate Kid and Eric van Lustbader novels and all that shit, but by the mid 90s this LAND OF MANGO shit was IMO weird already, it leaves me incredulous.

I guess you must have it right though, I'm not saying you're lying or some dumb shit like that. I'm just baffled by the whole thing because I remember having a much clearer view of Japan even back then, the main thing that culture shocked me was the open racism.

Largo had to become a teacher for some reason and that leetspeak ninja came along to class for some reason and was like a TA? I think Largo also fucked the actually attractive one of those two girls, the tall one.

Nothing went wrong, it just never was good.

I remember the characters page on the website was broken/unfinished for like a thousand years, but apparently it's there now. But who even gives a shit, y'know? There's something fucked up about that.

youtube.com/watch?v=TDwsiqQa1pw
youtube.com/watch?v=SwCYHXRB50U

You kind of have to place it in the context of both internet humor and anime fandom of the time. Internet humor was all animutation LOLRANDOM stuff, much more than it is even now, and anime was also in this weird post-Eva experimental phase where a lot of it was weird. So the kind of person reading webcomics about anime in 2001 was primed for a lot of wacky humor about how weird Japan was.

God, Evangelion is so fucking terrible.

Sorry, that's not really realted to any of this conversation. I'm just still blown away by how bad it is. It might be the most overrated piece of art of all time.

>But who even gives a shit, y'know? There's something fucked up about that.
That accurately summed up my feelings.
I was just thinking about how that always irked me about the comic, the character page was always under construction and just kind of assumed that it would always be the case. Even you saying that it's up doesn't even pique my interest enough to fact check it and this was one of the comics that inspired me to try doing my own non-sprite webcomic.

Thinking back, I think that stupid page always being under construction was sort of foreshadowing the entire comic.

The only crime is that people think Evangelion is Anno's masterpiece while Gunbuster was so fucking perfect.

What said.

I don't blame you for being baffled. I went to Japan back in the early 2000s (but had enough fucking sense to realize anime would in no way shape or form be an accurate depiction of Japanese culture) and enjoyed myself mostly whether I was taking in the actual culture or hitting up an arcade shopping center for Guilty Gear figurines, but back at college in the US there was this repugnant otaku wannabe who would argue with the Japanese teachers (who, like, WERE FROM JAPAN) about how shit over there HAS to be like his animes.

Idiots like that aside, I don't think many people were being intentionally racist or anything back then. They were so wrapped up in the weirdness, the shows themselves and how crazy shit was but they simply weren't thinking about how shit might actually be over in Japan. Just they they sure make all these weird and wonderful cartoons and video games where you date girls as the premise and what have you.

>I don't think many people were being intentionally racist or anything back then.
I think you probably misunderstood that line from me, I meant the *Japanese* were (and are) casually, openly racist to a degree that blew me away. It wasn't too bad against me as a tall blond white guy, but the shit they'd talk on blacks despite having seen one maybe once in their lie, from a distance, would have offended /pol/, and it was even worse against Koreans and the Chinese.

That's Piro's side of the story.

For awhile the split between the two was down played until the whole mess was exacerbated when Scott Kurtz (of the Nobody cares anymore webcomic, PvP) implied Piro stole the comic from Largo as a low jab while congratulating Largo for the birth of his recent child.

Piro blew up over that and maintained it was creative differences that caused the split.

Then Largo/Caston's response to all of THAT was that Piro threatened to rage quit right before the comic was going to get a book deal and he (Largo) didn't want the comic to die so he bailed.

Oh.

Shit, I'm sorry.

But... uh, yeah, China and Japan hate each other, with the former at times considering Japan to *still* be the villain from WWII. Japan has hated Korea for a long ass time (and got really furious as a whole when anthropology studies back in the day revealed there were probably genealogy links between the two countries.)

All three nations have invaded or tried to invade one another for centuries and that enmity runs deep. I even recall there's a weird ass superstition Japanese people used to have that foreigners with blue eyes saw everything in a blue tint opposed to "normal" vision.

>what went wrong
the concept

When you wanna draw weebshit without understanding why weebshit is popular.

The thing is that NGE actually transformed the industry by smashing the status quo while Gunbuster didn't. Gunbuster is stellar for different reasons but it didn't make everyone in the industry, both fans and creators, to start copying Gunbuster because of how much of an impact it had on everyone. Gunbuster was like a love letter (and maybe parody) to the mecha of its time, so it was more of an end-of-an-era type of piece than what NGE ended up being.

So when people think about "masterpieces" they think about pieces that had an impact on society more than a perfectly polished piece that fit with the rest of its time. If you want people to bring up Anno's other works in a discussion about his "masterpiece", you should use less vague terms and be more specific in what you mean by "masterpiece" and maybe they'll actually mention his other works.

Contrarian opinions don't make you sound smart.

Complaining about how ~bad~ NGE is after the fact is kind of pointless and meaningless when it objectively affected countless people of its time and countless more after that, especially when the complaints are made without the context of the era of when it came out. It's a pillar of the culture now, whether you like it or not, like Jojo or Touhou or DB or whatever else other shit that gets referenced/memed all the time that you don't like not just in anime but in Japan or the western world in general. Just as pointless as walking onto a stage and trying to tell people that the original Star Wars movies are artistically bad for X reason.

>and still not improve is the real question?
When you draw the wrong way for years its not going to suddenly make you better. You actually need to study that shit. Unless you're actually somehow a prodigy at illustration.

That's very little money, to be honest.

It's Excel Saga that always gets me. Forgotten now, but huge in America at the time despite being really awful, and I don't think I've ever seen an anime shit on the manga it's adapted from as much as it did: It turned Excel from the hyperactive but basically competent straight man team leader into a literal retard ranked below the mop, and Shioji is turned into a pedophile and that becomes his only character trait. It's very weird going from anime to manga or back

last couple pages have actually been pretty good
uh, it improved considerably.
i love excel saga..

largo is my favorite character.

Largo got married, realized Piro was a manic depressive incel, and bailed before shit got too bad. Piro later got married himself, long after that and long after he'd turned the comic into a shadow of its former self.

You should check out the manga if you ever get a chance. It starts off somewhat similar, but Excel being The Smart One changes things pretty significantly over time, and there's a bit more character humor and a bit less LOLRANDOM

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I think the teen girl that got Piro's bag had just become a magical girl when I stopped. Though by that time, I'd been in the "why do I keep reading this" phase for a while, so it's possible some more stuff happened that I just don't remember.

>Japan has hated Korea for a long ass time
Korea and Japan and China had centuries / millenia of healthy trading relations until the 7-year long genocide of Korea by Japan during the 1400s. Even after then, Korea still traded plenty with Japan when it got its footing back. Most of the real political bickering was over fishing territory and Japanese pirate raids onto Korea. The territory thing is what they have actually been arguing about for centuries. The second longest argument is over the Japanese's post-1901 treatment of Korea.
>(and got really furious as a whole when anthropology studies back in the day revealed there were probably genealogy links between the two countries.)
This is as retarded as American hillbillies being upset at finding out they are descended from Scottish immigrants. Wow, no shit the people of an island nation are probably descended from some immigrants of the nearest landmass. Also this is news to me.

>All three nations have invaded or tried to invade one another for centuries and that enmity runs deep
This statement makes it sound like Korea actually bothered to do any invading of its own. The aggression was always into Korea, not outwards, which is why Korean enmity towards Japan is so strong. Korea on the other hand, doesn't give as much fucks about China outside of its role in keeping the North vs South divide and keeping it alive because in the past, Korea lived as China's vassal and was fine with it because generally China didn't want to annex Korea and genocide them, it just wanted to bully it for offerings and taxes, so despite straight up conquering them several times, Korea was left alone. Yes, you can blame a lot of the split on the US, but Korea basically views MacArthur+the US as saviours despite his fuckups so outside of some renegades in the history department, you won't find anyone who'll listen to you on that.

tl;dr - China vs Korea, Korea sleeps. Japan vs Korea, Korea smash.

>until the 7-year long genocide of Korea by Japan during the 1400s
1592-1598, not the 1400s. I am bad at remembering years.