User:RD/comm/DrawnTogether

# Drawn Together

[content warnings:  crass humor; characters being terrible; sexually suggestive show]

## 1

presented like reality show
right down to the notion of having contestants narrate in another shot.
that's a pretty cool conceit. I don't know if it will make up for how lazily-made these characters are though

"a musical and bigoted fairy-tale princess"

three seconds in, and they really are focusing on the female characters' asses
it's like. is this a joke. or is it just what every show would do if it wasn't prohibited.
the only other thing I can really say about this is bring out the funny / laugh grid and label it did not funny, did not laugh. the entire concept of that grid is way funnier than this show really

Xander is based on CD-i Link or something
although at first he looked like a metroidvania in the footage
for two seconds, I thought they were setting up Toot as gay because of how ambiguously gendered Xander looks

rubberhose character invoked cartoon chaos, and it came out looking realistic
this was done way better on the Steven Universe + Uncle Grandpa episode

characters do something that wouldn't be allowed on daytime television - self-harm
this one was executed way better on Amazing Digital Circus, where they drew attention to the concept of character actions conflicting with reality show standards by putting censor beeps on relatively mild usages of swear words making them seem way worse
[edit:] blur censorship is diegetic. good idea. not quite funny.

show not above zoophilia joke
interesting because one of my initial predictions was they were absolutely not going to sexualize Ling-Ling like the other characters but I really don't know any more

white medieval princess makes racist comment
only thing on this show that's been funny

'she's assaulting me like I'm the English language'

so. Foxxy is my favorite character so far.
I like how all the characters have good visual designs even if their writing isn't that good, and I like how Foxxy speaks like a real person, how they managed to make her exaggerated without it feeling precisely like a fake stereotype. good dialogue only gets the show so far compared to having actually good characterization but it's still good

Communist symbol on post-Soviet product - unexamined racism?
yeah, no, if Ham exists it's like the year 2000. this makes no sense

ukulele played on Wooldor's scene transition, ostensibly because he ended up underwater I guess.
doesn't really fit the character. he looks like he comes from some kind of comedy about heaven and hell or something. I don't know what music you should play for this character. maybe like, when doing a transition that ends a particular day where he got trapped in his antics you play choir music but somehow fast and wacky and funny.

this is one of those shows that became unintentionally high-concept because the concept is absolutely there but the writing they put into it is bad
and yet, I think I hate this show less than Teen Titans Go. because at least it tried.

Clara makes inanimate objects come to life as an ability

MUSICAL NUMBER
oh god. okay, so this episode was just taking a while to get good. this is crazy. this is the kind of thing you make a show like this for
...you know what the funniest thing about this is. Disney would never fucking allow this scene. even though there's no sex in it, it's just lesbians

explosive drama between characters, exaggerated by animation
not quite funny, but at least fully illustrates the idea. you're on "Reincarnated as Yamcha" level

whenever they go outside the house live action segments happen?

Ling-Ling devours Toot and she is gone for now
how exactly do the characters come back? is there lore on that?

absolutely incomprehensible teaser that feels like you lived several lifetimes and almost certainly won't actually come up in future episodes. I have no idea what to expect. beautiful


### thoughts

> he looks like he comes from some kind of comedy about heaven and hell or something
that's something that's missing from this show. on actual reality shows you'll sometimes have about 10 minutes where people are in the setting they came from and talk about themselves but sort of ramble about the same points repeatedly. I think Total Drama Island actually had those segments. this should really could have used them because a couple of these characters like Ling-Ling and Wooldor actually do need a bit of introduction where you could learn a bit about their lore and whatever concerning things are happening to the people around them that accidentally got caught on camera.
god, can you imagine an MLP character but in this format, with some of the really dark stuff about the show just showing up while the cartoon magical creature gets interviewed. pony is talking about how harmonious everything is and how everyone is friends now thanks to their wonderful princess, zebra is just walking around and one of the ponies just socks her because of the plot point on the show that ponies are racist. griffin actually slaughters a pony and eats it and a bunch of soldiers have to rush in and defend the city. Starlight Glimmer is going onto the show to try to get released from probation and is grumbling about the suppression of (fake) Communism / anarchism when everyone is supposedly so nice and friendly. or a Kirin. who is really mad that the pony kingdom conquered and colonized the Kirin republic and now they had to move here to have any chance at a job but they're tightly repressed into these specific ways of behaving and everybody hates them for being from the Kirin republic and still supporting Communism. you have gags of like this character constantly getting surveiled and caught at bad moments and threatened with bad things happening to them for saying the wrong things, but where the joke is that none of the other characters know that doing this is wrong, they're just doing 1984 to the Communist unironically because they think it's a good way to live and the way they'd like to live. even Ling-Ling or the kaiju character is like, capitalism is good, I am a mouse, I don't know what money is.
I'd also love to see a character in a setting like this that is meant to represent a 3D-animated Pixar character.
honestly. another thought. I don't think they should categorize the characters by real-world races. I think they should assign them nationalities based on their literary genre or medium. that would be a lot funnier. like imagine the stereotype jokes you could pull with what a Disney type character is or what an anime character is etc.

these are the character types I would draw concept art of if I was designing this show:
* cartoon Japanese kaiju  -  that's a really solid pick
  * I think the cartoon kaiju should have more depth. picking Pokémon, this series that is almost intentionally simple, wasn't a good choice for this kind of show. look at how Digimon have four or five stages, and they can grow up into just basically humans, or become giant mechs, and presumably turn into these like gritty adult versions of themselves, just look at Agumon next to WarGreymon
  * the jokes you could make about a Renamon type character and how many people are sexually attracted to them for different reasons in different forms - including when they turn into a car, like humanity is not as limited as you think it is
* conventional anime protagonist, Ichigo Kurosaki type  -  this type of character gets interesting when you explore the notion of people having stereotypes about what anime is. that said, I think you could also do this kind of thing with a more specific character type aimed at a particular genre. like... mech pilot? somebody who was inexplicably famous for once being in high school, we can use some excuse like them being really good at basketball or chess or something and competing against other schools? I don't know.
* visual novel type character  -  horny protagonist? not sure. maybe a reference to how furry media is so often visual novels now? there's potential here but I don't know of what kind.
  * you know, the Danganronpa characters would definitely qualify as somebody who would be famous for having gone to high school, if they got trapped in a death game at high school but some of them survived.
* I guess on the note of high school character you could have a magical girl character. that's a story genre.
  * or a magical girl that plays school sports, and like, inappropriately combines different anime story genres as if they totally went together.
* 3D Pixar type character  -  you'd want to play on the concept of Pixar movies being highly emotional journeys and the character having depth after or during their story arc
* animated newspaper comic strip character, like Charlie Brown Christmas special, like Garfield  -  oh god the meme status of Garfield as anti-humor has some real potential. this character that is just a caricature of 'I go to work, I'm bored, I hate Mondays, it's never getting better' but everybody knows they're unfunny and kind of regard them as a mood killer
* character referencing Homestuck and the concept that parts of it are animated so it's technically a cartoon  -  this is a slow burn concept but gets increasingly funnier when you cover how confused everyone is by Homestuck's lore or why people are obsessed with it
* character from a show intended as LGBT media representation, Steven Universe type  -  very important bridge between action and sitcom shows, genuinely has subtle characteristics a lot of other shows don't have
  * it's important to note that this isn't really the same thing as a magical girl known for being in high school. you get a very different image when you imagine a Japanese high school show, versus older bulkier Steven Universe
* character already representing adult cartoons like Family Guy  -  intuitive idea but you have to pick just the right angle
* character who is a VTuber and whose adventures consist of let's-playing games
* really wonky very early 3D-animated show, Jimmy Neutron type, a lot of other shows like this are edutainment?
* actually, edutainment show character is a really good idea
* character referencing MLP:FiM  -  you could combine this with the concept of an edutainment character I guess because it is kind of lightly edutainment
* character representing the concept of everyone wanting a Warrior cats cartoon and some people animating them but it being underground and prohibited, and there somehow being a diegetic counterpart to that against the character's universe  -  you could make jokes about the books having a ton of lore and some people forgetting it and the books sometimes forgetting it and characters being put into places out of character because the plot demands it
* rubberhose adjacent character with tragic lore, like Kimba the White Lion, _Phoenix_
* animated character created for art student thesis  -  don't know what you'd do with this but it sure is a genre of animation
* claymation character, Wallace and Gromit type  -  you're going to have to find some actual story genre and angle for this, but it'd be visually striking
  * I'm kind of just turning this into Amazing World of Gumball. but I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Gumball but an adult cartoon is not a bad idea
* vocaloid or Japanese place mascot that is bizarrely used for everything, Zundamon type
* a superhero character was a solid pick but I wish they'd done a more interesting superhero concept
* a sword-and-sorcery fantasy was a solid pick but I wish they'd thought harder than CD-i Link, and looked into the notion of these fantasy shows with just really aesthetic painted backgrounds of evil fortresses etc and deeply apparent mood
* I think one category majorly missing from this show is toy commercial. you could go many directions with that. the very obvious way to go is the character being different or more disappointing at an older age than they were on the show
* very simplified animation style, Hello Kitty type
* character that plays trading card game?  -  while often represented within anime, the concept of having a whole show about a trading card game either in-universe or out-of-universe is not really an anime exclusive concept and I'm surprised it hasn't appeared more elsewhere
  * this is also a better way to integrate the concept of games than CD-i Link
  * megaman exe is a really good example of a show that is essentially in the universe of a trading card game, although it kind of merges into the concept of any other anime protagonist. I think what would be really good is a character that basically lives in Magic: the Gathering or the realm Yu-Gi-Oh monsters come from
* cartoon reality-show character that is literally written like a Total Drama Island character, for a perfect meta joke
honestly I kind of feel like the show's premise constrains itself a bit too much by focusing on the house. it can be a reality show, but it should be one where they go to a few different places and you can see the cast as more of an open system interacting with its environment, the lore and the personalities and the warts of the background settings
* Fionna Campbell. just... I don't know exactly what you do with that thought but that show is really really unique for being a spinoff of a fantasy show that turned into a sitcom and then had diegetic multiverse shenanigans where crossovers were a concept in the lore, and Prismo was flipping through universes with a TV remote. that's something.
  * realistically you could combine the characteristics of Adventure Time and Steven Universe into one character and make like a ripped lesbian sword hero that has been through a lot of adventures, I mean Rebecca Sugar was busy carefully burying lesbian romance into the latter.
* Excludey was an interesting idea. that was like, getting into character archetypes rather than animation settings? this show really hasn't thought about the characters as characters before just getting started, despite it basically being set up as a character study. I feel like fanfiction writers have a better understanding of what character studies are than this show does

I think half my ideas here are building up to the idea that this show would have been many times better if it had been based on only Japanese animation genres than if it were based on only United States animation genres.
like, take a cast like cartoon Kaiju, VTuber, magical girl that plays basketball, very tragic not Kimba the White Lion*, not MLP:FiM that kinda has the Ling-Ling role of spontaneously talking about being nice on United States political issues and confusing everybody, character that lives in the world of a trading card game, not Hello Kitty. how many characters are there again? not-Pixar character for the hell of it, visual novel protagonist that is voiced normally but is not fully animated and is stop-motion animated about every 2 seconds in a number of set expressions they can somehow do from any angle.
I think the second thing I'm discovering is that this would have been way more interesting if it was Young Adult than if it was in a Family Guy type setting. or, deceptively like a Young-Adult show for a bit and then suddenly it gets horribly dark. that could work too.
gosh I think the most fun thing about this show will be adding more ideas to this and building up my own cast
[*] it's true Toot gets the tragedy in there but it's just not very good. I feel like story-based tragedy would have made this a lot better.

- he had to live at a school that was being menaced by a terrible serial killer, but at least he survived. - ...Moroeda Hiyato!
  Moroeda:  really, I'm doing better now, you don't have to worry about me. the only thing that makes me angry is that asshole got away with it.
  not Kyubey:  [knife in hand] —yeah, but what are they going to do about it? no earth policeman can keep me locked down. you'd better just go home and be glad that I shifted my energy over to cooking.
  * character stop-motion animated in a very nicely-drawn talk sprite style but only a large but specific array of expressions. all the characters in his universe are animated like this

- coming to us from the world of Aubecritcha - they come from plants, but they hatch out of eggs! ...Hibiscuscha!
  Hibiscuscha:  ...I hope they actually pay me my money. everybody lets you down these days, you know?
  * combination of Telefang and Digimon, superficially presenting itself as being based on Tamagotchi. cell phones. technology. plant theming. egg theming. eggplant.
  * character animated basically in Digimon style, a somewhat normal anime style

- she lost everything. family dead, walking against a blizzard, she came to us all the way from Kazakhstan. - ...(soviet defector)!
  (defector:)  you know, it's actually pretty terrible here. people work themselves to death, the bosses try to get women to sleep with them. why, at **bleep**, you wouldn't believe wh—
  interviewer:  (defector), you can't say that stuff on TV. this is a free society. it's much better than the place you came from.
  * character animated in Osamu Tezuka style evoking the people who look for the phoenix or the guy that vows to protect the animals. this just feels right because of how it gives the implication she came from another era, which conceptually she did if she is a reference to historical events from circa 1941. (_The Long Walk_, tragic mood from end of Kimba when Kimba dies)
  * flashbacks to the Soviet Union are always animated in Phoenix / Kimba style — and they always accidentally end up showing something really nice about being there for a second before being really abruptly cut off with an unsatisfactory transition that truly looks like it was added at the last minute. censored Soviet Union flashbacks: the only time a cutaway gag is genuinely the funniest thing in the episode

- coming to us from the land of rainbows and friendship, Japan's only talking fenghuang as of today... Faux Eau!
  Faux:  I was named after the concept of mirages. you can see it on my wrist.
  * character animated in Flash-animation style
  * this character's show would be about an array of various magic birds. phoenix, fenghuang, homa, all of them relatively similar to each other in concept but with unique abilities per species and all in different collections of rainbow colors. I wanna say that there are a select few totally normal birds that are about as rare as phoenixes or griffins with speaking roles in MLP. like, one or two regular owls on the entire show. one golden eagle. lots of phoenixes; it's probably a setting where phoenixes can die but are just very very hard to kill. they become their own children, they effectively reproduce asexually but mutate into a new person. and it may be part of the lore that there are ways for them to re-integrate their past lives.

- she came to her home town to teach English, but due to some complicated mix-ups, they wouldn't let her leave. — ...Bonjour Antelope!
  Somebody:  Is your name actually Bonjour?
  B.A.:  No, it's Dick Flaccidson. ...What do you think. My name is Antelope Williams.
  * character animated in cut-out construction-paper-like style
  * character is a teacher in lore, and comes from an edutainment program where she gets into fairly tame but funny misadventures. kind of like Amelia Bedelia or something.
  * harmless and innocent on the surface, super sassy underneath after her time dealing with annoying kids.

I think you could keep the idea of the show turning live action whenever they leave specific places that are the main places. it would be super cool to see the characters modeled up into tokusatsu puppets or costumes that strongly feel exactly like at least what a physical version of the character would be. you go for that aesthetic that Ultra Series protagonists have where their clothing makes them stand out and they almost halfway look animated, and it would work out


## 2

Clara relates... a story... in fairytale storybook style
my thought is. how is it there is so much sexual shit in this show and like I bet that among everybody else who watches it people have more of a positive reaction to shows with no sex in them than this one.
I swear there are more people playing Undertale and having weird thoughts about Sans but having them very positively than there are people thinking this show is hot and like actually has good chemistry versus simply finding it uninteresting or finding the thoughtless, repetitive nature of the writing disgusting.
and that's saying something, isn't it? people will draw porn of anything. it takes some real negative talent to create a show about arbitrary characters having suggestive antics that is absolutely not hot

'what happens in fairy tales after the princess gets her first kiss?'
I thought that was going to go on through several wrong answers. like. 'princess turns into an ogre' or whatever

'my father used to tell me that too. but it's not true ....'
moment of almost having genuine emotion really improves episode
this episode is actually funny. I don't have a lot to say. it's superficial like always. but it's at least thought out enough to have good character interactions

evil stepmother used as plot point

reality show interviews used as effective storytelling
interesting. there's no reality here, not even a real game show, but it still works. here, it's like the "reality" in "reality TV" means struggling against something terrifying.

so let me get this straight. Clara got into this mess because Toot hates lesbians. she likes lesbians (?). but she didn't really stop being racist.
that's... bizarrely realistic to the way actual prejudices work, knowing one never guarantees people will get over others, it's always pain having to go through each one of them one at a time

princess brings in crowd of suitors for 'Bachelor' competition

Clara gets the shrek ending......... I don't know how I didn't expect this, because if I'd thought about it, yeah

'we were just scared of it because it was different' and the context of the statement is bizarre as hell
this was... a good episode.
I'm a little confused why Ling-Ling was more obsessed with doing dishes than fighting when this episode had a major theme of fighting but eh, whatever

god. like. how this episode leaves this quiet, understated theme that the White girl gets her beautiful metaphorically-coded prejudice story and the Black girl doesn't
the concepts of the episode are always way better than what the characters draw attention to


## 3

Spongebob hyper-detailed grossout painting, which for some reason is being applied to Toot

'since we went five days without a hate crime,'

'hmm... Acme gay test...'

they're really going to lengths on the idea that Ham says terrible things all the time but doesn't actually believe them. don't know what that makes me feel

Ham treats Ling-Ling as Chinese factory. to be fair, he does have a Chinese name... guess it's time for you to start reading Deng lil dude
the tiny 'hai' he says is adorable

Ling-Ling killed his master, so... he has motivation to defeat the fake task imposed on him? is that the idea?

plot beat about the horror of Vietnam losing customers. I don't think that's actually true
I think this is the moment the show actually shows its biases. the surface joke is that Ham imperializing China is bad. but the underlying statement is that if you deny "wage slavery" to Third World countries you're killing them and they should be super glad to work for Ham. that's contradictory. the reason you have a character like Ling-Ling is usually to suggest that Pokémon are slaves and humans exploit them. although that isn't really the angle used here; here the angle is that Ling-Ling is actually a monster, like in old kaiju movies, and just likes to kill things. either way. the episode set up a scenario where Ling-Ling was being exploited, after there had been another scenario where Ling-Ling was exploited to do all the dishes — becoming the tiny mouse housewife? so he doesn't really gain anything from this. we've already been through the idea that you shouldn't be in bad relationships, with Captain Hero versus Xandir, and Clara versus Foxxy and the "princes". so this is quite a contradictory message. is it intending to say that all the people on this show are privileged bastards? is it intending to say that the main casts of these cartoons in general are? it would be quite a statement if it was but I don't know that it is
closing thought: there's something to be said about how China itself created bootlegs of Pokémon games and many other things for its own independence, to basically avoid the scenario in this episode. this character would look really different to you if you grew up in China, just looking at the design, before we get to any of the writing. and I feel like the writers are really missing that

genderfluid pacman
you know, that's the only good explanation for visually ambiguous characters that are fine as they are suddenly getting bows on them. a conspiracy theory that Ms. Pac Man is actually the same Pac Man transitioning

Wooldor literally and figuratively pulls things out of his ass

Vietnamese people can turn into Voltron
most backhandedly true thing in the episode honestly

the genie doesn't say he can't make people not gay, only that it's "offensive". amazing


## 4-5

"our team had to invent a low-carb cure for polio while the other team had to put an egg in a bucket"

some semblance of 20s jazz used behind Toot. I don't really like this character but this is one of her good moments
I don't know, it seems like all she does is destroy people and just nothing
Ham is terrible too but there are signs it's only an act so it's, eh. Toot, I get this weird feeling she's totally serious

Clara's song about bullies is really something else. this feels like the exact subtext that's underneath a lot of white-bread fantasy stories. you could really use this scene next to a Disney scene to teach people exactly what microaggressions are and how they hide inside increasingly innocuous things until you can't tell something made by a bigot from something that wasn't and it comes to mean that everything is bad, not that everything is safe.

this episode is simultaneously utterly meaningless and a commentary on how prostitution is an opportunity to exploit the poor

intended theme:  Clara tries to teach Wooldor to stand up to Ham, he doesn't, he lets Ham push him around to kill and eat the songbirds
unintended theme:  living things must first exist before anything else, and when they are pushed to the brink they will simply eat each other, or throw away their usual standards to eat unusual prey
intended theme: charcoal.  unintended theme: violet.

now for some reason we are in the "old cartoons were full of fetish art" part of the episode. I have no clue if this was intentional or I'm just drawing connections between old cartoon tropes and this in an unintentional context.

"isn't that the meat blimp? it didn't crash"

ok, Spanky Ham laughing at the vengeful meat disaster is kind of exactly how internet cartoons typically end, like, yeah, that's Happy Tree Friends if it had a little more style

Xandir has learned important lesson that being cool isn't worth it

Ling=Ling's father's design is. disturbing. no
i'm gonna ignore that this exists and go back to pretending this show is smarter than it is because the Voltron scene reminded me of Marxist party-nations


## 6

"I gotta call my AA sponsor"
so did she become a Christian. there are throwaway lines about the other characters having random religions so now I'm curious

Captain Hero is a Zionist. listen I don't care what he said about Arabs, the part where he supports Israel is the only interesting part of the statement

does... Spanky Ham actually believe in anything. I think. he doesn't. I think that's what he believes.

Ham arrested for completing antics without interruption. actually funny

lore. the king is here

"off with his head!"
does. the king have jurisdiction here. I doubt he does


## 7

'you Black people think you can accomplish something by sitting around'
oh boy did that one age backhandedly. yeah, we had absolutely huge street protests and they ultimately accomplished basically nothing. as things got worse and worse and they were going to have to do it again and again people later just got tired and gave up

smuggling mexicans across the border challenge
hear about the new visas? again, way too backhandedly true
it's rather interesting that they're pretty careful to not call the host Donald Trump despite the clear implications he is. what is this show saying?

"everything - will - change"
yeah, this is exactly to the T what reality show commercials sound like.
hmm. I think. I would have wanted this show to kinda, compromise on character if it wanted to, but in exchange for that, push the boundaries of what a reality show could look like


## 2-01 / 8

ah I see, they landed on an island because there's going to be an island challenge. all right
yeah. yep.

Wooldor lives in a cloud motel. with, smurf mushrooms. hmm
something tells me that his day to day life is almost exactly like _Cloud Eight_, it just, it's peaceful but a thousand iterations of the same. and maybe that's why he became so weird
of course. speaking literally there's a certain comparison you can draw between _Cloud Eight_ and the concept of modern Spongebob going on and on, isn't there

in the Wooldoor dimension, Clippy just lives there
I guess it goes with the theme of Wooldoor's family being random inanimate objects
I guess we're working with the conspiracy theory that Spongebob is a Darkner. okay

so 3D and claymation characters were a possibility. just not a big one

Sweetcakes run evil Wonka factory where they used Sockbat slaves - and then ate them
I don't know what to feel about this except that it's kind of cool to see such a cute character gleefully try to deny genocide instead of people acting like she's innocent
hrrg he's getting Ling-Linged. okay
so how did the other Sockbats die if Wooldoor can't die. that's a little confusing
theory: Wooldoor is subject to Homestuck clock rules

"but he is ..." "without your mystery-solving license you aren't allowed to solve any more mysteries ever again"
"there's only one way to do that ... college"
not really feeling anything about this plot but that one line is important

"you mean if I gay marry you I get health insurance?"
honestly. this show is better than Big Bang Theory

"honeymoon pictures" "going around the world doesn't prove they're gay married"
'king of health insurance'

schoolhouse rock song.

"oops, wrong lever" - great animation reference

oh Ling-Ling's tail is a sword. like Oshawott. ok.

Foxxy looks in the secret file to understand the secret weapon, and it turns into a math problem


## 2-02 / 9

reference to YTPs as nearly a form of animation

whenever additional references to cartoon characters come up, 'existing in real life', it vaguely but not exactly has the energy of the creepy toys made into real objects by Playtime co
it's not a part of the show I particularly dislike. even if it's not the way I'd design things if I was allowed to do absolutely anything but use existing characters

realtalk? Toot sitting around looking 'gross' through a bit of chip realism looks... _less uncanny_ than the other characters being sexualized here. because it's like. although there's not even any such thing as edited and unedited with these characters she looks more the way a real person would look in that situation. a bit gross to look at but like, real. did you know human bodies are really weird to look at. I think there is a certain reason some people like drawing abstract characters such as furries, that they never really get over the fact that the real-world human body is always a little more gross than you imagine it and attraction is essentially the moment it unexpectedly stops doing that. that is the feeling this frame reminds me of, but... in a good way? not the bad way it usually is where you feel as if you never want to look at a human again but the better way where you say, okay, the human body is gross but I'd rather not hide it, the feeling of totally hiding or ignoring it is worse and in that, accepting my grossness and everybody else's grossness is better.
shame that the jokes made with this character are pretty much always the opposite of that. to be fair I don't know how you'd really capture an idea that complex in a show where a lot of the plot beats are really superficial. the. princes episode. was a good guide to what a more subtle episode looks like though.

the suicide hotline has a score chart.
and all of them look good except Ling-Ling's. presumably because they can't understand the words?

Captain Hero mistakes c-section for abortion... or something
god he reminds me of when I was testing that LLM and it would see one little context clue and get things totally wrong

the way Hero badly tries to persuade his mom "you don't know what I'm going to be" in tears is so real


### thoughts

this really wasn't the best "I'm just a bill" parody I've seen by a long shot. honestly... even if the message was wrong the one with Obama smugly knocking the bill off the stage was pretty good in terms of its acting. this one didn't feel inspired in the way that things like that did.
but in any event my mind is now stuck singing the bill song

* ok when you think about it, "Bill" would actually be another great candidate for a character to have on this show. a schoolhouse rock style edutainment character that is so well known he's become a meme. but that maybe has some other twist of some kind where you learn new things about him.
  * I think the unnecessary specificity of having a character that's a bill is part of the humor here. you have to take something really unnecessarily specific that could have an educational song about it, but which isn't /too/ specific, to the point it could know about other subjects than literally itself. gosh I don't know what you'd go for. maybe the US Bill of Rights, like, a constitutional amendment song, which has potential because of the way that amendments cover a lot of things and in concept you can always add more amendments. I like the idea of a character having just one specific song they came from they meme throughout the show a little bit at a time, and the other characters sometimes start singing totally different songs to it about awkward situations, like they've done on this show already, and it goes on like that for a while until one day you get the full song exactly when the other characters are exasperated and don't want to hear about the Bill of Rights and don't want to admit "Bill" is correct about the thing he's asserting. that would be gold. I think this show is missing moments like that that are genuine character arcs that punctuate the show, even if the arc is just one colossal build up to a punchline that gets fulfilled in an epic way. I wish the show would be superficial in other ways than sex and toilet humor, like turning around the shallowness of its characters into a genuinely good joke
  * one episode where, after being super confident he's always right, Bill meets up with a piece of paper describing another country's totally different system and everybody's worldviews or at least perceptions of Bill are shattered.
    * [74 bpm] "𝅘𝅥𝅯 We wish you a merry new year / We wish you a merry new year / We wish you a merry new year / In the new century / We wish you a solid people / We wish you a broken steeple / We wish you a dead elites bill / From East Germany 𝅘𝅥𝅯" "[Bill, flabbergasted] What" "I had to come a long way to get here, but if I got this far, you know I'm doing something right. Back in the beginning, I wasn't even a party program, I was just an idea..."
* unrelated: if somebody had seen neither show it would be easy to assume Bobobōbo Bōbobo had been invented for something like Drawn Together as like the representative of all of anime, the most powerful anime character ever to exist with the most unexpected and earth-shattering techniques that bend sense-making itself, the ober-Goku out of 500 Gokus, the... I wish I'd watched Evangelion so I could say something relevant to that but I haven't watched it so I can't. really that's a more interesting character type than Captain Hero or Xandir as he's first presented. although. there's not really anything stopping a climactically powerful anime protagonist from finding out he's gay. look at like the most popular interpretation of Naruto etc. yeah honestly I would just crunch all the adventure-story stuff with approximately-humans into one character to avoid duplicating it.
  * so my cast for episode one is: Ling-Ling (fine), Foxxy (fine in concept), Clara (best gimmicks), Toot (needs replacing), Wooldoor (lore bad, concept okay), Zōzozo, Bill, bingo card free space
  * Zōzozo is the first set of sounds that popped into my head but honestly it works because the idea of Zozo on ouija boards is like this powerful sequence of unknown, unpredicted events that's scary to people because you don't know what could happen to you, but ultimately it's all made of nonsense (coincidences, letters thrown together), and that's kind of what Bōbobo is in concept, a terrifying entity who gains power from nonsense and its infinite creative potential


## 2-04

Foxxy band members killed possibly by police - permanently?
nah. foxxy ran them over and they are. talking. of course.

Ham is like the diet version of Jax. nothing he does actually makes sense, he just does it

Wooldoor and Hero find commonality - they're sure that ending tiny conflicts by killing people is okay


## 2-05





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=> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Drawn_Together_episodes
=> https://genius.com/Schoolhouse-rock-im-just-a-bill-lyrics
:: cr. 2026-02-17T18:25:42H