But is she an Autotrot or a Decepticolt?

Hey! We gots a guest artist this week, Tofutiles! He was all like “I want to make a comic that’s insane and crazy,” and so I’m all like “AAAARRRGGGGG, comic.” Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the creative process. You can see Tofutile’s other works over at his DeviantArt. You can also commission him for your various arting needs, because commissions are cool.

It was unbelievably fun to see Tofutiles work to develop this comic.

Since it came up in some EQD comments last week, I feel up to chatting about canon. MovieBob’s “The Big Picture” over at the Escapist already has an entertaining canon-rant, because he has the best rants on all things of a nerdish nature, so I recommend checking that out.

In the world of GX, the word “canon” is practically dirty. Canon, headcanon, fanon, these ideas just seem silly in the context of it being a story. Hard canon only exists in so much that one event relies on another event to have happened for it to make sense, so I can say to your face that “Spike at your Service” is non-canonical, and there’s no argument you can make within the confines of the world to disprove me.

My brain treats things more like a canon “cloud” of sorts. There is a dense core of who a character is and what they do, things that are vital to them being that character. Fluttershy is timid but capable of finding confidence in a pinch, Applejack has strong family values but excess pride, Pinkie sees the world with child-like wonder though maturity isn’t her strong suit; the characters cannot exist without these qualities lest they become someone else entirely. Outside that core, bits and pieces revolve in a constant flux of existence and importance, especially unfilled gaps, character relationships, and how the rules of the world apply. It becomes an arc of continuous questioning: Is this event important to the stability of the world? How important? If I interpret it this way, does it change anything? The process makes the story twisted and confusing and unreliable, but it’s gotten me through nearly five months of comic strips, so there has to be some value.

Side note: I often like to humor the interpretation of Equestria being a world created as a result of Noah’s flood, or is actually the Garden of Eden. Neither are something I take seriously, but it’s occasionally fun to try to logic through it. You can probably blame Shel Silverstein for that.

This comic actually comes from two places: first, that weird trend of people making comics around the season finale of Twilight being all sad about outliving her friends with Alicorn immortality (I don’t think I can ever relate to people who make disturbingly sad interpretations of the cartoon), and, well… um… Shadow the hedgehog. Back in the day, I actually developed the framework for a Sonic fanfiction that humored one of the endings of the Shadow game, suggesting he was a robot, and thus immortal to time (safely stored in the canon cloud). As for the comic, I was humoring the idea of Celestia and Luna living forever by having a cloning lab that periodically replaces them, but when Tofutiles asked for a project that was a bit off-kilter, I turned what starts as a bittersweet exchange over mortality, into BAM! Robot face.

I’ll have to get back to you guys next week on the whole music update. I’ve made it through another few months, but in all honesty, I haven’t found jack. Maybe it’s the gap between seasons 1 and 2, but something about that time really had people pump out depressing themes and repetitive techno loops. I’m not against the ambiance of that kind of stuff, but I’m questing for songs that I would choose to listen to repeatedly. Oh, what I’d give for a solid melody right now.

Diamond Dogs, Di-iamond Dogs! Living underground in a world of thunder…
GX