The Black Parade (My Chemical Romance)



A fun side effect of finding out Deltarune is based on a bunch of old Grant Morrison comics is all the cool stuff I may not have found or looked into otherwise.

The standout here is obviously "Welcome to the Black Parade" but that and "Famous Last Words" are the only songs I'd really listen to on their own, so instead of judging each song separately maybe it'd be better to step back and analyze album as a whole. It's pretty morbid, being about death and nihilism and all. As the album progresses you sink deeper and deeper into the darkness, until the sun breaks through in "Famous Last Words" and the lines "I am not afraid to keep on living, I am not afraid to walk this world alone." Death comes for us all, but it can wait its fucking turn.

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Muppet Treasure Island (G)



Tim Curry steals the show as Long John Silver (between this and Treasure Planet, what is it with Silver being the best thing about Treasure Island retellings?) but when he's not on screen your enjoyment depends on your connection to whatever Muppets are. You can get any number of Muppets doing their shtick with a piratey flair like Sam the Eagle being a stick in the mud, you can get Gonzo and Rizz being a mixed bag, or you can be slogging through Kermit and Miss Piggy doing shit nobody cares about. Yeah, maybe when we're done debating the better Silver we can debate whether Miss Piggy or that fucking robot sucked more.

That said, I am quite disappointed that my searches for Kermit, Gonzo, and Fozzie doing the Livesey phonk walk haven't turned up any results. Yes, I know Bunsen played Dr. Livesey in this but screw that, I want my strutting Gonzo, Internet.

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The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book III (Matt Dinniman, Kindle eBook)



In Dungeon Crawler Carl, Odette coined Carl's catchphrase as "Goddamnit, Donut." That's because Carl keeps his real catch phrase, "you will not break me," to himself. This is expanded in this book when Carl acquires the titular Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, a mysterious book containing the wisdom of crawlers who found and contributed to it in the past, and adds "I will break you" to his catchphrase.

This book's narrative centers around a train system that winds up being an in-universe political allegory, but the series hints at the questionable morality of finding entertainment in the suffering of others. The dungeon is one big game show and everyone's deaths and struggles are being televised to the rest of the galaxy, and we're on an even higher level reading about it. Of course our point of view is down with Carl so we're probably supposed to see ourselves in his place, working shitty jobs for the benefit of CEOs and their shareholders. But if this series decides to start condemning us for consuming entertainment, then I'm going to ask the same question I asked of Deltarune: "If I'm an asshole for reading this book, Dinniman, what does that make you for writing it?"

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