The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

It’s time for a pointless spiel about Penny Arcade!

I like Penny Arcade. Hell, you like Penny Arcade. Everyone likes Penny Arcade, and there are good reasons why everyone likes Penny Arcade. Recently, Penny Arcade put forward a series of story starters for people to vote on. This is when the problems started happening.

Now, I’m going to preface this by saying, it’s not like I’m NOT going to read Penny Arcade any more. It’s mostly just… I can’t believe all this bullshit has been happening. They HAVE IT TOGETHER. They have turned a webcomic into an actual company that makes money and runs a charity and all kinds of shit. They shouldn’t be making these weak mistakes. I don’t get why they did. I really don’t.

So they put forward these story starters, Lookouts, Automata, and a Jim Darkmagic story starter that wasn’t actually a story starter but was really a Jim Darkmagic one-off. And they said “Vote!” and so we voted. And then, when Automata won, they said “Well, uh, vote again!” And we all cried bullshit on that one.
Seriously, I trust Gabe and Tycho. They should make whatever the fuck they want. If they wanted to make Lookouts, then they should have just done Lookouts, and not tried some sort of bullshit re-voting thing to try to sway it in their favor. Ugh.

So that happened, and then it passed. And now, all of the sudden, here comes Lookouts pg 2, only it’s done by somebody else.
And everyone hates it.
This must have caught them by surprise. For once thing, since I first saw the comic, its title has been changed to “Guest Lookouts, pg 2” to try to indicate that no, it is not the real next page, ha ha, when we said that we were fooling. But it is, of course. There has been tweets about the backlash.

What happened?

There is just so much wrong with this decision, I don’t see how they could have decided this was a good plan. People were REALLY excited about Lookouts. Irrationally excited. Sure, it didn’t win, but there was much fervor for it. To throw it to someone else, even a very talented someone else, with no warning is going to piss people off. And seriously, the people who made this page. They are talented. I went and I read their comic, Tiny Kitten Teeth. It is so cute and wonderful. The art style stands out and is fantastic. But it just doesn’t work with the dark, scary world that was laid out for the Lookouts. It is a bad fit.
On top of that is the fact that this continues the story. Gabe and Tycho’s story! I think, if this had just been a little separate Lookouts story, nobody would have cared. Show me a different tale, that’s the guest artist’s doing, you know? Don’t continue what was already started. Throwing away your story like that is such a horrible plan, and people are going to hate you for it.

I just don’t get it. If they wanted pretty filler while they were vacationing that was in the Lookouts world, they could have had that. But they didn’t ask for that, obviously. Because we got this.

I just can’t understand it. Are they losing touch with people? What’s going on?

I can speculate all day, as I have been, but it won’t do me any good, I know. I mean, I have been. And I wrote this thing about it.

You’d just think at this point, they’d know that we’re all fans of THEM. I want to watch them do things, read what they have to say, and see their art. That’s why I visit the site so often.
You’d think they’d know that.