UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

9 thoughts on “558 – Cotton Clad Calamity”

  1. Raznaak

    Yup, he’s a bastard XD

  2. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Are those pajamas available in XXXL in the gift shop?

  3. Otaku

    It’s been a while, so let me ask: Did we get a reason for him to WANT Susie dead? Not to backseat, but if we didn’t, I’m worried were about to move into “Stupid Evil” territory. Now, stupid happens, don’t get me wrong. It’s not bad storytelling for that to be the case here.

    You’ve just done a good job NOT having that be a driving factor, so the “Kill off the stars of my successful reality TV show.” seems shortsighted, otherwise. Oh, I guess I could be mistaken about the in-story reality TV show’s success. Like, if the company behind them is losing money, or they think a change in management at the ranch would make the whole thing more popular/profitable, then I can see the above scenario happening as well.

    I REALLY think I’m just forgetting something important, but that I don’t have time to deep dive to remind me of, hence the comment. >_<

    1. Deoxy

      It certainly has been stretched out over quite a while, but there have definitely been hints from quite near the beginning that whoever is running the reality TV show definitely wants her dead.

      But I certainly don’t recall any reason why.

      1. Clint

        Yeah it’s fair to not remember since it’s been a hot minute (many, many minutes) but if you feel like a refresher the most relevant bits would be the beginning of Episode 8 and the end of Episode 15. We haven’t explicitly spelled out exactly what The Exec means by his “side hustle” or who was on the other end of that phone call, though.

        I’m hoping that when the whole thing is eventually available it will make sense, or at least enough sense to have hung this narrative on.

        1. Otaku

          Thanks for the replies, Deoxy and Clint. Yeah, I’d totally forgotten about those things. Good to know!

  4. Evervigilant

    Seems about time for the two people who aren’t there to make a surprise entrance as the ace Susie didn’t even know she had.

  5. Scarsdale

    There’s still 3-5 people on her side that might be planning something. This guy is a megalomaniac with a god complex, so letting him think he’s the sharpest tool in the shed sets him up for a fall. Everything depends on those cameras, and I suspect their little stop over by the charging coffins had something to do with her actual plan, not the one the a-hole thinks it is.

  6. lyra

    Really enjoyed the opening of Zombie Ranch. I like the combination of the western setting with the zombie concept, it gives the story a really distinctive atmosphere. I’m a freelance illustrator and animator, and I’d be interested in seeing how some of these scenes could translate into motion, especially as a short animated teaser or character scene.

    If you’re ever interested in something like that, you can reach me here:

    IG: eve_verse_
    Email: [contact.lilaclines@gmail.com](mailto:contact.lilaclines@gmail.com)
    Discord: Lyralilac_

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558 – Cotton Clad Calamity
Posted on August 26, 2026 by Dawn

What would you call this? Armchair assassination? Merk-from-home?

Well, Suzie ain't dead (or undead) quite yet, so we'll just have to see if his gloating is justifiable.

The culture club

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Clint

A longtime reader of this blog (yes, those exist!) had some communication with me after last week’s article, asking my thoughts on the idea of writing for people not just of different genders but different cultures. The problem they kept running into was a sect of their writing peers who were of the notion that no one should be writing a character from another culture unless they themselves as writers had grown up in that culture. Now mind you there’s already a problem with that line of thinking since if you grew up in a culture, then it’s not going to be “another culture” to you, but I suppose the basic gist of the matter stands… are you allowed to write an Inuit character if you weren’t raised in an Inuit community? Should you?

There is an intense paradox at the heart of questions like this. The unspoken part of the argument is that in media representation we’re operating from the default of mainstream, Amero-Eurocentric culture, usually with an added rider of focusing on white people and white people problems, and sometimes with a further rider of focusing on the problems of straight white men. Given the ongoing output of Hollywood and E3, I’m not going to deny that, since it seems to be that only by continually pointing fingers at the issue does it even register as an odd thing.

Anyhow, here’s the paradox I spoke of. Minority groups often express a wish for more balanced representation, or sometimes any representation at all, in media. Which is absolutely fine. But pairing that with a blanket prohibition that, say, only Japanese people should be allowed to write characters from Japanese culture seems to me as self-defeating as saying only women should be allowed to write female characters.

Now arguably you can say that’s a problem of the majority of the writers at the top echelons of media being straight white men (and that’s not even counting the straight white men at the not-so-top echelons, like me). If we had more women in those positions, if we had more native Japanese, etc. etc., we could… well, what? Divide up the characters in terms of writing tasks, like so many poker chips? Would that really work even for a collaborative effort like a TV series? What about a novel? You know, those generally single-author things that a great number of TV Shows and movies are developed from? I really, really want to say no to the concept that we can’t possibly understand other human beings unless we’ve lived lives exactly like theirs.

That’s not to say there aren’t potential pitfalls and problems. I’ve talked up some of them before, and they’re issues even a black man writing black characters can have (as Dwayne McDuffie testified): that once you get out of the unspoken default, the character is in danger of becoming a symbol rather than just being seen as a human being. And yes, it gets more and more terrifying the further you get from shared circumstances. It’s true I spent the past couple of blogs arguing that we’re all the same when stripped down to our cores, but it would also be willfully blind of me to declare that once you start layering on circumstances of race, gender, and culture, everyone will have the same life experiences. If I create a character that’s an elderly Muslim woman living on the streets of Bangladesh, I believe I could figure out the core principles of what makes her tick and how she ties into my story, but getting the details right (or at least, not horribly wrong) will present a challenge. I might just need to do a bit of research on that score, as opposed to writing a middle-class white man from the Greater Los Angeles area.

We’re dealing with a legacy of years and years of hackneyed and insulting portrayals in media that’s continued to this very day, even if it’s gotten slightly more subtle than the times of the minstrel shows or depictions of the “yellow peril“. But I don’t think the right response is to pull up the ladders to our respective tree houses and declare our culture clubs closed to all outsiders. Let’s be more courageous than that.

And yes, you may now get the Boy George jokes out of your system, you karma chameleons, you.