Dare Sensei

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Rating Summary

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Background
A long time ago when I was a wee lad, a friend of mine from the land of Eng introduced me to an odd, long-running TV show from his home country known as Doctor Who, a show about a bunch of Time Lords, robots, and other wacky science fiction shenanigans, and it was quite enthusing. Years later, I joined this website and was unfortunate to come across this abomination. By contrast, this caused me to resist unloading my half-digested dinner all over my keyboard.

Downfall
When was it that Mary Bell, the author/writer of this webcomic, thought "Hey, what if I combined my lurv for teh animus with this totally awesome TV show that no one else has ever heard of? It'll be appealing to the Japanese, the English, AND the hipsters! I'm such a genius!"? Because that's exactly when this webcomic began to suck: when the very idea of it was conceptualized. So yeah, it started at the bottom of the hill, and never made any progress upwards from there.

Story and Plot
Christ, I can't even begin to tell you what's bad about this comic's story - not that the actual thing itself is bad, since, y'know, the actual story itself is what the original Doctor Who has been running by all the years - because I would just be telling what the actual show is about itself; the fact that this comic just dragged and dropped the entire premise of the original Doctor Who into a circlejerk of kawaii anime characters just goes to show the kind of lazy and uninspiring mind that plagues amateur writers, though this is by far the most extreme example. Hell, the webcomic itself just tells you to watch the original thing to figure its shit out, so that's what I'm going to do, too. Go and watch Doctor Who, mo'fo'. You've got over 30 years worth of episodes to catch up on. Good fucking luck.

Art review


So, caught up with the episodes now? No? Cheater. But that's fine. You're wasting enough time just being on the internet so let's move on to the art.

First off, there's nothing spectacular about it; in spite of the relatively harmless pacing and panel layout, the art itself is like every amateur usage of the anime and manga style out there, complete with the mindset "Screw anatomy and proportions! These characters have pointy hair and giant eyes!" On the very first page, you can see what I mean: the heads are all placed awkwardly, that one chick has giraffe neck, and the trend continues onto the second page. However, this time it includes the inevitably bad perspectives and anatomy so disproportionate it would make Henry Gray weep in shame. Also notice how distorted the perspectives are on this page. A picture says a thousand words, but quite frankly, that second panel says a thousand words worth of nonsensical gibberish. And that's just the first three pages. The pages that follow don't get much better. Just look at how static those "running" poses are. Did I also mention that every character is drawn in a different style of manga - the style of whichever work they originate from? Well they are. Just be glad you can differentiate each of them.

Writing review
Well, if the story isn't going to boast any unique values, there's no way the writing will be any different. Like I said earlier, every character in this horror fest is from another anime. And to make things worse, they're all out of character - it's justified in the site's cast list that they're "acting" the parts. So basically these characters are like real-life actors and actresses who can be used by any other hack with a bullshit idea and shortage of story devices? I mean it's not like some other bunch of mangaka lost sleep over developing each of those characters' physical designs and personalities. I guess that makes it perfectly okay to just yank them out of their stories for them to "play" other characters in a story that's not even yours to begin with. Also, I am totally not being sarcastic and you are fucking genius if you didn't realize that at this moment... In the meantime, check out some of that snappy/witty dialogue.

And that's the other thing about using those characters to play those parts: there's absolutely no semblance or plausible explanation for any of them to be "playing" their parts (honestly, Ichigo as Turlough? This is not in character for Ichigo; Turlough should be played by someone classier than that. The only similarity I can think of between those two is their hair color.) It's like Bell just put a bunch of names of anime characters in a hat and pulled one out at random for each of the roles in the story. If that really is the case, though, I suggest she try taking up statistics instead. She seems to know enough about randomization to be pulling bullshit like that.

And really, what's the point? What sense is there in filling your story with someone else's characters if they're not even going to act like them?

Author biography
It's been a bit since Bell and the Palcomix guy have done anything with this webcomic. Both are apparently furries though, and Pietro himself has recently been doing furry commissions (knowing that group of people, that means it's furry porn). Go figure. At least they were decent enough to keep that side of their life out of their work.

Conclusion
So many questions come up about this webcomic: how could anyone convince themselves into doing something this unoriginal? Why hasn't anyone called this thing out for copyright infringement? Doctor Who who? Fortunately, the webcomic hasn't been updated in quite a bit - only two chapters in its archives - so I can at least respect the authors for realizing that this venture was an absolute fuck-up and a waste of their time.

Oh, and for the record, the Japanese call it ドクタ　フー (read: Dokuta Fhuu) in their language. In case you were too dumbass to notice, that's just Doctor Who pronounced with a Japanese accent.

Links

 * The comic itself, in case you missed it earlier. Dead
 * the webcomic's forum, which is infested by bots. I'm not even sure it's active any more. Dead
 * Pietro's devArt account. Why not support the starving artist and buy some furry pornos?