Goblins

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Rating Summary

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Background
It goes without saying that the manner in which Dungeons and Dragons depicts the cultures of monstrous creatures is not terribly logical. Small groups of sapient monsters tend to live out in the middle of nowhere apart from their women and children, guarding treasure that they apparently refuse to use or spend, almost like they exist entirely for the purpose of giving the player characters easy loot and experience. This and many other absurdities in the game have provided fertile ground for parody and pastiche, and many webcartoonists (and in the case of Dragon magazine, print cartoonists) have based their careers on them. In 2005, Tarol Hunt decided to throw his hat into the ring. Most of his predecessors focused more on the issues surrounding player characters than on the monstrous creatures they fought, and he saw this as a niche to exploit. And thus Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes was born.

Downfall
Goblins started out as a dumb but relatively inoffensive send-up of the absurdities of Dungeons & Dragons in a manner similar to Order of the Stick and other comics of that nature. However, Thunt decided to turn the comic into a dramatic piece. Since the characters have no personality, the only way Thunt felt he could make readers sympathize with them was to put them through the wringers of over-the-top gore and forced edginess. In the parlance of Goblins' critics, SAD happened.

Story and Plot
After the attack on the goblin village, the focus splits onto two and then three groups, each with their own story:
 * The main group of goblins, who decide to become an adventuring party. Of the three, this is by far the least interesting group.  It consists of:
 * Chief, who was made chief of the village as an infant as a political compromise, and has no personality besides being a coward. Becomes a cleric. Dead.
 * Big Ears, who becomes a paladin after watching his best friend die. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Was revealed to be gay due to one of Tarol's many agendas he tries to push onto everyone to come off as enlightened.
 * Complains of Names, who was originally the comic's foil, and was exiled for using equipment from the village treasure chest during the attack in defiance of a taboo, creating the impetus for forming the party. Becomes a barbarian.
 * Thaco, Complains' father and generic grizzled badass. Becomes a monk.
 * Fumbles, the party's "wacky" character who creates a ridiculous alter ego for himself with the name of (ugh) Senor Vorpal Kickass'O and chooses to become 1/11th of every core character class at once (because again, "wacky").
 * The second group consists of the adventurers who survived the attack on the goblin village, consisting of:
 * Minmax, a character tweaked to be a combat monster at the expense of being a drooling retard out of combat.
 * Forgath, a dwarf cleric and foil for Minmax's idiot manchild shenanigans. Chose the DM as his patron deity. (How original.)
 * Kin, a yuan-ti and a late addition to the group who started out as a sex slave to one of the villains. Has left the group as of this writing due to forced drama.
 * Originally, this group also had three drow characters, a Drizz't do'Urden clone, a bimbo sorceress and a sadistic rogue, who died in the attack on the goblin village. Characters belonging to the same players show up later, but are quickly forgotten.  Of the three, this is probably the most interesting group (relatively speaking, of course).


 * The third group consists of:
 * Dies Horribly, who was separated from the main goblin adventurer party and is a massive coward due to the prophecy regarding his name.
 * Klik, who is that thing from the cover of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and replaces one of Dies' arms with a semi-sentient T-1000 replacement that eventually turns evil.
 * Saves a Fox, a female goblin who serves as Dies' love interest and is obsessed with overcoming fate.
 * Temporary members of this group include the son of the matriarch of a goblin clan (see below), a lizardman with an apparent vore fetish (also dead), and an orc who was held prisoner by a demon (this guy might be a more permanent member, it's a little too early to tell as of this writing).

The villains encountered by the parties include:
 * Kore, a dwarf "paladin" that murders everything he comes across, including children.
 * Dellyn Goblinslayer, an elf ranger with tree body parts who tortures monstrous humanoids because it's the only way he can orgasm.
 * Duv, the White Terror, a goblin matriarch and Chosen One figure who wanted to play nice with the civilized races, but was crippled by those mean old humans and is now out for revenge. (If you've noticed an unsubtle pattern so far, congratulations! You have an IQ above room temperature.)

Art review
Let's not beat around the bush; the art in this comic is fucking ugly. All of the character designs, even the ones for human characters, are lumpy and misshapen, being likened to melted candle wax by many readers. In the beginning, the comic was simply scanned ink drawings, which gave the art a little bit of charm, but the transition to digital inking was not kind to it at all. Also, you know how most hack cartoonists can draw faces at three-quarter perspective, but suck at drawing head-on and in profile? Well, Thunt has the opposite problem: he can draw faces head-on and in profile well enough, but his faces look disturbingly flat in three-quarter perspective, almost like his characters are wearing cheap cardboard Halloween masks. Character design is a mess as well, as Thunt's philosophy of character design seems to prioritize what he thinks is cool rather than what makes any goddamn sense. For example, one character has a shield so heavy that it requires tracks to move and wields a brace of octuple crossbows that should either break themselves, the wielder's wrists, or most likely both when fired, while another character has several tiny pouches attached to tassels on a shirt (somewhere Rob Liefeld is having a spontaneous orgasm).

Coloring is overly simple and washed-out for the most part, with an inexplicable preference for pastels, and colors tend to clash with each other. The major exception to this is blood, which is invariably bright candy-apple red and makes the violence look much more cartoonish than the tone would normally suggest. Frank Miller was able to use garish blood coloring to great effect, but this was also done against a high contrast of black and white, not a normal comic with the luminosity turned up and the saturation turned down. Recently, Thunt has started the practice of uploading strips as he used to do them first, and then replacing them with versions that have been shaded. This attempt at improvement is commendable, but it has two major flaws:
 * GoblinsShading.png shading is inconsistent in its quality, and is usually quite bad. At its worst, the shading is very slight, generally only near the lines, which ends up giving elements an embossed look to them instead of adding depth; this is especially true on characters' faces, which have the most pressing need of definition (actually, some of the shading appears to confirm that, yes, these characters are supposed to look like lumpy potato-people).  When this is combined with shadows cast from other elements, it gives the impression of really shitty ViewMaster-style 3D effects.  Moreover, the shading appears to be done in a single transparent color rather than proper shades of the relevant base color, which makes the art look dirty, especially on lighter colors (which are all over the place).
 * Why put up an unshaded version of the strip if you're just going to replace it with the finished version anyway? You don't upload uncolored or uninked versions just for the sake of putting something up (most of the time).  Just wait until it’s finished and then put it up.  The way it is now, the only people who see the "good" version are people who read the comic later or who are reading from the archive, depending on the length of the delay.  (It also makes copy-pasting from finished pages really, really obvious.)  This decision completely baffles me, especially considering the fact that Thunt's fans have been very forgiving of inconsistent updates in the past.

Purely artistic flaws aren't the only concern; the composition of the comic is terrible as well. In many cases, particularly during action scenes, it's difficult to figure out what the hell is going on. This is usually due to major mistakes in perspective, and while admittedly perspective is one of the most difficult things to get right in a comic, it’s also of critical importance to properly convey the action-heavy story that Thunt wants to. This inability to get perspective right can also cause characters to look even more grotesquely deformed than usual, to the point where one character suddenly looks like a thalidomide baby. Facial expressions and poses are heavily overused, particularly the "landing in a crouch with one hand on the ground" pose Thunt uses whenever he wants to make a character look badass. Layout is serviceable if uninspired, but there is an unfortunate tendency to cram too many panels on a single page, especially in exposition scenes.

Writing review
The biggest problem with the comic, even more than the art, is its tone. The central thesis of Goblins for most of its run has been that Man Is The Real Monster; this would be a perfectly acceptable premise for a story as long as there is any sort of subtlety to it. To be fair, this subtlety did exist very early on in the comic's run. But when you have one villain who murders children because of perceived cultural contamination and another villain who tortures sentient beings for pleasure and openly brags about being a rapist, and when "human" is unironically used as an insult, subtlety is a commodity in very short supply. The only major villain from a monstrous humanoid race so far was basically forced into becoming one due to humanity's prejudice a la Frankenstein. Minmax and Forgath are pretty much the only members of civilized races who see anything wrong with treating every other lifeform as an ambulatory hunk of XP or worse. This is, in fact, taken to such extremes that it ends up undermining the comic's original premise. When Big Ears confirms that Goblinslayer's minions are evil and thereby gives his party permission to massacre them, the minions have ironically been turned into the very same cannon fodder for the protagonists to mow through without having to worry about the moral ramifications for which most fantasy authors use, you know, goblins. You can't make a philosophical statement that means anything when all you did was have the teams switch jerseys.

Furthermore, it is a sacred law that no one is allowed to be happy in this comic. If a character is even temporarily happy, it's only to serve as added fodder for the inevitable descent into SAD. The term "grimdark" gets thrown around a lot, but it definitely applies here. And for that kind of bleakness to work, it needs to be either very tongue-in-cheek or have the characters be able to overcome adversity without having everything come crashing back down every fifteen minutes. And when I say "overcome adversity," I mean in terms of character growth, not adding to the heroes' collection of overpowered magic weapons. (In D&D parlance, this practice of handing out swag like Halloween candy is called a "Monty Haul" campaign.) Thunt hasn't shown much ability to make the audience sympathize with the characters by fleshing them out (certainly not with the "main" group of characters), so his only recourse is to constantly shit on them so that the audience sympathizes with their plight. In fact, Thunt is so adamant on this tack that he pursues it even when it results in phenomenally bad narrative decisions, like killing off a main character for no reason at all and with no payoff or flushing several months of character development down the toilet (that last example is so bad that it's shaping up to be this comic's version of Ctrl+Alt+Del's miscarriage arc). Well, you can't take shortcuts like that and expect it to work. It's like watching a bad slasher movie (i.e, pretty much any slasher movie): if I don't care about the characters as people, then why should I give a shit what happens to them? And if the characters keep getting the rug pulled out from under them, what reason do I have to remain invested in their plight?

Thunt's favorite way to bring the SAD, by far, is the liberal application of ultraviolence. Characters are continually slashed, stabbed, crushed, shot, gouged, impaled, bisected, dismembered, beheaded, burned, digested, melted with magic, put through a Salad Shooter, and subjected to pretty much every other horrible thing you could think of and some that you couldn't. Ultraviolence is normally used for one of two reasons: shock value or black comedy. The overall tone suggests the former, but this is severely hampered by the cartoonishness of the art. Moreover, you can't really shake the uncomfortable feeling that the author gets off on all of this.

And even this would be marginally less horrible if it were at least consistent. Even though the comic as it stands now is more melodramatic than a penny dreadful, Thunt refuses to let go of the comic's comedic roots and tries to inject humor into it, which only contributes to jarring shifts in tone. Perhaps the most egregious example is when the comic goes from a strip mocking passive-aggressive DMs (a topic on which Thunt is an expert) to Kore attacking a monstrous humanoid hideout, then cuts to Fumbles being a dumbass, cuts back to Kore's rampage and child killing, and then cuts back to the goblins like nothing even happened. The attempts at comic relief fall even flatter due to the fact that they're almost always terrible puns, ancient gaming references that have long since worn out their welcome, other unfunny observational gaming humor, or situations that boil down to "Gee, that Minmax/Fumbles/other character sure is stupid and/or wacky, amirite?"

The comic's pacing can charitably be described as glacial. This is due in large part to the fact that the comic juggles three different storylines, which is hard to do even in a good webcomic. This in turn is compounded by Thunt's irritating tendency to create cliffhangers by switching to another storyline at the climax of the current one, which means that if you actually cared about that story arc, you get to wait several months, sometimes years to see how it's resolved, and by that point the average reader no longer cares about or even remembers what's happening. But it's mostly due to a perverse need to show fight scenes in as much detail as possible. Every blow and dodge from every character needs its own panel, like this is some overly detailed storyboard for a movie, and only so many of these frames can be fit on a page. Exposition also both drags out the pace and makes a page feel much longer than it really is, because it's usually frame after frame of talking heads with a speech bubble taking up at least a third of the frame. Moreover, the frames used for this are quite narrow, which normally signifies a relatively brisk pace, and this clashes with the walls of text even further. This is the worst possible way to deliver exposition. No wait, I take that back; the worst possible way to deliver exposition is to bring a fight scene to a complete stop to unload literally a full page of exposition onto the reader. And if all this didn't already drag things to a snail's pace, this comic has actual filler. When Thunt is pressed for time on an update (or just can't be assed), he'll put up some biography on a past owner of a mystical McGuffin or characters from an alternate reality or other shit no one cares about. Seriously, I don't understand how even a fan can tolerate this when it means that the pace of the comic drops yet another precious notch.

Characterization is another major problem in this comic. The fact that every character is two-dimensional at best is only the beginning. Characters behave in ways that are completely baffling. Remember how I referred to Fumbles as the "wacky" character a while back? Well, in this case, "wacky" means "literally retarded," which makes him creepy instead of cute (well, obnoxious is more accurate, but whatever) and causes his antics, which are meant to be funny, to make you feel uneasy because it's like you're watching someone making fun of a mentally handicapped person. Case in point: the whole Brassmoon story arc is precipitated by Fumbles accidentally injuring a child from a passing trade caravan while swinging a sword around like the annoying spaz that he is (how the children managed to get that close without hearing him is a question for the ages). He feels guilty about this, and decides to make up for it by returning a toy the child dropped for some reason. And when he gets to the town, he asks a random passerby where the child lives. This is "in serious danger of drowning in a bowl of applesauce" levels of retarded. Kin, who is portrayed as highly intelligent, is apparently not intelligent enough to keep her mind-control rape leash (God, I wish I didn't have to type that phrase) from being out in the open where anybody can just grab it. Generally speaking, any given character can be counted on to take the most nonsensical option available for every decision they make. But it can go the other way, too: Minmax, for example, vanquishes an alternate-reality version of himself in a manner that is far too clever for his submoronic brain to come up with. This actually brings up one of the most irritating things about Goblins: there are occasional flashes of genuine brilliance, but they quickly become submerged in the mires of shittiness.



The writing of actual dialogue is no better than the tone or the pacing. Characters speak in an often very stilted manner, which is sometimes so hilariously bad that Thunt has to go back and change it. Intelligent characters have said intelligence portrayed using the time-tested hack formula of talking way too much while abusing the thesaurus; when you have two or more of these characters talking to each other, the walls of text would give Buckley pause. The stiltedness is particularly noticeable in Thunt's use of minced oaths such as "son of a crap" or "what the crap is this hell?" Thunt, you do know you're allowed to swear on the internet, right? If the intent was to make the comic family-friendly, I should point out that this is a comic that graphically depicts people getting their faces chopped off and where a character has a rape leash. Trust me, that ship has sailed.

The latest few pages (as of late 2022) sum up this comic's cancerous writing quite nicely. After wasting an entire page on an extended unfunny joke about a Marvel movie, the author indulges their two great loves of a) ridiculously overpowered magical gimmicks that would utterly break any actual tabletop campaign they existed in (and only manage to not break this entire story because Goblins is already full of so many overpowed story-breaking gimmicks that come up out of nowhere and are abandoned after four pages to never be seen again), and b) dragging the plot (which already moves at a glacial pace) to a grinding halt in favour of a lengthy, completely irrelevant tangent that takes itself way too seriously (like the time Complains's team all got judged by a goblin angel after touching some clocks they found hanging from the ceiling). Minmax and Kin encounter a magic door that makes whatever they say while touching the colour turqoise come true, allowing Minmax to ogle Kin's vagina (again, in a comic that's afraid to say the word "shit"), briefly become a god, create his own universe full of worshippers, and then have an eight-panel-long meltdown about how much he sucked at being a god and how sad it made him, while apparently trying to tear off his own face. Yeah.

Wangst and Irresponsibility
Tarol Hunt usually goes by the handle of Thunt, which is an unfortunate choice considering what it rhymes with (although that is a very good descriptor of his personality). If you've heard anything about him outside of making Goblins, it's more than likely in the capacity of being a passive-aggressive jackass. Whether he's engaging in a feud with the makers of Bittersweet Candy Bowl over some perceived slight or airing dirty laundry regarding an ugly custody dispute with an ex-girlfriend, to pushing certain Hot Button Topic Agendas, Thunt always takes the opportunity to prove himself the lesser man. In fact, a recent newspost is so passive-aggressive that I'm not even quite sure what it's supposed to be, only that it's not an apology because he makes that quite clear. (Even under the most charitable reading of the newspost, he can't even empathize with people without sounding like a tool.) And to put the cherry on this shit sundae, he was a business partner with that cockbag Ryan Sohmer up until the end of May 2013.

In 2014, after about three months of hiatus on the comic (with an explanation promised - by his wife - early on but never given), the man comes up with this thing. This is beyond description. There is no comment that could come close to the unveiled reality of what this wall of text is. (If you feel intimidated by its absurd length, content-wise it's about four parts wallowing in self-pity to one part telling his readers to fuck themselves in his usual passive-aggressive manner for daring to hold him to any kind of standard.) And that isn't even the worst it gets; he had temporarily published an even more bugnutty draft on his fan forum implicating Tumblr drama in his breakdown (a copy of which has been preserved here). After seven months of "self-inflicted PTSD", Goblins finally had a teaser page announcing it was back on September 15th, 2014.

...and what Thunt managed to create over the course of several weeks was a single page, gory, ugly and SAD even by Goblins standards, through multiple iterations (rough draft, uncolored draft, colored draft), and the final product sat on the site without further update for months. If it had turned out to be the very last page of Goblins ever, it would have been a fitting end.

Depravity
Of course, being a horrible douche isn't Thunt's only problem. The skeezy feeling you might get from reading the comic gets compounded by newsposts like this, where he explains that Kin's status as a rape victim is based on his mother and that Goblinslayer's death is based on a revenge fantasy. I... Uh... Wow. That's something you probably should have kept to yourself (especially since it puts what can be very easily construed as a rape joke on Twitter in a whole new uncomfortable light... And a trigger warning? Really? I don't remember any trigger warnings for the strip in question, or any of the other sick shit in this comic, for that matter. If you pull this Tumblr shit, at least be consistent about it.)

In 2019, he managed to up his creepiness another notch, after writing a long and rather painful to read post about ASMR, with lots of personal details I really wasn't curious about, first posted under nothing less than a comic update depicting MAXIMUM THUNTATION (not SFW). His nausea-inducing oversharing is bordering on mass sexual abuse perpetrated against the entire Internet. It might be indicative of something that the only time Thunt seems to be even creepier than his usual self is when he's making botched attempts at talking about gender.

And finally, in June 2019, Thunt went full Sonichu, and announced to the world that SHE's transgender. Yes you heard that right. If you're as perplexed as I am, well, it's a fucked up world. This whole saga from botched gender equality agenda pushing to coming out reads like the recent arc from South Park where Cartman becomes PC. It's weird and feels slightly wrong to watch. Oh and SHE also has a fucking TRANS TWITTER, and a "trans hammer", now in glorious HD, what the fuck ever that is supposed to be!

Everyone is expected to believe Thunt has suffered from gender dysphoria his entire life. Oh yes, questioning a serial liar about this one issue is somehow forbidden, despite giving no hint of it until he was 43 even though he is so prone to oversharing he once tweeted about his wife helping him masturbate in a fertility clinic because he was having trouble doing it himself. Oh, sorry... "SHE" did. There's no other possible explanation for Thunt seeking a new source of pity for money and attention, like the fact SHE was pitching Goblins: The Animated Series to Hollywood at the time.

All told, Thunt gives the impression that SHE's only a few steps short of becoming a serial killer. And I guess this comic justifies its existence if it keeps HER from gutting homeless people, but the point of a webcomic is ostensibly to entertain an audience, not to vent embarrassing psychological issues through vicarious revenge (a lesson that he should have learned from other webcartoonists), virtual exhibitionism of the most disturbing kind, or pushing bullshit agendas.

Like everything else, this latest TMI dump was done in the comic blog. Nobody goes to a site called "goblinscomic.com" to read about the author's facial feminization surgery (which, btw, the readers are expected to finance), or their historic role in the naming of an entire genre of postmodern softcore porn. We'd go there to read about goblins. You know, those little, vicious (or heroic), green monsters from The Hobbit or D&D or whatnotever. The gender, and in general the private life and psychological profile of the author should be completely irrelevant to a comic about effin' goblins.

You might think this would be the low point, but you can always fall further. Now that Thunt is a woman, "she" needs to explore her sexuality by fucking other guys, or at least giving them blowjobs. I am NOT kidding. Man, I wonder if suddenly having sex with other men, after being in a 20+ year old commited relationship will have any negative repercussions (it did). No worries though. Even though he's getting a divorce from the women that raised his children, cared for him through his depression phases, supported him through his first divorce, helped him become a full time comic author, and ran the buissness with him, along with many other things... Yes, despite this breakup, he's finally got an onlyfans girlfriend he can pimp out a week after he announced the upcoming divorce. Danielle never did an onlyfans to help get some money, so was this relationship really all that special? Couldn't have been.

Well, they've changed so much, you know. Like, Thunt has changed into a woman, who constantly harps on LGBT political activism, and Danielle has changed from someone that unconditionally supported Thunt, to someone that realised that she has needs too. Just two completely different people. They just can't give each other what they need anymore.

Greed and Unaccountability
Besides being a passive-aggressive Gordian Knot of creepyness, Thunt is best known for milking the hell out of his fanbase. Yes, for some demented reason, this comic not only has fans, but fans whose fanaticism was put on full display during the shitstorm when Goblins lost a voting contest to a much better webcomic despite rampant cheating on their part (seriously, they behaved so badly that Thunt and the other finalist were shamed into donating their prize money to charity). And they're very free with their money. Thunt was able to buy a house in large part due to donations (more on this below). And that's money that they're just straight-up giving him, on top of merchandise sales and ad revenue.

Thunt's most cynical donation drives are the "Tempts Fate" series, which puts a goblin of the same name into retarded but extremely hazardous situations and can only be kept alive if donation thresholds are met. Sort of like the old National Lampoon cover that threatened IF YOU DON’T BUY THIS MAGAZINE WE’LL KILL THIS DOG, but not a joke. The first ten Tempts Fate drives have netted Mr. Hunt a total of $18,142.86. That is not a typo. One of the larger drives offered a PBS-style "gift" of a T-shirt for donations over $25, and a very small amount went to charity (Thunt’s idea of generosity is apparently one quarter of the proceeds of one drive), but that’s still a ridiculous amount of money for holding a cartoon character hostage, especially one that was created specifically for this purpose. In fact, the titular character is so confident in Thunt's fans coming through that he looks almost bored in most of his screen-time.

The latest Tempts Fate drive was even more successful than the first ten put together, bringing in over $37,151.67 (also not a typo). This is how Thunt was able to afford a down payment on his house, and he was understandably grateful to his fans, but apparently not grateful enough to finish the relevant comic as of this writing, even after he promised to do so twice and it's been nearly three years since then (and if the "I Quit" newspost is anything to go by, he probably never will).

But as far as fan-fleecing goes, even this doesn't hold a candle to the Kickstarter launched during June 2013. It's called "Goblins: Alternate Realities" or "G:AR" for short. Thunt's fans gave him $177,850 (again, not a typo). For a collectible card game. Why the everloving fuck would anyone pay money for a collectible card game based on a webcomic (even a good one)? Who are you going to play it with? And if you think it'll ever get an update or support, then dream on, you mad bastard. I mean Jesus, not even Penny Arcade has enough of a following to make that enterprise worthwhile. This is either a scam or hubris of the highest order.

To sum all that up, if you're one of the nine people who gave $1,111 towards financing Hunt's card game, by December of 2013 you should have received everything on that list.

As of June 17, 2014, nearly one year after the Kickstarter was funded, the fans began wondering where their rewards were. They were right to wonder. The last update from the game developer was on June 12, 2013 while the Kickstarter was still running. The last Facebook update for the card game was in October of 2013 (excluding Thunt changing the heading 11 months later) as was the last update for Evertide Game's FB page.

These topical remarks from the Goblins forum aren't exactly reassuring either... ""I'm one of those backers. And my faith in Evertide Games is rapidly dwindling. It took them nearly 6 months to give me a usable reply as to why G:AR isn't showing up on my Evertide Games Store profile.. And even that reply is just an excuse. "Some database migration problems".."

Etc.

They also rarely respond to questions posted to their Facebook page, and replies tend to be "send us an e-mail." But I've seen comments about taking upwards of 6 months to get a reply via e-mail in some cases, so yeah."

One month later someone from the gaming company showed up in the thread and posted an apology and a link to a press release. The real highlight of it came from the company president:

"After the Goblins campaign ended, as we further tested the game in preparation for production, the design team discovered irreconcilable problems with the design and embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of the system. Due to the vicissitudes of R&D work, that overhaul has generated numerous other unworkable designs and false starts before we were able to find a system that was fun, representative of Goblins and matched what we promised during the campaign."



"Vicissitudes" is a pretentious $1,111 word for "frequently changing" and, if the other comments in the thread were true, it's likely the R&D was hampered by simultaneously making a card game out of Kingdom of Loathing and another one out of Romantically Apocalyptic. It may also be why (as of this update) the Official G:AR Rules haven't been updated since August of 2013.

By now you're probably wondering why I haven't been talking about Tarol Hunt for around 3 paragraphs. I've been setting the stage to make a point. See, I recently read the thread from the Links section where Goblins fan critiqued this review. Goblins fans complained that we attacked Tarol Hunt over being a shameless, irresponsible, ungrateful, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, agenda pushing... well, all those things we said. So instead of attacking "Thunt" I'm going to address the fans, because as a former fan, I have some sympathy for you all.

Let's do a little role playing!

''It's November 4, 2014, and let's say you were someone who pledged $1,111 in this bad economy. You lose your job. Winter is coming. You don't have a Goblins t-shirt to add to the layers of clothes you're wearing, you don't have any cards or prints to fuel your barrel fire, stickers to trade with your fellow bagpeople for food, a tablecloth/placemat to use as a blanket, or even a personal character badge to remind you of your former life. Then, when you slip into the library to check your email, you find that your request to the publisher for information from June still hasn't gotten a reply.''

''Frustrated, cold, and confused, you pop over to Twitter to see what Thunt has to say about the game. The first thing you see is he's been wasting time he should have been putting a comic out emoticon acting a scene from Star Wars. He probably was just blowing off steam though. You look further and find him bragging about a hangover, creating a Spanish Spiderman out of a Spiderman head and a stick-on beard, speculating on the merits of listing the definition of "definition", and complaining about the least important piece of visual continuity in a comic he totally fucked up most of the visual continuity in.''

''You keep scrolling backwards in time through all the goofy drivel Thunt's tweeted about until you realize you're coming up on the edge of The Gap. You remember that dark, 7 month period where Thunt neglected his comic and his fans trying to overcome self-inflicted PTSD. You think how he must have suffered in that house you bought him in exchange for those Tempts Fate comics he phoned in. I mean one demon had a sound effect announcing it exploded for no reason, and the comic ended with fucking framework drawings announcing nobody knows how the comic ended. No. No! We're not going to take out our cold, shirtless, homeless angst on Thunt! Let's skip past remembering his struggles to realize you're not his boss. That was a dark time for him.

''So you dismiss all this bullshit he's posting instead of drawing as leftover damage from the legitimate PTSD Thunt totally suffered. You just do a search on Twitter instead. Huh. Thunt hasn't said word-one about G:AR since July 1, 2013. In fact, the last thing he said about the Kickstarter is, "If you include the 'alternate payment methods', we've passed $180k! 96 minutes left!" The Goblins blog is empty of comments about the state of the game, except a single post from January announcing everyone loved the demo game (which will be scrapped) and the backers should have their stuff by June.''

''You sit there, cold, t-shirtless, and probably reeking of urine, as the realization sinks in. It dawns on you that Thunt hasn't done anything to facilitate communications between his fans and the company he got them to give their money to in order to produce his game for him. You even begin to feel a little chafed that Thunt, while living in that house you bought him, has put out a paltry 9 comics this year and it's early November.''

You all have made the point that this review is very harsh on Hunt as a person. My counterpoint is he has shirked all responsibility to you as fans. It's true that there are fans with bloated, unjustified senses of entitlement. However, there is nothing false about feeling entitled to not find a diatribe at the end of a 7 month hiatus announcing you will no longer bully Thunt in his imagination.

There is nothing false about feeling entitled to a Tempts Fate that you paid $37,151.67 for to consist of more than every challenge being overcome with an anti-climactic handwaving of difficulty moves from Super Mario Brothers games. With a couple more challenges Yoshi might have shown up and eaten someone. There's no excuse for this; remember, Tempts Fate 11 wasn't exactly rushed. It was announced in April 2011, Thunt declared in July he would work on camera with no more than 6 hours sleep to get those 4 pages quickly completed, and by May 2013 he was "done".

21 months after it started, Tempts Fate 11 ended with 3 of the 4 cash goal challenges defeated by jumping, except the last one where Hunt copped out and didn't show it. Remember? He had wireframe characters, one year in the future, debating what happened to Tempts before starting a plan to break into a prison named "Waffles." By the way, this final page telling you that you don't get to see the ending was announced as a bonus comic 'to thank you for your patience. You were entitled to better than that.

Lastly, there is no false entitlement in expecting a man who got you to spend over $180,000 to finance his card game to keep you up-to-date on how it's coming without being asked. It's even reasonable to expect more than one update in the 16 fucking months since you funded the damned thing.

You don't have to hate Thunt. You just have to recognize that it's far from unjustified, even if Goblins technically is a "free" comic.

The Play-by-post Game
When looking through the Tempts Fate fundraisers, you may have noticed that one of them got an 0.5 designation. Specifically, Tempts Fate 8.5. You may have wondered if there was a story behind that. The answer to that question is yes, and it's a doozy.

Back in 2008, Thunt decided he wanted to do a new Tempts Fate fundraiser, but this fundraiser would be unlike anything he had done before. The scope of this project was truly ambitious, and it was known as Tempts Fate 9, the play-by-post game. Basically, a player could design a goblin character, that is part of of the "Scroll Readers" clan village, and then enter a dungeon where he would gather loot, and kill monsters. During set intervals, he would leave the dungeon to fight humans, who are invading his village in order to get access to the treasure of the dungeon that the goblins were raiding.

The donation drive part comes into play during the raid section. If the donation goal is not achieved before the raid begins, the human armies destroy the town, no matter how well the goblin players did during the dungeon crawl phase. However, the loot gathered will go towards individual achievements during the raid battle. At some point during the fundraiser, the two players with the highest achievements would be given the roles of clan chief, and clan teller.

The character creator was fairly detailed. There was a significant amount of unique art created for this purpose. You'd begin by picking a base goblin model, and then add various features, such as having hair, tattoos, jewelery, and other markings, as well as being able to pick the colour scheme of the goblin, and the ability to be old or young. Obviously, you also get to pick the name.

On the day of the campaign's start, a map was revealed. The map showed many locations, and it was only the first floor of what was intended to be a sprawling adventure. Thunt would be GMing the entire thing, personally. Every player would get to make a certain amount of decisions at a time, Thunt would go over the results, and then email the results to you. Then the proccess would repeat. There was a great deal of anticipation. When campaign begin, money came pouring in.

Unfortunately, within 24 hours of the official start, the game was canceled. The problem? Too many people were interested in playing a goblin character. While this would obviously have been an issue before the game started, Thunt waited until after it began before saying anything. Certainly, a single GM would have difficulty being able to manage the hundreds of players that applied though. This left Thunt with a choice, either he could limit the number of players that could join to a reasonable number, perhaps around 50-100 players, or he could figure out a way to automate the game so that EVERYONE could play.

Thunt chose the second option, so the game was put on "pause", while Thunt worked with a programmer to create a way to automate much of the proccess.

In the meantime, however, Thunt still needed money. Which lead to the creation of Tempts Fate 8.5, while we waited for Tempts Fate 9.

Eventually, Tempts Fate 9 was released, but it wasn't the play-by-post game. The original Tempts Fate 9 had been scrapped, replaced by a more generic work. The money that had been donated for the original game had been transferred to this new version, rather than being refunded. Thunt's reasoning is as follows.

"When Tempts Fate 9 launched and crashed all those months ago, I had gotten some donations from readers. Since it would be unfair for those donations to go uncounted, I've transferred that money onto this Tempts adventure, giving us a bit of a head start." November 28th, 2009 blog entry

All references to the original play-by-post game were then erased. About the only thing that remains is various fan works, which includes two fancomics of the adventures of the Scroll Reader clan goblins, which featured the characters created by the Goblins forum "readers". The first one is posted here.

First fan comic: Risks and Side Effects, by Worst Case

It was a time of great creativity on the Goblins official forum. The allure of the play-by-post game had enchanted many, but Thunt ruined the entire thing. The erasure of the play-by-post game was also the first in a number of deletions Thunt would do over the years. At this time, all Tempts Fate adventures have been removed from the website, and can only be accessed by archive.org.

GoFundMe
After Thunt's failure to make good on the final update of Tempts Fate 11, he's stopped doing any new ones. Not only has he stopped doing new ones, but he's deleted the Tempts Fate section altogether. I guess that is one way to stop people from complaining about not finishing the final page of Tempts Fate 11, just pretend it never happened. Anyone donating money for those have had their reward for doing so removed, which sucks for them, but at least Thunt doesn't have to deal with his failure every time he looks through his website, and that's all that truly matters (to Thunt).

This doesn't mean he's not having any more fund raisers though. Oh no. Instead, he's gone on to GoFundMe.

The first fundraiser got a big announcement on his blog.

1. Elli's Transition Surgery $21,138 raised raised of $15,000 goal. Created Oct 17, 2019. --After getting the money, instead of doing a second announcement on the website, thanking everyone for donating, he deleted the blog post instead.

2. Help Elli Qualify For Bottom Surgery $5,918 raised of $3,500 goal. Created Dec 1st, 2021.

--The time inbetween from the first go fund me to the second was over two years, but that was about to change. Thunt had now realized that this was a great way to get money, that didn't require any work, or even... a public thank you (may have privately thanked donors during his first gofundme, but he certainly never did a general announcement like he did for his Tempts Fate fundraisers), he went hard into it.

3. Rescue My Friend June $4,076 CAD raised of $4,000 goal. Created Jan 19, 2022.

--Not two months later, and already a new one. Sure, Thunt never got the money himself, as you can clearly see by looking at the gofundme. Organizer (Ellipsis Stephens aka. Thunt) and beneficiary (Danielle Stephens). Wait, Danielle, Thunt's wife, is the benificiary, not June? Well, I'm sure Dani gave that money to this June person, who is surely a real individual. I mean, there is a photo of this June on the GoFundMe page. It's probably fine, don't think too hard about it. After all, Thunt would NEVER ALLOW donated money to be spent on something other than what he said it would be spent it on, right?

4. Help Elli Get A New Drawing Tablet​. $10,139 CAD raised of $4,500 goal. Created May 29, 2022.

--Oooh, look, this one took a whole year before showing up. Now, 10k might seem to be a lot of money for a new tablet, but keep in mind, the original goal was only for $4,500 (although $4,500+ is still, even with Canadian money, an absurd amount for a tablet), Thunt just decided to spend it on other things instead. After he admitted that he didn't spend the money on what he claimed was the goal, he got a second round that doubled the initial amount. Hmm, I guess Thunt WOULD spend money on something other than what the donation is for then.

5. Elli Going on a Trip $515 CAD raised of $1,500 goal. Created October 21st, 2022

--First time Thunt failed on the fundraiser. Doesn't seem to be the start of a trend though, perhaps 3 of them within a year was too much?

6. Need Hotel After Upcoming Surgery $2,000 CAD raised of $2,000 goal. Created February 17th, 2023.

--Thunt's finally got his neovagina. Don't ever look up what this proccess entails. It's horrific. Apperently, they also boot you out of the hospital right after the surgery but want you around to keep tabs on for two weeks, so you need to rent a hotel room. Well, if you don't need to give the patients medical beds afterwards, I guess it makes it a lot easier to do even more surgeries. God, can you say money grab any more loudly?

7. Help Elli Move ??? CAD raised out of $3,200 goal. Created July 7th, 2023. --So, it turns out that suddenly trying for an open marriage, where he gave men blowjobs, doesn't work too well for maintaining a 20 year relationship with Thunt's wife (there's no hard feelings though, according to Thunt), and now he's getting a divorce. Looks like the wife gets to keep the house, so Thunt needs some money for his big move. Still ongoing.

The Goblins Animation
Back in October 2017, an announcement was made.

A script had been written for Goblins: Book 1, and it could be turned into Ten Episodes of "incredible fantasy role-playing Goblinic Cartoon Awesomeness!". All that was needed to get the ball rolling was $465,000 USD. For that purpose, a kickstarter was created

The plan was to get enough money to release the first episode of this 10 episode series. It would be 10 minutes long. Of course, that was just the low ball estimate. For only 195k more (660k total), the second episode (also 10 minutes) would also be funded. Finally, the big ask was to get $1,985,000 and then all 10 episodes (each 10 minutes long) could be done.

Everyone was very confident at the time. There was an all star cast. Billy West would play Minmax, Maurice LaMarche would play Forgath, Jim Cummings would play Thaco, and Steve Blum would play Kore. In addition, Jennifer Hale would play Kin, and Tara Strong would play Saves a Fox.

"Wait", I hear you asking, "were those characters even in book 1?" Ha, ha, ha. Of course not, but Thunt understood that Young and Beautiful just didn't have the sex appeal to bring in the audience. Thunt was also excited to have Big Ears, Goblins only LGBT character at the time, being played Matther Mercer, who was married, to a woman... Man, it would be REALLY hypocritical if Thunt had ever stated that non-LGBT actors shouldn't be allowed to play LGBT parts...

OH WAIT, HE HAS!!!

Now, it's true that people had been burned by Thunt before, what with that whole card game scam, and Thunt had still never bothered with the final Tempts Fate comic reward, but the good will of fans was bottomless, right? Surely this would be a success of millions of dollars by the end of it, RIGHT?

It was not. Only a total of 101k was raised. With that, the animated saga concluded, which is what I would normally say, except Thunt refused to give up, and so he started a second fundraiser, with a more modest goal. Instead of asking for 465k for a 10 minute first episode, he wanted 248k for a 5 minute trailer that he would show off to studio executives so that THEY could give him the 2 million he needed to do the Goblins: Book 1 script.

To make extra sure that he would get something out of this, Thunt switched to Indiegogo, since you can take the money over there, even if you don't make the goal, unlike with Kickstarter.

This time, with a lot of effort, he did indeed make the goal. By the end of the campaign, he'd raised a total of 270k on December 22, 2017.

For the next two years, things went as one might expect. Update on progress, rewards were given out (as far as I know, all rewards that backers were due were delivered), and so on. However, on January 12, 2020, an update came out that not everything was going well. There were problems with the quality of the animation, so they were fired, and a new animation studio did some touch ups. Touch ups being all they could afford at that point. Was the original all that bad? Maybe, maybe not. Thunt is famously picky about how his art is represented. I wouldn't be surprised, at all, if he'd ran out of funds and had put in some of his own money for these alterations. Many projects have gone extremely overbudget.

Somehow, it all seemed to work out though, because, on December 7th 2021, the animation was officially finished. Time to release it to the public, right? Well, about that.

''We're not releasing it yet. We can. But we're going to hold off. Here's why.  We still are not fans of a lot of the animation that was created, and even though the second animation house fixed a lot of the most glaring errors, we are simply stuck with some of the things that the first house produced. We debated alternatives to continue pushing toward the original vision, but the issue is that the animation is finished. This makes it hard for us because if we release this thing wide, it will please our audience because they are receiving the thing they helped create, but it will not be what we want the final show to look like, and once people have a completed vision of something it is very hard to say, "but what we want it to look like for reals is this over here..." especially when the voice work is so on point, the music is amazing, and the jokes are landing because it is so well acted. This also muddies the waters because the internet is the internet and once a genie is out of the bottle, it is impossible to put back. So even though the animation is right here and only a click away, you guys will have to hold on a bit longer as we do the run of the studios and streaming services to get Goblins out to market the way we want it to be. So, I'm afraid for the time being we must ask you to be patient." ''

Hey, you know that animation you paid us for? SURPRISE! You plebs will NEVER see it. Anyway, since that announcement, communication died off. There has only been one update since that point. Will it ever be released to the people that paid for it? Don't count on it. Best you can do is maybe see it at a Con, as Matt king talked about doing in the comment section.

Matt King 7 months ago PROJECT OWNER ''Not at all. Quite the opposite. What we'd like to do is maybe take it to a con and show it there, but the issue is that once it is out on the internet, it becomes a very difficult thing to try and sell. And the environment for selling animation right now is VERY rough. HBO is a mess, Netflix is letting people go left and right and Amazon is taking a bath on sword and sandal. Add my wife's cancer victory to the mix and it's quite a thing. Short story: No to 51. But it is in a holding pattern.''

Lets be real, no one is going to buy Goblins. The days of these streaming studios funding any crap that gets pitched to them is long gone, and Goblins ain't no Girl Genius, which is a comic that really SHOULD be animated.

Oh, as a final note. Even though the goal of 270k was raised, Indiegogo allows you to keep getting new money. On September 26th, 2023, the actual total was $371,527 (CAD), or $274,827 (USD), was raised. Not really much of a difference, but still enough to take note of.

Conclusion
As I've said before, this comic is not completely irredeemable. It's just that any potential that it might have had has been buried under a mountain of terrible art, grimdark, torture porn, lame referential humor, and pacing as slow as an iron toad. If Thunt just put some real effort into improving the art, composition, and writing, and finally decided just what the hell he wants to actually do with this comic, it might even become passable. But that's not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future, not when the comic has this many easily-pleased fans stepping over each other for the opportunity to throw money at him and blow his e-penis.

It's... well, SAD, really.

Links

 * The comic, just in case you missed the link at the top.
 * Tempts Fate, archive of the comic’s spinoff/donation whoredom, since Thunt deleted it.
 * Thunt’s Twitter account.
 * Thunt's livecam.
 * Official fan forum.
 * Official chatroom (currently on a trial basis).
 * Dedicated wiki on Wikia.
 * Kickstarter for the TCG.
 * Mentioned in TV Tropes article about webcomic artists who had a massive meltdown.
 * A comic that compares women to people with hamburgers for hands. Uh... yeah, so that exists.
 * Tarol's insane "I Quit" blog post - Where he explains why he hasn't updated for months and how he intends to stop giving a shit about what his readers think.
 * Our "post-review" thread about Goblins on the forum - Contains more crazy shit from him and his fans.
 * Thread about our review on the Goblins forum - I hope you like bitching.