User:Turcano/Goblins

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. 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.
 * Big Ears, who becomes a paladin after watching his best friend die. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
 * 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.
 * 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, 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 wields a brace of octuple crossbows that should either break themselves, the wielder's wrists, or most likely both, 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. However, one 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.  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 "crouching 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. 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 where "human" is unironically used as an insult, subtlety is a commodity in very short supply. The only non-human major villain 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.

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 decent 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 Hall" 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 them?

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 think of and some that you can'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 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 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. 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 couldn'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 "monumentally stupid," even by webcomic standards. 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. And it goes the other way, too: Minmax 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 dialog 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. Trust me, that ship has sailed.

Author Biography
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, 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.

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. All told, Thunt gives the impression that he's only a few steps short of becoming a serial killer. And I guess this comic justifies its existence if it keeps him from gutting homeless people, but the point of a webcomic is ostensibly to entertain an audience, not to vent embarrassing psychological problems through vicarious revenge (a lesson that should have been learned from many other webcartoonists).

(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're going to pull that kind of Tumblr bullshit, at least be consistent with it.)

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. There have been rumors that Thunt was able to buy a house in large part due to donations. 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 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. As of this writing, the 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.

But as far as fan-fleecing goes, even this doesn't hold a candle to the Kickstarter launched during June 2013. 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.

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, the comic’s spinoff/donation whoredom.
 * Thunt’s Twitter account.
 * Thunt's livecam.
 * Official fan forum.
 * Dedicated wiki on Wikia.
 * Kickstarter for the TCG.