Pastel Defender Heliotrope
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This comic is an atomic bomb. It will destroy anything and anybody that touches, reads, or looks at it. This comic is an example of the downfall of human civilization, leaving a trail of nothing but destruction, deformed mutations and cancer in its wake. Pray you, avoid it. |
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CODE RED: PORN
(STRONG NSFW WARNING)
The following comic contains naughty parts on full display, and more than likely includes banging, screwing, porking, jacking, etc. Whether or not it's actually arousing is up for debate. Be on the look out for more extreme fetishes as well, such as scat, vore, bestiality, and so forth. Getting caught with this comic in your browser history may lose you some friends... or gain you some unwanted ones. View with extreme caution, preferably in a deep, dark cave, far away from anyone you know. |
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WARNING: This webcomic will nauseate many readers. This can be for a whole slew of reasons, including graphic depictions of gore, grossly unappealing depictions of sexual behavior, offensive descriptions of sexual abuse, and so on. In any case, this webcomic (and maybe even this review) is not for the weak of stomach. |
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WARNING: The creator of this webcomic is a giant douche, even by internet standards. Their behavior may include, but is not limited to: Rampant displays of racism, sexism, homophobia and/or other forms of bigotry and douchebaggery. May spew invective at critics and fans alike. Avoid real-life interaction as much as possible. |
| Original review author(s): | Angry Lesbian |
| Webcomic Name: | Pastel Defender Heliotrope |
| Author: | Jennifer Diane Reiz |
| Start Date: | January 8th, 2004 |
| End Date: | January 23rd, 2008 |
| Genre: | Sci-Fi |
| Defining Flaw: | Everything. Seriously, it cannot be pinpointed to just one thing. |
| Things that are fucking terrible about this webcomic: | Drowning everything in bullshit psuedo-science and expecting us to take it up the ass with a smile when the characters in the comic look like children's book rejects. More words than Tim Buckley has EVER spewed out. PAGES AND PAGES OF EXTRA SCIENCE TO READ AFTER THE COMIC. |
| Things that aren't terrible but could use improvement: | Some thought is put into the psuedo-science (like yaoihuntressearth has pointed out). But, really, it's too much. It's not even needed in most cases. The art is cute, and it shows a lot of time went into it, even if it is mushy. I dare say if the comic had no text at all, it might even be.. mediocre. |
| Summary: | This webcomic is a mess of preachy morals and too deep sci-fi. If you like that sort of thing, you'd still hate whatever's left of it. Nobody truly wins. Solution: Burn it or surgically remove the words, leaving one pile of pretty pictures and one pile of quantum physic bastardization mumbo jumbo. |
Rating Summary
| Art: | 
One unicrap for effort, another one for imagination. Too bad the rest looks like it's literally melting off the screen. It's a step above her/his horrible b&w bitmap comic, but not by much. |
| Storyline: | 
One highly radioactive isotope of bullshitonium because GOOD GOD THIS SHIT IS AWFUL. If this story was a ship, it'd be the Titanic. And y'all know where that went. |
| Characters: | 
One Pastey Heliodope. Imagine a cast of lifeless puppets with tons of techno babble stuffing, spewing strange tongues and trying really badly to act like humans. |
| Miscellaneous Details: | 
This comic is worse than a failed gender change operation. You are now a horribly disfigured tranny. Manually. No, no I'm serious. Try reading it. Just try to get to the end in one piece. I dare ya. |
| Overall: | 
The amount of screws lost from the creator's head is inversely proportional to how bad this comic is. I don't think I need to hammer it in, don't I? There's plenty of better comics out there that don't require cliff notes, pie charts and periodic tables. |
Background
I started reading this comic years ago, around the time it began. Why? Well, back then I was drawn to its cutesy art style. It's just.. So unassuming and sucks you in like a sand trap. I didn't know who this J.D.R. was, until I found out the 'dirt' behind this chick and oooooh lord is it all making sense now (I'll link those resources later..). Well, even when I read it (back then and now), it starts out simple enough.. You tend to overlook the extra pages of 'info' this chick puts under her comics.. Then.. Slowly.. Things descend into madness as those extras grow and the dialogue consumes the very pages they're written on. It becomes a chore to choke down the bullshit equations, and that's not even the half of it. There's things like weird gay relationships sneaking themselves into an otherwise innocent looking and fluffy sci-fi/superhero extravaganza, sex dolls come to life, and senseless violence.
Y'know, other people might love to rip this one a new bleeding hole, but to me this story, or should I say concept, is a damn shameful thing to waste. It was an 'ok' concept (like a Saturday Morning cartoon, or cutesy anime crap) buried in TOTAL SHIT. In fact, this entire story is based on a much simpler "picture story" made for an ancient PC program that would display images and text with sound in a tiny screen theater, and for its time it was pretty neat (before Flash came along). That story, for what it was worth, really was the cutesy anime crap, about a doll (just a doll, none of this sex doll bull) coming to life and defeating a (somewhat generic) enemy, with a happy ending. That's it. But nooooooooooo JDR decided to 'expand' upon that and that's where we're leaving off.
Yes, I do sound rather angry. I got bones to pick. This isn't going to be pretty. But hey, there's cake at the end.
Story and Plot
WARNING: THIS IS GOING TO BE LONG AND PAINFUL.
Let's say you didn't know about JDR. Let's say you also didn't know about her sites. Let's say you are an average guy/gal that has an average IQ and likes to read "the wonderful world of web comics". You accidentally tripped upon this site and generally 'like' the cutesy pastel colors and gummy designs. Let's just say you have a high tolerance for pain and are pretty open minded.
You will not last through this comic without a migraine. Get yer fucking booze out, this is going to be the worst and longest acid trip you'll ever take:
Alright, we start off with the cover with an out of place Japanese title (seriously folks, if your comic is in English, and your audience is primarily English, nobody is going to 'get' this) and a.. poorly drawn doll bust of our soon-to-be hero. Fine enough, moving on.. We get some inner workings of this doll. Eh, that's ok. It's nice to geek out with some background info once in a while. I'm a little perturbed by the, uh, "Pleasure Maiden" bit.. (Keep in mind: the doll company's name is Hentaiseiyoku, which basically translates to sexual perversion.) Then we see the guy that looks like he came out from some other mediocre newspaper comic going to a... Sex shop (Yes, it's in Japanese. It's official, we are in Weeaboo Land. Anger.. Rising..) to buy the same doll we've been talking about. We find out he's Dr. Aoi, a famous scientist, and we also get our first taste of one of JDR's many made-up cuss words. Majumdered.
We are going to play a little game. Take the smallest swig of light booze, or whatever spirits you got for whenever you hear or see something that confuses or pisses you off, or just looks out of place. You will be dead by the end of this review.
So, Aoi runs back home and wallows in self turmoil for doing some dirty deeds. I would've expect him to do this BEFORE he went out or AFTER he used it, but whatever. Aoi's a giant pussy. We get to see more of JDR's candy coated world, but the magical feeling has already been tainted, and before it wears off.. We get Dr. Aoi and a shit load of words. This is just the beginning. We get a CLASS LECTURE ON BULLSHITONIUM.
At this point, if you were me, you'd just skip over the words to look at the pretty pictures. Don't be ashamed in doing so, you aren't missing much. In fact, to keep this review at sane levels (if that's even possible), we're going to skim over a lot of things from now on. We've already gone waaaaay over our limit. But this is JDR. It's a never ending joy ride.
We then get to see this orange haired.. lady? Get abused by her.. dad? Oh geez.. Then we get Fuschia, a rather normal looking girl (by this comic's standards) going to church after daydreaming in comics. I'm getting a lot of Mary Sue vibes, but I'm not sure if my radar is broken from all this booze.
So, Fuschia is a rebel of.. some sort, and we're supposed to feel sorry for her. Oh hey, more SCIENCE.
... Geez, this is going nowhere, isn't it? We haven't even got to the point where the sex doll shows up. Well, long story short, doll comes to life, becomes a Powerpuff Girl, beats up Orange bitch, falls in love with Fuschia and a ton of other crap happens, and in the end merges together (literally), and somehow EVERYBODY DIES as Fuschiatrope lives on forever as 'god'. There, I saved you the pain. Really, did you want to sit through this bull crap?
Downfall
Don't even get me started.. It.. Oh fuck it. Seriously, what the hell is all of this? It couldn't just be a fluffy sci-fi beat-em-up and romance? It just had to be a clusterfuck, didn't it?
Look at this. Ignore the wapanese and text. Just block those out of your mind if you still have the willpower. Wouldn't this make an adorable children's story? I'm not saying it'd be the best story, but it just.. Y'know what I'm getting at? It steams me. Burns me to a crisp when I see somewhat nice characters in the hands of a madman who puts them through pages and pages of turmoil. This.. I don't even know what this is. It's high level Rain Man Mind Fuck. No ordinary person is going to enjoy this.
And, quite frankly, looking at the cutesy art, this is a goddamn shame. It's a bait and switch. You go in expecting a Saturday morning cartoon and instead you get War and Peace, hardcover Extended Edition, slammed into your face. And this is just one of her comics.
"Now, hold on for one second, Angry Lesbian." You ask as you scold me for all these big mean words. "I kinda like the cute art style and I can follow what these imaginary beings within JDR's head are saying." You say, doubting my review. And I say to you that's fine. You have a high tolerance for pain, you like all the pretty words and "deep meanings", and overlook the obvious Star-Gate-ripoff-isms. Oh, and maybe the female abuse/daddy issues laden about. "Congratulations!" I say, you have passed JDR's secret Transgender Test. Uh, I mean, you are one of the few that doesn't know what a good webcomic is, uh I mean, MOVING ON...
Author biography
What can I say about this man.. girl.. beast that hasn't been said before? Here are some links to 'enjoy' if your head isn't already reeling from the essay I oozed out: Pastel Defender Heliotrope review More about JDR, specially the Kokoro Wish JDR CRAZY: Death threat to Solomon
So, yeah. All kinds of alarms going off. What do I think? Well, you don't want to know what I think. ... Fuck it, y'know, there's some people who really shouldn't be allowed near art programs. If you want to write out a huge sci-fi ESSAY, do it in TEXT. Y'know, just make a goddamn Jenninomicon. A physics text book of all the quack logic and diagrams. The characters, the story, the art, it doesn't fucking matter. It's dead. You killed it. You killed it like all the others.
Oh my god.. I'm turning into her.. No.. NOOOOOOOoooo. Just three more sections Angry Lesbian.. You can do this. You can get this done with whatever brain cells left behind. There's cake at the end. You like cake, right? Aha. Ahahah..
Art review
I've been giving JDR much too much credit for this. It's.. charming at first. But incredibly mushy as time goes on always. Have I mentioned how the art TOTALLY DOES NOT FIT ALL THIS WORDY BULLSHIT? No? Well, now you know.
I'm going to probably get the same complaints as I did with people actually 'getting' this magnum opus. And I say bull. Bull to you this time. You might as well have stick figures with mile long word balloons, it doesn't match. A good story (and this isn't) needs good art that compliments it. Oh, sure, those charts sure do look pretty sometimes, but it's a moot point. That's like sticking flowers on a toilet. Now you have a pretty toilet. Good for you.
What would I do to make it better (and I was held at gun point and being told I couldn't change the text)? Alright, first I'd moody this shit up to the max. Give em more realistic bodies and thick outlines. Make a dedicated space for all this word crap. At least that'd be one step towards getting a nerdy audience (who'd probably want their art as serious as their algorithms) this comic deserves. It's almost mocking me on how it completely doesn't fucking match the seriousness of the ham-handed heavy story.
Wait, this might work.. Still mushy tho.
I took it upon myself to see if I can try better (with no color) after seeing Norad's noble attempts in his own reviews. It's not much. (huge image warning)
Writing review
I.. I can't. I just can't. What could possibly be said that hasn't already reared its ugly head in the previous sections? .. No. No you can't make me. I won't.. I won't..
Oh my lord, I swear this man-beast hasn't spoken to another living being that isn't a clone of her/him/it. I bet the two other beasts she leeches off of are exactly alike. Like robot hobbits. There's just something so incredibly awkward about the writing, on top of the graphic charts, that's like a one-two sucker punch. Who, really, who talks like this? As much as I hate to attack the person behind this wreck (really, I'm a firm believer that the comics and art don't directly represent the artist. I'm hoping this is work spawned from crackpot dreams), but I could swear there's some high level autism shut-in at work here. And the scary thing is, I could be right. Look, I won't blame ya for that JDR. Can't help those things. But at least try to get out more often. Oh forget it, I'm not playing psychiatrist. pfft.
Emotions? Who needs em?! Pfft! Let's have characters have sudden malfunctions. Let's have them say all of this monologue. It's okay! Someone out there will get it! My dolls will do the work for me! They will let people know about my creations! That's all that matters! Science! Humans suck (and religion too! Oh, and don't forget my abusive dad!) Even though they created science.. Humans.. Creating Scie-
*SYSTEM MALFUNCTION*
- REBOOTING ANGRY LESBIAN ALGORITHMS*
Wait, where am I? Oh crap I gotta review JDR's comi-.. Hey, cool, someone did it for me. Conclusion? CRAP.
Conclusion
Uh.. JDR is a loon.
Cake? What cake?
Project Dishwasher would like to add a few words. I read the whole thing in a single sitting. The thing about this comic is that it's bad. However, there are some moments where I would just imagine less blobby art, and think, gee, how could have this been handled by a better writer? Seriously! I really liked some of the ideas here, like the science, and the society depicted. Guess how many strips there are? 230. It's kinda sad, because there are some things that need some serious explaining, and could have some more interesting stuff added to it. Like, making Fuschia a ditzy yet lovable girl. Maybe everyone isn't gay (ie a more varied cast)? Expanding on the Fuschia and Cerul thing would be a good idea. Or Heliotrope falling in love with someone else, like Cerul. Or maybe a less backwards society, focusing on the social advancement Or MAYBE ACTUALLY USE AN OUTLINE, BREAK A FEW TROPES, AND ACTUALLY LEARN HOW TO DRAW. Gosh. This comic is a mix of bad ideas and wasted potential.
