Iji (webcomic)

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"And this is why Gurren Lagann fans should never be allowed to retell deconstructionist anti-war stories."

An Interactive Comic by Captain Lhurgoyf, based on Daniel Remar's game Iji, hosted on MSPA Forum Adventures. Well, mainly based on Iji. Because it has become a Mega Crossover of epic proportions.

The adventure initially follows the story of a killer game, starting in Iji's house on the morning of Bring-Your-Children-To-Work day. But a few differences appear quickly: For starters, Iji's mental state is already not that good. Her father being a Mad Scientist and her brother having a crush on her probably didn't help...

And it goes downhill from there as the Alpha Strike happens, Iji wakes up and starts killing, and the boundaries of the universe weaken even more.

Link to the adventures (It's not mirrored because the Four Lines, All Waiting story format doesn't interact well with the mirror's format)

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Tropes:

• The Abridged Series: Essentially a cross between one of these, a Let's Play, and an Interactive Comic. It uses a lot of Abridged Series Tropes, except that, due to the side stories, each installment is typically longer than the original.
• Acrofatic: After the events of Homestuck, Bro Strider has apparently let himself go, but not to the point where he's unable to jump into the sky and cut spaceships in half.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: While her appearance doesn't actually change, Iji was (supposedly) supposed to be plain-looking in the game. Here, numerous characters end up crushing on her.
• Adorkable: If there's anyone to prove it's not necessarily Always Male, it's Iji.
• Aerith and Bob: A Running Gag - any alien who gets a name who didn't have one in the source material will have a humourously mundane one, so you have, for example, Hel Sarie's son...Wayne.
• Aliens in Cardiff: Technically everywhere, but the majority of the action takes place in Milwaukee (as a Shout-Out to Commander Keen, a big inspiration for the adventure), and the Alternian Protectorate mostly covers central Asia.
• All the Myriad Ways: One sideplot involves a slowly-growing group of Touhou characters getting involuntarily shunted around between Alternate Universe versions of Gensokyo.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Everyone. No exceptions.
• Angst? What Angst?: Iji isn't nearly as broken about the Earth being destroyed and having to fight off the invasion as she is in the game, but that's sort of the point.
• Anticlimax Boss: Played for Laughs. Vateilika tries to fight Iji at the ends of Sectors 3 and 6, but either way she isn't any more powerful than a regular Soldier. The first time, Iji just kicks her out the window, and the second time, she pushes her out the door.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Ron is prone to bursting into tirades about SCIENCE! and world domination. In front of his children. Who don't appreciate it very much. Vexorg also has an Amazingly Embarassing Aunt.
• April Fools' Day: To celebrate, Captain Lhurgoyf did an update claiming that he had been killed by a combine harvester and that, from now on, all updates would be done by his (nonexistant) four-year-old brother. With expected results.
• Armed Farces
• Art Shift: Just as in Gurren Lagann, suitably badass moments are drawn in a looser, sketchier style.
• Author Appeal: If, reading the adventure, it comes as a surprise at all that Captain Lhurgoyf's favourite anime is Gurren Lagann, you're obviously not actually reading it.
• Author Avatar: Captain Lhurgoyf has appeared at least twice, represented by his avatar (The Doctor with a lhurgoyf's head). However, he's...not treated as invincible or a Mary Sue.
• Awesome McCoolname: The names Krotera and Vexorg's imaginary fiends chose for themselves:
  • Stupid Idiot McMoron became Okay Alright McAverage then Great Awesome McEpic and Cool Badass McAwesome;
  • Foolish Imbecile McBraindamaged became Hero Messiah McKarma.
• Awesomeness Is Volatile: The explanation of how Retribution works. Also, Spiral Nemesis has occured twice for this reason (once in a non-canon segment, once in Another Dimension).
• Badass Adorable: Iji is portrayed here as a ditzy, oblivious Fan Girl who borders on Adult Child at times. She's also just as badass as in the original game, only with her fear and hesitation replaced with hot blood.
• Big Applesauce: Parodied. New York is one of the few places in the world that wasn't affected by the Tasen invasion. No one knows why.
• Big Damn Heroes: The ghost of Franz, the star of Pulp Archaelogist Adventurer (another adventure by the same author), appears to help Iji during the fight with Iosa.
• Big Lipped Alligator Moment: At one point, during a discussion on how portal guns violate the law of conservation of energy, we cut to Dan watching Ron fall through an infinite portal loop while Kyubey freaks out in the foreground. No one acknowledges he's there, it's not brought up in the narration, and he's never mentioned again. Captain Lhurgoyf just included it as a one-off non sequitur joke.
  • Later, a command asks for something silly and unrelated to the plot to happen just because it's silly, which Captain Lhurgoyf renders as a monkey in a party hat, clown makeup, a tuxedo jacket, and a diaper juggling chainsaws on a unicycle while blowing a streamer in front of St. Basil's Cathedral. It even uses the Big Lipped Alligator Moment icon from The Nostalgia Critic.
• Big Name Fan: Daniel Remar, the creator of the original game, reads and enjoys the adventure. He's even used pictures from the adventure as an avatar on various forums.
• Breakout Character: Many unnamed Mooks are, by reader suggestions, given names and their own subplots. Even the two Scouts standing on either sides of a pit in Sector 1 served as Those Two Guys for quite a while, and the diary writer's girlfriend (or Denise) is more important than the diary writer (or Katelyn) now.
• Brother-Sister Incest: Dan likes Iji...a little too much. Originally, he was supposed to be Straight Gay, but an early suggestion changed that.
• Butt Monkey: Dan, Vexorg, the Tasen in general, and occasionally Iji (but she can get herself out of it).
• Camp Gay/Macho Camp/Manly Gay: Vexorg bounces around the spectrum seemingly at random.
• Canon Welding: Captain Lhurgoyf's first adventure was an Indiana Jones parody called Pulp Archaeologist Adventure. He's since worked the two plots together, with the Big Bad being Iji's ancestor and the protagonist inadvertently starting the Tasen-Komato War.
• Captain Ersatz: Due to Captain Lhurgoyf's inspiration from Gurren Lagann, many of the characters parallel members of its cast. For example, Iji is Simon , and Vexorg is a cross between Viral and Cytomander. On the Original Character side, there's an Elite who dresses like Kamina and pilots a mech resembling the Gurren Lagann...
  • Also, all the generic Assassins talk and act like the Spy from Team Fortress 2.
  • Tor is totally not Alistar Cooke.
  • Iji's attitude towards explosions also recalls Jaya Ballard. Given that the author's username comes from a Magic creature, this isn't that surprising.
  • Not to mention Ron's adopted oldest son Simon, who is a dead ringer for Kamina and wields Tadakatsu's drill-spear.
• Casanova Wannabe: Dan, who hits on basically any female who comes his way. He doesn't seem to have any standards on it, seeing as he's hit on his sister, an alien, and an imaginary woman. Most of the time, they want nothing to do with him.
  • Clueless Chick Magnet: Conversely, any girl that approaches him (The Gensokyans, Kelsey) finds him astoundingly attractive. He even inadvertently causes the events of Touhou 12.3 when the girls realize there literally isn't enough of him to go around, and decide to have a tournament with him as the prize.
• The Cassandra: The Crazy Homeless Man. If anyone paid him any attention, they might have been able to defend against the Alpha Strike. Problem is, he's a homeless old man who everyone assumes is completely insane.
  • He does survive, and spends most of the comic's events in a dumpster.
• Celebrity Paradox: Mentioned by name. Everything relating to Iji as a game is replaced in this universe by references to Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden.
  • Culminating in the sector 9 intermission, which is about the out-of-work indie game developer Daniel Remar in his quest to escape Tales Of Game's' shadow.
• Chess with Death: Used repeatedly and with many different deaths and different results. Most notably, during the Dead Writers' Revolt death basically has to abandon his post to deal with hundreds of people challenging him to consequitive games.
• Cool People Rebel Against Authority: Row Row Fight The Power is quoted multiple times, for one. See Do Not Do This Cool Thing.
• Cosplay Otaku Girl: Iosa.
• Cosy Catastrophe: From what we see of the survivors of the Alpha Strike (besides Iji), life is still fairly normal for most people by six months after the initial attack. Most people even are still able to live in the bombed-out ruins of their houses. Sweden even has a government intact, although that's because they had the help of Notch somehow making the physics of Minecraft work in real life.
• Crossover: With Touhou, Problem Sleuth, Homestuck, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Castlevania
  • Mega Crossover
• Curb Stomp Battle: Iosa the Invincible vs Iji. Before and after losing the exoskeleton.
• Death Is Cheap: The mechanics of the afterlife were borrowed wholesale from Problem Sleuth.
• Death Takes a Holiday: Various Deaths have their hands full because of the dead writers' revolt.
• Developing Doomed Characters: It takes a while to get to the actual game, mostly because Captain Lhurgoyf needed to finish a runthrough he was already on.
• Doing in the Scientist: Nanotechnology and other things from the original game are still technological, but there's a lot more metaphysical weirdness going on behind the scenes. In the cases where is does affect what was in the games, the Null Driver is explained as containing a Sealed Evil in a Can Eldritch Abomination, and Sector Z is an Eldritch Location accessed through black holes.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The very reason for this adventure's existence.

This is why Gurren Lagann fans should never be allowed to tell deconstructionist antiwar stories.

• • Additionally, one of the major morals of Iji, in addition to War Is Hell, was inevitability and the inability of one person to change the ways of a group of people no matter how hard they tried. It might not be best suited to taking on the ethos of a series containing a song best known (if mistakenly) as "Row Row Fight The Power".
  • A more subtle example is how the Alternians coming back from the dead and taking over large areas of Earth is portrayed in a positive light (in fact, out of the three alien races, they're the nicest - while the Tasen want to wipe out all life on Earth and then colonise it and the Komato want to blow the planet up, the trolls just want control over the planet) - Captain Lhurgoyf has said elsewhere on the forums that he thinks it would be cool being a troll on Alternia, and despite Andrew's clear intentions, he believes that the things the trolls do make complete sense for what they are. After all, when you recruit everyone on your planet to help maintain your empire, do you want to keep someone who's physically incapable of fighting around?
  • In a subversion, Captain Lhurgoyf has made it clear that he knows perfectly well that his interpretation of the game is the complete opposite of the original intent, but he's just having fun going along with it anyway.
• Dub Name Change: Asha's name here is Vexorg, a name borrowed from a The Far Side cartoon. Rule of Funny at work here.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Vexorg Asha Surnamedoesntmatterinsten. He was named after his aunt.
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: The Komato have been retconned as being evolved velociraptors, like many people thought they were supposed to be before it was Jossed by Word of God. But Captain Lhurgoyf liked it better that way.
• Everything's Better with Monkeys: The cyborg gorilla.
• Expendable Clone: Ron has plenty of them. He's already gone through more than four hundred before the adventure.
• Expressive Mask: The original game made extensive use of Faceless Goons, and the author didn't have any idea how he'd draw them unmasked, but needed them to show expression, so...
  • In fact, at one point, Krotera closes his eyes...which causes his visor to narrow down to a single line.
• Eldritch Abomination: Lots, notably Zorspoink, the Non-Euclidean Bat. And the null driver.
• Fail O'Suckyname though Name McAdjective: The names Krotera and Vexorg used for their imaginary fiends, Stupid Idiot McMoron and Foolish Imbecile McBraindamaged.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Although Homestuck is canon to the adventure, everything after and including Tavros's death is disregarded (as well as a few plot points before that that Captain Lhurgoyf thought were bad ideas, such as the ectobiology update), as this is when Captain Lhurgoyf thought the comic had Jumped the Shark and stopped reading it.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink
• Flanderisation: In the original game, Iosa was a relatively calculating, intelligent person who just so happened to be fanatically devoted to battle and a berserker in combat. In the adventure, she's basically an Angry Marine. Within the adventure, there's also Iji's relation to Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff - originally, she was just supposed to like the comic, the joke being that she's too oblivious to realise it's supposed to be ironic) and, before the adventure was placed in the Homestuck universe, it was uncertain as to whether or not she realised it was supposed to be a Show Within a Show. After Dave himself started making appearances and Iji visited his blog, she ended up being a giggling fangirl who wants to bear his child.
• For Science!: Just about everything Ron does. The sole exception being devising the plans for Iji's cybernetic enhancements, which was intended as a defense against the Tasen. Sometimes, he even shouts it.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: There are a lot of plotlines, and they're technically all going on at any given time. They only intersect when they happen to veer in that direction and none are allowed to seriously change the course of the "main" plotline. Virtually every update includes scenes from multiple groups who have never even met each other.
  • The huge recap in sector 8 is 12.5 pages long in Word. It required multiple corrections due to events the author himself had forgotten about and plotlines that hadn't been revisited in a while.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: With a "FREEM" sound effect.
• Fusion Dance: Broboa.
• Game Mod: The first one made since Daniel released the sources of Iji, no less! It mainly adds weapons, but also some other elements like Asha's new name.
  • Find it here, in the spoiler block of Shwart!!'s post.
• Gaydar: Andy is somehow able to "tell people's orientation by looking at them." Mostly, this was because one command had him explore the outside of the Komato base in Sector 3, and Captain Lhurgoyf liked the idea of him having a crush on Denise but knowing that he'd never get with her due to her being both a Tasen and gay.
• Granola Girl: Ansaksie, maaaan.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Iosa.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Well, technically more like Hilariously Neglectful Childhood, but it is implied that Ron does use his children as test subjects.
• Hot-Blooded: The author has admitted that Iji here has more in common with Simon than her canon counterpart.
• Hulk Speak: "CYBORG GORILLA SMAAASH PUNY SPACEMEN!"
• Imaginary Enemy: Both Krotera and Vexorg create one they want to humiliate and torment (resp. named Stupid Idiot McMoron and Foolish Imbecile McBraindamaged), but those quickly turn the tables on them.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon:
  • Dual-wielded four-barreled sawed-off imaginary phantom hammers with chainsaw lightsabre bayonets, a product of Krotera's active imagination.
  • Foolish Imbecile McBraindamaged later gets chainsaw shotgun crutches.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Ron and Vexorg.
• Irony: A Running Gag in the prologue was characters denying the existance of anything that anyone who played the game would know would happen. In a meta sense, despite his treatment of the source material, Captain Lhurgoyf is an Actual Pacifist (he just doesn't have a problem if it's not real people being hurt).
• Klingon Promotion: They actually call it that. Apparently, this is how the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (most notably Death) work.
• Late Arrival Spoiler: If you haven't played the game prior to reading the adventure, prepare for having a lot of plot points revealed sooner than they would be otherwise.
• Lighter and Softer: To the nth degree.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: The author used to keep a list of character stats in the first post. It got too big to continue after Sector 3. As of now, it's on Sector 9.
  • Not helped that, due to the limits of the original game, a good deal of them look exactly the same.
• Mad Scientist: Iji's father Ron.
• Man Bites Man: Dan bites Vexorg when kidnapped, Which somehow nano-enhances his teeth.
  • The Magic Touch: Said nano-enhanced teeth have the power to temporarily augment anything they bite with the same capabilities as nano-weapons (allowing them to damage things with nano-field shielding as though said shielding didn't exist). The first thing Dan does with this is bite his hands and punch Komato.
• Manipulative Editing: Some times, Captain Lhurgoyf has to edit his screenshots to make them match up with the events of the story. Usually, this comes from editing the numbers on the ammunition counter, but on one occasion he recoloured an Assassin to have Iji have a proper fight with Vexorg after using the Nuke in the original boss fight.
• Memetic Badass: reallyjoel's Dad makes a cameo fighting flying sharks with lasers on their heads over the Himalayas and Imaginary Gensokyo goes into Spiral Nemesis when Chuck Norris, Mr. T, Theodore Roosevelt, Vin Diesel, and Kamina stop by. In-universe, Flip Hero has Chuck Norris-style "facts" written about him.
• Misaimed Fandom: In-universe, Iji thinks that Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is unironically hilarious. Out of universe, the author intentionally puts himself here by taking the killer run of Iji and playing it for laughs and awesomeness.
• Modern Major-General: Krotera. He handles his job as a military leader by being an asshole to everybody, but his imagination makes him a borderline Reality Warper.
• Next Sunday AD: It takes place in 2016, apparently too early for there have been no apparent technological or social innovations but just enough for Iji's lust for Dave Strider to not come across as Shotacon.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Averted, as Captain Lhurgoyf has stated that the Tasen and Komato, who are descended from dinosaurs in this version of the story, don't have breasts. This isn't mentioned aside from one note of commentary, though.
• Noodle Incident: In "an epic adventure the likes of words can never describe, other than that it involved a dumpster, a ceiling fan, and ARADIA", Crabsprite ended up on earth.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Invoked when Death Demonhead Mobster Kingpin, Bec Noir, Team Sleuth, and every single Touhou character other than Team Sanae get into a giant battle...when we only see a reaction shot from a spectator describing how awesome it is.
• One Steve Limit: Averted with General Tor and Tor Johnson.
• Power Creep, Power Seep: In the game, Nanofields are supposed to be impenetrable to the majority of non-Nanoweapons. In the adventure, Dave slices countless Tasen apart with an ordinary katana. To the point where he ends up Atop a Mountain of Corpses that is apparently so tall it leaves his sword in throwing range of space. If this was the original game, not only would he not be able to do anything, he'd probably be killed in seconds... Unless he was actually wielding a Dragon's Tooth from Deus Ex, probably obtained through Alchemy.
• Reconstruction: Of the action genre.

Captain Lhurgoyf: I was looking at the original game and the people who played it, and saying, "Hey, what are you doing feeling guilty over engaging in virtual explosion-filled sci-fi combat? Have you forgotten it is AWESOME?".

• Refuge in Cool
• Rule 34: Richter Belmont makes an unpleasant encounter with a werewolf porn magazine. To top it, it's in Dracula's possession.
• Saved by the Fans: Multiple cases. Vateilika and Yukabacera were originally going to die fighting Iji, but reader suggestions asked for them to come back. And the adventure was going to follow the path where Dan dies, but giving him a Dying Moment of Awesome with a quick He's Back moment from Iji, but the way things had set up by that point prevented it.
• Schrodinger's Cast: The adventure features a few Homestuck characters and takes place 7 years afterwards, but is running at the same time. As a result, there are a few characters that died in Homestuck but are alive here, most notably Bro and Crabsprite. There's also a note about how the Homestuck trolls all lived in the Veil until they eventually died of old age. Of course, this is a universe where Death Is Cheap.
• Self-Disposing Villain: Iosa.
• Serial Escalation: It's Gurren Lagann inspired.
• Shana Clone: Iosa is an example of this happening entirely accidentally, since Captain Lhurgoyf isn't familiar with Shakugan no Shana. Granted, she's flat because everyone else in her species is.
• Shout-Out (Show Within a Show): To Dwarf Fortress, Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, Doom, My Little Missile Pony: Friendship Is Magic...
• Shout-Out (other): Many.
  • At one point, Bro Strider was prompted to combine items using meat paste, like in Kingdom of Loathing.
• Shonen Hair: Iji's was more of Wild Hair in the game, but here she has it even before falling into a coma, mostly due to Rule of Funny, recognition, and it being more fun to draw. And the adventure adheres to Shonen principles quite nicely, considering its inspiration.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Denise and Katelyn, to the point where one Commander outright asks them if they ever get tired of each other. Apparently, they don't.
• Silliness Switch: Forget the scrambler: Here, the switch is broken in the "ON" position.
• Silly Reason for War: According to the adventure, the Tasen-Komato War started when the Komato received a message insulting them claiming to be from the Tasen . Up until that point, they were allies.
• Space X: Parodied with a reference to the Space Geneva Convention.
• Spiritual Successor: To Gurren Lagann, of course, but in addition, Captain Lhurgoyf got the original idea from a MSPAFA playthrough of Cave Story.
• Stealth Pun: Although it was unintentional on Captain Lhurgoyf's part, Tor is introduced reclining in a leather armchair...
• The Stoner: Dan, though we don't see him engaging in drug use very often. Also Madotsuki, by implication.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: Daniel Remar (who is Swedish)'s response to being named "Sven MooseBorkesson."
• Take That: The GameBro review of Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden contains some verbatim quotes from a Destructoid review of Iji that basically admitted to not paying any attention to the storyline. Iji brushes it off as misinformed.
  • The fact that Vriska spends all of the trolls' meetings locked in a cage and only being let out on the battlefield, with the other trolls mentioning that the only reason they allowed her back in the first place was that they needed all the help they could get, should tell you something about how Captain Lhurgoyf feels about the character.
  • Take That Me: In the conversation between Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley over respect for the classics, they bring up the author intentionally Completely Missing the Point of the original story.
• Took a Level In Dumbass: Iji.
• Totally Radical: Parodied with Bro. Half of the words out of his mouth is some sort of slang from the 80s and 90s, he wears the same Kamina shades and baseball cap, and he owns an even gaudier rapper puppet (this was before he was shown to have repaired Lil' Cal), but he's not a teenager any more.]]
• Truly Single Parent: Ron. Justified in that he idolises Nikola Tesla and is thus celibate, but needed someone to test his experiments on and/or succeed him when he achieves world domination.
• 24-Hour Armor: The Tasen and Komato are seen wearing full armour while doing everything, including eating and sleeping. See Expressive Mask for the rationale.
• Unusual Euphemism: Primarily "Belgium"
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Komato Assassin Asha Vexorg and reallyjoel's Dad.
• Webcomic of the Game
• Wingdinglish: Specifically, alien writing uses the Standard Galactic Alphabet. With an actual font, so you can theoretically read it if you know the code.
• World Gone Mad: Yes.
• World Galaxy Multiverse Of Badass
• Worst News Judgement Ever: In the prologue, Dan goes to a news website where the front page story is "Bob Smith is a Jerk". This is because Captain Lhurgoyf couldn't find any fake news website generators that weren't supposed to be used for pranking your friends.
• Yaoi Fangirl: Iji is mentioned to ship Sweet Bro/Hella Jeff, and once attempted to send fanfiction to Dave in the past.
• You Bastard: Surprisingly, this actually does show up, but not in the way one would expect. When a command calls for the last duck on Earth to explode humourously:

Congratulations, you just laughed at the extinction of an entire species. I hope you're proud of yourself, asshole.

• You Kill It, You Bought It: One of the two ways to become Death (the other being inventing the atomic bomb).