I love murder drones. I think they’re such great little guys. Bring me a robot maid and I am yours forever, etc. But watching through the series itself actually took me a few stabs, and I think it’s due to a few design decisions that make following the plot unintuitive and add some friction to what’s otherwise a very fun show. So I want to talk a little bit about that friction, even though the entire thing is still a good time overall.

Indie Animation

First, the obviously relevant context is that Murder Drones is made by Glitch, which is a small independent animation studio. And independent animation necessarily comes with constraints. It’s incredibly exciting that we have the technology for small teams to make work with this quality and scale, and I don’t at all want to take that for granted. But I think a lot of the friction I have to talk about comes from fundamental trade-offs that come from that setup.

Since their resources are very limited and good animation is expensive work, there’s a pressure for everything to be compressed. Short episodes with short shots in an eight-episode miniseries mean the project is feasible, but it’s hard to get all your fun ideas in while still sufficiently paving the way for them to land properly.

Structurally, a small indie team also carries the risk of skill gaps. I don’t mean to make any criticisms of anyone in particular on the project here, but this kind of team might not necessarily have experienced television writers or producers. And, with a small independent team, there might not be enough of a test audience to catch things that could be improved, or not enough budget to re-iterate for minor improvements. So those are all categories of things that can easily run into trouble.

Independent serialized animation like this is a relatively new phenomenon, but these are going to be the same sorts of challenges projects like RWBY and Helluva Boss have. (Although I think Murder Drones is significantly better than both of those.) So while there are common environmental factors that can make this kind of project a little extra rough, the way that roughness actually manifests is interesting.

It’s not glaringly bad

The reason I’m interested in talking about this at all is that I noticed the friction as part of my own experience, but it wasn’t linked to any obvious problems. In fact, the whole reason I’m writing this is Murder Drones felt like it should be great, and I was surprised there were things that still weren’t quite clicking. In re-watching the series to write this, slowing down and zooming in to catch every piece made the effect much harder to see. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what caused the effect. Which is why I want to! The dynamics you can barely see are always the most interesting to understand.

Did you know there are still people who think the MCU’s Thanos is a deep character with interesting motivations? For all the CinemaSins “why didn’t he use his powers to end scarcity, is he stupid” types, there are still “Thanos did nothing wrong” chuds.

This is stupid, of course. But after seeing people be wrong on the internet, it occurred to me recently that there are a couple of genuinely interesting ways to spin the character without changing his mechanical role in the story. In fact, with just a tiny bit of re-framing, you can turn Thanos from a stupid dumb-dumb into a genuinely great villain.

Why Thanos doesn’t work

First, a super-quick summary of what I’m reacting to.

Gris

Last week, looking for a game to play to wind down at night in bed, I went through my backlog of unplayed Steam games and filtered for something that looked relaxing. I fished out Gris.

Gris is intriguing, atmospheric, and gorgeously animated. It’s a beautiful indie title.
And I kinda hate it?

The following are exerpts from my fully transcribed playthrough of Psycholonials, which I wrote last summer. If you aren’t familiar with psycholonials or haven’t played the game, I recommend reading that to catch up.

If you’ve already played Psycholonials though, here’s some food for you. Exerpts though, not the whole thing.

or, “W.D. Gaster undercuts Undertale’s cohesiveness as a work”

Something I struggle with as a writer is how to write fiction that’s deep and meaningful.

When a very young Gio wrote The Raphael Parable, I updated it with a little ARG. “The ARG Update”, I called it. There were scattered clues, and a puzzle, and secret notes so the diligent scavenger could piece together what really happened. Except nothing did really happen. There wasn’t a story I wanted to tell, there wasn’t an interesting mystery to solve, there were just clues tied to more clues tied to an arbitrary ending. It was hopefully fun to follow, but it was the trappings of mystery without any of the meaning.

Petscop, on the other hand, has a substantial depth to it because it keeps tying itself to reality. The viewer is given a real person recording themselves playing a game. It’s set in our world. The game itself seems to be intricately tied to real-world events; too. Disappearances, the player’s family, even the YouTube account managing the videos. Petscop tells a deep mystery story because the mystery is backed by a story: a death, an abuse, a revenge. There’s meat to the mystery.

Sans (Undertale) is a fun character. He’s spooky. He breaks an unbreakable log, he teleports, he’s figured out something about the timelines. Then there’s a fight with Sans, where he’s very tough and has a gun.

Then he needed a backstory for his gun and science, and we got Gaster, who is almost those things. Gaster was a fun idea, though, so he got some extra Easter eggs. We get room_gaster, the gaster followers, Mysteryman, the wrong number song, and the sound test. He’s fun, and mysterious, and ended up carrying most of the mysterious lore bits of Undertale that were never quite explained.