arcanetrivia | Monkey Island, anyone?

I dunno if anyone reading this cares or even knows about the old LucasArts (and more recently Telltale) adventure game franchise Monkey Island, but last month I became aware that the third and fourth games in the series, which had been sorta "lost" for a while, had become available on Steam and GOG sometime after 2013, when I had played MI 1 and 2 and Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island. (I didn't play MI 1 or 2 at the time of their original releases in 1990 and 1991. Other than Loom, we were mostly a Sierra household, for whatever reason. I do remember seeing Monkey Island on the shelf at the computer store around the age of 12 and being somehow intimidated by it. I think I had some wrong ideas about the nature of the content, did not grasp that it was a comedy adventure game and not really serious pirate stuff with actual swordfighting or whatever, and thought it would be "too hard", possibly even scary or grossout if I was put off by the image of LeChuck.) So I thought what the heck and bought and played them, and unlike in 2013 when apparently no major impression was made on me, this time I came out the other side with a big dumb crush on Guybrush Threepwood and an urge to consume fanworks as fast as I could.

Unfortunately for me, I appear to have stumbled on a fandom even tinier than Takin' Over the Asylum, despite the fact that its source material is easier to get a hold of and that it's widely considered one of the best or at least most influential adventure games of all time. It didn't take me long to get through all the fic (AO3/FFN) and art (Deviantart mostly, occasional ArtStation) and back posts in Tumblr blogs I could find (most of which are not currently active). I even tried the insanity of tracking back #monkey island on Tumblr to epoch, though it wouldn't let me go past 2017 (I think there might be technical database/indexing reasons for that) and the tag has few enough followers that it doesn't actually tell you the number. (I don't know what the threshold is, but the smallest of my tracked tags it will tell me about is 2k. That would still be sizable if they were all live users, but of course there are also a lot of dead blogs which are probably still in the count.) There's basically nothing on LJ or DW that isn't 1. dead RP journals or 2. just plain dead (often with very little content in the first place). It's likely that once upon a time there were Yahoo Groups devoted to MI, but it's really hard to find something specific in the big dumps of data grabs that some people have posted on archive.org. I haven't explored Usenet much although I'm not sure it's likely to contain the sort of fan content I'm familiar with from bigger things like, say, Harry Potter, Star Trek, or Tolkien.

TL;DR: Woe, no1curr about the few things I posted in the tag myself, and I've come here to inflict them on you. Warning: lots of images behind the cuts, most 1280 px wide, and about 3.5 MB total.

Ever since I hung up a printout of Vestergaard's Read or Die poster at work, I've occasionally made others to amuse myself. Guybrush is now tacked up beside Severus, the Tenth Doctor, and Lord Vetinari. (The image is not actually a screenshot from the game, but a cap from this Youtube video demonstrating upscaling and cleanup of the graphics.)

Insult swordfighting bonanza: I was really tickled by this post which stuck an Oscar Wilde quote on a screencap of the insult swordfighting from MI1, and decided to do some more with other quotes from Wilde, as well as Dorothy Parker (which seemed an obvious next step) and a handful of others. (Image resources from this game which combines all the insults from various MI games together. Some quotes have been edited slightly to make the grammar work in this context.)

Dorothy Parker (9):