ERBoA Anno 1
Our final intermission begins! If you know, you know: the inspiration for Epic Rap Battles of Arkerra was Epic Rap Battles of History, a well-loved YouTube series that still puts out a new video every now and then. Despite its name, ERB includes battles between fictional characters and present-day real people as well as historical figures, so we weren’t stretching things too far to write some raps of our own.
These battles are true battles, and the ERB versions of the characters they depict are often a little fightier than their non-rapping counterparts…more self-aggrandizing, quick to dis their enemies on every level, and very well-educated about their opponents’ weak points. That’s the lens we usually applied to these contests, but we focused them by mostly using pre-existing conflicts. We had you guys vote on the winners last time, but if you want the resulting scores, check the pop-up text on these images. (Writing is me, lettering is Flo.)
On to this battle, specifically…this one is mid-tier for me. I’m very fond of them all, but I’d rank this one #4 out of 6.
Cons: I feel like we should have acknowledged that in any fair, even musical contest…Best is going to win. He’s just going to win. There’s no way Byron could beat him…alone. But Byron is not alone: he has succeeded in making friends throughout the series. If the team of Sundar, Braggadocio, and Gravedust jumped in to offer support (much as another team of friends will in the final rap battle here), then that could make Byron’s point about friendship better. It’d do justice to the idea that Best the one-man band could overcome any one opponent.
I also think I should’ve tried harder to go with pure song parodies for Best—and maybe added a couple more songs to round things out—instead of jumping between song parody and more standard rap verses. At the least, we could’ve set the different kinds of lyrics off better…the Nirvana tribute in the middle is a little hard to “hear” at first.
And a rap battle that represents the clash of Best and Byron should pay some homage to how that clash ended. It wouldn’t be the first such battle to conclude with the combatants laying down their rhymes, making up, and embracing.
Pros: I really like some of the end rhymes we found (axes/chemoprophylaxis, nurse/curse, friendlessly/endlessly).
The song parodies of “Starman,” “Come As You Are,” and “Karma Chameleon” do work, and John renders Ziggy Best, Best Cobain, and Bes George wonderfully.
Echoes of our title in “guilt and rage” and Byron’s ax/friends in “bay and bray.” Plus a lot of internal rhyme, which was a policy we’d maintain for this whole mini-series.
I tested this on Janice, and the basic message comes through: Best’s lyrics have more cleverness, Byron’s have more heart. Plus, I love that the votes on the battle ended in an actual tie.
So yeah, it could’ve been better. But overall, not bad!
FB: Bowie riffs we didn’t use: “Look Bad In Anger,” “Life of Wars,” “Sundar’s Fresher.”
Personal fave is Teddy vs. Churchill. The beat on that one was next level!
I noticed on the original pages that the vote totals were surprisingly low. Did the number of people reading the comic drop during the intermission, or did very few people take the time to vote?
Some readers tune out during an intermission. Rap battles are not for everyone. Heck, rhyme is not for everyone. I tuned out during Axemas because of that. Texts that force you to keep paying attention because every last bit is intended to be clever can be exhausting. More so if English is not your first language. I do appreciate the effort, though.
I mean, I always tuned out for axemas, but everyone got mad at me for saying so in the annotation comments so I figured it must not be particularly common.
…and as fun as Epic Rap Battles theoretically are – I love the concept, but I’m not sure I’ve ever sat one out – they’re very high energy and kinda relentless, as they should be. But that amounts to six pages of our favourite heroes yelling at each other in ALL CAPS, just after we’ve sat through 14 extra pages of HR’s endless God Complex Rant. Gimme a break… :P
(Not that I’m going anywhere! I fully intend to witness the upcoming battles.)
Part of me’s inclined to say “Well, once it leaves our hands, it’s your series to read, so read it how you want.” But I do hate the idea of people missing out on pieces of the story! These rap battles are just funhouse reinterpretations of Guilded Age scenes and characters, but the Axemas tales, more often than not, introduced key elements like Bandit’s backstory, Best’s redemption, Penk and Magda’s growing rifts with their people’s leaders, the personalities of Daniel, Chrissie, Kaye, and Lia, et cetera.
I mean, if you’re just saying you skimmed the rhyming parts and got most of the info from the pictures, I get it, but if you tuned out entirely, then you may’ve been confused in a few parts.
(I realize that it was a little confusing to sort out which “extra bits” were going to affect the series plot and which wouldn’t. Sometimes we didn’t know ourselves until we developed them. Scipio’s Axemas tale is worth reading for me because it highlights a few aspects of his character that don’t shine as much when he’s in a group, but it’s not woven into the plot like the stuff I cited above. “Breaking Bread With The Enemy” is labeled a “bonus story,” but it has several big plot developments carried into later chapters, whereas “Mental Health Day” is the other “bonus story” and it really doesn’t: it’s an insert into the main continuity but nothing that happens in it is ever mentioned again. If Flo and I had been a bit more organized in our approach, we probably would’ve given all the plotty stuff chapter numbers and let things like the rap battles and guest strips be “extras.” Maybe the short Axemas tales could be “Chapter 20.5” or whatever. But, oh, well, it’s about a decade too late to adjust that one.)
Axemas seemed at first a trivial extra bit, which developed into something more interesting as the comic progressed. I’m sure readers saw that! Who would skip Sepia World Axemas if it offered a closer look at Daniel, Chrissie and the others?
The first two Axemas stories, on the other hand, rely heavily on rhymes that, while American cultural touchstones, mean a lot less to readers outside the USA. There has to be a balance between how much effort it takes to appreciate something and what you get out of it in content. I think that balance was better for the later Axemas stories.
(As with the rap battles, you can rest assured that I still read every last letter of Axemas rhyme that you threw at us. This second time around, I tune out for nothing.)
I like Byron. But Best had my vote the moment I read the Starman stanza.