Part III: "Halfling Warriors: Protectors of Unicorn Forest"

(As seen at www.coloringdragons.com/hwpouf)

Good GOD!

This comic will fucking floor you. It will smack you in the face with such pure, stereotypical girly fantasy that it makes Earthsong look like Berserk. And yet, for something so girly, it insists on throwing constant nakedness and fanservice at the reader, which is just bewildering.

So...this isn't a hentai comic?!

This one is really something else, folks. It's almost off the scale in terms of overall terribleness. With a name that hilariously, blatantly girly, and a premise that, when I explain it to you, you'll swear I'm making it up, POUF (god, even its acronym sounds like "poof") is, succinctly, a piece of work...

The Story

To properly gauge my reaction to all of this, please mentally insert streams of "ha"'s after every other sentence...

Much of this story is incomprehensible; it's that ridiculous! One of the character bios actually contains the sentence "Uroko, along with his younger brother Tsunoke, were taken in by Shih Fu Dy Tai Kee when Uroko was 12." Don't worry if your head exploded, that's normal. Everyone has forced-Japanese names, and look exactly the same if your turn the colors on your monitor off.

As for the story, I'll let the site explain it, 'cause I'd just laugh through it all, and you'd never understand me, even in text.

Long ago, the Sprite race formed a group called the "Light Sprites", eight warrior sprites who protected the sprite princess. However, during the 'War of the Fallen Wings', the Light Sprites were defeated and the princess was killed. The title and role of princess or "Sprite of White Light" could be passed down to another, but the Light Sprites were no more. Soon began a new recruitment of sixteen warriors: the Halflings.

During the 'War of the Races', Kajiko was able to bring eight halflings to her side, but Uma, on the other hand, tempted the other eight and they fought loyally for him. The result was a terrible Great Battle where many lives were lost.

Now in modern times, the sixteen who are now human have to be gathered once again, and hopefully, history won't repeat itself.

I swear I didn't make that up. It sounds like I did, though. That wasn't me making a mock-summary to imitate the comic's subject matter though, that's really what the comic says it's about. This comic just doesn't feel real, it really doesn't. It feels like one big April Fools joke from some of the guys at Something Awful, imitating what bad fantasy webmanga tends to be like. It doesn't seem possible that someone would make a comic like this and expect it to be taken seriously...
 

Yeah, yeah, you laugh, but I had to READ this horseshit!

When you first open the archives, you see two images you would swear someone used Sailor Moon as a template for. When you read through the archives... You fall asleep. I kid you not, I literally had to skip ahead just to stay awake. Everything was bland, INCREDIBLY badly drawn, and indescribably boring!

I really don't know how to describe it. I used up my most apt stuff describing the last two comics, and after reading this, I feel like some of it was written prematurely. THIS is trite incarnate! THIS is the ultimate in poorly written, bland, and predictable! And what's worse, it's hard to find any point to the story. It's like watching Eureka 7 all over again; "What is this?!" "What's the point of this thing!?" "Why waste time and effort with a story and premise that seem totally useless?!" "Can we put in some kind of exception to that 'murder is illegal' law?!" Must every comic I review attempt to out-suck the pervious one?! What kind of stagnant pond of utter suck am I getting myself into?! There's no oxygen tank on earth that can sustain a man for the a mount of time it would take to traverse THAT kind of muck!

The Art
 

Jesus Christ... The art in this thing is abhorrent! Atrocious! Appalling! Shitty, even! The artist doesn't get a thing right, besides the bullshit BESM formula! Not one thing else! Proportioning is terrible, perspective is worse than basic, everyone is deformed, it's god awful!

The lying shithead of an artist responsible for this mess claims she has diplomas in "Cartooning" and "Master Art". I say, after seeing this trash, BULLSHIT YOU DO! Take one look at the picture of the guy punching the rat thing, and tell me you buy that shit! And the FAQ has the balls to say she's good at coloring, when our human eyes tell us otherwise (see the "art" in the captions). This is, without a doubt, one of the worst-looking webmanga I've seen in a long time, and I am a worse person for having laid eyes upon it.
 

Dude, your ELBOW and your SHOULDER are CONNECTED! And your friend

there seems as freaked out by it as I am!

The character designs (the bits you can make out through the TERRIBLE body structuring) are almost hilarious. EVERY male character, besides the one old man, looks as effeminate as the women, and so waifish I'm pretty sure I could snap their arms in half with a pair of chopsticks.

The author also draws another comic called "Ribbon". For god's sake, do NOT read it! AVOID IT LIKE THE BLACK DEATH!

The Author

...is full of shit! Seriously, there ain't no way she got a diploma in jack shit with drawing abilities like this! I wanna see the scans! And, if she DID get any papers for this trash, then whatever school-of-higher-learning she went to has the lowest standards on the entire god damn planet! And I cannot believe this thing has a store! If you have bought anything from it, you do not deserve to live.

Damn CafePress...

This is what little girls see when they take a hit of acid.

Oh, and this bit from the site has to be read to be believed. I know I say things are hilarious and funny a lot, but this really is a fucking laugh and a half...

To be honest, I kinda stopped doing tarot readings, because I didn't want to hurt and devastate people anymore. The tarot deck I have doesn't deal in fun, light-hearted readings. It deals with serious occurrences and events of the future. Everything I read comes true, and I don't want to see people suffer and cry anymore because of the result of my readings. Enough is enough. Unless I get a sign from God that indeed tarot reading is my calling or mission in life, then so be it; I shall continue. But for now, I'm on hiatus.

Although my cousin says that the reading I gave her was good since it prepared her for the worst, could it be that I planted it into her mind and that her subconscious was telling her it was going to be inevitable? I don't know. The subject still intrigues and inspires me, but is this really what I am here for?

That's s'damn funny I gotta type my laughter on that one...

HAAAAA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAA! AAAAAAH HAAAA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!

G'AAAAAAAAAH HA HA HA HA HAAAAA HA-HA HAAAA!

LOOK OUT FOR THE MYSTIC WITCH PSYCHO ER I MEAN PSYCHIC LADY SHE GONNA SEE BAD FUTURE STUFF AND YOU IS GONNA CRY SHE ALWAYS RIGHT LOOK OUT I GONNA DIE IN TEN YEARS FROM A BLOWDART TO THE NECK OMG!!

Goddamn I love the internet!

In Conclusion...

For the love of god, and anything holy to you or your religion of choice, DO NOT READ THIS COMIC! It shouldn't even EXIST! It's that bad! NOTHING about this comic is right, to the point where I think its existence in the world is some kind of sign of the apocalypse, or the ever-strengthening rule of Satan, or something. Dear God, why is this comic here, amongst us, in this world?! Don't you love us, God?! I know you like to drop some human suffering on us once in awhile, but why this!? Why do you do this to us, O Lord?!

Why hasn't the Red Cross come and done something about this?! Why won't anyone help me deal with the trauma of reading this thing?! Tch... George W. Bush just doesn't like white people, that's the problem!

- Cody Baier

Alex's AFTER Thoughts

Reading through the archives of Protectors of Unicorn Forest, I couldn't help but notice that many aspects of the comic felt strangely familiar for some reason... I didn't pay it much mind though, figuring that the artwork was simply reminding me of that collection of self-portraits drawn by some kindergarten class I had seen on display at a local library. In fact, it wasn't until I read the comic's FAQ page that I figured out exactly why I was experiencing this bizarre bout of déjà vu. It was this excerpt from the author's response to a question that suddenly made everything crystal clear:

"[...] There're a lot of things in the universe we don't know about, so I want to explore and explain these things in HWPOUF. Of course, to make it entertaining, a touch of anime/manga (when I created HWPOUF, I was watching 'SailorMoon', 'Magic Knight Rayearth', 'Ah Megamisama', and 'Yu Yu Hakusho') will do the trick... and voila. -^__^-"

Of course! It was right there in front of me all along! Every single thing in this comic was something I had seen before in one of the above anime series! Alright, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little... I guess it was more like 98.5% of everything in the comic was something I had seen before.

Many of the character designs and the outline of the story itself were both taken from Magic Knight Rayearth without a doubt, while most of the "special attacks", the naked silhouette transformation sequences, and a good number of plot points were obviously copied from Sailor Moon. In addition, the main male protagonist, Uroko, is basically Yusuke Urameshi from Yu Yu Hakusho with a tan and a bad haircut. And even though I've never seen Ah Megami-sama (or "Oh My Goddess" or whatever the hell it's supposed to be called), the DVD covers for that series alone look like they were flat-out traced to produce many scenes in POUF where the female characters are looking wistful and melancholy while clutching their hands together as a convenient gust of wind blows by (the most noteworthy example of this being in the banner that used to be on site's splash page).

In case you haven't already figured it by now, when a webcomic author claims to have been "inspired" by something, what they actually mean is that's where they jacked most if not all of their characters and/or plotlines from. Originality isn't really a big deal within the webcomic community, you see... Which makes sense, because as long as the characters and setting of any given comic appeal to the readers and meet all the requisite manga clichés, who gives a shit whether they're creations of the comic's author or some anime series that came out fifteen years ago!

To be fair though, I can kind of understand why webcomic fans are so forgiving of stolen ideas appearing in the series they read. After all, whenever an author's original ideas do make their way into a comic, the results tend to be pretty awful. For instance, did you get a good look at that giant rat/lobster/dung beetle thing in the 3rd chapter of POUF? What the hell was up with that thing? That didn't make any sense. Like, at all. I mean seriously, what the fuck was that!? That shit was fuckin' messed up.

'Till next time!