This one's sort of an oldie (though really it looks indistinguishable from the new stuff he puts out), but still classic Ryuu. All the elements are there: shitty drawing, lined paper, more crap about his AU that no one really cares about, bland concept, and a crippling aversion to research. Say hello to Ryo's Panpipe.
Admittedly, I didn't identify the major problem with this pic right off the bat. I was distracted by the wobbly lines and the really horrible foreshortening that makes it look all squashed, and the fact that the whole thing is skewed sideways, like an elephant had parked its wrinkly pachyderm ass on top of it. But then, like that very same elephant had lifted its tail and aimed a steaming megaton of green, grassy feces right at the center of my hat, it hit me:
Ryuu put whistle mouthpieces on a fucking pan flute.
Really shitty ones, too. They're all stubby and kind of jut up higher than the rest of the flute, and the holes don't follow the cylindrical form of the tubes at all. They're just wobbly square things, floating there for no fucking reason. On a whistle, these mouthpieces would fail utterly and still show a ghastly amount of ignorance on Ryuu's part, but THIS IS A PAN FLUTE.
It isn't like this is some obscure thing. This is right after Spirit Tracks came out, which he owns and has played extensively. As a matter of fact, I highly suspect that the only reason he made this pic is because he'd gotten a copy of Spirit Tracks for Christmas a few months prior. Obviously Spirit Tracks doesn't own a fucking copyright on pan flutes, but considering Ryuu's track record of ripping off anything and everything that he happens to like at the moment, his insistence on making a +1 Ryuu version of everything good in a Zelda game, and the fact that he immediately lost interest in the flute right after he made it, I really wouldn't put it past him.
And yet he failed so UTTERLY at this that I don't even have words to express how baffled I am about it. This is like putting a trumpet mouthpiece on a saxophone. This is like playing a drum with chicken drumsticks. Does he really think that pan flutes work like that? Has he never seen one before, even in his childhood? I can't count the number of times I've passed up vendors selling cheap novelty shit, with heaping bowls of little cheapass yarn-covered pan flutes that barely work, and I grew up in some teeny-ass towns, so it's not like this is just a city thing.
And if, somehow, this was the case, if somehow he'd really never seen one IRL in his entire life, and SOMEHOW he'd never ever fucking actually looked at the top of the Spirit Flute while he was blowing into his DS, why didn't it occur to him to GOOGLE IT? It's not even hard to find; just type in 'pan flute' and you end up with literally millions of pictures of them, in all different sizes and shapes and styles and levels of complexity. There's info on how they work. There's info on how to make them.
There's really no excuse for this. Ryuu didn't care in the slightest about quality or accuracy. He simply pulled this shit out of his ass so that he could throw it down as fast as he could and minimize the wait for all the praise he'd get for his creative genius. And the sun rises in the east, the tide goes in, blah blah blah.
As an aside, I think it's kind of funny that there's notation written on it, like it was necessary for Ryuu to have the parts labelled in order to know how to play it. Imagine if the Ocarina of Time had all the buttons written on it, like some kind of cheap grade-school recorder.
I also think it's a little strange that he uses our version of a treble clef when Hyrule's clef symbol is quite different. Way to pay attention to the details, there, Ryuu baby.
BUT BECAUSE HE USED OUR TREBLE CLEF IT'S YOONIQUE!
ReplyDeleteGag me with a spoon.
Also, this thing's stopped showing up because Ryo sat on it and it exploded. It could survive the elephant but not that.