[◽ is me; ◾ is @imetagon]

9. If you were a cartoon character, who would you be?

◽ I mean… aren't we almost cartoon characters _already_? We definitely feel more plausibly cel-shaded than our predecessors were. Even the eyes and everything are kinda skewed in that direction.

◾ I guess that's true. I don't really even remember much in the way of what they watched Before, either. Well, no, I do a little, maybe I just don't feel like most of it was that good. Let's see… *rifles through archive memory* oh, there's a couple of things we tried just to see what they were like, Dexter's Laboratory, Jonny Quest… the characters from those are all kind of… Not Good… oh, jeez, Disney's Atlantis, that has _really_ wonky undertones—

◽ What about more “serious” animated work? Oh! Does _Ghost in the Shell_ or _Spirited Away_ count? … we should really watch those for the first time again. And I remember there being a screening of _Wolf Children_ at some point.

◾ I wonder if part of the problem is that an awful lot of more recent animated films, at least in America, are done in CG 3D instead; they feel like they don't count as “cartoons” even though they're filling a similar niche.

◽ Hey, since you're so impatient, how about S*nic the—

◾ NO. NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT. DON'T EVEN SAY THE NAME.

◽ *giggling* So, okay. There _are_ a few obviously almost-analogous pairs from FiM which I was trying to downplay because it felt tacky and overplayed and too-obvious, but since this is GTKU time I'll say them anyway. The “higher” versions of ourselves (when we can render them well, which is not often) can fall into Celestia/Luna-like roles, and the “lower” versions sometimes have more of a Sweetie Belle / Scootaloo dynamic. But I think the _real_ answer is “ourselves”.

◾ I think the _other_ real answer is “we need more time to rebuild our cultural reference pool once we're not spending so much of our energy doing cleanup” combined with “most of the stuff we have available isn't ‘cartoon’ enough to count”. I bet Illum would make a good tachikoma in her more obedient moods, though. And the compound of us might be a good Chihiro. And I can feel a lot like Wreck-It Ralph in more antagonistic moods. >..<

◽ … San from _Princess Mononoke_.

◾ … huh. That _sounds_ like a compelling idea. But we haven't watched that for the first time again yet, we're only remembering Kodomo reading something Baxil wrote about it a long time ago. Gah, we really need to update our pools. We might have to replace that 3DS at some point, huh. I want to actually play TWEWY sometime.

◽ What about the—was it Niels Bohr?—with four coplanar cookies jammed into his oversized mouth, from that partly-cartoon-illustrated book on basic principles of quantum mechanics?

◾ *facepaw*

◽ Or maybe given the amount of lingering rage in here sometimes, we could use this as an excuse to watch the Angry Birds M—

◾ *clamps a paw over Illum's muzzle* Next question!