The GaMERCaT

The best kind of parody is one made of love, not hate. When it's made out of hate most of the jokes boil down to 'this is stupid', but win it's made out of loves the writing changes. The writer has an understanding of the property. Any jabs at the property are more akin to a cousin teasing you about something stupid you did back in grad school. The GaMERCaT is one such webcomic.

The GaMERCaT is a videogame parody with an emphasis on Nintendo. The comic does actually have a constant cast of characters most of which are cats. Their is the title character videogame loving GaMERCaT and his adopted little brother Glitch; who is the most adorable thing ever.  Their is also the brother's gaming buddies Sweet( a ruff around the edges cat) and Pixel( a kind heart cat and the girl of the group). Their is also GaMERCaT and Pixel's human Malcolm who is a gamer, a good cat owner, and is completely unaware of his cats hobby.

The comic has two part, life and gaming. The life part is mostly the cats interacting with each other. The humor from this comes from a mix of jokes on the gaming community and cat based humor. The gaming segments in more of the direct videogame parody. What's weird about it is that the cats actually take the place of characters in the game. It takes a while to get use to, but not that long. As always humor is subjective and if you don't like cats or are not into videogames then basically all of the humor will fall flat.

Their isn't much in the was of story in this comic. Events in the cat's lives do carry over to the next update, but that's about it. Story arcs are simple things like GaMERCaT and Glitch trying to find two other players for co-op games. The stories are really just their for character interactions and jokes to be made. What can be surprising is when the comic actually gets really sweet and heartwarming all be it rarely happens. The cartoonist Samantha Whitten is amazing at telling a story with zero dialogue.

Whitten has a cartoony style that works well with the jovial nature of the comic. Something The GaMERCaT does is have gifs from time to time. A problem with gif based humor is that sometimes you need to start looking at it at the correct time to actually get the joke the way it was intended. Thankfully most of the gifs in The GaMERCaT are endless loops of a single motion like the image above.

 Whitten has created a fun lighthearted series that pokes fun at gaming while still being a big fan of the media. Once again the humor is videogame based, so non-gamers may not find the same amount of enjoyment I find from it. I've shown five example so really if you found those enjoyable then click here to start at the beginning . If you haven't been moved then come back tomorrow when I be talking about a fantasy adventure assuming I don't change my mind before then.