L'ordure She Wrote (I wrote it)

not sure if you can tell from how I wrote this, but despite my first exposure being the cartoons, sam & max filtered through Bugs & Frankie playing the remastered telltale games is definitely why I'm as obsessed with them as I am. Go watch frankenbugs streams. I love convoluted point and clicks & they love exhausting every line of dialogue and rubbing their hands over every single object. okay, time for the director's commentary, sorted by when it happens:

I

  • it has outright been stated that max takes antipsychotics. yeah sure it was as a shitty joke at the expense of people with psychosis, but look at me. look at me? my canon now. give that rabbit symptoms.
  • the spaghetti-eating contest with lindsey morse was meant to invoke that one scene in lady & the tramp, but it is so important that you know max sucked the spaghetti noodle right out of the poor girl's mouth. sam was also at the olive garden where this happened, watching with an emotion somewhere between the sick fascination of a car crash rubbernecker and Feverish, Demented Jealousy
  • Intranational Company of United Poets as an acronym is ICUP. teehee!
  • max, subtly: I'm such a smoking hot babe I can turn women gay and men straight
    sam, gay, the statement going directly over his head: gee I sure hope we get a case soon so I don't have to think about that!

II

  • max hint system moments <3
  • eau d'ufresnoy coccinelle is a pointed reference to Jacqueline Charlotte "Coccinelle" Dufresnoy, a famous trans cabaret dancer & activist because I wanted to capture the feeling of hearing what is clearly a reference, googling the name, and going "jesus christ"
  • who the fuck is even buying enough Hot Bunny magazine for bosco to keep selling it. max doesn't even like girls. sam? is it Just For Bosco?? horrifying.
  • sam voice "there are very clear differences between my partner and the model for weird magazines: for one, I'm going to think about max in those weird costumes for the rest of my life,"
  • sam, heterosexual, thinking about his "male" best friend in a short skirt: don't look now little buddy, but I think I might have covid
  • regina maximeveus, despite being the only original character in this fic that is MY original character, never actually appears. it's important for y'all to understand that she & stacey are besties who worry about fufu "workaholic" l'ordure and conspire to sneak fiancĂ©e time into her schedule. also, she does genuinely look Just Like Max but taller and with a less oblong head. same mouth and beady eyes.

III

  • can you believe in the telltale games, they kept the first episode's lines for like the first three episodes but only for half the things. hell. hell.
  • in surfin' the highway, a comic that came out in 1989, a mechanic charges the freelance police not even 5k for a full repair of the DeSoto and max sticks a tire pump in his mouth and blows the guy up like a balloon making him big and round. in 2024 money that repair job would be $11k and change. INFLATION. LAUGH, NOW.
  • "pickle juice & lemon boy" flavored sludgies are because spironolactone, an anti-androgen sometimes prescribed to trans women, is a diuretic and a very common remedy is Just Drink Pickle Juice. lemon boy is because cavetown, trans man artist, has a famous song called lemon boy. this is the trans episode, even if it's technically about other stuff.
  • ROSCOE BOSCO. end of note. I almost lost my job about the noise I made when I heard that.
  • BDOS is a bit about BTADS and also DDOS attacks. it's not a good one, so let's move on
  • boscotech labs officially rebranded to boscoduo labs now that momma bosco has a doctorate and, thanks to clone body, renewed mobility & life span! sam is straight up wrong about how much they annoy each other, their relationship is better than it's been since bosco was little. good for them.
  • the bowling bags is a double reference which I think turns it into a neither reference. at some point sam says "holy head of john the baptist in a rhinestone encrusted bowling bag" and it was such a Clear Visual that I wanted to see it again. I changed it to reference SOPHIE's album Oil Of Every Pearl's Un Insides because at the time of writing this, her birthday just happened so I'm thinking about a visionary. Rest in peace.
  • riffer or "z" but nobody calls it that is an obvious bit on twitter or "x" but nobody calls it that. hope u liked it.
  • max has come out to literally everybody. grandpa stinky knows max is a woman. GIRL STINKY knows max is a woman. harry moleman doesn't but that's less because he wouldn't be cool with it and more because he would hit on her and it's honestly hard to say who would hate this more: max, sam, harry after being mauled by max, or harry after being mauled by sam. How Dense Do You Have To Be,
  • if this were an actual point and click adventure game, bosco'd try to tweet after you cycle through the Do You Have Anys and get blocked by momma bosco and/or BDOS. if you talked to momma bosco there would be momentary distractions you could do ("look! it's agent superball riding a zombie horse!" "where?") but she'd turn around and whack sam with the wrench before you could actually change the settings. THEN you'd go through the disguise dialogue branch and distract her for long enough to actually do the thing, and then you piss off bosco to make him tweet, and then he gets into a bitter bitter feud with wyenne. yes, wyenne is in fufu's office, having a twitter feud with some rando. you know how it is with twitter. I didn't write it like this because I love you.

IV

  • sybil is a stagehand this week! this does not mean she is on set the way a stagehand would be, but instead she for some reason has all of the props for various WARP studio shows.
  • sybil's "pet rock" is her daughter, penelope. I've been thinking about this fucking post for weeks. clunk. what's wrong with her.
  • that big paragraph there was what made me stop the longest before posting this. because I'm like 85% sure I'm ace, and I think horny is funny, so I wrote it and then re-read it and went Hey Am I Allowed. This Feels Like It's Hornier Than I'm Allowed To Be. and then I remembered that there's actual e-rated fic and nobody fucking cares, so like, whatever.

V

  • FUFU'S FUCKASS PHONETIC ACCENT MY BELOVED. it's iconic, I fear. plus, obvi, couldn't disrespect her origins by NOT giving her that fuckass phonetic accent.
  • the main part of this sequence I wanted to write was the bechdel test joke and I'm pretty sure it shows
  • maria sklodowska (pronounced skwo-DOEV-skuh, I believe) curie, famed for discovering radiation, would absolutely have a saying about needing to book it when shit starts glowing. however also I wasn't bringing up wyenne's unsuccessful high school love life, so I needed to bring up poor miss tallarico's. jennie, if you're out there, I hope you and lindsey are very happy together these days.
  • wyenne's not like other girls
  • it's weird how many celebrities obsessed with themselves and their images sam & max have had to fight, right? like, if I had a nickel for all of 'em, I could probably buy a nice meal for myself at the good ramen place.
  • in the rough draft for this bit, it read [actual plot shit] then the original wyenne monologue & max's bechdel test joke, and then [they sell wyenne back to one direction] and that was literally it.
  • with the highest possible regards to fufu l'ordure's original author: what if she was a high femme lesbian with a rabbit gf. you ever thought about that?

VI

  • sam recognizes the antidepressants in bosco's gumball machine On Sight. also, noir sam. I rest my case.
  • frankie frankenstein once said "I think Flint Paper is The Geek's dad" and I have yet to stop thinking about it. incredible stuff, mr. frankenstein
  • the whole thing with the envelope and the horrific perfume is a direct reference to the original fic madam l'ordure is from, you really should read it. the spacing's a little off but it's GOOD it's really good go read it.
  • Emily Gwen, creator of the lesbian flag. originally, this was gonna be April Ashley & Duke & double-dutch, but ms. ashley seemed a little Too on the nose considering her wikipedia page literally links to ms. dufresnoy's and vice versa
  • the whole rest of this dialogue is literally lifted from my tumblr tags on a post where I was like "hm but what if max transfem?" because I fucking peaked with that. I wasn't gonna write it any better than I did the first time.
  • sam is not going to sleep tonight. he is going to lay awake in bed, max asleep in bed next to him like always, and have a crisis about homosexuality and his own feelings. I am firmly of the belief that sam is gay and hasn't thought about it, and now that he's like "oh it's okay for me to like max" he has to think about "How Long Have I Liked Max. Is It Actually Okay For Me To Like Her." this is very serious for him. max has known she likes sam since she played spin the bottle at 13 and kissed one of sam's girl cousins (who looked a lot like him) and went hm. not sam. well, guess I have to follow that big lug around for the rest of our lives! and then did that.
  • do you know how happy I was when I realized the "you crack me up little buddy" and "trans women realizing they are trans women is sometimes referred to as their egg cracking" thing. it's free real estate for dumb puns, I was DELIGHTED

yeah, that's jokes. uhhh, I will probably continue to cite my sources on the website instead of in the author's notes because nobody wants a GODDAMN DISSERTATION about easter eggs. look at this shit, it's barely under 2k. fucksake.
peace out, ily