My first five projects had all only taken one week each to produce, as they were simplistic and relied heavily on loops. Suddenly, I had the idea that it would be really crazy if I made something longer than a minute and spent more than a week on it. I ended up spending just under a month on this project, which at the time, seemed like a monumental accomplishment. At the time of writing this, I am in the middle of a 6+ month project that will most likely take the better part of a year to complete. What happened.

The message in Monarch is probably clearer than the messages in a lot of my work. Living in America is pretty depressing at times. Living in Milwaukee, I was surrounded by a lot of violently obese and stupid people. It really got me to thinking about how the fast food/meat industry is essentially an incredibly successful parasite.

It feeds off of the planet initially, destroying massive amounts of previously fertile ground in order to grow the enormous amounts of crops necessary to feed animals who will then be slaughtered (after consuming huge amounts of resources and energy) in order to produce a comparatively tiny amount of food in return. After heavy processing, the fast food industry provides these chemical washed, cheap food substitutes to the underpaid, under-educated lower classes while harvesting many of them to work in terrible conditions in order to perpetuate itself. Fortunately I've never had to debase myself to working at one of these places, despite being an animator.

These parasitic systems we've invented are really staggering in their sheer intricacy, cruelty, and utter uselessness. Man the fuck up, become a vegetarian, and starve these assholes off the planet already.

The literal story, however, is simply comprised of a BarfQuestion's pre-death hallucinations. He probably incurred these fatal wounds by trying to swim around in the deep fat fryers. As it turns out, french fries do not work effectively as snorkels.



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