✿ Web Revival Episode Bonus page ✿

Woaw!! This is the first episode to feature actual voice actors!! Cybermare's new voice was immediately found and Vera was the perfect fit! Manon took some more time to find and figure out. But Kenny ended up being chosen for this episode! (Only this one due to voice complications afterward)

Before the switch to real VAs was decided. I released a video on my channel talking about AI voices on LOVEWEB and the whole debate around all that. Switching to real VAs was the obvious move, LOVEWEB has grown quite a bit of an audience so it was no problem to replace the AI voices. The downsides of working with real VAs is that they're not immediatly available, I can't pay them and the robot voices had a charm to them, especially considering the lore behind Manon and Cybermare.
Despite all this working with real VAs is sooooooooo much more fun! It's so much easier to direct them too, I don't have to spend 10 minutes stuck generating one sentence over and over until it sounds like I want it to sound. I did consider adding a tiny robot filter to the real VAs to keep the "AI character" charm but decided agaisnt in the end. The point of having real VAs over TTS is they're much more understandable, and Manon and Cybermare being hard to understand was a critisism against the show since the very start.
Also it was funny to see people comment stuff like "It stucks you're getting bullied out of using AI!!". There never was any attack against the show for using AI, only that the voices were hard to understand. I think rational people could see that the show is more than AI slop to get dismissed.

This is also the episode that came after NOMOIDA released LOVEWEB Shuffle!! They did such an excellent job with all the tracks. It's the perfect LOVEWEB music album.

And!!!!! the episode launched with the new LOVEWEBSITE!!

(I wasn't gonna share this current screenshot of the website but I figured I'd do it just in case it gets rebooted again down the line, future-proofing you know)

This was the first ever version of the neocities website waaay back when there was only 2 episodes. It's so old I even forgot about it lol. It was clearly just a quick placeholder

THIS was the actual real first LOVEWEBSITE, meant to look like a DVD menu. It was all made in Flash! Sadly the files got messed up over time so the LOVEWEBSITE was moved to caard as a temporary placeholder.

The new music and VAs and website reboot really feels like it elevated LOVEWEB to a new level starting with this episode.

While epxloring the episode's folder, I found this old image! When scripting an episode and listing the list of conversation beats, I always note down fun interactions that pops into my mind. It feels very natural writing these characters. This is all I have left of conversation beats for this episode and most episodes. Scripting tends to just be a single txt document that gets written on over and over and anything that doesn't fit just gets deleted.
Starting a bit with this episode, the flow of the episode feels so much more smooth, feeling almost like a constant conversation between Manon and Cybermare. It's always been the plan to have Cybermare serve as the character foil of Manon... But during the next couple episodes, she slowly becomes more and more involved instead of just making unpleasant remarks. It's almost like Manon and Cybermare are growing closer woaw!!

One funny thing to note is that since I gotta show the animatics to the VAs to get the voices before animating... I can't just settle on crappy fast doodles for the animatic lol! They gotta be able to be understood by other people than me!

This is the first teaser artwork for the episode that was posted in september 2023, only teasing that the next episode will be "about... the internet?". It's almost what the final thumbnail looks like lol. But it was fun to tease people over something so nebulous. The episode does talk about the wider internet but only as a springboard into talking about Neocities and the web revival movement.

Ok so for a while when an episode had a release date figured out, all I'd do is something like above. Just the final thumbnail with the release date.
The thing is that it's kinda boooring.

Now THIS is more interesting, both for the fans but also me. It helps freshen up my brain because these are always made after a BIG GRIND of animation work and video editing and by the end of it, I always wanna do something else lol.
Here the final one with an earlier version side by side. The brushwork just looked too stale for my liking so I went with thin lines and dotted shading, remisnicent of the way I drew art for Lunar Live
Doing that kind of special artwork for the release of an episode is also inspired by storyboard artists on Cartoon Network posting a doodle to advertsise an episode they worked on about to air.

Episode time!

This is something I don't think anyone noticed back then but Manon's keyboard is covered in duck tape because it got split in 2 at the start of the Homestuck episode! A cute attention to detail that gets completely forgotten about after 2 minutes lol.

TTS would have never been able to do loud crying lol, yay for Kenny and Vera!

This is the most Manon/Cybermare interaction of all time.

This is a bit from Homestuck lol. It's around the introduction of Aradia. I don't wanna link to spoilers so if you know, you know.
Also Manon's used to be pretty high pitched! It's more relaxed starting with the Wikipedia episode, I understand that the voice can get grating over time.

Golly I sure am curious about this thingamajig that appeared and wasn't there before the Homestuck episode. Probably nothing lol.

Fun fact! Starting with the next episode, Manon's screenshots of website are all older versions in reaction to all websites looking the same. If you check the YouTube clips on the TF2 episode, it's NOT the modern YouTube at all.

This bit of "I AM NOT NOSTALIC, I AM OUTRAGED" is from a super high quality french animated video called ANARCHY IT'S NOT WHAT YOU BELIEVE.
There's a duck guy telling the cat teacher that people who doesn't like authority and have no privileges are just jealous. The teacher responds by explaining she's not jealous but revolted because of how many people suffer under capitalism and all that.

Would have been funny if this was said while still using TTS voices lol.

Another moment that makes it clear that LOVEWEB is "real". You can visit the LOVEWEBSITE and see that she did wrote herself a new description!

Anyways that's all for the web revival episode! I really needed to make a classic no-stakes episode after the Homestuck one lol.