[hider=Jabratica by 3V]
3V had gotten to the part of having a new roommate that meant inflicting all your favourite media on a captive audience. Assimilate to cohabitate, nerd, you have to understand each other’s dense web of personal references if you’re going to share a living space with them. 

“Have you seen [i]Jabratica[/i]?”

“No.”

“We’re watching [i]Jabratica[/i].” 

Then the usual thing happened; Not on any of the legal streaming sites. Not on any of the [i]illegal[/i] streaming sites (that she knew of). No torrents. No archives. Probably link rot. Ah well. Such was the fate of media just popular enough for broadcast but not popular enough to be preserved. It was a pretty old show by the time 3V had seen it as a kid. 

This time she wasn’t willing to accept it. This time it was [i]Jabratica[/i], a show 3V hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, which had some incredibly specific scenes in it that had led to some [i]very[/i] specific tastes and interests as a teenager (we all have one) and she [i]really[/i] needed to make sure they were definitely real before she kept making jokes about them. 

Clicky little paws started at the Wikipedia page. The only information there was the first (better) season’s box art, that it was produced by a company she hadn’t heard of, that it was released in 2043 and last aired on Earth in 2066. 

That wasn’t usual. It specified [i]on Earth[/i]. Most shows didn’t do that, and no air date on Aevum was given. 

An hour of forum threads and online ask spaces came to a lot of people asking the same questions, remembering some of the same scenes (but none of the important ones for her purposes) and then just… shrugging about it. Deep in the comment swamps, someone mentions the rights got bought up by Polyhedron and they didn’t pass them on. 

Maybe that’s it? Polyhedron was the death of a lot of media they didn’t think children should like, even when they evidently did. The answer doesn’t satisfy her. But at least she’s confirmed to herself the show really did exist.

“Latin American AtLA.” “One Piece for Lesbians.” “The Dragon Show With The Terrible Ship Wars.”

Jabratica’s had a lot of nicknames in different circles. Some people probably remember it from the memes about crushing colonizers underneath hot dragons. Some people remember the memes about the cast of Gold-Obsessed Tsunderes. Some people remember the (exaggerated) reputation for backing the wrong ship getting your inbox flooded with death threats. And some people (3V) actually remember Jabratica (and her relentless optimism) and Ascorela (and her acerbic deadpan wit) and Prince Ignacio (and his defiance of his birthright) and even Cyancio (and her unerring ability to lose even when she won).

And I definitely remember popping off when Jabratica abandoned her hard-won chance at regaining her former body and confessed her love to Ascorela instead.

(“Can you blame me? I cosplayed Ascorela back in high school— yes, in [i]that [/i]outfit. No, you can’t see the pictures.”)

She borrows her roommate to help her access the acquisitions record of that production company she didn’t care about before. Yeah, it ends up in Polyhedron, but it isn’t completely absorbed, it’s a side company. So Polyhedron held Jabratica’s leash (S1E7) but that was it. 

No, it got blocked from Aevum. Why? 

She learns the company was Greek, part of their animation boom in the late 2030s. That was a big surprise to the world, Greece didn’t really have an animation industry. Googling a page of the top 10 Greek animation studios in 2023 came back with a list of four. This ended up [i]being[/i] the reason rather than being counter to it. 

See, in the 2020s a lot of the veteran French animators, the old masters of the pencil and paper style, were picking Greece as their choice of retirement and started teaching master classes. Two of those students ended up making a really popular line of Greek flipbooks together, and that started a zeitgeist of young animators. (Most of the popular ones don’t translate or explain well, but there’s an incredible one called Growth that’s just a field of flowers growing from seed to petals and every flower in it is hand-drawn in complete detail. The flipbook’s the size of a phone screen, but each of the 2,280 panels had to be drawn on A3 pages and then scaled down to print. They published five more books that year.)

Because there was no existing industry at all, no institution, what ended up congealing was pure outsider art. It was a weird situation, because it all happened at once, all these kids basically focused on making stuff for the world stage and global indie awards because there weren’t domestic competitions worth a damn yet - but all the talent they talked to, the communities they were making to talk about that work? That was all insular, and local, and committed. It ended up being a bit of a beef/cow situation, where there’s a difference in language because the people who raise the meat know they’re doing it for someone else to eat. Still, it kept to their tastes, which was jagged and horny and dark and bright and brutal and pastoral. 

By the time Jabratica comes in, the industry had formed and matured out of its earliest punk rebellion phase, but that phase was so hard and embedded that it had formed coherent genres and recognized styles (e.g stuttertweening, Aegeatic noir, Crete dramedy). Maturity didn’t mean normalization, the normal had recognized [i]their[/i] zeitgeist. It meant that individual animating talents had the life experience to make real production houses and organize competitive scale products domestically. 

It’s a kid’s show, it’s obviously meant to be a kid’s show. But it’s unlike most of the other offerings at the time - even with the Greek renaissance, it’s a small boom in a small country and it’s mostly making stuff for adults and teenagers. Jabratica was kind of [i]it[/i] for going for kids. 

This takes hours to put together, and it can only be done in peripheral vision of the information 3V actually wants. It’s cross-referencing multiple rabbit holes and biographies and getting lost in the weeds of vintage flipbook collections that [i]have[/i] survived. Still there’s nothing here about why Jabratica disappeared. It’s just necessary to find who really made it.

The lead animator, Phaedra Orologa, won an award for it and that’s how 3V learns her name, and she had a blog (link rot), and the blog was rehosted (link rot), and archived (link rot, link rot, all you touch shall be link rot) and then pulled [i]from[/i] that archive to be quoted and blogged about (get Junta to click the link this time and don’t even [i]breathe[/i] in its direction and 3V can’t believe that worked). 

Here’s some of the answers 3V was originally looking for, at least, before this rabbit hole got deeper. Why did she remember the show being so much [i]like that[/i]? Orologa said it was about making the kind of cartoon [i]she[/i] would have wanted to watch as a kid - and she was a weird kid. But also it had to be the cartoon she wanted to make. 

Which means - wow, that really was just straight up someone injecting heroin on-screen and then getting dopesick in S1E3? How did she not remember that? Straight over her head, but it’s not hidden at all. They just called it ‘dark magic potion’. And wow 3V can see why so many people talked about the vore in the comments, S1E4, S1E9 and S1E12 all have way too detailed scenes of someone getting swallowed. Someone just really wanted to animate mouths and throats apparently, because that was fun. Orologa wrote about how they only found out that was a fetish [i]after[/i], and 3V believes [i]her[/i] at least. Still, it reflects a kind of wildly irresponsible do-it-for-the-love-of-it impulsivity that helped make it the thing that 3V half-remember 20 years later. The only question they seemed interested in was if something seemed fun to do. 

Season 2 they got out by Polyhedron who made the production value way higher, but made everything have to be boring, and the show didn’t get cancelled in the traditional sense, everyone working on it just quit in protest. The producers held the IP so Polyhedron couldn’t just force the issue. Nice. 

But that still doesn’t explain! Why! It! Isn’t! On! Aevum! 

Finally, though, she has all the keywords she needs to search-fu what she actually wants. The animators names, the producer with the IP, the production company, the years to look for. Finally she’s looking for something that only happened twenty years ago, there had to be people still alive who knew [i]this[/i] part of the story, and there was. 

The reason you cannot watch [i]Jabratica [/i]off Earth is an honoured protest. It wouldn’t be easy to find on Earth either, but it was actually made [i]illegal[/i] on Aevum. 

Jabratica started as something weird, and special, because it was the product of its little insular national movement. Despite that, from the start it was made in English for an international audience. Because of that, Polyhedron found it accessible, and killed what was good about it. 

One of the entry requirements for Aevum was a passable fluency in English. Other spoken languages would be curtailed, and no alternative language options would be presented for government signage or forms - though [i]translators[/i] would be made available. It was explicitly and openly a project of cultural hegemony. 

Through Polyhedron, they denied Aevum as an entity the rights to Jabratica. Even managed to make taking physical copies up the Fountain with you contraband, because Polyhedron had that much power at the time (obligatory RIP Bozos). Polyhedron’s motivations to go along with it mostly seemed to be hating the first season’s existence [i]that much[/i].

The people who made [i]Jabratica [/i]were worried that’s what Aevum would do to all art, that’s what it would become. A pure corporate entertainment monolith. One nation, one nationality, one shared expression. 

Twenty years later, though, they were wrong. They saw their studio as the result of a national movement, of national pride, a local expression, and it was. But that movement only existed where and when it did because of two really talented flipbook artists making a fandom, and that fandom being condensed into a place where they had people to bounce their shared passion with. 

Aevum as a project definitely killed that weird tension the Greek animators had between their internal community and having to turn to the internal communities they were outsiders from for validation and accreditation. That tension might be how something like [i]Jabratica[/i] got made from a professional studio with resources, not just hobbyists between shifts at day-jobs for a video site. It’s impossible to say. 

But of all the reasons for this one show to not be watchable? It was outsider artists who were scared the world would lose all its [i]outsides[/i] if you put it in a big blender carafe. Most of them stayed on Earth because of it - Ironically, they had to retire to France because of the rising sea levels. If they’re still alive, and that’s a big if, it’d be impossible to find now. 

3V has to wonder if they knew how Aevum turned out, if they’d be happy to seed a [i]Jabratica[/i] torrent after all. Or maybe that’s just wishful on her part, because she still couldn’t find a copy at the end of the rabbit hole, and now it feels like kind of a dick move to cross a picket line. 

At least, she thinks, it’ll make a good article. 
[/hider]