One cold Canadian day, an animator in Canada was working on the third season of a beloved cartoon series, the premiere of which was scheduled to be released on November 10, 2012.
As she drifted through the day on pillowy wings of cotton candy pony daydreams, the visual director for the cartoon, the honorable Tori Spelling, crept into her office.
“Kristen! Kristen Stewart! Wake up! Are you fantasizing about being a cartoon horse again?”
Kirsten looked up at her boss, who looked resplendent as always. Tori's Hasbow peeked out playfully from her Hasfro, striking a sharp dissonance with her livid eyefuzz and tersed lipworms. Her furious cheekbones were sharp enough to nearly cut through her rage-hued expression and race off into the sunset, finally free from facial oppression.
“Ralph Steadman came through with the concept art for season three's premiere villain. His name's King Somethingorother. It's up to you to insert him into the cartoon, one frame at a time, by hand, like you always do. If you're not done by five tonight, you're fired.” Tori's face softened dramatically as she finished, and she looked down at Kirsten Dunst with a warm slurry of pity and dominance.
Karen Stewart took the stuffed-with-art binder from Tori Spelling's outstretched binder hand. With only an hour and a half left until five, she had no time to waste.
“I expect greatness from you, dearie,” Tori purred, “After all, my quid quo pro sexual harassment can only get you so far in this business.” She moved her cruella defingers over Carlton Stewpert's navel, leaving icicles of sweat and fear clinging to her belly skin.
“Yes, Mistress Spelling. I'll do a good job, Mistress.”
“Oh, I know you will, my good little girl. Just thinking of you slaving away in here, your livelihood on the line, gets me all hot and bothered. I think I'll have to give executive producer Michael Bay a special visit soon.” Tori's Hasfro bounced lustily. “Ta-ta for now!”
Tori slammed the door, shaking dust off of the dingy walls and leaving Kieth Sutherland alone in the dank and dark. She snapped the icicle off of her perky little outie bellybutton and stuck it on the computer monitor with the others, opened the binder, and gasped at the sight.
King Soandso was gorgeous! An absolutely terrifying, villainous chap. His snaggletoothed orange headstalk and grape-flavored eye mist struck the kind of fear into her heart that she only previously felt bound spread-eagle down in the cold Hasbrocombs on Spelling's secret Speak & Fuck. Kristen shivered away the eternal nightmare and opened up the most professional and comprehensive image editing software she was entitled to use: Irfanview.
Luckily, King Saladbar only showed up in, like, twenty seconds of the new episode and even then it was mostly just his floating head in some smoke. Nothing the likes of her couldn't hand-animate quickly, especially if she used every cheap shortcut she taught herself while working there.
Soon enough, Kirsten was done with time to spare. She sat pondering the nature of her creation. Sure, King Suckasaurus was horrific and frightening and menacing, but there was just something missing.
Kristoop racked her brains, sorting through every aesthetic sensibility that she picked up during her years at North Carolina's prestigious Michael Degreemill's Memorial Aptitude College of the Arts. Go Whiteschloops! She thought and cognized and pondered and preened until finally...
“Aha! Gradients!”
Krypton clicked the Gradient Tool button on her Irfanview, which was easy because it took up roughly half of her screen. She began flipping back through every frame containing Grand Pony King Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb and began slapping gradients on him. Just, gradients all over the damn place. Two-point gradients, three-point gradients, sometimes even thirty-seven-point gradients, just to spice things up. Soon enough, King Susan could be aptly described as gradient-tastic.
And just in time! Five o'clock rang out through the studio, ding dong, ding dong, briefly overpowering the cries of the forsaken. Tori Spelling slipped through the crack in Kooky's door, bringing both a hostile work environment and Horse Show director Jason Voorhees with her.
“Kristen, darling, let's see what you've got for us!” Tori chirped.
“Yes, Mistress,” Kartman squeaked, floppy disk in hand.
“Goody! Jason, dear, I told you Special K over here was good for the job. I taught her everything she knows.”
Mistress Spelling put the floppy disk back into Kristen's computer and loaded up the almost two megabytes of rendered animation data.
~ ~ ~
As Col. Karl Quincent Mitchell wrote in his New York Times bestselling pamphlet, Me, Myself and the Art of Image Manipulation, any rational human brain instinctively rejects gradients and is willing to sever as many neurons as it takes to stop processing them. In the early seventeenth century, Byzantine monks classified gradients as “Satan's handcart”, excommunicating any artists who practiced the forbidden technique. Woodcut gradients were burned by the metric tonne, ushering in an artistic golden age that lasted roughly three hundred and fifty years, until postmodern pop artists and stay-at-home scrapbookers brought the handcart home again.
With the public resurgence of the graphic design nightmare ever-stirring in the mental underdark, that pool of ichorous pitch from whence foetal blasphemies terrorize the weak and depraved, rugged psychologists mustered to brave the horrors of field research, and discovered that the human mind is actually able to anticipate a gradient before the human eye is able to process one.
Perhaps this explains why, in the moment it took Irfanview to load the images, Tori Spelling's head found itself without a body and Jason's knife found itself painting an arc of black Tori blood through the air. The intersection of that bloody curve and Jason's own neck meant that Canadians everywhere would once again be forced to bear witness to a double-decapitation homicide-suicide featured on the local news. C'est la Studio B.
~ ~ ~
Kristen heard the gurgles from somewhere in the darkness behind her, and felt the same warm blood she felt on the Speak & Fuck soak into what was left of her hair. The gradients she worked so hard on cycled rapidly before her eyes for what seemed like uncountable eternities, until the monitor fried itself, charred and smoking. A whirring noise from the computer whispered sweet nothings into her eardrums, and Kristen briefly registered the swirling vortex expanding in her direction from the floppy disk drive.
Something like the feeling of mashed potatoes being squelched between toes in a moccasin followed. Kristen tumbled through space-time and landed horse-face first, her squishy hooves splayed out in all directions.
“Whoa, another new one! Radical!”
Kristen used her horse-neck to raise her horse-face, staring at the source of the voice with her horse-eyes.
“Welcome to Horse Land! I'm Horse McStallion, your own personal guide. Are you ready to become one with your inner horse, and frolic for the rest of your miserably long life in a sunny meadow?”
Kristen jumped ahoof and planted a wet kiss on her own hooves. “You know it! I've been wanting to be a cartoon horse ever since I started working on animating a bunch of cartoon horses!”
“Haha, yeah,” Horse replied. “Well, now that we're here, what do you want to see first?”
Kristian let her eyes take in the scene. The sun shined down on the pristine curves of the land, looking nothing like Canada, ever. The oversaturated hues sloshed in her eyes as a ticklish breeze rolled across the fields and hills of warm grass. The soft greens of a distant forest beckoned, as did the sights and smells of nearby Horseburg. A too-blue stream burbled, and she heard the singing fish leap and play and sing in the sparkling waters.
“I want to try out my new cartoon horse genitalia with another horse!” Kristen exclaimed, the speculum in her eyes expanding rapidly.
“Goddamn it, every fucking time!” Horse shouted as Kristen galloped off to the bustling town.
~ ~ ~
Police and paramedics eventually discovered Kristen “Miranda Zonfrudel” MacKirsten face-down at her desk, gibbering madly about hooves and flanks and rainbows. Initially taken into custody on suspicion of double-homicide, upon the discovery of gradients she was released into the care of Dr. Preston Brigleope, head of the DeviantARTist Rehabilitation Clinic in Iqaluit.
“There's really very little hope for her, or anyone else here,” the doctor admitted in a press conference, “We exist primarily to prevent this corruption from spreading. All art supplies are carefully monitored, and our staff goes through intense hugbox-prevention training. Some of our patients, well... a relapse would either be the end of them, or of us. They can't be told that their art has merit, whether it features colorful horses or not. It is harsh work we do at this institution, but all-too necessary.”
My Friendly Horse Friends executive producer Michael Bay expressed his general sympathies.
“Well, luckily these guys won't really be missed, y'know? Voorhees is pretty much an orphan, I think, and I don't even know if Tori Spelling was ever actually born. As for Kyrie Steward... well, we here at Studio B will always honor her commitment to our flash cartoon. We'll be sure to send her parents her severance package. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm a busy man. The new season premieres tomorrow morning, and I'm just ever so excited to see it, aren't you?”
