PPF ep3 update... bro...? where the F is it...

oooh man! its been eons...

so indeed PPF 3 is coming! it's been quite a journey to get here. honestly i've been putting off this update for a while now, as for various reasons this has been the most difficult ep to get to where it is now.

to rip the band aid off, yeah its still a ways off unfortunately. all the other animators i have on board (significantly more this time than previous episodes) are all cleaning up and roughing their shots now, so my workload is a lot more reduced from here on out. the current ICONIC guesstimate for when i'd IDEALLY like to have this done would be April... it's not impossible, but as always, take my guesstimate with a grain of salt.

boring yap section about why it's taken so long START -----

with getting more animators on board, i was really keen on this being the episode that breaks the near-yearly production times of the previous 2 episodes (started ep1 in roughly August 2022, uploaded in July 2023, episode 2 started around early September, then uploaded in June 2024). however a lot of the early delays this time were due to my own issues.
the most significant of which was probably the worst burnout i've ever experienced after finishing ep2. working for more than a couple hours a day became difficult for a long while, my focus was slipping, so on. but as the animatic reached its end point and i began cleanup, i've been steadily getting more and more back to my usual work hours and routine.
the other was simply a case of struggling to be satisfied with the episodes script. it went through a lot more rewrites than previous episodes. episodes 4 and 5 i'm planning on being slight deviations from the standard fighting formula, so i intended episode 3 to be a much more standard episode, more similar to the first episode. and i suppose this naively made me think the episode would come together effortlessly, but nope! it started off at like 16 minutes long, and i've always tried my best to avoid falling into the trap that a lot of youtube series'/projects do where each subsequent episode or video becomes longer and longer. i'm thinking of stuff like Spooky Month that started as like 2 or 3 minute long and then gradually became 20 minute videos (and thats fine if that damned Pelo wants!!!) but i want to try and maintain PPF as being a 10-ish minute long thing.
i never know how to feel about the episodes when they reach the point i'm at now, i thought episode 1 sucked by this point in production, then i thought episode 2 was "definitely worse than the first one" by this point in production, and while i am much happier with how ep3 turned out now than its previous iterations, i simultaneously feel "this will probably be peoples least favorite ep so far." we'll see i suppose! and even if that last statement is true, hopefully it'll still be enjoyable! i'll take a good 7/10 if it can't be 10/10 every time!

other things i dealt with during this time was the whole merch and figure launches, and developing RSI. it doesn't actually hurt while drawing at all funnily enough, but it has been interfering with other activities like working out, and naturally we're monitoring it to ensure it doesn't develop or get any worse - blood tests returned negative for other potential wrist pain causes we were worried about like early onset arthritis, etc. take care of your hands everybody! especially if u love drawing! damn bitch!!!

there's more i could say about what's made this one approach the finish line so much more sluggishly, but i think i've covered the key points and padded this out enough. 

----yap section END.

for a little extra about the episode, i've probably mentioned this somewhere before already, but this one is wrestling themed. it is THE Mama Wrestling Episode TM. i was going to do this episode further down the line originally, but since i put her wrestling outfit in the intro and people keep drawing fanart of it, i feel like i gotta deliver it ASAP!

look - her crapper is hanging out. shouganai. but there is also an unsightly amount of male cheeks as well in this episode and PPF already is borderline shadowbanned on YT so there's no point in compromising my original vision.

Mama and Gogo team up to take on a wrestling demon tag team. there's lots of little nods and cameos to old school WWF wrestlers, Attitude-era wrestlers, and 90s Japanese wrestling and a couple modern ones as well because even though i've given PPF the fake release year of "1991", i've never fully committed to the bit so i'll still throw in modern things in here or there.
as always, PPF continues to be a bit of a melting pot for my other interests, and twisting those interests into somehow fitting into demons in a martial arts tournament is a lot of fun. obviously "wrestling" is a pretty easy fit into a martial arts show, but future episode ideas get a lot more silly with the concept.

These guys aren't the tag team/villains of the episodes, but I figured I'd share! Hamada and Yamada, some more of Emperor Koro's henchmen, besides Jin. they don't do too much in the episode and only Hamada has 1 line, but i like to slowly build up the world some more with more semi-reoccurring side characters. in episode 4, i plan to introduce another somewhat main character and another human family that the Matsumoto's can befriend. look forward to that in 7 years time given my current pace!

speaking of which, in this episode, i actually went ahead and got a pretty fun cameo from a fairly well known Japanese entertainer. i said "celebrity" on bluesky - lol that might have been a bit of an overstatement maybe, i dunno, but it's someone who i know for sure some people are gonna Leo DeCaprio point at their screen when they hear them talk. someone well known enough on the western side of the internet for that to occur, and they did an awesome job. that's certainly something i don't plan on doing frequently for PPF because .. i mean honestly there's probably a very limited pool of Japanese entertainers whose voice would be recognizable to western viewers, and they're not a known anime/videogame voice actor or anything, so i think just this one will be enough! it was an interesting experience, i can say that much!

and lastly i'll say, someone... else... from a previous episode will return? no... it couldn't be... could it?

anyways, i think that'll do it for this update. the next one won't be as long of a wait. thanks for reading all this if you did! here, i'll reward you with my fav drawing of Gogo for this episode.

until next time!