commentary track (aka postmortem)

Well, it's November 17th, it was around this time last year that-

Well, it's the end of the year time to-

Well,  it’s been over an year since I set out to make my first zine about my favourite show of all time, and a year since I first published it, so let's go over it.

Like it says on the cover, this whole thing was just going to be a shorter post on my socials, but nirvana the band the show is one of the hardest things to properly recommend, telling what it is about doesn't do it justice and there's just too much to love about it you need to explain to communicate how good it is, while also warning folks about some caveats. Heck, I don't think this zine really fully does it justice.

Case in point, I don't really like the first section of this zine, The Blurring. Having what's essentially narration in the opening paragraph feels contrary to the spirit of a show that never does exposition, (but i guess this zine is meant to be an intro, so there's that), I had episode 9 in my head as inspiration and that had narration and exposition, so that's what I’m ripping off, at least.

 This intro paragraph is doing reality blurring things as well, it’s not an accurate explanation of the show or of real life, it’s a mix.

My main issue tho, is that I don’t think I did a good job with conciliating introducing the basic plot of the show and explaining how it mixes reality and fiction while also not giving much away about what and how they do it. It feels too fast and confusing. I find it honestly painful to read. The last phrase on it is nice, at least. 

Alongside the difficult of explaining the show, the main worry I had that was actually holding me back from just going "this show rocks, go watch it", was the fact that I really think is better to start watching the show with the webseries and that happens to have a lot of very bad jokes.

I do hope no one actually read this zine and think bad meaning bad quality, it's bad meaning not politically correct, offensive. The jokes might be messed up, but they can be funny, but sometimes they are bad bad jokes.

I didn't feel right letting people go into that blind, but just saying “oh, some offensive jokes here and there” didn't feel enough either. And if there's one thing that haunts me is the idea of someone having a terrible time with something I love deeply, so The Bad Jokes had to exist.

But at the same time, I worry that I may have gone too hard on it, but also, if any of what I said in there puts you off, you probably wouldn't really like the show anyway, so I guess it's fine and it's serving it's purpose... maybe? I kinda feel like this section has a bit of a morally right vibe. I'm personally not actually bothered by most of the bad jokes they do, I think edgy humour can be funny. All these counter-arguments I briefly touched on, I mess with all of them. It’s not that I think they should’ve never done them, but they could’ve done way less and way better.

I decided against adding it, but where you read "that thinks saying [bleep] it's funny" you can add, in parenthesis, "‘cuz it is". 

I stand by their right to say [bleep], it's funny and narratively meaningful.

It’s such bad optics tho to have the very 2nd section of a zine meant to recommend a show be, “hey, here’s some reasons you maybe don’t want to watch it” [groans]. But I do also stand by the criticism I give there.  This is not that big of a deal for this show, but I do think being able to recognize the “bad” stuff in the things you love and discuss it instead of dismissing or pretending it doesn't exist, even if you don't care about it, it's pretty cool, and I wanna be cool! And if you're gonna get into this show (or not) you should be aware of stuff that might bother you.

If you listen to the commentary tracks, you get the added fun factor that even 2009 Matt and Jay regret some of the jokes, which personally makes certain bad jokes better for me.

I don't want this to come across as a judgmental way tho. I happen to have a bunch of people in my circles that probably wouldn't be too happy about being caught off guard with homophobic or racist jokes, so it felt important to talk about it.

All my worries aside, I feel like it's when I start talking about what they do right in this section that the zine actually starts to get good, it's at least where I actually start to enjoy it, and hopefully folks don't give up on this zine (and by extension the show) before they get there, be brave, endure, it's worth it!

This is ridiculous, but I always read that whole “From 2017” part in the same tone as that “here’s the key to the city” bit. (Yeah, it doesn't really match, but you get it)

As a whole, it actually was very interesting to think long and hard about these jokes, their nature and structure and how they differ from one show to the other. For as much as I feel mixed about it, I do think it was worth writing this at the end of the day, and it ends with a nice little segway into my favourite section.

The B-friends is essentially what brings this show from great to one of my favourite things ever and it happens to be my favourite section as well. I don't really have much to say about it here, I just loved writing and thinking about this part, especially because it's something I didn’t see many people talk about when it comes to the show at the time, so being able to shed light on what I consider to be one of it's greatest strengths was really awesome.

If you're a fan of the show reading this, the end image is from the Chrono Trigger/unknown theme piano session, my personal favourite one. People don't talk enough about the piano sessions, they're so funny and well-structured.

The Because it's a pretty cheesy section, but it’s true, dammit! nirvana is genuinely a great source of self-expression and authenticity to me, and the final nail on the coffin in making it my favourite show of all time. Since making this zine, I have actually thought back to these words and feelings I wrote whenever I'm feeling unmotivated or unconfident about creating and I'm really putting in the effort to stay true to all said and figuring out how to express myself. I'm working on two other essay zines right now, they're both gonna be in-depth-assumes-you're-already-familiar-with-it pieces, so way less accessible compared to the zines I've done so far, and I'm okay with that. I've been felling pretty fulfilled writing them. (If you'd like to do your homework, one is gonna be about Nathan For You/The Rehearsal and the other about "The Dirties" (this one is out now!), they're all absolutely worth watching regardless tho)

Plus, I spent so much of my life not realizing that I too can make the things I love to engage in (writing and analysis in this case) that explicitly saying "hey you can and should make stuff too" felt needed as well. 

I also really do need more nirvana zines in the world, please and thank you.

On the same vein, I wanted to finish the zine off by crediting everyone that made it possible. From the technical stuff to the emotional support, direct or indirectly, so many people played a role into it. And I think even an individual work is done collaboratively.

I don't think I intended it, but it's kinda nice the section order of this zine parallels me getting into and falling in love with the show, from  reality bending, humour, drama, to personal stuff. Which, by the way, the other reason for the making of this zine was the fact that act of me even finding this show and then watching it was a mess, I had seen the YMS review of the TV series (awesome video, it does a great job talking about the humour and meta elements. thanks Adum for hooking me on this show), tried to find where to watch it, couldn't, forgot about it. Then, after I had gotten into Nathan Fielder/John Wilson (thanks again, Adum), i was looking for more reality bending shows, so I look again and i find this magnet link on a 4chan thread (I know, I know). I didn't know that it was a link for the webseries tho, which i didn’t even know existed. And the only things I remembered about this show was that 1. it was reality bending, 2. one joke i saw in the YMS review.

I was very confused, specially ‘cause that joke never came, then after I was done with “season 1” and had downloaded season 2, I just happened to find myself checking the IMDB for the show only to finally realize, “oh, there’s two shows”. (I did have a moment of staring at the IMDB episode list for season 1, wondering why the quality looked so good...) And then I watched season 1 of the tv series with hardsubbed Russian subtitles 'cause that was the only copy I could find.

So yeah... the implicit goal of this zine is to tell you there's two different nirvana shows.

Best part was me later looking for discussion about the show and finding so many links to watch the whole thing everywhere i went. I’m better at searching for things now, i swear.

And nowadays a fan made a really great website where you can watch the entire thing, from your [bleep]ing telephone even. There won't be no more suffering in the world now. (The webseries subtitles in there were done by me. and you can download the subs here also).

Main takeaways?

1. I think one thing I really got from it was learning I can just go and make changes to this zine after the fact. I initially intended this zine to be part of some jam that was going on at the time, (zine jams, where are you?) but the idea of publishing something unfinished was too unbearable to me, and it still is, but knowing I'm comfortable with making fixes/changes after the fact and improving on it the more I learn how to make zines is very nice. (That's actually how I approach subtitling, so I guess is nothing actually that new to me). They used to make changes for the webseries episodes all the time, so I'm gonna take that as part of my nirvana imitation as well.

I don't make proper dev notes about those changes (and maybe that's poor etiquette), 'cause they're so uninteresting, mostly fixing typos/formating, but the idea that someone that downloaded it when it first released will get a slightly different version than someone that did it just now it's very amusing to me, even if it's just marginally small differences.

But, um, if you downloaded the print version on day one, and haven’t actually printed it you should redownload tho, I fixed the image resolution, sorry.

The day I’m publishing this postmortem I have also updated the whole zine one more time, probably the last time for quite a while.

2. Writing in this more loose rambly style it’s pretty fun. (and improving on it after it’s even better)

I finished writing this postmortem on December 2024, but I'm only posting it on April 2025 'cause i wanted to post it alongside my Brazilian version of the zine and I can't have a Portuguese translated version of a zine about a show that you can't watch in Portuguese so I needed to have PTBR subs out first but life got in the way, and I only was able to start working on them this month so this zine stays english only for now.

On that note, trying to translate a zine that contains many references to lines from a show that doesn't have a translation in the language you're translating to it's a terrible idea. I'm very fortunate by the fact I wanted to translate the webseries in the first place after subbing it in English and was already thinking about how to adapt certain jokes. That b-friend thing was such a challenge, man.

To finish it off, while I do have my problems with some parts of this zine, I’m glad and proud of making it. It’s always a painful time when I start reading it myself but it slowly becomes better and enjoyable and satisfying to me at the end. Plus now that it’s out I can work on making my truly unhinged, in depth, collection of essays on the show. [evil laugh]

Once again, special thanks for my two supporters, Bella and Omi, I really couldn’t have made this zine without you two. The fact one of you is a big nirvana fan and the other only knows about it from me is very amusing to me. Balance!

Thank you very much for reading my zine and for reading this whole ramble.

If you're curious, I wrote some more on the technical making of this zine over on ko-fi. And I talked a bit more about nirvana in my zine about loser guys. Also, I was part of a really amazing nirvana fanzine with some amazing, amazing folks, I made a mini essay and a poem for it. That essay it’s the thing I’m the most proud of making in 2024 and it was very meaningful and impactful to me in a creative way.

Gotta go translate stuff now. Bye!