Asteroid
My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.
My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.
The comic begins with Blondie as a news anchor reporting that an asteroid is headed for Earth.
The end of the world has been envisioned in many ways. One of the most common is with a really big rock hitting Earth. This has been depicted in movies several times, most famously, and released in the same year, are Armageddon and Deep Impact, but also The Day the Sky Exploded and many more. These lists of films with asteroids and meteors show how popular this theme is.
There is an online calculator for asteroid impacts, but don't worry, as any rock that does hit Earth isn't likely to kill everyone. And, as seen in the what if? article Diamond, speed counts too.
The joke here, though, is that, after sending up a robot to blow the asteroid to smithereens, said rock is actually the home of the Little Prince from the famous tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. To save our world, we must destroy his. And probably the prince along with it. If the only way to save our species is by killing off another species, is the act still ethical? In none of the world-destroying asteroid stories were said rocks actually home to intelligent life. Or any life, for that matter. A second joke that can be seen is that in said movies the "heroic" mission always involves humans in some way imperiling themselves to save humanity, rather than, say, staying safely at home and using a robotic rover to do all the dangerous stuff.
The title text is a reference to the 1998 asteroid movie Deep Impact. "Crossover" is a term used to refer to a technique of taking two independent (and usually already existing) stories and creating a scene or short story in which characters from both worlds collide and interact with each other. Or, in other words, characters from one story "crossover" into the second. Fanfic is short for Fan Fiction, e.g. a fictional story written by someone who loves a particular story/series/idea so much they wanted to write their own tale about it (or one who hated said story so much they felt compelled to fix it). It suggests that most people were unwilling to read a story about people nuking miniature kingdoms to save civilization. A tough entertainment call any day.
The Little Prince was referenced already back in 2: Petit Trees (sketch), later in 1350: Lorenz at the end of the space trip branch, and in 2712: Gravity on B-612 as a carbon copy of this comic.
