Ciem Webcomic Series/Trivia

"Candi: "That isn't me!!!"
 * Aura Vision / Virgin Vision: One of Candi's Informed Abilities in the first story is a (very limited) ability to psychically know, just by looking at the areas around someone's eyes, whether or not they're a virgin. Not pleasant for her when she can see her own experience in the mirror, but she gets used to it.
 * The book that's being planned intends to have her use it to actually resolve a minor plot point.
 * There were once expanded universe plans for a male character who takes this Up to Eleven. He not only sees different-colored auras based on types of sexual experience (what went where,) but different shapes to those auras to indicate with whom. Absolutely nobody can ever tell him a lie about their sexual past. The more you whore it up, the stronger your aura, the more convicted you are.
 * His life gets very miserable very quickly largely because everyone hates a man they cannot lie to about their sexual exploits.
 * This was in-turn inspired by the would-be author having to put up with girls in his residence hall constantly exaggerating stories of their past conquests in the lobby with anyone who showed the slightest interest.
 * Bio Punk: The series has some elements of this, but avoids being completely true-to-form with this genre.
 * Captain Ersatz: Plenty of them, but especially Candi herself. Lampshaded in Ciem 2 when Vienna is cut off from telling Candi that she looks like a really bad version of Spider-Girl.
 * (Funny, because Vienna herself is a deliberate knock-off of Sidney.
 * Chivalrous Pervert / Comforting the Widow: In the Comprehensive Universe timeline, Jack makes it no secret that he wants to have sex with Candi, even as she is still in mourning over Denny's death. His predatory manipulation of her self-pity ultimately pays off; but she stops him mid-coitus because she's not ready to start a life with him. When she learns that Donte is Not Quite Dead, she immediately heads to Evansville to rescue him. Jack's only response is to agree that it's for the best.
 * City Noir: Dirbine has its moments, especially in Ciem 2.
 * The illusory happiness aesthetic in the original comes from its bright orange glow on buildings coupled with an amber-biased atmosphere. This, in turn, was just a wholesale Shout-Out to the Spider-Man films that inspired the original Ciem webcomics. With the books' Continuity Reboot, the need for this aesthetic has completely disappeared. Evansville is now free to look more like Gotham City if it wishes to.
 * Clear My Name / Designated Victim / My Girl Is Not a Slut: Candi may be hypersexual, but she tries to control it. She makes it her goal to be the good girl who gets by. But her name is Candi! So the Crapsack World she lives in cannot accept that she's a good girl. And she has promiscuous siblings that look just like her, so everyone in the high school who has slept with one of her sisters is convinced they've slept with her, so she is unable to leave high school without everyone assuming she's a slut. When word gets out that her boyfriend is five years her senior, she's mocked and compared to a pedophile.
 * Even after she's graduated, she is still frequently sexually harassed.
 * In the book, she goes off to college, and is still persecuted. One girl vaguely resembling her appearance even steals chemicals to break into Candi's locker, then impersonates her and has sex with the entire football team, purely out of spite. Then puts it on the Internet. Which later inspires one of Steve Mc Laine's ex-best friends to create the Mila Fila character. He then spies on Steve and Miriam with hidden cameras and makes Miriam into Mila Fila. And with Miriam unknowingly making Mila Fila sex tapes, the character looks exactly like Candi. She gets weird looks from almost everyone, as the whole campus now thinks Candi's a porn star. Not even marrying Denny is enough to salvage her reputation.
 * And because of the tapes, she can't even get a job as a Sunday school teacher.

Pete: "We can't take any chances...""


 * Continuity Reboot: The Comprehensive Gerosha universe, which paints Candi in Broad Strokes and reconstructs the Gerosha universe while freeing it up from damaged and incomplete franchise continuities.
 * Grillitan Diner is no longer canon. Volkonir is now its own thing.
 * Conspicuous CG: The centilegs and mask eye pieces of Ciem are painted onto the model via Photoshop in post-production. It was especially obvious in the original, where the author had only Photoshop Elements 1.0 to work with. Before it was canceled, Ciem 2 was being made with Photoshop CS2.
 * Dysfunctional Family / Everybody's Dead, Dave: The Flippos. Steve McNolan, Tobey Flippo, Alison Ligash, Dwayne Lloyd, and Marissa Hood (all the grandparents) are all dead. Stan and Shalia (the parents) are dead. Candi is raised by her sister Erin, who's a bit legalistic at times. Tom has vanished as of a very young age, but comes back. He is revealed to have devoted his life to selling motorcycles.
 * Candi's nephew Kirby is three years older than Candi is! Worse, Candi's half-brother Ploribus is half-alien. If not for the age retardant that Ploribus uses before he meets and falls in love with Nancy and marries her, then Candi wouldn't have a nephew named Lex. Yet, Lex is (by sheer miracle) NOT a nephew OLDER than his aunt.
 * As if this didn't create enough problems for Candi, she becomes an aunt again at the age of 19, when her sister Marina has a Shotgun Wedding. (Miriam won't have kids for a while yet, but isn't a virgin like Candi.)
 * As for Candi herself, she leaves behind a family just slightly less dysfunctional and screwed up.
 * Eternal Sexual Freedom: Strongly subverted, though not entirely inverted. Other than most of the central protagonists, who suffer at the hands of fate for any indiscretions they may commit, most everyone else, especially amongst the villains, can act like a total rabbit; and not a single eyebrow is raised. Unless they've pushed their luck too far.
 * Yet, Candi and Donte let their griefs drive them to lust by just before the sequel, and the rest is history.
 * Edited for Syndication: Due to potential Unfortunate Implications, whole scenes and subplots in the Dozerfleet Forum version are completely cut out of the Mod The Sims Social version. Also, the 800x483-pixel images in Ciem 2 are shrunk to a 500-pixel-width equivalent, mostly due to bandwidth constraints.
 * My Own Private I Do: In the books, this happens twice. The first time, it was because Candi wanted to protect Denny after a hit had been put out on him. The second time, it was because Candi 1)wanted to make it easier for Donte to adopt Charlie and 2)was tired of feeling guilty about the fact that she and Donte couldn't control themselves around each other.
 * It alters the story dynamic in Nuclear Crisis significantly from what it was in Ciem 2. No longer is Candi racing to marry Donte because of a pregnancy. She's only planning a ceremony later on (complete with changing her last name from Levens to Mc Arthur) 1) because her Flippo relatives have always wanted her to have one and 2) because it is the ultimate slap in Arfaas' face for Flippos to attend a wedding without fear.
 * This in-turn allows for the cause of Candi's power glitches to be a reaction to a flu shot rather than her flu coming clean out of nowhere.
 * She can still suspect pregnancy making her vulnerable to the shot; but she eloped shortly after Frank was conceived. Therefore, she is not worried about not being married to Donte even if she doesn't get the second wedding. Also, this slight change allows her storyline to be made a tiny bit simpler while avoiding excessive redundancy with Miriam's Shotgun Wedding subplot.
 * Denny never got the benefit of a second wedding with Candi, since his parents at the time feared it would be suicide (Which is what they thought of Candi and Denny even being married at all. They were half-right.)
 * Evansville and Boonville Are The Center Of The Universe: Even though one has to wonder why the Meethlites are so obsessed with a geographic location like this with so little strategic value. After all, it's not like it's New York or Chicago or anything.
 * Our Ghosts Are Different: And what they can do varies from story to story. But basically, they are most powerful in dreams.
 * In Ciem, they can voice disapproval to the living of how they are living. Otherwise, ghosts do nothing.
 * In Ciem 2, they can come very close to killing you (or can heal you) in your sleep. They can't foretell the future, but they can warn you about the present. But once you wake up, they become powerless and seemingly nonexistent.
 * Shout-Out / Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The webcomic's chapters alone are loaded with this.
 * Chapter 1: "What Secrets Lie"
 * Chapter 5: "Fatal Miscalculations"
 * Chapter 6: "No Turning Back"
 * Chapter 7: "Not-So Prime Real Estate"
 * Chapter 8: "More Needs She the Divine"
 * Chapter 12: "Building a Better Centipede Trap"
 * Chapter 13: "The Corrupting of the Shrew"
 * Chapter 14: "The Seeds of Despair"
 * Chapter 15: "A Centipede By Any Other Name"
 * Chapter 17: "To Love or Not to Love"
 * Chapter 19: "The Wages of Fertility"
 * Chapter 21: "Have Yourself a Deadly Little Christmas"
 * Chapter 27: "Ploribus is Coming" - And in Chapter 22, Merle's officers mention he's on the move.
 * Chapter 30: "Musaran's Melee"
 * Chapter 31: "Cancer Can't Stop Love" - Paraphrase of "Death Cannot Stop Love."
 * Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism / Shades of Conflict: Ironically, the more that Candi herself is darkened and the more Arfaas and Musaran get to Kick the Dog, the more idealistic other characters become. Botan the Plant-Man is at one point in Classic Gerosha a straight-up villain. In Comprehensive Gerosha, he's more of a misunderstood Type I Anti-Hero bordering on a Type II. Likewise, Capp Aard becomes a sympathetic screw-up trying to capture Miriam so he can get Arfaas to give him the cure before he loses his mind to his transformation. Originally, he developed a Split Personality that talked like Gollum, and quickly took over.
 * Where the Hell is Dirbine?: Supplemental materials strongly suggest it's somewhere around where Real Life Evansville is located.
 * In the Ultimate Universe novel series, it is Evansville. Viron is just the area around University of Southern Indiana and Farrenville is Ivy Tech. Gerosha is rebuilt on the remains of Boonville.
 * Also, Channel 26, as opposed to Real Life Channel 25 (WEHT, an ABC affiliate).