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It’s the night of the first and only preview screening of renowned director Dave Strider’s newest film, “SBaHJ: The Musicle”. It’s the most highly-anticipated movie of the year. Strider’s films have always been hyped, but this one more than any other before it because of his strange departure from SBaHJ two years prior…

...The year he won an Oscar. For a romance movie, of all things. No one knows what this means for Strider’s future as a director, and he has been secretive of his upcoming projects ever since. Which path will his artistic vision follow?

Tickets to the limited screening were available only by lottery, in a bold but egalitarian move that garnered Mr. Strider both praise and scorn. Lottery winners had to sign an abundance of waivers and consent forms for things ranging from the standard consent to being recorded and having their images reproduced to a waiver for “in the event of dinosaur attacks”.

In attendance tonight are three film critics, thirty-six lucky fans, and Dave’s boyfriend, a romance novelist who had “tragically” never watched one of his Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff films before their Oscar-winning collaboration.

The boutique theater chosen as the venue is tastefully decorated with plush burgundy chairs. There are baskets full of Really Nice Pillows, free for the hugging. A table sits right under the screen, with two chairs to either side. In front of each seat lies a script – presumably the actual script used by the many actors involved in the making of The Musicle.

Certain members of the audience consider going down to look at the script. Before any of them can do so, the lights dim around them. A lone spotlight shines over the table and chairs, then clicks off. The film begins to play.

The scene opens up on a darkened stage, not unlike the ones that can be found scheduled for remodeling in any local high school. It’s old. There’s copious amounts of brown. The red curtains are closed, though one can make out that one of the lower corners is a bit singed, as if some stupid stoner stagehand from long ago tried to test out the fabric’s claims to being inflammable.

The curtains draw open with a slight squeal. A spotlight shines on the center of the stage in which two empty chairs are placed. Upon each of them lies a script. Not a minute into the film, the events are already reaching eerie levels of meta.

“This way?” calls a voice from backstage.

“Yeah,” says another person, voice also muffled.

Two boys tromp in; they’re high school age. One is in a red t-shirt that says SWEAT BRO, and he’s also wearing as many sweatbands as he can fit on his person. The other’s blue shirt says HELLS OF JEFF. He sports a pitchfork and devil horns from the dollar store. His “pants”, if they can be called such, are custom printed skintight leggings featuring a fiery hell with pixelated Jeff heads floating everywhere.

The boys walk to center stage. They pick up their scripts and clear their throats awkwardly.

“LLAMAS~” begins SWEAT BRO, singing in a deep bass. His voice is surprisingly mature for his age.

“LLAMAS~” harmonizes HELLS OF JEFF, voice a clear, vibrant tenor.

“LLAMAS~” SWEAT BRO comes in again, an octave higher.

“LLAMAS~!” sings HELLS OF JEFF, hitting that high note like a pro boxer on a sandbag.

The scene cuts out.

It opens again, this time in what looks to be a seedy comedy club. This time the actors are SWOLE BRO, a very swole bro in a tiny red tank top, and HELLA JIF, a man whose hair is entirely covered in peanut butter.

They seem to have just finished singing the llama opening. SWOLE BRO begins to rap, because this is The Musicle, which is a musical, and, as a close-up of the script in his hands shows, it specifically notes that all lines which are not sung are to be rapped whenever possible.

“Now this is a story all about how my house got flipped turned upside down,” raps SWOLE BRO.

“Cuz this idiot went on HGTV,” picks up HELLA JIF, “and they ripped that place right outta the ground.”

“I thought it was a metaphor!” cries SWOLE BRO, sinking to his knees.

The scene cuts out again, and opens again in another location.

A shaky camera follows SWEET SIS and HELLA JEN as they walk down a suburban street. Only their backs are visible, though their names are printed on the butts of their sweatpants. SIS is a larger woman with a head full of unruly dark curls and apparently empty of all else. She regularly trips over absolutely nothing as they stumble down the smoothly paved streets. JEN’s dirty blonde hair is held up in a side-pony. This is a crucial point. The camera zooms in on the side-pony.

It zooms in.

In.

In.

All that is visible is hair. Individual strands can clearly be seen. The camera zooms in.

In.

In.

Hair cells.

Bzzt!

Static.

A small horse appears, laying on its side in a field. Another small horse ambles by, and also lays down.

“Side-ponies,” says a man’s sinister whisper. Pink and teal 80s laser effects criss-cross in the sky behind the ponies.

Bzzt!

Static.

SIS and JEN continue down the street. SIS is rap-ranting about how she’ll get them to fix her goddamn house when she finds her phone and calls their manj- menag- mananager. JEN beat-boxes terribly, chiming in only to say The Big Man in the TV Game is a produk- predoos- prodoucher. The shaky camera turns around to reveal that GEROMINA the token black friend has been holding it up on a selfie stick.

GEROMINA is chewing gum. She slowly blows a huge pink bubble, pops it, and resumes chewing. She shakes her head. “These bitches,” she says, “ain’t got a clue what they’re getting into.”

The camera turns back around to show that SIS and JEN have stopped at a gaping hole in the middle of the otherwise nice suburban neighborhood. Birds are chirping. A squirrel scampers up a neighbor’s oak tree. All that remains of SIS’s home is a smoking crater in the ground from which a set of stone stairs descends.

“Fuck,” says JEN. “There’s stairs, Sis.”

Suddenly, the video appears to be professionally shot, though it remains at the same location. The three girls are poofed into form-fitting sequined jazz dance outfits in their signature red, blue, and yellow colors. Each girl sports a top hat that looks like it ran afoul of a mad bedazzler.

“The stairs go on forever~!” sings SIS in a beautiful voice with just a hint of huskiness to it. She has the voice of a classically trained soprano turned lounge singer, perfectly suited for the dramatic jazzy tune. “It never ends~! Never, never~! Deep, deep, down, down into the shadow’s embrace they’ll go~”

Behind her, JEN and GEROMINA sing back up. They turn their sultry gazes to the camera, wagging their fingers. “Don’t go~ Don’t go~ Don’t be goin’ down those stairs~”

SIS’s last note on “Staaaaaa~ aaaaiiiiirs~!” is a glass-shattering operatic high C.

“Stairs!” they shout, and all leap into the air. Upon landing, they make aggressive jazz hands that get more and more aggressive as the seconds tick by. At the one minute mark, their jazz hands are so aggressive that they’re flailing and slapping each other. Yet they just keep going until JEN accidentally jazz-slaps SIS in the face, sending her spasming body screaming down the pit of stairs.

“Uh-oh,” JEN says.

GEROMINA shrugs. “We told her about stairs, girl. We warned her, dog.”

What follows is ten minutes of SIS aggressively jazz-handing her way down the stairs, flipping and rolling, sending sequins flying.

SIS lands with a thud, spraying bad CGI sequins and bedazzler rhinestones like vomit on the screen. This rainbow sparkle-vomit slides off in globs, revealing the side-ponies nosing each other while still lying on the grass. Slowly, the picture zooms out with the ponies on the left. To the right is a fluffy llama. Its eyes are big and bright, with very long lashes.

Then another llama steps in, equally cute and floofy. Both llamas get a close-up of them silently staring directly into the viewer’s soul.

The same sibilant whisper that had introduced the side-ponies presents the llamas. “Lllllamas...” it says. “Llamalamamalamala.”

SWEAT BRO, high school jock, enters the picturesque farm scene with a basketball tucked under one arm and the other arm wiping himself down with a towel. He seems to have come fresh from a game. Once the sweat is mostly gone, he shoves the towel into a pocket. He walks up to a llama and pets it. On the other side, HELLA JIF, middle-aged salaryman with a peanut butter hairdo, comes in to caress the other llama.

SWEAT BRO takes off one of his sweatbands and crowns Llama #1. “I now pronounce you LLAMA BRO,” he says.

JIF’s peanut butter head is attracting his llama’s attention. He swipes a bit of peanutty goodness from his bangs and boops Llama #2 on the nose. “I now pronounce you LLAMA JEFF.”

LLAMA JEFF attempts to lick his own nose. LLAMA BRO licks it off instead. It looks like an adorable llama kiss.

The llamas are married. Mendelssohn’s Wedding March begins to play while a pixelated “Just Married” banner flies behind them. Pixel flowers and miscellaneous JPEG artifacts swirl around, including many SORDs.

The peanut butter llama kiss is looped and repeated in increasingly slow slo-mo. On the eighth repeat, when one second is stretched into ten, it halts.

SIS picks herself part-way off the hard stone floor to find that she has landed in Hell. The afterlife destination for unrepentant sinners was located in a bottomless pit under her house the whole time. “The stairs,” she says in a frightened hiss. “They keep happening.”

There are flames all around her. They part, and a demon saunters through. It’s HELLS OF JEFF, high school mathlete and part-time Satan, adjusting his dollar store horns. Following close behind is his henchman, SWOLE BRO, personal trainer and life coach.

HELLS OF JEFF stops before SWEET SIS, who is still on her knees. He looks between the two BRO variants within reach. SWOLE BRO flexes and softly raps positive encouragement. SIS looks utterly confused.

“JEN? Is that you?” she asks.

HELLS OF JEFF smirks. “No homo,” he tells SWOLE BRO, gently pushing the muscular man back toward the flames. “Yes hetero,” he says to SIS, pulling her closer.

What follows is a convoluted plot wherein mathlete-Satan devises a plan to send SWOLE BRO back in time to assassinate Alison Bechdel before the creation of the Bechdel test. Somehow this is a turning point in history that would have, in complicated meta fashion, led SWEET SIS to never have struck up a friendship with HELLA JEN and GEROMINA.

Director Strider would never have been inspired in his formative years by accidentally coming across Bechdel’s feminist comics at the local library, and when he created gender-swapped versions of his own characters, he would have paired them up “Tab A into Slot B” instead of giving them the arguably most well-developed roles in the film-world they were all currently inhabiting.

Just as SWOLE BRO is about to blow the poisoned dart, he is overcome with indecision. In his mind, the Big Man was in the game now. The Big Man shoots… and misses! SWOLE BRO can’t do it. He is no assassin.

He puts down the darts.

A spark shines in the distance! What’s this? Nay, it is not salvation. It’s actually a stampede of ridiculously cute llamas. A multitude of BRO and JEFF variants, led by JEN and GEROMINA, ride in on the llamas, singing the llama intro song, to save the day. They flap awkwardly and fall off their adorable mounts, intending to defeat SWOLE BRO with the powers of friendship and kara-TAY, only to be met with SWOLE BRO’s sorrowful tears.

SWOLE BRO is accepted back into the fold. The llama army swiftly retrieves SWEET SIS from the clutches of HELLS OF JEFF, and they all burst into an exquisitely choreographed swing dance, the climax of which is HELLS OF JEFF singing the lines, “I’m sorry I acted like a misogynistic douche, I was having a gay panic.”

A pit of stairs opens up in Hell, which was already located under a pit of stairs. Everyone falls down, aggressively jazz-handing all the way.

Bzzt!

Static.

GEROMY is taking an Australian nature tour guided by Crocodile Dundee himself. At his side is his twin sister GEROMINA.

“Yo, were we always sibs, grown up sharing cribs?” raps GEROMY.

“Nah bro,” GEROMINA rap-replies, “it seems like us gettin’ our relate on, was all just a ret-con.”

Their outback tour is interrupted by a charging pixel-kangaroo. “Hiyaa!” GEROMINA kicks it in the face.

The story ends and the credits begin to roll. They are accompanied by home videos of fans singing “LLAMAS~” in the most absurd locations and positions they can imagine: while ziplining, while climbing Everest, photobombing a weather reporter, during a marriage proposal.

When the credits are over, one last home video is shown, of a young man in his apartment. Behind him is a window, where the skyline of Houston can clearly be seen. The young man starts by yawning and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He’s dressed in SBaHJ pajamas.

Then he opens his eyes for all to see… They’re red and very expressive. He waves shyly. He smiles shyly.

“Llamas~” he sings quietly and a little off key.

The end.

The lights in the theater turn back on. The audience erupts in confusion.

“Was that Strider?”

“That was him!”

“Oh my gah face reveal?!”

Amidst this chaos, Karkat calmly gets out of his seat. He walks up to the set-up beneath the screen. Calmly, expressionlessly, he FLIPS. THE GODDAMN. TABLE!!!

And then makes his way back up, through the seating area and toward the exit.

The screen lights back up, adding even more to the chaos and confusion. It’s Dave’s bare face again. He cups his hands around his mouth and shouts, as if calling for his boyfriend to return, though this was all recorded months ago.

“Karkat come back!” he shouts. “Will you marry me?!”

Karkat stops at the door, flips the screen the bird without looking back, and exits the theater.

The screen dims again.

All is silent in the nice boutique theater with the burgundy plush seats and baskets of Really Nice Pillows. No one says a word until Lottery Winner #29 picks his jaw off the floor. He looks around and decides to speak on behalf of everyone.

“What.”

The film released for the general audience the week after is actually a recording of this pre-screening session, zoomed in on the movie screen until the end in order to capture Karkat’s masterful table flip and exit.

The real final shot is of a black screen with Dave’s chickenscratch handwriting in bright red.

“bro you said you liked public declarations of love so i made you another romance movie and this time we are the stars seriously please marry me”