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swerval_zeroNo, really. No, really. Her oldest brother is Rat Bastard, her sister is Arsenal Fierce, and her other brother is Twitch Strummer. Zero's the baby of the family. Her parents, Nikki Savage and Dirk Hopeless (formerly known as David Sterling) are old-school punk royalty who settled down in the suburbs to raise their kids and continue being the most awesome parents at the PTA meeting.
Zero is basically a good kid. She doesn't drink, she doesn't do drugs--I've had her smoke once or twice, but that's about it. She doesn't have promiscuous sex. She's had precisely one boyfriend, Ginger Kincaid (named after the drummer), who's currently at MIT, and they're still together. He's a Harry Potter lookalike, by the way. She does get into quite a bit of trouble in her own way. In the second volume of Hopeless Savages, "Ground Zero", she vandalized the school gym as part of an expression of her love for Ginger, and broke into the production van of the people who were filming her family for a Behind the Music type show.
Because this is such an obscure fandom, and there are only three TPBs, I think I should summarize them al. So here goes. The Hopeless-Savage clan attracts drama. In the first grapic novel, "Hopeless Savages", (which is told in the frame story of Zero's film school application piece) Nikki and Dirk are kidnapped from their beds while Zero practices guitar upstairs. They put up quite a fight, but considering the volume Zero's working at, she doesn't know anything's happened until she comes downstairs the next morning. There's a spray-painted message on the door not to call the police, so she does the next best thing and calls Arsenal and Twitch instead. They go to track down Rat, who's run away and changed his identity (working for the man [in marketing, no less!] and going by David Sterling), in hopes he can help them. In a subplot, they get a voicemail message telling Zee she's about to be kicked out of of her own band Twitch gets hisgay drama queen gay on and convinces one of 'David's' minions that Arsenal and Zero are models. Zero pretends to be French. They knock Rat out and carry him out of the building in a Persian rug.
I can't make this shit up, people.
So, they attempt to deprogram Rat, and finally just drag him along with them to visit their parents' old manager, Norwegian Blue, in the hopes he'll have a clue. Turns out he's in on it. Zero beats up his secretary, the girl who caused Rat to bolt ten years previously. Weej has a crisis of conscience when the kidnappers tell him they'll shoot Nikki up with heroin (Nikki and Dirk met on the day she got out of rehab), and fesses up. Trevor Harris, a music producer, wants the rights to "I'm Your Cuddlebug", a song Dirk wrote when he was thirteen and still Dave, which 'David Sterling' still has the rights to.
Plz to see above about Rat's alias.
So Rat realizes this is all kind of his fault for bolting and denying who he was so Dirk put the song in his name to give him a fallback source of money, and sorta snaps, and they're off to, "Save mum an' da an' do violence." They beat up Trevor and the thugs, Twitch disarms a bomb without even really thinking about it, and thanks to Arsenal's terrifying driving, they make it to Zero's gig on time, where she does her own version of "I'm Your Squallin' Cuddlebug."
Volume two. "Ground Zero" The Hopeless-Savages are being filmed by that aforementioned "Behind the Music" type show, whose name does not jump to mind and please note my TPBs are on the opposite coast at the moment, and Nikki is in the middle of working on a remaster and cranky. Zero meets a boy. Zero likes the boy a lot. The boy doesn't like Zero so much. Or, well, he likes Zero plenty, but he thinks Zero will think she is too cool for him. It's like a whole big thing.
So Zero sneaks into the gym and paints "I Love YOU" on the back wall before her band, the Dusted Bunnies, are supposed to perform for Homecoming, in the hopes that Ginger (boy) will get a clue. She gets busted bigtime, and spends the rest of the book grounded beyond human belief. Add in the sneaking off to play the guitar outside his window in the rain (where she thinks he's laughing at her) and breaking into the camera van to try to destroy tape of her confessing her crush, and her grounding gets up to about three months at one point, though she does eventually make peace with her mum by helping her with the remasters.
Her siblings cut a deal where they'll interview if Lance (the host) will stop picking on Zero and Ginger, but they all blow their interviews--Rat by pointing out that what he did was no different than a dentist's kid dyeing his hair green and calling himself 'Poison', Arsenal by arguing that all those times she beat people up she was defending someone, and then there's Twitch, who was told before the interview the viewers couldn't handle him talking about being gay (did I mention he's gay?), so he makes some crack about, "My parents probably knew I was a mod before I did."
Also, there is an incredibly moving montage of Twitch's exes, from when he told his twu wuv Henry to go to Julliard even though Twitch didn't get in (not focused enough, the boy has ADD like whoa) to present day.
The big day comes, the show airs. We find out about the time Dirk got arrested for peeing on a gendarme's shoe in Paris (while wearing a handmade #1 Dad t-shirt with wee handprints on it) and Nikki had to break into the hotel safe to get the passports, the time their drummer bit off and swallowed a fan's finger, and the Turkey Incident. Dirk's band got arrested in Istanbul because the guitarist had drugs, and Nikki, who was about nine months pregnant with Arsenal at the time, snuck over the border with wee!Rat in tow to bribe the judge and break them out.
And then Zero confesses her crush onscreen. Lance ambushes Ginger, intimates he bets Zero's good in the sack, and Ginger punches him in the face. By this point, the entire family's on various phone lines screaming at the station for letting that be aired, so Nikki shoos Zero out the door to go see Ginger, who's running up the street toward her.
She bowls over Twitch and Henry, who are having their Romantic Staring Reunion on the porch. She meets up with Ginger, they confess their undying love for each other, and she is eventually ungrounded and able to associate freely with him once more, and they all lived happily ever after.
Wow, this is getting even longer than I'd planned. Continued in part two.
Edit: The girl who has my TPBs says the show was "Fame and Shame"
Zero is basically a good kid. She doesn't drink, she doesn't do drugs--I've had her smoke once or twice, but that's about it. She doesn't have promiscuous sex. She's had precisely one boyfriend, Ginger Kincaid (named after the drummer), who's currently at MIT, and they're still together. He's a Harry Potter lookalike, by the way. She does get into quite a bit of trouble in her own way. In the second volume of Hopeless Savages, "Ground Zero", she vandalized the school gym as part of an expression of her love for Ginger, and broke into the production van of the people who were filming her family for a Behind the Music type show.
Because this is such an obscure fandom, and there are only three TPBs, I think I should summarize them al. So here goes. The Hopeless-Savage clan attracts drama. In the first grapic novel, "Hopeless Savages", (which is told in the frame story of Zero's film school application piece) Nikki and Dirk are kidnapped from their beds while Zero practices guitar upstairs. They put up quite a fight, but considering the volume Zero's working at, she doesn't know anything's happened until she comes downstairs the next morning. There's a spray-painted message on the door not to call the police, so she does the next best thing and calls Arsenal and Twitch instead. They go to track down Rat, who's run away and changed his identity (working for the man [in marketing, no less!] and going by David Sterling), in hopes he can help them. In a subplot, they get a voicemail message telling Zee she's about to be kicked out of of her own band Twitch gets his
I can't make this shit up, people.
So, they attempt to deprogram Rat, and finally just drag him along with them to visit their parents' old manager, Norwegian Blue, in the hopes he'll have a clue. Turns out he's in on it. Zero beats up his secretary, the girl who caused Rat to bolt ten years previously. Weej has a crisis of conscience when the kidnappers tell him they'll shoot Nikki up with heroin (Nikki and Dirk met on the day she got out of rehab), and fesses up. Trevor Harris, a music producer, wants the rights to "I'm Your Cuddlebug", a song Dirk wrote when he was thirteen and still Dave, which 'David Sterling' still has the rights to.
Plz to see above about Rat's alias.
So Rat realizes this is all kind of his fault for bolting and denying who he was so Dirk put the song in his name to give him a fallback source of money, and sorta snaps, and they're off to, "Save mum an' da an' do violence." They beat up Trevor and the thugs, Twitch disarms a bomb without even really thinking about it, and thanks to Arsenal's terrifying driving, they make it to Zero's gig on time, where she does her own version of "I'm Your Squallin' Cuddlebug."
Volume two. "Ground Zero" The Hopeless-Savages are being filmed by that aforementioned "Behind the Music" type show, whose name does not jump to mind and please note my TPBs are on the opposite coast at the moment, and Nikki is in the middle of working on a remaster and cranky. Zero meets a boy. Zero likes the boy a lot. The boy doesn't like Zero so much. Or, well, he likes Zero plenty, but he thinks Zero will think she is too cool for him. It's like a whole big thing.
So Zero sneaks into the gym and paints "I Love YOU" on the back wall before her band, the Dusted Bunnies, are supposed to perform for Homecoming, in the hopes that Ginger (boy) will get a clue. She gets busted bigtime, and spends the rest of the book grounded beyond human belief. Add in the sneaking off to play the guitar outside his window in the rain (where she thinks he's laughing at her) and breaking into the camera van to try to destroy tape of her confessing her crush, and her grounding gets up to about three months at one point, though she does eventually make peace with her mum by helping her with the remasters.
Her siblings cut a deal where they'll interview if Lance (the host) will stop picking on Zero and Ginger, but they all blow their interviews--Rat by pointing out that what he did was no different than a dentist's kid dyeing his hair green and calling himself 'Poison', Arsenal by arguing that all those times she beat people up she was defending someone, and then there's Twitch, who was told before the interview the viewers couldn't handle him talking about being gay (did I mention he's gay?), so he makes some crack about, "My parents probably knew I was a mod before I did."
Also, there is an incredibly moving montage of Twitch's exes, from when he told his twu wuv Henry to go to Julliard even though Twitch didn't get in (not focused enough, the boy has ADD like whoa) to present day.
The big day comes, the show airs. We find out about the time Dirk got arrested for peeing on a gendarme's shoe in Paris (while wearing a handmade #1 Dad t-shirt with wee handprints on it) and Nikki had to break into the hotel safe to get the passports, the time their drummer bit off and swallowed a fan's finger, and the Turkey Incident. Dirk's band got arrested in Istanbul because the guitarist had drugs, and Nikki, who was about nine months pregnant with Arsenal at the time, snuck over the border with wee!Rat in tow to bribe the judge and break them out.
And then Zero confesses her crush onscreen. Lance ambushes Ginger, intimates he bets Zero's good in the sack, and Ginger punches him in the face. By this point, the entire family's on various phone lines screaming at the station for letting that be aired, so Nikki shoos Zero out the door to go see Ginger, who's running up the street toward her.
She bowls over Twitch and Henry, who are having their Romantic Staring Reunion on the porch. She meets up with Ginger, they confess their undying love for each other, and she is eventually ungrounded and able to associate freely with him once more, and they all lived happily ever after.
Wow, this is getting even longer than I'd planned. Continued in part two.
Edit: The girl who has my TPBs says the show was "Fame and Shame"
