Little Debbie Donut Sticks - A Lament

Let’s discuss donut sticks, and how they’re the most disappointing snack cake on the market.

Several months have passed since the painful death of Hostess, and we no longer have the sweet comforts of Twinkies and Devil Dogs to turn to in our times of need. With the top dog now euthanized, all of the second-rate bakery brands have been thrust into the spotlight, forcing us to settle with Tastykake, Blue Bird, and Little Debbie, to name a few.  Though they’ve expanded and advertised their versions of Hostess favorites (under some truly terrible names, seriously who thinks Bingles sound appetizing?) they all still have their own relatively exclusive snack cakes. In Little Debbie’s case, she has a little something called the donut stick, something I’ve never seen imitated by another brand… and for good reason.

On paper, donut sticks sound like a perfect snack cake: a glazed donut with the perfect shape for dunking into coffee, individually wrapped for freshness. Who wouldn’t want a couple of those, and what could possibly go wrong?

Let’s start with the donut itself. For me, a glazed donut is meant to be light and airy. Krispy Kreme absolutely nails it and Dunkin Donuts is very average. But these donut sticks are dense, almost downright hard. I don’t want my donut to be that dry and concentrated unless its a Munchkin. Little Debbie is basically dressing up a slice of stale pound cake and calling it a donut. Strike one.

Then there’s the glaze. Glaze is supposed to be soft and supple, but the glaze on donut sticks is dry, crunchy mess. It looks, feels and tastes like they glazed these pound cakes about 10 years ago and flash froze them, only to thaw them last month and ‘pack them fresh’. Also, whatever sugar (substitute) they’re using is just a little too fake for my tastes. I completely understand that it’s no small effort to mass-produce a glazed donut with a long shelf life, and probably impossible to do with fresh, true ingredients. But when you attempt it regardless and this is the final product you’re presenting me, I’m not impressed. Strike two.

If the look and feel of these donut sticks didn’t already turn you off, try eating one. These pastries fall victim to the same demon Drake’s Coffee Cakes did, in that they instinctively fall apart once you take a bite. How could a dense, dry cake with a papery glaze completely collapse like that? And they want you to dunk them in coffee?! Yeah that’ll help keep these things structurally sound! Strike three, Little Debbie.

The current, 'modern' packaging. But could you really tell?

It’d be one thing if they just invented these and were piloting them in test markets, because then they’d immediately be deemed a fail and sent back to the drawing board. However, donut sticks have been around for decades. As you could also tell from the virtually unchanged box artwork, these guys have probably been around since the Nixon Administration. I’m sure there’s some perverse cult following around these odd things, but that alone couldn’t have possibly kept the donut stick conveyors in motion. Something else must be fueling their popularity, and I think I know what it is:

Even though my description of them makes them seem repulsive, you cannot deny there is an allure around the concept of an on-demand glazed donut that pairs perfectly with a cup of coffee. And since no other snack cake bakery even makes a donut stick (at least not like this), when we come across these Little Debbie boxes in the supermarket we think we’ve struck gold. Cue the mental debate: “I mean, that cup of coffee does look delicious, and these donut sticks can’t be that bad… these pastries have been around forever, there’s gotta be a reason… And they’re what? Only $1.90 for a whole box? Wow, I gotta give these a try!” And we get all excited, thinking we’ve come across the holy grail of snack cakes… even though this same exact event happened about a year or two ago… and we didn’t like them back then… so why would we like them now… “Oh well maybe they changed the recipe,” you reason, “maybe they weren’t as bad as I remember. I mean, how could they mess up a glazed donut? Not to mention it’ll fit perfectly in my coffee cup!”

Behold, in all their, uh, glory...

So you get home and eagerly await that 9 o’clock hour. You make a small pot of coffee and break out your donut sticks so you can wash down and redeem the horribleness of the day. You pop open the box and slide out a stick, noticing it doesn’t look quite as good as it looks on the box (and let’s be honest, they don’t even look that good in the picture in the first place). You take a deep breath, gear yourself up to believe the hype and take your first bite… <crunch>… “Crunch? wtf?!” you think…  chew for a bit… … swallow… and the look of sheer disappointment on your face becomes enough to make a grown man cry. Every synapse of your brain is trying to rationalize why this supposed taste sensation instead became a giant dud, and suddenly it all makes sense. It makes sense why no other bakery has tried something like this, why you can regularly find a whole box for under 2 bucks, and why the world can be a cruel, cruel place sometimes.

Now you’re stuck with a half-eaten donut stick and several others still in the box. Then they’re sent to the back corner of the kitchen cabinet to remain and taunt you while you pray that one day they just disappear. But they stay, and especially since they’re individually wrapped they stay much longer than you anticipate. With every passing glance you might try another one, hoping to high heaven that this time they’ll taste better. They don’t, and another tear gets choked back until the day you can’t take anymore and unceremoniously throw them out.

Time passes, and life slowly returns to normal.

About a year and a half later you’ll go grocery shopping and once again the siren we call Little Debbie calls you to the perfect theory of the donut stick. All of your past experiences are rendered invalid and another box of donut sticks is added to your cart. The cycle repeats.

This is how donut sticks have remained in production all these years, and why no one’s ever called for a recipe revision. It’s because we’re constantly giving them ‘last chances’ and getting disappointed every time. Stop being fooled and get off the ride. The truth needs to be told about these things, and it looks like I've been nominated to do the honors. Please don't fall for donut sticks again, and keep your heads held high. One day we’ll have the perfect pre-made glazed donut that fits in a coffee cup... but that day is not today.

Forgotten Gaming Case Study: Project Sonic

Instead of doing a game review per se, I thought we'd talk about something so completely obscure and forgotten it's tragic: the lukewarm campaign known as Project Sonic. What? You never heard of it? Hmph, and you call yourself a Sonic fan...

The year is 1996 and Sega is in its darkest moment yet: they are financially stuck with a console that nobody likes and that has barely any compelling games to support it. Sound familiar, Wii U owners? =P So after being kings of the world with the Sega Genesis, Sega's continual missteps and questionable decisions ushered in the Sega Saturn, a console that was overpriced, underwhelming and notoriously known in software circles as an absolute pain to program games for. Sure, nowadays people see the Saturn as a misunderstood diamond in the rough, but back in the mid-90s you couldn't even pay people to invest their time and money into it. (Just like the Wii U today... Ok fine I'll stop!) And with Sega of Japan's braindead decision to discontinue all of their other consoles to focus squarely on the Saturn, they were putting all their eggs in a basket that didn't have a bottom. Only one thing in everyone's mind would be able to save the Saturn and Sega as a whole: a new and true Sonic game.

 

Gamers hadn't had a legit Sonic game since Sonic & Knuckles back in 1994, and their hunger for more Sonic platforming goodness was growing by the day. The closest thing people had to a 'Sonic 4' was the 32X exclusive Knuckles Chaotix which proved to be a little too radical for people's tastes (and was only played by like the 12 people that owned a 32X). And despite the Sega Saturn's unpopularity, it did have one last ace up its sleeve, a new, fully 3D Sonic game that was in development. Though Sonic X-Treme wasn't released yet, its lofty promises and demo footage kept Sega fans satiated and the Saturn relevant until its expected release in late 1996.

Then Sonic X-Treme was canceled.

The sudden and unceremonious announcement left fans furious and Sega in a very bad position: they now had no blockbuster game for the '96 Christmas season to go up against Nintendo's newly-released N64 and Sony's dominating PlayStation. Not to mention they completely let down their Sonic fans and general supporters. It was generally around this time that Sega internally gave up on the Saturn and laid out the groundwork for a new console, which later became the Sega Dreamcast. But the Dreamcast was years away, and although they knew they would never recoup their losses from the Saturn, Sega still had to do the best with what they had to keep themselves in the game (no pun intended) until their new console was ready. The Sega Saturn was dead in the water, and instead of reeling it in they decided to keep it around as a fancy-looking lure for whatever was still biting. One of these lures so-to-speak was a suite of low-profile spinoff Sonic games: aka Project Sonic.

Surely the next-gen Sega console (code named 'Dural' or 'Katana' at that point) would feature a major Sonic game as a launch title, learning from the mistake they made with Saturn by not having one. However, a world that lacked any kind of Sonic game for a few years ran the risk of Sonic being forgotten altogether, and that motivated Project Sonic's main goal: to keep the Sonic brand alive during Sega's tough times and the Saturn's slow and painful death. And hey, maybe they might sell another Saturn or two.

Now keep in mind that 'Project Sonic' was largely an internal name that rarely saw the light of day among consumers. I always looked at it like a PR campaign that never was, something that could have really been a active public movement to keep Sonic in the limelight. The project's logo should have been plastered in the windows of every FuncoLand and EB Games. Instead it was just an internal codename tossed around the corporate offices and umbrella term for the 3 Sonic games the Saturn had the pleasure of hosting. It was probably the overall lack of money that kept Project Sonic from really becoming a thing, as the Saturn was bleeding like a gunshot wound and Dreamcast development no doubt stretched Sega's bankroll beyond its maximum.

 

With Sonic X-Treme's cancellation, Project Sonic immediately went to work immediately to fill the massive gap in Sega's Christmas catalog. They filled it with a substantially enhanced port of the Genesis' swan song Sonic game: Sonic 3D Blast. The Saturn version was outsourced to a third party designer called Traveller's Tales who spruced up the graphics beautifully and featured a completely redone soundtrack composed by video game music god, Richard Jacques. The game was started from scratch and released to stores in under two months. Talk about a quick fix! A far cry from the open worlds and speed promised by X-Treme, 3D Blast was an isometric platformer that for many people wasn't truly 3D enough, nor a blast to play. It wasn't even a new game, and all of the added graphical touches and CD-quality soundtrack couldn't disguise that it was just a very nice port of a very mediocre game. But it was something, and it got Sega through the season without complete egg on its face.

The second game to bear the 'Project Sonic' label was Sonic Jam, released in the summer of 1997. The only game of the group to actually be developed by Sonic Team itself, Sonic Jam was a celebration of Sonic's past and a hint of Sonic's future. Sonic Jam featured Sonic 1, 2, 3, and Sonic & Knuckles (and its permutations) all on one disc. A little-known fact is that these games are not emulated, but were actually rebuilt to run natively on the Saturn hardware. As a result, Sonic Jam featured modified versions of the games' levels and took the liberty of rewriting some of the games' more sketchy areas (though the original versions of the game are still available). It also allowed for Sonic CD-style time attacks of each zone and Special Stage rush modes.

However that's just half of the game. The other half took the form of Sonic World, a 3D playground of sorts featuring Sonic staples such as rings, lamp posts, platforms and springs. You could even find Tails, who could give you a lift to other areas! Sonic World also featured a variety of missions, asking you to collect X amount of rings, find X number of lamp posts, and et cetera. When you weren't completing missions, you could go to the variety of buildings in the world to look at stock art of Sonic and friends, watch archived commercials, read the timeline of Sonic's history up to that point, and even uncover cheat codes for the original games. It was an incredible bonus, and Sonic Team's way of saying 'I'm sorry' for the death of X-Treme. Sonic World was also considered a prototype for Sonic Adventure, the Sonic launch title of the Dreamcast, so gamers were inadvertently getting their feet wet for the Sonic games to come. Unfortunately Sonic World's main drawback, besides primitive 3D gaming awkwardness, was its small size and limited number of missions. But like 3D Blast, it was something, and the fans took what little Sonic World was and were grateful for every bit of it.

Project Sonic's third and final game was Sonic R, an on-foot racing game that took gamers ever-tantalizingly closer to a fully open-world 3D Sonic game. Again developed by Traveller's Tales, composed by Richard Jacques, and released for the Christmas '97 season, Sonic R featured 5 large open areas with race paths carved into them. All of the Sonic basics were here and realized: rings, alternate paths, loops, springs, even the Chaos Emeralds. Sonic's original friends and enemies also make playable appearances, some for the very first time including Amy Rose, Dr. Robotnik, and Metal Sonic (Sonic Drift notwithstanding). This is also the very last time we see Amy before her major redesign from Sonic Adventure onwards.

Sonic R sounds like it has it all, and to a degree it does, but when gamers finally played it things just didn't click. There's an overbearing blah-ness to the game, and at this point it starts to feel like the Project Sonic games are coming out just for the sake of coming out. The game has no personality, no soul. Sonic R extended the Sonic World idea but really didn't do much with it, and it's a problem when an inferior demo area manages to be more compelling than a full game. Fans took this game and were done with it a half hour later, literally. That's about as long as it takes to unlock everything 100%.

By this point Sonic fans were done with being teased and were more than ready for the next generation of console gaming. By 1998 the tortured Saturn saw less than a dozen first-party releases, though those included the now-legendary Shining Force III, House of the Dead, Burning Rangers (which I've reviewed on this blog!) and the most tragically overlooked RPG of all time: Panzer Dragoon Saga. Project Sonic took the year off, as pre-release coverage of Sonic Adventure slowly started to dominate the gaming world and ignite a fiery desire to enter the new millennium with Sonic and Sega. Project Sonic's mission was complete. It carried a scorned fanbase through the Saturn's  1996 nightmare (Sonic 3D Blast), reoriented fans and newcomers with who Sonic truly is and will be (Sonic Jam), and sent them off with a final taste of what will be (Sonic R) before delivering them to the doorstep of the promised land of Sonic Adventure. It's actually quite beautiful in that context.

So was Project Sonic a success? Well in its limited scope, yes. It set out to do exactly what it wound up doing, and kept the dream alive until the Dream was actually Cast. But as a PR movement it failed miserably. How hard would it have been to create a mystère around the Project Sonic movement with some magazine ads or webpages (which were the new, cool thing at the time). Heck, throw someone in a Sonic suit in the middle of Times Square with a couple hundred flyers! How much could that really cost? Someone already went through the trouble of making that cool logo, and yet it was never used except for on the back covers of the Japanese box arts for each game. The logo also made a final cameo on the title cards for Sonic Pocket Adventure (for the NeoGeo Pocket Color) where it was animated no less!

In the mid-late 90s Sega was lacking an identity and a direction, and when one was created for its flagship mascot, it was effectively wasted. That is why I am writing about it now. I'm certain almost nobody knows that Project Sonic even existed, which is a crying shame. As hindsight is always 20/20, so looking back we could discover and analyze how our favorite blue hedgehog got through its company's darkest era, and even rationalize how universally well-received Sonic Adventure was at the time where nowadays it is panned. It is my firm belief that if Project Sonic took the trouble of going a little more public, the game would have been better understood and more successful, and perhaps a couple dozen more Saturns would have been sold. Let Project Sonic be a lesson for you PR people of today: a little transparency goes a long way, and you can't trust corporate to make the wisest decisions on its own.

We love you, Sonic.

Drag Race S5 Final Runway & Season Review

This is it, folks. It’s been about a dozen weeks but the fifth season of Drag Race is reaching its finish line. I can’t believe it. It seems like just last week I was writing about how beautiful Ivy Winters is or how hopeless Serena ChaCha was, but alas that had to have been some time in February!

Our final three is Jinkx Monsoon, Alaska, and Roxxxy Andrews; aka a stage actress, a lovable weirdo and a pageant diva. For this last Runway Recap, since the actual runway is so short (only 3 people from an original 14!) afterwards we’ll go through the losing queens in order of elimination to give them a final assessment now that the dust has settled. I’ve actually been looking forward to this post for some time… you’d think I wouldn’t have procrastinated it as badly as I have =P. But first things first, let’s look at the final official runway of the season, starting with our queen of queens RuPaul:

Asymmetrical shoulders can be hit or miss, but Ru’s rosebud is the perfect addition to this beautiful dress. I’m glad she ended with this look, I’ve always felt the last runway should be when you look your absolute best. It’s not the time to experiment or go for shock value, you’ve already made it to the elite so look the part! Now for the last time, let’s commence for shakedown.

COMMENCE… SHAKE… DOWN.

Ugh, Roxxxy’s overdone eyes are back.

Green and purple are those two colors that somehow just go together despite every synapse telling you it can’t be done. I like how the wispiness of the dress design even extends into the wispy angles near the bust. And what a bust it is, wow! I guess there’s a mixed blessing in not being a stick-thin drag queen, because you can use your pectoral skin to create some seriously believable cleavage. Regarding the hair, it is effective in giving her the right proportions for the dress but that’s about it. She loves that hair-shelf flippy thing and to me it just kills any illusion of realism she has. But I guess if that’s one of her signatures it’s only right to showcase it on the final runway.

Everyone classifies Roxxxy as a plus-sized girl and I disagree. Yes, she’s lost a lot of weight and her body reflects that, but to group her with queens like Latrice Royale and Stacy Layne Matthews is just wrong. Roxxxy Andrews belongs with Shannel, personally, who has rarely been called plus-sized.

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Awww she’s so pretty!! ^_^

Remember earlier in the competition when she’d go for the pretty look and it would just fail? She would look too toothy, or too wacko, but here she looks lovely!! Everything is perfect: nothing overdone or underdone, a put-together package of fishy realness. Jinkx was always the chameleon of the group who would go for the out-there look, for example the French jester or the muertos skeleton. Most often she’d be the glamour girl from yesteryear, and with this final fairytale princess look I feel like she completed the circle. There’s really nothing Jinkx Monsoon can’t do.

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In true alternative fashion, Alaska decided to do glamour by looking like Twiggy’s ghost.

Though Alaska just described her look as ‘ghoulish couture’, I personally think she looks like a zombified version of 60s British model Twiggy, especially in that last picture. Normally something like this would be a train wreck, especially for the last runway, but it’s so fully realized that it’s hard to yell at her. This is not her best drag by any means, nor does it really convey what kind of queen Alaska truly is, but the colors all coordinate and the hair and makeup just work. All of this just adds to the mystery of how you’d accurately classify what kind of queen she is. She’s funny, beautiful, edgy, intelligent and absentminded, but not one more than the other.

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Ranking Based On Runway?: Partially
Winner: No one
High-Ranking: Jinkx Monsoon, Alaska, Roxxxy Andrews
Low-Ranking: Jinkx Monsoon, Alaska, Roxxxy Andrews
Bottom Three: Jinkx Monsoon, Alaska, Roxxxy Andrews
Eliminated: No one

Confused? I would be too. Drag Race is an oddity when it comes to its final episodes. In prior seasons the Top 3 would stand on the runway and RuPaul would very unceremoniously eliminate one of them on the spot. Then the final two would lip-sync for their life and Ru would pick the winner right from that. It brought 3 top performers down to a single winner within 5 minutes, and barely give the two runners-up any attention despite being strong contenders. But for Season 4 RuPaul would have all 3 racers do a triple lip-sync and then announce the winner during the reunion show 2 weeks later. It was meant to keep people from leaking who the winner was, as was what happened in Season 3. Because everyone knew Raja was the winner weeks before the third season finished airing, the winner is no longer pre-recorded. Plus it gives people a chance to vote for the winner in the 2 weeks between the final episode and reunion show. Oh boy, more abuse of social media to give people the feeling that they’re actually a part of something they’re not…

So to explain the lists above, RuPaul and the judges spent time finding equal amounts of things that each queen was good and bad at. Then there was the triple lip-sync and then everyone (including the contestants!) needed to wait until the reunion to know who wins. This is very unfair and cliffhanger-y to the contestants, as this season was filmed months ago and they needed to wait until today (5/6/13) to know their results. It also makes the episode’s challenge seem pointless, as there was no declared challenge winner. And the lip-sync? Even more pointless, as no one was eliminated from it.

Listen to me, RuPaul and Drag Race producers. For Season 6 and beyond, do the final episodes like this: Have a challenge winner for the final ‘normal’ episode, and have the other two contestants lip-sync. Eliminate one person from the lip-sync (letting someone earn the title of third place), leaving us with a Final Two. During the reunion have the final two do a final lip-sync, and from that performance (plus fan votes, plus RuPaul’s personal preference), declare a winner then and there. That’s not so hard, is it?

Yes, the finale/reunion is today. If it’s anything like last season there won’t be an orthodox runway, so appropriately there will be no Runway Recap post. If I can get a good screenshot of them, and if they look good, perhaps I’ll do a post showing what all the past contestants were wearing, but personally I don’t see it happening.

Now the time has (finally) come to review all of the Season 5 contestants, one at a time, in order of elimination. This will be very similar to the ‘Meet the Contestants’ post I did before the premiere aired, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Back then I wondered how these queens would do, but now we know for sure and we could really discuss how much good (if any) they brought to the competition.

I’ll also be using their name banners and for the first time, we’ll be able to critique them! These banners ran under every single time they did a voiceover on the show (and the camera changed to them), so we’ve seen these pictures a lot the past few weeks. Some of them you might not even remember! In past seasons the picture used in the banner was one of their old stock photos, this season was different in that they used a candid from their first entrance to the workroom. In other words, this is the very first thing we got to really see them in, and this could almost be considered a runway itself. Now let’s have some fun!

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Aww, Penny!! Who here still remembers her? This picture practically confirms that full-on pictures do nothing for her and only showcase how awkward her eyebrows are drawn. (Though when pictured from the side it’d look much better.) Penny suffered from first-to-go syndrome, so she did not get the airtime needed to really show who she was. Therefore we really can’t cast accurate judgment on how ‘good’ she is. Her only runway look wasn’t horrible per se, and her lip-sync song was Miley Cyrus’ ‘Party in the USA’, which no one over the age of 21 should be singing anyway. This series of misfortunes had her sent home first. I’ve always thought that no one should be eliminated the first episode just to avoid having to shaft someone like this.

I can’t believe I never mentioned it earlier, but Penny Tration bears an uncanny resemblance to Season 1’s Victoria Parker, who was also the oldest of her season, a full-figured white guy, and the first contestant to be eliminated. And the racers that eliminated them totally got a lucky break…

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This banner picture is the best Serena ChaCha ever looked (which honestly isn’t bad). The self-proclaimed youngest of the group, Serena was immature as hell, so sure that her fashion school background would give her an edge. She wasted no time reading the other contestants and putting herself before them. All this would be fine if her runway looks made up for it, but they didn’t. They really didn’t. Serena may go down in history for bringing the worst look conceivable to the runway in the first episode. She made no friends but many enemies, and despite how cute she was in guy form (as well as the banner pic), she made it very difficult to be liked. I’m sure everyone would have rather had Penny Tration return than Serena.

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OMFG I’m so freakin tired of these Nicki Minaj wannabes!! These combinations of blonde banged wigs, pink lipstick and mocha skin need to be banned from fashion permanently. Ok… now that that’s out of my system, let’s talk, Monica. First of all, your name sucks. It always has. Second, I’m sorry my dear but you did not belong on this season, let me explain. It’s not because you were transgender (so calm down, trans supporters) it’s because you were not in the right mindset for it. You were in transition physically and mentally, and your confidence didn’t build up yet for this kind of competition. Ideally you should have been in a later season (or even an earlier one) so you would have been more comfortable in your own skin, but then you might have been ineligible for the show for not being biologically male. So you chose to shoehorn the show into your life when you did, before it was too late, and it didn’t help anyone. Again I wish you the best in life, but this was not your season. And please change your name!

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Oh Honey. This West Coast Milan could have brought some real fun to this season, but shot herself in the foot by wearing the same style of dress every single runway with minimal change to hair or makeup. She also sealed her fate by admitting that she doesn’t believe a drag queen’s look is important (which dumbfounded Alyssa Edwards) and that she should hire herself a stylist. As for the banner pic, it’s very blaxploitative. Yep, that about sums it up.

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Vivienne’s story is also a sad one. You might not be able to tell from the banner pic (that wig is awful) but Vivienne is easily one of the fishiest queens to grace RuPaul’s Drag Race, along with the likes of Carmen Carrera and Tatianna. Unfortunately she thought this innate beauty alone would be able to carry her to the finish line. She didn’t speak much and when she did it was usually not something very nice. I wanted to like her for more than her fishy realness but never gave me anything else to feed on. Vivienne Pinay was eliminated alongside Honey Mahogany (a Drag Race first): Honey for never changing her damn outfits and Vivienne for having the personality of a brick.

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Ah, the obligatory Puerto Rican contestant, who know less and less English as the seasons go by. Lineysha was a beautiful queen and a very cute boy, but his poor grasp of the language and his bizarre thought processes doomed him to failure. His first name is also rather stupid. On a positive note, his banner pic is the first one so far to accurately reflect how he generally looks in drag, with the structured up-do and solid makeup. He even won a challenge, being the only ‘bad’ contestant to do so. All in all though, there’s nothing that Lineysha brought that Season 5 was better off for.

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Jade Jolie, the queen everyone loved to hate, and I loved to love. Jade was the pure embodiment of stereotypical happy things, like hearts, flowers, rainbows and glitter. Literally. Almost every sentence was punctuated with a chuckle, and his banner pic perfectly sums up who he is: colorful, unedited and slightly messy. He’s hard-wired to rub people the wrong way with his saccharin nature, and he did, but I always liked it. He made his realness so fake and his fakeness so real, and never once didn’t remain true to himself.

Jade’s elimination was relatively early, but a direct result of being ‘safe’ too long. He never did exceptionally well, nor did he really slip up. He always just blended in with the others (which sounds odd given his colorful nature) and at this point in the competition his cover was weeded out, leaving him vulnerable without an excuse. Too bad he didn’t last just one more week…

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And now we begin the second half of the contestants, i.e. the ‘good ones’, i.e. the ones that won all the challenges (Lineysha was a fluke). Ivy was another one of my favorites, and actually one I wanted to win. She had almost everything: good looks, creativity… but of all the ‘good’ ones she probably had the weakest personality. You never really heard much of her, and what you did wasn’t anything you’d remember. She was one of those queens who bragged that she’d make outfits out of everyday objects and yet we barely saw any of them (Alaska was also guilty of this). Her banner pic is so 80s-licious it kills me, I absolutely love it. It’s also odd that she looks best as a blonde but is naturally dark-haired. Speaking of his boy alter-ego, I’m sorry but when he’s out of drag, he looks more like a lesbian woman than an actual guy, it may have something to do with the single dangling earring thing. Seriously, google it.

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Always and forever, Alyssa Edwards… at least that was her self-defined catchphrase. Alyssa was a former Miss Gay America who had her title revoked since she didn’t exactly fit in the cookie-cutter mold she was supposed to during her reign. Can’t blame her, but she took the hit very personally and she came to Drag Race to redeem herself. I’m not sure if finishing in 6th place is much of a redemption, but for her it was enough. She took the runway portion of this competition extremely seriously, letting everything else for the most part wind up wherever it will. I personally wasn’t in love with her runway choices and I hated that jaw-dropped expression she constantly made, as if it made her look couture (if anything it accentuated her massive overbite). Her pic is a good representative of her: the makeup is on point but the head-on intensity comes off uncomfortable, and the hair is big and draggy, but just a little too much so. I tried to like her but couldn’t bring myself to.

On a side note, in some shots Alyssa looks *just* like my mother… it’s hysterical. And Penny Tration reminds me heavily of my deceased great-grandmother! I find it very soothing, as if she’s reaching out to me through one of my favorite shows. I’m odd. =P

It’s in this left picture here. That’s my freaking mother!!

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Remember when I said Alyssa Edwards lost her title of Miss Gay America? Guess who was first runner-up to replace her. Yes, Miss Coco Montrese. Talk about awkward. So crazy pageant drama aside, I found Ms Montrese to be one of the more glamorous queens of the season, who could pull off an evening gown better than any woman I know. She liked looking pretty, and even her edgy looks had a hint of glamour to them. Challenge-wise, Coco either did great or would completely flatline. These mood swings are not becoming of America’s Next Drag Superstar, and I expected so much more from a seasoned girl such as Coco during those times. I do like the banner pic though, it’s screams ‘Hollywood’ to me. And on a random note, Coco was one of those people who had contact lenses in every color and would switch them constantly. And yet none of them would help correct her lazy eye…

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Easily my favorite banner pic of them all. It’s just the way the hat and the hair play off each other, combined with the well-done face. Anyway, Detox did a wonderful job during the show. All of her runway looks, challenge performances and lip-syncs were unique and crafted with care. She probably has the most stern look of all the queens, and she combines this with raw sexiness to create such a forbidden pleasure to look at. She also had the admirable ability to force me to like every look she created, even if I personally didn’t like it. Her level of confidence could have made her the ‘villain’ of the season but it was her humility that made her likable, relatable and just such a pleasure to watch. She deserved to be in the Top 3, but 4th place is the next best thing, I guess.

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Now for the Top 3 queens, I’ll list them in the order I think they’ll be in. And I’m probably not far off.

Roxxxy Andrews rubbed me the wrong way right from the start. Similarly to Detox she has a lot of confidence, but doesn’t have the humility to keep it in check. Roxxxy would always think about how beautiful and pageant she was, and that her form of drag is the only form of drag. I for one was not buying it. (As Alyssa Edwards would say, ‘She’s selling, you ain’t buying?’) All I saw was overdone makeup, hair that was too big (like in the banner pic) and this self-proclaimed fabulosity with little to support it. Detox should be here in 3rd place, not Roxxxy. And for goodness sake, cut some Xs out of your freakin name! It’s been a bitch to keep writing her name out and keep forgetting Xs (or adding additional ones!)

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Alaska… love of my life… I am so F*CKING proud of you. You auditioned for Drag Race  every year since Season 1, only to have your boyfriend audition one time for Season 4 and take home the crown, and then finally you made it to Season 5 albeit with so much hype and pressure on your shoulders. Despite all this, you took this season by storm and gagged RuPaul with guilt as to why you weren’t on this show earlier. You have everything a good drag queen needs, physically, mentally and socially, and you kept me on the edge of my seat with every moment. I dreaded every episode out of the fear that you’d be sent home early, but with every episode you continued to impress and floor me with your raw talent. I love you and everything you embody, so much so that I’m willing to overlook that you wear the same 3 wigs over and over, especially that off-center poofy blonde one… that you happen to be wearing in your banner pic… =P

You have showed me never to give up on my personal dreams as a writer. With every post on this blog that comes and goes without anyone to read it or comment, it’s like how your audition tapes would be sent in vain. And yet… eventually… you made it on the show and wowed me over, letting your talent and destiny shine. Same here. One day the right person will read this and see that the world needs more of my beautiful prose, and will finance me so I may do this forever more in more mainstream venues. But until then I’ll keep sending in my audition tapes… I mean, keep blogging.

Alaska also belongs to a very elite group of Drag Racers who have never landed in the bottom two, and never lip-synced for her life save for the finale where she had no choice. Only Nina Flowers and Tyra Sanchez have accomplished this; Nina was 2nd place and Miss Congeniality of Season 1 and Tyra was Season 2’s winner. So Alaska is destined to win something.

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And then there’s Jinkx Monsoon, the very definition of an underdog, a dark horse, or any kind of animal metaphor to describe a fierce competitor that no one took seriously. Jinkx is the latest in a long line of camp queens that have been until now, unsuccessful on Drag Race. Tammie Brown, Mimi Imfurst, Pandora Boxx… all of them were misunderstood for their humor and uniqueness and therefore had their times on the main stage cut short. But Jinkx had just the right amount of lucidity to remain relevant at all times, all while ironically suffering from narcolepsy lol. Jinkx rarely looks like she’s in the same time period as everyone else, but never used it as an excuse. She just has ‘winner’ written all over her, combining stage presence with grace and an infectiously wholesome, caring demeanor. In my opinion she’s the embodiment of the new face of drag, and an accessible one at that. That’s just what the industry needs now more than ever. She dreams of performing on Broadway, and mark my words, she will. Though my heart is with Alaska, Jinkx Monsoon is the true and best deserved winner of Season 5.

All hail the queen.