And, looking back, we realized that the invasion had begun long ago. Our side had been infultrated as long as ten years ago, or even earlier. Voltron. Speed Racer. Silverhawks. Transformers. In the begining, very few knew that they were not of our kind, but after the invasion it was painfully obvious to everyone.
It came out of the East. A giant fortress. Flowing with energy, bristling with guns. A spaceship unlike any we had ever seen. At first, we thought it was a creation of the humans, but no, it was a form of toon life. It was just drawn very detailed.
And surounding the ship, docking with it, crawling on it, a thousand kinds of smaller ships zoomed about. Even some living creatures. The denzians of the ship seemed to be fighting minor skirmishes with each other even as we watched, but their main attention was focused on us. A few garbled attempts at communication were made fom within the huge craft, but they were all in broken Japanese.
So we turned to our leaders for help. The cartoon creators. They told us to prepare for battle. Some of the humans said that they got the translation wrong, but the aliens' intentions were obvious.
They wanted our audiences.
We could not surrender without a fight, but our early defenses fell quite easily. The few military vehicles in toontown said that the invaders' weapons reacted diffrently from either real or toon blasts. Our improvised weapons were no use; the alien toons reacted the same way to slapstick as humans do. With surprise at first, then mild disgust and annoyance, then finally indiference. You can't hit a spaceship over the head with a hammer or throw a pie at it. At least, most of them we couldn't.
Hand to hand combat was even worse. At first, it appeared that they had no ability to squash and stretch. But no, they simply had subtler uses of it. Perhaps we could have overpowered them individually, as they were mortal and we were not. But they bled. Very few of us were able to keep attacking once we realized that.
We prayed for divine intervention from the Censors. But the creatures on the ship had been created under diffrent circumstances, and did not have to answer to them. All appeared lost...
Finally, backup arrived. We watched as our invincible superheros fought against the shipful of robots, martial artists, and alien monsters. Their forces were great, but for a while it seemed as if we might hold them back. That was when they recieved help from the last place we expcted.
Our viewers. They welcomed the change of venue offered by the invaders, and demanded their imigration. Not many, but enough for small companies to form, devoted to translating the Japanese cartoons. We knew we would be forced to call a truce eventually...
A curious irony. Under the truce, they became susceptable to the influence of the almighty Censors. We were able to have our way with Sailor Moon, and to a lesser extent, we assimilated Dragon Ball into our culture without exposing our beloved children audience to too much of their darker influence. Samuri Pizza Cats willingly submitted to massive rewrites because it was full of jokes that made no sense in English.
But it was then that we realized the awful truth. The fans who had helped the invaders were primarily adults. They eagerly snapped up those who the censors had tried to deport altogether, and released them under ratings systems. Very few catroons had needed a ratings system before.
Now, I fear the end is near. Sure, the initial threat is past, but our lives are changed forever. We see very few adults in toontown anymore. It has become unprofitable to run a pub. The adults prefer to frequent the Manga District. The toons are more serious there, less unpredictable. Or so the humans say. I don't think that's entirely true. It is completely possible for a person to die there... or worse. Something like that could never happen in the old Toontown.
There is no way to reverse what happened. I guess we'll just have to learn to get along. But, it's funny, we always used to annoy most adult humans. We tried our best to be friendly, but nothing seemed to work. We eventually came to the conclusion that cartoons and adults just don't mix.
Looks like Japan has proved us wrong.