What is RHG?

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to RHG Legacy.

If you've been around the internet for a while then chances are you've had some form of encounter with stick figures and stick figure animation. Whether you remember watching the original Shock Trilogy on stickpage.com or you like to gun down people as a mysterious man in golden armor in Fortnite, I bet most people reading this have at least SOME form of familiarity with it by now. And that's great! With all the new stick content going around and the rising popularity of artists like Alan Becker, Gildedguy, and Puffbals United, now may be one of the best points in history for the stickman community as a whole.

But what about what's been left behind?

I'm not here to talk about stick animation as a whole. Lord knows I'm not qualified enough for that. Instead, I am going to be focusing on a specific facet of the community that I'm slightly more qualified to cover in detail. A specific facet that's been largely forgotten and/or neglected by the internet as a whole. A facet that I'd argue has been instrumental to the growth of the community as a whole and to many artists who have gone on to do amazing things in the present day.

But I suppose I should answer that title question first.

What is RHG?

This is a simple question with a complex answer. Or maybe it's the other way around, I dunno. Point is, it's a little bit complicated, so I'm going to start with the way I know it best.

RHG, as you may have guessed by now, is an acronym. As of September 2021, it was officially changed to Rogues, Hunters, and Gladiators, but that's not what it stands for to me nor is it a change I like. Me and many others who have admired the community for a long time much prefer to refer to the system and its participants by its old name:

Rock Hard Gladiators.

If the name seems a little silly to you, it is, but I feel like that's part of the charm. RHG comes from a different era, the distant, far-off year of 2005. Simpler times. It started on a website called rockhardanims.com created by Travis Steven, better known to the community as "Stone". It was quickly rebranded to fluidanims.com and it remained as the central hub for RHG and its community until its unfortunate shutdown in 2012.

But we'll come back to that later. I've answered the semantics, but what about pragmatics? What is RHG? 

To put it simply, the Rock Hard Gladiator system was a way for animators to test their skills out against other animators in a very unique way. How it worked was that every animator had a character. Sometimes these characters changed over time and sometimes animators ditched their old characters to make new ones, but they all had a defined appearance and powerset. They were all stick figures too. In case that wasn't obvious.

Once an animator had a solid character and a "demo" animation showing off their own skill and their character's prowess, they started to seek out RHG battles. In these battles, two (or more, on very rare occasions) animators had to make an animation each about their character beating their opponent's. If both managed to complete their parts in a timely manner, people then voted on whose animation was better, and the winner had their character officially win the battle. 

Of course, those are just the basics, but it should be enough for any newcomer to get an understanding of the system. With that out of the way, time to resume that history lesson.

The history

To recap (or for those just skipping to a specific section), RHG was created in 2005 along with the site rockhardanims.com by animator Travis "Stone" Steven. As I mentioned, it was shut down in 2012, but many of its pages can still be seen through the Wayback Machine (and some plugin that reenables Flash for the best experience)

With such a good thing going, why did fluidanims shut down? It got sold off to another site called stickpage.com which was created in 1999 and, if you'll bear with me, I have a lot to say about this stickpage in particular.

First, a confession. I was not around for fluidanims's heyday. Don't get me wrong, I was very much acquainted on the internet at the time, but it never occurred to me to go to fluidanims. For me, stickpage was the place to be. If you were into stick content, stickpage was your Mecca. It's where I first learned about Animator vs. Animation, Xiao Xiao, Madness Combat, Henry Stickmin, and of course RHG.

Yet RHG's presence on the main site was surprisingly lowkey. Going onto the stick fights section and poking around a bit for battles will yield a handful or two at best. 

Not bad, but hardly a showing worthwhile of the supposed new home of RHG. So where was it hiding? The forums, of course! And guess what, they're completely defunct too! The forums have been archived on the wayback machine, but forums are notoriously a nightmare to archive and navigate on archival sites, plus the sheer amount of posts means that it's likely most of the content there is gone forever. 

A rather grim fate for RHG, right? Well, there's one more site to discuss. A small-time obscure animator by the name Eric "Hyun" Kwon decided to gather his friends and make his own website in 2012, coinciding with the closure of fluidanims. This new website would become Hyun's Dojo (https://www.hyunsdojo.com) and it is currently the main surviving site for mostly stick content and the final bearer of its legacy.

However, it's not exactly a home for RHGs. Hyun's dojo has its own system called Dojo Duels which are almost identical to RHGs in all but names and rules systems. The characters on this website are called "duelists" and the rules for dojo duels are both more open and more strict, with guidelines about deadlines, animation length, and a new relic-based scoring system alongside the opportunity for comic and written duels. I happen to have a written duelist myself, in fact! Maybe I'll talk about them some day.

That's the history of RHG to the best of my understanding, Soapycat's stick figure timeline goes more in-depth and has more information on the stick community as a whole, but this should be enough for the blog's purposes.

Yet, after all this history and backstory, you may be wondering...

Why does it matter?

They say the best way to hone a skill is through a stress-free environment.

Start out with just a few of your friends, show them your stuff, maybe introduce them to the medium too. Learn and help each other grow, but you're having fun along the way. It's not like the mandated learning in school where you hate it because you're forced to do it, this is something fun and enjoyable.

For many people, RHG was their place to start out. To have fun with their friends and mess around. Look at any older RHG battle and even while people are ripping each other to shreds, there's still an air of silliness and whimsy to all of it. Even with the competitive nature of RHG, nothing was taken as seriously as it is now. These were just animations to have fun and improve.

And many of these animators have gone on to do amazing things. Hyun, as I mentioned earlier, has his own website and community, Poppetje3D and Oxob3000 are doing independent animations paying tribute to and extending the stories of these characters, Terkoiz is working professionally for Alan Becker, Miccool has been credited on huge projects such as the My Hero Academia movie, and anyone into Glitchtale will be familiar with the name Camila Cueves.

And if you're not familiar with those names, don't worry, you will be soon.

Yet it would be unfair to only focus on the success stories. Many people just gave up, their passion petered out or life got in the way. They stopped animating and never went back for one reason or another, their creations being the only remaining fingerprint that they were ever there. And while they never went on to do other things in animation, at the time RHG was there for them, to entertain them and their passions and to provide friends to share them with.

So perhaps what I said earlier is wrong. Maybe RHG is more of a community than a system. But certainly not everyone interested in these stick animations are animators themselves. I'll be the first to admit I don't animate at all (nor am I interested in it). So what is it that makes it so special to us, the viewers? What's so special about it that drove me to start a blog?

I don't know.

Sticks have always been a part of me, and RHGs grew on me as a cast of (literally) colorful characters, moreso than more popular, perhaps more deserving series. But that's just me. It could very well be the same for many other people, but I'm sure others have their own reasons. 

Maybe it's watching the unrestrained creativity in the animations, maybe it's watching people with superpowers beating each other up, maybe it's the allure of anybody being able to become a success in animation, the American dream. I can't quite put my finger on a universal reason why it seems to attract so many people.

All I know is that there's a magic to it.

The blog

A few more things.

Firstly, if you've made it this far, I sincerely and genuinely thank you. I like to ramble about things that interest me for hours on end. That's sort of why I made this blog in fact, so I have a place to ramble on and on about this. I'll be going over RHG characters primarily, with the occasional dojo duelist. Every now and then I'll also do closer looks at the people behind these characters with what information I can gather and even posts about specific animations.

THESE WILL NOT BE REVIEWS. I AM NOT A REVIEWER. I want to get that out of the way. These are my opinions and mine alone. Do not take any of this too seriously. Despite the dramatic and serious nature of the rest of the post, at the end of the day these are still web animations.

The information presented on the blog will mostly be through my own knowledge and research. Questionable sources (such as the Stickpage Wiki) will be noted and I will mostly draw on information that can still be accessed in some form today. For lost media, I'll mostly be consulting other people when I can. My memory just isn't the best, sadly.

Finally, this blog will not be updated regularly at all. This is a project for fun and I do not want to stress out over a regular release schedule. I feel guilty enough about all my other deadlines as it is. So feel free to check in around once every month or so when the thought crosses your head if you enjoy reading my fanboy gushing. I update the blog whenever I want to or when big inspiration strikes.

Thank you again, happy reading, and Rock On!