Family Guy is now in Fortnite as part of Chapter 5. In an attempt to explain his latest glow-up, Fortnite itself has created a short that will haunt my nightmares.
While the choice to make Peter Griffin swole makes sense from a design perspective (his peak male physique would have required a whole new set of animations to avoid becoming clip city), it’s also something that’s happened in the cartoon before. Still, Fortnite has felt the need to provide an explainer short, no doubt to calm down fans concerned about Family Guy’s deep, complex, seasons-spanning multiversal narrative, rivalled only by fantasy epics like The Wheel of Time.
In the video we see Meowscles (a buff cat who I’m told is actually a dad in a turbulent relationship with Lynx) giving Peter Griffin a physical. After Peter rejects several self-help books, Meowscle gives him an expired jar of slurp juice which transforms him into an action hero.
He then jumps through a portal into the Fortnite world, grabs onto the landing skids of the Petercopter, and I feel my Bloodborne-style insight counter go up as a fracture in my brain opens up to the new terrible reality we now all exist in.
In seriousness: Fortnite’s been a carnival of media mash-ups for a for a while now. You can rock up as Rick from Rick and Morty, start swinging around like Spider-Man, then Kamehameha Will Smith. We’re far beyond the point where anything will make rational sense.
Moreover, the Fortnite spirit has seeped into other games. PC Gamer’s Morgan Park actually pointed this out last week, calling it “Cosmetic Uglification.” Which makes the Family Guy crossover less of a surprise and more of an inevitability. Modern Warfare 3 has an off-brand Groot skin in it, one that even had to be pulled because it clashed so poorly with the art style that it was wildly overpowered.
I just mostly don’t know who this short’s for. Was anyone concerned about Peter Griffin’s impact on the canon? Is his inclusion really a part of some delicate tapestry in the Fortnite lore? Moreover, why did Meowscles cohere to Family Guy’s artstyle in Peter’s home dimension, while Peter remained largely unchanged by the world of Fortnite? I have more questions than answers.