picklesthenonbeanary

[picklesthenonbeanary]

I keep thinking about the way many of the gods are kind of paired: Bauhauzzo and Huzzle Mug, and Thespius and Click Clack are the obvious ones. They have complementary domains that bolster each other: Bauhauzzo's history and memory and Huzzle's art and invention are intertwined and necessary for each other - which is why they absolutely cannot be separated, while Thespius and Click Clack's partnership is representative of the writing process itself, with them also filling in each other's stories in a way.

When I first played the game, I had wondered if Inspekta and King were similarly meant to be complementary gods. Leadership and eloquence of speech complement each other very well, and it is Inspekta's increasing reliance on orders and manipulation that makes things fall apart for him. But a lack of communication is really what happened with everyone in this game. It's King's loss more than Inspekta's letters alone that triggers the plot.

Moreover, King is quite literally paired with Miss Mitternacht, and that makes a lot of sense, really. Oldest and newest, dark and light. The way the quiet, soothing ambiance of the night is comforting, and how a carefully chosen phrase can illuminate our thoughts, feelings and next steps. They have that shared imagery of an open heart, and both are excellent at choosing the right words. Both are in the domain of bringing people together - Miss M is the mother, King, the folk hero. Moreover, they provide each other a necessary balance: Miss Mitternacht is a well of deep emotion that can quickly flood her over without some much needed perspective or clarity - but once she has that to work with, she spends much of the game behind the scenes putting two and two together, importantly, still driven by her big heart to believe in a person others have given up on. Fascinatingly, it is Miss Mitternacht who eventually finds the words to stop Inspekta's rampage spiral, when King could not. (<- I think about this all the time, btw.) They are the complement to each other. Both are masters of the domain of getting to the "heart" of a matter.

And besides, I keep coming back to poor Cobigail.

Most chapters of the game have two gods. Milldread has only one, adding to the visualization of Cobigail's isolation and loneliness, and really, the whole town's. No one works together. Their god is one of the harvest, but no one seems to remember what that means. There's some horrific implications to what's happening here. No one has visited Cobigail in twenty years. The townsfolk genuinely begin to believe rumours that she drinks blood. Cobigail can't remember whether or not this is true. No one shares any knowledge, so everything, their history and their memories as a community, are fragmented.

This must have started much earlier, before everyone stopped visiting Cobigail. What the reason for this is, we don't know, but there is something deeply concerning about the way that memory starts to fail, even in a god. Especially, even - do the memories of a god start to fail when the community forgets their importance? When the god is forgotten, do they lose themselves too? How terrifying. We never get a hint that Cobigail is scared, per se, but all the same, the loneliness is palpable, she just doesn't let on. She ends off every conversation with a scare, like she's trying to get as many pranks and jokes in as possible. She's hungry, like everyone else in the town; starved not just of a full harvest, but also of interaction and community.

And this is exactly what we later learn that Inspekta is so terrified of.

I wonder, did he have something to do with the initial dissolution of Milldread all those years ago? Or perhaps, was he simply witness to it, fueling the fear within him?

Cobigail and Inspekta make a lot of sense as complementary gods. One rooted, one constantly moving. Both are sustained/"fed" by their people. A leader without a community has no one to lead, but a community without some sort of unifying presence or goal will start to fracture or stagnate. Unity is what we learn Inspekta initially brought to the Bizzyboys - a chance to live better lives, a "poipose", a place to belong. That's... community. It's community he gave them. But along the way his fears took over his good intentions, and the Bizzyboys became a facsimile of a community instead of an actual one.

In Milldread, everyone forgot their god and their community as they detached further from each other, individual to the point of losing any semblance of cohesion. Meanwhile, the Bizzyboys' comradery becomes increasingly predicated on serving their god and becoming a singular group with no individuality, quite literally losing their own names and having to "earn" them back. And as Inspekta falls apart, so too does even this comradery.

The Bizzyboys are barely a cohesive group by the time we meet them in game - held together more by hero worship, fear of punishment, loyalty, and (in Capo's case) desperation more than anything. And for Inspekta, this is just not enough, further feeding into his spiral, and causing him to seize more and more power and control.

...where was I going with this? Right. This is my long-winded way of explaining why I think Cobigail and Inspekta's domains as gods are somewhat complementary, and I will now be forever wondering what their dynamic was like, or whether they ever really interacted much at all.

[picklesthenonbeanary]

Please please please ramble about your GGG headcanons! I always love hearing other people's thoughts! :D Anything would be good!

Oh boy oh howdy oh golly oh gosh! Thank you for asking, I'm always excited to share!!!

Let's see..... I think people might like the Hobbyhoo Prohibition headcanons! So let's have a history lesson!

Now this is something I've admittedly rambled about at length in a few specific peoples' DMs on Discord (Hi Jathis, Hi Molluscs, love you guys~<3) which is probably why they're so developed. But I've yet to share them with a wider audience so I hope y'all enjoy!

See, like a lot of people, I love Thespius and Click Clack. I love these two disaster gay art gods I want all the happiness for them, I rotate them in my mind constantly, I could literally write a whole novel length book with my headcanons about their lives together. They fascinate me so, truly they do. They are the Sun and Moon, the Tragedy and Comedy, the Muse and Creator, what absolutely delightful beings these gods of the Grove are.

What can I say? Bitches be weak for a good Lovestory!

(It's me, I'm bitches)

And it was in one of my many sessions of putting these funky art gods in the mental microwave and spinning them right round like a record baby right round, that I thought about something. Thespius is very very clearly visually influenced and designed around the 1960s and 70s. Mans is a hippie, we all know this we all love this.

But very curiously, Click Clack - who we know ascended after Thespius - is visually influenced by a much earlier time period, being seemingly designed in the style of a rubberhose cartoon character, which was a style that had it's peak in the 1920s and had mostly fallen out of fashion by the 1930s. If Click Clack came later, then why the anachronism?

Well, I set my wheels a-spinning, and thought about the world of GGG as I see it, which is that it is not a direct echo of our world, but rather a half-remembered copy of our world made from a time-space-flavoured-fruit-salad of all of our history, mashed together from the bits left behind when the Rift ate The World Before This One.

In such a world, the presentation of historical elements we recognize aren't so much laid out in an order we recognize. So perhaps the presentation of West Hobbyhoo and it's God with some 1920s hollywood influence is indicative not of wild anachronism, but that the era in which Click Clack became a God was taking some cues from the 20s.

And here's where things start to click (ha) together.

Thespius is very visibly designed around the idea of a hippie musician. The hippie movement was a countercultural movement focusing on freedom of self expression, lifestyle, love, art, and spirituality, an escape from oppressive societal structures, the ever-growing daily grind, and the rot of capitalism, and on the pursuit of equality, peace, and harmony amidst the peoples of the world, and harmony between people and nature.

The 1920s on the other hand (specifically in America and especially in Hollywood which is where I'm drawing my influence from here) were very much the peak of the "American Dream", the golden age of glamour. But they also saw a fascinating conflict of older structures and oppressive government practices vs social and political movements geared towards equality and personal freedoms spearheaded by the youth.

My headcanon goes like this. Thespius' ascension looked very much as it was portrayed in Modmad's wonderful comic "The Ascension of Thespius Green" (Read 'Here', it's really good and very worth your time).

And due to the nature of Thespius' ascension, it's aftermath spelled bad news for those who had worked to make art into an industry in Hobbyhoo. Because see, now there was a God encouraging artists to create for their own sake, rather than selling their souls to talent agencies and record labels and big budget studios, to buy a ticket in the one-in-a-billion-chance lottery of making it big. Which wasn't good for the high up execs who ran that lottery. After all, how were they meant to make their obscene amounts of money without starry eyed hopefuls to exploit?

They wanted to put a stop to the spread of this new god's "dangerous ideals" before any damage could be done to their bottom line. But they hit a stumbling block. Namely, they had to answer the question 'How Do You Ban a God in The Grove?'

It wasn't as though they could outright reject Thespius' god-status. The vote had long since been held, and more than that he'd already ascended. That wasn't something they could just 'Nuh uh' out of existence. But, fortunately for these poor, put upon, slimy bastard capitalists, eventually they figured out a workaround.

See, the governmental structure of the Grove is a sort collective of souped up Theocracies, where instead of a high priest or divine king, each municipality is ruled over by a patron god or gods, with those gods then being beholden to eachother and responsible for keeping one another in line. Hobbyhoo in its infancy was a bit unique in this regard however, as it had not been initially founded under divine guidance.

Initially an offshoot branch of Buzzhuzz, Hobbyhoo was quite literally built from the ground up by artists and the entertainment industry. Starting as a collection of theatres, art schools, and studios out in the woods, and slowly growing over time until eventually becoming their own sort of independent city. As such, Hobbyhoo did not initially have a patron god, leaving the governmental decisionmaking power in the hands of the executives running the various companies and studios the town had been built on.

And those executives decided that Actually Hobbyhoo was still an un-patroned city. Thespius might've lived in the city in his mortal life, but he wasn't raised there. He was raised in a little commune out on the edge of the woods, far out from the city (This commune would later grow into the town of Milldread btw). He'd spent most of his mortal life down on earth. And the entrance to his domain wasn't even in the city proper, it was out in a tent on a tall cliff in the woods!

So clearly, Thespius was not the god of Hobbyhoo's city. He was the god of the Hobbyhoo Hills, the wilder, more untamed part of the area, West Hobbyhoo was still an unpatroned city and that was that.

And that being that meant that within the city, Thespius' word held no power. And while the execs running the show couldn't ban Thespius' worship outright, or ban the god himself, they could start to really put the Squeeze on his followers, while insistently maintaining plausible deniability.

If they demanded a strict, hard to get, expensive liscence for busking and playing music in public spaces, it wasn't because Thespius offered his divine protections to street performers, no it was because they wanted to encourage these talented young artists to strive higher, sign on with a record label, get famous! If they started really tightening the screws on independently run theatres and film studios, it wasn't because performance art was sacred to Thespius, no not at all, they just really really cared about making sure Hobbyhoo's standards of quality entertainment were upheld.

They put in place strict noise ordinances, curfews, dry laws, all with the intent to criminalize the revelry and celebration that was structural to Thespian worship. They had a wall constructed around the city, to make the distinction between the city and the hills very very clear. They restricted what could be shown in movies and plays. What could be sung about written about, joked about, talked about. And anyone who was found breaking these new laws was punished severely. Arrested and thrown in jail for excessive amounts of time, fined until they could no longer afford to live in their homes, some particularly outspoken souls were even threatened with banishment from the Grove, though such threats were thankfully always empty as only a god could banish a grove citizen.

The goal was to either drive Thespius' followers out of the city, or scare them into shutting up. And the unfortunate thing is that it did actually work. Many Thespians fled the city (such is the origin of the term "Running for the Hills" in the world of Great God Grove), and those who couldn't or wouldn't leave their homes in the city learned to keep their worship as quiet as possible, for fear of getting arrested.

The effort wasn't completely successful however. Prohibition was deeply unpopular, and there were those who either had enough to say, or little enough to lose that they were willing to stand up and speak out against this oppression. People protested. They marched in the streets. Hobbyhoo's independent underground theatre scene that’s famous worldwide to this day as how the greatest of the greats get their start has it’s roots in the prohibition, with the original underground theatres being akin to speakeasies, as well as social centres for the city’s Thespian population. They were also connected to Hobbyhoo’s catacombs, which became instrumental for those who were forced to escape the city after the wall was built.

Chief among those who would not go down quietly was Thespius’ best friend, the passionate filmmaker and part-time godpoke we would eventually come to know as Click Clack, the God of Storytelling (Do I have names for these two when they were mortal? Yes. Am I putting them here? Nope.) Who was very insistent on making a right proper nuisance of himself. High up enough on the food chain as it were to not be in direct line of fire, they were able to do some serious good for the people who needed it, and to deal some serious damage to those who picked this fight.

And they did so on two separate fronts. Public facing and in the daylight, along with making films, comics, and cartoons that espoused the values of Love and Mirth and subtly criticized the prohibition laws and those who made them, they were a passionate advocate for the rights of workers and artists within Hobbyhoo’s studios, fighting for unionization and workplace safety regulations, as well as becoming quite well known for their insistence on fairness and transparency when it came to contracts. At the same time, after dark, they were effectively Thespius’ first priest, developing the god’s rites and teaching them to others, while also helping people leave the city to settle in the hills, or find ways to practice in quiet at home if they didn’t want to leave the city. He organized charity events to set up bail funds for those who were arrested during protests, and was often right on the front lines of those protests himself, megapon in hand, ready to help raise the voices of those who stood alongside him.

Their actions went on to inspire and enable other creatives in the city to follow his example. Art from the Hobbyhoo prohibition era was incredibly politically charged, from paintings and posters, to books and movies made in that time. Conflict between artist and buyer, author and publicist, filmmaker and production company bled through in every piece produced in those fraught years.

Things truly came to a boil about 30 years in, as preparations began for the next Rift celebration. In an attempt to stabilize the worsening civil unrest, an unprecedented second consecutive God Election was held to appoint an official god of West Hobbyhoo. The city's high rollers had hoped to put one of their own up in the pantheon to fully cement the divide between the city and the hills, and give divine power to the laws they'd put in place.

Unfortunately for that plan and very fortunately for everyone else, the God Election system had been specifically orchestrated to prevent that kind of powergrabby tomfuckery [Tune in later when I talk about how Huzzle Mug invented the God Elections], putting the vast majority of the voting power in the hands of the people, rather than local goverment. So while the top brass put their candidate forward, anyone who wanted to was welcome to contest.

And contest they did. As you could probably guess, Click Clack stepped up for election as well. They conducted their campaign with the same fire that they had long since become well known for. And to say the election was a massacre would be the understatement to end all understatements. They won in an absolute landslide, despite multiple instances of attempted sabotage along the way. And no amount of protesting, whinging, handwringing, or 'um actully'ing about where he was from, how long they'd been in the Grove, or whether or not he was in some nebulous way 'qualified' for godhood could change the simple irrefutable fact that they were the people's choice for the Patron God of West Hobbyhoo.

This election led into the final conflict of the Hobbyhoo prohibition. The Silencing.

Forever a black mark on Hobbyhoo's history, the Silencing was an act of mass domestic terror, wherein what few bits of Thespian iconography were left in the city were violently defaced, or even destroyed, with those who tried to intervene getting attacked for their trouble. This was the first time in the Grove's history that anyone had ever been so brazen as to effectively launch an attack against one of the gods. (Its also so far the only time that the people of the Grove ever managed to injure one of their gods, but that's it's own little story, that is in the process of being written, stay tuned~!)

The attack was devastating, but the response to it was immediate and awe inspiring. Once the people who had been attacked or frightened into fleeing had been safely evacuated from the city, and their god of love had been tended to, Hobbyhoo's newly elected god-to-be took those like-minded souls well enough and willing enough to stand up and fight for what they believed in, and led them in the biggest, loudest demonstration the Sunset Strip had ever- and indeed has ever seen.

The first proper festival of the God of Love and Mirth, known to us today as the Hobbyhoo Heart and Soul Festival, was nothing short of a riot.

Because you see, the beating heart of Hobbyhoo is and always has been Passion, in all its many forms.

And Passion does not take well to being Silenced.

While historically, the era of the Hobbyhoo Prohibition does not technically end until Click Clack's ascension, the subsequent legal reform of West Hobbyhoo, and the reunification of the city and the hills, it can be said that socially, that riot was the final nail in Prohibition's coffin. The moment when the people stood up and said enough was enough. Especially as the riot, the words of the then-godpoke, and the harm done to one of their own drew the eyes of the other gods to Hobbyhoo, and soon help was coming in from Buzzhuzz and the Cove to push back against those who'd gotten far too comfortable using their power to abuse and control those without.

The message was clear. The gods themselves stood with Thespius and his followers. And those who had pushed for prohibition to go as far as it had knew from that moment that their own days were numbered.

The smart ones left the Grove of their own volition, entering self imposed exile so as to not face the consequences of what they pushed for. The ones who insisted on staying would get their just desserts come the Rift festival and the ascension of Hobbyhoo's new god.

Upon taking his place in the pantheon, Click Clack was quick and ruthless, calling forward those who'd been responsible for the worst of it all, and promptly banishing them not just from the city, but from the Grove altogether. Those who went quietly went with only the crushing knowledge that they would never see their homes again. But those who protested? Those who still, after everything, were dumb enough to try and claim their actions were justified?

Well. It takes a very particular type of fool to challenge the judgement of the God that edits the world's story.

And while the Gods of the Grove are forbidden from harming mortals, and the divine oath of ascension mandates that they forgive always, and encourage forgiveness always, it does not demand that they give their divine protections or the gifts of their domain to those who forsake them. To have the story itself turn its back on you is a very grave misfortune indeed.

But well...

It just couldn't have happened to nicer people, could it?

Collapses my impromptu history teacher pointer stick

And there ya go! The story of the Hobbyhoo Prohibition in as many words as I can use without writing an actual novel about it! Thanks again for giving me an excuse to ramble, I do hope my mad ravings were at least somewhat entertaining, stop by again anytime! Sorry this took me two weeks ;v;

[picklesthenonbeanary]

REBLOG IF IT IS OKAY TO COME INTO YOUR INBOX AND SAY THE RANDOMEST SHIT I CAN THINK OF BECAUSE I REALLY WANT TO INTERACT WITH YOU.

[picklesthenonbeanary]

ever wanted to see every single blinkie that i've ever made? well now you can! i made a whole (very bare bones) page on my wip of a neocities page just for that! hooray! :D

it looks so bleh rn but thats cuz i haven't decided on how i want it to look fully and cuz this was litterally my first day makinging and actually fiddling with the pages :]

litterally all the blinkies are ggg (except 2) so its a good place to find those if you want them for decorating and the such! :D

learning to code is fun but its so so hard! agh! its hard to make things pretty </3

[picklesthenonbeanary]

website wip! wuh hooo! :D

just messing around, its kinda fun when it works :>

figured out how tomake containers andnow i just gotta finish making the rest of my vision for the site. its gonna be very simple and then you can scroll down into the rest of the page and thats where i'll actually have some stuff :]

having fun on this project. maybe after this i'll make a site for my school portfolio next (by that i mean after this site, not this page lol. i still have more to do, example being the todolist i've got)

thank you anon from a few months ago, you have definitely helped the idea take more strong of a hold in my brain (also the fact i want somewhere to archive my blinkies). i guess you will now get to see what a website made by me would actually look like :]

theres nothing on there (besides whats on screen) but heres the link.

will update it more as i go and change things. my biggest challenge is gonna be what i want my links tab to look like (i have an idea i just don't know how to css it into reality just yet), might use grids. it looks pretty elaberate to do from my research

[picklesthenonbeanary]

different version of the gif, hopefully this one works better

[picklesthenonbeanary]

been working on a webpage for myself :]

just need a place to put my assets for it so I don’t loss them

Will post more as I make them :D (this is such! A heavy wip site and i don’t even know if I’m gonna finish it anytime soon with school coming up and I gotta lock in on my SAT prep stuff (I’ve been slacking))

[picklesthenonbeanary]

self indulgent Great God Grove stamps made from the new trading cards

very quality mmmm

edit: these are free to use no credit needed :)

[picklesthenonbeanary]

so that new click clack trading card huh

[picklesthenonbeanary]

feeding him zucchini bread :]

It’s so tasty! My siblings made it! Yay yay yippie! Let him have a bite. He is keeping me company on this long long car ride I got myself into

[picklesthenonbeanary]

if you are request clickclacks *bats eyelashes* modmad's drainish director clicky? maybe??

anon i am SO sorry this took so long i ended up painting it and putting so much effort into it i had to spend the entire month painting it :sob:

also hi @modmad. bats my eyelashes. i painted your clicky :-)

[picklesthenonbeanary]

more photos! :D

Past the smoke towers and into the fields

taking Inspekta on a drive :]

Gonna show him all the corn fields frfr /hj (there are a lot of corn fields on the way to where we are going tho)

[picklesthenonbeanary]

taking Inspekta on a drive :]

Gonna show him all the corn fields frfr /hj (there are a lot of corn fields on the way to where we are going tho)

[picklesthenonbeanary]

I’M SHAKING SO FUCKING HARD.

[picklesthenonbeanary]

I’M SHAKING SO FUCKING HARD.

[picklesthenonbeanary]

Quick blinkie I made for the fun of it

Hello new neighbors! 👋

Excited about playing toys with you all :]

[picklesthenonbeanary]

GREAT GOD GROVE.