angryskarloey - Tumblr blog

[angryskarloey]

This, I think, is the highest praise anybody could give me.

the stories you write are genuinely inspiring

! Thank-you so much!! I'm incredibly flattered you think so!

[angryskarloey]

the stories you write are genuinely inspiring

! Thank-you so much!! I'm incredibly flattered you think so!

[angryskarloey]

you've stripped him of so many of his qualities that it's no longer "he would not say that". it's "who the fuck even is that guy"

[angryskarloey]

adulthood is just a constant struggle of, “man, i want cookies for breakfast, but I also recognize this is a bad nutritional decision.  On the other hand, the only one who can stop me is me.  i know that fucker’s weaknesses.  i could totally take me in a fight.”

[angryskarloey]

So, after being reminded of the insanity that is Oliver Bulleid's Leader Class, and by extension some of the stranger aspects of Bulleid's engines in general, I have spiraled off into thinking of a new headcanon / additional bit of characterization for Rebecca.

For anyone who doesn't know, Oliver Bullied was the Chief Mechanical Engineer for the Southern Railway starting in 1937, and is partially known for several of his designs featuring some unorthodox features, most notably his use of chain driven valve gear.

Rebecca is a Bulleid Light Pacific, so I feel it would fit to take some inspiration from the previous information about her builder, appropriately turned up to 11 for comedic effect and to fit the overall tone of the BWBA seasons of TTTE.

Consider:

Rebecca as a massive nerd / tinkerer / mad scientist of an engine, who is constantly experimenting with silly, outside the box, and very overly complicated solutions to problems, as well as just trying out various dumb ideas for the hell of it.

She notices her brakes are beginning to wear out and decided to try and extend the time before she has to get them fixed by instead stopping by throwing her wheels into reverse.

Pro: Less damage to brakes

Con: More damage to... everything else.

She hears about how the Skarloey Railway used to run gravity trains and decides to see how far the troublesome trucks can go on their own if released from the top of Gordon's Hill...

On the mainline...

Without telling anyone...

Maybe she spends a lot of time hanging around the Dieselworks of all places, because she's endlessly fascinated by the jury-rigged and patchwork repairs that have been made over the years to the work's equipment.

Den and Dart are confused by this, but feel very honored when Rebecca calls then "resourceful" and "innovative" for how they have kept the Dieselworks running.

There's even some support for this characterization in canon.

Rebecca is shown to be fascinated by the unique features of Harvey, Marion, and Belle in the episode What Rebecca Does and wishes she had something unique for herself.

She seems to have an appreciation for unusual designs built to solve specific problems and do special tasks.

Then there's this quote from Rebecca's introductory scene in the episode Confusion Without Delay:

“Hello, sir. And, uh, sorry, sir. I miscalculated how long it would take me to stop…by, uh, quite a lot!”

The use of "miscalculated" feels like it fits with what I've laid out so far, like she actually tried to do the math in her head to come to a precise stop and it just didn't work out.

Now, is all of this very silly and a bit dumb? Yes

But is it funny? Also yes

Not only that, but there's honestly some pretty good story potential here.

Like, what if there was an episode with Rebecca and Duck?

There could be a conflict between Ducks adherence to the tried-and-true and very practical Great Western Way, and Rebecca's desire to always think outside the box and try something new.

And Rebecca's trying to be respectful of and go along with Ducks way of doing things, but frankly she just keeps getting bored and ends up inevitably distracted with trying out he own new ideas.

Most of them don't work, and fail in comedic fashion.

But one of Rebecca's ideas actually looks like it could succeed...

Until Duck, but now tired of the delays to his work, interrupts and unintentionally causes the whole thing to fall apart.

The eventual resolution to this story could then come in the form of the Slip Coaches being brought into the mix.

The Slip Coaches, who are a product of the Great Western Railway, and yet are also an example of a seemingly strange and outside the box idea, which proved to be successful when given the chance.

The story could then conclude with the moral of how some ideas that seem stupid might just need a bit of extra time and patience to develop and refine them into a practical application.

[angryskarloey]

The letters y and w are genderfluid or bigender. X sort of is but in a different way. I don't think Z is but they do have two names so they hang out with them as well. We don't talk about why & got kicked out of the friend group.

[angryskarloey]

The talk about Henry’s rebuild has reminded me of my personal headcanon regarding how they turned a failed prototype (or whatever he was - I do like the modified H2 idea) into a Black 5.

Basically, in 1923, the GWR “rebuilt” one of the locomotives from the Vale of Rheidol so thoroughly that none of the parts of the original could actually have fitted on the new engine. In reality, they’d just discarded the old one and started over, but legally it was a rebuild (IDK why - tax reasons or something IG).

I like to think something similar happened to Henry. IIRC the LMS couldn’t actually legally build engines for other railways at the time, so they brought Henry in, Ship-of-Theseus’d him entirely for a Black 5, and then had it written up as a rebuild to get around the rules - and because it was officially a rebuild (or because Stanier knew the engine equivalent of black magic - using some tiny part or some of the metal from the old Henry or something), doing it that way transferred Henry’s consciousness to the new body.

(I don’t like the theories that Henry I and Henry II are entirely separate - I like to think such transfers can happen. In my OC stuff that Vale of Rheidol engine comes up and he also has memories from before his “rebuild” >:3)

Oh that's neat. Stanier as a wizard of death who can use powers for good fits all too well with his history of scrapping engines set aside for preservation...

I'm also not a huge fan of Henry I and Henry II as distinct characters. But the tropes here are catnip - "tax dodge bs" (classic Fat Controller stuff) and "regeneration, with memories from your previous life that pop up at significant moments" (I'm so weak for that stuff).

[angryskarloey]

✨️3801✨️

Wonderful engine. Possibly controversial opinion-the C38 class look better in black or gray.

And possibly more controversially, look best unstreamlined

[angryskarloey]

If Henry is tangentially related to the Ivatt C1s like a lot of people say, there's really no reason he needs to be a rival-built stolen A0 prototype; the LBSCR could have just thrown together an extended version of the H2, cheaped out during wartime (even moreso than usual) giving him a steel firebox, and decided they didn't like him and sold him off. The Sudrian firemen, not used to a steel firebox, have no idea how to fire him properly leading to atrocious steaming, even with his decently sized firebox.

Incidentally, this same scenario could be done with a regular H2 to have Atlantic Henry without changing his character arc too much.

We are jettisoning Island of Sodor as canon in this scenario... right? I find I can't quite remember now how firmly Henry's IoS entry establishes his origins, nor can I find my pdf right now.

I'm very intrigued to learn about this steel firebox business. Is that an LBSCR specialty in general or just something they tried out on this hypothetical experiment?

(I enjoy these scenarios exploring how Sodor's railwaymen cope with some of the random-ass stuff thrown at them. There is no standardisation on the early N.W.R. whatsoever and it's cool to think about how they cope (or don't cope) with some 'foreign' feature and how that might play into canon. Like with Henry's firebox, or Gordon's third cylinder, or Thomas's original lack of vacuum, etc.)

[angryskarloey]

recently i have spent a lot of time reading (and reading again... and again...) 'Impossible Things' by FutureRust and let me just tell you... it is so insanely good. i highly recommend anybody who hasn't already read it gives it a shot.

anyway, i decided to have a go at drawing two of the original characters in the fic, those being 'Shomari', an EAR 24 Class and 'Little Grace', an EAR GSL Class. they help give a wonderful backstory to Nia in the fic which i just absolutely adore.

[angryskarloey]

Mass prodiucing these sketches rn gonna try to get most of them done this week

[angryskarloey]

Thomas the privatised engine #2

Seperate section to save space, it's another page for funsies.

[angryskarloey]

Got any head cannons for these engines or should it be this?

I’m so sorry, but I absolutely do not. 

When I had a headcanon, I ran into the discovery of Just How Many Different Narrow Gauges There Actually Are, and I gave up. 

[angryskarloey]

Handle with love

[angryskarloey]

I’m still haunted by this one TikTok I saw ages ago (before I was in the fandom) that was about the fact that the Thomas fandom exists. And at one point they were talking about a fanfic that was apparently popular in it which was about two engines that were in love but they were on separate railway tracks or something so they couldn’t be together??

I still really want to know more about the context of what that fanfic was, cause the premise doesn’t seem familiar to me (in terms of tropes that people tend to write about the engines)

[angryskarloey]

oh my god dude

[angryskarloey]

It is impossible to contemplate any steam-engine, without feeling wonder and admiration at the ingenuity of man; but this feeling is raised to a degree of awe when you look at a locomotive engine—there is such enormous power compressed into so small a space—I never can divest myself of the idea that it is possessed of vitality—that it is a living as well as a moving being—and that idea, joined with its immense power, conjures up in my mind that it is some spitting, fizzing, terrific demon, who, if he could escape control, would be ready and happy to drag us by thousands to destruction.

— Frederick Marryat, “Diary on the Continent” (Olla Podrida)

Inauguration du premier chemin de fer en Belgique or Départ de la Flèche le 5 mai 1835 by Jan Antoon Neuhuys, 1885. An artistic recreation of the new Belgian rail lines of 1835 that Marryat witnessed on his continental tour.