relentlessanalysis

[relentlessanalysis]

(realising now that every time loop story I've engaged with turned out extremely death-heavy. even when it's all just a dream.

i'd say it's for the best this version of phil is genre blind, but the thought's already looming over him.)

[relentlessanalysis]

(realising now that every time loop story I've engaged with turned out extremely death-heavy. even when it's all just a dream.

i'd say it's for the best this version of phil is genre blind, but the thought's already looming over him.)

[relentlessanalysis]

(ooooo yeah that's goin in the vocabulary)

omniscient reader's viewpoint reference. get webnovelsed, loser.

@relentlessanalysis on it chief 🫡

[relentlessanalysis]

It is simply not fulfilling to enjoy media in the height of its popularity. You need to show up so late to the party that everybody else is gone and the hosts are asleep so you can rummage through their trash for chip dip and stale hors d’oeurves to eat alone in the dark like a dirty little raccoon secret

[relentlessanalysis]

ayyy congrats on the free time!! hope that goes better for you than it's obviously going for phil (low bar lmao)

also YEAH it's so strange trying to think from the pov of a timelooper without that cultural context. the first time i saw the show i was like "mental breakdown on the third loop? weak" and then i realized phil probably has no fictional examples to help him with this so i guess he just thinks he's going insane. webnovels could fix him. anyway i think you're doing a really good job of depicting his attempts to cope with that (in particular the whole saturdays thing from the main story comic is peak)!

(Previous)

(So far so good! I spent some time splatted on the couch, but now I've got the energy to program and work on story outlines again. Finally 👨‍🔬 chapter five stick figures.

And EXACTLY. I still remember watching the movie as a kid, and how it introduced me to the concept. I completely missed all the subtext so I was mostly unsettled by how nothing was explained. I had no clue what I'd do in Phil's situation.

I can't fault the man for not thinking of a trust password when his early attempts to explain got him sent to the hospital, and later attempts creeped people out. Get that grown-ass man some edgy manga. It's like a temporal self-help book

And thank you!! I'm still pretty happy with that chapter, which is rare for me.

I picture February 2nd as being as freeing as it is invasive. No consequences, but no structure. Only two hours of work, but you're expected to do it every morning. No bills to pay, but you don't own anything. Your situation is always going to be a secret no matter how hard you try.

I don't know how I'd build a life around that. Given how terrible Act 1 Phil is at introspection, I figured he'd try to force his idea of normal on the rest of the world.

A shame his normal life kinda sucked, too.)

[relentlessanalysis]

hi how goes it? (can be a phil ask or a mod ask. or both?)

"Everything that's ever been written, and I get five minutes to sort through it all."

--

(Hello anon! I'm doing good, thanks. Made it through a series of rough deadlines and finally have some time off. Personal projects here I come.

Unrelated Phil thought of the day: knowing the movie popularised the time loop trope in English-speaking countries makes my head hurt sometimes. It didn't invent it - the concept's been around since the '40s, give or take. But thirty years later, people still mutter Groundhog Day when they feel history repeat.

It's something I have to remind myself of whenever I write Phil, because obviously the movie and its cultural impact can't exist here.

Of course Phil's having a much harder time navigating things and explaining himself than the average time loop protagonist. "Time loop" won't be in anyone's vocabulary here, unless they're a historical sci-fi nerd or watch a lot of anime. Both unlikely for small town Pennsylvania.)

[relentlessanalysis]

doubletexting again sorry hi. sources of randomness other than phil (e.g. not him physically shuffling cards) would also repeat every loop right. imagining him finally getting bored enough to try solitaire on a stolen phone and it just gives him the same games over and over KDKFNFJDJS

like he could get really good at cheating(?) at real life cards if he made the same people shuffle every loop but at that point there’s no fun in it. many such cases

(MANY such cases.)

(I love the idea Groundhog Day smothers the butterfly effect / randomness, because having repetition carry over to minutiae like phones and cards must be both horrifying and boring.

You're right - there's no fun in winning if you can only lose if you want to lose. If nothing changes but you, it's possible the people around you don't act on anything. They only react to what you do.

And if that's the case, does that mean that every bad thing that happens to you only occurs because you want it to?

Very A Nice Place to Visit. Gotta fuck a man's psyche up.)

[relentlessanalysis]

(omg thank you for the response its literally everything i could have hoped for. somehow it didn’t occur to me that he could just steal phones from people who do have games. anyway here’s more heckling for phil)

uh huh and how’s that (the career and the sex life) going for you buddy. me personally if i get stuck in 5 million year hell time loop no cell service i can at least play 10 million games of phone solitaire. which when compared to having sex with half the town or whatever is an equally stupid but at least less creepy way of passing the time. seriously dude that’s too much sex. come on. what do you do for fun on long plane rides

(Previous)

"Why am I talking about this with you? You sound like you eat Kelloggs for every meal."

--

(Pleasure's all mine! I've had this blog for like a year now but was too nervous/busy to do anything with it. Feels good to do actual ask blog stuff.)

[relentlessanalysis]

@relentlessanalysis hi it's me again i kind of yapped about time loop randomness and solitaire in your inbox already but then i had this interaction in my head while i was doing warmup sketches. and now this bullshit exists. no idea if this is askblog verse compliant whoops.

canonically-learned-math-in-the-time-loop bonus:

[relentlessanalysis]

Anonymous (previously) asked: "for phil: do you have games on your phone. do they work without internet. loser"

[relentlessanalysis]

[smoke signals] did not send in anything that got eaten but ive been reminded that i wanted to say that i keep looking at the floating larry head from the thumbnail example and its frying me. peak. i love your art

(okay good news re: smoke signals. no they do not show up on my version of the app but yes they do show up when i switch to desktop. so i'm probably not losing any messages. probably.

and thank you i love my shitty little storyboards. which reminds me i had another "phil goes hunting for wifi" interlude planned for ch4.)

(stick leg rectangle man)

[relentlessanalysis]

(Tumblr mobile has this incredible new feature where it will say this sideblog has something in the inbox and then not show anything.

If you've sent anything in recently - i guess try smoke signals?)

[relentlessanalysis]

oop i think the images broke on ao3 </3 rest in peace cool scrolling phil png

(ffs. hold on)

(I swear this happens every wednesday. give it a rest dude closing the tab doesn't do anything)

[relentlessanalysis]

(If you're wondering if every chapter starts out looking as weird as those sketches, the answer is no.)

(They're usually a lot stupider)

[relentlessanalysis]

my sillies. throws them at you

[relentlessanalysis]

hi sorry it's me again. ik the askblog story is set before act 2 but do you think in a comic version of 'hope' he'd be trying to throw himself off the page. or get squashed in the gutter between panels. or like he's climbing up the margin using all the panels of the townspeople looking on in horror as a ladder. uh

(Oh, the story's set during the intermission - for now. Given Phil's character development hinges on things getting worse before they get better, I do have plans to cover Act 2 in the long run.

Happy to talk about them in more detail if that's a thing people are interested in, but since that leans more towards HTML/CSS than straight comic book, I'll put that aside for the mo.

So: adaptations!)

(What strikes me the most about Hope's staging is how complicated - yet completely low-energy - everything is.

For the first half of the number, Phil barely seems to be paying attention to the fact he's killing himself. Only partial sets are used, and the spotlights give only his current actions visual focus. He doesn't react when the groundhog mascot tries to get his mask back, or to Jonathan's greetings, or to the crowd begging him to come down. Punxsutawney has become meaningless.

Hell, he manages to retrieve the toaster from the kitchen without Ms Lancaster seeing him. It's the logical extreme to stealing the payroll in Philandering - not only does Phil no longer need to put effort into achieving his goals, he can't.

There's no challenge left anywhere. No room for him to improve. He's done. The story can end now, thank you.

And if the lyrics are anything to go by, he either considers his actions a necessity, or what any intelligent person would do in his situation.

All this rambling to say I think the first few deaths would be comparatively uninteresting. Phil's behaviour - and the comic structure - would seem normal at first. Deceptively normal. Mechanically moving through the script, as it were, until suddenly he does some Detective Noirot shit that dominoes through the page and kills him.

What he's doing is still impossible. But he no longer fears it or finds any novelty in it.

I do think things would get more visually chaotic as the cycle continues, and progressively more fourth wall break-y.

A suicide montage is not something you walk off, and Phil later copes by concluding he's a god. The less human he feels, the more sense it makes that he abandons the comic structure. Use those panels as a ladder! Springboard into the abyss! Something's gotta stick.

Which brings me to one of my fav niche bits of staging.

The revival productions of the show don't have a rotating stage, so Phil doesn't pop out of bed after jumping off a roof like he does in the Broadway run.

Instead, the second Phil hits the ground, Andy Karl (Phil's actor) simply turns around, fully dressed and suddenly at the front of the stage. If you don't know the trick is coming, it looks like he's sprung back to life.

And if you do know its coming, you can spot a fully-dressed Phil run into the crowd from stage-left as soon as the Phil in the quilt starts climbing. And then he just stands there.

(*The person who recorded this okayed the use of their footage for tumblr gifs.)

Which has always struck me as kind of eerie.

The implication, however unintentional, is Phil watches himself commit suicide and isn't able to do anything about it.

At some point it became automatic. At some point in the future he'll realise even this isn't sustainable.

But not before the panels have completely fallen apart.

[relentlessanalysis]

@relentlessanalysis you're an inspiration