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emo-crowgirl · 12 days ago

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do you have any tips for writing the glitch techs characters? i want to get back into fanfic writing but idk how to write them

I have a few things. Not entirely sure how much it would help because Im also kind of new to writing and have no idea what counts as advice and what’s just obvious here, but here’s some things I do:

General speech stuff:

The biggest thing I do to write any character is rewatch episodes of the show to try to get their speaking style and voice locked down in my brain. I rewatch a few episodes of Glitch Techs whenever I come back from a long pause in writing or if I’m trying to get a specific character’s personality down. A general rule for me is if I can’t read a bit of dialogue and hear it in the character’s voice, I rewrite it until I can.

(Also: I cheat a little. The reason my main fic right now (HTSBD) is primarily a Chatfic is because I’m bad at writing tone and struggle with writing movement. It’s a lot easier to write how a character would write something or speak in a vacuum than write how a character would physically say something or how they’d move.)

Anyways, watching episodes and really paying attention to the character’s speaking style helps a lot for me, and also helped me see a couple of verbal tics and quirks that I never really noticed before. Like I know how “Oh Nerds” or just “Nerds” is used as a kind of in-universe swear, and I know Mitch’s usage of “Noobs” and “Blueberries” to describe Five and Miko, but I never picked up on stuff like how often Five says “Holy Smokes” or how Miko tends to refer to people as “Dudes” for example until a rewatch.

Speaking of in-universe swears: I personally swear like a “written by vivziepop” meme, which gets in the way of writing dialogue because I’d keep putting swears in places where they don’t belong. To counter this, i literally made one of those “will they say fuck” meme charts and arranged all of the characters on it by how likely they are to swear at something and how likely they are to use more mild substitutes like “damn”, “heck” or the in-universe “Nerds”, and somehow this helped me write better. So what I’m saying is those meme charts can be surprisingly useful when trying to nail down specific character stuff and keeping it consistent if you take them seriously and don’t just use them for memes.

Below the cut is a very, very long post on each of the specific characters. I have no idea if it’s usable as writing advice or if it’s just me overanalyzing and incoherent rambling.

Specific characters:

Ok so this very quickly turned into me overanalyzing and rambling about my interpretations of the characters in extreme detail. I have no idea if any of this is even remotely helpful but I seriously enjoyed writing it.

Five:

I got this from another writing tip post made by someone else on this site, but Five is petty. He’s held on to a single ruined birthday for years and as pointed out by that post I mentioned he STILL hasn’t told Miko that they have actually met before because she kept beating him in various games. Five can and will hold grudges for a very long time.

At the same time though, he’s not usually the type to hold that grudge over someone’s head or bring it up around them all that often. Depending on the context he either keeps that sort of thing to himself and essentially bottles it all up or is willing to forgive, but very unwilling to forget.

The only major exception to this is Mitch. Five gives him plenty of leeway and is usually quick to forgive a good chunk of Mitch’s assholery, or at least doesn’t usually hold much of a grudge after the fact. I’ve always kinda personally seen this as a bit of hero worship. Mitch and especially Mitch’s old streams and videos mean A LOT to Five, he credits them for basically teaching him all of his gaming knowledge and they may have even been what got him as into gaming as he is now, and he holds onto that positive stuff just like how he holds onto grudges and pettier things.

That being said, Five does have a boiling point, for both holding onto grudges and how many times he’s willing to give Mitch the benefit of the doubt, and as seen in B.U.D.S, when Five does eventually hit that point he goes straight for the kill, shutting down Mitch and leaving him without any kind of response, which is saying something because it’s Mitch “Always has the last word” Williams. He seems willing to push things to the side and forgive later in the day, but again, Mitch is an outlier and gets a lot more leeway than anyone else.

In terms of his family (more specifically just his Dad), it’s complicated. Five loves his dad, but his arrest is a very sore subject and Five will do basically anything to avoid the topic, from just dodging the topic in conversations whenever possible to literally avoiding a family friend’s entire store for years. Five just doesn’t like dwelling on things that.

And that’s outside of Hinobi. Within Hinobi, it’s complicated but in a different way. Because the store that Five works at is 100% the exact same store that his Dad worked at. There’s no way it isn’t. And then you need to remember that in-universe, his dad made some of the earliest video games that were ESSENTIAL to the development of modern games, without even acknowledging that there’s a very high chance his Dad worked on or even invented the in-universe equivalent to PONG. Making Emilio Nieves most likely the literal inventor of video games as we know it. There are definitely people currently in the Bailley store that knew him. That worked with him. Phil probably knew him at least in passing and at most personally. There’s weight here, along with some MASSIVE shoes to fill, and Five knows it, but absolutely refuses to acknowledge it. He just wants to ignore it and pretend it isn’t there.

Kinda connecting to that, Five overthinks things a lot. He stresses over the smaller things, and is more than capable of sending himself into a spiral if he’s not careful, and if something is bothering him, it’s going to keep bothering him for a long time. So maybe that’s part why he tries to avoid anything to do with his dad. Because he knows that if he actually starts putting too much thought into it it’ll be hard for him to ever stop thinking about it.

Come to think of it, we see that he’s been friends with Casino since long before his Dad’s arrest, and yet Casino mentions that it’s been a very long time since the two of them have seen each other. Maybe Five trying his best to avoid anything to do with his dad and probably kinda just.. withdrawing from everything to avoid the topic has something to do with that.

In terms of his skills as a Glitch Tech and a Gamer, Five has a very good mind and planning ability, but lacks the raw, innate skill that some others have.

Like he can outthink his opponents, plan things out extremely well, figure out puzzles and strategies extremely quickly and he’s very quick to learn the ins and outs of a game, but he doesn’t have the insane reflexes, reaction times or that general raw, natural ability that someone like Mitch or Miko has. Give him a chance to think things through for even a moment and he can easily figure out what he NEEDS to do, but he could lack the raw, unlearnable ability to actually DO it. Luckily as a Glitch Tech, that’s typically where buffs come in to bridge that gap, and he’s typically more than willing to practice and retry games until he gets the hang of something, helped by the fact that Five is a very quick learner.

Like take my view on why he couldn’t beat Castlestein. He kept every weapon on him just in case it would be useful in the future and looted literally everything, and he definitely knew exactly what he NEEDED to do, but he just couldn’t do it. If he made it to Nogrog the upside down castle puzzle and Nogrog’s final battle would have been figured out in seconds, but he didn’t make it. The enemies were too fast, the timing windows for everything too small and Five simply lacked the reflexes and raw power to get through it until eventually he was worn down to the point of giving up.

Five isn’t weaker than Miko or necessarily worse than her at games, his skills are just in a different place and it’s hard to compare the two of them. Miko has the raw power and reflexes, but he’s better at planning and strategizing. In any competitive game between them could probably read Miko like a book, easily outmaneuver or flank her or just outsmart her completely, but he needs a even a small moment to think or do a tiny bit a of setup in order to do that effectively, and Miko excels in rushing down opponents before they’re able to react. If Miko can successfully rush Five and both start and end the fight quickly (in either a game or real life), she wins easily, but if it starts being dragged out a even a little bit longer and Five is able to actually think of a plan, it’s a lot more evenly matched, getting more favoured towards Five the more time passes and the more he’s able to think.

Also (just for pure, headcanoned fun) as for Five’s place on my “swear chart”: I have him marked down as one of the least likely characters to swear, but one of the most likely to use a substitute like Nerds, Damn or Heck.

Miko:

I have a lot to say about Miko because she’s one of my favourite characters.

Four letters: A.D.H.D. If you want to write Miko and aren’t diagnosed with ADHD, I suggest doing research on ADHD. The hyperactivity, the impulsiveness, the struggles with focusing on things, the hyperfixating on her interests, her “Boredom Dance” possibly being an example of stimming while being understimulated, she’s so ADHD coded it’s insane. Whether she’s aware of this or not is up to you.

Miko hyperfixates on things. That claim about beating all the games she owns says less about her skill than it does about her sheer determination to complete any game that interests her. If Miko starts something and she’s even slightly interested in it, she NEEDS to complete it. Once she’s gotten going on something it’s very hard to stop her.

However, this can go in reverse. If something does manage to stop Miko, like hitting some metaphorical wall that she just can’t get past, or anything else that finally gets her to give up, or if she’s not interested in whatever she’s supposed to do in the first place, it’s hard to get her going again, especially just on her own without any outside force or person to give her a push.

Also, Miko can’t stand being stuck in one place for too long. She needs to MOVE, She needs to DO SOMETHING, she needs stimulation. A Miko with nothing to do or a Miko forced to do things she finds boring (for two examples: Reading and Tutorials) is an unhappy Miko.

Kinda fitting with both of those above points, Miko is very competitive. She literally tracks down the kid who beat her Rock-Em-Sockers score to challenge him personally. She’s also this competitive against herself, which is another reason why she refuses to leave a game unbeaten. If she doesn’t beat the game, the game has won. (Just look at her brief crisis upon learning that she didn’t beat Castlestien).

Miko may be impulsive, she may not think everything through before doing it, and she may be easily distracted, but she’s not dumb. Far from it. She’s very smart, especially in areas that interest her (she literally sneaks around Joystick Jr’s and fixes the arcade machines in there and she probably had to have taught herself how to do that on her own), but she’s held back by, again, that impulsivity and inability to focus on stuff isn’t an active interest of hers. Again, ADHD.

Also worth noting, as seen in Ralphie Bear is Back, Miko probably has Automatonophobia. That’s the the fear of “human-like figures”. It’s usually the fear of something like mannequins, ventriloquist dummies, or wax figures but it’s also a kind of umbrella-term-phobia that covers a bunch of stuff all at once like the fear of robots, statues, dolls, animatronics and other things that kind of lean towards the uncanny valley. From what we’ve seen Miko’s fear might just extend to animatronics, but then again we’ve never seen her in the same room as a mannequin or a wax figure so who knows.

While we’re on the subject of Miko’s mind, her reset immunity. Have fun with it. It’s implied somewhat in BUDS with the actions of her clone that her immunity extends to things like Mind Reading too and there’s probably a good chance that her mind can’t be controlled or easily altered either, so feel free to go wild on what else Miko could be immune to.

Another note: Miko cannot drive for the life of her. I wouldn’t be surprised if Five at least has a beginner’s license. His grandparents either don’t have a car and just use the food truck, which hasn’t driven in years according to Five, or have like one car used mostly to pick up groceries and supplies for said food truck. Either way Five probably either has a beginner’s license with no logical way of getting a full one of his grandparents don’t have a car, or just has a driver’s license outright if they do. I refuse to believe Miko has been to any form of driving practice, and there is a good reason Five is almost always the person driving the van. The few times we’ve seen her get behind the wheel it’s been some kind of disaster and god help you if she uses the van’s portal gun because she’s either going to miss the destination by a little, miss the destination by a lot, or arrive on location perfectly, only to open the exit portal 10 feet above the ground.

On a less pleasant note: Miko is lonely. It’s kind of implied the timeline of events with her family’s arrival went Rock ‘Em Sockers -> The Ralphie Bear Incident, with Miko originally being lonely when her family first moved to Bailey, then getting herself noticed by getting really good at the arcade games at Joystick Jr’s, especially Rock ‘Em Sockers, only for everything to come crashing down because of that birthday party, and prior to meeting Five Miko really doesn’t have any friends. Sure it’s mentioned by the creators that she knows a couple of people online but in real life she’s was pretty much on her own until meeting Five, and Miko is aware of this.

She’s also a bit of a black sheep in her own family. Her family is large and as the second oldest child, Miko falls right into that middle-child area where her parents tend to be more focused on her older sister and younger siblings. Not to mention that Miko’s interest in gaming is pretty much limited to her within her family. Sure her siblings are willing to play with her occasionally, but the rest of her family just doesn’t GET her interest in video games the same way she does. Her parents and siblings still love her, and she loves them, but there’s a disconnect between her and the rest of her family, and Miko is, again, aware of this.

Also also, it’s kinda implied that Miko isn’t very well socialized, with things like her lack of friends but also things like her not knowing about Mitch being a former streamer and having a channel or her older sister telling her about social aspects of high school despite Miko being 16 and therefore a high schooler. That last point originally made me headcanon that Miko was or still is homeschooled, and although it’s just a headcanon, I like to stick with it. I think it fits with everything else about her.

Miko is terrified of being othered. Of being viewed as the weird kid and losing the friends that she’s pretty much just gained recently. Her greatest tangible fear may be animatronics but her greatest intangible fear is going back to being friendless, and that sort of thing shows.

I’ve made a whole post on it before but I’ll paraphrase it again, but in The Glitch Modder, Mitch’s comments about Miko being weird, everyone else being unnerved by her reset immunity and ESPECIALLY Miko finding out that Five, her current best friend, also sees her immunity as weird sets her off for the whole day because of that. She’s terrified of being viewed as not normal and pushing people away from her, so it’s a massive pain point for her. That sort of thing is also why she panics more than anyone else does when Mitch accuses her of being a glitch in Find The Glitch.

Also kinda connecting to that, Miko will often try to put the wellbeing and feelings of her closer friends before her own, mostly because she doesn’t want to do anything that has even the slightest chance of pushing someone away from her. Like letting Five call her Meeks. She hates the nickname, but doesn’t want to disagree with it for fear of pushing Five away.

Miko doesn’t exactly care about her own wellbeing in combat either. Her main strategy in most things is to charge straight in and start doing damage with very little defensive options, not caring about her own injuries, damage to her equipment or collateral damage, and she’s more than willing to take the hit for Five, Ally, or anyone else she’s working with (although Mitch kinda depends on context), she’s also definitely the type to ignore her own injuries or insist that she’s fine when she’s really not.

Whether you’re writing Miko with the intention of her being a human (canon), a glitch (not canon but there’s a lot of potential) or wanting to leave it ambiguous (The funny option), one thing you have to acknowledge is that Miko’s reflexes and reactions times are canonically insane. Literally called out as inhuman by Mitch. Miko has the reflexes of someone using a TAS in real life and a physical reaction time so good she may as well be seeing the future (as long as she’s focused on the right thing).

This can be seen in her choice of games. The games Miko is shown to be best at are the in-universe equivalent to games like Guitar Hero and DDR, games that primarily require fast reflexes and good reaction times. Even the unnamed game she and Five are playing at the beginning of Castlestien appears to be a fast paced racing or maybe obstacle dodging game of some kind, and what do you know, Miko’s beaten it multiple times.

This borderline superhuman raw skill comes at the cost of puzzles, tutorials and really any moment where Miko is required to sit and think becoming her greatest weakness. Again Miko’s not dumb, but a mix of being unable to focus on the right things, being easily bored and that constant need for stimulation and to actually DO something makes puzzles difficult at best and unbearable at worst for her. Can Miko solve a puzzle on her own? Yes. But she’s just not made for it, doesn’t like doing it and WILL attempt to brute force it if possible. So Miko tends to be unable or more often unwilling to do these sorts of things.

I still think my headcanon about Castlestien’s fake wall is the best example of what I’m trying to say: My headcanon is that the Blade Demon of Truth CAN be beaten, but he’s a puzzle boss that can’t be beaten through normal combat. Miko’s fake wall is a speedrunning glitch that Miko stumbled across by accident because she would rather brute force a seemingly impossible fight until literally finding a way to clip through a wall and skip the fight entirely than try to figure out whatever puzzle needs to be solved to beat the fight legitimately. Could Miko have figured out the intended solution on her own? Eventually sure. But Miko’s sheer determination and unwillingness to do something she hates was simply too strong.

I’ve already compared Five and Miko’s skills, but Miko and Mitch is a whole different story. I want to get into their relationship and how they interact once I start talking about Mitch next, but i think it’s important to get this out of the way now.

Miko has better “raw skill” than Mitch, or at the very least is equally matched or close to equally matched. Her reflexes are better, her reaction times are better, she’s faster than him, Mitch literally calls Miko’s skills inhuman by his own standards, but they’re still evenly matched in a 1 on 1 competition between both of them, possibly slanted in Mitch’s favour. Both of them THINK they’re better than the other, but in reality any straight competition between them will probably end in either a draw or inconclusive.

This is because sure, Miko has more raw skill, but Mitch, just like Five, is very good at strategizing and planning. He can read people, he knows how to get into people’s heads, he knows how to prepare and plan his next moves. And Miko’s patented strategy of rushing down the opponent before they can react doesn’t work very well against him because Mitch still has the raw skill and ability to hold his own against Miko.

Miko relies on rushing her opponent down and trying to take them out before they can think of a strategy or begin preparing for anything, and even if someone does manage to outsmart her, she’s so fast that a lot of the time even if someone can predict what she’s going to next, they might not be able to physically react fast enough to stop her, at least not without some kind of pre-existing strategy or setup or something to give them an advantage. The longer an opponent lasts against Miko, the longer they’re able to think and strategize ways to get past her, and the more her “rush opponent and don’t let them think or set anything up” strategy starts to fall apart. Mitch, even running with the most Miko-Favoured estimate of their skill differences, is still more than good enough to go against Miko without a proper plan and can either drag out an encounter long enough to strategize and figure out ways to tip the balance in his favour, or just win against her outright. This kind of balances the two to the point where it’s kind of a coin toss as to who wins in a fight (in-game or otherwise) between them.

In my own headcanons, no one in-universe really knows who would win in a completely fair 1v1. Miko and Mitch both think THEY would win, obviously, but ask anyone else and they wouldn’t be able to give you a concrete answer.

Mitch:

One of the first things I feel should be said about Mitch is that his ego may be massive, but it isn’t misplaced. It’s not a case where the huge ego is a cover for even larger insecurities or the trope where someone constantly talks big only to be unable to back up what they say. Mitch really is (more or less) as strong as he claims, and that status as the highest ranked Glitch Tech in Bailey is something he earned legitimately fighting the toughest glitches he could find on his radar. The glitches he steals from other techs barely make a dent in the total amount of xp he brings in and if Mitch says he can take out a glitch, he usually isn’t lying.

That being said, this ego does mean that if Mitch does get in over his head, either fighting a glitch or doing something in a game, it will be a cold day in hell when he admits it and backs down, at least without someone else stepping in for him. He’d never directly admit that he’s been beaten, and it can take something short of a miracle to get him to admit that he’s wrong, but he can find ways to indirectly say it, keeping his ego intact when possible.

Using my own work as an example because it’s the best one I can think of right now, in HTSBD, Mitch never directly calls for backup, even when he knows that he can’t do something himself. Instead, he always waits for someone ELSE around him to bring up the idea of calling for backup and then supports their idea. Instead of him basically saying “i need backup, I can’t win this”, it’s someone else’s idea. Mitch isn’t calling for backup because he’s in trouble, someone else is calling for backup because THEY’RE in over their head, and Mitch just so happened to support THEIR Idea.

Also, I kind of view Mitch like a fusion of Five and Miko, with a dash of assholery mixed in for taste. He has Five’s mind and planning ability an Miko’s raw talent, but he also has Five’s pettiness and Miko’s competitiveness and stubbornness. If someone wrongs Mitch, he’ll remember, he’ll hold a grudge and he’ll ruminate on it for a long time.

When it comes to fighting glitches (and probably other situations as well), Mitch is strange yet perfect balance of “Pure Speedrunning Effectiveness” and “The Flashiest Show Off You’ve Ever Seen”

What I mean by this is that I’d argue Mitch fits the description of the “Combat Pragmatist” trope. He does whatever he needs to do to win quickly and effectively, screw the rules or typical etiquette, and he does things with brutal efficiency. He doesn’t care about the rules or morals of it (For an example, in Age Of Hinobi: “You’re Mitch Williams!” “And you’re not.” *Kicks kid off a cliff*) and he doesn’t care if something is overkill or bending the rules or not intended to be used a certain way (like overclocking his gauntlet), he just wants to win.

But at the same time, Mitch is an egotistical show off. He wants to win as effectively as possible, but he also wants to show off how much he’s winning. So what you get is stuff like his initial fight against the Copycat Glitch in BUDS, with Mitch stylishly dodging and trash talking as much as possible (even with no one else to see it), mixed with Mitch overclocking his gauntlet and hitting the glitch with a point blank gauntlet beam that’s about as large as the glitch itself, regardless of how much overkill that is or the risks with overclocking (which as mentioned by Mitch, Hinobi really doesn’t like its employees doing in the first place).

Also, Mitch is a massive workaholic. As said by him in Age Of Hinobi, this job is everything to him. In many ways it’s all he really has going for him, and a part of him is terrified of the prospect of losing that. Besides just being extremely competitive, that’s part of why he’s so determined to keep himself at the top of the leaderboard whenever possible. I’m his mind, that score is everything to him, and although there’s very little that can actually challenge that score to be honest (Ignoring the second highest score held by Bergy and his level 1 glitch farming, which Mitch refuses to see as a threat), a part of him is extremely defensive of it whenever something even remotely threatens to come close.

Also, Mitch may be a bully, but he draws the line at physical stuff. Mitch gets into people’s heads, he manipulates and makes fun of people, and he steals glitches, but he refuses to physically hurt anyone. Closest thing we have to that is Mitch constant upping the power of his resets against Miko until threatening to “wipe her clean” (which.. fair. I’d be the same if all of a sudden I encountered something that resets didn’t work against when that shouldn’t even be possible), a low-power, seemingly harmless gauntlet shot to knock Miko over, and Mitch trying to shoot Miko with his van’s portal gun to get her off his van. There’s also Mitch and Miko’s brief game of chicken in Smashozaurs where Mitch very clearly panics when he realizes that Miko isn’t backing down and he’s about to hit her with the van (Notice how all of these include Miko). Mitch just avoids physically hurting people. A deleted scene even points out that the massive gun Mitch pulled on Casino should have just harmed the possessor and would have (probably) left Casino unharmed.

Every character kinda has their own way of dealing with Mitch.

I’ve already gone over how Five tends to give Mitch a pass or the benefit of the doubt when possible, and otherwise he mostly just deals with it.

Zahra also mostly puts up with him, but won’t hesitate to respond with her own comments, sarcasm or just snark back at him. It doesn’t typically do much because it’s Mitch Williams, but it’s something.

We see that Bergy just kind of takes orders from anyone who outranks him without questioning.

I say that Haneesh just tries to ignore him, but the two of them don’t interact much on screen so feel free to come up with your own dynamic there.

Nix

And then Miko pushes back against everything Mitch has ever and will ever say and/or do.

Miko and Mitch do NOT mix. Peak “Siblings that hate each other” vibes. It’s like oil and water unless they have someone else (typically Five) acting as a mediator.

The dynamics are peak. They both have a large amount of siblings, they’re both extremely competitive, I view their skills as basically equal at least to the point where you can’t really predict who’s going to win, Mitch is an asshole who is very annoyed having to deal with “the new techs” and Miko is one of said new techs. They’ve been rivals at best and enemies at worst since the moment they met.

On that note, god help us all if Miko and Mitch learn about each other’s skills in DDR-like games. Because we’ve seen Miko’s skill for ourselves in Setting The Score and an unused animatic for season 3 shows that Mitch ALSO has some insane DDR-like (technically an in-universe Just Dance equivalent but close enough) skills. If those two ever end up going against each other in DDR or Just Dance it’s going to go on until they both collapse from exhaustion or a glitch crawls out of the screen, at which point they’d probably start fighting over who can capture it first.

Also worth noting that for most characters, they’re able to point at at least one redeeming quality about Mitch. Like sure he’s a jerk but you have admit that he’s a really effective tech or good at games, or that he was a good streamer prior to joining Hinobi, or even that he’s a decent leader when he’s not trying to screw everyone else over. Miko’s competitive nature and her already being against Mitch as a concept means that she either refuses to acknowledge Mitch’s skill or just views it as competition, she refuses to listen to a word he says if he’s the leader and she had no idea about Mitch’s past until very recently, with her first impression of the guy being the Hinobi Smash Competition, followed by Mitch wiping her new friend’s brain. She views him as stuck up asshole who keeps stealing her kills and messing with her, and it usually takes a third person (usually Five) being present in some way to stop the two of them from at the very least arguing.

Also contributing a lot to that dynamic, they bounce off each other uniquely too. Usually, if Mitch messes with someone, like I mentioned before everyone has their own way of dealing with him, and a lot of that ends up being trying to ignore him or just just going along with him, sometimes calling him out on his bullshit if it’s a particular problem or if Mitch genuinely crosses a line. Miko though. If Mitch messes with Miko, basically every single time without fail, she will have some kind of response. Like sure Zahra might snark back at him occasionally, Mitch probably doesn’t WANT Five to snap at him again and everyone has a breaking point eventually, but Miko actively tries to go against him in every way imaginable to her. She’ll disobey orders, mock him right back, use her own gauntlet equipment against him, figure out exactly what he’s trying to do just so she can get in his way, even get others to do the same sometimes. To Mitch, Miko seemingly runs on pure spite against him, and vice versa to be honest.

However, this status of Miko and Mitch being enemies can vary greatly, and everything I just said about Miko and Mitch’s dynamic only really applies on days where they’re outright enemies. It actually depends almost entirely on how much of a dick Mitch has been recently. Because the more of a jerk Mitch is, especially to Five and Miko, the harder Miko pushes and fights back, and if Mitch isn’t currently being a jerk or does something actually nice for a change, his dynamic with Miko cools down a whole lot, going from enemies to something more like friendly rivals or even outright friends of a sort. They’re still incredibly competitive and won’t hesitate to mess with or snark at each other in a much more minor, more casual way, but they’re not actively arguing or fighting and will get along mostly fine, albeit while still annoying each other. Miko has basically unintentionally become a karma meter of sorts for Mitch. The more of a self-centered jerk he is, the harder Miko swings back at him.

Also I kind of headcanon that Miko scares Mitch just a little bit. Not in a “They’ll overtake my rank as a Tech” way, although that is a small fear of his when it comes to Miko and Five working as a team, but like in a physical way. Because from Mitch’s perspective, Miko has superhuman reflexes, never seems to tire herself out and has a habit of just ignoring setbacks and injuries and refusing to say down, along with a complete refusal to obey any form of orders and a single minded, almost machine-like determination when it comes to certain tasks, who almost seems to have made it her mission to ruin his day specifically. Not to mention that she also has a never before seen complete immunity to resets, aka one of the few tools techs have access to that are meant for use on humans, and it’s implied that that’s just scratching the surface of what she’s immune to. And did I mention that she has red eyes and purple hair like some kind of anime character? I’m not necessarily saying that Mitch still believes Miko is a glitch or has always believed that, regardless of if you’re writing with the intention of that being true or not, but I am saying that in Find The Glitch, he DEFINITELY at least convinced himself for a brief moment.

Moving to Five, Mitch definitely prefers him over Miko, but he still views him as one of the noobs or one of blueberries in his own words. Five doesn’t actively go against Mitch at every opportunity like Miko (although he is often an accomplice to her), but Five’s literal presence has some weight to it that Mitch doesn’t want to acknowledge, but kind of has to.

Five is a massive fan of Mitch’s old content. He credits Mitch’s old stuff for teaching him everything he knows, and there’s a good chance that Mitch’s gaming content or tournament appearances were what got Five into gaming in the first place, or at least played a big part of it, and I already mentioned in Five’s section that Mitch tends to get a pass in Five’s book even when he tends to hold grudges with everything else. The man’s STILL holding onto Miko constantly winning against him and and refusing to mention that they have actually met before and Miko and Five are practically inseparable, and yet he continues to give Mitch passes and second chances.

Point is, Five looks up to him. A lot. And Mitch wasn’t always a complete asshole. Sure I’m willing to put money on those traits still being there to some degree when Mitch was streaming pre-Hinobi, but as mentioned in canon, he’s changed a lot since becoming a Glitch Tech. BUDS made a point of that.

Also, with a headcanon I have blatantly stolen from Rose Tinted, the old streaming and tutorials Mitch leaks out occasionally. He’ll give someone tips on a game or say something extremely helpful one moment, sometimes not even realizing he’s doing it, and then go right back to being a prick. The old Mitch is still there, just buried deep down.

Despite what Mitch says and how he can act, he does care about his teammates, all of them. Sure he’s a dick but if he sees any of the rest of the techs in danger, even Five and Miko for as annoyed as he can get with them, he’s very quick to go “Oh wait those are MY idiots” before dropping whatever he’s doing to go save them. He doesn’t like to show it often, but he’s a good person deep down, and he does care.

And on that note, in my mind there’s no way he can’t see how much his old stuff means to Five. How much HE means to Five. Even if he refuses to admit it out loud, he knows that Five looks up to him, and there’s no way in hell he doesn’t at least feel slightly bad about being a dick to him. Messing with everyone else, that’s one thing, but Five was and still is a fan of his, Five thinks and expects him to be better than this, there’s a connection that no one else really has with Mitch, and constantly messing with him, constantly disappointing him with every prank and every haze and every stolen kill has a lot more weight to it than Mitch is used to and honestly comfortable with.

And this feeling builds up for the entire series in my interpretation of everything. Five yelling that he “doesn’t even know who Mitch is anymore” in Age Of Hinobi maybe stings a little, but to Mitch at the end of the day, he doesn’t know Five. To him, Five is just like that one kid in the tournament who stopped in awe only for Mitch to kick them off a cliff. Maybe it has some more impact because it’s real life but still. Five finally snapping at Mitch in BUDS though. That one hurt. That was the culmination of probably countless instances of Mitch being a jerk, messing with Five, and Five forgiving but not quite forgetting until finally boiling over, and by now Mitch knows Five much more. He’s not just that Hinobi Smash Kid anymore to Mitch, he’s a coworker, a fellow tech, someone who he’s (been forced to) work with several times now, and like mentioned before Mitch does care about the people he’s close to. He knows Five as a person, he knows that Five looks up to him, and disappointing him yet again only for Five to finally call him on his bullshit HURTS. I think that’s a good part of why Mitch doesn’t have a response.

At the point where the show was canceled, Mitch is just starting to go through some major character development. Mainly being less of an asshole, and in my own opinion Five and Miko are the main things driving that change. Five is, whether he’s aware of it or not, essentially guiding Mitch towards niceness. He’s shown himself to have WAY more patience with Mitch than he honestly deserves, he’s one of the only people who doesn’t immediately write Mitch off as an asshole in most scenarios and like I said before, he has that connection to Mitch that makes disappointing him repeatedly really sting after a while. Actively or not, Five is essentially holding out a hand and nudging Mitch towards being a better person, a more social and less asshole-ish person, more like his original, pre-Hinobi self that still sometimes shows itself only for the current, egotistical asshole Mitch to bury it again. And whether she’s aware of it or not, Miko is forcibly shoving Mitch away from being an asshole by effectively being karmic punishment for Mitch’s assholery and making it much harder for him to slip into his old habits, lest he’s forced back into conflict with Miko. Five somewhat unintentionally directs him to being a better person and Miko somewhat unintentionally directs him away from getting worse.

However, that’s just my interpretation. With how the show got cancelled basically any part of Mitch’s character development/redemption arc is up to interpretation. What causes him to change, how much he changes and if he’s even aware that he’s changing at all is entirely up to you to do whatever you want with it.

Moving onto something lighter, despite no longer being a streamer himself, Mitch does keep up with what’s going on in the streaming world. He definitely watches the Furious Four (although that’s kind of a given) and I think there’s a very solid chance that the anime character he was watching on his gauntlet in Tutorial Mode was an in-universe Vtuber.

Also, Mitch likes cats. We know this because not only does he own one (or at least owned one, as we’ve only seen her in a video from several years ago just before he got hired as a tech and don’t know his cat’s exact age), a grumpy old asshole of a cat named Miss Boosh (which actually raises the question of what came first, the Cat or his Catchphrase), who Mitch loves, and also because of how he mentions that Mobile Cat Collecting game in The Real Glitch Techs and his attempts to 100% it. He even seems to have spent money on it based on his “it was free to play… at first” line.

As for what games he likes, canonically it’s anything with a competitive scene. Basically any game that lets him go against other players and show off his skills, especially shooters and fighting games. He also canonically is a fan of and really good at the in-universe equivalent of Just Dance, as mentioned before, and I’m willing to bet he’d probably be a fan of DDR or Rock’Em Sockers even if we’ve never seen him play them on screen.

And as for games he canonically doesn’t like: Retro games. The simplistic and dated graphics, the janky controls, the insane difficulties and the fact that most of them are singleplayer or very simple co-op, he just doesn’t vibe with them.

This actually has a kinda funny headcanon attached to it for me because ive theorized and headcanoned that Glitch Techs takes place in the very late 90s or the very early 2000s, more specifically the year 1998. It just has a bunch of more advanced technology than our 1998 because of Hinobi’s existence as a tech company and the invention of Plixels.

The thing is, Chomp Kitty canonically came out in 1993. Five years before Glitch Techs takes place according to my theories, and Mitch considers Chomp Kitty a retro game. This means that at least in my own fics, Mitch’s definition of a retro game is kind of strange and heavily vibe based. Yes, chomp kitty came out five years ago, but to Mitch, it has the same pixelated and old style of a retro game, has the same janky controls and difficulty of a retro game, is singleplayer apart from a basic scoreboard, and was originally made for arcade machines. Ergo, it is a retro game to him, even if it isn’t technically retro in an age sense.

This kind of has its own comedy with Five because not only is Chomp Kitty mentioned to be one of Five’s favourite games, but Five has a pretty deep connection to retro games as a whole on account of being the son of the guy who fucking invented them. It’s a dumb little headcanon I have, but Mitch writing off Chomp Kitty as a retro game is probably one of the only things that can cause a genuine argument between the two of them that and it’s probably the only grudge that Five would ever actually hold against Mitch for a long period of time.

Zahra:

From this point onwards, my rambling gets a lot less detailed and shorter because I struggle to write the characters more. It doesn’t help that Zahra, Haneesh and Bergy all have a lot less screen time than Five, Miko and Mitch. So a lot of details are more surface level stuff, headcanons and just listing off canonical information from the show and the Show Bible that the creators released.

This is probably kind of a given, but research muslim stuff. Cultural things, religious practices, important terms, all of that. Ask people with knowledge and do research on how to write Muslim characters well. I made a short list in my fic notes of things to remember (mainly things regarding Hijabs because I originally kept forgetting details about them and honestly how to spell the word at times) kind of late into writing chapters and even if it hasn’t come directly into play while writing yet, I still think it’s helpful to have on hand.

Zahra is pretty chill. Cool, typically calm under pressure, pretty cut and dry and sarcastic at times. She’s pretty no-nonsense and has a tendency to just be blunt and say what everyone else is thinking or what’s on her mind. The show bible also mentions that’s she’s a quick study of people and tends to hold people to high standards too.

However, there’s a hard limit to that cool and calm persona in my mind.

This is kind of a headcanon, but in my view Zahra acts very calm under pressure, just look at her sniping or scouting things out on missions, but once something does get her to crack and she actually starts getting stressed over something, she tends to swing hard and fast in the other direction. I mostly tend to focus on stuff like her snapping at Mitch in The Real Glitch Techs (“Why don’t you try to hack something FROM THE BACK OF A MOVING VAN”) and her crushing on Five in BUDS. Despite how she appears and presents herself, Zahra actually feels emotions very strongly, but it takes some outside force or unforeseen event giving her a good push and breaking past that emotional armour of hers to see that side of her, and even then it doesn’t tend to last long.

Her own weapon loadout accidentally serves as a kind of metaphor for it. Her main weapon of choice is a sniper rifle. Something that requires calm, focus and the ability to remain steady under pressure. But once something gets close the first thing Zahra reaches for is a massive greatsword and a minigun, two weapons made to blindly obliterate anything in front of her without much calm or control at all, with Zahra attempting to delete whatever threat came close to her with as much firepower as possible before she goes right back to sniping.

Also this is pretty much pure headcanon, but I like to think that Zahra is very good under physical pressure, but completely folds under more personal social pressure. Sniping, taking out glitches and providing support and healing while under fire? Zahra’s Cool, Calm and Collected. More stressful social interactions or god forbid a dealing with a crush? Zahra’s trying her best to keep up appearances while internally screaming.

Surprisingly enough, Zahra really doesn’t have much canonical information about her, not helped by a focus episode on her being a part of the cancelled season 3 that will never see the light of day. We don’t know anything about her family, her living situation, anything. Even in the released parts of the show Bible, Zahra is the only person that not only doesn’t have a listed game preference, but also doesn’t have the reason Hinobi picked them mentioned anywhere in or out of canon. Even Nix with his exactly 4 appearances in the entire series has his game preferences and reason for hiring listed, but Zahra is pretty much a blank slate here.

So in general, if you can get her personality and/or speaking style right (my main recommendation is to rewatch episodes with her in it until you can picture her voice pretty clearly), you can do pretty much whatever you want with her. She’s not quite a blank slate, she has a pretty defined personality, but her lore and any potential deeper depths of her personality could be whatever you want it to be as long as it sounds close enough to be canon.

As for her abilities as a tech, I have a few headcanons on that.

Mainly, i think Zahra is amazing at long range, but sucks at close range. My rationale for this is her weapons. Zahra is a solid 20/10 when it comes to sniping. Her aim is literally insane enough to shoot several moving projectiles out of the air in extremely quick succession. But like mentioned before, her close range weapons are a greatsword and minigun. Two weapons that are made to deal as much damage as possible, quickly as possible, with very little actual aiming required. The sword is large enough that basically anything near her WILL be hit by it, and the minigun is a minigun. In other words, i think she’s compensating for a lack of skill or at the very least a lack of aim up close.

At range Zahra devastates anything unlucky enough to come into view of her scope, but if something gets close Zahra tries to reduce it to a fine pixelated mist as quickly as possible with either a one shot from that sword or by laying down fire with a minigun because she knows she won’t last long in a prolonged fight up close. Kinda helping with my headcanon here is that one of the support options she keeps on hand is a smoke bomb and glitch-bait hologram, which would let her get away from close combat and get back to a range she’s more comfortable with. Even her minigun helps with this because it lets her lay down cover fire and then back up to a better range.

Speaking of her support options. She’s the go-to support and essentially field medic of the team. Everyone else has some buffs (especially Mitch), but Zahra has WAY more, and her buffs tend to be stronger and last longer compared to what everyone else has. Speed Boosts, Strength boosts, those hologram-escape-options I mentioned before, she has them all.

When it comes to medical stuff, i headcanon that along with those support options, Zahra is the only member of the techs with full access to healing equipment, either because she’s spent time maxing out that part of the tech tree or because she’s the only one who’s fully certified and licensed to be able to use the advanced stuff, the same way Nix mentions needing a “Plixelcraft License” and/or special training to be allowed to use the advanced plixelcraft stuff.

Sure everyone else probably has some basic healing supplies, the older techs are probably taught first aid for obvious reasons and glitch items can be used as a temporary fix (human body isn’t exactly made of plixels, so the benefits from a plixel based healing item from a game won’t last too long, just like powerups), and Zahra definitely isn’t bringing anyone back from the brink of death or fixing life threatening injuries, but she’s still the one that’ll keep you in the fight and fix any mild to moderate injuries sustained during a fight, or at least speed up your recovery so you can get back on patrol tomorrow instead of two weeks from now. For any truly serious life threatening stuff she isn’t fixing you there and now, but would be able to keep you stable and minimize any further injury until you can be brought to HQ’s medical wing with actual doctors or a hospital. She’s a teenage field medic, not a real medical doctor.

Haneesh:

I struggle to write Haneesh more than anyone else. I don’t know why. He’s just really hard to write for some reason and I have no idea why that is. My main tip that I’ve been using for myself is just rewatching to get his voice down. After that as far as I know I’m writing him completely OOC by the seat of my pants because Haneesh confuses me.

Actual lore-wise, Haneesh is a former esports gamer. He’s apparently been some kind of prodigy since he was 6 according to the show Bible, before eventually getting some extreme burnout due to the pressure of it all that led him to quit professional esports altogether, with Hinobi seeking him out and recruiting him as a tech not long after. The show bible also mentions that he’s kind of laid back and given that, his past in esports and whatever noodle incident happened the last time he was in charge of a squad of techs, I’m willing to bet he doesn’t like being under pressure too much.

He also has a heavy interest in the more technical aspects of being a tech, think hacking, plixelcraft and how glitches actually work going off of his knowledge in Alpha Leader.

As for how i write him, i mostly lean into that interest in the technical stuff. I don’t write him explicitly as “the smart one”, I do whatever I can to try to avoid generalizing characters like that, but I do view Haneesh as one of the more knowledgeable people in the group. If you ask him a question about glitches, hacking or anything in that general range of topics , he’ll either have the information you’re looking for or know where you could get it. Like sure Mitch and Nix in my fics have plenty of experience and have picked up quite a few things over their time as techs, but they’re more street smart in my view while Haneesh is more book smart.

Mitch and Nix go “aim for this specific spot on a glitch, it’s their weak point” because they’ve figured out over the last few years of glitch fighting that hitting a glitch in that specific spot does more damage like 90% of the time. They may not know for certain WHY it works, just that it does and they probably aren’t going to question it.

Haneesh goes “aim for this specific spot on a glitch, it’s their weak point” because he’s done his research and knows that that specific spot is more exposed or has less Plixel density or is closer to the root form or whatever the actual reason is. He knows that it SHOULD work and knows WHY it should work, but might not have ever actually tested it before himself.

For example, He knows that Multiplayer Glitches are able to respawn and how they do it, but he might not have actually seen it happen before in person and might be missing some information that you could only really know if you’ve personally dealt with a multiplayer glitch yourself.

His knowledge also isn’t infinite. He has more than a couple limits where he just has to go “yeah I have no idea”. A lot of things are just too complex, especially when talking about glitches. Hinobi literally has its own team of scientists and specialists analyzing and researching these things and they’re STILL kind of unknowable and strange. Same goes for hacking, plixelcraft, Hinobi stuff and anything else he’s spent time learning. He may be good at hacking and programming, but there’s plenty of things that are just out of the scope of his understanding and knowledge. He may be more book smart than the other techs, but he’s still a 16 year old patrol tech, not a Hinobi scientist.

Gear and physical activity-wise, I mostly try to contrast him with Zahra. From what I’ve seen and kind of headcanoned, each pair of techs either compliment each other and add to each other’s strengths, or contrast each other to cover each other’s weaknesses. Like how Five is good at planning things out but struggles raw-skill-wise and therefore might struggle to actually go through with what he’s planned out, while Miko is completely insane with raw skill and physical ability but cannot plan or think ahead for the life of her. Together, they make up for each other’s weaknesses.

So I’ve headcanoned that Haneesh is primarily focused on Melee Combat, contrasting Zahra’s focus on sniping and attacking at range, and Debuffs, both to contrast Zahra’s buffs and support options and because of Haneesh’s interest in coding.

So in combat. Haneesh and Zahra work very well together. Haneesh fights at close range, drawing aggro away from Zahra and debuffing anything near him, while Zahra picks off threats from afar and absolutely SHREDS anything that Haneesh debuffs. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Zahra was capable of supplying buffs from long range using her sniper as well.

Also, we see in Alpha Leader and it’s mentioned in the show bible that Haneesh has an interest in Plixelcraft, making platforms and simple structures out of plixels. This also works well with Zahra because it means that Haneesh can make platforms and cover for Zahra to snipe from, giving her better angles and keeping her further out of reach from glitches. Hell, we even see them do something like that in Alpha Leader.

But again, all of this could be out of character because I have no idea what I’m doing with this guy. I am pretty confident with the headcanons for his loadout though.

Bergy:

I also kind of struggle with writing Bergy.

The way I see him, Bergy’s kind of the last thing you’d expect a glitch tech to be. But he also fills a very unique role in the glitch “ecosystem” in Bailley

Because all things considered, Bergy ain’t exactly peak glitch tech material to put it lightly. He’s a nervous wreck, he has a tendency to panic when dealing with any mildly aggressive glitch and his aim with a gauntlet sucks, especially when he’s panicking, which again, tends to happen when he sees any glitch above like level 3. Mitch doesn’t even really bother giving him orders because honestly, what’s he going to do against any truly dangerous glitch?

Speaking of orders, we see that Bergy just kind of takes orders from anyone above him without questioning it. Mitch could tell him to jump and he’d ask how high, not because he likes Mitch, but because he just likes taking orders I guess.

Also curiously, the show bible mentions why Bergy was chosen and I have some conspiracies about it. I’ve already made some post about it somewhere, but Bergy was chosen by Hinobi for being overly positive on Hinobi message boards and just generally being a pretty good, social person. He’s a big outlier among the rest of the techs because they all have reasons for being hired that make a bit more sense for techs. Mitch is a gaming prodigy and has been a regular tournament winner since he was a kid, Haneesh is a former semi-pro or possibly even professional esports player, Miko and Five took out an entire arcade of glitches with no training, plus Miko’s reset immunity, even Nix with basically no information about him was brought in for “completion of achievements” and going by the standards of everyone else those had to be some impressive achievements.

But Bergy was hired in for reasons that don’t necessarily line up with what Hinobi usually looks for in a tech. So it makes me kind of theorize if he was even meant to be a glitch tech in the first place. Maybe he was originally hired to work at the store’s front desk or even as non-monster-hunting, genuine tech support. Those jobs match up way more with his reason for hiring. Only for Bergy to become a glitch tech a bit later. Maybe he found it way better than whatever he was originally hired to do. I’m sure Phil wouldn’t mind the extra tech on patrol.

Anyways, about that unique role he fills, Bergy is essentially a scavenger in the glitch food chain of Bailley. A garbage man almost. He goes out and hunts all of the low level glitches that the other techs avoid in favour of the stronger stuff that gives more XP and is more fun and flashy to fight. And because everyone else avoids doing it and because low level glitches are so easy to take out (Miko proved you don’t even need a tech gauntlet some of the time), Bergy can capture a TON of them over the course of a shift and rakes in a metric TON of XP. I headcanon that he’s actually the second highest on the leaderboard behind Mitch because of this. It isn’t flashy, but Bergy is essential just because of how he hunts all the stuff that no one else wants to. Without Bergy on patrol the town would be overrun by a massive amount of level 1-2 glitches. The job sucks, but someone has to do it, so it may as well be the one guy in Bailey that enjoys going after the weaker glitches and doesn’t WANT to go after anything stronger.

Also just working off that and the kind of logical step that a lot of low level glitches would be harmless companion pets or items and weapons that can’t do anything unless a human is actively using them, i headcanon that Bergy is just sitting on a massive stockpile of weapons and items from various video games that he’s quite literally just found lying around somewhere. You need a healing potion? He has it. You need a sword? Bergy will hand you the master sword, a halo energy sword and the blades of chaos. You need some specific item to beat a glitch? Give Bergy some time to sift through his gauntlet’s inventory and he might just have a replacement.

Equipment wise, i headcanon that Bergy brings in a ton of XP, so he’s actually a very high level with a massive amount of the tech tree unlocked, although he only uses a small amount of it, mostly since he only fights very weak glitches. I kind of headcanon that he uses a lot of scouting equipment. Locating and Tracking Glitches, some stealth stuff to sneak up on them, maybe some stuff to trap glitches in place or slow them down, that sort of thing. He TECHNICALLY has a lot of really powerful stuff, but he doesn’t need to use it because he only hunts the low level stuff, and doesn’t WANT to use it most of the time because he’s just not made for combat.

In a team setting, I say that Bergy probably provides support through the two things he specializes in. The first thing is Scouting. He can track glitches from long distances, ping their locations and keep everyone else informed.

As for the second thing, Bergy may be bad at combat. His physical ability is lacking and his aim sucks, but Bergy is also sitting on a massive stockpile of various weapons and items, and he knows a couple of people that have much better aim than he does. If Bergy has access to some kind of Mitch-Level Glitch Oneshot Beam, he probably doesn’t have the aim or physical ability to effectively use it. But he’d happily hand it to someone that can. And that’s ignoring the potential of the powerups he has on him. Invincibility, extremely powerful healing, straight up extra lives that won’t bring someone back from the dead (glitches have limits), but will block or negate some massive hits to create the same effect, stuff that Hinobi’s gauntlets might struggle with or just might not be powerful enough to recreate. Sure it’s either one use only or has a massive cooldown time since they’re glitch items, but who cares, Bergy’s just gonna find more the next time he goes on patrol. Sure he’s limited by whatever random items he has on him, but he’s also ONLY limited by whatever items he has on him.

On another note, despite Bergy’s tendency to panic and bad aim, in B.U.D.S we see that Bergy is actually pretty good with a bow and is cool and calm while fighting the horrific monstrosity of the episode, and there’s a few possibilities with that.

Bergy is capable of being very competent, but not as himself. He used his DND persona as some kind of alterego and it boosted his confidence a whole lot. (Kinda unlikely considering that he got nervous and wanted to leave before being replaced by a glitch)

Bergy is just really good with a bow for some unknown reason.

If Bergy is in a situation that’s just stressful enough, his panic somehow loops back around to being calm and collected. Like put this man in a life or death scenario and he just pulls some genuinely insane competence out of his ass with “Zahra sniping” levels of calm and focus, beats the glitch and then goes back to his regular self afterwards. Or at least he appears calm to outside observers. Inside Bergy is 100% panicking so much he barely knows what’s going on.

I think option 3 is the best one, but I’m not sleeping on Bergy having some genuine skill with a bow. I’m willing to give that to him as a signature weapon like Zahra’s sniper or Miko and that sledgehammer.

Also: Bergy’s name is canonically Cecil Bergoch.

Nix:

Nix is a blank slate, and you can do whatever you want with him.

I’m serious.

This man has like four appearances total.

He is as close as you can get to a canonical OC in this fandom.

Also his name is canonically Adam Michael Nix.

As for how I personally write him, this is going to be one big ramble about Nix in my own fic and pure headcanons about him because again, he’s basically a blank slate. All you have to do is watch any of the like 5 scenes he appears in and congrats, you’ve seen his entire canon character.

Nix is kind of an enigma in my eyes. He’s kind of on the outskirts of the friend group and his main connection into the group is Bergy and Mitch. In canon, it’s only really Bergy that’s arguably close to him and him and Mitch don’t interact much, but that’s my view.

No one really knows much about him. No one knows any details about his personal life, no one but Bergy really ends up working with him for long enough to get to know him and the only people who know that his name is actually Adam and Nix is actually his last name are Bergy and Mitch.

(A detail from my fic: Bergy just casually goes “oh yeah i already knew that” on the topic of Nix’s name. Meanwhile Mitch mutes the group chat just before Nix’s name is revealed and doesn’t react when it’s brought up. Mainly because he muted the chat. Then a few chapters later he talks to Nix in private and isn’t surprised by his name, and also calls him by his name later despite again, having muted the chat and missing Nix’s name reveal. He already knew.)

The fact that Nix works two jobs, one job at Hinobi and one job at Joystick JR’s, doesn’t help with that degree of separation between him and the others. It also explains why he barely appears in the show. He works multiple jobs and physically can’t be around as much.

For minor personality stuff: I gave this man a fixation on video game secrets, achievements and collectibles. Mainly because it’s mentioned in the show bible that he was hired due to “competition of achievements” and I’m willing to bet he got some insanely hard ones to get hired by Hinobi. This man knows a lot of video game secrets, and enjoys achievement hunting.

Also in canon: Nix is mentioned to be very studious and favourite games are tactical and strategy games.

In my mind Nix, despite not working as much as the other techs, is still surprisingly knowledgeable and street smart when it comes to fighting glitches. Like I said before, he’d probably go “aim for this spot, it’s a weak point” because he somehow picked up that shooting a glitch there does more damage like 80% of the time. He may not know exactly WHY it works, but he knows that it does. But at the same time, he will get right to researching things if he has a question. Like if he started questioning WHY that weak spot only works 80% of the time, he would start looking things up until he knows EVERYTHING. It just takes a push to get him going.

With Nix and Bergy, the only canon connection he has, I’m confident that they’re friends. They’re seen on missions together, the show bible mentions that they’re frequently paired up because “their loadouts and skills compliment each other” and Castle Crashers is one of the few times when we Nix interact with ANYONE.

As for their dynamic, it is my full belief that whenever Nix and Bergy are offscreen and not a part of the current episode, they’re halfway across town going on a completely separate adventure that could easily be its own episode, plot and character arcs included. Like at any point during The Glitch Modder you could suddenly switch the perspective to Nix and Bergy and it would be like changing channels to another show that’s already in progress.

(A gag I really wanted to do in HTSBD for a while was someone getting stuck with Bergy and Nix on patrol at the beginning of a chapter and then by the end of the chapter they show up after being absent with Bergy and Nix the whole time having gone through some completely unseen adventure and character arc.)

Also, in canon Nix is 17, the same age as Bergy, and probably joined around the same time as them. My version of Nix is 18, the same age as Mitch, and joined Hinobi around the same time as everybody’s favourite asshole. This is because I headcanoned everyone’s ages way before I got my hands on the show bible so everyone’s ages are just ever so slightly different. My version of Nix is 18, my version of Zahra is 16 but right on the cusp of turning 17 when in canon she’s 17, my version of Five is 16 when in canon he’s 15 (but probably very close to turning 16), tiny changes that are almost entirely because I wrote the characters with certain ages in mind before actually learning how old they are. My version of Bergy is still 17 though. That sounds incredibly wrong to me for some reason but that’s his canon age.

As for Nix’s loadout, all we have for canon details is that according to the show bible Nix and Bergy’s skillsets complement each other and Nix getting into Plixelcraft in Im Mitch Williams. So it could be whatever you want.

I mostly headcanon his loadout as a kind of “trapper” loadout. Restricting movement, preventing glitches from escaping, plixelcraft walls and barriers, that sort of thing going with Bergy’s “scouting” loadout. Bergy can find and track glitches, and Nix can keep them in a certain area or lock them down once Bergy finds them.

I also like focusing on plixelcraft with Nix. Mainly because of what he mentions about needing certification to be able to use it. My own headcanon for it is that basically all techs have access to plixelcraft. Haneesh makes plixelcraft barriers and platforms for Zahra, Miko’s hammer is plixelcraft, Zahra’s minigun is plixelcraft, the axe Five briefly uses in Ralphie Bear is Back is plixelcraft, basically any of those untextured, one-solid-colour objects the gauntlet makes is plixelcraft, but that’s just the basic stuff. A bunch of preset options the gauntlet makes automatically. Haneesh can make a platform or wall, but he can only use a couple of preset shapes that he unlocked from the tech tree. The stuff that needs training and certification is the advanced stuff, where you can make whatever you want, with whatever code or purpose you want. That’s why it needs training and special certification.

Haneesh can make plixelcraft walls and barriers, but ONLY those walls and barriers with preset options, and the only real offensive value Haneesh could really get from his plixelcraft would be something like making a big block of plixel mid-air and hoping it falls on a glitch. Meanwhile Nix is limited only by his own creativity, programming ability and the obvious limitation that he has to make new stuff beforehand. Can’t exactly create and program an entirely new plixelcraft object while being attacked by an Elden Ring Boss.

Also kinda connecting to that whole “Nix has two jobs and can’t work as a tech as much” thing, i headcanon that despite working as a tech for as long as Mitch, Nix isn’t a very high level and doesn’t have too many things unlocked. He’s not a bad tech, he’s pretty knowledgeable about tech stuff, no slouch in combat and he’s definitely the muscle/bodyguard whenever him and Bergy are paired up to go after anything higher than Bergy’s usual weight class, but that second job combined with a few other factors means he’s a lower level than he probably should be for this time as a tech and his options for gear are somewhat limited compared to a tech like Zahra or Haneesh.

That’s another reason I say he uses a lot of plixelcraft. It lets him get around the limitation of his low level and use whatever he wants. Nix isn’t a high enough level to get a minigun? He’ll use plixelcraft to make his own custom one. Maybe even make it float around and attack things automatically if he can figure out how to code that.

I also think this pairs with Bergy for another reason: Bergy has a massive stockpile of glitch items on him and can provide support by just handing another tech whatever they might need, as long as he actually has it on him. Meanwhile Nix’s plixelcraft means that he can MAKE any item or weapon that someone might need at the moment, as long as he’s worked on it beforehand and has the file for it on his gauntlet. Basically these two together are a walking Swiss Army Knife. If you need a specific tool, Either Bergy has an item for it or Nix can make it.

And again, Bergy and Nix’s skillsets and loadouts mesh well together. Bergy has an extremely high level and access to a ton of extremely powerful tools and weapons from grinding a metric fuckton of low level glitches every day, but lacks the skill and ability to properly use most of them. Meanwhile Nix is fully capable, but has a lower level than he honestly should due to him not being able to work as much (and when he does work, he usually doesn’t get to fight glitches that are very strong) and because of that doesn’t have access to as many tools. So they fit together perfectly.

Overall, Nix is really malleable, and you could honestly do whatever the hell you want with him. He can be bent incredibly out of shape before starting to sound OOC, so have fun!

#glitch techs #headcanons #long post #very long post #writing tips #writing advice #?#is that what this would count as?#or is it just infodumping and rambling #who knows!#anyways sorry this took so long xp-luna-m0th #I just had a lot of things to say #so I’ve been working on it on and off for the last several months

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pink-onyx-au · 2 years ago

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[Jump to the Episode Master List]

[Looking for something? Jump to the Archive] (Browser Only)

Nap time! Thank you everyone for your continued support and interaction! I adore it and it adds so much more to the AU than you could know. This is a heads up on some minor down-time for the blog while I rest up and prepare the next episode.

Notes and asks are still open and encouraged during this time! Bored and want to chat? Send me a message!

To see some WIP, storyboard previews, doodles, shitposts, and other projects I’m working on, along with a healthy amount of 3am memes, head over to my trash fire blog, Ceephor’s Shit Show. The "pink onyx au" tag will filter everything for you, along with showing you fabulous fan art made by others that I just love to pieces.

Speculation and theories are encouraged! The comic is designed as close to the show’s logic as I could muster, which means many secrets are staring right at you, provided you know what to look for! Just be kind to one another.

Comic FAQ:

What is this?

Pink Onyx AU is a Steven Universe AU focused on interactions between Steven and Jasper and is intended to be read after you have finished Steven Universe Future, as it contains many many spoilers for the series. If you have watched it already, great! Welcome! The goal is to bring you a Jasper redemption arc that we couldn’t get due to time and cooperate restraints on the Crewniverse. I hope you enjoy!

I do not own these characters or their likenesses except for the single fluffy thembo fusion I created for the story. This is just a fan comic.

Comic is PG-13 for some angsty/touchy themes, minor blood, violence, and gem-cussing. Touchy-subjects will always be in a cartoon-ish metaphorical representation you would likely find on TV and be available for multiple interpretations.

When do you post?

Typically when you see this post pinned, I’m on a bit of a break, but when Nyx wakes up (this post goes away) the comic is due to be released 1 page at a time at 7am EST most days. I try for a daily release. Sometimes I skip a day if I’m behind. Episode release dates are always announced ahead of time by a few weeks.

Is this a romantic ship AU between Jasper and Steven?

Nope, more like an aunt and her nephew trying to figure it all out. No romance between these two here.

Is your Tapas updated at the same time?

Nope, tumblr comes first, and the tumblr will always have bonus content which Tapas will not. The Tapas for this updates after the tumblr version is completed. Usually same day or within a day.

Do you have a reference for Onyx? Sure do!

How do I use the ask system for this blog?

You can leave a message, or even an object, for the characters to interact with. The asks you leave can be answered by myself, Onyx, Steven or Jasper within the realm of this AU. Your asks will have no effect on the comic story. Think of it like the actors are in their dressing rooms and you get to give them a poke while they take a break! As the comic story progresses, their replies to your answers may change! Their responses will be in-character depending on where in the story we are.

My note by the den (an ask) was never answered. How come?

Lots and lots of asks come in every day. I wish I could answer them all! Since I draw something to go with most answers, especially the character ones, they do take a bit of time. Sometimes, I get duplicates of the same ask, or an ask that may refer to something that spoils the story if I answer it. I might hang onto those asks for a later time! Or group them into categories to answer all at once. I hoard asks for 1 year in an attempt to get to them. If I missed yours, know I tried and I love them anyway! I hope it does not discourage you in the future.

Curious about the characters? Check below the cut for more a detailed FAQ about the inner workings of the story. Love you all! See you soon! 🧡💕❤️

FAQ’s about the characters generated via interactive asks:

What kind of fusion is Pink Onyx? Are they good or bad? Pink Onyx is a fusion of a protagonist and an antagonist, so their alliance is yet unknown, but they have Steven’s good heart and Jasper’s loyal nature. They also have Steven and Jasper’s flaws, so they can be volatile and emotionally explosive at times, too.

What are Pink Onyx’s pronouns? Onyx likes they/them, but also answers to he/him and she/her, especially when Steven or Jasper is dominant over one another. They also seem to take on a fluid role and prefer a she/her when in a caretaker status. They dislike it/its.

What does Pink Onyx sound like? Personally, I hear them as a youthful, masculine tone. Like Steven if a little older. But I also enjoy when people say they hear them as a gruff, Amazonian-type feminine. I enjoy and endorse both.

Do Jasper and Steven enjoy being fused to one another? For now, it is a struggle, but they enjoy what the other brings to the fusion even if they won’t say it.

Does Pink Onyx need to eat and do human things? If so, do they enjoy it? They don’t need to do them, but they do feel the discomfort without them. Things like breathing, eating, and sleeping are optional for Onyx, but they will become quite irritable if not allowed to do them. They greatly enjoy sleeping and trying new foods.

What does Jasper think about having human organs when fused? She’s pretty grossed out by the idea of organic matter going into her mouth and coming out of other places. The heart beating and lungs breathing she can feel for the first time, and it is highly strange for her to experience.

What is Pink Onyx’s favorite food? They adore anything watermelon flavored and Cookie-cat ice cream products

Does Pink Onyx have any special fusion powers? They do, and as they learn about themselves, more powers seem to come out. Each of their base component appears to be enhanced in a unique way. They have Pink Diamond at their core, so the destructive potential is also there.

Why is Steven hiding Pink Onyx from others? This AU occurs directly after the events of "I Am My Monster", so Steven is very emotionally, and mentally, raw. He fears judgement for running back to Jasper, who in the past, was part of so much trauma he already endured.

Pink Onyx seems to know nothing about human culture and gem culture despite being a fusion. What’s going on? Jasper and Steven agreed to fuse, but they have yet to open up to one another about much else. The fusion exists because they agree to do so, but Jasper won’t open up about her emotions, and Steven is so sensitive yet that he is not sharing because he knows Jasper won’t want to hear it. This causes Onyx to be unable to access both of their memories easily, but they can bring it out with enough effort.

#pink onyx au #steven universe au #steven universe #steven universe future #c423art #ceephorart #pink onyx #fusion #jasper #steven #Nyx nap #faq

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castielstwigandberries · 2 years ago

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if the supernatural movie doesnt include a reference to

nevada and georgia turning blue, stop the count, destiel making putin resign, sherlock season 5 rumors, destiel news meme, which political person had to be briefed on what destiel is now?, jensen looks like he was holding back homophobic slurs, weird cuts in the confession scene, which way was dean thrown now?, bury your gays speedrun, gay angels get send to superhell/eeby-deeby/cas plinko, recognizing the confession scene only by the first letters of each word, 'homosexual declaration of love', The Tapes™ (Release them now jensen!!!), meta analysis after 15x18, 'i gripped you tight and raised you from perdition' callback as dean saves cas from the empty, why lamp?, onion field, pizza man montage, parallels be paralleling, dean screaming cas name so loud in one take that people heard it blocks away, dean offering to kill sam if it means chuck brings cas back, the 4 year old son of lucifer becoming god, chuck won theory, 'we explore the nature of destiel in act two', excitement for a long finale which could only be about dean saving cas, right?, the insanity inducing quotes of the day for episodes, 'the night we met' and 'angel with a shotgun' songs of the day on set, filming in a barn, worst finale ever (even worse than game of thrones), weirly short with 11 scenes cut, two thirds montages, carry on wayward son playinf twice, back to back, one a weird cover version, vampmimes, no cas in the finale but instead some random vampire from season one no one remembers, dean finally gets nailed from behind, dean dies from tetanus, party city wig, good cars go to heaven, Car/Cas and Biden/Bi!Dean/Bye!Dean, 'cas helped', blurry wife, misha and jensen are not in the thank you video, everyone was supposed to be at the roadhouse originally but no one was informed of those plans, walker backdoor pilot, covid/capitalism destroyed everything, misha was in vancouver for filming the last episodes and was in less episodes than he was contracted for, misha denies ever having been in vancouver, misha says originally he was supposed to be in the finale as jimmy, misha says cas was supposed to be in the finale and 'sidle up to dean in the roadhouse', heterosexual destiel whose kisses would have created entire universes, destiel reciprocated in spanish, rogue translator, #TheySilencedYou, Jensen Ackles sexy silence, jensen ackles longcon, deanbenny breakup in season 8 script leak, Heller Obama, fake italian dub, misha collins x bill clinton sex scandal, misha addressing the "scandal" and tagging bill clinton and monica lewinski, 'still beautiful, still dean winchester', mishapocalypse 2.0 and 3.0, 'eyes like the sky' beer from jensens brewery rumored to be misha description, cockles anniversay photo, chaos machine jensen ackles' production company, 'rainbow road' beer close to deans birthday, blue green ('destiel') shotglasses from jensen brewery, ash and ellen's actors roleplaying roadhouse reopening in twitter, people think they are planning destiel wedding, disappointment when thats not the case, fans celebrate Destiel Wedding anyway on Valentine's Day 2021, fallout with both actors after one said a 'queer interpretation would damage the integrity of the show',

*takes a deep breath*

jared calling cas junkless and comparing his love for dean to the love he has for his children, misha collins cameo including 'still beautiful, still dean winchester', saileen and midam wedding, spn prequel announcement and subsequent j2 fallout, '@/robbiethompson et tu brute wow. what a trully awful thing you've done #bravo you coward', the prequel being about the least favourite characters of supernatural and a love story disproved by canon, 100000 destiel fics on ao3, misha tweets about that, rumors if mishas secret ao3 account, real italian dub going 'you're kinda okay' instead of i love you, misha tweeting a video of him saying 'te amo' in response to that', jensen saying if there'd been more time he (he meant dean but he used first person pronouns) would have hugged cas and said 'i love you too', first anniversary, misha collins coming out as bisexual on accident and then saying he 'happens to be straight' three days later in a five post apology thread, hot sauce from adam/micheal actor advertised by him playing midam, casbaiting in the winchesters trailer, jarlos shipping by winchester main actors, dean with beard and turtleneck, jensen saying he wanted misha in the winchesters but it didnt work out because of scheduling conflicts but hed be there in a season two shortly before the show was cancelled, death of the rogue translator and destiel getting dragged to the trending page every time there is news

*panting* then i dont want it.

yes this is all i could remember without looking it up

#supernatural #spn #destiel #nov 5th #my post

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palmtreehero · 4 months ago

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it may be a bit weird question but could you elaborate on the difference in portrayal between shuake and akeshu? what differences did you notice between the two?

Hi anon, not a weird questions at all!

I can tell you what I've gathered from my beginning stage of getting interested in this ship and what I've experienced the past 8 years...

I've already sorta explained stuff in this post since it's a similar ask, but I think you're probably asking specifically the differences I personally found.

DISCLAIMER: this is just my experience please understand this is just all MY PERSONAL LIKES and what aligns with MY OWN INTERPRETATION- and in no way am I putting down any of the lanes... I must repeat this over and over because otherwise it becomes this meme:

ANOTHER DISCLAIMER: Due to the nature of this ask I must warn you that I will be talking about R18 topics.

Without further ado here's a read more:

When I was still a turtle at sea (reference to this) eating literally anything coming my way, what I found was that the akeshu buffet and the shuake buffet both had their different flavors and strengths..!

Each restaurant seemed to excel in different tropes, different scenarios, different characterization and vibes... It was magical at the beginning just consuming anything and everything as I went.

But I'm a turtle with much fujoshi experience, who already has some favorite tropes and preferences ingrained in her. I like eating certain flavors over other flavors, and actually, they're all explained in this post!

But AHhh, it looks like I'm starting to get a stomachache from eating this food that I thought I'd give a try? I mean, everyone seems to like it, actually, it's like the best restaurant in town apparently!? But just something about their seasoning is not agreeing with my stomach.

It's a shame, maybe it's just not for me, so to investigate what's going on, here's my food diary:

Restaurant Akeshu tropes/vibes/flavors that I've observed:

The obvious diff: Goro is the top and Joker is the bottom.

Goro is portrayed as more handsome and assertive and recently since P5R release, a heavy preference to 3rd Semester. He's often standoffish like a "kuudere". He's the initiator.

Joker is portrayed more soft, gentle, and kind of passive but a sweet guy. He's the reciprocator.

There is an emphasis on Goro's confidence and perseverance. Basically he's portrayed as very cool and figuring things out on his own because he wants to be better for/than Joker. (Their rivalry)

Goro is more reluctant to accept Joker's help, and he does not rely on him emotionally, but eventually he gives in and opens up.

In the self indulgent side: people seem to like making Joker like a cute cat LOL He's like Goro's pet? He's just always spoiled by Goro (at least in the wholesome portrayals~) idk much about the toxic side bc I live in delulu domestic lala land so all I know is Goro can RAVAGE HIM!

There is also a heavy preference to make Goro have a more masculine build, like he's portrayed pretty but there's a delicate balance of his Gap that shows off that despite his feminine traits he is undoubtedly a man.

For Joker, he's very Gender. Thank you punishment cop for my life.

In NSFW media, Goro is very assertive, he takes control, and he's the more reserved one(?) while Joker is more of the shy mess or he's a sexy power bottom trying to rile Goro up. I particularly like Top Goro because I like him being the one to approach Joker, I like him being the one to touch and guide Joker, to love him tenderly. Basically I find that in Akeshu there's an emphasis on Goro thinking of Joker as his treasure (even if reluctantly sometimes haha)

This translates to SFW content where Goro is always the one spoiling Joker or approaching him, making mooooves (or in situations where Joker is the one making mooooves he out mooooves Joker).

There seems to be a more balanced focus on both chars which makes it looks like this Joker >>>>>>LOVE BEAM CLASH<<<<<< Goro. Sometimes it becomes like this though: Goro AGGRESSIVE LOVE BEAM ►►►►►► Joker

Restaurant Shuake tropes/vibes/flavors that I've observed:

The obvious diff: Joker is the top and Goro is the bottom

Joker is portrayed as more suave/charming/a flirt making him more assertive but he can also be really sweet and silly (I really like top joker too hehehe mostly in shukitashu and shusumi :3) He's the initiator.

Goro is portrayed as more pretty/feminine and heavy preference to his Detective Prince persona. He's often a "cool beauty" or a "tsundere" He's the reciprocator.

There seems to be a heavy emphasis on the tragedy of Goro's life, and how he's suffered from it, and how Joker is the one who helps him overcome those insecurities. There's often a lot of exploration regarding his insecurities about that.

There also seems to be a focus on Goro's vulnerabilities and how Joker is the fix for that. He seems to really depend on Joker emotionally.

In the self indulgent side: people seem to really like making Goro a "wife" like those cool yakuza wives (idk if this makes sense) but basically he's like the intimidating "girl boss lady" while Akira is often very much like a kakkoii sparkly ikemen

People also seem to really like Goro's feminine traits, putting emphasis on making him have alluring expressions, or portraying him to have a feminine build

I used to see himbo Joker and tsundere Goro a lot

Based on NSFW media I've read in the past I think people really like to make him be needy or a power bottom. Joker is portrayed as the assertive one taking initiative etc he's a caring top OR sometimes he's all Cool and Chad about it all. Like I mentioned earlier, there's an emphasis of Joker thinking of Goro as his treasure.

A lot of the scenarios often focus on Goro, like Goro whump, or things directly pointing at Goro. It's like Joker LOVE BEAM>>>>>>>>>>> Goro.

Based on my food diary I came to the conclusion that my allergies lie in Goro portrayal.

Which is why I'm now a Fixed Top Goro 左固定 Enthusiast. I don't mind Top Joker (I like it as I said) I personally think Joker is able to be a top and a very caring and loving one, it's just that for me, Goro Akechi is overwhelmingly assertive and if you put them together Joker is going to be a bottom. That's just how the formula works in my brain.

I just personally don't like seeing Goro submissive and I prefer his more handsome 男前 side because I like assertive bishounens.

That's basically it, that's the story of how I became a slug fujoshi for akeshu.

I'm sorry this is so long omg.

#reply #shipping etiquette

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weepingflowerbonkcop · 1 year ago

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I'm trying to finish these headcannons before moving on. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions about the headcannons. Enjoy reading!

Warnings: Wild being Wild, nothing else.

What the Chain thinks about a Modern! Reader using slang/meme references:

Part 2

Sky

• Sky has some basic education for Skyloft. I'd say he finished high school standards for them, but elementary in our standards. He's still pretty smart but just doesn't show it as much as Four does.

• Sky didn't know what to think of when he first heard modern slang.

• He's one of those people that pretend like they know what you're talking about. Reader would be talking casually and Sky would nod his head, listening intently even if he really doesn't understand.

• He likes it when reader goes to talk to him, but sometimes he'd like subtitles to exist.

• He goes to Four and Wind whenever he doesn't understand a word, hoping that they'd be able to give him some indication/translation of it.

• Memes on the other hand - he's actually pretty good at understanding them. He might not find all of them funny but he does manage to catch what they're about.

• He's that person that hears a joke and goes into a full detailed interrogation of the joke. Something like, "Yeah nah, the bro took his cuzy out to the pub. After he met this nice sheela and got a nice rootin' only to find out the day after it was no sheela." Him not knowing what's going on just goes, "So, you've told me before that a 'she - lah' is a girl, yes? And you've also said a 'bro' is a shorter term for brother. So, what does 'cuzy' mean and what does the root have to do with the story?"

• After you do a break down of the slang he just lights up with a 'ooh' and does a little giggle to himself.

• It's cute but ruins a good story when you have to go into another full explanation of said story.

• He's also an 8/10 at least he'll laugh at memes even if he doesn't find them funny.

Wild

• Thinking about him losing his memories some of his schooling had also been lost since his resurrection.

• I believe Wild is the most adaptable of the Heroes. He had to be adaptable out in the wild in order to survive.

• So, he'd be the quickest - next to Wind - to catch Modern! Reader's slang.

• He would also interpret it into his own day to day talking. His Hyrule is more flexible in my opinion to different ways and languages than other Hyrules.

• Him along with Wind and Four are your main translators to the others. So, when someone is in doubt they run to Wild to ask about a certain word or abbreviation then run back to reader and continue the conversation.

• However, Wild does radiate chaotic energy and sometimes whenever the others try to learn, he'd casually tell them the complete opposite of what it means for shits and giggles. An example, "Wild, what does 'Yo - lo' mean?" "You only lick once." The person would thank him and run back to you, "Indeed only one lick." "What the -"

• This annoys the living daylights out of Twilight, Time, Warriors, First, Calamity - basically all the serious Links.

• Wild appreciates memes from Modern! Reader's world. In fact he sometimes tries to recreate them with readers guidance.

• Other times he would try and create an entirely new genre of meme little does he know he already is with some of his really cursed selfies on his Sheikah Slate.

• Overall 10/10 best boy cause he gets it and screws with people that don't.

Hyrule

• In my honest opinion I don't think this boy had any type of schooling. Most of the things he knows comes from pure experience. He might've been taught more about magic, curses and things more related to the fae since he was raised by them, but no school system like ours.

• Hyrule much like Twilight thought it was just an accent rather than the modern day and age talk when he first heard it.

• Someone had to sit him down though to tell him it's not.

• Hyrule learns from Wild about the terms and their meanings as Wild starts using them more frequently in his own speech. So, Hyrule starts picking up that habit as well and sooner or later you got two four in actuality people talking like anyone from your world!

• I believe he would purposefully go to Legend and start telling him some of the slang that he's learned through either you or some of the others. It's similar to a kid running up to their parent to show them a picture that they drew. Legend actually appreciates this and finds it cute but wouldn't admit it.

• He does surprisingly catch on to memes quick.

• His brain works in mysterious ways as well so he'd instantly understand Modern! Reader's references.

• He does go and have little back and forths with Wind when referencing memes that reader uses the most. It's turns into a challenge between Hyrule, Wild, Wind and Four of who is right with Modern! Reader as the referee.

• He genuinely believes its interesting to hear how different the people in Modern! Reader's world talk in comparison to any of their Hyrules.

• Overall he's an 8/10.

#linked universe #linked universe x reader #linkeduniverse #modern au #linked universe sky #linked universe wild #linked universe hyrule #isekai

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traumaticemphaticfantastic · 8 months ago

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I have delved into the art of “Memes” today, something that I do not normally do but a medium that I believe best suits today’s conundrum.

Today I present to you a really quite peculiar kind of phenomenon that I haven’t seen talked about very much, something that I have come to call “Jewish-deadnaming” or “Jew-naming” which is a kind of really odd tactic employed by certain members of the far-right against Jewish people that I’ve noticed bares a most striking similarity to the trans concept of “Dead-naming” wherein a far-right figure or otherwise ignorant individual will use the birth name of an otherwise passing individual as a sort of “Gotcha” that reveals said individual’s perceived inferiority.

In this meme I use the historical figure I have seen this tactic applied to the most, the Bolshevik and (ex)Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, or as his birth name reads, Lev Davidovich Bronstein as an example. The right-wing (Especially on the internet) really love to bring up Trotsky’s birth name, when you read their comments and posts there’s almost always a kind heir of smug superiority, as if they’re revealing some kind of “Big secret.” This I can only imagine, is most likely due to Trotsky not only being Jewish, but also being connected to the Bolshevik army and in-turn the communists, which plays very well into the Neo-Nazi conspiracy of “Cultural Marxism” which directly evolved from the “Cultural Bolshevism” conspiracy coined by the original Nazis proper. And the fact that Trotsky changed his name to a more Russian “Less Jewish/ethnic minority-sounding” one (Which I may add has been done by many people, not Just Jews, throughout history with a variety of languages and reasons) could and has been interpreted by antisemites to be a nefarious way of “Hiding in plain sight” and so spreading around Trotsky’s birth name becomes a sort of “Honourable” thing to do in the minds of the far-right, as a sort of means of “Exposing” the Jew for who he really is and in-turn exposing a “Larger conspiracy.”

As a trans girl myself I really can’t help but notice just how similar this is to deadnaming, in that the process of “Jew-naming” is done with a sort of venom that you don’t really see as often as say, referring to Lenin as “Vladimir Ulyanov” for historical purposes, most of the time when I’ve seen people going out of their way to Jew-name Trotsky, it’s very explicitly to denote his Jewishness that would otherwise be “Hiding” behind his Russified chosen name. And of course, Jews changing their names historically to “Fit in” better with the society they wish to be a part of goes beyond Trotsky, and maybe you have seen other examples of this? But for me, I see it the most with Trotsky, I’m thinking for the reasons stated above.

Sorry this one is a bit of a dark one today folks, if I can tell you a secret: This whole Jew-naming thing doesn’t particularly bother me personally too much, I find it to be more of a chronically-online curiosity than anything else, there’s definitely things that bother more than this these days haha. But, I wanted to share my observations with you all anyhow, as I do find it all quite batty.

But anyways, that will be all for today, be well!

#jewish #judaism #jumblr #antisemitism #transphobes #transgender

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basiatlu · 2 years ago

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On Theft in Art

First: thank you to the anon here and the other many people who brought this to my attention! I know you did it out of support of me and I love you for it.

I was ready to keep it private as I didn’t want anything negative to come up and be associated with my art. But as I was asked across different platforms concerning the art in question I realized it really bummed me out. I’m here to have a good time in the fandom and create with you all. We have a good thing here in the community and I didn’t want any smoke with another artist - a mutual even.

So to help me feel a little better about it I want to turn this into an opportunity to teach others on the differences between Reference, Inspiration, Reinterpretation, and Theft

Reference: (usually) a visual source of information in order to better understand something. Example here is of my reference board and the art I am currently working on.

My favorite example of a professional using reference photos is by Hirohiko Araki (creator and artist of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure), who uses fashion editorials and photoshoots ALL the time it’s awesome - tysm @yumiaiyuma for showing me this goldmine

Study and Inspiration: here is a great example from the wonderful Stephanie Pepper. Notice the caption stating these are studies, the movie it is from, and I will even go on to say that this artist is influenced or inspired by the prolific works of J. C. Leyendecker (but what’s key is that Stephanie Pepper has developed and practiced to the point of deviating from his work and become a style of art completely her own - and she’s so recognizable in my opinion!)

Personal Example for Inspiration:

An Example of Reinterpretation: note - Both these classical artists whose works are being recycled are dead and no longer missing out on potential work and income. Where stealing ideas and art from current artists hurts them financially and mentally and emotionally. Howl as The Fallen Angel by _mimimaru on Instagram is an interpretation of a 1847 painting by Alexandre Cabanel and is now considered public domain // the Mickey Mouse self portrait was by Charles Boyer and is a parody of the famous illustration by Norman Rockwell and was commissioned by Walt Disney, himself.

Now here’s the part that is concerning to several people, myself included.

Recently, an artist found the reference I used, and decided to draw Andromeda, Bellatrix, Narcissa, and Regulus staring at Sirius getting supposedly punished by Walburga Black off screen.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a matter of tracing or claiming my image as their own. I do not mind at all if myself and another artist end up using the same reference. It happens all the time. Referencing and studying is not stealing. Reinterpretation is great for meme art challenges and paying respect to old classics. Even being inspired and doing one’s own version of another artist’s idea is totally cool, especially if you tag and/or shoutout the artist that inspired you.

I genuinely love and appreciate everyone who has brought this to my attention and who has been supportive and defensive of me with this. That reaction means more to me than anything else in this whole ordeal, if I’m being honest. So thank you all so much, with all my heart.

In closing: Do I hope this is all one gigantic coincidence? Absolutely. It’s one of those very uncool things that hurts my heart as an artist. I just want everyone to enjoy art and inspire each other so we can all grow. I do not want any malice to come from this either. I just wanted to inform everyone that I am aware of this, and give some of my thoughts on it. I also wanted to use this as a way to educate everyone on artistic process and why these things might happen sometimes.

Edit: me and the artist have chatted and we see it as a silly coincidence ♡ and honestly I'm happy and so relieved with that. But I think a lot of this info is still good to be mindful of in a creative community where we circulate ideas and content regularly.

#shushbosh #ugly business sorry #I’m happy to talk with anyone on this of course #art thoughts

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notnights · 9 months ago

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i think.... my top 3 personal favs is 3. looming jax with his ears pressed against the wall: a cute detail! but also i like him cornering gangle/intimidating her and i also like those type of sketches you do!! messy and chaotic (positive), alot to look at and notice in those pieces! 2. jax falling in love with a idiot (gangle): its simple but i love jax expression there!! ahhh... its so good.. i love gangle having calm/simple expressions and jax having extreme emotions/expressions, its a nice contrast! 1. gangle with the npc figurine: a completely different/creative take on "the figurine thing"!! like.. many things to be implied woaw.. i generally think about gangle asking caine for a proper body model she can puppeter and he hands her one of those things, just to feel more? normal/humanoid..? 4 of the cast have humanoid bodies, kinger and gangle kinda being the odd one outs but even so kinger has hands/eyes 'human' things theres also the thought about her cuddling with this thing or experimenting with it haha (i think its canon she has a body pillow??) even if its like.. a joke that weebs have body pillows/ it could also mean shes starve-touched too or looks for physical comfort i would assume, with her sad mask making her passive to do things, she probably shys away from hugging/asking for a comfort, so falls back to her figurine (imagining it as probably ragatha comforting her? or jax if i wanna be bias) ^^^ but anyways! its a nice colored piece! i love gangles lil panicked pose and of course jax being presented there along with his comment...... its peak., sorry if this is alot!!! i thought it'd be a nice addition to include what i like about it! love seeing your ribbun artwork!!

Aw hey thanks this made my day.

1). As a friend once said to me "Jax looks good looming over people."

As a cartoon I like to think a lot of his motions have that closeness that slapstick cartoons have. I LOVE these kind of poses.

And try to push-the-pose most with Jax compared to the others to show off his toony nature but I don't think I'm very good at it yet.

2). Haha glad you like that one, I just took the expressions from the original meme though. So not much creativity on my part. Good excuse to draw a happy Gangle.

3). The inspiration for that piece was actually because the interpretation came up during a conversation with @canterbury-bell. I love the idea of Gangle being a little bit of a weirdo one way or another. Maybe she asked Caine for an artist reference originally.

I want to leave what she was doing with that thing up to interpretation but yeah actually! I like to think she wraps around it, makes it a pseudo-skeleton and puppets it around to feel more human and "solid". Which is weird but you can't really blame her! Might not be the only thing she does with it but that's the big one, and probably what she used as defense a when Jax found it but he implies more and Ragatha might have some concerning judgements about it. Especially if uhhh it is/was an active NPC.

Ah look what you've made me do, talk about a one-off joke as if it has depth!

The particular wording was "had" in that answer about the body pillow iirc. Which made me think she had one in the real world but doesn't in the DC. The other option being she did have one in the Circus too, but for whatever reason doesn't anymore.

Its nice to hear you like my ribbunies. I usually just assume I'm off-putting to others for it. Haven't gotten to draw it a whole lot lately due to trying to let my hand heal from whatevers wrong with it and when I do I can only draw so much. You can have some very early ribbun sketches I did for now. (I think I've posted some of these but not all of them.)

#ask #anonymous #gah sorry my replies are always so long too

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spectrum-core · 1 year ago

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STEPHCLAIR IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD

Alternative title: a very angry (and tired) Full Stop fan's thesis.

ok, so me being the stephan/sinclair comparison's strongest hater is a bit i really like to lean into, but for the sake of keeping things semi-serious i will try to keep the actual essay content as free of me ranting my frustrations as humanly possible (which i mean commitement to the bit aside this will be hard bc it is frustrating to see people calling them both the same character, at best it shows a very surface level understanding of either character and at worst it shows just reducing them to cookie cutter meme fandom archetypes neither character actually fits into, so bear with me if i slip up and make unserious comments from time to time)

so before i start the actual essay let me say this: this essay doesnt even scratch the surface of how much i hate this comparison you guys cant even possibly fucking imagine ive been obssessed and i mean OBSSESSED with the full stop office since 2021 and im glad i wasnt in the limbus prerelease fanbase because if i had to see people comparing my beautiful boy and beloved best friend to a guy we had no info about other than "hes based of the guy from demian" i would have turned into the joker this is not even about saving my own mental health this is about sparing the entire pjm fandom of the monster i would have turned into

spoilers for ruina and limbus, universe terminology heavy and surface level references and interpretations of demian by herman hesse because imma keep it real with you guys the first and only time i read that book i was still in high school and i barely remember shit.

Table of contents:

Stephan - a summary

Sinclair - a summary 2.1. Emil Sinclair in Demian (1919) 2.2. Emil Sinclair in Limbus Company (2023)

Addressing common arguments

1.- Stephan - a summary

And of course I will start with Stephan, because I love him very much, just like Liwei he's one of my favorite pjm characters (yeah i like him more than your favorite popular character don't ask) so it's not surprising that i have A Lot to say about him, right?

And of course, I do.

As I said in the serrated duo post, a core part of my perception of the Full Stop office depends on the fact that they are poor. Mentions of money are common all across many factions in the game, yes, but the Full Stops are extremely constant about money, how taking a wrong turn means losing more than they can afford, how they can't afford to drop their weapons because they were too expensive, how even getting the permissions to be able to buy and wield these weapons was ridiculously expensive and so on. Of course, Stephan is the one talking about this the most (something I will elaborate on later), but Liwei and Tamaki also make a few ocassional mentions to it in their dialogue and keypages and considering this is a shared business it just makes sense that this is something that affects all of them.

These are just some few of the callbacks to money that Stephan alone does in his dialogue, without focusing in keypage text or what Liwei and Tamaki have to say about it.

And idk man, at least to me the difference between social classes is an important aspect for their characterization, specially because of how constant the concern with money is for Stephan. From this point alone comparing them feels like erasing a core aspect of Stephan's characterization, a lot about Stephan (and the Full Stop office as a whole, let's be real here) starts making more sense once you read the office as lower-middle class (and I'm saying lower middle class because they can afford some place to live and their weapons, but to me these guys are the types who precisely because of their need to keep bullets at all times can't pay for water or electricity all the time and sometimes they simply can't afford food or if they do they can spend a week straight eating nothing but unsalted pasta).

Now, going back to Stephan being the most outward about his complaints with money, he is in general the most outward about all problems the office is facing, to the point in which he doesn't mind inconveniencing everyone else with his rants, being one of the few guests who interrupt Angela's introductory speech and getting into Tamaki's nerves (something he's well aware he's doing, as these two know each other) at least two times through the course of their pre-battle cutscene, even Roland comments after the reception on how he wishes he would always have been as open about his problems as Stephan was.

However, it's worth nothing that he doesn't spend the entire cutscene crying about his miseries, and he only starts losing hope at three key moments: when they can't kill Eileen inmediately (making them waste more bullets than needed), when Argalia shows up (forcing them to retreat and making them fail their mission, meaning they won't get paid for this after they already lost a ton of money, as well as turning the situation into something much more dangerous than what they had signed up for) and once they enter the Library (an Urban Plague grade threat they have little to no information about, when him and Tamaki are almost out of bullets so Liwei is essentially the only fixer with some chance of putting up a fight and, you know, making it out alive).

Now, while it's true that Stephan is someone who dislikes danger, he isn't someone who isn't used to seeing gruesome events, his instinctive reaction to seeing a guy getting his head put into a meat grinder was cracking jokes and calling the concept of thought gears "a load of horseshit", which is something that falls in line with him being a somewhat experienced Fixer (sure, grade 5 isn't amazing but we can assume it's still either in the higher side of average or barely above average, and for someone specialized in firearms, which are far from the best weapon in the city, getting that high means he must have some experience and skill, right? more so considering he's been at this for 5 years at most) who has seen a fair share of horrid shit and can be unfazed by (most of) it as long as his own safety isn't on the line.

Another point is... he dislikes danger and is always wary about money and expenses, to the point in which he enjoys checking his bank account (or at least he believes so, if we go for the theory of the artbook profiles being more a mix of what the characters perceive themseves as/would describe themselves as to others, which is a theory i go by, I see him as someone who's convinced he does that for fun instead as out of desperation), but this seems to be more a generalized feeling of impending doom at everything rather than something that can be traced back to a particular traumatic event (anything can be dangerous, anything can cost him money), dude's from the backstreets after all, he's seen shit and he's used to assuming the worst. How I see Stephan, he's a guy who already expects bad things to happen but once things go wrong he starts freaking out about how this time They're Screwed For Real, but he never really tricks himself into believing "maybe things will turn out just fine this time?" or who thinks "well, we've done this before, surely we can handle it again."

This is not very related to Stephan as a character in terms of personality but I think it's still an important point to make as it is particularly related to body mods, his physical condition and his body shape.

So we can easily say that Stephan is a strong dude, at least if compared to real world standards without the fancy and insane body mods we see people in the city have access to. He carries that huge rifle around with his bare hands, something that Tamaki doesn't do and that not even Stephan himself in earlier iterations of his dessign did, and his main talent (which based of my theories is something that can be assumed as "something he's proud enough of to consider it the thing he does best") is physical labor.

Pictured, Tamaki's talksprite, carrying a rifle almost as long as she is tall with a strap supporting the weight on her shoulders, like a normal person.

Also pictured, an earlier iteration of Stephan's dessign, carrying the same rifle his current version does, but also holding it with the help of a similar strap supporting the weight on his shoulders.

And finally, Stephan's current dessign, holding that shit with his bare fucking hands in an exhibition of his brute animal strength, what the fuck is wrong with this man (affectionate)

And Stephan's artbook profile, the important part here is his speciality being physical labor, not only he's strong but he aknowledges this.

However, I made a point about the Full Stop office being poor, right? Even Roland says that "giving a whole office augmentation procedures is cheaper than keeping a decent supply of bullets in stock" (not the exact phrasing).

At least personally, I see this as Roland essentially saying "it would be cheaper (and more efficient) to get body mods for everyone in the office and buy another (cheaper) type of weaponry instead", but as things stand, the Full Stops can afford to either buy more ammunition and maintain their weapons, OR to get body mods, and since their whole deal is firearms... well, they can't really Stop investing in them, meaning they have no body mods At All and they got their grades purely out of their own physical strength.

Similarly, Stephan makes a similar point about how body augmentations are required for people to be able to run while carrying their weapons around (specifically talking about the rifles he and Tamaki use).

And... you know, the whole point is that they couldn't run carrying their weapons because they were too heavy, Argalia mocked them for that, Liwei urged them to drop their weapons, something they refused to do because of the prices.

Lastly on this point, while it's true that Ruina talksprites have a very bad case of Long Anime Legs (to the point in which how Roland's legs take about 2/3 of his height is a common joke), if we focus only on his head and torso, Stephan looks pretty Wide, and not only because he's wearing thick, fluffy and multilayered clothing, as other characters wearing similar clothing styles still look thinner than him.

This is all to say: I don't think this guy is a twink, or thin at all. He's a prime example of the strongman build to me and this is yet another hill I'm willing to die on watch project moon turn him into a beanpole once he inevitably shows up in limbus and me turning into the first real world distortion as a consequence.

Finally, Stephan is very notoriously the most informal member of the office, not only being the only one who doesn't wear any sort of formal clothing fully prioritizing comfort and practicality over looks but also completely disregarding formalities with his attitude at work (again, he interrupts Angela's introductory monologue, and again, his first two lines when being introduced are him cracking jokes), being the only member of the office to swear on screen and using several informal expressions and metaphors through both the reception dialogue and his keypage story.

And for good measure, he's a compilation of Stephan being the creature he is.

The literal introduction of the characters, also known as the moment in which Stephan became one of my favorite characters because he's Just Like Me Fr

Very normal behavior for someone who hates blood and violence and isn't used to seeing it. This man is more than capable (and willing, assuming money is involved) to murder kill.

Which, I mean, this attitude is very different from what we see from Sinclair.

2.- Sinclair, a summary

In retrospect I probably should have made this one first because I'm gonna be honest with you, Sinclair is one of the sinners I care about the least (I still like him and think he's pretty cool mind you I just don't vibe too much with most of the tropes making up the character) so what I have to say about him is less me grasping for straws and subtext because I don't care enough about him to be bothered with a super serious and in depth analysis like I did with Stephan and more things we can explicitly see about him in game and things that happen in the novel Demian.

And if I can have a small parenthesis here, people saying that one of my favorite pjm guys Ever is in any way similar to a guy who despite being pretty cool is just Not the type of character I fully vibe with... really, it gets annoying fast. Anyway back to the serious analysis now.

2.1- Emil Sinclair in Demian (1919)

To be able to understand Sinclair as he is depicted in Limbus Company, it is important to first be familiar with the source material of the original iteration of the character, that's it we're doing your high school homework by compiling several literary analysis of a symbolic psychological early 20th century autobiographical novel i hope you guys signed up for this (and if you didn't, though luck! i will do this anyway, I love literary analysis).

In the novel, young Emil finds himself torn between the worlds of light (which can be equated to the Garden of Eden, but it's more tangible meaning for our protagonist is his childhood home and family, a serene and well structure/organized space where he can be innocent, untainted by the evils of the outside world) and darkness (basically all the scary shit that goes on outside, where people do evil things for the sake of it), he finds himself tempted by the violence of the outside world, particularly through the actions of his classmate Franz Kromer, which eventually leads him to consider that due to being exposed to this tainted world of evil he no longer can return to the world of good and innocence.

Here, the character of Demian acts as a guide, someone who helps Sinclair to trascend this binary perception of good vs evil and to see himself as someone worthy of happiness because him witnessing the world of evil didn't taint him as a person but rather merely showed him another face of the world, Demian here mentions the Mark of Cain as a symbol of mental strenght and freedom, considering that bearers of this mark are capable of making their own choices and should be able to go beyond their assigned roles, being able to embody aspects of both worlds. This is to say that Demian's view is less focused on good vs evil, instead taking a more order vs chaos approach (without giving an explicit moral character to either).

In the book, the symbol of a bird breaking out of the egg is frequently used to represent Emil's personal growth, the egg represents safety and innocence, but a bird must eventually leave the egg or it will die, and getting out of the egg is a process than can be seen as violent, as a bird must fight to get out of the egg, and getting out of the egg represents birth but also an irreversible change, it can be seen as breaking out of the world of light and getting permanently in the world of darkness since a broken shell can't be fixed, but it can also mean achieving the enlightment and personal balance to not feel permanently bound to a condition, place or state of being and therefore growing as a person by learning to see himself as a whole human instead of supressing his "evil side" by only forcing the "good side" to surface.

Max Demian is here to show this second meaning of growth/self improvement (while also explaining that Sinclair is permamently growing and must always keep this balance between all the parts conforming the whole being that is himself rather that trying to make parts of himself antagonize each other). This idea of personal growth being one of the core themes of the book.

2.2- Emil Sinclair in Limbus Company (2023)

With Sinclair's source media analyzed (at a very surface level, mind you), we now can start talking about the depiction of Sinclair in Limbus Company, how it parallels the book, why the book symbolism is important for this instance of Sinclair and so on.

When we are first introduced to Sinclair in the game he's clearly nervous, he doesn't know what he's supposed to do as he hasn't worked for a similar company before and he isn't used to the gruesome sight of the bus eating people, this does fit inmediately in the motif of a naive person with limited experience about the world (well, to be fair to him most people won't be seeing man-eating buses at a regular basis, but the average backstreets dweller would be familiar with equally violent situations).

With this said, despite Sinclair's obviously nervous behavior... he isn't really a pessimist like Stephan was, in fact, almost every chapter (counting cantos, intervallos and the short mini chapters such as the Dante's notes update episode) have at least one key moment with him trying to rationalize horrible stuff as something much less violent, or simply going "but I thought this thing didn't work like this..." when confronted with the more horrible realities in the city. He thought the G corp veterans were really going to let them pass without a fight, he thought the people being controlled by headhens were just actors wearing mascot costumes, he thought mermaids were the beautiful half-woman half-fish creatures he heard about in fairy tales, and there's more examples but I don't really feel like looking for The Entire Fucking Plot Because This Guy Is An Actual Protagonist Instead Of A Background Guy Like Stephan Was to make my point clearer than it already is. And it's only when he realizes that the real world doesn't fit his expectations that he panics.

Well, there is one exception to this pattern: his own canto. Here, he panics inmediately as soon as K corp's nest is mentioned and spends the first half of the chapter pleading to turn back while saying that they are going to get killed. So what is different here with the rest of the plot?

Obviously, the fact that is related to his very own very personal very specific trauma. That is to say, unlike Stephan who is wary of anything that can put him on danger or cost him more money than it should, Sinclair has a very specific traumatic event that makes him act Like That (sure, he gets scared and nervous outside that, but these are more normal "I'm unfamiliar with this and I don't fully know how to react, this is normal behavior in a human being" reactions than outright "I am Actually Terrified due to being reminded of an actual traumatic event, this reaction is a textbook definition of post-traumatic stress disorder").

HOWEVER, Sinclair being someone who's deeply traumatized and kind of a scaredy cat when it comes to violence and unfamiliar situations... it doesn't mean that he's incompetent or a bad fighter. Almost all of his identities are terrifyingly good fighters (at least in their lore), Los Mariachis fear jefe Sinclair, Cinq director Sinclair is someone most association members are terrified to duel even during training, Blade Lineage Sinclair is considered a talented killer (it's also worth noting that save maybe for the mariachi one, in none of these mirror worlds Sinclair is precisely happy of being recognized as "the guy who's very scary when he fights people", unlike Stephan who I don't think he particularly likes killing but has a more "as long as I get paid..." mentality about it), the only "not very good at this" Sinclair id I can think of is the molar boatworks id where he's more a mechanic than a fighter so he fears he's lagging behind in that aspect. Hell, even the Canon Timeline so to speak (which is to say: his base identity) has him carrying that huge halberd, going on a frenzy attacking some already mutilated inquisitor's corpse, piercing through Guido's armor and dealing a fatal blow that finally killed him for real. To compare, Stephan is good at physical work, but we don't know about his close combat capacities other than the fact that he dislikes it, for Sinclair however we know he's terrifyingly good at physical combat.

Now, I've seen a lot of people call Sinclair a twink and while it's one of these words that nobody agrees on what it means, let's give it the benefit of doubt and say "alright, for the duration of this analysis let's settle on a twink being a young looking (regardless of actual age), thin man with almost no facial/body hair".

Since Sinclair is a rich guy (not just Any Rich Guy though, we're talking of someone whose family had ties to a Wing, probably not some elite guy like Daniel or Hong Lu, but not a self perceived "mediocre" nest dweller like Samjo either), and pressumably not very experienced in combat in most mirror worlds (we know he has no prior experience in the base one where he joined Limbus, at least), let's say that he has enough body mods for him to be much stronger than he looks like despite being thin, he does look thin and young and much to my dissapointment he also has no facial hair, so yeah, under this very broad definition of the term he is a twink.

However if you start adding personality archetypes to the definition he stops being one almost inmediately, as we've been shown time after time that his "submissive" attitude is mostly a result of him not knowing too well how to impose himself and just going along with what the rest say or do, but he's starting to grow tired of that ever since Hell's Chicken (even if he clearly still isn't great at that), as it should be more than obvious for anyone who even just googled "demian herman hesse literary analysis", Sinclair is undergoing a lot of changes even now, and the game is doing a good job at portraying that.

Honestly I also think he'd be hotter with a sleeper build but really, I don't care enough about him to argue about that.

And for the last point, precisely due to his upbringing as a rich guy AND his traumatic experience with Kromer, Sinclair is not only a very polite and mild mannered guy (again, unlike resident creature Stephan), but also he tries to take as little space as possible, both literally and metaphorically, as Dante notices near the end of canto 3 when they finally comment on how Sinclair never talks about his own problems until it's too late because he doesn't want to bother the others as they probably have it worse (again, unlike Stephan "i don't mind loweing team morale and making everyone in the room uncomfortable as long as i get to vent" Full Stop office).

3.- Adressing common arguments

Alright, now that I talked about each character, let's see some of the most common arguments I've seen people use to compare them.

"They look the same!" No, they don't. The only thing they have in common is being blonde but even their hairstyles are different with Sinclair having a simple bowl-ish cut with slightly wavy hair and Stephan having curlier hair (not to mention the whole point I made about body types because I'm the sort of lunatic who cares about that stuff). I won't even bother with this argument.

"They have the same personalities!" Again, they don't. Stephan is very cynical with a lot of his attitude being clearly derivated from him coming from a poor background and having stayed there his whole life, he also doesn't care about his cynism getting in the way and bothering everyone else. On the other hand, Sinclair is someone who could almost be described as naive due to having lived a sheltered childhood and only having his experiences with Kromer and his time at Limbus as moments of realizing that the rest of the world is Not Like His Childhood House, still believing that the world is a binary of good vs evil and expecting things to turn out fine or be much better than they actually are, just to be hit with the reality of the city Not being a nice place where people are nice and polite and not trying to kill him, this is not to say he doesn't have his own issues but even Dante notices during his Canto that Sinclair makes a point to avoid bothering everyone else with his personal problems, keeping them to himself even if that makes things worse on the long run.

"Both are opposed and harmed by a lunatic!" This is an argument I've seen a lot and is incredibly filmsy at best, half of the city's population are lunatics and the other half are people who got opposed by them some way or another. Will you say that Ishmael and the rest of the Pequod crew can be compared to the Full Stop office (or really, even mention the other Full Stop fixers instead of just focusing on Stephan because he happens to be blonde and can be compared to Sinclair) because of their situations with Ahab? Or the W Corp crew who got their train targetted by Jae-heon and Elena (or, you know, the train passengers who were turned into Love townspeople or puppets)? What about the Vermillion Cross who got killed by the Reverb Ensemble? Or the Cane office fixers? or the Zwei association section 6 who got beaten to death by Gyeong-mi just because he felt like doing so? Or the Liu association section 1 who had to deal with Argalia taking Philip away? Or the Kurokumo clan members when they were attacked by Tanya? You aren't comparing them to either Stephan or Sinclair, right? Not to mention that in her weird and fucked up perception of things, Kromer was less opposed to Sinclair as she was trying to lead him to join her and her cause, even the last things she says before getting killed are her calling him to follow her.

"Both are compared to birds!" Oh, right, because I forgot that a very directed symbolic comparison to a baby bird breaking out of it's shell as a symbol of rebirth, learning about the nuances of the world and self improvement/liberation that is consistently used in the source material Sinclair comes from is exactly the same as one (1) throwaway line the big bad guy uses to mock not only Stephan but the whole Full Stop gang, right. And if you want to say "but Tamaki compares him to a bird once too", yeah she calls him a parrot because he keeps repeating the same complaints over and over, it's still not the same as a consistent metaphor.

"Both are sad blonde twinks! They're essentially the same guy." Sad? Yeah, everyone in the city is sad but their ways to be sad are polar opposites, and neither of them is the pure cinnamon roll uwu crybaby archetype people tend to lump both into, Stephan was merely having a bad day and people decided to make that his whole personality (when honestly we get more insight on his actual personality before Argalia shows up, when he's making sarcastic remarks and getting impatient because they weren't starting killing people fast enough) but he's still perfectly capable (and willing) to murder people, and Sinclair is just... someone who lacks experience about the real world and how it works and has a tendency to get nervous because of this, but he can adapt quickly to situations once he understands them. Blonde? Yeah, but I guess if that's a point to draw a comparison then we should also compare them to Don Quixote, the Tiphereths, Lenny, Yun, Lulu, Olga, every single npc, librarian, and agent who comes with blonde hair from the generator... Twinks? Stephan absolutely isn't one, Sinclair depends on how you define twink as nobody seems to get to an agreement with that, if you define it as merely "young looking thin man with almost no visible body hair" then yeah he is one, but if you go for any more specific definition than that he stops fitting into the definition almost instantly.

In conclusion: if I see anyone else comparing them I'll start blocking people liberally bc I'm sick of seeing that shit (I do that already tbh but just so you know), now scram

#pjm #library of ruina #limbus company #.🔫#this full stop office shit gets serious #probab ly not exhaustive but ive had this sitting on my drafts for way too long so i needed to post it so people understand how much i Hate #that godforsaken comparison

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shrinevandal · 2 years ago

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Initial thoughts on Double and Neoplasm - Who is guilty? What's true and what's a lie?

Hello! This is a (fairly long, sorry) post analysing the MV for Double, as well as Neoplasm, and what it means for Mikoto, Orekoto, a potential 3rd alter, their relationship as a whole, and Mikoto's judgement.

Note: I am a system myself, I am usually not very open about this so please don't ask about the details. But I think it's important to state that I do struggle with a lot of the same stuff Mikoto* does, and so my perception of it comes from a level of understanding that singlets may not have.

Obviously this contains spoilers for both Double and Neoplasm, I would recommend you watch/listen to both beforehand. This is also just my initial interpretation, I have purposefully avoided any other posts about it to make my theory/interpretation as straightforward and from-the-source as possible.

Some terminology notes: I will be using John to refer to Orekoto, as Es has so thoughtfully dubbed him. Also, if I say MILGRAM in all caps I am referring to the project itself, and if I say Milgram in title case I am referring to the location/entity which Es works for. I also believe the 3koto theory, which will become relevant at various points here. Any translators or sources will be linked at the end.

Alright, let's get into it. Music video analysis:

Double - Visual Motifs

There are a lot of visual elements to Double, which I will break down into different sections.

Phone (& Tarot)

There are two major instances of Mikoto's phone being important in the song: Right at the beginning, when he's getting several texts and then an incoming call from "Chief" (almost certainly his boss), and in the middle of the song, when he gets a call from his mom. In the beginning, Mikoto* doesn't even look at the texts, and when he answers the call, he seems to barely be listening.

Translation of the texts are as follows (thank you rochisama on wordpress!):

- Regarding the first draft you submitted today, I think option B might be the best after all, so can you remake it by morning.

- Also, I forgot to mention, but you made a lot of mistakes with the one we spoke about earlier, so make sure it’s all fixed too. This one also needs to be ready by morning, so I’ll leave it to you to get everything ready.

- Oi, get back here now.

- Are you going to abandon your duties?

There are also two fun little details here with the phone: His lock screen is a picture of the Hanged Man, the same version that was on his shirt in MeMe:

Also, His battery is at 29%.

Two of prisoner nine.

Later in the song, when his mom calls him, he immediately picks up, greets her energetically despite the bags under his eyes, and informs her he's doing well and not to worry.

"Oh, hello? Mom? It’s been a while. Yeah… well, I mean, some days are hard, but… I’m doing alright, don’t worry. How’ve you been? I’ll go home next time I get some time off."

He also hangs up very quickly, as if he doesn't want to talk to her. He gives her placating words and then ends the conversation as soon as he can.

According to his S1 Interrogation questions, Mikoto's family consists of him, his mom, and his younger sister. His parents are divorced. He gets along well with both his mom and sister, but also states that he can't let his mom worry. This checks out with him hiding the truth from her, as letting her know just how badly he's doing would certainly cause concern. Keep all this in mind, it will become important later on.

Eyes

I don't have much of note to say about it right now, but eyes are a pretty heavy visual motif throughout the whole video.

One thing I will say about it, though, is the large eyes across the whole screen show up twice: Once as orange, symbolizing John, and then as a grey-blue, symbolizing Mikoto.

Colors

There are five important colors: Blue, Green, Red/Orange, and Pink.

I'm grouping red and orange because I believe they both symbolize John. Blue is obviously Mikoto.

As I've mentioned, I am a fan of the 3koto theory- The visuals in the MV for MeMe, and even the composition itself, allude to 3 different entities (Music theory nerd here, hehe - I wanna write my own take on the 3koto theory eventually and talk about the way the song itself changes, but that's for another time.) And now in Double, it seems like there is still that imagery, albeit much less strongly than before.

So green, like in MeMe, symbolizes Midori/Midokoto/whatever you wanna call him. Pink is a little bit of a weird one, so I'll get to that in the moment. Anyway, let's start with some John moments.

The red glow in the back shows that John is the one fronting in all three of these shots, with Mikoto being asleep behind him in the second one.

An example of blood splatters with an orange tint. This is part of the reason I think both orange and red symbolize Mikoto, since they're so interconnected here. Also, as mentioned in the eyes section, the eyes there are very orange whereas John is usually associated with red.

Speaking of eyes,

Huge 3koto implications in a few frames from this shot. John's body flashes green at one point, and the background and fire-halo are green when John's eyes are glowing orange. In the next image, the body's eyes are scribbled over in green. This scene in particular is very interesting to me, with both implications of Midori's existence and his connection to the eye motif. It also calls John "savior"

Here's another notable instance of 3koto near the beginning, right after John throws Mikoto's phone. Notice the color progression in the scene. Green background with blue text, down to red background and red text. John is clearly being portrayed as an outsider here, with Midori and Mikoto being a duo.

Going back to blood splatters, there are various points in the video where the "inverse" of the blood is either green or blue. This also checks out with both red and orange being John's colors; Blue is the opposite of orange, and green is the opposite of red. This also doubles (haha) as another example of John being the opposite of MikoMido

The train itself has a lot of green highlights. When John stares out the door into the other train cars, it flashes green a few times. It's not pictured here, but the door also flashes a staticky pink once, and so does Mikoto's body earlier in that same scene I showed where it's fully green.

Alright, more on pink now. I'm actually not entirely sure what it may symbolise, but my main guess is it's Mikoto's victims.

Aside from the instances mentioned above, these are the most prominent pink scenes in the video. Similar to how orange was juxtaposed against both blue and green, here it's against blue. In context, these scene also seems to me like a switch, a realization of what Mikoto has done. A brief instance where his memories coexist with him, and he's horrified at his actions.

Double - Overall Analysis

As pointed out in the colors section above, Midori seems to be very present still. He seems to be haunting the video in a way, lying just underneath the surface.

A really important aspect of DID that hasn't been directly addressed by MILGRAM is the fact that it's caused by childhood trauma, usually around the ages 9 to 10 or younger. For those who don't know, this is because young kids have not fully formed their identity and sense of self yet. Usually, kids will eventually consolidate all their various parts into one, which becomes their sense of self. But trauma literally changes how the brain works on several levels, and for some kids, that interrupts the process of those parts fusing together. (This is also why there's discourse behind the idea of an "original" personality - Which one is the "original" between a pair of identical twins, for example? One cell divided into two, so really neither of them are that first cell.)

My theory for Mikoto's childhood trauma and subsequent DID symptoms, is that Mikoto in his current form is the body's "first" alter, and that Midori was the original host. (I have several reasons for believing it's this and not the other way around, but it's not that important for this post. But do think about, "I'm already the fake one.")

We know that John specifically was created as a result of Mikoto's job stress, meaning he was obviously not around when Mikoto and Midori were kids. By the time the events of MILGRAM roll around, it seems like Midori is completely dormant, or at least very rarely fronts, as John seems to pretty clearly imply just his and Mikoto's existence in both Double and Neoplasm. But if John wasn't around when Mikoto was a kid, there has to have been at least one other alter throughout the course of Mikoto's life. You don't just suddenly develop DID at age 23 without having had it since you were traumatized (Unless the MILGRAM team is just clueless about DID, which is possible too but imo they've done a pretty decent job so far so I would rather believe in 3koto. I have faith in them, maybe that'll bite me in the ass eventually, who knows).

Mikoto's childhood trauma is not very clear, but I think it can be one of two main things, and they are likely connected: Either something to do with his parents' divorce, or the reason he is so against worrying his mom.

Mikoto clearly loves his mother a lot, but it seems like doesn't trust her on some level. He doesn't want her to worry, which is an understandable emotion, especially if she puts a lot of pressure on him to perform well, which I have a feeling is the case. (Full disclosure, I could be projecting my own experiences here, because I have had these same struggles with my own mom pressuring me to do well in school and such. But I think it's worth mentioning)

Mikoto clearly hates his job, but he doesn't get a new one. Referencing the Interrogation again, while he seems to enjoy the career path he's on (ie graphic design), the job he currently has is purely to make money, and not for his enjoyment. He also mentions in the Interrogation that he hopes someday he can start his own indie company. In the real world, it's actually very common for graphic designers to start with jobs in advertising, because it makes a lot of money. Then once they have enough to support themselves, they go on to projects they're more passionate about. So Mikoto's reasons for sticking with his advertising job could be either to make money or to satisfy his mom, or both. Again, I could very much be projecting here.

Now onto his dad and the divorce. I won't lie, I am not at all an expert in Japanese law, but I'm fairly familiar with US law because my mom is a lawyer here. So how it usually how it works in the US is that parents divide custody by either working out a schedule or by simply choosing which kid goes with which parent, unless one parent is abusive, in which case all kids go to the non-abusive parent. In Japan, however, apparently the mom is the default parent that kids go to, regardless of other situations, except in some extreme cases probably. Again, not an expert, but it seems that even if Mikoto's mom was abusive in some way, the court system would still give Mikoto and his sister over to her, especially if her form of abuse is purely psychological with no physical evidence. So this is one possibility, but even if both parents were good people and separated on friendly terms, divorce can be traumatizing for kids. It's unclear at what age Mikoto's parents divorced, but it seems to have been long enough ago that he doesn't even consider his dad part of his family. Meaning it's very possibly the main source of trauma that cause Mikoto's DID.

Neoplasm

Alright, finally it's time for the audio drama! This is a much shorter section, but there's a LOT here and I'm really excited about this one actually, because it seems like a step in the right direction for Mikoto and accepting John. He doesn't know it's DID, nor does Es try to tell him, but he acknowledges it as "sleepwalking", which is still super huge. If Kotoko and Es ever choose to inform him, it seems like they have a much better chance at getting across to him now than when MILGRAM started.

John being much more present and coherent is also big news, as he has a full on conversation with Es, and even receives a name from them. Although he expresses concern about this and "wishes he had stayed a monster", I honestly think this is amazing for both him and Mikoto. Along with the sleepwalking analogy, it's progress on their ability to accept themselves and each other.

John also sheds some light on his and/or Mikoto's murder, claiming that there were several indiscriminate victims, and that his memories are also fuzzy, citing that it's likely because he had only recently been born. To me, the most interesting part of this is the fact that John's memories are not intact. While he seems to think it's just due to not really being used to being alive, I think there's another explanation for it. Fuzzy memories are a very common symptom of DID, and most notably happens when one alter tries to access another alter's memories, often because they're being blocked. Maybe in a similar way to how Mikoto doesn't remember anything? 🤔

Another important thing here is that John claims that he is the one who killed people. But the most pressing question is, is he telling the truth?

We know that Milgram's criteria for what counts as murder and who counts as the perpetrator is very loose; For example, Yuno's abortions are enough to qualify her, and Fuuta doxxing Killcheroy is enough to qualify him. So it's not a stretch to think that maybe John really is the killer, and that Milgram just picked Mikoto as the person to be judged since he's the "main" alter. But this honestly doesn't sit right with me.

If there's one thing we know for certain about John and his dynamic with Mikoto, it's that he would do anything to ensure Mikoto's safety. Notice how he was incredibly nonchalant about the murder until Es pointed out that even with psychological evaluation taken into account, the death penalty is still very likely for Mikoto. As soon as they allude to Mikoto being in danger, John's attitude immediately switches, claiming over and over, very relentlessly, that he was the sole killer, and that Mikoto is innocent. His frantic behaviour is a very clear sign that this is survival mode; why would he tell Es the truth if it could put Mikoto in danger?

All of this really goes back to the major differences between them; Mikoto is honest and uses humor to cope, John avoids being open and lashes out at people. Mikoto straight up blocks all the bad memories, John is aware of them but has a hazy recollection of events.

So while it's a possibility that Mikoto is innocent and that John is the killer, I find it much, much more likely that Mikoto did it and then blocked his own memories, and that John is lying about the situation to protect Mikoto. It's what he's always done, after all.

Final thoughts - Forgiven vs Unforgiven

This may be an unpopular take, but I think as of right now, my first instinct is to vote Mikoto as Unforgiven. I'd like to point out that there's a difference between Innocent vs Guilty, which is how the terms are officially translated, but in Mikoto and John's case I think they are interconnected. There are cases in Milgram where I think they're completely separate ideas and cases where I think the difference is moot, and MikoJohn definitely fall into the latter one.

I also am very conflicted on the concept of Metavoting; for example, Amane being voted Unforgiven was an incredibly stupid decision on the majority's part and I'm not afraid to state that. (Tbf Her mental state is delicate enough that forgiving her would also not end well, but lesser of two evils imo. But all that's for another time.) However, with MikoJohn, again, it actually aligns very well with my actual judgement. John very clearly states that it's his belief that forgiving Mikoto will reduce Mikoto's stress, and allow John to fade away. Whether this is a good or bad thing, or neutral even, is pretty complex honestly, but I think for me personally, I would view it as a bad thing.

Again, I am not very open about my system-isms, but I relate a lot to Mikoto in his current state of being unable to accept John's existence. I was in that exact same position once, and for me, accepting the existence of my alters was very beneficial to all three of us, and we are much closer now and less stressed overall. If John continues to exist, that means Mikoto will have a chance to figure things out and accept John's existence. But if John fades, he may be still caught in that perpetual state of half-existence, with Mikoto being unable to accept him.

So with all these things together; the fact that Mikoto is the one we are judging and I am pretty sure he is the killer, the fact that John may fade if Mikoto is forgiven, and how that isn't a good thing in Mikoto's case, and the fact that - I am pretty damn sure I want to vote Mikoto as Unforgiven. This isn't the be-all, end-all, of course. We don't know if John's prediction is correct about disappearing, we don't know if voting Mikoto Unforgiven will actually have the opposite effect that I hope for and drive him to his breaking point, hell we still don't know who did it. My opinion may change because again, this is just my initial thoughts. I'd love to interact with other systems about this and see their thoughts and opinions. Thank you for reading if you made it this far!!!

Translations, Resources, Etc

Chief's texts, translated by rochisama on wordpress

Interrogation questions, referenced from the MILGRAM Wikia. I'm unsure of the translator, sorry.

A/V of Neoplasm, edited by ac on youtube, featuring translation by onigiriico

kayanomikotoba's Triokoto theory (fun fact, this post is one of the main reasons I got into MILGRAM!)

A quick overview on Japanese divorce law, specifically by the US foreign embassy but it's good enough for my purposes

#milgram #kayano mikoto #this is super long and maybe be disjointed but idk i just had to get it out there #this took almost 4 hours. i havent even had breakfast #roach talk #LMK IF THERES ANY GLARING ERRORS LIKE IF SENETENCE JUST ENDS ABRUPTLY OR SOMETHING ack i did proofread several times but i dont trust mysel #to catch all errors asfdgfhd #3koto #triokoto #how do i tag all that #milgram theory #??

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