I need to write/draw C!Dream with hoarding/guarding behaviors because you guys have no idea how bad that fucks up your thinking. It makes you into a wild animal.
Techno jokingly reaching for one of Dream's apples while they're chilling together and Dream slapping his hand and becoming super defensive without even realizing. He's just short of growling at Techno, and just a second ago they were joking together
Him trying to act normal afterwards he's a little hunched over his things. A minute later he slides it all back into his inventory, saying that the mess was bothering him
When Punz and Dream are together then Dream will never leave anything of his on view, even while he cooks he angles himself to hide whatever he doing from Punz. He's not even doing it on purpose
Him guarding his territory. Punz rarely enters the prison because Dream always insists they have meetings elsewhere and always has an excuse of why they don't need to go in the prison rn
Having bunker after bunker filled with every type of item and backups for all those bunkers on top of that.
Tommy digs too deep one day and finds himself on seemingly endless hallways that just lead to storage after storage after storage
104 notes
·
View notes
frank and piper are interesting counterpoint narratives to me. both of them have relatively mundane problems compared to the rest of the cast yet their parent's domains represent the heights of human passion as defined by the series, despite piper and frank both being (outwardly) dispassionate and (inwardly) mopey. the good end of these domains is love and protection (selfless), the bad end is heartbreak and bloodlust (selfish), which both of them try to resist. they both get claimed last out of their trios and had beforehand assumed that they were the children of someone else. both also experience perceived rejection from their mortal family directly before the series begins - both express anger and hurt at being "sent away". their rejection and unexpected claiming, back-to-back, results in discombobulation for them both, and feelings of humiliation brought on by both sets of parents.
they also both go through forced physical transformations by their parents to fit an ideal they don't want. all of the characters experience issues of identity and self-esteem but i think its the most pronounced with these two in the series. neither of them really knows who they are, and are pessimistic about their own capabilities. they are also counterpoints in that they feel disconnected from their own looks - both are very self-conscious people, but, based on how they're described by other characters, piper is probably the most beautiful member of the 7 and frank is probably the least. piper is frequently harassed and objectified, whereas frank is teased constantly about his looks. he neither feels as childish as his face is nor as grown as his body is, and he doesn't understand how to move through the world. both of which are common experiences throughout puberty - suddenly being treated differently on the basis of a body that's changing faster than you want or understand.
(discourse alert) i don't have a lot to add to the piper transformation discourse except that i do think its interesting that her blessing was temporary within the book and her love interest actually self-reflected on his reaction to it and realized that he should not have told her that she looked hot in that instance. rick did reverse frank's transformation five years later and i'm curious about his thought process about both writing it in the first place and in reversing it, and what feedback he received, if any. piper's transformation was a makeover whereas frank's was a puberty, which later rick walked back with "actually frank is still going through puberty". piper's was cheesy, sure, but frank's falls so flat bc that's just not how it works. its too much of a stretch. i don't even think it was in rick's og plan for frank, maybe he just watched captain america and was like "hell yeah i should do that" and flipped a coin between frank and leo, bc again frank was already initially described as physically grown in his debut book. and i can't even talk about hazel's reaction to to it bc its not real to me and i can't read suddenly. idk frank's plotline in general was too rushed in that book and he should have gotten another pov chapter set at least bc rick was trying to do too much too fast and relied on idiocy like the transformation to support it in the place of real character work when it wasn't even necessary for anything he accomplished in the book. he could've just walked around with better posture and achieved the same effect.
17 notes
·
View notes
Ever since I talked about a universal language, or at least about common languages used in the interplanetary (though given we have examples from the Andromeda system, it could also be intergalactic) community, I have been contemplating number systems. Not exactly a universal one no, but certainly what the counting systems of some of the smarter species of Ben 10.
And who else none other than the cerebrocrustaceans that I have been headcanoning so much about for the privilege!
I remember watching a video about creating a number system (part of a series about making a conlang because :P) and at the time I had misremembered what the 'best' number system was and thought 'well what if the one thing cerebrocrustaceans and galvans agree on (rivalry or not) is their numbers'. Turns out, it's a hot fucking debate in the numbers community between base 6 (senary/seximal) and base 12 (duodecimal/dozenal), and the video made a compromise for base 16 (hexadecimal).
So instead of like... going based on that, I went with the next step; fingers!
Except... cerebrocrustaceans have uh... less fingers than humans (or even galvans). Sure, maybe if their number system is so low it can actually contribute into a literal billion digit IQ using the power of a base 2 (binary, of course) number system, using the 'on/off' of an open and closed claw to count but- 2 claws, 2 hands, that only counts up to 4. So I thought 'okay, what else would they use to count?' and looked at their teeth, counting from there; it didn't end up working, the tooth count was inconsistent between screenshots even though Brainstorm specifically held the same expression.
Then one day, in the middle of the night, as I was trying to figure out how to count with the babylonian number system (count to 12 on one hand counting the joints of your 4 fingers with your thumb, hold up a finger on the other to signify how many twelves you've counted up to 60);
What if I just give cerebrocrustaceans and extra joint on their claws (which technically they do have based on animation but it isn't shown because animation-friendly) and have they count the fronts and backs of their claw per claw (though I didn't understand the babylonian counting system previous since I kinda combined it with binary which I did know how to count).
Behold! A diagram!
We will address the 69 shaped elephant in the room later.
Let's bring in the close-ups for the discussion!
Including 0 (which would be an open claw in the same way a closed fist for a human is 0) the cerebrocrustacean number system using this diagram ends up being a base 9 (nonary) system, an odd-numbered system that I am not going to get into because I am only using hands as our counting origin. While functionally in decimal (because I practiced counting this way to stress test the system) you can count from 1-80 (each section on the tens claw corresponding to a multiple of 9 ending at 72), but with the fact that you can count up to 8 in each claw in a nonary system, it's actually counting up to the equivalent of 99 with only hands alone. Considering that the limitations of claws is that there isn't a vast landscape to count with, cerebrocrustaceans make do by counting each section of a claw twice, once from it's inner side and another on it's outer side going from, using the tip to count by touching the corresponding number.
The order from 1-8 is counted first in the (typically) right claw by the pollex (the inner claw) on the inner edge of the pincer (the outer claw) from bottom to top. Then the pincer bends to allow for the pollex to reach the outer edge, tapping the top claw then the bottom claw. Then the pincer follows the same steps to the pollex, counting from inside bottom to top, then outside top to bottom. The pincer has a little more reach being the larger of the two claws, but the pollex folds more because it has more mobility.
As a nonary system, there is no 9 and instead the 'nine' in this instance is 10, which is counted in the same order as 1-8 but done in the (typically) left claw, mimicking binary in how it accents the units of the right claw by adding an additional ten relevant to the corresponding claw.
Admittedly I had no rhyme or reason to display these claws in the order that they're in, but if cerebrocrustacean number systems are written in the same way it's counted then technically inside out, right to left, would probably be a pretty cool and also pretty hostile way to convey numbers (hah, reference to heavy out-grouping biases).
The main goal of the claw positions is to make at least an easily distinguishable set of numbers that don't blur (too much) between each other if you kinda look at it from silhouette alone. Not sure how successful I was but it isn't the actual numbers in written form themselves, so it's a different ball-park and more of a visualisation of the dexterity used to count.
And now- gotteem!
A funny thing about making a counting system and like, actually practicing how it feels and how to actually count, is that you sometimes stumble into comedy gold and get a 69 on the decimal 69 (if you twist your hands around to mimic it at least) plus just hitting you with an almost perfect 👌👌just made me want to actually visualise this. Well... I was gonna visualise it anyway since it helps to provide an example on how cerebrocrustacean's count with claws but like- yeagh I don't care that odd-numbered bases are not optimal I'm keeping the nonary system for this joke alone (not actually but it's a bonus)!
Anyway- don't ask me how they do math and have a good time counting to 76!
7 notes
·
View notes