rio i miss and love you and your analysis posts. what are your thoughts on the clethubs dynamic this season (in anticipation of the new episode tmrw)
hi aleph thank you so much for giving me a green flag to just drop a 1000 word rant about clethubs also sorry i missed the deadline and also sorry about the length. anyways personally i think clethubs is what you get when you put 3 people who are burdened with Remembering in a world where no one else really seems to. like, of course the other players remember and make references to events of the past, but they don’t remember in the way these three do.
to me this is best explained through a breakdown of Trust and how it manifests between each of them indiviudally. etho, especially, is so distrusted by most of the server. he’s a schemer, he has a reputation of being really unreadable and also unpredictable, but if you actually try to understand him it’s really easy to see that he’s actually the most straightforward person alive. he operates purely on debts and repayments. not debts in a trade sense—those are a business transaction and subject to being logically dissected and exploited. but debts in an emotional sense. etho offered grian mercy in limited life because of the diamond sword in episode 1, which grian had forgotten about entirely all the while etho had been biding his time and waiting for a chance to repay it all season.
cleo is the only person on the server who seems to really understand this part of etho, and therefore is the only person who seems to be able to read his true intentions. not only that, but she's the only one who really seems to approach the concept of loyalty in the same way. in the life series, alliances are feeble and fleeting, and for the most past actions hold no bearing in the future. it doesn’t matter what happened 5 episodes ago—if you’re not on my side now, you’re against me. there’s no such thing for cleo—loyalty and betrayal are not just momentary states of being. if you took something dear from me 5 episodes ago, i will never fully allow myself to need you again. even if we're in the final five and our survival depends on each other.
cleo and etho were direct antagonists in the last season and have no reason to trust each other now, but they trust openly despite it because better than most they understand the burden of a debt unpaid, and the burden of remembering in a way that no one else seems to. to them, loyalty isn’t about who you arbitrarily align yourself with, it’s a gesture. it’s “you gave me an extra pair of diamond leggings 3 episodes ago for no reason when you could’ve given it to your allies and now you have no idea that youre in my good books forever.” you can be on opposites ends of a war from someone but if they extend you a moment of mercy, well, how are you supposed to forget that? how are you not supposed to spend the rest of your life repaying that? they both subconsciously keep lists, not just of people they want to kill (like so many other players seem to), but of people who have extended a hand to them in a time where it didn't really make sense to. of gestures that were silently meaningful towards people they care about. "i trust you because bdubs trusted you" etc etc.
it makes so much sense that cleo and etho would both go immediately to becoming sworn allies this season after being bitter enemies in the previous series. because they both understand that there’s no such thing as fleeting alliances, and when they've decided to choose each other, it’s more than just a shared base or a team name—it’s something unshakable. it’s a thousand debts you take turns repaying.
and then theres bdubs, where remembering takes a different form entirely. for him, remembering manifests as shared history. if i chose you before, really chose you, then i’m going to choose you again and again and again. i’m going to hover in your orbit even if you don’t choose me the next time, because you and i both know what we had, even if we’re not supposed to acknowledge it. “that was a different universe, this is a different world. you’re just cleo” but i’m going to spend the rest of the episode hovering longingly by your base anyways. “this is our old thing, if it comes down to it we don’t betray each other” because the loyalty created its roots years ago and has been growing out of control ever since. you ask bdubs where his team is and he shifts uncomfortably and refuses to explicitly call them his allies, insisting that they just showed up around him but he's not really sure.
and just like etho, the other players never fully trust bdubs. he’s fickle with his loyalty and seems to be a split decision away from turning on his friends at any second, but cleo and etho both know that’s not really true either. their trust towards him comes from that Remembering, that fundamental understanding of shared history.
for etho, it’s the push and pull. it’s the knowing that we go so far back that what happens in between never really matters. you got caught in an explosion or a trap that i set in your base? well, good thing we have a hundred more lives to play with so we can just laugh it off like we always do. a stray explosion or a firing squad aren’t an act of betrayal, any more than a mocking comment about your height or a casual threat of violence. and when it really matters, we both know we’d put down our swords.
for cleo, it’s something unshakeable. bdubs, the known traitor of 3rd life, was fiercely protective of her and her alone. so she’s never wary of him the same way anyone else is—she knows that when bdubs really chooses you, then you’re marked for life.
so yeah. clethubs is three guys who share the burden of remembering. and also have some kind of unspoken understanding of each others motives and intentions that no other player seems to have concretely picked up on. but in a way that ultimately just culminates in them acting like freaks around each other and not actually making any direct effort to team mostly because, as usual, etho and bdubs have no idea how to communicate their intentions directly and sincerely like normal people and instead opt to hover in the fringes of each others alliances and make really weird and loaded comments . Anyways
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Genuinely so curious who Mike thinks is gonna be buying The Cage or the new DCTL GN bc with the way he tweets as far as he's concerned, it's not gonna be:
The queer people he has actively admitted he will never show any representation of in the games.
2. The POC he has actively fought against representing in his franchise. [Who he also mocked for thinking they would be represented in his franchise]
3. The Bendy fandom which has always been concerned with topics of diversity esp in the sense of queer people since its creation. Who he has responded to really poorly esp in regards to the GN.
4. The fans who critique him. [He blocked me for doing so lol]
5. His fans in general who he tweets about like this currently. [He's being vague about why people were mad at him or sent him 'nasty messages' because if you actually looked into why you'd see he was in the wrong. Either way, a very hateful way to speak abt ur own fanbase.]
Reminder while Mike is trash talking his fans he has always treated them rather poorly. The fans who won the fanart contest for Chapter 5 never got their posters actually in game due to it being rushed. Not only was chapter 5 a big slap to the face story wise, but it was literally so rushed he couldn't be bothered to add in the art his fans gave him for his game FOR FREE. [Meatly blames this on a crazy timeline, reminder him and Mike are the literal ceos of this company. The proposal of future updates here is also pretty cruel considering Mike nowadays happily admits he corrupted Chapter 5's source code and therefore literally can't update it At All currently. Because he is a moron]
At least they got to be in Boris and the dark survival, and by that I mean that was the Only game they got to be in so far, isn't that just treating your fans like you love them? Shoving their hard work into a spin off game almost nobody has played or addresses much. [Hell, who knows if with the Lone Wolf rebrand they'll even stay there. In which case they'll be in None of the games, only in the credits of BATIM]
6. The Bendy fans who just generally disagree with him on stuff. Like the new ink demon design where there is literally a public poll showing people generally prefer the old one.
7. The Bendy fans who can see he is actively lying to them. To their fucking faces.
He says this has always been the case, but screenshots and links to tweets regarding the books being canon prove it was not. Does he really think bendy fans are stupid or something? [Unless he's admitting here he lied to Kress when he told her the books were canon which sounds worse!]
8. Anyone who doesn't like the idea of giving money to a guy who laid off tons of employees then afterwards thought it was a great idea to express his anti-union views! Also brag about how good of an employer he was, according to his employees, he was not!
So in summary; Mike is an awful person who has not learned anything from the awful things he did. I will not be purchasing The Cage because, combined with this and his absolute refusal to take any kind of critique or see any differing interpretation of his franchise, I have no reason to think my problems with the franchise will ever be addressed or fixed. I probably will pirate The Cage along with any future Bendy Products [Including the movie] and will do my best to avoid giving it any kind of monetary support. Unless this changes any time soon, I can't see myself making anymore positive Bendy posts soon.
Mike has just managed to make it so hard to speak positively or optimistically of this franchise when he's so willing to broadcast how little he cares about it or its fans. I'm at the point where I refuse to pull any of my punches with my problems with it. What's the point of trying to play nice with my critique when either way the people creating it don't care?
So with this post, I want to invite anyone who feels similarly about the franchise to tell me, make a post or send an ask talking about how all of this makes you feel. It may not change how things are, but genuinely seeing other people share my feelings of anger makes me feel better. It feels nice to see when other people share our same concerns and worries. I'd also love to know if anyone else thinks they'll be avoiding purchasing Bendy products over this.
I'm not forcing anyone to participate in it nor trying to say anyone who doesn't supports mike but genuinely maybe if we can collectively decide to boycott things like the movie, graphic novel and The Cage... It might at least make the bendy devs acknowledge how much they have destroyed their own fandom's faith and trust in them.
The way Mike tweets about his actions like he had no control over why people were mad at him at least proves to me he takes NONE of it back nor regrets it. If you didn't know about his actions and only went off his tweets, you would be led to believe Mike has been needlessly picked apart by fans over things he couldn't control [or in his own words, had his words twisted and taken out of context]. That is not how you speak about your actions if you have actually learned better from them.
anyway, that has been my bendy dev callout post. This is an open invitation to anyone feeling similarly upset about the way the franchise is going to talk about it. It's genuinely nice to see how people feel about this and the more we talk about the more it's likely the bendy devs are forced to address our concerns. I don't think they will but hey, that's why I'm not gonna support them with my money anymore nor am I gonna be nice to them in any content I make critiquing Bendy. I mean I'm also basically making this post just in case anyone asks me Why I feel this way towards to bendy devs/as a way to respond to anyone who thinks I am too harsh in my critique in the future.
As always, it seems the best part of Bendy isn't actually anything about canon but about what the fan's are creating with the ideas Bendy failed to do anything interesting with.
Also the books, the books slap.
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