What Have I Become - Tumblr Posts
Never thought that I, atheist extraordinaire, would be saying I had a huge fucking head-over-heels crush on Adam.
Alas, Hazbin Hotel happened.
omg love! that makes total sense that she goes at night. i think she would rather die than go through the 5pm rush (and fucking same)
i totally get the wanting to do things solo (so relatable, im not looking at anyone, no one look at me i have my baseball hat on and focusing) but i would beg for her to watch me bench to make sure i dont drop the bar on my neck <3
and i need help on the pull up machine please dr. anderson
hello baby i’m here to request some gym hcs for both abby and ellie (abby for sure goes but does ellie??)
💗💗 it have overtaken my life as you know
hi princess <3 i just got this but i immediately had more thoughts than i expected so here it is!!
abby has a strict routine that she designed a long time ago and hasn't changed in the slightest since. i'm a firm believer that she goes to the gym at night!! it works with her schedule and she likes that there aren't as many people around.
she has never missed a workout a day in her life. i know we know this but it needs to be stressed!! she has gone in tired, hungover and sick— or all three things at once. you tell her she should stay in bed when she has a cold and she says, "it'll be good for me, baby, i'll sweat out the germs."
you look unimpressed. "is that a medical term?"
she slips on a loose tank top over warm skin stricken with chills and comes to kiss your forehead, something quick, her lips barely making contact. a sentiment more than a gesture. she doesn't want you getting sick. "it's an abby term," she explains, and smiles like she does when she wants to get out of trouble. "even more official than a medical term."
i know everyone wants to go with abby to the gym and live out the plot from a lesbian porn video but i'm sorry to say that if you do come along, she's not paying attention to you <3 she'll compliment you to death on your outfit before you get there and kiss you stupid right before you go in, but as soon as you cross the door she's gone!! she's been doing it for too long to let distractions slip in. she clicks into that comfortable headspace and wears expensive noise canceling headphones and she loves you, she really really does, but she's not looking at you once until she's done. she'll let you come if you really want to, though, she likes knowing that you're watching her. sometimes she'll avoid her carefully prepared towel and wipe the sweat from her forehead with her shirt, just for you! but that's all you're getting.
abby has like, two gym buddies and they're both men in their early 60s that go there maybe once a month but they chat for like forty minutes when they see each other! she gets really excited. every cool gym person that's there everyday wants to be her friend but she doesn't wanna talk about working out, she wants to hear about paul's granddaughter and dan's new lawnmower, thank you very much!
definitely has strong opinions on water bottles. has tried so so many and you cannot tell her that her current one isn't the best in the market. i will not elaborate on the details because i do not know enough about the subject, but she can tell you all about it if you ask! please ask.
ellie doesn't go to the gym but she runs after the bus when she's late sometimes :) does that count? i just asked her and she said that it counts.
I really thought it would pass, but it’s been months now and I can’t get the airplane gays out of my head. They’ve taken over my life, I can quote this movie word for word now. I’ve rewatched scenes at least 30 times. It was an open tab on my laptop for a solid month, maybe more. I’ve made an entire presentation dissecting the relationships in this movie. What have I become?
i need to go outside i’m starting to feel like an addict
Ah fuck it, I’ve decided that I’m gonna cave and write fanfiction for the first time in my life. The gay lawyers done did me in yall. Time to write some tooth rotting, brain go leaky leaky mush squish fluff.
Might link it later. Just been in a rut with art atm (I’m frustrated my old apple pen isn’t backwards compatible with the upgrade I got, it’s bullshit, I’ve been basically finger painting this whole time with no pressure sens or control, it’s annoying) so my creativity is going elsewhere before I pop like an over-inflated balloon.
BIAS EVOLUTION:
JAKE to HEESEUNG.
gif (heeseung) by @heeseunq.
end result credits to me.
I'm never going to live down the fact that this man
Has the same body proportions in the novel as-
a place between unreality and lucidity, or understanding the intentions of Chapter 12
CONTENT WARNING: DISCUSSIONS OF DEATH, SUICIDE, AND ABUSE. I ALSO TALK A LOT ABOUT LUCID DREAMING, WHICH CAN BE DISSOCIATIVE FOR READERS, SO PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.
SPOILER WARNING: REFERENCED YUME NIKKI AND OMORI SPOILERS, AND OBVIOUSLY, DREAMSCAPE SPOILERS.
We're back bois, and we're back with my favourite chapter.
I love Chapter 12 so much, the same way I adore the Truth Sequence in Omori. Originally I was going to compare the two, but I realised there's little overlap other than the intentions they're written with.
...so I wrote about the intentions instead. The little bitch boy intentions. You'll see what I mean.
Buckle up, this one takes some insane turns. I had wild epiphanies while churning all this out in a couple hours. I think I may be losing my mind.
understanding what I mean by "lucidity", and discussing dreams as plot devices
Lucidity is a very particular type of plot device that I find difficult to describe - it is a specific type of fragmented narrative that fragments location, exploring an impossibility that often has links to deeper meaning. Typically it is an abstract way of foreshadowing or revealing something to the reader, and it mirrors the concept of a "liminal space".
Dreams in texts have been used as a method of foreshadowing for hundreds of years. While the human brain has no ability to predict the future, but only reframe the past, the uncontrollable fragments of memory that are spat back out at you during unconsciousness have captured human fascination since we first started sleeping.
Dreamscape itself isn't a dream, but it is a different form of consciousness, and the creator has stated that Chapter 12 draws a lot from lucid dreaming, which suggests this counts as part of the 'Lucidity' narrative trope. As someone who does not dream much, I find this shit fascinating. Like I'm sure it's horrific as hell but. It seems so fucking cool.
Perhaps some of the best examples of the use of lucid dreaming to form narrative are Yume Nikki and its fangames, as well as Omori. Yume Nikki was a catalyst for the creation of many RPG maker horror games, and it's an excellent piece of work. No concrete story, just wandering an endless abyss of Madotsuki's mind, observing the horrors within it. The fangames branched off this concept (I personally recommend .flow ) and added more aspects, but never being concrete about the trauma.
Things are illogical in the Yume Nikki dreamverse, but they don't have to be logical, and things don't have to make sense to the player - it is purely up for speculation. At the same time, we know it has to mean something. There's an innate sense of exploration and meaning in dreams, despite the real life version often being meaningless bullshit.
This is where Omori explicitly diverts - it outright states what happened on the Recital day, in a short, distorted sequence known ominously as "The Truth". While the entire game is about lucid dreaming, this section captures the horror due to the illogical nature of it, where Sunny travels from his living room, to a hospital, to stairs, his bedroom, backstage... things are wrong. At the same time, the player is focused on completing the album and collecting the polaroids, with the confusing nature of the locations building to the horror of the final moment.
Despite all this, none of these sequences are the big moment, or even nearing the climax.
Yume Nikki doesn't have a big moment, unless you see the ending as significant enough for that title. It is a game about wandering unreality, and without a plot, it can't have a climax. It uses lucidity to provide a sense of narrative, even when there isn't one, tricking the player into trying to comprehend an impossible universe.
Omori is not building up to that that one sequence, but rather, it is a stepping stone leading to the Final Duet, which is the true climax of the game. It's an emotional release for Sunny and the player, a sense of finality in a game without a proper "ending". The Truth sequence is merely a way for the player to understand plot and build horror, and without the Truth's photo album... we would understand nothing at all. An impossible universe.
This leads to my big theory...
the purpose of chapter 12 - you can't understand it
Chapter 12 is a lying piece of shit and won't admit to us more than cookie crumbs about the future of the Dreamscape universe. And I still love it. And here's why.
Due to the abstract nature of it, we can't understand it. Perhaps Sunny can, to some extent, but since we're not sure the cause nor purpose for it, we can't understand it. We can speculate, but we can't understand. Just like Yume Nikki, we might never properly understand what each segment means.
Here's some little nuggets I've been scrambling through for information.
The beginning talks about time and distortion of it, which mimics some of the issues with time Sunny has in real life. This may be foreshadowing his eviction or declining physical state.
Body horror is incredibly prevalent, particularly self-mutilation. This has several implications, but it likely hints to Sunny's feelings for himself. It may also foreshadow what Mari looked like during the Recital day scene, which I'm starting to realise hasn't actually been shown yet. Interesting.
While this is one of the first times we see Mari as more than a virus or a corpse in the text, it's also completely distorted by Sunny's unreliable narration. Despite the slightly manipulative conversation held between them, Sunny is completely frozen in grief, desperate to beg for her forgiveness.
Sunny sits there with her pain in that hospital, insisting he deserves it. It hints further to Sunny's declining mental state, but that doesn't tell us anything more than his own self-loathing. Both this and the above point foreshadow Mari's potentially abusive nature.
Sunny is completely determined to stay within the lucid dream, and is also very insistent that Mari is somewhere at the end, which turns out to be right. How he knows this is not shown to the reader.
Segments of this are related to Mari's own memory, which provides us with a better understand of the VHS system, and of the accident that lead to her suicide.
The lucid dream is a representation of Sunny's unending trauma through what he perceives to be Mari's eyes, perhaps even a representation of what he feels he needs to do for her forgiveness.
We also learn a bit more about Pianoboy, who we know is a clone of Sunny, and he specifically highlights a connected feeling of isolation. At the same time, it has to go further than that, but we're again limited by understanding. There's more, but not enough to guess what 'more' means.
But those tidbits mean nothing. And I can't do much more than spew nonsense about segments, with no ultimate conclusion.
Because Chapter 12 is not designed to be understood, but rather, it's something to look back on when you finally do understand. It's foreshadowing in its most complex form, hinting ominously to what you don't understand. It is also similar to Black Space in this way - no-one can figure out the truth of the Recital Day from Black Space alone.
I could spend hours trying to understand every symbol, every room, the essence of Chapter 12 itself, and fuck me because i totally would but ultimately, it's all fragments of a deeper narrative, more complex than our limited understanding.
And it's a horrible, horrible thing to do to a reader. An unanswerable segment, dangling understanding right in front of their nose, but making it unreachable. Haunting them with the human desire to see patterns in chaos. What utter cruelty. How could you do this to me, @omoriboii. Why would you do this to me, the analysis God, with the most overthink-y brain in existence, and yet give me, ultimately, nothing to lead to. Why leave me a crumb to look back on, something I can never understand with the information I hold. I may be stupid, but I can understand when I am beat.
It's perfection.
why even torture someone with the inability to understand?
Building horror is incredibly difficult, because it's so easy to do foreshadowing incredibly wrong. We've all seen horror movies that are so bad they're funny, relying entirely on petty jumpscares, terrible props and showing off the killer way too fast-
Wait a minute. Showing off the killer too fast ruins everything? Dammit, I wanted to flex my big sharp knife. That's right guys. I'm the serial killer of this blog. ?????
Anyway, demonstrating the inability to understand something to the reader is a common feeling that gets the emotional brain hooked and the cogs whirring in the logical segments. You need to understand. You develop theories, you discuss them with others, seeking evidence, only to find something that changes your view, ruining everything, forcing you to start again. Being teased is fun. I am kinky
That's my favourite feeling of all time. It's why I spent hours searching for that again after I played Omori. I still remember my first theories of the truth of the game, right up until the one I had just before I discovered the real Truth. Even after that, there was more for me to analyse. Analysis. I love analysis. Yk?
I love a good challenge, and analysing these segments are so much of a challenge that I actually can't do it, which is why I get so hyped over it. Why do I do this to myself?
I actually don't really know how to end this, but I think you get my point. It's fun. I like it. I love suffering. uhh. dreams cool.
new bit: song i wrote this listening to.
today's song, the main title theme from Tomorrow Won't Come for those without.
i needed a reminder of what horrible liminality feels like, and that goddamn game does it better than anyone. i love it so much. thanks, etherane, your games cursed me with a sick desire for unreality.
special thanks to all the games who ever bullied me for having boring ass dreams.
I swore so now I’m in trouble and I feel bad :/
Do you ever have like two separate convos with friends at the same time?
Like just barely me and my friend where taking about her cheer tryouts and it’s just a nice convo
But then in all caps we are like
I WILL DESROY YOUR BLOOD LINE
NO CAUSE I HAVE THE POWER OF KIN POSSIBLE ON MY SIDE
KIM POSSIBLE IS DEAD A OUSHED HER OFF A CLIF WITH HER UGLY GERBIL RAT THING
GASP
MORE KIKE KIM UNPOSSIBLE
WELL I HAVE THE MY LITTLE PONYS ON MY SIDE
YEAH WELL I HAVE DISCORD
FEAR ME
And imvtween this is a normal conversation.
joining tumblr such a good thing for my overall moral, I can't get enough of these cringey cute drawings !
Sasha can’t believe she’s in love with both of them
What in Cherries name have I made!!!
