skufdaddyswansea

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Get it get it down get it get it down

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who are you kidding jimmy

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CRASH IMMINENT

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hi gang. so someone in the wrong organ discord server ripped all the Mouthwashing models into vrchat, and after some community digging, we found the best refs possible for them!

credits to brokenvideotape on discord for posting the originals. im simply putting them online in order for people to have the best refs possible! :-)

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beach episode

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NOTHING STOPS THE SWANTRAIN

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you can fix it

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Everytime I see Daisuke's name in Mouthwashing, I can't help but think of that one Beatmania IIDX song also called Daisuke.

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Hear me out. Daisuke brought a second Gameboy and a link cable and decides to play something with anya or Swansea, or even curly. I just want the boy to be happy.

I WANT HIM TO BE HAPPY TOO !!!!!

I think that’s suchhhh a good idea - omg I’m thinking about Swansea beating a Tetris level or something

^^^Swansea in the middle and the rest of the crew watching him get a world record high score

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Well this is frustrating. I spent ages writing up a post and tumblr just refuses to show it anywhere outside of my blog page. I sure do love this fully functioning website.

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Anya and Swansea

There's much to be said about how Swansea's bond with Daisuke, and Anya's interactions with Curly, reveal parts of their characters that Jimmy obscures. But there's also more we can learn about them by analyzing their relationship to each other, and the things they share.

From their first exchange, it appears that they have a fairly rocky relationship. Anya comes across as meek, Swansea is quick to shoot her down, and harshly at that.

It's not by accident that this is how they're introduced; first impressions go a long way in shaping our opinions. This fits in with a large part of Mouthwashing's narrative framing through Jimmy's perspective. It immediately suggests his way of thinking to the player; Anya is weak and incompetent, and the rest of the crew agrees with this judgment. Swansea is an old, selfish bastard with no respect for anyone around him.

But if we take into account the context of this interaction, we can see it from a different angle. The most important thing to take into account is the timing: two months after the crash. Keeping that in mind, we can then look not only to the one time we see them chatting before the crash, but to Anya's overall demeanour.

Here she appears lighthearted, friendly, even confident. It becomes clear that she's simply taking the crash harder than the rest of the crew. And after seeing the whole picture, it's not hard to see why. Everyone is in the same hopeless situation, but she's the only one stranded there for months on end with her rapist. The man she already feared was at the verge of more extreme violence, and rightly so. And on top of it all, she blames herself. It was, after all, moments after her third cry for help that the crash occurred.

And here I would also note a subtle but significant difference in the way she responds to Swansea's dismissals as opposed to Jimmy's.

She may not assert herself strongly, but with Swansea, she's at least comfortable enough to attempt it. For obvious reasons, she rarely does so with Jimmy. Add to that the way Swansea's roughness rolled off her back before the crash, and I think we can assume Anya felt much the same as Daisuke.

Of course, Swansea's words are still callous. But it shouldn't be taken for granted that he, like Anya, is alone in his particular struggle. He has, long before the rest of the crew, decided that the Tulpar will be his grave. Although it would have been easy for him to save himself using the lone cryopod, he has no interest in doing so. Instead he keeps this knowledge to himself, both to keep the crew as stable as possible in the final days and to protect whoever would get that one last chance to be saved.

And to cope with all this, he gives in to his worst impulses. Not just to his alcoholism, but to the walls he builds around himself.

Despite his worsening temperament, Anya still trusts Swansea. After months of enduring in silence, she tells him everything. I believe, in this moment, that Swansea does the same.

Shortly after this scene, before Swansea hits rock bottom, there's another rare moment in which Swansea is not guarding the Utility room. This time, he's dancing in the lounge, as he'd apparently been doing all 'night' long. And at a short distance, in his line of sight, is Anya.

Both of them could see time was running out. There was little they could do to make their remaining days any brighter. But Swansea was able to do at least one thing for Anya that no one else did-- he took her pain seriously. He took her at her word, and it changed the way he saw Jimmy entirely from that point on.

On the surface, Anya and Swansea couldn't have been more different. But in the end, they had more in common than perhaps even they knew.

Both stared death in the face with conviction, which was not misplaced. With food and air running out, no sign of rescue, and an increasingly unstable captain, they had no reason to cling to any delusions of hope. However, within their final words, a darker truth emerges.

It was easy for them to give whatever tiny sliver of hope the cryopod represented for someone who they considered more worthy. After all, in their eyes, they weren't worth saving to begin with. They were just broken people, with nothing left but to wait for the end. Even before the crash, these thoughts may have lingered somewhere deep in the darkest corners of their minds, waiting to surface.

What is certain, however, is that neither got the chance to find out otherwise.

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sorry !

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The Tulpar Crew !!

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SO. Mouthwashing. The Sorry! board. Right. It stays put for most of the time, it seems to be a fun pastime the crew partook in and never thought to clean up before the events of the game, but begins shifting around once things really hit the fan. And turns out, the movement of the pieces correlate to plot beats!

For reference, this is what the board is for most of the game, pre-chapter 16. The colors of the players align with that players text colors (Anya blue, Jimmy green, Daisuke pink, and Swansea yellow). Curly did not play the game, as there are no pieces that are white. The board spaces ARE white, which I think implies interesting things...

I have attached all versions of the board that I found, and will be describing them and putting my interpretations at the end.

This is a long one...

Before I begin, I'll cover a few Sorry basics: when the game starts, you have all four of your pieces in your designated home corner. To advance in the game, you want to get pieces into your winning condition lane, and to do that you must place a piece in play via your starting position and following the arrow jump ahead spaces on the board by rolling dice. You can only move your pieces clockwise, and can send other player's pieces back to their home by landing on their space.

The way you find the board at first shows Daisuke just starting out, his only piece on the board having only traveled two tiles so far, while Swansea's piece stalks right behind Daisuke's starting space. One of Jimmy's pieces are already on the first spot of his winning condition lane, while the other is positioned right behind one of Anya's, most likely having just been placed there in a recent turn.

Already, this board is showing Jimmy's determination to win this game in comparison to the others' meager moves, except Anya, who Jimmy makes it a point to hinder.

Since the board is under harsh red lighting and proves to be nearly impossible to decipher under said light, especially in a still image, I'll be labeling the pieces to make them more clear.

The first board shift happens in chapter 16, in which Daisuke relays to Jimmy that Anya locked herself in the med room and they create a cocktail to knock Swansea out for access to the vent.

At the top of the board, you can see Daisuke and Jimmy's pieces flanking Anya's, as well as Swansea's now moving toward Jimmy's. All of Anya's pieces are knocked except for the trapped one. Jimmy's piece in his winning lane has moved forward by one.

I like to think that Swansea's heightened vigilance and distrust is represented by his piece guarding Jimmy's winning lane (the way he guards the Utility room), and Daisuke's piece following closely behind shows their intent to blindside him. Anya's piece being surrounded by Daisuke and Jimmy is also a very clear display of their trying to get to her.

The second time the board shifts, its in chapter 19, where Swansea puts Daisuke down and Jimmy goes for the gun. It ends with Swansea brandishing an axe while he runs towards Jimmy.

Here, Anya's pieces are now all tipped over. Jimmy now has three pieces on the board, but the one that was sitting in the winning lane having gotten pulled out of said lane by a Swansea piece. Daisuke now has a piece sitting in the third spot of his winning lane with Jimmy placed right outside of it.

The way Swansea goes from playing defensive (staying near his starting space) to offensive (spread across the map, all in position behind green pieces ready to take them out) is really neat here. Daisuke finding his way three spots into his starting lane is a wild turn of events with Jimmy having been the only one previously to have done that in this game, and its neat seeing how Jimmy is immediately reactive to that by having a a piece be positioned right outside.

The final board version (that I could find) is from chapter 21, which entails Jimmy bringing Curly to the table with the dead bodies of their 3 other shipmates propped up as if in birthday celebration, where Jimmy does some leg sawing.

Here, all of the pieces are knocked down except for Jimmy's. Jimmy's winning lane piece has now advanced into its third spot, the farthest he's been.

My knowledge of Sorry is limited to my childhood so I can't comment on every detail, but I do vaguely recall that every time you send another person's piece back to their home (essentially knocking that piece out of the game), they're supposed to say "Sorry!" which is the namesake of the game.

With how it seems that Jimmy's advancements in his winning condition lane correlate to each time someone is killed, Jimmy saying sorry to no one that is hurt because of him, except for Curly, right at the end, is crazyy in the context of the board game . The fact that Jimmy had to obviously knock down other people's pieces and get them out of the game permanently (which is not the case in a typical game, where pieces sent back home can be put back into play) in order to get closer to winning makes me feel insane also . Not to mention the fact that Jimmy seems to have an incorrect assumption of how to actually win sorry, which he must've thought was getting one piece to the last winning condition space, but which actually involves you filling your entire winning lane up with all four pieces, which he hasn't gotten close to. which is a really fun way to show that Jimmy's conceptions of climbing the ladder did NOT match up with what he thought it was LOLL. He never actually won...

ANYWAYS IN CONCLUSION. feel free to tag on any other interpretations, especially since im sure there are a lot of little details in the positioning of the pieces that show or recontextualize in-game events!! I feel INSANe. abt this board game in a video game. Hopefully this is all coherent. godbless...