#Benrey you mean the world to me 🥹

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in your Bigger than the sky animation benrey starts out as barney? that seems so interesting lore wise? i would love to hear about what you were thinking when you animated that askdhfjlagh and the sweet voice and dreading stare? no clue what it means but curious as hell

ok im gonna go a little crazy on this because this is my biggest/favorite bc ever.

In the full vods they refer to benrey as “Barney” for the first while, it’s kind of unclear why, from Wayne’s perspective it seems he just didn’t know his name and defaulted to the character models name, and gir and Holly said they thought the joke with benrey was he was Barney but wrong, and they kept calling him the wrong name, so bipple, booper, Bentley, but eventually benrey, the name said by scorpy, stuck.

All this to say, it’s a BIG hc of mine that he was intended to be Barney (in universe) but due to being self aware was able to break off from this character he was meant to be. it’s kind of implied within the series they all have fake memories of who they are, being AI they are supposed to sort of act a certain way to maintain the immersion but at the end of the day, nothing before the game booted up really happened.

And benrey knows this, benrey knew from the beginning nothing was real, that he wasn’t human, how it ends, that no one actually dies, the works. I also headcanon that he became self aware during the AI model training stages, that the guy in charge of training his AI as Barney, broke him causing his self awareness and he was just launched into the beta game fully aware of the circumstances of his existence. I don’t think he was fully aware of how everything in game worked though.

but this to me is why he seems to constantly be changing his view of Gordon, antagonizing him one moment and then being friendly the next, his feelings about him are complex, he knows from the beginning he isn’t actually Gordon Freeman, but a guy just playing half life. Being a security guard, he’s programmed to protect Gordon with his life, but he knows this. He knows what’s compelling him to care for Gordon isn’t himself but lines of code he’s bound to, and this is why he antagonizes him. But that’s a whole different rant on its own lol

That sequence at the beginning of the bigger than the sky animatic was supposed to be a false memory, something he was supposed to think happened, but the version of Gordon he remembers isn’t real. This idea of ‘Gordon’ is a concept that only exists in these fake memories. (This is also why I think he never calls Gordon by name throughout the series, because he knows it’s not actually him (besides that one time but it doesn’t count bc it was for a bit lalala I can’t hear you))

there wasn’t much thought into the details of that part, like the coughing into the hand with the sweet voice, I really just put that bc I thought it looked dramatic and cool 😓

BUT on the topic of this big ass hc of mine, it actually is super important to a upcoming project im working on, and I realized throughout the story boarding it might need some explanation because it also has a lot of flash backs to some fake memories.

Sorry this got super rant-y I tried to keep it as short and simple as I could, I love hlvrai, I think about it literally every moment of my life and have so many hcs

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Hope it's not a bother but I was wondering if I could reference your specific design of Gordon's specs cause like HOLY MOLY I KNOW THOSE GLASSES ARE CANON BUT YOU ALWAYS MAKE 'EM LOOK BETTER SOMEHOW.

And this specifically for HLVRAI au I'm currently working on and I thought your Gordon glass design would probably go hard with this iteration of Gordon I'm creating.

Here's a rough comparison sketch for Gordon's design is gonna be for the au

(The little guy on his glasses is just a character thing)

And as a humble offering I present to you:

Benry plush in the Igor wig.

Also a slight Frenrey?/ Freehoun? Comic that I did at 5am. I was gonna post it regardless but I still believe it to be an adequate offering.

Sure? Idk 😭 it’s just glasses idk why you’d need to ask for that

I’ll say now though, I don’t really mind if people use my art as reference, I mean my style takes a lot of inspiration from several things too, and it’s not like I can really stop that plus it’s a free world yk do whatever, just as long as it’s not tracing my art and claiming credit i don’t really care, the only time it really bothers me if someone is using my art for a purpose I do not agree with (proship, illegal, hate speech, etc).

Also cute!! I love the little doodles! Benrey giving birth wasn’t something I expected to see, nature is beautiful 🥹