#I feel like I’ve circled all the way back to my BATIM era

[magiefish]

Borrowed a novelisation of Castrovalva from my university’s Doctor Who society and brought it home with me, and the thing is it has an absolutely dogshit cover, just cringe as fuck, and I accidentally left it on my fucking bed and my dad walked in and picked it up and looked at it and made a noise somewhere between confusion and amusement and then left. And I just started questioning my entire life and what I was even doing wasting it on this silly stupid sci-fi show and how my choices had led me here.

[inkabelledesigns]

Where does Bendy in Nightmare Run fit into the Bendy Universe?

Let me ask you this: does anyone else find it odd that we don’t see any of the content from Bendy in Nightmare Run within the Crack-Up Comics? Like the game has four great bosses, three standard enemies, and a bunch of costumes, and not ONCE do they make another appearance (save for one Easter egg of Chester in BATIM’s Chapter 5). We got parallels to our Chapters 3 and 4 enemies with Cameraman/Projectionist, Miss Twisted/Twisted Alice, and Brute/Brute Boris, but like, absolutely nothing from the game that arguably has more toons in it than the source material it’s based on. I know not a lot of people think about Nightmare Run anymore (hell, it’s only on my radar because I still log in everyday for the soup), but I feel like there should’ve at least been a nod to it there.

And that got me thinking: Souper Boris deals with radioactive bacon soup, right? And it’s teased at the end that Alice gets some too, right? Humor me here: is it possible that Canoodle is also a result of that radioactive soup? I mean this is a cartoon world, I don’t think it’d be much of a stretch to say that “radioactive” could serve as an explanation for a soup can becoming sentient, nor growing to a massive height. I can already picture the story, he was the can that wasn’t bought, got stuck in the back and never saw the light of day, so he had time to be brought to life, as opposed to other produce that was opened too quickly for that to happen. Maybe he passed his expiration date, got thrown away, ended up at the dump and made it his home. Who’s to say? 

Though then again, is Canoodle’s stage a junkyard, or a graveyard? And how does that change things?

https://twitter.com/BendyRun/status/1049237972288266241 

https://twitter.com/BendyRun/status/1038426739435655168 

I was looking around for Canoodle’s beef with Bendy (it’s that Bendy trespassed on his property and didn’t leave), and I stumbled upon this from the promotional material for the game. I thought Canoodle’s stage was a junkyard this whole time, you’re telling me it’s a graveyard? Well hang on a moment. The game was released in August of 2018, and both of these tweets are from September of 2018. All the other posts with the bosses for the initial marketing make sense within the context of their stage, but Canoodle’s is inconsistent. Everywhere else, he’s listed as living in a junkyard. So why then, is it called a graveyard here? 

So I loaded up the game real quick and played through the first act. Still looks like a junkyard to me. But then THIS happened.

My phone is a bit slow (as is my reaction time) so I couldn’t get a clear screenshot, but the other side of this barrel has a radioactive waste symbol on it. You see where I’m going with this? I predict Canoodle has some kind of link with the content we saw in the Souper Boris comic, it makes too much sense for it to be the same radioactive soup. The promotional material referring to this space as a graveyard could be insight into how Canoodle feels about it. I mean if you were a piece of trash that got thrown away, wouldn’t you feel like the scrapyard was your final resting place? Much like the studio is hell itself for its inhabitants, Canoodle’s “home” is here. 

But that leads to the question that I’ve had about Nightmare Run for a while: where in the timeline does it fall? And that’s a really difficult question to answer, because there’s two timelines we need to talk about: the real world of JDS, and the fictional world of the cartoons and comics. And in truth, I don’t have a good answer for it. I think the logical place for it to be is somewhere after the Souper Boris comic, meaning if it’s part of a story told in some kind of Bendy media, it’s gotta be after or alongside the period of 1936-1940. 

The thing is, we don’t really know what Nightmare Run IS within this universe, and that’s the bigger question to answer. Sure, here and now in our reality, it’s a mobile game, just as Bendy and the Ink Machine and Boris and the Dark Survival are games, but mobile games didn’t exist back then. There’s also that weird callback to Joey’s whole shtick about “there’s something I need to show you” when you first boot up the game. What is this trying to tell us? What IS Nightmare Run? For us it’s a game, but what is it to the studio employees? What is it to the cartoons? What is it to Joey? There are lots of things we could make of this, but my mind goes to a few places. We could say that it’s just a game that has no bearing on the story. We could say that Joey was ahead of his time, or that maybe Nathan did some development with the JDS property that permeated the modern era. We could say that this was a series of shorts or cartoons where Bendy and friends are having weird dreams.

Or we could turn to what The Illusion of Living tells us about Bendyland and Sillyvision. I haven’t given you all my thoughts on the book yet (I really should, because damn did it rock), but one thing I found fascinating was the look into Bendyland and Joey’s conversations with Bertrum Piedmont. We learn what Joey’s plans were for the park, that each section was meant to represent aspects of each of his core characters. I can absolutely see Nightmare Run fitting in as an attraction for Dark World, Bendy’s area of the park. Think of it like Disney’s animatronic dark rides, like Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, or one of the things I miss, Disney Quest. If you’re not familiar with Disney Quest, it was a five floor arcade that lived within Disney Springs (then called Downtown Disney). It’s since been replaced by an ESPN attraction, but when it was still there, it had all kinds of stuff. Early forms of VR (that were nauseating to play with those heavy helmets), lots of old arcade machines, and newer technology that blended virtual and physical gameplay together, like the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction that had you shooting cannonballs at a virtual screen (or Toy Story Midway Mania, if you want a more common comparison). 

But this was the 40s, technology for this kind of thing wouldn’t exist, right? And that’s where I turn to Sillyvision, Joey’s special process of editing the inks on the animation cells. Combine that with the advanced technology of harnessing living ink’s properties that Gent had going on, and you have yourself some plausible ways to create an attraction where guests can help Bendy (or be in his shoes) to run from some not-so-friendly faces. It doesn’t sound too far fetched for this universe, and given this man was working on “living cartoons” for the purpose of folks being able to meet them in the park, I wouldn’t put it past him to try this too. It still leaves some questions as to what content Canoodle and friends came from within the universe (were they in a cartoon or comic, or were they made specifically for an attraction?), but one thing is for sure: there’s possibilities. Besides that, we still never got an explanation as to what that hand is in the game. 

If you tap the hand on the top of the screen there, it opens and closes, but we still have no idea what it does or who it belongs to. It’s 2021, and we still haven’t cracked it! It could be Bendy’s or Boris’ hand (not Alice though, doesn’t have a circle in the palm), or it could be someone else’s. I don’t know. All I know is that I’m probably thinking too hard about this. X’’’D And I’m okay with that. I’d like to revisit Nightmare Run again, I have some thoughts about our enemy characters (Krawl, Stickle, and Gwen), but that’ll be for later. X’’’D I was gonna post cute headcanons about Sammy today and somehow ended up here, what is my life?