#actual tearjerker and thats not even half of it

[petrichal]

I cried so hard at this part specifically

[tumblunni]

hey guess what I played Don’t Starve again and predictably continued to use only Webber and get fifty bazillion feels about Webber and hey u guys wanna hear me constantly talk about Webber

seriously its SO UNFAIR that this guy just exists as a character skin in some random survival procgen world game and NOBODY GETS ANY DAMN STORY yet they give us really tantalizing one line story summaries and the REALLY ENDEARING thing of each character having different dialogue for item descriptions. Which is also their ONLY GODDAMN DIALOGUE! why why why WHY did you make such a good story charrie concept thinger if you were never gonna use it GAHHHHH

okay so anyway THIS IS HE

WHAT A CUTIE PATOOT AMIRITE YO??

and he has SUCH AN INRIGUING AND SAD AND COOL PREMISE he’s the absolute champion of creepycute, cos he’s not only a spoopy spider monster with the innocence of a child but also literally he was a regular human child once who got the most tragic life ever his super short tantalizingly vague summary is ‘webber the indigestable’, and like.. all we know is that He Very Much Died, and Now He Is Spide he was killed by some spider monsters and came back as this spooky AF form

tho srsly man HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK YO like i’ve seen people drawing super grimdark fanart of him being like springtrap from five nights at freddies, i.e like he opens his mouth and he has a whole dessicated skull inside. like he’s quite literally walking around in the skin of the monster that ate him, however the fuck that’s supposed to work... I really don’t like that version, so WHATEVER lets have A BUNCH OF OTHER BUNNI THEORIES!

* It’s more like the spider absorbed the memories of the kid? Like, his bones are out there somewhere and its just that his conciousness was transferred into the thing that killed him/its got a case of mistaken identity and thinks that its him. * He’s sorta like a ghost that possessed it? Was trying so hard to survive that his soul lingered around, and it just works different to the other ghost character in the roster since he’s possessing a non-human creature. he gets majority control instead of floating around as a support * He’s more like a zombie or demon or general corrupted creature? like, he just rose from the grave and took on this particular shape cos of how he died, rather than this being an actual fusion of him and the spider that killed him. * Its like a werewolf thing??? He wasn’t really killed but just got bit and turned into a thing?? I dunno. * His backstory isn’t meant to be something that happened prior to the start of the game, but you literally see it happening right there. I mean you unlock webber by finding his skull while playing as another character, and if you bury it then it turns into him. So its like he woke up as a zombie cos you gave him a kind burial, but because his remains were intermingled with those of the thing that killed him they got all mixed up and revived as a single creature. And I guess that spider just went off and died offscreen shortly after eating him? or maybe it choked on him, cos seriously an entire human skull sounds hard to swallow XD

anyway HOWEVER THAT WEIRD PREMISE IS SUPPOSED TO WORK, its really intriguing and seems to imply a lot of Deep Traumatic Sads and it sucks that we don’t get a full plot exploring this and I’m just left feeling weird for having tearjerker fanfic ideas for a goddamn minimal dialogue simulation game >_> cos I mean MAN its just so interesting thinking about it from his perspective!! cos webber is just so nice and innocent still!! he barely seems to understand what happened to him, and he’s stuck in a big scary world and like.. the scariest part somehow became the only comfort to him, like DEAR GOD he has so much great characterization from these tiny snippets of dialogue! he just loves the spiders so damn much, he’s like ‘don’t worry i forgive u’ and he’s so happy to make friends with this big ol spoopy forest of monster things that literally killed him. and then all his unique gameplay powers revolve around that, all the spider enemies refuse to attack him ever again and he has supportive abilities to generate new hives and upgrade existing ones and just generally Sweet Doom Boy He Lovv He Friendes and i’m SO EMOTIONALLLL

and its also intriguing how the game handles his status as a fusion creature? he’s got a unique syntax thing of referring to himself as both ‘we’ and ‘me’ at the same time. I just found it quite cool when i figured out that there actually was a consitant set of rules about this! He’s generally ‘we’ but then says ‘me’ whenever something only applies to one half of his memories. Like you’d assume ‘me’ is the boy and ‘him’ is the spider, but webber casually swaps it around all the time and its like its always both of them talking even in this situation. He isn’t really two personalities but just one fused one that can remember being two people, i guess? Its a little confusing to hear him being like ‘i don’t hold a grudge against me for killing me’ but a very unique speaking pattern is an endearing trait for a character!

oh and MAN I WISH THEY FOLLOWED UP ON ANY OF THESE BACKSTORY HINTS!!! cos some of his dialogue references him living on a goat farm with a dad and a grandpa back when he was human? and we have NO IDEA how this completely ordinary adorable kid got teleported to Fuckin Hell World, or whether he’ll ever see his family again T_T Closest thing we get to an idea is him saying ‘we don’t like him, he tricked us’ at a statue of the game’s main villain, even though none of the alternate characters have any story dialogue and we only know that mr default man wilson had a history with the villain. So do all the alternate characters also have a personal grudge with him and we’ve just never been told what happened? Also there’s the fan theory that mr default man is actually webber’s father, and I dunno if thats true but I love seeing fanart of them as adoptive family even if they didnt know each other before they got trapped here.

but also just AAAAA webber’s plot WEBBER’S PLOT seriously its so fucking dark and has so much Potential and just THINK about this poor kid’s perspective on this dark souls shit that happened to him its depressingly realistic that the game adds a kid hero to the mix and then his plot is ‘yeah no a kid would die instantly in this kind of situation, and he did’ I mean there’s one other child character but she had ghost superpowers before the game even started, and her personality is all grim and practical and such. webber acts super young and innocent and was probably the lil teacher’s pet shy cutie type when he was alive. HE HAD ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE T_T

SO JUST IMAGINE JUST IMAGINE THIS TRAGIC SHIT

you’re tiny tiny baby friend and you fall thru some random portal some day and instead of a magical adventure in a fairytale world you get Grim As Fuck Nintendo Hard Survival Game imagine how terrified he must have been, all huddled up cold and starving under a big leaf like totoro crying for his grandpa to save him and then he gets eaten alive by some other starving creature in this hell world and then he wakes up like ‘wow what a weird dream’ and he has to claw his way out of a grave first ray of sunlight hits his freaky gnarled monster hands and his tiny child brain must be terribly unequipped to handle that kind of revelation... let alone the identity crisis of Yes I Am Part Of The Spider Horde and possibly Wow I Remember Eating My Own Brain

and its just... really oddly sweet and heartwarming that he’s friends with the spiders now?? like that makes me wonder how that played out when he first woke up. Imagine the poor kid seeing a whole bunch of the same thing that killed him and he flinches thinking they’re gonna attack, but then they scuttle up and hug him. And he sees his reflection in a puddle and realizes he’s one of them too, and now he’s not so alone anymore. I mean its not the same as getting his family back, but he has someone protecting him now. Scary things aren’t so scary when you’re scary too! And like.. there’s all different tiers of the spider enemy, and what if the big queen boss one became a mother figure to him? And what if he acts as a translator to them and helps them make friends with humans? And tells them stories about his family and they try and mimic human family things in their own lil spidery way, to make him feel welcome? *wearing tiny ties and hats* ‘We love our strangely shaped child and respect his differences’ I just wanna see slice of life adventures of the spide swarm!!

also AAAA i just thought about what if the game ever got a proper conclusion and webber manages to escape back home it probably wouldn’t be an easy happy ending :( farm grandpa finds some terrifying spider thing haunting his farm, might even freak out and shoot his own grandson T_T or even if he recognised him, the kid’s probably not gonna be able to go back to a normal life. his family would have to try and keep him secret, lest the pitchfork-wielding mobs attack... and even if somehow it was possible for webber to be cured, that’d be sad too cos he’d have to leave all his spider friends forever. and he could never be cured of the mental scars T_T

also yo HAHAHA you wanna know the absolute saddest random item description dialogue I got while playing as him? he asks skeletons ‘are you okay’ and ‘i think he’s sleeping’ because yknow he just woke up the next day, when he died T_________________T

webberrrrrrrrr :(

god i am trapped in a glass case of emotion

[tumblunni]

Ok just... just... GIVE ME A SECOND to talk about the spoilery monster rancher stuffs, okay? Why THAT ENDING hurt so much but also fit so well with the rest of it, and why the third season kinda sucked so much despite being the continuation we all desperately craved. And why its still gonna have a place in everyone’s hearts, even the haters, JUST because it gave a conclusion to THAT FUCKING ENDING! I dont care if people say it would be more deep or whatever to leave on the downer cliffhanger, I still think it SHOULD have had a third season, just that it should have been better. Or I mean... maybe it would have worked better as a movie or a short ten episode season or something. Just there should have been SOME sequel to that ending, but a very very lighthearted season about a goofy tournement kinda wasnt what it should have been.

OKAY THE ENDING THE SEASON 2 ENDING the giant and damn awesome subversion of everything about the genre, which fit so well with everything else the show ever did, GAHHH Like.. there were SO MANY subversions and just interesting detailed twists on common ‘mon show’ tropes. One of the earliest episodes begins with an asshole trainer treating his Worm monster the same way a lot of people honestly might do while min-maxing in one of these videogames. He’s disgustingly abusive and feels like he’s justified because he’s making his monster stronger, and that’s all that it’s good for. And the show establishes its tearjerker tone early on by having this guy only repent after his horribly abused monster sacrifices itself to save him from the baddies, even after how badly he’d treated it. And he’s begging apologies to its dead disc stone, while it’s too late to do anything about it. But the show STILL gives him a chance at redemption, because our heroes trust him to raise a new newborn Worm, and to do it right. That’s just... what the show is. It went really REALLY dark, but it did this with this kind of determined optimism! And even the funnier episodes could have high stakes, and there was always the reminder that we were living in this dystopia and just trying to keep our smiles during it, because otherwise how can we change it?

And thats why season 3 fumbled by like.. not introducing its stakes early enough. Or.. at all. it was good that they finally introduced some good comic relief villains and generally villains with more motivations and backstory, but it combined badly with the no-intial-high-stakes thing to give a season that just felt way too happy. In a show that certainly had happiness in it before, but I mean it never felt hollow?? It kinda felt disrespectful to follow up a super depressing cliffhanger with such a badly explained and rushed flip back to the status quo, and then such a sparse plot with so few incentives to keep watching. Its only initial good point was that it resolved the cliffhanger AT ALL, but it could have done it WELL, and also established a new reason to wanna watch the show now the one big huge main plot has been resolved. Following up after the bad guy is defeated is always a hard thing, you cant just put no effort into it... Tho I feel bad even saying that, cos seriously season 3′s villains were the best part. They just might have fit better in season 1, or just if the plot kept up the slack surrounding them...

BUT YEAH JUST THE SUBVERSIONS!! I could fuckin ramble forever about how great they were! Seriously it was just THE BEST ‘ending’ to a ‘stuck in another world’ story, ever! Having the main kid finally get back home, but at the ABSOLUTE WORST MOMENT, after all his friends have sacrificed themself to save that world and he’s the only one left alive. And he doesnt even get enough time to process the shock, he barely even sees the rescued world before he just wakes up home as if nothing happened. And he’s stuck feeling like he can’t adjust to being part of this world anymore, and he’s mourning people he can’t even talk to anyone about. Imagine how worried his parents must have been when he became depressed seemingly overnight and refuses to tell them why! And then it just ends on him crying in the rain and the ghosts of his friends trying to motivate him to get back up and find a reason to live again. That was ONE HELL of a cliffhanger, yo! So yeah OF COURSE people were cheering for a new season, but also OF COURSE that new season would fail if it insufficiently followed up on the emotional impact of the cliffhanger and then had a bazillion episodes of barely anything emotional ever happening again, when the first series had you crying your eyes out as early as episode 4...

oh and like DEAR GOD all the OTHER really good subversiony episode plots aaaaa like even down to little stuff like how genki actually fights alongside his monster pals. And he’s a total badass who does succeed in doing more than most humans could do, but still he’s just a human going against monsters. he knows what he’s doing is rash, but he does it anyway because he cares about his monsters and couldnt just let them die without throwing himself in front of the bullet. And every battle in this show is life or death rebellion against an oppressive regime like that! Random low risk tournement episodes used to be.. like.. FILLER in this series. It was a terrible idea for the entire third season’s plot... And I also loved how the team actually did help people along the way as they journeyed to defeat the baddies, and it wasn’t JUST fighting. They had a whole tearful episode about everyone struggling to hold back a dam that the baddies had sabotaged to wipe a village off the map, and it was INFINATELY MORE INTENSE than half of the things Pokemon has ever done, lol! (not that I dislike pokemon, just the anime in particular is a bit naff) God, how they were all strangers to this village and how they actually had bickering between the team members on whether they should really do this, and all the different ways they tried to save the dam and how they made it way too clear that they were gonna die from friggin holding this thing back with their bare hands. And how they organized the whole town to work themselves to the bone trying to divert the dam, and how a bunch of their attempts failed and they came so close to not having enough time! You had me weeping for the potential deaths of a hundred nameless faceless npcs just from putting me in the shoes of our heroes reacting to it! You made a little kid understand the complexity of civilian casualties in war! And OH MAN, Golem’s backstory! How he was a former war soldier who just shattered mentally after being forced to kill so many other monsters. And he was so gentle at heart, and he sat there guarding this church full of disc stones for god knows how many decades, blaming himself for what happened. Like.. it showed that even when you’re fighting villains, killing still breaks you. Dear GOD, his face when he came back down from his friggin ptsd flashback anger episode saving the heroes from the baddies, and he saw all the dead baddies, and just... you could not talk to that man and tell him that killing was justified just because they were BADDIES. Even if its in self defense, he still has to look at his hands that just murdered people. I’m so damn glad the heroes managed to befriend him and take him away from that place, cos that moment came so close to sending him back to his guilt spiral! If anything, I think that the dub calling them ‘baddies’ actually made all these moments way more effective. The childish terminology makes you think this is gonna be a paint by numbers story, so it hurts more when its anything but! Even in a world with a concept like ‘the bad guy magically turns people into his bad minions’, they still managed to deal with complex grey morality, and that’s one hell of a crowning achievement!

...plus it allowed for a happy ending after all. God, i cried for all those poor minor mooks getting brought back to normal in the end. Honestly, even though it hurt, I would have accepted it ending on all of the hero monsters being dead forever for the sake of bringing back all the dead civilians and brainwashed baddies. Sacrificing yourselves to save so many others! God, this show’s characters are too goddamn pure. AND COMPLEX TOO! man I loved how grumpy and selfish half of the hero cast is, yet they’re still heroes despite it, and god just HOW THEY ALL DIED TOGETHER AND OUR PROTAGONIST IS THE ONLY ONE FORCED TO KEEP ON LIVING that was such a fucking cliffhanger thank you terrible season 3 for fixing it man i can forgive anything you do because you did that baby mocchi lived and ate some mochi cakes and tiger and hare lived to bicker with each other once more and golem could find some peace knowing all the people he saved, even if he might never be free of the guilt of those he failed to save and suezo and holly didnt have to be apart again, he didnt have to end his life finally proving his ‘usefulness’ at the cost of everything else (SERIOUSLY SUEZO LOW SELF CONFIDENCE EPISODES KILL MY HEART) and genki didnt have to have his childhood completely destroyed by his ‘magical adventure’ plot ending on so much of a trope subversion even if still it was good that it happened it was a really fuckin good plot all that suffering just made the happy ending that much happier! GOD I miss this show very much...

[tumblunni]

okay man but seriously PLEASE listen to this fucking bomb ass final boss theme and cry with me over all this plot’s wasted potential how can this song NOT be for a return of analogman boss fight?? how can ‘the machinedramon virus’ NOT be analogman?? HOW IS THERE NO ACTUAL CONTINUITY IN THE DIRECT SEQUEL TO DIGIMON WORLD aside from fuckin bringing back grown-up mameo and letting him do NOTHING in the plot even god you deserved better you sweet bean son JUST LISTEN TO THE FUCKING SONG

i’d recommend fucking CRANKING THE VOLUME UP

how in the FLYING FUCK did they not bring analogman back when this thing LITERALLY SAMPLES AN 8 BIT VERSION OF HIS ORIGINAL BOSS THEME im so fucking upset why did i even get my hopes up

LOOK OKAY im gonna ramble my stupid ass ideas for a fixfic remake thing okay:

* give me SOME FORM OF GAMEPLAY where the various human assistant characters can ACTUALLY FIGHT ALONGSIDE YOU * give them ACTUAL SCREENTIME. give them fucking social links or dont put them in this plot at all! * imagine if this game had the same amount of plot effort as cyber sleuth did, imagine if it wasnt just the world’s most half assed excuse to force an open world game to follow a linear corridor instead T_T * imagine if MAMEO ACTUALLY GOT TO DO THINGS

okay my always eternal headcanon/hope/fanfic for what on earth would happen with Analogman in a sequel! he had that fucking awesome cathartic ending in DW1 where his own hacking machine backfires and seemingly kills him as he tries to log out from the digital world so my idea for an explanation of the ‘machinedramon virus’ in the postgame, and how he could come back in a sequel... analogmon wouldnt it be insanely DOUBLE cathartic if this ‘digimon are just tools’ guy ended up as a glitched out digital shade of himself after that accident? he’s stuck permenantly trapped in the cyber world, as one of the things he despises! And i can think of like a million different potential directions you could take his smarmy businessman design and turn that into a funky cool digivolution that still keeps shades of his old self. And he could potentially be way more dangerous this way, he could have spent all this time learning how to apply his hacking skills to manipulate the digital world even more than before, since he’s basically a sentient malware program now. I mean he was somehow able to make all the digimon get amnesia and leave the city in DW1 just by being a regular human with a digivice and some above average laptop skills! Imagine what he could do with a direct connection to the network! And enough hate to motivate him to get even more serious than before. Trapped here forever with nothing to even keep him going except the idea that some day that trash kid that defeated him will come back and he can take his revenge! and then imagine how fucking pissed off he’d be that he CANT even get to fight the grown up version of his arch nemesis, instead he gets defeated by ANOTHER naive brat who loves their digimon! Mameo could have way more direct connection to the plot if its like a dramatic contrast that he grew up and used his adulthood to act as a kind mentor to the new heroes, while analogman’s stayed frozen where he was and just become the embodiment of childish entitlement. oh, and it could be a cool way to add maybe a bit of complexity to a very selfish motivationless villain, like even if he’s still irredeemable it could be a bit pitiful to see him so deranged. And then maybe when you defeat him he could end up reincarnated as a digiegg just like everyone else, so its kind of a bittersweet ‘maybe he’ll make the right decisions next time’. Totes obscure reference here, but I always liked that ending for Blon Fal-Fotch Slitheen in that random ninth doctor episode of DW??? I mean it was such a cop out that they had her de-aged to a child through a contrived excuse that was never foreshadowed until that exact moment, but the idea itself was good and I think it worked well. She was a completely 100% evil bastard who chose it of her own free will, but you saw how she made her own life suffering through those choices. She lost her entire (equally evil) family and just felt lost continuing their stupid murdery moneymaking schemes alone, and they even had that really tearjerking scene of her actually taking pity on a victim and deciding not o kill them, yet ignoring her own epiphany. And the doctor’s REALLy great speech about how she was turning that moment into a way to justify her evil actions, instead of choosing to stop. “You let one go. Every now and then, when the mood is right, when they BEGGED, you decide to let one go. And that’s how you look at yourself in the mirror every morning, that;s how you kill THOUSANDS, because you congratulate yourself for once letting one go.” (paraphrased cos i cant find the exact quote, alas...) But yeah, thats why that weird episode Boom Town actually resonated with me a lot even if the framing around the ultimate message was kinda camp and weird. It really did feel kinda uplifting to see this horrible horrible person somehow get a chance to die and be reborn at the start. I always wished we’d get a followup episode someday to see if she really did take that second chance and make different choices in life, yknow? ... man this post has gone off on so many tangeants anyway the final boss should have been cooler. also this trash man is still and will forever be the most engaging digimon game villain in my opinion. Sometimes we all need to really cheer at an irredeemable bastard getting killed by his own laptop, yknow? AND WISH HE COULD MAGICALLY COME BACK FOR THE SEQUEL and GET STABBED TWICE. Seeeeriousllyyyyyy!!

sayonara, trash princess