#always struck me as meshing really well with the nature of the video game protagonist as an element of horror

[whataboutfractions]

realized i don’t think i ever shared my rabbit hole of headcanons as for bombermen following standard shonen anime physics in a universe where, as the show goes on, it becomes increasingly clear barely anything else does, transcript under the cut

[image 1:

in general i give them heavy themes of malleability, honestly, which goes down to an unwell level with their nature as a whole stemming from another headcanon on the bomb crystal being an anchor for universal causality

since in the show bombermen are shown not only to have their bomb-creating abilities but highly-skilled ones, like mighty, the MA-units, and some of the shitennou, having supernatural physical ability compared to anything demonstrated by non-bomberman characters (with the closest we get being birdy, who still loses quickly to max)

my favorite example of those skills being mighty's flashstepping to the other side of the room just to touch misty's ears]

[image 2:

i was wondering that too! but they blush and mighty had those bandaids, which seems to suggest they have bloodflow, and shiro's shown getting nauseous enough he needs to throw up in several episodes - i think they probably have a different layout, but they most likely have organs and circulatory fluid of some sort!

i've been mostly attributing their lack of visible injury from bombs being a result of the aforementioned supernatural physical ability in a durability aspect, with the general logistics of it being like

in a universe where most beings are subject to the normal limits of a physical form, bombermen operate more on something like video game logic, where while they're born as weak as anything else they have the unique ability to increase their potential far beyond what should be rational limits due to the bomb crystal as an anchor for causality making them operate not on a physical but conceptual level

they effectively have no level cap because theoretically, if they just kept training and kept fighting to hone their combat capabilities/"stats" nonstop, they would rack up so much figurative exp that they'd be like the only video game protagonist in a world of npcs

i'd say mighty and momo are about the closest we see to that, but it's not like a video game where the rest of the world ceases to exist and you can just grind nonstop with no consequences - they still have to do every other part of their life, and as they get stronger, they start to become more and more alienated from the fears and concerns of the "normal" people around them

basically, passive reality-warpers who are unaware of their own ability, with that ability being given in the first place to make them unwitting (initially, at least) guardians of the bomb crystal because they're obviously not going to let the place they live be destroyed]