#and infinity on high is always a big one yknow

[allsassnoclass]

i was tagged by @redrattlers and @ijustdontlikepeople to share my top albums of 2022!  I feel like I didn’t listen to many new releases, so the first three are my top albums released this year, and the latter three are three albums that had an impact on this year for me in some way

Stick Season by Noah Kahan

Multitude by Stromae

5SOS5 by 5 Seconds of Summer

Hotel TV by Lawrence

Sound the Bells by Dessa and the Minnesota Orchestra

Infinity on High by Fall Out Boy

I’m not sure who has done this yet so apologies if I double tag you but I’d like to tag @clumsyclifford @igarbagecannoteven @lifewasradical @jbhmalumm @lukemichaelcalumashton if you’d like to!

[tumblunni]

Another patented Bunni Brand Random Game Idea I Will Probably Never Actually Make(tm) Guess what, its another pet raising game! Why am i so obsessed with these! Maybe because there AREN’T ENOUGH GOOD ONES and I DESPERATELY NEED THEM, YO

Anyway, the theme of this one is kinda S.C.P-esque? Not actually set in that series since I haven’t read much of it and I’m a huge wimp for psychological horror anyway. But I mean its set in a vaguely similar “organization for paranormal creatures” type of setting. The idea I had was “an artificially created god”. The facility only has one monster in it, and it’s like a homunculus they created themselves and are struggling to control. Flew too close to the sun! The aim of making this creature was to try and make an angel, or a channeler, or just something that can bridge the gap between life and death and answer our questions about what the afterlife really is. But they failed to think about the mental strain on the creature, they basically took a child and poured all of infinity into its head! Plus it doesn’t even know how to interpret any of this stuff, or explain it to humans. It has no perspective on any life other than this, so like... “what? I didn’t mention that cos I thought everyone already knew!” Or when its asked to predict the future it doesn’t know what any of these things mean since it’s never seen the outside world- “people will fall” could mean a mass death from disease, a literal death from an earthquake, one person tripping in france, or even just “my dolls fell off the shelf”. This small room is this creature’s entire world, how is it meant to know that you don’t consider the dolls equally important?

So, anyway, the player’s perspective in all this would be as... the janitor! Well, former janitor turned caretaker for a terrifying oracle child. How did this happen to meeeee?! Sort of an accident happened and the creature imprinted on the first person it saw when it was born. And the researchers are WAAAAAY less equipped to control it than they expected! All their containment facilities failed, which led to it getting far enough away from the lab that it bumped into this janitor in the first place. He was just a hapless dude sweeping the fakey harmless business exterior of the place, completely uninitiated into the true purpose of the place. Until someday some baby monster came flying through the wall and somehow it ended in a hug??? Now he’s their only method of (at least temporarily) containing the monster. For some reason it seems to be bound by oaths and words, if its “father” orders it not to do something then it obeys. Sit here in this room and don’t leave, don’t hurt any humans, stop breaking all the locks and bars just to boast that you can, it really demoralizes our staff! But it’s always searching for loopholes to someday escape. That would be exceptionally dangerous- humans are a fun toy to play with, and it doesn’t understand why you can’t fix them when they break...

So yeah, thats why this random ordinary man has now been forcibly initiated into a high position in this organization, and Has No Choice In The Matter. He has a huge amount of power as the only one able to control the beast, but also zero power in the organization as the latest noob and totally unqualified candidate. And they can’t kill him cos they need his power, but they can always torture him until he cooperates... (”We’d really rather NOT do that though, it would be such a waste of resources~”) Also this guy’s personality is just a super shy and anxious Good Dad who wouldn’t have the courage to be able to pull off a daring escape even if he had the opportunity. He’s sorta spent his whole life already just saying “ok” to everyone bullying him, this is no different. I was imagining this story as maybe a place to put the Iggy character I created for that random lets play, cos I’ve grown pretty attatched to him! Or maybe it could just be a similarly adorable shy dad, or another gender even? I was just thinking that a short round huggable parent is what this story needs, so Iggy is the perfect puzzle piece to slot into it~

So you’d spend every day selecting between different options to try and parent up your new monster child, similar to stuff like Princess Maker. The goal of the organization is to make them more obedient and find ways to make use of their powers to profit humanity. But the protagonist’s personal goal is just to show the monster love like a normal child, prove that it can live peacefully with humans someday. You have to balance these goals, otherwise if this whole project is deemed unprofitable the higher ups might just trash this monster and build another... And then in-between all this you’d get scenes of the protag being generally bossed around by the higher-ups, and learn more about this organization and how to operate within it. You can potentially expand your protagonist’s skills too, form relationships with your coworkers, and navigate a complex web of lies to eventually find some way to escape...

Though I think that the “just escape” ending would probably be the bad one, cos without you they have no way to control the oracle child. It’d be the ending of sacrificing everybody to save yourself, and spending forever on the run as you keep hearing of the cities destroyed by this monster trying to track you down. Of course, the ending where the two of you escape together and become a real family would be way more positive, but you’d need to complete your quest to earn the monster’s love and socialize it and etc first. Possible other endings: Go full organization and get sucked into their perspective of seeing this thing as just a thing. Stop caring about the monster child, treat it like shit, and experience success in your new job! Be a mindless yes man! Live happily ever after! :( Alternatively, maybe you can end up synmpathising TOO MUCH with the monster child? Instead of convincing them of the virtues of humanity, the general assholeishness of the organization makes you lose faith in it. But what would even happen if you refuse to cooperate with your orders? Maybe even could end up as just another monster locked up in this facility, and forget you were ever human :(

And then for the oracle child itself, I actually have no clue what kind of design I’d like to give to them? i was initially thinking a very humanoid one, cos it’d be creepy to have a creature that looks human but doesn’t act it, and everybody treats them like a mere object that’s never gonna be capable of real sentient thought. But then I’m also kinda like “ehh maybe people would be dissappointed the design isn’t a more monsterous monster child”. And I’m not sure exactly what sort of humanoid design I want, even? Their powers were meant to be mostly like psychic and such, so maybe a big ol monster eye in the middle of the forehead. I want something that’s at least a little bit spooky but can also be cute once you get to know them. Oh, and all I know about their gender is that I definately don’t want them to actually be a “them”, yknow? Nonbinary characters only ever being non-human is a weird trope in fiction. Its like the only representation we’re allowed to get is stuff that reinforces that we don’t exist in real life, both as an intentional and unintentional message. So yeah if there’s gonna be any Characters That Are Like Me in this story, they’d be one of the human characters. The kid will be a boy or a girl, even though I’m using “they” here until I decide it. Also i don’t know whether they’d be a formerly human child who was experimented upon to give them powers thus “oh no organization is evil cos they did that to an innocent”, or they were just created out of nothing like a homunculus and have always been a monster. That would lose that establishing aspect for the organization, but it would perhaps be an even more powerful metaphor for like.. love and stuff. This kid is worth loving not JUST because “there’s some human in them, deep down”, but because they’re an innocent and they’re a sentient being, and them just not being human isn’t a justification to treat them like an object. Anyway! Their personality! They’re just as innocent and have as much potential for goodness as a normal child, even though they seem scary at first. And they don’t understand humanity very much, and nobody’s ever really shown them kindness before or tried to teach them morality, so why would they know what it is? Its not like they’re intentionally being “evil” though, if they understood the consequences of their actions properly it would destroy them.

I was actually thinking of a particular potential scene where they temporarily escape and cause some chaos. It would initially be like “oh god they really are evil and you were stupid to trust them”, because you see that they killed a guard during their escape. And the guard would be one of the few nice npcs in this evil organization, and someone the child seemed to be developing a friendship with. It would be a REAL punch in the gut! So now you’re not trusting this kid anymore, yet you still have to come to work the next day and pretend like nothing’s wrong. And the kid acts like nothing’s wrong too, they don’t seem to comprehend why you’d be angry or upset, reinforcing the perception that they must be pure evil at heart. And its just a really awkward, messed up day at work, for the first time feeling like you’re being held hostage taking care of some dangerous monster that doesn’t care about you, even though that’s what they told you on the first day of the job... And then.. at the end of the day... they ask you when their friend is coming back. And you realize that they don’t even understand what they’ve done. Nobody bothered to explain death to them. They don’t understand that these “toys” can’t be fixed when they break. Possibly even a super creepy scene at some other point where their arm gets ripped off in an accident and you have to sew it back on, to establish that this homunculus creature is super hard to kill? Also i was thinking that.. well its not like they can’t understand pain, its just that they feel so much pain constantly that the minor additional pain when they take physical damage doesn’t matter enough to notice. You have to try and explain the concept by being like “you know that thing you feel 24/7 when your power is overloading and it burns inside your head? Other people feel that when their arms fall off.” And also maybe they have trouble understanding their own powers? Like, they have to learn to be able to turn the oracle visions on and off at will, initially they just happen at random and the kid can’t choose what they look at. They don’t even know if its from the past or the future, or how far in the future its gonna be, or what it’s about or who its happening to. And sometimes they don’t even realize they’re in a vision, so it’s hard to understand the consequence of your actions when you might have been seeing the events out of order. Also imagine the kid being like “you lied! you said they went somewhere where they weren’t coming back but I just saw them!”, but then they realise that their friend was just repeating stuff that they’d already said, and nobody else saw them there. So they realise that it was just a vision, and it really is true. Maybe they just go catatonic for a few days and try and live forever in the past, only waking up when they’ve finally managed to come to terms with the meaning of death... :( Or maybe they break out of their cell and run to the morgue and summon up every ounce of their power, try EVERYTHING to wake up the guard, and finally break down crying for the first time in their entire life when it doesn’t work. And imagine how SCARED they’d be to see a corpse! They ran down here expecting to see their friend just sleeping, and they see this cold and empty doll that doesn’t even look like them anymore... :(

Also, less depressingly, I was thinking of endearing moments where the kid’s emotionless facade would break in the rare event you’re able to show them true happiness. Like for example, their everyday life is just sitting here in this cagey room with barely anything to distract them from the boredom. They only even have a sparsely occupied bookcase because the organization was like “ugh, if it’ll make the thing more cooperative i guess we HAVE to”. And so the kid has just obsessively devoured those two or three textbooks, and one day comes to you like “So when is the test?” They’ve read the books hundreds of times and memorized everything right down to the punctuation and spelling mistakes. And they don’t even understand the CONCEPT of recreation, because every day is just testing. If these books were here, there must have been a purpose, right? When are you going to test me on them? Hell, they might even get a bit pissed off when you say there’s no test, cos those books weren’t even fun and the only hope they had of some minor enjoyment was the mystery of the test at the end. So then you introduce them to STORY BOOKS and they’re like HOLY SHIT WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME THIS WAS A POSSIBILITY.

And you find a lot of trouble trying to explain the outside world to them, when the idea of “grass” and “sky” just seems so ridiculous. So you go get a carpet swatch for the sake of comparison, and you find out the kid hasn’t even ever experienced THAT! Imagine them going totally nuts, like this thing is goddamn catnip. MY PERCEPTION OF LIFE IS EXPANDED BY THIS CARPET SWATCH! Imagine the protag convincing the scientists to put a carpeted floor on their cell, and the kid just being so impossibly happy that they never stop rolling around on it. “Goddamnit we can’t predict the future if our secret weapon is doing floor cartwheels for two straight weeks” (Relateable note: I literally feel this way as an autistic adult. For some reason carpet swatches work as a low budget stim toy for my stupid brain XD Also jam is like the opposite to carpet. if even the tiniest drop of jam lands on my hand, the grossness freaks me out so much that I can’t concentrate at all until i scrub my hand to death. Even if i wipe it off I can still feel it!!)

Oh, and its also surprisingly endearing to imagine when Creepy Moments intersect with these cute scenes! Like, moments where the kid is being pure and innocent but also reminds you they’re a monster. Getting too excited by a new toy and causing everything to levitate around in a tornado of poltergeist activity! Or, maybe moments where the kid is trying to say something completely normal and cute, but it accidentally gets misunderstood as creepy cos of their social inexperience? “Father I have the SKIN HUNGER.” = “Yknow that feeling when you really want a hug, but I don’t know the word for a hug cos none of these science guys ever show any affection.” The closest thing the kid has as a reference is being picked up and carried to the latest testing room when they refuse to walk there on their own, so sometimes they misbehave on purpose to experience this almost-hug. Tho having a hug with a hazmat suit guy while locked up in handcuffs isn’t really all that enjoyable, the scientists wouldn’t dare touch monster-kid without eighty billion protections. Actually, having a hug could be a really monumental moment, like a milestone for both of you. Kid understands humans enough to be able to vocalize this wish, and trusts you enough to think you’d give a different answer to the scientists who always say no. And you’ve overcome your fear of the big ol scary monster enough to hold them, and you’ve grown to understand them enough that you can figure out what they want when they’re not able to explain it well. And then it could be super sad and heartwarming cos when you have them in your arms you realise how fragile and thin they are, how much pain they must be in from their shaky breathing, maybe you can even see scars you never noticed on their scalp from all the experiments...

And probably there’d be a lot of other scenes like this, where all of their “creepy” actions can be linked to a misunderstanding or a cry for help, and you can always resolve it and help them become more human. It would help make the scene of them accidentally killing someone be even more of a misdirect, like “oh my god, was I wrong this entire time and they really are evil?” But at the same time you’d also have more reason to want to hear them out, even when the situation looks impossible to explain. And it would be even sadder that this time the “and in the end they learn to be more human” part would be learning something horrible, a part of life that’s just going to make them suffer more. :( And speaking of which, the protagonist would also have to develop away from his initial optimism, kinda? Like, the bad result is where the job makes him become more jaded and he eventually becomes an asshole just like everybody else in this organization. But the good result would be becoming jaded in a different way. Becoming less oblivious and naive, aknowledging that evil exists in this world. And addressing his blind cliche optimism, and replacing it with like.. actual real optimism that he came to out of his own free will. Like not just being nice cos you’re too scared to argue with people, but also being brave enough to stand up and say that something is wrong even when you’re scared of arguing! And also reexamining his rather cliche views on good and evil. This job has also been showing him how evil humans can be, as well as how innocent this monster is. Maybe its wrong to look at it as “I’m teaching them to become more human”...?

...anyway i have a lot of ideas for this idea, lol sorry this post is so long