#but anyway: PLEASE anb give us a barnacles and dashi episode!! show us their friendship 🙏🙏 i beg

[octoagentmiles]

do you have any hcs for barnacles and dashi ? I'm rewatching it and many episodes start with the two of them in the main area , oftentimes there's a third person involved but it's always the two of them so they must spend alot of time around each other :O 10 / 10 bonding

Had to think hard about this since Dashi's role in the main series is so small—but you're actually so right 👀 10/10 buddies 👍

You'll get my headcanons I promise but first you gotta listen to me infodump, okay? Deal:

I personally headcanon that Dashi was one of the first Octonauts, she hasn't been around a super long time- but at least long enough that she was probably around for the first Octopod, and that would give her and Barnacles (and the other OGs) plenty of time to get close.

We know Inkling canonically founded the Octonauts, but I imagine that it was actually Barnacles who picked out the crew—over various fateful encounters (Kwazii, Peso), or already knowing them (Tweak)—with the two exceptions of Dashi and Shellington.

Shellington heard about them through the kelp vine by pure chance, and got himself a job via determination. Then, at some point—he recommended Dashi to Barnacles or Inkling, and got her a position as an intern. (He knew her through her photography; she took pictures for him once or something like that.)

I also headcanon they weren't called The Octonauts yet at that point. I headcanon that Dashi came up with the "Octonauts" name during her first few days, and they kept it. (Coincidentally, the first Octopod crashed during those first few days. T'was completely unrelated, I promise 😅)

Fast forward: I've been thinking about Dashi in AnB a lot lately, and the one question that keeps coming up is: "Why did Barnacles make her the Captain of the Octoray?"

They haven't addressed it in the show yet, and it felt a little bit like the writers just wanted her to Do Something, y'know? So I went back to rewatch some of her main series episodes, and this scene from The Surfing Snails stuck out:

This scene shows how much he trusts her. He trusts her to make the right calls, and to be careful. He shows this trust in her again in the Wild Windstorms:

"...I'm ready for this!"

"I know you are, Dashi."

I REALLY wish they had spent more time giving her some kind of arc, showing this trust being built. She absolutely deserved an arc like Peso's, where we could've seen her growth and her bond with Barnacles getting stronger. It would've made the Octoray thing make much more sense, and I would've loved to actually SEE her evolution from "getting stuck in a whale shark" to "inventing stuff with Tweak" to the level of respect that Barnacles clearly has for her in S4 and Beyond, but instead it feels like all that stuff happened off-screen.

I also wanna point out real quick; that Dashi is one of the select few characters to ever call Barnacles by his first name only. This is something that the writers frequently use to emphasize closeness between Barnacles and someone else (Kwazii, Natquik, etc), and Dashi has done it twice. I'll admit I thought it was an error the first time, but then I caught her doing it again in Sac Actun. SO CLEARLY THEY ARE CLOSE. YES? WE AGREE. YES.

ok I'm done. pleasure doing business with you 🤝

*slams hands down on table* MISC. HEADCANON TIME ‼️ (which technically, could all totally be canon until the writers finally decide to give us real information ✨)

She has 100% read ALL of his books and journals, at least twice. Sometimes he gives them to her so she can beta read them, and she's also helped edit a few.

She has written her own journals, mostly in the form of scrapbooks, that she shares with him too. He has a first edition signed copy of one of them.

She made friendship bracelets for everyone on the ship after the Octopod was rebuilt, and he keeps his on his desk. It's still in mint condition.

I feel like at least ONE of the cameras in her collection was a gift from him.

She is trained on how to steer the Octopod manually. Considering the only two on board at the time who knew how to do it were Barnacles and Tweak—her showing slight interest was the only convincing he needed to teach her.

Sadly, she's never needed to use this skill. Yet.

She learned how to play harmonica when he decided to learn accordion, so they could duet together, but she got the hang of it much faster than he did.

They work out together sometimes. She's much stronger than she looks—and has won an arm wrestling match against him at LEAST once. She's also beat him in a foot race; it was almost a very close tie, and she needed to lay down for an hour after—but she did it. He will never live either of these down.

They definitely gossip in HQ sometimes, when it's just the two of them.