#get bamtwozled

[bamtwozled]

“who would change their last name if they got married” um they’ve had the same last name for a decade now?? do mr and mr games mean nothing to you people

[catboylesterr]

hi hi it’s @bamtwozled of “trying not to be completely insane in the tags of your failed ritual au” fame! (I hate using my main for asks forgive me lmao) this au compels me so bad and I was wondering if you had any lore for it you’d like to share besides what’s in the art 👀

AUGH thankyouthankyouthankyou for asking because I've REALLY been meaning to make a post talking about this au in more depth outside of art !!! I just keep getting preoccupied and forgetting 😭😭

(I had also specifically wanted to talk to u abt it via tags but even tho I've been on this app a couple years I still don't really know how reblogging other people's reblogs of your posts. works. so I'm glad you asked!! :3 )

Failed Ritual's lore is essentially the same as canon DAPC up to a certain point, that point being Slime, of course. Though we don't know much, we can assume the crafties met online in the same or a similar way as actual dnp. I personally think they split from real life events shortly b4 the first DAPC upload after they both begin to obsess over the occult. Maybe it stared from them looking at forums? Either way it devolves very fast.

We also know later on, pre-Slime, they were locked up together in a government facility for an undetermined amount of time and then escaped. I dont think just calling it 'obsessive occult practices' really comes close to scratching the surface of what they've been doing in universe at all, but we dont see all of their uploads, so we have to take what we have.

As for where I think it splits in Slime, there are so many things that had to go perfectly for the ritual to work that I think you can decide what you think the actual wrong move was for yourself, honestly!! It could've been like 10 seperate things. Maybe more than one, maybe just one tiny detail ruining everything. The actual Slime could've been made wrong prior to burning the night before, the ritual circle could've been sloppy, they could've just been out of practice from being in containment, even a candle accidentally snuffing out as Dan carved Phil's heart out. I like to think it was something very small that they were too preoccupied to notice.

Whichever you choose, when Dan begins to try and bring Phil back as he always has, [indicated by potato prints, Phil seems to be the one that usually dies and returns] it doesn't work. And Dan doesn't process it at first, waiting for a sign of life, but it begins to sink in quite quickly when nothing happens after a significant time. He tries everything he can think of to set things back on course and nothing works.

He doesn't leave Phil's side for days. But, eventually, he does, because otherwise he'll starve and have no way of even maybe getting him back. He doesn't have anything to dig with so he has to leave Phil where he is.

When he leaves, he absolutely takes Phils heart with him. He wouldn't dare leave it.

In regards to what happened on Phil's side.. he's not all gone, but it's arguably worse. The ritual only going partially right has left this soul in a sort of limbo, unaware and waiting for something he doesn't know will never come. With no physical body to return to, he remains. And though he can't see where he is, and doesn't quite know who he is, he knows something is missing. Someone.

Dans life post-ritual is something I want to touch on ALOT more than I have. I believe he and craftie Phil became codependent due to necessity thoughout the years, with being locked up and practicing carefully done rituals. He never really adjusts to being by himself. 15 years of Phil rattling on about something in his ear and suddenly it's replaced with nothing but rumors of police investigations and habits he picked up from him.

My most recent art regarding this au, a bloodied phil looking up from a dark red pool, is regarding nightmares I absolutely think craftie Dan gets. Trusted with Phil's life to bring Him back and failing and never ever recovering from the emotional turmoil. Sure, it may get a little better, but it'll never truly fade. He will be on the run forever.

At its core, intricacies aside, Failed Ritual, to me, is an au about grief. A bone deep grief and sense of anguish that will leave you haunted forever by your semidead cultist partner. You never really recover from that.

This au is also totally moldable to whatever someone's specific vision of a 'failed ritual dapc', I'm down to hear literally ANYTHING anyone wants to say because it's nearly been a yr since dapc has returned (and been put to rest) and I miss them really really badly everyday of my life it's agony like I miss dapc so badly oh mygod help help help he- (gets shot)

[antiadvil]

#I’m starting to disbelieve the claim that they uploaded to the crafting channel twice a day smh #amazingphil

@bamtwozled get peer reviewed

lmao @ phil saying people were mad at him for pronouncing crochet wrong and then proceeding to call crochet knitting. man get it together

[bamtwozled]

sorry. hi. having a moment.

[bamtwozled]

I need to hear thoughts on craftsverse dan

the thing that fascinates me the most about him is that he’s kind of afraid of what he is. dan appears to be a much better conduit for the occult forces they’re trying to communicate with—in glitter faces, he draws the pentagram seemingly without his own knowledge, in potato prints he seems to have some ability to understand what they’ve summoned when it speaks to him, and in slime he’s the one entrusted with completing the ritual to bring Him into their world (there’s also the little clip of him spinning the slime bowl presumably with his mind, which isn’t on the same level but is still a “something’s up with this guy” indicator nonetheless).

and yet there are multiple points where he’s afraid of what’s happening to him. in glitter faces, he panics when he discovers that he’s drawn the pentagram, and phil has to guide him back from it. in slime, he’s very clearly upset both before and after cutting his hand open to contribute the blood, and only starts laughing again when phil does. when the ritual is complete and He rises, dan full-body flinches. he still does all these things he’s supposed to do, up to and including literally stabbing phil to death and carving out his heart, even though doing so does seem to pretty significantly affect him, but he’s clearly not as perfectly on board with everything they’re doing as phil is.

phil’s role is pretty straightforward. he’s the true believer, and the sacrifice that’s happy to be a sacrifice because of that faith. he’s the driving force in these videos. he’s always the one to introduce the craft and guide dan and the audience through it, and he has more lines that directly acknowledge his absolute faith (think “I can’t see, but that’s okay, because I believe” from potato prints, or “I’m happy to give it to him” when dan says “this was just a start, but he’ll need it straight from the source” in slime, and that attitude around his own impending death also contrasts with dan’s trepidation around his own much smaller blood sacrifice). there aren’t really any times where his devotion or persona waver, but dan’s do.

and like I think there are plenty of things you can read into that, although we get more into headcanon territory rather than a direct interpretation of the video. the simplest explanation is that he does believe on his own, it’s just not quite as unshakeable as phil’s faith and confidence. another interpretation that I’ve played with in the past is that his devotion is more to phil than to Him, and his belief comes more from following phil than directly of his own accord. phil’s “everybody makes mistakes” in glitter faces is just a silly little line about dan being left handed, but in looking at dan having some fear of his own abilities, it’s possible that he sees plenty of things about himself as being a mistake, especially if any of this manifested before he really knew what was happening. finding someone who accepts and likes that part of him, even if it’s just because it’s useful, would be welcome, and could easily push him into this acolyte mindset. but again that’s all just like interesting headcanon territory based on how their power dynamic seems to me to play out in their videos, and there are plenty of other equally valid ways to read it.

I just think “this is the one thing he was made perfectly for, and yet it scares him” is such a fun and fascinating basis for a character like this, and I think it adds a lot more depth and room for interesting speculation than if they’d both been 100% complete believers

[bamtwozled]

You Guys Ever Think About Snokoplasm (2008)

I have been pondering snokoplasm, as one does, and besides the influence of 21 year old phil’s incomparable weirdguy charm, I think it stands out so much to me because it’s a really efficient little piece of slice-of-life science fiction.

one hates to make sweeping generalizations about science fiction as a whole when it encompasses so many subgenres and when the conventions shift based on culture of origin, but the perception at least is that (at minimum western) scifi can have a bit of an exposition problem. sometimes there’s kind of no way around it, and the story literally just can’t progress until the audience knows a certain amount, but sometimes you just want to drop the audience in, give them enough real world points of comparison to be able to anchor themselves a bit and identify with what the protagonist considers normal, and have them keep up from there. this is the approach phil takes in snokoplasm.

the main text of the video is about a minute and three seconds. the final 10 seconds are…ambiguous? I’m unclear if this is the intended use of snokoplasm and the vision is simply incomprehensible to me or if it’s just a certified weird phil moment (said with all the reverence it deserves). in that extremely short time, we get all of this information, either explicitly or implicitly:

- snokoplasm is a thing that exists, and it is a common item in this setting we’ve found ourselves in, because phil’s character does not see the need to provide context to an in-universe audience that should already know what it is. it’s an item used frequently enough that one would reasonably run out of it, and running out isn’t a crisis, but it’s still something you’d need often enough to want to replace it pretty quickly.

- there is a store called A47 that stocks snokoplasm. it’s specifically “the local” A47, implying that this is a well known chain at least regionally, and that it’s a pretty common type of shop rather than a niche specialty thing. this supports what we know from the first point. arguably this is also our first real clue that we’ve diverged from our normal universe and this isn’t just some weird shit regular phil found somewhere, in that he’s citing a store that doesn’t exist like it’s a thing everyone knows about, but for those of us who don’t live in the UK it could be dismissed as some british fuckery, so I think the next detail is more of the tipping point. we also find out a couple seconds later that the store exclusively stocks snokoplasm, so it’s clearly a pretty significant market in this society.

- the store is staffed by an exohelper, reenacted with a robotic voice. this is our main notice that we’ve crossed into scifi territory, but it’s just a science fiction-y prefix and overlay to the concept of a shop worker/cashier, so it’s not like we’ve been given too much to keep up with. the exohelper starts out with generic customer service lines, but then gets judgy about his choice of snokoplasm color, culminating in the “he’s just gonna buy the blue snokoplasm off the internet” comment, and it also argues with him on green vs yellow. you can begin to fill in some aspects about a world which has at least partially replaced retail workers with robots, but also gives these new workers a degree of personality beyond blank subservience. I also think it’s worth noting that the exohelper is built so it’s perceived as female, so we get a little bit of insight on gender perception in this society as well.

- the color of snokoplasm you buy may or may not necessarily make a tangible difference in terms of the product’s utility, but it DEFINITELY has societal baggage associated with it. based on phil saying “look at these muscles” as a counterargument to the idea that he’d want the blue snokoplasm, it may be linked to a concept of masculinity, or at least to a broader idea of “toughness”. buying the blue would be an embarrassing thing for him that he shouldn’t want to do in person, but that someone else might assume he does based on some aspect of how he presents himself (other people have delved more into the idea of snokoplasm color as a metaphor for gender roles and sexuality, and anything I could say here would be stolen from them and is also kind of out of scope here since it dips more into thematic interpretation vs literal reading, but I feel I should point it out. also I do think the fact that the exohelper is specifically presented as female adds a layer here)

- we even get a brief hint as to the economy of this society—the snokoplasm he buys costs 14 million…I don’t actually know what he says here sorry. but it’s 14 million of them. this seems to be a pretty normal cost for the product based on his reaction. obviously we cannot calculate any kind of actual value here, in that. well we don’t actually know what snokoplasm is. we will never know what snokoplasm is, because that’s the whole bit, and so we can’t compare to a real world equivalent, but we at least get some kind of baseline for the kind of money someone would be willing to drop on a quick purchase.

that is a lot of information about this world in a very short time but it doesn’t feel like an infodump; it’s convincingly just this guy talking about his slightly weird exchange with a worker on a standard shopping trip. almost a third of the video’s runtime is the “green”/“yellow” back and forth because that’s the only part of this that’s particularly remarkable to our viewpoint character, which means we get all of the rest of that information in like 40-45 seconds.

and obviously there is still a lot we don’t know about the universe this takes place in. we can get as far as “there’s probably not an ongoing immediate catastrophe, because this character would presumably not be making a video about his shopping trip,” but a lot of other things are wide open. but the fact that we can tell this much from one minute of one guy describing a pretty normal day in this society feels like a really strong start.

all of this to say I genuinely think it’s a neat little piece of storytelling contained in this one-off joke video from 16 years ago, and when I say “I want a phil scifi project” I’m not only saying that in an “I love and support phil lester” way (although that is also true). I just really want to see what he’s capable of.

[bamtwozled]

while we’re talking about underrated videos by view count, the shuffleboard video is so underrated to me. 15 absolutely terrible innuendos per second. smart bin reveal at the word “edging.” window into their somewhat confusing architecture and interior design choices. stupid little all or nothing handshake into kick move. motivational plant metaphor. and I would like to specifically mention “you’re allowed to beat each other off as well” because there was absolutely no reason to phrase it like that except to make dan scream in agony and it worked perfectly.

[bamtwozled]

like no it’s not necessarily good for the entertainment value of the video but phil is so funny for managing to reveal absolutely nothing during a sip or spill game. evasive king.

[bamtwozled]

this zoom during the ad read lowkey had dan and phil crafts energy

[bamtwozled]

thank you everyone for coming out to dan and phil’s onstage gay sex spectacular!

[bamtwozled]

the level of salt in this is directly proportional to the amount of saline solution in dan’s eyes

[bamtwozled]

fundamentally I think the dan and phil dynamic is that dan would kill god but doesn’t have the power, whereas phil has the power but just doesn’t feel like it

[bamtwozled]

had a dream they banned amazingphil yaoi and woke up in a cold sweat

[bamtwozled]

I just think it’s interesting how dan quite literally playing the heel in a wrestling context kind of pulls back the curtain on how often that’s been his role within Dan and Phil™️. probably the most obvious example was him pretending to be a hater about the tatinof song even though he wrote it into the show because being the hater was his role and his persona, but I also think it’s been kind of a throughline in things like dan vs phil (particularly in the original iteration, when phil was still boxed into the, for lack of a more accurate term, smol bean persona). and I don’t think it’s all an act by any means. disclaimer that I don’t know him personally and literally everything could be an act, etc etc, but I do think that’s really just his personality plenty of times. but there are aspects of that personality that get ramped up for the bit, and at its peak we get heel dan.

like, the routine has always been there if you’re looking for it. this isn’t truly new information. but there’s something about it staring you in the face like this that provides a different perspective on the performance of it all

[bamtwozled]

for the next dan and phil games video they will be hunting us, the viewers, for sport

[bamtwozled]

the fact that everyone is campaigning so hard for phil on here/in the comments and yet dan is still winning accurately captures the feeling of futility that comes with voting in US presidential elections due to the electoral college. in this essay I will