#gristol

[mirchloe]

gristol worming his way around the motherlobe being a sycophant to everyone he met, and truman being one of the few to not trust him feels like such a bob trait that was later passed down to lili. the zanottos are wary! they don't trust people as easily as they would appear to do. lili was impressed by raz when he first showed up, definitely showing her awe with his confidence and how he isolated he felt (lili voice just like me fr fr), but then put up her guards because she didn't really know raz. in a way, it's kind of how i see bob and helmut's relationship, too, like bob getting wowed by helmut, intrigued by him, but he doesn't fully let those walls down yet until he knows he can trust helmut. as for truman, he is a genuinely nice guy, wants to help how he can, but as the grand head, he harbors a unique position of power, knowing that his status as the leader brings about the possibility of trouble and danger. he can't be too careful, and someone like gristol trying his hardest to win him over would be met with derision in a calm, dispassionate fashion. anyone trying to suck up to anyone in the zanotto family is met with immediate suspicion.

[bellonathedragonborn]

FINALLY posting my oldish Daud DLC pics.

It’s so jarring fighting Corvo. Since this was a low chaos run I was able to defeat him in the dream.

I wish we could see more of the Gristol countryside instead of Dunwall in both games. Reminds me of Fable 2-3.

On a more serious note. After playing these DLCs finally I can understand now why people didn’t like how Daud was handled in Death of the Outsider.

Like in the canon ending of these DLCs he owns up that IT WAS HIS FAULT he became an assassin. Only for DOTO to have him lapse and blame the Outsider for it all. Like?? Why??

[razzmatazz-aquato]

yeah sorry

[ludinusdaleth]

something about stories with an island off to the north, a place cold & dead yet surviving like a corpse filled with maggots, like fungi in a flood, littered with the bones of dead societies & whales, near inhospitable and yet it feels more like home more than anywhere you've known.

[how-good-day]

Psychonauts but skills from disco elysium

My god I did this.....

[brain-sturgeon]

Small miscommunication

[marshvlovestv]

Oh oh oh, so I've talked before about how incredible it is to see how Double Fine matured in its handling of neurodivergence in the fifteen years between Psychonauts 1 and 2, but you know what else is addressed more sensitively in Psychonauts 2?

War.

The first game talks about war a weird amount, for it not really being the thing that the game is about, and it's all through the lens of insecure dudes in military cosplay (Fred I still love you the most but it had to be said). Oleander got rejected from every branch and now he's made this military fantasyland his whole personality, acting like a drill sergeant around the kids and dreaming up horrible superweapons, and all the while his construct in Lungfishopolis proves he doesn't really understand how the Navy works or how a revolution against the military complex would actually look. (Aside, I still find it very funny that Psychonauts 2 establishes that designing superweapons is just something he does all the time, even when he's good, and Hollis's austerity is the only thing getting in his way.) Waterloo World, meanwhile, has its roots in a real world conflict, but the real world conflict is not Fred's issue; the things casting a shadow over Fred are the mythologized legacy of Napoleon and a board game which is an abstracted mockery of real military strategy.

And all of this, treating the war and military as some abstract fantasy, is just for giggles and goofs. Which is totally fine by the way! Psychonauts is a comedy game and a dark one at that. I don't have a problem with a comedy deriving some harmless laughs from a dark topic. I'm just pointing out that the first game had an odd and irreverent fascination with war so I can say that the contrast between it and Psychonauts 2 is kind of mind-boggling.

In Psychonauts 2, war is no longer some heady hypothetical thing. This game puts an actual, in-universe war at the center of its backstory. This war had real casualties. It tore apart families, displaced people from their homes, left so much pain in its wake that even mentioning the name Maligula is said to cause a massive psychic outcry. Of course, every character in the game who was touched by this war has trauma coming out of their ears. And the villain of the piece is Gristol, the one person who (despite, yes, having associated traumas of his own) doesn't take what happened seriously, the person who wants the war machine that was Maligula to come back.

Anyway so yeah I played Psychonauts for one (1) hour yesterday and the Video Game Thoughts are alllllll coming back.

[industriallee]

people said a lot of crazy stuff to this ten year old

[medicalunprofessional]

[bumbldee]

They follow each other on tiktok

pre-render + sketch + ref under line

[mirchloe]

pov: you are gristol and lili is getting you

[determinedorca]

Some recent doodles I've done including a commission of Gristol for @enviousennui

[heximinimalsartstuff]

the same way that ugly things can be cute, he's kinda hot in an ugly way ykwim. ykwim.

yeah.

ugliest man alive. aka. my wife

[how-good-day]

False Pieta

((Ref under cut ))

Adolphe William Bouguereau (1825-1905) - Pieta

[brain-sturgeon]

Mouthful of gems

[mister-heart]

These two are actually so so special to me. Once again I fixate on antagonists.