#mr coke

[msicecreamy]

Mr. Coke and Ms. Ice Cream with the stars✨

[winntir]

Correct

[tododeku-or-bust]

Must admit, I didn't know that today I'd learn that Barack Obama occasionally did cocaine in his youth 🤣 really goes to show that when you're not funneled into the prison system and are offered opportunities to do better, you can even become the president of the United States 🤣

[somewhereincairparavel]

Will: my dad has many talents! He's the god of archery, medicine, poetry, sun, oracle, art, music, and more! What talent does your dad have?

Pollux: Um. Grape juice.

[dawnthefluffyduck]

New game interest unlocked

(crow in bottom right belongs to @patchwork-crow-writes)

[bedforddanes75]

some of u guys are taking 'drugs bad :((' too far i cannot lie

[shanediomorrissey]

I can be ur angle or ur devil

[idk-butimhere]

Day 1 of drawing greek gods and goddesses that have appeared in pjo-

[miumiins]

him and his ¥100000+ gucci shirt

[familyabolisher]

on multiple occasions i have hit a certain level of drunk/high/etc where i can make myself cry by thinking about vladimir nabokov. Would love to know what the hell my problem is

[inposterumcumgaudio]

Your thoughts on Madame Wanda or the Thomasina House? If you haven't already ofc.

I've talked a bit about Thomasina House in the Class Structure post and there's a bonus theory I have about it in my post about Gemma Olsen. I might do a post about Thomasina House in particular in the future because there's more to say, but for now, I'll take you up on Madame Wanda and expand that a bit to the Reform Club as a whole.

Gonna disappoint right off, but I don't think anyone is actually having sex at the Reform Club. Sorry. All right, maybe some people do sometimes, like fucking at Studio 54. But that's not actually what the point of the place is.

It is described in the art book as a "punishment club". People go here to be punished for a misdeed they refuse to remember, but becuase they don't remember what they feel guilty for, there's no apparent reason they can't have some fun with it. That the developers have taken this concept and appended fetish play to it confuses the subject, but even then it still makes perfect sense. Fetishes aren't really about sex either so much as foundational (often childhood) memories later re-contextualized in adulthood. Dohoho.

And Madame Wanda is a matron overseeing the discipline of her naughty children.

I would really liked it if she were the Wanda Durbyfield from the "Diary of a Wayward Girl" that you find at the Hippo Club.

In fact, I very much think this was the intention: the Wanda in this diary ends her last entry by saying that, "Some day I'm going to punish them. I'm going to punish them all." And Madame Wanda has a cut diary too, indicating that she would also have been in the habit of documenting her life.

The only problem with this is that Wanda Durbyfield's diary points to her being younger than Margaret Oliphant, which would make her too young to be a Crier. But its a very good story otherwise. A girl unable to raise her child herself and terrorized by the town for it, grows up to find her calling in punishing her fellow Wellies while forgetting just as much as they have why. I think they just couldn't let go of the idea of a Crier running the fetish club because that is also a good concept. Would that they were compatible!

If the cut diary is any indication though, Wanda would have also grown into the role. As Wanda Durbyfield, her punishments would have been a revenge for the rage she was made to endure from the townspeople who were more powerful as a group than her. As Madame Wanda, her punishments are corrections with the understanding that people - children - misbehave without fully comprehending the underlying cause, especially when they have the boldness of a mob obscuring their better sense. This is why you punish them one on one (and presumably a premium rate).

I have a chapter in which I've juxtoposed the Reform Club with the Church of Simon Says and if Wanda Durbyfield was supposed to be Madame Wanda, then the game would have done this as well.

"I don't care if we ARE required to go to church! Those women are lunatics, the way they ganged up on me! You'd think they'd be GLAD I'm giving up the baby. They put their children on the train -- wouldn't they want another child? But no, I'm apparently the worst sinner in the world for sending mine away. Am I supposed to raise it here? Much better for it to live on a farm."

That the Home for Wayward Girls was a religious institution and enforced church-going despite the growing danger it posed would not only place Wanda at odds with the Church of Simon Says on a business level in the future, but a philosophical one as well.

The thing I think is most interesting about the Reform Club is that they are apparently engaging in some sort of resistance efforts, but we never actually get to know anything about it other than that it's happening. And what's more, you only learn this from a line that Sally will soliloquize to herself when walking around in the Garden District.

"I almost miss going to the Reform Club. I bet some of them could help. And they never ask awkward questions. But I'd have to be Naughty Nurse again, and I'm just not that."

I genuinely think, though. that this line is only here to give context to Gemma's bug out bag and not to actually lead into any further supposition about the Reform Club's activities. It's a sort of slight of hand, really, because the thing you're supposed to be focusing on from this statement is Sally's Naughty Nurse act that she just can't bring herself to reprise. Whatever the Reform Club is doing is similar to Mr. Kite in that you are presented it to pique your interest, but you're never permitted to get any closer to it.

And, if we're accepting that Wanda Durbyfield was meant to have grown into Madame Wanda, she even had the sense as a wayward girl know that some people deserved their chance to leave Wellington Wells.

"No one will ever marry her now. Nor me, I suppose. Not unless I can move away."

"Am I supposed to raise it here? Much better for it to live on a farm."

Beyond that, I have a further, wilder theory about the Reform Club and its place in the world.

In Lionel Castershire's quests, he often makes mention of an unnamed client who collects Uncle Jack records, but its in Ollie's act when Castershire asks him to retrieve the Salty Dog from the Lawrence house that we learn more about this client beyond that.

"I have a client who likes to… collect things. Very powerful man. He has quite a few employees, but he'd rather they not know about his… private interests."

(As an aside, I think it's very funny that this dialogue implies the client is a taxidermy dog fucker - particularly in view of what I'm about to tell you further - but upon receipt of the quest, you learn he was probably just after the Hope Diamond that should be in the Salty Dog.)

When you return with the Salty Dog, you get one last parting piece of information from Castershire:

"My client is a man you want in your corner. And not in the other."

I like very much to think that this client is the Mr. Cleland that Madame Wanda is expecting when you come upon her as Arthur.

Mr. Cleland is a reference to John Cleland, who wrote Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more popularly known as Fanny Hill. In it, a wealthy woman recounts in two letters to a friend known only as "Madame" the sexual adventures of her earlier life. It is considered the first English prose pornography and is otherwise notable for its use of euphemism. It contains no vulgarities directly, instead describing its graphic sexual events in very... couched language. So couched you could lose your clover clamps or the key to your safe in it. Also, Cleland wrote this novel from debtor's prison.

So Mr. Cleland and his friends are coming to visit for some Golden Knocking, are they?

I think this is meant to be euphemism, which is doubly hidden because it is framed in a place that is also trading in innuendo. Which is to say, they are implying this is a fetish-y sex thing, but I think it is actually a business transaction and this is is why you want Mr. Cleland in your corner and not the other.

I believe he brings his "friends", people who owe him money, to the Reform Club to get the screws put to them and that Madame Wanda, resident expert in the art, assists him with this. This may even be why the Reform Club is permitted to operate as it does, it enjoys the protection of a "powerful man". Probably makes makes them lean over the chair and watches while Madame Wanda gives them a proper caning. Maybe the tranquilizer darts on the table are so they can walk home after.

Further story elements in the game that dovetail nicely with this idea are the quest "Moon Juice Leach" and Captain Lawrence's unpaid debts and subsequent "accidental" death in "Old Soldiers".

In "Moon Juice Leach", Eddie Coke is remembered as having not having the "common sense that God gave an ordinary bowl of porridge" nor much reason to need "contraband" motilene, but a desperation to try to steal it all the same. This idea that motilene can even be contraband is a whole other ???, but the constables suppose that Lionel Castershire (who we later learn in Ollie's act is perhaps a tad less upstanding than he appears) may be involved in Eddie's fatal caper. If Lionel acts as a buffer between Cleland and his acquisitions, this would make sense. If Eddie got a taste of that Golden Knocker, it would also explain the reckless attempt at theft.

Meanwhile Captain Edward Lawrence is past due on his bills and on notice for shut off from the Department of Water and Power. More motilene-related troubles. Possibly purchasing discounting "contraband" motilene and being unable to pay that bill either?

Rather than (or unable to) meet his obligations, he's chosen to shut himself up in his house and refuse calls.

To great effect:

If this is the work of Mr. Cleland (or more likely his "few employees"), it presents another interesting connection: that he may also have something to do with who has access to the apples from the last apple tree in the Garden District.

Or maybe Mr. Cleland's just wondering why Captain Lawrence is buying a luxury like apples when he owes him money.

That Ollie is asked to retrieve the Salty Dog from his brother Colonel Lawrence's house, after both brothers have died, seems like a case of shifting the debt around. (This is also why I wondered if the Salty Dog wasn't supposed to be Bonny Prince Charlie at a point.)

Dropping a bookcase on Captain Lawrence is a steep escalation, for sure, but if he wouldn't come to the Reform Club, then he didn't leave himself much room to negotiate a payment plan.

Who knows. He might have even liked it.

[msicecreamy]

Mr. Coke and Ms. Ice Cream!

These two characters are the representation of my partner and me, in the Cuphead universe.

[jinmalos]

if youre wondering what ive been up to, ive been drawing malos but its too terrible to post in full

[serious-goose]

out of adhd meds so i'm running on caffeine and agnostic prayers

[allmyandroids]

Coke Zero enjoyer Mr Black

[todayisafridaynight]

(gaiden and iw spoilers) hiii i finished infinite wealth and I'm kinda insane about it hope you don't mind

i can't stop thinking about how disappointed i am in iws story :( especially with how the jimas they just get thrown under the bus all the time

what bothers me the most is that i was so hopeful after that scene where the four all fought together at the end of gaiden(when daigo says the No Balls line)

after he says that and kiryu has given him a little speech about how he's proud of him, majima and saejima nod at each other, and JUST THAT tells you so much about how he's talked to them about how insecure he feels about dissolving the clan, going into hiding and all that stuff, it made me so hopeful for a proper talk between daigo and kiryu, for kiryu to finally change his ways and actually try to help him out instead of asking for shit without giving anything back all the goddamn time

it's really fucked up how we got that subtle story telling and then just. oh they're fishermen. oh kiryu's asking them to do stuff for him again. oh he got pissed and beat them up and then left without doing ANYTHING again after not seeing them for three years. oh they don't get to come with when kiryu's dying in a fucking helicopter

being a 3jimas fan is suffering we could have had so much man. how did they even get to that village. why is it abandoned. why didn't we get to do anything with them we just left

i'm so tired oh my god

i've ranted Extensively with My Cabinet about how much i'm annoyed and disappointed by IW's story and handling of characters, and how the 3jimas were handled is one of them- tbh mostly daigo since he had more of a presence in the plot but perhaps because of that its awkward to see how the game handled majima and saejima as well

to just focus on daigo, it genuinely was really annoying how we were given SOME semblance of finally getting a scene where daigo breaks it all down for kiryu about how much the past twosome decades have sucked and that kiryu was abysmal for just dumping (AND CONTINUING TO TRY TO DO SO) problems onto daigo and others and maybe JUST MAYBE kiryu gives a right proper apology or realizes he's being selfish (again). like the build up was great, but it just falls flat when kiryu just. LEAVES after the fight after making them all feel like piss about themselves so the jimas pull through at the tower anyway