#pillbug speech bubble

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

I love heavy metal so much

[gallus-rising]

have been rotating this article in my mind since i read it and god i want more media moving out of sync with the story and i think comics might be the only format capable of doing it. the act of reading a comic, taking the split second needed to connect speech bubbles and sound effects to pictures, is already sorta out of sync. in the average Big Deal 2 Page Spread everything is happening at the same time, but can a person really comprehend everything happening in the spread at once? part of the appeal of a spread is to stop for a second and fully take in the artwork. all the action is simultaneously happening all at once and stretched out over maybe 30 seconds of reading, even longer when you come back to pick it over for every small detail!

i keep thinking about it trying to come up with other examples of the action moving so fast the comic physically can't keep up with itself and King Crimson is the only thing coming to me. other people have pointed out that the thing that made King Crimson so unreadable is the fact is erases chunks of time in a medium that already erases time. in the space between comic panels the reader assumes characters have done things like move, start a new sentence, taken a breath, etc. so when Giorno changes positions between 2 panels and thinks to himself "wtf why am i standing here?" it's obvious to the reader that he must've moved between panels. in the space between line breaks he just took a few steps. the whole rest of jjba up to this point and the entirety of comics itself have taught us this is how movement works. it becomes impossible to show that the character have suddenly lost a few seconds of time when they already do that every time your eyes move to the next panel

also i went back and reread the chapter that the moment that article dissects comes from and found another cool bit of page comp. like with demon head lady, the speech bubbles show pillbug man continuing to speak after he's been decapitated. and extra detail is the "ZZZZ" sound effect posed behind him matching up with where he's just been de-limbed. in a totally silent medium Pochita is moving faster than sound without anyone having to tell us this

[rainonglass]

𝑪𝑯𝑨𝑹𝑨𝑪𝑻𝑬𝑹 𝑺𝑯𝑬𝑬𝑻.

Repost, don’t reblog.

BASICS.

full name.  quirrel...... of hallownest?? hallownest doesnt really do surnames

nickname.  nin canon, he’s been called “mask”. i hc he probably got called “monomon’s assistant” and “that bug following monomon” a lot, even though. both of those are longer than his actual name

gender.  male, he/him

height.  tentatively 3′9″-ish. canonicaly he’s taller than hornet without her horns and shorter than hornet with horns so take that as you will

age. for sure older than 50, probably around 65-70

zodiac. doesn’t remember his birthday, but i hc he’s an aquarius. fun fact Bring Your Child To The Library day is the first saturday of february

spoken languages.  whatever language was most common in and around hallownest, plus bits and pieces of many languages from the world beyond

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS.

hair color.  does not have hair follicles but his antennae are black

eye color. beady and black, if you google pillbug face you will see his eyes

skin tone.  whatever skin isn’t covered by carapace is a desaturated dark blue

accent.  uhh his voice actor is a guy from chicago if that gives you anything. ok for real though i think he has kind of a muddled accent, like the way he says “cat” doesn’t quite rhyme with “bat”. stuff that kinda clues you into his background in the wilds, where his speech patterns were shaped by the different places he went. despite that, he’s pretty easy to understand when he talks. something something being monomon’s assistant included teaching classes something something he retained that enunciation. fun fact one of my friends cobbled together his voice clips to make him say Words and the resulting accent sounded.... french? do with that what you will

voice.  i have it right here! specifically, near the end of the video but before his Fightin Words. he sounds his age, he’s pretty tired. still, there’s something very friendly about the way he talks

dominant hand.  ok so in game they just flip his sprite so you can’t definitively say what hand he holds his nail with, but in the prequel comic it looks like he favors his right both for combat and for general stuff (ie, he waves with his right hand)

posture.  i genuinely cannot tell if he’s slouching in-game or if his body’s just shaped like that, but i’m gonna go ahead and say he slouches a lot nowadays just because he’s old and his center of gravity is lower

tattoos. his position in hallownest wouldn’t have allowed it pre-amnesia, post-amnesia he wouldn’t have been keen on the recovery time given he was fighting to survive in the wilds

birthmarks. nope

noticeable feature(s). well, he’s obviously wearing a mask on his face, and he wears a kerchief over his antennae. if you got both of those off him you’d literally just be looking at a normal roly poly but i thought i’d mention them. uhhh he’s kinda leggy and he’s shaped like a kidney bean

CHILDHOOD.

place of birth. god i dont know. i hc quirrel was prrrrobably around middle-class? he doesn’t look like the aristocratic bugs in the city of tears and we know hallownest had a pretty strict caste system, so it was. probably kind of weird when monomon made him her assistant, but not inconcievable (for comparison, lurien’s butler/assistant was a member of hallownest’s high society). anyway that’s all to say i think he was uhhhhh probably hatched at home, in a city near but not part of the city of tears?

birth weight.  im sorry i cannot find the average birth weight of a pillbug but they look like this as mancas/babies

birth height.  like a milimeter or less

manner of birth. hatched from an egg!

first words. “outside”

siblings. so, so many (most didnt survive infancy though it’s tough for a pillbug)

parents.  two moms (it is MY headcanon and i give quirrel the two moms!!!)

parental involvement.  his parents tried their best but it’s tough when you have a bunch of pillbug babies running around. once he got a little older and survived molting though, they took more direct care of him. they made sure he got a very good education and worked hard to make him Refined in hopes he’d get a good job in the capital. he got in trouble pretty often even though he was a really sweet kid, he’d just forget the rules and run off to play outside. once he got his position with monomon, his moms talked about him a lot at like. the quilting circle.

(sidenote: quirrel remembers literally none of this, if you asked him any of these questions he’d have no idea except stuff that could logically be deduced from his species. he doesn’t remember his family at all)

SEX & ROMANCE.

sexual orientation. bisexual

romantic orientation. he’s bi all the way down baby

love language. playful debates, small touches, traveling together, saying exactly what he thinks about something, letting them see him sleep

relationship tendencies. asking a lot of questions, tends to hold his partner to a higher esteem than himself early on, learns a lot from his partner. not great at living with a partner because he’s so used to living outside

MISCELLANEOUS.

character’s theme song. doesn’t have one in-game, unless you count the archives theme (literally just ambient bubbling and spooky noises) or uumuu’s boss theme aka decisive battle (which is a general boss theme and isn’t unique to uumuu). i think uhhhh wait fuck i lied. closest thing we have is this, which is the city of tears indoors theme but is best known for playing in the scene where you sit on a bench with quirrel

mental illnesses. depression, some degree of anxiety, general dissociative problems, you know the deal. autism isn’t a mental illness but uuuuuh i’m gonna mention it anyway, i’m autistic so no matter what if i’m roleplaying a character they’re gonna end up with some autism in them. he’s got some issues with grief but like he doesn’t have a diagnosis and i don’t know what that would be anyway

self-confidence level. low! very low! he knows he’s old and he can’t remember much about being monomon’s assistant so he doesn’t have much going for him, in his eyes. his (implied) death at blue lake kinda gives you a look into that

vulnerabilities. grief. showing physical weakness. being shown pity. being trapped.

[a-captions-blog]

[Image descriptions: 1. A meme showing a close-up of a pill bug on some rocky ground. In the left center of the image is a circle showing a picture of a curled-up pill bug. White text at the top of the main image says, “Ewww! Pill bugs!” The curled up bug has a speech bubble that says, “No! I am extremely cool!” The one on the rocky ground on the main image says, “We are actually crustaceans! And we can remove heavy metals from the soil!” In the bottom left corner is white text that says, “Joseph Burger, BugWood.org.” 2. A version of the “Oh shit, for real?” comic. A person lies on their couch staring up at the ceiling with wide eyes and saying to their computer, “Oh pillbugs, I’m just feeling real low.” An image of a pill bug has been edited onto the computer screen. The next panel shows a close-up of the screen and has the pill bug saying, “I can remove heavy metals from the soil.” The next panel shows a close-up of the person on the couch. The last panel shows them sitting up slightly and looking in the direction of the computer. They say, “Oh shit, for real?” 3. A coloured, three-panel comic that starts showing a pill bug digging into the ground by a mound of dirt. The words “scrape scrape” appear above the digging spot. In the next panel, a light-skinned human arm wearing a spiked bracelet and several band-aids has emerged by the mound. The pill bug increases its efforts, and the words “dig dig” appear where the hand has emerged. A speech bubble from the hand says, “Mph mph” to indicate muffled noises. In the last panel, the arm’s owner, a heavy metal rocker with curly brown hair and a red guitar has emerged from the ground, along with their bandmates, a tan person with spiked blue hair and red glasses and a light-skinned fat person with brown beard. All three people are still partially buried. The person with the guitar says, “ *Gasp* Thank you, A. vulgare! Being trapped underground for weeks was putting a mad strain on the band.” The pill bug replies, “No problem. Isopods are great at removing heavy metal from soil.” The artist’s watermark is in the bottom right and says: Jack Byrley / Bedupolker. \End description]