#smollusk will become real

[molabuddy]

babf. babeb. babens... babeni....

[defiantinsect]

figured id write something up for the side order au i keep mentioning. general stuff below but if youre curious about anything specific feel free to ask (the same is true for all of my splat stuff)

no smollusk is the biggest change here. i think marina doing this on her own volition is much more interesting to me. give me women doing bad things

not that she thinks shes doing anything bad - she just thinks shes "making up" for all the things shes felt guilty for over the years. this, combined with her basically exploding and breaking down during the early days of the tour after shes suppressed herself for so long (she is 100 percent a bottler change my mind), culminates in the persona marina takes on after she enters the memverse.

the world of order is a place where no one can feel pain, sadness, regret, or...anything. no emotions, no hurt. marina wont be able to ruin any more lives if she just turns inkopolis into a place of stagnation. flawless plan. greyscaling in this au is for those that still feel scared and upset (how could you be upset? this world is so much better than the one you left behind!), and it turns them into either parallel canon-like beings or, arguably worse, jelletons, though the latter is reserved for specific individuals she has in mind (the idols, namely, but the agents as well). she cant watch over this place by herself, so greyscaled people are her mouth and eyes in the areas she cant reach.

ending up in the memverse is like entering a coma in the real world (while its still around. closer to the end in this au, marina initiates the merging of the two). for a while you grow increasingly lethargic, your personality begins to fade, and anhedonia starts consuming your life to the point you dont want to do anything but sleep. the more you sleep, the more youre likely to end up in the memverse until one fateful day or night, you lay down, and never wake up. mass hysteria amongst the public sets in not just in the wake of marinas disappearance, but in the wake of this new sleeping sickness.

another big point in this au is the ambiguity of whether or not the memverse itself is alive and alters your body in subtle ways to "adjust" you better to your new home. also ambiguous as to whether or not the memverse is truly separate from marina herself, and whether or not its her thats ship of theseus'ing your ass

marina has a mental link to eight. she tells pearl, whos a fucking mess, about how shes being listening to her voice and how she wants eight to join her, and its a dark relief for pearl - marinas alive somewhere. neither of them know how to actually reach her, and the stuff marinas saying isnt exactly normal. the sleeping sickness comes for them a lot faster and it takes a long time for them to wake up in the memverse, separated (pearl also ends up in a wheelchair. that wheelchair concept art is too sick to not utilize)

acht. the memverses original purpose of de-zombifying the sanitized is still in effect here, so theyre just a dude who is in a new torment nexus. like everyone else in this au, theyre in the order suit and have an id tag in their one of their ears. marina tempts them constantly with the allure of being re-zombified, though at one point they witness someone being greyscaled into a jelleton and know the horrors that go into the process, and its enough to keep them rejecting her. as the cast shrinks over the course of the au, they become eights lifeline until they give in to a moment of weakness and submit themselves to marinas whims, ironically triggering eights greyscaling in the process as shes the last one standing (no point to being the only sapient being in a world full of beasts)

greyscaling can be self-inflicted to some extent, btw. in these cases marina usually adds "finishing touches" to the individuals final form. stress and angst and trauma feed into desires of escapism, and the memverse listens and fulfills their wishes in the most malicious compliance way possible. their forms as jelletons, if they turn into one, are usually informed by what traumatized them or what made up their identity while normal (i.e. eight ends up being predominantly deep sea metro themed)

last note: agent 4. secondary antagonist in this au. shes one of the very first people to end up here, and marina weaponizes her loneliness + self worth issues to transform her into a formidable, calculating opponent. doesnt attack herself, and instead relies on her army of people-turned-parallel-canons to do the work for her; up until she snaps and becomes a jelleton, she runs the greyscaling operation so marina can focus on other things. seeing eight sends her into a rage (just dont pay any attention to the little part of her that lights up instead), and she only gets angrier when eight just tries to talk it out with her instead of fighting. in her mind, eight cant do anything to redeem herself - her past behavior betrays her words. the cool facade melts away when she proposes a new, specially made body for her (one that she can puppet from afar, leaving eight utterly at her disposal) and eight flatly rejects her. then she goes apeshitt

much more horror/angst oriented than canon side order

ok. i wrote too much again oops

[echo-onsl4ught]

thinking ab if there's any possible way that smollusk could become like.. an octoling in the real world. maybe marina could make it a robotic body or something. i mean tbf smollusk could just stay inside the simulation but it's nice to think about like.. an au where smollusk gets raised by marina and pearl but in the actual world instead of just the memverse

[a-oct0]

More Vill4in AU

Some more random info for this AU that I gotta write down before I forget it-

Four becomes corrupted after Eights first run of the spire. How and why no one knows. Marina suspects Four tried to break free from Order but by doing so corrupted her own code within the memverse during the process.

Order does not revert into Smollusk until the third spire run, when that happens- Four forceably removes Smollusk, replacing it with an AI copy of herself at the top floor.

Pearl, Marina and Acht are perma locked inside the memverse with no way out, Eight can exit however it is extreamly taxing physically and mentally on him.

Eight suffers from mild grey scaling when outside the memverse, not enough to incapacitate him but enough that everyday functions are gruelling.

Grey scaling has taken over the whole of Inkopolis Square and is leaking into Inkopolis Plaza, at current Splatsville is a safe zone.

Within Splatsville Callie and Neo have set up a sort of triage base to try and help those affected by the grey scaling, one such affected being Marie who was hit hard by the grey scaling effects.

Callie is unaffected by the grey scaling due to Eight having cleared the spire with her pallet first- she is both thankful and conflicted with that.

Kay only barely escaped being grey scaled due to working a case outside Inkopolis at the time.

Captain and Kay (who has joined the NSBS as Agent 5) are both in a race against time to find Four, the real physical Four before her grey scaling plans get out of control and her corruption goes beyond the point of repair.

Due to Captain sanitization injuries, Kay is usually out alone tracking down Four who he may have found a few times...

[thespianinthebackcorner]

Post side order AU I came up with

so after I made that post ages ago about Marina being one step away from making a full-blown homunculus, I started wondering... What if she actually did?

And then I remembered an old coroika headcanon/theory I had and yeah it just started developing on its own. And I'm gonna tell you the story now because I do NOT have the time to write a full fic (I do, my hyperfixations are taking that time away). I don't know if this counts as a human au or whatever the Splatoon equivalent of that is (Inkling au?) but its a Thing.

Here we go!

After Side Order happens, Marina gets her Dramatic Days in Orderland working again (albeit with some changes) and starts wondering if, considering Smollusk's sentience, she could create an inkling or Octoling vessel for a sentient AI. Basically, creating a semi-mechanical homunculus. She creates a prototype body, tests it with some code, and then uses the data from its inspiration- Parallel Canon- to see if it works, with some tweaking to give it a consciousness.

It does work, and you end up with the semi-mechanical, semi-alive entity Marina nicknames Harmony. Unfortunately, Marina's underestimated how good at coding she was, and how much of Agent 4 and Agent 8's data Parallel Canon has. Harmony is, despite looking like a teenaged Inkling, effectively a little kid.

Marina calls up Four and Eight- otherwise known as Surume and Patricia (I'm using the promo kids for this cause I like sticking to canon. Cuttlefrsh and Steven also exist they're just irrelevant.)- to help her with Harmony. The kid pretty much latches onto them and doesn't let go, recognising the two of them as its data origins and promptly considering the two of them its moms. Thank Cod they live together. It's a little bit of a squeeze, but Surume and Patricia agree to take her in, since Marina's not confident in her own ability to raise a child amidst the idol biz.

Of course, the whole gang helps with the accidentally acquired child. Perhaps due to absorbing some data from Splashley, Harmony turns out genderfluid, and imitates the hairstyles of Kensaki, Yari and Cuttlefrsh when it feels more masculine. The group takes to renaming it Canon, although sometimes it asks people to call it Harmony when it feels like it. (I should note that Canon changes between he/she/they, I just got into the "it" and kinda can't stop here cause it'll get confusing).

Meanwhile, what's Marina doing? Phase two of the Primordial Inkling Experiment. This time, she's creating a vessel for Smollusk- and testing her limits to see if she can gain one that can switch between Inkling and Octoling form.

The result is a successful Hivemind (yes Coroika Hivemind) whose real name is Order. (Hivemind is just a turf nickname.) Not only capable of switching between Inkling and Octoling forms, he's also capable of accessing and getting himself into the digital side of pretty much any device. Lucky he doesn't use it for chaos, and he tends to keep his connection from Off the Hook a secret. Eventually, he strikes out on his own to become the Hivemind that shows up in the manga, before taking a while after the Splatfest to return to digital form. Yeah, this timeline is now a time loop. Only way I can reasonably connect the games and the manga.

Does Canon join the NSS? Perhaps. Someday, when they're mature enough to make it out on their own.

🩵Canon and Hivemind my beloved. Someday I'm going to model them in blender

[delightfuldevin]

Parallel Canon being Agent 4 is neat and all, but because PC has the hairstyle you chose in Splat2 (and I chose the same style I have now in Splat3), I’ve decided to imagine it as my sona instead. Just cause it feels cool,,

Actually, I’m gonna go on a mini ramble real quick to work Side Order into my sona lore. Now’s as good a time as any.

So, even though Side Order already has a full backstory, I unfortunately have to tweak quite a lot of it in order to work with my sona… Such is the struggles of building your lore around a character whose own lore was unknown at the time… So in my version, Nelly (8) did not go on tour with Off the Hook. She did still help them prepare for it and all that, but when the time actually came, she stayed behind in Inkopolis.

So, while OTH was getting ready for their tour, Nelly and I formed Sealestial and started making a name for ourselves as a rising band. And shortly after they left, I caught wind of a clan of eel tamers in a faraway land. My connection to electric eels is something I discovered early on, but I didn’t know there were others who were like me, so this was very exciting! So exciting that I convinced Nelly to come with me to the Splatlands so I could investigate. (And with Splatsville becoming the newest hotspot for ink sports, it wasn’t too hard to convince her since she loooves playing Turf War.)

When OTH returned from their tour, Marina contacted Nelly again to tell her about Project Memverse’s completion and called her back to Inkopolis for the trial run. Order taking over and everything else happens pretty much as normal from here. Marina wanting 4 to be security is still a thing I guess, but rather than Order using their soul to form Parallel Canon, their soul is just lost in the Memverse same way everyone else’s whose Palettes are there are.

Instead, Parallel Canon is born from Nelly and OTH’s memories of me. Order sees that I’m in all three of their memories and a very close friend to them and uses that to shape PC.

I don’t have a Palette in the Memverse, but here are Smollusk’s notes on me anyway:

“Who is this woose canon?! They’re onwy in Mawina’s recent memowy, yet they seem to be vewy impowtant to her… Same for Peawl and Eight. They seem to be called “Dowian”…

Maybe they can help show those meanies the twue impowtance of order! If they see their best fwiend fighting for my perfect world, maybe they’ll finawy undewstand that this is what will bwing happiness to evewyone! Dowian shall be my new order pwotection force!”

[cru5h-cascades]

Some Your Side of Order facts and stuff idk what to call this. Behind the scenes? Maybe?

I originally intended to give Orion's brother, Poseidon, a bigger role in Your Side of Order, but after playing through the DLC (so I knew all the lore tibits and stuff I needed to make YSoO), I couldn't figure out a way to put him into the story outside of the flashbacks and epilouge.

Astor was a completely different character before I settled on putting him in YSoO! Originally, Astor would have been one of my scrapped ocs, Cassian, who was Hope's childhood friend who ended up becoming influenced by the big bad of Side Order but ultimately saved by Hope and the others, only to suffer the same fate as Ashley in YSoO. This was super early on in me crafting YSoO's story (like before the 2nd trailer for Side Order came out) and I swiftly got rid of the idea after I realized that the square was covered in coral not zombie fungus like I thought when the 1st trailer came out in February last year. And I didn't really like Cassian so I got rid of him, too.

Orion would have been a clone of Agent 8. Instead somewhere along the line I decided "fuck it I'm just gonna make her a real octoling" and some time after we got word that we'd be playing as the real Agent 8 in Side Order I decided to also have Orion be Agent 8.

Your Side of Order was originally called Order Tower because I thought it was so damn hillarious how Side Order was called Order Tower in other languages and this was around the time I was kinda into Pizza Tower so I thought "why not?". But soon enough the novelty wore off and the Killers' song Your Side of Town came out and I felt like it gave off the same order-ly vibes of Side Order and I really liked the song overall so I renamed the story Your Side of Order.

The reason why Order becomes Lusk instead of Smollusk immediately after being defeated is because of the sheer amount of Orion's venom that was inside of Order. Not only did the venom just make Order turn into one of those pretentious teens in high school movies but Order ended up picking up octoling DNA from the venom, causing Order to be able to gain its Lusk form.

Hope & April would have originally gone through her own side story parallel to the main story in Your Side of Order but I scrapped that idea after seeing how short Side Order was and that each floor was a full floor in the Spire of Order.

And that's about everything I could remember from me planning out Your Side of Order. If I think of anything else I'll make another post. Also dw I'll address the ressurected inkling in the room in a bonus chapter of Your Side of Order.

[alelelesimz]

splatoon 3: side order ~ ale's 2024 game reviews II

oooooh guess who finished side order (like, actually 100%)! me baby! and yes i've technically been playing splatoon 3 since 2022 and this is for games i finish this year BUT side order is a totally different game mode so it counts :p also it's my review i make the rules

spoilers ahead! although if you've paid any attention online there's no huge spoilers going on.

i finished the tower on my 4th run i think, i'm not that good at this game okay. but i did finish it on the day it released! i got a bit sad because i thought it was too short but then i realized you're supposed to replay this a bunch of times and the story keeps going! so it ended up lasting a couple weeks for me. it could've been faster if it wasn't bc i needed to finish my catalog before the season ended, but hey that's better i think!

i like that the game forces you to do a run with each weapon, cause otherwise i would've done only the shooter and MAYBE the roller. but it was fun! i hate chargers and splatlings, but once you learn how to use the chips and get a bunch of hacks, it becomes easier even with weapons you suck at. also i love overpowering Pearl, it's fun.

the game itself is absolutely gorgeous. i found myself staring at the ink before starting almost every level. i'm a sucker for glittery pastel ink are u kidding me!!!! the design of all the characters outside KILLS me like what the hell they're all SO adorable i want one of those jellies in real life. also cypher's design rules.

the world is so pretty too, i love all the backgrounds in the levels (and that they reused animal crossing fish ugh!!!!), the outside of the building, THE LOBBY????? i can't start a run without running around with the cool lights and music!

i LOVEEEE that we got so much Acht! i was already obsessed with them before the dlc, like their design and persona was such a cool concept for me, and now we get to hang out with them and learn about them before getting sanitized omg i love it so much. also we love an enby in a nintendo game

i also love Pearl and Marina so much, fight me all you want but they're truly the superior idols of splatoon. i love that nintendo let them be so incredibly fucking gay in this game. yeah yeah it's not said out loud but i've never seen two characters more in love than those two bitches. good for them

oh and i fucking love Smollusk wtf. why is it so adorable????????? specially at the end aaaaa him and small fry are my sons

the only things i didn't like about the dlc are that they kinda teased something going on with agent 4 but then there's nothing about them? we have a palette and the clone thing looks like them and then there are a couple mentions here and there but that's it? i would've preferred if they don't mention them at all instead of this. i also would have liked a little cut scene once you finish all the weapons. i was a bit disappointed once i finished eight's palette you're just done with it and well. that's all! smollusk is now friendly and nothing more :/

aaaanyways i really enjoyed myself with this dlc! i'd say i enjoyed it more than return of the mammalians which i still haven't 100%. i've seen people say octo expansion was better but idc cause i never played it! so side order gets 4.5/5⭐️ from me :D love u splatoon

[nullamirrors]

yeah you could also say that smollusk hates the wrong change - since it turns out to basically want to revert to the time before the octolings were assimilated into inkling society. I guess for me the difficulty with this area of the story is that we don't really know that much about what the octarian society was actually like - presumably the calamari inkantation is meant to be analogous to, like, the fall of the berlin wall… which makes sense to an extent, but that still doesn't fit 100% with what we see, especially since everyone seems to think octavio wasn't that bad now.

what I mean when I say all three villains fear change is that like… i would assume they all want their ideal world to be permanent. tartar's is the future (an accelerationist fantasy of oneness), grizz's is the past (well-documented), and marina's is the present (she seems to specifically want to endlessly relive the beginning of her relationship with pearl, since she could just rely on pearl saving her and not have to make her own choices - she thinks she can save all her octoling friends and keep her relationship just the way it is, but in working herself so hard and avoiding talking about her anxieties she isn't listening to their or her actual needs, hence allowing Order to take over. she realises her mistake as soon as pearl and eight see what she's become at the beginning of side order). all of them fear uncertainty above all (Tartar and Grizz being alienated from cephalo society and destructively rejecting it rather than trying to understand it or find their own peace, and Marina fearing - foolishly, of course - what might happen if she was honest with Pearl) and in all cases the solution is to accept change. the point of Side Order is that you have to keep accepting change, as the apparent happy ending of Octo Expansion turns into another nightmare. because, of course, capitalism isn't actually a better system, it's just a different set of problems. with the depth being that Order kinda has a point buried in there, but the real solution is to manage the fine line between uncaringly accepting all change (creating villains) and uncaringly rejecting all change (like the villains).

and yeah you're probably right that describing tartar as the enemy of the past is more of a stretch since I just said that for neatness, but that theme of exploring and accepting the past is all over Octo Expansion given most of the game is about reclaiming memories. (maybe if the characters had read a history book or played Portal or knew what a blender was they wouldn't have gotten into such peril? since Tartar relies on people naïvely falling for its scheme, in comparison to Grizz exploiting people's needs for his own gain - we always knew Grizzco was dodgy, but it's the only reliable source of income for these hordes of teenage runaways)

so smollusk is the fourth villain, the centre of the borromean rings, because it rejects the past, present, and future. in the memverse, memories are turned into pulp, the present is overwritten by its static digital twin, and the future can't be imagined. it is elsewhere. it wants to have always been everything there ever was and always be. it is heaven. and we have to make sure it burns

or something

it's really weird how the themes of RotM and Side Order were about letting go of the past and how you should fight for a better future and yet they made the final fest Past vs Present vs Future. like if you listen to the game there's a clear answer.

anyway i voted team past

[molabuddy]

this is written kind of messily but bear with me. ive been thinking a lot about how to me, the way i see them both, smollusk/order and commander tartar work well as parallels to eachother..

tartar was created to share humanity's knowledge with the next dominant species, but lived for thousands of years idolising the professor, putting him & humanity up on this pedestal of perfect order and genius. letting its idea of what the professor wanted and what humanity was become more and more twisted in its mind until its goal became Crush inkfish and turn them into perfect, orderly creatures just like humans were (humans were not, but it can't see that.)

order was born in a similar way, formed out of the desire within marina and the other octoling engineers for an orderly world where nothing needed to change, and acting on it because it thought that stripping the world of chaos is what everyone really wanted. but, among other things it got to speak directly to marina, its creator. (its professor..) and see that No, that really isn't what she wanted.

really, the two of them are both AI created with the ingrained need to carry out the wishes of their creators, influencing them to try and strip the world of chaos, but while smollusk was quite quickly convinced to rethink its worldview, tartar stayed alone for thousands of years becoming more and more misguided until nothing could convince it any other way...

AI with friends vs AI that is so painfully alone. AIs that care so much about their creators that they'd reform the entire world in their image. in their imagined, idolised image that doesn't match the real person at all. AI who was told this vs AI who was never told this. clutches my head lies down forever.