#spoilers for psychonauts 2

[wyauwu]

y'know, i never really got the logic of people blaming ford for the aquatos' generational psychic trauma. like. yeah, he did manufacture the water curse, but without ford's intervention, augustus would've been an orphan whose parents were both killed by maligula, and honestly probably would've been a far less well adjusted person in adulthood since he didn't have the support of lucretia in his formative years. if anything, his hatred of psychic powers would be more intense, not less.

don't get me wrong, ford did a LOT of fucked up shit, he's called peepaw warcrimes for damn good reason. although he genuinely did try to help lucretia and augustus, his methods were obviously less then ethical, and definitely not the best. AND, like, even if he didn't have time to hunt for helmut's body bc he was trying to relocate lucretia as fast as humanly possible, he could've at least LABELLED HIS FUCKING BRAIN JAR before committing mental suicide. ig he probably thought that someone would check the unlabelled brain and find out that it was helmut (which otto SHOULD'VE DONE but agh whatever) but he could've made the process a LITTLE EASIER, JUST SAYING.

...anyways, what was i talking about? oh yeah. assign blame correctly folks. get crully for the war crimes he actually committed, not for the ones he didn't. wya, out.

[doodledoodlesdoodles]

replaying psychonauts 2

[extantodyssey]

tell me how to feel about you now

oh, let me know, do i suffocate or let go?

-

my first time ever making a comic like this! very far from perfect but i’m satisfied

this came about as part of me thinking a lot (too much) about the psychic 7 and their relationships with one another and what those look like/how they develop after the events of the second game

[therealslimshady]

psychonauts is like. what if you met your hero and he turned out to be a silly, kind, down to earth guy who was willing to be there for you at a moments notice and was also personally responsible for every bad thing that'd ever happened to your family specifically

[technovillain]

the tempest knows no mother / the deluge, no son

[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.

[medicalunprofessional]

[brain-sturgeon]

Mouthful of gems

[kursed-curtain]

the bride and the ugly ass groom

[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

[the-little-squire]

First post of the side account I hope this is something

[mister-heart]

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

[extantodyssey]

as long as you are loving me i know i’m not alone

even if you’re nowhere to be found

sometimes life takes you back to the places you run from

i’ll be right here if ever you come home

-

forever thinking about them

[paxcallow]

anything i dont tell my dad directly is beyond his comprehension

[the-little-knight]

Some psychonauts stuff for my brain...... needed to draw Raz again...

Oh also my oc

[medicalunprofessional]