#the bingo hat

[nomaptomyowntreasure]

I don't know if the space bun gta lean already made it onto tumblr but is there anything better?

[peonychikh]

The world around us is dissolving, but you are real, aren't you?

@theterrorbingo prompt "Fitzjames's Belted Slops"

[looselipssinkships-x]

following this up with i watched the hold me like a grudge video and started laughing so hard i cried

yall ever get high and sit in a dark room and listen to heaven's gate

[thegoosiestlucy]

i did not have edward norton and jason schwartzman kissing on my 2023 bingo card

[fobsongfacts]

Thinking about the fact that fob knows about certain things that click with us - like the bingo hat, for example. Because in order for them to know those things they kinda gotta be pretty deep into the fandom lore/art etc. Pete wentz is lurking yall.

[wolfchans]

It's not a concept picture set if it doesn't have a chan picture of him either squatting or manspreading 😅

[wentzmp3]

[chelseaaasmileee]

I ❤️ bingo hat stim board <3

[someoneintheshadow456]

I'm keeping this thing on standby just in case...

[sincerely-sofie]

Thought I’d try out that favorite character bingo thingy… I feel like there’s a pattern here, but I’m scared to identify it.

Blank version under the cut!

[saguaroooo]

spock with a beanie for my mcspirc bingo by @mcspirkevents !!! :D

[aceredshirt13]

extremely funny to me seeing people say that Bertie has a heart of gold when his immediate solution to getting Freddie back together with his fiancée was to kidnap a child

[avaantares]

Wait, Zhao Yunlan's gun is actually a...?!

(I've never claimed production meta for @guardianbingo before, but after the amount of time and research I put in on this, I feel like I've earned the "Zhao Yunlan's Gun or Whip" square, haha)

SO. GUYS.

Maybe this is something fandom as a whole figured out back in 2018, but I, who didn't hear of Guardian until 2020, did not realize until now and I need to share the knowledge because when I finally noticed, I made an unholy sound.

I've tracked down where Zhao Yunlan's gun came from -- or at least, what it most likely started as. Not the in-universe dark-energy-maybe-uses-bullets-maybe-doesn't-device-that's-best-not-thought-about-too-long, but rather the actual fake-steampunk-revolver-that-is-best-not-looked-at-too-long-because-it's-awful prop.

Y'know, this disaster:

I was actually working on a different Guardian Bingo fill and needed to look something up for continuity, so I'd flipped through a couple of episodes at super high speed trying to find a scene. As luck would have it, one of my skips forward happened to land on the scene I screencapped above, when ZYL confronts Zhang Shi.

Normally we don't get this clear (or this stationary) a shot of the godawful gun prop. I'd assumed all along they had just taken a plastic gun, glued some extra bits and bobs on it to make it look fancy, and hit it with some dry brushing (fun fact: you can watch the paint flake throughout the series; check out the top of the barrel and the side of the cylinder in the above screenshot!) to make it look #steampunk like the abandoned aesthetic of 25% of the show (as I've said before, I have theories about what happened in preproduction, but that's another post). This sort of thing is exactly what I've done for cheap cosplay weapons or background props for film work that aren't going to be seen at HD detail range.

Anyway, since the detail showed up better here than in other shots, I paused the video to look at the random screws and hex bolts (why??) they'd glued on it, since I recalled that I had the aforementioned gun/whip bingo square to fill.

That's when I noticed a detail that had eluded me before: An inverted V shape at the bottom of the grip.

Only looking more closely, that's not an inverted V. It's a symbol that I've seen a whole series of variations of over the past 15+ years... every time there's a new installment of the Assassin's Creed video game series:

So I started hunting. The principal weapons in each game turned up no matches, but eventually I found a gun that looks almost exactly like ZYL's:

It's not a perfect replica, but the details are certainly all there: The stylized logo; the leaves and swirls on the grip; the feathers up the back; even the Victorian scrollwork beneath the barrel.

Now, what's really interesting is that this gun isn't actually from the AC game series. It's part of an elaborate fan project by artist David Paget that started as a class assignment back in 2014. Even though it gathered a bit of steam in the AC fandom and generated a couple of forum role-play groups, OCs and the like, nothing about this artwork was ever connected to a real Assassin's Creed title. So why would there be a physical version of a gun that was only someone's fanart?

This is where the smoking gun (*rimshot*) goes missing, because I can't prove any of this, and it's been long enough that digging through the archives of the internet to find answers is going to take way more time than I can afford to spend on a project I'm not getting paid for. But there are two likely possibilities:

Scenario A: Some employee in a toy factory somewhere in China got told, "This Assassin's Creed franchise is really big, so we need to be producing replicas from those games to sell. Work up some designs." So the employee Googles "assassin's creed gun," finds David Paget's very professional-looking art, and whips up a replica to mass-injection-mold without realizing it's not actually from a game. Later, someone on the cash-strapped Guardian production team needs a gun to mod, and finds a cheap toy revolver on clearance after several years of sitting in storage because there was little demand for a replica of a gun that was never in a game. They buy several, glue hex bolts on the cylinder for reasons unknown, and poof! Instant pseudo-steampunk!

Scenario B: Other fans were involved in the design. Someone did build a 3D model of David Paget's design that's still available on Sketchfab (screenshot below), and it's not unreasonable to assume that other fans could have thought it looked cool and built 3D printable models. Later, someone on the cash-strapped Guardian production team needs a gun to mod, and acquires the 3D print file of one of those models from the interwebs. They mod the file a bit, print some, glue hex bolts on the cylinder for reasons unknown, and poof! Instant pseudo-steampunk!

Personally, I find Scenario A far more likely than Scenario B, for two reasons: First, the hero prop looks more injection molded than 3D printed, especially given the technical state of 3D printing back in 2017-8. And second... Budget-challenged dramas do have a history of picking up bulk video game replicas and using them as cheap props. I made a post back in 2019 about the WoW Horde shields we spotted in a different drama...

Anyway, no firm answers about the source of the hero prop -- the world may never know! -- but we have now confirmed that in some alternate universe (possibly one of the first eighty?), Zhao Yunlan and/or Zhao Xinci is an Assassin.

Wait, wait, wait... *recalls mechanics of how the whole Assassin's Creed frame story is supposed to work* Uh... so... who wants to write a genetic memory explanation for the whole Kunlun -> [lots of lifetimes] -> Zhao Yunlan thing?

.

(I did actually check the catalogue of a friend of mine who makes replicas of props from various media franchises to see if he'd done a commission of the David Paget design, since a surprising number of his custom pieces actually do end up on film and television, but while he has a gorgeous replica of a revolver that actually appears in an AC game, it appears he has not done the Zhao Yunlan gun. I didn't really think it likely, since he's in the U.S., but you never know.)

[wormintheroad]

Best money ever spent, commissioned @jayjamjary for these masterpieces

[hotpinkboots]

Character bingo with vanessa?

HI SWEETHEART I also got your follow up ask about character bingo with Snatcher and Moonjumper, so here they are :D starting with Vanessa:

Snatcher:

Moonjumper:

(there isn't much to go off of for him so I usually just think "meh" about him but there ARE occasional times where I get giddy about him)

[frostninja007]

(My Little Pony) Multimedia Fan

So here's an art idea which I've wanted to execute for a while, and I've finally done it!!

This would be the art which would've been my first post back when I joined!

Hope y'all like the references planted here 😉

MLP FIM Belongs To Hasbro

Winter Eclipse (the Pegasus OC) Belongs To Me

Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel Belongs To Vivziepop and Amazon Prime Video respectively

The Owl House, Bluey, Gravity Falls, Ducktales 2017, Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure and Amphibia Belongs To Disney

Spiderman Belongs To Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios