#three person hug

[vibingncrying]

What should have happened after sealed god's test:

That's it, have a nice day/night

Still can't get over them NOT hugging after that, I was waiting for it ahhhh

Progress pictures lmao:

If someone's gonna comment about the lighting not being right, please don't, I stared at this for too long already, I'm aware, just ignore it or make your own then 🙏

Shout out to this three person hug reference:

[badninken]

🧡🤍 BEPO 🤍🧡

[lazycranberrydoodles]

they are so in love and disgusting and also sarcastic bitches. follow for more / prev comic / next comic

[luna-loveboop]

I love Malon.

She sees a face she likes

And she grabs it

It's a love language! She grabs the faces she likes. There's so many times it happened- like every time she was showing affection.

To anyone

Of any species

If you are near Malon and she likes your face it will be grabbed, sorry

She's gonna be such a great mother

Time is not immune, as her husband he signed up for it

Art and comic by Jojo @linkeduniverse au!

[solacebean]

The Goat

[please-stop-finding-me]

Harry + Gentle touch

This man deserves to be pat on the back and feel good about it (Kim is ON that mission)

[courtesanofdeath]

Tears don't mark the end of a sin.

[lalalin-imacancer]

if I had a nickel for every time Fitz lost someone close to him only for them to turn out to be okay, I'd have three nickels. which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened three times

[bulldog-butch]

dare i say that fusco might be one of my absolute favorite characters in person of interest? people would think he was so hot because of his redemption arc if he was younger and didn’t have the face of a grumpy new yorker pug

[apologetic-artist]

Can you draw some Yellow Guy plsss :]

Of course!! I don't usually draw Yellow but this is some good practice! Also, @frayedcircus asked for some Yellow so here ya go!

I'm really proud of these sketches and I hope yall like them too.

[just-an-enby-lemon]

My brain is unable to produce anything but angst.

Like I had this cute fluff idea of Carlos being a Ford fanboy and moving to Nightvale inspired by his favorite scientist going to study Gravity Falls in the 70s/80s. All mostly based on the fact Carlos moved to Nightvale the same year Mabel and Dipper went spend the summer at Gravity Falls.

And it was cute. It was mostly Carlos sending fan letters/reports and Ford reading them and deciding - thanks to Mabel - to answer and making a friend he didn't had a complicated past with (and had a similar love for science).

But them my brain went "Ford would fully assume Cecil was like Bill, right?" I mean from Ford's view there's a paranormal guy who imidiatly is into the scientist? Clearly manipulation.

And at first it was still fine. Maybe Ford helped Carlos own inicial distrust of Cecil. But my brain kept going. To the point it decided that maybe what makes Stan and Ford visit Nighvale after the Weirdmagedon is the news that Carlos is not being cautelos and instead is dating Cecil.

So at this point it was still just a funny au with Ford thinking Cecil is some type of evil charming eldrish god that'll end the world while Cecil is just bonding with Stan and super trying to impress his bf friends.

But finally my brain went: "okay but what about after Ford realizes that Cecil is just an overly dramatic paranormal guy and truly just loves Carlos?". And I realized that while of course Ford would be happy for his friend and relived about the world he would feel even more as if Bill was his fault. Here is Carlos just getting a sweet guy and maybe he was the only one that couldn't see the difference.

And now I need someone to write it and give Ford a hug.

[iguessitsjustme]

Stuck here.

[inbarfink]

A lot of 'Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared' is built upon a sort of inherent surrealism in young children’s edutainment. Because the thing is that for a lot of those shows it’s more important to, well, entertain-slash-educate the target audience of Literal Toddlers than it is to present a coherent world and story. DHMIS just takes this sort of dream-like world that is created as a result of these priorities and reframes it in a serious manner for an adult audience as an element of horror and/or tension. One example is the ages of the characters.

In a lot of those sorts of shows, preschool-and-under-puppet-shows (and sometimes cartoon shows), the ages of the puppet characters are kinda abstract. Again, the main priority isn’t really to make them feel like an accurate representation of a person who could exist in the real world. The ages of a lot of these characters is basically “young enough so that their emotional maturity and worldview is relatable to our preschool target audience, but old enough so that they can go on various misadventures that are also entertaining to our preschool audience without the worry of stuff like parental supervision”. 

So these characters have the same presumed understanding of the world as the children in the audience, usually need to be taught basic concepts and live-action adults would generally interact with them in a similar way one would a child - but on the other hand they usually treat themselves as a separate category from the live-action children they might also interact with, and are allowed to do a whole bunch of stuff an actual live-action kid on that same show wouldn’t be allowed to do -

Like drive vehicles -

Or work with heavy machinery - 

Or cook -

Or generally just live unsupervised without it being a big deal.

So yeah, the DHMIS trio all kinda live on different points of this spectrum of Ambiguously Childlike Puppets. They primarily interact with ‘teachers’ who explain to them basic concepts most adults would understand, and who generally regard them in a condescending manner (even when these teachers seem like children themselves).

When Yellow Guy meets Lesley, she also addresses him as one would a child. The existence of the Big Boy and Bigger Boy Rooms imply that our protagonist’s floor might be actually called something like the “Little Boys Room”. But they all have some aspects that make this reading a bit complicated, just in different ways.

Yellow Guy feels like the most ‘childlike’ puppet. He has the most simpleminded and naive worldview, the one who is most likely to go along with the ‘lessons’ of the teachers. Even when he becomes fully-charged and thus turns into the most intelligent and emotionally-mature character in the entire show - characters like the Teachers, the Big and Bigger Boys and Lesley all address him like a surprisingly clever kid instead. Plus he dresses in the most obviously childlike way. And possibly the most important factor, he has a father who is significantly taller and bigger than him -

Which definitely implies one is a child and another is an adult.

But… not only is he, urm, ‘recruited’ to a factory job. But he explicitly worked exactly 40 years until his retirement. With the ‘default retirement age’ in the UK being around 66 years, that might instead imply Yellow is in his mid-to-late 20’s instead. Plus, despite the implications that he is a child due to being considerably shorter than Roy - as an old man with a wife and child of his own, he actually remained the exact same size as his younger self. 

Which would imply that whatever Yellow Guy is a child or an adult, he is at least adult-sized-enough for his ‘species’.

He is also ‘recruited’ as the ‘Mummy’ in Lily and Todney’s family.

And his fantasy (memory?) of Mulhoven, he sees himself as living on his own. 

Red Guy, meanwhile, is on the other end of the spectrum. With his adult-human-like physique and very non-cartoon voice - it’s pretty intuitive to read him as an adult. Continuing the whole Roy Point, Red Guy is consistently shown as being around the same size as other adult ‘Red Guys’ - if not actually on the taller side of things.

And he is seen holding an ‘adult’ job not just in ‘Jobs’ (which you can argue is just some sort of Briefcase-powered pocket dimension where child labor is legal) but also in the ‘real world’ segments of Dreams…. Which, well, has a higher chance of being Actually Real, at the very least.

‘Dreams’ also shows a picture of him graduating from... somewhere? 

Plus, he tends to talk back to the teachers more. Which makes him feel more like an adult being condescended to. But then again, the affectations of an adult or a child being condescended too can be quite similar. At the end of the day, the primary things that make his adulthood ambiguous is that he does sometimes need basic concepts explained to him -

And that he does generally regard the other puppets, including the much more childish Yellow Guy as his peers. Even after arguing that he should be the ‘father figure’ of the household, he still ends up calling Yellow his ‘brother’.

And Duck is in sort of an interesting position, on one level he is more ‘adult-y’ than Red Guy, but on another level he is just as childish as Yellow Guy.

Physically he is even shorter than Yellow Guy, and his voice is much too cartoony to peg him as a child or an adult. He ALSO has a graduation photo....

His sense of fashion, his hobbies (reading the newspaper and doing the crossword) and even his chair of choice (a rocking-chair) are all pretty adult, or even old-man-like (compare Yellow Guy’s childish little stool, and Red Guy’s relatively neutral sofa). 

But he also likes the same show as the very childish Yellow Guy (although it is a Wallace and Gromit parody and that’s really an all-ages franchise, although it IS notable that it's Red Guy who thinks it's boring and predictable). He is pretty likely to push back against the teachers, although mostly when their lessons clash against his own ego. A behavior that is both mature and immature at the same time. In general with most of what Duck does, it's not necessarily easy to peg his behavior between an insecure grown-up or a child trying to act like an adult.

For example, the ‘Memories’ sequence in ‘Death’ has this memory of Duck ‘telling Yellow Guy about the military’. 

Yellow Guy’s words and their positioning is deliberately meant to invoke a specific cultural image of, like, a father or grandfather telling a child about their service. But what Duck is actually ‘telling’ Yellow about is just a very childish and uninformed gushing about military might. ("They're invincible!")

I guess my biggest point is the way this ambiguity can be used as part of DHMIS’ atmosphere of unease. It’s like… no matter how you read the ages of the characters, their situation is utterly fucked up - just in different ways.

If all of the puppets are all adults, then the way they have been robbed of their agency and the absolute lack of control they have over their own life becomes even more disturbing. The condescending and controlling way the teachers tend to treat them becomes even worse. Especially how they have been convinced of their own inability to do anything on their own. See, Yellow and Duck's apprehension about taking the car for a ride in "Transport":

It's just us three! We can't just... do stuff, us three. Can we?

I told you, you shouldn't try and do something without a little... thing telling you how to do it.

This isn’t just about the car - the point is that Duck says “try and do something”. Meaning anything. There is really nothing Duck can imagine the trio can do that they can do alone without the supervision of an ‘authority figure’. This would already be pretty fucked-up if they were kids, but as adults it’s an even darker situation. No wonder their life is so bleak and terrifying. 

If one is to read the puppets as kids instead, then it is also pretty disturbing how much they are left to their own devices. I mean, yeah, their life is robbed of all agency - but they lack any sort of real adult emotional support. Kids don’t just need adults to Teach Stuff to them or Stop Them From Doing Wrong Things, they need general advice and help and support and reassurance and role models and adult kindness and the DHMIS Trio doesn’t get any of this.

The characters’ utter isolation from anyone who isn’t a ‘teacher’ is already pretty fucked-up if they’re adults - but if you see them all as kids, it’s even darker. No one can help them mitigate pressures during interpersonal conflicts, no one to comfort and take care of them when things get rough, no positive example they can aspire and emulate. They all basically have to alternate being the ‘responsible adult’ for each other. And if they are all kids, this is really dark. No wonder they and their relationships are so fucked-up.

And if you see only some of them as kids, like for example, I think the most popular fan interpretation is that Yellow Guy’s a kid and the other two are adults? I think it is a valid read of the situation but that also comes with it’s own layer of fucked-upness with the power dynamics now at play. Like, every time Duck or Red Guy mistreat Yellow Guy, it’s not just them being assholes. They’re being assholes to a child, when they are the adults who are - by default of being the only adults consistently around in his life - are responsible for.

And no matter how you’d try and shake it, it’ll always come off pretty fucked-up. Like, if you have Red Guy as a Token Kid then it’s a matter of a child being forced into a Responsible Adult position basically by being the most grounded person in the household. If Duck's the only adult than, like, oh god who put THIS guy in charge of taking care of two children? And so on and so on… 

 No matter which path you take, it’s always very dark, and very DHMIS…

[pearl-crystals]

Ive been slowly playing through In Stars and Time and Siffrin needs a dang minute and a hug man. So I'm drawing him getting a hug that he could get with only some possible razzing and/or scalding.

Ive also added a couple other drawings as a treat for myself hahaha.

[pixelatedquarter]

Shoutout to Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III who's decided the only way he can ask Patrick (who's been constantly hugging both guests and joe for the entirety of the tour) for a hug is apparently onstage comparing him to a football player and saying he looks like a teddy bear he'd like to cuddle.

Like a normal person that doesn't have an extremely complicated relationship with boundaries borne from testing those decades ago and then backpedalling so hard we still see that one gif of him hovering his hand and pulling it back like patrick was a stovetop when they were fresh out of hiatus.

It's the tour of fuck it we heal man, i'm sure you can get a hug without reciting archivebears

[ingravinoveritas]

I had my post-op appointment today. The doctor said I am recovering beautifully and that “I wish I could take what you have and bottle it and give it to my other patients.” He also said that my cysts were 5 cm and 3 cm, respectively—about the sizes of an orange. Which freaked me out, but also affirmed my belief that I did the correct thing by having them removed from my ovaries. I am just feeling so, so relieved right now…