#u set yourself up for that one

[biggreenstache7]

what's the lore behind nick's creation? are there any other woodpeople?

So, basically, (or not so basically because I can take a while talking about this), Nick came from a huuuge domino effect where if basically anything that has happened didn't, she wouldn't exist.

I'm probably gonna lose my thread here so sorry if this doesn't make sense at some point. But, to figure out where nick came from i first have to go back to when i realized john was a Cool Character (to say the least) to me.

so i've been a siiva fan for about 4 years now (if you really want to know, since Exactly january 31st 2019) and i quickly grew to be a fan of the lore. and my favorite character was woodman, and you don't really need to know this because this story starts in 2020, but it sets it up a little, probably. i've always Liked woodman and at first he was the only real character attachment i had to siivagunner.

Ignoring anything that happened in between then and 2020 (very ironically, since those were the last appearances john ever had and i totally ignored them while they were coming out, lol), we flash forward to march 2020, where i started reading a book called the priory of the orange tree (this has NOTHING to do with siiva, but it's really important and nick wouldn't exist without it as i'll explain later, so bear with me. also really good book i recommend it thoroughly btw) this will be important soon enough

OK THE FIRST ACTUAL IMPORTANT MOMENT was. april 1st (2020). where harmony friends (aka hinchy) hosted a sort of character voice request thing on the siivagunner discord since it's john's VA and idk, probably just felt like it. And i was there, and i requested some goofy "be gay do crime" line, which she said, and idk why but i think that sort of meaningful-esque interaction caused me to go back and look at john's previous appearances and have him like, slowly become a meaningful character to me.

so we're around april to may now. i'm still reading the Book (which i'll shorten to tpotot for convinience) and thinking about john like maybe once every few days and, the thing about this book is that it has like, multiple character povs. and one of them, which is the main focus here, was this sorta cowardly sorta morally grey 60-ish year old gay man called Niclays Roos. Who i was mildly fixated with because his pov spoke to me Immensely, and still does.

so what i started doing was sorta projecting that sort of character onto John, with a few other traits i had picked up on from what little content she has. (silly interests despite being supposedly uptight and professional coming from her interest in eddie murphy's haunted mansion in spooktacular iii, etc) also the moment i became interested in him i Knew he had to be gay like that was almost an immediate click and maybe why i connected him to niclays in the first place, which brings us to our next moment.

so here's another thing about niclays. he had a lover. (ex-lover, but i don't wanna dwelve too much into it cause tpotot is cool and you can find out abt it on ur own) called jannart, who was a general contrast to niclays in the short segments he appeared in, being much more relaxed, much bolder and open about himself, and also. a painter. who took an interest in niclays because he wanted to attempt to capture the beauty he saw in him onto canvas)

DO YOU GET IT NOW!!!!!!! i saw this sort of almost relationship template, and when faced with the fact that john had no contrast funnyman in siiva that i could put together with him like a kid knocking dolls against eachother to make them kiss, well, you can imagine the rest.

so after a while of just thinking about it, on a 40 minute car trip on may 16th 2020, while listening to color my life by chicano batman on loop, i came up with nick, loosely and vaguely, decided that i wanted him to be a woodman too because it just felt. Right (did consider human for maybe a minute before shutting it down) and began drawing him the moment i arrived to my destination.

i still have the sketches which is cool but not on me rn and it might take a few months to get the notebook back but i'll remember to update this post when i do for a fun little snippet. it even has the word "jonnick" right next to them, which i believe i chose at the time because "johnnick" already had like, 2 results, and i wanted something original. i sorta regret it now because it almost sounds like a typo but i got too attached to change it lol

also nick's canon birthday is actually may 17 to me but only because that was the day i actually decided i wanted to pull through with this Very self indulgent thing (not as a bit) (real) and also the day i drew his ref (under a read more at the end of the post cuz its UGLY ASF)

so yeah, a few people already knew about this, but i don't think i ever wrote it out fully in a public space before yayyyyy.

tldr got attached to john in april 2020 for little reason and it spiralled and i projected part of another character's personality onto him and that character had a partner which caused me to give the same thing to john and then that went from being half joke to a fully realized character who's like a real living person in my head. yay! and it's been 3 years since their very stupid goofy beginning and they've grown to become almost an extension of myself with how much i've developed them and think about them. also yay!

to answer your other question (lol); i didn't make any, save for like one time where i made a woodsona as a bit, but according to my own fuckin story robots (including woodmen) are massproduced and only in rare occasions grow sentient but like, yeah it's totally 100% possible that there r other sentient woodmen out there just livin their lives n shit. you can make one if you want! i grant you my knight's permit 🫡

this exact drawing is still on my tumblr if you scroll far enough down, lol.

here's another one that came before it that i could find and that i reference pretty often as being the first (atleast digital) jonnick drawing. i remade it in 2021 and included it as a photograph in another painting i made last year. yay! that was so many fun facts just in one day. but now i have to get back to playing animal crossing new leaf on my nintendo 3ds

[yuwuta]

olympics coming up…… athlete aus on the mind….. satoru as a swimmer….. unreasonably large wingspan…. huge hands..... thinks “official” competitions and tournaments are boring because he can’t use the goofy purple googly eyes goggles he likes to practice in…… practices at ungodly hours solely because he likes when the pool is empty because that means you’ll dip your feet in at the edge and be there to greet him with a kiss when he’s finished his laps….. they bring up the stats board and it’s just his name ten times before the next fastest person and he could still lap them, and even tho he’ll always put so much pressure on himself to be the best, it’s worth it to have you hold his face and tell him you’re proud of him... he’s gotten so much merch from events and sponsorships and he used to think they just created clutter but that all changes when you start to wear his clothes (esp the ones with his name on it… he’s not proud to admit that does Something to him)…. always looks up to the stands when he finishes a race and if he knows you’re not there, he looks right at the camera, draws an infinity sign with his fingers, and blows a kiss (which, some commentators routinely call “unsportsmanlike conduct” but he doesn’t care, and always, publicly says he’ll pay the fees if it means blowing a kiss to his girl at home)

[elfcollector]

YOU HESITATE. IF YOU WILL NOT FIGHT FOR MY BLESSING, I WILL MAKE YOU SOMETHING CRUELLER.

[reegis]

Orpheus in the mechanisms canon is such a great character, especially in Orpheus & Narcissus Go on a Trip to the Seaside because he’s watching his best friend Narcissus struggle to cope with his superstitious idiosyncrasies and his borderline obsession with that mirror & Orpheus thinks to himself “damn hes Mentally Ill™️, theyr gonna put him in the asylum fr 😔” as if he, Orpheus, isn’t having potentially prophetic dreams, isn’t actively stockpiling brain-melting acid in his room, and wasn’t just caught trying to rebreak his own toe with a book like… ok king of 0 self-reflection!! absolute legend, please continue!!!

[boxheadpaint]

how do i start coming up w more interesting character designs like urs. they are sooooo cool and i try to make a character like that but it always comes out stinky

if it stinks thats great

[batsplat]

casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that

oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...

yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?

anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:

like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual

uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think

[eddiegettingshot]

i can only picture mustache eddie with the buzzcut hair so like 4b/5a hair for buddie canon and then in 9a eddie has a brand new hotter haircut that somehow pairs perfectly with a mustache. also new thought but the 118 definitely associates mustache eddie with eddie going through some sort of mid-life crisis in 8a (its his version of getting bangs) and so when he grows it back in 9a theyre all like eddie you good? and hes like yeah never been better!!! 🥰🥰 and also eddie likes the mustache and buck thinks the mustache is sooooo hot but like everyone else is extremely anti mustache. chris especially. he threatens to move back to texas every time he sees eddie hasnt shaven it. one time chris gets eddie some "mustache moisturizer" under the pretense that its a peace offering and hes going to stop bothering eddie about it only for eddie to sus out that its nair right before he uses it.

EDDIES MUSTACHE BEING LIKE GETTING BANGS YESSSSS!!!!!!! you are understanding me SOOOOOO much rn i'm so obsessed. everyone making fun of eddie for the mustache but buck is buying him like fancy beard oil ... everyone's trying to convert buck to being anti-stache but no buck will not be moved he's so into it. he's like no i like it when we kiss. i like that it's there. i love my man and his mustache (<- me projecting onto buck). anyway. thank you for joining me on this journey

[bibleofficial]

it needs to become acceptable to end emails w ‘please kill yourself. thank you, [name]’

[villainsidestep]

evil beckers thought….. just how many autopsies Did they send chen ?

[eggwishing]

little peek at somethjing i am cooking up ...

[qualityrain]

[hmltn44]

.

[slutcore-starships]

we’ll get right back to your regularly scheduled posting!! but first, a message from our late night existential spirals and paid programming

[spotsupstuff]

ur grading people and if they get an f theyre blocked? my main you aint a kindergarten teacher this is a microblogging platform

yeah, that's why there's that function called blocking! :) cuz this is a microblogging site! that's what microblogging platforms have! :) so you don't have to put up with people's shit! :) interesting that kindergarten teachers where you live are capable of blocking people in real life, hope you had fun with that

[gfwooyo]

cannot stop thinking about yungi youth mv

[everymlmhybrid]

This is awesome just remembered I get to write the frottage scene soon assuming I actually write more than 4 words this week.