left: hero’s island of memories
right: cyborg and ion’s trials
so i talked about hero’s IoM being very similar to cyborg’s trial before, but i was playing a bit of it yesterday and noticed that it’s also quite similar to ion’s trial…
it’s been a while since i talked about supervillain theory, so im gonna talk about it again because i do whatever i want:
it’s very interesting how cyborg’s trial theme is straight up an arrangement of hero’s. this isn’t all that unusual for cookie trials, to be fair - all the city of wizards cookies share a theme save for cinnamon and blueberry pie, and for unrelated cookies, lemon and chili also have the same trial theme. the thing is though, isn’t it a little strange that cyborg and hero share a trial theme, and a background? they’re flat out identical here.
it’s also quite unusual that the cookie most associated with cyborg, ion, also has a background very similar to one from hero’s island of memories. it isn’t flat out identical, but if you replaced the logo on the cups and the posters in the background, plus made ion’s a bit bluer? yeah, they’re the same.
this can’t be explained as “oh they’re both labs, so that’s just how devsis draws labs”. here’s a picture of wasabi’s lab for comparison:
it’s completely different. clearly, devsisters is capable of making new lab designs when they want to - and yet, here they chose to make ion and hero’s backgrounds look almost the exact same.
then of course, we can’t forget:
Cyborg Cookie -> Hero Cookie: (Rival) You’re no match for me!
Hero Cookie -> Cyborg Cookie: (Rival) Siphons electricity from the sky? Not bad…!
kinda weird that cyborg and hero have a mutual rival relationship, huh? most pairs of rivals have some common thread - skating queen and ice candy both do sports that involve ice skating, alch and wizard both are magic-related, matcha and pom are both connected to DE, and so on. but hero is a superhero and cyborg is some robot - what’s the connection there?
so, there’s two possible explanations for this: hero and cyborg were villain vs hero rivals, OR hero and cyborg were rival superheros. but this theory is called supervillain theory, so i’m sure you already know which explanation i think is mostly likely. here’s why:
B3-4R is one of the newer inventions from the same lab as Ion Cookie Robot. Despite never having been outside the lab, B3-4R’s primary directive is focused on world domination.
B3-4R’s description is pretty weird, isn’t it? B3-4R is explicitly another invention of aloe’s - it’s from the same lab as ion, after all. and yet…consider the bolded part - why is B3-4R’s primary directive focused on world domination?
you could chalk this up to a glitch or malfunction or something - but consider the wording. B3-4R has never left the lab, yet its primary directive is focused on world domination - there’s nothing there about how B3-4R has glitched out. but even more than that, consider this line exchange during ion’s half of the cyborg menace event:
Cyborg Cookie: Now…let’s go after ALOE COOKIE! Ion Cookie Robot, remember your directive?
Ion Cookie Robot: Cookies = bad. Defeat Cookies.
Ion Cookie Robot: Ion Cookie Robot. Commencing attack.
cyborg is calling on ion to remember their directive - to defeat cookies. why would ion AND B3-4R malfunction at the same time though? this leads me to believe this has always been their programming - it’s no glitch, it’s how they were designed.
i also want to note that all of hero’s bosses in his island of memories are robots - and who do we know who builds robots? that’s right, aloe cookie. aloe’s built a cookie robot and a pet robot who both have unusual directives, shall we say - attacking cookies and world domination, respectively - so is it such a stretch to think they also built the robots hero battles?
consider this line as well:
Aloe Cookie: All the CookieBots have escaped! What’s going on here!?
isn’t it kind of weird that aloe isn’t surprised by how many cookiebots there are? they express surprise at cyborg replicating themself for the second part of cyborg menace, with the wave of cyborgs to defeat, and yet there’s none here…almost as if there already were a lot of ions.
so aloe built a large number of cookiebots, all with the directive to attack, as well as a petbot whose primary directive is world domination - doesn’t that all sound very supervillain-y?
thus i believe aloe is definitely a supervillain rather than superhero. and considering how aloe and cyborg were at one time very close - “That way, we can keep running together!” - it seems most likely to me that they were supervillains in cahoots with each other, with hero as the superhero bent on defeating them.
at this time, we have no idea what AI run 2 might involve - but i for one sure hope it addresses like, any of this.