Bryndle

stickmen are pretty cool did you know that

[bryndlle]

intro (kinda)

hi, i like stickmen i will talk bout em here. if you want to see that, then press that funny button. ok bye thank you mwa

[bryndlle]

happy 6th anniversary to THSC, henry can now ride a bike

this is the only thing I could make as I lack the art skills to make cool stuff

[bryndlle]

I'm always thinking 'wow, the thsc community is so cool and nice and sweet and awesome' and then I remember how every halloween, every single one of you draws Charles in an angel costume purely for the purpose of giving Henry vietnam flashbacks you sick freaks.

[bryndlle]

I don’t think it’s a hot take to say that Toppat Civil Warfare is one of the least popular endings in the THSC Fandom. 

To no fault of Puffball, as he was already very swamped with the rest of the game and I don’t envy him at all for having this wonderful masterpiece take over his life for 4 years. You can’t expect every ending to be 100% perfect. Everyone has their own qualms when it comes to this ending, I certainly have a few, so as our minds naturally do, we think of an alternate ending that fixes these problems. I’m sure you’ve read at least 1 AU or headcanon based off of TCW, whether it be rewriting the story completely, or continuing with what was given. You may have even thought of one yourself. Personally, I think that Henry would try to strike up a deal with the government after being denounced as leader, given how much info he would have on the rocket plans. The difficult part though, is making your story feel ‘right.’

One of the main problems I and many people have with this ending is we don’t like seeing Ellie as a villain. People just love how Henry and Ellie play off each other so much, that it just feels odd seeing them as rivals for this one ending. Maybe this wouldn’t be as jarring if more Ghost Inmate endings featured Ellie, but that's a topic for another time. However, I don’t think I would want my headcanon to end with Henry and Ellie magically becoming friends, no matter how much I appreciate their dynamic. Thinking about this is what kinda led me to this question:

If you had the opportunity to rewrite the official Toppat Civil Warfare ending, would you change how Ellie ends up?

I can see that Henry and Ellie having a happy ending in this timeline is feasible, it really is, but there definitely are some issues that come with it. Ellie’s main driving force in this ending is Henry’s betrayal, this is known from the second you leave her behind in Fleeing the Complex. Removing this aspect of the storyline is the same as removing Ellie’s character. The route is among the shortest in the game with only 3 choices, so it feels like there isn’t enough time to make a complete 180 on Henry and Ellie’s relationship which feels meaningful. It basically just invalidates the one ending that actually followed through with the point made in FTC. Despite all of this, if you follow through with Henry and Ellie settling their differences,  you create a happier ending for the characters, you get a lot more support for this ending, and you make a large majority of the fans happy. If you are like me, then you end up with the ending that you'd want, but not necessarily the one the game needs. This all puts you into a sort of perdicament:

Is it better to give the fans the simpler concept for the ending that they desire, if it means that we invalidate one of the main character’s entire purpose for the ending. 

You can’t have Toppat Civil Warfare without someone to go to war with. If you remove Ellie’s main purpose, do we still end up with a satisfying conclusion for the ending, and for Ellie as a character in one of her last appearances in the game?

[bryndlle]

Capital Gains post credit Scene where Ellie and Henry deposit the 70 billion dollars they stole. Somehow, they got the giant train car, which is currently leaking gold coins, through the bank doors: 

“How can I help you?”

“Hi, we’d like to make a deposit, please.”

“...”

“(Do you guys no longer use the gold standard anymore or…)”

"..."

“Do you have an account open already?.”

“Nah, we usually keep our money in giant impracticle stashes, but we heard you have good interest rates.”

[bryndlle]

Hello once again THSC people of tumblr who write AUs/headcannons, if you need fuel for the fire, here is something I found out recently that has been messing with my brain chemistry for a bit:

Now, I've read AUs where one of the members of Triple Threat is either seriously injured, or full on dead for the story, but putting Henry in a sink or swim scenario with the two best people in his life and making one of them die by his hand???????

This is such an out there concept for the series that feels completely ripped from the depths of AO3 or something, and I'm so much happier with the ending we did get, but honestly? I'm so curious how this would have turned out. Especially the 'too much' part of it all. Henry, of course, would be so fucked up by that, but whoever he saved would definitely have some survivors guilt over being viewed as the 'better option' to save. Imagine all the AU's we have now based on Triple Threat, but rewritten to have either Ellie or Charles dead. Or more original AU's that follow this timeline.

Even more interestingly, this would make TT a split path ending, leaving us with 17 endings. Assuming Puff wanted to keep an even number, what would happen to PP or TR? Would one get removed? Or would we see a bonus ending added to round out at 18. What ending could we possibly have seen, or in turn, never have seen if we went down this alternate path?

[bryndlle]

Charles kinda just knows shit and it’s the funniest thing ever when he does random things.

Henry and Ellie, they’re street smart y’know? They’ve lived the criminal life, they know the basics on how to pick different locks, how to disarm security cameras, how to operate different weapons when the situation presents itself, etc. Stuff that could translate over when they started working in the military. Charles on the other hand? He’s spent so many hours both in the sky and on the ground just waiting, and had to find some way to kill time, so he just got in the habit of figuring out the most random of things on his own. The list goes on. He learnt to solve a Rubik’s Cube, he figured out how to do pro Minesweeper strategies, he practised spinning a basketball on his finger for hours on end even though he is a hot ass at actually playing basketball. He’s memorised digits of Pi, famous speeches, he can recite any Peanuts comic down to the signature as long as you give him a date to remember. He became strangely good at card games, board games, anything that holds no actual value to his job as a helicopter pilot. He just did all this because he was bored. 

He just randomly announces he can do these things too, and he in turn proves his point, but all you can think is’ Why did he learn this stuff?’ However, you tell him to actually commit to learning something, and he puts in zero effort. Henry and Ellie are the same but they are just lazy bums in general unless whatever it is involves crime or money or both.

[bryndlle]

Ellie is an absolute beast when it comes to spicy food.

If any restaurant has a ridiculously spicy item or some type of challenge, it is going right in her mouth. She has a full wardrobe at home filled with the random stuff you win from those. In the back you’ll find a shirt that says, “I survived the Ultra Scary Depths of Hell Inferno Spicy Wing Challenge” and she still added hot sauce to it. For Christmas, Henry got her a Hot Ones Challenge Set, and she put that stuff on anything for the next month.

Charles on the other hand, crumbles like a paper bag at even a hint of spice. If you add pepper to his food, first thing you will here is:

“Ooh.. okay it's got a little kick to it, ooh.”

Henry is somewhere in the middle, he can enjoy spicy food to a certain degree, but won’t go out of his way for it. He is more of a sugary sweets kinda guy. That doesn’t stop him from using his spice tolerance to trick Charles into eating hot food, though. 

*Experimenting with tinier head cannon posts that are more digestible

[bryndlle]

i just made some BULLLLLLSHITTTTT!!!!!!!!

the best thing about simple character design is how easy it makes it to create shitposts. you slap eyebrows on any white blob drawing and you're 50% of the way there for most henry stickmin characters

[bryndlle]

nice argument but i have already portrayed myself as the unbothered and scheming ellie rose and you as the depressed and helicopterless charles calvin

[bryndlle]

i just made some BULLLLLLSHITTTTT!!!!!!!!

the best thing about simple character design is how easy it makes it to create shitposts. you slap eyebrows on any white blob drawing and you're 50% of the way there for most henry stickmin characters

[bryndlle]

Okay, I’ve been tryna find an excuse to make a post about @ending-the-cycle-ask ever since I started this blog, and with the return of the blog back in May, this felt like as good a time as any to just go for it. I first discovered the story back in October/November and have probably read through the whole thing like 4 times, half of that looking for lore implications/hidden details, and throughout all of that, I’ve collected a rather large collection of  ✨thoughts✨ so here are some of those in no particular order. Please note some of these may be confirmed wrong in canon and/or I just missed something, I’m not stating these as hard facts, more just ideas and stuff I’ve thought about/noticed while reading

This should come as no surprise but:

🚨SPOILER WARNING🚨

If you have not read ETC yet, please do. It's a really good story. I need more people to know about it and you can come back to this post later. With that out of the way, here are my ramblings:

During the start of Act 3: Rose, we meet up with Ellie and give her the details on what's been going on. All the information we know is shared to her and we exchange some potential theories to what is going on. A piece of information I feel was glossed over way too fast was the possibility of 2 Ellies. With us being sent back to the past, we’ve already experienced duplicates. We have 2 Henrys, Main and Ghost, and it’s implied Charles merged(?) with his past self, due to his memory loss. With this all laid out, 2 Henrys and 2 Charles, it would make sense for there to be 2 Ellies. This is acknowledged by both parties. This led me down two trains of thought. The first being that if there truly is 2 Ellies, what would happen if they cross paths? We will most likely see what happens in a sense when Henry and Ghost Henry meet, but if two of the same alive person met, would there be a different reaction? In other sources of media, it tends to create a sort of black hole in a sense, or something at that scale as the universe tries to correct itself. But then again, what would happen if they didn’t meet. In Henry Stickmin canon, Ellie had quite a long criminal record attached to her name before she was caught by The Wall, but with the wall destroyed, or at least severely damaged reputation wise, would Ellie still end up there? Assuming she isn’t, we now have another huge criminal mastermind going haywire in the background whilst everything goes down, which just adds more trouble to our main group. This was my original train of thought, until when I read through the act to check some things for this post, I noticed a detail I missed before when Ellie started talking:

File Uncorrupted: Memory Retained.

When we first meet up with Charles, when different aspects of his memory are brought up as we get our bearings, he and the posts start to glitch out. ETC plays a lot with coding and general computer things, considering the universe is based on a computer game. It’s shown multiple times as Charles glitches out when he struggles to remember his past, or in this case, his future. However, Ellie doesn’t. She keeps a perfect memory of what happened before she ended up back in time. And this isn’t like with Henry, as he doesn’t have the file uncorrupted message in the corner when we start talking to him. What this all implies, at least to me, is the possibility that Ellie fused with her past self, like Charles, but kept her memory, like Henry, leading us to my second train of thought. There being one Ellie. Now this has less information compared to the two Ellies theory, and this was all thought up as I was originally writing the first part, but this still does leave the door open for a lot of possibilities. Even if the one Ellie theory isn’t true, there is still a lot to talk about with their being only one Charles.

With Charles being both his past and present self, there arises a lot of situations as the story starts to close. If our main trio does make it back to their timeline, will the timeline the story is set in be left without a Charles? Or will we see a sort of consciousness split where we see the return of Present Charles. If this does happen, then it brings back up the Ellie and Henry situation of what happens when you see your past self. Maybe we will see Past Charles in his currently combined state receive the memories of Present Charles, but will this lead to him leaving to go back to our protagonist's timeline, and what will this mean for the timeline he used to occupy? When Fleeing The Complex tried to start up, it summoned the Ghost Henry to its location to keep the timeline running. Even if the game’s story has finished, will it keep trying to summon the correct file when necessary? With no file available to summon, what then? 

Another thing I have thought a lot about when it comes to the different timelines is Zen. During the end of Act 2: Government Supported Rescue Operative, as he talks about the defragmentation, he says:

“I don't know what could possibly be powerful enough to warrant the use of something that deletes every unstable, forgotten timeline, but I hope I'm far away in a stable one when it happens... Preferably with everyone I've met here…”

Our Ellie knows Zen, which means a Zen exists in the TT timeline, so not only do we see example 47 of someone meeting their past, but we also have to wonder what happens with Zen’s friends. It’s stated in the story that characters like Walter and Lem don’t exist in the other timelines. With them hopping timelines, unless they bring everything necessary with them, we essentially have created two people that don’t exist. No I.Ds, no birth certificates, no proof of having been here before. From what we saw in Zen’s premonition dream, it doesn’t look like this will be an event with enough time to plan for things and to gather all your stuff. Literally how do you continue your life with no proof of existing. How will Walter get his job as a weather reporter and continue to be screwed by his work place? Oh, my poor shayla. Whilst on the topic of the original characters, does anyone have a voice or general idea of what most of them sound like in your head? I'm curious if any of the writers have thought about this or have a specific voice they can point at and be like ‘That’s them right there.’

Quick side tangent but one detail I love is whenever we zoom out for a wider shot, we either see the characters in frame turn into stickmen or have the tiny circle hands.

Look at these little goobers, they're so small and stupid looking I love them with all my heart. Side tangent over

One thing that Zen mentions to Ellie is that a way to stabilise the timeline to allow Henry, Charles, and Ellie to return to their timeline would be to, “Secure an ‘ending’ for this timeline.” That then begs the question, what would the name for this ending be? If there is a name, I really hope we also get to see a win screen just like in the games, could be stylized real cool.

One of the main reasons behind the whole timeline mess is due to Past Henry releasing MissingNo from the Goodball, causing a lot of the weird glitches in the code. Due to what Zen explained about MissingNo, we can deduce that the Goodball came specifically from Pokemon Yellow. MissingNo in Blue and Red was highly stable, mostly causing item duplication and graphical errors, but in Pokemon Yellow, it had the ability to corrupt the save file due to the game reading garbage data to render its sprite, similar to what it is doing to the proverbial ‘system’ of the Ending the Cycle Universe. Not plot relevant, but one of those random things I learnt whilst researching for possible clues.

Also not plot relevant but can I quickly say how much I love the outfit designs for all the characters? For having literally nothing to base off from the original games besides hats, each outfit perfectly reflects each character that wears it. Henry especially, he would enjoy giant freaking hoodies to hide in and be sneaky.

Finally, as I wrap up this post, I just want to quickly give Mello, Erik, and Mercy their flowers for what they’ve achieved with this blog so far. Even as a newer fan, it has been so fun and exciting to watch this story unfold and I can’t wait to continue reading. It’s insane how you three have taken one of my favourite games for so many years and evolved it into so much more. Ending the Cycle is what led me to discovering the THSC community on Tumblr, so I owe them for that as well. I hope you enjoy your rest when this book closes, whenever that may be, because I could never see myself working on a project this big for so long without giving up. If any of you are reading this, please invalidate every theory/idea I made in this post, that would be very funny. Thank you for reading what is definitely my longest post (this spread across 3 google doc pages), and enjoy the rest of your day

[bryndlle]

henry stickmin au where everything is the same except charles wears really fucking ugly yellow shoes that don't match with his headphones at all.

this doesn't change the story in anyway, it's just really hard to look at.

[bryndlle]

Has anyone ever considered exactly how The Wall works?

I mean in the sense of an employee timetable. During the Ghost Inmate route, we hear Ibriahm (yes I searched up the guy's name for this) say:

 

Yet, throughout all of Fleeing The Complex, it’s night time.

This implies the existence of night and day shifts, although I wouldn’t put it past Dmitri to have his workers go through 24 hour shifts, but the thing that confuses me more is the word ‘lunch’ being used here. For how late it its, you’d assume it would be called dinner, right?

Do the workers have dinner as well? On top of lunch? How long are they staying here to require multiple meals? My best guess is each shift lasts 12 hours for an even split, but that leads to even more questions. The Wall has 24 floors to it, so is lunch time cycled throughout each? Or are we really stuffing this cafeteria full all at once. Looking at the screenshots, it doesn’t seem that way. If we are accounting for multiple meals each shift, how many employees are there eating, and how much food is getting brought into this place at once?? 

Assuming Dmitri wants to run a tight ship in there, I think he would want to guarantee enough security to stop any funny business, but that just leads to even more food ON TOP of feeding the bare minimum to his prisoners. But the most egregious part I haven’t even brought up is the variety of the food here. Looking at the different lunch trays and bios, we’ve got green beans, we’ve got steaks, we’ve got hot dogs, we’ve got mashed potatoes, we’ve got goddamn jelly and jelly sandwiches. How many different items are on this prison cafeteria menu?? Who are the chefs in the back making all of this non-stop? How many people are running the kitcken? All of this doesn’t even account for the rest of the schedule, which by my guess has to be a great fucking schedule based off of how many bios from people working at The Wall say they love their jobs. Why am I looking into this so much, I looked up staff to prisoner ratios for maximum security prisons in different regions of the US for this post. The wall isn’t even in the US, it’s in Canada which makes things even more confusing, but everyone's already argued about that.

Please someone come up with a reasonable timetable for The Wall, if that is even possible. And calculate how much food Dmitri is buying, thanks.

[bryndlle]

Henry and Ellie are both brainrotted to the max and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Whilst they both mesh well with Charles, these two are sort of on the same brain wave, y’know? Anytime a song lyric, tv show reference, or dumb meme is made, accidental or not, when they are both in earshot, they can’t help but give each other the look, before bursting out laughing. And whoever is there with them just has to deal with it until they are done. Charles sometimes can follow along with them, but he usually tries to keep his ‘professional government attitude’ because yes they do this quite often during important army stuff, and sometimes he has no clue what deep recess they have pulled something from.

It got worse when they both got legitimate phones they could always be on, and could ditch the old burners they used to avoid police tracking in their criminal days. If you check their messages, it’s just them sending different videos to one another. Every night is Charles trying to sleep whilst he hears the other two doomscrolling and giggling like children. It got to the point where he considered parental controls.

Like I’ve said multiple times by now, my Henry very rarely speaks, and it’s only for important stuff or to mess with Ellie and Charles. This time, once agin, it was the latter. I can imagine them all relaxing, early in the morning, Charles making coffee whilst Ellie and Henry are just chilling.

“We should add another T to our team name.”

“(For once, please have something meaningful to say)”

“Like, Team Triple Threat? Why?”

“Cause then we would be TTT”

You can visibly see the cogs turning in both of their heads

“Henry, it’s 7:16am. If this is some dumb internet thing again then I swear to go-”

Ellie made the connection already and now both her and Henry are on the floor dying laughing. The only way Charles has found to combat this is figuring out a joke fast enough so he can quote it until they find it unfunny. However, this is usually unsuccessful, like most of Charles’ plans, and like right now. The only thing he is doing is adding more fuel to the fire.

[bryndlle]

Hello THSC people of tumblr who write AUs/headcannons, I have a very important question for you:

If your Henry knows about the multiple timelines/follows the general rules of the game, what happens to the previous timeline when he resets? 

E.g. He was previously in the Toppat King timeline and reset, starting up the Special Brovert Ops. timeline. What then happens for the TK timeline?

From what I’ve seen, there are many different interpretations that people have gravitated towards, but 2 (3?) sort of main ones exist.

Timeline ending

The basic premise is when the reset occurs, the timeline is cut off and the world then continues from the start. Memory is either kept or forgotten for everyone besides Henry. Probably one of the most common ways to deal with this conundrum.

2. Timeline continuation

Things keep going on in the previous timeline, but the original Henry goes back to the start, leaving behind a duplicate? to keep things running. I can’t think of a good example off the top of my head but I swear I’ve seen a few people do this, although it is much rarer than the previous

3. Ignoring this

Most AUs don’t explain this part of the universe, either because it is still going and it may or may not be a crucial part of the story, or it just doesn’t matter.

If you have something different in mind, or just wanna yap about this very rarely brought up aspect, feel free to do so! 

It’s 1am I need to sleep, good night

[bryndlle]

Hot take: Little Nest Egg would be a top 10 ending if By Sea was the incorrect option and ended with a titanic reference, and By Air was the correct option and we got a kick ass freeze frame of henry surfing on the money cart mid air.

don't ask how he survives that.

[bryndlle]

it amazes me how such nothing characters like Dave and Burt are so loved by THSC fans and have such big cult followings despite having nothing going for them.

Dave at least has the running gag of him being in every game besides BTB but Burt literally showed up in the last game of the series, had a few lines of dialogue, then dipped. He should probably be in the photo but dave looks funnier imo. Quite literally the biggest glup shittos ever, really speaks volumes on how creative the fandom is. The biggest blank slates creates the prettiest pictures I suppose.