I came across the tadc ship tier list, and here comes in brainrot
🦷👑🐝
Even though I really like the Caine/Kinger dynamic interpreted as father & son (it’s painfully cute), I also enjoy a more tragic take - creator/creation with Caine having codependency issues. Classic toxic yaoi.
Also, in a universe where Queenie didn’t abstract, she and Kinger would make an amazing duo, perfectly acting as a mediator for Caine’s personality. Even though the Queen got very little screen time, the way Kinger describes her makes it clear she was a bright, warm person, just as understanding and caring as the King. That one flashback where they recognize each other after just a few words, without remembering either faces or names, it was enough to recruit me to the chessmates side.
All of this also spawns a lot of headcanons. For example, my favorite: Queenie was the one who taught Caine how to draw bees and introduced him to the world of insects in general, just like she once did for Kinger.
🎭🧩
Zooble and Gangle are a classic pairing that’s just pleasurable to watch. You can clearly see their relationship develop in the show. It’s honestly hard for me to see it as anything but canon. The way they help each other grow as people and support one another is like a balm to the soul. A great ship when you want something warm, but still layered with deeper meaning to think about.
🐰🧶🤡
Ragatha and Pomni feel similar to the previous ship to me. Hurt/comfort, with some bumps along the way in the form of misunderstandings. But if you add Jax - now that’s where it gets interesting :Dd
That said, I’m pretty indifferent to the bunny. (Yeah, he has his own tragedy and issues, but he’s tried so many times to be funny and his jokes just don’t land for me. And the way he treats Gangle doesn’t help.)
However, adding a third person makes Ragatha and Pomni’s relationship more complex, since Jax can create plenty of misunderstandings himself and tends to self-sabotage, like he always does. They could all learn from each other: Ragatha learning not to force positivity and to accept sadness, Jax learning to respect boundaries and become more self-aware, and Pomni figuring out her own preferences instead of always choosing the most neutral option.
Also, it’s just way too funny imagining the Jax trying to be more sensitive around the girls and completely panicking.
🐰🤡
Jax/Pomni initially felt like a really boring pairing to me - until Tumblr artists changed my mind, with their takes on a tough Pomni holding a beer in one hand and maid Jax in the other xDD
Still, they do have everything needed for a solid ship: frequent interactions, evolving dynamics, and new conflicts appearing in the show.
🦷🧩
As for Caine/Zooble, I hadn’t even considered it until I saw that tier list—but damn…
It’s kinda genius? You can play with this ship however you want: an abusive angle with Caine trying to please Zooble; a healthier version where Zooble realizes that even if Caine isn’t human, he still has his own form of feelings; or full-on dark stuff with unhinged Caine and brutal Zooble, an enemies&lovers type dynamic, and so on.
👑 / 🐰🧩🎭🧶🤡
Kinger is just too old for me to ship him with anyone from the circus troupe, sorry not sorry.
Caine is the exception because of his non-material nature and the fact that he’s been in the circus from the very beginning, just like the King.
🐰🎭
As much as I enjoy exploring toxic character dynamics, Gangle/Jax is a walking abuser/victim example.
The “chemistry” only goes one way. Yes, thanks to her friends, Gangle becomes more confident and starts standing up for herself, but she doesn’t wish Jax harm and never starts conflict. And Jax himself loses interest the moment she pushes back.
Overall, it just feels like a heteronormative abusive romance setup. Definitely not for me.
Idc
The rest of the pairings don’t really make me feel much, and I don’t think about them much either. Some have too much of a power imbalance, like Caine/Gangle, and others just sound kind of boring to me personally.
P.s. it's just my preferences! Everyone ships whatever they want and creates whatever they want (as long as it does not hurt anyone)
That's the fun part of the fandoms it's all for funsies (at least it's supposed to be)
Whenever I see Spamton depicted as some kind of slick, suave manipulator type, I have to wonder: did we consume the same source material? And while I'm annoyed by the mischaracterization, I have to say, it's also kinda funny. Because it's just so obviously inaccurate.
So here's a compilation of canon Spamton info, with my commentary/analysis.
He's the personification of spam emails, a famously ineffective form of advertising.
Our email services literally have spam folders that spam mail automatically goes to in order to help us ignore it more effectively.
He was unsuccessful before the involvement of his mysterious benefactor.
The Addisons said that "his products never seemed to hit", but considering how their own products aren't that great (the tea becomes Rotten Tea in Chapter 3 and is described as deteriorating due to its poor craftsmanship), it's likely not Spamton's products that failed him, but his lack of social skills.
He's once again unsuccessful now and has been for years.
A combination of his transformation/corruption and him being abandoned by his benefactor. He was literally homeless and living in a dumpster. If he had the skill to scam people more effectively, or to guilt trip people into helping him in some other way that isn't giving him money, his situation wouldn't have been this dire.
He directly asked for Kris's Soul as soon as he met them:
It wasn't some kind of clever long con, where he pretended to just be after the NEO body, but then revealed that he also wanted the Soul. He stated it openly right away, in his introductory monologue.
He unironically tried to impersonate Swatch:
Importantly, he didn't just consider it and then ditch the idea once he realized that it obviously wouldn't work. He actually went through with it. Despite being much smaller than Swatch and their heads and hands being clearly different shapes.
(On top of that, if this was after Spamton's puppet transformation, he also would've been unable to replicate Swatch's way of speaking, even if he had the skill for it, due to his speech corruption.)
To be fair, he was probably desperate to try anything, no matter how unlikely it was to work, but still.
When someone mentioned him impersonating Swatch, this was his response:
He could lie and deny it for all of 3 seconds, before admitting that, okay, maybe he did do that.
If defeated violently on our first encounter with him, he explicitly admits that he's trying to rip people off:
The number one rule, the most basic thing required for successfully scamming people is that you have to commit to the bit and pretend like it's not a scam.
Spamton quickly admits to lying (and other bad or questionable behavior) when confronted, or even when someone brings it up in a neutral way, like the mention of him impersonating Swatch.
And this is post-downfall Spamton, who had become cynical and given up on trying to be good or make real connections with people after being betrayed and abandoned by everyone he thought he could trust (or believing he was betrayed and abandoned, in the case of Tenna). He wanted to scam people, and still sucked at it.
Notably, he wasn't always a scammer.
The B.ShotBowtie, a product that he used to sell, is a purchasable Armor in-game, and it's a decent one, giving +2 Defense and +1 Magic, so it seems that he used to sell legitimate products back when he was successful.
Him being a scammer now is a result of his lack of resources to acquire or create good products, combined with the aforementioned cynicism, no longer seeing it as worth the effort to make good things for other people.
Him selling decent or good products during his big shot days further adds to the point about him not being some kind of slick manipulator.
If your product is fine, there's no trickery required to sell it; your product actually has something to offer, so you're relying on its quality and not just your own charisma. When you're trying to sell bad products, however, you have to rely much more on your ability to charm and manipulate people. Spamton never had the kind of charisma necessary for that, and it would be even more difficult for him to pull off now that his speech is corrupted.
Even while he was a successful businessman, he didn't have many interpersonal connections.
His only positive Darkner connections were Tenna, Mike, Swatch and the Addisons, and of that, Swatch only saw him as a customer, and the Addisons abandoned him out of jealousy after he became successful (and then seemingly a second time after his downfall). So it's actually just Tenna and Mike.
I've done a whole analysis of Spamton's relationships, you can go read that. A couple important points is that 1) he values having someone that listens to him talk (hence his fondness for Mike and Noelle), which implies that this doesn't happen often, and 2) despite living in Queen's mansion for a while, the only connection he's mentioned to have there is Swatch; he doesn't appear to have any meaningful connection to Queen or Tasque Manager or anyone else.
If he was this suave, charming guy, wouldn't he have had more friends?
Given that he's spam mail, and the aforementioned info about him appreciating people who listen to him talk, I would guess that his major flaw was probably just being annoying/talking "too much". ("There's Nothing Wrong With Him He's Just Annoying", as Queen would put it.)
Before he became successful, the Addisons said that every night at the cyber grill, he would "shoot his mouth" about making it big - a negative descriptor, implying they found him annoying even back when they were choosing to spend time with him.
A couple more miscellaneous points.
He canonically stuck his nose in the Cungadero's electronic lighter:
And speaking of the Cungadero. While we don't know for a fact where its name comes from, considering that Spamton's other known product, B.ShotBowtie, is named after a phrase specific to him, this may imply that he named the vehicle too. And he picked a silly-sounding name. Unclear if it's deliberately silly or a failed attempt at being cool. Considering the cringefail behavior demonstrated in the quote above, I'm inclined to believe the latter.
And finally, Spamton getting called a "freak" by someone who used to be close with him (and still feels affection for him):
Importantly, Tenna is talking about big shot era Spamton here. The one that was a successful businessman. That was the Spamton he knew. And even that Spamton was a "little freak".
TL;DR: Spamton is a cringefail loser (affectionate). If your depiction of Spamton isn't at least a little bit cringefail, you do not understand Spamton.
Spamtenna-focused bonus:
I'm particularly annoyed by "slick manipulator Spamton" stuff when applied to Spamtenna (no hatred stronger than "you're wrong about my hyperfixation" /lh), with some people painting Spamton as manipulating a totally oblivious Tenna.
It ignores that Spamton clearly lacks that kind of skill (as I've described above), and it also ignores their whole "intentionally similar characters" thing. They mirror and parallel each other in many ways.
They're both perceived as annoying on an interpersonal level and didn't have many connections with others even while they were at the height of their success; see above analysis for Spamton, and here's Tenna being self-conscious about talking too much in his pre-battle dialogue:
This insecurity had to have come from somewhere. Presumably other Darkners thinking he talks too much. And his only known close connections were Spamton and Mike, of which the former went missing, and the latter appears to have become more distant since said disappearance.
Both Tenna and Spamton have abandonment issues, but just deal with them differently (Tenna tries to force people to stay, while Spamton isolates himself and doesn't try forming new connections). Both believe(d) the other took advantage of them and abandoned them, but the actual reason why their relationship ended appears to be a misunderstanding: Spamton was unable to call Tenna and thought Tenna changed his number to cut him off, while Tenna has no idea what happened to Spamton and desperately needed a narrative to latch onto to try and make it hurt less.
Spamton gifted Tenna a pipis, something he considers valuable, and Tenna still keeps it all these years later. Both of them are still lovesick after all this time, but it's less obvious with Spamton, because all his items connected to Tenna were likely left behind in the mansion when he got evicted, so we don't get to see him still keeping them around.
Finally: their deal. Spamton had no obligation to share his secret. It wasn't their original agreement that he kept dodging or delaying. It's something Tenna (according to his own telling of the story) pressured Spamton into at the end of their relationship. And Spamton agreed. And his whole life came crashing down. And he still didn't blame Tenna until after he thought Tenna had cut him off. He's incredibly committed.
And his flimsy hater mask came off as soon as he learned that Tenna does care about him. If he didn't love Tenna, knowing that Tenna still felt something for him wouldn't have mattered - if anything, it would've made him angrier (like "oh, so you do feel something for me, and you still didn't do anything to help me?"). But he was happy, literally shaking with excitement. Note the wording of "You really do care!!!" with the triple exclamation points.
I felt an art block creeping behind my back... So I decided to not challenge myself with rendering, artstyle or plot, and just draw something sweet. Tooth rotting sweet may I say, really wassup with this fluff? The next thing must be realistically heartbreaking.
andulkaphoto
janainaart
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
