my doodles

side blog: moonbobreblogs // ao3: moonbobwrites

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PLANT A SEED AND WATCH IT GROW

a Avery & Julius fanmix // listen

ON THE OUTSIDE (Oingo Boingo) this is where it all begins, right here, on the outside looking in, I’m on the outside

PEOPLE II 2: STILL PEOPLIN’ (AJJ) we’re all two or three decisions away, from becoming the ones that we fear and pity […] you’re an irreplaceable human soul, with your own understanding of what it means to suffer, and that’s a huge bummer

SPLENDID ISOLATION (Pete Yorn) I don’t need no one, splendid isolation, don’t want to wake up with no one beside me, don’t want to take up with nobody new

OLD MAN (Neil Young) old man look at my life, twenty-four and there’s so much more […] old man take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you

LIFE IS STRANGE (Lord Huron) life is strange so am I, I’ll be strange ‘till the day that I die […] I’m a lost cause, so are you, I can’t change who I am, I don’t want to

THE WOODPILE (Frightened Rabbit) won’t you come and break down this door? I’m trapped in an abandoned building, come find me out now […] spent too long alone tonight, would you come and brighten my corner?

ARE YOU ALRIGHT? (Lucinda Williams) I looked around me and you were gone, are you alright? I feel like there must be something wrong, are you alright? ‘cause it seems like you disappeared

NOT ONLY I (Courtney Barnett) not only I want something to believe in, not only I long for the feeling, not only I wanna wake up into a new day, and knowing we feel the same is a comfort to me, all the love and all the shame

THE GRUDGE (Tami Neilson) and that son had a daughter and that daughter was my mother, passing grudges down the family tree [...] you choose pride over love, you’re left holding nothing but that grudge

MARRIED TO THE GROUND (Glitterfox) and I begin to pray, I will plead and beg, that I am not alone, I’m married to the ground, and I have made my vow

NOTHING ORDINARY (Lucius) how’s about a rebirth, plant a seed and watch it grow […] when nature intervenes, keeps trying, new is in, out with the old

TREE OF LIFE (Small Fools) I cannot unfold this, desire to be found, swallow the egg, renege, my bargain with solitude […] oh woodcarver, lay your weapon, at my bower, let it happen, chisel away, the petrified places

FLOWERS AND BLOOD (Mariee Sioux) I’ll see you a baby of drying clay so don’t you cry, oh flowers and blood, build up a new me of flowers and blood

MAKE SOMETHING GOOD (Laura Veirs) I wanted to make something pure, an emerald field from steer manure, a wide-eyed child in a moonlit room, make something good, I wanted to make something built to last

WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND (Chuck Ragan) you are not alone, proof’s in the flesh and bone, young eyes watching you […] all we are is what we leave behind

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late nights awake and alone with / myself again, and it's lonely

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grocery shopping with the belle-tremaines

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take a chance / start a garden / grow some plants

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i really appreciate the empathy and understanding you show avery and julius's relationship in your art/writing! especially julius. i get that the game encourages assuming the worst of him for thematic effect on most runs, but it's been alienating for me to see the response frequently stay there instead of investigating further or asking why the game is positioning the player that way. i think he's frequently looked at from a callous and individualistic lens instead of seeing some of the structural horror in his situation and integrating him into a larger picture of the town and its treatment of outsiders, and that's just not how i've been approaching the game, personally. your portrayals have been really refreshing! thank you for your work

ty friend!! Yeah, I'd been kinda surprised by so much of the fandom reaction to him being like "he sucks and he should die" (though perhaps that also speaks to the quality of the game's writing that so many people come away with the same opinion the town seems to have of him). Especially in a game that's full of morally grey characters, many who you witness at some of the most stressful/lowest moments of their lives. Like a lot of the characters can choose to do some really awful things!

I also think just writing him off as an irredeemably terrible person weakens Avery's entire storyline (which Julius serves to further as a side character). Like they do consider him a friend - they're willing to publicly (and repeatedly) go to bat for someone who everyone else in town views with disdain. Even in spite of how much they want people in town to like them. And it does end up negatively affecting people's opinions of Avery! Yet still Avery doesn't back down or ever retract what they say. Just like how, even if they see Duke literally kill Julius right in front of them, it doesn't stop them from immediately trying to argue for sparing Joseph's life. It all says something about Avery's loyalty, as well as their ability to empathize and see beyond what other people see.

The ambiguity of their relationship and how many ways you can interpret it is just kind of fascinating to me. And I feel like watering it down to "Julius is a shitty person and Avery's dumb/wrong/crazy to care about him and would be better off with him dead" ends up missing out on all the fun possible interpretations of why they connect. Like, for example, I have seen surprisingly little discussion of gender in episode 5. That, in offering Julius what he secretly wants more than anything, Sybil doesn't offer him a wife or some way of finding love that could lead to a pregnancy. No, he jumps straight to handling the pregnancy himself. He may not be carrying the baby himself at first, but he is the one actively tending to it and bleeding himself to feed it. And, depending on the outcome, he can end up more actively birthing the baby.

[Side Rant: what I do see instead is people calling Julius an incel more times than I'd like to see lmao. Like man, what kind of incels do you know that wanna skip the sex bit and go straight to birthing a baby themselves??? But...whatever lol.]

But what exactly does connect them? Is it purely just that they're both lonely, that they're both outsiders in their own ways? Julius is estranged from his cousins, Avery's estranged from their parents. They both nurture plants (and then potentially Joseph). They both work with their hands to make things (Avery's garden, Julius's woodworking). They both fail to create the connections they want - Julius pushes people away and Avery tries to draw people closer but never quite manages it. Their appearances in the game both center around the diner, a hub of social activity in the town, yet they're both extremely alone. Julius admits openly to having been suicidal. Avery vaguely hints at just how unhappy they were previously in Charlotte.

Could there be potential for Julius admiring/envying how Avery lives (always being themself, regardless of how others might react negatively)? Because I think there's a lot of room to interpret Julius as repressing either his sexual orientation or gender identity, and not even realizing what "kindred connection" there is between them.

Also, on another note, I think there's always parallels to be drawn between the various characters in the game. Like Duke and Julius really do reflect Tabitha and the MC to me - two cousins born into being at odds with one another because of what their ancestors before them did, passing trauma and pain and expectations down the family tree. So, I find the outcome where Duke is the one to directly kill Julius especially sad in that it reflects how Tabitha and the MC could turn out - one of them killing the other, nothing but pain and anger left behind.

[f4rfields]

there comes a point in caring a lot about avery belle that you unfortunately begin to care about julius tremaine and also start shaking your head at the way some people talk about their friendship lmao

obviously, avery 1000000% deserves better than the treatment that they get from people in town, and they give julius a lot of grace that he does not really deserve, and julius is absolutely still afraid of the fact that he can have a Feeling about someone, but the way avery talks about him makes me think they'd still try to be friends with julius even if they did actually feel accepted by the community. they seem really proud that they've been able to get past a lot of his defenses and feel like it's rewarding. their experiences with him are also way different than everyone else's (including the players!) and those experiences are why they're so willing to go to bat for him and believe that he's not this fundamentally evil person everyone else is trying really hard to convince them that he is.

like that's their 50+ year old libertarian bestie who doesn't understand castle doctrine and is going to prison for sure because of it. that's their problematic nasty old man fav that everyone else hates but who'd be there for them if they were in trouble and who shows up for them. that's their emotional support curmudgeon who grumbles at them from the corner when they call him out for being an asshole, but who'll make them a bench with his own two hands without them ever asking for it. like maybe they are both very lonely but also just kind of have questionable taste in guys they're willing to befriend.

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tbh I often feel like people write off/downplay Avery's friendship with Julius because they personally don't like Julius and find him off-putting.

Like, yeah, Julius is off-putting (and clearly supposed to be! but uh, so's y'know, Tabitha lol), but him and Avery are truly friends and do mean something to each other. Julius is the only one who's truly noticed and paid real attention to Avery.

They're fully capable of bantering back-and-forth with one another. Their interactions certainly don't read like Avery's just settling for Julius's friendship out of inability befriend someone else.

They also do have similarities to each other and ways they can relate beyond just being lonely. Yes, they're both lonely outsiders to the town, but they're also both estranged from their families (minus Winnie for Avery of course). Julius from the Calloways (as far as we know, his only living family) and Avery from their parents to the point where they "don't have any other place to go back to."

They both make repeated bids for connection in a town that ignores them. Avery with their community garden - which they repeatedly state is supposed to not be *theirs* alone but *public*, yet they're the only one who works on it. Who's the only other person who's contributed to it? Yeah, Julius. And Julius himself sure spends a lot of time at the diner for someone who supposedly wants to be left alone.

Also, I feel like it's often ignored that Avery enjoys weirdness and strange things. They like the ditchlings, they're excited to have been possessed by a ghost, they want the pumpkin baby to live, etc etc... And Julius, quite frankly, is weird. Avery's repeatedly shown to be almost amused by Julius's strangeness - the bear traps and other booby traps, that he's grumpy and barely speaks. Avery isn't some kind of poor victim who somehow missed Julius's red flags. They've noticed all of Julius's red flags and seem to like him maybe even because of those red flags.

Also, re:Avery liking Julius for reasons beyond just loneliness - yeah! Beyond Avery's dialogue that directly says that (feeling "accomplishment" in having won him over), there's Avery's later comments in the basement about desperately wanting to feel that they're important to someone. So being the one and only person capable of befriending a man who an entire town describes as unlikeable and someone who pushes people away on purpose? Being the one who Julius chooses to call for help? There's a sense of importance to be found there.

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where do failed imposters go

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((fast travels you to tetanus lake without asking first))

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send her like a cup to her mother's table swallow, drink the water watch her play her part in a long-fixed fable oh, as her father's daughter

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rowan mayfair & her emotional support ex bf

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janey just washed those sheets man :\

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"I guess it might steal all our nutrients and kill us, which would be bad. But if it didn't? That's a one-of-a-kind lifelong friendship with a weird little creature, and there's no way I'm passing up an opportunity like that."

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bring the abomination child borne of witchcraft (from that time your 50-60 year old bestie kinda but not quite blackmailed the local witch) that you're co-parenting to work day

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cip

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I'm addicted to the touch that bites me back / just another fix before I can relax