celphalopod gaming club @sharting-snailfish - Tumblr Blog

It’s been a hot minute, hasn’t it?

this came to me in a vision

there's something so weirdly sweet about the fishing aspect of cruelty squad to me. like sure, we never get a proper backstory for john, but he knows how to fish (and the names of different species of fish in the cruelty squad universe), and a tattered rain hat is "nostalgic" for him. it's pretty clear that he used to be a fisher, maybe even a fisherman's son, someone who grew up with this completely ordinary and grounded hobby that he still understands and enjoys as an adult, despite whatever mental breakdown he had apparently causing him to lose touch with most of his memories (personal interpretation).

it's so strangely comforting that in a game notorious for its absurdism and jarring graphics and incomprehensible lore, a game where you literally kill and become god, a game that's essentially a parody of late-stage capitalism, you can ignore your mission and go fishing instead. you can put on a tattered rain hat and go fishing. to me, it feels a lot like a reminder that even in the absolute batshit world we live in, people are still people, no matter how hard you try to strip them of their humanity (you can fish on any difficulty; john's ability to engage in his one and only hobby can't be taken away even when his divine light is severed, or even when he apparently loses bodily autonomy).

and it's not like that hobby is somehow pure or untouched by the horrible reality around him; you still find human bodies in the water, you still ultimately find the fishes you catch on the stock market. you can't escape capitalism, it infects everything, but you're allowed to find momentary comfort in something you can control. something that was born of you and your humanity alone.