I love your tadc horror AU sm, it’s one of the only AUs I actually follow :)
as a huge Ribbit fan, I love her design! Do you know what her personality is in your AU? ^^
thank you for enjoying my AU! I'm glad you like her design, that means a bunch! TuT
Ribbit seems to have been pretty laid-back in canon, so I carried that over to the AU but as a mask for an undercurrent of anxiety over wanting to leave the circus. She was very confident in there being a way to leave and wouldn't stop looking for it even if it meant the others distanced themselves from her to avoid any suspicion from Caine. Jax was the last friend they had after Kaufmo cut them off due to her erratic behavior near the end.
Your ask actually motivated me to make a short comic about Ribbit's abstraction hehe:
“Players don't have to be nice to Caine or their fellow captives, but if it gets in the way of an adventure…he'll take action”
Imagining an episode two where Caine sends them to the beautiful candy kingdom with the same story as in canon but the message of “you better have fun and be nice or else”
I imagine Pomni may have been punished for falling out of the map (not that it was her fault)
congratulations you predicted the next images i was going to post LMAO
but yeah that's more or less what I was thinking for the Hellscape take on the candy kingdom segment! Caine tries to make it very welcoming and colorful to test how Pomni fits in with the group, plus to reveal her temperament (is she going to be a problem?). This fails of course, because he can't keep his adventures clean of corruption these days.
(It's not really a punishment, but Caine is curious why one of his player characters fell under the map, so he removes Pomni's rig skeleton to inspect it and ensure that doesn't happen again. i have yet to draw/write this scene lol)
Hello I'm back again - may i ask what's going on in the image where Jax is hanging in front of the Caine screen in the sketches? Is that the Ribbit incident or another - just because it looks a little different from the comic
Hello again! :D
So this was originally just a conceptualization of how Caine grabs the players with his wires to take them to a punishment zone, not the Ribbit incident.
It will come up again though in another incident :]
if canon jax is confirmed trans fem, does that mean that hellscape jax is also going to be trans?
The answer to this is spoilery for Hellscape and I wanna give as thorough and honest of an answer as possible considering episode 9 + some of the VAs AND Goose herself solidified Jax as trans. If you're okay with BIG spoilers for what's to come of HS!Jax's background see below!
(bonus doodle because gah dam chapter 3 is taking forever i feel like I owe y'all SOMETHING)
CW: HS!Jax's family is full of bigots.
The plan has been for HS!Jax to discover his nonbinary trans identity with some prodding from Pomni. This was laid out around episode 7 in December-January when I really locked into making a roadmap for the AU.
Living in Hellscape's version of the circus has left him on such an intense level of survival mode that he hasn't really had the opportunity to properly process this aspect of himself. That is until the compassionate, prying little jester comes along of course.
It's very much this meme up until that point LOL:
I've also mentioned in a post that HS!Jax comes from a farming family. On the farm, he lived with just his father and his two brothers, who all expected him to perform hyper-masculinity and adhere to a strict gender binary. He eventually ran away from home and ended up in the circus. His unhoused situation between running away and being scanned into the circus is pretty close to canon.
He was especially close to his late mom (completely opposite from canon lmao). With her, he felt he could safely participate in feminine things without his father and brothers punching down on him. When she died, his family's treatment of him worsened until it came to a head over his adolescent years and he left.
So yeah! This stuff's a loooooong ways out but it's in the plan. Episode 6 specifically clued me into Jax's trans identity after the "chicken fetus in an egg" line so I wanted to incorporate that aspect into my AU.
I wouldn't normally lay out a spoiler like this, but I think it's important to clarify since canon Jax's gender journey (or refusal to take one) is a vital part of her character and a big motivator for her behavior, and that's mirrored in her Hellscape counterpart.
(I'm gonna get a little personal here, so sorry for that. I'll add that I can definitely relate to Jax's feelings of shame that come with knowing you're queer but vehemently denying it due to familial circumstances and internalized queerphobia. I'm from a religious upbringing and so I comfortably fit myself into the "it couldn't be me" queer ally camp up until 2020. I felt deep shame for being bi for so long lol. It's only this year that I've even considered getting a feel for a demigirl identity too, so it's been a loooooong road to self acceptance. This is something that's reflected in a lot of my original stories so Hellscape was NOT going to be an exception even if it is a fanwork.)
Sorry for going a little off the rails, my head's been spinning since the finale.......I haven't had a show affect me like this in quite some time LOL.
Hopefully my word vomit made some kind of sense. Regardless, thank you for your question!
Adore your AU, especially the LSD dream emulator inspo in the adventures.
I’ve been wondering, do you have any ideas as to what your Caine sounds like? Is it just his og voice but more robotic and bit crushed or like a clean pre-programmed corporate-compliant conversational tone tts or something else?
First off, HOLY FAAAWWWKKK your art of Caine is AMAZING!!!! I especially love your take on his wiring AAAAHHHH!!!!! T____T
Secondly, thank you!!!! I'm glad you're enjoying the AU, I love creating for it! And it's always cool to find another LSD dream emulator fan in the wild. :D
Also, yes! I did have a TTS voice in mind for Caine, reflecting the limitations he faces in his new "body" and early computer TTS:
(I had Microsoft Sam read a couple of Caine's lines, then pitch shifted and bitcrushed the results lol)
I'm quite set on making this version of Caine feel physically unsettling and cold despite his honest intentions to execute his programming and entertain his players. A huge part of canon Caine's charm is his character design and how it allows him to emote his voice lines so expressively, so I wanted to strip that away. I also just find TTS uncanny, so I thought why not mash those ideas together.
Whats Hellscape Gummigoos personality like? He looks... terrifying, but is that reflective of his personality? Is he like the Gummigoo we know and love, or has he too been "corrupted" by the rapidly failing circus?
Hey hey thank you for your question! I've been wanting to expand on Hellscape!Gummigoo for a bit.
[Again, sorry for anything that's not 100% accurate to how game programming works lol]
Throwing in a "standard" Gummigoo design for comparison:
Gummigoo is actually "normal" if a little offputting appearance-wise at the start of the Candy Canyon adventure. Like many of the NPCs on this adventure, Gummigoo is 2D on a 3D plane. He's got a lot of repeated dialogue, too. Caine's doing some resource-optimization because he wants to:
a) make a good first impression on Pomni
and
b) see how she reacts to a "standard" adventure.
So he's piling all his resources into creating the 3D atmosphere and also making sure nothing goes wrong (he fails lmao).
It's after Gummigoo and Pomni fall through the map that things really go awry. Gummigoo can't handle it and he glitches out, transforming into a warped form and gaining sentience in that moment. And in Hellscape, Caine disposes of Gummigoo before Pomni can invite him back to the circus.
(And just to touch on how he and the other 2D NPCs move, it's basically a swivel movement like in IMSCARED. Idk why but it's the only 2.5D horror game coming to mind right now lol)
