Threadbare is a “visual” “”novel”” about a martyr exacting revenge on the prophet who foretold her death. Make him pay! Fail upward! Change nothing! Fulfill your awful, awful destiny!
Threadbare features:
The indomitable power of spite, through which all things can be accomplished!
One-sided(?) tension(??) with the guy you’re doomed to kill!
The machinations of a deeply stupid meritocracy, which asks “what if we put wealthy art patrons in charge of a communications & intelligence agency?”
Running errands against your will!
High effort low art! Low effort high art? Low effort low art. It still took me nine months. And it’s not even done!
What I can only describe as a slideshow with quicktime events scored by industrial noise metal!
This guy, I guess !!
This is like… a pre-alpha demo. It covers maybe a third of the story, and its code is held together by duct tape and a wish. Mostly this is an excuse to get other people to break it so I know what to fix. Enjoy!
i dig the freys! i think they're a really good villain house because i appreciate villains that just suck complete shit. i'm also very interested to see what will happen to the freys (i don't think arya will slaughter them all? i think arya slaughters them all on the show using faceless man magic, right? i.... doubt this is what will happen)
walder frey is an enduring, opportunistic, nouveau riche asshole. he's been a rotted, unpleasant little weasel for the whole of his very long life. he has faced basically no consequences so far because his greatest crime before the red wedding was being just kind of a dick.
but he has now orchestrated (along w the lannisters and the boltons) the greatest betrayal of guest rights + protections that westeros has ever known. through all of asos, chapter after chapter, we are shown the enormity of guest rights and protections in the culture of westeros as a social pillar. and then we're shown that pillar being blown to smithereens.
the boltons and the lannisters are going extinct. so what's with walder frey sitting with his feet up still?
the freys, of the three houses that orchestrated the red wedding, have gotten the least character development for any of their members, which strikes me as sort of odd!! i don't really think we're gonna get a million frey pov chapters all of a sudden but i do wonder if they will feature more prominently going forward. obvious we don't have and will never get bolton povs (roose + rams don't work as pov characters) but we still know quite a bit about them both through the eyes of multiple other characters. (and ofc we do have one (1) frey pov of poor merrett and his ice pick migraines from the asos epilogue)
i don't think we'll get anything more on walda, but maybe we will with the walders frey? rams has taken big walder (the little one) under his wing which might become interesting, but i also don't see rams living that much longer. maybe a new frey will drop.
anyway. very long way to say that i am very interested to see what is in store for the freys as the third leg of the triad that orchestrated the greatest act of dishonor and betrayal in all of history. we do have the frey pies of course but wyman killing 3 guys doesn't feel equivalent to what's going on w the lannisters and the boltons so i just don't think that'll be it.
What inspired the sort of abomination-like Swiss Army knife centipede look of the Archivist? And can I get a picture of them being all tall and with bad back posture :D
Absolutely.
excellent excuse to do horrible weevil man origami. Also hi I have a tablet again, yay :)
I didn't expect to have as much to say about him as I did, but design rambling below.
so I should preface this with the fact that I didn't work out Petrei's design in advance. I definitely had an image of him in my head, but the panels in Threadbare are the first times I drew him. so the biggest reason he looks like that is because it's what I could draw quickly and shittily.
second biggest reason is uhhhhhhh
The Archive is an offshoot of the Endlings which are an offshoot of me wanting to make some WH40k Mechanicus-type guys that I could play dolls with. they're kind of walking backwards into this, the Archive being visually closer to the source material, but deviating more than the Endlings from being machine animists, what with their disdain for the secutors they rely on.
With the Imperial Archive, I think it's important for them to take themselves very seriously but look goofy while doing it. I struggle to find a good balance between making them feel goofy, but not too endearing; brutal and inhumane, but not too competent. it should be easy to make fun of them, but it should also feel a little dangerous, because they are fragile people with big egos and bigger guns. probably that's why I keep taping knives to every available limb. I'm taking another page out of warhammer's book. it's an inherently goofy setting, and the more bad actors try to co-opt it into being "cool", the more goofy it becomes. tape a knife to a gun. tape a knife to his legs! and he has bonesaws for wings because fuck you i guess
Designing around this tension between goofy and banally cruel is difficult sometimes, because there are a lot of ways we can unconsciously punch down when we design villains... making them "ugly," old, gender-nonconforming, giving them disfigurements, equating extensive robotics and prosthetics with inhumanness, etc. In retrospect, Petrei sorta resembles this statement and is a weird primer for what an Archivist looks like. I think of the archetypal Archivist as a conventionally beautiful person who is just, like, vacuously brittle and empty inside. but Petrei isn't in the business of worrying about his appearance. He has other insecurities to deal with. He's also head of the Archive's bioengineering division, and I felt like it would be a missed opportunity for him not to be a giant mechanical weevil man.
(Aside: The Doctor studied under Petrei before working with Markus, so that's another source of design symmetry. I thought it would be fun that they resemble each other.)
Anyway, I found myself thinking a lot about about body image, disability, and transhumanism with Petrei, because of the aforementioned considerations, and also because this has emerged as a running theme with Chief + the R.A. and Threadbare and I'm stumbling to keep up. I think the Archive rides the fringes of what is socially acceptable / desirable among the imperial elite. but they also are maybe the most sensitive to others' perceptions of them because they're in the business of manipulating hearts and minds. so, the mundane self-image problems that everyone has get magnified to the extreme in them. they're too mired in the loneliness and misery of cruelty to be able to see themselves clearly... not to say they are unhappy people necessarily. probably they are doing the same mental gymnastics that we do just to get by, and it has become too normal to be anything but background noise in their lives of comfort. but they are certainly yoked to maintaining power/control/security and I think they are forever missing something because of that.
Perhaps Petrei feels insecure about his dainty frame or his masculinity, and feels the need to appear bigger than he actually is. maybe he doesn't want to be perceived as, ahem, "flamboyant" like certain other Archivists. Being the Archive's head bioengineer also means he's very Visibly a guy who is artificially extending his lifespan like a living mummy. He interacts more intimately with death than the other Archivists, and maybe his own mortality hangs over him because of that. I mean, all Archivists tend to be obsessed with their own mortality, because they had to kill to get into office, but perhaps Petrei is insulated from that, because he hoards knowledge on his trade and creates secutors, something every Archivist needs. this leaves him time to self-experiment and guard himself against the more inevitable specter of age hanging over him. does he hide behind layers and layers of robes and wires and biomechanical augments because he feels fragile? maybe it's fitting that his proximity to death makes him a little "weirder," less brittle, and more vulnerable/accessible than other Archivists. maybe his self-image could benefit from the fact that there are people who will see being a 15 foot tall centipede weevil man as a feature and not a bug (hah) but I don't think his ego needs inflating. he chose lobotomizing people over love, and he gets to deal with that.
Speaking of weevils, we'll get his personal monologue for modeling himself after them later. mine is that I think they're cute (goofy) and it's easier for me to design machines after insects than anything else because I'm better with creatures than I am machines. The centipede origami came later when I had the idea that it would be fun if he was actually tiny under there.
He did end up resembling the Col more than I wanted him to, but I can live with tweaking their designs later. we can't both show up to the party with centipede legs. how embarrassing!
Anyway. That's my rambling thought process, but I also am just throwing spaghetti at the wall recreationally and seeing what sticks. Thank you for inquiring! I will also be answering your other ask soon because it is making my brain tick in a good way... stay tuned
In other news, I feel like I’ve been working exclusively on things I can’t share because I’m under an NDA with myself about them. an NDA that is simply not real and I can break at any time. like right now.
Look at these frames from my twine, boy (working on it) (no ETA) (scope-creeped myself really bad) (having the time of my life)
