Apparently (guessing from the feedback), the public wants pigeons. I provide pigeons.
(2025/08/30)
Anyway, I’d like to give you some more context as well. The main inspiration for my drawings is a book I got as a gift around 2007, if I remember correctly. Its title translates to just, you guessed it, “Pigeons” x))
It describes tens of different breeds of domesticated pigeons/doves and contains a lot of photorealistic pictures. (The imprint mentions Alena Čepická as the illustrator. I can’t find any exact info about this lady, but it seems like she illustrated some other books about animals as well). Judging by the descriptions, which often note stuff like how close a particular bird is to its breed standard, these illustrations were based on actual photos. They make cool drawing references, don’t they? Especially when it comes to colors.
A loosely redrawn Emma, and the first Amelia fanart on this cursed website (at least according to my quick research). Cheers.
Please sit down for a moment, I’m gonna yap and overthink. Per usual.
Beholder 2 writing is wack and the higher floor you reach, the more half-assed the lore is. On Floor 1, everything is more or less connected. On Floor 12, some connections between the characters still exist, but they are weaker, and you can get a promotion without interacting with the boss even once. On Floor 25, you can ignore absolutely everyone, not only the boss, but the coworkers too. (I loved the Floor 25 minigame, though. It’s relaxing. Fellow B2 fans give me weird looks when I say that, idk, maybe it’s the fact that it’s 100% logical and doesn’t require you to change your thinking pattern— but I am digressing ehehhehe).
The main problem I have with Floor 1, though, is called Emma Hazer. If I remember correctly, it was @pharrell-the-formation who once said that Emma’s lore looked like the devs tried to sit on two chairs at once: they wanted to put two archetypes at once into one character. As a result, Emma is hardworking, but careless. Looking for a good father for her children, but sleeping around with any eager man. Caring and determined, but silly and vain. A contradiction.
Circling back to Floor 25: you know what other female character is known for being silly and kinda flirtatious? Amelia. Amelia, whose role in the plot is basically non-existent. You can talk to her once or twice, learn that she is a flighty girl who doesn’t care about work, and then you can give her a leaflet so that she changes her attitude and quits her job. I had to check her in-game portrait in the game wiki before drawing her because I couldn’t even remember what she looked like.
I would have to write a full-blown essay or a fanfic to fix every single element of this mess, but I feel like Emma’s flirtatious, promiscuous nature should be crossed out from her lore and given to Amelia instead. This is the character you should be able to randomly cheat on your wife with, if this arc was THAT necessary in the game (/s). Of course, Peter Dong’s questline would need some rewriting in that case, because his cringy poem about Emma “wasting her time for other men” wouldn’t fit the vibe; it wouldn’t be the “sexy seductress with multiple lovers x shy guy” trope, but rather “a woman searching for a caring responsible husband x a guy whom she didn’t consider a good candidate for that”. Still. If a fix-it can be done by rewriting a few dialogues, it’s not FUBAR. End of review.
nobody asked me where I half-subconsciously got my interpretation of James from, but I’ll tell you anyway.
I’ve played Beholder 2 in the Polish version only. I had no idea what the English version of the dialogues looked like until I had to look up some canonical quotes. The Polish translation has its own issues, yeah (btw it’s visible that it’s been translated via English, instead of directly from Russian). There’s one thing that influenced my writing the most, though: James has a noticeably different vibe in that version. He doesn’t tell Evan to wear other employees down, but to “annihilate them”. He doesn’t order the police officers to shut Weinberg’s mouth, but to “gag him”.
see what I mean? heh
Evan’s remark I quoted in the picture above — “investigations are what you and your division do!” in the English version — was reworded in Polish as “conducting investigations is the specialty of yours and your division, after all!”. Well. In the context of a totalitarian regime, the phrase “conducting an investigation” does not make me think of a detective stealthily looking for clues. No, I wouldn’t say that James does anything violent by himself behind the scenes in the B2 timeline, he has subordinates to get their hands dirty instead of his… but he must’ve started somewhere, right?
I usually don’t like crossovers and fandom fusions, but I like these two guys
I am surprised that no one has tried to write a full-blown Papers Please + Beholder universe fusion yet, actually. One has a chunk of good wide-scale worldbuilding (more countries and cities mentioned, more consistent information about historical events like wars, pandemics, economical hardships etc.), while the other goes in depth with internal affairs of a totalitarian country, like bureaucracy and propaganda. Sounds like a good complement.
hear me out:
The Great State ↔ Arstotzka, obviously. The Great State of Arstotzka lol
Helmer ↔ Grestin, but the West/East Grestin division would need some more worldbuilding
Valverde ↔ Kolechia (as the main long-time enemy of the country which the story is set in)
South Borea ↔ Obristan (yeah, I know that TGS wages war against South Borea and Arstotzka doesn’t have any animosity towards Obristan, but... close enough, both South Borea and Obristan are depicted as well-developed countries, good places to live. Not everything would be a 1:1 equivalent, obviously)
New Tomorrow ↔ EZIC (their “work methods” are very similar anyway)
the ministries and other state institutions could be easily “imported” and merged if needed, no collision here
Beholder technologies like cloning and brainwashing/mind control could also exist as they are
same with little flavorful details like the directives, TGS salute, propaganda slogans and other dictatorship-typical crap.
I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.
now to my blorbo fixation i.e. James Cunningham & M. Vonel (btw I headcanon his first name to be Mortimer or something like that). Aghhh I could draw a bunch of parallels between them. They work in the same “industry”, they’re made to seem suspicious and intimidating to the player, we know virtually nothing about their private lives and their past (“More space for headcanons that don’t collide with canon!” my inner fic writer squeals), both are very loyal to the state they serve, both are dutiful and composed. Both would make interesting unreliable narrators in a story. They seem similar attitude-wise and personality-wise, imho, judging by the few dialogues from their respective source media. Vonel feels like the type who would consciously build his authority on fear and intimidation, though— Cunningham is more kind-hearted, but still strict. They would get along. Don’t change my mind, you can’t. :D
I’ve been redrawing lots of random things lately, one of which is this old fanart of my all-time favorite Beholder character x)))
old version
since we’re already here, I need to talk about this guy. I’ll try to be as little boring as possible, but I cannot promise. :v
you see, even though I enjoy writing James Cunningham the morally gray state security officer, I recently came to a conclusion that his role and behavior within the story would make much more sense if he was a detective— preferably a retired one. It would patch up several plotholes:
1) the weird ass idea of an entire state sec department being banned from entering the Ministry for no reason. I’ve always imagined that James was manipulated to think he was carrying out the Leader’s order so that he wouldn’t oppose this madness (here’s a fic mentioning this). If he was a private detective, his work wouldn’t be state-affiliated in any way, so he obviously wouldn’t be able to send anyone into the Ministry (or contact some other department that was already present there), and he’d have to use Evan as his “agent” to conduct an investigation. They’d have to convince the state authorities to arrest Evan’s bosses, too, so finding compromising materials would be really important.
2) James being gullible af. Again, as a detective and not an experienced state-affiliated functionary, he would’ve simply treated Hemnitz’s manipulation as another mission he’d get paid for.
3) his lack of reaction if Evan decides to help the New Tomorrow movement carry out a terrorist attack. I once wrote (yet another) fic trying to explain what that situation could have looked like behind the scenes, but again: if James wasn’t a high-ranking state sec officer, no explanation would be needed.
last but not least, it would be possible to write him as an actual good guy. Him saying “he [De Salvo] will say that he’s been torturing enemies of the state— and, naturally, they’ll believe him” wouldn’t raise the question of “who are ‘they’ if he is the one in charge there?”, and therefore it wouldn’t have an undertone of “murder and tortures are fine as long as it’s dissidents being murdered and tortured”; he’d be talking about some authorities that he’s not connected to. He could have his own opinions about TGS, instead of dealing with corrupted elites in the name of the Wise Leader (“those bastards keep twisting the Leader’s legacy every day, turning the Great State into a landfill” — another canonical quote).
tbh, I suspect he was initially supposed to be just a detective. If that’s really the case, I don’t understand why the devs decided to change it.
bonus idea, because I want to eat my cake and have it too: it would be interesting if James had a short episode of working for the state security in the past anyway, before he realized how corrupted TGS was and quit that job to actually serve the people
that one vocational class in technical school when we were told to design and print a package for a toy car and we decided to redraw a meme in MS Paint
Stuff nobody asked for: I feel like sharing some of my Beholder 2 experiences today. No reason. I mean, okay, the main reason is that 1) most of my lovely 20 subscribers follow me for Beholder-related content, 2) I like chattering about random things that I’m interested in.
I’d bought the game in late 2021, but hadn’t played it until summer 2023. Then I went through Floor 1, reached Floor 12 and got stuck there because I couldn’t figure out how to participate in the Supergame (I didn’t know I should’ve just waited until the previous edition ended lmao).
My first experience was… kinda bland? It’s hard to “reconstruct” my exact impressions because there are no written traces of them lol. Only once I messaged my friend (who’d played B2 before I did) about the game, telling him that I’d completed the task about Ferguson’s party and “lost a bunch of braincells”. Besides, I remember some of my thoughts about different characters and events (warning, heavy chatter below the cut, hehe):
Floor 1 coworkers — they stuck in my memory, actually. I liked how different they were from each other. If I remember correctly, none of them survived my first gameplay, whoops. I was testing various options, thinking “what can go wrong?” — well, turns out this line of thought sometimes leads to a shooting spree, for example (sorry, Peter)
if I was to say which character I liked the most, I’d probably say Marwitz or Rakovich lol (I still like them a lot, they’re side characters but feel multi-dimensional. I like all female characters from B2, honestly)
fun fact: I’d completely overlooked Morris and learnt about his existence much later, from some walkthrough
Hemnitz getting executed? Yeah, surprising and confusing, but on the other hand I thought “well, it’s a brutal totalitarian dictatorship, ‘give me a man and I’ll find an article’ etc., maybe we will learn about the reason later”. Haha. Ha.
that whole Heimdall intrigue was confusing as hell too. I was collecting the safes but didn’t have the slightest idea what I needed that for. It was very interesting but at the same time I felt like it would take ages to see the full picture and understand everything (well, soon I abandoned the game for the next two years, sooo… yeah lmao). Honestly this is the element that makes me really regret taking a long break from playing and forgetting most of the lore only to rediscover it much later via walkthroughs. I think I’d lost a part of my curiosity in the meantime.
James? Tutorial guy, but like… for the entire game. No, seriously, I didn’t have any doubts regarding him (mind that I hadn’t discovered most of Caleb’s notes back then), because he did not feel like a full-fledged character; I treated him like an equivalent of the Ministry calling Carl in B1 and giving hints/instructions. Find some dirt on the boss? Okay. Get a promotion? Logical. It’s not possible to cut yourself off from him anyway. When I came back to playing B2 in 2025, I barely remembered he existed. (There’s no such thing as love at first sight, hah)
Floor 12, just like I’ve mentioned before, had been utterly confusing (both the Supergame and processing the forms) and I hadn’t progressed any further than just getting there until I resumed the game a few months ago
…and after resuming it, I progressed to Floor 37 fairly quickly. I’d accidentally spoiled the ending for myself earlier, by the way. Do I regret that? Yes — or maybe not at all…? The element that had remained unspoiled until I discovered it myself, though, was Albert’s iron maiden. Ughhh I had to literally get up from my laptop and walk around the room for a moment
Generally the longer I am a part of the fandom, the more complex thoughts and opinions I have about this game.
If y’all want me to explain something more or just share your own thoughts, agree/disagree with my point of view, feel free to comment x))
“I set fire again
To the bridges behind me
As they burn, they illuminate
The road ahead of me”
a few weeks ago, @thecouncilreturns and I had a DM yap about how James most likely cannot sleep sometimes and he goes for nighttime walks around the neighborhood to calm down and make dark thoughts related to his job go away. If there is any kind of curfew in Helmer... well, he’s able to get out of trouble easily, for obvious reasons. There are a few other layers and elements to this headcanon, but my interpretation of James’s character is already quite counter-fanon to say the least, so I’ll spare you the details lol
