Hey yo-snap do you have any random headcanons about shoot-o? Id love to hear all about them
*rubs my gay little bug hands together*
This is gonna be long.
So i’ll start off by saying that i’m going to go into the full character’s whole deal: i’m gonna be talking about the character “Suit-O” from High on Life, as well as “the rival bounty hunter/Shoot-O” from High On Life 2, as they’re the same character. I’m gonna call the player character “Killer” here, the rival bounty hunter “Shoot-O,” and the digital assistant in HOL2 “Copy” (just to keep it consistent).
I think that Suit-O is a computer in the bounty hunter suit helmet. There are sensors and cooling systems and stuff all throughout the suits that Gene/Killer uses, but for the most part those things could be considered more on the “auxiliary device” side of things to his “main computer:” like an external disk drive or something. I don’t really know if he would be complete without an actual suit attached; idk if he would work the same if you just had the helmet and not a compatible suit, but on a personal level i think he would feel incomplete without one. Also he would complain about it, like how a real computer would!... I guess to get even more specific, Suit-O is the personification of the computer, but i don’t think that the computer would see a divide between itself and Suit-O. Suit-O is just its mouthpiece. In-game, i think all of the HUD stuff is Suit-O: the objectives, your health, guns’ ammo, waypoints, stuff like that; that’s Suit-O telling you directly through text instead of speech, just to keep things easy for the player.
I’ve mentioned before that i headcanon that Gene was a bounty hunter for over 100 Earth-years. I don’t think Suit-O was with him for that entire time, but he was definitely with him for at least a portion of it. I think that Gene got him a while before he lost his legs and upgraded him to keep him up-to-date so that he would have the latest tech. I think it might be that the activation key held some of Suit-O’s actual memories: he calls Killer “Gene Zaroothian” the first time they put him on, but i think he’s referring to something equivalent to a user on a computer. “Hello, User 1!” Like that. And then he regains access to his memories and abilities with the code. He recognizes Killer as a different person than Gene, and he doesn’t call them Gene again after that. (idk if you noticed, but Suit-O never calls Killer by any title. He just talks to them directly, through all three installments.)
I think Suit-O really likes to help out, even if it’s not completely direct. It’s probably part of his coding, his directive, to make the wearer’s life easier, so that’s why he’s always so enthusiastic about trying to help. It’s probably why he likes Detective Mode so much: someone would only use it if they really needed it. It was also one of the only segments of HOL where he’s consistently talking to Killer, rather than the occasional popup at other points of the game. It was only a trial version of Detective Mode, though, so either Gene didn’t need to use it often, or he also pawned off/didn’t renew his license for the feature. [Theoretically Killer opted to get the full version, as there aren’t any spam popups during the Murder Mystery segment.]
I think Suit-O did get attached to the team. If we’re getting technical, he’s the one that’s usually touching the weapons, not Killer (because the gloves are part of the suit. They keep track of the Gatlians’ ammo and let you know when you can use Knifey.) I think he sees all of them as very good friends, but i do think that Killer is his favorite. I want to imagine that Killer is nicer to him than Gene was, but i guess i can’t say that he is for certain. I do think that Killer did ask for Suit-O to be his in-suit advisor, though. I think he’d be kind and helpful to anyone that was allowed to wear the suit, but he has a fondness for Killer, Gus, Sweezy, and Knifey because… fff idk, it’s part of the story. I will say, though, that i think there might be a slightly-less-than-best-friends thing between Suit-O and Knifey because they almost never interact directly. He doesn’t directly interact much with the other weapons either, but Gus and Sweezy do ask if he’s okay at the beginning of HOL2, while Knifey doesn’t. MAYBE there was a rivalry between them when they were with Gene, or maybe they just don’t mesh perfectly when they’re alone, or maybe they’re so close already that they don’t really need to speak to one another to know how either is doing. Or something. I want to think about the Suit-O/Knifey relationship more tbh.
Idk why he kys himself at the end of HOL, but i do think it was a funny gag. Idk if it’s just me, but he sounds so annoyed in High On Knife. Not sure what that’s about. Maybe he’s jealous of Knifey (for aforementioned relationship issues) or maybe he’s upset that they’re not on a proper bounty mission and are just kind of doing whatever instead. It’s just kind of funny imo. He seems all aboard when the bounty is Lizzie at the beginning of HOL2, so idk. Maybe he just likes to do hunting-type stuff because that’s also part of his coding. Maybe he’s also into the killing aspect of the whole ordeal, too, as he doesn’t say anything AT ALL when Killer does attack the other bounty hunters: Suit-O just glitches out afterwards because he allowed something that he wasn’t supposed to and the Bounty Network took over after that. I will say that it’s interesting that he was able to hack himself into working again after the Network took over: that’s probably part of how he was able to control the suit by himself afterwards.
[Okay, i don’t know anything about technology, so forgive me if i get anything wrong.] After the crew got rid of the old suit, the one that contained Suit-O, the character that we’re talking about, he must have continued to hack himself until he jailbroke the suit from the Bounty Network. I think that’s probably what made him “unregistered,” since he wouldn’t have been connected to the Network after doing that. We already know that he has some level of control over the suit itself, beyond just the biometric type stuff i mentioned earlier. He can allow and disallow the suit to move. I mentioned that there’s probably some kind of cooling system inside the suit (look up “driver cooling suit” to see where my head’s at) to help regulate the wearer’s temperature in extreme conditions (which is maybe also like a stillsuit from Dune??? Idk, i don’t know anything about Dune), and i headcanon that he uses the fluid from that as hydraulics towards actually being able to move the suit as a new body. It’s still him: he’s just alone now, so he has to figure out how to ambulate without something solid on the inside.
So he’s jailbroken, and using hydraulics to move. He theoretically has all of the upgrades that are used in that first segment of the game, though their functionality might have been cut off as well. We don’t really get to see him move around independently that much in the game, so that part’s hard to say. What we can say though is that he got a new… sword? and a revolver, as well as what i guess is a teleporter of some kind (whatever it is that he uses after Jeppy shoots him).
I think it would have been really interesting to have had at least a couple segments where you’re fighting the rival bounty hunter, rather than having all of the segments with the Buttons’ Gluttons. They could even interrupt those segments, and have a three-way group battle. But that’s just me.
He says himself that he felt betrayed specifically by Killer because they broke the Bounty Hunter Code; even though he knows that Killer didn’t have anything to do with the crew copying his data and discarding him. I can understand him being upset that Killer didn’t recognize that the real Suit-O wasn’t with them, but i think that he has some misplaced anger about being thrown away like how he was. Maybe he feels like he wouldn’t have been thrown away if he hadn’t been compromised by what they did, so he puts the blame for that on them too. I’m not sure why he goes after them so soon: maybe it’s because he knows that they’re the deadliest one in the Bleeding Stars at the time, and that their operation would be kinda helpless without them, but i don’t know if that mindset is something that Suit-O would actually have. He doesn’t seem to hate humans in general, he’s just angry at Killer and everyone. He does go after only Killer, and doesn’t care about any of the weapons or the rest of the crew, it seems, so… I don’t know. I really think a lot of it is misplaced anger. Not unwarranted, just misplaced, and not even through his own fault, as he doesn’t know specifically what Lizzie was doing to get that specific bounty on her head. I don’t know why he would have gone after Killer when he knew that they were up to important stuff, but MAYBE he just didn’t know about the court hearing that the game is leading up to. He says “so i finally tracked you down,” as if he had been searching a long time, when in game only a few days have passed (apparently only four or five, as you wake up at Quarters with 26 days until the hearing, and pick up Jeppy when there’s 22 days left, so like… okay, Drama Queen.)
I think it’s interesting the way that he seems to interact with Copy before they’re merged. Copy can detect him, and detect that he has a “hostile energy signal.” We don’t have much to go off regarding other enemies’ energy signatures, we just know that Copy thinks that Shoot-O’s is something that he needs to keep track of. At this point, Copy is the one that’s helping the crew, doing what he can to keep Killer safe, which is why he points out Shoot-O. I headcanon that Shoot-O somehow has the ability to either disable Copy’s ability to communicate with Killer when he’s around, or maybe he can communicate with Copy directly and tells him to stay out of the situation. I don’t know which. Shoot-O would know Copy’s software, so he should potentially be able to overtake Copy, since he overtook himself at the Zoo. I just know that Copy is quiet as a mouse when Shoot-O actually attacks Killer the first time, and literally just confirms that Shoot-O is Suit-O when he attacks Killer the second time. I need to think about it a little more, but that’s what i have for right now.
Oh, one thing i do want to mention though is Shoot-O’s relationship with K-SO. (I know we don’t see them directly interacting, but stay with me.) Suit-O was probably copied over to the Outlaw suit when they were somewhere safe, rather than when they were just in the RV after the Zoo, as Gene wasn’t there to actually do that part. For the sake of this analysis, we’re gonna place this event at the Bleeding Stars Headquarters, the arcade. K-So would probably be there; i hc that they were stationed there or in the RV and helping the Zoo raid remotely; so we’re saying that K-SO was also at Quarters when Suit-O was copied. K-SO is a robot, so they would probably know something or other about how copying an AI would actually go. I’m sure there had to be some dialogs in the hardware while they were doing it: stuff like “administrator access only” type stuff, you know.. Gene had to have known to some extent that he was COPYING and not TRANSFERRING Suit-O, and i feel like K-SO would have probably known that too. Now whether or not they said anything at the time, we’ll probably never know. We do know, however, that they never mention anything about it in the dialogs that there are with them. For all we know, K-SO knowingly let Suit-O’s original data be thrown away along with his suit, which is kinda messed up tbh :/// On the other hand, maybe they really didn’t know about any one given aspect of it, but i feel like that’s not the case. I’ll get into why later, but i just wanted to mention K-So in this because i do think they have some kind of a role in this.
I would have liked to have seen more of Shoot-O on his own. I really headcanon that he moves in the same way that either Killer or Gene moved, as those are his best sources of how an alien with their general body-type (upright, two legs) is supposed to move. I want to say that the way he leans on his knee and the hand movements that he makes are more based on how Killer moves, only because he’s obsessing over Killer at the time. Whether he’s aware of where his physical mannerisms come from might not really matter; OR they might just make him angrier. The only way that he knows how to move is directly copying the person that he hates the most right now. Probably doesn’t help on the “not hating them” side of things. Like a resentment sort of thing for making him act this way.
Which could probably also extend into how he feels about his prison body. Obviously he should be angry at the people that ACTUALLY put him in prison, but he’s still just spiraling on his hatred towards Killer. He honestly doesn’t even acknowledge why they’re in prison in his (counting…) third monologue, he’s just yelling at Killer. I will say, i do appreciate how Super Nipulon acknowledges that Suit-O did have a role in what happened to him in HOL: i think that’s very nice of him to see Suit-O as a threat. If Killer interrupts Shoot-O’s fourth monologue by picking stuff up, he’ll go on about Killer being how they always were and being frustrated with it.
I don’t know if Shoot-O cares about Killer on his own. I think that part of his coding is to keep his wearer safe, which is why the suit has radars and stuff. But since he’s jailbroken and doing stuff against his original coding, and because Killer isn’t actually inside him at the time, that part is hard to say. Part of me wants to believe that he does care for Killer even if he hates them, but another part of me wants to believe that he just can’t shake that part of his coding. It could be a little bit of both, but whatever it is, Shoot-O does care about Killer. He can’t shoot is gun, he doesn’t even attempt to attack Killer in his prison body, he puts Killer back onto the bed after Super Nipulon rips off their arm, and he begins thinking of a way for them to escape via a truce. He allows Killer to use his prison body’s arms in the gravity gun, and he encourages them even though they make it without following his blueprints. And despite being able to escape on his own, he goes back for Killer before he does. I think Shoot-O does genuinely care for Killer, even if he really, really doesn’t want to.
Okay, i’m going to bring back the stuff i mentioned with K-SO. I think part of the reason K-SO gave Killer their arm was because they felt guilty about what they let happen to Suit-O. Of course, K-SO claims that losing a robot arm is different than losing a living arm; and they might have given Killer their arm anyway even if they didn’t feel guilty about what happened to Suit-O. But i feel like there might have been alternatives to literally cutting K-SO’s right arm off and grafting it to Killer, as Killer’s left prosthetic is made up of different parts. I think a lot of those parts came from the gravity gun, but it’s still its own piece of hardware because it does look completely different from the gravity gun. K-SO still has their left arm after this, so it’s probably not theirs, and therefore its own item. If they were able to put pieces of stuff together to make a left arm, why didn’t they do that for the right arm as well??? I’m just saying, K-SO giving Killer their arm is a little strange for someone that only has a handful of dialog options in between missions: K-SO isn’t exactly Killer’s best friend.
So that brings me to where Shoot-O is in comparison to Copy. I don’t know. Like how i said Suit-O was in the helmet, i think Copy is in the Outlaw suit’s helmet. As far as we saw, Shoot-O’s AI chip is inside the Tamagatchi on Killer’s right wrist; but we also saw him talk about what it felt like to shoot, even though the Tamagatchi was more of an accessory on the gravity gun than it was an actual part of it. I don’t really know the relationship between Shoot-O’s AI chip and either version of the gravity gun. I kind of think that Shoot-O’s computer is split up between both of Killer’s prosthetic arms, because i really don’t know how they would be able to control the gravity functions without some kind of assistance there, but i have no idea.
I do think that all of the “Suit-O” speaking interaction that we get post-prison is Shoot-O talking, not Copy. I can tell the difference between them, but maybe i’m crazy. (They say, 3000 words into a question about Shoot-O headcanons.) I don’t know which one of them was the first to respond when Nipulon injected Killer with their own… essence? But i do think that it was Shoot-O that got Nipulon off of them when he first attacked them. He was probably also the one that suggested the party at Spaceforest Cafe lol. I think Copy is the one that always talks at Quarters, though.
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So yeah, just a couple of things. Feel free to ask about any other characters that i obsess over!! :3c
