Soooo to the -5 people who are asking "WHERE IS CTN YOU SAID YOU'D BE WORKING ON IT!!!" My answer is I was forever-plagued. I have been sick for almost a month and a half and JUST NOW STARTED TO GET BETTER OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOODDDD. But we're good now, and once I get my responsibilities out of the way, I can finally cook again.
BUT I did have some doodles backlogged from ages ago. If any of you are in the discord servers I'm in you've seen these before and can scroll past idm lol. If you wish to continue, join me as I condense 3 months' worth of yapping into one post.
Dave: Mal, I went to the CCC for an interview, and I got this cool hat.
Mallory: Oh man, I gotta see if they'll give me one too.
Bill: You're cursed. Would you like the cool hat or cool shades?
Mallory: Could I have both-
Bill: NO.
Take a Mallory moment before you descend into hell. I'll be waiting~ (More below cut):
OK OK SO BEHIND THE SCENES I HAVE BEEN DOING SO MUCH CANON LORE BUILDING. And by canon lore building I mean hyperfocusing on Rupert, Mallory, and the people they're associated with bc goddamnit if I'm gonna draw, I'm gonna have fun with it.
As a result, I have proceeded to make family trees, ocs, angst art, and cutely finding ways to insert Mallory into pre-BTB lore cuz I love Mallory and I love making them important when they really have no business being there.
For the first comic, I set up Dave's torture lore. Wanna know why Dave's life is so "god's favorite torture city resident?" Mallory. Mallory unintentionally did that. Mallory's curse does cause bad things to happen both to them and the victim of eye-contact. HOWEVER, it is not instantaneous. It can be, but not always. Sometimes it likes to wait and linger until the most inconvenient time ever. (So StD lol. Mallory gets shot and almost bleeds out while Dave gets kidnapped, thank you, narrative. How kind.)
And because I hate my boy Rupert, he has ALSO met Mallory. However, they were vastly different people at the time.
Rupert: GODDAMNIT!! I'm not a fuckin' "chaos anomaly"!! I am NORMAL!! Ya hear me!? NORMAL!!! Stop askin' me 'bout it!!
Mallory: ... (Waaaait a second.)... Why did he leave unscathed?
RUPERT LORE DROP. YEAH, HE'S A CHAOS ANOMALY TO ME. His "final girl" energy and the swap AU I have yet to post about has manifested in my head into "oh yeah he's an anomaly just unclassified." Like, once or twice is a coincidence, but over and over? That's a pattern. A pattern of being the last guy standing.
In my hc canon, Rupert is an unclassified B10-Anomaly. He would be the same "rank" as Henry, but one class lower than Mallory, who is a A5-Anomaly. He is a danger, but to everyone else instead of himself. As a result, if he was classified, he would be pulled from any kind of law-enforcement or military jobs on the basis of regular death and as a result, being deemed a hazard. However, since he wasn't classified (he stormed out of his CCC scanning and avoided the organization like the plague ever since), he was allowed to stay in the force and upgrade to the military.
And since Mallory ain't a snitch (also lowk relating to Rupert), they pretend that he was clean. Rupert has no record of his status because Mallory was scared but also intrigued by him lmao. However, Mal knows he's quirky. After all, nothing bad happened when they made eye-contact, which is why they were asked to interview Rupert in the first place. If things went south, eye-contact could cause incapacitation of the opposite party. Ofc Mal would be hospitalized or smth but that's the price to pay for public safety (woooow, I wonder why they left the CCC, I couldn't imagine).
Speaking of Rupert and his friends~
???: Wow Rupert! You look nothing like your kid self.
Rupert: Tell me about it.
Heh, yeah, my Rupert is trans. This is the future I (the woke left) want 😈😈. Also, he realized he was trans as an adult, both for story reasons and because later cracking eggs deserve to be represented lol.
Bc of this cute thing called genetics, Rupert was indeed a little blond kid before growing up and his hair progressively getting darker. He was always spunky tho, he just became a pissy teen from family problems, school issues, and unrecognized dysphoria lol. After a very violent episode in his early days of being a police officer, he cut off his long hair, and lowk realied he enjoyed it being shorter and more "boyish". He started T at 23 lmao.
As for his family, it does look small, but that's because both parents are partially estranged from their families. They were both immigrants (Maria from the Philippines and Mitch from Australia) who met in California and moved to Arizona before Rupert was born. There, he was born and raised and stayed until joining the military. His family is bigger technically, but he doesn't know any of them.
The other family tree is Johnny! I love Johnny guys, even if he's one of the most nothing-burger guys ever. But it's ok, he's my oomf.
Johnny's family is interesting cuz it can either be one of the most wholesome things ever if he lives, and incredibly tragic if he dies. On one hand, MARRIAGE AND LOVE AND HEALING FAMILY TRAUMA AND A DAD WHO STEPPED UP LET'S GO. ON the other hand, unfulfilled promises, trauma, revenge, and fighting. Decisions decisions.
And uh, Nora and Rupert have beef. At first, it's kinda one-sided on Rupert's end for... reasons, but in IoaS, the beef is crazy and violent and screamy.
Nora, in her grief shows her distain for Rupert (and law enforcement as a whole), by basically saying he should have been the one hit by the rock and turning into asphalt splatter instead of Johnny. And although Rupert defends himself, he can't help but agree with her.
He'll never admit it tho.
Also Fish is back to kick ts outta Rupert. He deserves it for being so interesting to me <3.
???: What are you doing?
Fish: Stress relief.
Oh yeah, and the original Mal comic:
Thank you for reading til the end and have a wonderous day✨✨✨
