forgot i had this clip tbh but like, gem's giggle? the way skizz cuts in with the 'impulse!' that girl showed him the mac & cheese vine on stream and you just know she showed him how good it sound irl too
most imaginative treebarpf soldier: martyn watches old clips of ren singing on stream and then ren streams himself singing a song about a lost love woww
rendog: making up songs for literally anything on false’s birthday and inserting her into a song and conveniently describes her as “shimmering” and “such a lovely face” and “i was thinking to myself this could be heaven or this could be hell” and quickly adding “it’s hell” completely unprompted
#‘does he know he can be bi’ he doesn’t even know he can be straight with false I fear#said this before but he’s doing suppressed homosexual yearning but he. maybe there’s just something really peculiarly wrong with him. god
Obsessed with the "bdubs is actually straight" idea its so funny. Like everyone is busy congratulating Etho on transitioning and becoming comfortable with herself and someone makes a joke about how at least bdubs is bisexual you don't have to worry about him! or something. meanwhile Bdubs is in the corner sweating bullets desperately trying to figure out what to do with his bisexual pride pins. Etho gives him a medal for queerbaiting
“Are you really getting rid of this stuff?” Etho asks, resting her chin on his shoulder to peer down into the bundle. “You’ve had it for so long.”
“Now that I’m officially straight,” Bdubs says, bravely holding back tears, “I don’t deserve it.”
It’s not that Bdubs isn’t happy about Etho’s transition—he couldn’t be happier, frankly, to see her so happy—but it does put him in somewhat of an awkward position. The small collection of pink-purple-blue pins and buttons and flags (okay, only one flag) he’s accumulated over the last decade fits easily inside of one small bundle. He’s just not sure what the heck to do with it.
“Uh-huh. Maybe it should go to someone who hasn’t been queerbaiting me for the last ten years. It’s a shame, actually,” Etho says, and wraps her arms around his waist, breathing a laugh against his neck. “I don’t get to call you a sissy anymore.”
Bdubs decides that afternoon to swing by Ren’s. There’s a few bi people on the server, but he’s fairly sure Cleo and Gem both have their own collections of flagged-up merch, and after them, Ren’s the person he’d trust to take care of this stuff the most. Maybe it doesn’t suit him given his new circumstances (not that anything else would; Bdubs shudders at the thought of wearing anything with that heinous black-and-white straight pride flag), but it does still have sentimental value. Ren’ll look after it, he’s sure.
When he makes it over to the Archives of the Arcane, he finds Ren poring over a levitating tome, a big circle of magic nonsense floating in the air around him. It dissipates the second Bdubs shouts out, “hi Ren!”
“Sir Bdubs,” Ren says, looking up from his book. “What can I do you for?”
Bdubs pulls the bundle out of his inventory and empties its contents over the table nearest to Ren’s flying book. “I have an amazing, one-of-a-kind offer for you. A load of pride stuff. Vintage pins from—from 2015.” Bdubs snorts at his own joke. “You want ‘em?”
Ren picks up a pin and inspects it through his glasses. Then his eyes go wide and he drops it. “Is that the, erm, bisexual flag?” he asks, voice a little high and strained like he’s trying to be casual.
Bdubs nods, and sighs mournfully. “Yeah. My old standard.”
“What makes you think I’m—that?”
Bdubs rolls his eyes. “Are you kidding me? You and Martyn were fa—oh, I can’t say that any more. You and Martyn were doing something back in Third Life. And I’ve heard those Creepr notifications on your comm.”
Reddening, Ren’s hand flies to the communicator burning a hole in his robe pocket, like Bdubs can see the app through the fabric. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ren stammers. “And if I did have an app like that, I definitely wouldn’t have notifications.”
“Okay!” Bdubs says, holding up his hands. “Look, you want this stuff or not?”
“Erm.” Ren reaches out for it, then stops himself. “Why are you giving it away, anyway?”
“It’s a whole thing,” Bdubs says, and sighs. “Since Etho came out, I figured she was the only guy I ever liked. So now she’s a woman, I guess I’m not bi anymore. Which sucks! ‘Cause I got all this stuff. So I want it to go to a good home. You know I got my first pride pin almost a decade ago, and—”
“Hold the phone,” Ren says, frowning. “You and Etho are… dating?”
Bdubs blinks at him. And blinks again. “What kind of question is that? We’ve been together since, I don’t know—ten years, Ren.”
“Oh,” Ren says, frown deepening. Then, “I thought we weren’t meant to date other hermits.”
“Where’d you get that idea?” Bdubs says. “You really didn’t know? I know we keep it low-key, but—”
Ren cuts him off again. “So you’re straight, now. You can be straight.”
“...Yes?” Bdubs puts his hands on his hips. “Look, do you want this stuff or not?”
“My deepest apologies, Sir Bdubs, something’s just occurred to me,” Ren says, pulling his robes tightly around him and heading for the exit. “A matter of utmost importance that I need to discuss with Lady FalseSymmetry.”
Crap. “No, no, that’s not what I meant,” Bdubs says, trying to get between Ren and the door but getting buffeted by Ren’s big hat for his trouble. “First me, now you? No way, man! I can’t be de-bisexual-ising two people in one day.”
Ren slips past him easily and, grabbing the brim of his hat with both hands to pull it down and squeeze through the opening, darts through the door. “Hold that thought, Sir Bdubs. I’ll be right back!”
Bdubs is left standing in the middle of the library with the bundle still in his hands, mouth gaping.
That’s it. I hate myself, he thinks. I’ve gotta be the worst ally of all time.
imo etho regards his own clones as objects/empty vessels mainly & sadly just wouldn't think abt fucking his own clone. however adventures with npc stuff in his modded series suggest a) he thinks it's funny to have copies of his friends around like bdubs in the most recent season and b) willing to program a pseudo gf whatever in the first one. therefore, i think he'd be willing to fuck other people's clones. bc they're objects but interesting ones. run a simulation fine tune the scene. play it back. see how real you can make it. etc.
like i'll concede maybe he fucked around with one in the context of testing shells for future pseudo-hardcore worlds or something in the name of testing body functions but it was more work & less interesting than regular masturbation so whatever. doesn't much think about it. until he's messing with copies of other people and he remembers they can get off and do certain simple actions in loops or whatever. he'd know he should probably feel a little more gross about setting up scenes like that, silent character wearing bdubs' face or whomever, but he really doesn't at all. it's just not that different than a fantasy as long as it stays private. they're like dolls, more than anything, and the differences are obvious most of the time, but when the mental catalogue of little details from fantasies align just right with the knockoff physical forms, well, it's good. who could blame him.
a little more specifically i think he thinks making copies of his friends for modded worlds is just funny, and making a chatbot gf is also kind of funny but the tech for a long time in these unstable worlds aren't good enough to have both sentience and animation in a single body, it's supercomputer or fancy mannequin. those other ethos in the lab with the dreamworld portals weren't him, they're more like mindless beasts. so when he gets back around to the most recent modded series and the dolls are a lot more animated; you still have to script them, of course, and it's a lot like jacklin, but the bdubs he summons to staff his restaurant breathes, that long moss coat swaying as it waits for an input. the voice is all wrong, but there's a moment when it flashes that wide, wide smile at him as it hands over a drink during testing and etho flushes. it's justifiable to keep tinkering, both a test of skill to see how good he can get and how well he knows bdubs, if a little bit of code and a little bit of magic can bring this version of him to life, if he can make it close enough. when he's back on hermitcraft it's so easy to give into the temptation of quizzing bdubs - the real one, the original - so etho can break him down and build him back up from first principles. bdubs starts questioning the questioning but he's easy to placate: etho's just curious. he wonders. bdubs is so private - and there's an argument opening bdubs can't resist, and the trouble is dodged. maybe it's embarrassing, if anyone were ever to know, but he's always been willing to tolerate a lot of cringe to run a simulation like this, so if this bartending bdubs is a little out of character, a little too obliging and lingers too long when handing off the drinks, if etho takes a little advantage, if maybe he picks fantasies that can't be real anywhere else to test how good the simulation is well. nobody'll ever know.
no but for realsies it is always the people who hate us who cause more damage than we ever have. people forcing CCs and their mod teams to view explicit art and fiction? that's not us. that's the people who hate us. people forcing shipping on CCs and making them feel uncomfortable with their own friends? that's not us. that's the people who hate us. im so sick of being blamed for this shit fr.
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