wassup. welcome to my We Happy Few blog! ā¼ļøNOT SPOILER OR SHIP FREEā¼ļø !!will contain dark and adult content due to the nature of the source material!! ^ please do not interact if you are not comfortable/old enough to play WHF ^ if your favorite character gets nerfed or shipped in one of my fics. i promise theyāre okš it/he ran by jazzedpunk check pinned for more
ok! now that iāve reblogged all the posts i wanted to from my main video games blog, hereās a new pinned post! (will be updated as more tags are made or if info changes)
hi! hereās my We Happy Few-centric sideblog!
i use it/he pronouns
on this blog, i will go by Lightbearer or Joy! (Charlie works too but w/e)
owned by @jazzedpunk / @betty-fandom-blog
i was born in 2002, so yeahš
if anyone wants my discord, here it be!:
@/moosetrackart
meant to add, hereās my AO3:
roenixph0enix
ā
tag list under the cut!
and psst, we're plural, so sometimes you might hear about Sally or others of us!
#from the parade
personal tag
#from the garden
personal vent tag
#from the village
plurality or system-related posts
#from the sandbox
posts relating to my experiences playing WHF
#from the stream
adding this one to separate my stuff about streaming
#blankās posts
posts from my old blog
#saving old tags:
for when iām saving tags from my old blog or previous reblogs iāve done
#self-rb
reblogging from myself
#art
my art
#ocs
my oc tag
#othersā ocs
for other pplsā ocs
#scribbles of a lightbearer
for my writings (scenarios, fanfics, etc.)
#angst
for my angsty writings
#ship post
posts involving shipping of any kind
#rb
reblogging from other people
#not mine
for posts that arenāt mine
#not my tags: / #prev tags:
for when i save OPās or the previous personās tags
#we kinky few
for any suggestive/adult content. block that tag if under 18 pls!
i tag individual fandoms as well as any characters in the posts if i can, just to keep things organized!
posts that are centered around a video or audio track will be tagged accordingly(#video or #audio), and asks are tagged with #ask and either #anonymous or the url of the person asking. links are tagged as #link or #links.
also, any fics i post will be tagged with their titles, so if you donāt like those specifically, then you can block those tags!
Another fanart drawing cooked up! Meet Barnaby Cottonwood, a baker who happens to look very similar to a Bobby, and never hears the end of it. OC does not belong to me, and is owned by @joys-guys (:
š¬ 0Ā Ā š 0Ā Ā ā¤ļø 1Ā Ā·Ā OCs page! I have a different OC/sona I may show off later, but for now have a miscellaneous collection of characters!
^ A
Fanart time!!! Mlp whf OC belongs to @we-joyless-few.. Meet Joy Lightmarer!
OC reference is here https://www.tumblr.com/we-joyless-few/727733203374424064/finally-i-have-a-drawing-of-joy-lightmarer-that-i
š¬ 0Ā Ā š 3Ā Ā ā¤ļø 14Ā Ā·Ā Finally I have a drawing of Joy Lightmarer that I can show you all!! Iāve drawn it multiple times, but I finally drew one
Iāve been gone so long and Iām pretty sure anyone following me thought I died but here I am! Started getting back into whf and drew one of my favourite characters for funsies (used a reference from Pinterest if the pose looks familiar) so yeahhh.. NICKKKK ššš
Been a while but decided to finally draw one of my WHF ocās! He doesnāt currently have a name as Iām still indecisive with my choices, but Iām open to suggestion based off his looks. His whole thing is that heās an āup and comingā musician who puts everything on the line to absolutely destroy Nick Lightbearerās career, whilst stealing melodies in Nickās symphonies at the same time. In interviews heāll go out of his way to paint the most ridiculous pictures and just straight up lying about Nick
I do want to tweak the colours, as his original colour scheme was orange, blue, and a little bit of yellow. And I believe the overcoat is much too yellow.
(my apologies this took so long by the way, had some stuff going on and got distractedš )
Evening Meeting
An unexpected knock came at the Joy Doctorās door in the middle of the night, startling him out of his clinical notes. āYes?ā he called out, receiving a mumbled reply. āYou can open the door, you know.ā As the door slowly opened, the doctor could see a familiar sight: his most beloved constable. āWhatās the matter, dear? You look a bit flushed.ā
āWell, I was havinā to, uh, gather up me courage to knockā¦ā The Bobby fidgeted shyly with the hems of his gloves, a habit that had endeared the doctor to him.
With a chuckle, the medicine man patted his leg, then motioned further for the other to come closer when he just stood there uncertainly. Once the constable was close enough, the doctor got out of his chair and embraced him. A surprised sound left the officer, pulling another lighthearted laugh from the doctor.
Before the Bobby could ask what was so funny, his lips were granted a kiss and his hips were firmly grabbed. A light shudder of surprise ran up his spine from the contact, and his face became even redder. When the kiss broke, he just stared dumbly at the man in front of him, eyes half-lidded and shoulders relaxed.
āThere you areā¦ Nice and calm. Come, sit a while and tell me what youāve been up to. I could really use a break from my notes.ā The Joy Doctor gave the other a soft smile before leading him to sit together on the plush couch along the wall. āIām all ears.ā
The two talked for hours together, entangled in each othersā embrace. After the long days they had, they needed it.
Ofc!!! I'm sooo excited to share all of the ideas I've got brewing lately
Don't think this hyperfixation's gonna die any time soon cause I'm still at Arthur's arc and I wanna make sure I do everything in everyone's arcs and DLCs like the side quests and stuff. There's so many characters to meet and interact with and it's just aaaa I'm so thrilled!!!
The ppl in this fandom are super cool too and I'm so glad my moot Dizzy got me into this peak of a game :PP Really can't wait to make more WHF content!!!
(I hope the shading makes sense here. He's supposed to be resting under a tree and the random assortment of shadows are supposed to be leaves)
I also really like your content too! Can't wait to see/read more about your OCs šš»
hi!! I'm very glad to have come across your blog while I'm re-playing We Happy Few for the first time. I'd love to hear any thoughts you've got on Johnny Bolton.
When I first started actually making stuff for We Happy Few, my primary interests were the Faraday Household and Johnny Bolton.
Obviously the Faraday house gives you a LOT to work with. It appears in all three Acts and has an entire DLC about it to follow up. Bolton also appears in all three Acts (sort of) and features prominently in a DLC, but the actual volume of content is much smaller. And for a spy, most of what there is about him is pretty on the table.
I think it's cool that his "appearance" in the third - Ollie's - Act is actually a "presence of his absence". It is a little undercut by the game's procedural generation, in that because that aspect makes the game buggy, you may not realize that his treehouse being there without him in it is intentional, even despite the tripwire mines he rigged it with. (I also think it's funny to give you the hope of a shop that early in Ollie's Act, only to dash it immediately.) Once you see him again in We All Fall Down though, it all comes together.
He's also one of the few characters who - as much as we're given - has no apparent character flaws. Like, even goodest boy Roger Bacon has his tendency to be a little too adoring of exotic cultures. Bolton, though... well, if you've been here long enough or read enough of the entries on my pinned post, you might know by now that one of the big overarching points of these posts is that Wellington Wells has no truly indisputable monsters or villains except Davey Hackney. Everyone in the town, despite most having no more than two or three things about them, are nuanced and come from understandable points of view if only one cares to look.
By that virtue, though, Wellington Wells should also have no true heroes, right?
I think Johnny Bolton is as close as we get, but it is extremely close.
I think if we'd ever gotten a DLC, we'd find him a little more nuanced, but as it is, the shape of him is that throughout everything, the town's troubles and his own, he alone never lost sight of the greater good and has never faltered in its pursuit. He even ranks higher than Chief Constable Peters on this because Peters acts to the best of his ability to help within the system he lives in, while Bolton goes further and works to dismantle the system itself.
But you have to recall that Peters' background is as a small town constable and so his perspective is proportional to that. He helps as he can, offering small assistance to small resistance. He may not believe that one person can bring the whole thing crashing down. Or he might know that they can, but that the consequences of that crash would be worse than the present and he's not willing to put the people of his town through it.
Bolton was a spy so he thinks much bigger picture though. He sees the world through the lens of international espionage, where one lone agent completing the right operation can change the world. And so he must, no matter the consequences to individuals, because the present regime cannot be allowed to continue.
It's basically that same series of comments you always see on reddit where one guy is like "Obviously, this system isn't working for us. We need to tear the whole thing down and start over" and another guy will be like "You've never lived through a revolution, have you? What are you going to do when there's no food in the stores and no one to collect trash?" And like, they're both right, but eventually you get to a point in the current system where there's no food in the stores and no one to collect trash.
Anyway.
So Bolton this whole time has maintained an unflinching dedication to king and country and this - the Executive Committee, Joy, and the world built around it - is not in accordance with the values he was raised and trained in. Doped up and subjugated is not the way English people are meant to live. If taking meth and orders was what they were gonna do anyway, they shoulda just rolled out a welcome mat for the Germans.
It's really not a nuanced situation as far as Bolton is concerned. Yes, it will hurt, badly so, but it must stop.
And while I do think this is helped by having the apparent mentality of a child, I also think he would have been uncompromising in this goal even without that detriment.
The other characters who voice an opinion on Bolton all suppose that he went "loony". That is, he became the way he is all on his own with no provocation, beyond the usual.
But I have a theory.
It's a tenuous theory because we don't have a lot of other examples to compare it too, but come, stroll along this boulevard with me.
Bolton has not simply gone mad in a nonsensical Alice in Wonderland sort of way, has he? His madness is specific; he behaves as a child pretending to be a spy. The artbook actually describes him as "pretending to be an eight-year-old boy who is himself pretending to be a secret agent." The idea that this is a put-on, that the entire thing is an act to undermine his previously known canniness and conceal his current operations, is really intriguing. I don't think that's actually the case in the story presently, but it might have been at some point, to judge by that particular description. Or it might just have read nicely enough to keep it even if it isn't the exact shape of a thing.
As is, I think he genuinely does have the mental faculties of a child at the point when we meet him as Arthur. He insists on playing Spy with him, but if given any resistance to the game like Arthur coming back without the required quest item or balking when encountered at the end of "Old Soldiers", Bolton will pout and say "If you won't play, I won't play".
What's interesting is, he only does this with Arthur.
Part of it is probably just that Sally's mission with him doesn't afford him any avenue to be denied in this way. She literally only gets to collect Peachy from him and be on her way. His shopkeep lines don't even play for her after she's completed her objective with him (although he will treat her as an agent if you try to shop with him before initiating the quest objective, despite his dialogue about girls not being allowed, which we'll come back to).
I think though that there's another reason.
I mentioned before that we don't have a lot of other examples to compare him to and the one I do have is not one-to-one. It's entirely supposition on my part that they are comparable at all.
Nonetheless, I theorize that Johnny Bolton has been given Oblivion.
The only other example to show us what response to Oblivion looks like is Ollie. And Ollie has not age regressed in this way. But then, Ollie and Johnny are very different people.
Despite his ornery personality and temperamental moods, Ollie is whimsical and at times silly, a former song-and-dance man. He is great with children; he knew Arthur, Sally, Margaret and Victoria all as kids. Arthur and Sally would come over to his house to play, Victoria remembers him quite fondly (presumably from when she would to work with her father). And most importantly to this distinction, a child figures quite prominently in his psyche.
Bolton, on the other hand, was known to be a "quite serious chap" as the former head of the Cryptology Intelligence Division during the war and later the Executive Committee's Minister of Intelligence (or head of counter-intelligence, depending). This is a guy firmly rooted in the seriousness and stakes of the adult world. I suspect this actually makes his mind much weaker to resisting and reconstituting itself after being administered Oblivion, at least in the short term.
Now I'm not saying Oblivion is an age-regression drug. As described, it seems to block out memories indiscriminately but also spottily, making the mind a "church made of cheese and all the congregation are mice," as they say. What I'm getting at is that regardless of what parts of one's memory it ends up taking, the percentage left is probably going to be on par with a child's. It's not that it made these guys into children, but that they largely now lacked their accumulated experiences as adults.
But they also both recovered from this fairly quickly. Not in entirety obviously, but they have both made a lot of progress since the point at which they were given Oblivion. I think the reason is also different for both and that, say, Benedick Keyes will not arrive at it so quickly, if at all.
For Ollie, I think it's that he is, for one thing, pretty used to understanding the world from the smaller capacity of a child. There's a reason so many of our main characters gravitated to him as children. I think it's just inherent to his personality, but I'll go one further and say that his experience as a soldier probably contributes as well. Much like children, soldiers are also helpless to the whims of powers greater than their own. Having been both, he's quite relatable that way.
The other factor for Ollie is Margaret.
He took Oblivion to forget her, but it didn't work. What it did instead was convince him that he had a child he was responsible for. Luckily, Ollie's also apparently one of those people who, faced with parenthood, actually starts to get his shit together to provide. Ordinarily, you might have a lot of time to enjoy the new blankness of your mind, but now he's gotta get food on the table (even if she doesn't eat).
So these things together are why he seems to be doing so well a year out, despite how dire Oblivion is spoken of in the game.
Bolton don't got none of that going for him, but he does have something Ollie doesn't: "a knack for seeing patterns others can't see".
So where Ollie's main motivation in rebuilding his memory is Margaret, Bolton's is a question. Not a particular question, just that being the kind of guy he is and finding himself in the situation that he does, his immediate instinct is to suss out why.
Just the act of trying to piece together a situation, even as a child spy, probably did a lot for his cognition. By the time, he speaks to Sally, he is no longer "playing". He has his kit together, courtesy of Arthur's help, and by Ollie's Act, he has set out on what very probably will be his own last mission.
Speaking of Sally...
So while I was digging up all the lines in the game from Bolton's quests, I found a particularly interesting cut line:
You can't fool me! you're a girl! You can never trust a girl! I trusted a girl once, and she tricked me into going to Dr. Verloc's secret lair! Go away, girl! We don't want to play with you.
See, I've had this theory about Bolton getting Obliviont for a pretty long time, but there wasn't anything really to substantiate it. Because, after all, this line was cut. But it does explain, beyond the regression to boyhood, why there's no girls allowed at the SOE treehouse.
It also coincides nicely with this pensive line from Sally:
Poor Johnny Bolton. I think he even guessed my secret. He could have helped. But he couldn't even help himself.
Prior to finding that other line, I had guessed this meant that Bolton had happened on her out in the Garden District sometime during her pregnancy when she was visiting the Witches. But imagine instead if he figured this out during a failed attempt to infiltrate Haworth Labs? Very intrigue! Especially since, assuming Sally never went back to Verloc after finding out she was pregnant, he'd have had to figure it out before she did, lol.
That's a fun scenario though, isn't it? Sally catches Bolton infiltrating Haworth Labs and lures him into "Verloc's Lair" where he can be made to see reason. I don't think she imagined Verloc would use her Oblivion on him - after all, they're not the bad guys here - but what's done is done. And it's only thinking back on it later that she realizes that Bolton probably also figured out she was pregnant and would have been an ideal person to help her... if only she hadn't helped wreck his mind. Womp, womp.
Well, what can you do? I think people actually already thought he was mad at this point, just not in the way that we come to know him as loony. Like, if you were a Wellie - hell, if you were Victoria - and Johnny Bolton started telling you that Dr. Verloc was planning some super villain shit, what would you think? It'd be like when you try to tell people America is descending into fascism now.
I also think he anticipated this possibility and so left himself clues in such event.
Given the point and place of this, maybe he even did this with Chief Constable Peters' help. After all, aside from Sally, he's the only other person in the game that we know has access to Oblivion. Perhaps it was he who told Bolton it was a factor. All supposition, again, but it's something you can tie them together with red yarn on the conspiracy board with.
You wouldn't guess on first glance, but I think Bolton values teamwork quite highly for a guy who spends most of his time alone in a treehouse surrounded by bees and plague wastrels.
In his dialogue that plays as you approach his treehouse as Arthur,
You won't get away with this, Dr. Verloc. I've come to stop your evil scheme.
Hah! You've fallen into my evil trap.
What's going on? I can't move!
Yes, Mr. Croker. It's my Paralyzing Ray!
But wait! Here's Peachy Carnehan, with his Special Operations Executive Hand Mirror. He reflects your Paralyzing Ray back at you!
Noooo, what are you doing, now I can't move!
The part about the paralyzing ray also suggests that Bolton encountered the same electrified seating arrangement that Arthur did so that just lends credence to a failed Haworth Labs mission. But what's more interesting is that the narrative changes when Peachy leaves for his dangerous mission with Sally.
"Do you expect me to talk?"
"No, Mr. Croker, I expect you to die."
"You can kill me, but you'll never kill Peachy Carnehan! He'll come back and avenge me."
"Maybe so, Mr. Croker. Maybe so. But he is far away, and I have all the time in the world."
This, based on where it is in the script, would have played as you left with Peachy to return him to the puppet theatre.
Without Peachy, the evil Doctor Verloc has all the time in the world to kill Mr. Croker!
A lot of his shopkeep lines also hint at this camaraderie. Like, effectively, most "missions" that he undertakes himself and sends you the player on are solo jobs, but espionage is a group activity. What is James Bond without M, Q and Moneypenny? What is a Kingsman without Merlin? Even WHOOP agents and Charlie's Angels always work in groups of three.
It's dangerous to go alone. And yet, so often he must.
Thankfully, he's also very good at recruiting help. Arthur indulges him for three separate quests, the Mad Haberdasher lets him use his attic as a base of operations, he even gets Victoria to complete his mission by the end of We All Fall Down.
For a mad man, he's quite talented at rallying support. Even outside of the game, I don't think I've ever met anyone who didn't like him.
