jonesin’ for a fun bag

teddy stilwater music historian just here to draw and talk about my canon ••• “sorry you got a little too into two side characters from a 2006 xbox game” ••• ⚜️ READ MY PINNED it’ll explain this whole blog ⚜️

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⚜️WHOREDMODE DIRECTORY⚜️

I'm Teddy (or you can just call me whoredmode idgaf) and this is my Saints Row sideblog. I post a lot of art, worldbuilding, and I follow my own canon on here. Here's a (hopefully easy) guide to everything on this blog.

Boss Profiles

Summaries of my Rewritten Canon (and AUs)

General Guide to my Tags

Contents on these pages will change as my stories develop, so I’ll be sure to keep y’all updated on any new additions. I’m very talkative about my interests and projects (if my rewrites don’t make that clear), so get used to it. With that in mind please feel free to ask me whatever about my canon, my OCs, my AUs, anything!

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dextroyteros kinda

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“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”

imagine being trapped in a time loop w the guy you hate most

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Johnny wants Anteros to hit him. He wants them to fight each other, pretend it’s the old days, pretend they’re canonizing each other all over again because then maybe, just maybe, things will make sense. If Anteros hits him hard enough then it’ll lodge something loose, he’ll know what he’s feeling. But he cannot make Anteros understand. He cannot make himself understand.

last month i quietly posted a oneshot based on a draft i’d been working on/off for awhile. kinda shared it for one of the rowvember prompts.

read it here if you want!

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love to love you baby

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i think abt them every day

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i need to be insane about dex and troy again. i need to work on that fic

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train of thought i wanna develop more is looking at dex and troy as mirrors of each other in a similar way to how i described johnny and anteros as mirrors of each other. i think in dex and troy’s case it’s more of a search for identity and meaning rather than an expression of grief or one’s own shortcomings, as is the case w johnny and anteros. it’s something i’m still mulling over so i’ll have more usual elaborate thoughts later

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​still don’t 100% have my words yet but. i believe it’s at least somewhat rooted in that dex and troy both struggle w where they are in life at a certain point. there’s a real discontent i think they both feel w what they’re doing, how they’re perceived, uncertainty towards the future, etc. dex is not taken seriously by the saints. he does not want this life forever. even when he gets his ultor job he quickly learns it’s still the same old shit w a different coat of paint, he gets forced into a career he didn’t study for and just has to do it bc they tell him to. troy was forced into pretty much every decision he’s made over the last several years, and he quickly realizes that things are even worse and more corrupted than he thought. what’s the right thing to do? how do i save my friends? how am i supposed to live w myself?

like there is a real recurring theme of choices w these two, i feel like. making good and bad decisions, having to learn to live w what you’ve done. and this isn’t to remove any agency or blame from these two—quite the opposite. they are responsible for the choices they make. which like i said in my original tags, it’s what makes them so compelling under the context of “two guys trapped in a time loop w only each other” bc. if given the choice again, will they make the right one? will we know better next time?

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coming back to this post. i’d argue we can view dex and troy are mirrors in a much more narratively straightforward way than anteros and johnny, and it’s bc dex and troy both play the role of “the traitor,” albeit in their own unique ways.

so this question of perception (and ultimately choice) takes on another meaning when you ask it in the context of a traitor, a betrayer. can the others tell i’m not who i say i am? am i being second-guessed and questioned? are they suspicious of me? who am i gonna leave behind when the inevitable reveal comes? what’s gonna happen to me?

and i just find that interesting. dueling betrayers in a way. and it’s especially fascinating in that five year period between sr1 and sr2 bc life just moves on. we’ve done what we’ve done. are we better off?

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i think abt them every day

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anyway um hi. did yall forget about me yet😭

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idk if theres already a fic or anything but id love to see a fic (or comic or smth) about some detective having to peice together what happened to the gangs from the outside; just news clippings and the jane valderama update

something like that could be so interesting! i am a HUGE fan of unreliable narrators and/or reexamining stories from the perspective of an uninvolved or unaware party. one thing i’ve always wanted to write was something set during sr2 where johnny recounts the events of sr1 (even the parts he wasn’t around for) to shaundi and pierce. one of my absolute favorite media tropes is when characters give dubiously accurate and embellished accounts of what happened (periodically being interrupted by who they’re telling it to ofc).

in this specific case it could be interesting to see the case from the perspective of another detective who works with or under troy. actually worth mentioning this is somewhat reminiscent of how i imagine troy and carmen costa’s dynamic, where she’s like the one person who actually likes troy within the SPD but she is still suspicious of his intentions. she’s technically not entangled in all this but she is witness to troy’s reactions and mental/emotional decline.

especially in the case of sr1, everyone is involved so deeply and emotionally, and so much reporting on it is so biased, you’re really left wondering how those uninvolved came to view it. it’s irrevocably a piece of stilwater history and changed the face of the city forever.

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Hi! I hope I'm not mistaking you for someone else, if you're not the person who loves Troy SR1 please disregard. Anyway.

Started playing the first Saint's Row recently (couldn't put my hands on a working copy 'til recently), and anyway for fun I loaded SR4 to see if I could hunt for easy achievements while listening to homies bantering. And it hit me. You can't call Troy?????? I remembered it was a terrible game but they missed out on BIG convos here it's so sad 😔😔😔

sorry for yapping in your inbox uninvited 🤸‍♂️

I AM! i’m dex and troy’s strongest soldier hi

i’m so glad you finally got a copy of sr1 i hope you enjoy it! it’s a fantastic game that still really holds up. and i agree it’s such a shame sriv doesn’t really do much in the way of bringing troy and several other characters back, even just having more of a conversation about them and how it relates to where the boss has ended up. troy held such an important role in the boss’ life and in the overarching narrative and it’s such a shame he’s just kinda. thrown away. in its worst cases i really do feel like it’s just a complete disservice to the story and world as a whole, but oh well😔

this was a really nice message to see, i always love ppl yapping in my inbox especially about my faves💜

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actually one thing i’d like to do is continue more pixel art (likely in the style of the fake DS game) so w that in mind are there any particular characters you’d like to see? across any of the games

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sorry this is gonna sound mean but you know how nice it is to have someone going thru a tag of mine that isn’t just the johnny tag and nothing else😭 much love to the johnny fans but god it gets tedious when it’s nothing but him in my notifs constantly……but to see dex or troy fans specifically in my notifs….come here…

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honestly i could probably forgive sriv more if it was just. visually interesting. the designs and art direction are so so soooo painfully bland and generic, and i understand production was difficult but god there’s just nothing good or fun to look at with that game. like at least new hades in GooH had something going for it design-wise. sriv we got steelport but worse with boring alien designs and uninspired sci-fi elements to fill in the gaps.

like look my ideal sriv wouldn’t have any of that mess but if we were forced to have a shitty sci-fi fourth game then i’d at least like to see them do something akin to like. gaultier’s costume design for the fifth element. keep up the fashion and sleaze and consumerism of srtt. it could’ve worked!!

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sr1 remaster any day now

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holy shit dex getting to actually read troy’s old reports from sr1/sr2 during the sriv prologue. when they go to his home office and dex starts looking through stuff while troy’s preoccupied w the current case. that would be such a good segue into them both having to come to terms w everything that’s happened. forced to say something about the persistent elephant in the room. did dex find the obituary troy wrote. did he find the old tape recordings. what do you even feel in that moment. so this is where we’ve ended up.