just sorta posting my thoughts after some reflection today. talking about pressure btw.
Ultimately i had no physical stakes in Pressure besides my own emotional investment and some money i threw for merch. I did not have any personal or direct ties to the devs. and i do extend my empathy, and the situation is terrible from every angle, i did not know anyone personally. it is out of my hands, i could not nor can change what happened or will happen.
what i put the most value into is the game itself and the community that grew from it. I held those two things very close, and they were what i was grieving the most when everything fell apart. that loss is what i took the hardest.
but after some reflection and time, I think I can still appreciate the game and parts of the community without directly engaging with material that directly benefits development. that conclusion has been pretty cathartic for me. i can appreciate the characters, the story that was trying to be told, and the people i engaged with before.
this doesn't mean i'm going to support the game or the people behind it, the opposite in fact since that's the last thing i want to do. i'm going to continue to enjoy what this community makes, what people do with the characters outside of the game, appreciate it all independently, and make the most of it.
does this mean i'm gonna be posting pressure again? probably not. if anything i would like to take a stab at a redesign and rewrite actually. I've seen a lot of lovely reinterpretations. But yeah, that's my thoughts.
love you all, thanks for reading.
i was gonna write a long sappy post about how much pressure meant to me and blah blah blah but then I started crying so let’s save that for another day!
here is the absolutely deranged result of over a year and a half of collecting pressure merch/related items thanks to a combination of special interests and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
got questions about it? feel free to ask as i put it away in a box to be suppressed for the next 5 years!
(EDIT2: i'm not fully satisfied with how this is written, but honestly... i can't abandon it in the drafts anymore. the contents of this post have been weighing on me for months and i think i might need this to move on from the game and start posting and creating again. sorry if this is poorly paced and chaotic... writing something over the course of multiple days is hard it turns out)
hello!
it's been a short while and i'll slowly be coming back to life posting and responding. slowly being a keyword.
before i proceed i want to say i'm not posting this to take away the spotlight from ren, especially at a time like this. a lot of untrustworthy docs and videos are coming out from zeal supporters, please watch out for them. additionally, cause apparently this needs to be said, don't favor zeals autism over rens bpd. (edit: wow, an actual zeal doc came out huh? personally i dont think it changes much. my support still goes to ren even if she isnt a perfect victim. also? quite frankly even if zeal didnt commit sa, i think he's an asshole that i don't want to support anyway! but, i don't think his doc should be mass reported like some people are suggesting. whatever our personal feelings are on the matter, he has the right to share his perspective. this isnt a spectacle for us to engage in, this is a discussion about an actual crime.)
this post is something i want to do instead of playing a final run, as im afraid that would directly support the dev team (a psa for you to not do it too. ultimate pressure roleplay can be a solid replacement if you want to say goodbyes to the setting). i want to tie a nice bow on this chapter of my artistic journey, for my peace, since this is probably my last chance to do it. this is going to be a wip/unpublished works dump, something i also wanted to do on the last daily pressure post. granted, i thought that last post would come with me achieving the original goal - getting hrt, but here we are.
as much as i would like to contain everything in a singluar post, tumblr apparently has an image limit... which means this is unfortunately going to be part 1 out of 3, the other two pertaining samuel's design process (a response to an ask that i've been writing for weeks like a dumbass) and the development of sharkbait.
warnings for typical stuffs related to my art, mind the tags please.
i wanted to come here with this post because i've decided that my passion and hard work doesn't deserve to get abandoned and forgotten because of one abhorrent team of developers. nothing i ever made was for their gaze anyway, and with the stuff that's been coming out about the creation of the characters? quite frankly we all indulged in our own versions of the them since forever.
i will not delete any daily pressure posts. the old sebastian design(s) can now be considered detached and i take pride in knowing he would probably bother the devs to hell and back. that being said, he is still going to get a redesign, but slightly more on that later.
first wip i would like to share (even if its chronologically incorrect) the most is something that i've been meaning to finish since early, EARLY 2025. a butcher vanity animation for a timeline in which sebastian caused the lockdown because urbanshade cut down his rations, causing him to start starving. i never got around to finishing it, but i was planning to sit down to it this week, before the document was released. obviously i'm not going to do that anymore, but, even if it's severely unpolished, i want it to finally be public. it's so special to me despite it's neglected state.
it's rendered in really low quality, part of why i never finished it (this and my seb design changed quite a bit). my computer went through a reset and the entire davinci file got corrupted. i still have the separate layers, i could've upscaled them, but never had enough motivation for it. even still, even if it's old, im proud of what was done for this animation... and hey! you can observe the old way i used to draw sebastian!
actually... i want to show some of my old 2024-early 2025 sebastians. first and final trip down the memory lane, once again something i was dying to do for the last daily pressure post.
this is my earliest seb! all the way back from 2024. i quickly scrapped this design, but i find it funny how the big coat collar stayed with him till the very end.
back then i wanted him to look really ill and rugged. i still kind of go by a similar sentiment, but i figured this design didn't really fit someone who "tries his best to take care of himself". also he just kinda... looks as if my brother and a turtle had a baby? this made drawing him really awkward.
fun fact though: the 3rd hand got recycled for my snoutbastian.
sebastian from early 2025. a design made specifically to be animation friendly, i'm still quite proud of it. especially of the way i managed to simplify his palette.
this one is going to come up again in samuel's post.
i actually did get to animate him, but i can only add one video... so i included screeshots of the animation. it was really choppy anyway..
i don't think this needs to be said but, this one got ultimately scrapped for an opposite reason to the earlier one - i thought he looked too tailored and "pretty". which is a nice way of saying "i didnt like the fact that he looked like a twink".
imaginary friend + 3rd design. the last 2 pictures arent related btw..
first 4 drawings are actually my first ever attempts at creating rigs. i didnt get to use them at all though, because of the reset... but im not sure if they even were truly usable. besides that though, you can really see my recent sebastian design start to shine through these drawings.
the image at the very end was one of, if not the last drawing i tried to finish before falling into burnout for 8 months. which means the next wips will be,, more daily-pressure recent.
except for these 3.
these sebs are from the time when i didnt draw, but not quite late 2025 yet... im not sure when these were made. i know i made the first one while on a train and the other ones during some family gathering, which means they were probably drawn between january and easter.
getting really close to my tumblr resurrection, these sebs are slightly from before i started posting again. these were my first attempts at drawing for fun after months of break!
you may think i intentionally came back to a more standard build for him. that'd be wrong though, i just genuinely didn't know how to draw a different bodytype at the time, i think. it's weird to see him in this kind of... in between state.
i guess it's now time to move on to daily pressure runtime period. there's not going to be much to find here though, visually. most of what i drew ended up being posted anyway, even if i didn't like how it came out.
the comic visible above is very unfinished and will forever stay that way, but im really proud of these panels... especially the way i drew his hair. he's still kind of inconsistent on the face here, but i guess in a way that's a struggle i still have, even after all this time, so...
and here's some sketchbook drawings. to give context to the last 2, it was my at-the-time roblox avatar/pressure sona, my friend as ikari shinji and well. sebastian as himself. this family was kind of a running joke between me and my friend whenever we were playing. i got stupidly attached to these idiots..
there's more stuff like this. some, scribbles that don't need any spotlight. others, related to samuel and sharkbait, i will show in separate posts as said earlier, only because i've reached the limit of images on this one.
i do want to talk about projects that i never got to even sketch out though,, ironically because these were the ones i was the most passionate about. i got intimidated by the possibility of messing them up. heads up, a lot of those ideas were conjured while i was pretty unstable, so while im doing okay now they will get dark.
isolated ideas: bodypillows for seb and samuel that i actually planned to make real, hq seb rewrite that would base on the idea of painter causing the lockdown and seb being sent to "terminate the rogue ai" (sebastian would get a new title of "urbanshade's leviathan"), expendable x everyone engagement bait kissing game, custom expoteur music album (mostly focused on the visual side of things - posters, stickers, a custom disc ect, but i planned to just include their playlist on the cd with voice lines mixed into the songs), samuel rp blog, comic archive website, more samuel badges (this including a "free the saboteur" one which would have a small 2 panel comic attached), "death of z-r" animation which would depict seb on a mission to kill z-r while the machine begs him to turn back or it'll be forced to get rid of him in self defense (it would use the track human factory from doai), something about how z-r used a broken wire to burn a ring-like scar on seb's hand since they didn't know how else to show affection in a 'human' way, samuel written content (i actually have one of those pieces completed, but i am still to embarrassed to post it publicly,,)
comics: The expoteur comic continuation (in which sebastian doesnt remember what happened and is very confused as to why expendable is acting so off), a very detailed comic about sebastian feeling like he's a parasite utilising a corpse to enact revenge on urbanshade (i wanted to explore the sensation of feeling a ghost in your own body that atp feels like a strangers carcass and sebastian's unique approach to that - using this flesh as a tool in a fight for freedom while desperately looking for pieces of himself in it), samuel's first breach attempt (them slowly gaining control over scientists, displaying the full extent of horror hidden in his affection. it would contain a lot of scenes of honest bonding that would later be twisted into more sinister scenes), samuel's "painting experiment" comic (one of many samuel sub-stories i wanted to create, this one was specifically about documenting how samuel's art would change the more they mutated, getting more and more abstract and all. the experiment would have to be cut short after it was discovered that samuel was sneaking his saliva into the paint, making everyone in the process more vulnerable to his powers or already in the process of assimilation. also just really wanted to show him slowly losing his humanity, not being able to hold a paintbrush anymore cause it'd be too small and resolving to drawing with fingers, ect...), sebastian's crashout about painters suicide attempt (now thats a heavy one, i think. i want to mention that i do not think seb's actions here are morally correct. i wanted to explore handyman sebastian's uglier feelings here. the comic would assume that the two have already known eachother prior to the incident, but weren't even all that close. sebastian would break down yelling at painter at daring to try to take the "easy way out" while he would be forced to stay locked up alone, because urbanshade would probably just bring him back if he tried the same method of escaping. basically sebastian calling both painter and himself selfish, telling him to not try again and that if theyre going to escape, theyre gonna do it together. because there's no way in hell he's going to allow painter to make him alone again. and well, since they can't exactly die together to escape, i guess causing a lockdown months/years later would have to suffice)
the oc interactions that i had concrete plans for: there was an ask a whiile ago that i got really REALLY excited about and it was about samuel coercing an expendable into cannibalism and then holding it over their head to isolate and assimilate them (its in this category and not above because i wanted to twist this into a comic with @elf-ishhh's philo! i even had a script written out but,, as most samuel works it was meant to depend more on facial expressions and gestures, so the script alone looks kind of ridiculous), some kind of a comic exploring how samuel would go from negative obsession over @aspiriphim's cedar into a more 'positive' one (inspired by the fact that post sebastian assimilation cedar apparently gained a tendency to mimic his mannerisms! obviously assimilated sebastian is basically fully rid of those and i always liked to imagine that one of the last things samuel would say to him before hiveminding would be "i'm going to miss your attitude"... what im getting at here is samuel would involuntarily look for a replacement in cedar and both sides of this situation would have negative views on that)
(i hope you two don't mind me pinging you here, but if you do i'll get rid of these or the entire section!)
and... that's all i can think of right now. i know this post's flow breaks here very abruptly, but truthfully i finished the last part of it 2 (EDIT2: 4, actually) days after it's initial creation. writing this just makes me so immensely melancholic.
it's kind of weird to say this here, considering there's going to be 2 more posts after this one (when i get the guts to write/polish them), but i think it'll be fitting only in this one. this is a slightly altered version of a personal note i wrote to myself to process what happened, as my final message about this case and daily pressure:
"in all of my years of content creation, i don’t think i have felt this backstabbed. and i know that i should've moved on to the stage of anger by now. i briefly had and i, indeed, feel furious about certain things. but i can’t help feeling just... disgusted. which is why as of right now, i've decided to try and remove myself emotionally from this situation that doesn't pertain me in the slightest. my feelings and opinions on the matter are ultimately meaningless and all that's important is that i support the victim. and endless doomscrolling and feeling guilty about creating anything is not going to help that effort.
it still stings, though. i have never been this consistent in anything. i think pressure could count as my first true, prominently lasting interest. i know that if all of this hadn’t transpired, i would’ve kept creating for this community for years to come.
i’m disappointed, utterly so. i’m mad at myself too, for not having enough motivation to finish projects that are now forced to rot with the game they were attached to. i wish i could feel revolted at the mere mention of the characters and the setting in the same way i am when i see any mention of the devs, but first and foremost they make me feel empty, like something is missing. like deciding to visit your old school only to discover that the building has been abandoned for years. i guess i’m a little torn. i don’t want to let go and yet i dont want to have anything to do with it.
i always knew the developers were shady. i know it’s easy to say now and feels like a cop-out, but it’s true. and it makes everything feel even more scummy. i gave these people the benefit of the doubt just because i loved their creation. is that really enough to buy my support? jingle some shiny set of keys in front of my face?
i withheld from monetarily supporting them and even buying fan merch just in case, until recently. i decided to take a leap of faith, trust them finally after all this time. dammit, i even got the sebastian plush! i’m so fucking happy i bought a used one, now.
let's face the facts, we were all played. that leaves such a sour taste in my mouth. for christ’s sake - these people hated our guts. they hated the creativity, personal interpretations, humor, passion. they wanted our interest and adoration only when it meant benefiting them. i feel awful that i ever gave them attention.
i agree with gianni, ultimately it’d be for the best to let the game perish completely, stop talking about it, stop engaging with the story and characters. but for now, i’m not strong enough to do it. which is why i don't judge anyone else who's in the same boat (please don't actually play the game anymore though).
my sebastian is mine and mine alone. he’s also the community’s. my art of him and every other character will stay public as a testament to how much passion i can have for the things i love, and as a symbol of connections made over this shared excitement. there will never be a moment when i will feel distaste while looking at this specific version of him. i’m reclaiming my own attachment and engagement. i didn’t do anything wrong adoring the game and the character and quite frankly neither did any other fan. we were all lead on.
i’m so proud of ren for coming forward about her experiences. i’m glad she unveiled the truth, i hope she doesn’t feel guilty for it. we will get through this loss, but she will have to live with the real trauma forever. it's good to know she's doing okay and got the help she needed.
i’m glad she revealed the ugly side of this game and it's authors. we’re not being lied to anymore and she can get the justice she deserves. please read her new document when it comes out and keep spreading the word.
fuck zeal. fuck the other devs and anyone else who might’ve been involved in covering up sa, scamming fans, making queerphobic moves, racist creative choices, everything. from the deepest depths of my heart, you enrage me.
i guess that's all to say, i'll miss this game's community. it felt like the corner of the internet in which i belonged, some grounding comfort amidst the chaos we all live in currently. i know i'm not alone in this.
may pressure and it’s past rot and become fertilizer for new creations to sprout out of the ground. there's so much talent and creativity here. please utilise it, keep creating. tear apart what we used to love and tailor it to your own vision if you must. i know i will be doing it."
thank you again for sticking around till the very end of daily pressure's journey, this experience will be cherished by me forever. i know this was just a silly doodle series about a dumb roblox game, but it does have a lot of sentimental value for me. i would've never thought myself to be capable of doing something like it and yet i pushed through. i would've continued to do so if this didn't happen. im proud of myself for that. (on that note, please don't console me further. i'm alright and i've recieved so many kind words already, i will soon start responding to them. direct this energy into supporting the actual victim instead of a guy who's favourite toy was rightfully thrown in the trash.)
to those who will decide to keep following my art, see you soon (i hope). i have a story i'm writing and other fandoms i've neglected. you'll keep seeing certain fish faces around still, even though they won't quite be their past selves anymore. as i said, i am cooking something up and recycling old ideas for it.
to those who are going to leave, thank you for your interest regardless! enjoy your other passions, there's a whole big world out there outside of this fandom after all.
to both, take care of yourselves! keep hearing out ren, keep creating and keep being passionate!
zeal is disgusting and a vile person. i am giving ren my full support during this time. my thoughts aren’t very organized, but i think it goes without saying that i will not be posting about pressure on my blog anymore because of what came to light.
i will likely take a hiatus. those who know me understand how much time, energy, money and love i dumped into this game, and consequently how hard the news has hit because of that.
i’m still in shock, and working through grieving, so apologies if this is bare-bones and not well formatted.
please support ren, that is what is important right now.
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