"You are on the verge of crumbling...
What happened to you...?!"
✨ hello and welcome to my little lily garden! here is where i post random doodles, writing, and rambles for the funsies. this sideblog is mostly related to crk, but my other interests bleed through at various points.
my thoughts are VERY unhinged, so they'll come out as spur of the moment word vomit... typically as philosophical talk that may or may not make sense. also a big fan of pureshadowsugarlily (yes you heard that correctly) or any pairing within it. as well as many others because i love multishipping!!! i like to do it because i love exploring weird and convoluted and complex character dynamics :3 see this post for what i mean by it!
(would doing this be called... charanamic? character + dynamic? i don't know... i need to come up with a term for this...)
✨ my posts will all be SFW but horror/gore and other dark topics may be mentioned... You Have Been Warned. (warnings will be tagged when appropriate! apologies if i forget anything x_x)
✨ please refrain from reposting my art, thank you! (reblogs are always welcome!)
there's way more fun and better things to do than start discourse/drama, so click away if you need to! no pressure to stay - curate your online experience! we're just here to chill and have fun🤍
Askbox is OPEN! (it may take me some time to answer asks depending on how busy i am)
If you'd like to send me gimmicks, here's my strawpage!
I like that guy as much as the next person, but the amount of promo/videos/etc he’s getting is like eating the same food over and over again. You might love the food starting out, but you’re gonna get sick and/or want something else eventually.
This isn’t from a story perspective btw, though part of it bleeds into that. I’m moreso talking about exposure by Devsis themselves. I fully believe the marketing team are capable of letting other characters have spotlight, this isn’t about in game narrative or anything. but they know which one draws the most attention. they will keep making shadow milk cookie youtube videos and miscellaneous promos with shadow milk cookie in it. people will continue to eat it up. and good for them! but some people will also grow tired of seeing him
Pure vanilla is a casualty of this overexposure, imo. With Shadow Milk everywhere, the quickest and easiest thing to guarantee more eyes is to put him with his ancient counterpart. the great thing about pure vanilla is that he's friendlier and less bombastic, so he's easier on people. I haven't really seen people complaining about too much PV everywhere.
the problem is that he's a little too attached to shadow milk's hip at the moment. their dynamic is fun, but Pure Vanilla has characterization outside of being Shmilk's adversary (let alone his plight with White Lily, but i digress). And the more you keep mashing these two together over and over and over, the more tired it gets. Pure Vanilla is associated with Shadow Milk and vice versa, and when people are already tired of one character, the other, by association, risks that too. Shadow Milk and Pure Vanilla get butts in seats, pencils on paper, and tags in the algorithm. But at what cost to either of them, and to the people (us) constantly seeing them?
like using the food analogy again, some people can be content with eating the same spaghetti with marinara day in and day out. but some people want fettuccine alfredo or pesto tortellini. shake it up a bit before everyone gets tired of your pasta
Pertaining to Shadow Milk’s role in the narrative: You can have an elaborate plan for a story years and years in advance and still fumble the execution
Even if Shadow Milk has been built up for a long time, which I don’t doubt to a degree, the way Devsis have been presenting him in-game and out is not appealing to everyone. Which, of course it isn’t, as nothing can appeal to everyone—but the issue is that they seem very excited, a little too excited to push their character out into the world.
It’s like if during Gravity Falls’s run, Bill Cipher got tons of official promos and episodes where he spent half the runtime monologuing. Then Disney put his face on all their marketing material. Surely Alex Hirsch had a very detailed plan for Bill walking in, but with him being literally inescapable, people grow tired of seeing him. The mystique of Bill Cipher came from how little of him we saw despite his importance to the lore. Shadow Milk had that potential but it was pretty much squandered after chapters 7 and 8. (imo, Shadow Milk was at his most engaging and mystical when we had less of him. The time between his introduction in BY 1 and 2 up to BY 7 and 8, when his presence was strong but not too overbearing)
Shadow Milk’s staying power is undermined by how Devsis chose to write him and promote him. In game, he is extremely dependent on long dialogues and/or lots of screentime, to the detriment of most other characters in the same scene as him. In promotional material, Devsis are getting dependent on him to make money. We’re seeing him everywhere, and while some people will eat it up, a lot of others won’t—and therein lies the diminishing impact of the years of planning the writers had done for this character. No matter how detailed your story is, a reader can still drop the book at any time
TLDR: Shadow Milk would ironically benefit from being in the spotlight less. Devsis’s overdependency/overenthusiasm to promote their new golden boy has the potential to do more harm for their narrative than good
Okay actually last LAST thing I think I’ll say because it’s important
👉 it is OK to like shadow milk
👉 it is OK to like where the story is headed
👉 it is NOT OK to bully the people who like those two things
👉 it is just a game. no matter how much investment you have in cookie run kingdom, no matter how valid, at the end of the day it is just a game. it is not life or death and it should not be life or death
👉 and you are ALLOWED to be critical of the media you enjoy. in fact, you should be more critical of the media you enjoy
Honestly I think people are more than in the right to be upset over how White Lily's character ended. Like okay sure it was always going to end like that logically (though it was really easy to just... find a loophole),
The issue is that you can't just make a character who's extremely mentally ill and suicidal have an arc where she realized she needs to move on from her faults, needs to forgive herself and allow herself to finally be happy after everything that happened, and then give her an ending where her death was the ONLY possible way she could "attone" for what she's done. You. You guys do understand the issue with that, right. "It's a cookie game" I cannot begin to stress how common it is in media for people to kill off mentally ill characters that were starting to heal as a way to end their stories. And I cannot begin to stress how awful of a message that is. It really is kind of a big deal
alrighty. some of my thoughts on episode 15 below because i have learned that I need at least a day to process things before i start to spew nonsense that could be taken the wrong way and i should take a step back and collect my thoughts properly!!!
And i'll preface this by saying, i do genuinely think that with more time they could've executed this whole war arc better. i wholly understand that the devs are a TEAM, are on a pressuring time crunch, and more often than not coming to agreements in a large group is difficult in a lot of cases, and what's done is done, and cannot be undone - but alas i hope they highly consider the feedback and take it in stride for the future, because their team is full of so many talented people, and they're clearly capable of excellent writing as they had done in the past.
episode 14 is the best episode in the war arc by a long shot and there was so much potential for the finale to match it but i digress. i don't think i can say anymore on this for now
i DO like the format of versing dark enchantress and Losing On Purpose. i didn't get it at first but i thought it was funny lmao. also the AVATAR versus dark enchantress was entertaining. i like they're doing different formats with the cutscenes as well like incorporating the skill effects and stuff. pretty minor things but it's cool
good execution of DEC UP until lily's confrontation with her. and i think this is where i go into DEC's character because she fascinates me (as with lily if you can't already tell)
since crk is a more of a "wide-range audience" i feel like they ended dec on the sort of classic disney villain trope where they get defeated by the protagonist and vanish/die after terrorizing every living being in existence. which felt rather... underwhelming? kind of? might explain this in another post.
and while i DO agree that lily taking down DEC came full circle for her, i think that bringing herself completely down along with it in the hopes of cookies of the future taking a better path than either of them is not exactly the right course of action here
i wonder what message the writers wanted to convey with lily going down this route because her Being Dead for atonement is something i don't really have energy to dissect at the moment (other than destroying me emotionally) but with the potential interpretation of sacrificial suicide being "freedom" is not exactly how it should be done in this way.
because by this, it can mean that anyone (including those who are suicidal) who has made a terrible mistake they cannot exactly take back should deserve to die, or shouldn't exist because it would ruin everything for everyone else. whether or not someone "deserves" death for their wrongdoings should not be taken lightly, and thinking that it's the only option is not true.
had saint lily inevitably started the conflict of the ENTIRE GAME and dec took countless lives? yes.
should they both deserve to die so it could resolve everything?
...it's entirely possible for someone to be given a chance to heal while still being held accountable. their path would become one of learning to deal with that matter, of learning to live with your mistakes, but it's a path they could go down regardless.
did the writers ever think of this option....?
...i honestly don't know. but i hope they learn to acknowledge that they've made this connotation to avoid repeating it again.
aside from that, the light of freedom and silence merging into a new cookie-soul-thing is incredibly intriguing. while both lily and salt are gone i don't think this is completely the end of the line for them - or their souls? their soul jams are still incredibly life energy-infused objects (even if they were... drained...) so even if their bodies were gone the soul jams would still remain behind... and their souls.
also this thing is just genuinely so fucking pretty. I want to learn more about it so BAD.
also with shadow milk mentioning to salt that they could meet again in another timeline... i could say more but i dunno. the odd dilemma of valuing the life in a timeline if another out there exists...
i could say more on the shadow milk escaping and fucking over the timeline but i suppose we'll just have to see what happens. don't wanna jump to conclusions before the Big Picture is completed and just base my assumptions off of what we have.
though i do hope shadow milk gets his shit rocked by timekeeper LMAO he'll have it coming for him
in the end, despite everything that happened, i just feel so bad for pure vanilla 😭 he has gone through so much anguish he needs a hug 💔
i hope the april update does something about the aftermath of it all, because it felt a little too cut and dry without actually seeing the cookies' reactions.... and the other beasts? what of the other beasts in this timeline??? please don't just leave them there rotting away...
deleted my other post about the update because i realized (after i made it on a very, very bad whim) that lily's death has a MASSIVE suicide connotation (amongst other things) because of how it was written. and that is something i do not want to endorse or glorify! /gen
enormous oversight on my part, and i sincerely apologize for that, i genuinely never wanted to have that kind of interpretation.
i'll explain later in another post (in a bit) more clearly because i apparently cannot trust myself to do shit at 3am when i try to thoroughly look at things from different perspectives and come to a decent conclusion.
in general, i'd say they're very nuanced ships! which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can deter a lot of people based on their tastes and personal preferences. they have Sides You Cannot Ignore and this is often what sparks up the controversy around these kinds of ships.
ship discourse has always existed since the beginning of fandoms but with the rise of puritan culture it's gotten Worse. sometimes people send threats to each other over liking/disliking certain ships (especially bxa) and it's honestly disheartening people will go far lengths to try and "punish" others for having such opinions. and i'm not saying one's opinion should be diminished for being "bad", but it's the fact of trying to harm someone over it is Irreversible and has Consequences.
aside from that, i see shipping as more of a possible dynamic/connection exploration rather than in terms of romance (like i said here a while back!) so the beasts/ancients having a lot of complex interactions/parallels/philosophical connections... gives me a lot to feast on!
while there is a line to be drawn depending on where you see fit, it's kind of just Something that can't exist with a panacea. it's something that's not for everyone and that's Okay - but as long as people are civil about it with each other it's good enough for me.
pure vanilla: he's super adorable, i Love him. (and i'm not exaggerating. every time he was on screen for the millenial advent update i'm just so Gleeful. i want to give him a big hug) he was a general favorite of mine before but Now he's a big comfort character for me after his awakened form got released.
i think what really got me though was how he uses a lot of metaphors of his own experience with the truth. the way he says it is so tranquil and kind of just... magical? there's a certain sense of Peace he exudes that i often forget about, but always draws me back in <3
hollyberry: i have a very Fond memory of getting BOTH pure vanilla + hollyberry in the same ten pull when i started the game.
(taken on march 8, 2022. crazy how time flies)
anyway. hollyberry's always been a neat character for me but BY-9 and 10 gave me a whole lot more respect for her. i like her dynamic with wildberry and pitaya dragon a lot. i also find her pretty relatable as well - running away as a sort of ignorance because other people can take care of those problems... it's fine... they don't need me...
dark cacao: i have a History with dark cacao. he's super cool - i joined the game right at the end of the first anniversary, so i was there for his ENTIRE update and he remains Nostalgic to me. also idk if it's just me but I pull him the most from the gacha for some reason??? i have him at A2 as a F2P after like almost 4 years. also the dark cacao cookies are some of my favorites by his introduction. i LOVEEE affogato and caramel arrow a bunch, along with crunchy chip.
i need to Go Back and really Reread but fascinating how he doesn't want to be forgotten by his subjects... or anyone, really. he highly treasures effort and a sense of self, wanting to have future generations remember his name... likely to inspire them to have the same amount of determination he has.
golden cheese: she's a very strong character!! golden cheese is awesome. really fascinating that they went a technology-route with her character for the first update because i still remember for the longest time (before her release) everyone is like "where is golden cheese at" and all this time she's been Managing her Server underground. was also there for the bspice update + her awk update, and i like they brought back smoked cheese for it, especially after the events of crispia 18. admittedly i don't have much to say about her right now, but she's cool!
saint lily: it's a no-brainer that she's my favorite LOL if it wasn't obvious enough. i already liked her a LOT in general before, but it started getting Worse when the silent salt update came out and my fixation Whims ensnared her like a mantis with its prey. she is an excellent morally grey (female!) complex character. she's a bit of an Enigmatic Contradiction but it's what entices me. We Need Dissonance.
though, it's a bit of a double-edged sword, as admittedly (even though she's my favorite) she is HARD to write. mostly because she hasn't had enough characterization as she should, even with how important to the lore she is, but her character is also extremely convoluted and unique that it's hard to pin her down right away. BY ep 12 finally gave a lot of answers to the questions surrounding her character, but i'm a bit frustrated it took this long to actually know more what she's like as a person. she's so elusive, narrative and character-wise sometimes i feel a bit crazy for wanting more content/a clearer explanation on her but we don't get anything😭
i would do an entire character analysis right here right Now but i feel like it'd be too much under this one post (also i'd sound like a deranged maniac JHASLDJASKL). but i think my little analysis under this old post kinda sums up what's been missing from her character for the longest time, though it's missing some stuff i want to write down later
bugs!!!! the beasts are all Bugs to me even though their current designs strayed away from that concept <3
but! i suppose if i wanted to give my thoughts on each one:
mystic flour: her concept of apathy has always Intrigued me but i haven't gotten around to REALLY analyze her. thinks she has cookiekind's best interests in mind from her own values but actually doesn't, after having been desensitized to everyone screwing her and each other all over and over.... i love her a lot, her design is really pretty 💖
burning spice: him being the herald of Change already has me balling my fists (/pos) but his perspective on it leading to Destruction is fascinating! i need to Philosophically Dissect his character a lot more. his take is a bit more on the side of getting so lost in "metaphors" and whatnot that they eventually lose meaning... so he strives to create meaning by his own hands.
shadow milk: there's enough that's already said about him but i think i find his voice to be particularly enticing. his eng voice is really amazing, but i absolutely love the way his japanese voice laughs...
also Shadow Milk is a Beetle to me now and forever. snake? wolf? amazing, but he is ultimately a beetle.
eternal sugar: my favorite beast out of all of them <3 there is a Certain philosophical concept ive started associating her with and it's Only Getting Worse by the day. analysis on that coming fairly soon
silent salt: i like how he isn't inherently "evil", but i also LOVE how he isn't entirely morally the greatest either. consumed by his own judgement and beliefs and killed without a second thought, while still harboring appreciation for cookiekind itself that it all became twisted into Revenge and expunging evil... augh salt i want to pat you gently a million times on the head. excellent morally grey antagonist.
A couple refs for A Lily’s Soliloquy! The only major one that looks different from her normal form is White Lily because there’s not much changes to the Virtues… so you could technically use their OG sprites. I kinda just wanted to redraw them in my style hehe
Also I did some concept sketch CG’s under the cut as well!
nothing is definite because they’re still kind of only vague ideas in my head atm, but i hope to take this somewhere later on!!! :3c
hmm, that's a hard question! while episode 12 is up there for me (for obvious reasons) episode 8's story has been one of my favorites since it came out!!! it was what actually got me REALLY fixated on the game again, i haven't had such a big fixation on crk since like 2022 when i first started playing
shipping aside, there's something about the dynamic depicted between pure vanilla and shadow milk that just STRUCK me at the time... it's mostly due to a bunch of factors but the multiple times pure vanilla catches shadow milk completely off guard really did it for me lol. and with how gentle he was... and reaching out to shadow milk at the end...
The lore around the cakes in cookie run is SO untapped it's a crime, they were made to be eaten by cookies but even the cookies were loved more and they got their own freedom and worlds and culture while the cakes were left to die, no wonder they were so willing to work with dark enchantress against them
PREACH!!!! i honestly hope they address this more before the DEC storyline ends, the cakes have SO MUCH potential and we need more playable characters who are cakes, not just npcs (even if it's called COOKIE run kingdom). i'd actually like to see a cake hound that's a playable character even though it's pretty unlikely 😭🙏
and it's really sad that DEC is lowkey turning against them now after essentially gaining their trust and freeing them at first 💔 even if it's part of her "grand plan for true freedom" to destroy and eventually rebuild the world from the ground up, betrayals like that are NOT easily forgiven. the cakes deserve justice after being shunned and treated as "the enemy" and need more love for being such fascinating and unique creatures... i hope we get to see more of them lorewise in the future
