What’s one aspect of Shadow Milk’s character you wish the story and/or fandom explored more?
What do you predict the devs will do with Shadow Milk’s character in the future?
What parts of Shadow Milk’s story do you like, and what parts (if any) do you think could’ve been better?
What are some headcanons you have about the blue freak? >:3
Oh GOD yes. RUBS MY HANDS TOGETHER!!!
One aspect I wish the fandom explored more: there are actually a few, but I guess the best summary of it all would be "any side besides the heehee jester"? Like, it's directly stated, repeatedly, and even shown to us to a lesser degree, that Shadow Milk acts differently when Pure Vanilla isn't around-- the implication seeming to be that he's more quiet and cold, and Candy Apple even outright states that he smiles more around Pure Vanilla. His entire thing is knowledge and intelligence; he likely spends a lot of time off camera, so to speak, quietly thinking or planning, or just. Being depressed, honestly.
OH and here is a BIG one that could really go for any of the Beasts, but: the fact that the Shadow Milk we meet is an incredibly limited form of him. Like. Shadow Milk was essentially a god of Knowledge. He himself says that "time and space were an open book"-- but now he's been cut off from all of that, limited severely to the Knowledge he has access to, and can you imagine how horrible and painful and frustrating that must be? Like it's very easy to just focus on the Beasts' thing as being "I NEED MY FULL POWER" in a very typical villain kind of way, but think about it: these Cookies were literally created specifically to HAVE this power. They were built around it. For who knows how many years, they didn't know how to live any other way-- and then one day they all had a chunk of their very being taken away from them. That would change the entire way they interact with the world-- in the case of Knowledge, I have to imagine it severely changed the way he VIEWS the world and how he's able to interact with it. It would be fucking maddening.
What do I predict will be done with him: honestly, I'm not exactly sure how the Beasts' story will play out-- I mean, I'm 100% sure that, in some way, around the next update the Beasts are gonna rally around Dark Enchantress and then she'll betray them. Where things go from there is less obvious-- I definitely do think there will be an "the enemy of my enemy" situation where the Beasts and Ancients have to work together to fight her, and out of all of the Beasts, I think SM and Eternal Sugar are the most likely to willingly work with their Ancient and have a positive relationship with them in the end. After all, they're the two who already have strong feelings for their Ancients, even if SM might have ended up fumbling his.
What parts of his story do I like and dislike: I LOVE a lot of the way the story unfolds, and just how subtle a lot of it is-- there are a lot of things that are blatantly textual but you'd miss on a first playthrough, or would likely not connect simply by how long the story takes to play, so you'd need a second viewing to really piece it together for what it is. Such as the scene at the top of the Spire where Pure Vanilla pledges himself to Shadow Milk, and the way the things he's saying become VERY interesting in light of the stuff Pure Vanilla says at the end about letting Shadow Milk think he'd won-- essentially, he was saying what he knew Shadow Milk wanted to hear badly enough that he would let his guard down on hearing it. There's just a LOT of really interesting stuff going on with the writing of his chapters.
HOWEVER. as much as I praise that aspect. I will say that it doesn't work perfectly for a mobile game like crk with limited stamina jellies and all-- basically, because of the way the game works mechanically, it can fuck the pacing all up and make it easy to forget details or conversations by the time you actually do reach the end, if you play through it normally and not like an insane person, which leads to a lot of misunderstandings and frustrating misreadings among players. I do wish things had been paced out a little differently in that sense, so that there would be less risk of giant gaps of time between scenes that affect or inform each other, to cut back on some of that important information being lost before it's relevant again in the story, y'know? Because most people AREN'T going to be replaying the story or rewatching cutscenes later-- they're gonna come away with just their first impression and let that dictate how they remember the story playing out.
HEADCANONS!! I HAVE A LOT OF THEM. Of varying degrees of importance, LMFAO. I think that he speaks a LOT of different languages, though mostly older forms of them that are kind of outdated now. I think he's genderfluid in the way of him just answering to whatever pronouns the person he's speaking to currently uses for him, and changes his presentation with his mood. A very silly one I made up with a friend is that in his original body, his jam/insides were red as usual for cookies, but when his new body was being made, he had the guts customized blue to match the outside. (Totally pointless headcanon, I just think it's hilarious.)
