In Search of a White Tulip

I don't typically paint with greys and browns so this was Interesting....

Thinking about the twins living with Chuck after Sherman essentially handed over custody for their own safety in main canon (since Sherman is about to dip and potentially make himself a target when trying to fight back the wack shit he started)

After moving to Toontown, Chuck's main occupation outside of passing Cog Nation secrets to the Toon Resistance is being a math tutor to toons; easy to say living with toons is a lot different from working with toons.

confession: when i first saw sherman (animatronic sherman, specifically, i didnt know he was a regular cog until i went to ur toontown tag) i thought he was this evil creepy guy trying to turn cogs into toons

To be fair, he would not be against swapping another cog over to an animatronic, but only if approached and the other cog seems serious about it.

He'd probably do it at low-or-no-cost too just because he personally enjoyed the process of building The Current Vessel™ and wouldn't mind having an excuse to do it again; the only catch here is that he's -very- hesitant about telling the other party that part of the reason he opted to stay a toon in that au was because he gave up on trying to swap back to the og cog body before realizing it was actually better for him to just live that life. So, it might be a one-way trip, but hey, he does technically give em what they asked for.

Some more misc. thoughts about toon animatronic Sherm.

Sherman tends to be physically active, so when he was building the animatronic, he tried to give himself little advantages here and there. One of these features was using the ears as an extra radiator; the fabric for the ears themselves (especially the inner ears) is pretty thin, breathable, meant to swap off extra heat to keep a lower operating temp (only really visible if you're blasting light at them). This was a sorta risky choice though since bigass ears can get injured easier; if sensors catch a drop in coolant pressure, access to lines in the ears automatically shuts off to prevent a leak and to maintain enough pressure to reach more critical components if something else is wrong.

He doesn't fight cogs as much as he used to when he was a cog himself, doesn't really do it for money anymore either, but he would never be a pacifist. If he feels like a cog is a threat he -is- going to throw hands and he's still pretty mean when he does it.

Thinking about the toon animatronic Sherman AU again lol

Searching for a way to transfer back to his og body after fucking around and finding out for lack of a better word wasn't going super well and he ended up putting that on hiatus out of frustration.

Stuck living under the guise of a toon, Sherman went ahead and began to ease his way into toon society working as a handyman. At some point he gets introduced to a recreational hockey team out in the Brrrgh from a client and decided to take a chance, forming a new hobby that he wasn't expecting to love so much.

Laying low as a toon ends up being good for Sherman there; by swapping over to the animatronic, he's presumed to be dead by those who were looking for him since he seemed to abruptly dip from the face of the earth, essentially giving him a blank slate. This doesn't mean his prior actions are to be disregarded because people were trying to snipe him for a reason.

Cue an unrelenting sense of dread since Sherman desperately doesn't want to lose the new relationships he's formed and the community he'd found himself a part of and he knows he'd lose that if they knew he was the same Sherman that nearly ruined everything for the toons. (I say nearly because this AU is a timeline where Sherman pulled back before finding his replicable method for making gag-tolerant cogs)

Really, Sherman is presented with a sense of belonging that he had never felt prior; over time he realizes that even if he was able to figure out what went wrong with transferring his consciousness over, he'd have a difficult time letting all that slip out of his grasp and he knows he isn't ready to confront that.

Something meant to be a companion piece to this

I think Kelvin would be a mycology fan and likes to spend fall mushroom hunting.

Wanted to follow through with the collage concept from Edna's piece; collected leaves from around campus on the last day of class.

Trying to figure out what the twins are about and I feel like Edna would be into scrapbooking; if you're nice, she might put you in it too.

Really wanted to have a juxtaposition of a desaturated toon with bright colors and shiny things; got to whip out some of my paper collection and my little drawer of stickers :^)

small misc. thing but since I've been playing around a lil more recently, if you see this in ttcc, that's me, feel free to say hi 🐰

Goofing around and thinking about how some of the blorbos would write...

Been getting into Corporate Clash recently, had a short change and a tightwad show up in a fight together and I felt a need to scribble down what Sherman's Setup™ is in that context (even though I'm generally working with TTR and TTO lore)

Hey, I just wanna say, I've been following your blog for a long while, and I wanna let you know that everything you post here is a delight. The characters, the story building, the artwork, every little bit of it. Genuinely, I get excited when I see the notification for your blog cause everytime I go "SHERMAN'S POSTING AGAIN". Keep up the fantastic work, buddy.

Good news is I don't particularly intend to stop even if I just kinda powerpoint opacity fade out for weeks or a few months haha

Thank you for the words, I really do appreciate them

My sister recommended me this account and wanted to say that Chuck has rizz

Chuck? Not looking like the grumpiest man ever built? More likely than you think! (He likes a little flattery every now and then, even if he probably has no idea what 'rizz' even means)

Bird jumpscare lmao

But uhhhhh, Thom Fletcher, bodyguard by day and cog-sanctioned hitman after hours. With Sherman out on the loose sniping cogs like a game of Duck Hunt and the Lawbots seemingly unable to secure him through more Conventional Means™, Cog Nation decided it was time to fight fire with fire.

A cog-hired hitman to take out the toon-hired hitman. What ensues is a weird endless game of cat and mouse with both parties ripping their hair out over the ordeal.

Also called "In Which Mr. Williams Inadvertently Gave Cogs the Upper-hand (The Old Man Should Not Have Been Allowed to Cook)"

Anyways wow finally getting around to explaining the Big No-No™ Sherman did that really set things in motion.

So, when Sherman was partnered with the toons, it was known that he intended to try to find a way to make cogs more toon-like as most cogs cannot handle toon humor. At first he thought it was about mental conditioning, and to an extent, cogs gradually acclimated to toon humor could last longer before being worn down, but this was not really an effective change.

Over time, he set his sights towards trying to figure out what Laff -is- and whether or not that can be applied to cogs, after all, Sherman himself is an anomaly that is powered by Laff; to an extent, the story he told himself in his head is that he's trying to give other cogs "his gift." Of course, trying to work off of yourself when it's hard to know if there are other cogs with the exact same defect is tricky. He can't quite figure it out, and it seems that pure Laff itself tends to destabilize cogs, however, he did find something close enough.

By equipping cogs with a supplemental power core utilizing silly particles as a power source, cogs who underwent the procedure would appear to have Laff to some capacity without actually having it. While these cores are vaguely unstable, they were generally safe enough for those cogs to adjust to over time.

Of course, the main thing Sherman didn't bother to think about is that just because you make cogs a bit toonier, doesn't mean they'll do good things with it. While cogs who underwent silly particle infusion were given increased immunity to toon humor and the capability to understand and utilize it, it did not mean that most of those cogs didn't still harbor anti-toon sentiment.

Upon realizing that he effectively just made cogs that were even more capable of harming toons by virtue of being harder to destroy, Sherman promptly ceased performing silly particle infusion procedures and tried to wrangle up prior subjects to uninstall their hardware and revert them to their prior state. Unfortunately, the cat was out of the bag the second a subject managed to escape and fled back to Cog Nation.

Once Cog Nation realized what was done, it was over. Cog Nation had an intact silly particle power core on their hands and they were quick to figure it out. In a matter of months, toons were swamped with increasingly difficult waves of cogs, with future lots being even stronger as manufacturing was gradually refined.

Of course, it was easy to see that all these new cogs had different hardware and it wasn't hard at all to deduce that this was a result of Sherman's work prior, and Sherman himself knew right from the get go this was his mistake the second rumors started passing around.

When the Toon Council sent out rangers for his arrest, they found that Sherman had already run off to god knows where. Sherman knows damn well that he inadvertently doomed the toons, that he cannot return to face them, and swears up and down that one day he will find a way to help them push Cog Nation back despite knowing deep down that there might not be anything he can do to mitigate any of this now.

The War ramped up with the toons having to become even more aggressive to even have a chance against the cogs which results in pretty sizeable chunks of both Toontown and Cog Nation becoming uninhabitable territories that cogs don't view as advantageous to utilize and that toons have a hard time trying to renew and reclaim as habitable green space. It's said there's a ghost in the ruins, really it's just Sherman wandering around sentenced to witness what he put the toons through, still futilely trying to think of a solution that will probably never arrive.

Completely zoned out for the past 11 (eleven) days but I forgot to say I'm doing artfight again this year lmao

Boy oh boy, sir, then the rest of these fellas are gonna be a doozy because this Robber Baroness is not the only one who wants to act out against Cog Nation. There's an entire array of charismatic and fun-loving Sellbots just off doing their own thing facing oppression and judgement from their peers... a small handful of Lawbots faced with the choice of staying true to their morals and purposes, or following the examples of their close friends and rebelling against the unjust system... A particularly itty bitty Bossbot working within the system whose too curious for her own good... more Cashbots struggling to get by in this society of theirs... and a Toon-Made Cog or two grappling with the crisis of who they're supposed to be. It's a lot of fellas, and each and everyone one of them are seasoned with a bit of trauma and personal issues!

I feel like Kelvin and Edna would be shaking hands with the toon-made cogs as cog-made toons. Something something both groups sharing some of the same questions and potentially similar identity journeys

Apologies for the big wall in your ask box, but I'm dying to know the thoughts that your characters (not just Sherman) would have on a particular character of mine. I've got a Cog OC who used to be a Short Change, but the kicker is they stole their way to the top of the corporate ladder, soaring through ranks all the way up to Robber Baron, and not by means of normal promotion. They would sabotage their fellow Cashbots and use their collected assets and even their parts to gain an upper hand, eventually resulting in their high status within the branch. What makes this even funnier is that this particular Cog wants to see the entire capitalist corporation crumble to the ground, and if it means associating with Toons and other suspicious characters, they'll gladly take any opportunity. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", after all.

No worries, I love walls actually, gives me stuff to think about; I'm just gonna answer in text since there's a lot to cover here across four primary ocs.

Starting w/Sherman first since that's the blorbo that rotates in my head the hardest so I sorta Know The Most About That™ in particular at the moment. Can say right off the bat that your OC and Sherman are shaking hands and same hatting on the "Lets see this bitch burn" and the "Time to associate w/toons and other Suspicious People™ on both sides" type thing, but there are things Sherman is a bit hesitant about. Chiefly, the concept of directly going to the top of the ladder. While Sherman did work with people who were higher up (cough cough Chuck), Sherman himself would refuse to work up the ladder.

While being a complete bastard with scrambled ethics, Sherman did hold some weird personal rule of not complying or working with the system he was trying to dismantle, and grinding to the top through any means would go against that one rule he had for himself. Instead, he valued the idea of planting seeds that would potentially disrupt Cog Nation in other ways, chiefly by finding a way to make toony cogs; with a whole generation of toony cogs that don't find any value in upholding cog society, the system would crumble since Sherman thinks that things like Cog Nation and the cesspit of capitalism exist because most of cog society decides/believes in a narrative that upholds it. The way he sees it, things only exist when people believe in something put value into it. Sherman doesn't really have many qualms about your OC running off and using the parts of other cogs given Sherman straight up fights cogs for toons and will use some of those cogs as research subjects or yoink a part here and there for other things. It's just a less savory but mundane part of the job for him.

Second, Chuck. Chuck is interesting because while he opts to defect to join the toons and tries to wash his hands clean from Cog society, he still upholds certain Values™ that aren't super easy for him to shake off even years after the fact. That's partially because Chuck only had the illusion of choice given that Cog Nation would only allow him to avoid getting a death warrant after his involvement w/Sherman if he accepted promotion that would instantly jump him up to be Robber Baron in what would essentially be a renewed vow to Cog Nation. He refused because he recognizes its a society he no longer wants to uphold because he knows what hell toons go through and that he cannot in his right mind perpetuate this shit, so he ran off and bargained his Secrets™ from his time as the CFO's right hand to prove to the toons he's legit in order to find a place in toon society to settle.

Despite this, Chuck has a set of ethics that would despise the concept of stealing your way up the ranks. He was in a hard grind from the bottom to work his way up to where he got, and at one point he would have wanted to be a Robber Baron no hesitation. With time and changed perspectives, he understands that in societies like Cog Nation, a lot of people, especially those in power, do not attain that legitimately a lot of the time. It's a system where many people cheat for power. Chuck's belief in a meritocracy was naive as hell and in many ways detrimental, but despite being aware of that, he'd still loathe thinking about cheating upwards. Additionally, he doesn't mind your OC associating w/toons because y'kno... Chuck lives in toontown. With toons. Raising two toons ahsfgsd... He is side eyeing about interacting with other Suspicious People though. He's tired, the things he did while he was with Sherman was enough for one lifetime, and he knows he wants to hit the bricks if someone is doing something that seems off.

Edna and Kelvin, the kids (as adults) are going to be side eyeing hard. When Sherman left them so they could live with Chuck when they were both pretty young, Chuck made a point to not tell them what Sherman did; he knew they'd find out soon enough from toon society since the shit he pulled was broadcasted, written about, thoroughly documented, dude actually was put on trial in front of a toon court since y'kno... Toontown still technically has laws and a judicial system and he did some Very Not Toony Things.

By the time both of them are adults starting to find their paths (where they're ultimately working together bc they're the twins that get anxious when they're separated too long), they know about what Sherman did and have to live with the knowledge that they are the children of a war criminal and the only person who they can talk about that with is Chuck. They do not know which toons they're working with know that they aren't Chuck's kids, but they're not about to put themselves on blast either, but that's beside the point; Point is that if they knew what your OC was doing, they're not going to vibe. They see similarities to Sherman and they do not want any of that near them period.

To some extent, they're sort of suspicious about cogs coming forward to help the toon resistance as a whole ever since learning more about what was up w/Sherm. They're both mature and know that's a sweeping generalization and that inevitably there are cogs helping in good faith, but the second anyone new comes around, they're on alert. If they knew what your OC was up to, Kelvin is a bit more quiet about his concern but Edna is going to let everyone she can know that she thinks something's up. Enough toons were hurt in the past and she ain't sleeping until she feels a threat has been eliminated.