Ok I’ll be totally completely honest I’ve been WEIRDLY nervous about posting this and I DONT KNOW WHY
But here is FINALLY. FINALLY the long awaited somewhat joke somewhat serious analysis/theory that Bitores Méndez and Luis’ Grandfather had something going on between them
Again just take this post with a grain of salt, I’m just here to have a little bit of fun but ANYWAYS
My first point; It’s canon that Luis grew up with and almost treated Bitores Méndez as somewhat of a father figure; this was apparently true for most if not all of the children in the village, but Mendéz seemed to have had a particular fondness of Luis, even going as far as to encourage his love for science and fictional literature from a very very young age. Which by itself is definitely worth noting- Valdelobos was a very very devout Catholic village before Saddler arrived (as stated by the design team as well as through visual clues such as rosaries and bibles being scattered around, Luis signing the cross after he kills a villager, the location of the village itself etc etc) which I IMAGINE wouldn’t be very fond of their youth engaging in fantasy and science as that goes against a lot of super hardcore Catholic beliefs. But not only does Méndez encourage it; so does Luis’ Grandfather. Why else would Méndez be so willing to excuse Luis’ interests if it weren’t for a fondness of his Grandfather???
And circling back to Méndez’ relationship with Luis- we get told that Luis would be told by his grandfather to stay behind and, presumably, be taken care of by Méndez while he went away on hunting trips. Who knows if Méndez did this for ALL the children in the village, or JUST Luis, but we know from the fact that (again, presumably) the only reason Luis’ Grandfather was attacked by wolves was because he was distracted by Luis’ presence that Méndez most likely kept a pretty close eye on him on behalf of his Grandfather. Plus!! Méndez was the village chief!!!!! The fact that he took the time out of his day to specifically take care of Luis AND engage and foster his interests is very telling!! He clearly had a lot of respect and/or fondness for his Grandfather on SOME level to do that for him.
And then of course we get to the infamous fire; Luis’ Grandfathers notes describing his slowly worsening state is just devastating and culminates in him telling Méndez; ‘You know what to do.’ He trusted and knew the man well enough to know that HE’D know what to do when worst came to worst. He didn’t even have to SAY, ‘light the house on fire’, he just knew Méndez would understand instinctually. Luis’ Grandfather even explicitly asks Méndez to take care of Luis after he’s gone!!! That’s so telling in my extremely humble opinion!!!!!! Like yes, sure, absolutely you could just assume that it’s his natural trust in the village chief, but Luis is all he had left- and I personally think it’s very poignant of him to pick Méndez specifically to take care of him.
Again, could this all be just regular old fondness of Méndez being the village chief and/or just them being good friends?? Well sure absolutely!!!! This is all just my personal interpretation!!!!! But I think it’s very interesting that Luis himself is a somewhat queer-coded character as well the fact that him being raised by healthy father figures in his childhood affects who he becomes when he’s an adult. He’s a gentleman at heart and is always always putting others first before himself- again, his childhood directly affects how he acts when he’s older and I just think it’s super fascinating to see a character having grown up with father figures that were there and active in their life their ENCOURAGED their interests carry that along with them and have that encourage the actions they make. It’s little things like that that make Luis such a beautifully crafted character to me at least.
And also I think it’d be funny if being gay ran in the family HDNWNENDJ
AGAIN. Again. Don’t take this post too seriously. You don’t have to agree with it I’m just having a bit of fun and I hope you had some fun too
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Wow, so umm... This looks bad, not only is it inaccurate due to using the wrong ink demon design [unless this is confirmation BATIM Ink Demon has been outright retconned... Which would make me pissed enough to make a new post just about THAT] but from an art standpoint this is just... Confusing and poorly done.
I wouldn't care if this was fanart, of course you should support young, indie artists... But for a Graphic Novel making sure your cover doesn't look like something Butch Hartman shat out in an afternoon is kind of important. Remember they're going to be asking us to give money to them to read this. The artist likely won't see any of that money and neither do the authors most of the time, not to mention this art screams of the artist being underpaid and overworked.
Like they Had to get something on someone's desk and their boss said 'good enough'. A concept Joey Drew Studios is very familiar with considering the allegations of poor working environments that Kindly Beast. Not to mention Mike Mood admitting in a Reddit AMA that they did in fact rush projects like Showdown Bandit. [Which they sold at full price]
He also says they can in fact say no or yes to designs involving their IP. Either Mike or Meatly had to say yes to this cover, according to his own damn words.
And do you really think this company in particular would care enough about its fanbase to not sell them garbage? They have done exactly that on several occasions. It's not like they care particularly about art either, considering their previous use of AI Art. There was no apology or even posts addressing it... Instead, they just rushed out an archives update to their game to get people to stop talking about it... Even forgetting an entire character in it. Again
This company is [or at least SHOULD BE] on thin ice when it comes to being suspected of misleading their fans or rushing out crappy products to them.
So with all that context in mind, I'm gonna talk about why this cover sucks ass.
The light sources are all over the place? Why does it look like someone put maces or knight armor on his shoulders but it's just flesh?? It looks both gross and weird [not in a good way either]
To explain more I'm going on a rant below but sadly this seems to have been confirmed to not just be a rough pass but the final cover and man... I am not excited about this graphic novel just at all. This felt like it really drained any possibility of it turning out good for me and I already had expectations low.
Okay first point, the light sources?? And there is no consistency here with the shadows or lighting, it looks like there's a hundred light sources all at once but none of them are even consistent!
the arrows here represent all the different light sources I can make out and yet the the shadow clearly implies there's only one. I understand wanting to use highlights to give the character a more clear shape but then just give him one or two lights behind him or in front of him? No matter how u follow the light sources, the highlights make no sense and the shadows make even less sense.
Why are the shoulders like that? Like on the legs it's a little understandable, at least those are clearly very heavily affected by perspective, for me I think they are so exaggerated it makes it look like one of the legs is either huge or one is small but that's maybe subjective.
However, the shoulders are unjustifiable, what happened there, what did they do??
I could pick on so much more honestly, how the color choices of piss yellow with no other colors being used, and the harsh pitch black being used for every part of his body is weird. How it looks straight out of Butch Hartman's recent crappy art. But to put bluntly bad start! Also what the HELL is going on with this background??
Seems once again the Bendy team is fine with sending out stuff thinking it's "Good Enough" for Bendy fans and honestly the people trying to tell me to "Be Grateful" for this are just proving that no matter how many times you betray your audience some of em will defend you!
Which is sad tbh. If anything we should be putting MORE pressure on the Bendy team to do better. Cause we deserve better than this, honestly we do. There are amazing artists in the bendy community who could do so much better for a cover. They've employed their fan artists before... Wouldn't it be great to do that for such a lore important book? The book that gives us the identity of one of the main characters in BATIM? The character you spend the entirety of Chapter 4 fighting to save? Not to mention will give several major characters their human designs?
But I guess this is... Good enough...
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So i saw this post by @avelera (if i had a nickel for every time they’ve inspired a post, i’d have two nickels which....funnily enough is the exact amount that meme requires) and i CANNOT stop thinking about Hob’s first century as an immortal.
I mean surely he thought it was all in jest- his mates were having a right crack of it for the rest of the night, and Hob knew it well himself that no man escapes death; he would fight to live as long as he could in this world, experience everything he could, and when his time came he would simply find adventure elsewhere. Hob couldn’t have seriously believed Dream; he was just a nobleman with an odd sense of humour. And so what if he knew Hob’s name? Everyone in this pub knew his name, much like he did theirs, so he probably just asked.
I wonder if it remained a bit of an inside joke between Hob and his friends- when he gets injured in a fight and is laid up in bed, one of his friends says “You can’t die, remember? Got that meeting with some posh prick in 1489, what good’ll you be dead” and Hob sees it for what it is (a distraction) and plays along with a grin. Anytime he joins a new battle, its “Do prior engagements mean nothing to you, Robert Gadling?“ As said by his mate with a ridiculous put-on posh accent, “Your good man’ll be right cross when you ditch him in 1489 cause you got killed fighting for this bastard”. When Hob gets hit, its “I’ll be meeting him in 1489 at this rate! To tell him you got fucking done in, you knob-”
It might have been fun, at first. But as Hob’s friends started dropping dead around him- war, disease, killed in the streets for some gold- i think it stopped being a joke. Because now Hob was walking away from fights no else did. Now he was recovering from diseases within the week, where others were still thrashing in its grasp or going cold and still in the night. Its not enough to make him question his mortality, but it is enough to make him think he’s unnaturally lucky. Maybe he’s done something to please the gods recently, or maybe fortune was smiling down upon him for once. He could not bear it all with good-nature, because despite how fortune or luck or even the gods themselves seemed to look favourably upon him, their grace did not extend to his friends and he is still conscious of their loss.
But Hob Gadling appears to be one lucky bastard, and that’s that.
...until it isn’t.
Maybe Hob accidentally builds up a local reputation about being a reliable soldier- no matter who it is, or how many of them there are, Hob survives. I think maybe he’s died a few times by now, but he doesn’t know that- his throat was slashed by an enemy sword, and he died right there on the battlefield the moment his knees hit the dirt, but the fight lasted so long that by the time Hob woke up, gasping and grasping at his blood-covered neck, the gash which had nearly beheaded him was instead a shallow but still bleeding wound. Later he would settle on the idea that the cut hadn’t been as bad as he thought it was- why he passed out from such a wound is beyond him, but maybe it was from shock, he heard that it did that to people sometimes. Someone trying to slit your throat is different to someone slicing your arm, so even though hes still unsettled by it and sure that the wound was worse...he can’t argue with the actual wound on his body, which points to the contrary. This is probably not the first and definitely not the last time Hob dies.
So yeah, maybe he accidentally builds up a local reputation about being a reliable fighter because he simply can’t stop surviving. And its not that hes unharmed- he gets stabbed, sliced, beaten, etc. He can be out of it for days depending on the severity of his wounds or illness, but he always gets back up. And maybe eventually, as most stories go involving ageless immortals, people go from being surprised by his abilities and age, to suspicious. Hob himself took passing note of it a while ago- he thought his hair would long since be grey by now, or at least most of it would, but it isn’t. When he goes for a drink with the remaining friends he has, he notices that his hands aren’t wrinkled like theirs. Hobs hands are calloused and rough, yes, but not aged like they ought to be. He thinks its strange, of course he does, but soon he’s too smashed to think of it anymore.
How many comments does it take about his age before Hob starts to close himself off? How many times must surprise turn to suspicion, because Hob says hes in his 50′s but he still looks like he’s in his mid 30′s? How many years does it take before Hob hastily fakes his first death/disappearance, because now the people he grew up with are intensely aware of how young Hob looks compared to them- its unnatural, unusual, and for a medieval peasant, probably has something to do with the devil. And i think it would be different to the witch trials Hob would later experience in the 17th century, where the whole town was after him because he became ‘complacent’- this isnt Hob being complacent, this is Hob freaking the fuck out. This is Hob not knowing how to deal with the fact that he’s not aging like he should be- of course he thinks its fucking weird (great, but weird), of course he thinks its fucking CRAZY that hes been in so many battles, been wounded and sick so many times, and yet has always come out the other side. Of course he thinks its fucking strange but he doesn’t know whats going on so he’s just..he’s just going to keep going, because what else can he do? and it isn’t until things get a little too heated that Hob turns tail and ditches town with a half formed plan and the cover of darkness.
I wonder how long it takes him to come to terms with his immortality- does he throw himself into more dangerous situations with an “Either i’m right or it wont matter cause ill be dead” attitude? Is he seriously fucking spooked by it for a few years before the dawning realisation of lifes now limitless possibilities hits him? Does Hob think of that noble stranger in 1389 often, at first with mirth and amusement because that tosser knew exactly what he was saying when he said they’d meet again in 100 years; and then does Hob think of it with growing worry and stress, because...what exactly did he give up for this power? what has he yet to give up for it? Maybe his town was right- he’d heard the whispers, part of why he hauled ass to get out of there- maybe he had made a deal with the devil, or a demon. Perhaps, when Hob is more hopeful, he prays he struck a deal with a saint or an angel.
Dream is neither of those things, but medieval peasant Hob doesn’t know that.
Anyway. Yeah I’m having thoughts about what it must have been like for one Hob Gadling to discover his immortality. I mean, using the show as a frame of reference, Hobs taken to it pretty well- in avelera’s original post we know, and can discuss, the fact that Hob seems weary at their first centennial meeting in 1489. He doesn’t know what this stranger wants from him, doesn’t know if he unwittingly agreed to a deal back in 1389 that he now has to make good on. But when Dream tells him that he simply wants to hear of his life, wants to hear what its like being a mortal-turned-immortal in a world Dream so clearly (at the time) holds little regard for...Hob is just Hob about it all. Dream thinks he’s going to say something profound, or wish for death, but instead my man started going on about how great chimneys and card games are. It makes me even more interested in what it must have been like for him to discover his gift- the highs of being able to live life freely, of realising that should that stranger be merciful and grant him more time on earth, he could experience everything under the sun for decades- Hob seems so innately positive, i mean his whole thing is that there’s always more to do and always greener grass to chase. This must be such a contrast to the lows of watching your friends and family die when you don’t, to being watched by your own town for a deal you now realise may not have been in jest at all, to stressing about what exactly you will be asked to give in 1489.
Im. Having thoughts.
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