Ever wanted to see someone walk backwards through all of BATDR? Well have I got a stream for you! My friend Friendly is moonwalking through BATDR! I'll be here co-hosting with a couple of friends, hope you can join us!

Tomorrow, join me in celebrating Bendy’s anniversary! I’ll be streaming BATIM over on Twitch at 2pm EST. ✨

So....

WILSON VOLLEYBALL

To celebrate the one year anniversary of BATDR's release, I will be beating BATIM for the first time!

The whole thing will be streamed over on my twitch! twitch.tv/pineappleoracle

Come hang as me and a bunch of my nerd friends overanalyze every pixel of this game!

"Pine what do you mean you've never beat batim, you've been running a bendy blog for over five years??" Well you see. Until this year, I didn't have a laptop capable of running the beast bendy fight. It was just way too laggy. I don't even know how I got past Bertrum before.

"But didn't batdr come out on the 15th-" In a hilarious repeat of last year, I am insanely busy on the 15th and don't have time until the next day lmao

Depending on how the stream goes, I might then continue right on to playing through batdr! Or maybe I'll do that the following day, we'll see!

I would love to hear the megatheorem

It's not ready for full publication and won't be for a while tbh, but like, maybe before the end of summer? If I'm being optimistic? It will definitely go up here when it's finished, although probably in parts because it's an absolute beast, currently weighing in at over 25 pages and nearly 13k words.

Here's a sneak peek at the table of contents though 😎⚔💀

Also I'm just now noticing that I have "Empty's as Good as Clean" from the draft version of the poem instead of the published version as a section title, whoops. Pretend that's on purpose. Maybe it's a nod to the like, three hours where we thought @torbooks was speaking to us in code. That sounds like both a regular thing to happen as well as to reference, right?

Some segments have stuff I've pulled in from things I've posted here before but off the top of my head I don't think any of the sections are fully anything I've posted here. That is to say, as the draft currently stands, every section has new analyses in addition to anything pulled in from previous posts, though I'd say most of the sections are things I've haven't posted. I believe the sections that have the most pulled from "old" content are Lyctorhood Lite, Resurrection vs Waking Up, and A Cavalier by Any Other Name, which would all be under my "tlt meta" tag - I'll tag this one for ease of navigation if you want to poke around.

But don't worry, when it's ready, I will make sure everyone is subjected to my theories.

Results from the latest Requestpile stream! Just me and Rob (@robboyblunder) drew this time. Thank you everyone who showed up with your requests and had a good time 💀💖

Here are the drawings I did based on the Bendy cast’s gameplay and autograph signing streams!

I had a blast geeking out with you guys the entire time and I truly cannot wait to see what comes next.

So, come what may.

Pepito chiquito mi corazón, mi amor

Te amo mucho gusto Pepito

Hey, I'm live! I am immune to fear! Playing Bendy 2: The Dark Revival! 

https://www.twitch.tv/eret

Still in a Bendy and the Ink Machine kick. Gonna try and finish sketches from last week. Hopefully I don't get sleepy early. So get over here Goobers!

Hey Bendy fans, hope you're having a fabulous Sunday! It's November 12th, a couple days before BATDR's 1 year anniversary (November 15th). My friend Brandon from Inky News is hosting a wonderful Livestream TODAY at 2 pm EST to celebrate this milestone! There's gonna be all kinds of special guests from the Bendy world, and while I can't say for certain who will be there, it's bound to be a great time. I'll be in the chat as a moderator (accompanied by MLSpence) to keep the festivities safe and fun for everyone. Hope to see you there!

Gonna be doing my first ever gaming stream with friends in celebration of Bendy’s anniversary! I’ll be hosting on my Twitch channel. I’ll post more details later this week. :)

Didn't know I need that in my life

That was such a good analysis. And do you think a "balancing" is possible?

Re: this ask!

I think that depends entirely on what is meant by balancing!

If you’re specifically referring to the “you were meant to be my balance” line, in the context which it is said shdhdd I do not think he remotely meant it. When he’s like “you might make me a better man :)” etc, I think he’s fully bullshitting her. He isn’t saying it with the intention of becoming a better person, or even with genuine acknowledgment that that is something that might require doing! He’s just trying to get her to hook up with him. If at that very point Alina took him up on his offer, there is zero chance imo that he would at all change his ways. He’s fully decided that he is right, and she is wrong, and she only needs to see things his way. That if she doesn’t, the fault lies with her.

That being said, I think he’s a character that’s remarkably easy to rehabilitate in one way or another. I find online discussions of redemptions often really simplistic and only from the perspective of a single type of story. Fictional/narrative morality is so fluid, all it takes to side a character like the Darkling with protagonists is to simply put him in a position where his goals align with theirs. And I find that pretty easy because he has such clear cut things he cares about, ie the political situation in Ravka. So it’s a pretty easy fix to just introduce an outside threat and force him to work with Alina/any protagonist of choice.

Or like for fanfic reasons, I’ve thought a lot about scenarios where either the stag isn’t found, or he doesn’t go immediately batshit villain mode the moment Alina runs away, and the status quo established in SaB stretches on for longer. Or scenarios that are just set earlier. Like he seems to not have been committing many war crimes, that we know of, in that pre canon time? So that’s one metric, but that doesn’t actually sand down any of his edges lol. And it’s only placing a brief interstice on his more egregious terrible behavior— I fully anticipate the manipulation and interpersonal cruelty would also still be present.

If we’re talking about balancing him out from a legit moral perspective, that becomes harder, chiefly because he is really goddamn old, and him being unadaptable, and set in his ways is literally a plot point (his hatred for technological advancement).

His age is super unclear, but canonically *at least* upwards of five hundred years old, and honestly I can understand why, past a certain point, he’d be like “WHY do I have to care what these children think, when they’re going to die in five minutes anyway?” I don’t think he can really think of people as people anymore, because he’s seen repetitions of similar things play out so many times, for so long. And being so powerful for so long means that he can afford to act pretty carelessly because there aren’t that many permanent consequences. Most typical worst case scenario (beyond the canon ending lol) is that he can literally just fake his death and come back as his own son or grandson with zero consequences. So a key factor in making him change in any way imo is stripping him of power so that he doesn’t have the luxury of not giving a damn about other people. I mean that more institutionally, but losing his magic could also be useful.

Once again, for its flaws and my baseline disagreement with the concept of bringing him back from the dead after TGT, I think RoW had the right idea wrt forcing him to pretend to be a random monk. He was, however, even trying to claw to power then lmao. I think it would just take way longer than the span of stuff we saw in RoW to make any meaningful change in him. He’s just been an evil wizard king in his little evil wizard tower for too long. And on top of that, imo, his insistence to Alina that, when herself faced with immortality, she will turn out exactly the same as him, stems from a sort of sunk cost fallacy. He honestly seems desperately unhappy as a character! He seems so jaded and fully emotionally removed from everyone and everything, where the only thing that matters to him is power, and he needs her to discover that that is the only outcome possible bc if not… well he’s just wasted centuries being fucking miserable for nothing. He doesn’t want there to be another option! So he’s just very, very reticent to having any other perspective or changing in any way, and if he ever does it will inevitably be done while kicking and screaming the entire way. (I might honestly just be averse to the idea personally because redemptions are boring to me! He’s much more fun if he sucks!)

Personally, my favorite method of domesticating the Darkling is just Alina using one of the Morozova amplifiers (possibly any amplifier if it just works like that?) on him and keeping him as her pet war criminal tbh. I think that has the most entertainment value, and the most safeguards against him finding his way to power again and committing more war crimes, or being in a place to do much manipulating. Will it fix him? Ehhhh maybe over time, since it might force him out of his usual habits? Probably not. But at least it functionally tempers most of his worse tendencies lol.

TLDR: Do I think the Darkling can be balanced? I don’t know! Sounds like a tall order! I do think he can be put on a leash though.

streaming on saturday! bring your qs your reqs and your stomachs because its gonna be a crazy one

saturday march 4th 1-3 est, hairscare on twitch