#ive been meaning to redraw literally everyone AGAIN SO | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

acuaticamber06 · 6 years

Text

Thoughts on Bendy, Chapter 5

A bit obvious, but

*****SPOILERS AHEAD!*****

If you haven’t seen/played chapter five, this will ruin it for you. Avert your eyes! XD

Okay. So, I started typing this over in the comments on Seán’s video, but I realized things as I was typing, so I’m putting down here instead.

I keep seeing a lot of comments along the lines of “the ending is unclear” and “I don’t get it” and “the ending was so unsatisfying”, but I think you guys are looking at this in all the wrong ways. Take a minute to reflect back on everything that has happened, hear me out, and maybe you’ll think of it in a different light.

Joey orchestrated the whole ordeal. Joey wrote it. Well, he drew it, actually. We saw the pictures he drew on his desk in his apartment. He had the entire story of BATIM storyboarded out there. He knew what was going to happen, and even said he was expecting Henry at a specific time- an hour later than it actually took Henry to get back- knowing that Henry would arrive. (EDIT: This is why Henry doesn’t stay dead when Bendy or one of the other monsters kills him, because that isn’t the ending Joey wrote for Henry. Henry crawls back to life through the Fallopian tube of ink because Joey has written him as the winner.)

That means that Joey is the one who wrote all of the glowing text on the walls. Stay with me here:

Alice hands Henry a magic piece of glass after a couple of scenes that are broken up by sleep cycles. She calls it glass, but I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s acetate.

Acetate is a special plastic used by traditional animators to add layers on top of a scene. That way, the background could remain the same while the characters did their thing on a completely separate layer. It meant less work for the animators, too, as they didn’t have to redraw the background for every frame.

Did you catch that? Acetate was used to add layers. It makes sense that it would reveal the hidden messages in this cartoon-based world.

When Henry looks through the glass, what was the first glowing text Henry saw?

“She will leave you for dead.”

And what did Alice and Tom do? Leave him behind to escape Bendy. Predicted. Scripted. Predestined. Joey had it all right there on his desk at home.

And Henry discovers even more hidden messages inside his little “cell” (appropriate name for it, too, considering a frame of animation is literally called a Cel [short for cellulose acetate]). The glowing text complimented Henry’s drawings on the floor. Drawings that weren’t there when Henry arrived, inside an enclosed area that Henry had to literally break out of with a big old pipe. The only way to get in and out of there besides breaking the boards would be to walk through the walls. And what does Bendy do in phase one of the boss fight? Run through the walls.

But if Bendy is the only character who can phase through the walls, then how would Joey-?

Because Joey created Bendy. He made Bendy in his own image. The Jesus to his God, and Bendy can be influenced by his creator, but not controlled for long periods of time. It makes sense when you think about it.

In the flashback, Joey is standing in the kitchen. There’s a wheelchair very close by, and when he turns away from the sink to address Henry, he visibly limps to the opposite counter.

Bendy walks with a significant limp.

And haven’t we seen a wheelchair before in a previous chapter? I’m almost certain we have, although I can’t place exactly when or where in my mind.

Furthermore, there is an ink machine in Joey’s apartment in the final scene. And it’s running. We can hear it glugging along as we look at the picture on the wall. It’s active and in his apartment. It kind of reminds me of when older people need machines at home to keep them alive. Oxygen tanks, IV bags, etc. They are connected to them.

Joey and Bendy are actively linked through the ink and the ink machine.

SO- They are linked and Joey can influence Bendy to walk through walls and write the messages for Henry made out of ink...but it isn’t ink. It’s something more than ink, but it comes from the ink. Whenever Henry looked through the glass, there were glowing orbs rising from the ink streams.

And since the ink is linked to Bendy who is linked to Joey, the golden ink must come directly from Joey. Almost as if it is pure creativity, untainted by greed. Or looking back on a memory with different eyes. Older and wiser eyes. It indicates Alice as an angel, even though she claims she isn’t one.

So the final question is why? Why make Henry go through all of this? Why not face his demon (literally) and beat Bendy by himself?

He’s too old. Joey couldn’t physically haul his own body down into the depths, wading through ink and falling through the floors. It would kill him. That and his creations are pretty pissed at him all the time. They would attack him and he wouldn’t have been able to defend himself. He’s an old man at the end of his life.

Henry is a good friend of his. Why else would he ask him to come over? To go down there? Henry was the one who had written the message we see on the picture in the final cut scene.

He trusted Henry to do it, because Henry was strong enough to make his own happiness in life, rather than letting the business consume him and beat him down. Joey admits to letting the cartoons become his life.

Read that again: he says “I let them become my life.”

That gets to the core of this story.

It isn’t just that Joey created Bendy and the ink monsters. Not even that he created Bendy in his own image. They exist because Joey literally gave them life- part of his own. The people who worked there fuel their ink monster-personas with their own lives, too. They were too weak to escape the ink. To escape the failing business. But there are so many more monsters than there were employees.

Because each one of them has a piece of Joey’s actual life force in them.

The glowing text... the golden orbs that rose from the ink... that’s Joey.

It’s all linked back to him. And the hell that exists down in the old studio will not cease to be until Joey dies...which is not far off, from the look of him.

The only wrench in the machine was Bendy. Bendy has a mind of his own. As one of the other characters put it: an otherworldly quality. If Joey dies and Bendy is still alive, the cartoon world will continue on without him. So, Joey asking Henry to go down there to beat Bendy was Joey accepting that his time is short and he’s going to die. He’s at peace with that.

And Bendy’s death is no cop-out. He’s a cartoon. How do cartoons end? With a “The End!” endcard. As Porky Pig said: That’s all, Folks!

When an animation ends, the characters don’t come back and have more adventures until their creators draw them doing new things. Take the Animaniacs, for example- there was a final episode for them. (Yes, I realize the series is getting a reboot, but they aren’t back yet, so this example works.) They ceased to be when the final episode finished. Sure, we remember them and watch reruns, but nothing new was created. They effectively died with that episode.

Showing the endcard to Bendy was the most cartoon-logical way to end his existence. It followed the rules of the cartoon world in which he existed.

And my last little side note:

I think the girl’s voice we hear in the final cut scene is Henry’s daughter. She calls him “Uncle Joey”, which is definitely what some families have their children do to address extremely close family friends. (I had an Uncle Pete who wasn’t related to our family at all, but was one of my dad’s closest friends.) And when Joey says that Henry chose the path that gave him a wonderful family, he gestures to the left, to the living room, which is where we hear her voice coming from in the cut scene.

She says “Tell me another one, Uncle Joey.” Tell me another story. Maybe Joey was telling her the story that Henry was living out in the studio below. We may never know for sure.

Thoughts? Anything else to add? All in all, chapter five was a great way to wrap up the story. And I really freaking enjoyed it! All that’s left to see now is if there’s anything in the extras, any extra lore in the hidden messages that you’ll be able to see once unlocking the glass after chapter five, or if the version they released to everyone else is any different from the Jacksepticeye edition. Keep your eyes peeled, everybody!

#jacksepticeye #jse community #jacksepticeye community #bendy and the ink machine #batim #theory #bendy and the ink machine spoilers #batim spoilers #batim chapter 5 spoilers

1K notes · View notes

madokasoratsugu · 3 years

Text

therefore you and me post-production notes (or: murphy’s law as a project that has been two years in the making)

ive had this idea for ‘therefore you and me’ and Fritz ever since i first played CindPhenon. nothing ever fell into place until i played Evermore though, so here we are!

drafting this project was pretty easy tbh (see: hubris). the parallel imagery and everything about the lyrics was right up my alley aha.

fun thing with the lyrics: TadanoCo uses ‘要る (iru)’ in the line ‘Which do you want (iru)? Or do you want neither (iranai; aka negative form of ‘iru’)?’

‘ 要る ‘ as a verb can mean ‘to be wanted’ or ‘to be needed’.

hence, the line can also be read: ‘Which do you need? Or do you need neither?” or any other variation of the verb’s usage.

it’s halfway through drawing the lineart that murphy’s law began. 1) i drew ~15 panels on the wrong dimensions, and had to redraw them all (lol), re-grey tone (LOL), and re-ink (LOLOL). it was not a fun three days.

then i lost momentum because of lunar new year (happy late lunar new year btw! happy year of the ox :”) )

anyway: the moment i regained momentum for the project again, i hit a roadblock in the form of overconfident, sloppy drafting (see: hubris is my downfall).

because of the lack of clear drafting for certain panels (and changes to previous panels), i had to redraft two different sections of the PV while keeping in mind that there was the bridge still to be drafted. fun !

i decided to simplify the bridge. can you believe it was supposed to be another animation. i can’t. so i scrapped it.

(slight tangent. Evermore’s release honestly cleared up a lot of uncertainty regarding the direction of the PV and whether or not to include Fritz’s mother (who I still fondly call Beatrice). im really happy the PV never came to fruition before Evermore’s release, as im not sure i would have done half as good a job without Evermore’s content.)

back to the hubris of proceeding with a messy draft - there was a lot of push and pull internally for me as to how much i should keep to the original PV and how much i should just put my spin on things. i ended up doing a bit of half-and-half, i think.

but really, it only delayed things as i ended up redrafting and having multiple drafts of certain panels haha//

the last two choruses were honestly my favourite parts to draw. the shift from Varg’s clothes and colours to Fritz, Fritz’s acceptance of Varg and the soft way Varg looks at Fritz (and no one else). there’s something cathartic about acceptance and acknowledgement. i think that’s what i aimed to really capture.

also: in between drawing all the panels, murphy’s law 2) my Evermore itchio game file ? got deleted off my computer ?

it’s a very old, barely functional brick so im lowkey unsurprised but at the same time it was a crazy experience and setback when i needed to reference certain scenes. oh, and Steam decided to not download Evermore too. i still haven’t fixed that one. haha. ha.

i have screenshot posters to thank for uploads of certain CGs, although im still pretty sure its best not to post a ton of those publicly at one shot?

also, i had to scrap the recreation of the famous ‘did you love Varg’ scene because of this aha. looking back now, i think it worked out.

(another tangent: using referencing as an excuse, i actually took the opportunity to replay Fritz’s route for the third time. i ended up checking nothing at all and falling in love with the masquerade scene again.)

up till the very end, im still not sure if everyone got that the line “You are love itself.” was meant to be said by Lucette to Fritz. i colour-coded Lucette with her own unique blue for the PV, which was the same hue as the line. i hope that it got across, aha.

with that said, video production was a whole entanglement in and of itself. i think murphy’s law really took up a hammer and swung hard at this stage.

timing was actual hell. im usually not this bad at it, but this project in particular was tricky bc TadanoCo uses a lot of background beats that aren’t overt, which his PV also matches - i think? or maybe im just not good at recognising beats from lack of video/music production haha//

hence there were certain scenes i was stuck at and kept revising because i wasnt clear where the beat was meant to be, what transitions i should use, and when the transitions should be.

subtitling was actually really fun! until i rendered my first version and realised all the subtitles were completely off and blurry.

turns out my project properties were different from my video properties, hence the off-alignment. huh. didnt know those were Actual Things(tm).

also, quick tip to all vid-making amateurs like me out there: you may have to double the dimensions of the font’s media properties if you dont want them to come out fuzzy. another thing i didnt know lol.

anyway all this lead to: me needing to spend another evening to redo subtitles. haha. it was not a fun two back-to-back 3am nights + extra evening afterward.

in between all this was countless rendering tests to guess-and-check what’s causing numerous errors in the video btw.

and with those rendering tests came: glaring mistakes in the panel art that i only now spotted and had to fix, and refix, and refix again. then reimport into sony vegas, put it into the video, render and double check if it’s alright. rinse and repeat countless times ! haha ! PV making is fun !

i think i nearly redid a certain scene with the exact same panels once. like i said: not a fun two 3am nights.

that said: i dont know how all this technical issues (and more) popped up and were resolved over two 3am nights and one evening. im not about to question it either.

at this point: panel art - fixed ! subtitling all redone ! render works fine, everything checks out.

i make the mistake of uploading it directly to yt instead of leaving it unlisted first.

murphy’s law 3) when im watching the vid on yt, the yellow parts in the second verse were completely unable to be seen.

panic put it on unlisted. people are already watching it and leaving (very sweet) comments. panic delete it.

btw if you’re one of the first three commenters reading this: thank you for the quick response !! it means a lot and made me really flustered in a good way :”))

cue me re-colouring those scenes, redo-ing the section and oops, is that a panel in the masquerade scene where Fritz literally is missing his mask ???

i think i lost my mind entirely at this point. from then on i was fueled by spite to complete this cursed project.

at thereforeFINAL.mp4, (version five of the full PV, version maybe 10-11 of all the rendered videos, including tests) finally. finally it is done.

i upload it.

the end !

(except, not really. because here you are at post-production notes detailing the worst luck i’ve ever had with PV making.

i learnt a lot from this though, and honestly on hindsight i should have learnt all these from my first PV but nothing went wrong at this magnitude so i kinda just...shelved it aha//

but really, im relieved it turned out well, and that i took the time to redo scenes until i was satisfied. for a PV that’s been waiting in the background for two years now, i think this is the least it deserves.

if the comic about Fritz and Varg (which i referenced in one of the last choruses, i wonder if anyone caught that?) was meant to be a love letter to Fritz’s route, i think this PV ought to be a tribute to the character himself.

although - hm, this isn’t quite as good a tribute to Fritz as it is to his route, maybe? i don’t know, haha ! maybe it’s just myself wanting to make excuses to create more for him//

i was thinking of continuing on about the PV and it’s significance to Fritz and Varg, but hm. maybe not on this post. maybe some other one, some other time.

but at it’s core, at it’s simplest, most raw - i think i just wanted to explore what it means to Fritz to ‘want’ and to ‘need’ with this PV.

thank you for watching the PV, and thank you for reading this.

- blu.)

#linear notes #notes #bluh bluh text #long post

0 notes