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blockgamepirate · 3 years

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On Philza and Tommy

I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a while but I just didn’t wanna rewatch ANY exile streams because they genuinely make me so depressed and anxious but I finally forced myself to rewatch the one where Phil visits Tommy. Or I say “rewatch”, I actually never saw the whole thing before, I kept popping in and out of the stream while it was live bc of the aforementioned anxiety and shit..

Anyway, I’ve seen arguments over the topic of whether Phil is a terrible person for not helping Tommy or not. And I wanted to offer my take on it. So I’m just gonna go through the arguments:

1: “Phil is Tommy’s dad and has a duty to look after him“

I’m not gonna spend too much time on this because for one thing it’s not really canon and for another, I actually don’t think it’s the relevant issue here. Even if Phil was Tommy’s dad, Tommy has already basically been living independently for a while. And even back when Phil and Will were still talking about the family relationships being canon, Phil said as much: that he doesn’t have authority over his boys, they’re independent people.

2: “Phil doesn’t even know Tommy and it’s unfair to ask him to look after a stranger”

I legitimately have no idea where this take came from or what it’s based on. I feel like it’s so obvious that they knew each other from before Phil even joined the SMP. Tommy recognises him right away (1), they act very familiar with each other, Phil immediately attacks Dream when Dream blows up Tommy’s house (2), Tommy tries to convince Phil to join NLM but Phil is torn because he’s friends with both Techno and Tommy (3), they plan to make their houses in NLM next to each other and Phil helps Tommy build his (4), Phil specifically gives Tommy one of the three friendship emeralds he has (5)... Also OOC Phil refers to himself as basically a father figure to Tommy (6).

The reason their relationship becomes colder is because Tommy doesn’t approve of Phil staying friends with Techno. I think this is made pretty obvious too. Tommy gets upset with Phil when he sees him hanging out with Techno (7) and when Phil comes to visit him in exile, Tommy immediately acts cold towards him and accuses him of being Techno’s friend before softening a bit when Phil gives him gifts (5).

Ref:

1: I assume you’ve all seen this one it’s in Tommy’s video

2: Philza’s Twitch Archive: Nov 16 (around 03:44:30)

3: Tommyvods: Tommyinnit speaks to Philza’s wife (around 37:40)

4: Philza’s Twitch Archive: Nov 18 (around 18:55)

5: Tommyvods: Tommy Is Holding It Together in Exile with Dream (around 24:35)

6: Philza’s Twitch Archive: Jan 27 (around 01:20:30)

7: Tommyvods: Tommy & Wilbur make Tubbo a gift and he hates it (around 19:30)

3: “Phil didn’t help Tommy at all while he was in exile“

Oh shut up, watch reference video 5 again. He brought Tommy tons of useful shit, a stack of coal blocks, 8 iron blocks, diamond boots, how was he supposed to know that it would all get destroyed by Dream? When asked, he also helped Tommy with his projects at Logstedshire.

4: “Even if Phil isn’t Tommy’s father OR his friend, he still has a duty to save an abused kid”

Okay this is finally getting to the actual point.

So I wanna refer back to video number 5 up there on my references list again and I’m gonna go through that stream here:

- Ghostbur brings Phil over to meet Tommy

- Tommy is mad because Phil is friends with Techno

- Tommy gets distracted by Phil’s new clothes and the vision of Tubbo reappearing

- Phil gives Tommy a bunch of presents, including “Tommy Slippers“ (for the cold) and a friendship emerald from Techno. Tommy is excited about the slippers, somewhat apprehensive about the emerald until Phil assures him that it’s a gift from him to Tommy, not from Techno

- Tommy decides that Phil is his friend after all

- Dream shows up and acts all casual and friendly, Phil greets him politely but doesn’t interact much with Dream unless prompted to

- Tommy asks Phil and Ghostbur if they’re even real because he keeps seeing Tubbo

- Phil asks if Tommy has been drinking the sea water

- another vision of Tubbo, only Tommy and Ghostbur see him

- Ghostbur shows Phil around while Tommy tells Dream not to tell Phil about the beach party because it’s a surprise

- Tommy asks if the reason why Phil didn’t visit earlier was because there wasn’t a path and if the path made it easier for him and Phil says yes, because he didn’t actually know how to get there before

- More Tubbo hallucination shenanigans which I’m gonna cut out from now on, just assume that it keeps happening

- Phil tells Tommy not to drink the sea water, Tommy goes “I DID DRINK THE SEA WATER BECAUSE IT TOLD ME TO!“

- Tommy asks Phil (and also Fundy who showed up) to leave the VC so he can talk to Ghostbur and Dream alone (about the secret beach party plan)

- Tommy is happy about the fact that the path he made seems to be working and people are coming to visit him

- Dream notes that they aren’t even really hanging out with him so they might just be visiting Logsted, not him (which... Tommy literally asked them to leave them alone so they could plan, Dream is just blatantly trying to fuck with his head) and Tommy deflates and agrees that Dream is probably right

- Ghostbur invites Phil and Fundy to help decorate the beach (not telling them what for but it’s like super obvious that they’re planning a party) and they do

- all five of them work on the beach for a whole while and goof around until the end of the stream

So from Phil’s point of view Tommy is acting kind of cold towards him and doesn’t seem to particularly want him around (combined with the fact that he later doesn’t get an invite to the beach party that Tommy was obviously planning). Phil brought Tommy basic survival stuff and the slippers to keep him from getting cold, not knowing that all of that is going to get destroyed by Dream anyway. He seems a bit worried about the hallucinations but assumes it’s because Tommy’s been drinking sea water and tells him to stop doing that. He also notes that Tommy looks kind of rough but doesn’t push the issue.

Meanwhile Tommy is being manipulated by Dream into believing that Phil didn’t actually come to visit him, even as Phil is literally visiting him, with named gifts and everything. And he’s already doubting if Phil is even really present because he keeps seeing Tubbo who isn’t actually there so Phil could just as well be a hallucination too, or he could easily be convinced later that Phil was a hallucination.

Basically Phil sees that Tommy is having a hard time but there’s no obvious sign of anything being wrong besides him not taking very good care of himself and feeling lonely. Tommy says he hasn’t been sleeping and that he’s been drinking sea water (which is probably a joke but anyway). Him and Dream seem to be very friendly with each other, they even keep having all these secret chats that Tommy is telling Phil to leave for.

So.... assume this is your friend who you’ve recently had a bit of a falling out with. What kind of conclusions would you draw and what would you do? Honestly, yes, Tommy’s condition seems pretty worrying, but everything just points to him being lonely and depressed about being exiled, which isn’t really something Phil can easily fix other than just visit him more. But then Tommy gives really mixed signals about whether he actually wants Phil there or not (which is because he’s planning the party but Phil doesn’t know that) and then when Phil finds out about the party he doesn’t get an invite to it (because Dream stole the invites but, again, Phil doesn’t know this). So Phil just kinda has to decide whether to go there uninvited and presumably unwanted, or just vibe and wait to hear from Tommy. Meanwhile he has stuff to do with Techno who DID invite him to hang out.

Also Tommy seems to be doing better, he’s very excited about his beach, he’s excited about the fact that he’s getting more visitors (not just Phil but Fundy too) and he’s convinced that there will be more now that there’s a path. So as far as Phil is concerned, it seems like things are getting better and Tommy might end up doing okay after all, despite everything

As a sidenote also, Phil is a bit of a hermit, right? I feel like that’s fair to say about his character. He doesn’t mind hanging out with people but to him living alone in the wilderness isn’t a bad deal at all. Obviously he understands that Tommy is not like him and needs company but you can see how he might not see the situation as all that urgent. And you can argue about what Tommy’s canon age actually is but he’s been living independently and taking care of himself like an adult during his entire time on the server, this shouldn’t really be that different. Obviously the fact that he’s exiled is bad and upsetting for him but there’s nothing Phil can do about that either. He doesn’t have control over L’Manberg or Dream.

And I just wanna point out that all of this is exactly how abusive relationships work, right? Dream is deliberately distancing Tommy from everybody he knows and making him think that Dream is the only one who cares about him. And that shit can be really hard to pick up on. It might just seem like your friend is becoming kind of distant and has different friends now. And I’ll tell you, even if you DO see the signs, it’s really hard to decide when or how to intervene, or if you’re just paranoid about it.

It’s easy to say Phil should do this or that when you’re watching Tommy’s streams and KNOW what’s happening, but try to put yourself in Phil’s shoes for a second and actually think about what you’d do in a situation like this. Also please do so while assuming that Phil is a real person with his own life to live too.

You can say that he should have been more worried and more suspicious of Dream and gone to see Tommy anyway, that’s fair. But that’s a normal human mistake and also something pretty much everybody else should have done too by that logic. And Tommy was not being very receptive to help because he was being manipulated by Dream. Honestly this was probably something where Tommy needed to figure out for himself to break free. Which he did. (And speaking from a narrative perspective: that was the best possible ending to that arc. Tommy finding his own strength and willpower again, on his own.)

I’m gonna leave this here but I might reblog with more points (or make a new post). It does take ages to go through the vods, though, and I only made it up to December 9th so far.

#philza #ph1lza #philza minecraft #tommyinnit #dream smp #zablr #also yes expect something like this except way longer #for the techno essay #if i ever finish it

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uniformbravo · 6 years

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“quick” life update while i wait for my ipod to charge

(do ppl even still use ipods in this day & age. whats spotify)

i never made any posts abt it but i started the new semester & im taking 2 classes, it’s funny actually bc i waited even more til the last minute than i usually do to figure out my classes & spent the 1st week of school trying to see a counselor to find out if i still needed classes and that’s a whole other story for a whole other day but long story short the answer was no but i decided to take a couple anyway

mainly because every time im not in school The Depression takes over & i just needed something to Do so im taking intermediate painting (even tho painting 1 made me want 2 die every day) and animation (even tho i’ve already decided i don’t want to be an animator????)

so heres the thing, okay, since these are classes i don’t need in order to fill any requirements or anything i had to pick them based on nothing, really, like my main reason for taking classes this semester was to give myself something to do, right. i picked painting because my friend had told me she was taking it so i was like yo i’ll just do that too bc we had fun last time & it’s a good way to stay in contact. originally that was gonna be my only class bc i knew it’d be a lot of work and time but then i talked to my school’s art counselor about transferring to another school after im graduated from here and i’d said i was maybe interested in storyboarding so we looked at schools with animation programs and i decided super last minute to just take the animation class here and Boy what a mistake

last semester i was talking on here about a computer art class i had considered taking but dropped bc it seemed kinda... shitty?? because i hated the way the teacher taught and i felt like i wasn’t gonna gain anything from the class??? well animation is taught by the same guy and hhhhhhhhh he’s so fucking unhelpful it’s such a nothing class

see i was hoping to learn some hand-drawn animation basics like timing, squash & stretch, the fucking bouncing ball assignment, shit like that, right. the teacher was like “today we’re gonna go over the 12 principles of animation” and i was like “sweet i’ve heard of that this’ll be good” & literally he brought up a list, read off most of the names, briefly described a few, and told us to google it if we wanted more info like?? holy shit dude????? thanks for nothing oh my god

i’ve been taking a lot of time practicing animating in flipnote studio on my 3ds and watching youtube videos and i’ve been learning so much more from that than anything explained by my teacher bc godddd. basically what the class boils down to is like. flash animation. so far we’ve been working in adobe illustrator and animate & i cannot stand illustrator. i know it’s a good and useful program and if i wanted to i could learn how to use it & eventually get used to it but just the way he teaches it makes me want 2 slam dunk my computer

the computer art basics class was strongly recommended to be taken before this class but tbh i don’t even think that’s the issue here because i tried to take that class and his method was the same; he does a demo on screen that you’re supposed to follow along and do with him and he explains what hes doing as he goes but he goes so fast that if u miss a step ur fucked

and it’s not just that he goes fast, it’s also that theres no understanding of the program itself, like ok u know how in math there’s all these formulas where if u just plug numbers into them it gives u the right answer? i always understood formulas better when i knew what each variable stood for & why the values were being added or multiplied together because then it made it easier to extract the information i needed from word problems and also helped me memorize the formulas themselves easier because i could make those associations between numbers and purpose. i had the groundwork of the formula, so i could apply it to all kinds of situations

this class is like, he only gives you the very specific formulas required to accomplish very specific tasks in the programs so i can’t make the connections to figure out how to perform other tasks and i get super lost every time & it’s super frustrating & i could ask for help because he comes around and helps people who need it but i sit in the back corner so he never really even looks my way so i feel like i can’t get his attention w/o speaking up or getting up to go get him & i get lost so often that it’s really just a pain to ask him every single time

i just hate when i have a problem in one of the programs & i just have absolutely no clue how to fix it or even work around it? im used to photoshop and illustrator is just so opposite that my brain doesn’t want to work with it so im. 100% floundering in this class

we have 2 assignments during the whole semester, the first was a group project where we hand draw a 3-second animation (~30 frames) and that was literally the very first thing we did in the class with no prior guidance and honestly i suspect that the only reason he assigns it is to fill the requirement for a group project (which i know is a thing bc a lot of my past teachers have talked about it being a thing) so it was literally just. a nothing project

the second assignment is our final which is a 90-second animation (~1080 frames) and we have basically the rest of the semester to work on it, so about a month and a half-ish? and all we’ve learned how to do so far is motion tweening in animate, basically. i mean we did a ball-and-string thing which was kind of different but it mostly involved a lot of copy+paste bullshit in illustrator & also like automatic shortcuts & stuff, there was really no drawing involved at all

also it’s one of those classes where everyone just kind of messes around and does their own thing like?? i saw one girl reading manga on her computer & these two dudes at my table were comparing yugioh cards & i hear like 50 thousand conversations about anime every day & i mean im not one to talk tbh but it’s just the atmosphere, it feels like u either know what ur doing or u just fuck around w/ ur friends and im in the “neither of those” category and the girl who was reading manga is in the “both” category bc every other time i’ve looked over there she’s got this amazing masterpiece on her screen that she made in illustrator & i die inside every time what the fuckkc

he showed us examples of final projects from last semester and i noticed that some of them were done traditionally or in programs that were obviously not illustrator so i asked him about it & he said it doesn’t have to be done in illustrator/animate as long as it’s 90 seconds long so Guess What i think i’m just gonna make it somewhere else lmaooo i mean i feel like it’s a missed opportunity bc i have these programs at my disposal & im not even using them but god amn. god fuckign damn

im thinking of animating it in flipnote bc that’s what i’ve been using & im pretty familiar with it by now but im not sure because there are some important things im not sure i’ll be able to accomplish with it like backgrounds (which are another requirement for the assignment) and i don’t want to back myself into a corner, especially with how little time i have to do it, so idk for sure. my other idea was to use clip studio paint but i have the pro version which only lets u use 24 frames per animation which totals out to a whopping 2 seconds so idk if i want to have to deal with that bullshit either. right now im considering making the rough animation in flipnote so i can figure out the timing & shit and then slapping it into clip studio to finalize everything (or technically i could even do that in photoshop, since im more familiar w/ it & can probably work faster there- from photoshop it’d be a matter of copying the finished frames into clip studio to export into 2-second clips & then compile those in movie maker & then bam finished animation)

so!!! it’s a lot of shit im dealing with in this class & im just like. if im doing it this way then why do i even need to show up for class. what am i even in this class for im just basically making an animation on my own time with my own resources using none of the techniques taught in the class. im only doing this animation because it’s an assignment for the class im not gaining anything from. it just seems so pointless & the only thing getting me through it is the thought that i could possibly put this in a portfolio somewhere down the line, and for that i’d want it to look nice and not rushed so im thinking that for the sake of finishing the assignment i might just use my rough animation so that i can spend more time on the “nice” version afterward

aaaanyway it’s um Late for me & i went on about this for too long but i needed to get it off my chest tbh, i’ve been thinking abt making this post for like 2 weeks so there u go. i didn’t even talk about my painting troubles good lord. if you’ve been wondering why i havent been online as much lately This is why. also bc im a huge loser and 100% of my free time has been going into watching anime bye

#retag later #me? complaining for an hour?? maybe #school /#i usually reread these & edit them to make things sound better but this time im too tired so if anything doesnt make sense sorry

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