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the-trinket-witch · 8 months

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PlayfulLand Theories before the event starts!

Everybody's excited for the New Twst Halloween Event coming to the JP servers, right? I am too. These bones been rattlin' since I found out. And my brain has been rotting with theories and predictions. Are they baseless? Likely. I would like to say I've seen enough of a pattern in this game to see a familiar plot coming down the pipe. Call it grasping at straws or pareidolia, but I'm having fun turning this all in my brain. Everybody in the Brainrot Buggie, we're making wild guesses and throwing shit at the wall to see what is right.

(SPOILERS FOR TWST PLAYFULLAND EVENT, TWST CH. 6, BLACK BUTLER: BOOK OF CIRCUS. CW for Child Abuse, manipulation/loss of physical faculties, and general body horror)

Biggest takeaway from this theory dump: Fellow and Gidel aren't the main antagonists of this event.

"But Trinket, they're the face of the event! How are they not the Big Bads?" I hear you wonder. It's because they weren't the Main Antagonists in their own source material. These two were:

Stromboli and The Coachman.

Assuming anyone reading has already watched the 1940 film, will note these two are connected to Honest John and Gideon/The Fox and Cat by their financial dealings. The Coachman in specific pays the Two for them to round up boys to bring to Pleasure Island to meet their fates. In most iterations of Pinnochio, Mangiafuoco/Stromboli and The Coachman are two separate entities. One adaptation, though, combines them. And while I will not delude myself to think it was an inspiration for the potential 'Actual Big Bad', an idea came to mind when thinking of the character from the 1996 The Adventures of Pinnochio, Lorenzini. A couple ideas, actually…

But before I get to that, where else in Toboso-sensei's work have we seen Charismatic Gingers in Circus Settings who are the bait-and-switch 'face' of a story arc?

That's right:

Joker.

I guess not really 'bait and switch', but a lot of emphasis was put on him as a character when Book of Circus first came out. But then he and the rest of the Circus troupe began mentioning a man they called Father. Baron Kelvin.

Before his obsession sparked for Ciel, he was a philanthropist who could have been considered a good man. But in the state we meet him in for the first time in BoC, he's a completely changed man obsessed with becoming physically appealing to Phantomhive, to the detriment of the children who had and would come under his 'care'. Their bones became the ceramic used to give prostheses to the rest of the circus.

What if we're gearing up to have a similar figure 'pulling the strings' in this coming event? An amalgamation of Stromboli/The Coachman/Baron Kelvin…and Monstro the Whale?

"Why Monstro? We already have a reference with Azul's cafe!"

Remember Lorenzini that I mentioned earlier?

He's also a combination of The Puppetmaster, Coachman, and Whale. What if this Combination character… was a Whale merman? A merman looking for a different way to stay human, in a sense 'Become a Real Boy'? What if his transition to humanity has him stuck in one location out of the way? What if this is all a trap to sap the life/magic out of these boys so he can shirk his mer form for permanent legs? While it could be a stretch to say this is the case, lemme see if I can coherently explain…

@thecosmicjackalope posed the notion that the extraneous went characters might in some way be foils/parallels to the Overblot Gang. So far we have Idia getting a parallel with Rollo (two siblings dealing with the grief over the death of their brother), what if this is an event paralleling Azul and his dynamic with The Tweels?

Shady fish men with (possible) varying degrees of disgust with their mer forms

Equally fishy business practices

Employ more physically capable individuals to do his 'legwork'

Plan(ned) on having the student body of NRC under their thumb of servitude

Employ magical tactics to entice and bind those they want into their grasp.

On top of all of this, what if his magic extends to both Fellow and Gidel? What if those two are just a regular fox and cat given sentience to do a whale's dirty work? Would they turn back after being defeated? That would explain the motivation, outside of just 'I'm getting paid handsomely to bring these boys in and not ask questions'. Even if this part is all thrown out the window, the idea that a shady Ringmaster lording over Playfulland just won't leave me. So then, what else can I guess about this event? (NOTE: THESE ARE ALL QUESTIONS AND THEORIES, not posed by much/any evidence)

The costumes/masks might specifically be used to control the boys. In a way similar to The Beast and the trees of Over the Garden Wall, thanks to @squidwen for the notion, maybe the masks progressively creep up on the NRC boys both subduing them, and eventually sapping them of life/magic? What if the incentive for the boys to act 'like jackasses' is how the mask takes root/grows? What if the end result (the host losing their life/stores of magic) their bones turn to wood? What if the park is literally built of the Bones of Fairgoers Past?

Something I already began to theorize about when the announced SSRs came out was: why those three were picked.

Ortho we know shares A LOT of parallels/references to Pinocchio already. It's basically a given that he'd be a part of this. He is naive and fresh, so he could very well follow wanderlust wherever (by whoever) inspires it. But why Kalim and Ace? Ideas for each:

Kalim:

He's a trusting person (played as 'To his own detriment')

A bit of a party animal

One to go with the flow, isn't quick to realize he's in deep shit til it's too late

Ace:

Brutally honest

Brother worked at a theme park. (Possible enticement to bring him in, on the promise of finding him somehow?)

One of the biggest liars of the cast-couple that with his immaturity and quick willingness to shirk responsibility, he's a prime candidate to pick off to someplace that promises leisure and fun away from school.

All three of the SSR boys are technically prime folk to lure off to the equivalent of Pleasure Island. Kalim with his weak will and shortsightedness, Ortho with his lack of experience both as a bot and now as a legit person, and Ace again because he has the most maturing to make for this arc. If anybody becomes a literal donkey in all of this: I can see it most likely being Ace.

Assuming the rest of the Event Cast are only there on the premise of having drawn the short straw and not able to go to the Glorious Masquerade, I don't have any other theories for them. (Though I gotta say I'm digging the much more blatant Mad Hatter Ref in Trey's design.) A gameplay theory I had is that maybe we have to fight them to 'cut them loose', with eventually Ortho, Kalim and Ace being the 'final' bosses of the event, who defend the Puppetmaster in one final stand.

For a TL:DR:

It's Book of Circus 2: Electric Boogaloo if it was written by Neal Shusterman (of Full Tilt fame). A Fishman wants to be a Real Boy, masks are terrifying, and Ace is an immature clown who's gonna get a lotta folks put in danger.

#twst #twisted wonderland #twst theory #twst playful land #twst event #fellow honest #twst gidel

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raven-at-the-writing-desk · 1 year

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I absolutely love your thoughts and introspectives! I also really relate to sometimes having opinions or preferences that differ from the majority in the fandom (eg I also am not that into malleus and fail to see his appeal, and I mald over tweel mischaracterization)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on a headcanon I've seen in the fandom concerning merfolk: that they also live long lives. not as long as fae, but in the 100s ranges. do you think it's plausible given what we already know? I do like the instant angst material that occurs when a mer is paired with a human but personally, given the spare bits and pieces of mer lore we've seen, I think they age pretty normally like humans. you could even say their life expectancy may be even shorter than humans simply because of how dangerous it is under the sea. what do you think?

Aaah 🫣 I’m glad that you have fun reading through my blog brain dumps!

Personally, I don’t think there’s a lot that supports the “merfolk have long lifespans” headcanon. I feel like that’s something that comes less from TWST canon itself and more from general real life legends and lore. I guess a lot of it comes from people wanting to have fun with making creations where a merman outlives their human friends and/or S/O.

While it’s true that not every headcanon needs “proof” or backing from official materials, I think this is definitely a case where fans borrow from outside resources rather than the canon to form their ideas (and there’s nothing wrong with doing that; we just have to remain mindful that headcanon isn’t canon and to not conflate the two). The same can honestly be said for a lot of headcanons pertaining to fairies (which borrow from fairy mythology from all over the real world) and beastmen (who are likened to their real world animal counterparts). Headcanons involving merpeople usually have fans referencing mermaid stories (ie “eat the flesh for eternal life”, “catch a mermaid and they’ll be forced to grant you three wishes”, “their songs lure sailors to their doom”, “they cry pearls”, etc) or real marine animals (”moray eels have second jaws, so the twins must also have those”, “octopuses has three hearts, so merform Azul must have them too”, “opening the mouth is a courtship ritual for moray eels, so that must be why Jade was embarrassed to show his mouth when apple bobbing”, etc).

The impression I’ve always gotten is that both merfolk and beastmen have lifespans similar to humans. Fae are consistently portrayed as the “outlier” race or the one that is the most far-removed from being “human” (right down to the fairies in Fairy Gala and Vargas Camp chasing off those they perceive as being different from themselves). The age and lifespan difference between them and other races is mentioned often, and sometimes fairies use “Child of Man” to refer to all non-fairies, which implies that fairies see themselves as a separate entity from all the others. Every other race appears to be lumped into the same category of “human” to fairies.

Even more telling than that is a scene at the end of episode 6 of the main story (more specifically, 6-82). In that scene, Malleus asks Lilia if humans really do change (age) drastically in “100 years or so”. Lilia says yes, then elaborates that while human lives are as fragile as threads on a spindle, they can still weave together and, in their companionship, create something far stronger. While Lilia is saying this, the game cycles through each of the other dorms, including beastmen and merfolk characters. If we take into consideration what Malleus said prior to Lilia’s confirmation (ie the disbelief that “humans” age so rapidly), plus the general dissonance between fairies and all other races (again, all being lumped into the category of “human”)… this implies to me that merfolk and beastmen probably have the same general life span as a regular human.

Now, I can’t really speak on average life expectancy seeing as we don’t know a lot of details about how life is under the sea (whether it’s more “civilized” or more “feral/wild” or about different adaptations between the types of merpeople. I don’t doubt that the deep sea is a treacherous place to live, but at the same time, I also don’t doubt that merpeople have evolved over time to adapt to those harsher environments and have taken measures to protect themselves from the dangers the deep may pose. To me, it’s not that different than like human parents who live by the woods telling their children to not eat the wild plants they can’t identify or to not play with wild animals.

There’s also the fact that Floyd has said that not a lot of merpeople come to the land. However, if the sea is supposedly so dangerous and maybe cutting their lives short because of it, why wouldn’t merpeople be clamoring to come to the surface world (especially when there are organizations and resources in place to encourage this migration)?

The brief time we were underwater to visit the Atlantica museum (in episode 3), we see something that I assume is the seabed (the background where we fight eel forms Jade and Floyd), and for being the bottom of that part of the ocean it seemed to be pretty light and colorful (which probably means it’s not the deepest the ocean can go)?? Not to mention that the mermen guards stationed there seemed relatively friendly, not hostile or on guard for their lives. It’s definitely not representative of all merpeople or life under the sea though (there are definitely different “depths” to the sea, so what is the “bottom” of one location doesn’t necessarily cover for the deepest or darkest possible corner of the entire sea); we’d need more information to draw a more firm conclusion. Until then, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to merpeople and say they’re similar to humans in both life span and life expectancy (though it could be highly variable depending on merperson subspecies and if they live in a shallower or in a deeper section of the sea).

#twst #twisted wonderland #Octavinelle #Azul Ashengrotto #Floyd Leech #Tweels #disney twisted wonderland #Jade Leech #twst theory #twisted wonderland theory #twisted wonderland theories #twst theories #notes from the writing raven #question #spoilers #Malleus Draconia #Lilia Vanrouge

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