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betweenlands · 7 months

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It takes exactly two seconds between Impulse looking up at the top of the Secret Keeper and him realizing what he's actually seeing up there to decide he is officially sick and tired of seeing ghosts.

There are seven entire ghosts around the thing today -- a couple appear to be tinkering with the secret delivery mechanisms. Impulse squints at them.

"What are you doing?" he says.

"Trying to figure out how to load more tasks into this thing," one of them replies, kicking one of the blocks with buttons on them. He's got a full beard and some weird green glowing mushrooms poking out of cracks in his face. It's definitely... a look, Impulse will give him that. Very Mycelium Resistance. "But whoever designed it used freakin' command blocks, and you can't even see the randomizer run."

"How many times did your randomizer break again?" one of the other ghosts calls from up on top of the Secret Keeper.

"Never!" the mushroom ghost protests, causing at least two other ghosts to crack up laughing. "It worked completely flawlessly except for user error."

One of the ghosts, someone who appears to have a floating cactus block for a head, snorts. "And programmer error."

"You shut it," the mushroom ghost responds.

"He's not wrong," the more normal-looking brown-haired ghost over by the command blocks says absently, purple eyes clearly focused on trying to trace the wiring back to the actual command blocks.

Impulse just stands there, bewildered -- both because the ghosts are actually talking to him, and also because these are extremely weird ghosts to be talking to who look nothing like anyone he's even vaguely heard of.

"Fine," he says, "you know what, I'll bite. Why are you guys here?"

"Checking in," a ghost sitting on one of the lower rocks says. He's wearing blue and yellow, looks to be a little more transparent than the others. "Y'know, new season and all that?"

Impulse squints at him. "No, I meant, why are you following me?"

"Ohhhh!" The ghost laughs. "Hadn't looked into what you were doing yet, and these guys wanted to see if they could get some of their tasks into the machine, so I just brought everyone along."

"That's not really a good answer," a ghost leaning inside the alcove under the Secret Keeper says. He's got a mask pulled up over his face, though his voice doesn't really sound muffled at all.

"What," the blue and yellow ghost says, "am I supposed to say something like it's because you're one of the people with no hard-and-fast thematic associations to stick to and therefore easier to facilitate a meeting with and freak him out more?"

Impulse squints harder. "Are you guys Watchers?"

The blue-and-yellow ghost snorts. "Hah! That's Martyn's lore, bud, not yours. Nope, nothing to do with the Watchers."

"Aren't you technically--" the ghost in the alcove starts.

"Tsssssshhhhhh," the other ghost replies by way of shushing him aggressively, "spoilers!"

"Alright," the alcove ghost says, spreading his hands in mock defeat, "fine, have it your way. He's right though. Not Watchers."

"Lowercase-w maybe," the brown-haired ghost still inspecting the redstone with the mushroom ghost says, "but otherwise, no."

Impulse is starting to feel like he's wandered into something way above his pay grade.

The alcove ghost snaps his fingers. Impulse notes somewhat absent-mindedly that he has, like, a lot of piercings on one ear. "Hey," he says, "come to think of it, we might be able to help you out with some stuff."

"I swear to God," another ghost says from on top of the Secret Keeper, "if you try to sell another person on your weird coffee god thing again-"

"I wasn't going to!" he responds. "Honest! I was just gonna say, it looks like there's a plains biome here, that means oxeye daisies, that means suspicious stew with regen if you can get a good source of mushrooms."

"Unfortunately," the mushroom ghost says, looking up from where he and the other ghost appear to now be trying to cram books into the ground, "the space for the hearts seems like it just kinda vanishes when people get hit. At least, if I'm not misunderstanding the programming."

"If you're misunderstanding the programming then we're both reading this code wrong," the brown-haired ghost says. "And I'm pretty sure I used something similar here for Dark Path stuff, so probably not?"

"Dang," the alcove ghost says, then tilts his head back towards Impulse. "Maybe make splash poison potions, then? That'll take out a good chunk of someone's health if they can't regen."

"He is green," the cactus-headed ghost says. "Why's he gotta make poison potions right now?"

A shrug in response. "Never hurts to prep early."

The blue-and-yellow ghost leans forward, squinting at him. "Alright," he says, "one of my wisps give you that idea or what?"

Another shrug. "I mean, what if they did?"

"Last time you started listening to his wisps," the brown-haired ghost says, "they told you to try and kill everyone just because I beefed it before the dragon fight."

"It would've worked if you hadn't warned them," the ghost in the alcove replies. "I can't believe you tried to sabotage my attempt at avenging you."

"I can't believe you listened to them in the first place," the blue-and-yellow ghost says. "They're bloodthirsty, they don't really give good advice."

"And I," Impulse says, having inched his way over towards the new task button, "am going to take my task and leave, because you guys are weird."

He hits the button and flips through the taskbook.

"End every sentence said to another player in a question?" he says, squinting down at it.

"You're already doing better than some of us were!" one of the ghosts on top of the Secret Keeper yells down.

"Oh my god, shut up!" the mushroom ghost yells back, and then turns to Impulse. "Hey, by the way, have you considered getting a pet parrot?"

"That's still a bad loophole and you know it," the blue-and-yellow ghost cuts in.

"I heard him just fine," the brown-haired ghost says. "Hey, hang on -- that's one of ours! It worked!"

Impulse decides he's not even going to bother trying to be polite about leaving. He has had entirely enough of these ghosts in particular.

#secret life #secret life smp #impulsesv #gilded hardcore #vikingpilot #this minific brought to you by: gilded is good go watch it #unlike last impulse fic i will not bother with a pretense of it being symbolism. this one is fully because it is funny to me #there's SOME stuff in there if you squint but it doesn't actually have anything to do with impulse #anyway sorting tags time:#yt #txt #solar scraps #solar scrawls #slsmp #gilded #you may have noticed i tagged the blue and yellow ghost. this is because i fear no man. or pronoun stealer for that matter #oh dunk wait i should also tag the others #devonsdesk #thefoolnse #avidmc #and then whimzee and trog are in the background (sorry guys i didn't have the voices down yet)#oh and fun fact about this one. the identity of one of these ghosts is Really Questionable #like just a little bit... it could be him acting weird or it could be something else entirely yknow? something more aware of certain things #but ehhhhhhhhhhhnnnn that's spoilers so who am i to blow up its spot #update josh got a new username so #codeneon

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inbarfink · 9 months

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A lot of 'Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared' is built upon a sort of inherent surrealism in young children’s edutainment. Because the thing is that for a lot of those shows it’s more important to, well, entertain-slash-educate the target audience of Literal Toddlers than it is to present a coherent world and story. DHMIS just takes this sort of dream-like world that is created as a result of these priorities and reframes it in a serious manner for an adult audience as an element of horror and/or tension. One example is the ages of the characters.

In a lot of those sorts of shows, preschool-and-under-puppet-shows (and sometimes cartoon shows), the ages of the puppet characters are kinda abstract. Again, the main priority isn’t really to make them feel like an accurate representation of a person who could exist in the real world. The ages of a lot of these characters is basically “young enough so that their emotional maturity and worldview is relatable to our preschool target audience, but old enough so that they can go on various misadventures that are also entertaining to our preschool audience without the worry of stuff like parental supervision”.

So these characters have the same presumed understanding of the world as the children in the audience, usually need to be taught basic concepts and live-action adults would generally interact with them in a similar way one would a child - but on the other hand they usually treat themselves as a separate category from the live-action children they might also interact with, and are allowed to do a whole bunch of stuff an actual live-action kid on that same show wouldn’t be allowed to do -

Like drive vehicles -

Or work with heavy machinery -

Or cook -

Or generally just live unsupervised without it being a big deal.

So yeah, the DHMIS trio all kinda live on different points of this spectrum of Ambiguously Childlike Puppets. They primarily interact with ‘teachers’ who explain to them basic concepts most adults would understand, and who generally regard them in a condescending manner (even when these teachers seem like children themselves).

When Yellow Guy meets Lesley, she also addresses him as one would a child. The existence of the Big Boy and Bigger Boy Rooms imply that our protagonist’s floor might be actually called something like the “Little Boys Room”. But they all have some aspects that make this reading a bit complicated, just in different ways.

Yellow Guy feels like the most ‘childlike’ puppet. He has the most simpleminded and naive worldview, the one who is most likely to go along with the ‘lessons’ of the teachers. Even when he becomes fully-charged and thus turns into the most intelligent and emotionally-mature character in the entire show - characters like the Teachers, the Big and Bigger Boys and Lesley all address him like a surprisingly clever kid instead. Plus he dresses in the most obviously childlike way. And possibly the most important factor, he has a father who is significantly taller and bigger than him -

Which definitely implies one is a child and another is an adult.

But… not only is he, urm, ‘recruited’ to a factory job. But he explicitly worked exactly 40 years until his retirement. With the ‘default retirement age’ in the UK being around 66 years, that might instead imply Yellow is in his mid-to-late 20’s instead. Plus, despite the implications that he is a child due to being considerably shorter than Roy - as an old man with a wife and child of his own, he actually remained the exact same size as his younger self.

Which would imply that whatever Yellow Guy is a child or an adult, he is at least adult-sized-enough for his ‘species’.

He is also ‘recruited’ as the ‘Mummy’ in Lily and Todney’s family.

And his fantasy (memory?) of Mulhoven, he sees himself as living on his own.

Red Guy, meanwhile, is on the other end of the spectrum. With his adult-human-like physique and very non-cartoon voice - it’s pretty intuitive to read him as an adult. Continuing the whole Roy Point, Red Guy is consistently shown as being around the same size as other adult ‘Red Guys’ - if not actually on the taller side of things.

And he is seen holding an ‘adult’ job not just in ‘Jobs’ (which you can argue is just some sort of Briefcase-powered pocket dimension where child labor is legal) but also in the ‘real world’ segments of Dreams…. Which, well, has a higher chance of being Actually Real, at the very least.

‘Dreams’ also shows a picture of him graduating from... somewhere?

Plus, he tends to talk back to the teachers more. Which makes him feel more like an adult being condescended to. But then again, the affectations of an adult or a child being condescended too can be quite similar. At the end of the day, the primary things that make his adulthood ambiguous is that he does sometimes need basic concepts explained to him -

And that he does generally regard the other puppets, including the much more childish Yellow Guy as his peers. Even after arguing that he should be the ‘father figure’ of the household, he still ends up calling Yellow his ‘brother’.

And Duck is in sort of an interesting position, on one level he is more ‘adult-y’ than Red Guy, but on another level he is just as childish as Yellow Guy.

Physically he is even shorter than Yellow Guy, and his voice is much too cartoony to peg him as a child or an adult. He ALSO has a graduation photo....

His sense of fashion, his hobbies (reading the newspaper and doing the crossword) and even his chair of choice (a rocking-chair) are all pretty adult, or even old-man-like (compare Yellow Guy’s childish little stool, and Red Guy’s relatively neutral sofa).

But he also likes the same show as the very childish Yellow Guy (although it is a Wallace and Gromit parody and that’s really an all-ages franchise, although it IS notable that it's Red Guy who thinks it's boring and predictable). He is pretty likely to push back against the teachers, although mostly when their lessons clash against his own ego. A behavior that is both mature and immature at the same time. In general with most of what Duck does, it's not necessarily easy to peg his behavior between an insecure grown-up or a child trying to act like an adult.

For example, the ‘Memories’ sequence in ‘Death’ has this memory of Duck ‘telling Yellow Guy about the military’.

Yellow Guy’s words and their positioning is deliberately meant to invoke a specific cultural image of, like, a father or grandfather telling a child about their service. But what Duck is actually ‘telling’ Yellow about is just a very childish and uninformed gushing about military might. ("They're invincible!")

I guess my biggest point is the way this ambiguity can be used as part of DHMIS’ atmosphere of unease. It’s like… no matter how you read the ages of the characters, their situation is utterly fucked up - just in different ways.

If all of the puppets are all adults, then the way they have been robbed of their agency and the absolute lack of control they have over their own life becomes even more disturbing. The condescending and controlling way the teachers tend to treat them becomes even worse. Especially how they have been convinced of their own inability to do anything on their own. See, Yellow and Duck's apprehension about taking the car for a ride in "Transport":

It's just us three! We can't just... do stuff, us three. Can we?

I told you, you shouldn't try and do something without a little... thing telling you how to do it.

This isn’t just about the car - the point is that Duck says “try and do something”. Meaning anything. There is really nothing Duck can imagine the trio can do that they can do alone without the supervision of an ‘authority figure’. This would already be pretty fucked-up if they were kids, but as adults it’s an even darker situation. No wonder their life is so bleak and terrifying.

If one is to read the puppets as kids instead, then it is also pretty disturbing how much they are left to their own devices. I mean, yeah, their life is robbed of all agency - but they lack any sort of real adult emotional support. Kids don’t just need adults to Teach Stuff to them or Stop Them From Doing Wrong Things, they need general advice and help and support and reassurance and role models and adult kindness and the DHMIS Trio doesn’t get any of this.

The characters’ utter isolation from anyone who isn’t a ‘teacher’ is already pretty fucked-up if they’re adults - but if you see them all as kids, it’s even darker. No one can help them mitigate pressures during interpersonal conflicts, no one to comfort and take care of them when things get rough, no positive example they can aspire and emulate. They all basically have to alternate being the ‘responsible adult’ for each other. And if they are all kids, this is really dark. No wonder they and their relationships are so fucked-up.

And if you see only some of them as kids, like for example, I think the most popular fan interpretation is that Yellow Guy’s a kid and the other two are adults? I think it is a valid read of the situation but that also comes with it’s own layer of fucked-upness with the power dynamics now at play. Like, every time Duck or Red Guy mistreat Yellow Guy, it’s not just them being assholes. They’re being assholes to a child, when they are the adults who are - by default of being the only adults consistently around in his life - are responsible for.

And no matter how you’d try and shake it, it’ll always come off pretty fucked-up. Like, if you have Red Guy as a Token Kid then it’s a matter of a child being forced into a Responsible Adult position basically by being the most grounded person in the household. If Duck's the only adult than, like, oh god who put THIS guy in charge of taking care of two children? And so on and so on…

No matter which path you take, it’s always very dark, and very DHMIS…

#don't hug me i'm scared #dont hug me im scared #dhmis #dhmis analysis #dhmis theory #yellow guy #red guy #duck #yellow guy don't hug me i'm scared #dhmis red guy #red guy dhmis #red guy dont hug me im scared #duck dhmis #dhmis duck #yellow guy dhmis #dhmis yellow guy #this post was inspired by me watching DHMIS on Niconico with Japanese fansubs #and noticing the different first-person pronouns the different fans gave to the Three of Them lol

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