Paratober!

Paratober!

October 16th:

The narrator

KACHOWW!! art dump of me trying to figure out how to draw stanley

I honestly and truly believe all good AUs should be a little “”””ooc”””” in the sense that good characterisation involves understanding that changes a characters backstory and circumstances will have an effect on how they respond to the world around them

Good characterisation isn’t about creating a perfect 1:1 canon replica it’s about understanding why a character is different in your work and about grounding the changes you do deliberately choose to make in canon character traits

Yeah, I knew it. I had this same feeling recently where I even made a small post about it a few days ago.

Now, I’m not much of a hardcore TSP fan, more casual per se. But this post really nails it down of my own concern of making my AU. I only have 1 AU so far, and I’m pretty sure that’s all it would ever be. However, me looking at my one AU of this fandom just doesn’t feel right. It felt like it doesn’t belong in the place of this fandom. I’m placing the cast of TSP into another whole other different fandom that the scenario is vastly different. I am still working on tweaking the universe to resemble or reference some events that happened in the base game. I do my best to respect the aesthetic style of the game, which is why my cast (aside from Stanley or any TSP character with a visible appearance) wear masks in my AU. Yeah, Curator, Narrator, and TimeKeeper are going to be represented with a physical appearance, but by wearing a mask references these characters physically unseen, or ‘masked’ if you will.

I mean, if the game weren’t that meta we wouldn’t be having all of this creative plethora of art, theories, and head-canons. But yeah, some, not all, AUs in these fandoms just don’t make sense at times? Like when I think of an AU, it’s supposed to be when you place the existing characters with their predetermined lore into a different scenario but written in a way that it feels like an extension of the original story, rather than ripping it apart and having two completely separate worlds that makes the original so foreign. cough cough, Undertale AUs 💀

not to rain on everyone's parade, but sometimes i do think there's something almost sad to me about the fact that I have seen so much stanley parable fandom content that exclusively revolves around alternate universes that have progressively grown further and further off-track from the narrative of the original game to an extent that i find barely recognizable at times. something about how whether or not it's true (i can't tell people that they don't enjoy something 'enough', i have no metric by which to measure how cherished the original is to people making this content) it almost feels like one of those cases where fanon precedes canon in terms of how much enjoyment people find in the content, as if people wanted the story to be *more* than it was to an extent that makes them override the original mentally. i think it doesn't help that a lot of people perceive fandom content as existing to fill some kind of 'deficit' in an original work- to give people what they didn't get in the original, so to speak. you've probably heard the spiel about how tragic tales have the most coffee shop AUs drifting around in their fandom tags, and such. the difference is that in most cases, those coffee shop AUs aren't more commonly posted about than the source they're based on. i can't really say the same for the stanley parable at this point. people are so enamored with AUs and versions of the game's story involving modifications of the narrator or the limited range of setting laid out by the game itself that i'm sad to say i don't see people engaging much with actual moments from the game itself all that often.

is that just a matter of personal preference? yeah, totally, but it does make me sad. I really *like* the fact that the Parable is so limited. I think it does the narrative a massive service that there truly is no finite ending or escape, that the Narrator is never given form nor further interactability with the game, that nothing ever goes wrong or changes in a way that matters. It's a fundamental part of the narrative to me. Changing that is fun to people, and I get that- but at some point to me it just feels like so much about what I love about the game's narrative is just being reduced to the meaningless backdrop to shipping and the opportunity for something people Want to see more.

Wuh oh, what do you have there Timekeeper?

How do you draw a human and a voice having say gex?

It’s a genuine question, I’m not joking 😭🙏