hamsteaks conceptual (wip)

i love that the button right below this says TRASH like the world's most judgemental UI

i guess we are keeping it smartphone era, tackling modern issues but i want oldtimey throwback items and sets and costumes in keeping with the homestuck vibe, with the exception that the iterations of gaming design match up with the cases, so LARPing belonged to cow tb problem, board game monopoly for the next?

we all know a privatised housing market is a goddamn nightmare, but how to tie that to a joke with smuppets

probably the punchline every chapter is going to be the cops failing to do their job for some absurd and slightly homoerotic reason and Babe's immediate capitulation to cowardice because his family are *entertainers* they're not politicians and make no claims against the law.

i think the cops should be a different pair of characters every time, like Babe just keeps RETIRING police and stalkers (the last two caught TB from drinking the raw milk).

anyway, stop calling police "bacon", it's rayciste.

Chapter Dos: monopoly

is just Babe trying to rent an apartment and the gimmick is he rolls the dice he has to rent in order to even be able to travel around the city; it's a shitty bus payment system, the dice roll, so like maybe this city is a vegas clone. people on the sidewalk will have tophats and scotty dogs and all be extremely homeless, the closer to the BOARDWALK neighborhood that Babe gets

eventually all he can find are overpriced and pre-furnisher air b'n'bs, littered with surveillance cameras and 'smart' appliances that all stop working as soon as a storm takes the wifi out.

the pair of cops for this one should be garden variety creeps, maybe paparazzo after some scrilla but they end up spending more money than they can make and the shitty bus fare dice roll system keeps launching them ahead of Babe around the city 'board'.

eventually the stalkers land in a cheap neighborhood and win the deed to a railroad company in a game of rock-paper-scissors (reaux chambeaux) because the railroad owner was tired of making zero dollars and getting terrorised by the owner of the other three railroads -- petty enough not to sell to his enemies but proud enough not to just donate, for free, like a weenie.

dunno how this one's getting solved, probably Babe leaves the city during the storm with renewed determination to remain unhoused, as the only way to truly win at monopoly is to just not play.

the stalkers are laughsassinated by an agent (hired by the three-title-owning railroad mogul), a dark carapacian who finds the photo negatives the stalkers had gathered thus far, and ~mysteriously~ follows Babe out of town.

other monopoly town foibles:

people keep saying "hours" when they mean years, alluding to how casinos are windowless in order to warp our perception of time, and also how goddamn long a game of monopoly can drag on

there are piles of cards you can draw from at the bus stations, but most of them send you directly to jail so the risk is never worth it (people draw them anyway, Babe meets a woman who has been in jail three times because she got five hundred dollars once, and has her fingers crossed for access to healthcare).

Babe does pass "Go" at least once, it is the name of a restaurant whose other title letters have fallen off into the sea: together they originally spelled "burGer jOint". the place hands out two hundred dollars for everyone who passes through the bus stop to just keep traveling, because it is a money laundering joint and nobody there knows how to cook burgers and tbh paying out small bribes is cheaper than intimidation and also keeps the community invested in protecting the racket, like a statement on how socialism can be confused for criminality just because it looks busted, but also how criminality can use socialism to keep itself propped up (the place has so much more money to spare and they don't use it to improve the city any).

the scenes between cases, for the slow reveal of Babe's past:

first one introduces the nod and wink toward Babe's parents, his earliest memories of being home alone while his older siblings were at school and both parents off to work, Babe too short to reach the door knobs and eating whatever was in the bottom drawers of the fridge or cupboards.

there could be a reveal at the end that a nanny was there the whole time, like maybe just a really sleepy grandparent? who Babe was always scared has stopped breathing, because he was the one to find grandpa had passed while trying to rouse him from a nap.

and because of that early confusion about death, Babe figures not waking a grandparent means they could never die, or at least never be discovered as dead. he's bored out of his tiny toddler mind and eats absolute garbage but at least he never has to feel responsible for killing a grandparent. (this is a setup to how Babe reacts to things he is responsible for, later)

SECOND revealing flashback could cover Babe's playground fights over being mixed and trans. the reptile / bird classmates think he's privileged to have the size and strength of a pig and call him a colonizer, and the mammal classmates just think he's kinda froggy-eyed and ugly for being green.

within each group are a few who objectify Babe in a way that turns to petty jealousy, like Babe knows he can kick reptile ass and that he's slim and big-eyed for a pig in a way that could be pretty, and this means the reptile and birds call him fat and ugly out of fear and the mammals call him scrawny and ugly out of jealousy (the biggest names in mainstream fashion are colorfully plumaged birds, flamingo and peacock and et c).

Babe is also born intersex, as most frogs, and plays his early life as a boy simply because he identifies with his frog dad's values and not his pig mom. the school has his assigned medical sex on file, though, and makes him use the girl's restroom. the problem that arises here (redacted) will foreshadow Babe's difficulty making friends, even after most of his bullies had grown up and moved on, those bullies freed out of their various closets successfully while Babe stays frozen well into adulthood, because he was also part frog and the bullies were also full mammal.

THIRD CASE

Babe travels the side-scrolling landscape, loses nearly all his life tokens just sleeping through the whole journey, propped up on a railroad wagon that the screen edge just dutifully pushes along, getting pizza'd at intersections cos Babe would rather take the Ls than try and make the wagon jump.

He always has plenty of life tokens left, his high LUCK STAT means he finds them goddamn everywhere like it's kind of a pain (life has no thrill, hence he volunteers to homelessness and impoverished travel adventures)

the cops who follow him this time only have ten life tokens each and lose them all trying to perform the difficult jumps that Babe just sleeps through.

this is a metaphor about privilege, and how quite a lot of law enforcement and similar mercenary laborers are from impoverished beginnings and would probably be doing different jobs if any other different jobs were hiring or union or had fair pay and pension.

THE LAUGHSASSIN clears the jumps with ease, like this road is only level five and they've been all the way to the castle (lv 99) and had already beat hairy turtle ass.

ADDENDUMS:

BABE STRIDER is a stage name, his legal name would have been DeFrog but he changed it to Hopper to honor his frog family's cultural past.

we never find out what kind of celebrity Babe even has that he would need a stage name for, except maybe his social media but even that he uses his legal name on (his own personal journalism, not monetized). We will see him introduce himself as Strider to mammals and mundanes (human characters), and Hopper to reptiles and birds, and coose Strider when in mixed company, presumably for his safety if not just for his comfort.

THIRD FLASHBACK will follow miss piggy's harrowing ordeal of working as a secretary to a local politician, when Babe is starting gradeschool. i know this story by heart. you don't have to hear about it before the comic, but the end result is that Babe and his most Piggiest older sister get into a physical fight with the politician, during which Babe lands wrong on a piece of fencing and his thin froggy skin can't stop him from getting slightly, uh, impaled.

he doesn't lose a life because he hasn't entered THE GAME yet, these are memories from a pre-game world, possibly low tech like sixties era? forties? 1800s xmas carroll micheal caine cameo? they had canon children in that muppet movie, did the DeFrogs.

i like the idea of 1800s juxtaposed to modern gamescapes, but don't want to lose the thread of how these problems in the flashbacks are actually very present and modern and not a racism or sexism of the past. maybe the defrogs drive a minivan because the price of horse and buggy is in the millions (the horses are unionised).

anyway, babe is injured near his spine and thus lands him in a 'trauma ward' in the big city hospital an entire state over, with other kids with injuries to their spine, and this is where Babe meets the carapacian we had previously seen as the laughsassin, who is in the ward for a MUCH WORSE injury, from child assassin training.

this is also where Babe meets [redacted], whose injuries are too grim to discuss (but [redacted] discusses them anyway, because he's angry and doesn't want to suffer alone). redacted is a scrawny baby rooster, and he and his father had been attacked by a bigger and unrelated rooster on their farm. dis a metaphor for cop on cop violence.

Babe, having high CHARISMA base stat, befriends the rooster kid, but rooster monopolizes Babe's time and attention away from others who wanted to be his friend too, like the carapacian. rooster doesn't weaponize pity on purpose, and babe doesn't intend to neglect the other kids, they just share the same kind of ferocious loyalty that the constantly bullied can form together, a precursor to the radicalised incel violence that rooster will grow into.

when rooster soils himself in the play area, a medical issue that he's so ashamed of he starts crying, Babe loudly claims that he himself did shit his own pants, and begs rooster to escort him to the showers on a fictional excuse that he can't walk very far on his own. when rooster asks why Babe did that, Babe explains that it's no big deal for a pig to roll in shit, inadvertently reinforcing the racism with which others had taunted him, because he didn't really understand the idiom except that maybe his mom, a pig, had to change a lot of poopy baby diapers over the years (and this was something to be proud of, pigs being able to caretake in ways that maybe other animals found beneath them).

when the nurse chases Babe from the shower room to help rooster wash, rooster is DEVASTATED to learn that Babe can't stay because Babe is medically assigned female.