JotoMan

i'm so physically tired i am a big fat slob *lays my bird eggs* nnnnnghhhhh *lays another* i can't stop drawing but i dont want people to think i will always post daily *lays yet another egg* ooooooorgh *heavy breathing* i'm not gonna post daily or every other day i just have a lot of art i want to share i'm soorrghhyy my pals and oomfs and oomfettes

I don't think it's ever directly referred to as a black hole in game (but like. What else could it be.) But I have had a very big soft spot for black holes my entire life so let me waffle about them for a little while.

A black hole is the product of a star dying, particularly a very massive star. A star is a ball of gas crushed so tightly by gravity that the atoms themselves are smashed until they collide, causing a nuclear fusion reaction that gives off enough energy to beat back the very gravity that started it. More gas → more fusion → bigger star → more light and heat, and usually a smaller lifespan. For millions, billions, maybe trillions of years, a star will slam together atoms until it has worked through all of its supply of Hydrogen. There is now a deficit in the energy supply, and gravity will slowly start to win, crushing the core down until the force is enough to start fusing Helium (and other elements) together.

A lot of other shit happens from there but at the end of it all, the star is sort of pulled two ways. The outer layers get blasted out into space, and in the core, the gravity from the sheer mass of everything will crush the star in on itself, compacting all the material it had been fusing all that time into one tiny spot, which then resides in the cloud of stuff that had been blasted off in the process of dying. This process decimates the star and everything around it, but simultaneously spreads material back out so that new stars and planets can form from it.

A black hole is what happens when gravity tries to smash too much mass into too little space. It is not unfathomably dense, it is beyond density. It is a hole in the fabric of spacetime. Space and time stop having meanings at the edge of it, at the event horizon. It is infinity in a tiny ball, it is the error in a calculator made real. It has unimaginable, indescribable gravity, so strong that nothing can escape it past a certain point. That's why they're black. It's not coloration, but the boundary where light itself can no longer escape the pull.

There is something so incredibly lonely about these objects to me. They're very hard to detect due to emitting no light of their own, and everything around them is liable to be spaghettified. Any world that tried to orbit one would be cold and dead due to the lack of heat and light, unless they were warmed by the plasma in the accretion disk, which they would risk joining if they got too close.

I think it's sadder to imagine that Coat Guy was normal once. That he used to be a star. He gave off heat and light without even thinking, because it was just part of existence. And then something happened and he saw himself collapse and now what is left is a tiny, ghoulish thing in the blasted remains of its previous life. His endless cold is keeping him going as much as it is killing him. He hates it and yet it's all he can think about or focus on. The very thing that draws people in is what tears everything near him to shreds. His singularity is his secret. Everything he attempts to connect with will be destroyed by what he is, and he will never feel the warmth of any living thing he consumes. It just falls in and then God knows what happens, and it never touches the infinite cold, infinite hollowness, infinite density, infinite pull that resides in that zombified star speck.