#nephro.pdf

while the side-season's setting of a hospital might seme odd at first, it's kind of quickly obvious as well as outright confirmed that it is merely another form of the reality that these little freaks have always been a part of for the main show, just in a different form, a different building. also made obvious by how the last train functions and all but i feel like the biggest tell is actually the opening for the bloody karte sharing exterior decor with the loading screen for gregory house as a hotel from lost qualia; it really is only much different on the inside, which compliments the focus on catherine quite well. speaking of, onto her after all of that.

anyways, the episode's beginning and, abck to what started all of this thinking; the scene of a plane exploding right within her eyes. this is definetly meant to be taken as a sign to her, with the whole dimension being in some way, still controlled by gregory and all. but the sheer time it took from her to lament about her paths that seem exclusive to each other to that sign -- enough to, well, Obviously shake her up a bit ! but i really do wonder if this was intentional signage. to not think about it too hard, and yet, to not let it slide into fate's hands ever so. she does have at least a slight belief in superstitions if the collectable blood horoscopes in soul collecter are a sign as well.

onto what i want to actually get onto dissecting, though. that same issue of not trusting fate -- and her temporary decision to attempt leaving her position in order to seek what she truly wants despite her disturbing nature of aquiring it, the many failed attempts already within the bloody karte to take love into her own hands.

but, of course, the path of no return had been reached long ago by catherine, if not obvious by not only the fact that she is there in such a reptilian form in the first place, and everything else, but by the bloody karte existing as a season in the first place; in a more meta nature, catherine is pretty important as a character i feel to naomi himself -- more appearances than most, at least, as well as being one of few characters with a Name name, rather than a name that is more a title than anything.

and glorious shoutout both to catherine's rather pretty suitcase, as well as dr. fritz' kind of hysterical reaction to all of this being a relief about it. sorry fritz you're kind of stuck with her until the next episode where you get hit by a taxi and all of that can you wait a few minutes....

but also the sheer power of gregory over his own guests is not to be understated; his immediete rejection of her own path. such is the nature of gregory, honestly -- while his own murmoring might be to try and lead somebody somewhere, well. Don't Fucking Go There. but again, we are talking about a woman who's fate was sealed -- her destructive nature to be continued, lest the hotel and the lost world as a whole loses one of its most notable, powerful inhabitants.

and like YEAH gregory kind of has a point with how she already did love her career and these patients she claims to want to help, and YES there can always be both but like. The Cycle. Ohhhhh the Cycle of it all. and the way this love is expressed, well, we already know how abhorrent she is <3 even if i, personally, love her back for it, but maybe it is also the nature of the lost world that i shall never be let in it …

but ALL of this leading to that honestly more main-season esque scene of so, so many of the men, some of which we never see otherwise in the bloody karte, collasped on the hallway, a victim to that sickening love. and even if gregory does remorse about his regret with that, i do feel like such would differ if he just wasn't on the recieving end of it. refer to...catherine's first appearance in the nightmare begins, with the two speaking of leaving the first guest half-alive, half-dead -- he's in on this, and she's in on him.

You took a seat, looking up with your elbow on the table, resting your head upon the hand built upon it, and watched as Rush pushed the chair over to the wall with such little force that the bare air could've carried it. The small dimensions of the room made his height seem even more intimidating, and to you, endearing, not to mention the smell of gasoline and factory that came off of him like a fond cologne, a send-off to the roaring twenties for whatever unfortunate soul could still remember such an age and stumble inside the hotel.

It was your acquired taste, however. You could say he smelled like a personal heaven any day.

"So!" that booming voice he had spoke, or rather, yelled with no intention to yell yet would always be able to be heard from a few rooms away, "haven't seen anybody coming through for the past day. Pray for me this lasts."

"Mhhm."

That Jersey accent was already about to drive you crazy. Anyways, now that it did come to your attention, the hotel had been quiet recently. A much needed break for everybody involved, and you had already been witness to a few conversations held within this grace period. The other entities also seemed to have noticed it, embraced with a warmth of the cravings for peace. It would not last forever. People would be back, and people would be slain for everybody's sake, and that's why it was treated like it was worth such mild celebration. Rush's permanent grin seemed to extend farther down the cheeks, though that could just be because you were there. While your paths did not cross as much as either of you would like, times like these of relative quiet were spent together, stuck together, cold fumes wrapping around you without objection to his touch. The cold smoke, another acquired taste. You couldn't get enough of it.

You couldn't get enough of him. He was loud, able to strike fear into anybody, and you liked that.

"Plenty of things to do here, just have to look for them. There's always a few pieces missing, but the backgammon set should be good," he gestured to the left -- a shelf with a few other classic board games, a deck of cards, something unrecognizable as a game that probably was taken off of a dead body, and the already mentioned backgammon. You wished you were aware of this earlier. A few weeks to a few months. Time was lost too easily here. None of these looked too great to play with only two players, and the other two player options were either not competitive enough for you to like, too competitive and could rile either of you into a frenzy, or not that fun at all.

But the best sort of fun came from just making things up, and you already had a game made up as your selection for the night. Your head perked up from the unintentional slipping towards the table it had made.

"Give me a hand, dear. Wait, no...the entire arm. Two, if you'd so desire," you requested.

A hearty chuckle, a nod from the face of slightly brighter grey, and the smog bent to form the shape of two arms, starting from an elbow, the condensed fog taking a reach to hold onto one of your own hands already. They were minuscule compared to those monsters -- and cold, too. Even colder than just burying your face into it like you usually did. Hopefully frostbite wouldn't come and ruin the moment. You've seen Rush with these before -- fingers blocky and the size of your torso, and you had watched those fingers form the tightest grip against a trespasser and throw them against a wall at one point, reducing bones into powder with just one movement. He could've done that to you at one point. But now...?

Your arm moved up, shifting the elbow into that classic posture for a round of arm wrestling, and Rush copied your movements without a word, without a blink or twitch of that handsome face.

"Ready?" you asked.

"Whenever you are, love," he growled, a growl of upcoming ecstatic sparks. The battle was on, both of your hand's now in the ring. 

And you were either suddenly really good at this, or the smoke beast was not as strong as he let on, because it was already in the struggle part of every arm wrestle match. Tilted to the left, then the right again, an almost-win on Rush's end being shoved up as you began to break a sweat. The two of you exchanged words during all of this -- they were not very kind words. The love language of telling each other that you would kick each other's asses, to eat shit after the round, a banter that Rush and you loved to engage in. It soon turned into screaming curse words at each other, Rush giving a finale of a growl, and your hand being shoved onto the table. He always won, but it's not like you minded. Rush's eyes closed in enthusiastic laughter, and you joining in with a chuckle while still trying to process the last few seconds of that brawl.

You moved the arm to give a congratulatory handshake with him, an excuse to hold that hand yet again, and it felt like something had happened within those few seconds of intensities.

And you did hear a slight snap alongside the bang of your fist on the table.

And this wouldn't be the first time, nor probably the last, that he would've accidentally broken something in your frail works.

"Rush, think you did that thing where you fuck up my wrist again. Watch the way it dangles--" you shook out your wrist a little bit, and while it did hurt, it didn't hurt as badly as last time. It wasn't broken at the very least, but you still let out a string of quiet swears to decorate your pain before stopping.

"Wait. Again?" One of the few things that could nearly wipe that grin off his face.

You made another muffled agreement.

"Ice pack, then? Want to come with me to get it?"

I’ve always been much more interested in the Cogs than the toons when it came to this game. Their origins, which elaborated on with a simple flash animation within older installers for the game, are mostly unexplained. And, of course, the unified designs of just average, uncanny office workers with little variation except for head design and suit color dependent on department, are a specific, stylized sort of cool. There’s also probably something to say about my own personal experiences with work and neurodivergency and the want to be one, but that’s not the point.

The point now will turn political – despite the game being aimed at kids who could afford ten dollars a month to play, there are some specifics parts that addle to my now an adult brain, that make it think of the further lore implications, and what it means in the greater scheme of things. What do the Cogs represent? What does the war between the Toons and them mean? Of course, it’s also very easy to compare such a thing to the workforce in our own daily lives, and how big corporations play a role, reaching in, making evil decisions, and yet, giving us no choice but to consume their product. And what would I use any of this information for, to look into the implications of Cogs as a symbolism for real-life capitalism and its evils? Probably just rewording this entire paper into an essay to be posted on my website, but also, for my own fan-writings for the game, because, well, making fan content is fun.

My Search Process

The main treasure chest of information when it comes to Toontown Online nowadays is the Toontown Preservation Project, a website hosting game design documents, concept art, and much more, donated from the developers of Toontown Online while it was still active, such as Bruce Woodside. There’s also, of course, the many still-standing videos and posts on old forums about Toontown Online, as well as the gameplay that remains in private servers (mostly relevant to Toontown Rewritten, which is actually the group that runs the Toontown Preservation Project as well). The documentation is vast, encompassing things never implemented into the game, removed early or in beta testing, but for almost all of the conception, there is no use of the word Cogs to describe the Cogs. Instead, they are called Suits, and no discussion into the robotics parts, either.

However, these are not decisions that made it into the final game, and thus, could mean nothing at all in the long run. What was in the game, however, was Unites, a reward for completing a certain boss that replenished either your gags or your Laff (the toon equivilent of health), which were considered the most useful of boss rewards for obvious reasons. When a Unite was used, your Toon also shouts “Toons of the World,” and then a slightly varied prose based on the type of Unite. In addition, if you went a little bit out of your way, you could get a Speedchat (pre-picked) phrase of just “Toons of the world, Unite!”.

While if you had any clue of the book or the man behind it, you probably could’ve seen this coming, but there is something to be said of Toontown Online’s central themes and including a rip from “Workers of the world, unite” (Marx), which is straight from The Communist Manifesto. While it has never been confirmed, nor probably ever will, if the recycling from such a fundamental source of socialist theory was on purpose or merely a coincidence, it sure does work for my point here.

In addition, take into account the setting of the game, and how Toontown’s economy seems to hinge upon a plethora of small businesses, there is the obvious comparison one could make to themes of anti-monopolization. Toontown is defending itself against what the fate of plenty of smaller towns has become, which is depending on one or two companies to carry the entire area in terms of business, and while the Toon’s shops all serve all sorts of purposes (but being boiled down in gameplay to just throwing quests at you), the Cogs only have one overbearing one, so at least there’s one major reason to keep them out of sticking their stick into the ground.

What I Have Learned

What I can gather from all of this is actually pretty interesting into the accidental symbolism the Cogs have become over the years, as, in my own eyes, the unavoidable evils of a society that hinges on capitalism and the selfishness of product become more obvious. They are a stereotype, sure, but also a stripped-down truth to the place of most workers in the eyes of company – in the truest form of the word – just another cog in the machine. The robotism of Cogs can also be taken as a symbol of automation, as more of the bottom-line, repetitive work becomes shelved out by machinery and AI to replace humans, at the cost of jobs for those who do not have a specialization in anything at all, or who’s specialization has become the menial labor needed for these, such as factory work.

There’s little variation compared to the colorful forms of toonery you play as, having to fit into these molds, and perhaps, business stereotypes as the Cog types are most often named after. There is no deviation. You serve a purpose, serve it well, and that’s all there is to it. That’s your life purpose. Have fun doing that until you die.

I’m also not the only one who’s attempted to co-relate their own life to the satire situation of Cogs. During the research part, I was stumbling over some less than reliable sources of social media, and plenty of older Toontown Online players had ended up in office positions themselves, and mentioned how, in a way, they had become what they once fought against. Sometimes, this was more obviously aligned with the office positions shown in-game, with one user stating “When I was having an early 20s life crisis when the song Suit and Jacket by Judah and the Lion came out and I have a vivid memory of standing in the shower hating working at a bank and being pushed to ‘sell’ checking accounts and that’s when I had the sleeper memory of toontown cogs awaken in me” (goddessbotanic). In the system of modern life, where one has to almost kill themselves, emotionally or otherwise, just to be able to keep up with the frivalities of modern life, to keep a roof on their head, the best you can do is try and keep your tooniness alive, though only at the side.

What This Means to Me, and How I’ll Use It

I’ve always cared about little silly niche topics to try and explore like this. Though there is probably no true intention to any of the evidence brought upon the table except for really in-line coincidences, it all seems to add up to a more mature way of seeing a game I’ve cared about since my first years using a computer. I’m all too big on nostalgia – most of my best memories of technology were with the early 2010s net, which encompasses the later years of Toontown Online, as well as the earlier years of some of my other favorite games, as well as an era of content that wasn’t as dopamine-trapping and headache-causing as the modern internet feeds. Something like this is a bright, fresh light, and makes it all too easy to keep caring about Toontown Online.

Fortunately, I am not trying to embrace a grave. The spirit of Toontown Online still lives on in the form of private servers that keep the game running and available to play, and, in both spite of what made Toontown Online shut down in the first place and to avoid copyright troubles, entirely for free. The two most popular are Toontown Rewritten, which keeps to the base game for the most part for nostalgia reasons, and Toontown Corporate Clash, which adds new content and quality of life changes to change Toontown and modernize it into an all-new, exciting experience. I’ve invested a lot more hours than I would like to admit on a few renditions of these servers, but time having fun is not time wasted, despite what the Cogs think.

Works Cited

Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. The Communist Manifesto. London ; Chicago, Ill. :Pluto Press, 1996.

“r/Toontown - Ever Realise We Grew up to Be the Cogs?” Reddit, Dec. 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/Toontown/comments/zmwjtm/ever_realise_we_grew_up_to_be_the_cogs/.

Luthin, Stefanie. “The Unique Anti-Capitalist Journey of Toontown Online.” VGA Gallery, VGA Gallery, 24 Mar. 2022, https://vgagallery.org/vga-zine/toontown-anti-capitalism.

Woodside, Bruce. “Toontown Preservation Project.” Finalized Suit Turnaround -- Toontown Preservation Project, Toontown Rewritten, 28 Aug. 2022, https://toontown.online/Finalized- Suit-Turnaround-4393ef3db89341638e8a55242b79ee0a