The Council

“I set fire again To the bridges behind me As they burn, they illuminate The road ahead of me”

a few weeks ago, @thecouncilreturns and I had a DM yap about how James most likely cannot sleep sometimes and he goes for nighttime walks around the neighborhood to calm down and make dark thoughts related to his job go away. If there is any kind of curfew in Helmer... well, he’s able to get out of trouble easily, for obvious reasons. There are a few other layers and elements to this headcanon, but my interpretation of James’s character is already quite counter-fanon to say the least, so I’ll spare you the details lol

🎩

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(Only if you’re up for it thank you :3)

jasper you don’t get to get away with this that easily.

I usually don’t like crossovers and fandom fusions, but I like these two guys

I am surprised that no one has tried to write a full-blown Papers Please + Beholder universe fusion yet, actually. One has a chunk of good wide-scale worldbuilding (more countries and cities mentioned, more consistent information about historical events like wars, pandemics, economical hardships etc.), while the other goes in depth with internal affairs of a totalitarian country, like bureaucracy and propaganda. Sounds like a good complement.

hear me out:

The Great State ↔ Arstotzka, obviously. The Great State of Arstotzka lol

Helmer ↔ Grestin, but the West/East Grestin division would need some more worldbuilding

Valverde ↔ Kolechia (as the main long-time enemy of the country which the story is set in)

South Borea ↔ Obristan (yeah, I know that TGS wages war against South Borea and Arstotzka doesn’t have any animosity towards Obristan, but... close enough, both South Borea and Obristan are depicted as well-developed countries, good places to live. Not everything would be a 1:1 equivalent, obviously)

New Tomorrow ↔ EZIC (their “work methods” are very similar anyway)

the ministries and other state institutions could be easily “imported” and merged if needed, no collision here

Beholder technologies like cloning and brainwashing/mind control could also exist as they are

same with little flavorful details like the directives, TGS salute, propaganda slogans and other dictatorship-typical crap.

I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.

oh boy i've been thinking of this one for a while long story short - my obsession with Beholder overlapped with the release of "Severance" series and I really wanted to somehow mix them because y'know... evil megacorporation… identity erasure… bureaucracy… all that stuff…

couldn't come up with anything more clever, so I just lazily redrew the series poster with Evan