Tuylur

So I don't know how hot this take is, or if most people are already aware, but I have never seen a full write-up of all the evidence that supports this, so I thought I'll make a post about it.

WHY SUNFLOWERS?

Most people associate Basil with sunflowers because of this scene:

(don't know why he is telling a tree about this)

It makes sense, right? In this sequence, he goes through all the flowers in his garden and for each of them, he explicitly says that he associates them with each of the major characters. Lily of the valley for Mari, roses for Hero, gladioluses for Aubrey, cacti for Kel, and tulips for Sunny.

Except, he doesn't actually say this for sunflowers. It's just easy assume because that would parallel all the other flowers he discusses. Instead, he says that sunflowers represent what he wants to be like.

An unspoiled player won't know at this point that this is not the real world of the game, but instead just a figment of Sunny's imagination. That also makes it easier to take at face value, and by the time we learn about this we have already internalised this information and don't question it again.

I think it's reasonable to assume that real world Basil has said something like this, and this sequence is a representation of that in Sunny's headspace, because I don't think Sunny would come up with something like that on his own.

Still, it's important to keep in mind the nature of headspace Basil here as well: later, when we meet Stranger in Black Space, he tells us that Basil was "split in half". Stranger reflects the less happy aspects of Basil in Sunny's mind, the ones that confront him both with the existence of The Truth and also that Basil is a real person in the real world who is suffering because of Sunny's avoidance of the truth.

In turn, headspace Basil is an idealised version of Basil that only has his most positive traits. We see this in his introduction in the prologue. He is happy and cheerful and sociable around his friends, and even willing to immediately forgive and befriend a guy that wanted to kidnap him. Once we meet real world Basil, it becomes clear that this elides other aspects of his personality: his insecurity and awkwardness and skittishness and social anxiety.

They are inconvenient for Sunny's perfect headspace world, so that part of him gets banished to Black Space. So in a sense, headspace Basil may actually come close to the aspiration he mentions, coming close to what the sunflower represents. Insecure real world Basil, not really.

(This turned out really long so I put my evidence under a readmore. Please click through.)

So like, a series that requires extensive knowledge of japanese culture, or one that relies on the audience already being very familiar with the media tropes that it’s parodying, would have a high Weeb score while one that any 10-year old american would totally understand would have a low Weeb score.

The Ass column is for how much gratuitous nudity or attempts at titilation there is, with pure and innocent things like most ghibli films getting really low numbers, things like Bakemonogatari or Kill la Kill ending up in the middle of the scale, and borderline hentai at the top.

And finally, the Shit column covers things that are just fucking stupid, or poorly implemented. Low numbers indicate a series that is extremely well written and has a lot of good ideas, higher values come from plot holes, idiot plots, authors shoehorning in some incredibly nonsensical philosophy, etc.

1. “LADIES”

2. The very disappointed “Eclair…”

3. “WHAT?” (High pitched mooing in response)

The girl who used to do my hair let her toddler pick the theme of her 3rd birthday and she chose Target. Like, the store. So everything was red and white and covered in bullseyes and I'm just so full of joy looking at the pictures on Facebook right now because it is obvious that this little girl is having the time of her life and that her parents put so much love and creativity into making the decorations and cupcakes.