I FINALLY managed to finish the Devil theory pics!! Just barely before the end of the week like I hoped I would ;u;

And so, finally, my very rambly set of headcanons for these gremlins. They’re my gremlins now I guess, I have hyperfixated too much lol

(This is going to be long. Incredibly long. And very headcanon-y because these guys don’t exactly have a lot going for them in canon anyways. I’m warning you now. :u )

There are some of these borrowed from/inspired by @mechanical-magician’s excellent Devil Theory and other BRC headcanons, I will point them out when they come up! :>

Starting off with Devil Theory in general:

• The crew name is something all four of them came up with to sound threatening yet badass. With their reputation, it works well!

• Their aliases come from the types of weapons most commonly associated with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (for the most part). Daishō is named as such because naming him “Katana” probably would have made the connection too obvious.
• He was originally going to have them named after famous Japanese swords/swordsmiths (since it would probably fit the samurai-theming of their costumes better), but decided on the TMNT weapon names because he thinks they flow together better anyways. And secretly, he named each of them after the weapon of the TMNT member they’re most similar to.
• Plus, he finds it amusing to see other people’s reactions when they find out, lol
• The other members themselves did not even realize the themeing until much, much later. Sai and Bō were annoyed by it (Nunchaku still thinks it’s hilarious), but by then they were all so used to their aliases that they didn’t want to bother coming up with new ones. :P

• I personally like to think the gravelly voices they have in game is a sort of “character voice” they do to sound more threatening most of the time.

• The only person they genuinely respected before the events of the game was DJ Cyber, though they wouldn’t admit it publicly. Also it’s mostly due to the fact that he can kick (and has kicked) all four of their asses in a 4-against-1 fight. In game, it’s mentioned they were kicked out of Mataan, and in a way I like to think they were quite literally kicked out of Mataan by DJ Cyber himself.
• After the game, they do have some respect for BRC overall too. But kind of begrudgingly, and mostly because BRC managed to beat Faux and save the whole city.

• On that note! Before and during the game’s main plot, they just liked to be heels/assholes for the hell of it (not exactly true, but it’s what they tell people if asked). It wasn’t until get backstabbed (and almost killed) by Faux as Project Algo did they start reconsidering that, hey, maybe they can afford to be a little less assholish. Sucks that it took that much for them to change, but hey, better than nothing I guess??
• So they did manage a sort of Heel-Face Turn… but mostly in that they stop pushing the Code of the Street to the limit, and of course they’ve stopped ratting out rival crews to the cops. They still have their own “heel personas” while in costume though, and still continue their activities as writers. Also occasionally still physically fighting other writers anyways, but its fine, probably!
• None of them expect the other crews to forgive them for what happened (especially, y'know, the snitching thing), and indeed no one offers any sort of forgiveness. The feelings from most of the other crews and writers towards Devil Theory ranges from "Well, at least you got what you deserved and learned your lesson. You better make good on your promise to be good or else, alright?” to “I don’t fucking trust you and I’m gonna keep an eye on you assholes.”
• Devil Theory have enough grace to accept this judgement, because hey, it’s understandable. And on a more selfish perspective, it’s either this or stick to being such unapologetic assholes that they get kicked out of New Amsterdam altogether!
• Each of them do feel genuine guilt over the snitching thing and working with Faux behind everyone’s backs. Sai was the only one who was opposed to it all in the first place, only being convinced by the others and Faux that it would be “fine”. So besides guilt in not pushing back harder, there’s also a bit of, “I fuckin’ called it that this was a bad idea. I only went along with it because you guys said it’d work out, and look what fuckin’ happened!!”
• Meanwhile… Daishō is the one who feels the most guilty about what happened, since he’s basically the leader, and had convinced the others to go for it. So he feels like it’s his fault first and foremost for trying to cheat, as well as for trusting Faux in all of this just because he was one of the Big 3. Not to mention all of his friends nearly dying because of Faux, especially with Sai being the one slammed against the statue in Mataan… If any of them died, Daishō definitely would not be able to live with himself after that. He has not admitted this to anyone and is still personally grappling with that guilt. Nobody knows because he’s (unfortunately?) very good at masking these kinds of things…

• Sai is the member who ends up leaving DT for BRC, though mostly out of revenge against BRC (and specifically Red) for the crew battle back on Pyramid Island. He gets that out of his system eventually, and sticks with BRC as a genuine member (I have a fan fic idea for this bit of story, hee hee). He’s still friends with the remaining DT crew of course, they’ve all been friends for a long time. (I’ll touch on this more in a bit)

• So then after the events of the game and Sai joining BRC, as a show of good will, Devil Theory let other writers (and especially DJ Cyber) know how exactly they managed to sic the cops on people: Basically hijacking certain police signals to send in false tips. Because otherwise interacting with the cops directly would have just led to them getting arrested too. (It’s something that Faux told them how to do in order to gain their trust and make a “deal”)
• Everyone thinks it might be at least good as last resort free distraction against the cops. Send in a false tip, something like “Ignore those writers, there’s a bigger emergency that is conveniently on the opposite side of the city!!” No one’s sure if the cops have the ability to actually trace back the false tips to the source (like what happened with DOT EXE finding out about Project Algo), so writers only use it for emergencies. Still, coincidentally, arrests against writers has gone way down after this!
• This also leads to a new addition to the Code of the Street: Any writer found to be abusing the false tips in order to get another writer/crew arrested, will be ratted out to the cops themselves. An eye for an eye! DJ Cyber was considering doing this to Devil Theory as well, but figured them getting pummeled by Faux towards the end of the game was punishment enough.

• This one comes from a Mech headcanon: Devil Theory has their own hideout in the shipping container maze on Pyramid Island. The confusing (and frankly rather unnerving) nature of that area means their hideout can stay secure from anyone who doesn’t know how to get there.
• My personal addition to this: There are different routes to the hideout based on whether or not it’s Tuesday, raining, a bank holiday, or any combination of those factors. Also, the crew (and even the dock workers of Pyramid Island in general) have not ruled out the possibility of there being any sort of Backroom Beasties in the maze. Sometimes you can hear things in there…
• Sai is still invited to hang out at their hideout. Anyone else has to have approval from him and the remaining DT members before they’re allowed to visit.

• Also based on a Mech headcanon: They have pet crabs they keep at their hideout. Me personally, I like to think they’re specifically hermit crabs! So then the crew paint designs onto any shells brought for the crabs, and will let visitors paint one too.

• Back to the topic of all four of them being friends for a long time, more specifically: Sai and Daishō have known each other since very early childhood, and then they became friends with Bō and Nunchaku during middle school (i.e. around ages 12/13). Nunchaku in particular was living in California at the time, so it was an online friendship with the other three, eventually moving to New Amsterdam after turning 18.
• They may or may not have started an anime-manga club during their time in school, which is how Sai and Daishō met Bō (and with Nunchaku as an honorary online member). All four of them refuse to admit to it these days, lol
• Truthfully, the main reason all four of them have stuck together for so long is because they have had rough childhoods in one way or another, mostly due to their respective parents. This is what lead to the four of them becoming friends and wanting to protect/defend each other (sort of like a found family kind of thing), and thus forming Devil Theory together later on. However, they are more likely to admit to the anime-manga club thing than any of this.
• (I might elaborate more on how rough it was for each on them in a separate post. Or just save it for a fan fic, if I can manage it…)

• All four of them learned to fight mostly from watching wrestling shows and martial arts movies. “But wrestling is fake, those moves probably wouldn’t actually hurt someone–” “Only if you hold back.”

• Both Sai and Bō have face scars. Sai has it over part of his lips, while Bō has a mark on part of his jaw. Both of them got these from injuries while trying to learn how to skate and freerun in order to be writers.
• With Bō in particular, he outright passed out when it happened, causing the others to panic. They had to take him to the Flesh Prince to get him fixed up (hospitals would ask too many questions for their liking).
• For Sai, the only people who know about how he got his scar are the rest of Devil Theory (and eventually he tells Rise too). To anyone else, he just tells them he got it from fighting 3 walking tanks at once. Rise says he should tell people it was 5 tanks at once to make it sound more impressive!

• All four of them have cybernetic lower legs (from looking at the in-game models, it definitely looks more like cybernetics/prosthetics than just armor, at least to me). Long story short, each of them lost a foot or part of a lower leg (sometimes on both legs) for one reason or another. It eventually got to the point where Daishō went, “You know what?? Fuck this, we’re clearly cursed, so let’s just get this over with.” And paid for all of them to just get what’s left of their lower legs upgraded to fancy cybernetics, as seen in the game!
• This is at least another reason for them becoming writers (“With these legs we could probably manage it pretty good, right?”), and then of course eventually forming Devil Theory.
• Some more specifics on the why for each member:
• For Sai and Daishō, it was directly caused by their Respective Bad Parents. (Like I mentioned earlier in this post, I may go into further detail on that in a separate post. Especially since it gets pretty dark…)
• For Bō, it was an accident out in New Amsterdam. Basically there was a failed test involving one of the police’s walking tank, resulting in Bō and other civilians getting injured. Some of them fairly severely, and of course Bō being one of those. None of them (including himself) know what actually caused the accident, not even that it was caused by a walking tank.
• For Nunchaku, it was a factory accident. This was back when she first moved to New Amsterdam and needed a job. That led her to having to work at a shady factory with unsafe work conditions, and which was taking advantage of new immigrants like her who don’t 100% know their rights or who to go to for help right away. Her accident in particular was one of the worst at the factory up to that point, with several other employees getting hurt as well. They all of course quite after that, including Nunchaku herself.
• Sai’s incident was the earliest to happen chronologically, while Bō’s was the last one.

• Daishō and Sai tried dating each other at one point in high school. Emphasis on “tried”. At the least, it wasn’t the worst relationship either of them have had, just awkward. So they were able to stay friends afterwards.

And now for each individual member! With bonus head pics. :P

Sai

• As previously mentioned, he’s the member who joins up with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk in the postgame.
• Also as previous mentioned, he at first only joined BRC for revenge against Red, but they sort it out after a while!
• Has some anger issues, but since joining BRC (especially after a final serious fight with Red) he’s gotten a much better handle on it.
• Eventually after that previous point, he starts dating Rise, there is a whole outline for this I swear…
• He and Red still fight each other, but it’s more like sparring matches. The rest of BRC end up treating it like actual sport matches, basically cheering on one or the other! Cueball and Bel even act as commentators for these matches, lol

• He is fairly stand-offish most of the time, and takes some time to open up to other people.
• He can cook, as in cooking without necessarily following a strict recipe. He cooks a lot for his former crew, though it takes him a while to open up and cook for BRC as well. You will not be disappointed if you invite him to a potluck!
• He can sing quite well, but he hates singing in front of others, even his own friends (they’ve only ever heard him by accident when he didn’t mean for them to hear him at all). He eventually opens up to singing for Rise at least.
• I have a personal headcanon that DJ Cyber will occasionally take suggestions for mixtapes he’s working on. Sai suggested several reggaeton songs/remixes, though he expected none of them to be picked. He was super stoked when he found out the DJ actually included one of his suggestions (the AGUA remix) in the particular mixtape that plays on Pyramid Island.
• Works as a freelance graphic designer/artist as his day job. He takes commissions on the side. No, he does not take requests and will not draw your OC for free.
• He is the one who designed Devil Theory’s graffiti in canon, Daishō paid him for it too!

• He’s Puerto Rican, he moved to New Amsterdam as a kid.
• Fluent in Spanish, he has a noticeable Puerto Rican accent when speaking Spanish.

Daishō

• He is the leader of Devil Theory!
• He let Sai leave the group to join BRC because he started getting sick of Sai’s anger issues (it had been growing worse until the BRC crew battle, at which point said issues were at their worst).
• Once Sai gets a better handle on his anger, they go back to being friends, even with Sai staying with BRC.

• Fairly chill guy (though also arrogant and snarky at times) out of costume.
• While in public as the Devil Theory leader, he can be ruthless (as seen by how the group pushes the Code of the Street to the limit). He can also be dramatic sometimes, almost playing it up like an anime villain/wrestling heel at times. At least he’s smart enough to not let himself get distracted by monologuing.
• Though if you genuinely piss him off, he can be incredibly petty and cruel, regardless of him being “in costume” or not.
• Daishō wears contacts while in costume, but just normal glasses outside of that
• He’s the one who designed Devil Theory’s costumes. He has experience with cosplay before forming DT.
• He’s also the one that came up with their Hip-Hop dance. He’s particularly proud of the “criss-cross hop” part of the dance, but this was also the part that the other members had a hard time getting right. (I say this as someone who has attempted doing the dance IRL myself, and also had problems with that part :P)
• On that note, he’s a pretty good dancer in general, with both freestyle and “formal” dances with specific steps.
• He supposedly has enough money to just live off of for the rest of his life, but he continues to be a writer for the fun of it (and as an outlet/destressor). He does still work part-time though, as a secretary for one of the companies in Mataan.
• He’s a theater major and part of a group that holds plays in New Amsterdam. He loves to play as the villains, especially in musicals. Villains always get the best songs!! That being said, his actual singing is about 100% confidence and 65% actual talent. Him singing villain songs is already great, but anything else is usually “just” alright.
• Big fan of horror movies, mainly slasher/splatter and body horror. Also the kind of guy who goes looking for director’s cut versions and deleted scenes. He will ramble for hours about his favorite horror movies, especially about the acting and special effects! Though he will also rant about genuinely awful horror movies just as much. He has opinions!!
• Claims to have a girlfriend, but he never names who he’s dating or goes into any specific details about her, and the other DT members have never met her. They have a running joke about her being his “theoretical girlfriend”. (Truthfully I just haven’t decided if she’s going to be someone “in canon” or just slap together an OC. I’ll decide eventually…)

This one gets its own subsection because it’s pretty long lol:

• Daishō is terrible with names. In general it takes a while for him to learn other people’s names, and he tends to mess up by getting close-but-not-quite with names. And with him being the leader of Devil Theory, most people assume he’s just being a jerk and making fun of them. :P
• Some examples:
• Tryce = Tricycle, Trace, Tracy, Trance, Trick
< li>Bel = Bell, Beth, Bev, Ring (like a ringing bell lol)
• Vinyl = Vine, Vino, Vinny, VHS
• Solace = Soul, Solis, Crash, Test
• He doesn’t have this problem with people who are basically celebrities to him (DJ Cyber and Felix being two-thirds of The Big 3, and he knows Rise because he follows her on social media). So then otherwise, the only thing that helps is coming up with mnemonics/associations. “Bel’s hair kinda looks like a bell”, “Vinyl works at a record store”, etc.
• One of the rare times he managed to remember someone’s name easily is Red. Because, y'know, literal red head. :P
• And yes, this also applies to his own friends, at least with their real names. He had no trouble with their street names, but only because he was the one who came up with them, lol

• He’s half-Japanese and half-Peruvian, born and raised in New Amsterdam. Fluent in Spanish and Japanese. He has a Peruvian accent when speaking in Spanish, his mother insisted on teach him herself (and to avoid him potentially ending up with a Spaniard accent, lmaooo).
• As mentioned much earlier, he has known Sai since they were kids in elementary school. Basically Sai latched onto him because he was the only other Latino at their school, and Sai was already being alienated by the other kids because of that. They eventually realizing they have a lot in common anyways (like same favorite manga at the time) and became friends.
• On that note! He only got into anime and manga in the first place out of spite towards his dad, who basically looked down on it as “everything wrong with my homeland these days”. Dad only very begrudgingly got Daishō stuff in the original Japanese, choosing to see it as at least a way for his kid to learn Japanese more easily.
• That leads to a more genuine love for anime and manga, and then forming the anime-manga club, becoming friends with Bō and Nunchaku, and of course eventually all four of them forming Devil Theory. Funny how these things work out!

Bō

• Rather stoic while in public as a Devil Theory member, but outside of that he tends to be fairly nerdy and polite.
• Arguably the way he acts in and out of costume is probably the biggest difference among the rest of the DT members. Which tends to be rather jarring to most people…
• The tech person of the group, bit of a hacker too. He was the one who figured out the false tips thing with the police signals, and frankly he finds the police force’s security systems to be insulting pathetic a lot of the time.
• His day job is as an IT tech, though he often gets forced into doing stuff outside of his job description, especially since his damn coworkers keep pushing their own work onto him. He even has to take care of coding things as a programmer/engineer, which is even more outside of his job description!
• Being a writer is basically a destressor for him at this point. Do not ask him to troubleshoot your tech problems when he’s off the clock, he hates that. The rest of DT know this and don’t ask him unless it’s something genuinely serious (and only after they’ve done their own troubleshooting).
• He’s a gamer, and especially loves games that he can mod himself.
• Related to the previous point: he has strong opinions about how the game industry is going these days (Little-to-no official support for preservation of older games, going after emulators when they won’t even help make their games more accessible, awful dev crunch especially from larger companies, etc.). He will rant about it if you let him!
• He can’t handle horror content very well, be it movies or video games. And I mean genuine horror stuff, especially with gore. Silly scary stuff like Luigi’s Mansion is fine, but getting into Silent Hill and Resident Evil is where he starts genuinely freaking out. He’ll at least watch his friends playing through survival horror games, not playing it himself, but he’ll insist on having all the lights on.
• One time the others did manage to drag him through a haunted house attraction. He ended up freaked out badly, and afterwards got into a fistfight with Sai over it (it was his idea to do that in the first place). Lesson learned!
li>He has attempted at least once to get a piercing like his friends, but he almost fainted while doing so (he might have a fear of needles). He hasn’t tried since.
• Knows how to fight like the rest of the DT members, but some people may underestimate him because they assume the tech guy isn’t that strong. Also, Bō is admittedly built more for weightlifting than outright fighting like the others, but that doesn’t mean he can’t kick your ass!
• On that note, he hates when people underestimate him in general, or otherwise think he’s naive.
• Inspired by Mech’s own CUE.mp4 and Pluto: Bō eventually starts dating Cueball (the DOT EXE member who joins BRC in the postgame). Admittedly at first I was like, only lightly considering something similar in my own stuff, like “That’d be cute, but it probably wouldn’t work for these two in my AU/headcanons, ha ha” but eventually after more thinking I realized, “Wait a minute, this could work after all.” lol

• His family has lived in New Amsterdam for generations.
• Knows enough Spanish to follow along with Sai and Daishō when they have conversations in Spanish, though not necessarily respond to either of them in Spanish (or anyone else for that matter).

Nunchaku

• In case her real name in my headcanons didn’t already tip you off, Samus Aran surprise!! Nunchaku is a gal named Roxanne! She has a naturally deep voice, and can pull off a gravely “character voice” like the rest of DT.
• She goes by Rox as a nickname out of costume/with friends.
• “Wait so is she cis or trans–” The way I like to handle this with headcanons is, “Would the character themselves be comfortable answering that question?” And in this case, she wouldn’t want to answer either way. If she were trans, she would not feel comfortable sharing that publicly. And if she were cis, she wouldn’t answer that out of spite, seeing it as something that’s none of people’s business anyways.
• So basically, either way she’s a very butch lady in my personal AU/headcanons for BRC, and that’s all you really need to know on that front. :P

• Overall a very positive and friendly (and energetic) person outside of Devil Theory, but can be surprisingly underhanded when in costume.
• Though either way, she tends to be very high-energy. She is in fact the team member with the highest gremlin energy!
• Her ears are pierced, but that was something her parents forced her into doing. She refuses to use earrings and stuff even as an adult, though she did eventually get that piercing on her nose.
• She likes spicy food! Also has a tendency to add hot sauce to certain foods just to kick up the spice factor. Sai and Nunchaku used to have small arguments over her adding hot sauce to the food he cooked for her (Sai sees it almost as an insult, as if she’s saying it doesn’t already taste good enough). By now they’ve come to more of an understanding, and Sai just side-eyes her whenever she adds hot sauce to her food.
• Was a bit of a kleptomaniac as a teen, and these days she still steals things on occasion. She’s good at it and manages to not get caught (a lot of the time).
• One time she went to steal a new TV for the Devil Theory hideout. She saw the store she was hitting had a buy one get one free deal on TVs, so she stole two and gave the extra to BRC for their own hideout!

• She works as a mechanic as her day job, mainly fixing cars, though also other kinds of large machines and equipment (washing machines, fridges, trucks, construction vehicles, etc). She’s in charge of fixing the crew’s skateboards when needed.
• Adding onto her job backstory: The shop Nunchaku works for as a mechanic is owned by a guy who originally mentored her back at the factory she worked at (mentioned a lot earlier on this post). Basically he’d seen a lot of violations and other shady crap, none of it getting fixed despite multiple complaints and reports. And seeing so many people (including unfortunately Nunchaku) end up hurt at once was the last straw. So he quit, opened a repair shop, and offered Nunchaku and other former employees of the factory new jobs at his business. They’re all happier to be away from that crappy factory, which has since been shut down due to the accidents and violations.
• Nunchaku is crane and forklift certified. She figured it would look good on her resume, and hopefully be impressive to the ladies. Hopefully. It hasn’t worked yet.
• She has been interested in learning about welding, especially given how much money those types of jobs make, but for now she’s happy with her mechanic job.
• She likes to take things apart in order to put them back together again. She finds it’s the easiest way for her to understand how something works!
• She has a personal goal of someday taking apart DJ Cyber’s spider tank thingamajig in order to figure out how it works. And ideally being able to make one of her own. Basically imagine the following:
  Nunchaku: “Heeeey, Mr. DJ, do you mind if I take a look at your tank thing? I promise I won’t take long!”
  DJ: “Hell no.”

• She has a crush on Vinyl, but gets too nervous to actually ask her out. Nunchaku also keeps going to the music shop that Vinyl works at to buy records (she doesn’t even have a record player) just to talk to her. Note that Vinyl working at a music shop is inspired by Mech’s headcanons for Vinyl! :>
• Nunchaku’s impromptu “record collection” is growing out of hand at this point, a lot of it for genres she doesn’t even like, lol
• She once tried to learn how to juggle knives in order to impress ladies! That ended in a trip to the Flesh Prince (again, hospitals would ask too many questions), and she hasn’t tried that since.
• She knows how to pick locks though! Most of the time it’s just using one tool (more often than not the single-sided jiggler) to jam everything until they open. She gets excited when she has to pick a lock that actually requires genuine work to get open.

• American, as mentioned a while ago she moved from California to New Amsterdam a bit after high school
• Fluent in Japanese (she learned it due to being a weeb, lol); in terms of Spanish, she’s in the same boat as Bō, knowing enough to at least follow Sai and Daishō’s conversations in Spanish

—

SO THAT’S EVERYTHING!! For now. Maybe.

I’m gonna go hibernate like a bear for a while. Feel free to leave snacks in front of my cave if you want, loool