Are pigtown and Arctos rival, or sister companies?

As Mister Peanutbutter would say, “What is this, a crossover episode?”

Yes, season 4 drops in three days, and I just binged the whole thing again shut up.

As for the question:

Pigtown is not a company. It doesn’t make money, it doesn’t charge anything at the bar, it doesn’t have any conventional business goals. It’s just a place, localized around a bar. Similarly, I’m not sure I would really call Arctos a company either, since they seem to be much more interested in giving their products away for free, than they are in making money. They don’t seem to have much of a corporate infrastructure, and their corporate headquarters listed on the website is probably an empty warehouse, or just a field. 

This probably seems beside the point, I suppose, but I do feel like mentioning the fact that both of these settings are designed to mimic capitalism in some senses, but the logic by which they function isn’t capitalistic at all–it’s just predatory expansion with all of the trapping stripped away. So, to ask what their relationship is as competitors over an assumed market-share is just…not a very good question, I suppose. Or, to put that another way, if it’s a question you think has an answer that makes sense, you’re doing a couple of things:

1. You’re trying to construct a larger world around these stories, and trying to fit them all into some framework which, as I’ve said before, is going to be a fool’s errand, because I purposefully don’t structure my stories in this fashion. These aren’t worlds, they’re settings. It’s just window dressing and McGuffin deployment for whatever is going on in my head at the moment.
2. You’re rarefying Capitalist superstructure, please stop. Not everything can be symbolized through the terms and machinery of Capitalism. I understand that drive and compulsion to do so, because so much of our lives are dominated by the processes of the Capitalist system, but if you try and apply that shit to my stories, you’ll only end up misunderstanding them.

Beyond Capitalism, however, Pigtown and Arctos don’t exist together in my head, if they really exist at all, as concepts static enough to be understood as something with enough permanence to exist in relation to something else. I could, I suppose, forsee a story in which the two co-exist and independent and competing plot devices, but I have a hard time even imagining how that would work in my head, because for the two to be placed into conflict with one another, they would have to be given motives…but neither of the entities really possess enough awareness or agency to even become a solid character and enter into conflict, and if they did, they would lose the very qualities I enjoy about them the most–their fundamental inconsistency over time.

None of this is really an answer, I suppose, or at least, not the answer you were looking for. Your frame of reference is wrong, and you’re searching for a deeper level of content which I’m purposefully omitting. It’s like the tank where they filmed “The Loveboat”–the water’s only two inches deep, but the future is bright, just look at it.