First Encounter With Death / Last Encounter With Death

Oh jeez thats me

Calling it now: with how much world-building has gone into the Dream SMP and how active and huge the fandom has become, I FULLY expect one of you fanfiction writers will write a novel that goes viral and eventually will end up published with changed names and everything.

I’m putting all my faith on you guys!

all I want is to have a room that looks like I'm old biology professor whose been away from human civilization for half a century in the forest who spends my evenings reading old books researching about cryptids with my cat surrounded by my many treasures and trinkets I've collected over the years and my many, many growing plants that nearly take over all of my house.

@heroescourage

“what am I without you?” “Yourself” is such a raw gut wrenching exchange and it came from a minecraft roleplay which goes to show the medium doesn’t matter and stories can be good no matter what when the writer(s) have the passion and heart for it 

guess what I did instead of being productive all day

Look I can't make edits but the idea won't leave me alone so tumblr or tiktok do something about it

The "Feels like we had matching wounds" audio but before that is Gwen saying "Lets do this one more time" and it cuts between her peter dying and her dad pulling a gun, meanwhile Miles gives Ganke a fistbump and hugs his family

Followed by Miles saying "Lets do this one last time" and the audio repeats, but this time it's all of Miles' drawings and his graffiti wall cut with Gwen bragging about spider society and interacting with hobie and pavitr

Idk if I'm explaining it well visually but god it won't leave me alonee

When I buy a house I am going to put a huge antenna on my roof and start an illegal radio station

I don't know if I'm crying or laughing 😂

i think Eret’s betrayal was really the turning point of the SMP, and it deserves more credit. like, before that we had conflict (of course) but it was all fairly standard. hell, the Revolution was one of the most vanilla stories you can possibly tell; a group of underdogs rise up against the tyranny of rulers and establish their independence. it’s such a basic conflict, and was defined by very clearly established good guys and bad guys: L’Manburg good, Dream SMP bad. this is exemplified by the L’Manburg national anthem, which is a fantastic piece of propaganda that idealises L’Manburg as a “special place”, free from the “tyranny and bloodlust” of the Dream SMP. this was a narrative that the audience never really challenged, and the streamers didn’t either.

but Eret’s betrayal began the spiral into moral relativity and clashing ideologies that defines the SMP today. suddenly, those good guys and bad guys weren’t so clearly defined. suddenly, motivations went deeper than just ‘fighting for our country’, and the pursuit of power became a common theme. it took some time for those ideas to take root (for example, the second version of the anthem dismissed Eret entirely: “fuck Eret”. he’s a bad guy, now. we’re still the good guys). but the ideas were there, both for the audience and the streamers. people began to question the narrative they had been fed, the notions of right and wrong, leading to an election arc where Wilbur and Tommy - our initial heroes - were very openly undermining the democratic process. even as the audience was overwhelmingly on Pogtopia’s side, questions were raised as to the fact that they were staging a coup against a democratically elected leader simply because they felt entitled to it, because they were the heroes. the story began to embrace this: Wilbur wondering if they were the “villains”. it culminated, of course, in Techno’s bid for anarchy and rejection of systemic power structures, his assertion that power corrupts, and that L’Manburg was never the paradigm of goodness that it painted itself as, and perhaps never will be.

and that’s just on a meta level; in character, i honestly believe the effects of Eret’s betrayal can be felt in practically every major L’Manburg character decision since. it’s most obvious in Wilbur, of course. the dude never recovered, never quite learnt to trust again. Eret’s betrayal was the first crack in his image of a perfect L’Manburg - the L’Manburg from the anthem - a crack that would spread after Schlatt’s rise to power, and eventually shatter in his corruption arc. in the culmination of this arc - the destruction of Manburg - he purposefully mirrors Eret’s “It was never meant to be”, thus returning to the first moment he realised that good and evil weren’t quite so black and white.

but Wilbur’s not the only one: all of the original L’Manburg boys struggle with trust nowadays, and all of them have strayed from the vanilla perception of morality that the L’Manburg revolution represented. Fundy’s very existence conflates Wilbur and L’Manburg into one being; Fundy is the first child of L’Manburg, and thus is Wilbur’s son. as he grows to acknowledge Wilbur’s flaws as a father, then, he’s also rejecting L’Manburg. he’s revealing, retroactively, that the perfect L’Manburg from the early days never existed, or could only exist in the simplified perspective of a child. Tubbo, meanwhile, is the third president of L’Manburg, and Wilbur has already lampshaded the fact that things don’t usually go so well for the president. Tubbo has begun to make dubious decisions in the name of his country, the power leading him towards increasingly out of character actions. he’s (arguably) turning into the very tyrannical ruler the anthem condemned, making weapons a bigger and bigger part of the supposedly peaceful nation. and Tommy, the one who secured L’Manburg’s independence. he was the protagonist, the force for good. he was supposed to be the paragon of what L’Manburg stood for, giving up his selfish desires (the discs) for the good of the nation. now, he’s prioritising those discs over everything. he’s been exiled from L’Manburg, unable to align with their morality anymore, and is working alongside their number 1 enemy in pursuit of his goals.

even Eret themself, after a brief attempt at redemption arc, has embraced their place of power despite it putting him at odds with the ‘friends’ he tried to prioritise on November 16th.

look, moral of the story is that Eret’s betrayal began the steer the story away from the typical good vs bad narrative it initially mirrored; began the turn away from Hamilton, to the slightly more morally grey Heathers, to bloody Greek mythology (home to some of the most morally complex stories around). it shattered the characters’ perception of the world around them and what they fought for, and resulted in all of them turning away from the idealistic L’Manburg they once fought to establish. it even made them realise that said idealistic L’Manburg may have never existed in the first place. that’s why Eret’s betrayal continues to be such a prominent feature in fan material, and the most memorable part of the Revolution; it changed something fundamentally in the moral framework of the narrative, and broke something that can never truly be fixed

do you ever become obsessed with a character and you just go "of fucking course its that one" at yourself because you are so incredibly predictable