#I realized after I drew this that I think this is the season cleo actually wears the 80s get up DGBDFGNK so whoops but that’s okay!

[shepscapades]

I started watching through Xisuma’s Season 8 the other day (for uhhh no reason!) since I never got to watch it proper, and this early season moment really got me for some reason =w= Joe was teasing Xisuma and I was like. Yeah. Even pre-deviant joe would <3

[theminecraftbee]

Re: your winged!Grian origin post

I joined the HC fandom circa early s7, and I just want to say that I think we as a fandom are sort of retroactively putting importance onto the whole bird symbolism. Yes, it's important and does make some sense, but back then it definitely felt like probably 80% of winged Grians were Watcher Grian (inspired by ATUS) and parrot or chicken or any other wing was the outlier. I understand not wanting to place too much importance on any one particular fic, but it's hard to overstate just how much ATUS was THE watcher fic. No one except the most niche fans had watched Evo, but suddenly this was The One Thing About Grian (the most popular hermit) so everyone in the fandom had to read that to understand any fanworks, basically. And a huge amount of Watcher knowledge that became fanon, especially back then, was extrapolated from ATUS, full stop.

TLDR. yes it's good not to raise one fic on a pedestal but I also think we shouldn't be trying to erase ATUS influence after the fact. Feels like a weird attempt to change history

(Also I swear this isn't ATUS propaganda I only read it the once. I just legitimately think it's an important part of hermit history and am trying to help, so sorry if this comes off mean or anything!)

so, disclaimer, i wasn't there in the fandom at the time, but my own like, editorialized thoughts on this, as opposed to informative (which means my own opinions are in here and you may not agree with them, this isn't meant to be a factual accounting of fandom history anymore):

i don't think you're entirely wrong, which is why i went out of my way to include it; at least on tumblr, i think that fic probably had an outsized influence on how people write watchers and the winged grian stuff. as someone who wasn't around, the main way i know that is "people still discourse about it", "specific design elements that weren't super present in canon (or present at all in hermitcraft canon) are really present in fanworks", and "i know full well that, while people claim cleo said she read atus, she only said that she read a fic where grian had wings and something about how he was sad a lot if i remember right, and the fact that people extrapolated that to mean atus says some pretty strong things to me". like, all of these things together is why i think atus clearly had a lot of influence here.

that being said, i do have people in my comments like "oh yeah i realized he liked flying so i drew him with an elytra a lot, and then i saw people adding feathers so i started doing that". that seems especially common with people who were, say, on the reddit at the time - they didn't have the fandom context that was causing it on tumblr, so they either A) originated giving him wings on their own or B) picked it up from other artists and made assumptions about where it came from.

the thing is that while atus clearly had a huge influence on the older fandom... i bet, show of hands, most of the newer fandom members who joined late season 7 and beyond? have not actually read atus. or, if they have, that isn't their main influence for the winged grian art - other winged grian art is. that's how stuff like this ends up spreading in the fandom. hell, that's what we're seeing with things like xb's fish properties - one or two people who were big in the fandom liked it, and other artists picked it up from them, and it wouldn't surprise me if it really does become a ubiquitous character trait of his that people are baffled by at this rate. the hermitcraft fandom does that a lot.

that newer grian artists don't have that fandom context so they are drawing him with wings because they know he is meant to have them, and are making up the reason they think he should have them. atus has, at this point, been mostly removed from the wings equation. the watcher thing hasn't - he's never losing that association - but specifically atus's influence isn't really a major factor so much anymore. besides, as i said: i see him with parrot wings far more often than i see him with purple ones these days, and it's a little silly to say that that's not because of season 7, when it absolutely is.

all of this is to say that when it comes to the wing stuff atus is absolutely important which is why i included it but i sort of get the sense grian would have ended up with wings even without atus, if only because of the parrot stuff in season 7 when combined with the fandom's specific love of non-humaning people.

as for the watcher stuff... so here's the thing. i think fanon watcher stuff is absolutely heavily influenced by atus and it wouldn't be an inescapable part of grian's character without it, if only because evo just is not that popular compared to hermitcraft and people wouldn't be dragging all the evo stuff up in the specific way hermitcraft fans do if atus hadn't happened. so many of the watcher tropes people use originate clearly from that fic.

and like. okay. i agree with people when they say a lot of those tropes would have cropped up around watchers anyway. i know the "the watchers are evil" thing is a massively debated plot point but it's such low-hanging fruit people would have grabbed it. i have seen the watcher statues, people would have grabbed the angel imagery. people would have grabbed the purple. it's more the specific confluence of ideas that seems to have originated with atus, and more specifically, the popularity of doing watcher stuff in the first place.

once again, to be clear: the watcher stuff has undergone a LOT of fandom mutation. i think most new fans hear about it and don't know about atus, and even maybe watch evo themselves, which is neat. but evo... is not as big as hermitcraft! evo is an old series! and like. yhs or even vault hunters don't get as integrated into the characters as evo does, and that's almost certainly because it blew up at one point. and while i think most current watcher people do their own thing, i think it would be disingenuous to say that atus didn't have an influence on the fact that the fandom does not let go of the watcher thing for grian, just like trying to claim that the superhero fic trend in dsmp didn't come from tommy's unbeatable method. like, yes, the people doing it now aren't necessarily doing it because of that fic, or using the tropes because of that fic; they've picked them up themselves. at the same time, it's hard to say the popularity didn't start there.

i also know it sucks to say that, since a lot of people have some shitty memories related to atus, which i won't comment on because i was really not there for that discourse and i don't want to put words in people's mouths. it also sucks because people hear that and think people are saying they aren't being original/they're making things up, or that it's bad that they do the watcher things, and they want to defend it. i get that. like i said, a lot of the tropes that we attribute to atus probably would have been associated with watcher stuff anyway. its just that watcher!grian would have been a lot more niche without it, i think.

(with the possible exception of if martyn had still done his thing at the end of last life; we have no way to know how much he was influenced by fanon or not on that, given that he and grian were the actual writers for evo lore and all that. that's a different can of worms though we're talking about hermitcraft here.)

this also comes from me as an outsider, someone who really only entered the hermitcraft fandom early season 8, and only started watching mid season 7 (after the turf war, even). this is my observation of the trends as i've seen them. it probably feels different when you're an insider, as well, and were there at the time this stuff came about. and i admit some of this comes from being someone who joined the fandom late and has had trouble picking up the why for the watcher stuff. i get it with the "grian has wings", that's constantly reaffirmed as a headcanon, but a lot of the weird specifics of watcher tropes continue to baffle me as someone who isn't really interested in watching evo and mostly just wants to do hermitcraft stuff. (i use the watcher stuff sometimes as it suits me, as i do with basically all the fanon. i'm mostly neutral to it i actually have stronger opinions about hels stuff than i do watcher stuff when it comes to 'things that are largely fanon', lol.)

anyway atus is also fascinating to me because it's like. reading it now it's like, okay? it isn't bad, i'm not saying that, but it's also not a masterpiece, and it very heavily reads to me as "this fic got lucky to be in the right place at the right time to have the influence it had, by being the first to do a trope other people would latch onto later", and i think that kind of way fics work is interesting as someone who writes fics myself. (for the record, that's kind of how i consider black box too - it's fine, it does what i wanted it to do, but also it is as popular as it is because it happened to be in the right place at the right time and was the first decently-written thing to do a trope other people would latch onto later.) i can see why people would be annoyed to have the stuff they do that they consider unrelated to it constantly attributed to it, especially given the amount that it's just become established fanon by now that people don't have to know any of the original context to be able to use.

uhhh that was long the tl;dr is that the wing stuff almost certainly would have happened eventually anyway from what i can tell and a lot of the tropes we use for watchers probably would have also shown up anyway, but it's also silly to pretend that atus isn't a huge part of why it's as popular of a set of tropes as it is, because it is a part of that. that doesn't make any of the tropes bad or unoriginal though and i think people should keep doing them they're cool

[pandafunkey809]

Childhood nostalgia goddamnit

Okay, I was going to work on the first thoughts on secret show in the morning, but when I found this I just HAD to talk about it. When I was little and TVs didn’t need the little boxes to receive digital programs and you just used a button on the telly or the remote to change the channel on the television. Sadly they removed that but thankfully now we get A LOT more content to view. Anyways, back then I was a little kid and Ioved mythology and lore and all kinds of stuff, but it started with fantasy stories, then mythology, then folktales and the like, and then lore. I’m jumping all over the place on the subject because it is almost 1am and I’m tired, but I’ll try to straighten it out. My whole life, I have loved stories. Storytelling is a bit of a dying art when it comes to the telling, but when it comes to the writing and the thinking and the visualizing it couldn’t be any more potent! And my first massive interest in these kinds of things was when I discovered mythology. I used to watch this channel on saturday mornings called discovery kids or cvs discovery kids... I forget what it was called exactly but it had a little bear trap icon that they’d sometimes have eat the logo in the bottom right corner of the screen. Every Saturday I’d see an episode each of 2 shows. Lenny the great white shark (or tiger shark, I forget which it was) which was about a shark walking and talking like we do but still having the body of a shark. Yeah, apparently in the show’s world anything in the sea could talk and was perfectly well integrated into human society. I liked the show just fine but it was nothing to me compared to the next show which is a personal favourite from my childhood, my earliest introduction to mythology that I can remember, that one show I just had to see every Saturday or else nothing was going to be good that week, the one and only..... TUTENSTIEN!!!! Yes, if you knew me as a kid and know me now and asked the question, I LOVE egyptian history and mythology. The Pharaohs, the pyramids, the architecture, the heiroglyphics, the history, the mythology, I love it all! And it all really started (in my opinion) when I first started watching this show. They made sure a lot of the character designs for people and creatures from ancient egyptian mythology looked like the original designs the egyptians made of them! The two episodes I saw the most were the season 1 pilot, and the episode where Tut’s heart is weighed against the feather of truth on the scales of I-can’t-remember-if-the-scales-had-a-specific-name..... come on give me a break, I haven’t looked at my egyptian mythology for a while. Anyways, from what I saw of the show they made a real effort to keep the mythology shown in the show accurate. I will admit that coming back to it it chloe (the other main character) looks a little bit different from how I remember her and sounds ever so slightly different from how I remember her, but overall i remembered everything about it perfectly the minute I watched the first episode again because yes, I have found all 3 seasons of the show! After all, why would I be bringing it up if I hadn’t found it again? Because I’m a productive member of society reflecting happily on his happy childhood? Pfft, as if. Something I did notice that is different from how I remember it is the intro animation. During it, King tut falls and gets wrapped in bandages before falling into his sarcophagus. I remember being able to see his terrified expression so well as a kid and it was always what drew my eyes in that part of the episodes. Now that I’m a lot older, I find it strange that I now notice the bandages wrapping around him more than his expression. Might say something about me or it might not. Either way I loved this show.  the dark atmosphere, the evil villains, the big monsters of an undead variety, king tut’s weird I am king and I know everything childish attitude even though it is the 21st century and he  was before even the first century, the cat’s silly voice and his almost complete and total blind devotion to king tut, cleo’s sassiness and hairstyle, sets growly gargly voice and withered skin, the egyptian art style, the underworld, the egyptian gods, the mystical magical artifacts, the snobby museum curator and his assistant, the cowardly security guard who doesn’t do his job and yet STILL NEVER GETS FIRED, the faithfulness to the egyptian mythology, the fact that the world’s coloring is literally as dark as freaking gotham (heck, the cities are probably next door to each other) except for in the underworld where it looks like they are literally on the wall of an ancient egyptian tomb. I just love it all and I can’t wait to watch it again. I really really really really REALLY loved this show when I was a kid and I might actually postpone the review of the killer tomatoes series for a little bit. (a lot of these old shows [particularly the good ones] are 3 seasons long so it may take a while). However, to anyone who actually views this tumblr, let me know which you’d prefer. I’ll still be posting the first thoughts on The Secret Show in the morning guys, ciao!

Edit: I just realized the heart weighing episode is the 2nd one of the first season. xD