#consider this a retrospective on why i love ranboo lore so much and why its hard to share that

[theenderwalker]

thinking about the fact that ranboo's lore is hard to get into and impossible to get the full picture of without watching literally hundreds of hours of vods that may or may not be archived and also are occasionally scattered across other peoples vods completely randomly including but not limited to awesamdude, philza, capt. puffy, tubbo, tommy, fundy, or wilbur and that many of *these* vods were not archived, not to mention the ARG. and also the fact that this is by design and when given the opportunity to rectify this by doing a recap stream, ranboo did it "in character", meaning a vast majority of these smaller details were completely omitted and lore in chill streams is completely unlabelled because cc ranboo just didn't want to do it, or because he wanted people to watch his streams regardless of if it was lore or not so countless scenes are buried and lost to time, even those that give vital information to his character, such as the two scenes with the plan board that i hardly ever see referenced. and cc ranboo insisting you can understand his character without following the enderwalk arc and then like half of his solo lore is exclusively about the enderwalk arc and ive been following this trail of crumbs hopelessly for over a year now and i have to deal with people having shitty uninformed lore takes and i have to look at this and know that it was done by design that you can follow ranboo lore and get the broader picture through recaps and analyses but will you ever experience digging through or archiving ranboo's inventory from stream to stream to pick out when things were happening off camera? or will you ever stream hop in the middle of the school day for the hope of maybe spotting him wandering around in the background of another stream, maybe sending a cryptic message in chat? do you still watch every single stream trying to connect it to ranboo's story somehow, and then somehow manage to be RIGHT even when ranboo hasn't logged on in a month? do you theorize and theorize based on information given to us a year ago and get that confirmation a year later, only for people who haven't been watching from the start to insist this just means he was manipulated and has no autonomy? and you just have to sit there and hunt for clips that may or may not exist because c ranboo is unreliable and cc ranboo is allergic to confirming anything about the enderwalk state, knowing that this misinformation is by design and so much of this arc is preserved in your memory and in analyses long lost to time or deleted discord servers with months of backlogs and liveblogging from this era. theres so few clips to prove anything outright because none of this information is ever given outright. it's implied, suggested, spread across 4 streams. its a culmination, a build up over time repeatedly slowed down by scheduling issues and real life getting in the way. and it SUCKS because so many of these facts are what make this story well written. but it also makes it exclusionary by design and things get abandoned and pushed to the side and maybe retconned maybe not, maybe reworked and adjusted and it all adds up to something but it's impossible to know what and i adore this story. i adore it because i've had this experience and i've been there from the start. it just makes me a little bit sad because it seems to gatekeep itself and if i weren't a college student and super fucking busy, i'd do it. i'd rewatch the streams from december, january, february, march, and i'd document it all. i'd clip it and give you all the information i build my perceptions of this character off of from back to front, but i physically cannot and that makes me sad. maybe this is a commentary on how inaccessible the DSMP is but it feels like ranboo turns that up to 11. i've been hyperfixated on ranboo's story for over a year now and i want to share that experience, and i do in every way i can. but it's fucking hard sometimes.