#i just. wow. double life smp you own my entire heart.

[erstwhilesparrow]

what's double life, sparrow? it almost sounds like a dnd podcast title jsdfgkjh

reyni, i would like to preface this by saying that i'm genuinely delighted and flattered by your consistent efforts to reach out / discuss shared interests, and that i hope my responses reasonably convey how much i like seeing you in my inbox. i appreciate you! :]

that said. i regret to inform you double life is not a dnd podcast; it is a minecraft roleplay series on youtube. double life is the third season of what i think we're calling the life series, where a bunch of creators scheme, collect resources, and fight to the death on a very small map. the goal is to hold on to your limited number of lives longer than everyone else, and the prize is [???]. (the prize is you have fun fucking around with your friends, and a lot of people on the internet get very sad about your roleplay character.) i have seen double life be described by turns as a telenovela, a sitcom, and a minecraft gay marriage simulator. i really really like it, and in particular i'm a huge fan of the way they do soulmates, but i will put that under a cut for reasons of [talking a lot about something that is not really directly answering the question]. i'm (not very) sorry that i keep reblogging fanart that makes silly youtube videos look all edgy and serious :P

hi there, welcome to the space underneath the readmore! the thing about double life is its shiny new conceit, the thing that makes it different from previous seasons of the life series, is (:sparkles:) soulmates! each player is "soulbound" to one other player, and what this means mechanically is that when one of them takes damage, the other person takes that same amount of damage. what this means narratively, on the other hand, has widely varied depending on the creator / soulbound pair.

i've tried describing this set-up to multiple people without mentioning the minecraft component and the thing that particular exercise has thrown into sharp focus is that "person who feels your physical pain (and only your physical pain)" is. not necessarily a very conventional definition of soulmate. and the thing i keep ending up at is that i kind of adore that fact? it gets dressed up in language and behaviour we typically use when dealing with romantic relationships (some characters refer to their soulbound partners as their "crazy exes", others find their partner and immediately start flirting with them, i mean even just the fact that they call this being soulmates) but it is so important to me that the soulbond is fundamentally a game mechanic.

it's completely arbitrary who gets paired with who, and i know that none of the creators went into this game with the goal of picking apart the whole way people often think about romance, but the fact of its randomness combined with the ways the players talk about the bond is so deeply appealing to me for a soulmate story because i think it opens up avenues and / or spaces for discussing aspects of romantic relationships i am personally very interested in exploring?

i've thought for a long time about soulmate stories, because i'm invested in Doing Weird Shit to romance tropes (see: that summer i wrote what is to date my longest published fic about hanahaki But Make It Weirder) and this is sure one of them! i know there are other people -- on tumblr even! -- who are interested in this too, but i've never been totally satisfied with the stories i've seen?

like, obviously, just playing the trope straight throws me off because it constantly feels... too easy? like it shouldn't have worked out that neatly? it typically assumes a certain amount of... natural importance to romance that i don't agree with? but the ones that try to complicate the trope have also never quite clicked for me. the closest i've gotten to being able to say why is... i think they are often "what if soulmates existing sucked for this one specific person because [this person isn't their soulmate's soulmate / this person is in love with someone who isn't their soulmate / this person doesn't seem to have a soulmate at all / this person is aro which comes with its own set of potential complications]?" and there's. it feels like a personal problem? one that that specific person has to [repress / ignore / cope with / solve]? and that, on top of being wildly depressing, just. doesn't ring true or feel interesting to me?

because sometimes [gestures broadly at the whole thing of dating / relationships / falling in love] is good for people! it works out for them, and they genuinely are getting things they need / want out of it even though it's not perfect! i care about stories that can play around with that! i don't care about stories where this works out fairy-tale-happy-ending perfect, but i do care about what it takes to get to this being Good For You, what those types of people might fail to consider when they assess other people's relationships, the very subtle ways things can go wrong in a relationship because parties involved have been told their whole lives that this thing they're doing is Good and Correct and The Only Way, what it looks like to feel that pressure toward a romantic relationships and attempt to conform to those expectations, and so on. there are so many different ways to be hurt here! and that sort of thing just. doesn't fit into either of the models of soulmate stories i've described above?

but double life! double life has So Much of that! it's so delicious! there's such a range in the way that the players approach the bond, and it's so so fun and useful as a springboard for thinking about and illustrating -- in the [greatly exaggerated for funsies but nevertheless reflective of real parts of our society] way of sci-fi / fantasy fiction -- so many of the ways people approach romance, outside of the binary of [Perfect And Good] and [Just The Shittiest Ever]. and, again, i cannot imagine any of the creators set out to On Purpose say any of the stuff i've described here -- it was improv and playing around and friends trying out new stories to tell. but they give themselves over to an arbitrary system for defining their relations to each other, and some struggle to fit themselves to it and others don't, and we as the audience can see just how arbitrary it is but we and they find meaning regardless, and none of them think to say, "hey, what if we just gave up on every single piece of this system entirely?" and in the end it all falls apart anyway, because separate from being a soulmate story it was also a death game and it was never not going to be a tragedy. i care So Much about it. despite this being the season where the rules of the game themselves seemed to intertwine themselves with the concept of love, it was also the season where the power of love failed, where everything unravelled not despite but because of it.