#idc what you say in the foot note Jim i know what you are

[andy-888]

I did this after a lot of thoughts about THAT author's note

[juju-on-that-yeet]

I beg you ELABORATE BIGLY

*cracks knuckles* Hell yeah

Actual footage of me writing this all out:

To start off, I’ll say that the egos are technically all roughly the same age. They’re figments, not humans, so it’s all a little fuzzy. Some of them look younger and/or act more childish, but even then they’re physically/mentally 20ish at the youngest. But they’ve all technically only been alive for a few years at the most (except for Dark and Wil, who as we know are ALL sorts of fucky), so the age differences between them all mean a lot more proportionally. I’ve mentioned this in fics before, how even a few months age difference means a lot to figments because they haven’t been around very long in the first place.

(pls lordt let the readmore work)

But on the whole, the egos fall into three groups:

The Older/Oldest Ones/The Elders (or The OGs, as I kinda like calling them) consist of Dark, Wilford, King of the Squirrels, The Host, Dr. Iplier, Silver Shepherd, Google, Bim, and Ed Edgar. They’re the ones at the conference table in MarkiplierTV, because they’re the head honchos. Dark may be the boss with Wil as his right-hand man, but all the older egos have the respect of the younger ones. They’re on the whole more mature than the others, and when things get crazy, they’re the ones the others look to for guidance (some of them are even older brother/father figures to certain younger egos) (tho Dark and Bim each have a boyfriend among the younger ones, which got some side-eyes from their peers at first but everyone’s over it by now). They’re also the group with the most politics in it: Dark and Wil don’t respect Silver at all, for example, and half of them only trust Dark as far as they can throw him (except for Google, who actively hates him in addition to not trusting him). But they’ve been around since the beginning, since before Ego Inc. even existed, and remember what it was like to live apart from one another without a solid way of life or place to call home. Dark was the one who brought them all together (not without resistance, mainly from Host, then The Author), so as wary as the others are of Dark, they do all respect him with various levels of reluctance. They also know very well what it’s like to lose egos, to see them get forgotten by the fans and fade away, and they’re all a little desensitized to it. It usually takes them a while to warm up to new egos for this reason.

If you look at the birth dates of the egos (at least among the main ones + ones that are in my canon), there’s a couple big gaps between new ones cropping up. Not that none appeared, but that none appeared and survived. The first such gap comes after Ed Edgar was made, leaving a space of a year and a half where no egos had enough footing to stick around. This period finally ended when Yandereplier popped into existence and became the first real baby of the family. Even though Ed was previously the youngest, he wasn’t much younger than the next-youngest (Bim) and never felt like the baby, nor was he treated like one. But Yandere, between his appearance after such a drought of new egos and the fact that he was the first one to really look younger than the others, made the whole group collectively say “oh, he’s baby.” It didn’t last very long, though, because more egos showed up pretty soon after, and became…

The Middle Kids: Yandere, MarkBop, Bingiplier, Oliver, Plus, Chrome, Reporter Jim and Cameraman Jim. They’re not quite babies anymore; they’ve been around for a couple years or more and they’ve become savvy to how things work in Ego Inc. But they’re still much younger than the oldest ones, and are still less mature than them. Of the three groups, this one causes the most trouble by FAR (Yandere likes wrecking shit in the city and is constantly getting hurt, Bing picks fights with 3/4 of the Googles and Plus and Chrome pick fights with him in return, and the Jims are just constantly Up To Something™). They mostly see the older ones as authority figures, but they aren’t quite up in the politics that the older ones create (even Yandere, who gets away with everything thanks to having Dark and Wil wrapped around his finger, barely notices that fact most of the time). They haven’t seen as much death among the egos as the older ones have, but they’ve seen enough to make them a little cautious around newbies. The hardest hitting deaths for them were the first pair of Jims, Weatherman Jim and News-anchor Jim. Those two were unusual in that they lived for a good few months before they faded, which hadn’t really happened before. The newer Jims, RJ and CJ, ended up evoking the same “they’re baby” response that Yandere did for this reason (and the one place where my subconscious grouping was inaccurate was with the Jims, who I associated as being in the younger camp, when they’re really just the youngest middle kids).

After the Jims show up, it’s a little over a year before the next ego shows up, leading to…

The Youngest Ones/The Newbies/The Babies: Eric Derekson, Yancy, Illinois, and Captain Magnum. Granted, Eric is almost a year older than the Heist egos, but let’s be real, he’s still baby. These four are still finding their footing among the group, still figuring out who their friends are, still finding the limits of Dark’s patience. They know the written rules but not the unwritten ones, essentially. To them, the middle kids are a mixed bag of fun friends/intimidating authority figures (half the noobs are scared of Yandere, for example, and they’re all intimidated by Plus and Chrome, but they like the others pretty well for the most part). They listen to the older ones and follow their lead much more than the middle kids do, and are intimidated by pretty much all of them. At the same time, the softer-hearted among the older egos (Doc, Silver, Bim) baby them a LOT. They’re not spoiled rotten, but they sure are spoiled. On the flip side, though, they haven’t been exposed to the loss of egos like the others have. Eric’s only seen a few egos die, and the Heist egos haven’t seen any die at all. They’ll be the most optimistic and hopeful when new egos show up – and be the saddest and most horrified when new egos die.

But yeah, I kinda subconsciously had them organized like this and it’s always influenced how I write them, even though I only just recently realized it enough to put it into words. It’s pretty wild what your brain can come up with without even trying! I truly love this dynamic for them, and it’ll be cool to see how it changes as more egos crop up (we’ll see if E-boyiplier manages to survive his first month without being forgotten :3c)

This is already way too long but I did compile a list of the egos in age order with their birth dates for my own reference that I can post if y’all want it (plus their astrological signs because I’m that bitch) (side note @ Mark WHY are so many of your characters Scorpios??) (also idc what Eric said in his video, he was introduced on December 2 so he’s a Sagittarius and not a Libra and that’s that on that)