#im also admittedly not a fan of the fact that the fandom is very oc focused when i love the canon characters

[ruthlesslistener]

Any wings of fire thoughts?

Most of my thoughts relating to Wings of Fire range from genuine delight at the plot twists and society designs for each tribe to overwhelming despair at how Tui handles her own content. She's absolutely amazing at creating these extremely intense, interesting setups and character arcs for each book, and then failing to close them off in a satisfying manner, with her worst example being Darkstalker, who started off as a wonderful morally grey character that was then shoehorned into a generic villain arc with an unsatisfying conclusion because he was 'born evil' (even though she literally set up his abusive homelife in a manner that would have explained his control issues, but nooooo him wanting to take over the world was just because he was apparently inherently nasty. That's not how living beings WORK, tui).

She's also absolutely terrible at creating great characters/concepts and then dropping them with no follow-up after their books have concluded (Winter and the entire MudWing tribe), and is inconsistent with her own worldbuilding to the point that its embarrassing. For example, in her latest book, she describes Tsunami's blood as blue for some reason, even though SeaWing blood was described as red for literal years beforehand. Additionally, she seems to have no idea how the age system works for the dragons, and has done nothing to clarify it beyond 'until 7 they are dragonets and 20 is a full adult', which has caused absolute hell within the fandom discourse circles. There SEEMS to be a system where a dragon ages rapidly until they are roughly mentally 11 years of age by their first year, after which their growth slows until they hit sexual maturity at 7 and reach prime breeding age at 20, but there is no clarification in-canon, and the age gaps that she puts in relationships seems to reflect that she has absolutely no idea what she is doing (or does, but forgot to explain it). This is made worse by the fact that young dragonets (as in, dragonets 2 years of age or below) tend to act wildly different between books, which makes it even harder to understand how dragon development works, and whether or not it varies between tribes. And none of that even TOUCHES on the absolute mess that is Clearsight.

That's not to say that WoF is a bad book series- I'm criticizing it because I like it, I've been here since book 2 was a new release- but its really frustrating when a book series written for teenagers that is riveting enough to capture the attention of an adult audience + has wonderful moments of genuine horror ends up dropping the ball near the end of the arc. It's not like it being a YA series is an excuse, either- kids aren't stupid, and the kids she's writing for are certainly old enough to notice when worldbuilding goes awry or a plot point ends on an unsatisfying note. It's actually almost painful to interact with the source material, because it almost always gets SOOO CLOSE to being a genuinely good story before Tui either trips up on something that she shouldn't have, or writes herself into a corner that she can't get out of. I love it, but dear god it is a MESS.

Also the fandom (generally) sucks ass.

[lunatic-fandom-space]

Okay, you know how I said I wanted to watch all these german minecraft series and then watch 3rd Life SMP? Yea, I actually dont have the attention span to watch a bunch of white bread boys fuck around in minecraft with little to no story, regardless of wether theyre american or european so Im just gonna write this post and them start watching 3rd Life SMP so yeah.

First, I kinda want to discuss what Im hoping for on like, a meta-level I guess. The only other minecraft RP Ive watched that seems similar to this is Dream SMP so expect lots of comparisons.

I like to split dsmp into three major parts: no story/non-rp, story/non-rp and story/rp.

The first part was literally just a live streamed vanilla minecraft let's play and it was boring as shit. It felt exactly like watching a bunch of dudes play minecraft and unless they acknowledged the people in their donations (who could uncomfortably pushy and even shippy at times) you did not at all get the impression they were even aware of the stream. And as much as I appreciate some level of authenticity in this type of content, I also expect to be entertained by it and this did not even meet my bare minimum standard of entertainment. Admittedly, my attention span is very low so that definitely has something to do with it, but still. I personally have never felt anything but boredom and occasionally intense discomfort while watching anything from this 'era' of dsmp.

The second part was the start of the first conflict, and thus the start of some semblance of a story. They were kind of 'roleplaying' already (both in the sense that they obviously have their personas for their content and in sense that they didnt actually have grievances with one another and were just playing it up for the sake of entertainment) but it was more on the fly, even less focused and less serious. However, it was already legues more fun to watch.

And then we had the third part, where, starting with Wilbur Soot joining and deciding to larp Hamilton, they started to plan things out more and have more complex and/or dramatic conflicts. Needless to say, this was/is the best part in my opinion and what made me see the appeal of dsmp.

What Im hoping for 3rd Life SMP is, that they skip atleast the first part. From what I can tell, it was created sometime after dsmp has been in that third part for a bit and it is a minecraft rp, so Im assuming the people behind it wanted to do something similar, just with the story aspect there on purpose and from the get-go, if you know what I mean. And by the way, I dont think thats wrong or even "copying" in the slightest. Dsmp very much seems like a case of "they did it first, not best" and if anything, I think it would be a shame if people didn't want to do their own spin on this basic concept.

What Im personally hoping for in terms of the 'style' of roleplay itself, I really hope that they dont seperate it as rigidly into lore and non-lore as they did in dsmp. Ideally, they would do it like Ranboo (Wilbur when he was playing Ghostbur to an extend too, but he didnt actually stream and have his own POV back then), where he's always kinda 'In-Character' even when there isnt really anything happening in the plot at that moment. Again, I just dont have the attention span for no story in series like this anymore, so I'd appreciate it on a personal level, but I also think that it could humanize the characters more and potentially add additional depth to them. Especially since it looks like 3rd Life is made by the Hermitcraft group and if the stuff Ive read about Hermitcraft (especially in comparison to dsmp) it wont thrive off intense conflicts and wars in quite the same way, so that could also be a way of making a calmer rp interesting.

And now, some actual plot predictions!

So, the way I found 3rd Life SMP was this really neat 'Pitiful Children' animatic by ZylisticArt. I didnt actually 'watch' it because when I look up animatics I just kinda stare at the screen, not processing anything because Im too busy imagining my own OC animatic to the song, but I did read the description and was mildly intrigued, and its the main reason I wanted to watch 3rd Life so Im going to properly watch it now and post my predictions for the plot below.

***

The description mentions something about the animatic being based on some kinda theory, but I only skimmed it in order to not get spoiled so idk what thats really about. Im mostly intrigued by the fact that the description mentions it being a hardcore SMP (with a twist!), that, combined with the name and the visuals of the animatkc lead me to a couple conclusions;

I dont really know how Hardcore mode works in multiplayer, but in singleplayer you just get permanently kicked out of your world when you die, so Im assuming it works like that on a server too, except on a server, Im pretty sure you have the option of being 'reinvited' onto a server by the admin(s) so you could theoretically have three lives while keeping it a hardcore project where you cant regenerate without potions or golden apples and all that. Again, idk if thats actually how hardcore works but I sure hope it is, because thats what Im basing pretty much all of my predictions on.

In the animatic there were like green people, yellow people and a red guy who was like, the antagonist I guess. I think the green guys still have all their lives, the yellow ones are down to two and the red lads are all down to their last one. Maybe theres gonna be a thing thats like, if you lose a life you lose a part of your soul and that makes you evil or something? Yknow, like the whole "character comes back wrong" thing, except its the conflict of the entire series. Pitiful Children is very much a 'Manipulating Others Into Doing Harmful Shit' kinda song, and I feel like that would be very in-line with a plotline like that, yknow?

Im not expecting there to be wars/conflicts on the scale of dsmp (no blown up countries here bois) but I am expecting to get ridiculously attached to a place that inevitably gets blown up/set on fire by an antagonist.

Speaking of antagonists, theyre definitely also doing the whole multiple POV thing, which means everyone is an antagonist in one way or another and Im a solutely watching every POV from every characters so that I know the full context and story of everything, so I can have the most correct opinions on them, which is both normal to want and possible to achieve.

Since these are the Hermitcraft guys Im expecting some beautiful builds that make me feel insanely untalented and the same thing with redstone shit.

Ghosts. If they havent added some kind of ghost mechanic/lore at the time Im writing this, they will add one in later, mark my words 3rd Life fandom, mark my words...

Thats pretty much it. This is all going under my mcyt tag too, and I dont think I'll be live blogging it, but it really depends on how interesting it is.

Also, if youre a 3rd Life fan who already watched all of it, the only thing youre allowed to respond to this with is a meme that is horribly incomprehensible to anyone who hasnt watched it.

Have a nice day!