#the rps were their own separate things they just took place on the same server

[bayonettas-tits]

Thinking about how when I was twelve, I was put in a mock court trial over being allowed to remain on a Warriors/Homestuck Minecraft roleplay server with my irl friend acting as my lawyer, due to being a bit of a shithead on there.

I somehow won it.

[lazyliars]

/rp

Before I get into it, I want to state that is EXPLICITLY an analysis of the Characters, and is not intended to touch on how the cc’s played them in a meta sense unless specifically stated otherwise.

Also, this is technically a part two to my other post, which took a more in depth look at Techno and Phil’s reactions to Tommy’s death. It’s not necessary when reading this post, but I don’t address their reactions here.

So. The question must be asked.

Are we [the Syndicate] the baddies?

Yes.

The End.

 Why are the Syndicate the baddies?

They got damn logo is a wither skull.

The End.

That's not how this works.

Yeah, yeah. You’re right.

The Syndicate's goals as an organization are not inherently bad. They seem to have good intentions behind them, and the focus on the freedom of it's individual group members is important to remember when talking about it; It is not a government. There is no hierarchical power system. No one is forced to do anything against their will, or surrender any of their rights or power to remain a member. It is not a government.

I also want to address Techno and Phil backing Ranboo into a corner – I see them getting a lot of flack for this, but I personally do not think it is relevant to the greater discussion, or necessarily representative of any contradictions within the organization. It was clearly played for laughs, and after they back off they clarify to Ranboo that they won't force him. Then later when Phil and Ranboo are alone, Ranboo feels safe enough to express that he felt like he was pressured into it, and Phil assures him he is allowed to leave whenever he wants; He is not being forced to do anything, and he is not being coerced or blackmailed.

None of the Syndicate members have done any wrongs against each other in the context of the Syndicate, OR gone against any of the Syndicate's core principles.

That, said, holy shit are they the baddies.

Listen, there's trying to telegraph a meaning or message to the audience and then there's having your logo be wither skulls on blackstone. That is straight out of the skit I keep referencing, seriously.

Okay, but, they laughed at it! It was played as a joke, just like the Ranboo thing!

The Ranboo thing was improv, the Syndicate's headquarters were planned – the artistic choices that they made reflect on what role they want the build and the organization inhabiting it to play in the future storylines.

Wither Skulls kind of have some CONNOTATIONS. Techno is an English major, I don't think he chose the most threatening imagery possible on accident, and then joked about the way people would interpret it just to stir the pot. This reads as hugely intentional.

And beyond that, the jokes they make during this part aren't “haha yeah, we look bad but we're actually good!” they're “you can tell by looking at these that we're the good guys wink wink, this is good guy stuff right here :)” It is a joke about how they are definitely not the good guys. This isn't even a case of unreliable narrators, this is one step down from flat out saying the meta intent.

But okay, I hear you, I'm talking about things that haven't happened yet. The Syndicate hasn't used any Withers, they could be an aesthetic choice.  Lets look at what they do in practice.

So, they barge into private property, assess Snowchester's right to continue existing based entirely on their own ideals of what Freedom is, and then only once Tubbo assures them that they have no standing leader do they grant the place their approval to, and I gotta stress this part, continue existing.

 In my Quackity meta, I already talked about how Government in the context of a M1necraft RP cannot be compared to IRL Governments on a one-to-one scale. They don't serve the same purposes or have the same type of power. What I didn't talk about was Agency in the context of m1necraft governments.

In an irl government, if you are born into one, you can't really leave without committing a massive overhaul on your life, which can be expensive and difficult, if not impossible for many people. Even in a “benevolent” government, the simple physicality of where you were born can prevent you from leaving it easily.

The same hurdles do not exist in the Dream SMP. People who join M1necraft governments choose to. They want to, either at the beginning when they form one, or later on when they join up. So far, no Government has just Sprung Up and forced the current residents of an area to become dependent on them, except maybe the Eggpire, who's status as a government is... shakey.

And even when people want to leave or separate from the government, they have been historically able to do so without any trouble or any effort from said governments to stop them. Jack Manifold emancipated from Manberg. Fundy and Quackity both left to start new nations. In all cases they were allowed to do so without any attempts on the part of the governments to stop them, either through force, or institutions preventing them from doing so.

The most anyone has lost when leaving a government is their house, which is still usually their property anyway, and is something that is easily rebuilt elsewhere and is inconvenient to move anyway.

The only exceptions to this might be Schlatt exiling Wilbur and Tommy - but even then, they weren’t trying to leave, they were trying to get back in, and of course the original L’manberg revolution, where Dream attempted to force L’manberg back into the Dream SMP, which wasn’t even a government at that point in time.

I don’t consider Phil’s house arrest an example of a government forcing someone to stay a citizen - that was treated less as a matter of a citizen wanting to leave the country and more as a threat to national security. Still pretty fucked up, but it’s a different issue.

What I'm saying is, If Tubbo wants to create a government out in the middle of nowhere, threatening no one, forcing no one to join either through force or desperation, and allowing people to join willingly because they want to, then he should be allowed to do that.

The Irony of the Syndicate, a group of people consisting of some of the richest, strongest people on the server, going around and enforcing 'Freedom' that entails no one person having more power than any other, is absurd. 

It shows an extreme lack of self-awareness and/or self-righteousness, as they seem to think that they deserve to be the ones who decide what constitutes a government.

Snowchester is a small independent nation - they shouldn’t have to live in fear of being obliterated if they don’t walk on eggshells to meet an arbitrary standard decided by people who’s only authority on the matter COMES FROM THEIR PERSONAL POWER. No one elected them! No one chose them! They were not “approved” by the server at large to enact this kind of law.

The Syndicate are not a government, but they are an unsupervised power structure exerting their ideals on a land that did not ask for them. Like, These people have invented an actual Authoritarian-Anarchist faction. How the hell did they manage this?????

Back on topic.

Tubbo shows them the crater left by his nukes. The reaction is oddly positive – the nukes are fine by the morals of the Syndicate, apparently. I'd argue that they come across as more impressed than anything else; they seem to respect Tubbo for having gotten ahold of “real” power.

(There's a few good memes out there about “We can excuse nuclear weaponry, but we draw the line at Government!”)

So. By the Syndicate's standards: A single person or group of acceptably equal persons with weapons of mass-destruction are only worth “keeping an eye on” because they might provoke other people.

Like, I consider Project Dreamcatcher to be one of, if not the most morally ambiguous thing Tubbo has ever done, largely because it was all on his own initiative. He holds some culpability for The Butcher Army and Phil's house arrest, but they weren't his ideas and he was mostly following Quackity at that point.

And Phil tells Tubbo, IMMEDIATELY AFTER SEEING THE NUCLEAR CRATER:

“Looks like you've reformed a little bit Tubbo, I'm proud.”

And it's fine. Crimes against nature? Fine. A sign of healing in fact!! Tubbo is having a sweeeelll time and he definitely didn't make these nukes specifically in fear of being attacked by these exact people! Tubbo is doing great. Tubbo is doing fine. Tubbo. is. FINE.

Anyway.

I don't think this presentation of the Syndicate was an accident. Looking at the greater lore of SMP right now, after the Egg is done, their list of enemies is slim, and considering that they seem solely invested in taking down governments, that leaves maybe Snowchester, Kinoko Kingdom, and Eret and the greater Dream SMP.

Snowchester has not been shown to be corrupt, evil, or have any intent to go down that route. The most ambiguous thing they've done is, again, is the nukes. Other than that, it's pretty much your average cottagecore snow village.

Kinoko is presented in an even more morally 'good' light, Karl having founded it specifically for his Time-travel library purposes, which are currently being treated by the narrative as a selfless act, if not downright heroic.

Eret is also a fairly 'good' aligned character atm. He's been on that redemption grind since the og betrayal, and doesn't seem keen on backtracking. He's actively tried to leverage his position as king to make things better, and hasn't been quiet about that. He was also 'validated' by Tommy*, a character who has been described both by his allies and enemies as “the hero,” so take that as you will.

What I'm getting at is, all of the current potential enemies for the Syndicate aside from the Egg, are currently being cast as 'good,' and if they were to be attacked, they would undoubtedly have the moral high-ground, unless something drastically changed.

The only potential shakeups I can think of is are a Dream escape and/or a Wilbur revival, both of which could draw the Syndicate's attention and ire, depending on how things go. That said, it's just as likely that either or both of them would join the Syndicate – Dream still has that favor, and Phil and Techno both seemed to think Wilbur would've agreed with their blowing up L'manberg.

Both of those characters are currently **villains – the fact that they're both prime candidates for the Syndicate is a huge indication of the direction it's going to go as the plot moves forward.

((*I know some people are gonna come at me for painting Tommy as the “deciding factor” of what is morally good, so lemme just stop you there. I'm not talking about Tommy somehow having the 'right' to decide who is and isn't good, and definitely not the right to decide who should and shouldn't be king. I'm saying that Tommy, a character who the narrative treats as, if not a good person, then a person who is trying to be good, was in support of Eret, a character who has also been trying to be good.

Eret doesn't gain the moral highground because Tommy said so, he gets it because a character who the narrative treats as trying to do better, acknowledged Eret's earnest attempts at doing the same.

**I'm referring to Wilbur here as a villain because Tommy seemed convinced he would be if he were to be brought back. There is always the possibility that he's wrong.))

So, to summarize this: I read the Syndicate as being intentionally positioned as future antagonists, if not outright villains of a future arc. They are NOT a Government but their goals are contradictory with their means, and it is important to keep in mind that they plan to enforce their own brand of freedom on people who did not grant them either the authority or permission to do so.

So, uh. Can you tell I loved these streams? They were seriously so good. I kept switching between Ranboo and Techno's POV's trying to keep up with everything. I still have to watch Niki's!

All in all, I'm super, super excited for whats coming next, egg stuff, Syndicate stuff, Tommy stuff, all of it.

[dailysuna]

Hello, yes, I heard requests are open!! I would like to know your thoughts on the economic repercussions of Suna losing the battle of the chunnin exams? I thought they were already in a depression before and I think I remember that things ere pretty dire to have them need to make Gaara, but the loss at the Leaf must have hit even harder. What do you think some likely strategies were, and by whom, to stave off complete economic ruin and widespread starvation among their citizens? Thank you!

Okay first off thank you so so so much for sending these in! I kid you not we were overjoyed at seeing them because they are just the type of content we like to see!!! We think about these types of things in depth so its great to see others thinking about them as well. Now let me separate these questions and answer them for you.

Question One

You are very right! Canonically Sunagakure never had great economic standing, but during Rasa’s reign as Kazekage it got worse. Now, this has nothing to do with Rasa’s way of ruling himself, but rather that the Wind Daimyo, ruler of their specific country, not Suna, started giving shinobi missions to Konohagakure instead of Suna. So, Rasa used his abilities to extract precious metals to sell so Suna didn’t collapse; however, their economy never really got back onto their feet because of many reasons I will not get into at this moment. The economy was already suffering under Rasa’s leadership, which was good even if he sucked as a father, so the sudden absence and loss of the battle during the exams would cause much chaos. 

Rasa was killed meaning the country lost their best source of procuring income as well as their main leadership position (although the fact they have a council means they won’t be thrown into complete chaos without a kage good job Suna). His death alone would cause much turmoil and trouble. With the added loss of ninja, supplies (any war requires supplies and loss only means losing all that effort put in), and already strained relationships would not help. How can they even come back from this?

Well first, who is the one implementing the methods? The way we see Suna formatted almost seems to be based on a democracy where the kazekage is but one voice amongst that of the council, thus, the kazekage and the council would be the ones to brainstorm and make the changes necessary. We think that their main method in fact is to lower wages. When shinobi cash in on their missions, they take some of the profit and the government takes the other amount. They would need to start taking more from their already small amount of missions. (In fact in a discussion us mods had about similar situations one time I, mod K, have an oc family I have based in Suna that we figured would be the first to have wages cut.) In consequence I believe they would order local businesses to drop their prices. Suna has no fertile land in sight, their small plot of land in the Land of Fire they acquired years ago their only place where growing is possible, so they rely heavily on importing goods. The government would likely prioritize trying to keep the country running, while reforming relationships with Konoha. I could see them purchasing larger quantities of non-perishable food or ingredients to give out rations. They are also going through a change in power which most likely made the situation very difficult and required the council to do most of the work while Gaara listened and learned.

The important thing to remember is Suna shinobi are extremely patriotic and loyal, so here at dailysuna we think the village as a whole would do their best to cooperate and help one another should it mean the success of Sunagakure, aka a more stable economy.

Question Two

I briefly addressed some of these questions at the end of the last one, but yes we actually have planned a lot of this out in varying degrees of depth. As for the change in power, I already established Suna was facing ruin and shifting power creates another hard element in harsh times. Sometimes it is what you need but sometimes it doesn’t help in the slightest. In the case of Suna, the job of the kazekage isn’t one where someone can jump in after assassination and immediately change it all. The council is there to provide checks and balances for the kazekage as well as advice, its no coincidence we see council members mostly i their middle ages or later. This abrupt shift in power from the dead fourth kazekage to his 12-13 year old son is just a crazy change. Gaara is continuously not trusted by the council, in Shippuden they even discuss his death being beneficial in a meeting, so Gaara needs to not only learn the ropes in his young emo preteen years but to foster a better relationship with the council and the citizens as well. I don’t believe it is actually ever confirmed when Gaara officially took the seat of kazekage, so there could be a few months or even years in there where there was no official fifth kazekage. During this time, the council likely ran Suna, as they have the power to do so. Even a bit into Shippuden I believe the council was still pulling a majority of Sunagakure’s puppet strings as Gaara simply lacked the life experience for certain decisions. As far as for Gaara, we are told that he had a very rough time gaining everyone’s trust but had started doing so before being stolen away by sparky sparky boom boom man and Suna’s original angsty emo preteen, but they never really explain it? Either way, its clear based on everything I said so far that Gaara’s main focus in his transition was mostly on building those relationships others had decided to break out of fear. He is very successful and everyone loves Gaara now including us mods!

Baki. I love this man so so dearly. In an old rp discord server that no longer exists, may it rest in peace, I actually role played Baki so I workshopped an entire backstory for him based on our millions of Suna headcanons that us mods have all accepted as our canon (you’ll find we all share the same exact headcanons). As far as his ascent to council member, I thought long and hard to develop it. Everyone starts out as a basic ninja, and, without going into my headcanons for his childhood, Baki was the same. He slowly rose with his skill, as he is extremely skilled - his stamina is awful but I am convinced its because he is so good none of his battles last long and thus no need for it anyways - and became a trusted aide to Rasa. In our collective brain that contains headcanons we have also determined this is due to the personality we gave Baki, which is he is so dedicated to the village he doesn’t stop to take care of or think of himself. In other words, he can be a pushover when it comes to doing work because he only wants to be of use. This makes him the perfect target for paperwork which we believe is how he got closer to Rasa. Baki and Rasa are never explicitly said to be close or anything of the sort, but the fact that he is entrusting his precious children, one of which has a giant chaos beast inside of his little emo body, plays to the fact that he is familiar with Baki in some regard. Serving as the Kazekage’s aid, aka errand boy in this case, Baki would gain experience with paperwork, the jobs of the council and kazekage, form connections, and display his skill in all assets. 

Now, there are some nasty little children needing to be taken care of. Who better to send than the man who you know will do anything for you, for the country? I am convinced very few ninja would willingly teach preteen Gaara, I mean, I don’t think I would even want to, so no one would be willing to have such an assignment and would do anything to get out of it. Even Baki was likely wary of it and for the longest time debated quitting, although, after some time, the siblings likely began to realize he cared about them (this is something I would love to talk about in more depth some other time) and weren’t as awful towards him. Hence a successful team. Did being the kazekage’s children’s sensei help Baki? Because he was their teacher? No. Because he was able to gain their trust and lead them? Most definitely. This experience likely helped him gain prestige and respect for his abilities which is how we mainly believe he got his position on the council, as that is what the council members seem to have as well as dedication to the village.

As far as being kazekage goes, we love Bakikage! This is what I mentioned earlier about a role play server. What happened is we had a plan for Rasa to be taken out of power in this AU but we didn’t wish for Gaara to suddenly be ripped from the rest of the role play by being stuck with kage duties. So, we sat down to think and realized Baki would actually be a great person to wear that fancy greenish hat. As stated earlier, he has the respect, the strength, the intelligence, the ability to prioritize things, as well as many other necessities for a good leader. The big thing that stood in his way was Gaara’s character development because the angsty emo preteen needed to turn soft boy cottage core obviously. But in all seriousness, I believe what stood between him and his theoretical throne - which he deserves - was honestly himself. Baki serves the village. Baki loves the village. Baki wants the best for the village. Baki is, as we call it, villagesexual. He only desires to be of use, not to gain power or prestige, they just happened to be given to him along the way. His own lack of drive, as well as care for Gaara, because of course if his adopted son wants those fruit snacks he will get them for him. Please Baki, you spoil them too much. So yes, Baki could be the kazekage, he has all the equipment for it, but Gaara’s own desire to be something no one expected and show them he wasn’t a monster was all Baki would have cared about. Even in our rp AU Baki was going to be reluctant about taking the power. Even if he did have that desire and drive, his care for Gaara would likely win out. 

Honestly, it might be best he didn’t have that drive. You know, all the kazekages are assassinated and Baki is not an important enough of a character to Kishimoto to be brought back to life. I will gladly hold onto council member Baki if Bakikage means he dies. But its nice to think how Gaara would actually get to be a kid while Baki gets a hard earned role, huh?

I hope you enjoyed my very very long winded answers - believe it or not I tried to keep it short - and that they actually answered your questions. We all look forward to more submissions/asks from you as well as others! And we’re working on getting those lovely drawing requests planned out.

[pandoriasbox]

Jade’s SSO Rambles - 8 Updated Care/Bonding System

(Please keep in mind that these are my thoughts and opinions at the time of writing these rambles. I may change my mind in the future.)

Some time after I sorted out my thoughts on the current care system I took a step back and finally fit the pieces together regarding how I think a new “care” system could be implemented into SSO. Some of this is pulling from ideas for my own personal horse game concept but I don’t think that’ll be an issue. My game is intended to be a single player experience with a very different horse system to SSO’s collect ‘em all style of horse models.

We are very long overdue for a better care system and I certainly don’t blame the team for taking their time on it. I would prefer to wait over having something so integral to the game’s core be rushed and sloppy. I just hope that I can toss my own two cents in and propose some decent ideas that might help facilitate a better experience.

A final additional note before I begin, I do have ideas for how to expand on the care skill I will be lightly brushing over but I plan on doing a separate ramble on it. Primarily it involves some suggestions for improving the skill and making it more useful and interesting than its current implementation and expanding on ideas for the Rescue Ranch and Jorvik Rangers.

Regardless of System Adjustments (From Previous Ramble)

Remove designated care areas (stable interior, outside of stables, ranch rp areas, ect) and let the player do basic care actions such as brushing, hoof picking, watering and feeding anywhere.

Remove the loading bar and just play the animations as well as remove the blinking/fading black screens. If necessary clip the player into place like when mounting and simply let them move from where they are after the animation. (Unless it could cause issues with players clipping through walls.)

Keep a simplistic means of doing horse care for roleplay and accessibility. (I don’t think the mini games are a bad idea but I think something simple that is a single click or click and drag with animations should be kept in.)

Bonding System Overview

Horses do not need daily care to maintain happiness which is removed along with the debuffs for not caring. Any care performed instead builds up the horse’s “bond” with the player. Bond does not give buffs to speed or anything that actively affects racing or PVP gameplay. Bonding is also earned by actively interacting with the horse. Your current ridden horse does not lose bonding even when dismounted.

The bond level is only decreased while the player is in game and not actively riding the horse. I would argue that technically horses in the pasture should be allowed to maintain their bond level and only horses kept active in the stable should be affected. (Pasture horses are resting and this would allow players to build up bond with their sometimes 100+ horses without feeling punished for having so many.)

Having high bonding with a horse primarily affects the player when they are actively riding the horse. This could result in bonuses such as earning more horse experience, getting a boost to endurance/horse HP and maybe your horse even can randomly find items for you. I also like to think if potions were added to the game that those (and visual effects like powders) could have extended use on high bonded horses.

Benefits

Treats/Feed Boosts

Increased Bond (Points)

Speed Boost

Agility Boost

Jump Boost

Endurance/HP Boost

High Bonding Benefits

Boost to Horse Exp

Higher Endurance/Horse HP

Horse Randomly Finds Objects

Potions and Powder Effects Last Longer

In general I think switching to a “bonding” system is far more friendly to all players but especially children. It avoids this idea of abusing your horses if you don’t care for them and that your actions could cause unhappiness for your animals. It also removes the guilt of not paying for stable care and as I mentioned in my other care ramble allows players to spend more money on buying more horses without feeling guilt of getting additional horses.

This system would also make it easier to manage large amounts of horses and make it more enjoyable to switch between all of them. For me I generally feel trapped into only riding a few at a time because I cannot afford stable care. That means I either plan out who I ride or suffer through a heavily debuffed horse since both stable care and vets are too expensive and I personally don’t have the time to care for more than 5 horses.

The suggestions I will bring up could give players better means to interact with their horses and control their play style, adding more to how players think about interacting with the game while still giving them reasons to log in often. At the same time though players aren’t being punished (or technically rewarded) for not playing the game either.

Loss of Bond and Freezing Bond Level

Loss of bonding over in game time only occurs on horses who are stabled and not pastured or not your currently ridden horse.

While the player is in game stabled horses’ bond levels will slowly decrease. This can be paused for the day by doing any action that increases bonding. (For example just running around and petting or feeding each stabled horse once is enough.) When the server ticks over to the next day the bond will begin decreasing again while the player is in game. It’s best to do this as soon as you jump on to play to freeze the horse’s current bonding level.

For players who do not wish to actively interact with each horse I believe having a feeding system (not unlike Amelia’s idea for a silo) would work well as an automated bonding action to freeze your background bonding loss. I will go into this more later in the rambles but it would activate with server rollover and not require the player to initiate it so they can have hands free care without requiring SC.

Bond loss due to time in the stable unridden should not be a rapid loss, it should take around 3-4 days worth of not caring for your horse at all while playing the game to completely lose bond level. Bonding should be able to be relatively quickly increased but require more effort to do so faster.

Whenever your actively ridden horse is injured to the point of having no HP left that will reduce bond level by quite a bit. You put your horse in harm’s way and did not protect them therefore they feel less of a bond with you. Whenever your horse is injured enough to remove HP that may also slightly decrease bond as well.

Increasing Bonding

Primarily bond would be improved via interacting with your horse with the main ways being feeding, watering, grooming, petting and racing/training. When racing/training bond is gained (and any bonus exp is earned) with the horse whom you turn it in with.

I think a new feeding system should be implemented along with this idea where instead of doing “stable care” and paying SC to activate it the player has the option to use their feed room to craft food for their horses and choose a feeding schedule for them. Scheduling feed would be similar to stable care where the player simply picks how many days they’d like it active and can cancel the current feed (while keeping in mind they won’t get anything in return for doing it.) The amount of feed needed increases along with how many days the player’s horses will be fed. This should not be affected by the stable size or number of horses in the stable however.

Horse feeding would only apply to horses currently stabled and not affect pastured horses. Doing a mass stable feed allows the player to either choose between doing a basic feed to maintain bond (increasing it by 1pt) or to apply bonuses such as improving how much bonding it provides or adding boosts to stats.

Feed can be obtained via either crafting it (free but more effort) or purchasing it from a food vendor with shillings or SC. Standard feed can be bought with JS or SC but specialized feeds might require SC. All food can be crafted but not everything can be purchased. Crafting requires more effort on the player’s part as they need to collect the ingredients in the world (or save some from events such as free food from the Winter Village. Or maybe we could have our own farms and gardens someday.)

Any stat boosts should be relatively small however and not able to stack. If there is stacking it should only be with different boosts. For example if a player has a horse on a feed that boosts speed then feeding them a treat that boosts speed should not add more speed. However the horse in speed boosting feed could have a treat that boosts jump. Potentially they could be fed multiple treats but only be buffed once per stat.

In addition to feed I think having craftable treats would be wonderful for expanding horse care and adding more a personalized experience. If trading is ever implemented players could sell or gift horse food they made to others. Even without trading this could be a small way for players to make money and convert materials they find in the world into shillings through the effort of crafting.

When feeding your horse however there should be a limit and using feed counts as one point of feeding for that day. The player can continue feeding their horse treats but after say 5 feedings they no longer boost your horse’s bonding. This may also be something to keep in mind with grooming where doing the main grooming actions only give bonding once per day but can be performed countless times. (Such as brushing, hoof picking and using the wash stall.)

I also think it might be cute if your horse has a preference for a specific kind of food each day which is randomized. If you can guess what type of food it is (like a treat with apples in it or just apples) then it could give an extra bonding bonus. I wouldn’t go with horses having perma favorite foods because I know I personally like to imagine my horses liking certain things then I feel disappointed if they don’t follow my idea in game. This also could encourage players to try feeding their horses a variety of treats as well, encouraging them to find and create each recipe.

Horse Food and Recipes

I think starting out the player should have access to some basic options such as being able to feed their horse a few standard food (+1, +3 or +5 bonding effect per day for feed or per treat) and maybe a basic speed boost recipe for feed and treats.

For advanced recipes the player will need to complete mini quests and befriend/increase reputation with the NPCs or groups around Jorvik. For example, after helping Ed Field fix up the inn and revive it he has enough rep with you that he decides to give you a nutter butters weird horse treat or feed recipe. Other options could be a questionable but safe smoothie from Tim or Jamie Olivetree giving you a horse biscuit recipe that with some tweaking the player is able to figure out how not to burn to a crisp. Marly’s family could give rewards unique to each of them including his sister offering a gourmet one.

These recipes would be unlocked following a mini quest given by the NPC and then become permanently available in the crafting part of the feed room. In general it’s a nice way to both give players more reasons to interact with the world and reward those who get invested in it. It also helps flesh out the NPCs and the world we are living in while adding some more holistic aspects. To me it would feel like I’m truly making friends and finding a home in the world of Jorvik through small things such as NPCs appreciating my help so much they gift or help me out in turn. This would also be something that requires the player to work for the more “powerful” items in the game AKA the ability to properly buff your horse outside of tack.

Quick Care Skill Notes

I think I will leave an in depth discussion on improving the care skill to another ramble but I wanted to cover a few ideas and how they might factor into this new bonding system

Players with higher care skill would have automatic bonuses applied to their bonding with all of their horses. For example let’s say every 5 levels of care the player gains an extra +1 with all bonding increases. A player at level 1-4 in care would receive no benefit, one at level 5-9 would get +1 and 10-14 would get +2 and so on. So if brushing only gave +1 bonding usually then a player at level 10 would get +3 bonding with their horse.

If more aspects were added to horse health and we were able to heal our horses with bought/crafted first aid kits then having high care could result in both gaining more bond back as well as improving how much your horse is healed.

Potentially a player with high care skill could have a chance of producing better quality feed and treats with a basic treat that normally only gives +2 could have a 25% chance of being boosted to a higher quality such as giving +5 bond instead.

Overall I’m incredibly happy with what I was able to come up with and even if none of this makes it into the game I do hope that my discussion can help inspire the team or anyone else who reads this when it comes to thinking critically about game systems. I do hope it helps with brainstorming and thinking about how to address interconnected systems within SSO itself though and can provide some benefit to the team. 

Silo idea mentioned can be found in Amelia and Leila’s interview! I also want to mention that the recipes idea was most likely pitched to me by my friends but I apologize for not recalling who as both @sso-ali-archdotter and @centeris2 have been integral to helping me flesh this idea out and I want to thank them profusely for listening to my endless jumbled rambles. 

I also hope you all enjoyed reading through my thoughts on a bonding system and found it intriguing! Let me know if you have any thoughts by leaving a reply, reblog or ask! Likes are always welcome as well and thank you for taking the time to read through this huge discussion!

[blackvelvetwriteson]

𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐄, 𝐒𝐖𝐄𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐓

                                                       (  ~ Corrupted Bakugo Katsuki x                                                Midoriya Izuku ~ )

GENRE: ANGST!                                                                

FANDOM: Boku No Hero Academia (My Hero Academia)

TRIGGER WARNINGS: This story is angsty as SHIT dude. There’s also death, harm, and weapons mention in here so if you’re not into that, this isn’t for you!

SUMMARY:  This was a submission for a short writes channel on one of my RP Discord servers. The prompt was make the characters involved choose between two impossible things.

WORD COUNT: 2518 

(Headers are mine, but the art inside of them are not! Please don’t steal or repost without credit!)

      It was getting heated. The infamous heroes Ground Zero and Deku out in the middle on the front lines fighting back to back, damage to properties everywhere. There was no doubt that these were even more of Shigaraki’s pawns. This time, they were after Aizawa, both of the notorious heroes’s old sensei. Apparently he was the target of all of this. The two didn’t know, the two didn’t care. They just wanted to protect him and all of their classmates no matter the cost. In the backdrop, Sero was slinging around, creeping around buildings in a hope to aide the two heroes in their battle. All of the Class 1-A formers were separated, and now it was every man and woman for themselves. Just hold out as long as they could until more reinforcements arrived. That’s all they had to do. But with even the two contenders for the number one spot struggling as hard as they were, all hope seemed lost.

  “One for All,” Izuku charged up his attack, positioning his hand in front of him, his free hand holding his forearm with a tight death grip, his usually wide eyes now narrowed out, cuts, bruises, and blood covering and coating his freckled cheeks along with a fresh layer of soot and dust, Sero catching the debris to protect the both of them. Around his arm was a burst of green lightning that’d covered both his hand and his arm as he closed one eye for aim as if he were a sniper aiming to kill, “Full Cowling…”

  “Are you a fucking idiot?!” Bakugo of course had to growl out in the middle of the battlefield, his eyes narrowed out as he continued to fire his AP shots in all sorts of directions, the fire that had caught up with them in the surrounding areas creeping closer to the two heroes that’d also been a couple at this point. “You KNOW you can’t control it at that level yet! Don’t fucking do that just yet! We can make it!”

 “Kacchan! LOOK at us! We’re both contending for our LIVES right now! As well as everyone else’s!”

 “Deku LISTEN!” He was clearly growing more frustrated, reaching one of his hands, weighed down by his heavy gauntlet, over Izuku’s shoulder, firing off a large blast that’d knocked the three villains trying to ambush them off of their feet and into a building nearby. “We have a KID to go home to! Don’t overexert what you don’t need to! You’re with ME! I’LL fucking protect you!” He growled loudly and he gripped one of the villain’s faces, quickly pulling the pin to his gauntlet unleashing a large explosion that’d cleared the area around them for the time being. “DIE DIE DIIIEEEE!” Both of them were beat up, scarred, bruised, cut, barely standing, leaning against each other for support so they didn’t collapse in the middle of the battlefield.

 “Detroooiiitttt….”

 “DEKU-“

 “SMAAAAASSSHHH!” He suddenly released his charging flick, his body being blown back by his own force, knocking Katsuki back into both a wall of flames and villains. He tried to escape, blasting explosions at the ground to get away, and he was successful before he was caught by something, knocking him out of the air and holding his neck, struggling to breath.

 “KACCHAN!” Izuku’s shriek ripped through the air and time seemed to stop before a large shadowy figure appeared from the smoke behind a wheezing Katsuki who was struggling to get up. The sight made the green haired boy sick to his stomach and he couldn’t shake that it was all his fault.

  “What a beautiful sight to be held, right *Deku,*” the villain sneered as he tangled his fingers with Katsuki’s hair, pulling the heaving boy up into the air, his legs’s kicking slowing to a stop, his pupils becoming larger as his will to fight was so clearly draining from his body.

 “N-No… W-What’d you d-do t-to him?!” Izuku’s tears rolled down his face, the trail of their fall searing into his skin like lava running over sand.

 “Nothing he wouldn’t already want… Now he’s a lean mean killing machine! Just like he was always meant to be,” the villain’s smirk grew to be an eerie smile and he let out a dark laugh that shook the two heroes  as well as the clouds in the sky. He dropped Katsuki and turned his back to them, smirking once again, shoving his hands into his pockets.

 “*Ground Zero,*” he chimed out in a condescending voice as he blew his bangs out of his face, Katsuki’s eyes locking onto Izuku’s, the same fire he’d had for the villain’s death now present but only for Izuku. “Be a good hero and do what needs to be done… “ With that, he walked away, Katsuki launching his explosions at the ground flinging himself towards Izuku at a speed not unlike a bullet’s.

 “KACCHAN-“ He shrieked out, but before Izuku could utter another word, their eyes locked as Katsuki grabbed his shoulder and formed a new crater in the ground, Izuku laying semi unconscious at the bottom of it.

 “K-Kacchan,” he choked out with his tears, not even daring to raise his hand to Katsuki despite the fact that whatever had hit Katsuki made him not himself anymore. Why did he stop charging the villains? Why was he not himself? What…. What other avenues did the two have. “D-Don’t d-do t-this K-Kacch-“

  “Shut up, idiot,” Katsuki growled in a chesty snarl as he rose his hands to Izuku. For a moment, he was able to break character and his eyes teared up some, the place where he’d been shot in the neck with the drugged bullet starting to drip blood. He’d tried to force himself to lower his hand or change direction but he couldn’t.

  “Pl-Please,” Izuku whimpered as he writhed around in the bottom of the crater just wanting to give a last hug, a last kiss- anything. But more than anything at all, he wanted to save his husband. He wanted to be at home with his perfect family; his husband and his baby, watching a movie or reading a book.

  “K-Kill me,” Katsuki heaved as his finger looped through the pin and he bared his teeth trying to continue breaking this character, counteracting the drug, and so far it seemed to be working. “P-Please! F-Fucking k-kill m-me!” His voice sounded strangled and squeaky as he let more tears fall, the world around stopping, every audience member’s breath stopping, the viewers at home on the edge of their seats. The world around them, had it not been for the roaring of the flames that were starting to lick Katsuki’s legs and feet, would have been so quiet you could hear a pin drop. “I-It hurts! I-I c-can’t control it! IZUKU! F-Fucking- J-Just! P-PLEASE!” His choked whispers were now roaring wails as he held his sobs inside. “S-Soon I’ll f-fall under! I don’t want to do this! K-KILL ME! HURRY UP AND KILL ME!”

 Izuku couldn’t believe it and he was frozen in fear and shock, paralyzed with the debris at the bottom of the ravine Katsuki had created for the two of them, but suddenly he was jarred back to reality when he saw the dark figure showing up behind Katsuki again, choking him out from behind.

 “Useless,” the villain hissed as he took out a gun and held it to Katsuki’s head, Izuku’s eyes widening as he popped up despite the pain, climbing out of the crater. “You had ONE *FUCKING* JOB! And you couldn’t even do that… You want to die? You’re gonna have to beg… and YOU-“ He looked at Izuku and a villain had held him and laughed in his ear, wiping the tears from his freckled face roughly, licking his fingers and groaning.

  “Actually,” the main villain laughed as he tightened his grip on Katsuki’s throat. “Change of plans….”

 “LEAVE US ALONE! I-I’ll… K-KILL YOU,” Izuku cried out only causing a blade to be plunged into his back right next to his spine, his legs buckling under him, his eyes widening as he shrieked out in pain, trying to pull himself away, the blood running down his back and legs. The fellow Class A Alumni not having anything left, all of them watching with wide glazed over eyes, some mouths covered, some jaws through the ground.

 “D-DEK-“ he was cut off as his mouth was covered and the villain looked around, leaning into Katsuki’s ear.

 “Listen here, Ground Zero… You’re either going to kill… Mmmm….. You’re gonna kill the All Might wannabe, or you’re gonna kill all of those bystanders over there…. And if you try anything funny or you don’t follow through… I’ll make sure you’re never able to continue being a hero for one… But I’ll also kill Deku *and* all of those bystanders and you’re gonna have to live with it,” he laughed darkly and loudly and Izuku’s body was numb, his mind hazy.

  “YOU HAVE THREE FUCKING SECONDS OR I’LL MAKE THE CHOICE FOR YOU!” He laughed out more, pointing the gun to Izuku. In one swift movement, Bakugo had taken a risk, using the last bit of fight he had left before he fell unconscious, grabbing the villain’s face, unleashing large explosions that in turn fried half of his face, launching the both of them into a broken down and crumbling building just past Izuku, attempting to reach for the villain that’d been holding his husband hostage, his fingers just barely missing them, eliciting a soft laugh as they cocked the hammer to the gun, loading a bullet into the chamber. The world was in slow motion, damn near paused. Both heroes were stuck, images of each other crossing each other’s minds as they figured what’d happened next. Bakugo broke free of his restraints, tears streaming down his face as he launched himself towards the two, getting in between them as the shot was fired from the gun, hitting Katsuki instead of Izuku, lodged right in the epicenter of his guts, his body paralyzed for a second before he fell forward, blood spilling from his mouth as he let out a couple of choked growls. Whatever’d happened it hadn’t killed him yet, and it wasn’t going to anytime soon.

 “KACCHAN!” Izuku sobbed as he clung to his husband that had now clung to the villain in an attempt not to be down yet, because once he was on the ground, it was game over. The bullet travelled through Katsuki and it’d hit Izuku creating a superficial wound in his pelvis. All of the former Hero Course heroes now watching, shrieks, wails, gasps, shuddery breaths filling the air around them as Katsuki continued to fight, trying to wrestle the gun away from the villain. “D-Deku,” he whimpered and coughed out quietly, spitting iron-y tasting blood clots from his mouth as he choked the villain out. “E-Everyone- R-Run!” He tried to warn in his gruff voiced fashion but by the time the warning was voiced, all of the bystanders were now scattered everywhere. A bomb. A bomb had dispersed the crowd in all of the wrong ways… And the fight was almost over….

Izuku dropped to his knees, trying to smile just like All Might taught him was now impossible…. It was over. It was done….

Until he heard that familiar voice… A voice of hope… His husband’s.

 “GET UP A-AND FIGHT!” He managed to yell as he held the collar of the villain’s shirt over his trachea, a whole swarm now closing on them quickly, Bakugo using the last bit of fight in him to clear out the swarm and win the game….

 He’d blasted himself into the air, broken and barely able to move, but somehow he was able to manage… It’d be his final… His big finale.. Everybody knew it and started to weep for all parties involved, Ground Zero. Deku. Their child.

 “HOWITZER…” He’d started to maneuver in the air, a tornado of both explosions and fire kicking up air as Shoji and Tokoyami tried to protect the injured survivors which were few and far in between, Katsuki making himself a sacrifitory projectile, launching himself right into the middle of the villain’s swarm. “IMPAAAAACCCCTTTTTTT!”

….

With that, fire, damage, a high death toll… A destroyed Japan… A shattered nation….. It was over… It was finally over…. Izuku had stumbled over to Katsuki with tears in his eyes, everybody following suit as Izuku pulled his head into his lap, sobbing and stroking his cheek with one of his hands, ripping his own gloves off so he could have skin to skin contact.

 “Ka-Kacchan! Kacchan wake up! Damnit wake up!” He slapped his cheeks to get a heaving Bakugo to pay attention and focus to him.

 “W-We won,” he choked out with a slight smile and gruff laugh, holding his fist up for Izuku’s and everyone in his class’s as well.   “Guys… W-We-“ he gasped for air as his eyes glazed over and everyone touched their fists to his.

 “K-Kacchan there’s still a c-chance! J-Just k-keep f-fighting,” Izuku tried to choke out through his wall of weeps and sobs, hugging his head against his chest. “You have to! You h-have t-to for H-Hiko a-and m-me a-and e-everyone!”

 “Bakubro, everything’s gonna be okay,” Kirishima tried to add, his body just as broken as everyone else’s, lazily on his knees leaning against Izuku, keeping his fist against Bakugo’s as he let his own tears fall.

  “C-Crying I-is’nt manly… S-Shitty h-hair,” he whispered out hoarsely. “I-Izuku,” he groaned out quietly as he tried to move, everyone holding him in place.

 “DON’T MOVE KACCHAN!”

 “Kiss me,” he whispered softly as he weakly reached for the side of his face, his tears now having no barrier, everyone’s breath stopping as he used his final breath to utter a soft “I love you,” his arm now falling limp against the ground, his eyes stuck open as the stray tears kept falling, his heart stopping, his other hand sliding from Izuku’s face, his fingers slowly losing contact as Izuku shook his head, grabbing his hand before it hit his chest.

 “W-Wait! W-WAIT! N-No no no! N-No not y-yet! I-It c-can’t e-end l-like this! K-Kacchan! K-KATSUKI,” he sobbed as he pressed his head against Katsuki’s chest gently, trying to get a read on pulse with no response. “DAMNIT DAMNIT DAMNIT! HE SHOULD’VE JUST KILLED ME! I-IT D-DIDN’T HAVE TO END LIKE THIS!”

Everyone in the class crowded around the two, hugging each other, their broken bodies leaning against each other’s for support, their sobs growing louder and louder.

 You always think, “It’s not gonna be me,” but… It’s different if you’ve attended both the wedding and the funeral and watched the deceased fight till the very. Bitter. End.

[shoryubug]

( beneath the mask )

So because @siamxshade has given me permission to do this, I think I’m gonna let you all know now what the majority of my writing time is going to be dedicated to.  A while ago, @siamxshade and I kind of went crazy with our rps as Adrien/Chat Noir and Marinette/Ladybug, which, nbd, it was fun and it still is fun, but we came up with this one story together that we both wanted to explore, but it kind of took a backseat to an rp based off of my favorite fanfic (written by @thetauruspixie, called Madness Within). If you’re gonna try and hunt tumblr for it, I’m gonna be honest, you won’t find a trace of our rp for that anywhere. It’s in a private discord server between him and I. Anyway; The idea that we recently scrapped is something that I think would be amazing as a fanfic, and I’m going to pursue that. The basic idea is that Adrien gets himself in danger, and Marinette has to reveal herself to one person, in order to save his life. This story will be called Life Will Change, both as an homage to where @siamxshade and I met in rp (P5!) and because the title really works for what I want to do.  So what does this mean for my future stories? Nothing much. I’m already a slow writer as is when it comes to Standing Up, and I Said Leave Me Alone is going to have it’s own natural conclusion when I find it after the next 2 chapters sometime, aside from that though...Rooftops is going to take a hit since I’m going to be putting more concentration on Ladrien which means I’ll be out of the Ladynoir loop in my writing. As much as I love Rooftops though, it is also just...something meant to be moments as I think of them, nothing more than that, so updates there will always be scattered anyway.

Thank you all for your patience and understanding when it comes to my stories though, I swear the embrace here has been something awesome. Also...I kinda got into a thing on my personal blog which...is upsetting me. I know that if I want to avoid a meeting of the two and keep this separate from my personal blog then I shouldn’t address this issue, but I’m gonna so watch me commit social suicide for a moment in the ‘keep reading’. 

So I know that on my personal blog I made a bit of a blunder in a way that I didn’t mean to. I had posted something in response to someone’s point on Ladrien, and it seems that the points I was trying to make were really misconstrued. It seems as though I hate the ship, and like I was trying to rag on people for liking it when really the only part of the love square I dislike is Adrinette, and I don’t even hate Adrinette, I just...the scene in Puppeteer 2 in the car (not the god awful statue scene because that is hilarious cringe!) really broke my heart and made me lose hope for Adrinette...but that’s beside the point.  One of the points made by the OP was about how people argue that Ladrien is the ‘perfect’ sides of them, and I tried to support that by pointing out the flaws in the characters as Adrien and Ladybug, and then I kinda...said something else, which now reading, yeah it seems like I was being an asshole, but I never intended to be.  So let’s get this out there; I don’t think Ladrien is boring or lacks tension. I was speaking from an analytical view of how most people view it that way because that’s where their arguments against it come from, a lot of where this analysis comes from is watching mainstream television for years. Shows like Bones went the distance on milking the lack of a romantic relationship with Boothe and Brennan because the thought of their being together was a network nightmare due to previous shows having that same kind of tension of will they/won’t they and it not measuring up when they have tender moments of actual romantic love together in the state of being in a known relationship. I know I could have stated my point better like I’m attempting to do now, but I just felt defeated about the whole thing, because someone else told me I was just being hateful, and I got a LOT of hateful messages on my personal blog which for the most part is just my hideaway from literally everything. I use my tumblr like a reddit account most of the time, I just lurk and repost/like shit. It was really unsettling to get other messages about my personal looks and body image from my icon due to what I had meant to be a simple analytical statement. But I don’t blame the OP for that at all, in fact, there are no hard feelings one way or another with myself and them, I don’t even know who they are, and I can’t find the post in my history because of a lot of other crap (not related to that). Anyway I just wanted to say that while I do seem like an asshole sometimes, I really don’t mean to. I mostly just try to poke my analytical head in places and I’m gonna try to be better about that because I really do not want anything like what happened to happen again. Also...this is 2020, SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT OTHER PEOPLES BODIES. I know I’m a trainwreck but how I look is MY business, nobody else’s except maybe my doctor’s, and even then if it’s not a health concern then it’s not their business.  Anyway, I’m gonna go deal with some other entanglements that need clearing up for a while (irl shit). Hope you guys have a good day and like the updates above the keep reading! Let me know your thoughts on Life Will Change!

[dentalhoney]

In Regards To ThistleClan

DISCLAIMER: THIS POST IS NOT MEANT IN AGGRESSION. I DO NOT CONDONE THE HARASSMENT OF THOSE INVOLVED. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, ASK. 

So, what prompted my posting this? Recently, most of the players who made up ThistleClan ( which I was a part of ) in @land-ofthe-lost, were banned without much preface for it. However, we were informed of what was being told overall, a story of which spun events very differently than how they were. Now, could there have been misunderstandings? Absolutely! I believe that’s what happened! However, things have been handled very poorly.

It seems that some of us were given messages from a bot explaining why we were banned. Some of which explanations which didn’t make all that much sense whatsoever. But, some of us didn’t receive a message at all. A much-beloved part of our RP experience was just...gone...in a flash. In my opinion, it’s kind of wrong anyways that they had a bot send these things.

*To The Mods: Since I am @'ing your RP, I'll address you directly as well.  I'm making this post on behalf of my fellow players. Me, personally, I am willing to speak to you all privately. I'd rather have a discussion. I want to reiterate that this isn't an attack on you. But the way this was handled has truly hurt a lot of us. However, we are sorry that in all of this you were hurt as well. It was never our intention, unfortunately communication was poor. But, we can't exactly just sit by and see an untrue story spun about us. The rest will be under the cut, this is a long post.

Now, what did the moderation team say was the reason for the ban to others? 

This is from the post given an explanation to non-banned members:   “As of today, we have banned the majority of ThistleClan after months of harassment and being made aware of a separate server in which complaints about the server were discussed but never brought to the moderation team. When we tried to work with these members we were met with hostility and aggression, being called passive aggressive and attacked for any moderation we did.”

Let’s address that statement!

Was there a chat made to discuss issues within the server?

Yes, absolutely! We as a clan had many troubles with how moderation handled a lot of the members of ThistleClan. We had very active members leave the server entirely because of their discomforts, and a number contemplating the same action. But, we didn’t want it to come to that. So, as a collective, we made this server so we could all discuss our grievances with the moderation team. We wanted our thoughts to be collected and presented by a more neutral mediator, instead of a bunch of disgruntled ThistleClanners going at the mod team.

It should also be mentioned: Some of the individuals who were banned were not involved in this server discussing the issues whatsoever. So, this was not a ban that was reserved only to those involved with this discussion server.

So, we never brought the issues to the mod team?

False. Our chosen mediator, Em ( who played Marigoldstar ), brought these thoughts and worries to one of the mods and would relay their responses to us so we could respond and give our thoughts. These discussions seemed to go pretty well. After the discussions were had, ThistleClan began to feel normal and active again.

What were the issues Thistleclanners had with the mods?

Overall, many ThistleClanners felt ignored or brushed aside. I, for example, felt like it was pulling teeth to get any of my desired plots for my characters moved forward. I had to wait for permission on an event and time from the mods, which is fine, except I felt frequently left in the dark. I didn’t hear from moderation for what felt like ages and did often ask them again about matters. I wound up feeling ignored, and undesired within the RP. Like my plots that I felt were important didn’t matter. It was like being in limbo.

 Some players also felt like mods were passive aggressive or condescending to them. There were times when players would joke, and be shut down immediately despite mods making similar jokes. Additionally, players felt like their recommendations were ignored when it came to server suggestions and the like. 

 Players felt their characters were micromanaged and power-played by the moderators. One of our players was literally told by a mod that they couldn’t make a certain choice because it was out of character….for their own character….the character they made and played. It didn’t make much sense and just felt as though the mods were trying to push for something that favored their characters, rather than allowing the plot of our clan progress naturally.

 In the overall environment that brewed from this, most of us were uncomfortable approaching the mods. We felt we had to walk on eggshells, and some of us even stopped feeling comfortable talking in the general chat. We were happy within our own clan chats, but, uneasy most other places.

Of course, the blame of how things went isn’t entirely on the mod team. Despite our best efforts, communication fell through in a lot of areas. Because we couldn’t fully recover from things with the tension initially, some things just remained awkward. Sure, we should have communicated better. But up until this event, when we were banned? We generally thought things had been worked out. We thought that the discussions we had of our problems had gotten through. Things seemed to have gotten better. But, I guess not.

I want to point out, that to my personal knowledge nobody in ThistleClan was privately or collectively spoken to about this issue before it happened. It took us all for a shock. I was absolutely broken to find out what had happened, and so were many of us. Many of us had invested nearly a year into this RP. I had been RPing in it since July of 2018, and now...it’s all for naught.

I wish things had gone better, but they didn’t.

*ADDENDUM:

An additional issue that may need to be addressed is some of the dark nature of plots in ThistleClan. Yes, our clan was considered “edgy”. We had many dark and heavy things happen within the clan, and that is not denied. But, these things were done with permission. Many of the gruesome events were even given by mods. ( Including a fox maiming multiple warriors, and a hawk maiming an apprentice. ) There were things that needed to be worked on, namely that individuals like myself needed to take more care to tag some content. However, this content was almost always discussed prior. And when it was brought up that mistakes in tagging were made, we apologized and tried to correct the behavior.

That is all.

[vertyblog]

The Best: The Saga

I have a good friend, not on tumblr, who frequents terrible roblox roleplay servers, looking for fun.

A result of this fun is one of the best stories I’ve ever read. The Best story.

He preferred to remain anonymous, but I think this needs to be shared with the world. With that in mind, all of this text below this readmore is his own words, not mine, and a completely factual account of events. (The art is by me tho.)

Oh speaking of that-  the art was made at the time of original telling, which means there was some artistic liberty and also my art separates it into three parts while the actual text goes with two parts. I left both as is for the sake of historical accuracy.

Now then, before I get into the glorious clusterfuck that is my story, I need to make a few things clear. Yes, this was an RP, but it took place within an actual game space. All characters were in a "Physical" world and not just some text on a page. However, most complex actions were done 100% of the time through text. With that out of the way, we can begin.

This story is split into two pieces, each one taking place on a different real-world day. They all happened back-to-back, and the entirety of the story took place over the course of a weekend. As a sort of hobby, I like to go trawling for terrible RPs and join them to laugh at what I find. It's nothing short of incredible observing (and sometimes being a part of) the often hilariously bad antics Mary Sues get up to. This being said, while this STARTED as one of those times, it quickly escalated into the greatest thing I've ever lived through. So, enough of the backstory, let's get into it. For this particular outing, I decided to pick a Super Paper Mario RP. Yes, they exist and yes, they are exactly as terrible as you think they are. But that's not why we're here.

PART 1, In which a Hero is born-

It all started from the moment I logged in; we were off to a flying start. Basically every bad RP trope and sin was being evoked at the same time completely unironically by people who didn't know any better. I don't come to these to clean them up or set everyone on the right path, I come here to point and laugh at the people for my own amusement. Still, you can't exactly lurk an RP that takes place in an actual game; You have to be SOMEONE, and if you looked important in any way you would somehow be swept up into whatever crap they were doing. So with all of this in mind, I chose to look as unimportant as possible. I was a Green Toad. Not a frog, mind you, but those vaguely adorable Mushroom folk from Mario (Why am I saying this? I have seen some real idiots and the last thing I need is someone thinking I was a frog while doing this). Toads are nearly invisible, as far as the dozens of Marios and Luigis and what-have-yous were concerned. So, with my character set and with one eye on the global chat to catch any wonderful bits of Fail RP, I set off on the greatest ride of my life.

I chose to settle down in a town on one of the map borders. Honestly it was a quaint little place. Snow-covered, with a train occasionally showing up to ferry off whatever Joe Q. Jerkholes wanted to go to where things actually happened. Now, while there's definitely some cringe-worthy stupidness in every last RP I've gone to, I can reliably say without a doubt in my head that I have never seen something as laughably terrible as what this one group of people was doing. There was one group SOMEWHERE that were having a Cyberpunk RP. In this Paper Mario game. How exactly you do that is beyond me; it's not like the map is full of cities and technology and flying cars, and yet they were having the time of their lives blasting away at each other with their guns and smoking their cigarettes in back alleys that didn't even exist on the map. It's been over a month since this happened, and I can't even remember what was going through my head at that point, so I'll put it bluntly. I'll stand for a lot, I'll idly sit by and just let a lot of crap happen. This was just one step too far, and through the power of bad (great) decisions, I decided that I was going to put a stop to it. Of course if it was as simple as that, we wouldn't have this story.

Before I set out of the little snow-covered town, some preparations had to be made. Even if I was the most un-threatening Toad in the world, someone out in that grand old world would find SOME reason to start something with me. To that end, I took up a simple spear. There wasn't a single thing special about it; no legendary enchantments, no amazing artifact status, no +1. Just a completely mundane spear. And that was it. So with newfound weapon in hand, I boarded the train out of town. Cutting out the boring travel time, I arrived in a desert area. As frequently as these people were talking about their trenchcoat-wearing Bob-ombs and augmented Yoshis (I wish I was joking), I still had not a damn clue where on the map they actually were. As I would soon find out, where they were didn't matter. While the group actually having this RP was only something like six people, it happened to be the "Coolest" thing on the whole server, so everyone and their mother was copying it. Enter our first contestant, who now stood in front of me. His sprite was your average Shy Guy. The way he was DESCRIBED to me, he was nothing short of Adam Jensen, sunglasses and all. And just as I had predicted, he saw some random Toad wandering around and figured I must have been easy pickings. So he more or less started trying to kick my ass. If you're expecting some amazing and epic battle to get written here, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Instead, this is what actually happened. He tried his best to get his actions across, and I responded by using the largest words I could get from my vocabulary and putting them into my responses. After a few minutes of this, I'm convinced his brain shut down and he simply logged out. So, that was one victory for me. And I continued on my way.

To say that the effects of this RP were server-wide is an understatement. Everyone I came across had some bit of metal stuck to them somewhere, and I'm convinced they saw the Mushroom Kingdom as some glowing neon cityscape. Luckily for me, most of them seemed content to let me continue on my way. I wasn't out to burn down the whole server, my problem was specifically with the source of the madness. Rapidly exhausting the places these guys could be, I hopped on a cruise ship to maybe point me in the right direction (And to get away from the throngs of cyborg rejects wandering the streets). Unfortunately for everyone, not even at sea was I safe from out-of-place Cyberpunk whackos. Our next offender happened to be a Yoshi. This particularly wonderful individual had a mohawk and could breathe fire, among other fun abilities (Can you guess what color Yoshi he was? Hint: it was black). In hindsight, I'm pretty sure he was trying to make himself Bowser without actually playing as Bowser. At any rate, he was yet another wonderful problem who saw fit to try and murder me. To his credit, this guy wasn't actually thrown off by large words, and did put up a reasonable fight. After a few minutes of us dancing around the ship trading blows (And the entire thing being an inferno because of liberal application of fire), the two of us go overboard. It was either to escape the fire or he grabbed me and jumped, but that doesn't matter. What DOES matter is that when you replace a large portion of your body with metal parts, you don't float very well. To my utter shock and amazement, the Yoshi forgot to augment his lungs. I think he wanted me to pull him ashore and start some wonderful friendship between us, but I was having none of it. I left him to sink to rock bottom, which prompted some wonderful comments from him riddled with questionable grammar, mostly to the effect of "Aren't you the hero?". He didn't get a response from me. I was just some Green Toad with a spear.

So, I clamber ashore from this underwater zone and I'm on an island. Decently sized, and as I would soon find out, without a single other person on it. While I DID want to get away from it all, this was a tad extreme. I get to exploring and find out a few wonderful things: The only boat that takes you off of this island was broken because of shoddy scripting and would never arrive, there is nothing to do on this island outside of jump on things and reenact your favorite castaway movie, and the Circuit City wholesale saw no signs of stopping any time this century. What would have normally been entertaining roleplay failures in the global chat became anything but. I'm not some insane Mario fanboy, but having gotten this far into attempting to stop this from happening and having it continue unopposed just felt like a slap in my face; It was an insult to me, and this had gone from a visit born from morbid curiosity to an anger-fueled mission. With my only way off of this island never arriving, I decided on simply killing myself to respawn on the mainland. I was simply going to walk into the ocean, fall through the map, and respawn back where there were people. It was when I took five steps out into the water that something incredible dawned upon me. The entire ocean was a solid object, just like the land. It was simply a different kind of land painted blue and with a fancy water texture on it. Only the water immediately around the cruise ship was special in any way, with the rest of the ocean just being a solid slab. I was walking on water. I walked all the way back to the mainland. The mapmaker does deserve SOME credit, however. When I say this was an ocean, I mean it. The walk was long, but eventually, I came ashore once again.

Where exactly I ended up concluding my miracle walk across the ocean was another matter entirely, however. I stepped out into a forest that I hadn't been to before. Once again, giving the mapmaker some credit, I did get lost in these woods. After a couple of minutes of aimless wandering, the forest took on a different tone. It's become obviously more spooky (I use that term loosely. It was about as spooky as a bedsheet ghost) and it becomes very clear why: the woods appear to lead directly to the titular mansion from Luigi's Mansion. Why exactly it was in a Paper Mario RP I couldn't tell you, but there it loomed, amidst the trees and less-than-adequate lighting. It was here than I ran into a pretty large issue; not so much the mansion proper, but what was right next to it: E. Gadd's lab. This is one of the very few locations on the entire map that had actual, honest-to-God technology in it, so to say that it was swarmed was an understatement. Now, I want to make something very, very clear here. I won my first two scrapes with these clowns because of sheer luck or glaring incompetence on their part. No matter how well I wrote or how amazingly I could wield a spear, it would offer no defense from an entire room full of these people all coming at me at once. So the lab was a no-go, but I derived a small amount of joy from the fact that there wasn't a single one of them in the mansion proper. I like to think they were actually afraid of the place, although that probably wasn't the answer. So my next course of action was to go inside.

As mentioned before, the inside hadn't a single soul within. I have never played Luigi's Mansion so I cannot attest to the accuracy of the interior. For what little the words of a stranger on the internet are worth, it certainly looked the part. Probably much smaller than the real thing, but once again that isn't the point. After walking through a few identical hallways and being moderately shocked at the complete lack of anything even remotely resembling a ghost, I finally ran into someone else, and was more than surprised with what I found. I fully expected another wonderful individual to come charging at me with his cyber-arms and demand my lunch money or something, but instead I was greeted with a "Hello" and the realization that this one guy wasn't a cyborg. For those that care, he was playing as Mr. L, or at least had him selected as his player model. He wasn't exactly in-character, but I think he just wanted to talk to someone that ALSO wasn't trying too hard. We get to talking, and he genuinely threw me a curveball when he asked, "What's your name?". To be honest, I hadn't given our hero one yet. In thinking what name would be appropriate for a random Toad, something rang out in my head, something that Toads always seem to say. "I'm The Best.", I told him. Seemingly content with that answer, we exited the mansion together. It is at this point that, once again, I have to be the bearer of bad news. I'd love to say that we teamed up like some kind of Buddy Cop movie, found those jerks, and saved the day like the big-dick heroes you think are at the end of this chapter, but alas there is no such thing. So here's what actually happened. A hacker turned up, and crashed the game. As simple an anticlimax as that. With that being said, in all honesty I don't think I could've went out and gotten a better ending. There's something wonderfully poetic about Cyberpunk RPs ending because an actual hacker turned up.

If our story ended there, I would have been content. But once again, through the power of excellent decision-making, I returned the following day.

My second excursion started more or less the same way as the first: Roleplaying failures abound, yours truly as a Green Toad, and a whole wide world to blunder through. Except at the onset of this adventure, there were no Trenchcoats or Augments. It wasn't exactly 100% normal goings on in the Mushroom Kingdom, but really it never is. As I once again trekked up to that snow-covered village, I scanned the Global chat for anything worthy of my attention; be it offensively bad or just stupid enough that it had to be seen in person. Three things caught my eye. The first was a bodysnatched/posessed/evil/combination Princess Peach who was now out to kill Mario. Normally this would be cause for alarm, but there were roughly a dozen people playing as Mario. As far as I was concerned that Peach was doing her God-Given duty and thinning the herd, so I would let her carry on this most righteous mission. The second event was that, apparently, the Mushroom Kingdom was in the midst of some kind of alien invasion. This was ALMOST what this  part of our story was about, until I saw the third and final thing to grace my screen. Somewhere out in that world, out in that grand old expanse of continent, there was another Toad calling himself The Best. It was a common thing for any enterprising Toad out on the street to say; that wasn't what set me off. He was using it as a title, claiming that he was actually The Best. He swung those two words around like some kind of blunt instrument and expected everyone to bow down to him. So I made it my NEW mission to take the title from him. I had claimed in passing to a random stranger a day prior that I was The Best, and now the time had come to prove it. With spear once again in hand, I set out from my frozen home to take a random person on the internet down a few pegs.

I elected to not take the train this time, instead deciding to hoof it back to civilization. I had an entire server to comb for one man in particular; a train or any kind of fast-travel would raise my chances of missing my mark. Fortunately (Or unfortunately, depends on which camp you're in) it also increases my exposure to the ever-present bullshit that infests these places, which is exactly what I ran into. Fleeing at high-speed from a full-blown Dragon, a Princess Peach made a beeline straight for me. Yelling "Help me!" in about every way imaginable, she just sort of kept on running past me and left the first person she ran into with the monumental task of getting rid of a Dragon. Deciding a Toad was an easier target than a Princess, the dragon seemed pretty happy with the arrangement as well. I've had my fair share of fighting dragons, so I had a pretty good battle plan. Of course, EVERYONE always has a plan, until the goddamn lizard starts breathing fire. The start of the fight was pretty ineffectual on both of our parts, the Dragon trying vainly to hit the tiny target that is a Toad and me trying to piece together how I would take down something this stupidly big. Calling upon my experiences dealing with things far too large for a person so small to be expected to kill, I decided to take the Shadow of the Colossus road, and start scaling the beast. I'm assuming at this point the thing took flight and I somehow brought it down to earth again after a prolonged struggle, because the next thing in my memory is me still fighting this damn dragon in the middle of the desert.

I don't know just how long we had been locked in this struggle, but I know that at that point I just wanted to be done with it. I did my best to force the thing into a good position for me to gain the upper hand, but it's pretty damn hard to make a dragon do much of anything, especially when it wants to consume your weird Toad head thing (Is it a hat? Is it their head? Someone please inform me, I need this question answered.) But sure enough, through judicial use of baiting both literary and physical, I managed to get the Dragon into a corner. Three separate times I tried to end the fight with a decisive strike, but each one he would bullshit out of it. It's to be expected, the last thing anyone wants is for their character to get offed, even worse if its in an excessively embarrasing matter. "Killed by spear-wielding Toad" is about as embarrasing a death as you can have in something like this, being only a few steps above "killed by Goomba walking to the left". But anyway, that's not the point. After a bit more flailing, I took one final shot at the damn thing in such a way that there was well and truly no way out of it. Probably fed up with getting whooped all up and down the map and airspace by something only a few steps above "Goomba" in threat level, the dragon promptly ragequit. And that is the story of how I killed a dragon. Unfortunately (Or fortunately, depending on how you feel today) I didn't have time to go track down the Princess and inform her that the dragon was dealt with. I probably would've gotten a cake, maybe a statue, maybe ignorance. Who can say? At any rate, with that distraction dealt with I got back to my primary mission.

You would think that in a game like this, Toads would be in short supply. I certainly thought so, but apparently they were more popular than I first assumed. For a good long while, the only thing I did was wander the earth, find a Toad, and ask them if they were The Best. It was always followed with a "No" and I continued on my way. There were probably far better ways I could've gone about it; I could've just called the guy out in general chat and hopefully had him come to me. Hindsight is 50/50 and in spite of how often I'll think of myself as a smart individual, I am definitely not the brightest bulb in the box. Anyway, back to our story. This pattern of asking random Toads if they were The Best and moving on went on for a few more iterations, until I saw one of them get on a train. Thinking it was my man, I made a beeline for it, only for the train to pull out of the station and speed off with me having not even seen the guy's name in time. STILL unable to grasp the concept of "Global Chat", I did the only thing my mind thought of and started running after the train like an idiot. I don't have to put it in writing but I'm going to anyway: Trains are faster than Toads. I did not come even close to catching up to that train before it sped off over the horizon and carried the mystery man with it. So I did the (reasonably) smart thing and just caught the next one, hoping that maybe he'd be standing around the next train station, making my life easy.

It seems endemic of the Mario universe that nothing is ever simple. You want a dollar? Go bash your head against a brick. Out for a Sunday Stroll? Hope you're headed to the right, 'cause that's the only way you're going. So of course shit went down on the train. A player dressed as Mr. L walked up and down the cabin kind of aimlessly. Given my one and only instance of prior experience with anyone dressed up as Mr. L, I was almost delighted. For one brief and shining second, I thought I would finally have an ally against the chaos. The first words out of his mouth were that, verbatim, he pulled out a knife and tried to stab me. He was one Katana short of fufilling every stereotype in three seconds. Honestly I don't know what I expected. I never got a chance to respond to my assailant, as another player dressed up as Luigi spotted his evil twin, thought he was hard enough, and decided to have a go. Say what you want, but I wasn't about to deny Luigi a shot at his doppelganger. The two of them launched into combat, and I made myself scarce. I don't know who won the scrap. Some say they're still fighting to this day. All that matters is that the train pulled into the station, and I kept on my search.

The cycle continued. Find a Toad, ask if they're The Best, get the answer of "No", keep on walking. Until finally, I found my man. He didn't look like your average Toad, but that isn't saying much. Clad in some kind of cloak and armed with a spear all his own, he had chosen Yellow for his color. I approached, and I asked the question for the last time. I got a lot more than a "Yes", but to save all of you the hospital bill and subsequent psychiatrist visit, I'm just going to condense it down to a "Yes". After a while of his rambling about just how great he was, I cut him off with an offer someone of his pride couldn't refuse. It was something to the effect of "I don't think you're all that great, and I'll fight you to prove it.". Several sentences of heated words and a LOT of escalation later, it had gone from a simple test of honor to a full-blown fight to the death. My plan was to keep it on the down-low; any sort of high-profile and high-impact fight would be sure to draw attention from everyone and their mother, and the last thing I needed to deal with was some full-blown warzone. Unfortunately for me, someone playing as Bowser overheard us and walked up.

I know what I expected. I expected Bowser to go on about how HE was actually the Best and try and kill both of us. Instead, he said that he wanted to host this death battle at his "Rad castle". Before I could object to this in favor of the quiet 1 v 1 I wanted, the other guy agreed to it. What I DID finally say was that I would meet him there at sundown. Both for dramatic effect (which I knew he'd eat up), and to give me at least fifteen minutes to come up with a plan for when this inevitably went tits-up. So, with the date and time for our climactic showdown set, I hit up the local shops. I bought everything I could that I thought would give me some kind of edge, which turned out to not be much. Wandering the continent on a manhunt didn't exactly pay well, and I could only afford a few Mushrooms and a single Fire Flower. Knowing full well I was pretty unprepared for some kind of mass-swarming if Bowser sent out the army of minions he'd probably have waiting, I went anyway. Even if I was marching straight into what I thought was a massive trap, I had little choice anymore. I knew what I expected. When the sun set, and I made my way through that castle gate, I realized that I had completely under-estimated whoever was playing Bowser. What greeted me when I walked through that gate was nothing short of incredible.

You see, Bowser had spread the word about this fight across the land in record time. His castle was packed with people, all watching from the ramparts and the balconies and anywhere else they could stand or sit. And amidst them all, looking down from his throne room, was the King Koopa himself. As I entered the courtyard, he gave me a goddamn entrance worthy of some kind of wrestler on WWE. It was absolutely astounding. He went on to do the same for my opponent. I hadn't planned for an audience, much less one the size of damn well near the entire server. With that many people watching, I threw aside my plans for some quick and decisive conflict. These people probably paid really good fake money for those seats and goddamn if I wasn't about to give them their money's worth. And just like that, we crossed spears and the fight began. Everyone I had encountered up to this point was either incompetent or simply unintelligent. He was a completely different beast. Prideful, overconfident, and showboating like you wouldn't believe, but he could actually back it up. For the first time in my entire misadventure, I was toe-to-toe with someone who could stand up to me. He might have actually been The Best, if only I wasn't here. It was a knock-down, drag-out brawl, eventually exiting the courtyard and had us both parrying and dodging through all of those balconies and ramparts I had mentioned earlier. Spear met spear, strikes glanced, and we continued to drift through the castle locked into a lethal struggle only one of us would walk away from. Eventually the fight gravitated to the highest spire of the castle, steered there by both of us. We both knew the fight was going to end up there, and we both wanted to be the last man standing. Unfortunately for him, I borrowed a page from Joseph Joestar's playbook and started going for some hard reads and some pretty sick bait.

At the very pinnacle of the spire, I went for an all-or-nothing maneuver: I let him disarm me. My spear sailed off the tower and far, far out of my reach. Rather than go for the killshot, he gloated. He launched into yet another speech about how great he was and how I was a fool for challenging him and all that wonderful jazz said better by about three dozen other folk. It was at this point that I pulled out the ace I'd been hiding up my metaphorical sleeve the entire fight, and used the Fire Flower to launch a point-blank fireball right into his face. It caught him mid-sentence, and it gave me the upper hand, if only for a brief moment. My one regret out of this entire adventure is that I didn't have a cool thing to say at that exact moment. So, wordlessly, I dropkicked him straight off the tower. And down he plummeted, well within view of everyone who attended, right into the lava below. And with my brutal mission achieved it was official: I was The Best, and everyone in the server now knew. So much for being an unassuming Toad. As I stepped down from the tower back into the courtyard, Bowser stood before me and the exit. To this day, I am absolutely convinced that he was going to start something the moment the fight was over. But after the display I put on up there, he merely handed me my spear (No idea how he got it), told me that the fight was the most awesome thing he'd ever seen, and got the hell out of my way. With my goal attained and no reason to stick around with all the attention I was about to get, I walked out of the fortress and logged off.

But what if I told you it got better? The following day, curiosity won out one last time and I logged back in.

PART 2, in which the Hero becomes a Legend-

Everything up to this point was great and amazing, but this is the point at which this story transcends reason. It's also the part I remember the best, so strap yourselves in, this is going to be a long one.

I log in, I pick my Green Toad, I exit spawn. As an extra measure, to keep anyone who remembers me from last time from swarming me immediately, I hide my Username. Immediately, something strikes me in a metaphorical sense; I spy another Green Toad. Not exactly out of the ordinary, except they were talking to yet another Green Toad. Chalking it up to coincidence, I entered town. The sheer number of people playing as Green Toads was staggering. It had gone from nearly a dozen Marios, Luigis, and any other important guy that looked cool, to nothing but the most unimportant character in a Mario game in a very specific color that wasn't red. In one chain of bad decisions and murder in front of an audience, I had gone from some nameless jackass to the new meta. Everyone wanted to be The Best, it was goddamn surreal. On the upside, when everyone's The Best, no one is. So by virtue of being so popular, I was once again invisible. Imagine if every problem solved itself like this. On the downside, it was going to be a bit hellish proving my own identity. Still, it was nice to blend into the crowd again. I kept a watchful eye on the chat. With this many people wanting a title that can only belong to one man, I figured the entire server was going to devolve into complete anarchy sooner or later. There was a certain appeal to a server-wide free-for-all with everyone vying to be the same guy Highlander-style, but that's neither here nor there.

It was calm. It was surprisingly calm; no one went for each other's throats, life proceeded as normal. The Princess and a few Toads that guarded her walked amongst the crowd of people in the town square. Spotting her and her guard was pretty easy; they were the only thing that wasn't green. She was handing out invitations to the townsfolk for some kind of banquet or celebration or party or SOME kind of mass-gathering at the castle that night. Even the Global chat was calm; the entire server was, if only for a minute, peaceful. Honestly, the place had started to grow on me; I can say that I legitimately liked the dumb antics that I usually got up to every time I logged in. So I stuck around, even though nothing was going on; Hell, I thought about buying a house near the castle just to be closer to where the action happened. Funnily enough, this was the right choice. While I was house-shopping, I saw speech bubbles floating up from this sort of back area inbetween a few of the houses. It wasn't out-of-place or anything because the town was jam-packed; it was what the bubble said that caught my attention. "They can't know we're here.", it said. So, naturally the curious type, I ducked into a nearby vacant house and started spying on whomever was speaking.

It was more Toads, but something was off. They were purple and not green, the both of them. One just an ordinary Toad and the other using some kind of palette swap of Toadette, I think. Their conversation continued, and to say that I had struck gold was an understatement. So, to run you through who these two were and why they were about to set the greatest cavalcade of insanity in motion: Remember when I mentioned that there was some kind of alien invasion going on in Part 2 of my story? Well, these two were it. Shapeshifters, and not friendly ones. Obviously they wanted to take over the Kingdom, but their plan was to crash the gathering the Princess had planned for later tonight,  slaughter her and any other important figures that turned up, turn all of the Toads into more aliens through MacGuffin Magic, and then take their army and steamroll the rest of the continent. Now, I was in a bit of a tight situation. I didn't have my spear yet, so charging into the alley and handling them right then and there was out of the question. Warning the town or the Princess' guard was something I was strongly against, as that reduced me to nothing more than a whistleblower and not the absolutely legendary figure that I had somehow become in the eyes of these people. So really, I had one option: Get my spear, get supplies, and personally foil their plan in front of everyone. The only problem was, I did not have a lot of time or money to do it with.

I had very, very little in the way of coins to my name, and I wasn't just about to grab any spear from any old shop; It had to be the one I've always carried. The journey from the main city up into the snow-covered lands isn't exactly a long one, but it wasn't short, either. Worse still, what shops they did have up there were pretty lackluster in supplies and rather high in price. Still, I didn't have time to do much else. I made the trek, keeping a watchful eye on the sun and the global chat, hoping the party wouldn't start until I got back. I made it up there as fast as I could, and my spear was there waiting. I'd used it for a lot up until now, but its greatest challenges were still ahead of it. With my weapon of choice sorted, I walked into the local storefront. All I could afford was two mushrooms and a bottle of Hot Sauce that happened to be on sale. Honestly, I was ready to take anything I could get on the shoestring budget I had brought with me. As I departed back for town, things took a turn for the worse: The sun had set, the party had begun, and I was nowhere near the city.

I was running as fast as a Toad could go. I kept glancing from the road to the global chat; their plan could kick off at any moment and if I wasn't the guy to stop them then I don't think anyone else would. Yeah, everyone wanted to be me, but nobody wanted to have the danger of potentially having their character die doing heroics; they only wanted to be heroes and live to gloat about it. Sooner rather than later I get back into the town. There's no yells about dead princesses or mass anarchy in the town, so I only assume that I still had time left. Finally, I reached the castle proper only to be faced with something I forgot to prepare for: The Princess had posted up guards out front whom were actually checking for invitations. I didn't have one and I didn't have time to go looking for one, either. I had to get through that door as fast as possible; I had no idea where my enemies were and for all I know they were already inside. It's then that I looked at the guards at the door and remembered a very crucial fact: everyone was playing as a Green Toad today. If I could just get through the door, they wouldn't be able to pick me out from the crowd. So with that in mind, I picked my moment and simply sprinted through the doors. Once inside, I walked into the nearest group of similar-looking mushroom people and held my breath. The door guards walked in, picked some random fellow that just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time, and kicked him out instead of me. If you're out there, and you're reading this, Thank you random citizen. Yours was a pivotal role in this tale, and I will not forget your unintentional sacrifice.

I was inside, and the gathering was in full swing. Just what this was all for I never found out; I was moving too fast to take in the details. First it was scanning the crowd and trying to pick out anyone that was purple. Luckily, it seemed as though they weren't here just yet. Then, I tried to find the Princess. Outside of their plan and the fact that they came from outer space, I had no idea what those two could do, so my best bet was to get the Princess out of the castle and hope that the confusion they'd cause would let me and her get the hell out of dodge before the E.T.s realized she was gone. Let me tell you, it's no wonder Bowser is able to kidnap her so easily, because she REALLY makes no attempts to hide herself or even have guards around her. She was talking to Daisy and a few OC Princesses from made-up kingdoms about, well, me and my stupid antics yesterday. Almost on cue, I walk up to where she was standing and strike up a conversation. Well, perhaps "conversation" isn't the right word; it was pretty one-sided. I got her attention, and informed her that some very not-nice people were due to turn up any minute now and that she should come with me if she wanted to get out of this in one piece. This prompted a question I was hoping beyond belief would eventually get asked. "What? Who are you?" I needed only to utter three words and draw attention to my username for just a moment. "I'm The Best."

Three words worth twenty times their weight in gold. Three words that silenced a whole table full of royalty and fixated all eyes on me. Three words, met only with a singular response of ":O". With little ceremony, and even less to say, the Princess stood up and was at my side in an instant. I had lucked out; the person I was trying to save was also a huge fangirl. The rest of the table had their own things to say, but at that point my mind was already trying to think five steps ahead. Every second I was still at this party was another second off of the invisible timer heralding the arrival of the aliens. I was being posed with a really, really difficult question: How do you sneak a Princess out of her own party while attracting as little attention as possible? Frankly I didn't have an answer, so my initial plan was to simply say "Screw it" and walk out the front door, all witnesses be damned. Fortunately for the dramatic tension of the story and unfortunately for my nerves, at that exact moment, my time ran out, and our two antagonists strolled into the castle, shooting down my plans for an easy front door escape. Our escape was temporarily put on hold, and all mental resources were instead pushed towards NOT letting the regicidal extraterrestrials spot me or Princess Peach.

As fast as my fingers could manage, I typed out my instructions. Specifics aren't important, the gist of it was that I wanted her to stay as close to me as possible, and to follow my lead. With that out of the way, I ducked behind a pillar and triple-checked that I was talking into local chat only. It doesn't take a genius to conclude that attempting to do anything remotely discrete with Princess Peach is nigh-on impossible. The stealthy approach lasted all of fifteen seconds before the gig was up, the aliens spotted the Princess, and they started making a beeline for her. Now, at this moment, I did not have a lot going in my favor. My plan was falling apart, the bad guys were closing in at a very fast pace, and it was a very real possibility that if I wasn't the luckiest man alive our story would have ended much sooner and with a much bleaker twist than the version we got. Luckily for me, my original plan was still VERY fresh in my mind, and they weren't inbetween me and the door anymore. So with a very simple exclamation of, "RUN!", we made a mad dash for the door and the chase was on. It was at this precise moment in time that all hell broke loose.

When someone yells "RUN!" inside of a packed venue, people tend to panic. When shapeshifting space aliens pull out guns and begin firing into a crowd of people, said people tend to freak out. When everyone's pretending to be a hero and the shit hits the fan, you find out who the real heroes are. Toads were racing everywhere, lasers were being sprayed like Xcom just turned up, the Princesses still at the table were having a full-scale freakout, and what guards there were inside were fighting a losing battle at attempting to make sense of the utter chaos. The Castle emptied at an alarming pace, both because people were throwing themselves out of any available exit they could find and because there were two determined shooters killing those that couldn't. Ducking and dodging, my luck held out long enough to get outside with the Princess in tow. The streets weren't much better than the inside, with most of the sensible folk running as far as they could, and a few plucky people that didn't have a grasp on what they were up against charging into the Palace to play the hero. Still, if only for a few seconds, we weren't being shot at. Those few seconds let me think on my options to devise a new plan better than "Run like hell". I came up with "Run like hell, but towards the harbor, then get on the first boat going anywhere." And so, I informed Peach as we made a madman's dash towards the coastline. Unfortunately, the Princess hadn't caught on to the whole "Local chat" thing, and ended up saying aloud how great a plan it was. The aliens became an issue again really quickly after that blunder.

I called on every action movie chase scene cliche that my mind could spit out to slow them down. There wasn't a tremendous amount of city we had to cover, but it felt like I was running a cross-country marathon (In spirit. I was sitting in a desk chair holding "w" for a minute or two.). In spite of my best efforts, their blasts were getting more accurate by the second and the lead I had on them was evaporating. Still, sometimes you can call in a favor from Lady Luck, and sure enough when I reached the port, there was a ferry departing. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and so a shout of "Get on the boat!" was all it took to secure our getaway. In my mind, it was the classic action dive onto a boat just as it departs the harbor, laser bolts barely missing the hero as he escapes below deck. In reality, all I did was walk into the designated "Get on the boat" area. Details, details; what matters is that I had managed to pull this escape off, and at least for the moment we were well and truly safe. A minute later, and we step off of the ferry with a few other frightened townsfolk in a place called Rogueport. I had no time to relax, however, as the ferry was very punctual, and I had only three minutes at best before the next one turned up, probably carrying two whole units of bad news. After a very, very quick examination of the town, I noticed it had a train station. An escape by rail certainly beat walking, and so we set about the time-consuming task of waiting for the next train. With what she percieved as a moment of peace, the Princess got around to asking what we were running from. There is no good way to explain to someone that Aliens are trying to kill them; take it from me, I tried. She didn't believe me; maybe she had doubts that I was who I said I was. Honestly, wherever her indecisiveness came from has no real bearing on the story, because the train didn't arrive in time, and the aliens turned up in all of their glory.

We were cornered, but I could tell from the way they were acting that they hadn't caught on to who I was just yet. There were some generic villain-esque statements, "Turn over the princess and we'll spare you" and all that nonsense. Their answer came in the form of a drawn spear and a combat stance. I thought over how this was going to play out. There were two of them, both with guns. There was one of me, trusty spear in hand and a handful of items to keep me in the fight. I made damn sure they didn't get the first move, and launched my attack. What played out was a game of cat-and-mouse, with them trying to stay just out of range and pelt what they thought was any ordinary wannabe with lasers until he went down. They quickly realised that I was no poser, and began to play dirty. Up until now, I had been dodging everything they could throw at me. They seemed to know this, too, and decided to fire on someone that couldn't dodge half as well: Princess Peach. My plans shifted from an all-out offensive to playing completely defensively, having to block or leap in front of every shot they now fired at the Princess. Things rapidly fell apart even further as what little healing items I had to keep myself in the fight disappeared at an unacceptable rate. It was absolutely clear that they were about to win, and Lady Luck was unreceptive to any further bribes as the train was still nowhere in sight. I looked into my inventory for some kind of 11th-hour miracle; who knows, maybe I had another Fire Flower I had forgotten about until now. The only thing left was the bottle of Hotsauce. To put it bluntly, I had no idea what it would do. Maybe it WAS another Fire Flower, just by a different name. Maybe it was one final healing item to keep me fighting for just a few seconds more. With everything to lose, I downed the bottle.

I promptly burst into flames.

Absolutely zero people were expecting that, myself included; the Princess practically fell over when it happened. Life had given me lemons and the means to go out and burn something down in one fell swoop; I felt Cave Johnson give me his strength from beyond the grave. I decided to see if space aliens were flammable by disregarding any form of subtlety and just bumrushing them, spear swinging all the while. Still shaken from the act of self-immolation and scrambling to come up with a counter of their own, the psychological warfare value of a flaming madman stabbing you with a spear proved to be the alien's Kryptonite. All told, these two were incredibly smart, but more than that they were organized. Maybe they had another chat program open or something, but these two were absurdly coordinated. This was one of the few times I managed to disrupt their harmony, and it gave me the edge I needed. For a few seconds I tore into them, paying back what they had done to me over the course of several minutes. When they finally got back in-sync with one another, they unanimously decided to run the hell away. With shouts of "This isn't over!", they fled back into town and away from the Princess and I. The train STILL wasn't here. I was completely battered, and if they had just stuck around for a second longer, that would've been the end of the story. Still, a pyrric victory is still a win in my books, and I turned to the Princess and gave a simple "Believe me now?". She did. She also believed that we needed a new way out of Rogueport, which I was more than happy to agree with.

Hoofing it out of town was somewhat unacceptable because that's what the bad guys just did, so that limited things slightly. After a few seconds of looking around, we found a blimp offering nonstop service to somewhere named Glitzville. I don't care what the name was, when I got off of that airship I was convinced that it was where Pro Wrestlers went when they died. It was literally this fighting arena floating in the clouds, built up like a massive coliseum. I have no idea what the hell Super Paper Mario's plotline is and even now I don't have any goddamn clue, but between the cruise ships, aliens, and Wrestling afterlife it must have the most confusing story of all time. At any rate, we moved inside, and I judiciously purchased snacks to get my HP back up (With the Princess' help, of course. She had money and I still didn't, glorified murderhobo that I was.). There was one problem that we noticed, however, and it was that Glitzville is its own little world; it doesn't connect to anywhere and was a very, very flashy dead end. Still, it was probably a bad idea to head back down into Rogueport in case the terrible twosome was there looking for us, so we decided to lay low in a floating sky coliseum for a few minutes. It didn't take long for someone to stumble upon us, and boy, had I seen nothing yet.

At first, much like an eldritch abomination, my brain could not comprehend what had walked up and started engaging in conversation. He was talking like several different big-shot wrestlers all got mashed together into one man, and said man was some kind of bird-person-thing. Absolutely ripped, on every poster all over the Coliseum, and asking me who I was. I still couldn't articulate a sentence, so it was a good thing the Princess was quick on the draw. "He's The Best.". I will never get tired of that line for as long as I live. Of course, Birdman wasn't quite ready to believe it yet, but a flash of my username made him take a step back. Obviously he recognized me, but he still had some doubts. I called it from a mile away; he wanted to fight me in the ring. I was of two minds about this: It would frankly be really, really cool to throw down with the guy, but I was in the middle of saving the Kingdom. I declined politely, trying to get the point across that this was a really bad time and that I had some more important things to do. Just as I'm about to walk out of the door, he says it. A declaration, and a challenge I couldn't refuse. "I thought you were The Best!"

The Princess was probably about to jump to my defense, but I was quicker on the draw this time. I turned right around. "I am. Meet me in the ring." Saving the world could wait; beating this bird was now my top priority. I handed the Princess my spear and headed ringside. At this point in our story, I was more than a little nervous behind the screen. The only thing I had ever made sure this lovable yet murderous scamp was good at was wielding that spear of his, and with it out of my hands I felt positively naked. To make matters worse, I was stepping into a coliseum with a positively ripped professional wrestler; I had really little margin for error here. As I strode through the doors that led to the ring and gazed upon the massive audience of NPCs, the very beginnings of an idea started to form in my head. As he, too, made his entrance, I got an overwhelming feeling of Deja vu. This fight, in a sense, was nothing new; save for my opponent and the locale, this was a repeat of yesterday. There was little warmup; we both were eager to get this started, with him wanting to thrown down with The Best and me wanting to end this and get back on the road. He started off with some bombastic moves and acrobatics, staying true to his avian nature and attacking in drops and dives. I did my best to stay out of his way, but he was the one in charge here.

With his high-flying style, he controlled the pace of the match from the get go. Finding opportunities to try and get hits in was difficult, and I could only dodge for so long. Eventually, he changed tactics and tried to bring me to the floor with a lariat. I ducked his arm, and seeing this as what could potentially be my one and only opportunity to get a hit in, threw out a leg sweep. I was expecting him to dodge it and retaliate with something of his own, but not only did I connect, the way his response was worded was like he just got hit by a car. In that moment I remembered just who I was, and the enormous amount of weight my self-made title held in the eyes of these people. What the hell was I afraid of?

I was The Best.

To figure out just why this happened, take a minute to imagine what the conclusion to yesterday's match must have looked like to everyone but me. A nameless man challenges some hotshot that's been hooting about how great he was all damn day to a duel at Bowser's Castle, and without saying a word, brutally murders him and then disappears without a trace afterwards. That is the kind of edgy-ass intro and outro all of these people WISH they had, and I just sort of did it without even thinking about it. Because of that, rumors had spread about The Best. What he was truly capable of, where he had come from. At this point, not even I knew just how strong I really was. Truly, though, there was no better place to find out than in this ring, against this bird. I pushed my newfound advantage, and the tide began to turn. Every time he came down, I was ready for him. Instead of dodging, I was blocking and countering. The tables turned, and I threw in some style of my own. There was something inside of me that felt deeply, deeply validated when I came up with the idea to start using spears, as in the wrestling move, in this scuffle. I soon decided to really push the envelope, and go for suplexes. I didn't have a mirror anywhere near me, but I didn't need one to inform me of the big, stupid grin on my face when some tiny mushroom man grabbed a buff bird three times his size around the waist and actually pulled it off. In spite of all of this, the eagle would not fall, always managing to kick out at 2 and keep the fight going. Maybe it was a dare from him; some kind of pride that made him demand that I truly gave him all that I had. Perhaps he just wanted to drag out a fight with a legend for as long as he can. I'll never know his reasons, but they didn't matter. If I lingered here, there was the chance someone with less than wonderful intent would walk in and kidnap the Princess while I was distracted.

With this in mind, I had to go big: bigger than anything I had used so far. One move popped into my head before all others, and I decided to give my opponent a finishing barrage worthy of a Platinum game. He launches a few strikes of his own, but at this stage in the game I knew that I was a god among men. Like Neo at the end of the first Matrix, I blocked and no-sold everything he pulled out. Finally, he over-extended, and I saw my opportunity. Getting him in a grab once again, I launched into a wholesale stolen Final Atomic Buster, but I didn't stop there. After slamming him down into the mat and leaving him stunned, I sprinted out of the arena, shoulder-barging through my exit doors and rushing into the stands. From there, I ran up as high as I could go, and launched myself into an elbow drop that shook Glitzville to its very foundations. I transitioned into a pin, and at last, he stayed down. The Princess was cheering, the NPCs were cheering (But that wasn't news, they were always cheering), and I took a second to bask in the glory of it all, before remembering that there was still a world I had to save. I helped the turkey off of the floor and, as he described it, an indent in it shaped exactly like him. There was a small conversation afterwards, and I want to give the player behind that bird a shout-out. He never broke character once, and goddamn was he skilled in the art of a good RP fight. Still, my journey wasn't going to end here, so after some goodbyes, we got back on the Zepplin and the Princess and I came back down to earth. Unfortunately, it was not the same earth that we had left. In my fifteen or so minutes of absence, the aliens had gotten busy.

I had saved the Princess, yes. However, that was the only thing I had managed to save. Every other Princess at Peach's party was dead, logged out, or otherwise totally on-board with the new management. The general population of the server, easily swayed, were all over the chance to sign up as world-conquering aliens. Except the ones that weren't, which ended up becoming something called the X-Nauts in some attempt to fight the space aliens for control of the server. To put this lightly, the Kingdom was a war zone. Conflict and strife had erupted everywhere, and anarchy reigned. At first, I was ready to take up my spear and take on the entire world, but that's when I realised something. That's exactly what the last guy calling himself The Best did, and then I came around and knocked him clean off of his high horse; I could not let me pride consume me like it consumed my predecessor. No, if I was going to win this war, and bring peace back to the land, I needed a plan. To fight back this many people, I'd need an army of my own. Only problem was, I didn't have much left to work with. The aliens were converting anyone they could get their hands on at an alarming rate, The X-Nauts were razing everything they came across, and if I didn't act soon we'd be caught in the middle of it all. It was here that my mind came up with its final, greatest plan. I already had an army, for all intents and purposes. I just had to convince an old acquaintance to lend it to me. I told the Princess that we were going to pay Bowser a visit. For a minute, she thought that I had played the longest con in the business, and was about to hand her off. Fortunately for her, I hadn't come this far for a cop-out ending like that.

Our travel time to Bowser's domain was not a completely peaceful one, with lots of sneaking around on our parts. With everyone having moved on to other things, I was once again the only Green Toad on the map. If anyone caught sight of me, I'd be drowning in assailants from both sides of the fight, and chances are I'd lose the Princess in the human tidal wave. Once again, I do not know the storyline to Super Paper Mario, so for all I know, everything happening around me was super canonical. Still, I find it hard to believe that space aliens toting guns were fighting men from the moon decked out with technology all their own and even some towering mecha, in this universe most known for an oversized turtle that kidnaps the same Princess from her castle over and over again with two plumbers playing the hero. Either way, we made the trip to Bowser's castle a little easier when we stole one of his airships and simply flew all the way there. You'd think that would attract a lot of attention, but so do giant robots piloted by space men laying siege to your town. We slipped through by simply being part of the background noise. We DID, however, end up attracting a lot of attention from Bowser, and what little forces he had managed to hold onto during this war.

The welcome we recieved, by flying up to Bowser's own fortress in one of his stolen airships, was a lot less than warm. It was plenty warm temperature-wise, active lava flows have a tendency to ensure that, but that did little to warm the ice-cold stare of a few Koopas at the front gate. The fortress was already on edge given all the fighting everywhere else, it's a wonder they didn't try shooting us down before we even got this close. Still, as I strolled down from the ship's wheel and dismounted with the Princess, the general tone at Casa de Bowser went from "barely-restrained fury" to "utter confusion" real damn fast. They were prepared for an army, hell they were probably ready for a last stand, but the moment they commanded me and the Princess to halt, and demanded to know who I was, they collectively realized that they weren't prepared for just one Green Toad. I told them three words, and revealed my username for the whole fortress to see.

"I'm The Best."

Their momentary silence spoke volumes, more than what came out of their mouths next ever could. They could have done a lot in that situation, and what they chose to do was doubt my claim. It was a pretty sensible move on their part, after all if a man came to your front door and claimed to be the President, the first word out of a lot of people's mouths is going to be "Bullshit". Unlike the possibility of the President upon your doorstep, they next decided to attack me. And that second part told me everything I wanted to know about the company Bowser still held. They were tenacious, weren't afraid of literally anyone, and had so much loyalty that they would sooner throw themselves at the mushroom equivalent of Chuck Norris over disappointing their lord. They went down in a few moves on my part, but I knew I was in the right place. I told the Princess to hang around outside of the gates, and that I wouldn't be long. More came in behind them, happily a few more troops than I was expecting Bowser to have. It was a creative writing exercise on my part; I had to find a way to disable or knock out every combatant that came at me without roughing them up too bad, after all if my plan worked these were going to be my soldiers. Skipping over a stroll through Bowser's castle with a couple of speedbumps on the way, I made it to the same courtyard I had begun yesterday's deathmatch in. And wouldn't you know it, Bowser was waiting for me atop his balcony. I didn't have to say a word, he knew who I was. He didn't know why I was here, though, and that part got me to say quite a mouthful. In short, I needed an army to take back the Mushroom Kingdom, I had the Princess on my side, and he was the world's only shot at getting thoroughly un-fucked. And here, I got some very lovely exposition on the situation and exactly the level of fucked the world was at that moment in time.

As far as Bowser was concerned, it was already too late. The aliens had everything they needed to complete some kind of ritual or something, the usual "Unseal the ancient evil" type of plot, you know the kind. The only thing really stalling them was the X-Nauts, and even then it wasn't going to last for much longer. The moment this thing was out of its can, the aliens were going to bowl over everything that wasn't them. But to top it all off, out of everything he COULD have called Bullshit on, he thought I didn't have the Princess. That was the easiest fix in the world, all I did was whistle and she was by my side in an instant. I don't know what it was about that gesture, but the moment Peach came into the frame, he did a complete 180 and agreed to help. If it was all screwed anyway, then he thought he owed it to his men, the Princess, and even me to be, and I quote, "The nastiest thorn in their purple side for as long as we can!". Which was a hell of a motivation, but from there? We had a start. I had my army, I had the Princess, and I had a clock counting down to Doomsday. What I didn't have was an assault plan.

I did have experience and a black belt in kicking asses by these folk's standards, though. So I let Bowser figure out the finer points of the assault, while I grabbed up every Goomba, Paratroopa, Koopa, EVERYONE I could get my hands on inside that fortress, and I trained them. It was a crash course if ever there was one, and I knew that at best, these guys were only going to get me so far. Still, when an army "trained by The Best himself" came rolling over the hills, suddenly these mooks were going to be looked at like supersoldiers. I devoted no time to planning the assault out myself, as I figured, having done it so many times and with me at his side, Bowser needed no help coming up with a plan for breaking into Princess Peach's castle, and my faith was not misplaced. The X-Nauts had the full brunt of the alien's attention, currently launching an all-out, last-ditch offensive from the harbor in some vain attempt to get in and drive them out before their Cthulhu cult did its job. We were going to come in from the side, using the very airship I rode in on, and take the aliens by surprise. We were nothing more than a handful of hopeful idiots, but we had Bowser, and we had me. With the element of surprise, he thought, smashing into the castle and taking out the aliens was going to be a cakewalk. Getting out again was going to be the problem, but he thought I could take care of that part on my own. I didn't object to that. After all, I was The Best.

And here, I took a moment to realize just how far I had come in the past few days. As I had said at the very start of this chapter, I had gone from some nameless jackass to the new Meta literally overnight. I didn't come out here to be the hero, but here I was, at the forefront of an army I had personally trained to save the world from an alien invasion. From beating back cyborgs with big words to suplexing a buff bird in the great Wrestlemania in the sky, my story was a winding, insane pathway that I don't think will ever be replicated. And one way or another, when I got on that airship, it was going to have an ending. I was going to do everything in my power, and perhaps a few things beyond it, to see this through to the bitter conclusion.

Just before we departed, there was one thing I had to take care of. I had to ensure that, during this whole escapade, nobody swooped in and stole Peach out from under me. Honestly, at this point she had little value in the grand scheme of things but I'd be the shittiest goddamn hero ever if I let the Princess get offed during the big battle with evil. I couldn't keep her at my side, we were marching into a war zone. I couldn't just leave her at the castle, as everyone and everything was coming on this assault, and either side could kick down the doors with no one home. Eventually, I picked one of the more useful people in my army, and told him to stay with the ship for as long as he could, both to defend Peach and to rain down hell with the cannons. Something about me calling him "The best in the army" really sold it to him, though, and he agreed to the plan. That was all the preparations I could make, because we were out of time. By the way things sounded in the Global chat, it was now or never. Everyone piled on to the ship, Bowser took the helm, and I climbed up the mast to deliver a pre-battle speech to my men. I don't remember the whole thing, but I remember the gist and spirit of it.

For as long as anyone could remember, this land had heroes. Gods to some, they were so almighty on the field of battle that none could ever hope to best them. And as far as anyone knew, no one could surpass them. Everyone in front of me, from the Goombas to the King Koopa himself, had lived in the shadows these figures cast on history. Well right now, I didn't see those heroes. Instead, I saw in front of me something far brighter, far deadlier, far stronger. Now, it was everyone else's time to shine. This was OUR time, damnit, and for once in our lives, WE were the giants people would look up to, not because of some prophesy or some pre-ordained onus of heroism, but because we had fought tooth and nail for everything we had. And now, in this dark hour, it wasn't gods that rode on wings of fury to save the world, but the common folk with absolutely nothing to lose.

When that first volley of cannon fire left the Airship, the Aliens had no idea we were even coming. Two seconds afterwards, though, they found out real quick. Bowser didn't just land the ship, no, he ran it aground right through a column of the purple bastards and the broadsides started FLYING after that. I vaulted the railing, leading my army from the forefront, and from there it was all a blur of combat. I can't know what happened for sure, I was so sucked up in the high of warfare that my eyes were focused solely on that castle at the end of town. I think when Bowser crashed the ship, it gave the aliens such a shock that their front line basically collapsed, and the X-Nauts came pouring through. It was absolute goddamn pandemonium. The chat was moving so fast that I just closed it, instead relying on the speech bubbles popping up over people's heads to react to the warfare around me. We had aliens in front of us, X-nauts at our rear, and in the center of it all, a legendary Green Toad and his elite fighting force annihilating all that dared approach. Bowser was a one-man wrecking crew, bashing down X-Naut mechs faster than they could get to the combat zone, while I had attained a level of power so ridiculous that I was parrying gunshots with my spear.

I was invincible, shouts of "IT'S HIM!" and "IT'S THE BEST!" popping up so frequently that they accounted for nearly half of the local chatter. Nothing could stand in my way, but that didn't stop everyone from trying. The element of surprise only helped for so long, because as soon as they knew who I was, EVERYONE came swarming twoards me. My progress twoards the castle was slow, but I was simultaneously the unstoppable force and the immovable object. They could slow me down by sheer weight of numbers, but there was no halting our advance. Knee-deep in the conflict, I became blind to just how dire my situation was getting until far too late. I was making progress twoards the castle, yes, but things had been taking a turn for the worse right under my nose for a while. My men were good, but they had their limits. I had started to lose them, and it's only when I took a look behind me that I only saw four of them left, including Bowser.

At this point in the fight, the aliens had lost too much ground, and too many numbers. What remained was falling back inside the castle as a last line of defense, but the X-Nauts just kept coming. Whenever they'd lose someone, that guy would just run back to the Harbor and re-join the fray as reinforcements. There was absolutely no end to them, and soon making our way to the castle doors wasn't the biggest of our concerns. The X-nauts were grabbing all the space we gave up, and soon the five of us found out backs up against the castle doors, too busy fighting for our lives to get inside. I lost another man to the tide, but I couldn't fight any harder. I was hitting the limit of how fast I could type out coherent actions, there were just too many. On the other side of the screen, I was sweating bullets, both metaphorically and physically, because I was beginning to think I couldn't do this. I know that analogy that says, "What's a mob to a king?" and frankly, I don't think that man has seen what a pissed-off mob of people can do. Back against the wall, typing to my limit, I thought I had come all this way to finally fail right at the finish line.

And then, it happened. Lady Luck hid an ace up her sleeve from me this entire time. Chekhov's gun got speed-loaded and fired, because  Rawk Hawk dove out of the sky with the most literal interpretation of an RKO out of fucking nowhere I will ever witness. I don't even know how the hell he got up that high, the game didn't include methods of flight, and Glitzville was across the goddamn map. But SOMEHOW, that glorious bastard came in during the 11th hour, with an entrance so perfect that for a moment, I wanted to name him my successor. With typical professional wrestling banter, he tore into the crowd in front of us like a hurricane, and I knew that this was going to be the last miracle I got today. I told whoever was left to buy me time, and I kicked in the front door to the palace.

The war raged outside, and now inside I waged a one-mushroom offensive on everything those extraterrestrial bastards could muster. I channeled the collective fury of everyone that had ever played an XCOM game, and I ripped and teared my way to the room where the ritual was taking place. I don't know the names of any that stood beside me on this fateful day, and held that door, but if you find this story and you read it, know that I await you in Valhalla, brothers. Shoutouts aside, I made it to the ritual chamber. I found out I had made it too late, JUST too late, probably because the Ayys wanted to win so bad they had started to bend the rules. Either way, they had their God or Leader or whatever the hell they were trying to summon right there in the chamber. Frankly, I expected hentacle tentai or Cthulhu, what I got made very little sense and frankly almost felt like a cop-out. Standing in front of me, in the middle of this somewhat intimidating ritual circle, I had what I can realistically describe as an edgy Princess Peach and her Stand, The Downward Spiral. Upon looking this one up after the fact, I now know that I was staring at the Shadow Queen, but that name is nowhere near as good as what I came up with. And lo and behold, the first thing she asks is who dares to defy her.

Do I even need to type out what I said at this point?

The only noteworthy thing about her response is that she had never heard of me. Which frankly, is both an insult that a fourth grader would come up with, but also absolutely perfect given the context of everything about me. I properly introduced myself via a spear stab to her midsection, which didn't go over very well with her OR what little lackeys she had left. In the grand scheme of things, it's sort of funny how this adventure began and semi-ended with the same three words, in the same place. Upon looking it up, I now know the term for this is "bookending" but damn if life doesn't work out sometimes. Anyway, this final brawl proved to be one hell of a show, looking back. She was pretty reliant on that Stand of hers, a lot of stuff involving hands that sort of gave me a few flashbacks to Geb, but legally distinct from Geb because these are made of shadows or some stupid shit. It was a big game of keep away for her, because she could just keep the damn hands coming all day long, but I still had to land a hit on the actual her to keep the show going as planned. To pull out a cringeworthy joke on any readers, I was trying to catch her, while she was trying to make me catch those hands.

Still, a mob fight involving twenty different people is a lot different than one person controlling twenty different things. I was still fighting in mob mode, and she just couldn't keep up. I would have loved to know just how quickly I was launching my assault during that, get some kind of time-traveling WPM counter so I have a solid statistic to give you, but without that I have to describe it. I was typing pretty fucking fast, to avoid flowery language or a dumb analogy. She still dragged out the war of attrition for as long as she had patience, but at this point in the story I had come too far, and sacrificed too much to give any ground in there. Like the dragon a day prior, she gave up too much ground, got cornered, and I promptly finished the job. Unlike the dragon, she had enough respect for both the narrative at play and herself, and played out her downfall. Kudos to her, because with that one action she was already a better roleplayer than a lot of the folks that came before her. So, job's done, hero wins, evil is defeated, right?

I fucking wish it ended there. GOD, do I wish it ended there. In my mind, the X-Nauts would have fallen back, I would have strolled out of the palace, and me and my surviving troops would celebrate with whatever the Mario equivalent of a cold one with the boys is. But no, sometimes fate demands a final act.

I made my way back to the door, only to find that my troops were all dead and the X-nauts were swarming the lobby. Rawk Hawk, Bowser, every last one fought to the bitter end, of that I'm fucking certain, but in the end, they were overrun. I couldn't accept it! I flung open the chat window, trying to find ANY record of that battle, frantically scrolling up as far as it would let me. Maybe they just fell back inside the castle, and they're waiting for me to come rescue them. Maybe they doubled-back to the airship and they're going to come in and pick me up in a really badass, "You thought we were dead, haha!" sort of way. No, they were gone. They put up a slobberknocker of a fight and raised hell for as long as they could, but every last one died defending that door. And that wasn't all, no, if that was all maybe I could have accepted it. Wrought bloody vengeance on the X-Nauts until they gave up the ghost themselves, but no. I saw in the Global Chat the one thing I absolutely, positively did not need to read with my own two eyes. Somehow, two of those alien bastards broke through every last goddamn X-Naut, got to the airship, took down my best man, and they stole the Princess.

And at that point, all I saw was red.

I do not know where I summoned the typing speed from, nor do I think I will ever manage it again, but when those X-Nauts finally found me, they didn't even have time to call it in. I was on them like shit on a pig, and more than that, I wasn't stopping for anyone. Squads, mechs, it was all the same in my mind, just more obstacles between me and the only goddamn thing that mattered in this bloodbath. I kept one hateful eye staring into the global chat, and something kept turning over in my mind. Their names seemed so familiar to me, but I couldn't place them. Steeped as I was in the battle, my brain devoted solely to ripping through an entire army singlehandedly, I didn't know who I was dealing with. I hauled ass out of the town and cut down anything that tried to stop me, the X-Nauts could have the goddamn palace if they wanted it so badly. And only now, holding W harder than I had ever held a key in my life, did I recognize those two names. These two are the ones that started it all. That couple I saw behind the house, The aliens that shot up the palace, the duo that fought me at the train station, those two insurmountable dickheads that just couldn't accept defeat like everyone else, and had to try and drag me down with them. I thought they were going to kill the Princess any minute, petty bastards that they were, but no. They decided they were going to do it onboard a train just to fucking taunt me. Ride off into the sunset, kill Peach when you get there, and then log out. No chance for me to interfere.

But I knew that train real goddamn well, and it took its sweet-ass time getting to that station.

And I ran. I ran so far away. I just ran, I ran all night and damn well to the crack of dawn, because those bastards weren't getting away. Getting to Rogueport without the ferry, especially when you're traveling from the town, is a daunting prospect. It's not like you're running a cross-continent marathon, but with everything riding on my ability to get there before the train did, you can't fathom how long that sprint felt like it took. The train arrived before I did. They got onboard, but before it pulled out of the station, I slipped on. I made it there with time to spare, and in the interim, we could do nothing but awkwardly stare at one another, knowing full well the confrontation that was about to take place the moment this train left the station. It all came down to this, one final showdown between me and them. They had numbers and guns. Unlike last time, all I had was my spear. No miracle hotsauce to tip the scales, no healing items to call upon to drag it out. And just like last time, they had no idea who they were dealing with.

The train left the station, and we were transported to an endless bridge over an ocean, the train hurtling twoards the unknown. The sun was just breaking over the horizon, and the moment the game let us move, it was on. They tried the guns, but I was knocking blasts out of the sky like it was nobody's business. They tried to attack the Princess again, but this time I got so thoroughly in the way that they couldn't even reach her. Still, these two had otherworldly coordination, and a desire to see me fail almost as strong as my need to win. There was no cavalry coming. If I failed here, my legend was going to die with me. Lady Luck had pulled every string she could just to get me on this train; she had nothing left to give me, and in the back of my mind, I knew it. Both of them wouldn't accept defeat, not even taking a blow here and there to make the fight seem fair. They just wanted victory. I needed to make my own luck, and to do that I needed to throw the playbook out the window; do something so unconventional that not even they would see it coming. I did the absolutely unthinkable, gave a mental farewell to the only ally I had left, and threw my spear.

I threw it knowing full well they would dodge it without a second thought. Whenever he dodged, he moved his in-game character a little bit, just to make it feel that much more real. So when he went to dodge it, I "physically" sprinted right at him, and used the momentum of my in-game avatar to bodycheck him right off the train. No amount of godmodding or powerplaying can save you from literal, inescapable death, and just like that the fight was one-on-one.

The remaining alien was none too pleased with my maneuvering, and redoubled their assault to try and kill me. I was having fucking none of it anymore; I slapped that ray gun out of their hand and gave them a hook to the jaw. The fight with Rawk Hawk flashed through my mind, and I once again called upon every close-combat move I could muster. The chips were crooked, the dice were weighted, but I had no choice anymore. A spite-fueled grudge match on the top of a speeding train probably looked cool as all get out to any spectators, but in my mind there wasn't anything about looking cool, or being flashy. It was about being The Best. It was about saving the Princess, about conquering all of the odds, about being the hero everyone thought I was. But more than that? It was about beating this stuck-up, godmodding bastard in a straight-up fight. Still, there's only so much you can do in a roleplay fight when the other person doesn't want you to win. Take it from me, because I tried everything. There was no reasoning with them, there was no outplaying them. They wanted to see me die, and I wanted to see them fail. Only one person can get what they want out of a conflict like that, or so I thought. Something finally dawned on me, trading blows with this thing on top of the train for what felt like aeons. Nobody was walking away from this, and that is the only way this is going to end.

I had to face facts, I was going to die on top of this train but so were they. A world where neither of us win, but in a way, we both get what we want. I made my move, grabbing them with both hands and forcing them to the train's edge, both in RP and with my avatar. They fought the entire time, trying to squirm out of it, knowing what I was trying, but I wasn't letting anyone live. Not them, not me. I backed up just a hair's breath, and then came at them full-speed. The avatars ended up colliding with one another, flooring both of us as we tumbled over the side together. As I went over the edge, I said one final sentence to the Princess before I hit the water and met my fate. "Tell my story." And just like that, we slammed full-speed into the kill-zone underneath the bridge together, the alien keysmashing in impotent fury the entire time. A pyrric victory for me, but a victory nonetheless. I started to go through the motions to log out, and just before I exited, I saw the Princess' final words. She never even knew my name. Only that I was The Best.

That's my story, and I swear to god it's true. I'm sharing it because a few friends demanded a writeup, and while it took me a while to get it all together, better late than never. I don't want any fame from this, and I can guarantee that, for that reason alone, anyone claiming to be me is lying. The Best's story is finished, ended. Only a handful people know who it was, and I'm content with that. I'll go down in the annuls of nameless history like I've always wanted. All the fame, none of the consequences. Thanks for reading all the way through, you have a good day.

[pastdefined-a]

I’ve taken some time to digest The Situation and ultimately, I refuse to let this be a moment that bothers me, upsets me or turns me away from doing something I enjoy. I’m nearly 30 years old, for once in my life I am happy with where I am, I have accepted my struggles and my own personal issues; I am not about to let a child with a victim complex try and destroy me.

Was my initial message to Cade after the other night “grow the fuck up”? Yes, I will admit that. It was a knee-jerk anger moment. I have a temper. You can ask the men from last night’s mosh pit that you don’t push me. But then I took the time to message her...

"Yeah, you know what, I have one problematic ship. I don’t condone it. And I write it, wrote it actually. With one partner for multiple years. I don’t promo my Bella blog, I write in a very closed circle. You went out of your way to dredge that up, after months. Not that it’s any of your business: but I haven’t been writing that ship, that blog, or any blogs, because I’ve been dealing with my own depression. Wait, I’m an ableist, right, so how could I possibly have depression? I haven’t been on Tumblr in months. I lost my grandfather, I tried to kill myself immediately after. Are you happy to hear that? Are you happy to know that while I was trying everything I could to help you with your discomfort with the group, literally trying my hardest to mend the situation in a way that wouldn’t require you leaving, and while I was on vacation, my grandfather was in the hospital dying? We’re not bad people, Cade. We just don’t have the same opinions as you. And I tried. I’m sorry you blame us for everything. But I haven’t bad mouthed you once. I haven’t mentioned you since you left. I would never stoop so low as to drag your name through the mud. You can have your problems with us, you can reflect how you want. I know this isn’t the first time you’ve said nasty things about us, about me. You’ve vagued about us. You blame us. That’s fine. I’m sorry things didn’t work out."

Their response? To block me, on any blog I tried to reach out to them on, post that I should “take a hint” and then say that we were all giving them anxiety. I never wanted Cade to leave the group, but things were getting out of hand. I have been role playing for longer than most of you have been alive. I have been around the block multiple times, I have been a moderator, admin, storyteller and dungeon master many times over. The sad fact is, if a player is continuously a problem and you have exhausted your avenues of corrective action, you need to let a player go. I wanted Cade to be successful. I urged them to reach out to people, but they continuously felt ignored because messages may not have been answered in a timely manner, or answered at all. 

At the time, three of us were all working full time jobs with varying hours. At least one of those people are the people Cade reached out to. I can’t tell you how many times it’s taken me a week to realize I have notifications. Cade felt that we were all talking about them behind their back, and that wasn’t true. There were no secret groups. There was one sub server created as place where a few of us could one on one do IC texts, but that was it. I had provided multiple channels in the main server to engage in active RP. It wasn’t helping. 

Cade approached me at one point asking to bring on another muse. My concern with how they were struggling to connect with muns and drive their own personal storylines and growth that the addition of another muse wouldn’t be helpful and they would only get more upset and stressed out. I told them no, for that very reason.

One repetitive issue was topics would be brought up in “the dumpster”, our ooc channel, that would grow heated. Cade became argumentative and when people attempted to have a conversation, or voice their own opinion, Cade would immediately back down, or waffled. It frustrated a lot of players. The boiling point was when I was on vacation and unable to moderate the chat actively. IIRC it was regarding the portrayal of South within RVB and things got out of hand. Cade left the server and I was furious. Frankly, I was furious at everyone. It was my first time off of work in 7 months, my grandfather was hospitalized, I had a lot on my mind. I spoke with Cade and told them they needed to decide what they wanted to do. A few days later they approached me to tell me that they wanted to remain in the verse but not on the server. The only problem was that at this time 90% of our activity was taking place on Discord. We were all becoming less and less inclined to be on Tumblr. I expressed to Cade my concern, once again, that they would be unhappy and unable to actively participate in the verse if they weren’t on the server and that I would advise them to come back on but ignore the OOC chatter.

There was a conversation regarding RT hiring animators. A byline on the application was applicants have a sense of humor, and one member made the comment “lmao i feel like that's the equivalent of putting: "tumblr need not apply"” Cade’s response was “but a lot of their fans are on tumblr?” and that’s when “the joke, cat, the joke” happened. Up until this point, we all knew Cade as Cat. None of us had been approached or made aware of Cat being Cade’s deadname. If we had, it never would have happened. Yes, Katie came to me and told me what happened. She told me what happened because she chose not to respond to Cade’s message and it wouldn’t be the first time Cade would mention to me that people were ignoring her messages. The number one rule of my verse had always been “don’t be a dick”. And if I believe someone was being mean, out of line, needed reminded, I handled it. I spoke with more than one person about such behavior while we were active. What irked me wasn’t Cade’s request, but how they chose to go about it. It was what upset Katie as well. There had been a continual issue of Cade not being able to conduct conversations with simple manners, a please a thank you or even a genuine apology. And this was just the end of it. 

When Cade left, we didn’t talk about them. But I know we were vagued about or brought up multiple times. None of us messaged her. We just went our separate ways. 

On June 14 my grandfather died. Yes, I attempted suicide when I got home from his funeral. I realized that I just needed to be the person he wanted me to be, and I got my shit together. I got a new job, one that makes me extremely happy and I notified my followers on all my blogs that my activity was going to waver. I have barely been on Tumblr. So I missed the big July 1 call out post about me and all of us from two of Cade’s blogs. They were only brought to my attention the other night when Nova flipped out on our server. None of us had seen the anon messages. And honestly, there were varying degrees of caring.

I’m not transphobic or ableist. Full stop. Now as for the incest: I write Bellatrix Black. Please, take a moment to look at the Black family tree. I previously had one partner that I wrote Bella and Sirius in a romantic relationship with. It stemmed from a shared head canon that up until Sirius left, Bella and Sirius would have been arranged to be married and also that the amount of hate they had for one another came from somewhere deeper than just being related. That’s it. I’m not going to fall on my sword for that. It was in my rules so people would be aware of it. 

The truth is, looking back, I should have known from the beginning that Cade wasn’t going to be happy in my group. Cade and their sister had intended to join as North and South together. Flash came to me asking to join as North and it was becoming apparent that Cade’s sister wasn’t going to be making North. I felt bad, but I wasn’t going to turn down another writer because of it. But it was always an underlying problem.

I’ve made my peace with this issue, I’ve moved on. I’ve hoped Cade would find their peace as well, especially since they’ve claimed to have left the fandom. I tried apologizing, because I never wanted anything like this to happen. But I don’t accept the blame that people want to place on me. I don’t blame my own actions or decisions on anyone but myself, and I don’t think anyone else should.

Now, if anyone would like to discuss this, I’m here to talk but you can not message me anonymously. I won’t let you hid behind a wall if you want to say hateful things to me. You get to own your actions or say nothing at all.

[kilieit]

My £2 on alternative RP communities and the best way to go about making one

Originally posted on the RPC, here.

My summarised opinion/advice to people who want to create a Balmung alternative: I really, really want to see you guys succeed in creating a valid alternative... but I really fear it's not possible to achieve that with single-leader communities. Single-leader communities are great. While they last. But there's no longevity there. You need to consolidate into a multi-leader playerbase if you're going to create something sustainable, that will survive in the long term, and provide a genuine alternative to Balmung. Contact leaders of other alternative communities, pool your efforts on one server, and go on from there.

Full Post:

I come from a small pop RP server in WoW. I played there for almost 10 years, and roleplayed there for over 8. Here's my 2p (more like £2... oops) on the challenges you need to be addressing and the things you need to consider moving forward if you (any of you) want to make a genuine, valid alternative community to Balmung.

Here is the shape I've seen small communities take. At the beginning, everyone is really excited about the opportunity to have a fresh start. There's a boom in RP guilds, events, and community get-togethers, there's some method of communication established like a chat channel or a forum or both. People usually think this is the hard part, because it takes a lot of effort and promotion and logging in every day and it is hard, no doubt about it. But by comparison, it is the easy part. The hard part comes a year later.

By this stage, the original person or people (usually a group of 5 people or less) who began the community have begun to burn out. When someone burns out, what happens is they pull back their operations and start mostly doing their in-game stuff, or their personal RP plots, or just stop logging in as much. And the thing is... there's nothing bad about this! It's a healthy, good reaction to burn-out. Pushing through burn-out without heed to your own mental limits is a recipe for shitty events and shitty relations, because you start to resent the hobby, and inevitably lash out at the people related to it. So pulling back and doing something else for a bit is absolutely the right answer. But here's what you need to recall. Who is going to provide roleplay for people in your stead when that happens?

Here's my key point: roleplay communities under a certain size are NOT SUSTAINABLE. Let's say you're the singular leader of the entire RP community on a given server. You will reach burn-out. Maybe this year, maybe next year, maybe next month. It's going to happen. What next? If your answer to "who is going to provide RP" is "one of my friends who's been helping me so far", that is not adequate. Your friend's probably been working just as hard as you! Maybe even harder, depending on the systems you're using and how easy they make it for non-leaders to do stuff like set calendar events. There's only so many friends in a friend group - and if you go through all of them without the first guy feeling like he wants to come back, then you're screwed. If your answer is "I don't know but I'm sure someone will step forward", I have a little spoiler for you: no one is going to take over. That won't happen. Sorry. This is my experience: during their leisure time, people naturally gravitate towards either leader or follower roles, because they will have a preference (either conscious or subconscious) for which one they enjoy performing more. If no one has made themself apparent as enjoying the leader role so far, it's a vanishingly small chance that they're suddenly going to leap forward and take it up. So, then... things fizzle out... or people start getting upset that there's "no roleplay any more", and turn on each other in blame.

What you need is another group who's been running RP separately but concurrently to you. Let's take three Balmung events I attend regularly, and which I know have no overlap in leadership: Matron's Reach on Mondays, Stellazio Pizzaria on Wednesdays, and Fight Club on Thursdays. What happens if the leader of, say, Matron's Reach burns out and doesn't want to lead it any more, and nobody steps forward? Then I suppose that event would stop running. But what happens to Stellazio Pizzaria and Thursday Fight Club? Absolutely nothing. And if someone wants healer-based RP after that? Then there are three free companies I can think of off the top of my head that could scratch that itch, also not dependent on the Matron's Reach in any fashion whatsoever. Because these RP outlets are concurrent and separate, the overall community is stable. One person dropping out won't kill the whole community, no matter who it is.

That is the thing you need to strive for, even in a small server. If one person or FC stops operating, the overall community needs to have the stability and breadth to continue without them (maybe in a different fashion, but still to continue). Because if it doesn't, then this starts happening:

foxfirestorm Wrote: Mateus has a great deal of potential to become something AMAZING. We do have an active community here, but as of recent times (and why I went on my vacation), we have an issue where this... Large group of individuals (Not going to say names) are very entwined into their own little spot and due to the small nature of the RP community right now, this is effecting those that are not in this circle. As the one in charge, I voice time and time again that my officers need to do more world RP and actually go out and do things, however, they seem very convinced to remain in that circle and some of my own officers have been pulled into this little group-- which makes matters WORSE.

I'm not trying to single you out. I'm using this quote because it is so accurate to what happened to my server's community, in another realm, on another game, 5+ years ago. My guild was in the position "your guild" is in. We were the pillar upon which the rest of the community depended to initiate RP. Then our leader burned out, and took a break from big RP events. His inner circle closed ranks around him... excluding most of the members of his actual guild, including me, despite the fact that I was far and away the second-most active in organising things next to him. That's the familiar part - the part that sounds like it's happening to you. Here's the rest of my cautionary tale about the original community on my small server.

The rest of the community turned to our entire guild, even though it was just the one guy who'd pulled back (and we had as little idea about why as they did!), and started to demand why we weren't making RP events any more? Had we abandoned them? Did we think we were too good for them?

And of course it was none of these things. But even though there were a good 100+ people in the community, the fact that none of them were running independent, concurrent things meant people got angry at us for "making him quit" and "taking away their RP". People started to reroll or transfer, and those that didn't grew bitter. Even though it was just our leader that had burned out and I was still running RP events for people just like he had, on a similar schedule, with a similar quality, they were received with nothing but hostility. People either didn't see the point in putting their faith in someone who wasn't our leader, or they were too upset about our leader "abandoning" everyone to trust anyone with the same guild tag, or they were just apathetic in general and about to drift off to a PvE server. Eventually, I stopped trying. No one wants to put their heart and soul into something only to be called names because they have the wrong nametag above their head.

A few guilds tried to step up and fill the void. The problem was they were all either underestimating how hard it was to actually coordinate a "community-wide" event, or they were too consumed with anger over what had happened before to really make much good out of it (too focussed on trying to copy or be "different from" before, rather than just focussing on doing something that was good). I can think of three who tried, and two fell to in-fighting and either completely rebranded, disbanded, or both... the third's leader was perma-banned over something unrelated, and the guild fell apart shortly after. Our leader finally quit completely, I assumed his mantle on a formal basis rather than the de-facto one I'd been in before, and we actually changed our guild tag last year because years later, people were still blaming my members for the "death" of the original community. All because one guy had made a fixture of himself and then quit.

You'll notice I said "original", so here's the thing. I have word from my friends that the community is actually doing fine these days, although I'm not part of it any more (so I can't personally verify). What changed? Server merges. It was merged with two other RP servers, and although there were initial hiccoughs of people being territorial, these days it's stabilised into a much more sustainable, larger community. People were introduced from a friendlier neighbour-server, and diluted the bitterness in the community. If one guy doesn't like you, it's no longer the end of the world. And if one guy quits, there are a half-dozen others you can seek RP from instead.

Here is what I think y'all need to do if you seriously, actually want to make a solid alternative to Balmung.

Pick one server and pool your efforts. Work together with other people who are currently running small alternative RP communities to bring your efforts together in one place. It seems like there are a good handful of you guys, all with 20-100 people each, who all had the initial thought of "why don't we go somewhere other than Balmung? I'll just pick any low-pop server/the server I initially happened to roll on". If you seriously want to make a valid, serious, stable alternative, then I think you need to start bringing yourselves together with one another. Set aside your pride, stump up the cash to move if you must, and create one, unified RP community on an otherwise low-population server. Do your own thing there! You don't necessarily need to be in communication and coordination with everyone on that server, so place the logistical fears out of your mind - in fact, if there's so many people that you can't, that's a healthy sign that you're on your way to sustainability. Just do it all in the same place so people know where to go.

That way, new players aren't looking at entering one of a number of single FCs or small clusters of FCs where if they don't like the OOC culture, or the stance on lore, the genre of RP, or one of the people there just plain ol' dislikes them, they have to move or reroll again. There should be a choice within a single World, both in terms of what content is on offer and what people are offering it. That would be forming the basis of a genuine Balmung alternative, where people who would otherwise have moved to Balmung will actually want to go.

[lazyliars]

/rp

DreamXD actually slots very nicely into a working theory I've had for about two or so months now, mainly centering around one question:

What happened to Dream?

Namely, why did Dream change, when exactly did it happen, and was it solely an internal change, or was there an external force at play, specifically a preternatural one?

I think with DreamXD, we might finally have an answer.

Or at least some clues to follow. DreamXD presents a shift in every single paradigm the Dream SMP has had. Like, I think most of it is just being so utterly blind-sided by George Lore Real, but part of it is the massive ramifications of an Actual God* being present in the storyline.

((*On the other resident god of the server, Foolish:

DreamXD is different than Foolish, in that his characterization is so dramatically inhuman - Foolish talks and acts like a (somewhat eccentric) person, and his powers are, as far as we know, limited in comparison to the creative-mode godhood that DreamXD occupies. And whether that is because Foolish is not a "full" god (having been referred to as a demigod) or simply because he's spent so much time around humans, we don't know, but we do know that either way, DreamXD is NOT that.

DreamXD's voice is marked by glitches and dramatic shifts in tone, he seems to lack control over the different aspects of his personality, like the more "Dream" part vs. the darker one that threatens to eat peoples souls. The "normal" part even displays confusion when George references things that the "darker" part said, implying that it may not be fully aware of itself.

TLDR: Foolish acts more human than DreamXD, who has a very eldritch personality.))

To get right to the point:

The Dream we knew before November 16th, and the Dream we know now are not the same. Something changed, and it changed for the worse.

Consider: Dream was always antagonistic to the L'manbergians - he was always imperious to them, and he was responsible for starting a number of fights between his faction and theirs, just as many if not more than they were.

But, he was also not... evil. He'd pick fights with Tommy, the disc wars were still a thing, but the gravity of the spats they had weren't dire. They were fun. They were... actually a game. He wasn't like the way he is now. While in hindsight we can look at these events and detect a serious undertone knowing what's to come, at the time they were far from it.

There is an argument to be made that he had the same tendencies as now, just not expressed as loudly, and while I believe it's a valid argument, I disagree that it's proof of Dream always being the way he is now.

Sapnap, Badboyhalo, Sam. They all remember Dream as their friend - they remember someone who was, maybe a little aggressive and a lot competitive, but not cruel. Not needlessly murderous. Not someone who steals sentimental items and lines the walls of a disgusting museum to use against them.

Dream cut them out. Sapnap was totally blindsided. Bad doesn't seem to fully believe it. Sam blamed himself for not realizing and tried to take the weight of that crime on his own shoulders by becoming the Warden.

There's also the competing theory that what happened to Dream was purely psychological - either the circumstances slowly isolating him from his friends driving him to the do things he's done, or a desire for control that started early and continued to fester until it overshadowed everything else, or any combination of both.

And those theories are still valid, they could still be the case, but I haven't been able to shake the idea that there is something deeper at play. I can't overstate how the exile arc and everything after it have been so inhumane, so cruel, and... not exactly out of character in the sense that I could never see Dream doing them, but in the sense that I could never see him doing them for no reason.

And there really doesn't seem to be one. Dream says himself, it's like a game. He sees people as toys, puppets. And there just doesn't seem to be an inciting incident that could explain how he made the leap from semi-authoritarian leader who, despite being a warmonger, does love his friends, to heartless murderer who wants to reduce everyone he knows to dolls.

There's... ways, he could get there, but nothing that we've seen makes sense. There is a missing piece, something that must have happened from his POV that we didn't get to see because he doesn't stream.

And DreamXD could be it. This godly entity that claims that it is "a part of [Dream]" but that it isn't him entirely. That seems to share the lack of understanding of humanity that Dream has been displaying like when he asks if resurrecting Tommy was “cool.” But that still loves George. He still, despite apparently not having the same history as Dream, desperately wants to be George's friend.

If I had to pinpoint the moment Dream changed, it would be the day that he revealed that he switched sides, and was going to be fighting against Pogtopia. He was paid for this betrayal in the Revive Book.

I mark this as the turning point in my theory because it is the first time Dream mentions his affinity for chaos in the context of hurting others. However, we also know that this likely wasn't the day he actually made the decision to betray - as he revealed that there was a traitor among the Pogtopians, a fact that he likely would have learned before this.

Now, I mark George's lore stream as the introduction of DreamXD proper, and I want that on the record because it isn't technically his first appearance on the server.

Most people will remember him from Techno's stream, where he logged on to break the End Portal in a panic. I doubt the character was properly written into the lore at that time, but it fits neatly with the rest of what we know about him - a guardian of the server, and the keeper of it's rules. No contradictions.

What less people might know, is that DreamXD has made an even earlier appearance, and it's this one where things begin to get... interesting.

Around roughly October of 2020, Tubbo and Fundy did some improv'd streams centering around Demon Hunting, or rather, "Dreamon" Hunting, and it's during the first of these two streams that DreamXD makes an appearance.

The bare bones of it was - Tubbo is an experienced "Dreamon Hunter" and teaches Fundy his ways. They find Dream, and realize that he has a Dreamon inside of him, which is basically an evil version of him. They attempt to exorcise the Dreamon from Dream via various shenanigans, and eventually, they do a ceremony to free Dream. However, they apparently botch it, and unleash the Dreamon within. After more shenanigans, one attempt to fix it utilizing Fundy and Dream's wedding appears to work, but then DreamXD logs on, flys around at Tubbo and Fundy threateningly, and they end stream on the idea that there are probably more Dreamons to hunt.

Now. There's a lot to unpack here. I'm not gonna go into the nitty gritty details in this post, but I do recommend watching the Dreamon streams, as they have A LOT of details that, if this is getting incorporated into the main story line, could be important - especially the focus on duality, having TWO versions of Dream, which end up being potentially separated from each other.

(Also, they're just really funny streams. Tubbo and Fundy are at PEAK chaos and Dream plays along with their inane bit perfectly, it's just good content.)

At the time of the Dreamon streams airing, they were explicitly non-canon. IIRC Tubbo and Fundy referred to them as taking place In an “alternate universe,” which makes sense considering they would have been on opposite sides at the time (Manburg and Pogtopia.)

However.

And this is where I show you my wall of red string and newspaper clippings.

My singular piece of evidence for this comes from one line DreamXD drops. He simply says: “At least you're not hunting me.”

The Dreamon streams take place around early October. Dream reveals his betrayal of Pogtopia around November 6th-7th. The timeline of the Dreamon streams would line up perfectly with the idea that there was a catalyzing event that put Dream on the proverbial path to hell.

I do not believe that they intended the Dreamon arc to be anything other than a side story at the time, but considering that DreamXD himself was barely canon until now, I don't think it's out of the question that they took a look back at a fan-favorite minor arc, saw an opportunity to co-opt it into the current story line, and potentially fill in some holes regarding Dream's characterization all in one move.

On the question of whether this would be a GOOD storytelling move?

The Dreamon theories were prevalent during the exile arc, and I've got to say, I was never a huge fan. The detachment of Dream's actions from his intentions, and by extension his morality, never sat right with me. It feels cheap to make him a victim and say “a Dreamon did it!” in regards to all of the horrible things that he's done. It strips his agency and makes everything that happened less impactful in my opinion, and I stand by that reading.

BUT. With DreamXD introduced, I feel like it's necessary to look at this from all angles. And with the way DreamXD was characterized in George's stream, I don't think it necessarily ruins Dream's character to say that an external force was involved with his descent into evil.

Namely, the idea that whatever happened to Dream was not really a “possession” so much as a gradual loss of humanity, could be an interesting way to look at this. It implies that Dream was always capable of his actions, but grants us understanding as to why he would actually perform them, and why he might have become isolated enough from his friends that they would let this happen.

The Dream we know now could be an expression of his “worst self” brought to the surface by a Dreamon/DreamXD/other. It also begs the question of what would happen if that force were to leave him, and how it might cause yet another shift in character, especially if it were to be portrayed as less of a switch being flipped, and more of a withdrawal, with a gradual process of realizing how far gone he was.

To close this out, I've been stewing on the idea that Dream hasn't entirely been himself since the climax of the Exile Arc.

I think this theory holds water, but it's also not waterproof... there are plenty of holes, and a lot of that comes from the fact that Dream doesn't stream. We're left in the dark when deciphering his character, and what might appear to be the key, could just as easily be revealed as a red herring, or even nothing at all.

Regardless of the validity of the Dreamon theory, I think that DreamXD is one of the most interesting developments we've had on the SMP in a long time, if simply because his arrival coincides with fucking George Lore Real. God. I still don't know how to deal with that.

I always appreciate people adding to the discussion by the way! Feel free to reblog with additions if you like or leave them in the replies.

And if a single one of you comes to my blog on THIS. THE DAY OF MY DAUGHTER'S WEDDING. And calls ME a c!Dream Apologist to MY FACE..... I will be v sad.