You, Both Figuratively And Literally, Are A Ghost Of Who You Once Were.

i HATE games that encourage a variety of weapon choices what if i WANT to play the whole game with a double barrel shotgun huh???

what if instead of having a fake name for internet personal-life purposes we could have a fake name for professional work-life purposes

"How do you kill God?"

"You don't! He doesn't exist!" A ghost answers with a smile.

"How do you kill God?"

"With a surprise." A young president answers with a frown.

"How do you kill God?"

"With your words." A vice president answers with clenched fists.

"How do you kill God?"

"With force!" A young hero laughs, tainted with a hint of sadness.

"How do you kill God?"

God himself asks, then answers as he faces a crowd of angry mortals.

"You don't."

*walks into american followers bedrooms* *in gentle voice* hows it going champ

The updated (and hopefully finalized) version of the Stitcher!

physically i’m here. mentally i’m in the hollowed out trunk of an ancient oak. i do not move, moss grows over me and i become a part of the forest. animals walk past me without fear, for i am not a threat. i photosynthesize and live as one with nature. we, the forest, are at peace.

quackity possession arc pog

ok so i just had A Thought.

how would the s1 characters react to their s2 selves?

like, tommy expects to see this warrior, wilbur's right hand man, confident, strong, brave... and instead he finds this broken shell of a boy, talking about how the only person who actually really cares for them is their own worst enemy.

tubbo doesn't really expect much. he never really changed, not as much as his friends. but instead of the usual awkward, friendly boy he expected, he finds a tired president, who misses his best friend, and is covered in burn scars from something awful that he doesn't want to talk about.

wilbur has the highest hopes, curious on how he did, how well he'd run the country. he wants to ask questions, ask how his family is. instead, he meets his ghost. a spirit who refuses to admit he's done wrong. wilbur seeks out future tommy for answers, only to get screamed at to get out.

fundy wasn't sure what he'd expected. he was worried he'd have faded into nothingness with his father's constant babying, and getting brushed to the side but... he seemed more vibrant than ever. angrier, sure, but also more confident, smiling at his younger self with so much genuine happiness that he felt his eyes water.

eret assumed they'd be more regal than this. they'd have a crown, and a gown, and a throne. instead, they wore stained jeans and a sweatshirt. "did we lose. were we caught?" "no. we just decided some things are worth more than a crown."

i think Eret’s betrayal was really the turning point of the SMP, and it deserves more credit. like, before that we had conflict (of course) but it was all fairly standard. hell, the Revolution was one of the most vanilla stories you can possibly tell; a group of underdogs rise up against the tyranny of rulers and establish their independence. it’s such a basic conflict, and was defined by very clearly established good guys and bad guys: L’Manburg good, Dream SMP bad. this is exemplified by the L’Manburg national anthem, which is a fantastic piece of propaganda that idealises L’Manburg as a “special place”, free from the “tyranny and bloodlust” of the Dream SMP. this was a narrative that the audience never really challenged, and the streamers didn’t either.

but Eret’s betrayal began the spiral into moral relativity and clashing ideologies that defines the SMP today. suddenly, those good guys and bad guys weren’t so clearly defined. suddenly, motivations went deeper than just ‘fighting for our country’, and the pursuit of power became a common theme. it took some time for those ideas to take root (for example, the second version of the anthem dismissed Eret entirely: “fuck Eret”. he’s a bad guy, now. we’re still the good guys). but the ideas were there, both for the audience and the streamers. people began to question the narrative they had been fed, the notions of right and wrong, leading to an election arc where Wilbur and Tommy - our initial heroes - were very openly undermining the democratic process. even as the audience was overwhelmingly on Pogtopia’s side, questions were raised as to the fact that they were staging a coup against a democratically elected leader simply because they felt entitled to it, because they were the heroes. the story began to embrace this: Wilbur wondering if they were the “villains”. it culminated, of course, in Techno’s bid for anarchy and rejection of systemic power structures, his assertion that power corrupts, and that L’Manburg was never the paradigm of goodness that it painted itself as, and perhaps never will be.

and that’s just on a meta level; in character, i honestly believe the effects of Eret’s betrayal can be felt in practically every major L’Manburg character decision since. it’s most obvious in Wilbur, of course. the dude never recovered, never quite learnt to trust again. Eret’s betrayal was the first crack in his image of a perfect L’Manburg - the L’Manburg from the anthem - a crack that would spread after Schlatt’s rise to power, and eventually shatter in his corruption arc. in the culmination of this arc - the destruction of Manburg - he purposefully mirrors Eret’s “It was never meant to be”, thus returning to the first moment he realised that good and evil weren’t quite so black and white.

but Wilbur’s not the only one: all of the original L’Manburg boys struggle with trust nowadays, and all of them have strayed from the vanilla perception of morality that the L’Manburg revolution represented. Fundy’s very existence conflates Wilbur and L’Manburg into one being; Fundy is the first child of L’Manburg, and thus is Wilbur’s son. as he grows to acknowledge Wilbur’s flaws as a father, then, he’s also rejecting L’Manburg. he’s revealing, retroactively, that the perfect L’Manburg from the early days never existed, or could only exist in the simplified perspective of a child. Tubbo, meanwhile, is the third president of L’Manburg, and Wilbur has already lampshaded the fact that things don’t usually go so well for the president. Tubbo has begun to make dubious decisions in the name of his country, the power leading him towards increasingly out of character actions. he’s (arguably) turning into the very tyrannical ruler the anthem condemned, making weapons a bigger and bigger part of the supposedly peaceful nation. and Tommy, the one who secured L’Manburg’s independence. he was the protagonist, the force for good. he was supposed to be the paragon of what L’Manburg stood for, giving up his selfish desires (the discs) for the good of the nation. now, he’s prioritising those discs over everything. he’s been exiled from L’Manburg, unable to align with their morality anymore, and is working alongside their number 1 enemy in pursuit of his goals.

even Eret themself, after a brief attempt at redemption arc, has embraced their place of power despite it putting him at odds with the ‘friends’ he tried to prioritise on November 16th.

look, moral of the story is that Eret’s betrayal began the steer the story away from the typical good vs bad narrative it initially mirrored; began the turn away from Hamilton, to the slightly more morally grey Heathers, to bloody Greek mythology (home to some of the most morally complex stories around). it shattered the characters’ perception of the world around them and what they fought for, and resulted in all of them turning away from the idealistic L’Manburg they once fought to establish. it even made them realise that said idealistic L’Manburg may have never existed in the first place. that’s why Eret’s betrayal continues to be such a prominent feature in fan material, and the most memorable part of the Revolution; it changed something fundamentally in the moral framework of the narrative, and broke something that can never truly be fixed