Do you have any thoughts on Rek during earlier seasons (S2-S4)? I can struggle to pin down his character, and the recent uptick in text posts, clips, and tagged reblogs (along with the answers to my ask) from you and others help a lot in avoiding some common misconceptions. However, a lot of these focus on his S6 and S7, and his past character also is difficult to me. Is there anything that you’d say was of note, and/or any reason there’s less talk about it?
i think we just talk more from s6 and s7 because there are actually streams to analyze LMAO. s2-s4 is rough because of how little they've been documented and also how the majority of things we can analyze about rek comes from other people's videos (and streams, when applicable), but we gotta work with what we've got, and about a month or so ago i actually did watch every single s2 video for the sole purpose of seeing what s2 rek was like, so i've got a couple tidbits about that lol
(just typed everything. i'm putting this under a readmore i yapped way too much LMAO)
for a couple of interesting things from s2:
parrot and spoke were threatening to kill clutch, who had just joined the server that day. clutch asked rek, who was in the vc, for help, but when he showed up, he started threatening him alongside parrot and spoke
came up with the plan for jaron to pretend to be him when scamming clown; he's a pretty good liar even though he says he doesn't like lying and thinks he's bad at acting
rigged m.o.b's old base with spoke (SPOKE: right when we come through their front door, we need to just yell at them like, "hey, we don't want violence, we just wanna talk." / REK: [laughs] until we blow up their base.)
stole zam's among us statue and left her a series of riddles to follow in order to get it back, creating the scavenger hunt while he was undercover in her detective agency pretending to help her solve the clues at the same time
pretended to not know about the anvils poafa tried to kill him with after poafa used the trap on leo, despite the fact that he had gone back and secretly stolen about half of them
pulled the cake lag trap under m.o.b tower to help poggies win the fight against m.o.b, but never actually joined the fight himself
fought in the finale alongside poggies despite not actually knowing why they were fighting in the first place (literally sent a message in chat saying "does anyone know why we're fighting?") and being underprepared (REK: i'm down to my last piece of mutton! how am i supposed to fight these kids?!), but from all the footage i've looked through it seemed like he went deathless and was holding his own pretty well—he popped three of mapicc's (at least i think it was mapicc. it's really hard to tell their voices apart sometimes) totems while he only popped once. at some point he also asked if anyone had "copious amounts of tnt," as if the 1000 withers weren't blowing things up enough already
there's a couple more things, like rek helping jaron with a flying machine to strand someone in the end, helping poafa and mapicc rig a trap with tnt, vitalasy showing rek the 1000 dogs he was gonna bring to the prom even though they weren't teamed or even really allied in the slightest, clutch getting rek to help him build his void trap, zam paying rek to build a trap intended to trap herself and somehow managing to kill parrot with it instead...
he has a very strange team relationship in s2, as after poggies disbanded he's seen getting along with members of every team that hated them, but old poggies members—namely parrot and spoke—still got him to help with their traps, like the cake lag trap and parrot showing him his void trap. two of his enemies have even expressed liking him, only really targeting him out of his association with poggies: clown, deciding to trap rek instead of outright killing him (REK: what's my guarantee you won't kill me if i just give you my armor right now? / CLOWN: parker, parker. i like you, parker, alright? this is not about you, it's about something else. i don't wanna hurt you.); mapicc, fighting him in the finale (MAPICC: kill rek! i like him, but kill him!). it's a sentiment that still carries through to this day—people have never enjoyed killing him because they like him and they tend to avoid it if at all possible, and rek gets to take advantage of it by being granted leniency from his enemies and neutral parties, and gaining information that he can then use to keep himself alive. notably, he doesn't yet have that same sense of team loyalty that'll eventually become his entire thing after he rejoins lifesteal; he's not gonna outright betray his team by any means (at least not on purpose), but he's not necessarily dedicated to them, not in the way he was with the sticklers and apocalypse. he's an opportunist; he'll take whatever he can get and make the most of it. consequently, though, this leads to him feeling distant from his teams. for example, he joins poggies in the finale and fights alongside them, but he doesn't stick around long enough for all of poggies to kill themselves together, nor did he even know what they were fighting for. he also wasn't there for their biggest fights, at most playing support or watching from the sidelines. he was on the team, but he didn't really feel part of it.
but while his loyalties were different, what does stay the same is his fondness for chaos. "kind" and "nice" and "sweet" have all been words that color other players' perceptions of him, but have never really fit his actual actions on the server; he's been a fan of destruction and deception since the day he first logged on, and he tends to get away with it because people like him too much to target him—"yeah, he's associated with the enemy team and i'll attack him if i have to, but it's rekrap2! who could ever hurt dear, sweet rekrap2? i'd feel too bad about it!" morality has never been a factor in his decision-making either; it doesn't matter if something was morally evil or morally good, only whether or not it was fun or interesting, and most often the things that are fun and interesting on lifesteal involve chaos. i can't count the amount of times he's done something purely because he found it funny, and i would list some recent season examples because i think about those the most but i'm trying to stay on topic lmao
(it's hard to say this about s2-s4 because of how little we see so these are recent examples but i just really wanted to say it anyway: this isn't to say that rek doesn't have moments where he's just nice for the sake of it. he helps clear a lot of wardens out of spawn in s6 and he gives pili, jojo, and pangi birthday presents in s7, and while it is just his real self being nice, it has the added effect of contributing to his overall image of being nice on lifesteal, which continues to disincentivize people from targeting him. not that he's completely immune, of course, but sometimes i think about the way zam and pentar completely forgot that there was a reason rek didn't have an elytra, saying that "[he] could probably make a deal [for one].")
what's also really funny about s2 is that i'd argue this is the season that actually started his reputation of being untrappable—there was leo's first armor stand trap where he tried to convince rek he wanted to trap clown, the second armor stand trap in the gameshow that spep was involved with, and poafa's anvil trap, all of which seemingly happened in fairly quick succession.
which leads us into s3. everyone and their damn mother tunnel visions on s3 diamondduo and ignores every other thing that happens, so i'm not gonna open that can of worms (but i will say that there was a moment before zam recruited rek to join her side for the wall war, where she said something about keeping up his untrappable streak, and rek had mentioned that it wasn't the traps that scared him, it was the expectation of maintaining his reputation that was what really stressed him out the most. to reference s7 again, right before he rolled up to jojo's birthday party, upon the chat saying that it might be a trap, he just said, "well, then it's an opportunity to escape." you're gonna look me in the eye and tell me that he fears for his life when he sees traps as "opportunities"?? and also when rek walked into subz's trap and subz had asked whether he wanted the harder, more dangerous challenge or the easier, less dangerous one, rek had just responded with, "which one's more fun?" danger isn't necessarily a deterrent for him when he has the confidence in himself to be able to survive it).
instead, what i will say is that rek embraces chaos even more in this season compared to the last, being recruited by clown to join the dirties and chaos faction, and then later joining decimation, participating in much more pvp than he did in s2 and frankly thriving in it; he was skilled at both candycrushing and cartpvp, being so good at the latter that players had genuinely been scared to fight him. he killed clown at the very beginning of the season (saying that it was something he'd been trying to do for three months last season), and killed branzy twice after accidentally betraying his team (he did say he felt really bad about it, but he also didn't exactly hesitate, especially when terrain was literally right next to branzy the second time). he was also more than happy to help zam with her door-selling business trap, but when it failed to kill clutch, he played dumb and pretended like he didn't even know the trap existed despite literally sitting at the bottom of the spike pit waiting to kill people. he says "yo what's up zam!" when she logs in as he's literally with decimation about to spawntrap her.
i can't really say more as i haven't written notes on every s3 video yet, but ian also talks about his whole party vs policy perspective, which is indicative of how he treats teams and alliances from s2-s4—and that's pretty telling, isn't it? he doesn't particularly care about who he teams with, just that he's teaming with people who he agrees with...and it's important to remember that among those teams are the dirties (fighting against the cleansers who were using an exploit to kill people quickly, with their goal being to equalize everyone on the server back to 10 hearts), chaos faction (fighting both the dirties and the cleansers, with their goal being to hoard all the hearts for themselves and getting his own heart count to 20—which is something he has famously never cared about; he instead was just "having fun killing people and stealing their hearts"), and decimation (banning everyone off the server to bring them to s4).
then, when he had his fun killing people with decimation, he decided to make zam kill him, banning himself off the server on the day of the finale and giving the enemy team 20 hearts.
this marked the true start of an interesting theme that would kind of follow rek into every season afterwards (with the exception of s7. if i had a nickel for every time an mcsr ranked event coincided with a major lifesteal event, i'd have a couple of them), that being his lack of purpose and aimlessness followed by banning himself off the server completely. there's the aforementioned s3, s5 where he didn't even give anyone else time to say goodbye before he jumped in the void, and s6 where it was very much an accident but he found it so funny that he didn't even care, even though he'd just forever altered the trajectory of woogie's life. i have no idea if he banned himself when he left in s4, but his aimlessness definitely haunted him the entire time he was there instead of just at the end of the season.
s4 is the fuzziest for me on account of the fact that rek left halfway through so i don't really have much to analyze here, but there is something i wanna mention that we never and probably will never get an answer to, and if it's gonna haunt me until the end of time then i want it to haunt at least five other people too.
in parrot's movie-length video of his time on lifesteal, there's a part where rek and clown meet up with him to talk. clown says that he and rek want to duo up in order to do something separate from the nppp, but in order to do that they wanted permission for rek to be able to wear pants. parrot grants them permission through the use of clown's pants pass—as he was already specially allowed to wear pants—by splitting it in half, meaning that if one of them had lost their half, they'd immediately become an enemy to the nppp (though that being said, the nppp were never gonna go after clown for breaking the pants rule, so all the danger here was just with rek).
sometime later on one of clown's streams, he and rek are planning to break into a prison at spawn and farm the prisoners inside for hearts, but this doesn't end up working as every cow within a 1000 block radius of spawn had been killed, meaning they couldn't get past the elder guardians' mining fatigue. while they were traipsing around looking for cows, though, they talked about "something secret" they had planned, but decided not to talk about any details, wanting to leave it for their videos (that neither of them ever ended up making, by the way).
back to parrot's video, he wanted to get the pants pass from clown and rek in order to survive a duel he had planned. upon asking rek, however, he simply dodges the question (REK: do you think i have the pass on me right now? / PARROT: ...yes? / REK: okay. well, it was nice talking to you.) and leaves. when parrot asks clown, he says "this no longer has a linked brother, so it's completely useless now" and gives parrot his half of the pass. as far as i know, this is the last we ever see of rek in s4.
what happened to rek's half of the pass? i don't know. what were clown and rek planning that necessitated them working with just the two of them separate from nppp? i don't fucking know. and i wish i knew So Badly.
anyway i think that's kinda it. i've been writing this thing for so long that i feel like this just turned into me yapping incomprehensively about stuff rather than actual analysis, but hopefully you got something from all of it LMAO. it's really hard to figure out the intricacies of rekrap2, but as someone who's been trying to study this guy's character obsessively for the past 9 months or so, you just gotta remember that he's less risk-averse than most people think, not nearly as paranoid, loves chasing thrills and fun and interesting things, and his favorite type of lie is a white lie.
the day i get fed actually accurate clown + rek dynamics is the day i die happy. i don’t care if it’s rapiers or clownrek, but there’s maybe one good fic of them on ao3, and i know the person who wrote it
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
pixelskylines
gamechangershow
gummygunk
2087
areudirty
yousharknotpass
