meow @ink-bunny2 - Tumblr Blog

Man I haven’t rambled about my minecraft diaries thoughts here in a LONG time. I’ve very busy with webcomics and now a lot of my old takes I can see are flawed or outdated but I have something new today I don’t think I’ve spoken about before when it comes to my own, individual perspective on minecraft diaries as someone rewriting it, and it’s a perspective I don’t think I see very often in fandom spaces:

I don’t think Minecraft Diaries is about the main characters. I think Minecraft Diaries is about the background characters, and you cannot have an authentic Minecraft diaries experience without them.

Now obviously this isn’t the authorial intent at all. I don’t think Jessica Bravura went out of her way to, intentionally on purpose, flood her modded minecraft gameplay roleplay series with hundreds of NPCs that each mattered pivotally to an overarching narrative that was specifically designed from the beginning to be about the background characters instead of literally Aphmau herself lmfao. Obviously the authorial intent is that minecraft diaries is about Aphmau, and like… Garroth, Laurance, Aaron, and Zane as the secondary core of what the story’s about. But authorial intent isn’t what I’m talking about here.

I think, mostly because of how the story was constructed through the medium of modded minecraft gameplay, similar to the likes of DanTDM’s mod showcases back in the day, this storytelling format requires the creation of a lot of NPC characters that are quickly thrown together for a single, brief purpose, like demonstrating a mod, or being a brief antagonist in a mini contained story constructed for the mod showcase, and then they usually disappear forever. Thats just how the medium goes! It’s not even necessarily bad writing, because that’s just… what the medium was at the time, back when minecraft mod showcases with loose narrative plots were the main popular thing. Kawaii~Chan is a good example of one of these background NPCs constructed randomly and briefly for a singular purpose (demonstrating the maid cafe mod). She wasn’t written to be a fully-developed, richly multi-faceted and compelling person in a plot, she’s a background NPC with a fleeting yet specific purpose. That’s literally why she’s called Kawaii~Chan of all things. In the medium Aphmau was specifically using to tell minecraft diaries’ story at the time, Kawaii~Chan served her purpose, and faded into relative obscurity once that purpose was served. She completed the assignment! She was never supposed to be anything more than that, by the demands of the medium’s base structure!! Obviously she became more relevant later as the medium gradually shifted over the years from minecraft modded gameplay to “fully produced and voice acted television show shot in the set dressing of minecraft” and then she was developed more into a well-rounded person, because that was what the new medium’s standards demanded of its characters, but as far as the season 1 medium’s standards demand, KC being a fully developed person any sooner would be…impractical. Needless, inconvenient, useless. That just wasn’t how it went back then.

Minecraft Diaries isn’t as simple as just saying “oh its poorly written and it doesn’t make any sense from a Netflix tv show perspective for her to have a million background NPCs that practically do nothing,” that’s not the case at all and is a severely inaccurate way of looking at it for what it actually was. I think that’s a bad faith reading, to judge MCD s1, and even s2, by Netflix production/writing quality standards. Minecraft Diaries is a series that shifted entire mediums slowly and gradually over the course of years, and the production value and narrative focus upgrade from season 1 (minecraft modded gameplay with some light, improvised story elements incorporated into the mod showcases), to season 2 (mod showcase aspect gets dropped, now we’re beginning to REALLY focus on the narrative plot for the first time and finding our footing in that with incredibly limited tools and production time/budget), to season 3 (fully produced, high budget animated and voice acted, entirely scripted tv show being filmed by a tv entertainment corporation) is emblematic of that medium shift. Each medium of each season demands completely different standards of how the characters should be written. This is part of the challenge that comes with efficiently rewriting it: I am essentially going against the structural standards and demands of the very medium Minecraft Diaries season 1 was made in, and translating the entire thing to a written novel, which is an unfamiliar medium that works under an entirely different ruleset. I am transforming it from the base up into something it never could’ve or frankly should’ve been, which is a ravine’s gap to fill.

But that’s only mildly relevant to my point. Thats just the why we have the background characters and how they all end up serving some kind of important purpose when such a thing never would’ve been possible in a professionally produced television show. But I think because minecraft diaries is so unique in how it was produced, it bears an interestingly unique opportunity in being a series that is not written the same way a Netflix-produced tv show is. A fully scripted and high budget produced animated tv show from Netflix would demand a story that’s cut down and compressed to focus solely on its main characters. It doesn’t have the time or the budget to waste on literally hundreds of background characters. But minecraft diaries, as a modded minecraft playthrough that evolved gradually over time, does have that time and the budget, and it uniquely REQUIRES the production of hundreds of background NPCs that each serve a purpose in the story arcs they were created for. You NEEDED the NPCs that demonstrated each mod for the player, but also the mini, fleeting, relatively shallow NPCs that served narrative roles in whatever story arcs each mod would require, like a villain NPC (eg. Queen of the Candy Dimension), or a helper npc (eg. Prince Reese), etc. And even as MCD transfers out of this early format and into more heavy story-driven content, it still follows this philosophy when it comes to making a million tiny self-composed story arcs that each require their own NPCs.

What does this result in? A story uniquely constructed to center around and require hundreds of important, legitimately LOAD-BEARING background characters.

It’s not a waste of time to focus on the background characters. It’s not a waste of time to focus on Visher, whose importance is emphasized even further in the reboot. Visher is the first substantial death in the series. Visher is the first splatter of blood on the wall, he is the marker that demonstrates to Aphmau that this shit is real, that she’s getting into a dark and terrifying world that isn’t going to be some skip in the park: there will be serious shit happening, and people will die. People will die in horrible, graphic ways, being blown up to pieces by dynamite when their guard is down, when no one is looking. It means if Aphmau isn’t paying attention, the people around her, who she may care for, who she may feel nothing for at all, will be murdered at the cost of her negligence. The fairy tale fantasy is shattered. When Lord Malik warned of dangers in the world hunting him down, he wasn’t fucking joking around. Even if Visher mattered to Aphmau as little as he did in the pre-boot as a brief, fleeting trading mod showcase NPC, he still mattered to the other characters. He had a family. He had a wife who was thrown into despair by his death. He had a son, John, a son who stays narratively relevant even into season 2. He had friends, friends like Donna, who screamed in anguish when he died in the reboot. He had an entire life outside of the protagonist’s point of view, and even if his irrelevancy can be argued in that all the characters that cared about him were background NPCs too, his influence on Aphmau as the first shot fired, as the first splatter of blood on the wall, is not to be undersold. He sets the tone of the series, establishes the way this world is gonna work, lets the audience know that there’s something shifty and mysterious and dark and shadowy going on under the hood. You cannot have Minecraft Diaries without Visher.

It is not a waste of time to focus on Yip and the Eastern Werewolf Tribe. The Alpha of the Eastern Werewolf Tribe was an extremely simple, cartoonish (cough likely racist caricature cough) villain character that only showed up for like… two minutes maximum out of the entire series’ watch time. He was cruel, greedy, arrogant, and again, exceedingly simple. He tried to kill Aphmau and co. He worked for Zane Ro’meave. And yet, despite apparently being a simple, shallow character, he was betrayed by Zane Ro’meave, a victim of Zane’s cruelty. Zane massacred his entire tribe, his family, his people, everyone he knew except for a single surviving member of the tribe, his son, all because Zane just… didn’t feel like continuing to trade with him anymore. Because Zane thought he was “too greedy” and that inconvenienced or bothered him. Which we know certainly was not because of some moral superiority that Zane was offended by on an ethical level, because Zane himself was an equally and exceedingly greedy, power-hungry evil villain, and multiple times throughout the series there’s specifically a point to be made about how Zane throws away his toys when he deems them to be useless. All the researchers he slaughters because they mildly inconvenienced him by taking too long to get him what he wants, or because they mildly talked back to him and he deemed that to be a crime far too great to deserve living anymore. He slaughtered this man who depended on him, the Royal Prince of an untouchable empire, for his pack’s survival. He slaughtered his family, his packmates, potentially his mate, his parents, his friends, everyone in the pack. Mothers, fathers, elders, children, everyone, lost in a completely pointless, unnecessary genocide of pure, unmatched, monstrous cruelty. Before we had Emmalyn being menaced by Zane to demonstrate Zane’s wrath, we had the Alpha of the Eastern Wolf Tribe. Who, despite hating humans and thinking so poorly of them, despite being nothing but cruel to Aphmau and her friends, begged her to save his son. He may have been shallow, but at least some part of him still cared to try to save his son, by desperately clunging to any chance Yip had at not starving to death alone in the freezing cold of a completely slaughtered tribe in the middle of a cold arctic biome, even if it meant his son would be raised by the enemy. Anything was better than the monster that Zane turned out to be. Anything was better than the monster he let into his own home, and died regretting it so sorely that he gave up his son’s life to Aphmau’s hands. If Visher works to set the scene, the Alpha of the Eastern Wolf Tribe works to define and demonstrate our antagonist as an evil, genocidal bastard better than any petty wedding interruption would. You cannot have Zane without him. Frankly, you can’t even have MCD Aaron without him, because of how intimately similar he and Aaron are as heads of their own villages who lost everything due to Zane’s betrayal, one of many victims that were carelessly thrown away as Zane’s toys. You can’t have Minecraft Diaries without him, his son, and the arc they have in season 1.

It is not a waste of time to focus on Damian, the exorcist who freed Malachi in season 1. Malachi is a child that was neglected and abandoned his whole life. He was abandoned by his parents, abused and neglected by the strange doctor who caged him away from the rest of the world, the doctor who ended up murdering this child as his final act of neglect and abuse. He was never cared for or thought of properly, all because he was born with something he couldn’t control, something that made him different, that inconvenienced and disturbed and upset all the adults around him, so they threw him away to be “fixed” and “cured”—something that never worked to make him any less different from everyone else (COUGH this is an analogy COUGH). Malachi died alone and forgotten in the middle of an arctic wasteland nowhere, far away from his family, with no friends, no one to care for him, and a doctor who was never properly put to justice or held accountable for what he did to abuse and kill this poor child. And yet, here Damian steps in, as the only person left alive who remembers. Everyone forgot Malachi with time—except for this one man, who never forgot a thing, who spent his whole life searching for him, who remembered his name and dedicated his life’s purpose to making things right. He had no need to try to fix his ancestors sins, but he did. He cared. He cared for years, and though nothing could undo the damage that was done on Malachi’s psyche, he could free him from the cage his ancestor built for him and let him live the life he deserved from day one: the life of a child loved and cared for by a family that swore to be there for him, who took him in despite his powers, despite the fact that he was a ghost, despite the things that made him weird. Because it didn’t matter how different he was, he deserved to be loved. He deserved to be freed. He deserved closure, and Damian dedicated his life to giving him that. Damian is extremely important to Malachi’s character, in a way that should matter to Levin, to Zoey, to Aphmau, to Garroth and Laurance. You cannot have Malachi without Damian. You cannot have Malachi’s family dynamics without a fully fleshed out Malachi, whose traumatic origins is fully recognized as it is and how it defines him. Damien is a load-bearing domino effect. You cannot have Minecraft Diaries without Damian.

You cannot have Minecraft Diaries without Jeffory the Golden Heart, the first Jury of Nine to prove that a Jo9 member can be good. Previously a purely evil, feared group of villains, but here’s one of those villains who has a family, a deceased wife whom he still loves dearly to this day, a daughter who he tries desperately to care for despite Zane’s threatening influence. Here is this man whose life exists entirely out of Aphmau’s scope, and yet they cross paths, and he humanizes the Jury of Nine in ways no one else has, aside from Katelyn, but even Katelyn doesn’t serve the same powerful role that he does. He isn’t just a villain, he’s a single dad who has a family whom he loves and cares for and wants to protect, a family he’s willing to die and kill for. He’s a man who was manipulated by Zane, a good person who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, to demonstrate how even the best of us can be turned into Zane’s weapons and toys. In season 2, Katelyn briefly speaks about her origins in the Jury of Nine, and in the same vein of talking about Jeffory’s origins in the Jo9, she mentions how she used to have a family as well, before she joined the Jury. She had four younger brothers she cared for dearly, but Zane found out about them, and… she falls silent, upset, and her guard goes up, clearly a deeply painful subject she refuses to share anything further. Even those that didn’t want to join Zane’s Jury were forced to via threatening their family members, and if that was enough to work on Katelyn, there’s no doubt that it could work on Jeffory, too. It’s likely he never even wanted to become a member of the Jury, but was chosen by Zane for his skill, and when he turned him down, Zane forced him into this life of cruelty, bloodshed, violence, and corruption by threatening the life of his daughter. But Aphmau provides Jeffory hope, she is the first real force that’s ever fought back against Zane and really had a shot at succeeding. So he trusts in her, and he believes in her cause, he believes in the hope that she provides him. She speaks to his heart, and brings out the best in him, brings out the man that he had to kill so many years ago. Jeffory is a crucially defining foundation of Katelyn’s character, and therefore defines Travis Valkrum’s character as the love interest who takes his place. Jeffory’s death is so damn important, it was the first time Jess had ever hired voice acting for her series. Without hiring Kestin to voice Zane in Jeffory’s murder scene, we wouldn’t have all the voice acted work, even just from Kestin, that followed afterwards, that became so massively defining for Aphmau’s career from that point onwards. Without Jeffory, there’s a chance we wouldnt have ended up with the such high production value MCD s3 and MCD reboot we got years later. Aphmau’s multi-million dollar business would not be the same without Jeffory’s influence. To this day, they still bring him up at convention panels, when reminiscing about how this all began. You cannot have Minecraft Diaries without Jeffory the Golden Heart.

You wouldn’t have Minecraft Diaries without Nicole. Without Vylad and Sasha. Without Lowell and John. Without Paul and Donna, Emmalyn and Kenmur. Without Cadenza and Lord Joh and Lord Hayden, hugely defining Laurance’s entire character. You wouldn’t have MCD without Kiki, Brendan, Bodolf, Leona, and Khira. Without Hailey, Zoey, Malachi, Levin, Alexis, Molly, Dale, Logan, Lo, Amethyst, Lord Burt, Matilda, Lord Malik, Michi, The Demon Warlock, Dmitri, Nekoette, Fenrir, Gabriel, Garte, Zianna, Hyria, Ivy, Ivan, Lillian, the list goes on. None of them are optional in my eyes. Man, in my rewrite I’ve removed probably like… 3 notable background characters, and I’ve EATEN SHIT in the writers room SCRAMBLING to invent entire massive plot arcs JUST to fix the holes they leave behind in their wake when you remove literally any of them. It is legitimately highly difficult to write minecraft diaries without focusing on any of the notable backgrounds characters, because of the massive, load-bearing, domino effect influence each of them has on a fuckton of other characters and the narrative at large. Legitimately it is a goddamn nightmare trying to write minecraft diaries without even a tiny handful of them.

Minecraft Diaries’s main characters cannot be defined without the influence these background characters have on them. MCD Laurance is not MCD Laurance, in any capacity, without Lord Joh’s influence on his character. You cannot have Laurance without Cadenza, Hayden, Vylad, even Michi and Fenrir. You cannot have Garroth without Lillian and Nicole. You can’t have Dante without Gene, Nekoette, KC, Nicole, Donna, Logan, the Eastern Wolf Tribe, or even Yip. You cannot have Aphmau without Zoey, Malachi, and Levin, and therefore all the other, even more minor characters that mean something significant to them, like Gabriel, Damian, Lord Malik, and Matilda. You cannot have Zane without Jacob, Lillian, Alexis, Molly, the Alpha of the Eastern Wolf Tribe, Kiki, Bodolf, Yip, Lily, Emmalyn, Kenmur, Leona, and everyone else he hurts in his wake. The moment you start cutting out these background NPCs that are seemingly “irrelevant” and “only drag down the plot with unnecessary filler” you start cutting out pivotal and meaningful pieces of your own main cast’s character arcs and personalities, pieces they cannot be their full, authentic, multi-faceted, compelling selves without.

MCD Zane is nothing without his path of bloodshed and destruction, all the people that he hurts with not a care in the world, all the toys he throws away in his arrogance. Zane is defined as a villain not by his own snarky, witty, cunning, maniacally laughing performance, but by all the people whose lives he’s irreparably damaged and shaped and torn away forever. He is the main antagonist because of what he does to the background characters. Laurance is nothing without Sasha and his family, and how his father’s death irreversibly shaped his entire character arc and personality and worldview, he’s nothing without Michi and Fenrir and how the werewolf kingdom arc hugely shaped his character arc by forcing his Shadow Knight side out of him, how hugely it shaped his and Aphmau’s relationship and intimately solidified their bond for the rest of the season. Laurance is nothing without the werewolf kingdom arc, the werewolf kingdom arc is nothing without Fenrir, Fenrir is nothing without Abby, Abby is nothing without Jeffory, and therefore if you cut Jeffory out of the picture, you somehow end up fucking over the character arc of Laurance Zvahl and have to HAUL ASS trying to undo the damage you’ve done, which is exactly what rewriting MCD feels like lmao.

But above all else, I think the character each and every background NPC is the most pivotally important to is Aphmau. Where the other main characters have their specific areas of background NPCs that they intersect with, Aphmau interacts with everyone. And I think one of the most important pieces of her character is her role as Lady Irene, the goddess that brings hope and light and love to everywhere she goes. The paragon of mercy and love that fights against a cruel and unjust world that keeps arguing for violence where she enforces mercy. Aphmau, who brings the best out of everyone, whose influence is designed to heal the rot and damage everywhere she touches. Where Zane is important in how he brings destruction and devastation to everywhere he touches, Aphmau is important in the hope she brings to everyone she meets. On a narrative level, it’s her purpose, her entire job as the main character. She brings hope to Fenrir when she tries to break him out of a cruel system and speaks of a different way of life, she brings hope to Jeffory and Katelyn as she convinces them to flee the Jury of Nine, she brings hope to Laurance and Garroth as they cling to her image as their salvation, she brings hope to the fucking Neapolitan Village by solving their murder mystery lmfao, she brings hope to Brendan as she works to save his life, to Lowell and John as she works to resolve the conflict between their villages and saves Lowell from being turned into a rug, she saves Lord Burt’s life, she gives Nicole and Kawaii~Chan and Lucinda a safe place to live where they can finally stop running from the world that’s been persecuting them their whole lives. She gives hope to Dante, who refuses to let go of that hope for a single second for 15 years straight, she gives hope to Travis as she kills his abusive shitty dad and frees him and the entire village of the island, and gives Travis the home, friends, acceptance and support he always needed. She brings hope to Aaron, who was convinced the world was a horrible, shitty place not worth living in, she brings hope to Emmalyn and Kenmur and Donna and Logan, to Phoenix Drop at large as she saves the village from disrepair, to the entire realm at large as she fights against Zane and O’khasis and The Shadow Lord. Aphmau would be nothing without this. Aphmau would not be Aphmau without this core fact of her character. You cannot write MCD Aphmau without the influence she brings to everyone around her, including and especially all the background characters that decide to fight by her side, who give their lives to her in the war against Scaleswind and O’khasis, because even though their enemy seems impossible to beat, Aphmau’s influence is more than enough to make them believe in fighting and dying for what is good and right.

Minecraft Diaries is, quite literally, a story about how friendship saves the day lmao. Aphmau’s bonds define her character arc and the entire narrative plot of MCD at large more than anything else. If she didn’t befriend Nicole and give Nicole hope, Phoenix Drop never would’ve won the war against Scaleswind and O’khasis. If she didn’t befriend Dale, Zoey, and Logan, who protected her kids against Zenix’s attack on Phoenix Drop, her kids probably wouldn’t have survived the attack, and the rest of the story would’ve gone with Levin being deceased, which would fuck over season 2 later on when he becomes Lord of Phoenix Drop. You cannot have Aphmau without Matilda, Lord Malik, Zoey, Malachi, Levin, Hyria, Kiki, Brendan, Visher, Donna, Lowell, Lord Burt, John, Emmalyn, Kenmur, Kawaii~Chan, Katelyn, Jeffory, Nicole… literally any of the characters she interacted with in the entire series and influenced or was influenced by in some way. Every character she helps is a crucial character building moment that defines her as a person. Every character she hurts is a crucial character moment that defines her character arc throughout the series. The second you start removing them, you start losing pieces of Aphmau that make her the fully developed, complex, well-rounded individual that she is.

The background characters of MCD are often some of the first to be called “filler,” “unnecessary,” “uselsss and pointless,” the first to go when people decide to cut pieces out of the original series in an effort to essentially turn MCD into one of the same compressed, short and succinct, high budget production tv series on Netflix. But I disagree with this practice. You cut out the background characters, you cut out not only fundamental, important, influential chunks of your main cast’s character arcs, and you cut out important chunks of the narrative as a whole, but you also cut out the heart of the series. The heart of the series is not, to me, the main cast at all. It’s the background characters. I don’t write MCD for the main cast, I write it for the background NPCs that people cut out to “save time” and “remove filler.” I don’t write Cycles of Love for Garrance, or Aphmau, or Zane Ro’meave’s villainy, or anything in the main cast at all, I write it because Minecraft Diaries is a story about a woman stepping into the lives of a thousand people, people who live entire lives separate from hers, who exist as people outside of her scope, but are still massively influenced by her, and influence her in turn. That is what Minecraft Diaries’s plot is about, hundreds of individuals coming together to form a complex web of connections and domino effect influences on each other that end up changing the world, for both better and worse. That is what Minecraft Diaries is, as a story. Without the people that make up the story, you do not have the heart of Minecraft Diaries.

Or at least thats my interpretation of things lmfao, none of that’s concrete fact or anything and is mostly just character analysis speculation. It’s not the authorial intent, because there…really wasn’t much authorial intent in general to go off of in terms of an overarching plot with a sensible goal to tell, because minecraft diaries was not written to have the same overarching plot that a Netflix series or a movie would have. It’s a modded minecraft roleplay. So it’ll act and behave the way a modded minecraft roleplay does. Because that’s…what it was always supposed to be, and only ever could’ve been. But in that, I think there’s something beautiful to be made about how it recreates the isekai experience of a woman stepping lightly into a thousand different peoples lives, each fully developed and real separate from her, and yet she influences and pulls all of them to follow her and her footsteps, in the same way Lady Irene did in life. And how this contrasts against Zane and The Shadow Lord, and the opposite, destructive impact they have on the cast at large. So, in that way, MCD’s plot is about the constant battle between Aphmau and Zane/Shad, and how they both work in opposing directions to either heal or break the world. The Goddess of Life and creation and healing and light and hope VS the God of death and destruction and chaos and bloodshed and fire and pain. That kind of eternal cycle between yin and yang. That’s what MCD is to me, and you can’t have that without the background characters.

I think that’s. About everything I wanted to say??? I will die on the hill of “there’s no such thing as filler content, you just need to change how you view that media as a piece of art” forever lmao. There is no such thing as filler, you fool!!!!! You’re just not viewing it for what it is!!! Which is a modded minecraft playthrough!!! And if you saw it for what it was, and not the 8-episode-long-greenlit-binge worthy-Netflix-professional-tv-production-series corporate content mill that you’ve grown complacent to, you would see the value and the worth in it all!!! You would see the potential and the meaning that it all can hold and how it all intersects with each other to create a larger narrative of how all these tiny background lives are actually important and if we come together we can change the world for the better !!!! You have missed the point and are making an inaccurate judgement of something that never was designed to meet the standards of an entirely separate medium to begin with !! Enjoy and relish in the opportunity to spend 100 episodes puttering around with background NPCs, relish in this luxury you will never see again in the age of cut costs and the plague of shows getting cancelled after only 20 episodes or 2 seasons !! I am tied up in a madman’s suit and dragged off the stage by my heels howling and screaming until I fade out of earshot

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

meow