Life Series Pearl was raised by wolves (as confirmed by Pearl at Twitchcon), so here’s some consequences of that:
She will whimper and sometimes howl when in distress because she learned to do it as a baby to get the attention of the wolves raising her. The other players find it very off putting, because it genuinely sounds like a wolf doing it. It makes it hard for her to get people to stay around her when she’s crying because it’s kind of piercing. They expect to hear human sobs and instead Pearl starts howling.
Pearl prefers to sleep in the same bed as someone else. She’s never really gotten used to blankets and she’s come to realize that players don’t typically share beds (Scott gave her the oddest look during Last Life when she asked and told her that it was weird), so she shares with her wolf of the season to keep warm. The exception to this was Limited Life, where Froggy’s little body wasn’t enough to heat her up so she tried sleeping with blankets. She would wake up every morning with them torn to shreds from tossing and turning in her sleep. Eventually BigB noticed and offered to share a bed with her. That and the Secret Life sleepover in her mound are the closest she’s gotten to really feeling like a pack with other players.
Part of why she took being alone so hard in DL is because wolves aren’t supposed to be alone. A lone wolf is a sick wolf, a wolf that has something deeply wrong with that would make its pack cast it out or leave it to die. Pearl doesn’t want to be a sick wolf. She wants to belong to the pack.
thinking about etho’s eulogy for pearl again and how it’s riddled with the bitter realization that she ended her series without taking a chance with him
Etho yearned for Pearl when he would follow her as a ghost to shield her from impostors in among us, because he believed she could avenge him more than anyone.
Etho yearned for Pearl when they started teaming up as the last yellows in Last Life. She might have trapped them for a boogey kill, and she might have suggested burning down his tree, and she might have pulled him down to his red life, but it didn’t matter. In the end it was he who would apologize, even telling her he trusted her the most after everything.
Etho yearned for Pearl when he accidentally knocked her off a great height in Limited Life, leading to their 1v1 and him losing. “Nice!” he exclaimed, right after dying. He lost time but she gained some, and that mattered more.
Etho yearned for Pearl when everyone was teasing him to sell his tissue box. “Couldn’t I sell art instead, like Pearl?”
Etho yearned for Pearl everytime she started taking up redstone projects. He would play Pearldle all the time, carefully logging all of his attempts for her to read after. He got so excited to be invited in the ballroom she built for them to fight on. Etho yearned to see her grow, experiment, and succeed in things she put her mind into.
Maybe thats why he also yearned for Pearl when he played minigames.
He yearned for Pearl whenever he played TCG. After all, she was the best card—his favorite card—in a vacuum.
He yearned for Pearl in decked out, taking mental notes on her play style. When Lizzie, under Pearl’s supervision, got to level 4, Etho whispered, “It’s Pearl, man…” among the applause for Lizzie.
He loved being her second hand in Hungry Hermits. When Impulse suggested having more cooperative games in the server, he turned to look at Pearl, a whole 180 from Impulse, for a moment after. In a world where he might have the courage he might have asked her to play more games with him.
And the boldest he has ever shown this buildup of continuous yearning was when he tasted a glimpse of an opportunity during Past Life—a sense of familiarity in Pearl’s invitation to team together against everyone, a familiarity he only learned because of rehearsed daydreams and well-explored what-ifs.
He would be a fool to let go of it… if only she felt how real it was for him.
Etho, who gets called a genius on the daily, clinging unto a false narrative he was informed to be untruthful from the start. It couldn’t be further from a rational decision.
In the end, he tried his hardest to get that string tied and locked in place, in a manner so unconventional and out-of-the-box, that only he could ever think of a scheme like that.
When watching Etho’s final episode of Past Life, try to think of Pearl watching before you. Listening to every conversation he’s partaking in. Even—especially—the muted ones, where he is seemingly just talking to himself.
And in the faintest of thoughts, try to realize that we are only shown a fraction of Etho’s attempt to act on years of excruciating longing for this sort of secrecy between just him and Pearl. Just the two of them for once, with only his unspoken thoughts hanging in the air. Maybe she will finally hear them if he screams them loud enough in his mind. Maybe.
271 // Tough one. The fact that he watched all the way to the finale and was sharing it with pearl through call, I’m thinking thoughts, guys. Normal ones.
Etho glances back up at the firewatch tower, making sure none of his teammates are paying attention. “C’mere real quick,” he says, starting down the stairs.
“This isn’t suspicious at all,” Pearl says, but she still follows him.
Once they’re safely out of earshot, Etho says, “Let’s finish our conversation. For real this time.”
Pearl sighs. “This again?”
“Yep. Gem and Grian aren’t here, so they won’t hear you.”
“I already told you, it was a lie. I wasn’t just saying that because Gem was listening.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Pearl glances around like someone else might be listening—which is entirely warranted, given that last time they were alone in the woods together, someone blew Etho up. “Why are you so convinced that I was telling the truth?”
“You were,” Etho says. “You just don’t realize it.”
“You don’t get to decide how I feel about something!”
“Why not? Gem does it.”
“No she—” Pearl throws up her hands. For a second he thinks he’s got her, but then she switches gears and asks him, “Why do you even care?”
“Because it’s not fair,” Etho says, even as he asks himself the same question. Why does he care so much about Pearl being treated fairly? Unfair things happen to everyone. It’s weird that he got so worked up about it. Still, the conviction remains. “You were right. They’ve been treating you badly.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Nothing to do with the fact that you’re mad you got kicked out and want to break up our team.”
“Of course not,” Etho lies.
“And if I do team with you, you definitely wouldn't get bored after one session and abandon me.”
She’s got him. He can't really dispute that accusation. “What if I pinky promised not to do that?”
“Would you leave your team for me, then?” Pearl says. “Or does this only go one way?”
“Sure,” Etho says. The immediacy of his answer surprises him as much as it does Pearl, but then he thinks about it and realizes he doesn’t really care about his team this season. Scar would be mad, which would be funny, and Scott would be mad, which would be a lot more fun than he is now, and Bdubs would be really mad, which is one of Etho’s favorite things in the whole world. “Let’s do it.”
“Hang on, now,” Pearl says. “I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”
“C’mon, it’ll be fun! Please?” Etho makes puppy eyes at her.
“I’m still not going to betray my team over a little teasing! Why would I do that?”
“A little teasing? They threw you out like trash!”
“You keep saying stuff like that, and it’s just—”
“True stuff?”
“I still don’t get it,” Pearl says. “Why you think that way about us. Does it really look that bad?”
“I mean, yeah,” Etho says. How does he explain this to her? “At first I thought you and Gem were like me and Bdubs, but you’re not.”
Pearl snorts. “Definitely not.” Then her eyes narrow and she says, “Why do you think that?”
Etho squirms a little. “We have this back-and-forth thing, y’know? I push him and he pushes me. With you guys, Gem pushes you and you just—”
“I push back,” Pearl says, sounding offended.
“You do?”
“I complain all the time! I told them the netherrack was ugly, I…” Pearl struggles to come up with a second example for so long that Etho feels obligated to interrupt.
“You’re doing it wrong,” he says. “You have to up the stakes every time, that’s how it’s supposed to go. He goes—I mean, she goes low, you go lower.”
Pearl looks thoughtful. “I don’t know about that,” she says, “but you’re right. I don’t get them back enough.”
“If they push, you have to push back. You can’t let them walk all over you. You gotta make ‘em realize they’ll miss you when you’re gone.”
“By, let me guess, teaming up with you to betray them?”
“Offer still stands,” Etho says. “I’ll ditch my guys too.”
Pearl gets a devious look on her face. “What if I told Scott you said that? Or Scar, or Bdubs?”
He only hesitates for a split second. “Go for it.”
“You really don’t care?”
“If you do, make sure I’m there for it. I wanna see their faces.”
“I wish I could do that,” Pearl says, a little bitterly. “Stop caring about things. It sounds so convenient.”
Etho wouldn’t say he doesn’t care about anything, but if it gets Pearl interested, he won’t argue. “It’s pretty great. I could teach you.”
Pearl looks away. Etho can’t tell what she’s thinking, and in the uncertainty, he starts to process the position he’s put himself in with this conversation. If she wanted, she could turn him down, snitch on him to both their teams, and completely screw him over.
She won’t, though. It’s not like her. Maybe that’s why he—
“I’ll think about it,” Pearl says.
“You will?” He sounds a little too eager, and feels embarrassed. But it makes her smile.
“It’s a big decision,” she says. “I’ll have to sleep on it.”
“You’re killing me.” But he can see it in her eyes, she’s tempted. He’s going to get her. The thought excites him in a way that only one of his current teammates can.
Maybe he has nothing to worry about. Maybe it’ll keep feeling like this, and he won’t get that itch to move on like he so often does. It’s near the end of the season anyway; if they’re going to do this, they’d better do it now.
“Do you really think we’d make a good team?” Pearl asks him.
“We’d make a great team,” Etho assures her. He’s almost starting to believe it himself.
—
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hi i swear this is the last thing but i watched ethos pov and from his pov you can hear gem and grian encouraging pearl to go kill jimmy btw. i dont remember what exactly they said but. etho was fighting an enderman to try and get a pearl and he was in range for that. i dont know what to say about that other than that. maybe influenced him telling the other two villies off in his eulogy. idk. just. god.
watching etho's pov, you can honestly barely hear what they're saying. but he seems to have cut out the part after this, where he speaks to grian and gem once pearl leaves to kill jimmy. he asks "where's pearl?" and they don't answer him.
etho seems to have pearl on the brain multiple times throughout session seven. he has a very compassionate and genuine response to her death, and his eulogy is more of the same. it's fascinating to watch him seem to decide over the course of the season that, since pearl is the butt of the villies' jokes, and eventually of everyone else's, he's not going to participate.
and it actually comes off as genuine! i won't pretend to be an etho expert, so if anyone knows of another time he's taken something this seriously and made it a point to be fair and compassionate, please do let me know.
this whole thing has thrown me for such a loop. i can't believe that someone who's actually in the life series is noticing and taking issue with the same shit as i am. let alone the fact that it's etho (love the guy, but he's famously emotionally inept). i keep searching for another interpretation besides the obvious and coming up short.
