warning, long ava worldbuilding post-newground-attack incoming
id like to think that the newground attack managed to divide sticks who lived on the outernet into two categories: given that all sticks are immortal, some are conditionally immortal and some are unconditionally immortal.
i wanna start by describing what i believe happens in a sticks life span. they ARE capable of being born, and they are capable of growing up (as seen by purples flashback and golds growth). but i dont think they can die naturally. they can’t reach a certain old age and die like humans do. what i think happens is that they reach a certain age where they stop growing physically (maybe like king’s age?) and remain that way. aka immortality. i consider this type of immortality the unconditional type. sticks id consider falling under this category would be : the color gang (as evident by the fact that when alan deleted them in the og ava short, they were back on their page as soon as alan refreshed it. even when alan deleted their programs off his computer)
now u might b thinking: whats so special about the color gang that would make them unconditionally immortal? would other sticks also fall under the category? and the answer is: yes!
sticks that haven’t had their files be deleted/disintegrated by the chosen one and the dark lord’s attacks are unconditionally immortal. this is simply due to their files being their source of life, and thus any death experienced in the outernet. or any game. would just return them back to their source. a good example would be greens revival after he got killed in minecraft (without saving) by an enraged second. rather than dying permanently, he just respawned in his original website .
(on that note i dont think the color gang originated from newgrounds, so their source of life is just the website. a deleted website would lead to a bunch of dead sticks lol)
now in gold’s case this might become confusing. gold DID die, so how come she wasnt led back to her source? i believe this is because she became conditionally immortal after the newgrounds attacks. and it is why i believe king orange and his daughter were also victims of the it, as well. their files we’re disintegrated. obviously this would mean that gold’s death is permanent.
my idea of conditionally immortal sticks is as follows: they are capable of living immortaly unless they are to affected by a virus, or an attack, or any other obstacle that would leave their code useless and glitching. purple’s mom, orchid, had been a conditinally immortal stick that had the misfortune of having her code jumbled after the attack, and thus permanently died.
(i don’t think sticks suffer from sickness like humans do. an error in their code that doesn’t eventually fix itself (given that theyre ai) is just a quick indication of approaching death)
what about the showdown? the dark lord managed to kill the color gang without approaching their website. so how come they died so easily by her band?
i think thats precisely what dark had been working on all these years. yes she wanted to attack alan first and foremost, but what she had back on her mind was the ability to kill all stickmen by first stab without needing to reach their source. it appears that shes capable of reaching the actual code of sticks, untangling it, and disintegrating their concept of self . the website would still exist, it just wouldnt host the sticks themselves since dark basically erased their very existence from it. think of it that way: sticks are like mirrors of their code, or avatars that are able to roam the outernet. killing them would be like killing a spare copy. it wouldn’t affect the code itself. but altering the code? since its a mirror, its like directly altering the code of the website, deleting the sticks code from it. as if dark’s instruments allow her to attack unconditionally immortal sticks as if theyre conditional ones.
finally, my last point (this is getting long): remember how the second chosen is capable of reviving sticks? what i believe orange can do is alter files. or reach the original files of sticks. awakened second’s first course of action was to go to a laptop, write a bunch of code, and they were instantly revived. second managed to rewrite their existence back to their website (which tdl deleted) and thus brought them back. that is also how i believe second would revive mitsi.