Sometimes I think a lot about what we know about The Dark Lord's character and how that may or may not relate to what he's experienced.
Like, right off the bat in AvA 3, this is a guy whose life starts during a currently ongoing fight, is told that his purpose is to join that fight, and when he loses, is prompted to start fighting again. For the first 5 minutes of his existence, the only thing he is exposed to is violence.
I think about how his first instinct in Minecraft is to destroy everything even when Chosen has already discovered that there's another way they can interact with the world. I recall how in AvA 3 when he starts playing Minesweeper, the one and only time he tries engaging with something non-destructively, it ends up biting him in the ass. How much later, the very first time he creates something—even if it is a means to further destruction—he gets told it's wrong.
I think about how, when Chosen spares him, he doesn't tell Dark that trying to kill him is wrong, he points to their uncaring creator. The lesson isn't "Fighting is wrong", it's "Don't get tricked into fighting for someone else's benefit." I wonder how it felt when that same person told him he needed to stop fighting. For someone else's benefit. The one person he stops fighting for years suddenly switches sides without any prior warning.
This is probably all verging on headcanon, but...
His reason for being is violence and conflict. He finds combat fun and exhilarating, but combat for him has always been with the aim to destroy. Nothing has ever taught him that an alternative to destruction is anything good. He has been thoroughly conditioned to be the way he is.
God I wanna see a redemption arc for him done well. What would it take to bring out the parts of him that built such a versatile tool like the Virabots, that started playing with a logic puzzle in the middle of a fight, that saw beauty in the hellish pre-1.16 Nether, and channel them into something good? What kind of person would he be afterwards?
My Korean composition practice: a paragraph about my life as a student.
저는 고등학교 학생이에요. 12학년에 있어요. 홈스쿨을 해요, 그래서 매일 집에서 공부를 해요. 그리고 아주 일찍 안 일어나요. 요즘 다섯 과목을 들어요. 영어문학이랑 미국 정부랑 미술이랑 체육이랑 바느질을 수업 들어요. 그리고 한국어를 혼자서 배우고 있어요. 아주 재미있어요. 이 가을에 대학교에 가요. 번역사랑 통역사를 전공하겠어요.
English Translation:
I am a high school student. I am in 12th grade. I am homeschooled therefore I study at home everyday. Also, I don't get up very early. These days, I am taking 5 courses. I am taking English literature, U.S. Government, art, P.E, and sewing class. Also, I am learning Korean by myself. It is very fun. I go to College this Fall. I am going to major in translating and interpreting.
Thinking about Minecraft EXP and hypothetical lore
Hey yeah so what if "Experience" was entirely literal. Every point gained from mining, smelting, farming, and so on is a literal expansion of one's lived experience, and your experience is what makes you you.
But every time you kill something, they drop their own experience. Not all of it, most simply disperses into nothingness (after all, players only drop a small portion of their EXP when they die). But some of it stays behind and is absorbed, a fraction of themselves becoming a part of you. You are painfully aware (sometimes in a literal sense) that these creatures are living and feeling beings like you. Every zombie killed in self-defense shares some of their hunger with you; the last terrified moments of every animal killed for food haunt you.
The Ender Dragon has lived centuries; only a few decades of its life will survive in the one that kills it. The Wither is a conglomerate of tortured souls filled with a hatred for life itself; killing it drives many a victorious hero insane.
What if enchanting came about as a way not just to imbue power into one's tools and weapons, but to purge the unwanted memories and feelings accumulated over the years? Before the iron defenders of today's villages, warriors worn down by the gnawing hunger and pain of the countless undead they'd killed defending their home would visit the local clerics and librarians, who could relieve them of that burden and channel it into a vessel, keeping them sane and creating powerful items.
Perhaps the Illagers are an example of what happens when the act of sacrificing a part of yourself like this is taken too far. The Illagers practice magic far beyond that of the villagers, but their forms are twisted and sickly. They are always in need of more experience to survive, and when research involving strange alters and rooms filled with plants evidently falls short—perhaps attempts to generate EXP from other forms of life—they turn to raiding and killing to get their fix.
Consider the Sculk, an organism that, at first glance, looks like some kind of plant or fungal growth. But while plants don't have lived experiences, this stuff does. Every inch of this thing is alive and feeling, and it feeds on the very lives of those that expire within its reach. The appearance of souls within the Warden's chest suggests it even allocates small portions towards fueling parts of its immune system for brief periods. Consider, when clearing out an ancient city of Sculk, the massive quantity of EXP you gain from it, and think about how many things you would have had to kill to gain a similar amount. I wonder how many people once lived in those cities. I wonder how much of that experience is theirs, and how much is the Sculk's own. I wonder what you'd feel when you absorbed it.
Aka: "In Which Cyberjello Spends Too Many Words Projecting Onto One of His Favourite Characters"
If you're here from the SRS discord server, Hi! I noticed something neat about Alex, and because I either have nothing to say or way too much, I wrote this whole… thing about it. Enjoy!
On the other hand, if it's the future and you stumbled upon this post by chance and are still here because you like reading character analyses even when you know nothing about the character (like me), this is about Alex Hill. He's a main character from a webtoon called The Last Dimension, which you can read here (and should because it's great)! This pile of words contains some spoilers for the first and second seasons. Enjoy!
Alex is a pretty interesting character. Sometimes he's a massive jerk, and sometimes he feels really bad about having been a massive jerk. But 90% of the time he's a pretty chill dude (if a little insensitive) who doesn't seem to care about any particular issue. I've pointed out an example of this before; how in the span of a couple days he switched from harassing Phillip about not being normal, to telling him in no uncertain terms that his otherness didn't matter. At first I was a little mystified. It seemed weird for him to change his stance like that so quickly, yet at the same time it didn't feel out of character for him. So I thought about it a bit more, and then I had an epiphany.
Alex differs from the others in how he thinks. He doesn't worry about what could happen in the near future, like Fai does. He doesn't dwell on the implications behind pieces of information, like Phillip does. He's impulsive, quick to say whatever pops into his head, and rarely stops to consider the long-term consequences of his actions.
And gee, as a young fellow with ADHD who's only been medicated for less than ten years, that all sounds awfully familiar. And rereading TLD with that connection in mind has been quite interesting.
See, ADHD—or at least my particular flavour of it—does some interesting things with one's sense of importance. Past, present, and future are tossed aside in favour of a much simpler system: "Now" and "Not Now". Things that happen during "Not Now" are rarely factored into decisions made during "Now". Desires, ideas, and thoughts that happen "Now" are almost always a higher priority and given more immediate attention.
The most visible manifestation of this is impulsiveness: the moment at which you have an idea, something you could say or do, is Now. Anything else—be it a task you were just in the middle of doing, a favour somebody asked of you an hour ago that you should really get started on, or the possible future consequences of executing this idea—those are all Not Now, and therefore not important, in the unlikely event that they even come to mind.
And you can definitely see that impulsiveness in Alex whenever he says something he really, really shouldn't.
But impulsiveness isn't the only thing that the Now/Not Now dichotomy is responsible for. One of the clearest places I've also noticed it is in how he treats Phillip. Remember how he switches from jerk to friendly almost on a dime? Yeah, he actually does that a lot in season 1, doesn't he? In fact, I've gone and taken SIXTEEN FRICKING SCREENSHOTS BETWEEN EPISODES 2-15 AND I'M GOING TO GO THROUGH AND TALK ABOUT EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS BECAUSE I'M INSANE!!!
To start off though, I'm going to say what should be obvious to anyone who's read TLD: Alex isn't a mean person at heart. He cares a lot about those around him, including Phillip.
Anyway, in Episode 2 he acts like an absolute jerk to Phillip:
Clearly not the best of friends, are they? Well, you could have fooled me, because 15 minutes later, Alex is cheering him on and then looking out for him as he bluntly tells Phillip to "shift into [his] normal self".
And he proves to be a pretty good person after this. He's genuinely worried about Fai when she nearly drowns, and he's pretty friendly, if a bit cranky. But eventually it becomes clear how bad their situation is and all of a sudden—
—he's back to being a jerk.
But then Fai calls him out on it, and the effect is immediate.
He feels bad. He knows what he just did wasn't right.
BUT THEN FIVE MINUTES LATER HE DOES IT AGAIN
Twice more this happens, where Alex is acting pretty friendly but then says something stupid, Fai tells him off, and he clearly feels bad immediately after—
—and then he acts like it never happened and he's genuinely friendly and nice again.
In fact, after that first day on Imash, he never says anything mean-spirited to or about Phillip again. Insensitive, sure, but not outright mean.
This isn't just Alex changing his opinion over the course of a couple days. This little flip-flop he does is a whole pattern that I'm going to go ahead and examine a little closer.
To start, let's compare the first two scenes I mentioned. In their room the Institute, Alex is frustrated that he has to share a room with Phillip. There's a good reason for him to not be upset; he does care about Phillip, and sharing a room with him would really help Phillip stay hidden. But Phillip's predicament—and more to the point, the effect it has on him that Alex perceives—currently rests in the far-off land of Not Now. Meanwhile in the land of Now, Alex doesn't get to be in a room with his other friends. Phillip's visible otherness is a painful reminder of the perceived betrayal from when he revealed his true form. To top it off, there's the background noise of Alex's frequent use as a guinea pig. There's a lot going on, and only one target to lash out at.
15 minutes later during the fall to Imash, all those things have entered Not Now. On the other hand, "I'm no longer falling to my doom thanks to Phillip" and "Fai and Anne are coming and are about to see Phillip" become Now. Looking out for Phillip is the Now Problem, sharing a room with him is a Not Now Problem.
But that's fairly normal, isn't it? Of course Alex is going to be nice to the person who just saved his life. Let's continue.
After they swim the shore, Alex is actually relatively friendly with Fai, in contrast to the name-calling and snarkery he used with her and Susi back at the Institute. Because Now, Fai isn't someone annoying trying to get in his way, she's just someone stuck here along with him.
Speaking of which, he doesn't seem all too concerned about what just happened. Annoyed, maybe, but not worried. After all, nothing bad is happening Now. But then Anne finds a tablet with an alien language on it, and the fact that they're not in Kansas anymore suddenly becomes a very big, very obvious Now Problem. Alex finally feels the true gravity of the situation, and lashes out at Phillip. (This provides a decent example of that impulsiveness again, where Alex's brain makes a connection and he acts on it Now.) Which brings me to my next observation, which is that Fai, by intervening, basically gives Alex the opportunity to realize when he's in the wrong.
Now, this part brings back a lot of memories from before I started taking medication for my ADHD. I used to tease my sister relentlessly. As Paranatural's Ed Burger puts it:
As I myself can testify, that bit about the reactions is the key here, ESPECIALLY when one has ADHD and that immediate reaction, the thing that happens Now, is practically the only thing that matters here. When I used to mess with my sister, I hated making her sad and felt awful wherever that happened. But angry? When she got angry and chased me around the house I thought was hilarious. It was that brief but very much Now moment of entertainment that motivated me. However, we've seen that Phillip doesn't give much of a reaction when bullied. He freezes up and then afterward, he disappears somewhere for half an hour to cry where no-one will see it:
And I believe that LACK of an immediate reaction is just as important. Alex has a lot of crap in his life to move him to take it out on Phillip. He doesn't need a reaction to do it, but the absence thereof means he never immediately sees how much Phillip suffers because of it. It never becomes apparent Now, when he's able to notice.
But then along comes Fai, who does react when he says something hurtful about somebody else. And it's her reaction that makes him stop and become able to realize that what he was doing. He genuinely feels bad because as I said earlier, he doesn't want to be mean, he's just never able to notice when he is.
There's one other things I want to point out about the Now/Not Now thing. When you have something that could happen or will happen in the future, something that could affect you in some way, it doesn't really seem real. It's not immediately affecting you, it's Not Now, so there's no need to worry. And I see this in Alex a LOT.
These are his thoughts about seeing a giant energy beam appear in the distance: "I'm tired; it's not a Now Problem, I don't feel like thinking about it right now." The reason I find this familiar is because it's exactly what my brain would tell me whenever I sat down to do homework with a far-off deadline.
And later, when Alex and Fai tell Phillip about Fai's bad vision about him, he very clearly isn't thinking about the contents of the vision itself; they're not happening Now, after all. He doesn't seem even a little worried about it, unlike Fai.
Now, I'm not going to outright say "Alex might canonically have ADHD" because I'm not a brain biologist who knows how to look for this stuff, nor do I know if this was intentional. (I'm also never been one to form headcanons, I typically stare at canon and go, "yup, that's pretty cool!") But I will say that I have ADHD, and I see a lot of myself in Alex, which is pretty neat.
I love that feeling when you and your dad are having peak father son bonding, like out of a movie, but you’re his daughter, and your relationship actually did start improving a while ago, but slowly and naturally as you matured, and lived, and found that even while you two are apart, you take a lot of him with you in your everyday life, but also it’s playing out like an animal comedy movie from the 2000s.
After much time staying locked up in her dorm room, Alli had decided to go down to check out the school's pool. She has heard about it before, but has never seen it for herself, given the fact that she was still new to the boarding school. Before leaving her room, she got dressed on her favourite red striped bikini, slid into her pink flip flops, slipped into her peach sun dress, and finally, grabbed her straw beach bag and matching hat. Her bouncy curls was tied back into a messy ponytail. Taking one look in her full length mirror, Alli decided that for once in her life she looked pretty decent. The corners of her lips lifted into a small smile, and then, she left her dorm.
Alli reached the pool area within a matter of minutes. Surprisingly, she didn't get lost on her way there, which gave her satisfaction knowing she hadn't gotten lost at this school yet. She found a clean, white lawn chair that she was able to sit on. Alli smoothed out her fluffy sky blue towel onto the chair and sat down on it. She gently placed her bag on the side table next to her and took off her hat. Finally, she was able to tan in peace.
The warm sun was beating down on Alli's thin body as she let her skin bronze a little. After a good fifteen minutes, another girl who looked eerily familiar sat down on the chair next to her. Alli then realized it was Savannah. She smiled and greeted her. "Hey Savannah."
